Chauncey Foster Ryder

Artist Info

Chauncey Foster RyderAmerican, 1868 - 1949

The illustrations of HOWARD PYLE (1853-1911) are as exciting now as they were a hundred years ago, while pictures by many of his contemporaries today look dated and mannered.

Several special qualities combined to make Pyle America's foremost illustrator. Pyle was interested in pictures, first of all, as drama. As a young man his initial reaction to a theatrical performance had made a great impression on him and influenced his point of view from then on. In his illustrations, Pyle sought to dramatize themes with universal appeal. The pictures portrayed basic human emotions: the ruthlessness of pirate greed, raw grief in the break-up of Lee's army after Appomattox, smug pride, humble petition.

Pyle's concept of a picture was never trite. He deliberately looked for new ways to tell a story and involved himself in his subject so thoroughly that his pictures make the reader and eye-witness to a vivid experience.

Having evolved his basic pictorial idea, Pyle developed his compositions; his pictures are fascinating to analyze. No area of a picture is wasted; each makes its contribution, through placement, line, tone or color, to the whole story. Through the details, the viewers eye is purposefully led toward the focal center.

Pyle wrote, as well as illustrated, many books himself. He did original research on the obscure subject of the buccaneers in the New World. It is from his famous Book of Pirates that our present-day concept of pirates has come. School children still read his Men of Iron, The Story of King Arthur and his Knights, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, and many other tales.

As a teacher, Pyle attracted a large number of students, inspiring them as much by his idealism as by the high standards he set for picture making. Over the years he taught at Drexel Institute in Philadelphia, lectured at the Art Students League in New York, and eventually conducted special classes for gifted students at both Wilmington, Delaware and, during the summer at Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania. He made no charge for his teaching, and, in fact, built a set of studios for the students to work in. N. C. Wyeth, Harvey Dunn, Stanley Arthurs, and Frank Schoonover were among the beneficiaries of this instruction, and passed along to others Pyle's unique approach as they, in turn, became illustrators and teachers.

At the time when it was customary and fashionable to study in Europe, Pyle had a strong conviction that students should seek their training and inspiration in America. Many of Pyle's greatest pictures came from his intense and loyal interest in Americana. His renditions of the Revolutionary War period and of Civil War subjects have since become standard pictures in our history books, among them Woodrow Wilson's History of the American People, and James Truslow Adams' History of the United States.

After Pyle's death, his students collected many of his original paintings as a nucleus for the present comprehensive collection of his work in the Delaware Art Museum. An excellent biography entitled Howard Pyle, was written by Henry C. Pitz and published in New York by Bramhall House in 1965.

Source:

- Walt Reed, Illustration House, New York

Howard Pyle has long been considered 'The Father of American Illustration' as much for his prolific and superb work as a writer and illustrator as for his commitment to teaching. In the 1890's, Pyle was well established as an illustrator and turned his mind to teaching others. He founded the first school in the nation for illustration at Drexel Institute (1894-1900) in Philadelphia. In that same year he published ninety-nine illustrations bringing him substantial fees, yet he never accepted money for his teaching.

Many of the greatest illustrators attended his classes at Drexel, and later at the Howard Pyle School of Art in Wilmington (1900-1905, and in the summers alongside the Brandywine River at Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Howard Pyle's school in Wilmington made that city the center of illustration in the twilight of the 19th century. Pyle had about two-hundred students during his teaching career of whom more than eighty were well-known and very successful, and two dozen more of whom were very famous and immensely successful.

Many of the students and subsequently, their students became known as 'The Brandywine School'. Some of the best known included Stanley Arthurs, Clifford Ashley, William Aylward, Arthur Becher, Anna Whelan Betts, Ethel Franklin Betts, Harvey Dunn, Anton Otto Fischer, Philip R. Goodwin, Elizabeth Shippen Green, Gayle Hoskins, Oliver Kemp, W.H.D. Koerner, Violet Oakley, Maxfield Parrish, Ernest Peixotto, Frank Schoonover, Jessie Willcox Smith, Henry J. Soulen, Sarah Stilwell Weber, C. Leslie Thrasher, and N.C. Wyeth.

A most extraordinary and little known fact was that Pyle's classes were about fifty percent female students,an unheard of proportion in those days.

Pyle was born into a Quaker family from Delaware and lived his whole life there except for two years at the Art Students League early in his career and a year in Italy, where he died. His family was not unhappy when he expressed an interest in studying art although such a thought was not on any Quaker agendas.

His first art teacher was Van der Weilen, but at the age of twenty-three, he moved to New York to attend the Art Students League. He expected to gain an education as an artist, an easel painter for there was no specific education for illustrators, and his first thoughts was making art, not making a living. Like most of his students, Pyle later went into illustration to earn a living at his craft.

While studying in NYC, he was able to get small commissions illustrating for Century Magazine. Other commissions flowed from his initial projects including some from Collier's Weekly, Everybody's Magazine, Harper's Weekly, Harper's Monthly, Cosmopolitan, The Ladies' Home Journal, McClure's Magazine, Scribner's, Wide Awake, and St. Nicholas magazines. Each commission was more lucrative than the previous one, and each illustration was received enthusiastically by the magazine art editors and their readership. Pyle was in demand from the very beginning.

In 1879, Pyle returned to Delaware and produced a number of books, which he both wrote and illustrated, including Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates, The Story of King Arthur and his Knights, Men of Iron, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, and for other publishers; Riverside Press, The Bibliophile Society, Century, Little Brown and Company, Scribner's, and Houghton Mifflin, Co., the most important publishers in the USA.

Howard Pyle was a master of all forms of media. He excelled in pen and ink, watercolors, oils, pencil, and charcoal, equally well. From his experiences as an art student, he realized that there was no training, which taught a young artist the difference between a cover illustration and an interior one. There was no lesson in the application of masthead lettering to an image for it took a certain design ability, which was more than the training of an easel artist approached, and so on.

He realized that there was a need arising to train illustrators with the advent of better publishing technologies. Most of those elements of illustration training he had learned from experience, by intuition, or by listening carefully to the myriad of magazine art directors whom he attracted to his door.

Additionally, when teaching, he tried to instill certain standards of behavior amongst his students to imbue them with his own precepts. He had the goal to train a generation, which could visually define this nation for itself through illustration. It was all ad hoc, and it worked.

Pyle recommended that his pupils look to their own country and their own lives for inspiration. He asked the students to train themselves hard, both spiritually and artistically, and to experience the environments they wished to replicate, to use authentic props in their paintings to enhance the images they created. Howard Pyle's influence is the most enduring influence on all illustrators, bar none.

His teaching methods were as bold as his paintings. His images of our national story have become commonplace in the nation's history books and in the artistic molding of what it means to be an' American'. It was said that Pyle had the fine faculty of transporting himself into any period of history and with his masterful brush; he turned historic figures into flesh and blood. His familiar works are images of rakish pirates, tough frontiersmen, and noble knights; they populate children's adventure novels, and remain paradigms, prototypes, stereotypes. They will forever remain our visual models. He captivated anyone who read his stories or viewed his images-in short, he was the best illustrator in his day.

Howard Pyle was born in 1853, at the most propitious time for an illustrator of great genius. It was a time comparable to Michelangelo's birth with its respective coincidence of the Renaissance and Medici rule of power. When Pyle was born, the American public was just getting interested in establishing our own cultural icons, and our American civilization had begun to flower. A young Quaker artist understood that the new magazines and progress in printing meant that a need for more images was at hand. Pyle's magical images came from a vibrant mind, which enhanced his notions with authenticity making fairy tales and fictional personages come alive in the reader's mind's eyes.

