(b 1896; d 1965).
German potter who after an early career as a sculptor established a pottery workshop in Kandern. Initially he made pottery statuettes, and then cubist vases. In the 1940s he became interested in East Asian (especially Japanese) glazes, and c. 1950 became the first German potter to produce asymmetrical work with experimental viscous glazes and broken, irregular surface textures....
[Karl Theodore Kasimir]
(b Penza, Feb 9, 1874; d Moscow, Feb 2, 1940).
Russian theorist, stage director and actor. He was the director of the imperial opera and drama theatres in St Petersburg, but he had established an avant-garde reputation before the appearance of Russian Futurism in late 1912. This was largely due to his innovative and experimental unofficial productions for the House of Interludes cabaret and the Terioki summer theatre of 1912. As early as 1906 Meyerhold had signalled his break with tradition through the production of Aleksandr Blok’s Balaganchik (‘Little fairground booth’) at the Kommisarzhevskaya Theatre. Through his use of such ‘low’ techniques as improvisation, buffoonery, masks, making-up the actors in the auditorium and direct audience involvement, Meyerhold anticipated many features employed in the visual arts by the Russian Neo-primitivists and Futurists.
In August 1918 Meyerhold joined the Bolshevik Party and embarked on a second period of experimentation. By the autumn he had become head of the Petrograd section of TEO, the Theatre department of ...
(b Amersfoort, March 7, 1872; d New York, Feb 1, 1944).
Dutch painter, theorist, and draughtsman. His work marks the transition at the start of the 20th century from the Hague school and Symbolism to Neo-Impressionism and Cubism. His key position within the international avant-garde is determined by works produced after 1920. He set out his theory in the periodical of Stijl, De, in a series of articles that were summarized in a separate booklet published in Paris in 1920 under the title Le Néo-plasticisme (see Neo-plasticism) by Léonce Rosenberg. The essence of Mondrian’s ideas is that painting, composed of the most fundamental aspects of line and colour, must set an example to the other arts for achieving a society in which art as such has no place but belongs instead to the total realization of ‘beauty’. The representation of the universal, dynamic pulse of life, also expressed in modern jazz and the metropolis, was Mondrian’s point of departure. Even in his lifetime he was regarded as the founder of the most ...
Hungarian artists’ colony founded in 1928 in Szentendre on the Danube Bend near Budapest. Its founder-members had all been pupils of István Réti, a member of the Nagybánya colony and, though designed as a centre for the creation of a national art, it soon incorporated an eclectic variety of styles, from Neo-classicism to Surrealism. Its more interesting developments came from the influence of such international movements as Constructivism and Surrealism, although in both cases these received a peculiarly Hungarian interpretation. Jenő Barcsay joined soon after the foundation of the colony and later arrivals included Antal Deli (1886–1960), Miklós Göllner (b 1902), Pál Milháltz (b 1899), János Kmetty and Vilmos Pelrott-Csara (1880–1955). In addition to the artists in the colony itself, there was an equally significant number who worked in the town either permanently or in the summer, such as Béla Czóbel, Lajos Vajda and ...
(Yevgrafovich)
(b Kharkiv, Dec 12, 1885; d Novodevichy, Moscow, May 31, 1953).
Ukrainian painter, designer, sculptor and teacher, active mainly in Russia.
The son of a railway engineer and a poet, he attended school in Kharkiv and trained as a merchant sea cadet, visiting Bulgaria, Turkey, Egypt, Asia Minor, Africa, Greece and Italy. He began his painting career as an icon painter in Moscow, but he subsequently attended the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (1902–3), studying under Konstantin Korovin and Valentin Serov, before moving to the Penza School of Art (1904–10), where his tutors were Ivan Goryushkin-Sorokopudov (1873–1954) and Aleksey Afanas’ev (1850–1920). During the summer months he made copies of Russian church frescoes. This awareness of traditional painting techniques complemented the adventurous and Westernized art of his Moscow tutors Korovin and Serov. Between 1908 and 1911 he also became friendly with the Burlyuk brothers and Mikhail Larionov, who were instrumental in the evolution of Russian ...
(b Montevideo, Jul 28, 1874; d Montevideo, Aug 8, 1949).
Uruguayan painter, teacher, and theorist, active also in Spain and France. His father was a Catalan emigrant from Mataró and his mother was Uruguayan. Financial problems forced the family to return to Catalonia in 1891, and he entered the Escuela de Artes y Oficios in Mataró. In 1892 he went to Barcelona, where he attended the Academia Baixas and became involved in the Cercle Artistic, also working as an illustrator for magazines and participating in various exhibitions. In 1903–1904 he collaborated with Antoni Gaudí on the Templo Expiatorio de la Sagrada Familia (begun 1882) in Barcelona and on renovating the stained glass in the cathedral of Palma de Mallorca. In 1905, through the works he exhibited at the Sala Parés, his talent as a muralist was recognized by Eugenio d’Ors. He became involved in teaching and met Manolita Piña, whom he married in 1909. In 1910 he provided decorations for the Uruguayan pavilion at the Exposition Universelle et Internationale in Brussels. In ...
