ludwig mies van der rohe

Kamis, 23 Februari 2012

Albert Bierstadt - landscape painter - part 1

This is part 1 of a 3-part post on the works of Albert Bierstadt (1830 – 1902). Bierstadt was a German-American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. In obtaining the subject matter for these works, Bierstadt joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion. Though not the first artist to record these sites, Bierstadt was the foremost painter of these scenes for the remainder of the 19th century.

Bierstadt was part of the Hudson River School though not an institution but rather an informal group of like-minded painters. The Hudson River School style involved carefully detailed paintings with romantic, almost glowing lighting, sometimes called luminism. An important interpreter of the western landscape, Bierstadt, along with Thomas Moran is also grouped with the Rocky Mountain School.

Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany. His family moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1833. He developed a taste for art early and made clever crayon sketches in his youth. In 1851, he began to paint in oils. He studied painting with the members of the Düsseldorf School in Germany from 1853 to 1857. He taught drawing and painting briefly before devoting himself to painting.

Bierstadt began making paintings in New England and upstate New York. In 1859, he traveled westward in the company of Frederick W. Lander, a land surveyor for the U.S. government, returning with sketches that would result in numerous finished paintings. In 1863 he returned west again, in the company of the author Fitz Hugh Ludlow, whose wife he would later marry. He continued to visit the American West throughout his career.

Though his paintings sold for princely sums, Bierstadt was not held in particularly high esteem by critics of his day. His use of uncommonly large canvases was thought to be an egotistical indulgence, as his paintings would invariably dwarf those of his contemporaries when they were displayed together. The romanticism evident in his choices of subject and in his use of light was felt to be excessive by contemporary critics. His paintings emphasized atmospheric elements like fog, clouds and mist to accentuate and complement the feel of his work. Bierstadt sometimes changed details of the landscape to inspire awe. The colours he used are also not always true. He painted what he believed was the way things should be: water is ultramarine, vegetation is lush and green, etc.

Nonetheless, in 1860 he was elected a member of the National Academy; he received medals in Austria, Bavaria, Belgium, and Germany; and his paintings remain popular. He was a prolific artist, having completed over 500 (possibly as many as 4000) paintings during his lifetime, most of which have survived. Many are scattered through museums around the United States.

In 1882 his studio at Irvington, New York was destroyed by fire, along with many of his pictures. He died in 1902.

1854 Scene in the Tyrol oil on fibreboard 24 x 33 cm

c1857-62 Iceberg oil on paper 13 x 22 cm

1857-8c Gathering Storm oil on paper 17 x 25 cm

1858 Gosnold at Cuttyhunk


1858 Lake Lucerne oil on canvas 183 x 305 cm

Bierstadt's painting offers a sweeping viewof Lake Lucerne with the village of Brunnen in the middle distance and thealpine peaks Ematten, Oberbauen, Uri-Rotstock and St. Gotthard in the distance.Though an image of mountain grandeur, Lake Lucerne also containsnumerous pastoral vignettes - a harvest scene near the center, a religiousprocession at the right, and a gypsy camp at the left.
One year after completing Lake Lucerne Bierstadttravelled to the Rocky Mountains for the first time. During the decade thatfollowed he produced the western landscapes that brought him his greatestsuccess. These views of the west, so often described as distinctly American,were born of Bierstadt's experience abroad and frequency duplicate the compositionof the first of his large-scale landscapes, Lake Lucerne.

1859 The Marina Piccdola, Capri oil on canvas

1859 Wind River Country

1860 Chimney Rock oil on millboard 34 x 49 cm

1863 Mountain Brook oil on canvas 112 x 91 cm

1863 The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak oil on canvas 187 x 307 cm

This painting is the major work that resulted from the artist's first trip to the West. His intention to create panoramic views of the American frontier was apparent by December 1858, just before he embarked on the trip. In early 1859 he accompanied a government survey expedition, headed by Frederick W. Lander, to the Nebraska Territory. By summer, the party had reached the Wind River Range of the Rocky Mountains in what is now Wyoming. Bierstadt dubbed the central mountain in the picture Lander's Peak following the colonel's death in the Civil War. This was one of a number of large works painted after Bierstadt's return from these travels. It was completed in 1863, exhibited to great acclaim, and purchased in 1865 for the then-astounding sum of $25,000 by James McHenry, an American living in London. Bierstadt later bought it back and gave or sold it to his brother Edward.

c1863-75 Lake in Yosemite Valley oil on canvas 91 x 133 cm

c1863-75 Looking Up the Yosemite Valley oil on canvas 91 x 149 cm

1864 Cho-Looke, The Yosemite Fall

1865 Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California oil on canvas 163 x 245 cm

1865 Staubbach Falls Near Lauterbrunnen Switzerland oil on canvas 97 x 154 cm

1866 Merced River, Yosemite Valley oil on canvas 91 x 127 cm

1866 Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mount Rosalie oil on canvas 211 x 361 cm

