Artist 50: Yaakov Agam

Yaakov Agam was born in 1928 in Palestine.  He is a sculptor and did experiments in optical and kinetic art.  He got his formal art training at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem.  He then moved to Zürich Switzerland in 1949 to study at the Kunstgewerbe Schule.  Then in 1951, Agam moved to Paris where he still lives with his three children.  In 1953 he had his first solo exhibition, and in his 1955 exhibition he established himself as a leading artist of kinetic art.  Agam’s art is characterized by his abstract style in his kinetic art as well as the movement of this piece along with the interaction between the viewer and the artist along with his use of light and sound.  Most of his sculptures are placed in public spaces.  Other than sculptures, Agam was also known for a type of print called the Agamograph, which is a lenticular printing that looks very different when viewed from different angles.  In 1972 he had a retrospective exhibition in Paris and then again in New York in 1980.  Agam is one of the highest selling, most well known Israeli artists.  His works are visually captivating to the viewer because they are not what people expect out of public art.

Artist 49: James Wines

James Wines was born in 1932 and is an American artist and architect.  He deals mainly with environmental design, working to integrate buildings with their surroundings.  This led him to found an architecture and environmental arts organization in 1970 called SITE.  This organization does everything from landscape design to product design.  Since 1969 Wines has lectured in fifty-two countries on various green topics and is currently a professor of architecture at Penn State University.  In 1958 he graduated from Syracuse University and became a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.  To jump-start his career as a successful sculptor and graphic designer, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962.  Throughout his career, Wines has taught at several different Academies, Institutions, and Universities, in both the United States as well as abroad.  He very firmly believes that hand drawing is a key element in the artistic process, it does not necessarily have to be perfectly accurate but the action of drawing out what the artist wants to achieve allows them to explore the physical as well as the psychological aspects of each design.  In total James Wines has designed over 150 projects for both the private and public client in eleven different countries.

Artist 48: Norman Carlberg

Norman Carlberg was born in 1928 in Minnesota.  He is a both a sculptor and a printmaker.  Before attending Yale he studied at the Minneapolis School of Art and at the University of Illinois.  In 1959 the Museum of Modern Art held an exhibition that featured his work.  After that he went to Chile to teach for a year and in 1961, Carlberg became the director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art, he taught there until 1966.  Carlberg likes to classify his sculptures as Modular Constructivism, but others also classify his work as Minimalist.  His art is very recognizable in the art community.  The aspect of Carlberg’s work that is modular is very easy for the viewer to spot.  His work characteristically has an element of repetition from a unit to a basic shape.  Many of his sculptures use geometric shapes, and hardedge designs, but they also combine straight edges with curves.  Most of his prints, which he made after 1970, they employ many of the same stylistic elements and are very simplistic.  Because each print contains a modular aspect, his prints can be rotated and repositioned to make a new image.  Carlberg is seen as one of the earliest artists to make Module Art.

Artist 47: Donald Judd

Donald Judd was born in 1928 in Missouri.  In 1948 he enrolled in the Art Students League to study painting and drawing.  After only a few months on the Art Students League he transferred to the College of William and Mary.  In 1949 he transferred again to Columbia University to study philosophy and he began taking classes at the Art Students League again.  By the late 1950s he was experimenting with three-dimensional art and in 1957 he began the master’s program in Art History at Columbia University.  He had his first solo show in 1957; it included only paintings at this time.  By the early 1960s Judd had totally left painting for sculpture.  He combined found objects with industrial materials like, steel, concrete, aluminum, and plywood.  He is said to be at the forefront of the international Minimalist art movement.  Unlike many artists, he was inspired by the architecture, objects, and installation of his peers in the art world.  In his works he removed the human or emotional element and rather than placing his art on a pedestal he placed it directly on the gallery floor of his shows.  In 1965 he began to experiment with sculpture that moved up the walls of galleries.  Between 1962 and 1967 he taught at different Institutes, Colleges, and Universities. 

