Alex Katz
(web extracts)
Alex Katz (born July 24, 1927) is an American figurative artist associated with the Pop art movement. In particular, he is known for hispaintings, sculptures, and prints and is represented by numerous galleries internationally.
Katz is well known for his large paintings, whose bold simplicity and heightened colours are now seen as precursors to Pop Art.[8] His paintings are defined by their flatness of colour and form, their economy of line, and their cool but seductive emotional detachment.[9] A key source of inspiration is the woodcuts produced by Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro.[10]
Beginning in the late 1950s, he developed a technique of painting on cut panels, first of wood, then aluminum, calling them "cutouts". These works would occupy space like sculptures, but their physicality is compressed into planes, as with paintings.[11] Katz achieved great public prominence in the 1980s.[12]
[edit]Painting
Katz's paintings are not divided almost equally into the genres of portraiture and landscape. Since the 1960s he has painted views of New York (especially his immediate surroundings in Soho), the landscapes of Maine, where he spends several months every year, as well as portraits of family members, artists, writers and New York society protagonists.[13]
In the early 1960s, influenced by films, television, and billboard advertising, Katz began painting large-scale paintings, often with dramatically cropped faces. Ada Katz, whom he married in 1958, has been the subject of numerous portraits throughout his career.[14] To make one of his large works, Katz paints a small oil sketch of a subject on a masonite board; the sitting might take an hour and a half. He then makes a small, detailed drawing in pencil or charcoal, with the subject returning, perhaps, for the artist to make corrections. Katz next blows up the drawing into a "cartoon," sometimes using an overhead projector, and transfers it to an enormous canvas via "pouncing"—a technique used by Renaissance artists, involving powdered pigment pushed through tiny perforations pricked into the cartoon to recreate the composition on the surface to be painted. Katz pre-mixes all his colors and gets his brushes ready. Then he dives in and paints the canvas—12 feet wide by 7 feet high or even larger—in a session of six or seven hours.
After 1964, Katz increasingly portrayed groups of figures. He would continue painting these complex groups into the 1970s, portraying the social world of painters, poets, critics, and other colleagues that surrounded him. He began designing sets and costumes for choreographer Paul Taylor in the early 1960s, and he has painted many images of dancers throughout the years. One Flight Up (1968) consists of more than 30 portraits of some of the leading lights of New York’s intelligentsia during the late 1960s, such as the poet John Ashbery, the art critic Irving Sandler and the curator Henry Geldzahler, who championed Andy Warhol. Each portrait is painted using oils on both sides of a sliver of aluminium that has then been cut into the shape of the subject’s head and shoulders. The silhouettes are arranged predominantly in four long rows on a plain metal table.[15]
After his Whitney exhibition in 1974, Katz focused on landscapes stating "I wanted to make an environmental landscape, where you were IN it."[16] In the late 1980s, Katz took on a new subject in his work: fashion models in designer clothing, including Kate Moss and Christy Turlington.[3] "I've always been interested in fashion because it's ephemeral," he said.[17]
[edit]Printmaking
In 1965, Katz also embarked on a prolific career in printmaking. Katz would go on to produce many editions in lithography, etching, silkscreen, woodcut and linoleum cut, producing over 400 print editions in his lifetime. The Albertina, Vienna, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, hold complete collections of Katz print oeuvre. A print catalogue raisonné is due for release by the Albertina in the fall of 2011.
[edit]Public commissions
In 1977, Alex Katz was asked to create a work to be produced in billboard format above Times Square, New York City. The work, which was located at 42nd Street and 7th Avenue, consisted of a frieze composed of 23 portrait heads of women. Each portrait measured twenty feet high, and was based on a study Katz did from life. The billboard extended 247 feet long along two sides of the RKO General building and wrapped in thee tiers above on a 60-foot tower. Katz was commissioned in 1980 by the US General Service Administration's Art in Architecture Program to create an oil on canvas mural in the new United States Attorney’s Building at Foley Square, New York City. The mural, located inside the Silvio V. Mollo Building at Cardinal Hayes Place & Park Row, is 20 feet high by 20 feet wide.[18] In 2005, Katz participated in a public art project Paint in the City commissioned by United Technologies Corporation and organized by Creative Time. The work, titled Give Me Tomorrow, reached 28 feet tall and 53 feet long on a billboard space above the Bowery Bar. Located on the corner of the Bowery and East Fourth Street in the East Village, the work was hand painted by sign painters and was installed during the summer of 2005.[19]
Portrait of Kenneth Koch (1970) Lithograph 27 3/4 x 22"
Reclining figure Indian blanket (1987) Aquatint
Ted Berrigan (1967)
Jorg Immendorff
Jörg Immendorff (June 14, 1945 – May 28, 2007) was one of the best known contemporary German painters; he was also a sculptor, stage designer and art professor.
