CONTROFORMA Art & Design Space

Modernism in the Wild, with Georgia O’Keeffe.

2023-10-23T08:47:09.241Z

Near Abiquiu, New Mexico (1931)

Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was an American modernist artist. She was known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. O'Keeffe has been called the "Mother of American modernism".

In 1905, O'Keeffe began art training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and then the Art Students League of New York. In 1908, unable to fund further education, she worked for two years as a commercial illustrator and then taught in Virginia, Texas, and South Carolina between 1911 and 1918. She studied art in the summers between 1912 and 1914 and was introduced to the principles and philosophies of Arthur Wesley Dow, who created works of art based upon personal style, design, and interpretation of subjects, rather than trying to copy or represent them. This caused a major change in the way she felt about and approached art, as seen in the beginning stages of her watercolors from her studies at the University of Virginia and more dramatically in the charcoal drawings that she produced in 1915 that led to total abstraction.

Alfred Stieglitz, an art dealer and photographer, held an exhibit of her works in 1917.

Red Hills with Pedernal, White Clouds (1936)

Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait (1918).

Over the next couple of years, she taught and continued her studies at the Teachers College, Columbia University.

She moved to New York in 1918 at Stieglitz's request and began working seriously as an artist. They developed a professional and personal relationship that led to their marriage in 1924.

O'Keeffe created many forms of abstract art, including close-ups of flowers, such as the Red Canna paintings, that many found to represent vulvas, though O'Keeffe consistently denied that intention. The imputation of the depiction of women's sexuality was also fueled by explicit and sensuous photographs of O'Keeffe that Stieglitz had taken and exhibited.

Special No. 39 (1919)

No. 12 Special (1916)

O'Keeffe and Stieglitz lived together in New York until 1929, when O'Keeffe began spending part of the year in the Southwest, which served as inspiration for her paintings of New Mexico landscapes and images of animal skulls, such as Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue and Ram's Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills. After Stieglitz's death, she lived in New Mexico at Georgia O'Keeffe Home and Studio in Abiquiú until the last years of her life, when she lived in Santa Fe. In 2014, O'Keeffe's 1932 painting

Jimson Weed / White Flower No. 1 sold for $44,405,000, more than three times the previous world auction record for any female artist. After her death, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum was established in Santa Fe.

Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 (1932)

Fig (1923)

Grapes No. 2 (1927)

Alligator Pears (circa 1923)

Calla Lilies (1924)

Abstraction Blue (1927)

Waterfall, No. 2, lao Valley (1939)

"'I have been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do."

- Georgia O'Keeffe

Alfred Stieglitz. Georgia O'Keeffe (1923)

Amrita Sher-Gil, ahead of her time.

2023-08-01T12:42:58.343Z

Ladies and Gentlemen, meet Amrita Sher-Gil, an amazing creative personality and a splendid mysterious woman who brought Modernism in art to the subcontinent.

Amrita was born in 1913 and raised partially in Budapest, Hungary, and Shimla, India.

Thus, she grew up with one foot in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the other in what was then British India (present day Pakistan). Born with a firm place in upper-crust society, her mother was a bourgeoise, Hungarian opera singer (named Marie Antoinette, no less) who met her father, Umrao Singh, whilst on holiday with her friend Princess Bamba Sutherland in India. Amrita's father was a Sikh Punjabi aristocrat, so she and her younger sister grew up in very intellectual and multilingual households, exchanging ideas in English or French one moment and Hungarian the next. Due to her bi-cultural upbringing, and her constant travels between India and Europe, her work comes across as an immersion, absorption and very detailed understanding of aesthetic styles and traditions of the West and the East.

It was clear that Amrita, who had already started sketching the family's household staff, was destined for a future in the arts.

“It seems to me that I never began painting that I have always painted. And I have always had, with a strange certitude, the conviction that I was meant to be a painter and nothing else”, wrote the artist in her book of memories “Evolution of My Art”.

Notre Dame (1932)

So she did the best thing a girl can at 16-years-old, and moved to Paris.

