Berenice Abbott was born in Springford, Ohio, in 1898. After graduating from Ohio State University she moved to New York to study journalism, but eventually decided on sculpture and painting.
In 1921 she moved to Paris to study with sculptor Emile Bourdelle. Abbot also worked with the surrealist photographer, Man Ray (1923-25), before opening her own studio in Paris. She photographed the leading artists in France and had her first exhibition at the Au Sacre du Printemps Gallery in 1926.
Abbott returned to the United States in 1929 and embarked on a project to photograph New York. In 1935 she managed to obtain funding for this venture from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and its Federal Art Project.
In 1936 Abbott joined with Paul Strand to establish the Photo League. Its initial purpose was to provide the radical press with photographs of trade union activities and political protests. Later the group decided to organize local projects where members concentrated on photographing working class communities.
Abbott's photographs of New York appeared in the exhibition, Changing New York, at the Museum of the City in 1937. A book, Changing New York, was published in 1939. She is also published a Guide to Better Photography (1941). In the late 1950s Abbott began to take photographs that illustrated the laws of physics. Berenice Abbott died in Monson, Maine, in 1991.
www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAPabbott.htm

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Carla Accardi was born in Trapani, Italy. She completed her classical studies in high school, and in 1943 she trained privately for an art diploma. She continued her art training at the Accademia di Belle Arti of both Palermo and Florence. In 1946 she moved to Rome with the painter Antonio Sanfilippo, who she married a few years later. Accardi quickly became part of the inner circle of the Art Club and was a frequent visitor to Consagra’s studio. There she met such artists as Attardi, Dorazio, Guerrini, Perilli, and Turcato, with whom she signed the manifesto of the Forma 1 group in 1947. She took part in many group shows in Italy and abroad; her first solo exhibition was in 1950 at the Galleria Numero in Florence. During the 1950s Accardi developed a reductivist visual language that became more and more abstract. She focused on signs and limited her palette to black and white, thus linking herself visually to the major artists of the Art Informel movement. Between 1954 and 1959, Michel Tapiè, an art critic and promoter of the movement, invited her to take part in several exhibitions that he organized in Italy and abroad.

In the 1960s Accardi joined the Continuità group; she began to reintegrate color into her work, making references to metropolitan culture and optical illusion. She continued to explore new possibilities by experimenting with diverse media, eventually beginning to paint on plastic transparent supports, which emphasised the luminous surface of the painting. She took part in the Venice Biennale several times, appearing first in 1964 and again in 1976 and 1978.

In the 1980s Accardi returned to canvas, and her visual language changed again as she shifted her focus to the use of signs and chromatic juxtapositions. She showed again at the Venice Biennale in 1988 and took part in the most important retrospectives of twentieth-century Italian Art. Among these was The Italian Metamorphosis 1943–1968, held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1994. She was nominated a member of the Accademia di Brera in Milan in 1996, and the following year she became part of the Venice Biennale Commission as an advisor. Her work is part of many important collections, including the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea of Castello di Rivoli (Turin), the Gallerie Civiche of Modena and Bologna, the Palazzo Reale in Milan, and the Museo Civico in Turin. The artist currently lives and works in Rome.

Tags:   carla accardi accardi painter 20th century italian female photo portrait artist portrait portrait

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Carla Accardi was born in Trapani, Italy. She completed her classical studies in high school, and in 1943 she trained privately for an art diploma. She continued her art training at the Accademia di Belle Arti of both Palermo and Florence. In 1946 she moved to Rome with the painter Antonio Sanfilippo, who she married a few years later. Accardi quickly became part of the inner circle of the Art Club and was a frequent visitor to Consagra’s studio. There she met such artists as Attardi, Dorazio, Guerrini, Perilli, and Turcato, with whom she signed the manifesto of the Forma 1 group in 1947. She took part in many group shows in Italy and abroad; her first solo exhibition was in 1950 at the Galleria Numero in Florence. During the 1950s Accardi developed a reductivist visual language that became more and more abstract. She focused on signs and limited her palette to black and white, thus linking herself visually to the major artists of the Art Informel movement. Between 1954 and 1959, Michel Tapiè, an art critic and promoter of the movement, invited her to take part in several exhibitions that he organized in Italy and abroad.

In the 1960s Accardi joined the Continuità group; she began to reintegrate color into her work, making references to metropolitan culture and optical illusion. She continued to explore new possibilities by experimenting with diverse media, eventually beginning to paint on plastic transparent supports, which emphasised the luminous surface of the painting. She took part in the Venice Biennale several times, appearing first in 1964 and again in 1976 and 1978.

