Artist of the Week / Linking to ABC Wednesday

K is for Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky

1886-1944

Black is like the silence of the body after death, the close of life.
  ~Wassily Kandinsky, 1911

In 1911, a new group of German artists began exhibiting their work to the public. Der Blaue Reiter was to become the high point of German Expressionism, but it also opened the way towards abstraction with its stand for free experimentation and originality. It is Wassily Kandinsky, the most influential member of the group, who is most often credited with the distinction of painting the first ``abstract'' picture, in 1910.

The Blue Mountain

1908-09

Guggenheim Museum, New York City

Munich-Schwabing with the Church of St. Ursula

1908

 The First Abstract Watercolor

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 color, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential. (Wassily Kandinsky)

WWI

1913

"Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated." (from On the Spiritual in Art)

Moscow I

1916

"Color is the power which directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with the strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul." 

                ~Kandinski

Red Oval

1920

That is beautiful which is produced by the inner need, which springs from the soul. 

~Wassily Kandinsky

Yellow, Red, Blue

 1925

Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris

Orange Violet

1935

Twilight

1945

Sources

Olga's Gallery

WebMuseum Paris

The Guggenheim

History of Russian Painting

Humanities Web
The Painter's Keys

Linking to ABC Wednesday

ABC Wednesday - G

G if for George Grosz
(July 26, 1893 – July 6, 1959)
 German-born, American artist known for painting, drawing and caricatures

George Grosz gave a fantastic testimony of Berlin life during a terrible period, divided between fascism and communism. He was active in the communist party but had an anarchist’s fascination for the characters of underground life. Military figures, prostitutes and violence abound, and fascinate the viewer.

 Self-Portrait

  The Love Sick Man
 1916

 The Suicide
 1916

In 1921 his album "Gott mit uns" (God with us) brought Grosz charges of defaming the Reichswehr (army); in 1924 he was prosecuted for offences against public morality by his album "Ecce Homo" (the album was confiscated as being pornographic); in 1928 for his drawing "Shut up and keep serving the cause" he was accused of blasphemy. All these scandals only helped consolidate his fame. Olga's Gallery

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1921

 Remembering Uncle August
1919

 The White Slave
 1918


"I don't even like to talk about it. I hated being a number and not merely because I was a very small one. I let them bellow at me for just as long as it took me to find enough pluck to bellow back at them."

 Eclipse of the Sun
 1926

 Artist and Model
1928

In the early 1930's,  Grosz was invited to lecture at the Arts Student League in NY, after being forced to flee from Nazi Germany. In 1938, Grosz's wife and sons joined him. He became a naturalized citizen in 1938.
Here is what Grosz had to say about that period of work in the United States:

  "My motto was now to give offense to none and be pleasing to all. Assimilation is straightforward once one overcomes the greatly overvalued superstition concerning character. To have character generally means that one is distinctly inflexible, not necessarily for reasons of age. Anyone who plans to get ahead and make money would do well to have no character at all. The second rule for fitting in is to think everything beautiful! Everything – that is to say, including things that are not beautiful in reality." 

Note:  I had a difficult time finding an example of what Grosz may have meant when he referred to work with "no character" , which appears to distinguish his period of work in from the early 1930's until just before his return to Berlin in the late 1950's.  I found an image of the painting below, which may or may not be what he was referring to and what critics called an uninteresting time in his career. Certainly, his early paintings are the stand-outs, in my opinion. But then again, I am a huge fan of expressionism and I find the Dad movement fascinating. 

 Nude in the Dunes

 1948

 Eva Grosz

(the artist's wife)

1940

 The Survivor" by George Grosz 

1944

Private Collection

"I had grown up in a humanist atmosphere, and war to me was never anything but horror, mutilation and senseless destruction, and I knew that many great and wise people felt the same way about it. "
George Grosz

George Grosz sketches or caricatures of The Weimer Republic

"The war was a mirror; it reflected man's every virtue and every vice, and if you looked closely, like an artist at his drawings, it showed up both with unusual clarity."
George Grosz

Sources

Olga's Gallery

Exposición de Pintura blog

Spartacus Educational

MoMA

Brainy Quotes

ABC Wednesday

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ABC Wednesday - F

F is for Freud

 British painter, born 1922

Lucian Freud bio

"A painter's tastes must grow out of what so obsesses him in life that he never has to ask himself what it is suitable for him to do in art."

- Lucian Freud 

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From Whitehot Magazine:

Lucian Freud’s tireless exploration of the human form, removed from the romantic pedestal, and examined in the most minute and disturbing detail, makes him the most interesting British painter of his generation.
Freud has produced stunning figurative paintings and portraits for over sixty years, but these lesser known etchings reveal a much more delicate approach to his subjects than his oil paintings. In this interesting mix of paintings and prints spanning six decades, Starr Figura, the curator, has engineered a fascinating glimpse at the bones behind Freud’s paintings. His first etchings were produced in the 1940’s after which he abandoned the technique for over thirty years, returning to the plates in the 1980’s. In spite of Freud’s use of color in his oil paintings, his subjects are always bleak. For Freud, the hard reality of an image is far more interesting than anything imagined. Etching, a process in which a reverse image is scratched with special needles on copper plates, is a technique that lends itself to Freud’s relentless eye. His vision is as exact and uncompromising as the hairline etches in these black and white prints. The result is powerful and a little disturbing, as though things are being magnified when we asked for no such thing. Freud is foremost a portraitist, and his unerring and often unflattering images speak of the immense depths behind the simplest objects and things. Few contemporary artists can claim the ability to capture a human emotion so precisely and so unflinchingly. His occasional forays into non human subjects show similar ability, whether it is the dense flora of his garden or the exquisite form of his dog, Pluto, which is one of the finest etchings on display.

Self-portrait with Black Eye 

c. 1978

(This self-portrait by Lucian Freud nursing a black eye after a brawl with a taxi driver has sold for £2.8 million at auction)

Lucian Freud's paintings are not easy met up-close and personal, as they mostly found in private collections. People appear to want to keep Freud's work close to them. They are profoundly personal and original images. Freud's viewpoint on the human figures he captures on canvas certainly makes him, in my book, one of the greatest living figurative painters in the world. PS

Girl With a White Dog
 1951-52

 Double Portrait
1985-86


"I paint people not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be."
Lucian Freud

"Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid."
Lucian Freud

 Gaz
 1997

"I am only interested in painting the actual person, in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong. "
Lucian Freud

Interior A


 "When I make a painting, I paint as if it is the only painting I am working on.  Or, further, I paint as if it is the only painting that I have ever made.  Or, even further still, I paint as if it is the only painting that anyone ever has made."
- Lucian Freud

 Two Men
  1987-88

Lying by the Rags1989-90

"The paintings that really excite me have an erotic element or side to them irrespective of subject matter. "
Lucian Freud

 The Artist's Daughter and her Husband

 Portrait of Bruce Bernard

'

"The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh."  
Lucian Freud

 

Lucian Freud's paintings are not easy met up-close and personal, as they are mostly found in private collections. People appear to want to keep Freud's work close to them. They are profoundly personal and original images. Freud's viewpoint on the human figures he captures on canvas certainly makes him, in my book, one of the greatest living figurative painters in the world.

Sources

Art News Blog

The Telegraph

WhiteHot Magazine

The Artchive
Brainy Quotes
Transposition Blog
 Web Art Academy


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ABC Wednesday