Alfred Levitt |
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Alfred Levitt (August 15, 1894 - May 25, 2000), born Avraham Levitt in Starodub, Russian Empire, was a painter and an expert on prehistoric art who migrated to the United States in 1911 and was made a Chevalier of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the government of France for his studies of paleolithic cave paintings. [1]
Levitt was an anarchist [2] whose friends included radicals Emma Goldman and Jack London as well as artist Marcel Duchamp. [3] He and his wife were close friends with artist Margret Sutton, who lived with them till they died. [4]
Most of Levitt's works can be classified based on location. His scenes from Gloucester, MA, and Provance, France are the most famous of these location-related pieces. Twenty of his works are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. [5] He was also a MacDowell Colony Fellow in 1956. [6] His papers are now in the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art. [7]
Beatrice Wood was an American artist and studio potter involved in the Dada movement in the United States; she founded and edited The Blind Man and Rongwrong magazines in New York City with French artist Marcel Duchamp and writer Henri-Pierre Roché in 1917. She had earlier studied art and theater in Paris, and was working in New York as an actress. She later worked at sculpture and pottery. Wood was characterized as the "Mama of Dada".
George Catlin was an American lawyer, painter, author, and traveler, who specialized in portraits of Native Americans in the American frontier. Traveling to the American West five times during the 1830s, Catlin wrote about and painted portraits that depicted the life of the Plains Indians. His early work included engravings, drawn from nature, of sites along the route of the Erie Canal in New York State. Several of his renderings were published in one of the first printed books to use lithography, Cadwallader D. Colden's Memoir, Prepared at the Request of a Committee of the Common Council of the City of New York, and Presented to the Mayor of the City, at the Celebration of the Completion of the New York Canals, published in 1825, with early images of the City of Buffalo.
The 1913 Armory Show, also known as the International Exhibition of Modern Art, was organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. It was the first large exhibition of modern art in America, as well as one of the many exhibitions that have been held in the vast spaces of U.S. National Guard armories.
The Federal Art Project (1935–1943) was a New Deal program to fund the visual arts in the United States. Under national director Holger Cahill, it was one of five Federal Project Number One projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the largest of the New Deal art projects. It was created not as a cultural activity, but as a relief measure to employ artists and artisans to create murals, easel paintings, sculpture, graphic art, posters, photography, theatre scenic design, and arts and crafts. The WPA Federal Art Project established more than 100 community art centers throughout the country, researched and documented American design, commissioned a significant body of public art without restriction to content or subject matter, and sustained some 10,000 artists and craft workers during the Great Depression. According to American Heritage, “Something like 400,000 easel paintings, murals, prints, posters, and renderings were produced by WPA artists during the eight years of the project’s existence, virtually free of government pressure to control subject matter, interpretation, or style.”
Robert Crannell Minor (1839–1904), American artist, was born in New York City on April 30, 1839. His father, Israel Minor, was a merchant who made a large fortune in the pharmaceutical business. As a young man, Robert Minor worked as a bookkeeper in New York City but decided to study art in his early thirties. After studying in New York with painter Alfred Cornelius Howland, Minor went abroad in 1871 to continue his artistic education. He visited various galleries in England before traveling to Barbizon, France, where he studied under Diaz. He later studied in Antwerp under Joseph Van Luppen and Hippolyte Boulenger. In 1874, he was vice president of the Société artistique et littéraire of Antwerp.
John D. Graham was a Ukrainian–born American modernist and figurative painter, art collector, and a mentor of modernist artists in New York City.
Alice Pike Barney was an American painter. She was active in Washington, D.C., and worked to make Washington into a center of the arts. Her two daughters were the writer and salon hostess Natalie Clifford Barney and the Baháʼí writer Laura Clifford Barney.
Andrew Michael Dasburg was an American modernist painter and "one of America's leading early exponents of cubism".
Margaret Frances Bacon was an American artist, best known for her satirical caricatures.
Leon Kroll was an American painter and lithographer. A figurative artist described by Life magazine as "the dean of U.S. nude painters", he was also a landscape painter and also produced an exceptional body of still life compositions. His public art includes murals for the Department of Justice Building in Washington, D.C. He created his only mosaic for the chapel ceiling at Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial.
Prentiss Taylor was an American illustrator, lithographer, and painter. Born in Washington D.C., Taylor began his art studies at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, followed by painting classes under Charles Hawthorne in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and training at the Art Students League in New York City. In 1931, Taylor began studying lithography at the League. He became a member of one of the most important printmaking societies in America at that time, the Society of American Graphic Artists. Taylor interacted and collaborated with many writers and musicians in his time in New York in the late 1920s and early 30s. This was in the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance. Among his close friends and colleagues were Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten.
Ethel Edwards was an American painter, collage artist, illustrator, and muralist. She is known for her New Deal murals.
Worden Day (1912–1986) was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor. Day was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in both 1952 and 1961.
Paul J. Smith was an arts administrator, curator, and artist based in New York. Smith was professionally involved with the art, craft, and design fields since the early 1950s and was closely associated with the twentieth-century studio craft movement in the United States. He joined the staff of the American Craftsmen's Council in 1957, and in 1963 was appointed Director of the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, a position he held for the next 25 years. In September 1987, he assumed the title of director emeritus and continued to work as an independent curator and consultant for museums, arts organizations, and collectors.
The American Art Association was an art gallery and auction house with sales galleries, established in 1883.
Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones was an American painter who lived in New York City, Philadelphia, and Paris, France. She had a successful career as a painter at the turn of the century, exhibiting her works internationally and winning awards. She had a mental breakdown that caused a break in her career, and she returned to have a successful second career, creating modern watercolor paintings. She was a resident at three artist colonies, with notable artists, writers, and musicians. Sparhawk-Jones' works are in American art museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Museum of Modern Art.
Donald Lester Reitz was an American ceramic artist, recognized for inspiring a reemergence of salt glaze pottery in United States. He was a teacher of ceramic art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1962 until 1988. During this period, he adapted the pottery firing technique developed in the Middle Ages, which involved pouring salt into the pottery kiln during the firing stage. The method was taught in European ceramic art schools, but largely unknown in United States studio pottery.
Norman Carton was an American artist and educator known for abstract expressionist art. He was born in Ukraine, at the time part of the Russian Empire and moved to the United States in 1922 where he spent most of his adult life.
Theodore Brenson (1893–1959) was a Latvian-American abstract artist and educator.
Reginald Gammon (1921-2005) was an American artist and member of the African American artist's collective, Spiral.