Featured Artist at the e.Gallery: David Smith


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Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 20th Century artist of the Expressionist movement, David Smith [American, 1906-1965] Link: https://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Smith_David

David Smith was born in 1906 in Decatur, Indiana. After briefly attending college at Ohio University, the University of Notre Dame, and George Washington University, he moved to New York in 1926, where he studied painting full time at the Art Students League. During the 1930s he began to focus on sculpture, creating welded constructions by using found objects and forged metal. Smith moved permanently to Bolton Landing, in upstate New York, in 1940. Smith died in a car accident near Bennington, Vermont, in 1965. Major exhibitions of his sculptures, paintings and drawings have been presented worldwide since the 1950s, including recent retrospectives at the Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo (1994); MNCA, Reina Sofía, Madrid (1996); and Storm King Art Center, New York (1997-1999). A centennial retrospective organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2006) traveled to the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Tate Modern, London (2006–2007).


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Voltri VII

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Featured Artist at the e.Gallery: Leslie Ruth Kraker Lampron

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 20th Century artist, Leslie Ruth Kraker Lampron [American, 1950- ] Link: https://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Lampron_Leslie_Ruth_Kraker

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Featured Artist at the e.Gallery: René François Ghislain Magritte


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Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 20th Century artist of the Surrealist movement, René François Ghislain Magritte [Belgian, 1898-1967] Link: https://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Magritte_Rene

René Magritte (1898–1967) was born in Lessines, Hainaut, Belgium. Aside from a few facts, almost nothing is known of Magritte’s childhood. We know that the family’s financial status was comfortable because Léopold, ostensibly a tailor, made handsome profits from his investments in edible oils and bouillon cubes.

We also know that young René sketched and painted early on, and began taking formal lessons in drawing in 1910 — the same year that he produced his first oil painting. Anecdotally, he was said to be a lackluster student in school. The artist himself had little to say about his childhood beyond a few vivid memories that shaped his way of seeing.

Perhaps this relative silence about his early life was born when his mother committed suicide in 1912. Régina had been suffering from depression for an undocumented number of years, and was so badly affected that she was usually kept in a locked room. On the night she escaped, she immediately went to the nearest bridge and threw herself into the River Sambre that flowed behind the Magritte’s property. Régina was missing for days before her body was discovered a mile or so downriver.

Legend has it that Régina’s nightgown had wrapped itself around her head by the time her corpse was recovered, and an acquaintance of René’s later started the story that he was present when his mother was pulled from the river. He was certainly not there. The only public comment he ever made on the subject was that he’d felt guiltily happy to be the focal point of sensation and sympathy, both at school and in his neighborhood. However, veils, curtains, faceless people, and headless faces and torsos did become recurring themes in his paintings.

In 1916 Magritte enrolled in the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels seeking inspiration and a safe distance from the WWI German invasion. He found none of the former but one of his classmates at the Academie introduced him to Cubism, Futurism, and Purism, three movements he found exciting. On a less visionary note, he emerged from the Academie qualified to do commercial art. Although creating ads and designs can be boring, it is steady work. Commercial jobs kept Magritte’s bills paid until, decades into the future, he was able to paint “seriously” full time. agritte died on August 15, 1967 in Schaerbeek, Brussels, Belgium.


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Hegel’s Holiday

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Time Transfixed

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Attempting the Impossible

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The Lovers (Les Amants)

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Featured Artist at the e.Gallery: Salvador Dalí


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Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 20th Century artist of the Surrealist movement, Salvador Dalí [Spanish, 1904-1989] Link: https://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Dali_Salvador

Salvador Dali (May 11, 1904 ? January 23, 1989), was born in Figueres, Spain in 1904, Salvador Dali is known for his technical skill as a painter and the shocking quality of his imagination. His pioneering spirit was also accompanied by a reverence of tradition and a will for continuity. Dali consistently depicted the landscape of his homeland, one that became synonymous with the landscape of the imagination and of dreams. He forged in his long career a remarkable body of work, and his life demonstrates the richness of living creatively in every aspect of one?s existence.

Salvador Dali was the only surviving male child of a prosperous Catalan family that divided its time between Figueres and the coastal village of Cadaqués. Dali attended a prominent art academy in Madrid. From his earliest years as an artist he exhibited his work widely, lectured, and wrote. In 1929 he joined the Surrealist movement becoming its most visible and controversial member. That year, Dali met Gala Eluard when she visited him with her husband, poet Paul Eluard. Subsequently, Gala became Dali?s wife, his muse, primary model, and life-long obsession.

