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 ...
(b Holywood, County Down, Ireland, Jan 26, 1922).
Australian painter, printmaker, book designer, lecturer, collector, gallery director and publisher of limited edition artists’ books, of Irish decent. He worked as a draughtsman before entering war service in the British Admiralty from 1940 to 1949, including five years in Colombo, where he made sketching trips to jungle temples with the Buddhist monk and artist Manjsiro Thero. Between 1949 and 1951 Adams worked as an exhibition designer in London and studied wood-engraving with Gertrude Hermes in her evening class at the Central School of Arts and Crafts (now Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design). In 1951, after moving to Melbourne, Adams began a 30-year teaching commitment at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), where he instructed many of the younger generation of Australian printmakers, including George Baldessin and Jan Senbergs. A brief return to Britain and Ireland in 1957–8 provided experience with Dolmen Press, Dublin, which published his first book of engravings, ...
(b San José, June 1, 1907; d 1998).
Costa Rican engraver, painter, illustrator, draughtsman, writer and critic. He studied for a year from 1931 at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes but was otherwise initially self-taught, using Louis Gonse’s L’Art japonais (Paris, 1883) as a source. He produced a series of caricature drawings, influenced by Cubism, in the Album de dibujos de 1926. During 1929 he met the sculptors Juan Manuel Sánchez and Francisco Zúñiga (the latter was also a printmaker), and through his interest in German and Mexican Expressionist printmakers, he developed a passion for wood-engraving. His first wood-engravings were published in the periodical Repertorio Americano (1929). He went on to contribute wood-engravings and drawings to collections of short stories and poetry, educational books, periodicals and newspapers. In 1931 he taught drawing and wood-engraving at the Escuela Normal in Heredia. He exhibited at the Salones Anuales de Artes Plásticas in San José (1931–6...
French, 19th – 20th century, male.
Draughtsman, watercolourist, illustrator, novelist.
Marcel Arnac illustrated François Villon's Works (1928) with miniature watercolours, and illustrated his own work, 83 Centimetres of Adventures (Les éditions Georges-Anquetil, 1925), with drawings. He also wrote and illustrated Le Brelan de Joie...
French, 20th century, male.
Born 16 September 1886, in Strasbourg; died 7 June 1966, in Basel.
Collage artist, engraver, sculptor, draughtsman, illustrator, poet.
Dadaism.
Der Moderne Bund, Dadaist groups in Zurich and Cologne, Artistes Radicaux, Das Neue Leben, Paris Surrealist Group, Abstraction-Création.
Hans Arp joined the École des Arts et Métiers in Strasbourg in 1902, at the age of 16. In 1903 he began painting and contributed to a local magazine. In 1904 he made his first trip to Paris. From 1905 to 1907 he studied under Ludwig von Hoffmann at the fine arts academy in Weimar, where he attended modern art exhibitions. He returned to Strasbourg, which his family then left for Weggis, on the edge of the Lac des Quatre Cantons in Switzerland. Between 1908 and 1910 he made a second trip to Paris and worked for a time at the Académie Julian. In Weggis he completed his first Abstract compositions and learned the art of modelling. In 1911 he co-founded the group...
British, 20th century, male.
Born 20 February 1921, in London, in Hoyland (Yorkshire) according to some sources; died 17 November 1975.
Painter, sculptor (bronze), illustrator, stage set designer, art critic, designer. Figures, landscapes, portraits, mythological subjects.
The son of the art critic and poet Gerald Gould and the feminist Labour Party activist Barbara Ayrton, Michael Ayrton travelled widely in his youth to Vienna, Paris and Italy. He received his artistic education at Heatherley's and St John's Wood art schools in London. In ...
Belgian, 20th century, male.
Born 1879 or 1889, in Brussels; died 1954, in Paris.
Painter, illustrator, writer. History painting, nudes, portraits, landscapes, still-lifes.
Baes was a student of J. Stallaert at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels; he also studied under Cabanel and Bonnat in Paris. Work by him was shown at the Salon de Bruxelles (1903-1904), at the Salon d'Automne in Paris (from 1928 to 1933), at the Salon des Artistes Français (between 1929 and 1938) and at the Salon des Tuileries (from 1933 to 1939)....
American, 20th century, male.
Born 2 September 1911, in Charlotte (North Carolina); died 12 March 1988, in New York.
Painter (including gouache), watercolourist, lithographer, screen printer, engraver, collage artist, newspaper cartoonist, illustrator, art theorist. Religious subjects, figure compositions, local figures. Humorous cartoons, frontispieces, stage sets...
British, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1952, in London.
Painter, illustrator, art critic. Landscapes, cityscapes, interiors with figures, portraits.
Julian Bell is the grandson of the painter Vanessa Bell. He studied English Literature at Magdalen College in Oxford before attending the City and Guilds Art School in London. He taught at Goldsmiths College ...
Russian, 19th – 20th century, male.
Active also active in France.
Born 1870, in St Petersburg; died 1960, in Paris.
Painter, watercolourist, draughtsman, illustrator, decorative designer, writer.
Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) group.
Aleksander was the brother of Albert Nikolaevich Benois. He studied law, and then painting, in St Petersburg, before going on to Paris for further arts studies. In St Petersburg in 1909, he exhibited a series of paintings entitled, ...
(b Gunclje, nr Ljubljana, Sept 6, 1933).
Slovenian painter, printmaker, sculptor, illustrator and poet. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Ljubljana, in 1955 and later received his MFA in painting and engraving. He continued his studies in 1959 with Johnny Friedlaender in Paris. After 1970 he taught painting at the Ljubljana Academy. He was one of the most outstanding Yugoslav artists after the early 1960s and won several major international awards, including the Grand Prix of the Tokyo, Ljubljana and São Paulo biennales of graphic art.
