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Article

Aguéli, Ivan  

Hans-Olof Boström

(Gustave) [Agelii, John Gustaf]

(b Sala, Västmanland, May 24, 1869; d Barcelona, Oct 1, 1917).

Swedish painter. He started to paint of his own initiative on Gotland at the age of 20. In the spring of 1890 he went to Paris, where he studied under Emile Bernard, through whom he became familiar with the work of Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh. He became involved in theosophical circles, with Jacques Tasset, M. E. J. Coulomb and other members of the theosophical group Ananta. During the summers of 1891 and 1892 he went back to Gotland to paint. On returning to Paris he painted only sporadically, while studying oriental languages and religions. In the autumn of 1894 he went to Egypt and began painting intensively, producing such works as Egyptian Landscape (1894/5; Stockholm, Nmus.). In 1895 he was again in Paris where he was an enthusiastic student of Islam, to which he converted in 1898. In 1900 he shot and wounded a banderillero at a bullfight in Paris in protest against the cruelty to the animals: this led to the abolition of bullfights in France....

Article

Amiet, Cuno  

(b Solothurn, March 28, 1868; d Oschwand, July 6, 1961).

Swiss painter and sculptor. From 1884 to 1886 he received irregular lessons from the Swiss painter Frank Buscher (1828–90). In the autumn of 1886 he attended the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Munich and the following year met Giovanni Giacometti, who was to be a lifelong friend. In 1888 he visited the Internationale Kunstausstellung in Munich, where he was particularly impressed by the work of Jules Bastien-Lepage and Whistler. This prompted him to go to Paris to continue his studies, and from 1888 to 1891 he attended the Académie Julian, working under William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Tony Robert-Fleury and Gabriel Ferrier. While in Paris he also met Paul Sérusier, Maurice Denis and other Nabis artists, though his own painting of this period was most influenced by Impressionism. In 1892 he was advised to visit Pont-Aven in Brittany, where he met Emile Bernard, Armand Séguin and Roderic O’Conor, as well as seeing the works of Vincent Van Gogh and Gauguin at first hand. This brief period had a decisive effect upon his work, leading to such Synthetist paintings as ...

Article

Angrand, Charles  

Richard Thomson

(b Criquetot-sur-Ouville, Normandy, April 19, 1854; d Rouen, April 1, 1926).

French painter. He was trained at the Académie de Peinture et de Dessin in Rouen, where he won prizes. Although he failed to gain entry to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Angrand began to win a controversial local reputation for canvases in a loosely Impressionist manner. In 1882 he secured a post as a schoolteacher at the Collège Chaptal in Paris. With this security he was able to make contacts in progressive artistic circles, and in 1884 he became a founder-member of the Salon des Indépendants. His paintings of this period depict rural interiors and kitchen gardens, combining the broken brushwork of Monet and Camille Pissarro with the tonal structure of Bastien-Lepage (e.g. In the Garden, 1884; priv. col., see 1979 exh. cat., p. 27).

By the mid-1880s Angrand had met Seurat through Signac and the literary salon of the writer Robert Caze. From 1887 Angrand began to paint in Seurat’s Neo-Impressionist manner and adopted his tenebrist drawing style. Paintings such as ...

Article

Anquetin, Louis  

Belinda Thomson

(b Etrepagny, nr Gisors, Jan 26, 1861; d Paris, Aug 19, 1932).

French painter. He came to Paris in 1882 and studied art at the Ateliers of Bonnat and Cormon, where he was a contemporary and friend of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Emile Bernard and Vincent van Gogh. His early work shows the influence of Impressionism and of Edgar Degas. In 1887 Anquetin and Bernard devised an innovative method of painting using strong black contour lines and flat areas of colour; Anquetin aroused much comment when he showed his new paintings, including the striking Avenue de Clichy: Five O’Clock in the Evening (1887; Hartford, CT, Wadsworth Atheneum) at the exhibition of Les XX in Brussels and at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1888. The new style, dubbed Cloisonnisme by the critic Edouard Dujardin (1861–1949), resulted from a study of stained glass, Japanese prints and other so-called ‘primitive’ sources; it was close to the Synthetist experiments of Paul Gauguin and was adopted briefly by van Gogh during his Arles period. Anquetin’s works were shown alongside Gauguin’s and Bernard’s at the Café Volpini exhibition in ...

