Following high school, Rousseau worked for a lawyer and studied law but joined the army in 1863 after committing a minor perjury.  In 1868, he moved to Paris after the death of his father and took a job with the Paris government as a custom’s official.

Rousseau retired from work in 1893 to devote more time to painting and supplemented his income with a variety of part-time jobs including teaching painting and drawing. In the same year, he moved to Montparnasse, a centre for artistic activity in Paris.

Rousseau took his own art very seriously, however, many critics at the time often ridiculed his work as childish and untutored.  Today, Rousseau is celebrated for his dream like jungle paintings with their bold and primitive style, incredibly detailed with lush animal and plant life.  His exotic scenes did not originate from any worldly travels. In fact, Rousseau never left France.  His paintings were based on images adapted from printed sources, and from visits to the Paris Natural History Museum, and the Jardin des Plantes, a botanical garden and zoo.

As his career moved forward, Rousseau increasingly associated with the avant-garde. He exhibited alongside the Fauves at the Salon d’Automne in 1905 where he met Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay, Picasso and others. By 1910, sales of his work grew considerably.

Unfortunately, on September 2, 1910,  as his work was beginning to gain recognition, Rousseau, died after suffering from an infected leg wound.

At the end of 1910 Max Weber organized an exhibition of Rousseau’s works at the 291 gallery in New York, and in 1911 the Salon des Indépendants held a retrospective of forty-five paintings and five drawings.

Check out Rousseau’s “The Dream” and “The Sleeping Gypsy” up close on Google Art Project.

Sources: MOMA, New York Times, Wikipedia

Braque grew up in Le Havre and, following in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps, trained to be a house painter and decorator. He studied in Paris under a master decorator and received his craftsman certificate in 1901. In the evenings, he studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts from 1897-1899.  He studied painting at the Académie Humbert in Paris from 1902-04.

Braque’s first works were Impressionist but by 1906 was painting in a Fauvist style, successfully exhibiting that year in the Salon des Indépendants. Braque met Pablo Picasso in 1907.  Both artists were influenced by Paul Cézanne’s use of geometry in depicting his subjects in his work . Cézanne’s paintings greatly impacted the direction of the Paris avant-garde, and soon after, Cubism.

From 1909 Braque and Picasso worked together daily to develop Cubism. By 1911 their styles were extremely similar and during this time, it was virtually  impossible to distinguish one from the other.  In 1912, the duo began to incorporate elements of collage into their paintings and to experiment with the papier collé (pasted paper) technique.

From about 1911, Braque began experimenting with other media and techniques, as well as new canvas shapes. He began mixing paint with sand  used a house-painter’s comb to introduce areas of imitation wood-grain into his paintings. In 1912, Braque married  Marcelle Lapre and rented a house at Sorgues, near Avignon. There, he and Picasso began using pre-existing objects and materials in their paintings.

Braque and Picasso’s artistic collaboration lasted until 1914 when Braque served in the French Army during World War I. He was wounded in the war and temporarily blinded in 1915, but resumed painting in 1916. During his recovery in 1917, Braque began a close friendship with the Spanish artist Juan Gris who was also closely associated with the Cubist movement.

In the 1920s, Braque returned to a more “realistic interpretation of nature, although certain aspects of Cubism always remained present in his work.” He painted landscapes and reintroduced the figure into his work which was characterized by bold color and textured surfaces. In the mid-1920s Braque also designed the decor for two Sergei Diaghilev ballets.

In 1931 Braque made his first engraved plasters and began to portray mythological subjects. His first retrospective was held in 1933 at the Kunsthalle Basel.  In 1937,  he won first prize at the Carnegie International, in Pittsburgh.

From about 1936,  Braque’s paintings shifted again from the still-life to wider interior views. “Into ornately decorated rooms he introduced impersonal, flattened figures, such as in Woman with Mandolin or The Duet. The new mood suggested by his use of brighter colours was offset, however, by a series of macabre vanitas still-lifes, linked to the theme of the artist’s studio, that he began in 1938, possibly in despair at the approach of World War II. He also built a sculpture studio near his house at Varengeville and began experimenting with sculpture about this time, producing simple and playful, if rather two-dimensional works.

During World War II Braque remained in Paris. He painted mainly still lifes and interiors that were stark and sombre in colour. During this time, Braque also made lithographs, engravings, and sculptures.

In 1954, Braque designed stained-glass windows for the church of Varengeville. During the last few years of his life, Braque’s poor health prevented him taking on any large-scale work, but he continued to paint, make lithographs, and design jewelry.

Georges Braque died on August 31, 1963, in Paris. He is buried in the church cemetery in Saint-Marguerite-sur-Mer, Normandy, France.

Related Books:
Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism
Georges Braque: A Life
Braque (Great Modern Masters)

Sources: Guggenheim, MoMA

He was a student at the San Fernando Academy of fine Arts in Madrid but was expelled for encouraging students to rebel and for withdrawing from an exam because he said the teachers were not qualified to judge his work.

Dali quickly gained recognition in 1925 after a solo show in Barcelona, in 1928 when his works were shown at the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh, and in 1929 when he held his first solo show in Paris.  It was at this time that Dali joined the ranks of the surrealists and met his future wife, Gala Eluard.

