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Article

Beaton, Cecil (Sir)  

British, 20th century, male.

Born 1904; died 1980.

Painter (including gouache), watercolourist, draughtsman (including ink), illustrator, designer, photographer. Portraits, landscapes. Stage sets, stage costumes.

Sir Cecil Beaton was influenced, in the first half of the 20th century, by the Russian ballets of Diaghilev and the fashionable world surrounding Coco Chanel. He was particularly known as a theatrical costume designer, for the famous musical comedies ...

Article

Beaton, Cecil  

British, 20th century, male.

Born 14 January 1904, in London, UK; died 18 January 1980, in Broad Chalke, UK.

Photographer, illustrator, scenographer. Portraits, fashion photography, costume, film set and stage design.

Cecil Beaton established himself as a fashion photographer during the Roaring Twenties, when he circulated among the Bright Young Things, a group of British socialites that included Evelyn Waugh, the Mitfords and the Sitwells. His portraits and fashion photographs attracted the attention of American magazine editors, and in ...

Article

Beaton, Sir Cecil  

Reinhold Misselbeck

(Walter Hardy)

(b London, Jan 14, 1904; d Broad Chalke, nr Salisbury, Jan 18, 1980).

English photographer and stage designer. He began taking photographs at an early age, mainly of his sisters Nancy and Baba. Beaton emulated pictures he saw in fashion magazines, especially those by Baron Adolphe de Meyer and the soft-focus technique used in them. In 1922 he went to Cambridge University to study history and architecture, but he left after three years without graduating. He took an office job, but he continued to photograph, receiving portrait commissions. Diaghilev’s praise of his photographs, particularly the double portrait of Nancy and Baba with Reflection (1924), encouraged him to set up a studio in his home in Sussex Gardens, London. Beaton created lavish decorations and painted his backgrounds himself. He encouraged his subjects to sit in striking poses. In his diary he noted: ‘Till now my pictures have been ordinary attempts to make people look as beautiful as possible, but these are fantastic and amusing’. The friendship and patronage of the ...

Article

Bilal, Enes  

Yugoslav, 20th – 21st century, male.

Active in France.

Born 7 October 1951, in Belgrade (now in Serbia).

Draughtsman, newspaper cartoonist, painter, designer, film producer. Comic strips, posters, stage costumes and sets.

Enki Bilal was the son of General Tito's former tailor. He arrived in Paris with his family in ...

Article

Cai Guo-Qiang  

Chinese, 20th – 21st century, male.

Active in Japan and the USA.

Born 8 December 1957, in Quanzhou City (Fujian Province).

Painter, draughtsman, mixed media, video artist, installation artist, performance artist.

Cai Guo-Qiang trained in stage design at the Shanghai drama institute from 1981 to 1985. He spent several periods in Tibet, emigrated to Japan in 1986, and since 1995 lived in New York. Guo-Qiang made his name by using gunpowder in his work, which he would detonate as a symbol of his desire to free himself from cultural or political fetters. These works may be ephemera, which he captures on film or video—images that literally explode into being, or simulated landmines that detonate when visitors walk on them.

As a bearer of ancestral Chinese culture, Cai holds Western art up for examination as a form of inverse exoticism, shifting familiar ground by displacing his spectators and the way their eyes move. Sometimes, as in ...

Article

Chargesheimer  

Reinhold Misselbeck

[Hargesheimer, Carl-Heinz]

(b Cologne, May 19, 1924; d Cologne, Dec 31, 1971).

German photographer, sculptor, stage designer and theatre director. He studied graphic design and photography at the Cologne Werkschulen. In 1948 he made his first sculptures in metal, but he made his name shortly afterwards with experimental photographs and other experimental works. A member of the young German avant-garde, from 1951 he taught experimental photography at the photographic school BIKLA (Bild und Klang) in Cologne. In 1957 his first book, Cologne intime, appeared, and a year later he published Im Ruhrgebiet and Unter Krahnenbäumen (both with texts by Heinrich Böll), whose new photographic structures provoked violent reactions and public debate. His photography during this period was based on the collection of images, and he always attempted to penetrate the façades of buildings and of people.

