Eric Fischl

Eric Fischl, contemporary painter and sculptor was born in New York City, New York, 1948, educated in California Institute of the Arts and Valencia, California, B.F.A., 1972. Artist lives in New York City and Sag Harbor, New York.










KEN JOHNSON notes, in his short review about Eric Fischl published in NY Times:
"Like the ones in his last show at this gallery, Eric Fischl's curiously repellent paintings are based on his own photographs of hired models behaving like jaded wealthy sophisticates during a daytime love-making session or at home after a late-night party. The middle-aged people in the paintings, who appear in various states of undress, may be talking or arguing about something, but there is a frustrating vagueness about what is going on, and despite the portentously noirish mood, the psychological intrigue is limited."

"...the people he pictures look like the sort you could imagine actually owning Mr. Fischl's paintings. All of this would be more interesting if the imagery were more pointedly defined as social satire or psychosexual drama, and if it didn't look as if Mr. Fischl were congratulating himself with each stroke of his brush. "

Lucien Freud

Lucien Freud is probably one of the most wide known living today painter and figurative artist. He was born in December, 1922, one of three brothers who were brought up in Berlin. He is the grandson of Sigmund Freud. As a youth, Lucian belonged to a gang, roamed the streets, and stole chocolate when dared. Friends of his joined the Hitler Youth because they reported, you got good sausage there. His father was an architect who was prevented from working in Germany in 1933 and who moved his family to England before things in Germany got worse.



I must confess that this artist is not my favorite one, I wouldn't call his art as erotic of course but he has incredible number of followers and fans, that's fact. Then here is some fragments from the book "Lucian Freud" from Lawrence Gowing.


"At the outset there is always a mystery. We cannot know what a painter brought to painting or what drew him to it. Yet everything he paints throughout his life adds to our understanding of one or both these things. When his last picture is painted in that predestined way in which, one cannot help believing, an artist's work, and therefore art, unfolds when the last predestined picture is finished and the trajectory of his meaning completes its curve then we know all there is to be known about these first riddles and understand what can't be known, what remains unknowable about the sources and the resources of a painter.
"This book offers a chance to look at work by Lucian Freud. Generally the sight is not easy to come by, because most of the pictures belong to people, not museums. It is nearly ten years since as many of them as this were shown together. Unlike most noted contemporaries, Freud does not paint museum pictures, though if you come on one in a museum you may never forget it. Large groups of them hang in a few collections; his pictures are sought after and kept at home, as if there was something personal in their significance. This book, in which Freud has taken a large part, is exceptional in another respect. Not only the work but the view of it here (though not the commentary) is his own. Seen through his eyes, the pictures show aspects that are unexpected. In his comparisons, cutting sometimes a little across the order in which they may have been painted, they connect in ways that one had not foreseen. Seen in his context they show more of ... something or other, which one had not noticed, more of a character that is peculiarly his. They not only complement each other; they reveal more of the unpredicted discords that are an elusive element in them. Led by the painter, one is aware at page after page of a residual shock from which familiarity does not shield one. One would not wish that it should. One rather, and shamelessly, prizes the frisson, without particular sentiment for whomever, in what unsparing involvement, inspired it. Familiarity does not shield but sharpens, engaging one more deeply in a relationship that is addictive.

"With modern art in particular one is always considering, or should be if one is not, the shades of indispensability that attach to the surprise. The way that Lucian Freud's world presents itself to him and to us has been inseparable from a chill of incongruity that preserves its particularity, its otherness, as if a coldness in the figurative substance made the visual contact electric and compelling.

