bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Gorgi, Abdelaziz (1928–2007)
Authors: Gerschultz Jessica
Published: September 2018

Abdelaziz Gorgi was a Tunisian artist and teacher. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Tunis from 1944 to 1949, and received further artistic training in Parisian ceramics studios between 1949 and 1953. He was a founding member of the École de Tunis, an elite group of artists charged with creating a Tunisian artistic modernism. In 1957 Gorgi was a regional manager in the Office National de l’Artisanat, where his experience overseeing the pottery manufacture of Nabeul impacted his early perspectives on art. From 1958 on he directed the ceramics atelier of the École des Beaux-Arts in Tunis. Together with Safia Farhat he implemented an arts curriculum aligned with government initiatives for national development. In 1963 they co-founded the Société Zin to harness state commissions for decorative programs in civic buildings. Gorgi’s most significant ceramic tiles from this period wrap around the façade of the presidential palace in Monastir, designed by architect Olivier-Clément Cacoub, and depict lyrical scenes of horses, trees, and marine life. Throughout his career Gorgi employed various media to evoke artisanal production, cultural patrimony, surrealist imagery, and sexuality. He founded two galleries in Tunis, Espace Gorgi in Mutuelleville in 1973 and Galerie Ammar Farhat in Sidi Bou Saïd in 1988.
Villanueva, María Cecilia (1964--)
Authors: Etkin Mariano
Published: September 2018

María Cecilia Villanueva was born in 1964 in La Plata, Argentina. She studied composition with Mariano Etkin at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, where she currently works as teacher in composition and researcher in musical analysis focused on twentieth-century music. She is considered one of the most notable figures of her generation, successfully mixing research and composition.

Villanueva’s music is a testimony to her esthetic independence. She distinguishes herself from her colleagues by the originality of her technical approaches and her rendering of very personal ideas. The expressive density of Villanueva’s music develops around a complex elaboration of materials, which, in some cases, coexist with elements of extreme simplicity. Her music has been performed in many of the main festivals and new music cycles of Europe, the United States, and Latin America. She has also received recognition for her work on numerous occasions. She was awarded the German Forum JungerKomponisten 1989 (WDR) prize in Köln, and won the Elizabeth Schneider prize in 2001 in Freiburg, as well as the Premio de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2003. She has been the recipient of several prestigious German composer residences at the AkademieSchloss Solitude, Stuttgart (1994–95), the KünstlerhofSchreyahn (1996) and the KünstlerdorfSchöppingen (2003).
Henein, Adam (1929--)
Authors: Radwan Nadia
Published: September 2018

Born in Cairo, Egypt, Adam Henein is one of the leading contemporary sculptors of the Arab World. Throughout his career, he produced large- and small-scale pieces incorporating granite, bronze, plaster, limestone and terracotta. His work is inspired by the graceful solidity of ancient Egyptian statuary and expresses a sense of simplicity in the treatment of mass and volumes.

Henein is also a talented painter who worked to revive ancient techniques, such as working with natural pigments on papyrus sheets. Graduating from the School of Fine Arts in Cairo in 1953, he received a scholarship in 1957 to pursue his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In 1971, he moved to Paris, where he stayed for twenty-five years. By the time he returned to Egypt in 1996, he enjoyed international recognition. He was appointed by the Ministry of Culture to participate in the restoration of the Sphinx in Giza from 1989 to 1998. In 1996, he founded the Aswan International Sculpture Symposium.
Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts
Authors: Rogers Sarah Ann
Published: September 2018

The Royal Society of Fine Arts, a private, non-profit, non-governmental organization with the goal of promoting the visual arts in Jordan and the region, established the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts in 1980. Located in two buildings in the historic district of Jabal al Weibdeh in the capital of Amman, the National Gallery houses over two thousand five hundred paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, photographs, weavings, installations, and video art by modern and contemporary artists from Arab, Islamic, and developing countries. One of the institution’s most important projects was the 1989 exhibition, Contemporary Art from the Islamic World, which opened at the Barbican Centre in London. Edited by founding director Dr Wijdan F. Al-Hashemi and accompanied by an extensive catalogue, the exhibition represented the most extensive show of modern Islamic art in Europe, with over two hundred pieces and inclusive of over a hundred artists from twenty-three countries in the Islamic world. In 2009, the National Gallery launched a second pioneering project: the Mobile Museum. Each week, a van converted into a gallery shares the work of Jordanian artists, along with art workshops and artist talks, with villages throughout Jordan’s rural countryside.
Kacimi, Mohamed (1942–2003)
Authors: Powers Jean Holiday
Published: September 2018

Mohamed Kacimi was a significant Moroccan modernist artist who rose to prominence in the 1970s. His paintings were semi-abstract, and while a large part of his canvases was often entirely abstracted washes of color, recognizably human figures, created with an economy of lines and lacking individual differentiation, took on increasing importance during his career. Besides being recognized as a painter, Kacimi was known as a writer of both essays and poetry. He began writing in 1972 for various journals and papers in Morocco and throughout the Arab world. With the Moroccan writers’ union and arts association, Kacimi played a role in founding the journal Alischara (Signs). Kacimi exhibited in a number of significant exhibitions, including the first Arab biennale in Baghdad (1974), and his work is held in numerous collections, including the Khalid Shoman Foundation/Darat al Funun (Amman). He also provided illustrations for numerous books in collaboration with writers, including Abdellatif Laabi. After his death, the Moroccan Ministry of Culture opened the Galerie Mohamed el Kacimi in 2005 in Fes, in homage to the significance of Kacimi’s artistic contribution.
Kappata, Stephen (1936–2007)
Authors: Cantone Helena
Published: September 2018

