"Vase de Fleurs" by Pierre Bonnard

"Vase de Fleurs" by Pierre Bonnard.

       Pierre Bonnard was born in  Born in Fontenay-aux-Roses, in the Ile-de-France, France in 1867 and he died in 1947. He studied at the Academie Jullian, where he met Vuillard, Maurice Denis, K. X. Roussel, and Serusier, with whom he participated in the Nabis. As a young student he was influenced by Degas, Renoir, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec, and developed a great interest in Japanese prints. In 1891 he exhibited for the first time at the Salon des Independants and in group shows with the Nabis. Five years later he had his first one-man show of paintings, posters, and lithographs at Durand-Ruel's. During this period his lithographs appeared in the Revue Blanche and L'Escarmouche, as well as in a portfolio called Quelques Aspects de la Vie de Paris which Vollard published in 1895. He also worked on sets, costumes, and posters for the Theatre de l'CEuvre and the Theatre des Pantins and modeled marionettes for a play with music by his brother-in-law, Claude Terrasse. In 1900 Ambroise Vollard commissioned him to illustrate with lithographs Parellilement and Daphnis et Chloi. Both are masterpieces of graphic art. In 1903 Bonnard exhibited in the first Salon d'Automne and in the Viennese Secession show and subsequently participated in many important exhibitions in Europe and America. He also had a number of one-man shows in Paris, London, New York, and other cities. His style, at first decorative and subdued in color, became much freer and brighter after 1900. Transposing the universe into colors, he painted landscapes, still lifes, and nudes transfigured by a shining light. Revolting against the fashions and theories of his contemporaries, Bonnard went his own way. He was an extremely modest man and very hard on himself, but his work is characterized by a charming ever-youthful, good-natured cheerfulness and by an increasing audacity of color harmonies. In 1912 he bought a house at Vernnet, in the Seine Valley, not far from Paris, and subsequently divided his time between there and the south of France. He died in 1947 in his house in Le Cannet on the Cote d'Azur.

"Sunflowers" by Van Gogh

"Sunflowers" by Vincent Van Gogh

       Born into an upper-middle-class family, Van Gogh drew as a child and was serious, quiet and thoughtful. As a young man he worked as an art dealer, often travelling, but became depressed after he was transferred to London. He turned to religion, and spent time as a Protestant missionary in southern Belgium. He drifted in ill health and solitude before taking up painting in 1881, having moved back home with his parents. His younger brother Theo supported him financially, and the two kept up a long correspondence by letter. His early works, mostly still lifes and depictions of peasant labourers, contain few signs of the vivid color that distinguished his later work. In 1886, he moved to Paris, where he met members of the avant-garde, including Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin, who were reacting against the Impressionist sensibility. As his work developed he created a new approach to still lifes and local landscapes. His paintings grew brighter in colour as he developed a style that became fully realised during his stay in Arles in the south of France in 1888. During this period he broadened his subject matter to include olive trees, cypresses, wheat fields and sunflowers. 

"Egyptian Girl" by Alexej Jawlensky

"Egyptian Girl" by Alexej Jawlensky.

       Alexej Georgewitsch von Jawlensky was born on 13 March 1864  and died on the 15th of March 1941. He was a Russian expressionist painter active in Germany. He was a key member of the New Munich Artist's Association (Neue Künstlervereinigung München), Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group and later the Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four). Read more...

"Aurelia Roma" by Manuel Neri

"Aurelia Roma" by Manuel Neri.
 Laumeier Sculpture Park.

       Manuel Neri was born April 12, 1930 is an American sculptor who is recognized for his life-size figurative sculptures in plaster, bronze, and marble, as well as for his association with the Bay Area Figurative Movement during the 1960s. In Neri's work with the figure, he conveys an emotional inner state that is revealed through body language and gesture. Since 1965 his studio has been in Benicia, California; in 1981 he purchased a studio in Carrara, Italy, for working in marble. During the past four decades, Neri has worked primarily with the same model, Mary Julia, creating drawings and sculptures that merge contemporary sculptural concerns with classical forms. Read more...

"Girl in Yellow" by Moses Soyer

"Girl in Yellow" by Moses Soyer. 

