Today is the 128th birthday of the architect and designer Le Corbusier.  His designs are widely admired and even copied to this day.  His true talent was being able to create designs that have continued to feel modern and current.  The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Le Corbusier
OCCUPATION: Architect, Artist
BIRTH DATE: October 6, 1887
DEATH DATE: August 27, 1965
EDUCATION: École des Arts Décoratifs at La Chaux-de-Fonds
PLACE OF BIRTH: La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland
PLACE OF DEATH: Cap Martin, France
AKA: Charles Jeanneret-Gris

BEST KNOWN FOR: Le Corbusier was a Swiss-born French architect who belonged to the first generation of the so-called International school of architecture.

Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris on October 6, 1887, Le Corbusier was the second son of Edouard Jeanneret, an artist who painted dials in the town’s renowned watch industry, and Madame Jeannerct-Perrct, a musician and piano teacher. His family’s Calvinism, love of the arts and enthusiasm for the Jura Mountains, where his family fled during the Albigensian Wars of the 12th century, were all formative influences on the young Le Corbusier.

At age 13, Le Corbusier left primary school to attend Arts Décoratifs at La Chaux-de-Fonds, where he would learn the art of enameling and engraving watch faces, following in the footsteps of his father.

There, he fell under the tutelage of L’Eplattenier, whom Le Corbusier called “my master” and later referred to him as his only teacher. L’Eplattenier taught Le Corbusier art history, drawing and the naturalist aesthetics of art nouveau. Perhaps because of his extended studies in art, Corbusier soon abandoned watchmaking and continued his studies in art and decoration, intending to become a painter. L’Eplattenier insisted that his pupil also study architecture, and he arranged for his first commissions working on local projects.

After designing his first house, in 1907, at age 20, Le Corbusier took trips through central Europe and the Mediterranean, including Italy, Vienna, Munich and Paris. His travels included apprenticeships with various architects, most significantly with structural rationalist Auguste Perret, a pioneer of reinforced concrete construction, and later with renowned architect Peter Behrens, with whom Le Corbusier worked from October 1910 to March 1911, near Berlin.

These trips played a pivotal role in Le Corbusier’s education. He made three major architectural discoveries. In various settings, he witnessed and absorbed the importance of (1) the contrast between large collective spaces and individual compartmentalized spaces, an observation that formed the basis for his vision of residential buildings and later became vastly influential; (2) classical proportion via Renaissance architecture; and (3) geometric forms and the use of landscape as an architectural tool.

In 1912, Le Corbusier returned to La Chaux-de-Fonds to teach alongside L’Eplattenier and to open his own architectural practice. He designed a series of villas and began to theorize on the use of reinforced concrete as a structural frame, a thoroughly modern technique.

Le Corbusier began to envisage buildings designed from these concepts as affordable prefabricated housing that would help rebuild cities after World War I came to an end. The floor plans of the proposed housing consisted of open space, leaving out obstructive support poles, freeing exterior and interior walls from the usual structural constraints. This design system became the backbone for most of Le Corbusier’s architecture for the next 10 years.

In 1917, Le Corbusier moved to Paris, where he worked as an architect on concrete structures under government contracts. He spent most of his efforts, however, on the more influential, and at the time more lucrative, discipline of painting.

Then, in 1918, Le Corbusier met Cubist painter Amédée Ozenfant, who encouraged Le Corbusier to paint. Kindred spirits, the two began a period of collaboration in which they rejected cubism, an art form finding its peak at the time, as irrational and romantic.

With these thoughts in mind, the pair published the book Après le cubisme (After Cubism), an anti-cubism manifesto, and established a new artistic movement called purism. In 1920, the pair, along with poet Paul Dermée, established the purist journal L’Esprit Nouveau (The New Spirit), an avant-garde review.

In the first issue of the new publication, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret took on the pseudonym Le Corbusier, an alteration of his grandfather’s last name, to reflect his belief that anyone could reinvent himself. Also, adopting a single name to represent oneself artistically was particularly en vogue at the time, especially in Paris, and Le Corbusier wanted to create a persona that could keep separate his critical writing from his work as a painter and architect.

In the pages of L’Esprit Nouveau, the three men railed against past artistic and architectural movements, such as those embracing elaborate nonstructural (that is, nonfunctional) decoration, and defended Le Corbusier’s new style of functionalism.

In 1923, Le Corbusier published Vers une Architecture (Toward a New Architecture), which collected his polemical writing from L’Esprit Nouveau. In the book are such famous Le Corbusier declarations as “a house is a machine for living in” and “a curved street is a donkey track; a straight street, a road for men.”

Le Corbusier’s collected articles also proposed a new architecture that would satisfy the demands of industry, hence functionalism, and the abiding concerns of architectural form, as defined over generations. His proposals included his first city plan, the Contemporary City, and two housing types that were the basis for much of his architecture throughout his life: the Maison Monol and, more famously, the Maison Citrohan, which he also referred to as “the machine of living.”

Le Corbusier envisioned prefabricated houses, imitating the concept of assembly line manufacturing of cars, for instance. Maison Citrohan displayed the characteristics by which the architect would later define modern architecture: support pillars that raise the house above the ground, a roof terrace, an open floor plan, an ornamentation-free facade and horizontal windows in strips for maximum natural light. The interior featured the typical spatial contrast between open living space and cell-like bedrooms.

In an accompanying diagram to the design, the city in which Citrohan would rest featured green parks and gardens at the feet of clusters of skyscrapers, an idea that would come to define urban planning in years to come.

Soon Le Corbusier’s social ideals and structural design theories became a reality. In 1925-1926, he built a workers’ city of 40 houses in the style of the Citrohan house at Pessac, near Bordeaux. Unfortunately, the chosen design and colors provoked hostility on the part of authorities, who refused to route the public water supply to the complex, and for six years the buildings sat uninhabited.

In the 1930s, Le Corbusier reformulated his theories on urbanism, publishing them in La Ville radieuse (The Radiant City) in 1935. The most apparent distinction between the Contemporary City and the Radiant City is that the latter abandoned the class-based system of the former, with housing now assigned according to family size, not economic position.

The Radiant City brought with it some controversy, as all Le Corbusier projects seemed to. In describing Stockholm, for instance, a classically rendered city, Le Corbusier saw only “frightening chaos and saddening monotony.” He dreamed of “cleaning and purging” the city with “a calm and powerful architecture”; that is, steel, plate glass and reinforced concrete, what many observers might see as a modern blight applied to the beautiful city.

At the end of the 1930s and through the end of World War II, Le Corbusier kept busy with creating such famous projects as the proposed master plans for the cities of Algiers and Buenos Aires, and using government connections to implement his ideas for eventual reconstruction, all to no avail.

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Today is the 90th birthday of artist Robert Rauschenberg.  Seeing things differently, interpreting them from other views and giving people the ability to do the same is as much an art to me as painting a bowl of apples.  The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Robert Rauschenberg
OCCUPATION: Painter, Sculptor
BIRTH DATE: October 22, 1925
DEATH DATE: May 12, 2008
EDUCATION: Black Mountain College, Académie Julien, Kansas City Art Institute
PLACE OF BIRTH: Port Arthur, Texas
PLACE OF DEATH: Captiva, Florida

BEST KNOWN FOR: American artist Robert Rauschenberg is best known for paving the way for pop art of the 1960’s with fellow artist Jasper Johns.

American artist. Milton Ernst Rauschenberg was born on October 22, 1925, in Port Arthur, Texas. He studied at the Kansas City Art Institute (1946–7), the Académie Julien, Paris (1947), and with Josef Albers and John Cage at Black Mountain College, North Carolina (1948–50).

Traveling widely, he was based in New York City from 1950, where he and Jasper Johns paved the way for pop art of the 1960s. He worked with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, New York, as costume and stage designer (1955–64).

An imaginative and eclectic artist, he used a mix of sculpture and paint in works he called ‘combines’, as seen in The Bed (1955). From the late 1950s he incorporated sound and motors in his work, such as Broadcast (1959), and silk-screen transfers, as in Flush (1964).

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he experimented with collage and new ways to transfer photographs. In 1997 the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York City, staged a major exhibition of his works, showcasing the breadth and beauty of his work and its influence over the second half of the century.

Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg died on May 12, 2008 in Lee County, Florida.

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Today is Picasso’s 134th birthday.  He died 42 years ago at the impressive age of 91.  A long life only matched by his long long full name:  Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Clito Ruiz y Picasso.  He was part of that group of friends back in the 20’s that I became madly fascinated with, that lost generation.  Only, he managed to get through it and continue.  Take some time to view his work today (phone-google images-picasso) and remember that life is more vibrant than you think and perspective is different for everyone.  Jump start your morning and recharge yourself and remember that beauty is everywhere as long as you don’t rush past it.  The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Pablo Picasso
OCCUPATION: Painter
BIRTH DATE: October 25, 1881
DEATH DATE: April 08, 1973
EDUCATION: La Llotja, Royal Academy of San Fernando
PLACE OF BIRTH: Málaga, Spain
PLACE OF DEATH: Mougins, France

Best Known For:  Spanish expatriate Pablo Picasso was one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, and the co-creator of Cubism.

Born October 25, 1881 in Málaga, Spain. Picasso’s gargantuan full name, which honors a variety of relatives and saints, is Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Clito Ruiz y Picasso. Picasso’s mother was Doña Maria Picasso y Lopez and his father was Don José Ruiz Blasco, a painter and art teacher. A serious and prematurely world-weary child, the young Pablo Picasso possessed a pair of piercing, watchful black eyes that seemed to mark him out for greatness. He remembered, “When I was a child, my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk you’ll end up as the pope.’ Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.”

Although he was a relatively poor student, Picasso displayed a prodigious talent for drawing from a very young age. According to legend, his first words were “piz, piz,” his childish attempt at lápiz, the Spanish word for pencil. Picasso’s father began teaching him to draw and paint from early childhood, and by the time he was 13 years old his paintings were already better executed than his father’s. He lost all desire to do any schoolwork and instead spent the school days doodling in his notebook. Picasso recalled, “for being a bad student, they would send me to the ‘cells’& I loved it when they sent me there, because I could take a pad of paper and draw nonstop.”

In 1895, when Picasso was fourteen years old, his family moved to Barcelona and he immediately applied to the city’s prestigious School of Fine Arts. Although the school typically only accepted students several years his senior, Picasso’s entrance exam was so extraordinary that the school made an exception and admitted him immediately. Nevertheless, Picasso chafed at the strict rules and formalities and began skipping class to roam the streets of Barcelona, sketching the city scenes he observed.

In 1897, a 16-year-old Picasso moved to Madrid to attend the Royal Academy of San Fernando. However, he again grew frustrated at the school’s singular focus on classical subjects and techniques. He wrote to a friend, “They just go and on& about the same old stuff: Velazquez for painting, Michelangelo for sculpture.” Again he started skipping class to wander the city and paint what he observed: gypsies, beggars, prostitutes.

In 1899, Picasso moved back to Barcelona and fell in with a crowd of artists and intellectuals who made their headquarters at a café called El Quatre Gats, the four cats. Inspired by the anarchists and radicals he met there, Picasso made his decisive break with the classical methods in which he had been trained and began a lifelong process of experimentation and innovation.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Picasso moved to Paris, the cultural center of European art,  to open his own studio. Art critics and historians typically break Picasso’s adult career into distinct periods and the first of these, which lasted from 1901-1904, is called his Blue Period after the color that dominated nearly all of Picasso’s paintings during these years. Lonely and deeply depressed over the death of his close friend Carlos Casagemas, he painted scenes of poverty, isolation and anguish using almost exclusively blues and greens. The critic Charles Morice wondered, “Is this frighteningly precocious child not fated to bestow the consecration of a masterpiece on the negative sense of living, the illness from which he more than anyone else seems to be suffering?” Picasso’s most famous paintings from the Blue Period include Blue Nude, La Vieand The Old Guitarist, all three completed in 1903.

