Music History: Johnny Hartman

Photographer Unknown, “Johnny Hartman” Date Unknwon, Publicity Photo, Gelatin Silver Print

Born at Houma, Louisiana in July of 1923, John Maurice Hartman was an American jazz singer, known for his rich baritone voice and his recording of jazz ballads. An amazingly talented and trained singer, Hartman was always optimistic as he struggled through long periods when popular music was the antithesis of his musical aesthetic.

One of six children born to John Hartman and Louise Barner, Johnny Hartman traveled with his parents and older siblings to Chicago where the family established itself in its African-American working class community. Like his peers, his first singing experience was in the local Baptist church where he gravitated towards the gospel style of song. At DuSable High School, Hartman studied music under the highly-regarded director Walter H. Dyett, whose alumni included such greats as vocalist Dinah Washington, jazz tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan, Bo Diddley and Nat “King” Cole.

In 1940, Hartman enrolled at the Chicago Music College of Roosevelt University where he studied pitch control, proper enunciation and correct vocal production, the future hallmarks of his singing. Drafted into military service in 1943, Hartman was initially stationed at an Army base in Virginia. Recognized for his singing ability, he was reassigned to the Army Special Service group and began entertaining the troops at local bases and the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC.

In 1946 after his army service, Johnny Hartman returned to Chicago where he sang at Chicago’s South Side nightclubs and recorded songs for several local independent labels. In September of 1946, Hartman won a singing contest at the Apollo Theater. He was awarded a one-week engagement with jazz pianist Earl “Fatha” Hines’s ensemble: however, he remained with the group for a year. After the Hines Orchestra disbanded, Hartman was invited to join Dizzy Gillespie’s Big Band for an eight-week tour of California in 1948. At the tour’s end, he briefly worked with jazz pianist and composer Erroll Garner before starting a career as a soloist in early 1950.

Although Hartman was recording regularly with a series of independent labels and even produced a series of sides for RCA Victor, he never had a breakthrough hit and struggled to find a foothold in the popular music scene. In 1956, Hartman released his first solo album, “Songs from the Heart”, a collection of ballads with a quartet led by trumpeter Howard McGhee for Bethlehem Records. This was followed by the 1957 “All of Me: The Debonair Mr. Hartman”, with jazz saxophonist and arranger Ernie Wilkins’s orchestra. “All of Me” contained Hartman’s cover of songwriter Ray Henderson’s very popular “The Birth of the Blues”.

In the early 1960s, Johnny Hartman continued to sing at clubs within the mostly African-American circuit; he also made a few appearances on network television variety shows. Hartman was approached during this period by the head of Impulse! Records, Robert Thiele, to inquire if Hartman would consider performing with John Coltrane. Hartman approached Coltrane after attending Coltrane’s performance at Birdland, New York City’s famous jazz club. After agreeing on a list of songs, they recorded the 1963 “John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman”, a series of six vocal and musical jazz compositions, five of which were recorded in one-take.

The popularity of “John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman”, the only album where Coltrane played with a singer, led to Harman recording four more albums with Impulse! and its parent label ABC. As popularity swung to rock and roll, Hartman’s style had less commercial appeal; he began singing at upscale lounges in New York City and Chicago as well as recording several albums in Japan, one of which included a memorial tribute to Coltrane after his death in 1967. Now returned to the jazz combo format of his earlier works, Hartman recorded the 1981 album “Once in Every Life”, four songs of which were used in the soundtrack for Clint Eastwood’s 1995 “The Bridges of Madison County”. For this album, Hartman earned a Grammy nomination for Best Male Jazz Vocalist in 1981.

After the soundtrack of “The Bridges of Madison County” became a fixture on the Billboard charts, there was a flurry of reissues of Hartman’s out of print albums. A new generation of jazz vocalists acknowledged Hartman’s influence with their own tribute albums. Johnny Hartman followed his Grammy—nominated album with his last album of new material, the 1980 “This One’s for Tedi”, a tribute to his wife Theodora. He also gave several performances at jazz festivals and on both television and radio. Hartman’s health, however, had been steadily failing since 1981. Johnny Hartman died of lung cancer at the age of sixty-two on the fifteenth of September in 1983 at New York City. He was buried at the Calverton National Cemetery in New York’s Suffolk County.

Notes: The complete discography of Johnny Hartman, compiled by Gregg Akkerman and Noal Cohen, can be found at Noal Cohen’s Jazz History Website located at: https://attictoys.com/johnny-hartman/johnny-hartman-discography/

The Jazz Journalist Association News has a review by David Kastin on music professor Gregg Alderman’s 2012 book “The Last Balladeer: The Johnny Hartman Story” at its site: https://news.jazzjournalists.org/the-last-balladeer-the-johnny-hartman-story-a-review/

An excellent article on author and music critic Will Friedwald’s SubStack “Slouching Towards Birdland” covers the release of the boxed set from Fresh Sound Records entitled “Johnny Hartman: “Complete Singles, Rarities, and Live Recordings 1947-1961”. Contained within this article are four early songs that Hartman sang with big bands: https://willfriedwald.substack.com/p/johnny-hartman-complete-singles-rarities

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Johnny Hartman” Date Unknwon, Publicity Photo, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Johnny Hartman, “For Trane”, Album Cover, Recorded Japan 1972, Released 1995, Blue Note Records

Third Insert Image: “John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman”, Album Cover, Recorded March 1963, Released July 1963, Van Gelder Studio, Impulse⁄ Records

Bottom Insert Image: Johnny Hartman, “Johnny Hartman Sings the Songs of Paul Greewood & Gene Novello”, Album Cover, Recorded 1977, Released 1997, Gary Music Records

Peter Keetman

The Photography of Peter Keetman

Born at the Wupper River city of Elberfeld in April of 1910, Peter Keetman was a German photographer, a member of the avant-garde Fotoform and a formative force in the evolution of subjective photography.

