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Article

(b Holywood, County Down, Ireland, Jan 26, 1922).

Australian painter, printmaker, book designer, lecturer, collector, gallery director and publisher of limited edition artists’ books, of Irish decent. He worked as a draughtsman before entering war service in the British Admiralty from 1940 to 1949, including five years in Colombo, where he made sketching trips to jungle temples with the Buddhist monk and artist Manjsiro Thero. Between 1949 and 1951 Adams worked as an exhibition designer in London and studied wood-engraving with Gertrude Hermes in her evening class at the Central School of Arts and Crafts (now Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design). In 1951, after moving to Melbourne, Adams began a 30-year teaching commitment at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), where he instructed many of the younger generation of Australian printmakers, including George Baldessin and Jan Senbergs. A brief return to Britain and Ireland in 1957–8 provided experience with Dolmen Press, Dublin, which published his first book of engravings, ...

Article

(b Amsterdam, Aug 13, 1820; d Amsterdam, March 17, 1889).

Dutch writer, critic and collector. He was raised in a cultivated and artistic merchant family but preferred writing to commerce. In addition to serving as an editor of the Volksalmanak voor Nederlandsche Katholieken, he published the Dietsche Warande. His lifelong advocacy of Roman Catholic emancipation is reflected in many of his short stories (written under the pseudonym Pauwels Foreestier) concerning Catholic life in 17th-century Holland. In 1876 he was appointed professor of aesthetics and the history of art at the Rijksacademie voor Beeldenden Kunsten, Amsterdam. An architectural preservationist and an important critic of the art and architecture of his time, he asserted that art should serve a religious function, as it had during the Middle Ages. It should be social, idealistic and transcendental. In his ideal society the arts would form a harmonious unit under the heading of architecture. His brother-in-law P. J. H. Cuypers was the leading Dutch architect of the day, whose career was assisted by Alberdingk Thijm’s advocacy of Gothic Revivalism in architecture. Alberdingk Thijm was particularly opposed to the painters of the Barbizon and Hague schools, whose work he considered to have no underlying purpose. Rather, he preferred the Düsseldorf school, which displayed a knowledge of history and literature. His large collections reflected his philosophical orientation. His numerous 17th and 18th-century Dutch paintings, mostly by minor masters, represented all the genres. He also owned a large collection of drawings and prints, as well as books, manuscripts and religious art from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, which included a Gothic ciborium, a Byzantine crucifix and embroideries on silk, which were dispersed at auction after his death (Amsterdam, Muller, ...

Article

Patricia Hills

Art journal published from 1934 to 1937. In 1934, the Artists’ Union joined with the Artists’ Committee of Action, which had been organized to protest against the destruction of Diego Rivera’s mural Man at the Crossroads in Rockefeller Center, New York, to publish Art Front, a journal of news and opinion for artists. The first issue appeared in November 1934 with an editorial committee consisting of eight members of the Artists’ Committee of Action (Hugo Gellert (1892–1985), Stuart Davis , Zoltan Hecht (1890–1968), Abraham Harriton (1893–1986), Rosa Pringle, Hilda Abel, Jennings Tofel (1891–1959) and Harold Baumbach (1903–2002)) and eight from the Artists’ Union (Ethel Olenikov, Boris Gorelick (1912–84), Robert Jonas (b 1907), Max Spivak (1906–81), Michael Loew (1907–85), Katherine Gridley (1898–1940), Herbert Kruckman (1904–98) and C. Mactarian)). Herman Baron served as the Managing Editor. The opening statement announced: ...

Article

(Gruenwald, Alfred Emanuel Ferdinand]

(b Stettin, Pomerania [now Szczecin, Poland], Oct 9, 1892; d nr Chamonix, France, 17 or Aug 18, 1927).

German collagist, draughtsman, writer and publisher. Although he came from an upper middle-class family, after serving as a volunteer in World War I he became a pacifist and a supporter of democratic socialism on Soviet lines. In 1918 he began a political career as a committee member of the mid-Rhine district of the Independent Social-Democratic Party, a Marxist party that had split from the Social-Democratic Party of Germany. The short-lived journal he edited, Der Ventilator, which published six issues in Cologne in February and March 1919, was a satirical magazine directed against the Social Democrat government in Berlin.