“The Persistence of Memory” was painted in 1931 after seeing some Camembert cheese melting in the heat on a hot summer day. Later that night, he dreamt of clocks melting on a landscape.  The small work (24 cm x 33 cm) is one of the most famous of the surrealist paintings. During this time and inspired by Freud, Dali used his “paranoiac-critical method” to create his art.

During the 1930s Dalí’s political indifference alienated him from the other Surrealists who were mainly leftist. In 1937 he painted an unusual series of Adolf Hitler that were considered to be in bad taste and partly led to his expulsion from the movement.

Salvador and Gala spent World War II in the United States, where he became a popular figure. He painted portraits, dressed shop windows, created a dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s film “Spellbound” and created a cartoon, “Destino”, with Walt Disney.

Dalí returned to Europe in 1948 and was completely disconnected from Surrealism. He painted mainly in Spain, with an eclectic approach focusing on history, religion, and science.  Dalí created over 1,500 paintings in his career as well as illustrations for books, lithographs, designs for theatre sets and costumes, numerous drawings,  sculptures, and various other projects.

Dali was greatly affected by the death of his wife Gala in 1982. After that time, he lost much of his passion for life, his health began to fail, and he painted very little.  On January 23, 1989, at the age of 84, Salvador Dali died from heart failure with respiratory complications. He is buried in his Theater Museum in Figueres.

For a full biography of Salvador Dali, see the source links below.

Sources: MOMA, Salvador Dali Museum, Wikipedia

Salvador Dali on Amazon.com

Yves Klein was born on April 28, 1928 in Nice, France. He had no formal art training though both parents were artists. Between 1948 and 1952, he traveled to Italy, Great Britain, Spain, and Japan where he became a master at judo, achieving a 4th degree black-belt. In 1954, Klein settled in Paris and began his career as an artist.

A student of Eastern religions and Rosicrucianism, Klein’s quest for pure color led him to paint in monochrome. He worked with a chemist to develop his “International Klein Blue” which was made from pure colour pigment and a binding medium.  Klein considered monochrome painting to be an “open window to freedom, and the possibility of being immersed in the immeasurable existence of color.”

Klein’s artistic breakthrough occurred in 1956 when he aroused public debate with the exhibition Yves: Propositions monochromes at the Galerie Colette Allendy in Paris. The exhibition consisted of 20 monochrome surfaces, each a different shade of red, purple, orange, yellow and blue. The French critic Pierre Restany, in his speech at the opening of the exhibition, described Klein’s paintings as ‘single-colour proposals’.

“Klein presented his work in forms that were recognized as art but would then take away the expected content of that form (paintings without pictures, a book without words, a musical composition without in fact composition) leaving only a shell. He wanted his subjects to be represented by their imprint: the image of their absence.” (1)

In 1960, Klein, along with art critic Pierre Restany, and other artists founded the Nouveau Réalisme art movement. Restany wrote the original manifesto for the group, titled the “Constitutive Declaration of New Realism,”  proclaiming, “Nouveau Réalisme – new ways of perceiving the real.”

Klein was a showman and one of his most famous events was the imprinting of paper with naked models smeared with blue paint, as he directed their performance to music. As well as his monochrome works, Klein created sculptures using sea sponges, paintings made with fire, and is well known for his exhibit called The Void, in which he chose to exhibit an empty gallery room, void of everything but a large cabinet.

Klein used two other colours before and after his Blue Period,  yellow/gold and red. These colours represented his ideas of the immaterial. “Gold is the colour of the Absolute, the infinity of (divine) space. Red stands for life, fire and warmth.”

During his brief career, Klein’s body of work was an important precursor to art movements including minimal, conceptual, land and performance art.  Yves Klein died of a heart attack on June 6, 1962 at the height of his career.  He was 34 years old.

Sources: MoMA, Centre Pompidou, Wikipedia, Coskun Fine Art, Hirshorn (images)

In the 1940’s de Kooning participated in group shows with other New York School artists who became known as Abstract Expressionists. From 1950 to 1955, he produced his well-known Women series, “integrating the human form with the aggressive paint application, bold colors, and sweeping strokes of Abstract Expressionism. These female “portraits” provoked not only with their vulgar carnality and garish colors, but also because of their embrace of figural representation, a choice deemed regressive by many of de Kooning’s Abstract Expressionist contemporaries, but one to which he consistently returned for many decades.”

Following the Women series, de Kooning painted abstract urban landscapes, parkways, rural landscapes, and, in the 1960s, a new series of Women. In 1975, after working in sculpture for two years, de Kooning began a new series of dense, richly colored abstractions. “His late work consists of calligraphic, predominantly white canvases that demonstrate the artist’s ultimate synthesis of figuration and abstraction, of painting and drawing, of color and line.”

In 1974 the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, organized a show of de Kooning’s drawings and sculpture that traveled throughout the US. In 1978 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, held an exhibition of his work. In 1979, he  was awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Prize, and an exhibition was held at the Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh.

De Kooning settled in the Springs, East Hampton, Long Island, in 1963. A retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1997.

De Kooning died on March 19, 1997 in Long Island, New York.  His works are  collected in major museums and galleries all over the world.

