The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (97 page)

(1887–1985).
Russian-born painter and designer, active mainly in France. In 1910–14 he lived in Paris, where he was a member of an avant-garde circle including
Apollinaire
,
Delaunay
,
Léger
,
Modigliani
, and
Soutine
. After going to Berlin in 1914 for his first one-man show (at the
Sturm
gallery) he visited Russia and had to remain because of the outbreak of war. After the Revolution in 1917 he was appointed Fine Arts Commissar for his home province of Vitebsk, where he founded and directed an art academy.
Malevich
was among the other teachers there, and after disagreements with him Chagall moved to Moscow in 1920 and there designed for the newly founded Jewish Theatre. He returned to Paris in 1923 at the invitation of Ambroise
Vollard
, who commissioned much work from him, including illustrations for Gogol's
Dead Souls
(1923) and other books. In 1941 he moved from occupied France to the USA, where he lived for the next seven years. He returned to Paris in 1948 and from 1950 lived at St-Paul-de-Vence near Nice, working to the end of his very long life—the last survivor of the generation of artists who had revolutionized painting in the years leading up to the First World War.
Chagall was prolific as a painter and also as a book illustrator and designer of stained glass (in which he did some of his most impressive late work) and of sets and costumes for the theatre and ballet. His work was dominated by two rich sources of imagery: memories of the Jewish life and folklore of his early years in Russia; and the Bible (he was born into a deeply religious family). He derived some of his spatial dislocations and prismatic colour effects from
Cubism
and
Orphism
, but he created a highly distinctive style, remarkable for its sense of fairy-tale fantasy. This caused André
Breton
to claim him as one of the precursors of
Surrealism
, but Chagall himself stated in his autobiography
Ma vie
(1931) that however fantastic and imaginative his pictures appeared, he painted only direct reminiscences of his early years. There is a museum devoted to Chagall's religious art in Nice. The work there does not always show him at his best, for he could be sentimental and overblown, but his finest paintings have won him an enduring reputation as one of the greatest masters of the School of
Paris
.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

chalk
.

Drawing material made from various soft stones or earths. There are three main types; black chalk (made from stones such as carbonaceous shale); red chalk, also called sanguine (made from red ochre or other red earths); and white chalk (made from various limestones). Chalk drawings are known from prehistoric times, but the medium really came into its own in the late 15th cent., notably in the hands of
Leonardo
, who made many drawings in red and black chalk. The terms ‘chalk’, ‘crayon’, and
‘pastel’
are not always clearly distinguished from one another. Crayons, as the term is now generally understood, are sticks of colour made with an oily or waxy binding substance, and pastels are sticks of powdered pigment bound with gum. In other words, they are both manufactured products, whereas chalk needs only to be cut to a suitable shape and size to be usable.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1927– ).
American sculptor. His early sculpture, made largely from metal pipes, was influenced by that of David
Smith
, but in 1957 he began introducing scrap metal parts from cars in his work and from 1959 he concentrated on sculpture made entirely from crushed automobile parts welded together. Usually he retains the original colours, and the expressive energy of his work, with its twisted planes and crumpled surfaces, has been compared to that
Action painting
. Many of his compositions are intended for wall hanging rather than to stand on the ground. An example is
Dolores James
(Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1962). Although he has continued with work of this type, which has been widely acclaimed since the early 1960s, Chamberlain has also experimented with other types of sculpture and other media. In 1966, for example, he started using urethane foam, as in
Koko-Nor II
(Tate Gallery, London, 1967). He has also done abstract paintings and made experimental films.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1602–74).
Flemish-born painter who came to Paris with his master Jacques Fouquières (
c.
1580/90–1659) in 1621 and took French citizenship in 1629. He became the outstanding French portraitist of the 17th cent. and was patronized by Louis XIII, the Queen Mother (Marie de
Médicis
), and Cardinal Richelieu . Two of his finest portraits of Richelieu (late 1630s) are in the National Gallery, London; they bring the personality of the cardinal vividly to life and show how Champaigne moderated the
Baroque
idiom of
Rubens
towards a classical simplicity in line with French artistic trends of the middle of the 17th cent. He was a friend of
Poussin
, and Anthony
Blunt
has written that ‘His portraits and his later religious works are as true a reflection of the rationalism of French thought as the classical compositions of Poussin in the 1640s.’ His style became even more severe after he was influenced by the Jansenists—a Catholic sect of great austerity—in the early 1640s. Some of his finest work was done for the Jansenist convent at Port-Royal, where his daughter became a nun: he commemorated her miraculous recovery from paralysis in his most celebrated work, the
Ex-Voto
de 1662 (Louvre, Paris). His masterpiece in portraiture might well have been his self-portrait of 1668, which is lost, but survives in a copy by his nephew
Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne
(1631–81) in the Louvre and in a superb engraving (1676) by Gerard
Edelinck
.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search