By 1905, Picasso had largely overcome his depression of the previous years. He was madly in love with a beautiful model named Fernande Olivier and newly prosperous thanks to the generous patronage of the art dealer Ambroise Vollard. The artistic manifestation of Picasso’s improved spirits was the introduction of warmer colors beiges, pinks and reds in what is known as his Rose Period. His most famous paintings from this time include Family at Saltimbanques (1905), Gertrude Stein (1905-1906) and Two Nudes (1906).

In 1907, Picasso produced a painting unlike anything he or anyone else had ever painted before, a work that would profoundly influence the direction of art in the twentieth century: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a chilling depiction of five beige figures, prostitutes, abstracted and distorted with sharp geometric features and stark blotches of blues, greens and grays. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is considered the precursor and inspiration of Cubism, an artistic style pioneered by Picasso and Georges Braque.

In Cubist paintings, objects are broken apart and reassembled in an abstracted form, highlighting their composite geometric shapes and depicting the object from multiple viewpoints at once to create physics-defying, collage-like effects. At once destructive and creative, Cubism shocked, appalled and fascinated the art world. “It made me feel as if someone was drinking gasoline and spitting fire,” Braque said. The French writer and critic Max Jacob reflected, “It was really the harbinger comet of the new century.” Picasso’s early Cubist paintings, known as his Analytic Cubist works, include Three Women (1907), Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table (1909) and Girl with Mandolin (1910). Picasso’s later Cubist paintings are distinguished as Synthetic Cubism because they go further toward creating vast collages out of a great number of tiny individual fragments.  These include Still Life with Chair Caning (1912), Card Player (1913-1914), and Three Musicians (1921).

The outbreak of World War I ushered in the next great change in Picasso’s art. He grew more somber and once again preoccupied with the depiction of reality. Picasso’s works between 1918-1927 are considered his Classical Period,  a brief return to realism in a career otherwise dominated by experimentation. His most interesting and important works from this period include Three Women at the Spring (1921), Two Women Running on the Beach/The Race (1922) and The Pipes of Pan (1923).

Then, from 1927 onward, Picasso became caught up in a new philosophical and cultural movement, Surrealism, whose artistic manifestation was an offspring of his own Cubism. Picasso’s greatest surrealist painting, one of the great paintings of all time, was completed in 1937, in the midst of the Spanish Civil War. On April 26, 1937, German bombers supporting Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces, carried out a devastating aerial attack on the Basque town of Guernica. Outraged by the bombing and the inhumanity of war, Picasso painted Guernica shortly thereafter, a surrealist testament to the horrors of war in black, white and grays, featuring a Minotaur and several human-like figures in various states of anguish and terror. Guernica remains one of the most moving and powerful antiwar paintings in history.

In the aftermath of World War II, Picasso became more overtly political. He joined the Communist Party and was twice honored with the International Lenin Peace Prize, once in 1950 and again in 1961. By this point in his life, Picasso was also an international celebrity, the world’s most famous living artist. However, while paparazzi chronicled his every move, few paid attention to his art during this time. In contrast to the dazzling complexity of Synthetic Cubism, Picasso’s later paintings use simple imagery and crude technique. Upon passing a group of school kids in his old age Picasso remarked, “When I was as old as these children, I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.” The epitome of his later work is his Self Portrait Facing Death, drawn with pencil and crayon a year before he passed away. The autobiographical subject, who appears as something between a human and an ape, with a green face and pink hair, is drawn with the crude technique of a child. Yet the expression in his eyes, capturing a lifetime of wisdom, fear and uncertainty, is the unmistakable work of a master at the height of his powers.

Picasso was an incorrigible womanizer who had countless relationships with girlfriends, mistresses, muses and prostitutes over the course of his long life. However, he had only two wives. He married a ballerina named Olga Khokhlova in 1918, and they remained together for nine years before parting ways in 1927. He married his second wife, Jacqueline Roque, at the age of 69 in 1961. Picasso had four children: Paul, Maya, Claude and Paloma.

He passed away on April 8, 1973 at the age of 91.

Pablo Picasso stands alone as the most celebrated and influential painter of the twentieth century. His technical mastery, visionary creativity and profound empathy distinguish him as a revolutionary artist. Picasso was also endlessly reinventing himself, switching between styles so radically different that his life’s work seems the product of five or six great artists rather than just one. Discussing his penchant for radical shifts in style, Picasso insisted that his career was not an evolution or progression. Rather, the diversity of his work was the result of freshly evaluating for each piece the form and technique best suited to achieve his desired effects. “Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should,” Picasso said. “Different themes inevitably require different methods of expression. This does not imply either evolution or progress; it is a matter of following the idea one wants to express and the way in which one wants to express it.”

FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
The Mystery of Picasso (5-May-1956) · Himself

Wrote plays:
Desire Caught by the Tail (1941)

Selected paintings:
The First Communion (1896)
The Absinthe Drinker (1901)
Garçon à la pipe (1905)
The Family of Saltimbanques (1905)
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)
Guernica (1937)
Dora Maar au Chat (1941)
Massacre in Korea (1951)
Las Menina (1957)

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Since I accidentally pulled the trigger on today’s post last night while I was finalizing it, I decided to make today’s post be a proper Week In Review. My last one was about the death of a wonderful person who I was luck enough to have in my daily life for the better part of a decade. His internet footprint was so small, I didn’t use his name in the title and used pronouns all but once. He must have wanted it that way, so i will let him remain virtually un-google-able.

When a person I am close to dies, it is the only time that my atheism waivers. I wish there is something out there for them walk into and have it envelope them in light and love and comfort all the pains they experienced while here with us. But there isn’t. He is gone and every day, he is remembered less and less. The same will happen to me as it will happen to you.

None of this means I don’t still have conversations with him and my dad in my head, but it is just a brain trick, a coping device. I know I am not really communicating with them any more than I am with a pair of shoes I donated to the Goodwill.

It is times like this that I wish I could believe in something. I believe in nothing. There is no man with a long white beard in the sky dolling out punishments and praises for the deeds we do here. There are no angels keeping us safe. My birthdate does not dictate the type of person I am. A small piece of paper from the inside of a cookie at a Chinese restaurant is just a cookie. We are not universally connected.

We are organisms empowered with free will.

I know it’s dark. I am very dark. I fight the dark inside of me daily.

Still, I have free will and choose to do the best that I can. My personal goal here is to “State Park” the hell out of it. Meaning I strive to leave it better than I found it. Here meaning everywhere. Maybe those tiny of reverberations of positivity can grow and be felt farther than my reach?

Since the last roundup, over on Waldina, I have celebrated the birthdays of Candy Darling, Boris Karloff, Jose Clemente Orozco, Doris Duke, Robert F. Kennedy, Corita Kent, Isabella Blow, Imogene Coca, Frances Marion, Rock Hudson, Hedy Lamar, Kay Thompson, Marie Dressler, Sara Sherman Wiborg Murphy, Ezra Pound, Bob Ross, Edith Head, Elsa Lanchester, Roy Lichtenstein, Lewis Hine, Mark Rothko, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Joan Fontaine, Celia Cruz, Bela Lugosi, George C. Scott, Montgomery Clift, Rita Hayworth, Arthur Miller, Jean Arthur, Oscar Wilde, Jane Darwell, Carole Lombard, Le Corbusier, Buster Keaton, Groucho Marx, Jimmy Carter, Truman Capote, Edith Bouvier Beale, Sally Field, Vivien Leigh, Robert Mapplethorpe, Adam Ant, Georgia O’Keefe, Louise Brooks, Veronica Lake, Jean Seberg, Grace Kelly, added the Samuel_Novarro House and Lost TV Shows to my Not-So-Secret-Obsessions list and added Giant, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad Mad World, Blade Runner, Woman of the Year, and Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway to the Required Viewing Film Series. I also documented some self help from Diana Vreeland. It all adds up when I don’t keep on top of the Week in Reviews by doing them weekly.

The Stats:

Visits This Week: 3,878
Total Visits: 255,774
Total Subscribers: 407
Total Posts: 1,779
Most Popular Post Last Week: Happy 78th Birthday Carol Doda

I have divided my tumblr accounts into two separate ones, changing Wasp & Pear to The Real SPA and creating a new one focused on men’s fashion, tattoo’s and yoga: Pete Crenshaw. The Real SPA is still a clearing house for everything I find inspirational, etc.

The Stats:

Posts This Week: 200
Total Posts: 13,192
Total Subscribers: 525

Over at @TheRealSPA on Twitter, I tweet a straight feed from my tumblr account and pepper in original tweets whenever I see fit. Mostly, people DM me wanting me to buy more followers or follow them on Facebook or check out their YouTube channel. It’s all too annoying if you pay any attention to it.

The Stats:

Total Tweets: 667 (tweets over 31 days old are automatically deleted to preserve freshness)
Total Followers: 735
Total Following: 694

This week on @TheRealSPA Instagram, I posted photos of most of the people whose birthdays I celebrated on Waldina and several Scraps updates. I am strongly considering making a spin-off Instagram for just scraps. Starting back, I probably have enough content to create a weekly update for quite some time. Will he have more followers than me? Will you follow him? The answer is YES to both. OK, Fine. I just created one for him: @MrScraps. #InstaDog #InternetFamous

The Stats:

Total Posts: 582
Total Followers: 265
Total Following: 316

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Today is the 124th birthday of the Guatamalan muralist Carlos Merida.  I am a fan of mid-century murals and if they are mosaic murals, even better.  The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Carlos Mérida
OCCUPATION: Painter
BIRTH DATE: December 2, 1891
DEATH DATE: December 22, 1984
PLACE OF BIRTH: Guatemala City, Guatemala
PLACE OF DEATH: Mexico City, Mexico

BEST KNOWN FOR: Guatemalan muralist Carlos Mérida created work inspired by the social revolution in Mexico. An earthquake destroyed his mosaic murals in Mexico City in 1985.

From 1910 to 1914 Mérida traveled in Europe, living mainly in Paris, where he studied art and became personally acquainted with such leaders of the avant-garde as Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani. At the start of World War I in 1914, Mérida returned to Guatemala, where he had his first one-man show. In 1919, interested in the social and artistic revolution in Mexico, he went to Mexico City and became involved in that nation’s mural-painting renaissance, working as an assistant to the painter Diego Rivera. Mérida’s early work, like that of many of the Mexican muralists, was politically oriented and executed in a figurative style.

After 1927, when Mérida took a second trip to Europe, his art became less representational; he eventually developed his characteristic abstract style of geometrically conceived figures and forms. In his later works he combined modern European influences—Cubism and Surrealism, and the paintings of artists such as Paul Klee, Joan Miró, and Wassily Kandinsky—with aspects of Mayan art. Among his important works were mosaic murals for the Benito Juárez housing development in Mexico City (1952; destroyed in an earthquake in 1985) and for the Municipal Building in Guatemala City (1956).

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Today is the 107th birthday of the photographer Yousuf Karsh.