Related Books:
Elaine and Bill
Abstract Expressionism
Willem De Kooning: Paintings 1960-1980

Sources: Guggenheim, Wikipedia, NGA

Alfred Cheney Johnston was born on April 8, 1885 in New York to a wealthy family who had connections with New York’s upper class.  In 1903, Johnston attended The Art Students League of New York but transferred to the National Academy of Design in New York in 1904 where he studied illustration and experimented with photography. While there, he met fellow student Norman Rockwell with whom he became lifelong friends.

In 1908, Johnston graduated from the Academy and married classmate and painter Doris Gernon in 1909. With the encouragement of family friend Charles Dana Gibson (creator of the “Gibson Girl”), Johnston continued to develop his photographic skills. His wife Doris was known to complete the darkroom retouch work on his prints and glass plates.

Johnston was invited to become official photographer of the Ziegfeld Follies by its founder Florenz Ziegfeld around 1916. Ziegfeld promoted his productions as “Glorifying the American Girl” and it was Johnston’s job to capture that vision in photographs. His photos were considered sexual at the time and his props included tapestry backgrounds, pearls, and shawls and scarves  for draping.

Through his relationship with Ziegfeld, Johnston also became known for his portraits of silent film stars, the upper class society, advertising work, layouts for industrial firms and cigarette companies.

Johnston’s photographs became famous around the world and he had a very successful career with the Follies until the stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent death of Ziegfeld in 1932.

In 1937, Johnston, with Swann Publications,  published his book of artistic nude photographs entitled “Enchanting Beauty” which had only limited success. Johnston continued to work in New York until 1939 when he and his wife moved to a rural property in Oxford, Connecticut where they converted their barn into a studio space. There are few records of Johnston’s photographic work in Connecticut though he is known to have belonged to photographic clubs and associations where he gave numerous lectures.  Johnston also taught photography from his studio during this time.

In the 1960′s, Johnston attempted to donate his studio and photographic works to several organizations in New York and Washington but received little interest in the proposal.  Johnston died in 1971 at Griffin Hospital in Ansonia, Connecticut. In 2006, the book “Jazz Age Beauties: The Lost Collection of Ziegfeld Photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston” by Robert Hudovernik was published. Today, Johnston is considered a top photographer of his time, among the ranks of Edward Steichen, Horst, Arnold Genthe, and others.

Sources: Alfred Cheney Johnston.com

Ernst studied philosophy at the University at Bonn in 1909 and was influenced by the ideas of Freud, Nietzsche and the  Max Stirner.  In 1911 Ernst became associated with August Macke and joined the Rheinische Expressionisten group in Bonn. He exhibited for the first time in 1912 at the Galerie Feldman in Cologne.  In 1913 he met poet Guillaume Apollinaire and Robert Delaunay and traveled to Paris. In 1914 he met Jean Arp, who was to become a lifelong friend.

From 1914-1918, Ernst served in the German Army.  He continued to paint, influenced semi-Cubist, semi-abstract motifs following Delaunay, Arp and Apollinaire.  “Like many German writers and artists he was scarred by his experience of the war; it led him to reject the values of his family and class and to join in with the provocative, critical stance of the Dada movement.”

Ernst married art historian Louise Strauss in 1918. Between 1919 and 1920,  he collaborated with Johannes Baargeld in Cologne on an exhibition and a series of publications similar in style of the Dada activities in Zurich and Berlin. In 1922, Ernst left his wife and child and moved illegally to Paris, where he lived and collaborated with French poet Paul Elouard and his wife Gala.

“After 1918 Ernst rarely employed conventional techniques in his paintings. His early work shows that he was a technically skilled painter and draughtsman. Between 1918 and 1924 virtually all his paintings and prints were based on the principle of collage, and this practice remained central to his later work. Ernst’s major paintings of 1921–4 do not employ collage, but their composition is based on the collage principle.  Ernst’s definition of collage as ‘the culture of systematic displacement’ and ‘the exploitation of the chance meeting of two distant realities on an unfamiliar plane’”

From 1925-1927, Ernst developed the  frottage technique which he said was a form of automatism. In 1926, he produced a series of drawings called Histoire naturelle that he exhibited and published. “The drawings were made by placing sheets of paper over different objects such as floorboards and leaves, and rubbing with a stick of graphite. Through precise selection, combination, control of texture and some discreet additions, he was able to build up delicate, surprising images of fantasy landscapes, plants and creatures. He adapted this fundamentally simple technique to painting in the form of grattage, by which textures and patterns were made through simultaneously rubbing and scraping off layers of paint. Representational forms were then extracted from the whole by means of overpainting.”  Ernst used variations on the technique in most of his paintings for the next several years, especially in the Forest series.”

Ernst held successful exhibitions between 1925 and 1928, and became a “fashionable” artist in Paris. In 1926 he painted sets for Diaghilev’s production of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet in collaboration with Joan Miró.  In 1927, Ernst married Marie-Berthe Aurenche and painted After Us—Motherhood, using calm, harmonious forms and warm colours. “This painting, along with the three versions of Monument to the Birds,  illustrates Ernst’s growing preoccupation with bird imagery during this period.”

In 1929, Ernst renewed his interest in collage producing the  ‘novel’, La Femme 100 têtes (‘The woman with 100 heads’). The book consisted of 124 captioned pictures which were made by adapting images taken from late 19th-century illustrated magazines. From 1929 to 1932, Ernst also created a series of collages featuring ‘Loplop, the Bird-Superior’. “In these and other collages Loplop represents the artist himself and presents a sequence of tableaux illustrating Ernst’s technical methods and ideas.”

