French (1880-1950) Louis Icart was born in Toulouse, France. He began drawing at an early age. He was particularly interested in fashion, and became famous for his sketches almost immediately. He worked for major design studios at a time when fashion was undergoing a radical change-from the fussiness of the late nineteenth century to the simple, clingy lines of the early twentieth century. He was first son of Jean and Elisabeth Icart and was officially named Louis Justin Laurent Icart. The use of his initials L.I. would be sufficient in this household. Therefore, from the moment of his birth he was dubbed 'Helli'. The Icart family lived modestly in a small brick home on rue Traversi??re-de-la-balance, in the culturally rich Southern French city of Toulouse, which was the home of many prominent writers and artists, the most famous being Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Icart fought in World War I. He relied on his art to stem his anguish, sketching on every available surface. It was not until his move to Paris in 1907 that Icart would concentrate on painting, drawing and the production of countless beautiful etchings, which have served (more than the other mediums) to indelibly preserve his name in twentieth century art history. When he returned from the front he made prints from those drawings. The prints, most of which were aquatints and drypoints, showed great skill. Because they were much in demand, Icart frequently made two editions (one European, the other American) to satisfy his public. These prints are considered rare today, and when they are in mint condition they fetch high prices at auction. Art Deco, a term coined at the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Decoratifs, had taken its grip on the Paris of the 1920s. By the late 1920s Icart, working for both publications and major fashion and design studios, had become very successful, both artistically and financially. His etchings reached their height of brilliance in this era of Art Deco, and Icart had become the symbol of the epoch. Yet, although Icart has created for us a picture of Paris and New York life in the 1920s and 1930s, he worked in his own style, derived principally from the study of eighteenth-century French masters such as Jean Antoine Watteau, François Boucher and Jean Honor?? Fragonard. In Icart's drawings, one sees the Impressionists Degas and Monet and, in his rare watercolors, the Symbolists Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau. In fact, Icart lived outside the fashionable artistic movements of the time and was not completely sympathetic to contemporary art. Nonetheless, his Parisian scenes are a documentation of the life he saw around him and they are nearly as popular today as when they were first produced. In 1914 Icart had met a magical, effervescent eighteen-year-old blonde named Fanny Volmers, at the time an employee of the fashion house Paquin. She would eventually become his wife and a source of artistic inspiration for the rest of his life.   Related Paintings of Louis Lcart :. | Wait | Four Seasons Summer | Awakened | Accident | Play the birds were |
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Makovsky, Konstantin
Russian, 1839-1915 He produced historical and social scenes, as well as being a portrait painter of some renown, although his significance lies more in the role he played as a founder-member of the WANDERERS art society in late 19th-century Russia. He studied first at the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture (1851-8), which had been co-founded by his father Yegor Ivanovich Makovsky (1800-86), under Mikhail Ivanovich Skotti (1814-61) and Sergey Konstantinovich Zaryanko, then from 1858 to 1863 at the Petersburg Academy of Arts. In 1862 he was awarded a Minor Gold Medal, but the following year, together with 13 other students, Makovsky rebelled against the theme set for the Grand Gold Medal competition and left the Academy with the title of Artist of the Second Degree. In 1863 he joined the Petersburg Artel of artists, the forerunner of the Wanderers and the most potent symbol of the break with classical tradition. The reversal of official policy that this engendered led to his being made an academician in 1867, in 1869 a professor and in 1898 a full member of the Academy. As a member of the Wanderers, Makovsky was most notable for his new subject-matter, namely the common people. However, he split with the society in 1883 and by 1891 had become a member of the newly formed and more Salon-orientated St Petersburg Society of Artists, of which he was subsequently to be president. Makovsky often veered towards sentimentalism, giving his works a cloying pathos, as in his portrait of the Stasov Children (early 1870s) and Children Fleeing the Storm (1872),
Giorgio Vasari
1511-74 Italian painter, architect, and writer. Though he was a prolific painter in the Mannerist style, he is more highly regarded as an architect (he designed the Uffizi Palace, now the Uffizi Gallery), but even his architecture is overshadowed by his writings. His Lives of the Most Eminent Architects, Painters, and Sculptors (1550) offers biographies of early to late Renaissance artists. His style is eminently readable and his material is well researched, though when facts were scarce he did not hesitate to fill in the gaps. In his view, Giotto had revived the art of true representation after its decline in the early Middle Ages, and succeeding artists had brought that art progressively closer to the perfection achieved by Michelangelo.
Joseph Israels
1824-1911