In his painting, he focuses on the commonplace in a way that suggests irony and objective distance from his subjects. He also makes a point of keeping an independent distance from the New York art scene.

He was born in Mesa, Arizona, in 1920, and for one summer during his high school years he apprenticed at the Walt Disney Studio and then studied at an Los Angeles trade school the next summer. He earned a degree from Sacramento State College in 1941. From 1938 to 1949, he worked as a cartoonist and designer in California and New York and served as an artist in the United States Army.

In 1950, at the age of thirty, he enrolled in Sacramento State where he earned a Master’s Degree in 1952 and began teaching at Sacramento City College. In 1960, he became assistant professor at the University of California, Davis, where he remained through the 1970s and influenced numerous artist students. However, he did not have much following among Conceptualists because of his adherence to basically traditional disciplines, emphasis on hard work rather than creativity, and love of realism.

On a leave of absence, he spent time in New York City where he became friends with Willem De Kooning and Franz Kline and was much influenced by these abstractionists as well as Pop Artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. During this time, he began a series of very small paintings based on images of food displayed in windows, and he focused on their basic shapes.

Returning to California, he pursued this subject matter and style, isolating triangles, circles, squares, etc. He also co-founded the Artists Cooperative gallery, now Artists Contemporary Gallery, and other cooperatives including Pond Farm, having been exposed to the concept of cooperatives in New York.

Wayne Thiebaud had his first solo show in April 1962 in  New York City at the Allan Stone Gallery. His first solo museum show was mounted in San Francisco at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in July 1962, and that same year in October, he was included in the group show, New Realists, at Sidney Janis Gallery, New York.

In 1963, he turned increasingly to figure painting, wooden and rigid with each detail sharply emphasized; in 1967 his work was shown at the Biennale Internationale, and in 1985, he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

From June to September 3, 2001, The California Palace of the Legion of Honor held a special 80th birthday commemorative exhibition titled: Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective.

Sources:
Matthew Baigell, Dictionary of American Art
Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art
Tsujuimoto, Karen. Wayne Thiebaud. San Franciso Museum of Modern Art. Exhibition Catalogue 1985.

Lived/Active: Massachusetts Known for: impressionist landscape

Available for Blossom Newman:

Styles, locations, mediums, teachers, subjects, geography, etc.

Motherwell decided to become a serious artist only in 1941.  Although he was especially influenced by the Surrealist* artists; Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, and André Masson; he remained largely self-taught.  His early work followed no single style, but already contained motifs from which much of his later art grew.  He received his first one-man show in 1944 at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery* in New York City.  In the mid-1940s, Motherwell painted abstract figurative works that showed the influence of Surrealism*.  But in 1949 he painted the first in a series of works collectively entitled “Elegy to the Spanish Republic.”  He painted almost 150 versions of these “Elegies” in the next three decades.  These Abstract Expressionist paintings show his continuous development of a limited repertory of simple, serene, and massive forms that are applied in black paint to the picture plane in such a way that they generate a sense of slow, solemnly suggestive movement.

During the 1960s he painted in several different styles, so that such paintings as Africa (1964, 65; Baltimore Museum of Art) look like enlarged details of elegant calligraphy, while Indian Summer, #2 (1962, 64) combines the bravura brush-work typical of Abstract Expressionism with the broad areas of evenly applied color characteristic of the then-emerging Color Field* Painting style.  By the end of the decade, paintings in his Open series (1967, 69), he had abandoned Abstract Expressionism in favor of the new style.

From 1958 to 1971 Motherwell was married to the American painter Helen Frankenthaler.  He taught art at Hunter College (1951, 58, 1971, 72), directed the publication of the series “The Documents of Modern Art” (1944, 52), and wrote numerous essays on art and aesthetics.  He was generally regarded as the most articulate spokesman for Abstract Expressionism.

From visionary pop artist of the 1960′s, to master of dynamic neo Expressionism, Peter Max and his vibrant colors have become part of the fabric of contemporary American culture.  In the 1960′s Max rose to youthful prominence with his now-famous Cosmic ’60s style, a bold linear type of painting which employed Fauvist use of color and depicted transcendental themes.  Peter Max revolutionized art of the 60’s just as the Beatles transformed the music of the decade.  As his expressionistic style evolved, becoming more sensuous and painterly, Max’s unique symbolism and vibrant color palette have continued to inspire new generations of Americans throughout the decades.  Peter Max is a passionate environmentalist and defender of human and animal rights, often dedicating paintings and posters for these noteworthy causes.  He has celebrated our nation’s principles of freedom and democracy with his famous paintings of American icons of freedom including Lady Liberty and the American Flag.

Peter Max has received many important commissions including the creation of the first “Preserve the Environment” Postage Stamp commemorating the World’s Fair in Spokane, Washington; 235 Border Murals at entry points to Canada and Mexico commissioned by the U.S. General Services; and a painting of each of the 50 states, resulting in a book, Peter Max Paints America  in celebration of the Bicentennial. In 1981 he was invited by President and Mrs. Reagan to paint six Liberty portraits at the White House.  Max has painted for five U.S. Presidents – Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton.  Max has exhibited in over 40 international museums and over 50 galleries, worldwide.  His work can be found in many prominent museum and private collections around the world.

