James Irwin Billmyer (May 14, 1897 - July 9, 1989 [1] [2] ) was an American modern painter and illustrator.
James Billmyer was born in Union Bridge, Maryland [3] and received his BA from Western Maryland College. He continued his studies at the National Academy of Design, Beaux Arts, the Art Students’ League, Cooper Union, Maryland Institute, Baltimore Charcoal Club, and Baltimore Grand Central School of Art. [4] Some of his influential teachers included John Sloan, George Luks, Frank Vincent Dumond, George Bridgeman, William De Leftwüch Dodge, Dean Cornwell, and Harvey Dunn. [4] Billnyer was involved with the commercial art of periodicals and advertising, working as an illustrator for magazines such as “Cosmopolitan”, “Family Circle”, “House and Garden”, “Ladies Home Journal”, “Parents Magazine”, and Collier’s "Good Housekeeping”. In 1931, he became a member of the American Society of Illustrators. [4]
Billmyer travelled extensively in Latin and Central America, Canada, the Near East, and Europe, exploring the history and cultures of these locations, which ultimately impacts his work. In the 1950s and 1960s, he was a part of the 10th Street galleries scene. For twelve years, he studied plastics under the tutelage of Hans Hofmann in New York and Provincetown. Hofmann showed him the importance of objects moved out from the canvas and resolved back into it. This type of painting that deals with multiple rhythms, colors, and angles, offers viewers a higher-dimensional experience. Billmyer has created patterns in and out of divided planes that go in independent directions before receding back into the canvas, which is his unique adaption of Hofmann’s methods. Many of his patterns and forms appear in the film “The Hypercube: Projections and Slicing.” Billmyer has taught and lectured at the New York School of Interior Design, The Hudson River School, Spellman College, Miami Art Center, the Naskeay School, Maine, and his own New York School. [5]
Abstract expressionism in the United States emerged as a distinct art movement in the immediate aftermath of World War II and gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s, a shift from the American social realism of the 1930s influenced by the Great Depression and Mexican muralists. The term was first applied to American art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates. Key figures in the New York School, which was the epicenter of this movement, included such artists as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Norman Lewis, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell and Theodoros Stamos among others.
Robert Mills was a South Carolina architect and cartographer known for designing both the first Washington Monument, located in Baltimore, Maryland, as well as the better known monument to the first president in the nation's capital, Washington, DC. He is sometimes said to be the first native-born American to be professionally trained as an architect. Charles Bulfinch of Boston perhaps has a clearer claim to this honor.
The flag of the state of Maryland is the 17th-century heraldic banner of arms of Cecil, 2nd Baron Baltimore. It consists of the arms of his father George, 1st Baron Baltimore (1579–1632), quartered with those of his grandmother, heiress of the Crossland family. The flag was officially adopted by the General Assembly of Maryland in 1904.
Color field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to abstract expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering abstract expressionists. Color field is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favor of an overall consistency of form and process. In color field painting "color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself."
Samuel Yellin (1884–1940), was an American master blacksmith, and metal designer.
John Frederick Kensett was an American landscape painter and engraver born in Cheshire, Connecticut. He was a member of the second generation of the Hudson River School of artists. Kensett's signature works are landscape paintings of New England and New York State, whose clear light and serene surfaces celebrate transcendental qualities of nature, and are associated with Luminism. Kensett's early work owed much to the influence of Thomas Cole, but was from the outset distinguished by a preference for cooler colors and an interest in less dramatic topography, favoring restraint in both palette and composition. The work of Kensett's maturity features tranquil scenery depicted with a spare geometry, culminating in series of paintings in which coastal promontories are balanced against glass-smooth water. He was a founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) is a private art and design college in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1826 as the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts, it is regarded as one of the oldest art colleges in the United States.
