I Know an Artist: The inspiring connections between the world's greatest artists

by Susie Hodge, Sarah Papworth (Illustrator)

Overview

Discover the fascinating connections between the world's greatest artists. 

I Know an Artist introduces some of the most inspirational stories of friendship, love, creativity and shared passions in the world of art. Each of the 84 illustrated profiles reveal the fascinating links between some of the best known artists. Whether through teaching, as in the case of Paul Klee and Anni Albers; a mutual muse, as seen in the flowers of Georgia O’Keeffe and Takashi Murakami; or an inspirational romantic coupling like that of Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock.
 
In telling the tales of these creatives lives and achievements – each extraordinary and oftentimes ground-breaking – Susie Hodge exposes the fascinating web of connections that have fostered some of the world’s art masterpieces. Some are well-known, whereas others span both time and place, linking pioneers in art in fascinating and unexpected ways.
 
Illustrated in colourful tribute to each artists’ unique style, I Know An Artist is an illuminating and celebratory account of some of the art world’s most compelling visionaries. A perfect introduction for students, and a source of new and surprising stories for art lovers. 
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781781318447
Publisher:	White Lion Publishing
Publication date:	03/21/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	32 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Susie Hodge has written over 100 books on art, art history and artistic techniques, including I Know an Artist, Art Quest: Classic Art Counterfeit, What Makes Great Design, Modern Art Mayhem, Why Your Five Year Old Could Not Have Done That, Art in Detail and Modern Art in Detail. In addition, she hosts lectures, talks and practical workshops, and regularly appears on television and radio, as well as in documentaries. She has twice been named the No. 1 art writer by the Independent.

Susie Hodge has written over 100 books on art, art history and artistic techniques, including I Know an Artist, Art Quest: Classic Art Counterfeit, What Makes Great Design, Modern Art Mayhem, Why Your Five Year Old Could Not Have Done That, Art in Detail and Modern Art in Detail. In addition, she hosts lectures, talks and practical workshops, and regularly appears on television and radio, as well as in documentaries. She has twice been named the No. 1 art writer by the Independent.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Claude

Monet

ONE OF the founders of Impressionism, Oscar-Claude Monet (1840–1926) remained faithful to the movement's aims throughout his life: painting en plein air, capturing fleeting moments and using colour to depict the effects of light. Even the name Impressionism came from the title of one of his paintings. As a teenager growing up in Le Havre on the Normandy coast, he began painting outdoors with Eugène Boudin (1824–98). At that time, although some artists made outdoor sketches or visual notes, most paintings were completed in artists' studios. By painting directly in front of his subject, Monet believed he was capturing light and colour as accurately as possible, and using bright pigments, he rendered everything with bold, broken brushmarks. From 1874 to 1886, he helped to organise, and exhibited in, five of eight independent exhibitions with the artists known as the Impressionists. Although his style changed in later life, he always aimed to capture spontaneous, passing moments, representing the flickering sensations that our eyes naturally see. At first, his sketchy, seemingly unfinished paintings attracted ridicule and derision, but Impressionism later became one of the most significant art movements of the late nineteenth century. Because of his commitment to the movement, Monet's colourful paintings earned him the epithet 'the father of Impressionism'.

Throughout his life, Monet produced more than 2,000 paintings and 500 drawings, but initially he faced fierce family opposition. His father wanted him to join the family grocery and ship chandlery business, and his aunt would only support him in his artistic ambitions if he undertook conventional art training. After moving to Paris at the age of nineteen, Monet enrolled at a small studio that disregarded established teaching methods, where he mixed with the avant garde of the day. However, his family cut him off financially and he was often so poor that he could not afford to feed himself, let alone his wife and child. Despite the hostility towards him, Monet persevered. After more than twenty years, he achieved fame and financial success, and in 1883 bought a house in the village of Giverny outside Paris. By 1890, he was wealthy enough to buy a plot of land next to it. There, he employed six gardeners to build a garden and an enormous pond, which was filled with water lilies and spanned by a Japanese-style bridge. For the last thirty years of his life, the artist painted this untiringly in different lights and seasons.

Monet once told a journalist: 'I perhaps owe it to flowers for having become a painter.' His paintings of flowers and gardens broke with artistic traditions and generally elevated the status of such themes. He especially liked to paint his own gardens, first at Argenteuil, then at Vétheuil, and finally at Giverny. Similarly inspired by nature, Anya Gallaccio (b.1963) has frequently made flowers a prominent subject. In the same way that Monet broke artistic boundaries with his monumental paintings of lilies, so Gallaccio creates installations consisting of huge expanses of actual flowers, as seen in preserve 'beauty' (1991–2003).

