“The attacks of which I have been the object have broken the spring of life in me… People don’t realize what it feels like to be constantly insulted. Insults are pouring down on me as thick as hail.”
– Edourd Manet (Jan 23, 1832 – April 30, 1883)
Agnes Martin
Courtesy of the estate of Agnes Martin and Pace Gallery.
“I don’t get up in the morning until I know exactly what I’m going to do. Sometimes, I stay in bed until about three in the afternoon, without any breakfast.”
Agnes Martin (March 22, 1912 – Dec 16, 2004)
Agnes Martin in her studio on Ledoux Street, Taos, New Mexico, 1953.
Photo: Mildred Tolbert. Courtesy of the Harwood Museum of Art, Gift of Mildred Tolbert. ©Mildred Tolbert Family.
“When we realize that we can see life, we gradually give up the things that stand in the way of our complete awareness.
Agnes Martin (March 22, 1912 – Dec 16, 2004)
Sketch for Several Circles, 1926
Wassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866–1944)
Oil on canvas, 27 5/8 x 27 5/8 in., Gift of Mrs. Edgar B. Stern
New Orleans Museum of Art
Everything starts from a dot.
Wassily Kandinsky
“Why talk when you can paint?”
A singular artist, Milton Avery defied stylistic trends and charted his own way through American Modernism. A quiet man who did not necessarily fit the romantic, bohemian notion of the modern, avant-garde artist, Avery boldly used color and abstracted forms to convey a unique vision of the American scene. Friends with the young Abstract Expressionists, Avery imparted his unique vision of the power of color to them, and in turn, he seemed intrigued by their explorations of the power of ambiguous, abstract compositions.
While often overlooked in the annals of American art, Avery was a touchstone not only for the Abstract Expressionists and later Color Field Painters, but also for more contemporary painters, like Peter Doig, who emphasize color to convey the moods of places and memories. While his reputation was often overshadowed, Avery’s art seems newly fresh again.
Avery abstracted forms to their simplest shapes and component parts,leaving out extraneous details. His aim in doing so was to convey the idea, the essence, of the object, whether a model or a landscape. While many of his compositions could be quite abstract, he insisted on representing the real world of things and people.
The Art Story
Miton Avery was often thought of as an American Matisse, especially because of his colorful and innovative landscape paintings. His poetic, bold and creative use of drawing and color set him apart from more conventional painting of his era. Early in his career, his work was considered too radical for being too abstract; when Abstract Expressionism became dominant his work was overlooked, as being too representational.
For several years in the late 1920s through the late 1930s, Avery practiced painting and drawing at the Art Students League of New York. Roy Neuberger saw his work and thought he deserved recognition. Determined to get the world to know and respect Avery’s work, Neuberger bought over 100 of his paintings, starting with Gaspé Landscape, and lent or donated them to museums all over the world. With Avery’s work rotating through high-profile museums, he came to be a highly respected and successful painter.
In the 1930s, he was befriended by Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko among many other artists living in New York City in the 1930s–40s. Avery’s use of glowing color and simplified forms was an influence on the younger artists.
The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., was the first museum to purchase one of Avery’s paintings in 1929; that museum also gave him his first solo museum exhibition in 1944.
Wikipedia
Girl Writing (1941)
Artist’s Wife (1930)
Gaspe Pink Sky (1940)
Self-Portrait (1947)
Sea Grasses and Blue Sea (1958)
Robed Nude (1960)
“Nothing is static in the universe, so why make a static painting? It’s an unreality.”
“Painting, to me, has never been about the paint, but what the painting can make you feel.”
“Art is the experience of our abstract truth and the experience of our human state – our unseen side. Art to me is difficult to talk about because it is an experience. The art is not really on the wall, it’s in your perception, as I always say. Art is the experience of our truest, deepest nature, and experience from the expression of our true state.
