Piet Mondrian
Dutch
1872-1944
Piet Mondrian Location
was a Dutch painter.
He was an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neo-Plasticism. This consisted of a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines and the use of the three primary colours.
When 47-year-old Piet Mondrian left his artistically conservative native Holland for unfettered Paris for the second and last time in 1919, he set about at once to make his studio a nurturing environment for paintings he had in mind that would increasingly express the principles of Neo-Plasticism about which he had been writing for two years. To hide the studio's structural flaws quickly and inexpensively, he tacked up large rectangular placards, each in a single color or neutral hue. Smaller colored paper squares and rectangles, composed together, accented the walls. Then came an intense period of painting. Then again he addressed the walls, repositioning the colored cutouts, adding to their number, altering the dynamics of color and space, producing new tensions and equilibrium. Before long, he had established a creative schedule in which a period of painting took turns with a period of experimentally regrouping the smaller papers on the walls, a process that directly fed the next period of painting. It was a pattern he followed for the rest of his life, through wartime moves from Paris to London??s Hampstead in 1938 and 1940, across the Atlantic to Manhattan.
At 71 in the fall of 1943, Mondrian moved into his second and final New York studio at 15 East 59th Street, and set about again to create the environment he had learned over the years was most congenial to his modest way of life and most stimulating to his art. He painted the high walls the same off-white he used on his easel and on the seats, tables and storage cases he designed and fashioned meticulously from discarded orange and apple-crates. He glossed the top of a white metal stool in the same brilliant primary red he applied to the cardboard sheath he made for the radio-phonograph that spilled forth his beloved jazz from well-traveled records, Visitors to this last studio seldom saw more than one or two new canvases, but found, often to their astonishment, that eight large compositions of colored bits of paper he had tacked and re-tacked to the walls in ever-changing relationships constituted together an environment that, paradoxically and simultaneously, was both kinetic and serene, stimulating and restful. It was the best space, Mondrian said, that he had ever inhabited. Tragically, he was there for only a few months: he died of pneumonia in February 1944. Related Paintings of Piet Mondrian :. | Conformation | Composition with Black, Red, Gray, Yellow, and Blue | Little Girl | White cow | Victory Boogie Woogie | Related Artists: Donatien NonotteFrance (1708 -1785 ) - Painter
Charles le BrunFrench Baroque Era Painter, 1619-1690
French painter and designer. He dominated 17th-century French painting as no other artist; it was not until over a century later, during the predominance of Jacques-Louis David, that artistic authority was again so concentrated in one man. Under the protection of a succession of important political figures, including Chancellor Pierre S?guier, Cardinal Richelieu and Nicolas Fouquet, Le Brun created a series of masterpieces of history and religious painting. For Louis XIV and his chief minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert he executed his greatest work, the royal palace of Versailles: an almost perfect ensemble of architecture, decoration and landscape. After Colbert's death in 1683, he was no longer able to count on prestigious commissions Francis Cotes(20 May 1726 - 16 July 1770) was an English painter, one of the pioneers of English pastel painting, and a founder member of the Royal Academy in 1768.
He was born in London, the eldest son of Robert Cotes, an apothecary (Francis's younger brother Samuel Cotes (1734 - 1818) also became an artist, specialising in miniatures). Cotes trained with portrait painter George Knapton (1698 - 1778) before setting up his own business in his father's business premises in London's Cork Streetelearning, incidentally, much about chemistry to inform his making of pastels.
An admirer of the pastel drawings of Rosalba Carriera, Cotes concentrated on works in pastel and crayon (some of which became well-known as engravings). After pushing crayon to its limit as a mediumealthough he was never to abandon it entirelye - otes turned to oil painting as a means of developing his style in larger-scale works. In his most successful paintings, particularly those of the early 1760s, the oil paint is thinly applied, in imitation of his pastel technique, and imbued with charm, inviting comparisons with Allan Ramsay (1713 - 1784) and Sir Joshua Reynolds. They have clarity and warmth and possess a remarkable attention to costume. In 1763, he bought a large house (later occupied by George Romney) in Cavendish Square.
One of the most fashionable portrait painters of his day, Cotes helped found the Society of Artists and became its director in 1765. At the peak of his powers, Cotes was invited to become one of the first members of the Royal Academy, but died just two years later, aged 44, in Richmond.
He also taught pastel skills to John Russell, and his skills were described in book The Elements of Painting with Crayon.
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