NAME: Yousuf Karsh
OCCUPATION: Portrait Photographer
BIRTH DATE: December 23, 1908
DEATH DATE: July 13, 2002
PLACE OF BIRTH: Mardin, Ottoman Empire
PLACE OF DEATH: Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.

BEST KNOWN FOR: Armenian–Canadian portrait photographer. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he is “one of the greatest portrait photographers of the twentieth century, [who] achieved a distinct style in his theatrical lighting.”

Yousuf Karsh was born in Mardin, a city in the eastern Ottoman Empire (present Turkey). He grew up during the Armenian Genocide where he wrote, “I saw relatives massacred; my sister died of starvation as we were driven from village to village.” At the age of 16, his parents sent Yousuf to live with his uncle George Nakash, a photographer in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada. Karsh briefly attended school there and assisted in his uncle’s studio. Nakash saw great potential in his nephew and in 1928 arranged for Karsh to apprentice with portrait photographer John Garo in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. His brother, Malak Karsh, was also a photographer.

Karsh returned to Canada four years later, eager to make his mark. In 1931 he started working with photographer John Powls, in his studio on the second floor of the Hardy Arcade at 130 Sparks Street in Ottawa, Ontario, close to Parliament Hill. When Powls retired in 1933, Karsh took over the studio. Karsh’s first solo exhibition was in 1936 in the Drawing Room of the Château Laurier hotel. He moved his studio into the hotel in 1973, and it remained there until he retired in 1992.

Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King discovered Karsh and arranged introductions with visiting dignitaries for portrait sittings. Karsh’s work attracted the attention of varied celebrities and on 30 December 1941 he photographed Winston Churchill, after Churchill gave a speech to Canadian House of Commons in Ottawa.

The image of Churchill brought Karsh international prominence, and is claimed to be the most reproduced photographic portrait in history. In 1967, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and in 1990 was promoted to Companion.

Of the 100 most notable people of the century, named by the International Who’s Who [2000], Karsh had photographed 51. Karsh was also the only Canadian to make the list.

In the late 1990s Karsh moved to Boston and on July 13, 2002, aged 93, he died at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital after complications following surgery. He was interred in Notre Dame Cemetery in Ottawa.

Karsh was a master of studio lights. One of Karsh’s distinctive practices was lighting the subject’s hands separately. He photographed many of the great and celebrated personalities of his generation. Throughout most of his career he used the 8×10 bellows Calumet (1997.0319) camera, made circa 1940 in Chicago. Journalist George Perry wrote in the British paper The Sunday Times that “when the famous start thinking of immortality, they call for Karsh of Ottawa.”

Karsh had a gift for capturing the essence of his subject in the instant of his portrait. As Karsh wrote of his own work in Karsh Portfolio in 1967, “Within every man and woman a secret is hidden, and as a photographer it is my task to reveal it if I can. The revelation, if it comes at all, will come in a small fraction of a second with an unconscious gesture, a gleam of the eye, a brief lifting of the mask that all humans wear to conceal their innermost selves from the world. In that fleeting interval of opportunity the photographer must act or lose his prize.”

Karsh said “My chief joy is to photograph the great in heart, in mind, and in spirit, whether they be famous or humble.” His work is in permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, Bibliotheque nationale de France, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the National Portrait Gallery of Australia and many others. Library and Archives Canada holds his complete collection, including negatives, prints and documents. His photographic equipment was donated to the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa.

Karsh published 15 books of his photographs, which include brief descriptions of the sessions, during which he would ask questions and talk with his subjects to relax them as he composed the portrait. Some famous subjects photographed by Karsh were Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Muhammad Ali, Marian Anderson, W. H. Auden, Joan Baez, Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Humphrey Bogart, Alexander Calder, Pablo Casals, Fidel Castro, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, Winston Churchill, Joan Crawford, Ruth Draper, Albert Einstein, Dwight Eisenhower, Princess Elizabeth, Robert Frost, Clark Gable, Indira Gandhi, Grey Owl, Ernest Hemingway, Audrey Hepburn, Pope John Paul II, Chuck Jones, Carl Jung, Helen Keller and Polly Thompson, Grace Kelly, Jacqueline Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, Peter Lorre, The Marx Brothers, Pandit Nehru, Georgia O’Keeffe, Laurence Olivier, General Pershing, Pablo Picasso, Pope Pius XII, Prince Rainier of Monaco, Paul Robeson, the rock band Rush, Albert Schweitzer, George Bernard Shaw, Jean Sibelius, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Andy Warhol, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

The story is often told of how Karsh created his famous portrait of Churchill during the early years of World War II. Churchill, the British prime minister, had just addressed the Canadian Parliament and Karsh was there to record one of the century’s great leaders. “He was in no mood for portraiture and two minutes were all that he would allow me as he passed from the House of Commons chamber to an anteroom,” Karsh wrote in Faces of Our Time. “Two niggardly minutes in which I must try to put on film a man who had already written or inspired a library of books, baffled all his biographers, filled the world with his fame, and me, on this occasion, with dread.”

Churchill marched into the room scowling, “regarding my camera as he might regard the German enemy.” His expression suited Karsh perfectly, but the cigar stuck between his teeth seemed incompatible with such a solemn and formal occasion. “Instinctively, I removed the cigar. At this the Churchillian scowl deepened, the head was thrust forward belligerently, and the hand placed on the hip in an attitude of anger.”

The image captured Churchill and the Britain of the time perfectly — defiant and unconquerable. Churchill later said to him, “You can even make a roaring lion stand still to be photographed.” As such, Karsh titled the photograph, The Roaring Lion.

However, Karsh’s favourite photograph was the one taken immediately after this one where Churchill’s mood had lightened considerably and he is shown much in the same pose, but smiling. It was announced on 26 April 2013 by the Bank of England that the more well-known image would be used on the new £5 note, to be issued in 2016.

In 2009, in Ottawa, Yousuf Karsh’s life and work were celebrated during Festival Karsh, a collaboration between the Canada Museum of Science and Technology and the Portrait Gallery of Canada.

He was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

Canada Post honoured the 100th anniversary of the birth of Yousuf Karsh by releasing an artist’s series of three stamps depicting Karsh images. The famous Churchill portrait figures on the International Rate stamp and has a face value of $1.60CAN, a lithe side-profile taken in 1956 of Audrey Hepburn graces the American Rate stamp with a face value of $0.96CAN, and a self-portrait of Yousuf himself viewing photographic plates appears on the Domestic Rate stamp with a face value of $0.52CAN. A souvenir sheet set depicting an additional 24 Karsh portraits of some of the world’s most famous and interesting persons includes among others: Walt Disney, Muhammad Ali, Mother Teresa, Humphrey Bogart, Indira Gandhi, Sophia Loren, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ernest Hemingway, Nikita Khrushchev, Martin Luther King, Pope John XXIII, Pablo Picasso, Dizzy Gillespie, and Queen Elizabeth II, further confirming the range and scope of Karsh’s work.

Karsh has influenced many other photographers in different styles to become more independent and further motivate other artists.

On December 3, 1959, Karsh appeared as a guest challenger on the TV panel show To Tell the Truth.

In 2005, the city of Ottawa established the Karsh Prize, honoring Ottawa photo-based artists, in honor of Yousuf and Malak Karsh. Karsh also photographed the Canadian rock band Rush for their 1984 album Grace Under Pressure. Geddy Lee of Rush has referred to the picture as a typical bar mitzvah photo.

In 2015, the International Astronomical Union and the Carnegie Institution for Science revealed the winners of a public competition to name five geologically significant impact craters on the planet Mercury imaged by the MESSENGER probe. By rule of the IAU, craters on Mercury are named after figures of historical significance in the world of art. In recognition of Yousuf Karsh’s outstanding contributions to portrait photography, one of the five impact craters was named Karsh.

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Today is the 132nd birthday of the French artist Maurice Utrillo.  His art is most widely recognized due to the reproductions into post cards of the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris.  The paintings are representations of how we wish we could see Paris now.  The world is a better place because Maurice was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Maurice Utrillo
OCCUPATION: Painter
BIRTH DATE: December 26, 1883
DEATH DATE: November 5, 1955
PLACE OF BIRTH: Paris, France
PLACE OF DEATH: Le Vésinet, France

Utrillo was the son of the artist Suzanne Valadon (born Marie-Clémentine Valadon), who was then an eighteen-year-old artist’s model. She never revealed who was the father of her child; speculation exists that he was the offspring from a liaison with an equally young amateur painter named Boissy, or with the well established painter, Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes, or even with Renoir.

In 1891 a Spanish artist, Miguel Utrillo y Molins, signed a legal document acknowledging paternity, although the question remains as to whether he was in fact the child’s father.

Valadon, who became a model after a fall from a trapeze ended her chosen career as a circus acrobat, found that posing for Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others provided her with an opportunity to study their techniques; in some cases, she also became their mistress. She taught herself to paint, and when Toulouse-Lautrec introduced her to Edgar Degas, he became her mentor. Eventually she became a peer of the artists she had posed for.

Meanwhile, her mother was left to raise the young Maurice, who soon showed a troubling inclination toward truancy and alcoholism. When a mental illness took hold of the 21-year-old Utrillo in 1904, he was encouraged to paint by his mother. He soon showed real artistic talent. With no training beyond what his mother taught him, he drew and painted what he saw in Montmartre. After 1910 his work attracted critical attention, and by 1920 he was internationally acclaimed. In 1928, the French government awarded him the Cross of the Légion d’honneur. Throughout his life, however, he was interned in mental asylums repeatedly.

Today, tourists to the area will find many of his paintings on post cards, one of which is his very popular 1936 painting entitled, Montmartre Street Corner or Lapin Agile.

In middle age Utrillo became fervently religious and in 1935, at the age of fifty-two, he married Lucie Valore and moved to Le Vesinet, just outside of Paris. By that time, he was too ill to work in the open air and painted landscapes viewed from windows, from post cards, and from memory.

Although his life also was plagued by alcoholism, he lived into his seventies. Maurice Utrillo died on 5 November 1955, and was buried in the Cimetière Saint-Vincent in Montmartre.

An apocryphal anecdote told by Diego Rivera concerning Utrillo’s paternity is related in the unpublished memoirs of one of his American collectors, Ruth Bakwin:

“After Maurice was born to Suzanne Valadon, she went to Renoir, for whom she had modeled nine months previously. Renoir looked at the baby and said, ‘He can’t be mine, the color is terrible!’ Next she went to Degas, for whom she had also modeled. He said, ‘He can’t be mine, the form is terrible!’ At a cafe, Valadon saw an artist she knew named Miguel Utrillo, to whom she spilled her woes. The man told her to call the baby Utrillo: ‘I would be glad to put my name to the work of either Renoir or Degas!'”

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Today is the 146th birthday of the French artist Henri Matisse.  If you have been to IKEA, you have seen his artwork.  For good or for bad, his art is recognized and helped to change the path of modern art.  The world is a better place because Henri was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Henri Matisse
OCCUPATION: Painter, Sculptor
BIRTH DATE: December 31, 1869
DEATH DATE: November 3, 1954
EDUCATION: Académie Julian, Paris, École des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, École des Beaux-Arts, Paris
PLACE OF BIRTH: Le Cateau, Picardy, France
PLACE OF DEATH: Nice, France

BEST KNOWN FOR: Henri Matisse was a revolutionary and influential artist of the early 20th century, best known for the expressive color and form of his Fauvist style.

