Search Results

(b Paris, Jan 14, 1904; d La Clarté, Brittany, Aug 27, 1967).

French sculptor, printmaker and tapestry designer. His father was a jeweller, and after his return from World War I in 1918 Adam worked in his studio and learnt how to engrave. At the same time he studied drawing at the Ecole Germain-Pilon and read Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, which was to have a great influence on him. In 1925 he attended evening classes at a school of drawing in Montparnasse. From 1928 to 1934 he started to produce prints and became associated with André Breton, Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard, although he was never greatly influenced by them. His early prints, reminiscent of the work of George Grosz, were mostly designed as social satire, mocking the myths surrounding patriotism, the family and religion, as in When Papa is Patriotic (1935). In 1933 he designed the costumes and scenery for Hans Schlumberg’s Miracle à Verdun performed at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris. His first exhibition of prints was held in ...

(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 (...

[Anneliesenée Fleischmann]

(b Berlin, June 12, 1899; d Orange, CT, May 10, 1994).

American textile designer, draughtsman and printmaker, wife of Josef Albers. She studied art under Martin Brandenburg (b 1870) in Berlin from 1916 to 1919, at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg (1919–20) and at the Bauhaus in Weimar (1922–5) and Dessau (1925–9; see fig.). In 1925 she married Josef Albers, with whom she settled in the USA in 1933 after the closure of the Bauhaus, and from 1933 to 1949 she taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina; she became a US citizen in 1937. Her Bauhaus training led her as early as the 1920s to produce rectilinear abstract designs based on colour relationships, such as Design for Rug for Child’s Room (gouache on paper, 1928; New York, MOMA), but it was during her period at Black Mountain College that she began producing her most original work, including fabrics made of unusual materials such as a mixture of jute and cellophane (...

(b Atlanta, GA, March 16, 1938).

African American painter, printmaker, and weaver. Amos studied fine arts and textile weaving at Antioch College at Yellow Springs, OH, where she received her BFA in 1958. She went on to study etching and painting at the Central School of Art, London (1958–9), and the following year she moved to New York, where she began working at two printmaking studios: Robert Blackburn’s workshop and that of Letterio Calapai (an outpost of Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17). She completed her MA at New York University (NYU) in 1966. Through Hale Woodruff, an art professor at NYU and family friend, she was invited to exhibit with Spiral, an all-male art group founded by Woodruff and Romare Bearden and featuring recognized African American artists. Spiral, closely allied with the Civil Rights movement, dissolved in 1967 and subsequently Amos had trouble exhibiting her work. In 1974, after the birth of her two children, Amos found a position as an instructor in textile design at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts. She continued her own weaving in New York and benefited from the revival of interest in women’s traditional art forms in the early years of the feminist art movement....

(b Saint-Mihiel, Lorraine, bapt June 4, 1640; d Paris, Jan 24, 1711).

French designer, ornamentalist and engraver. The Berain family moved to Paris c. 1644. Berain’s father, also called Jean Berain, and his uncle Claude Berain were master gunsmiths. In 1659 Berain published a series of designs for the decoration of arms, Diverses pièces très utiles pour les arquebuzières, reissued in 1667. In 1662 he engraved for the guild of locksmiths a series of designs by Hugues Brisville (b 1633), Diverses inventions nouvelles pour des armoiries avec leurs ornements. It would seem that by this date Berain’s skill as an engraver was well known. Around 1667 he decorated and signed a hunting gun (Stockholm, Livrustkam.; see Arms and armour §II 2., (iii)) for Louis XIV, which probably served as his introduction to the court. Through the influence and support of Charles Le Brun, in 1670 Berain was employed by the crown as an engraver. In January 1671 he received 400 livres in payment for two engravings (Paris, Bib. N., Cab. Est.) recording the ceiling decoration by Le Brun of the Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre, Paris, for which he also designed the painted stucco grotesques. In ...

(António Teixeira Bastos Nunes)

(b Lisbon, Sept 18, 1899; d Lisbon, Aug 18, 1982).

