Andrew Wyeth

Name: Andrew Wyeth
Birth Place: Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania
Birth Date: July 12, 1917
Death Date:
Genre: Watercolor Realism
Famous works: Painting of Helga Testorf
Quote: “Artists today think of everything they do as a work of art. It is important to forget about what you are doing – then a work of art may happen.“

“I think one's art goes as far and as deep as one's love goes.”

“I dream a lot. I do more painting when I'm not painting. It's in the subconscious.”

Influenced by: Newell Convers Wyeth

Andrew Wyeth was born July 12, 1917 in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. He was the youngest of five children. Andrew was a sickly child and so his mother and father made the decision to pull him out of school after he contracted whooping cough. His parents home-schooled him in every subject including art education.

Newell Convers Wyeth (Andrew's father) was a well known illustrator whose art was featured in many magazines, calendars, posters and murals. He even painted maps for the National Geographic Society!

Painting Style
Andrew had a vivid memory and fantastic imagination that led to a great fascination for art. His father recognized an obvious raw talent that had to be nurtured. While his father was teaching him the basics of traditional academic drawing Andrew began painting watercolour studies of the rocky coast and the sea in Port Clyde Maine.
Andrew Wyeth - Afternoon
Afternoon

He worked primarily in watercolours and egg tempera and often used shades of brown and grey. He held his first one-man show of watercolours painted around the family's summer home at Port Clyde, Maine in 1937. It was a great success that would lead to plenty more.

Successes
He married at the age of twenty-two to a local girl named Betsey James and had two boys, Nicholas who became an art dealer, and James who became the third generation artist in his family. Interestingly, although James' father was the most popular artist in his family history, he was greatly inspired by his grandfather's illustrations.

He was featured on the cover of American Artist as well as many other famous magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post that displayed his painting "The Hunter." His first solo museum exhibition was presented in 1951 at the Farnsworth Art Museum. Since then he has seen many more successes and is considered one of the most "collectable" living artist's of our time.

"With watercolour, you can pick up the atmosphere, the temperature, the sound of snow shifting through the trees or over the ice of a small pond or against a windowpane. Watercolour perfectly expresses the free side of my nature." - Andrew Wyeth


Childhood/ Early career
Andrew Wyeth is the son of Newell Convers Wyeth, a famous American illustrator and artist. The youngest of five children, Andrew Wyeth was home-tutored and learned art from his father. In 1937 at age twenty, Wyeth had his first one-man exhibition of watercolors at Macbeth Gallery in New York City. The entire inventory of paintings quickly sold out, and Wyeth's career was launched.

In 1940 Wyeth married Betsy Merle James, whom he had met the year before in Maine. Betsy introduced Wyeth to Christina Olson, who later became the subject of the painting Christina's World. Christina, her brother Alvaro and their weatherbeaten house became an important subject of Wyeth's art for over twenty years. Betsy James Wyeth has played a guiding and supportive role in Wyeth's art through his career.

Father's death / 1940s
In 1945 Andrew Wyeth's father and his three-year-old nephew were killed when their car stalled on railroad tracks near their home and was struck by a train. Wyeth has referred to his father's death as a formative emotional event in his artistic career, in addition to a personal tragedy. It was shortly after this time that Wyeth's art consolidated into his mature and enduring style, characterized by a subdued color palette, highly realistic renderings, and the depiction of emotionally-charged symbolic objects.

In 1948 Wyeth began painting Anna and Karl Kuerner, neighbors of the Wyeths in Chadds Ford. Ironically the Kuerner's farm is just a few yards from where the rail road tracks that N.C. Wyeth died on, use to be. The Kuerner's farm is now available to tour through the Brandywine River Museum. Like the Olsons in Maine, the Kuerners and their farm became one of Wyeth's most important subjects for nearly 30 years.

Mature career
Dividing his time between Pennsylvania and Maine, Wyeth has maintained a relatively consistent realist painting style for over fifty years. He has tended to gravitate to several identifiable landscape subjects and models, to which he would return repeatedly over a period of decades. He typically creates dozens of studies on a subject in pencil or loosely brushed watercolor before executing a finished painting, either in watercolor, drybrush (a watercolor style in which the water is squeezed from the brush), or egg tempera. His works have fetched increasingly higher prices with his growing fame, and today Wyeth's major works can sell for in excess of one million dollars from private dealers and at auction.

