The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (245 page)

Justus of Ghent
.

See
JOOS VAN WASSENHOVE
.

 
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(1907–54).
Mexican painter. In 1925, at a time when she was preparing to enter medical school, she suffered appalling injuries in a traffic accident, leaving her a permanent semi-invalid, often in severe pain. During her convalescence she began painting portraits of herself and others. She remained her own favourite model and her art was usually directly autobiographical. In 1928 she married Mexico's most famous artist, Diego
Rivera
, who was twice her age and twice her size. Their relationship was often strained, but it lasted to her death, through various separations, divorce and remarriage (1939–41), and infidelities on both sides (one of her lovers was Leon Trotsky , who was assassinated while living in her house in Coyoacán, Mexico City, in 1940). Kahlo was mainly self-taught as a painter. She was influenced by Rivera , but more by Mexican folk art, and her work has a colourful, almost
naïve
vigour, tinged with
Surrealist
fantasy. Her paintings of her own physical and psychic pain are narcissistic and nightmarish, but also—like her personality—fiery and flamboyant. They were widely shown in Mexico and in 1939 she had successful exhibitions in New York and Paris, but during her lifetime she was overshadowed by her husband. Since her death, however, her fame has grown and she has become something of a feminist heroine, admired for her refusal to let great physical suffering crush her spirit or interfere with her art and her left-wing political activities. Her house in Coyoacán was opened as a museum dedicated to her in 1958.

 
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(1884–1976).
German-born art dealer, publisher, and writer, who became a French citizen in 1937. In 1907 he opened a gallery in Paris. His first purchases were of
Fauvist
works, but he is best known as the friend and promoter of the
Cubists
. In 1912
Braque
and
Picasso
signed contracts giving Kahnweiler exclusive rights to buy their entire outputs. He was also a friend and supporter of Juan
Gris
, of whom he wrote a standard biography (1947). As a publisher he brought out numerous books illustrated by his artist friends.

 
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(1619–93).
Dutch painter, one of the most celebrated of all still-life painters. He was born in Rotterdam and in 1642–6 worked in Paris. On his return to the Netherlands he lived in Hoorn and then in 1653 settled in Amsterdam. His early works were modest kitchen and courtyard scenes, but he soon became the outstanding exponent of a type of still life in which fruit and precious objects—porcelain, oriental rugs, Venetian glass—are arranged in grand
Baroque
displays. His pictures have often been compared with those of
Vermeer
because of his masterly handling of texture and his ability to manipulate warm and cool colours (he frequently contrasts the reddish browns in a carpet with the yellow of a peeled lemon and the blue and white of porcelain).

 
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(1866–1944).
Russian-born painter and writer on art, one of the most important pioneers of
abstract art
. He abandoned a promising university career teaching law, partly under the impact of an exhibition in Moscow of French
Impressionists
, at which one of
Monet's
Haystack
pictures made a particularly lasting impression upon him, and in 1896 went to Munich to study painting. In 1901 he was one of the founders of the avant-garde exhibiting society
Phalanx
, the main forum for Jugendstil (
Art Nouveau
) in Germany, and in 1902 he joined the Berlin
Sezession
. Between 1903 and 1908 he travelled widely in western Europe and Africa. His pictures at the turn of the century combined features of Art Nouveau with reminiscences of Russian folk art, to which he added a
Fauve
-like intensity of colour. In 1908 he returned to Munich and in 1909 was one of the founders of the
Neue Künstlervereinigung
there. At about this time he began to eliminate the representational element from his work, until, in a series of
Compositions, Improvisations
, and
Impressions
, done between 1910 and 1913, he arrived at pure abstraction. (The best collection of his work from this period is in the Lenbachhaus in Munich.) Kandinsky said that his understanding of the power of nonrepresentational art derived from a night when he went into his studio in Munich and failed to recognize one of his own paintings that was lying the wrong way up, seeing in it a picture ‘of extraordinary beauty glowing with an inner radiance’. (He is often cited as the first person to paint an abstract picture, but other pioneers, such as the American Arthur
Dove
, were making similar experiments at this time and no artist can claim absolute primacy.) From 1911 Kandinsky was one of the most active figures in the
Blaue Reiter
, editing with Franz
Marc
the
Blaue Reiter
almanac. In 1914 he returned to Russia, where he gained several distinguished academic posts. However, being out of sympathy with the new ideas that subordinated fine art to industrial design, he left Russia in 1921 to take up a teaching post in the
Bauhaus
, where he remained until it was closed in 1933. In 1927 he became a German citizen. He left Germany for France in 1933 and settled at Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, becoming a French citizen in 1939. Kandinsky was one of the most influential artists of his generation both for his painting and for his writing. His progress towards abstraction proceeded alongside his philosophical views about the nature of art, which were influenced by theosophy and mysticism. He did not completely repudiate representation, but he held that the ‘pure’ artist seeks to express only ‘inner and essential’ feelings and ignores the superficial and fortuitous. His chief works setting forth his theories of abstract pictorial composition are
Über das Geistige in der Kunst
(Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1912),
Rückblicke
(Reminiscences, 1913), and
Punkt und Linie zu Fläche
(Point, Line and Surface, published in 1926 as a Bauhaus pamphlet).