Arturo Souto Feijoo (April 5,1902 - July 3, 1964) was an important Spanish painter who studied in Seville and Madrid and then traveled to Paris in the 1920s where he was influenced by the avant-garde. Prior to his exile from Spain following the Spanish Civil War, Souto exhibited throughout Europe. While living in Havana, Mexico, and the U.S. during the 1940s until his death in 1964, Souto continued to exhibit and developed a reputation as one of the outstanding Spanish painters of the twentieth century.
Leonardo da Vinci liked to think that he was as good at engineering as he was at painting, and though this was not actually the case (nobody was as good at engineering as he was at painting), the basis for his creativity was an enthusiasm for interweaving diverse disciplines. With a passion both playful and obsessive, he pursued innovative studies of anatomy, mechanics, art, music, optics, birds, the heart, flying machines, geology, and weaponry.
Olga Costa was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1913, at the outset of World War I. Her parents, Jacobo Kostakowsky and Ana Falvisant Bovglarevokeylandel, were immigrants who had fled czarist Russia to escape persecution of the Jews. Costa and her younger sister Lya were raised in Berlin, where their father, a violinist and composer, exposed them to the arts at a young age. But after the end of the war, her family, along with many other Russians, fled Germany. In 1925 they set sail from the French port of Saint-Nazaire, arriving in Veracruz, Mexico later that year.
Peter Max (born Peter Max Finkelstein, October 19, 1937) is a German-American artist known for using bright colours in his work. Works by Max are associated with the visual arts and culture of the 1960s, particularly psychedelic art and pop art. Max, the son of German Jews, fled Berlin in 1938, settling in Shanghai, China, where they lived for the next ten years. In 1948, the family moved to Haifa, Israel where they lived for several years. From Israel, the family continued moving westward and stopped in Paris for several months—an experience that Max said greatly influenced his appreciation for art—eventually settling in Brooklyn, N.Y.C.
As an artist, Joaquin Clausell (June 16, 1866 - November 28, 1935) had two periods of production, the first between roughly 1903 and 1910 and the second from 1920 until his death in 1935. He abandoned painting during the Mexican Revolution, mostly likely to concentrate on his law practice. However, his production was most intense in the latter period, becoming something of a vice, with all of his spare money going to supplies and even painting on wood and cardboard when he did not have canvas. In addition, he occasionally disappeared to Mexico’s coasts, especially the area between Mazatlán and Acapulco to return with sketches as the basis of new paintings.