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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