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Article

Benton, Thomas Hart  

Henry Adams

(b Neosho, MO, April 15, 1889; d Kansas City, MO, Jan 19, 1975).

American painter, illustrator, and lithographer. One of the most controversial personalities in American art, both in his lifetime and today, Thomas Hart Benton was a key figure in the American Regionalist movement of the 1930s, when he focused on working-class American subject-matter and was outspoken in his denunciation of European modern painting. Today he is best remembered for this phase of his life, and much criticized because of it. But Benton’s long career is not easily reduced to a single moment or achievement: his legacy was more complex. As a young struggling artist in Paris and New York, he was a leading American modernist and abstractionist, and in his early maturity he became the teacher and lifelong father figure for Jackson Pollock, the most famous of the Abstract Expressionists. He was also a major American writer, who wrote on art and whose autobiography of 1936 became a best-seller. He was also a notable figure in American music who collected American folk songs and devised a new form of harmonica notation that is still in use....

Article

Fautrier, Jean  

Philip Cooper

(b Paris, May 16, 1898; d Châtenay-Malabry, Seine-et-Oise, July 21, 1964).

French painter, printmaker, illustrator and sculptor. An illegitimate child, he was given his mother’s surname but was brought up by his grandmother. On the death of both his father and grandmother in 1908 he joined his mother in London, where he entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1912. Finding the teaching too traditional, he left to enrol at the Slade School of Fine Art, which had a reputation for being more avant-garde, though he was again disappointed. He then decided to work alone and devoted himself to painting, concentrating on nudes and still-lifes. He also regularly visited the Tate Gallery, where he was particularly impressed by the works of Turner. In 1917 he was called up for the French Army, but because of his poor health he was soon transferred to the auxiliary corps. Suffering from a pulmonary complaint, he lived in the Tyrol from 1920 to 1921 and was finally discharged from the army in ...

Article

Goncharova, Natal’ya  

Anthony Parton

(Sergeyevna)

(b Negayevo, Tula Province, June 16, 1881: d Paris, Oct 17, 1962).

Russian painter, stage designer, printmaker and illustrator. She was a leading artist of the Russian avant-garde in the early 20th century but became a celebrity in the West through her work for Serge (de) Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. During the 1920s she played a significant role within the Ecole de Paris and continued to live and work in France until her death.

She was the daughter of Sergey Mikhaylovich Goncharov, an architect, and Yekaterina Il’icha Belyayeva but grew up in her grandmother’s home at Ladyzhino, near Kaluga, in Tula Province. She attended the Fourth Gymnasium for Girls in Moscow and in 1898 entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture as a sculpture student where she was taught by Paolo Troubetskoy. At the school Goncharova became friendly with Mikhail Larionov. He became her lifelong companion and colleague, and he encouraged her to relinquish sculpture for painting. Goncharova’s early work comprised mainly pastels, which were exhibited in ...

Article

Kline, Franz  

David Anfam

(Rowe)

(b Wilkes-Barre, PA, May 23, 1910; d New York, May 13, 1962).

American painter. His first academic training was at Boston University from 1931 to 1935 and in London at the Heatherley School of Art from 1937 to 1938 as an illustrator and draughtsman. Two main tendencies emerged at an early stage that would later develop into a powerful contribution to the ‘gestural’ trend within Abstract Expressionism. Numerous small graphics, sketches, and oils and the mural series Hot Jazz (Norfolk, VA, Chrysler Mus.), painted for a New York bar in 1940, reveal an interest in translating animated subjects into quick, rudimentary strokes. Kline admired and found inspiration in a wide range of artists notable for their fluency in handling paint, including Rembrandt, Goya, Manet, Sargent, and Whistler. By contrast, an inclination to compose in terms of simplified areas was derived from academic training and perhaps also reflected Kline’s memories of his native Pennsylvania’s coal-mining region, with its stark scenery, locomotives, and similar massive mechanical shapes, to which the titles of his later abstract images sometimes referred. ...

Article

Larionov, Mikhail  

Anthony Parton

(Fyodorovich)

(b Tiraspol, Moldova, June 3, 1881; d Fontenay-aux-Roses, nr Paris, May 10, 1964).

Russian painter, stage designer, printmaker, illustrator, draughtsman and writer of Moldovan birth. He was a leader of the Russian avant-garde before World War I but came to prominence in the West through his work for Serge Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. During the 1920s he played a significant role within the Ecole de Paris and continued to live and work in France until his death.

He was the son of Fyodor Mikhailovich Larionov, a doctor and pharmacist, and Aleksandra Fyodorovna Petrovskaya, but he grew up in his grandparents’ home in Tiraspol. He completed his secondary education at the Voskresensky Technical High School in Moscow and in 1898 entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Here he studied under Valentin Serov and Konstantin Korovin, and he also became friendly with Natal’ya Goncharova who was to remain his lifelong companion and colleague. Larionov’s work soon caught the imagination of collectors and critics. In ...

Article

Mathieu, Georges  

Philip Cooper

(b Boulogne-sur-Mer, Jan 27, 1921).

