French Fauvist Painter and Sculptor, 1869-1954
Henri Matisse is considered the most important French artist of the 20th century and, along with Pablo Picasso, one of the most influential modernist painters of the last century. Matisse began studying drawing and painting in the 1890s. A student of the masters of Post-Impressionism, Matisse later made a reputation for himself as the leader of a group of painters known as Les Fauves. An ironic label given to them by a critic, the name reflected Matisse's aggressive strokes and bold use of primary colors. In 1905 Matisse gained sudden fame with three paintings, including Woman with the Hat, purchased by the wealthy American ex-patriot Gertrude Stein. Beyond painting, he worked with lithographs and sculpture, and during World War II he did a series of book designs. Later in his career he experimented with paper cutouts and designed decorations for the Dominican chapel in Vence, France. Along with Picasso, Related Paintings of Henri Matisse :. | Woman in a Flowered Hat (mk35) | Nude | Still Life with a Magnolia (mk35) | Nude Standing in front of an Open Door (mk35) | Silent room | Related Artists:
Hans BaluschekGerman, 1870-1935,German illustrator, painter, and writer, known for his graphic depictions of the proletarian milieu and hard life in big cities. Baluschek was also a renowned illustrator of fairy tales and produced superb illustrations for five books in the series Deutsche Marchenbucherei published by the Klemm Verlag between 1878 and 1923: Peterchens Mondfahrt (Little Peter's Flight to the Moon, 1915), Pips der Pilz. Ein Wald?\ und Weihnachtsmarchen (Pips the Mushroom: A Forest and Christmas Fairy Tale, 1920), Prinzessin Huschewind (Princess Hush Wind, 1922), and Ins Marchenland (Into Fairyland, 1922). He employed aquarelles and oils to form unusual and bizarre characters and also used ink to create the text.
Arshile GorkyArmenian
1904-1948
Arshile Gorky Gallery
Gorky was born in the village of Khorkom near Van, Turkey. It is not known exactly when he was born: it was sometime between 1902 and 1905. (In later years Gorky was vague about even the date of his birth, changing it from year to year.) In 1910 his father emigrated to America to avoid the draft, leaving his family behind in the town of Van. Gorky fled Van in 1915 during the Armenian Genocide and escaped with his mother and his three sisters into Russian-controlled territory. In the aftermath of the genocide, Gorky's mother died of starvation in Yerevan in 1919. Gorky was reunited with his father when he arrived in America in 1920, aged 16, but they never grew close. At age 31, Gorky married. He changed his name to Arshile Gorky, in the process reinventing his identity (he even told people he was a relative of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky).
In 1922, Gorky enrolled in the New School of Design in Boston, eventually becoming a part-time instructor. During the early 1920s he was influenced by impressionism, although later in the decade he produced works that were more postimpressionist. During this time he was living in New York and was influenced by Paul Cezanne. In 1927, Gorky met Ethel Kremer Schwabacher and developed a life lasting friendship. Schwabacher was his first biographer.
Cagnaccio di San PietroItalian, 1897-1946,born Natale Bentivoglio Scarpa, was an Italian magic realist painter. He had his artistic training at the Academy of Fine Art in Venice, where he studied under Ettore Tito. Cagnaccio's early paintings were in a Futurist idiom, but by the early 1920s he had adopted a very smoothly brushed, nearly photographic style. His work, which includes portraits, nudes, still lifes, scenes of popular life, and religious pictures, shows the influence of the German painters of the New Objectivity. One of his best-known paintings, After the Orgy (1928) shows three nude women asleep on a floor littered with wine bottles, playing cards and cigarettes.