Critical reaction
Wyeth's art has long been controversial. As a representational artist, Wyeth's paintings have sharply contrasted with the prevailing trend of abstraction that gained currency in American art in the middle of the 20th century. Museum exhibitibitions of Wyeth's work have set attendance records, but many art critics have derided his paintings. The most common criticisms are that Wyeth's art verges on illustration, and that his predominantly rural subject matter is heavily weighted with sentiment. Admirers of Wyeth's art believe that his paintings, in addition to sometimes displaying overt beauty, contain strong emotional currents, symbolic content and underlying abstraction. Most observers of Wyeth's art agree that he is exceptionally skilled at handling the mediums of watercolor and egg tempera (which uses egg yolk as a medium). Except for early experimentations, Wyeth has avoided using traditional oil paints

The Helga paintings
A particularly controversial episode in Wyeth's career surrounded a body of work Wyeth painted of Helga Testorf, a model he met through the Kuerner family in Chadds Ford. Wyeth began painting Helga in 1971 and for nearly fifteen years she was one of Wyeth's most important models. Unlike his other subjects, however, Wyeth kept the vast majority of his Helga works a secret from everyone, including his wife Betsy. He revealed the Helga pictures to Betsy in 1985, and arranged a sale of the paintings to Leonard Andrews, a private investor, the following year. Andrews arranged a publicity blitz that attracted major museums to exhibit the artwork. Enticed by the suggestion of a secret love affair between Wyeth and Helga, national news media featured the story of Wyeth's secret cache of art. Following the museum exhibitions, Andrews sold the works to an anonymous Japanese industrialist in 1990 reportedly for a substantial profit. Some curators felt that their museums were used to enhance the value of the art prior to the sale. Some art critics thought that Wyeth and his wife had fabricated the entire story of the secret cache of paintings. Others simply admired the art. After the paintings' sale to the anonymous Japanese industrialist in 1990, the paintings were frequently exhibited at museums in the U.S. and Japan. The paintings were resold in early December, 2005 to an American buyer, who may break the collection up for individual sale.

Museum collections
Andrew Wyeth is in the collection of most major American museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, in the Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock and the White House, in Washington, DC. Especially large collections of Wyeth's art are in the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania; the Farnsworth Art Museum of Art in Rockland, Maine, and the Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, South Carolina. A major retrospective of Andrew Wyeth's work will be at the Philadelphia Museum of Art[1] from March 29, 2006 - July 16, 2006.

Honors and awards
Wyeth has been the recipient of numerous honorary degrees. In 1963, Andrew Wyeth became the first painter to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which was conferred by President John F. Kennedy. In 1977, he became the first American artist since John Singer Sargent elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. In 1980, Wyeth became the first living American artist to be elected to Britain's Royal Academy. In 1987 Wyeth received a D.F.A. from Bates College. In 1990, he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor by President George H. W. Bush.

Trivia
* Andrew Wyeth's brother, Nathaniel C. Wyeth, invented the plastic soda pop bottle.

* Wyeth was often referenced by cartoonist Charles M. Schulz (a longtime admirer) in the comic strip Peanuts. The character Snoopy was a collector of fine art and had a Wyeth that, even when in dire financial straits, he refused to sell, and which went "over big" on display at a housewarming party.

* Andrew Wyeth's father is the renowned illustrator N.C. Wyeth, known for his illustrations for Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe.

* Tom Duffield, the production designer for the American remake of The Ring, drew inspiration from Wyeth's paintings for the look of the film.

* M. Night Shyamalan based his movie The Village on paintings by Andrew Wyeth.[2]

* John Testorf, Helga's husband, was out of the country at the time of the Helga Paintings' unveiling. Also unaware of their existence, he was, upon returning to America, very much surprised to see his wife on the cover of Time Magazine.

