Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban, KC (22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626) was an English philosopher, statesman and author but is best known for leading the scientific rebellion with his new ‘observation and experimentation’ theory which is the way science has been carried out ever since. He was knighted in 1603, created Baron Verulam in 1618, and formed Viscount St Alban in 1621; both peerage titles became destroyed upon his death.

He began his specialized life as a lawyer, but he has become best known as a philosophical advocate and defender of the scientific revolution. His works set up and popularize an inductive methodology for scientific question, often called the Baconian method. Induction entails drawing knowledge from the usual world through testing, observation, and testing of hypotheses. In the milieu of his time, such methods were connected with the occult trends of hermeticism and alchemy.

Bacon’s works consist of his Essays, as well as the Colors of Good and Evil and the Meditations Sacrae, all published in 1597. His famous aphorism, “knowledge is power”, is establish in the Meditations. Bacon also wrote in felicem memoriam Elizabethan, a tribute for the queen written in 1609; and various philosophical works which comprise the fragmentary and incomplete Instauration magna, the most important part of which is the Novum Organum (published 1620). Bacon also wrote the Astrologic Sana and expressed his faith that stars had physical effects on the planet.

Balthazar Klossowski de Rola (February 29, 1908 in Paris – February 18, 2001) was a respected Polish/French modern artist whose work was eventually anti-modern.

Style and themes

Balthus’ style varies from traditional and academic to brush techniques and work that seem enthused by pre-renaissance painters. Arguably there are pressures by surrealists like de Chirico, but typically Balthus worked in un-modern styles. In spite of this he is broadly documented as an important 20th century artist. Many of his paintings show young girls in an erotic context. Balthus insist that his work was not pornographic, but that it just documented the awkward facts of children’s sexuality.

Early life

In his formative years his art was back by Rainer Maria Rilke, Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse. His father, Erich Klossowski, a renowned art historian (he wrote a monograph on Daumier), and his mother Elisabeth Dorothea Spiro (known as Baladine Klossowska) were part of artistic elite in Paris. Balthus’ older brother, Pierre Klossowski, was a philosopher and writer prejudiced by theology and the works of Marquis de Sade. Among the visitors and friends of the Klossowskis were well-known writers such as André Gide and Jean Cocteau, who found some inspiration for his novel Les Enfant Terrible (1929) on his visits to the family.

In 1921 Mitsou appeared an early publication that built-in forty drawings by Balthus, depicting the story of a young boy and his cat, with a foreword by Balthus’ mentor Rilke. The theme of the tale foreshadowed his life-long fascination with cats, which resurfaced with his self-portrait as “The king of cats” (1935). In 1926 Balthus visited Florence, copying frescos by Piero Della Francesca, which inspired another early ambitious work by the youthful painter - the tempera wall paintings of the protestant church of the Swiss village of Beaten berg (1927). In 1930 to 1932 he went to Morocco drafted into the Moroccan infantry in Kenitra, and Fes, working as a secretary and sketching his painting La Caserne (1933).

Roy Lichtenstein (October 27, 1923 – September 29, 1997) was a famous American pop artist, whose work borrowed heavily from well-liked advertising and comic book styles that he himself described as being “as artificial as possible.”

Mature Style

Using oil and Magna paint his best known works, such as Drowning Girl (1963, Museum of Modern Art, New York), characteristic thick outlines, bold colors and Benday Dots to symbolize certain colors, as if created by photographic copy. Rather than attempt to copy his subjects, his work tackles the way mass media depicts them.

His most well-known image is arguably Whaam! (1963, Tate Gallery, London), one of the initial known examples of pop art, marking a fighter aircraft firing a rocket into an enemy plane with a dazzling red and yellow explosion. The cartoon style is sharp by the use of the onomatopoetic writing WHAAM! And the boxed caption “I pressed the fire control… and ahead of me rockets blazed through the sky…” This diptych is large in scale, measuring 1.7 x 4.0 m (5′7″ x 13′4″).

WHAAM! Most of his best-known artworks are comparatively close, but not exact, copies of comic book panels, a subject he mainly abandoned in 1965. These panels were at first drawn by lesser known comic book artists such as Russ Heath, Tony Abruzzo, Irv Novick, and Jerry Grandinetti, who rarely conventional any credit. Artist Dave Gibbons said of Lichtenstein’s works: “Roy Lichtenstein’s copies of the work of Irv Novick and Russ Heath are flat, blank tracings of quite sophisticated images.” In response to grievances like that of Gibbons, Lichtenstein’s obituary in The Economist noted these artists “did not think much of his paintings. In enlarging them, some claimed, they became static. Some in danger to sue him…But this is to miss the point of Roy Lichtenstein’s achievement. His was the idea. “The art of today”, he told an interviewer, “is all around us.”

Andy Warhol (August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American painter. With his background and knowledge in commercial art,Warhol was one of the founders of the Pop Art movement in the United States in the 1950s.

Warhol is best known for his very simple, larger-than-life;high-contrast color paintings and silk-screen prints of enclose consumer products, and everyday objects, such as poppy flowers and the banana emerging on the cover of the rock music album The Velvet Underground and Nico(1967).

