Italian, 20th century, male.
Born 1900, in Marciana Marina (Livorno); died 1971, in Milan.
Painter, ceramicist, illustrator, scenographer, writer. Stage costumes.
Futurism.
Giovanni Acquaviva studied philosophy and law at the University of Pisa, while devoting himself to illustration at the same time. He founded the Futurist group ...
French, 20th century, female.
Painter, illustrator. Figures, fruit. Stage costumes and sets.
A graduate of the École des Arts appliqués, Géraldine Allier started out as a graphic illustrator in the advertising and publishing industries. With the help of Louis Bercut, with whom she worked for several years, she then started making her own sets and costumes: ...
German, 20th century, male.
Active in France from 1960.
Born 1934, in Bad Bellingen.
Painter (including gouache), performance artist, watercolourist, engraver (etching), monotype artist, draughtsman. Stage sets, artists' books, posters.
Hermann Amann is very active. He has published written works and given numerous lectures on painting. As a painter, he produces very colourful, very musical works, with a dynamic rhythm, made up of geometric figures in thick lines or black rings, biomorphic forms and graphic signs. He also produces engravings (etchings and monotypes), artists' books ( ...
Russian, 20th century, male.
Also active in France.
Born 11 July 1889, in Petropavlosk (Kamchatka); died 1974, in Paris.
Painter, collage artist, sculptor, illustrator, draughtsman. Stage costumes and sets, film sets.
The son of a political exile in Kamchatka, Yuri Annenkov was able to go to St Petersburg in 1898 and study at the school of fine art and at several artists’ workshops between 1908 and 1911, developing a passion for the theatre and theatrical production. He went to Paris in 1911 and studied with Maurice Denis and Félix Vallotton and then went to Switzerland in 1913. He exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1912 and 1913 and then returned to Russia where he joined the...
[Count Balthazar Klossowski de Rola]
(b Paris, Feb 29, 1908; d Rossimiere, Feb 18, 2001).
French painter, illustrator and stage designer. Appreciated for many years by only a handful of collectors, and ostensibly out of step with the modern movement, Balthus’s classically inspired work won the recognition and admiration of a wider public only late in his career. Although he received no formal training, he came from a highly artistic family background. His father, Erich Klossowski (1875–1949), was a painter and art historian, born to an aristocratic family in East Prussia and the author of a book on Daumier; his brother, Pierre Klossowski, was to become a painter and writer; and his mother, Elizabeth Spiro, was also a painter. Beginning in 1919, she engaged, under the name of Baladine, in a long-lasting relationship with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, providing etchings to accompany many of his poems. In this environment Balthus met the writers André Gide and Pierre-Jean Jouve, as well as Pierre Bonnard, who gave him his earliest guidance. Rilke also acted as Balthus’s mentor, writing the preface for an album of drawings by the 13-year-old artist entitled ...
French, 20th century, male.
Born 1882, in Nantes; died 1932.
Painter (gouache), watercolourist, draughtsman, illustrator, stylist. Figures, portraits, landscapes. Stage costumes and sets.
Art Deco.
On the suggestion of his friends Lesage and Broca, Georges Barbier studied with Jean-Paul Laurens. He was to work mainly for the theatre and the cinema, designing costumes and sets. He was responsible for Rudolph Valentino's costumes in the film ...
(b Pergamino, Buenos Aires, Sept 22, 1894; d Buenos Aires, Feb 21, 1976).
Argentine painter, stage designer, and illustrator. He studied drawing in Buenos Aires under the Italian painter Augusto Bolognini (b 1870) and at the Academia Nacional before moving in 1923 to Paris, where he worked in Charles Guérin’s studio and at the Académie Colarossi. He also studied in the studios of André Lhote and Othon Friesz and became associated with other Argentine artists based in Paris. Like others of his generation and nationality, he sought in the 1920s to escape from pictorial provincialism by rejecting academic norms, as in Still Life (1926; Rosario, Mus. Mun. B.A.). He learned how to paint while living in France and developed a range of imagery typical of Argentine art without showing any great originality.
More than any other painter, Basaldúa depicted life in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, concentrating humorously and without sentimentality on the wide boys, dance-hall girls, loose women, and handsome, dangerous men of the tango in such pictures as the ...
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 ...
French, 20th century, male.
Born 20 August 1902, in Paris; died 11 February 1949, in Paris.
Painter (including gouache), pastellist, watercolourist, collage artist, draughtsman, illustrator. Nudes, portraits, genre scenes. Stage costumes and sets.
Bérard studied at the Académie Ranson in Paris in 1920. He was influenced by the graphic art of Maurice Denis, and by the sense of colour he found in the work of both Bonnard and Vuillard. He quickly discovered a passion for stage design and costumes, through theatrical friends such as Louis Jouvet, Boris Kochno and Jean Cocteau. The composer Francis Poulenc dedicated his ...
Danish, 20th century, male.
Active from 1947 active in France.
Born 20 or 29 May 1924, in Kolding; died 21 October 1999, in Paris.
Painter, watercolourist, draughtsman, engraver, illustrator, newspaper cartoonist. Stage sets, stage costumes.
Lars Bo was the son of an architect and painter who duly followed in his father's footsteps. His earliest drawings were of animals of every description. He enrolled at the academy of applied arts in Copenhagen in ...
Belgian, 20th century, male.
Born 1920.
Painter (including gouache), draughtsman, engraver, illustrator, decorative designer. Stage costumes and sets, postage stamps.
Oscar Bonnevalle studied at the Ghent academy and went on to produce postage stamp designs which demonstrate a genuine feeling for realism and traditional folklore....
(b Vercelli, Piedmont, March 11, 1806; d Dijon, March 5, 1867).
