Karel Appel 90th's Birthday

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Christiaan Karel Appel (25 April 1921 – 3 May 2006) was a Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet. He started painting at the age of fourteen and studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in the 1940s. He was one of the founders of the avant-garde movement Cobra in 1948. [Read more on Wikipedia]

Karel Appel in 1974

Constantin Brâncuşi's 135 birthday

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Constantin Brâncuşi (Romanian pronunciation: [konstanˈtin brɨnˈkuʃʲ]; February 19, 1876 – March 16, 1957) was a Romanian sculptor.

Brâncuşi grew up in the village of Hobiţa Romania, Gorj, near Târgu Jiu, near Romania's Carpathian Mountains, an area known for its rich tradition of folk crafts, particularly woodcarving. Geometric patterns of the region are seen in his later works. [Read more on Wikipedia]

Constantin Brâncuşi; Photograph taken by Edward Steichen in 1922.

Nachum Gutman Birthday

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Nachum Gutman (alternate romanization: Nahum Gutman; Hebrew: נחום גוטמן‎: born 5 October 1898, died 28 November 1980) was a Russian-born Israeli painter, sculptor and author. [Read more on Wikipedia]

Nachum Gutman in Vienna, 1920

Arthur Boyd's Birthday

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Arthur Merric Bloomfield Boyd, AC, OBE (24 July 1920 – 24 April 1999) was a member of the prominent Boyd artistic dynasty in Australia, with many relatives being painters, sculptors, architects or other arts professionals. His sister Mary Boyd married John Perceval, and then Sidney Nolan, both artists. His wife Yvonne Boyd née Lennie, and son Jamie and daughters Polly and Lucy are also painters. Boyd is best known for his experimental and sometimes complex painting of figures and impressionist, pastoral landscapes. He was a member of the Antipodeans, a group of Melbourne painters that also included Clifton Pugh, David Boyd, John Brack, Robert Dickerson, John Perceval and Charles Blackman. [Read more on Wikipedia]

Happy 4th of July and Happy Birthday Rube Goldberg!

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Reuben Lucius Goldberg (July 4, 1883 – December 7, 1970) was a Jewish American cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer, and inventor. Goldberg is best known for a series of popular cartoons he created depicting complex devices that perform simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways – now known as Rube Goldberg machines. Goldberg received many honors in his lifetime including a Pulitzer Prize for his political cartooning in 1948 and the Banshees' Silver Lady Award 1959.

Goldberg was a founding member and the first president of the National Cartoonists Society, and is the name sake of the Reuben Award which the organization awards to the Cartoonist of the Year. He is the inspiration for various international competitions, known as Rube Goldberg contests, which challenge participants to make a complex machine to perform a simple task. [Read more on Wikipedia]

Isamu Noguchi's Birthday

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Isamu Noguchi (野口 勇 Noguchi Isamu, November 17, 1904 – December 30, 1988) was a prominent Japanese American artist and landscape architect whose artistic career spanned six decades, from the 1920s onward. Known for his sculpture and public works, Noguchi also designed stage sets for various Martha Graham productions, and several mass-produced lamps and furniture pieces, some of which are still manufactured and sold.

Among his furniture work was his collaboration with the Herman Miller company in 1948 when he joined with George Nelson, Paul László and Charles Eames to produce a catalog containing what is often considered to be the most influential body of modern furniture. His work lives on around the world and at the Noguchi Museum in New York City. [Read more on Wikipedia]

Isamu Noguchi, 1941

Ilya Repin's Birthday

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Ilya Yefimovich Repin (Russian: Илья́ Ефи́мович Ре́пин, Ukrainian: Ілля Юхимович Рєпін, (5 August [O.S. 24 July] 1844, Chuguyev, Kharkov Governorate, Russian Empire – September 29, 1930, Kuokkala, Viipuri Province, Finland) was a leading Russian painter and sculptor of the Peredvizhniki artistic school. An important part of his work is dedicated to his native country, Ukraine. His realistic works often expressed great psychological depth and exposed the tensions within the existing social order. Beginning in the late 1920s, detailed works on him were published in the Soviet Union, where a Repin cult developed about a decade later, and where he was held up as a model "progressive" and "realist" to be imitated by "Socialist Realist" artists in the USSR. [Read more on Wikipedia]

Self-portrait, 1878 (State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg).