Displaying items by tag: painter

Spanish painter Francisco de Goya's stark portrayals of Spanish aristocrats, intellectuals and fellow artists in a major new exhibition at the National Gallery in London aims to show him as "the best ever portrait artist."

The exhibition, which opens on Wednesday, brings together from around the world around 70 portraits by the celebrated artist who lived between 1746 and 1828.

The works make up almost half of the 150 Goya portraits that still survive today, and account for a third of his total known output.

The colorful, stained-glass effect decor items produced by Tiffany Studios represent some of the most beautiful and quintessential specimens of pre-war design such as the Oriental Poppy lamp, which sold for $1.1 million at Sotheby’s in New York this past May. As a painter, Louis Comfort Tiffany was fascinated with the interplay of light and color, and using opalescent glass as his canvas, created masterful renderings of nature — such as flowers or landscape scenes — and decorative geometric patterns in lampshades and leaded-glass windows that popped with color and texture.

Max Beckmann (1884-1950) was one of the most important German visual artists of the first half of the 20th century. The St. Louis Art Museum has the largest collection of his paintings in the world.

In recognition of that fact, the museum has just published “Max Beckmann at the Saint Louis Art Museum: The Paintings,” by Lynette Roth (published by Prestel, 272 pages, $65). It’s a volume that provides an intelligent layman’s guide to Beckmann — painter, sculptor, printmaker — and his world, as well as a detailed guide to the canvases in St. Louis.

The first carved woodblock prints by Wharton Esherick, an artist who was a major figure in American crafts, have just been republished. They illustrated "Rhymes of Early Jungle Folk," a book of children's verse, published in 1922.

Pieces by Esherick, known for his expressive, modernist furniture and wood sculpture, are now collected by major museums around the world. But he started as a painter at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

Unfortunately, nobody wanted his paintings.

Only a short time remains for a special exhibition of the work of American modernist Gershon Benjamin (1899-1985), a Romanian-born, Montreal-educated artist remembered as an Expressionist for his individualistic style and use of color. The exhibition, Gershon Benjamin: Modern Master features more than 60 portraits, still lifes, landscapes and city scenes in oil, watercolor and charcoal—all representing more than seven decades of work.

Benjamin was part of a 1920s New York scene of progressive artists who favored European modernism to the popular American Scene and Regionalist art of the day.

Best known as a member of the Ashcan School, painter and illustrator John Sloan (1871-1951) often focused his paintings and prints on city life and its people during the early 20th century. However, between 1900 and 1910, Sloan produced a weekly series of word and picture puzzles for the Sunday supplement of the Philadelphia Press, one of the country’s leading illustrated newspapers.

Rare furniture, paintings and exotica from the collection of leading American arts and crafts figure Lockwood de Forest II will be auctioned by Bonhams in Sydney this month, having been consigned from the designer’s grandson who lives in Australia.

The renowned New York designer, painter and interior decorator was a prominent member of the 19th-century Aesthetic Movement and famously worked alongside Louis C. Tiffany, creator of the iconic Tiffany stained-glass lamp, in the 1880s.

Revered as the “Dean of American Craftsmen,” Wharton Harris Esherick played a pivotal role in establishing the American Studio Furniture Movement. A visionary in the truest sense, Esherick was the first craftsman to approach furniture as sculpture -- a notion that influenced an entire generation of designer-craftsmen, including Arthur Espenet Carpenter, Sam Maloof, and Wendell Castle (read more about Wendell Castle and his latest work).

A trained painter and printmaker, Esherick’s fascination with wood began in 1920, when he started carving designs on the frames for his paintings. Soon, he was carving woodcuts and crafting sinuous organic sculptures, furniture, and architectural interiors...

Continue reading this article about Wharton Harris Esherick at Moderne Gallery on InCollect.com.

The Springfield Museums' April Museums à la Carte lectures will start with a screening of 'James McNeill Whistler & The Case for Beauty' on April 2.

The film, directed by Karen Thomas, is a PBS documentary about the life of eccentric painter James McNeill Whistler. He is best known for the painting "Symphony in Grey and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Artist's Mother", popularly known as "Whistler's Mother."

On Friday, February 6, 2015, the Blanton Museum of Art announced that it will acquire and construct Ellsworth Kelly’s only building. Kelly, an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with Color Field painting, hard-edge painting, and Minimalism, conceived the stand-alone structure in 1986 for a private collector. At the age of 91, he is finally seeing the project come to fruition.

Austin, a 73-by-60-foot stone building, will be constructed on the museum’s grounds at the University of Texas at Austin. The structure will feature luminous colored glass windows, a totemic wood sculpture, and fourteen black-and-white stone panels in marble -- all designed by the artist.  Kelly has gifted the Blanton the design concept for the work, including the building, the totem sculpture, the interior panels, and the glass windows. Once it is complete, Austin will become part of the museum’s permanent collection. The Blanton has launched a campaign to raise $15 million to realize the project and has received commitments totaling $7 million.