"There is always something more or less unexpected in the unfolding of an original artist's work; because few of such people exist at one time we remain unaccustomed to the fact. One is never prepared for the edgy, restless mobility that continually implies something more and different until the artist's last picture has been painted. As I write Freud has just passed his fifty ninth birthday; this concluding and conclusive evidence is a long way off. The latest picture on his easel is as full as any of the peculiar personal momentum that one has known from the beginning, but in every other respect so different that I find myself understanding afresh and differently a condition of private liveliness that was already apparent when I became aware of him more than forty years ago. Apparent and slightly irksome; I was inclined to resent it, and was lately concerned to find that Freud regarded this evidently unconcealed inclination of mine as a positive qualification for writing about him. I first knew this quality of liveliness, for which I should prefer a word that did not suggest animation or wholesomeness, when I think as much of a coiled vigilance and a sharpness in which one could imagine venom (my critical equipment was primitive and my sympathies limited) knew it as a quality of drawing, one that was intrinsic to line and indeed to edges. Freud's view of a subject was marked from the first by a serpentine litheness in the ready, rapid way in which an object was confronted, the object of intellectual curiosity or sociable advantage or desire it was apt then to be all of them at once. A personal flavour that was unlike any one had known was communicating itself to art; it still does. Going to look at the heads in the new picture, I become aware that this uncommon condition is now a condition of the paint, of the material itself and the incomparable alertness with which it is moulded to the experience of people. In the paint itself, through its receptive granulation and equally through its miraculous lack of anything like the approximating mellowness that one had thought endemic to malerisch figuration, one feels the quality of sharpened perception and pointed response that makes one think of the lowered muzzle of some hunting creature, and think with involuntary admiration, unless it is apprehension.

"One may recognize the latest work and the earliest, as well as the successive styles between, as one man's uses for art. That is not to account for them. Painting offers itself unaccounted for, uninterpreted, unexcused. Freud's rather few remarks about art in general set store by the defiantly inexplicable spell that the image arts achieve at their peak. The viable, surefooted, impenetrability of his persona is intended. Again, one is now unaccustomed to a daemon like this in the polite community of the visual arts, but in the past art was full of such people. This is how the young men of the Renaissance must have been, with their eyes on anatomy and the main chance, on the street corners at evening when the botteghe came out and the virgins were hurried indoors. I have been able to confirm rather few even of the relevant details of Lucian Freud's childhood and how he came to painting. There is no evidence for most of the circumstances, least of all the highly coloured ones, that have been described. These myths were not Lucian's myths."

Egon Leo Adolf Schiele

Egon Leo Adolf Schiele, Austrian expressionist, ( 1890-1918). His art is full of erotism even more than Gustav Klimt's works are. Schiele made eroticism one of his major themes and was briefly imprisoned for obscenity in 1912.



His treatment of the nude figure suggests a lonely, tormented spirit haunted rather than fulfilled by sexuality. At first strongly influenced by Klimt, whom he met in 1907, Schiele soon achieved an independent anticlassical style wherein his jagged lines arose more from psychological and spiritual feeling than from aesthetic considerations.

Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt (1862 - 1918) was born as the son of a gold and silver engraver in a suburb of Vienna. He had a formal art training at the Vienna School of Decorative Arts. In 1882, Klimt opened a studio of his own with his brother Ernst and Franz Matsch, a fellow student. He specialized on executing mural paintings. He was quite successful from the beginning and received commissions from theaters, museums and other public and semi-public institutions.



In 1897 Gustav Klimt founded with other artists the Vienna Secession and became its first president. By that time Klimt had developed his own and characteristic style, which should became the trademark of the movement. Like impressionism, art nouveau was an International revolt against the traditional academic art style.



Gustav Klimt's style is highly ornamental. The Art Nouveau movement favored organic lines and contours. Klimt used a lot of gold and silver colors in his art work - certainly an heritage from his father's profession as a gold and silver engraver.

Pierre Auguste Renoir

"Auguste Renoir and Monet worked closely together during the late 1860s, painting similar scenes of popular river resorts and views of a bustling Paris. Renoir was by nature more solid than Monet, and while Monet fixed his attentions on the ever-changing patterns of nature, Renoir was particularly entranced by people and often painted friends and lovers. His early work has a quivering brightness that is gloriously satisfying and fully responsive to what he is painting, as well as to the effects of the light.



"Renoir seems to have had the enviable ability to see anything as potentially of interest. More than any of the Impressionists, he found beauty and charm in the modern sights of Paris. He does not go deep into the substance of what he sees but seizes upon its appearance, grasping its generalities, which then enables the spectator to respond with immediate pleasure. "Pleasure" may be decried by the puritanical instinct within us all, but it is surely the necessary enhancer that life needs. It also signifies a change from Realism: the Impressionists' paintings have none of the labored toll of Millet's peasants, for example.



Instead they depict delightful, intimate scenes of the French middle class at leisure in the country or at cafes and concerts in Paris. Renoir always took a simple pleasure in whatever met his good-humored attention, but he refused to let what he saw dominate what he wanted to paint. Again he deliberately sets out to give the impression, the sensation of something, its generalities, its glancing life. Maybe, ideally, everything is worthy of attentive scrutiny, but in practice there is no time. We remember only what takes our immediate notice as we move along.

