Quote of the Day

"A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others."
- Salvador Dali

Egon Schiele: Intense and Productive

Egon Schiele - Self-Portrait - 1911 - Watercolor, gouache, and graphite on paper - 20 1/4 x 13 3/4 in. (51.4 x 34.9 cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY (click photo for larger image)Austrian Expressionist artist Egon Schiele (1890-1918) experienced both a life and career that were “short, intense, and amazingly productive. Before succumbing to influenza in 1918 at the age of twenty-eight, he created over three hundred oil paintings and several thousand works on paper. The human figure provided Schiele with his most potent subject matter for both paintings and drawings.” (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Shiele’s portraits often featured nudes that were unapologetic, contorted, and emotionally charged. During his brief career, he carved himself a distinct niche in 20th-century art with his beguiling, sinuous figurative approach. This work helped re-establish the vitality of the portraiture genre with its unprecedented level of emotional and sexual directness and use of figural distortion in place of conventional notions of beauty. Frequently depicting himself or those close to him, Schiele's portraits often present his sitters in the nude, posed in revealing, unsettling angles—frequently viewed from above—and devoid of secondary attributes often depicted in the portrait genre.

It is not surprising that fellow Austrian artist Gustav Klimt exerted the most powerful influence on Shiele. given the eroticism and figural approaches found in Klimt’s work. “Schiele's aesthetic greatly influenced both Expressionist contemporaries like Oskar Kokoschka, as well as Neo-Expressionist successors as varied at Francis Bacon, Julian Schnabel, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.” (The Art Story)

You can read more about all of these artists right HERE on What About Art?

Édouard Manet: A Risk Taker

Édouard Manet (1832-1883) began his career with The Absinthe Drinker (1858). It’s a painting depicting a debauched and solitary man amongst the shadows of the back streets of Paris. Paintings like the Absinthe Drinker, and the Old Musician (1862), portray a darker aspect of Parisian life which was quite removed from Manet's circle, but nonetheless very real.

“Throughout his oeuvre Manet painted modern day life, yet many of his paintings are so much more than simple mimetic depictions. If Manet's work seems to be full of contradictions, or to employ a lack of perspective from time to time, then perhaps that was the true reality of Paris in Manet's time. Always controversial, Manet sought to record the days of his life using his own unique vision. From beggars, to prostitutes, to the bourgeoisie he sought to be true to himself and to reproduce "not great art, but sincere art." He died, in Paris, on April 30, 1883.” (The Artchive)

Manet opened a door—wholly on his own—that the younger Impressionists were able to walk through. Although they certainly had their own share of struggles for recognition (and sales) they were still deeply indebted to Manet for his courage, vision, and dedication.

Sandro Botticelli: A “Golden Age” Painter

Sandro Botticelli - Agony in the Garden - c. 1500 - Tempera on panel, 53 x 35 cm - Museo de la Capilla Real, Granada (click photo for larger image)Born Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, (1445-1510), Botticelli's name is derived from that of his elder brother Giovanni, a pawnbroker who was called Botticello (“Little Barrel”). 

As is often the case with Renaissance artists, most of the modern information about Botticelli’s life and character derives from Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, & Architects, as supplemented and corrected from documents. 

Botticelli’s father was a tanner who apprenticed Sandro to a goldsmith after his schooling was finished. But, since Sandro preferred painting, his father then placed him under Filippo Lippi, who was one of the most admired Florentine masters. Lippi’s painterly style, which was formed in the early Florentine Renaissance, was fundamental to Botticelli’s own artistic formation, and his influence is evident even in his pupil’s late works. Lippi taught Botticelli the techniques of panel painting and fresco, and gave him an assured control of linear perspective. Stylistically, Botticelli acquired from Lippi a repertory of types and compositions, a certain graceful fancifulness in costuming, a linear sense of form, and a partiality to certain paler hues that is still visible even after Botticelli had developed his own strong and resonant color schemes.

Interestingly, just as Lippi as had trained Botticelli, so did Botticelli eventually train his teacher’s son, Filippino Lippi. Also like his teacher, Botticelli also became closely tied to the Medici. Botticelli’s work eventually fell out of favor, but interest in it was revived by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He is now widely regarded as one of the great masters of the Italian Renaissance.

The work featured here is the only one of Botticelli's paintings known to have been exported from Italy during the artist's lifetime. It is recorded as being in the possession of Isabella the Catholic, Queen of Castille, in 1504. It was probably brought to the court of Castille by a merchant, accompanied by various other luxury goods.

Jack Tworkov: Flashes of Color

Jack Tworkov - West 23rd - 1963 - Oil on canvas - 60 x 6' 8" (152.6 x 203.3 cm) - Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York (click photo for larger image)Early member of the New York School and a first-generation Abstract Expressionist, Jack Tworkov (1900-1982) painted with gestural brushstrokes, emphasizing texture and line. His most characteristic work contains flashes of color against muted, monochromatic backgrounds, documenting his gestures and drawing attention to pigment and medium.

In the second phase of his career, he abandoned his expressionistic practice for a more theoretical one and began to employ grid-like structures, geometric patterns, and other elements of Minimalism, although often deliberately damaging and deteriorating his paintings.

“Not necessarily a household name, Tworkov nonetheless inhabited a central position in the formation of Abstract Expressionism in the middle of the 20th century.…Like many American artists at the time, Tworkov worked his way through European styles before embracing bold gestural painting, but [he] always spoke of the importance of these precursors and influences and insisted that all art was in dialogue with each other. (The Art Story)