This is one of several interior scenes in which Alexander showed people at work, surrounded by their equipment. The portrait d’apparat—an image in which a figure appears along with objects associated with his or her daily life—reflects Alexander’s training in the Munich academy of fine arts and showcases his skills both as a portraitist and as a still-life painter. His subject here is the chemist and assayer Thomas Price (1837–1912), and the setting is Price’s San Francisco laboratory. A consultant to international mining companies, Price was noted for his practical and theoretical knowledge of metals and mines.
Henry Alexander (1860 – May 15, 1894) was a painter from California. Aside from a few trompe-l'oeil paintings, his paintings generally depict individuals within highly detailed interiors. He is especially known for his paintings of men in cluttered offices filled with business furnishings or laboratory equipment, such as his several paintings of the mineralogist Thomas Price. He also painted Chinese and Japanese subjects.
He left San Francisco for New York City on April 15, 1887, in order to be at the center of the art world, but he suffered from money troubles and alcoholism. He had a studio at 51 West Tenth Street. The other artists in the building avoided him, because he was always trying to borrow money.
Alexander's work attracted enough notice that the New York Herald described him as one of the creators of the modern school of art. On May 15, 1894, his money troubles led him to commit suicide by swallowing oxalic acid in the Oriental Hotel at Broadway and Thirty-Ninth Street. Many of his works were destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.
ROFF BEMAN This memorial exhibition of his work will be the first one-man exhibit of paintings by an artist who was born, lived all his life in this University Community and developed his work here.
His untimely death, a year ago last summer, cut short the continuous production of the mature and highly developed work of one of the most significant Chicago artists of his time. Also the influence of one whose interest in the work of other artists had a far reaching effect in the development of their work.
He was born at Fifty-second Street and Harper Avenue, the son of S. S. Beman, the Chicago architect who designed the then model city of Pullman, numerous Christian Science churches, among them the First Church in Boston, and notable buildings here in the Loop.
He was educated at Harvard and the Art Institute of Chicago, studied printing and architecture, and under the influences of his mother, and accomplished amateur, also studied music throughout his life and was a fine violinist.
He pursued his studies of art and architecture in Europe, and then served in France during the first World War, where be was badly gassed. After the was he worked as an architectural draftsman, and, although he continued to follow his interest in painting, could not give his whole time to it, and felt great frustration. In about 1930 however, this became possible, and from this time to his death he worked intensively. No one was more successful in recording the atmosphere and characteristics of Chicago. Even though still-lifes and interiors the color and tempo of the city are expressed. Love of nature and the country, a feeling for the soil is shown in his simple landscapes of bleak winter fields and plowed earth.
All the paintings shown have been borrowed from his family, private collectors and the Illinois W.P.A. Art Project for which he painted continuously from its beginning.
He is represented in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, numerous private collections, and much of his work, done under the auspices of the Art Program has been allocated and hangs in public buildings throughout the country.
I love the simplicity and the gentleness of the colors
Joseph Rodefer DeCamp (November
5, 1858 – February 11, 1923) was an American painter and educator. DeCamp
became known as a member of the Boston School, focusing on figure painting, and
in the 1890s adopting the style of Tonalism. He was a founder of the Ten
American Painters, a group of American Impressionists, in 1897.
"When I begin a painting I
always hope to complete it in a few strokes, starting with the first colors I
daub down anywhere and anyhow. But it never works, so I add more, without realizing
it. I have never wanted to paint thickly paint tubes are much too expensive.
But one way or another, the painting has to be done. When I learn how to paint
better, I will paint less thickly."
Riopelle's style in the 1940s
changed quickly from Surrealism to Lyrical Abstraction (related to abstract
expressionism), in which he used myriad tumultuous cubes and triangles of
multicolored elements, facetted with a palette knife, spatula, or trowel, on
often large canvases to create powerful atmospheres.
