The elder brother of the painter of the well-known and very characteristic vedute (views) of Venice Francesco Guardi (1712-1793), Gianantonio Guardi led a rich but also mercurial professional life, thanks, for the most part, to his virtuosity as well as his extraordinary knowledge of Italian painting, both of the Baroque and the Renaissance. A brilliant copier but also the author of paintings of exotic themes (quadri turchi) Gianantonio worked for fifteen entire years exclusively for the chief of the Imperial Army, Mathias von Schulemburg, whose collection in Hanover was one of the most splendid in Europe, at least as far as the work of Venetian painters of the period was concerned.
He was a self-taught painter. He worked as a metal worker for Renault Enterprises. In 1939 he became a member of the Communist Party and during the German occupation was very active in the Resistance. In 1941 he turned his studio into an illegal printing shop where he designed the titles for illegal newspapers as well as printing most them. The same year he presented his work in the exhibition “Vingt Peintres des traditions francaise”.
In 1942 he was put in charge of art matters for the National Front of the Arts and worked together with Edouard Pignon and Edouard Goerg. The following year he participated in the exhibition “Douze peinters d’ aujourd’ hui”, which played a definitive role in the creation of a new School of Paris. The group would be named New French Realists.
In 1944 he met Pierre Villon and Paul Eluard. After the Liberation, he was assigned the organization of an exhibition of Picasso’s works, by then a symbol of the resistance against the German occupation. He presented the work “la Guerre” and later, after steps were taken by the National Front, it was purchased by the state. In 1947 he took a journey to Italy for many months where he studied Italian painting and met Italian artists.
His first solo exhibition was in 1946 and this was followed by a great deal of exhibition activity. He decorated the church at Romainville and did other public buildings as well. He won many prizes. In 1954 he was invited to the Venice Biennale for his lithographs.
His subject matter always was involved with social and political criticism and his works were commentaries on the major events of his era.
She was involved with the decorative and applied arts, including designed fabrics, jewellery, rugs, ceramics, furniture and lacquer panneau. Nearly all her works were based on subjects derived from the animal kingdom.
She exhibited at the Salons des Independants and d’Automne, the Salon des Artistes Decoratifs and the Salon of Women Painters.
Giovanni Benedetto Ponsi was born near Lucca in 1697; in 1728, he moved to Rome, where he frequented the studios of Benedetto Lutti, Francesco Trevisani, and Sebastiano Conca. In 1741, he returned to his home city, where according to archival sources he developed a fervent artistic activity – which remains the object of study until the present day – in all forms of painting.
From 1895 till 1897 he attended classes a the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs. He exhibited for the first time at the Salon de la Societe des Artistes Francais in 1899. His early works were impressionistic in style and were favorably received by the art market. In 1905 and 1907 he held his first two solo exhibitions. In 1908 he met and married the musicologist Gabrielle Buffet who made a decisive contribution to his development. Their views concerning art were completely in tune with the most avant garde ideas of the era. As a natural consequence, Picabia abandoned his Pointillism and Impressionism and was then influenced by Fauvism and, later, Cubism. In 1911 he met Apollinaire and Marcel Duchamp. Orphism led to Cubist compositions and in 1912 he exhibited with the group Section d’ or.
His financial security permitted him to travel to New York to see the important exhibition The Armony Show, where the Cubist work Danses a la source I was exhibited. He was the only European artist who made the trip and for that reason the press besieged him. The painter declared: “I don’ t paint what my eyes see. I paint what my spirit sees, what my soul sees.” His most characteristic Orphic works Udnie and Je revois en souvenir ma chere Udnie were done in 1913 and they already displayed a primitive dynamism clearly influenced by the dynamic geometric shapes of the buildings of New York City, but iconographically the painter’ s experiences were based on the theories of consciousness, theories related to the way a musical work is engaged with, which had been worked out together with Gabrielle Buffet. In New York Picabia had and exhibition of watercolors at the gallery run by the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. The coexistence of organic and mechanical systems intimated the next stage of his work, the mechanical one, as it were. His close friendship with Marcel Duchamp led him into his Dada period.