The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (198 page)

 
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Gonzaga
.

Lords of Mantua between 1328 and 1708, who at several different periods attracted to their court some of the greatest Italian and other European artists. Under
Lodovico
(reigned 1445–78) and his immediate successors
Mantegna
was employed as court painter and
Alberti
began the church of S. Andrea. The presence of Isabella d'
Este
, who married
Francesco II
in 1490, helped to make Mantua one of the greatest centres of art collecting and patronage. Under
Federico
(1519–40)
Giulio Romano
built and decorated the Gonzaga pleasure house, the Palazzo del Tè, and turned Mantua into one of the main centres of
Mannerist
art. Under
Vincenzo I
(1587–1612)
Rubens
was made court painter; and the reign of
Ferdinando
(1612–26) saw the employment of van
Dyck
, Domenico
Feti
,
Albani
, and other artists. The spectacular collections built up over the years were sold by
Vincenzo II
in 1628, principally to Charles I of England, and important Gonzaga patronage came to an end after the sack of Mantua in 1630.

 
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(1876–1942).
Spanish sculptor, draughtsman, metalworker, and painter, the leading pioneer in the use of iron as a sculptural medium. He learnt to work metals under his father, a goldsmith and sculptor, but his early career was spent mainly as a painter. In about 1900 he moved to Paris and formed a lifelong friendship with
Picasso
, whom he had earlier met in his native Barcelona. He initially supported himself mainly by making metal-work and jewellery, and it was not until the late 1920s, when he was already 50, that he devoted himself whole heartedly to sculpture and turned to welded metal as a material. His best-known work,
Montserrat
(Stedelijk Mus., Amsterdam, 1937), is a fairly naturalistic piece, showing a woman with a child in her arms, and commemorates the suffering of the people of Spain in the civil war (Montserrat is Spain's holy mountain). More usually, however, his sculptures are semi-abstract, as in his series of
Cactus People
, formidable pieces with some of Picasso's savage humour. González’ work had great influence, notably on Picasso, to whom he taught the techniques of iron sculpture, and on a generation of British and American artists exemplified by Reg
Butler
and David
Smith
.

 
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(1878–1914).
British painter of landscapes, music-hall scenes, interiors, and occasional still lifes. He was the son of Spencer Walter Gore , who won the first Wimbledon tennis championship in 1877, and nephew of Charles Gore , Bishop of Oxford. In 1896–9 he studied at the
Slade
School, where he was a particular friend of Harold
Gilman
. In 1904 he visited
Sickert
in Dieppe; this marked the beginning of his close acquaintance with recent French painting (he returned to France in 1905 and 1906), and his enthusiasm helped to decide Sickert to return to Britain. For the rest of his short career Gore was part of Sickert's circle, becoming a founder member successively of the
Allied Artists’Association
in 1908, the
Camden Town Group
(of which he was first President) in 1911, and the
London Group
in 1913. His early work was
Impressionist
in style, but he was strongly influenced by Roger
Fry's
Post-Impressionist
exhibitions (Gore's own work was included in the second in 1912) and his later pictures show vivid use of flat, bright colour and boldly simplified forms. He died of pneumonia aged 35 and was much lamented by his many friends in the art world. Sickert said Gore was ‘probably the man I love and admire most of any I have known’, and his obituary in the
Morning Post
remarked that ‘his personal character was so exceptional as to give him a unique influence in the artistic affairs of London in the last dozen years.’ His son
Frederick Gore
(1913– ) is also a painter.

 
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(1904–48).
American painter, born in Turkish Armenia, who formed a link between European
Surrealism
and American
Abstract Expressionism
. He emigrated to the USA in 1920 and adopted the pseudonym Arshile Gorky, the first part of the name being derived from the Greek hero Achilles, the second part (Russian for ‘the bitter one’) from the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, to whom the painter sometimes claimed he was related (evidently not realizing that the writer's name, too, was a pseudonym). In 1925 he settled in New York, where he first studied and then taught at the Grand Central School of Art. Gorky took a romantic view of his vocation and is said to have hired a Hungarian violinist to play during his classes to encourage his students to put emotion into their work. He was among the first to recognize the importance of the abstract work of Stuart
Davis
, and owed a debt to
Picasso
, seen both in his haunting
The Artist and his Mother
(Whitney Mus., New York,
c.
1926–9) and in the
Cubist
abstractions which he did at this period. Gorky was never at home with geometrical abstraction, however, and preferred to adapt Cubist techniques to his own more painterly and expressive purposes. He came into his own when he became a friend of the circle of European immigrant Surrealists who during the early years of the 1940s lived in New York. Under this influence he worked out a style of abstraction using
biomorphic
forms akin to those of
Miró
. At the peak of his powers, however, Gorky suffered a tragic series of misfortunes. In 1946 a fire in his Connecticut studio destroyed a large proportion of his recent work. In the same year he was operated on for cancer. In 1948 he broke his neck in a motor-car accident and, when his wife left him soon after, he hanged himself. Gorky has been called both the last of the great Surrealists and the first of the Abstract Expressionists, and his work in the 1940s was a potent factor underlying the emergence of a specifically American school of abstract art.