Art
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The Life You Give: Albrecht Dürer *1471
Albrecht Dürer, born May 21, 1471, in the Imperial Free City of Nürnberg, Germany, is the painter and printmaker generally regarded as the greatest German Renaissance artist. His vast body of work includes altarpieces and religious works, numerous portraits and self-portraits, and copper engravings. His woodcuts, such as the Apocalypse series (1498), retain a more…
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The Life You Give: Joseph Beuys *1921
Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld, a small city in northwest Germany. He was an only child, to the merchant Josef Jakob Beuys and his wife Johanna Maria Margarete Hulsermann. The two were a devout Catholic couple of the northern Rhine-Westphalian middle-class. Just months after Beuys’s birth, the family moved south to the industrial town…
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The Life You Give: Max Ernst *1891
Max Ernst, born Maximilian Ethelbert Ernst, on April 2 1891, in Brühl, Germany, was painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A key member of first Dada and then Surrealism in Europe in the 1910s and 1920s, Max Ernst used a variety of mediums—painting, collage, printmaking, sculpture, and various unconventional drawing methods—to give visual form to…
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The Life You Give: Eva Hesse *1936
Eva Hesse created innovative sculptural forms using unconventional materials such as latex and fiberglass and gave minimal art organic, emotional, and kinetic features. She scorned good taste and the decorative, creating sculptures out of repeated units which embodied opposite extremes. These extremes were born from the extremes of her own life. Hesse is recognized as…
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The Life You Give: Louise Bourgeois *1911
Louise Bourgeois, born December 25, 1911, in Paris, France, was a sculptor known for her monumental abstract and often biomorphic works that deal with the relationships of men and women. Born to a family of tapestry weavers, Bourgeois made her first drawings to assist her parents in their restoration of ancient tapestries. She attended the…
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Happy Birthday, Edvard Munch! *1863
Edvard Munch was a prolific yet perpetually troubled artist preoccupied with matters of human mortality such as chronic illness, sexual liberation, and religious aspiration. He expressed these obsessions through works of intense color, semi-abstraction, and mysterious subject matter. Following the great triumph of French Impressionism, Munch took up the more graphic, symbolist sensibility of the…
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Happy Birthday, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec! 1864
During his brief artistic career, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec captured the lively and often sordid atmosphere of Montmartre’s late 19th-century dance halls, cabarets, and theaters. Recording the performances he viewed and the establishments he visited on a nightly basis, he functioned as artist and narrator: his paintings, drawings, prints, and posters expose the complexities of the…
Sila Blume 