Guess the Artist

Your clues this week are:

• The artist was born in the Russian Empire, became a French citizen in 1924, became a U.S. citizen in 1957, died in Italy, and is buried on Har HaMenuchot in Jerusalem.
• When the artist went to study in Paris, the Montparnasse area was in full, les Années Folles bloom. If ever there was a great place to be a starving artist, Montparnasse in the early 20th-century was it. Our artist was immediately swept into a circle of friends including Pablo Picasso, Ossip Zadkine, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, Chaim Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brâncuşi, Juan Gris, Diego Rivera, Alberto Giacometti, Salvador Dalí, and Joan Miró to name just a few artists -- and omit three dozen writers and poets. Between them all, they had (1) barely a franc, and (2) the best time ever.
• The first thing our artist learned about sculpture was how to cast in bronze. Apparently the second thing our artist learned about sculpture was how expensive it is to cast in bronze, because clay, plaster, and wood were used as mediums much more frequently until sometime in the 1960s.

And


• The work seen here is very, very early. Not only is it an exception to the "no bronze" rule, it predates every style with which the artist would experiment, from proto-Cubism, to Abstraction, to a wondrous blend of heroic, Neoclassic-slash-Aztec figures (my "analysis"). With our artist, only portraits of friends were realistic. This one was fit for a wealthy, expatriate American collector, although she passed on buying it. However, she had two friends, collecting siblings she knew from her years in Baltimore, who snapped it up and took it back to America. Our artist was happy either way, for a sale is a sale is a sale. Do you know who the model for this sculpture was?

Please email me your guesses over the coming week. I'll post the winner and correct answer with next week's guessing game. Good luck!

Last Week's Answer:

Last week's clues pertained to Sir Henry Raeburn (1756-1823), the beloved Scottish Romantic painter, and his portrait Henry Raeburn Inglis (1814). The title is a bit confusing, isn't it? Henry Raeburn Inglis was Henry Raeburn's step-grandson if that helps ... and honestly, nearly everyone refers to the painting as Boy and Rabbit anyway, probably to simplify Matters Henry. Wade knew all of this right off the bat, so he is our winner. Congratulations to you, Wade and thanks to everyone who participated!