American Art and Architecture



Download 161.1 Kb.
Page3/5
Date17.11.2017
Size161.1 Kb.
#34074
1   2   3   4   5

George Catlin, 1796-1872, (U.S.) American Indian life. Gallery of Indians. American painter and writer, born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, whose art was self-taught. In 1823 he gave up the practice of law and established himself as a portraitist in Philadelphia. From 1824 to 1829, Catlin painted portraits in Washington, D.C. and in Albany, New York. After meeting a tribal delegation of Native Americans from the Far West, he became eager to preserve a record of vanishing types and customs of the Native Americans, and traveled for years in North and South America, painting and sketching hundreds of portraits, and scenes of villages, religious rituals, games, and Native Americans at work. He stimulated popular interest in Native American culture by publicly exhibiting his work and by presenting groups of Native Americans to audiences in the United States and Europe. Most of his paintings are in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. The American Museum of Natural History in New York City owns about 700 of his sketches. Catlin also wrote and illustrated Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians (2 vol., 1841), Catlin's North American Indian Portfolio (1844), and My Life Among the Indians (1867). His work is a valuable source of historical information.
Frederic Church, 1826-1900, (U.S.) Hudson River school. Niagara, Andes of Ecuador. American painter, born in Hartford, Connecticut. He studied painting with Thomas Cole and became a member of the Hudson River school, which specialized in romantic landscapes of the Hudson River valley. Although he painted scenes of this type–notably Niagara Falls (1857, Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.) and Catskill Mountains (1852, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota)–Church preferred landscapes of scenes in South America, Europe, and Palestine. He produced such works as The Aegean Sea (1871) and Heart of the Andes (1859).
Thomas Cole, 1801-1848, (U.S.) Hudson River school. The Ox-Bow.American painter, began his artistic career as a wood engraver. He moved to Catskill, New York, on the Hudson River. He soon gained recognition for his allegorical and romanticized landscapes, which are generally considered to be the first important American landscape paintings. Because of his fame, he attracted a group of American landscape artists that became known as the Hudson River school. Cole is best known for The Oxbow (1836) and In the Catskills (1837), and a series of five allegorical canvases, The Course of Empire (1836).

John Singleton Copley, 1738-1815, (U.S.) portraitist. Samuel Adams, Watson and the Shark.

the foremost artist of colonial America and one of its most prolific. Copley's early work shows the influence of the Boston painter John Smibert and of English rococo portraitists (see Rococo Style). From the latter he learned the device of the portrait d'apparat, in which artifacts used by the subject are included in the portrait, as in Paul Revere (1768), an intense likeness of the patriot-silversmith holding one of his silver teapots. By 1760 Copley's distinctive style had crystallized, characterized by meticulous technique, clear verisimilitude, and a vivid, balanced palette. Well aware of his outstanding gifts, Copley sent his painting The Boy with a Squirrel (1765) to London, where it was exhibited.


