The document provides biographical information on several artists including W. Blake, A. Beardsley, Franco Caprioli, Ugo Pratt, Corto Maltese, Jacob Lawrence, and discusses the art movements of Pop Art. It notes that W. Blake was a visionary artist and forerunner of Romanticism, while A. Beardsley pioneered Art Nouveau and graphic design. Details are given on the lives and works of comic artists Franco Caprioli and Ugo Pratt. The style and narratives of Pratt's comics Corto Maltese are described. Jacob Lawrence is discussed as a painter of African American scenes and history in a colorful, layered style. Finally, Pop Art is summarized as

2. A Tour in Art

3. W. BLAKE
A visionary artist
An isolated genius
A forerunner of Romantic and Symbolist A
Biblical references
Large use of allegory
A large range of techniques

5. A Selection from
His works

7. A Selection from
His works

14. A forerunner of Art Nouveau and Graphic Design
A large use of decorations
A strong sexual note
A sense of perverse
A large stock of symbolism
A sense of irony
A. BEARDSLEY

28. A selection
from
His Works

29. COMICS

30. FRANCO CAPRIOLI
He was born in Mompeo, in the province of Rieti, in 1912.
He started his comic career in 1936, working for several
magazines, such as Il Vittorioso and Il Corriere dei Piccoli.
His speciality was adventure stories, like 'Gino e Piero' and
'Pino il Mozzo'. In the 1960s, he briefly collaborated with
writer Roger Lécureux, creating 'La Patrouille Blanche'.
After that, Caprioli mainly worked for the magazine Il
Giornalino, but he also adapted novels like 'Moby Dick' for
comics for the publishing house Mondadori.

33. UGO PRATT
Pratt is at the first glance difficult . Not only his style seems
odd or careless here and there but the whole pace of the
story is much slower than in some average books. A whole
page can be devoted to "talking heads" or still pictures
creating atmosphere, and then sometimes, action without
any text. Pratt was a great storyteller and although many of
his books can be read as plain adventures, the most
important factor is nostalgia, the atmosphere of a
disappeared era.

34. UGO PRATT
Pratt was more interested in the overall appearance and the
play of shadow and light. Some machines like cars and trains
were drawn with extreme realism. Pratt's drawing style was not
fixed but changed to fit the pace of the story. A detailed
landscape creates the feeling of the time standing still. Rough
lines and "misplaced" camera angles underline the intensity of
an action to the point of abstraction.

37. Corto Maltese was born on July 10, 1887 on
Malta.
His mother was a gypsy woman and father a
seaman from Cornwall. We also know that when
he was young, he was not satisfied with the line
of fate in his palm so he drew a better one with a
knife. The first available story of Corto is located
at Manchuria, during the 1904-05 war between
Russia and Japan (La jeunesse de Corto). There
he meets Raspoutin, by that time a deserter of
the Russian army, for the first time. They head
for Africa but end in America.
The books Sous le signe du Capricorne, Corto
toujours un peu plus loin and Les Celtiques
contain shorter stories regarding the 1907-13
and 1915-1916 voyages of Corto. From November
1913 to early spring 1915 the story unfolds at La
Ballade de la mer salée. Raspoutin robs English
cargo ships on Pacific but the appearance of
Corto brings some obstacles on his way to
richness

39. J. LAWRENCE
•Reality is caricature of the heightened gesture.
•His paintings are essentially narrative and were often done in series.
•Simple, intensely colored shapes define his figures and their
environment.
•Black nationalism.

40. J. LAWRENCE
•Busy New York City street corners were favourite
subjects for him who began painting African -American
genre pictures as a young man in Harlem during the
Depression.
•The affectionate portrayal of day-to-day maternal
rituals
Like other American Scene painters, Lawrence was
thrown on the defensive by the Abstract Expressionist

41. J. LAWRENCE
tide that washed over New York in the 1950s, but he tenaciously clung
to the belief in figurative art with liberal humanistic meaning. He told an
audience of artists and art students at the time:
“Maybe ... humanity to you has been reduced to the sterility of the line,
the cube, the circle, and the square; devoid of all feeling, cold and highly
esoteric. If this is so, I can well understand why you cannot portray the
true America.

42. J. LAWRENCE
It is because you have lost all feeling for man.... And your
work shall remain without depth for as long as you can only
see and respect the beauty of the cube, and not see and
respect the beauty of man-every man”.
He thrived on the company of budding African -American
writers and artists still in Harlem even after the Harlem
Renaissance had become another victim of the Great
Depression. More fortunate than most of these Harlem
friends, he enjoyed early recognition.

43. J. LAWRENCE
His tempera and gouache series on African-
American history, Toussaint L'Ouverture (1937-
38), Frederick Douglas (1938-39), Harriet
Tubman (1939-40), The Migration of the Negro
(1940-41), and John Brown (1941-42) were
praised by established critics and purchased by
museums.
Numerous individual paintings, some of lyrical
and fantasy themes, also attracted favourable
notice during the early 1940s.

44. J. LAWRENCE
Lawrence's style grew more complex in the 1950s.
The colors are less brilliant and saturated than before, possibly
because of the casein medium. An intricate pattern of darting shapes
defines the women, the buggy, the pavement, the buildings, the fish
balloons, and the sky.
The background attains a force and energy equal to the figures.
COX

45. J. LAWRENCE
The individual features appear as if they could be pealed off the paper
surface; the effect of the cadence of shredded patterns is an unexpected
unity, a medley of dynamic design and poetic resonance.
Such sophisticated picture-making can be attributed to Lawrence's
deepening knowledge of modern art. Working alongside Josef Albers at
the Black Mountain College of Art in 1946 had a major effect on
Lawrence's art through the 1950s, as did Pablo Picasso's Synthetic Cubist
paintings and Ernst Kirchner's dagger-like Expressionism.

47. A selection
Of his
works

48. A selection
Of his
works

49. A selection
Of his
works

50. A selection
Of his
works

53. POP ART
It rebelled against the Abstract Expressionist style of painting
that dominated the art world of the 1950s.
Abstract Expressionism sought to convey moods and
emotions through nonrepresentational shapes and colors
painted with bold, expressive brush strokes.
In sharp contrast with this style, pop artists presented images taken
unchanged from the commercial environment around them.

54. POP ART
Pop Art brought art back to the material realities
of everyday life, to popular culture (hence ``pop''),
in which ordinary people derived most of their visual
pleasure from television, magazines, or comics.
Pop Art emerged in the mid 1950s in England,
but realized its fullest potential in New York in
the '60s where it shared, with Minimalism,
the attentions of the art world.

55. POP ART
In Pop Art, the epic was replaced with the everyday
and the mass-produced awarded the same significance
as the unique; the gulf between ``high art'' and
``low art'' was eroding away. The media and
advertising were favourite subjects for Pop Art's
often witty celebrations of consumer society.

56. POP ART
.
The term ``Pop Art'' was first used by the
English critic Lawrence Alloway in a 1958 issue
of Architectural Digest to describe those paintings
that celebrate post-war consumerism, defy the
psychology of Abstract Expressionism,
and worship the god of materialism.