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(b Jan 25, 1930; d Lomé, Jan 4, 2010).

Togolese painter, sculptor, engraver, stained glass designer, potter and textile designer. Beginning in 1946, he received his secondary education in Dakar, where he also worked in an architecture firm. He travelled to France and received his diplôme supérieur from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris. A versatile artist, Ahyi is best known for his murals and for monumental stone, marble and cement public sculptures. His work reflects the fusion of his Togolese roots, European training and an international outlook, and he counts among his influences Moore, Braque, Modigliani, Tamayo, Siqueiros and Tall. His work combines ancient and modern themes and materials, maternity being a prominent topic. The messages of his larger, public pieces operate on a broad level to appeal to the general populace, while smaller works often reflect his private engagement with challenges confronting the human condition. His compositions are both abstract and figurative and evoke the heroism and hope of the two world wars, Togo's colonial period and the struggle for independence from France, as well as the political efforts of the peoples of Vietnam, South Africa and Palestine. Ahyi has won numerous international prizes, including the prize of the city of Lyon (...

maiden name: Fleischmann

German, 20th century, female.

Active in the USA.

Born 12 June 1899, in Berlin; died 10 May 1994, in Orange (Connecticut), USA.

Draughtswoman, textile designer, printmaker.

Having studied in Berlin and Hamburg, Anni Albers went on to study at the Bauhaus from 1922 to 1930. She married Josef Albers and became an assistant teacher at a weaving workshop. In 1933, the two emigrated to the USA, founding the art department at Black Mountain College, a newly established liberal arts school in North Carolina. In 1949, Anni and Josef moved to New Haven (Connecticut) where he served as chair for the design department at Yale University.

As early on as her first teaching post at the Bauhaus, where she ran technical classes, she taught students to combine natural and synthetic materials in weaving, saying: ‘The material determines its own limits in the face of the tasks imposed by the imagination.’ After emigrating to the USA, she continued to teach this philosophy at Black Mountain College and was thus part of the considerable influence exerted by the college on the artistic movement that would go on to become the American School of the 1940s. Challenging historical distinctions between high and low art forms, she carved out space for fibre arts within the discourse of fine art. Her pedagogical approach not only integrated art, craft, and industry, but also emphasised the cultivation of moral character, self-sufficiency, and independence from machinery....

(b Atlanta, GA, Mar 16, 1937; d Bedford, NH, May 20, 2020).

American painter, printmaker, and weaver. Born in segregated Atlanta, GA, Emma Amos grew up in an upper-middle-class family with connections to influential Black figures including W. E. B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston. At age sixteen, she had exhibited her work at Atlanta University and enrolled in a five-year BFA program at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, OH (1953–1958). She went on to study etching, painting, and weaving at the Central School of Art, London (1958–1959) where she began creating gestural abstractions, experimenting with color, brushwork, and space to evoke specific places (e.g., Shepherd’s Path, 1958). In 1960 Amos moved to New York, where she worked as a rug designer for Dorothy Liebes, an art instructor. Simultaneously, she advanced her printmaking at two printmaking workshops: Robert Blackburn’s and Letterio Calapai’s (an outpost of Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17). Amos completed her MA at New York University (NYU) in ...

British, 20th – 21st century, male.

Active in California.

Born 1940, in Cleator Moor (West Cumbria).

Painter, ceramicist, print artist, film maker, photographer. Textiles.

Conrad Atkinson graduated from Carlisle College of Art (1961), Liverpool College of Art (1962) and the Royal Academy Schools in London (...

German, 19th – 20th century, male.

Born 14 April 1868, in Hamburg; died 27 February 1940, in Berlin.

Painter, draughtsman, engraver, architect, designer, decorative artist, graphic designer. Posters, furniture, wallpaper, carpets, glassware, ceramics, table services, jewellery, silverwork, objets d'art, typefaces.

Jugendstil, functional school.

Die Sieben (Group of Seven), Deutscher Werkbund...

French, 18th – 19th century, male.

Born 17 May 1754, in Lyons; died 24 October 1843, in Lyons.

Painter (gouache), watercolourist, pastellist, engraver, draughtsman, miniaturist. Portraits, still-lifes (flowers/fruit), costume studies. Designs for fabrics.

Berjon was the son of a butcher and grew up in the Vaise suburb of Lyons. He initially worked with his father; then, it is thought, he gave this up to study medicine, before learning to draw with the sculptor Perrache in Lyons. Eventually he became a designer at a silk manufacturer in Lyons, and began to paint. He often travelled to Paris on business, where he got to know several painters and became friends with the portrait artist Augustin. As a result of the destruction of the silk factory during the siege of Lyons, Berjon moved to Paris, where he lived in abject poverty for many years. He eventually returned to Lyons and went to work for an embroidery manufacturer and, in ...

French, 20th century, male.

Born 26 June 1909, in Dijon; died 6 December 1996, in Paris.

Painter, collage artist, engraver, draughtsman. Wall decorations, designs for mosaics, stained glass windows, tapestries, stage costumes and sets.