In keeping with the West Coast’s unique brand of Minimalism, a contrast to its starker East Coast counterpart, Mary Corse adopted light as the primary subject in her exploration of visibility and perception. Like the work of her Southern California contemporaries such as Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, and James Turrell, Corse’s shimmering canvases are experiential pieces that stimulate a heightened sensory awareness.
Mary Corse investigates materiality, abstraction, and perception through the subtly gestural and precisely geometric paintings that she has made over her fifty-year career. Earning a BFA in 1968 from Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles, Corse developed her initial work during the emergence of the Light and Space movement in Southern California. Throughout the 1960s, she experimented with unconventional media and supports, producing shaped canvases, works with plexiglass, and illuminated boxes.
https://www.pacegallery.com/exhibitions/mary-corse-5/
Mary Corse, Untitled (Electric Light), 2021 . Courtesy of the artist and Kayne Griffin, Los Angeles. Photo by Flying Studio.
Mary Corse, Untitled (Electric Light), 2021
Corse emerged in the mid-1960s as one of the few women associated with the West Coast Light and Space movement. She shared with her contemporaries a deep fascination with perception and with the possibility that light itself could serve as both a subject and material of art. Yet while others largely migrated away from painting into sculptural and environmental projects, Corse approached the question of light through painting. She charted her own course through studies in quantum physics and complex investigations into a range of “painting” materials, from fluorescent light and plexiglass to metallic flakes, glass microspheres, and clay.
https://whitney.org/exhibitions/mary-corse
Installation view of Mary Corse: A Survey in Light (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, June 8-November 25, 2018). From left to right: Untitled (White Grid, Vertical Strokes), 1969; Untitled (White Grid, Horizontal Strokes), 1969; Untitled (Space + Electric Light), 1968. © Mary Corse. Photograph by Ron Amstutz
Installation view of Mary Corse: A Survey in Light (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, June 8-November 25, 2018). From left to right: Untitled (Black Light Painting), 1975; Untitled (Black Earth Series), 1978. © Mary Corse. Photograph by Ron Amstutz
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler was a German-born art collector, and one of the most notable French art dealers of the 20th century. He became prominent as an art gallery owner in Paris beginning in 1907 and was among the first champions of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and the Cubist movement in art.
Although the financial support for artists was an important contribution to art history, he was also a significant figure for his work as an art historian and eyewitness to the emergence of Cubism during the period 1907–1914. When working in Paris, his spare time was devoted to reading and understanding the history of art and aesthetics.
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 not only ruptured the Cubist experiments in art, but also forced Kahnweiler who was Jewish to live in exile in Switzerland; due to his German citizenship, he was considered an alien under French law. Many German nationals living in France had their possessions sequestered by the French state, and as a result, Kahnweiler’s collection was confiscated in 1914 and sold by the government in a series of auctions at the Hôtel Drouot between 1921 and 1923.
Wikipedia
“To be an intermediary between the artists and the public, to clear their way, and to spare them financial anxieties. If the profession of art dealer has any moral justification it can only be that.”
“When I decided to become an art dealer, I never thought of buying works by Cézanne. I believed that the opportunity to buy them had passed, at least for me, and that I had to defend the artists of my generation.”
1907. Picasso’s studio in Paris. 1960. With one of his portraits painted by Picasso
https://patrons.org.es/kahnweiler-daniel-henry/
Kahnweiler with Picasso at Villa La Calefornie, 1957 (left photo)
In his office and a picture by Picasso (right photo)
Pablo Picasso, 1910, Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago
Kees van Dongen, c. 1907-08, Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, oil on canvas, Musée du Petit Palais, Geneva
“What would have become of us if Kahnweiler hadn’t had a business sense?”
– Picasso about Kahnweiler
Born: February 23, 1879, Kyiv, Ukraine
Died: May 15, 1935, Saint Petersburg, Russia
Malevich in front of his paintings in Leningrad, 1924
“By “Suprematism” I mean the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling.”
“Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners, it wants to have nothing further to do with the object, as such, and believes that it can exist, in and for itself, without “things” (that is, the “time-tested well-spring of life”).”
― Kasimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism
“I tell you, you will not see the new beauty and the truth, until you make up your minds to spit.”
“The square is not a subconscious form. It is the creation of intuitive reason. The face of the new art. The square is a living, regal infant. The first step of pure creation in art.”
—
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was born in Kyiv in Ukraine on February 23, 1879, and died from cancer on May 15, 1935. He was a famous Russian avant-garde artist who started the Suprematism art style and theory, pioneering non-objective Abstract art in Russia as well as the world. He started art from a young age and studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. He was influenced by various styles, from Impressionism, Cubism, and Futurism.
He was one of the fathers of non-objective, otherwise non-representational, Abstract art. From his writings about Suprematism, he is often quoted as writing, “When, in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form”.
Alicia du Plessis
Black Square (1915)
A section of Suprematist works by Kazimir Malevich exhibited for the first time at The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings1915
Suprematism (1915)
Boy, oil on canvas, 1928/1929
I always pet a dog with my left hand because if he bit me I’d still have my right hand to paint with.
The instant you know what the result will be, you are lost.
Still Life with a Guitar by Juan Gris (1913)
Portrait of the Artist’s Mother by Juan Gris (1912)
Still Life with Guitar by Juan Gris (1912 – 1913)
Still life before an open window by Juan Gris (1915)
“This Juan Gris, who lived only a short time, had little good fortune and never pushed his way to the fore, was one of the very great ones.”
– Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler
“There were neither speeches nor a religious ceremony, but in the procession which filed down the Avenue de la Reine to the old cemetery of Boulogne were all those who had known Gris – painters, sculptors, poets and musicians. The chief mourners were his son Georges, Lipchitz, Picasso, Raynal and myself.”
– Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (Gris’s and Picassso’s art dealer), describing Gris’s funeral
“It is not enough to know your craft – you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more.”
– Edourd Manet (1832 – 1883)
The Monet Family in Their Garden at Argenteuil
Edouard Manet
1874
In July and August 1874, Manet vacationed at his family’s house in Gennevilliers, just across the Seine from Monet at Argenteuil. The two painters saw each other often that summer, and on a number of occasions they were joined by Renoir. While Manet was painting this picture of Monet with his wife Camille and their son Jean, Monet painted Manet at his easel (location unknown). Renoir, who arrived just as Manet was beginning to work, borrowed paint, brushes, and canvas, positioned himself next to Manet, and painted Madame Monet and Her Son (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.).
https://www.metmuseum.org/
“A new dawn challenges this world and demands the salt of every one of us.”
John Thomas Biggers (1924 – 2001)
Inherent Opulence by John Thomas Biggers
“A lot of artists are good cooks as I’m too, but coming from a culture that was very concerned with food, I was very interested in that from the start. If you’re interested in food, you’re interested in lots of different aspects of culture. And it’s like being interested in the music from a certain area, or writing, or whatever–food is part of that, too.”
Keith Sonnier
Keith Sonnier (1941-2000)
“Painting today is pure intuition and luck and taking advantage of what happens when you splash the stuff down.”
Francis Bacon (1909-1982)
Photograph by Irving Penn / © Condé Nast
1952
“They begin as an unknown adventure in an unknown space.”
– Mark Rothko (1903-1970)
Painting: Untitled (Black on Grey), 1970 by Mark Rothko
Painting: Charing Cross Bridge (1906) by Andre Derain
“We were always intoxicated with color, with words that speak of color, and with the sun that makes colors live.”
– Andre Derain (1880-1954)
“I’m interested in glorifying something that we in the world would say doesn’t deserve being glorified. Something that’s forgotten, focused on as though it were some sort of sacred object.”
– Ed Ruscha, born in 1937
Ed Ruscha- Venice, California Studio
1995 Photo: Leon Holob
“That’s what it’s about. Freedom. That’s the only possession an artist has — freedom to do whatever you can imagine.”