Was particularly influenced by the painting Déjeuner sur l'Herbe by

EDOUARD MANET

Helped inspire the painting Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose by

JOHN SINGER SARGENT

Wrote thousands of letters to friends including

MARY CASSATT

Wrote thousands of letters to friends including

AUGUSTE RODIN

CHAPTER 2

ANYA

GALLACIO

FREQUENTLY INCORPORATING organic material, such as fruit, vegetables and plants, in her work, Anya Gallaccio explores the relentlessness of time and the processes of transformation and decay. Her installations of natural materials change through decomposition during their display period, so they look and smell wonderful at the start, but by the end of an exhibition they are quite the opposite. For example, Red on Green (1992) was a huge rectangle of 10,000 fresh rose heads on a bed of their stalks, left to decompose. Unpredictability is important. She says: 'I have a notion about a material and about how [it] might react, but I haven't got a preconceived notion about how it will turn out … You get more experienced about spaces and materials, so you can guess how the material will respond. But I try really hard to have some element where I don't really know.'

Gallaccio gained international recognition after participating in the 'Freeze' exhibition in London in 1988, organised by Damien Hirst (b.1965). The exhibition included the work of sixteen young British artists, most of whom attended Goldsmiths College together, and it elicited the monikers YBAs (Young British Artists) and Britart.

Inspired by a wide range of influences, from Italian fresco painting to the Minimalist works of Donald Judd (1928–94), Gallaccio also uses more traditional sculptural materials, such as bronze. For example, Because I Could Not Stop (2002) is a bronze sculpture of a tree adorned with real apples that were left to rot. Her associations with decay and death form alternatives to the traditional memento mori, which remind viewers of the effects of time on both beauty and life. A professor in the department of visual arts at the University of California in San Diego, Gallaccio was also nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize in 2003 for her work preserve 'beauty' (1991–2003), consisting of a wall of gerbera daisies pinned behind a sheet of glass. It evoked notions of still life and landscape paintings, as well as flower arranging and pressing, but gradually, as the flowers decayed, it became something else altogether.

In 2008, Gallaccio was commissioned by the Marquess of Cholmondeley to create the Sybil Hedge at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, based on the signature of his grandmother, Sybil Sassoon. Gallaccio created a sarcophagus-like marble structure at the end of a path, close to a hedge that is planted to follow the shape of Sybil's signature. In 1907, John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) painted Sybil Sassoon, the Marchioness of Cholmondeley: an elegant aristocrat swathed in a golden shawl.

Was nominated for the Turner Prize, as was

TRACEY EMIN

BRIDGET RILEY

also attended Goldsmiths College in London

CHAPTER 3

John

Singer Sargent

AN AMERICAN who spent most of his life in Europe, and an accomplished pianist who often played for his sitters, John Singer Sargent reflected the elegance of the Edwardian era. Like other American artists such as James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) and Mary Cassatt (1844–1926), Sargent trained in Paris, from where in 1874 a fellow art student, Julian Alden Weir (1852–1919), wrote: 'I met this last week a young Mr Sargent about 18 years old and one of the most talented fellows I have ever come across; his drawings are like Old Masters, and his colours are equally fine.'

Sargent was born in Florence to American expatriates who constantly moved around Europe as their three children grew up. The first time he visited the United States, he was twenty years old and was travelling there to secure his US citizenship. From early on, his mother nurtured his interest in art, and he studied briefly at Florence's Accademia di Belle Arti, and also in Paris at the studio of portrait painter Carolus-Duran (1837–1917) and at the École des Beaux-Arts.

Although he preferred painting landscapes, figures and murals, Sargent became the favourite portrait painter of the upper classes. Over his career, he produced some 900 oil paintings, more than 2,000 watercolours and a vast number of sketches and drawings. His style fuses the sketchy brushwork that he learned from his friend Claude Monet; techniques from the art of Titian (c.1488/90–1576), Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641), Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), Thomas Gainsborough (1727–88), Édouard Manet (1832–83) and Japanese ukiyoe paintings and prints; and his own astute observations. In 1897, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York nicknamed him 'the Van Dyck of our times', and in 1910, Walter Sickert (1860–1942) published an article comparing the clamour for his art to religious devotion, labelling it 'Sargentolatry'. Yet Sargent's work also provoked scandal, and soon after his death, he was judged adversely for not embracing modern movements such as Cubism and Fauvism. After the influential English art critic Roger Fry (1866–1934) dismissed his work as lacking aesthetic quality at the 1926 retrospective of his work in London, he became disregarded, but in the early twenty-first century he began to be appreciated once more.

