Lucian Freud

Lucian Michael Freud, OM, CH (8 December 1922 20 July 2011) was a British painter. Known chiefly for his thickly impasted portrait and figure paintings, he was widely considered the pre-eminent British artist of his time. His works are noted for their psychological penetration, and for their often discomfiting examination of the relationship between artist and model.

Early life and family

Born in Berlin, Freud was the son of an Austrian Jewish father, Ernst Ludwig Freud, an architect, and a German Jewish mother, Lucie ne Brasch. He was a grandson of Sigmund Freud, the elder brother of the late broadcaster, writer and politician Clement Freud (thus uncle of Emma and Matthew Freud) and the younger brother of Stephan Gabriel Freud. He moved with his family to St John's Wood, London, in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism. He became a British citizen in 1939, having attended Dartington Hall School in Totnes, Devon, and later Bryanston School.

Early career
Freud briefly studied at the Central School of Art in London, and from 1939 with greater success at Cedric Morris' East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham, relocated in 1940 at Benton End near Hadleigh. He also attended Goldsmiths, University of London from 19423. He served as a merchant seaman in an Atlantic convoy in 1941 before being invalided out of service in 1942. In 1943, Tambimuttu, the Sri Lankan editor, commissioned the young artist to illustrate a book of poems by Nicholas Moore entitled "The Glass Tower." It was published the following year by Editions Poetry London and comprised, among other drawings, a stuffed zebra (-cum-unicorn) and a palm tree. Both subjects reappeared in The Painter's Room on display at Freud's first solo exhibition in 1944 at the Alex Reid & Lefevre Gallery. In the summer of 1946, he travelled to Paris before continuing to Greece for several months. In the early fifties Freud was a frequent visitor to Dublin where he would share Patrick Swift's studio - during this period the artists also worked side by side in London when Swift would visit Freud. He otherwise lived and worked in London for the rest of his life. Freud formed part of a group of figurative artists that the American artist, Ronald Kitaj, later named "The School of London". This was more a loose collection of individual artists who knew each other, some intimately, and were working in London at the same time in the figurative style (but during the boom years of abstract painting). The group was led by figures such as Francis Bacon and Freud, and included Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, Leon Kossoff, Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde, Reginald Gray, and Kitaj himself. Most of these artists, including Freud, had been championed in, and contributed to, Patrick Swift's X magazine, which ran from 195962. He was a visiting tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art of University College London from 194954.

Change in style
Freud's early paintings are often associated with surrealism and depict people, plants and animals in unusual juxtapositions. These works were usually created with thin layers of paint.

From the 1950s, he began to work in portraiture, often nudes, to the almost complete exclusion of everything else, employing impasto. With this technique, he would often clean his brush after each stroke. The colours in these paintings are typically muted. Freud's portraits often depict only the sitter, sometimes sprawled naked on the floor or on a bed or alternatively juxtaposed with something else, as in Girl With a White Dog (195152) and Naked Man With Rat (197778). The use of animals in his compositions is widespread, and often features pet and owner. Other examples of portraits with both animals and people in Freud's work include Guy and Speck (198081), Eli and David (200506) and Double Portrait (198586). He had a special passion for horses, having enjoyed riding at school in Dartington, where he sometimes slept in the stables. His portraits solely of horses include Grey Gelding (2003), Skewbald Mare (2004), and Mare Eating Hay (2006). Freud's subjects were often the people in his life; friends, family, fellow painters, lovers, children. He said, "The subject matter is autobiographical, it's all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement, really. In the 1970s Freud spent 4,000 hours on a series of paintings of his mother, about which art historian Lawrence Gowing observed "it is more than 300 years since a painter showed as directly and as visually his relationship with his mother. And that was Rembrandt." In art critic Martin Gayford's 2010 book, Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud, Gayford chronicled the forty days he spent with Lucian Freud while sitting for his portrait. Gayford surmised that Freud sought to capture his model's individuality by, as Gayford named it, his "omnivorous" gaze. Gayford also mentions that his final portrait seemed to "reveal secretsageing, ugliness, faultsthat I imagine...I am hiding from the world..." suggesting how sharp and penetrating Freud's gaze is.

Later career

Girl with a white dog, 1951 1952, Tate Gallery. Portrait of Freud's first wife, Kitty (Kathleen) Garman, the daughter of Jacob Epstein and Kathleen Garman. "I paint people," Freud said, "not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be." Freud painted fellow artists, including Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon. He produced a series of portraits of the performance artist Leigh Bowery, and also painted Henrietta Moraes, a muse to many Soho artists. Towards the end of his life he did a nude portrait of model Kate Moss. Freud was one of the best known British artists working in a representational style, and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1989.

After Czanne, 1999 2000, National Gallery of Australia. His painting After Czanne, which is notable because of its unusual shape, was bought by the National Gallery of Australia for $7.4 million. The top left section of this painting has been 'grafted' on to the main section below, and closer inspection reveals a horizontal line where these two sections were joined. In 1996, Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal mounted a major exhibition of 27 paintings and thirteen etchings, covering the whole period of Freud's working life to date. The following year the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art presented "Lucian Freud: Early Works". The exhibition comprised around 30 drawings and paintings done between 1940 and 1945.[19] This was followed by a large retrospective at Tate Britain in 2002. During a period from May 2000 to December 2001, Freud painted Queen Elizabeth II. There was criticism of this portrayal of the Queen in some sections of the British media. The highest selling tabloid newspaper, The Sun, was particularly condemnatory, describing the portrait as "a travesty". In 2005, a retrospective of Freud's work was held at the Museo Correr in Venice scheduled to coincide with the Biennale. In late 2007, a collection of Freud's etchings titled "Lucian Freud: The Painter's Etchings" went on display at the Museum of Modern Art. In May 2008, his 1995 portrait Benefits Supervisor Sleeping was sold at auction by Christie's in New York City for $33.6 million, setting a world record for sale value of a painting by a living artist. In November 2008, letters written by Freud were obtained by The Independent under the Freedom of Information Act. They detail his bitter dispute with some of the most powerful figures in the art world after he was asked to represent Britain at the 1954 Venice Biennale, the world's leading contemporary art exhibition. The publicity-shy portrait painter locked horns with gallery officials after a selection committee rebuffed his suggestions of works to show in Italy. The article includes a copy of the letter written by Freud to the British Council complaining about the selection process. On October 13, 2011, Freud's 1952 Boy's Head, portrait of Charlie Lumley, his neighbor, reached $4,998,088 at Sotheby's London Contemporary art evening auction, making it one of the highlights of the 2011 auction fall season.

Working process
Painting from life, Freud was apt to spend a great deal of time with one subject, and demanded the model's presence even while working on subsidiary elements. A nude completed in 2007 required sixteen months of work, with the model posing all but four evenings during that time; with each session averaging five hours, the painting took approximately 2,400 hours to complete. A rapport with his models was necessary, and while at work, Freud was characterised as "an outstanding raconteur and mimic". Regarding the difficulty in deciding when a painting is completed, Freud said that "he feels he's finished when he gets the impression he's working on somebody else's painting".

It was Freud's practice to begin a painting by first drawing in charcoal on the canvas. He then applied paint to a small area of the canvas, and gradually worked outward from that point. For a new sitter, he often started with the head as a means of "getting to know" the person, then painted the rest of the figure, eventually returning to the head as his comprehension of the model deepened. A section of canvas was intentionally left bare until the painting was finished, as a reminder that the work was in progress. The finished painting is an accumulation of richly worked layers of pigment, as well as months of intense observation.

Personal life
Freud is rumoured to have fathered as many as forty children although this number is generally accepted as an exaggeration, and thirteen can be accounted for below. After an affair with Lorna Garman, he went on to marry her niece Kitty (real name Kathleen), daughter of sculptor Jacob Epstein and socialite Kathleen Garman in 1948. After four years and the birth of two daughters, Annie and Annabel, their marriage ended. He then began an affair with Lady Caroline Blackwood, a celebrated social figure and writer. They married in 1953. The marriage was dissolved in 1959. Freud also had children by Bernardine Coverley (fashion designer Bella Freud and writer Esther Freud) ; Suzy Boyt (five children); and Katherine Margaret McAdam (four children: Paul Freud, Lucy Freud, David McAdam Freud and Jane McAdam Freud, who is also an artist).

Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly (born May 31, 1923) is an American painter and sculptor associated with Hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and the Minimalist school. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing the simplicity of form found similar to the work of John McLaughlin. Kelly often employs bright colors to enhance his works. Ellsworth Kelly lives and works in Spencertown, New York.

Childhood
Kelly was born the second son of three to Allan Howe Kelly and Florence Bithens Kelly in Newburgh, New York, a town approximately 60 miles north of New York City. His father was an insurance company executive of Scottish-Irish and German descent. His mother was a former schoolteacher of Welsh and PennsylvaniaGerman stock. His family moved from Newburgh, New York, to New Jersey shortly after he was born. Kelly remembers his mother moving his family around each year to a different house. They lived in many places in New Jersey both in and around the Hackensack area. Many of Kellys memories are centered on the time they lived in Oradell, New Jersey a town of nearly 7,500 people at the time. They lived near the Oradell Reservoir where his paternal grandmother Rosenlieb introduced him to bird watching at the age of eight or nine. This introduction to bird watching enabled Kelly to train his eye and develop his appreciation for the physical reality of the world by focusing in on natures shapes. This is where he developed his passion for form and color. He continued to further expand his knowledge on this particular passion by studying the works of Louis Agassiz Fuertes and John James Audubon. Audubon had a particularly strong influence on Kellys work throughout his career. Author E.C. Goossen speculates that the two and three-color paintings (such as Three Panels: Red Yellow Blue, I 1963) for which Kelly is so well known can be traced to his bird watching, and his acquaintance with the two and three-color birds he so frequently watched at such an early age. Kelly has said he was constantly alone as a young boy and became somewhat of a "loner". He was also afflicted by a slight stutter that persisted into his teenage years.

