Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin is one of the most significant French artists to be initially schooled inImpressionism, but who broke away from its fascination with the everyday world to pioneer a new style of painting broadly referred to as Symbolism. As the Impressionist movement was culminating in the late 1880s, Gauguin experimented with new color theories and semi-decorative approaches to painting. He famously worked one summer in an intensely colorful style alongside Vincent Van Gogh in the south of France, before turning his back entirely on Western society. He had already abandoned a former life as a stockbroker by the time he began traveling regularly to the south Pacific in the early 1890s, where he developed a new style that married everyday observation with mystical symbolism, a style strongly influenced by the popular, so-called "primitive" arts of Africa, Asia, and French Polynesia. Gauguin's rejection of his European family, society, and the Paris art world for a life apart, in the land of the "Other," has come to serve as a romantic example of the artist-as-wandering-mystic.

Gauguin's naturalistic forms and "primitive" subject matter would embolden an entire, younger generation of painters to move decisively away from late Impressionism and pursue more abstract, or poetically inclined subjects, some inspired by French Symbolist poetry, others derived from myth, ancient history, and non-Western cultural traditions for motifs with which they might refer to the more spiritual and supernatural aspects of human experience. Gauguin ultimately proved extremely influential to 20th-century modern art, in particular that of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and their development of Cubism from about 1911 to 1915. Likewise, Gauguin's endorsement of bold color palettes would have a direct effect on the Fauvists, most notably André Derain and Henri Matisse, both of whom would frequently employ intensely resonant, emotionally expressive, and otherwise "un-realistic" color.

Gauguin, the man, became a legend almost independently of his art and came to inspire a number of literary works based on his "exotic" life story - a prime example being W. Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence (1919). 

Wilhelm Heinrich

Childhood

Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix was born to Franz and Pauline Dix on December 2, 1891. His father was a mold maker in an iron foundry, and Dix inherited his strength of character and steel-blue eyes. From his mother, a seamstress, he received a love of music and poetry. He first displayed his artistic talent - especially in drawing - during elementary school. At the age of ten, he modeled for painter Fritz Amann and, impressed by his experience in the studio, decided to become a painter himself. His school art teacher, Ernst Schunke, guided his study and helped him get financial assistance. The award required that he learn a craft while he continued to study art with Schunke, so he became an apprentice decorator for four yeas.

Otto Dix has been perhaps more influential than any other German painter in shaping the popular image of the Weimar Republic of the 1920s. His works are key parts of the Neue Sachlichkeit ("New Objectivity") movement, which also attracted George Grosz and Max Beckmann in the mid 1920s. A veteran haunted by his experiences of WWI, his first great subjects were crippled soldiers, but during the height of his career he also painted nudes, prostitutes, and often savagely satirical portraits of celebrities from Germany's intellectual circles. His work became even darker and more allegorical in the early 1930s, and he became a target of the Nazis. In response, he gradually moved away from social themes, turning to landscape and Christian subjects, and, after serving in the army during WWII, enjoyed some considerable acclaim in his later years.

Chuck Close

Chuck Close is globally renowned for reinvigorating the art of portrait painting from the late 1960s to the present day, an era when photography had been challenging painting's former dominance in this area, and succeeding in steadily gaining critical appreciation as an artistic medium in its own right. Close emerged from the 1970s painting movement of Photorealism, also known as Super-Realism, but then moved well beyond its initially hyper-attentive rendering of a given subject to explore how methodical, system-driven portrait painting based on photography's underlying processes (over its superficial visual appearances) could suggest a wide range of artistic and philosophical concepts. In addition, Close's personal struggles with dyslexia and subsequently, partial paralysis, have suggested real-life parallels to his professional discipline, as though his methodical and yet also quite intuitive methods of painting are inseparable from his own daily reckoning with the body's own vulnerable, material condition.

Childhood

Charles Thomas Close was born at home to Leslie and Mildred Close, a couple with a leaning toward artistic pursuits. Leslie Close was a jack-of-all-trades with a flair for craftsmanship, he built Charles his first easel. His mother was a trained pianist but unable to pursue a musical career due to financial restraints. Determined to provide her son with opportunities she herself never enjoyed, Mildred pushed Charles to take up a myriad of extracurricular activities during his school years and hired a local tutor to give his son private art lessons.

Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch was a prolific yet perpetually troubled artist preoccupied with matters of human mortality such as chronic illness, sexual liberation, and religious aspiration. He expressed these obsessions through works of intense color, semi-abstraction, and mysterious subject matter. Following the great triumph of French Impressionism, Munch took up the more graphic, symbolist sensibility of the influential Paul Gauguin, and in turn became one of the most controversial and eventually renowned artists among a new generation of continental Expressionist and Symbolist painters. Munch came of age in the first decade of the 20th century, during the peak of the Art Nouveau movement and its characteristic focus on all things organic, evolutionary and mysteriously instinctual. In keeping with these motifs, but moving decidedly away from their decorative applications, Munch came to treat the visible as though it were a window into a not fully formed, if not fundamentally disturbing, human psychology.