Having discovered the work of de Chirico and come under the influence of Dada, in autumn 1919 Baargeld became an opponent of tradition and convention in art as well, setting himself particularly against Expressionism. In November 1919 he and Max Ernst, who together can be said to have founded the Cologne branch of ...

Article

(fl 1748–73).

French critic and poet . He was one of the earliest Salon critics, publishing between 1748 and 1757 his commentaries on the exhibitions of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture—often anonymously, because of harsh censorship. An abiding principle in his sometimes contradictory stance is that artists should base their work on nature rather than slavishly following Classical antiquity or the Old Masters: in this he sided with his immediate precursor, the Abbé Jean-Bernard Le Blanc, against the founder of French art criticism, Etienne La Font de Saint-Yenne. He believed that critics should develop an understanding of artists’ techniques and problems, here anticipating Denis Diderot and parting company with Le Blanc. He devoted as much attention to developing a critical methodology, often by attacking fellow critics, as to analysing works of art on exhibition; in this he was typical of his time. He particularly admired Jean-Siméon Chardin, Maurice-Quentin de Latour, Claude-Joseph Vernet and Jean-Baptiste Oudry, none of them an exponent of history painting, the genre that stood highest in the traditional academic hierarchy. He became increasingly ready to criticize adversely, but his comments on individual works tend to be banal, whether he is praising or blaming. He praised the efforts of the Direction des Bâtiments du Roi (the French government’s arts administration) to promote the visual arts through regular exhibitions and generous commissions, and he exhorted wealthy individuals similarly to provide worthwhile work for artists....

Article

Mariana Katzarova

(b Dolni Dŭbnik, nr Pleven, July 24, 1901; d Sofia, Jan 23, 1958).

Bulgarian cartoonist, illustrator, draughtsman, painter, teacher, editor and critic. In 1926 he studied painting at the Academy of Art, Sofia, and although he was later known for his paintings, he achieved greater fame as a political and social cartoonist and newspaper and magazine illustrator. His early cartoons are courageous commentaries on political events in Bulgaria from 1925 to 1934, wittily satirizing the monarchy and dictatorships. He also mocked the machinations of the various bourgeois political parties as they fought for power. Among his most celebrated cartoons are the Kidnapping of the Constitution and the Tsar’s Family, published in the Sofia newspapers Zemedelsko Zname and Sturetz, as well as Suvremennik and other left-wing publications. He also illustrated the series Spanish Chronicle (1936). In 1940 he began freelancing for the anti-Fascist satirical newspaper Sturshel (Sofia) and in 1941 became its editor. During World War II he executed many political cartoons opposing Fascism and Nazism (e.g. ...

Article

Iain Boyd Whyte

(b Grüneberg, June 28, 1865; d Dresden, Feb 1, 1910).

German writer and publisher. From 1892 to 1894 he edited the Freie Bühne (later renamed Neue deutsche Rundschau), the Berlin-based magazine that acted as the chief mouthpiece of literary naturalism. He took up the cause of modernist painting in his very first publication, A. Böcklin (1891), a text introducing 15 heliographs of the artist’s work, and this was followed by publications on Fritz von Uhde (1893; 1908) and on Hans Thoma (1904). In 1894, with Julius Meier-Graefe, Bierbaum founded Pan, which was to become the leading avant-garde journal of the period in Germany, notable for its typography and for the inventive integration of text and illustration. There were also reproductions of paintings, drawings and sculpture, and the list of contributors included Franz von Stuck, Thoma, von Uhde, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Max Klinger, Arnold Böcklin, Paul Signac, Georges Seurat, Félix Vallotton, ...

Article

Dianne Timmerman and Frank van den Hoek

(b Amsterdam, Feb 1, 1891; d Amsterdam, May 5, 1951).