The presence of long filaments of
paint in his painting from 1948 through the early 1950s has often been seen as
resulting from a dripping technique like that of Jackson Pollock. Rather, the
creation of such effects came from the act of throwing, with a palette knife or
brush, large quantities of paint onto the stretched canvas (positioned vertically).
Riopelle's voluminous impasto became just as important as color. His oil
painting technique allowed him to paint thick layers, producing peaks and
troughs as copious amounts of paint were applied to the surface of the canvas.
Riopelle, though, claimed that the heavy impasto was unintentional.
When Riopelle started painting,
he would attempt to finish the work in one session, preparing all the color he
needed beforehand: "I would even go as far to say—obviously I don't use a
palette, but the idea of a palette or a selection of colors that is not mine
makes me uncomfortable, because when I work, I can't waste my time searching
for them. It has to work right away."
A third element, range of gloss,
in addition to color and volume, plays a crucial role in Riopelle's oil
paintings. Paints are juxtaposed so that light is reflected off the surface not
just in different directions but with varying intensity, depending on the
naturally occurring gloss finish (he did not varnish his paintings). These
three elements; color, volume, and range of gloss, would form the basis of his
oil painting technique throughout his long and prolific career.
Riopelle was arguably one of the
most important Canadian artists of the 20th century, establishing his
reputation in the burgeoning postwar art scene of Paris, where his entourage
included André Breton, Sam Francis and Samuel Beckett. Riopelle produced over
six thousand works.
In 2014, Philipsburg-based artist
Devin Leonardi tragically died. To honor his passing and share his artistic
vision, MAM has worked closely with Altman Siegel Gallery in San Francisco and
the artist’s family to present this selection of paintings.
Leonardi deftly uses 19th century
photography as source material for his haunting landscape paintings. He
investigates the complex relationship between painting and photography, a
medium that came to prominence during modernity and challenged painting’s
supremacy. By editing and re-presenting historical photographs, Leonardi
interprets our collective record and comments on modernity as a causal force in
the nation’s burgeoning expansion.
His atmospheric paintings elicit
the precise aesthetic and illustrative realism of Thomas Eakins, Norman
Rockwell, and Maxfield Parrish, and like these influences, revel in bucolic
idealism. He positions historical subjects, however, as allegories and parables
against anonymous western tropes to present a past that isn’t lost, but
manifests as contemporary anxiety and fears of the changing future.
Dame Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth DBE
(January 10 1903 –May 20 1975) was an
English artist and sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism and in particular
modern sculpture. She was one of the few female artists of her generation to
achieve international prominence.
Centre Theatre East North Avenue,
Baltimore, Maryland ca. 1939 Photograph by the Hughes Company. Also known as
Film Centre, Centre Theatre opened in 1939 and included a studio theater and
the broadcasting center of WFBR radio. WFBR radio has since moved out and the
building was converted into a storefront church. ( I understand it has since been demolished, I hope not)
My Drawings expressed my despair,
hate and disillusionment, I drew drunkards; puking men; men with clenched fists
cursing at the moon. ... I drew a man, face filled with fright, washing blood
from his hands ... I drew lonely little men fleeing madly through empty
streets. I drew a cross-section of tenement house: through one window could be
seen a man attacking his wife; through another, two people making love; from a
third hung a suicide with body covered by swarming flies. I drew soldiers
without noses; war cripples with crustacean-like steel arms; two medical
soldiers putting a violent infantryman into a strait-jacket made of a horse
blanket ... I drew a skeleton dressed as a recruit being examined for military
duty. I also wrote poetry. — George Grosz
George Grosz was a German artist known especially for his
caricatural drawings and paintings of Berlin life in the 1920s. He was a
prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity group during the Weimar
Republic. He immigrated to the United States in 1933 and became a naturalized
citizen in 1938.
Abandoning the style and subject
matter of his earlier work, he exhibited regularly and taught for many years at
the Art Students League of NewAlthough Grosz made his first oil paintings
in 1912 while still a student, his earliest oils that can be identified today
date from 1916.
