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Artworks by Fernand Léger

The below artworks are the most important by Fernand Léger - that both overview the major creative periods, and highlight the greatest achievements by the artist.

Nudes in the Forest (1909-10)

Artwork description & Analysis: This painting was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1911 and is considered Léger's first major work showcasing his break from Impressionism and his alliance with Cubism, particularly in his monochromatic palette and his breaking of form into geometric shapes. Léger's focus on drawing and form rather than color also indicates his influence from Paul Cézanne. Léger's Cubism, however, was distinct from mainstream Cubism. Léger does not abandon three-dimensionality and volumetric form to the same degree as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque whose canvases from this period lack all but the merest illusion of space. Léger's interest in nature, his use of cylindrical form, and his focus on machine-like forms further distinguishes his work from that of other Cubists, while the latter aligns him with Italian Futurism, reflecting the period's optimism about the benefits of urbanization and an industrialized society. These unique qualities led the critic Louis Vauxcelles to dub Léger's style as "Tubism."

Oil on canvas - Kröller-Muller State Museum, Otterlo

Contrast of Forms (1913)

Artwork description & Analysis: Contrast of Forms was a title given by Léger to a series of paintings completed between 1912 and 1914 in which the artist experimented with the boundaries between abstraction and representation, flatness and three-dimensionality, problems that would occupy him throughout his career. Léger shows his ability to represent volumetric form without the illusion of three dimensions, abstracting both human and mechanical forms. The works exemplify what Léger referred to as the "law of contrasts" in which the greatest opposition or dissonance in line, form, and color are sought. Like Picasso and Braque in their Synthetic Cubist phase, Léger also brings color into these works, particularly blue, red, and yellow; these were typically added very sparsely only after the line and without a smooth finish. These paintings were the first non-representational works to emerge from Cubism and seem to burst with volume and pattern, while giving an overall impression of floating shapes on a flat surface. The painting again exemplifies Léger's unique contribution to Cubism in its use of shading to depict spatial recession and his reliance on mechanical forms.

Oil on canvas - Museum of Modern Art, New York

The Card Players (1917)

Artwork description & Analysis: Léger worked on this painting as he was recovering from a gas attack during World War I. The work shows the continuing influence of Cézanne, who painted several canvases devoted to this subject matter in the 1890s, as well as Léger's burgeoning interest in the human figure after the trauma of his war experience that gave him an appreciation for ordinary men and crude reality. In referring to the work in 1954, Léger says it was an attempt "deliberately to extract subject from the times" and indeed the helmets and medals of the men mark them as soldiers. His interest in subject matter and three-dimensionality again sets him apart from other Cubists. His color palette remains largely primary and he continues to show his skill in depicting movement, which is highly advanced in The Card Players as the work almost appears as a film sequence.

Oil on canvas - Kröller-Muller State Museum, Otterlo

The City (1919)

Artwork description & Analysis: The City demonstrates Léger's interest in depicting the dynamism and dissonance of urban space rather than pictorial unity or a static image. His fascination with all things modern beyond conventional high art subject matter is evident in the references to traffic lights, billboards, graphic design; he stated that he was especially influenced by the place Clichy in Paris with its large posters. Also obvious is a focus on other colors beyond the primary. He remarked on his use of color in this period: "Color rushes in like a torrent. It swallows up the walls, the streets ... When one opens a window, a piece of shrill publicity blows in the wind ... Exuberance of color and noise." In The City colors play an equal role with form in depicting the chaos of the city; they collide as volumes and flat shapes both recede and move forward in space, seeming to overlap like pieces of a collage, giving the viewer the impression of standing on a busy, noisy street corner.

Oil on canvas - Philadelphia Museum of Art - this image is only a detail of the painting

Three Women (Le Grand Déjeuner) (1921)

Artwork description & Analysis: This is one of Léger's best-known paintings. In it he retreats from the experimentation with dissonance and collage-like space that he utilized in The City. The work is a culmination of several interests in the previous decade with its depiction of three-dimensionality, its mechanical human figures, and its primary colors. The subject matter of three nude women, however, is one of the most traditional in the history of art. In part for this reason, the painting is often seen as a classic example of what is known as a "return to order" that was typical of many artists in the early 1920s as they retreated from some of their bolder pre-World War I experiments with form, space, and subject matter. Though the subject matter is not contemporary as in The Card Players, Léger is not abandoning his interest in everyday people, but is instead responding to a culture-wide interest in past art with the re-opening of the Musée de Cluny and the expansion of the Louvre to include Egyptian and Assyrian rooms.

Oil on canvas - Museum of Modern Art, New York

La Joconde aux Cles (Mona Lisa with Keys) (1930)

Artwork description & Analysis: This is one of Léger's most experimental canvases, one of the few in which he shows influence from Surrealism. The objects depicted have no support, but rather simply float in space as in works by Joan Miro. The influence of Surrealism is further evident in the bizarre juxtaposition of objects, chosen specifically because of their lack of relation to one another and in that sense the work harkens back to his interest in dissonance and contrast. Léger had made numerous paintings that included keys in the late 1920s and said of this painting: "One day, after drawing a bunch of keys, I asked myself what element was furthest removed from the bunch of keys, and I said to myself: 'It's the human face.' I went out into the street and saw in a shop window the portrait of Mona Lisa. . . . No contrast has ever been sharper than between this bunch of keys and Mona Lisa." He considered this "risky picture" a success and kept it for himself.

Oil on canvas - Musée National Fernand Léger, Biot, France

Les Grand Plongeurs Noirs (The Big Black Divers) (1944)

Artwork description & Analysis: This painting is part of a series about divers influenced by watching dock workers in Marseilles. Léger shows his ability to depict the human body without sacrificing freedom from representation, a theme that runs through his oeuvre. The bodies here are woven together like a textile, symbolizing a social network, with the arms, legs and torsos also serving as independent forms. As in Mona Lisa with Keys, the bodies float and intertwine in space with no visible support. Further underscoring his dual interest in the human figure and non-representation, the painting includes lines separate from color and blocks of color that are not outlined--a technique that marks Léger's later works. The work was done when Léger was living in New York City during the early period of Abstract Expressionism and the all-over composition no doubt reflects a cross influence with the artists in that circle.