Source Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rufino Tamayo

Name: Rufino Tamayo
Birth Place: Oaxaca, Oaxaca Mexico
Birth Date: August 26, 1899
Death Date: June 24, 1991
Genre: Pop Art
Famous works: mixografías Dos Personajes Atacados por Perros
Quote: None
Influenced by: Unknown




Rufino Tamayo (August 26, 1899 – June 24, 1991) was a Mexican painter. He was a Zapotec Native American and was born in Oaxaca, Oaxaca.

He moved to México City where he attended the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas "San Carlos." Tamayo was exposed to the cultural wealth of pre-Colombian México as he worked as a draftsman at the Museo Nacional de Arqueologia. His exhibitions have been in major museums such as the Palacio Nacional de Bellas Artes, México, The Philips Collection in Washington, The Guggenheim Museum in New York, The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid as well as important art galleries throughout the world.

In his paintings, Tamayo expressed what he believed was the traditional Mexico and did not follow the more politically based paintings that many of his contemporaries such as José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, Oswaldo Guayasamin and David Alfaro Siqueiros did. Tamayo and another artist, Lea Remba, were the first artists to create a new type of printed artwork called "mixografía". This consisted of artwork printed on paper but with depth and texture. One of their most famous mixografías is entitled Dos Personajes Atacados por Perros ("Two Characters Attacked by Dogs").

Tamayo also painted murals, some of which – including Nacimiento de la nacionalidad ("Birth of the Nationality"), 1952 – are displayed inside Mexico City's Palacio de Bellas Artes opera house. His art has also been shown in U.S. museums such as The Phillips Collection in Washington and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

The Tamayo Contemporary Art Museum (Museo Tamayo de Arte Contemporáneo), located on Paseo de la Reforma as it crosses Chapultepec Park, was opened in 1981 as a repository for the collections that Rufino and his wife, Olga, acquired during their lifetimes and ultimately gifted to the nation.

Tamayo also built another art museum in his home city of Oaxaca,Oaxaca, the Museo Rufino Tamayo.

In 1988 he was the recipient of the Belisario Domínguez Medal of Honor.

In 1972 Tamayo was the subject of the documentary film, Rufino Tamayo: The Sources of his Art by Gary Conklin.

Source Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jan Vermeer

Name: Johannes Vermeer or Jan Vermeer
Birth Place: Delft, Netherlands
Birth Date: October 1632
Death Date: December 15, 1675
Genre: domestic interior realism
Famous works: Dutch painter of Girl With a Pearl Earring
Quote: None
Influenced by: Carel Fabritius, Caravaggio, Leonaert Bramer.





Johannes Vermeer or Jan Vermeer (baptized October 31, 1632, died December 15, 1675) was a Dutch painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of ordinary bourgeois life. His entire life was spent in the town of Delft. Vermeer was a moderately successful provincial painter in his lifetime. He seems to have never been particularly wealthy, perhaps due to the fact that he produced relatively few paintings, leaving his wife and eleven children in debt at his death. Virtually forgotten for nearly two hundred years, in 1866 the art critic Thoré Burger published an essay attributing 66 pictures to him (only 34 paintings are firmly attributed to him today). Since that time Vermeer's reputation has grown astronomically, and he is now acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age, and is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work.
Life

Relatively little is known about Vermeer's life. The only sources of information are some registers, a few official documents and comments by other artists. The following biography attempts to give an impression of what we can surmise about the life of this Dutch masterpainter.

Youth
Johannes Vermeer was born in 1632, in the city of Delft in The Netherlands. The precise date of his birth is unknown but it is known that he was baptised on October 31, 1632, in the Reformed Church in Delft. His father, Reynier Vermeer, was a lower middle-class silk weaver and an art dealer. He married Johannes' mother, Digna, who was from Antwerp, Belgium, in 1615. Reynier Vermeer's name actually was Reynier Vos (Fox), but he used the name Van der Meer. It was likely he who introduced the young Johannes to the art of painting. The Vermeer family bought a large inn, the "Mechelen" named after the homonymous Belgian town, near the market square in Delft in 1641. Reynier Vermeer probably served as inn-keeper while also acting as a merchant of paintings. After Reynier's death in 1652, Johannes Vermeer inherited the Mechelen as well as his father's art-dealing business.