Nathaniel Currier, 1813-1888, and James M. Ives, 1824-1895, (both U.S.) lithographers. A Midnight Race on the Mississippi. Currier & Ives, firm of American lithographers, active during the 19th century. Currier's first successful print depicted destruction from an 1835 fire that destroyed a large part of lower Manhattan. This lithograph was followed by the series, now known as Currier & Ives prints, devoted to contemporary subjects that ranged from the familiar to the sensational: scenes of social and domestic life, public disasters, and raids by Native Americans. In 1857, Currier promoted to partnership in the firm the artist James Merritt Ives (1824-95), whom he had employed as a bookkeeper. Thereafter all prints published by the firm bore the dual trademark. After the deaths of the partners, the firm continued until 1907. Today original Currier & Ives prints, some hand-colored, are valuable collectors' items.
John Steuart Curry, 1897-1946, (U.S.) Americana, murals. Baptism in Kansas. American painter, born in Dunavant, Kansas. After an initial career as a magazine illustrator, Curry worked with notable success as both an easel and mural painter. His murals include decorations for the buildings of the Department of Justice and the Department of the Interior, and dramatic scenes of Kansas landscape and history for the state capitol in Topeka, Kansas. His oil paintings are realistic depictions, primarily of rural midwestern scenes. With the American artists Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, whose work also dealt with rural life, Curry contributed to the regionalist school of American painting.
Arthur Davies, 1862-1928, (U.S.) Romantic landscapist. Unicorns. American painter. His early canvases, such as Along the Erie Canal (1890, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.), were small landscapes. After returning from travels in Europe, he painted larger, delicate romantic landscapes with imaginary figures, such as Leda and the Dioscuri (1905). He belonged to The Eight, later known as the Ashcan school, a group of antiacademic painters, and was chief organizer of the Armory Show of 1913 in New York City, which introduced modern art to Americans. An experimenter with cubism, he designed tapestries for the Gobelins factory in Paris. Although not a realist, Davies was associated with the realist painters in the circle of Robert Henri.
Asher Brown Durand, 1796-1886, (U.S.) Hudson River school. Kindred Spirits. American engraver and painter, born in South Orange, New Jersey. Trained by an engraver and at the American Academy of Fine Arts, he established his reputation as a printmaker with his 1823 engraving of the painting The Declaration of Independence, painted by American artist John Trumbull. Subsequently Durand engraved more than 50 portraits of such personages as the American general and President Andrew Jackson, the American statesman Henry Clay, and several other American presidents. After 1835 he devoted himself primarily to painting, at first figure pieces and portraits, but later realistic landscapes, mostly of the Hudson River valley and New England. With the American painter Thomas Cole he originated the Hudson River School of landscape painting; he was one of the first Americans to encourage painting outdoors.

Among examples of Durand's work are Old Oak (1844); Kindred Spirits, showing Thomas Cole and the American poet William Cullen Bryant admiring a view (1849); and Catskill Clove (1866). In 1825 Durand was a founder of the National Academy of Design; he served as the academy's president from 1845 to 1861.



Thomas Eakins, 1844-1916, (U.S.) Realist. The Gross Clinic. American realist painter, one of the foremost of the 19th century. Working independently of contemporary European styles, he was the first major artist after the American Civil War (1861-1865) to produce a profound and powerful body of work drawn directly from the experience of American life. He was strongly influenced by 17th-century masters, particularly the Dutch artist Rembrandt and the Spanish painters Josepe de Ribera and Diego Velázquez. These masters impressed him with their realism and psychological penetration. Eakins's paintings depict scenes and people observed in the life around him in Philadelphia, particularly domestic scenes of his family and friends. He exercised his scientific inclination in paintings of sailing, rowing, and hunting, where he delineated the anatomy of the human body in motion. He painted several large and powerful hospital scenes, most notably The Gross Clinic (1875, Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia), which combined sharp realism–a depiction of an operation in progress–with psychological acuity in the portrayal of the surgeon, Doctor Gross. Although none of his paintings brought him financial or popular success, Eakins had a profound influence, both as a painter and as a teacher, on the course of American naturalism. His realistic approach to painting was ahead of his time.
Arshile Gorky, 1905-1948, (U.S.) Surrealist. The Liver Is the Cock's Comb. Armenian-born American painter, whose work combined geometric abstraction and quasi-figurative surrealism. His earliest work showed the influence of Pablo Picasso. After 1939, his works were influenced by the European surrealists and by the abstractions of Wassily Kandinsky and Joan Miró. By bringing these styles to America he exerted great influence on later American painting. In particular he had an effect on the developing abstract expressionist style of his contemporaries Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning; he shared a studio with the latter in the late 1930s. Gorky's works, such as Agony (1947) and Betrothal II (1947), expressive of his subconscious fantasies, are characterized by calligraphic line and brilliant hues keyed to a dominant background color.
Horatio Greenough, 1805-1852, (U.S.) Neo-classical sculptor. George Washington. American sculptor, sometimes considered the country's first professional sculptor. He was born in Boston and educated at Harvard University. He executed busts of President John Quincy Adams, among others, and studied with the Danish neoclassical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen in Italy, where he received a commission to sculpt figures for the American author James Fenimore Cooper. Greenough spent most of his life in Florence, executing portraits and groups in the neoclassical style. His huge, seated figure of President George Washington (1847) was the first major commission given by the U.S. government to an American. The Rescue (1837-51), representing the conflict between the Native Americans and the white settlers in America, is on the portico of the Capitol in Washington.
Childe Hassam, 1859-1935, (U.S.) Impressionist. Southwest Wind.Hassam, (Frederick) Childe (1859-1935), American painter and etcher, born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and educated at the Boston Art School and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Hassam was the chief American exponent of impressionism. His primary objective both in his paintings and in his etchings was to represent the effects of sunlight in city scenes and in landscapes of rural New England. His works include July 14 Rue Daunon (1910) and Church at Gloucester (1918), both in the Metropolitan Museum, New York City. Hassam is remembered primarily for the sparkling effects that he achieved.
Edward Hicks, 1780-1849, (U.S.) folk painter. The Peaceable Kingdom. American painter, who was the leading folk, or naive, artist of the first half of the 1800s. An untutored artisan, he was apprenticed to a coach maker at the age of 13 and later set up his own successful workshop for the painting of signs, clocks, furniture, and other utilitarian items. After becoming a Quaker preacher, he began to paint canvases illustrating scenes from the Scriptures, considering his art a useful, elevating craft rather than an artistic endeavor. His principal subject was the Peaceable Kingdom, illustrating Isaiah 11:6: “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.” About 40 versions of this work are extant (Brooklyn Museum, Worcester Art Museum, among others). In them, placid groups of cows and sheep are shown together with lions, monkeys, and other beasts; children are often included, and the background always includes a scene of the Quaker colonist William Penn making a peace treaty with the Native Americans.