In the post-war period of the 1950s, inter-human subjectivity was seen as a significant means to correct the errors of objectified wartime politics. This concept of subjectivity, taught by photographer Otto Steinert, influenced the Essen school of photography and formed the basis of a new movement, subjective photography, that championed the exploration of both the inner psyche and human condition rather than the outside world.

Born to consul and banker Alfred Keetman and Käthe Simons, Peter Keetman attended the Bavarian State Institute for Photography, later known as the State Academy for Photographic Design, Munich. After his graduation, he worked in Duisburg as an assistant to portrait photographer Gertrud Hesse and, later, industrial photographer Carl Heinz Schmeck in the Wurm River city of Aachen.

In 1940, Keetman was called into Germany’s Army where he served as a member of its Railway Pioneers, a division that converted Russian rail lines from broad gauge to German standard gauge, thus enabling the transport of Germany’s troops and supplies into Russia. In 1944, Keetman returned from the war; however, a serious injury during his service left a permanent disability. He resumed his studies by finishing his master class at the Bavarian State Institute for Photography in 1947-1948. In this period, Keetman assisted prominent New Objectivist photographer Adolf Lazi with the planning of “The Photographie 1948” exhibition in Stuttgart’s State Museum of Applied Arts.

In 1949, Peter Keetman became a founding member of Fotoform, a six-member avant-garde group that sought to revive the creative possibilities of photography that had been extinguished by the propaganda of Nazi cultural policy. The group adhered to personal expression and formalism, the study of art by comparing form and style, often through unusual compositional framings and darkroom manipulation. Keetman played a major role in the evolution of subjective photography; his work was presented at the 1951 “Subjective Photography” exhibition and within its accompanying catalogue.

Beginning in 1948, Keetman’s work appeared in all major German and many international photography magazines. He united within his wort the two main aesthetic currents of his era: the modernist attention to form, experimentation, and abstraction, and subjectivity’s wish for a humanistic approach to the depiction of the world, both cities and nature..The motifs of Keetman’s images were drawn from nature, architecture, people and industry; he was particularly adept at depicting the detail and sturcture of even ordinary objects.

Among all his collective works, Peter Keetman’s most noted series was his “Volkswagen: A Week at the Factory”, where he captured images of car parts and assembly lines. Begun on Easter of 1953, this series was more than conventional industrial photographs or documentation of the production process. Keetman included long shots in which the vastness of the factory halls dominate, and close ups with a high degree of abstraction taken under natural light.

Peter Keetman died in Marquartstein, Bavaria at the age of eighty-eight in March of 2005. For his photographic work, he was awarded the David -Octavius-Hill Medal from the German Photographic Academy, and the Cultural Award of the German Society of Photography. Keetman’s work is held in many private collections and such public institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago, the city of Wolfburg’s Art Museum, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, among others.

Top Insert Image: Peter Keetman, “Self-Portrait with Camera”, 1957, Gelatin Silver Print, 17.2 x 23.3 cm, Stiftung F.C. Gundlach

Second Insert Image: Peter Keetman, “Trister Bahnhof (Dreary Train Station)“, 1954, Ferrotyped Gelatin Silver Print on Agfa Paper, 30.8 x 23.9 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Peter Keetman, “Mensch und Natur (Man and Nature /My Own Shoe)”, 1948, Ferrotyped Gelatin Silver Print, 41.3 x 50.8 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Peter Keetman, “Volkswagen Work/Welding the Dash Panel and Roof of the Beetle, Assembly Hall 2”, 1953, Gelatin Silver Print, 25.8 x 26.8 cm, Private Collection

Richard Lindner

Richard Lindner, “The Meeting”, 1953, Oil on Canvas, 152.4 x 182.9 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Born at Hamburg in November of 1901, Richard Lindner was a German-American painter and illustrator. Unique as an artist, he created his own oeuvre: hard-edged paintings with stretches of color that melded human figures with machine-like elements. Lindner’s paintings in the 1960s used the sexual symbolism of advertising and investigated definitions of gender roles in the media.

Lindner’s career as an artist began at the age of forty after his arrival in New York City. Acknowledged as a significant and unique European-American painter, he was represented by prestigious galleries, including New York’s Cordier & Ekstrom and Betty Parson Gallery, and the Claude Bernard Gallery in Paris. Lindner had solo exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Berkeley’s University Art Museum, the Walker Center in Minneapolis, and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris.

Richard Lindner did not fit into any modernist or post-modernist category. He was erroneously categorized as a precursor of Pop Art. Lindner, however, regarded himself as a hard-edge painter with roots in European culture, particularly that of Germany in the Weimar years from 1919 to 1933. His work emerged from the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) in the 1920s, a reaction against German Expressionism that created a new realism with a grim but precise, satirical edge. Another source, perhaps more important, was the work of French painter Fernand Léger whose figurative work consisted of formalized, mechanical bodies with bold outlines; after 1927, this work became more organic and irregular.

Thoroughly knowledgable about European art, Lindner thought of himself as a European artist in exile, having escaped safely from the clutches of the German government in the 1930s. He adored New York’s cosmopolitan nature as well as its glamorous and seedier sides, aspects of which were used as themes in his work. Lindner’s paintings were created from the icons of American fantasy: Times Square, Coney Island, Hollywood, Las Vegas and Disneyland. His works displayed an iconographic human circus removed from reality, fantastic and dangerous at the same time.

“The Meeting” is considered Lindner’s first masterpiece; it is, surely, one of the odder paintings of the latter half of this century. Inside an impossibly claustrophobic room, Lindner has assembled tokens of obsession as well as friends and family: a buffoonish King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Lindner’s sister Lissy, the artist as a child with his aunt, and friends Hedda Sterne, Evelyn Hofer, and Saul Steinberg. The compositional anchors of the “The Meeting”, however, are a corseted woman whose back is toward us and a large cat who stares at the viewer in an accusatory manner. The bits-and-pieces quality of the painting is typical of Lindner’s compositions, although the space seen here is more “realistic” than the abstracted environments that were to follow. The isolation of each figure stems from Lindner’s collage-like sensibility. The portraits of Sterne and Steinberg, for instance, are based on photographs and their incongruity is due, in part, to the artist’s working methods. But Lindner’s best paintings don’t surrender to fragmentation, they flirt with it, and symbolic and pictorial density of “The Meeting” goes beyond cleverness.”