Artist 46: Victor Vasarely

Victor Vasarely was born in Hungary in 1906.  His art can be classified as Op art.  In 1925 he began his medical studies at Budapest University but two years later he gave up on medicine to study painting.  In 1928 he enrolled at Sandor Bortnyik’s workshop and in 1930 he marries a fellow student.  After his time at the workshop he worked at a ball-bearing company, in accounting and designing posters for advertising.  In the 1930s Vasarely became a graphic designer and a poster artist.  He combined patterns and organic images in his designs.  When he got married he moved from Hungary to Paris to work as a graphic artist and a creative consultant at different advertising agencies.  Vasarely went on to create sculptures and other works that focused on optical illusion.  He developed his personal style of geometric abstract art; he used various materials but a very limited number of forms and colors.  Throughout his years he tried his hand at several types of art including a large kinematic form, industrial design and serigraphs.  In March of 1997 Vasarely died at the age of 90 in Paris.

Artist 45: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was born in 1886 in Germany.  He is one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture.  He worked for his father in his stone-carving shop and he also worked for several local design firms.  He then moved to Berlin where he worked for the interior designer Bruno Paul.  In 1908 he began his apprenticeship of architecture.  In 1912 he set out on his own, receiving many independent commissions.  At the start of his career he was designing upper class homes, his style was a return to the purity of the nineteenth century.  He began to develop projects that embodied a harmony with the spirit of the emerging modern society.  He openly abandoned ornament when he proposed at 1921 all-glass skyscraper.  He emphasized the straightforward display of materials and forms, believing that the way in which every architectural element is arranged, especially the character of enclosed space, must contribute to a unified expression.  In 1930 Mies served as the last Director of the Bauhaus school and in 1933 he was forced to close the school due to Nazi pressure.  He moved to the United States in 1937 and in 1944 he became a citizen.  He continued to create architectural pieces of artwork and pursued his goal of a new architecture for the twentieth century.

Artist 44: Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson, born in Cleveland, Ohio, was an American architect.  He studied at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.  He is most known for his buildings entirely clad in glass.  In 1930 he founded the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art.  In his undergraduate at Harvard, Johnson focused mainly on history and philosophy.  He also took several trips to Europe, these trips where his introduction to his fascination with architecture.  In 1932 Johnson and two of his friends put on a show at the Museum of Modern Art, “The International Style: Architecture Since 1922”.  This show by Johnson, Barr and Hitchcock was seen as the introduction of modern architecture to the American public.  He created what is seen as his masterpiece in 1949, the Glass House.  This house has a floor of bricks and the sides are made from glass and charcoal-painted steel.  On his property just fifty feet away from his glass house, sits his guest house, which was made entirely out of bricks with the exception of three large circular windows.  This building was an exact opposite of his glass house.  One of his other most well known buildings was the Seagram Building.  He worked along side Mies van der Rohe as associate architect in 1956.  This caused his practice to grow allowing him to take on larger public projects.  In 2005 Johnson died in his sleep at his glass house getaway.

Artist 43: Samuel Alexander Yellin

Samuel Alexander Yellin was born in 1885 in Poland.  He attended an arts and crafts school when he was young and in 1897 he became an apprentice under a local blacksmith.  In 1902 he received his masters certificate and traveled throughout Europe and worked in many different cities.  Then in 1906 he came to the United States and began studying at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art.  A year later he developed a wrought iron program there and taught this class until 1919.  In 1909 he opened his first shop and advanced to Master Craftsman in the Society of Arts and Crafts of Boston in 1915.  Yellin created masterpieces out of wrought iron, from railings to gates, his work can be seen throughout the world.  He held a strong emphasis on the craftsmanship and design of each of his pieces.  Because Yellin was trained in a blacksmith’s shop in Europe and worked there for years, he was able to bring the traditions of European metal working to the ever-changing art scene of America.  His passion for metalworking caused him to not view it as work but he felt he was creating pieces of art in and for people’s homes.

