The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (471 page)

 
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(1860–1931).
American sculptor, writer, and teacher. He studied at the École des
Beaux-Arts
in Paris, 1880–6, and taught sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1886–1929. In his day Taft was well known for portraits and allegorical public sculpture, particularly fountains such as The Fountain of Time (Washington Park, Chicago, 1922), but he is now remembered mainly for his books
The History of American Sculpture
(1903), the first comprehensive work on the subject, and
Modern Tendencies in Sculpture
(1921), in which he defended the academic tradition and attacked abstraction. In addition to writing and teaching, he spread his ideas as a public lecturer, touring clubs and schools in Illinois. Taft's studio in Chicago has been preserved as a national monument.

 
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(1925– ).
Greek experimental artist, best known for his highly original work in
Kinetic
sculpture. His creations often employ magnetic fields in which various metal objects produce changing patterns—the magnet's ‘live force and vibration gives life to what has seemed to be dead material’. In 1960 he suspended the poet Sinclair Beiles in a magnetic field at the Galerie Iris Clert in Paris. Sometimes he combines light effects and music with movement. Since 1954 Takis has lived mainly in Paris.

 
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(1899–1991).
Mexican painter and graphic artist. Although he painted many murals as well as easel paintings, his work was opposed to the creed of the revolutionary mural painters,
Orozco
,
Rivera
, and
Siqueiros
, who set greater store by the message and theme of a picture than its pictorial qualities, and for many years his reputation was higher abroad than in Mexico. From 1938 to 1957 he lived mainly in New York and thereafter mainly in Paris. Tamayo's fervent and highly distinctive style blends influences from modern European movements such as
Surrealism
with the folk-art traditions of the indigenous Mexican Indians (his parents were Zapotec Indians and in the 1920s he was head of the Department of Ethnographic Drawing at the National Museum of Archaeology in Mexico City). His subjects included animals, still lifes, and portraits, many of his pianist wife, Olga. In 1974 he donated his fine collection of pre-Hispanic art to his native city of Oaxaca.

 
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(1900–55).
French-born American painter. He decided to become a painter after seeing pictures by de
Chirico
in 1923. In 1925 he met
Breton
and joined the
Surrealist
movement. His art developed quickly and by 1927 his mature style had emerged. In 1939 he met the American Surrealist painter Kay
Sage
in Paris. He emigrated to the USA that year, married Sage in 1940, and became an American citizen in 1948. The couple lived first in New York and then from 1942 at Woodbury, Connecticut. Tanguy's most characteristic works are painted in a scrupulous technique reminiscent of that of
Dalí
, but his imagery is highly distinctive, featuring half marine and half lunar landscapes in which amorphous nameless objects proliferate in a spectral dream-space (
The Invisibles
, Tate Gallery, London, 1951).

 
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(1923– )
. The most important Spanish painter to emerge in the period since the Second World War. He studied law at the university in his native Barcelona from 1943 to 1946 and was largely self-taught as an artist. His early works were in a
Surrealist
vein influenced by
Klee
and
Miró
, but in about 1953, after turning to abstraction, he began working in mixed media, in which he has made his most original contribution to art. He incorporated clay and marble dust in his paint and used discarded materials such as paper, string, and rags, and then (from about 1970) more substantial objects such as parts of furniture. He explained his belief in the validity of commonplace materials in his essay
Nothing is Mean
(1970). Tàpies has travelled extensively and his ideas have had worldwide influence. Apart from paintings he has also made etchings and lithographs.