There, she studied at the prestigious Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where Picasso, Manet and Cezanne painted, as well as the Ecole des Beaux-Arts - both terribly fun places to grow not only as an artist, but as a creative minded young woman. This wasn't just Paris. It was the Roaring Twenties in Paris.

Young Girls (1932)

Department Store (1932)

Amrita started to experiment - with colour, with technique, and with love.

One of her rumoured lovers was Marie-Louise Chassany, a fellow student at the Beaux-Arts. It's said that many of Amrita's romantic partners figured in her portraits, and Marie-Louise had three to her name.

Marie-Louise Chassany by Amrita (1931)

Amrita's work was some of the best at the Beaux-Arts, and her painting Young Girls (1932) earned her both a gold medal, and a spot as an associate of Paris' 1933 Grand Salon. It would've been impressive for anyone her age, but it was particularly epic considering her gender and ethnic background. Amrita was the toast of the town, and her piercing self-portraits became one of her staples.

Portrait of a Young Man (1933). The subject is one of Amrita's classmates, Boris Tazlitsky

Just as Amrita was taking off in Paris, one of her teachers suggested that she move back to her beloved India where she'd be more "in her element" to paint the subjects and culture she so admired. It might sound like xenophobic sabotage masked as career advice, but Amrita did think her teacher made an interesting point: there was room to do something different in India.

"I can only paint in India," she wrote, "Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse, Braque... India belongs only to me".

In 1934, she moved to back to Shimla, India.

Dressing Table (c.1931)

At a time when most artists portrayed women as content and compliant, Sher-Gil’s treatment of female subjects was singularly unique, revealing their loneliness or silent resolve. This was perhaps a reflection of her own isolation in a life caught between different worlds. Nonetheless, she came to be seen as an arbiter of style in India, a symbol of the glamour of the inter-war years.

Sleep (1933)

Amrita's self portrait, Still Life as a Tahitian (1934)

Amrita and her husband, Victor, decided to move to the artistically vibrant city of Lahore (present-day Pakistan). There, they lived at 23 Ganga Ram Mansions, The Mall. Amrita's studio was on the top floor of the townhouse, and she was just prepping for her next major one-woman show in town when the unthinkable happened. Amrita fell ill - so ill, that she fell into a coma. A few days later, at just 28-years-old, she passed away in December, 1941.

Brahmacharis (1937)

To this day, there's a lot of mystery around Amrita's death. Some historians believe she could have died from a failed abortion, or tuberculosis. Others suspect foul play, as Amrita continued to have affairs right up until her death.

Her own mother, for example, believed that the jealous Victor - who would've had ample access to harmful substances as a doctor - killed her daughter.

Scandals aside, Amrita left behind a legacy of some 200 paintings (many of them are on display at the Modern Art Gallery in New Dehli).

Two Elephants (c.1940)

The Last Unfinished Painting (1941)

In life and art Sher-Gil was a woman both within and ahead of her time, breaking boundaries that make her one of India's most compelling figures of the 20th century.

Sources: messynessychic.com / Sotheby’s

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Joaquín Torres-García: individuality between many styles.

2023-07-28T10:37:46.742Z

Pintura (1928)

In the end of yet another week of hard work, we decided that adding some strait forward and bold constructivism from the beginning of the XX century would provide some additional energy for a well deserved art lovers' weekend.

So, here is a short selection of paintings by Joaquín Torres García, a prominent Uruguayan/Spanish artist.

Paisaje de playa (1924)

He was born in Montevideo, Uruguay on July 28, 1874. As an adolescent he emigrated to Catalunya, Spain, where he initiated his career as an artist in 1891.

For the next three decades, he embraced Catalan identity leading Barcelona's and Europe's art and culture to its utmost vanguards. A 'renaissance or universal man'; painter, sculptor, muralist, novelist, writer, teacher and theorist. He was also active in United States, Italy, France and Uruguay from where his influence encompasses a personal presence in European, North American and South American modern art. He dealt the eternal dilemma between the old and the modern, the classical and the avant-garde, reason and feeling, figuration and abstraction with a simple and brilliant metaphor: there is no contradiction or incompatibility.

