Francesco Clemente was born in Naples, Italy, in 1952. After an early academic background in classical languages and literature, he briefly enrolled as an architecture student at the University of Rome, in 1970. Throughout the 1970s he exhibited drawings, altered photographs and conceptual works across Europe. Since 1973 he has frequently resided and worked in India. In 1981 Clemente moved to New York City, where he currently lives with his wife and children. The artist has often engaged in collaborations, both in India with local craftsmen, and in New York with artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, among others. He has published many works in conjunction with poets, including John Wieners, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Rene Ricard. Clemente’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, including traveling retrospectives of his pastels (Nationalgalerie, Berlin: 1984-5) and drawings (Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel: 1987-9). His works on paper were the focus of a full retrospective organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1990, which traveled within the United States and to the Royal Academy of Arts, London (1991). His works on paper have been shown in exhibitions organized by the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1994-5) and at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna (1999). The artist’s comprehensive oeuvre was the subject of a retrospective exhibition, Clemente, mounted by the Guggenheim Museum, New York (1999-2000), which traveled to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain (2000). Most recently, a survey of the artist’s work was organized by the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (2002-2003).
Adolf Born was born on 12 June in 1930 in the town of Ceske Velenice on the Czech-Austrian border. His father worked as a railman. In the first years of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia under the German occupation, his family moved to Prague. During 1949-1950, Born studied Visual Art Education at the Pedagogical Faculty of the Charles University in Prague. In 1962, he married a young lady Ema and two years later their daughter, Erika, was born.
Since the 1960s his works have been exhibited all over the world. In 1977, Born was awarded a prestigious Grand Prix prize in Montreal. It should, however, be mentioned that Adolf Born has become famous both at home and abroad also thanks to many animated films created together with the Macourek – Born – Doubrava team. For over twenty years Born’s creations published on the pages of many Czech and Slovak newspapers and magazines have enriched our daily lives. Among other prizes, Born became the Best Caricature Artist of the Year 1974. Born is well known for his persistent use of black humor. His famous series called “Bornography” scrutinised everyday relationship between men and women from the late 50s until the 70s. Born’s experiences gained through travelling, and admiration for historic personalities, characters from literature and mythological heroes have provided constant inspirations for his artistic ideas and concepts. Born has also drawn from his memories of the old Prague markets and the theatre scene. Adolf Born has illustrated over 230 publications and numerous book covers.
Rosenberg Lev Samoylovich called Bakst was a painter and a stage designer of Belorussian birth. He was born in Grodno on 10 May 1866 ans dead in Paris on 27 December 1924. Born into a middle class Jewish family, Bakst was educated in St Peterburg, attending the gymansium and the Academy of Arts (1883-1886). He began his professional life as a copyist and illustrator of teaching materials but quickly moved on to illustration of popular magazines. His tastes was influenced and horizons enlarged when he met Alexander Benois and his circle in 1890. Bakst traveled regularly to various countries into Europe and North Africa and studied in Paris with a number of notable artists including the French Orientalist painter Jean-Leon Gerome at the Academie Julian and, from 1893 to 1896, the Finish landscape painter Albert Adelfelt. Returning to the St Peterburg, he became active as a book designer and fashionable portrait painter. With Benois and Serge Diaghlev he was a founder of the WORL OF ART (Mir Iskusstva) group in 1898 and was largely responsible for the technical excellence of its influential magazine. Later he contributed graphics to such publications as “Apollon” and “Zolotoe Runo” (”The golden fleece”). In 1906 he became a drawing teacher at the Yelizaveta Zvantseva’s private school in St Peterburg, where his pupils included Mark Shagall. The portrait of the dancer “Isadora Duncan” (Oxford, Ashmolean) in brush and ink, dating from her Russian tour in 1908, is typical of his draughts-manship in its sensual and flowing movement.
Bakst realized his greatest artistic success in the theatre. Making the debut with designs for stage productions at the Hermitage and Alexandrinsky theatres in St Peterburg (1902-1903), he was then commissioned for several works at the Maryinsky theatre (1903-1904). In 1909 he collaborated with Diaghilev in the founding of Ballets Russes, where he acted as artistic director, and his stages designs rapidly brought him international fame. His colourful exotic costumes and decors for Diaghilev’s Scheherezade (Paris, 1910) caused a sensation whenever the ballet was performed and prompted new fashions in dress and interior decorations. Between 1909 and 1921 he designed more Diaghilev productions than any other artist, his name became inseparable from the Ballets Russes. He also designed for other celebrities, included the artist producers Vera Komissarzhervskaya in 1906, Ida Rubinstein between 1911 to 1924. Rubistein’s ballet “Le Martyre de saint Sebastien” (Paris, 1911) provided him with another spectacular triumph. He settled in Paris in 1912, having being exiled from St Peterburg where, as a Jew he was unable to obtain a residence permit.
A dedicated professional who was able even in mid-career to make stylistic developments, Bakst was arguably the most accomplish painter, as well as designer, in the World of Art group. His early preferences were for Realist painters and Old Masters, such as Rembrandt and Velazquez. The animated line and relaxed postures in his portraiture also suggest the influence of his close friend Valentin Serov. Through Benois and his circle Bakst was attracted to “retrospectivism” and Orientalism, and motifs from ancient Greece and Egypt became signatures in his easel paintings and theoretical work. The Benois circle also introduced him to Symbolism and Art Nouveau. From 1900 these tendencies, and sensuousness similar to that of Konstantin Somov, characterized his graphic ornamentation and designs for the stage. Bakst did not experiment with Cubism, abstraction or any other innovations of the early 20th century, yet he modernized stage design and had many imitators. Through his Kinetic forms and bold color schemas, he integrated vertical space with the movement on stage. His costumes, though lavish, did not restrict dancers: in the manner of Isidora Duncan’s tunics, they freed the torso. However his costumes for Diaghlev’s revival of Imperial Ballte, The Sleeping Princess (London, 1921) were appropriately traditional as may be seen from his Design for Columbine from the ballet (London, Theatre Museum). Other examples of his designs for Diaghelev are to be found in the Australian National Gallery in Canberra.
After studying art at the Cleveland Institute of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, Norman Bel Geddes started out working as a set designer in Los Angeles. From 1918 Norman Bel Geddes designed sets for the Metropolitan Opera in New York. In 1925 he returned to Los Angeles and worked in Hollywood. Contact with the architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Erich Mendelsohn induced Norman Bel Geddes to turn to architecture and design. Norman Bel Geddes belonged, along with Raymond Loewy, Henry Dreyfuss, and Walter Dorwin Teague, to the first generation of American industrial designers, who designed railroad trains, buses, cars, aircraft, and machinery. Further, they used the aerodynamic streamlined form as an aesthetic device, applying it to machinery, smaller appliances, lamps, and furnishings. Norman Bel Geddes was an especially eloquent advocate of the teardrop form. From 1928 Norman Bel Geddes designed futuristic-looking cars for the Graham Paige company. Norman Bel Geddes designed the celebrated General Motors Pavilion, the “Futurama”, for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, his vision of tomorrow’s world as a landscape filled with model buildings. Norman Bel Geddes also expounded his philosophy of design and his vision of the future in the book “Horizons” (published in 1932) and in “Magic Motorways” (1940).