Article

Baertsoen, Albert  

Danielle Derrey-Capon

(b Ghent, Jan 9, 1866; d Ghent, June 9, 1922).

Belgian painter and etcher . The son of a successful mill-owner and an excellent musician, he was a pupil and friend of Gustave Den Duyts (1850–97), and later, at the Ghent Académie, of Jean Delvin (1853–1922). He was involved in the exhibiting society L’Essor in Brussels as well as the triennial salons held in Brussels, Antwerp and Ghent in rotation. Among his earliest important works are The Scheldt at Dendermonde (1887; Ghent, Mus. S. Kst.), which he painted beside Isidore Meyers (1836–1917) and Franz Courtens in a Realist style characteristic of the Dendermonde school. In 1889–90 he attended the studio of Alfred Roll in Paris, where he met Jacques-Emile Blanche and Charles Cottet, and became particularly closely associated with Frits Thaulow, Emile-René Ménard and Edmond Aman-Jean. He exhibited regularly at the Salon in Paris. Although Baertsoen is considered to be one of the first Belgian ...

Article

Bakst, Léon  

Kenneth Archer

[Rosenberg, Lev (Samoylovich)]

(b Grodno, Belarus, May 10, 1866; d Paris, Dec 27, 1924).

Russian painter and stage designer of Belorussian birth. Born into a middle-class Jewish family, Bakst was educated in St Petersburg, attending a gymnasium and then the Academy of Arts (1883–6). He began professional life as a copyist and illustrator of teaching materials but quickly moved on to illustration for popular magazines. His tastes were influenced and horizons enlarged when he met Alexandre Benois and his circle in 1890. Bakst travelled regularly to various countries in Europe and North Africa and studied in Paris with a number of notable artists including the French Orientalist painter Jean-Léon Gérôme at the Académie Julian and, from 1893 to 1896, the Finnish landscape painter Albert Edelfelt. Returning to St Petersburg, he became active as a book designer and fashionable portrait painter. With Benois and Serge Diaghilev he was a founder and leading member of the World of Art (Mir Iskusstva) group in 1898...

Article

Ballin, (Francesco) Mogens  

Rigmor Lovring

(Hendrik)

(b Copenhagen, March 9, 1871; d Copenhagen, Jan 28, 1941).

Danish painter and metalworker . He trained at private schools of painting in Copenhagen. In 1889–1904 he travelled to Paris and Brittany several times and between 1892 and 1906 was often in Italy. Mette Gauguin (b 1850) inspired in him an interest in French art, and it was she who introduced him to Paul Gauguin and Paul Sérusier in Brittany. He was encouraged by his friend the Dutch painter Jan Verkade to convert from Judaism to Catholicism in 1893. Ballin introduced French Symbolism and Art Nouveau to Denmark, and he was valued for his knowledge of the work of Gauguin, Sérusier, the Symbolists and the Synthetists. Symbolist inspiration is apparent in one of his few paintings, At the Beach (1900; Copenhagen, M. Bredholt priv. col.)

After his conversion to Catholicism, Ballin became interested in religious artefacts and abandoned painting for metalwork. In 1899 he opened a metal workshop with the sculptor ...

Article

Bartholomé, Albert  

Thérèse Burollet

(b Thivernal, Seine-et-Oise, Aug 29, 1848; d Paris, 1928).

French sculptor and painter . He first studied law; when the Franco-Prussian war broke out in 1870 he enlisted as a volunteer in Gen. Charles Bourbaki’s army. After the battle of Sedan he fled to Switzerland. As a prisoner on parole, he attended Barthélemy Menn’s studio at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Geneva and decided to devote himself to painting. He worked alone, in a naturalistic manner heavily influenced by that of Jules Bastien-Lepage, with its insistence on working in the open air rather than in the studio. Bartholomé exhibited for eight years at the Salon des Artistes Français (e.g. Recreation, 1885; Paris, priv. col.), receiving encouragement from Joris-Karl Huysmans. His first wife’s death in 1887 plunged him into depression; his best friend, Edgar Degas, advised him to sculpt a tombstone for her (1888; Bouillant cemetery, Crépy-en-Valois, Oise).

Soon after, Bartholomé embarked on the chief work of his career: from ...

