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Arnold Bocklin
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Early days:
Arnold Bocklin, a.k.a Arnold Boecklin, was
born in 1827,in Basel, Switzerland. Arnold Böcklin studied
and worked throughout northern Europe, Düsseldorf, Antwerp,
Brussels, and Paris. Inspite of this,he found his real motivation
in the landscape of Italy.He returned to Italy from time to time
and he even spent his last years in this country.
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Career:
Arnold Bocklin was a Swiss Symbolist painter
whose moody landscapes and ominous allegories enormously influenced
late 19th-century German artists.Böcklin initially won a great
reputation with the huge mural “Pan in the Bulrushes” .This mural brought
him the support of the King of Bavaria.He got an opportunity to teach
at the Weimar Art School,but his heart was always set towards Italian
Landscapes. After an hiatus during which he finished his mythological
frescoes for the decoration of the Public Art Collection, in Basel,
he settled in Italy and only sporadically he returned to Germany in
order to experiment with flying machines.
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In his last two decades,his work became ever more subjective, frequently
depicting fabulous creatures or being based on dark allegorical themes,
as in "Isle of the Dead" (1880), that was the inspiration
for the symphonic poem The Isle of the Dead by the Russian composer
Sergey Rachmaninoff. The spectral scenes depicted in "Odysseus
and Calypso" (1883) and "The
Pest" (1898) reveals the
morose symbolism that projected the so-called Freudian imagery of much
20th-century art.
He passed away in Jan.16,1901 Fiesole in Italy.
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