Grant Wood - American Gothic

American Gothic

American Gothic is one of the most reproduced—and parodied—images ever. Many artists have replaced the two people with other known couples and replaced the house with well known houses. References and parodies of the image have been numerous for generations, appearing regularly in such media as postcards, magazines, animated cartoons, advertisements, comic books, and television shows.

Grant Wood, born Grant DeVolson Wood (February 13, 1891 – February 12, 1942) was an American painter, born in Anamosa, Iowa. He is best known for his paintings depicting the rural American Midwest.

His family moved to Cedar Rapids after his father died in 1901. Soon thereafter he began as an apprentice in a local metal shop. He enrolled in art school in Minneapolis in 1910, and returned a year later to teach in a one-room schoolhouse. In 1913 he enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago and did some work as a silversmith. He again returned to Cedar Rapids to teach Junior High students after serving in the army as a camouflage painter. From 1920 to 1928 he made four trips to Europe, where he studied many styles of painting, especially impressionism. From 1924 to 1935 Wood lived in the loft of a carriage house that he turned into his personal studio at "5 Turner Alley" (the studio had no address until Wood made one up himself). In 1932, Wood helped found the Stone City art colony near his hometown to help artists get through the Great Depression. He became a great proponent of regionalism in the arts, lecturing throughout the country on the topic.

Wood taught painting at the University of Iowa art school beginning in 1934, prompting his move to Iowa City. During that time, he supervised mural painting projects, mentored students, produced a variety of his own works, and became a key part of the University's cultural community. On February 12, 1942, one day before his 51st birthday, Wood passed away at the university hospital.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Wood

Vincent Van Gogh - Wheat Fields with Crows

Wheat Field with Crows

Wheat Field with Crows was painted in July 1890. It is commonly and mistakenly believed that this was Van Gogh's last painting, or even that he shot himself while he was painting it; this is how it was portrayed in the film Lust for Life. However there is no evidence to support this idea; and Dr Jan Hulsker's chronology gives seven works following it.

It is generally agreed that Van Gogh went for a walk in the fields on the evening of July 27, 1890, during which he shot himself with a revolver, then made his way back home. He was then in bed for two days before he died, with his brother Theo at his side.

A usual interpretation of this painting is that it shows Van Gogh's troubled state of mind with a dark, forbidding sky, the indecision of three paths going in different directions and the black crows overhead being signs of foreboding or even death. Vincent wrote that he had made three paintings in Auvers of large fields of wheat under troubled skies.

This painting is currently held at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_Field_with_Crows

Vincent Van Gogh - Starry Night

Starry Night

The Starry Night was completed near the mental asylum of Saint-Remy, 13 months before Van Gogh's death at the age of 37. Vincent's mental instability is legend. He attempted to take Paul Gauguin's life and later committed himself to several asylums in hopes of an unrealized cure.

Van Gogh painted furiously and The Starry Night vibrates with rockets of burning yellow while planets gyrate like cartwheels. The hills quake and heave, yet the cosmic gold fireworks that swirl against the blue sky are somehow restful.

This painting is probably the most popular of Vincent's works.

Vincent van Gogh was born March 30, 1853, in Groot-Zundert, the Netherlands. Starting in 1869, he worked for a firm of art dealers and at various short-lived jobs. By 1877, van Gogh had begun religious studies, and from 1878 to 1880 he was an evangelist in the Borinage, a poor mining district in Belgium. While working as an evangelist, he decided to become an artist. Van Gogh admired the work of Jean François Millet and Honoré Daumier, and his early subjects were primarily peasants depicted in dark colors. He lived in Brussels and in various parts of the Netherlands before moving to Paris in February 1886.

In Paris, he lived with his brother, Theo, and encountered Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting. Van Gogh worked briefly at Fernand Cormon’s atelier, where he met Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The artist also met Emile Bernard, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Camille Pissarro, and Paul Signac at that time. Flowers, portraits, and scenes of Montmartre, as well as a brighter palette, replaced his earlier subject matter and tonalities. Van Gogh often worked in Asnières with Bernard and Signac in 1887.