During this period, Ernst supported the ideas of the Surrealists. “Andre Breton’s novel Nadja and Dalí’s advocacy of the ‘paranoiac-critical’ method were important background influences on his work. Ernst renewed his solidarity with the group in his collage Loplop Introduces Members of the Surrealist Group.”

From 1925 to 1931 many of Ernst’s works carried imagery that was “violent and menacing. This aspect of his work became more prominent after 1933, partly in reaction to the political and social climate of the time.”  Ernst (as well as many other German artists and writers) was condemned by the Nazi cultural authorities.

During the 1930s Ernst became increasingly well known. He exhibited at the Julian Levy Gallery in New York and in 1936 and 1938, participated in the large international Surrealist exhibitions in London, New York and Paris.

At the outbreak of WWII,  Ernst was interned as an enemy alien. With the help of Peggy Guggenheim, was able flee to New York in July 1941. Ernst married Guggenheim in 1942 and became a leading figure among the art community in New York. His marriage to Guggenheim was short, and in  1946, Ernst married American artist Dorothea Tanning.

In New York, Ernst developed a technique using paint dripped from a suspended, swinging can and renewed his belief in the “unconscious sources of his work.” Many of his paintings of this period employ the technique of decalcomania where “rich, unpredictable patterns were obtained by either taking an impression from, or sponging, layers of liquid paint: figurative motifs were then developed by overpainting.”

In 1946 Ernst and Tanning settled in Sedona, Arizona, and in 1948, he gained American citizenship. Between 1943 and 1950 he  created a series of paintings in a controlled geometric style and produced a number of sculptures.

In 1953 Ernst and Tanning returned to France where he had his first major post-war retrospective at Knokke-Het Zoute. Ernst became a naturalized French citizen in 1958. His reputation grew steadily after his return to Europe and in 1954 he was awarded a Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale. In the following years,  major exhibitions of his work were held in New York, Cologne, and Stockholm. Major retrospectives of his work were held in New York and Paris in 1975.

Max Ernst died on April 1, 1976 in Paris. He was interred at the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Sources: MoMA, Olga’s Gallery (images), Guggenheim, Wikipedia

At age 16, Van Gogh worked as an apprentice for the art dealer Goupil & Cie in Hague at a gallery run by his uncle.  Between 1873 and 1876, Van Gogh moved between the London and Paris branches of Goupil. During this time,  he learned a great deal about Old Master and contemporary painting.  While in England he began collecting illustrations. In 1876, Van Gogh was dismissed from his position, at which point, he decided to become a minister.

In 1877, Van Gogh moved to Amsterdam where he attempted to enroll in theology school.  After giving up his preparatory studies, Van Gogh moved to the coal mining town Borinage in Belgium where he worked as a lay preacher. Living like a pauper among the miners, Van Gogh slept on the floor and gave away his belongings. His obsessive commitment was frowned upon by the church and he was dismissed.

In 1880, Van Gogh decided finally that he would become an artist. He moved to Brussels  and studied independently,  and occasionally with  Dutch artist Anthon van Rappard. Van Gogh’s brother Theo, who worked at Goupil’s Paris branch, sent him money during this time and would continue to support him regularly until the end of Van Gogh’s life. Van Gogh also studied briefly in The Hague with Anton Mauve, where he  was introduced to watercolour and oil technique, and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp in 1886, but withdrew after two months.

Van Gogh moved to Paris in 1886 where he lived with his brother Theo in the artists’ quarter of Montmartre. As a manager at the Montmartre branch of Goupil’s, Theo introduced Van Gogh to the works of Claude Monet and other Impressionists. Van Gogh studied for four months at the studio of Fernand Cormon where he met other artists including Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Emile Bernard, and Camille Pissarro.

Van Gogh began painting in brighter colours and his brushwork became more broken. Like the Impressionists, he chose his subjects from the city’s cafés and streets, as well as the countryside along the Seine River. During this time, Van Gogh dreamed of creating an artistic community in which they lived and worked together in harmony.

In February 1888, Van Gogh left Paris and traveled to Provence in the south of France.  Still hoping to establish his artists’ cooperative, Van Gogh rented a studio (The Yellow House) in Arles and invited Gauguin to join him. Gauguin finally agreed and from October 1888 spent nine weeks working and discussing art with Van Gogh. However, tension began to grow between the two artists. In December, an argument occurred resulting with the infamous “cutting off his own ear” story.

There are two schools of thought about how Vincent van Gogh lost part of his left ear on December 23, 1888. Some believe that Paul Gauguin cut off van Gogh’s ear in self-defense during a quarrel.  Others think that he slashed his own left ear lobe after learning that his  brother, Theo, was getting married. Whether the wound was self-inflicted or not, there is no doubt that Van Gogh, bleeding from his wound,  staggered into a bordello and gave a prostitute friend named Rachel his severed ear, telling her to ‘keep this object carefully’.

Gauguin left Arles, and Van Gogh, while being treated for his ear in the hospital, experienced  the first serious onset of insanity. After Van Gogh was discharged from the hospital, he was unable to set up a new studio or organize his life.  In May 1889, he admitted himself into a psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy, near Arles. Van Gogh continued to paint and converted a cell into a studio where he produced 150 paintings over the course of one year. Van Gogh sent his paintings to Theo in Paris. During this time and despite his illness, Van Gogh continued to produce one masterpiece after another including Irises, Cypresses, and The Starry Night.

