- Gustave
Moreau [French, 1826-1898]
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"The only influence that really affected Moreau's development
was that of his master, Théodore Chassériau (1819-56),
an eclectic painter whose depictions of enigmatic sea goddesses
deeply impressed his student. In the Salon of 1853 he exhibited
Scene from the Song of Songs and the Death of Darius,
both conspicuously under the influence of Chassériau.
Moreau's Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864; Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York City) and his The Apparition (Dance of Salome)
(c. 1876; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass.) and Dance of
Salome (c. 1876; Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris) show
his work becoming increasingly concerned with exotic eroticism
and violence, and his richly crowded canvases made greater use
of dramatic lighting to heighten his brilliant, jewel-like colours.
His last work, Jupiter and Sémélé
(1896; Musée Gustave Moreau), is the culmination of such
tendencies. Moreau's art has often been described as decadent.
He made a number of technical experiments, including scraping
his canvases; and his nonfigurative paintings, done in a loose
manner with thick impasto, have led him to be called a herald
of Abstract Expressionism.
Moreau succeeded Elie Delaunay as professor at the école
des Beaux-Arts, and his teaching was highly popular. He was
a very influential teacher of some of the artists of the Fauve
movement, including Matisse and Rouault. At his death, Moreau
left to the state his house and about 8,000 works, which now
form the Musée Gustave Moreau in Paris." (Source:
Britannica.com)
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to alphabetical listing.
- Berthe
Morisot [French, 1841-1895]
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"French painter and printmaker who exhibited regularly
with the Impressionists and, despite the protests of friends
and family, continued to participate in their struggle for recognition.
The daughter of a high government official (and a granddaughter
of the important Rococo painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard),
Morisot decided early to be an artist and pursued her goal with
seriousness and dedication. From 1862 to 1868 she worked under
the guidance of Camille Corot.
She first exhibited paintings at the Salon in 1864. Her work
was exhibited there regularly through 1874, when she vowed never
to show her paintings in the officially sanctioned forum again.
In 1868 she met Edouard Manet, who was to exert a tremendous
influence over her work. He did several portraits of her (e.g.,
Repose, c. 1870). Manet had a liberating effect on her
work, and she in turn aroused his interest in outdoor painting."
(Source: Britannica.com)
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to alphabetical listing.
- Evelyn
De Morgan (née Pickering) [English, 1855-1919]
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"Groomed by her wealthy family for marriage, [Evelyn de
Morgan] studied art in secret until reluctantly allowed to attend
the Slade School of Art. She went on to develop a career of
distinction, adn works such as Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamund,
Port after Stormy Seas and The Prisoner display her
originality, love of colour, detail and pictorial symbolism,
and her interest in neo-classical as well as traditionally Pre-Raphaelite
subjects." (Source: Sound the Deep Waters: Women's Romantic
Poetry in the Victorian Age, edited by Pamela Norris)
The official online presence for Evelyn De Morgan is The De Morgan Centre, whose Web site is at: http://www.demorgan.org.uk/index.htm.
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to alphabetical listing.
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Camille Claudel [French,
1856-1920]
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"French sculptor of whose work little remains and who for
many years was best known as the mistress and muse of Auguste
Rodin. She was also the sister of Paul Claudel, whose journals
and memoirs provide much of the scant information available
on his sister's life.
Between the ages of about 5 and 12, Camille Claudel was taught
by the Sisters of Christian Doctrine. When the family moved
to Nogent-sur-Seine, the education of the Claudel children was
continued by a tutor. Camille had little formal education from
that point on, but she read widely in her father's well-stocked
library. By her teenage years she was already a remarkably gifted
sculptor, and her abilities were recognized by other artists
of the time. When in 1881 her father was once again transferred,
he moved his family to Paris. There Camille entered the Colarossi
Academy (now the Grande Chaumière). Her first extant works are
from this period.
Claudel and Rodin probably first met in 1883. Shortly thereafter
she became his student, collaborator, model, and mistress. While
continuing to work on her own pieces, she is believed to have
contributed whole figures and parts of figures to Rodin's projects
of that period, particularly to The Gates of Hell. She
continued to live at home until 1888, when she moved to her
own quarters near Rodin's studio at La Folie Neubourg. By 1892
her relationship with Rodin had begun to crumble, and by 1893
she was both living and working alone, though she continued
to communicate with him until 1898. From this point on she worked
ceaselessly, impoverished and increasingly reclusive. She continued
to exhibit at recognized salons (the Salon d'Automne, the Salon
des Indépendents) and at the Bing and Eugène Blot galleries,
though just as often she would utterly destroy every piece of
work in her studio.
