Artist Biographies Agam, Yaacov Agam is one of the pioneer creators of the kinetic movement in art as well as its most outstanding contemporary representative. An artist of unlimited dimension and versatility, Yaacov Agam is internationally recognized. Born in 1928, son of an orthodox Rabbi of Rishon Letzion (Israel), Yaacov Agam studied at the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem. In 1949 he journeyed to Zurich to study. He traveled throughout Europe and went to almost every museum and important church in Italy to see the art of the past. He found the impact of the great art of the Renaissance and of primitive and ancient times overwhelming, but all along Agam was obsessed with the idea of inventing a new artistic mode of expression that would reflect the present. In 1983, Israel issued an Agam stamp, to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the independence of the State of Israel. Azoulay, Guillaume A. Guillaume A. Azoulay was born in Casablanca, Morocco in 1949. By the age of thirteen was sketching and selling his drawings on the street. He has held major exhibits in Rome, Copenhagen, Monte Carlo, Reno, Paris, Tel-Aviv and many other major cities. In 1978 two of his works were accepted into the permanent collection of the Louvre Museum in France. Bragg, Charles Charles Bragg was born in Missouri, raised in New York and now lives and works in California. He has received world wide recognition for his satirical studies of mankind. He has been commissioned to do work for "Playboy", "Mother Jones", and the "New York Times", and has been the subject of a PBS Special: "Charles Bragg - One of a Kind". He has won numerous international awards and his work is in the permanent collection of museums around the world including the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, Gallery of Modern Art in Milan, Joseph Hirshhorn Collection and many others. Chagall, Marc Marc Chagall was born in Vitebsk, Russia (1887 - 1985). He was educated in Vitebsk, Russia in 1907; St Petersburg, Russia, 1907 - 10 and Paris, France, 1910-14 Francis, Sam Sam Francis was born in 1923 in San Mateo, California. He entered the University of California at Berkeley as a botany major, then switched to medicine before leaving to join the Army Air Corps in 1943. During military service he suffered injuries that led to spinal tuberculosis, requiring a long recuperation. He began to paint during that recuperative period. In the late 1940s Francis began to associate with students and faculty at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) and to study with painter David Parks. He returned to UC Berkeley to study painting and art history, earning a bachelor's degree in 1949 and a master's a year later. Francis's career was launched in Paris in the 1950s. He then began extensive travel that has characterized his entire career, living, working and exhibiting in Tokyo, Switzerland and the United States as well as Paris. In 1962 he settled in Santa Monica, California, where he established a lithography workshop. The artist's early work of the 1950s and 1960s, described as airy and light-filled, was followed by more structured work of the 1970s and '80s. A list of his solo exhibitions and collections including his paintings is extensive. Francis was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts at UC Berkeley in 1969, and the first Distinguished Alumni Award and retrospective exhibition a short time before his death in 1994. Gross, Chaim Chaim Gross was born in 1904 in the village of Wolowa, in the Carpathian Mountains of East Austria. When he was 10 years old he was separated from his family due to World War I. In 1918, he was reunited with his parents. Gross joined his brother, Abraham, in Vienna the following year, and both traveled to Budapest in search of a better life. Eventually, he and Abraham made their way to America, landing in New York City on April 14, 1921. Gross had just turned 17. He enrolled in the art division of the Educational Alliance on the Lower East Side. Gross enrolled in the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in order to study sculpture under Elie Nadelman. In 1927, Gross left both institutions to join Robert Laurent's classes at the Art Students League. The Alliance hired him as an instructor and he continued to teach at this post for the rest of his life. Chaim Gross died on May 5, 1991 his legacy of joy, his precious gift, is preserved for all time Hagin, Nancy Nancy Hagin was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey in 1940. Indiana, Robert Robert Indiana was born in 1928 at New Castle, Indiana, as Robert Clark. Between 1945 and 1948 he studied at art schools in Indianapolis and Utica, and from 1949 to 1953 at the Chicago Art Institute School and the Skowhgan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. In 1953 and 1954 he studied at the Edinburgh College of Art and London University, after which he settled in New York. His early works were inspired by traffic signs, automatic amusement machines, commercial stencils and old tradenames. In the early sixties he did sculpture assemblages and developed his style of vivid color surfaces, involving letters, words and numbers. In 1966 he had exhibitions in Düsseldorf, Eindhoven (Van Abbemuseum), Krefeld (Museum Haus Lange) and Stuttgart (Württembergische Kunstverein). He was represented at the documenta "4" exhibition, Kassel, in 1968. He became known for silkscreen prints, posters and sculptures which took the word LOVE as their theme. The brash directness of these works stemmed from their symmetrical arrangements of color and form. Kravjansky, Mikulas Born in Rudany, Czechoslovakia in 1928, Mikulas Kravjansky set the stage for his remarkable artistic career when her entered the Academy of Arts in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. While studying at the Academy, Kravjamsky met his wife who was an acting student there and both of them became heavily involved in Czechoslovakian theater. Soon after, Kravjansky became on of the foremost set and costume designers in the Czechoslovakian theater and lectured frequently at the Academy of the Arts. He designed more then 450 productions for the National Theater and National Film Board of Czechoslovakia, including opera, ballet and drama. From 1965 to 1968, Kravjansky was Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Bratislava and his designs and paintings were exhibited in Prague, Budapest and Vienna. In 1968, Kravjansky and his family left Bratislava and settled in Canada here Kravjansky became Assistant Master of Art at Toronto's Humber College in 1969. During the next six years, Kravjansky exhibited extensively in Toronto and developed 51 shows for Columbia Pictures Television. In 1976, Kravjansky decided to return to making of graphics and felt the need for greater exposure. He moved to Pompano Beach, Florida and began creating limited edition graphics which were in great demand. The name for the general technique used by Kravjansky is intaglio, in which the image is created by the artist on many different plates and then transferred to handmade paper by the high pressure of the etching press. A close examination of Kravjansky's procedure demonstrates its complexity - including precise technical specifications for plate cutting, materials, textures and viscosity of the inks, formulas for accurate color balance, and most importantly, his creation of the image on the plate. After the graphic is produced to Kravjansky's exacting specifications, the work is painted over with watercolor inks and laminated with metallic inlays. Kravjansky produces only small limited editions oh his designs and then destroys the plates to assure the artistic integrity of his work. Kudo, Muramasa Kudo was born in Kawamata-Machi, a small town near Fukushima City, north of Tokyo, Japan in 1948. Kudo's skilled, artistic gift is inherited from his ancestors, since the 12th century, the men of Kudo house have been Samurai's , a once respected profession. At age 1 his extraordinary skill won him first place in Japan's Youth Competition., the International-All- Asia Competition and finally at 14 he won the International World Committee Calligraphy Competition. Inspired by Japan's turbulent social reinvention, Kudo was very active in his youth and teenage years and continued to broaden his creative awareness in pursuit of mastering himself. Kudo found his sanctuary from a calligraphy Master, who became his first teacher in Zen philosophy, which allowed his creative instincts to flourish and taught him the skills and discipline which uncommonly characterizes his contemporary works. He has continued the rigorous practice of Zen philosophy for over 20 years. Kudo work evokes a sense of escape and fantasy. many of his paintings are inspired by strong, goddess-like women who dwell in the natural settings Kudo has loved since a child. Deemed a "master of line" by his critics, Kudo is acclaimed for his clean, simple and controlled style which earned him distinction in calligraphy. His skill of calligraphy, gives each original painting, refinement and delicacy of detail, as a great master of the line drawing. Lebadang Lebadang was born in Vietnam in 1922 and immigrated to France in 1939, where he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse. He received numerous prizes for his paintings, drawings and sculpture. In 1950, his first one-man exhibition in Paris was highly praised by the French press. Over the next three decades there were many important exhibits of his works throughout France and Germany. Lebadang came to the attention of Americans in 1966 when the Cincinnati Art Museum hosted the first one-man exhibition of his paintings in the United States. McKnight, Thomas Born in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1941, by generation he should have been an early pop artist or a late neo-expressionist. But he came of age artistically during the 1970s, when art had practically done itself in with minimalism and conceptual experimentation. His work, full of color and image, seems to be a reaction to that gray decade. McKnight discovered art at about thirteen when his mother gave him