Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall was born near Vitebsk, Russia (today Belarus). He was raised in a Jewish community and attended religious schools throughout his youth. In 1906, Chagall left Vitebsk to study at the Zvantseva School of Drawing and Painting in St. Petersburg. During his studies he was apprenticed under Leon Bakst, an artist and set designer who encouraged Chagall to express his Jewish heritage through his art practice.

He moved to France in 1910 and became a prominent painter at the École de Paris. His work combined Fauvism, Cubism, and Surrealism to create dream-like motifs in a poetic and figurative style. As his practice evolved, Chagall continued to express his Jewish identity, bringing together cultural traditions coupled with aspects of modernism.

When Chagall returned to Russia for a short visit, he was forced to stay in the country due to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and, while there, took up the political post of Commissar of Arts. During this time, he managed to create new paintings and exhibit in Moscow and St. Petersburg. In 1923, he was able to move back to Paris with his wife. He began working on commissions, traveling and exhibiting his work until the outbreak of World War II. With the threat of Hitler’s Third Reich and his publicly known Jewish identity, Chagall and his family sought refuge in New York City. In 1947, he moved back to Europe and settled in Vance, France.

Throughout the decades that followed, Chagall was commissioned to create numerous large-scale public artworks such as a stained-glass window for the Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem, the memorial Peace window for the United Nations, The American Windows for The Art Institute of Chicago, the ceiling of the Paris Opera House, and murals for the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Throughout his lifetime, Chagall mastered a number of mediums including oil and gouache, and watercolour painting, etching, lithography, drawing, ceramics, set and costume design, as well as stained glass. His work is housed in the Palais Garnier in Paris, France, the Tate Modern in London, England, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, NY, among other prestigious international collections.

Christo

Christo

Christo Vladimirov Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude were a married couple that created large works of art in different environments. Their works became part of the environments themselves with the intention that spaces could be seen with new perspectives and consciousness. Artistic credit was only given to Christo for their large instillations up until 1994 when their works began being credited to “Christo and Jeanne-Claude.”

Both artists were born on the same day in 1935, Christo in Gabrovo, Bulgaria and Jeanne-Claude in Casablanca, Morocco. Christo studied art at the Sofia Academy from 1953-1956 and lived in both Prague and Austria in the late 1950s. He later studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and moved to Paris in 1958, where he met Jeanne- Claude when he was commissioned to paint a portrait of her mother. Jeanne-Claude graduated with a baccalauréat in Latin and philosophy from the University of Tunis in 1952. She received no formal art education during her lifetime and claims that she became an artist out of her love for Christo. During their projects, it was her responsibility to oversee work crews and raise funds.

In the 1960s, the couple began collaborating on their installations. In 1962, they covered barrels at the port of Cologne and, the following year, they blocked off Rue Visconti in Paris with a wall of oil barrels as a protest against the Berlin Wall. In addition to their barrel works, other major works include Wrapped Trees (1966-1998), The Gates (1971-2005), Wrapped Reichstag (1971-1995), The Pont Neuf Wrapped (1975-1985), Running Fence (1972-1976) and many more.

Although their work was often considered controversial due to their colossal sizes and invasiveness on the environment, the artists maintained that the purpose of their artwork was merely to bring joy and beauty and to create new ways of seeing familiar landscapes.

Jean-Claude passed away in 2009 and Christo passed away in 2020.

Chuck Close

Chuck Close

Chuck Close is an American artist known for his photorealistic, large-scale portraits. Born in Monroe, Washington in 1940, Close graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1962 from the University of Washington, Seattle and went on to obtain a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from Yale University in 1964. After graduation, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, worked as a teacher at the University of Massachusetts, and later moved to New York City in 1967 where he established his studio.

Close struggles with dyslexia and suffers from prosopagnosia, a neurological disorder characterized by the inability to recognize faces, also called ‘face blindness’. Throughout his life, he found solace in turning to the arts. For the majority of his career, Close has focused on portraiture, mastering techniques such as watercolour, finger painting, pastel, graphite, and printmaking. His large-scale paintings are created from an initial gridded photograph of a subject to produce system-driven portrait painting.

His first solo exhibition was held at the University of Massachusetts Art Gallery in 1967 and his second was held at the Bykert Gallery, New York in 1970. He has since exhibited in almost eight hundred exhibitions at institutions and art festivals such as the MoMA, the 1979 Whitney Biennial, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia, and many more throughout North America and Europe. His work was also selected to represent the United States in the 1993, 1995, and 2003 Venice Biennales.

Close is the recipient of numerous awards and honours including the Skowhegan Arts Medal (1992), the New York State Governor’s Art Award (1997), as well as the National Medal of Arts from President Bill Clinton (2000). In 2010 President Obama appointed him to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. In that same year, Close was commissioned to create twelve large mosaics for the 86th Street subway station in New York City, and in 2016 his portrait of Paul Simon was used as the cover art for the singer’s album, Stranger to Stranger.   

