Art Lovers discussion

You're welcome, love doing it ;-)

If I counted correctly we will be ending the month with the year 1938...
I could just go on in August and we'll be ending in the early seventies...
What do think?
This is a question for all of you ;-)
Is there anybody who would find it boring?
Another 31 years of abstract paintings?

I'm enjoying it, and it will be interesting to see how the art changes over the years.

Have a Happy Birthday!

HaPpY BiRtHdAy DIRK !!!

Thanks!

It's definitely the hottest birthday ever: all over Europe heat records are broken (an hour ago we had 40.6°C (105°F) here in Antwerp.
Normally my 9to5 is finished now, but I'm hesitant to go outside out of the A/C and get on my bike...
Let's post today's pics first.

Again two new names for 1932:
An Englishman and an Italian:

Ben Nicholson
(1894 – 1982)

Benjamin Lauder Nicholson, OM (Order of Merit) was an English painter of abstract compositions (sometimes in low relief), landscape and still-life.
Born in a family of artists he won the prestigious Carnegie Prize in 1952 and in 1955 a retrospective exhibition of his work was shown at the Tate Gallery in London. In 1956 he won the first Guggenheim International painting prize and in 1957 the international prize for painting at the Sao Paulo Art Biennial.


Painting
1932
Oil, pencil and gesso on board
H 74.6 x W 120 cm
Tate

Enrico Prampolini
(1894 – 1956)

Enrico Prampolini was an Italian Futurist painter, sculptor and scenographer. He assisted in the design of the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution[1] and was (like Gerardo Dottori) active in Aeropainting.


Superamento terrestre
1932

For 1933 a German artist who worked with and for Solomon Guggenheim, but was forgotten for 2 decades after Guggenheim died in 1949.

Rudolf Bauer
(1889- 1953)

Alexander Georg Rudolf Bauer (1889 – 1953) was a German-born painter who was involved in the avant-garde group Der Sturm in Berlin, and whose work would become central to the Non-Objective art collection of Solomon R. Guggenheim.

In 1917 Bauer was introduced to the Baroness Hilla Rebay von Ehrenwiesen. Rebay, also an artist, met Bauer at Der Sturm, and they became lovers. Bauer and Rebay shared a studio beginning in 1919, but her family did not approve of Bauer. In the early 1920s she traveled to Italy. She and Bauer would continue to write to one another regularly, but their relationship became platonic, though still fraught with difficulties.
In 1920 Katherine Sophie Dreier, the preeminent collector and co-founder of the Société Anonyme, with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, visited Berlin and bought several works by Bauer including the oil Andante V (now in the permanent collection of the Yale University Art Gallery). She would later write in 1949 that Bauer's paintings "were very beautiful and subtle in color and helped to introduce abstract art to the people. We had no artist in those early years whose work so appealed to the public in general and which received so much response."
Bauer remained in Berlin in the 1920s and continued to make both abstract, or as the movement came to be known, "Non-Objective" art [a translation of the German gegenstandslos], as well as figurative work to support himself. In 1927 Hilla Rebay traveled to the United States. A year later she began a portrait commission of copper magnate Solomon R. Guggenheim. Rebay showed Guggenheim Non-Objective art by Bauer and Kandinsky, and he decided to start a collection of the work.
In 1930 Solomon Guggenheim and his wife, Irene, traveled with Rebay to Germany to meet Bauer and Kandinsky. By this point, Bauer's work had moved from lyrical to geometric abstraction, which would dominate the rest of his artistic career. Guggenheim bought several of Bauer's new works and also put him on a stipend, which allowed Bauer to open his own museum for his work and the work of other Non-Objective painters such as Kandinsky. He called his museum Das Geistreich, or "The Realm of the Spirit."
In June 1937 Guggenheim formed the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for his collection, with Rebay as its official curator. The Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina, hosted the first public showing of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection of Non-Objective Paintings in March 1936. Bauer traveled to the United States for the first time to be present at the opening of the exhibition. From that show a solo show of his work traveled to the Arts Club of Chicago, where he also visited. There would be yearly showings of this collection for the next four years at various museums.
Bauer's life's work had become completely tied up in the Foundation, and he had been assured he would have a role in running it. This proved quickly not to be the case, and Bauer became very upset about the fate of his paintings. He stopped painting altogether, and made no further works the rest of his life, evidently not wanting to give the Foundation the satisfaction of having any more of his work. Eventually Bauer's relationship with Rebay became very strained, culminating in a libel suit against Rebay because Rebay had insulted Bauer's new wife, his maid Louise Huber, whom he had married in 1944.
In 1949 things changed drastically for Rebay when Solomon Guggenheim died. Within a couple of years of Solomon's death the trustees abandoned Guggenheim's original vision for the collection. Hilla Rebay was asked to step down as curator, and all of Guggenheim's Non-Objective collection was sent to storage. In 1953 Rudolf Bauer died of lung cancer. The newly renamed Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened in 1959 without a single work of Bauer's on its walls.
Bauer's work was basically unseen for the next two decades. In 1967 Bauer's work was shown at the Guggenheim in Seven Decades, A Selection for the first time since his death. In 1969 his work was given a large retrospective at the Galerie Gmurzynska in Cologne. This was followed by several solo exhibitions in New York and Europe. Since that time, Bauer's work has begun to get more attention from art collectors and museums. In 2005 the Guggenheim Museum mounted Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim, which featured many Bauer works and traveled also to the Museum Villa Stuck and the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin. A major retrospective of Bauer's work took place at Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco, in 2007. Weinstein Gallery also represents the artist's estate and archives. 60 of Bauer's drawings and paintings have been gifted to the Boca Raton Museum of Art.