Hans Hofmann was a German-born American painter, renowned as both an artist and teacher. His career spanned two generations and two continents, and is considered to have both preceded and influenced Abstract Expressionism. Born and educated near Munich, he was active in the early twentieth-century European avant-garde and brought a deep understanding and synthesis of Symbolism, Neo-impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism when he emigrated to the United States in 1932. Hofmann's painting is characterized by its rigorous concern with pictorial structure and unity, spatial illusionism, and use of bold color for expressive means. The influential critic Clement Greenberg considered Hofmann's first New York solo show at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century in 1944 as a breakthrough in painterly versus geometric abstraction that heralded abstract expressionism. In the decade that followed, Hofmann's recognition grew through numerous exhibitions, notably at the Kootz Gallery, culminating in major retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1957) and Museum of Modern Art (1963), which traveled to venues throughout the United States, South America, and Europe. His works are in the permanent collections of major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, National Gallery of Art, and Art Institute of Chicago.
William James Glackens was an American realist painter and one of the founders of the Ashcan School, which rejected the formal boundaries of artistic beauty laid down by the conservative National Academy of Design. He is also known for his work in helping Albert C. Barnes to acquire the European paintings that form the nucleus of the famed Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. His dark-hued, vibrantly painted street scenes and depictions of daily life in pre-WW I New York and Paris first established his reputation as a major artist. His later work was brighter in tone and showed the strong influence of Renoir. During much of his career as a painter, Glackens also worked as an illustrator for newspapers and magazines in Philadelphia and New York City.
Frederick Dielman was a German-American portrait and figure painter.
James Royer Flora was an American artist best known for his distinctive and idiosyncratic album cover art for RCA Victor and Columbia Records during the 1940s and 1950s. He was also a prolific commercial illustrator from the 1940s to the 1970s and the author/illustrator of 17 popular children's books. He was a fine artist as well, who created hundreds of paintings, drawings, etchings and sketches over his 84-year life.
Jane Schenthal Frank was an American multidisciplinary artist, known as a painter, sculptor, mixed media artist, illustrator, and textile artist. Her landscape-like, mixed-media abstract paintings are included in public collections, including those of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She studied with artists, Hans Hofmann and Norman Carlberg.
J. Abbott Miller or Abbott Miller is an American graphic designer and writer, and a partner at Pentagram, which he joined in 1999.
Dean Cornwell was a left-handed American illustrator and muralist. His oil paintings were frequently featured in popular magazines and books as literary illustrations, advertisements, and posters promoting the war effort. Throughout the first half of the 20th century he was a dominant presence in American illustration. At the peak of his popularity he was nicknamed the "Dean of Illustrators".
Earl Hofmann, painter, sculptor, educator. Hofmann was one of Baltimore's realist artists, he was a significant part of the Baltimore art scene of the mid-20th century. Hofmann studied with and assisted Jacques Maroger at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Paul Gordon Georges was an American painter. He painted large-scale figurative allegories and numerous self-portraits.
Alfred Jacob Miller was an American artist best known for his paintings of trappers and Native Americans in the fur trade of the western United States. He also painted numerous portraits and genre paintings in and around Baltimore during the mid-nineteenth century.
Julian Allen (1942–1998) was a British-American illustrator. He covered various "secret history" stories, including the Watergate scandal and the Yom Kippur War. His illustrations appeared in numerous publications, including Queen, NOVA, Esquire, The Observer, Sports Illustrated, The New Yorker, Time, and The New York Times.
Cecile Gray Bazelon was an American painter living in New York City. Bazelon was best known for her perspectives of unpeopled New York cityscapes, and her depictions of interior spaces framed in geometric patterns.
James Edmund Allen was an American illustrator, printmaker, and painter. His works include a significant body of lithographs and etchings showing steelworkers, pipe workers, and other aspects of American industrial life, carefully composed compositions depicting "the daily heroism of America's industrial workers." Allen was also a prolific illustrator who, working mostly in oil, contributed numerous illustrations to stories in popular magazines of the day. He has been misidentified in many references as James Edward Allen.