Marriage and family
Despite the fact that he came from a Protestant family, he married a Catholic, named Catherina Bolnes, in April 1653. It was an unlikely marriage: in addition to the religious difference, a serious issue at that time (Catholics were an unpopular religious minority in mainly Calvinist Holland), Bolnes' family was significantly wealthier than Vermeer's. Vermeer probably converted to Catholicism shortly before their marriage (certainly, all his children were named after Catholic saints rather than his own mother and father, and one of his paintings, The Allegory of Faith, manifests a Catholic belief in the Eucharist).

Some time after their marriage, the couple left the Mechelen and moved in with Catherina's mother, Maria Thins, a well-off widow, in a house in the "Papist corner" of the town, where the Catholics lived in relative isolation. Vermeer would live in his mother-in-law's house with his wife and children for the rest of his life. Maria apparently played an important role in their life, for they named their first daughter after her, and it is possible that she used her comfortable income to help support the struggling painter and his growing family. Maria Thins was a devotee of the Jesuit order in the Catholic Church, and this, too, seems to have influenced Johannes and Catherina, for they called their first son Ignatius, after the founding saint of the Jesuit Order. Johannes and Catherina had fourteen children in total, three of whom predeceased Vermeer.

Career
Vermeer was apprenticed as a painter, but it is not certain where he studied, nor with whom. It is generally believed that he studied in Delft and that his teacher was either Carel Fabritius (1622 - 1654) or Leonaert Bramer (1596 - 1674). On the 29th of December 1653, Vermeer became a member of the Saint Luke's Guild, which was a trade association for painters. During the Dutch Golden Age, painting was not considered an art, but a trade, a way to make a living. His financial difficulties are revealed by the guild's records, which establish that he could not initially pay the admission fee. However, in later years he evidently was well established: One of the town's richest citizens, Pieter van Ruijven, became his patron and bought many of his paintings. If he indeed completed only a small number of paintings, his income probably relied largely on his business as an art-dealer. In 1662 he was elected head of the guild and was reelected in 1663, 1670 and 1671, evidence that he was considered an established craftsman among his peers, and a respectable middle-class citizen.

However, a severe economic downturn struck the Netherlands after 1672, when the French invaded the country. This led to a collapse in demand for luxury items such as paintings, and consequently damaged Vermeer's business both as a painter and an art-dealer. With a large family to support, Vermeer was forced to borrow money. When Johannes Vermeer died in 1675, he left Catherina and their children with very little money and with several debts. In a written document his wife attributed her husband's death to the stress of financial pressures. Catherina asked the city council to take over the estate, including paintings, in order to pay off the debts. The famous Dutch microscopist, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who also lived in Delft and worked for the city council, was appointed trustee for the estate in 1676. Nineteen of Vermeer's paintings were bequeathed to Catherina and Maria; Catherina sold some of these paintings to pay creditors.

In Delft Vermeer had been a respected artist, but he was almost unknown outside his home town, and the fact that a local patron, van Ruijven, purchased much of his output reduced the possibility of his fame spreading. Vermeer's relatively short life, the demands of separate careers, and his extraordinary precision as a painter all help to explain his limited output. It is assumed that some of his paintings were lost after his death. Nonetheless, Vermeer is now considered one of the great masters of the seventeenth century.

Technique
Vermeer produced transparent colours by applying paint onto the canvas in loosely granular layers, a technique called pointillé (not to be confused with pointillism). No drawings have been securely attributed to Vermeer, and his paintings offer few clues to preparatory methods. David Hockney, among other historians, has speculated that Vermeer used a camera obscura to achieve precise positioning in his compositions, and this view seems to be supported by certain light and perspective effects which would result from the use of such lenses and not the naked eye alone; however, the extent of Vermeer's dependence upon the camera obscura is disputed by historians.
Themes

Vermeer painted mostly domestic interior scenes. His works are largely genre pieces and portraits, with the exception of two cityscapes.

His subjects offer a cross-section of seventeenth century Dutch society, ranging from the portrayal of a simple milkmaid at work, to the luxury and splendour of rich notables and merchantmen in their roomy houses. Religious and scientific connotations can be found in his works.

