Pioneer Artists

Artist n A person who employs creative talent to produce works of art. History Pioneer Works was founded by artist Dustin Yellin who purchased a colossal brick building in Red Hook in 2010.[2] Yellin’s artistic aim was to improve the culture as a whole, and he sought to provide a place where a variety of thinkers and artists could readily

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Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder was born in 1898, the second child of artist parents – his father was a sculptor and his mother a painter. Because his father Alexander Stirling Calder received public commissions, the family traversed the country throughout Calder’s childhood. Calder was encouraged to create, and from the age of eight he always had his

Alexander Rodchenko

Russian artist, photographer and designer. He is one of the leaders of the new Soviet art after 1917, but from 1930 on relatively ignored though not wholly unemployed. He studied art in Kazan (where he met his wife, Varvara Stepanova) and St Petersburg, and in 1915 moved to Moscow to join the avant-garde circles around Malevich and Tatlin.

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Amedee Ozenfant

French painter, trained in his native Saint-Quentin and in Paris. He became interested in Cubism but thought it confused and unstructured. In 1917 he allied himself to Le Curbusier. They published the book After Cubism in 1918, launching Purism Which they further discussed and contex-tualised in the journal L’Esprit Nouveau, (1920-25), and summarized in La

Antonio Canaletto

Venetian vedute painter working largely for the English markel and mainly resident in England 1746-55. He trained first as a scene painter under his father Bernardo Canal, and worked with his father and brother Cristoforo in theatres in Venice and Rome, 1719-20. Little is known of his training in easel painting, although he must have

Antonio Canova

Italian sculptor, a dominant figure in Western art in his day. Born near Venice, he settled in Rome in 1781 – where he soon belonged to an international group of neoclassical artists intent in revolutionary change. Public commissions showed him chastening his originally lively, naturalistic style in search of the beauty afforded by clear forms

Carlo Carra

Italian painter, prominent in the Futurist movement, co-creator of Pitlura metafisica and subsequently a tradition-based realist of peat power. He was trained at the Milan Academy where he met Boccioni. In 1910 he joined him and others in signing the twro manifestos of Futurist painting. His personal manifesto of 1913 called for paintings delivering ‘the

Caspar David Friedrich

German painter, born in Greifswald, close to the Baltic Sea, and now famous for, principally, landscapes and seascapes charged with religious symbolism. Friedrich studied at the Copenhagen Academy under Abildgaard and others. From 1798 on, he lived in Dresden, but returned repeatedly to the North coast and travelled also in the mountains of Germany and

Claude Monet

French painter, one of the creators of impressionism, in some ways its most steadfast practitioner but also the one who took impressionism into new, contradictory ways to become, in the 1940s, a major influence on abstract expressionism. He was born in Paris, son of a merchant who took his family to Le Havre in 1845. Young Monet had

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

British painter and poet, son of an Italian Dante scholar who was professor of English in London University and of his Italian, highly literate wife, and brother of the poel Christina Rossetti. At the age of 13 he began to study art, first at Sass’s art school in London, then in the Royal Academy Schools,

Eduardo Paolozzi

British sculptor and print-maker, born in Edinburgh of Italian parents. He attended evening classes in Edinburgh in order to become a commercial artist; in 1945-7 be studied sculpture at the Slade School of Art (then in Oxford), and in 1947 had his first one-man show. He was in Paris between 1947 and 1949, absorbing surrealist

El Lissitzky

Russian painter and designer, born Lazar Markovich Lissitzky, trained as architect in Darmstadt and Moscow in 1909-14. His first art work was illustrating Jewish Passover stories in an idiom close To Chagall’s. In 1918, he was appointed to the art panel of the new Commissariat of Enlightenment. In 1919, Chagall invited him to teach graphics

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Francis Picabia

French painter, born in Paris (his father was Cuban), and trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and under Pissarro. He worked successfully as an impressionist but was then involved in cubism, associating particularly with Duchamp and becoming a founding member of Section d ‘Or in 1911. By 1909, he was painting abstract color compositions, and in 1912, he was seen

Georges Braque

French painter, associated with Picasso in the creation of cubism. Born near Paris, Braque grew up in Le Havre where he attended evening classes in drawing and was apprenticed to a painter-decorator, the profession also of his father and grandfather. From 1900 he was in Paris, pursuing both this and training as an artist, setting up

Giorgio de Chirico

Italian painter born in Greece and trained first in engineering – and then as a painter. He studied in Munich and in Paris. From 1915 to 1917 he was in the Italian army. In 1917 he met Carra in the Ferrara army hospital; together they founded Pittura metafisica. He spent some years in the 10s and 30s

Henri Matisse

French painter who studied law and turned to painting when recuperating from an operation in 1890. He studied in Paris under Bouguereau and Moreau, meeting in the latter’s studio Marquet, Rouault and others, and then also under Carriere, meeting Derain. He began to send paintings to open exhibitions in 1896. In 1897, he met Pissarro

Jacques Louis David

Great and complex French painter. He oscillated between baroque Rubenisme and classicizing Poussisme, and may be said to have at last reconciled these tendencies in French art. We can think of him as the last major 18th-century painter or as the originator of 19th-century art. His working life fell into quite distinct phases: ancient regime

Joseph Mallord William Turner

English painter, now considered one of the most remarkable of 19th-century artists. Son of a London barber, he drew from childhood and entered the Royal Academy Schools at the age of 14. At 15, he showed a watercolor in the Academy exhibition, and at 16 he began touring around Britain recording buildings and natural scenery

Kasimir Malevich

Russian painter, born near Kiev and trained there and in Moscow. He associated with Larionov and Goncharova, participating in their 1910-1912 exhibitions and sharing their interest in primitivism. He had worked in symbolist and impressionist ways; now he developed a folk-art-based style of dynamic, simplified forms and strong colors for representations of peasants that look iconic and may be symbolic,

Naum Gabo

Russian-American sculptor, born in Bryansk, south of Moscow, brother of Antoine Pevsner. Gabo adopted his professional name in 1915 when he made art his career. Before then he had embarked on medical studies in Munich, changed to science and then to engineering, and attended art history lectures. He visited Italy and also Paris where he