Category: 131 R

Frida Kahlo was born in 1907 in Coyoacán, Mexico, at the Casa Azul, which was her home for most of her life, although she spent the majority of her life claiming she was born in 1910: in part because she was younger than her peers in school due to having been infected with Polio as a child, but mostly because she wanted to be known as a child of the Mexican revolution, which began in 1910. Frida enjoyed art as a child, but was quite academically inclined and was well on her way to medical school until she was in a tragic bus accident at the age of 18.

On her way home from school, the wooden bus Frida was riding collided with a streetcar. She was very badly injured: she fractured multiple ribs, her collarbone, both her legs, and she was impaled through her pelvis by an iron handrail. This left her bedridden and unable to walk for 3 months, she turned to art. Her parents set up an easel and mirror that allowed her to paint while in bed.

In 1928, she married the well known Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, who was 20 years older than her. Only a couple of years into their marriage they moved to the US for Diego’s work. Frida did not like it there, so they eventually returned to Mexico, much to Diego’s dismay. This caused some tension in their marriage, and they divorced in 1939. This proved to be a productive time for Frida’s career where she painted many of her important pieces. She remarried Diego one year later. Their marriage was marked with infidelity and affairs.

Frida never had it easy in terms of health and suffered quite a bit. As her health began to decline she got increasingly confined to the Casa Azul. She had her first solo show in Mexico in 1953 but had been put on bed rest by her doctors. Determined she had to be there, she had her bed moved to the gallery and arrived at the show in an ambulance.

Throughout her life, Frida was an active member of the Mexican Communist Party, was very passionate about her Mexican culture and heritage, and expressed her feminist and anti-colonialist ideals through traditional indigenous Mexican peasant clothing.

Frida’s main subject was herself, painting a total of 55 portraits in her lifetime. In a style that combined realism and fantasy, she also commonly painted themes of identity, post-colonialism, gender, class and race in Mexican society. Although she is sometimes classified as a surrealist, she strongly disagreed with this, once saying: ” this bunch of coocoo lunatics and very stupid surrealists”.

As she neared the end of her life, her paintings got darker in subject matter, often containing themes of terror, suffering, wounds and pain. After losing the bottom half of her right leg to gangrene and set off by another affair of Rivera’s, she attempted an overdose. The last words she wrote in her diary were “I joyfully await the exit — and I hope never to return”. Her cause of death was officially ruled to be a pulmonary embolism, but it was found that she had taken an overdose the same night she died. No autopsy was ever performed.

The home where she was born, lived and died is now known as the Frida Kahlo Museum. Although she remained relatively unknown until the late 1970s, by the 90s she had become an icon to Chicanos, feminism and the LGBTQ+ movements. Today Frida is “one of the most instantly recognizable artists.”

I LOVE THIS WOMAN SHE IS INCREDIBLE!

Sources

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9XYtPqWLB4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frida_Kahlo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0VwjzuEn7o

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frida_Kahlo_Museum

Philip Guston was born in Montreal in 1913 and moved to Los Angeles with his family when he was young. When he was 10 years old, his father hung himself. Philip found his body in their shed. This obviously had a profound impact on his life. As a kid, his preferred setting to draw in was inside a small closet lit by a hanging lightbulb.

When Guston was 14, he began painting when he started attending the LA Manual Arts High School. While he was there, he published a paper alongside Jackson Pollock that got them both expelled. After that, aside from a one-year scholarship at Otis Art Institute, he was mostly a self-taught artist. In his early career, Guston painted many murals.

He moved to New York in 1935 and began to teach and lecture in universities in 1941 at the School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa. He taught there until 1945. Other schools he taught at are Washington University in St. Louis, New York University, the Pratt Institute, and Boston University where he ran a monthly graduate seminar from 1973 until 1978.

In the 1950s, Guston moved away from mural painting and became a first-generation abstract expressionist (although he preferred the term New York School for the movement). In the late 60s, he began to get frustrated with abstraction and helped lead the transition from abstract expressionism to neo-expressionism. This transition led Guston’s style to become representational and cartoonish, which was widely misunderstood by critics and led him to isolate himself in his little art world. After 1968 his palette became limited and his pieces were very existential and sad.

I really really like his work, especially his later stuff. It’s so funky and I just really love it!!