During his career, Howard Pyle produced illustrations for nearly three-thousand five hundred publications, and about half of those images illustrated books and articles he authored - two hundred magazine articles and nineteen books.

The Delaware Museum of Art was founded to house his art works.

Known as the man who revolutionized American book illustration in the late 19th century and described as "unquestionably the Renaissance man of American illustration" (Zellman 467), Howard Pyle did highly dramatic, detailed, and colorful illustrations of subjects ranging from American history to childrens' fairy tales. As a teacher, he had a significant influence on succeeding generations of illustrators including N.C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, Ethel Franklin Betts, Jessie Willcox Smith and Harvey Dunn.

Howard Pyle was born at Wilmington, Delaware, and showing early art talent, commuted to Philadelphia to take classes from F.A. van der Wielen, a Belgian painter. He wrote and illustrated a poem, and when this was published in 1876, he moved to New York City to be close to national publishers. There he enrolled in the Art Student's League*.

In New York City he gained attention for his skillful line drawings in the style of Albrecht Durer. In the 1870s, he began doing illustrations for the childrens' magazine St. Nicholas and then accepted a number of book commissions includingYankee Doodle and Tennyson's Lady of Shalott. He was author-illustrator of The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, 1883, and illustrated several other books tied to his interest in medieval lore. In 1902, he began illustrating his own version of the legends of King Arthur.

From 1894, he began teaching classes at Philadelphia's Drexel Institute* of Art, Science and Technology. The school authorities allowed him plenty of freedom with his teaching methods, which focused on students thinking in terms of the printed page rather than artwork on a wall and of placing themselves into their illustrations.

Four years later, he, established the Brandywine School of Illustration Art* on the Brandywine River near the Delaware/Pennsylvania border. This resulted from students having been given Drexel Institute scholarships the summer before to study with Pyle at his summer home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania near Wilmington. Attending these classes, N.C. Wyeth became aware of the charm of the region and subsequently located his family there.

Pyle's only visit to Europe was in the last year of his life, and he died unexpectedly in Florence, Italy on November 9, 1911, at the height of his career. More than 100 of his works are in the possession of the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

Source:

Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art

Leonard Pytlak- Pytlak studied at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts and at the Art Students League of New York. He has won many awards for his works throughout the years. Pytlak has successfully combined lithography and serigraph for his unique prints.

PYTLAK, LEONARD: Appointed for creative work in painting and color lithography; tenure, twelve months from April 1, 1941.

Born March 3, 1910, Newark, New Jersey. Education: Newark Art School and Art Students League.

Exhibitions: Exhibited at Seattle Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, National Academy of Design, Brooklyn Museum, Albany Institute of History & Art, Philadelphia Print Club, Philadelphia Art Alliance, Museum of Modern Art, New York World's Fair, Paris Exposition, Montclair Museum. Awarded Philadelphia Print Club prize, 1937. Represented in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Newark Library.

Michael Rand-sensuality in Clay: Mike Rand's Ceramic Sculptures Colorado ceramic artist, Mike Rand, is only in his mid-thirties, so it might seem preposterous to say that he has three decades of work experience under his belt--but, none the less, it would be true.

"I started working in clay when I was five," says Rand, "my mother would kick the wheel for me, and I remember firing wood kilns with my father at about the same time."

Born in Leadville, Colorado in 1976, Rand attended school in Michigan but spent a good deal of his time each year in the Rockies. He lived in an A-frame cabin that his parents, artists themselves, had designed and built in Carbondale, not far from Aspen. This area was a fertile ground for a budding ceramic artist and as a child Rand was exposed to the work-and the work habits-of several significant potters and ceramic sculptors. Rand was particularly influenced by the late Thanos Johnson, a disciple of Shoji Hamada. "I learned raku from Thanos," Rand recalls, "and when I was a teenager, I was gathering tall grasses and using them in the firings." Also in the mix of influences at this time was another ceramic artist who worked nearby, the world renowned Paul Soldner.

Beginning in 1990 and continuing through '94, Rand, who was still in high school at the time, studied ceramics at Michigan State University while, in the summers, he attended workshops around Aspen. For his undergraduate degree in material engineering at University of Michigan, Rand was mentored by the ceramic sculptor, Sadashi Inuzuka. Rand then attended Southern Cross University in Australia and he earned his Master of Arts there. At Southern Cross, Rand studied with Tony Nankervis, a master of wood-firing. At the time, Rand's principle interest was developing what he calls "velvet clay" in which the iron oxide in the mixture comes back out of the solution when pieces are fired, creating what looks like glazes on the surfaces.

As may be surmised by this brief accounting of his extensive formal grounding in ceramics, Rand was early-on exposed to the Asian tradition, specifically, the Japanese current that dominated studio ceramics for most of the 20th century in the United States. As a result, up until the last few years, Rand created several bodies of work, divided between functional vessels, and sculptures that were vessel-based, all of which were derived from Japanese ideas.

Then Rand made a bold move in a new direction with the results, illustrated in this catalogue, revealing a marked change in his sensibility toward clay. Rand increasingly moved away from the Japanesque approach and began to embrace other traditions and to make them his own.

Early-on Rand had discovered the work of George Ohr, the so-called "Mad Potter of Biloxi" who worked a century ago. The smashed clay shapes and collapsed forms that Rand employs, owe their origins to Ohr's example. More unusual, given his grounding in aesthetics derived from the Japanese sensibility, is Rand's embrace of its countercurrent in the history of clay: the Mediterranean aesthetic. This is most obvious in his torso sculptures, that are meant to be self-portraits, and which have a Greco-Roman character, but is also evident in his more thoroughly abstract and surrealist confections that are meant to recall undersea life. His use of tendrils or spikes, for example, recalls the decorative flourishes of Italian modernist ceramics and glass.

The reconciling of Japanese ideas with Italian ones, which is easy to see in Rand's work, is a contemporary movement in ceramic sculpture with perhaps its best known proponent being Betty Woodman who worked in Colorado for nearly half a century. How Rand made this sudden turn can only be explained by his recent exposure to the masters of Italian craft during the time he worked in a gallery in Aspen. "It was Lino," Rand says by way of explanation, referring to Venetian glass master Lino Tagliapietro whose creations were a mainstay of the gallery.

Finally, there's an undeniable sexuality in the forms of these recent pieces. The torsos, depicting lithe and athletic men, are quietly sensual. The surrealist sea creature sculptures, on the other hand, are more thoroughly erotic, abounding in both phallic and vaginal imagery, though the referents are essentially subliminal and evocative, as opposed to being literal.

Mike Rand's most recent efforts featured on the following pages reveal the vast array of artistic forces that have guided him over the years. These courageous and technically ambitious pieces demonstrate the artist's longtime commitment to beauty and, at the same time, to endless experimentation.

--Michael Paglia

Art Critic, Westword, Denver, Colorado

William Ranney- Born in Middletown, Connecticut, William Ranney devoted his career to depicting the West. As a young man, he apprenticed to a tinsmith in Fayetteville, North Carolina, having abandoned his study of art in New York City after the death of his sea-captain father. To find adventure, he joined in 1836 the Texas army in its fight for independence against Mexico, and this period, very brief, was his only experience on the frontier. It is likely that he met trappers on this venture, as several of his most popular paintings including The Trappers Last Shot, were based on a rowdy rendezvous with trapper Joseph Meek in Yellowstone Park.