He also rendered stylized portraits of twentieth century image Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Elizabeth Taylor.Warhol was even an avant-garde filmmaker, publisher, music producer and actor.

Socialite and Recluse

Warhol used to socialize at Serendipity and Studio 54, nightclubs in New York City. He was usually regarded as quiet, shy and as a careful observer. More than one person jokingly referred to him as “death warmed over.”

Warhol frequently volunteered at homeless shelters in New York, chiefly during the busier times of the year. He describes himself as a religious person, though he was not fully conventional by religion because of his homosexuality. Many of his later works hold almost concealed religious themes or subjects, and a body of religious-themed works was found posthumously in his estate.

In 1968, Warhol was shot in the coffer by a former employee, Valerie Solanas. Solanas had before founded a “group” called the “Society for Cutting up Men” (S.C.U.M.) and authored the S.C.U.M. Manifesto, which has since become a typical of feminist literature. In realism, Solanas was the only member of S.C.U.M. Arrested the day after the attack, she said, “He had too much control over my life.” Warhol was gravely wounded and suffered physical effects for the rest of his life (he had to wear a corset to support him). Solanas had conventional the gun in swap over for a stolen Warhol painting from artist, David Horvitz.

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908-1992) is a Portuguese-French abstractionist painter.

Life

Vieira da Silva was born on June 13, 1908 in Lisbon, Portugal. At the age of eleven she had started seriously studying drawing and even painting at that city’s Academia de Belas-Artes. In her teen years she intentional painting with Fernand Léger, sculpture with Antoine Bourdelle, and etching with Stanley William Hayter, all masters in their own fields. She also shaped textile designs.She died in Paris, France on March 6, 1992.

Work

By the late 1950s Vieira da Silva was globally known for her dense and multifaceted compositions, prejudiced by the art of Paul Cézanne and the fragmented forms, spatial ambiguities, and limited palette of cubism and abstract art. She is measured to be one of the most important post-war abstract artists however she is not a “pure” abstract painter. Her paintings often look like mazes, cities seen in profile or from high above or still library shelves in what seems to be a parable to a never-ending seek for information or the Absolute.

She exhibited her work widely, winning a prize for painting at the Biennial in São Paulo in 1961.In November 1994, it was inaugurated the Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva Foundation, in Lisbon, a museum that displays a large collection of paintings by both artists.

Her name, sometimes appears written as Maria Elena Vieira da Silva, but the correct version,in Portuguese,is Maria Helena Vieira da Silva.

Paul Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956) was a powerful American painter and a major force in the abstract expressionist movement. His work was a huge influence in 20th century art.

Early life

The youngest of five sons, Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming, and grew up in Arizona and California, presence Los Angeles’ Manual Arts High School where he studied with Frederick John Schakowsky before being barred for fighting and other disruptive behavior. He moved to New York City in 1930, following his brother, Charles Pollock, where they both studied under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. Benton’s influence on Pollock’s determining work could be seen in his use of curvilinear undulating rhythms and in the use of rural American subject matter.

Early work

Pollock’s early representative work was influenced by the Mexican Muralists Siqueiros, Orozco, and also Rivera - and even worked in Siqueiros’s experimental workshop in 1936. After visiting exhibitions of Picasso and Surrealist Art, his work became increasingly symbolic. He traveled widely throughout the United States during the 1930’s, but he established in New York in 1935 where he worked on the WPA Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1942. Pollock’s first solo show was held at the Peggy Guggenheim Art of this Century gallery in New York in 1944.

Pollock had for several years been in psychotherapy to try to cope with depression and this gave him an interest in Carl Jung’s theory of primitive archetypes that formed the basis of his work between 1937 and 1945. These works were often violent and were not well received at first.

Egon Schiele (June 12, 1890 – October 31, 1918) was an Austrian painter.

Egon Schiele was born in Tulln on the Danube. His father, Adolf, worked for the Austrian State Railways as a station master; his mother, Marie, was from Krumau, in Bohemia. As a child, he attended the school run by the Stift Klosterneuburg, where his arts teacher K.L. Strauch known and supported Schiele’s artistic talent.

When Schiele was 16 years old, his father died of syphilis, and he turn into a ward of his uncle (his mother’s brother), who became upset by Schiele’s lack of interest in academic studies, yet recognized his fervor and talent for art. In 1907 Schiele applied at Kunstgewerbeschule (the School of Arts and Crafts) in Vienna, where Gustav Klimt had once studied. Within his first year there, Schiele was sent, at the persistence of several faculty members, to the more customary Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna in 1907. There, he studied painting and drawing, but was frustrated by the school’s conservatism.

In 1908, Schiele sought out Gustav Klimt. Klimt encouraged younger artists, and he took an interest in the talented young Schiele, buying his drawings, or offering to exchange them for some of his own, position models for him and introducing him to potential patrons.