Henri Matisse was born on December 31, 1869, and was raised in the small industrial town of Bohain-en-Vermandois in northern France. His family worked in the grain business. As a young man Matisse worked as a legal clerk and then studied for a law degree in Paris in 1887-89. Returning to a position in a law office in the town of Saint-Quentin, he began taking a drawing class in the mornings before he went to work. When he was 21, Matisse began painting while recuperating from an illness, and his vocation as an artist was confirmed.

In 1891 Matisse moved to Paris for artistic training. He took instruction from famous, older artists at well-known schools such as the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts. These schools taught according to the “academic method,” which required working from live models and copying the works of Old Masters, but Matisse was also exposed to the recent Post-Impressionist work of Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh while living in Paris.

Matisse began to show his work in large group exhibitions in Paris in the mid-1890s, including the traditional Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and his work received some favorable attention. He traveled to London and to Corsica, and in 1898 he married Amélie Parayre, with whom he would have three children.

By the turn of the 20th century, Matisse had come under the more progressive influence of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, who painted in a “Pointillist” style with small dots of color rather than full brushstrokes. He stopped exhibiting at the official Salon and began submitting his art to the more progressive Salon des Indépendants in 1901. In 1904 he had his first one-man exhibition at the gallery of dealer Ambroise Vollard.

Matisse had a major creative breakthrough in the years 1904-05. A visit to Saint-Tropez in southern France inspired him to paint bright, light-dappled canvases such as Luxe, calme et volupté (1904-05), and a summer in the Mediterranean village of Collioure produced his major works Open Window and Woman with a Hat in 1905. He exhibited both paintings in the 1905 Salon d’Automne exhibition in Paris. In a review of the show, a contemporary art critic mentioned the bold, distorted images painted by certain artists he nicknamed “fauves,” or “wild beasts.”

Painting in the style that came to be known as Fauvism, Matisse continued to emphasize the emotional power of sinuous lines, strong brushwork and acid-bright colors in works such as The Joy of Life, a large composition of female nudes in a landscape. Like much of Matisse’s mature work, this scene captured a mood rather than merely trying to depict the world realistically.

In the first decade of the century, Matisse also made sculptures and drawings that were sometimes related to his paintings, always repeating and simplifying his forms to their essence.

After finding his own style, Matisse enjoyed a greater degree of success. He was able to travel to Italy, Germany, Spain and North Africa for inspiration. He bought a large studio in a suburb of Paris and signed a contract with the prestigious art dealers of Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris. His art was purchased by prominent collectors such as Gertrude Stein in Paris and the Russian businessman Sergei I. Shchukin, who commissioned Matisse’s important pair of paintings Dance I and Music in 1909-10.

In his works of the 1910s and 1920s, Matisse continued to delight and surprise his viewers with his signature elements of saturated colors, flattened pictorial space, limited detail and strong outlines. Some works, like Piano Lesson (1916), explored the structures and geometry of Cubism, the movement pioneered by Matisse’s lifelong rival Pablo Picasso. Yet despite his radical approach to color and form, Matisse’s subjects were often traditional: scenes of his own studio (including The Red Studio of 1911), portraits of friends and family, arrangements of figures in rooms or landscapes.

In 1917 Matisse began spending winters on the Mediterranean, and in 1921 he moved to the city of Nice on the French Riviera. From 1918-30, he most frequently painted female nudes in carefully staged settings within his studio, making use of warm lighting and patterned backgrounds. He also worked extensively in printmaking during these years.

The first scholarly book about Matisse was published in 1920, marking his importance in the history of modern art as it was still taking place.

In his later career, Matisse received several major commissions, such as a mural for the art gallery of collector Dr. Albert Barnes of Pennsylvania, titled Dance II, in 1931-33. He also drew book illustrations for a series of limited-edition poetry collections.

After surgery in 1941, Matisse was often bedridden; however, he continued to work from a bed in his studio. When necessary, he would draw with a pencil or charcoal attached to the end of a long pole that enabled him to reach the paper or canvas. His late work was just as experimental and vibrant as his earlier artistic breakthroughs had been. It included his 1947 book Jazz, which placed his own thoughts on life and art side by side with lively images of colored paper cutouts. This project led him to devising works that were cutouts on their own, most notably several series of expressively shaped human figures cut from bright blue paper and pasted to wall-size background sheets (such as Swimming Pool, 1952).

In one of his final projects, Matisse created an entire program of decorations for the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence (1948-51), a town near Nice, designing stained-glass windows, murals, furnishings, and even sacred vestments for the church’s priests.

Matisse died on November 3, 1954, at the age of 84, in Nice. He was buried in nearby Cimiez. He is still regarded as one of the most innovative and influential artists of the 20th century.

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Today is the 104th birthday of Jackson Pollock.  Some of his art pushes some people’s definitions of art because they do not see it as a representation of anything they recognize.  Fortunately, the definition of art is not if someone can see a red barn on a grassy hill in it.  His art elicits emotions, questions and wonder; it draws the viewer in, blurs the periphery and creates a pure experience.  The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Jackson Pollock
OCCUPATION: Painter
BIRTH DATE: January 28, 1912
DEATH DATE: August 11, 1956
PLACE OF BIRTH: Cody, Wyoming
PLACE OF DEATH: East Hampton, New York
FULL NAME: Paul Jackson Pollock

BEST KNOWN FOR: Famous 20th century artist Jackson Pollock revolutionized the world of modern art with his unique abstract painting techniques.

Paul Jackson Pollock was born on January 28, 1912 in Cody, Wyoming. His father, LeRoy Pollock, was a farmer and a government land surveyor, and his mother, Stella May McClure, was a fierce woman with artistic ambitions. The youngest of five brothers, he was a needy child and was often in search of attention that he did not receive.

During his youth, Pollock’s family moved around the West, to Arizona and throughout California. When Pollock was 8, his father, who was an abusive alcoholic, left the family, and Pollock’s older brother, Charles, became like a father to him. Charles was an artist, and was considered to be the best in the family. He had a significant influence on his younger brother’s future ambitions. While the family was living in Los Angeles, Pollock enrolled in the Manual Arts High School, where he learned to draw but had little success expressing himself. He was eventually expelled for starting fights.

In 1930, at age 18, Pollock moved to New York City to live with his brother, Charles. He soon began studying with Charles’s art teacher, representational regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. Pollock spent much of his time with Benton, often babysitting Benton’s young son, and the Bentons eventually became like the family Pollock felt he never had.

When Pollock’s father died suddenly in 1933, he fell into a deep depression. He got drunk one night and started a fight with Charles’s wife, Elizabeth. During the fight, Pollock threatened her with an ax, and then turned around and sliced through one of his brothe’’s paintings, which had been scheduled for an upcoming exhibition. Pollock was forced to leave Charles’s house, and in 1934, his brother Sanford arrived in New York to help take care of him.

During the Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt started a program called the Public Works of Art Project, one of many intended to jumpstart the economy. Artists such as Pollock were given $24.86 to do 20 hours of work a week. The program resulted in thousands of works of art by Pollock and contemporaries such as José Clemente Orozco, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko.

But despite being busy with work, Pollock could not stop drinking. In 1937, he began receiving psychiatric treatment for alcoholism from a Jungian analyst who fueled his interest in symbolism and Native American art. In 1939, Pollock discovered Pablo Picasso‘s show at the Museum of Modern Art. Picasso’s artistic experimentation encouraged Pollock to push the boundaries of his own work.

“Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was.”

In 1942, Pollock met Lee Krasner, a Jewish contemporary artist and an established painter in her own right, at a party. She later visited Pollock at his studio and was impressed with his art. They soon became romantically involved.

Around this time, Peggy Guggenheim began expressing interest in Pollock’s paintings. During a meeting she had with the painter Pete Norman, he saw some of Pollock’s paintings lying on the floor and commented that Pollock’s art was possibly the most original American art he had seen. Guggenheim immediately put Pollock on contract.

Krasner and Pollock married in October 1945, and with the help of a $2,000 loan from Guggenheim, bought a farmhouse in the Springs area of East Hampton, on Long Island. Guggenheim gave Pollock a stipend to work, and Krasner dedicated her time to helping promote and manage his artwork. Pollock was happy to be in the country again, surrounded by nature, which had a major impact on his projects. He was energized by his new surroundings and by his supportive wife. In 1946, he converted the barn to a private studio, where he continued to develop his “drip” technique, the paint literally flowing off of his tools and onto the canvases that he typically placed on the floor.

In 1947, Guggenheim turned Pollock over to Betty Parsons, who was not able to pay him a stipend but would give him money as his artwork sold.

Pollock’s most famous paintings were made during this “drip period” between 1947 and 1950. He became wildly popular after being featured in a four-page spread, on August 8, 1949, in Life magazine. The article asked of Pollock, “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” The Life article changed Pollock’s life overnight. Many other artists resented his fame, and some of his friends suddenly became competitors. As his fame grew, some critics began calling Pollock a fraud, causing even him to question his own work. During this time he would often look to Krasner to determine which paintings were good, unable to make the differentiation himself.

In 1949, Pollock’s show at the Betty Parsons Gallery sold out, and he suddenly became the best-paid avant-garde painter in America. But fame was not good for Pollock, who, as a result of it, became dismissive of other artists, even his former teach and mentor, Thomas Hart Benton. Furthermore, acts of self-promotion made him feel like a phony, and he would sometimes give interviews in which his answers were scripted. When Hans Namuth, a documentary photographer, began producing a film of Pollock working, Pollock found it impossible to “perform” for the camera. Instead, he went back to drinking heavily.

Pollock’s 1950 show at the Parsons gallery did not sell, though many of the paintings included, such as his “Number 4, 1950,” are considered masterpieces today. It was during this time that Pollock began to consider symbolic titles misleading, and instead began using numbers and dates for each work he completed. Pollock’s art also became darker in color. He abandoned the “drip” method, and began painting in black and white, which proved unsuccessful. Depressed and haunted, Pollock would frequently meet his friends at the nearby Cedar Bar, drinking until it closed and getting into violent fights.

Concerned for Pollock’s well-being, Krasner called on Pollock’s mother to help. Her presence helped to stabilize Pollock, and he began to paint again. He completed his masterpiece, “The Deep,” during this period.

But as the demand from collectors for Pollock’s art grew, so too did the pressure he felt, and with it his alcoholism.

Overwhelmed with Pollock’s needs, Krasner was also unable to work. Their marriage became troubled, and Pollock’s health was failing. He started dating other women, and by 1956, he had quit painting, and his marriage was in shambles. Krasner reluctantly left for Paris to give Pollock space.

Just after 10 p.m. on August 11, 1956, Pollock, who had been drinking, crashed his car into a tree less than a mile from his home. Ruth Kligman, his girlfriend at the time, was thrown from the car and survived. Another passenger, Edith Metzger, was killed, and Pollock was thrown 50 feet into the air and into a birch tree. He died immediately.

Krasner returned from France to bury Pollock, and subsequently went into a mourning that would last the rest of her life. Retaining her creativity and productivity, Krasner lived and painted for another 20 years. She also managed the sale of Pollock’s paintings, carefully distributing them to museums. Before her death, Krasner set up the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, which gives grants to young, promising artists. When Krasner died on June 19, 1984, the estate was worth $20 million.

In December 1956, the year after his death, Pollock was given a memorial retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and then another in 1967. His work has continued to be honored on a large scale, with frequent exhibitions at both the MoMA in New York and the Tate in London. He remains one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.

