Swedish Realist Painter, 1853-1919
Swedish painter, illustrator and printmaker. He came from a poor family and studied (1866-76) at the Konstakademi in Stockholm, supporting himself throughout this period. From 1871 to 1878 he contributed illustrations to the comic journal Kaspar and the Ny illustrerad tidning. From 1875, for several decades, he was a prolific book illustrator, his most renowned work in this field being his drawings for Föltskärns beröttelser ('The Barber-surgeon's tales'; pubd 1883-4) by Zacharius Topelius, and the Rococo-inspired watercolours for the Samlade skaldeförsök ('Collected attempts at poetry'; pubd 1884) by the 18th-century Swedish author Anna Maria Lenngren. Related Paintings of Carl Larsson :. | Lisbeth in her night Dress with a yellow tulip | la merveileuse | somnad | blommor- nyponros och backsippor | lille tropp | Related Artists:
William BarraudBritish
19th.
Boris Kustodiev1878-1927
Russian
Boris Kustodiev Galleries
The Russian Revolution of 1905, which shook the foundations of society, evoked a vivid response in the artist's soul. He contributed to the satirical journals Zhupel (Bugbear) and Adskaya Pochta (Hell??s Mail). At that time, he first met the artists of Mir Iskusstva (World of Art), a group of innovative Russian artists. He joined their association in 1910 and subsequently took part in all their exhibitions.
In 1905, Kustodiev first turned to book illustrating, a genre in which he worked throughout his entire life. He illustrated many works of classical Russian literature, including Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, The Carriage, and The Overcoat; Mikhail Lermontov's The Lay of Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich, His Young Oprichnik and the Stouthearted Merchant Kalashnikov; and Leo Tolstoy's How the Devil Stole the Peasants Hunk of Bread and The Candle.
In 1909, he was elected into Imperial Academy of Arts. He continued to work intensively, but a grave illness??tuberculosis of the spine??required urgent attention. On the advice of his doctors he went to Switzerland, where he spent a year undergoing treatment in a private clinic. He pined for his distant homeland, and Russian themes continued to provide the basic material for the works he painted during that year. In 1918, he painted The Merchant's Wife, which became the most famous of his paintings.
The Merchant's Wife, (1918).In 1916, he became paraplegic. "Now my whole world is my room", he wrote. His ability to remain joyful and lively despite his paralysis amazed others. His colourful paintings and joyful genre pieces do not reveal his physical suffering, and on the contrary give the impression of a carefree and cheerful life. His Pancake Tuesday/Maslenitsa (1916) and Fontanka (1916) are all painted from his memories. He meticulously restores his own childhood in the busy city on the Volga banks.
In the first years after the Russian Revolution of 1917 the artist worked with great inspiration in various fields. Contemporary themes became the basis for his work, being embodied in drawings for calendars and book covers, and in illustrations and sketches of street decorations. His covers for the journals The Red Cornfield and Red Panorama attracted attention because of their vividness and the sharpness of their subject matter. Kustodiev also worked in lithography, illustrating works by Nekrasov. His illustrations for Leskov's stories The Darner and Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District were landmarks in the history of Russian book designing, so well did they correspond to the literary images.
August Macke1887-1914
August Macke Locations
August Macke was born in Meschede, Germany. His father, August Friedrich Hermann Macke (1845-1904), was a building contractor and his mother, Maria Florentine, n??e Adolph, (1848-1922), came from a farming family in Germany's Sauerland region. The family lived at Br??sseler Straße until August was 13. He then lived most of his creative life in Bonn, with the exception of a few periods spent at Lake Thun in Switzerland and various trips to Paris, Italy, Holland and Tunisia. In Paris, where he traveled for the first time in 1907, Macke saw the work of the Impressionists, and shortly after he went to Berlin and spent a few months in Lovis Corinth's studio. His style was formed within the mode of French Impressionism and Post-impressionism and later went through a Fauve period. In 1909 he married Elizabeth Gerhardt. In 1910, through his friendship with Franz Marc, Macke met Kandinsky and for a while shared the non-objective aesthetic and the mystical and symbolic interests of Der Blaue Reiter.
Macke's meeting with Robert Delaunay in Paris in 1912 was to be a sort of revelation for him. Delaunay's chromatic Cubism, which Apollinaire had called Orphism, influenced Macke's art from that point onwards. His Shops Windows can be considered a personal interpretation of Delaunay's Windows, combined with the simultaneity of images found in Italian Futurism. The exotic atmosphere of Tunisia, where Macke traveled in 1914 with Paul Klee and Louis Moilliet was fundamental for the creation of the luminist approach of his final period, during which he produced a series of works now considered masterpieces. August Macke's oeuvre can be considered as Expressionism, (the movement that flourished in Germany between 1905 and 1925) and also his work was part of Fauvism. The paintings concentrate primarily on expressing emotion, his style of work represents feelings and moods rather than reproducing objective reality, usually distorting colour and form.
Macke's career was cut short by his early death at the front in Champagne in September 1914, the second month of World War I. His final painting, Farewell, depicts the mood of gloom that settled after the outbreak of war.