Oil on canvas; 65 x 70 cm.

Polish painter. His unsystematic training began in 1898 at the Warsaw Drawing School and continued at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (1903–6). He anticipated Polish Expressionism and was one of the most intriguing and inventive artists of the period. An ironic sense and the grotesque motifs in his works bear a similarity to James Ensor’s art. The roots of Wojtkiewicz’s art, however, are local. He admired the modernist paintings of Stanislaw Wyspianski and Jacek Malczewski, and he held aesthetic ideas similar to those of the Romantic poet and painter Cyprian Kamil Norwid (1821–83) and of Stanislaw Przybyszewski (1868–1927) and Edward Abramowski, the authors of Expressionist manifestos. He began his short career as an illustrator and postcard designer. His first known work, a watercolour entitled Spring Is Approaching (1900; Warsaw, N. Mus.), already shows tragic irony, depicting dead birds on snow-covered ground. After 1905 he exhibited with the ‘Group of Five’, also known as ‘Norwid’s Group’. During their exhibition at the Galerie Schulte in Berlin (1907) Wojtkiewicz’s ‘strange harmony of tones, painful fantasy of drawing, pathetic and moving game of colours’ caught the eye of André Gide, who invited him to Paris and organized his one-man show at the Galerie Druet. Wojtkiewicz’s later works (series entitled Monomanias , Circuses and Ceremonies) include oil and distemper paintings, watercolours, drawings and lithographs that explore the world of madness (e.g. Circus of Madmen , 1906) and the melancholic poetry of fairy tales (e.g. the Rape of a Princess , 1908; both Warsaw, N. Mus.).

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Pastel, paper blue; 45.6 x 58.5 cm.

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, pseudonym Witkacy, was a Polish painter, novelist, and playwright, well known as a dramatist in the period between the two world wars.

After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, Witkiewicz traveled in Germany, France, and Italy. In 1914 he left for Australia as the artist and photographer of an anthropological expedition led by Bronisław Malinowski. Three years later, as a reserve officer in the Russian Army, Witkiewicz witnessed the Russian Revolution. In 1918 he settled at a provincial cultural centre, Zakopane, at the foot of the Tatra Mountains. He committed suicide at the beginning of World War II.

Witkiewicz’s plays anticipated the Theatre of the Absurd of Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett in their deliberately contorted characters and plots and their use of grotesque parody. Rapid tempos, warped time juxtapositions, and catastrophic incidents are combined with an original and symbolic use of language in such plays as Kurka wodna (1921; The Water Hen) and Wariat i zakonnica (1925; The Madman and the Nun).

Witkiewicz’s works began to be revived in Poland and the West in the 1950s and were a perennial feature of Polish and foreign theatrical repertoires. Some of his plays were published in English translation in The Witkiewicz Reader (1992). His novel Nienasycenie (1930; Insatiability) projected a vision of cruel totalitarianism gaining control over nations and individual destinies. A number of his expressionistic paintings survive, and they form part of many museum collections in Poland and abroad.

For more details see the following link:

info-poland.buffalo.edu/classroom/witkacy/witkacy.html

Tags:   stanislaw ignacy witkiewicz witkiewicz witkacy painter 20th century polish 1918 1910s nova auriga public collection abstract abstract expressionism

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Oil on canvas; 37.5 x 45 cm.

Guan Zilan, born in 1903, graduated in University of Shanghai (in art department), went to Japan continuing her art education in 1927. In Japan, she was influenced by western modern art, especially post-impressionism and fauvism. She came back to China in 1930, and worked as an art professor in an art college of Shanghai. During that time she was quite active and made herself a very famous young woman artist. Married when she was 35, she had one daughter.

After 1949, she pretty much lived like a "hermitess", especially during Cultural revolution, she did not paint anything. Beside her regular job (based on internet source she worked in a history & art museum in Shanghai), she lived as a plain housewife until she died of heart disease in 1986.

