The Lost Talent - Arts and Entertainment

Amedeo Modigliani

Posted: 19th October 2010 by admin in Artist
Tags: Amedeo Modigliani, Head and Rose Caryatid, Head of a woman with a hat, Italian artist, Italian Renaissance artists

Amedeo Modigliani was a talented Italian artist. He worked in France. He is particularly known for his extra ordinary paintings and the sculptures that fascinate the painting lovers of all ages even today. His paintings reflected modern style. In the last days of his life he is believed to have died because of poverty, overwork, and alcohol addiction.

Birth, Childhood and Education
Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was born on July 12 in the year 1884. He died in the year 1920 on January 24. Modigliani was born in a family which was Jewish and was situated in the beautiful Livorno city of Italy. His father was a money changer. All of a sudden their business changed and started facing failures. It was a time when the family started living in poverty.

Head of a woman with a Hat

His mother taught him at home till he was ten years of age. He contracted tuberculosis at the age of sixteen. After he recovered from his illness his mother took him on a tour of Naples, Rome, Capri, etc. His mother recognized the growing artist in him right at an early age.

Work Life
Modigliani started painting at an early age. He realized that he has grown passion for the subject of painting. This passion begun in him even before his formal studies. So, it can be said that he started working as an artist at an early page.

Amedeo Modigliani saw the paintings of Palazzo and Pitti and grew up making many Italian Renaissance artists his inspiration. He worked in Micheli’s Art School between the years 1898 and 1900. The study of Renaissance art can be seen in his paintings.
Some of his famous works in the field of art are Head of a woman with a hat (1907), Seated Nude (1918), Woman with a Fan (1919), Potrait of a Jean Cocteau, etc. Modigliani’s famous sculptures are Head and Rose Caryatid.
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Raja Ravi Varma

Posted: 17th October 2010 by admin in Artist
Tags: painter of India, portrait artist, Raja Ravi Varma

Raja Ravi Varma is the most celebrated painter of India. Ravi Varma is considered as modern among traditionalists and a rationalist among moderns. He was the first artist to cast the Indian Gods and mythological characters in natural earthy surroundings using a European realism. He is famous for his depiction the scenes from the epics of the Mahabharata and Ramayana in his paintings.

Birth, Childhood and education

He was born on April 29, 1848 at Kilimanoor, a small town in Kerala. His uncle first noticed his artistic talents and gave him elementary art lessons.

At the age of 14, he was sent Thiruvananthapuram where he stayed at the Moodath Madam house of the Kilimanoor Palace and was taught water painting by the palace painter Rama Swamy Naidu. Ravi Varma had been using the indigenous paints made from leaves, flowers, tree bark and soil which his uncle Raja Raja Varma prepared for him.

He learnt oil painting by watching a visiting Dutch portrait artist who painted the portraits of Ayilyam Thirunal and his wife. Ravi Varma’s fame as a portrait artist soared with several important portrait commissions from the Indian aristocracy and British officials between 1870 and 1878, and the sensitivity and immense competence this artist still remains unsurpassed.

Work Life

Raja Ravi Varma received widespread acclaim after he won an award for an exhibition of his paintings at Vienna in 1873. He got recognition abroad mainly for his portraits, and portrait-based compositions. These works finely blended the elements of the early Tanjore custom of painting Nayikas (the feminine emotions being the central theme) and the graceful realism of European masters.

In 1904, Viceroy Lord Curzon, on behalf of the King Emperor bestowed upon Raja Ravi Varma the Kaiser-i-Hind Gold Medal and he was awarded the title of Raja.

in 1894 he set up an oleography press called the Ravi Varma Pictures Depot. In 1894 and 1888, Ravi Varma and his younger brother C.Raja Raja Varma took a tour around India, in search of images and landscapes for inspiration.

Ravi Varma is particularly noted for his paintings depicting episodes from the story of Dushyanta and Shakuntala, and Nala and Damayanti, from the Mahabharata.