Artis 42: Damien Steven Hirst

Damien Steven Hirst was born in Bristol England in 1965.  He grew up in Leeds and was seen as a rebellious child.  He attended the Jacob Kramer School of art when he was young and in 1986 he began his studies of fine art at the Goldsmiths University of London, he studied there for three years.  In the 1990s he became one of the most prominent members of the Young British Artists group.  A central theme found in Hirst’s art is death; one of his most famous series included the preservation of dead and even dissected animals.  He has also created “spin paintings” and “spot paintings” that are characterized with seemingly random colors.  Although he personally created his early work, he then used assistants to help keep up with the high demands of the amount of work being produced.  This caused a great deal of tension because he was coming up with the idea but not actually executing the idea, Hirst felt that because the idea was his, he was the artist.  He tends to speak with vulgar language and in the 1990s he had serious drug and alcohol problems.  But his art is seen as very desirable and in 2008 he sold a complete show at auction bringing in a large sum of money.

Artist 41: P. Buckley Moss

P. Buckley Moss was born in 1933 on Staten Island in New York City.  She attended Washington Irving High School for the Fine Arts in Manhattan.  Due to her many undiagnosed learning disabilities she was voted “least likely to succeed” her senior year.  After high school she went on to study at Cooper Union College.  After she graduated college she got married in 1955, and in 1964 she and her family moved to Waynesboro, Virginia.  Using the scenery presented to her by the beauty of the Shenandoah Valley, her art became a portrayal of rural life in Virginia.  The Amish and Mennonite communities that were easily observed influenced her art.  In 1967 she her solo exhibition was sold out.  Because of her images of calm nature, her work drew the attention of collectors worldwide.  Many of her pieces have a signature animal present in each image, her love for family is also very present in her work.  Then in 1989 the P. Buckley Moss Museum was opened in Waynesboro.  Although she continues to create art, she also has found ways to give back to the community and encourage young artists who struggle with learning disabilities.  In 1995 she created the P. Buckley Moss Foundation for Children’s Education.  Moss is referred to by many who know her or her work, as “The People’s Artist”.

Artist 40: Hermann Glockner

Hermann Glöckner was born in 1889 in Dresden.  In 1903 he attended the vocational school in Leipzig and worked as a designer for textiles.  Then in 1904 he began attending evening classes at Kunstgewerbeschule in Dresden, he attended these classes until 1911.  Glöckner was very interested in drawings as well as in projections and geometry.  From 1914 to 1918 he served his time in the military as an infantryman.  He then studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts from 1923 to 1924.  Because of his experimental style, his work was not fully accepted by his fellow artists and he left the Academy.  This rejection caused him to dive deeper into constructivist artwork.  He became a member of the Dresdner Sezession, but because the Nazis refused to allow him to exhibit or sell his work, he turned to grafitto to make a living.  When Dresden was bombed in World War II he lost his home and then moved to Loschwitz.  At this time the German Democratic Republic did not appreciate his formalist style and his lack of artistic appreciation continued.  Then in 1969 his work was exhibited in Dresden and in 1979 he received a permanent visa for the Federal Republic of Germany.  In his later years, Glöckner visited West Berlin frequently and in 1987 he dies in West Berlin.

Artist 39: Hans Dieter Zingraff

Hans Dieter Zingraff was born in 1947 in Karlsruhe, Germany.  Early in his life he showed an interest in the arts, especially trompe-l’œil and optical illusion.  In 1972 he moved to Spain where he created works in the surrealist style and he continued to paint in a purely abstract architectural still lives.  Then in 1984 he began experimenting with wood strip images.  From 1996 he began to remove spatial continuity and add visual ambiguity making it radically abstract.  In 1999 he really came into his own personal style.  Zingraff was not creating art in the traditional format, but he was using real depth, volume, and lighting to create his pieces.  Although he has had many exhibitions he continues to create new pieces. 