Article

Benson, Frank W(eston)  

Bailey Van Hook

(b Salem, MA, March 24, 1862; d Salem, Nov 15, 1951).

American painter, etcher and teacher. Benson attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 1880 to 1883 as a student of Otto Grundmann (1844–90) and Frederick Crowninshield (1845–1918). In 1883 he travelled with his fellow student and lifelong friend Edmund C(harles) Tarbell to Paris, where they both studied at the Académie Julian for three years with Gustave(-Clarence-Rodolphe) Boulanger and Jules(-Joseph) Lefebvre. Benson travelled with Tarbell to Italy in 1884 and to Italy, Belgium, Germany and Brittany the following year. When he returned home, Benson became an instructor at the Portland (ME) School of Art, and after his marriage to Ellen Perry Peirson in 1888 he settled in Salem, MA. Benson taught with Tarbell at the Museum School in Boston from 1889 until their resignation over policy differences in 1913. Benson rejoined the staff the next year and taught intermittently as a visiting instructor until ...

Article

Bernard, Emile  

Belinda Thomson

(b Lille, April 28, 1868; d Paris, April 15, 1941).

French painter and writer. He was the son of a cloth merchant. Relations with his parents were never harmonious, and in 1884, against his father’s wishes, he enrolled as a student at the Atelier Cormon in Paris. There he became a close friend of Louis Anquetin and Toulouse-Lautrec. In suburban views of Asnières, where his parents lived, Bernard experimented with Impressionist and then Pointillist colour theory, in direct opposition to his master’s academic teaching; an argument with Fernand Cormon led to his expulsion from the studio in 1886. He made a walking tour of Normandy and Brittany that year, drawn to Gothic architecture and the simplicity of the carved Breton calvaries. In Concarneau he struck up a friendship with Claude-Emile Schuffenecker and met Gauguin briefly in Pont-Aven. During the winter Bernard met van Gogh and frequented the shop of the colour merchant Julien-François Tanguy, where he gained access to the little-known work of Cézanne....

Article

Bevan, Robert  

Justine Hopkins

(Polhill)

(b Hove, Aug 5, 1865; d London, July 8, 1925).

English painter and lithographer. He studied at the Westminster School of Art and in Paris. In 1890–91, having encountered Paul Sérusier at the Académie Julian in Paris, he made his first visit to Brittany, where he worked with the Pont-Aven group; he also developed an interest in lithography. After contact with Renoir, Bevan made a second visit to Brittany in 1893–4, when he met and was influenced by Gauguin. From the early 1900s Bevan adopted a divisionist or pointillist style in paintings that often depicted London street scenes and horse trading, as in Horse Sale at the Barbican (1913; London, Tate), and landscapes painted on summer holidays in Devon and Cornwall, of which Green Devon (1919; Plymouth, City Mus. & A.G.) is a striking example. In the last years of his life his style changed, the paint becoming thicker and more textural, with a new attention to the juxtaposition of masses. At times he approached a Cubist geometry of form, for example in rural scenes such as ...

Article

Bílek, František  

Petr Wittlich

(b Chýnov, Bohemia [now in Czech Republic], Nov 6, 1872; d Chýnov, Oct 13, 1941).

Czech sculptor and printmaker. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (1887–8, 1890) under Maximilián Pirner, at the School of Applied Arts in Prague (1888) under Josef Mauder (1854–1920) and at the Académie Colarossi in Paris (1892) under Antoine Injalbert. From the outset of his career Bílek displayed an almost fanatical zeal in using his religious art to rouse mankind to avert a moral decline. While he was in Paris, the dramatic naturalism of his first important statues treating Christological themes was greeted with indignation by the Prague scholarship commission.

In Bílek’s over life-size woodcut of the Crucifixion (1896–9; Prague, St Vitus Cathedral), Symbolism prevailed over his initial naturalism and he was inspired by the work of William Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites. Bílek’s imagination was excited by the neo-Platonic symbolism of light, which he interpreted in an original way in both his woodcuts and prints. When he was criticized by the Catholic Moderns for exaggerated individualism, he turned to the tradition of the medieval Bohemian Hussite movement and began to foster their ideals. This is reflected in his mystically conceived statue of the heretic and leader of the movement, Jan Hus, entitled a ...

Article

Böcklin, Arnold  

Elizabeth Clegg

(b Basle, Oct 19, 1827; d San Domenico, nr Fiesole, Jan 16, 1901).

