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(b Glendale, CA, Dec 11, 1918; d Albuquerque, NM, May 13, 2002).

American painter, printmaker, art historian, writer and teacher. His appointment to the art faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1942 was interrupted by military service, and it was not until 1946 that he resumed his career as a teacher of the practice and theory of art. This took him to the universities of Kentucky (Lexington), Florida (Gainesville) and finally New Mexico (Albuquerque), where he served as Dean (1961–76). Despite academic demands, Adams always found time to paint and showed his work in over 50 solo exhibitions. Equally at home in oil, acrylic, watercolour and egg tempera, he was initially inspired by the abstracted cityscapes of Stuart Davis. Later he absorbed the lessons of Matisse, achieving particularly radiant paintings during the 1980s. In 1993 he was elected an Academician by the National Academy of Design.

In 1948, at Stanton Macdonald-Wright’s suggestion, Adams began to make lithographs with the Los Angeles printer, ...

(b Genoa, Feb 14, 1404; d Rome, April 1472).

Italian architect, sculptor, painter, theorist and writer. The arts of painting, sculpture and architecture were, for Alberti, only three of an exceptionally broad range of interests, for he made his mark in fields as diverse as family ethics, philology and cryptography. It is for his contribution to the visual arts, however, that he is chiefly remembered. Alberti single-handedly established a theoretical foundation for the whole of Renaissance art with three revolutionary treatises, on painting, sculpture and architecture, which were the first works of their kind since Classical antiquity. Moreover, as a practitioner of the arts, he was no less innovative. In sculpture he seems to have been instrumental in popularizing, if not inventing, the portrait medal, but it was in architecture that he found his métier. Building on the achievements of his immediate predecessors, Filippo Brunelleschi and Michelozzo di Bartolomeo, he reinterpreted anew the architecture of antiquity and introduced compositional formulae that have remained central to classical design ever since....

(b Ciminna, Jan 24, 1634; d Palermo, July 3, 1714).

Italian architect, writer and painter. He trained as a priest in Palermo and entered the Padri Ministri degl’Infermi. Another member of this Order was Giacomo Amato, with whom he worked, although they were not related. While serving as a chaplain Amato studied geometry, architecture, optics and engraving. His earliest known artistic work is a painting on copper of the Miracle of S Rosalia (1663), the patron saint of Palermo. After 1686 he created many works of an ephemeral character. For the feasts of S Rosalia and for important political events he provided designs for lavish triumphal chariots, probably developed from those by Jacques Callot, triumphal arches and other ceremonial apparatus set up on principal roads and piazzas, and he painted hangings, papier-mâché models and massive altarpieces for the cathedral. These works influenced Amato’s permanent architecture. The spiral columns of the campanile of S Giuseppe dei Teatini, Palermo, recall the festival designs of ...

(b San José, June 1, 1907; d 1998).

Costa Rican engraver, painter, illustrator, draughtsman, writer and critic. He studied for a year from 1931 at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes but was otherwise initially self-taught, using Louis Gonse’s L’Art japonais (Paris, 1883) as a source. He produced a series of caricature drawings, influenced by Cubism, in the Album de dibujos de 1926. During 1929 he met the sculptors Juan Manuel Sánchez and Francisco Zúñiga (the latter was also a printmaker), and through his interest in German and Mexican Expressionist printmakers, he developed a passion for wood-engraving. His first wood-engravings were published in the periodical Repertorio Americano (1929). He went on to contribute wood-engravings and drawings to collections of short stories and poetry, educational books, periodicals and newspapers. In 1931 he taught drawing and wood-engraving at the Escuela Normal in Heredia. He exhibited at the Salones Anuales de Artes Plásticas in San José (1931–6...

(b Leiden, c. 1618; d ?Batavia [Jakarta] after July 11, 1664).

Dutch writer, painter and etcher. He is now known chiefly as the author of Lof der schilder-konst (Dut.: Praise of painting). Originally a lecture given to Leiden artists on 18 October 1641, St Luke’s Day, it was published the following year. At present virtually no works of art are attributed to this Philips Angel except the etching Head of an Old Man (1637), a rather coarse imitation of Rembrandt. Although nothing is known about his training, this etching and certain ideas within Lof der schilder-konst suggest that Angel had been in contact with Rembrandt shortly before becoming a master painter in Leiden in 1638. The first half of this small book enumerates the most famous painters from antiquity to Angel’s contemporaries and makes the traditional comparisons between painting, sculpture and poetry. The second half discusses the skills necessary for a good painter. The latter section is more original as the author occasionally refers to such new genres as seascapes, battle scenes and guardroom scenes. His interest in the exact depiction of appearances has a close relation to the extremely minute renderings for which Gerrit Dou and other Leiden painters became famous....

