The artist Birger Sandzén was a renowned Swedish-American painter, printmaker, educator and art advocate. Born in 1871 in Blidsberg, Sweden to a cultured family, he first attended a boy’s school in Skara where he studied drawing and painting with the noted academician Olof Erlandson. After graduating in 1890, Sandzén furthered his studies—in French and Esthetics—at Lund… Read more »
Francis Newton Souza: An Indian Artist in Exile
Artist Francis Newton Souza was born to Catholic parents in 1924 in Saligao, Goa, a Portuguese colony in the south of India. After his father died when he was three months old Frances moved with his mother Lilia to Mumbai where she worked as a dressmaker. While attending St. Francis Xavier’s College, a secondary school,… Read more »
M.F. Hussain: India’s Rebellious “Barefoot Picasso”
Maqbool Fida Hussain (1915-2011) was the most famous Indian painter of the 20th century. His work stirred up so much negative media attention that he was forced to live in exile during the final decade of his life. It was a disappointing fate for a much-loved man who was once called “India’s barefoot Picasso.” M.F…. Read more »
Frank Diaz Escalet (1930-2012): Power to the People
Frank Diaz Escalet (1930-2012), was a Puerto Rican-American artist who originally lived in New York before settling in Maine. Escalet’s bold and brilliant paintings art chronicle both the everyday lives and cultural expressions of Hispanic Americans in the mid-20th century. Much of Escalet’s is autobiographical, including his attempts to escape the Spanish Harlem ghetto of… Read more »
Jack Kirby and Stan Lee: How did the Greatest Team in Comics History Work?
Jack Kirby and Stan Lee were, without doubt, the greatest team in the history of comics: they were to comics what John Lennon and Paul McCartney were to songwriting. Together, they worked on quite a number of projects, including the Avengers (a classic grouping of comic heroes) the X-men, the Fantastic Four and the Hulk…. Read more »
Zhang Daqian: Artist, Collector, Scholar, Forger
Judging Zhang Daqian (aka Chang Dai-chien) as an artist isn’t hard to do: he was a versatile, daring and highly accomplished painter. Judging Zhang Daqian as a man is much more difficult, as he was a dedicated forger who paid for his extravagant lifestyle by creating absolutely convincing copies of ancient Chinese paintings and duping… Read more »
Xu Beihong (1895-1953): How Europe Shaped a Chinese Modernist’s Art
Xu Beihong: An Introduction Xu Beihong (aka Hsü Pei-hung) was a Chinese painter whose lifelong project involved re-invigorating Chinese art by hybridizing it with Western influences. Motivated by his conviction that the tradition of Chinese painting had gone slack and that over-reliance on mimicry of the past left Chinese art unable to carry the necessary… Read more »
Chen Yifei (1946-2005): China’s Restless Romantic
As a boy in Shanghai, the artist Chen Yifei once leapt from a second floor window holding an umbrella, hoping the wind would carry him gently to the ground Mary Poppins style. In that daring act his nature was already apparent: he had a restless spirit and was prone to taking risks in his quest… Read more »
Looking at a 1972 “Splashed Color” Landscape by Chinese Master Zhang Daqian
Between November 16th and December 17th of 1972, the 74 year old Chinese artist Zhang Daqian (aka Chang Dai-chien) was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition in San Francisco at the Center of Asian Art and Culture (now the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco). It was a triumphant event for the aging artist… Read more »
Alfonso Ossorio (1916-1990): Gorgeously Out of Touch with Reality
Before the 1989 release of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, few people outside of the upper reaches of the art world had ever heard of Alfonso Ossorio, the Philippine-born artist and collector who was Pollock’s close friend and most important patron. Ossorio died about a year after the book was published–he… Read more »
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