In February of the following year, van Gogh moved to Arles, where he painted in isolation, depicting the Provençal landscape and people. Gauguin joined him in the fall, and the two artists worked together. Van Gogh suffered his first mental breakdown in December 1888; numerous seizures and intermittent confinements in mental hospitals in Arles, Saint-Rémy, and Auvers-sur-Oise followed from that time until 1890. Nevertheless, he continued to paint. In 1890, van Gogh was invited to show with Les Vingt in Brussels, where he sold his first painting. That same year, he was represented at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. Van Gogh shot himself on July 27, 1890, and died on July 29 in Auvers-sur-Oise, France.

Edvard Munch - The Scream

The Scream

Norwegian painter and printmaker whose intense, evocative treatment of psychological and emotional themes was a major influence on the development of German Expressionism in the early 20th century. His painting The Cry (1893) is regarded as an icon of existential anguish.

A gifted Norwegian painter and printmaker, Edvard Munch not only was his country's greatest artist, but also played a vital role in the development of German expressionism. His work often included the symbolic portrayal of such themes as misery, sickness, and death. The Cry, probably his most familiar painting, is typical in its anguished expression of isolation and fear.

Munch traveled to Paris in 1885, and his work began to show the influence of French painters--first, the impressionists, and then the postimpressionists--as well as art nouveau design. Like many young artists Munch reacted against conventional behavior, and in 1892 he took part in a controversial exhibit in Berlin. His circle of friends included several writers, one of whom was the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Munch designed the sets for several of Ibsen's plays.

Between 1892 and 1908, Munch spent much of his time in Paris and Berlin, where he became known for his prints--etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts. After 1910 Munch returned to Norway, where he lived and painted until his death. In his later paintings Munch showed more interest in nature, and his work became more colorful and less pessimistic. Munch died in Ekely, near Oslo, on Jan. 23, 1944. He left many of his works to the city of Oslo, which built a museum in his honor.

El Greco - View of Toledo

View of Toledo

Greco, El (1541-1614). Cretan-born painter, sculptor, and architect who settled in Spain and is regarded as the first great genius of the Spanish School. He was known as El Greco (the Greek), but his real name was Domenikos Theotocopoulos; and it was thus that he signed his paintings throughout his life, always in Greek characters, and sometimes followed by Kres (Cretan).

Little is known of his youth, and only a few works survive by him in the Byzantine tradition of icon painting, notably the recently discovered Dormition of the Virgin (Church of the Koimesis tis Theotokou, Syros). In 1566 he is referred to in a Cretan document as a master painter; soon afterwards he went to Venice (Crete was then a Venetian possession), then in 1570 moved to Rome. The miniaturist Giulio Clovio, whom he met there, described him as a pupil of Titian, but of all the Venetian painters Tintoretto influenced him most, and Michelangelo's impact on his development was also important.

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/greco/

There are two surviving landscapes by El Greco: The View of Toledo (Metropolitan Museum, New York) and the View and Plan of Toledo (Museo de El Greco, Toledo). They respond to very different objectives: one setting out to document the city in cartographic terms, the other evoking it through a selective arrangement of its most characteristic features. The Metropolitan painting belongs to a tradition of emblematic city views, its approach is interpretative rather than documentary: it seeks to portray the essence of the city rather than to record its actual appearance.

Both in here and in the View and Plan the city is shown from the north, except that El Greco has included only the easternmost portion, above the Tagus river. This partial view would have excluded the cathedral, which he therefore imaginatively moved to the left of the dominant Alcázar or royal palace. The fact that an identical view appears in the Saint Joseph and the Christ Child in the Capilla de San José suggests that the painting was conceived in connection with the San José commission (1597-99). From that time, the town features in many of his paintings: in the Laocoön (National Gallery of Art, Washington), the Christ in Agony on the Cross (Cincinnati Art Museum), the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception (Museo de Santa Cruz), in all of which it takes on an apocalyptical character appropriate to the themes. In his late Saint John the Baptist (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) the landscape of the Escorial is appropriately introduced.

