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(b Minas de Ríotinto, Huelva, Jan 12, 1871; d Vera de Bidasoa, Navarra, 1953).

Spanish printmaker, painter and writer . He was self-taught. He belonged to the Generación del 98 and the modernist literary movement. He began engraving in 1901 and won second prize at the Exposición Nacional, Madrid (1906), going on to win first prize in 1908. He also began etching c. 1908, and it became his favourite technique, although he also made lithographs. Both his prints and paintings have a literary content and focus thematically on life’s human aspects in a way reminiscent of the work of Toulouse-Lautrec. He illustrated Rubén Darío’s Coloquio de los centauros. Despite their lack of fine detail, his prints are realistic, for example Bar Types (etching and aquatint, c. 1906–9; Madrid, Bib. N.) and Beggars (etching and aquatint, c. 1910; Madrid, Bib. N.). His impressionistic painting style of the 1920s became more roughly worked later, possibly due to the loss of an eye in 1931. In ...

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, ...

(b Barcelona, Dec 27, 1849; d Barcelona, Dec 27, 1923).

Spanish Catalan architect, professor, historian, and politician. He is considered one of the protagonists of Catalan architectural Modernism, which is characterized by the doctrine of Rationalism, and which contrasted with the more expressionist Modernism headed by Gaudí. His essay ‘En busca de una arquitectura nacional’ in the magazine La Renaixença (Feb 1878) proposed the renewal of tradition and upheld the authenticity of architecture from a rational point of view. One of his first works was a building for the Editorial Montaner y Simón (1880) in Barcelona. For the Exposición International (1888), Barcelona, he built the Hotel Internacional (destr.) and the Café-Restaurante del Parque de la Ciudadela (now the Museu de Zoologia), a building that demonstrates two of his signature qualities: his rationalist concern and his predilection for brick. It was here, after the exhibition, that he and some other artists set up a workshop for architecture-related arts, in line with the Modernist ideal of artistic integration. Such integration is evident in the Instituto Pere Mata (...

(b Berlin, April 12, 1871; d Berlin, April 13, 1925).

German architect, designer, writer and teacher. After moving to Munich in 1892, he abandoned his plan to become a teacher, deciding on a career as a freelance scholar. He then studied aesthetics, psychology and philosophy, being particularly influenced by the lectures of the psychologist Theodor Lipps. He also studied German literature, art and music. In 1895 he intended to write a doctorate on the theme of ‘The Construction of Feeling’. In spring 1896 he met Hermann Obrist, who persuaded him to abandon his proposed academic career and become a self-taught artist. As well as book illustrations and decorative pieces for the art magazines Pan and Dekorative Kunst, he produced decorative designs for wall reliefs, carpets, textiles, coverings, window glass and lamps. In 1897 he designed his first furniture for his cousin, the historian Kurt Breysig. His first architectural work, the Elvira photographic studio in Munich (1896–7; destr. 1944), decorated on its street façade by a gigantic, writhing dragon, was a quintessential work of ...

(b Asikkala, nr Lahti, June 4, 1876; d Helsinki, March 2, 1956).

Finnish architect and writer. He became known as an aggressive opponent of the National Romantic style in architecture, which had begun as a reform movement, taking its inspiration from the English Arts and Crafts Movement. In Finland, however, where its most important representatives were Eliel Saarinen and Lars Sonck, the movement’s picturesque and romantic manifestations achieved great popularity. In 1904 Frosterus made his famous attack on romanticism with Gustaf Strengell, with whom he also collaborated on some building projects. In connection with the competitions for the railway stations for Helsinki and Viipuri, the friends published a number of newspaper articles, collected into a pamphlet and furnished with handsome typography, which held that romantic architecture was at its worst and most anachronistic in designs for station buildings that were clearly ‘modern’ design tasks. Saarinen, who won both competitions, suffered their bitterest criticism but was persuaded to take a serious interest in Rationalist architecture, a change that had a lasting and, it is generally held, positive, effect on his work. Frosterus participated in both competitions with progressive and handsome projects. However, the jury thought them ‘imported’ and did not award them prizes. Frosterus had indeed worked on his entries while in ...

(b Lyon, Aug 13, 1869; d La Bédoule, Jan 19, 1948).