He also introduced Schiele to the Wiener Werkstätte, the arts and crafts workshop linked with the Secession. In 1908 Schiele had his first exhibition,in Klosterneuburg. Schiele left the Academy in 1909,after completing his third year, and founded the Neukunstgruppe (”New Art Group”) with other students.

Edvard Munch was a Norwegian expressionist painter and printmaker. His intense, suggestive treatment of anguish deeply influenced development of German expressionism in the early 20th century.

The Scream (1893; originally called Despair), Munch’s best-known painting, is observed as an icon of existential anguish. As with many of his works, he painted more than a few versions of it. The Scream is one of the pieces in a series titled The Frieze of Life, in which Munch discovered the themes of life, love, fear, death and melancholy. It was stolen from the Munch-museum in Oslo, Norway, on August 22, 2004. There have been unsubstantiated rumors that the painting was shattered by the thieves.

The Frieze of Life themes recur all through Munch’s work, in paintings such as The Sick Child (1886, portrait of his deceased sister Sophie), parasite (1893–94), Ashes (1894), and The Bridge. The latter shows limp figures with featureless or hidden faces, over which appear the threatening shapes of heavy trees and brooding houses. Munch portrayed women also as frail, innocent sufferers or as lurid, life-devouring vampires. Munch analysts speak this reflects his sexual anxieties.

In December 1893, Unter den Linden in Berlin detained an exhibition of Munch’s work, showing, among other pieces; six paintings free Study for a Series: Love. This began a cycle he later known the Frieze of Life — A Poem about Life, Love and Death. Friezes of Life design are steeped in atmosphere such as The Storm, Moonlight and Starry Night. Other motifs illuminate the nocturnal side of love, such as Rose and Amelie and Vampire. In Death in the Sickroom (1893), he portrays his sister Sophie’s death to illustrate the morbid theme. The dramatic focus of the painting, in which he depicts the entire family, is the Munch figure. In 1894, he distended the spectrum of motifs by adding Anxiety, Ashes, Madonna and Women in Three Stages.

Die Brücke (The Bridge) was a collection of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905. The original four Jugendstil architecture students led by Hermann Obrist included:

Fritz Bleyl (1880-1966

Erich Heckel(1883-1970)

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner(1880-1938)

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884-1976)

Emil Nolde (1867-1956) and Max Pechstein (1881-1955) joined in 1906, and Otto Mueller (1874-1930) joined in 1910.

Although they were name for a way in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra that spoke of humanity’s potential to be the evolutionary “bridge” to a additional perfect future (Übermensch), Die Brücke’s members instead aimed to make a ‘bridge’ between customary neo-romantic German painting and modern expressionist painting.

Die Brücke was one of two groups of German painters basic to Expressionism, the other being Der Blaue Reiter group (”The Blue Rider”) formed in Munich in 1911.

Die Brücke members isolated themselves in a working-class neighborhood of Dresden and urbanized a common style based on vivid color, emotional tension, violent imagery, and an influence from primitivism. After first concentrating exclusively on urban topic matter, the group ventured into southern Germany on expeditions arranged by Mueller and created more nudes and arcadian images. The group disbanded in 1913, at the onset of World War I, due to artistic differences.

A successor group formed in 1919, the Dresdner Sezession, counting painter Conrad Felixmüller. In recent years, the influence of Die Brücke has been seen in the Stockiest collection of painters and even in the Re-modernist film movement.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (May 6, 1880 – June 15, 1938) was a German expressionist painter and one of the founders of the artists set Die Brücke or “The Bridge.”

Born in Aschaffenburg, Germany, Kirchner studied architecture in Dresden beginning in 1901. While in Dresden, he befriended three other youthful architecture students, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Fritz Bleyl. This young set was drawn together by their wish to become painters as well as by their dislike of modern painting. They began calling themselves Die Brücke, which describe their liking of “all revolutionary and surging elements”. The group sought motivation in such painters as Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Edvard Munch as well as the prehistoric arts of Africa and the Pacific Islands.

Kirchner’s own artistic development begins with woodcuts he created in the years before 1900. After studying architecture, he studied painting in Munich and was prejudiced there by Art Nouveau styles as well as by the woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer. In Munich, Kirchner’s style of painting urbanized as he began using bold colors, reminiscent of Gauguin, and wild brushstrokes evocative of Van Gogh. His portrayal of subjects conveys a moving intensity similar to that found in the woodcuts of Dürer and Munch.

With the onset of World War I, Kirchner enters military service, and in 1915, he suffered a nervous breakdown and physical collapse. In a self portrayal of this time he depicts himself with an amputated hand (this did not actually happen). He moved to a sanitarium near Frankfurt, where he finished five wall frescoes in 1916, but was struck by a car and severely injured. In 1918 he moved near Davos, Switzerland to convalesce, but sustained to suffer from depression despite solo shows held in Munich, Hamburg, and New York.

His inclusion in Entartete Kunst, the Nazis’ 1937 exhibition of so-called “degenerate art,” along with the obliteration of approximately 600 of his works, caused him further distress, exacerbate by the closeness of his Swiss home to the German border. Kirchner committed suicide in 1938 in Davos.