French painter, sculptor, designer and illustrator. He left Boulogne-sur-Mer in 1933 to attend the Lycée Hoche in Versailles, where he learnt Greek, Russian and Spanish. Over the next few years he was educated at various secondary and university institutions in Rouen, Cambrai and Douai, studying law at Douai in 1941. He started to paint landscapes and portraits in oils in 1942 and the following year taught English at the Lycée in Douai. He worked as an interpreter for the US Army at Cambrai in 1944 and in that year read Edward Crankshaw’s Joseph Conrad: Some Aspects of the Art of the Novel (London, 1936), which impressed upon him the importance of style; he cited it as an influence on his first experiments with abstraction, such as Inception (1944; artist’s col., see Quignon-Fleuret, p. 9), with dark amorphous forms suggestive of primordial creation. The following year he began to use drip techniques, as in ...

Article

Onchi, Kōshirō  

Toru Asano

(b Tokyo, July 2, 1891; d Tokyo, June 3, 1955).

Japanese printmaker, poet and book designer. He studied at the Tokyo Art School from 1910 to 1915. Influenced by Yumeji Takehisa (1884–1934), a painter of highly popular sentimental portraits of women, and later by Edvard Munch and Vasily Kandinsky, he moved towards the expression of his inner feelings, which he termed lyricism. In 1914–15, with Shizuo Fujimori (1891–1943) and Kyōkichi Tanaka (1892–1915), he founded Tsukuhae (‘Moonglow’), a magazine of poetry and woodblock prints, in which he published abstract prints. One of these, Bright Time (1915; Tokyo, N. Mus. Mod. A.), is possibly the first purely abstract Japanese work. He also produced polychromatic figurative woodblock prints, such as Ripples (1939; priv. col., see Kubo, pl. 202) and The Author of Hyōtō (‘Ice isle’, 1943; Tokyo, N. Mus. Mod. A., see Kubo, pl. 224), a portrait of his close friend, the poet Sakutarō Hagiwara. Works such as the illustrated poetry collection ...

Article

Pougny, Jean  

Christina Lodder

[Puni, Ivan (Al’bertovich)]

(b Kouokkala, Finland [now Repino, St Petersburg Region, Russia], Feb 22, 1892; d Paris, Dec 28, 1956).

Russian painter, illustrator and designer, active in France. He was educated at the gymnasium and then at the military academy in St Petersburg. Between 1909 and 1912 he visited Italy and France. In Paris he studied at the Académie Julian and stayed with his compatriot, the artist Yury Annenkov. He became friendly with Osip Zadkine and other Russian artists and began to experiment with Fauvism and early Cubism. Very few paintings remain from this period, although Walk in the Sun (1912; Zurich, M. et Mme Berninger priv. col., see Berninger and Cartier, vol. i, p. 31), painted after he returned to Russia, indicates an interest in expressive colour, surface texture and perspectival distortions.

On his return to St Petersburg, Pougny was introduced by Nikolay Kul’bin into avant-garde circles, and he exhibited with the Union of Youth group in the winters of 1911–12 and 1913–14. Breaking with them in January 1914...

Article

Shinoda, Tōkō  

Yasuyoshi Saito

[Masuko]

(b Manshū, Manchuria, March 28, 1913).

Japanese calligrapher and painter of Manchurian birth. She learnt calligraphy from her father from 1930 to 1945. In 1940 she held her first one-woman exhibition at the Kyukyodo Gallery in Tokyo. From c. 1945 she began the production of abstract paintings using sumi (ink). In 1954 she exhibited at the exhibition of Japanese Calligraphy at MOMA, New York. In the same year she produced mural calligraphy for the Japanese pavilion at the celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the city of São Paulo. In 1955 she exhibited at the Nichi-Bei chūshō bijutsuten (exhibition of Japanese and American abstract art) at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, and at the Sumi no geijutsuten (exhibition of sumi art) which toured Europe in 1955–6. From 1956 she held numerous one-woman exhibitions in Europe and North America, and in 1961 she was invited to exhibit work at the 6th São Paulo Biennial. The following year she created a relief mural for the lobby of the Kyoto International Conference Hall, and in ...

Article

Slobodkina, Esphyr  

Russian, 20th century, female.

Born 22 Sept 1908, in Chelyabinsk, Russia; died 21 July 2022, in Glen Head, NY.

Author, illustrator, sculptor, painter, designer. Fashion, American Abstraction. Children’s books, assemblage, paper collage.

Esphyr Slobodkina emigrated to the United States and settled in New York in 1928 after her family was displaced by the Russian Revolution. She enrolled in the National Academy of Design while also working for her mother’s dress salon. In 1933 she dropped out of the National Academy of Design, having felt like the school’s conservatism was hindering her creativity. Slobodkina became a founding member of the American Abstract Artists in 1936, an organisation which aimed to promote the work of and make the art world more aware of the Americans who were creating abstract work.

An outspoken proponent of Abstraction, Slobodkina joined multiple organisations to increase awareness of her own work as well as that of her peers. She joined the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors, started the lecture series for the American Abstract Artists while acting as their Assistant Treasurer, joined the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, and founded the polychrome printing business Art Development Company, which ran from ...