Expressionism - Iberê Bassani Camargo

Iberê Bassani Camargo (1914, in Restinga Seca – 1994, in Porto Alegre) was a Brazilian painter, one of the greatest expressionist artists from his country.
Shortly after his death, the Iberê Camargo Foundation was created by his widow, Maria Coussirat Camargo. Since 2008 the Foudantion headquarters and museum is located in a building designed by Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza. Thousands of paintings by Camargo are on display there

 

Yasuo Kuniyoshi

Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1 September 1893– 14 May 1953) was an American painter, photographer and printmake
Kuniyoshi was born in Okayama, Japan in 1893. He migrated to America in 1906, choosing not to attend military school in Japan. Kuniyoshi originally intended to study English and return to Japan to work as a translator. He spent some time in Seattle, before enrolling at the Los Angeles School of Art and Design.Kuniyoshi spent three years in Los Angeles, discovering his love for the arts. He then moved to New York City to pursue an art career. Kuniyoshi studied briefly at the National Academy and at the Independent School in New York City, and then studied under Kenneth Hayes Miller at the Art Students League of New York.He later taught at the Art Students League of New York in New York City and in Woodstock, New York. Nan Lurie was among his students. Around 1930, the artist built a home and studio on Ohayo Mountain Road in Woodstock. He was an active member of the artistic community there for the rest of his life

Kuniyoshi was also known for his still-life paintings of common objects, female circus performers and nudes. Throughout Kuniyoshi’s career he had frequent changes in his art: methods and subject matter. In the 1920s, Kuniyoshi painted images that were more angular, somewhat Cubist style and a tilted plane that allowed him to paint the most detail for each object in his paintings. Kuniyoshi’s application of Cubism’s angularity can be seen in his painting titled Little Joe with Cow (1923). In these early paintings, Kuniyoshi was painting from a combination of his memory and imagination, which is a Japanese mode of thinking about painting. Instead of painting from life, like in Western painting, traditional Japanese painters typically paint the ideal image of a particular subject matter. Kuniyoshi combines this with Western painting in the way he applies the bold colors in oil on canvas; in Japan, traditional painters use ink on either silk or rice paper. These early paintings are the precursors to his mature style that we see in the 1930s.

It was in the 1930s that Kuniyoshi switched from painting from memory to painting from life. This change occurred after his two trips to Europe in 1925 and 1928 where he was exposed to French modern art. In 1928, Goodrich notes, Kuniyoshi spent most of his time in Paris, France with his friend Jules Pascin and it was in this later trip that Kuniyoshi realized that his art had grown stale.By switching to painting from life and incorporating perspective into his paintings, he was able to breathe life back into his images; the change in his style can be seen in Daily News (1935). In this painting it appears that the woman, who is seated in a chair, occupies space within the room depicted as opposed to appearing flat as in Little Joe with Cow. The sharp angles in the cow painting are gone in his painting of the woman, but the soft line work and bold use of colors are apparent in both images.

Kuniyoshi's "Artificial Flowers and Other Things" appeared in Whitney Museum's "Second Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting," which ran from November 27, 1934, to January 10, 1935, and included the work of one other Japanese-American artist, Hideo Noda.
Even in his images of women where they are full-bodied and seem to have a presence in the painting, such as the woman in Daily News, Kuniyoshi did not entirely throw out painting from memory. Goodrich points out that Kuniyoshi did not work with models for the entire painting process. Rather, the artist drew from the model in the early stages of a painting but eventually stopped using her after about a week, or so, and then would continue on from his memory, making adjustments as he saw fit.This desire to paint the ideal perfection of a subject was favored in Japanese art, whereas in Western traditions the painting is typically informed by the real object throughout the entire painting process.Wikipedia

Ken Kiff

Ken Kiff (29 May 1935 – 15 February 2001) an internationally known figurative artist, was born in Dagenham and trained at Hornsey School of Art 1955-61. He came to prominence in the 1980s thanks to the championship of art critic Norbert Lynton, and a cultural climate intent on re-assessing figurative art following the Royal Academy’s ‘New Spirit in Painting’ exhibition in 1981. He started exhibiting at Nicola Jacob’s gallery, moved to Fischer Fine Art in 1987 and finally to the Marlborough Gallery in 1990, by which time he had begun exhibiting internationally and had work in major public collections. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1991 and became Associate Artist at the National Gallery 1991-93. His 30-year teaching career at Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College influenced a generation of students.

