ert Rauschenberg [1925~]. After that, Blackburn devoted his energy to administering the Printmaking Workshop; and to his own art, which had gradually shifted from figurative work to a highly colored abstraction.
— Born in 1920 in Summit, New Jersey, Robert Blackburn studied art in New York City at the Art Students League after graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School. Throughout much of his career, he has been at the center of the Black art world and has worked with many of the major two-dimensional artists. His unique position in the art world resulted in part from his Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Located in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, it has served as a center for many artists. Blackburn first went to "the street" (17th Street) in 1948 after having migrated downtown from Harlem. He started the workshop primarily as a place in which to create and disseminate his own work at a time when there were very few opportunities for Black artists. Though now located at a different site, he has been on 17th Street ever since.
     Blackburn studied with the best. He studied under Rex Goreleigh at the Harlem Community Art Center at the same time as Jacob Lawrence. In the New York public schools, Countee Cullen was one of Blackburn's English teachers. Other teachers important in his life were Riva Helfond (his first teacher in lithography), Henry "Mike" Bannarn (his first inspiration), and Charles "Spinky" Alston. While still a student in junior high school, he worked at the Harmon Foundation. Blackburn's extensive facilities still cater to those artists who want to use and master traditional methods of lithography, etching, and woodcut. Hundreds of examples of the work done by artists who have passed through the workshop decorate the walls of the building, and Blackburn recorded the artists who have worked there in many thick albums filled with photographs. They are an impressive visual display of the importance of the workshop's place in the art world.
     At a time when computer-generated images occupy a greater prominence in the visual world, the workshop holds to its traditions. The workshop has become the home for a community of artists, including many loyal supporters. One of the younger generation of artists who has found a home in the workshop is a Nigerian who prefers to be known simply as Augustino. Jayne Cortez and Mel Edwards have worked there, too. The importance of the very act of making prints cannot be underestimated. Prints are less expensive on the open market than one-of-a-kind drawings or paintings in part because of the multiple images. This means that more people can afford to own them, and thus an image created in this way potentially has a wide impact. The act of making prints makes art more accessible and aids in the dissemination of the art. As a visual artist and principal administrator of the workshop, Blackburn wears two hats. He has also taught at every major art school in New York, including New York University, Columbia University, the School of Visual Arts, and Pratt Institute.
— Blackburn changed the course of US art through his graphic work and the Printmaking Workshop, which he founded in New York City in 1948 (55 West 17th Street, New York NY 10025). His pioneering contributions to the technical and aesthetic development of abstract color lithography is as legendary as his generosity in encouraging and training thousands of diverse artists to experiment in the graphic medium.
     Growing up in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, Blackburn was influenced by the intellectual and artistic legacies of the Harlem Renaissance as well as European abstraction and the artistic ideologies and political tendencies of both US social realism and Mexican modernism. He learned lithography as a teenager at a community center on 125th Street sponsored by the Depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA). While in his twenties, he studied at the Art Students League for three years. Later, he did freelance artistic work for institutions such as the Harmon Foundation and began to forge his signature abstract style amidst the varied modernist currents he encountered. In 1948, he opened his own studio, the Printmaking Workshop, launching the oldest and largest non-profit print workshop in the United States.
     After a period of travel and study in Europe, in 1957 Blackburn became the first master printer for the prestigious Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE). He printed the first seventy-nine editions for the seminal workshop, setting the standard by which ULAE exerted a powerful influence on modernist printmaking in America. His own complicated, varicolored abstractions prefigured or complemented more familiar ULAE works. In particular, his experiments in color lithography during the 1950s helped fuel the explosion of graphic art that occurred in the next decade.
     In 1971, the Printmaking Workshop became a non-profit corporation, with a mission to maintain creative and artistic quality, support and encourage innovation, create opportunities for Third World and minority artists, and foster public appreciation of the fine art print. The Printmaking Workshop was renowned for its open, informal, and accommodating atmosphere. Through the workshop, Blackburn has been teacher and friend to thousands of artists--as master printer, technical advisor, fund raiser, diplomat, catalyst, and instigator.
—      During his youth, Robert Blackburn was mentored and shaped by Harlem Renaissance artists including Charles "Spinky" Alston, Augusta Savage, and James Lesesne Wells. From age thirteen, he created and studied art at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library and the Harlem YMCA. At DeWitt Clinton High School, he contributed artwork, stories, and poetry to the school's literary magazine, The Magpie. He also participated in the Harlem Arts Workshop, the Uptown Art Laboratory, and the Harlem arts salon known as "306."
     Following his high school graduation in 1940, Blackburn attended the Art Students League in New York on scholarship until 1943. There he worked with painter and printmaker Will Barnet, who became a life-long friend. For four years, Blackburn freelanced as a graphic artist for institutions including the philanthropic Harmon Foundation, the China Institute of America, and Associated American Artists, while his vision of a career in printmaking developed. By late 1947, he had acquired his own lithographic press. In 1948, he opened his own studio in Chelsea, printing for artists and encouraging his friends to experiment in lithography. In 1950, when the innovative Parisian printmaking studio, Atelier 17 returned to Europe after a war-time hiatus in New York, Blackburn installed an intaglio press at his shop a few blocks away. Between 1951 and 1952, he worked with Barnet on a groundbreaking suite of color lithographs that were featured in the contemporary art journal ARTnews.
     Lithography classes offered at the WPA-sponsored Harlem Community Art Center introduced him to the art of printmaking. The center, initiated by Savage and artist and writer, Gwendolyn Bennett, became a model for Blackburn's own workshop years later. Among his colleagues at this time were artists Romare Bearden, Ernest Crichlow, Roy DeCarava [1919~], and Jacob Lawrence. Also key to his artistic development were his lithography teacher, Riva Helfond, and his friend, the artist Ronald Joseph. Blackburn's drawings and lithographs from this period won national acclaim in exhibitions from Chicago to New York and were cited and praised by such art critics as Alain Locke and James Porter.
     Prominent artist Will Barnet [1911~] was an early teacher of and mentor to Robert Blackburn as well as a founding member of the Printmaking Workshop. As their relationship evolved from teacher and student to colleague and friend, the two printmakers were eager to explore the artistic and technical potential of lithography.
     During the mid 1950s Robert Blackburn's printmaking workshop was run by a loose cooperative of artist-friends while he spent a year and a half in Paris and Europe, under the auspices of a prestigious John Hay Whitney Traveling Fellowship. After his return, he was hired in 1957 as the first master printer at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), the lithographic venture founded by Tatyana and Maurice Grosman, based in West Islip, Long Island. At ULAE, he printed for an emerging generation of artists including Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan [1922~], Helen Frankenthaler, and Robert Rauschenberg. His own predilections and fluency with the medium contributed to the new "look" of these works, which would go on to define the US's "graphics boom."
     During this active period, Blackburn's color graphics reached a creative and technical zenith. In 1963, he began to operate his own Manhattan workshop full time, providing an open graphics studio for artists of diverse social and economic backgrounds, ethnicities, styles, and levels of expertise. Under his direction, the Printmaking Workshop became one of the most vital collaborative art studios in the world.
     Blackburn spent 1953 and 1954 in Europe (primarily Paris) on a Jay Hay Whitney Traveling Fellowship. When he returned to New York in 1955, he entered a new creative period. During the 1950s and 1960s, he produced a series of small, Cubistic table top views in both intaglio and lithography. His explorations of this theme show Blackburn's continuing interest in mark-making as a representational sign or as an abstracted, compositional element.
     From 1957-1963, Blackburn served as the first master printer at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE). As he helped other, better-known artists with their productions, his own work reached its zenith in color abstraction, as seen in Color Symphony. At ULAE, Blackburn collaborated with prominent artist practitioners of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, including Jim Dine [1935~], Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. In most cases, he taught the artists how to make lithographs, sharing his sensibility of the medium and his approach to the stone.
     With incorporation came increased sponsorship and funding from sources such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Their contributions allowed Blackburn to invite a wide range of artists to his workshop. He conceived and produced varied, ambitious, collaborative projects such as Impressions: Our World (1974), a portfolio by notable Black US artists with introductory texts by artist Romare Bearden and art historian Edmund Barry Gaither.
     The lively intellectual exchange within his workshop stimulated Blackburn's own graphic pursuits. He investigated abstract color woodcuts throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. During this period, artist Krishna Reddy taught his innovative viscosity technique at the Printmaking Workshop. Romare Bearden's work in photoetching and stenciled monoprints also inspired both Blackburn and the workshop community.
     