– Philip Guston (1913-1980)
The Limit (1947) by Arshire Gorky
(Oil, canvas, paper)
“The stuff of thought is the seed of the artist. Dreams form the bristles of the artist’s brush. As the eye functions as the brain’s sentry, I communicate my innermost perceptions through the art, my worldview.”
– Arshile Gorky (1904-1948)
Arshile Gorky, 1935
“When I am in my painting, I am not aware of what I’m doing. It is only after a short of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.
Jackson Pollock
(1912-1956)
Botero Plaza in Medellín features nearly two dozen large-scale sculptures by Botero Photo by young shanahan, via Flickr
“My popularity has to do with the divorce between modern art, where everything is obscure, and the viewer who often feels he needs a professor to tell them whether it’s good or not. I believe a painting has to talk directly to the viewer, with composition, colour and design, without a professor to explain it.”
Interview with The Los Angeles Times (2012)
courtesy of the The Art Newspaper
The Dream by Henri Rousseau (1910)
Rousseau had embraced a new subject in the 1890s that few would consider “realist”: tropical jungles brimming with riotous combinations of flora and fauna, from palm trees and lotus flowers to flamingoes and jaguars. The artist undertook his first jungle painting in 1891, then proceeded to complete around 20 in the next two decades. The last and the largest of these jungle paintings was The Dream (1910), a nighttime scene teeming with life. Half-submerged in the lush foliage are watchful lions, preening birds, and dangling monkeys, along with other creatures. Positioned among these creatures are two figures: at right, a musician who plays the flute, and at left, a nude reclining on a couch. How to explain the incongruous appearance of household furniture in a rainforest? A curious critic posed this question to the artist in 1910, when the painting was exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Indépendants, a jury-free exhibition in Paris where Rousseau had shown his work since the mid-1880s. “This woman asleep on the couch is dreaming she has been transported into the forest,” the artist replied, “listening to the sounds from the instrument of the enchanter.”
Rousseau, though he often claimed otherwise, never set foot in a tropical jungle. To paint The Dream, he relied on images from magazines, novels, and postcards, as well as his own sketches of the Jardin des Plantes—a botanical garden and zoo in Paris—and of two World Fairs held in the city, one in 1889 and another in 1900. “As a painter of the ‘exotic,’” the scholar Christopher Green has observed, “Rousseau offered, in the end, Parisian jungles.” Though homegrown, these “Parisian jungles” were shaped by French colonialism. Rousseau’s sources—from illustrated magazines to the World Fairs—sought to present France as a major colonial power. And paintings like The Dream project fears and fantasies onto distant landscapes and faraway peoples. In this way, too, the artist was decidedly modern.
courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art
https://www.moma.org/artists/5056
“A painter is a choreographer of space.”
Barnett Newman
(1905-1970)
Helen Frankenthaler and Barnett Newman
Photo: Alexander Liberman
“One eye sees, the other feels.”
– Paul Klee (1879 –1940)
Paul Klee
Senecio, 1922
Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel
“I am staying unsettled and trying not to talk for three years. I want to do it very much.” (1967)
Agnes Martin (1912 – 2004)
“I was interested in transcendence from a very early age. I was interested in what was over there, what was behind life. So when I had my first communion I was very disappointed. I had expected something amazing and surprising and spiritual. Instead all I got was a bicycle. That wasn’t what I was after at all.”
– Anselm Kiefer, born March 8, 1945
Anselm Kiefer: Pour Paul Celan, Grand Palais Éphémère, Paris. Photo: Ana Beatriz Duarte.Grand Palais Éphémère, Paris
17 December 2021 – 11 January 2022
“In 19 vast canvases, Kiefer creates a dialogue with the work of Paul Celan, the great German-language poet who has influenced the artist’s output since adolescence.
Poetry is what Paul Celan chose for his account of the barbarism of the Nazi regime. Now considered one of the greatest 20th-century poets of the German language, Celan experienced the horrors of the concentration camps, having been forced to work at one and having lost his parents at another.”
https://www.studiointernational.com/anselm-kiefer-pour-paul-celan-review-grand-palais-ephemere-paris
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