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Cortès was born in Lagny, France on April 26, 1882.  During his early lifetime, Paris was the center of the art world.  Artist from across the globe traveled there to study and paint it’s beautiful countryside and cities; views of Paris, or as it became known ‘the City of Lights’, were in great demand by both collectors and tourists. Édouard Cortès, along with other artists like: Eugene Galien-Laloue (1854-1941), Luigi Loir (1845-1916) and Jean Beraud (1849-1936) answered their call.  Specializing in Paris street scenes, each of these artists captured the city during its heyday and continued with these scenes well into the 20th century.

Édouard was the son of Antonio Cortès – the Spanish Court painter – who was himself the son of the artisan André Cortès.  Antonio was born in Seville in 1827 and established himself as a painter of rural genre.  In 1855 he traveled to Paris for the Exposition Universelle and was drawn to the town of Lagny-sur-Marne – where he settled.  He continued to paint scenes reminiscent of Troyon, Jacque and Van Marcke.  Antonio had three children – Édouard, Henri and Jeanne – and while all had artistic talent, it was Édouard who had the passion.

Antonio began teaching Édouard at an early age and enrolled him in a private elementary school where he continued his schooling until the age of 13.   From this point on he devoted his life to art – working and studying with both his father and older brother.    In 1899, at the age of 16, he exhibited his first work at the Société des Artistes Français entitled La Labour.  The work was well received by the critics and the public – helping establish Édouard’s favorable reputation in Paris.

It was at the turn of the century, c.1900, that he began to paint the scenes that he would become most famous for – Paris’ streets and monuments.  One of the more prolific artists of his time, Cortès found his niche and stayed with it.  His views of Paris are among the most telling and beautiful images of this genre; capturing the city during all it’s seasons for more than 60 years.

Édouard married Fernande Joyeuse in 1914 and had a child – Jacqueline Simone in 1916.  Fernande died in 1918 and shortly thereafter Édouard decided to marry his sister-in-law Lucienne Joyeuse.  They settled in Paris and Edouard continued to paint views of Paris.  By the mid 1920’s, Edouard and his family moved back to Lagny (in Normandy) and he began painting scenes of country life – including landscapes, interior scenes and still lives.  He was an active member of the Union des Beaux-Arts de Lagny and was the Unions first president.   Their inaugural exhibition was held in 1927 and Cortès continued to exhibit there until the late 1930’s.

During this period he received many awards, gained great notoriety and was a frequent exhibitor at the exhibition halls in Paris, including the Salon d’Automne, Salon d’Hiver, Salon de la Société Nationale de l’Horticulture and Salon des Indépendants.

During the years of World War II, Cortès and his family spent their time in Cormelles-le-Royal (in Normandy) in an attempt to remove themselves from the harsh realities of war. By the early 1950’s he had relocated to Lagny, where he would remain for the rest of his life.  

His beautiful depictions of Paris were always in demand and he continued to paint them until his death in 1969.

This essay is copyrighted by Rehs Galleries, Inc. and may not be reproduced or transmitted without written permission from Rehs Galleries, Inc.

Werner Drewes’ life was like a metronome, always in beat with the tumultuous and transitional times of the 20th century.  The wanderlust painter was born at the turn of the century in 1899 in Canig, Germany.  His father, a Lutheran Minister, was always questioning the nature of life and reality. This later on played an impacting role in Drewes perspective and art career.  Questions of this nature are reflected when he stated, “But art is also a world with its own laws, whether they underlie a painting of realistic or abstract forms. . .  To create new universes within these laws and to fill them with experiences of our life is our task. . . When they convincingly reflect the wisdom or struggle of the soul, a work of art is born.”[1]

 

Drewes began his artistic career after his military duties in World War I when he was 22 years old.  During this period he studied with prominent figures such as Wassily Kandinsky, Johannes Itten, and Paul Klee.  While attending the Bauhaus School in Weimar, Germany, Drewes became close friends with Lyonel Feininger, Moholy-Nagy, and Josef Albers in who later proved to be lucrative for his career.  During this period of the Bauhaus when they were located in Weimar, there was a high stress on avant-garde experimentation. Drewes was torn between the worlds of structure and organization.  This struggle remained prominent in his mind and is reflected in the stylistic fluctuation from representational to geometric abstraction.  In 1923 Drewes left Bauhaus and traveled Europe, South and Central America, and Asia. Perhaps, this was an attempt to escape the turmoil that was bubbling to the surface in Europe.  After his world-traveling adventure, Werner later returns to Bauhaus to find the educational regiment has changed, and with distaste of this new structure, he relocated to New York.

