American, 19th century, female.
Born in Portland (Maine); died 1904, in New York.
Painter.
Article
Göran Schildt
(Henrik)
(b Kuortane, Feb 3, 1898; d Helsinki, May 11, 1976).
Finnish architect and designer, active also in America. His success as an architect lay in the individual nature of his buildings, which were always designed with their surrounding environment in mind and with great attention to their practical demands. He never used forms that were merely aesthetic or conditioned by technical factors but looked to the more permanent models of nature and natural forms. He was not anti-technology but believed that technology could be humanized to become the servant of human beings and the promoter of cultural values. One of his important maxims was that architects have an absolutely clear mission: to humanize mechanical forms.
His father was a government surveyor working in the lake district of central Finland and became a counterforce to his son’s strong artistic calling. Instead of becoming a painter, which tempted him for a long time, Alvar chose the career of architect as a possible compromise. He never became a planner dominated by technological thinking, however, but always gave his creations an artistic, humanistic character. He studied at the Technical College in Helsinki (...
Article
Elizabeth P. Benson
Pre-Columbian
Maya site in Retalhuleu, in the Highland Maya region, near the Pacific coast of Guatemala. It is best known for its monumental stone sculptures, some of which were recorded in the 19th century. The site lies partly on the Finca San Isidro Piedra Parada, and it was known by this name when
Eric Thompson published a description of some of the sculpture in 1943. ‘Abaj Takalik’ (‘standing stone’) is a translation of ‘Piedra Parada’ into
Quiché Maya. It was occupied during the Pre-Classic (c. 2000
Article
Argentinian, 20th century, male.
Born 25 May 1922, in Mendoza.
Painter, draughtsman.
After studying at the academy of fine arts in Mendoza, Abal became a teacher of painting and drawing there. From 1948, he exhibited in the official salons of Mendoza and Argentina, where he obtained some distinctions. He lived in France ...
Article
Argentinian, 20th century, male.
Born 27 November 1901, in Buenos Aires.
Painter, draughtsman.
Abalsamo was a student at the school of fine arts in Buenos Aires, then became a drawing teacher. He took part in various official salons - the national salon from 1935, the salon of the arts in Buenos Aires and the Eva Perón arts salon from ...
Article
American, 19th – 20th century, female.
Born 23 June 1847, in New York; died 1917.
Painter, watercolourist, draughtswoman, illustrator. Landscapes, flowers.
Agnes Abatt studied art at the Cooper Institute and the International Academy of Art in New York, and later received advice from R. Swain Gifford and James D. Smilie....
Article
American, 20th century, female.
Born 1887, in Vienna, Austria.
Painter, illustrator.
Article
(Edward)
(b Alfred, ME, July 17, 1883; d San Francisco, Nov 11, 1973).
American photographer. Self-taught, Abbe started to produce photographs at the age of 12. From 1898 to 1910 he worked in his father’s bookshop and then worked as a reporter for the Washington Post, travelling to Europe in 1910. Having earlier produced photographs of ships and sailors for tourist cards, from 1913 to 1917 he worked as a freelance photojournalist in Virginia. In 1917 he set up a studio in New York, where he produced the first photographic cover for the Saturday Evening Post as well as photographs for Ladies Home Journal, the New York Times and other publications. From 1922 to 1923 he worked as a stills photographer, actor and writer for film studios. Though this was mainly for Mack Sennett in Hollywood, he also worked for D. W. Griffiths as a stills photographer on Way Down East (1920) and accompanied Lilian Gish to Italy to provide stills for Griffiths’s ...
Article
American, 19th – 20th century, male.
Born 1 April 1852, in Philadelphia; died 1911, in London.
Painter, watercolourist, draughtsman (including ink), pastellist, illustrator. Historical subjects, genre scenes, landscapes, figures.
Edwin Austin Abbey's apprenticeship consisted of making drawings for a wood engraver before studying at the Pennsylvania Academy in Philadelphia and starting work as an illustrator. The drawings he supplied for ...
Article
Pamela H. Simpson
(b Philadelphia, PA, April 1, 1852; d London, Aug 1, 1911).
American painter, illustrator, and muralist, active also in England. Abbey began his art studies at the age of 14 in his native Philadelphia where he worked with Isaac L. Williams (1817–95). Two years later he enrolled in night classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art working under Christian Schussele (1824–1979), but by then Abbey was already a published illustrator. In the 1870s his drawings appeared in numerous publications, but it was his work for Harper & Brothers that proved most important to his career. In 1871 he moved to New York, and in 1878, Harper’s sent him on a research trip to England. He found such affinity with the country that he made it his home for the rest of his life. After 1889 he devoted more time to painting, was elected a Royal Academician in 1898, and in 1902 was chosen by Edward VII (...