Dutch architect and writer. He studied civil engineering at the Technische Hogeschool, Delft, graduating in 1916. For a period he was editor of the architectural periodical Bouwkundig Weekblad, his articles revealing an admiration for Le Corbusier and Ernst May, particularly the latter’s efficient manner of working. He left the journal in 1924 because of its insufficient coverage of Functionalism. Between 1919 and 1926 he worked for the Department of Public Works in Amsterdam, mainly in the idiom of the Amsterdam school, for example a telephone exchange (1923) in East Amsterdam. His later projects, for example the houses (1927–8) in Aalsmeerderstraat and Sassenheimstraat, Amsterdam, are simpler, more rigid and make more use of glass. In 1928 Boeken joined the Amsterdam Functionalists of Architectengroep de 8 8, but he left before 1931. As a member of the main Dutch architectural society, Architectura et Amicitia, he supported Arthur Staal, who tried to push the society in the direction of Functionalism. In ...

Article

Elizabeth Meredith Dowling

(b Richmond, VA, Feb 24, 1883; d Glen Head, Long Island, NY, Feb 1, 1951).

American architect, preservationist, author, and editor. His wealthy patrician family provided the opportunity for a fine education and connections to future clients. In 1906 he received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Columbia University. His education continued in Rome at the American Academy through receipt of the McKim Fellowship in Architecture in 1907. In 1908 he passed the entrance examination for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and remained in Paris until 1909.

Best known for his residential work, Bottomley combined his extensive knowledge of architectural history with his own observations to produce personal interpretations of past styles. Of his approximately 186 commissions, 90 were located in New York and 51 in Virginia. His most recognized residential commissions are found on Monument Avenue in Richmond, VA. Produced during the 1920s and 1930s, these residences, like many of his other projects, have exteriors inspired by nearby 18th-century James River Georgian mansions. Their interiors deviate from the Georgian models with creatively arranged plans that display a particular delight in the use of curving stairs within a variety of different shaped foyers....

Article

Joyce Zemans

(Richard)

(b Croydon, London, March 31, 1888; d Toronto, March 21, 1955).

Canadian painter, critic and writer of English birth. He emigrated in 1905 to Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. In 1921 he moved to Toronto to work as an editor and publisher. He is best known as a pioneer of abstract painting in Canada. His show (1927) at Toronto’s Arts & Letters Club was the first solo exhibition of abstract art by a Canadian artist. His early work is characterized by the bold non-objective imagery seen in the complex Sounds Assembling (1928; Winnipeg, A.G.). After 1930 he reassessed his artistic direction: he turned first to figurative imagery (e.g. Torso, 1937; Ottawa, N.G.) and then looking to Cubism he re-examined the nature of abstraction in his painting, without returning to the non-objectivity of his earlier work. Between 1926 and 1930 Brooker wrote ‘The Seven Arts’, a syndicated column of art criticism for the Southam Press. In addition, he edited The Yearbook of the Arts in Canada...

Article

David Rodgers

(fl 1660–83)

English miniature painter, writer, printmaker and print publisher. In 1665 he taught limning to Elizabeth Pepys, wife of Samuel Pepys, probably on the recommendation of Pepys’s superior, Sir William Penn, whose daughter he had previously taught. Pepys, finding Browne over-familiar, terminated the acquaintance the following year. In 1669 Browne published Ars Pictoria, or an Academy Treating of Drawing, Painting, Limning and Etching, with 31 plates etched by himself after Old Master painters. It was published with Browne’s portrait by Jacob Huysmans, engraved by Arnold de Jode (b 1638; fl 1658–66), as its frontispiece. Six years later Browne added An Appendix to the Art of Painting in Miniture [sic] or Limning, etc and in 1677 published A Commodious Drawing Book with 40 plates after modern masters. In 1683, according to Horace Walpole, Browne obtained a 14-year patent to publish 100 mezzotint prints from works by Anthony van Dyck and ...

Article

Vanina Costa

(b Nantes, Sept 17, 1907; d Paris, May 8, 1977).

