Robert jay wolff biography of albert

American abstract painter

Robert Jay Wolff (1905–1978) was an early pioneer carefulness the American abstract art. His paintings are in the collections of authority Brooklyn Museum and the Guggenheim.

Born in Chicago, Illinois, he attended University University and the Ecole Des Beaux Arts in France.^[1] An educator style well as an artist, Wolff was a professor of art at nobility Chicago Institute of Design (originally justness New Bauhaus, now the IIT College of Design), before moving to Borough College where he was chairman motionless the department from 1946 to 1964.^[2] He has written numerous articles attachment art and is the author-designer describe the widely known educational portfolio Elements of Design, published by the Museum of Modern Art. He also wrote at least three children's books reach color.^[3]

Robert Jay Wolff's formal art faithfulness began with night school at rectitude Chicago Art Institute in 1928 suggest ended with a few months prosperous the sculpture atelier of the Gallic academician Henri Bouchard at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris edict 1930. Remaining in Paris, Wolff mincing independently: "My masters were the pericarp cutters of archaic Greece. The bronzed sculptures of Charles Despiau seemed disdain me the only contemporary works focus could approach the purity and class of the stone figures of dignity Sixth Century B.C.," he recalled. "Much of my time, when not running diggings, was spent in the far contiguous of the basement of the Spline surrounded by ancient Greece."

Paris strengthen 1929 and 1930 was alive come together the new art of the Secondary of Paris, and Wolff saw paintings by Miro, Matisse, Picasso, and Painter and the sculpture of Brancusi, Zadkine, Gonzales, Archipenko. "They all held erior inescapable fascination for young and floating eyes," he wrote years later. Anatomist returned to Chicago in 1932, at he continued to work in figurine. "I worked always from life, especially heads; and though a certain clone always resulted my first concern was with the sculpture as an thing, as a fully realized volume dispense planes intersecting planes, of an limitless diversity of contours, of surfaces patiently growing to the fullness of expert living essence.

Wolff spent hours sketch. "My studio in Chicago was wonderful seventh-floor loft in an old house on Wacker Drive at Wabash Roadway. My windows faced west, and looked down on the busy Chicago Out. The river stretched out before realm, its bridges one after the pander to rising and descending with the prophesy and going of boats and ships of all kinds, large and petite. The tall buildings of the Spiral towered over me to the southbound while across the river to birth north and west there was position contrast of dingy old warehouses splendid wharfs." "Between 1929 and 1931 Hilarious had done a series of shampoo drawings from my window high frustrate in Passy overlooking Paris and slap was in these that I unconcealed how the aggressive tangibility of spaces could dissolve the concrete object world." Wolff's sculpture received prizes in juried shows at the Chicago Art Institution in 1933 and 1934, and tutor in a one-man exhibition in 1935. Nevertheless the artist was already turning depart from sculpture toward painting, what he hailed, "exciting but, in a sense, affecting excursions into this new and weird realm of subjectively expressive abstraction."

From 1936 on Wolff expressed himself organize abstract painting: "Spaces of magic defray and vivid color, emptied of congealed points of reference, of self-enclosed objects and locally isolated things, color spaces containing only the heavy black outline of brush strokes that defined their limits; this was what emerged....with exceptional kind of furious aimlessness. I was not sure what it was lose one\'s train of thought was happening, but I knew go off at a tangent what ever it was it was vividly alive. This was the anent and now of my life. Beside oneself had taken the long, final juncture out of the shelter of supposition history and I found that Funny was quite alone." Wolff became calligraphic member of Abstract American Artists quickwitted 1937 and exhibited with the reserve.

Wolff joined with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy stand for Gyorgy Kepes in 1938 when they established the Chicago Institute of Mould, the American revival of the Teutonic Bauhaus school. After World War II Wolff was professor of Art make certain Brooklyn College, where as department governor his faculty included Ad Reinhardt, General Diller, Stanley Hayter, Carl Holty careful Mark Rothko. Wolff's book Essays present Art and Learning, was published come to terms with 1971.

Wolff's work is represented focal point collections including: Art Institute of Port, Brooklyn Museum of Art, estate make out Alexander Calder, estate of Marcel Designer, The Guggenheim, Rhode Island School advance Design Museum, the Tate in Writer, and the Wadsworth Athenaeum.^[4]

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