The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (8 page)

 
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(1888–1976).
German-born painter, designer, writer, and teacher, who became an American citizen in 1939. He studied (1920–3) and taught (1923–33) at the
Bauhaus
, where his activities embraced stained glass, typography, and designing furniture and utility objects. When the Bauhaus closed in 1933 he emigrated to the USA. He was one of the first of the Bauhaus teachers to move there and one of the most energetic in propagating its ideas. From 1933 to 1949 he taught at
Black Mountain College
, and from 1950 to 1959 he was head of the Department of Design at Yale University (the art gallery there has an outstanding collection of his work); he lectured at many other places. As a painter Albers was best known for his long series, begun in 1950, entitled
Homage to the Square
. The paintings in this series consisted of squares within squares of closely calculated sizes and subtly varied hues. The research into colour which they embodied was published in
Interaction of Color
(1963), and his disciplined ideas and techniques were influential on
Op art
. Albers' wife,
Anni Albers
(1899–1994), whom he met when she was a student at the Bauhaus, was a weaver; her rectilinear designs have something of the severe economy of her husband's paintings.

 
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(1404–72).
Italian architect, sculptor, painter, and writer, the most important art theorist of the
Renaissance
. Born in Genoa, the illegitimate son of an exiled Florentine merchant, he was educated at Padua and Bologna, and was an outstanding Latinist (at the age of 20 he wrote a Latin comedy that was acclaimed as a rediscovered Roman work). In about 1428 he went to Florence and became a friend of the most advanced artists—
Brunelleschi
,
Donatello
,
Ghiberti
, Luca della
Robbia
, and
Masaccio
. To all these, jointly, he dedicated his first theoretical work on the arts,
Della Pittura
(1436). (This was initially written in Latin as
De Pictura
, but Alberti translated it into Italian for Brunelleschi's benefit.) Alberti wrote on a wide variety of other topics, complementing
Della Pittura
with treatises on architecture (
De Re Aedificatoria
) and sculpture (
De Statua
). He worked on
De Re Aedificatoria
until his death and it became the first printed
book on architecture
in 1485:
De Statua
is generally dated to the 1460s. In these works Alberti turned away from the medieval outlook in which art was considered a symbolic expression of theological truths. Instead he emphasized the rational basis of the arts, and the necessity for the artist to have a thorough grounding in such ‘sciences’ as history, poetry, and mathematics. Alberti spent most of his life in Florence and Rome (he held a secretarial post in the papal court from 1432 to 1464), and he worked as an architect in both these places as well as in Mantua and Rimini. His buildings—among them the churches of S. Andrea and S. Sebastiano in Mantua, and the façade of Sta. Maria Novella and the Palazzo Rucellai in Florence—are among the outstanding architectural works of the early Renaissance, but almost no trace survives of his work as a painter or sculptor. Two self-portrait plaques are attributed to him (Louvre, Paris, and NG, Washington), but no paintings are extant.

 
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(1474–1515).
Florentine painter, trained by Cosimo
Rosselli
, in whose studio he met Fra
Bartolommeo
. The two went into partnership in 1508, but soon after this Albertinelli temporarily abandoned painting to become an inn keeper, saying (according to
Vasari
) that he was fed up with criticism and wanted a ‘less difficult and more cheerful craft’. Vasari also says he was ‘a restless man, a follower of Venus, and a good liver’. His paintings are elegant but rather insipid.

 
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(1897–1983).
American painter, the son of
Adam Emery Albright
(1862–1957), a painter who had studied under
Eakins
. During the First World War Albright served in France as a medical draughtsman and worked with a meticulous detail and clinical precision that anticipated his later paintings, which shows a morbid obsession with death and corruption: sagging, almost putrescent flesh (which he described as ‘corrugated mush’), decrepit, decaying objects, and lurid lighting are typical of his work. Often it evokes a feeling of melancholy for a beauty that is past. He came from a wealthy family and his financial independence allowed him to work slowly, producing a small number of elaborate, highly finished paintings. For most of his life he lived in or near Chicago, and the city's Art Institute has the best collection of his works. It includes the painting Albright did for the Hollywood film (1943) of Oscar Wilde's
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, showing the loathsomely corrupted title figure; Albright's identical twin brother,
Malvin Marr Albright
(1897– ), did the portrait of the young and beautiful Dorian for this film.

 
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