Albers, Josef (19 March 1888–25 March 1976), painter, designer, and educator, was born in Bottrop, Germany, the son of Lorenz Albers, a house painter and craftsman, and Magdalena Schumacher. He graduated in 1908 from the teachers’ college in Büren and went on to teach in public schools in Bottrop and neighboring Westphalian towns. In the summer of 1908 he traveled to Munich to view modern art in the galleries and the historical collections of the Pinakothek. Albers’s earliest known drawing, ...
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Albers, Josef (1888-1976), painter, designer, and educator
Brenda Danilowitz
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Bayer, Herbert (1900-1985), artist, industrial designer, and architect
Leslie Humm Cormier
Bayer, Herbert (05 April 1900–30 September 1985), artist, industrial designer, and architect, was born in Haag (near Salzburg), Austria, the son of Maximilian Bayer, a rural government bureaucrat, and Rosa Simmer. Bayer traced his lifetime interests in nature and art to early alpine treks with his father and to watercolor landscape painting encouraged by his mother....
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Billings, Charles Howland Hammatt (1818-1874), artist and architect
James F. O’Gorman
Billings, Charles Howland Hammatt (15 June 1818–14 November 1874), artist and architect, was born in Milton, Massachusetts, the son of Ebenezer Billings, Jr., a tavern keeper and clerk, and Mary Demale Janes. Billings attended Boston’s English High School in the early 1830s but did not graduate. He had begun instruction in drawing at the age of ten with an itinerant German master, Franz (or Francis) Graeter, and in the 1830s he apprenticed himself to Abel Bowen, a wood engraver, and to the architect ...
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Platt, Charles Adams (1861-1933), artist and architect
Keith N. Morgan
Platt, Charles Adams (16 October 1861–12 September 1933), artist and architect, was born in New York City, the son of John Henry Platt, a corporate lawyer, and Mary Elizabeth Cheney. Born into a comfortable and cultured family, Platt became interested in the arts at a young age. In 1879, while on summer vacation, he was introduced to the newly revived fine art of etching by Stephen Parrish, a Philadelphia artist and one of the leaders of the etching revival. Platt’s early experiments in this medium earned him the epithet of “the boy etcher,” critical acclaim, and financial success. For most of his etchings, he chose marine landscapes, in which he explored the interaction of light, water, and atmosphere. Although he continued to etch throughout his life, Platt also studied painting from 1878 to 1882 at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League in New York. Dissatisfied with the instruction in New York, he traveled to Paris in 1882 for five years of training, first on his own and later at the Académie Julian. He concentrated on figure study in Paris but eventually returned to his love of landscape, winning in 1894 the prestigious Webb Prize for landscape painting from the Society of American Artists. In 1886 he married Annie C. Hoe, who died in childbirth losing twin girls the following year. Platt subsequently married Eleanor Hardy Bunker, the widow of painter ...
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Proskouriakoff, Tatiana (1909-1985), artist, architect, and archaeologist
Catherine Dyer Klein and Karen Bachman Barnett
Proskouriakoff, Tatiana (23 January 1909–30 August 1985), artist, architect, and archaeologist, was born in Tomsk, Siberia, the daughter of Avenir Proskouriakoff, an engineer and chemist, and Alla Nekrassova, a physician who graduated with the first class of women from a Russian medical school. The parents were aristocrats. The family traveled to the United States in late 1915, when Avenir Proskouriakoff was sent to supervise the manufacture and sale of weapons to Russia. When Tatiana and her older sister Ksenia contracted diphtheria and scarlet fever, they and their mother returned to Russia. The following spring they joined their father in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. When the Russian Revolution broke out, the family elected to remain in their adoptive country. Tatiana Proskouriakoff attended Pennsylvania State University and graduated in 1930 with a bachelor of science degree in architecture. Though she never pursued architecture as a profession, her training and artist talents came into play later....
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Sheets, Millard (24 June 1907–31 Mar. 1989), watercolorist, architectural designer, and impresario of art and architecture commissions in many traditional media
Adam Arenson
Sheets, Millard (24 June 1907–31 Mar. 1989), watercolorist, architectural designer, and impresario of art and architecture commissions in many traditional media, was born Millard Owen Sheets in Pomona, California, the only child of John Gosper Sheets, a butter maker turned salesman, and Marilla Mae Owen. Millard’s mother died of complications following his birth, and Sheets was raised by his maternal grandparents on a horse ranch in the rural, agricultural community. As a boy, Sheets was encouraged to draw by his aunts, and a neighbor volunteered to be Sheets’s first art instructor when he was only seven. At twelve, he won a prize in an art competition at the Los Angeles County Fair. Sheets’s early aptitude for painting brought him from one mentor to another, including the Los Angeles County Fair art commissioner Theodore B. Modra and California regionalist painters F. Tolles Chamberlin and Clarence Hinkle....
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Urban, Joseph (1872-1933), architect, scenic designer, and illustrator
Matthew A. Postal
Urban, Joseph (26 May 1872–10 July 1933), architect, scenic designer, and illustrator, was born Josef Karl Maria Georg Urban in Vienna, Austria, the son of Josef Urban, an official in the Viennese school system, and Helen Weber. Although his family hoped he would become a lawyer, in 1890 Urban enrolled at the Polytechnicum in Vienna for courses in architectural engineering and at the Imperial and Royal Academy, where he studied architectural design and aesthetics under the architect Karl von Hasenauer....
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Urban, Joseph (1872-1933)
Maker: Arnold Genthe
In
Joseph Urban Photograph by Arnold Genthe, c. 1916. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-G432-1732).