Following this period of western adventure, he returned to Brooklyn where he lived, working in and around New York City for the next ten years. In 1853, he moved his family to West Hoboken, New Jersey and built a studio large enough for animals including horses. The walls were decorated with western items such as saddles, guns and swords.

His paintings included portraits and romanticized Revolutionary War history paintings and focused on pioneers, trappers, and scouts, especially Daniel Boone, opening up the frontier. He also did numerous hunting scenes from the New Jersey marshes. He was popular among his fellow artists, and after his death his fellow members of the National Academy had a memorial show to raise funds for his widow.

Sources include:

Harold and Peggy Samuels, "Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West"

Peter Hassrick, "Drawn to Yellowstone"

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William Ranney was born on May 9, 1813 in Middletown, Connecticut. He spent six

formative years in the hill country of North Carolina. Having abandoned his study of art in New York City, he was apprenticed to a tinsmith in Fayetteville after the death of his sea captain father. Two years later he went to Texas where he joined the Texas army in its fight for independence against Mexico; this brief period was his only experience on the frontier.

With the encouragement of the American Art Union, he executed three types of Western subjects: the Western trapper pursuing a dangerous life on the prairies; the pioneer family, heading across the plains with children, dogs and goods; and the dangers of emigration.

He had returned to Brooklyn, New York, where he lived and worked for the next ten years. In 1853 the family moved to Hoboken, New Jersey where he built a studio large enough for animals including horses. The walls were decorated with saddles, guns and swords.

Ranney died in West Hoboken, New Jersey on November 18, 1857.

Written and submitted by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.

Sources include:

Glenn Opitz, Editor: Mantle Fielding's Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors and Engravers, 1986-87

From the Internet, www.AskART.com and www.artnet.com

William Ranney, son of a captain in the West Indies trade, was apprenticed from 1826 to 1833 to a tinsmith in Fayetteville, North Carolina where he had relatives. He interrupted his painting studies in Brooklyn, New York to enlist in the Texan Army in 1836 to avenge the Alamo. While serving as paymaster, he was deeply influenced both by the military and the trappers and hunters gathered in Texas. For the rest of Ranney's career, he remembered their garb and anecdotes as romantic prairie life.

He was back in Brooklyn in 1837, established as a portrait painter by 1838. In 1843 his studio was in Manhattan. By 1848 he was in Weehawken, and by 1853 in West Hoboken, New Jersey where his studio was "so constructed as to lead a visitor to imagine he had entered a pioneer's cabin or border chieftain's hut."

Ranney was a sportsman, playing with the New York Cricket Club until 1854. He was described as a "glorious fellow" by Wiilliam Sidney Mount, and his artist friends rallied to the support of his family after his death from consumption. Paintings for a benefit auction were donated by 95 artists including; Church, Bierstadt, Tait, Kensett, Inness, and the Harts.

Ranney's Western paintings did not begin until almost 10 years after his return from Texas. His approach was to tell a dramatic story about the white hunters and pioneers, ignoring the panoramic landscape and minimizing the role of the Indians.

He was an important member of the new American genre school, and the leader of the school, Mount, thought enough of Ranney to complete paintings left in Ranney's studio. Ranney's work was reproduced at the time by the American Art-Union.

Source:

Peggy and Harold Samuels, Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West

Hilla Rebay-

A woman credited largely for the existence of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Hilla Rebay also was an accomplished artist in modernist styles that included collage and biogmorphic-linear oil paintings. She is remembered primarily for being the key person in first exposing the American public to avant-garde art and creating revolutionary museum environments for that art. To remind the public that Rebay was an artist in her own right, curators at the Guggenheim Museum held a retrospective of her work in the spring and summer of 2005.

Hilla Rebay (pronounced reh-bye) was born to minor nobility in Strasbourg, Alsace and had the full name of Baroness Hildegard Anna Augusta Elisabeth Rebay von Ehrenwiesen. Her father, a career army officer from Bavaria, and her mother encouraged her obvious childhood art talent. She studied locally and then enrolled in 1909 at the Academie Julian in Paris.

There she was much influenced by avant-garde movements especially theosophist artists and writers led by Wassily Kandinsky "who helped formulate her lifelong belief in the power of intuition in art-making and other areas of life" (Glueck). In 1910, she spent time in Munich where she was further exposed to modern art, and she returned to Paris in 1913, having exhibited work in Cologne and Munich. In Paris she studied at the Academie Julian.

By 1914, she was exhibiting with the Secession Group in Munich, the Salon des Independants in Paris, and the November Gruppe in Berlin--all rebelling against prevalent realism and traditional teaching methods. In Berlin, she associated with many modernist artists including Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Marc Chagall. In 1917, she med Rudolph Bauer, a German painter in non-objective styles who became her long-time lover and in the future the cause of controversy because she was accused of devoting disproportionate exhibition space to him at the Guggenheim Museum. It was said that her enthusiasm for him and his work was "unbounded" (Glueck) and that he inspired her paintings "alive with restless, jostling, organic forms" (Glueck).

Hilla Rebay first visited the United States in 1927 and stayed for an extended time period, which included giving painting lessons to Louise Nevelson, seeking portrait commissions, designing posters and exhibiting her own work at venues including the Worcester Art Mluseum and a Manhattan gallery. Among her portrait commission subjects was Solomon Guggenheim, whose wealthy family had extensive western mining interests. Rebay had met Solomon and his wife Irene when they purchased two of her paintings at the Manhattan show. To that time, the couple were collectors of conventional art, but during the sittings, Hilla talked to him of what was going on in avant-garde art circles. She brought painters of leading-edge styles to meet Guggenheim and encouraged him to collect their art, which he did--filling his Plaza Hotel apartment.

Rebay supervised the collection, and in 1937, she led the establishment of a Guggenheim foundation to build "The Museum of Non-Objective Art," achieved in 1939 in rented gallery space on 54th Street. The main focus of the collection was works of the Dutch De Stijl Group that included Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, and of Bauhaus artists from Germany such as Paul Klee, Vasily Kandinsky, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

Although she was committed to purely non-objective works, she added to the collection abstract works by George Seurat, Henri Matisse, Henri Rousseau, Pablo Picasso, and others in France who were experimenting with Cubism, Futurism, etc.

The Foundation directors bought land between 88th and 89th Streets on Fifth Avenue and commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design a museum building. The collection was temporarily housed in a mansion on the grounds, and Hilla, who had a strong interest in mysticism, "created an unforgettable, hushed, other worldly atmosphere . . . People coming in from the noise and bustle of the streets found themselves transported into a seemingly higher spiritual dimension" (Rubinstein). There was gray fabric on the walls, plain, minimal frames on the paintings, and Bach music in the background---all creating a sense of quiet refinement and revolutionary for a museum setting.

During this time, Rebay was reaching out to many young non-objective American artists including Jackson Pollock and Rudolf Bauer who had emigrated from Germany, by giving them money and exhibiting their work.