French painter, illustrator, set designer and poet. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Guillaume Lethière from 1821. The Punishment of Mazeppa (1827; Rouen, Mus. B.-A.), inspired by the scene from Byron’s poem, in which Mazeppa is tied to the back of a wildly stampeding horse, is his most important early painting and one of the key images of the Romantic movement.
Early in his career Boulanger became friendly with Eugène and Achille Devéria. Through them he met Victor Hugo, who became his ardent supporter and the source of many of his most typical works. Among Boulanger’s illustrations were those for Hugo’s Odes et ballades (1829), Les Orientales (1829), Les Fantômes (1829) and Notre-Dame de Paris (1844). Boulanger interpreted the macabre and romantic quality of Hugo’s texts with an imaginative power and freedom that anticipated Redon (e.g. ‘...
(b Fresnaye-sur-Sarthe, nr Alençon, July 11, 1899; d Paris, March 1, 1979).
French painter, illustrator and stage designer. He studied briefly at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux and from 1917 at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Paris under Eugène Morand (b 1885), whose innovative teaching influenced his later work.
Brianchon was an eclectic artist, and there are traces in his work of many of the styles that succeeded each other in Paris during the period in which he worked. Taking landscapes, cityscapes and images of women as his main subject-matter, he nevertheless managed to maintain a distinctive approach based on a harmonious colour sense and a concern with calm, silent or moonlit atmospheres. The Courtesans (1932; Paris, Mus. A. Mod. Ville Paris) and Rue La Fontaine (1946; Geneva, Petit Pal.) are typical of his work as a painter. He also produced murals (e.g. Symphony, 1936; Paris, Pal. Chaillot), book illustrations (e.g. lithographs for André Gide’s Le Théâtre complet...
French, 20th century, male.
Born 3 September 1921, in La Baule.
Painter, lithographer, illustrator. Scenes with figures, portraits, nudes, landscapes, still-lifes. Stage sets, stage costumes, church decoration.
Jean Bruneau was a student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Nantes from 1938 to 1945 and won the Prix de la Ville de Nantes in his final year. In ...
(b London, March 29, 1905; d Hastings, Oct 22, 1976).
English painter, illustrator and stage designer. As a student at the Chelsea Polytechnic (1921–3) and the Royal College of Art (1923–5) he became a talented figure draughtsman. In the second half of the decade he spent much time in France painting intricately detailed urban scenes, which depicted the low life of Toulon and Marseille. Works such as the watercolour Toulon (1927; priv. col., see Causey, cat. no. 33) were executed in a meticulously finished and vividly coloured decorative style. Burra usually used watercolour and tempera and occasionally collage oil paints.
Burra took ideas from Cubism, Dada (notably George Grosz) and, especially, Surrealism, but his work is also linked with the English satirical tradition of William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson and Isaac Cruikshank: Burra loved burlesque and poked fun at people’s pretensions and excesses of style and behaviour, as in John Deth (Homage to Conrad Aiken) (...
Greek, 20th century, male.
Born 1893, in Athens; died 1972.
Painter, draughtsman (charcoal), illustrator. Scenes with figures, landscapes. Posters, murals, stage costumes and sets.
Nuagisme.
Pericles Byzantios studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and returned to Greece in 1916. Early on, Byzantios was influenced by Bonnard and Vuillard. He used a broad stroke, softly animated lighting, and a pleasing palette of ochres and blues. His charcoal and pencil sketches allowed him to achieve an almost Expressionist line in his depiction of elegant women and Parisian passers by....
Italian, 20th century, male.
Born 8 August 1927, in Palermo.
Painter, watercolourist, pastellist, draughtsman, illustrator. Figure compositions, figures. Stage sets, stage costumes.
Bruno Caruso edited the Sicilia review from 1953 to 1956, and worked on numerous other publications, including Graphis, Fortune and Du, providing both drawings and articles. From ...
French, 20th century, male.
Born 25 March 1897, in Paris; died 12 July 1981, in St-Germain-en-Laye.
Painter, engraver, illustrator. Scenes with figures, landscapes, still-lifes. Designs for tapestries, stage costumes and sets.
Roger Chastel's father was a banker and a collector. In 1914, he entered the Atelier Cormon at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which he left quite quickly for the Atelier Jean-Paul-Laurens at the Académie Privée Julian. Having been drafted in 1916, he was discharged in 1919 and enrolled at the Académie Ranson. At the same time, encouraged by the caricaturist Sem, he was commissioned to produce fashion designs and cartoons for magazines, including the leading contemporary French fashion magazine ...
French, 20th century, male.
Born 8 March 1911, in Paris.
Painter, illustrator. Landscapes with figures. Stage costumes and sets.
Chauffrey travelled in Spain, Italy, Greece, the USA and Morocco; he brought back personal studies from these countries. He exhibited regularly in Paris, at the Salon d'Automne, the Salon de Mai and the Salon des Tuileries. Chauffrey created the sets and costumes for ...
(b Mexico City, Jun 10, 1940).
Mexican painter, sculptor, illustrator, and stage designer. Coen was self-taught when he took up painting in 1956 with the encouragement of Diego Rivera, but from 1956 to 1960 he studied graphic design with the American publicist Gordon Jones. During those years he worked in an Abstract Expressionist manner, although he soon incorporated figurative elements and, from around 1963 onward, elements of fantasy.
In the 1950s until the early 1970s, he was one of the indispensable creators of the collective exhibitions organized by the Juan Martín Gallery, the most important platform for vanguard art in Mexico City at that time. This gallery also dedicated four individual exhibitions to the work of Coen. In 1967 he went to Paris on a French government grant. In the following year he was a founder-member of the Salón Independiente, where he began to exhibit acrylic sculptures of the female torso.
He systematically returned to working the image of the feminine. These were followed between ...
