Giuseppe Arcimboldo | Mannerist painter

The bizarre works of Giuseppe Arcimboldo🎨, especially his multiple images, were rediscovered in the early 20th century by Surrealist artists🎨 like Salvador Dali🎨.

Arcimboldo🎨 was born in Milan in 1527, the son of Biagio, a painter who did work for the office of the Fabbrica in the Duomo. Arcimboldo was commissioned to do stained glass window designs beginning in 1549, including the Stories of St. Catherine of Alexandria vitrage at the Duomo.
In 1556 he worked with Giuseppe Meda on frescoes for the Cathedral of Monza.
In 1558, he drew the cartoon for a large tapestry of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, which still hangs in the Como Cathedral today.

Wassily Kandinsky | Abstract / Expressionist painter

Wassily Kandinsky🎨 / Василий Кандинский (born December 4 [December 16, New Style], 1866, Moscow, Russia-died December 13, 1944, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France), Russian-born artist, one of the first creators of pure Abstraction in modern painting.

After successful avant-garde exhibitions, he founded the influential Munich group Der Blaue Reiter ("The Blue Rider"; 1911-14) and began completely abstract painting🎨.

His forms evolved from fluid and organic to geometric and, finally, to pictographic (e.g., Tempered Élan, 1944).

• Early years

Kandinsky’s mother was a Muscovite, one of his great-grandmothers a Mongolian princess, and his father a native of Kyakhta, a Siberian town near the Chinese border; the boy thus grew up with a cultural heritage that was partly European and partly Asian.
His family was genteel, well-to-do, and fond of travel; while still a child he became familiar with Venice, Rome, Florence, the Caucasus, and the Crimean Peninsula.
At Odessa, where his parents settled in 1871, he completed his secondary schooling and became an amateur performer on the piano and the cello. He also became an amateur painter, and he later recalled, as a sort of first impulse toward abstraction, an adolescent conviction that each colour had a mysterious life of its own.

Peter Demetz, 1969 | Figurative wood sculptor

Peter Demetz was born in Bolzano-Italy and lives and works in Ortisei (BZ).

After completing his studies at the Ortisei Art Institute, Peter Demetz began an apprenticeship under Maestro Heinrich Demetz and earned his Master's Degree in sculpture.

In the years since, he has participated in a number of exhibitions in Italy and abroad, including Austria, Germany, the United States, Belgium, and Turkey.

From 1999-2001, Demetz studied education, teaching, and the psychology of learning and development, and has been teaching courses and seminars on wood carving since 2001.

From 2002-2006, he was Head Teacher for the Art Sculpture Course at Germany's Lignea University of Zwickau, as well as the Schneeberg's Faculty of Applied Arts and the Daetz-Centrum in Lichtenstein.

Claude Monet | Promenades / Le passeggiate

With Manet's🎨 assistance, Monet🎨 found lodging in suburban Argenteuil in late 1871, a move that initiated one of the most fertile phases of his career.

Impressionism evolved in the late 1860s from a desire to create full-scale, multi-figure depictions of ordinary people in casual outdoor situations. At its purest, impressionism was attuned to landscape painting, a subject Monet favored.

In Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son, his skill as a figure painter is equally evident. Contrary to the artificial conventions of academic portraiture, Monet delineated the features of his sitters as freely as their surroundings.

Claude Monet🎨 | The Promenade, Woman with a Parasol, 1875

Love Letter from Auguste Rodin to Camille Claudel, 1886

"My ferocious friend".... "Mia feroce amica"...

Thus begins Rodin’s desperate cry of love to Camille Claudel in the early years of their relationship.

Rodin was soon captivated by this pupil who became his assistant, mistress and muse, while Claudel outwardly remained in complete control of her feelings.

Consumed and tormented by an obsessive love, he implores her - “on his knees” - to ease his suffering from beginning to end of this letter, written in a muddled style, with erroneous syntax and imperfect spelling.