Raja Ravi Varma died of diabetes on October 2, 1906, in his Kilimanoor Palace home overflowing with friends, relatives, dignitaries and the media.

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Peter Paul Rubens

Posted: 15th October 2010 by admin in Artist
Tags: Counter-Reformation altarpieces, Peter Paul Rubens, The Descent from the Cross, The Lion Hunt, The Raising of the Cross

Peter Paul Rubens was a classically educated humanist scholar, art collector, and diplomat who was knighted by both, Philip IV, King of Spain, and Charles I, King of England. He was well educated, well placed and powerfully patronized and died before he outlived his talent.

He is best known for his Counter-Reformation altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and history paintings of mythological and allegorical subjects.

Birth, Education and Childhood

He was born on June 28, 1577 at Siegen, German province of Westphalia, Germany. Ruben’s ancestral home was Antwerp but his father relocated there. His mother moved back to Antwerp. He received a humanist education, studying Latin and classical literature.

By fourteen he began his artistic apprenticeship with Tobias Verhaeght. Subsequently, he studied under two of the city’s leading painters of the time, the late mannerists Adam van Noort and Otto van Veen. He completed his education in 1598 and joined the painter’s guild.

http://www.oceansbridge.com/paintings/collections/16-17th-century-european-paintings/small/Peter-Paul-Rubens-xx-Lion%20hunt%201616-xx-Alte%20Pinakothek%20Munich.jpg

The Lion Hunt

Rubens travelled to Italy in 1601 and lived there till 1608. There, he studied classical Greek and Roman art and copied works of the Italian masters; Hellenistic sculpture, Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci. He was also influenced by the recent, highly naturalistic paintings by Caravaggio.

During this period, he completed his first altarpiece commission, St. Helena with the True Cross for the Roman church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme.

Work Life

In 1608, he returned to Antwerp upon hearing of his mother’s illness. He became the court painter to the Spanish governors of Flanders and subsequently to Charles I of England (who, in fact, knighted Rubens for diplomatic work) and Marie de’ Medici, Queen of France.

Altarpieces such as The Raising of the Cross (1610) and The Descent from the Cross (1611–1614) for the Cathedral of Our Lady established Rubens as Flanders’ leading painter shortly after his return.

Rubens’s last decade was spent in and around Antwerp. His most famous works include The Elevation of the Cross (1610), The Lion Hunt (1617-18), and Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (1617).

http://www.thecross-photo.com/images/rubens_elevation.jpg

The Elevation of the Cross

He painted religious and hunting themes, as well as landscapes, but is best known for his oft-unclothed figures.

Personal Life

Rubens died from gout on May 30, 1640. He was interred in Saint Jacob’s church, Antwerp.

His fondness of painting full-figured women gave rise to the terms ‘Rubensian’ or ‘Rubenesque’ for plus-sized women.

Paul Klee

Posted: 15th October 2010 by admin in Artist
Tags: graphic artist, painter, Paul Klee, Portrait of My Father, Virgin in a Tree

“First of all, the art of living; then as my ideal profession, poetry and philosophy, and as my real profession, plastic arts; in the last resort, for lack of income, illustrations.” — Paul Klee.

Paul Klee was a Swiss-born painter and graphic artist whose personal, often gently humorous works are replete with illusions to dreams, music, and poetry. He is also considered as a German Painter. He was a master of color and tonality. Klee has been variously associated with Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, and Abstraction.

Birth, Education and Childhood

Paul Klee was born on December 18, 1879, in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, into a family of musicians. From 1898 to 1901 Klee studied in Munich. During his school years, he avidly drew in his school books, drawing caricatures, and demonstrated his skill with line and volume.

Upon completing his schooling, he went to Italy from October 1901 to May 1902. It was the first in a series of trips abroad that nourished his visual sensibilities.

Virgin in a Tree

Work Life

By 1905, he developed some experimental techniques, including drawing with a needle on a blackened pane of glass, resulting in fifty-seven works including his Portrait of My Father (1906).