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Today is the 129th birthday of the artist Juan Gris. When I see his art, I hear the jazz, see the dancers, smell the cigarette smoke and remember Paris in the 20s as I have read about it in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and The Sun Also Rises, Vail’s Everybody Was So Young and Tompkins’ Living Well is the Best Revenge. I feel Paris. The world is a better place because he is in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Juan Gris
OCCUPATION: Painter, Artist, Illustrator
BIRTH DATE: March 23, 1887
DEATH DATE: May 11, 1927
EDUCATION: Escuela De Artes Y Manufacturas
PLACE OF BIRTH: Madrid, Spain
PLACE OF DEATH: Boulogne-sur-Seine, France
FULL NAME: José Victoriano Carmelo Carlos González-Pérez

BEST KNOWN FOR: Spanish painter and illustrator Juan Gris was among the leaders of the Cubist movement in the early 20th century.

José Victoriano Carmelo Carlos González-Pérez was born on March 23, 1887, in Madrid, Spain. After studying mathematics, physics, engineering and mechanical drafting at the Escuela de Artes y Manufacturas in Madrid from 1902 to 1904, he embarked on a career as a professional illustrator under the name Juan Gris. He settled permanently in Paris in September 1906, where he met another gifted Spanish artist, Pablo Picasso.

Gris continued to submit illustrations to publications for several years, but he became heavily influenced by the paintings of Picasso and Georges Braque, the creators of Cubism. Devoting significant energy to his own painting after 1910, Gris initially produced works in the Analytic Cubist style, with his use of linear grids and lucid depictions. His Homage to Picasso was among the paintings exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1912, and that same year he signed a contract that gave German art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler exclusive rights to his work.

Gris’s focus soon drifted to Synthetic Cubism, a style marked by a more expansive use of colors and the addition of collage and other materials. The outbreak of World War I disrupted his business relationship with Kahnweiler, but Gris received financial help from writer Gertrude Stein, and he signed a new contract with French dealer Léonce Rosenberg in 1916.

Gris assumed a leading role within the Cubist movement during this time, producing paintings such as The Man from Touraine (1918), which were associated with a sense of classical order. He was awarded his first major solo exhibition at Rosenberg’s Galerie l’Effort Moderne in Paris in 1919, but was slowed the following year by an undiagnosed illness that may have been pulmonary tuberculosis.

Along with his painting, Gris designed costumes and sets for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and illustrated texts for Stein and other friends in the 1920s. He enjoyed increased public acclaim and financial security during this period but was unable to bask in his success for long due to declining health. Gris died of renal failure on May 11, 1927, in Boulogne-sur-Seine, France.

Source: Juan Gris – Painter, Artist, Illustrator – Biography.com

Source: Juan Gris – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source: Juan Gris

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P is for Perfect.

Jackson Pollock “Convergence” (1952)

Paul Jackson Pollock, known professionally as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was well known for his unique style of drip painting.

William Horatio Powell was an American actor. A major star at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, he was paired with Myrna Loy in 14 films, including the popular Thin Man series based on the Nick and Nora Charles characters created by Dashiell Hammett.

Pablo Picasso “Three Musicians” (1921)

Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, also known as Pablo Picasso, was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France.

“Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses.”

– Dorothy Parker [1893-1967]

Dorothy Parker was an American poet, short story writer, critic, and satirist, best known for her wit, wisecracks and eye for 20th-century urban foibles.

The Psychedelic Furs are an English rock band founded in 1977. Led by singer Richard Butler and his brother Tim Butler on bass guitar, the Psychedelic Furs are one of the many acts spawned from the British post-punk scene.

Eldred Gregory Peck was an American actor who was one of the most popular film stars from the 1940s to the 1960s. Peck continued to play major film roles until the late 1970s.

Vincent Leonard Price, Jr. was an American actor, well known for his distinctive voice and performances in horror films. His career spanned other genres, including film noir, drama, mystery, thriller, and comedy.

Sir Sidney Poitier, KBE, is a Bahamian-American actor, film director, author and diplomat. In 1964, Poitier became the first Bahamian and first African-American to win an Academy Award for Best Actor, for his role in Lilies of the Field.

I am taking part in the April A to Z Blog Challenge. Every day in the month of April, I will post a blog entry related to a letter of the alphabet. I gave it some thought and wanted to keep it in line with what I write about here on Waldina.com and came up with famous quotes, people that inspire and music that resonates with me.

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S is for Seattle.

“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”

– Gertrude Stein [1874-1946] Sacred Emily

Gertrude Stein was an American novelist, poet, and playwright. Born in the Allegheny West neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and and made France her home for the remainder of her life. A literary innovator and a pioneer of Modernist literature, Stein’s work broke with the narrative, linear, and temporal conventions of the 19th-century. She was also known as a collector of Modernist art.

Scritti Politti are a British new wave band, originally formed in 1977 in Leeds, Yorkshire, England, by Cardiff-born singer-songwriter Green Gartside. He is the only member of the band to have remained throughout the group’s history.

Barbara Stanwyck (born Ruby Catherine Stevens) was an American actress. She was a film and television star, known during her 60-year career as a consummate and versatile professional with a strong, realistic screen presence, and a favorite of directors including Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang and Frank Capra.

Siouxsie and the Banshees were an English rock band formed in London in 1976 by vocalist Siouxsie Sioux and bass guitarist Steven Severin.

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Francis Albert “Frank” Sinatra was an American singer, actor, and producer who was one of the most popular and influential musical artists of the 20th century. Sinatra’s music has been considered timeless by many.

I am taking part in the April A to Z Blog Challenge. Every day in the month of April, I will post a blog entry related to a letter of the alphabet. I gave it some thought and wanted to keep it in line with what I write about here on Waldina.com and came up with famous quotes, people that inspire and music that resonates with me.

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Today is the 112th birthday of the artist Willem de Kooning. He is one of the major influencers of abstract expressionism. The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Willem de Kooning
OCCUPATION: Painter
BIRTH DATE: April 24, 1904
DEATH DATE: March 19, 1997
EDUCATION: Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques
PLACE OF BIRTH: Rotterdam, Netherlands
PLACE OF DEATH: East Hampton, New York

BEST KNOWN FOR: Willem de Kooning was a Dutch-born American painter who was one of the leading proponents of abstract expressionism.

Born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 1904, Willem de Kooning embraced the artistic path at a young age, dropping out of school when he was 12 to begin an apprenticeship in commercial design and decorating. During this period, de Kooning took night classes at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques, and in the midst of his education, at age 16, he landed his first job in the industry, working with the art director of a large department store.

In 1926, de Kooning stowed away on a ship bound for the United States, where he jumped from various jobs in the Northeast until he eventually settled in New York City. While he worked for several years in commercial art and was not able to dedicate himself to his creative pursuits, de Kooning did find a like-minded group of artists in New York who encouraged him to paint for himself.

Around 1928, de Kooning began painting still lifes and figures, but it wasn’t long before he was dabbling in more abstract works, clearly influenced by the likes of Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró. As a young artist, he would have an unbeatable opportunity in 1935, when he became an artist for the federal art project for the WPA (Works Progress Administration), through which he created a number of murals and other works.

In 1936, de Kooning’s work was part of a Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) exhibit titled New Horizons in American Art, an early career highlight, but the following year his job with the WPA came to an abrupt end, when he was forced to resign because he was not an American citizen. Soon after, de Kooning began a series of male figures, including Seated Figure (Classic Male) and Two Men Standing. Also during this period, de Kooning hired an apprentice, Elaine Fried, and she would sit as a female subject for such works as Seated Woman (1940). That would be the artist’s first major painting of a woman, and he would go on to be chiefly known for his decades-long work in depicting women in his paintings. Married in 1943, de Kooning and Fried would have a fiery, alcohol-soaked life together before separating in the late 1950s for nearly 20 years. In the mid-1970s, they would reunite and remain together until her 1989 death.

Artistically, de Kooning kept on with his figure work while branching out into more abstract work as well, a notable example of which is The Wave. The abstract works began to reveal the presence of human forms within them, and his two artistic approaches merged in 1945’s Pink Angels, one of his first significant contributions to abstract expressionism. He he would quickly become a central figure in the movement.

In 1948, de Kooning would have his first solo show, at the Charles Egan Gallery. Also during this period, he joined academia, briefly teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and at the Yale School of Art.

In the 1950s, de Kooning turned his abstract sights to landscape painting, and the series Abstract Urban Landscapes (1955-58), Abstract Parkway Landscapes (1957-61) and Abstract Pastoral Landscapes (1960-66) would help define an era in his artistic life.

In 1961, de Kooning became an American citizen and settled in East Hampton, New York. He continued working through the 1980s, but the onset of Alzheimer’s disease destroyed his memory and impaired his ability to work. After his wife died in 1989, de Kooning’s daughter cared for him until his death in 1997, at age 92.

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Today is the 112th birthday of the artist Salvador Dali. My very favorite description of one of his pieces is that of the 1940 Painting “Daddy Longlegs of the Evening — Hope!” The painting depicts an elongated, seemingly molten human figure draped over a dead tree and trying to play a cello, while off to the left a horse is shot from a cannon. The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Salvador Dalí
OCCUPATION: Painter
BIRTH DATE: May 11, 1904
DEATH DATE: January 23, 1989
EDUCATION: Colegio de Hermanos Maristas and the Instituto, Academia de San Fernando
PLACE OF BIRTH: Figueres, Spain
PLACE OF DEATH: Figueres, Spain
FULL NAME: Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí y Domenech

BEST KNOWN FOR: Spanish artist and Surrealist icon Salvador Dalí is perhaps best known for his painting of melting clocks, The Persistence of Memory.

Salvador Dalí was born Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí y Domenech on May 11, 1904, in Figueres, Spain, located 16 miles from the French border in the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains. His father, Salvador Dalí y Cusi, was a middle class lawyer and notary. Salvador’s father had a strict disciplinary approach to raising children—a style of child-rearing which contrasted sharply with that of his mother, Felipa Domenech Ferres. She often indulged young Salvador in his art and early eccentricities.

It has been said that young Salvador was a precocious and intelligent child, prone to fits of anger against his parents and schoolmates. Consequently, Dalí was subjected to furious acts of cruelty by more dominant students or his father. The elder Salvador wouldn’t tolerate his son’s outbursts or eccentricities, and punished him severely. Their relationship deteriorated when Salvador was still young, exacerbated by competition between he and his father for Felipa’s affection.

Dalí had an older brother, born nine months before him, also named Salvador, who died of gastroenteritis. Later in his life, Dalí often related the story that when he was 5 years old, his parents took him to the grave of his older brother and told him he was his brother’s reincarnation. In the metaphysical prose he frequently used, Dalí recalled, “[we] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections.” He “was probably a first version of myself, but conceived too much in the absolute.”

Salvador, along with his younger sister Ana Maria and his parents, often spent time at their summer home in the coastal village of Cadaques. At an early age, Salvador was producing highly sophisticated drawings, and both of his parents strongly supported his artistic talent. It was here that his parents built him an art studio before he entered art school.

Upon recognizing his immense talent, Salvador Dalí’s parents sent him to drawing school at the Colegio de Hermanos Maristas and the Instituto in Figueres, Spain, in 1916. He was not a serious student, preferring to daydream in class and stand out as the class eccentric, wearing odd clothing and long hair. After that first year at art school, he discovered modern painting in Cadaques while vacationing with his family. There, he also met Ramon Pichot, a local artist who frequently visited Paris. The following year, his father organized an exhibition of Salvador’s charcoal drawings in the family home. By 1919, the young artist had his first public exhibition, at the Municipal Theatre of Figueres.

