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(b Fort Plain, NY, Oct 27, 1925; d San Francisco, 2006).

American tapestry artist, painter and stained-glass designer. Adams studied painting at Syracuse University and with Hans Hoffmann in New York, where he was influenced by the medieval tapestries in the Cloisters and also by the work of Matisse. In the 1950s Adams was apprenticed to the influential French tapestry designer Jean Lurçat, from whom he learnt the bold colours and clear imagery that characterize his work. He also studied at the Ecole Nationale d’Art Décoratif in Aubusson before beginning to use a series of workshops, notably that of Marguerite and Paul Avignon, who wove his first nationally acclaimed tapestry, Phoenix and the Golden Gate (1957). Flight of Angels (1962) was exhibited at the first Biennale Internationale de la Tapisserie in Lausanne. In 1976 his cartoon of California Poppies (San Francisco, CA Pal. Legion of Honor) was woven for the Five Centuries of Tapestry exhibition at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, as a demonstration piece. Later tapestries, for example ...

(b Jan 25, 1930; d Lomé, Jan 4, 2010).

Togolese painter, sculptor, engraver, stained glass designer, potter and textile designer. Beginning in 1946, he received his secondary education in Dakar, where he also worked in an architecture firm. He travelled to France and received his diplôme supérieur from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris. A versatile artist, Ahyi is best known for his murals and for monumental stone, marble and cement public sculptures. His work reflects the fusion of his Togolese roots, European training and an international outlook, and he counts among his influences Moore, Braque, Modigliani, Tamayo, Siqueiros and Tall. His work combines ancient and modern themes and materials, maternity being a prominent topic. The messages of his larger, public pieces operate on a broad level to appeal to the general populace, while smaller works often reflect his private engagement with challenges confronting the human condition. His compositions are both abstract and figurative and evoke the heroism and hope of the two world wars, Togo's colonial period and the struggle for independence from France, as well as the political efforts of the peoples of Vietnam, South Africa and Palestine. Ahyi has won numerous international prizes, including the prize of the city of Lyon (...

Descriptive term applied to a style of decorative arts that was widely disseminated in Europe and the USA during the 1920s and 1930s. Derived from the style made popular by the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris in 1925, the term has been used only since the late 1960s, when there was a revival of interest in the decorative arts of the early 20th century. Since then the term ‘Art Deco’ has been applied to a wide variety of works produced during the inter-war years, and even to those of the German Bauhaus. But Art Deco was essentially of French origin, and the term should, therefore, be applied only to French works and those from countries directly influenced by France.

The development of the Art Deco style, or the Style moderne as it was called at the time, closely paralleled the initiation of the 1925...

[Fr.: ‘new art’]

Decorative style of the late 19th century and the early 20th that flourished principally in Europe and the USA. Although it influenced painting and sculpture, its chief manifestations were in architecture and the decorative and graphic arts, the aspects on which this survey concentrates. It is characterized by sinuous, asymmetrical lines based on organic forms; in a broader sense it encompasses the geometrical and more abstract patterns and rhythms that were evolved as part of the general reaction to 19th-century historicism. There are wide variations in the style according to where it appeared and the materials that were employed.

Art Nouveau has been held to have had its beginnings in 1894 or 1895. A more appropriate date would be 1884, the year the progressive group Les XX was founded in Belgium, and the term was used in the periodical that supported it, Art Moderne: ‘we are believers in Art Nouveau’. The origin of the name is usually attributed to ...

Informal movement in architecture and the decorative arts that championed the unity of the arts, the experience of the individual craftsman, and the qualities of materials and construction in the work itself.

The Arts and Crafts Movement developed in the second half of the 19th century and lasted well into the 20th, drawing its support from progressive artists, architects and designers, philanthropists, amateurs, and middle-class women seeking work in the home. They set up small workshops apart from the world of industry, revived old techniques, and revered the humble household objects of pre-industrial times. The movement was strongest in the industrializing countries of northern Europe and in the USA, and it can best be understood as an unfocused reaction against industrialization. Although quixotic in its anti-industrialism, it was not unique; indeed it was only one among several late 19th-century reform movements, such as the Garden City movement, vegetarianism, and folksong revivals, that set the Romantic values of nature and folk culture against the artificiality of modern life....