This is one of the earliest independent landscapes in Western art and one of the most dramatic and individual landscapes ever painted. It is not just a 'View of Toledo', although the topographical details are correct; neither is it 'Toledo at night' or 'Toledo in a storm', other titles which have been attached to the painting: it is simply 'Toledo', but Toledo given a universal meaning - a spiritual portrait of the town. In introducing the view into his paintings he acknowledges how much his art owed to the inspiration of the town, until a few years before the great Imperial Capital and still the great ecclesiastical and cultural centre of Spain - the town isolated on the plain of Castile which he had made his new home, so far from the island of his birth.

http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/g/greco_el/11/1104grec.html

Wassily Kandinsky - Composition Storm

Composition Storm

Russian painter, whose exploration of the possibilities of abstraction make him one of the most important innovators in modern art. Both as an artist and as a theorist he played a pivotal role in the development of abstract art.
Born in Moscow, December 4, 1866, Kandinsky studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany, from 1896 to 1900. His early paintings were executed in a naturalistic style, but in 1909, after a trip to Paris during which he was highly impressed by the works of the Fauves and postimpressionists, his paintings became more highly colored and loosely organized. Around 1913 he began working on paintings that came to be considered the first totally abstract works in modern art; they made no reference to objects of the physical world and derived their inspiration and titles from music.
In 1911, along with Franz Marc and other German expressionists, Kandinsky formed Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group (so called for Kandinsky's love of blue and Marc's love of horses). He produced both abstract and figurative works during this period, all of which were characterized by brilliant colors and complex patterns.
Kandinsky's influence on the course of 20th-century art was further increased by his activities as a theorist and teacher. In 1912 he published Concerning the Spiritual in Art, the first theoretical treatise on abstraction, which spread his ideas through Europe. He also taught at the Moscow Academy of Fine Arts from 1918 to 1921 and at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, from 1922 to 1933.
After World War I (1914-1918), Kandinsky's abstractions became increasingly geometric in form, as he abandoned his earlier fluid style in favor of sharply etched outlines and clear patterns. Composition VIII No. 260, for instance, is composed solely of lines, circles, arcs, and other simple geometric forms. In very late works such as Circle and Square, he refines this style into a more elegant, complex mode that resulted in beautifully balanced, jewel-like pictures.
He was one of the most influential artists of his generation. As one of the first explorers of the principles of nonrepresentational or “pure” abstraction, Kandinsky can be considered an artist who paved the way for abstract expressionism, the dominant school of painting since World War II (1939-1945). Kandinsky died in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, on December 13, 1944.

http://www.mcs.csuhayward.edu/~malek/Kandin.html

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner - Forest with Brook

Forest with Brook

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was born in Aschaffenburg on 6 May 1880. In 1901 he began to study architecture at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden. He continued his studies in Munich from 1903/04 and finished his degree back in Dresden in 1905. Together with his fellow students Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl, Kirchner founded the artists’ association “Brücke” in June 1905 and hencefoth comitted himself to painting, drawing and printing. In 1906 he met Doris Große, who became his favourite model until 1911. He spent the summers between 1907 and 1911 in Goppeln, at the lakes of Moritzburg and on the island of Fehmarn with various members of the “Brücke”. In his work he focused on the female nude in nature, expressed in strong and impulsive images.

He moved to Berlin in 1911 and founded the MUIM-Institut with Max Pechstein, in order to pass-on new artistic convictions and demands through “Moderner Unterricht im Malen” (modern teaching of painting). This private art school was closed in 1912 due to a lack of viability. In 1912 Kirchner also met Erna Schilling who remained his commited partner until his death. Until 1914 he returned regularly painting to island of Fehmarn to paint. In 1913 Kirchner wrote the “Chronik der Brücke” (chronicle of the “Brücke”), which caused the association’s break-up. His first exhibition as an individual artist at the Folkwang Museum in Essen established his work as a part of the contemporary artistic scene.