Formas abstractas (1929)

Like Goethe, Joaquín seeks the integration between classicism and modernity.

He is known for his collaboration with Gaudi in 1903 on the stained glass windows for the Palma Cathedral and the Sagrada Família. He decorated with monumental frescoes the medieval Palau de la Generalitat seat of the Catalan government. His art is associated with archaic universal cultures; Mediterranean cultural traditions, Noucentisme, and Modern Classicism. He developed a unique style first described as 'Art Constructif' while living in Paris' 1930's. Arte Constructivo (Constructive Art), a school he opened in Madrid, will be continued as Universalismo Constructivo (Universal Constructivism), a treaty he published in South-America while teaching through his workshop schools "Asociación de Arte Constructivo" (Constructive Art Association) and 'El Taller Torres-Garcia'.

Naturaleza muerta (1947)

Estructura con formas trabadas (1933)

As a theoretician he published more than one hundred and fifty books, essays and articles written in Catalan, Spanish, French, English. In his lifetime he gave more than 500 lectures. An indefatigable teacher, Torres founded several art schools in Spain and Montevideo and numerous art groups including the first European abstract art group and magazine Cercle et Carré (circle and square) in Paris in 1929.

Pintura constructiva (1929)

Retrospectives in Paris in 1955 and Amsterdam in 1961 are the earliest to document historically the place of Torres-Garcia in the currents of abstract art. In the United States he exhibited in New York's 1920s when the Whitney Studio Club, The Society of Independent artists and the Societe Anonyme were giving their first steps. In the 1930s Albert Eugene Gallatin exhibited his work in the Museum of Living Art with Modern masters; Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Fernand Léger, etc. The Museum of Modern Art opened its Latin American collection exhibition in the 1940s with the acquisition of his works.

Pintura (1928)

Interior (1928)

During his life, Joaquín Torres-Garcia was affiliated to various modernist art movements that sought to combine European precedents of abstraction with South American imagery and life. He was constantly researching and experimenting. At different times, Joaquín was associated with Noucentisme and Theo van Doesburg's Neoplasticism. With fellow Uruguayan artist Rafael Pérez Barradas, Torres-Garcia developed Vibrationism, a style concerned with combined formal elements of Cubism and Futurism with urban imagery. Works made in this style had compositions based upon loose grids, then filled with linear symbols; these would become some of his best known and most influential pieces.
Universalismo Constructivo (Constructive Universalism), on the other hand, sought to identify a universal structural unity strictly through pure abstraction.

One can appreciate or not the style of this painter, but his extremely high capability to feel the heart beat of his time and his never ending desire to search for new solutions and to risk new ways in art can never be doubted and deserve admiration.

The artist died on August 8 1949 in his motherland, in Uruguay.

La Guitarra (1935)

Estructura constructiva con formas geométricas (1943)

Torres-García at the Sagrada Família in Barcelona (1903)

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Summer colours with Henri Lebasque.

2023-07-17T14:00:23.838Z

The extreme heat wave is covering our Mediterranean shores and it’s about time to renew our energies with a splash of some good old art - like this selection of summer drenched paintings by Henri Lebasque (1865-1937).

Le Bar Sur La Plage (1923-25)

Henri Lebasque was a French post-impressionist painter.

He was born at Champigné (Maine-et-Loire). His work is represented in French museums, notably Angers, Geneva (Petit Palais), Lille (Musée des Beaux-Arts), Nantes, and Paris (Musée d'Orsay).

He started his education at the École régionale des beaux-arts d'Angers, and moved to Paris in 1886. There, Lebasque started studying under Léon Bonnat, and assisted Ferdinand Humbert with the decorative murals at the Pantheon. Around this time, Lebasque met Camille Pissarro and Auguste Renoir, who later would have a large impact on his work.

Lebasque's vision was coloured by his contact with younger painters, especially Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, founders of Les Nabis, a group of Intimist painters that first favoured the calm and quietude of domestic subject matter. From his first acquaintance with Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, Lebasque learnt the significance of a colour theory which stressed the use of complementary colours in shading.