Education
Kellys schooling from the elementary to the high school level followed the conventional public school curriculum, which included art classes that stressed materials and sought to develop the "artistic imagination". This curriculum was typical of the broader trend in schooling that had emerged from the Progressive education theories promulgated by the Columbia University Teacher's College, at which the American modernist painter Arthur Wesley Dow had taught. His parents were reluctant to support Kelly's training in the arts, but a school teacher offered the necessary encouragement. As his parents would only fund technical study, Kelly was educated first at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, which he attended from 1941 to 1943, until he was inducted into the Army on

New Years Day, 1943. Upon his discharge at the end of World War II, Kelly took advantage of the generous G.I. Bill education provisions to study from 1946 to 1947 at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he haunted the collections of that city's museums, and then at the cole nationale suprieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. There he attended classes infrequently, but again immersed himself in the rich artistic resources of the city. While studying in Boston in 1948, Kelly listened to a lecture by Max Beckmann on Paul Czanne. It was in Paris that Kelly established his aesthetic.

Military
Upon entering U.S military service in 1943 he requested to be assigned to the 603rd Engineers Camouflage Battalion, which was normal for artists at the time to do. He was inducted at Fort Dix, New Jersey and waited there several weeks for transfer orders that never came. He was then sent off to Camp Hale, Colorado where he trained with mountain ski troops. He had never skied before. His transfer came in six to eight weeks later and he went to Fort Meade, Maryland. During World War II, he served, alongside other artists and designers, in a deception unit known as The Ghost Army. The Ghost soldiers used inflatable tanks, trucks, and other elements of subterfuge to mislead the Axis forces about the direction and disposition of Allied forces. He had a lot of exposure to military camouflage during the time he served. His exposure to the visual art of camouflage can be seen as part of his basic training. Kelly served with the unit from 1943 until the end of the European phase of the war.

Career

Ellsworth Kelly, The Meschers, 1951, oil on canvas, 59 x 59 inches, Museum of Modern Art. Kelly was a pioneer of Hard-edge painting in the 1940s and 1950s

Kelly decided to return to America in 1954 after being abroad for six years. His decision to venture back into the New York art scene was sparked after reading a review of an Ad Reinhardt exhibit, to which he felt his work related. Upon his return to New York he found the art world very tough. The acceptance of his art was anything but rapid. Although Kelly can now be considered an essential innovator and contributor to the American art movement, he was not always seen in such a positive light. It was hard for many to find the connection between Kellys art and the dominant stylistic trends. In May 1956 Kelly had his first New York exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery. The art he

showed in this exhibit was considered by many in the art world to have more of a European flair. He showed at Betty Parsons Gallery in the fall of 1957. He had three pieces, Atlantic, Bar, and Painting in Three Panels selected and shown for the Whitney Museum of American Art's show "Young America 1957. His pieces were considered radically different from the other twenty-nine artists work. Painting in Three Panels, for example, was particularly noted and questioned for the idea of having more than one canvas used to create one piece was unheard of at this time. Critic Michael Plante commented on this use of multiple-panels by noting that more often than not Kellys multiple-panel pieces were cramped in accordance to the installations restrictions, which resulted in a downplay of the interaction between the pieces and the architecture of the room. Today, he works in a studio designed by the architect Richard Gluckman.
Painting

In Paris, Kelly continued to paint the figure, but by May 1949 he had made his first abstract paintings. Observing how light fragmented on the surface of water, he painted Seine (1950), made of black and white rectangles arranged by chance. In 1952 he started a series of eight collages titled Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance I to VIII. Numbered slips of paper each referred to a colour, one of eighteen different hues to be placed on a grid 40 inches by 40 inches. Each of the eight collages used a different process. Kelly's discovery in 1952 of Monets late work infused him with a new freedom of painterly expression: he began working in extremely large formats and explored the concepts of seriality and monochrome paintings. As a painter he worked from then on in an exclusively abstract mode. By the late 1950s his painting stressed shape and planar masses (often assuming non-rectilinear formats). His work of this period also provided a useful bridge from the vanguard American geometric abstraction of the 1930s and early 1940s to the Minimalism and reductive art of the mid-1960s and 1970s. Kelly's relief painting Blue Tablet (1962), for example, was included in the seminal exhibition "Toward a New Abstraction" at the Jewish Museum in 1963. During the 1960s he started working with irregularly angled canvases, and in the 1970s he added curved shapes to his repertoire. A larger series of twelve works Kelly started in 1972 and did not complete until 1983, "Gray" was originally conceived as an anti-war statement and is drained of color. In 1979 he began again to employ curves in two-colour paintings made of separate panels. In his recent painting, Kelly has distilled his palette and introduced forms never before seen in his work. In each work, he starts with a rectangular canvas that he carefully paints with many coats of white paint; a shaped canvas, mostly painted black, is placed on top. Lithographs and drawings Kelly has been making drawings of plants and flowers since the late 1940s and continues to do so today. Kelly first experimented with reductive geometry in paint and wood in 1949. His initial series of 28 transfer lithographs, entitled "Suite of Plant Lithographs" (196466), marked the beginning of a corpus that would grow to 72 prints and countless drawings of foliage. His Purple/Red/Gray/Orange (1988), at eighteen feet in length, may be the largest single-sheet lithograph ever made.

Sculpture

Although Kelly may be better known for his paintings, he has also pursued sculpture throughout his career. In 1958, Kelly conceived one of his first wood sculptures, Concorde Relief I (1958), a modestly scaled wall relief in elm, which explores the visual play and balance between two rectangular forms layered on top of each other, the uppermost with its top-right and lower-left corners removed. He has made 30 sculptures in wood throughout his career. From 1959 onwards, he created freestanding folded sculptures. In 1973 he began regularly making large-scale outdoor sculpture, in a variety of materials including aluminum, bronze, and weathering steel. and often in totem-like configurations such as Curve XXIII (1981). While the totemic forms his freestanding sculptures can measure up to 15 feet tall, his wall reliefs can span more than 14 feet wide. Kellys sculpture is founded on its adherence to absolute simplicity and clarity of form. Although the source of the piece is usually unidentifiable to the viewer's eye, there is almost always a source behind the forms he creates. Kelly creates his pieces using a succession of ideas on various forms. He may start with a drawing, enhance the drawing to create a print, take the print and create a freestanding piece, which is then made into a sculpture. Kellys sculptures are meant to be entirely simple and can been viewed quickly, often only in one glance. The viewer observes smooth, flat surfaces that are secluded from the space that surrounds them. This sense of flatness and minimalism make it hard to tell the difference between the foreground and background. Kelly's Blue Disc was included in the seminal 1966 exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York entitled, "Primary Structures" alongside many much younger artists just beginning to work with minimal forms.
Style

William Rubin noted that Kellys development had been resolutely inner-directed: neither a reaction to Abstract Expressionism nor the outcome of a dialogue with his contemporaries. Many of his paintings consist of a single (usually bright) color, with some canvases being of irregular shape, sometimes called "shaped canvases." The quality of line seen in his paintings and in the form of his shaped canvases is very subtle, and implies perfection. This is demonstrated in his piece Block Island Study 1959.
Influences

Kellys background in the military has been suggested as a source of the seriousness of his works. While serving time in the army, Kelly was exposed to and influenced by the camouflage with which his specific battalion worked. This close contact helped enlighten him on the use of form and shadow as well as the construction and deconstruction of the visible. It was a basic part of Kellys early education as an artist.[1] Ralph Coburn, a friend of Kellys from Boston, introduced the technique of automatic drawing to him while he was visiting Kelly in Paris. Kelly embraced this technique of arriving at an image without looking at the sheet of paper upon which the image is drawn. These techniques helped Kelly in loosening his particular drawing style and broaden his acceptance of what he believed to be art. Kellys illness and coexistent depression may possibly be related to his use of black and white during his last year in Paris. The influence of Kellys admiration for Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso are

apparent in his work. His ability to view things in various ways and work in different mediums is in thanks to them. Piet Mondrian influences the different forms he uses in both his paintings and sculptures for they are nonobjective. Kelly was first influenced by the art and architecture of the Romanesque and Byzantine eras while he was studying in Paris. His introduction to Surrealism and Neo-Plasticism influenced his work and caused him to test the abstraction of geometric forms.

Artworks (selection)

Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris, 1949, oil and wood on canvas, Private Collection Spectrum of Colors Arranged by Chance, 195153, oil on wood, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Black Ripe, 1955, oil on canvas, Collection of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson Sculpture for a Large Wall, 1957, anodized aluminum, Museum of Modern Art, New York Red Blue Green, 1963, oil on canvas, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego Curve IX, 1974, polished aluminum, Private Collection Houston Triptych, 1986, bronze, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Three Panels: Orange, Dark Gray, Green, 1986, oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York Red Curves, 1996, oil on canvas, Private Collection High Yellow, 1960, oil on canvas, Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, TX

Exhibitions
Kelly's first solo exhibition was held at the Galerie Arnaud, Paris, in 1951. In 1957, he completed his first public commission, sculptural works for the lobby of the Penn Center in Philadelphia. In 1959 he was included in the Museum of Modern Art's ground-breaking exhibition, Sixteen Americans. Kelly was invited to show at the So Paulo Biennial in 1961. His work was later included in the Documenta in 1977, 1977, and 1991. A room of his paintings was included in the 2007 Venice Biennale. Kellys first retrospective was held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1973. His work has since been recognized in numerous retrospective exhibitions, including a sculpture exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1982; an exhibition of works on paper and a show of his print works that traveled extensively in the United States and Canada from 198788; and a career retrospective in 1996 organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Since then, solo exhibitions of Kellys work have been mounted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1998), Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge (1999), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1988/2002), Philadelphia Museum of Art (2007), and Museum of Modern Art in New York (2007). In 1993, the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris mounted the exhibition "Ellsworth Kelly: The French Years, 1948-54" about the artist's relationship with the city, which travelled to the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; in 2008, the Muse d'Orsay honored Kelly with the exhibition "Correspondences: Paul Czanne Ellsworth Kelly".