Oil on canvas - Centre Georges Pompidou

The Constructors (Builders with Rope) (1950)

Artwork description & Analysis: Léger became interested in the theme of construction workers in 1940 in line with his socialism and sympathy for the working classes, lecturing at the time that art should be accessible to everyone. The human figure is depicted here as more naturalistic than in his previous works, making him one of the few artists interested in the human figure during this period. In fact, Léger, abandoning his mechanical figures of his earlier period, wanted the human figures to contrast with the steel. He got the idea when he drove past a construction site: "I saw the men swaying high up on the steel girders! I saw man like a flea; he seemed still lost in his inventions ... I wanted to render that; the contrast between man and his inventions, between the worker and all that metal architecture, that hardness, that ironwork, those bolts and rivets." After its completion, Léger wanted the workers to have access to the painting, so he exhibited the work in the cafeteria of the Renault automobile factory and was disappointed that the workers did not seem to understand it.

Oil on canvas - Musée National Fernand Léger, Biot, France

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Fernand Léger Artworks & Famous Paintings

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The below artworks are the most important by Fernand Léger - that both overview the major creative periods, and highlight the greatest achievements by the artist. Artwork description & Analysis: This painting was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1911 and is considered Léger's first major work showcasing his break from Impressionism and his alliance with Cubism, particularly in his monochromatic palette and his breaking of form into geometric shapes.

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The mission of the Estate is to develop understanding and appreciation of the work of the American sculptor, painter and draftsman David Smith (1906-1965). The website will become the study center for the artist's sculpture, drawings, photographs and writing, and includes a comprehensive exhibition history and bibliography for Smith's work.

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Born: May 12, 1936 - Malden, Massachusetts

Artworks by Frank Stella

The below artworks are the most important by Frank Stella - that both overview the major creative periods, and highlight the greatest achievements by the artist.

Michapol I (1971)

Artwork description & Analysis: The shaped canvas recurs in the works of Stella's Polish Village series, to which Michapol I belongs. Each composition is developed from color variations and interlocking geometric forms influenced in part by Russian Constructivism. Also inspired by Polish synagogues of the 17 th through the 19 th centuries, the works of the Polish Village series are large-scale collages, in which the artist pasted felt, paper, and wood onto the stretched canvas. Despite their sculptural qualities, Stella described the impulse behind Michapol I and the other works of the series as "pictorial."

Mixed media on canvas - The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, Ein Schauspiel, 3X (1998-2001)

Artwork description & Analysis: Given Stella's creation of numerous, at times large-scale, paintings with protruding three-dimensional elements, the production of freestanding sculptures or architectural structures might have seemed the next logical step for the artist. Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, Ein Schauspiel, 3X is just that - a massive composition whose spiraling forms and clusters continues the visual lexicon of the artist's painterly reliefs. Sitting outside the National Gallery of Art, it is one of Stella's first monumental works - weighing in just under ten tons and measuring an enormous 31 x 39 x 34 feet. The title comes from the name of a play by the 18 th-century German playwright Heinrich von Kleist about love and war.

Stainless steel, aluminum, painted fiberglass and carbon fiber - National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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Content compiled and written by Rachel Gershman

Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors

" Artist Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Rachel Gershman
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
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First published on 21 Jan 2012. Updated and modified regularly.
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Frank Stella Artworks & Famous Paintings

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Born: May 12, 1936 - Malden, Massachusetts The below artworks are the most important by Frank Stella - that both overview the major creative periods, and highlight the greatest achievements by the artist. Artwork description & Analysis: The shaped canvas recurs in the works of Stella's Polish Village series, to which Michapol I belongs.

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"It is with Dalí that, for the very first time, the windows of the mind are opened wide."

"Dalí has endowed Surrealism with an instrument of primary importance, in particular, the paranoiac critical method, which has immediately shown itself capable of being applied equally to painting, poetry, the cinema, to the construction of typical surrealist objects, to fashion, to sculpture, to the history of art, and even, if necessary, to all manner of exegesis."

Summary of Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí is among the most versatile and prolific artists of the 20 th century and the most famous Surrealist. Though chiefly remembered for his painterly output, in the course of his long career he successfully turned to sculpture, printmaking, fashion, advertising, writing, and, perhaps most famously, filmmaking in his collaborations with Luis Buñuel and Alfred Hitchcock. Dalí was renowned for his flamboyant personality and role of mischievous provocateur as much as for his undeniable technical virtuosity. In his early use of organic morphology, his work bears the stamp of fellow Spaniards Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró. His paintings also evince a fascination for Classical and Renaissance art, clearly visible through his hyper-realistic style and religious symbolism of his later work.

Accomplishments

Freudian theory underpins Dalí's attempts at forging a visual language capable of rendering his dreams and hallucinations. These account for some of the iconic and now ubiquitous images through which Dalí achieved tremendous fame during his lifetime and beyond.

Obsessive themes of eroticism, death, and decay permeate Dalí's work, reflecting his familiarity with and synthesis of the psychoanalytical theories of his time. Drawing on blatantly autobiographical material and childhood memories, Dalí's work is rife with often ready-interpreted symbolism, ranging from fetishes and animal imagery to religious symbols.

Dalí subscribed to Surrealist André Breton's theory of automatism, but ultimately opted for his own self-created system of tapping the unconscious termed "paranoiac critical," a state in which one could simulate delusion while maintaining one's sanity. Paradoxically defined by Dalí himself as a form of "irrational knowledge," this method was applied by his contemporaries, mostly Surrealists, to varied media, ranging from cinema to poetry to fashion.

The Life of Salvador Dalí

The self-assured Dalí famously retorted, "I myself am Surrealism." After, members of the Surrealists would have a tumultuous relationship with him, sometimes honoring the artist, and other times disassociating themselves from him.

Important Art by Salvador Dalí

Un Chien Andalou

By the age of 24 Dalí had acquired an art education, been inspired by Picasso to practice his own interpretation of Cubism, and was beginning to utilize Surrealist concepts in his paintings. It was at this point that he joined film director Luis Buñuel to create something truly new - a film that radically veered from narrative tradition with its dream logic, non-sequential scenes, lack of plot and nod to Freudian free association.

Un Chien Andalou recreates an ethereal setting in which images are presented in montaged clips in order to jostle reality and tap the unconscious, shocking the viewer awake. For example, in this clip we find a glaring cow's eye in a woman's eye socket soliciting feelings of discomfort. In the scene that follows, a razor blade slashes said eye in extreme close-up.

The film turned out to be a sensation and gained Dalí entrance to the most creative group of Parisian artists at the time, The Surrealists. In fact, it's become known as the first Surrealist film yet remains paramount in the canon of experimental film to this day.

