Lyonel Charles Feininger was a German-American painter, and a leading exponent of Expressionism. He also worked as a caricaturist and comic strip artist. He was born and grew up in New York City, traveling to Germany at 16 to study and perfect his art. He started his career as a cartoonist in 1894 and met with much success in this area. He was also a commercial caricaturist for 20 years for magazines and newspapers in the USA and Germany. At the age of 36, he started to work as a fine artist. He also produced a large body of photographic works between 1928 and the mid 1950s, but he kept these primarily within his circle of friends. He was also a pianist and composer, with several piano compositions and fugues for organ extant.
Events from the year 1966 in art.
The Terra Museum of American Art was an art museum founded by Chicago businessman Daniel J. Terra in Evanston, Illinois in 1980. The museum was relocated to Chicago, Illinois in 1987. During its tenure, the museum presented more than 200 exhibitions on American art and provided related programs and events for children, teachers, families, general adult audiences, and scholars. The museum closed on October 31, 2004 after 24 years of operation.
Norris Embry was an American artist associated with Neo-Expressionism, Art Brut and Outsider Art.
Sandra Binion is a Swedish-American artist based in Chicago whose artistic practice includes fine-art exhibitions, multimedia installations involving, and performance art. Her work has been performed and exhibited at museums, galleries, theaters, and festivals in the US, Europe, and Japan. Some of the venues that have featured her work include the Evanston Art Center, Link's Hall, Kunstraum (Stuttgart), The Goodman Theatre, and Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art.
Dale Threlkeld is an artist who has exhibited his oil paintings in galleries in New York City as well as competitions throughout the United States.
Irving Kriesberg was an American painter, sculptor, educator, author, and filmmaker, whose work combined elements of Abstract Expressionism with representational human, animal, and humanoid forms. Because Kriesberg blended formalist elements with figurative forms he is often considered to be a Figurative Expressionist.
Harry S. Mintz was a Polish-American painter active in Chicago and Los Angeles.
Carol Diehl is an American artist, art critic and poet. In addition to her writing, most recently appearing in her blog Art Vent, she is best known for her paintings, which have often documented daily life in a manner described as diaristic, even compulsive, using dense, painterly, often indecipherable words, numbers and symbols in grid or geometric frameworks. Diehl has also been a prolific art critic, having contributed features and reviews to numerous periodicals, including Art in America, ARTnews, and Art + Auction, as well as to books and artist catalogues. In the 1990s, she became active in New York's performance poetry scene. Diehl lives in New York City and southwestern Massachusetts. She has two sons, Matt Diehl and Adam Diehl.
Corey Postiglione is an American artist, art critic and educator. He is a member of the American Abstract Artists in New York, and known for precise, often minimalist work that "both spans and explores the collective passage from modernism to postmodernism" in contemporary art practice and theory. New Art Examiner co-founder Jane Allen, writing in 1976, described him as "an important influence on the development of contemporary Chicago abstraction." In 2008, Chicago Tribuneart critic Alan G. Artner wrote "Postiglione has created a strong, consistent body of work that developed in cycles, now edging closer to representation, now moving further away, but remaining rigorous in approach to form as well as seductive in markmaking and color."
Fern Shaffer is an American painter, performance artist, lecturer and environmental advocate. Her work arose in conjunction with an emerging Ecofeminism movement that brought together environmentalism, feminist values and spirituality to address shared concern for the Earth and all forms of life. She first gained widespread recognition for a four-part, shamanistic performance cycle, created in collaboration with photographer Othello Anderson in 1985. Writer and critic Suzi Gablik praised their work for its rejection of the technocratic, rationalizing mindset of modernity, in favor of communion with magic, the mysterious and primordial, and the soul. Gablik featured Shaffer's Winter Solstice (1985) as the cover art for her influential book, The Reenchantment of Art, and wrote that the ritual opened "a lost sense of oneness with nature and an acute awareness of ecosystem" that offered "a possible basis for reharmonizing our out-of-balance relationship with nature."
Don Baum was an American curator, artist and educator, most known as a key impresario and promoter of the Chicago Imagists, a group of artists that had an enduring impact on American art in the later twentieth century. Described by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA) as "an indispensable curator of the Chicago school," Baum was known for lively and irreverent exhibitions that offered fresh perspectives combining elements of Surrealism and Pop and that broke down barriers between schooled and untrained, or so-called outsider artists. From 1956 to 1972, Baum was exhibitions director at Chicago's Hyde Park Art Center. It was there, in the 1960s, that he became involved with a group of young artists he exhibited as "Hairy Who" that later expanded to become the Chicago Imagists. That group included Ed Paschke, Jim Nutt, Roger Brown, Gladys Nilsson, and Karl Wirsum. Baum mounted two major shows at the MCA that featured the emerging artists in their first museum exhibitions: "Don Baum Sez: 'Chicago Needs Famous Artists'" (1969) and "Made in Chicago" (1973), which shaped a vision of Chicago's art world as a place of meticulous craftsmanship and vernacular inspiration.