In the years 1903-1905, he also completed a cycle of eleven zinc-plate etchings called Inventions, his first exhibited works, in which he illustrated several grotesque characters. These combined satirical, grotesque, and surreal elements and reveal the influence of Francisco de Goya and James Ensor, both of whom Klee admired.

His best known etchings are Virgin in a Tree and Two Men Meet, Each Believing the Other to Be of Higher Rank.

In 1910, he met Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and other avant-garde figures, and became associated with the art group known as Der Blaue Reiter. This group contributed much to the development of abstract art.

A trip to Tunisia with Macke and Louis Molliet in 1914 brought a turning point in the artist’s career. He became fond of colors. He was so overwhelmed by the intense light there that he wrote:

“Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever. That is the significance of this blessed moment. Color and I are one. I am a painter.”

One of the most literal examples of this new synthesis is The Bavarian Don Giovanni (1919).
He taught at the German Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture after World War I.

His Ad Parnassum (1932) is considered his masterpiece and the best example of his pointillist style; it is also one of his largest, most finely worked paintings. In 1933, during his last year in Germany, he produced nearly 500 works.

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Two Men Meet

He used a great variety of color palettes from nearly monochromatic to highly polychromatic. His works often have a fragile child-like quality to them and are usually on a small scale. He often used geometric forms as well as letters, numbers, and arrows, and combined them with figures of animals and people.

Personal Life

Klee married Bavarian pianist Lily Stumpf in 1906 and they lived in a suburb of Munich.

Klee suffered from a wasting disease, scleroderma, toward the end of his life that killed him. He was buried at Schosshalde Friedhof, Bern, Switzerland.

Paul Cezanne

Posted: 13th October 2010 by admin in Artist
Tags: Cezanne's paintings, Cubism, French artist, Paul Cezanne, Post-Impressionist painter

Paul Cezanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavor to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century’s new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism.

Cézanne’s work demonstrates a mastery of design, color, composition and draftsmanship. His often repetitive, sensitive and exploratory brush strokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable.
Cézanne’s explorations of geometric simplification and optical phenomena inspired Picasso, Braque, Gris, and others to experiment with ever more complex multiple views of the same subject

Birth, Education and Childhood

Paul Cezanne was born On January 19, 1839 in Aix-en-Provence in France to a successful retailer and his mistress.

In 1849, Paul started studying drawing at Saint Joseph school in Aix. At 13 Cezanne attended Bourbon College in Aix where he met Emile Zola and Baptistin Baille. These three were known as known as “les trois inseparables. This friendship was to last almost a lifetime. Cezanne attended classes at a local drawing academy.

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The Card Players

In 1861, Paul left Aix for Paris to develop his artistic talents. In Paris, Cézanne met the Impressionist Camille Pissarro. Earlier it was more of a master and pupil relationship but over the course of the following decade their landscape painting excursions together, in Louveciennes and Pontoise, led to a collaborative working relationship between equals.

Work Life

His early work is often concerned with the figure in the landscape and comprises many paintings of groups of large, heavy figures in the landscape, imaginatively painted. Later in his career, he became more interested in working from direct observation and gradually developed a light, airy painting style that was to influence the Impressionists enormously.

During 1870 – 1878, they moved to Auvers in Val-d’Oise near Paris. There, he and Camille Pissarro painted landscapes together. Under Pissarro’s influence Cézanne began to abandon dark colors and his canvases grew much brighter.

http://gardenofpraise.com/images/apples.jpg

Apples and Oranges

He concentrated on a few subjects and was highly unusual for 19th-century painters in that he was equally proficient in each of these genres: still life, portraits, landscapes and studies of bathers.
In his late fifties Cezanne’s paintings finally began to attract the attention they deserved. In 1895, Ambroise Vollard, the famous art dealer, organised an exhibit of Cezanne’s work in Paris.

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