Kelly is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery, New York. From 1964 he produced prints and editioned sculptures at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles and Tyler Graphics Ltd near New York City. Selected solo exhibitions

1951 Kelly Peintures et reliefsGalerie Arnaud, Paris 1956 Betty Parsons Gallery, New York 1957 Betty Parsons Gallery, New York 1957 Young America 1957, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 1973 Ellsworth Kelly, Museum of Modern Art, New York 1977 Ellsworth Kelly: Paintings, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York 1982 Ellsworth Kelly: Sculpture, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 1985 Ellsworth Kelly: White Panel II", High Museum of Art, Atlanta 1987 Ellsworth Kelly: Works on Paper, Fort Worth Art Museum, Fort Worth 1994 Ellsworth Kelly: Recent Paintings, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York 1996 Ellsworth Kelly: A Retrospective, Guggenheim Museum, New York 2002 Ellsworth Kelly in San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco 2003 Ellsworth Kelly: The Self-Portrait Drawings, 1944-1992, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York 2006 Ellsworth Kelly: New Paintings, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York 2010 Ellsworth Kelly: Drawings 1954-1962, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Middlesbrough, United Kingdom

Public commissions
In 1957 Kelly was commissioned to produce a 65-foot-long wall sculpture for a building in Philadelphia, his largest work to that date. Largely forgotten, the sculpture entitled Sculpture for a Large Wall (1957) was eventually dismantled. Kelly has since executed many public commissions, including Wright Curve (1966), a steel sculpture designed for permanent installation in the Guggenheims Peter B. Lewis Theater; a mural for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris in 1969; a sculpture for the city of Barcelona in 1978; Curve XXII (I Will) at Lincoln Park in Chicago in 1981; the Houston Triptych, vertical bronze planes mounted on a tall concrete at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 1986; a two-part memorial for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., in 1993; and large-scale panels for the Deutscher Bundestag, Berlin, in 1998. For the United States Courthouse (designed by Henry N. Cobb) in Boston he designed the The Boston Panels, 21 brilliantly colored aluminum panels installed in the central rotunda as a single work throughout the building. Kelly's Untitled (2005) is a large-scale bronze that was commissioned specifically for the courtyard of the Phillips Collection.

Collections
Kelly's work is in many public collections, including those of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa, Madrid, and Tate Modern, London. In 1999, the San Francisco Museum of Art announced that it had bought 22 works, paintings, wall reliefs and sculptures, by Ellsworth Kelly. They have been valued at more than $20 million. In 2003, the Menil Collection received Kelly's Tablet, 188 framed works on paper, including sketches, working drawings and collages.

In 2005, Kelly was commissioned with the only site-specific work for the Modern wing of the Art Institute of Chicago by Renzo Piano. He created White Curve, the largest wall sculpture he has ever made, which is on display since 2009. For the opening of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts designed by Tadao Ando in St. Louis, Kelly conceived Blue Black (2008).

Frank Stella
Frank Stella La scienza della pigrizia (The Science of Laziness) 1984, oil, enamel paint and alkyd paint on canvas, etched magnesium, aluminum and fiberglass, National Gallery of Art Washington DC Frank Stella (born May 12, 1936) is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.

Biography
Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts. After attending high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, he attended Princeton University, where he majored in history and met Darby Bannard and Michael Fried. Early visits to New York art galleries influenced his artist development, and his work was influenced by the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. Stella moved to New York in 1958, after his graduation. He is one of the most well-regarded postwar American painters still working today. Frank Stella has reinvented himself in consecutive bodies of work over the course of his five-decade career.

Late 1950s and early 1960s

Upon moving to New York City, he reacted against the expressive use of paint by most painters of the abstract expressionist movement, instead finding himself drawn towards the "flatter" surfaces of Barnett Newman's work and the "target" paintings of Jasper Johns. He began to produce works which emphasized the picture-as-object, rather than the picture as a representation of something, be it something in the physical world, or something in the artist's emotional world. Stella married Barbara Rose, later a wellknown art critic, in 1961. Around this time he said that a picture was "a flat surface with paint on it - nothing more". This was a departure from the technique of creating a painting by first making a sketch. Many of the works are created by simply using the path of the brush stroke, very often using common house paint. This new aesthetic found expression in a series of paintings, the Black Paintings (60) in which regular bands of black paint were separated by very thin pinstripes of unpainted canvas. Die Fahne Hoch! (1959) is one such painting. It takes its name ("The Raised Banner" in English) from the first line of the Horst-Wessel-Lied, the anthem of the National Socialist German Workers Party, and Stella pointed out that it is in the same proportions as banners used by that organization. It has been suggested that the title has a double meaning, referring also to Jasper Johns' paintings of flags. In any case, its emotional coolness belies the contentiousness its title might suggest, reflecting this new direction in Stella's work. Stellas art was recognized for its innovations before he was twenty-five. In 1959, several of his paintings were included in "Three Young Americans" at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, as well as in "Sixteen Americans" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (60). Stella joined

dealer Leo Castellis stable of artists in 1959. From 1960 he began to produce paintings in aluminum and copper paint which, in their presentation of regular lines of color separated by pinstripes, are similar to his black paintings. However they use a wider range of colors, and are his first works using shaped canvases (canvases in a shape other than the traditional rectangle or square), often being in L, N, U or T-shapes. These later developed into more elaborate designs, in the Irregular Polygon series (67), for example. Also in the 1960s, Stella began to use a wider range of colors, typically arranged in straight or curved lines. Later he began his Protractor Series (71) of paintings, in which arcs, sometimes overlapping, within square borders are arranged side-by-side to produce full and half circles painted in rings of concentric color. These paintings are named after circular cities he had visited while in the Middle East earlier in the 1960s. The Irregular Polygon canvases and Protractor series further extended the concept of the shaped canvas.

Late 1960s and early 1970s

Frank Stella Harran II 1967 Stella began his extended engagement with printmaking in the mid-1960s, working first with master printer Kenneth Tyler at Gemini G.E.L. Stella produced a series of prints during the late 1960s starting with a print called Quathlamba I in 1968. Stella's abstract prints in lithography, screen-printing, etching and offset lithography (a technique he introduced) had a strong impact upon printmaking as an art. In 1967, Stella designed the set and costumes for Scramble, a dance piece by Merce Cunningham. The Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a retrospective of Stellas work in 1970, making him the youngest artist to receive one. During the following decade, Stella introduced relief into his art, which he came to call maximalist painting for its sculptural qualities. Ironically, the paintings that had brought him fame before 1960 had eliminated all such depth. The shaped canvases took on even less regular forms in the Eccentric Polygon series, and elements of collage were introduced, pieces of canvas being pasted onto plywood, for example. His work also became more three-dimensional to the point where he started producing large, freestanding metal pieces, which, although they are painted upon, might well be considered sculpture. After introducing wood and other materials in the Polish Village series (73), created in high relief, he began to use aluminum as the primary support for his paintings. As the 1970s and 1980s progressed, these became more elaborate and

exuberant. Indeed, his earlier Minimalism [more] became baroque, marked by curving forms, Day-Glo colors, and scrawled brushstrokes. Similarly, his prints of these decades combined various printmaking and drawing techniques. In 1973, he had a print studio installed in his New York house. In 1976, Stella was commissioned by BMW to paint a BMW 3.0 CSL for the second installment in the BMW Art Car Project. He has said of this project, "The starting point for the art cars was racing livery. In the old days there used to be a tradition of identifying a car with its country by color. Now they get a number and they get advertising. Its a paint job, one way or another. The idea for mine was that its from a drawing on graph paper. The graph paper is what it is, a graph, but when its morphed over the cars forms it becomes interesting, and adapting the drawing to the racing cars forms is interesting. Theoretically its like painting on a shaped canvas."

1980s and afterward

Stella's Memantra in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, Stella created a large body of work that responded in a general way to Herman Melvilles Moby-Dick. During this time, the increasingly deep relief of Stellas paintings gave way to full three-dimensionality, with sculptural forms derived from cones, pillars, French curves, waves, and decorative architectural elements. To create these works, the artist used collages or maquettes that were then enlarged and re-created with the aid of assistants, industrial metal cutters, and digital technologies. In the 1990s, Stella began making free-standing sculpture for public spaces and developing architectural projects. In 1993, for example, he created the entire decorative scheme for Torontos Princess of Wales Theatre, which includes a 10,000-square-foot mural. His 1993 proposal for a kunsthalle and garden in Dresden did not come to fruition. In 1997, he painted and oversaw the installation of the 5,000-square-foot "Stella Project" which serves as the centerpiece of the theater and lobby of the Moores Opera House located at the Rebecca and John J. Moores School of Music on the campus of the University of Houston, in Houston, TX. His aluminum bandshell, inspired by a folding hat from Brazil, was built in downtown Miami in 2001; a monumental Stella sculpture was installed outside the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Stellas work was included in several important exhibitions that defined 1960s art, among them the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museums The Shaped Canvas (1965) and Systemic Painting (1966). His art has been the subject of several retrospectives in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Among the many honors he has received was an invitation from Harvard University to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1984. Calling for a rejuvenation of abstraction by achieving the depth of baroque painting, these six talks were published by Harvard University Press in 1986 under the title Working Space. Stella continues to live and work in New York. He also remains active in protecting the rights for his fellow artists. On June 6, 2008, Stella (with Artists Rights Society president Theodore Feder; Stella is a member artist of the Artists Rights Society) published an Op-Ed for The Art Newspaper decrying a proposed U.S. Orphan Works law which "remove[s] the penalty for copyright infringement if the creator of a work, after a diligent search, cannot be located." In the Op-Ed, Stella wrote,

The Copyright Office presumes that the infringers it would let off the hook would be those who had made a "good faith, reasonably diligent" search for the copyright holder. Unfortunately, it is totally up to the infringer to decide if he has made a good faith search. Bad faith can be shown only if a rights holder finds out about the infringement and then goes to federal court to determine whether the infringer has failed to conduct an adequate search. Few artists can afford the costs of federal litigation: attorneys fees in our country vastly exceed the licencing fee for a typical painting or drawing. The Copyright Office proposal would have a disproportionately negative, even catastrophic, impact on the ability of painters and illustrators to make a living from selling copies of their work... It is deeply troubling that government should be considering taking away their principal means of making ends meettheir copyrights.