Dali broke with the Surrealist movement in 1939. He and Gala fled Europe in 1940 and spent the war years in the United States where he revised his strategy toward art, rejecting modernism and connecting with other traditions of art. In 1947 Dali and Gala returned to Spain and thereafter divided their time between Europe and the United States. In 1974, Dali organized a museum of his own collection of art, the Teatro-Museo Dali in Figueres. After the death of Gala in 1982, Dali?s health declined. His final years were spent in seclusion at his museum. Salvador Dali died on January 23, 1989 in the place of his birth.


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Featured Artist at the e.Gallery: Giorgio Morandi


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Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 20th Century artist of the Futurist movement, Giorgio Morandi [Italian, 1890-1964] Link: https://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Morandi_Giorgio

Giorgio Morandi was born in Bologna on 20 July 1890. He displayed an artistic talent at a very young age and in 1907 he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts. Up until 1911 his scholastic performance at the Academy was excellent, but the final two years were marked by conflicts with his professors due to his change in interests now that he had identified his own artistic language. His artistic influences ranged from Cézanne to Henry Rousseau and from Picasso to André Derain. At the same time Morandi developed an interest in the great Italian art of the past. In 1910 he visited Florence where he admired the masterpieces of Giotto, Masacci and Paolo Uccello. In 1914 Morandi began to exhibit his work. At the Hotel Baglioni in Bologna he took part in the famous five-artist exhibition together with Osvaldo Licini, Mario Bacchelli, Giacomo Vespignani and Severo Pozzati. The years of the First World War correspond to his metaphysical period, during which he produced about ten works that underscore the importance and independence of his role in the metaphysical movement. In the twenties his works assumed a greater degree of plasticity. This marked the beginning of his still-life period, characterized by the metaphysics of everyday objects. Without moving from Bologna, Morandi continued to play an active part in the intellectual debate. Although he did not travel abroad until 1956, he nonetheless always showed a lively interest in important international events. His teaching career was emblematic of the esteem he enjoyed in intellectual and official circles of the period. After teaching for many years in the municipally-run drawing schools, in February 1930 he was given the chair of engraving at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna on the strength of his reputation alone. He was to teach here until 1956. Even more important than his participation at the Venice Biennials was that of the Rome Quadrennials. In 1930 and 1935 he was on the acceptance committee and also took part as an artist with a few highly representative works. But he came to controversial public notice at the third edition of the Rome exhibition in 1939, where he had an entire personal room with 42 oil paintings, 2 drawings and 12 aquafortis etchings and won second prize for painting after the younger Bruno Saetti. There were heated arguments surrounding both the awarding of the first prize and the value of the work displayed in the Morandi room.

Morandi continued to work in his studio in Via Fondazza and in the summer in the town of Grizzana in the Apennine hills near Bologna. After the Second World War broke out, in June 1943 he left as an evacuee for Grizzana. This marked the beginning of what Francesco Arcangeli has defined as his “great period,” corresponding to the landscapes and still-lifes of 1942–43. At the 1948 Biennial, Morandi won first prize, thus rekindling the interest of the press and the public in an artist that a select but growing circle of admirers were now hailing as one of the greatest masters of the century. Morandi was highly considered in the most exclusive international circles and some of his works appeared at prestigious exhibitions in Northern Europe and the United States. A glance at the list of foreign exhibitions is sufficient to give an idea of the esteem in which this Bolognese artist was held.

After a year-long illness, Giorgio Morandi died in Bologna on 18 June 1964. The image accompanying this article is a Self-portrait done in 1925.


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Still Life with Cups and Boxes

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Metaphisical Still Life

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Still-Life with a Dummy

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Natura Morta

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Featured Artist at the e.Gallery: Alberto Giacometti


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Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 20th Century artist of the Surrealist movement, Alberto Giacometti [Swiss, 1901-1966] Link: https://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Giacometti_Alberto

Alberto Giacometti, 1901–1966, was a School of Paris sculptor, a painter and draughtsman born in the village of Borgonovo near Stampa, Switzerland, and son of the Post-Impressionist painter Giovanni Giacometti. Alberto began to draw, paint and sculpt at an early age. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts at Geneva in 1919–20, and at Italy in 1920–21. He moved in 1922 to Paris where he first studied in Archipenko’s studio, and then for five years at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière under Bourdelle. His first one-man exhibition ws at the Galerie Aktuaryus, Zurich, 1927. He went through a period of intense restlessness in which he experimented with polychrome sculpture, cages, erotic kinetic objects, near-abstraction and other styles. Giacometti articipated in the Surrealist movement in 1930–35.

