Alina 2018-09-07 14:05:00 painters biographies
Jasper Johns was born in Georgia in 1930 and grew up in South Carolina. After moving to New York City to pursue a career as an artist, he found fame in the 1950s for his paintings of flags, targets and other ordinary objects; this work was a change from Abstract Expression and helped usher in the Pop Art era. Over the course of his career, he has collaborated with an array of other artists, including choreographer Merce Cunningham. Johns, who also works in sculpture and printmaking, remains a leader in the art world.
Jasper Johns, who was born in Augusta, Georgia, on May 15, 1930, lacked stability during his childhood, which was spent in South Carolina. His parents divorced when he was a toddler and he was subsequently sent to live with his grandfather. After his grandfather's death in 1939, Johns spent a short period with his remarried mother and her new family before moving in with an aunt. He rejoined his mother to finish his last years of high school.
Though his childhood included little exposure to art, Johns grew up knowing he wanted to be an artist. He took art classes at the University of South Carolina, where he studied for three semesters, before leaving for New York City. There, he became a student at the Parsons School of Design for a short time, but dropped out due to a lack of funds.
In 1951, during the Korean War, Johns was drafted into the U.S. Army. Instead of being sent to Korea, he was initially posted in South Carolina, then sent to Sendai, Japan. There, he developed a love of Japanese art and culture.
After leaving the army in 1953, Johns returned to New York City. He soon developed a close friendship with fellow artist Robert Rauschenberg; to earn money, the pair designed window displays for stores like Tiffany's. Johns's circle also grew to include John Cage, the avant-garde composer, and Merce Cunningham, a dancer and choreographer.
In 1954, Johns had a dream in which he was painting an American flag. This inspired him to create "Flag," a painting in encaustic (a technique that uses pigments mixed with melted wax). Johns destroyed nearly all the art he'd created before "Flag" because the pieces had been "done with the spirit that I wanted to be an artist, not that I was an artist."
Johns's art was already getting attention when dealer Leo Castelli happened to spot his paintings while visiting Rauschenberg; impressed, Castelli quickly invited Johns to have a solo exhibition at his gallery. This 1958 showing was a success, with the director of the Museum of Modern Art purchasing three of Johns's paintings.
"Flag" was just one example of Johns presenting a commonly seen object in a new way; in addition to flags, he would produce images of targets, numbers, letters and maps. This work disrupted the dominance of Abstract Expressionism, and is credited with helping to set the stage for Pop Art and Minimalism.
In the 1970s, Johns shifted into abstraction, using cross-hatched patterns in numerous works. He would return to a more figurative style; "Cicada" (1979) features cross-hatching and a cicada. As he grew older, Johns also began to include some autobiographical touches in his work.
In his art, Johns doesn't try to convey a specific message; instead, he prefers that his audience interpret his work and find its meaning themselves. Besides painting, he has worked in sculpture, drawing and printmaking. He also collaborated with figures such as Andy Warhol and the writer Samuel Beckett (Johns produced prints to accompany Beckett's "Fizzles" text).
Johns's art has been displayed around the globe; in 1988, he was awarded the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale. Though critical opinion sometimes found fault with his work, Johns always remained popular among collectors, with high auction prices such as: $17.05 million for "False Start" (1959) in 1988; $28.6 million for "Flag" (1960-66) in 2010; and $36 million for "Flag" (1983) in 2014. (In a private sale in 2006, "False Start" went for $80 million.)
In 1961, Johns and Rauschenberg's close relationship came to an end, though the specific details behind their separation remain unknown. Johns lost another close associate when he learned that between 2006 and 2011 his trusted longtime studio assistant had stolen some of his unfinished work and falsified authentication papers in order to sell the items.
Though Johns does not profit directly when a piece is re-sold for staggering amounts, that success is reflected in the price of his new work, so he is in no way a starving artist. A private person, he has a home and studio in Sharon, Connecticut, and a house on the island of St. Martin. Johns was honored with a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.
Alina 2018-09-04 14:05:00 painters biographies
Born on March 8, 1945, in Donaueschingen, Germany, Anselm Kiefer is an artist known for his paintings, sculptures and photography. Much of his work explores his home country’s sensibilities and culture, including an unflinching gaze on the rise of Nazism. His art has been exhibited in museums around the world, including the Louvre and White Cube gallery, and he has directed the opera Am Anfang.
Alina 2018-09-04 14:05:00 painters biographies
Born on March 8, 1945, in Donaueschingen, Germany, Anselm Kiefer is an artist known for his paintings, sculptures and photography. Much of his work explores his home country’s sensibilities and culture, including an unflinching gaze on the rise of Nazism. His art has been exhibited in museums around the world, including the Louvre and White Cube gallery, and he has directed the opera Am Anfang.
