The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (176 page)

 
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(1878–1943).
German painter and sculptor. From 1909 to 1914 he spent much of his time in Paris, where he became a member of
Picasso's
circle. After flirting with
Cubism
, he began to do purely abstract painting
c.
1919, composing with interlocking swathes of pure colour. From 1924 to 1939 he lived in Paris, where he was a member of
Cercle et Carré
and of the
Abstraction-Création
association. In his own country he was classed as a
degenerate
artist (before being destroyed by the Nazis, his sculpture
The New Man
was reproduced on the cover of the catalogue of the infamous exhibition of ‘Degenerate Art’ held in 1937). After being arrested in the Pyrenees he died in a concentration camp at Lublin.

 
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(1849–1919).
American industrialist, art collector, and philanthropist. He made his fortune in coke and steel operations and assembled a collection of paintings, sculpture, and decorative art under the guidance of Roger
Fry
and the dealer Joseph
Duveen
. On his death he left his New York mansion and a large fund to form the Frick Collection, which was opened to the public in 1935. It is generally regarded as one of the finest small museums in the world, with a choice collection of works from the Middle Ages to the late 19th cent.
Rembrandt's
Polish Rider
and Giovanni
Bellini's
St Francis
are among the celebrated masterpieces in the collection. Attached to the Frick Collection is the Frick Art Reference Library, which has major collections of books and photographs. It was founded in 1920 by Frick's daughter,
Helen Clay Frick
. In 1970 she established the Frick Art Museum in Pittsburgh, the city where her father had made his fortune.

 
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(1873–1966).
German-born American art historian. He had a distinguished academic career in Germany and, as professor at the university of Freibourg, numbered Erwin
Panofsky
among his pupils. In 1933 he was dismissed by the Nazis and emigrated to the USA, where he became professor at New York University and exercised a great influence on American art historians. His major publications include
Caravaggio Studies
(1955),
David to Delacroix
(1952),
Mannerism and Anti Mannerism in Italian Painting
(1957), and monographs on
Poussin
in German (1914) and English (1966).

 
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(1867–1958).
German art historian. The successor to Wilhelm von
Bode
as director of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, he enriched the collection particularly in his own field of Early Netherlandish painting. In 1934 he retired to Holland. His
magnum opus
is
Die altniederländische Malerei
(14 vols., 1924–37). In a prefatory note to the English edition (
Early Netherlandish Painting
, 1967–76) Erwin
Panofsky
described it as ‘one of the few uncontested masterpieces produced by our discipline’. Friedländer covered the same ground in a much briefer format in
Die frühen niederländischen Maler von Van Eyck bis Bruegel
(1916), translated as
From Van Eyck to Bruegel
(1956).

 
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(1774–1840).
The greatest German
Romantic
painter and one of the most original geniuses in the history of landscape painting. He was born at Greifswald on the Baltic coast, and after studying at the Copenhagen Academy with
Juel
and
Abildgaard
from 1794 to 1798, he settled permanently in Dresden. There he led a quiet life, interrupted only by occasional excursions to the mountains or the coast of Pomerania, pursuing with a rare and instinctive single-mindedness his personal insight into the spiritual significance of landscape. He was intensely introspective and often melancholic (although his marriage at the age of 44 brought him much happiness), and he relied on deep contemplation to summon up mentally the images he was to put on canvas. ‘Close your bodily eye, so that you may see your picture first with your spiritual eye’, he wrote, ‘then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react on others from the outside inwards.’ Friedrich began with topographical drawings in pencil and sepia wash and did not take up oil painting until 1807. One of his first works in the new medium.
The Cross in the Mountains
(Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, 1808), caused great controversy because it was painted as an altarpiece, and to use a landscape in this unprecedented way was considered sacrilege by some critics. His choice of subjects often broke new ground and he discovered aspects of nature so far unseen: an infinite stretch of sea or mountains, snow-covered or fog-bound plains seen in the strange light of sunrise, dusk, or moonlight. He seldom uses obvious religious imagery, but his landscapes convey a sense of haunting spirituality. Friedrich had a severe stroke in 1835 and returned to his small sepias. He was virtually forgotten at the time of his death and his immediate influence was confined to members of his circle in Dresden, notably G. F.
Kersting
, who sometimes painted the figures in Friedrich's work. It was only at the end of the 19th cent., with the rise of
Symbolism
, that his greatness began to be recognized. Most of his work is still in Germany;
Winter Landscape
, acquired by the National Gallery, London, in 1988, is the first Friedrich oil to enter a British public collection.