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


Invention (Composition 31)
1933
Oil on canvas
130,5x130,5cm
Guggenheim
https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/462

For 1934 we have a minimalistic work of art:

Carl Buchheister
(1890–1964)
Carl Buchheister (17 October 1890 – 2 February 1964) was a German constructivist artist noted for his multiple series of "model paintings"at Galerie Lambert Weyl, Paris. which he began in 1925. He was born in Hanover, Germany. Although he was not officially part of the Bauhaus movement, Buchheister was a close friend of Wassily Kandinsky and paralleled many of the social and artistic goals of the Bauhaus school. With regard to constructivism, Buchheister was typically more playful and improvisational than his contemporaries, becoming interested in the Dada movement after a collaboration with Kurt Schwitters in the late 1920s which led him to incorporate more varied materials such as acrylic glass, aluminum, wood, and twine into his compositions. This direction was given much freer rein after World War II and the end of Nazism.

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



Komposition rotes Dreieck (Composition with red triangle)
1934
mixed media
50 x 35 cm. (19.7 x 13.8 in.)

For 1935 we go to America:

Balcomb Greene
(1904–1990)
Balcomb (John Wesley) Greene was born on May 22, 1904, Millville, New York.
He studied from 1922 to 1926 at Syracuse University, where he received his BA degree. In 1927 he studied English literature at Columbia University. Greene taught English literature at Dartmouth College from 1928 to 1931. In 1931 he went to Paris and studied art at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.
Greene and his wife, artist Gertrude Glass Greene, were heavily involved in political activism to promote mainstream acceptance of abstract art. They were founding members of the American Abstract Artists organization. His early style was completely non-objective. Juan Gris and Piet Mondrian as well as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse influenced his early style. From the 1940s his work "opened out to the light and space of natural form." He painted landscapes and figure. "He discerned the pain of a man, and hewed to it integrally from beginning to end…. In his study of the figure he did not stress anatomical shape but rather its intuitive, often conflicting spirit."

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



Untitled (35-7),
1935,
paper, pencil, and gouache on paper,
21.3 x 16.8 cm.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Patricia and Phillip Frost, 1986

Again three artists today, the first one featured in the quiz just a couple of days ago…

Clyfford Still
(1904 - 1980)

Clyfford Still was an American painter, and one of the leading figures in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, who developed a new, powerful approach to painting in the years immediately following World War II. Still has been credited with laying the groundwork for the movement, as his shift from representational to abstract painting occurred between 1938 and 1942, earlier than his colleagues like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, who continued to paint in figurative-surrealist styles well into the 1940s.

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


1936-7 No 2
1936
Oil on canvas
161x84 cm
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

For more on Clyfford Still, see this topic:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...


