10 Artists you need to Know đ #11
Discover 10 hidden gems of the art world, including Eugène Boudin, Leonor Fini, Utagawa Kuniyoshi & Lotte Laserstein. Your next favorite artist is here.
1 | Eugène Boudin (1824 to 1898)
Summer 1857, Le Havre. A 33 year old painter walks past a framerâs window and notices the caricatures of a local kid hanging in the display. He goes in, asks to meet the kid, and tells him the most useful thing anyone has ever told him: stop the caricatures, come paint outside with me at Honfleur.
The kid is 17 and his name is Oscar Claude Monet.
The painter is Eugène Boudin. He did not wait for Monet to have a body of work. Son of a harbour pilot in Honfleur, he has been painting outside on Normandy beaches for ten years with an easel planted in the sand, which nobody else does at the time.
He invents a new motif: Trouville, Deauville, bourgeois families in crinolines taking the sea air on the Channel coast while immense clouds occupy two thirds of the canvas.
Corot nicknames him the king of skies. Baudelaire devotes a long eulogy to his pastels in his Salon of 1859, long before Monet exists as a painter.
He keeps painting his skies and beaches until his death in 1898. Today, in the MusĂŠe dâOrsay, most visitors walk past the small Boudin canvases in a hurry to reach the Monets.
2 | Guido Borelli (born 1952)
You have already seen one of his paintings without knowing his name. An Italian village at golden hour, a Tuscan alley with laundry hanging between the walls, a warm dusk. On a friendâs living room wall, in a hotel room in San Francisco, on a poster sold at an airport gift shop.
His name is Guido Borelli. Born in Caluso, at the foot of the Piedmont Alps, into a family of musicians and painters who pushed him to draw from childhood. National drawing competition won at thirteen. First solo exhibition at seventeen, in Turin, in 1969. Classical training at the Accademia Albertina.
The market falls in love. Borelli ends up exhibiting in around twenty countries, from Italy to Japan, from Kenya to California. His Italian villages become a tourism export more efficient than any travel agency.
Italian critics call him commercial. Italian collectors keep buying anyway. So does the rest of the world.
3 | John Powell (born 1930)
He is 95 years old, lives in Santa Barbara with his wife, and paints flowers every morning. Bouquets in copper jugs, garden tables with wine and bread, sun pouring through the petals of an open peony.
John Powell was born in Hollywood in 1930. Self taught. He started painting at sixteen and has never stopped. He learned by looking at Boldini, Sorolla, the Spanish still life masters who could make a piece of pottery feel heavier than a person.
He traveled a lot. Mexico, Italy, Greece, North Africa, Japan. He came home loaded with fabrics, ceramics, embroidered shawls that reappear in his still lifes like permanent set pieces.
In 1995, for the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations, the World Federation of United Nations Associations named him Artist of the Year. A set of his paintings entered the permanent collection of the Philatelic Museum at the Palais des Nations in Geneva.
The critics ignore him. The buyers who push open the door of a Carmel gallery and stop in front of one of his canvases do not.
4 | Sergiu Ciochina (born 2001)
