The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (247 page)

(1890–1954).
American-born painter and designer who settled in England in 1914. He was a member of Wyndham
Lewis's
Group X and of the
Cumberland Market Group
, but he abandoned painting in 1921 and is best known for his brilliant and witty poster designs, notably for the London Transport Board and the Great Western Railway.

 
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(1741–1807).
Swiss painter. From an early age she travelled with her father, the painter
Joseph Johann Kauffmann
(1707–82), in Switzerland and Italy, and she formed her style in Rome. In 1766 she moved to London, where her work and her person were vastly admired. A foundation member of the
Royal Academy
in 1768, she was a close friend of the President, Sir Joshua
Reynolds
, their relationship giving rise to gossip and to a satirical picture by Nathaniel
Hone
. (
Canova
,
Goethe
, and
Winckelmann
were among the other distinguished men charmed by her.) Kauffmann began in England as a fashionable portraitist, but then devoted herself more to historical scenes and also did decorative work for Robert Adam and other architects. Although her work owes much to the
Neoclassical
tradition, it has a prettiness that can be described as
Rococo
. At its best it has great charm, but it can be rather insipid, and she was much more successful with ladylike decorative vignettes than with scenes from Homer or Shakespeare . After an unhappy first marriage, she married the decorative painter Antonio Zucchi (1726–95) in 1781 and settled in Rome, where she continued her successful career.

 
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(1923– ).
American painter and sculptor. In the mid-1950s he became recognized as one of the leading exponents of the
Hard-Edge
style that was one of the reactions against
Abstract Expressionism
. His paintings are characteristically very clear and simple in conception, sometimes consisting of a number of individual panels placed together, identical in size but each painted a different uniform colour (he started using this formula in 1952). He was also one of the first artists to develop the idea of the
shaped canvas
. Kelly has also worked in various printmaking techniques and in sculpture (using painted cut-out metal forms—often industrially manufactured—related to those in his paintings).

 
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(1879–1972).
British painter. One of the leading society portraitists of his day, he had many distinguished friends, among them Somerset Maugham , whose portrait by Graham
Sutherland
Kelly wittily attacked. From 1949 to 1954 he was President of the
Royal Academy
; in this position he devoted much of his time to organizing loan exhibitions, and became well known for his appearances in related television programmes. His popularity helped to revitalize the Academy's image after the damage done by his predecessor, the arch-conservative
Munnings
. Apart from portraits Kelly painted landscapes and also pictures of Asian dancing girls (he had spent some time in Burma) that were once very popular in reproduction.

 
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Kelmscott Press
.

A private printing-press founded in 1890 by William
Morris
at Hammersmith and named after the village near Oxford where he had lived since 1871. Between 1891 and 1898, two years after Morris's death, the press issued more than fifty titles, including editions of several of Morris's own works. Deeply influenced by his study of early printing, Morris himself designed most of the type, borders, ornaments, and title-pages. The press's greatest book, and by common consent one of the world's masterpieces of book production, is the 1896 edition of Geoffrey Chaucer's works, with illustrations by
Burne-Jones
. Although short-lived, the Kelmscott Press had enormous influence on the private presses that followed in its wake.

 
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