In 1921, Dalí’s mother, Felipa, died of breast cancer. Dalí was 16 years old at the time, and was devastated by the loss. His father married his deceased wife’s sister, which did not endear the younger Dalí any closer to his father, though he respected his aunt. Father and son would battle over many different issues throughout their lives, until the elder Dalí’s death.

In 1922, Dalí enrolled at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid. He stayed at the school’s student residence and soon brought his eccentricity to a new level, growing long hair and sideburns, and dressing in the style of English Aesthetes of the late 19th century. During this time, he was influenced by several different artistic styles, including Metaphysics and Cubism, which earned him attention from his fellow students—though he probably didn’t yet understand the Cubist movement entirely.

In 1923, Dalí was suspended from the academy for criticizing his teachers and allegedly starting a riot among students over the academy’s choice of a professorship. That same year, he was arrested and briefly imprisoned in Gerona for allegedly supporting the Separatist movement, though Dalí was actually apolitical at the time (and remained so throughout most of his life). He returned to the academy in 1926, but was permanently expelled shortly before his final exams for declaring that no member of the faculty was competent enough to examine him.

While in school, Dalí began exploring many forms of art including classical painters like Raphael, Bronzino and Diego Velázquez (from whom he adopted his signature curled moustache). He also dabbled in avant-garde art movements such as Dada, a post-World War I anti-establishment movement. While Dalí’s apolitical outlook on life prevented him from becoming a strict follower, the Dada philosophy influenced his work throughout his life.

In between 1926 and 1929, Dalí made several trips to Paris, where he met with influential painters and intellectuals such as Pablo Picasso, whom he revered. During this time, Dalí painted a number of works that displayed Picasso’s influence. He also met Joan Miró, the Spanish painter and sculptor who, along with poet Paul Éluard and painter René Magritte, introduced Dalí to Surrealism. By this time, Dalí was working with styles of Impressionism, Futurism and Cubism. Dalí’s paintings became associated with three general themes: 1) man’s universe and sensations, 2) sexual symbolism and 3) ideographic imagery.

All of this experimentation led to Dalí’s first Surrealistic period in 1929. These oil paintings were small collages of his dream images. His work employed a meticulous classical technique, influenced by Renaissance artists, that contradicted the “unreal dream” space that he created with strange hallucinatory characters. Even before this period, Dalí was an avid reader of Sigmund Freud‘s psychoanalytic theories. Dalí’s major contribution to the Surrealist movement was what he called the “paranoiac-critical method,” a mental exercise of accessing the subconscious to enhance artistic creativity. Dalí would use the method to create a reality from his dreams and subconscious thoughts, thus mentally changing reality to what he wanted it to be and not necessarily what it was. For Dalí, it became a way of life.

In 1929, Salvador Dalí expanded his artistic exploration into the world of film-making when he collaborated with Luis Buñuel on two films, Un Chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog) and L’Age d’or (The Golden Age, 1930), the former of which is known for its opening scene—a simulated slashing of a human eye by a razor. Dalí’s art appeared several years later in another film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), starring Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman. Dalí’s paintings were used in a dream sequence in the film, and aided the plot by giving clues to solving the secret to character John Ballantine’s psychological problems.

In August 1929, Dalí met Elena Dmitrievna Diakonova (sometimes written as Elena Ivanorna Diakonova), a Russian immigrant 10 years his senior. At the time, she was the wife of Surrealist writer Paul Éluard. A strong mental and physical attraction developed between Dalí and Diakonova, and she soon left Éluard for her new lover. Also known as “Gala,” Diakonova was Dalí’s muse and inspiration, and would eventually become his wife. She helped balance—or one might say counterbalance—the creative forces in Dalí’s life. With his wild expressions and fantasies, he wasn’t capable of dealing with the business side of being an artist. Gala took care of his legal and financial matters, and negotiated contracts with dealers and exhibition promoters. The two were married in a civil ceremony in 1934.

By 1930, Salvador Dalí had become a notorious figure of the Surrealist movement. Marie-Laure de Noailles and Viscount and Viscountess Charles were his first patrons. French aristocrats, both husband and wife invested heavily in avant-garde art in the early 20th century. One of Dalí’s most famous paintings produced at this time—and perhaps the best-known Surrealist work—was The Persistence of Memory (1931). The painting, sometimes called Soft Watches, shows melting pocket watches in a landscape setting. It is said that the painting conveys several ideas within the image, chiefly that time is not rigid and everything is destructible.

By the mid-1930s, Salvador Dalí had become as notorious for his colorful personality as his artwork, and, for some art critics, the former was overshadowing the latter. Often sporting an exaggeratedly long mustache, a cape and a walking stick, Dalí’s public appearances exhibited some unusual behavior. In 1934, art dealer Julian Levy introduced Dalí to America in a New York exhibition that caused quite a lot of controversy. At a ball held in his honor, Dalí, in characteristic flamboyant style, appeared wearing a glass case across his chest which contained a brassiere.

As war approached in Europe, specifically in Spain, Dalí clashed with members of the Surrealist movement. In a “trial” held in 1934, he was expelled from the group. He had refused to take a stance against Spanish militant Francisco Franco (while Surrealist artists like Luis Buñuel, Picasso and Miró had), but it’s unclear whether this directly led to his expulsion. Officially, Dalí was notified that his expulsion was due to repeated “counter-revolutionary activity involving the celebration of fascism under Hitler.” It is also likely that members of the movement were aghast at some of Dalí’s public antics. However, some art historians believe that his expulsion had been driven more by his feud with Surrealist leader André Breton.

Despite his expulsion from the movement, Dalí continued to participate in several international Surrealist exhibitions into the 1940s. At the opening of the London Surrealist exhibition in 1936, he delivered a lecture titled “Fantomes paranoiaques athentiques” (“Authentic paranoid ghosts”) while dressed in a wetsuit, carrying a billiard cue and walking a pair of Russian wolfhounds. He later said that his attire was a depiction of “plunging into the depths” of the human mind.

During World War II, Dalí and his wife moved to the United States. They remained there until 1948, when they moved back to his beloved Catalonia. These were important years for Dalí. The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York gave him his own retrospective exhibit in 1941. This was followed by the publication of his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942). Also during this time, Dalí’s focus moved away from Surrealism and into his classical period. His feud with members of the Surrealist movement continued, but Dalí seemed undaunted. His ever-expanding mind had ventured into new subjects.

Over the next 15 years, Dalí painted a series of 19 large canvases that included scientific, historical or religious themes. He often called this period “Nuclear Mysticism.” During this time, his artwork took on a technical brilliance combining meticulous detail with fantastic and limitless imagination. He would incorporate optical illusions, holography and geometry within his paintings. Much of his work contained images depicting divine geometry, the DNA, the Hyper Cube and religious themes of Chastity.

From 1960 to 1974, Dalí dedicated much of his time to creating the Teatro-Museo Dalí (Dalí Theatre-Museum) in Figueres. The museum’s building had formerly housed the Municipal Theatre of Figueres, where Dalí saw his public exhibition at the age of 14 (the original 19th century structure had been destroyed near the end of the Spanish Civil War). Located across the street from the Teatro-Museo Dalí is the Church of Sant Pere, where Dalí was baptized and received his first communion (his funeral would later be held there as well), and just three blocks away is the house where he was born.

The Teatro-Museo Dalí officially opened in 1974. The new building was formed from the ruins of the old and based on one of Dalí’s designs, and is billed as the world’s largest Surrealist structure, containing a series of spaces that form a single artistic object where each element is an inextricable part of the whole. The site is also known for housing the broadest range of work by the artist, from his earliest artistic experiences to works that he created during the last years of this life. Several works on permanent display were created expressly for the museum.

Also in ’74, Dalí dissolved his business relationship with manager Peter Moore. As a result, all rights to his collection were sold without his permission by other business managers and he lost much of his wealth. Two wealthy American art collectors, A. Reynolds Morse and his wife, Eleanor, who had known Dalí since 1942, set up an organization called “Friends of Dalí” and a foundation to help boost the artist’s finances. The organization also established the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.

In 1980, Dalí was forced to retire from painting due to a motor disorder that caused permanent trembling and weakness in his hands. No longer able to hold a paint brush, he’d lost the ability to express himself the way he knew best. More tragedy struck in 1982, when Dalí’s beloved wife and friend, Gala, died. The two events sent him into a deep depression. He moved to Pubol, in a castle that he had purchased and remodeled for Gala, possibly to hide from the public or, as some speculate, to die. In 1984, Dalí was severely burned in a fire. Due to his injuries, he was confined to wheelchair. Friends, patrons and fellow artists rescued him from the castle and returned him to Figueres, making him comfortable at the Teatro-Museo.

In November 1988, Salvador Dalí entered a hospital in Figueres with a failing heart. After a brief convalescence, he returned to the Teatro-Museo. On January 23, 1989, in the city of his birth, Dalí died of heart failure at the age of 84. His funeral was held at the Teatro-Museo, where he was buried in a crypt.

Source: Salvador Dalí – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source: Salvador Dalí – Painter – Biography.com

Source: Salvador Dalí – 300+ Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy

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Today is the 134th birthday of the man who is widely recognized as the co-founder of Cubism: Georges Braque. While his counterpart’s name is much more recognizable, his works in the genre are equal to Picasso’s and breathtakingly beautiful. The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Georges Braque
OCCUPATION: Painter
BIRTH DATE: May 13, 1882
DEATH DATE: August 31, 1963
EDUCATION: École des Beaux-Arts
PLACE OF BIRTH: Argentuil, France
PLACE OF DEATH: Paris, France
FRENCH LEGION OF HONOR AWARDEE

BEST KNOWN FOR: Georges Braque was a 20th century French painter best known for inventing Cubism with Pablo Picasso.

Georges Braque was a French painter born on May 13, 1882, in Argenteuil, France. He spent his childhood in Le Havre and planned to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather by becoming a house painter. From about 1897 to 1899, Braque studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in the evenings. Wanting to pursue artistic painting further, he moved to Paris and apprenticed with a master decorator before painting at the Académie Humbert from 1902 to 1904.

Braque started his art career using an Impressionistic painting style. Circa 1905, he transitioned into a Fauvist style after viewing works exhibited by the Fauves, a group that included such notable artists as Henri Matisse and André Derain. The Fauves’ style incorporated bold colors and loose-form structures to emulate deep emotions.

Braque’s first solo show took place in 1908 at Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s gallery. From 1909 to 1914, Braque and fellow artist Pablo Picasso collaborated to develop Cubism as well as to incorporate collage elements and papier collé (pasted paper) into their pieces.

Braque’s style changed after World War I, when his art became less structured and planned. A successful exhibition in 1922 at the Salon d’Automne in Paris garnered him much acclaim. A few years later, renowned dancer and choreographer Sergei Diaghilev asked Braque to design decor for two of his ballets at the Ballets Russes. The end of the 1920s saw another style change as Braque began painting more realistic interpretations of nature, though he never strayed far from Cubism, as there were always aspects of it in his works.

Braque started to engrave plaster in 1931, and his first significant show took place two years later at the Kunsthalle Basel. He gained international fame, winning first prize in 1937 at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh.

