René Duvillier - Abstract art

"Born in 1919, René Duvillier joins the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Paris in 1935. Duvillier however defines himself as autodidact stating that the only thing he got out of his time at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts was “learning what not to do”. After five years of captivity in Ukraine and Poland during World War II a defining moment comes in 1952 when Duvillier meets the influential art critic Charles Estienne. Through Charles Estienne Duvillier meets Serge Poliakoff, Jean Degottex, Hans Hartung and Charles Lapicque and becomes part of the “Nouvelle Ecole de Paris” which under the guidance of the art critic Charles Estienne gathered painters from Surrealism and gestural or lyrical abstraction. In 1953 Duvillier exhibits together with Jean Degottex, Marcelle Loubchansky and Jean Messagier in the Galerie L’étolie scellée owned by the founding father of surrealism, André Breton. Also in 1953 Duvillier takes part in the exhibition “Younger European Painters” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

 Although close to Degottex, Hartung and Messagier, Duvillier was however independent. And if, his gestural painting may have affected Breton, in which he found a form of surrealist automatism, his lyricism is much more oriented towards the nature.
Despite the international recognition, Duvillier could nevertheless still be overwhelmed. It is the sea in Brittany that created “a terrible choc” for him when he was invited in 1954 by Charles Estienne on the wild coast of North Finistere. “I found the movement and the gesture there. Everything was moving, the waves, the shore, the sky, the birds. I was especially struck by the spectacle of the Breton horses, manes flowing in the wind, springing out of the foam. I also found the ancient Greek myth of the birth of the sea”.

 This experience gave inspiration for a series of polychrome works with the sea and seahorses as the theme.
Although the themes changed over the years in the work of Duvillier it was always about nature – from minimal movements of waves and air. From the seahorses in Argenton to planets and to whirlwinds, the world painted by René Duvillier connects the personal to the universal and the human to the cosmos. It was the man of the myth and the vertigo, between paradoxes and successive shocks, a generous, rigorous and instinctive humanist. “I am emotional and passionate, the painter said (…) I’m not looking for simplification, or a synthesis ; I am moving on all fronts, I have to keep my totality”. He faced the material and his imagination fed on life. His dynamic and gestural painting associates the almost monochrome to the brightest colors."(frenchartandvintage.dk)

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Sir Sidney Nolan

Sir Sidney Nolan, in full Sir Sidney Robert Nolan (born April 22, 1917, Melbourne, Australia—died November 27, 1992, London, England) artist known for his paintings based on Australian folklore.With little formal art training, Nolan turned to painting at age 21 after varied experiences as a racing cyclist, cook, and gold miner. In his early work he was influenced by the abstract artists Paul Klee and László Moholy-Nagy, and his own greatly simplified abstractions, such as Boy and the Moon (1940)—a splash of yellow against a raw blue background—incited controversy among visitors to his Melbourne studio. He designed sets and costumes for a Sydney production of Serge Lifar’s ballet Icarus in 1940.

 Nolan served in the Australian army from 1942 to 1945, during which time he began to paint the local desolate desert landscapes in a more representational style. Apart from his landscapes, most of his mature works dealt with Australian historical or legendary characters and events—notably, the bushranger Ned Kelly, a famous outlaw whose square helmet is an iconic image in Australia. Nolan’s painting style is noted for its fluidity, which he emphasized by applying unusual mediums—such as ripolin (an enamel house paint) and polyvinyl acetate—to masonite, glass, paper, or canvas.

Nolan moved to England in 1955, but he continued to paint his native Australian landscapes, among other themes. He remained involved with the theatre, designing stage sets for a production of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring in London in 1962 and for Camille Saint-Saëns’s opera Samson et Dalila, also in London, in 1981. Nolan’s work has been exhibited internationally, and many of his paintings and prints are in the permanent collections of the Tate Gallery in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He was knighted in 1981 and became a member of the Order of Merit in 1983.(Encyclopædia Britannica)

Abstract expressionism Lenore Krassner

Lenore Krassner (October 27, 1908 – June 19, 1984), known professionally as Lee Krasner, was an influential American abstract expressionist painter in the second half of the 20th century.She is one of the few female artists to have had a retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art.Krasner was born as Lena Krassner (outside the family she was known as Lenore Krasner) on October 27, 1908 in Brooklyn, New York. Krasner was the daughter of Chane (née Weiss) and Joseph Krasner.Her parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants, from Shpykiv, a Jewish community in what is now Ukraine. Her parents fled to the United States to escape anti-Semitism and the Russo-Japanese War. Her mother Chane changed her name to Anna once she arrived in America.Lee was the fourth of five children, including her sister, Ruth, and the first who was born in America. She was the only one of her siblings to be born in the United States

 

Krasner is identified as an abstract expressionist due to her abstract, gestural, and expressive works. She worked in painting, collage painting, charcoal drawing, and occasionally mosaics. She would often cut apart her own drawings and paintings to create her collage paintings. She also commonly revised or completely destroyed an entire series of works due to her critical nature. As a result, her surviving body of work is relatively small. Her catalogue raisonné, published in 1995 by Abrams, lists 599 known pieces.

