Artfixdaily Blog Network

It is tempting for anyone who creates art to believe that it would be easier somewhere else.  Where less people pursue art. Where every artistic creation has not already been done. Where everything and anything about art is not a click away. After reading John Singleton Copley by James Thomas Flexner, I could not help but wonder what would have been of the great portraitist of the eighteenth century if he hadn’t been born in the Boston colony and then lived in London? Would he have been as successful or would it have been easier for him to succeed?  Although the book published by ...

Raoul and Jean Dufy, brothers and painters, share this exhibit, part of a French initiative that studies the artistic relationships among family members. Raoul Dufy (1877-1953), the older and the more famous of the two brothers, introduced Jean (1888-1964) to art. Starting in 1920, the two brothers maintained a close artistic relationship, sharing their cultural explorations while pursuing parallel careers with little in common. The exception is La Fee Electricité in 1937. Ironically, this art piece realized together marks also their rupture. They then  followed their own artistic ...

For four months, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris offers to rediscover Kees Van Dongen, the complex Dutch artist who became in the 1920s an essential figure of the Fauvism, a caricaturist of the times and a Parisian socialite, but was later boycotted in France due to his highly controversial association with the German Reich. Kees Van Dongen was born in 1877, near Rotterdam, in a wealthy family. He enters the Royal Academy for the Arts at the age of sixteen. For the following years, he study drawing. His artwork will represent the world of sailors and prostitutes, ...

She wanted to live a bohemian life when only men were allowed to. She posed as a model for most Montmartre painters in the early 20th century. Erik Satie and Toulouse-Lautrec were her lovers among several others. She was the mother of Maurice Utrillo. His name is familiar to anyone interested in art when hers is still unknown to many. Who was this woman who painted like a man but is often only remembered in association with the successful men she met?Marie-Clémentine Valadon, a woman Renoir called Maria and Toulouse-Lautrec Suzanne, became the painter Suzanne Valadon.Born out of ...

  It is not every day that a contemporary French artist sets a world auction record.  This is however what happened at Christie’s last week when the painting L’Année Dernière à Capri from Martial Raysse was sold for more than four million pounds.  Painted in 1962, L’Année Dernière à Capri or Last Year in Capri is representative of the female portraits Raysse was painting in the 60’s. Acidulated colors, women in bathing suits inspired from the fashion magazines, and the addition of the neon, contribute to a unique portraying of a consumerist society.  Martial Raysse was born in the south of ...