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Guston

https://www.moma.org/artists/2419#works

Jean Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor. He was born in 1901 in Le Havre to successful wine merchants. Exposed to art during his childhood through art classes, he moved to Paris to study painting at the Academie Julian in 1918, where he met and formed friendships with many other well-known artists including Fernand Leger. Unsatisfied with academic art training, Dubuffet only stayed at the school for 6 months, after which he chose to go study independently. He ended up abandoning art for a while, turning instead to the family business of winemaking. He opened his own wine business which was quite successful.

In 1942, Dubuffet decided to devote himself back to art. he was most interested in painting subjects of everyday life: people sitting in the Paris Metro or people walking. He often painted individuals in cramped spaces, which had a psychological impact on the viewer.

In 1944, he had his first solo show at the Galerie Rene Drouin in Paris. This was his 3rd attempt to become an established artist (so be persistent!). In 1945, Dubuffet was impressed by a show of Jean Fautrier paintings: he viewed is as meaningful art that expressed the depth of a person. Shortly after this, he began to use thick oil paints mixed with various stuff for his pieces — mud, sand, coal, dust, straw, gravel. This led to some backlash from critics, who accused him of ‘anarchy,’ and ‘scraping the dust bin’.

Despite this, he quickly became successful when he moved to America. He was included in a Pierre Matisse exhibition in 1946. Matisse was an influential dealer of contemporary European art in America. Dubuffet’s work was placed alongside Picasso, Braque and Rouault. By the following year, Dubuffet had his first solo show in New York.

One of the most important things Dubuffet started was the Art Brut movement. ‘Art Brut’ means ‘raw art’ in french. He became very interested in art produced by non-professionals such as psychiatric patients, prisoners, and children. He collected this type of art and had exhibitions for the pieces. Inspired by the art he was collecting, he wanted to create art himself that was free from intellectual concerns. Many of his ‘art brut’ style pieces have been called primitive and childlike and compared to wall scratchings and children’s art.

From 1962 onwards, he limited his palette to red, white, black and blue, which makes his paintings from this time very cohesive. Near the end of the 1960s, he turned himself mostly towards sculpture.

I find some of Dubuffet’s work very childlike looking, but some of even those pieces contain really interesting and humorous subject matter, which I really appreciate. A lot of his later work with the limited colour palette I really enjoy.

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Dubuffet

https://www.moma.org/artists/1633

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/jean-dubuffet

Gustav Klimt was an Austrian symbolist painter in the last 19th and early 20th centuries. He was most interested in painting the female body and human figure in expressive and erotic ways that showed the domination of woman over man. He also painted many murals and landscapes of Attersee.

Klimt attended the University of Applied Arts in Vienna where he studied Architectural Painting from 1876-1883. He was poor during his time as a student but later gained popularity and wealth. He later became an honorary member of the University of Munich and the University of Vienna. Klimt received the Golden Order from Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria in 1888 and his painting Death and Life won him a prize in the World Exhibition in Rome in 1911.

Klimt’s “Golden Phase” was a period in his painting style that brought him very much positive critical reaction and financial success. He used gold leaf in his pieces throughout this time. His most well-known piece, The Kiss, came out of this period.

One of the most important things Klimt was a part of was leading the Vienna Secession Movement. The Vienna Secession was a movement of artists that revolted against academic art and provided exhibitions for unconventional and unknown young artists. He was a part of the movement from 1897 until 1908.

Although Gustav Klimt could be considered ‘unimportant’ in art history because he did not directly make any drastic changes, he was a very popular and influential artist. His most important influences include Egon Schiele and the expressionist movement. His mural work pioneered a union of art and architecture that went on to influence the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism.

Klimt didn’t care for censorship or criticism, in fact he fought against it, aiming to ‘shake up the establishment’. There was major controversy around a ceiling he was commissioned to paint in the Great Hall of the University of Vienna (Philosophy, Medicine, & Jurisprudence). The piece was criticized as ‘pornographic’. This was the last time Klimt took a public commission; his fame brought him many patrons, but he could afford to be selective.

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Klimt

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gustav-Klimt

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-gustav-klimt

Henri Rousseau was a french post-impressionist painter that began painting later on in his life. Rousseau studied law after high school, served in the army for 4 years and then spent much of his life working as a toll and tax collector for the Paris customs office.

