Alex Katz (born July 24, 1927) is an American figurative artist associated with the Pop Art movement. In particular, he is known for his painting, sculptures and prints and is represented by numerous galleries internationally.
Alex Katz was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, as the son of an émigré who had lost a factory he owned in Russia to the Soviet revolution. In 1928 the family moved to St. Albans, Queens. From 1946 to 1949 he studied at The Cooper Union in New York, and from 1949 to 1950 he studied at the Skowhegan School Of Painting And Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. Skowhegan exposed him to painting from life, which would prove pivotal in his development as a painter and remains a staple of his practices today.
Katz is well known for his large paintings, whose bold simplicity and heightened colors are now seen as precursors to Pop Art. His paintings are defined by their flatness of colour and form. A key source of inspiration is the woodcuts produced by Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro.
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. Katz achieved great public prominence in the 1980s.
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 has collaborated with poets and writers since the 1960s, producing several notable editions such as "Face of the Poet" combining his images with poetry from his circle, such as Ted Berrigan, Ann Lauterbach, Carter Ratcliff and Gerard Malanga.
Katz' first one-person show was an exhibition of paintings at the Roko Gallery in New York in 1954. In 1974 the Whitney Museum Of American Art showed Alex Katz Prints, followed by a traveling retrospective exhibition of paintings and cutouts titled Alex Katz in 1986. The subject of over 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group shows internationally, Katz has since been honored with numerous retrospectives at museums including the Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum and the Jewish Museum.
Vincent Van Gogh.
Vincent Willem Van Gogh (30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch post-impressionist painter whose work, notable for its rough beauty, emotional honesty and bold color, had a far-reaching influence on 20th-century art. After years of painful anxiety and frequent bouts of mental illness, he died at the age of 37 from a gunshot wound, thought to be self-inflicted (although no gun was ever found). His work was then known to only a handful of people and appreciated by fewer still. Van Gogh began to draw as a child, and he continued to draw throughout the years that led up to his decision to become an artist. He did not begin painting until his late twenties, completing many of his best-known works during the last two years of his life. In just over a decade, he produced more than 2,100 artworks, consisting of 860 oil paintings and more than 1,300 watercolors, drawings, sketches and prints. His work included self portraits, landscapes, still life's of flowers, portraits and paintings of cypresses, wheat fields and sunflowers.
Theodorus (Theo) Van Gogh (1857 -1891) who was Vincent's younger brother who worked as an art dealer and was Vincent's closest friend. Over three fourth's of the more than 800 letters Vincent wrote during his life were to Theo including his first and his last letters. Johanna Gesina Van Gogh who was Theo's wife, she was the first to publish the letter's Vincent wrote to Theo after his death. Anna Cornelia Van Gogh (1819 - 1907) was Vincent's mother and Theodorus Van Gogh (1822 - 1885) who was Vincent's father. Cornelia Adriana Vos-Stricker who was Vincent's widowed cousin who he fell in love with in the summer of 1881 in Etten. Still grieving the loss of her husband Cornelia rejected Vincent and returned to Amsterdam. Dr. Felix Ray (1867 - 1932) was the Doctor who treated Vincent after he cut part of his left ear lobe off. Dr. Paul Gachet (1828 - 1909) was Doctor and friend to Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise.
On February 22, 1890, van Gogh suffered a new crisis that was "the starting point for one of the saddest episodes in a life already rife with sad events". This period lasted until the end of April, during which time he was unable to bring himself to write though he did continue to draw and paint. Hughes writes that from May 1889 to May 1890 he, "had fits of despair and hallucination during which he could not work, and in between them, long clear months in which he could and did, punctuated by extreme visionary ecstasy."
Although an alternative theory exists that he was shot by someone else, it is widely understood that on 27 July 1890, aged 37, van Gogh shot himself in the chest with a revolver.
While many of Vincent's late paintings are somber, they are essentially optimistic and reflect his desire to return to lucid mental health right up to the time of his death. Yet some of his final works reflect his deepening concerns. Referring to his paintings of wheatfields under troubled skies, he commented in a letter to his brother Theo: "I did not have to go out of my way very much in order to try to express sadness and extreme loneliness." Nevertheless, he adds in the same paragraph: " ... these canvases will tell you what I cannot say in words, that is, how healthy and invigorating I find the countryside"
Leonardo Da Vinci.
A painter, a sculptor, an architect and an engineer. Da Vinci's fascination with science and his in depth study of human anatomy aided him in mastering the realist art form. While Leonardo's counterparts were known to create static figures in their works, Leonardo always tried to incorporate movement and expression into his own paintings. All the personages in his works are painted with great accuracy and detail that it is sometimes said that Da Vinci's painted from the bones outward. Having lived until the ages of 67, Leonardo experienced a very long career that was filled with times during which the painter was celebrated, but at times he was also humiliated and cast away. His life experiences all influenced his works and often, his paintings never left the sketchpad, or were only partially completed, as Leonardo often abandoned his commissions in order to flee from social situations. Today, there are record of only few Da Vinci paintings, and 20 note books.
He was born on April 15, 1452 and died on May 2, 1519 in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, in the lower valley of the Arno River in the territory of the Medici-ruled Republic Of Florence. He was the out-of-wedlock son of the wealthy Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a Florentine legal notary, and Caterina, a peasant. Leonardo had no surname in the modern sense, “da Vinci” simply meaning “of Vinci”: his full birth name was "Lionardo di ser Piero da Vinci", meaning "Leonardo, (son) of (Mes)ser Piero from Vinci". The inclusion of the title "ser" indicated that Leonardo's father was a gentleman .Little is known about Leonardo's early life. He spent his first five years in the hamlet of Anchiano in the home of his mother, then from 1457 he lived in the household of his father, grandparents and uncle, Francesco, in the small town of Vinci. His father had married a sixteen-year-old girl named Albiera, who loved Leonardo but died young. When Leonardo was sixteen his father married again, to twenty-year-old Francesca Lanfredini. It was not until his third and fourth marriages that Ser Piero produced legitimate heirs.
In 1466, at the age of fourteen, Leonardo was apprenticed to the artist Andrea di Cione, known as Verrocchio, whose workshop was "one of the finest in Florence". Other famous painters apprenticed or associated with the workshop include Domenico Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli and Lorenzo di Credi. Leonardo would have been exposed to both theoretical training and a vast range of technical skills including drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics and carpentry as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting and modelling. Florentine court records of 1476 show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy and acquitted. From that date until 1478 there is no record of his work or even of his whereabouts. In 1478 he left Verrocchio's studio and was no longer resident at his father's house. One writer, the "Anonimo" Gaddiano claims that in 1480 he was living with the Medici and working in the Garden of the Piazza San Marco in Florence, a Neo-Platonic academy of artists, poets and philosophers that the Medici had established. In January 1478, he received his first of two independent commissions: to paint an altarpiece for the Chapel of St. Bernard in the Palazzo Vecchio and, in March 1481, The Adoration of the Magi for the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. Neither commission was completed, the second being interrupted when Leonardo went to Milan.
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