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Head I
''Head I'' is a relatively small oil and tempera on hardboard painting by the Irish-born British figurative artist Francis Bacon. Completed in 1948, it is the first in a series of six heads, the remainder of which were painted the following year in preparation for a November 1949 exhibition at the Hanover Gallery in London.Russell, 38 Like the others in the series, it shows a screaming figure alone in a room, and focuses on the open mouth.Dawson, 44 The work shows a skull which has disintegrated on itself and is largely a formless blob of flesh. The entire upper half has disappeared, leaving only the jaw, mouth and teeth and one ear still intact. It is the first of Bacon's paintings to feature gold background railings or bars; later to become a prominent feature of his 1950s work, especially in the papal portraits where they would often appear as enclosing or cages around the figures.Davies; Yard, 19 It is not known what influences were behind the image; most likely they were mul ...
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Francis Bacon (artist)
Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992) was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his raw, unsettling imagery. Focusing on the human form, his subjects included Crucifixion of Jesus, crucifixions, portraits of popes, self-portraits, and portraits of close friends, with abstracted figures sometimes isolated in geometrical structures. Rejecting various classifications of his work, Bacon said he strove to render "the brutality of fact." He built up a reputation as one of the giants of contemporary art with his unique style. Bacon said that he saw images "in series", and his work, which numbers in the region of 590 extant paintings along with many others he destroyed,Harrison, Martin.Out of the Black Cavern. Christie's. Retrieved 4 November 201Archivedon 11 November 2019 typically focused on a single subject for sustained periods, often in triptych or diptych formats. His output can be broadly described as sequences or variations on single motifs; including t ...
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Tempera
Tempera (), also known as egg tempera, is a permanent, fast-drying painting medium consisting of colored pigments mixed with a water-soluble binder medium, usually glutinous material such as egg yolk. Tempera also refers to the paintings done in this medium. Tempera paintings are very long-lasting, and examples from the first century AD still exist. Egg tempera was a primary method of painting until after 1500 when it was superseded by oil painting. A paint consisting of pigment and binder commonly used in the United States as poster paint is also often referred to as "tempera paint", although the binders in this paint are different from traditional tempera paint. Etymology The term ''tempera'' is derived from the Italian ''dipingere a tempera'' ("paint in distemper"), from the Late Latin ''distemperare'' ("mix thoroughly"). History Tempera painting has been found on early Egyptian sarcophagus decorations. Many of the Fayum mummy portraits use tempera, sometimes in combina ...
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Hanover Gallery
The Hanover Gallery was an art gallery in London. It was opened in June 1948 by the German art expert Erica Brausen and financier and art collector Arthur Jeffress at 32A St. George's Street, W1, and closed on 31 March 1973. It was named after nearby Hanover Square. The Hanover Gallery was an important centre for modern art. History Erica Brausen arrived in London before the Second World War and worked at the Redfern Gallery in the West End of London. She ran the Hanover Gallery, together with her partner Toto Koopman, from 1948 onward. One of the exhibitions in 1949 was of work by the then-little known British painter Francis Bacon, his first solo exhibition. Bacon's close relationship with Brausen and the gallery ended by 1958, when he defected to Marlborough Fine Art. In 1953, Brausen and Jeffress decided to part ways. The financier Michael Behrens was visiting the gallery one evening when Brausen mentioned in passing that she would be closing up the next day, so Behr ...
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Matthias Grünewald
Matthias Grünewald ( – 31 August 1528) was a German Renaissance painter of religious works who ignored Renaissance classicism to continue the style of late medieval Central European art into the 16th century. His first name is also given as Mathis and his surname as Gothart or Neithardt. Only ten paintings—several consisting of many panels—and thirty-five drawings survive, all religious, although many others were lost at sea on their way to Sweden as war booty. He was obscure until the late nineteenth century, when many of his paintings were attributed to Albrecht Dürer, who is now seen as his stylistic antithesis. His largest and most famous work is the Isenheim Altarpiece created ''c.'' 1512 to 1516. Life The details of his life are unusually unclear for a painter of his significance at this date, despite the fact that his commissions show that he was recognised in his own lifetime. The first source to sketch his biography comes from the German art historian Joa ...
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Impasto
''Impasto'' is a technique used in painting, where paint is laid on an area of the surface thickly, usually thick enough that the brush or painting-knife strokes are visible. Paint can also be mixed right on the canvas. When dry, impasto provides texture; the paint appears to be coming ''out'' of the canvas. Origins The word ''impasto'' is Italian in origin; in which it means "dough" or "mixture"; related to the verb , "to knead", or "to paste". Italian usage of includes both a painting and a potting technique. According to Webster's ''New World College Dictionary'', the root noun of is , whose primary meaning in Italian is "paste". Mediums Oil paint is the traditional medium for impasto painting, due to its thick consistency and slow drying time. Acrylic paint can also be used for impasto by adding heavy body acrylic gels. Impasto is generally not used in watercolor or tempera without the addition of thickening agent due to the inherent thinness of these media. An artist ...
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Metropolitan Museum Of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 Fifth Avenue, along the Museum Mile on the eastern edge of Central Park on Manhattan's Upper East Side, is by area one of the world's largest art museums. The first portion of the approximately building was built in 1880. A much smaller second location, The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, contains an extensive collection of art, architecture, and artifacts from medieval Europe. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 with its mission to bring art and art education to the American people. The museum's permanent collection consists of works of art from classical antiquity and ancient Egypt, paintings, and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, and an extensive collection of American and modern ...