Van Gogh’s work began to receive some recognition. In 1890, the Belgian artist group Les Vingt included six of his paintings in their exhibition. As well, the critic Albert Aurier published a favorable review of Van Gogh’s paintings in January 1890, linking his work to the Symbolists. It was at this time that he sold his painting the Red Vineyard to the painter Anna Boch. It was the only painting he would ever sell.

In 1890, Van Gogh left the hospital and moved Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris. While there, he placed himself under the care of the homeopathic physician Paul Gachet. Gachet had previously treated several artists and was an amateur artist himself. Van Gogh became prolific in his work producing nearly one painting a day for two months.

In June, 1890, Van Gogh visited Theo, who expressed his desire to go into business for himself which would mean a tightening of finances, including his support of his brother. Van Gogh was deeply troubled by Theo’s dissatisfaction and became very worried: “…but my life too is threatened at its very root, and my step is unsteady too.”

On 27 July 1890, Vincent Van Gogh walked into a wheat field and shot himself in the chest. He died two days later, on July 29.  “He was buried in Auvers the next day. Among the mourners were Lucien Pissarro, Emile Bernard and Père Tanguy. Bernard later described Van Gogh’s coffin, covered with yellow flowers, and his easel and brushes lying on the ground next to the casket. Van Gogh’s paintings were left to Theo who died six months later.”

In 1914 the two brothers were re-interred next to each other at the cemetery of Auvers-sur-Oise.

“Part of van Gogh’s fame is based on his extraordinary personal letters, the most numerous of which were to Theo. From France he also wrote a series of letters to his sister Wilhelmina, in which he regularly included explanations of artistic concepts that he considered superfluous in his letters to Theo. In addition, two other sets of letters have been preserved: those to Anthon van Rappard from 1881 to 1885, and those to Emile Bernard. He also corresponded and exchanged paintings with Gauguin. The abundance of biographical data and the diary-like character of the letters were important contributory factors in the making of van Gogh’s reputation. Due to the existence of the letters, many of the works are provided with the interpretation and commentary of van Gogh himself, to a far greater extent than with his predecessors and contemporaries.” (from MoMA)

Related Books:
Vincent’s Colors
Letters of Vincent van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh: Between Earth and Heaven

Sources: Van Gogh Musem, MoMA

Born on March 24, 1886 in Highland Park, Illinois, Edward Henry Weston was a major American photographer and co-founder of Group f/64.

Weston began taking pictures at the age of sixteen when he received a Bull’s Eye #2 camera from his father. His first photos were of the parks of Chicago and his aunt’s farm. His first photograph was published in Camera and Darkroom in 1906.  That same year, Weston moved to California where he sold his photographic services door to door, taking pictures of children, pets, and funerals.

In 1908, Weston moved back to Illinois and began his studies at the Illinois College of Photography. Completing the 12 month course, in six months, Weston returned to California where he gained employment as a re-toucher at the George Steckel Portrait Studio in Los Angeles. In 1909, Weston joined the Louis A. Mojoiner Portrait Studio as a photographer. In that same year, he married Flora Chandler with whom he had four children.

In 1911, Weston opened his own portrait studio in Tropico, California where he would remain for the next twenty years. He worked in a soft-focus, pictorial style which won him numerous exhibitions and professional awards. He gained an international reputation for his high key portraits and modern dance studies. Magazines such as American Photography, Photo Era, and Photo Miniature published articles about his work and Weston himself wrote many pieces for these publications.

In 1922, Weston visited the ARMCO Steel Plant in Middletown, Ohio. The photographs taken there began a turning point in his career. During this time, Weston turned away from his Pictorial style and placed a new emphasis on abstract form and sharper resolution of detail. “The industrial photographs were true straight images: unpretentious, and true to reality.” Weston later wrote, “The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.’ “

“Weston strove to capture the formal essence of his subject matter and present it as a revelation. Emphasizing line, careful cropping, and the interplay of shadows and light, Weston turned peppers, cabbages, egg slicers, rocks, and roots into objects of mystery and wonder.”

In 1923, Weston moved to Mexico City and opened a photographic studio with his apprentice and lover Tina Modotti. Many portraits and nudes were taken during this time and famous artists such as Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and Jose Orozco hailed Weston as the “master of 20th century art.”

Weston returned to California in 1926 and began his work for which he is most famous: natural forms, close-ups, nudes, and landscapes. Between 1927 and 1930, Weston made a series of  close-ups of seashells, peppers, and halved cabbages, bringing out the rich textures of their sculpture-like forms. In 1929, he moved to Carmel, California where he photographed his well known images of rocks and trees at Point Lobos.

In 1932, Weston joined with Ansel Adams, Willard Van Dyke, Imogen Cunningham and Sonya Noskowiak as a founding member of Group f/64. The group’s aim was to promote a “new Modernist aesthetic that was based on precisely exposed images of natural forms and found objects.” The optical term was chosen because they frequently set their lenses to that aperture to secure maximum image sharpness of both foreground and distance.

In 1936, Weston began a series of nudes and sand dunes in Oceano, California, which are considered to be some of his best work. That same year, he became the first photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship for  his experimental work. Weston spent the next two years taking photographs in the West and Southwest United States with assistant and future wife Charis Wilson.

