Ans Wortel

Ans (Anna Maria) Wortel 1929 - 1996 ) was a Dutch painter, poet and writer. She made gouaches and oil paintings, aquarelles, drawings, collages, lithographs, etchings, sculptures and glass sculptures. She was an autodidact and has won the first prize at the biennale of Paris in 1963. She was one of the leading female artists of postwar Dutch modern art.Wortel’s work is strongly autobiographical. Her experiences as a girl, woman, mother and as an artist were mainly the source of her inspiration. Common themes are human emotions, love, relationships, mother/child relations and social criticism.
Up until the late 1950s there was a search for a personal style. Artwork from that time varies and shows characteristics of different artists, such as Katsushika Hokusai, Willem de Kooning, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Wifredo Lam and Karel Appel. In the late 1950s her artistic style eventually flows into her very own style which is best described as abstract figurative art. It often consists of naked woman, man or child figures, sometimes recognizable, but always deformed. These human figures are together, search each other, embrace each other or repel each other. The figures are in unspecified spaces. The moon, the sun and the contours of earth often recur in her work. Mostly her work is accompanied by handwritten poetical lines.Wikipedia

Hubert Dalwood - Modern Art

"Hubert Dalwood was born in Bristol on 2 June 1924. After serving an apprenticeship with the Bristol Aviation Company he joined the Royal Navy as an engineer before attending Bath Academy of Art (1946-49) where he studied sculpture under Kenneth Armitage. During this period he spent several summers in the artists' colony of St Ives, Cornwall, where he worked as an assistant to the sculptor Barbara Hepworth."(56groupwales.com)

"Until 1956 Dalwood was a sculptor of figures - figures that were boldly, even brutally, re-formed to coincide with artist’s intention, but later adopted an abstract imagery, shedding gradually such reminiscences of the human body as remained in his sculptures. He worked in clay, modelling the surface by hand and leaving tell tale finger prints and marks, and casting pieces in bronze or aluminium. He tended to combine geometric shapes with surprising free forms, to juxtapose extreme differences of scale, and to ignore the then conventions of organic form relationships."(visualarts.britishcouncil.org)

Reuben Nakian - Masterpieces of Sculpture

Reuben Nakian ( 1897–  1986) was an American sculptor and teacher of Armenian extraction. His recurring themes are from Greek and Roman mythology. Noted works include Leda and the Swan, The Rape of Lucrece, Hecuba, and The Birth of Venus. He was also commissioned to create portraits of Roosevelt's cabinet in the 1930s.He met and befriended painters Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning in the 1930s and Marsden Hartley and Marcel Duchamp in the 1940s. Poet Frank O'Hara was the curator of a major Reuben Nakian retrospective at New York City's Museum of Modern Art in 1966 where the artist was also exhibited in 1930. In the exhibition's catalog, O'Hara noted: Nakian is unrepressed, un-neurotic, unabashed in his approach to sensuality, however tortuous his esthetic commitment, and whether his subject be death, bestiality, or Arcadian dalliance. This explicitness gives the "Nymph and Satyr" plaques a marvelous joy and ease, the "Europa" terra-cottas a voluptous dignity, and the "Leda and the Swan" drawings an almost comic abandon. Unlike most sexually oriented images in modern art, from Auguste Rodin to Andy Warhol, one finds no guilt or masochism in a Nakian. It is outgoing and athletic even in its releases and defeats: the satyr, the bull, the swan, the goat are each circumvented or absorbed by the goddess of his choice in the most choice of circumstances, that of his own choosing, like the amorous "dying" of the Elizabethans or the Metamorphoses of Ovid."Wikipedia

Jacques Lipchitz - Crystal Cubism

Jacques Lipchitz (1891 –1973) was a Cubist sculptor. Lipchitz retained highly figurative and legible components in his work leading up to 1915–16, after which naturalist and descriptive elements were muted, dominated by a synthetic style of Crystal Cubism. In 1920 Lipchitz held his first solo exhibition, at Léonce Rosenberg's Galerie L'Effort Moderne in Paris. Fleeing the Nazis he moved to the US and settled in New York City and eventually Hastings-on-Hudson.
"Jacques Lipchitz’s work has been commented upon internationally by leading art scholars and the most eminent museum directors. It is present in practically every museum in the world, from the Metropolitan Museum in New York to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, to the Tate Gallery in London to the Museum of Rotterdam. His public work is in cities such as Philadelphia, Rome, Paris, London, Los Angeles, etc..
This great artist who had to emigrate in 1909 from Lithuania to France and then in 1941 from there to the United States, always took his ideas and talent with him. His work not only speaks of exiles but also of the misfortunes of man (in the mid 1950’s his New York studio burned down) and above all of man’s recoveries, with references both to Greek mythology and to the Old Testament. In his personal cocktail shaker of forms, Lipchitz returns to the images of different religious traditions to create a poem, visual in his case, like lyrical mysticism that transcends the usual meaning of words in search of the ineffable, of a transcendental sculptural experience."(jacques-lipchitz.net)