—Mario Naves, Richard Lindner: A New Yorker in Washington, The New Criterion, Art January 1997

Notes: In 1967, the “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album appeared to wide acclaim at the height of Beatlemania. It was one of the most successful albums with more than eleven million copies sold in the United States alone. British painter Peter Blake designed the album cover which featured over seventy faces of recognizable people from Marilyn Monroe and Mae West to Marlon Brando and Edgar Allan Poe. Of all these famous faces, there was only one face that depicted a painter: Richard Lindner.

Second Insert Image: Richard Lindner, Untitled, Colored Lithograph, 44/125 Edition, 1975, “Eugène Ionesco” Series, 38.5 x 52 cm, Mourlot Printer, Paris

Bottom Insert Image: Richard Lindner, “Checkmate”, 1966, Cut-and-Paste Papers, Watercolor, Pencil, Crayon and Ink on Paper, 60.6 x 45.6 cm, Museum of Modern Art

__________________

If you find this site interesting, please make a small donation of support. Ultrawolves is not a free WordPress site and several of my research sites require paid yearly subscriptions. A donation made at the site’s app on the page prompts a message that you are setting up a WordPress account; this is only used to process your donation through Stripe.

To all those who have used the comment section, thank you for your support, suggestions, new information on posted articles, and alerts for the many typos and other errors found.

Chas (Ultrawolves)

Ralph Eugene Meatyard

The Photography of Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Born at the city of Normal, Illinois in May of 1925, Ralph Eugene Meatyard was an American photographer, a visionary artist known for his black and white portraits of friends, posed family members in masks, and experimental abstracted compositions.

Raised in the city of Bloomington, Ralph Meatyard at the age of eighteen joined the United States Navy during World War 11. After his discharge from military service, he studied optometry through the government’s GI Bill at Williams College in Massachusetts. After his marriage to Madelyn McKinney, Meatyard and his wife relocated to Chicago where he began training as an apprentice optician.

From 1950 to 1967, Meatyard worked at Tinder-Krausse-Tinder, a large optical firm in Lexington, Kentucky. After leaving the company, he opened his own business, Eyeglasses of Kentucky, that created lenses for glasses. The city of Lexington was the site of the University of Kentucky and, during the 1960s, the gathering place for the area’s writers and intellectuals, many of whom became Meatyard’s friends. Among these artists and writers were novelist Wendell Berry, visual artist Guy Davenport, photographers Jonathan Williams and James Baker Hall, and Trappist monk Thomas Merton, a poet who resided at Kentucky’s Abby of Gethsemani.

In 1950, Ralph Meatyard purchased his first camera to photograph Michael, his first-born of three children. Having become interested in photography, he joined the Lexington Camera Club and the Photographic Society of America in 1954, working primarily with a Rolleiflex 6cm square medium format camera. During the 1950s, Meatyard attended a series of summer workshops created by Indiana University’s photography teacher Henry Holmes Smith. He also studied under Minor Martin White, a photographer known for his technical mastery and his strong sense of light and shadow.

Meatyard embraced photography’s function as both a memory and documentary device. His images were populated with family and friends portrayed on suburban front stoops, beside cars, within backyards, and either outside or inside abandoned farmhouses. Meatyard’s subjects, dressed in everyday clothes, were photographed in tight focus from commonplace angles with just enough light. Addressing the issue of identity, he often portrayed family and friends behind costume-shop masks or paper bag faces. This single addition to a posed everyday scene radically altered the image’s context and hinted at an undiscovered story.

In 1956 through fellow photographer Frank Van Deren Coke, Ralph Meatyard entered his photographs in the “Creative Photography” exhibition held at the University of Kentucky. He frequented the Trappistine Abbey of Gethsemani where he shot a number of experimental photographs depicting his friend Thomas Merton posed on its grounds. In 1971, Meatyard collaborated with writer Wendell Berry on “The Unforeseen Wilderness”, a book about Kentucky’s Red River Gorge. The public response to this volume, which contained photography by Meatyard, rescued the gorge from construction of a federally proposed Army Corps of Engineers dam.

Meatyard’s photography began to be known nationally in the early 1970s through several museum shows and its publication in magazines. He had shown his work in several exhibitions alongside such photographers as Ansel Adams, Minor White, Harry Callahan, Edward Weston and Robert Frank. Over the course of his career, he produced a number of photographic series including “Romances”, “Dolls and Masks” and “Light on the Water”. Produced over a two year period, his final series of photographs, the 1974 “The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater”, contained sequential cryptic double portraits of friends and family members wearing masks and enacting symbolic dramas.

A pioneering and inventive artist, Ralph Eugene Meatyard died at the age of forty-six from cancer in his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky on the seventh of May in 1972. He was survived by his wife Madelyn and three children: Michael, Melissa and Christopher. Meatyard was cremated and his ashes scattered in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge. His work is contained in several museums, among which are Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC, the John Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Notes: The name Lucybelle Crater in Meatyard’s final series was adapted by the artist from a character in Flannery O’Connor’s 1955 short story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”. Meatyard clearly intended that the identity of each person in the series not be known to the viewer of this work; he identified every character in this series with the same name: Lucybelle Crater. In each image, the Lucybell figure was portrayed by the artist’s wife, Madelyn Meatyard, who wore a costume-shop hag mask. This figure was paired with a family member or friend who wore a transparent mask that hid identity and aged the wearer.

