osadmin – Page 3

Chester Beach

1881-1956

Theme/Style – Allegorical, Mythological, Figurative art

Media – Bronze and marble sculptures, medals, coins

Artistic Focus – Chester Beach’s stature as an academic sculptor of the figure is undisputed. But his work, characterized by one critic as “pure idealism united to a brilliant technique,” also possesses a subtlety and cleverness that reveal him as an imaginative and extremely insightful artist, whose sculptures transcend traditional representation and communicate to the observer both deep emotion and the presence of a vital, human spirit.

Career Highlights –

Chester Beach was born in San Francisco, California, in 1881, where he studied at the California School of Mechanical Arts and the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art.
From 1903 to 1906, Beach studied in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian under Raoul Verlet, exhibiting at the Académie in 1905 and winning the gold medal.
Returning to the U.S. in 1907, Beach settled in New York City, where he was to maintain his studio and residence at 207 East Seventeenth Street for 45 years.
Beach exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1907, winning the Barnett Prize for sculpture, and continued to exhibit there into the 1930s, winning its medal for sculpture in 1932 for his piece entitled Crying.
Beach exhibited 10 bronzes in a group show at the Macbeth Galleries in New York in 1908, and was also included in exhibitions at New York’s National Arts Club and at the National Sculpture Society in Baltimore that same year.
From 1910 to 1922 Beach was a teacher of sculpture at New York’s Richmond Hill Settlement House for immigrants, and in 1934 he taught drawing at the city’s Beaux-Arts Institute of Design.
At the groundbreaking 1913 Armory Show in New York, Beach exhibited his The Unveiling of Dawn, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and in 1914 he had a solo exhibition at New York’s Macbeth Galleries.
Beach returned to San Francisco to execute sculptures for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, winning a silver medal for his three large statuary groups in the Court of Abundance entitled The Stone Age, The Medieval Age, and The Ages of the Future.
In 1923 Chester Beach’s design was selected for the 50-cent-piece commemorating the Monroe Doctrine Centennial Exhibition in Los Angeles that year, and also won the prize of the American Numismatic Society in 1919 for his medal commemorating the Peace Treaty of Versailles. Beach designed several other medals, and in 1946 was given the Society’s Saltus Medal for distinguished medallic work.
In 1918 Beach was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he became an academician of the National Academy of Design in 1924. He exhibited at the Architectural League of New York in 1924 and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1925, receiving gold medals in both exhibitions, and in 1927 was president of the National Sculpture Society.
Beach exhibited at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in 1929, as well as in a show at the Grace Nicholson Galleries in Pasadena comprising work by artist members of the Grand Central Galleries in New York.
Beach exhibited at the National Sculpture Society in 1938, and at the New York World’s Fair in 1939 with his fountain Riders of the Elements. In 1945, Beach was included in the show “Portraits of Americans by Americans” at the New York Historical Society.
A few of Beach’s best known public sculptural works in New York are a bust of Adolph Lewisohn at City College, and statues at Barnard College and the former American Telephone & Telegraph Building at 195 Broadway. Beach’s four bronzes, Twelve Signs of the Zodiac, The Fountain of the Waters, Sun Drawing the Waters, and Earth Receiving the Waters, are on the grounds of the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio. Beach’s last completed work, executed in 1955, was a plaque of Benjamin F. Fairless, former president of the United States Steel Corporation.
Chester Beach passed away in Brewster, New York, in 1956.

Selection of Works by this Artist

No posts found.

Roberto Berdecio

1910-1996

Theme/Style – Figurative art, portraits, genre scenes, landscapes

Media – Oils, drawings, murals, lithographs, illustration

Artistic Focus – Roberto Berdecio was an energetic and creative muralist, painter, and printmaker who not only holds an important place in Mexico’s long history of art in the service of social change, but who, like David Alfaro Siqueiros, also embraced and left his mark on the creation of art and murals in the United States during the late 1930s. Berdecio himself noted that his extensive travels throughout South America brought him closer to its indigenous peoples, and this affinity is reflected in the simple integrity of his smaller-scale figural works.

Career Highlights –

Roberto Guardia Berdecio was born in Sucre, Bolivia in 1910. His father was a diplomat, lawyer and author, and Berdecio’s early schooling was in Argentina. Though he was largely self-taught as a painter, Berdecio studied for a few years in the late 1920s at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires and the Academy of Fine Arts in La Paz, Bolivia, and it was in La Paz that his first solo exhibition was held in 1929.
In 1934 Berdecio came to Mexico City, where he began working with David Alfaro Siqueiros and joined the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR, Revolutionary Writers’ and Artists’ League); other members were Pablo O’Higgins and Luis Arenal. In 1936 he traveled to New York City as one of Mexico’s delegates to the First Congress of American Artists against War and Fascism, along with Siqueiros, Arenal, José Clemente Orozco, and Rufino Tamayo.
Berdecio remained in New York where he assisted in running the newly-formed Siqueiros Experimental Workshop, a Laboratory of Modern Techniques in Art. Berdecio, Siqueiros, Orozco, Tamayo and other Mexican artists were featured in a show at New York’s Gallery of American Contemporary Art (ACA) in 1936.
Berdecio painted two murals for New York’s Worker’s Bookshop, which were unveiled at his solo exhibition at the Delphic Studios there in 1939. Entitled “Two Portraits of New York,” their highly political theme juxtaposed views of Wall Street and American capitalism with Nazi symbols, and portraits of the Scottsboro Boys and Sacco and Vanzetti. Moreover, they employed the artist’s innovative techniques of “kinetic perspective” and the use of a pioneering technology using nitro-cellulose paint, a compressor and a mechanical brush. That same year Berdecio was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his uses of these new materials and methods.
Two solo shows for Berdecio took place in California in 1940: in Los Angeles at Raymond Galleries, and at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. Also in 1940, Berdecio created a mural for the Spanish Center in Fresno.
Berdecio returned to Mexico in 1941, where he continued to create mural paintings. In 1944 he traveled to Peru and Bolivia and was a delegate to the convention of the Latin-American Confederation of Labor in Cali, Colombia.
Back in the U.S. in 1945, Berdecio taught a painting course at Sarah Lawrence College, New York before again returning to Mexico in 1946.
In 1947 Berdecio began his collaboration with Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP, Popular Graphic Arts Workshop), Mexico’s foremost political print shop, and was a founding member of Sociedad para el Impulso de las Artes Plásticas.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Berdecio continued to be a significant contributor to the political and cultural art movement in Mexico. In the 1960s he assisted artist Juan O’Gorman in creating his “Hidalgo Libertador” mural, and subsequently also worked on its restoration; and in 1972 he edited a book of prints by Jose Guadalupe Posada.
Roberto Berdecio passed away in La Paz, Bolivia in 1996.

