Category Archives: Birthdays

Artist Birthday Quiz for 5/20~

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Which German baroque sculptor also worked as an architect and built many state buildings in Berlin during his role as Court Architect?

Which photojournalist and his wife became LIFE magazine’s first husband and wife photographer-reporter team to be sent overseas?

Answers here~ https://schristywolfe.com/2015/05/20/may-20/

Artist Birthday Quiz for 5/19~

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What Italian Renaissance artist, known for ceramic sculpture with colorful glazes, was a member of Florence’s most prestigious family of terracotta sculptors?

What painter from a famous family of early American artists was able to maintain a career for about sixty years and support herself without marrying, unusual in the 1800s?

Answers here~ https://schristywolfe.com/2015/05/19/may-19/

Erik Satie~ Born May 17, 1866

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Portrait of Erik Satie Playing the Harmonium by Santiago Rusiñol

Erik Satie, original name in full Eric Alfred Leslie Satie (born May 17, 1866, Honfleur, Calvados, France—died July 1, 1925, Paris), French composer whose spare, unconventional, often witty style exerted a major influence on 20th-century music, particularly in France.
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During his last 10 years Satie’s best friends were painters, many of whom he had met while a café pianist. Satie was nonetheless deeply admired by composers of the rank of Darius Milhaud, Maurice Ravel, and, in particular, Claude Debussy—of whom he was an intimate friend for close to 30 years.
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His ballet Parade (1917; choreographed by Léonide Massine, scenario by Jean Cocteau, stage design and costumes by Pablo Picasso) was scored for typewriters, sirens, airplane propellers, ticker tape, and a lottery wheel and anticipated the use of jazz materials by Igor Stravinsky and others. The word Surrealism was used for the first time in Guillaume Apollinaire’s program notes for Parade.
FROM https://www.britannica.com/biography/Erik-Satie

Watch the 1917 Ballet “Parade”: Created by Erik Satie, Pablo Picasso & Jean Cocteau,
It Provoked a Riot and Inspired the Word “Surrealism” (from Open Culture)
http://www.openculture.com/2017/05/the-1917-ballet-parade-created-by-erik-satie-pablo-picasso-jean-cocteau.html

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Artist Birthday Quiz for 5/17~

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The watercolor medium fascinated this painter throughout his career, and in 1925 he and two other artists founded the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour, which continues actively to this day.

This self-taught Virginian ceramist has work in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the American Folk Art Museum, and other museums and private collections.

Answers here~ https://schristywolfe.com/2015/05/17/may-17/

Woody Herman: Born May 16, 1913

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A fine swing clarinetist, an altoist whose sound was influenced by Johnny Hodges, a good soprano saxophonist, and a spirited blues vocalist, Woody Herman’s greatest significance to jazz was as the leader of a long line of big bands. He always encouraged young talent and, more than practically any bandleader from the swing era, kept his repertoire quite modern. Although Herman was always stuck performing a few of his older hits (he played “Four Brothers” and “Early Autumn” nightly for nearly 40 years), he much preferred to play and create new music.
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/woody-herman-mn0000958076/biography

Artist Birthday Quiz for 5/16~

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Which post-war Soviet Union painter, despite the mixed critical reception to his work, was able to lead a highly successful career due to his many supporters in the state cultural bureaucracy?

Which contemporary French fashion designer enrolled in art history and museum studies, planning to become a museum curator, until he realized that his true calling was fashion and costume design?

Answers here~ https://schristywolfe.com/2015/05/16/may-16/

Artist Birthday Quiz for 5/15~

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What American painter explained that his imagery derives from “things the mind already knows,” familiar icons such as flags, targets, stenciled numbers, and maps of the US?

What cartoonist/illustrator, his provocative work rejected by editors in London, began traveling back and forth to the US in search of a more hospitable publishing environment?

Answers here~ https://schristywolfe.com/2015/05/15/may-15/

Artist Birthday Quiz for 5/14~

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Despite his great success as a portraitist, this 18th-Century artist always maintained that he preferred painting landscapes.

This Photorealist painter has long used projected 35-millimeter color slides as the basis of his images, which he then develops through layers of underdrawings and washes.

Answers here~ https://schristywolfe.com/2015/05/14/may-14/