Portuguese painter, printmaker and designer of tapestries and tile panels. Known primarily as a ‘painter of Lisbon’, he began his artistic career as an illustrator and cartoonist as well as writing a weekly satirical page (1928–50) in the newspaper O sempre fixe. He visited Paris in 1929, 1930–1 and again in 1937, when he was impressed by a retrospective exhibition of the work of van Gogh, whose influence is evident in Botelho’s scenes of urban squalor of the late 1930s. He had begun to depict calm, unpopulated views of Lisbon in the early 1930s, for example Side View of the Castle (1935; Lisbon, Mus. Cidade), and from the early 1940s concentrated almost exclusively on this theme. The compositions became increasingly crisp and planar and the piling up of volumes and compression of space increasingly stylized, especially after he began to paint from memory in 1949. The tonalities of Botelho’s paintings remained consistently pale, as in ...

(b Paris, Sept 29, 1703; d Paris, May 30, 1770).

French painter, draughtsman and etcher. Arguably it was he, more than any other artist, who set his stamp on both the fine arts and the decorative arts of the 18th century. Facilitated by the extraordinary proliferation of engravings, Boucher successfully fed the demand for imitable imagery at a time when most of Europe sought to follow what was done at the French court and in Paris. He did so both as a prolific painter and draughtsman (he claimed to have produced some 10,000 drawings during his career) and through engravings after his works, the commercial potential of which he seems to have been one of the first artists to exploit. He reinvented the genre of the pastoral, creating an imagery of shepherds and shepherdesses as sentimental lovers that was taken up in every medium, from porcelain to toile de Jouy, and that still survives in a debased form. At the same time, his manner of painting introduced the virtuosity and freedom of the sketch into the finished work, promoting painterliness as an end in itself. This approach dominated French painting until the emergence of Neo-classicism, when criticism was heaped on Boucher and his followers. His work never wholly escaped this condemnation, even after the taste for French 18th-century art started to revive in the second half of the 19th century. In his own day, the fact that he worked for both collectors and the market, while retaining the prestige of a history painter, had been both Boucher’s strength and a cause of his decline....

[Frantz]

(b Rostock, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, 1582; d London, 1658).

German painter, designer, illustrator and printmaker. He probably studied first in the Low Countries. He was perhaps in Denmark c.1611, but then spent four years in Italy, mainly in Rome and Venice, where he met the English ambassador Sir Henry Wotton. By 1617 he was living in Copenhagen; an inscribed drawing of Apollo and Marsyas from this period is in the Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen. Between 1618 and 1623 Cleyn was employed by Christian IV at Rosenborg Slot, decorating the King’s writing closet with pastoral landscapes, Venetian views, genre scenes and grotesque designs. Commissions followed for larger subject pictures (which show pronounced Venetian influence) and for similar decorative schemes for the royal castles at Frederiksborg (Fireworks), Christiansborg (Children on their Way to School) and Kronborg. In 1623 Cleyn visited England, with a letter of introduction to Prince Charles (later Charles I) from the English envoy in Copenhagen, Sir Robert Anstruther. In the Prince’s absence in Spain, he was received by James I, who wished to retain his services for himself and sent him back to Copenhagen with a request to Christian IV to release him. Work in progress kept Cleyn in Denmark until late in ...

(b Aelst [now Aalst], Aug 14, 1502; d Brussels, Dec 6, 1550).

South Netherlandish painter, sculptor, architect and designer of woodcuts, stained glass and tapestries. Son of the Deputy Mayor of the village of Aelst, he was married twice, first to Anna van Dornicke (d 1529), the daughter of the Antwerp painter Jan Mertens, who may have been his teacher; they had two children, Michel van Coecke and Pieter van Coecke II (before 1527–59), the latter of whom became a painter. He later married Mayken Verhulst, herself a painter of miniatures and the mother of three children, Pauwel, Katelijne and Maria; they are shown with their parents in Coecke’s Family Portrait (Zurich, Ksthaus). Mayken is credited with having taught the technique of painting in tempera on cloth to her son-in-law, Pieter Bruegel the elder, who married Maria in 1563. (For family tree see Bruegel family.) Van Mander also stated that Bruegel was Coecke’s apprentice, an allegation no longer universally accepted in view of their substantial stylistic differences. Although the names of other students of Coecke’s, including ...

