Robert Henri Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Robert Henri - Essay Example During summers, he could paint in Barbizon and Brittany, and visited Italy before gaining admission to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the year1891. Late that year, he went back to Philadelphia and in the year 1892, he went on with his studies in the academy. Moreover, he started his lengthy and great career as a teacher of art at the School of Design for Women and he taught here until the year 1895. While here, he came across the youthful newspaper illustrators who would later become famous affiliates of ‘The Eight’: Everett Shinn William Glackens, John Sloan and George Luks. Henri regularly visited Paris where Frans Hals, Diego Velazquez and Edouard Manet were his greatest source of inspiration. In the year 1899, one of his paintings was bought for the Musee National du Luxembourg. This was one year after having married Linda Craige (Margaret and Horowitz Raymond, para1). According to Adams, Henri’s painting portraits were often of different ethnic types such as Chi nese, Native American, African-American, and Irish. He also painted many pictures of dancers and when describing the principles of vital art, he often pointed to Isadora Duncan. In the year 1900, Henri decided to settle in New York and he got a teaching job at the New York School of Art where he worked from 1902-1908. Slowly, he started rejecting the academic painting as well as impressionism’s discreet traditions, turning his focus on urban realist themes produced in a bold, painterly style. In the year 1906, Henri was nominated to the National Academy of Design, and during that summer, he tutored in Spain. Following the academy’s refusal to exhibit works by Henri's circle during its annual show in 1907; he decided to arrange an independent show and in February 1908, he held the famous exhibition of ‘The Eight’ at the Macbeth Gallery. In the same year, he married Marjorie Organ the illustrator, as his second wife. In the year1910, he prepared the first â €˜Exhibition of Independent Artists’ and in 1913 played a peripheral role in the organization of the Armory Show by the Association of American Sculptors and Painters. Between the year 1911 and 1919, Henri also organized jury-free exhibitions at the MacDowell Club. Despite the fact that he kept on winning many awards, the influence that Henri had as a progressive creative leader started diminishing following the rise of American and European modernism and he came to be recognized only as part of the artistic enterprise. Nevertheless, his work during his visits to Southwest presented some of the most inventive and innovative of his career. The beginning of one of Henri’s most innovative eras began in the summer of 1914 when he took a trip to La Jolla, California (Margaret & Horowitz, para2, and Leeds, para9). Margaret & Horowitz explain that he lectured at the Art Students League from the year 1915 to 1927. Although personal expression underlines all the creative end eavors of Robert Henri, his portraiture, the painting mode for which he is infamous, explicitly manifest it. Henri’s work went by Thomas Eakins’ realist tradition, an artist for whom he had the utmost admiration. He believed that Eakins was America’s greatest painter of portrait. Henri’s paintings were principally single-figure masterpieces that directly confront the