Artist 38: Piet Mondrian

Piet Mondrian was born in 1872 in the Netherlands.  His father was an amateur artist and his uncle was an accomplished artist, both help to teach Mondrian to paint.  In 1892 he enrolled in the National Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam.  After three years of training, he used what he learned to support himself by producing scientific drawings and copies of museum paintings.  His art did not stand by itself, because he firmly believed that art and philosophy went hand in hand.  In 1908 he joined the Theosophical Society, which had widespread influence in Europe.  He later left the group, but it highly influenced his utopian ideals, which can be seen in the balance and tension of form and color in his paintings.  Mondrian termed his drive to transform his art as “always further” and as time went on his traditional landscapes began to show a new sense of drama and light.  In 1912 he moved to Paris and allowed cubism to have a large influence on his art, and can be seen as the turning point of his career.  Through his use of cubism, he was attempting to stress the flatness of his paintings.  On a visit to Holland in 1914, World War I broke out and he was unable to return to Paris and the art scene for 5 years.  During this time his curved lines faded from his art as well as the references to objects and nature.  In 1919 he moved back to Paris and was at that time creating his best known iconic abstract paintings.  By the 1920s he was at the height of his artistic purity.

Artist 37: John Ernest

John Ernest was born in Philadelphia in 1922.  From 1946 to 1951 he lived and worked in both Sweden and Paris, in 1951 he moved to London and studied at St, Martin’s School of Art, this is when he became influenced by constructivism.  Along with other artists in the 1950s Ernest became a key member of the British constructivist art movement.  He created both reliefs and freestanding constructions, including a tower and a large wall relief.  Because Ernest had a lifelong fascination with mathematics it was clearly shown in his artwork.  His work along with that of a fellow artist, made large contributions to graph theory in art.

Artist 36: Ella Bergmann-Michel

Ella Bergmann-Michel was born in Germany in 1896.  She was an abstract painter and a student of constructivist art.  By the time she was 19 she had already began experimenting with a collage technique, using wood, metal and other obscure material.  Her work has a very exact and scientific look, yet still in the abstract constructivist style.  By the 1920s she had started to expand her techniques further, she also began to incorporate poetry into her art.  During this phase of her art she also became one of the first artists to incorporate photography into her collages.  Although the Constructivism style was seen throughout the world, each area had its own spin on the style.  In Germany the Constructivist style in Germany was most impacted by the Bauhaus school, which highly influenced her artistic style as well.  In the late 1920s Bergmann-Michel had moved to Frankfurt with her husband, while in Frankfurt she decorated the minimalist walls of the Bauhaus school.  She continued creating her work until she was forced to stop due to World War II and Hitler’s hate for abstract art.  At this time she worked on her family’s farm and after the war she resumed her work.  In her later years of her career she continued to make collages and compositions without titles.

Artist 35: Peter Lowe

Peter Lowe was born in 1938 in London.  He is a British Constructivist sculptor.  From 1954 to 1960 he studied at Goldsmiths’ College.  Most of his work is characterized by a rational, abstract and very geometric style.  In 1960 he had his first exhibition of his geometric reliefs, he also showed his experimentations with balanced transformable works.  Although known throughout the world, most of his work has been exhibited and in national collections in Europe.  In 1972 he was the cofounder of the Systems group and in 1974 he became a member of Arbeitskreis.  He believes that what the viewer gets out of a piece of his art is up to them.  His work is very simple and clean, his clean lines and well-mastered craftsmanship makes his art very easy to look at.  Although there is not much visually, his works are very visually attractive.

Artist 34: Kara Walker

Kara Walker, born 1969 in California, this African American artist is best known for her black and white cut-paper silhouettes.  She was introduced to art early on in her life, her father is a formally trained artist and allowed her to sit with him as he worked.  Walker’s work addresses some very highly controversial themes throughout history.  In 1991 she received her Bachelors in Fine Arts from Atlanta College of Art, three years later she received her Masters in Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design.  In that same year, 1994, her mural “Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil Was as it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart”, gave her the attention of the world.  In 1996, at the age of 27 she became the youngest recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grant.  In 2007 she had her first full-scale exhibition.  She now lives in New York and she teaches visual arts in the MFA program at Columbia University.  During her art career she has worked in a number of different mediums but it is her black and white cut-paper silhouettes that are her most recognizable work.  She confronts many large issues head on, she takes issues like rice, gender, sexuality, violence and identity and pairs that with a mix of nightmarish yet fantastical images paired with a cinematic feel.