35mm Film - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Great Masturbator

Central to the piece is a large distorted human face looking down upon a landscape, a familiar rocky shoreline scene reminiscent of Dalí's home in Catalonia. A nude female figure representing Dalí's new-at-the-time muse Gala rises from the head, symbolic of the type of fantasy a man would conjure while engaged in the practice suggested by the title. Her mouth near a male's crotch suggests impending fellatio while he seems to be literally "cut" at the knees from which he bleeds, a sign of a stifled sexuality. Other motifs in the painting include a grasshopper - a consistent beacon for sexual anxiety in Dalí's work, ants - elusion to decay and death, and an egg - representing fertility.

The painting may represent Dalí's severely conflicted attitudes towards sexual intercourse and his lifelong phobia of female genitalia right at the cross section of meeting and falling in love with Gala. When he was a young boy, Dalí's father exposed him to a book of explicit photos demonstrating the horrific effects of venereal disease, perpetuating traumatic associations of sex with morbidity and rot in his mind. It is said that Dalí was a virgin when he met Gala and that he later encouraged his wife to have affairs to satisfy her sexual desires. Later in life when his paintings turned to religious and philosophical themes, Dalí would tout chastity as a door to spirituality. This piece has been compared to Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Oil on canvas - Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain

The Persistence of Memory

This iconic and much-reproduced painting depicts the fluidity of time as a series of melting watches, their forms described by Dalí as inspired by a surrealist perception of Camembert cheese melting in the sun. The distinction between hard and soft objects highlights Dalí's desire to flip reality lending to his subjects characteristics opposite their usually inherent properties, an un-reality often found in our dreamscapes. They are surrounded by a swarm of ants hungry for the organic processes of putrefaction and decay with which Dalí held unshakable fascination. Because the melting flesh at the painting's center resembles Dalí, we might see this piece as a reflection on the artist's immortality amongst the rocky cliffs of his Catalonian home.

Oil on canvas - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Archeological Reminiscence of Millet's 'Angelus'

Dalí often recounted a memory of passing laborious hours at school as a child by focusing on a reproduction of the famous 1859 painting by Jean-François Millet The Angelus. In the classical piece, two farmers are depicted saying a devotional prayer moments after hearing a far-off dinner bell signal the end of their workday. In Dalí's homage, two curvaceous rock figures (another nod to the Catalonian landscape) rise at sunset; the one on the left is a female while the one on the right is male. The woman's form suggests the figure of a praying mantis, a species in which the female cannibalizes the male after copulation.

The praying mantis was a predominant theme in Surrealist works signifying the conflicting feelings of attraction and despair within the realm of desire. As The Dalí Museum describes, "In his analysis of the painting's latent meaning, Dalí felt that the female was not only the dominant partner, but also posed a sexual threat to the male..." It can thus be inferred that Dalí saw the The Angelus painting as symbolic of the repression of the male by the female - an overhanging threat to male existence. In a number of works throughout his career, Dalí reused these two forms.

Oil on panel - The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida

The Enigma of William Tell

The renowned legend of William Tell is about a man who is forced to put an apple on top of his son's head and to shoot an arrow through it. The story is a modern retelling of the Biblical sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham. Dalí takes this age-old tale further yet with a decidedly Freudian bent. Here, the man is holding a baby, and the baby has a lamb chop on its head. In a twist on the theme of paternal assault, the father figure is about to eat the baby, and the birds in the corner await the leftovers. Dalí had a tumultuous relationship with his family, which is hinted at upon canvas in many of his works. This piece is a fine example of how our dreams continually process such persistent dilemmas in our lives through montages of wild symbolism and subconscious representations.

Dalí used a few other tools from his symbolic toolkit in this painting. The extended buttock has a sexualized/phallic connotation. The fact that it is held up by a crutch shows the father's weakness and need for assistance. At the time Dalí made this painting he was virtually disowned by his father for his relationship with Gala who is supposedly represented by the tiny nut and baby right next to the father's giant foot, in peril of being stomped out.

This artwork also served as a bit of turning point in Dalí's relationship with the Surrealist group. The main Surrealists led by André Breton were leftist supporters of Lenin, while Dalí here gave the evil father figure Lenin's face. The Surrealists were highly upset by such depictions and started proceedings to try to kick Dalí out of their group.

Oil on canvas

Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)

Dalí painted this work just prior to the start of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 and said it was evidence of the prophetic power of his subconscious mind. He depicts the anxiety of the time, visually predicting the violence, horror, and doom many Spaniards felt during General Franco's later rule. Two grossly elongated and exaggerated figures struggle, locked in a tensely gruesome fight where neither seems to be the victor. To quote Dalí, the painting shows "a vast human body breaking out into monstrous excrescences of arms and legs tearing at one another in a delirium of autostrangulation." The boiled bean referenced in the title most likely refers to the simple stew that was eaten by the poverty-ridden citizens living through this difficult time in Spain.

Dalí's composition manages to express his political outrage. He would later continue to paint about politics and war in a series of works on Hitler and his agreement with Lord Chamberlain of Britain. This image also brings to mind Pablo Picasso's masterwork on a similar topic, Guernica (1937).

Oil on canvas - The Philadelphia Museum of Art

In Voluptas Mors

At first glance at this photograph, the viewer sees a skull, but deeper observation reveals it is actually composed of seven nude female models. Dalí designed the precise sketch for this work and it took the photographer Philippe Halsman over three hours to realize the image. The photograph's title is loosely translated as "Voluptuous Death". Dalí said, "I value death greatly. After eroticism, it's the subject that interests me the most."

The piece is an excellent example of Dalí's many experiments with optical effects and visual perception. Here one can see a skull or the seven nudes, but not both at the same time. The particularities of our individual, visual perception was something Dalí was very interested in because he felt we could find clues about our inner psyches through the different associations artwork evoked. He used these double-image experiments in dozens of works throughout much of his career.

Halsman was an established photographer and photojournalist who holds the record for the largest number of Time magazine covers photographed by any one person. After meeting in 1941, Dalí and Halsman worked together for 37 years, until the end of Halsman's life. Their cooperation also produced the famous photograph Dalí Atomicus (1948), and the book Dalí's Mustache (1954), which featured 28 different photographs of the artist's iconic facial hair.

Gelatin silver print

Biography of Salvador Dalí

Childhood

Dalí was born in Figueres, a small town outside Barcelona, to a prosperous middle-class family. The family suffered greatly before the artist's birth, because their first son (also named Salvador) died quickly. The young artist was often told that he is the reincarnation of his dead brother - an idea that surely planted various ideas in the impressionable child. His larger-than-life persona blossomed early alongside his interest in art. He is claimed to have manifested random, hysterical, rage-filled outbursts toward his family and playmates.

