1-20 of 298 Results  for:

  • Twentieth-Century Art x
Clear all

Article

Abrams, Harry N(athan)  

A. Deirdre Robson

(b London, Dec 8, 1904; d New York, Nov 25, 1979).

American publisher and collector. He trained at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League in New York before working in publishing. In 1950 he set up his own publishing company, Harry N. Abrams Inc., one of the first American companies to specialize in art books. In 1968 he founded Abbeville Books. His collecting, which began in the mid-1930s, went through three distinct phases: his first interest was in such contemporary American painters as Milton Avery and Raphael Soyer. He continued to purchase such works into the 1950s, but from the mid-1940s his collecting began to be dominated by works by major 20th-century artists; he acquired, among other works, Marc Chagall’s Clock (1948), Pablo Picasso’s Motherhood (1921) and Georges Rouault’s Miserere (1939).

Abrams’s most notable period as a collector was the 1960s, when he became known as a major collector of new American art. His interest in this area was fuelled by the ...

Article

Adams, Maurice B(ingham)  

T. Affleck Greeves

(b Burgess Hill, Sussex, 1849; d London, Aug 17, 1933).

English architect, editor and draughtsman. After completing his articles with H. N. Goulty of Brighton, he became assistant to William Ralph Emerson, and Architect to Brighton Council. Between 1872 and 1923 he was Editor of Building News. He instituted the Building News Designing Club, which enabled young architects to submit designs for his criticism. He contributed largely to the paper’s illustrations, redrawing designs for lithographic reproduction, and covered a wide range of subjects in a skilful and accurate, if somewhat dull, linear style. He also published several architectural books. Through the owner of Building News he obtained his major architectural commissions, notably Camberwell Polytechnic and Art Gallery (1902). He also designed country houses near London, for example Queensmead Cottage, Kings Road, Windsor, Berks (1883), for Reginald Talbot, as well as in Australia (e.g. Bellevue Hill, Double Bay, for Charles B. Fairfax in the mid-1880s) and America, where he designed timber houses in New Jersey for E. S. Wilde in ...

Article

Adams, Tate  

(b Holywood, County Down, Ireland, Jan 26, 1922).

Australian painter, printmaker, book designer, lecturer, collector, gallery director and publisher of limited edition artists’ books, of Irish decent. He worked as a draughtsman before entering war service in the British Admiralty from 1940 to 1949, including five years in Colombo, where he made sketching trips to jungle temples with the Buddhist monk and artist Manjsiro Thero. Between 1949 and 1951 Adams worked as an exhibition designer in London and studied wood-engraving with Gertrude Hermes in her evening class at the Central School of Arts and Crafts (now Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design). In 1951, after moving to Melbourne, Adams began a 30-year teaching commitment at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), where he instructed many of the younger generation of Australian printmakers, including George Baldessin and Jan Senbergs. A brief return to Britain and Ireland in 1957–8 provided experience with Dolmen Press, Dublin, which published his first book of engravings, ...

Article

Ai Weiwei  

Chinese, 20th – 21st century, male.

Active in China and the United States.

Born 18 May 1957, in Beijing, China.

Artist, architect, designer, curator, publisher, activist.

After spending most of his childhood in the provinces of China, Ai Weiwei moved to Beijing in the mid-1970s to attend the city’s film academy. While there, he co-founded the first of the loose collectives of pro-democracy artists to emerge in the city, known as the Stars Group (1979–1983). In 1981, he travelled to the United States, first to Philadelphia before enrolling in New York City’s Parsons School of Design. During his student years, Ai worked at a printing press in the meatpacking district of New York City. In 1993, he returned to Beijing, where he co-founded the Chinese Art Archives & Warehouse (CAAW), a non-profit organization and gallery. In Shanghai in 2000, Ai co-curated, with Feng Boyi, the infamous Fuck Off exhibition, which was closed by the authorities at the same time that the first Shanghai Biennial took place. He published a series of books about experimental art in Europe and North America: ...

Article

Aitken, William Maxwell, 1st Baron Beaverbrook  

Ian G. Lumsden

(b Maple, Ont., May 25, 1879; d Cherkley, nr Leatherhead, June 9, 1964).

