Max Walter Svanberg

Max Walter Svanberg (February 21, 1912 – May 28, 1994) was a Swedish surrealist painter, illustrator, and designer. His most prevalent motifs were of women's bodies merged with elements of flora and fauna.
Born in Malmö, Sweden, Svanberg founded the Swedish artist group Imaginisterna in 1948, but left them soon after. In 1950, he published an album of lithographs. In 1953, he was invited to join a surrealist group in Paris led by André Breton. Svanberg exhibited at the Galerie de l’Etoile Scellee in 1955. In 1958, he illustrated an edition of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations.Wikipedia

 "Max is early in his life inspired by the female body, already as a 10 year old he makes sculptures in wood of women torsos.
Starts to work on technical school in the decoration department in 1929. Starts on Art School in 1931.
Exhibits his first pieces of art in 1935, some flower stilleben, but with a little touch of sureallism. In 1942 he starts the group Minotaur together with a.o. Hulten and Osterlin. In 1945 Jorn visits Malmoe, as he after the war is eager to seek for artists and inspiration after 5 years in the occupied Denmark, he meets Minotaur, and the artists in these circles.
In 1946 Svanberg creates the expression 'Imaginism' and most of the group Minotaur follows this direction.
In 1949 Jorn talks to Imaginisterne about Cobra, and they find that there are a lot of common interests, so Imaginisterne becomes the Swedish branch of Cobra, as Host was the Danish craddle for Cobra.
Svanberg participates in a few exhibitions, but gets after Cobra more and more inspired by the surrealism, which this lithograph shows, he makes a litograph for Cobra nr. 5. shown below.
During the 50's and 60's his pictures get more surrealistic, and very erotic, illustrated among others in the exhibition in Malmoe Kunsthal in the summer of 1979, the catalog is very fine documentation on Svanberg. "( www.cobra.li )

American Pin-Up artist Rolf Armstrong

Rolf Armstrong (April 21, 1889 – February 22, 1960) was an American painter of pin-up art.Rolf Armstrong was born in Bay City, Michigan on April 21, 1889, to Richard and Harriet (Scott) Armstrong. His father owned the Boy-Line Fire Boat Company, which included a line of passenger ships. Some were deployed in Chicago for use at the Chicago World's Fair there in 1893. However, the father's business and family were struggling, and the family homestead was lost to foreclosure. In 1899, the family moved to Detroit, Michigan.
Rolf's father died in 1903, and a year later he and his mother moved to Seattle, Washington, following the footsteps of his oldest brother, William, who had moved there a year earlier. By now Rolf's artistic interests were emerging to more than a part-time pleasure.He moved to Chicago in 1908, where he later studied at the Art Institute. He then went on to New York, where he studied with Robert Henri.

 

After a trip to Paris in 1919 to study at the Académie Julian, he returned to New York and established a studio. In 1921 he went to Minneapolis to study calendar production at Brown & Bigelow.
During the 1920s and 1930s, his work appeared on many pieces of sheet music, as well as on the covers of many magazines, most famously for movie fan magazines such as Photoplay and Screenland. His work mostly consists of women; Mary Pickford, Bebe Daniels, and Greta Garbo are just a few of the numerous he painted.
Armstrong's work for the Pictorial Review was largely responsible for that magazine achieving a circulation of more than two million by 1926. A year later, he was the best-selling calendar artist at Brown & Bigelow. In 1930, RCA hired him to paint pin-ups to advertise their products, and in 1933 the Thomas D. Murphy Calendar Company signed him to produce a series of paintings for their line.
Rolf Armstrong died in 1960 on the island of Oahu, Hawaii as one of the best "pin-up" artists of the first half of the twentieth century.Wikipedia

Surrealism Félix Labisse

French painter, illustrator and stage designer. he was of flemish and polish descent and worked in both france and belgium. On a visit to ostend in 1922 he met james ensor, whose lifelong friendship he later commemorated in bonjour m. ensor (1964; ostend, mus. s. kst.). In 1927 he set up his studio in ostend, where he was associated not only with ensor but also with constant permeke and léon spilliaert, and with the poets henri van de putte, jean teugels and michel de ghelderode, and the film maker henri storck.

 He was self-taught and strongly influenced at first by ensor. He sought to render both his own poetic reveries and the preoccupations of modern life through a technique of smoothly painted and strongly outlined violent colours. He specialized in images of a particular type of woman, at once strangely sensual and cold, whom he painted in blue and other exaggerated hues and who haunted his pictures like a mythical goddess, as in on the other side of the grape-harvest month (1980; ghent, priv. col.). In 1928 he and storck founded the ciné club in ostend, which disseminated avant-garde films by man ray, carl dreyer and fritz lang, and he made a film of his own, la mort de vénus . In 1930 he founded the literary review tribord , which ran to eight issues; collaborators included max jacob, franz hellens and jean teugels. (rogallery.com)

Art that inspires you 

Max Svanberg

Max Walter Svanberg (February 21, 1912 – May 28, 1994) was a Swedish surrealist painter, illustrator, and designer. His most prevalent motifs were of women's bodies merged with elements of flora and fauna.

Art that inspires you