Artist 33: Estuardo Maldonado

Estuardo Maldonado, born in 1930, is a Latin American sculptor and painter.  His work was very highly influenced by the Constructivist movement.  Born in Ecuador he was very influenced by nature and at a young age he left home to set out to observe and learn from nature.  What he learned and saw during his time spent in nature has been a huge inspiration for many of his works.  He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Guayaquil and by 1953 he was teaching drawing and art history at the American School of Guayaquil.  Then in 1955 Malsonado traveled along the coast painting the people and landscapes of the Ecuadorian coast.  That same year he held his first exhibition.  A year later he was the first Ecuadorian artist to exhibit sculpture at the House of Ecuadorian Culture.  Then in 1957 Maldonado headed to Europe on a scholarship and settles in Rome while there he attended the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome and the Academy of San Giacomo.  His work combines the innovation of Constructivism with the influence of nature and the history of his people.  Then in 2009 he was awarded the Premio Eugenio Espejo, which is his country’s most prestigious National Award for Art, Literature and Culture.

Artist 32: Elias Wakan

Elias Wakan, born in 1945, is a constructivist sculptor in British Columbia.  His work was very similar to that of the artists in the Russian Constructivist movement.  He uses thousands of pieces of identical wood to create his sculptures.  He uses straight edged rectangles and triangles to create his over all pieces that end as curved, abstract sculptures but they were still very geometric.  He studied mathematics and philosophy at Stanford University.  He then spent years traveling in South America, India and the Yukon.  After his years abroad he moved to Ontario and used his knowledge of spatial problems and structure to design and build an underground solar house.  He was later accepted by the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, but instead of attended the art school he decided to go to Japan where he spent two years studying the photography of form and pattern.  Upon his return he created geometric paper sculptures that he later turned into wooden forms.

Artis 31: Max Bill

Max Bill was a Swiss designer, born in 1908.  From 1924 to 1927 he was in an apprenticeship as a silversmith, but then went to study at the Bauhaus in Dessau until 1929.  He then moved to Zurich and in 1944 he became a professor at the school of the arts on Zurich.  Then in 1953 Bill along with a few others founded the Ulm School of Design in Germany.  It started out in the same tradition as Bauhaus, but later took a new approach on education, integrating art and science.  Although the Ulm School of Design opened in 1953 by 1968 it was closed.  Max Bill was an industrial designer and his work was characterized by clear designs and precise proportions.   He tried to create visual representations of the New Physics of the early 20^th century, he wanted to make art in a way that the new science could be understood by the senses.  Bill was not a rationalist, he was a phenomenologist, he understood that the ultimate expression of concrete art was embodiment.  He became a member of the Swiss National Council in 1967 and a professor at an art school in Hamburg at the same time.  Then in 1973 he became an associate member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Science, Literature and Fine Arts in Brussels, three years later he became a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts.  In 1983 he created a granite sculpture that was installed as public art next to the Bahnhofstrasse in Zürich.

Artist 30: Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol, as we all know is the poster child of Pop Art.  Born in 1928 in Pittsburgh, he graduated high school in 1945 and went on to what was then Carnegie Institute of Technology.  While there he received formal training in pictorial design.  Once he graduated in 1949 he moved to New York City where he worked as a commercial illustrator.  In the early 1950s he legally shortened his name to Warhol from Warhola, at this time he also decided to work as a serious artist.  His early works were characterized by expressive and a more painterly style said to be the influence of abstract expressionism.  After that phase he turned away from abstract expressionism and tried to completely remove any evidence of the artist in his work.  In 1964 he moved to what would be called The Factory.  This is where he did some of his most well known work and began experimenting with film.  When a friend made an attempt on his life in 1963 he began to distance himself from others and ended The Factory scene.  Once that scene was gone many critics viewed him later works to be that of a decline in his art.  In the 1970s and 1980s he returned to painting and in 1987 he died from a complication in a medical procedure.

