Born February 3, 1894 in New York City, Norman Percevel Rockwell discovered his artistic talent early on. By the age of fourteen, he began taking classes at The New York School of Art, and, by the age of sixteen, his desire to pursue a career as a painter grew so strong that he dropped out of high school and enrolled at the National Academy of Design. Shortly thereafter, he transferred to the Art Students League of New York. Upon graduation, Rockwell was immediately hired as an illustrator for Boy’s Life magazine. Then, in 1916, the 22-year-old Rockwell, newly wed to Irene O’Connor, completed his ‘first cover for The Saturday Evening Post — the beginning of a 47-year relationship with the iconic American magazine.’ In total, Rockwell painted
January 28, 1912, Paul Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming. He was the youngest of five boys, and began taking an interest in art after his oldest brother, Charles Pollock. He later enrolled at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, first doing sculptures, and then later doing paintings. After getting kicked out for starting fights, he moved to New York and shadowed Thomas Hart Benton, attending the Art Students League. Benton’s family took Jackson under their wing. But after his father died suddenly, Pollock became depressed. This lead to excessive drinking and the threatening of Charles’ wife with an ax that he threw at one of Charles’ paintings scheduled for an upcoming exhibition. He was then kicked out, and the Great Depression started to take place.
Thomas Hart Benton was born in the familiar, small town of Neosho, Missouri. He was named after his granduncle, the famed and prominent pre-American Civil War senator. First Thomas Hart Benton studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and then lived in beautiful Paris for three years. When he came back he moved to New York City after 1912 he turned away from his usual style, modernism, and gradually developed a rugged naturalism that affirmed traditional rural values. By the 1930’s Benton was riding a tide of popular acclaim along with his fellow regionalist Grant Wood, who was responsible for American Gothic, and John Steuart Curry, who was responsible for The Tragic Prelude. The mural, America Today (1930-1931, The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the U.S., New York City), Thomas Hart Benton’s masterpiece, presented an optimistic portrayal of a vital country filled with earthy, muscular figures.
Carle had a happy childhood in America. However, he moved to Germany with his parents when he was six years old and attended the prestigious art school Akademie der Bildenden Künste. In 1952 he moved back to New York to return to the happy place where he grew up. He was then recruited as a graphic designer by The New York Times before he was enrolled as a mail clerk in the Korean War. Once he returned, he worked as the art director for an advertising agency (“Eric Carle”).
In 1911, Rockwell illustrated his first book, “Tell Me Why Stories”. Two Years later he contributed to “Boys Life”, He soon became art director of the magazine. Commissions for other children’s magazines, among them “St. Nicholas”, “Youths Companion” and “American Boys”, soon followed. In 1915, Rockwell moved to New Rochelle, New York, home to many of America’s finest Illustrators. He studied the work of older illustrators while painting crisply, painted renditions of fresh-faced kids and dogs.
In January of 1826, Cole had become to be known for founding the National Academy of Design. During this time, many would comission him to paint pictures of American scenery, but his primary desire and goal, he says, was to create a “higher style of landscape that would express moral or religious tones.” In 1836, Cole married Maria Barstow and settled in Catskill, New York. Catskill would obviously become the inspiration for his piece, “Catskill Mountains and the Hudson River”. From these paintings he influenced many other artists. Among these artists were Frederick Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt.
Jackson Pollock was an American abstract artist born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912. He was the youngest of his five brothers. Even though he was born on a farm, he never milked a cow and he was terrified of horses because he grew up in California. He dropped out of high school at the age of seventeen and proceeded to move to New York City with his older brother, Charles, and studied with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. Thomas Benton was already a great artist at the time in which Pollock studied with him. Benton acted like the father figure in Pollock’s life to replace the original that wasn’t there. Benton was known for his large murals that appear on ceilings or walls. “Jack was a rebellious sort at all times,” recalls his classmate and friend, artist Harold Lehman. He grew his hair long and helped pen a manifesto denouncing athletics, even though “he had a muscular build and the school wanted to put him on the football team,” says former teacher Doug Lemon. Pollock always was upset with himself in his studies because he had troubles drawing things like they were supposed to look. From 1938 to 1942, Jackson joined a Mexican workshop of people with a painter named David Siqueiros. This workshop painted the murals for the WPA Federal Art Projects. This new group of people started experimenting with new types of paint and new ways of applying it to large canvas. People say that this time period was when Jackson was stimulated with ideas from looking at the Mexican or WPA murals. Looking at paintings from Picasso and the surrealists also inspired Jackson at this time. The type of paint they used was mixing oil colors with paint used for painting cars. Jackson noticed that the shapes and colors they created were just as beautiful as anything else was. Jackson realized that you didn’t have to be able to draw perfect to make beautiful paintings. Jackson started developing a whole new way of painting that he had never tried before and his paintings were starting to look totally different from before.