 

As a professor for The Brooklyn Museum School and Columbia University, Werner Drewes encouraged and inspired many future generations of artists.  He, along with numerous well-known artists, founded the American Abstract Artists in 1937.  During this time his style of painting is highly distinguishable, and he concentrated on abstract geometric landscapes and architectural abstraction.  He received an award in 1939 from the Museum of Modern Art during an exhibition there.  In the 1940s, Drewes taught at the Moholy-Nagy Institute of Design in Chicago, Illinois.  A year later he relocated to St. Louis, Missouri and would remain as at teacher at the School of Fine Art at Washington University for over 20 years.

 

The rest of Drewes’ career consists of geometric abstraction and cubism. Occasionally drawing studies are found, but he remains known for painted and woodcut abstractions.  Werner Drewes passed away in 1985 in Reston, Virginia. A year before passing away, he had a retrospective at The Smithsonian Institute of American Art titled, “65 years of Printmaking.”  Today, over 600 works and papers written by Drewes are housed in The Smithsonian American Art Archives.

[1] http://nmaa-ryder.si.edu/collections/exhibits/abstraction/drewes.html  [02/29/2008]

Kupka stands as one of the most important abstractionists of the early twentieth century along with Mondrian and Kandinsky.  This artist was one of the first innovators of pure abstraction.  Kupka created a theory that painting could be articulated in chromatic relationships, and as musicians were free to create sounds not found in nature; artists should be able to explore these same freedoms with forms and colors. 

These compositions are life giving, evocative of nature and harmony and are joyous in spirit.  There has not been another artist since that has achieved the uniqueness of vision that Kupka brought forth although most abstractionists of the twentieth century sought inspiration and were influenced by these avant-garde studies.

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1907, Ilya Bolotowsky became a leading early 20th-century painter in abstract styles in New York City. His work, a search for philosophical order through visual expression, embraced Cubism and Geometric Abstraction and was greatly influenced by Dutch painter Piet Mondrian.

Bolotowsky immigrated to New York in 1923 and became a United States citizen in 1929. He studied from 1924 to 1930 at the National Academy of Design; in 1930 Bolotowsky received his first one-man show at New York’s G.R.D. Studios. In 1932, during a trip to Europe, he became interested in the cubist style of Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger. During the early 1930s, he became associated with a group called The Ten, artists including Louis Schanker, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko and Joseph Solman  who were exploring the use of abstraction for expressive purposes.
   
In his early works, Bolotowsky formed abstract images on the flat picture plane by combining biomorphic and geometric elements inspired by both Miró and the Russian Constructivist Kasimir Malevich. This style particularly characterized Bolotowsky’s mural for the Williamsburg Housing Project, New York; it was one of the first abstract murals done under the Federal Art Project.* 
 
In 1936 Bolotowsky became one of the founding members of the American Abstract Artists, a New York organization that opposed realistic styles and embraced non-objective subjects based on pure form and color. In 1940 Piet Mondrian moved to New York, and it was the pure geometric abstraction of the older artist’s work that had profound influence on Bolotowsky’s art. Mondrian’s stylistic clarity aided Bolotowsky in his goal to strip his paintings of any direct reference to nature and explore universal balance. Unlike Mondrian, however, Bolotowsky did not limit himself to primary colors in his painting, preferring instead to emphasize a variety of colors and geometric forms.
 
During World War II, Bolotowsky worked for a while in Alaska as a translator. When he returned to the “lower 48” in 1946, he taught at BlackMountainCollege, an important art school in North Carolina, replacing Josef Albers, who was on sabbatical leave. He stayed there until 1948 and then took teaching positions at other schools, among them the University of Wyoming, State Teacher’s College, New Paltz, New York, the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater and in the1960’s he taught humanities and fine arts at the Southampton, NY campus of Long Island University. In 1974 Bolotowsky received his first one-man museum show, held at the GuggenheimMuseum in New York. Bolotowsky died in New York in 1981. 
 
