"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.