The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (63 page)

(1905–60).
Canadian painter, active mainly in Montreal. He trained as a church decorator under Ozias
Leduc
, then studied in Paris. In the early 1940s, under
Surrealist
influence, he started to produce ‘automatic’ paintings (see
AUTOMATISM
), and with
Riopelle
founded the radical
abstract
group Les
Automatistes
. His later paintings have an
all-over
surface animation recalling the work of
Pollock
, although the only American influence Borduas acknowledged was that of Franz
Kline
. In 1953–5 he lived in New York, then spent his final years in Paris. He ranks with Riopelle as one of the outstanding Canadian abstract painters of the post-war years.

 
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Borghese Gallery
, Rome.

Italian state museum housed in the Villa Borghese. The villa was built (1613–15) for Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1576–1633), nephew of Pope Paul V (Camillo Borghese, 1552–1621), and their collections of paintings and sculpture form the nucleus of the museum. Scipione was
Bernini's
first important patron, and the Gallery has an unrivalled representation of the sculptor's early work, including two busts of Scipione. The collection of paintings includes outstanding works by
Caravaggio
(Scipione was an early admirer),
Raphael
, and
Titian
. The Borghese collection was one of the few Roman patrician collections not dispersed in the 18th cent. The villa and its contents were acquired by the Italian government from the Borghese family in 1902.

 
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Marble statue (Louvre, Paris) of a nude warrior in a vigorous attitude of combat (his sword and shield are missing, but he is evidently lunging at an opponent on horseback in a type of pose that has been described as a ‘heroic diagonal’). It was discovered in 1611 at Nettuno (near Anzio), had entered the
Borghese
collection by 1613, and was bought by Napoleon (brother-in-law of Prince Camillo Borghese) in 1807. The statue is signed by ‘Agasias, son of Dositheos, Ephesian’ and is generally considered to be a copy of a
Hellenistic
work done under the influence of
Lysippus
. It became famous soon after its discovery and for two centuries it was one of the most admired and copied of antique statues, praised particularly for its anatomical mastery:
Bernini's
David
is an early instance of a derivation from it and a more curious adaptation is found in
Copley's
Brook Watson and the Shark
, in which the figure of Watson—horizontal in the water—is based, in reverse, on the
Warrior
. It is now much less admired as a work of art, Martin Robertson (
A History of Greek Art
, 1975) describing it as ‘harsh and unappealing’.

 
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(1867–1941).
American sculptor of Scandinavian descent. He carried to an extreme the American cult for the colossal (what his wife called ‘the emotional value of volume’) and gained renown with gigantic sculptures on mountain-sides executed with pneumatic drills and dynamite, particularly the huge portrait busts of Washington, Jefferson , Lincoln , and Theodore Roosevelt at Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The project, begun in 1930, was sponsored by the US Government and cost over $1,000,000; the final details were added in 1941 after Borglum's death by his son Lincoln .
Solon Hannibal Borglum
(1868–1922), Gutzon's brother, was also a sculptor, mainly of Wild West subjects.

 
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Borofsky , Jonathan
.

See
NEW IMAGE PAINTING
.

 
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