All Art Painting Art Blog - Oil Painting on Canvas

September 30, 2009

Tamara de Lempick’s life in Paris and her painting

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In Paris, the Lempickas lived for a while from the sale of family jewels. Tadeusz proved unwilling or unable to find suitable work, which added to the domestic strain, while Maria gave birth to Kizette de Lempicka.

Her distinctive and bold artistic style developed quickly (influenced by what Lhote sometimes referred to as “soft cubism” and by Denis’ “synthetic cubism”) and epitomized the cool yet sensual side of the Art Deco movement. For her, Picasso “embodied the novelty of destruction”. She thought that many of the Impressionists drew badly and employed “dirty” colors. De Lempicka’s technique would be novel, clean, precise, and elegant.

For her first major show, in Milan, Italy in 1925, under the sponsorship of Count Emmanuele Castelbarco, de Lempicka painted 28 new works in six months.She was soon the most fashionable portrait painter of her generation among the haute bourgeoisie and aristocracy, painting duchesses and grand dukes and socialites. Through her network of friends, she was able to display her paintings in the most elite salons of the era. De Lempicka was criticized and admired for her ‘perverse Ingrism’, referring to her modern restatement of the master Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, as displayed in her work Group of Four Nudes, 1925. A portrait might take three weeks of work, allowing for the nuisance of dealing with a cranky sitter; by 1927-8 de Lempicka could charge 50,000 French francs per portrait (a sum equal to about US$2,000 then—perhaps ten times as much today). Through Castelbarco she was introduced to Italy’s great man of letters and notorious lover, Gabriele d’Annunzio. She visited the poet twice at his Lake Garda villa, seeking to paint his portrait; he in turn was set on seduction. After these attempts to secure the commission, she left angered while both she and d’Annunzio remained unsatisfied.

In 1929, she painted her iconic work Auto-Portrait (Tamara in the Green Bugatti) for the cover of the German fashion magazine Die Dame. As summed up by the magazine Auto-Journal in 1974, “the self-portrait of Tamara de Lempicka is a real image of the independent woman who asserts herself. Her hands are gloved, she is helmeted, and inaccessible; a cold and disturbing beauty [through which] pierces a formidable being—this woman is free!” De Lempicka won her first major award in 1927, first prize at the Exposition Internationale de Beaux Arts in Bordeaux, France for her portrait of Kizette on the Balcony.

Tamara de Lempicka “the first woman artist to be a glamour star”

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Tamara de Lempicka (Łempicka) (May 16, 1898 – March 18, 1980), born Maria Górska in Warsaw, in partitioned Poland,was a Polish Art Deco painter and “the first woman artist to be a glamour star.”

Born into a wealthy and prominent family, her father was Boris Gurwik-Górski, a Polish lawyer, and her mother, the former Malvina Decler, a Polish socialite. Maria was the middle child with two siblings. She attended boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, and spent the winter of 1911 with her grandmother in Italy and the French Riviera, where she was treated to her first taste of the Great Masters of Italian painting. In 1912, her parents divorced and Maria went to live with her wealthy Aunt Stefa in St. Petersberg, Russia. When her mother remarried, she became determined to break away to a life of her own. In 1913, at the age of fifteen, while attending the opera, Maria spotted the man she became determined to marry. She promoted her campaign through her well-connected uncle and in 1916 she married Tadeusz Łempicki in St. Petersburg—a well-known ladies’ man, gadabout, and lawyer by title, who was tempted by the significant dowry.

In 1917, during the Russian Revolution, Tadeusz was arrested in the dead of night by the Bolsheviks. Maria searched the prisons for him and after several weeks, with the help of the Swedish consul, she secured his release. They traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark then London, England and finally to Paris, France to where Maria’s family had also escaped, along with numerous upper-class Russian refugees.

Frederic Leighton’s works depicted historical, biblical and classical subject matter

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Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron Leighton, Bt, Kt, PRA (3 December 1830–25 January 1896) was an English painter and sculptor. His works depicted historical, biblical and classical subject matter.

Leighton was born in Scarborough to a family in the import and export business. He was educated at University College School, London. He then received his artistic training on the European continent, first from Eduard Von Steinle and then from Giovanni Costa. When in Florence, aged 24, where he studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti, he painted the procession of the Cimabue Madonna through the Borgo Allegri. He lived in Paris from 1855 to 1859, where he met Ingres, Delacroix, Corot and Millet.