L'égyptienne Au Plateau De Fruits

Lebasque was a founding member of the Salon d'Automne in 1903 with his friend Henri Matisse and exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants. Two years later, a group of artists exhibited there including Georges Rouault, André Derain, Henri Ottmann, Edouard Vuillard, and Matisse. Lebasque also became friends with artists such as Raoul Dufy, Louis Valtat, and Henri Manguin, the last of whom introduced Lebasque to the South of France.

Sur La Plage

Nu Allongé Au Coussin Espagnol (1925)

Vase D'anémones Sur Fond Bleu (1912)

His time in South of France would lead to a radical transformation in Lebasque's paintings, changing his colour palette forever. Other travels included the Vendée, Normandy, and Brittany.

Lebasque had some commercial success during his lifetime. He worked on the decorations at the theatre of the Champs-Elysees and of the Transatlantique sealiner.

Lebasque died at Cannet, Alpes Maritimes in 1937.

Nu au tapis vert (Kiki) (circa 1920)

Véranda sur la Plage de Cannes (circa 1922)

Nu au collier

Nu allongé contre un lit

Baigneurs dans la vague (circa 1922)

Nu allongé

Resource: artvee.com

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Harry Richardson Cremer‘s poetic art

2023-07-10T09:20:42.832Z

When speaking of the development of the artistic photography in the first half of the XX century, Harry Richardson Cremer is one of the most interesting and poetic representatives of his time and, in our opinion, one of the most talented as well.

Born around 1904, of Upper Montclair, New Jersey, Harry Richardson Cremer comes from a family of photographers.
He was the grandson of James Cremer (1821-93), a pioneering photographer from Philadelphia. Harry’s father, Frank R., was a photographer as well. He has been influenced and inspired by both of them. Shortly after high school graduation, he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts for two years. H.R. Cremer first exhibited his photos in 1924. Later, he became a charter member of the Photographic Society of America and president of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts, Photography Department (now the Brooklyn Museum). He participated in more than 100 photographic exhibitions (salons) until 1937.

In his art world dealings, H. R. Cremer met and photographed fellow artists such as photographer Margaret Bourke-White and illustrator W.H.D. Koerner. The negatives at that time range in size from 4-by-5, 5-by-7, and 8-by-10 to an astounding and rare 11-by-14 inches.

The art by H. R, Cremer is a vivid and authentic illustration of the original aesthetics of his time, and we highly recommend adding his works to your photography collection.

In this blog article, some of selected images by Cremer are shown, all created in the 1920-30s. One of them is currently available at Controforma for a special price and others can be found on request, so please contact us if you are interested.

🚩 AVAILABLE:

H. RICHARDSON CREMER

BREAKING WAVE

1928

€ 850

Original vintage photogravure on paper, labeled by the artist's name, verso. Composed and printed in 1928. A stunning black & white composition of this famous photographer of the 1920's. The artist leaves the viewer with the impression that the flying woman is born by a flowing wave. Shown for the first time at the Salon International d’Art Photographique, Paris, in 1928.

Condition: Good. Few, very fine scratches, visible only by holding the photograph against the light.

21.5 (W) X 18.5 (H) CM

Alla rights reserved, Controforma 2023

Frank Dobson, pioneer of modern British sculpture

2023-06-11T15:57:28.027Z

Reclining Nude / 1924

Frank Dobson was born in Acton Street, St Pancras, London on 18 November 1886. His father was a commercial artist, and young Frank was introduced to the technical aspects of painting at an early age. His father also fostered in him a love and respect for fine art by taking him on frequent visits to the National Gallery.