British publisher, financier, politician, collector and patron, of Canadian birth. As Minister of Information during World War I, he was responsible for the War Records Office in London, through which Wyndham Lewis, Muirhead Bone, William Orpen, Christopher Nevinson, Augustus John and six Canadian artists, J. W. Beatty (1869–1941), Maurice Cullen, C. W. Simpson (1878–1942), Fred Varley, David Milne and A. Y. Jackson, received commissions to record Canada’s military contribution to the war effort. The Canadian War Memorials were deposited at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, in 1921, and since then all but the major canvases have been transferred to the Canadian War Museum, also in Ottawa.

Beaverbrook was instrumental in developing the National Gallery of Canada’s collection of historical pictures; he was directly responsible for the gift of Benjamin West’s The Death of Wolfe by the Duke of Westminster in 1918, and the acquisition of ...

Article

Alastair  

German, 20th century, male.

Born 1889; died 1969.

Draughtsman, illustrator.

Self-taught, Alastair lived in Germany and often in Paris, where he was drawn to the study of black magic and transvestism. He worked for European and American publishers, illustrating many literary works by authors including Théophile Gautier, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Laclos, Mérimée, Poe, L'Abbé Prévost, Wedekind and Oscar Wilde....

Article

Alatalo, Sally  

American, 20th–21st century, female.

Born 19 November 1960, in L’Anse (Michigan).

Book artist, poet, performance artist, publisher, educator. Artists’ books, wallpaper.

Conceptual Art.

Sally Alatalo completed her undergraduate degree in fine art at Kansas City Art Institute in 1982 and her master’s degree in fine art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in ...

Article

Albertin, André  

French, 19th – 20th century, male.

Born 4 June 1867, in Grenoble; died 1933, in Grenoble.

Painter, watercolourist. Landscapes.

André Albertin was a journalist and art critic who learned painting from Laurent Guétal and Ernest Hareux. He exhibited at the various Paris Salons in 1895, 1896 and ...

Article

Alvarez Bravo, Manuel  

Mexican, 20th century, male.

Born 4 February 1902, in Mexico City; died 19 October 2002, in Mexico City.

Photographer, photojournalist.

Originally working as a copy clerk, Manuel Alvarez Bravo experienced a dramatic shift in his life trajectory when his father gave him a camera in ...

Article

Aperture  

Monica McTighe

American photography foundation and publisher. Aperture magazine was founded in San Francisco in 1952 by American photographers Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Morgan, Minor White, Ernest Louie, Melton Ferris, and Dody Warren, with writer–curators Beaumont Newhall and Nancy Newhall. They intended the organization to serve as a forum for discussing photography, to exhibit photographers’ work, and to raise the profile of art photography in the United States.

The journal Aperture, which began publication in 1952, dedicated itself to the practice of photography as a fine art and thus distinguished itself from popular and commercial photographic periodicals. In this way the journal emulated Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work (1903–17). Photographer Minor White was the journal’s first editor and, under his tenure, it became concerned with the capacity of photography to deal with spirituality and profound human experiences. The first issue included the work of Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and French photographer Lisette Model. All contributors were urged to write about their own work. In ...

Article

Appay, Émile  

French, 20th century, male.

Born 1876; died 1935, as the result of an accident.

Painter, watercolourist, pastellist. Landscapes.

Émile Appay was taught by his grandfather, a printer and lithographer, and was also given guidance by Henri Harpignies and Paul Lecomte. From 1922 to 1932 he travelled around several countries in Europe, while helping to make stage sets for the Georges Pitoëff theatre troupe. He exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français in Paris, of which he was a member, and also showed his works in a number of galleries....

Article

Art Front  

Patricia Hills

Art journal published from 1934 to 1937. In 1934, the Artists’ Union joined with the Artists’ Committee of Action, which had been organized to protest against the destruction of Diego Rivera’s mural Man at the Crossroads in Rockefeller Center, New York, to publish Art Front, a journal of news and opinion for artists. The first issue appeared in November 1934 with an editorial committee consisting of eight members of the Artists’ Committee of Action (Hugo Gellert (1892–1985), Stuart Davis , Zoltan Hecht (1890–1968), Abraham Harriton (1893–1986), Rosa Pringle, Hilda Abel, Jennings Tofel (1891–1959) and Harold Baumbach (1903–2002)) and eight from the Artists’ Union (Ethel Olenikov, Boris Gorelick (1912–84), Robert Jonas (b 1907), Max Spivak (1906–81), Michael Loew (1907–85), Katherine Gridley (1898–1940), Herbert Kruckman (1904–98) and C. Mactarian)). Herman Baron served as the Managing Editor. The opening statement announced: ...