*(The Federal Arts Project (FAP) was the visual arts arm of the Great Depression-era New Deal WPA Federal One program in the United States. Reputed to have created more than 200,000 separate works, FAP artists created posters, murals and paintings; some of which stand among the most significant pieces of public art in the country. Opening August 29, 1935, as the latest in a short series of Depression-art visual arts programs, it closed on June 30, 1943. Its primary goals were to employ out-of-work artists and to provide art for non-federal government buildings: county courthouses, post offices, libraries and the like.)
 
 
 
 
PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
 
Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Ct
Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Al
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York
Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA
Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA
Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
Robert Hull Fleming Museum, Burlington, VT
Gotheborg Museum, Gotheborg, Sweden
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY
Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN
University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, IA
Jerusalem Museum, Jerusalem, Israel
Lyman Alyn Museum, New London, CT
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Michener Art Museum, University of Texas, Austin, TX
University of Minnesota, Duluth, MN
Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, NY
Musee d’Art Moderne, Ceret, France
Museum of Fine Arts, Calcutta, India
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Museum of ModernArt, New York, NY
National Collection of Fine Arts Washington, D.C.
Newark Museum Association, Newark, NJ
New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ
University of New Mexico, Albuqueque,NM
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC
Oklahoma Ar tCenter, Oklahoma City, OK
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA
Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, R.I.
Edward Root Collection, Utica, New York
RoseArt Museum, BrandeisUniversity, Waltham, MA
Salt Lake City Art Center, Salt LAke City
San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA
Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, NB
Slater Memorial Museum, Norwich, CT
Societe Anonyme Yale University, New Haven, CT
J.B.Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Il
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH
Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, IN
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.
 
 
 
References
 
“Federal Art Project” http://www.wikipedia.org/
"Ilya Bolotowsky” http://www.phillipscollection.org/

Writing in La Nouvelle Revue in 1895 at the centennial of the birth of one of the most celebrated landscape artists of the nineteenth century, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Georges LeComte proclaimed that

 

Corot is the greatest painter of the century.  Beautiful painter, yes, always interesting, but especially during our century in which painting, so preoccupied with literature and philosophy, has unfortunate tendencies to neglect the plastic qualities.  Corot has them all, marvelously: the logic and the sureness of composition, the expressive simplicity of drawing, the fairness of values, the harmonious sobriety of color, and a freshness of vision.

 

Written over one hundred years ago, the public still shares LeComte’s expression and regard for Corot, who was compared to the celebrated 17th century French writer, Jean de la Fontaine, and referred to as the “La Fontaine” of landscape painting. 

 

Corot moved between Neo-classicism, Realism, and Romanticism as well as toward an affinity with the Barbizon school, though he had a firm foundation by studying Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorraine.  More than just a painter, Corot also did many drawings, glass prints, and watercolors.  His ability to capture expressive light effects within his paintings has been suggested as having paved the way for the Impressionist movement, especially since the Impressionists revered him and thought of Corot as their teacher.    

 

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was born July 16, 1796 in Paris.  His friends extolled him as being continually in good spirits and charming.  He always had a smile on his face.  His parents, his mother of Swiss origin and his father from Burgundy, ran a successful fashion shop on the Rue du Bac in Paris.  His father hoped Corot would follow in his footsteps and maintain the family shop, but during his secondary school studies in Rouen, which began at the age of 11, it became clear that Corot had a talent for drawing.  Just five years after entering school in Rouen, Corot left and went to Poissy where he studied for another two years.  Corot returned to Paris and in 1815 was placed as an apprentice draper, later moving on to work with another merchant.  His fortuitous encounter, during this period, with a Bonington river landscape was inspirational (as noted by Patrick Noon in Crossing the Channel: British and French Painting in the Age of Romanticism, Tate Publishing, 2003):

 

No one thought of landscape painting in those days…the artist had captured for the first time the effects that had always touched me when I discovered them in nature and that were rarely painted.  I was astonished.  His small picture was for me a revelation.  I discerned its sincerity and from that day I was firm in my resolution to become a painter.

 

In 1822 he took his first painting trip, visiting a family friend in Rouen and also painting a number of scenes from Bois-Guillaume, Le Havre, and Dieppe.  It was only after this period and after much cajoling that his father accorded him a stipend which allowed him to pursue his dream of becoming a painter.  Corot once wrote, “I have only one goal in life, which I desire to pursue with constancy: that is to paint landscapes.”  While his father thought of a career in painting as worthless, Corot was determined to succeed.  He entered the atelier of Achille-Etna Michallon, a famous historical landscape painter, but just one month after enrolling, Michallon passed away.  Corot then moved to the atelier of Jean-Victor Bertin, a classical and conventional, almost methodical landscape painter.

