Geoff Collins

Jack Perlmutter

Born January 23 1920, Perlmutter referred to himself as an abstract realist, although this appears to combine two seemingly irreconcilable artistic styles. His works were typically built around recognizable urban scenes, such as railroad tracks, urban crowds and buildings or bridges. He typically overlaid his work with busy linear forms, often in bright colors – […]

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Louis Ritman

Born January 6, 1889 in Ukraine, Louis Ritman was an American impressionist painter. He is best known for his paintings of women. He moved with his family to Chicago around 1900 and studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts before moving to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His favourite subject was the female

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Frances Gearhart

Born January 4 1869 in Illinois, Gearhart was an American printmaker and watercolorist. She was known for her boldly drawn and colored American landscapes, typically woodcut or linocut prints featuring California’s coasts and mountains. She worked in a traditional Japanese relief-printing method, being one of the first artists to bring this technique to Europe and

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Charles Hinman

Born Dec 29 1932 in New York State, Hinman is an artist and sometime professional baseball player. After his artistic training, he served in the army for two years and then taught mechanical drawing. From here he combined these skills and specialized his artistic talents, focusing on abstract representation of 3D shapes on canvas. Using

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Lucian Freud

Born 8 December 1922 in Berlin, Freud, grandson of Sigmund, became known as one of the foremost British portrait painters of the 20th Century. Early in his career, he was influenced by surrealism, but later, starker, paintings tended towards realism. Words like “sombre”, “unsettling” and “discomforting” are often used when describing his works. He worked

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Wassily Kandinsky

Born 4 Dec 1866 (according to the Julian calendar that the Russians were using at the time) in Moscow, Kandinsky claimed to be the first abstract painter, with this work, Composition V. It’s viewable in the MoMA in New York. His Blue Rider painting had already showed the direction he would later take, and he

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Georges Seurat

Born 2 Dec 1859 in Paris, Seurat is known as the founder of pointillism and used this trademark style to great effect. His paintings, Sunday Afternoon at Grand Jatte and Bathers are the best known of his works, but over 200 paintings are known to exist. Seurat took a scientific approach to his art, believing

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Rene Magritte

Born Nov 21 1898 in Lessines, Belgium, Magritte is well known as a thought-provoking surrealist, and in particular for his pipe that is not a pipe. This 1962 work is appropriate for our modern world and is entitled: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905.

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Charles Demuth

Born Nov 8 1883 in Lancaster PA, Demuth worked with fellow American artists to develop the concept of Precisionism in his mainly watercolour-centric style of painting. His works often show a range of forms in a quasi-Cubist, sharply-defined manner. Frequently occurring scenes include urban and rural landscapes, often consisting of industrial features such as bridges,

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