Creeley, Robert
Creeley, Robert born May 21, 1926, Arlington, Massachusetts, U.S. died March 30, 2005, Odessa, Texas in full Robert White Creeley American poet and founder of the Black Mountain movement of the 1950s Creeley dropped out of Harvard University in the last semester of his senior year and spent a year driving a truck in India and Burma (Myanmar) for the American Field →
Leibovitz, Annie
Leibovitz, Annie born October 2, 1949, Westbury, Connecticut, U.S. original name Anna-Lou Leibovitz American photographer who is renowned for her revealing, eye-catching portraits of celebrities. Leibovitz enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute in 1967, intending to become a painter. After being introduced to photography in a night class, she quickly switched her focus to that medium. In 1970, while still a →
Parrish, Maxfield
Parrish, Maxfield born July 25, 1870, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. died March 10, 1966, Plainfield, New Hampshire in full Frederick Maxfield Parrish American illustrator and painter who was perhaps the most popular commercial artist in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. The son of an artist, Parrish was educated at Haverford College, Pennsylvania, and studied art at the →
Coburn, Alvin Langdon
Coburn, Alvin Langdon born June 11, 1882, Boston, Mass., U.S. died Nov. 23, 1966, Rhos-on-Sea, Denbighshire, Wales American-born British photographer and the maker of the first completely nonobjective photographs. Coburn began taking photographs when he received a camera as a gift on his eighth birthday, but it was not until 1899, when he met the photographer Edward Steichen, that he became a serious photographer. →
Matter, Herbert
Matter, Herbert born April 25, 1907, Engelberg, Switzerland died May 8, 1984, Southampton, New York, U.S. Swiss-born American photographer and graphic designer known for his pioneering use of photomontage in commercial art. Matter studied with the painters Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant in Paris, where he later assisted the graphic artist Cassandre and the architect Le Corbusier. His own international reputation was firmly established →
Abstract Expressionism
Abstract Expressionism broad movement in American painting that began in the late 1940s and became a dominant trend in Western painting during the 1950s. The most prominent American Abstract Expressionist painters were Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. Others included Clyfford Still, Philip Guston, Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Lee Krasner, Bradley Walker Tomlin, →
Brandt, Bill
Brandt, Bill born May 1904, Hamburg, Germany died December 20, 1983, London, England byname of Hermann Wilhelm Brandt photographer known principally for his documentation of 20th-century British life and for his unusual nudes. Following early schooling in Germany and a stay in Switzerland, during which he took up photography, Brandt briefly worked in the Paris studio of the American artist and photographer Man →
Tachism
Tachism French Tachisme (from tache, “spotâ€), style of painting practiced in Paris after World War II and through the 1950s that, like its American equivalent, Action painting, featured the intuitive, spontaneous gesture of the artist's brushstroke. Developed by the young painters Hans Hartung, Gérard Schneider, Pierre Soulages, Frans Wols, Chao Wu-chi (Zao Wu-ki), and Georges Mathieu, Tachism was part →
Glackens, William J.
