Romantic artist Eugène Delacroix

Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix( 26 April 1798 – 13 August 1863) was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school.
As a painter and muralist, Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement. A fine lithographer, Delacroix illustrated various works of William Shakespeare, the Scottish writer Walter Scott and the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix( 26 April 1798 – 13 August 1863) was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school.
As a painter and muralist, Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement. A fine lithographer, Delacroix illustrated various works of William Shakespeare, the Scottish writer Walter Scott and the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Classicism 

Hard-edge painting Deborah Remington

Deborah Remington (1930 – April 21, 2010) was an American abstract painter. Her most notable work is characterized as Hard-edge painting abstraction. Born in New Jersey, she became a part of the San Francisco Bay Area's Beat scene in the 1950s. In 1965, she moved to New York where her style solidified and her career grew substantially. A twenty-year retrospective of her work was exhibited at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in California, in 1983. Remington's work was a part of more than thirty solo exhibition and hundreds of group exhibitions including three Whitney Museum of American Art annuals. She was the descendant of artist Frederic Remington.

Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting.Wikipedia

Cubism Vicente Silva Manansala

Vicente Silva Manansala (January 22, 1910 - August 22, 1981) was a Filipino cubist painter and illustrator.
Manansala was born in Macabebe, Pampanga. From 1926 to 1930, he studied at the U.P. School of Fine Arts. In 1949, Manansala received a six-month grant by UNESCO to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Banff and Montreal, Canada. In 1950, he received a nine-month scholarship to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris by the French government.Marker (Macabebe, Pampanga Town hall.Manansala's canvases were described as masterpieces that brought the cultures of the barrio and the city together. His Madonna of the Slums is a portrayal of a mother and child from the countryside who became urban shanty residents once in the city. In his Jeepneys, Manansala combined the elements of provincial folk culture with the congestion issues of the city.

Manansala developed transparent cubism, wherein the "delicate tones, shapes, and patterns of figure and environment are masterfully superimposed". A fine example of Manansala using this "transparent and translucent" technique is his composition, Kalabaw (Carabao).

Vicente Manansala, a National Artist of the Philippines in Visual Arts, was a direct influence to his fellow Filipino neo-realists: Malang, Angelito Antonio, Norma Belleza and Manuel Baldemor. The Honolulu Museum of Art, the Lopez Memorial Museum (Manila), the Philippine Center (New York City), the Singapore Art Museum and Holy Angel University (Angeles City, Philippines) are among the public collections holding work by Vicente Manansala. Holy Angel University recently opened a section of its museum called The Vicente Manansala Collection, holding most of the estate left by the artist.He died on August 22, 1981 in Manila, Philippines due to cancer.Wikipedia

Alfonso Ossorio

Alfonso Angel Yangco Ossorio (August 2, 1916 – December 5, 1990) was an Filipino American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Manila in 1916 to wealthy Filipino parents from the province of Negros Occidental. His heritage was Hispanic, Filipino, and Chinese. Between the ages of eight and thirteen, he attended school in England. At age fourteen, he moved to the United States. Ossorio attended Portsmouth Priory (now Portsmouth Abbey School) in Rhode Island, graduating in 1934. From 1934 to 1938, he studied fine art at Harvard University and then continued his studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. He became an American citizen in 1933 and served as a medical illustrator in the United States Army during World War II.Wikipedia

 Alfonso Ossorio synthesized Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Art Brut styles over the course of his career. His early works were inspired by Surrealism, although he created these paintings by pouring oil and enamel paint onto canvas—a technique aligned with abstract expressionist art. A meeting with Jean Dubuffet sparked Ossorio’s interest in Art Brut, as he was drawn to the form’s shedding of fine art preconceptions. Ossorio’s career is marked by an oscillation between the influences of Jackson Pollock and Dubuffet—both of whom the artist was friends with—and experimentation with abstraction and figuration. “Congregations,” a series of Dubuffet-inspired assemblages, evoke a Catholic spirit and decorative energy that is characteristic of Ossorio’s paintings.(.artsy.net)

Avant Garde Art

Alfred Maurer

Alfred Maurer was one of the first American painters to reflect the influence of European modernism in his painting. Born in New York, Maurer studied in 1884 at the National Academy of Design, New York, where he became recognized as an accomplished painter of portraits inspired by those of James A. M. Whistler and American impressionist William Merritt Chase. From 1897–1914 Maurer lived in Paris where he became acquainted with fellow Americans Arthur Dove and Gertrude and Leo Stein. It was in the Stein’s salon, a well-known meeting place for Americans and modern French artists, that Maurer met Henri Matisse. The intense color and expressive freedom of Matisse’s fauvist paintings forced Maurer to reexamine the fundamentals of his art. Maurer’s painting between 1905 and 1914 became the work of an artist whose gift for lyric expression had been released for the first time. Using the bold colors of the fauve palette and the dark, rough outlines of pre-cubist art, Maurer attacked his canvases with renewed vigor. Widely respected by his avant-garde contemporaries, Maurer exhibited in 1909 at Alfred Stieglitz’s Gallery 291 in New York, in the 1913 New York Armory Show, and was an associate member of the modernist Salon d’Automne in Paris.

