The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (47 page)

 
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(1902–75).
Polish-French graphic artist, painter, sculptor, and writer, all of whose work is explicitly erotic. In 1922–4 he studied engineering in Berlin, but he gave up the course after becoming friendly with
Dix
and
Grosz
and began working as a typographer and bookbinder, then as a draughtsman in an advertising agency. In 1933 he constructed an articulated plaster figure of a young girl, inspired partly by an infatuation with his 15-year-old cousin Ursula. He photographed his creation in various attitudes and states of dismemberment (sometimes partly clothed) and published a collection of the photographs as
Die Puppe
(‘The Doll’) in Karlsruhe in 1934; a French edition,
La Poupée
, was published in Paris in 1936. Bellmer sent samples of the photographs to André
Breton
in Paris, and the
Surrealists
were highly excited by these striking images of ‘vice and enchantment’. In 1938, in danger of arrest by the Nazis, Bellmer fled to Paris to join the Surrealists. He was interned at the beginning of the war (with Max
Ernst
), then lived in the South of France, 1942–6, before returning to Paris, where he began a long series of drawings and etchings that developed the violent eroticism of his dolls. Bellmer also produced paintings and sculpture in a similar vein. His work includes some of the acknowledged masterpieces of erotic art, but it was not well known until a large retrospective in 1971–2 at the Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Paris.

 
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(1615–96).
Italian biographer, art theorist, antiquarian, and collector. His most important work—a basic source for the history of the
Baroque
period—is
Vite de' pittori, scultori et architetti moderni
(1672), in the preparation of which he was helped by his friend
Poussin
. In contrast to former biographers, his method was to concentrate on artists selected for their importance and only these received comprehensive treatment. The Preface to the work was a lecture given in 1664 to the Academy of St Luke at Rome, which became the seminal statement of the concept of
ideal
art. In the prominence he gave to
Raphael
, Annibale
Carracci
, and Poussin , his rational Platonism, and his acceptance of the
antique
as the model of excellence, his formulation expressed the ideals of the Roman Academy and proved a decisive influence on French academic theory. It later became the theoretical basis of the
Neoclassicism
that was preached by
Winckelmann
.

 
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(1720–80).
Italian painter, nephew, pupil, and assistant of
Canaletto
in Venice. Bellotto left Italy for good in 1747, to spend the rest of his life working at various European courts, notably Dresden and Warsaw, where he died. He called himself Canaletto, and this caused confusion (perhaps deliberate) between his work and his uncle's, particularly in views of Venice. Bellotto's style, however, is distinguished from his uncle's by an almost Dutch interest in massed clouds, cast shadows, and rich foliage. His colouring is also generally more sombre, much of his work being characterized by a steely grey. The best collections of his work are in Dresden (Gemäldegalerie) and Warsaw (National Museum). In the rebuilding of Warsaw after the Second World War his pictures were used as guides, even in the reconstruction of architectural ornament.

 
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(1882–1925).
American painter and lithographer. He was a pupil of Robert
Henri
and became associated with the
Ash-can School
. An outstanding athlete in his youth and noted for his hearty, outgoing character, Bellows is best known for his boxing scenes. The most famous of them is
A Stag at Sharkey's
(Cleveland Museum of Art, 1907), remarkable for its vivid sense of movement and energetic, sketchy brushwork. Such works rapidly won him a reputation, and in 1909—aged 27—he became the youngest person ever elected an associate member of the
National Academy of Design
. He took a highly active part in the art life of his day and was one of the organizers of the
Armory Show
in 1913. After this, his work tended to become less concerned with movement, placing more emphasis on formal balance. He was a man of strong social conscience, and his work included scenes of the urban poor—of which the most famous is the crowded tenement scene
Cliff Dwellers
(Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1913)—and a series of paintings and lithographs about First World War atrocities. He did not take up lithography until 1916, but in the nine remaining years of his life he produced almost 200 prints, and he is accorded a high place among modern American print-makers. In the last five years of his life Bellows turned to landscapes and portraits and was considered one of the finest American portraitists of his day. His early death was caused by a ruptured appendix.

 
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