From a very young age, Dalí found much inspiration in the surrounding Catalan environs of his childhood and many of its landscapes would become recurring motifs in his later key paintings. His lawyer father and his mother greatly nurtured his early interest in art. He had his first drawing lessons at age 10 and in his late teens was enrolled at the Madrid School of Fine Arts, where he experimented with Impressionist and Pointillist styles. When he was a mere 16, Dalí lost his mother to breast cancer, which was according to him, "the greatest blow I had experienced in my life." When he was 19, his father hosted a solo exhibition of the young artist's technically exquisite charcoal drawings in the family home.

Early Training

In 1922 Dalí enrolled at the Special Painting, Sculpture and Engraving School of San Fernando in Madrid, where he lived at the Residencia de Estudiantes. Dalí fully came of age there and started to confidently inhabit his flamboyant and provocative persona. His eccentricity was notorious, and originally more renowned than his artwork. He kept his hair long and dressed in the style of English aesthetes from the 19 th century, complete with knee-length britches that earned him the title of a dandy. Artistically, he experimented with many different styles at the time, dabbling in whatever piqued his ravenous curiosity. He fell in with, and became close to, a group of leading artistic personalities that included filmmaker Luis Buñuel and poet Federico García Lorca. The residence itself was very progressive and exposed Dalí to the most important minds of the time such as Le Corbusier, Einstein, Calder and Stravinsky. Ultimately though, Dalí was expelled from the academy in 1926 for insulting one of his professors during his final examination before graduation.

Following his dismissal from school, Dalí went idle for a number of months. He then took a life-changing trip to Paris. He visited Pablo Picasso in his studio and found inspiration in what the Cubists were doing. He became greatly interested in Futurist attempts to recreate motion and show objects from simultaneous, multiple angles. He began studying the psychoanalytic concepts of Freud as well as metaphysical painters like Giorgio de Chirico and Surrealists like Joan Miró, and consequently began using psychoanalytic methods of mining the subconscious to generate imagery. Over the course of the next year, Dalí would explore these concepts while working to consider a means of dramatically reinterpreting reality and altering perception. His first serious work of this style was Apparatus and Hand (1927), which contained the symbolic imagery and dreamlike landscape that would become Dalí's inimitable painting signature.

Mature Period

In 1928, Dalí partnered with the filmmaker Luis Buñuel on Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog), a filmic meditation on abject obsessions and irrational imagery. The film's subject matter was so sexually and politically shocking that Dalí became infamous, causing quite a stir with the Parisian Surrealists. The Surrealists considered recruiting Dalí into their circle and, in 1929, sent Paul Eluard and his wife Gala, along with René Magritte and his wife Georgette, to visit Dalí in Cadaques. This was the first time Dalí and Gala would meet and shortly after the two began having an affair which eventually resulted in her divorce from Eluard. Gala, born in Russia as Elena Dmitrievna Diakona, became Dalí's lifelong, constant, and most important muse, as well as being his future wife, his greatest passion, and his business manager. Soon after this original meeting, Dalí moved to Paris, and was invited by André Breton to join the Surrealists.

Dalí ascribed to Breton's theory of automatism, in which an artist stifles conscious control over the creative process by allowing the unconscious mind and intuition to guide the work. Yet in the early 1930s, Dalí took this concept a step further by creating his own Paranoic Critical Method, in which an artist could tap into their subconscious through systematic irrational thought and a self-induced paranoid state. After emerging from a paranoid state, Dalí would create "hand-painted dream photographs" from what he had witnessed, oftentimes culminating in works of vastly unrelated yet realistically painted objects (which were sometimes intensified by techniques of optical illusion). He believed that viewers would find intuitive connection with his work because the subconscious language was universal, and that, "it speaks with the vocabulary of the great vital constants, sexual instinct, feeling of death, physical notion of the enigma of space - these vital constants are universally echoed in every human." He would use this method his entire life, most famously seen in paintings such as The Persistence of Memory (1931) and Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) (1936).

For the next several years, Dalí's paintings were notably illustrative of his theories about the psychological state of paranoia and its importance as subject matter. He painted bodies, bones, and symbolic objects that reflected sexualized fears of father figures and impotence, as well as symbols that referred to the anxiousness over the passing of time. Many of Dalí's most famous paintings are from this highly creative period.

While his career was on the rise, Dalí's personal life was undergoing change. Although he was both inspired and besotted by Gala, his father was less than enthused at this relationship with a woman ten years his son's senior. His early encouragement for his son's artistic development was waning as Dalí moved more toward the avant-garde. The final straw came when Dalí was quoted by a Barcelona newspaper as saying, "sometimes, I spit for fun on my mother's portrait." The elder Dalí expelled his son from the family home at the end of 1929.

The politics of war were at the forefront of Surrealist debates and in 1934 Breton removed Dalí from the Surrealist group due to their differing views on communism, fascism, and General Franco. Responding to this expulsion Dalí famously retorted, "I myself am Surrealism." For many years Breton, and some members of the Surrealists, would have a tumultuous relationship with Dalí, sometimes honoring the artist, and other times disassociating themselves from him. And yet other artists connected to Surrealism befriended Dalí and continued to be close with him throughout the years.

In the following years, Dalí travelled widely, and practiced more traditional painting styles that drew on his love of canonized painters like Gustave Courbet and Jan Vermeer, though his emotionally charged themes and subject matter remained as strange as ever. His fame had grown so widely that he was in demand by the rich, well known, and fashionable. In 1938, Coco Chanel invited Dalí to her home, "La Pausa," on the French Riviera where he painted extensively, creating work later exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. But undoubtedly, Dalí's true magic moment came that year when he met his hero, Sigmund Freud. After painting his portrait, Dalí was thrilled to learn that Freud had said, "So far, I was led to consider completely insane the Surrealists, who I think I had been adopted as the patron saint. This young Spaniard with his candid, fanatical eyes and his undeniable technical mastery has made me change my mind."

Around this time Dalí also met a major patron, the wealthy British poet Sir Edward James. James not only purchased Dalí's work, but also supported him financially for two years and collaborated on some of Dalí's most famous pieces including The Lobster Phone (1936) and Mae West Lips Sofa (1937) - both of which decorated James' house in Sussex, England.