He began in 1934–35 to work again from the model, but each sculpture became smaller and smaller, and was finally almost always destroyed; Alerto had no exhibitions between 1935 and 1947. In 1941–45 he lived in Geneva, then returned to Paris. His characteristic style dates from 1947 when he started to make figures which were very tall and thin. He was awarded the First Prize for Sculpture at the Pittsburgh International in 1961, the main prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1962, and the Guggenheim International Award for Painting in 1964. He died at Chur in Switzerland.


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The Surrealist Table

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Tall Figure II

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Woman with Her Throat Cut

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Man Pointing

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Featured Artist at the e.Gallery: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner


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Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 20th Century artist of the Die Brucke movement, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner [German, 1880-1938] Link: https://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Kirchner_Ernst_Ludwig

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (b. Aschaffenburg 1880; d. Davos 1938) studied architecture in Dresden where he met and worked with Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. After finishing his studies, however, he opposed his father’s wishes and decided to become a painter. The intense artistic and intellectual relationship between the four artists soon led to the formation of the artist group “Die Brücke,” which, according to Schmidt-Rottluff, wanted to “attract all revolutionary and restless forces.”

The artists began to work on the “Viertelstundenakte,” drawings on nude models in the studio or in open nature. At first the group oriented itself to artists from Late Impressionism. The discovery of the Fauves, South Seas’ art and van Gogh led the painters to Expressionism. Due to the encounter with Italian Futurist works, the group’s painting style changed and became “tougher.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner studied the sculptures at the Völkerkundemuseum in Dresden, which influenced his own wood sculptures. In 1911 Kirchner moved to Berlin. Here Kirchner discovered new motifs — city and street scenes. He painted them in a simplified manner, with sharply contoured forms, expressive features and clashing colors. The city paintings became incunables of Expressionism and made Kirchner one of the most important German artists of the 20th century.

The beginning of world war I and the following years were a turning point in his life. The war experiences and military service caused an existential angst and led to illness and long stays in sanatoriums. The more remarkable was his artistic production of that time. Works like the woodcut “Frauen am Potsdamer Platz,” the “Bilder zu Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl,” the self-portraits and woodcut pictures from the sanatoriums, which are counted among the highlights of his œuvre, came into existence.

In 1917 Kirchner settled in Frauenkirch near Davos. The city scenes were now replaced by mountain landscapes and scenes of rural life. Around 1920 his painting style calmed down, his paintings had a carpet-like two dimensionality. Besides, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner also produced an extensive graphic work — wood cuts, lithographs and ink drawings. In 1923 Kirchner moved to the “Haus auf dem Wildboden” at the entrance of the Sertig Valley where he lived and worked until he committed suicide in 1938.


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Nollendorfplatz

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10 Thumbnails of various Artists

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A Group of Artists: Otto Mueller, Kirchner, Heckel, Schmidt-Rottluff

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Siesta

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Featured Artist at the e.Gallery: Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida


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Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 20th Century artist, Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida [Spanish, 1863-1923] Link: https://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Sorolla_y_Bastida_Joaquin

Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida (February 27, 1863 – August 10, 1923) was a Spanish painter, born in Valencia, who excelled in the painting of portraits, landscapes, and monumental works of social and historical themes. His most typical works are characterized by a dexterous representation of the people and landscape under the sunlight of his native land. Joaquin Sorolla was the eldest child born to a tradesman, also named Joaquin, and his wife, Concepcion Bastida. His sister, Concha, was born a year later. In August 1865 both children were orphaned when their parents died, possibly from cholera. They were thereafter cared for by their maternal aunt and uncle. He received his initial art education, at the age of fourteen, in his native town, and then under a succession of teachers including Cayetano Capuz, Salustiano Asenjo. At the age of eighteen he traveled to Madrid, vigorously studying master paintings in the Museo del Prado.

After completing his military service, at twenty-two Sorolla obtained a grant which enabled a four year term to study painting in Rome, Italy, where he was welcomed by and found stability in the example of F. Pradilla, the director of the Spanish Academy in Rome. A long sojourn to Paris in 1885 provided his first exposure to modern painting; of special influence were exhibitions of Jules Bastien-Lepage and Adolf von Menzel. Back in Rome he studied with Jose Benlliure, Emilio Sala, and Jose Villegas.


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Minha mulher e minhas filhas

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Walk on the Beach

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Sad Inheritance

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Children on the Sea-shore

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