She became obsessed with Rodin's injustice to her and began
to feel persecuted by him and his "gang." Alienated from most
human society, living at a great distance from Paul—the
one family member close to her—her condition overwhelmed
her. On March 10, 1913, she was committed by force to an asylum
at Ville-évrard. In September 1914 she was transferred
to the asylum of Montdevergues, where she remained until her
death." (Source: Britannica.com)
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to alphabetical listing.
- Arthur
Rackham [English, 1867-1939]
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"Reared in London, [Arthur] Rackham enrolled in evening classes at the Lambeth School of
Art in 1884 and spent seven years studying there while also working full-time in
an insurance office. While a staff artist for a newspaper, the Westminster
Budget (1892Ð96), he also began illustrating books. He became skillful using the
new halftone process, and his drawings began to reveal a unique range of
imagination.
Rackham achieved renown with the publication of a 1900 edition of
the Grimm brothers' Fairy Tales featuring his illustrations. He illustrated a
limited edition of Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle (1905), which made him
known in America as well. In 1908 Rackham was made a full member of the Royal
Society of Painters in Watercolours.
Inspired by the early 16th-century German artists Albrecht Dürer and Albrecht Altdorfer, Rackham produced drawings that are distinctive for their
angularity and high detail. His illustrations are also noted for their ability to communicate the spirit of each story. Altogether he illustrated more than 60
books, including works of William Shakespeare, James Barrie, Charles Dickens, Jonathan Swift, Izaak Walton, John Milton, and Edgar Allan Poe, as
well as Mother Goose rhymes and several further collections of fairy tales." (Source: Britannica.com)
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to alphabetical listing.
- Maxfield
Parrish [American, 1870-1966]
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"The son of an artist, Parrish was educated at Haverford
College, Pa., and studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of
Fine Arts (l891-94) and the Drexel Institute of Art in Philadelphia.
He did many posters, magazine covers, and book and advertising
illustrations in the following years, and he also painted murals.
By the 1920s he was the highest-paid commercial artist in the
nation. His popularity began to decline in the late 1930s, but
his illustrations never lost favour with some segments of the
American public, and there was a renewed appreciation of his
work in the 1960s and '70s.
Parrish is best known for his depictions of fantasy landscapes
populated by attractive young women. He used meticulously defined
outlines and intricately detailed natural backgrounds, and his
unusual colours give his pictures a dreamlike and idyllic atmosphere."
(Souce: Britannica.com)
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to alphabetical listing.
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Aubrey Beardsley [English,
1872-1898]
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"Drawing was a strong interest from early childhood, and
Beardsley continued with it while earning his living as a clerk.
A meeting with the English artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones in
1891 led to his attending evening classes at the Westminster
School of Art for a few months — his only professional
instruction.
In 1893 he was commissioned to illustrate a new edition of Sir
Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, and in 1894 he was appointed
art editor and illustrator of a new quarterly, The Yellow
Book. His illustrations for Oscar Wilde's play Salomé
(1894) won him widespread notoriety. He was greatly influenced
by the elegant, curvilinear style of Art Nouveau and the bold
sense of design found in Japanese woodcuts. But what startled
critics and public alike was the obvious sensuality of the women
in his drawings, which usually contained an element of morbid
eroticism. This tendency became pronounced in his openly licentious
illustrations to Aristophanes' Lysistrata (1896). Although
Beardsley was not homosexual and was quite outside the scandals
surrounding Wilde, he was dismissed from The Yellow Book
in the general revulsion against Aestheticism that followed
Wilde's exposure in 1895. He then became principal illustrator
of another new magazine, The Savoy, and he illustrated
numerous books, including Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock
(1896). During this period he also wrote some poems and a prose
parody, Under the Hill (1903; the original unexpurgated
version, The Story of Venus and Tannhauser, appeared
in 1907).
Delicate in health from the age of six, when he first contracted
tuberculosis, he was attacked again by the disease when he was
17. From 1896 he was an invalid. In 1897, after being received
into the Roman Catholic Church, he went to live in France, where
he died at the age of 25. His work enjoyed periodic revivals,
most notably during the 1960s. " (Source: Britannica.com)
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to alphabetical listing.
- Romaine
Brooks (née Beatrice Romaine Goddard) [American,
1874-1970]
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"Born to wealthy American parents, Beatrice Romaine Goddard
had an excruciatingly unhappy childhood. Her mother doted on
a paranoid and mentally unstable son and treated Romaine viciously,
with behaviour ranging from neglect to accusations of demonic
possession. Goddard finally gained independence at age 21. From
1896 to 1899 she studied painting in Italy and then set up a
studio on the island of Capri. With the death of her brother
and, soon after, her mother, Goddard became independently wealthy.
