Tag Archives: Germany

Day 359- Paul Duhem- Locked Doors

It’s Day 359 and it’s Christmas Day!  Merry Christmas to you all.  I had a great time doing today’s piece and now I have to cook a bunch of food for my husband, brother and myself and try to have a nice relaxing day.  Please join me in honoring Paul Duhem today!  I wanted to honor his style, but also honor today’s holiday. 🙂

Paul Duhem

Paul Duhem

Paul Duhem

Paul Duhem

Paul Duhem was born in Blandain, Belgium. He left school at 14 and worked as a farmhand for various agricultural concerns. During the Second World War he went to Germany, where he laid rails for the railways. Going to France at the end of the war, he was arrested for his collaboration with the Germans. But not being in full possession of all his faculties, he was transferred from prison to a psychiatric hospital before being employed as a labourer in farms in the region.

In 1977 he was admitted to a home where he did horticulture. Twelve years later, at the age of 70, Paul Duhem started to draw within the framework of a

Paul Duhem

Paul Duhem

workshop. He devoted himself to this activity, continuing until he died.

The human figure is a recurrent motif in his compositions. He drew the same face, which can be interpreted as a self-portrait, over and over again in an obsessive manner, declining it in series, introducing subtle variations in shape, rhythm and color.

Biography above is from Art Brut.com’s website.

Paul Duhem had been institutionalized for more than 40 years and was well into his seventies when he established a grueling quota for himself. He made up his mind that he wanted to produce six artworks a day, every day, for the remainder

Paul Duhem

Paul Duhem

of his life. Each morning after taking breakfast at a hospital for mental patients in southern Belgium, he brought out his crayons and jars of paint and crayons and, in the three or four hours before lunch, produced three new drawings. Then, in the hours between lunch time and dinner, he turned out three more works. Duhem’s subjects mostly took just two forms — a sad-eyed homme whom everybody understood to be Paul himself, and also the locked doors that he encountered everywhere in the mental institution.

Duhem was born in Blandain, a farming region. Because his parents were too poor to care for all their children, he was mostly

Paul Duhem

Paul Duhem

raised by grandparents. He attended school until his fourteenth year, and then left to work on a farm. Duhem was serving in the Belgium Army during World War II when, after being wounded and suffering shell shock, he was taken captive and held for two years in a German concentration camp.

Duhem finally resumed the life of a farmhand, but the war and prison years had taken a toll on his mentalstability. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, he was admitted to a mental institution in 1977. Because of his years as a farm worker, Duhem was given assignments as a gardener and groundskeeper at the institution.

Paul Duhem

Paul Duhem

In 1990, after beginning to show fragility of health, he was retired as a day worker. Soon after, he started producing colored drawings, at first turning out works with a variety of subjects, including birds, floral still-lifes and windmills, and then gradually limited his art to his own visage and the locked doors. He was 81 when he died in the summer of 1999.

Duhem’s work is widely admired art brut enthusiasts today, and is to be found

Paul Duhem

Paul Duhem

in nearly every significant museum collection of art brut in Europe. A large Paul Duhem museum show was presented in Brussels in 2001. The show then traveled to museums in France and The Netherlands.

Biography is from Dean Jensen Gallery’s website.
I hope you enjoy my piece today!  I had a great time painting it.  I will see you tomorrow on Day 360.  Then only 5 paintings left.  I can hardly believe it.
Best,
Linda
Santa- Tribute to Paul Duhem Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Santa- Tribute to Paul Duhem
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View Santa- Tribute to Paul Duhem Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View
Santa- Tribute to Paul Duhem
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1 Santa- Tribute to Paul Duhem Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1
Santa- Tribute to Paul Duhem
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2 Santa- Tribute to Paul Duhem Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2
Santa- Tribute to Paul Duhem
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3 Santa- Tribute to Paul Duhem Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3
Santa- Tribute to Paul Duhem
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Day 314- Ernst Ludwig Kirchner- Allegories

