Dutch 1872-1944 Piet Mondrian Location was a Dutch painter. He was an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neo-Plasticism. This consisted of a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines and the use of the three primary colours. When 47-year-old Piet Mondrian left his artistically conservative native Holland for unfettered Paris for the second and last time in 1919, he set about at once to make his studio a nurturing environment for paintings he had in mind that would increasingly express the principles of Neo-Plasticism about which he had been writing for two years. To hide the studio's structural flaws quickly and inexpensively, he tacked up large rectangular placards, each in a single color or neutral hue. Smaller colored paper squares and rectangles, composed together, accented the walls. Then came an intense period of painting. Then again he addressed the walls, repositioning the colored cutouts, adding to their number, altering the dynamics of color and space, producing new tensions and equilibrium. Before long, he had established a creative schedule in which a period of painting took turns with a period of experimentally regrouping the smaller papers on the walls, a process that directly fed the next period of painting. It was a pattern he followed for the rest of his life, through wartime moves from Paris to London??s Hampstead in 1938 and 1940, across the Atlantic to Manhattan. At 71 in the fall of 1943, Mondrian moved into his second and final New York studio at 15 East 59th Street, and set about again to create the environment he had learned over the years was most congenial to his modest way of life and most stimulating to his art. He painted the high walls the same off-white he used on his easel and on the seats, tables and storage cases he designed and fashioned meticulously from discarded orange and apple-crates. He glossed the top of a white metal stool in the same brilliant primary red he applied to the cardboard sheath he made for the radio-phonograph that spilled forth his beloved jazz from well-traveled records, Visitors to this last studio seldom saw more than one or two new canvases, but found, often to their astonishment, that eight large compositions of colored bits of paper he had tacked and re-tacked to the walls in ever-changing relationships constituted together an environment that, paradoxically and simultaneously, was both kinetic and serene, stimulating and restful. It was the best space, Mondrian said, that he had ever inhabited. Tragically, he was there for only a few months: he died of pneumonia in February 1944.  Related Paintings of Piet Mondrian :. | Mill under the night | The still life with plaster | Conformation | Broadway Boogie Woogie | Composition with Black, Red, Gray, Yellow, and Blue |
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Cagnaccio di San Pietro
Italian, 1897-1946,born Natale Bentivoglio Scarpa, was an Italian magic realist painter. He had his artistic training at the Academy of Fine Art in Venice, where he studied under Ettore Tito. Cagnaccio's early paintings were in a Futurist idiom, but by the early 1920s he had adopted a very smoothly brushed, nearly photographic style. His work, which includes portraits, nudes, still lifes, scenes of popular life, and religious pictures, shows the influence of the German painters of the New Objectivity. One of his best-known paintings, After the Orgy (1928) shows three nude women asleep on a floor littered with wine bottles, playing cards and cigarettes.
Kasimir Malevich
1878-1935 Kasimir Malevich Gallery In 1904, after the death of his father, he moved to Moscow. He studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture from 1904 to 1910 and in the studio of Fedor Rerberg in Moscow (1904?C1910). In 1911 he participated in the second exhibition of the group Soyuz Molodyozhi (Union of Youth) in St. Petersburg, together with Vladimir Tatlin and, in 1912, the group held its third exhibition, which included works by Aleksandra Ekster, Tatlin and others. In the same year he participated in an exhibition by the collective Donkey's Tail in Moscow. By that time his works were influenced by Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, Russian avant-garde painters who were particularly interested in Russian folk art called lubok. In March 1913 a major exhibition of Aristarkh Lentulov's paintings opened in Moscow. The effect of this exhibition was comparable with that of Paul Cezanne in Paris in 1907, as all the main Russian avant-garde artists of the time (including Malevich) immediately absorbed the cubist principles and began using them in their works. Already in the same year the Cubo-Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun with Malevich's stage-set became a great success. In 1914 Malevich exhibited his works in the Salon des Independants in Paris together with Alexander Archipenko, Sonia Delaunay, Aleksandra Ekster and Vadim Meller, among others. It remains one of the great mysteries of 20th century art, how, while leading a comfortable career, during which he just followed all the latest trends in art, in 1915 Malevich suddenly came up with the idea of Suprematism. The fact that Malevich throughout all his life was signing and re-signing his works using earlier dates makes this u-turn in his artistic career even more ambiguous. Be that as it may, in 1915 he published his manifesto From Cubism to Suprematism. In 1915-1916 he worked with other Suprematist artists in a peasant/artisan co-operative in Skoptsi and Verbovka village. In 1916-1917 he participated in exhibitions of the Jack of Diamonds group in Moscow together with Nathan Altman, David Burliuk and A. Ekster, among others. Famous examples of his Suprematist works include Black Square (1915) and White on White (1918). In 1918 Malevich decorated a play Mystery Bouffe by Vladimir Mayakovskiy produced by Vsevolod Meyerhold. Malevich also acknowledged that his fascination with aerial photography and aviation led him to abstractions inspired by or derived from aerial landscapes. Harvard doctoral candidate Julia Bekman Chadaga writes: ??In his later writings, Malevich defined the 'additional element' as the quality of any new visual environment bringing about a change in perception .... In a series of diagrams illustrating the ??environments' that influence various painterly styles, the Suprematist is associated with a series of aerial views rendering the familiar landscape into an abstraction..." (excerpted from Ms. Bekman Chadaga's paper delivered at Columbia University's 2000 symposium, "Art, Technology, and Modernity in Russia and Eastern Europe").
Mattia Preti
1613-1699 Italian Mattia Preti Gallery Born in the small town of Taverna in Calabria, Preti was sometimes called Il Cavalier Calabrese (the Knight of Calabria). His early apprenticeship is said to have been with the "Caravaggist" Giovanni Battista Caracciolo, which may account for his life-long interest in the style of Caravaggio. Probably before 1630, Preti joined his brother Gregorio (also a painter), in Rome, where he became familiar with the techniques of Caravaggio and his school as well as with the work of Guercino, Rubens, Reni, Giovanni Lanfranco. In Rome, he painted fresco cycles in Sant'Andrea della Valle and San Carlo ai Catinari. Between 1644 and 1646, he may have spent time in Venice, but remained based in Rome until 1653, returning later in 1660-61. He painted frescoes for the church of San Biago at Modena (app. 1651-2) and participated in the fresco decoration of the Palazzo Pamphilj in Valmontone (documented 1660-61), where he worked along with Pier Francesco Mola, Gaspar Dughet, Francesco Cozza, Giovanni Battista Tassi (il Cortonese), and Guglielmo Cortese. Jacob blessing his grandchildren, Ephraim and Manasseh, in the presence Joseph and their mother Asenath. Whitfield Fine Art Gallery, London.During most of 1653-1660, he worked in Naples, where he was influenced by the other major Neapolitan painter of his era, Luca Giordano. One of Preti's masterpieces were a series of large frescoes, ex-votos of the plague (which were painted on seven city gates but have since been lost to the ravages of time), depicting the Virgin or saints delivering people from the plague. Two sketches are in the Capodimonte Museum in Naples. The bozzetto of the Virgin with the baby Jesus looming over the dying and their burial parties envisions a Last Judgement presided over by a woman. Preti's salary for the work was 1500 ducats. Preti also won a commission to supervise the construction, carving, and gilding for the nave and transept of San Pietro a Maiella. Having been made a Knight of Grace in the Order of St John, he visited the order??s headquarters in Malta in 1659 and spent most of the remainder of his life there. Preti transformed the interior of St. John's Co-Cathedral in Valletta, with a huge series of paintings on the life and martyrdom of St. John the Baptist (1661-1666). In Malta one also can find many paintings of Preti in private collections and in parish churches. His increased reputation led to an expanded circle of patrons, and he received commissions from all over Europe. Preti was fortunate to enjoy a long career and have a considerable artistic output. His paintings, representative of the exuberant late Baroque style, are held by many great museums, including important collections in Naples, Valletta, and in his hometown of Taverna.