Immendorff was born in Bleckede, Lower Saxony. When he was 11 years old, his father left the family. This traumatic experience has been used to explain Immendorff's later feelings of inadequacy and emotional remoteness.[1] He visited the boarding School Ernst-Kalkuhl Gymnasium as a student.
He studied at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf (Kunstakademie Düsseldorf) under Joseph Beuys. The academy expelled him because of some of his (left-wing) political activities and neo-dadaist actions. From 1969 to 1980, he worked as an art teacher at a public school, and then as a free artist, holding visiting professorships all over Europe. In 1989, he became professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and in 1996 he became professor at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf — the same school that had dismissed him as a student.
He created several stage designs, including two for the Salzburg Festival. In 1984, he opened the bar La Paloma near the Reeperbahn in Hamburg St. Pauli and created a large bronze sculpture of Hans Albers there. He also contributed to the design of André Heller's avant-garde amusement park "Luna, Luna" in 1987. Immendorff created various sculptures; one spectacular example is a 25 m tall iron sculpture in the form of an oak tree trunk, erected in Riesa in 1999.His paintings are sometimes reminiscent of surrealism and often use irony and heavy symbolism to convey political ideas. He named one of his first acclaimed works "Hört auf zu malen!" ("Stop painting!")[2] He was a member of the German art movement Neue Wilde. Best known is his Cafe Deutschland series of sixteen large paintings (1977–1984) that were inspired by Renato Guttuso’s Caffè Greco; in these crowded colorful pictures, Immendorff had disco-goers symbolize the conflict between East and West Germany. Since the 1970s, he worked closely with the painter A. R. Penck from Dresden (in East Germany).
In 1997, he won the best endowed art prize in the world, the MARCO prize of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Monterrey,Mexico. In the following year he received the merit medal (Bundesverdienstkreuz) of the Federal Republic of Germany. He was a friend and the favorite painter of former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who chose Immendorff to paint the official portrait of Schröder for the Bundeskanzlerleramt. The portrait, which was completed by Immendorff's assistants, was revealed to the public in January 2007; the massive work has ironic character, showing the former Chancellor in stern heroic pose, in the colors of the German flag, painted in the style of an icon, surrounded by little monkeys.[3] These "painter monkeys" were a recurring theme in Immendorff's work, serving as an ironic commentary on the artist's business.In 2006, he selected 25 of his paintings for an illustrated bible. In the foreword he described his belief in God.[4]Immendorf skillfully used the media for self-promotion. In 2000, his wedding to his Bulgarian former student Oda Jaune more than 30 years his junior became a public event. The two had daughter, Ida, who was born on August 13, 2001.
Cafe Deutschland V, acrylic on canvas 1979.
Door to the sun, 1994, Oil on canvas, 280 x 280cm
Alice Neel
Alice Neel (January 28, 1900 – October 13, 1984) was an American artist known for her oil on canvas portraits of friends, family, lovers, poets, artists and strangers. Her paintings are notable for their expressionistic use of line and color, psychological acumen, and emotional intensity.
Early life
Alice Neel was born in Merion Square, Pennsylvania, and moved to the rural town of Colwyn, Pennsylvania, when she was about three months old. She took the Civil Serviceexam and got a high-paying clerical position after high school in order to help support her parents. After three years of work, taking art classes by night in Philadelphia, Neel finally enrolled full-time in the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. Neel often said that she chose to attend an all-girls school so as not to be distracted from her art by the temptations of the opposite sex.
[edit]Cuba
Shortly after finishing her studies Neel married a Cuban painter named Carlos Enríquez, the son of wealthy parents. They were wed in 1925 and moved to Havana the following year to live with Enríquez’s family. In Havana, Neel was embraced by the burgeoning Cuban avant-garde, a set of young writers, artists and musicians. In this environment Neel developed the foundations of her life long political consciousness and commitment to equality.
