American Figurative Expressionism
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American Figurative Expressionism
American Figurative Expressionism is a 20th-century visual art style or movement that first took hold in Boston, and later spread throughout the United States. Critics dating back to the origins of Expressionism have often found it hard to define. One description, however, classifies it as a Humanist philosophy, since it's human-centered and rationalist. Its formal approach to the handling of paint and space is often considered a defining feature, too, as is its radical, rather than reactionary, commitment to the figure. The term "Figurative Expressionism" arose as a counter-distinction to "Abstract Expressionism." Like German Expressionism, the American movement addresses issues at the heart of the expressionist sensibility, such as personal and group identity in the modern world, the role of the artist as a witness to issues such as violence and corruption, and the nature of the creative process and its implications. These factors speak to the movement's strong association with ...
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German Expressionism
German Expressionism () consisted of several related creative movements in Germany before the First World War that reached a peak in Berlin during the 1920s. These developments were part of a larger Expressionist movement in north and central European culture in fields such as architecture, dance, painting, sculpture and cinema. This article deals primarily with developments in German Expressionist cinema before and immediately after World War I, approximately from 1910 to the 1930s. History The German Expressionist movement was initially confined to Germany due to the country's isolation during World War I. In 1916, the government banned foreign films, creating a sharp increase in the demand for domestic film production: from 24 films in 1914, to 130 films in 1918. With inflation also on the rise, Germans were attending films more freely because they knew that their money's value was constantly diminishing.Thompson, Kristin. Bordwell, David. ''Film History: An Intro ...
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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (6 May 1880 – 15 June 1938) was a German expressionist painter and printmaker and one of the founders of the artists group Die Brücke or "The Bridge", a key group leading to the foundation of Expressionism in 20th-century art. He volunteered for army service in the First World War, but soon suffered a breakdown and was discharged. His work was branded as "degenerate" by the Nazis in 1933, and in 1937 more than 600 of his works were sold or destroyed."Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: German, 1880–1938"
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James Ensor
James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor (13 April 1860 – 19 November 1949) was a Belgian painter and printmaker, an important influence on expressionism and surrealism who lived in Ostend for most of his life. He was associated with the artistic group Les XX. Biography Ensor's father, James Frederic Ensor, born in Brussels to English parents, was a cultivated man who studied engineering in England and Germany. Ensor's mother, Maria Catherina Haegheman, was Belgian. Ensor himself lacked interest in academic study and left school at the age of fifteen to begin his artistic training with two local painters. From 1877 to 1880, he attended the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where one of his fellow students was Fernand Khnopff. Ensor first exhibited his work in 1881. From 1880 until 1917, he had his studio in the attic of his parents' house. His travels were very few: three brief trips to France and two to the Netherlands in the 1880s, and a four-day trip to London in 1892 ...
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The Blue Rider (Kandinsky Painting)
''The Blue Rider'' (German: ''Der Blaue Reiter'') is an oil painting executed in Bavaria in 1903 by the Russian emigré artist Wassily Kandinsky. It is now held in a private collection in Zurich, and shares its name with the Der Blaue Reiter, art movement he would co-found with Franz Marc in the early 1910s. Background Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866, the only son of a tea merchant. When his parents divorced, he was sent to live with an aunt; it was his life there when he first discovered the magic of colours. At university, he decided to study Economics and Law, passing his exams "with ease". Shortly after marrying his cousin, after seeing one in Claude Monet, Monet's series of paintings Haystacks (Monet series), ''Haystacks'', he was faced with a dilemma to be either a professor, or to begin a career as an artist. He decided to learn painting, and thus, in 1896, the thirty-year-old went to Munich, Germany. Description It depicts a horseman in a blue cloak galloping through ...
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Boston Arts Festival
The contemporary Boston Arts Festival is an annual event showcasing Boston's visual and performing arts community and promoting Boston's Open Studios program. The weekend-long Festival at Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park features a wide variety of arts and high-end crafts, including painting, photography, ceramics, jewelry, sculpture and live music. The Arts Festival, which has existed in several different forms, was relaunched by former Mayor Thomas Menino in 2003, then reconceived by Mayor Marty Walsh in 2015. The Beacon Hill Art Walk and Artists Crossing Gallery will be organizing the 2019 September Festival. The original Festival, briefly named the "Boston Art Festival," was held at Boston's Public Garden between 1952 and 1964. That version is credited with democratizing access to the fine arts in Boston, especially for young, emerging and often Jewish-American, artists who felt shut out of Boston's famously Brahmin museums and other institutional exhibition sites. Activis ...