Stephen Chipango Kappata was born in Zambia in 1936 to Angolan migrant parents who had fled Angola during the Portuguese wars of conquest during World War I. Kappata began painting in 1969–1970, following a meeting with an artist who sold paintings depicting Victoria Falls in the local tourist market. At first Kappata sold his paintings to a largely local market centered around the town of Mongu. Following a brief period abroad in Britain, where he received some training in film, photography, and illustration, Kappata returned to Zambia. It was there, in 1982, that he met Anna-Lise Clausen, the Danish woman who helped organize Kappata’s first solo exhibition at the Mpapa Gallery in 1986. Kappata went on to take part in numerous international shows, including the Third Havana Biennial in Cuba in 1989. Kappata’s work is a complex interplay between satire and education, his paintings generally addressing three main themes: Zambians traditions, customs, and culture; the historical experience and injustice of colonialism; and social commentary on contemporary issues including alcoholism, AIDS, sexual promiscuity, and workers’ rights. Although Kappata’s work was in many ways marketed by a Western-driven African art market as "naive," "self-trained" and "folkloristic," today his paintings stand out as an important testament of Zambian and South African political and social history.
Kawabata, Ryûshi (川端龍子) (1885–1966)
Authors: Loh Kazuhara Eve
Published: September 2018

Kawabata Ryûshi was one of few artists who were adept at both Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) and Yôga (Western-style painting). Originally trained in the latter, Ryûshi’s successful pointillist impressionist works were exhibited at the Tokyo Industrial Exposition and the Bunten (a government-sponsored exhibition) in 1907. In 1912, Ryûshi traveled to the United States where his encounter with the collection of Japanese art at the Boston Museum inspired a turn towards Nihonga. Ryûshi’s subsequent works were accepted for the Taishô Exposition in 1914, as well as for the Japan Art Institute’s second annual exhibition. After Ryûshi was made a full member of the Institute, he left his illustration job to become a full-time artist. Following his departure from the Institute in 1929, Ryûshi established the Blue Dragon Society (Seiryû-sha). There, he advocated painting large-scale works meant for exhibition purposes. This was a radical departure from traditional Nihonga works which were conventionally designed for smaller spaces, such as the interiors of Japanese homes. Some of Ryûshi’s better-known works are paintings created during Japan’s participation in World War II, and include narrative paintings based on the Japanese mythical creature known as the kappa. In 1956, Ryûshi painted dragons on the ceilings at the Asakusa Sensôji Temple. In 1959, he was awarded the Order of Culture by the Japanese government.
Kinugasa, Teinosuke (1896–1982)
Authors: Heitzman Kendall
Published: September 2018

Kinugasa Teinosuke (1 January 1896–26 February 1982) was a Japanese actor and film director, most famous for his experimental films of the 1920s and art-house classics of the 1950s. He started as a specialist in oyama female roles, a tradition carried over from Japanese theater to film, and turned to directing as the convention faded in the 1910s and 1920s. After directing films for the major film studios Nikkatsu and Makino, Kinugasa went independent in 1926 with the New Impressionist Film League, his collaboration with members of the New Impressionist School of modernist writers led by Yokomitsu Riichi and Kawabata Yasunari. Kinugasa produced his most famous film, the experimental, avant-garde Kurutta ichipeiji [A Page of Madness] (1926), from a script by Kawabata and others. Despite its secure location in global film history, A Page of Madness was not a financial success, and Kinugasa began working for Shōchiku, at first producing noteworthy films such as Jujiro [Crossroads] (1928) that, while experimental in nature, never again rose to the same level of high-modernist abstraction. Kinugasa had a long career at Shōchiku and then Daiei as a director of period dramas. His films Yukinojo henge [An Actor’s Revenge] (1935) and Jigokumon [Gate of Hell] (1953)—both starring Kinugasa’s frequent collaborator, Hasegawa Kazuo—are representative of his middle and late career. Gate of Hell won a Palme d’Or at the Cannes International Film Festival and received an Academy Honorary Award, the precursor category to Best Foreign Language Film.
Kline, Franz (1910–1962)
Authors: Thyssen Esther T.
Published: September 2018