"In The Boating Party Lunch, a group of Renoir's friends are enjoying that supreme delight of the working man and woman, a day out. Renoir shows us interrelationships: notice the young man intent upon the girl at the right chatting, while the girl at the left is occupied with her puppy. But notice too the loneliness, however relaxed, that can be part of anyone's experience at a lunch party. The man behind the girl and her dog is lost in a world of his own, yet we cannot but believe that his reverie is a happy one. The delightful debris of the meal, the charm of the young people, the hazy brightness of the world outside the awning - all communicates an earthly vision of paradise.



"One of Renoir's early portraits, A Girl with a Watering Can, has all the tender charm of its subject, delicately unemphasized, not sentimentalized, but clearly relished. Renoir stoops down to the child's height so that we look at her world from her own altitude. This, he hints, is the world that the little one sees - not the actual garden that adults see today, but the nostalgic garden that they remember from their childhood. The child is sweetly aware of her central importance.

Solid little girl though she is, she presents herself with the fragile charm of the flowers. Her sturdy little feet in their sensible boots are somehow planted in the garden, and the lace of her dress has a floral rightness; she also is decorative. With the greatest skill, Renoir shows the child, not amid the actual flowers and lawns, but on the path. It leads away, out of the picture, into the unknown future when she will longer be part of the garden but an onlooker, an adult, who will enjoy only her memories of the present now depicted."

from "Sister Wendy's Story of Painting", by Wendy Beckett

Amedeo Modigliani

Being thinking about the website erotic in the art I knew the name of artist I’ll start. This is Amedeo Modigliani of course, my one of the most loved artist.



It’s just too hard to write about his paintings the way of banal prose but the love and high poetry words must be used to describe that.

Quando fra l'altre donne ad ora ad ora
Amor vien nel bel viso di costei,
quanto ciascuna è men bella di lei
tanto cresce 'l desio che m'innamora.
I' benedico il loco e 'l tempo et l'ora
che sí alto miraron gli occhi mei,
et dico: Anima, assai ringratiar dêi
che fosti a tanto honor degnata allora.

Da lei ti vèn l'amoroso pensero,
che mentre 'l segui al sommo ben t'invia,
pocho prezando quel ch'ogni huom desia;

da lei vien l'animosa leggiadria
ch'al ciel ti scorge per destro sentero,
sí ch'i' vo già de la speranza altero.

I’ve had the reason to begin the post with this amazing Francesco Petrarca's Sonnet. The Italian painter and sculptor and at the same time one of the greatiest artists of the 20th century Amedeo Modigliani was born in Italy on July 12, 1884 into the family of Flaminio and Eugenia Modigliani.



Today his graceful portraits and lush nudes at once evoke his name, but during his brief career few apart from his fellow artists were aware of his gifts. Modigliani had to struggle against poverty and chronic ill health, dying of tuberculosis and excesses of drink and drugs at the age of 35.

In 1906, Modigliani settled in Paris, where he encountered the works of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Georges Rouault, and Pablo Picasso (in his "blue period") and assimilated their influence, as in The Jewess (1908; private collection, Paris). The strong influence of Paul Cezanne's paintings is clearly evident, both in Modigliani's deliberate distortion of the figure and the free use of large, flat areas of color.



His friendship with Constantin Brancusi kindled Modigliani's interest in sculpture, in which he would continue his very personal idiom, distinguished by strong linear rhythms, simple elongated forms, and verticality. Head (1912; Guggenheim Museum, New York City) and Caryatid (1914; Museum of Modern Art, New York City) exemplify his sculptural work, which consists mainly of heads and, less often, of full figures.



After 1915, Modigliani devoted himself entirely to painting, producing some of his best work. His interest in African masks and sculpture remains evident, especially in the treatment of the sitters' faces: flat and masklike, with almond eyes, twisted noses, pursed mouths, and elongated necks.



Despite their extreme economy of composition and neutral backgrounds, the portraits convey a sharp sense of the sitter's personality, as in Moise Kisling (1915; private collection, Milan). A fine example of Modigliani's figure paintings is a reclining Nude (1917; Guggenheim Museum), an elegant, arresting arrangement of curved lines and planes as well as a striking idealization of feminine sexuality.