Lives of the Great Twentieth Century Artists

369 Pages·1999·63.02 MB·English

by  Edward Lucie-Smith

CENTURY
ARTISTS
Edward
Lucie-Smith
V
)ince the appearance ofGiorgioVasari's
JvesoftheArtists in 1550, stories of
jainters, sculptors, andtheir miUeushave
Dlayed an important role in our
jnderstandingofthe history ofart.Lives
jfthe Great Twentieth-CenturyArtists
Bxtendsthistraditionto our own time, in a
decade-by-decade exploration ofthe major
modern artists,the revolutionary
movementstheyinspired, andthe lively
anecdotesthat make artists unique
members ofsociet}'. ''
The century'beginsv^ith the European
avant-garde artistswho broke fromthe
academicpractices ofthe nineteenth
centuryto create the colorful explosions of
Fauvism,the jarringabstractions ofCubism,
andthe antiart expressions ofDada. After
the upheavals causedbyWorldWar1, art
moved in a number ofdirections: the
Surrealists nourished in Eastern Europe
and Paris;the Bauhaus introduced new 1
aesthetictheories in Germany;and exiles
from all overEurope importednewideas to
America.The years sinceWorldWar 11
feature the activities oftheAbstract
Expressionists and Pop artists.
This ground-breakingbook considers
artists not merely as intellectuals and
producers ofcreativeworks,but as
We
arrestingandvolatile personalities.
meet such artistic "giants" ofour era as
Picasso, Pollock, andWarhol, and those, like
who
the dance impresario Diaghilev,
influenced art from behind the scenes.
Nearlyone hundred artists - amongthem
Matisse, Kandinsky, Duchamp, Leger, Dali,
Chagall, Modigliani, De Kooning,
Rauschenberg,lohns, Hockney, Oldenburg,
Lichtenstein - come vividlyto life in these
pages. Lives ofthe Great Twentieth-Century
Artists restoresthe artist to his proper place
at the center ofattention and focuses onthe
artist's life asthe keyto his creative
achievement.