A prominent member of the Abstract Expressionists, Franz Kline was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. In high school he drew cartoons and, after attending Boston University, studied at the Art Students League in New York and the Heatherly Art School in London. Kline became a regular at the Cedar Tavern, and for most of the 1940s painted urban and industrial spaces with boldly drawn architectural elements. These paintings later developed into the signature black and white canvases for which he is best known. The bold swaths of black pigment relate to one another as steel beams and bridge spans might, while the interstitial gaps are thickly painted and blended along the edges of directional motifs eliminating any illusion of depth, as in Painting Number 2 (1954) at the Museum of Modern Art. Kline’s canvases, canonized as "action painting" by Harold Rosenberg, were harbingers of individualism and vitality in American art exhibitions sent abroad during the Cold War. Kline died suddenly in 1962 just as color begun to reappear in his palette. His blustery abstractions inspired a large following, including Brice Marden, the sculptor Mark di Suvero and photographer Aaron Siskind.
Modern Lacquer Painting in Vietnam
Authors: André-Pallois Nadine
Published: September 2018

First practiced in China and Japan, lacquer was originally adopted in Vietnam as a decorative technique, used to protect and embellish religious and household objects. In the 1930s, the technique was revived in Vietnam as a distinct style of fine art—known as sơn mài—largely thanks to the efforts of Vietnamese students and French teachers at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine in Hanoi. Following the 1930s, Vietnamese artists worked to develop further the potential of this traditional technique, organising a lacquer workshop at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine with the help of Vietnamese craftsmen, who taught attendees the different steps involved in creating a lacquer painting. During this period Vietnamese art students, including Nguyễn Gia Trí, Trâ`n Văn Cẩn, and Phạm Hâ`u, worked to increase the nuance of the medium and to give a superior relief to the lacquer board through rubbing and polishing.
Lilanga, George (1934–2005)
Authors: Siegler Jennifer E.
Published: September 2018

George Lilanga was a contemporary Tanzanian artist best known for his colorful paintings and sculptures of mashetani, or devils in Kiswahili, and transforming a Makonde art form developed in the 1950s into an international brand. Although his works have been exhibited widely in the United States, Europe, and Japan since the late 1970s, he received little recognition in Tanzania until the 21st Century, over twenty years after he first garnered international attention. Lilanga’s diverse work is unified by playful mashetani performing scenes of daily life in villages and cities in Tanzania. The spirits are typically depicted as hairless creatures with large ears, a wide-open mouth, prominent teeth, and a protruding stomach. Their hands only have two fingers, and their feet have three toes. Mashetani inhabiting village scenes are often depicted bare-chested with a wrap around their waist, while those in urban scenes are shown wearing Western clothing. Lilanga’s style is characterized by a sinuous line and bright, saturated hues. His two-dimensional works feature forms outlined in black or white. His compositions have no horizon line, and rarely include any environmental details. Lilanga’s themes are often commentary on changing societal values, with his titles providing aphorisms encouraging traditional morals.
Liu Haisu [劉海粟] (1896–1994)
Authors: Ma William H.
Published: September 2018

Liu Haisu was a painter, art educator, exhibition organizer, and key figure in introducing Western art to China in the 20th century. As the founder of art schools in Shanghai and Nanjing—including the Shanghai Academy, the first art college in modern China—he advocated for a Western style of art education. He encouraged individual students’ creative expression, and attracted much scandalous attention when he introduced nude model drawing into his school in 1920. As an exhibition organizer, he helped introduce modern Chinese art to Europe and Asia. He was involved with many artists’ groups, including co-founding the Heavenly Horse Society, a group that promoted French salon-style exhibitions.

Born into a family of distinguished literati, Liu was trained in classical Chinese painting when he was young. After briefly studying art in Shanghai, he traveled to Japan and later Europe to view and learn about Western art. His early works reflected much of what he saw: paintings by Post-Impressionists like Paul Cézanne and Vincent Van Gogh. Returning to China, he became an active promoter of that particular type of European modernism. His later works were mostly in traditional Chinese media and techniques, but they were clearly indebted to the Post-Impressionists in the use of bold colors and expressive brushstrokes.
Mede, Cuthy (1949--)
Authors: Birch de Aguilar Laurel
Published: September 2018

Born in Zimbabwe in 1949 to Malawian parents, Cuthbert (Cuthy) Mede grew up on Likoma Island, Lake Malawi. Internationally, Mede is considered the most well known Malawian artist. Known for his cubist forms and pointillist style, Mede unites modern art techniques with traditional Malawian subjects, and his work is inspired by his religious beliefs and local imagery. With a single dot giving perspective to his pointillism paintings, Mede’s most well recognized style emerges in wavy lines of white light over portraits of local people, or vivid primary colors of dancing, celebrations, and movement. His subjects are distinctly local: a woman with snuff; a witchdoctor; a mother and child; traditional instruments; cooking pots; images of imaginary spirit forms in reds, oranges and blues. Cuthy Mede taught modern art in Chancellor College as a young man, but soon became a successful artist. Mede opened the first art gallery in Malawi, the Gallerie Africaine in the city center, in Lilongwe in the early 1980s, and exhibited his works throughout Malawi from 1970s on, finding success worldwide. In recent years Mede is known for his fluorescent tube white garden and his purely white artworks.
Ashton, Frederick William Mallandaine (1904–1988)
Authors: Morris Geraldine
Published: September 2018