— Man With Load (or The Toiler, Toil) (1936) _ Blackburn absorbed the lessons of the Mexican muralists through his teacher Charles Alston [1907-1977], who met Diego Rivera [1866-1957] in 1933 at Rockefeller Center. Man with Load reprises a "burden carriers" theme that also appeared in Rivera's works. Many of Blackburn's early drawings draw on the conventions of monumentalism found in Mexican mural painting, as well as social realist iconography.
— Refugees (1938) — Interior (1958) — Color Symphony (1960)
— Girl in Red (1950) _ This is a pivotal work in Blackburn's development as he turned towards abstraction and away from figurative work. Using a rich color palette, Blackburn combines age-old artistic themes of still life, landscape, and portraiture. His subject, a young Black girl, engages the viewer directly and wryly, her arms crossed.
— Heavy Forms, Pink (1958) _ Heavy Forms (1961) _ From 1958 to 1961, Blackburn worked on variations of the lithograph Heavy Forms. The imagery can be seen as deriving from Blackburn's earlier tabletop still lifes. However here, the image matches its "tabletop" to the printed surface, tipping it up to mimic the linked edge of the lithographic stone and print process itself. Blackburn treated the stone with tremendous fluidity, re-orienting the image and frequently signing his work on both top and bottom margins, allowing options for viewing.
— Faux Pas (1963) _ In this lithograph, Robert Blackburn winks with reference to Robert Rauschenberg's Accident (1963), the "gaffe" which would become such a key event in the history of contemporary printmaking. Through the middle of the image, a white stripe of paper breaks the image, alluding to the fragile nature of the limestone. Blackburn would continue to explore the broken stone concept with a suite of elegantly calligraphic works, including Curious Stone, that also recall his interest in Sumi ink drawing. — Curious Stone (1970)
— Red Inside (1972) — Woodscape (1984) — Three Ovals (1980) _ These three prints are from a series of related woodcuts Blackburn created between the 1960s and 1980s. Reworking several large blocks, he created images that were bold and masterfully graphic. He began with a monochrome image of three ovals, framed by black lines of varying widths—hearkening back to his earlier exploration of Cubist language and revealing the texture of the wood itself. A later experiment, in which he filled certain areas with directly printed woodgrain, led him to create Woodscape, which vertically reorients the imagery in Three Ovals.
— Yellow Flash (1972) _ In this woodcut, Blackburn creates a heavenly space where the seam of the blocks reads like a revelatory crack in the heavens. It registers as a jewel-like yellow diamond embraced by red. This is part of a series of large related woodcuts, in which Blackburn continued his practice of recycling and re-visioning blocks and imagery.

Died on a 21 April:

1994  Raúl Soldi, Argentinian painter.

^ 1990  Romain de Tirtoff "Erté", Russian French Art Déco painter and stage and fashion designer born on 23 November 1892, son of Admiral of the Russian Imperial Fleet Piotr Ivanovich de Tirtoff. He moved to France in 1912 and worked for a time sketching for Paul Poiret and designing opera and theater costumes. Between 1914 and the 1930s he created many magazine covers for Harper’s Bazaar. In the United States he worked for Flo Ziegfeld and designed costumes for the film Ben Hur (1959). Influenced by Indian miniatures, his designs, illustrations, and drawings were sophisticated and highly stylized. — LINKS — 1 (592x468pix, 142kb) — 2 — 3 — 4 — 5 — 6 — 7 — 8 — 9 — A — B — C — D — E — F — G — I — J — L — N — O — P — Q — R — S — T — U — V — W — X — Y — Z — Hiver — Prisons — Duel des Ombres — Rose Gown (710x551pix, 187kb) — Rêve des Tropiques — Der Rosenkavalier (1980) — Rainbow Scarf — Rainbow Dream

1971 Alberto Giovanni Cesare Magnelli, Italian painter born on 01 July 1888. He was born into a wealthy family of textile traders and, on the death of his father in 1891, his education was supervised by his uncle Alessandro. From 1907 he taught himself to paint by visiting galleries and studying Quattrocento fresco cycles, especially those by Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca. From 1911, through the circle of Giovanni Papini and Ardengo Soffici, Magnelli came into contact with Futurism and the international avant-garde: he responded to Cubism through the reproductions in Guillaume Apollinaire’s Les Peintres cubistes: Méditations esthétiques (Paris) but infused his large figures constructed from simplified curved planes with an individual use of bold color (e.g. Workers on the Cart, 1914). In March 1914 he travelled with the poet Aldo Palazzeschi to join Soffici, Papini and Carlo Carrà in Paris, where he met Apollinaire, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger and others. Commissioned to expand his uncle’s collection, Magnelli bought works by Picasso, Juan Gris, Carrà and three of the most controversial sculptures at the Salon des Indépendants: Alexander Archipenko’s Medrano II and Carrousel Pierrot (both 1913) and The Boxers (1914). The solidity and color of his own work impressed Apollinaire, who encouraged Magnelli’s move towards ‘pure’ painting.