(b Barcelona, 1755; d Barcelona, Sept 7, 1822).

Spanish writer and painter. He was a member of the Real Escuela de la Junta de Comercio in Barcelona, where he was primarily active in a political capacity rather than as an artist and professor in its Escuela de Nobles Artes. He was expelled from the Junta in 1814 because he had taken the oath of loyalty to the usurper King Joseph Bonaparte, and as a result of accusations of favouring the French he spent his last years in total isolation from public life. His work as a writer on art is of considerable interest. He strongly defended French Neo-classicism and, in particular, the artists François Gérard and Jacques-Louis David. In a lecture he gave to the Junta de Comercio in 1810 he proclaimed the absolute validity of academic classicism, and this belief also pervades such manuscript pamphlets as the Discurso sobre la enseñanza del dibujo, Máximas generales para la pintura...

(b Santander, 1824; d Madrid, 1897).

Spanish painter and writer. He was a pupil of the landscape painter Carlos de Haes at the Escuela Superior in Madrid and exhibited at the National Fine Arts Exhibitions of 1858, 1860, 1862 and 1866. His artistic career, however, is less significant than his profound knowledge of art. He published articles in La Ilustración española y americana, El Día, Arte en España and the Revista de bellas artes (all published in Madrid), at a time when art criticism, understood as ‘a commentary on work, made with some degree of authority’, was still in its infancy in Spain. He gave several lectures at the Ateneo Cientifico, Literario y Artístico in Madrid, such as: ‘Observaciones sobre el concepto del Arte’ (15 May 1884), ‘Los desenvolvimientos de la pintura—López, Madrazo, Rosales, Fortuny’ (1887) and ‘La España del siglo XIX: Goya y su época’ (1895). His publications include the monographs ...

(b Madrid, 1664; d Madrid, Feb 15, 1726).

Spanish architect, painter and writer. He was trained in architecture by the Jesuits and in painting by Claudio Coello and worked mainly as an architect. Two overdoors showing multiple allegorical scenes of the Battle of Lepanto (1721; Madrid, Pal. Arzobisp.) and a St Barbara (1723; Madrid, Mus. Lázaro Galdiano) reveal Ardemans as a talented painter working in the tradition of Francisco Rizi, Juan Carreño de Miranda and Francisco de Herrera the younger, and partially influenced by Luca Giordano. His debt to Coello is apparent in a ceiling fresco attributed to him in the Capilla del Cristo de los Dolores of the Venerable Orden Tercera de San Francisco, Madrid, which shows St Francis riding in a chariot of fire with figures watching from a balcony. Also attributed to Ardemans is the portrait of Pedro Atanasio Bocanegra (c. 1689; Granada, Pal. Arzobisp.)

As an architect, Ardemans belongs to a period of transition, continuing into the 18th century the Baroque tradition of the Madrid school. He worked in Granada (...

(b Faenza, c. 1525; d Faenza, April 1609).

Italian painter and writer. He probably began his apprenticeship at Faenza and at the beginning of the 1550s settled in Rome, where he worked as a copyist of ancient and modern works. Around 1556 he made a series of journeys across Italy before settling in Faenza in 1564, where he took orders. Of his artistic works, which he himself held in low esteem, we know only an Ascension of the Virgin (Faenza, Pin. Com.) and a few leaves from an album of drawings, dating from the 1550s, which show Raphael’s Logge. His most important contribution to the history of art is his treatise entitled De’ veri precetti della pittura (1587).

With this book Armenini wished to revive painting, which he felt had declined. He attributed its downfall to three main causes: the indifference of the great masters of the early 16th century to teaching, the lack of artists of sufficient stature to succeed them and a general depreciation of the art of painting. The ...

Apartheid, an Afrikaans word meaning ‘separateness’, was a system of racial segregation in South Africa that curtailed the economic, political, and social rights of black, coloured, and Indian people. Enforced through the legislation of the National Party, apartheid was the rule of the land between 1948 and 1994. Apartheid affected art and art-making in three primary areas: expressions of nationalism; limited access to education and commercial art markets for black, coloured, and Indian artists; and articulations of political resistance to this system of governance.