Arshile Gorky
(1904 - 1948)

Arshile Gorky was an Armenian-American painter, who had a seminal influence on Abstract Expressionism. He spent most his life as a national of the United States. Along with Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Gorky has been hailed as one of the most powerful American painters of the 20th century. As such, his works were often speculated to have been informed by the suffering and loss he experienced in the Armenian Genocide.

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



Child of an Idumean Night (Composition No. 4
1936
Oil on burlap mounted on paperboard
30,4x20,4cm
Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Smithsonian Institution



Victor Vasarely
(1906 - 1997)

Victor Vasarely was a Hungarian-French artist, who is widely accepted as a "grandfather" and leader of the op art movement.
Vasarely was born in Pécs and grew up in Pöstyén (now Piešťany, Slovakia) and Budapest, where, in 1925, he took up medical studies at Eötvös Loránd University. In 1927, he abandoned medicine to learn traditional academic painting at the private Podolini-Volkmann Academy. In 1928/1929, he enrolled at Sándor Bortnyik's private art school called Műhely (lit. "Workshop", in existence until 1938), then widely recognized as Budapest's centre of Bauhaus studies. Cash-strapped, the műhely could not offer all that the Bauhaus offered. Instead it concentrated on applied graphic art and typographical design.
In 1929, he painted his Blue Study and Green Study. In 1930, he married his fellow student Claire Spinner (1908–1990). Together they had two sons, Andre and Jean-Pierre. Jean-Pierre was also an artist and used the professional name 'Yvaral'. In Budapest, he worked for a ball-bearings company in accounting and designing advertising posters. Vasarely became a graphic designer and a poster artist during the 1930s combining patterns and organic images with each other.


Harlequin
1936
Oil on canvas
119x76 cm

Dirk wrote: "For 1935 we go to America:

Balcomb Greene
(1904–1990)
Balcomb (John Wesley) Greene was born on May 22, 1904, Millville, New York.
He studied from 1922 to 1926 at Syracuse University, where he re..."

Sorry, I have to repost the picture to reference:



I can't help but see this every time I look at this painting now, but I see an Olympic bobsledder, with his helmet and earmuffs on, ready to go down the hill. Oh! Or an astronaut...

Clifford Still

I don't like this at all! So macabre, almost evil or sinister. It makes me feel gloomy and weird inside. I don't even like to look at it and would never want to see it in a darker room or worse, a stairwell! I wonder what kind of person he was...

Heather wrote: "

Clifford Still

I don't like this at all! So macabre, almost evil or sinister. It makes me feel gloomy and weird inside. I don't even like to look at it and would never want to see it in a darker..."

Did you have a look at his surrealistic paintings I posted in the Quiz thread?
The all look like a sort of aliens ;-)

It feels very gothic though..dark,sinister and gloomy..with only a hand sticking out... I liked it.

And that red thing hanging down... like a bloody knife...

Yes I remember those, Dirk. I didn’t care for them and yes, they were... different, but they didn’t creep me out like this one does.

Yes..those alien like paintings are odd....

Heather wrote: "

Clifford Still

I don't like this at all! So macabre, almost evil or sinister. It makes me feel gloomy and weird inside. I don't even like to look at it and would never want to see it in a darker..."

But you are right ,seeing it in a dark room won't be a pleasant experience.
I like it beacause it gives me a Mystery of Udolpho , Castle of Ortranto and Northanger Abbey .ish feeling...

Geoffrey wrote: "Randomness does not make art. Art must have intent."

I agree.

For 1937 I have another American artist, an a reprise:


John Ferren
(1905–1970)

