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[Murillo, Gerardo]

(b Guadalajara, Oct 3, 1875; d Mexico City, Aug 14, 1964).

Mexican painter, printmaker, writer, theorist, volcanologist, and politician. Murillo first studied art in his native Guadalajara with the painter Félix Bernardelli (1866–1905). Murillo relocated to Mexico City in 1896, studying briefly at the Academia de San Carlos, before securing support from the government to continue his education in Europe. He stopped briefly in Paris in 1897 before moving on to Rome and beginning his studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti and the Real Academia de España. Murillo’s encounters with European art had a profound impact on him, particularly Impressionism. He also achieved a measure of success on the European art scene, and his Self-portrait (1899; priv. col.) was awarded the silver medal at the Paris Salon. During his six-year stay Murillo also became absorbed by French and Italian socialist political theory.

Murillo returned to Mexico in 1904, joining the staff of the Academia de San Carlos, where he became an agitator for reform, clashing with the school’s administration over teaching methods and becoming a hero to students, among them José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. The debates culminated in the student strike of ...

(b Castres, Tarn, Nov 15, 1813; d Paris, Jan 17, 1882).

French writer, arts administrator and engraver. The younger brother of the journalist and politician Louis Blanc, he settled in Paris around 1830 to study engraving under Luigi Calamatta and Paolo Mercuri (1804–84). He engraved a series of portraits in the 1830s of famous contemporary figures such as François-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot and the composer and conductor Philippe Musard. However, his interest lay principally in art criticism: between 1836 and 1840 he wrote reviews of the Salons and articles on art for journals such as Bon Sens and Le Progrès and also contributed to Courrier français, L’Artiste and Journal de Rouen. By this time he had already joined the Republican opposition to Louis-Philippe and was running Propagateur de l’Aube.

Blanc’s experience as an art critic and his support for the Republican–Socialist cause, as well as the protection of his elder brother (who became a member of the provisional government after the Revolution of ...

(b Paris, Feb 11, 1830; d Parays, Tarn-et-Garonne, June 3, 1890).

French critic, collector and etcher. He studied drawing and painting before becoming art critic of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1859. His extensive articles examined such issues as the etching revival (see Etching, §II, 4), modernization of the industrial arts, the cult of Japonisme and Impressionism. With his notices in the newspaper Le Rappel (1869–71) and the avant-garde journal La Renaissance littéraire et artistique (1871–2), the periodical of the emerging Symbolist poets, Burty passionately espoused the taste for Japanese art and culture and coined the term Japonisme in 1872. His apartment, which contained a vast collection of Japanese works of art, attracted many collectors also fascinated by Japan, including Edmond de Goncourt, Félix Bracquemond and Edgar Degas. Burty’s meetings and his collection and staunch advocacy of Japonisme influenced many, including his Impressionist friends, in whose compositions the subtle assimilation of Japanese print design is evident. The marriage of Burty’s daughter Madeleine to the entrepreneur ...

[il Sordino]

(b Bologna, Feb 23, 1740; d Bologna, May 5, 1815).

Italian painter, biographer, draughtsman and engraver. He was a pupil of Giuseppe Varotti (1715–80). While a student at the Accademia Clementina, Bologna, he received two awards, including the Premio Marsili for the Sacrifice of Noah (1758; Bologna, Accad. B.A. & Liceo A.). He pursued literary interests throughout his life and became a member of the avant-garde Accademia Letteraria degli ‘Ingomiti’ in Bologna in 1763. His early paintings, notably the St Francis de Sales (1764; Bologna, Ospizio dei Preti), continue the strict classical strain within the Bolognese figurative tradition; they show the influences of Ercole Graziani, Marc Antonio Franceschini and Donato Creti. Calvi primarily painted sacred subjects, receiving numerous, mainly local, commissions. From about 1770 onwards many pictures, including his superb Self-portrait (1770; Bologna, Pin. N.), became increasingly austere and Raphaelesque in both style and design, anticipating 19th-century Bolognese Neo-classicism. In 1766 he frescoed an Assumption of the Virgin...

(b Stevenage, Jan 16, 1872; d Vence, France, July 29, 1966).

English theatre director, designer, theorist, printmaker and typographer. He was one of the great, if controversial, innovators of the modern theatre movement. The son of the actress Ellen Terry and the architect Edward William Godwin, Craig was born into a strong theatrical tradition. He abandoned a promising career as an actor with Henry Irving’s Lyceum Company in 1897 to concentrate on directing and developing ideas about ‘the theatre of the future’. Inspired by Hubert von Herkomer’s scenic experiments with auditorium lighting and three-dimensional scenery in productions at the Bushey Art School, Herts, Craig exchanged the conventions of realistic scenery for a suggestive, abstract interplay of form, light, movement and music. This new total theatre drew on the imagination to create an architectonic vision of choreographic movement, colour harmony, visual simplicity and atmospheric effect united under the sole control of a single artist. Influenced by his relationship with the dancer Isadora Duncan, he also proposed a concept of the rhythms and movements in nature acting as the vehicle for an emotional and aesthetic experience....