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Robert Melville (art Critic)
Robert Melville (31 December 1905 - March 1986) was an English art critic and journalist. Along with the artists Conroy Maddox and John Melville (his brother), he was a key member of the Birmingham Surrealists in the 1930s and 1940s. An early biographer of Picasso, he later become the art correspondent of the ''New Statesman'' and the ''Architectural Review''. Early life Melville was born in Tottenham, London, in 1905, the second son of an asphalt contractor's foreman. His family moved to the Harborne area of Birmingham in 1913 and after his secondary schooling Melville spent most of the 1920s in clerical jobs with a variety of industrial companies. In 1928 he married and settled in Sparkhill.. Melville's brother John had shown early talent as a painter and from the late 1920s the Melvilles both developed an interest in the emerging modernist movements in continental Europe, becoming regular patrons of Zwemmer's art bookshop in London's Charing Cross Road. Meeting fellow Bi ...
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Diego Velázquez
Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (baptized June 6, 1599August 6, 1660) was a Spanish painter, the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV of Spain and Portugal, and of the Spanish Golden Age. He was an individualistic artist of the Baroque period (c.1600–1750). He began to paint in a precise tenebrist style, later developing a freer manner characterized by bold brushwork. In addition to numerous renditions of scenes of historical and cultural significance, he painted scores of portraits of the Spanish royal family and commoners, culminating in his masterpiece ''Las Meninas'' (1656). Velázquez's paintings became a model for 19th-century realist and impressionist painters. In the 20th century, artists such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and Francis Bacon paid tribute to Velázquez by re-interpreting some of his most iconic images. Most of his work entered the Spanish royal collection, and by far the best collection is in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, thoug ...
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Head VI
''Head VI'' is an oil-on-canvas painting by Irish-born figurative artist Francis Bacon, the last of six panels making up his "1949 Head" series. It shows a bust view of a single figure, modeled on Diego Velázquez's ''Portrait of Innocent X''. Bacon applies forceful, expressive brush strokes, and places the figure within a glass cage structure, behind curtain-like drapery.Zweite, 244 This gives the effect of a man trapped and suffocated by his surroundings, screaming into an airless void. But with an inverted pathos is derived from the ambiguity of the pope's horrifying expression—whose distorted face either screams of untethered hatred towards the viewer or pleads for help from the glass cage—the question of what he is screaming about is left to the audience. ''Head VI'' was the first of Bacon's paintings to reference Velázquez, whose portrait of Pope Innocent X haunted him throughout his career and inspired his series of "screaming popes", a loose series of which the ...
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Portrait Of Innocent X
''Portrait of Pope Innocent X'' is an oil on canvas portrait by the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez, executed during a trip to Italy around 1650. Many artists and art critics consider it the finest portrait ever created. It is housed in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome. A smaller version is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and a study is on display at Apsley House in London. The painting is noted for its realism as an unflinching portrait of a highly intelligent, shrewd, and aging man. He is dressed in linen vestments, and the quality of the work is evident in the rich reds of his upper clothing, head-dress, and the hanging curtains. The pope, born Giovanni Battista Pamphilj, was initially wary of sitting for Velázquez, but relented after he was shown reproductions of portraits by the artist. A contributing factor for this large advancement in the painter's career was that he had already depicted a number of members of Pamphilj's inner court. The pope, how ...
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Michael Peppiatt
Michael Henry Peppiatt (born 9 October 1941) is an English art historian, curator and writer. Biography Son of Edward George Peppiatt (died 1983), B.Sc, ARCS, of Silver Birches, Stocking Pelham, near Buntingford, Hertfordshire, technical and production director for a pharmaceutical manufacturing company, and Elsa Eugénie (née Schlaich; died 1997). Education and career Michael Peppiatt studied at Brentwood School, Essex, at the University of Göttingen, and at Trinity Hall, Cambridge (BA 1964, MA 1985, PhD) and subsequently joined ''The Observer'' as a junior art critic. He then went to Paris to take up an editorial job at '' Réalités'' magazine, where he remained until 1969, when he was appointed arts editor at ''Le Monde''. In the mid-1970s he began reporting on cultural events across Europe for ''The New York Times'' and ''The Financial Times'', becoming Paris correspondent for several art magazines, notably ''Art News'' and ''Art International''. In 1985, Peppia ...
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John Russell (art Critic)
John Russell CBE (22 January 1919 – 23 August 2008) was an English art critic. Life and career John Russell was born in Fleet, Hampshire, England, in 1919. He attended St Paul's School and then Magdalen College, Oxford. He was an unpaid intern at the Tate Gallery in 1940, but moved to the country after the gallery was bombed. During World War II he worked in Naval Intelligence for the Admiralty. There he met Ian Fleming, who helped to secure Russell a reviewing position at ''The Sunday Times''. Russell succeeded a fired critic at ''The Sunday Times'' in 1950. Art critic Hilton Kramer of ''The New York Times'' hired Russell in 1974. Russell was chief art critic there from 1982 to 1990. Marriages Russell was married to: * Alexandrina, Countess Apponyi de Nagy-Appony, the former wife of Julius Lanczy. They married in 1945, divorced in 1951, and had one child, Lavinia (married Sir Nicholas Grimshaw). * Vera Poliakoff (died 1992), married 1956, divorced 1971. Also known profess ...
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