“The Believer” is a quarterly literature, arts and culture magazine that specializes in criticism, literary non-fiction, and immersive reporting on contemporary issues. Investigative reporter and novelist Ted McDermott wrote an extensive article, “The Family Albums of Ralph Eugene Meatyard”, for its January 2007 issue: https://www.thebeliever.net/the-family-albums-of-ralph-eugene-meatyard/

Writer David A. Cory has a biographical article on Ralph Eugene Meatyard at the online photography magazine “F-Stop”: https://www.fstopmagazine.com/blog/2013/ralph-eugene-meatyard-by-david-cory/

San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery has an article on Ralph Eugene Meatyard that contains images from four of his series: https://fraenkelgallery.com/artists/ralph-eugene-meatyard

Top Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, (Self Portrait), 1964-1965, Gelatin Silver Print, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Second Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, (Self Portrait), 1958, Gelatin Silver Print, 28 x 35.6 cm, Fraenkel Gallery

Third Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, (Boy by Abandoned House), 1968-1969, Gelatin Silver Print, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Fourth Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled (Table and Chair), circa 1957-1958, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, (Wagon Wheel), 1957-1958, Gelatin Silver Print, 19.3 x 21.5 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Edmund Dulac

The Illustrative Work of Edmund Dulac

Born at the southern French city of Toulouse in October of 1882, Edmund Dulac was a French British-naturalized illustrator of books and magazines as well as designer of banknotes and stamps. Best known as an illustrator of gift books and children’s books, he was one of the illustrators who worked during the Golden Age of Illustration, that period from 1875 to 1920 which marked an upsurge in the quality of illustrated books.

Born the only child of Pierre Henri Aristide Dulac and Marie Catherine Pauline Rieu, Edmund Dulac grew up in a comfortable bourgeois household and was educated at the Lycée de Toulouse. By the age of sixteen, he was creating professional art nouveau work. Dulac studied law at the University of Toulouse for two years before enrolling at the École des Beaux Arts in 1900. While at school, he roomed with his close friend and fellow student Émile Rixens, who became a painter of landscapes and historical scenes.

In 1903, Dulac was awarded a scholarship to the Académie Julien in Paris where he studied for a short period. An impulsive marriage in December of 1903 to Alice May de Marini, an American thirteen years his senior, quickly dissolved. By 1904, he had left for England to pursue his artistic career. Dulac was immediately successful and joined both the London Sketch Club and the St. John’s Art Club. Settled in London’s Holland Park, he received his first commission: illustrations for an edition of Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” and nine other volumes of work by the Brontë sisters to be published by J. M. Dent & Company.

Edmund Dulac’s career flourished between 1890 and 1920, a period when British book illustration was unrivaled. Through his connections with the London Sketch Club, he began associations with London’s Leicester Gallery and publisher Hodder & Stoughton. The gallery commissioned illustrations which they sold at an annual exhibition; publishing rights for reproducing Dulac’s illustrations in yearly gift books were handled by Hodder & Stoughton. Through this partnership, Dulac illustrated multiple editions, which included “Stories from the Arabian Nights”, Shakespeare’s “Tempest”, “Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales”, “The Serpent Prince”, and “Ali Baba and Other Stories”.

Dulac also collaborated with his friends, impresario Sir Thomas Beecham and dramatist William Butler Yeats, on various theater productions. In 1920, he composed music for Yeat’s production of “At the Hawk’s Well”. Dulac, along with Yeats and Ezra Pound, staged Japanese Nō productions for which he designed costumes and stage sets as well as music compositions. The hardships of World War I, however, were still intensely felt in England by 1920; policy decisions and an economic depression made the publishing of elaborately illustrated book editions a rarity.

Though concerned about his income, Edmund Dulac managed on what he earned from portraits and frequent commissions by the Hearst newspaper chain for “American Weekly” cover illustrations. He widened the scope of his work to newspaper caricatures, theater costume and set designs, medals, banknotes and postage stamps. Among these stamp series were issues to celebrate King George VI’s coronation and the 1948 Summer Olympics in London.

By World War II, Dulac had become the leading authority on postage stamp design. To fulfill Charles de Gaulle’s request for a stamp to unite France’s colonies against Germany, he designed a series of stamps depicting the Cross of Lorraine, a sixteenth-century heraldic cross that soon became a symbol of Free France. For his final wartime work, Dulac designed a Victory stamp series, the 1944 “Marianne de Londres”. He used the widow, Léa Rixens, of his college friend Émile Rixens as the model for Marianne, the national personification of the French Republic since the French Revolution.

Dulac lived in London with British author and translator Helen Beauclerk from 1924 until his death. He illustrated two of her novels, “The Green Lacquer Pavilion” (1926) and “The Love of the Foolish Angel” (1929); she, in turn, often posed as the model for some of Dulac’s illustrations. At the close of his career, Dulac returned to illustrating children’s books with the same perfection that had characterized his earlier works. His final commission was for an edition of Milton’s “The Masque of Comus”. Halfway through this project, Edmund Dulac died from his third heart attack on the twenty-fifth of May in 1953 at the age of seventy.

Notes: A collection of Edmund Dulac’s papers, correspondence and musical compositions is house at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin.

A prolific illustrator, Edmund Dulac illustrated dozens of books, some of which required twenty to forty images. The Art Passions website discusses twenty of Dulac’s best known illustrative projects with images from each: https://www.artpassions.net/dulac/dulac.html

A more extensive study of the illustrators in the Golden Age of Illustration can be found in the Illustration History section of the Norman Rockwell Museum: https://www.illustrationhistory.org/essays/childrens-book-illustrators-in-the-golden-age-of-illustration

Top Insert Image: Howard Coster, “Edmund Dulac”, 1938, Half-Plate Film Negative Print, National Portrait Gallery, London

Second Insert Image: Edmund Dulac, “Caricature of John Singer Sargent in His Studio”, Date Unknown, Watercolor and Ink on Paper, 62.2 x 52.1 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Edmund Dulac, Design for a Rug, Date Unknown, Pencil and Gouache on Paper, 12.5 x 9 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Edmund Dulac, “Inspector James Pryde S.C.”, 1915, Pencil, Pen and Ink, Watercolor and Bodycolor on Artist’s Board, 29.6 x 27.5 cm, Private Collection

Music History: Don Cherry

Francis Wolff, “Don Cherry, Recording Session for “Where is Brooklyn” Album”, November 11, 1966, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Gelatin Silver Print, Francis Wolff Mosaic Images/Corbis

Born at Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in November of 1936, Donald Eugene Cherry was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader and multi-instrumentalist. Pioneering in free jazz, avant-garde jazz and world fusion music, he is considered one of the most influential jazz musicians of the late twentieth-century.

