Art History 15 American Artists
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6th Grade Owensville Community School – Visual Arts Department This Outline the Property of: ___________________________________________________________ I. Winslow Homer b. February 24, 1836, Boston MA. Homer, a naturalist painter, is considered by many to be one of America's greatest 19th-century artists. Homer was almost entirely self-taught as a painter. Early in his career he sought work as a magazine illustrator, but during the American Civil War (1861-1865) he depicted scenes of soldiers and their battlefields. Later in his career, after taking up a solitary existence on the coast of Maine, he produced some of his finest masterpieces. His subject matter centered on nature, particularly the sea and its fishermen, often emphasizing the human struggle with the forces of nature. Homer died in Prout's Neck, Maine, on September 29, 1910. II. Mary Cassatt b. 1844, Allegheny City, Pennsylvania. In 1861, Mary Cassatt began to study painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, but proclaimed her independence by leaving in 1866 to paint in France. By 1872, after studying in the major museums of Europe, her style began to mature, and she settled in Paris. While in Paris, her work attracted the attention of the famous French painter Edgar Degas, who invited her to exhibit with his fellow Impressionists. Portrayals of mothers and children became her theme. Her portraits were not commissioned. Instead, she often used members of her own family as subjects. France awarded her the Legion of Honor in 1904. With the loss of her sight, she was no longer able to paint after 1914. Mary Cassatt died in 1926. III. Frederic Remington b. Canton, New York, 1861. Frederic Remington was educated at the Art Students League in New York City. He is famous for his lively scenes of the Wild West in paint and bronze. During the Spanish-American War, Remington served as a war correspondent and artist. His work is admired for its forthright and unsentimental naturalism. His paintings and sculptures often displayed an amazing energy and sense of movement. Remington was also the author and illustrator of several books about the West. Frederic Remington died in 1909. IV. Edward Hopper b. Nyack, New York, July 22, 1882. Hopper was one of his generation's finest representatives of the realist tradition of American scene painting. Between 1906 and 1910 he made several trips to Europe but remained unaffected by such new developments in European art as Fauvism and Cubism. After 1908, Hopper lived and worked in New York City. In his paintings, Hopper depicted the loneliness, isolation, and lack of variety of the daily life of small-town America through his compositions of solitary figures in cold offices, desolate houses, or hotel rooms, or through his bare, unsentimental rural and city landscapes. His work contains a strong sense of geometry using vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines and shapes. Edward Hopper died on May 15, 1967. Page 1 V. Georgia O'Keeffe b. Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, 1887. O'Keeffe is famous for the purity and clarity of her still-life compositions. She studied at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Art Students League of New York. She taught art in Texas from 1913 to 1918.O'Keeffe is best known for her large paintings of flowers and desert scenery, in which single blossoms or objects such as a cow's skull are presented in close-up views. A number of her paintings have an abstracted effect, the flower paintings in particular, in which the details of the flower are so enlarged that they become unfamiliar and surprising. Georgia O'Keeffe died in 1986. VI. Thomas Hart Benton b. Neosha, MO., April 15, 1889. Benton was born into a political family. He was named after his great –uncle, Missouri’s first U.S. Senator. Tom’s father was a member of the House of Representatives, and dismissed his son’s drawings as “scribbling and daydreaming.” It was Tom’s mother who encouraged his interest in art. His paintings with simplified, exaggerated shapes, overlapping forms, and rhythmic compositions with bright colors were meant to give people hope as the country tried to dig out of the Great Depression. Many Americans identified with the farmers, construction workers, housewives, and office workers in his paintings. His artistic style, with its emphasis on local culture came to be known as Regionalism. Benton died at work in his studio, brush in hand, on January 19, 1975. VII. Grant Wood b. Anamosa, Iowa, Feb. 13, 1891. Wood, known as a Regionalist, won popular and critical acclaim for his elegant, meticulously composed canvases. He expressed strong Midwestern themes in a stylized form of realism. He was strongly influenced by the van Eyck brothers during his four visits to Europe. His most famous work, “American Gothic”, caused