Maurice Denis | Les Nabis Group

Even today Maurice Denis' (1870-1943) place in the history of art remains unspecified. Known as the "Nabi of the beautiful icons", he is celebrated alongside Vuillard and Bonnard as one of the most importan Nabi painters, a founder of the movement and its brilliant theoretician.

Everyone remembers his famous dictum of 1890 when he was twenty years old and unknown. "Remember that a painting – before being a battle horse, an anecdote of some sort is essentially a flat surface covered with colours, put together in a certain order".

Wassily Kandinsky | VII - Teoria della Pittura

Lo spirituale nell'arte, 1910

Seconda parte: La Pittura

Dalla natura della nostra armonia si deduce che oggi non si può costruire una teoria compiuta, creare un basso continuo in pittura. Questi tentativi condurrebbero in pratica allo stesso risultato dei cucchiaini di Leonardo, che citavamo prima. Ma sarebbe imprudente affermare che in pittura non esisteranno mai regole fisse, princìpi paragonabili al basso continuo, e che qualsiasi regola condurrebbe inevitabilmente all'accademismo.

Anche la musica ha una sua grammatica: una grammatica che si modifica nel tempo, come ogni cosa vivente, ma che è sempre stata utile, come una specie di vocabolario.

Wassily Kandinsky | Pond in the park

Wassily Kandinsky | VIII - L'Opera d'Arte e l'Artista, 1910

Lo spirituale nell'arte, 1910

Seconda parte: La Pittura

La vera opera d'arte nasce "dall'artista" in modo misterioso, enigmatico, mistico.

Staccandosi da lui assume una sua personalità, e diviene un soggetto indipendente con un suo respiro spirituale e una sua vita concreta.

Diventa un aspetto dell'essere. Non è dunque un fenomeno casuale, una presenza anche spiritualmente indifferente, ma ha come ogni essere energie creative, attive.

Wassily Kandinsky | Delicate tension, 1923

Maria Wiik (1853-1928)

Maria Catharina Wiik was a Finnish painter.

She worked principally with still life, genre, landscape paintings and portraits. Wiik was born in Helsinki.

She was the daughter of architect Erik Johan Wik (or Wiik) (1804-1876) and his wife Gustava Fredrika Meyer.

She was born and grew up in Brunnsparken and attended the Swedish language school Svenska fruntimmersskolan in Helsingfors. She then studied drawing with art professor Adolf von Becker.

Encouraged by her family, she studied art during 1874-1875 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki.

Hovsep Pushman | Orientalist painter

Hovsep Pushman [Armenian: Յովսէփ Փուշման] (1877-1966) was an American artist of Armenian background. He was known for his contemplative still lifes and sensitive portraits of women, often in exotic dress.

He was most closely associated during his lifetime with the Grand Central Art Galleries, which represented him from its opening in 1922 until his death in 1966.

Life

Hovsep Pushman was born and grew up in the town of Dikranagerd in the Ottoman Empire, where his family, originally "Pushmanian", was in the carpet business. Pushman showed artistic ability early, and at age 11 was the youngest student ever admitted to Istanbul's Imperial School of Fine Arts.

In 1896, Pushman's family emigrated to Chicago, where he studied Chinese culture, immersing himself in Asian art, and began to teach at the age of 17. He then moved to Paris and studied at the Académie Julian under Jules Joseph Lefebvre, Tony Robert-Fleury and Adolphe Déchenaud.

Wassily Kandinsky | VIII - Art and Artists

Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1910

Part II: About painting

In an obscure and puzzling way, the artist develops a work of art. As it gains a life of its own, it becomes an entity, an independent spiritual life, which as a being, leads the life of material realism.

It is, therefore, not simply a phenomenon created casually and Inconsequentially indifferent to spiritual life.

Instead as a living being, it possesses creative active forces. It lives, has power, and actively forms the above-mentioned spiritual atmosphere.

From an innermost point of view, the question finally should be answered as to whether creation is strong or weak. If too weak in its form, it is impotent to cause any kind of spiritual vibration.

Wassily Kandinsky | Succession, 1935

André Lhote | Pittore Cubista

André Lhote (1885-1962) was a French Cubist painter of figure subjects, portraits, landscapes and still life. He was also very active and influential as a teacher and writer on art.

Early life and education

Lhote was born 5 July 1885 in Bordeaux, France and learned wood carving and sculpture from the age of 12, when his father apprenticed him to a local furniture maker to be trained as a sculptor in wood.

He enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux in 1898 and studied decorative sculpture until 1904.

Whilst there, he began to paint in his spare time and he left home in 1905, moving into his own studio to devote himself to painting.

He was influenced by Gauguin and Cézanne and held his first one-man exhibition at the Galerie Druet in 1910, four years after he had moved to Paris.

Paul Verlaine | Poichè l'alba si accende.. / Puisque l'aube grandit..

Poiché l'alba si accende, ed ecco l'aurora,

poiché, dopo avermi a lungo fuggito, la speranza consente

a ritornare a me che la chiamo e l'imploro,

poiché questa felicità consente ad esser mia,

facciamola finita coi pensieri funesti,

basta con i cattivi sogni, ah! Soprattutto

basta con l'ironia e le labbra strette

e parole in cui uno spirito senz'anima trionfava.

Lionel Noel Royer (French painter, 1852-1926) | Jeune Femme en Bord de Mer, 1928