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| 2002: MAASTRICHT
ART FAIR |
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Born on 07 March 1744 or 1752: Jean-Louis
Demarne (or de Marne), French painter who died on 24 March
or 24 January 1829. — Demarne was born in 1752 in Brussels where he was baptized on 22 January 1754. In 1764 he came to Paris where he studied at the Académie 1769-77 under the history painter G. Briard. He first visited Switzerland and the Dauphiné in 1776 with N.-A. Taunay, and the sight of Karel Dujardin's works in the Randon de Boisset collection (sold in 1777) confirmed his inclination to paint picturesque scenes rather than history pieces. In 1779 he exhibited a landscape 'dans le goût de Karle Du Jardin' at the exposition de la jeunesse. He was agréé in 1783 (Paysage avec animaux) and showed regularly at the Salon 1789-1827. His work, which also included village fairs and guard-room scenes, was profoundly influenced by seventeenth-century Dutch masters, such as Wouwerman, Potter, Palamedesz, and Lingelbach. He never signed or dated his pictures and the titles of his exhibited works are repetitive. In 1806 he was commissioned to paint Napoléon et Pie VII à Fontainebleau (landscape by A. Dunouy). He worked for the Sèvres porcelain factory 1809-13 and made a number of landscape and figure etchings. He was made chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1828 and died at Batignolles, near Paris, on 24 January 1829. — Foire à l'Entrée d'un Village — Une Route — Women and Soldiers Revelling (1787, 49x57cm) — The Elixir (49x60cm) |
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Died on 07 March 1826: Abraham
van Stry I, Dutch artist born on 31 December 1753. — Abraham van Stry (1753-1826) was a painter of oils and watercolors born in Dordrecht. A versaitile painter, van Stry first made still life scenes of flowers and fruit. Later, obliged to assist his father, Leendert van Stry, he began to make history paintings and landscapes. Van Stry painted interiors and genre scenes in the style of Gabriel Metsu and Pieter de Hooch, and his landscapes reveal a close study of Cuyp. Van Stry also painted illusionistic grisaille imitations of marble reliefs, a popular decor in the Netherlands since the Renaissance. These were known as "witjes" ("wit" or white) after Jacob de Wit (1695-1754), who gained international renown in this style. In 1774 Abraham van Stry founded the society "Pictura" of Dordrecht. Beginning in 1818 he was a member of the Antwerp Academy. His works earned several prizes in Paris and London. — Young Sweethearts (36x46cm) _ This is a genre scene of the type popular in eighteenth-century Holland. Middle-class patrons delighted in their status and possessions, and enjoyed painted representations of this kind |
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Born on 07 March 1802: Sir
Edwin Henry Landseer, British painter specialized in animals
[why not landscapes? He wasn't named Beastseer after all.]. He died on 01
October 1873. — Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (1802-73) is an English painter, born in London, the son of the engraver John Landseer (1769-1852). Trained by his father to sketch animals from life, he began exhibiting at the Royal Academy when only 13; the same year (1815) he received a silver medal from the Society of Arts for his drawing of a hunter. Success came easily and early. By the age of 16 he was a constant and active exhibitor at the RA, already patronized by leading collectors and talked about as a rising star. His election as an Associate of the RA in 1826, when he was only 24, surprised no one but himself. In 1824, Landseer went to Scotland for the first time to visit Sir Walter Scott. He fell in love with the Highlands, and since then every year he used to return there for inspiration, drawing, hunting, and rest. Landseer's romantic vision of border history is reflected in his work, inspired by Scott, The Hunting of Chevy Chase (1826). Landseer was elected a full Academician in 1931; the decade that followed was the most successful and the most creative of his entire career. Major works, such as Hawking (1832), Scene in the Olden Time at Bolton Abbey (1834) won him critical acclaim, but it was often his smaller pictures of dogs such as The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner (1837) and Dignity and Impudence (1839) that captured the popular imagination. Most of Landseer's pictures were well known from excellent engravings of them by his elder brother Thomas (1796-1800). The publication of numerous prints won him a vast and devoted popular audience. The strain of keeping up his career, of satisfying his patrons, and of maintaining his social position cost Landseer more effort than he cared to admit. In May 1840, at the height of his powers and reputation, he suffered a severe nervous breakdown. In the face of all his personal and professional problems, Landseer continued to paint pictures of high quality, which enhanced his popularity. His The Monarch of the Glen (1851) was exhibited in 1851; the bronze lions at the foot of Nelson's Monument in Trafalgar Square were modeled by him (1859-66). He was a favorite with the aristocracy, but it was his position at court, which gave him an unrivaled prestige in the eyes of the public. As well as painting a succession of royal pets Eos, A Favorite Greyhound, the Property of H.R.H. Prince Albert (1841), Macaw, Love Birds, Terrier, and Spaniel Puppies, Belonging to Her Majesty (1839), Landseer undertook major portrait commissions, including the great unfinished picture of Queen Victoria , the conversation piece Windsor Castle in Modern Times (1841-1845), and the Portrait of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (1842-1846). Landseer was the most famous English artist of his generation, and he was mourned throughout the nation. He was accorded the honor of public funeral, and he was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral alongside Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769~1830), and J.M.W. Turner. — LINKS — Lady Louisa Russell, Marchioness (and later Duchess) of Abercorn Holding her Daughter, Lady Harriet Hamilton (Later Countess of Lichfield) (1834) — The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner (1837) — Dignity and Impudence (1839) — Windsor Castle in Modern Times (Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and Princess Victoria) (1843) — Scene in Braemar- Highland Deer (1857) |
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Died on 07 March 1957: Percy
Wyndham Lewis, Canadian British writer and painter, born
on a yatch near Amherst, Nova Scotia, on 18 November 1882. — Lewis founded the abstract Vorticist movement, which, in painting and literature before WW I, sought to relate art to the industrial process. (Tarr, Apes of God). Lewis went to England and was educated at Rugby School and the Slade School of Art (1898-1901). After leaving art college Lewis spent the next seven years in Europe. When he returned to England in 1909 he began publishing stories, essays, novels and plays. In 1912 Lewis became the founder of Vorticism, a literary and artistic movement. Members of the group included Charles Nevinson, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, William Roberts and Alvin Langdon Coburn. In his journal, Blast (1914-15), Lewis attacked the sentimentality of 19th century art and emphasized the value of violence, energy and the machine. In the visual arts Vorticism was expressed in abstract compositions of bold lines, sharp angles and planes. From 1916 to 1918 Lewis served on the Western Front as a battery officer. He was also commissioned by Lord Beaverbrook and the Canadian War Memorials Fund to paint A Canadian Gun Pit. However, his most famous war painting is A Battery Shelled. Lewis later wrote an account of his experiences in the war entitled, Blasting and Bombardiering (1937). After the First World War Lewis developed right-wing views and was sympathetic to the political changes taking place in Germany and Italy. On the outbreak of the Second World War returned to Canada. In 1951 Lewis went blind and was forced to give up painting. In his later years he concentrated on writing, this included the autobiographical Self-Condemned (1954) and The Human Age (1955). Percy Wyndham Lewis died in London. — ART LINKS — A Canadian Gun-Pit (1918, 305x362cm) _ A Battery Shelled (1918, 183x318cm) — Despite the difference in format and the - less obvious - difference in style, these two works may be considered as being two moments from the same story. Through his training, Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) belonged to the Vorticists, the London branch of the Cubo-Futurists. Along with the poet Ezra Pound, he edited the magazine Blast and stood out as a leader of that movement, if only because of his provocative stances and his taste for controversy. In March 1916, he signed up in the artillery. In May 1917, he met Orpen and, paradoxically modeling his style on this painter whose art he considered outmoded, he in turn became "official army painter" with the Canadian and later British troops. This took him to the Vimy sector, before he transcribed his observations onto monumental formats. A Canadian Gun-Pit and A Battery shelled are examples of this original enterprise - at the risk of disconcerting, Lewis combined the geometrical stylization of Vorticism and more immediately figurative elements, close to the portrait for instance. The former offers a wealth of detail, with the sheet metal of the dugouts, the mechanisms of the gun, the uniforms and camouflage nets. The latter is more elliptical; a group on the left observes impassively the devastation caused by the bombing as a dead gunner is buried by his comrades. More deliberately modernist in tone, it is based on a plastic language of angles, lines, changes of scale and schematization of silhouettes. These paintings are thus the product of one of the rare attempts at inventing a modern style of war painting._ Wyndham Lewis endeavors to show the war in terms of energy - Battery Shelled - in which the symbolism dominates, in which men lose their human form in action; chimneys wave and bend, and the very shells zigzag in lumps and masses across the sky. |
| Born
on 07 March 1872: Pieter
Cornelis Mondriaan “Piet Mondrian”,
Dutch Neo~Plasticist
painter born on 07 March 1872. Mondrian carried abstraction to its furthest limits. Through radical simplification of composition and color, he sought to expose the basic principles that underlie all appearances. [click on image for full self-portrait >] 
Born in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, Mondrian embarked on an artistic career
over his family's objections, studying at the Amsterdam Academy of Fine
Arts. His early works, through 1907, were calm landscapes painted in delicate
grays, mauves, and dark greens. In 1908, under the influence of the Dutch
painter Jan
Toorop, he began to experiment with brighter colors; this represented
the beginning of his attempts to transcend nature. Moving to Paris in 1911,
Mondrian adopted a cubist-influenced style, producing analytical series
such as Trees (1912-1913) and Scaffoldings (1912-1914).