 

Corot was an avid traveler and made several trips to Italy, Switzerland, England, and the countryside of France.  He began his first journeys to Italy in late 1825 after his father generously gave him the funds necessary for this artistic venture.  Corot left with a comrade from Bertin’s atelier and passed through Switzerland in October, staying in Lausanne for a short while before arriving in Rome during the month of December.  He stayed in Italy until 1828.  This voyage inspired his Vue Prise à Narni and Campagne de Rome.  Georges LeComte, again in La Nouvelle Revue, commented on the importance of this first trip to Italy:

 

The splendors of light and sun made, on this prodigiously gifted Corot, a profound impression that becomes plainly apparent if we compare the paintings he brought back [from Italy] with works done earlier.  He was charmed, conquered and entirely abandoned himself to this sensation.  In this delight with color and light, he lost his memory of the traditions which paralyzed him, he looked at nature and life without reminiscences, without preconceived ideas.  When he returned to France, he knew how to look personally at nature, and feel the varied beauties and colors.

 

Corot sent his first Salon entry from Rome, debuting in 1827 with Vue Prise à Narni and the La Cervara: Campagne de Rome.  His later Salon entries were numerous: Port de Rouen, Site de Fontainebleau, Souvenir d’Italie (1834); Agar Delaissé (1835); Saint Jérome (1836); Silène (1837); Diane au Bain (1838), among others.  In 1846, Un Site de Fontainebleau in the style of Theodore Rousseau and Jules Dupré was exhibited.  Several years later in 1855, he exhibited six paintings at the Exposition Universelle, obtaining a first class medal.  Of these, Napoleon III purchased Souvenir de Marcoussis.  Corot continued to exhibit regularly at the Salon until 1875.  At first, Corot exhibited themes influenced by his sojourn in Italy.  Even though Corot went back to Italy numerous times, his later works show a close affinity with the Barbizon tradition, then in full swing.  Another artist, Gustave Colin, noted that “What Corot paints, it is less nature than the love he has for it.”  In 1873 he showed his Pastorale and the Passeur, which were considered at the time his best works and which showed a complete expression of his genre of talent.  In addition to his classically inspired works, and those linked to the Barbizon group, Corot also excelled in the categories of classical landscape and the representation of figures in interiors.  In the end, he is best known to the public through his numerous dreamy and filmy landscapes of the French countryside   

 

Corot was twice awarded a first place medal at the Salons and also received many honorary titles: Décoration des Fonts Baptismaux de Saint-Nicolas du Chardonnet (1846), Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur (1846) promoted to officer (1867), and Salon jury member (1848-49).  But these honors bestowed upon him held little in personal value in comparison to the gold medal, in the name of French artists, presented to him in 1874 by his friends, as a supreme and fitting homage to his lifetime of working toward lifting landscape painting to the highest rank of creativity in the hierarchy of painting categories.

 

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot died February 23, 1875 in Ville d’Avray, continuing work on other pieces until the end.  The Salon of 1875 was the last time Corot exhibited his works, albeit posthumously, showing Souvenir du Lac Nemi and Danse Antique.   

                      

Corot’s work can now be found in many museums around the world, including the following renowned museums:

 

Art Institute of Chicago

Hermitage Museum

J. Paul Getty Museum

Louvre

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Minneapolis Institute of Arts

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

National Gallery, London

Marc Chagall was born in Vitebsk, Russia in 1887 and lived to be 97 years old. His style, while reflective of cubist, expressionist and surrealist affinities, is distinctly personal. His contribution to early modern painting and printmaking has been of the first order. Chagall studied briefly with a local artist in Vitebsk, and in 1908 studied at the academy in St. Petersburg. In 1910, he went to Paris, where he would live for most of the rest of his long life. There, he met the poets Max Jacob, Blaise Centrars and Andre Salmeon and the painters Modigliani, Delaunay, LaFresnaye, and other cubists and independents. The complexities of Chagall’s aesthetics are apt to be obscured somewhat by the whimsical fantastic subject matter. Although cubism had an early and formative influence upon his works, it did not detract from his uniqueness of expression. The impact of cubist structure and spatial handling is evident in I and my Village (1911) and Over Vitebsk (1916), both in the New York Museum of Modern Art. Thereafter, his style becomes increasingly unique and the cubist aspects operate less evidently.

