High-Quality Endeavor

Sad to hear that Ellsworth Kelly, one of America’s great 20th-century abstract artists, who in the years after World War II shaped a distinctive style of American painting by combining the solid shapes and brilliant colors of European abstraction with forms distilled from everyday life, died on Sunday at his home in Spencertown, N.Y. He was 92.

Read more at nytimes.com

Henri Matisse

Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence, France

Easter and the Totem, Jackson Pollock, 1953, MoMA: Painting and Sculpture

Gift of Lee Krasner in memory of Jackson Pollock Size: 6’ 10 1/8" x 58" (208.6 x 147.3 cm) Medium: Oil on canvas

Seated Girl (Fränzi Fehrmann), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 1910 (altered 1920), Minneapolis Institute of Art: Paintings

Seated girl. Franzi Fehrmann. German Expressionism. Figure shown nearly full length, filling almost all of the picture space, seated on vivid blue divan dressed in bright red dress with yellow trim and black polka dots on green sleeves. Small nude figure at left a frequent motif in Kirchner’s art. Strong color utilized, applied in broad areas with an eye to contrast and balance. Harsh contour lines add a decorative element to the composition. These strong contour lines reveal the influence of the woodcutting technique which Kirchner also practiced to great effect. Composition is simplified and economy of line and form reveal influence of Japanese art and primitive African sculpture. No signature - checked 8-21-96. In the early decades of twentieth-century Germany, a group of avant-garde artists known as Die Brücke (The Bridge, 1905-13), emerged. Hoping their work would serve as a bridge to the art of the future, they developed a radical new style of painting called Expressionism. This composition, with its deliberate brushstrokes and forceful use of outline, articulates both Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s and Die Brücke’s intent to reveal raw emotion without apologies. Lina Franziska “Franzi” Fehrmann (1900-1950), the adolescent model for Seated Girl, met Kirchner in 1910. She and her siblings regularly posed for artists in the Die Brücke group. Size: 31 ¾ x 35 7/8 in. (80.6 x 91.1 cm) (canvas) 40 ¾ x 45 x 2 3/16 in. (103.51 x 114.3 x 5.56 cm) (outer frame) Medium: Oil on canvas

The essential of painting is that ‘something’, that 'ethereal glue,’ that 'intermediary product’ which the artist exudes with all his creative being and which he has the power to place, to encrust, to impregnate into the pictorial matter of the painting. —Yves Klein 

French artist Yves Klein was born today, April 28, 1928 in Nice, France. 

Klein’s work is currently on view at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London: In Search of the Absolute

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Arturo Herrera, Venezuelan, born 1959  Untitled, 1998

Mixed media collage on paper