1866 Yosemite Valley oil on canvas 97 x 142 cm

1866 Yosemite Valley

1867 Emigrants Crossing the Plains oil on canvas 170 x 259 cm

Over three years later Bierstadt was reported to be working on a large painting representing an emigrant train on its way across the Plains. Emigrants Crossing the Plains (1867, National Cowboy Hall of Fame, Oklahoma City) was finished by November 27, 1867 and went on exhibit in a San Francisco art gallery. It was sold a year later to Amasa Stone of Cleveland, Ohio. The Oregon Trail is identical in subject to the Oklahoma City painting but only one-half its size. It could have been painted during Bierstadt's European sojourn from 1867 to 1869 when he took studios in London, Rome, and Paris, showed Rocky Mountain pictures to Queen Victoria, and made pictures of the American West popular in Europe and Britain. The Butler Institute picture, probably painted after the artist's return to America, was bought in Washington, D.C. from the artist and descended in the same family until 1946.

1867 The Domes of the Yosemite oil on canvas 295 x 457 cm

c1867 In the Mountains oil

1868 Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California oil on canvas 183 x 305 cm

1868 Lake Tahoe oil on canvas 33 x 41 cm

1868 Mount Vesuvius at Midnight oil on canvas 43 x 61 cm

1868 Yosemite Valley, Yellowstone Park oil on canvas 91 x 137 cm

c1868 Sunset in the Yosemite Valley oil on canvas 92 x 133 cm

Selasa, 21 Februari 2012

Matthias Weischer - part 2

This is part 2 of a 2-part post on the works of painter Matthias Weischer (born 1973 Rheine, Germany). Weischer is gaining international acclaim from critics and collectors for his individual painting style and through his association with David Hockney.
For biographical notes on Weischer and more works see part 1 below. (Click on the images for larger versions)

2010 Arrangement oil on canvas 90 x 120 cm

2010 Boudoir oil on canvas 60 x 65 cm

2010 Framework oil on canvas 20 x 18 cm

2010 Garden Study II oil on canvas 40 x 50 cm

2010 Haze oil on canvas 40 x 50 cm

2010 Läufer oil on canvas 60 x 80 cm

2010 Leprello oil on canvas 40 x 50 cm

2010 Line oil on canvas 25 x 31 cm

2010 Persecutor oil on canvas 110 x 200 cm

2010 Pixel oil on canvas 22 x 30 cm

2010 Screen oil on canvas 195 x 220 cm

2010 Stack oil on canvas 22 x 31 cm

2010 Stage oil on canvas 28 x 40 cm

2011 Berth pulp painting 219 x 350 cm

2011 Jardin oil on canvas 70 x 65 cm

2011 Oasis oil on canvas 40 x 50 cm

2011 Omodi pulp painting 160 x 260 cm

2011 Peak oil on canvas 30 x 46 cm

Egyptian Room

© Copyright: The presentation of these low resolution jpg files add more than words alone could impart. It is believed that this is fair use and does not infringe copyright. According to section 107 of the United States Copyright Act of 1976: The fair use of a copyrighted work…for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. The images are used for non-profit purposes. This factor is noted as relevant by the Act.

Minggu, 19 Februari 2012

Matthias Weischer - part 1

This is part 1 of a 2-part post on the works of painter Matthias Weischer (born 1973 Rheine, Germany). Weischer is gaining international acclaim from critics and collectors for his individual painting style and through his association with David Hockney.

Dr Jean-Christophe Ammann, former director of Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst: “I understood that I was confronted with a real painter, and not only with somebody who is moving the brushes around, as is often the case today,” said in 2001 when he first saw Weischer’s paintings – and bought one for the museum’s collection.

Weischer enrolled at the influential Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig (Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts) in 1995 and, following three years’ tuition with a master painter, received a diploma with distinction in 2000. His paintings explore space through the construction and deconstruction of imagined interiors, creating rooms within rooms and building up layers of paint, while simultaneously creating overlapping perspectives. The interior spaces Weischer paints are the stage sets of everyday life, often decorated with patterned carpets, furnishings or other props. The recipient of the 2002 prize for young artists in Saxony, Weischer has received several grants for his work, which is exhibited at galleries, museums and institutions in Europe and the United States. Most recently, he was invited to exhibit eight paintings at the prestigious Venice Biennale. An entire room of the Italian Pavilion was dedicated to his work.

“The central focus of my art work is the fusion of the experience of space and time,” says Weischer who acknowledges that there are both parallels and differences between his paintings and those of his Mentor David Hockney, his lifelong “model”.

David Hockney is very appreciative of Matthias Weischer’s work and reflects fondly on his time spent with him. “His work interested me at first because of his attitude to pictorial space and as I got to know it, more layers were revealed,” Hockney says. “He knows looking is a very positive act. The more one looks the more one sees. His skills as a draughtsman are revealed here, the deep pleasures of the hand, the eye and the heart.”