 In 1914, on the eve of World War I, Maurer permanently returned to New York. For Maurer the departure from Paris was painful, but he continued to increase his mastery of modernism, assimilating aspects of cubism and even venturing into abstraction at a time when such developments were anathema to popular opinion in the United States.
In 1924 the art dealer Ernest Weyhe purchased the contents of Maurer’s studio—more than 255 works—and Weyhe became his artistic representative, providing Maurer long-awaited financial security. At this point in Maurer’s career, Duncan Phillips began collecting Maurer’s works on Weyhe’s advice. The Phillips Collection owns five works by Maurer, four late oil paintings and one watercolor.(american art)
Highly respected today, his work met with little critical or commercial success in his lifetime, and he died, a suicide, at the age of sixty-four.

 

The Death of Socrates Jacques-Louis David

The Death of Socrates is a 1787 oil on canvas painting by the French painter Jacques-Louis David. Like many of his works from that decade, the painting focuses on a classical subject, in this case the story of the execution of Socrates, as told by Plato in his Phaedo. In this story, Socrates has been convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens and introducing strange gods, and has been sentenced to die by drinking poison hemlock. Socrates, rather than fleeing when the opportunity arises, uses his death as a final lesson for his pupils, and faces it calmly. The Phaedo, which depicts the death of Socrates, is also Plato's fourth and last dialogue to detail the philosopher's final days, which is also detailed in Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito.

 In the painting, an old man in a white robe sits upright on a bed, one hand extended over a cup, the other gesturing in the air. He is surrounded by other men of varying ages, most showing emotional distress, unlike the stoic old man. The young man handing him the cup looks the other way, with his face in his free hand. Another young man clutches the thigh of the old man. An elderly man sits at the end of the bed, slumped over and looking in his lap. To the left of the painting, the wall becomes an arch, with more men in the background.Wikipedia

 Classicism

 

Heinrich Campendonk

Heinrich Mathias Ernst Campendonk (born 3 November 1889 in Krefeld, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany – died 9 May 1957 in Amsterdam, Netherlands) was a painter and graphic designer born in Germany and became a Naturalized Dutch citizen.
Campendonk was the son of a textile merchant, stopped his textile apprenticeship in 1905. From 1905 - 1909, he received artistic education from Johan Thorn Prikker, a very progressive school for arts and crafts at the time. He became friends with Helmuth Macke, August Macke, Wilhelm Wieger, Franz Marc and Paul Klee during this time.

 He was born in Krefeld. He was a member of the Der Blaue Reiter group, from 1911 to 1912. When the Nazi regime came to power in 1933, he was among the many modernists condemned as degenerate artists, and prohibited from exhibiting. He moved to the Netherlands, where he spent the rest of his life working at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, first teaching Decorative Art, printmaking and stained-glass, then as the Academy Director. He died as a naturalized Dutchman.Wikipedia

Art that inspires you

George McNeil

 George McNeil, an Abstract Expressionist painter who turned to the use of vibrant colors and explosively painted figures in works that suggest the joyous anarchy of children's art, died on Tuesday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 86.The cause was congestive heart failure, said Julian Weissman of ACA Galleries, his dealer.Mr. McNeil was an important member of the second wave of Abstract Expressionists, the group of American artists including Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning who achieved fame in the 1940's and 50's. In the early 1950's he had four one-person exhibitions of abstract paintings at the Charles Egan Gallery, a leading center for the new style.But in the 1960's Mr. McNeil began to include roughly rendered figures in his canvases, prompting critics to associate his later work with the deliberately crude style of Jean Dubuffet and the heavily painted images of such artists as Asger Jorn. "I wanted to celebrate a Mediterranean, Dionysian sense of pictorial and human richness," Mr. McNeil wrote of these paintings, in which figures and backgrounds are carefully balanced in vivid near-abstractions.

 

He remained remarkably prolific until his death, regularly exhibiting new work. In recent years he began to include a wide variety of materials in his paintings, from sand to mops, scraps of cloth and images from magazines.His work also became more openly expressive of charged psychological states and violent emotions, as he based his paintings on such contemporary phenomena as disco dancing, punk rock and street life in New York City. As he wrote in 1984, expressionism of the sort he pursued "seems to demand extremism; to distort, disturb, negate and agitate seems to be the name of the game."

