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Giacometti

February 19, 2011 by · Comments Off on Giacometti 

Giacometti, Alberto Giacometti (October 10, 1901 to January 11, 1966) was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draftsman, and engraver. Alberto Giacometti was born in the Grisons in the south of the Alps Bergell and came from an artistic background, his father, Giovanni, is a painter well known post-impressionist. Alberto was the eldest of four children and is interested in art early in his life.
Giacometti was born in Borgonovo, now part of the Swiss municipality Stampa, near the Italian border. His father, Giovanni Giacometti, was a painter. Alberto attended the School of Fine Arts in Geneva. In 1922 he moved to Paris to study under the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, an associate of Auguste Rodin. It is there that Giacometti experimented with cubism and surrealism and came to be regarded as one of the leading surrealist sculptors. Among his associates were Joan Mir? Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso and Balthus.

Between 1936 and 1940, Giacometti concentrated his sculpting on the human head, focusing on the years sitter look. He preferred models; it was close to his brother and artist Isabel Rawsthorne (then known as Isabel Delmer). It was followed by a unique artistic phase in which his statues became stretched Isabel, her long limbs. Obsessed with creating his sculptures exactly as he envisioned through his unique perspective of reality, he often carved until they are as thin as nails and reduces the size of a packet cigarettes, to his dismay. A friend once said that if Giacometti decided to sculpt you, “it would make your head look like the blade of a knife.” After his marriage to Annette Arm’s small sculptures became larger, but the more they grew, they became thinner. Giacometti said that the end result is the sensation he felt when he watched a woman.

His paintings underwent a parallel procedure. The figures appear isolated, are severely attenuated, and are the result of continuous reorganization. Subjects were frequently revisited: one of his favorite models was younger than his brother Diego Giacometti. A third brother Bruno Giacometti was a Swiss architect.

In 1962 he received the grand prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale, and the award brought with it fame worldwide. Even when he had attained the popularity and his work was in demand, it still has reworked models, often destroying them or put aside to be returned to later. Prints produced by Giacometti are often overlooked, but the catalog, Giacometti – The Complete Graphics and 15 Drawings by Herbert Lust (Tudor 1970), comments on their impact and gives details on the number of copies of each print. Some of his most important images were in editions of only 30 and many have been described as rare in 1970.

In his later years, Giacometti’s works were presented in a number of major exhibitions throughout Europe. Riding a wave of international popularity, and despite his failing health, he traveled to the United States in 1965 for an exhibition of his works at the Museum of Modern Art New York. As his last work, he prepared the text to the end without a book in Paris, a sequence of 150 lithographs containing memories of all the places he had lived.

Giacometti died in 1966 of heart disease (pericarditis) and chronic bronchitis at the Kantonsspital Chur, Switzerland. His body was returned to his birthplace in Borgonovo, where he was buried near his parents. In May 2007, Giacometti, a top auctioneer, convicted the liquidator of the estate of his widow, French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas, of illegal sale of works. The auctioneer, Jacques Tajan, was also convicted. Both were sentenced to € 850,000 to Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation.

[Source: via wikipedia and various online sources]
[Source: image via WWW.CORD.EDU]

Michelangelo

February 19, 2011 by · Comments Off on Michelangelo 

Michelangelo, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (March 6, 1475 to February 18, 1564), commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian painter of the Renaissance sculptor, architect, poet and engineer. Despite making few forays beyond the arts, his versatility in the disciplines he has taken such a high order that it is often considered a contender for the title of the archetypal Renaissance man, with his rival and fellow Italian Leonardo da Vinci.

Michelangelo’s output in all areas during his long life was prodigious, when the volume of correspondence, sketches, and memories that survive is also taken into account; it is the best-documented artist of the 16th century. Two of his most famous works, the Pieta and David, were sculpted before turning thirty. Despite his low opinion of painting, Michelangelo also created two of the most influential works in fresco in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling and the Last Judgement on the wall of the altar of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. As an architect, Michelangelo’s Mannerist style pioneered in the Laurentian Library. At 74, he succeeded Antonio da Sangallo the Younger as the architect of St. Peter’s Basilica. Michelangelo turned the plane; the western end being finished with the design of Michelangelo, the dome was completed after his death, with some modifications.

In a demonstration of single date of Michelangelo, it was the first Western artist whose biography was published in his lifetime. Two biographies were published of him during his life, one of them, by Giorgio Vasari, proposed that it was the pinnacle of all artistic achievement since the beginning of the Renaissance, a viewpoint that continued to have currency in art history for centuries. In his lifetime he was often called Il Divino (“the divine”). One of the qualities most admired by his contemporaries was his terribilità, a feeling of grandeur with breathtaking and has been the attempts of later artists to emulate the passionate and very personal style of Michelangelo that resulted Mannerism, major movement in Western art after the High Renaissance.

London, February 19: Late Italian artist Michelangelo Caravaggio criminal record has been revealed, and they show the tumultuous life that led to the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

The exhibition documents in Rome, the State Archives shows friendships Caravaggio ‘everyday life and frequent fights, including one that earned him a death sentence from Pope Paul V, the BBC reported.

They are described in the police handwritten journals, legal and court scrolls all tied together in heavy volumes.

The picture documentation of the painting is that of an irascible man, who went from town carrying personal weapons – a sword and dagger, and even a gun – without written permission, boasting that he enjoyed the protection of ecclesiastical authority who ordered some of his most famous works.

He had frequent brushes with the police, got into trouble for throwing a plate of cooked artichokes in the face of a boy in a tavern, and made a hole in the ceiling of his rented studio, so that his huge paintings would fit inside. His landlady continued, so he and a friend bombed her window with stones.

The documents provide an entirely new account of his most serious fighting in May 1606 in which he killed a Ranuccio Tommassoni.

[source: via encyclopedia and various online sources]

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