^ 1667 Cornelis de Wael (or Waal), Flemish painter, draftsman, and dealer, born on 07 September 1592. He was the son of painter Jan Baptist de Wael I [1558–1633], from whom he and his brother Lucas de Wael [03 Mar 1591 – 25 Oct 1661] learned to paint. They both went to Italy in 1610 and by 1613 had settled in Genoa. There Cornelis founded the Cenacolo Fiammingo, where he trained many young painters. Their circle of expatriate Flemings included Anthony van Dyck, who lived with them for a time and painted a double portrait of them (1627). Cornelis may have collaborated with van Dyck; he may also have worked with the Italian landscape painter Giovanni Battista Vicino (fl c. 1650), as various landscapes by Vicino have figures in them by either de Wael or a painter from his circle. During visits to Rome, Cornelis came into contact with the Schildersbent, the confraternity of northern artists there, and in 1627 he was recorded in the documents of Rome’s Guild of Saint Luke. He moved there from Genoa in 1656, following an outbreak of the plague. Cornelis received commissions from Italian churches but is best known for his military pieces, harbor views and bambocciante or low-life subjects. Jan Baptist de Wael II [25 Jul 1632 – 1669+] was the son or nephew of Cornelis de Wael. — A Military Camp (77x97cm; 412x524pix, 26kb) _ In this view of a busy military encampment, before a tent on the left there is a group of elegantly dressed men, a farmhand holds the horse, whose rider has dismounted to give a document to a sitting officer. Opposite them men attend to their different occupations: A wet nurse feeds a baby, men spread out maps, stand before a beer stand or around a field kitchen, while others slaughter two cows.— Seven Works of Mercy: Burying the Dead (400x609pix, 64kb) — Battle of Warships (104x167cm; 345x569pix, 82kb) — The Return of the Prodigal Son (sketch 24x22cm; 698x617pix, 109kb)

1588 Francesco Traballesi (or Trabaldese), Italian artist born in 1544.


Born on a 21 April:

1904 Jean Hélion, French painter and writer who died on 27 October 1987. — {That's Hélion NOT Hellion}— {Did he favor scenes lit by a bright sun?}— His family background was modest and unconnected with the arts: his father worked as a taxi-driver. At school he was attracted to poetry and later began to study chemistry until 1921, when he moved to Paris to further his ambitions as a poet. There he financed his studies at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs by working as an architectural draughtsman; while copying decorative details at the Louvre he encountered for the first time the work of Poussin and Philippe de Champaigne, which redirected his interests towards painting. Living in Montmartre, he remained largely self-taught in art, and in 1925 he gave up his architectural employment to concentrate exclusively on painting. His early work consisted typically of still-lifes and figures, somewhat in the manner of Chaïm Soutine, until he met Joachím Torres García, who introduced him to Cubist and abstract art.

1891 Oskar Mulley, Austrian artist who died in 1949. — {There once was an artist named Mulley, / To his models sometimes a bully, / But otherwise he was quite jolly, / Austrian artist Oskar Mulley.}

1843 John Emms, British artist who died on 01 November 1912. — {Could his last name also be spelled “M's”? Perhaps they should have named him “Six”, short for Sixtus, and then his full name could have been spelled “MMMMMM”}

