I. BIOGRAPHY On December 7, 1892, Stuart Davis was born to two Philadelphia artists. His mother, Helen Stuart Foulke, was a prominent sculptor who exhibited at the annual exhibitions of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His father, Edward Wyatt Davis, was a newspaper art editor who employed many [...]
William Merritt Chase, November 1st, 1849
Today is the birthday of one of the great impressionists. William Merritt Chase was born in Williamsburg (later Ninevah), Indiana, in 1849, the oldest of six children. When he was twelve, the family moved to Indianapolis. His father hoped that he would follow him into the women’s shoe business, but Chase, who said “the desire [...]
Cy Twombly
ILLUSTRIOUS AND UNKNOWN: this was what Degas aspired to be, and what Cy Twombly has become. His imposing reputation has an aura of myth and ambiguity, for reasons that have partly to do with the elusiveness of the artist himself (residing abroad and protective of his privacy), but more to do with the singularity of [...]
Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and the Académie Julian in Paris, France, before enrolling in 1948 at the legendary Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Robert Rauschenberg ,Untitled, ca. 1954 As a young artist Rauschenberg married the painter Susan Weil. The two met while attending the Academie Julian in Paris, and [...]
Louis Schanker
Born in 1903, Louis Schanker quit school as a teenager and joined the circus, worked in the wheat fields of the Great Plains, and rode the rails. In 1919, he went to New York and began studying art. He spent 1931 and 1932 in Paris and came back “something of a Cubist”, becoming a muralist [...]
Theodoros Stamos
The youngest of the first-generation abstract expressionists, Theodoros Stamos was born in New York in 1922, to Greek immigrant parents. At thirteen, Stamos received a scholarship to New York’s American Artists’ School, where he studied sculpture. After dropping out of school in 1939, he held several jobs and concentrated on painting. While working in a [...]
A Short History of Abstract Expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an specifically American post-World War II art movement. It was the first American movement to achieve worldwide influence and also the one that put New York City at the center of the art world, a role formerly filled by Paris. After WWII, with images of the Holocaust everywhere, it seemed redundant for [...]