In 1946, the Museum of Modern Art in New York featured a major retrospective of 300 prints of Weston’s work.  In 1948, with advancing Parkinson’s disease,  Weston took his last photograph.

Weston’s 50th Anniversary Portfolio was published in 1952 and a larger project known as “the Project Prints” took place between 1952 and 1955.  These were a series of 8 -10 prints from 832 negatives considered to be Watson’s best photographs. In 1956, the Smithsonian held the show, “The World of Edward Weston” honouring his accomplishments in American photography.

Edward Weston died on January 1, 1958 at his home, Wildcat Hill, in Carmel, California. His ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean at Pebbly Beach at Point Lobos.

Sources: Edward Weston.com, Wikipedia, Getty Museum,

Related Books:
Edward Weston: The Form of the Nude (Monographs)
Edward Weston’s Book of Nudes
In Focus: Edward Weston: Photographs From the J. Paul Getty Museum

In 1882, the Leyendecker family immigrated to Chicago, Illinois where his mother’s uncle had founded the McAvoy Brewing Company. After studying drawing and anatomy under John H. Vanderpoel at the Chicago Art Institute, J. C. and his brother Frank traveled to Paris where they studied at the Académie Julian. During this time they were exposed to the work of Toulouse-Lautrec, Jules Chéret, Alfons Mucha, and the French Art Nouveau movement. The brother’s returned to America in 1899 and in that same year, J.C. received his first commission for a Saturday Evening Post cover. It was the first of over 320 covers he would create for the Post, as well as many advertisement illustrations for the magazine’s interior pages. Leyendecker’s most well known work for the post was the New Year’s Baby. For close to forty years, the Post featured a Leyendecker Baby on its New Year’s covers.

Leyendecker also made a name for himself through his illustrations for the Arrow brand of detachable shirt collars.  Leyendecker created his “Arrow Collar Man”, a handsome, smartly dressed man who became the “symbol of fashionable American manhood.” Charles A. Beach was the original Arrow Collar model. Beach was Leyendecker’s assistant, business agent, and companion – a relationship that lasted nearly 50 years.

As well, Leyendecker designed posters for the World War I and World War II efforts that inspired many Americans to support the cause.  His sports posters which often promoted Ivy League football, baseball and crew teams, were widely collected by college students.

Leyendecker also created advertisements for The House of Kuppenheimer, Ivory Soap, and Kelloggs, as well as covers for other magazines including Collier’s and Success.

Leyendecker reached the height of his fame in the 1930’s. “His popularity grew from his ability to establish a specific and readily identifiable signature style.  With his very wide, deliberate stroke done with authority and control, he seldom overpainted, preferring to interest the viewer with the omissions as well as the parts included. Leyendecker’s approach to his career influenced the art of illustration and he became a mentor to an entire generation of younger artists, most notably Norman Rockwell, who began his career by emulating Leyendecker.”

By the end of the 1930s, Leyendecker’s grew less popular. He painted his last cover for the Post shortly after the U.S.A entered World War II.  “Though few today recognize the name Leyendecker, his work was some of the most popular of its day, owing to his ability to convey the essence of both everyday life in America and international events through paintings that reflected his unique sense of drama, romanticism and humor.”

J. C. Leyendecker died of a heart attack on July 25, 1951. He is buried alongside his parents and brother Frank at Woodlawn Cemetery in Bronx, New York.

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Sources: Wikipedia, National Museum of American Illustration, The Haggin Museum,

Related Books:
J.C. Leyendecker
Covers of the Saturday Evening Post: Seventy Years of Outstanding Illustration
Poster-Art: Innovation in Poster Design

Robert Lang merges mathematics with aesthetics to fold elegant modern origami. His scientific approach helps him make folds once thought impossible — and has secured his place as one of the first great Western masters of the art.

For more information about Robert Lang visit LangOrigami.com.

Hubert’s allegorical sculptures, monumental in size, evoke the curiosity of machines and the organic forms of nature heavily weighted within the “Steampunk” movement where present day technology is still being run by steam.  Fantastical yet fictional, Hubert’s sculptures melds the cold and often mechanical side of man and within the same, creates life like creatures that evoke spiders and insects. The Work, which is rebellious, yet philosophically beautiful, the work stands to presume a time of the past and future yet each sculpture is kinetic in nature and a fully functional moving sculpture, ensuring that the motors are hidden and the lights emerge from within the pieces bringing life to his late 19th century inspirations.

Not unlike a race car or roller coaster, Hubert’s work begins with an accelerated motion until it reaches its full velocity.  The work stands to question our own physical movement beckoning us to question the psychological rebellion each individual incurs when confronted with the new and the desire to remain in the comfort of the past. (bio from The Conference Room)

To see more of Hubert’s work, visit 1661235.com. Check out videos of these kinetic creations in motion on You Tube.

Discovered via:  Hi-Fructose

Born on March 12, 1918 (or 1920) in Brooklyn, New York, Elaine Marie Catherine Fried de Kooning was a painter, sculptor, draughtswoman, printmaker, writer, and wife of influential artist Willem de Kooning.

De Kooning studied in New York at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School, the American Art School, the Academy School, and with Willem de Kooning. She was interested in both figurative and abstract art, acknowledging the influence of her husband and of the Abstract Expressionists of the New York School.