1740 Nicolaes Muys, Dutch artist who died on 28 February 1808.

1682 Jaspar Broers, Flemish artist who died on 19 January 1716.

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artist who hanged himself on 04 August 1932.
— He studied at the National Academy of Design, New York, in 1884 and briefly at the Académie Julian, Paris, during 1897. He received critical success with academic paintings of single female figures in interiors and genre scenes of café society, which reflected the influence of the work of James Abbott McNeill Whistler and William Merritt Chase, for example At the Café (1905). His long residence in Paris from 1897, his participation in various independent salons and his association with Leo and Gertrude Stein led to his interest in avant-garde art. He may have been one of a group of Americans who studied briefly with Henri Matisse. By 1907 he was producing vigorously painted Fauvist landscapes, such as Landscape with Red Tree (1908).
— Alfred Maurer was born in New York, the son of German-born Louis Maurer, a celebrated painter and lithographer employed for a time by Currier and Ives. At age sixteen, Maurer was taken out of school to work, as his father had done at that age, in his father's lithographic firm. He worked there for about thirteen years, designing cigar and soap labels. However, this did not satisfy the largely self-taught artist. In 1897, after limited study with the sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward [1830-1910] and painter William Merritt Chase [1849-1916], Maurer had saved enough money to go to Paris. He remained there for four years, inspired by the Parisian art world and a circle of US and French artists. His work, in the style of James McNeill Whistler [1834-1903], earned recognition with prestigious prizes, such as First Prize at the 1901 Carnegie International Exhibition — the most important exhibition in the world at that time — and similar recognition at major exhibitions in this country and Europe. At age thirty-six, stimulated by Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism, and not satisfied with continuing to paint "acceptable" or "fashionable" work, Maurer diligently sought his own method of expression. His revolt, and resulting break with representationalism, caused his international reputation to dissipate almost overnight.
      Maurer left Paris just prior to World War I, leaving much of his work behind. Regretfully he returned to his father's house where he found no parental support or understanding. The elder Maurer, satisfied with his own career, rejected not only his son's modernist work, but also his son. For the next seventeen years Maurer worked in a garret in his father's house with neither financial success nor critical acclaim. He continued to work and experiment, though he sold his work infrequently and at low prices. Having celebrated his 100th birthday in 1932, Maurer's father died that same year, leaving his son financially secure and finally free of his father's domination. Tragically, Alfred Maurer — “gentle, introspective, rejected Alfy” — took his own life several weeks after his father's death. Some sources indicate he was in ill health and filled with remorse at not having reconciled with his father before his death. Others state that he could not exist without an object for the hatred that had sustained him for so long.
      Hans Hofmann, the influential and respected teacher and painter wrote in 1950:
      Four names already excel in the great drama of modern art in the US: Alfred Maurer, John Flannagan [1895-1942], Arthur Carles [1882-1952], Arshile Gorky [1904-1948]. All of them have been guided by the same artistic awareness that no expression can become coherent without being plastically and aesthetically conceived. Maurer is a painter of enormous stature. His vision of the reality of painting drove him to leave behind the success that accompanied his earlier work. This is the tragedy and glory of every great man; he must follow an inner urge of deeper purpose which may destroy him in order that the work may live. It is the continuation of such essential creativity into another generation that creates tradition. Maurer, Flannagan, Carles, Gorky, Ryder are the forerunners of a true and great US tradition that is being carried on by the vanguard of advanced modern artists.
— At the 1901 Carnegie International Exhibition, Maurer's An Arrangement was awarded the gold medal and the top prize of $1500 by a jury of artists that included Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. The title of this painting of a young woman suggests the influence of James Abbott McNeill Whistler. The painting itself also reflects the influence of William Merritt Chase, an influence even more pronounced in Maurer’s earlier Self-Portrait (1897). All this placed Maurer in the mainstream of accepted taste in US art. Maurer was the heir also to John Singer Sargent.
      Alfred Maurer's father, Louis Maurer [21 Feb 1832 – 19 Jul 1932], who is today best known for his work as a Currier & Ives artist, was also a well-connected painter in the academic style of the period. It was in his father’s successful lithography business that Maurer worked before departing for Paris in 1897, a journey which determed both the glories and the miseries of the last half of the artist’s life. For it was in Paris that Maurer, to the horror of his reactionary father, embraced the Modernism of Cézanne and Matisse. Maurer can thus be said to be the first US Modernist.
      Maurer’s encounter with the new Fauvist paintings of Matisse in the Salon d’Automne of 1905 was certainly crucial. It was not the only experience that prompted his turn away from the tonal Estheticism at which he had excelled to the more radical color-oriented Modernism that became the basis of so much of the best Modernist painting for decades thereafter. Late Cézanne and the late pastels of Degas, and the entire esthetic weight of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masters, led Maurer to reexamine the fundamentals of his art. He described his situation in an article for The New York Times five years before the Armory Show:
      “The transition from the old school to the new is not an easy one.… When I decided to make the change, I had to lay aside my brushes for almost a month and think nothing but Impressionism. Then I went at it slowly and timidly, feeling my way. I am still in transition, I know. I can’t tell what tomorrow will bring about.”
      Maurer’s early Fauvist paintings of figures, still lifes, and landscapes look like the work of an artist whose gift for lyric expression has been released for the first time. In avant-garde Paris his artistic development was rapid and prolific.
     The outbreak of war in 1914 forced Maurer to return to the US, and he never again was able to return to Europe. He continued to expand upon his early mastery of Modernist innovation, assimilating certain aspects of Cubism and even venturing into abstraction, at a time when all such developments were still anathema to established opinion in the US. The artist’s father, in whose Manhattan town house at 404 West 43rd Street Alfred Maurer lived for the rest of his life, remained fiercely opposed to the Modernist course of his son’s art.
     But Maurer attracted the support of some of some collectors, dealers, and critics, among them Alfred Stieglitz, Erhard Weyhe, and Albert C. Barnes. Still, after 1914, Maurer’s was a sad and lonely life, which, shortly after his father’s death, ended in suicide on the 18th anniversary of the outbreak of the war which drove him home from Paris.
— Friedrich Overbeck was a student of Maurer.

— LINKS
— Abstract Heads (1920, 52x46cm; half~size, 232kb _ ZOOM not recommended to full size; 978kb)
— In a Café (1905) — Still-Life with Doily (1930)
— Father and Son (1930, 55x46cm) a block of wood and much more than a chip off the old block.
— One Red Flower
— George Washington (1932, 99x61cm; 700x425pix, 46kb _ ZOOM to 1400x849pix, 128kb) _ Like many of his generation, Maurer was strongly influenced by European modernism and strove to combine its principles with a uniquely US style. When he left for Europe in 1897, Maurer had achieved critical and financial success for his traditional academic paintings. In France, under the influence of Cubism, Fauvism and the revolutionary intellectual atmosphere, Maurer abandoned his earlier style in favor of brilliantly colored, loosely rendered landscapes and still lifes. Although he never found critical support for his newer work, he continued his exploration of modernism. George Washington is Alfred Maurer's final painting: a dual commemoration of the two-hundredth anniversary of Washington's birth and the one-hundredth birthday of the artist's father, with whom Maurer had a strained relationship.
^ Baptized as an infant on 21 April 1555: Lodovico Carracci, Bolognese painter and printmaker who died on 03 November 1619. — Cousin of the brothers Agostino Carracci [16 Aug 1557 bapt. – 23 Feb 1602] and Annibale Carracci [03 Nov 1560 – 15 Jul 1609], with whom he effected an artistic reform that overthrew Mannerist aesthetics and initiated the Baroque. Brother of Paolo Carracci [1568-1625].
— His father, Vincenzo Carracci, was a butcher, whose profession may be alluded to in Ludovico’s nickname ‘il Bue’, though this might also be a reference to the artist’s own slowness. Ludovico’s style was less classical than that of his younger cousins Agostino and Annibale, perhaps because of a mystical turn of mind that gave his figures a sense of other-worldliness. Like his cousins, he espoused the direct study of nature, especially through figure drawing, and was inspired by the paintings of Correggio and the Venetians.
      However, there survives in his work, more than in that of his cousins, a residue of the Mannerist style that had dominated Bolognese painting for most of the mid-16th century. Ludovico maintained a balance between this Mannerist matrix, his innate religious piety and the naturalism of the work of his cousins. With the exception of some travels during his training and a brief visit to Rome in 1602, Ludovico’s career was spent almost entirely in Bologna.
      In the first two decades of the 17th century he lost touch with the activities of his more up-to-date Bolognese compatriots — contemporaries and students alike — who were then active in Rome, including his cousin Annibale. Ludovico’s later work became overblown and eccentric. This curious ‘gigantism’ was first evidenced in paintings of the late 1590s, but the tendency seems to have been reinforced by the monumental classicism of Annibale’s ceiling of the Galleria Farnese in the Palazzo Farnese, Rome, which Ludovico saw on his visit in 1602. In spite of his isolation in Bologna, Ludovico strongly influenced the subsequent development of painting in his native city and elsewhere, especially through his students, who included Giacomo Cavedone [1577-1660], Domenichino [1581-1641], Alessandro Algardi [1598-1654], Guido Reni [1575-1642], Gianfrancesco Grimaldi [1606-1680], Francesco Albani [1578-1660], Remigio Cantagallina [1582-1656], Pietro Faccini [1575-1602], and Alessandro Tiarini [1577-1668].