Although apartheid is equated with the 20th century, its notions of segregation predate this period. As descendants of Dutch settlers who first settled in southern Africa in 1651, Afrikaners were long at odds with people indigenous to this region and with British and German imperialists who sought to colonize it in the 19th century. In Afrikaner lore, the Great Trek (1835–52) represents the spirit of struggle to claim a land in the name of God. The pilgrimage was driven by a desire both to civilize a so-called heathen place through the introduction of Christianity and to establish a republic free of English intrusion in the heartland. This spirit is embodied by Pioneers (...

Astrology is the art of predicting events on earth as well as human character and disposition from the movements of the planets and fixed stars. Medieval astrology encompassed both general concepts of celestial influence, and the technical art of making predictions with horoscopes, symbolic maps of the heavens at particular moments and places constructed from astronomical information. The scientific foundations of the art were developed in ancient Greece, largely lost in early medieval Europe and recovered by the Latin West from Arabic sources in the 12th and 13th centuries. Late medieval astrological images were successfully Christianized and were adapted to particular contexts, acquired local meanings and changed over time.

Astrology developed into a scientific branch of learning in ancient Greece, but because of the opposition of the Church Fathers it was transmitted to early medieval Europe in only fragmentary form in technically unsophisticated textbooks and popular divinatory genres. Literary and scientific texts provided more general ideas about the nature and attributes of the planets which were influential on later iconography. The first significant astrological images appear in 11th-century illustrated astronomical texts (e.g. London, BL, Cotton MS. Tiberius BV), which were acquired and produced by monasteries to aid with time-keeping and the construction of the Christian calendar....

[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 ?Toledo; d 1595).

Spanish painter, miniaturist, sculptor, architect and writer. He belongs to the Toledan school of the second half of the 16th century. The son of the painter Lorenzo de Ávila, he developed a Mannerist style that is smooth and delicate and derives from his father’s and from that of Juan Correa de Vivar and of Francisco Comontes (d 1565). He worked as painter to Toledo Cathedral from 1565 to 1581 and was painter (Pintor del Rey) to Philip II from 1583. He acted frequently as a valuer for the work of other artists.

Between 1563 and 1564, in collaboration with Luis de Velasco, Hernando de Ávila painted the retable of the church of Miraflores (Madrid Province) with the Life of Christ and the Life of the Virgin (untraced); these are probably among his earliest works. He was commissioned to paint the retables of St John the Baptist and the ...

(b Vila Nova de Gaia, Jan 17, 1923; d 2002).

Portuguese painter, graphic artist, critic and art administrator . In 1947 he was a founder-member of the Grupo Surrealista de Lisboa, with which he exhibited in 1949. By 1952 he was one of the few remaining members of the original group still involved in Surrealism. That year he held a large exhibition with two other artists, showing Occultations, photographs in which parts of the images were masked by overpainting. At the time he was more interested in the process of image-making, in the unconscious genesis of images and their internal rhythms, than in the result as an aesthetic object. From the mid-1950s, Azevedo’s paintings were almost entirely abstract and gestural, with greater overt affinities to lyrical abstraction than to automatism, for example Painting (1961; Lisbon, Mus. Gulbenkian). While in smaller works he often returned to the Surrealist use of collaged photographs introducing an element of shock or surprise, in his paintings there is an overriding interest in morphological dissolution and mutation, which remains lyrical rather than violent....

(b Paris, 1724; d Paris, April 13, 1806).

French painter, writer and administrator . A pupil of Jean-Baptiste Pierre, he was approved (agréé) by the Académie Royale in Paris in 1750 and received (reçu) as a painter of flowers in 1752 on presentation of a Portrait of the King in a Medallion Surrounded by a Garland of Flowers and Attributes of the Arts (untraced). He was essentially a flower and animal painter; as a successor to Jean-Baptiste Oudry he played a key part in the continuation of a precise and polished type of still-life painting. Yet Bachelier also had pretensions towards becoming a history painter, a status he achieved officially in 1763 when he was admitted to the category of history painters at the Académie on the strength of his Death of Abel (Auxerre, Mus. A. & Hist.), for which he substituted a Roman Charity (Paris, Ecole N. Sup. B.-A.) in 1764.

Bachelier exhibited regularly at the Salon from ...

(b Rome, c. 1566; d Dec 30, 1643).