It’s Day 314 and today’s piece is a little sunnier than yesterday’s but just as fun to create!  I love the style and colors of today’s painting.  Join me in honoring Ernst Ludwig Kirchner today.  Although today’s art is sunny, the artist’s story is still a sad one.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a driving force in the Die Brücke group that flourished in Dresden and Berlin before World War I, and he has come to be seen as one of the most talented and influential of Germany’s Expressionists. Motivated by the same anxieties that gripped the movement as a whole – fears about humanity’s place in the modern world, its lost feelings of spirituality and authenticity – Kirchner had conflicting attitudes to the past and present.

An admirer of Albrecht Dürer, he revived the old art of woodblock printing, and saw himself in the German tradition, yet he rejected academic styles and was inspired by the modern city. After the war, illness drove him to settle in Davos, Switzerland, where he painted many landscapes, and, ultimately, he found himself ostracized from mainstream German art. When the Nazis rose to power in the early 1930s he was also a victim of their campaign against “Degenerate Art.” Depressed and ill, he eventually committed suicide.

The human figure was central to Kirchner’s art. It was vital to the pictures that took his

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

studio as their backdrop – pictures in which he captured models posing as well as aspects of his bohemian life. For Kirchner, the studio was an important nexus where art and life met. But the figure also informed his images of Berlin, in which the demeanor of figures in the street often seemed more important than the surrounding cityscape. And, most commonly, he depicted the figure in movement, since he believed that this better expressed the fullness and vitality of the human body.

Fränzi vor geschnitztem Stuhl- Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Fränzi vor geschnitztem Stuhl- Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Kirchner’s Expressionistic handling of paint represented a powerful reaction against theImpressionism that was dominant in German painting when he first emerged. For him, it marked a reaction against the staid civility of bourgeois life. He would always deny that he was influenced by other artists, yet Henri Matisse and Edvard Munch were clearly important in shaping his style. Fauvism was particularly significant in directing his palette, encouraging him to use flat areas of unbroken, often unmixed color and simplified forms.

Kirchner believed that powerful forces – enlivening yet also destructive – dwelt beneath the veneer of Western civilization, and he believed that creativity offered a means of harnessing them. This outlook shaped the way in which he depicted men and women in his pictures, as people who often seem at war with themselves or their environment. It also encouraged his interest in Primitive art, in particular that of the Pacific Islands, for he considered that this work offered a more direct picture of those elemental energies. Primitive art was also important in directing Kirchner to a more simplified treatment of form. Primitive sculpture undoubtedly inspired his own approach to the medium and his love of rough-hewn, partially painted surfaces.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was born on May 6, 1880 in Aschaffenburg, Bavaria, and began studying architecture at the Dresden Technical

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

High School in 1901 at the encouragement of his parents. While attending classes, he became close friends with Fritz Bleyl, who shared his radical outlook on art and nature. During this time, Kirchner chose to dedicate himself to fine art rather than architecture.

In 1905, Kirchner and Bleyl, along with fellow architecture students Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel, founded the artist group Die Brücke (“The Bridge.”) The aim was to eschew traditional academic styles and to create a new mode of artistic expression, forming a “bridge” between classical motifs of the past and the present avant-garde. Die Brücke expressed extreme emotion through crude lines and a vibrant, unnatural color palette.

Do Do with Large Fan- Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Do Do with Large Fan- Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

The group would meet in an old butcher’s shop that served as Kirchner’s studio to practice figure drawing. (Studio meetings, however, would often devolve into casual lovemaking and general nudity.) Much of the artwork created by Die Brücke was a direct response to the graphic work of Albrecht Dürer and the bold color palette of the Neo-Impressionists. Kirchner held a particular interest in the woodcarvings of Dürer, and sought to modernize them with his own unique style of pared-down lines and dynamic compositions.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a leading force behind the Expressionist movement in Germany. Since 1913, his work has gained international recognition, extending its popularity into America. His art captures German culture at a critical point in pre-World War I history. Although his work speaks to a specific culture, his expressive skill as a painter and printmaker has influenced generations. Many attempt to emulate Kirchner’s distorted sense of perspective. The graphic, agitated lines and highly-keyed color palette are timeless and distinct to the artist. Kirchner’s work continues to be exhibited and sold around the world. It has also been a significant influence on new generations of Expressionists, including artists such as Georg Baselitz and Jörg Immendorf.

