A Tour in ArtM O D E R N A R T

W i l l i am B L A K E A u brey B erardl ey C O M I C S J acob L aw ren ce P O P A R T

B et w een 19t hC an d 20t hC

W.BLAKE

A visionary artistAn isolated jenius A forerunner of Romantic and Symbolist ArtBiblical referencesLarge use of allegoryA large range of techniques

A Selection fromHis works

A Selection fromHis works

A Selection fromHis works

A Selection fromHis works

A Selection fromHis works

A Selection fromHis works

A Selection fromHis works

A Selection fromHis works

A forerunner of Art Nouveau and Graphic DesignA large use of decorationsA strong sexual noteA sense of perverseA large stock of symbolismA sense of irony

A. BEARDSLEY

A selection from His Works

A selection from His Works

A selection from His Works

A selection from His Works

A selection from His Works

A selection from His Works

A selection from His Works

A selection from His Works

A selection from His Works

A selection from His Works

A selection from His Works

A selection from His Works

A selection from His Works

A selection from His Works

COMICS

FRANCO CAPRIOLI

He was born in Mompeo, in the province of Rieti, in 1912. He started his comic career in 1936, working for several magazines, such as Il Vittorioso and Il Corriere dei Piccoli. His speciality was adventure stories, like 'Gino e Piero' and 'Pino il Mozzo'. In the 1960s, he briefly collaborated with writer Roger Lécureux, creating 'La Patrouille Blanche'. After that, Caprioli mainly worked for the magazine Il Giornalino, but he also adapted novels like 'Moby Dick' for comics for the publishing house Mondadori.

A Selection from his works

UGO PRATT

Pratt is at the first glance difficult . Not only his style seems odd or careless here and there but the whole pace of the story is much slower than in some average books. A whole page can be devoted to "talking heads" or still pictures creating atmosphere, and then sometimes, action without any text. Pratt was a great storyteller and although many of his books can be read as plain adventures, the most important factor is nostalgy, the atmosphere of a disappeared era.

UGO PRATT

UGO PRATT

Pratt was more interested in the overall appearance and the play of shadow and light. Some machines like cars and trains were drawn with extreme realism. Pratt's drawing style was not fixed but changed to fit the pace of the story. A detailed landscape creates the feeling of the time standing still. Rough lines and "misplaced" camera angles underline the intensity of an action to the point of abstraction.

Corto Maltese was born on July 10, 1887 on Malta. His mother was a gypsy woman and father a seaman from Cornwall. We also know that when he was young, he was not satisfied with the line of fate in his palm so he drew a better one with a knife. The first available story of Corto is located at Manchuria, during the 1904-05 war between Russia and Japan (La jeunesse de Corto). There he meets Raspoutin, by that time a deserter of the Russian army, for the first time. They head for Africa but end in America.

The books Sous le signe du Capricorne, Corto toujours un peu plus loin and Les Celtiques contain shorter stories regarding the 1907-13 and 1915-1916 voyages of Corto. From November 1913 to early spring 1915 the story unfolds at La Ballade de la mer salée. Raspoutin robs English cargo ships on Pacific but the appearance of Corto brings some obstacles on his way to richness

J. LAWRENCE                                                  

•Reality is caricature of the heightened gesture.

•His paintings are essentially narrative and were often done in series.

•Simple, intensely coloured shapes define his figures and their environment.

•Black nationalism.

J. LAWRENCE                                                  

•Busy New York City street corners were favourite subjects for him who began painting African -American genre pictures as a young man in Harlem during the Depression.

•The affectionate portrayal of day-to-day maternal ritualsLike other American Scene painters, Lawrence was thrown on the defensive by the Abstract Expressionist

J. LAWRENCE                                                 

tide that washed over New York in the 1950s, but he tenaciously clung to the belief in figurative art with liberal humanistic meaning. He told an audience of artists and art students at the time:“Maybe ... humanity to you has been reduced to the sterility of the line, the cube, the circle, and the square; devoid of all feeling, cold and highly esoteric. If this is so, I can well understand why you cannot portray the true America.

J. LAWRENCE                      

It is because you have lost all feeling for man.... And your work shall remain without depth for as long as you can only see and respect the beauty of the cube, and not see and respect the beauty of man-every man”.He thrived on the company of budding African -American writers and artists still in Harlem even after the Harlem Renaissance had become another victim of the Great Depression. More fortunate than most of these Harlem friends, he enjoyed early recognition.

J. LAWRENCE

 His tempera and gouache series on African-American history, Toussaint L'Ouverture (1937-38), Frederick Douglas (1938-39), Harriet Tubman (1939-40), The Migration of the Negro (1940-41), and John Brown (1941-42) were praised by established critics and purchased by museums.

Numerous individual paintings, some of lyrical and fantasy themes, also attracted favourable notice during the early 1940s.

J. LAWRENCE

 Lawrence's style grew more complex in the 1950s.

The colours are less brilliant and saturated than before, possibly because of the casein medium. An intricate pattern of darting shapes defines the women, the buggy, the pavement, the buildings, the fish balloons, and the sky.

The background attains a force and energy equal to the figures.

COX

J. LAWRENCE The individual features appear as if they could be pealed off the paper surface; the effect of the cadence of shredded patterns is an unexpected unity, a medley of dynamic design and poetic resonance.Such sophisticated picture-making can be attributed to Lawrence's deepening knowledge of modern art. Working alongside Josef Albers at the Black Mountain College of Art in 1946 had a major effect on Lawrence's art through the 1950s, as did Pablo Picasso's Synthetic Cubist paintings and Ernst Kirchner's dagger-like Expressionism.

A selectionOf hisworks

A selectionOf hisworks

A selectionOf hisworks

A selectionOf hisworks

A selectionOf hisworks

A selectionOf hisworks

A selectionOf hisworks

POP ART It rebelled against the Abstract Expressionist style of painting that dominated the art world of the 1950s.Abstract Expressionism sought to convey moods andemotions through nonrepresentational shapes and colorspainted with bold, expressive brush strokes. In sharp contrast with this style, pop artists presented images taken unchanged from the commercial enviroment around them.

POP ART Pop Art brought art back to the material realities of everyday life, to popular culture (hence ``pop''), in which ordinary people derived most of their visual pleasure from television, magazines, or comics. Pop Art emerged in the mid 1950s in England, but realized its fullest potential in New York in the '60s where it shared, with Minimalism, the attentions of the art world.

POP ART

In Pop Art, the epic was replaced with the everyday and the mass-produced awarded the same significance as the unique; the gulf between ``high art'' and ``low art'' was eroding away. The media and advertising were favourite subjects for Pop Art's often witty celebrations of consumer society.

POP ART. The term ``Pop Art'' was first used by the English critic Lawrence Alloway in a 1958 issue of Architectural Digest to describe those paintings that celebrate post-war consumerism, defy the psychology of Abstract Expressionism, and worship the god of materialism.