As the Old Sang, So the Young Pipe of Jacob Jordaens

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As the Old Sang, So the Young Pipe c.1638-40 is considered a companion to The King Drinks (Louvre, Paris). Both paintings are of a moralizing nature, have near identical measurements, and related styles. As the Old Sang, So the Young Pipe shows three generations of wealthy Antwerp burghers sitting around a table making music. Being a popular theme among Jordaens and his clients, several versions of this painting were created. In the version shown Jordaens’ father-in-law Adam van Noort is depicted as the old man. In these types of paintings always represented are elderly and middle-aged figures singing and creating music, as children pipe along. The title was taken after a proverb from the book “Spiegel van den Ouden ende Nieuwen Tijdt”, a collection of emblems published by Jacob Cats in 1632. Cats, a Calvinist, translated the proverb into a moralizing message; parents must be mindful of their actions and words, because children will copy their elders. In the paintings, Jordaens conveys this moralizing message as well as the idea that younger generations succeed their elders. The owl, considered the bird of the night, perched on the older woman’s wicker chair, serves as a ‘’memento mori’’, a reminder of mortality.

Carl Larsson’s life ,career and paintings

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After spending two summers in Barbizon, the refuge of the plein-air painters, Carl Larsson settled down with his Swedish painter colleagues in 1882 in Grez-sur-Loing, at a Scandinavian artists’ colony outside Paris. It was there that he met the artist Karin Bergöö, who soon became his wife. This was to be a turning point in Larsson’s life. In Grez, Larsson painted some of his most important works, now in watercolour and very different from the oil painting technique he had previously employed.

Carl and Karin Larsson had eight children and his family became Larsson’s favourite models. Many of his watercolours are now popular all over the world. Their eight children included Suzanne (1884), Ulf (1887, who died at 18), Pontus (1888), Lisbeth (1891), Brita (1893), Mats (1894, who died at 2 months), Kersti (1896) and Esbjörn (1900).

In 1888 the young family was given a small house, named Little Hyttnäs, in Sundborn by Karin’s father Adolf Bergöö. Carl and Karin decorated and furnished this house according to their particular artistic taste and also for the needs of the growing family.

Through Larsson’s paintings and books this house has become one of the most famous artist’s homes in the world, transmitting the artistic taste of its creators and making it a major line in Swedish interior design. The descendants of Carl and Karin Larsson now own this house and keep it open for tourists each summer from May until October.

Larsson’s popularity increased considerably with the development of colour reproduction technology in the 1890s, when the Swedish publisher Bonnier published books written and illustrated by Larsson and containing full colour reproductions of his watercolours, e.g. A Home. However, the print runs of these rather expensive albums did not come close to that produced in 1909 by the German publisher Karl Robert Langewiesche (1874–1931): His choice of watercolours, drawings and text by Carl Larsson, titled Das Haus in der Sonne (The House in the Sun), immediately became one of the German publishing industry’s best-sellers of the year — 40,000 copies sold in three months, and more than 40 print runs have been produced up to 2001. Carl and Karin Larsson declared themselves overwhelmed by such success.

Larsson also drew several sequential picture stories, thus being one of the earliest Swedish comic creators.

Carl Larsson considered his monumental works, such as his frescos in schools, museums and other public buildings, to be his most important works. His last monumental work, Midvinterblot (Midwinter Sacrifice), a 6×14 meter oil painting completed in 1915, had been commissioned for a wall in the National Museum in Stockholm (which already had several of his frescos adorning its walls), but was upon completion rejected by the board of the museum. The fresco depicts the blót of King Domalde at the Temple of Uppsala.

Fitz Hugh Lane’s painting Training and influences

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However ambiguous many aspects of Fitz Hugh Lane’s life and career may remain, a few things are certain. First, Lane was, even in childhood, clearly gifted in the field of art. As was noted by J. Babson, a local Gloucester historian and contemporary in Lane’s time, Lane “showed in boyhood a talent for drawing and painting; but received no instruction in the rules till he went to Boston.”  In addition to confirming Lane’s early talent, this observation also indicates that Lane was largely self-taught in the field of art—more specifically drawing and paintings—previous to beginning his employment at Pendleton’s lithography firm at the age of 28. Lane’s first-known and recorded work, a watercolor titled The Burning of the Packet Ship “Boston,” executed by Lane in 1830, is regarded by many art historians as evidence of Lane’s primitive grasp of the finer points of artistic composition previous to his employment at Pendleton’s.

Lane most likely supplemented his primary, purely experiential practices in drawing and painting with the study of instructional books on drawing, or more likely, by the study of books on the subject of ship design. Some study of the literature on the subject of ship design indeed does seem most highly plausible, given that Lane would have had easy access to many such texts, and, more importantly, the most certain necessity of such a study in order for Lane to be able to produce works of such accurate detail in realistically depicting a ship as it actually appeared in one of any given number of possible circumstances it faced in traversing the sea.