(b 1926, Butte, MT; d Missoula, MT June 20, 2007).

American potter and sculptor of Finnish descent who is best known as a figurative ceramicist but has also worked in bronze, concrete, glass and metal. His works are normally in stoneware with incised decorations, but Autio began to work in porcelain while working at the Arabia Porcelain Factory in Helsinki in the 1980s....

[Cristallerie de Baccart]

French glassworks. In 1764 Monseigneur de Montmorency-Laval, Bishop of Metz, petitioned Louis XV to have a glassworks built at Baccarat, near Lunéville, in order to make use of his vast forests. The factory was initially directed by Antoine Renault and was called the Verreries de Sainte-Anne because Renault requested permission to build a chapel so that the workers could attend their religious obligations. At first the factory produced soda glass for household and industrial purposes. In 1816 it was purchased by the Belgian manufacturer Aimé-Gabriel D’Artigues (1778–1848), who transferred his Vôneche glassworks near Namur to Baccarat, built a new factory and began the production of lead glass. In 1823 the factory changed its name to the Compagnie des Cristalleries de Baccarat and made plain crystal, opaline, and some alabaster and agate glass. In 1846 Baccarat began producing millefiori glassware and paperweights, followed by paperweights with flowers, fruits or reptiles. From ...

(b Brussels, Aug 20, 1848; d Ixelles, Brussels, Dec 13, 1914).

Belgian architect, designer, painter and writer . He came from a family of artists: one brother, Charles Baes, was a glass painter and two others, Henri Baes and Pierre Baes, were decorative painters. Jean Baes studied decorative design at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, and, from 1867 to 1871, in the firm of Charle-Albert. He subsequently trained in architecture in the studios of Emile Janlet, Wynand Janssens and Alphonse Balat. Baes devoted most of his professional career—which was cut short in 1895 by a debilitating illness—to architecture but he also worked as an interior designer, a graphic designer, an architectural draughtsman and, especially, as a watercolourist of architectural subjects. In 1872 he was a founder-member of Belgium’s Société Centrale d’Architecture and after 1874 he collaborated on its journal, L’Emulation. In 1886 he became Assistant Director of the newly established Ecole des Arts Décoratifs, Brussels, where his pupils included Paul Hankar and ...

Italian family of glassmakers. The family are recorded as working in Murano, Venice, as early as 1324, when Iacobello Barovier and his sons Antonio Barovier and Bartolomeo Barovier (b Murano, ?1315; d Murano, ?1380) were working there as glassmakers. The line of descent through Viviano Barovier (b Murano, ?1345; d Murano, 1399) to Iacobo Barovier (b Murano, ?1380; d Murano, 1457) led to the more noteworthy Barovier family members of the Renaissance. Iacobo was responsible for public commissions in Murano from 1425 to 1450. From as early as 1420 he was a kiln overseer, with a determining influence on the fortunes of the Barovier family.

During the 15th century Iacobo’s sons, notably Angelo Barovier (b Murano, ?1400; d Murano, 1460), and his sons Giovanni Barovier, Maria Barovier, and Marino Barovier (b Murano, before 1431; d Murano, 1485) were important glassmakers. From as early as ...

(Stuart)

(b Chicago, IL, Dec 6, 1939).

American painter and sculptor. Bell Los Angeles from 1957 to 1959. After experimenting with geometrically shaped paintings, he turned to constructed paintings made of mirrored and transparent glass and canvas, for example Untitled (Magic Boxes) (canvas, acrylic, glass, 1964; Los Angeles, CA, Co. Mus. A.). The optical ambiguities created by the reflections of the viewer’s image and the ambient space became the hallmark of Bell’s work. Dissatisfied with the limitations of two-dimensional art, he began making faceted boxes of mirrored and transparent glass, the reflecting and refracting surfaces of which greatly extended the optical complexities and ambiguities of his earlier glass and canvas paintings. By late 1964 he had abandoned faceted, mirrored boxes in favour of pure glass cubes, whose sides he coated with various metals to create fields of elusive, evanescent colour, for example Untitled (1965; artist’s col., see 1982 exh. cat., p. 25). The environmental space seen through and reflected by the glass optically merged with the cube and became an intrinsic part of it....

(b Rosario, May 14, 1905; d Buenos Aires, Oct 13, 1981).

