Saturday, July 30, 2022
Friday, July 29, 2022
Monday, July 25, 2022
Sunday, July 24, 2022
Alphonse Mucha
Art Appreciation
Alphonse Mucha was a Bohemian and Czech painter, illustrator, and graphic artist who was born on July 24, 1860. He is best known for the decorative theatrical posters, particularly those of French stage actress Sarah Bernhardt.
Later in life, he focused on painting a series of twenty monumental canvases known as The Slav Epic, which depicts the history of the Slavic people.
His daughter, Jaroslava Muchová help restore these canvases which were hidden from Nazis.
From an early, Mucha showed talent in not only drawing but also music. Supposedly, he drew exclusively with his left hand and was an alto singer and violin player.
At the age of 19, while in Vienna, he was employed as an apprentice scenery painter for Vienna theaters. There he met Hans Makart, an Austrian painter, who influenced Mucha's later work.
In 1885, Mucha moved to Munich where he became friends with notable Slavic artists. While in Munich, he founded a Czech students' club and contributed political illustrations to nationalist publications in Prague.
A few years later, he moved to Paris.
While in Paris, Mucha began providing illustrations for magazine publications and novels, which provided a regular income. One investment he made was purchasing a camera that used glass-plate negatives. This allowed him to use pictures he took to compose drawings.
In the 1890s, Art Nouveau was the modern style objecting the academic art of the 19th century. This would play an important role in Mucha's work.
At the end of the 1894, Mucha was asked to draw a last-minute poster for actress Sarah Bernhardt to advertise the continuation of the play Gismonda. Mucha created a life-size poster of Bernhardt in the costume of a Byzantine noblewoman with decorative Byzantine mosaic tiles behind her head. The poster appeared on the streets of Paris on January 1st, 1895. Mucha became famous overnight.
His new fame landed big advertising commissions for JOB cigarette papers, Ruinart Champagne, Lefèvre-Utile biscuits, Nestlé baby food, Idéal Chocolate, the Beers of the Meuse, Moët-Chandon champagne, Trappestine brandy, and Waverly and Perfect bicycles.
In 1896, Mucha introduced a series of illustrations that was purely for decoration known as The Seasons, which depicted four different women in decorative floral settings representing the seasons of the year. Posters of beautiful women became a common format.
The Paris Universal Exposition of 1900 allowed Mucha to move in a different direction toward large-scale historical paintings and express his Czech patriotism.
In 1904, Mucha sailed to the United States to find funding for his grand project, The Slav Epic. Considered a celebrity in New York, Mucha met Charles Richard Crane, a wealthy businessman and philanthropist. Crane commissioned Mucha to make a portrait of his daughter in traditional Slavic style. Mucha would then later use Crane's daughter as the model for the Czechoslovak 100 koruna bill.
A few years later, Crane agreed to fund Mucha's project.
The Slav Epic was shown in Prague twice in Mucha's lifetime, in 1919 and 1928. It was then rolled up and put in storage.
Gismonda (1894)
Painting, part of the series The Arts (1898)
Slavs in their Original Homeland:
Between the Turanian Whip and the Sword of the Goths,
part of the series The Slave Epic (1912)
Saturday, July 23, 2022
Friday, July 22, 2022
Wednesday, July 20, 2022
László Moholy-Nagy
Art appreciation
Source: Wikipedia
Born on July 20, 1895, László Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian artist known for his constructivism, integrating industrial and technology into design.
At age 16, László was a writer. Some of his poems were published in local daily newspapers. A couple of years later, he studied law at the University of Budapest.
While servicing in the Austro-Hungarian army, he began tinkering with sketching, watercolors, writing about his wartime experiences. After being injured and then discharged, László attended a private art school.
In the early 1920, László moved to Berlin. He met photographer and writer Lucia Schulz, who he then married. She introduced him to making photograms--a photographic technique using light-sensitive photographic paper. They separated in 1929.
In 1923, he took a teaching and leadership role at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. There he developed his art of photography, typography, sculpture, painting, printmaking, film-making, and industrial design.
He's credited for coining the term Neues Sehen (New Vision), which became an art movement of photographic expression where the lens of the camera becomes a second eye for looking at the world. László is also considered the first interwar artist to suggest the use of scientific equipments to make art.
In collaboration with Hungarian architect Istvan Seboek, he constructed an early example of light art called the Light-Space Modulator, a kinetic sculpture using industrial materials like reflective metals and plexiglass. It was featured at the Deutscher Werkbund exhibition in 1930.
László put his creativity in photography, theatre stage design, advertisement, writer, and filmmaker. In 1931, he met actress and scriptwriter Sibylle Pietzsch and got married the following year. They collaborated to make the classic film Ein Lichtspiel: schwarz weiss grau ("A Lightplay: Black White Gray"), a film based on the Light-Space Modulator.
In 1935, László moved his family to England after the Nazis came to power in Germany. In England, he worked in commercial design, architectural photography, special effects designer, and filmmaking.
During this time, he began experimenting with painting on transparent plastics, like Perspex. László created kinetic sculptures and abstract light effects for the Neo-classic film Things to Come.
His artworks were included in the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition, held by the Nazis in Munich in 1937. The exhibition included works from internationally renowned artists and was designed to inflame public opinion against modernism.
In 1937, László moved to Chicago to become the director of the New Bauhaus. Although the school closed after a year due to financial backing, László opened the School of Design in Chicago, which then became part of the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
For the remainder of his life, László continued during commercial work design. He produced artworks in multiple media, including using static and mobile sculptures in transparent plastic.
He passed away on November 24, 1946 after being diagnosed with leukemia.
Light Space Modulator (1922-1930)
Perpe (1919)
Vertical black, red, and blue (1945)
via Hauser & Wirth
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