At the time when Lane began his employment at Pendleton’s, it was common practice for aspiring American artists—especially those who, like Lane, could not afford a more formal education in the arts by traveling to Europe or by attending one of the prestigious American art academies, such as New York’s National Academy of Design or Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts—to seek work as a lithographer, this being the next logical step in their pursuit of a career in the arts. As for why such employment was beneficial to the budding artist, art historian James A. Craig, in his book “Fitz H. Lane: An Artist’s Voyage through Nineteenth-Century America,” the most comprehensive account of Lane’s life and career, offers this illuminating description of the career evolution of the typical lithographer:

“…an apprentice’s schooling presumably began with the graining of stones, the making of lithographic crayons, and the copying of the designs and pictures of others onto limestone. As his talents developed, the apprentice would find himself gradually taking on more challenging tasks, from drafting and composing images (the role of the designer) to ultimately being permitted to draw his own original compositions upon limestone (that most prestigious of ranks within the litho shop, the lithographic artist). Since the compositional techniques employed in lithography differed little from those taught in European academic drawing, and the tonal work so necessary for the process to succeed was akin to that found in painting (indeed, when his studio began in 1825 John Pendleton specifically sought out painters for employment in his establishment due to their habits of thinking in tonal terms), an apprenticeship within a lithographic workshop like Pendleton’s in Boston was roughly equivalent to that offered by fine art academies for beginning students.” [2]

Working in the lithography shop, Lane would have been taught the stylistic techniques for producing artistic compositions from the practiced seniors among his fellow employees. As noted above, because Pendleton specifically sought painters to work in his shop, Lane would most likely have received the benefit of working under and with some of the most skilled aspiring and established marine and landscape painters of his day. The English maritime painter Robert Salmon, who, historians have discovered, came to work at Pendleton’s at a period coinciding with Lane’s employment therein, is regarded as having had a large impact, stylistically, on Lane’s early works.

Beginning in the early 1840’s Lane would declare himself publicly to be a marine painter while simultaneously continuing his career as a lithographer. He quickly attained an eager and enthusiastic patronage from several of the leading merchants and mariners in Boston, New York, and his native Gloucester. Lane’s career would ultimately find him painting harbor and ship portraits, along with the occasional purely pastoral scene, up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States, from as far north as the Penobscot Bay/Mount Desert Island region of Maine, to as far south as San Juan, Puerto Rico.

The early life and career of Georges de La Tour

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Georges de La Tour was born in the town of Vic-sur-Seille in the Diocese of Metz, technically part of the Holy Roman Empire, but controlled by France after 1552. Baptism documentation reveal that he was the son of Jean de La Tour, a baker and Sybille de La Tour, née Molian. It has been suggested that Sybille came from a partly noble family. His parents had seven children in all, with Georges being the second-born.

La Tour’s educational background remains somewhat unclear, but it is assumed that he travelled either to Italy or the Netherlands early in his career. His paintings reflect the Baroque naturalism of Caravaggio, but this probably reached him through the Dutch Caravaggisti of the Utrecht School and other Northern (French and Dutch) contemporaries. In particular, La Tour is often compared to the Dutch painter Hendrick Terbrugghen.

In 1617 he married Diane Le Nerf, from a minor noble family, and in 1620 he established his studio in her quiet provincial home-town of Lunéville, part of the independent Duchy of Lorraine which was absorbed into France, during his lifetime, in 1641. He painted mainly religious and some genre scenes. He was given the title “Painter to the King” (of France) in 1638, and he also worked for the Dukes of Lorraine in 1623–4, but the local bourgeoisie provided his main market, and he achieved a certain affluence. He is not recorded in Lunéville in 1639–42, and may have travelled again; Anthony Blunt detected the influence of Gerrit van Honthorst in his paintings after this point. He was involved in a Franciscan-led religious revival in Lorraine, and over the course of his career he moved to painting almost entirely religious subjects, but in treatments with influence from genre painting.

Georges de la Tour and his family died in 1652 in an epidemic in Lunéville. His son Étienne (born 1621) was his pupil.