She was also at the center of controversy from a a variety of sources. Left-wing activists made fun of her mysticism; reactionaries found her much too liberal; and most of her critics thought she was way too autocratic. Of that era, she has been described as "a complicated dynamic woman, take-charge and bossy, who aroused jealousy in the art world by her closeness (though it was probably not romantic) to Guggenheim." (Glueck). In addition, she was disdained during World War II because she was German and was accused of being a German spy, rumors that were promoted by Rudolf Bauer, whom she and others thought was jealous of her position with Guggenheim.

In 1951, two years after Guggenheim's death, Hilla Rebay resigned as Director but remained a trustee of the collection, and lived in Greens Farms, Connecticut. During her career as an administrator, she had continued as a painter and created canvases of geometric shapes and ones that expressed pure color and rhythm. She also authored several books including one titled "Wassily Kandinsky", and wrote articles for the "Carnegie Institute Magazine" and "Southern Literary Digest. " However, her enduring reputation is for her influence in bringing non-objective art to America.

Sources:

American Women Artists by Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein

Grace Glueck, 'Guiding Spirit of the Guggenheim Was An Artist in Her Own Right', The New York Times, May 20, 2005, B29

Hilla Rebay was an avant-garde artist who believed deeply in the power of intuition while creating art. She was the progenitor of The Museum of Non-Objective Art (which would become the Guggenheim Museum) and was instrumental in bringing abstract, modernism art to the United States.

Hilla Rebay was born into nobility in Strasbourg, Alsace and had the full name of Baroness Hildegard Anna Augusta Elisabeth Rebay von Ehrenwiesen. Her father, a career army officer from Bavaria, and her mother encouraged her obvious artistic talent from childhood. She studied locally and then enrolled in 1909 at the Academie Julian in Paris, France.

There she was much influenced by avant-garde movements especially theosophist artists and writers led by Wassily Kandinsky "who helped formulate her lifelong belief in the power of intuition in art-making and other areas of life" (Glueck). In 1910, she spent time in Muenich where she was further exposed to modernist art, and she returned to Paris in 1913, having exhibited work in both German southern lands, Cologne and Muenich.

In 1917, she med Rudolph Bauer, a German painter of non-objective styles who became her long-time lover, and in the future, the cause of controversy after she was accused of devoting disproportionate exhibition space to him at the Guggenheim Museum. It was said that her enthusiasm for him and his work was "unbounded" and that he inspired her paintings "alive with restless, jostling, organic forms" (Glueck).

Hilla Rebay first visited the United States in 1927 and stayed for an extended time period, which included her giving painting lessons to Louise Nevelson, seeking portrait commissions, designing posters, and exhibiting her own personal works at venues including the Worcester Art Museum and Manhattan galleries. Among her portrait commission subjects was Solomon Guggenheim, whose wealthy family had extensive western mining interests. Rebay had met Solomon and his wife Irene when they purchased two of her paintings at the Manhattan show. To that time, the two were collectors of conventional art, but during the sittings, Hilla apprised him of what was going on in avant-garde art circles. She brought painters of leading-edge styles to meet Guggenheim and encouraged him to collect their art, which he did, filling his Plaza Hotel apartment.

Rebay supervised the collection, and in 1937, she led the establishment of a Guggenheim foundation to build "The Museum of Non-Objective Art," achieved in 1939 in rented gallery space on 54th Street. The main focus of the collection was works of the Dutch group De Stijl that included Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, and of Bauhaus artists from Germany such as Paul Klee, Vasily Kandinsky, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

Although she was committed to purely non-objective works, she added to the collection abstract works by George Seurat, Henri Matisse, Henri Rousseau, Pablo Picasso, and others in France, experimenting with Cubism, Futurism, and other forms

In 1951, two years after Guggenheim's death, Hilla Rebay resigned as Director but remained a trustee of the collection, and lived in Greens Farms, Connecticut. During her career as an administrator, she continued her life as a painter and created canvases of geometric shapes and ones that expressed pure color and rhythm. She also authored several books including one titled Wassily Kandinsky, and wrote articles for the Carnegie Institute Magazine and Southern Literary Digest. However, her most enduring reputation is for her influence in bringing non-objective art to America.

John Register- John Register (1939 - 1996) was dogged by congenital kidney disease, enduring two transplants in 1981 and 1985. Diagnosed in 1989 with what would be a fatal cancer, he described himself as "positive and belligerent," preparing to fight the disease as he had fought to find and fulfill himself as an artist.

In the early 1960s, Register studied art at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, the Art Center School of Design in Los Angeles and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, after taking a B.A. degree in literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961.

Register was a very successful advertising art director in California and New York for approximately eight years, during the latter period studying painting at the Art Students League on Saturdays. But the longer he worked in advertising, the unhappier he became. "I was almost speechless with misery about my job and life. Sometimes Cathy (his wife) and I would go to the Museum of Modern Art to look at the paintings during lunch. One time I remember telling her that if only I could paint one good picture, I might be happy." In 1972, shortly after his 33rd birthday, he simply walked out of a meeting, away from his job and into the life of an artist.

Always a photographer, at times in a professional capacity, Register painted from sketches and photos he took as a matter of course wherever he lived and on scouting trips for subject matter, sometimes traveling alone by bus.

Though different in style than Edward Hopper, Register has in common with him the use of interiors as subject matter, and a sense of the alienation of modern man that has been nearly universal in 20th Century art, whether abstract of realistic. While Hopper's art is more traditionally realistic (made modern by hard contours and a subtle use of cubist geometry), Register's painting reflects both contemporary photo-realism and the flat planes of minimalism, itself a further derivation of cubism. But, where Hopper will often place single figures in an architectural setting to express the problem of human loneliness, Register generally eliminates people altogether, making paintings that resonate with the void created by their absence. Both Hopper's and Register's architecture is haunted, to one degree or another, by this feeling of loneliness and displacement.

In concentrating nearly all his attention on inanimate objects, Register imbues them with the feeling and presence of human beings. As a result, a chair is no longer a simple piece of furniture, but a nearly living entity expressive of the artist's attempt to come to terms with the existential crisis of doubt afflicting the modern age.

A 1989 quote from John Register reveals his feelings about society, his sense of its loss of purpose and vitality. "A realist today must deal with the threat of the bomb, extraordinary materialist and Philistine values, a hypocritical government, and a generally vulgar environment. Consequently, the subject matter of a realist painter must capture the feeling of isolation, the tension of nothing happening. The suspended animation. The frozenness one feels when confronted with this environment."

Register's paintings of diners, waiting rooms and offices are invested with great dignity and melancholy. He paints chairs, stools and booths, either singly, which magnifies their aloneness, or in series, as if the objects that we use congregate in our absence to overcome transferred isolation. But the chairs may have given up hope that anyone will ever sit in them.

Another way of saying it, Register's art is about structures...walls, chairs, booths and counters in diners, throughway overpasses, bridges, hotels, offices, airports and buses...and, equally importantly, the windows that connect the interior spaces with those with those outside. This dichotomy between inner and outer space, in addition to the absence of people, forms the basis of his art.

The interiors represent the emotional intensity and zone of relative safety within his own being (the interiors are literally self-portraits of Register). All the richness of color and depth of tonal values are within this inner world. The outer world through the windows is blanched and, if not threatening, unappealing, little there to satisfy. This, of course, is the visual equivalent of what Register has told us about our "frozen" world where "nothing is happening".

There is a certain yearning of the furniture for the windows (and doors), which are the means of possible connection with the outside world despite its negativity. There is also added sadness because it seems apparent that the two will never come together. The human desire for a significant relationship with the world will not be fulfilled. outside. This dichotomy between inner and outer space, in addition to the absence of people, forms the basis of his art.