The advent of World War II influenced Braque to paint more somber scenes. After the war, he painted lighter subjects of birds, landscapes and the sea. Braque also created lithographs, sculptures and stained-glass windows.

In 1910 Braque met Marcelle Lapré, a model introduced to him by Pablo Picasso. They married in 1912 and lived in the small town of Sorgues in southeastern France. During World War I, Braque served in the French army and sustained wounds in 1915. It took him two years to fully recover.

In his elder years, his failing health prevented him from taking on large-scale commissioned projects. Braque died on August 31, 1963, in Paris.

Is the subject of books:
G. Braque, 1959, BY: John Russell
Braque, 1961, BY: Jean Leymarie
The Art of Georges Braque, 1968, BY: Edwin Mullins
Georges Braque: Life and Work, 1988, BY: Bernard Zurcher

Source: Georges Braque – Painter – Biography.com

Source: Georges Braque – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source: Georges Braque Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works | The Art Story

Source: Georges Braque

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Today is the 136th birthday of the fauvist painter André Derain.  The progression of his work through his lifetime is beautiful, I love looking at them chronologically.  He finds his style, perfects it and moves on to another style.  The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: André Derain
OCCUPATION: Painter, Illustrator
BIRTH DATE: June 10, 1880
DEATH DATE: September 8, 1954
EDUCATION: Académie Carrière, Académie Julian
PLACE OF BIRTH: Chatou, France
PLACE OF DEATH: Garches, France

BEST KNOWN FOR: André Derain was a French painter of the Fauvist school and a book illustrator. He was friends with Henri Matisse.

André Derain was born on June 10, 1880 in an affluent commune region west of Paris, France. At the age of 18 he took a painting class conducted by Eugene Carriere while studying to become an engineer at the Academie Camillo. It was there that he first met Henri Matisse. Two years later he would come to share a studio with Maurice de Viaminck. His first landscapes were created at this location around 1900.

The beginning of his career was interrupted after he was called to duty by the French Army in 1901. Mr. Derain served in the military for 3 years. After his release, his friend Henry Matisse lobbied André’s parents to allow their son to pursue his true love of art as opposed to concentrating on becoming an engineer. His mother and father subsequently relented to the Matisse idea and Derain enrolled at the Academie Julian in Paris.

Derain worked with Matisse in the summer of 1905 on the shores of the Mediterranean in southern France. He produced very unique paintings that were a short time later shown as part of the Salon d’ Automne. The bright and unusual color combinations of these works led critics to describe the paintings as “les Fauves”. The English translation is “wild beasts.” However, the attention given these pieces was widespread and eventually led to the art form being dubbed “Fauvism.”

Shortly thereafter, a respected art dealer by the name of Ambroise Vollard commissioned Derain to travel to London and compose a series of the city’s landscape. The result of this assignment was a collection of 30 paintings including scenes of the Tower Bridge and Thames. The vibrant colors and bold compositions were heralded as exceeding the likes of Monet and Whistler who had previously painted scenes of the English city.

In particular his interpretations of the Thames, he used a technique employing multiple dots, which came to be known as Pointillism. His separation of colors provided a wonderful sensation of the sunlight flickering off the water, which is an art form deemed as Divisionism.

When an art dealer purchased Derain’s entire collection in 1907, the artist found financial stability at age 27. With this, he moved to Montemartre to be near another artist he had befriended by the name of Pablo Picasso. In Montemartre, he also began to experiment with sculptures and moved from his Fauvism period to one of Cubism. At this point he was inspired by the works of Paul Cezanne. Derain also began to show an inclination towards the Old Masters in his art. 1911 to 1914 became known as his gothic period.

Derain’s livelihood was once again interrupted in 1914 by the military, when he was mobilized to serve during World War One. This portion of his life lasted until 1919. Upon his release from the Army, after the war, he was heralded as a traditionalist and a leader in the Classism movement. Also during this time period he produced a variety of projects including book illustrations and ballet designs. The high point in his career may have been being awarded the Carnegie Prize in 1928. A low point occurred in 1941 when he made a visit to Nazi Germany during that country’s occupation of France, which brought accusations of collaboration from many Parisians.

Derain died in 1954 at the age of 74 as a result of being struck by a motor vehicle on a French street.

Source: André Derain – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source: André Derain Art – 10+ Works, Bio, News | Artsy

Source: Andre Derain – WikiArt.org

Source: André Derain – Painter, Illustrator – Biography.com

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Today is the 134th birthday of the artist Edward Hopper.  I was first introduced to his art in that same college library where I read everything by the Lost Generation.  His artwork fit into the same time period and elicited that underlying feeling of lonliness and being set apart from your surroundings.  The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Edward Hopper
OCCUPATION: Painter
BIRTH DATE: July 22, 1882
DEATH DATE: May 15, 1967
PLACE OF BIRTH: Nyack, New York
PLACE OF DEATH: New York, New York

BEST KNOWN FOR: Artist Edward Hopper is the painter behind the iconic late-night diner scene Nighthawks (1942).

Edward Hopper was born in 1882, in NY, into a middle class family, which encouraged the art work and career that he wanted to pursue. From 1900 to 1906 he studied at the NY School of Art, and while in school, shifted from illustration to works of fine art. Upon completing his schooling, he worked as an illustrator for a short period of time; once this career path ended, he made three international trips, which had a great influence on the future of his work, and the type of art he would engage in during the course of his career. He made three trips to Europe between 1906 and 1910. In retrospect, Europe meant France, and more specifically, Paris, for Edward Hopper. This city , its architecture, light, and art tradition, decisively affected his development.

When he arrived in 1906, Paris was the artistic center of the Western world; no other city was as important for the development of modern art. The move toward abstract painting was already underway; Cubism had begun. There, in 1907, Picasso painted his legendary Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Hopper, however, later maintained that when he was in Paris he never heard of Picasso, who was to become so important for the development of modern literature. For Hopper, the encounter with Impressionism was decisive. The light in these paintings and the thematic treatment of architecture and nature particularly attracted him and were to influence all of his work. His reaction to the Impressionists is directly reflected in his own art. He forgot the dark, Old Master-like interiors of his New York student days, when he was influenced mainly by the great European artists – Goya, Caravaggio, El Greco, and Diego Velazquez. The influence of Impressionists, like Paul Cezanne, Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, is directly reflected in his own art. His palette lit up and he began to paint with light and quick strokes. Even in 1962, he could say, “I think I’m still an Impressionist.”
In 1910 Hopper returned to the United States, never to leave North America again. During the 1910s, Edward Hopper struggled quite a bit to gain any recognition for the works he had created. During this period a number of his works were distributed through various shows and exhibits in New York, but very little, if any attention, was given to his pieces. Oil painting was a focal point of the work he had done, but a majority of the sales he made during this period, was for works he had created doing etching work and murals.

At the age of 37, Edward Hopper received his first open invitation to do a one person exhibit, featuring some of this finest pieces of art. 16 pieces of his work were shown at the Whitney Club, and although none of the pieces were sold at this exhibit, it did point his career in a new direction, it got his art work out to the general public, and he became a more notable name in the type of work and the art forms which he most wanted to focus his career on, for the future works he would create.

A few years later, Edward Hopper found his career had taken a turn for the better, and he was doing well in sales, and financially with the works he had created. He was invited to do a second one person exhibit, to feature new works, and to create a buzz about the work he had created in recent years. The Frank KM Rehn Gallery in NYC, was where this second exhibit took place, and it received far more attention and a much larger crowd, due to the location where the exhibit was taking place, and also because of the fact that more people were now aware of the works Edward Hopper had created.

House by the Railroad, was a famous painting created by the artist, which was the first work to be acquired for the Museum of Modern Art, which had only recently been opened for general viewing. Strongly defined lighting, clearly defined lines, and cropped viewpoints, were some of the features which this art work captured; and, this embodied the style in which Edward Hopper would use later on in his career, and with the future works that he would produce during the course of his career as an artist.

In 1923, Edward Hopper married a fellow student who attended the NY Academy where he got his education, Josephine Nivision. Not only did she pose for nearly half of the female figure pieces which he created during his career, she also encouraged and pushed him to engage in different art forms during his career as well. She pushed him to work with water colors, and she kept records of all the pieces he designed, the exhibits he was to be a part of, and all of the sales of the pieces which were made, during these exhibits in which his work was presented.

In 1933, Edward Hopper received further praises for the works he had done, and for a piece that was on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. His highly identifiable style, and mature painting styles, were some things he had become known for during this period. The gorgeous landscapes, the quiet rooms and empty rooms he designed, and the transitory effect which many of his works posed, created a sense of contemporary life and a new style, which many in the art world recognized, and many praised him for this distinct style he had created in his art forms.

In Edward Hopper’s most famous piece, Nighthawks, there are four customers and a waiter, who are in a brightly lit diner at night. It was a piece created during a wartime; and many believe that their disconnect with the waiter, and with the external world, represent the feelings of many Americans during this period, because of the war. The piece was set up in 1942, in the Art Institute of Chicago, and was seen by many people while it was on exhibit for a show.

Between the 1930s and 1950s, Edward Hopper and his wife spent quite a bit of time, and most of their summers, visiting Cape Cod, Massachusetts. In many of the works that Hopper created during this period, many of the scenes, the common locations, and nearby attractions which they visited, were often seen in the art forms that he created during his career. He also started to travel further out, and visited regions from Vermont out to Charleston, in order to add more new points of interest to his collection, and to broaden the works and the locations which he would include in many of the images that he created over the course of his career.

Later in his career, many of his works were displayed in various exhibits, namely at the Whitney Museum, which was located in New York City. Later in his career, during the 1940s, was a period in which he found the most commercial success. But, soon after, and even during this time period, he began losing critical favors. This was namely due to the new forms of art, and the fact that abstract pieces were beginning to enter the art world, which took over the work he did, as well as the work of many famous artists prior to him.

His choices of subject matter – particularly the places he painted – seem to have been somewhat unpredictable, since they were part of his constant battle with the chronic boredom that often stifled his urge to paint. This is what kept Hopper on the move – his search for inspiration, least painfully found in the stimulation of new surroundings. As he explained to one critic:

“To me the most important thing is the sense of going on. You know how beautiful things are when you’re traveling.”

In the 1940s and 1950s, Hopper found himself losing critical favor in the wake of Abstract Expressionism. Among the new vanguard art movement emerged in the early 1940s, artists such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko advanced audacious formal inventions in a search for significant content. By breaking away from accepted conventions in both technique and subject matter, those artists made monumentally scaled works that stood as reflections of their individual psyches, and attempted to tap into universal inner sources. Even during this era of national prosperity and cultural optimism, Edward Hopper’s art continued to suggest that the individual could still suffer a powerful sense of isolation in post-war America. Hopper never lacked popular appeal, however, and by the time of his death in 1967, Hopper had been reclaimed as a major influence by a new generation of American realist artists.

Source: Edward Hopper – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source: Edward Hopper – Painter, Artist – Biography.com

Source: Edward Hopper

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Today is the 133rd birthday of the woman that said, “Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.”  Coco Chanel.  I admire a person that creates their life how they wish it to be.  Determination, focus, drive and perseverance.  Her life is as beautiful as her designs.  The world is a better place because she was in it and still feels the loss that she has left.

NAME: Coco Chanel
BIRTH DATE: August 19, 1883
DEATH DATE: January 10, 1971
PLACE OF BIRTH: Saumur, France
PLACE OF DEATH: Paris, France
REMAINS: Buried, Bois-de-Vaux Cemetery, Lausanne, Switzerland

BEST KNOWN FOR: With her trademark suits and little black dresses, fashion designer Coco Chanel created timeless designs that are still popular today.