Born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Cindy Sherman grew up in suburban Huntington Beach on Long Island, the youngest of five children and had a regular American childhood. She was very self-involved, found of costumes, and given to spending hours at the mirror, playing with makeup (Schjeldahl 7). Cindy Sherman attended the state University College at Buffalo, New York, where she first started to create art in the medium of painting. During her college years, she painted self-portraits and realistic copies of images that she saw in photographs and magazines. Yet, she became less, and less interested in painting and became increasingly interested in conceptual, minimal, performance, body art, and film alternatives (Sherman 5). Sherman’s very first introductory photography class in college was a complete failure for she had difficulties with the technological aspects of making a print. After her disastrous first attempt in photography, Sherman discovered Contemporary Art, which had a profound and lasting effect on the rest of her artistic career (Thames and Hudson 1). Sherman’s first assignment in her photography class was to photograph something which gave her a problem, thus, Sherman chose to photograph her self naked. While this was difficult, she learned that having an idea was the most important factor in creating her art, not so much the technique that she used.
Robert Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey in 1938. He was an only child. His father, Irving Smithson, was an automobile mechanic who later became vice-president of a mortgage firm. His father and mother, Susan, were both Protestants and Susan was also Catholic. When Smithson was eight his parents took him on his first major trip, a tour around the United States. The trip made a huge impression on him and he began to love traveling. Some of his other interests as a child were drawing, collecting things, natural history, geology, and dinosaurs according to Smithson, in an interview with Paul Cummings in 1972. Like many teenagers, Smithson found high school boring and was in search of a more stimulating and open environment. In the fall of 1954, his third year of high school, Smithson enrolled in classes at the Art Students League in New York. He received a scholarship for the1955-56 academic year. Smithson’s training at the Art Students League focused on basic foundation courses such as cartooning, life drawing, painting, and composition. Of his time at the Art Students League, Smithson said, “it gave me an opportunity to meet younger people and others who were sort of sympathetic to my outlook.” 1(pg.12).
Born in 1886 Diego Rivera was born to a wealthy family living in Guanajuato, Mexico. At the age of two his twin brother died and a year later Diego Rivera started drawing, his parents caught him drawing on walls and instead of punishing him nurtured his artistic side by enabling him with the supplies he needed. Throughout his life Diego Rivera was dedicated to art, “He began to study painting at an early age and in 1907 moved to Europe. Spending most of the next fourteen years in Paris, Rivera encountered the works of such great masters as Cézanne, Gauguin, Renoir, and Matisse.” Influenced by the work of such great minds Rivera began the search for his own signature and contribution to modern art, “Rivera was searching for a new form of painting, one that could express the complexities of his day and still reach a wide audience.” Rivera found the medium he was looking for, a form of street art involving murals painted on fresh plaster, he returned to Mexico to introduce this new form of art to the public. Rivera soon sewed himself into the art community in America, “His outgoing personality puts him at ...
Knowing information about the artist plays an important role in why some art was created in such an extraordinary way. Artist Christian Petersen practiced his art during a transitional stage in American sculpture when styles moved from heroic to realistic (George Washington Carver). In 1934, Iowa State President Raymond Hughes offered Petersen a one-semester residency to create the fountain and bas-reliefs in the Dairy Industry Building courtyard. Amazingly this one semester job turned into 21 years, and from 1934 to 1955 Petersen served as Iowa State's sculptor-in-residence (George Washington Carver). According t...
Archibald Motley Jr. was born in 1891 in New Orleans. Ever since, Archibald was a child he had the desire to be an artist. His family moved to a Chicago neighborhood in the 1890’s, but the family would take frequent trips back to New Orleans in the summer. Later we find out that these two similar settings were the determining factor for Archibald’s paintings. He decided to study art at the Institute of Chicago and was recognized by being one of the few African American artists during that time.
"Photographing a cake can be art," Irving Penn said when he opened his studio in 1953. Before long he was backing up his statement with a series of advertising illustrations that created a new high standard in the field and established a reputation that has kept him in the top bracket ever since.
"1920's Art." The 1920's - Roaring Twenties - The Nineteen Twenties in History. 2005. Web. 28 Feb. 2011. .
Robert Norman Ross was an Amazing painter with a show called “The Joy of Painting”. Bob Ross was born on October 29th, 1942 in Daytona beach, Florida and died on July 4 1995 in New Smyrna beach, Florida. As a child Ross like to take care of injured animals, such a squirrels. Ross dropped out of high school after 9th grade to work with his dad, as a carpenter. Bob Ross enlisted in the air force when he was 18 and was stationed in Alaska, he later became a drill sergeant. He found his love of painting from a class that he took while enlisted in the army. Later he learn a quicker technique of painting, wet on wet painting from Bill Alexander's show “The Magic of Oil Painting.” Bob Ross sold paintings and taught lessons which made him more money
Paradise: Painting in America 1800-1959. Ed. Kynaston McShine. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1976.