Alina 2018-09-03 14:05:00 painters biographies
Paul Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, on December 18, 1879. Klee participated in and was influenced by a range of artistic movements, including surrealism, cubism and expressionism. He taught art in Germany until 1933, when the National Socialists declared his work indecent. The Klee family fled to Switzerland, where Paul Klee died on June 29, 1940.
Paul Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, on December 18, 1879. The son of a music teacher, Klee was a talented violinist, receiving an invitation to play with the Bern Music Association at age 11.
As a teenager, Klee’s attention turned from music to the visual arts. In 1898, he began studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. By 1905, he had developed signature techniques, including drawing with a needle on a blackened pane of glass. Between 1903 and 1905, he completed a set of etchings called Inventions that would be his first exhibited works.
In 1906, Klee married Bavarian pianist Lily Stumpf. The couple had a son, Felix Paul. Klee’s artwork progressed slowly for the next five years. In 1910, he had his first solo exhibition in Bern, which subsequently traveled to three Swiss cities.
In January 1911, Klee met art critic Alfred Kubin, who introduced him to artists and critics. That winter, Klee joined the editorial team of the journal Der Blaue Reiter, co-founded by Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky. He began working on color experiments in watercolors and landscapes, including the painting In the Quarry.
Klee’s artistic breakthrough came in 1914, after a trip to Tunisia. Inspired by the light in Tunis, Klee began to delve into abstract art. Returning to Munich, Klee painted his first pure abstract, In the Style of Kairouan, composed of colored rectangles and circles.
Klee’s work evolved during World War I, particularly following the deaths of his friends Auguste Macke and Franz Marc. Klee created several pen-and-ink lithographs, including Death for the Idea, in reaction to this loss. In 1916, he joined the German army, painting camouflage on airplanes and working as a clerk.
By 1917, art critics began to classify Klee as one of the best young German artists. A three-year contract with dealer Hans Goltz brought exposure as well as commercial success.
Klee taught at the Bauhaus from 1921 to 1931, alongside his friend Kandinsky. In 1923, Kandinsky and Klee formed the Blue Four with two other artists, Alexej von Jawlensky and Lyonel Feininger, and toured the United States to lecture and exhibit work. Klee had his first exhibits in Paris around this time, finding favor with the French surrealists.
Klee began teaching at Dusseldorf Academy in 1931. Two years later, he was fired under Nazi rule. The Klee family moved to Switzerland in late 1933. Klee was at the peak of his creative output during this tumultuous period. He produced nearly 500 works in a single year and created Ad Parnassum, widely considered to be his masterpiece.
Alina 2018-09-02 14:05:00 painters biographies
Born in Nice, France, in 1928, Yves Klein developed an interest in spirituality and judo before turning his attention to art in the late 1940s. By the mid-1950s he was producing large monochromatic works meant to convey a sense of the infinite, an approach that he soon refined to feature a particular ultramarine that he called International Klein Blue. As his importance in the avant-garde art scene began to grow, Klein branched out to work in new formats, including sponge sculptures, “living paintbrushes,” fire paintings and other conceptual works. One of the founders of “Nouveau Réalisme,” Klein’s impact on modern art grew significantly after his death in 1962, heavily influencing the performance and conceptual art movements that followed.
Yves Klein was born on April 28, 1928, in Nice, France. Though he would receive no formal training as an artist, his parents were painters who each exposed him to a unique approach to visual communication. His father, Fred, worked in a figurative style, while his mother, Marie, favored more abstract expression. Klein was raised in Paris and—particularly during World War II—in Cagnes-sur-Mer in the unoccupied south. From 1942 to 1946 studied at the École Nationale de la Marine Marchand and the École Nationale des Langues, where he developed interests in literature, jazz, philosophy and judo.
Shortly after this period, Klein had an epiphany that focused his thinking and helped shape his future work. Lying on the beach with friends in 1946, Klein “claimed” the sky, which he identified as the perfect representation of the formless and infinite. Describing the experience years later, Klein wrote that he “began to feel hatred for birds which flew back and forth across my blue sky, cloudless sky, because they tried to bore holes in my greatest and most beautiful work.” For the rest of his life, Klein would devote himself to depicting that mystical experience through his art.