Inspired in particular by the styles and palettes of Velázquez and Manet, Sargent painted Madame X (1884), a portrait of a society beauty in a risqué dress. The ensuing scandal compelled the artist to leave Paris for London. In 1884, after Manet's death, Sargent attended his studio sale and bought the painting Mademoiselle Claus (1868). The subject was Fanny Claus, Manet's wife's closest friend, and the work was a study for one of Manet's most famous paintings, Le Balcon (1868–69).

Particularly admired the paintings of

EDGAR DEGAS

CHAPTER 4

Edouard

Manet

TRADITIONAL ARTISTS tried to convey permanence, but Édouard Manet created a sense of spontaneity. He later became recognised as one of the most original and influential painters of the nineteenth century and a key figure in the development of modern art. Yet he did not consider himself to be a revolutionary; he simply felt that art had become disconnected from life.

From a family of diplomats and judges, Manet did not need to earn a living from painting, but he longed for recognition from the French art authorities and was shocked by the scandal his paintings provoked. However, the Impressionists admired him, and although he never exhibited with them, he led their discussions, advocating novel ideas such as painting alla prima (at first attempt) rather than building up paint in layers. His first picture to cause uproar was Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) of 1863. It was rejected by the Salon, the official art exhibition in Paris, and exhibited instead at the Salon des Refusés (the exhibition of rejected art). A naked woman sitting between two clothed men was shocking enough, but the paint was also thin and sketchy and the image unrealistic and flat-looking.

Full of contradictions, Manet's paintings not only included landscapes, portraits, everyday scenes and still lifes, but also scenes of history that conventional artists painted, although executed in his unconventional style. He was an accomplished draughtsman and a skilled printmaker and also used pastels proficiently. His astute observations of the people, places and events around him were his main inspirations, which the French art academy considered to be one of his greatest mistakes – modern life was deemed too unsightly for art. Despite this, Manet aimed to learn as much as possible from the great masters before him, and he travelled across Europe studying art. In Spain, the work of Diego Velázquez had a particularly powerful effect on him. He began to incorporate some of Velázquez's ideas in his own work, including dramatic viewpoints, Spanish subjects and black paint to emphasise contrasts of light. He spent many hours in the Louvre in Paris, studying the work of Spanish artists, and at one point he was nicknamed 'the Spanish Parisian'.

In 1862, Manet was copying Velázquez's portrait of the Infanta Margarita in the Louvre and began to chat with another artist who was doing the same. At twenty-seven, Edgar Degas (1834–1917) was three years younger, and also from a wealthy, although less conventional, family. Despite their contrasting personalities and artistic interests, they became friends.

Often worked in pastel on coloured papers, like

MARY CASSATT

CHAPTER 5

EDGAR

DEGAS

RENOWNED FOR his vibrant images of dancers, racecourses and women washing, Edgar Degas was associated with the Impressionists, but his approach was different and he rejected the label. Nonetheless, he helped to organise their independent exhibitions that were held from 1874 to 1886, and he took part in all but one of them. While the Impressionists painted directly from nature, capturing fleeting effects of light, Degas was more concerned with accurate drawing and movement. The Impressionists often painted landscapes en plein air, but Degas preferred to complete his work in the studio.

An admirer of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867), Degas initially studied classical art, but soon began combining conventional approaches with contemporary ideas. Many of his methods were also unusual. He often diluted his paints and turned his pastels into paste, then used them over paint. Over his career, he produced paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings and photographs, always aiming to capture movement and spontaneity, but spending hours studying, planning, sketching and photographing.

The son of a wealthy banker, Degas grew up in an upper-class family, but on leaving school he registered to become a copyist at the Louvre. His father was uneasy about his eldest son becoming an artist, so to appease him Degas started training as a lawyer. But within a short time, he left law school and studied with Louis Lamothe (1822–69), a former student of Ingres, who taught him the importance of drawing and encouraged his passion for Italian art. Later, he met Ingres, who told him to concentrate on drawing. He also took classes at the École des Beaux-Arts and went to Italy to study the great Renaissance masters. On his return, he painted portraits and historical subjects, but after meeting Édouard Manet in 1862, he focused on scenes of modern life, such as racetracks, café interiors, dance studios and theatres. After the 1870s, ballet dancers became his favourite theme, often depicted from dramatic angles or with limbs 'cut off' at the edges of his canvases. These original ideas derived from his understanding of photography.

An intelligent man, Degas had poor eyesight and was often irritable. Although he never married, he was fascinated by women's movements and postures. He first met Mary Cassatt when he visited her Montmartre studio in 1877, and he invited her to exhibit with the Impressionists. 'Most women paint as though they are trimming hats, but not you,' he said. It was the beginning of a friendship that lasted for nearly forty years.