Arthur Lerner is an American artist, known for his atmospheric figurative paintings and drawings, landscapes, and still lifes. He is sometimes described as a realist, but most critics observe that his work is more subjective than descriptive or literal. Associated with Chicago's influential "Monster Roster" artists early in his career, he shared their enthusiasm for expressive figuration, fantasy and mythology, and their existential outlook, but diverged increasingly in his classical formal concerns and more detached temperament. Critics frequently note in Lerner's art a sense of light that evokes Impressionism, delicate color and modelling that "flirts with dematerialization," and the draftsmanship that serves as a foundation for all of his work. The Chicago Tribune's Alan Artner lamented Lerner's comparative lack of recognition in relation to the Chicago Imagists as the fate of "an aesthete in a town dominated by tenpenny fantasts." Lerner's work has been extensively covered in publications, featured in books such as Monster Roster: Existential Art in Postwar Chicago, and acquired by public and private collections, including those of the Smithsonian Institution, Art Institute of Chicago, Smart Museum of Art, and Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, among many.
Jan Cicero Gallery was a contemporary art gallery founded and directed by Jan Cicero, which operated from 1974 to 2003, with locations in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois and Telluride, Colorado. The gallery was noted for its early, exclusive focus on Chicago abstract artists at a time when they were largely neglected, its role in introducing Native American artists to mainstream art venues beyond the Southwest, and its showcasing of late-career and young women artists. The gallery focused on painting, and to a lesser degree, works on paper, often running counter to the city's prevailing art currents. It was also notable as a pioneer of two burgeoning Chicago gallery districts, the West Hubbard Street alternative corridor of the 1970s, and the River North district in the 1980s.
Leopold Segedin is a Chicago-based, American artist and educator. He is best known as an urban figurative painter, who portrays humanist scenes of life in mid-20th century Chicago. He has exhibited for over 70 years, including retrospectives at the Chicago Cultural Center, University Club of Chicago, University of Illinois, and Northeastern Illinois University, and major group shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, Illinois State Museum and Des Moines Art Center, among others. His art has received awards from the Art Institute of Chicago, Terry Art Institute, Corcoran Gallery of Art, and American Jewish Arts Club. Segedin was one of Art in America’s 1956 "New Talent in the U.S.A." artists and has been featured in The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Daily News and Chicago Sun-Times, among many publications. Chicago Tribune critic Alan Artner characterized Segedin's work as a "distinguished example" of magic realism; in visual terms, critics have often noted his vivid color, dynamic illusionist space, and rendering of light and surfaces that betray the passage of time.
Sam Himmelfarb was a Russian Empire-born, American artist and commercial exhibit designer, known for his modernist-influenced paintings of everyday people and urban scenes. He also designed the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired Samuel and Eleanor Himmelfarb Home and Studio in Winfield, Illinois, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Himmelfarb studied art at the Art Students League and National Academy of Design in New York and at the Wisconsin School of Fine and Applied Arts. He initially painted in a realist style influenced by the Ashcan School, which gave way to more modernist, increasingly abstract styles. His paintings appeared in exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), Terra Museum of American Art, Milwaukee Art Institute, and Arts Club of Chicago, and in circulating shows from the American Federation of Arts, among other venues. He received awards from the AIC, Wisconsin State Fair and Milwaukee Art Museum, and his work belongs to the collection of the latter, and those of the Illinois State Museum, Block Museum, and Arkansas Art Center, among others. Himmelfarb was married to the artist and educator, Eleanor Himmelfarb (1910-2009); their son, John Himmelfarb, and grandchild, Serena Aurora Day Himmelfarb, are also artists.
Eleanor Gorecki Himmelfarb was an American artist, teacher and conservationist known for semi-abstract paintings that reference the landscape and human figure, and for her work protecting woodlands in DuPage County, Illinois. She studied art history and design at the University of Chicago, natural history at the Morton Arboretum, and fine art at the Art Institute of Chicago and University of Illinois at Chicago. Critics characterize Himmelfarb as a modernist, who explored her subjects metaphorically through complex rhythmic compositions, stylized forms, and subtle coloration. Her work was featured in solo shows at the Evanston Art Center (retrospective), University Club of Chicago and Sioux City Art Center, and group exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Cultural Center, and Renaissance Society. Himmelfarb taught painting and design for four decades at several institutions, including over 30 years at the DuPage Art League. She was married to the painter, Sam Himmelfarb, and helped him design their house, the Samuel and Eleanor Himmelfarb Home and Studio in Winfield, Illinois, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Their son, John Himmelfarb, and grandchild, Serena Aurora, are also artists. Himmelfarb died at age 98 in Winfield in 2009.
Paul Wieghardt (1897–1969) was a German-born American artist and professor, he is known for his paintings. He taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT).
Fay Gunderson Peck was an American Expressionist artist, known for her oil painting and printmaking.
Thomas Harry Kapsalis was a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a leading American abstract painter and sculptor.