In 1981 he painted six liberty portraits for the America President and Mrs. Reagan, and in 1993, his famous ‘100 Clintons’ installation.

Max has had approximately forty museum shows internationally, and more than fifty gallery shows worldwide. His works appear in the prominent collections of many museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Born into a strong matriarchal Russian Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, Krasner was raised in a highly cultured environment. In the 1920s, she studied at Cooper Union, the Art Students League, and the National Academy of Design. From 1934 to 1943, she was a WPA mural painter and also became involved with radical art and politics. During much of this time, she was a mural assistant to Max Spivak, prominent abstract artist.

In 1937, she became a student of Hans Hofmann and then began exhibiting with the American Abstracts Artists, a group protesting the Social Realist movement led by Robert Henri. Like so many of her contemporaries, she felt that traditional representational art was too confining.

In the early 1940s, Krasner started working with Jackson Pollock and she, with sophisticated understanding of European modernism, was a major influence on his revolutionary style of gestural painting. The couple married in 1945 and lived on Long Island near East Hampton in a Victorian style home. She outlived him by over thirty years and came to be recognized as a major force in avant-garde American art. From 1945 to 1950, she worked on her Hieroglyph Series, and also spent much time promoting her husband’s career. She also did many gestural paintings, and some think that she was a big influence on her husband utilizing this style, for which he is so famous.

As an artist, she worked in concentrated spells and then had times of waiting for inspiration to come. Much of her early work was either lost in a fire or cut-up by her for collages.

A retrospective of Krasner’s painting was held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from October 10, 1999 to January 2, 2000 with more than 60 pieces. It also traveled to the Des Moines Art Center, the Akron Art Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum.

Source:
“American Women Artists” by Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein
Peter Falk, “Who Was Who in American Art”
Ellen Landau, “Lee Krasner”

Hans Hofmann was born in Weissenberg, Germany, showed a precocious interest in music and science, and had early training in mechanics while working for the Director of Public Works of Bavaria between 1896 and 1898. On that job, he invented the electromagnetic comptometer, the precursor of the adding machine.

He began to study art in 1898 in Munich where he was introduced to Impressionism. From 1904 to 1914, he studied in Paris and was exposed to many of the avant-garde artists and movements of that time including Fauvism, Cubism, and Surrealism. He was much taken with the exploration of pure color for its own sake, especially as investigated by Picasso, Braque, Matisse, and Delaunay.

In Munich at the outbreak of World War I, he founded an art school and was highly successful until 1932 when he emigrated to America, having spent the summers in 1930 and 1931 teaching at the University of California at Berkeley.

In 1932, he began teaching at the Arts Students League in New York and the following year opened his own schools in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts. During the 1930s and 1940s, American Scene painting was prevalent, but he resisted that style, staying with the modernism to which he had been exposed in Europe. Hence he was later credited as a courageous pioneer in America of European modern art.

He closed both of his schools in 1958 so he could devote himself full time to his own painting. He died in New York City in 1966.

Hofmann said he always based his paintings on the subject of nature, and he used vivid colors such as bright blues, greens oranges and yellows and applied them with palette knives in long slashing strokes. He viewed the surface of the canvas as alive, responsive, and active, often with opposing forces which he created with his theory of “push and pull,” and which is closely tied to theories of Paul Cezanne. He also experimented with dripping paint onto the canvas, a method Jackson Pollock learned and later made famous.

Most of the configurations of his later paintings were rectangular, likely influenced by the analytical Cubism of Picasso, and which he fled were best in accord with the overall shape of the canvas.

Source:
Matthew Baigell, “Dictionary of American Art”
Michael David Zellman, “300 Years of American Art”
Peter Falk, “Who Was Who in American Art”

He was also an art educator who taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1961 to 1962; Yale University in 1967; and the University of Minnesota in 1968.  He and his artist wife, Lynn Umlauf, both taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York city.

Goldberg was born in 1924 in the Bronx of New York City.  His studies at the Art Students League, 1938-1942, were interrupted by World War II where he served as a paratrooper in North Africa and Burma, making eighty jumps behind Japanese lines.

Returning to New York, he studied with Jose de Creeft and Hans Hofmann, and Hoffman remained a strong influence.  He was also influenced by Roberto Matta and Arshile Gorky, but it was Willem de Kooning, and his use of fiery brush-work and explosive color, who would prove to be Goldberg’s greatest influence.  Beginning 1980, he spent five months of each year in Tuscany, Italy on an estate near Siena.  In his studio there, he created many of his signature paintings done with oil sticks pressed directly onto canvas.  He described these as quasi grids, “patchy squares of color intersected at random by strong diagonals.” (Glueck)

Goldberg died on December 30, 2007 while working in his studio in the Bowery in New York City.  His studio was one he took over from Mark Rothko in the 1950s.