French architect, urban planner and writer. Regarded as a precursor of the Modern Movement in France, paradoxically he was absent from the debates that enlivened architectural and urban-planning circles between World Wars I and II. He built only c. 15 works, all in the area around Lyon. A winner of the Grand Prix de Rome and recognized by his profession, he was regularly published in architectural reviews. His fame and influence on the Modern Movement in the 1920s and 1930s was due to a theoretical project for a Cité industrielle, sent from Rome while he was a pensionnaire at the Villa Medici. This project was so rich, as much in its city plan (inspired by the site of Lyon) as architecturally, that it had a profound influence on a whole generation of architects led by Le Corbusier and served as an inexhaustible model for Garnier himself, for almost all his future activities....

(Genrikhovna) [Notenberg, Eleanora]

(b St Petersburg, Jan 10, 1877; d Uusikirkko, Finland [now in Russia], May 6, 1913).

Russian painter and poet. She has an important place in the development of Russian modernism, as one of its founders and inspirations, and as an artist of independent and original vision. She studied at the drawing school of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, St Petersburg (1890–93), in Yan Tsionglinsky’s private studio (1903–5) and at the Zvantseva School (1906–7) under Mstislav Dobuzhinsky and Léon Bakst. She was attracted to Symbolist literature and her visual art was characterized by a psychological impressionism that first appeared in the work she showed in exhibitions organized by Nikolay Kul’bin in 1908–10. Guro concentrated on elements of the Finnish landscape near her dacha, be that a leaf or the seashore, on her cats, her husband (the painter and musician Mikhail Matyushin) or on items such as a drainpipe or the cobbles of a street. Using watercolour and ink, she moved away from visual mimesis towards a Japanese-style response to nature and an empathy with her surroundings, as in ...

(b Brünn [now Brno], Moravia, Dec 10, 1870; d Kalksburg, Austria, Aug 23, 1933).

Austrian architect, theorist and writer. He was an often satirical critic of the Vienna Secession, an early advocate of the Functionalist aesthetic, a radical polemicist and one of the most important and influential pioneers of the Modern Movement, achieving in his buildings of c. 1910 the style generally adopted elsewhere only a decade later.

His father had studied painting but worked as a sculptor and mason in Brünn, then an important industrial centre of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and early contact with his father’s workshop probably influenced Loos’s choice of career as well as his understanding of and respect for natural materials. In 1887 he obtained a bricklayer’s certificate, in 1887–8 he studied at the Gewerbeschule in Reichenberg and he eventually completed a building engineering course at the Gewerbeschule in Brünn. He then decided to train as an architect and in 1889 attended the Technische Hochschule, Dresden. His course was interrupted by army service and a period at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna; he returned to Dresden (...

(b Amersfoort, March 7, 1872; d New York, Feb 1, 1944).

Dutch painter, theorist, and draughtsman. His work marks the transition at the start of the 20th century from the Hague school and Symbolism to Neo-Impressionism and Cubism. His key position within the international avant-garde is determined by works produced after 1920. He set out his theory in the periodical of De Stijl, in a series of articles that were summarized in a separate booklet published in Paris in 1920 under the title Le Néo-plasticisme (see Neo-plasticism) by Léonce Rosenberg. The essence of Mondrian’s ideas is that painting, composed of the most fundamental aspects of line and colour, must set an example to the other arts for achieving a society in which art as such has no place but belongs instead to the total realization of ‘beauty’. The representation of the universal, dynamic pulse of life, also expressed in modern jazz and the metropolis, was Mondrian’s point of departure. Even in his lifetime he was regarded as the founder of the most ...

(b Grossneuhaus, April 20, 1861; d Berlin, Oct 26, 1927).

German architect, architectural historian, theorist and critic. He worked with Ende & Böckmann, one of the leading architectural firms in Berlin, who employed him in Tokyo (1887–91), where he designed a Gothic Revival German church. On his return to Germany he joined the Ministry of Public Works and was appointed technical attaché (1896–1903) to the German Embassy in London. In England he studied the work of the English country-house architects from about 1870: the earlier figures, Philip Webb and R. Norman Shaw, and his own contemporaries C. F. A. Voysey, Edwin Lutyens and W. R. Lethaby. He published several accounts of his investigations of English architectural culture, most notably the three-volume Das englische Haus (Berlin, 1904–05). This detailed study, which considers the house, and architecture in general, as an expression of the society of which it is a part, expressed Muthesius’s enthusiasm for England and his belief that the immediate future belonged to this style of building. It was much admired in England, but its effect in Germany was to provoke controversy; even in the 1920s a copy was still kept locked away from students of the Technische Hochschule, Berlin. Although keen to promote an awareness of the functional and practical in architecture, Muthesius did not go so far as to see the form of a house as merely the result of fulfilling functional needs. He never denied that the architect was an artist, motivated by the desire to give a convincing visual expression. Indeed his admiration went to artistically minded architects, such as Lutyens and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who became a close friend, rather than to the more severely rational, such as Voysey....