Between 1913 and 1915 Kirchner painted a famous series of depictions of the metropole (Großstadtbilder), in which he captured the pulsating life of modern Berlin in hectic brushstrokes. In 1914 Kirchner voluntarily joined the military service. Following a nervous breakdown Kirchner was released from the army at the end of 1915, and from 1916 to 1917 he recovered in the sanatoriums of Taunus and Davos, Switzerland.

In 1918 Kirchner moved to Davos permanently, lived in a farm house in the Alps and mainly focused on the depiction of mountain scenery until the end of his life. Various exhibitions in 1920 introduced his work to a wider public in Germany and Switzerland. Kirchner moved to Frauenkirch-Wildboden in 1923. A substantial exhibition of his work shown at the art gallery in Basel prompted the Swiss painters Paul Camenisch, Albert Müller and Hermann Scherer to found the artists’ association “Rot-Blau” (red and blue). In 1925/26 Kirchner undertook a final trip to Germany.

The later 1920s were characterized by artistic success: the first monograph was published in 1926 as was the first part of a catalogue raisonne of his graphic work. In Davos an extensive exhibition was staged. A commission for murals in the Folkwang Museum followed in 1927 and in 1928 Kirchner took part in the Biennale in Venice. In 1931 he became a member of the Prussion Academy of Arts. The Nazis defamed his work as “degenerate” in 1937 and confiscated all of his paintings which were on display in public museums. Kirchner committed suicide on 15th July 1938.

http://www.bruecke-museum.de/englkirchner.htm

Paul Klee - Head of Man

Head of Man

Paul Klee was born on December 18, 1879, in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, into a family of musicians. His childhood love of music was always to remain profoundly important in his life and work. From 1898 to 1901, Klee studied in Munich, first with Heinrich Knirr, then at the Kunstakademie under Franz von Stuck. Upon completing his schooling, he traveled to Italy in the first in a series of trips abroad that nourished his visual sensibilities. He settled in Bern in 1902. A series of his satirical etchings was exhibited at the Munich Secession in 1906. That same year, Klee married Lily Stumpf, a pianist, and moved to Munich. Here he gained exposure to Modern art. Klee’s work was shown at the Kunstmuseum Bern in 1910 and at Moderne Galerie, Munich, in 1911.

Klee met Alexej Jawlensky, Vasily Kandinsky, August Macke, Franz Marc, and other avant-garde figures in 1911; he participated in important shows of advanced art, including the second Blaue Reiter exhibition at Galerie Hans Goltz, Munich, in 1912, and the Erste deutsche Herbstsalon at the Der Sturm Gallery, Berlin, in 1913. In 1912, he visited Paris for the second time, where he saw the work of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso and met Robert Delaunay. Klee helped found the Neue Münchner Secession in 1914. Color became central to his art only after a revelatory trip to Tunisia in 1914.

In 1920, a major Klee retrospective was held at the Galerie Hans Goltz, Munich; his Schöpferische Konfession was published; he was also appointed to the faculty of the Bauhaus [more]. Klee taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar from 1921 to 1926 and in Dessau from 1926 to 1931. During his tenure, he was in close contact with other Bauhaus masters, such as Kandinsky and Lyonel Feininger. In 1924, the Blaue Vier, consisting of Lyonel Feininger, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, and Klee, was founded. Among his notable exhibitions of this period were his first in the United States at the Société Anonyme, New York, in 1924; his first major show in Paris the following year at the Galerie Vavin-Raspail; and an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1930. Klee went to Düsseldorf to teach at the Akademie in 1931, shortly before the Nazis closed the Bauhaus. Forced by the Nazis to leave his position in Düsseldorf in 1933, Klee settled in Bern the following year. Seventeen of his works were included in the Nazi exhibition of “degenerate art,” Entartete Kunst, in 1937. Major Klee exhibitions took place in Bern and Basel in 1935 and in Zurich in 1940. Klee died on June 29, 1940, in Muralto-Locarno, Switzerland.

http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_bio_75.html

George Rouault - A Clown

A Clown

Georges Rouault, an artist who lived and worked in France about 100 years ago. He painted this picture called The Clown....sort of a sad-faced clown with a pointy hat and fluffy collar.

