Classic Artist of the Week #16 - Hans Holbein

If you read this rubric at least a few times, you know that we try writing about more modern artists from the late nineteenth or twentieth century. But it is not a rule, so I don't have to make an exception here (if it was, I'd still make an exception). Ladies and gentlemen - Hans Holbein the Younger. One of the most recognized Renaissance painters and the earliest professional designers. Undobtful master and a hipster of his times (unlike others, Holbein never founded a school). Would you agree that he deserves a place here?

Classic Artist of the Week #15 - Roy Lichtenstein

 I always had problems with understanding the paintings of Roy Lichtenstein. Comic book strips made by a guy named like a European country - big deal. But now, after examining them once again I think I got it and you might tell me if I'm right or wrong.

Classic Artist of the Week #14 - Piet Mondrian

Not often do we have a chance to, when discussing an artist, observe a clear journey in a style. We are left under impression that they were born great, on the outbreak of their careers experimented with few so-called "periods" and then marched on with the Great Art that we watch with awe today. Yet every painter, sculptor, designer and everyone else had to learn and it is clear upon seeing the chronological works of Piet Mondrian - a man who traveled around the world seeking for his unique means of expression, his new aesthetics and who finally became one of the most recognizable artists of the twentieth century.

Classic Artist of the Week #13 - Chaim Soutine

You like tragic bohemian artists from the beginning of the twentieth century, don't you? There is certainly something about that time - the specific, somewhat enchanting Zeitgeist. Pride in poorness, rebellion against traditional art, debauchery, drugs and alcohol. We had all of that in the character of Modigliani, whom we featured last week - today's artist is a bit different.

Classic Artist of the Week #12 - Amedeo Modigliani

A man is being born in a wealthy family. Sickly, introvert child with a passion of painting, in his agony dreaming about seeing the Renaissance masters. Yet, contrary to all common sense, he recovers, grows up, travels around the Europe. Learns, creates, meets famous of his time and tries to mask his disease by heavy alcohol and drug use. Then, the man creates more, the he destroys. Becomes unstable both physically and mentally. Becomes the legend of Parisian Montmartre - stripping naked on tables, having multiple affairs, creating misunderstood art and drinking himself into oblivion. He dies young. Only to be globally recognized several years later as one of the greatest artist of his time. Meet Amedeo Modigliani.

Classic Artist of the Week #11 - Helen Frankenthaler

If abstract expressionists were drinks, Motherwell would be scotch, Pollock moonshine, Rothko lager and Frankenthaler a tequila sunrise cocktail. Smooth, light, refreshing, tasty and girly, but men like them too (they're just too afraid of being spotted).

Classic Artist of the Week #10 - Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud inherited much more than a surname from his grandfather - it is the deep fascination with human psyche, lying on the border of science and philosophy. He avoided the "Expressionist" label and indeed, Freud did not paint like Dix or Schiele, but it is impossible to not the the expression in his portraits. One of the rare occasions when upon seeing a piece we think we know it all - and yet we stare at it, discovering more and more layers of human emotion and the seemingly futile existence that we dread.

Classic Artist of the Week #9 - Yves Klein

On this site, we like people who think differently. Those who have the bravery to do something the "wrong" way only to find that there exist no right or wrong ways anyway. And Yves Klein was in his craft so innovative that he founded minimal art, laid grounds for pop-art and, began performance art started the whole conceptual movement.

Classic Artist of the Week #8 - Zinaida Serebriakova

Zinaida Serebriakova (nee Lanceray) was fortunate to be born in the late XIX century in a family with deep artistic tradition - they were nearly all painters, architects, poets or writers. It is no surprise then that young Zina decided to follow a similar career and went to study under Repin in her native Kharkov. She then traveled and studied at Italy and France. Serebriakova returned to Russia and stayed there despite her growing European fame and the October Revolution. Widowed with four children, she stayed true to her style while everyone else was creating in constructivism manner.
She managed to escape to Paris in 1924, yet her children stayed in the Soviet Union. Two of them joined them in the next four years. The two that stayed in USSR stayed there for the next 36 years.

Despite her tragic history, Serebriakova's paintings are full of beauty that she admired in both people and nature. They are full of light and lightness, painted in an effortless colours that indicate happiness and love. Reflect upon these short moments when we fully realize we're alive - that striking consciousness in ordinary moments. These moments are not beautiful because they are ordinary and perfect, but because we perceive them as ordinary and they SHOULD be ordinary, but they aren't. Like eating a breakfast without hurrying. Like smiling to oneself in a mirror. Like creating.

The painting with four children is however different. It meant to represent the painter's children after being orphaned.

Classic Artist of the Week #7 - Franz Xavier Messerchmidt

Today, we do not want to feature a well-known, honored artist or even lesser-known, but still famous creator that meddled with the course of the history of art. Instead, we want to present you someone relatively unknown even to those engrossed in art, someone so out of his time that his genius was considered a madness. Yes, we know about Van Gogh - but he waited "merely" about twenty years after his death to become famous. This man waited two and a half century. Ladies and gentlemen, Franz Messerschmidt.

Messerschmidt was born in 1736 and grew up in Germany with his uncle, a sculptor. He then finished the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and began work for the government. Pretty boring bronze busts, nothing that would separate him from other contemporary sculptors. When he was about 37, he started having episodes of paranoia and hallucinations. This is believed to have caused his obsession with physiognomy - the study of the human face.

