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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 (...

(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 ...

(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 ...

[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 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.

(b Utrecht, Aug 30, 1883; d Davos, Switzerland, March 7, 1931).

Dutch painter, architect, designer and writer. He was officially registered as the son of Wilhelm Küpper and Henrietta Catharina Margadant, but he was so convinced that his mother’s second husband, Theodorus Doesburg, was his father that he took his name. Little is known of his early life, but he began painting naturalistic subjects c. 1899. In 1903 he began his military service, and around the same time he met his first wife, Agnita Feis, a Theosophist and poet. Between about 1908 and 1910, much influenced by the work of Honoré Daumier, he produced caricatures, some of which were later published in his first book De maskers af! (1916). Also during this period he painted some Impressionist-inspired landscapes and portraits in the manner of George Hendrik Breitner. Between 1914 and 1915 the influence of Kandinsky became clear in such drawings as Streetmusic I and Streetmusic II (The Hague, Rijksdienst Beeld. Kst) and other abstract works....

(b Ehden, Lebanon, Sept 14, 1912; d 1994).

American painter and stained-glass artist, of Lebanese birth. After an apprenticeship with the Lebanese painter Habib Srour (1860–1938) in Beirut, he studied from 1932 to 1936 at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris. In 1934 he received the top award for drawing at the school and later exhibited his work at the Salon des Artistes Français. After graduating in 1936, he returned to Lebanon, opening a studio in Beirut, and becoming well known in the early 1940s for his frescoes in the Maronite church at Diman. At the same time his paintings of Lebanese life and the countryside came to public notice when he exhibited at the gallery of the Hotel St–Georges, Beirut, though by the late 1940s he had begun to simplify the style of his work. In 1950 he moved to New York, where his paintings became increasingly abstract, consisting of flat forms of brilliant colour with hard straight edges. Although he was influenced by the artistic life around him, and by his acquaintance with Rothko, Hans Hofmann and Ad Reinhardt, he did not join any group or movement. He became an American citizen in ...

(b Solothurn, Dec 9, 1930; d Berne, July 12, 2000).

Swiss sculptor, painter, printmaker and jewellery designer. From 1946 to 1951 he was apprenticed to a maker of stained glass while at the same time attending the Kunstgewerbeschule in Berne. He then studied at the painting school, also in Berne, run by Max von Mühlenen (1903–71). In 1955 Eggenschwiler, Peter Meier (b 1928), Konrad Vetter (b 1922) and Robert Wälti (b 1937) formed the Berner Arbeitsgemeinschaft, which operated until 1971.

Until the mid-1960s Eggenschwiler’s work was essentially Constructivist, although until 1968 he was still regarded as a stained-glass maker. His prints and paintings, as well as his sculptures, were dominated by basic geometric forms, especially the cube, as in the sculpture Stair Cubes (iron, 155×155×155 mm, 1968; Westphalia, priv. col., see 1985 exh. cat., p. 41). From the 1960s he worked with objets trouvés, collecting discarded objects made of metal, wood or other materials, as well as stones and other natural objects. He either worked on these ...

(b Leonfelden, Upper Austria, Nov 2, 1878; d Stockerau, nr Vienna, Nov 5, 1936).

Austrian designer, painter and illustrator. He studied from 1899 to 1902 under Kolo Moser and Karl Karger (1848–1913) at the Kunstgewerbeschule in the Österreichisches Museum für Kunst und Industrie in Vienna, and in 1903 under Ludwig Herterich (1856–1932) at the Kunstakademie in Munich. He was represented at the 15th exhibition of the Vienna Secession in 1902 and produced woodcuts for Ver Sacrum in 1903. He was co-founder of the Vereinigung Wiener Kunst im Hause; he designed the poster for the exhibition of 1903–4 and showed stained-glass windows, naturalistic watercolours of peasant types, and tapestry designs. He made numerous study trips to Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and especially Italy, where he studied the work of glassmakers and mosaicists in Ravenna, Rome and Venice. From 1906 he worked intensively to revive the art of the mosaic, prepared the foundation of the Wiener Mosaik Werkstätte (trade licence 1908) and added his own glassworks in ...

(b Upper Norwood, Surrey, Jan 25, 1872; d Kensington, London, March 10, 1945).

English illustrator, painter and designer. She entered the Royal Academy Schools, London, and won a prize for a mural design in 1897. She specialized in book illustration, in pen and ink and later in colour. Among her many commissions were illustrations to Tennyson’s Poems (1905) and Idylls of the King (1911) and Browning’s Pippa Passes (1908). She was particularly popular with the publishers of the lavishly illustrated gift-books fashionable in the Edwardian era. She exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy and the Royal Water-Colour Society. She took up stained-glass design (windows in Bristol Cathedral), which modified her style of illustration to flat areas of colour within black outlines. She also painted plaster figurines and designed bookplates.

Fortescue-Brickdale continued the Pre-Raphaelite tradition, reworking romantic and moralizing medieval subjects in naturalistic and often strong colour and elaborate detail. Her most important oil painting is The Forerunner...

(b Brunswick, Melbourne, Oct 10, 1928).