Dalí and Gala in the US

Dalí had a presence in the United States even before his first visit to the country. The art dealer Julien Levy organized an exhibition of Dalí's work in New York in 1934, that included The Persistence of Memory. The exhibition was incredibly well-received, turning Dalí into a sensation. He first visited the US in the mid-1930s. And he continued to ruffle the waters wherever he went, oftentimes staging deliberate public appearances and interactions, which were in essence early examples of his love for performance. On one such occasion, he and Gala went to a masquerade ball in New York dressed as the Lindbergh baby and his kidnapper. This caused such a scandal that Dalí actually apologized in the press, an action that prompted contempt from the Surrealists in Paris.

Dalí also participated in other Surrealist events while in New York. He was featured in the first exhibition on Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art. He also made quite a scene at a showing of Joseph Cornell's Surrealist films when he knocked over the projector, famously fuming "my idea for a film is exactly that, and I was going to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made. I never wrote it down or told anyone, but it is as if he had stolen it."

After the devastation of the Second World War in Europe, Dalí and Gala returned to the United States in 1940. They would remain for eight years, splitting time between New York and California. During this period, Dalí became highly productive, expanding his practice beyond the visual arts into a wide array of other creative interests. He designed jewelry, clothing, furniture, sets for plays and ballets, and even display windows for retail stores. Dalí's eccentric personality often took center stage in many of these pursuits - for example, while being consigned by the department store Bonwit Teller, Dalí was so angered by changes to his artistic vision that he shoved a bathtub through the window display case.

Dalí (and Gala) wanted to become stars and make a large amount of money so Hollywood was a natural destination for the couple. They did not succeed in their quest for cinematic celebrity, but Dalí was asked by the famous director Alfred Hitchcock to create the dream sequence in his thriller Spellbound (1945). In addition, Walt Disney cooperated with Dalí to create the animated cartoon Destino, but the project was suspended due to financial difficulties following World War II and not actually completed until much later (2003).

Return to Port Lligat

After being ousted from the family home in 1929, Dalí purchased a small seaside house in the nearby fishing village of Port Lligat. Eventually he bought up all of the houses around it, transforming his property into a grand villa. Gala and Dalí moved back to Port Lligat in 1948, making it their home base for the next three decades.

Dalí's art continued to evolve. Besides exploring different artistic mediums, Dalí also started using optical illusions, negative space, visual puns, and trompe l'oeil in his work. Starting in 1948 he would make approximately one monumental painting per year - his "Dalí Masterworks" - that were at least five feet long in one or both directions and creatively occupied Dalí for at least a year. His studio had a special slot built into the floor that would allow the huge canvases to be raised and lowered as he worked on them. He painted at least 18 such works between 1948 and 1970.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Dalí's paintings focused primarily on religious themes reflecting his abiding interest in the supernatural. He famously claimed, "I am a carnivorous fish swimming in two waters, the cold water of art and the hot water of science." He aimed to portray space as a subjective reality, which may be why many of his paintings from this period show objects and figures at extremely foreshortened angles. He continued employing his "paranoiac-critical" method, which entailed working long, arduous hours in the studio and expressing his dreams directly on canvas in manic bouts of energy.

Dalí became quite reclusive while encompassed in his studio making paintings. Yet, he continued to step out to orchestrate stunts, or what he called "manifestations" that were just as outrageous as before. Designed to provoke, these performance-based interactions reminded the public that Dalí's inner imp was alive and well. In one, Dalí sipped from a swan's egg as ants emerged from inside its shell; in another he drove around in a car filled to the roof with cauliflower. When his book, The World of Salvador Dalí, was published in 1962 he signed autographed copies at a bookstore in Manhattan while hooked up to a monitor recording his blood pressure and brain waves. Customers left with a signed copy and a printout of Dalí's vitals. He also made a number of commercials for televisions and other media for companies such as Lanvin Chocolates, Alka-Seltzer, and Braniff Airlines - casting his star power far and wide.

In the 1960s when Dalí came to New York City, he always stayed at the St. Regis hotel on 5 th Avenue. He made the hotel bar practically his living room, where parties raged throughout his stay. At the time Dalí had an entourage of strange and charismatic characters with whom he spent his time. Andy Warhol, another eccentric collector of outrageously wacky humans, also spent time with Dalí at the St. Regis. In one legendary story, Warhol brought a silkscreen painting as a gift to Dalí, but the older artist threw it on the ground at the hotel and proceeded to pee on it. Rather than get offended, Warhol supposedly loved the whole episode. The group that Warhol later put together at The Factory was considered a modern evocation of the setting Dalí produced earlier.

Late Period and Death

The last two decades of Dalí's life would be the most difficult and psychologically arduous. In 1968 he bought a castle in Pubol for Gala and in 1971 she began staying there for weeks at a time, on her own, forbidding Dalí from visiting without her permission. Her retreats gave Dalí a fear of abandonment and caused him to spiral into depression. Gala inflicted permanent damage on Dalí after it came to light that, in her senility, she had marred his health by dosing him with non-prescribed medication. The physical damage that Gala wrought on Dalí hindered his art-making capacity until his death. After her death in 1982, Dalí experienced a further bout of depression and is believed to have attempted suicide. He also moved into the castle in Pubol, the site of her death.

One of Dalí's most important achievements during this rough time was the creation of The Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres. Rather than donating a single work to the city, Dalí said, "Where, if not in my own town, should the most extravagant and solid of my work endure, where if not here? The Municipal Theatre, or what remained of it, struck me as very appropriate." In preparation for the museum's opening in 1974 Dalí worked tirelessly to design the building and put together the permanent collection that would serve as his legacy.

On January 23, 1989, Dalí died of heart failure while listening to his favorite record, Tristan and Isolde. He is buried beneath the museum that he built in Figueres. His final resting place is three blocks away from the house that he was born in and across the street from the Sant Pere church where he was baptized and had his first communion.

The Legacy of Salvador Dalí

Dalí epitomized the idea that life is the greatest form of art and he mined his with such relentless passion, purity of mission and diehard commitment to exploring and honing his various interests and crafts that it is impossible to ignore his groundbreaking impact on the art world.

His desire to continually and unapologetically turn the internal to the outside resulted in a body of work that not only evolved the concepts of Surrealism and psychoanalysis on a worldwide visual platform but also modeled permission for people to embrace their selves in all our human glory, warts and all. By showing us visual representations of his dreams and inner world laid bare, through exquisite draftsmanship and master painting techniques, Dalí opened a realm of possibilities for artists looking to inject the personal, the mysterious and the emotional into their work. In post-war New York, these concepts were incorporated and transformed by Abstract Expressionists who used Surrealist techniques of automatism to express the subconscious through art, only now through gesture and color. Dalí's use of wildly juxtaposing found objects to create sculpture helped shake the medium from its more traditional bones, opening the door for great Assemblage artists such as Joseph Cornell. Today, we can still see Dalí's influence on artists painting in Surrealist styles, others in the contemporary visionary arts spheres and all over the digital art and illustration spectrums.

