OK. We are back to our regularly scheduled art installment. The next artist in the made-it-big-in-the-80's collection is a woman named Nancy Graves.
She was born in 1939 in Pittsfield, MA. She attended both Vassar and Yale. She was a sculptor, painter, and print maker. Her work has been shown in some of the more high profile galleries in the US including the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Nancy Graves was the first woman to receive a solo retrospective at The Whitney Museum.
In her younger years she was greatly interested in art, anthropology and nature. These interests were fostered by her father who was an accountant at a local museum. She graduated from Vassar with a degree in English Literature and went on to Yale for her bachelor's and master's degrees. Around this time she was awarded a Fulbright to paint in Paris. She later moved on to live in Florence, Italy. Graves made her life a trip around the world going to Morocco, Germany, Canada, India, Nepal, Kasmir, Egypt, Peru, China, and Australia.
She first moved onto the art scene in the 60's and 70's in NYC with her life size sculptures of camels. Graves work has strong ties to Calder and David Smith whom she admired. She worked with parts that were welded together as well as with found objects.
Her most notable collection are her camels. They were first displayed at The Whitney Museum and were made of wax, burlap, fiberglass and animal skin that was painted with acrylics and oils. Camels were her obsession and later in her career she went on to create deconstructed skeletons of camels as well as illustrations.
In the 1980's she worked with polychrome sculptures and is was from here that she really continued working in unorthodox materials and found objects.
She made aerial landscapes based on maps and photos.
Nancy Graves was diagnosed in May 1995 with ovarian cancer and died that same year in October at the age of 55.
John Says:
This is Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985)
Jean was a French painter and
sculpture. Until recently I didn’t know
much about him. I still don’t. I’d see a painting of his from time to
time. I’d look at it for a bit. Then I’d move on. Lately I’ve been spending a good amount of
time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York, the loudest city in
the world. They have a few of Dubuffet’s
paintings, and I’ve managed to spend a bit more time with them. And I think I kind of like the guy. Hell, I even have one of his painting as my
background screen on the ol’ computer at work.
Dubuffet was born into a wealthy
wine merchant family, which should’ve made me hate him upon sight. But I didn’t know he was a little rich kid
until I’d already become hooked on some of his art. He was born in Le Havre and moved to Paris in
1918 to study art. For almost thirty
years after Dubuffet mixed his passion for art along with going into the wine
business like his mom and pop. By 1942
Dubuffet dedicated himself solely to art.
He did paintings mostly of nude women and of common street scenes (at
least this is what my pals at Wikipedia told me).
In 1945 things got interesting for
Jean Dubuffet. He came across an art
exhibit by one Jean Fautrier. According
to Dubuffet Fautrier’s work represented meaningful art that expressed the pure
depth of humanity. As a result Dubuffet
altered the way he painted. He started
to thicken the oil on his canvases and added texture to his painting by adding
sand or gravel.
Dubuffet was also
influenced by Hans Prinzhorn’s book Artistry of the Mentally Ill. Dubuffet was inspired by the
non-professional/non-aesthetic idea behind the work in the book. Pulling in this influence and adding it to the
work he’d been doing since coming across Fautrier, Dubuffet coined the term “art
brut” to describe the sort of raw, animalistic, juvenile paintings that he was
churning out
And by the 1960’s Dubuffet was
churning out sculpture as well.
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