Kenyon Cox
Kenyon Cox ( born October 27, 1856 in Warren, Ohio, † March 17, 1919 in New York ) was an American painter, illustrator, art critic and teacher. He was an academically trained painter, who maintained a realistic and symbolic manner contrary to modern trends. Cox, who produced numerous murals and mosaics in public buildings. He was also known for poetry and art critical and theoretical essays.
Life
Cox was the son of Jacob Dolson Cox and Helen Finney Cox. He first studied art at the McMicken School of Art (later the Art Academy of Cincinnati ) in Cincinnati. After visiting the Centennial Exhibition in 1876, he found that Philadelphia was the better place for an artist and began at the local art academy, to study Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
1877 Cox went, like many of his contemporaries, to Paris. He studied first with Emile Auguste Carolus- Duran, had a falling out but after a short time with this, and he began studying at the École des Beaux -Arts. There he attended the painting classes of Alexandre Cabanel, Jean -Léon Gérôme and Henri Lehmann. During his stay in Europe Cox traveled through France to Italy, where he grappled with the artists of the Renaissance.
1882 Cox returned back to the United States and settled in New York as a painter down. He took a job as a teacher at the Art Students League. There he met his future wife, the San Francisco native Louise Howland King, know. The two married in 1892, and four years later, in 1896, her son came into the world Allyn. For livelihood Cox began drawing illustrations for magazines and newspapers, and ( unsigned ) to write art criticism contributions to the New York Evening Post. For some magazines such as Century, The Nation and Scribner's, he wrote poems. Together with his wife he designed for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, the walls of the Liberal Arts Building.
Cox also designed walls and mosaics, including the Library of Congress in Washington DC, the State Capitol Des Moines and in the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin. In 1910 he was awarded the Architectural League of New York, a Medal of Honor for his murals.
Kenyon Cox was artistically active until the end of life. He died on March 17, 1919 in his home in New York of pneumonia. Much of his writings and correspondence are now the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University in New York City in the Department of Drawings & Archives.
About the artwork
Contrary to the modern art movements that developed during his life, such as Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, or, Cox kept always in a traditional painting style. As an academically trained artist, he painted in a realistic manner, in which he used allegories and Symbolist style means in his paintings to express his ideas. Although his landscapes, portraits and genre paintings found recognition, yet had his idealized Act and its traditional implementation of classical themes in common with the little spirit of the avant-garde of these days. In an article for the Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he described the difference between figurative art, which he pursued and the more fashionable abstract or representational painting.
Works (selection)
- Sacre Conversazione (after Boltraffio ), oil on canvas, 1878-1882, collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
- Justice, study for the mosaic in the Wisconsin State Capital, oil on canvas, 1913, collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
- The Spirit of Self- Sacrificing Love, Mural at Oberlin College, 1914
- The Sword is Drawn The Navy Uphold it! Recruiting poster for the United States Navy, 1917
Writings
Letters
- An Artist of the American Renaissance: The Letters of Kenyon Cox, 1883-1919. Kent State University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-87338-517-9.