LIVES
of the Great
TWENTIETH
CENTURY
ARTISTS
Frontispiece
ThestudioofAlbertoGiacometti
(photo: Doisneau, Rapho)
LIVES
of the Great
TWENTIETH
CENTURY
ARTISTS
Edward Lucie-Smith
%IZZOLI
X__J NEW YORK
BRIGHTON
1
NbU89
L83
.1986
EB
U5111-22
860
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 6 VII THE ECOLE DE PARIS 92
Georges Rouault
Chaim Soutine
I TOWARDS THE MODERN 8 Amedeo Modigliani
Edvard Munch Jules Pascin
Pierre Bonnard Constantin Brancusi
Kathe Kollwitz Piet Mondrian
Aristide Maillol
THE RUSSIANS
VIII 1 1
Mikhail Larionov & Natalia Goncharova
THEFAUVES 22
II Kasimir Malevich
Henri Matisse VladimirTallin
Andre Derain Alexander Rodchenko
Maurice Vlaminck Naum Gabo
Marc Chagall
III CUBISM 33 IX DADA 130
Pablo Picasso Marcel Duchamp
Georges Braque
Francis Picabia
Juan Gris Hans Arp
Fernand Leger Kurt Schwitters
Robert & Sonia Delaunay John Heartfield
X METAPHYSICAL PAINTING 148
IV FUTURISM 51
Giorgiode Chirico
Umberto Boccioni
Giorgio Morandi
Giacomo Balla
Gino Severini
XI SURREALISM 157
Max Ernst
V GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM 61 Andre Masson
Joan Miro
ErnstLudwig Kirchner
Yves Tanguy
Emil Nolde
Franz Marc Salvador Dali
Rene Magritte
Ernst Barlach
Max Beckmann
XII THE BAUHAUS 179
Lyonel Feininger
VI THE VIENNA SEZESSION 79 Vasily Kandinsky
Gustav Klimt Paul Klee
Egon Schiele Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
Oskar Kokoschka JosefAlbers
XIII THE NEW OBJECTIMTY 1 95 X\ III POST-WAR EUROPE 291
George Grosz .•Vlberto Giacometti
OttoDix Francis Bacon
Balthus
THE MEXICAN MURALISTS 202 Jean Dubuffet
XI\'
Nicolas de Stael
Diego Rivera
V\'ols
Jose Clemente Orozco
Da\id Alfaro Siqueiros
XIX THE HEIRS OF ABSTRACT
AMERICA BETW^EEX THE EXPRESSIONISM 311
X\'
WARS 214 David Smith
Morris Louis
Thomas Hart Benton
Edward Hopper
Georgia O'Keeffe XX AMERICAN NEO-DADA 317
Stuart Dans
Robert Rauschenberg
JasperJohns
XVI EXGLWD BETWEEN THE
WARS
228 XXI BRITISH POP ART 325
Stanley Spencer
Richard Hamilton
Jacob Epstein
PeterBlake
Da\id Bomberg
Da\id Hockney
Paul Nash
Graham Sutherland
Henry Moore XXn AMERICAN POP ART 336
Ben Nicholson
.\ndy Warhol
Barbara Hepworth
Roy Lichtenstein
Claes Oldenburg
X\ll ABSTR.ACT JimDine
EXPRESSIONISM 257
Arshile Gorky XXIII THE ARTIST NOT THE ART-
WORK
HansHofmann 349
Jackson Pollock
Yves Klein
Willem de Kooning
Joseph Beuys
Franz Kline
Mark Rothko
Cl\-fford StiU BIBLIOGRAPHY 357
Bamert Newman
Ad Reinhardt
INDEX OF ARTISTS 360
Mark Tobey
INTRODUCTION
This book is perhaps rather impertinently modelled on designed for the use of contemporaries (a wifl, a
the greatest classic ofRenaissance art history, Giorgio contract, a deed of endowment).' Is it drawn from a
Vasari's Lives ofthe Artists, the indispensable narrative contemporary document addressed to posterity (a
source upon which all subsequent historians of Re- medieval chronicle).' Or does it come from some
naissance art have relied. I say 'impertinently' not only posterior source? The scientific bias of contemporary
because it is a bold author who tries to rival Vasari's history has tended to reduce the role ofthe individual-
quirky vividness, his gift for the telling anecdote, but historians look for broad trends or influences, rather
because our views both ofart itselfand ofthe nature of than attributing a change in the course ofeventstothe
human personality have changed radically since the impact of some powerful individuality. This is why
sixteenth century. biography has increasingly tended to separate itself
Vasari based his book on the idea that art was from the mainstream ofcontemporary historical writ-
perfectible - that each successive generation of artists ing. This is true even ofart, where the influence ofthe
could build upon the achievements of its predecessor. individual is surely paramount by the very nature of
ForVasari, trueartconsistedin thedevotedimitationof things.
nature, but this imitation had to correspond with an Itis ofstill greater importance that our view ofwhat
ideal form which was already to be found in the artist's human beings are like has altered. For Vasari, a man,
mind. The final result must, however, also be imbued once he became an adult, possessed a relatively fixed
with grace, 'an indefinable quality dependent on 'character' which could be appropriately illuminated
judgement and therefore onthe eye'. And it must have by means of striking anecdotes. The memorability of
aquality Vasari called 'decorum' -that is, appropriate- the anecdotes, the fact that they had stuck in people's
ness to the task in hand. These beliefs gave his minds, served almost as a guarantee of the fact that
collection ofLivesalogicalshape andstructurewhichit they illustrated some important facet of what a man
is difficultto discoverin the conflicting -isms which are was like. And here we have to remember that, though
characteristic ofthe history ofthe Modern Movement. Vasari lived in a literate society, it was still much closer
Speaking of Abstract Expressionism. Jacques Barzun than ours is to the oral tradition of the Middle Ages.
once remarked that it was an 'abolitionist' style, which Therewasnotsuch aplethoraofprinted information as
sought to efface all memory of the achievements that exists now - Vasari had to rely on the memories of
had preceded it - to create a tabula rasa and start informants who passed on to him some incident which
entirely anew. Other styles have had the same am- had grown more striking with the passage ofthe years.
bition, and I am forced to rebuild what their partisans In addition, the material available to him was much
have tried to demolish. more readily in proportion to the space at his disposal.
It is for this reason, among others, that this book These things help to give his biographies their cutting
contains rather more scene-setting than Vasari was edge, the clear, defined contourwhich isthe equivalent
prepared to allow himself. Another reason is that of the Florentine artistic tradition of disegno - a word
Vasari shared both a common background and a which, in Italian, means so much more than either
common culture with his prospective readers. This is 'drawing' or 'design'.
an assumption that no historian can afford to make Writing in a post-Freudian epoch, when personality
today. In any case, historical method has greatly is essentially seen to be mutable throughout the whole
changed since the time when Vasari undertook his course of a man's life, and with an embarrassing
task. Onecan generalizeby means ofa paradox. Vasari plethora of printed sources at my disposal, I shall be
thought ofart as quasi-scientific, itbeing the essence of hard putto itto achieve eitherVasari's concision or his
science that one man can build on the discoveries of vividness. However, the enterprise seems worth under-
others. Now it is history which aspires to be a science, taking for one reason - that it may help to restore the
with a methodology which Vasari would havethought artist himselfto the very centre ofour thinking about
impossiblyover-elaborate. We askourselves: isthisfact art. There is a theory that even modern pictures are
or statement drawn from a contemporary document best admired in isolation, cordonned off from the
INTRODUCTION 7
circumstances which surroundccl ihfir crciition. hi thethingswhich theartofourcentury hastoconveyto
that way all art can be judged on the same basis, an those with eyes to look at it and minds to consider its
Egyptian statue of the Old Kingdom, about whose meaning. If my book concentrates largely on artists
maker we know nothing, on exactly the same tooting who are already dead, that is not because 1 feel that
as a carving by Brancusi. about whom we happen to there are few good artists living, but because it is
know a good deal. Yet this in the end runs contrary to difficult to see the true shape of any life until it has
the whole spirit ofModernism, which sees works ofart actually completed itself, and difficult too to speak of
as being extensions of the actual personalities ofthose the living with the outspokenness which a collection of
who created them. Nor is this attitude peculiar to brieflives' or "characters' seems to impose. The choice
Modernism itself- it is one ofthe things which we have ofartists is in anycase necessarily selective. It has been
inherited from the Romanticism of the nineteenth governed by many factors: by personal preference, the
century, which still subsumes so much contemporary availability of information, the pattern made by the
thinking about art. book as a whole, and most of all by the physical
This, then, isin a special sense a 'romantic' book, one limitations ofspace. An ideal collection of biographies
which aims to focus on the artist's life as the most covering the development of Modernism would fill
obvious key in his creative achievement, and at the several volumes the sizeofthisone, which already runs
sametimetoexpressmy own boundlessenthusiasm for to nearly two hundred thousand words.
For Lord Weidenfeld
- wlwse idea it was