Painting as a hobby, Rousseau eventually took early retirement to focus all of his time on painting. Having never received any formal artistic instruction, he was self-taught. Many critics took his self-taught, naive style as flat and childish, ridiculing him for it. His paintings were disproportionate and exaggerated, portraying images that made it impossible to distinguish between fantasy and reality. Despite the push back from critics, Rousseau was self-confident and had quite a sense of entitlement in his work.

Rousseau’s unique style was very primitive, serving as a driving force for surrealism and other avant-garde artists such as Picasso. Appreciative of Rousseau’s work, Picasso even held a banquet in his honour, showing many of his paintings. He also heavily influenced and got to exhibit with the Fauves. Additionally, Rousseau regularly exhibited at the ‘Salon Des Indépendants’. Despite all this, Rousseau didn’t become well until shortly after his death.

Henri Rousseau is known for his jungle scenes, despite the fact that he never left France and never saw a jungle in his life. His inspiration came from children’s book illustrations, botanical gardens he visited in Paris, as well as from stories he heard from soldiers who went on the French Exhibition to Mexico while serving in the army.

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Rousseau

http://www.henrirousseau.net/

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henri-Rousseau/Later-paintings-and-recognition

John William Waterhouse, nicknamed “Nino,” was born in Rome to two parents who were also painters. Growing up, Waterhouse was encouraged to draw, without a doubt having an influence on his eventual career.

Waterhouse attended the Royal Academy of Art in London, where he later held regular exhibitions of his art. Initially studying sculpture, he soon completely abandoned that direction and moved to paint.

Although he came a little bit too late to be considered a part of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, his style is very close to it. He is often associated with them because of their shared interest and inspiration from literary subjects such as Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare, Tennyson & Keats.

As well as being inspired by literary subjects, he also depicted many women from greek mythology and Arthurian legend. Waterhouse painted a lot of women, many of them about to die in or near water. The dramatic beautiful women he painted often included damsels in distress, enchantresses and the “femme fatale.”

John William Waterhouse had a good reputation among fellow artists, art critics, and the general public during his lifetime, although he fell out of popularity around the beginning of the 20th century along with other artists of similar style.

I really like Waterhouse’s work. His paintings are absolutely beautiful and the richness and vibrancy of the colours he chose are really enjoyable to look at.

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_William_Waterhouse

https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-William-Waterhouse

http://www.johnwilliamwaterhouse.com/

Caspar David Friedrich was a german romantic painter. He first studied at the University of Greifswald in Germany, where the art department is now named the Caspar David Friedrich Institut, in his honour. He went on to study at the Academy of Copenhagen, before settling in Dresden for the remainder of his lifetime.

Friedrich was elected a member of the Berlin Academy after two pieces of his were purchased by the Prussian Crown Prince, helping him more known. His altarpiece “Cross In the Mountains” also helped his name spread, but not for the best reasons. It was the first landscape in Christian art and was heavily critiqued because of that. In 1805, Friedrich won a prize, helping establish his reputation.

He was decently popular in his early career, but his reputation, unfortunately, declined over the last 15 years of his life, leaving him to die in obscurity. Romanticism went out of style, and Friedrich’s work was too original and personal to be understood by the public. Living in poverty and relative isolation near the end of his life, symbols of death began to appear in his paintings. Around this time, he was described by friends as “the most solitary of the solitary.”

He came back into the light at the beginning of the 20th century, over half a century after his death, when 32 of his pieces were featured in an exhibition in Berlin. This modern revival died out and he lost popularity once again post-war after the nazi party used his work to promote their ideologies. Friedrich later came back into acknowledgement around the 1970s.

Landscapes were Caspar David Friedrich’s specialty. Contemplative, emotional silhouettes, night skies, morning mists, barren trees and gothic ruins were all commonly found in his paintings. The gloominess can easily be attributed to Friedrich’s state of mind. Being familiar with death from an early age, losing his mother at the age of 7 as well as two sisters soon after. This most impactful loss in life though was surely his brothers, whom he witnessed fall through the ice of a frozen lake and drown. He was once described to be “surrounded by a thick, gloomy cloud of spiritual uncertainty.”