 

 

 

 

 Despite his success, Kiff’s position was never a comfortable one. His commitment to the pictorial values of modernism, his deep respect for artists such as Klee, Miro or Chagall, and his ideas about painting were often at odds with prevailing assumptions. In contemporary debates around abstraction versus figuration he tended to push past the battle-lines: ‘colour thinking’ as opposed to ‘image thinking’, pictorial form versus representational meaning, in order to get at something beneath their seeming differences. Images themselves arose out of the stuff of painting and an intimate relationship with a technique. His deep personal knowledge of poetry and music informed his sense of a painting’s structure. He saw colour in terms of images and images in terms of colour, which constituted, as he saw it, “the natural complexity of painting”.

 

 

 

 

 Colour and colour relationships interacted in his paintings with a range of images evoking the blissfully radiant and lyrical to the comic and disturbingly grotesque. ‘Fantasy’ as he saw it ‘was a way of thinking about reality’. The matter-of-fact imagery of streets, houses, trees, animals and people was configured with dreamlike encounters and happenings in a way that invited the viewer into an internal world constantly using the external world as its subject-matter.
‘The Sequence’ begun in the 1970s, and by the time of his death, constituting nearly 200 works represented a striking formal innovation. Regarded by Kiff as a single work, it was a series of pictures (acrylic on paper), forming a chain, repeating and developing imagery and colour, and allowing their networks of association to move and develop laterally across many formats, with a single energy carrying them along.

 

 

 

 

 By the late 1980s his range of media had expanded to include woodcuts, monotypes, lithography and etching. He enjoyed how new ways of working with materials, the grain of the wood, for example, or the wax in the encaustics, could extend his visual thinking and force him to make decisions more quickly. He took great pleasure in collaborating with master printmaking technicians such as Dorothea Wight and Mark Balakjian in Britain, Erik Hollgersson in Sweden, and Garner Tullis in the US.Wikipedia

Expressionism Július Jakoby

Július Jakoby (born as Gyula Jakoby, Kassa, 28 March 1903 – Košice, 15 April 1985) was a Hungarianpainter living in Košice, a prominent figure of Hungarian and Slovak modernist art.His image is that of an loner, living on the fringe of society, struggling for survival at start. His work is deeply tied to the small town atmosphere of Košice and its people, whose macrocosm can be seen in most of his works. In formal terms his work reflects secessionist expressionism and symbolism of Konštantín Kövári-Kačmárik and the Hungarian symbolism of Károly Férenczy and József Rippl-Rónai.
The works of Július Jakoby are exhibited in Slovak national gallery, National Gallery in Prague and Hungarian National Gallery and in many Slovak art museums and private collections. The biggest collection of his work is held in East Slovak Gallery in Košice.Wikipedia

 

William Congdon

William Grosvenor Congdon (April 15, 1912 in Providence, Rhode Island – April 15, 1998 in Milan, Italy) was an American painter who gained notoriety as an artist in New York City in the 1940s, but lived most of his life in Europe
William Grosvenor Congdon was born on April 15, 1912, in Providence, Rhode Island, the second child of Gilbert Maurice Congdon and Caroline Rose Grosvenor, who married in 1910. Both parents came from rich families: the Congdons dealt in iron, steel and metals, while the Grosvenors owned a textile manufacturing business in Rhode Island. They had five children, all sons. William Congdon was the cousin of Isabella Stewart Gardner (the American, poet-critic Allen Tate's second wife) who is spoken of in personal letters between Allen Tate and Jacques Maritain (see pages 77–79 in John M. Dunaway's Exiles and Fugitives: The Letters of Jacques and Raissa Maritain, Allen Tate, and Caroline Gordon).After graduating from St. Mark’s School of Southborough, Massachusetts, he studied English Literature at Yale University and graduated in 1934. His cousin on his mother's side was poet Isabella Gardner. For three years, Congdon took painting lessons in Provincetown with Henry Hensche, followed by a further three years of drawing and sculpture lessons with George Demetrios in Boston and then Gloucester. For some months in 1934-35 he frequented the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

