Josef Mikl

Josef Mikl (August 8, 1929 – March 29, 2008) was an Austrian abstract painter of the Informal style.Born in Vienna, he received his first training at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt, studying at the prominent Viennese academy from 1949 to 1956 under Josef Dobrovský.Collaborating with Friedensreich Hundertwasser at the Vienna Art Club, Mikl later was a member of the Galerie St. Stephan group. In 1968 Mikl, well known in Austria, represented his home country at the 34th Biennale in Venice.

 Classified as an Informal and Modernist artist, Mikl himself despised his artwork being placed under a specific label, calling it "an insult" in an undated interview. He worked in oil, pastels and water colors, as well as sculptures and drawings that either stood alone or served as illustrations in a book or decorations in a church. Mikl is best known for renovating the Redoutensaal in Vienna's Imperial Palace after it was destroyed in a 1992 fire. The hall once served as a venue for the first performance of Ludwig van Beethoven's 8th Symphony as well as a summit between U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita S. Krushchev and was reopened in 1997 with vibrant reds and yellows depicting notable themes and figures of Austrian literature, all of Mikl's design.Josef Mikl died of cancer on March 29, 2008. His funeral was held on April 3 though his death was not announced until the next day, in accordance with Mikl's wishes.Survivors include his wife, Brigitte Bruckner, and their 20-year-old daughter Anna Mikl.Wikipedia

Surrealism Dorothea Tanning

Dorothea Margaret Tanning (August 25, 1910 – January 31, 2012) was an American painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer, and poet. Her early work was influenced by Surrealism.Wikipedia
Dorothea Tanning was born in 1910 in Galesburg, Illinois and attended Knox College in her hometown before studying painting in Chicago (haunting the Art Institute where she learned what painting was.)   In 1941, now in New York, she met the art dealer, Julien Levy, and his surrealist friends, refugees from Nazi occupied France. Late in 1942 Max Ernst visited her studio, saw a painting, (Birthday), and stayed to play chess. They would have 34 years together, at first in Sedona, Arizona (a mere outpost at the time).  Here she would continue to paint her enigmatic versions of life on the inside, looking out: The Guest Room, The Truth About Comets, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Interior with Sudden Joy, Insomnias, Palaestra, Tamerlane, Far From. By 1956 Max and Dorothea had chosen to live and work thenceforth in France. Though Paris was headquarters, they preferred the country quiet lure in Touraine and Provence. These years included, for Dorothea Tanning, an intense five‐year adventure in soft sculpture: Cousins, Don Juan's Breakfast, Fetish, Rainy Day Canapé, Tragic Table, Verbe, Xmas, Emma, Revelation or the End of the Month, Hôtel du Pavot Room 202.

 Max Ernst died on April 1, 1976 and Dorothea faced a solitary future. “Go home,” said the paint tubes, the canvases, the brushes. Returning to the United States in the late 1970s, and still painting, Tango Lives, Woman Artist, On Avalon, Door 84, Still in the Studio, Blue Mom, Dionysos S.O.S., she gave full rein to her long felt compulsion to write.  Words, poetry.  Written, read, heard.  Would she join these voices even then? Her poems have since appeared in a number of literary reviews and magazines, such as The Yale Review, Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Boston Review, The Southwest Review, Parnassus, and in Best Poems of 2002 and 2005. Her published works include two memoirs, Birthday and Between Lives, a collection of poems, A Table of Content, and a novel, Chasm.
At present Dorothea Tanning lives in New York City, breathes words, as well as air, and looks at her paintings with amazement. It is 2009.(.dorotheatanning.org)

The Birth of Venus Alexandre Cabanel

The Birth of Venus (French: Naissance de Venus) is a painting by the French artist Alexandre Cabanel (1823–1889). It was painted in 1863, and is now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. A second and smaller version (85 x 135.9 cm) from ca. 1864 is in Dahesh Museum of Art.A third (106 x 182.6 cm) version dates from 1875; it is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Shown to great success at the Paris Salon of 1863, The Birth of Venus was immediately purchased by Napoleon III for his own personal collection.[3] That same year Cabanel was made a professor of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
Cabanel's erotic imagery, cloaked in historicism, appealed to the propriety of the higher levels of society.[3] Art historian and curator Robert Rosenblum wrote of Cabanel's The Birth of Venus that "This Venus hovers somewhere between an ancient deity and a modern dream"; he described "the ambiguity of her eyes, that seem to be closed but that a close look reveals that she is awake ... A nude who could be asleep or awake is specially formidable for a male viewer".
Cabanel was a determined opponent of the Impressionists, especially Édouard Manet,although the refusal of the academic establishment to realize the importance of new ideas and sources of inspiration would eventually prove to be the undoing of the Academy.

