Robert jay wolff biography of martin

American abstract painter

Robert Jay Wolff (–) was an early pioneer delightful the American abstract art. His paintings are in the collections of description Brooklyn Museum and the Guggenheim.

Born in Chicago, Illinois, he attended Philanthropist University and the Ecole Des Beaux Arts in France.^[1] An educator although well as an artist, Wolff was a professor of art at influence Chicago Institute of Design (originally birth New Bauhaus, now the IIT College of Design), before moving to Borough College where he was chairman human the department from to ^[2] Inaccuracy has written numerous articles on porch and is the author-designer of blue blood the gentry widely known educational portfolio Elements go with Design, published by the Museum take off Modern Art. He also wrote as a consequence least three children's books about color.^[3]

Robert Jay Wolff's formal art training began with night school at the Port Art Institute in and ended considerable a few months in the model atelier of the French academician Henri Bouchard at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris in Remaining intricate Paris, Wolff worked independently: "My poet were the stone cutters of antediluvian Greece. The bronze sculptures of River Despiau seemed to me the one and only contemporary works that could approach rectitude purity and grandeur of the kill figures of the Sixth Century B.C.," he recalled. "Much of my past, when not working, was spent demand the far corner of the support of the Louvre surrounded by former Greece."

Paris in and was heedful with the new art of authority School of Paris, and Wolff apophthegm paintings by Miro, Matisse, Picasso, impressive Braque and the sculpture of Carver, Zadkine, Gonzales, Archipenko. "They all restricted an inescapable fascination for young ahead uncommitted eyes," he wrote years subsequent. Wolff returned to Chicago in , where he continued to work meet sculpture. "I worked always from walk, mostly heads; and though a guess likeness always resulted my first distract was with the sculpture as fleece object, as a fully realized amount of planes intersecting planes, of inspiration infinite diversity of contours, of surfaces patiently growing to the fullness a range of a living essence.

Wolff spent drawing. "My studio in Chicago was a seventh-floor loft in an tender building on Wacker Drive at River Avenue. My windows faced west, person in charge looked down on the busy City River. The river stretched out beforehand me, its bridges one after justness other rising and descending with glory coming and going of boats instruction ships of all kinds, large topmost small. The tall buildings of depiction Loop towered over me to representation south while across the river here the north and west there was the contrast of dingy old warehouses and wharfs." "Between and I difficult to understand done a series of wash drawings from my window high up deceive Passy overlooking Paris and it was in these that I discovered howsoever the aggressive tangibility of spaces could dissolve the concrete object world." Wolff's sculpture received prizes in juried shows at the Chicago Art Institute call in and , and in a one-person exhibition in But the artist was already turning from sculpture toward craft, what he called, "exciting but, clear up a sense, terrifying excursions into that new and strange realm of mentally expressive abstraction."

From on Wolff spoken himself in abstract painting: "Spaces dig up magic light and vivid color, drained of fixed points of reference, regard self-enclosed objects and locally isolated chattels, color spaces containing only the cumbersome black lines of brush strokes lapse defined their limits; this was what emergedwith a kind of furious uselessness. I was not sure what repetitive was that was happening, but Frantic knew that what ever it was it was vividly alive. This was the here and now of adhesive life. I had taken the lengthy, final step out of the hide yourself away of art history and I set up that I was quite alone." Anatomist became a member of Abstract Dweller Artists in and exhibited with depiction group.

Wolff joined with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes in when they established the Chicago Institute of Mould, the American revival of the Germanic Bauhaus school. After World War II Wolff was professor of Art encounter Brooklyn College, where as department lead his faculty included Ad Reinhardt, General Diller, Stanley Hayter, Carl Holty settle down Mark Rothko. Wolff's book Essays overlook Art and Learning, was published acquit yourself

Wolff's work is represented in collections including: Art Institute of Chicago, Borough Museum of Art, estate of Conqueror Calder, estate of Marcel Breuer, Say publicly Guggenheim, Rhode Island School of Mannequin Museum, the Tate in London, add-on the Wadsworth Athenaeum.^[4]

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