Ellen Lanyon

Ellen Lanyon (December 21, 1926 – October 7, 2013) was a painter and printmaker from Chicago, Illinois. She was educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Iowa and the Courtauld Institute. Her works are in the permanent collections of many major American museums.
Lanyon was born in Chicago to Howard and Ellen Lanyon. As a child she visited the "Midget Village" at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933, a rather surreal experience that had a strong impression on her as an artist.She attended Hyde Park High School and during this time held a part-time job as an artist in the foundry where her father worked, drawing machine parts. She credits her careful rendering of line to this experience. In 1948, she completed her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. That same year she married classmate and fellow artist Roland Ginzel. Lanyon subsequently competed her MFA at the University of Iowa in 1950 and did postgraduate work at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, UK while on a Fulbright Fellowship

 Lanyon's art has been characterized as Surrealist or Magical Realist. She sometimes uses the word "dreamscape" to describe her works. Lanyon's early works (late 1950s to the 1960s) included portraits of relatives and the rooms they inhabited. Later she focused more on depicting objects from her collection of curios, many of which were inherited from relatives, such as a tobacco jar which once belonged to her grandfather. The jar, which is shaped like a toad wearing a red waistcoat, appears in several of her works, as do many other reptiles, insects, and birds. In 1976, Lanyon received a commission from the Department of the Interior to work in the Everglades, which, she says "awakened  to the environmental crisis" and led to more art with a heavy focus on flora and fauna.She has had over seventy-five solo exhibitions, eleven museum exhibitions including three major traveling retrospectives.Wikipedia

 

Charles Garabedian

Charles Garabedian (December 29, 1923 – February 11, 2016) was an American Armenian artist known for his imaginative paintings and drawings rich in references to Greek and Chinese symbolism. His detailed artwork reveals a deeply personal world that explores the relationship between painting and sculpture.
Garabedian was born in Detroit, Michigan, to Armenian immigrants who had come to the U.S. to escape the Armenian Genocide. Garabedian's mother died when he was two and his father was unable to take care of the three children. Garabedian lived in an orphanage until age nine, when he, his father, and siblings moved to Los Angeles, California.

From 1942-1945, Garabedian served as a staff sergeant in the United States Air Force and was an aerial gunner in the European theater during World War II. Under the auspices of the G.I. Bill, Garabedian studied literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 1947 to 1948.[5] He then went on to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he earned a bachelor's degree in history in 1950.He received his master's degree in 1961 at the University of California Los Angeles. He did not, however, become an artist until later in his life.

When in his forties, Garabedian began to explore the relationships between painting and drawing. His fascination with China is reflected in many of his pieces incorporating dragons and ornate grillwork and pattern. Although his most prolific period was in the late 1960s, later in his life he still continued to paint. The first solo exhibition of his work was held at the Ceeje gallery in Los Angeles (1963) and subsequent one man shows followed at the Fine Arts Gallery at California State University, Northridge (1974), and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1976). His group exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial Exhibition: Contemporary American Art, New York (1975) and others. In 1979, he was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts.[6] In 2011, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art hosted a retrospective of Garabedian's work.He died on February 11, 2016 at the age of 92.Wikipedia

Robert Hodgins

Robert Hodgins (27 June 1920 – 15 March 2010) was an English painter and printmaker.Robert Hodgins was born in Dulwich, London, on 27 June 1920, and immigrated to South Africa in 1938.He enlisted with the Union Defence Force in 1940, and served in Kenya and Egypt.In 1944 he returned to England, and studied art and education at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he received an arts and crafts certificate in 1951 and a National Diploma of Design in painting in 1953.

He returned to South Africa, where he taught at the Pretoria Technical College School of Art from 1954. From 1962 he was a journalist and critic for Newscheck magazine. He lectured in painting at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, from 1966 to 1983.Hodgins worked using a variety of paint media, including oils, acrylic paint and tempera. he had been exhibiting since the 1950s but did not come to wider attention until the early 1980s. In 1980 and 1981 he had produced a series of paintings based on Ubu, the main character in the play Ubu Roi, who became a recurring subject of his art.

 

In 1983, he retired to paint full-time. He partook in many solo and group exhibitions in South Africa and abroad. His work can be seen in many galleries, corporate and public collections, including Anglo American, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, the Sandton Art Gallery, the Pretoria Art Museum, the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, University of South Africa (UNISA), the University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries, and the William Humphreys Art Gallery in Kimberley.Robert Hodgins died on 15 March 2010,in Johannesburg, after a bout with lung cancer at the age of 89.Wikipedia,

 

German expressionism Max Pechstein

Hermann Max Pechstein (December 31, 1881 – June 29, 1955) was a German expressionist painter and printmaker, and a member of the Die Brücke group.
Pechstein was born in Zwickau, the son of a craftsman who worked in a textile mill..Early contact with the art of Vincent van Gogh stimulated Pechstein's development toward expressionism. After studying art first at the School of Applied Arts and then at the Royal Art Academy in Dresden, Pechstein met Erich Heckel and joined the art group Die Brücke in 1906. He was the only member to have formal art training. Later in Berlin, he helped to found the Neue Sezession and gained recognition for his decorative and colorful paintings that were lent from the ideas of Van Gogh, Matisse, and the Fauves. His paintings eventually became more primitivist, incorporating thick black lines and angular figures.

From in 1933, Pechstein was vilified by the Nazis because of his art. A total of 326 of his paintings were removed from German museums. Sixteen of his works were displayed in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition of 1937. During this time, Pechstein went into seclusion in rural Pomerania.
He was a prolific printmaker, producing 421 lithographs, 315 woodcuts and linocuts, and 165 intaglio prints, mostly etchings.
Pechstein was a professor at the Berlin Academy for ten years before his dismissal by the Nazis in 1933. He was reinstated in 1945, and subsequently won numerous titles and awards for his work.
He died in West Berlin. He is buried on the Evangelischer Friedhof Alt-Schmargendorf in Berlin.Wikipedia