[Friedrich] (Wilhelm)

(b Bremen, Nov 4, 1869; d Hamburg, Nov 5, 1947).

German architect, urban planner and writer. He was born into an old-established family of merchants. His childhood and early youth were spent in Bogotá and New York. Although he first studied mathematics and science (1889–96) in Munich and Berlin, he gradually applied himself to studying architecture. His teacher Friedrich von Thiersch placed it in a historicizing style. From 1896 until 1901 he was an architect at the Stadtbauamt in Leipzig under Hugo Licht. He was involved in the construction of the town hall, the St Johanniskirche and the rebuilding of the town library. In this period he went on long study trips to Paris, Rome, London, the Netherlands and Belgium. He was a regular collaborator on the journals Dekorative Kunst and Kunstwart.

In 1901 Schumacher was appointed to the Technische Hochschule in Dresden. He read about interior architecture, the stylistics of arts and crafts, the morphology of Classical architecture and taught freehand and decorative drawing for engineers and architects. In ...

(b Antwerp, April 3, 1863; d Zurich, Oct 25, 1957).

Belgian designer, architect, painter, and writer. He was one of the leading figures in the creation of Art Nouveau in the 1890s.

From 1880 to 1883 Van de Velde studied at the Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp, exhibiting for the first time in 1882. In 1883 he was a founder-member of the art group Als Ik Kan, which fostered the position of the artist outside of the Salon. His earliest paintings, such as the Guitar-player (1883; Brussels, priv. col., see Canning, p. 100), are in a Realist vein with sombre tones. In October 1884 Van de Velde travelled to Paris. Although he entered the studio of the academic painter Carolus-Duran, where he remained until the spring of 1885, he was strongly attracted to the works of Jean-François Millet (ii). His works after his stay in Paris, such as Still-life with Fruit Dish (1886; Otterlo, Kröller-Müller), display the characteristic broken brushstroke of the Impressionists, although this style is often combined with subjects drawn from Millet, seen in the ...

(b Königsberg [now Kaliningrad, Russian Federation], Nov 5, 1885; d Cambridge, MA, April 28, 1957).

German architect, urban planner and theorist, active also in the USA. After brief apprenticeships in the studio of Hermann Muthesius in Berlin (1908–9) and with Fritz Schumacher in Hamburg (1911), he was appointed director of urban planning at Rüstringen (now Wilhelmshaven), where he remained until 1914, producing his first examples of municipal architecture. From 1918 to 1920 he was chief planner at Schöneberg, a suburb of Berlin. Here he designed the Siedlung Lindenhof housing estate (1918–19; destr. 1944). Wagner’s principal interest was in producing low-cost housing provided with the social and hygienic requisites lacking in the speculative building typical of large 19th-century cities. This preoccupation led him to assist in the establishment of cooperative building ventures funded by trades unions, such as the Bauhütte Berlin (1919), the Verband Sozialer Baubetriebe (1920–24) and the Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Förderung des Wohnungsbaus (Dewog). As director of the latter’s branch in Berlin, the Gemeinnützige Heimstätten AG (Gehag), Wagner initiated the construction of the Hufeisensiedlung (...

( Colomann )

(b Penzing, nr Vienna, July 13, 1841; d Vienna, April 11, 1918).

Austrian architect, urban planner, designer, teacher and writer. He was one of the most important architects of the 19th and 20th centuries—in 1911 Adolf Loos called him ‘the greatest architect in the world’—and a key figure in the development of 20th-century European architecture. His work, spread over more than half a century, embodies the transition from mid-19th-century historicism to the earliest expressions of 20th-century Modernism. Wagner was an influential teacher and theorist, and in addition to his executed work he designed and published more than 100 ambitious schemes, the last volume of his Einige Skizzen being published posthumously in 1922; this long series of often fantastic but always highly pragmatic and carefully thought out projects included urban plans, museums, academies, parliament buildings and public monuments.

After studying at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna from 1857 to 1860 and spending a short period at the Bauakademie in Berlin, where he became familiar with the work of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Wagner studied from ...