— The brothers Agostino and Annibale Carracci and their cousin Lodovico Carracci worked together early in their careers, and it is not easy to distinguish their shares in, for example, the cycle of frescos in the Palazzo Fava in Bologna (1584).
      Lodovico was by temperament a fairly shy person who never found real success, unlike his cousin Annibale. Apart from traveling when young in the course of his studies and a brief and rather unpleasant stay in Rome, he spent all his life in the cosy atmosphere of Bologna, where most of his work still remains. He nevertheless has to be recognized as the first painter systematically to abandon the late Mannerist style in favor of a new kind of moral and devotional style of painting. By interpreting the suggestions made by Cardinal Paleotti, who had a special interest in the reform of religious art, Lodovico Carracci took an early lead in its renewal. This was arrived at by reassessing nature exactly as it is, even when it appears plain or uninteresting, but without ever resorting to the cerebral ploys used by the last of the Mannerists. To achieve his aim, as well as painting, Lodovico placed great emphasis on teaching. In the 1580s, he and his two cousins Annibale and Agostino opened their "Accademia dei Desiderosi" (of those who desire [to make Progress]). This was later renamed "Academia degli Incamminati" (of those who are on the way [to Progress]) but later still was known simply as the Carracci Academy. It shaped a whole generation of Emilian painters.
      Proof of how united the group was came when the three Carracci cousins together painted the frescos in Palazzo Fava. The simplicity of their compositions recalls the style of Federico Barocci [1526-1612] style while the sweetness of their expression is reminiscent of Correggio [1490 – 05 Mar 1534].
      Lodovico left Bologna only for brief periods and directed the Carracci academy by himself after his cousins had gone to Rome. His work is uneven and highly personal. Painterly and expressive considerations always outweigh those of stability and calm Classicism in his work, and at its best there is a passionate and poetic quality indicative of his preference for Tintoretto [1518 – 31 May 1594] and Jacopo Bassano [1515 – 13 Feb 1592]. His most fruitful period was 1585-1595, but near the end of his career he still produced remarkable paintings of an almost Expressionist force, such as the Christ Crucified above Figures in Limbo (1614). Lodovico's own sensitivity derived from his deep knowledge of Venetian painting. His style was composed of delicate gestures, bashful looks, and a good deal of narrative drama. Especially in his medium to small pictures this readily became lyrical poetry. Among his most important works we should mention his youthful Annunciation and his noble Madonna dei Bargellini. Later on he painted the frescos in the cloisters of S. Michele in Bosco, near Bologna (1604). After his cousins' deaths he produced some large and rather sad compositions, such as The Funeral of the Madonna and the fresco of the Annunciation, finished the year he died.