Born in New York City on February 1, 1939, Register died in his wife's arms in Malibu, California, April 9, 1996.

Murray Reich- Of the dominant symbol in many of his paintings, Murray Reich wrote: "The arrow seems to be a universal sign. It is so simple and clear in its meaning that it can be described in a vast amount of styles, from a childlike scrawl to an intensely designed and sophisticated graphic image. Arrows are signs found everywhere, from the cursor on the computer, to street signs, to markers at complex country intersections and beyond. They are (as)signed the task of pointing. We are asked to respond to them by looking or moving to where they are pointing. Arrows involve time.

Born and raised in New York City, Murray Reich attended City College and received his M.F.A. in Painting from Boston University. As a younger artist, he attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and studied at Hunter College with Robert Motherwell and Richard Lippold.

Following his first solo show in New York at Max Hutchinson Gallery, Reich was awarded a Solomon R. Guggenheim Fellowship. His work was exhibited in two Whitney Annuals, as well as solo shows and group exhibitions.

Reich was Professor Emeritus of Painting at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where he taught for 25 years. He served on the faculty of the Graduate Program in Art at Hunter College in New York. He was the inaugural director of Tanglewood's Summer Program in Art in Massachusetts, and also taught at Boston University.

Reich lived and worked in New York City and Mt. Tremper in upstate New York, where he was involved with several long-standing interests, including fly-fishing and playing squash. Beginning in 2003 he pursued his "Arrow Project," taking street photographs that offered an interesting counterpoint to his paintings.

AWARDS

1981 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship

1972 Solomon R. Guggenheim Fellowship in Painting

PUBLIC COMMISSIONS

1980 Memphis Mural," 16' x 3', GSA Art in Architecture Program, Clifford Davis Federal Office Building, Memphis, Tennessee

978 "Mural," 8' x 25', Bard College (wall demolished)

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

Artists Space, New York,

Sydney, Australia

Huntington Museum, Huntington, West Virginia

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

"Abstract Vocabularies," Studio 18 Gallery, New York

American Academy of Arts and Letters, Invitational Exhibition of Painting & Sculpture, New York

Edith C. Bloom Art Institute, Bard College

Charles Cowles Gallery, New York

Long Point Gallery, Provincetown, Massachusetts

"23rd Annual of Contemporary American Painting," Lehigh University, Lehigh, Pennsylvania

"For the Reconstruction of Udine," Grey Art Gallery, New York

"Whitney Annual, " Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

"Painting on Paper," Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut

"9 from New York," Festival of Perth, Australia

"New Acquisitions," Power Institute of Fine Arts, Sydney and Melbourne, Australia

"Small Works," Museum of Modern Art, New York

"The Structure of Color," Whitney Museum of American Art

"8 from New York," Gallery A, Sydney, Australia

"New Work: New York," American Federation of Arts Traveling Exhibition

"Lyrical Abstraction," Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art

"Whitney Annual," Whitney Museum of American Art

"Insights," Parker 470, Boston

"Younger American Painters," American Federation of Arts Traveling Exhibition

"Painting without Brushes," Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts

The National Gallery, Washington, D.C.

Source:

Website of the artist at suggestion of Elizabeth Weatherford

George Reindel- William George Reindel was an engraver, etcher and painter. He was a member of the Cleveland Society of Artists, the Chicago Society of Illustrators and the Chicago Society of Etchers. Today his original art is included in such major collections as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the New York Public Library; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Butler Art Institute; and the British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

During the 1920's and 1930's, William Reindel created over one hundred and fifty original etchings and engravings. Most of his prints were created in the drypoint medium. Reindel printed most of these works himself and because drypoints will yield very few impressions, his editions rarely exceeded twenty-five in number.

Most of Reindel's engravings depict either street scenes or figure studies. He visited Europe (most particularly England) on several extended trips and made a number of fine drypoints while there.

Joseph Renier-Born: Union Hill, New Jersey 1887 Died: New York, New York 1966

Joseph Renier grew up in New Jersey and studied at the Art Students League in New York. He attended art schools in Paris and Brussels, and in 1915 won the Prix de Rome to study at the American Academy. He served with the American Red Cross in Italy during World War I and in 1921 finally returned to America. He created many architectural sculptures, reliefs, and medals, which included designs for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Civil War Centennial, and the American Heart Association. In 1959, Renier was awarded the gold medal for sculpture from the American Artists Professional League.

Paul Revere II- Paul Revere, Jr. (1734-1818)

Boston's most famous patriot-silversmith trained with his father, the French Huguenot silversmith Apollos Rivoire, also known as Paul Revere, Sr. (1702-1754), whose shop he inherited in 1754. With a fully equipped shop and many local patrons, he soon developed a thriving business and took on several apprentices himself. His clients included a number of family members (69.147) and neighbors, as well as political associates. He was married twice, first to Sarah Orne (ca. 1736-1773) and then to Rachel Walker (1745-1813), and was the father of sixteen children. An ardent revolutionary, Revere was active in political and civic organizations, including the Sons of Liberty.

He began his military service in 1756 and was promoted in 1776 to the rank of lieutenant colonel. His role as a courier for the Committees of Correspondence is well known from his midnight ride on April 18, 1775, an event later immortalized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

As a member of St. Andrew's Lodge, Revere was a devoted Freemason for fifty years, and many of his clients were also members of Boston's Masonic lodges. His shop was large and exceptionally active, supplying patrons with merchandise as well as services, including the importation of foreign goods (46.40.1-.2). Like other colonial merchants, he sold wrought silver and jewelry alongside imported textiles, foodstuffs, tools, and hardware. Documented instances of his relationships with other Boston craftsmen indicate a steady exchange of goods and services.

Revere's work in silver is often divided into two periods, preceding and following the Revolutionary War. The earlier period features some of his most creative and varied designs, still under the sway of the curvilinear Rococo style (46.40.1-.2; 38.98). By the postwar years, Neoclassicism was the dominant design aesthetic, and the output of Revere's shop increased and became more standardized, aided by equipment such as the flatting mill he acquired in 1785, which simplified the production of sheet silver. Objects like the quintessentially Neoclassical teapots and sugar urns (33.120.543; 33.120.546a,b,.547) were produced with new-found ease.

Many American silversmiths found it necessary or desirable to diversify their professional activities, and Revere was no exception. Following the Revolution, he branched into other fields, advertising in city directories as "Revere & Son, bell and cannon founders," a joint venture with his son Joseph Warren Revere. He also expanded into the areas of copperplate engraving, printing, and dentistry and later established a copper rolling mill in Canton, Massachusetts. A silversmith, merchant, entrepreneur, family man, and patriotic citizen, Revere led a full and successful life. His surviving daybooks, kept intermittently between 1761 and 1797 (now in the Massachusetts Historical Society), offer a valuable window on the workings of an eighteenth-century silversmith's business. By the end of his life, his silversmith shop was but one aspect of a wide-ranging business enterprise, and he took to styling himself "Paul Revere, Esquire."

One artistic measure of his success is the survival of two portraits, both now belonging to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The earlier one portrays Revere as a young craftsman, painted by the fashionable John Singleton Copley (1768); the later, Revere as a prosperous elderly gentleman, painted by Gilbert Stuart (1813) five years before his death.

By Beth Carver Wees

Department of American Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Citation

Wees, Beth Carver. "Paul Revere, Jr. (1734-1818)". In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000-. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/rvre/hd_rvre.htm (October 2003)

Further Reading

Federhen, Deborah A. "Paul Revere, Jr." In Colonial Massachusetts Silversmiths and Jewelers, by Patricia Kane et al., pp. 795-848. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1997.

Paul Revere, Artisan, Businessman, and Patriot: The Man Behind the Myth. Exhibition catalogue. Boston: Paul Revere Memorial Association, 1988.

Judy Rifka- Judy Rifka, video artist, book artist and abstract painter, is a multi-faceted artist who has worked in a variety of media in addition to her painting and printmaking. She was born in 1945 in New York City and studied art at Hunter College, the New York Studio School and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.

Her printmaking includes themes of the Italian Renaissance with church facades and According to critic Ann Shengold, "Rifka's work has been characterized by an agitated, often thick, black line which has become a kind of shorthand for her subjects: figures, architecture, and everyday objects. Her iconography describes the city she resides in, the places she travels to, and the events that are reported in the media. The work is quite frequently laced with visual and verbal puns."

Rifka's work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; New York Public Library, New York City; Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Massachusetts; University of North Carolina, Greensboro; Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; and Staatliche Museum, Berlin, Germany.

Her one-person exhibitions include New York City venues of Franklin Furnace, in 1977, and Printed Matter, in 1980; Museum fur Kultur, in Berlin and Hamburg, Germany, in 1981; Knight Gallery, Charlotte, North Carolina, 1984; and an installation in Gracie Mansion, the residence of the Mayor in New York City, in 1985.

A catalogue of a show in which Rifka participated, "Nine from Carolina: An Exhibition of Women Artists", was published in 1989 by the combined efforts of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the North Carolina State Committee.

Source:

Jules and Nancy Heller, "North American Women Artists of the 20th Century"

http://www.tandempress.wisc.edu/tandem/gallery/rifka/rifka.htm

Rodney Ripps- Rodney Ripps is an American visual artist who was born in 1950. Several works by the artist have been sold at auction, including 'Pink Duchess' sold at Bonhams Los Angeles 'Sunset Estate Auction - Fine Art' in 2006.

Hugo Robus- Painter-sculptor Hugo Robus was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1885. He studied from 1904 to 1908 (1903-07 says Wichita State U) at the Cleveland School of Art, where he also was employed manufacturing jewelry, tableware and ivories. He continued his studies at the National Academy of Design in 1910-11 (1907-09: Wichita) under Emil Carlsen (1853-1932), and with Antoine Bourdelle (1861-1929) at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, Paris, from 1912 to 1914.

After completion of his studies, Robus returned to the United States in 1914. He began teaching painting at the Modern Art School in New York shortly thereafter. After leaving the school in 1918, he painted briefly, but by 1920 devoted his time almost exclusively to sculpture, working primarily in isolation and supporting his family through the sale of crafts. He did not show his work publicly until the 1930s, when his work achieved "the sweeping contours and highly polished sleekness of his mature style" (Falk).

As a painter, he had created sophisticated Cubist studies of interiors, nudes and back yard scenes but dissatisfaction with his work had caused him to turn to sculpture. Rather than transpose Cubism into three dimensions, he developed a lyrical, expressionist style. People were his preferred subject matter, the parts of their bodies made round and bulbous so that the perimeters seemed bounded by continuous arcs, as in "Woman Combing Her Hair," 1927, now in the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.

The flow of volumes always lay at the base of his designs. Only briefly, in the late 1940s, did he investigate three-dimensional Cubism, using chunky, hollowed out forms.

Robus chose not to emphasize the properties of materials, believing that "they distort or destroy pure form optically much more frequently than they enhance it." Hugo Robus's abstract figurative sculpture, "Invocation" is a large work on the campus of Wichita State University in Kansas. It was originally crafted in plaster (location unknown) in 1928-29. The plaster was first exhibited in the Sculptors Guild exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Robus's decision to create the figure in polished bronze was necessary to secure the structural integrity of the work and also because he "considered ours an age of metal."

The androgynous figure of "Invocation" lifts its head to the sky, calling to a higher power. The streamlined, stylized anatomy conveys a plastic energy, an indication of what Roberta K. Tarbell called the "universal life force."

Former Fairleigh Dickinson University president Peter Sammartino and his wife, Sylvia donated "Girl Washing Her Hair," by Hugo Robus, to the University in 1981 in honor of Dr. and Mrs. Joseph Muscarelle. The sculpture now stands in the lobby of the Muscarelle Center for Building Construction Studies on the Teaneck-Hackensack campus in New Jersey. The piece is one of four original bronze castings and was acquired from the artist in 1961. Originally made in plaster and displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1940s, the sculpture was said to have embodied the essence of modern art.

Robus was also a teacher at the Modern Art School in New York City, Columbia University, the Brooklyn Museum School, and Hunter College.

Sources include:

Matthew Baigell, Dictionary of American Art

Peter Hastings Falk (Editor), Who Was Who in American Art

http://webs.wichita.edu/depttools/user_home/?view=mark2&page=invocation

http://www.fdu.edu/newspubs/magazine/00su/sculp.html

Umberto Romano- Umberto Romano was a painter, sculptor, teacher and illustrator who did work embracing a wide variety of styles and influences. It is written that "Roman's versatility may have kept him from being easily classified", (Suite101.com) but his output reflects both a sincerity of responses at the time of their completion, and a wide range of emotions and world experiences.

He lived with his wife, Clorinda, in New York City, Gloucester, Worcester, and Provincetown, Massachusetts. He was born in 1906 in Bracigliano, Italy and emigrated to America with his parents when he was a child. The family settled in western Massachusetts. He showed early interest in art, and as a teenager enrolled at the National Academy of Design* in New York. A few years later he earned a Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship, which he used to study art in the museums in Europe. His self-portrait around this time, Psyche and the Sculptor, shows him wearing a skin-tight shirt, scarf, beret, and weight-lifting belt. "He holds a hammer near his crotch, a cocky symbol of his artistic and sexual prowess." (New England Journal)

After his period in New York followed by travel, he settled in Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1933. There he associated with painters and sculptors whose names remain famous as leading American artists: Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, John Sloan, Paul Manship and Milton Avery. These men influenced his styles and subjects, which included Art Deco*, Cubism*, Realism*, Expressionism*, and Regionalism*. It is written that after he left Gloucester for Provincetown in the mid 1960s, his style became increasingly abstract* and that "with loopy line drawings of naked ladies and 70s disintegrating bodies, it feels forced." (New England Journal)

In 1928, Romano had his first solo exhibition, which was held at New York's Rehn Galleries. The next year, he began giving art lessons on a boat in Rocky Neck, Massachusetts, and eventually in Gloucester, he purchased a larger space, the Gallery-on-the Moors, and opened the Romano School of Art. In the '30s, he also taught nearby at the Worcester Art Museum School and at the New York Academy of the Fine Arts*.

Reportedly his teaching style was "charismatic and impassioned", and he was very helpful with his students, while insisting on quality of work. He insisted "that art was a like a foreign language that needed to be studied fully in order to have true fluency and understanding." (Suite 101)

In 1935, Romano did work for the WPA* including a six-panel historical mural at the Post Office Building in Springfield, Massachusetts. He also painted the official portrait of Sara Delano Roosevelt, mother of United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. During World War II, he did paintings that increasingly reflected the turmoil he and others were experiencing with the sufferings of war victims. His work became darker and darker and more melancholic. In his painting, Cargo, his theme was a nearly naked, sun exposed Merchant Marine dying on a raft after Axis forces had sunk his ship. ("Merchant Marine cargo ships brought vital supplies to American troops during battle and were often attacked by enemy forces. Despite frequent casualties, Merchant Marines were not regarded as veterans and did not receive military honors or benefits." (Suite 101.com) The painting resembled a pieta "or one of the poor wretches in Theodore Gericault's early 19th century masterpiece, The Raft of Medusa." (New England Journal)

Additional painting was a Great Man Series, which included a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, done with a dribble technique, varied blue tones and heavy lines, all which contributed to a very introspective seeming figure. In the 1970s, he did a Glass Box Series where he placed representational "fragments" of humanity into glass cases, a concept partially prompted by Nazi Adolf Eichmann's being tried for World War II atrocities within a bulletproof glass booth.

Romano died in New York City in 1982. His work is in many leading museums such as the Whitney, Smithsonian, and Cape Ann Historical Museum. His portrait of Abraham Lincoln is in the Presidentlial Library collection. Among his exhibition venues were the Carnegie Institute and Chicago Art Institute.

His son, U. Roberto (Robin) Romano is a social realist photographer and documentary film maker.

In 2007, the Cape Ann Historical Museum had a survey of Umberto's painting titled: Man Sings of Man: Umberto Romano, 1906-1982.

Sources:

The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research, January 16. 2007,

http://gregcookland.com/journal/2007/01/umberto-romano.html

Suite101.com

http://20thcenturyart.suite101.com/article.cfm/umberto_romano#ixzz0kvzIyc92

Bakkom Collection, St. Paul, Minnesota, courtesy Matthew Bakkom

Charles Rosen- An Impressionist and modernist experimenting with Cubism, Charles Rosen applied this style and other European innovations to typical American subjects. He did numerous snowscenes and was especially drawn to industrial and marine scenes including factories, barges, and mills along the Hudson and Delaware rivers. He is best remembered as a second-generation member of the New Hope Impressionist School and a long-time resident of the Woodstock Art Colony.

He was born in Reagantown, Pennsylvania and at age sixteen ran a photography studio in West Newtown, Pennsylvania. In 1898, he began an illustration career in New York City and studied with Francis Coates Jones at the National Academy of Design. He also studied at the New York School of Art with William Merritt Chase and with Frank Vincent DuMond, whom he later followed to Old Lyme Connecticut, a colony of impressionist painters. It was there that he developed an interest in landscape painting.

In 1903, he married Mildred Holden, and they moved to New Hope, Pennsylvania in Bucks County about forty miles north of Philadelphia, and in 1916, he began exhibiting with fellow artists there, called "The New Hope Group," including Daniel Garber and Edward Redfield. In 1918, he went to the Woodstock Art Colony at age forty to teach landscape painting in summer school in the Art Students League program, and by 1920 he had settled in Woodstock. In 1922, he and Henry Lee McFee and Andrew Dasburg founded their own school of art, the Woodstock School of Painting.

He lived primarily in Woodstock until his death in Kingston, New York in 1950 with the exception of several years in Texas. In 1940, Charles Rosen worked in San Antonio, Texas as director of the Witte Memorial Museum School of Art to replace Henry McFee, who had resigned. He remained until the school closed in 1942, but then became director for of the Koogler McNay Art Institute in San Antonio.

He was an elected member of the National Academy of Design and The National Arts Club, and his work is in many collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Butler Institute in Youngstown, Ohio, and the City Art Museum in St. Louis. His painting, Winter Sunlight, won the Altman Gold Medal and the Inness Gold Medal at the National Academy of Design in 1917.

Sources include:

Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art

John and Deborah Powers, Texas Painters, Sculptors & Graphic Artists

James Rosenquist- James Rosenquist was born in 1933 at Grand Forks, North Dakota. His family moved to Minneapolis in 1944. In 1948, he began his studies of art at the Minneapolis Art Institute. In 1953, he continued his studies of painting at the University of Minnesota.

In 1955 he had a scholarship to go to the Art Students' League, New York, where he met Robert Indiana. During this period, he painted small format abstract paintings and worked part-time as a driver. In 1957 he met Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. In 1959 he was at the same drawing class as Claes Oldenburg and was made "head painter" by the Artcraft Strauss Corporation.

He married the textile designer Mary Lou Adams. During the election he produced the picture President Elect in which John F. Kennedy's face is combined in a kind of collage with sex and automobile imagery. His first one-man exhibition in the Green Gallery, in 1962, was sold out. In 1963 he worked on several sculptures, had a number of exhibitions at the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, showed his work at the Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles, and taught at Yale University. In 1965 he began to work with lithographs.

In the same year he made the 26 meter-wide picture F-111, which was shown at the Jewish Museum, New York, at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and in other European cities. It is one of his most important works. The spatial organization of the composition into layers suggests the interrelationship of contemporary historical symbols and signs of affluence and military hardware, a vision of American culture expressing the proximity of euphoria and catastrophe. In 1967 he moved to East Hampton.

In 1968 he was given his first retrospective by the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. In 1969 he turned his attention to experimenting with film techniques. In 1970 he went to Cologne for the opening of his exhibition at the Galerie Rolf Ricke. During the public protest against the Vietnam War he was briefly detained in Washington. During the same year he had comprehensive retrospectives at the Wallraf-Richards Museum, Cologne, and the Whitney Museum, New York.

In 1974 and 1975, he lobbied the U.S. Senate on the legal rights of artists. He became separated from his wife and designed his own house with an open-air studio at Indian Bay, Aripeka, Florida. In 1978 F-111 was exhibited in the International Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In his work of the late seventies and eighties, e.g. 4 "New Clear Women," images of women are confronted with machine aesthetics, usually in large oblong compositions. The themes of these dynamic compositions also include fire, progress and war machinery which he shows in rotating pictorial narratives. Between 1985 and 1987 Rosenquist's entire development as an artist was shown in a comprehensive retrospective at six American museums.

James Rosenquist was born in the dust bowl that was Grand Forks, North Dakota on November 29, 1933. He lived a nomadic childhood as his father moved throughout the northern midwest seeking work. Louis Rosenquist was an ex-pilot and imbued his son with a love of things mechanical. In 1948 James won a scholarship to study at the Minneapolis School of Art; from 1952 to 1955 he studied painting at the University of Minnesota. In 1955 he moved to New York City to study at the Art Students League because he had won a scholarship. This traditional training was combined with an apprenticeship painting billboards in New York City.

In 1960 when he was twenty-seven he was ready to abandon billboards for serious art. As a young sign painter, Rosenquist was considered to be a "billboard Michelangelo." His debt to Surrealism in his reliance on seemingly irrational juxtapositions was evident in the majority of his paintings. He was determined to find an alternative to the Abstract Expressionism that was so prevalent in New York City. His references to mass-produced goods, and to magazines, films and other aspects of the mass media, together with his seemingly anonymous technique, caused him to be regarded as one of the key figures in the development of Pop art in the United States.

Rosenquist was married twice and had a daughter, Lily, with his second wife, Mimi Thompson.

Written and submitted by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.

Sources:

From the Internet, www.artnet.com

ARTnews magazine, March 1986

ARTnews magazine, October 1991

Rosenquist Revisited by Eleanor Heartley in ARTnews magazine, Summer 1986

David Roth- David Roth (b. 1942)

A conceptual abstract artists, his work reflects his fascination with "the reflection of light on a 'necessarily' elusive material surface." Roth works to formulate with color. The graphs he executes are proportioned according to a strict mathematical formula and the pictures are composed according to horizontal and vertical divisions on the graph paper.

Born in New York City in 1942, he studied with Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Eugene Dana, Misch Kohn and Richard Koppe at the Institute of Design (The New Bauhaus), Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT).

In the 1960's he designed a series of Poster Poems with Alan Ginsburg, Robert Creeley, Michael McClure, Robert Olson and Louis Zukofsky. Roth's original works have been available over the years at several galleries, from New York to Los Angeles, from Paris to Stockholm. Various publishers have issued over 60 editions of his prints.

Selected Group Exhibitions:

1967 State University of New York, Buffalo

1972 The Brooklyn Museum, New York

1972 The Newark Museum, New Jersey

1972 Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois

1973 Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio

1973 Museum at Art, Rhode Island School of Design

1974 Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana

1974 Taft Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio

1974 Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

1975 New York Cultural Center

1976 Indianapolis Museum of Art

Public and Corporate Collections:

The Albright-Knox

Amstar Corporation

American Telephone and Telegraph

Ball State University Museum

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Chase Manhattan Collection

Museum at Contemporary Arts, Teheran, Iran (Gift from Nelson Rockefeller)

Hess Oil Corporation

Lehman Brothers

First National City Bank

Rockefeller University

Owens-Corning Fiberglass

Swiss Investment Bank

United Mutual Savings & Loan

Newark Museum at Art

Sources include:

modernegallery.com/

rogallery.com

Chauncey Ryder- Chauncey Foster Ryder was born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1868. He spent much of his youth in New Haven, Connecticut, where he began to pursue an interest in painting between the ages of ten and twelve. In his early twenties he moved to Chicago for artistic instruction, studying first at the Art Institute and then at Smith's Academy, where he became an instructor after his first year as a student. In 1891 he married Mary Dole Keith, and in 1901 they sold their belongings and moved to France so that he could study art in Paris.

He first enrolled in the Academie Julien, under Jean Paul Laurens and Raphael Colin; after two years there, he began to exhibit works at the annual Paris Salon, and showed works regularly there from 1903-1909. At this time he also developed a friendship with American artist Max Bohm, who profoundly influenced his style with his dramatic and moody compositions. In 1907 Ryder won an honorable mention for Ce Que Rende La Mer (That Which the Sea Gives Up), the figurative style of which is very different from Ryder's characteristic landscapes, which even contemporaries recognized to be his usual style.

1907 was also an important year for Ryder when the prominent New York art dealer, William Macbeth, began to represent him, selling the first of Ryder's works after only two months of partnership. This was a lifelong business relationship, and Macbeth was responsible for the marketing of Ryder's painting style, as well as his works, hanging, framing, and even titling the production that poured from Ryder's studio. That fall Ryder moved to New York City and began to show his work both in Paris and in New York, and finally in 1909 he opened a studio in New York.

In 1910 Ryder began to travel through New England, the landscape of which provided much of the subject matter for his work. He and his wife bought "a little house and three acres in Wilton, New Hampshire," and for the rest of their lives, they split their time between New York City in the winter months and New Hampshire in the spring and summer.

From their home in Wilton they traveled throughout New England, and continued to do so until old age. From this point until the end of his life, Ryder's works gained great popularity due to his consistently recognizable style, what is called his "Ryder green…that was, in part, responsible for the pleasing quality and unique character of his work,". Shortly after the purchase of the New Hampshire property, Ryder began to undertake lithographs, in addition to the drypoints, etchings, drawings, and watercolors he already produced, at the behest of Bolton Brown, one of the premier lithographers of his time. These lithographs were shown alongside his paintings at Macbeth's gallery in New York.

Ryder died in 1949 in Wilton, New Hampshire. His work is known today primarily through his oil painting, and it was known and recognized at the time of his death for its "economy of line" (About the Artist). In addition, however, "the unusual and vigorous quality to his prints" (Chicago Society of Etchers) was also noted, and the way his landscapes engaged the aesthetic of the abstract without presenting abstract subject matter, in a time when the general public was unsure about how to approach truly abstract art.

The bareness of his drypoints, in particular, is stunning; there is a true feeling of his "unfailingly kind and gentle" (Memories of Chancey and Mary Ryder), simple personality, and a deep sense of "the poetic aspect of nature" (Peace and Plenty, 80) conveyed by his works.

"I paint by feeling," (Peace and Plenty, 78) Ryder once said-and it is this feeling that is given to the viewers when they see his prints and paintings. With the exhibition and cataloguing of his graphic works numbering more than two hundred drypoints and lithographs in www.raisonne.org -half a century after his death- we hope that the subtle, stark power of his landscape scenes will be given new relevance, and that Ryder's "wealth…[of] peace of mind" (Memories of Chauncey and Mary Ryder) will give us some of our own.

Written and submitted by Diana Limbach and D. Roger Howlett, 2005

(Of particular interest to your audience is the appearance of the new, free, Chauncey Ryder print raisonné at www.raisonne.org. D. Roger Howlett, President, Childs Gallery, Boston)

SOURCES

About the Artist, publication unknown, from the artist's estate.

Swann, James. Text Accompaniment to "Road to Bristol." Chicago Society of Etchers,

1943.

Pisano, Ronald G., "Chauncey Foster Ryder: Peace and Plenty", Art and Antiques,

(September-October 1978), pp. 76-83.

Abbot, Elinor. "Memories of Chauncey and Mary Ryder," unpublished, from the artist's

estate.

A painter noted for his landscapes that reflected both Impressionism and Tonalism, Chauncey Ryder was also one of the more successful painters associated with exhibitions at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City. His paintings became popular with collectors "who were drawn to paintings that inspired a reflective state of mind and who admired Ryder's ability to achieve 'the right proportion between the real and the unreal, between detail and vagueness.' " (Lowrey)

He grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, and in his 20s, moved to Chicago where he was a student at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the art school, Smith's Art Academy. He later was a teacher there. In 1901, Chauncey Ryder enrolled in the Academie Julian in Paris where he studied with Raphael Collin and Jean Paul Laurens. He exhibited genre scenes in the Paris Salon, 1903-1906, and also painted at the port town of Etaples, France with other American artists including Max Bohm and Roy Brown.

In 1907, he returned to America, settling in New York City, and three-years later became one of the Macbeth Gallery artists. He also purchased a house in Wilton, New Hampshire and began a routine of spending seven months of each year there, April to November, and the remaining months in New York.

In 1910 and 1911, he painted and exhibited at Old Lyme, Connecticut, and did a panel, Winter Landscape, for the home of Florence Griswold, a key person in that community. In 1920, he was named Academician by the National Academy of New York. He exhibited for over 30 years with the American Watercolor Society.

Sources include:

Carol Lowrey, 'Chauncey Foster Ryder', The Poetic Vision: American Tonalism, p. 164 (Spanierman Galleries, LLC)

Ronald Pisano, American Art & Antiques, 10/1978, "Chauncey Foster Ryder Peace and Plenty."