Dalí's physical character in the world, eccentric and enigmatic, paved the way for artists to think of themselves as brands. He showed that there was no separation between Dalí the man and Dalí the work. His use of avant-garde filmmaking, provocative public performance and random, strategic interaction brought his work alive in ways that differed from the painting - instead of the viewer merely looking at a beautiful work that evoked great imagination, they would be "poked" in real life by a manifestation of Dalí's imagination designed to unsettle and conjure reaction. This could later be seen in artists like Yoko Ono. Andy Warhol would go on to concoct his own persona, environment and entourage in much the same way as would countless other 20 th-century artists. In today's social-media landscape, artists are almost expected to be visibly and socially just as interesting as their art work.

Dalí also spearheaded the idea that art, artist and artistic ability could cross many mediums and become a viable commodity. His exhaustive endeavors into fields ranging from fine art to fashion to jewelry to retail and theater design positioned him as a prolific businessman as well as creator. Unlike mass merchandising, which is often disdained in the art world, Dalí's hand touched such a variety of products and places, that literally anyone in the world could own a piece of him. Today this practice is so common that we find great architects like Frank Gehry designing special rings and necklaces for Tiffany or innovators like John Baldessari lending his images to skateboard decks.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Salvador Dalí

Similar Art

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"It is with Dalí that, for the very first time, the windows of the mind are opened wide." "Dalí has endowed Surrealism with an instrument of primary importance, in particular, the paranoiac critical method, which has immediately shown itself capable of being applied equally to painting, poetry, the cinema, to the construction of typical surrealist objects, to fashion, to sculpture, to the history of art, and even, if necessary, to all manner of exegesis."

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Synopsis

Georges Braque was at the forefront of the revolutionary art movement of Cubism. Braque's work throughout his life focused on still lifes and means of viewing objects from various perspectives through color, line, and texture. While his collaboration with Pablo Picasso and their Cubist works are best known, Braque had a long painting career that continued beyond Cubism. Braque was also often dedicated to quiet periods in his studio rather than to being a personality in the art world.

Key Ideas

Though Braque started out as a member of the Fauves, he began developing a Cubist style after meeting Pablo Picasso. While their paintings shared many similarities in palette, style and subject matter, Braque stated that unlike Picasso, his work was "devoid of iconological commentary," and was concerned purely with pictorial space and composition.

Braque sought balance and harmony in his compositions, especially through papier collés, a pasted paper collage technique that Picasso and Braque invented in 1912. Braque, however, took collage one-step further by gluing cut-up advertisements into his canvases. This foreshadowed modern art movements concerned with critiquing media, such as Pop art.

Braque stenciled letters onto paintings, blended pigments with sand, and copied wood grain and marble to achieve great levels of dimension in his paintings. His depictions of still lifes are so abstract that they border on becoming patterns that express an essence of the objects viewed rather than direct representations.

Georges Braque was guided from a young age toward creative painting techniques. His father managed a decorative painting business and Braque's interest in texture and tactility perhaps came from working with him as a decorator. In 1899, at age seventeen, Braque moved from Argenteuil into Paris, accompanied by friends Othon Friesz and Raoul Dufy.

Georges Braque's childhood, life, career, and various anecdotes

Read Georges Braque's Biography

And, the artists and movements that built upon Georges Braque's art

Read Georges Braque's Artistic Legacy

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Georges Braque was at the forefront of the revolutionary art movement of Cubism. Braque's work throughout his life focused on still lifes and means of viewing objects from various perspectives through color, line, and texture. While his collaboration with Pablo Picasso and their Cubist works are best known, Braque had a long painting career that continued beyond Cubism.

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Artworks by Anthony Caro

The below artworks are the most important by Anthony Caro - that both overview the major creative periods, and highlight the greatest achievements by the artist.

Table Piece LXXXVIII (The Deluge) (1969-70)

Artwork description & Analysis: In 1966, Caro began to experiment with a new format for his sculptures: rather than making large-scale works for placement on gallery floors, he began to create smaller, "table sculptures", to sit at the edges of flat surfaces. Although this work might resemble a maquette, then - a scale-model preparatory to a larger, finished work - it is an artwork in its own right; indeed, the 'hanging' format made Caro's established technique of placing his works directly on the ground impossible.

The scale of works such as The Deluge is vital to their appeal, and in defining their relationship with the viewer. Not only does their reduced size stand in striking contrast with the large works, such as Early One Morning, to which Caro's audiences had grown accustomed, but it also confirmed their status as pieces for domestic settings, intended to coexist with the viewer as everyday objects rather than (or as well as) works of art. Caro noted that "my Table Pieces are not models inhabiting a pretence world, but relate to a person like a cup or a jug. Since the edge is basic to the table all the Table Pieces make use of this edge which itself becomes an integral element of the piece." This particular Table Piece also makes a series of allusions to the history of modern painting, as the art historian Ann Hindry notes: "[w]ith his Table Pieces, [Caro] gave himself the means [...] to implement a translation or transfer of the values of pictorial art to sculpture. The Deluge (1969-70) is one of the first pieces to present a three-dimensional interpretation of the arabesques of Matisse."

Responding again to painting rather than sculpture as his primary source of inspiration, with these smaller, more lyrical works Caro took another step in re-defining the formal parameters of sculpture, re-framing its spatial relationship to the viewer through its partial suspension in the air.

Steel - Tate, London

Prairie (1967)

Artwork description & Analysis: Prairie is one of Caro's masterpieces, and another example of the phase of work represented by Early One Morning. Combining the impressions of haphazard arrangement and conscious design (as partly implied, again, by the homogenous color-gloss), the yellow-ochre bars articulate lines and planes which seem to continue beyond the bounds of the sculpture, creating a sense of openness and expansiveness. The organic color-palette, meanwhile, in combination with the hint provided by the title, suggests an agricultural landscape, complete with plough-lined fields.

Like Early One Morning (1962), Prairie extends outwards rather than upwards, offering a reconceptualization of the space defined by sculptural form. Once again, walking around the piece provides a series of shifting and receding sightlines, generating tension between the impressions of modelled shape and of uncontrollable physical mass. More than in his 1962 work, however, Caro introduces a certain quality of weightlessness into this piece, a paradoxical association for an object made of solid steel: from some angles, the central plane seems to be floating in space, while from others the means of support is obvious. Again, this poses subtle questions about the distinctions between the illusory space of art and the 'real world' of physical matter.