— LINKS
— Christ's Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane (600x681pix — ZOOM to 1400x1590pix, 540kb — ZOOM++ to 2221x2522pix; 902kb)
— Bargellini Madonna (1588, 282x188cm) _ Lodovico Carracci derived his Baroque type of composition from certain pictures by Titian, adding to these a celestial plane, by which the upper part of the picture is filled with great beauty. The Renaissance 'Sacra conversazione', in which all the people were motionless, has become a living conversation, in which men and saints are admitted in familiar terms into the presence of the sacred figures.
— The Dream of Saint Catherine of Alexandria (1593) _ We recognize this sleeping figure as Saint Catherine by the fragment of spiked wheel in the lower left corner, which was the instrument of an attempted martyrdom. Here Lodovico Carracci represented her legendary dream in which Mary and the infant Christ, accompanied by angels, appeared to her. Plighting his troth, Christ placed a ring on Catherine's finger, and through this mystic marriage she became his bride. To cast the event as a dream, rather than having Saint Catherine receive the ring while awake, is Lodovico's innovation. Two angels at the left look on with protective tenderness, while others barely emerge amid the vaporous bronze radiance at the right -- spirit becoming matter. The figures, solid and robust, bask in an indeterminate setting. A languorous warmth pervades the scene and slows the composition. At the same time, the quirky folds and pleats cascading down Catherine's garments impart a vertiginous sensation -- the dizziness of sleep. Lodovico was the eldest of the three Carracci, the family of Bolognese artists who inaugurated the age of the baroque. His depictions of saints in states of visionary ecstasy were highly prized in an age when the purpose of religious art was to arouse intensely pious emotions in the spectator. _ detail
— The Martyrdom of Saint Margaret (1616) _ The perfect way in which all the formal components of this altarpiece are balanced shows how deeply Lodovico Carracci reformed religious painting. He used both intelligence and sensitivity in the way he implemented the Counter-Reformation dictates laid down by the Council of Trent. Lodovico tried to stick to simplicity and persuasion.The saint baring her neck for the executioner is a model of Christian virtues. These are exalted through her luminous beauty which contrasts with the brutality of the soldier to the left and the executioner himself (two figures which contain references to Titian, something so often found in Lodovico's work). The faithful looking at this picture are able to identify with the spectators below· the scaffold and thus feel they are present at the scene rather than outsiders to it.
— The Stories of Jason (detail) (1584) _ The three Carracci cousins were always proud of the fact that the fascinating frieze that surrounds this room in Palazzo Fava was a team effort. They refused to identify which part each one had painted. Recent critical attempts have tried to distinguish Lodovico's contributions from those of his younger cousins Agostino and Annibale. At the same time these studies have emphasized the value of the way the three artists collaborated on this work. The Carracci cousins' idea of an Academy should not be seen as a reactionary move or merely the wish to perpetuate rigid classical models. It should rather be viewed as a cultured and dynamic relationship with tradition. With this in mind, it is much easier to appreciate the variety of quotations and the richness of motifs found in Palazzo Fava. Above all, however, we perceive a sense of hidden, wintry melancholy, a feeling almost of crepuscular poetry that can most probably be attributed to Lodovico's own sensibility.
— The Virgin Appearing to Saint Hyacinth (1594, 375x223cm) _ The painting is from the church of San Domenico, Bologna.
— Saint Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima (1612, 167x231cm) _ Although Saint Sebastian is usually depicted bound to a tree or pillar and pierced by arrows, that attempt by the Romans to take his life was unsuccessful. Ludovico Carracci chose to represent the moment after the subsequent deadly beating, when Roman soldiers dumped Sebastian’s limp and lifeless body into a sewer.
      Against the dark of night, brutish soldiers lift and tug the dead saint’s body. Ludovico contrasted the tensile strength of their straining bodies with the slackness of the saint’s limbs, head, and facial muscles as he falls into the sewer’s depths. The night atmosphere is dark and thick: figures seem to emerge from the blackness. Light glints dully off helmets and armor, but the soldiers’ faces are unreadable. A bright light suffuses the body of Saint Sebastian, making him the focal point of the composition.
      In 1612 Cardinal Maffeo Barberini commissioned this painting from Ludovico for his family’s chapel in the Church of San Andrea della Valle in Rome. The chapel commemorated the site where Saint Sebastian’s body was recovered from the sewer, called the Cloaca Maxima. Barberini decided to keep the painting in his private collection, believing that an image of the recovery of Sebastian’s body by Christians was more appropriate for the church.
^ Died on 21 April 2003: Robert H. Blackburn, Black US printmaker, born on 10 December 1920, in Summit NJ.
Blackburn<-- Portrait of Robert Blackburn in the studio (1937, 40x31cm) by Ronald Joseph [1910-1992]
—      He was introduced to printmaking in 1938 at the WPA's Harlem Community Art Center, where his teachers and colleagues included Harlem Renaissance artists Charles Alston [1907-1977], Romare Bearden [02 Sep 1914 – 1988], Jacob Lawrence [1917-2000], and Augusta Savage [1892-1962]. At the Art Students League in 1941 he studied lithography under Will Barnet. In 1948 Blackburn started an informal cooperative for lithography which would become the Printmaking Workshop, whose users would include Benny Andrews [1930~], Nell Blaine, Mel Edwards [1937~], Michi Itami, Lucio Pozzi [1935~], Faith Ringgold [1930~], Betye Saar [1926~], Juan Sanchez, Michelle Stuart [1940~], Ursula von Rydingsvard [1942~], Kay WalkingStick, and William T. Williams. . From 1957 to 1963 Blackburn was the first master printer at Universal Limited Art Editions on Long Island, where he printed for an emerging generation of artists that included Larry Rivers [1923-2002], Helen Frankenthaler [1928~], Jasper Johns [1930~], and Robert Rauschenberg [1925~]. After that, Blackburn devoted his energy to administering the Printmaking Workshop; and to his own art, which had gradually shifted from figurative work to a highly colored abstraction.
— Born in 1920 in Summit, New Jersey, Robert Blackburn studied art in New York City at the Art Students League after graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School. Throughout much of his career, he has been at the center of the Black art world and has worked with many of the major two-dimensional artists. His unique position in the art world resulted in part from his Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Located in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, it has served as a center for many artists. Blackburn first went to "the street" (17th Street) in 1948 after having migrated downtown from Harlem. He started the workshop primarily as a place in which to create and disseminate his own work at a time when there were very few opportunities for Black artists. Though now located at a different site, he has been on 17th Street ever since.
     Blackburn studied with the best. He studied under Rex Goreleigh at the Harlem Community Art Center at the same time as Jacob Lawrence. In the New York public schools, Countee Cullen was one of Blackburn's English teachers. Other teachers important in his life were Riva Helfond (his first teacher in lithography), Henry "Mike" Bannarn (his first inspiration), and Charles "Spinky" Alston. While still a student in junior high school, he worked at the Harmon Foundation. Blackburn's extensive facilities still cater to those artists who want to use and master traditional methods of lithography, etching, and woodcut. Hundreds of examples of the work done by artists who have passed through the workshop decorate the walls of the building, and Blackburn recorded the artists who have worked there in many thick albums filled with photographs. They are an impressive visual display of the importance of the workshop's place in the art world.
     At a time when computer-generated images occupy a greater prominence in the visual world, the workshop holds to its traditions. The workshop has become the home for a community of artists, including many loyal supporters. One of the younger generation of artists who has found a home in the workshop is a Nigerian who prefers to be known simply as Augustino. Jayne Cortez and Mel Edwards have worked there, too. The importance of the very act of making prints cannot be underestimated. Prints are less expensive on the open market than one-of-a-kind drawings or paintings in part because of the multiple images. This means that more people can afford to own them, and thus an image created in this way potentially has a wide impact. The act of making prints makes art more accessible and aids in the dissemination of the art. As a visual artist and principal administrator of the workshop, Blackburn wears two hats. He has also taught at every major art school in New York, including New York University, Columbia University, the School of Visual Arts, and Pratt Institute.
— Blackburn changed the course of US art through his graphic work and the Printmaking Workshop, which he founded in New York City in 1948 (55 West 17th Street, New York NY 10025). His pioneering contributions to the technical and aesthetic development of abstract color lithography is as legendary as his generosity in encouraging and training thousands of diverse artists to experiment in the graphic medium.
     Growing up in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, Blackburn was influenced by the intellectual and artistic legacies of the Harlem Renaissance as well as European abstraction and the artistic ideologies and political tendencies of both US social realism and Mexican modernism. He learned lithography as a teenager at a community center on 125th Street sponsored by the Depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA). While in his twenties, he studied at the Art Students League for three years. Later, he did freelance artistic work for institutions such as the Harmon Foundation and began to forge his signature abstract style amidst the varied modernist currents he encountered. In 1948, he opened his own studio, the Printmaking Workshop, launching the oldest and largest non-profit print workshop in the United States.
     After a period of travel and study in Europe, in 1957 Blackburn became the first master printer for the prestigious Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE). He printed the first seventy-nine editions for the seminal workshop, setting the standard by which ULAE exerted a powerful influence on modernist printmaking in America. His own complicated, varicolored abstractions prefigured or complemented more familiar ULAE works. In particular, his experiments in color lithography during the 1950s helped fuel the explosion of graphic art that occurred in the next decade.
     In 1971, the Printmaking Workshop became a non-profit corporation, with a mission to maintain creative and artistic quality, support and encourage innovation, create opportunities for Third World and minority artists, and foster public appreciation of the fine art print. The Printmaking Workshop was renowned for its open, informal, and accommodating atmosphere. Through the workshop, Blackburn has been teacher and friend to thousands of artists--as master printer, technical advisor, fund raiser, diplomat, catalyst, and instigator.
—      During his youth, Robert Blackburn was mentored and shaped by Harlem Renaissance artists including Charles "Spinky" Alston, Augusta Savage, and James Lesesne Wells. From age thirteen, he created and studied art at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library and the Harlem YMCA. At DeWitt Clinton High School, he contributed artwork, stories, and poetry to the school's literary magazine, The Magpie. He also participated in the Harlem Arts Workshop, the Uptown Art Laboratory, and the Harlem arts salon known as "306."
     Following his high school graduation in 1940, Blackburn attended the Art Students League in New York on scholarship until 1943. There he worked with painter and printmaker Will Barnet, who became a life-long friend. For four years, Blackburn freelanced as a graphic artist for institutions including the philanthropic Harmon Foundation, the China Institute of America, and Associated American Artists, while his vision of a career in printmaking developed. By late 1947, he had acquired his own lithographic press. In 1948, he opened his own studio in Chelsea, printing for artists and encouraging his friends to experiment in lithography. In 1950, when the innovative Parisian printmaking studio, Atelier 17 returned to Europe after a war-time hiatus in New York, Blackburn installed an intaglio press at his shop a few blocks away. Between 1951 and 1952, he worked with Barnet on a groundbreaking suite of color lithographs that were featured in the contemporary art journal ARTnews.
     Lithography classes offered at the WPA-sponsored Harlem Community Art Center introduced him to the art of printmaking. The center, initiated by Savage and artist and writer, Gwendolyn Bennett, became a model for Blackburn's own workshop years later. Among his colleagues at this time were artists Romare Bearden, Ernest Crichlow, Roy DeCarava [1919~], and Jacob Lawrence. Also key to his artistic development were his lithography teacher, Riva Helfond, and his friend, the artist Ronald Joseph. Blackburn's drawings and lithographs from this period won national acclaim in exhibitions from Chicago to New York and were cited and praised by such art critics as Alain Locke and James Porter.
     Prominent artist Will Barnet [1911~] was an early teacher of and mentor to Robert Blackburn as well as a founding member of the Printmaking Workshop. As their relationship evolved from teacher and student to colleague and friend, the two printmakers were eager to explore the artistic and technical potential of lithography.
     During the mid 1950s Robert Blackburn's printmaking workshop was run by a loose cooperative of artist-friends while he spent a year and a half in Paris and Europe, under the auspices of a prestigious John Hay Whitney Traveling Fellowship. After his return, he was hired in 1957 as the first master printer at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), the lithographic venture founded by Tatyana and Maurice Grosman, based in West Islip, Long Island. At ULAE, he printed for an emerging generation of artists including Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan [1922~], Helen Frankenthaler, and Robert Rauschenberg. His own predilections and fluency with the medium contributed to the new "look" of these works, which would go on to define the US's "graphics boom."
     During this active period, Blackburn's color graphics reached a creative and technical zenith. In 1963, he began to operate his own Manhattan workshop full time, providing an open graphics studio for artists of diverse social and economic backgrounds, ethnicities, styles, and levels of expertise. Under his direction, the Printmaking Workshop became one of the most vital collaborative art studios in the world.
     Blackburn spent 1953 and 1954 in Europe (primarily Paris) on a Jay Hay Whitney Traveling Fellowship. When he returned to New York in 1955, he entered a new creative period. During the 1950s and 1960s, he produced a series of small, Cubistic table top views in both intaglio and lithography. His explorations of this theme show Blackburn's continuing interest in mark-making as a representational sign or as an abstracted, compositional element.
     From 1957-1963, Blackburn served as the first master printer at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE). As he helped other, better-known artists with their productions, his own work reached its zenith in color abstraction, as seen in Color Symphony. At ULAE, Blackburn collaborated with prominent artist practitioners of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, including Jim Dine [1935~], Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. In most cases, he taught the artists how to make lithographs, sharing his sensibility of the medium and his approach to the stone.
     With incorporation came increased sponsorship and funding from sources such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Their contributions allowed Blackburn to invite a wide range of artists to his workshop. He conceived and produced varied, ambitious, collaborative projects such as Impressions: Our World (1974), a portfolio by notable Black US artists with introductory texts by artist Romare Bearden and art historian Edmund Barry Gaither.
     The lively intellectual exchange within his workshop stimulated Blackburn's own graphic pursuits. He investigated abstract color woodcuts throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. During this period, artist Krishna Reddy taught his innovative viscosity technique at the Printmaking Workshop. Romare Bearden's work in photoetching and stenciled monoprints also inspired both Blackburn and the workshop community.
     