After a series of publications about Berlin, the Rhineland and stocktaking, Chargesheimer turned to the theatre, working as a stage designer, director and photographer for theatres in Cologne, Vienna, Brunswick, Hamburg, Bonn and Kassel. He summed up this achievement in ...

Article

Colomer, Jordi  

Spanish, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1962, in Barcelona.

Sculptor, video installation artist, photographer, scenographer.

Colomer studied art history at Universitat Autònoma, in Barcelona, and then studied architecture at Escola Tècnica Superior in Barcelona. He lives and works in Barcelona. He produces scenography for the theatre, notably for Valère Novarina's play ...

Article

Daguerre, Louis(-Jacques-Mandé)  

Grant B. Romer

revised by Stephen C. Pinson

(b Cormeilles-en-Parisis, nr Paris, Nov 18, 1787; d Bry-sur-Marne, Paris, July 10, 1851).

French photographer, inventor, painter, printmaker, entrepreneur, and stage designer. He began his artistic training at the public school of drawing, and possibly served as an architect’s apprentice, in Orléans. He began his career in Paris around 1804 as a student of the stage designer Ignace-Eugène-Marie Degotti (c. 1759–1824), who led the painting studio of the Paris Opéra. Daguerre first appears as a day labourer in the records of the Opéra in 1808 and held various posts as a painter through to 1816. He also may have been a student of Jacques-Louis David, and early biographies of Pierre Prévost (1764–1823) state that Daguerre was one of Prévost’s assistants in the production of immense panorama paintings; extant documentation has not been found to support either claim, however. Daguerre exhibited his first independent work at the Salon of 1814, Interior of a Chapel in Feuillants Church (Paris, Louvre), which was purchased by Louis XVIII. During the next twenty years he exhibited four paintings and two lithographs at the Salon. He received the Légion d’honneur in ...

Article

Fabre, Jan  

Belgian, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 14 December 1958, in Antwerp.

Draughtsman, watercolourist, installation artist, performance artist, director, scenographer, film writer.

Jan Fabre attended the art academy and the arts and crafts institute in Antwerp. He is a visual artist, but also a choreographer, dancer and playwright (his first play was written in ...

Article

Hacker, Dieter  

German, 20th century, male.

Born 1942, in Augsburg.

Painter (mixed media), draughtsman, sculptor, photographer. Figures, nudes, landscapes. Stage costumes and sets.

New Fauves.

Hacker attended the art academy in Munich before settling in Berlin. In 1974, he was guest professor at the school of fine art in Hamburg. After producing works ascribable to kinetic art, Hacker became interested in the problems of creative activity, and displayed them in exhibitions alongside objects based on popular art. In ...

Article

Heartfield, John  

Barbara Lange

revised by Andrés Mario Zervigón

[Herzfeld, Helmut]

(b Berlin, June 19, 1891; d Berlin, April 26, 1968).

German photomontagist, draughtsman, typographer, stage designer, and film director. After a difficult childhood owing to the persecution of his father for his political beliefs, he studied art at the Königliche Kunstgewerbeschule in Munich from 1907 to 1911, specializing in advertising art. In 1912 he took his first job in a paper packaging company (for which he completed graphic design work) in Mannheim, moving to Berlin in 1913, where he and his brother Wieland Herzfeld made contact with avant-garde circles. (Wieland changed his surname to Herzfelde in early 1914.) Heartfield’s experiences in World War I led him to conclude that the only worthy art was that which took account of social realities (see Eclipse of the Sun on the Rhine, 1957). He destroyed all his early work.

From 1916 Heartfield collaborated closely with George Grosz and in the summer of 1917, like Grosz, anglicized his name, although he did not adopt this form officially until after the war. His earnest criticism of bourgeois society found its expression in his commitment to the ...

Article

Heartfield, John  

German, 20th century, male.

Born 19 June 1891, in Berlin-Schmargendorf; died 1968, in Berlin.

Painter, photomontage artist, photographer. Stage sets.