(b Karlstad, Dec 31, 1938).

Swedish painter, sculptor, printmaker and weaver. She began her studies in 1958 at the Konstfackskolan, Stockholm, continuing from 1959 to 1960 at the Kungliga Akademien för de Fria Konsterna, Stockholm. Cronqvist’s main subject-matter was the human figure. She first attracted attention for her sensuous use of bright, fleshy colours, evoking an air of humorous absurdity by distorting form and perspective. Although adhering to traditional forms and themes, such as landscape, still-life and self-portrait, her continuous dialogue with tradition led her to question the latter’s implicitly patriarchal function and to dispute its representation of women as objects. In 1969–70 she became absorbed with the crucially conflicting themes of being an artist and a mother. She went on to depict her own childhood in a manner reminiscent of Edvard Munch, capturing not only its atmosphere of discolouring depression but also the distortion of memory. For this new imagery she used a darker range of colours and a larger scale to give a sense of constraint, dominated by a rigidly accomplished central perspective. In the self-portrait ...

(b Masset, Queen Charlotte Islands, BC, Nov 4, 1946).

Native American Haida sculptor, metalworker, printmaker and blanket-maker. He was the grandson of the Haida blanket- and basket-maker Florence Davidson (1895–1993), and great-grandson of the Haida wood-carver Charles Edenshaw. He began carving argillite as a teenager in Masset, and in 1966 he met Bill Reid, who offered him workshop space in Vancouver. There Davidson developed new carving skills and learnt the fundamentals of the two-dimensional (‘formline’) designs used by the Haida and other tribes of the northern Northwest Coast (see Native North American art, §III, 2). In 1969 he returned to Masset to carve a 12.2 m-high totem pole, the first heraldic column to be raised on the Queen Charlotte Islands since the end of the 19th century. In 1987 Davidson and his crew produced a set of three totem poles entitled Three Variations on Killer Whale Myths for the Pepsicola Sculptural Garden in Purchase, NY. In these totem poles Davidson worked within the strict conventions of the Haida style, refining it by introducing subtle variations in design but preserving a degree of conservative austerity in which movement and individual expression are sacrificed to overall unity of form. In his early work in silver Davidson used flat patterns influenced by Edenshaw, and he went on to develop these into an innovative style of his own in screenprints, silver and bronze. Davidson’s younger brother, ...

(b Waelhem, Feb 23, 1779; d Ghent, Nov 22, 1843).

Belgian painter, designer and printmaker. The son of the painter and architect, Pierre-François De Noter the elder (1747–1830), and brother of Jean-Baptiste De Noter (1786–1855), a painter of architectural views, he had an early grounding in the arts. He was taught by Guillaume-Jacques Herreyns at the Mechelen Academie and attended Jan Frans Van Geel’s sculpture class until 1793, when the French invasion prevented further study. One of his earliest commissions, shared with his father and Herreyns, was the decoration (begun shortly after 1793) of the SS Pieter en Pauwelkerk in Mechelen. This project had a determining influence on his career. The French had transformed the church into a Temple of Reason, and it seems likely that the damage done by them to the suppressed religious institutions of the Low Countries awakened the interest of Pierre-François De Noter and his brother in the architectural heritage of the Flemish towns. Pierre-François worked as a designer for a printed fabric manufacturer and as a printer before devoting himself to painting. He settled in Ghent in ...

(b Montauban, Sept 30, 1894; d Perpignan, July 21, 1972).

French painter, printmaker, stage designer, illustrator and tapestry designer. He was encouraged to study art by Emile-Antoine Bourdelle, to whom he showed his drawings at the age of 16, and was taught by him at the Ecole de Dessin à la Manufacture des Gobelins. From 1912 to 1914 he attended the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Montauban, and after serving in the infantry during World War I he moved to Paris, where he showed his work regularly at such exhibitions as the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne.

