Jp Calosse: 31 books

Picasso was born a Spaniard and, so they say, began to draw before he could speak. As an infant he was instinctively attracted to artist’s tools. In early childhood he could spend hours in happy concentration drawing spirals with a sense and meaning known only to himself. At other times, shunning...

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), who can be assigned to the school of classical modernism, was born in Amersfort, Netherlands. After studying in Amsterdam, he started his artist´s career in the impressionist style as a figure and landscape painter. His works from these years showed the influence of Vincent...

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (Fuentetodos, 1746 – Bordeaux, 1828) Goya est peut-être le peintre le plus accessible entre tous. Son art, comme sa vie, est un livre ouvert. Il ne cachait rien de ses contemporains, et leur offrait son art avec la même franchise. L'entrée dans son monde n'est pas...

Vincent van Gogh’s life and work are so intertwined that it is hardly possible to observe one without thinking of the other. Van Gogh has indeed become the incarnation of the suffering, misunderstood martyr of modern art, the emblem of the artist as an outsider. An article, published in 1890, gave...

Goya is perhaps the most approachable of painters. His art, like his life, is an open book. He concealed nothing from his contemporaries, and offered his art to them with the same frankness. The entrance to his world is not barricaded with technical difficulties. He proved that if a man has the capacity...

The eclectic art of which the Carracci family dreamed was realised by Rubens with the ease of genius. However, the problem was much more complicated for a man of the north, who wished to add to it a fusion of the Flemish and Latin spirits, of which the rather pedantic attempts of Romanism had illustrated...

Paul Gauguin was first a sailor, then a successful stockbroker in Paris. In 1874 he began to paint at weekends as a Sunday painter. Nine years later, after a stock-market crash, he felt confident of his ability to earn a living for his family by painting and he resigned his position and took up the...

Léonard de Vinci (Vinci, 1452 – Le Clos-Lucé, 1519) Léonard passa la première partie de sa vie à Florence, la seconde à Milan et ses trois dernières années en France. Le professeur de Léonard fut Verrocchio, d'abord orfèvre, puis peintre et sculpteur. En tant que peintre, Verrocchio était...

Johannes Vermeer (Delft, 1632 – 1675) Vermeer est le seul peintre correspondant à l'idée que l'on se fait habituellement de la placidité hollandaise. Peutêtre incarne-t-il un genre héroïque de placidité, car aucune de ses peintures ne laisse percer le moindre souffle d'inquiétude. Partout,...

Pablo Picasso (Málaga, 1881 – Mougins, 1973) Picasso naquit en Espagne et l’on dit même qu’il commença à dessiner avant de savoir parler. Enfant, il fut nstinctivement attiré par les instruments de l’artiste. Il pouvait passer des heures de joyeuse concentration à dessiner des spirales...

Whistler suddenly shot to fame like a meteor at a crucial moment in the history of art, a field in which he was a pioneer. Like the impressionists, with whom he sided, he wanted to impose his own ideas. Whistler’s work can be divided into four periods. The first may be called a period of research...

Paul Gauguin fue primero un marino y luego un exitoso corredor de bolsa en París. En 1874 comenzó a pintar los fines de semana, como pasatiempo. Nueve años después, tras la caída de la bolsa de valores, se sintió lo bastante confiado en su habilidad para ganarse la vida pintando, que renunció...

Kasimir Malevitch (Kiev, 1878 — Saint-Pétersbourg, 1935) était un peintre, un grand théoricien d’art, et surtout le père fondateur du suprématisme, style basé sur les formes géométriques et la recherche de l’abstraction pure. « Le suprématisme, écrivit-il, m’a conduit à découvrir...