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ART “4” “2”-DAY  16 December
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BIRTHS: 1534 BOL — 1866 KANDINSKY

^ Born on 16 December 1534: Hans Bol, Flemish draftsman, illuminator, painter who died on 20 November 1593.
— Renowned for his miniatures, Hans Bol learned his trade from two uncles, who were also painters. At age fourteen he was apprenticed to a painter of waterschilderen, large-scale scenes painted on canvas using opaque watercolor or tempera. Waterschilderen, a specialty of artists in Mechelen, were used as wall decorations instead of expensive tapestries. According to Karel Van Mander, Bol's large watercolors were so widely copied that he turned instead to making miniatures in bodycolor on parchment, which he promoted as independent cabinet paintings. His miniatures earned him a good income and an international clientele. Despite the war with Spain and periods of religious unrest that caused frequent upheavals in his life, Bol remained one of the Netherlands' most prolific and successful landscapists. He painted some oil paintings, illuminated a breviary for a French duke, and made many drawings that were the basis for engravings. His pupils included Joris Hoefnagel. Bol's works combined artifice and naturalism in formats ranging from extensive panoramas to intimate views of the Flemish countryside, usually including small figures enacting a biblical or mythological scene, an allegory, or a genre scene.
LINKS
Landscape with the Story of Venus and Adonis (1589, 21x26cm) _ Hans Bol painted this unusual miniature in two parts: the central landscape, painted on parchment mounted on wood, and the framing design, painted directly on wood. Both parts tell the story of the beautiful youth Adonis from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the main panel, Venus and Adonis embrace before he leaves on the hunt shown in the distance, in which he is killed by a boar. Clockwise from left, the frame’s ovals show subsidiary incidents: Adonis’s mother Myrrha commits incest with her father; turned into the myrrh tree as punishment, Myrrha bears their son, Adonis; Venus is struck with love for Adonis; blood springing from the dead Adonis turns into the anemone flower. In the frame, Bol combined the cartouches and trophies of a three-dimensional picture frame with illusionistic borders reminiscent of manuscript illumination. His materials—opaque color and gold paint on parchment—also follow the tradition of manuscript illumination.