Born to musical club owner Ulysses Cherry, an African-American, and Daisy Lee Fulson, a woman of Choctaw descent, Don Cherry grew up in a world of music. His father played trumpet and both his mother and grandmother played piano. Ulysses Cherry was the owner of Oklahoma’s Cherry Blossom Club, a jazz venue that hosted such musicians as Charles Henry Christian, one of the first electric guitarists and a key figure in bebop jazz, and Fletcher “Smack” Henderson, a pianist and one of the most influential arrangers and bandleaders in jazz history.

At the age of four, Cherry moved with his family to the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles where his father tended bar at Central Avenue’s Plantation Club, the center of the city’s jazz scene. Transferred to Jacob Riis High School, Cherry met jazz drummer Billy Higgins, who would later play with Ornette Coleman, Herbie Hancock and Thelonius Monk, among others.

By the early 1950s, Don Cherry, in his teenage years, was playing trumpet with jazz musicians in Los Angeles; he would occasionally play piano in trumpet player Art Farmer’s group. His attendance at a Los Angeles jam session with trumpeter Clifford Brown, drummer Larance Marable, and saxophonist Eric Dolphy led to Brown informally acting as Cherry’s mentor. In the late 1950s, Cherry toured for a period with tenor saxophonist James Earl Clay, who later made an appearance on Cherry’s 1988 “Art Deco” album for the A&M label.

Cherry first played with Ornette Coleman as a cornet player alongside double bass player Charlie Haden and drummers Billy Higgins and Ed Blackwell for Coleman’s first album, the 1958 “Something Else: The Music of Ornette Coleman” released by Contemporary Records. Well known for his free flowing harmonic structures, Cherry co-led “The Avant-Garde” 1960 sessions with John Coltrane, accompanied by Gharlie Haden and Ed Blackwell; the studio album was released by Atlantic in April of 1966.

After leaving Ornette Coleman’s quartet, Don Cherry explored and played with a variety of musicians in small groups during an extended trip to Scandinavia, Europe, India, Morocco, and South Africa. In the late 1960s, he and his wife, textile artist Monica Karlsson (aka Moki Cherry), settled in the small Swedish town of Tågarp. Cherry taught music classes with guest lecturers, performed with collaborators, and held workshops to explore the concept of an Organic Music Society.

Cherry continued to play trumpet and other instruments on recorded sessions. These included Allen Ginsberg’s 1970 “Songs of Innocence and Experience” and Coleman’s 1971 “Science Fiction”. He joined with saxophonist Dewey Redman and former Coleman players Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell to form the Old and New Dreams, which recorded four albums. Entering the genre of world fusion music, Cherry incorporated influences of African, Indian and Middle Eastern music into his playing.

Other playing opportunities for Cherry arrived throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Along with director Alejandro Jodorowsky and Emmy Award winner/keyboardist Ronald Frangipane, he co-composed the score for Jodorowsky’s 1973 surrealist film “The Holy Mountain”. Cherry played on jazz pianist Carla Bley’s impressive 1971 “Escalator over the Hill”, a triple LP set that covered a wide range of musical genres from avant-garde jazz to rock opera. He also played as a sideman for recordings by Lou Reed, Ian Dury, and Sun Ra.

In both 1980 and 1981, Don Cherry toured the United Kingdom and Europe with Ian Dury and his band, Blockheads, which included a Christmas Eve live broadcast by the BBC in London. In 1992, he performed in Mumbai, India with noted Indian violinist L. Shankar. This performance was captured in the award-winning documentary film “Rhythms of the World; Bombay and All the Jazz”. Cherry united in 1994 with the Red Hot Organization and the Watts Prophets to create the compilation album “Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool”, an album to raise awareness of the HIV/AIDS epidemic among African-Americans.

Donald Eugene Cherry died at the age of fifty-eight of liver cancer in Málaga, Andalucia, Spain on the nineteenth of October in 1995. He was inducted into the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame in 2011.

Notes: Believing bebop and modal jazz were too limiting due to regular tempos, tones, chord changes and hormonic structures, jazz musicians in the late 1950s and early 1960s developed something new: free jazz. Seen as a return to primitive and often religious roots, this style drew heavily from world music (essentially culturally exotic compositions) and ethnic music traditions. Free jazz was never entirely distinct from other genres of jazz. It did, however, put a premium on the individual voice or sound of a musician, as opposed to the performer expressing the thoughts of the composer.

Modal jazz also emerged in the late 1950s. Its style used musical modes and scales rather than the complex and rapidly changing chord progressions, thus allowing greater improvisation. Miles Davis based his 1959 album “Kind of Blue” entirely on modality, giving each member of the ensemble a set of scales that encompassed the parameters of their improvisation. This facilitated more creative freedom with melodies. Ornette Coltrane, however, led the exploration of modal composition, producing such albums as “Africa/Brass”, “Giant Steps”, and “Live! at the Village Vanguard”.

