The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (133 page)

 
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Deineka , Alexander
.

See
SOCIALIST REALISM
.

 
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(1904– ).
Dutch-born painter (and latterly sculptor) who became an American citizen in 1961, one of the major figures of
Abstract Expressionism
. He went to America as a stowaway in 1926 and the following year settled in New York. His early work was conservative, but in 1929 he met Arshile
Gorky
, who became one of his closest friends and introduced him to avant-garde circles. During the 1930s and 1940s he experimented vigorously and by the time of his first one-man show in 1948 (at the Egan Gallery, New York) he was painting in an extremely energetic abstract style (often in black and white) close to that of Jackson
Pollock
. The exhibition established his reputation (although prosperity was still some years away) and after it he was generally regarded as sharing with Pollock the unofficial leadership of the Abstract Expressionist group. Unlike Pollock , de Kooning usually retained some suggestion of figuration in his work, and in 1953 he caused a sensation when his
Women
series (
Women nos I–VI
) was exhibited at his third one-man show, at the Sidney
Janis
gallery.
Woman I
(MOMA, New York, 1950–2), with its grotesque leer and frenzied brushwork, shocked the public and dismayed those critics who believed in a rigorously abstract art. One of these was Clement
Greenberg
, but New York's other most influential critic of avant-garde art—Harold
Rosenberg
—supported de Kooning .
Woman I
became one of the most reproduced paintings in the USA and de Kooning was enormously influential on young painters at this time. By the end of the 1950s, however, he was beginning to be regarded as an elder statesman whose best days as a creative force were past. From the 1960s he had honours heaped on him. His paintings continued to mix abstract and semifigurative work and in 1969 he began making sculpture—figures modelled in clay and later cast in bronze. He continued working well into his eighties, until he was incapacitated by Alzheimer's disease.
His wife,
Elaine de Kooning
(1918–89), was also a painter, notably of
Expressionist
portraits, and a writer on art. The couple married in 1943 and separated in the mid-1960s. A collection of her writings,
The Spirit of Abstract Expressionism
, was published in 1994.

 
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(1798–1863).
The greatest French painter of the
Romantic
movement. He was the son of a politician, Charles Delacroix , but there is some evidence to indicate that his real father was the diplomat Talleyrand, a friend of the family. His mother, Victoire Oeben, came of a family of notable craftsmen and designers. In 1816 Delacroix entered the studio of Pierre
Guérin
, who had earlier taught
Géricault
. His basic artistic education was obtained, however, by copying Old Masters at the
Louvre
, where he delighted in
Rubens
and the Venetian School. He met
Bonington
in the Louvre and was introduced by him to English
watercolour
painting.
Constable's
Hay Wain
, exhibited in the 1824
Salon
, also made a great impression on him and in 1825 he spent some months in England, admiring in particular
Gainsborough
,
Lawrence
,
Etty
, and
Wilkie
. In the Salon of 1822 he had his first public success with
The Barque of Dante
(Louvre, Paris). It was bought by the State (with Talleyrand perhaps pulling strings in the background), as was
The Massacre at Chios
(Louvre) two years later, ensuring the success of his career.
Gros
called this painting ‘the massacre of painting’, but
Baudelaire
wrote that it was ‘a terrifying hymn in honour of doom and irremediable suffering’. In 1832 Delacroix visited Morocco in the entourage of the Comte de Mornay and there acquired a fund of rich and exotic visual imagery which he exploited to the full in his later work (
Sultan of Morocco
, Musée, Toulouse, 1845). From the late 1830s his style and technique underwent a change. In place of luminous glazes and contrasted values he began to use a personal technique of vibrating adjacent tones and
divisionist
colour effects in a manner of which
Watteau
had been a master, making colour enter into the structure of the picture to an extent which had not previously been attempted. In spite of being hailed as the leader of the Romantic movement, his predilection for exotic and emotionally charged subject-matter, and his open enmity with
Ingres
, Delacroix always claimed allegiance to the
classical tradition
, and for his large works followed the traditional course of making numerous preparatory drawings. In his later career he became one of the most distinguished monumental mural painters in the history of French art. His public commissions included decorations in several major buildings in Paris: Palais Bourbon (Salon du roi, 1833–7; Library, 1838–47); the Library of the Luxembourg Palace (1841–6); and three paintings in the Chapelle des Anges of S. Sulpice (1853–61). In the last of these, his
Jacob and the Angel
and
Heliodorus Expelled from the Temple
are among the maturest expressions of his decorative richness of colour and grandiose structural integration. Baudelaire said of him that he was the only artist who ‘in our faithless generation conceived religious pictures’ and van
Gogh
wrote, ‘only
Rembrandt
and Delacroix could paint the face of Christ.’
Delacroix's output was enormous. After his death his executors found more than 9,000 paintings, pastels, and drawings in his studio and he prided himself on the speed at which he worked, declaring ‘If you are not skilful enough to sketch a man falling out of a window during the time it takes him to get from the fifth storey to the ground, then you will never be able to produce monumental work.’ Among great painters he was also one of the finest writers on art. He was a voluminous letter writer and kept a journal from 1822 to 1824 and again from 1847 until his death—a marvellously rich source of information and opinion on his life and times. His influence, particularly through his use of colour, was prodigious, inspiring
Renoir
,
Seurat
, and van Gogh among others. Delacroix's studio in Paris is now a museum devoted to his life and work, but the Louvre has the finest collection of his paintings.

 
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