Jacob Lawrence 1917-2000 | African American Expressionist painter

Jacob Lawrence is one of the most prominent and revered American artists of the twentieth century. This exhibition includes seventeen panels from Lawrence’s renowned sixty-panel Migration Series, portraying the flight of more than six million African Americans from the impoverished communities in the rural South to the industrial cities of the North. The panels depict themes of migration including movement, family, labor, segregation, struggle, and hope. An American epic told through vivid patterns and colors, The Migration Series is a masterpiece of narrative painting, the first work produced on this subject. Capturing racial ruptures of the day, Lawrence chronicles the quest of people in search of greater economic and social justice.
Following its installation at the Whitney, the exhibition will travel to the Mississippi Museum of Art and will reunite with the remaining thirteen panels at The Phillips Collection for a culminating exhibition.

Egon Schiele 1890-1918 | Espressionista austriaco

Egon Schiele nacque a Tulln, nella Bassa Austria nel 1890. A scuola il suo talento viene notato dal maestro Karl Ludwig Strauch che lo supporta con lezioni private e lo incoraggia ad entrare all'Accademia di Belle Arti di Vienna. Egon fu affidato alla custodia dello zio, il quale, dopo aver tentato inutilmente di orientarlo verso una carriera nelle ferrovie, ne riconobbe il talento artistico. A sedici anni Schiele, un giovane dall'espressione grave, occhi ribelli e portamento da dandy, è il più giovane allievo dell'Accademia. Lo scontro di Schiele con l'indirizzo accademico storicistico è inevitabile: i suoi veri maestri sono Van Gogh, Touluse-Lautrec e soprattutto Klimt che il giovane artista incontra per la prima volta nel 1910 e che lo stimolò nel miglioramento della tecnica del segno e del contorno,introducendolo poi nel Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop), fondato nel 1903. Schiele, che considerò Klimt suo padre spirituale, si formò anche nell'ambito della pittura di Hodler e sviluppò, ben presto, uno stile del tutto personale. Nel 1909 lasciò l'Accademia di Vienna e fondò, con altri artisti, il Neukunstgruppe. In questa occasione Schiele avrebbe voluto scambiare alcuni suoi disegni con quelli di Klimt; pare che Klimt abbia invece risposto: "Perché vuole questo scambio? Lei disegna meglio di me!", ed abbia addirittura acquistato le opere di Schiele riempiendolo di orgoglio.

Il Trattato dei colori | Wassily Kandinsky 1866-1944

Wassily Kandinsky 1866-1944, in base alla propria convinzione, secondo la quale, il movimento del colore è una vibrazione che tocca le corde dell'interiorità, descrive i colori in base alle sensazioni e alle emozioni che suscitano nello spettatore, paragonandoli a strumenti musicali. Egli si occupa dei colori primari - giallo, blu, rosso, e poi di colori secondari - arancione, verde, viola, ciascuno dei quali è frutto della mescolanza tra due primari. Analizzerà anche le proprietà di marrone, grigio e arancione:

Otto Müller 1874-1930 | Expressionist painter | The Die Brücke Group

The Die Brücke Group, The Bridge, was a group of german expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905, after which the Brücke Museum in Berlin was named. Founding members were Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Later members were Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller. The seminal group had a major impact on the evolution of modern art in the 20th century and the creation of expressionism. Die Brücke is sometimes compared to the Fauves. Both movements shared interests in primitivist art. Both shared an interest in the expressing of extreme emotion through high-keyed color that was very often non-naturalistic. Both movements employed a drawing technique that was crude, and both groups shared an antipathy to complete abstraction. The Die Brücke artists' emotionally agitated paintings of city streets and sexually charged events transpiring in country settings make their french counterparts, the Fauves, seem tame by comparison.

Paul Klee 1879-1940 | Swiss expressionist painter

Klee has been variously associated with expressionism, cubism, futurism, surrealism, and abstraction, but his pictures are difficult to classify. He generally worked in isolation from his peers, and interpreted new art trends in his own way. He was inventive in his methods and technique. Klee worked in many different media-oil paint, watercolor, ink, pastel, etching, and others. He often combined them into one work. He used canvas, burlap, muslin, linen, gauze, cardboard, metal foils, fabric, wallpaper, and newsprint. Klee employed spray paint, knife application, stamping, glazing, and impasto, and mixed media such as oil with watercolor, water color with pen and India ink, and oil with tempera. He was a natural draftsman, and through long experimentation developed a mastery of color and tonality. Many of his works combine these skills. He uses a great variety of color palettes from nearly monochromatic to highly polychromatic. His works often have a fragile child-like quality to them and are usually on a small scale. He often used geometric forms as well as letters, numbers, and arrows, and combined them with figures of animals and people. Some works were completely abstract. Many of his works and their titles reflect his dry humor and varying moods; some express political convictions. They frequently allude to poetry, music and dreams and sometimes include words or musical notation. The later works are distinguished by spidery hieroglyph-like symbols.

