The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (225 page)

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1853–1918).
Swiss painter, active mainly in Geneva. He ranks alongside
Böcklin
as the outstanding Swiss artist of the 19th cent., but his early work (till 1890) was rather unimaginatively naturalistic, and his landcapes were hardly more than rather ambitious colour postcards for tourists. But with his
Night
(Kunstmuseum, Berne) of 1890 began a sudden change of style. From then on Hodler's canvases were filled with monumental and simplified flat figures, composed into a rhythmic and repetitive pattern of lines, forms, and colours—a method which the artist himself called ‘Parallelism’. Contacts with the Rosicrucians (he exhibited at the first
Salon de la Rose + Croix
in Paris in 1892) and possibly knowledge of the aims of Maurice
Denis
gave a markedly
Symbolist
flavour to his art (
The Disappointed
, Kunstmuseum, 1892). He applied the same principles to
history painting
(
The Return from Marignano
, Kunsthaus, Zurich 1896–1900) and to his Swiss landscapes. Holder became immensely popular in the German-speaking world and ranks among the harbingers of
Expressionism
.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1880–1966).
German-born painter and teacher who became an American citizen in 1941. From 1904 to 1914 he lived in Paris, where he knew many of the leading figures of
Fauvism
,
Cubism
, and
Orphism
. In 1915 he founded his own art school in Munich and taught there successfully until 1932, when he emigrated to the USA (following visits in 1930 and 1931 during which he taught at the University of California, Berkeley). He founded the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in New York in 1934 (followed the next year by a summer school at Provincetown, Massachusetts) and became a teacher of great influence on the minority group of American artists who practised abstract painting during the 1930s. Hofmann continued teaching until 1958, when he closed his schools so that he could concentrate on his own painting. This was to counter opinions that he was merely an academic figure and a symbol of the avant-garde rather than a creative artist. In the course of his career he experimented with many styles, and was a pioneer of the technique of dribbling and pouring paint that was later particularly associated with Jackson
Pollock
. His later works, in contrast, feature rectangular blocks of fairly solid colour against a more broken background. He gave a large collection of his pictures to the University of California, Berkeley. As a painter and teacher Hofmann was an important influence on the development of
Abstract Expressionism
. The essence of his approach was that the picture surface had an intense life of its own.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1697–1764).
English painter and engraver. He trained as an engraver in the
Rococo
tradition, and by 1720 was established in London independently as an engraver on copper of billheads and book illustrations. In his spare time he studied painting, first at the
St Martin's Lane Academy
and later under Sir James
Thornhill
, whose daughter he married in 1729. By this time he had begun to make a name with small
conversation pieces
, and about 1730 he set up as a portrait painter. At about the same time he invented and popularized the use of a sequence of anecdotal pictures ‘similar to representations on the stage’ to point a moral and satirize social abuses.
A Harlot's Progress
(6 scenes,
c.
1731; destroyed by fire) was followed by
A Rake's Progress
(8 scenes, Sir John Soane's Mus., London,
c.
1735), and
Marriage à la Mode
(6 scenes, NG, London,
c.
1743), which each portray the punishment of vice in a somewhat lurid melodrama. Each series was painted with a view to being engraved, and the engravings had a wide sale and were popular with all classes. They were much pirated and Hogarth's campaigning against the profiteers led to the Copyright Act of 1735. ‘I have endeavoured’, he wrote, ‘to treat my subjects as a dramatic writer: my picture is my stage, and men and women my players.’ Hogarth, however, was much more than a preacher in paint. His satire was directed as much at pedantry and affectation as at immorality, and he saw himself to some extent as a defender of native common sense against a fashion for French and Italian mannerisms. In spite of his rabid xenophobia, Hogarth made some attempts to show he could paint in the Italian
Grand Manner
(
Sigismunda
, Tate, London, 1759). These, however, are generally considered his weakest works, and apart from his modern morality subjects he excelled mainly in portraiture.
Captain Coram
(Coram Foundation, London, 1740), which he regarded as his highest achievement in portraiture, shows that he could paint a portrait in the
Baroque
manner with complete confidence and without artificiality. However, he could not flatter or compromise and had not the disposition for a successful portraitist. From 1735 to 1755 he ran an academy in St Martin's Lane (independent of the one at which he had studied), and this became the main forerunner of the
Royal Academy
. In 1753 he published
The Analysis of Beauty
, a treatise on aesthetic theory which he wrote with the conviction that the views of a practising artist should carry greater weight than the theories of the connoisseur or dilettante.
Hogarth was far and away the most important British artist of his generation. He was equally outstanding as a painter and engraver and by the force of his pugnacious personality as well as by the quality and originality of his work he freed British art from its domination by foreign artists. Because so much of his work has a ‘literary’ element, his qualities as a painter have often been overlooked, but his more informal pictures in particular show that his brushwork could live up to his inventive genius. The vigour and spontaneity of
The Shrimp Girl
(NG, London,
c.
1740), for example, have made it deservedly one of the most popular British paintings of the 18th cent.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search