 In the 1950s Congdon was recognized as one of the leading painters in the United States and quickly attained an international reputation as an Abstract Expressionist. In 1951 Time magazine published a long article on him, and his works were selling well, attracting the attention of major museums. But once again he turned his back on his homeland to go and live in Italy, mainly in Venice, where he befriended Peggy Guggenheim who became a collector of his paintings.

 In the fall of 1979 Congdon moved his studio to an apartment adjacent to the Benedictine monastery Comunità Ss. Pietro e Paolo (Community of the Saints Peter and Paul) in Cascinazza, in the Milanese countryside of Gudo Gambaredo (Italy), where he would live for the rest of his life. He was aware that this was the last decisive move of his career; there would be no more traveling to far-flung places. At first, he was more than diffident towards his own “promised land”, but a few years later, the placid Lombardy plain, its florid meadows, the stark outline of its farmhouses, its low foggy sky, all found a vertical elevation in his paintings; they became the new points of reference for his imagination. Congdon now had to tackle a sky and earth that never seemed to change, that seemed the permanent heralds of death. In his diary he wrote that it was like going into exile from all that had previously supported, comforted, flattered and inspired him. In effect the demanding and unavoidable engagement with the land and the rhythm of the seasons had precise and decisive effects upon his art. From the early 1980s onwards, his draftsmanship became less taut, his paint less thick, his colors more sharply divided. While never totally denying a basis in naturalistic perception, the works of this new phase in his art reveal a greater degree of abstraction.
Congdon died on April 15, 1998, his 86th birthday. He painted up to a few days before his death. The palette range in his last painting reveals unusual combinations and contrapositions: for example, the sky in his very last work - Three Trees - is a startling innovation.Wikipedia

Sven "X-et" Erixson

Sven "X-et" Leonard Erixson (November 23, 1899 - May 17, 1970), was a Swedish painter and sculptor. Son of Alfred and Mathilda Eriksson, he was married to Ingeborg Erixson with whom he had two children; a son, the artist Sverre Erixson (born 1932) and a daughter, the actor Irma Erixson (born 1937)Erixson's journey to becoming an established artist was a long one. He started his apprenticeship to a master painter at age of 14. He continued his artistic education by studying decorative painting, while he took a position as a teacher of drawing at the Konstfack. This was followed by a year of study at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts, to which he later returned as a Professor of painting 1943–53.

 Erixson has an extensive and diverse artistic production. He has painted landscapes with figures, often with motifs from the south, city and port pictures, interiors, floral pieces. He drew inspiration from a variety of sources, ranging from Medieval Folk art to German Expressionism. He spent a significant time throughout his artistic life to travel. Which both has been the source of various motives, mostly from Spain and the south of France, but during his travels he was always keen on study both old masters and the biggest contemporary artists of his time. Goya and Velazquez at Museo del Prado; El Greco in Toledo; Paul Klee, Lovis Corinth, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele at the Bavarian National Museum.

 Erixson belong to Sweden's great modern painters, and his work is represented in most Swedish art museums. He was one of the artists who in 1932 started the artist led gallery 'Color and shape' (Färg och Form). His many artistic missions include frescos of Holy Cross Chapel at Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm (1938 to 1940), as well as his great fresco in the town hall of Huddinge (1948 to 1949), into which he wove his own childhood memories of the railroad town. Alongside his easel painting, Erixson often tried other artistic tasks, often involving his decorative imagination. For example, he created the theatrical decor of Garcia Lorca's Blood Wedding, 1944, decor and costume sketches to Aniara, 1959.Wikipedia