Australian painter and designer. With encouragement from Victor Greenhalgh, he attended evening classes at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology from 1944 to 1947. He studied from 1949 to 1951 in England, Belgium and Ireland where his interest in Celtic art increased. With the aid of a travelling scholarship in 1960–61, he studied the Eastern art of Asia, and in 1965 went to the USA on the Harkness Fellowship. His travels were often responsible for his series’ themes. Literary images and social injustices were frequently used, as in Iliad (1952), Edmund Campion series (1963), the Death of a Revolution (on South America, 1974–6), and South African-inspired works in the mid-1980s. French carefully constructed his images which are based on formal patterns and shapes, for example in Death and Transfiguration (1957; Melbourne, Joseph Brown Gal.). Using simple, easily recognizable symbols, he portrayed a powerful bluntness and honesty. After studying enamelling techniques in the 1960s, French’s paintings became known for their thick glowing layers of enamel on different textual levels, at times with gold leaf added. Apart from paintings and murals, he was known for his stained glass projects, mosaics, tapestries, etchings and lithographs. He was commissioned by the ...

(b Stolp [now Stupsk, Poland], July 10, 1878; d Maidanek concentration camp, nr Lublin, March 9, 1943).

German painter, sculptor, stained-glass designer and writer. He studied art history (1903–4) in Berlin and Munich. After a visit to Florence (1905–6), he began to experiment with sculpture and studied with Lothar von Kunowski (b 1866) in Berlin (1907–8). He spent 1908–9 in Paris, where he met Picasso, Braque and Gris. Between 1910 and 1914 he divided his time between Paris, Berlin and Cologne: from 1910 he participated in the exhibitions of the Berlin Secession and from 1913 had contacts with the Sturm-Galerie in Berlin. His expressive early works included both sculptures and flat, geometric paintings (e.g. Composition with Figure, 1911; Pontoise, Mus. Pontoise). Having spent World War I in Cologne, from 1918 to 1924 he lived in Berlin, where he was one of the founder-members of the Novembergruppe in 1918, and contributed to the radical newspaper Die Aktion: Zeitschrift für Freiheitliche Politik und Literatur Aktion....

(b Glasgow, Nov 7, 1865; d Glasgow, June 18, 1936).

Scottish painter, stained-glass designer and illustrator. He attended evening classes at the Glasgow School of Art from 1882 to 1885 while an apprentice lithographer. In 1887 he worked as an illustrator on a Glasgow newspaper and in 1889 provided illustrations for a book of poetry by James Hedderwick. His paintings of this period were realist in subject and low in tone, but these illustrations show an awareness of Pre-Raphaelite technique and symbolism, particularly that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Symbolism of a similar kind appeared in his oil paintings in 1889. In two works, Music (priv. col., see Billcliffe, pl. 232) and St Agnes (London, Andrew McIntosh Patrick priv. col., see Billcliffe, pl. 233), the change in subject was accompanied by a more colourful palette and more thickly applied paint. Perspective is flattened, and a dark outline surrounds each figure and other objects in the composition. The religious symbolism and outlined technique, which may have influenced his close friend Charles Rennie Mackintosh, almost certainly reflect Gauld’s involvement in designing stained-glass panels. Throughout the 1890s he worked freelance for some of the many stained-glass manufacturers in Glasgow. For ...

(b Mildura, Victoria, Jan 30, 1927; d 1999).

Australian painter, printmaker, teacher and glass artist. He was first employed as an apprentice by the prominent stained glass firm Brooks, Robinson & Co. in Melbourne. During his ten-year association with this firm, he undertook part-time studies in painting and drawing at various Melbourne art institutes, including the Art School attached to the National Gallery of Victoria and the Technical College, and at the privately run George Bell School, which at the time presented a more progressive approach to the subject than was espoused at the larger institutes. With his training Gleeson was well-placed to investigate the innovative use of glass as a medium for artistic expression. In line with the notion of truth to material, he virtually abandoned the traditional process of staining glass in favour of a method of creating abstract compositions by overlaying, fusing and acid-etching sheets of coloured glass. Using these techniques he was able to achieve a subtle tonal range. Although Gleeson was awarded an impressive sequence of window commissions including the cycles for the Burwood Presbyterian church, Victoria (...

(b Guatemala City, Nov 20, 1924; d Guatemala City, Nov 13, 2007).

Guatemalan sculptor and painter. He studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Guatemala City (1938–1945) and from 1942 to 1945 worked on the stained-glass windows at the Palacio Nacional. In 1948 he won a grant that enabled him to study in New York, at the Art Students League and at the Sculpture Center, until 1951. On his return from the USA he concentrated on sculpture until 1973, working particularly closely with Guatemalan architects in the 1950s on large reliefs in exposed cast concrete, mainly for government buildings in Guatemala City. The outstanding examples of these reliefs in Guatemala City, characterized by simple lines and an epic scale, are Guatemalan Nationality (3 × 40 m, 1959) for the Seguro Social building; Culture and Economy (14 × 7.5 m, 1963–1964) for the Crédito Hipotecario building; Economy and Culture (40 × 21 m, 1964; Banco de Guatemala); and ...