Appollinaire introduced Chagall to Herwarth Walden, the German publisher and dealer, in Berlin in 1914. This resulted in Chagall’s first one-man show in the same year. He returned to Russia to marry. After the revolution of 1917, he was appointed Commissar of Fine Arts for Vitebsk and founded an art school there. He designed murals for the Moscow Jewish Theatre in 1922 and then left for Paris by way of Berlin, where he stayed long enough to make engravings as illustrations for a book. The poet Cendrars was responsible for Chagall’s meeting with the dealer Ambroise Vollard. His first retrospective exhibition was given at the Galerie Barbazange-Hodebert, Paris in 1924. His style became increasingly romantic and devoted to fantastic narratives during the middle 1920s. Chagall’s first lithography plates (30 in all 1922-23) were executed in crayon on lithographic paper. The Jewish Wedding (1926), a gouache and chalk composition, disclosed another tendency of his Russian origin. His first New York show dates from 1926. In 1927, he undertook the illustration of La Fontaine’s Fables, completing the 100 plates in 1930. In 1931, he traveled to Palestine and Syria to study themes for Biblical engravings, another Vollard commission.

By now, Chagall had become internationally famous, and a large retrospective in 1933 at the Basel Art Museum increased his prestige. He was disquieted, however, by political developments in Europe during the early 1930s and the increasingly severe persecution and threat of war lead him to paint religious works of a darkly exciting kind. His apprehensions were aggravated by a visit to Poland in 1935.

In 1939, the first prize in the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, was given to Chagall, and in 1941, he settled in the United States at the invitation of the Museum of Modern Art. At first rejuvenated by his new environment, he was deeply saddened by the death of his wife in 1944. Before returning to Paris in 1946, he completed the sets for Stravinsky’s Firebird and other theatrical designs. He also produced 13 color lithographs for One Thousand and One Nights. On his return to Paris, Chagall went to master printer Mourlot, who was responsible for the revival of lithography after the war.

Chagall had retrospective shows in 1947 in Paris, Amsterdam, and London, and was represented at the 1948 Venice Biennial. In 1949, he worked in Venice, primarily with ceramics. In that year, he also painted an important canvas, The Red Sun. This was an allegory invoking memories of his late wife and the rich colored imagery of Russian folk fantasy, which was always so much a part of his art.

1950-1952     Workshop in rue Chabrol

        1952      First color print, The Artist with Palette

1955-1956     Verve Magazine publishes 18 color and 12 black-and-white lithographs

1958-1960     80 color and 23 black and white Biblical drawings for Verve

1957-1960     Daphnis and Chloe published by Teriade. 42 illustrations, 26 small, 16 double-page

        1966      Exodus

        1967      The Circus

        1967      The Land of the Gods

The 1950s brought additional honors to Chagall, not the least of which was the commission from the Joseph Neufeld and the Women’s Zionist Organization of America to design 12 stained glass windows for the synagogue of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center near Jerusalem.

Chagall had the rare ability to start each morning fresh as if each day was the first. He saw each flower as the most brilliant, each fruit as the sweetest, and each woman as the most beautiful.

Museum Collections include:

 

  • ·         Guggenheim Hermitage Museum
  • ·         Guggenheim Museum
  • ·         Minneapolis Institute of Arts
  • ·         National Gallery of Canada
  • ·         Peggy Guggenheim Collection
  • ·         Art Gallery of New South Wales
  • ·         Arthur Ross Gallery, University of Pennsylvania
  • ·         California State University Library
  • ·         Cleveland Museum of Art
  • ·         Dixon Gallery and Gardens
  • ·         E.G. Buhrle Collection
  • ·         Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
  • ·         Goteborg Museum of Art
  • ·         Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University
  • ·         Kunsthaus Zürich
  • ·         Kunstmuseum Basel
  • ·         Kunstmuseum Bern
  • ·         Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes
  • ·         Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo
  • ·         Museum of Fine Arts
  • ·         Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall
  • ·         Oglethorpe University Museum
  • ·         Palazzo Forti
  • ·         Royal Academy of Arts
  • ·         Saginaw Art Museum
  • ·         San Diego Museum of Art
  • ·         Santa Barbara Museum of Art
  • ·         State Russian Museum
  • ·         Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art
  • ·         Tate Gallery
  • ·         Tel Aviv Museum of Art
  • ·         Museum of Fine Arts, University of Montana
  • ·         Wright Museum of Art, Beloit College
  • ·         Art Institute of Chicago