Quotes

“My paintings are allegories not portraits.”

“The heaviest burden of all is the pressure of the war and the increasing superficiality. It gives me incessantly the impression of a bloody carnival. I feel as though the outcome is in the air and everything is topsy-turvy.. All the same, I keep on trying to get some order in my

Self-portrait as a Soldier- Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Self-portrait as a Soldier- Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

thoughts and to create a picture of the age out of confusion, which is after all my function.”

“It seems as though the goal of my work has always been to dissolve myself completely into the sensations of the surroundings in order to then integrate this into a coherent painterly form.”

“All art needs this visible world and will always need it. Quite simply because, being accessible to all, it is the key to all other worlds.”

Biography is from www.theartstory.org.

I hope you enjoy my painting today!  I love painting with these colors and there’s this kind of abandon with painting such bold strokes and colors.  I will see you tomorrow on Day 315!  Then it’s only 50 paintings to go.  Whew.

Best,

Linda

Mädchen in Einem Grünen Zimmer- Tribute to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Acrylic on Canvas

Mädchen in Einem Grünen Zimmer- Tribute to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View Mädchen in Einem Grünen Zimmer- Tribute to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View
Mädchen in Einem Grünen Zimmer- Tribute to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1 Mädchen in Einem Grünen Zimmer- Tribute to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1
Mädchen in Einem Grünen Zimmer- Tribute to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2 Mädchen in Einem Grünen Zimmer- Tribute to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2
Mädchen in Einem Grünen Zimmer- Tribute to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3 Mädchen in Einem Grünen Zimmer- Tribute to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3
Mädchen in Einem Grünen Zimmer- Tribute to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Acrylic on Canvas

Day 119- Friedel Dzubas- Fields of Color

It’s Day 119 and I have a ton of house stuff happening right now.  They are still trying to install the vent hood and I’m waiting for the screen guy to show up.  I’d like to spend more time on my painting and blog, but gotta get life done. 🙂  Join me in celebrating Friedel Dzubas today.

Friedel Dzubas

Friedel Dzubas

Friedel Dzubas (born April 20, 1915 in Berlin, Germany, died 1994 in New York) was a German-born American abstract painter.

Friedel Dzubas

Friedel Dzubas

Friedel Dzubas studied art in his native land before fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939 and settling in

Friedel Dzubas

Friedel Dzubas

New York City. In Manhattan during the early 1950s, he shared a studio with fellow abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler. He began exhibiting his Abstract expressionist paintings at this time. His work was included in the Ninth Street Show in New York City in 1951, and in group exhibitions at the Leo Castelli gallery, the Stable Gallery, and the Tibor de Nagy Gallery among others. After the Ninth Street Show annual invitational exhibitions were held at the Stable Gallery throughout the 1950s. The poster of the second New York Painting and Sculpture Annual at The Stable Gallery in 1953, included an introduction by Clement Greenberg:

In the 1960s he became associated with Color field painting and Lyrical Abstraction. He was included in Post-painterly abstraction a 1964 exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg. Dzubas was a friend of Clement Greenberg, who in turn introduced him to Jackson Pollock and other artists.

Friedel Dzubas

Friedel Dzubas

His large work (up to 24 feet (7.3 m) wide) became more fluid. During the last three decades of his career, Dzubas had more than sixty solo exhibitions around the world. He was represented by the André Emmerich gallery and Knoedler Contemporary Arts in New York for more than thirty years. In 1976 he settled in Massachusetts, but also painted and lived in New York City, where his paintings were regularly exhibited.