Article

Auerbach, Arnold  

British, 19th – 20th century, male.

Born 1898, in Liverpool; died 1978, in London.

Sculptor, painter, printer. Portraits, cityscapes, still-lifes.

Arnold Auerbach took art classes at the Liverpool Institute as a boy before going on to study at the Liverpool School of Art. He also studied in Paris and in Switzerland. He was enlisted during World War I, but was invalided out of the army in ...

Article

Avedon, Richard  

American, 20th century, male.

Born 15 May 1923, in New York City; died 1 October 2004, in San Antonio, Texas.

Photographer, photojournalist. Portraits, fashion, news.

Born to a merchant of women’s clothing, Avedon was exposed to fashion and its consumers from an early age. He greatly admired the work of Hungarian fashion photographer Martin Munkasci, who exploited photography’s new ability to capture the immediacy of motion. After serving in the US Merchant Marines ...

Article

Aylmer, George R.  

British, 19th – 20th century, male.

Draughtsman.

George R. Aylmer contributed illustrations, mainly of historical subjects, to the London Art Journal.

Article

Baargeld, Johannes Theodor  

Walter Vitt

(Gruenwald, Alfred Emanuel Ferdinand]

(b Stettin, Pomerania [now Szczecin, Poland], Oct 9, 1892; d nr Chamonix, France, 17 or Aug 18, 1927).

German collagist, draughtsman, writer and publisher. Although he came from an upper middle-class family, after serving as a volunteer in World War I he became a pacifist and a supporter of democratic socialism on Soviet lines. In 1918 he began a political career as a committee member of the mid-Rhine district of the Independent Social-Democratic Party, a Marxist party that had split from the Social-Democratic Party of Germany. The short-lived journal he edited, Der Ventilator, which published six issues in Cologne in February and March 1919, was a satirical magazine directed against the Social Democrat government in Berlin.

Having discovered the work of de Chirico and come under the influence of Dada, in autumn 1919 Baargeld became an opponent of tradition and convention in art as well, setting himself particularly against Expressionism. In November 1919 he and Max Ernst, who together can be said to have founded the Cologne branch of ...

Article

Barber, George  

British, 20th – 21st century, male.

Active in the UK.

Born 1958, in Georgetown, Guyana.

Video artist, film maker, photographer, journalist, broadcaster. Scratch videos.

George Barber has a BA from St Martin’s School of Art in London (1980) and an MA from the Slade School of Art in London (...

Article

Bo Bardi [née Bo], Lina  

Julio Roberto Katinsky

revised by Adrian Anagnost

[Achillina]

(b Rome, Dec 5, 1914; d São Paulo, Mar 29, 1992).

Brazilian architect of Italian birth. She graduated in architecture (1939) from the University of Rome, where director Marcello Piacentini oversaw a curriculum dominated by the classicizing monumentality of Fascist Italy. In 1940 she moved to Milan and worked for publications seeking to modernize Italian architecture and interior design, including Lo Stile (1941–1943) and Domus (1943–1944). In 1945 she co-organized the critical rationalist architects’ group Movimento studi architettura, and participated in debates on postwar reconstruction at the Primo Convegno Nazionale per la Ricostruzione Edilizia, with Ernesto Nathan Rogers and others. In 1946 she worked with architect Bruno Zevi on the magazine A– Cultura della Vita, wrote for the revived Domus under editor Gio Ponti, and designed displays for a Milan commercial fair.

In September 1946 she moved to Brazil where her husband, Pietro Maria Bardi (1900–1999), was invited to establish and direct the ...

Article

Barillet, F.  

French, 19th – 20th century, male.

Active in Nevers (Nièvre) at the end of the 19th century.

Painter, draughtsman, lithographer. Figures.

As well as being an artist, Barillet was also a printer.

Versailles, 26 Oct 1980: Fishermen on the River (1904, oil on canvas, 18 × 22 ins/45.5 × 55 cm) ...

Article

Barillet, Madeleine  

French, 20th century, female.

Decorative designer.

Madeleine Barillet designed liturgical vestments in a contemporary idiom. She contributed an article to the journal Art Sacré (September 1938) discussing the principles lying behind her work.