The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (290 page)

 
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(1840–84).
Austrian painter. He studied under
Piloty
in Munich, then the chief centre of history painting, and from 1869 worked in Vienna, where he was enormously successful and a leading society figure. His exuberant, somewhat
Rubenesque
style, which he applied to mythological, historical, and allegorical subjects, often on a huge scale, now seems overblown, but it had great influence in Austria and Germany.

 
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(1417–68).
Italian nobleman, effective lord of Rimini from 1422 until his death. A brilliant and totally unscrupulous
condottiere
, he is the prototype of the megalomaniac, paganizing tyrant once thought to be characteristic of the Italian
Renaissance
(he was publicly consigned to hell while still alive—the only man ever to suffer this fate—by Pope Pius II, but modern research has watered down his image). His name is indissolubly linked to one of the most famous creations of 15th-cent. art—the conversion (begun 1457) of the church of San Francesco in Rimini into a sort of temple to himself and his mistress (later wife) Isotta degli Atti.
Alberti
was his architect and
Agostino di Duccio
and
Piero della Francesca
were among the artists who worked on the decoration of the building. It was never completed, but under Sigismondo's direct inspiration it became the most self-conscious return to the
antique
yet seen.

 
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(1862–1954).
French art historian. A pioneer in the study of French medieval art, on which he published several books, he became Professor of the History of Art at the Sorbonne in 1912. His work is distinguished not only by great learning but also by literary merit, his style being praised by Marcel Proust amongst others.

 
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(1878–1935).
Russian painter, designer, and writer, with
Mondrian
the most important pioneer of geometric
abstract art
. He began working in an unexceptional
Post-Impressionist
manner, but by 1912 he was painting peasant subjects in a massive ‘tubular’ style similar to that of
Léger
as well as pictures combining the fragmentation of form of
Cubism
with the multiplication of the image of
Futurism
(
The Knife Grinder
, Yale Univ. Art Gal., 1912). Malevich, however, was fired with the desire ‘to free art from the burden of the object’ and launched the
Suprematist
movement, which brought abstract art to a geometric simplicity more radical than anything previously seen. He claimed that he made a picture ‘consisting of nothing more than a black square on a white field’ as early as 1913, but Suprematist paintings were first made public in Moscow in 1915 (there is often difficulty in dating his work and also in knowing which way up his paintings should be hung, photographs of early exhibitions sometimes providing conflicting evidence). Malevich moved away from absolute austerity, tilting rectangles from the vertical, adding more colours and introducing a suggestion of the third dimension and even a degree of painterly handling, but around 1918 he returned to his purest ideals with a series of
White on White
paintings. After this he seems to have realized he could go no further along this road and virtually gave up abstract painting, turning more to teaching, writing, and making three-dimensional models that were important in the growth of
Constructivism
. In 1919, at the invitation of
Chagall
, he started teaching at the art school at Vitebsk, where he exerted a profound influence on
Lissitzky
, and in 1922 he moved to Petrograd (Leningrad), where he lived for the rest of his life. He visited Warsaw and Berlin in 1927, accompanying an exhibition of his works and visited the
Bauhaus
. In the late 1920s he returned to figurative painting, but he was out of favour with a political system that now demanded
Socialist Realism
from its artists and he ran into trouble with the authorities. However, he remained a revered figure among artists. Malevich wrote various theoretical tracts and several collections of his writings have been published. His influence on abstract art—in the West as well as Russia—was enormous. The best collection of his work is in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

 
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