Frederick Ashton was a British choreographer and dancer whose work significantly contributed to the development and identity of The Royal Ballet. Along with its founder, Ninette de Valois, and music director, Constant Lambert, Ashton is regarded as one of its main architects and more broadly as a major creator of British ballet style. He was the company’s principal choreographer between 1935 and 1970, and its director from 1963. Inheriting the avant-gardism of the Ballets Russes, he pushed and molded it to suit his own purposes. Concentrating chiefly on one-act works, his main stimulus was dance itself; ballet movement was central to his work. Even when he used narrative, he did so largely to explore dance. As a frequent collaborator with other modernist artists, he created works that were innovative and occasionally challenging: In 1934, he made the dances for Gertrude Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts and, in 1937, her ballet A Wedding Bouquet, while in 1950 he choreographed Illuminations for the New York City Ballet to Benjamin Britten’s setting of Arthur Rimbaud’s poems. Despite the reservations of Constant Lambert and the English music press, he used four of Stravinsky’s scores, two of which were in mixed media: Persephone (1961) and Le Rossignol (The Nightingale) (1981).
Mostafa, Kamel (1917–1982)
Authors: Dwider Sarah
Published: September 2018

Kamel Mostafa was an Egyptian impressionist painter recognized for his soft oil paint scenes depicting daily life in Egypt. He began his studies at the Faculty of Fine Art in Alexandria under the instruction of noted Egyptian artists Ragheb Ayad, Youssef Kamel, and Mohammed Nagui, graduating with a painting degree in 1941. In 1946 Mostafa received a government grant to travel to Rome to continue his studies. He returned to Alexandria in 1950 and completed a second degree in oil paint restoration. Following his studies, he worked as both an artist and educator in Egypt. Mostafa served as an instructor at the Faculty of Fine Art in Alexandria between 1958 and 1977. In 1969, he was additionally appointed dean of the Faculty of Fine Art.

Along with his contemporaries, Mostafa was part of second generation of Egyptian modernists who built on the arts innovations initiated by early Egyptian modernists like Mahmoud Said, Ragheb Ayad, Youssef Kamel, and Mohamed Nagui. In 1979, a retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Museum of the Faculty of Fine Art, Alexandria, celebrating the artist’s significance in the development of Egyptian modernism.
Munakata, Shikō (1903–1975)
Authors: Aijoka Chiaki
Published: September 2018

Munakata is one of the most significant Japanese woodblock artists of the 20th century. Born as the son of a local blacksmith in Aomori, northern Japan, Munakata’s formal education was limited, but poetry inspired his love of his native land. The literary content of his work often required large or series formats, which distinguished his prints from those of his contemporaries, sometimes to their annoyance. Munakata initially exploited the strong contrast of black and white but later introduced color by way of applying it on the reverse of the paper. His extremely poor eyesight shaped his working method of forming the image in his mind and quickly transferring it onto the block. Yamato the Beautiful (1936) attracted the attention of Yanagi Muneyoshi (1889–1961) and other leaders of the Mingei movement, who became Munakata’s mentors and sponsors. In 1938, his Utō became the first printed work to be awarded the First Prize at the government-run annual art exhibition, and the Two Bodhisattvas and the Ten Disciples of the Buddha won a major prize at the Kokugakai Exhibition the following year. After World War II, the Ten Disciples was awarded a prize at Saõ Paulo Biennale (1955), then the Grand Prize for prints at the Venice Biennale (1956), bringing Munakata to the world stage.
Nabaa, Nazir (1938--)
Authors: Lenssen Anneka
Published: September 2018

Nazir Nabaa, a respected Syrian painter, made his greatest contributions to Arab modern art in the 1960s and 1970s, when he contributed to the graphic identity of progressive political causes and the Palestinian liberation struggle. He joined the Syrian Communist Party in the 1954 and in 1959 was briefly jailed for this affiliation. After his release, he traveled to Cairo on a fellowship to study painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, there developing a heroic realist style around social and labor themes. After returning to Syria in 1964, Nabaa taught drawing in rural schools and worked with myth and folklife. Moving to Damascus in 1968, he worked as an illustrator and became involved in creative projects in support of political mobilization, including poster design, puppet theater, fine art painting, and art criticism. Between 1971 and 1975, Nabaa studied in Paris at the Academy of Fine Arts. Upon his return, he joined the faculty of the College of Fine Arts in Damascus. His later paintings became more fantastical, combining goddess figures with still lifes of fruits, tapestries, and jewelry. He also developed a parallel corpus of abstract paintings based on the exploration of texture and color.
Natalsya, Amrus (1933--)
Authors: Rath Amanda Katherine
Published: September 2018