In an extended interview with the writer and academic Stanley Casson broadcast by the BBC in 1933 Frank Dobson set out his intentions and ideas concerning his sculpture. 'The primary appeal of sculpture', Dobson declared, 'is to the emotion which results from contemplating the peculiar and apparently static evolutions which take place when a number of forms are superbly assembled'. Questioned by Casson about what he meant by this, Dobson expanded further: 'All the finest works of sculpture which I have seen have a peculiar still quality, which I call static. Underlying this, the forms ... or the multiple of them, are assembled in such a fashion that one is aware of a continuous and beautiful movement within the whole which I like to call rhythm. One limb is given a fullness which leads up to another shape…' Dobson apologised that it was difficult to define something which he struggled precisely to put into words. But moreover, that it was exactly this need to represent some indefinable emotion, which stood outside the strictures of spoken language - and summoned by the rhythmic relation of sculpted forms one to another - which made him a sculptor.

Sir Osbert Sitwell, Bt / 1923

Margaret Rawlings / 1937

Noon / 1935

Rhonda / 1930

As many artists Dobson had a tragic experiences in his early age, that eventually marked his artistic vision and influenced his personality.

Frank was heavily influenced by his artist father during his childhood, which undoubtedly determined much of his life's direction. But at the age 14 Dobson abruptly severed their close relationship by his father's early death. Dobson's father had suffered a stroke while fishing at Snaresbrook, he died before reaching hospital at age forty-four. Dobson ran away from home, sleeping under railways arches or wherever he could find shelter for eight weeks until writing to his aunt and being taken in by her in Hastings. This also caused Dobson to sever all further connections with his mother.

He joined Hastings School of Art and attended in the evenings. After a few months and with a loss of patience from his aunt with his lifestyle she requested he get a job. Dobson answered a newspaper advertisement for the role of 'studio boy' with the sculptor William Reynolds-Stephens, who at the time was President of the Royal Society of British Sculptors.

It’s amazing that Dobson was to decide to become a sculptor fifteen only years later, and he was not inspired by his old master whatsoever. At this moment Dobson had no aspirations of a career as a sculptor. His intentions were to become a painter like his father and to produce art to be housed in the National Gallery or Royal Academy.

After returning to London, he continued his studies at the City and Guilds School, Kennington, then again lived in Cornwall, where he shared a studio with Cedric Morris in Newlyn.
His early work consisted mainly of paintings.

He made his first carving in 1913, but his first one-man exhibition - at the Chenil Gallery, London, in 1914-consisted of paintings and drawings. After the First World War (when he served in France with the Artists' Rifles), he finally started turning increasingly to sculpture, and had his first one-man exhibition as a sculptor in 1920, at the Leicester Galleries, London.

During the 1920s and 1930s Dobson gained an outstanding reputation. In 1925 Roger Fry described his work as 'true sculpture and pure sculpture ... almost the first time that such a thing has been even attempted in England'.

The monumental dignity of his work was in the tradition of Maillol, and like him Dobson found the female nude the most satisfactory subject for three-dimensional composition, as in Cornucopia (University of Hull, 1925-7), described by Clive Bell as the finest piece of sculpture by an Englishman since - I don't know when'.

His work was more stylized than Maillol's, however, and his sophisticated simplifications of form made him one of the pioneers of modern sculpture in Britain.

Woman seated / 1926

Truth / 1930

Torso 2 / 1928

Cecil Beaton / 1930

First portrait of Mary / 1926

Bather / 1943

Standing female nude / 1927

Lady Dorothea Ashley Cooper / 1933

Source: frankdobsonartist.com / thefineartsociety.com

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Mediterranean mood with Matisse

2023-06-04T15:13:54.439Z

Intérieur - porte ouverte (circa 1920-1921)

Summer is trying its best to take over and, on this lazy Mediterranean weekend, we are feeling like adding some color to the day by sharing the art of our much beloved Henri Matisse.

Matisse painting in his Nice studio / September 1942. His model, Carla Avogadro, is seated in the background / Photograph by André Ostier.

Henri Emile Benoît Matisse (1869 - 1954) was a French visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was also a printmaker and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter.
Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.

The intense colourism of the works he painted between 1900 and 1905 brought him notoriety as one of the Fauves (French for "wild beasts"). Many of his finest works were created in the decade or so after 1906, when he developed a rigorous style that emphasised flattened forms and decorative pattern. In 1917, he relocated to a suburb of Nice on the French Riviera, and the more relaxed style of his work during the 1920s gained him critical acclaim as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting.
After 1930, he adopted a bolder simplification of form. When ill health in his final years prevented him from painting, he created an important body of work in the medium of cut paper collage.