Childhood

Edvard Munch was born in 1863 in a rustic farmhouse in the village of Adalsbruk, located in Loten, Norway. His father, Christian Munch, was a practicing physician, married to Laura Catherine Bjolstad. The family, including sisters Johanne Sophie, Laura Catherine Inger Marie, and brother Peter, relocated to Oslo in 1864, following Christian's appointment as medical officer at Akershus Fortress, a military area which at the time was in use as a prison. Munch's mother died of tuberculosis in 1868, the same year Inger Marie was born. Within a decade, Munch's favorite sister, Sophie, just one year his senior and a gifted young artist, also died of tuberculosis. Munch's father, a fundamentalist Christian, thereafter experienced fits of depression and anger as well as quasi-spiritual visions in which he interpreted the family's illnesses as punishment of divine origin.

Due largely to Christian's medical career with the military, the family moved frequently and lived in relative poverty. Christian would often read to his children the ghost stories of Edgar Allen Poe, as well as lessons in history and religion, instilling in young Munch a general sense of anxiety about (and morbid fascination with) death. Adding to this, Munch's frail immune system was little match for the harsh Scandinavian winters and frequent illness kept him out of school for months on end. To pass the time, Munch took up drawing and watercolor painting.

Art became a steady preoccupation for Munch during his teen years. At thirteen, he was exposed to the works of the fledgling Norwegian Art Association and was particularly inspired by the group's landscape paintings. In the course of copying these works he taught himself the techniques of oil painting.

Early Training

In the 1880s, seeking a bohemian lifestyle, Munch discovered the writings of the anarchist philosopher, Hans Jæger, head of a group called the "Kristiania-Boheme" (as a central principle of a larger anti-bourgeois agenda, the group advocated liberal sexual behavior, or "free love," and the abolition of marriage). Munch and Jæger formed a close friendship, and Jæger encouraged the artist to draw more from personal experience in his work. The Sick Child (1885-1886), a somber composition that served as a memorial to Munch's deceased sister, Sophie, speaks to Jæger's profound influence on Munch at this juncture. When the painting was exhibited as A Study in Kristiania in 1886, it was attacked by critics as well as Munch's own colleagues for its overtly unconventional qualities, such as its scratched paint surface and the work's generally unfinished appearance.

Barbara Kruger

 

Barbara Kruger is best known for her silkscreen prints where she placed a direct and concise caption across the surface of a found photograph. Her prints from the 1980s cleverly encapsulated the era of "Reaganomics" with tongue-in-cheek satire; especially in a work like(Untitled) I shop therefore I am(1987), ironically adopted by the mall generation as their mantra. As Kruger's career progressed, her work expanded to include site-specific installations as well as video and audio works, all the while maintaining a firm basis in social, cultural, and political critique. Since the 1990s, she has also returned to magazine design, incorporating her confrontational phrases and images into a wholly different realm from the art world. Associated with postmodern Feminist art as well as Conceptual art, Kruger combines tactics like appropriation with her characteristic wit and direct commentary in order to communicate with the viewer and encourage the interrogation of contemporary circumstances.
Barbara Kruger's work has an integral place in the history of feminist, postmodern, and conceptual art. Connected with this, Kruger dissects contemporary culture in her unique combinations of image and text, often targeting multiple oppressions or hypocrisies. Kruger's aesthetic is among the most recognizable of contemporary artists, along with the likes of Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, and Damien Hirst. More importantly, as a successful artist in both the commercial and high art arenas, Kruger continues to influence many artists who struggle to make that same crossover. A clear connection to Kruger's approach is found in the work of artists likeShepard Fairey, the Guerilla Girls and Lorna Simpson, through their use of image and text, as well as cultural critique. Kruger's wide variety of work, from her early prints, to her magazine covers, installations and t-shirt designs, has ensured that she has and will continue to have a wide influence on artists and non-artists alike. 

John Baldessari

Childhood

Edward Clark was born in the Storyville section of New Orleans on May 6, 1926. When he was six, his parents Merion and Edward Sr., moved their family to Baton Rouge where they lived in a shotgun house with his father's great aunt. At this time, Clark began his elementary schooling, where he was first exposed to drawing. On one occasion, a nun at his Catholic school issued a challenge to Clark and his classmates: whoever could produce the best tree drawing would receive a gold star. Taking up the challenge, Clark won acknowledgement from his teachers for his artistic abilities as well as the gold star, and this experience awakened in Clark the desire to become an artist.

Two years later, Clark's family relocated north to Chicago. In 1943, at the age of 17, he left high school and enlisted in the air force during the height of World War II; he was stationed for two years in the South Pacific and returned to Chicago upon his release.