Influence of other painters

* Carel Fabritius (1622–1654) who spent his final years in Delft. Vermeer's ideas about perspective, and his tendency to paint everyday themes were possibly influenced by Fabritius.
* Italian painter Caravaggio (1573–1610), indirectly through Dutch followers.
* Leonaert Bramer, another painter from Delft, and witness to his marriage.
* Vermeer owned a Dirck van Baburen painting, which appears in two of Vermeer's paintings.

Johannes (or Jan) Vermeer is now recognized as one of the great Dutch painters, but while he was alive he could barely make ends meet, and his artistic achievement was almost entirely ignored for 200 years after his death. Little is known about his personal life, other than he died poor and young and left behind a wife and eleven children. Vermeer is admired for his realistic style, his subtle use of color and light and his unusual and inventive brush technique, but fewer than forty of his paintings exist. His most famous works include domestic scenes such as Girl With a Peal Earring (1665) and The Music Lesson (1662-65), and tranquil landscapes such as The Little Street (1657-58) and View of Delft (1659-60).

Source Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wayne Thiebaud

Name: Wayne Thiebaud
Birth Place: Mesa, Arizona, U.S.A
Birth Date: November 23, 1920
Death Date: Still Living
Genre: Pop Art
Famous works: cakes, pastries, toys and lipsticks
Quote: None
Influenced by: Giorgio Morandi, Vermeer, Diego Velasquez, and Degas.


His last name is pronounced "Tee-bo."


Thiebaud was born to Mormon parents in Mesa, Arizona, U.S.A.. He was brought to Long Beach, California at the age of six months. Thiebaud spent over ten years working in New York and Hollywood as a cartoonist and advertisement designer. These stints were interrupted for four years, from 1942 to 1946, while Thiebaud served as a member of the United States Army Air Forces. Wayne Thiebaud's formal art training was paid for by the G.I. Bill, and he studied at San Jose State College and the California State University, Sacramento. He received a teaching appointment at Sacramento Junior College in 1951, while still in graduate school. He remained there for eight years after which he joined the University of California, Davis as an art professor, where he is a professor today. He currently (2006) teaches one class per year.

Wayne Thiebaud has said that Northern California was a pleasant change from Long Beach, and that Sacramento "almost seemed a Northeastern city. It had a train station and the leaves even changed colors with the seasons."

Thiebaud is best known for his paintings of production line objects found in diners and cafeterias, such as pies and pastries. Many wonder if he spent time working in the food industry, and in fact he did. As a young man in Long Beach, he worked at a cafe named Mile High and Red Hot, where "Mile High" was ice cream and "Red Hot" was a hot dog.

He was associated with the Pop Art painters because of his interest in objects of mass culture, however, his works, executed during the fifties and sixties, slightly predate the works of the classic pop artists, suggesting that Thiebaud may have had a great influence on the movement. He has also been seen, due to his true to life representations, as a predecessor to photorealism. Thiebaud uses heavy pigment and exaggerated colors to depict his subjects, and the well-defined shadows characteristic of advertisements are almost always included in his work.

Thiebaud's first solo exhibition was at the Crocker Art Gallery in Sacramento, and between the years of 1954 and 1957, he produced eleven educational films for which he was awarded the Scholastic Art Prize in 1961. In the spring of 1962, Thiebaud exhibited for the first time at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York. This exhibition was followed by his first solo museum show - in San Francisco at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum. Later that year he was included in the landmark group exhibition, New Realists, at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York.

In addition to pastries, Thiebaud has painted landscapes, streetscapes, and popular characters such as Mickey Mouse. His recent paintings such as 'Sunset Streets' (1985) and 'Flatland River' (1997) are noted for their hyper realism, and are in some ways similar to Edward Hopper's work, who was fascinated with the mundane scenes from everyday American life.

Thiebaud includes Giorgio Morandi as one of his inspirations. He also admires the work of Vermeer, Diego Velasquez, and Degas. Thiebaud considers himself not an artist, but a painter. He is a voracious reader and is known for reading poetry to his students. His favorite poet is William Carlos Williams.

Today, Thiebaud's art dealer continues to be Allan Stone, the man who gave him his first "break" decades ago. The Allan Stone Gallery is currently located in New York City.

Source Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia