Initial Research: Artists and The 7 Deadly Sins
Taking into account my post about the method the mountain and valley I will start now my research. I will take a look about three different artists who painted about the Seven Deadly Sins. These are: Vladimir Zuev, Otto DIx and Paul Cadmus.
Vladimir Zuev
After some research I found an artist which I believe that is going to be an important influence in my project, his name is Vladimir Zuev. His artistic practice explores print, ex libris, woodcut, book illustration. Although with a different style from the one that I will do, Zuev has represented The Seven Deadly Sins in a similar way of the one I expect to do.
Vladimir Zuev was born on 5th August 1959 in Sverdlovsk region, Russia. He is an honored artist of Russia who has won a lot of awards in his life, including Medal of Russian Academy of Arts, and that has already participated in more than 250 exhibitions in Russian and abroad.
He studied at the Faculty of Printmaking, State Pedagogical Institute, Nizhny Tagil between 1976-1981 and now he lectures classical drawing and contemporary printmaking at the Faculty of Printmaking in Nizhny Tagil, Russia.
I was not able to find any information about "The Seven Deadly Sins" artworks, just that they are from the collection Richard Sica and that are bookplates. However I believe that it is important to show each of them.
I really like the constrasts that he used and how he represented each sin. It is very clear to understand what is the sin represented in each piece and that is something that I expect to achieve. Therefore, I put the 7 pieces that he made in here so that it is very explicit what I pretend.
Otto Dix
Otto Dix was born on December 2, 1891 in Untermhaus, Thuringia, Germany. His parents were working class, but Louise (his mother) had an artistic side. She exposed Dix to art through her cousin Fritz, who became Dix's mentor. From 1906 to 1919 Dix had an apprenticeship with Carl Senff and also attended Kunstgewerbeschule in Dresden.
Initially he was drawn to movements such as Expressionism and Dada, but like many of his contemporarys he was inpired by trends in Italy and France, which embraced a more realistic imagery. However the Nazis considered Dix degenerate because in his paintings he described the truth of war. For this reason he was fired as an art professor at Dresden Academy and in 1939 and was arrested for plotting against Adolf Hitler. He was released but was once again forced to serve in World War II and this time he was captured by French troops. Serving in war had a lot of influence in Dix and his paintings.
His artworks were an important part of the Neue Sachlichkeit ( "New Objectivity" ) movement, which also included George Grosz and Max Beckmann. Haunted by his experience at the Great World War, the first great subjects of the artist and also veteran were cripple soldiers. However he also painted nudes, protitutes, and often satirical portraits of celebrities from Germany's intellectual circles during the height of his career. In the early 1930s he became a target of the Nazis due to his work which became even darker and more allegorical. So he gradually moved away from this type of themes and turned to landscapes and Chritian subjects. One of his most famous patings was "The Seven Deadly Sins".
The piece "The Seven Deadly Sins" was painted in 1933. It represents allegarically the political situation in Germany at the time and was created right after the Nazis had Otto Dix removed from his teaching position at the Dresden Art Academy.
The figures are Avarice - a bent over hag clutching at money; Envy - who rides the back of Avarice; Sloth - the figure in skeleton costume, whose legs and arms form a rough swastika; Lust - the figure dancing in a lascivious way behind Death; Anger - the horned Demon that is behind Death; Pride - the enormous head, whose ears are puggled; Gluttony - represented by the figure who is wearing a cooking pot on his head.
It was important for me to understand how Dix represented the sins since I might use some of ideas to represent them in my paintings, but always keeping in mind that I need to adapt the figures to my reality.
Paul Cadmus
Paul Cadmus was born on December 17, 1904, in New York, America. Both of his parents were artistically gifted: his father was an commercial lithorapher who created adverstising images and his mother illustrated children's books, but his family, inlcuding his sister Fidelma, was quite poor. He once told Judd Tully in an interview conducted for the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art that their apartment building was "a horrible tenement. We lived with lots of bedbugs and cockroaches."
Cadmus decided upon a career in art when he was still young. Therefore he enrlled in art classes at New York City's National Academy of Desing (now the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts) when he was 15. He studied there until 1926 and in the following two years he studied at the Art Students League. Then he worked at an advertising agency and between 1931 and 1933 he lived with the artist Jared French. They traveled to the island of Majorca and it was in there that Cadmus created the well known paintings Shore Leave and YMCA Locker Room.
Cadmus conitnued to work steadily even though the post-Worl War II art paid him little attention. Among his notable works is the SAilors and Floosies (1938), The Seven Deadly SIns series (1945-1949) and the Subway Symphony series (1975-1976). His works were represented in most American art museums and he took part in several prestigious group shows over the years. In 1980 Cadmus was made academician of the National Academy of Design.
As mentioned before, between 1945 and 1949, Paul Cadmus focused his attention in representing the Seven Deadly Sins, a subject that artists have been explore since the Middle ages. Cadmu's interpretation extends his predilection for social satire to surreal extremes of excess and vulgarity. These works were shown in 1949 in Cadmus’s third one-man exhibition at Midtown Galleries. The series is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the museum mounted a solo exhibition of Cadmus’s work in 1995 which featured the “Sins” along with other works from their collection.
Cadmus once declared "I don’t appear as myself, but I am all of the Deadly Sins in a way, as you all are, too."
Reference:
Vladimir Zuev, Biography [online] Available from: http://www.vladimirzuev.com/biography.html (Accessed 16.01.2021)
Arthive, Seven Deadly Sins [online] Availble from: https://arthive.com/artists/1657~Otto_Dix/works/542057~Seven_Deadly_Sins (Accessed 20.01.2021)
The Met, The Seven Deadly Sins: Lust [online] Available from: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/486322 (Accessed 21.01.2021)
Epreuve d'Artist, Vladimir Zuev [online] Available from: http://wonderingmind.eu/staffs/vladimir-zuev/ ( Accessed 23.01.2021)
The art Story, Otto Dix - Biography and Legacy [online] Available from: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/dix-otto/life-and-legacy/ (Accessed 23.01.2021)
Csus, The Seven Deadly Sins - Otto Dix - 1933. [online] Available from: https://www.csus.edu/indiv/e/eppersonm/phil002/documents/dix.html (Accessed 23.01.2021)Art Net, Otto Dix [online] Available from: http://www.artnet.com/artists/otto-dix/biography (Accessed 23.01.2021)
Encyclopedia of World Biography, Paul Cadmus Biography [online] Available from: https://www.notablebiographies.com/supp/Supplement-Ca-Fi/Cadmus-Paul.html (Accessed 23.01.2021)
DC Moore Gallery, Paul Cadmus [online] Available from: https://www.dcmooregallery.com/artists/paul-cadmus (Accessed 23.01.2021)
Britannica (December 2020), Paul Cadmus [online] Available from: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Paul-Cadmus
(Accessed 23.01.2021)
Good work on the research however I would also discuss techniques they used to create these are these are vital to inform you own practice.
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