Selection of Works by this Artist

No posts found.

Franz Bergmann

1898-1977

Theme/Style – Modernism

Media – Oils, murals, watercolors, illustrations, copper enamel

Artistic Focus – Whatever their medium, Franz Bergmann’s bold, modern paintings – often seeming European in influence – and his large and sometimes eccentric murals, were praised for their dexterous facility, use of brilliant color and poetic quality. Categorized as a Modernist, Bergmann employed the techniques of particular artistic styles – Post-Impressionism, Cubism and Futurism among them – without ever allowing himself to be strictly identified with any of the styles he incorporated into his work.

Career Highlights –

Though Franz Bergmann’s father was a librarian and frustrated artist and his mother a pianist, it was only after his service for Austria in World War I that he began taking his own art studies seriously.
Enrolling in the Vienna National Academy of Art, Bergmann completed the seven-year course of study – exhibiting in Stockholm and Vienna during his sixth year – and earning top honors upon his graduation in 1925.
After traveling through Europe, Bergmann sought his artistic fortune in America. He worked in New York and Chicago before heading west in the late 1920s, painting in the Rocky Mountains outside Denver before arriving in San Francisco.
Sometimes Bergmann’s paintings offered a word of social commentary through gentle satire – in Los Angeles Main Street, for example, he incorporated bits of boasting and honky-tonk to poke modest fun at the self-declared Center of the Universe.
Bergmann, who often called himself “Frank” and spelled his last name with only one “n” in an effort to assimilate, resided in the San Francisco Bay Area until his demise.

Jane Berlandina

1898-1970

Theme/Style – Post-Impressionism, Modernism. Portraits, still lifes

Media – Oils, murals, watercolors

Artistic Focus – Among the canvases painted by Jane Berlandina during her career were portraits, landscapes, genre and still lifes, created in a variety of media, including oil, watercolors and tempera. She was best known for her watercolors, which reflected the teachings of Dufy and featured jarring colors, which she juxtaposed for brilliant effect. Her use of color was said to presage the “push-pull” theories of color use that Hans Hofmann later applied to his work.

Career Highlights –

Berlandina was born in France, where she studied costume design and was a painting student of Raoul Dufy.
She immigrated to the United States to teach art and upon her marriage to architect Henry Howard, she moved to San Francisco.
She also worked as a set designer for the San Francisco Opera Company.
One of the artists commissioned by the Public Works of Art Project to create murals for Coit Tower’s inside walls: Her mural favored a reductive palette of reds, browns and chartreuse outlined in white, a highly fluid, modernist line, and the use of egg tempera rather than the fresco and oil techniques common in other works. Her mural, Home Life, differed in tone from the works produced by her fellow artists. The subject matter, too, was lighter, showing people living their lives in three rooms in a home of the period.

Raymond Bertrand

1909-1986

Theme/Style – Social Realism, California Modernism, landscapes

Media – Oils, murals, lithography

Artistic Focus – Raymond Bertrand’s works on canvas were predominantly landscapes, featuring scenes of California’s striking geography, as well as oil paintings of Arctic landscapes noted for their use of icy blues, grays and whites.

Career Highlights –

San Francisco native, Bertrand studied art at the California School of Fine Arts.
Participated as one of the artists chosen by the New Deal’s Public Works of Art Project to create frescoes. His fresco, a depiction of California’s meat packing industry, showed the industry at work, from the hanging and cleaning of pigs through the processing of hams and sausages. The composition of Bertrand’s fresco offered a hint of Cubist influence, setting it apart from some of the other works in the Tower.
Later in his career, Bertrand returned to the California School of Fine Arts as an instructor of lithography.

Trinidad Bonn

1914-1973

Theme/Style – Modernism, Art Deco, figurative

Media – Lithographs, pen and ink drawings

Artistic Focus – Little is known of this enigmatic figure that had visionary talent for evoking the Modernist sentiment in the viewer. Known as “Trin” in how he signed some of his artwork, Bonn created a simultaneously fantastic and possibly religious modernist work of art in The Magdalene. With a nod to the lovely and severe Marlene Dietrich, The Magdalene leaves the viewer breathless and in awe of this woman and the symbolism attached to her. Trin Bonn, though enigmatic, was an artist of merit.

Career Highlights –

Trinidad Francis Bonn was born in California in 1914.
Bonn worked as a draftsman for U.S. Grant & Son, Surveyors.
His work in pen and ink was included in a Federal Art Project Southern California exhibition in 1936.
Trinidad Bonn was a resident of Santa Barbara from 1934 until his demise in 1973.

Selection of Works by this Artist

No posts found.