— Man With Load (or The Toiler, Toil) (1936) _ Blackburn absorbed the lessons of the Mexican muralists through his teacher Charles Alston [1907-1977], who met Diego Rivera [1866-1957] in 1933 at Rockefeller Center. Man with Load reprises a "burden carriers" theme that also appeared in Rivera's works. Many of Blackburn's early drawings draw on the conventions of monumentalism found in Mexican mural painting, as well as social realist iconography.
— Refugees (1938) — Interior (1958) — Color Symphony (1960)
— Girl in Red (1950) _ This is a pivotal work in Blackburn's development as he turned towards abstraction and away from figurative work. Using a rich color palette, Blackburn combines age-old artistic themes of still life, landscape, and portraiture. His subject, a young Black girl, engages the viewer directly and wryly, her arms crossed.
— Heavy Forms, Pink (1958) _ Heavy Forms (1961) _ From 1958 to 1961, Blackburn worked on variations of the lithograph Heavy Forms. The imagery can be seen as deriving from Blackburn's earlier tabletop still lifes. However here, the image matches its "tabletop" to the printed surface, tipping it up to mimic the linked edge of the lithographic stone and print process itself. Blackburn treated the stone with tremendous fluidity, re-orienting the image and frequently signing his work on both top and bottom margins, allowing options for viewing.
— Faux Pas (1963) _ In this lithograph, Robert Blackburn winks with reference to Robert Rauschenberg's Accident (1963), the "gaffe" which would become such a key event in the history of contemporary printmaking. Through the middle of the image, a white stripe of paper breaks the image, alluding to the fragile nature of the limestone. Blackburn would continue to explore the broken stone concept with a suite of elegantly calligraphic works, including Curious Stone, that also recall his interest in Sumi ink drawing. — Curious Stone (1970)
— Red Inside (1972) — Woodscape (1984) — Three Ovals (1980) _ These three prints are from a series of related woodcuts Blackburn created between the 1960s and 1980s. Reworking several large blocks, he created images that were bold and masterfully graphic. He began with a monochrome image of three ovals, framed by black lines of varying widths—hearkening back to his earlier exploration of Cubist language and revealing the texture of the wood itself. A later experiment, in which he filled certain areas with directly printed woodgrain, led him to create Woodscape, which vertically reorients the imagery in Three Ovals.
— Yellow Flash (1972) _ In this woodcut, Blackburn creates a heavenly space where the seam of the blocks reads like a revelatory crack in the heavens. It registers as a jewel-like yellow diamond embraced by red. This is part of a series of large related woodcuts, in which Blackburn continued his practice of recycling and re-visioning blocks and imagery.

