The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (461 page)

(1823–1906).
Belgian painter, active mainly in Paris, where he settled in 1844. From about 1860 he achieved immense success with his pictures of young ladies in elegant interiors dressed in the height of fashion. His skill in rendering fine materials earned him the title ‘the
Terborch
of France’. He was a friend and supporter of
Manet
and influenced
Whistler
, with whom he was one of the first enthusiasts for Japanese art. Stevens also painted coastal and marine scenes in a rather freer, more
Impressionistic
style, similar to that of
Boudin
or
Jongkind
. His brother
Joseph
(1819–92) was also a painter, mainly of animals, and in his day was almost as famous and successful as Alfred (both brothers received the Legion of Honour). Another brother,
Arthur
, was an art critic and dealer.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1864–1946).
American photographer, editor, and art dealer who, during the first two decades of the 20th cent., did more than anyone else to bring the works of the European avant-garde before the American public. The son of a German immigrant, he spent most of the 1880s in Berlin and returned to the USA in 1890 with an international reputation as a photographer. His 291 Gallery (at 291 Fifth Avenue, New York), which he opened in 1905, presented the first American exhibitions of
Matisse
(1908),
Toulouse-Lautrec
(1909), the Douanier
Rousseau
(1910),
Picabia
(1913),
Severini
(1917), and the first one-man exhibition of
Brancusi
anywhere (1914). It also gave the first major exhibition of African art in America. Stieglitz also championed American artists, among them Georgia
O'Keeffe
, whom he married in 1924. From 1903 to 1917 Stieglitz edited the journal
Camera Work
, which he published from the 291 Gallery. At first devoted to photography, it was later extended to cover all the visual arts, including reviews and criticisms, and opened its pages to avant-garde American writers. The 291 Gallery was closed in 1917 when the building was pulled down, but Stieglitz continued his work with the Intimate Gallery (1925–9) and An American Place (1929–46), both of which promoted American artists of what had come to be known as the Stieglitz group. Stieglitz was a brilliant innovative artist in his own medium of photography. Learning from the avant-garde paintings which he exhibited, he experimented with various modes of abstraction and his work went a long way to revolutionize the concept of the photographic image and to establish photography as an independent art form. He formed a fine collection of art, much of which was donated to the Art Institute of Chicago.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1805–68).
Austrian writer and painter. He is now regarded as one of the outstanding Austrian novelists of the 19th cent., but he enjoyed little success in his lifetime, and full recognition of his stature came only after the First World War. For much of his career he worked as a tutor, then an educational administrator. His later years were clouded by the suicide of an adopted daughter in 1859 and he took his own life, cutting his throat with his razor, whilst suffering agonizing pain from what was thought to be cancer. As a painter he was self-taught, and as in his writing eschewed heroic events in favour of simple, everyday happenings. His sensitive perception of nature comes out in his remarkably fresh landscapes. There is a museum devoted to his work in Vienna.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(Dutch: ‘the style’). The name of a group of Dutch artists founded in Leiden in 1917 and of the journal they published to set forth their ideas. Members of the group included painters (most notably
Mondrian
and van
Doesburg
), sculptors (Georges
Vantongerloo
), the architect and designer Gerald Rietveld (1888–1964), and the poet Antony Kok . They sought laws of equilibrium and harmony that would be applicable to life and society as well as art, and their style was one of austere abstract clarity (see
NEO-PLASTICISM
). The journal was founded by van Doesburg and Mondrian in 1917 and van Doesburg continued to edit it until 1928 (it appeared roughly monthly, but irregularly; the place of publication also varied). A final issue (number 90) was published in 1932 by Mme van Doesburg in memory of her husband, after whose death in 1931 the group disbanded. At first the journal was devoted exclusively to Neo-Plasticism, but a
Dadaist
element crept in. Mondrian ceased to contribute to
De Stijl
after 1924 and in 1926 van Doesburg published the manifesto of a splinter movement that he called
Elementarism
. Despite this lack of cohesion,
De Stijl
was probably the most influential of the many avant-garde publications in Europe between the two wars on both ideas and artistic practice. It was, however, in architecture and the applied arts (including furniture design and typography), rather than painting and sculpture, that it had its greatest influence—notably at the
Bauhaus
and in the clean-lined architectural style known as ‘International Modern’, of which Rietveld's Schröder House in Utrecht (1924) is an early and famous example.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1904–80).
American painter, one of the major figures of
Abstract Expressionism
but the one least associated with the New York art scene. After working in war industries in California, 1941–3, he taught for two years at the Richmond Professional Institute, Richmond, Virginia. He then lived briefly in New York (1945–6), where he had a one-man exhibition at Peggy
Guggenheim's
Art of This Century gallery in 1946. Although he stood somewhat apart from the other Abstract Expressionists, he was friendly with Mark
Rothko
(they had met in 1943), the two men sharing a sense of almost mystical fervour about their work. In 1946–50 he taught at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, then lived in New York, 1950–61. By the time he returned to New York Still had created his mature style and had a rapidly growing reputation. He was one of the pioneers of the very large, virtually monochromatic painting. But unlike
Newman
and Rothko , who used fairly flat, unmodulated pigment, Still used heavily loaded, expressively modulated impasto in jagged forms. His work can have a raw aggressive power, but in the 1960s it became more lyrical. In 1961 Still moved to Maryland to work in tranquillity away from the art world. Scorning galleries, dealers, and critics, and rarely exhibiting, he considered himself something of a visionary who needed solitude to give expression to his high spiritual purpose, and he gained a reputation for cantankerousness and pretentiousness—his comment on his painting
1953
(Tate Gallery, London, 1953) is typical of his high-flown prose: ‘there was a conscious intention to emphasize the quiescent depths of the blue by the broken red at its lower edge while expanding its inherent dynamic beyond the geometries of the constricting frame … In addition, the yellow wedge at the top is a re-assertion of the human context—a gesture of rejection of any authoritarian rationale or system of politico-dialectical dogma.’ Still presented large groups of his paintings to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Art, and his work is represented in many other major collections.