He moved progressively from seminaturalism through increased abstraction,
arriving finally at a style in which he limited himself to small vertical
and horizontal brushstrokes. In 1917 Mondrian and the Dutch painter Theo van Doesburg founded De Stijl magazine, in which Mondrian developed his theories of a new art form he called neoplasticism. He maintained that art should not concern itself with reproducing images of real objects, but should express only the universal absolutes that underlie reality. He rejected all sensuous qualities of texture, surface, and color, reducing his palette to flat primary colors. His belief that a canvas—a plane surface—should contain only planar elements led to his abolition of all curved lines in favor of straight lines and right angles. His masterly application of these theories led to such works as Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue (1942, 39x35cm), in which the painting, composed solely of a few black lines and well-balanced blocks of color, creates a monumental effect out of all proportion to its carefully limited means. [< image] 
When Mondrian moved to New York City in 1940, his style became freer and
more rhythmic, and he abandoned severe black lines in favor of lively chain-link
patterns of bright colors, particularly notable in his last complete masterwork,
Broadway
Boogie Woogie (1942-1943). Mondrian was one of the most influential
20th-century artists. His theories of abstraction and simplification not
only altered the course of painting but also exerted a profound influence
on architecture, industrial design, and the graphic arts. Mondrian died
in New York on 01 February 1944.— [Nederlands biografie] — LINKS — Self Portrait (1918) — Little Girl (1901) — Still Life with Gingerpot II — Composition with Large Blue Plane, Red, Black, Yellow, and Gray (1921) — Composition blanc, rouge et jaune (1936) — River View with Boat (1908) — Molen (Mill); Mill in Sunlight — Avond (Evening); Red Tree (1908 ) — Amaryllis (1910) — Gray Tree (1911) — Composition No. II; Composition in Line and Color (1913) — Ocean 5 (1915) — Composition with Color Planes and Gray Lines 1 (1918) — Composition with Gray and Light Brown (1918) — Composition A: Composition with Black, Red, Gray, Yellow, and Blue (1920) — Lozenge Composition with Yellow, Black, Blue, Red, and Gray (1921)— Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue (1921) — Composition with Blue, Yellow, Black, and Red (1922) — Lozenge Composition with Red, Black, Blue, and Yellow (1925) — Fox Trot; Lozenge Composition with Three Black Lines (1929) — Composition with Yellow Patch (1930) — Composition with Yellow (1930) — Composition No. III Blanc-Jaune (1942) — Rhythm of Black Lines (1942) — Vertical Composition with Blue and White (1936) — Composition No. 8 (1942) — Composition No. 10 (1942) — New York City (1942) — Broadway Boogie Woogie (1943) — Solitary House (1898) — Composition with Oval in Color Planes II (1914) — Composition with Grid VII (Lozenge, 1919) — Composition with Grid IX (1919) — Composition A (1920) — Composition with Black, Red, Gray, Yellow, and Blue (1921) — Lozenge Composition with Red, Gray, Blue, Yellow, and Black (1925) — Place de la Concorde (1943) — New York City I (1942) — Victory Boogie Woogie (1943) |
| 07 March 2002: OPENING
OF THE MAASTRICHT ART FAIR Every year, despite continued grumbling about the dwindling supply of great paintings, furniture and decorative objects available today, thousands of collectors, curators, scholars and auction house experts flock to this Dutch city and the European Fine Art Fair, where some 200 dealers from 13 countries offer their best. Although there are fewer blockbuster paintings and objects than before, this remains the largest art fair in the world, with everything from a $40 million Rembrandt to first-rate examples of classical antiquities, modern art, diamonds, Oriental ceramics and 18th-century furniture. From the minute the doors to the fair opened here this afternoon, museum directors could be seen shepherding trustees, while scholars hovered around art in deep debate and collectors inspected the offerings. During the customary two days before the fair opens, when a committee of experts authenticates the works on display and the Art Loss Register checks for stolen pieces, a complement of Italian police officers arrived, taking digital photographs of artworks that they suspected might have been illegally exported from Italy. In February 200, Frederick Schultz, a New York antiquities dealer, who was convicted in a federal courtroom in Manhattan of conspiring to sell ancient artifacts that had been illegally taken out of Egypt. 
