Robert Arneson - Funk Art

Robert Arneson   (September 4, 1930 – November 2, 1992)  was an American sculptor and ceramicist who is considered as the father of Funk Art, the anti-establishment movement that incorporated a mélange of found objects, autobiographical subjects, and humor. He was born on September 4, 1930 in Benicia, CA and studied at California College of the Arts after working as a cartoonist for a local newspaper. In 1962, he was appointed professor of ceramics at UC Davis where he worked for nearly three decades, establishing the ceramic sculpture program and thereby helping bring the previously maligned medium into the realm of fine art. He is perhaps best remembered for his Eggheads series, the bizarre sculptures of faces he installed around the UC Davis campus. He died on November 2, 1992 in Benicia, CA from liver cancer, and his works can be found in major institutions around the world including including the Chicago Art Institute, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. (artnet.com)

 

 

 

CoBrA - European avant-garden art Asger Jorn

"Asger Jorn was a Danish artist and co-founder of the avant-garde CoBrA group in 1948.  He is best known for his paintings, lithographs, and etchings, where he experimented with spontaneous line and semi-figurative representation—two fundamental aspects of the distinctive CoBrA visual language. In one of his best-known series called Défigurations, he overpainted inexpensive 19th century works that he collected at the flea markets, obscuring the classical images with his gestural style. Born on March 3, 1914 in Vejrum, Denmark, he studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen from 1937 to 1942, where he was influenced abstract art and critical thought. One of Jorn’s other major contributions came after he and his friend, the artist Guy Debord, founded the Situationist International in 1957. As a member of social avant-garde revolutionary movements, Jorn often combined writing with images as a means of popular communication. During this same time, he began working on his masterpiece painting, simply titled Stalingrad, which used layers of paint to depict the famous Russian battle. Jorn continued laboring on the painting until his death on May 1, 1973 in Aarhus, Denmark. The Silkeborg Museum of Art was renamed the Museum Jorn in 2010 in his honor."(artnet.com)