Artist 29: Berthold Lubetkin

Berthold Lubetkin was a Russian architect born in 1901.  He is attributed with pioneering modernist design in Britain in the 1930s.  While studying in Moscow and Leningrad, Lubetkin witnessed the Russian Revolution of 1917.  During this time he was taking in the elements of Constructivism.  In the 1920s he practiced in Paris, where he helped to design an apartment building located in the Avenue de Versailles.  While in Paris he designed a trade pavilion in the USSR.  Then in 1931 he moved to London and set up an architectural practice called Tecton.  The company’s first projects included buildings for the London Zoo.  They later designed the Dudley Zoo, which consisted of twelve animal enclosures and showed a great example of modernism in the United Kingdom.  Tecton also designed private homes, including one of the few modernist terraces in the U.K.  Due to the onset of war in 1939 Lubetkin’s practice was stopped from reworking the Finsbury slums to modern flats.  Even though the war stopped one of their largest projects, war made Lubetkin’s work mainstream.  Modernist architecture was what England showed to their people as the goal when peacetime came.  Many of his later designs put to use precast concrete panels and complicated abstract facades.  He later moved to Bristol with his wife, until his death in 1990.

Artist 28: Kenneth Martin

Kenneth Martin was an English painter and sculptor born in 1905.  He and his wife, Mary, were leading figures in the revival of Constructivism in both England and America.  Martin started his studies at Sheffield School of Art, but won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art and studied there from 1929 until 1932.  In the 1930s his paintings were characterized by a naturalistic style, in the 1940s his work turned to emphasize structural and design elements.  In 1949 he turned to a purely abstract style.  His pieces appeared in 1951 and he became very well known for his mobile works and kinetic sculptures.  Martin became particularly focused on geometric abstraction.  In the 1950s ha and his wife participated in a number of group shows and in 1960 Martin and Mary held a joint show.  Then in the 1960s he ran a class at the Barry summer school.  At Brixton Day College in London a stainless steel fountain made by Martin can be seen.

Artist 27: Sternberg Brothers

The Sternberg brothers, Vladimir and Georgii, were both born in Moscow.  But remained Swedish citizens, like their father, until 1933.  Together they attended the Stroganov School of Applied Art in Moscow from 1912 to 1917.  They then moved into the Moscow Svomas, the free studios, while there they, along with other students, they designed decorations and posters for the first May Day celebration in 1918.  Then in 1919 the brothers helped to found the society of young artists.  Although they participated in many group exhibitions from 1919 to 1923, in 1922, along with one other artist, the brothers had their own constructivist exhibition.  Other than their art, they made costumes and sets for a theater.  Then between 1929 and 1932 they taught at the Architecture-Construction Institute in Moscow.  Their art covered a wide range of media, but their largest success was in graphic design of film posters.  In their posters they distort perspective, photomontage, exaggerated scale, movement, and a use of color and typography that was very dynamic.  Even after Georgii, age 33, died his brother, Vladimir continued to create posters and organized decorations for the May Day celebration of 1947.  Although they only worked together on posters for nine years, their work became the standard that got imitated by others.

Artist 26: Kenneth Noland

Kenneth Noland was an American painter born in North Carolina in 1924.  Throughout his childhood he played with paints, which instilled in him the love of painting.  Following the United States entry into World War II Noland enlisted in the Air Force.  After his four years of service he put his G.I. Bill to use and in 1946 he enrolled in Black Mountain College.  After two years at Black Mountain College he traveled to Paris and studied under a Russian Cubist, which Noland later rebelled against that type of art wanting an ultra-simplified color and form.  He spent only a year in Paris and upon his return to the United States he began his teaching career, first at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Washington D.C. followed by a tenure at Catholic University.  While at Catholic University he also spent time teaching at the Washington Workshop Center for the Arts.  His early works were more abstract expressionist but he some abandoned that style for a series of color-field paintings for which he would become the best known.  In 1963 he shifted his focus again to a more simple, minimalistic, abstract image.  This phase lasted until the late 1960s when he began painting horizontal stripes of color on canvases.  In his later years he returned to different aspects of each of his artistic phases as well as to teaching.