Swiss-German painter. He was one of the most celebrated and influential artists in central Europe, particularly Germany and Switzerland, in the later 19th century, notable for his imaginative and idiosyncratic interpretation of themes from Classical mythology.

In Basle, while still at school, Böcklin attended the Zeichenschule of Ludwig Adam Kelterborn (1811–78). He then trained (1845–7) at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, where he studied principally in the landscape painting class of Johann Wilhelm Schirmer. Among Böcklin’s fellow students in Düsseldorf were Carl Friedrich Lessing and Anselm Feuerbach. Böcklin’s early works were largely landscapes marked by a strong sense of atmosphere akin to that in the work of Lessing. This was the case both in daytime scenes, such as the bleak, overcast Dolmen (1847; Basle, Kstmus.), and also in several dramatic nocturnal subjects, such as Ruined Castle (1847; Berlin, Tiergarten, N.G.).

After travelling in Belgium, where he was impressed by early Netherlandish painting in public collections, and working briefly in Switzerland with the Swiss landscape painter ...

Article

Bonnard, Pierre  

Antoine Terrasse

(b Fontenay-aux-Roses, nr Paris, Oct 3, 1867; d Le Cannet, Jan 27, 1947).

French painter, printmaker and photographer. He is known particularly for the decorative qualities of his paintings and his individual use of colour. During his life he was associated with other artists, Edouard Vuillard being a good friend, and he was a member of the Nabis.

Bonnard spent some of his childhood at Grand-Lemps in the Isère, where his family owned a house surrounded by a large park. There was a farm adjoining the house, and from an early age he developed a love of nature and animals. After obtaining the baccalauréat at 18, he enrolled in the Law faculty in order to please his father, who wanted him to have a steady job. He graduated when he was 21, and he was sworn in as a barrister in 1889. In the meantime he was already drawing and painting, having enrolled at the Académie Julian, Paris, in 1887. In an attractive ...

Article

Borisov-Musatov, Viktor  

Marian Burleigh-Motley

(Yel’pidiforovich)

(b Saratov, April 14, 1870; d Tarusa, Nov 8, 1905).

Russian painter. He studied art in Saratov from 1890 to 1891 and then at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture from 1893 to 1895. In the intervening years he attended the Academy of Art in St Petersburg and worked under Pavel Chistyakov (1832–1919). During three winters in Paris between 1895 and 1898 he attended the studio of the history and portrait painter Fernand Cormon. Cormon had little influence on his style, but the exposure to contemporary French art was crucial, and the first mature works of Borisov-Musatov date from this period. He produced landscapes and figure studies in the high-keyed colours of the French Impressionists, as in the oil painting Boy with a Dog (1895; Khar’kov, Mus. F.A.). In France Borisov-Musatov had also seen the murals of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and he returned to Moscow hoping to produce monumental, decorative art based on a Symbolist rendering of nature. His many paintings of women in early 19th-century dress have a superficial resemblance to the retrospective paintings of the Russian World of Art (Mir Iskusstva) group, but add a new note of melancholy, of an imaginary past irretrievably lost. He came close in mood to the contemporary Russian Symbolist poets, Valery Bryusov (...

Article

Bourdelle, Emile-Antoine  

Antoinette Le Normand-Romain

(b Montauban, Oct 30, 1861; d Le Vésinet, nr Paris, Oct 1, 1929).

French sculptor, painter and draughtsman. After working with his father, a cabinetmaker, in 1876 he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse. In 1884 he was admitted as a pupil of Alexandre Falguière to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, but in rebellion against academic training left two years later. He then moved into a house (now the Musée Bourdelle) in the Impasse du Maine; Jules Dalou, for whom he had the greatest admiration, lived near by.

Bourdelle had begun exhibiting at the Salon of the Société des Artistes Français in 1884 and at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts from 1891. In 1893 he became an assistant in Auguste Rodin’s studio, remaining there until 1908. This period was marked principally by his first major commission, the War Memorial (1895–1902) at Montauban, and by commencement of his Beethoven series, comprising 45 sculptures as well as pastels and drawings, work on which continued until ...

Article

Bracquemond, Marie  

Jean-Paul Bouillon

[née Quivoron-Pasquiou]

(b Argenton, nr Quimper, Dec 1, 1840; d Sèvres, nr Paris, Jan 17, 1916).

