Francesco Clemente is a contemporary Italian artist known for his dreamlike paintings based on esoteric themes of sexuality and spirituality. Working across oil painting, installation, and watercolour, Clemente’s works are characterized by their formal experimentation with symbols, portraiture, and the human figure.
After an early academic background in classical languages and literature, he briefly enrolled as an architecture student at the University of Rome, in 1970. Throughout the 1970s, he exhibited drawings, altered photographs and conceptual works across Europe. Since 1973 he has frequently resided and worked in India. In 1981 Clemente moved to New York City, where he currently lives with his wife and children.
Fascinated with Indian art and mysticism, his gouache paintings and pastel drawings are especially noted for their intense and arcane quasi-religious content that has grown increasingly surreal in his later works. Though large in scale, I think Clemente’s work often conveys an uncanny and unabashed intimacy and he helped reinvigorate painting by using recognizable human figures as his primary subject. I especially love the pastel color palette and blended brush strokes!
Otto Dix was a German painter and printmaker, known for his grotesque portrait paintings, brutal depictions of war and the Weimer society. Exposed to artwork at an early age, Dix spent a lot of time in his older cousin’s art studio, Fritz Amman who was a landscape painter. Between 1906 and 1910, he served an apprenticeship with painter Carl Senff, learning to paint landscapes. In 1910, he entered the Kunstgewerbeschule in Dresden (Academy of Applied Arts), where Richard Guhr was among his teachers.
To Beauty (1922)
WWI was an event that profoundly shaped Dix’s artwork. He volunteered for the War in 1915 and was discharged in 1918. Throughout the war, Dix kept a diary and sketchbook to record his experiences. His sketches served as material for a major series called, “The War” which was published in 1924. Most of these experiences were horrific and therefore many of his illustrations expressed some form of trauma. WW1 affected the development of Expressionism because many artists wanted to convey their emotional experience that affected them during the war. Whether because they were a soldier or not, they were emotionally scarred and wanted to show the emotional violence or hatred of the war.
Stormtroopers Advancing Under Gas (1924)
Dix later became a founder of the Dresden Secession group in 1919, during his expressionist phase. In 1920 he met George Grosz. Influenced by Dada, he began incorporating collage elements into his works, some of which he exhibited in the first Dada Fair in Berlin.
The Nun (1914)
Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1928)
Odilon Redon was a leading French artist of the Symbolism movement, a European movement at the end of the nineteenth century. He depicted a variety of motifs, including dreams, floral still lifes, landscapes, and mythological scenes. Early in his career, he worked almost exclusively in charcoal and lithography, works referred to as noirs. He made some 30 etchings and 170 lithographs over a period of twenty years his life and from 1870 to 1890, he predominantly worked with charcoal. The noirs exemplify Redon’s fascination with the impact and resonance of black. As with this lithograph, he printed almost exclusively using chine appliqué. Starting in the 1890s, he began to use pastel to add color to his charcoal works.
The Eye like a Strange Balloon Mounts toward Infinity (1882) https://mltshp.com/r/5HQ1
Head within an Aureole – Odilon Redon (1894–1895) https://i.redd.it/40is5htvs8b41.jpg
Redon was a symbolist, not a surrealist. He was connected to literature such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire and influenced by artists like Gustave Moreau and Goya, to whom in fact he dedicated a series of prints. He also developed a keen interest in Hindu and Buddhist religion and culture, which increasingly showed in his work. He was an unsuccessful art student at first. Very slowly, however, he taught himself the discipline of printmaking. It was his atmospheric and symbolist prints, with their dark and cloudy ground and their enigmatic figures, that finally began to win him some public attention. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Gallery in London.
The Dream (1904) https://i.redd.it/3rznv8z8vgr11.jpg
I was immediately drawn to his mysterious and disturbing art style and aesthetics because of how his work was so original and different from what other artists were creating during his time. Redon was a great artist who was a contemporary of the Impressionists without being one; who was close to Symbolism without letting himself become trapped by their lively aesthetic approach. I definitely did not expect to see this creepy and ominous yet stunning psychedelic art style from the Post-Impressionism time period. Although I probably would be too scared to look at his drawings in the middle of the night!
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) was a seminal French painter who championed Neoclassicism during a period that saw the rise of Romantic painters like Eugène Delacroix.
Though Ingres was an artist known to follow his own impulses he was still a devout student of cultural conservatism, never straying completely from Neoclassical’s new but traditional beliefs. As his father was an artist, Ingres likely began training at an early age. He studied under Jacques-Louis David for four years and was profoundly influenced by him, as well as by the works of antiquity he saw in the Louvre. Ingres considered himself the protector of French academic orthodoxy and fought against the rising popularity of Romanticism. He did not enjoy painting violent battle scenes like others during his time did. Instead, he took inspiration from Orientalism and he saw himself as a history painter, the highest goal of academic art which centered on study from the nude and classical art. Under the influence of Italian art, particularly Raphael, Ingres mastered portraiture. After his death in 1867, Ingres left behind many fans but no pupils to carry on the Neoclassicism legacy.
My first impression of Ingres’ work was that it seemed very dramatic, eventful, and passionate. It appears very monotone, but I think Ingres created great depth with his values and uses great contrast between subject and background. The attention to detail put into the pieces amazes me and I thoroughly adore the way he paints fabric and clothing in general.
Bosch is a well-known Dutch 15th century artist, known for his surrealistic depictions of scenes derived from religious beliefs. Although little is known about his life, we know that he was born sometime between 1450–1456 and that his birth name was Jheronimus Van Aken. Bosch was very well-known throughout Europe in his lifetime. He is also believed to have been a well-educated man and relatively affluent. And after his death, his art was widely imitated and copied. He received many commissions relating to religious themes while staying in Hertogenbosch, a city located in North Brabant, Netherlands. His early work was very conventional, and the unusual style and biblical references developed later. As his city belonged to the Roman Empire, we can speculate that he might have had access to classical Roman art and would have been somewhat influenced by the art of the Renaissance.
The Garden of Earthly Delights, oil on canvas, 1515 Adoration of the Magi, oil on panel, 1500 The Hermit Saints, oil on panel, 1493The Last Judgement, oil on wood, 1482 The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things, oil on wood, 1500
I gravitate towards the surrealistic and sinister style Bosch beautifully achieves. No other artist from that period (from what I’ve seen) consistently created non-traditional images throughout every painting. Although only twenty-five paintings and eight drawings remain, his creative imagery and his use of earthy, warm-toned colours really attracted me to his paintings. An interesting thing I noticed is that he creates many triptych paintings and effectively use this layout to communicate a story. Bosch was successful with the Habsburgs, who found his work desirable and collected it. Therefore, today his masterworks can be found in Madrid and Vienna.
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