A pupil at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyons in 1930, Bertholle studied in Paris from 1932-1934, and subsequently attended classes run by the painter Roger Bissière at the Académie Ranson, where he met his friends and associates Manessier, Etienne-Martin, Le Moal and Véra Pagava. He was artistic director of the Gien porcelain factory from 1943-1957, and taught at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1965-1980. He was a member of the Institut de France, a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur and a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Initially an admirer of Puvis de Chavannes, whose work he had encountered at the city museum in Lyons, Bertholle later discovered Manet (at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1932), and through the latter, Van Gogh and Renoir. Following his early, highly-coloured Expressionist period, Bertholle was greatly influenced by the Flemish fantasies of Breughel and Heironymus Bosch, and ultimately by the Surrealists - as may be seen in his painting of the ...

British, 20th century, male.

Active in Crays Pond, near Reading.

Born 1909, in Essex; died November 1996, in London.

Painter, printmaker, sculptor, ceramicist, textile designer. Portraits, landscapes, urban landscapes.

London Group.

André Bicât was a self-taught artist. Born to French and Anglo-Irish parents, he worked as a theatre designer and scene painter in the 1930s. His theatre work included work for Mercury Theatre Productions in ...

(António Teixeira Bastos Nunes)

(b Lisbon, Sept 18, 1899; d Lisbon, Aug 18, 1982).

Portuguese painter, printmaker and designer of tapestries and tile panels. Known primarily as a ‘painter of Lisbon’, he began his artistic career as an illustrator and cartoonist as well as writing a weekly satirical page (1928–50) in the newspaper O sempre fixe. He visited Paris in 1929, 1930–1 and again in 1937, when he was impressed by a retrospective exhibition of the work of van Gogh, whose influence is evident in Botelho’s scenes of urban squalor of the late 1930s. He had begun to depict calm, unpopulated views of Lisbon in the early 1930s, for example Side View of the Castle (1935; Lisbon, Mus. Cidade), and from the early 1940s concentrated almost exclusively on this theme. The compositions became increasingly crisp and planar and the piling up of volumes and compression of space increasingly stylized, especially after he began to paint from memory in 1949. The tonalities of Botelho’s paintings remained consistently pale, as in ...

(b Paris, Sept 29, 1703; d Paris, May 30, 1770).

French painter, draughtsman and etcher. Arguably it was he, more than any other artist, who set his stamp on both the fine arts and the decorative arts of the 18th century. Facilitated by the extraordinary proliferation of engravings, Boucher successfully fed the demand for imitable imagery at a time when most of Europe sought to follow what was done at the French court and in Paris. He did so both as a prolific painter and draughtsman (he claimed to have produced some 10,000 drawings during his career) and through engravings after his works, the commercial potential of which he seems to have been one of the first artists to exploit. He reinvented the genre of the pastoral, creating an imagery of shepherds and shepherdesses as sentimental lovers that was taken up in every medium, from porcelain to toile de Jouy, and that still survives in a debased form. At the same time, his manner of painting introduced the virtuosity and freedom of the sketch into the finished work, promoting painterliness as an end in itself. This approach dominated French painting until the emergence of Neo-classicism, when criticism was heaped on Boucher and his followers. His work never wholly escaped this condemnation, even after the taste for French 18th-century art started to revive in the second half of the 19th century. In his own day, the fact that he worked for both collectors and the market, while retaining the prestige of a history painter, had been both Boucher’s strength and a cause of his decline....

German, 20th century, male.

Born 1889, in Krefeld; died 1957, in Amsterdam.

Painter (including gouache), watercolourist, pastellist, engraver (wood), decorative designer. Figure compositions, figures, nudes, rustic scenes, landscapes, landscapes with figures, architectural views, still-lifes, animals. Stage sets, designs for stained glass, glass painting, designs for fabrics...

French, 20th century, male.

Born 15 October 1893, in Angers.

Engraver, illustrator, painter, decorative designer. Designs for carpets, designs (wallpapers/fabrics).

Maurice Camus studied with Claudio Castellucho at the latter's Académie de Montparnasse and also under Lucien Simon. During a visit to Palermo in 1919, he painted decorative compositions for the Casa Florio. He exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in Paris and was made a member in ...

French, 19th – 20th century, male.

Born 12 January 1874, in Montpellier; died 1933, in Algiers.

Painter (including gouache), engraver, decorative artist. Genre scenes, figures, landscapes, landscapes with figures. Designs for carpets, designs (furniture).

Orientalism.

School of Algiers.

Léon Cauvy studied under Albert Maignan and exhibited at the Paris Salon as of 1901. He served as principal of the École des Beaux-Arts in Algiers from 1909 to 1933. Cauvy was a member of the Société du Salon des Artistes Français from 1906 onwards. He was awarded a silver medal in 1911, following which he exhibited out of competition. He was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur in 1926....

German, 19th – 20th century, male.

Active also active in France.

Born 6 March 1866, in Flensburg; died 5 January 1945, in Wiesbaden.