       Moses Soyer (December 25, 1899 – September 3, 1974) was an American social realist painter. He was born in Borisoglebsk, Russian Empire, in 1899. His father was a Hebrew scholar, writer and teacher. His family emigrated to the United States in 1912. Two of Soyer's brothers, Raphael (his identical twin) and Isaac were also painters. Soyer's wife, Ida, was a dancer, and dancers are a recurring subject in his paintings. Soyer studied art in New York, first at Cooper Union and later at the Ferrer Art School, where he studied under the Ashcan painters Robert Henri and George Bellows. He had his first solo exhibition in 1926 and began teaching art the following year at the Contemporary Art School and The New School. He died in the Chelsea Hotel in New York while painting dancer and choreographer Phoebe Neville. 

"Eye" by Tony Tasset

"Eye" by Tony Tasset.
(fiberglass, steel, resin, oil paint)

        Tony Tassset is an American multimedia artist. His works consists mainly of video, bronze, wax, sculpture, photography, film, and taxidermy. He has exhibitions that can be seen in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Germany, Canada, Portugal, Italy, Ecuador, and London.

       Tasset was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the cousin of Robert Sunderman. He received his BFA from The Art Academy of Cincinnati, and his MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1985). In 1986, 13 pieces of his art were purchased by two New York art dealers at the Chicago Art Expo. Tasset received an Award in Visual Arts along with $15,000 cash in 1989. He was also awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006 and The Louis Comfort Tiffany Award. He currently resides in Chicago, Illinois and is represented by Kavi Gupta of Chicago and Berlin. He is an art professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Read more...

"Bird Garden" by Klee

"Bird Garden" by Paul Klee.

       Paul Klee was born 18 December 1879  and died on the 29th of June 1940. He was a Swiss-German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting for the Renaissance. He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.

"Lunch In Normandy" by Edouard Vuillard

"Lunch In Normandy" by Edouard Vuillard.

       Edouard Vuillard was born in Cuiseaux, Saone-et-Loire, France 1868 and he died in 1940. His family moved to Paris when Edouard was nine, and during the rest of his life he rarely went far from Montmartre, where his mother, to whom he was devoted, ran a dressmaking shop. He was enrolled in the Military Academy of St. Cyr, but gave it up to attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with his friends Maurice Denis and K. X. Roussel. In 1888 the three young artists enrolled in the Academie Jullian, where they met Serusier, Ranson, Piot and Bonnard, and formed the group called the Nabis. Vuillard's early paintings, mostly still lifes and small portraits, revealed a debt to Chardin and Corot, but by 1890 the influence of Gauguin and the Japanese was apparent in his simplification of form and his use of color in the painting "La Femme Endormie." He had his first exhibition in the rooms of the Revue Blanche, one of the meeting places of the Nabis, in 1891 and, about the same time, began exhibiting in the Nabis group shows at Le Bare de Boutteville's. With his friends, he helped establish the Theatre de l'CEuvre, and designed scenery for its productions. From 1893 until the beginning of World War I he painted a number of decorative panels such as "Le Jardin des Tuileries" (nine panels now in the Musee d'Art Moderne in Paris), did scenic designs for the Comedie des Champs Elysees and the Theatre de Chaillot, and produced many lithographs and easel paintings, particularly the intimate interior scenes in which the figures of his mother and close friends appear. After 1918 his style changed to a more emphatic Realism and in the thirties he did a series of commissioned portraits of fashionable people. In his last years he painted decorative murals for the Palais de Chaillot in Paris and the League of Nations in Geneva. A master of the intimate, who could create a whole world in his bourgeois Victorian interiors, Vuillard always remained outside the main stream of the aesthetic of his time. He died in La Baule in June, 1940, a short time after leaving Paris to escape the advancing Nazis.

"Shuttlecocks" by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen

"Shuttlecocks" by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen at The Nelson Atkins Museum.

       Claes Oldenburg (born January 28, 1929) is an American sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions of everyday objects. Many of his works were made in collaboration with his wife, Coosje van Bruggen. Van Bruggen died in 2009 after 32 years of marriage. Oldenburg lives and works in New York. Read more...

"The Wedding" by Henri Rousseau

"The Wedding" by Henri Rousseau.