Radio presenter and soul/R&B aficionado Wes Berwise’s WBSS Media: The Soul Purpose has a Don Cherry biography/discography on the site as well as several links to videos of Don Cherry playing his trumpet: https://wbssmedia.com/artists/detail/2883

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown,”Don Cherry at the Amougies Festival, Belgium”, 1969, Gelatin Silver Print, Angel City Jazz, Claremont, California

Second Insert Image: Don Cherry, “Art Deco”, 1988, (Don Cherry, James Clay, Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins), Van Gelder Studio, A&M Records

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Don Cherry”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print

Fourth Insert Image: Don Cherry, “Complete Communion, Live in Hilversum, the Netherlands”, May 9 1966, (Don Cherry, Bo Stief, Aldo Romano, Karl Berger, Gato Barbieri), DBQP Records

Fifth Insert Image: Daavid D. Spitzer, “Don Cherry, New York City” 1973, Gelatin Silver Print, 25.5 x 34.9 cm, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington DC

Bottom Insert Image: Don Cherry, “Live in Stockholm”, 2013, Recorded 1968 ABF House, 1971 Stockholm Museum of Modern Art, Caprice Records

William Bronk: “Several Possible Worlds”

Photographers Unknown, Several Possible Worlds

Whether what we sense of this world
is the what of this world only, or the what
of which of several possible worlds
–which what?–something of what we sense
may be true, may be the world, what it is, what we sense.
For the rest, a truce is possible, the tolerance
of travelers, eating foreign foods, trying words
that twist the tongue, to feel that time and place,
not thinking that this is the real world.

Conceded, that all the clocks tell local time;
conceded, that “here” is anywhere we bound
and fill a space; conceded, we make a world:
is something caught there, contained there,
something real, something which we can sense?
Once in a city blocked and filled, I saw
the light lie in the deep chasm of a street,
palpable and blue, as though it had drifted in
from say, the sea, a purity of space.

William Bronk, Metonymy as an Approach to a Real World, 1964, The World, the Worldless, New Directions

Born at Fort Edward, New York in February of 1918, William Bronk was an American poet and essayist. A poet of statement, he fashioned experimental and meditative works that used a language stripped of imagery, metaphor and ornamentation.

A descendant of settler Jonas Bronck for whom the Bronx River is named, William Bronk entered Dartmouth College in 1934, where he studied under poet and critic Sidney Cox. After graduation, he studied for a semester at Harvard and left college to write a paper on Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman entitled “The Brother in Elysium: Ideas of Friendship and Society in the United States”.

During World War II, Bronk served in the U.S. Army, first as a draftee and, later after attending Officer Candidate School (OCS), as an officer. After his military discharge in October of 1945, he taught English for one year at Union College in Schenectady, New York before returning to Hudson Falls, the site of his family’s homestead. In the latter half of 1946, Bronk finished writing his “The Brother in Elysium”; this volume of essays would be published in 1980 by The Elizabeth Press in Virginia.

Upon the unexpected death of his father in 1941, William Bronk had managed his father’s business in Hudson Falls, the Bronk Coal and Lumber Company, until he was called up for military service. In January of 1947, Bronk again took the responsibility of managing the family business; this position, at first temporary, lasted until his retirement in 1978.

Bronk’s work follows the New England poetic tradition, an evocation of nature and its seasons that delves into the essence of reality and truth. This core tenet is also examined in the works of Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson, Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost. As a poet, Bronk was a spontaneous writer; poems would emerge in his mind as he went through his daily life. Known for his austerity, both in world-view and writing style, Bronk believed the world was only a semblance of the truth. While able to intuit its existence, he understood it was really beyond his grasp.

A prolific poet, William Bronk never used the typewriter, but wrote longhand. His manuscripts revealed that he seldom rewrote or modified a poem once it was written down on paper. Bronk’s poetry is clean and even in tone, free of unnecessary wording and filled with a subtle congruity of sound set to a basic iambic line.

In 1951, Bronk published his first major poetic works in the Journal “Origin”, an American poetry magazine founded in that year by poet Cid Corman. The response to his first two books, the 1956 “Light and Dark” and the 1964 “The World, The Worldless” did not garner him any reputation. Following those disappointments, many publishers proposed and later abandoned projects for Bronk’s poetry. Throughout the 1970s, the Elizabeth Press published his poetry volumes and established his place in the literary world.

William Bronk was the author of thirty-two published collections of poetry. His 1981 “Life Supports” won the National Book Award for Poetry. In addition to his 1980 essay collection “The Bother in Elysium”, Bronk wrote two other volumes of essays: the 1974 “The New World” and “Vectors and Smoothable Curves” published by North Point Press in 1983, Talisman House, Bronk’s publisher since 1993, published his final collection of poems, “Metaphor of Trees and Last Poems” in 1999.

William Bronk died of respiratory heart failure at the age of eighty-one, on the twenty-second of February in 1999 at his home in Hudson Falls, New York. He is interred in Union Cemetery in Hudson Falls, New York.

“To Bront, poetry is about what exists independent of writing. It’s about that something, that force, which sweeps poetry (and just about everything else) away. . . Behind Bronk’s deadpan voice, there’s often humor, warmth, even compassion.”—Daniel Wolff, “Why Nobody Reads William Bronk”, Literary Review, Spring 2014

Notes: Poet Burt Kimmelman, Professor of English at New Jersey Institute of Technology, wrote an extensive and interesting 2001 essay on William Bronk for the NJIT educational site: https://web.njit.edu/~kimmelma/poetessaylong.html

Two audio recordings with William Bronk can be found on the Poems to a Listener website: https://poemstoalistener.org/interview/william-bronk-1986-1994-series/

A biography and a taped 1978 poetry reading by William Bronk can be found on the PennysPoetry website: https://pennyspoetry.fandom.com/wiki/William_Bronk

Harvard Library’s “Listening Booth” site has thirteen audio recordings of William Bronk reading his poems: https://library.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/static/poetry/listeningbooth/poets/bronk.html

Top Insert Image: Daniel Leary, “William Bronk”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Poems to the Listener

Second Insert Image: William Bronk, “Metaphor of Trees and Last Poems”, 1999, First Edition, Paperback, SOS Talisman House, Northfield, Massachusetts

Third Insert Image: William Bronk, “Manifest and Furthermore”, January 1987, First Edition, North Point Press, New York City

Bottom Insert Image: William Bronk, “Light and Dark”, 1956, First Edition, Origin Press, Ashland, Massachusetts

Jan Preisler

Jan Preisler, “Black Lake”, circa 1904, Oil on Canvas, 111 x 153 cm, National Gallery, Prague

Born at the Litavka River town of Králův Dvůr in February of 1872, Jan Preisler was a Czech painter, decorative designer and art professor, a leading figure of Czech Symbolism and early Modernism.