In the 1980s Accardi returned to canvas, and her visual language changed again as she shifted her focus to the use of signs and chromatic juxtapositions. She showed again at the Venice Biennale in 1988 and took part in the most important retrospectives of twentieth-century Italian Art. Among these was The Italian Metamorphosis 1943–1968, held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1994. She was nominated a member of the Accademia di Brera in Milan in 1996, and the following year she became part of the Venice Biennale Commission as an advisor. Her work is part of many important collections, including the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea of Castello di Rivoli (Turin), the Gallerie Civiche of Modena and Bologna, the Palazzo Reale in Milan, and the Museo Civico in Turin. The artist currently lives and works in Rome.

Lucio Fontana was born in Argentina. His father was Italian and his mother Argentinean. He lived in Milan from 1905 to 1922 and then moved back to Argentina, where he worked as a sculptor in his father’s studio for several years before opening his own. In 1926, he participated in the first exhibition of Nexus, a group of young Argentinean artists working in Rosario de Santa Fé. Upon his return to Milan in 1928, Fontana enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, which he attended for two years.

The Galleria Il Milione, Milan, organized Fontana’s first solo exhibition in 1930. The artist traveled to Paris in 1935 and joined the Abstraction-Création group. The same year, he developed his skills in ceramics in Albisola, Italy, and later at the Sèvres factory, near Paris. In 1939, he joined the Corrente, a Milan group of expressionist artists. In 1940, Fontana moved to Buenos Aires. With some of his students, he founded in 1946 the Academia de Altamira from which emerged the Manifiesto Blanco group. He moved back to Milan in 1947 and in collaboration with a group of writers and philosophers signed the Primo manifesto dello Spazialismo.

The year 1949 marked a turning point in Fontana’s career; he concurrently created the Buchi, his first series of paintings in which he punctured the canvas, and his first spatial environment, a combination of shapeless sculptures, fluorescent paintings, and black lights to be viewed in a dark room. The latter work soon led him to employ neon tubing in ceiling decoration. In the early 1950s, he participated in the Italian Art Informel exhibitions. During this decade, he explored working with various effects, such as slashing and perforating, in both painting and sculpture. The artist visited New York in 1961 during a show of his work at the Martha Jackson Gallery. In 1966, he designed opera sets and costumes for La Scala, Milan.

In the last year of his career, Fontana became increasingly interested in the staging of his work in the many exhibitions that honored him worldwide, as well as in the idea of purity achieved in his last white canvases. These concerns were prominent at the 1966 Venice Biennale, for which he designed the environment for his work, and at the 1968 Documenta in Kassel. Fontana died in Comabbio, Italy.

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Oswald Achenbach was a German landscape painter. Born in Düsseldorf, he received his art education from his brother, Andreas Achenbach. His landscapes generally dwell on the rich and glowing effects of color which drew him to the Bay of Naples and the neighborhood of Rome. He also painted in the Bavarian Alps and Switzerland. From 1863 to 1872, he was professor of landscape painting at the Düsseldorf School. His conception of nature was more ideal than that of his brother. He died in Düsseldorf of an inflammation of the lungs. He is represented at most of the important German galleries of modern art, and many of his pictures are in the United States.

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Valerio Adami is an Italian painter. Educated at the Accademia di Brera in Milan , he has since worked in both London and Paris. His art carries obvious influence from Pop Art. He was born in Bologna, and by 1945 he was studying painting from Felice Carena. He was accepted into the Brera Academy in 1951, and there studied as a draughtsman until 1954 in the studio of Achille Funi. In 1955 he went to Paris, where he met and was influenced by Roberto Matta and Wifredo Lam. His first solo exhibition came in 1959 in Milan.

In these early years, Adami's works were expressionistic, but around the time of his second exhibition in 1964 at Kassel, he had developed a style of painting reminiscent of French cloisonnism, featuring regions of flat color bordered by black lines. Unlike Gauguin, however, Adami's subjects were highly stylized and often presented in fragments, as seen in Telescoping Rooms (1965).

In the 1970s, Adami began to address politics in his art, and incorporated subject matter such as modern European history, literature, philosophy, and mythology. In 1971, he and his brother Gioncarlo created the film Vacances dans le désert. From 1985 to 1998, there were four retrospective exhibits of Adami's work in Paris, the Centre Julio-Gonzalez de Valence (Spain), Tel Aviv, and Buenos Aires.

Jacques Derrida, the famous philosopher, launched an investigation of Adami's works in 'The Truth in Painting', specifically on his use of the frame ('the paregon').

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