Amrus Natalsya was born 21 October 1933, in Medan, Sumatra. Having also trained as a painter, Natalsya is known primarily as a pioneering figure of modern wood sculpture in Indonesia. Beginning in the early 1950s, he developed a signature style, combining the carving techniques, sculptural forms, and flat decorative elements of his Batak cultural background with "revolutionary realism", a combination of social and romantic realism. Typical subjects of his work are the community life of common people and the labors of the poor. His early sculptural work shows the influence of one of his instructors and mentors, Hendra Gunawan (1918, Bandung–1983, Bali), with whom he studied while a student at the Indonesia Fine Arts Academy or Akademi Seni Rupa Indonesia (ASRI) in Yogyakarta, 1954–1962. In 1961, Natalsya co-founded Sanggar Bumi Tarung (SBT) or Fighting Grounds studio with fellow ASRI students. Under his leadership, SBT’s artistic program was, in certain respects, more radical than that of its sponsoring organization, the People’s Culture Institute or Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat (Lekra), the cultural branch of Indonesia’s Communist Party. With the political changes of the late 1960s, SBT was banned and Natalsya was imprisoned without trial from 1968 to 1973. After his release, he was refused access to many venues and exhibitions. These circumstances changed considerably after 1998, with the introduction of political reforms in Indonesia. Natalsya continues to work in a social realist mode. In addition to free-standing sculptures, his work since the 1990s has included intricately carved and painted low-relief panels, often set within frames with roughly hewn decorative elements.
Balanchine, George (1904–1983)
Authors: Reynolds Nancy
Published: September 2018

George Balanchine (Georgii Melitonovich Balanchivadze), arguably the greatest ballet choreographer of the twentieth century, was at once both modernist and traditionalist. Unlike many radical innovators, in charting new ground he did not reject the past. Virtually all of his major works make reference, even if obliquely, to the classical ballet technique in which he was trained. Although born in Russia and active in Europe in the early part of his career, it was in America that he made his greatest impact, directing the New York City Ballet, which he co-founded with Lincoln Kirstein, from its inception in 1948 until his death in 1983. During this time, the company grew from modest beginnings to become one of the most important ballet troupes in the world. Balanchine is credited with creating a particularly American style of classical dance, one that is characterized by speed, precision, energy, daring, and a rough grace more associated with athletes than with sylphs. His more than 400 dance works include Apollo (1928), Serenade (1934), Concerto Barocco (1941), Le Palais de cristal (later renamed Symphony in C) (1948), Orpheus (1948), The Nutcracker (1954), Agon (1957), Symphony in Three Movements (1972), Stravinsky Violin Concerto (1972), Vienna Waltzes (1977), Ballo della Regina (1978), and Mozartiana (1981).
Nawar, Ahmed (1945–)
Authors: Dwider Sarah
Published: September 2018

Born in El-Shin in the Gharbia province of Egypt, Ahmed Nawar received his bachelor’s degree from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Helwan University in Cairo in 1967. Following his graduation, Nawar was called for service in the Egyptian military and was deployed to the Suez border during the War of Attrition. His experience during the war affected him deeply and would find expression in his later artworks. In 1971, Nawar traveled to Spain and in 1974 received a second degree in graphics from the San Fernando Academy in Madrid, as well as a degree in mural painting and a doctorate equivalent in painting in 1975.

As a painter, sculptor, and graphic printmaker, Nawar’s work focuses on the interplay of linear and organic forms, often integrating mathematical or technological imagery. In the 1980s, Nawar was a key member of the Mihwar (Axis) Group, an artist collective that focused on the relationship between unity and individuality in art. In 1982, Nawar founded the Faculty of Fine Art at Menia University. He served as the faculty’s dean and chair of the graphics department until he was appointed head of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture’s Sector of Fine Arts in 1988. In recognition of his contributions to the arts, Nawar was awarded the State Order of Arts and Sciences, First Class, in 1979.
Nguyễn Sáng (1923–1988)
Authors: Proctor Ann
Published: September 2018

Nguyễn Sáng was an artist born in the south of Vietnam who spent two thirds of his life working in the north of the country. Following an initial period of study at the Gia Dinh School of Fine Arts in Saigon, he moved to the École des Beaux-Arts d’Indochine in Hanoi from 1940 to 1945. Best known for his monumental paintings in lacquer and oil, Sáng also designed bank notes and prints with revolutionary themes. Students at the École des Beaux-Arts d’Indochine adapted lacquer techniques—which were previously used on three-dimensional surfaces—to two-dimensional paintings. Sáng, as an early practitioner of lacquer painting, is viewed as one of the innovators for updating and reconciling Vietnamese art with international art.

Sáng’s career was not without controversy, however. He was one of the artists involved in the Nhan Van Giai Pham affair of 1956, during which artists proposed "art for art’s sake" rather than the government’s line of "art for the people." His best-known paintings include The Enemy Burnt My Village (1954) and Admission to the Party at the Ðiê.n Biên Phủ (1963), both of which are in the collection at the Museum of Fine Arts in Hanoi.
Okada, Kenzô [岡田謙三] (1902–1982)
Authors: Szostak John
Published: September 2018

Kenzô Okada was an American painter of Japanese birth, and one of the earliest artists from Asia to earn an international reputation as an abstract expressionist. Okada began his artistic training at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, but withdrew in 1924 in order to travel to France. In Paris, he met fellow expatriate Fujita Tsuguharu and also became acquainted with Alberto Giacometti and Marie Laurencin. A comparison of Laurencin’s portraits with work from Okada’s initial phase suggests her example was important in the development of his early figural style. Okada returned to Japan in 1927 due to financial hardship, at which point he became associated with the Nikakai, where he exhibited for the next thirty years. In 1950, Okada moved from Japan to New York, where he befriended Mark Rothko, Bradley Walker Tomlin, and Clyfford Still. The work of these New York School painters encouraged Okada to forego representational styles in favor of abstraction. During this latter phase, he rendered his paintings in subdued, flat colors with a decorative lyricism often associated with the aesthetics of traditional Japanese paintings; in a 1968 interview, Okada later came to define abstraction as "West and East meeting each other." Okada became an American citizen in 1960 but made frequent visits to Tokyo, where he died in 1982.
Okamoto, Tarō (1911–1996)
Authors: Clarke Neilton
Published: September 2018

