ART “4”
“2”-DAY 10 October
v.8.60 |
| DEATH:
1958 VLAMINCK |
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Born on 10 October 1654: |
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Born on 10 October 1901:
Alberto Giacometti, Swiss Surrealist
sculptor, painter, draftsman, and printmaker, who died on 11 January 1966.
He was a son of Giovanni Giacometti [07 March 1868 – 25 June 1933],
who was a second cousin of Augusto Giacometti [16 August 1877 – 09
Jun 1947]. — Alberto Giacometti began drawing about 1910 to 1912, followed by painting and sculpting from 1913 to 1915. While at secondary school in Schiers, near Chur (1914–1919), he developed his drawing style primarily through portraiture. In 1919–1920 in Geneva he studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts and sculpture at the École des Arts et Métiers but was more impressed by subsequent visits to Italy (1920–1921), where he worked without formal instruction. In sculpture he worked in an academic mode, while in painting he emulated his father’s Post-Impressionist and Fauvist style, which he thoroughly mastered by late 1921, as in Self-portrait. In January 1922 he began studying sculpture in Paris under Émile-Antoine Bourdelle at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where he continued intermittently for five years. In 1925 he ceased drawing and painting to concentrate on sculpture, and his brother Diego Giacometti [15 Nov 1902 – 15 July 1985] joined him in Paris. In 1927 they moved into the studio at 46, rue Hippolyte-Maindron in Montparnasse, where Alberto worked for the rest of his life, with annual visits to his family in Switzerland. — Alberto Giacometti was born in Borgonovo, Switzerland, and grew up in the nearby town of Stampa. His father, Giovanni, was a Post-Impressionist painter. From 1919 to 1920, he studied painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and sculpture and drawing at the Ecole des Arts et Métiers in Geneva. In 1920, he traveled to Italy, where he was impressed by the works of Alexander Archipenko and Paul Cézanne at the Venice Biennale. He was also deeply affected by African and Egyptian art and by the masterpieces of Giotto and Tintoretto. In 1922, Giacometti settled in Paris, making frequent visits to Stampa, and occasionally attended Antoine Bourdelle’s sculpture classes. In 1927, the artist moved into a studio with his brother, Diego, his lifelong companion and assistant, and exhibited his sculpture for the first time at the Salon des Tuileries, Paris. His first show in Switzerland, shared with his father, was held at the Galerie Aktuaryus, Zurich, in 1927. The following year, Giacometti met André Masson, and by 1930 he was a participant in the Surrealist circle until 1934. During the early 1940s, he became friends with Simone de Beauvoir, Pablo Picasso, and Jean-Paul Sartre. From 1942, Giacometti lived in Geneva, where he associated with the publisher Albert Skira. He returned to Paris in 1946. The artist’s friendship with Samuel Beckett began around 1951. Giacometti died in Chur, Switzerland. — Alberto Giacometti was born on 10th October 1901 in Borgonovo in Val Bregaglia to Giovanni, a neo-impressionist painter, and Annetta Stampa. He had a happy childhood. His father introduced him to working in the atelier, his godfather (the painter Cuno Amiet) taught him the latest styles and techniques, and the other members of his family assisted with his artistic development by sitting for him as models. In 1916, during high school, he displayed total mastery of impressionist language in a portrait of his mother modelled with plastilina. He left high school and moved to Geneva to attend the School of Fine Arts. Following a trip to Venice and Rome in 1920, during which he developed a passion for the work of Tintoretto and Giotto, he resolved to recover the innocent gaze of man's origins through primitive art and anthropology. In 1922 he moved to Paris to attend the courses of sculptor Antoine Bourdelle and partly experimented with the Cubist method. In 1925 his brother Diego joined him in Paris and became his permanent assistant. Alberto shared a sympathy for the surrealist movement with the Swiss artists he met in Paris and in 1927 began to display his first surrealist sculptures at the Salon des Tuileries. Success