a sensation when exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago. The hard, cold realism of this work and the honest, direct, earthy quality of its subject were unusual in American art. The painting portrays a farmer-preacher and his daughter in front of their farmhouse, but Wood actually used his sister, Nan, and his dentist, B.H. McKeeby, as models. It is a telling portrait of the serious and hard-working rural dwellers of the Midwest. An image of another of his paintings is depicted on the 2004 Iowa State Quarter. Can you name the painting? Wood helped found the Stone City Art Colony near his hometown to help artists get through the Great Depression. He became a great promoter of regionalism in the arts, lecturing throughout the country on the topic. Grant Wood died on Feb. 12, 1942, on the eve of his 51st birthday and at the peak of his fame. VIII. Norman Rockwell b. New York City, Feb. 3, 1894. Rockwell is America’s most famous and popular illustrator. His name is synonymous with his realistic, colorful and frequently humorous views of Middle America. In 1917 he sold his first cover to, The Saturday Evening Post, for which in the next 17 years he illustrated a total of 317 magazine covers. From 1926 to 1976 Rockwell illustrated the official Boy Scout Calendar. Rockwell was a careful craftsman with an ability to represent detail realistically. The subjects of most of his illustrations are taken from everyday family and small-town life and are often treated with a touch of humor. During his long career, he was commissioned to paint the portraits for Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. In 1977, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, our nation’s highest peacetime award. Rockwell died November 8, 1978 of emphysema at age 84 in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Page 2 IX. Alexander Calder b. Philadelphia, PA, July 22, 1898. Alexander Calder was an American sculptor most famous for inventing the mobile. In addition to mobile and stabile sculpture, Calder also created paintings, lithographs, and even designed carpets. Calder came from a family of sculptors, with both his father Alexander Stirling Calder and grandfather, the Scottish-born sculptor Alexander Milne Calder, sharing the same name. His mother, Nanette was a painter. Although his parents encouraged his creativity as a child, they discouraged their children from becoming artists, knowing that it was an uncertain and financially difficult career. Having decided to become an artist, Calder moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students' League. In 1928 Calder had his first solo show in New York. He spent much of the next decade crossing the Atlantic to give shows in Europe as well as in America. On one transatlantic steamer, he met his wife Louisa James. They married in 1931. After a long and productive career, Calder died on November 11, 1976. X. Jackson Pollock b. Cody, Wyoming, Jan. 28, 1912. Pollock was the central figure of the Abstract Expressionist art movement. In 1930 he traveled to New York were he studied under Thomas Hart Benton. Pollock relied on the unconscious mind to stimulate his art. He perfected new techniques of application, including dripping paint from cans and pouring and hurling paint onto flat canvases placed on the floor of his studio. These paintings would often take weeks of alternating periods of contemplation and painting to finish. After his death in an automobile accident on Aug. 11, 1956, he came to be recognized as one of the great influences on American art, having opened new boundaries of texture, line and expression. XI. Andrew Wyeth b. Chadds Ford, PA, July 12, 1917. Andrew Wyeth received his artistic training from his father, artist N.C. Wyeth who is best known for his illustrations for the novels Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe. Andrew Wyeth's brother, Nathaniel C. Wyeth, invented the plastic soda pop bottle. Andrew presented his first one-man show in New York City in 1937. The subject matter of his paintings comes almost entirely from two localities, the Brandy Wine Valley around Chadds Ford and the area near his summer home in Cushing, Maine. Wyeth paints in both watercolor and tempera. His technique is precise and detailed. Most of Wyeth’s most well known paintings are in egg tempera, which allows him to attain the greatest possible degree of precision. Wyeth was the first painter to receive the Presidential Freedom Award. Today, Wyeth's major works sell for in excess of one million dollars from private dealers and at auction. Andrew Wyeth died January 16, 2009. XII. Roy Lichtenstein b. New York City, October 27, 1923. Lichtenstein is a Pop Art artist well known for his painted enlargements of commonplace comic strips. Lichtenstein taught at Ohio State University. His studies were interrupted by a three year stint in the army during World War II.