 

Her changeable nature is reflected throughout her work, which has led critics and scholars to have very different conclusions about her and her work. Her style often goes back and forth between classic structure and baroque action, open form and hard-edge shape, and bright color and monochrome palette. Throughout her career, she refused to adopt a singular, recognizable style and instead embraced change through varying the mood, subject matter, texture, materials, and compositions of her work often.By changing her work style often, she differed from other abstract expressionists since many of them adopted unchanging identities and modes of depiction.Despite these intense variations, her works can typically be recognized through their gestural style, texture, rhythm, and depiction of organic imagery.Her interest in the self, nature, and modern life are themes which commonly surface in her works.Krasner is often reluctant to discuss the iconography of her work and instead emphasizes the importance of her biography since she claims her art is formed through her individual personality and her emotional state.Wikipedia

Dimitris Mytaras

Dimitris Mytaras (born 1934, Chalkis) is a Greek artist who is considered one of the important Greek painters of the 20th century.
His work is mainly inspired by the human figure, and a combination of naturalism and expressionism. From the 1960s onward, Mytaras moved in the direction of naturalism, while from 1975 an expressionistic approach became more and more marked in his output.

From 1953 till 1957, Mytaras studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts under Yiannis Moralis. Later on he studied stage design at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. From 1964 till 1972, he directed the Interior Decoration Workshop of the Athens Technological Institute. Since 1975 he has been teaching at the Painting Workshop of the Athens School of Fine Arts. Mytaras has participated in more than 30 international group shows, including the 1972 Venice Biennale.

During the time of the Greek military junta of 1967-1974, Mytaras sought to comment critically on Greek life through a series of realistic works entitled Photographic Documents.
In later life he turned towards classical themes.
Mytaras was also selected to create one of the official posters for the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens.Wikipedia

Russian artist Nadezhda Udaltsova

Nadezhda Andreyevna Udaltsova, née Nadezhda Andreyevna Prudkovskaya (born Dec. 29 [Jan. 10, New Style], 1886, Oryol, western Russia—died Jan. 25, 1961, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.) one of the leading figures of the pre-Revolutionary Russian avant-garde. Of her Russian peers she was the most influenced by French Cubism. But personal misfortunes and the social conditions of the Stalinist era led her to withdraw to her studio, turning her into a marginal figure in Soviet art.

Udaltsova was born into a military officer’s family. The decisive moment of her turning to new art was her introduction to contemporary French painting in 1908 at the home of the renowned art collector Sergey Shchukin. Udaltsova was particularly drawn to Post-Impressionism. She read the letters of Vincent van Gogh and studied the biography of Paul Cézanne and, somewhat later, the art of Henri Matisse. During this period, Udaltsova began moving in Moscow’s avant-garde circles, and in 1912 she traveled to Paris with her friend the painter Lyubov Popova. While in Paris she studied at the Académie de la Palette with Henri Le Fauconnier and Jean Metzinger. These two French artists, who had written a noted book on Cubism, counted Udaltsova as their foremost Russian student. She effectively adapted the lessons of classical Cubism (as in the work of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso), using it as a point of departure for an original style of her own, softening Cubism’s rational scheme with an uncommon wealth of shade and nuance of colour and a certain rationality that was more characteristic of Russian art. Returning to Moscow in 1913, she became a leading figure in the Russian avant-garde. Both she and Popova made their debuts at the fourth Jack of Diamonds exhibition in 1914, and in 1915 Udaltsova exhibited eight Cubist works at the exhibition “Tram V.” Her best works of that period (and probably her best work in any period) are New (1914–15), At the Piano (1915), Restaurant (1915), and Kitchen (1915). In 1916–17, after joining Kazimir Malevich’s group, Supremus, she painted several purely geometric Suprematist compositions.