Today, after suffering from a spinal artery collapse in 1988, Close continues to work with brushes strapped to his wrist to help him paint large portraits, but in a style that is more abstract, drawing from low-resolution photos which appear pixelated from afar. His works remain highly sought after by museums and collectors.

Alexander Colville

Alexander Colville

Alexander Colville was a Canadian painter whose works captured a number of subjects in New Brunswick including the ocean, boats, people, and the natural expanse of the province. His ordinary subjects were rendered in a static, slightly eerie style, echoing elements of Surrealism.

Colville was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1920. In 1942, he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick and, shortly after, enlisted in the Canadian Army infantry during World War II. After two years in the military, Colville was employed as a war artist. With his drawings he captured the horrors of the war in the Netherlands, Germany, and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After the war, he returned to New Brunswick and taught in the Fine Arts Department at his alma mater, Mount Allison University. In 1963, he left teaching to devote his time to painting and printmaking full-time in his studio.

During his career, Colville exhibited extensively across Canada and abroad. In 1966, along with artists Yves Gaucher and Sorel Etrog, his work represented Canada at the Venice Biennale. His works can be found in the collections of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax, the New Brunswick Museum in Saint John, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the MoMA in New York, and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris.

George Condo

George Condo

George Condo is an American artist known for combining Cubist-inspired faces with realistic forms to realistically represent the unreal, an approach that he has dubbed ‘Artificial Realism’. He blends elements from the European Old Masters with popular culture in his paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints. Inspired by notable artists like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Diego Velázquez, Condo created a surrealistic style for himself that he has also termed ‘psychological cubism’.

He studied Art History and Music Theory at the University of Massachusetts and moved to Boston where he worked as a silkscreen printer after graduation. Condo met Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1979 and was soon after inspired to pursue a career in the arts. He began to exhibit at galleries in New York in 1981 and, during this time, he worked in Andy Warhol’s silkscreen production studio. As Condo progressed throughout the 1980s, he began exhibiting in more prestigious institutions in New York, Los Angeles, and throughout Europe, a high point being his participation in the 1987 Whitney Biennial.

In 1999, Condo received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been an invited lecturer at prestigious institutions including Yale University, the Guggenheim, and Harvard University where he taught a six-month course titled Painting Memory in 2004.

Condo has received numerous commissions throughout his career including book covers, album artwork for rappers such as Kanye West, and t-shirt designs for Barney’s New York. He continues to exhibit extensively in North America and Europe in institutions such as the Whitney Museum, the MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, NY. He currently lives and works in New York.

Robert Cottingham

Robert Cottingham

Robert Cottingham is an American artist predominantly known for his paintings and prints of urban building façades, neon signs, and shop fronts. He was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1935. After completing his service in the U.S. Army, Cottingham studied at the Pratt Institute in New York, earning his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1963.

During the 1960s, he worked as an artistic director for an advertising firm while producing paintings inspired by the works of American Photorealists such as Edward Hopper and Charles Sheeler. Additionally, like many artists in the 1960s, Cottingham’s work was heavily influenced by Pop Art. His enlarged scales evoke the work of James Rosenquist and his employment of text echoes that of Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana.

In 1964, Cottingham moved to Los Angeles where he focused exclusively on his art practice. He experimented with photography and used his photographs as a reference point for his paintings. In the 1970s he moved to rural Connecticut and, although removed from the urban environment, he continued to paint more expansive and broad urban landscapes.

During his career, he exhibited extensively, most notably at the Whitney Museum in New York, NY, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, Germany, Documenta in Kassel, Germany, the Serpentine Gallery in London, England, and the Samsung Museum of Modern Art in Seoul, South Korea. Cottingham continues to live and work in Connecticut.

Maurice Cullen

Maurice Cullen

Maurice Cullen was a Canadian landscape painter known for his winter landscape paintings. He was born in St. John’s, Newfoundland in 1866 but was mostly raised in Montreal, Quebec. In 1889, he travelled to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts and at the Académie Julian where he learned the traditional French style of Academic painting. While in Paris, Cullen discovered and was greatly inspired by the work of the Impressionists. During World War I, Cullen was assigned to be an official war artist to document the horrors of battle.

Cullen’s landscape paintings maintained the tradition of both European and Canadian painting, but employed more luminous, Impressionistic colours. Cullen’s Impressionist influence helped inspire the next generation of Canadian artists, having taught from 1891 to 1920 at the Art Association of Montreal. He was the first Canadian to be elected an associate member of the Société national des Beaux-Arts, Paris. In 1899, he was also elected to be an associate member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

Jean Philippe Dallaire

Jean Philippe Dallaire

Jean Philippe Dallaire was a Canadian painter known for his festive imagery and macabre characters often painted in his highly original style reminiscent of both Surrealism and Cubism. During his artistic career, Dallaire rarely paid attention to trends and developed his own unique practice. In contrast to the cheerful colours of his palette, Dallaire’s work often features visibly troubled subjects affected by fear, madness, and violence.

