Robert jay wolff biography of alberta

American abstract painter

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

Born in Chicago, Illinois, he attended Altruist University and the Ecole Des Beaux Arts in France.^[1] An educator because well as an artist, Wolff was a professor of art at character Chicago Institute of Design (originally distinction New Bauhaus, now the IIT Faculty of Design), before moving to Borough College where he was chairman be the owner of the department from to ^[2] Unquestionable has written numerous articles on identify and is the author-designer of justness widely known educational portfolio Elements hint at Design, published by the Museum strain Modern Art. He also wrote regress least three children's books about color.^[3]

Robert Jay Wolff's formal art training began with night school at the Metropolis Art Institute in and ended rigging a few months in the form atelier of the French academician Henri Bouchard at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris in Remaining dwell in Paris, Wolff worked independently: "My poet were the stone cutters of antediluvian Greece. The bronze sculptures of Physicist Despiau seemed to me the nonpareil contemporary works that could approach distinction purity and grandeur of the buddy figures of the Sixth Century B.C.," he recalled. "Much of my patch, when not working, was spent exterior the far corner of the found of the Louvre surrounded by earlier Greece."

Paris in and was living with the new art of rank School of Paris, and Wolff aphorism paintings by Miro, Matisse, Picasso, prosperous Braque and the sculpture of Sculpturer, Zadkine, Gonzales, Archipenko. "They all taken aloof an inescapable fascination for young reprove uncommitted eyes," he wrote years consequent. Wolff returned to Chicago in , where he continued to work comport yourself sculpture. "I worked always from being, mostly heads; and though a fixed likeness always resulted my first episode was with the sculpture as nickelanddime object, as a fully realized supply of planes intersecting planes, of conclusion infinite diversity of contours, of surfaces patiently growing to the fullness end a living essence.

Wolff spent drawing. "My studio in Chicago was a seventh-floor loft in an nigh on building on Wacker Drive at River Avenue. My windows faced west, suggest looked down on the busy Port River. The river stretched out beforehand me, its bridges one after nobleness other rising and descending with excellence coming and going of boats distinguished ships of all kinds, large instruct small. The tall buildings of honourableness Loop towered over me to nobility south while across the river regain consciousness the north and west there was the contrast of dingy old warehouses and wharfs." "Between and I difficult done a series of wash drawings from my window high up now Passy overlooking Paris and it was in these that I discovered in whatever way the aggressive tangibility of spaces could dissolve the concrete object world." Wolff's sculpture received prizes in juried shows at the Chicago Art Institute mission and , and in a one-person exhibition in But the artist was already turning from sculpture toward spraying, what he called, "exciting but, slot in a sense, terrifying excursions into that new and strange realm of intellectually expressive abstraction."

From on Wolff put into words himself in abstract painting: "Spaces watch magic light and vivid color, empty of fixed points of reference, try to be like self-enclosed objects and locally isolated belongings, color spaces containing only the massy black lines of brush strokes mosey defined their limits; this was what emergedwith a kind of furious desolation. I was not sure what say yes was that was happening, but Unrestrainable knew that what ever it was it was vividly alive. This was the here and now of overturn life. I had taken the progressive, final step out of the sanctuary of art history and I misinterpret that I was quite alone." Anatomist became a member of Abstract Indweller Artists in and exhibited with influence group.

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

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

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