The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (378 page)

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(
c.
1500–43).
Italian painter, named after his birthplace, Caravaggio in Lombardy. At an early age he moved to Rome, where he assisted
Raphael
in the decoration of the Vatican Loggie and then achieved great success painting palace façades with monochrome scenes imitating
classical
sculpture. They have almost all perished (only the heavily restored decoration of the Palazzo Ricci remains
in situ
), but they became well known through engravings and drawings and were much imitated. Polidoro's other claim to fame is his decoration of the chapel of Fra Marino Fetti in S. Silvestro al Quirinale (1525) with two murals—oil not fresco—(one each from the life of St Mary Magdalene and St Catherine of Siena) in which he gave an entirely new prominence to the landscape, which dominates the figures. In this he foreshadowed the ‘heroic landscape’ of
Claude
and
Poussin
. Polidoro fled Rome after the sack of the city in 1527, moving to Naples and then Messina, where he was murdered by a thief.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

Pollaiuolo , Antonio
(
c.
1432–98) and
Piero

(
c.
1441–
c.
1496).
Florentine artists, brothers, who jointly ran a flourishing workshop. They are both recorded as being painters, sculptors, and goldsmiths, but there are considerable problems in attempting to disentangle their individual contributions. Antonio was evidently primarily a goldsmith and worker in bronze, Piero primarily a painter. Several documented paintings by Piero are known, all of fairly mediocre quality, but none by Antonio , and as certain pictures from the studio of the two brothers are so much better than Piero's independent work, Antonio's collaboration, at least, has usually been assumed. The most important of these pictures is the
Martyrdom of St Sebastian
in the National Gallery, London, probably painted in 1475. The figures of the archers in the foreground reveal a mastery of the nude paralleled in certain bronzes generally accepted as Antonio's (e.g. the
Hercules and Antaeus
in the Bargello, Florence,
c.
1475–80), in his only surviving engraving (
The Battle of the Nude Men
,
c.
1460), and in his numerous pen drawings in which his typically wiry figures are seen in vigorous and expressive movement. His main contribution to Florentine painting lay in his searching analysis of the anatomy of the body in movement or under conditions of strain, but he is also important for his pioneering interest in landscape, seen in the National Gallery
St Sebastian
and other works. He is said to have anticipated
Leonardo
in dissecting corpses in order to study the anatomy of the body. Antonio's two principal public works were the bronze tombs of Pope Sixtus IV (signed and dated 1493) and Pope Innocent VIII (
c.
1492–8), both in St Peter's, Rome. The latter contains the first sepulchral effigy that simulated the living man.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1912–56).
American painter, the commanding figure of the
Abstract Expressionist
movement. In 1929–31 he studied at the
Art Students League
under Thomas Hart
Benton
and was influenced not only by Benton 's restlessly energetic style, but also by his image as a virile, hard-drinking macho-man (Pollock began treatment for alcoholism in 1937 and in 1939 he started therapy with Jungian psychoanalysists, using his drawings in sessions with them). During the 1930s he painted in Benton's
Regionalist
vein, and he was influenced also by the work of the Mexican muralists (see
OROZCO
;
RIVERA
;
SIQUEIROS
) and by certain aspects of
Surrealism
, particularly the use of mythical or totemic figures as archetypes of the unconscious. From 1935 to 1942 he worked for the
Federal Art Project
, and in 1943 he was given a contract by Peggy
Guggenheim
; his first one-man show was held at her Art of this Century gallery in that year. A characteristic work of this time is
The She-Wolf
(MOMA, New York, 1943), a semi-abstract picture with vehemently handled paint and ominous imagery recalling the monstrous creatures of
Picasso's
Guernica
period. By the mid-1940s Pollock was painting in a completely abstract manner, and the ‘drip and splash’ style for which he is best known emerged with some abruptness in 1947. Instead of using the traditional easel, he laid his canvas on the floor and poured and dripped his paint from a can (using commercial enamels and metallic paint because their texture was better suited to the technique); instead of using brushes, he manipulated the paint with ‘sticks, trowels or knives’ (to use his own words), sometimes obtaining textured effects by the admixture of ‘sand, broken glass or other foreign matter’. In line with Surrealist theories of
automatism
, this method of
Action painting
was supposed by artists and critics alike to result in a direct expression or revelation of the subconscious mind of the painter. Pollock's technique was bound up with the creation of the
All-over method of painting
, which avoids any points of emphasis and abandons the traditional idea of composition in terms of relation among parts. The design of the painting had no relation to the size or shape of the canvas—indeed in the finished work the canvas was sometimes docked or trimmed to suit the image. These characteristics were important for the development of American abstract painting in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and when the drip paintings were first publicly shown, at Betty
Parsons's
New York gallery in 1948, Willem
de Kooning
commented ‘Jackson's broken the ice.’
Pollock's drip period lasted only from 1947 to 1951 (in the 1950s he went back to quasi-figurative work), but it is on the paintings of these four years that his enormous reputation rests. Among the most celebrated are
Autumn Rhythm
(MOMA, New York, 1950) and
Lavender Mist
(NG, Washington, 1950), which Robert
Hughes
describes as ‘his most ravishingly atmospheric painting’. Pollock was supported by advanced critics, particularly Clement
Greenberg
and Harold
Rosenberg
, and in 1949 the French painter Georges
Mathieu
said that he considered him the ‘greatest living American painter’. However, he was also subject to much abuse as the leader of a still little comprehended movement (in 1956
Time
magazine called him ‘Jack the Dripper’). By 1960 he was generally recognized as the most important figure in the most important movement in the history of American painting, but a movement from which artists were already in reaction. His unhappy personal life and his premature death in a car crash contributed to his status as one of the legends of modern art; he was the first American painter to become a ‘star’.
In 1945 Pollock married Lee Krasner (1908–84), who was an Abstract Expressionist painter of some distinction, although it was only after her husband's death that she received serious critical recognition. She was also an important source of encouragement and support to Pollock, whose attitude to his work fluctuated from supreme confidence to dismal uncertainty.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search