Argentine painter, sculptor, and printmaker. He trained at the stained-glass window workshop of Buxadera & Compañía, Rosario, province of Santa Fé, and with Eugenio Fornels and Enrique Munné. He held his first exhibition in 1920. At the age of 20 he won a scholarship for study in Europe awarded by the Jockey Club of Rosario, which enabled him to study in Paris under André Lhote and with Othon Friesz at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. After showing his European works in Buenos Aires in 1927 he obtained another scholarship, this time from the government of the province of Santa Fé, as a result of which he established contact with the Surrealists in 1928; in particular he befriended Louis Aragon and the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre.

Berni returned to Argentina in 1930. In 1933 he established an artistic–literary group, Nuevo Realismo, and began to depict Argentina’s social reality. From the 1960s, through two characters he created (Juanito Laguna and Ramona Montiel) he began to create works from pieces of metal and wood, buttons, burlap, wires, and other debris gathered by him in the shantytowns surrounding Buenos Aires. Combining in these works commonplace materials and a brutal realism (e.g. ...

(b Carshalton, Surrey, Mar 6, 1938; d London, July 1, 1966).

English painter and collagist. She studied stained glass at Wimbledon School of Art (1954–8), and at the Royal College of Art, London (1959–61). At the Royal College she continued to work with stained glass whilst privately making Surrealist-influenced collages and abstract paintings. Painting became the focus of her practice after finishing college, and in 1961 she exhibited alongside artists such as Peter Blake and two other painters in one of the first exhibitions of British Pop Art (London, AIA Gal.). Boty became a well-known personality in London during the 1960s, attracting attention for her striking looks and minor roles in television drama as well as through her reputation as a painter. In 1962 she and her eclectic collages were featured in Ken Russell’s BBC television film documenting British Pop, Pop Goes the Easel. By 1963 she had evolved a Pop vocabulary in her paintings using images of celebrities such as Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe with a celebratory and humorous approach to female sexuality. In ...

(b Eisenach, Dec 3, 1882; d Mexico City, Jun 13, 1954).

German photographer, active in Mexico. Brehme grew up in the town of Eisenach, initially studying photography in the nearby city of Erfurt. In 1899, at the age of 17, Brehme traveled to Africa, working in the German colonies, but returned home after contracting malaria. Once he had recovered, he departed for Central America and Mexico, traveling through the region between 1905 and 1907 before returning to Germany.

The next year, along with his new wife, Brehme emigrated permanently to Mexico, stopping in Veracruz before settling in Mexico City. There was a thriving German community in the capital and Brehme likely worked for one of the German-owned photography studios before eventually opening his own. These studios typically specialized in portraits, but some photographers, including Brehme, also explored the genre of costumbrismo, photographing regional costumes and customs.

Brehme arrived in the capital at the zenith of President Porfirio Díaz’s power and in ...

[Andersen, Hans]

(b Brændekilde, Fyn, April 7, 1857; d Jyllinge, March 30, 1942).

Danish painter, glass designer and ceramicist. He trained as a stonemason and then studied sculpture in Copenhagen at the Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi (1877–81), where he decided to become a painter. In 1884 he changed his name from Andersen to Brendekilde after his place of birth, as he was constantly being confused with his friend Laurits Andersen Ring, who moreover also took the name of his birthplace. In the 1880s Brendekilde and Ring painted together on Fyn and influenced each other’s work. Brendekilde’s art had its origin in the lives of people of humble means and in the country environment of previous centuries. He painted landscapes and genre pictures. He himself was the son of a woodman, and his paintings often contain social comment, as in Worn Out (1889; Odense, Fyn. Kstmus.), which shows the influence of both Jean-François Millet and Jules Bastien-Lepage. Brendekilde was a sensitive colourist, influenced by Impressionism, for example in ...

(b Durham, England, Nov 11, 1831; d New York, Feb 8, 1913).

American painter. A popular painter of rural and urban genre scenes, he spent his youth in England, where he served an apprenticeship as a glasscutter. By 1853 he was employed in Brooklyn, NY. After serious study he became, in 1860, a fully fledged member of the New York artistic community, with a studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building and participating regularly in National Academy of Design exhibitions.