Jules Cheret was born to a poor family of artisans in Paris on May 31, 1836.  His formal education ended at the age of thirteen, when his father placed him in a three-year apprenticeship to a lithographer in order to help the family.  He continued to work for several lithographers while attending the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs.  Cheret had some success selling sketches for covers to various music publishers but it didn’t afford him the luxury of pursuing a career in art.  At this point he went to London to study technical advancements in color lithography.  After six months of drawing pictures for a furniture company catalog Cheret returned to Paris.

In 1858, young Cheret sold a poster design for Orphée aux Enfers to Jacques Offenbach.  The poster was a success but when no commission followed, Cheret again returned to London.  There he barely supported himself doing posters for operas, circuses and music halls.  A turning point in Cheret’s career developed when a friend of his introduced him to perfume manufacturer Eugene Rimmel.  Cheret did floral designs for the Rimmel products and in 1866 Rimmel advanced the funds that enabled Cheret to return to Paris and set up his own lithography studio.

The early poster designers used on or two colors on tinted paper, or in red and green strongly outlined in black.  In 1890 Cheret abandoned this primitive technique altogether and discontinued using black for a softer outline in blue.  From that time on he used flowing yellows, reds, and oranges against cool greens, and vibrant blues.  Cheret was greatly affected by the works of Rubens, Watteau, and especially Tiepolo, whose strong influence is reflected in the vertical composition of many of Cheret’s posters.  The technique of color-printing as applied to posters was, if not invented, at least enormously developed and refined by Jules Cheret, Lautrec’s most distinguished predecessor in this field, during the eighteen-eighties.

Cheret won a silver medal at the Universal Exposition of 1879 and a gold medal at the Exposition of 1889.  In the same year, an exhibition of about one hundred of his posters, pastels, lithographs, drawings, and sketches for posters was held at the Theatre d’Application.  This proved to be another turning point for Cheret.  A petition to have Cheret decorated was signed by leading figures in the arts, including Rodin, Daudet, de Goncourt and Massennet.  In 1891, he became a Chevalier de la Légion of Honor, cited as “the creator of an art industry.”

Cheret produced over one thousand posters in both color and black and white.  However, after 1900 he stopped taking poster commissions on a regular basis in order to devote more time to his paintings and pastels.  In 1912 Cheret was honored by the Louvre Museum with retrospective exhibit at Pavillion de Marsan.  Cheret had often wintered in Nice and toward the end of his life he lived there exclusively until his death in 1932 at the age of 96.  A large collection of his works is on display at the Hermitage museum in Russia.

Cheret’s charming, frivolous Harlequins, columbines, and Pierrots, his girls and boys in masks and fancy dresses, were a delight to the eye; his brilliant yet delicate colors danced like flickering sunbeams over the gray stonewalls of Paris.  The posters turned out while other contemporary designers were by comparison, vastly inferior in composition, crude in color, and slipshod in execution.  For more than a decade, until the advent of Lautrec, Cheret had no serious rival; he was the only creative artist who really understood the decorative possibilities of the poster.

Museum collections include:

 

Salvador Dali is considered as the greatest artist of the surrealist art movement and one of the greatest masters of art of the twentieth century. During his lifetime the public got a picture of an eccentric paranoid. His personality caused a lot of controversy. After his death in 1989 his name remained in the headlines. But this time it was not funny at all. The art market was shaken by reports of great numbers of fraudulent Dali prints. What’s all behind it?

Salvador Dali was born as the son of a prestigious notary in the small town of Figuera in Northern Spain. His talent as an artist showed at an early age and Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali received his first drawing lessons when he was ten years old. His art teachers were a then well known Spanish impressionist painter, Ramon Pichot and later an art professor at the Municipal Drawing School. In 1923 his father bought his son his first printing press.

Dali began to study art at the Royal Academy of Art in Madrid. He was expelled twice and never took the final examinations. His opinion was that he was more qualified than those who should have examined him.

In 1928 Dali went to Paris where he met the Spanish painters Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro. He established himself as the principal figure of a group of surrealist artists grouped around Andre Breton, who was something like the theoretical "schoolmaster" of surrealism. Years later Breton turned away from Dali accusing him of support of fascism, excessive self-presentation and financial greediness.