Dallaire was born in Hull, Quebec in 1916. He studied at the Central Technical School in Toronto from 1932-1935, at the École des Beaux-Arts, Montreal and at the Ateliers d’Art Sacré, Paris in 1938. While in France, young Dallaire encountered the works of Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, and Joan Miró all of whom strongly influenced his art practice. Although technically trained, Dallaire is noted for his self-education and originality.

It is believed that the artist’s frequent employment of dark imagery stems from his experiences during World War II. While living in France in 1940, Dallaire and his wife were placed in the German internment camp, Saint-Denis. Although his wife was released after six months, Dallaire was forced to endure four years of imprisonment.

After the war, Dallaire briefly returned to Canada and later settled in Vence, France. He worked for the École des Beaux-Arts, Quebec from 1946-1952 and for the National Film Board from 1952-1958, where he worked in animation. During this period, he also received numerous commissions for murals, as well as an order to decorate the interior of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal.

Dallaire’s work has been exhibited internationally in Paris, São Paolo, Seattle, and San Francisco. Retrospective exhibitions of his work have been held at the Musée d’Art contemporain in Montreal and the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec in Quebec City. In 1957, he participated in the Biennial of Canadian Art at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. More recently, from 2005-2008, a traveling exhibition Dallaire, Illustrateurs, Extraits des séries historiques was organized by the city of Gatineau, Quebec and its municipal gallery.

Jim Dine

Jim Dine

Jim Dine is an American painter, printmaker, sculptor, poet, and conceptual performance artist. His artwork employs the use of nostalgic motifs, including Pinocchio, heart shapes, bathrobes, and tools that are both autobiographical and that focus on themes of personal identity and memory.

Dine was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1935. He studied at the University of Cincinnati and the Art Academy of Cincinnati. In 1957, he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Ohio University. He moved to New York the following year and became known for his critical role in a group of artists who initiated ‘Happenings’, which is a genre of performance art that challenges the elitism of Abstract Expressionism.

Dine believes in the power of simple images because their familiarity is accessible and relatable to any viewer. Although he uses straightforward and popular imagery, Dine resists his connection to Pop Art. Instead, he insists that his work is an extension of the work put forth by artists who question the power of iconic symbols rather than exploit them, such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

In addition to his numerous international exhibitions, his work is included in the public collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France, the British Museum in London, England, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the MoMA in New York, NY, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Tate Modern in London, England, the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawai’i. Today Dine lives in New York, Paris, and Walla Walla, Washington.

Jean Dubuffet

Jean Dubuffet

Jean Dubuffet was a French painter known for founding the Art Brut movement (a French term that literally translates to ‘raw art’). This term was used to describe artworks made outside the realm of academic tradition, usually in reference to graffiti or naïve art – also called ‘outside art’. Dubuffet concerned himself with anti-culture and anti-art, dismissing conventional aesthetics. He challenged beauty standards, customary academic painting, and notions of realism. Refusing to believe in the difference between the beautiful and the ugly, Dubuffet deliberately chose to evoke the grotesque. 

Dubuffet was born in Le Havre, France in 1901. Though well educated, he rejected the notion of formal institutions, preferring to study on his own. In 1918, he moved to Paris and studied for a short time at the Académie Julian until he withdrew after a brief six months. It was not until 1942 that Dubuffet decided to return to painting. He was heavily influenced by the paintings of Jean Fautrier, a painter of Tachism (or Art Informel). Dubuffet used a similar stylistic approach by applying texture to paint with the combination of sand, gravel, tar, and straw.

While post-war Paris favoured artwork that reaffirmed old values, Dubuffet preferred to create ‘low-brow’, childlike imagery that satirized high art. Opposed to an intellectual approach, Dubuffet sought out the work of children and the mentally ill. He admired their unrepressed style with which they could freely experiment, unrestricted by rigid art theories and normative trends.

His early work is comprised of portraits of everyday people with exaggerated, grotesque features. During the later years of his career, Dubuffet experimented with unusual mediums such as with ballpoint and felt tip pens. He also began to embrace the Surrealist idea of automatic drawing as a means to tap into the subconscious. Dubuffet used this technique to create the graphic style of his later series, Hourloupe (1962), which were comprised of clean black lines forming cells filled with unmixed color that showcased the contrast between physical and mental representation. He considered these works of art to be in their purest form. They would continue to occupy him for the next several decades.

Throughout his career, his work was exhibited in numerous exhibitions and retrospectives internationally. Today, his work can be found in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the MoMA, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France, and the Tate Modern in London, England. The Foundation Jean Dubuffet in Paris, France continues to actively collect and exhibit his work.