Elaine met Willem de Kooning in 1938 and the couple married  in 1943. They had a  turbulent marriage, separating in 1956 and reconciling in 1975. Though they benefited from one  another’s art and teaching, they also suffered from each other’s infidelities and struggles with alcoholism.

During the 1940s, de Kooning painted portraits of her family, her husband, and many of her literary friends and fellow artists, including the poets Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg and the choreographer Merce Cunningham.

De Kooning had her first solo exhibition  at the Stable Gallery in New York in 1952 and exhibited almost annually thereafter throughout the United States, including shows at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, and Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1964.

In 1962,  de Kooning was commissioned by the White House to paint the portrait of President John F. Kennedy. The portrait is one of de Kooning’s most well known and celebrated paintings. Following his assassination in 1963, de Kooning stopped painting for a year and took a teaching appointment at the University of California, Davis.

In the 1970s, de Kooning taught at numerous colleges including Yale University, Pratt Institute, University of Pennsylvania, and Rice University, and others.

While de Kooning, like the “action” painters of the time, used gestural brushstrokes, most her work was figurative and representational,  and rarely pure abstraction.  An avid traveler, “she was exposed to and inspired by a wide variety of art work that helped make her one of the more diverse artists from the Abstract Expressionist movement; she experimented with sculpture, etchings and subject matter inspired by cave drawings, all in addition to her wealth of painting, which included everything from watercolors and still lifes to abstractions and formal portraits.”

De Kooning’s works are in the collections of numerous major American museums, including the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, and the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York.

Elaine de Kooning died of lung cancer on February 1, 1989. Willem de Kooning,  suffering from dementia at the time, was never  told of his wife’s death.

Related Books:

Elaine and Bill
Abstract Expressionism
50 Women Artists You Should Know

Sources: Crown Point Press, The Art Story

Born in Oldenburg , Germany in 1983, Sandra Dieckmann urrently lives and works as a Freelance illustrator and Manager for the RSPCA in East London. Dieckmann studied fashion design in 2006 and eventually earned  a degree in Graphic Information Design from the University of Westminster in London.

“My work eternally explores and expresses my personal love for drawing and observing animals and the planet we live on … bathed in all the shades of human emotion.”

To see more, visit SandraDieckmann.com.

Sources: Creative Boom

Inspired by the color palette of the light at dusk, Kimber depicts psychological portrait studies within environments reminiscent of the Brother’s Grimm Fairy tales. When it comes to her characters, she finds beauty in flaws. Ultimately, her biggest inspiration is nature – animal movements, fossils, colors found in light and shadow, objects worn and atrophied by forces of nature. Costumes, rituals, and anything else symbolic of a specified sacred celebration is what provides her man-made inspiration.

Kimber’s paintings have been exhibited in Birmingham, Philadelphia, Atlanta, San Francisco, Savannah, NY, Orlando, and Providence.

Her illustration work has been published with Lipstick magazine, Yellow Brand Skateboards, an upcoming CD project from Kebbi Williams, and Ancestry Magazine. (bio from Matt Jones Gallery)

To see more of Megan Kimber’s work, visit MeganKimber.com.

Born on March 6, 1475, in Caprese, Italy, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was a Renaissance sculptor, painter, draftsman, architect, and poet. Michelangelo was thought of as the greatest living artist in his lifetime, and is considered to be one of the greatest artists of all time.

In 1488, at the age of 13, Michelangelo apprenticed with Domenico Ghirlandaio, Florence’s best fresco painter. Following that, he studied with sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni in the Medici gardens in Florence. During this time, he was surrounded by prominent people including Lorenzo de’ Medici (known as “Lorenzo the Magnificent”), who introduced him to poets, artists, and scholars in his inner circle.

Early on, Michelangelo strove for artistic perfection in his depictions of the human body. He studied anatomy with great interest and at one point even gained permission from the prior of the church of Santo Spirito to study cadavers in the church’s hospital. It was at this time that Michelangelo began a life-long practice of preparatory drawing and sketching for his works of art and architecture.

After Medici’s death in 1492, Michelangelo left Florence, traveled to Bologna and eventually to Rome, where he continued to sculpt and study classical works. In 1498-99, the French Ambassador in the Holy See commissioned Michelangelo to sculpt the “Pietà” for Saint Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican.

In 1501, Michelangelo returned to Florence where he began work on his famous marble statue “David”. This work established Michelangelo’s prominence as a sculptor of incredible technical skill and innovation.

In 1503, Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to create his papal tomb which features the famous statue of Moses. The artist worked on the tomb for 40 years, stopping often to work on other commissions including the painting of more than 300 figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel from 1508-12.

From 1534 to 1541, Michelangelo produced an enormous fresco “The Last Judgment” in the Sistine Chapel. “A depiction of the second coming of Christ and the apocalypse, the work was controversial even before its unveiling because of the depictions of nude saints in the papal chapel, which were considered obscene and sacrilegious.”

From about 1516, Michelangelo began to focus his attention more on architecture. In 1534, he designed plans for the Medici Tombs and the Laurentian Library attached to the church of San Lorenzo. In 1536, he designed the Piazza del Campidoglio, and in 1546 he was appointed architect of Saint Peter’s Basilica and designed its dome. From 1561-65, Michelangelo’s final plans were for the Porta Pia, a gate in the Aurelian Walls of Rome.

