Mid Century Oil Painting George Constant Art Abstract Expressionism

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Artist: George Constant
Oil On Canvas / Wood Frame
Title: Diminishing lights #615
Date: 1961-1963
Size: 40 W x 50 … Read more Artist: George Constant
Oil On Canvas / Wood Frame
Title: Diminishing lights #615
Date: 1961-1963
Size: 40 W x 50 H

About the Artist: George Constant was a pioneering modernist painter, engraver and etcher. He was born George Zachary Konstantinopoulos in 1892 in Greece. Orphaned in early childhood, he was raised by uncles, one of whom was a monk at the Monastery of Panagia Eleousa, near Patras, from whom he "learned about icons". Constant, who immigrated to the United States in 1910 at the age of 18, said he "had a flair for drawing even in Greece, but really turned to art only in the United States," after reading Dante's Inferno, with its striking illustrations by Gustave Dore. He enrolled in art school in 1912 -among the earliest Greek Americans to do so- first at Washington University in Saint Louis (1912-1914) and then, on scholarship, as a student of George Bellows and Charles Hawthorne at the Art Institute of Chicago (1914-1918) with George Bellows and C. W. Hawthorne. As soon as he graduated, Constant's paintings were exhibited in a group show at the Arts Club in Chicago (1918). From then on, his work has been exhibited almost every year of his life. By 1998 his work had been in more than 50 personal exhibitions. See less