In 2009, Frank Stella was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. Along with artists Shepard Fairey and Andres Serrano, Stella appeared on the satirical television program The Colbert Report on December 8, 2010. As part of a segment with comedian Steve Martin, Stella appraised a portrait of Colbert.

1974 work of Frank Stella Tuftonboro

Jasper Johns
For the Welsh Liberal politician, see Jasper Wilson Johns.

Detail of Flag (1954-55). Museum of Modern Art, New York City. This image illustrates Johns' early technique of painting with thick, dripping encaustic over a collage made from found materials such as newspaper. This rough method of construction is rarely visible in photographic reproductions of his work.

Jasper Johns, Map, 1961. Museum of Modern Art New York City. Flags, maps, targets, stenciled words and numbers were themes used by Johns in the 1960s. Jasper Johns, Jr. (born May 15, 1930) is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.

Life
Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed. He then spent a year living with his mother in Columbia, South Carolina and thereafter he spent several years living with his aunt Gladys in Lake Murray, South Carolina, twenty-two miles from Columbia. He completed high school in Sumter, South Carolina, where he once again lived with his mother. Recounting this period in his life, he says, "In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant. I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different than the one that I was in." He began drawing when he was three and has continued doing art ever since. Johns studied at the University of South Carolina from 1947 to 1948, a total of three semesters. He then moved to New York City and studied briefly at the Parsons School

of Design in 1949. In 1952 and 1953 he was stationed in Sendai, Japan during the Korean War. In 1954, after returning to New York, Johns met Robert Rauschenberg and they became long term lovers. In the same period he was strongly influenced by the gay couple Merce Cunningham (a choreographer) and John Cage (a composer). Working together they explored the contemporary art scene, and began developing their ideas on art. In 1958, gallery owner Leo Castelli discovered Johns while visiting Rauschenberg's studio. Castelli gave him his first solo show. It was here that Alfred Barr, the founding director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, purchased four works from his exhibition. In 1963, Johns and Cage founded Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, now known as Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York City. Johns currently lives in Sharon, Connecticut and the Island of Saint Martin.] He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1984. On February 15, 2011 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, becoming the first painter or sculptor to receive a Presidential Medal of Freedom since Alexander Calder in 1977.

Work
He is best known for his painting Flag (195455), which he painted after having a dream of the American flag. His work is often described as a Neo-Dadaist, as opposed to pop art, even though his subject matter often includes images and objects from popular culture. Still, many compilations on pop art include Jasper Johns as a pop artist because of his artistic use of classical iconography. Early works were composed using simple schema such as flags, maps, targets, letters and numbers. Johns' treatment of the surface is often lush and painterly; he is famous for incorporating such media as encaustic and plaster relief in his paintings. Johns played with and presented opposites, contradictions, paradoxes, and ironies, much like Marcel Duchamp (who was associated with the Dada movement). Johns also produces intaglio prints, sculptures and lithographs with similar motifs. Johns' breakthrough move, which was to inform much later work by others, was to appropriate popular iconography for painting, thus allowing a set of familiar associations to answer the need for subject. Though the Abstract Expressionists disdained subject matter, it could be argued that in the end, they had simply changed subjects. Johns neutralized the subject, so that something like a pure painted surface could declare itself. For twenty years after Johns painted Flag, the surface could suffice for example, in Andy Warhol's silkscreens, or in Robert Irwin's illuminated ambient works. Abstract Expressionist figures like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning ascribed to the concept of a macho "artist hero," and their paintings are indexical in that they stand effectively as a signature on canvas. In contrast, Neo-Dadaists like Johns and Rauschenberg seemed preoccupied with a lessening of the reliance of their art on indexical qualities, seeking instead to create meaning solely through the use of conventional symbols. Some have interpreted this as a rejection of the hallowed

individualism of the Abstract Expressionists. Their works also imply symbols existing outside of any referential context. Johns' Flag, for instance, is primarily a visual object, divorced from its symbolic connotations and reduced to something in-itself. In 1990, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. He is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York City, and in the spring 2008, a ten-year retrospective of Johns' drawings was mounted there.

Collection and acquisition

In 1998, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York bought Johns' White Flag. While the Met would not disclose how much was paid, "experts estimate [the painting's] value at more than $20 million." In 2006, private collectors Anne and Kenneth Griffin (founder of the Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel LLC) bought Johns' False Start for $80 million, making it the most expensive painting by a living artist. The National Gallery of Art acquired about 1,700 of Johns' proofs in 2007. This made the Gallery home to the largest number of Johns' works held by a single institution. The exhibition showed works from many points in Johns' career, including recent proofs of his prints. Since the 1980s, Johns produces paintings at four to five a year, sometimes not at all during a year. His large scale paintings are much favored by collectors and because of their rarity, it is known that Johns' works are extremely difficult to acquire. Skates Art Market Research (Skate Press, Ltd.), a New York based advisory firm servicing private and institutional investors in the art market, has ranked Jasper Johns as the 30th most valuable artist. The firms index of the 1,000 most valuable works of art sold at auction Skates Top 1000 contains 7 works by Johns. The Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, South Carolina, has several of his pieces in their permanent collection.

Other work

Flag (195455) White Flag (1955) Target with Plaster Casts (1955) False Start (1959) Three Flags (1958) Coathanger (1960) Painting With Two Balls (1960) Painted Bronze (1960) Device (1962-3) Periscope (Hart Crane) (1963) The Critic Sees (1964) Study for Skin (1962) Figure Five (196364) Voice (1967)

Skull (1973) Tantric Detail (1980) Seasons (1986) Numbers in Color(195859) Titanic(197678)

Appearance in popular culture

In 1999, Jasper Johns guest-starred in the animated television series The Simpsons, as himself. In the episode "Mom and Pop Art", Homer Simpson is hailed as an "outsider artist" after an art dealer discovers Homer's mangled brick barbecue grill, and Johns attends one of his exhibitions. Johns is portrayed as a kleptomaniac, constantly stealing food items, lightbulbs, a motorboat, and Marge's painting of the flooded town.

David Hockney
David Hockney, CH, RA, (born 9 July 1937) is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer, who is based in Bridlington, Yorkshire and Kensington, London. An important contributor to the Pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth century.

Life
Hockney was born in Bradford, England on 9 July 1937 to Laura and Kenneth Hockney and was educated first at Wellington Primary School then Bradford Grammar School, Bradford College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, where he met R. B. Kitaj. While he was there Hockney said he felt at home, he took pride and success in his work here. While a student at the Royal College of Art, Hockney was featured in the exhibition Young Contemporariesalongside Peter Blakethat announced the arrival of British Pop art. He was associated with the movement, but his early works also display expressionist elements, not dissimilar to certain works by Francis Bacon. Sometimes, as in We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961), named after a poem by Walt Whitman, these works make reference to his love for men. From 1963, Hockney was represented by the art dealer John Kasmin. In 1963 Hockney visited New York, making contact with Andy Warhol. A subsequent visit to California, where he lived for many years, inspired Hockney to make a series of paintings of swimming pools in Los Angeles, using the comparatively new acrylic medium and rendered in a highly realistic style using vibrant colours. In 1967, his painting, Peter Getting Out Of Nick's Pool, won the John Moores Painting Prize at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. He made prints, portraits of friends, and stage designs for the Royal Court Theatre, Glyndebourne, La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Hockney's older sister, Margaret, who lives in Yorkshire, is an artist of still life photos. Hockney was born with synesthesia; he sees synesthetic colours to musical stimuli. In general, this does not show up in his painting or photography artwork too much. However, it is a common underlying principle in his construction of stage sets for various ballets and operas, where he bases the background colours and lighting upon his own seen colours while listening to the music of the theatre piece he is working on.

Works
The "joiners"
David Hockney has also worked with photography, or, more precisely, photocollage. Using varying numbers of small Polaroid snaps or photolab-prints of a single subject Hockney arranged a patchwork to make a composite image. One of his first photomontages was of his mother. Because these photographs are taken from different

perspectives and at slightly different times, the result is work that has an affinity with Cubism, which was one of Hockney's major aimsdiscussing the way human vision works. Some of these pieces are landscapes such as Pearblossom Highway #2, others being portraits, e.g. Kasmin 1982,[4] and My Mother, Bolton Abbey, 1982. Hockney created these photomontage works mostly between 1970 and 1986. He referred to them as "joiners". He began this style of art by taking Polaroid photographs of one subject and arranging them into a grid layout. The subject would actually move while being photographed so that the piece would show the movements of the subject seen from the photographer's perspective. In later works Hockney changed his technique and moved the camera around the subject instead. Hockney's creation of the "joiners" occurred accidentally. He noticed in the late sixties that photographers were using cameras with wide-angle lenses to take pictures. He did not like such photographs because they always came out somewhat distorted. He was working on a painting of a living room and terrace in Los Angeles. He took Polaroid shots of the living room and glued them together, not intending for them to be a composition on their own. Upon looking at the final composition, he realized it created a narrative, as if the viewer was moving through the room. He began to work more and more with photography after this discovery and even stopped painting for a period of time to exclusively pursue this new style of photography. Frustrated with the limitations of photography and its 'one eyed' approach, he later returned to painting.