French painter, draughtsman, printmaker, and designer, wife of Félix Bracquemond. After a difficult start in life, she began to study drawing at Etampes, near Paris. She took advice from Ingres but never received any formal teaching. Admitted to the Salon from 1857, she was commissioned by the State to copy pictures in the Louvre. There she met Félix Bracquemond in about 1867 and married him on 5 August 1869. She was involved in her husband’s work for the Haviland Limoges factory and produced in particular several dishes and a wide panel of ceramic tiles entitled the Muses, shown at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878; the sketch for this was shown at the Impressionist Exhibition of 1879 and was greatly admired by Degas. Originally very much influenced by Ingres and then by Alfred (Emile-Léopold) Stevens, her style of painting changed completely c. 1880 as a consequence of her admiration for Renoir and Monet and subsequently because of advice from Gauguin. The few pictures surviving from this period illustrate her conversion to a clearly Impressionist style, comparable to that of Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt. Examples include ...

Article

Bremer, Anne M(illy)  

Marian Yoshiki-Kovinick

(b San Francisco, CA, May 21, 1868,; d San Francisco, CA, Oct 26, 1923).

American painter and muralist. At the age of 12, she spent a year visiting the important galleries of Europe, which instilled in her aspirations of becoming an artist. Later, in San Francisco, she attended the California School of Design (c. 1888) under Emil Carlsen and the San Francisco Art Students League (1889), studying with Arthur F. Mathews. Subsequently, she made two more trips to Europe. In 1901, she studied with André Lhôte and at La Palette and the Académie Moderne in Paris; in 1910–1911/12, she exhibited at the Paris Salon (1911) and painted and sketched in Brittany and Barbizon. Afterwards she continued to paint, teach and involve herself in women suffrage issues and in the art community of San Francisco.

Best known for her still-lifes, Bremer also painted landscapes (in several northern California counties), marines, figures and portraits. Of her paintings, her cousin and art patron Albert Bender stated: ‘She continued to interpret nature, animate and inanimate, through a technique [which is] unmistakably her own and which is distinguished by simplicity, clarity and purity of colors.’ Her earlier works were painted in soft, muted tones and in a decorative style, as typified by ...

Article

Brusselmans, Jean  

Danielle Derrey-Capon

(b Brussels, June 13, 1884; d Dilbeek, Jan 9, 1953).

Belgian painter and printmaker. He was apprenticed to an engraver and lithographer and with these skills entered the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (1897). Soon, however, he transferred to painting and between 1900 and 1906 studied under Guillaume Van Strydonck (1861–1937), Isidore Verheyden and Jean Delville. In 1907 he shared a studio with Rik Wouters and befriended the future Brabant Fauvists, among whom was Auguste Oleffe. He joined the circle known as L’Effort and in 1912 participated in a group exhibition of the Bleus de la G.G.G. (Galerie Georges Giroux in Brussels) with Constant Permeke, Léon Spilliaert, Edgard Tytgat and Wouters. For several years common themes, a bold use of colour and the influence of Cézanne united Brusselmans even more closely with Oleffe, Wouters and Ferdinand Schirren. He had his first one-man show in Antwerp at the Galerie Breckpot in 1921. Three years later he decided to stay in Dilbeek, exhibited at the Expressionist Galerie Le Centaure and became friendly with Louis Thévenet. A founder of the ...

Article

Bryans, Lina  

Jan Minchin

(b Hamburg, Aug 26, 1909; d 2000).

Australian painter of German birth. Untrained, she took up painting in 1936 at the suggestion of William Frater (1890–1974), a pioneer of modernist art in Melbourne who had been much influenced by Post-Impressionism. Over the next decade she developed a close working relationship with Frater. From 1943 to 1948 she lived at Darebin Bridge House, a converted hotel, which became a meeting place for artists and writers and was known as the ‘painter’s pub’: Frater, Ambrose Hallen (1886–1943) and Ian Fairweather had studios there. It was a stimulating and productive period. Her working method was rapid and intuitive. The vitality of her work derives most from the vigorous handling of paint and the strongly felt and immediate response to the subject. Colour was her main interest, and she used it to express mood and emotion. Subjects include cityscapes and a number of fine portraits: one of the best, the ...