Glackens, William J. born March 13, 1870, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. died May 22, 1938, Westport, Connecticut in full William James Glackens American artist whose paintings of street scenes and middle-class urban life rejected the dictates of 19th-century academic art and introduced a matter-of-fact realism into the art of the United States. Glackens studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and at →
Yardbirds, the
Yardbirds, the 1960s British musical group best known for their inventive conversion of rhythm and blues into rock. The original members were Keith Relf (b. March 22, 1943, Richmond, Surrey, Eng.—d. May 14, 1976, London), Eric Clapton (original name Eric Patrick Clapp; b. March 30, 1945, Ripley, Surrey), Chris Dreja (b. Nov. 11, 1946, London), Jim McCarty (b. July 25, 1943, →
Nadar
Nadar born April 5, 1820, Paris died March 21, 1910, Paris pseudonym of Gaspard-félix Tournachon French writer, caricaturist, and photographer who is remembered primarily for his photographic portraits, which are considered to be among the best done in the 19th century. As a young man, he studied medicine in Lyon, Fr., but, when his father's publishing house went bankrupt in 1838, he →
Action painting
Action painting direct, instinctual, and highly dynamic kind of art that involves the spontaneous application of vigorous, sweeping brushstrokes and the chance effects of dripping and spilling paint onto the canvas. The term was coined by the American art critic Harold Rosenberg to characterize the work of a group of American Abstract Expressionists (see Abstract Expressionism) who utilized the method from →
de Kooning, Willem
de Kooning, Willem born April 24, 1904, Rotterdam, Netherlands died March 19, 1997, East Hampton, New York, U.S. Dutch-born American painter who was one of the leading exponents of Abstract Expressionism, particularly the form known as Action painting. During the 1930s and '40s de Kooning worked simultaneously in figurative and abstract modes, but by about 1945 these two tendencies seemed to fuse. The →
Vigee-Lebrun, Elisabeth
Vigee-Lebrun, Elisabeth born April 16, 1755, Paris, France died March 30, 1842, Paris in full Marie-Louise-Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun , Lebrun also spelled LeBrun or Le Brun French painter, one of the most successful women artists (unusually so for her time), particularly noted for her portraits of women. Her father and first teacher, Louis Vigee, was a noted portraitist who worked chiefly →
Poetry – Part 8
Additional Reading The most convenient way to get to know poetry is to read poetry. It would be invidious for the writer of a general article on the subject to prejudice the reader by making a selection of poems or poets; in experience, anyhow, one's acquaintance with poetry comes about chiefly by love and accident, supported, when not undermined, by schools, →
Poetry – Part 7
Poetry as a mode of thought: the Protean encounter In the fourth book of the Odyssey Homer tells the following strange tale. After the war at Troy, Menelaus wanted very much to get home but was held up in Egypt for want of a wind because, as he later told Telemachus, he had not sacrificed enough to the gods. “Ever jealous →
Poetry – Part 6
Form in poetry People nowadays who speak of form in poetry almost always mean such externals as regular measure and rhyme, and most often they mean to get rid of these in favour of the freedom they suppose must follow upon the absence of form in this limited sense. But in fact a poem having only one form would be of →
Poetry – Part 5
Poetic diction and experience Returning to the comparison, it is observable that though the diction of the poem is well within what could be commanded by a moderately well-educated speaker, it is at the same time well outside the range of terms in fact employed by such a speaker in his daily occasions; it is a diction very conscious, as it →
Poetry – Part 4
Major differences In place of further worrying over definitions, it may be both a relief and an illumination to exhibit certain plain and mighty differences between prose and poetry by a comparison. In the following passages a prose writer and a poet are talking about the same subject, growing older. Between the ages of 30 and 90, the →
Poetry – Part 3
Poetry and prose People's reason for wanting a definition is to take care of the borderline case, and this is what a definition, as if by definition, will not do. That is, if a man asks for a definition of poetry, it will most certainly not be the case that he has never seen one of the objects called poems that →
Poetry – Part 2
Attempts to define poetry Poetry is the other way of using language. Perhaps in some hypothetical beginning of things it was the only way of using language or simply was language tout court, prose being the derivative and younger rival. Both poetry and language are fashionably thought to have belonged to ritual in early agricultural societies; and poetry in particular, it →
Poetry – Part 1
Poetry literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm. Poetry is a vast subject, as old as history and older, present wherever religion is present, possibly—under some definitions—the primal and primary form of languages themselves. The present article means only to describe in as general →
Callahan, Harry
Callahan, Harry born October 22, 1912, Detroit, Michigan, U.S. died March 15, 1999, Atlanta, Georgia in full Harry Morey Callahan American photographer noted for his innovative photographs of commonplace objects and scenes. Callahan had no formal training in photography and was a hobbyist until 1941, when he saw photographs by the landscape photographer Ansel Adams. He was then inspired to search for his →
Eastman, George
Eastman, George born July 12, 1854, Waterville, New York, U.S. died March 14, 1932, Rochester, New York American entrepreneur and inventor whose introduction of the first Kodak camera helped to promote amateur photography on a large scale. After his education in the public schools of Rochester, New York, Eastman worked briefly for an insurance company and a bank. In 1880 he perfected a process →