Supported and encouraged

SUZANNE VALADON

Rejected the spontaneous methods of the Impressionists alongside

PAUL CEZANNE

CHAPTER 6

MARY CASSATT

AFTER SPENDING much of her childhood in France and Germany, Pennsylvania-born Mary Stevenson Cassatt moved to Paris at the age of twenty to complete her art education, and lived and worked there for most of the next sixty years. As a woman, she was barred from the École des Beaux-Arts, so she took private lessons with the academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) and also copied Old Master paintings in the Louvre. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, she returned to Philadelphia, but went back to Europe as soon as it was over. Cassatt made a living painting portraits of wealthy American women who visited Paris for its culture and fashions, and much of her work was accepted for the prestigious annual Salon. In 1877, Edgar Degas invited her to exhibit with the group of artists who, rejected by the art establishment, had been holding their own independent exhibitions since 1874 and who had been nicknamed the Impressionists, the Independents and the Intransigents. Influenced strongly by their ideas, especially by Degas and Édouard Manet, Cassatt moved away from her accepted style and began using small, sketchy brushmarks, lighter colours and compositions that showed the influences of photography and Japanese art. She began painting urban life, but as a woman she could not focus on the same scenes as the Impressionists, so rather than city streets, cafés and bars, she painted mother and child images, or females in bourgeois interiors, at the theatre or in gardens. Her models were family members and friends, especially her sister. She also experimented with printmaking and pastels.

In her determination, style and insightful evocations of women's lives, Cassatt was unique. She also had business acumen and served as an advisor to several leading art collectors, persuading them to donate their acquisitions to American galleries. Through her friendships and professional relationships with artists, dealers and collectors on both sides of the Atlantic, she helped to establish the American taste for Impressionist art.

In the 1890s, when she was well known, Cassatt met a fellow American who also went to Paris to study art. Lucy Bacon (1857–1932) had studied in New York, but moved to Paris in 1892 and enrolled at the renowned Académie Colarossi. Dissatisfied with the instruction there, she asked Cassatt for advice. Cassatt introduced her to Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) and Bacon travelled from Paris to Éragny-sur-Epte where Pissarro was living, to study with him. A few years later, she returned to the United States and established her career as an Impressionist.

Paved the way for feminism in art, as did

GEORGIA O'KEEFFE

(Continues…)

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Copyright © 2019 Susie Hodge.
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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION,
Claude Monet,
Anya Gallaccio,
John Singer Sargent,
Édouard Manet,
Edgar Degas,
Mary Cassatt,
Lucy Bacon,
Paula Modersohn-Becker,
Käthe Kollwitz,
Tamara de Lempicka,
Varvara Stepanova,
Francis Bacon,
George Grosz,
Hannah Höch,
Piet Mondrian,
Bridget Riley,
Ben Nicholson,
Barbara Hepworth,
Pablo Picasso,
Amedeo Modigliani,
Diego Rivera,
Frida Kahlo,
Georgia O'Keeffe,
Takashi Murakami,
Yayoi Kusama,
Marina Abramovic,
Cornelia Parker,
Auguste Rodin,
Camille Claudel,
Constantin Brâncusi,
Fernand Léger,
Sonia Delaunay-Terk,
Paul Klee,
Anni Albers,
Julie Mehretu,
Wassily Kandinsky,
Hilma Af Klint,
Agnes Martin,
Margaret Macdonald,
Sophie Taeuber-Arp,
Marcel Duchamp,
Alexander Calder,
Joan Miró,
Louise Bourgeois,
Tracey Emin,
Max Ernst,
Alberto Giacometti,
Paul Cézanne,
Loïs Mailou Jones,
Amrita Sher-Gil,
Paul Gauguin,
Vincent van Gogh,
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec,
Suzanne Valadon,
Maurice Utrillo,
Henri Matisse,
Pierre Bonnard,
Gustav Klimt,
Egon Schiele,
Edvard Munch,
Jasper Johns,
Andy Warhol,
Jean-Michel Basquiat,
Jenny Holzer,
Alice Neel,
Lee Krasner,
Jackson Pollock,
Hans Hofmann,
Helen Frankenthaler,
Robert Motherwell,
Yves Tanguy,
Leonora Carrington,
Franz Marc,
Aleksandra Ekster,
Kazimir Malevich,
Mikhail Larionov,
Natalia Goncharova,
Judy Chicago,
Méret Oppenheim,
Marlene Dumas,
Kara Walker,
Paula Rego,
Mona Hatoum,
Eva Hesse,