Later works

A Bigger Splash, 1967, Tate Collection, London. In 1974, Hockney was the subject of Jack Hazan's film, A Bigger Splash (named after one of Hockney's swimming pool paintings from 1967). In 1977 David Hockney authored a book of etchings called The Blue Guitar: Etchings By David Hockney Who Was Inspired By Wallace Stevens Who Was Inspired By Pablo Picasso. The etchings were inspired by and represented the themes of Stevens' poem, "The Man With The Blue Guitar", which accompanied the art. It was published as a portfolio and as a book in spring 1997 by Petersburg Press.

Hockney was commissioned to design the cover and a series of pages for the December 1985 issue of the French edition of Vogue. Consistent with his interest in cubism and admiration for Pablo Picasso, Hockney chose to paint Celia Birtwell (who appears in several of his works) from different views, as if the eye had scanned her face diagonally. In December 1985, Hockney was commissioned to draw with the Quantel Paintbox, a computer program that allowed the artist to sketch directly onto the screen. Using this program was similar to drawing on the PET film for prints, with which he'd had much experience. The resulting work was featured in a BBC series profiling a number of artists. His artwork was used on the front cover of the 1989 British Telecom telephone directory for Bradford.

A Bigger Grand Canyon, 1998, National Gallery of Australia. His A Bigger Grand Canyon, a series of 60 paintings that combined to produce one enormous picture, was bought by the National Gallery of Australia for $4.6 million. On 21 June 2006, his painting of The Splash fetched 2.6 million - a record for a Hockney painting. In October 2006 the National Portrait Gallery in London organized one of the largest ever displays of Hockney's portraiture work, including 150 of his paintings, drawings, prints, sketchbooks and photocollages from over five decades. The collection ranged from his earliest self-portraits to work completed in 2005. Hockney himself assisted in displaying the works, and the exhibition, which ran until January 2007, proved to be one of the most successful in the gallery's history.

The BMW 'art car' decorated by Hockney in 1995. In June 2007, Hockney's largest painting, Bigger Trees Near Warter, which measures 15x40', was hung in the Royal Academy's largest gallery in their annual Summer Exhibition. This work "is a monumental-scale view of a coppice in Hockney's native

Yorkshire, between Bridlington and York. It was painted on 50 individual canvases, mostly working in situ, over five weeks last winter." In 2008, he donated this work to the Tate Gallery in London, saying: "I thought if I'm going to give something to the Tate I want to give them something really good. It's going to be here for a while. I don't want to give things I'm not too proud of...I thought this was a good painting because it's of England...it seems like a good thing to do". Since 2009, Hockney has painted hundreds of portraits, still lifes and landscapes using the Brushes iPhone and iPad application, often sending them to his friends. His show (these works discussed above) Fleurs fraches (Fresh Flowers) is just closed at La Fondation Pierre Berg in Paris. Many of Hockney's works are now housed in Salts Mill, in Saltaire, near his home town of Bradford.

The Hockney-Falco thesis

Main article: HockneyFalco thesis In the 2001 television programme and book, Secret Knowledge, Hockney posited that the Old Masters used camera obscura techniques, utilized with a concave mirror, which allowed the image of the subject to be projected onto the surface of the painting. Hockney argues that this technique migrated gradually to Italy and most of Europe, and is the reason for the photographic style of painting we see in the Renaissance and later periods of art.

Public life
A conscientious objector, Hockney worked as a medical orderly in hospitals as his National Service 195759. He was made a Companion of Honour in 1997 and is also a Royal Academician. Hockney was offered a knighthood in 1990, but he declined the offer. Hockney serves on the advisory board of the political magazine Standpoint, and contributed original sketches for its launch edition, in June 2008. He is a staunch pro-tobacco campaigner and was invited to guest-edit the Today programme on 29 December 2009 to air his views on the subject. In October 2010 he and 100 other leading artists signed an open letter to the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Jeremy Hunt protesting against cutbacks in the arts.

In popular culture

David Hockney was the inspiration of artist Billy Pappas in the documentary film Waiting for Hockney, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2008

Peter Blake (artist)

Sir Peter Thomas Blake, KBE, RDI, RA (born 25 June 1932) is an English pop artist, best known for his design of the sleeve for the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. He lives in Chiswick, London, UK.

Career

On the Balcony, 1955 - 1957, Tate Gallery During the late 1950s, Blake became one of the best known British pop artists. His paintings from this time included imagery from advertisements, music hall entertainment, and wrestlers, often including collaged elements. Blake was included in group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and had his first solo exhibition in 1960. It was with the 'Young Contemporaries' exhibition of 1961 where he was exhibited alongside David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj that he was first identified with the emerging British Pop Art movement. Blake won the (1961) John Moores junior award for his work Self Portrait with Badges. He first came to wider public attention when, along with Pauline Boty, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips, he was featured in Ken Russell's Monitor film on pop art, Pop Goes the Easel, which was broadcast on BBC television in 1962. From 1963 Blake was represented by Robert Fraser which placed him at the centre of swinging London and brought him into contact with leading figures of popular culture.

Work
On the Balcony (1955-57) is a significant early work and still stands as one of the iconic pieces of British Pop Art, showing Blake's interest in combining images from pop culture with fine art. The work, which appears to be a collage but is in fact wholly painted, shows, among other things, a boy on the left of the composition holding

Edouard Manet's The Balcony, badges and magazines. It was inspired by a painting by Honor Sharrer depicting workers holding famous paintings.

The First Real Target, 1961, Tate Gallery Blake has directly referred to the work of other artists many times. Another example is The First Real Target (1961) is a standard archery target with the title written across the top as a play on the paintings of targets by Kenneth Noland and Jasper Johns. Blake also painted several notable album sleeves. He designed the sleeve for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band with his then-wife Jann Haworth, the American-born artist whom he married in 1963 and divorced in 1979. The Sgt. Pepper's sleeve has become an iconic work of pop art, much imitated and Blake's best known work. Producing the collage necessitated the construction of a set with cut-out photographs and objects, such as flowers, centred around a drum (sold in auction in 2008) with the title of the album. Blake has subsequently complained about the one-off fee he received for the design (200), with no subsequent royalties. Blake also made sleeves for the Band Aid single, "Do They Know It's Christmas?" (1984), Paul Weller's Stanley Road (1995) and the Ian Dury tribute album Brand New Boots and Panties (2001; Blake had been Dury's tutor at the Royal College of Art in the mid-60s). He also designed the sleeves for Pentangle's Sweet Child and The Who's Face Dances (1981), which features portraits of the band by a number of artists. In 1969, Blake left London to live near Bath. Blake's work changed direction featuring scenes based on English Folklore and characters from Shakespeare. In the early 1970s, he made a set of watercolours to illustrate Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass including the use of a young artist, Celia Wanless, as a model for Alice and in 1975 was a founder of the Brotherhood of Ruralists. Blake moved back to London in 1979 and his work returned to the earlier popular culture references. In January 1992, Blake appeared on BBC2's acclaimed "Arena" Masters Of The Canvas documentary and painted the portrait of the wrestler Kendo Nagasaki. In June 2006, as The Who returned to play Leeds University 36 years after recording their seminal Live at Leeds album there in 1970, Blake unveiled a new Live at Leeds 2

artwork to commemorate the event. Both the artist and The Who's Pete Townshend signed an edition which will join the gallery's collection. More recently, Blake has created Artist's editions for the opening of the Pallant House Gallery which houses collections that include some of his most famous paintings. These works are homages to his earlier work on the Stanley Road album cover and Babe Rainbow prints. He also designed a series of deck chairs. In 2006, Blake designed the cover for Oasis greatest hits album Stop the Clocks. According to Blake, he chose all of the objects in the picture at random, but the sleeves of Sgt. Pepper's and Definitely Maybe were in the back of his mind. He claims, "It's using the mystery of Definitely Maybe and running away with it." Familiar cultural icons which can be seen on the cover include Dorothy from Wizard of Oz, Charles Manson (replacing the original image of Marilyn Monroe, which could not be used for legal reasons) and the seven dwarfs from Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs. Blake also revealed that the final cover wasn't the original one. That design featured an image of the shop 'Granny Takes A Trip' on the Kings Road in Chelsea, London. Blake created an updated version of Sgt. Pepper - with famous figures from Liverpool history - as part of the successful campaign for Liverpool to become European Capital of Culture 2008, and is creating a series of prints to celebrate Liverpool's status. In 2008, Blake painted a pig for the public art event King Bladud's Pigs In Bath in the English city of Bath. A fan of Chelsea Football Club, Blake designed an exclusive collage to promote the team's new home kit in 2010. He also recently designed a shopping bag for the Lucky Brand Jeans company for the holiday season. Blake created the carpet which runs through the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom's Middlesex Guildhall building.

Honours
Blake became a Royal Academician in 1981, a CBE in 1983 and in 2002 Blake received a knighthood for his services to art. Retrospectives of Blake's work were held at the Tate in 1983 and Tate Liverpool in 2008. In February 2005, the Sir Peter Blake Music Art Gallery, located in the School of Music, University of Leeds, was opened by the artist. The permanent exhibition features 20 examples of Blake's album sleeve art, including the only public showing of a signed print of his Sgt. Pepper's artwork. In March 2011, Blake was awarded an honorary DMus from the University of Leeds, an event also marked by the public unveiling of his artwork for the Boogie For Stu album. On 18 July 2011, Blake was awarded an Honorary degree for Doctor of Art from Nottingham Trent University.

Georg Baselitz

Georg Baselitz (photographed by Lothar Wolleh.

Georg Baselitz (born 23 January 1938) is a German painter who studied in the former East Germany, before moving to what was then the country of West Germany. Baselitz's style is interpreted by the Northern American as Neo-Expressionist, but from a European perspective, it is more seen as postmodern. His career was kick-started in the 1960s after police action against one of his paintings, (Die groe Nacht im Eimer), because of its provocative, offending sexual nature. Baselitz is one of the world's best-selling living artists.[ He is a professor at the Hochschule der Knste art academy in Berlin.