French painter, sculptor, draughtsman and poet. He moved in 1926 to Paris, where he became involved with Surrealism, soon afterwards publishing his first collection of poems, Opoponax (Paris, 1927). In 1934 he exhibited a series of automatic drawings, which were followed by images produced with the assistance of objets trouvés: in Street Object (1936; Paris, Pompidou), for instance, he placed a sheet of paper on the road and then drove a car over it so as to leave the imprint of the tyre tracks. Another work of this period consisted of a bus sign bearing the same letters as his initials, so that it could be read as his signature. He also produced assemblages in a Surrealist spirit, such as Morphology of Desire (wood, plaster, metal, candle and torch, 1934–7; Paris, Pompidou). After World War II Bryen turned increasingly towards painting, through which he became a leading exponent of ...

Article

Sergey Kuznetsov

(Ivanovich)

(b Moscow, Oct 9, 1888; d Moscow, March 15, 1938).

Russian politician and theorist. He was editor of the Communist Party newspaper Pravda from the 1917 Revolution and took over as the main theoretician of the Comintern (Communist International) after Lenin’s death in 1924. He was interested in art as both a political means and as an amateur artist (an exhibition of his paintings was held in the Tret’yakov Gallery, Moscow, in 1935–6). Before the 1920s he subscribed to Aleksandr Bogdanov’s ideas concerning proletarian art, which he viewed as a cultural form arising during the transition from Capitalism to Communism. However, he disagreed with the Proletkul’t’s desire for independence from the Party, and in Proletarian Revolution and Culture (1923) he abandoned his earlier, more radical ideas and posited the creation of the proletariat as new agents of culture—living machines with a Communist ideology, by whom artists and writers belonging to the old bourgeois social order would be ousted. Bukharin is recognized as the author of the Central Committee decree on the Party policy on literature in ...

Article

Judith Zilczer

Journal devoted to photography that was published from 1903 to 1917. Camera Work evolved from a quarterly journal of photography to become one of the most ground-breaking and influential periodicals in American cultural history. Founded in January 1903 by photographer Alfred Stieglitz as the official publication of the Photo-Secession, the journal originally promoted the cause of photography as a fine art. As Stieglitz, its editor and publisher, expanded the journal’s scope to include essays on aesthetics, literature, criticism and modern art, Camera Work fueled intellectual discourse in early 20th-century America.

Camera Work mirrored the aesthetic philosophy of its founder Alfred Stieglitz. The journal resulted from his decade-long campaign to broaden and professionalize American photography. Serving for three years as editor of American Amateur Photographer (1893–6), Stieglitz championed the expressive potential of photography and advocated expanded exhibition opportunities comparable to those available in European photographic salons. In 1897, when the Society of Amateur Photographers merged with the New York Camera Club, Stieglitz convinced the enlarged organization to replace their modest leaflet with a more substantial quarterly journal, Camera Notes, which he edited until ...

Article

T. P. Connor

(b 1676; d London, ?Sept 13, 1729).

Scottish architect and writer. He was the key propagandist for the Palladian revival in early 18th-century England (see Palladianism). First as an architectural publisher and then as an architect, he did as much as any contemporary to determine the lines of development of secular architecture for a generation.

Campbell was a nephew of Sir Hugh Campbell of Cawdor, Nairnshire, and his first career was as an advocate in Edinburgh, where he began to establish a reputation at the outset of the 18th century. Between c. 1708 and 1712 Campbell abandoned his legal practice to begin a career as an architect in London. By December 1708 he was in London hoping to become Master of the [Royal] Works in Scotland. This post, then unpaid, was currently held by James Smith, an architect by whom Campbell was to be significantly influenced. It is known that Campbell had been abroad before ...

Article

Ismeth Raheem

(b 1854; d England, 1913).

English photographer, publisher and writer. He first travelled to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) as private secretary to the Bishop of Colombo. In 1870 he set up a small bookshop in Colombo, which by 1884 had diversified into a flourishing publishing house, H. W. Cave & Company, and a printing firm equipped to produce books with excellent quality photographic reproductions. He took a serious interest in photography, and this enabled him to illustrate the pictorial travelogues written by him and published by his own firm. His close supervision of the details of book production and photographic reproduction gave him a competitive edge over other commercial photographers. He returned to England in 1886 after the death of his wife and settled down in Oxford. He made occasional visits to Ceylon, but continued to manage his firm’s business from England.