By 1914, Grosz worked in a style
influenced by Expressionism and Futurism, as well as by popular illustration,
graffiti, and children's drawings.
Sharply outlined forms are often treated as if
transparent. The City (1916–17) was the first of his many paintings of the
modern urban scene.
He settled in Berlin in 1918 and
was a founder of the Berlin Dada movement, using his satirical drawings to
attack bourgeois supporters of the Weimar Republic. His drawings, usually in
pen and ink which he sometimes developed further with watercolor, frequently
included images of Berlin and the Weimar Republic in the 1920s. Corpulent
businessmen, wounded soldiers, prostitutes, sex crimes and orgies were his great
subjects.
After his emigration to the USA
in 1933, a softening of his style had been apparent since the late 1920s,
Grosz's work assumed a more sentimental tone in America, a change generally
seen as a decline. His late work never achieved the critical success of his
Berlin years. In 1959 he returned to Berlin where he died.
From 1947 to 1959, George Grosz
lived in Huntington, New York, where he taught painting at the Huntington
Township Art League. It is said by locals that he used what was to become his
most famous painting, Eclipse of the Sun, to pay for a car repair bill, in his
relative penury. The painting was later acquired by house painter Tom
Constantine to settle a debt of $104.00. The Heckscher Museum of Art in
Huntington purchased the painting in 1968 for $15,000.00, raising the money by
public subscription.
In 2006, the Heckscher proposed
selling Eclipse of the Sun at its then-current appraisal of approximately
$19,000,000.00 to pay for repairs and renovations to the building. There was
such public outcry that the museum decided not to sell and announced plans to
create a dedicated space for display of the painting in the renovated museum.
The Grosz estate filed a lawsuit
in 1995 against the Manhattan art dealer Serge Sabarsky, arguing that Sabarsky
had deprived the estate of appropriate compensation for the sale of hundreds of
Grosz works he had acquired. In the suit, filed in State Supreme Court in
Manhattan, the Grosz estate claims that Sabarsky secretly acquired 440 Grosz
works for himself, primarily drawings and watercolors produced in Germany in
the 1910s and 20s. The lawsuit was settled in summer in 2006.
In 2003 the Grosz family
initiated a legal battle against the Museum of Modern Art in New York City,
asking that three paintings be returned. According to documents, the paintings
were sold to the Nazis after Grosz fled the country in 1933. The museum never
settled the claim, arguing that a three-year statute of limitations in bringing
such a claim had expired. It is well documented that the Nazis stole thousands
of paintings during World War II and many heirs of German painters continue to
fight powerful museums to reclaim such works.
Art Nouveau is an international
style of art, architecture and applied art, especially the decorative arts. The
style was most popular between 1890 and 1910. It was a reaction against the
academic art, eclecticism and historicism of 19th century architecture and
decoration. It was often inspired by natural forms such as the sinuous curves
of plants and flowers. Other characteristics of Art Nouveau were a sense of
dynamism and movement, often given by asymmetry or whiplash lines, and the use
of modern materials, particularly iron, glass, ceramics and later concrete, to
create unusual forms and larger open spaces.
One major objective of Art
Nouveau was to break down the traditional distinction between fine arts
(especially painting and sculpture) and applied arts. It was most widely used
in interior design, graphic arts, furniture, glass art, textiles, ceramics,
jewelry and metal work. The style
responded to leading 19-century theoreticians.
From Belgium and France, it
spread to the rest of Europe, taking on different names and characteristics in
each country. It often appeared not only in capitals, but also in rapidly
growing cities that wanted to establish artistic identities (Turin and Palermo
in Italy; Glasgow in Scotland; Munich and Darmstadt in Germany), as well as in
center of independence movements (Helsinki in Finland, then part of the Russian
Empire; Barcelona in Catalonia, Spain).
By 1910, Art Nouveau's influence
was fading. It was replaced as the dominant European architectural and
decorative style first by Art Deco and then by Modernism.
