Category Archives: Artists

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 19th Century artist of the Barbizon movement, Charles-François Daubigny [French, 1817-1878] Link: http://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Daubigny_Charles-Francois

Charles-François Daubigny was born on February 15, 1817 in Paris. Daubigny was taught how to paint by Paul Delaroches and his father, the landscape painter Edme-François Daubigny. From 1838 Daubigny regularly contributed to exhibitions, but did not reach his full artistic development before 1848, when he received great public acclaim for his landscape paintings, which were some of the first plein air paintings.

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 20th Century artist of the Expressionist movement, Joan Mitchell [American, 1926-1992] Link: http://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Mitchell_Joan

Joan Mitchell (American artist, 1926–1992), has had her reputation increase dramatically in the past few decades, and she’s now considered one of the major Abstract Expressionists. The Chicago native received her formal training in the mid-1940s at that city’s Art Institute. After a year in Europe, she moved to New York, where she fell in with the Abstract Expressionists and was considered a “second-generation” member of that movement. She moved to France in 1955, spent most of her life there, and died in Paris. Mitchell often painted big, both in terms of the size of the canvas and the seemingly all-out, vigorous, somewhat aggressive style that exuded an energy not unlike Willem de Kooning’s work. Mitchell’s wild mark making took place within risky but exquisite, precise compositions that often evoked landscapes. The Whitney Museum in 2002 organized a traveling Mitchell retrospective. Her work is in many prominent museums throughout the world, including New York’s Whitney Museum and Museum of Modern Art, Washington, D.C’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and Phillips Collection, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, MN, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 20th Century artist of the Contemporary Realist movement, William Bailey [American, 1930-] Link: http://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Bailey_William

William Bailey was born in 1930 in Council Bluffs, Iowa, William Bailey is certainly American, but he has spent summers in his studio in the Italian countryside for more than forty years. The colors and feeling of Italy are important influences on his art. In American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, Robert Hughes writes that Bailey’s “calm arrays of pots, jugs, eggs, and bowls make up an ideal form-world, Platonic in its removal from ‘the itch of desire.’ Nothing spills out, thrusts forward, or wants to be touched or possessed — the traditional solicitations of still-life painting, most materialistic of arts. They are as removed from touch (and as grandly articulate in their scale) as the facade of a fine quattrocento building, seen from the other side of the piazza … an extreme opposite to the American taste for works of art which bear the signs of their struggle, unedited, in their final form.”

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 15th Century artist, Fra Angelico [Italian, 1387-1455] Link: http://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Fra_Angelico

Fra Angelico (Fra Giovanni da Fiesole) (Guido di Pietro) (c. 1400-55). Florentine painter, a Dominican friar. Although in popular tradition he has been seen as ‘not an artist properly so-called but an inspired saint’ (Ruskin), Angelico was in fact a highly professional artist, who was in touch with the most advanced developments in contemporary Florentine art and in later life travelled extensively for prestigious commissions. He probably began his career as a manuscript illuminator, and his early paintings are strongly influenced by International Gothic. But even in the most lavishly decorative of them all — the Annunciation in the Diocesan Museum in Cortona — Masaccio’s incluence is evident in the insistent perspective of the architecture. For most of his career Angelico was based in S. Domenico in Fiesole (he became Prior there in 1450), but his most famous works were painted at S. Marco in Florence (now an Angelico museum), a Sylvestrine monastry which was taken over by his Order in 1436. He and his assistants painted about fifty frescos in the friary (c.1438-45) that are at once the expression of and a guide to the spiritual life of the community. Many of the frescos are in the friars’ cells and were intended as aids to devotion; with their immaculate coloring, their economy in drawing and composition, and their freedom from the accidents of time and place, they attain a sense of blissful serenity.

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 20th Century artist of the Dadaist movement, Max Ernst [German, 1891-1976] Link: http://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Ernst_Max

Max Ernst (b. 1891, Bruhl, Germany; d. 1976, Paris), was born on April 2, 1891, in Bruhl, Germany. He enrolled in the University at Bonn in 1909 to study philosophy, but soon abandoned this pursuit to concentrate on art. At this time he was interested in psychology and the art of the mentally ill. In 1911 Ernst became a friend of August Macke and joined the Rheinische Expressionisten group in Bonn. Ernst showed for the first time in 1912 at the Galerie Feldman in Cologne. At the Sonderbund exhibition of that year in Cologne he saw the work of Paul Cézanne, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh. In 1913 he met Guillaume Apollinaire and Robert Delaunay and traveled to Paris. Ernst participated that same year in the Erste deutsche Herbstsalon. In 1914 he met Jean Arp, who was to become a lifelong friend.

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 20th Century artist of the Op Art movement, Victor Vasarely [Hungarian-French, 1908-1997] Link: http://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Vasarely_Victor

Victor Vasarely, Hungarian Viktor Vásárhelyi (born April 9, 1908, Pécs, Hungary. – died March 15, 1997, Paris, France), a Hungarian-born French painter of geometric abstractions who became one of the leading figures of the Op Art movement.

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 19th Century artist, Mariano Fortuny y Marsal [Spanish, 1838-1874] Link: http://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Marsal_Mariano_Fortuny_y

Mariano Fortuny, in full Mariano José María Bernardo Fortuny Y Marsal (born June 11, 1838, Reus, Spain – died Nov. 21, 1874, Rome, Italy), was a Spanish painter whose vigorous technique and anecdotal themes won him a considerable audience in the mid-19th century.

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 19th Century artist, Ernst Heinrich Haeckel [German, 1834-1919] Link: http://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Haeckel_Ernst_Heinrich

Ernst Haeckel, much like Herbert Spencer, was always quotable, even when wrong. Although best known for the famous statement “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”, he also coined many words commonly used by biologists today, such as phylum, phylogeny, and ecology. On the other hand, Haeckel also stated that “politics is applied biology”, a quote used by Nazi propagandists. The Nazi party, rather unfortunately, used not only Haeckel’s quotes, but also Haeckel’s justifications for racism, nationalism and social darwinism.