Bernik’s early works, such as his series of flat picture surfaces, Magmas, Quarries and Burnt Soil, were influenced by Art informel. In the mid-1960s Bernik was an important exponent of the type of European painting based on the use of words. The Great Letter (1964; Ljubljana, Gal. Mod. A.) combines the devices and texture of Art informel with evocations of Byzantine religious texts. At the same time he was also painting pictures with sensually explicit, almost sculpturally or haptically modelled traditional iconographic objects such as the apple, table and cloth, or bread, or pictures in which a written-out word with its meaning was a substitute for a certain object. Here he was responding to European Nouveau Réalisme, Pop art and conceptualism, and the work of Francis Bacon. In the late 1970s Bernik again dispensed with the object in his pictures, producing a series of abstract paintings entitled ...
(b Dolni Dŭbnik, nr Pleven, July 24, 1901; d Sofia, Jan 23, 1958).
Bulgarian cartoonist, illustrator, draughtsman, painter, teacher, editor and critic. In 1926 he studied painting at the Academy of Art, Sofia, and although he was later known for his paintings, he achieved greater fame as a political and social cartoonist and newspaper and magazine illustrator. His early cartoons are courageous commentaries on political events in Bulgaria from 1925 to 1934, wittily satirizing the monarchy and dictatorships. He also mocked the machinations of the various bourgeois political parties as they fought for power. Among his most celebrated cartoons are the Kidnapping of the Constitution and the Tsar’s Family, published in the Sofia newspapers Zemedelsko Zname and Sturetz, as well as Suvremennik and other left-wing publications. He also illustrated the series Spanish Chronicle (1936). In 1940 he began freelancing for the anti-Fascist satirical newspaper Sturshel (Sofia) and in 1941 became its editor. During World War II he executed many political cartoons opposing Fascism and Nazism (e.g. ...
French, 20th century, male.
Born 5 February 1902, in Mestry (Calvados); died 23 April 1982, in Rochefort-en-Yvelines.
Painter (gouache), sculptor, draughtsman, engraver, newspaper cartoonist, humorist artist, poster artist, illustrator, writer. Landscapes with figures, landscapes, village views. Advertising art.
Georges Pierre Beuville studied in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts and then at the École des Arts Décoratifs....
French, 20th century, male.
Born 9 November 1932, in Chalon-sur-Saône; died 9 August 1992, in Paris.
Painter, sculptor, engraver, illustrator, poet.
Alexandre Bonnier studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Aubusson. He became a teacher and then a director, first of the École des Beaux-Arts in Moulins, and then of the École des Beaux-Arts in Lille. He was a driving force behind the administration of art education in France. In his first period, Alexandre Bonnier used traditional materials in his paintings, in a style somewhere between two apparently opposite poles: surreal eroticism and informal abstraction. Pieyre de Mandiargues, justifiably comparing him with Gustave Moreau and Fautrier, notes that Bonnier 'is driven to seek and to find pictorial equivalents to sensations of sound, taste and touch'. These kinds of nudes, which evoke touch or sound, were the subject of his ...
Palestinian, 20th century, male.
Active in the USA and in France.
Born 1942, in Jerusalem.
Painter, watercolourist, pastellist, draughtsman, writer. Artists’ books.
Kamal Boullata received a diploma from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, then studied at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington DC ...
(b Prague, April 9, 1858; d Prague, May 23, 1934).
Bohemian etcher, illustrator, painter and writer. As the daughter of František Augustín Braun, a prominent Bohemian politician, she was able to play a significant role in Bohemia’s cultural life at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, especially in the area of Czech–French cultural relations. She was a frequent visitor to Paris, where her elder sister, who was married to the writer Elémir Bourges, lived. She was instrumental in familiarizing Bohemian artists with French culture and introduced them to such prominent artists as Rodin, Redon and others. In Bohemia she was much to the fore in bringing writers and artists together and in discovering such artists as František Bílek. She painted landscapes and together with her teacher Antonín Chittussi established contacts in France with members of the Barbizon school. She was, however, primarily an etcher and illustrator and she specialized in etchings of Old Prague, for example ...
American, 20th century, male.
Born 20 February 1878, in Hartford (Connecticut); died 16 April 1936, in Hartford.
Painter, illustrator, engraver, art critic. Landscapes, portraits.
James Britton trained in the studio of Charles Noel Flagg and at the Art Students' League in New York. He was a founding member of the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts, but spent much of his career in New York. He also contributed articles to the weekly ...
Australian, 20th century, male.
Active also active in the USA.
Born 30 January 1885, in Kew (Melbourne); died 11 February 1969, in London.
Painter, draughtsman, stage set designer, engraver (etching, linocut), illustrator, writer, critic. Scenes with figures, portraits.
London Group.
Horace Brodzky was born in Australia but ultimately settled in Britain. In ...
French, 20th century, male.
Born 1908.
Draughtsman, illustrator, writer.
Between the two world wars, Jean Bruller worked prolifically as a draughtsman, publishing albums on themes of black humour, such as Twenty-one Practical Recipes for Violent Death ( Vingt-et-une Recettes Pratiques de Mort Violente) (...
French, 19th – 20th century, female.
Active in Switzerland.
Born 1872, in Arras; died 1952.
Painter, watercolourist, illustrator, writer. Portraits, genre scenes. Posters, decorative designs.
Art Nouveau.
Marguerite Burnat-Provins was a pupil of Benjamin Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens. She married in 1896 and settled in Vevey, Switzerland. Very responsive to poetry, she wrote poems and plays from her early days, and when she was living in Vevey she wrote a long poem, ...