More than any other artist, “Michelangelo elevated the status of the artist above the level of craftsman. His deeply felt religious convictions were manifested in his art. For him, the body was the soul’s prison. By using movement, monumental forms, and gesture to express spiritual urges, he opened up new artistic vistas in the direction of Mannerism and the Baroque.”

Michelangelo was known to be a complicated man. “Arrogant with others and constantly dissatisfied with himself, he nonetheless authored tender poetry. In spite of his legendary impatience and indifference to food and drink, he committed himself to tasks that required years of sustained attention, creating some of the most beautiful human figures ever imagined.”

“He constantly cried poverty, even declaring to his apprentice Ascanio Condivi: ‘However rich I may have been, I have always lived like a poor man’, yet he amassed a considerable fortune that kept his family comfortable for centuries. And though he enjoyed the reputation of being a solitary genius and continually withdrew himself from the company of others, he also directed dozens of assistants, quarrymen, and stonemasons to carry out his work.”

Michelangelo’s final work in marble, the “Rondanini Pietà,” was left unfinished. He died in Rome on February 18, 1564 at the age of 88.

Related Books:
Michelangelo: The Complete Sculpture,
Painting, Architecture Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man and his Times
Complete Poems and Selected Letters of Michelangelo

Sources: The Getty Museum, Wikipedia, Michelangelo.syr.edu

Alessia Iannetti was born in 1985 in Carrara (Italy), where she still lives and works. She enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts of Carrara, majoring in Painting and studying under Omar Galliani and Fabio Sciortino.

“Her work, characterized by an illustrative style, is nourished by poetic elements, the artist prefers the classical drawing technique, creating an encounter of hyperrealism of subjects, details and a surreal dimension where female characters, evanescent as spirits, reign in a space between infancy and adulthood. Her pale creatures, angels or demons, nymphs of the forest, or gothic lolitas, breathe in a natural, fantastic universe where metaphors and dark symbols pullulate; references of the dream world that send us to Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist Painting. Her moths, little hummingbirds that sew blinding sutures, or nourish through the blood of a sacred heart. Her dragonflies that enlighten the darkness and other fragile tiny insects, getting lost in the thick vegetation to live there hidden as locked secrets. All these arcane elements are re-interpretated in a dark way by the artist, who associate them to the world of literature, horror movies, Indie and Alternative Rock music; an essential ingredient and soundtrack of her creative process.

The exhibition Daphne Descends takes name from the song of the Smashing Pumpkins and follows the mith of Apollo and Daphne. Ten brand new artworks, with Iannetti’s unique style, realized in graphite and oil colors on wood or paper, take us through a surreal exciting fusion with Mother Nature.” ( from artist’s website)

Born on March 2, 1943, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Robert Williams is a well-known painter and founder of Juxtapoz Art and Culture Magazine. Williams studied painting at Los Angeles City College and at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, California.

Early in his career, Williams designed containers for the Weyehaeuser Corporation and was a designer for Black Belt magazine. In 1965, he became art director for Ed “Big Daddy” Roth -  the artist and cartoonist who created the hot-rod icon Rat Fink and other characters. In the late 1960′s, Williams joined the Zap Comix collective of artists, a non-conformist, anti-establishment movement that included R. Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Spain Rodriguez, Rick Griffin, Gilbert Shelton, and Victor Moscoso.

Williams published his first book, The Lowbrow Art of Robert Williams in 1979. The title of the book was meant as a statement on the current “Highbrow” tone of the art world and how Williams’ work did not fit in. Of the term “Lowbrow” Williams denies that it was ever meant to define the movement, but was merely used in the title of his first collection. He says “There was never any intention to make the title of my book the name of a fledgling art movement but, over time, that seems to be what has transpired.” In his 2008 lecture at the Oakland Museum of California, Williams stated: “The Art movement I go by is Conceptual Realism.”

In 1994 Williams founded Juxtapoz Art and Culture Magazine with a group of artists and collectors. The publication’s mission statement was to “present art that is provocative, technically adept and worthy of exposure”. “Today, Juxtapoz is widely credited with being the unifying force that drew together the various satellite art movements like street art and Pop Surrealism, into one coherent movement of “alternative art” that evolved during the late ’90s and early ’00s.”  The magazine currently has one of the highest circulations of any art magazine in the United States.

Williams’ work has been exhibited around the world including Helter Skelter: L.A., Art in the 1990s at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1992,the 1993 exhibition Kustom Kulture at the Laguna Art Museum, as well at the 2010 Whitney Biennial. Aside from his first book, Williams has published “Malicious Resplendence”, “Zombie Mystery Painting”, “Visual Addiction”, “Views from a Tortured Libido”, “Through Prehensile Eyes”, and “Conceptual Realism: In the Service of the Hypothetical”.

Williams currently lives in the Chatsworth, California with wife, artist Suzanne Williams. For more information about Robert Williams, visit RobertWilliamsStudio.com.

Sources: Bein Art, Wikipedia, Arrested Motion, Artnet, Lowbrow Art World

Related Books:

Conceptual Realism: In the Service of the Hypothetical
Through Prehensile Eyes: Seeing The Art Of Robert William
Lowbrow Art of Robert Williams