The son of an iron foundry worker, Jan Preisler was educated at a municipal school in Popović. A loner by nature, his early talent at drawing enabled him to receive financial aid for studies in Prague. In 1887 at the age of fifteen, Preisler entered the recently opened School of Applied Arts, now the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design. He studied under Czech painter František Ženíšek, a member of the Generation of the National Theatre.

During his studies at school, Preisler became a member of Prague’s artists’ association, the Mánes Union of Fine Arts, and became one of its journal’s contributors. He created the cover for the 1896 inaugural issue of the Union’s journal “Volné Směry (Free Directions)” and served as the journal’s editor for several years. After graduating, Preisler shared a studio in Malostranská with Karel Špillar, a painter, graphic artist and fellow student under Ženíšek at the School of Applied Arts.

Jan Preisler initially painted in a Neo-Romantic style, a genre that arose in opposition to realism and naturalism, considering those formats to be misleading distortions of reality. As he progressed in his work, Preisler began to use the allegorical approach to symbolism. In the 1890s after studying the works of painters Alfons Mucha and Vojtěch Preissig, he began to experiment with the emerging Art Nouveau style.

Jan Preisler infused his paintings with poetic solitude and dreamlike mystery. The setting of a figure in a landscape is a typical feature of his paintings. In his development of the figure, Preisler’s understanding of that symbol changed from etheric levitating figures with symbolistic poses to their realistic rendering. This change in figural rendering was principally evidenced in the works from his loose “Black Lakes” series. Compact in content, those paintings build their stories from all the individual motifs.

In 1902, Preisler and his artist friend Antonin Gudechek traveled to Italy. In Vienna, he met French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Preisler was the organizer of the 1905 Prague Mánes Society exhibition of Edvard Munch’s works; Preisler designed the poster for this exhibition. He traveled to Paris in 1906, where attended a major retrospective of Paul Gauguin’s work at the Salon d’Automne.

In 1903, Jan Preisler became the teacher of nude painting at Prague’s School of Applied Arts and, later in 1913, was designated Professor of Painting at the city’s Academy of Fine Arts. In the period between 1908 and 1918, Preisler was given several public commissions for decorative work at prominent buildings in Prague. Among these were the Palacky Room in the Municipal House of Prague, and mural work for the dining hall of the District House (now Grand Hotel) at Hradec Králové.

Jan Preisler died of pneumonia in April of 1918. He was survived by his wife of four years, Božena Pallas Preisler, and his two children. Preisler was interred in the family vault in Prague.

Notes: In Preisler’s 1904 “Black Lake”, a pale horse stands with a solitary nude figure at the edge of an ominous, dark pool; the scene is an allegory of introspection, nature, and the unconscious. Preisler’s subdued palette and lyrical composition evoke myth and reverie, rooted in both Art Nouveau elegance and Symbolist philosophy. This enigmatic “Black Lake” remains one of Preisler’s most haunting and iconic works.

Top Insert Image: Jan Preisler, “Self Portrait with Cigarette”, circa 1900, Oil on Linen, 50 x 45 cm, Galerie Kodl, Prague

Second Insert Image: Jan Preisler, “Riders in the Wood”, 1904, Pastel on Paper, 36 x 51 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Jan Preisler, “Portrait of the Artist’s Mother”, Date Unknown, Oil on Board, 39.4 x 33 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Jan Preisler, “Study for Young Beggar”, Date Unknown, Black Pencil and White Chalk on Paper, 28 x 31.5 cm, Private Collection

Alair de Oliveira Gomes

The Photography of Alair Gomes

Born at Valença, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro in December of 1921, Alair de Oliveira Gomes was a Brazilian photographer whose work fixated on the depiction of the male body. Over the three decades of his photographic career, Gomes produced one hundred-seventy thousand images, the majority of which still remains unpublished.

During his early career and life, Alair Gomes dealt with an environment where the expression of one’s queer identity was fraught with danger. He often worked in secrecy and faced challenges as a photographer of homoerotic images. In the repressive and strictly controlled political climate that succeeded the 1964 military coup in Brazil, photojournalism focused on exposing the abuses of power perpetrated by the regime, while another significant branch of photography placed its focus on issues of social exclusion and cultural identity. Within the Brazilian heteronormative culture, Alair Gomes was one of very few photographers of the homoerotic tradition.

The son of a civil servant, Alair Gomes spent his formative years in Brazil’s capital, Rio de Janeiro. During his early childhood, he studied the violin and won a local photography competition. At his father’s request, Gomes studied civil engineering and the philosophy of science, that branch of philosophy that examines the foundations, methods, implications and reliability of science. He graduated with a degree from the National School of Engineering at the University of Brazil in 1944. In the following year, Gomes was appointed as a civil engineer for the Brazilian Railway Company.

In 1946, Gomes collaborated with José Francisco Coelho and other friends to found the literary review MAGOG. He abandoned his profession as an engineer to devote himself to the study of modern physics, mathematics and biology. With a 1961 philosophy grant from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Gomes spent a year in the United States where he, in addition to his studies, associated with New York’s academic and artistic communities. From 1964 to 1976, Gomes participated in numerous international conferences on the philosophy of science.

Gomes began turning to photography in the mid to late 1960s. He traveled to Europe in 1965 for the first time; during this six-month trip, Gomes visited museums and began his photographic career through the use of a borrowed camera. In 1977, Gomes decided to devote himself specifically to the development of his photographic work, which initially focused almost exclusively on the men at Rio de Janeiro’s beaches.