[edit]Personal difficulties, themes for art
In 1926 she became pregnant with her first child. Following the birth of her daughter, Santillana, Alice returned to her parents’ home in Colwyn. Carlos followed soon after, and the family moved to New York City. Just before Santillana’s first birthday, she died of diphtheria. The trauma caused by Santillana’s death infused the content of Neel’s paintings, setting a precedent for the themes of motherhood, loss, and anxiety that permeated her work for the duration of her career.
Immediately following Santillana’s death, Neel became pregnant with her second child, Isabetta. Isabetta’s birth in 1928 inspired the creation of "Well Baby Clinic", a bleak portrait of mothers and babies in a maternity clinic more reminiscent of an insane asylum than a nursery.
In the spring of 1930, Carlos returned to Cuba, taking Isabetta with him. Mourning the loss of her husband and daughter, Neel suffered a massive nervous breakdown. After a brief period of hospitalization, she attempted suicide. She was placed in the suicide ward of the Philadelphia General Hospital. Deemed stable almost a year later, Neel was released from the sanitorium in 1931 and returned to her parents’ home. Following an extended visit with her close friend and frequent subject, Nadya Olyanova, Neel returned to New York.
[edit]Depression era
There Neel painted the local characters, including Joe Gould, whom she famously depicted with multiple penises in 1933. Her world was composed of artists, intellectuals, and political leaders of the Communist Party, all of whom became subjects for her paintings. Her work glorified subversion and sexuality, depicting whimsical scenes of lovers and nudes.
At the end of 1933, Neel was hired by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which afforded her a modest weekly salary. In the 1930s Neel gained a degree of notoriety as an artist, and established a good standing within her circle of downtown intellectuals and Communist Party leaders. While Neel was never an official Communist Party member, her affiliation and sympathy with the ideals of Communism remained constant.
In 1939 Neel gave birth to her first son, Richard, the child of Jose Santiago, a Puerto Rican night-club singer whom Neel met in 1935. Neel moved to Spanish Harlem. She began painting her neighbors, particularly women and children. José left Neel in 1940.
[edit]Post-war years
Neel's second son, Hartley, was born in 1941 to Neel and her lover, communist intellectual Sam Brody. In this decade, Neel made illustrations for the Communist publication,Masses & Mainstream, and continued to paint portraits from her uptown home. Between 1940 and 1950, Neel’s art virtually disappeared from galleries, save for one solo show in 1944. In the 1950s, Neel’s friendship with Mike Gold and his admiration for her social realist work garnered her a show at the Communist-inspired New Playwrights Theatre.
Neel even made a film appearance in 1959, after director Robert Frank asked her to appear alongside a young Allen Ginsberg in his classic Beatnik film, Pull My Daisy. The following year, her work was first reproduced in ARTnews Magazine.
[edit]Increasing fame
By the mid-1970s, Neel had gained celebrity and stature as an important American artist. In 1979, President Jimmy Carterpresented her with a National Women’s Caucus for Art award for outstanding achievement. Neel’s reputation was at its height at the time of her death in 1984.Toward the end of the 1960s, interest in Neel’s work intensified. The momentum of the Women’s Movement led to increased attention, and Neel became an icon for Feminists. In 1970 Neel was commissioned to paint Feminist activist Kate Millett for the cover of Time magazine. In 1974, Neel's work was given a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and posthumously, in the summer of 2000, also at the Whitney.
Neel's life and works are featured in the documentary Alice Neel, which premiered at the 2007 Slamdance Film Festival and was directed by her grandson, Andrew Neel. The film was given a New York theatrical release in April of that year.
Alice Neel was to be the subject of the upcoming retrospective "Alice Neel: Painted Truths" organized by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, and on view March 21-June 15, 2010. The exhibition will travel to Whitechapel Gallery, London and Moderna Museet Malmö, Malmö, Sweden.
The Estate of Alice Neel is represented by David Zwirner, New York, Victoria Miro Gallery, London and Galerie Aurel Scheibler, Berlin, and is advised by Jeremy Lewison Ltd.
1926 Beggars, Havana, Cuba
Oil on Canvas
20 x 18 inches / 50.8 x 45.7 cm
20 x 18 inches / 50.8 x 45.7 cm
1970 Andy Warhol
Oil on Canvas
60 x 40 inches / 152.4 x 101.6 cm
Oil on Canvas
60 x 40 inches / 152.4 x 101.6 cm
1980 Self Portrait
Oil on Canvas
54 x 40 inches / 137.2 x 101.6 cm
54 x 40 inches / 137.2 x 101.6 cm
Gillian Carnegie
Carnegie is a graduate of the Camberwell School of Art and the Royal College of Art.
