Famed Artist Ellsworth Kelly, dead at age 92
Ellsworth Kelly, one of the last of the American masters of abstract art, has died. He was 92. The painter/sculptor died Sunday at his home in Spencertown, N.Y., according to Matthew Marks of the Matthew Marks Gallery in Manhattan. “He was simply one of the great modern painters of our era, certainly of the 20th century,” says Harry Cooper, head curator of...
Stan Gregory
Stan Gregory was born in Tallahassee, Florida on September 22, 1948. He received a Graduate degree in painting at the University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida in 1980, thereafter, moving to New York City and setting up his studio…initially in Astoria, Queens and later in...
Renata Bernal
Born in Munich, Germany in 1937, Renata Bernal moved to the United States with her mother and settled in New York city at the age of 13. She attended The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City, and later moved to California where she received a Bachelor of...
Richard Diebenkorn
Born in Portland, Oregon on April 22, 1922, Richard Diebenkorn moved with his family to San Francisco, California at the age of two. He enrolled into Stanford University in 1940. After graduating Stanford, Diebenkorn served in the Marines from 1943 to 1945. Once his tour ended, he moved...
Paul Klee
Paul Klee was born in Munchenbuchsee, Switzerland on December 18, 1879. He was brought up in a musical household. His father Hans Klee, was a music teacher and his mother Ida Frick, was a singer. He was the youngest of two children. Klee began to explore art and music at an early age. He...
Paul Burlin
Originally named Isadore Berlin, Paul Burlin was born in New York on September 10, 1886. He changed his name from Isadore Berlin to Harry Paul Burlin shortly after leaving home at the age of 16. By the time he turned thirty, he had dropped the name Harry altogether. Many believe he...
Norman Bluhm
Norman Bluhm was born on March 28, 1921 in Chicago, Illinois. He studied architecture under Mies van der Rohe at the then Armour Institute of Technology before enlisting for service in the U.S. army in 1941 as a B-26 pilot. He returned to the U.S. after his tour of duty for a brief time...
Michael Mazur
Michael Mazur was born November 2, 1935 in New York City. He was a celebrated academist who received his Bachelors Degree from Amherst College in 1957 and his Masters Degree from the Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1961. He received his first teaching assignment in 1965 at the...
Mark Tobey
Born December 11, 1890 in Centerville, Wisconsin, Mark Tobey was a painter, composer and a poet. His experimentation with abstract painting and calligraphy had a tremendous impact on future art movements, particularly Abstract Expressionism. Tobey began his studies at the Art Institute of...
Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko was born Marcus Rothkowitz in Russia in 1903. His father, Jacob Rothkowitz, was a pharmacist and an intellectual, who provided his children with a secular and political, rather than religious, upbringing. Unlike Jews in most cities of Czarist Russia, those in Dvinsk had been...
Louise Nevelson
Born Louise Berliawsky on September 23, 1899 to a Jewish family in what is now known as Keiv in the Ukraine. Her and her parents, Isaac and Minna Berliawsky, immigrated to America and settled in Rockland, Maine when she was just 3 years old. Shortly after graduating high school in 1917,...
Kim MacConnel
Born in Oklahoma City in 1946, Kim MacConnel is an American artist who is best known for his pattern designs painted on furniture (or 3 dimensional canvases as he refers to it). MacConnel was a creative force in the Pattern and Decoration movement that had its heyday in the 1970’s....
Karel Appel
Christiaan Karel Appel was born on April 25, 1921 at his parents house in a working-class district in Amsterdam, Netherlands. On the ground floor, his father, Jan Appel, had a barber shop. His mother, Johanna Chevalier, was a descendant of French Huguenots. Karel Appel had three brothers...
Milton Avery
Although Milton Avery was not an abstract artist, we have decided to include his work because of our admiration of him as an artist and his contribution to modern art. Milton Avery was a modern artist born in Altmar, New York on March 7, 1885. Having been born into a working-class family,...
Josef Albers
Albers was born in Bottrop, Germany on March 19, 1888. He studied art in Berlin, Essen, and Munich, before enrolling at the famous Bauhaus-Weimar school in 1920. It was there that the Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus asked him to teach the course ‘Werklehhre’ that...
Joan Miro
Joan Miro was born on April 20, 1893 in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. He was the son of a goldsmith and a jewellery maker. His work is often referred to as whimsical and childlike and is primarily associated with the Surrealist art movement. In his youth, Miro was enticed by the art...
Jean Arp
Born Hans Arp in Strasbourg, Germany on September 16 1886, He was a distinguished sculptor, painter and poet. He studied art at the Strasbourg School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar from 1905 to 1907, and moved to Paris in 1908 to study at the Julian Academy. He was also a poet and a founder...
Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock is considered by many to be one of the greatest American painters of the 20th century, although he has had his share of detractors. He created a completely new form of art, free from the confines of paint brushes and easels, where his mind and body worked together on the...
Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann was born in Weibenburg, Bavaria on March 21, 1880. At the age of six he moved to Munich where his father, Theodor Hofmann, took a job with the Bavarian government. As a student, Hofmann had a keen interest in mathematics and his father’s job enabled him to pursue this...
Franz Kline
Franz Jozef Kline was born May 23 1910 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He studied at Girard College before attending Boston University. He then took art courses at the Art Students League in Boston from 1931 to 1935 and traveled abroad to London from 1936 to 1938 and studied at the...