Rouault grew up in Paris. His family wasn't particularly artistic, but his grandfather loved art. He used to take young George to the museums and the galleries to look at great paintings. George soon learned to love the shapes and colors and forms that artists created, and he wanted to be an artist himself.

When he was a teenager, Rouault got a job as an apprentice for a stained glass studio. He learned all the skills of making colored glass, cutting shapes and putting them together to make intricate stained glass windows.

When he was a young man, he left the stained glass business and went to art school. He became a famour painter. His art is best known for rich colors and heavy black outlines. Look at the arms and face of the clown...the painting almost looks like a stained glass window glowing with light.

You genius artists can practice expressions the same way. Just stand in front of a mirror with a sketchpad and a pencil. Make a face, and draw what you see. Rouault liked to use really thick layers of paint. If you could touch the clown's collar, the paint would feel lumpy and bumpy. You genius artists can paint with really thick colors too. Some paint comes already thick, like acrylic paints you squeeze out of a tube. But you can also stir stuff in to runny poster paint to make it thicker, like regular white flour or salt from your kitchen. Experiment and see what new art techniques you can discover!
http://www.kidsart.com/IS/403.html

Salvador Dali - Persistence of Memory

Persistence of Memory

A flamboyant painter and sometime writer, sculptor and experimental film-maker, Salvador Dali was probably the greatest Surrealist artist, using bizarre dream imagery to create unforgettable and unmistakable landscapes of his inner world. His most famous work is The Persistence Of Memory.

Dalí, Salvador (1904-89): Spanish painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and designer. After passing through phases of Cubism, Futurism and Metaphysical painting, he joined the Surrealists in 1929 and his talent for self-publicity rapidly made him the most famous representative of the movement. Throughout his life he cultivated eccentricity and exhibitionism (one of his most famous acts was appearing in a diving suit at the opening of the London Surrealist exhibition in 1936), claiming that this was the source of his creative energy. He took over the Surrealist theory of automatism but transformed it into a more positive method which he named `critical paranoia'. According to this theory one should cultivate genuine delusion as in clinical paranoia while remaining residually aware at the back of one's mind that the control of the reason and will has been deliberately suspended. He claimed that this method should be used not only in artistic and poetical creation but also in the affairs of daily life. His paintings employed a meticulous academic technique that was contradicted by the unreal `dream' space he depicted and by the strangely hallucinatory characters of his imagery. He described his pictures as `hand-painted dream photographs' and had certain favorite and recurring images, such as the human figure with half-open drawers protruding from it, burning giraffes, and watches bent and flowing as if made from melting wax (The Persistence of Memory, MOMA, New York; 1931).

In 1937 Dalí visited Italy and adopted a more traditional style; this together with his political views (he was a supporter of General Franco) led Breton to expel him from the Surrealist ranks. He moved to the USA in 1940 and remained there until 1955. During this time he devoted himself largely to self-publicity; his paintings were often on religious themes (The Crucifixion of St John of the Cross, Glasgow Art Gallery, 1951), although sexual subjects and pictures centring on his wife Gala were also continuing preoccupations. In 1955 he returned to Spain and in old age became a recluse.

Apart from painting, Dalí's output included sculpture, book illustration, jewellery design, and work for the theatre. In collaboration with the director Luis Buñuel he also made the first Surrealist films---Un chien andalou (1929) and L'Age d'or (1930)---and he contributed a dream sequence to Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945). He also wrote a novel, Hidden Faces (1944) and several volumes of flamboyant autobiography. Although he is undoubtedly one of the most famous artists of the 20th century, his status is controversial; many critics consider that he did little if anything of consequence after his classic Surrealist works of the 1930s. There are museums devoted to Dalí's work in Figueras, his home town in Spain, and in St Petersburg in Florida.