Tarō Okamoto [岡本太郎] (1911–1996) was one of Japan’s most visible artists during the post-World War II period. Born in Kawasaki, Kanagawa, his father was a cartoonist and his mother a writer. In 1929, having enrolled at the Tokyo Fine Arts School, Okamoto travelled to Europe and in 1930 began living in Paris. A member of the Abstraction-Création group between 1933–1937, Okamoto associated with the likes of Georges Bataille, André Breton, Pablo Picasso, and Man Ray before returning to Japan in 1940. Working in a broad range of media and courting abstraction, biomorphic surrealism, and an abstracted figuration, his political-allegorical paintings are seemingly emblematic of the post-war decades. Examples include the paintings Heavy Industry (1949), an apparent indictment of capitalism, and Law of the Jungle (1950). In 1954, he exhibited in the 27th Venice Biennale, also establishing the Institute of Esthetic Research. The 1960s saw him working in Mexico on a large-scale commission, the nuclear-themed mural Myth of Tomorrow (1970), which was subsequently returned and installed in Tokyo’s Shibuya Station in 2008. Okamoto’s sculptural output saw his Tower of the Sun artwork exhibited as part of World Expo ’70, Osaka, for which he was also artistic director. The Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum in Tokyo, which opened in 1988, occupies his former Aoyama home and studio site, while The Taro Okamoto Museum of Art, having opened in 1999 in Kawasaki, holds an extensive collection of his work.
Aragon, Louis (1897–1982)
Authors: Svendsen Christina
Published: September 2018

French author Louis Aragon was a member of the surrealist movement until he split with André Breton and began to devote more of his energy to the Communist Party. He is best known for his love poetry and his novel, Paris Peasant. Educated as a physician, Aragon joined the army medical corps and met André Breton there. The two joined Dada in 1919 and became founding members of the surrealist movement along with Philippe Soupault in 1924. Aragon’s first two poetry collections were highly surrealist in style, but he was criticized by the group after he published Le Paysan de Paris [Paris Peasant], a novel and dialectical meditation on areas of Paris about to be destroyed by modernization. This book deeply influenced the German philosopher Walter Benjamin. Soon after he joined the French Communist Party in 1927, Aragon was ejected from the surrealist movement.
Owais, Hamed (1919–2011)
Authors: Radwan Nadia
Published: September 2018

Born in Beni Soueif, Egypt, Hamed Owais is one of the leading painters of Egyptian social realism. He was a partisan of the ideals of the Gamal Abdel Nasser era and was inspired by Mexican muralists, such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. His work portrays the daily life of the Egyptian working class through a clear and direct style, reflecting the strength of his social convictions. Having graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Cairo in 1944, he pursued his studies at the Institute of Art Education in Cairo where he received his diploma in 1946. A year later, he founded, together with other artists of his generation, the Egyptian "Group of Modern Art". Following a teaching career at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Alexandria, he received a scholarship in 1967 to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid. On his return to Egypt, he served as the head of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Alexandria (1977–1979).
Pongdam, Prayat (1934–2014)
Authors: Mukdamanee Vichaya
Published: September 2018

Deemed a National Artist in 1998, Prayat Pongdam was a Thai printmaker. Pongdam’s studies in painting began under the tutelage of Prof. Silpa Bhirasri at Silpakorn University. Pongdam continued his education at the Academia di Belle Arti di Roma in Italy in 1961. Upon returning to Thailand, he regularly created paintings and prints, and was among the first in a group of Thai artists to introduce printmaking techniques to the public. He was declared an artist of distinction for his printmaking in 1981, and was awarded the title Academico Onorario Classe Incisione from the Italian government through the L’Accademia Florentina delle Arte del Disegno. His artworks explored ideas of nature, ways of life, and the Thai rural spirit through simple human and animal symbols expressing themes of warmth, affection, and love. Usually foregrounding his paintings with animal subjects, his backgrounds consisted of landscapes such as temples, churches, vihara, heritage sites, local villages, fields of rice, gardens, and forests. Prayat harmonized these themes and techniques within the unique character of his woodcut techniques. Using line, color, and composition, Prayat blended plainness, purity and sincerity with nature, religion, and the folk cultures of rural societies.
Serra, Richard (1939--)
Authors: Spampinato Francesco
Published: September 2018

The American artist Richard Serra emerged in the 1960s in association with the Minimalism art movement. Known primarily for his work as a sculptor, he also realized several films and videos in the 1960s and 1970s, which could be divided into two groups: 16mm films mainly concerned with sculptural issues, and videos that explore the influence of the mass media.

