Derrier Le Miroi, Lithograph
The American sculptor Alexander Calder was born in Philadelphia; his father was a sculptor, his mother a painter. He was at first interested in engineering, and in 1919 graduated from the Stevens Institute of Technology as a mechanical engineer. It was not until 1922 that he became seriously interested in art; he attended the Art Students' League in New York from 1923 until 1926, when his first paintings were exhibited. That same year, after a visit to England, he went on to Paris.
"Calder Alexander (1898 - 1976)." A Biographical Dictionary of Artists, Andromeda. London: Andromeda, 1995. Credo Reference. Web. 10 October 2012.
The Family, Etching
Printmaker, painter, and draftsman. Particularly known for etchings, he specialized in dreamlike scenes inspired by surrealism. Born in Almeria, Spain, Federico Cristencia Castellón y Martinez emigrated with his family to Brooklyn in 1921, was naturalized as a citizen in 1943, and served in the U.S. Army during World War II. He had almost no formal instruction in art but traveled in Europe on several occasions. In the early 1930s he developed a style related to the veristic form of surrealism just coming to be admired in the United States through the work of Salvador Dalí. He died in New York. Castellón's work characteristically features vast, desolate spaces peopled by enigmatic people and objects. In the brightly sunlit but troubling painting, The Dark Figure (Whitney Museum, 1938), a menacing individual, garbed and hooded in black, wrings his hands in the foreground. Grouped before a wall behind him is a nightmarish arrangement of people and body parts, along with indecipherable elements and four drooping rings held aloft.
"Federico Castellón." Oxford Reference. . . n.d. Web. 11 Oct. 2012.
Guillaumin, Etching
French painter, a figure of central importance in the development of 20th-century art. He was born in Aix-en-Provence, the son of a hat dealer who became a prosperous banker, and his financial security enabled him to survive the indifference to his work that lasted until the final decade of his life. Much of his early career was spent in Paris in the circle of the Impressionists (he participated in the first and third of their eight group exhibitions), but after the death of his father in 1886 and his inheritance of the family estate (the Jas de Bouffan, which figures in many of his paintings), Cézanne lived mainly in Aix. His goal, in so far as he verbalized it, was to create an art combining the classical tradition of formal structure with a rigorous honesty about perception, and he summed up this aim in two much-quoted remarks: that it was his ambition ‘to do Poussin again after nature’ and that he wanted to make of Impressionism ‘something solid and enduring like the art of the museums’.
Chilvers, Ian, inasdf and John Glaves-Smith. "Cézanne, Paul." Oxford Reference. Oxford University Press. . n.d. Web. 11 Oct. 2012.
La Gaie, Color Lithography
1887–1985, Russian painter. In 1907, Chagall left his native Vitebsk for St. Petersburg, where he studied under L. N. Bakst. In Paris (1910) he began to assimilate cubist characteristics into his expressionistic style. He is considered a forerunner of surrealism. After some years in Russia, Chagall returned to France in 1922, where he spent most of his life. His frequently repeated subject matter was drawn from Jewish life and folklore; he was particularly fond of flower and animal symbols. His major early works included murals for the Jewish State Theater (now in the Tretyakov Mus., Moscow). Among his other well-known works are I and the Village (1911; Mus. of Modern Art, New York City) and The Rabbi of Vitebsk (Art Inst., Chicago).
"Chagall, Marc." The Columbia Encyclopedia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Credo Reference. Web. 10 October 2012.