I personally really like Friedrich. His pieces evoke a lot of emotion, which I really appreciate, but I also really like and relate to him as a person. One of the reasons he fell out of popularity in his lifetime is said to have been because he was “too eccentric, melancholic and out of touch with the times,” which describes how I often feel myself.

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspar_David_Friedrich

https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/21-facts-about-caspar-david-friedrich

https://www.wikiart.org/en/caspar-david-friedrich/all-works#!#filterName:all-paintings-chronologically,resultType:masonry

Jan Steen was a Dutch painter who created about 800 pieces, 350 or so of them surviving today. He was a busy man. He painted various types of pieces including portraits, religious and historical scenes, but he was most well known for his genre paintings. Genre paintings simply portray everyday life. His paintings are said to portray a realistic image of 17th-century Dutch life.

His genre paintings are known for being chaotic. There is even a dutch expression inspired by him, “a Jan Steen household,” meaning a messy and chaotic house.

The son of a brewer, Jan Steen painting quite a few inns, and in order to make some extra income on the side, he opened a brewery and a tavern himself.

As well as the various other topics he was inspired by and liked to portray, he was heavily influenced by the world of theatre. Many of his pieces are quite theatrical in nature.

I personally really enjoy the chaotic and real nature of his pieces, as well as his sense of humour that is evident in many of his paintings.

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Steen

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jan-Havickszoon-Steen

https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio/artists/jan-havicksz-steen

http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/artists/181/jan-steen-dutch-1626-1679/

https://www.holland.com/global/tourism/discover-holland/traditional/dutch-masters/jan-steen-12.htm

https://www.wikiart.org/en/jan-steen/all-works#!#filterName:all-paintings-chronologically,resultType:masonry

There is a lot we don’t know about Bosch. He did not leave any diaries, journals or record of information about himself. We can only estimate when he was born and died. He didn’t date his paintings. There is even some mystery to which paintings can be accredited to him.

What we do know is that his father, grandfather and uncles were all painters, so it is assumed that one of them taught Bosch to paint. We can also determine that he was well educated based on the knowledge he displays in his paintings.

In his time, religion was still a major theme in painting. Artists stuck to painting reality & truth and venturing into the unknown or imaginary was not yet a thing; until Bosch came along.

The theme of religion was still present and heavily influential in Bosch’s paintings, but he took his own interpretation and imagination into it. Filled with symbolism, absurdity, and portrayals of the inner world and subconscious, his paintings were, to say it simply: different. Hieronymus Bosch is considered a revolutionary in his creation of beings and realms unknown to humans.

Bosch was a popular artist throughout Europe and received many commissions. Many people enjoyed and imitated his work. His fame definitely began during or very shortly after his lifetime.

His most famous painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights, has influenced many modern artists, designers and musicians. There have been songs, fashion collections and theatre/dance productions inspired by the piece.

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieronymus_Bosch

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/bosch-hieronymus/life-and-legacy/#biography_header

http://mentalfloss.com/article/83945/8-bizarre-facts-about-hieronymous-bosch

Born in Venice in 1430, Giovanni Bellini was an important Italian renaissance painter. Among his family of Venetian painters, he was the most well known. Son of Jacopo Bellini, brother of Gentile Bellini and brother in law to Andrea Mantegna, he was very much surrounded by painters.

Throughout the first two decades of his career, his work is heavily religious and traditional in focus, painting many madonnas, pietàs, and crucifixions. He later switched his focus over to the setting and scenery of his pieces, eventually becoming one of the most impressive landscape painters.

Bellini was very influential in the instruction of painters of the high renaissance in Venice, taking on many pupils throughout his time as a part of the Venetian School. Notably, he taught Giorgione and Titian, who both surpassed him in fame.

He was also known for his use of oil paints to convey light and colour incredibly well. His use of colour and lighting in his pieces makes it very easy to identify the season and time of day being portrayed.

Bellini was a very inventive and original painter. In his later years, he brought quite a humanistic quality to his paintings, especially showing a lot of human tenderness and softness in the people he painted. He was an important part of the transition into high renaissance painting.

I personally really like his work. His landscapes are pretty incredible.

Sources

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Giovanni-Bellini-Italian-painter

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/bellini-giovanni/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Bellini

https://www.wikiart.org/en/giovanni-bellini