Hans Hofmann, 1880-1966, (U.S.) early Abstract Expressionist. Spring. The Gate. American painter and teacher, often called the dean of abstract expressionism. He was influenced by the Fauvist and cubist movements and by German expressionism. He immigrated (1932) to the United States and opened (1933) a school in New York City. After 1940 his own style, in which cubist planes are heightened by brilliant Fauve color, as in Fantasia in Blue began to approach gestural painting. Over the years, many abstract expressionist painters attended his lectures and absorbed his principles of nonrepresentational art.
Winslow Homer, 1836-1910, (U.S.) marine themes. Marine Coast, High Cliff. American naturalist painter, who is often considered, along with Thomas Eakins, one of the greatest American 19th-century artists. Homer was almost entirely self-taught as a painter. His illustrations, primarily engravings, were characterized by clean outlines, simplified forms, dramatic contrasts of light and dark, and lively groupings of figures. During the American Civil War (1861-1865), Homer made several trips to the Virginia front, where he painted his first important oil, Prisoners from the Front (1866), a work notable for its cool objectivity and vigorous realism. In 1873 he began working in watercolor, a medium that became as important to him as oil. His subject matter of the 1870s was primarily rural or idyllic–scenes of farm life; children at play; and resort scenes peopled with fashionable women; one of the best known of the latter is Long Branch, New Jersey (1869). A stay in England from 1881 to 1882, during which Homer lived in a fishing village, led to a permanent change in his subject matter. Thereafter he concentrated on large-scale scenes of nature, particularly scenes of the sea, of its fishermen, and of their families. Taking up solitary residence on the Maine coast at Prout's Neck, he produced such masterpieces of realism as Eight Bells (1886); in it the drama of the sea scene is imbued with an epic, heroic quality that symbolizes the dominant theme of his maturity: human struggle with the forces of nature.
Edward Hopper, 1882-1967, (U.S.) realistic urban scenes. Sunlight in a Cafeteria. American painter, whose highly individualistic works are landmarks of American realism. His paintings embody in art a particular American 20th-century sensibility that is characterized by isolation, melancholy, and loneliness. His early paintings, such as Le pavillon de flore (1909), were committed to realism and exhibited some of the basic characteristics that he was to retain throughout his career: compositional style based on simple, large geometric forms; flat masses of color; and the use of architectural elements in his scenes for their strong verticals, horizontals, and diagonals. Although one of Hopper's paintings was exhibited in the famous Armory Show of 1913 in New York City, his work excited little interest, and he was obliged to work principally as a commercial illustrator for the next decade. In 1925 he painted House by the Railroad , a landmark in American art that marked the advent of his mature style. The emphasis on blunt shapes and angles and the stark play of light and shadow were in keeping with his earlier work, but the mood–which was the real subject of the painting–was new: It conveyed an atmosphere of all-embracing loneliness and almost eerie solitude. Most of his paintings portray scenes in New York or New England, both country and city scenes, all with a spare, homely quality–deserted streets, half-empty theaters, gas stations, railroad tracks, rooming houses. One of his best-known works, Nighthawks (1942), shows an all-night café, its few uncommunicative customers illuminated in the pitiless glare of electric lights.
George Inness, 1825-1894, (U.S.) luminous landscapist. Delaware Water Gap. American landscape painter, largely self-taught but traveled in Europe. At first he was influenced by the detailed, romantic depictions of nature of the Hudson River school, particularly the work of Asher B. Durand and Thomas Cole. The work of Inness's middle period reflects his interest in the French open-air painters of the Barbizon school and the work of the English landscapist John Constable. The charming Hackensack Meadows (1859) exemplifies, in its more direct, colorful, and decorative treatment, his increasing feeling for mass over detail, and his fine mastery of space and atmosphere are revealed in The Delaware Valley (1865). He was made a full member of the National Academy of Design in 1868. In 1878 Inness settled permanently in Montclair, New Jersey. He was particularly successful and famous during the last years of his life. Many of his landscapes of this period show a marked preference for the soft effects of early spring and the glowing russet hues of autumn.