a set of oil paints, and his first painting--a snowy castle on a hill--was not unlike some of those he still creates. He attended Wesleyan University, a small liberal arts college in Middletown, Connecticut, where he was one of only five art majors. Perhaps this fostered his independent, even eccentric, approach to the art "isms" of his time. He spent his junior year in Paris where he developed a lifelong love of European civilization. After a year of graduate work in art history at Columbia University, McKnight decided against pursuing a career as an art professor or curator. In 1964 he found a job at Time magazine where he would work for eight years, interrupted by a two-year stint in the army in Korea. McKnight held many jobs at Time, beginning as a file clerk and ending by writing advertising copy. During a vacation in Greece in 1970, McKnight realized that life in a corporation was not for him. He had been reviewing art for a radio program around that same time, and it became clear to him that the art currently popular was not his cup of tea either. Two years later, with the cushion of his profit-sharing plan, he left Time, summered on the Greek island of Mykonos, and commenced painting in earnest. His work began to sell, although slowly, in America and Germany. In the early 1980's he discovered a larger audience by creating limited edition serigraph prints. By then he had found that, for his work, the silkscreen technique was a natural choice--its brilliant colors and clean shapes echoed his own visions. Moore, Wayland Wayland Moore is an internationally acclaimed artist. His forte is the exciting use of swirling impact color in a near-strobic effect which "captures motion without freezing it." One critic has described Moore's works as "reminiscent of Degas ballet dancers. His facile brush captures a world of motion in changing Moore's limited edition prints are exhibited in galleries across the United States and abroad. His works reside in museums, private collections, corporate offices, and in colleges and universities around the world. His commissions are as varied as his background. They span all arenas of sport and capture the excitement of events such as the Kentucky Derby, the Triple Crown, the America's Cup, Super Bowls, the Indianapolis 500, the World Series, the Masters, the U.S. Open, Madison Square Garden, summer and winter Olympic games, the Maccabiah Games of Israel, the Special Olympics, and many other international events. Nesbitt, Lowell Lowell Nesbitt (1933 - 1983) was born in Baltimore, MD in 1933. Nesbitt has successfully tackled many subjects: landscapes, nudes, ruins caverns and flowers. Nesbitt who has been painting giant flowers since 1964, removes their usual context of devastating sentimentality so that their peculiar beauty is again visible. The flowers are removed from three-dimensional space and from traditional social contexts. In 1980 the U.S. Post Office issued four stamps based on his flower paintings, and he later served as official artist for the Apollo 9 and Apollo 13 space missions. Nesbitt has emerged as one of the most important American Realist. Noyer, Philippe Philippe Noyer (1917-1985) Pissarro, Hugues Claude Hugues Claude Pissarro, also known professionally as Isaac Pomié, is the grandson of the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro and son of the artist Paulemile Pissarro. Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine on November 9, 1935. At present best known for his style of realism, he had nonetheless been involved with different contemporary movements before confirming his preference for figurative realism in later life. Predestined by his educational background to become a professor of art for much of his professional life, his temperament was notably molded by formal training at prestigious French establishments such as the "Ecole du Musée du Louvre" and, in particular, at the "Ecole Normale Supérieure" a unique French institution dedicated to the pursuit of achievement and excellence to which only the academic elite have access. Rauschenberg, Robert Robert Rauschenberg was born in 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas. In 1942 he studied pharmacy briefly at the University of Texas, following which he served in the U.S. Marines. From 1947 to 1948 he studied various subjects at the Kansas City Art Institute, including art history, sculpture and music. During this time he did window displays, executed film sets and designed photographic studios. In 1948 he attended the Académie Julian, Paris, met Susan Weil, who was later to become his wife, and returned to the USA to study under Joseph Albers at the Black Mountain College, North Carolina. In the same year he moved to New York and studied at the Art Students' League until 1952. He did window displays for Bonwit Teller and Tiffany, had his first one-man exhibitions in 1951 and returned to Black Mountain College in 1952. He traveled in Italy, France and Spain and had exhibition in 1953 at Florence and Rome. He moved into a studio in New York in the same year and started to paint his red