He used Magna paint an oil based acrylic paint. Magna was originally developed by

Friedel Dzubas

Friedel Dzubas

the paintmakers Leonard Bocour and Sam Golden for and also used by Morris Louis. Dzubas would apply thick layers of color over washes, scrubbing the paint into the unprimed canvas. Dzubas used staining, brushing and other ways of applying color. His paintings were generally large in size and scale, but he made many very small paintings as well.

Friedel Dzubas

Friedel Dzubas

Biography is from wikipedia.

Even though I was rushed today, I still had a wonderful time painting this piece.   I hope you enjoy it as well.  I will see you tomorrow on Day 120.  Best, Linda

Untitled 119- Tribute to Friedel Dzubas Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Untitled 119- Tribute to Friedel Dzubas
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View Untitled 119- Tribute to Friedel Dzubas Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View
Untitled 119- Tribute to Friedel Dzubas
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1 Untitled 119- Tribute to Friedel Dzubas Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1
Untitled 119- Tribute to Friedel Dzubas
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2 Untitled 119- Tribute to Friedel Dzubas Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2
Untitled 119- Tribute to Friedel Dzubas
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3 Untitled 119- Tribute to Friedel Dzubas Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3
Untitled 119- Tribute to Friedel Dzubas
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Day Twenty-Eight- Hannah Höch- Blurring Boundaries

It’s Day 28 and I’ve got to be honest with you.  I’ve started packing up my house and so fitting in painting has been difficult.  BUT, I’m not giving up.  It’s not an option! 🙂  I was excited to see that Hannah Höch was today’s artist.

Hannah Hoch

Hannah Hoch

Hannah Höch (November 1, 1889 – May 31, 1978) was a German Dada artist. She is best known for her work of the Weimar period, when she was one of the originators of photomontage.

Grotesque (1963)

Grotesque (1963)

Hannah Höch was born Anna Therese Johanne Höch in Gotha, Germany. From 1912 to

Bouquet of Eyes- Hannah Hoch

Bouquet of Eyes- Hannah Hoch

1914 she studied at the College of Arts and Crafts in Berlin under the guidance of Harold Bergen. She chose the curriculum glass design and graphic arts, rather than fine arts, to please her father. In 1914, at the start of World War I, she left the school to work with the Red Cross. In 1915 she returned to school, entering the graphics class of the National Institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts. Also in 1915, Höch began an influential friendship with Raoul Hausmann, a member of the Berlin Dada movement. Höch’s involvement with the Berlin Dadaists began in earnest in 1919. After her schooling, she worked in the handicrafts department for Ullstein Verlag (The Ullstein Press), designing dress and embroidery patterns for Die Dame (The Lady) and Die Praktische Berlinerin (The Practical Berlin Woman). The influence of this early work and training can be seen in her later work involving references to dress patterns and textiles. From 1926 to 1929 she lived and worked in the Netherlands. Höch made many influential friendships over the years, with Kurt Schwitters and Piet Mondrian among others. Höch, along with Hausmann, was one of the first pioneers of the art form that would come to be known as photomontage.

Platonic Love- Hannah Hoch

Platonic Love- Hannah Hoch

After her involvement with Hausmann ended in 1922, she was involved with women and had a relationship from 1926 to 1929 with the Dutch writer and linguist Til Brugman. She supported reproductive rights for women; she had two abortions during her involvement with Hausmann.

While the Dadaists “paid lip service to women’s emancipation,” they were clearly reluctant to

The Flirt 1926

The Flirt 1926

include a woman among their ranks. Hans Richterdescribed Höch’s contribution to the Dada movement as the “sandwiches, beer and coffee she managed somehow to conjure up despite the shortage of money.” Raoul Hausmann even suggested that Höch get a job to support him financially. Höch was the lone woman among the Berlin Dada group, although Sophie Täuber, Beatrice Wood, and Baroness Else von Freytag-Loringhoven were also important, if overlooked, Dada figures. Höch references the hypocrisy of the Berlin Dada group and German society as a whole in her photomontage, Da-Dandy.