Article
revised by Margaret Barlow
(b Springfield, OH, July 17, 1898; d Monson, ME, Dec 9, 1991).
American photographer. She spent a term at the Ohio State University in Columbus (1917–18) and then studied sculpture independently in New York (1918–21) where she met (Henri-Robert-)Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. She left the USA for Paris in 1921 where she studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière before attending the Kunstschule in Berlin for less than a year in 1923. From 1924 to 1926 she worked as Man Ray’s assistant and first saw photographs by (Jean-)Eugène(-Auguste) Atget in Man Ray’s studio in 1925. Her first one-woman show, at the gallery Le Sacre du Printemps in Paris in 1926, was devoted to portraits of avant-garde personalities such as Jean Cocteau, James Joyce, and André Gide. She continued to take portraits, such as that of James Joyce (1927; see Berenice Abbott: Photographs, p. 26), until leaving Paris in 1929. After Atget’s death (1927) she bought most of his negatives and prints in ...
Article
American, 20th century, female.
Born 17 July 1898, in Springfield, Ohio; died 9 December 1991, in Monson, Maine.
Photographer. Portraiture, documentary, scientific illustrations.
At age 19 Berenice Abbott moved to New York City, where she met Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. Abbott’s initial interests were in sculpture and acting. In ...
Article
American, 19th – 20th century, male.
Active in Philadelphia.
Died 1925, in Philadelphia.
Painter.
Francis R. Abbott was a Fellow of the Pennsylvania Academy of Art and a member of the Philadelphia Art Club.
Article
American, 19th – 20th century, male.
Born 1874, in Mechanicsville; died 1953.
Painter (gouache), illustrator. Genre scenes.
New York, 3 June 1982: Archery Lesson (gouache, 11 × 9½ ins/28 × 24.2 cm) USD 850
Article
American, 19th – 20th century, male.
Born 1870, in Philadelphia; died 1938.
Painter. Landscapes.
Bolton, 15 May 1985: Houses, Provincetown (oil on canvas, 30 × 36 ins/76.2 × 91.6 cm) USD 900
New York, 14 Nov 1991: Sea and Derricks (oil on canvas, 30¼ × 36½ ins/77 × 92.9 cm) ...
Article
Sarah Urist Green
(b Kabul, June 5, 1973).
Afghan video and performance artist and photographer, active also in the USA. After fleeing Soviet-occupied Kabul with her family in the late 1980s, Abdul lived as a refugee in Germany and India before moving to Southern California. She received a BA in Political Science and Philosophy at California State University, Fullerton, and an MFA at the University of California, Irvine, in 2000. Abdul first returned to a post-Taliban Afghanistan in 2001, where she encountered a place and people transformed by decades of violence and unrest. Since that time, Abdul has made work in Kabul and Los Angeles, staging herself in performances and creating performance-based video works and photography that explore ideas of home and the interconnection between architecture and identity.
Beginning in the late 1990s, Abdul made emotionally intense performance art informed by that of Yugoslavian artist Marina Abramović and Cuban-born American artist Ana Mendieta. At the time unable to travel to Afghanistan, Abdul created and documented performances in Los Angeles that probed her position as Afghan, female, Muslim, a refugee and a transnational artist. In ...
Article
American, 20th century, female.
Born 1894, in Mount Healthy (Ohio), according to some sources, in Widdern (Germany).
Sculptor.
Article
Giulio V. Blanc
(b San Antonio de los Baños, nr. Güines, 1889; d Havana, 1965).
Cuban painter and caricaturist. He graduated from the Academia de S. Alejandro in Havana in 1920 and lived in Paris from 1927 to 1929. There he studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and abandoned academicism, developing a modernist “Cuban” style, in which folkloric scenes of peasant life were depicted in a colorful, energetic, pseudo-naive manner reminiscent of Jules Pascin and Amedeo Modigliani. An outstanding work of this period is Triumph of the Rumba (c. 1928; Havana, Mus. N. B.A.). After a trip to Italy in the early 1930s, Abela began to paint canvases such as Guajiros (“Peasants”; 1938; Havana, Mus. N. B.A.), in which the classical sobriety and order is the result of his contact with Italian medieval and Renaissance art. His style underwent a radical change in the early 1950s, and from this time until his death he painted small works that recall in their use of fantasy the drawings of children as well as the works of Marc Chagall....
Article
Cuban, 20th century, male.
Born 1892, in Havana; died 1966.
Painter, illustrator, caricaturist. Landscapes.
Abela studied at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro in Cuba, after a period of working in a cigar factory. He lived in Paris from 1927 to 1930, then was made director of the free academy in Havana in 1937. He contributed to many Cuban newspapers. He is well-known as a caricaturist, having created the character of ...
