seniority list
John E. Ferneley was an English artist who specialised in depicting sport horses and hunting scenes. Although his rendition of horses was stylised, he is regarded as one of the great British equine artists, second perhaps only to George Stubbs.
Félix González-Torres was a Cuban-born American visual artist. He lived and worked primarily in New York City between 1979 and 1995 after attending university in Puerto Rico. González-Torres was known for his minimalist installations and sculptures composed of everyday materials such as strings of lightbulbs, clocks, stacks of paper, or packaged hard candies. In 1987, he joined Group Material, a New York-based group of artists whose intention was to work collaboratively, adhering to principles of cultural activism and community education, much of which was influenced by the artist's experience as an openly gay man. González-Torres is known for having made significant contributions to the field of conceptual art in the 1980s and 1990s. His practice continues to influence and be influenced by present-day cultural discourses.
Arnold Schoenberg, real name Arnold Franz Walter Schönberg, was an Austrian and American composer, representative of musical expressionism, teacher, musicologist and conductor.
Schoenberg came from a Jewish family and began studying the violin at the age of eight and later the cello. While working as a bank clerk, he simultaneously studied composition with Alexander Zemlyansky (1871-1942) and soon wrote his first string quartet (1897) to acclaim. With the help of Richard Strauss, he obtained a teaching position in Berlin, and lived for a time in two cities. In 1904, Alban Berg and Anton Webern began studying with Schoenberg, and this largely determined their future artistic careers.
Around 1906, through much experimentation, Schoenberg came to the conclusion that tonality should be abandoned. He created new methods of music-making and composition involving atonality. In the subsequent period of "free atonality" from 1907 to 1916, he composed the monodrama "Reason", "Five Orchestral Pieces", "Pierrot Lunaire" and other works.
In 1933, due to the rise of National Socialism in Germany, Schoenberg was expelled from the country and emigrated to the USA, in 1941 he took American citizenship and taught at the University of California at Los Angeles until 1944. The works of this period demonstrate the composer's ever-increasing skill and freedom in the use of the 12-tone method.
Although Schoenberg was never accepted by the general public, he nevertheless had a significant influence on 20th century music, being the founder of the New Viennese School of Composition.
Francis Harry Compton Crick was a British molecular biologist, biophysicist and neuroscientist. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1962.
During World War II he had to work on developments for the military, and in 1947 he turned to biology at the Strangeways Research Laboratory, University of Cambridge. In 1949 he moved to the University Medical Research Council at Cavendish Laboratories. Using X-ray diffraction studies of DNA by biophysicist Maurice Wilkins (1916-2004) and X-ray diffraction images taken by Rosalind Franklin, biophysicist James Watson and Crick were able to construct a molecular model consistent with the known physical and chemical properties of DNA.
This achievement became a cornerstone of genetics and was regarded as one of the most important discoveries of 20th century biology. In 1962, Francis Crick, along with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for determining the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the chemical ultimately responsible for the hereditary control of life functions.
From 1977 until the end of his life, Crick served as professor emeritus at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, California, where he conducted research on the neurological basis of consciousness. He also wrote several books. In 1991, Francis Crick received the Order of Merit.
Jakob Marrel was a German still life painter active in Utrecht during the Dutch Golden Age.
Otto Altenkirch was a German impressionist painter and stage designer. He studied at the Berlin University of the Arts and the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts.
Otto Altenkirch was one of the founders of the Künstlervereinigung Dresden, one of the artists who worked at the Dresden Museum and the Opera House.
For two decades one of his favourite subjects was the linden alley in Rheinsberg. In 1941 and 1943 his works were exhibited in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung (exhibition of Nazi-approved art in Munich).
