Elmer bischoff biography of albert einstein

DESPITE ALL THE OPPORTUNITIES we have been afforded during the last two decades to see Richard Diebenkorn’s paintings, his work, for many, has remained peculiarly invisible, hard to get a fix on, difficult to place. That situation, of course, is our fault, not his. A major cause is the way art has been categorized in museums, college art courses and popular histories. Most of the time the history of modern art is presented not as the study of the work of individual artists, but as the unfolding of a kind of contemporary Hundred Years’ War among rival esthetic factions. Territorial seizures are imaginatively reconstructed. Victories are celebrated. Artists are arranged rank by rank into opposing movements, being thereby reduced to so many colored pins on the historians’ battle maps. Theoretically unaligned people like Diebenkorn (and after all these years, even Bonnard) are viewed condescendingly as civilians in the ideological wars, and so are assigned, like inconvenient refugees, vague geographical tags like “Bay Area Artist” or, limply, “West Coast School.” The rule is, if it doesn’t easily fit a category, don’t try to deal with it.

There are other reasons for Diebenkorn’s uncertain position. When he first showed in New York in the ’50s his Berkeley paintings didn’t seem authentically New York Abstract Expressionist. In his subsequent representational phase he wasn’t your average magic, photo or mainstream realist either. And now his Ocean Park paintings have little to do with Minimal, color field, or other later ’60s developments. His independence—he is the quintessential nonjoiner—and the uniqueness of his painterly methods isolate him from everyone else while providing all the elbow room an artist could possibly want. He has moved freely over the years at his own pace, a steady, intelligent tortoise ambling past the burned-out wrec

The history of painting reaches back in time to artifacts and artwork created by pre-historic artists, and spans all cultures. It represents a continuous, though periodically disrupted, tradition from Antiquity. Across cultures, continents, and millennia, the history of painting consists of an ongoing river of creativity that continues into the 21st century. Until the early 20th century it relied primarily on representational, religious and classical motifs, after which time more purely abstract and conceptual approaches gained favor.

Developments in Eastern painting historically parallel those in Western painting, in general, a few centuries earlier.African art, Jewish art, Islamic art, Indonesian art, Indian art,Chinese art, and Japanese art each had significant influence on Western art, and vice versa.

Initially serving utilitarian purpose, followed by imperial, private, civic, and religious patronage, Eastern and Western painting later found audiences in the aristocracy and the middle class. From the Modern era, the Middle Ages through the Renaissance painters worked for the church and a wealthy aristocracy. Beginning with the Baroque era artists received private commissions from a more educated and prosperous middle class. Finally in the West the idea of "art for art's sake" began to find expression in the work of the Romantic painters like Francisco de Goya, John Constable, and J. M. W. Turner. The 19th century saw the rise of the commercial art gallery, which provided patronage in the 20th century.

Pre-history

Main articles: Prehistoric art, Art of the Upper Paleolithic, Art of the Middle Paleolithic, and List of Stone Age art

Modernist art movement

Not to be confused with Abstract Expressionism or Expressivism.

Expressionism is a modernistmovement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas. Expressionist artists have sought to express the meaning of emotional experience rather than physical reality.

Expressionism developed as an avant-garde style before the First World War. It remained popular during the Weimar Republic, particularly in Berlin. The style extended to a wide range of the arts, including expressionist architecture, painting, literature, theatre, dance, film and music. Paris became a gathering place for a group of Expressionist artists, many of Jewish origin, dubbed the School of Paris. After World War II, figurative expressionism influenced artists and styles around the world.

The term is sometimes suggestive of angst. In a historical sense, much older painters such as Matthias Grünewald and El Greco are sometimes termed expressionist, though the term is applied mainly to 20th-century works. The Expressionist emphasis on individual and subjective perspective has been characterized as a reaction to positivism and other artisti