Painter, engraver, draughtsman, decorative designer, graphic designer. Portraits, landscapes, urban landscapes, still-lifes, flowers, decorative motifs. Designs for carpets, designs (furniture/posters/jewellery/book-binding).

Jugendstil.

Die Sieben (Group of Seven)...

[Frantz]

(b Rostock, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, 1582; d London, 1658).

German painter, designer, illustrator and printmaker. He probably studied first in the Low Countries. He was perhaps in Denmark c.1611, but then spent four years in Italy, mainly in Rome and Venice, where he met the English ambassador Sir Henry Wotton. By 1617 he was living in Copenhagen; an inscribed drawing of Apollo and Marsyas from this period is in the Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen. Between 1618 and 1623 Cleyn was employed by Christian IV at Rosenborg Slot, decorating the King’s writing closet with pastoral landscapes, Venetian views, genre scenes and grotesque designs. Commissions followed for larger subject pictures (which show pronounced Venetian influence) and for similar decorative schemes for the royal castles at Frederiksborg (Fireworks), Christiansborg (Children on their Way to School) and Kronborg. In 1623 Cleyn visited England, with a letter of introduction to Prince Charles (later Charles I) from the English envoy in Copenhagen, Sir Robert Anstruther. In the Prince’s absence in Spain, he was received by James I, who wished to retain his services for himself and sent him back to Copenhagen with a request to Christian IV to release him. Work in progress kept Cleyn in Denmark until late in ...

(b Aelst [now Aalst], Aug 14, 1502; d Brussels, Dec 6, 1550).

South Netherlandish painter, sculptor, architect and designer of woodcuts, stained glass and tapestries. Son of the Deputy Mayor of the village of Aelst, he was married twice, first to Anna van Dornicke (d 1529), the daughter of the Antwerp painter Jan Mertens, who may have been his teacher; they had two children, Michel van Coecke and Pieter van Coecke II (before 1527–59), the latter of whom became a painter. He later married Mayken Verhulst, herself a painter of miniatures and the mother of three children, Pauwel, Katelijne and Maria; they are shown with their parents in Coecke’s Family Portrait (Zurich, Ksthaus). Mayken is credited with having taught the technique of painting in tempera on cloth to her son-in-law, Pieter Bruegel the elder, who married Maria in 1563. (For family tree see Bruegel family.) Van Mander also stated that Bruegel was Coecke’s apprentice, an allegation no longer universally accepted in view of their substantial stylistic differences. Although the names of other students of Coecke’s, including ...

French, 20th century, male.

Born 14 February 1925, in Alexandria, Egypt.

Painter, engraver, illustrator, graphic designer. Posters, wall decorations, designs for tapestries, designs for carpets.

From 1942, Jean Cortot studied under Othon Friesz at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and together with Busse, Calmettes, Patrix and others, was a co-founder of the ...

(b Karlstad, Dec 31, 1938).

Swedish painter, sculptor, printmaker and weaver. She began her studies in 1958 at the Konstfackskolan, Stockholm, continuing from 1959 to 1960 at the Kungliga Akademien för de Fria Konsterna, Stockholm. Cronqvist’s main subject-matter was the human figure. She first attracted attention for her sensuous use of bright, fleshy colours, evoking an air of humorous absurdity by distorting form and perspective. Although adhering to traditional forms and themes, such as landscape, still-life and self-portrait, her continuous dialogue with tradition led her to question the latter’s implicitly patriarchal function and to dispute its representation of women as objects. In 1969–70 she became absorbed with the crucially conflicting themes of being an artist and a mother. She went on to depict her own childhood in a manner reminiscent of Edvard Munch, capturing not only its atmosphere of discolouring depression but also the distortion of memory. For this new imagery she used a darker range of colours and a larger scale to give a sense of constraint, dominated by a rigidly accomplished central perspective. In the self-portrait ...

(b Waelhem, Feb 23, 1779; d Ghent, Nov 22, 1843).

Belgian painter, designer and printmaker. The son of the painter and architect, Pierre-François De Noter the elder (1747–1830), and brother of Jean-Baptiste De Noter (1786–1855), a painter of architectural views, he had an early grounding in the arts. He was taught by Guillaume-Jacques Herreyns at the Mechelen Academie and attended Jan Frans Van Geel’s sculpture class until 1793, when the French invasion prevented further study. One of his earliest commissions, shared with his father and Herreyns, was the decoration (begun shortly after 1793) of the SS Pieter en Pauwelkerk in Mechelen. This project had a determining influence on his career. The French had transformed the church into a Temple of Reason, and it seems likely that the damage done by them to the suppressed religious institutions of the Low Countries awakened the interest of Pierre-François De Noter and his brother in the architectural heritage of the Flemish towns. Pierre-François worked as a designer for a printed fabric manufacturer and as a printer before devoting himself to painting. He settled in Ghent in ...

French, 20th century, male.

Born 6 October 1936, in Roanne (Auvergne).

Painter, engraver, lithographer, illustrator. Designs for stained glass, tapestries.

Jacques Degenne studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in St-Étienne. In 1961 he worked in advertising in Switzerland, coming under the influence of the Lausanne Graphic Artists...