Desnoyer lived and worked among the Cubists, but like the Fauves he favoured bright primary colours, marrying colour and line in landscapes, still-lifes and portraits. His debt to both movements is visible in paintings such as La Foire du Trône (1927; Paris, Pompidou). He also produced an illustrated edition of La Fontaine’s Dies Irae (Editions Mortier, 1947) and stage designs for the Opéra Comique in Paris, for example for Henri Barrand’s ...

(b Zólkiew, Jan 28, 1933).

Polish printmaker, painter and embroiderer active in Australia. Groblicka studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Kraków (1951–7), graduating with a Fine Art Diploma. She was taught by Ludwik Gardowski, a leading Polish printmaker, and she specialized in woodcuts. Groblicka lived in London (1958–65), where she married Tadeusz Groblicki (b 1929) and had a son. They migrated to Sydney in 1965, first living at Bradfield Park migrant hostel and then settling in Adelaide in 1966. There Groblicka joined the Royal South Australian Society of Arts and was elected a Fellow in 1973. She exhibited with the Contemporary Art Society and the Print Council of Australia.

Groblicka is a master of technique and has an unerring sense of composition and design in printmaking and oil painting. Her early prints, done in Communist Poland in the 1950s, were socialist realist finely cut depictions of rural peasant life. In London, using linocut, her prints were broader. In Australia she returned to the medium of finely detailed woodcuts (e.g. ...

(b Budapest, April 17, 1904; d Budapest, Jan 26, 1986).

Hungarian painter, illustrator, mosaicist, tapestry designer, stage designer, poster designer, printmaker, sculptor, teacher and administrator. From 1922 to 1929 he studied at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts (Magyar Kepzőmüvészeti Főiskolá) in Budapest under Gyula Rudnay (1878–1957) and János Vaszary (1867–1939). In the mid-1920s he became acquainted with Béla Uitz’s General Ludd series (1923; Budapest, N.G.) and in Venice he saw the work of such Russian avant-garde artists as Rodchenko and El Lissitzky and such Italian Futurists as Severini. In 1926 in Paris he studied the works of Léger, Braque, Picasso and others in the collection of Léonce Rosenberg. He was also influenced by the art of Brancusi and Joseph Csáky, as well as André Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme (Paris, 1924). From the outset, Hincz’s work revealed a number of different objectives. Although he experimented with abstraction, the reference to the figure is always present in one form or another. His profound interest in humanity and its social interaction was based on, and motivated by, this interest in the figure. His early paintings are expressionist in mood and are composed of flattened forms in a shallow space in a manner reminiscent of Cubo–Futurist art. Elements of Purism and Surrealism are also present. After World War II he became increasingly preoccupied with realism, political agitprop art and the problems inherent in creating new symbols; a study trip to Korea, China and Vietnam in ...

French term used to describe a range of European borrowings from Japanese art. It was coined in 1872 by the French critic, collector and printmaker Philippe Burty ‘to designate a new field of study—artistic, historic and ethnographic’, encompassing decorative objects with Japanese designs (similar to 18th-century Chinoiserie), paintings of scenes set in Japan, and Western paintings, prints and decorative arts influenced by Japanese aesthetics. Scholars in the 20th century have distinguished japonaiserie, the depiction of Japanese subjects or objects in a Western style, from Japonisme, the more profound influence of Japanese aesthetics on Western art.

There has been wide debate over who was the first artist in the West to discover Japanese art and over the date of this discovery. According to Bénédite, Félix Bracquemond first came under the influence of Japanese art after seeing the first volume of Katsushika Hokusai’s Hokusai manga (‘Hokusai’s ten thousand sketches’, 1814) at the printshop of ...

(b Paris, Nov 29, 1686; d Paris, March 20, 1766).

