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(b Mosman, NSW, April 23, 1908; d Emu Plains, NSW, Feb 20, 1978).

Australian painter, textile designer, and sculptor. From 1925 to 1929 she studied in Sydney with Anthony Dattilo Rubbo (1870–1955), an Italian-born academic painter whose students were significant in the development of modernism in Australia. In 1933 Lewers studied at the London Central School of Arts and Crafts, and met Herbert Read and the artists of Unit One. Her works during the 1930s included Bauhaus-inspired domestic artefacts, such as pottery, modernist timber furniture, and hand-printed fabrics. After World War II she continued her studies in Sydney with the Hungarian artist Desiderius Orban (1884–1986), who had himself studied at the Académie Julian in Paris when Cubism was developing. Lewers took up his Aristotelian ideas based on the essence of the object. She was influenced by Vieira da Silva and later Afro, whose paintings were exhibited in Sydney, and also by colleagues who followed the ideas of Dynamic Symmetry. However, she did not study modernist theory herself but worked intuitively and was not part of any artistic group or movement....

Latvian, 20th century, female.

Born 23 August 1908, in Riga, Russian Empire (now Latvia); died 21 December 1983, in Riga, Latvian SSR (now Latvia).

Painter, sculptor, tapestry designer. Still-life, portrait, celestial, and abstract subjects, assemblages.

Zenta Logina survived decades of material adversity, official hostility, and professional obscurity to produce one of Latvian art’s most stylistically diverse, technically inventive, and intellectually ambitious bodies of work. Like many Latvian artists of her generation, Logina spent World War I as a refugee in the Russian interior, returning to a newly independent nation consciously fashioning its modern cultural identity. In ...

(b Constanţa, March 26, 1932).

Romanian painter, engraver and tapestry designer. He studied at the Fine Arts Institute, Bucharest (1950–56). Although his artistic education in Romania neglected the work of modern European artists, he acquired a sound knowledge of classical art and managed to discover the expressive values of modern art. His first figurative works reveal a sensitive use of colour and a taste for chromatic nuances in the contours. From 1963 to 1968 he worked and exhibited in Rome. Here he turned towards an allusive abstract art with a tendency to lyricism, comparable to the abstract allusive style of Adolph Gottlieb. After 1965 Nicodim moved towards a lyrical abstraction of reality in his paintings, as he depicted in symbolic form such natural phenomena as fields, birds and lakes, e.g. Tranquil Lake (Bucharest, N. Mus. A.). He also made a series of colour engravings entitled The Rainbow in the Grass (Bucharest, N. Mus. A.). In the mid-1970s he produced some compositions with figurative–human themes containing a profoundly tragic message, such as ...

(b Como, Feb 5, 1901; d Como, Sept 7, 1957).

Italian painter and designer. He studied painting at the Scuole Techniche in Como (1918–23), where he met Giuseppe Terragni and Mario Radice. Attracted by Futurism, he taught painting at the Scuola di Arte Applicata (1919–37) and the Collegio ‘Baragiola’ (1920–28), Como, and became a poster designer and satirical cartoonist for La Zanzara (1922–4). As secretary to the Istituto Nazionale di Setificio (1923–9), he produced designs for silk, but his paintings (some pseudonymously signed Boroscki, Prague) remained rooted in Novecento classicism. In 1932 Rho followed Radice’s adoption of finely poised geometric abstraction, and subsequently they encouraged younger artists, notably Carla Badiali (b 1907) and Aldo Galli (1906–81). They formed the Gruppo di Como with Terragni and other Rationalist architects and established links with the Galleria del Milione in Milan. In 1936 the group organized the abstract section of the Como ...

[née Taeuber]

(b Davos, Jan 19, 1889; d Zurich, Jan 13, 1943).

Swiss painter, sculptor and designer. She studied textile techniques at the Ecole des Arts Appliqués in St Gall from 1908 to 1910 and then in Hamburg at the Kunstgewerbeschule in 1912. Her career began in the centre of Dada activity in Zurich between 1915 and 1920; see Symétrie pathétique, 1916–7 and Dada Composition, 1920. Although she did not date her work until the last two years of her life, its chronology was reconstructed by Hugo Weber from the testimony of her husband, Hans Arp, and from internal evidence.

Taeuber-Arp’s work evolved in groups, each characterized by a distinctive use of formal elements. The first prevailing format was a horizontal–vertical sectioning of a square or vertical rectangular ground, as in Pillow Sham, a wool embroidery (c. 1916; Zurich, Mus. Bellerive). Its structure reveals the importance of her textile training as much as the influence of Cubism. Her austerely geometric art arose from her belief in the innate expressive power of colour, line and form, and was informed by unusual wit and freedom. She rejected her contemporaries’ progressive schematization of objective form. During the years of Dada in Zurich (...