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Boston Brahmin
The Boston Brahmins or Boston elite are members of Boston's traditional upper class. They are often associated with Harvard University; Anglicanism; and traditional Anglo-American customs and clothing. Descendants of the earliest English colonists are typically considered to be the most representative of the Boston Brahmins. They are considered White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs). Etymology The doctor and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. coined the term "Brahmin Caste of New England" in an 1860 story in ''The Atlantic Monthly''. The term ''Brahmin'' refers to the priestly caste within the four castes in the caste system in India, Hindu caste system. By extension, it was applied in the United States to the old wealthy New England families of British Protestant origin that became influential in the development of American institutions and culture. The influence of the old American gentry has been reduced in modern times, but some vestiges remain, primarily in the institutions ...
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Institute Of Contemporary Art, Boston
The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) is an art museum and exhibition space located in Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America. The museum was founded as the Boston Museum of Modern Art in 1936. Since then it has gone through multiple name changes as well as moving its galleries and support spaces over 13 times. Its current home was built in 2006 in the South Boston Seaport District and designed by architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro. History The Institute of Contemporary Art was founded as the Boston Museum of Modern Art in 1936 with offices rented at 114 State Street with gallery space provided by the Fogg Museum and the Busch–Reisinger Museum at Harvard University.Smee, SebastiaA beacon among its contemporaries. The Boston Globe. September 11, 2011. Accessed February 18, 2012. (Note: In the printed version of this article, a map with previous ICA venues was included. Some cited information has been retrieved from this map) The Museum planned itself as "a renegade ...
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David Aronson
David Aronson (October 28, 1923 – July 2, 2015) was a painter and Professor of Art at Boston University. Biography Aronson was born in Šiluva, Lithuania in 1923. He taught at Boston University from 1955 to his death in 2015, where he formed the Fine Art Department. As an artist, he exhibited in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Paris, Rome, Berlin and Copenhagen, among others. His work is represented in over forty museums. Aronson's work is associated with the school of Boston Expressionism. Aronson died at the age of 91 on July 2, 2015, from pneumonia and chronic heart failure.Roberts, Sam (July 15, 2015Link Label/ref> Collections * Art Institute of Chicago * DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, Mass. * Israel Museum, Jerusalem * Keene State College, Keene, N.H. * Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York * Museum of Fine Arts, Boston * Museum of Modern Art, New York * New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut * National Academ ...
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Boris Mirski Gallery
The Boris Mirski Gallery (1944-1979) was a Boston art gallery owned by Boris Chaim Mirski (1898-1974). The gallery was known for exhibiting key figures in Boston Expressionism, New York School (art), New York and International style (art), international Modernism, modern art styles and non-western art. For years, the gallery dominated with both figurative and African work. As an art dealer, Mirski was known for supporting young, emerging artists, including many Jewish-Americans, as well as artists of color, women artists and immigrants. As a result of Mirski's avant-garde approach to art and diversified approach to dealing art, the gallery was at the center of Boston's burgeoning modern mid-century art scene, as well as instrumental in the birth and development of Boston Expressionism, the most significant branch of American Figurative Expressionism. Organization Founder Born to a well-to-do Jewish lumber dealer in Vilnius, Lithuania, Mirski was raised amid "pomp ... pogroms ...
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School Of The Museum Of Fine Arts At Tufts
The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University (Museum School, SMFA at Tufts, or SMFA; formerly the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) is the art school of Tufts University, a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. It offers undergraduate and graduate degrees dedicated to the visual arts. It is affiliated with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts. SMFA is also a member of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD), a consortium of several dozen leading art schools in the United States. The school is accredited by the National Association of Schools of Art and Design. History The school was founded in 1876 under the name School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA). From 1876 to 1909, the school was housed in the basement of the original Museum building in Copley Square. When the Museum moved to Huntington Avenue in 1909, the School moved into a separate, temporary structure to the west of the main b ...
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Social Realism
Social realism is the term used for work produced by painters, printmakers, photographers, writers and filmmakers that aims to draw attention to the real socio-political conditions of the working class as a means to critique the power structures behind these conditions. While the movement's characteristics vary from nation to nation, it almost always utilizes a form of descriptive or critical realism.James G. Todd Jr, ''Social realism'' in: Grove Art Online The term is sometimes more narrowly used for an art movement that flourished between the two World Wars as a reaction to the hardships and problems suffered by common people after the Great Crash. In order to make their art more accessible to a wider audience, artists turned to realist portrayals of anonymous workers as well as celebrities as heroic symbols of strength in the face of adversity. The goal of the artists in doing so was political as they wished to expose the deteriorating conditions of the poor and working clas ...
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Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to leader André Breton, to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality", or ''surreality.'' It produced works of painting, writing, theatre, filmmaking, photography, and other media. Works of Surrealism feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and '' non sequitur''. However, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost (for instance, of the "pure psychic automatism" Breton speaks of in the first Surrealist Manifesto), with the works themselves being secondary, i.e. artifacts of surrealist experimentation. Leader Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was, above all, a ...
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