His mastery of the expressive language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art.

Les coucous, tapis bleu et rose / 1911

"I depend entirely on my model," wrote Matisse in 1939. The artist was drawn to powerful women whom he considered his collaborators, challenging and inspiring him to greater heights of creativity. Yet it is fair to say he demanded much of them. As his biographer Hilary Spurling writes, ‘They had to learn to live with the unbearable tension Matisse generated when working.’

Their reward was to be depicted as sensuous Ottoman odalisques or dancing girls in blazing strokes of red, ultramarine and yellow.

Nu couché aux yeux bleus / 1936

Odalisque couchée aux magnolias / 1923

Le tapis rouge / 1919-1920

Nu allongé / 1928

Splashes of pure energy, vivid colours, adoration of the blooming of Nature in every form - this is what we find in all types of Matisse's art works, not only portraits.
Actually, the South of France was one of the most suitable places to find inspiration for an artist like Matisse but the first encounter with the city of Nice was disappointing for him.

It is in 1917 that Matisse, a man from the North, first discovered Nice where he hoped to treat his bronchitis. From then on, he came back every winter and stayed in hotels until 1921. He then moved to place Charles Felix on the Cours Saleya.

The painting Tempête à Nice was painted from the window of the Hôtel de la Méditerranée where the artist moved in November 1918. It evokes his first stay ruined by constant rain at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage in Nice.

Tempête à Nice, 1919-1920 / Musée Matisse Nice

Disappointed by the poor weather, he was even ready to leave at some point: "I left l'Estaque because of the wind, and because I had caught bronchitis. I came to Nice to treat it, but it rained for a whole month. Eventually I made the decision to leave the city." The following day, the Mistral wind blew the clouds away, the weather was splendid. Discovering the luminosity of the sea and the sky was a life-changing revelation: "When I understood that every morning, I would be able to see such light again, I couldn't believe how happy I was".

Anémones au miroir noir / 1919

Confronted with the threat of German occupation, Matisse left Nice in 1943 and moved in the villa Le Rêve in Vence where he stayed until 1949. Painted during the spring of 1944, Lectrice à la table jaune is one of the numerous paintings from Matisse's 'Vence Period'. Here, Matisse returned to one of his favourite themes, that of women reading.

Lectrice à la table jaune / 1944

The magic of Nice always remained in the heart id the artist. He continued to create paintings deeply linked with it.
For example, "Nature morte aux grenadesand", the painting that eventually became part of the first donation Matisse made to the City of Nice in 1953.
In 1949, Matisse even designed a poster for the tourist office, using this painting to which he added the words "Nice, Travail & Joie" written in his own hand (Nice, Work & Joy).

Nature morte aux grenadesand / 1947

Matisse's style is also deeply rooted in the exotic, which the poet and traveler John-Antoine Nau calls "a waiting paradise" and which is directly related to the Baudelairean inspiration.

From 1945 onwards Matisse, whilst in Paris, starts to draw models from Martinique and Madagascar.

Danseuse créole / 1950

In Danseuse créole we can see an imaginary creature, half-bird, half-plant. In particular, it illustrates Matisse's fondness for artistic performances and music, in particular jazz, as well as his knowledge of Afro-American culture, discovered during his travels to New-York.

Intérieur avec deux figures, fenêtre ouverte / 1922

Nice, intérieur / 1919

Even if throughout his career Matisse didn't prefer a particular colour on his palette, blue became a privileged colour in his work at the end.

During the last few years of his life, he uses a type of blue with a particular texture so as to obtain a luminous medium through the use of flat-tints.

The intense blue of the cut-out is not meant to symbolise the colour of the sea, but simply because Matisse, through long experimental researches, recognised that this particular blue had a fixing capacity to generate gradually light and colour. The intensity of this unique blue challenges the spectator, similar to the strike of a gong that stops all action, and attracts attention carrying it towards a new vision and a new balance.

