Word: painter
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Only in Britain is this Danish-British painter known, and only there is his influence felt. As a modern Realist, he energized younger British Modernists in the 1900s like Spencer Frederick Gore and Harold Gilman. You can still see his mark today, on the work of figurative artists like Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and even Francis Bacon. Sickert's "brown world" of rented rooms in Camden Town, with their plump, sweaty nudes, sprawled on iron bedsteads, dense and claustrophobic, runs into the younger painters', its solidly constructed Realism forming a bridge across the light turbulence of derivative avant- gardism...
...unspectacular painter, you might think -- but take care. For it was also Sickert who in his old age, during the 1930s, became obsessed with mass-media images. Decades before American Pop, and to the consternation of most critics, he made signery into scenery, recycling theater publicity photos, news shots (of the King with his horse trainer or Amelia Earhart being mobbed at the London airport) and even a gangster-movie poster of Edward G. Robinson. No American or European artist at the time used such sources with as much aplomb. Scorning British good taste and the Edwardian artist's role...
...long association with Degas steered him away from being a provincial Impressionist, grazing on first sensations. Construct in the studio, do studies, mistrust "the tyranny of nature." And if you want narrative, why not have it? The world, especially the city -- for Sickert was an intensely urban painter -- was crammed with narratives, and like Degas, Sickert found his in closed rooms and places of popular entertainment. For Degas's cafes concerts, Sickert substituted the British music hall, then at its apex of rowdy success...
...photography -- much to the puzzlement of the London art world. Photos were common speech, immediate, iconic but not "sensitive." They stood the Impressionist cult of the nuance on its head. And turning the black-and-white of photography back into color represented a fascinating challenge for a tonal painter like Sickert...
Probably Hesse's leaning to the personal, the bodily and the autobiographical would have come out in her art anyway -- she began as a painter of Expressionist heads, vaguely along the lines of Munch's The Scream -- but it was certainly helped by a year's visit to the German city of Dusseldorf in 1964-65. There Hesse came to know the work of Joseph Beuys and the post-Dada Fluxus group. From that point on -- accelerated by her admiration for artists like Dubuffet and Claes Oldenburg -- she grew more and more interested in whatever did not pertain to sculpture...