1820-1876
He was born in La Rochelle. After leaving school he studied for some years under Louis Cabat, the landscape painter. Fromentin was one of the earliest pictorial interpreters of Algeria, having been able, while quite young, to visit the land and people that suggested the subjects of most of his works, and to store his memory as well as his portfolio with the picturesque and characteristic details of North African life. In 1849 he obtained a medal of the second class.
In 1852 he paid a second visit to Algeria, accompanying an archaeological mission, and then completed that minute study of the scenery of the country and of the habits of its people which enabled him to give to his after-work the realistic accuracy that comes from intimate knowledge. In a certain sense his works are contributions to ethnological science as much as they are works of art. Related Paintings of Eugene Fromentin :. | The land of Thirst (san15) | Moroccan Burial | Falcon Hunting in Algeria;The Quarry | The Tribal Tents | The Land of Thirst | Related Artists:
Laszlo Moholy-NagyHungarian
1895-1946
was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism. He was a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts.
Moholy-Nagy was born L??szl?? Weisz to a family of mixed Jewish and Hungarian heritage. His cousin was Georg Solti. He changed his German-Jewish surname to the Magyar surname of his uncle, Nagy. Later, he added the pseudonym Moholy to his surname, after the town in which he grew up (Mol, today in Serbia). After studying law in Budapest and serving in World War I, Moholy-Nagy was in Vienna in 1919, where he first discovered constructivism in exhibitions of works of Malevich, Naum Gabo and El Lissitzky.
In 1923, he replaced Johannes Itten as the instructor of the preliminary course at the Bauhaus. This effectively marked the end of the school's expressionistic leanings and moved it closer towards its original aims as a school of design and industrial integration. The Bauhaus became known for the versatility of its artists, and Moholy-Nagy was no exception. Throughout his career, he became proficient and innovative in the fields of photography, typography, sculpture, painting, printmaking, and industrial design. One of his main focuses was on photography. He coined the term "the New Vision" for his belief that photography could create a whole new way of seeing the outside world that the human eye could not. His theory of art and teaching was summed up in the book The New Vision, from Material to Architecture. He experimented with the photographic process of exposing light sensitive paper with objects overlaid on top of it, called photogram. While at the Bauhaus, Moholy's teaching in diverse media -- including painting, sculpture, photography, photomontage and metal -- had a profound influence on a number of his students, including Marianne Brandt.
He was editor of the art and photography department of the European avant-garde magazine International Revue i 10 from 1927 to 1929. Moholy-Nagy resigned from the Bauhaus in 1928 and worked in film and stage design in Berlin, where he was required to submit his work to be censored, and then in Paris and Holland before moving to London in 1935. In England, Moholy-Nagy formed part of the circle of ??migr?? artists and intellectuals who based themselves in Hampstead. Moholy-Nagy lived for a time in the Isokon building with Walter Gropius for eight months and then settled in Golders Green. Gropius and Moholy-Nagy planned to establish an English version of the Bauhaus but could not secure backing, and then Moholy-Nagy was turned down for a teaching job at the Royal College of Art. Moholy-Nagy made his way in London by taking on various design jobs including Imperial Airways and a shop display for men's underwear. He photographed contemporary architecture for the Architectural Review where the assistant editor was John Betjeman who commissioned Moholy-Nagy to make documentary photographs to illustrate his book An Oxford University Chest. In 1936, he was commissioned by fellow Hungarian film producer Alexander Korda to design special effects for Things to Come. Working at Denham Studios, Moholy-Nagy created kinetic sculptures and abstract light effects, but they were rejected by the film's director. At the invitation of Leslie Martin, he gave a lecture to the architecture school of Hull University.
In 1937, at the invitation of Walter Paepcke, the Chairman of the Container Corporation of America, Moholy-Nagy moved to Chicago to become the director of the New Bauhaus. The philosophy of the school was basically unchanged from that of the original, and its headquarters was the Prairie Avenue mansion that architect Richard Morris Hunt designed for department store magnate Marshall Field.
Unfortunately, the school lost the financial backing of its supporters after only a single academic year, and it closed in 1938. Paepcke, however, continued his own support, and in 1939, Moholy-Nagy opened the School of Design. In 1944, this became the Institute of Design. He authored an account of his efforts to develop the curriculum of the School of Design in his book Vision in Motion.
Moholy-Nagy died of leukemia in Chicago in 1946.
Fritz Petzholdt (1 January 1805 - 29 August 1838) was a Danish landscape painter of the Copenhagen School, also known as the Golden Age of Danish Painting. He spent most of his artistic life in Italy, where he painted refined landscapes in a light colour palette but died early, most likely by way of suicide.
Fritz Petzholdt was born into a prosperous home on 1 January 1805 in Copenhagen to grocer Johan Jacob Petzholdt and his second wife Josephine Marie Elisabeth Petzholdt. After completing an apprenticeship as a house painter, he attended the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1824 where he studied under Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, known as the farther of the Golden Age of Danish Painting spanning the first half of the 19th century. He graduated in 1828 and already the following year sold a painting, En mose ved Høsterkøb med tørvearbejdere (A Bog at Høsterkøb), to the Royal Danish Painting Collection.
Although he never won the Academy's gold medal, the traditional opening for Academy students to go abroad to further their studies since it was accompanied by a travel stipend, his family's wealth allowed him to travel to Harz the same year and then, in May 1830, to set out for Rome. On the way he visited Dresden, Prague, Nuremberg, Munich, Venice and Florence. In Rome he joined the Danish artists colony which had formed in the city with Bertel Thorvaldsen as its centre. He made excursions to the Roman countrysideeto places such as Tivoli, Subiaco and Olevanoeas well as longer trips south to Naples, Sicily and Corfu.
In the winter of 1835/36 he returned to Copenhagen due to his farther's illness and subsequent death. Shortly after the funeral, he returned to Italy with an extended stop in Munich on the way. From Italy he continued to Greece, a destination only Martinus Rørbye had visited before him among the Danish Golden Age painters. On 29 August 1838 he was found dead in his hotel room in Patras with his throat cut. Whether it was a case of suicide or murder was never settled.
MASACCIOItalian Early Renaissance Painter, 1401-1428
was the first great painter of the Quattrocento period of the Italian Renaissance. His frescoes are the earliest monuments of Humanism, and introduce a plasticity previously unseen in figure painting. The name Masaccio is a humorous version of Tommaso, meaning "big", "fat", "clumsy" or "messy" Tom. The name was created to distinguish him from his principal collaborator, also called Tommaso, who came to be known as Masolino ("little/delicate Tom"). Despite his brief career, he had a profound influence on other artists. He was one of the first to use scientific perspective in his painting, employing techniques such as vanishing point in art for the first time. He also moved away from the Gothic style and elaborate ornamentation of artists like Gentile da Fabriano to a more natural mode that employed perspective for greater realism. Masaccio was born to Giovanni di Mone Cassa??i and Jacopa di Martinozzo in Castel San Giovanni di Altura, now San Giovanni Valdarno (now part of the province of Arezzo, Tuscany). His father was a notary and his mother the daughter of an innkeeper of Barberino di Mugello, a town a few miles south of Florence. His family name, Cassai, comes from the trade of his grandfather Simone and granduncle Lorenzo, who were carpenters - cabinet makers ("casse", hence "cassai"). His father died in 1406, when Tommaso was only five; in that year another brother was born, called Giovanni after the dead father. He also was to become a painter, with the nickname of "Scheggia" meaning "splinter". The mother was remarried to an elderly apothecary, Tedesco, who guaranteed Masaccio and his family a comfortable childhood.