John Ferren was an American artist. In his 20s, he apprenticed as a stonecutter in San Francisco, California. He is noted for his success in France as an American artist. For a short time, Ferren was an art school student in San Francisco. By the mid-1920s, Ferren was producing portrait busts. It was also around this time that he became interested in Buddhist and Eastern philosophy. By the early 1930s, he was attending the Académie Ranson, and the Sorbonne, Académie de la Grande Chaumiere. -Although for the most part not formally educated, preferring to develop his art through an adventurous life style, and interaction with other artists, he was known as an intellectual among his peers. He wrote many published articles on abstract art and art theory.
While in Paris, Ferren was part of the community of artists working in Europe in the 1920s and 30s, including Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Hans Hofmann, Joaquín Torres-García, Alberto Giacometti, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Picasso. He became quite friendly with Picasso who mentored him, and together they stretched the canvas for Guernica, in 1937.
He returned from Europe to the United States in 1938, to live in New York City. He was a founding member (and later president) of The Club, a group of artists who were at the heart of the emerging New York School of abstract expressionism.
In the 1950s, Ferren collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock. In the movie The Trouble With Harry, the artworks of main character Sam Marlowe were painted by Ferren. In Vertigo, Ferren created the Jimmy Stewart nightmare sequence as well as the haunting Portrait of Carlotta.


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



Lutte as ciel
1937
oil on plywood
J. Donald Nicols Collection, Wake Forest University


And the second artwork from Paul Klee, we already had him for 1916, but he kept going strong till the end of his life:

Paul Klee
(1879 - 1940)

Paul Klee was a Swiss-born artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting for the Renaissance. He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.

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



Characters in Yellow
1937

The last day of the month gives us two relatively unknown artists one American, but bron in Ukrain and one from Canada and a reprise (from yesterday):


Boris Margo
(1902-1995)

Boris Margo, inventor, painter, sculptor, and printmaker, was born as Boris Margolis on November 7, 1902, in the small Ukrainian town of Volochisk.  He studied at the Polytechnik of Art in Odessa from 1918 to 1923. The following year, in Moscow, he participated in the Workshop for the Art of the Future known as Futemas, and between 1927 and 1929, he studied in Leningrad, first at the Hermitage and then with the cubist/surrealist painter Pavel Filinov at the Analytical School of Art.  In 1928, with the permission of the Soviet government to study abroad, Margo traveled to Montreal where he worked as a muralist before immigrating to the United States in 1930.  He began studying at the Roerich Museum and two years later was teaching there. 
In 1931, Margo began experimenting with celluloid and he developed the cellocut, a new approach to printmaking. He dissolved sheets of celluloid into a viscous liquid that he poured onto masonite and then worked the hardened surface with printmaking tools.
Margo married Jan Gelb in 1941 and became an American citizen in 1943. He joined the stable of artists with the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in 1947 and that same year his works were included in the exhibition of Abstract and Surrealists American Art at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of The Century Gallery, and he won the first of many purchase awards from the Brooklyn Museum.
Margo was visiting artist at the American University in Washington, D.C. in 1946 and in the late 1950s he was visiting professor for two years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1988 a retrospective exhibition of his work was mounted at the Provincetown Art Association. His work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Boris Margo died in Hyannis, Massachusetts on July 5, 1995.

No wiki page…
https://americanart.si.edu/artist/bor...



Untitled
1938

No wiki page…
https://americanart.si.edu/artist/bor...


Lawren Harris
(1885 – 1970)

Lawren Stewart Harris CC was a Canadian painter. He was born in Brantford, Ontario, and is best known as a member of the Group of Seven who pioneered a distinctly Canadian painting style in the early twentieth century. A. Y. Jackson has been quoted as saying that Harris provided the stimulus for the Group of Seven. During the 1920s, Harris' works became more abstract and simplified, especially his stark landscapes of the Canadian north and Arctic. He also stopped signing and dating his works so that people would judge his works on their own merit and not by the artist or when they were painted. In 1969, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada.


ABSTRACT PAINTING #98
1938
oil on canvas
73.7 by 91.4 cm.

http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/e...

And the man from yesterday, just because I like his work:

John Ferren
(1905 - 1970)



The desert
1938

Dirk wrote: "Only on pic for 1911:


Umberto Boccioni
(1882 - 1916)

Umberto Boccioni was an influential Italian painter and sculptor. He helped shape the revolutionary aesthetic of the Futurism movement as one..."

Carol She's So Novel꧁꧂ wrote: "That Klimt is amazing!"

That's a cool piece - like it very much.

Brianna wrote: "Dirk wrote: "Only on pic for 1911:


Umberto Boccioni
(1882 - 1916)

Umberto Boccioni was an influential Italian painter and sculptor. He helped shape the revolutionary aesthetic of the Futurism mo..."

If you like him, you can see more of him here:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...