Artist 25: Ivan Leonidov

Ivan Leonidov was born in 1902 and is known as a Russian constructivist architect, urban planner, painter and teacher.  Coming from a humble family it wasn’t until an icon painter saw his skills in drawing that he started his art career, he became the painter’s apprentice.  In 1919 he attended the Svomas free art studios in Tver.  Then from 1921 to 1927 he studied in Moscow.  While in Moscow he switched his art attention away from his painting and on to architecture.  In 1927 Leonidov received international recognition for his thesis project, which was in regards to the Lenin Institute and Library in Moscow.  Although his project design won him recognition, he did not actually execute his project.  Between 1928 and 1930 he was a teacher at the school he studied at in Moscow.  After his few years in teaching he worked in the Giprogor and Mossovet, he then joined the studio of Moisei Ginzburg at the People’s Commissariat for heavy industry in 1934 and remained there until 1941.  Leonidov created many designs but only one was ever materialized; in 1938 his design of a staircase in Kislovodsk was created. 

Artist 24: Carl Andre

Carl Andre is an American sculptor born in Massachusetts in 1935.  In 1951 he was awarded a scholarship to attend Phillips Academy, while at the academy he received his only formal training in art.  After high school he briefly attended Kenyon College in Ohio, but dropped out.  He then headed to Fort Bragg in North Carolina to do his years of military service from 1955to 1956.  In 1957 he then moved to New York to devote more time to his art and poetry.  Andre started experimenting with found blocks of wood, sawing and carving them into very simple geometric shapes.  It was not until Andre was in his 30s that he had any of his sculptures were exhibited publically.  In 1966 he decided that he had developed his sculptures to their fullest extent and they would go no further.  There were two clear phases in Andre’s sculptures; his early work can be seen as sculptures as forms because he cut and shaped the materials, his next stage was his sculpture as sculptures because he did not cut away materials but he stacked identical pieces.  Carl Andre’s later works were pieces that sat horizontally along the ground and encourage the viewer to walk on his pieces to be able to experience them fully.

Artist 23: Frank Stella

Frank Stella is an American painter born in 1936 in Massachusetts.  While in high school at Phillips Academy he started taking painting classes and then went on to Princeton University to earn a degree in history, all the while taking painting classes.  On trips to New York galleries he was exposed to many different artists that were critical to his personal development in art.  Once Stella graduated from Princeton he moved to the Lower East Side of New York and set up his gallery in a former jewelry shop.  Unlike the traditional abstract expressionists he used a monochromatic palette and a flat application of paint.  Stella’s early works were seen as very minimalist, they emphasized the form rather than the content.  At the age of 23 he was widely known for his pinstripe parallel patterns.  Later in his career he began to create his own geometrically shaped canvases, which challenged the traditional format.  He also moved from his pinstripes to complex circles and used brighter colors.  At this time Stella also began jumping into printmaking.  In 1970 he was the youngest artist to have a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, 17 years later he received a second retrospective and was the first to ever receive a second.  In the 1980s and 1990s while continuing his work in printmaking he also expanded his three dimensional pieces.  He then moved into free standing bronze and steel sculptures, this then led to his work in architectural structures.  He now lives in New York and continues to make large-scale sculptures and does designs for potential architectural projects.

