Jean Jansem

Hovhannes "Jean" Semerdjian (9 March 1920 – 27 August 2013), also known as Jean Jansem, was a French-Armenian painter. Jansem's artworks are internationally known, and are part of museum collections throughout France, Japan and the United States. A Foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia (2002).
He was awarded by the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1953 and by the Knight of the French Legion of Honour in 2003.The President of Armenia awarded Jansem a Medal of Honor for his “reinforcement of Armenian-French cultural ties.”
Hovhannes Semerdjian was born in 1920 in Bursa, Turkey. In 1922, his family fled to Greece. He spent his childhood in Thessaloniki.They arrived to Issy-les-Moulineaux suburb of Paris, France in 1931 when he was 11 and that is when he begin to paint. The first professional schools for Jansem became free academies of Montparnasse (1934-1936). He studied in the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs. His teachers were Brianshon, Legjon and Udon. Jansem also studied at the Sabatie studio for a year. Early paintings by Jansem were mainly to national issues. He had individual exhibitions in Paris, New York, Chicago, London, Tokyo, Rome, Brussels, Lausanne, Beirut etc. Hovhannes Semerdjian was elected the President of the Young Artists' Saloon in 1956.

He won the Comparison prize in Mexico in 1958. In Japan, two museums were built to honor Jansem′s work, located in Tokyo Ginza and Nagano Prefecture Azumino. In 1973 he visited Armenia for the first time. In 2001, 34 of his paintings were given to the Armenian Genocide Museum.
The act of painting reveals who we are. We are betrayed by what we love.
— Jean Jansem
Azumino Jansem Museum
Jansem’s primary sources of inspiration were Goya and Brueghel. His mother and his children were the main heroes in his earlier works. Jansem was characterized as a miserablist, an artist of unfortunate people.
On 10 March 2010, the day after Jansem's 90th birthday, during a visit to France, the President of Armenia awarded Jansem a medal of honour saying the following, "Our nation is proud of you and values highly your art. While living outside Armenia, you have made our country more recognizable, extending our nation's good name all over the world."Jansem died on 27 August 2013, aged 93, outside Paris.Wikipedia

Michael Kmit

Michael Kmit (Ukrainian: Михайло Кміт) (25 July 1910 Stryi, Lviv — 22 May 1981 Sydney, Australia) was a Ukrainian painter who spent twenty-five years in Australia. He is notable for introducing a neo-Byzantine style of painting to Australia, and winning a number of major Australian art prizes including the Blake Prize (1952) and the Sulman Prize (in both 1957 and 1970). In 1969 the Australian artist and art critic James Gleeson described Kmit as "one of the most sumptuous colourists of our time"

 Michael Kmit studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Kraków, but due to the conflict in World War II, he was forced to leave his homeland and found himself a displaced person in Innsbruck, Austria where he met Dorothea (Edda) in 1945. They married in Landeck and later moved to Bregenz where his two daughters, Xenia & Tania (Tatiana) were born, in 1946 and 1948. While in post-war Europe Kmit studied under cubist Fernand Léger in Paris, and futurist Carlo Carrà in Italy.

 Kmit emigrated to Australia in 1949, as part of the Australian Government's immigration scheme. He was contracted to work in Sydney for two years in a job selected for him by the Australian Government's employment service. He initially worked at a cement factory in Villawood, New South Wales, and then as a railway porter as contracted reimbursement for his passage. But after Kmit met the artists James Gleeson and Paul Haefliger, who were impressed with his work, he was introduced to other artists including Donald Friend and Russell Drysdale. His artist friends later helped him find lodging at Merioola and work nearer to the artist community in Sydney. Painting at night, during the day Kmit worked as a railway porter and cleaner while he established himself "as one of Australia's best artists" of the time. He lived in Elizabeth Bay with his family until he moved to the United States.Wikipedia

Mexican painter and sculptor Juan Soriano

Juan Soriano  (1920 -2006)  was born in Guadalajara to a middle-class family. His father, Rafael Rodríguez Soriano, fought in the Mexican Revolution, later becoming a minor politician and, eventually, a spiritist. His mother, Amalia Montoya, who had followed her husband into battle as a "soldadera," or female soldier, kept the house that included Juan's thirteen aunts and four sisters. His precocious talents led him to enter the circle of the renowned artist Jesús Reyes Ferreira, known as "Chucho" Reyes, who introduced Soriano to pre-Columbian and colonial Mexican art as well as art from outside his country. Soriano began exhibiting in Guadalajara at age 14. His first show in the regional museum attracted the attention of such influential Mexican painters as María Izquierdo and José Chávez Morado as well as the photographer Lola Álvarez Bravo, all of whom became close friends of Soriano and urged the young man to travel to Mexico City. The following year (1935), Soriano moved to the Mexican capital and soon entered into a lively visual and personal dialogue with Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Orozco, Siqueiros, as well as the more vanguard artists and writers who composed the famous Contemporáneos group.

 Soriano considered the work of all these diverse artists with care, drawing on a deep interest in popular and indigenous arts, as well as the expressive modes derived from Cubism, German Expressionism, and Fauvism as well as the School of Paris artists of the interwar period. In addition, he became acquainted with the imaginative forms of painting that were behind the creations of the European Surrealists who had come as war refugees to Mexico at the end of the 1930s and into the 1940s.

 While all of these elements are at play in Soriano's unique works done during these two decades, he cannot be directly connected with any one trend, creating a personal brand of romantic realism. Soriano was also in contact with the most distinguished art dealer of the time, Inés Amor (of the prestigious Galería de Arte Mexicano), who was instrumental in placing Soriano's works in important local and foreign (especially American) collections, and had a pivotal role in the acquisition of Philadelphia's four Soriano paintings (the most extensive collection of works by the artist in the United States).

 After 1950, Soriano began several long periods of residence outside Mexico. He experimented with various approaches to abstraction in both painting and sculpture, and also expanded his frame of artistic reference and did extensive set and costume work for the Mexican theatre company "Poesía en Voz Alta." His years spent in Rome and later in Paris definitively changed his art as he absorbed what his life-long friend Rufino Tamayo would call "universalist tendencies."(juansoriano.net)

Ismael Nery

Ismael Nery (October 9, 1900 - April 6, 1934) was a Brazilian artist.
Born in Belém, Pará of Dutch, Native-Brazilian and African ancestry, he studied at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes (National School of Fine Arts) in Rio de Janeiro and at the Académie Julian in Paris. He created numerous paintings, wrote many poems and also helped design Brazil's National Patrimony of the Treasury department. Nery married a poet, Adalgisa Nery, in 1922. He contracted tuberculosis in 1931, and died of it in 1934.Wikipedia

 

Ken Kiff

Ken Kiff, RA (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.Wikipedia