       Henri Rousseau, called Le Douanier , was born in Laval, Mayenne, France in 1844 and he died in 1910. Joined the Army when he turned eighteen and was assigned to play the saxophone in a regimental band. Served in the Franco-Prussian War, was discharged in 1871, and settled in Paris with Yadwigha, the Polish girl he had married in 1869. He got a job as a second-class clerk in the Customs Service, from whence came the nickname he has become known by, Le Douanier.

       Without any formal training, he began to paint in the 1880's. In 1886, in his early forties, he retired from the Customs Service on a small pension - which he supplemented by giving drawing and music lessons to the neighborhood children - and devoted most of his time to painting. He began submitting to the Salon des Independants in 1886, and exhibited regularly for the next twenty years without notice more favorable than ridicule. In 1905 he began exhibiting at the Salon d'Automne, and gradually attracted the attention of artists and writers like Gauguin, Derain, Vlaminck, Delaunay, Picasso, Apollinaire, Max Jacob, and Raynal. In 1907 he met Wilhelm Uhde, the famous art critic, who wrote the first monograph on him a few years later. In 1908 Picasso gave a banquet for him at the Bateau-Lavoir, and he was heralded as the pet of the avant-garde. The pleasure of success in his last few years was somewhat spoiled for him by personal difficulties, particularly the heartbreak of being turned down by a woman he wanted to marry. (He was already twice a widower.) He died of pneumonia on October 2, 1910, and was buried in a pauper's grave; his remains were later transferred to Laval, and an epitaph written by Apollinaire and engraved in stone by Brancusi and Orthiz de Zarate was placed on his grave.

       Henri Rousseau was an outstanding example of the Naive painter. Though untaught and ingenuous, he produced a remarkable body of work that includes scenes of family occasions, military events and sports, landscapes of Paris and its environs, bouquets of flowers and exotic and allegorical scenes such as "The Dream" and "Sleeping Gypsy." His paintings have won universal recognition, and are found in the Louvre and important museums of modern art throughout the world.

"Composition in Primary Colors" by Mondrian

"Composition in Primary Colors" by Piet Mondrian

       Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) was born in Amersfoort, Holland. He studied to be a teacher, then decided to be a painter instead, and in 1892 enrolled in the Academy of Amsterdam. From 1895 to 1907 he painted naturalistic landscapes in delicate but rather dull colors, then a stay at Dombourg on the island of Walcheren in 1 908 changed his manner and brightened his palette. He arrived in Paris in 191 1, where he was influenced by Cubism and inclined toward abstraction. He spent the war years in Holland, continuing his experiments with abstraction until in 1916 he produced openly non-figurative paintings, rhythms consisting of horizontal and vertical lines which later became known as the "plus and minus" series. While in Holland, he became the center of a group of artists interested in geometrical proportions as the basis of art. With Theo van Doesburg, a member of this group, Mondrian founded an art magazine called De Stijl, which gave its name to the group and in which its ideas of Neo-Plasticism were set forth. Mondrian elaborated on these theories in his book LeNeo-Plasticisme, published in 1920 after his return to France. In Paris he became a member of the Circle and Square Group and, later, of the Abstraction-Creation group. He participated in large international exhibitions of abstract art in Paris and the United States. He lived in London from 1938 to 1940, then came to New York, where he was very warmly received, and had two exhibitions at the Valentine Gallery in 1 942 and 1 943 . He began painting in the more exuberant mood of "Broadway Boogie-Woogie," which is still geometrically abstract but uses bright, garish color in insistently repeating patterns that suggest the jangling pulse of Times Square at night. Since his death at Murray Hill Hospital in February, 1944, important retrospective exhibitions of Mondrian's work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitechapel Gallery in London and the Municipal Museum at The Hague. His canvases, which inaugurated a new style, are in the principal museums of modern art throughout the world.

"Eagle" by Alexander Calder

"Eagle" by Alexander Calder in the Olympic Sculpture Park,
Seattle WA. photography by Steven Pavlov.

       Alexander Calder was born on July 22, 1898  and died on November 11, 1976. He was an American sculptor known as the originator of the mobile, a type of moving sculpture made with delicately balanced or suspended shapes that move in response to touch or air currents. Calder’s monumental stationary sculptures are called stabiles. He also produced wire figures, which are like drawings made in space, and notably a miniature circus work that was performed by the artist. Read more...