Albert Bloch 1882-1961 | American Expressionist | The Blue Rider Groups

Bloch was an american modernist artist and the only american artist associated with Der Blaue Reiter - The Blue Rider, a group of early 20th-century European modernists. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He first studied art at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts. In 1901-03 he produced comic strips and cartoons for the St. Louis Star newspaper. Between 1905 and 1908 he worked as a caricaturist and illustrator for William Marion Reedy's literary and political weekly The Mirror. From 1909-1921, Bloch lived and worked mainly in Germany. After the end of World War I, Bloch returned to the United States, teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago for a year, and then accepting a Departmental Head position at the University of Kansas until his retirement in 1947.

Arshile Gorky 1904-1948 | American abstract expressionist painter

Gorky’s early life was disrupted when his father abandoned Turkey, his wife, and his family in order to avoid service in the Turkish army. The rest of the family soon fled to Armenia to escape Turkish persecution and were subsequently dispersed. In 1920 Gorky emigrated to the United States, where he rejoined his sister in Watertown, Mass., and assumed the pseudonym by which he became known. The name Arshile is derived from Achilles, the brooding Achaean hero of the Iliad. The name Gorky (Russian for “the bitter one”) is derived from that of the writer Maksim Gorky.

After studying painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, Gorky enthusiastically entered into the Bohemian life of Greenwich Village in New York City, occasionally passing himself off as a successful Russian portraitist who had studied in Paris and experimented with Automatism. From 1926-1931 he taught at the Grand Central School of Art. Early in his career, he hit on the idea of becoming a great painter by subjecting himself to long apprenticeships, painting in the style of such artists as Paul Cézanne, Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso. His aim was never merely to imitate the work of others, however, but to assimilate fully their aesthetic vision and then move beyond it.

Emil Nolde 1867-1956 | The Expressionist Garden

Born to a peasant family, Emil Nolde carved wood for a living and came late to painting. Though briefly a member of Die Brücke 1906-07, he was essentially a solitary painter. Fervently religious and racked by a sense of sin, he created such works as Dance Around the Golden Calf 1910, in which the figures' erotic frenzy and demonic faces are rendered with deliberately crude draftsmanship and dissonant colours. On an ethnological expedition to the East Indies 1913-14, he was impressed by the power of the art he saw there. Back in Europe, he produced brooding landscapes and colourful flowers. As a printmaker he was noted especially for the stark black-and-white effect of his crudely incised woodcuts.

George McNeil 1908-1995 | American abstract expressionist painter

A pioneer Abstract Expressionist of the New York School, McNeil had over forty solo exhibitions during his lifetime. Between the ’40s and until the mid ’60s his art was decidedly abstract but it was always joined to metaphor. George McNeil had a career that spanned the entire postwar American art era. McNeil attended Pratt Institute and the Art Students’ League, where he studied with Jan Matulka. From 1932-36, he studied with Hans Hofmann, becoming Hofmann's studio classroom monitor. In 1936 he worked for the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project and became one of the founding members of the American Abstract Artists group. McNeil was one of the few abstract artists whose work was selected for the New York World's Fair in 1939. During World War II, he served in the US Navy. In the late 1940s McNeil taught at the University of Wyoming and then taught art and art history at Pratt Institute until 1980, influencing generations of young artists. From the ’70s onward, McNeil explored ways to expand beyond the cannons of the Abstract Expressionism. In this period his work became more figurative, drawing inspiration from the dynamic life of the city, its dancers, discos and sports. Throughout his career as a painter McNeil commanded a mastery technique, capable of creating paintings of rich texture depth and color. In 1989, McNeil was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. George McNeil's work is represented in numerous museum collections around the country, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of America Art, San Francisco Museum of Art, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and Walker Art Center Minneapolis.

Emil Nolde 1867-1956 | German expressionist painter | The Die Brücke Group

Born to a peasant family, he carved wood for a living and came late to painting. Though briefly a member of Die Brücke 1906-07, he was essentially a solitary painter. Fervently religious and racked by a sense of sin, he created such works as Dance Around the Golden Calf 1910, in which the figures' erotic frenzy and demonic faces are rendered with deliberately crude draftsmanship and dissonant colours. On an ethnological expedition to the East Indies 1913-14, he was impressed by the power of the art he saw there. Back in Europe, he produced brooding landscapes and colourful flowers. As a printmaker he was noted especially for the stark black-and-white effect of his crudely incised woodcuts.