Life
Baselitz was born 23 January 1938, as Hans-Georg Kern in Deutschbaselitz (now a part of Kamenz, Saxony), in what was later to be East Germany. His father was an elementary-school teacher and the family lived in the local schoolhouse. Baselitz first encountered art in albums of nineteenth-century pencil drawings in the school library. He also assisted nature photographer Helmut Drechsler on occasional ornithological shoots.
1950-1957

In his early life, his family moved to the county town of Kamenz. Baselitz attended the local school, in the assembly hall of which hangs a reproduction of the 1859 painting Wermsdorfer Wald by Louis-Ferdinand von Rayski, an artist who's grasp of realism was a formative influence. He read the writings of Jakob Bhme. At the ages of 14 and 15, he painted portraits, religious subjects, still lifes and landscapes, some in a futuristic

style. In 1955, he applied to study at the Kunstakademie in Dresden but was rejected. In 1956, he passed the entrance exam to study forestry at the Forstschule in Taranth and successfully applied to study at the Hochschule fr bildende und angewandte Kunst in East Berlin. He studied painting under professors Walter Womacka and Herbert Behrens-Hangler, and befriended Peter Graf and Ralf Winkler (later known as A. R. Penck). After two semesters, he was expelled for "sociopolitical immaturity." The next year he successfully applied for a place at West Berlin's Hochschule der Knste and continued his studies in the class of Professor Hann Trier, a creative environment largely dominated by the gestural abstraction of Tachism and Art Informel, affecting a certain orientation towards Paris amongst both staff and students [1]. He immersed himself in the theories of Ernst-Wilhelm Nay, Wassily Kandinsky and Kasimir Malevich. During this time he became friends with Eugen Schnebeck and Benjamin Katz. Andreas Franzke gives his primary artistic influences at this time as Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston. Conversely, he argues that Baselitz found the work of Barnett Newman inaccessible, as well as that of Mark Rothko.
1958-1963

In 1958, after moving from East Berlin to West Berlin, Baselitz met his future wife, Elke Kretzschmar. He also produced his first original works in a distinct style of his own, among them the imaginary portraits "Uncle Bernhard"/ "Onkel Bernhard." In the same year, he started work on the "Rayski-Head"/ "Rayski-Kopf" series. In 1961, he adopted the name Georg Baselitz in a tribute to his home town. In the same year, he is admitted to the Hann Trier master class. In 1962, he married Elke Kretzschmar and they had a son named Daniel. He also completed his studies at the Akademie. In 1963, Baselitz's first solo exhibition at Galerie Werner & Katz, Berlin, caused a public scandal. Two of the pictures, "The Big Night Down The Drain"/ "Die groe Nacht im Eimer" (1962/63) and the "Naked Man"/ "Nackter Mann" (1962), are seized by the public prosecutor. The ensuing court case did not end until 1965.
1964-1969

Baselitz spent the spring of 1964 at Schlo Wolfsburg and produced his first etchings in the printing shop there, which were exhibited later that year. The next year, he won a six-month scholarship to study at the Villa Romana in Florence. While there, he studied Mannerist graphics and produced the "Animal Piece"/ "Tierstck" pictures. After returning to West Berlin, he worked until 1966 on the "Heroes"/ "Helden" group, which includes the large-format composition "The Great Friends"/ "Die groen Freunde." In 1966, his second son, Anton, was born, and the family moved to Osthofen, near Worms. Through early 1969, he produced further large-format "Foresters"/ "Waldarbeiter" pictures. In 1969, using Wermsdorfer Wald by Louis-Ferdinand von Rayski as a model, he paints his first picture to feature an inverted motif, "The Wood On Its Head"/ "Der Wald auf dem Kopf."
1970-1975

In the 1970s, Baselitz exhibited regularly at Munich's Galerie Heiner Friedrich. Most of the works he produced during this time were landscapes themed as pictures-within-apicture. In 1970, at the Kunstmuseum Basel, Dieter Koepplin staged the first retrospective of drawings and graphic works by Baselitz. At the Galeriehaus in

Cologne's Lindenstrae, Franz Dahlem puts on the first exhibition of pictures with upside-down motifs. In 1971, the Baselitz family once again moved, relocating to Forst an der Weinstrae. Georg used the old village school as studio and started painting pictures featuring bird motifs. He exhibited several times in the next few years around Germany. He also participated in the 1972 documenta 5 in Kassel. This same year he began using a fingerpainting technique. He then began painting landscapes until 1975, chiefly based on motifs from around Deutschbaselitz. In 1975, the family moved to Derneburg, near Hildesheim. Baselitz visited New York for the first time and worked there for two weeks. He also visited Brazil, participating in the 13th Biennale in So Paulo.
1976-1980

In 1976, Baselitz set up an additional studio in Florence, which he used until 1981. In 1977, he began working on large-format linocuts. He began teaching at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Knste in Karlsruhe, where he is appointed professor in 1978. From 1978 until 1980, he worked on diptychs using the tempera painting technique (combinations of motifs), multipart pictures (series of motifs), and large-format individual works such as "The Corn Gleaner"/ "Die hrenleserin," "Woman Clearing Away Rubble"/ "Trmmerfrau," "Eagle"/ "Adler" and "Boy Reading"/ "Der lesende Knabe." The works become more abstract, with scriptural elements predominating. In 1980, he showed his first sculpture at the Venice Biennale.
1981-1989

In 1981, Baselitz set up an addition study in Castiglione Florentino, near Arezzo, which he uses until 1987. His work is exhibited in New York for the first time in 1981. By 1982, he began devoting more time to sculpture, in addition to several exhibitions. In 1983, he began using Christian motifs in much of his artwork, and completed the major composition "Dinner in Dresden"/ "Nachtessen in Dresden". In the same year, he took up a new professorship at the Hochschule der Knste Berlin. In 1986, in recognition of Baselitz's achievements, he was awarded the Kaiserring by the city of Goslar. Through the 1980s, Baselitz's work is exhibited frequently in Germany. In 1989, the title Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres was conferred upon Baselitz by French Minister of Arts Jack Lang.

1990-2009

In 1990, at the Nationalgalerie im Alten Museum in Berlin, the first major exhibition of Baselitz's works in East Germany was staged. In 1992, he resigned from the Akademie der Knste in Berlin. In 1993, he designed the set for Harrison Birtwistle's opera "Punch and Judy," staged under the direction of Pierre Audi at the Dutch Opera in Amsterdam. He also took part in the International Pavilion at the Venice Biennale with the "Male Torso"/ "Mnnlicher Torso" sculpture, accompanied by oversized drawings. In 1994, Baselitz designed a stamp for the French postal service. He also produced his first ground gold picture that year. In 1995, the first major retrospective of Baselitz's work in the US is staged at the Guggenheim in New York City. This retrospective is also exhibited in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles. Throughout the 1990s, his work was exhibited frequently throughout Europe.In 2002,retrospective of Baselitz's work in Art Gallery of Yap Kredi Bank in [Istanbul]. Baselitz currently lives and works near Munich and in Imperia. He recently sold his castle in Derneburg. His work was exhibited in London, at the Royal Academy of Arts in late 2007, and in the White Cube gallery in 2009. From 21 November 2009, to 14 March 2010, the Museum Frieder Burda and BadenBadens Staatliche Kunsthalle will be exhibiting a comprehensive survey of the artist, featuring approximately 140 works. Baselitz. A Retrospective will be presented at the two neighbouring museums, with the Museum Frieder Burda displaying 50 years of painting, the Staatliche Kunsthalle 30 years of sculpture.

Style
In the 1970s, Baselitz was part of a group of Neo-Expressionist German artists, occasionally identified as Neue Wilden, focusing on deformation, the power of subject and the vibrancy of the colors. He became famous for his upside-down images. He is seen as a revolutionary painter as he draws the viewers attention to his works by making them think and sparking their interest. The subjects of the paintings dont seem to be as significant as the works visual insight. Throughout his career, Baselitz has varied his style, ranging from layering substances to his style, since the 1990s, which focuses more on lucidity and smooth changes.

Works
Below is a partial list of Baselitz's works.
1. Ohne Titel (Untitled) (1958) 2. Der Orientale - Kranker Orientale - Vision - Glaubenstrger (The Oriental - Sick Oriental Vision - Upholder of the Faith) (1959) 3. Paranoia (1960) 4. Russische Frauenliebe (Russian Woman's Love) (1960) 5. Rayski Kopf (Rayski Head) series (1960-61) 6. G.-Kopf (G.-Head) (1960-61)

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

Auf einer Landschaft (On a Landscape) (1961) Der Acker (The Field) (1962) Drei Kpfe (Three Heads) (1962) Brustkorb (Ribcage) (1962) Hommage Charles Mryon (Homage to Charles Mryon) (1962-63) Die grosse Nacht im Eimer (Big Night Down the Drain) (1962-63) Trnenbeutel (Tear Sac) (1963) Schweinekopf (Pig's Head) (1963) Aus Der Traum (The Dream is Over) (1963) Drei Herzen (Three Hearts) (1963) Hommage Wrubel - Michail Wrubel - 1911 - Alte Heimat - Scheide der Existenz (Homage to Vrubel - Mikhail Vrubel - 1911 - The Old Native Country - Border of Existence) (1963) Der Fuss - 1 P.D. (The Foot - 1st P.D.) (1963) 2. P.D. Fuss - Alte Heimat (2nd P.D. Foot - The Old Native Country) (1960-63) Dritter P.D. Fuss (Third P.D. Foot) (1963) Alte Heimat - Scheide der Existenz - Vierter P.D. Fuss (The Old Native - Border of Existence Fourth P.D. Foot) (1960/63) Fnfter P.D. Fuss - Russicher Fuss (Fifth P.D. Foot - Russian Foot) (1963) 6. P.D. Fuss (6th P.D. Foot) (1963) Kelte P.D. Fuss (Celt - P.D. Foot) (1963) Achtes P.D. - Die Hand (Eighth P.D. - The Hand) (1963) P.D. (1960/63) P.D. Fuss (1963) Gruss aus der Zukunft (Greetings from the Future) (1963) Geschlecht mit Klssen (Sex With Dumplings) (1963) Idol (1963) P.D. Idol (1964) Oberon - 1. Orthodoxer Salon 64 - E. Neijsvestnij (Oberon - 1st Orthodox Salon 64 - E Neizvestny) (1963/64) Weihnachten (Christmas) (1964) Die poetische Kugel (The Poetic Sphere) (1964) Das Herz (The Heart) (1964) Das Kreuz (The Cross) (1964) Gottes Horn - Ich bin unumgnglich (God's Horn - I Am Indispensible) (1964) Die Peitschenfrau (The Whip Woman) (1965) Bild fr die Vter (Picture for the Fathers) (1965) Die Banane (The Banana) (1965) Mann im Mond - Franz Pforr (Man in the Moon - Franz Pforr) (1965) Das Blumenmdchen (The Flower Girl) (1965) Der Dichter (The Poet) (1965) Die Hand - Das brennende Haus (The Hand - The Burning House) (1964/65) Die Hand - Die Hand Gottes (The Hand - The Hand of God) (1964/65) Rotgrner - Die rote Fahne - Der Rot-Grne (Red-Green Man - The Red Flag - The RedGreen Man) (1965) Der Hirte (The Shepherd) (1965) konomie (Husbandry) (1965) Ralf 1 (1965) Der Hirte (The Shepherd) [2] (1965) Die grossen Freunde (The Great Friends) (1965) Rebell (Rebel) (1965) Der Hirte (The Shepherd) [4] (1965)