pictures, replacing the all-white and all-black paintings. In 1958 he had his first exhibition at the Leo Castelli gallery and began his drawings to illustrate Dante's "Inferno". In 1962 he first used the technique of silkscreen on canvas, mixed with painting, collage and affixed objects. He also did his first lithographic work, for which he was awarded the Grand Prix at Ljubljana. In 1968 he was invited by NASA to witness the lift-off of Apollo 11 at Kennedy Space Center and to use this theme in his work. He set up the foundation Change Inc. for destitute artists in 1970, and a house with art studios in Florida in 1971. In 1975 he received the Honorary Degree of Fine Arts from the University of South Florida, Tampa, and, together with James Rosenquist, became involved in appealing for a re-examination of taxation for non-profit art institutions. He lives in New York City and on Captiva Island, Florida. Rosenquist, James Born in 1933 in Grand Forks, North Dakota. His family moved to Minneapolis in 1944. In 1948 he began his studies of art at the Minneapolis Art Institute. In 1953 he continued his studies of painting at the University of Minnesota. In 1955 he had a scholarship to go to the Art Students' League, New York. During this period he painted small format abstract paintings and worked part-time as a driver. During the election he produced the picture President Elect in which John F. Kennedy's face is combined in a kind of collage with sex and automobile imagery. His first one-man exhibition in the Green Gallery, in 1962, was sold out. In 1963 he worked on several sculptures, had a number of exhibitions at the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, showed his work at the Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles, and taught at Yale University. In 1965 he began to work with lithographs. In the same year he made the 26 meter-wide picture F-111, which was shown at the Jewish Museum, New York, at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and in other Europen cities. It is one of his most important works. The spatial organization of the composition into layers suggests the interrelationship of contemporary historical symbols and signs of affluence and military hardware, a vision of American culture expressing the proximity of euphoria and catastrophe. In 1970 he went to Cologne for the opening of his exhibition at the Galerie Rolf Ricke. During the public protest against the Vietnam War he was briefly detained in Washington. In 1974 and 1975 he lobbied the senate on the legal rights of artists. In 1978 F-111 was exhibited in the International Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In his work of the late seventies and eighties, e.g. 4 New Clear Women, images of women are confronted with machine aesthetics, usually in large oblong compositions. The themes of these dynamic compositions also include fire, progress and war machinery which he shows in rotating pictorial narratives. Between 1985 and 1987 Rosenquist's entire development as an artist was shown in a comprehensive retrospective at six American museums. Secunda, Arthur Secunda was born in New Jersey in 1927. His career in art has been marked by international recognition in many fields. Painter, sculptor, teacher, critic and printmaker, he is particularly acclaimed as the latter. A review of a recent Secunda exhibition in Montreal elicited the critical comment that "Secunda's work combines the geometry of New York with the warmth and color of California." Not surprisingly, Secunda maintains studios on both the East and West coast, though he travels and exhibits extensively in Europe as well. Vasarely, Victor Victor Vasarely was born in Pecs, Hungary in 1906. After receiving his baccalaureate degree in 1925, he began studying art at the Podolini-Volkmann Academy. He is internationally recognized as one of the most important artists of the 20th century. He is the acknowledged leader of the Op Art movement, and his innovations in color and optical illusion have had a strong influence on many modern artists. In 1947, Vasarely discovered his place in abstract art. Influenced by his experiences at Breton Beach of Belle Isle, he concluded that "internal geometry" could be seen below the surface of the entire world. He conceived that form and color are inseparable. "Every form is a base for color, every color is the attribute of a form." Forms from nature were thus transposed into purely abstract elements in his paintings. Recognizing the inner geometry of nature, Vasarely wrote, "the ellipsoid form...will slowly, but tenaciously, take hold of the surface, and become its raison d'etre. Henceforth, this ovoid form will signify in all my works of this period, the 'oceanic feeling'...I can no longer admit an inner world and another, an outer world, apart. The within and the without communicate by osmosis, or, one might rather say: the spatial-material universe, energetic-living, feeling-thinking, form a whole, indivisible...The languages of the spirit are but the super vibrations of the great physical nature." Victor Vasarely died in 1997.