(b Paris, May 7, 1869; d Paris, Nov 9, 1927).

French collector, writer and etcher. He began to collect prints at the age of 13 and rapidly established a reputation as a connoisseur and expert, particularly in the field of modern prints. His principal work is the 31-volume series Le Peintre-graveur illustré (Paris, 1906–30); his other publications include works on 19th- and 20th-century prints and c. 500 auction-room catalogues. His own etchings were exhibited at the Salons of 1888 and 1897, and he was an officer of the Société des Peintres-graveurs Français and the Société pour l’Etude de la Gravure Française. His first print collection was sold at auction in 1890, the second in Paris, 13–15 June 1928, comprising 404 lots of modern prints.

(b Granville, Nov 25, 1870; d Paris, Nov 13, 1943).

French painter, designer, printmaker and theorist. Although born in Normandy, Denis lived throughout his life in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, just west of Paris. He attended the Lycée Condorcet, Paris, where he met many of his future artistic contemporaries, then studied art simultaneously at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and at the Académie Julian (1888–90). Through fellow student Paul Sérusier, in 1888 he learnt of the innovative stylistic discoveries made that summer in Pont-Aven by Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard. With Sérusier and a number of like-minded contemporaries at the Académie Julian—Pierre Bonnard, Paul Ranson, Henri-Gabriel Ibels and others—Denis found himself fundamentally opposed to the naturalism recommended by his academic teachers. They formed the Nabis, a secret artistic brotherhood dedicated to a form of pictorial Symbolism based loosely on the synthetic innovations of Gauguin and Bernard. Denis’s first article, ‘Définition du néo-traditionnisme’, published in Art et critique in 1890 (and republished in ...

(b Paris, March 25, 1813; d Montigny-lès-Corneilles, nr Paris, Jan 16, 1880).

French painter, writer and lithographer. He was given his first art lesson by his uncle, Nicolas-Auguste Hesse, in Paris, then moved to the studio of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. According to Auvray in the Dictionnaire général, he also studied with the sculptor Denys Foyatier. Like a number of Ingres’s pupils, Galimard was involved in decorating the newly built or newly restored churches of the July Monarchy and the Second Empire. At his first Salon in 1835 he exhibited Three Marys at the Tomb, a Châtelaine of the 15th Century and a portrait of his cousin, Mme Lefèvre (all untraced). The following year he exhibited one of his first attempts at glass painting, The Queen of the Angels (broken by a gust of wind during the exhibition), and a painting, Liberty Leaning on Christ Flanked by the Apostles James and John (untraced), a subject indicating sympathy with the social ideology of Charles Fourier or Saint-Simon. In ...

(b Paris, Dec 8, 1881; d Avignon, June 23, 1953).

French painter, printmaker and writer. He grew up in Courbevoie, a suburb of Paris, and as a student at the Collège Chaptal became interested in theatre and painting. At 19, his father put him to work in the family interior design and fabric business, an experience that contributed to a lifelong respect for skilled workmanship. The first paintings he exhibited, at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1902, were Impressionist in character, but the work accepted within two years at the Salon d’Automne showed a shift to social themes, a tendency that accelerated until 1908. Compulsory military service from 1903 to 1905 thrust him into the company of working-class people, arousing a permanent sense of solidarity with their aspirations and needs. The results were immediately apparent in the Association Ernest Renan, which he helped to establish in 1905, a kind of popular university with secular and socialist aims. He was also one of the founders of a community of intellectuals based near Paris, the ...

French family of writers, critics, printmakers, painters and collectors. Edmond de Goncourt (b Nancy, 26 May 1822; d Champrosay, 16 July 1896) and his brother Jules de Goncourt (b Paris, 17 Dec 1830; d Paris, 20 June 1870) were born into a minor aristocratic family. Their father, Marc-Pierre Huot de Goncourt, died in 1834, and after the death of their mother, Annette-Cécile Guérin, in 1848 they were sufficiently well-off to set up as painters. Jules was notably talented, his etchings being published in 1876. However, the Goncourts soon turned to literature, in which, in a remarkable collaboration that lasted until the death of Jules in 1870, they made their name, first as journalists and historians, and a little later as novelists and art critics. Their finest and best-known works, such as L’Art du XVIIIe siècle (published in 12 fascicles between 1859 and 1875) and Manette Salomon...

(b Paris, May 15, 1786; d Paris, Feb 16, 1857).

