Artist of the Week - Emil Nolde (Linking to ABC Wednesday)

 N is for Nolde

Emil (Hanson) Nolde

(1867-1956)

German Expressionist painter and printmaker

  Self-portrait

1917

"There is silver blue, sky blue and thunder blue. Every colour holds within it a soul, which makes me happy or repels me, and which acts as a stimulus. To a person who has no art in him, colours are colours, tones tones...and that is all. All their consequences for the human spirit, which range between heaven to hell, just go unnoticed."  ~ Emil Nolde

 1908

 Green Landscape with Red Cloud

"I had an infinite number of visions at this time, for wherever I turned my eyes nature, the sky, the clouds were alive, in each stone and in the branches of each tree, everywhere, my figures stirred and lived their still or wildly animated life, and they aroused my enthusiasm as well as tormented me with demands that I paint them."

Spectators at theCabaret

1911

"The art of an artist must be his own art. It is... always a continuous chain of little inventions, little technical discoveries of one's own, in one's relation to the tool, the material and the colors."

"What an artist learns matters little. What he himself discovers has a real worth for him, and gives him the necessary incitement to work."

Lost Paradise

Linking to ABC Wednesday

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

.

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

Look it up here

Blogging Notes

Comments on Art Posts

I want to share with you my feelings about comments on my art posts. This isn't meant to be taken by anyone personally, of my regular readers because I think you mostly are able to read through the lines and figure out a little bit about how I think and how I blog. Occasionally, I'll get really depressed over "drive-by" commenting. I get very few of those on "regular" Pagan Sphinx posts. But when I participate in photo "memes", which I love to do and post them to this blog because they relate to art or art history, I get the occasional "I don't like it" comment. Or the occasional " this is great". I want people to tell me why. Is that selfish of me? If you hate it, say why! That offends me much less, if you get my drift. I'll admit that my feeling is that if you're gonna leave a "drive-by" comment, the least you can do is be nice.  ;-)  If you can't be nice, click off! In the rare instance where blogging brings me somewhere I don't want to be, I click off. Isn't that the beauty of the electronic age social networks? 

What Does "Say why" Mean?

Whatever you want it to say!  I'm not a high-brow type! I know as much about art as a bright tenth grader!  :-)
Trust your immediate reaction and tell me why! If what you feel It's disgust, say it. If you are shocked, good! If you love that little splotch of globbie red with black outlines in the corner of the canvas, perfect.

 Any painting is an invitation to look. Two seconds or two hours. We can each decide for ourselves.

Give it a try with this work. I'll go first:  I like several details such as the manufactured tear from the eye and the "bowling pin" leg on the chair but trying to put it all together is a bit of a challenge!  :-)  The turquoise and red frame with the inner yellow is pretty. It has a primitive look. I wondered if Picasso liked this. :-)

Paul Klee

Pagan Sphinx Blog Design

A friend of the blog recently sent me a message that she finds the font colors and backgrounds hard to read. I'd like to know if anyone else is experiencing this. I've had more than a couple of complaints about the comments window format, but this is a first for the blog colors. If you have any suggestions for improving this, please let me know.

And speaking of the comments box, which do you prefer:  the embedded or the pop-up versions?

And so as not to leave abruptly, I hope you are having a good Sunday. It's clear and very chilly here. I'm going for a walk and coming in to have turkey soup for lunch.  I'm not much of a cook but I love to make soup and stew in the winter!

Love and Peace,

Pagan Sphinx

Artist of the Week: Louis Anquetin

Louis Anquentin

 

1861-1932

 Self-portrait

French painter. He came to Paris in 1882 and studied art at the Ateliers of Bonnat and Cormon, where he was a contemporary and friend of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Emile Bernard and Vincent van Gogh. His early work shows the influence of Impressionism and of Edgar Degas. In 1887 Anquetin and Bernard devised an innovative method of painting using strong black contour lines and flat areas of colour; Anquetin aroused much comment when he showed his new paintings, including the striking Avenue de Clichy: Five O’Clock in the Evening (1887; Hartford, CT, Wadsworth Atheneum) at the exhibition of Les XX in Brussels and at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1888. The new style, dubbed Cloisonnisme by the critic Edouard Dujardin (1861–1949), resulted from a study of stained glass, Japanese prints and other so-called ‘primitive’ sources; it was close to the Synthetist experiments of Paul Gauguin and was adopted briefly by van Gogh during his Arles period. Anquetin’s works were shown alongside Gauguin’s and Bernard’s at the Café Volpini exhibition in 1889, where they attracted considerable attention among younger artists.


The contemporary critic Edouard Dujardin praised Anquetin for inventing a style based on heavy outlines and flat areas of color, which resembled cloisonne enamels.

In 1882, he came to Paris and began studying art at Léon Bonnat's studio, where he met Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The two artists later moved to the studio of Fernand Cormon, where they befriended Émile Bernard and Vincent van Gogh. wikipedia

Photograph from 1886 of Vincent Van Gogh and Emile Bernard

 After viewing this painting Van Gogh wrote in a letter that influenced his painting 

Cafe Terrace at Night (below) . I had previously assumed it was the other way around.

Portrait of Henri de Toulouse Lautrec

The Van Gogh Museum recently acquired this painting by Anquentin

Art Knowledge News

Moulin Rouge

1893