Nominated to the 2005 Turner Prize shortlist at Londons Tate Britain gallery, her apparently traditional use of the oil medium prompted the Daily Telegraph headline: 'Turner Prize shocker: the favourite is a woman who paints flowers. Whatever next?' - in clear allusion to the medium-combative nature of the Prize. She was beaten to the Prize by Simon Starling's Shedboatshed. Her work builds up the oil paint to create an almost sculptural relief of impasto. This technique is most effective in her Black Square paintings where the dense layerings of black oils coalesce to form dense woodlands.
Black Square, 2008, Oil on canvas, 1930 x 1930 mm.
rsXXII-/8-7, 2007, Oi on hardboard, 230 x 331 mm
Thirteen, 2006, Oil on fibreboard, 749 x 584 mm.
Leo Golub
Leon Golub (January 23, 1922 – August 8, 2004) was an American painter. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, where he also studied, receiving his BA at the University of Chicago in 1942, his BFA and MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1949 and 1950, respectively.
He was married to and collaborated with the artist Nancy Spero (1926 – October 18, 2009). Their son, Stephen Golub, is an economics professor at Swarthmore College.
Golub, who always painted in a figural style, drew upon diverse representations of the body from ancient Greek and Roman sculpture, to photographs of athletic competitions, to gay pornography; often pulled directly from a huge database he assembled of journalistic images from the mass media. He likened his painting process to sculptural technique and employed a method of layering and scraping away paint, sometimes using a meat cleaver, leaving varying amounts of canvas untouched.
From 1959 through 1964, Golub and his wife Nancy Spero opted to live in Europe, a move occasioned in part by the belief that Europe would be more receptive to their work dealing overtly with issues of power, sexual and political. During this period Golub's work increased in size because of larger available studio space and the inspiration of the French tradition of large-scale history painting. He also switched from using lacquer to acrylics, left more of the surface unpainted, and began to grind the paint directly into the canvas. While in Italy, both Golub and Spero were profoundly influenced by the figurative works of Etruscan and Roman art, whose narratives addressed ancient themes of power and violence.
When Golub returned to New York, the Vietnam War was escalating, and he responded with his two series: Napalm and Vietnam.
In the mid-1970s, Golub was beset with self-doubt. He destroyed or cut up many works he produced up to this period and nearly abandoned painting. In the late seventies, however, he produced more than a hundred portraits of public figures, among them political leaders, dictators, and religious figures. Leon Golub: Paintings, 1950-2000includes several portraits of Nelson Rockefeller and Ho Chi Minh, along with images of Fidel Castro, Francisco Franco, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger.
In the 1980s, Golub turned his attention to terrorism in a variety of forms, from the subversive operations of governments to urban street violence. Killing fields, torture chambers, bars, and brothels became inspiration and subject for work that dealt with such themes as violent aggression, racial inequality, gender ambiguity, oppression, and exclusion. Among the work produced in this period are the series Mercenaries, Interrogation, Riot, and Horsing Around.
From the nineties to his death, Golub's work shifted toward the illusionistic, with forms semi-visible, and appropriated graphic styles from ancient carvings, medieval manuscripts, and contemporary graffiti. As an older man he began to consider his own mortality, and moved toward themes of separation, loss, and death. Text appeared in many of the paintings combined with a series of symbolic references, including dogs, lions, skulls, and skeletons.
Golub's work was seen in solo exhibitions throughout the world, among them World Wide (1991), a Grand Lobby project at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. For World Wide the artist created a process, repeated in exhibitions at several other museums, by which he enlarged images and details from his paintings and screened them on transparent sheets of vinyl, hung so that they surround the viewer. He was represented in many group exhibitions and was one of the few white artists included in Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1994.
In 1996, Golub was given a commission to design a set of stained glass windows for Temple Sholom in Chicago, the four windows depict the life of Joseph. These would be the only stained glass windows Leon Golub ever did. They were fabricated in New York by Victor Rothman and Gene Mallard.
Chou en lai (1946), 1976, Acrylic on linen, 21 x 17 in.
Mercenaries I, 1979, acrylic on linen, 120 x 164 in.
White Squad III, 1982, acylic on linen, 120 x 172 in.
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