In 1902 she entered into a short-lived marriage of convenience
with John Ellingham Brooks.
In 1905 Romaine Brooks moved to Paris, where she established
herself in literary, artistic, and homosexual circles. In 1915
she met Natalie Clifford Barney, who was to be her lover for
a great many years. Brooks's portrait of Barney, L'Amazone,
is among her finest works and, like most of her portraits, is
characterized by dark, muted colours and an image or symbol
strongly associated with the subject. In the case of L'Amazone,
Barney, who was an expert horsewoman, is accompanied by a miniature
horse. Brooks's career reached its height in 1925 with exhibitions
in London, Paris, and New York City. From the 1930s onward,
Brooks's work was largely forgotten. However, in 1971, a year
after her death, the National Collection of Fine Arts (now the
Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American Art) staged
an exhibition of her work. The exhibition rekindled interest
in Brooks and led to several other exhibitions during the 1980s.
Brooks's paintings, most of which are portraits, are predominantly
studies in gray with the occasional addition of a stroke of
bright colour. Her palette shows the influence of J.A.M. Whistler,
but her portraits were often so painfully honest that her sitters
preferred not to have their portraits exhibited." (Source:
Britannica.com)
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to alphabetical listing.
- Georgia
O'Keefe [American, 1887-1986]
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"O'Keeffe grew up and attended schools in her
hometown of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, and, from
1902, in Williamsburg, Virginia. Determined from an
early age to be a painter, she studied at the Art
Institute of Chicago (1904Ð05) and the Art Students
League of New York (1907Ð08), and afterward she
supported herself by doing commercial art. She then
taught art at various schools and colleges in Texas
and other Southern states from 1912 to 1916, and in
the latter year her drawings were discovered and
exhibited by the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz praised and
promoted her work, and the two artists began a lifelong relationship, marrying
in 1924. The hundreds of photographs Stieglitz took of her form a notable and
extended portrait series. O'Keeffe moved to New York City after meeting
Stieglitz; she later spent periods in New Mexico, to which she moved after her
husband's death in 1946.
O'Keeffe's early pictures were basically imitative, but by the early 1920s her
own highly individualistic style of painting had emerged. Frequently her
subjects were enlarged views of skulls and other animal bones, flowers and plant
organs, shells, rocks, mountains, and other natural forms. O'Keeffe delineated
these forms with probing and subtly rhythmic outlines and delicately modulated
washes of clear colour. Her mysteriously suggestive images of bones and flowers
set against a perspectiveless space inspired a variety of erotic, psychologic,
and symbolic interpretations. The precision and austerity of her works owe
something to the Precisionist paintings of Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth,
but her ability to invest biomorphic forms with an abstract beauty was entirely
her own. Her style is typified in such paintings as Black Iris (1926) and Cow's
Skull, Red, White and Blue (1931).
O'Keeffe painted her best-known works in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, but she
remained an active painter into the '80s. Her later works frequently celebrate
the clear skies and desert landscapes of New Mexico. A retrospective exhibition
of her art held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970 assured her
reputation as one of the most original and important artists in modern
American painting.
Her autobiography, Georgia O'Keeffe, was published in 1976." (Source: Britannica.com)
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to alphabetical listing.
- M. C. (Maurits Cornelis) Escher [Dutch, 1898-1972]
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"Escher studied at the School of Architecture and Decorative
Arts in Haarlem. Growing interested in graphics, he spent a
number of years traveling and sketching throughout Europe. His
works from this period treated landscape and natural forms in
a fantastic fashion using conflicting perspectives. Escher's
mature style as a printmaker emerged after 1937 in a series
of prints that combined a meticulous realism with paradoxical
visual and perspective effects. He exercised great technical
virtuosity to portray unexpected metamorphoses of mundane objects.
His images were of equal interest to mathematicians, cognitive
psychologists, and the general public, and were widely reproduced
in the mid-20th century." (Source: Britannica.com)
The official online presence for M. C. Escher is Cordon Art B.V., whose Web site is at: http://www.mcescher.com/.
Return to alphabetical listing.
- René Magritte [Belgian, 1898-1967]
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to alphabetical listing.
- Remedios
Varo [Spanish, 1908-1963]
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Return
to alphabetical listing.
- Thomas
Canty [American, Contemporary]
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Terri
Windling has written an essay about Thomas Canty which can be found online at her site, Endicott Studio.
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to alphabetical listing.
- Lesley
Anne Ivory [English, Contemporary]
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Return
to alphabetical listing.
- Michael
Whelan [American, Contemporary]
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I hope to write a brief bio eventually, but for now you can visit Whelan's official Web site, http://www.michaelwhelan.com/, to take a look at his artwork.
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to alphabetical listing.
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