Paul Delvaux - Trains du Soir

Trains du Soir

Artist: Paul Delvaux (1894 - 1994)
Nationality: Belgian
Movement: Surrealism
Media: Painting
Influences:

Biography:
After studying architecture and painting in Belgium, Paul Delvaux established a studio in Brussels and experimented with Expressionism and Impressionism. Later, he was introduced to the Surrealist styles of de Chirico and Magritte, and began creating his own approach within the movement. His painting are often full of male and female nudes, skeletons, and ruins with a self-portrait in their midst. His incorporation of classical and modern imagery is a unique an enduring aspect of Delvaux’s work. He taught at the Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Art at d’Architecture in Brussels from 1950 to 1962 and established a museum at Saint Idesbald in 1982.

Rene Magritte - Le Mariage Du Minuit

Mariage du Minuit

Rene Magritte

Birth Year : 1898
Death Year : 1967
Country : Belgium

René Magritte, the famous Belgian Surrealist, developed his signature techniques early in his career while working as a commercial artist-designing wallpapers, posters, sheet-music covers and collage illustrations for furriers' catalogs. When he moved to Paris from Brussels, in August 1927, to join the Parisian Surrealists, Magritte began his investigation of pictorial language in a burst of activity that was to produce sixty pictures in one year, some quite large. When Magritte left Paris in 1930, he abandoned the Surrealist milieu where the painters tended to be subordinate to the writers, and in particular to André Breton. Although Magritte was not adverse to the company of writers-indeed Paul Eluard was his closest friend in Paris and many of his writer friends helped produce titles for his paintings-he was adverse to Breton's organizing, and returned to Brussels where he was regarded as the center of the avant-garde circle. He remained in Belium, save for a few trips, until his death.

Magritte's works are conceived of as riddles. In them, he explores the mysteries lurking in the unexpected juxtaposition of everyday things, involving the viewer in a self-induced disorientation. His paintings exclude symbols and myths; everything is visible. Magritte worked from several sources, which he repeated with variations: anatomical surprises, such as the hand whose wrist is a woman's face; the mysterious opening, where a door swings open onto an unexpected vista; metamorphic creatures, such as a stone bird flying above a rocky shoreline. He animates the inanimate, as a shoe with toes; he enlarges details, as an immense apple filling a room. he makes an association of complementaries, as the leaf-bird, or the mountain-eagle. His titles accompany the paintings in the way that names correspond to objects, without either illustrating or explaining them. There is always a kind of logic to Magritte's images but when asked about analysis of the content of his paintings, Magritte replied, "If one looks at a thing with the intention of trying to discover what it means, one ends up no longer seeing the thing itself, but of thinking of the question that is raised." The interpretation of the image was a denial of its mystery, the mystery of the invisible. His images are to be looked at, not into.

Andrew Wyeth - Benny's Scarecrow

Benny's Scarecrow

Andrew Wyeth is one of the most celebrated living artists in history. Several galleries and museums, including the National Gallery of Art, display his work when prior to this they had never featured the work of a living artist.

Andrew Wyeth’s ability to create unmistakably realistic images set to a fictional tone both impressed and enraged critics. During his sixty-year career, his work gradually began an evolution from realism to surrealistic expressionism to a combination of both. This is the primary reason for the feelings of rage held by these critics. They felt if he were to be taken seriously as an artist and build a career based on merit, he should not be working in such a light medium.

This “painter of the people,” as he was often referred to as, holds no high school diploma, formal training or college degree. Until he was eighteen years of age, Wyeth’s father Newell (otherwise known as N. C. Wyeth) homeschooled him and trained him in the arts. His parents, based in part on his frail health, made this decision about his education. When he was very young, he contracted whooping cough and was prone to illnesses thereafter. Rather than continuing to deal with schools any longer, he attended until the third grade; it was thought best his father taught him at home.

Wyeth, now eighty-three years of age, still paints all day everyday. He still speaks during dedications, such as the celebration of his eightieth birthday, and gives interviews. His life, full of creation and success, is and inspiration to both seasoned artists and those in training.