The art critic Michael Fried was deeply struck by Prairie when he first saw it, stating in his commentary on the work that Caro had incorporated the very ground on which the sculpture sat into the form of the work, as "the last, or lowest, of the three levels which, as abstract conception, Prairie comprises." In so doing, Fried argued, Caro had framed a series of conceptual and formal distinctions between the sculpture and the ground beneath, as different arrangements of physical mass: " Prairie defines the ground not as that which ultimately supports everything else, but as that which does not itself require support. It makes this fact about the ground both phenomenologically surprising and sculpturally significant [...] the result is an extraordinary marriage of illusion and structural obviousness."

Painted steel - Private collection

Elephant Palace (1989)

Artwork description & Analysis: In the 1980s, Caro became interested in combining sculptural tropes with architectural ones, creating what he called "sculpitecture"; Elephant Palace is an important example of such work. Whereas his 1970s practice was characterized by its openness and linearity, his architectural pieces are notably 'closed-off', as the art historian Ian Barker notes: " Elephant Palace marks a real change in his work because it presents a skin. We see the outside only."

This particular work was inspired by Caro's travels: the motif of the elephant's head suggests a memory of his time India, but in a more general sense, it was a visit to Greece which prompted him to consider the relationship between the body - and other organic forms - and the rectilinear spaces of architecture. In Elephant Palace, Caro presents an architectural 'entrance' which also seems like a mouth or ears, and a roof which also seems like the domed skull of a large animal. Connotations of the organic and the inorganic are thus brought together to suggest a tension between natural and man-made worlds.

Caro's 1980s works - also including pieces such as Oracle (1983-85) and Xanadu (1986-88) - are interesting in suggesting that his sense of sculptural space had, in a sense, come full circle. Having exploded the space of the sculpture in the 1960s, and hollowed it out in his 1970s works - so that the physical elements of the work framed the gaps between them - he began once more to confront the viewer with solid, sculptural mass (though still suggesting inner recesses and voids).

Steel - Tate, London

Millennium Bridge (2000)

Artwork description & Analysis: During the 1990s, as part of his development of "sculpitecture", Caro looked for opportunities to work with architects and engineers. One of the results was a collaboration with the architect Norman Foster and the engineering team Arpus, on a bridge that would cross the Thames in London, connecting the area in-front of St Paul's Cathedral with the grounds of the Tate Modern Gallery. (Both were due to open in 2000, but due to structural complications, the bridge finally opened in 2002).

The Millennium Bridge combines Caro's interests in architecture, minimal composition, the material qualities of steel, and engineering. The artistic and architectural qualities of the work are deeply complementary, with a complex, shallow suspension system, elided in the simple and elegant overall appearance, allowing panoramic views across the city. Through the design process, however, Caro discovered that an artist's way of thinking was often very different from an architect's. In conversation with Norman Foster, he noted: "[m]y way of working is quite different from yours, as I discovered when we worked together on the Millennium Bridge. Your thinking is from the tiny to the massive, and because you think with sketches, you get grandeur and a sense of overallness. Later you focus on the detail."

As a work designed solely for the public realm and for practical use, Caro followed up on the implications of earlier gestures such as removing the sculptural plinth by producing a work which was wholly incorporated into the everyday space of the city-dweller. The Millennium Bridge was also intended to fulfil a social function, promoting connectedness in the city, and revitalizing areas that were previously under-visited; indeed, it is a work intimately familiar to almost anyone who has visited London, and thus, more than any of Caro's other pieces, confirms his status as one of the most ubiquitous artists of his era.

Steel suspension bridge - City of London

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Anthony Caro Artworks & Famous Sculptures+

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The below artworks are the most important by Anthony Caro - that both overview the major creative periods, and highlight the greatest achievements by the artist. Artwork description & Analysis: In 1966, Caro began to experiment with a new format for his sculptures: rather than making large-scale works for placement on gallery floors, he began to create smaller, "table sculptures", to sit at the edges of flat surfaces.

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"What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject-matter, an art which could be for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue."

Synopsis

Henri Matisse is widely regarded as the greatest colorist of the 20 th century and as a rival to Pablo Picasso in the importance of his innovations. He emerged as a Post-Impressionist, and first achieved prominence as the leader of the French movement Fauvism. Although interested in Cubism, he rejected it, and instead sought to use color as the foundation for expressive, decorative, and often monumental paintings. As he once controversially wrote, he sought to create an art that would be "a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair." Still life and the nude remained favorite subjects throughout his career; North Africa was also an important inspiration, and, towards the end of his life, he made an important contribution to collage with a series of works using cut-out shapes of color. He is also highly regarded as a sculptor.

Key Ideas

Henri Matisse's childhood, life, career, and various anecdotes

Read Henri Matisse's Biography

And, the artists and movements that built upon Henri Matisse's art

Read Henri Matisse's Artistic Legacy

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"What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject-matter, an art which could be for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue."

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Synopsis

Marsden Hartley, one of the first American artists to paint in a completely abstract mode, was part of the circle of artists, including Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth, and John Marin, who congregated around and were promoted by photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Hartley incorporated into his own paintings the abstract trends that he witnessed first - hand during his time among avant-garde artists in Europe during the 1910s. While his early abstract style met with resistance back in the States, Hartley, undeterred, continued to paint his more recognizable subject matter with the same vivid colors, sharp contrasts, simplified forms, and ambiguous space that he mastered early in his career. His landscape paintings, imbued with the spirit of 19 th - century American Transcendentalism, as well as his later portraits, which convey a love for and the earnestness of his subjects, are a uniquely American version of modernism that continue to resonate among younger contemporary artists today.

Key Ideas

While initially known for his more radical abstractions, Hartley used formal devices, such as strong colors and simplified forms, to convey the weightiness and groundedness of his preferred subjects, whether landscape, portraits, or genre scenes, that created a tension with the two-dimensionality of the picture plane.

Unlike his colleagues, Hartley spent several extended periods of time away from the United States, living in various parts of Europe as well as Mexico. These experiences exposed him to a much wider swath of avant-garde activity than was available in the U.S. as well as extended encounters with unfamiliar landscapes. One of the results of his travel, however, was an isolation from his fellow artists, which Hartley both welcomed and lamented.

Not a traditionally religious man, Hartley was steeped in the spiritual ideas of 19 th-century Americans Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Additionally, he was drawn to Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism and was familiar with more esoteric traditions such as Theosophy. Hartley's own syncretic spirituality pervades many of his paintings, especially his landscapes.