Nu bleu IV, Nice / 1952 / cut-outs, pasted on paper, mounted on canvas

As the final stroke of this post, let us choose one of the famous stain glass art works created by Matisse for The Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence, a unique building which was designed and constructed by the artistas a monument to the gratitude he felt towards his nurse Monique Bourgeois. It is a truly profound space which combines the artistic and the spiritual, and is abiding proof of Matisse’s genius.

L'Arbre de vie, stain glass / 1960

"When I put down a green, it doesn't mean grass; and when I put down a blue, it doesn't mean the sky."

HENRI MATISSE

Sources: sothebys.com / musee-matisse-nice-org / art we.com

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Franz von Stuck: Building his Myth

2023-05-29T08:34:44.542Z

Samson and the Lion / 1891

Franz von Stuck was a German painter, sculptor, printmaker, and architect.

Stuck was best known for his paintings of ancient egyptian mythology receiving substantial critical acclaim with The Sin in 1892.

In 1906, Stuck was awarded the Order of Merit of the Bavarian Crown and was henceforth known as Franz Ritter von Stuck.

The Sin / 1906

A lot of known artists usually have some sort of mentor but Stuck did not.

Franz Stuck came from a peasant stock, and his talent as an artist was evident from an early age. His father was a miller and as soon as Stuck was able to he supported himself. After his talents in drawing were noticed he went to live in Munich, where he lived the rest of his life, and where he received his artistic training at the Academy of Applied Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts. His first jobs that he started to earn income from weren't all that fancy, but they were still jobs in the art world. These jobs included such things as being an illustrator, making drawings or caricatures for magazines, making bookplates, menus, posters etc.

The Kiss of the Sphinx / 1895

Franz practiced what he called "gesamtkunstwerk" or "total work of art" and that is exactly the phrase that best describes him. He embodied art in every way he could, it wasn't simply just his painting skills that made him such an icon, his wholistic devotion and success in multiple areas of art is truly what made him "the last prince of art of Munich's great days".

Franz von Stuck was indeed an icon and had influenced people both inside and outside the world of art.

Self-portrait / 1899

In 1897 Stuck married an American widow, Mary Lindpainter, and began work designing his own residence and studio, the Villa Stuck. His designs for the villa included everything from layout to interior decorations; for his furniture Stuck received another gold medal at the 1900 Paris World Exposition.

Having attained a high public profile by this time, Stuck was ennobled on December 9, 1905, and would receive further public honours from around Europe during the remainder of his life. He continued to be well respected among young artists as professor at the Munich Academy, even after his artistic styles became unfashionable. His students over the years included Paul Klee, Hans Purrmann, Wassily Kandinsky, Alf Bayrle and Josef Albers.

Wounded Amazon / 1905

He was a member of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers. His work was also part of the sculpture event in the art competition at the 1928 Summer Olympics.

Large, heavy forms dominate most of Stuck's paintings and point toward his proclivities for sculpture.
His seductive female nudes, in the role of the femme fatale, are a prime example of popular Symbolist content.

Stuck paid close attention to the frames for his paintings and generally designed them himself with such careful use of panels, gilt carving and inscriptions that the frames must be taken as an integral part of the overall piece.

Sphinx / 1904

It can be stated without doubt that he ascended past just an artist and became an example of what a proud German should be. Indeed, Franz von Stuck pushed the limits and set the bar higher for what it means to be a true artist.

Pietà / 1891

Blowing Faun / 1914

Susanna im Bade / 1913

Study for Sonnenuntergang am Meer / 1910

Franz von Stuck died on August 30, 1928, in Munich; and it was his his funeral address to memorialise him as "the last prince of art of Munich's great days".
He is buried in the Munich Waldfriedhof next to his wife Mary.

The Guardian of Paradise / 1889

Source: Web Gallery of Art, artvee.com, openeducationalberta.ca

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Salvador Dali in Port Lligat

2023-05-24T17:31:06.661Z