French textile manufacturer, collector and amateur engraver. He was the nephew of François de Jullienne, a cloth merchant, and of Jean Glucq, a celebrated dyer for the Gobelins factory in Paris, and in 1721 he merged their successful businesses. As a young man he studied drawing with Jean-François de Troy, and engraving with François Boucher and Girard Audran, and he was friendly with François Lemoyne and with Antoine Watteau, whose Portrait of a Gentleman (Paris, Louvre) has been said to be of Jullienne. Shortly before his death Watteau presented Jullienne with a large number of his drawings; Jullienne eventually owned more than 500 of Watteau’s drawings. In 1726 he published Figures de différents caractères de paysages et d’études, dessinés d’après nature par Antoine Watteau, a volume of engravings by major artists after all the drawings by Watteau then known (Jullienne himself provided 12 plates). In 1736 Jullienne was ennobled and created a Chevalier of the Order of St Michel; in that same year he published four volumes of the ...

(b Rouen, 1735; d Paris, 1802).

French painter, printmaker and designer. He came from a family of architects and engravers that had been active in Rouen since the 16th century, and he may have been distantly related to Jean de La Vallée. He first studied under Jean-Baptiste Descamps at the newly established Académie des Arts du Dessin in Rouen and in 1755 went to Paris and entered the studio of Jean-Baptiste-Marie Pierre. In 1759 he won the Prix de Rome with Elisha Multiplying the Poor Widow’s Oil (untraced), and from 1759 he was at the Ecole des Elèves Protégés in Paris. Already by this time he seems to have been producing landscapes in the manner of Nicolas Poussin and had begun to be referred to by the name Lavallée-Poussin. He was in Rome from 1761 to 1777, for part of the time at the Académie de France. He then stayed with Louis-Auguste Le Tonnelier, Baron de Breteuil, the Maltese Ambassador, whose house, the Garden of Malta, Lavallée decorated in ...

[Christof]

(bapt Frankfurt am Main, May 23, 1667; d Paris, May 15, 1741).

German printmaker, painter and tapestry manufacturer, active in the Netherlands, England and France. He was the son of the engraver and bookseller Christoph Le Blon II (1639–after 1706), whose mother was a daughter of Matthäus Merian (i), granddaughter of Johann Theodor de Bry and half-sister of Maria Sibylle Merian. Between 1696 and 1702 Le Blon was in Rome and was perhaps a pupil of Carlo Maratti. He then moved to Amsterdam in 1702, where he worked as a miniature painter until 1717. He visited London in 1710 and lived there from 1718 to 1734. He began experimenting with colour-printing in 1710, and in 1719 was granted a privilege by George I to reproduce pictures and drawings in full colour (see Prints, §III, 6). However, the company he set up failed in 1725. In that year he published Coloritto: Or the Harmony of Colouring in Painting, in which he presented his theory that any colour as well as black could be achieved by mixing in varying proportions just three colours (red, yellow and blue—not, as has been suggested, based on Newton’s colour theory). In ...

(b Pedakondji, 1950).

Togolese painter, printmaker and sculptor, active in Germany. He trained as a textile designer in Accra and Tema, Ghana, before moving to Germany in the early 1970s. He studied fine arts at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie with Beuys, Crummenauer and Heerich. His work includes a number of linoleum cuts in which birds’ wings, claws and beaks are combined with masks, faces and other elements in striking compositions. More recent mixed-media paintings and prints juxtapose images and abstract shapes executed in earthen tones. In works on paper and wooden sculpture dating from the early 1990s, sand and earthen pigments are combined to create texture and a sense of movement and depth. Many of his works are abstract colour fields composed of striking red-orange, yellow ochre and slate blue tones that outline geometric forms and, at times, stylized faces of partial humans. Eyes, crown, conical human heads and projecting horns are familiar elements, as is a mottled surface pattern. These same qualities are repeated in wooden sculptures, some exploring curvilinear and geometric volumes of the human form, others creating more two-dimensional, openwork, geometric patterns in sculptures that resemble commemorative or totemic wooden posts. El Loko has had numerous one-man exhibitions, primarily in Germany, and group shows in Germany, Switzerland, England, Togo, Ghana and the USA....