While he rarely discussed his private relationships in public, many now surmise that Hartley had several homosexual relationships throughout his life. At various points, he commemorated these relationships - more subtly in his early painting and more overtly in his later paintings - making Hartley an important early touchstone for gay identity in the United States.

Edmund Hartley was the youngest of nine children born to English immigrant parents Thomas and Eliza Jane Hartley. The death of his mother when he was eight years old affected him profoundly; many years later, Hartley explained, "I was to know complete isolation from that moment forward." His family was soon after divided, with Hartley forced to live with an older sister in Auburn, Maine. To assuage his loneliness, he found solace in the comforting embrace of nature, something he would cling to throughout his life. Hartley's love of the outdoors also led him to imbibe the writings of American Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in addition to the poetry of Walt Whitman.

Marsden Hartley's childhood, life, career, and various anecdotes

Read Marsden Hartley's Biography

And, the artists and movements that built upon Marsden Hartley's art

Read Marsden Hartley's Artistic Legacy

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Marsden Hartley, one of the first American artists to paint in a completely abstract mode, was part of the circle of artists, including Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth, and John Marin, who congregated around and were promoted by photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

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Synopsis

Early in his career, Miró primarily painted still-lifes, landscapes, and genre scenes. Influences ranging from the folk art and Romanesque church frescoes of his native Catalan region in Spain to 17 th-century Dutch realism were eventually superseded by more contemporary ones: Fauvism, Cubism, and Surrealism captivated the young artist, who had relocated to Paris in 1921. His exposure to the ideas of André Breton and Breton's Surrealist circle prompted Miró to make radical changes to his style, although the artist cannot be said to have identified consistently with a single school. Rather, his artistic career may be characterized as one of persistent experimentation and a lifelong flirtation with non-objectivity. Miró's signature biomorphic forms, geometric shapes, and semi-abstracted objects are expressed in multiple media, from ceramics and engravings to large bronze installations.

Key Ideas

Conducting his own Surrealism-inspired exploration, Miró invented a new kind of pictorial space in which carefully rendered objects issuing strictly from the artist's imagination are juxtaposed with basic, recognizable forms - a sickle moon, a simplified dog, a ladder. There is the sense that they have always coexisted both in the material realm and in the shallow pictorial space of Miró's art.

Miró's art never became fully non-objective. Rather than resorting to complete abstraction, the artist devoted his career to exploring various means by which to dismantle traditional precepts of representation. Miró's radical, inventive style was a critical contributor in the early-20 th-century avant-garde journey toward increasing and then complete abstraction.

Miró balanced the kind of spontaneity and automatism encouraged by the Surrealists with meticulous planning and rendering to achieve finished works that, because of their precision, seemed plausibly representational despite their considerable level of abstraction.

Miró often worked with a limited palette, yet the colors he used were bold and expressive. His chromatic explorations, which emphasized the potential of fields of unblended color to respond to one another, provided inspiration for a generation of Color Field painters.

Artists have traditionally confined themselves to visual expression in a single medium with occasional forays into other materials. However, Miró was, in a sense, a modern renegade who refused to limit himself in this regard. While he explored certain themes such as that of Mother and Child repeatedly throughout his long career, Miró did so in a variety of media from painting and printmaking to sculpture and ceramics, often achieving surprising and disparate results.

Biography

Childhood

Joan Miró was born in Spain in 1893 to a family of craftsmen. His father, Miguel, was a watchmaker and goldsmith, while his grandfathers were cabinetmakers and blacksmiths. Perhaps in keeping with his family's artistic trade, Miró exhibited a strong love of drawing at an early age; according to biographers, he was not particularly inclined toward academics. Rather, Miró pursued art-making and studied landscape and decorative art at the School of Industrial and Fine Arts (the Llotja) in Barcelona.

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Joan Miró Biography Continues

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Joan Miró Overview and Analysis | TheArtStory

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Early in his career, Miró primarily painted still-lifes, landscapes, and genre scenes. Influences ranging from the folk art and Romanesque church frescoes of his native Catalan region in Spain to 17 th-century Dutch realism were eventually superseded by more contemporary ones: Fauvism, Cubism, and Surrealism captivated the young artist, who had relocated to Paris in 1921.

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Click on the MASTERPIECES Tab to see work

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Jasper Johns - paintings, biography, quotes of Jasper Johns

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Over this 50 year career, Jasper Johns created his own distinct style, and a vast series of pieces. Not only were they ahead of their time, he led artists to a new transition of work as well. And, to this day, his works were sold for some of the highest price tags in the art world, especially as a living artist.

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"Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential."

Synopsis

One of the pioneers of abstract modern art, Wassily Kandinsky exploited the evocative interrelation between color and form to create an aesthetic experience that engaged the sight, sound, and emotions of the public. He believed that total abstraction offered the possibility for profound, transcendental expression and that copying from nature only interfered with this process. Highly inspired to create art that communicated a universal sense of spirituality, he innovated a pictorial language that only loosely related to the outside world, but expressed volumes about the artist's inner experience. His visual vocabulary developed through three phases, shifting from his early, representational canvases and their divine symbolism to his rapturous and operatic compositions, to his late, geometric and biomorphic flat planes of color. Kandinsky's art and ideas inspired many generations of artists, from his students at the Bauhaus to the Abstract Expressionists after World War II.

Key Ideas

Painting was, above all, deeply spiritual for Kandinsky. He sought to convey profound spirituality and the depth of human emotion through a universal visual language of abstract forms and colors that transcended cultural and physical boundaries.

Kandinsky viewed non-objective, abstract art as the ideal visual mode to express the "inner necessity" of the artist and to convey universal human emotions and ideas. He viewed himself as a prophet whose mission was to share this ideal with the world for the betterment of society.

Kandinsky viewed music as the most transcendent form of non-objective art - musicians could evoke images in listeners' minds merely with sounds. He strove to produce similarly object-free, spiritually rich paintings that alluded to sounds and emotions through a unity of sensation.

Modernist abstraction could not have asked for a more charismatic and visionary theorist than Kandinsky - the highest ideals he pursued through his many travels and friendships.

Wassily Kandinsky's childhood, life, career, and various anecdotes

Read Wassily Kandinsky's Biography

And, the artists and movements that built upon Wassily Kandinsky's art

Read Wassily Kandinsky's Artistic Legacy

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"Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential."

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Richard Stankiewicz - 25 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy

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Find the latest shows, biography, and artworks for sale by Richard Stankiewicz