By 1929 Dali had found his personal style that should make him famous – the world of the unconscious that is recalled during our dreams. The surrealist theory is based on the theories of the psychologist Dr. Sigmund Freud. Recurring images of burning giraffes and melting watches became the artist’s surrealist trademarks. His great craftsmanship allowed him to execute his paintings in a nearly photorealistic style. No wonder that the artist was a great admirer of the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael.

Meeting Gala was the most important event in the artist’s life and decisive for his future career. She was a Russian immigrant and ten years older than Dali. When he met her, she was married to Paul Eluard. Gala decided to stay with Dali. She became his companion, his muse, his sexual partner, his model in numerous art works and his business manager. For him she was everything. Most of all Gala was a stabilizing factor in his life. And she managed his success in the 1930s with exhibitions in Europe and the United States.

Gala was legally divorced from her husband in 1932. In 1934 Dali and Gala were married in a civil ceremony in Paris and in 1958 in church after Gala’s former husband had died in 1952. However from around 1965 on, the couple was seen less frequently together. But Gala continued to manage Dali’s business affairs.

In 1933 Salvador Dali had his first one-man show in New York. One year later he visited the U.S. for the first time supported by a loan of US$500 from Pablo Picasso. To evade World War II, Dali chose the U.S.A. as his permanent residence in 1940. He had a series of spectacular exhibitions, among others a great retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Besides creating a number of great paintings, Dali caused the attention of the media by playing the role of a surrealist clown. He made a lot of money and was contemptuously nicknamed Avida Dollars (greedy for dollars) by Andre Breton.

Dali became the darling of the American High Society. Celebrities like Jack Warner or Helena Rubinstein gave him commissions for portraits. His art works became a popular trademark and besides painting he pursued other activities – jewelry and clothing designs for Coco Chanel or film making with Alfred Hitchcock.

In 1948 Dali and Gala returned to Europe, spending most of their time either in their residence in Lligat/Spain or in Paris/France or in New York. Dali developed a lively interest in science, religion and history. He integrated things into his art that he had picked up from popular science magazines. Another source of inspiration were the great classical masters of painting like Raphael, Velasquez or the French painter Ingres. The artist commented his shift in style with the words: “To be a surrealist forever is like spending your life painting nothing but eyes and noses.”

In 1958 the artist began his series of large sized history paintings. He painted one monumental painting every year during the summer months in Lligat. The most famous one, The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, can be seen at the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg in Florida. It is breath-taking. The artist’s late art works combine more than ever his perfect and meticulous painting technique with his fantastic and limitless imaginations.

Salvador Dali is the only known artist who had two museums dedicated exclusively to his works at lifetime. In 1980 Dali was forced to retire due to palsy, a motor disorder that caused a permanent trembling and weakness of his hands. He was not able to hold a brush any more. The fact that he could not follow his vocation and passion of painting and the news of Gala’s death in 1982 left him with deep depressions.

After Gala’s death he moved to Pubol, a castle, he had bought and decorated for Gala. In 1984, when he was lying in bed, a fire broke out and he suffered sever burns. Two years later, a pacemaker had to be implanted.

Towards the end of his life, Dali lived in the tower of his own museum where he died on January 23, 1989 from heart failure.

 

Museum collections include… 

  •   Chicago Art Institute
  •   Cleveland Dali Museum
  •   Teatro-Museo Dali, Figueras, Spain
  •   Tate Gallery, London
  •   Contemporary Art Museum, Madrid, Spain
  •   New York Metropolitan Museum
  •   Modern Art Museum, New York
  •   Modern Art Museum, Paris
  •   Washington D.C. National Gallery
  •   Philadelphia Museum of Art
  •   Stockholm Modern Museum, Sweden

Diaz was born in Bordeaux, the child of refugees from Spain.  Soon after his birth his father seemed to have deserted the family and left for England.  His mother, existing by teaching languages, made her way from Burgundy to Paris.  As a small child, Diaz was bitten by a snake while walking in the countryside and consequently lost a leg.  By the time he was ten years old he was also orphaned, and given over to the care of a priest, presumably in Paris.

By the age of 15, Diaz was apprenticed as a printer and porcelain decorator, working under an uncle of Jules Dupré.  By 1830, having by now given up the porcelain decorating, he was painting avidly.  In 1831, he exhibited for the first time in the Salon with a painting titled Scène d’Amour, which received very good critical reviews.