Gaston Lachaise, 1882-1935, (U.S.) figurative sculptor. Standing Woman.French-American sculptor, born in Paris. He went to the United States in 1906 and studied sculpture in Boston until 1912, when he moved to New York City and began the series of monumental figure pieces for which he is noted. Some of these works, more than life-size, combine weighty proportions with unusual grace; examples are Floating Woman (1927) and the bronze Standing Woman (1930-33),t. In 1931 he executed reliefs for the RCA Building, and in 1934 for the International Building, both at Rockefeller Center, New York City. Among his many portrait busts, that of the American painter John Marin is considered his best. New York City's Museum of Modern Art honored him with a large retrospective exhibition just before his death in 1935.
John La Farge, 1835-1910, (U.S.) muralist. Red and White Peonies. American painter, known for his murals, watercolors, and stained glass decorations. He was born in New York City. He studied with the French painter Thomas Couture in Paris and the American painter William Morris Hunt in the United States; he painted landscapes and figure pieces of a simple, decorative nature. La Farge was commissioned to decorate Trinity Church, Boston, in 1876 and, as a result, became largely involved in mural work for most of his career. Experimenting with stained-glass decorations, he developed and subsequently manufactured an opalescent glass that became widely used. In 1886, on a visit to Japan and the South Sea islands, he painted many watercolors of native life. His work had considerable influence on American mural painting because of its classical simplicity and fine sense of design. The Ascension (1888), an altarpiece in the Church of the Ascension, New York City, and four lunettes in the Supreme Court room of the State Capitol, Saint Paul, Minnesota, are considered among his most important mural compositions. La Farge's notable work in stained glass includes the Watson memorial window at Trinity Church, Buffalo, New York, and the peacock window in the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts.
Emanuel Leutze, 1816-1868, (U.S.) historical themes. Washington Crossing the Delaware.
John Marin, 1870-1953, (U.S.) expressionist seascapes. Maine Island.American painter, who is generally regarded as the foremost American watercolorist of his time. In 1905 he went abroad, during this period, he painted in oils and watercolors and also etched. In 1909 he held his first show of watercolors at “291,” the New York City gallery owned by the American photographer Alfred Steiglitz. Marin made his most important contribution in the medium of watercolor by using a method of bracketing and subdividing his pictures into a series of semicubist planes and bold clashes of color. He is best known for his prolific series of Maine seascapes, such as Maine Islands (1922). His other principal subjects are city buildings as, for example, Lower Manhattan from the River no. 1 (1921), and landscapes.
Reginald Marsh, 1898-1954, (U.S.) satirical artist. Tattoo and Haircut. American painter, whose pictures of the raffish aspects of New York City life have a Hogarthian liveliness. His works, for all their slapdash exuberance and piled-on detail, are skillfully composed and carefully drawn. After working as a magazine illustrator in the 1920s, he went on to paint his most characteristic work–street scenes, crowds, and honky-tonks. In the 1930s, Marsh also executed a series of large murals in the rotunda of the U.S. Custom House in New York City.