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

Das grosse Pathos (The Great Pathos) (1965) Ludwig Richter auf dem Weg zur Arbeit (Ludwig Richter on the way to work) (1965) Ein Vesperrter (The Inhibited One) (1965) Der Baum 1 (The Tree 1) (1965/66) Falle (Trap) (1966) Das Hirte (The Shepherd) (1966) Scwarzgrdig (Black Grounded) (1966) Exote (Exotic) (1966) Schwarz Weiss (Black White) (1966) Lockiger (Curly) (1966) Zwei geteilte Khe II (Two Divided Cows II) (1966) Drei Streifen - Der Maler im Mantel - Zweites Frakturbild (Three Strips - The Painter in a Coat - Second Fracture Painting) (1966) 66. MMM in G und A (1961/62/66) 67. Grosser Kopf (Larger Head) (1966) 68. Der Jger (The Hunter) (1966) 69. 3 Kpfe mit Schnecke (3 Heads with Slug) (1966) 70. Kullervos Fe (Kullervo's Feet) (1967) 71. Mann mit Gitarre. Paranoiamarsch (Man with Guitar. Paranoia March) (1967) 72. Katzenkopf (Cat's Head) (1966/67) 73. Kullervos Beine - Fe (Kullervo's Legs - Feet) (1967) 74. Ein Grner (Green One) (1967) 75. B fr Larry (B for Larry) (1967) 76. Hunde im Gebsch (Dogs in the Bushes) (1967/68) 77. Ein Jger (A Hunter) (1968) 78. Waldarbeiter (Woodmen) (1968) 79. Meissener Waldarbeiter (Meissen Woodmen) (1968) 80. Die Kuh - Nr. 2 (The Cow - No. 2) (1969) 81. Der Wald auf dem Kopf (The Wood on It Head) (1969) 82. Der Mannn am Baum (The Man by the Trees) (1969) 83. Da. Portrt - Franz Dahlem (Da. Portrait - Franz Dahlem) (1969) 84. D. Hildebrand - Kopfbild (D. Hildebrand - Upside-Down Picture) (1969) 85. Der werkttige Dresdener - Portrt M.G.B. (The Dresden Workman - Portrait M.G.B.) (1969) 86. Fnfziger Jahre Portrt - M.W. (Fifties Portrait - M.W.) (1969) 87. Birke (Birch) (1970) 88. Kaspar und Ilka Knig (Kaspar and Ilka Knig) (1970/71) 89. Der Falke (The Falcon) (1971) 90. Fingermalerei I - Adler - la (Finger Painting I - Eagle - la) (1971/72) 91. Fingermalerei Birken - 4. Bild (Finger Painting Birches - 4th Picture) (1972) 92. Elke II - Fingermalerei an Elkes Kopf (Elke II - Finger Painting on Elke's Head) (1972) 93. Fingermalarei - Interieur (Finger Painting - Interior) (1973) 94. Akt Elke (Nude Elke) (1974) 95. Birken Piskowitz (Birches Piskovitz) (1974) 96. Mnnlicher Akt (Male Nude) (1975) 97. Schlafzimmer (Bedroom) (1975) 98. Brauna (1975) 99. Elke V. (1976) 100. Stilleben (Still Life) (1976/77) 101. Mnnlicher Akt - Schwarz (Male Nude - Black) (1977) 102. Elke 4 (1977)

103. Die Flasche - der Adler (3. Paar) (The Bottle - the Eagle [3rd Pair]) (1978) 104. Adler (Eagle) (1978) 105. Birnbaum Nr. 1-4 (2. Gruppe) (Pear Tree Nos 1-4 [2nd Group]) (1978) 106. Die hrenleserin (The Gleaner) (1978) 107. Trmmerfrau (Bomb-Site Woman) (1978) 108. Adler (Eagle) [2] (1978) 109. Akt - Der Baum (13. Gruppe) (Nude - The Tree [13th Group]) (1979) 110. Das Straenbild (The Street Picture) (1979/80) 111. Modell fr eine Skulptur (Model for a Sculpture) (1979/80) 112. Ohne Titel (Untitled) (1979/80) 113. Ohne Titel (Untitled) 2 (1979/80) 114. Frau am Strand - Night in Tunesia (Woman on Beach - Night in Tunisia) (1980) 115. Blick aus dem Fenster nach drauen - Strandbild, 7 (Look Outwards of the Window - Beach Picture, 7) (1981) 116. Orangenesser I (Orange-Eater I) (1981) 117. Orangenesser IV (Orange-Eater IV) (1981) 118. Flaschentrinker (Bottle Drinking Man) (1981) 119. Glastrinker (Drinking Man) (1981) 120. Glastrinker (Glass Drinking Man) (1981) 121. Kaffeekanne und Orange (Coffeepot and Orange) (1981) 122. Buckliger Trinker (Humpbacked Drinker) (1981) 123. Adler (Eagle) (1982) 124. Frau am Strand (Woman on the Beach) (1982) 125. Die Mdchen von Olmo I (The Girls of Olmo I) (1982) 126. Mann im Bett (Man in Bed) (1982) 127. Adieu (1982) 128. Mann auf rotem Kopfkissen (Man on Red Pillow) (1982) 129. Nacht mit Hund (Night with Dog) (1982) 130. Adler im Bett (Eagle in Bed) (1982) 131. Franz in Bett (Franz in Bed) (1982) 132. Rotschopf (Redhead) (1982) 133. Maler mit Segelschiff (Painter with Sailing-Ship) (1982) 134. Maler mit Fustling (Painter with Mitten) (1982) 135. Ohne Titel (Untitled)[1 - 5+] (1982/83) 136. Blauer Kopf (Blue Head) (1983) 137. Schwarz Sule (Black Post) (1983) 138. Nachtessen in Dresden (Dinner in Dresden) (1983) 139. Blauer Mann (Blue Man) (1983) 140. Der Brckechor (The Brcke Chorus) (1983) 141. Die Dornenkrnung (The Crowning with Thorns) (1983) 142. Der Bote (The Herald) (1984) 143. Lazarus (1984) 144. Der rote Mann (The Red Man) (1984/85) 145. Scheibenkopf (Segment Head) (1986) 146. Die Beweinung (The Lamentation) (1983) 147. Der Abgarkopf (The Abgar Head) [1-3] (1984) 148. Die Verspottung (The Mocking) (1984) 149. Vier Hnde (Four Hands) (1984) 150. Zwei Rehe (Two Deer) (1985) 151. Das Liebespaar (Loving Couple) (1984) 152. Die Nacht (The Night) (1984/85)

153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173.

Mutter und Kind (Mother and Child) (1985) Italienische Frau (Italian Woman) (1985) Weibliche Landschaft (Female Landscape) (1985) Der Hase (The Hare) (1986) Pastorale - Der Tag (Pastorale - The Day) (1986) Pastorale - Die Nacht (Pastorale - The Night) (1985/86) Dolores (1986) Besuch in Dresden (Visit to Dresden) (1986) Zerbrochene Brcke - Wendenbraut (Shattered Bridge - Wendish Bride) (1986) Zwei schwarze Bume (Two Black Trees) (1986) Gru aus Oslo (Greetings from Oslo) (1986) Die Riesin (The Giantess) (1987) Der Fisch (The Fish) (1987) Alte Sachen (Old Things) (1987) G.-Kopf (G.-Head) (1987) Selbstportrt Desaster (Self-Portrait Disaster) (1987) 1897 (1986/87) Sieben mal Paula (Seven Times Paula) (1987) Dicke Blonde (Fat Blonde) (1987) Das Malerbild (The Painter's Picture) (1988) Die Mhle brennt - Richard (The Burning Mill - Richard) (1988)

Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer Grane, Woodcut with paint and collage on paper mounted on linen, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Anselm Kiefer (born March 8, 1945) is a German painter and sculptor. He studied with Joseph Beuys and Peter Dreher during the 1970s. His works incorporate materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac. The poems of Paul Celan have played a role in developing Kiefer's themes of German history and the horror of the Holocaust, as have the spiritual concepts of Kabbalah. In his entire body of work, Kiefer argues with the past and addresses taboo and controversial issues from recent history. Themes from Nazi rule are particularly reflected in his work; for instance, the painting "Margarethe" (oil and straw on canvas) was inspired by Paul Celan's well-known poem "Todesfuge" ("Death Fugue"). His works are characterised by a dull/musty, nearly depressive, destructive style and are often done in large scale formats. In most of his works, the use of photography as an output surface is prevalent and earth and other raw materials of nature are often incorporated. It is also characteristic of his work to find signatures and/or names of people of historical importance, legendary figures or places particularly pregnant with history. All of these are encoded sigils through which Kiefer seeks to process the past; this has resulted in his work being linked with a style called "New Symbolism." Kiefer has lived and worked in France since 1991. Early life and career Kiefer was born in Donaueschingen, Germany on March 8, 1945, just a few months before the end of World War II. In 1951 he moved to Ottersdorf and attended grammar school in Rastatt. In 1966 he abandoned his law and Romance language studies at University of Freiburg to study at art academies in Freiburg, Karlsruhe, and Dsseldorf. In Karlsruhe, he studied under Peter Dreher, an important realist and figurative painter.