French architect, writer and engraver. He was a pupil of Jean-Antoine Alavoine and Jean-Nicolas Huyot at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and began his career as a vérificateur (1811–15) in the Direction des Travaux Publics from its creation in 1811, subsequently becoming Chef de la Révision (1815–19). He was sous-inspecteur for the restoration (1819–20) of the Porte St Martin, Paris, and then inspecteur of the Bourse (1821–6) and architect of the reserve granary (1827–31). At the same time he worked (1819–33) for the Conseil des Bâtiments Civils, serving as its secretary from 1824 to 1831. In 1835 he was involved in important work on several cathedrals on behalf of the Ministère des Cultes, including the choir at Nantes and rebuilding the nave roof at Chartres, following a fire in 1836. Gourlier was also an engraver and exhibited at the Salon many architectural designs, which were published in ...

(b Lausanne, May 25, 1841; d Paris, Oct 23, 1917).

French illustrator, decorative artist and printmaker of Swiss birth. Before arriving in Paris in the autumn of 1871, Grasset had been apprenticed to an architect, attended the Polytechnic in Zurich and travelled to Egypt. In Paris he found employment as a fabric designer and graphic ornamentalist, which culminated in his first important project, the illustrations for Histoire des quatre fils Aymon (1883). Grasset worked in collaboration with Charles Gillot, the inventor of photo-relief printing and an influential collector of Oriental and decorative arts, in the production of this major work of Art Nouveau book design and of colour photomechanical illustration. Grasset used a combination of medieval and Near Eastern decorative motifs to frame and embellish his illustrations, but most importantly he integrated text and imagery in an innovative manner which has had a lasting influence on book illustration.

In 1881 he was commissioned by Rodolphe Salis to design furnishing in a medieval style for the latter’s new Chat Noir cabaret in Montmartre. This project brought him in direct contact with Montmartre avant-garde artists such as Adolphe Willette, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, Henri Rivière and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Grasset’s numerous posters include ...

(b London, Dec 15, 1875; d Tonbridge, Jan 20, 1952).

English painter, printmaker, art historian and museum curator. Educated at St Paul’s School, London, and Trinity College, Cambridge, he came from a family closely associated with the arts, one of his uncles being John Pettie. At Cambridge, Hardie studied etching under Frank Short (1857–1945), and he developed into an able etcher and watercolour painter (examples Oxford, Ashmolean); from 1908 he was a regular exhibitor in London at the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers and the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours. In 1898 Hardie was appointed to an assistant post at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; in 1914 he was made Assistant Keeper, and from 1921 until his retirement in 1935 he served as Keeper in the Print Department. Under his direction the Department was extended to include the collection and study of posters and of various aspects of theatre arts. Hardie was a prolific writer, celebrating and recording all the arts with which he was for so long connected, and he produced books and pamphlets on numerous individuals, including Samuel Palmer, whose reputation had fallen into total neglect. He also wrote on posters and coloured books and produced an edition of ...

(b Amsterdam, Dec 4, 1868; d Bloemendaal, Dec 31, 1938).

Dutch painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer and stained-glass artist. He trained at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (1886–90), under the directorship of August Allebé. Having initially painted and drawn Impressionistic landscapes, he started working in the ’t Gooi region in 1892, where, influenced by Vincent van Gogh and Jan Toorop, he made a number of Symbolist drawings and lithographs. In 1896 he married the Dutch writer Henriette van der Schalk. They both devoted themselves to the recently founded Sociaal Democratische Arbeiders Partij. In the years up to c. 1900 Holst produced among other things a series of lithographs of political cartoons with socialist content, as well as serene landscapes and paintings of girls from the village of Huizen. His allegorical murals (1902; in situ), on topics such as ‘Industry’ or ‘Commerce’, in the new Koopmansbeurs in Amsterdam by H. P. Berlage (1876–1903), marked an important point in his career as his first opportunity to construct a monumental piece of work. Partly inspired by the murals in the town hall at ’s Hertogenbosch by Antoon Derkinderen, he developed a tight, stylized type of design, which he believed to be ideal for visually representing idealistic and exalted thoughts. In his murals (...

[Giottino]

(b The Hague, July 18, 1770; d Leiden, Jan 9, 1849).

Dutch draughtsman, printmaker and writer. His father, Jean Humbert (1734–94), was a successful portrait painter, and David Pierre Humbert was awarded a gold medal by the art society Pictura when he was 18. The Dutch ambassador in Paris enabled Humbert to go to Italy in 1789. He stayed there until 1800, spending most of his time in Rome. He became part of the international community of artists, made working trips to Umbria and Tuscany and became a notable draughtsman, working in a highly austere, linear style, as in Jeremiah in the Temple (1798; Amsterdam, Rijksmus.). He was forced to leave Rome because of his support for the French Republican army defending Rome against the papal troops in 1799. He was imprisoned in Civitavecchia for three months, during which time he produced a number of drawings, such as Gagliuffi (1799; now Leiden, Rijksuniv., Prentenkab.).