Grandma Moses, 1860-1961, (U.S.) folk painter. Out for the Christmas Trees. Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860-1961), American self-taught artist, born in Washington County, New York, and for most of her life a farmer's wife. Without formal art training and largely self-educated, she began to paint rural scenes for her own pleasure while in her late 70s. When her work was exhibited in a drugstore window, it was noticed by the New York art collector Louis Calder. This led to Moses's discovery by the New York art world. In 1939 three of her landscapes were displayed in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In 1940 the Gallerie Saint Étienne in New York City presented her first solo show; this launched her career as an artist. Her work is characterized by harmonious arrangement of figures and simple, decorative treatment, as in Thanksgiving Turkey (1943, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City).
Barnett Newman, 1905-1970, (U.S.) Abstract Expressionist. Stations of the Cross. American painter associated with the abstract expressionists and a prominent exponent of color-field painting. He is best known for his simplified canvases in which a large block of color, or color-field, is broken by one or more vertical lines. In his early works of the 1940s, Newman attempted to reject contemporary American and European influences; his arrangements of loose vertical and horizontal lines and circular forms were intended as representations of surfaces and voids. In 1948, with Onement I (Newman Collection, New York City), he restricted himself to a solid-color canvas broken by a single contrasting vertical band, a format he would use again. By treating the band of color not as a sharply defined stripe but as a rough-edged strip, Newman attempted to create a sense of tension on the canvas, as though the main color-field was ripped or torn apart by the ascending vertical. Newman also exploited the impact of the size of his canvases; some of his works were so large that they filled the viewer's field of vision. His work strongly influenced other abstract expressionist painters. See Abstract Expressionism.
Georgia O'Keeffe, 1887-1986, (U.S.) Southwest motifs. Cow's Skull.American abstract painter, famous for the purity and lucidity of her still-life compositions. O'Keeffe, who moved to New Mexico in 1949, is best known for her large paintings of desert flowers and scenery, in which single blossoms or objects such as a cow's skull are presented in close-up views. Although O'Keeffe handles her subject matter representationally, the starkly linear quality, the thin, clear coloring, and the boldly patterned compositions produce abstract designs. A number of her works have an abstracted effect, the flower paintings in particular–such as Black Iris (1926)–in which the details of the flower are so enlarged that they become unfamiliar and surprising. In the 1960s, inspired by a series of airplane flights, O'Keeffe introduced motifs of sky and clouds, as seen from the air, into her paintings. One of her largest works is the mural Sky above Clouds (1965), which is 7.3 m (24 ft) wide.
Charles Willson Peale, 1741-1827, (U.S.) American Revolutionary portraitist. Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, John Adams. American painter, who was the most prominent portraitist of the Federal period. He studied in London with the American-born historical painter Benjamin West in 1767 and settled permanently in Philadelphia in 1776. Peale painted notable portraits of many military leaders, including 14 of George Washington. He was also an enthusiastic naturalis. In 1805 he helped found Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. One of Peale's best-known works is his life-size trompe l'oeil (“fool the eye”) portrait of two of his sons, The Staircase Group (1795, , an affectionate work showing them mounting a spiral staircase. Several of his 17 children also became painters, notably the still-life artist Raphaelle Peale and the portraitist Rembrandt Peale.

Download 161.1 Kb.

Share with your friends:
1   2   3   4   5



The database is protected by copyright ©ininet.org 2024
send message
    Main page
united states
most innovative
great fire
american west
time that
chicago school
pennsylvania academy
same situation
established church
brooklyn bridge