Artist 22: Hector Guimard

Hector Guimard was a French architect born in 1867.  He is best known for his French Art Nouveau style.  Since the 1960s Guimard’s reputation has been on the rise, being praised for his architectural and decorative style.  From 1882-1885 he attended the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, while there he acquired rationalist ideas that provided the basis of his style.  In 1898 Guimard designed the Castel Beranger, which made him famous through his display of tension between the medieval sense of geometrical volume and organic lines.  He was especially devoted to the Art Nouveau ideal of harmony and continuity; this led him to not only design the exterior of buildings but also the interior.  Guimard was a precursor of industrial standardization because he wanted to diffuse new art on a large scale.  Moving into pieces of art rather than architecture, he continued to have the same formal continuity and harmoniously connected practical function with linear design.  In both his stone and woodcarvings he created a sense of movement in his sculptures.  His abstract two-dimensional patterns were used in stained glass, ceramic panels, wrought iron, wallpaper and fabric.  Unfortunately most of his works were demolished and due to his fear of war and the anti-Semitism of the Nazi party forced him into exile and in 1942 when he died, he was largely forgotten.  Although most of his work was lost, there was a rediscovery of his work in the 1960s.

Artist 21: Richard Serra

Richard Serra was born in 1939 in California.  He earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1961 from the University of California.  He continued his studies and earned a Masters degree from Yale University where he also trained in painting.  In 1964-1965 Serra traveled to Paris where he spent many hours drawing, the following year he went to Italy and began painting girds in random colors.  On a side trip to Spain he came to realize that he was unsatisfied with painting because of its two-dimensional limitations.  After that he began creating works using live and stuffed animals in cages.  When he returned to the United States in 1966 he settled in New York, this was when he began creating rubber sculptures.  By the 1970s Serra was creating large-scale pieces, due to his exposure to environmental art he was well aware of the idea of site-specific art, causing him to make art that became an integral part of its surrounding area.  As his works grew, Serra developed an interest in the spaces that he was creating with his art, along with the visual and physical relationship to the viewer.  Richard Serra is an American sculptor of the post abstract expressionism period.  He uses the experience of the viewer as a key element in each of his pieces.

Artist 20: Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko was born in 1903 in what is now Latvia.  His family moved immigrated to the United States in 1910 and settled in Portland Oregon in 1913.  At a young age Rothko was forced to get a job in which he was required to learn English.  This left him feeling bitter about his lost years of childhood.  When he graduated high school, Rothko was much more interested in music than in visual art.  He was awarded a scholarship to Yale University, but he felt that the environment was conservative and exclusive, so in 1923 he left without graduating.  After leaving Yale Rothko made his way to New York City where he took odd jobs so that he would be able to attend classes at the Art Students League.  He then returned to Oregon to continue his art career.  Over time his artistic style evolved from figurative to abstract.  In his early works he did many portraits, nudes, and urban scenes in which he blended expressionism and surrealism.  Soft rectangular forms floating on stained color fields characterized Rothko’s later paintings.  His color field paintings were a direct result of his search for new forms of expression.  Because he supported the artist’s total freedom he felt that the art market compromised that freedom.  These feelings put Rothko at odds with the art world, which caused him to refuse commissions, sales, and exhibits at times.  Throughout his life he suffered from severe depression and as a result he committed suicide in 1970, this surprised very few people because he had lost his passion and inspiration for his art.

Artist 19: E. W. Pugin

E. W. Pugin was born in 1834.  He was the eldest son of a successful and widely well known architect and designer of Neo-Gothic architecture.  He became part of the family business and learned from his father and then worked for his father.  When Pugin’s father died in 1852, he took over the family architecture practice and continued his father’s great legacy.  Although he mainly designed and completed projects in the British Isles, he received many commissions from countries in Western Europe, Scandinavia, and even from countries in North America.  Throughout Pugin’s life he designed and created over 100 churches and cathedrals.

Artist 18: Jean Tinguely

Jean Tinguely was born in 1925 in Switzerland.  He was a painter and a sculptor.  His sculptures were kinetic pieces done in the Dada tradition known as metamechanics.  Made a satire of the mindless over production of material goods in advanced industrial society.  In 1952 TInguely moved to France to be able to pursue a career in art.  In the 1950’s he belonged to the Parisian avant-garde, he was also one of the artists who signed the New Realist’s manifesto in 1960.  The work he is best known for are his sculptures that self-destruct.  Tinguely’s piece, Homage to New York was at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, this piece is one of his most famous pieces because it only partially self-destructed.