was not long in coming and Alberto began to frequent artists such as Arp, Mirò, Ernst and Picasso and writers including Prévert, Aragon, Eluard, Bataille and Queneau. He became firm friends with Breton and wrote and drew for his magazine Le surréalisme au Service de la Révolution. But Giacometti felt the need to return to the idea of "absolute resemblance" and after his father's death in 1933 shut himself off in period of a renewed apprenticeship. From 1935 to 1940 he concentrated on the study of the human head, starting from the gaze, considered the seat of thoughts. He also drew entire figures in an attempt to capture the identity of individual human beings with a single glance. In this period he met Picasso and Beckett and established a dialogue with Sartre which was to influence the work of both. He spent the Second World War years in Geneva. In 1946 he returned to Paris and met up again with his brother Diego, beginning a new artistic phase in which his statues became stretched out, their limbs elongated in a space that contained and complemented them. In 1962 he received the Grand Prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennial. In his later years he worked frenetically and displayed his work at a sequence of large exhibitions throughout Europe. Although seriously ill, he went to New York in 1965 for his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. As his last work he prepared the text for the book Paris sans fin, a sequence of 150 lithographs containing memories of all the places where he had lived. He is buried in Borgonovo, close to his parents. — Milo Milunovic was a student of Alberto Giacometti. — LINKS — Head-and-Shoulders Self-Portrait (600x408pix _ ZOOM to 1400x952pix) — Full Length Self-Portrait Sitting at the Easel (600x496pix _ ZOOM to 1400x1157pix) — Madame D. (1944; 600x492pix _ ZOOM to 1400x1148pix) — Rue d'Aleisa (1954 color lithograph, 65x54cm; 728x558pix, 129kb) pale washed-out colors, sloppy drawing, acceptable only if done during an earthquake. —(061008) |
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Born on 10 October 1656: Nicolas de
Largillière, French Rococo
painter who died on 20 March 1746. — Nicolas de Largillière was born in Paris but passed his youth in Antwerp and, from about 1674, spent some years in England as Lely's assistant. He was thus almost a Flemish painter when he returned to Paris in 1682. He became one of the most successful portrait painters of the second half of Louis XIV’s reign. His principal rival was Rigaud (who had beet his assistant) but, although Largillièrre was patronized by the Court, most of his sitters came from the wealthy middle classes, leaving the aristocrats to Rigaud. By the end of Largillière's career he had produced some 1500 portraits. The Sainte Geneviève is the only survivor of the large ex-voto type of picture that he painted for the Corporations. He also painted a few pictures of still-life. In 1734–1735 and again from 1738 to 1742 he was Directeur of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, of which he had been a member since 1686. — Nicolas de Largillière once told a friend that he never wanted official commissions; private clients were less troublesome, and payment was quicker. Unlike his friend court painter Hyacinthe Rigaud, Largillière worked for Paris's wealthy middle class. He grew up in Antwerp, then worked in England as Sir Peter Lely's assistant, painting draperies and still lifes and developing a lustrous version of Anthony van Dyck's style. This Flemish training imparted the warm hues, broad, thick brushstrokes, and sinuous curves that gave Largillière's paintings their dynamism. He returned to Paris in 1682, gained Académie Royale membership in 1686, and ultimately became its director. By the late 1680s, Largillière had established his reputation among the bourgeoisie. He produced 1200 to 1500 portraits in his lifetime, gradually becoming less formal and more relaxed in describing pose and costume. He also painted group portraits to commemorate solemn occasions, landscapes, still lifes, and religious works. When Largillière ordered his student Jean-Baptiste Oudry to depict a bouquet of all-white flowers, Oudry reported learning a basic lesson in color. By carefully observing their subtle variations and then