But his use of bold, bright colors and energetic compositions made his paintings seem as much playful as tormented. In a typical late painting, figures of widely disparate sizes appear as if seen from above, their thickly painted forms entwined on the canvas.
John Russell, reviewing a 1983 exhibition of Mr. McNeil's work in The New York Times, wrote: "The dark night of the soul plays no part in these paintings. McNeil sees the world as a place in which people kick up their heels as often as they can, and he has taught his paint to do the same."
Born in Brooklyn, Mr. McNeil attended Saturday art classes at the Brooklyn Museum as a high school student, and in the early 1930's studied with Jan Matulka, a Cubist painter influenced by Picasso. His understanding of modern art was strongly influenced by Hans Hoffmann, with whom he studied from 1932 to 1936.

In 1935 he joined the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, and the following year helped form the American Abstract Artists, a group that protested the rejection of contemporary American abstract art by most museums and galleries. Following service in the Navy during World War II, Mr. McNeil began a distinguished teaching career, first at the University of Wyoming and later at the University of California at Berkeley and the New York Studio School and the Pratt Institute in New York City.
As director of Pratt's evening program from 1948 to 1960 he hired fellow artists, including Philip Guston,Franz Kline and Adolph Gottlieb, as instructors. He remained on the Pratt faculty until 1980, and taught at the Studio School from 1966 to 1981.In 1969 Mr. McNeil received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1982 he was awarded a prize by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. (The New York Times )

Avant Garde Art 
 

Inji Jaber

Art allows me to express my emotions through a painting, as I did here. This painting represents a point in life that we all come to. Represented with the water is the overflow of mixed emotions I was experiencing at the time. The snake represents the things in life that we can’t control. And finally, the umbrella is turned inside out because sometimes it feels as if life has been turned inside-out.

Alberto Burri

Alberto Burri,  (born March 12, 1915, Città di Castello, Italy—died Feb. 13, 1995, Nice, France), Italian artist known for his adventurous use of new materials.
Burri was trained as a physician and began to paint only in 1944, while in a prisoner-of-war camp in Texas. About 1946 he moved to Rome and began to paint seriously. His early works—rags splashed in red paint to simulate blood-soaked bandages—grew directly out of his experiences as a doctor in the Italian army. He then began to produce works grouped into series according to the material used. The works of the earliest series (c. 1953) were made of coarse cloth stitched together. After 1956 he employed thin pieces of burned wood and layers of polyethylene in which holes were burned, creating a rich spatial network within the layers of plastic. The humble and sometimes crude materials used in these works contrast effectively with their elegant designs, and the easily destroyed materials form a perforated network over an impinging background field. In his series of metal works done after 1959, however, the solid material completely encloses the background field, although the metal is hammered from behind as if the imprisoned field were trying to break out.( Britannica)

 

New York School Michael Goldberg

Michael Goldberg (December 24, 1924 – December 31, 2007 was an American abstract expressionist painter and teacher known for his gestural action paintings, abstractions and still-life paintings. A retrospective show, "Abstaction Over Time: The Paintings of Michael Goldberg", is showing at MOCA Jacksonville in Florida from 9/21/13 to 1/5/14. His work was seen in September 2007 in a solo exhibition at Knoedler & Company in New York City, as well as several exhibitions at Manny Silverman Gallery in Los Angeles. Additionally, a survey of Goldberg's work is exhibited at the University Art Museum at California State University, Long Beach since September 2010.

 A veteran of World War II, Goldberg was one of the last few remaining survivors of the New York School; he was sometimes referred to as a member of the so-called "second generation" of Abstract Expressionists, although he began exhibiting his action paintings in important group shows in galleries in New York City in the early 1950s. Goldberg began taking classes at the Art Students League of New York at age 14. In the 1950s he studied painting with Hans Hofmann, and he discussed painting with Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko and several others of the New York School sometimes at The Eighth Street Club, a regular meeting place of modern artists working in and around Tenth Street in New York and sometimes at the Cedar Bar He began to exhibit his paintings in New York City during the early 1950s, and some of his abstract expressionist peers included artists like Joan Mitchell, Alfred Leslie, Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler, Knox Martin, Friedel Dzubas, Norman Bluhm and Sam Francis among others.

Michael Goldberg came into prominence in the late 1950s, early 1960s just as Color field painting, Hard-edge painting and Pop Art emerged onto centerstage. With the changing of fashions in the art world; his greatest accomplishments as a painter weren't sufficiently recognized; and as many of his generation his work was overlooked for many years. Although by the 1970s and 1980s his work began to achieve recognition and appreciation and he enjoyed a long, successful and a celebrated career as an abstract painter. His work like others of the abstract expressionist generation expressed a painterly integration of Western metaphysics and Eastern philosophy. Wikipedia