^ Born on 16 December 1866 (04 December Julian): Vasily Vasilevich Kandinsky, Russian Expressionist painter who died on 13 December 1944 in Neuilly-sur-Seine.
— Article about Kandinsky: Towards Abstraction
— Russian-born Kandinstky was one of the first creators of pure abstraction in modern painting. After successful avant-garde exhibitions, he founded the influential Munich group “Der Blaue Reiter” (1911-14) and began completely abstract painting. His forms evolved from fluid and organic to geometric and, finally, to pictographic ( e.g., Tempered Élan, 1944 – thumbnail >).
— Kandinsky, himself an accomplished musician, once said “Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.”' The concept that color and musical harmony are linked has a long history, intriguing scientists such as Sir Isaac Newton. Kandinsky used color in a highly theoretical way associating tone with timbre (the sound's character), hue with pitch.
— Born in Moscow , Kandinsky spent his early childhood in Odessa. His parents played the piano and the zither and Kandinsky himself learned the piano and cello at an early age. The influence of music in his paintings cannot be overstated, down to the names of his paintings "Improvisations", "Impressions", and "Compositions." In 1886, he enrolled at the University of Moscow, chose to study law and economics, and after passing his examinations, lectured at the Moscow Faculty of Law. He enjoyed success not only as a teacher but also wrote extensively on spirituality, a subject that remained of great interest and ultimately exerted substantial influence in his work.
      In 1895 Kandinsky attended a French Impressionist exhibition where he saw Monet's Haystacks at Giverny. He stated, “ ...it was from the catalog I learned this was a haystack. I was upset I had not recognized it. I also thought the painter had no right to paint in such an imprecise fashion. Dimly I was aware too that the object did not appear in the picture...” Soon thereafter, at the age of thirty, Kandinsky left Moscow and went to Munich to study life-drawing, sketching and anatomy, regarded then as basic for an artistic education.
      Ironically, Kandinsky's work moved in a direction that was of much greater abstraction than that which was pioneered by the Impressionists. It was not long before his talent surpassed the constraints of art school and he began exploring his own ideas of painting – “ ...I applied streaks and blobs of colors onto the canvas with a palette knife and I made them sing with all the intensity I could...”
      Now considered to be the founder of abstract art, Kandinsky had his work exhibited throughout Europe from 1903 onwards, and often caused controversy among the public, the art critics, and his contemporaries. An active participant in several of the most influential and controversial art movements of the 20th century, among them the Blue Rider which he founded along with Franz Marc and the Bauhaus which also attracted Klee, Geiniger, and Schonberg, Kandinsky continued to further express and define his form of art, both on canvas and in his theoretical writings.
      His reputation became firmly established in the United States through numerous exhbitions and his work was introduced to Solomon Guggenheim, who became one of his most enthusiastic supporters. In 1933, Kandinsky left Germany and settled in the classy Paris suburb of Neuilly. The paintings from these later years were again the subject of controversy. Though Kandinsky was out of favor with many of the patriarchs of Paris's artistic community, younger artists admired him. His studio was visited regularly by Miro, Arp, Magnelli and Sophie Tauber. Kandinsky continued painting until June 1944. His unrelenting quest for new forms which carried him to the very extremes of geometric abstraction have provided us with an unparalleled collection of abstract art.
LINKS
Autumn in Bavaria (1908, 33x45cm) — Composition VII (1913, 200x300cm) — Cemetery & Vicarage in Kochel (1909) — Gabriele Münter (1905) — Picture with a Black Arch (1912, 186x193cm) — Colorful Ensemble (1938) — (Insect Watching TV?) — fineart''' is gone Der Blaue Reiter — Murnau with Church I (1910, 65x50cm)
Improvisation 31 (Sea Battle) (1913; 145x120cm) _ Neither Marc nor Macke were abstract painters. It was Kandinsky who found that the “interior necessity”, which alone could inspire true art, was forcing him to leave behind the representational image. He was a Russian who had first trained as a lawyer. He was a brilliant and persuasive man. Then, when already in his thirties, he decided to go to Munich in 1897 to study art. By the time Der Blaue Reiter was established, he was already “abstracting” from the image, using it as a creative springboard for his pioneering art. Seeing a painting of his own, lying on its side on the easel one evening, he had been struck by its beauty, a beauty beyond what he saw when he set it upright. It was the liberated color, the formal independence, that so entranced him.
      Kandinsky, a determined and sensitive man, was a good prophet to receive this vision. He preached it by word and by example, and even those who were suspicious of this new freedom were frequently convinced by his paintings. Improvisation 31 has a less generalized title, Sea Battle, and by taking this hint we can indeed see how he has used the image of two tall ships shooting cannonballs at each other, and abstracted these specifics down into the glorious commotion of the picture. Though it does not show a sea battle, it makes us experience one, with its confusion, courage, excitement, and furious motion.
      Kandinsky says all this mainly with the color, which bounces and balloons over the center of the picture, roughly curtailed at the upper corners, and ominously smudged at the bottom right. There are also smears, whether of paint or of blood. The action is held tightly within two strong ascending diagonals, creating a central triangle that rises ever higher. This rising accent gives a heroic feel to the violence.
      These free, wild raptures are not the only form abstraction can take, and in his later, sadder years, Kandinsky became much more severely constrained, all trace of his original inspiration lost in magnificent patternings. fineart''' is gone Accent in Pink (1926, 101x81cm) exists solely as an object in its own right: the “pink” and the “accent” are purely visual. The only meaning to be found lies in what the experience of the pictures provides, and that demands prolonged contemplation. What some find hard about abstract art is the very demanding, time-consuming labor that is implicitly required. Yet if we do not look long and with an open heart, we shall see nothing but superior wallpaper. [but if we look long enough and with an open mind we will see that it is not superior to wallpaper].

Died on a 16 December:
1947 Gino Rossi, Italian artist born on 06 June 1884.
1937 Glyn Warren Philpot, British painter of portraits and subject pictures, born on 05 October 1884. — He was trained in London and Paris and quickly established himself as a successful society portraitist in the years before the First World War; elected A.R.A., 1915 and full R.A., 1923. In 1931-2, Philpot made the courageous step of embracing modernist influences in his art, producing a body of work marked by a new simplicity of form and technique. — Glyn Philpot by Sir Oswald Birley (1920, 100x75cm) — [The pot is empty as far as Philpot artwork on the internet is concerned].
1907 Fritz Beinke, German artist born on 23 April 1842.
1872 John Frederick Kensett, US American Hudson River School painter, specialized in landscapes, born on 23 March 1816. — LINKSSunrise among the Rocks of Paradise, Newport (1859, 46x76cm)
1866 Claude Anthelme Honoré Trimolet, French artist born on 16 May 1798.
1800 Guy Head, British artist born in 1753. — LINKS
1693 Jacques Rousseau, French artist born in 1630.
1698 Simone Pignone, Italian artist born in 1614.

Born on a 16 December:
1910 Egill Jacobsen, Danish artist.
1832 Jules Worms, French artist who died on 25 November 1924. — [He did not invent the Diet of Worms]
1751 Franz Schüz (or Schütz), German artist who died on 14 May 1781.
1668 Constantyn Netscher, Dutch artist who died on 27 May 1723. — son of Caspar Netscher (1635-1684)
1597 Pieter Deneyn (or de Neyn), Dutch artist who died on 16 March 1639. — [There's no denying that I found no Deneyn on the internet]

“Black is like the silence of the body after death, the close of life.”
— Wassily Kandinsky [16 Dec 1866 – 13 December 1944] in 1911
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