Dada.Berlin Dada, ASSO Group (Association of Revolutionary Figuration Artists)

John Heartfield was an apprentice in a Wiesbaden bookshop in 1905-1906. He was a pupil at the school of decorative arts in Munich ...

Article

Hockney, David  

Marco Livingstone

(b Bradford, July 9, 1937).

English painter, printmaker, photographer, and stage designer. Perhaps the most popular and versatile British artist of the 20th century, Hockney made apparent his facility as a draughtsman while studying at Bradford School of Art between 1953 and 1957, producing portraits and observations of his surroundings under the influence of the Euston Road School and of Stanley Spencer. From 1957 to 1959 he worked in hospitals as a conscientious objector to fulfil the requirements of national service. On beginning a three-year postgraduate course at the Royal College of Art, London, in 1959, he turned first to the discipline of drawing from life in two elaborate studies of a skeleton before working briefly in an abstract idiom inspired by the paintings of Alan Davie.

Encouraged by a fellow student, R. B. Kitaj, Hockney soon sought ways of reintegrating a personal subject-matter into his art while remaining faithful to his newly acquired modernism. He began tentatively by copying fragments of poems on to his paintings, encouraging a close scrutiny of the surface and creating a specific identity for the painted marks through the alliance of word and image. These cryptic messages soon gave way to open declarations in a series of paintings produced in ...

Article

Jarman, Derek  

British, 20th century, male.

Born 31 January 1942, in Northwood (Middlesex); died 19 February 1994, in London.

Painter, filmmaker, designer, author, poet. Landscapes, townscapes. Designs for stage sets, films, gardens.

Derek Jarman studied English, History and Art History at King's College in London before going on to study fine art at the Slade School of Art in London (...

Article

Knapp, Peter  

Swiss, 20th century, male.

Active from 1952 in France.

Born 5 June 1931, in Baeretschwill.

Painter, photographer, film maker. Stage sets.

After attending the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich, Peter Knapp went to Paris where he attended the École des Beaux-Arts. Resident in Paris from 1952 onwards, he became, in ...

Article

Masurovsky, Gregory  

American, 20th century, male.

Active from 1954 in France.

Born 26 November 1929, in the Bronx (New York City).

Draughtsman, engraver (etching), illustrator. Figures, nudes, landscapes, interiors, still-lifes. Stage costumes and sets, videos, artists' books.

Gregory Masurovsky studied at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in ...

Article

Moser, Rudolf  

Swiss, 20th century, male.

Born 1914, in Zurich; died 1972, in Hinterkapden (Bern).

Painter, film producer. Stage sets.

Rudolf Moser studied in Zurich and Vienna, and went on to direct films.

Article

Ponsard, Daniel  

French, 20th century, male.

Born 4 March 1943, in Digne (Alpes-de-Haute-Provence).

Painter, draughtsman, pastellist, photographer, scenographer, illustrator. Figures, landscapes. Stage sets.

Daniel Ponsard graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1967. He has been a photographer at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris since ...

Article

Raysse, Martial  

French, 20th century, male.

Born 12 February 1936, in Golfe-Juan.

Painter (mixed media), sculptor of assemblages, sculptor (bronze), collage artist, draughtsman, film producer. Stage costumes and sets.

Nouvelle Figuration, Citationism.

Nouveaux Réalistes group.

Martial Raysse studied art in Nice. Although he never studied there, he had numerous friends at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In October ...

Article

Seydl, Zdenek  

Czech, 20th century, male.

Born 29 April 1916, in Trebon; died 17 June 1978.

Painter, pastellist, engraver (dry-point), illustrator, ceramicist. Animals, insects. Stage sets, cartoon strips, animated films.

Zdenek Seydl worked in a variety of media, including cartoon strips and puppet films. As painter and dry-point engraver he adapted Jugendstil scrolls and arabesques to the representation of animals and sometimes even the microscopic world of insects, while as an illustrator he often depicted the horrors of fascism and nazism. He was deeply influenced by Chinese art, travelling to that country in ...