The first group includes Hand Scraping (1968) and Hand Catching Lead (1968), whose titles alone are illustrative of their content. Defined by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh as "sculptural films," they explore the nature of sculpture as process and seriality. To this group also belong Railroad Turnbridge (1976) and Steelmill/Stahlwerk (1979), focused on materials, construction, and industrial production.

The second group of moving image works consists of videos that comment on the mass media as devices of control. Television Delivers People (1973) is a series of rolling sentences about the power of television to turn its audience into a product. In Boomerang (1974), the artist Nancy Holt (1938–2014) describes her feelings of displacement while listening to her delayed voice, while The Prisoner’s Dilemma (1974) is a studio-scale production that compares a TV game show to a police interrogation.
Sirry, Gazbia (1925--)
Authors: Seggerman Alex
Published: September 2018

Gazbia Sirry is an Egyptian painter. Throughout her sixty-year career, Sirry responded to political, social, and artistic shifts in Egypt. She is well respected for her richly colored canvases and her savvy perseverance in the Egyptian art world. Born in 1925 in Cairo, Sirry came of age during the era of the 1952 Free Officers Revolution. After graduating from the Cairo School of Arts Education in 1950, she earned government scholarships for study abroad and local support. Her early paintings are characterized by depictions of strong, imposing female figures of all social classes.

In the late 1950s, the backgrounds in her works became increasingly abstract as her interest in non-representational color and line grew. The fading of figures could be attributed to her increasing disillusionment with the Egyptian government. In 1959, the government imprisoned her and her husband for several days due to their alleged communist activity. In 1965, Sirry earned a fellowship to join the Huntington Hartford Foundation in Pacific Palisades, California, an artists’ colony located in the Santa Monica Mountains. The experience introduced her to the American style of abstract Expressionism. In 1967, figural representations vanished abruptly from her work. Throughout the 1970s, Sirry painted abstract "cityscapes," complex grids that evoke urban skylines but are primarily exercises in color and shape. Sirry continues to make art in Cairo today.
Cancan
Authors: Parfitt-Brown Clare
Published: September 2018

The cancan is a popular dance form closely associated with the Parisian setting in which it emerged and underwent much of its early development. From its origins as a French social dance practice in the early nineteenth century, the dance shifted to a more performative mode of presentation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The nineteenth-century cancan involved both male and female dancers performing either solo or in couples, improvising around the quadrille form. The dance attracted the attention of the writers and artists of an incipient Parisian modernism in the 1830s and 1840s, and this connection was reinvigorated in the 1880s and 1890s, particularly within the bohemian culture that centered on the Moulin Rouge. The familiar stereotype of the cancan as a female kick-line refers primarily to the form of the dance that emerged in the early twentieth century, echoing the development of modern mass culture. Later representations of the cancan, particularly in American films of the 1950s, referenced the Moulin Rouge of the 1890s and its connections with both the cancan and the post-Impressionist modern art of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
Nandakwang, Tawee (1925–1991)
Authors: Galloway Charlotte
Published: September 2018

Tawee Nandakwang was one of the pioneers of modern art in Thailand. Born in the northern city of Lamphun, he trained at Silpakorn University and also completed a diploma in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome in 1961. Nandakwang established his reputation as a leading artist early in his career, winning numerous prizes in the 1950s. Work from this period was heavily influenced by Impressionism and Cubism, drawing on familiar subjects such as portraits, landscape scenes and still lifes. He eventually settled into his own distinct style, which demonstrated a close interest in technique: each mark on the canvas was carefully considered. He had an affinity with the natural world and strove to create an aesthetic that did not mimic reality, but conveyed an emotional response to the scene. For example, flowers were not simply painted for their beauty; they became vehicles for conveying the changing atmospheric qualities of light and weather through the day. Buddhism was also an influence. There is a reflective quality in his paintings, in which feeling and impression override any direct rendering of the subject. Nandakwang was recognized for his innovation and skill, receiving several awards, including the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Visual Arts (painting) Award in 1990. His works are represented in Thai and international collections.
Die Blaue Vier [The Blue Four] (1924–1945)
Authors: Wünsche Isabel
Published: September 2018

Die Blaue Vier [The Blue Four] was founded in Weimar in March 1924 at the initiative of Galka E. Scheyer, who became the American representative of the four artists Lyonel Feininger, Alexei Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. Although implying a direct link with and a continuation of the spiritual orientation of Der Blaue Reiter [The Blue Rider], the association was essentially a public relations effort—an attempt to put the works of the four artists under a common name in order to exhibit and sell their works successfully in the United States. Between 1925 and 1944, Scheyer organized Blue Four exhibitions in New York, Palo Alto, San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Portland, Spokane, Seattle, Mexico City, Santa Barbara, Chicago, Northampton, and Honolulu. In the 1930s, Scheyer, believing that she could better present the artists’ work in a suitably arranged private setting, built a small gallery house on Blue Heights Drive in Hollywood. Scheyer’s personal collection of works by the Blue Four is now a part of the permanent collection of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena.
Pan Tianshou [潘天壽] (1897–1971)
Authors: Wu Yao
Published: September 2018