trying to paint them, Oudry came to understand how to express highlights, shades of gray, and shadows as his teacher Largillière did. — Although born in Paris, Largillièrre spent his youth in Antwerp, becoming a student of the still life and genre painter Antoine Goubau in 1668. Soon after his acceptance as a master in the Guild of Saint Luke (1672), the artist went to England. There he studied portraiture, perhaps in the studio of Peter Lely. He returned to Paris in 1679 and became a member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1686, advancing rapidly to important posts in the hierarchy of that institution. The major part of his work is devoted to portraiture, but Largillierre also produced history paintings, landscapes, and still lifes. His rival for court commissions was Hyacinthe Rigaud, while his own clientele was primarily the wealthy bourgeoisie who found his taste for warm color tones, sumptuous fabrics, and a regal manner of presentation very much to their liking. Extremely successful during his long life, the artist produced a huge ceuvre. Anthony van Dyck's influence on English portraiture as well as the seventeenth century French portrait tradition are both critical to his stylistic development. Largillierre is pivotal in the transition from the baroque to the rococo portrait style during the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV. — De Largillière's students included Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Jean-Baptiste Descamps, Robert Gardelle, Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne II, Gustaf Lundberg, Pierre Mosnier, Jean Restout II. — LINKS — Self-Portrait (1725, 889x700pix, 60kb) — The Artist and his Family (1710, 149x200cm; 800x1095pix, 116kb) — Catherine Coustard, Marquise de Castelnau, Femme de Charles-Léonor Aubry, avec son Fils Léonor (1700, 138x106cm; 1/3 size, 255kb — ZOOM to 1/2 size, 343kb) _ Catherine Coustard came from a family of well-to-do cloth merchants in Paris and married into the Aubrys, wealthy, middle-class civil servants and statesmen from Tours. At the time of this portrait, her father-in-law had just been ennobled after serving twenty years as secretary to the king, thus precipitating the great step upward in family prestige that this picture commemorates. — A Boy in Fancy Dress (1710, 115x146cm; 960x752pix, 70kb) _ Dressed in a fanciful Roman costume, a young boy with blond hair and blue eyes poses before an enigmatic landscape. Facing frontally, he twists his torso in order to hold and stroke his dog. Both the boy and the animal watch a goldfinch with outspread wings perched on a thornbush. Although the young sitter's identity is unknown, he is presumed to be a member of the French royal family. Nicolas de Largillière positioned his figure before an atmospheric landscape and used fluent brushwork, rich autumnal colors, and exquisite treatment of draperies. All these characteristics betray his training in a Flemish late Baroque style heavily indebted to Anthony van Dyck. The inclusion of elaborate symbolism also reflects a Baroque sensibility. The child's costume refers to nobility, his pet dog to fidelity, and the thornbush to the Crown of Thorns. Through an extended series of connections, the goldfinch functions as a symbol of the Passion: goldfinches eat seeds from the thorny thistle, another reminder of the Crown of Thorns, and the red spot on their breast is a further reminder of Christ’s bloody death. –- Gentleman A (81x65cm; 1251x990pix, 67kb _ .ZOOM to 2504x1980pix, 465kb) –- Gentleman B (136x105cm; 1126x848pix, 73kb _ .ZOOM to 2108x1696pix, 595kb _ .ZOOM+ to 4504x3392pix, 2509kb) –- Pierre Van Schuppen? (1680, oval 72x60cm; 735x570pix, 37kb _ .ZOOM to 1256x950pix, 70kb _ .ZOOM+ to 2043x1583pix, 193kb) –- A Lady (81x65cm; 1176x970pix, 85kb _ .ZOOM to 2412x1940pix, 617kb) –- A Lady as Pomona (65x55cm; 734x592pix, 43kb _ .ZOOM to 1957x1580pix, 274kb) — Charles Le Brun (1686, 232x182cm, 953x750pix, 120kb) — Princess Louisa Maria Teresa Stewart (1700, 127kb) — The Countess of Montsoreau, her Sister as Diana, and an Attendant (1714, 122kb) — Gentleman C (1720, 126kb) — Paysage Boisé (136kb) — Nature Morte avec Gibier, Fleurs, Fruits, et un Épagneul (1680, 1097x1448pix, 589kb) —(061009) |
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