Brown’s first genre scenes focused on rural children out of doors. Often sentimental, these exhibited a clarity of light and drawing attributable to his early interest in the Pre-Raphaelite painters. The Music Lesson (1870; New York, Met.), a courtship scene set in a Victorian parlour, reveals his debt to English painting. In 1879 Brown painted the Longshoreman’s Noon (Washington, DC, Corcoran Gal. A.), an affectionate but sober rendering of the variety of ages and physical types in the urban working class. About ...

(b Krefeld, Nov 3, 1889; d Amsterdam, May 9, 1957).

German painter, printmaker and stained-glass artist. He attended the Fachschule für Textilindustrie and the Kunstgewerbeschule in Krefeld (1905–9), where his teacher Johan Thorn Prikker showed him the power of line and colour and introduced him to the work of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne. In 1911 he was invited by Franz Marc and Vasily Kandinsky to Sindelsdorf in Upper Bavaria. They knew of his work through August Macke whose cousin, Helmut, shared a studio with Campendonk. While Campendonk’s harmonious and often transparent application of luxurious Fauvist colours reflects the influence of Robert and Sonia Delaunay and of Macke, Marc’s geometric compositional approach is clearly visible in the experimental style of such paintings as Leaping Horse (1911; Saarbrücken, Saarland Mus.), shown in the first exhibition of Der Blaue Reiter in 1911–12 in Munich and illustrated in the almanac Der Blaue Reiter. Unlike Marc, however, he included figures in his mystical portrayals of animals in nature. This subject-matter was also explored in his first tentative graphic works, published in ...

(b Brockmoor, Staffs, Sept 18, 1863; d Dec 10, 1963).

American glass designer and technician of English birth. He trained as an assistant in his father’s salt-glazed stoneware factory in Stourbridge, Staffs, and attended evening classes at the Stourbridge School of Art and the Dudley Mechanics Institute, Dudley, W. Midlands, where he came under the tutelage of John Northwood (1836–1902). In 1880, after a recommendation by Northwood, Carder was employed as a designer and draughtsman at the Stourbridge firm of Stevens & Williams. During this period Carder developed his Mat-su-no-ke glass (which uses the application of clear or frosted glass in high relief outside the vessel). He also collaborated with Northwood to make coloured art glass and cut and cased glass.

In 1902, after a research trip to the USA for Stevens & Williams, Carder established a factory at Corning, NY, to produce blanks for Hawkes, T. G., & Co & Co. In 1903 Carder, who was inspired by the Art Nouveau style, joined with ...

(b Emporia, KS, Nov 6, 1932).

American furniture designer. He normally worked in wood (sometimes exotic wood), but has also made furniture in plastic and fibreglass; his finest work reflects his mastery of laminated wood. Castle’s decorative furniture is strongly sculptural; his designs are markedly individualistic, but nonetheless evince debts to the traditions of Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts Movement. His best-known designs are the Molar chair and loveseat designed for Stendig in ...

[Ger. Kreibitz]

Czech centre of glass production. A glass factory was established in Chřibská in northern Bohemia on the Česká Kamenice estate in the Lužické Mountains at the beginning of the 15th century. Martin Friedrich (1582–1612) was a renowned glassmaker, and he and other glassmakers at the works were invited in 1601 by the Elector of Brandenburg, Joachim Frederick (reg 1598–1608), to establish a glass workshop at Grimnitz in north Brandenburg. From the list of products made at Grimnitz it is evident that the Chřibská glassworks produced cold-painted, enamelled, engraved and filigree glass. Dishes and goblets were decorated with the imperial eagle, the Electors, allegories of the Virtues, the Apostles and the Seven Ages of Man. During the 17th century the production of painted glass continued at Chřibská. In 1661 the first Bohemian guild of glassmakers, enamellers and glass engravers was established at Chřibská. From the 1660s local records indicate the names of the glass engravers, whose numbers increased after the 1670s. By the end of the 17th century the factory was producing a good-quality potash glass. Between ...

(b Flensburg, March 6, 1866; d Wiesbaden, Jan 5, 1945).

German designer. After an early career as an interior designer he turned to the design of tapestries (subsequently woven at the Scherbeker Kunstgewerbeschule), porcelain (table wares), drinking glasses (for the Theresienthaler Kristallglasfabrik) and silver cutlery. After 1914 he worked primarily as a painter and writer.