Famed fashion designer Coco Chanel was born Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel on August 19, 1883, in Saumur, France. With her trademark suits and little black dresses, Coco Chanel created timeless designs that are still popular today. She herself became a much revered style icon known for her simple yet sophisticated outfits paired with great accessories, such as several strands of pearls. As Chanel once said,“luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury.”

Fashion fades, only style remains the same.

Her early years, however, were anything but glamorous. After her mother’s death, Chanel was put in an orphanage by her father who worked as a peddler. She was raised by nuns who taught her how to sew—a skill that would lead to her life’s work. Her nickname came from another occupation entirely. During her brief career as a singer, Chanel performed in clubs in Vichy and Moulins where she was called “Coco.” Some say that the name comes from one of the songs she used to sing, and Chanel herself said that it was a “shortened version of cocotte, the French word for ‘kept woman,” according to an article in The Atlantic.

Around the age of 20, Chanel became involved with Etienne Balsan who offered to help her start a millinery business in Paris. She soon left him for one of his even wealthier friends, Arthur “Boy” Capel. Both men were instrumental in Chanel’s first fashion venture.

It is always better to be slightly underdressed.

Opening her first shop on Paris’s Rue Cambon in 1910, Chanel started out selling hats. She later added stores in Deauville and Biarritz and began making clothes. Her first taste of clothing success came from a dress she fashioned out of an old jersey on a chilly day. In response to the many people who asked about where she got the dress, she offered to make one for them. “My fortune is built on that old jersey that I’d put on because it was cold in Deauville,” she once told author Paul Morand.

In the 1920s, Chanel took her thriving business to new heights. She launched her first perfume, Chanel No. 5, which was the first to feature a designer’s name. Perfume “is the unseen, unforgettable, ultimate accessory of fashion. . . . that heralds your arrival and prolongs your departure,” Chanel once explained.

In 1925, she introduced the now legendary Chanel suit with collarless jacket and well-fitted skirt. Her designs were revolutionary for the time—borrowing elements of men’s wear and emphasizing comfort over the constraints of then-popular fashions. She helped women say good-bye to the days of corsets and other confining garments.

Another 1920s revolutionary design was Chanel’s little black dress. She took a color once associated with mourning and showed just how chic it could be for eveningwear. In addition to fashion, Chanel was a popular figure in the Paris literary and artistic worlds. She designed costumes for the Ballets Russes and for Jean Cocteau’s play Orphée, and counted Cocteau and artist Pablo Picasso among her friends. For a time, Chanel had a relationship with composer Igor Stravinsky.

Another important romance for Chanel began in the 1920s. She met the wealthy duke of Westminster aboard his yacht around 1923, and the two started a decades-long relationship. In response to his marriage proposal, she reportedly said “There have been several Duchesses of Westminster—but there is only one Chanel!”

When I find a colour darker than black, I’ll wear it. But until then, I’m wearing black!

The international economic depression of the 1930s had a negative impact on her company, but it was the outbreak of World War II that led Chanel to close her business. She fired her workers and shut down her shops. During the German occupation of France, Chanel got involved with a German military officer, Hans Gunther von Dincklage. She got special permission to stay in her apartment at the Hotel Ritz. After the war ended, Chanel was interrogated by her relationship with von Dincklage, but she was not charged as a collaborator. Some have wondered whether friend Winston Churchill worked behind the scenes on Chanel’s behalf.

While not officially charged, Chanel suffered in the court of public opinion. Some still viewed her relationship with a Nazi officer as a betrayal of her country. Chanel left Paris, spending some years in Switzerland in a sort of exile. She also lived at her country house in Roquebrune for a time.

At the age of 70, Chanel made a triumphant return to the fashion world. She first received scathing reviews from critics, but her feminine and easy-fitting designs soon won over shoppers around the world.

In 1969, Chanel’s fascinating life story became the basis for the Broadway musical Coco starring Katharine Hepburn as the legendary designer. Alan Jay Lerner wrote the book and lyrics for the show’s song while Andre Prévin composed the music. Cecil Beaton handled the set and costume design for the production. The show received seven Tony Award nominations, and Beaton won for Best Costume Design and René Auberjonois for Best Featured Actor.

Coco Chanel died on January 10, 1971, at her apartment in the Hotel Ritz. She never married, having once said “I never wanted to weigh more heavily on a man than a bird.” Hundreds crowded together at the Church of the Madeleine to bid farewell to the fashion icon. In tribute, many of the mourners wore Chanel suits.

A little more than a decade after her death, designer Karl Lagerfeld took the reins at her company to continue the Chanel legacy. Today her namesake company continues to thrive and is believed to generate hundreds of millions in sales each year.

In addition to the longevity of her designs, Chanel’s life story continues to captivate people’s attention. There have been several biographies of the fashion revolutionary, including Chanel and Her World (2005) written by her friend Edmonde Charles-Roux.

In the recent television biopic, Coco Chanel (2008), Shirley MacLaine starred as the famous designer around the time of her 1954 career resurrection. The actress told WWD that she had long been interested in playing Chanel. “What’s wonderful about her is she’s not a straightforward, easy woman to understand.”

Source: Coco Chanel – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source: Coco Chanel – Fashion Designer – Biography.com

Source: Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel (1883–1971) and the House of Chanel | Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Source: Sleeping With the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War — By Hal Vaughan — Book Review – The New York Times

Source: Coco Chanel

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Today is the 117th birthday of the photographer Brassaï.  I learned about him while researching some of his contemporaries on their birthdays and became fixated on his nighttime Paris photos, the thick fog, the lights fighting to do their jobs and the Parisians that continue to live and love inside of all of it.  The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Brassaï
OCCUPATION: Poet, Photographer, Sculptor
BIRTH DATE: September 9, 1899
DEATH DATE: July 8, 1984
PLACE OF BIRTH: Brasso, Hungary
PLACE OF DEATH: Eze, France
FULL NAME: Gyula Halász

BEST KNOWN FOR: Brassaï was a Hungarian-born French photographer, poet, and sculptor who became known for his photographs of Paris nightlife in the 1930s.

BRASSAI took his name from the town of his birth, Brasso, in Transylvania, then part of Hungary, later of Roumania, and famous as the home of Court Dracula. He studied art at the academies of Budapest and Berlin before coming to Paris in the mid-twenties. He was completely disinterested in photography, if not scornful of it, until he saw the work being done by his acquaintance Andre Kertesz, which inspired him to take up the medium himself.

In the early thirties he set about photographing the night of Paris, especially at its more colorful and more disreputable levels. The results this project — a fascinatingly tawdry collection of prostitutes, pimps, madams, transvestites, apaches, and assorted cold-eyed pleasure-seekers — was published in 1933 as Paris de Nuit, one of the most remarkable of all photographic books.

Making photographs in the dark bistros and darker streets presented a difficult technical problem. BRASSAI”s solution was direct, primitive, and perfect. He focused his small plate camera on a tripod, opened the shutter when ready, and fired a flashbulb. If the quality of his light did not match that of the places where he worked, it was, for BRASSAI, better: straighter, more merciless, more descriptive of fact, and more in keeping with BRASSAI’s own vision, which was as straightforward as a hammer.

When Paris de Nuit was published, the great photographer and theorist Dr.Peter Henry Emerson, then approaching eighty, wrote BRASSAI in care of his publisher, asking BRASSAI to please send his proper address, so that Emerson could send him the medal that he had awarded him for his splendid book. It is an interesting comment on the chaotic incoherence of photographic history that BRASSAI had never heard of Emerson.

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Today is the 113th birthday of the artist Mark Rothko. His works are inspiring in their pure boldness. Photographs remove the texture and movement. The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Mark Rothko
BIRTH DATE: September 25, 1903
DEATH DATE: February 25, 1970
EDUCATION: Yale University
PLACE OF BIRTH: Dvinsk, Russia
PLACE OF DEATH: New York, New York
Originally: Marcus Rothkovitch

BEST KNOWN FOR:  Marc Rothko is best known as one of the central figures of the Abstract Expressionist movement in American art in the 1950s and ’60s.

Mark Rothko was born Marcus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, Russia (now Daugavpils, Latvia), on September 25, 1903. He was the fourth child of Jacob Rothkowitz, a pharmacist by trade, and Anna (née Goldin) Rothkowitz. The family immigrated to the United States when Rothko was 10 years old, resettling in Portland, Oregon.

Rothko excelled at academics and graduated from Portland’s Lincoln High School in 1921. He attended Yale University, studying both the liberal arts and the sciences until he left without graduating in 1923. He then moved to New York City and studied briefly at the Art Students League. In 1929 Rothko started teaching at the Center Academy of the Brooklyn Jewish Center.

In 1933, Rothko’s art was shown in one-person exhibitions at the Museum of Art in Portland and the Contemporary Arts Gallery in New York. During the 1930s, Rothko also exhibited with a group of modern artists who called themselves “The Ten,” and he worked on federally sponsored arts projects for the Works Progress Administration.

In the 1940s, Rothko’s artistic subjects and style began to change. Earlier, he had been painting scenes of urban life with a sense of isolation and mystery; after World War II, he turned to timeless themes of death and survival, and to concepts drawn from ancient myths and religions. Rather than depicting the everyday world, he began to paint “biomorphic” forms that suggested otherworldly plants and creatures. He was also influenced by the art and ideas of Surrealists like Max Ernst and Joan Miró.

In 1943, Rothko and fellow artist Adolph Gottlieb wrote a manifesto of their artistic beliefs, such as “Art is an adventure into an unknown world” and “We favor the simple expression of the complex thought.” Rothko and Gottlieb, along with Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman and others, became known as the Abstract Expressionists. Their art was abstract, meaning that it had made no reference to the material world, yet it was highly expressive, conveying strong emotional content.

By the 1950s, Rothko’s art was completely abstract. He even preferred to number his canvases, rather than giving them descriptive titles. He had arrived at his signature style: working on a large, vertical canvas, he painted several colored rectangles of color floating against a colored background. Within this formula he found endless variations of color and proportion, resulting in different moods and effects.

Rothko’s use of broad, simplified areas of color (rather than gestural splashes and drips of paint) caused his style to be categorized as “Colorfield Painting.” He painted in thin, layered washes of color that seemed to glow from within, and his large-scale canvases were intended to be seen at close range, to that the viewer would feel engulfed by them.

In the 1960s, Rothko began to paint in darker colors, especially maroon, brown and black. He received several commissions for large-scale public works during these years. One was a group of murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York’s Seagram Building, which Rothko never completed since he withdrew from the project; another was a series of paintings for a non-denominational chapel in Houston, Texas. Rothko consulted with the chapel’s architects, and the final product was the ideal space for contemplation of his stark, yet immersive, canvases.

Rothko was diagnosed with heart trouble in 1968 and suffered from depression. He committed suicide in his studio on February 25, 1970. He was survived by his second wife, Mary Alice Beistle, and by his children, Kate and Christopher. His personal holdings of nearly 800 paintings possession became the center of an extended legal battle between his family and the executors of the will. The remaining work was eventually divided between the Rothko family and museums around the world.

Source: Books That Shaped America | National Book Festival – Library of Congress

Source: Banned Books Week | Banned & Challenged Books

Source: Banned Books Week | Celebrating the Freedom to Read: September 25- October 1, 2016

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