British
1855-1942
1942). English painter, fisherman and scrap merchant. Although the exact date of Wallis birth is doubtful, he stated in letters to Jim Ede, one of his greatest patrons, that he was born on the day of the fall of Sebastopol. He claimed to have gone to sea at the age of nine and was involved in deep-sea fishing, sometimes sailing as far as Newfoundland. About 1875 he married Susan Ward, a woman 21 years his senior, and shortly afterwards gave up deep-sea fishing to become an inshore fisherman. In 1890 he moved to St Ives, Cornwall, where he set up as a marine scrap merchant. In 1912 he retired. His wife died in 1922, whereupon he took up painting to keep himself company, as he told Ede. Related Paintings of Alfred Wallis :. | Nevermore, O Tahiti | Vista de Palermo | The Little Cook | The Fall | Self-portrait | Related Artists:
pablo picassoPablo Diego Josee Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Mareea de los Remedios Cipriano de la Sant??sima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Rueez y Picasso (25 October 1881 C 8 April 1973) was an Andalusian-Spanish painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. As one of the most recognized figures in twentieth-century art, he is best known for co-founding the Cubist movement and for the wide variety of styles embodied in his work. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d Avignon (1907) and his depiction of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, Guernica (1937).
Picasso was baptized Pablo Diego Josee Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Mareea de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santesima Trinidad Clito, a series of names honouring various saints and relatives. Added to these were Rueez and Picasso, for his father and mother, respectively, as per Spanish custom. Born in the city of Melaga in the Andalusian region of Spain, he was the first child of Don Josee Ruiz y Blasco (1838?C1913) and Marea Picasso y Lepez. Picassoes family was middle-class; his father was also a painter who specialized in naturalistic depictions of birds and other game. For most of his life Ruiz was a professor of art at the School of Crafts and a curator of a local museum. Ruizes ancestors were minor aristocrats.
The young Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age; according to his mother, his first words were epiz, pize, a shortening of lepiz, the Spanish word for epencile. From the age of seven, Picasso received formal artistic training from his father in figure drawing and oil painting. Ruiz was a traditional, academic artist and instructor who believed that proper training required disciplined copying of the masters, and drawing the human body from plaster casts and live models. His son became preoccupied with art to the detriment of his classwork.
The family moved to La Coruna in 1891 so his father could become a professor at the School of Fine Arts. They stayed almost four years. On one occasion the father found his son painting over his unfinished sketch of a pigeon. Observing the precision of his sones technique, Ruiz felt that the thirteen-year-old Picasso had surpassed him, and vowed to give up painting.
In 1895, Picasso seven-year old sister, Conchita, died of diphtheria - a traumatic event in his life.After her death, the family moved to Barcelona, with Ruiz transferring to its School of Fine Arts. Picasso thrived in the city, regarding it in times of sadness or nostalgia as his true home. Ruiz persuaded the officials at the academy to allow his son to take an entrance exam for the advanced class. This process often took students a month, but Picasso completed it in a week, and the impressed jury admitted Picasso, who was still 13. The student lacked discipline but made friendships that would affect him in later life. His father rented him a small room close to home so Picasso could work alone, yet Ruiz checked up on him numerous times a day, judging his sones drawings. The two argued frequently.
Picassoes father and uncle decided to send the young artist to Madrides Royal Academy of San Fernando, the foremost art school in the country. In 1897, Picasso, age 16, set off for the first time on his own. Yet his difficulties accepting formal instruction led him to stop attending class soon after enrollment. Madrid, however, held many other attractions: the Prado housed paintings by the venerable Diego Velezquez, Francisco Goya, and Francisco Zurbaren. Picasso especially admired the works of El Greco; their elements, like elongated limbs, arresting colors, and mystical visages, are echoed in Picassoes œuvre.
Jackson Pollockl912--1956,U.S. painter. He grew up in California and Arizona. In the early 1930s he studied in New York City under Thomas Hart Benton, and later he was employed on the WPA Federal Art Project. In 1945 he married the artist Lee Krasner. Two years later, after several years of semiabstract work stimulated by psychotherapy, Pollock began to lay his canvas on the floor and pour or drip paint onto it in stages. This process permitted him to record the force and scope of his gestures in trajectories of enamel or aluminum paint that veiled the figurative elements found in his earlier work. The results were huge areas covered with complex and dynamic linear patterns that fuse image and form and engulf the vision of the spectator in their scale and intricacy. Pollock believed that art derived from the unconscious and judged his work and that of others on its inherent authenticity of personal expression. He became known as a leading practitioner of Abstract Expressionism, particularly the form known as action painting. Championed by critic Clement Greenberg and others, he became a celebrity. When he died in a car crash at 44, he was one of the few American painters to be recognized during his lifetime and afterward as the peer of 20th-century European masters of modern art.
William Morris PrintsEnglish Pre-Raphaelite Writer and Designer, 1834-1896
was an English architect, furniture and textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement.
Born in Walthamstow in north London, Morris was educated at Marlborough and Oxford. In 1856, Morris became an apprentice to Gothic revival architect G. E. Street. That same year he founded the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, an outlet for his poetry and a forum for development of his theories of hand-craftsmanship in the decorative arts. In 1861, Morris founded a design firm in partnership with the artist Edward Burne-Jones, and the poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti which had a profound impact on the decoration of churches and houses into the early 20th century. Morris's chief contribution was as a designer of repeating patterns for wallpapers and textiles, many based on a close observation of nature. Morris was also a major contributor to the resurgence of traditional textile arts and methods of production.
Morris wrote and published poetry, fiction, and translations of ancient and medieval texts throughout his life. His best-known works include The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858), The Earthly Paradise (1868?C1870), A Dream of John Ball and the utopian News from Nowhere.
Morris was an important figure in the emergence of socialism in Great Britain, founding the Socialist League in 1884, but breaking with the movement over goals and methods by the end of that decade. Morris devoted much of the rest of his life to the Kelmscott Press which he founded in 1891. The 1896 Kelmscott edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer is considered a masterpiece of book design.