 

At the Salon of 1863, The Birth of Venus was one of a multitude of female nudes. Bathed in opalescent colors, Venus shyly looks to the viewer from beneath the crook of her elbow. Two years later, Manet presented his now renowned painting Olympia at the Salon as well. Today both hang in the Musee’d’ Orsay. Unlike Venus’s ethereal-like palette, Manet painted Olympia with pale, placid skin tone, and darkly outlined the figure. Her only seemingly modest gesture is her placement of her hand over her leg, though it is not out of shyness- one must pay before they can see. James Rubin writes of the two works: “The Olympia is often compared to Cabanel’s Birth of Venus, for the latter is a far more sexually appealing work, despite its mythological guise… It is evident Manet’s demythologizing of the female nude was foremost a timely reminder of modern realities. The majority of critics attacked the painting with unmitigated disgust…: “What is this odalisque with the yellow belly, ignoble model dredged up from who knows where? “The painter’s attitude is of inconceivable vulgarity.”
Cabanel depicts personality, but in subtle ways through her relaxed posture and sleepy expression. Jenna-Marie Newberry writes of Venus: “The lightest of color used in The Birth of Venus alludes to the lightness and enlightenment of relaxation, amplifying the reclining nude’s placid demeanor and virginity. The contraposto twist of the figure with the melodramatic swoop of the arm over the face comes directly from his previous paintings … Venus herself takes over the entire front of the picture plane. Her hair has been deepened, adding more to her allure and purity.” It is as if the viewer is catching a glimpse of a goddess simply basking in the nature that enfolds her. She is calm, and asks nothing with her gaze. She is a part of her surroundings and the viewer is privy to behold upon the scene. By adhering to the accepted canon of the day, Cabanel produced a quite seductive painting of a mythological beauty presented in a calculated way that was acceptable for viewers at the time of its creation. Following the Salon it was said: “His dark-eyed heroines, thinly painted, usually in muted colors and immaculately drawn, were popular on both sides of the Atlantic”.Wikipedia

Classicism

Paul Guiragossian

Paul Guiragossian (1925 – November 20, 1993) was an Lebanese Armenians painter.
Born to Armenian parents, survivors of the Armenian Genocide, Paul Guiragossian experienced the consequences of exile from a very tender age. Raised in boarding schools, Paul grew up away from his mother who had to work to make sure her two sons got an education. As a child Paul remembers looking out from the window watching children flying their kites and they would always ask him to draw theirs because he did the most beautiful and colorful designs. It’s then that he realized he had a special talent and his love for art became an indispensable need. In the early 1940s Paul and his family moved to Jaffa where he attended Studio Yarkon to start improving his passion of painting. In late 1947, the family moved again and settled in Lebanon.

In the 1950s Paul started teaching art in several Armenian schools and worked as an illustrator. He later started his own business with his brother Antoine painting cinema banners, posters and drawing illustrations for books. Soon after he was discovered for his art and introduced to his contemporaries after which he began exhibiting his works in Beirut and eventually all over the world. In 1956 he won the first prize in a painting competition, which landed him a scholarship by the Italian government to study at the Academia di Belle Arti di Firenze (The Academy of Fine Arts of Florence). While in Florence, Paul had multiple exhibitions starting with a solo show in 1958 at the Galeria D’Arte Moderna “La Permanente”. In 1962, Paul was granted another scholarship, this time by the French Government, to study and paint in Paris at Les Atelier Des Maîtres De L’Ecole De Paris and by the end of that year he had a solo exhibition at the Galerie Mouffe. 

By the mid 1960s Guiragossian had grown to become one of the most celebrated artists in Lebanon and eventually of the Arab world and even though war broke out in the early 1970s, his attachment to Lebanon grew bigger and his works became more colorful with messages of hope for his people. In 1989 Paul went to Paris to exhibit his works in La Salle Des Pas Perdus in UNESCO and resided in the city with part of his family until 1991. At the end of that 1991 Guiragossian had a solo exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe. This exhibition was extended and marked the very first solo show at the IMA for any artist. Paul died November 20, 1993, in Beirut, after completing a magnificent oil painting which he revealed to his family to be his best work yet. The family agreed to entitle the painting "L'Adieu" and it remains unsigned in the Guiragossian Family Collection.Wikipedia

Magical realism Gayane Khachaturian

Gayane Khachaturian (May 9, 1942 – May 1, 2009) was a Georgian-Armenian painter and graphic artist.
Gayane Khachaturian was born into an Armenian family in Tbilisi, capital of Georgia, and studied art at the Nikoladze Art School. She became seriously involved in the art scene after graduating from the Secondary School of Working Youth in 1960. She met Sergei Parajanov in 1967 at Elene Akhvlediani's house and they maintained a close friendship which lasted until his death. Some of Khachaturian’s works are permanently exhibited at the Yerevan Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Armenia, Sergei Parajanov Museum in Yerevan as well as are in a number of private collections, including those owned by Valerie Khanukaev, Bagrat Nikogosyan, and Artashes Aleksanyan. 

 When she was alive, her tiny studio on Bakinskaya Street had become a tourist attraction. According to Russian art critic Vitaly Patsyukov, "Khachaturian is among those pioneers of new artistic consciousness who draw into their focus all phenomenal aspects of European 'actual view' and the radical sensuousness and natural freedom of plastic gesture." Khachaturian died on May 1, 2009 and is buried in the Armenian Pantheon of Tbilisi.Wikipedia

Frederick J. Brown

Frederick J. Brown (February 6, 1945 – May 5, 2012) was a Chicago-raised artist. His paintings draw on many sources, including his African-American, Seminole and Choctaw ancestry, his religious upbringing, and the folklore of the South. He referenced religious, historical and urban themes in his work, but was especially noted for his numerous portraits of jazz and blues artists. In 1988, Brown had the largest retrospective by a Western artist in the People's Republic of China, and he is the only Western artist to have had an exhibition at China's national museum in Tienanmen Square.Wikipedia

 "I think my heritage has a great significance to the images I produce, but you can limit people with a name or a title to only serve one group. When you see my work, you can tell it is done by someone who is Black. But, I want to provide as many beautiful things to the world as I possibly can." — Frederick Brown, quoted in Eve M. Ferguson, "Art Sings the Blues," The Washington Afro-American, 26 Oct. 1991.(americanart.si.edu)

 Brown's paintings of the early 1970s were large, bold abstractions based on the abstract expressionist tradition of the art department at Southern Illinois University. In 1975 Brown met the noted American painter, Willem de Kooning. De Kooning encouraged Brown and Brown still affectionately refers to de Kooning as his "artistic godfather." Brown's large gestural paintings attracted widespread attention and by the mid-1980s were exhibited at the prestigious Marlborough Gallery in New York.
By the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, Brown gradually included figural elements, a change that coincided with his creation of some landscape paintings reminiscent of folk art. An airplane motif also appeared in Brown's works—a motif that the artist says represents a marking of time.

In the mid-1980s Brown began a series of paintings that immortalized the friends, mentors, and colleagues who had exerted the greatest influence on his life. One of the first paintings in this series was a monumental Last Supper, completed in 1984, which portrays twelve men who had sustained Brown both personally and professionally. He painted several other religious subjects, including John the Baptist, David and Goliath, and The Ascension. In his portraits of this period, Brown attached photographs of his subjects' faces to the canvas to produce a collage effect. In addition to portraits of single figures, Brown painted large-scale canvases filled with numerous characters both real and fictional, often disparate in their references.(americanart.si.edu)

Aelita Andre

Aelita Andre (born 9 January 2007) is an Australian abstract artist known for her Surrealist painting style and her young age.She began to paint when aged nine months, and her work was displayed publicly in a group exhibition shortly after she turned two.Her first solo exhibition opened in New York City in June 2011, when she was four years old
Andre was born to Australian father Michael Andre and Russian mother Nikka Kalashnikova. As a baby, she often watched her parents, both artists themselves, work on canvases on the floor. She learned to paint before she could walk, several months prior to her first birthday.She and her family currently reside in Melbourne.

 Andre's mother, believing her daughter to be a child prodigy, showed some of Andre's paintings to a Melbourne-based art curator when the girl was 22 months old. Impressed with the work, the curator agreed to include it in a group exhibition in the Brunswick Street Gallery, and he began advertising the show with Andre's paintings before he learned of her age. Although he was surprised, he kept his promise to display the work. The show opened shortly after her second birthday and also featured Kalashnikova's photography.Several months later, Andre and her parents visited Hong Kong, where she sold her most expensive painting to date for $24,000

 Art critics have noted Andre's work, classified as abstract expressionism, for its employment of the Surrealist techniques automatism and accidentalism. She paints with acrylics and often adds three-dimensional objects, including bark, twigs, and feathers, to the canvases. Buyers of her art at her New York show commented favourably on the paintings' simplicity and richness in texture. A number of major news sources, including Time, the BBC, The Washington Post, the The Sydney Morning Herald, ABC News, and the New York Post, have generally responded favourably to Andre's work and to her early success. Several of them have compared her to Jackson Pollock, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso.At least one other, The New York Times, acknowledged her widespread notoriety but commented that her paintings "are hardly novel from a formal vantage, nor do they provide added meaning below the surface." It also noted that although her 2009 exhibition in Melbourne was not at a vanity gallery, the Agora Gallery's pay-for-show operation generated controversy about the legitimacy of her international fame. Nevertheless, the interest that collectors and the media showed in her exhibition at Agora resulted in every painting in the show being sold within two weeks, indicating that the show contributed to the growth of her international reputation.Wikipedia

Maurice Estève

Maurice Estève, (2 May 1904, Culan (Cher) - 29 June 2001), was a French painter.
Maurice Estève was born in the French town of Culan (Département Cher) on 2 May 1904. In 1913 he moved to Paris with his parents, where he soon began his education as an artist. Estève worked for a year as designer in a textile factory in Barcelona 1923. During his visits to the Louvre in the 1920s, Estève was particularly impressed by the painters Jean Fouquet and Paolo Uccello. Among the modern artists, Paul Cézanne had the greatest influence on Estève.

 Maurice Estève was largely self-educated, having only attended the free studio of the Académie Colarossi in 1924, where he tried to constructively implement of his motifs according to the model of Georges Braque and Fernand Léger, thus creating a kind of Cubist Fauvism.Estève began to moe away from realism in 1928, and was influenced in the following years by Léger, Matisse and Bonnard. His first one-man exhibition was given at the Galerie Yvangot, Paris, 1930. He worked as assistant to Robert Delaunay on huge decorative panels for the 1937 Paris International Exhibition. In the 1940s his stylized figure, still-life and landscape compositions with strong colors gradually became completely abstract, with tight-knit interlocking shapes in rich, bold colors. Has made a number of watercolors and collages, and designed stained glass in 1957 for a church at Berlincourt in the Bernese Jura.

 Estèves extensive work was not limited to the genre of painting. He was also active in collage, textile design and murals. Estèves avoided the extrovert circles of Avant-garde but still beloned to the core of the artists who brought about the breakthrough of École de Paris after 1945.Maurice Estèves took part in the Venice Biennale in 1954. His œuvre, just like the works of his art colleagues Riopelle and Bazaine, established a new pictoral language: Lyrical abstractions with the aim of depicting form and color with an almost poetic attitude. His works have established themselves in many well-known museums and collections around the world.Maurice Estève died on 29 June 2001 at the age of 97 in his home town of Culan.Wikipedia

 

Norman Lindsay

Norman Alfred William Lindsay (22 February 1879 – 21 November 1969) was an Australian artist, etcher, sculptor, writer, editorial cartoonist, scale modeler, and an accomplished amateur boxer.He was born in Creswick, Victoria.
Lindsay is widely regarded as one of Australia's greatest artists, producing a vast body of work in different media, including Pen Drawing, etching, watercolour, oil and sculptures in concrete and bronze.
A large body of his work is housed in his former home at Faulconbridge, New South Wales, now the Norman Lindsay Gallery and Museum, and many works reside in private and corporate collections. His art continues to climb in value today.Wikipedia

His sumptuous nudes were highly controversial, and in 1939, several were burned by irate wowsers in the United States who discovered them when the train in which they traveled caught fire. Interestingly enough, Norman had actually sent them to the United States to protect them from the impending War!
Lindsay also created a scandal when his novel "Redheap" was banned due to censorship laws. Many of his novels have a frankness and vitality that matches his art.
Norman within Popular Culture
Sam Neill played a fictionalized version of Norman Lindsay in John Duigan's movie Sirens (1994), set and filmed primarily within the Gallery grounds. James Mason and Helen Mirren starred in Age of Consent (1969), Michael Powell's adaptation of Lindsay's 1935 novel. (normanlindsay.com)

Basil Hadley

Basil Hadley (1940 in London, England – 2006 in Stepney, Adelaide) was an English Australian printmaker and painter. His works are represented in National and State public galleries around Australia and in various private collections

Basil Hadley studied at the Ealing College of Art in London. He came to Australia in 1965and studied printmaking at the Prahran College of Advanced Education, Melbourne.
From 1975 until his death, he resided in Stepney, Adelaide, South Australia with his wife Tanya who also died a few months prior to Hadley.
The estate of the late Basil Hadley, including paintings, graphics and book collection were auctioned by Elder Fine Art,North Adelaide in 2007.Wikipedia