Höch’s time at Verlang working with magazines targeted to women made her acutely aware of the difference between women in media and reality, even as the workplace provided her with many of the images that served as raw material for her own work. She was also critical of marriage, often depicting brides as mannequins and children, reflecting the socially pervasive idea of women as incomplete people with little control over their lives. Höch considered herself a part of the women’s movement in the 1920s, as shown in her depiction of herself in Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser DADA durch die letzte weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (1919–20). Her pieces also

Dada Dandy- Hannah Hoch

Dada Dandy- Hannah Hoch

commonly combine male and female traits into one unified being. During the era of the Weimar Republic, “mannish women were both celebrated and castigated for breaking down traditional gender roles.” Her androgynous characters may also have been related to her bisexuality and attraction to masculinity in women (that is, attraction to the female form paired with stereotypically masculine characteristics).

Höch spent the years of the Third Reich in Berlin, Germany, keeping a low profile. She lived

Cut with the Kitchen Knife: Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-belly Cultural Epoch of Germany" (1919)

Cut with the Kitchen Knife: Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-belly Cultural Epoch of Germany” (1919)

in Berlin-Heiligensee, a remote area in the outskirts of Berlin, hiding in a small garden house. She married businessman and pianist Kurt Matthies in 1938 and divorced him in 1944.Though her work was not acclaimed after the war as it had been before the rise of the Third Reich, she continued to produce her photomontages and exhibit them internationally until her death in 1978, in Berlin. Her house and garden can be visited at the annual Day of the Memorial (Tag des offenen Denkmals).

Read more of her biography here at wikipedia.

"Hochfinanz" (High Finance) - Hannah Hoch

“Hochfinanz” (High Finance) – Hannah Hoch

I thought my tribute to her came out okay.  I wish that I had more time to work on it.  I wish I filled the canvas entirely.  You would

Hannah Höch, Russian Dancer/My Double, 1928

Hannah Höch, Russian Dancer/My Double, 1928

think that doing a photomontage/Dadaist collage would be easy, but it wasn’t.  I spent a good amount of time sifting through photographs on the computer and trying to visualize cutting them apart and putting them together in the right way.  It was also pretty difficult to paste everything down gracefully.  I felt like a little kid using glue for the first time.  I also printed the photos out with an ink-jet printer onto regular paper so I had to be careful the ink didn’t bleed because of the glue and mod-podge.  I primed the photos with enamel before glossing it over one last time.  My hands were sticky and pretty gross after.  I decided to keep this one simple and of course I wanted to do a self-portrait.  I used her self-portrait for inspiration.

Please enjoy the first of the Dadaists tributes that I’ve created.  I can’t wait for the next Dada/photomontage/collage artist I get to.  I will make sure to do something more involved.  For now I’m just satisfied, but not exactly excited about how it turned out.

I’m giving myself an emotional break and not beating myself up too much because this next month is going to be insane!

See you tomorrow on Day 29!  The month is almost over even though it feels like it just started!

xoxo, Linda

It's for you- Tribute to Hannah Hoch Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic/Paper/glue on canvas

It’s for you- Tribute to Hannah Hoch
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic/Paper/glue on canvas

Side- View It's for you- Tribute to Hannah Hoch Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic/Paper/glue on canvas

Side- View
It’s for you- Tribute to Hannah Hoch
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic/Paper/glue on canvas

Close-Up 1 It's for you- Tribute to Hannah Hoch Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic/Paper/glue on canvas

Close-Up 1
It’s for you- Tribute to Hannah Hoch
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic/Paper/glue on canvas

Close-Up 2 It's for you- Tribute to Hannah Hoch Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic/Paper/glue on canvas

Close-Up 2
It’s for you- Tribute to Hannah Hoch
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic/Paper/glue on canvas