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(b Lafayette, LA, 1967).

African American painter. Charles graduated from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, LA, in 1985, having studied advertising design, illustration, and painting. He received his MFA from the University of Houston in 1993, and subsequently taught at the University of Texas at Austin. His paintings, which manipulate images of historical black stereotypes, have generated critical controversy and hostile reactions from viewers. Charles, however, saw himself as investigating these images and their place in American history, exploring and exposing their negativity. He typically signs his work with an actual copper penny, oriented to display the profile of Abraham Lincoln.

Charles also collected black memorabilia, such as Aunt Jemima dolls and other advertising ephemera, and has researched 19th-century blackface and minstrelsy performers. Some of his most controversial figures have been of childhood literary icons, including a black Sambo reminiscent of Mickey Mouse. Charles is interested in how these images remain in America’s collective memory, and the different attitudes of Caucasians and African Americans when viewing them. He creates extreme caricatures, such as a sinister-looking black face with a watermelon slice for a mouth and black seeds instead of teeth—images meant to stimulate thought. The faces in his paintings confront the viewer with their oversized scale, some of them more than 1 m high. Charles felt that American advertising conditioned people of all types to pigeonhole blacks as representing the body (instead of the mind), and as entertainers—and that these stereotypical attitudes have been retained in the American psyche. To emphasize this point, Charles juxtaposed African American celebrities with advertising imagery, such as Oprah Winfrey as a cookie-jar mammy figure....

(b Veracruz, Mar 13, 1880; d Stamford, CT, Jan 10, 1961).

Mexican illustrator, writer, gallery owner, and publisher, active in the USA. He was the son of a wealthy Mexican lawyer and publisher. De Zayas started his career as an artist by providing drawings for his father’s newspaper in Veracruz. In 1906 he moved on to Mexico City’s leading newspaper, El Diario, but a year later, after the ascension of the dictator Porfirio Diaz, whom the newspaper had opposed, he fled to the USA. There he landed a position making caricatures for the New York Evening World. Shortly after his arrival in the USA, he came into contact with Alfred Stieglitz, who staged solo shows of De Zayas’s caricatures at his gallery Gallery 291 in 1909 and 1910, both of which proved to be huge popular successes.

In 1910 De Zayas traveled to Paris, where he stayed almost a year, scouting out adventurous forms of modern art for Stieglitz, notably the cubist work of Picasso and African sculpture. On his return, equipped with knowledge of European modern art and inspired by the work of the French modernist ...

(b Brooklyn, NY, Oct 27, 1877; d White Plains, NY, July 13, 1949).

American painter, illustrator and lithographer. As an organizer of the Armory Show (1913) alongside Arthur B. Davies, he played an integral role in unveiling European modernism to the USA. While he painted landscapes of Maine, Cézanne-inspired still lifes and a series based on the American West, his expressive portraits of circus and vaudeville performers remain his best-known works.

In 1901, he trained at the Académie Colarossi in Paris, but soon transferred to the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich where he studied under Barbizon painter Heinrich von Zügel (1850–1941) until 1903. Upon returning to New York in 1903, he worked as an illustrator for publications such as Life and Puck, exhibited at the Salmagundi Club (1905) and organized artists’ balls for the Kit Kat Club. Working in an Impressionist style, he participated with Robert Henri in the Exhibition of Independent Artists (1910)....

(Bainbridge)

(b Norristown, PA, July 5, 1864; d Philadelphia, PA, Nov 20, 1942).

American painter, illustrator and teacher. Born in Norristown, near Philadelphia, McCarter enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1879, at the age of 15. Of the several hundred students who moved through the classes of Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy, none would move as far, stylistically and temperamentally, from their teacher as McCarter. Though later he would regard the five years he studied there as “years lost,” his training was sufficient to earn him a post drawing imagery for the Philadelphia Press.

In 1887 McCarter sailed to Europe for further studies under Léon Bonnat and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and an apprenticeship to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in the medium of lithography. On his return to the United States, McCarter, grounded in the international style of graphic arts, settled in New York to a prosperous career and continued transatlantic travels as an illustrator for McClure’s, Harper’s, Century...

(b Wilmington, DE, March 5, 1853; d Florence, Nov 9, 1911).

American illustrator and writer. Along with such figures as Edwin Austin Abbey, Arthur Burdett Frost and Charles Stanley Reinhart, Pyle was instrumental in raising American book and magazine illustration to a higher level, and inaugurating what is often termed the “Golden Age” of American illustration. Pyle was born in Wilmington, DE, counting among his ancestors some of the original Quaker settlers of the place. His mother, who encouraged his interest in literature, art and fantasy, introduced him to fairy tales, as well as to classic stories such as Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe. After graduating from high school, Pyle attended a small private art academy in Philadelphia for three years, his only formal training. This was run by a Francis Adolf van der Wielen (b 1847), a graduate of the art academy in Antwerp, who was a stern taskmaster in matters of academic technique.

In 1876, Pyle produced an illustrated article on the wild horses of Chincoteague that was accepted by ...

(b Mayfield, KY, April 30, 1899; d New York, NY, Jan 1, 1977).

American painter. Wilson worked as graphic artist in Chicago for five years after completing the four-year commercial art program at the Art Institute of Chicago School in 1923. He became an adept colorist with a particular interest in still life composition. Wilson hoped to grow as a painter after moving to Harlem, New York in 1928 where he worked odd jobs for wages. Three years later, he permanently relocated to Greenwich Village. He exhibited with the Harmon Foundation, at the Detroit Museum, the Contemporary Arts and Roko Galleries in New York City, and at most of the large historically black universities and colleges. Wilson socialized with important members of the New Negro arts movement such as Aaron Douglas and Jacob Lawrence whose abbreviated figurative works tempered his academic realist style ( see New Negro Movement ). His skill with linear gestures, affinity with nature, and ability to strike a coherent balance between them identify this best work. With two years of Guggenheim fellowships, he spent time with the African Americans living on South Carolina’s Sea Islands in ...