Pan Tianshou was a 20th-century Chinese painter, calligrapher, and art teacher. A dedicated advocate of guohua [國畫], he is highly esteemed for his dynamic landscape and bird-and-flower paintings imbued with a literati aesthetic. Tianshou argued for a distinct separation between Chinese and Western painting, wrote extensively on Chinese art history and theory, and devoted himself to the proliferation and education of China’s artistic heritage. He directed guohua instruction at the national art academy in Hangzhou from its founding in 1928, and was associated with the school until the time of his death. Pan’s paintings are known for their bold composition, his vigorous application of brushstrokes and ink splashes, tonal variation, his occasional use of fingers as an unmediated medium, and poetic inscriptions executed in refined calligraphy. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Pan went on government-sponsored sketching expeditions, while also creating an immense range of public artworks that glorified the beauty of the new nation. Pan was severely persecuted shortly after the onset of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), however, and died in 1971.
Truitt, Anne (1921–2004)
Authors: de Baca Miguel
Published: September 2018

Anne Truitt is an American artist most closely identified with Minimalism. Truitt’s art consists of wooden boxes, planks, and columnar works industrially fabricated and painted by hand, which were among the first examples of Minimal art. Because of the evocative colors and literary titles of her works, she is often distinguished from her contemporaries, who argued against expressivity in art.

Truitt’s principal critical ally was Clement Greenberg. Despite viewing other minimalists’ works with contempt, Greenberg admired Truitt’s formal references to painters Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman, and understood her sculptures as three-dimensional articulations of a two-dimensional painted surface. Elsewhere, the language Greenberg used in defence of Truitt made her gender a conspicuous issue, contributing to the feminizing of her practice in ensuing discourse. Truitt had a remarkably long, productive, and diverse studio practice, producing sculpture, drawings, and paintings until her death in 2004.
Wee, Beng Chong (1938--)
Authors: Galloway Charlotte
Published: September 2018

Wee Beng Chong is a Singaporean artist known for his work in both painting and sculpture. Trained at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore, and L’Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Wee’s art practice explores both Western and traditional Chinese art styles. Prior to studying in Paris, Wee was a founding member of the Modern Art Society, an organization started in 1964 that did much to promote public understanding of contemporary art in Singapore. On his return to Singapore, Wee helped popularize sculpture in the early 1970s at a time when few Singaporean artists were working seriously in the medium. His work ranges from realism to abstraction, and he often composes works in mixed media. Additionally, Wee is a practitioner of Chinese traditional ink painting, calligraphy, and seal engraving. In 1979 Wee received the Cultural Medallion for Artistic Excellence from the Singapore Ministry of Culture. He is active in many arts organizations and was head of the Fine Art Department at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (1982–89), where he is currently a senior teaching fellow. Wee’s works have been featured in many major exhibitions of Singapore art, and he is well represented in public collections.
Chandraleka (1928–2006)
Authors: Banerji Anurima
Published: September 2018

Chandralekha Prabhudas Patel, known by the mononym Chandralekha, was a pioneering choreographer, dancer, writer, graphic designer, and social activist based in Chennai, India. Best known as an innovator of dance, she originated an open-ended, layered movement style that has been variously labeled ‘‘modern,’’ ‘‘postmodern,’’ ‘‘avant-garde,’’ ‘‘Western-influenced,’’ and ‘‘experimental,’’ although she resolutely rejected all of these categorizations. Initially trained in the classical dance Bharatanatyam, Chandralekha rebelled against the strictures of Indian concert performance by fusing the traditional lexicon with the structures and vocabulary of yoga, quotidian gestures, and Kalarippayattu—a South Indian martial art—to create a novel dance language devoted to the exploration of body politics in a contemporary frame. In the arc of her artistic career, which spanned half a century from the 1950s to 2006, the period between 1985 and 1995 is often cited as the time when she crystallized her choreographic technique and vision. Regarded as an iconoclast, Chandralekha is also considered a controversial figure in the field of Indian performance for her radical approach to art and politics, domains that she saw as indivisible from each other. She pursued her creative commitments up to the time of her death from cervical cancer in 2006. A significant force in the history of Indian dance, Chandralekha continues to serve as an influential figure for many artists working at the intersection of a number of indigenous and transnational South Asian forms.
Woodruff, Hale A. (1900–1980)
Authors: Baker Marissa H.
Published: September 2018

Hale A. Woodruff was an African American painter and educator associated with the Negro Renaissance and later with the New York Abstract Expressionists. Woodruff studied painting in France (1927–31) and later taught art at Atlanta University (1931–45), where he initiated an influential annual exhibition of African American art promoting artists from around the country. Woodruff’s paintings depict the hardships of rural poverty for African Americans in the South. His Amistad murals (1939) at Talledega College are representative of his early expressive figurative style, portraying African Americans with a lyrical physicality in a narrative of universal struggle and survival. In 1943 Woodruff was awarded the Rosenwald Fellowship and, soon after, left Atlanta for New York to teach at New York University (1945–68). There his style became more abstract as he incorporated Dogon, Ashanti, and Yoruba imagery into his paintings. Woodruff was a founding member of Spiral, a group that addressed the persistent difficulties black artists faced in America. Woodruff remained in New York until his death.