A – G – Page 3

Nicholas Brigante

1895-1989

Theme/Style – American Scene, Modernism, Abstraction

Media – Oils, watercolors, charcoal, india ink

Artistic Focus – Nicholas Brigante’s early landscapes reflected a Cubist influence, but as his style evolved over time he became one of Southern California’s earliest proponents of abstract and non-objective painting. Believing that watercolor painting was undervalued by the art community and the public at large, Brigante worked primarily in watercolor for the better part of his career. By producing major watercolors that were accepted as important contributions to American art, he helped cement the medium’s rightful place in the art arena.

Career Highlights –

Born in Padula, Italy, in 1895, Nicholas P. Brigante moved to Los Angeles as a toddler, and studied landscape painting under Hanson Puthuff, Rex Slinkard and Val Costello.
Following his service in World War I, Brigante returned home and joined a group of students, led by Stanton Macdonald Wright, in establishing a beachhead for Modernism in the Los Angeles area.
After holding his first exhibition at what is now the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1921, Brigante studied for a year in New York, and then returned to Los Angeles. He began a series of watercolors depicting the Southern California mountains, followed by a series on the life cycle of prehistoric man.
His earliest masterwork, the nine-panel, 21-foot-long American Scene-style Nature and Struggling, Imperious Man, also showed the artist’s interest in the Chinese aesthetic, with its use of classic Chinese painting techniques.
In addition to his stunning watercolor paintings of the late 1920s and 1930s created in a precisionist manner, some of Brigante’s most innovative and highly recognized work was done in the 1950s and 1960s, when he created several series of watercolors – including Burnt Mountain, Cloud Lands of Abstractions, Tide Pool, Space, and Rolling Waters. Many of his paintings during this time began as black-and-white compositions, some of which received coloration. This later work was nationally exhibited, bringing deserved attention to Southern California Modernists in the process.
Nicholas Brigante passed away in Los Angeles in 1989.

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.

Maxine Albro

1893-1966

Theme/Style – Social Realism, WPA themes, Spanish and Mexican motifs

Media – Oils, murals, sculpture, lithographs

Artistic Focus – Maxine Albro’s world travels inspired many of her landscapes and street scenes, and she often paid special homage to her tutelage by Mexican artist Diego Rivera in works featuring Spanish and Mexican themes.

Career Highlights –

Maxine Albro was born in Iowa in 1893, after which her family moved to Los Angeles, where she grew up.
After graduation from high school in 1920, Albro moved to San Francisco, where she worked as a commercial artist to finance studies at the Art Students’ League in New York and the Ecole de la Grande Chaumière in Paris.
After a year in New York and Europe, Albro returned to San Francisco and attended the California School of Fine Arts from 1923 to 1925.
During one of her many trips to Mexico, Albro studied mural painting with Diego Rivera.
In 1933 Maxine Albro was one of 26 artists commissioned by the Public Works of Art Project to paint frescoes and create one bas-relief in the newly constructed Coit Tower. Albro’s contribution was her 1934 striking and colorful mural depicting seasonal scenes of California’s agricultural abundance.
Following the destruction of the Diego Rivera mural in New York’s Rockefeller Center because it included a portrait of Lenin, Albro’s politically progressive views prompted her to present her fellow Coit Tower muralists with a resolution that called the destruction “an acute symptom of a growing reaction in the American culture which has threatened for years to strangle all creative effort…”
In addition to her murals, Albro produced many canvases, as well as frescoes painted on the walls of private homes in California. She also exhibited widely, at Delphi Studios in New York and the Berkeley Women’s City Club, as well as in San Francisco at the S.F. Art Association, Beaux Arts Club, Gump’s, and the Golden Gate International Exposition.
Albro married fellow Coit Tower muralist Parker Hall in 1938, and the couple settled in Carmel, California. Albro passed away in Los Angeles in 1966.

Oscar Vincent Galgiani

1903-1994

Theme/Style – Modernism, California Scene, Plein Air, figurative art, landscapes

Media – Oils, murals

Artistic Focus – Oscar Galgiani’s work often featured highly complex compositions and an adaptation of the pointillist technique. Although his figure painting skills were exemplary, Galgiani tended not to include figures in his work, focusing instead on the land and buildings of rural California. Galgiani also painted a large number of portraits during his career. His finest large-scale project consisted of two murals painted in the Stockton Court House.

Career Highlights –

Born in Stockton, California, Oscar Galgiani first studied art with an aunt during his teen years, before attending the California School of Fine Arts, where he studied with a number of major Northern California artists.
Galgiani chose not to settle in the Bay Area, returning home instead and working a variety of jobs to support himself as an artist. His loyalty to home later earned Galgiani the honorific “Pioneer Artist” of Stockton.
On sketching trips to California’s Mother Lode, Mono Lake and the north coast, Galgiani developed his plein air painting techniques, creating hundreds of rural landscapes.

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.

Hans Burkhardt

1904-1994

Theme/Style – Cubism, figurative art, still lifes, assemblage, Abstraction

Media – Oils, pastels, linocuts

Artistic Focus – Hans Burkhardt’s artwork went through several important changes – from early pastel nudes, to Arshile Gorky’s influence, and finally to his collage-style skull paintings of the 1980s. He carried Modernism to a new level through the means of fragmentation and extreme depth of composition, creating works which made statements about modern society and politics, particularly to express his antiwar beliefs.

Career Highlights –

Born in Basel, Switzerland, Hans Burkhardt arrived in New York City in 1924. There he became a student of Arshile Gorky at the Grand Central School of Arts, and was involved with a group of European émigrés who espoused Abstract Expressionism.
Relocating to Los Angeles in 1937, Burkhardt became a vital link between the avant-garde movements on both coasts, though he never returned permanently to New York. In 1939 Burkhardt held his first one-man show at the Stendhal Galleries in Los Angeles.
In 1957 a 10-year retrospective took place at the Pasadena Art Museum, and three years later Burkhardt began a long teaching career – first at the University of Southern California, then at the University of California, Los Angeles, and finally at California State University, Northridge from 1963 until his retirement.
In 1991 the City of Los Angeles honored him by proclaiming Hans Burkhardt Week, and he continued to live and work in Los Angeles until his demise in 1994.