The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (135 page)

(1935– ).
American sculptor and experimental artist. He was one of the earliest exponents of
Minimal Art
, producing examples of the type
c.
1960, before the term was current, and was also a pioneer of
Land art
. Some of his work belongs to the category of
Conceptual art
, as for example
Mile Long Drawing
of 1968, two parallel chalk lines 12ft. (3.6m.) apart in the Mojave Desert.

 
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(1855–1919).
British painter, born Evelyn Pickering; in 1887 she married
William De Morgan
(1839–1917), famous as a designer of pottery, tiles, and ceramics, but also a painter himself. She specialized in literary subjects, done in a style owing much to the
Pre-Raphaelites
and to such Renaissance artists as
Botticelli
(she and her husband spent each winter in Italy for the sake of his health). At the end of her career she painted several allegories relating to the First World War, exhibiting them to raise money for the Red Cross.

 
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(1883–1935).
American painter and illustrator. He made visits to Europe in 1904, 1907–8, and 1912–14, staying mainly in Paris, and during the last of these visits he became seriously interested in avant-garde art, particularly
Cubism
. Its influence was felt in his paintings of architectural subjects from about 1916 and he became one of the leading exponents of
Precisionism
. His most personal paintings are what he called ‘poster portraits’ (pictures composed of words and objects associated with the person ‘represented’) The most famous example is
I Saw The Figure Five in Gold
(Met. Mus., New York, 1928), a tribute to the poet William Carlos Williams and named after one of his poems. Demuth was lame from childhood and in the last decade of his life was debilitated by diabetes. Often he worked on a small scale in watercolour, rather than in more physically demanding media. The fastidious taste and concentrated energy of his work are suggested by his comment: ‘John
Marin
[another great American watercolourist] and I drew our inspiration from the same source, French modernism. He brought his up in buckets and spilt much along the way. I dipped mine out with a teaspoon, but I never spilled a drop.’

 
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(1870–1943).
French painter, designer, and writer on art theory. Early in his career he was a
Symbolist
and a member of the
Nabis
. In his article
Definition of Neo-Traditionalism
(1890), he made a famous pronouncement on art, which has often been regarded as the key to contemporary aesthetics of painting: ‘Remember that a picture—before being a war horse or a nude woman or an anecdote—is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.’ His early work did indeed put great emphasis on flat patterning, but he was also very much concerned with subject-matter, for he was a devout Catholic and set himself to revive religious painting. In 1917 he did frescos for the church of St Paul in Geneva, and he also designed stained glass and church furnishings. His writings on art are for the most part collected in
Théories
(1912) and
Nouvelles Théories
(1922). In 1939 he published a history of religious art.

 
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(1635–1709).
French art historian and amateur painter. De Piles was employed by Louis XIV on various diplomatic missions and was thus enabled to study the arts at first hand in many European countries. He was an admirer of
Rubens
and in the famous controversy of the ‘Rubensistes’ against the ‘Poussinistes’ (see
POUSSIN
) that split the French
Academy
in the second half of the 17th cent. he took the side of those who held that colour and
chiaroscuro
are of prime importance in painting against the upholders of the academic emphasis on drawing. He also recognized the value of genius, imagination, and ‘enthusiasm’ against the excessive domination of formalized rule. His best-known book is
Cours de peinture par principes avec une balance des peintres
(1708), which has become notorious for the section (the ‘balance des peintres’) in which he awarded marks to great artists of the past for their skill at composition, drawing, colour, etc., then added up the scores to form a sort of league table of genius. His criticism, however, is usually much less crude than this.

 
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