In 1917–19 Udaltsova was active in cultural politics of Revolutionary Russia, organizing the Left Federation of Moscow Artists. Like her colleagues, she taught art at leading art schools, but unlike her avant-garde comrades-in-arms, Udaltsova did not abandon painting for design and actively opposed this trend by resigning in 1921 from the Institute of Artistic Culture. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Udaltsova experienced a fresh creative surge, during which she painted a series of landscapes of the Altai Mountain region, which she traveled to with her husband, the painter Aleksandr Drevin, in 1929–32. These landscapes, which she painted in an Expressionistic style clearly influenced by Drevin, were Udaltsova’s last major success. In January 1938 Drevin was arrested on political charges and was executed shortly after. (Her father, a retired general, had been executed by Bolsheviks in 1918.) Only after Drevin’s official rehabilitation in 1956—18 years after his death—did Udaltsova find out the truth about her husband’s end.

During World War II, Udaltsova painted a series of portraits of fighter pilots. Her last personal exhibition was mounted in 1945 in Moscow. Denounced as a formalist, Udaltsova was forced to relinquish her teaching posts. The rest of her artistic life was spent in the confines of her studio. She painted mainly still lifes and landscapes, in which her efforts to move toward realism reveal a marked weakening in the quality of her painting.(Encyclopædia Britannica)

Julius Hatofsky

According to the celebrated New York art critic Hilton Kramer:
’’The American artist Julius Hatofsky, (1922–2006) was one of the most accomplished painters of his generation…he remained an independent spirit whose art resembled that of no other living artist. The greatest influence on the work of his maturity was that of the Old Masters—among them Tintoretto, Turner, Blake, Goya, Ryder and Delacroix.’
Julius Hatofsky was born in Ellenville, in upstate New York, in 1922, and first studied art as a teenager in the Works Progress Administration/Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP) art classes. Later he studied at the Art Students League of New York (1946–1950) and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris (1950–1951), returning to New York to study at the Hans Hofmann School in 1952. At the League he studied with Morris Kantor and Robert Beverly Hale.

 Hatofsky had a varied experience beyond the art world. While still a young man he worked as a New York City police officer. Later, in 1942 in World War II, he was drafted into the 82nd Airborne Division, landing by glider in crucial battles. A foot soldier later promoted to sergeant, he served in the Battle of the Bulge and the invasions of the Netherlands and Normandy; later in 1945 he participated in the liberation of a concentration camp.Julius Hatofsky began painting in New York during the 1950s and moved to San Francisco in 1961 to teach at the San Francisco Art Institute, eventually retiring in 1995. According to the critic from Art in America magazine,
 ”During the 1960s, he worked in a Bay Area Abstract Expressionst mode, creating sumptuous, almost iridescent surfaces animated by streams of sinuous energy.”
after 1973, his paintings gradually moved toward American Figurative Expressionism.
”These works often feature obscure, scurrying phantoms painted in a frothy multihued and multilayered oil impasto…Hatofsky’s paintings are sensually generous and richly nuanced.”

 Julius Hatofsky
”for 33 years taught painting and figure drawing to generations of aspiring artists at the San Francisco Art Institute. He befriended many, treating them to a round of drinks and a good cigar at the pub, and inviting hundreds at a time to standing-room-only parties at his 5,600-square-foot SoMa loft. He rented the loft for decades, until the dot-com boom of the mid-1990s pushed him and his wife to a Victorian house in remote Vallejo, the nearest town to San Francisco where he could afford to buy a house.”

 Close to his death Hatofsky wrote:
 ”..Inventing imagery is the basis of my painting. Once involved, I concentrate on scale, inner light, drawing, surface, rhythm, color. Developing these painting concerns has helped to focus my emotional intensity and release my imagination.At age 83, I have a range and variety of expression and imagery and feel a command over the work that has taken over sixty years to acquire. I constantly try to reach deeper, to move beyond my limitations, to challenge myself and to learn.
I feel I’ve made considerable progress in the last 25 years.”
Julius Hatofsky died on January 1, 2006 in Vallejo, California.Wikipedia

Josef Šíma

Josef Šíma (March 18, 1891 – July 24, 1971) was a renowned Czech painter, an important figure of modern European art.
After graduating from Academy of Arts in Prague where he was the student of Jan Preisler he was involved in the Devětsil movement and in Umělecká beseda in Prague before travelling to Paris in 1921. He took French citizenship in 1926. He was artistic director for the journal Le Grand Jeu in 1929 and friend of French poets René Daumal, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte and Roger Vailland.

His sources of inspiration spanned from sensual experience, through civil themes, geometric abstraction, imaginative seeking of archetypes of nature, things and human existence pictured as crystals, cosmic egg and female torsos to fascination by landscapes and mythology, until he finally united all these elements and made a synthesis of them in cosmic visions and symbols of human destiny.
He exhibited at documenta 2 in 1959. He also illustrated many books, made book covers, scenic paintings and designed stained glass windows (e. g. in The Church of St Jacques in Reims).Wikipedia