Work
Photography

Kiefer began his career as a photographer with performances in which he mimicked the Nazi salute on various locations in France, Switzerland and Italy calling for Germans to remember and to acknowledge the loss to their culture through the mad xenophobia of the Third Reich. In 1969 at Galerie am Kaiserplatz, Karlsruhe, he presented his first single exhibition "Besetzungen (Occupations)" with a series of photographs about controversial political actions.

Painting and Sculpture

By 1970 while studying informally under Joseph Beuys at Kunstakademie Dsseldorf[2], his stylistic leanings resembled Georg Baselitz' approach. He worked with glass, straw, wood and plant parts. The use of these materials meant that his art works became temporary and fragile, which Kiefer himself is well aware of; he also wanted to showcase the materials in a way in which they were not disguised and could be represented in their natural form. The fragility of his work contrasts with the stark subject matter in his paintings. This use of familiar materials to express ideas was influenced by Joseph Beuys' art practice, in which Beuys used fat and carpet felt. It is also typical of the Neo-Expressionist style. After many years away, Kiefer returned in 1971 to live and work in Donaueschingen. In the following years he incorporated German mythology in particular, and in the following decade he argued with the Kabbalah. He went on expanded journeys throughout Europe, USA and the middle east, in which the latter two journeys further influenced his work. Besides paintings, Kiefer created sculptures, watercolors, woodcuts, and photographs. A series of paintings Kiefer executed between 1980 and 1983 depict looming stone edifices, referencing famous examples of National Socialist architecture, particularly buildings designed by Albert Speer and Wilhelm Kreis. By the mid-1980s, Kiefers themes widened from a focus on Germany's role in civilization to the fate of art and culture in general. His work became more sculptural and involved not only national identity and collective memory, but also occult symbolism, theology and mysticism. The theme of all the work is the trauma experienced by entire societies, and the continual rebirth and renewal in life. During the 1980s his paintings became more physical, and featured unusual textures and materials. Kiefer's paintings of the 1990s explore the universal myths of existence and meaning rather than those of national identity.[5] From 1995 to 2001, he started a cycle of large paintings of the cosmos.[6] He also started to turn to sculpture, though lead still remains his preferred medium. In 2006, Kiefers exhibition, Velimir Chlebnikov, was first shown in a small studio near Barjac in the South of France then moved to White Cube in London and finished in the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in rural Connecticut. The work consists of 30 large paintingssix-feet high and around 10-feet longhanging on two banks of 15 on facing walls of an expressly constructed grooved steel building that mimics the studio in which it was originally created. The work refers to the eccentric theories of the Russian futurist philosopher/poet Velimir Chlebnikov, who invented his own "language of the future" which he called "Zaum", and postulated, among other things, that cataclysmic sea battles shift the course of history once every 317 years. In his paintings, Kiefers toy-like battleships misshapen, battered, rusted and hanging by twisted wiresare cast about by paint and plaster waves. The works recurrent color notes are black and white and gray and rust, and their surfaces are rough and slathered with paint and plaster and mud and clay. In 2009, Kiefer mounted two exhibitions at the White Cube gallery in London. A series of forest diptychs and triptychs enclosed in glass vitrines, many filled with dense Moroccan thorns, was entitled Karfunkelfee, a term from German Romanticism stemming from a poem by the post-war Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann. In The Fertile Crescent, Kiefer presented a group of epic paintings inspired initially by a trip to India fifteen years earlier where he first encountered rural brick factories. Over the past decade the photographs Kiefer

took in India "reverberated" in his mind to suggest a vast array of cultural and historical references, reaching from the first human civilisation of Mesopotamia to the ruins of Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War, where he played as a small boy. "Anyone in search of a resonant meditation on the instability of built grandeur", wrote the historian Simon Schama in his catalogue essay, "would do well to look hard at Kiefers The Fertile Crescent".
Books

From 1969 Kiefer also worked on book design. Early examples are typically worked-over photographs; his more recent books consist of sheets of lead layered with the artist's characteristic materials of paint, minerals, or dried plant matter. For example he assembled numerous lead books on steel shelves in libraries, as symbols of the stored, discarded knowledge of history. The book Rhine (1981) comprises a sequence of 25 woodcuts, that suggest a journey downstream along the banks of the Rhine. The river is central to Germany's geographical and historical development, acquiring an almost mythic significance in works such as Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungs. Scenes of the unspoiled river are interrupted by dark, swirling pages that represent the sinking of the battleship Bismark in 1945, during an Atlantic sortie codenamed Rhine Exercise.
Studios

In 1991 Kiefer departed his studio in a large converted brick factory in Buchen[10], and spent time traveling in Japan, Mexico and India. In 1992 he established himself in Barjac, France, where he transformed his 35-hectare studio compound La Ribaute into a Gesamtkunstwerk. A derelict silk factory, his studio is enormous and in many ways is a comment on industrialization. He has created there an extensive system of glass buildings, archives, installations, storerooms for materials and paintings, subterranean chambers and corridors. Sophie Fiennes filmed Kiefer's studio complex in Barjac for her documentary study, Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (2010), which recorded both the environment and the artist at work. One critic wrote of the film: "Building almost from the ground up in a derelict silk factory, Kiefer devised an artistic project extending over acres: miles of corridors, huge studio spaces with ambitious landscape paintings and sculptures that correspond to monumental constructions in the surrounding woodland, and serpentine excavated labyrinths with great earthy columns that resemble stalagmites or termite mounds. Nowhere is it clear where the finished product definitively stands; perhaps it is all work in progress, a monumental concept-art organism." Around 2008, Kiefer left his studio complex at Barjac and moved to Paris. A fleet of 110 lorries transported his work to a warehouse on the Priphrique, outside Paris, that had once been the depository for the La Samaritaine department store. A journalist wrote of Kiefer's abandoned studio complex: "He left behind the great work of Barjac the art and buildings. A caretaker looks after it. Uninhabited, it quietly waits for nature to take over, because, as we know, over our cities grass will grow."

Exhibitions

Opening of the Exibitioms "SHEVIRAT HA-KELIM" (Breaking of the Vessels) at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. November 1 2011

In 1969, Kiefer had his first solo exhibition, at Galerie am Kaiserplatz in Karlsruhe. Along with Georg Baselitz, he represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1980. Comprehensive solo exhibitions of Kiefer's work have been organized by the Kunsthalle Dsseldorf (1984); Art Institute of Chicago (1987); Sezon Museum of Art in Tokyo (1993); Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1991); Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1998); Fondation Beyeler in Basel (2001); the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2005); the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2006); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2007). He was also featured in the 1997 Venice Biennale with a one-man show held at the Museo Correr, concentrating on paintings and books. In 2007, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presented an extensive survey of recent work and Kiefer was commissioned to create a huge site-specific installation of sculptures and paintings for the inaugural "Monumenta" at the Grand Palais, Paris. With the unveiling of a triptych - the mural Athanor and the two sculptures Danae and Hortus Conclusus - at the Louvre in 2007, Kiefer became the first living artist to create a permanent site-specific installation in the museum since Georges Braque in 1953. In 2009, he directed and designed the sets for Am Anfang (In the Beginning) by Jrg Widmann at the Opra National de Paris. Kiefer is represented by Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris, Gagosian Gallery in New York, White Cube in London, and Thaddaeus Ropac in Vienna. Before moving to Gagosian, he showed with Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

Recognition
In 1990 he was awarded a Wolf Prize. In 1999 the Japan Art Association awarded him the Praemium Imperiale for his lifetime achievements. In the explanatory statement it reads: "A complex critical engagement with history runs through Anselm Kiefer's work. His paintings as well as the sculptures of Georg Baselitz created an uproar at the 1980 Venice Biennale: the viewers had to decide whether the apparent Nazi motifs were meant ironically or whether the works were meant to convey actual fascist ideas. Kiefer worked with the conviction that art could heal a traumatized nation and a vexed, divided world. He created epic paintings on giant canvases that called up the history of German culture with the help of depictions of figures such as Richard Wagner or Goethe, thus continuing the historical tradition of painting as a medium of addressing the world. Only a few contemporary artists have such a pronounced sense of art's duty to engage the past and the ethical questions of the

present, and are in the position to express the possibility of the absolution of guilt through human effort." In 2008, Anselm Kiefer was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. Art historian Werner Spies said in his speech, that Kiefer is a passionate reader who takes impulses from literature for his work. In 2011 Kiefer was appointed to the chair of creativity in art at the Collge de France.

1983 Hans-Thoma-Preis 1990 Wolf Prize 1990 Goslarer Kaiserring 1997 International Prize by the Jury of the 47. Biennale di Venezia 1999 Praemium Imperiale

2005 Federal Cross of Merit First Class 2005 Austrian Decoration for Science and Art 2008 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade 2011 Berliner

Lucian Freud (born 8 December 1922). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucian_Freu Ellsworth Kelly (born May 31, 1923) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellsworth_K Frank Stella (born May 12, 1936) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Stell Jasper Johns ((born May 15, 1930) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_John David Hockney (born 9 July 1937) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hockn Peter Blake (born 25 June 1932) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Blake Georg Baselitz (born 23 January 1938) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Basel Anselm Kiefer (born March 8, 1945) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anselm_Kief