Birger Sandzen: A Swedish-American Master of Landscape Painting

The artist Birger Sandzén was a renowned Swedish-American painter, printmaker, educator and art advocate. Born in 1871 in Blidsberg, Sweden to a cultured family, he first attended a boy’s school in Skara where he studied drawing and painting with the noted academician Olof Erlandson. After graduating in 1890, Sandzén furthered his studies—in French and Esthetics—at Lund… Read more »

Francis Newton Souza: An Indian Artist in Exile

Artist Francis Newton Souza was born to Catholic parents in 1924 in Saligao, Goa, a Portuguese colony in the south of India. After his father died when he was three months old Frances moved with his mother Lilia to Mumbai where she worked as a dressmaker. While attending St. Francis Xavier’s College, a secondary school,… Read more »

Frank Diaz Escalet (1930-2012): Power to the People

Frank Diaz Escalet

Frank Diaz Escalet (1930-2012), was a Puerto Rican-American artist who originally lived in New York before settling in Maine. Escalet’s bold and brilliant paintings art chronicle both the everyday lives and cultural expressions of Hispanic Americans in the mid-20th century. Much of Escalet’s is autobiographical, including his attempts to escape the Spanish Harlem ghetto of… Read more »

Zhang Daqian: Artist, Collector, Scholar, Forger

Zhang Daqian

Judging Zhang Daqian (aka Chang Dai-chien) as an artist isn’t hard to do: he was a versatile, daring and highly accomplished painter. Judging Zhang Daqian as a man is much more difficult, as he was a dedicated forger who paid for his extravagant lifestyle by creating absolutely convincing copies of ancient Chinese paintings and duping… Read more »

Xu Beihong (1895-1953): How Europe Shaped a Chinese Modernist’s Art

Xu Beihong: An Introduction Xu Beihong (aka Hsü Pei-hung) was a Chinese painter whose lifelong project involved re-invigorating Chinese art by hybridizing it with Western influences. Motivated by his conviction that the tradition of Chinese painting had gone slack and that over-reliance on mimicry of the past left Chinese art unable to carry the necessary… Read more »