Guan painted mostly oil paintings, in which I saw mostly "Chinese" style - a similar atmosphere I see in Chinese traditional (brush) paintings. I always have a thought on Chinese traditional painting, that due to certain limitation of traditional Chinese painting technique, contemporary Chinese (brush parinting) artists do not have to stick on traditional mediums, rather, they could adapt to western art technique and transmit Chinese art "spirit" in western art medium (such as oil painting or acrylic painting). I had this idea back when I was a student, when many artists struggled with creating "brand new" effects by using Chinese brush painting materials. The fact is, that Chinese painting materials have very strict and limited attributes and can only produce certain special visual effects, and this limitation gives artists very little room to be creative and unique. However, since I believe that mediums and techniques are not the most important elements in art, working with western mediums can be a better choice for those who really want to be creative. Oil painting (and acrylic) might be the freest art medium in the world (in terms of effects) and it really gives artists maximum freedom to be unique. Furthermore, I do not believe technique alone can define "style", Western or Chinese. So, my point is, the spirit of Chinese art can be continued in western art technique. I think Guan Zilan proved my point.

Guan's talent struck the world when she was young (both in Japan and China), but during communist era, she stayed as ordinary as possible. People knew her in real life mostly recognized her as a housewife and a widow (her husband died when she was 55). Art in China since 1949 has been tied to politics (Communism). Was it the reason that Guan did not paint that much anymore? Or she gave up painting simply because she found passion in her ordinary life as a wife and mother? No matter what reasons, during all those decades of her later years, within Chinese art circle almost nobody talked about her anymore. After she died quietly in 1986, as she wished, her ashes was scattered in West Lake of Huang Zhou City - one of the most beautiful lake that inspired most of her landscape paintings.

Agatha Christie said "the best time to plan a book is while you're doing dishes". I wonder Guan would think the same way. Or maybe to her, washing dishes WAS as same as painting a masterpiece. After gaining such a fame as a young artist (she was the first Chinese woman artist who painted oil painting), it is said that she was happy and satisfied with her plain daily life. I believe that, because from her paintings, I do see a "plain" women with a "plain" heart, which resonates with every beautiful detail of the Nature.

Guan was a beautiful old style women. Is God really fair to give her both beauty and talent? (Just kidding. :-)) However, both her career and personal life stayed low-toned. Maybe, it is exactly because of this quality of being "ordinary", Guan enjoyed her life in its maximum scale. From this view, being forgotten by this noisy world really does not do any damage to her life.

humanwithoutgod.blogspot.com/2011/12/between-greatest-mos...

lisongyang.weebly.com/208513204320848-guan-zilan.html

Tags:   guan zilan painter 20th century chinese female 1928 1920s house christie's street scene post impressionism

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Oil on canvas; 30 x 28 in.

Morris Topchevsky was born in Bialystock, Poland. His father immigrated to the United States in 1910, and the rest of the family followed later. Four of the Topchevsky children perished in the Bialystock pogroms of 1905. Topchevsky studied art at the Hull House and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His teachers were Enella Benedict and Albert Krenbiel. In 1925, he traveled to Mexico with Jane Addams to visit poor neighborhoods and to meet with local leaders. During his studies, Topchevsky worked as a billboard designer and painter. When he became ill from toxic paint, his doctor advised him to move to a better climate to improve his health. In 1926, he traveled back to Mexico.

His experiences in Mexico had a dramatic influence on his career. He was inspired by the Aztec and Maya sculptures and by the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera (1886-1957) and José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949). When Topchevsky returned to Chicago during the Depression, he applied the social messages and monumental effect of the Mexican muralists to his work. His works expressed the agony of the unemployed and scenes of Chicago’s industrial areas. In 1936, he painted the mural North American Children Working in Holmes School in Oak Park, Ill.

Topchevsky was the most politically radical artist of those who contributed to A Gift to Biro-Bidjan. In the book Art of Today: Chicago, 1933 (written by J.Z. Jacobson and published by L.M. Stein), he boldly revealed his revolutionary ideas: At the present time of class struggle, danger of war and mass starvation, the artist cannot isolate himself from the problems of the world, and the most valuable contribution to society will come from the artists who are social revolutionists.

In all my work I have felt that movement of masses of people is the most important element. At first it was because I was fascinated by the problem it afforded. At the present, and I hope in my future work, it will be a means of helping the revolutionary movement of this country and the liberation of the working masses of the entire world. In 1933, the year he was quoted, Topchevsky created the painting Century of Progress. He grotesquely displayed unemployed workers in shantytown observing the extravagant pavilions of Chicago’s World’s Fair, A Century of Progress, which celebrated the city’s 100 years of “advancement.”

Tags:   morris topchevsky topchevsky painter 20th century polish american jewish 1934 1930s unemployed private collection social realism double portrait portrait expressionism worker hat jewish

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Oil on canvas; 75 x 100 cm.

Léonard Tsugouharu Foujita was a painter and printmaker born in Tokyo, Japan who applied Japanese ink techniques to Western style paintings.

Immediately after graduating secondary school, Foujita wished to study in France, but on the advice of Mori Ogai (his father's senpai military physician) he decided to study western art in Japan first. In 1910 when he was twenty-four years old Foujita graduated from what is now the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. His paintings during the period before he moved to France were often signed "Fujita" rather than the gallicized "Foujita" he adopted later.

Three years later he went to Montparnasse in Paris, France. When he arrived there, knowing nobody, he met Amedeo Modigliani, Pascin, Chaim Soutine, and Fernand Léger and became friends with Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Foujita claimed in his memoir that he met Picasso less than a week after his arrival, but a recent biographer, relying on letters Foujita sent to his first wife in Japan, clearly shows that it was several months until he met Picasso. He also took dance lessons from the legendary Isadora Duncan.[2]

Foujita had his first studio at no. 5 rue Delambre in Montparnasse... Many models came over to Foujita's place to enjoy this luxury, among them Man Ray's very liberated lover, Kiki, who boldly posed for Foujita in the nude... Another portrait of Kiki titled "Reclining Nude with Toile de Jouy .... was the sensation of Paris at the Salon d'Automne in 1922, selling for more than 8,000 francs.... Within a few years, particularly after his 1918 exposition, he achieved great fame as a painter of beautiful women and cats in a very original technique. He is one of the few Montparnasse artists who made a great deal of money in his early years. By 1925, Tsuguharu Foujita had received the Belgian Order of Leopold and the French government awarded him the Legion of Honor.

After the breakup of his third marriage, and his flight to Brazil in 1931 (with his new love, Mady), Foujita traveled and painted all over Latin America, giving hugely successful exhibitions along the way. In Buenos Aires, Argentina, 60,000 people attended his exhibition, and more than 10,000 queued up for his autograph. In 1932 he contributed a work to the Pax Mundi, a large folio book produced by the League of Nations calling for a prolonged world peace.[3] However, by 1933 he was welcomed back as a minor celebrity to Japan where he stayed and became a noted producer of militaristic propaganda during the war. For example, in 1938 the Imperial Navy Information Office supported his visit to China as an official war artist.

On his return to France, Foujita converted to Catholicism. He was baptised in Reims cathedral on 14 October 1959, with René Lalou (the head of the Mumm champagne house) as his godfather and Françoise Taittinger as his godmother. This is reflected in his last major work,at the age of 80, the design, building and decoration of the Foujita chapel in the gardens of the Mumm champagne house in Reims, France, which he completed in 1966, not long before his death.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsuguharu_Foujita

Tags:   tsugoharu foujita painter 20th century japanese 1949 1940s nu allonge a la toile de juoy christie's million nude art nouveau figure interior bed

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