French (1880-1950) Louis Icart was born in Toulouse, France. He began drawing at an early age. He was particularly interested in fashion, and became famous for his sketches almost immediately. He worked for major design studios at a time when fashion was undergoing a radical change-from the fussiness of the late nineteenth century to the simple, clingy lines of the early twentieth century. He was first son of Jean and Elisabeth Icart and was officially named Louis Justin Laurent Icart. The use of his initials L.I. would be sufficient in this household. Therefore, from the moment of his birth he was dubbed 'Helli'. The Icart family lived modestly in a small brick home on rue Traversi??re-de-la-balance, in the culturally rich Southern French city of Toulouse, which was the home of many prominent writers and artists, the most famous being Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Icart fought in World War I. He relied on his art to stem his anguish, sketching on every available surface. It was not until his move to Paris in 1907 that Icart would concentrate on painting, drawing and the production of countless beautiful etchings, which have served (more than the other mediums) to indelibly preserve his name in twentieth century art history. When he returned from the front he made prints from those drawings. The prints, most of which were aquatints and drypoints, showed great skill. Because they were much in demand, Icart frequently made two editions (one European, the other American) to satisfy his public. These prints are considered rare today, and when they are in mint condition they fetch high prices at auction. Art Deco, a term coined at the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Decoratifs, had taken its grip on the Paris of the 1920s. By the late 1920s Icart, working for both publications and major fashion and design studios, had become very successful, both artistically and financially. His etchings reached their height of brilliance in this era of Art Deco, and Icart had become the symbol of the epoch. Yet, although Icart has created for us a picture of Paris and New York life in the 1920s and 1930s, he worked in his own style, derived principally from the study of eighteenth-century French masters such as Jean Antoine Watteau, François Boucher and Jean Honor?? Fragonard. In Icart's drawings, one sees the Impressionists Degas and Monet and, in his rare watercolors, the Symbolists Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau. In fact, Icart lived outside the fashionable artistic movements of the time and was not completely sympathetic to contemporary art. Nonetheless, his Parisian scenes are a documentation of the life he saw around him and they are nearly as popular today as when they were first produced. In 1914 Icart had met a magical, effervescent eighteen-year-old blonde named Fanny Volmers, at the time an employee of the fashion house Paquin. She would eventually become his wife and a source of artistic inspiration for the rest of his life.   Related Paintings of Louis Lcart :. | A woman wearing a skirt | Deciduous | Four female deer | Wind and the line | Spring Walking |
Related Artists:
Pierre Pater The Elder
Picardy ca 1605-Paris 1676
Georges Seurat
French Pointillist Painter, 1859-1891 Georges-Pierre Seurat (2 December 1859 ?C 29 March 1891) was a French painter and draftsman. His large work Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, his most famous painting, altered the direction of modern art by initiating Neo-impressionism, and is one of the icons of 19th century painting Seurat took to heart the color theorists' notion of a scientific approach to painting. Seurat believed that a painter could use color to create harmony and emotion in art in the same way that a musician uses counterpoint and variation to create harmony in music. Seurat theorized that the scientific application of color was like any other natural law, and he was driven to prove this conjecture. He thought that the knowledge of perception and optical laws could be used to create a new language of art based on its own set of heuristics and he set out to show this language using lines, color intensity and color schema. Seurat called this language Chromoluminarism. His letter to Maurice Beaubourg in 1890 captures his feelings about the scientific approach to emotion and harmony. He says "Art is Harmony. Harmony is the analogy of the contrary and of similar elements of tone, of color and of line, considered according to their dominance and under the influence of light, in gay, calm or sad combinations". Seurat's theories can be summarized as follows: The emotion of gaiety can be achieved by the domination of luminous hues, by the predominance of warm colors, and by the use of lines directed upward. Calm is achieved through an equivalence/balance of the use of the light and the dark, by the balance of warm and cold colors, and by lines that are horizontal. Sadness is achieved by using dark and cold colors and by lines pointing downwards.
ANTONIAZZO ROMANO
[Italian Early Renaissance Painter, 1430-ca.1510 Antoniazzo was born in the Colonna quarter of Rome. He was influenced at first by the decorative manner of Benozzo Gozzoli and Beato Angelico, as well as by the local painters of Lazio. His first recorded work is from 1461, a replica (untraced) of the miraculous Virgin and Child of St. Luke in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore of Rome, for the seignior of Pesaro, Alessandro Sforza. From 1464 he worked for the papal court, producing at first a triptych of the Virgin and Child with Saints in Rieti. In 1467 he completed the decoration of the funerary chapel of Cardinal Bessarion in the church of Santi Apostoli of Rome, not far from his birthplace. In the centre of the decoration was an icon of the Virgin, now in the Chapel of St Anthony, a copy of the Byzantine icon in the Santa Maria in Cosmedin, the church of the Greeks in Rome. This icon in the Santi Apostoli is one of the most remarkable examples of Antoniazzo's considerable production of Virgins, generally taken from Byzantine models: he was indeed a much sought-after copier of icons. Later he worked to a series of frescoes in the Monastery of Tor de' Specchi in Rome, featuring stories of the life of S. Francesca Romana, and to the decoration of the public rooms of the Palazzo Venezia. In the 1470s Antoniazzo worked to the decoration of the Vatican Palace with artists like Perugino, Melozzo da Forl?? and Ghirlandaio. Through their influence his figures acquired gentler expressions and their garments were ornamented with decorative patterns, though always retaining several Medieval features. Together with Melozzo he worked to frescoes in Santa Maria sopra Minerva, and subsequently painted for that church a famous Annunciation (1482). The painting shows the Dominican Juan de Torquemada (cardinal) (d. 1468) presenting poor girls dowered by the guild of the Annunciation that he founded to the Virgin Mary. In the years between 1475 and 1480 Antoniazzo's production of altarpieces and panels with images of the Virgin increased as a result of the encouragement of the cult of the Virgin by Pope Sixtus IV. His later works show an increasing mannerism in their features, which were later imitated by several painters, whose works had been often attributed to the master. Antoniazzo was one of the three founders of the Compagnia di San Luca, the guild of painters and illuminators in Rome, and signed the statutes in 1478.