Clark currently lives and works in New York City and returns to Paris often. In addition to his many other accomplishments, he also appears in the Melvin van Peebles film Story of a Three-Day Pass (1967), and painted a mural inside the plane of the late Reginald Lewis, a multi-millionaire and owner of Beatrice Foods, a snack food and grocery store conglomerate. Throughout the course of his career Clark has fought to remain relevant and is constantly evolving his style in order to do so. 

"I guess a lot of it's just lashing out, because I didn't know how to be an artist, and all this time spent alone in the dark in these studios and importing my culture and constant questions. I'd say, 'Well, why is this art? Why isn't that art?'"

Edwin Parker Twombly Cy

Part of the generation immediately following Abstract Expressionism, Cy Twombly rejected the artistic movements taking shape around him and provoked the art world with his graffiti-like scribbles and scratches, immediately setting himself apart from his peers. Throughout his long career, Twombly has consistently reinvented his technique, media and motifs, experimenting with both penciled lines and thick paint. At the same time, his distinctive style, notable for its originality, has made him highly influential in the art world for the last 60 years. 

• Twombly sought to contradict audiences' conventional understandings of art, blurring long-held distinctions between drawing and painting, as well as depicting refined Classical themes with unidentifiable doodles and splotches. Similarly, he often made works deliberately opaque to challenge viewers to find their own meanings; in some cases Twombly intended his works to echo a specific inspiration or story, while in other instances he simply selected random titles after their completion.
• Although influenced by the gestural brushstrokes and compositions of action painters, as well as by Dadaism and Surrealism, Twombly drastically reimagined aspects of those techniques and concepts to create an immediately recognizable, individual style.
• Writing and language served as major conceptual foundations for Twombly's art; the written word, in the form of poems, myths and histories, inspired much of his work. He focused on the process of writing, both by sketching words directly onto the canvas and by creating line- and handwriting-based compositions.

Edwin Parker Twombly, Jr. was born in Lexington, Virginia in 1928. Like his father, who briefly pitched for the Chicago White Sox, he was known as Cy, after Cy Young. His father later became a coach and athletic director at Washington and Lee University. Twombly's parents were from the Northeast, so he made frequent trips to Massachusetts and Maine, but the South, with its sense of history and autonomy, ultimately became an integral aspect of his identity. As a young boy, Twombly's parents encouraged his interest in art, and at 12 years old he started studying with Spanish modern painter Pierre Daura. 

Following high school, Twombly began formal art training at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (1947-1949), where he became interested in the Dadaist and Surrealist work of artists such as Kurt Schwitters and Alberto Giacometti. At his parents' suggestion, Twombly then spent a year at Washington and Lee's newly created art program before moving to New York in 1950 to study at the Art Students League. Exposure to numerous New York gallery exhibitions of artists such as Kline, Pollock and Motherwell began to shape Twombly's own aesthetic away from the figurative toward abstraction. While at the League, he metRobert Rauschenberg, who became a close friend and artistic influence. At Rauschenberg's encouragement, Twombly studied at Black Mountain College in North Carolina (1951-1952). In 1952, Twombly traveled to Italy and North Africa with Rauschenberg on a grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. Upon returning, the two artists had a joint 1953 exhibition at Stable Gallery in New York, which resulted in such a hostile and negative response from the public that gallery director Eleanor Ward had to remove the visitor comments book. 

Twombly's work at this time was largely in black and white, influenced both by Rauschenberg's paintings and the monochromatic work of De Kooning, Kline and Motherwell. Twombly drew on ideas of the primitive, notions of ritual and the psychoanalytic concept of the fetish, and also took inspiration from his European travels in these early works. From 1953 to 1954, Twombly was drafted into the army, where he served as a cryptographer at Camp Gordon near Augusta, Georgia and at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. On weekend leaves, Twombly spent time in his hotel room in Augusta making scrawled, biomorphic drawings, which he has said set "the direction everything would take from then on." While in the army, he also modified the Surrealist technique of automatic drawing by creating compositions in the dark after lights out. These "blind" drawings resulted in elongated, distorted forms and curves that became distinct stylistic motifs in his later work. 

Twombly worked less frequently in the late 1970s and 1980s, but continued creating important canvases. In the mid-1970s, he also returned to sculpture, a medium in which he had not worked for almost 20 years. These sculptures, often focusing on Classical themes, were largely assembled from found objects and painted white. His time in Italy continued to influence Twombly's work; he spent much time in the medieval port city of Gaeta, and many of his paintings from the 1980s reflected his interest in the sea. Critical reception of his work became more positive in the 1980s, as well, partially due to a new interest in modern European art. Classical references persisted in his later work, particularly in the form of Bacchus, the god of wine. Twombly's paintings in the next decades expanded his previous use of color, applied with gestural brushstrokes that occasionally depicted more recognizable forms, such as flowers and landscapes. Currently living in Italy and Virginia, Twombly is represented by Gagosian Gallery in New York.