Newly inspired, in the late 1940s Klein began to seek ways to communicate his vision. One of his first creations was the Monotone-Silence Symphony (1947–48), a musical piece meant to evoke the sky through the steady playing of a single chord for 20 minutes, followed by an equally long period of silence intended for reflection. Though the piece would not be performed publicly until more than a decade later, it established the primary theme around which Klein’s future works would revolve.
Over the next few years, Klein would travel extensively while developing both his artistic vision and skills. From 1949 to 1952 he lived primarily in London, where he worked in a frame shop and gained a solid foundation in painting and the fundamentals of color. He also pursued his ongoing interest in judo, and in 1952 relocated to Japan, where he became a fourth-dan black belt at the Kodokan Institute. While there he also held a solo exhibition of his work and wrote the Manifesto of the Monochrome, in which he described his work as a liberation of emotion from the restraints of line and object.
By the mid-1950s, Klein had returned to Paris, where he opened a judo school and continued to developed his avant-garde work. In February 1956, he held another solo exhibition, titled Yves: Propositions Monochromes, in which he displayed 20 paintings, each composed of a different single color. Disappointed by the unenthusiastic response it received, Klein decided to further refine his approach by limiting the majority of his future work to a special color that he worked with a chemist to develop, a deep ultramarine that he called International Klein Blue (IKB).
A symbol for Klein of both his spirituality and the sky that he had identified with a decade earlier, IKB would dominate his work for the remainder of the 1950s. He launched his Blue Period in 1957 with his Aerostatic Sculpture—releasing 1,001 blue balloons in Paris—and followed with exhibits of his paintings in Paris, London and Milan.
That same year, he also began to branch out to find new ways to express his ideas, completing a mural for the entrance hall of a new opera house in Gelsenkirchen, West Germany, and beginning a series of sculptures that featured the paint-soaked sponges he used to create his monochromes. Among his other important works from this period was The Void in which he presented the emptied-out Galeries Iris Clert, which he had painted completely white.
Around this same time, Klein began to experiment with yet new approaches to expressing his vision, most notably by covering nude female models in IKB and directing them to interact with blank surfaces. These “living paintbrushes” were featured in his series of Anthropométries, which debuted in a live performance piece at the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Paris in 1960. Klein also began working with a large torch to burn the surfaces of his canvases and create a series of “fire paintings,” and with gold leaf to complete numerous Monogolds. He also joined a group of other artists and art critic Pierre Restany in signing the Nouveau Réalisme Manifesto, which stated their intentions of finding new means of representing reality.
His popularity growing, in 1961, Klein had exhibitions of his work in Germany, Italy and the United States. The latter, held at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City, failed to connect with the public, which prompted Klein to write the Chelsea Hotel Manifesto, in which he described his transcendent experience on the beach in 1947 and attempted to explain his work.
In January of the following year, Klein married German artist Rotraut Uecker, with whom he had become involved in 1957. More exhibitions of his work were overshadowed by signs of heart trouble. On June 6, 1962, Klein suffered a third heart attack and died at the age of 34. Two months later, Uecker gave birth to their son, Yves Amu Klein.
Though often misunderstood or maligned during his day, today Klein is counted as one of the most important avant-garde artists and an early pioneer of conceptual and performance art. Since his death, his work has been featured in countless exhibits around the world, and in 2012, one of his sponge paintings set a new record for postwar French art when it was auctioned for nearly $37 million.
Alina 2018-09-01 14:05:00 painters biographies
Max Klinger was born on February 18, 1857 in Leipzig, Germany. He was a painter, sculptor, and printmaker known for his use of symbol, fantasy, and dreams. He is best known for a series of pen-and-ink drawings called Series upon the Theme of Christ and Fantasies upon the Finding of a Glove. He had a deep influence on Edvard Munch, Max Ernst, and Giorgio de Chirico. Klinger died in 1920.
Alina 2018-08-31 14:05:00 painters biographies
French painter Georges La Tour, born in 1593, is considered a major influence on Caravaggio for his use of simple lighting, like candles, in a realistic manner. Although little is known of La Tour's life, he regained popularity in the 20th century as more of his works were correctly identified.
Alina 2018-08-30 14:05:00 painters biographies
Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, on March 22, 1873, painter Ernest Lawson studied at the Art Students League in New York with J. Alden Weir and John Twachtman (1891), and later in Paris at the Académie Julien (1893). Upon his return to the United States, he settled in upper Manhattan and produced his famous impressionistic urban landscapes, which linked him to the Ashcan school. His typical use of thick, intense color, often applied with a palette knife, can be seen in "Spring Night, Harlem River" (1913), one of his most prominent works. Lawson died on December 18, 1939, in Miami Beach, Florida.