Russian Painter Wassily Kandinsky’s Artistic metamorphosis

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Kandinsky’s time at art school, typically considered difficult to get through, was eased by the fact that he was older and more settled than the other students. It was during this time that he began to emerge as a true art theorist in addition to being a painter. The number of existing paintings increased at the beginning of the 20th century and much remains of the many landscapes and towns that he painted, using broad swathes of color but recognizable forms. For the most part, however, Kandinsky’s paintings did not emphasize any human figures. An exception is Sunday, Old Russia (1904) where Kandinsky recreates a highly colorful (and fanciful) view of peasants and nobles before the walls of a town. Riding Couple (1907) depicts a man on horseback, holding a woman with tenderness and care as they ride past a Russian town with luminous walls across a river. Yet the horse is muted, while the leaves in the trees, the town, and the reflections in the river glisten with spots of color and brightness. The work shows the influence of pointillism in the way the depth of field is collapsed into a flat luminescent surface. Fauvism is also apparent in these early works. Colors are used to express the artist’s experience of subject matter, not to describe objective nature. Perhaps the most important of Kandinsky’s paintings from the first decade of the 1900s was The Blue Rider (1903), which shows a small cloaked figure on a speeding horse rushing through a rocky meadow. The rider’s cloak is a medium blue, and the shadow cast is a darker blue. In the foreground are more amorphous blue shadows, presumably the counterparts of the fall trees in the background. The Blue Rider in the painting is prominent, but not clearly defined, and the horse has an unnatural gait (which Kandinsky must have known). Indeed, some believe that a second figure, a child perhaps, is being held by the rider, though this could just as easily be another shadow from a solitary rider. This type of intentional disjunction, allowing viewers to participate in the creation of the artwork, would become an increasingly conscious technique used by Kandinsky in subsequent years, culminating in the (often nominally) abstract works of the 1911–1914 period. In The Blue Rider Kandinsky shows the rider more as a series of colors than of specific details. In and of itself, The Blue Rider is not exceptional in that regard when compared to contemporary painters, but it does show the direction that Kandinsky would take only a few years later.

The last decade of Peter Paul Rubens

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Rubens’s last decade was spent in and around Antwerp. Major works for foreign patrons still occupied him, such as the ceiling paintings for the Banqueting House at Inigo Jones’s Palace of Whitehall, but he also explored more personal artistic directions.

In 1630, four years after the death of his first wife, the 53-year-old painter married 16-year-old Hélène Fourment. Hélène inspired the voluptuous figures in many of his paintings from the 1630s, including The Feast of Venus (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), The Three Graces (Prado, Madrid) and The Judgment of Paris (Prado, Madrid). In the latter painting, which was made for the Spanish court, the artist’s young wife was recognized by viewers in the figure of Venus. In an intimate portrait of her, Hélène Fourment in a Fur Wrap, also known as Het Pelsken (illustrated left), Rubens’s wife is even partially modeled after classical sculptures of the Venus Pudica, such as the Medici Venus.

In 1635, Rubens bought an estate outside of Antwerp, the Château de Steen (Het Steen), where he spent much of his time. Landscapes, such as his Château de Steen with Hunter (National Gallery, London) and Farmers Returning from the Fields (Pitti Gallery, Florence), reflect the more personal nature of many of his later works. He also drew upon the Netherlandish traditions of Pieter Bruegel the Elder for inspiration in later works like Flemish Kermis (c. 1630; Louvre, Paris).

Rubens died from gout on May 30, 1640. He was interred in Saint Jacob’s church, Antwerp. The artist had eight children, three with Isabella and five with Hélène; his youngest child was born eight months after his death.

The great synthesis of Wassily Kandinsky

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In Paris he was quite isolated since abstract painting—particularly geometric abstract painting—was not recognized, the artistic fashions being mainly Impressionism and cubism. Kandinsky lived in a small apartment and created his work in a studio constructed in the living room. Biomorphic forms with supple and non-geometric outlines appear in his paintings; forms which suggest externally microscopic organisms but which always express the artist’s inner life. He used original colour compositions which evoke Slavonic popular art and which are similar to precious watermark works. He also occasionally mixed sand with paint to give a granular texture to his paintings.

This period corresponds, in fact, to a vast synthesis of his previous work, of which he used all elements, even enriching them. In 1936 and 1939 he painted his two last major compositions; canvases particularly elaborate and slowly ripped that he hadn’t produced for many years. Composition IX is a painting with highly contrasted powerful diagonals and whose central form give the impression of a human embryo in the womb. The small squares of colors and the colored bands seem to stand out against the black background of Composition X, as stars’ fragments or filaments, while enigmatic hieroglyphs with pastel tones cover the large maroon mass, which seems to float in the upper left corner of the canvas.

In Kandinsky’s work, some characteristics are obvious while certain touches are more discrete and veiled; that is to say they reveal themselves only progressively to those who make the effort to deepen their connection with his work. He intended his forms, which he subtly harmonized and placed, to resonate with the observer’s own soul.

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