Died on a 21 April:

1994  Raúl Soldi, Argentinian painter.

^ 1990  Romain de Tirtoff "Erté", Russian French Art Déco painter and stage and fashion designer born on 23 November 1892, son of Admiral of the Russian Imperial Fleet Piotr Ivanovich de Tirtoff. He moved to France in 1912 and worked for a time sketching for Paul Poiret and designing opera and theater costumes. Between 1914 and the 1930s he created many magazine covers for Harper’s Bazaar. In the United States he worked for Flo Ziegfeld and designed costumes for the film Ben Hur (1959). Influenced by Indian miniatures, his designs, illustrations, and drawings were sophisticated and highly stylized. — LINKS — 1 (592x468pix, 142kb) — 2 — 3 — 4 — 5 — 6 — 7 — 8 — 9 — A — B — C — D — E — F — G — I — J — L — N — O — P — Q — R — S — T — U — V — W — X — Y — Z — Hiver — Prisons — Duel des Ombres — Rose Gown (710x551pix, 187kb) — Rêve des Tropiques — Der Rosenkavalier (1980) — Rainbow Scarf — Rainbow Dream

1971 Alberto Giovanni Cesare Magnelli, Italian painter born on 01 July 1888. He was born into a wealthy family of textile traders and, on the death of his father in 1891, his education was supervised by his uncle Alessandro. From 1907 he taught himself to paint by visiting galleries and studying Quattrocento fresco cycles, especially those by Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca. From 1911, through the circle of Giovanni Papini and Ardengo Soffici, Magnelli came into contact with Futurism and the international avant-garde: he responded to Cubism through the reproductions in Guillaume Apollinaire’s Les Peintres cubistes: Méditations esthétiques (Paris) but infused his large figures constructed from simplified curved planes with an individual use of bold color (e.g. Workers on the Cart, 1914). In March 1914 he travelled with the poet Aldo Palazzeschi to join Soffici, Papini and Carlo Carrà in Paris, where he met Apollinaire, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger and others. Commissioned to expand his uncle’s collection, Magnelli bought works by Picasso, Juan Gris, Carrà and three of the most controversial sculptures at the Salon des Indépendants: Alexander Archipenko’s Medrano II and Carrousel Pierrot (both 1913) and The Boxers (1914). The solidity and color of his own work impressed Apollinaire, who encouraged Magnelli’s move towards ‘pure’ painting.

^ 1667 Cornelis de Wael (or Waal), Flemish painter, draftsman, and dealer, born on 07 September 1592. He was the son of painter Jan Baptist de Wael I [1558–1633], from whom he and his brother Lucas de Wael [03 Mar 1591 – 25 Oct 1661] learned to paint. They both went to Italy in 1610 and by 1613 had settled in Genoa. There Cornelis founded the Cenacolo Fiammingo, where he trained many young painters. Their circle of expatriate Flemings included Anthony van Dyck, who lived with them for a time and painted a double portrait of them (1627). Cornelis may have collaborated with van Dyck; he may also have worked with the Italian landscape painter Giovanni Battista Vicino (fl c. 1650), as various landscapes by Vicino have figures in them by either de Wael or a painter from his circle. During visits to Rome, Cornelis came into contact with the Schildersbent, the confraternity of northern artists there, and in 1627 he was recorded in the documents of Rome’s Guild of Saint Luke. He moved there from Genoa in 1656, following an outbreak of the plague. Cornelis received commissions from Italian churches but is best known for his military pieces, harbor views and bambocciante or low-life subjects. Jan Baptist de Wael II [25 Jul 1632 – 1669+] was the son or nephew of Cornelis de Wael. — A Military Camp (77x97cm; 412x524pix, 26kb) _ In this view of a busy military encampment, before a tent on the left there is a group of elegantly dressed men, a farmhand holds the horse, whose rider has dismounted to give a document to a sitting officer. Opposite them men attend to their different occupations: A wet nurse feeds a baby, men spread out maps, stand before a beer stand or around a field kitchen, while others slaughter two cows.— Seven Works of Mercy: Burying the Dead (400x609pix, 64kb) — Battle of Warships (104x167cm; 345x569pix, 82kb) — The Return of the Prodigal Son (sketch 24x22cm; 698x617pix, 109kb)

1588 Francesco Traballesi (or Trabaldese), Italian artist born in 1544.


Born on a 21 April:

1904 Jean Hélion, French painter and writer who died on 27 October 1987. — {That's Hélion NOT Hellion}— {Did he favor scenes lit by a bright sun?}— His family background was modest and unconnected with the arts: his father worked as a taxi-driver. At school he was attracted to poetry and later began to study chemistry until 1921, when he moved to Paris to further his ambitions as a poet. There he financed his studies at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs by working as an architectural draughtsman; while copying decorative details at the Louvre he encountered for the first time the work of Poussin and Philippe de Champaigne, which redirected his interests towards painting. Living in Montmartre, he remained largely self-taught in art, and in 1925 he gave up his architectural employment to concentrate exclusively on painting. His early work consisted typically of still-lifes and figures, somewhat in the manner of Chaïm Soutine, until he met Joachím Torres García, who introduced him to Cubist and abstract art.

1891 Oskar Mulley, Austrian artist who died in 1949. — {There once was an artist named Mulley, / To his models sometimes a bully, / But otherwise he was quite jolly, / Austrian artist Oskar Mulley.}

1843 John Emms, British artist who died on 01 November 1912. — {Could his last name also be spelled “M's”? Perhaps they should have named him “Six”, short for Sixtus, and then his full name could have been spelled “MMMMMM”}

1740 Nicolaes Muys, Dutch artist who died on 28 February 1808.

1682 Jaspar Broers, Flemish artist who died on 19 January 1716.

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