Soon after that, he was thought of as a lunatic, despite his mastery in sculpture, and was forced to leave Vienna. Then Messerschmidt began full-time work on his busts representing horribly twisted and deformed human faces. But how. Deformed through expression. The Viennese madman tried to achieve what no one else, no matter how good, did not achieve - he tried to make the stone alive. It screams, gasps, exhales in a vain attempt to express the fear, the futility, the despair, anguish, surprise and every other emotion imaginable.

This is another example of a great intellect and bigger-than-life character lost partially because of the system and partially because of his own genius. Some say he was paranoid. I say he felt.

Pictures taken from Wikimedia Commons and Flickr.

Classic Artist of the Week #6 - Aubrey Beardsley

What can someone living only a quarter of a century achieve? The most hardly graduate and start their careers serving burgers. Others, like Aubrey Beardsley, start a new movement in art, befriend the most influential writers of his times and become one of the most renown artist of late XIX century.

Beardsley was born in 1872 in England. After leaving school, he worked in an architect's office until he decided that a career in art is something worth pursuing - and he began working on it furiously. In the six remaining years of his life the son of an English noble went through various stages, different stylistically from each other and illustrated a lot of books.

Influenced by Matisse and Japanese prints, Beardsley's drawings were often innovative, expressive, erotic, grotesque and most of the time, shocking to the audience. Using only ink and only one colour he contrasted black and white, details and plainness, bright and dark. His works can be felt and understood at the same time.

Aubrey Beardsley died of tuberculosis at 25 years old.

Classic Artits of the Week #5 - Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel was born to a poor faminy in Brooklyn in 1960. His childhood was full of trauma - first, a car accident, splenectomy, his mother being taken to a mental institution and him running from home at fifteen. Not to mention everything else that a black men from Brooklyn was subjected to growing in the 60s and 70s.

Basquiat began his artistic career as a graffiti painter around New York under the pseudonym SAMO. Then, he started appearing in TV shows, made and produced music and collaborated with Andy Warhol, to name just a few. By the 1980 he has already gained significant fame and switched to neo-expressionism (which we show in this post), characterized by simplified lines, bursts of clear color and emphasis placed on emotions. Jean-Michel had another badass feature - he worked in expensive Armani suits and then appeared in public in the same, paint-splattered clothes.

The works clearly show his state of mind at the time - disturbing images of a twisted, damaged mind but with a great sensitivity. He overdosed heroin when he was 27 years old.

Classic Artist of the Week #4 - Jean Dubuffet

 Jean Dubuffet was born in 1901 in France. He decided to study art, but after a while abandoned the Academy in order to look for meaningful forms independently - and then abandoned painting altogether in favor of selling wine. Dubuffet has returned to art many years later and his first exhibition took place when he was already forty-three. A year later, under the impression of another French painter, Fautrier, he changed his style to thick impasto-placed paint imbued with sand, straws, tar and other objects coated in oil trying to create a new form.

 Debuffet also experimented with music and sculpture. Using light materials he formed them as quickly as he could and them moved to another one - like sketches. One of my favourite works of his is the Winter Garden placed in Centre Pompidou in Paris - a large room made of irregular waves of white plastic covered in black lines and circles. The same style that he has used in the Monument with Standing Beast, seen below.

 

And the Jardin d'Hiver itself

 

Classic Artist of the Week #3 - Constantin Brâncusi

Constantin Brâncuși was a Romanian-born French sculptor from the beginning of the XX century. He showed extraordinary talent from his youth - which he utilized during his studies at École des Beaux-Arts and training under Rodin (which lasted only two months because "nothing can grow under big trees" as Constantin said). Then - the first commission. Already showing simplification of the form - which later had to lead to pure abstraction - then, an innovation in sculpture.

That symbolic novelty earned Brâncuși name of the pioneer of modernism - and later on, one of the most significant artist in art history. But fame did not come that early - or at least positive fame. Parisians were scandalized after in 1920 he represented princess Marie Bonaparte as a shape best described as... phallic. True that, she was obsessed with that shape, but anyway... 

When looking at his work, keep in mind this quote, by artist himself: "Don’t look for mysteries; I bring you pure joy."

 

 And at last, the infamous "Princess X"

 

 

Classic Artist of the Week #2 - Jan Cybis

Another week, another artist. Again, Polish painter of the XX century. Why? Because I believe that his work is worth showing and he doesn't even have his own page on English wikipedia. Outrageous, if yo ask me.

Jan Cybis [Ian See-beas] was studying law after WW1, which he in 1919 abandoned in order to join the Academy of Fine Arts and Artistic Industry in Wrocław. Learning under the best of Central-European painters, he developed his own style. Just like impressionists, Cybis believed that a painting should not be resembling the subject in an objective way - rather, It ought to present the subject filtered through the painter. A subjective vision of whatever you choose to portray.

And he saw the world in colour. Cybis collected like-minded people and formed Kapists - also known as the Colourists. Their works are about light, that gentle ray of photons from the Sun rabidly smashing objects in order to be reflected into our eyes and minds. The light gives impression, brings up individual memories, forms aesthetic value of the image.

But enough talking, see the paintings already.