Michael Goldberg’s work is in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Baltimore Museum of Art; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; De Cordova and Dana Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Sources include
Grace Glueck,  “Michael Goldberg, 83, Abstract Expressionist”,  The New York Times, Obituaries, Firday, January 4, 2008, A21
Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art
Peter Hastings Falk, Editor, Who Was Who in American Art

Sam Francis was born in San Mateo, California in 1923, the son of a mathematics professor.  In 1941 he began a premedical course at the University of California at Berkeley, but he dropped out in 1943 to join the United States Army Air Corps.  He landed in a United States Army hospital following a spinal injury during flight training.   Flat on his back in the hospital, he took up drawing and painting; the play of light on the ceiling became one of his favorite themes.   In 1948 he returned to Berkeley as an experienced painter, earning his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1949 and his Masters in 1950.   He gravitated into the orbit of San Francisco’s Abstract-Impressionist movement.

His exuberant atmospheric color paintings of the 1950s bespeak a hedonistic approach that distinguishes his work from the usually harsh, anxiety-ridden canvases of the first generation Abstract Expressionists.  Francis’s embrace of one of the strongest traditions in French art – a joyous and unrestrained love of color and light was demonstrated by Francis at the outset of his career.  In 1950, having obtained a master’s degree, Francis by-passed New York and moved to Paris where he lived for almost seven years.  He visited Japan in 1957 and the influences of both art worlds have been evident.

In 1947 Francis, while recovering from his spinal injury, he married Vera Miller, the first of his five wives.  His fifth wife was an English painter Margaret Smith with whom he had one son, Augustus.  Another wife was Mako Kawase; she was the mother of Shingo, another son.

He died on November 4, 1995 at the age of seventy-one.  He was forced to scale down his activities in his final year.  But nothing short of death could extinguish his need to paint.  Although his right hand was crippled, and and he was in brutal agony (he even painted with an IV in his arm for a few days) he painted one hundred and fifty small pictures, working until he had no more energy and they had to put him back to bed.

Sources include:
Master Paintings from the Phillips Collection
Time Magazine, January 16, 1956 and  November 13, 1972
It’s Never Too Much, article by Suzanne Muchnik in LA Times Sunday, April 21, 1991
The Lion’s Last Roar  article by Kristine McKenna in LA Times Sunday, May 28, 1995

He was born April 20, 1915 in Berlin and studied at the Prussian Academy of Fine Art and under Paul Klee while in Düsseldorf from 1936 to 1939.  In 1939, Dzubas fled Germany for London and the United States where he later became a citizen.

In 1948, he he answered art critic Clement Greenberg’s anonymous advertisement for a summer roommate.  It was the height of the Abstract Expressionist Movement in New York, and through Greenberg Dzubas met Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman.  Later, in the early 1950s, Dzubas shared a studio with Helen Frankenthaler, associating with some of the younger generation of abstract painters in New York including Jules Olitski and Kenneth Noland.

In the early 1950s, he began exhibiting his work in New York.  In the 1960s, he started experimenting with color field painting.

Dzubas’ mature paintings since the 1960s assimilate his early interest in German Romanticism and Expressionism into post-war American abstraction. “He abandoned oil paint for Magna acrylic in 1965 when he found he could achieve with a brevity of gesture the brilliance and luminosity of oil paint applied in thin veils of color.  He could thus effect the richness and variation of traditional glazed tones using a more expressive, immediate process.  By the early 1980s, Dzubas abandoned his preliminary preparations of sketching and priming, thereby inviting spontaneity and accident into his painting process. Although he typically coated his canvas with a gesso primer before painting, he began to apply it so thinly that the pigment was almost immediately absorbed into the ground, making it impossible for him to revise and rework his compositions.  Dzubas’ change in technique reveals a thoroughly modernist sensibility: “I like that risk,” he explained. “I think, to a certain degree, I have to make it mechanically difficult and unreliable for myself. If I can predict the effect too much, then I probably am not supposed to be doing it.  I function better if my footing is not too sure, so to speak.”  The rich, velvety hues of Grade’s reds, greens, and blues appear radiant in places.  Dzubas heightened his color drama — a drama characterized as quintessentially Baroque by some critics– by varying the density of his paint.  His rectangular forms appear to ebb and flow in an orchestrated movement across the surface of the picture plane.” (Megan Bahr)

A retrospective of Dzubas’ work was shown at the Museum of Fine Art, Houston in 1974 and at the Museum of Fine Art, Boston the following year.  In 1983, Dzubas was honored with an exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.

Sources include:
Twentieth-Century Art from the Collection of Mary and Jim Patton “Friedel Dzubas”, by Megan Bahr, Ackland Museum of Art
www.ackland.org/art/exhibitions/patton/dzubastext.html
www.lorettahoward.com/