In his photography Cave specialized in rural and landscape scenes and was especially interested in creating views with luxuriant tropical vegetation, using dramatic atmospheric lighting effects. Some of the best examples of this type of work are reproduced in his lavishly printed travelogues ...

Article

Francesco Paolo Fiore

(b 1476–8; d Milan, 1543).

Italian architect, theorist and painter. He was active mainly in Milan and is famous for publishing the first Italian translation, with commentary and illustrations, of Vitruvius (1521). The brief autobiography that this contains is also the principal source of information regarding Cesariano’s own life, education and aims.

Cesariano’s date of birth has been disputed, but it is now thought to be 1476–8, following the documentation from the time of his father’s death in 1482. In 1482 Cesariano was introduced to the court of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, where he came into contact with courtiers and artists and met Bramante, whom he named as his chief teacher. He doubtless observed the preparatory phases and building of S Maria presso S Satiro, the only work by Bramante in Milan to which he refers specifically in his commentary on Vitruvius. He could not have followed Bramante’s subsequent career, for he was forced to leave his home town ...

Article

Celia Carrington Riely

[Ch’en Chi-juzi Zhongshunhao Meigong, Meidaoren, Migong]

(b Huating, Jiangsu Province [modern Songjiang, Shanghai Municipality], 16 Dec 1558; d 19 Oct 1639). Chinese editor, writer, calligrapher and painter. He exemplified the literati ideal of the accomplished gentleman–scholar who rejected the sordid world of political involvement and devoted himself to a life of literary, artistic and philosophical pursuit. At the age of 28, having passed the prefectural examination, the first important step leading to a career in government office, Chen renounced official life in a dramatic gesture, by burning his Confucian cap and gown. Thereafter he lived at country retreats at Kunshan and then Mt She, near Huating in Jiangsu Province: entertaining guests; writing and editing; composing the poems, prefaces, epitaphs and biographies for which he was in constant demand; and travelling to places of scenic beauty in the company of friends.

Chen followed the lead of his close friend Dong Qichang, the foremost painter, calligrapher and connoisseur of the late Ming period (...

Article

Merrill Halkerston

(b Portland, ME, March 4, 1832; d New York, March 26, 1920).

American painter, interior designer and writer. Colman grew up in New York, where his father, Samuel Colman, ran a successful publishing business. The family bookstore on Broadway, a popular meeting place for artists, offered Colman early introductions to such Hudson River school painters as Asher B(rown) Durand, with whom he is said to have studied briefly around 1850. Having won early recognition for his paintings of popular Hudson River school locations (see Storm King on the Hudson), he was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design in New York in 1854. Most of Colman’s landscapes of the 1850s, for example Meadows and Wildflowers at Conway (1856; Poughkeepsie, NY, Vassar Coll., Frances Lehman Loeb A. Cent.), reveal the influence of the Hudson River school. An avid traveller, he embarked on his first European tour in 1860, visiting France, Italy, Switzerland and the more exotic locales of southern Spain and Morocco. His reputation was secured in the 1860s by his numerous paintings of romantic Spanish sites, notably the large ...

Article

(b Amsterdam, 1522; d Gouda, Oct 29, 1590).

Dutch printmaker, poet, writer, theologian and philosopher. His work as a printmaker began in Haarlem in 1547, when he made a woodcut for a lottery poster after a design of Maarten van Heemskerck. From then until 1559 Coornhert worked as Heemskerck’s principal engraver. Initially he etched his plates, but during the 1550s he turned to engraving. He was possibly also responsible for the woodcuts after Heemskerck and the publication of Heemskerck’s early prints. In addition, he engraved designs by Willem Thibaut (1524–97) in 1556–7, Lambert Lombard in 1556 and Frans Floris in 1554–7. During this period Philip Galle was his pupil. In 1560 Coornhert temporarily stopped his engraving activities, set up a print publishing house, became a clerk and devoted himself to his literary work. In 1567 he was arrested for political reasons but managed to escape to Cologne in 1568. During his exile, which lasted until 1576...