More than 50 people at a time were gathering behind a black rope to see
the star of the show: Rembrandt's
Minerva in Her Study (1635) [image >], which depicts
a regally dressed Minerva, goddess of wisdom, with long blond hair, seated
at a table, apparently distracted from a book she is reading. [a different
1635 Rembrandt Minerva]"This is the last history painting by Rembrandt that will ever change hands," said Otto Naumann, the Manhattan dealer who wants to sell it for $40 million. It was last exhibited in 1956 at the National Museum in Stockholm for the 350th anniversary of Rembrandt's birth. Mr. Naumann bought the painting last year from an unidentified Japanese company and is asking $40 million for it. "At least four museums are trying to raise the money to buy it," he said, emphasizing that many American museums have no Rembrandts. "Most of the big ones only have his portraits," he said. By the time the fair ends on 10 March 2002, nearly 80'000 visitors have come through the Maastricht Convention Center for an event vastly larger than any New York art fair. The show boasts many exceptional artworks. One painting, A Young Turk Cutting Up Tobacco With a Gentleman Smoking in the Background, is by the Italian artist Mattia Preti (1613 – 13 Jan 1699), and shows a slave with a shaved head cutting tobacco. Jean- Luc Baroni, a London dealer, bought it at Sotheby's in London in December. "They had dated it to the 1630's and people were uncertain about its attribution," he said. His own research concluded that the work was painted during the artist's time in Malta, around 1660. He has another painting, circa 1640, Lorenzo Lippi's Creation of Music, a portrait of Music, personified by a pretty girl, with her score resting on a spinet while she dips her quill pen into an ink pot. Her hand rests on an anvil and hammer, a reference to Pythagoras' ideas about the origin of music. Among the old master dealers is Charles Beddington, whose three-month-old gallery, Beddington & Blackman, brought a pair of panel paintings by Johannes Hispanus, who worked in Italy from 1495 to 1528, which tell the story of the early life of Achilles. This year modern art can be found in many guises. One of the most interesting works is Birds in Flight, a 1928 stone fresco by Brancusi (1876-1957) that is hanging at Dickinson Roundell of New York and London. James Roundell discovered it unrecognized in a London collection. The theme of birds in flight was a fundamental one in Brancusi's work. While few frescoes by Brancusi are known, several works relate to this work, including Birds in Flight, a watercolor. [Brancusi's sculptures Bird in Space (1923), Golden Bird (1920)] One of the most talked about booths at the fair belongs to Kunstkammer Georg Laue, a Munich dealer, which is showing more than 100 memento mori, or reminders of man's mortality. They depict the fascination with the transitory nature of life and human frailty from the 16th to the 20th centuries. The works include a 17th-century watch in the form of a skull, a pair of early 17th- century Italian boxwood skeletons, a Japanese ivory skull with a snake tightly woven around it and a series of 1920's photographs of a young woman seduced by a skeleton. One of the show's most popular pieces is a wooden sculpture, circa 1520, of a monk standing with a skeleton. — Other examples of Memento Mori or Vanitas (unrelated to the fair): Giovanni Martinelli, Memento Mori (Death Comes to the Banquet Table) Master M.Z., Vanitas (Memento Mori) (1503) Pieter Boel:: Large Vanitas Still-Life (1663) Abraham Mignon:: The Nature as a symbol of Vanitas (1675) [pas un sujet très mignon!] David Bailly:: Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols (1651) Gregor Erhart:: Vanitas (1500) Harmen Steenwijck:: Vanitas (1640) Nicolaes van Verandael:: Vanitas Willem van Aelst::Vanitas Flower Still Life (1656) Barthel Bruyn the Elder:: Vanitas Still-Life Jacques de Gheyn II:: Vanitas Still Life (1603) Jan van Kessel:: Vanitas Still Life (1665 Jan Lievens:: Vanitas Still Life (1630) Jan Davidszoon de Heem:: Vanitas Cornelis de Heem:: Vanitas Still-Life with Musical Instruments (1661 Pieter Claesz:: Vanitas Still-Life (1630) — Vanitas Still Life with the Spinario Frans Hals:: Young Man with a Skull (Vanitas) (1628) |
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