Diaz first visited Barbizon in 1835 and from then on spent most summers there.  His paintings were either pure landscape or imaginative romantic historical or figurative pieces, many having backgrounds of forest scenery.  He became financially successful and won many medals.  Much of his works were done for dealers, the trade and commissions from important aristocrats for portraits.  Because of his commercial success he was able and generous enough to help his needy friends, Troyon, Rousseau, and Millet in Barbizon.  In 1849 he was elected a member of the Salon Jury, and in 1851, having previously won many medals, he received the Legion d’Honneur.  Diaz reached the height of his fame in 1855 at L’Exposition Universelle.   Diaz exhibited regularly in the French provinces where he received maximum exposure. 

During the latter part of his life, his delight was to take what he called his “morning exercise,” which was hunting through the antique stores and the dealers looking for reminders of his earlier days, for example at one time he discovered a painting done by him in his early days, which he had sold for 25 Francs.  He was delighted to pay the dealer 3000 francs, and rushed home with it and hung it over his bed.  In another one story, a dealer describes how Diaz discovered a little painting of a baby in a crib with a mother bending over it.  As it turned out, the painting was by Diaz himself; it portrayed his wife and child that had died.  Diaz had sold it when he needed the money, but it had great sentimental value to him and he begged to buy it back. 

Diaz died of lung disease, nursed by his wife.  After his death, Jules Dupré, a lifelong friend and pallbearer at his funeral, wrote of Diaz, “the sun has lost one of its most beautiful rays.”

 

Museum collections include:

  • Louvre, France
  • Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
  • National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
  • Museum of Amsterdam, Holland
  • Museum of Berlin, Germany
  • Bordeaux Museum, France
  • Musse D’Orsay, France
  • Clamecy Museum, France
  • Londres Museum, England
  • Museum of Montreal, Canada
  • Museum of Moscow, Russia
  • Metropolitan Museum, New York
  • Le Puy Museum, France
  • Museum of Lille, France
  • Louviers Museum, France
  • Museum of Montpellier, France
  • Museum of Nancy, France
  • Museum of Nantes, France
  • Museum of Reims, France
  • Rouen Museum, France
  • Museum of Stockholm, Sweden
  • Toulouse Museum, France
  • Norton Simon Museum, CA
  • Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, MA
  • Royal Pavilion, Great Britain
  • Taft Museum, OH
  • Columbus Museum of Art, OH
  • Detroit Institute of Arts, MI
  • Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Ireland
  • National Gallery of Scotland
  • Phoenix Art Museum, AZ

Fernand Leger was born in France in 1881. After apprenticing with an architect in Caen from 1897 to 1899, Léger settled in Paris in 1900 and supported himself as an architectural draftsman. He was refused entrance to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts but nevertheless attended classes there beginning in 1903; he also studied at the Académie Julian. Léger’s earliest known works, which date from 1905, were primarily influenced by Impressionism. The experience of seeing the Paul Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d’Automne in 1907 and his contact with the early Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque had an extremely significant impact on the development of his personal style. From 1911 to 1914, Léger’s work became increasingly abstract, and he started to limit his color to the primaries and black and white. In 1912, he was given his first solo show at Galerie Kahnweiler, Paris. Léger served in the military from 1914 to 1917. His “mechanical” period, in which figures and objects are characterized by tubular, machinelike forms, began in 1917.

During the early 1920s, he collaborated with the writer Blaise Cendrars on films and designed sets and costumes for performances by Rolf de Maré’s Ballets Suédois; in 1924, he completed his first film without a plot, Ballet mécanique. Léger opened an atelier with Amédée Ozenfant in 1924 and in 1925 presented his first murals at Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau at the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs. In 1931, he visited the United States for the first time. In 1935, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago presented an exhibition of his work. Léger lived in the United States from 1940 to 1945 but returned to France after the war. In the decade before his death, Léger’s wide-ranging projects included book illustrations, monumental figure paintings and murals, stained-glass windows, mosaics, polychrome ceramic sculptures, and set and costume designs. In 1955, he won the Grand Prize at the São Paulo Bienal. Léger died August 17 of that year, at his home in Gif-sur-Yvette, France. The Musée Fernand Léger was inaugurated in 1960 in Biot, France.

 

 

MUSEUM COLLECTIONS INCLUDE: