Portrait: Franz Marc, one of the key figures of German Expressionism

24 November 2021 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: Portrait Reading Time:  5 minutes

Franz Marc, 1910

Franz Marc, 1910

Franz Moritz Wilhelm Marc (8 February 1880 – 4 March 1916) was a German painter and printmaker, one of the key figures of German Expressionism. He was a founding member of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a journal whose name later became synonymous with the circle of artists collaborating in it.   read more…

Portrait: Wassily Kandinsky, expressionist and pioneer of abstract art

22 September 2021 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: Portrait Reading Time:  8 minutes

Wassily Kandinsky in 1922 by Hugo Erfurth

Wassily Kandinsky in 1922 by Hugo Erfurth

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was a Russian painter and art theorist. Kandinsky is generally credited as the pioneer of abstract art. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa (today Ukraine), where he graduated at Grekov Odessa Art school. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. Successful in his profession—he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law) at the University of Dorpat (today Tartu, Estonia)—Kandinsky began painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30.   read more…

Portrait: August Macke, a German Expressionist painter

28 July 2021 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: Portrait Reading Time:  10 minutes

Selbstporträt mit Hut (1909) by August Macke

Selbstporträt mit Hut (1909) by August Macke

August Robert Ludwig Macke was a German Expressionist painter. He was one of the leading members of the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). He lived during a particularly innovative time for German art: he saw the development of the main German Expressionist movements as well as the arrival of the successive avant-garde movements which were forming in the rest of Europe. Like a true artist of his time, Macke knew how to integrate into his painting the elements of the avant-garde which most interested him. Like his friend Franz Marc and Otto Soltau, he was one of the young German artists who died in the First World War. The August-Macke-Haus is a museum dedicated to August Macke founded in 1991. It is located in Macke’s former home in Bonn, where he lived from 1911 to 1914.   read more…

Portrait: Paul Klee, painter and graphic artist

23 June 2021 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: Portrait Reading Time:  8 minutes

Paul Klee by Hugo Erfurth in 1927

Paul Klee by Hugo Erfurth in 1927

Paul Klee was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci‘s A Treatise on Painting for the Renaissance. He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture in Germany. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.   read more…

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