Italian painter, draughtsman and writer . He executed canvases and frescoes of religious and mythological subjects, and portraits. He was given important commissions by popes and aristocrats and sold his works to patrons in Italy and abroad. Baglione’s arguably greater fame as a writer derives from Le nove chiese di Roma (1639) and especially from his Vite de’ pittori, scultori, architetti (1642), containing biographies of more than 200 artists who worked in Rome between 1572 and 1642.

Although born in Rome, where he spent most of his life, Baglione claimed descent from a noble Perugian family. His only acknowledged training (in the autobiography appended to Le vite, 1642) was an apprenticeship with Francesco Morelli, a little-known Florentine painter in Rome. However, drawings for works from the late 1580s and 1590s (such as the Finding of Moses, the Denial of St Peter and the Arrest of Christ...

(b Budapest, Oct 14, 1914; d Budapest, May 3, 1986).

Hungarian painter, printmaker, critic and stage designer . He studied at the School of Applied Art, Budapest (1930–34). Bálint went to Paris for a short time and then attended János Vaszary and Vilmos Aba-Novák’s private school in Budapest, where he met his future brother-in-law Lajos Vajda, whose Constructivist–Surrealist style had a great influence on him. They spent their summers together at the Szentendre colony. Béla Czóbel’s lyrical expressive paintings also influenced Bálint’s early work. From 1939 to 1942 he edited the art column of the newspaper Népszava, to which his father had contributed until 1925, and also published his own articles. He destroyed many of his early works after World War II. The persecution of the Jews was the theme of a series of linocuts, By Candlelight (1939–41; see Román, nos 21–4). In 1946 he became a member of the European School in Budapest, and in 1947 he went to Paris and took part in the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (Gal. Maeght). Subsequently his work changed, and in his ...

[Fu Pao-shih; ming Fu Ruilin]

(b Xinyu, Jiangxi Province, Oct 5, 1904; d Nanjing, Sept 28, 1965).

Chinese painter, seal carver, and art historian. He was one of the foremost painters of guohua (literally “national painting”), who worked in the traditional medium of painting in East Asia, namely, ink and color on paper or silk. His work helped transform literati painting, an age-old artistic pursuit of the elite scholarly class, to an idiom of expression in tune with the aesthetic and social values of modern era.

Born into a humble family, Fu received a modest education in Nanchang. He later studied at the Imperial School of Fine Arts in Japan, and in 1935 became a faculty member at the National Central University in Nanjing. During the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), Fu fled to the hinterland, where he developed his mature style of painting—semi-abstract landscapes often combined with human elements—and earned considerable repute through exhibitions and publications. After the Communist takeover of China in 1949, Fu produced paintings inspired by poems by Mao Zedong and the Red Army, as well as those emphasizing the beauty of the land in China. He continued to serve in important positions in the art world, most notably, director of the Jiangsu Provincial Chinese Painting Institute....

(b East Anglia, 1704; d Norwich, Sept 9, 1767).

English painter and writer . He began his career as a painter of decorative panels, and a number of poor quality overmantels from 1728 onwards survive. About 1738 his brother Robert Bardwell took over the family decorative painting business, which was based at Bungay, Suffolk; by then Bardwell was producing conversation pieces and portraits, perhaps influenced by the Norwich-based portrait painter John Theodore Heins. William Henry, 4th Earl of Rochford, with his Hunter and Groom (1741; Brodick Castle, Strathclyde, NT Scotland) is an example of his naive approach: the doll-like figures inhabit a clear, airless landscape, while the background view of Easton Park, Suffolk, painted with the same degree of clarity as the foreground figures, shows the influence of his early decorative work. In the 1740s and 1750s Bardwell visited London and painted several portraits there. In 1752 and 1753 he journeyed through Yorkshire to Scotland, carrying out a large number of commissions. His ...

(Manuel)

(b Coimbra, 1943).

Portuguese painter and critic. After studying medicine at the University of Coimbra, he studied fine art (1963–8) in Lisbon. He spent three years (1971–4) on a scholarship at the Royal College of Art in London. On returning to Portugal, he worked as a critic for the weekly newspaper O sempre fixe.

In the 1970s Batarda’s early conceptual work gave way to a detailed, obsessive and cruelly playful figuration, often in watercolour, with a complex iconography drawing on literary, art-historical and popular sources. The social and political satire of these works has affinities with that in the watercolours of George Grosz and Otto Dix. Intricate images of invented mechanical objects, personages and animals fill up and float against a space at times structured by a geometrical grid. His later black and white paintings maintain the geometric grid and the obsessive quality of the earlier works but dispense with figuration....