Humbert subsequently travelled in Italy as the assistant of ...

(b Leeds, Dec 29, 1759; d Masham, N. Yorks, Oct 13, 1817).

English painter, printmaker and writer. The son of a clothier, he was apprenticed to John Fletcher, a ship painter in Hull; in 1775 Ibbetson became a scene-painter there. In 1777 he moved to London, where he worked as a scene-painter and picture restorer. He married about three years later. From 1785 he exhibited landscapes, genre scenes and portraits at the Royal Academy. In 1787–8 Ibbetson was personal draughtsman to Col. Charles Cathcart on the first British Mission to Beijing, a voyage that included visits to Madeira, the Cape of Good Hope and Java. His watercolour False Bay, Cape of Good Hope (London, V&A), made on this journey, shows a picturesque roughness of foliage and rustic staffage adapted from his English landscape style. Cathcart’s death forced Ibbetson to return to England (he exhibited an oil painting, untraced, of the Burial of Col. Cathcart in Java at the Royal Academy in 1789...

(b Valencia, 1757; d Madrid, after 1807).

Spanish illustrator, printmaker and painter. He was nominated Miembro de Mérito of the Real Academia de S Fernando, Madrid, in 1781. He made reproductive engravings of paintings and illustrated such books as Juan Antonio Pellicer’s (1738–1806) annotated edition of Don Quixote (1797), the Fábulas morales (1781–4) by Félix María de Samaniego (1745–1801) and the 1803 edition of the short stories Novelas ejemplares by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616). In his depiction (1790) of the fire in the Plaza Mayor in Madrid and in his interiors of prisons and barracks he pioneered the use of aquatint. He produced the series Caprichos y bombachadas and illustrated the title-page of Ideas y caprichos pintorescos (Madrid, 1807). He had two sons: Laureano (1802–58), an engraver, and Vicente (1796–1857), a history painter.

[Vassily; Wassily] (Vasil’yevich)

(b Moscow, Dec 4, 1866; d Neuilly-sur-Seine, Dec 13, 1944).

Russian painter, printmaker, stage designer, decorative artist and theorist. A central figure in the development of 20th-century art and specifically in the transition from representational to abstract art, Kandinsky worked in a wide variety of media and was an important teacher and theoretician. He worked mainly outside Russia, but his Russian heritage continued to be an important factor in his development.

Kandinsky grew up in Odessa and from 1886 to 1893 studied economics, ethnography and law in Moscow, where he wrote a dissertation on the legality of labourers’ wages. He married his cousin Anya Shemyakina in 1892 (divorced 1911). In 1896 Kandinsky decided to become an artist and went to Munich. There he studied from 1896 to 1898 at the art school of Anton Ažbe, where he met Alexei Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin, and then in 1900 at the Akademie with Franz von Stuck. The following year he was a co-founder of the ...

(b Münchenbuchsee, nr Berne, Dec 18, 1879; d Muralto, nr Locarno, June 29, 1940).

Swiss painter, draughtsman, printmaker, teacher, and writer. Klee’s work forms a major contribution to the history of 20th-century art. He is associated most commonly with the Bauhaus school in Weimar and Dessau. He is regarded as a major theoretician among modern artists and as a master of humour and mystery. In much of his work, he aspired to achieve a naive and untutored quality, but his art is also among the most cerebral of any of the 20th century (e.g. Disturbance, 1934; Turin, Gal. A. Mod.). Klee’s wide-ranging intellectual curiosity is evident in an art profoundly informed by structures and themes drawn from music, nature, and poetry.

Klee was brought up in Berne, where his father was a music teacher. As a boy, he displayed great talent both as a violinist and as a draughtsman. On leaving school he decided to study art in Munich, first with ...

(Severinovich)

(b Kiev, Feb 26, 1878; d Leningrad [now St Petersburg], May 15, 1935).

Russian painter, printmaker, decorative artist and writer of Ukranian birth. One of the pioneers of abstract art, Malevich was a central figure in a succession of avant-garde movements during the period of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and immediately after. The style of severe geometric abstraction with which he is most closely associated, Suprematism (see fig.), was a leading force in the development of Constructivism, the repercussions of which continued to be felt throughout the 20th century. His work was suppressed in Soviet Russia in the 1930s and remained little known during the following two decades. The reassessment of his reputation in the West from the mid-1950s was matched by the renewed influence of his work on the paintings of Ad Reinhardt and on developments such as Zero, Hard-edge painting and Minimalism.