Alair Gomes created an immense collection of black and white photographs, shot on the beach or through a telephoto lens from his balcony, that were devoted to the beauty and nudity of the male body. These images were reworked and ordered in carefully constructed sequences to form several series of visual compositions. Among these works are “Sonatinas”, the “four feet” series, “Beach Triptychs”, and “A Window in Rio”. Gomes’s most ambitious work, “Symphony of Erotic Icons” (1966-1978), is composed of thousands of images, sometimes shot at unusual angles, that detail slight variations of the nude body. The choreographic sequence of each rhythmic subset is evocative of music scores.

Gomes was a professor of Philosophy of Science at the Biophysics Institute of the Federal University in Rio de Janeiro. He was also a professor of Contemporary Art at the School of Visual Arts for the Brazilian Ministry of Culture. Gomes later became an advisor at the National Institute of Visual Arts (National Foundation for the Arts, Rio de Janeiro). Between 1976 and 1984, he exhibited his photographs in New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and Toronto.

A highly cultured man who was active as a writer, critic and university professor, Alair Gomes was a collector of books, pictures, and films; he had kept copious journals as well as instructive notes on how his photography should be displayed. Gomes died, at the age of seventy-one, from a stabbing at his Rio de Janeiro home by an unknown attacker in August in 1992. Upon his death, Gomes’s entire archive was donated to the National Library of Brazil and the Foundation Cartier pour Art Contemporain in Paris.

In 2001, the Foundation Cartier organized a major monographic exhibition of Alair Gomes’s work, which was accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue. Since then, his work has gradually achieved international attention, having featured in the 30th São Paulo Biennial and the Maison Eoropéenne de la Photographie in Paris. Gomes’s photographs are now in the Foundation Cartier in Paris, Madrid’s Loewe Foundation, and New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown,”Alair Gomes, Rio de Janeiro”, May 1980, Gelatin Silver Print, Ronca Clube Magazine, April 2016

Second Insert Image: Alair Gomes, “A Window in Rio No.120, Opus 2”, Gelatin on Plate, 23.3 x 17.2 cm, Coleção Gilberto Chateaubriand MAM Rio

Third Insert Image: Alair Gomes, “Sítio Burle Marx”, “Botãnica” Series, Gelatin Silver Print, 30 x 20 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Alair Gomes, Untitled, Greco-Roman Statue, “Viagens” Series, Collection of Renata Phoenix, Museum of Modern Art

Jenö Paizs Goebel

The Artwork of Jenö Paizs Goebel

Born at Budapest in June of 1896, Jenö Paizs Goebel was a Hungarian painter, a prominent representative of modern painting in the first half of the twentieth-century. Influenced by both Post-Impressionism and Surrealism, his works primarily contain lyrical abstraction, emotionally charged color, and a natural perspective.

Born Gőbel Jenő Dezső Gyula, Jenö Paizs Goebel was the son of Hungarian silk painter Mihály Gőbel and Tekla Piroska Liebmann. Beginning in 1915, he initially studied at the glass painting department of the Hungarian Royal National School of Arts and Crafts. Goebel continued his studies at Budapest’s Academy of Fine Arts from 1916 to 1924 under realist painter Tivadar Zemplényi and István Réti, plein-air painter and co-founder of the noted Nagybánya artists’ colony in Romania.

A talented artist in his early career, Goebel received a 1924 Nemes Marcell Scholarship from the Szinyei Pál Merse Society which enabled him to travel. He painted at the Nagybánya artist colony for six months, traveled to Paris where Goebel saw the works of Paul Cezanne and Giorgio de Chirico, and stayed for a period in the French commune of Barbizon where he studied the work of Hungarian Impressionist landscape painter László Paál. In 1925, Goebel was part of a group exhibition held at the Galerie Zodiaque in Paris; his work was also shown in the same year at Budapest’s Ernst Museum.

In 1926, Jenö Paizs Goebel painted in the riverside town of Szentendre and became one of the 1928 co-founders of its Painters Society. During this period in the late 1920s, his work was influenced by the paintings of impressionist László Paál and those of István Szőnyi, a fellow artist from the Nagybánya artist colony. Goebel adopted a painting style that utilized thin, flexible lines and enameled, clean surfaces. Works in this period included the 1926 “Self Portrait Leaning on a Table” and the 1927 “Saint Sebastian”, both now housed in the Hungarian National Gallery. Goebel received a silver medal for the works he exhibited at the 1929 Barcelona World Exhibition.

A significant change occurred in Goebel’s artwork in the early 1930s. The former enameled effect with its contrasting light and shadow was replaced with a decorative, carefully edited style. Now aligned with international Surrealism, he created compositions of myth and magic that contained symbolic elements within metaphysical spaces. The colors and decorative elements of the paintings evoke the techniques Goebel acquired as a glass painter. These dream-realm images, often depicting thick vegetation, can be interpreted as a visual refuge from the rising specter of upcoming war in Europe. Among the works created in this period was Goebel’s best known work, the 1931 “The Golden Age: Self-Portrait with Pigeons”.

After the first half of the 1930s, Jenö Paizs Goebel’s style changed again. The fantastic elements of his former work were absent; his style had become more relaxed with lighter atmospheric effects. Most of his work’s themes were now centered on life in Szentendre where he would live until his death. Simple rural motifs, scenes of local circuses, and self-portraits became the focus of Goebel’s paintings. These cheerful, finely-nuanced works, fashioned with delicate brushstrokes, were shown in a 1943 group exhibition at the local art center, Alkotás Művészház.

Jenö Paizs Goebel died at the age of forty-eight in Budapest on the twenty-third of November in 1944. Retrospectives of his work have been held over the years at the Budapest Art Gallery, the Hungarian National Gallery, the Szentendre Art Gallery, the Ferenczy Museum, and the Budapest History Museum. Goebel’s work can be found in many private collections and such public collections as the Janus Pannonius Museum, Hungarian National Gallery and the Ferenczy Museum.

Notes: Fine Arts in Hungary has a short article on Jenö Paizs Goebel’s “The Golden Age” on its website: https://www.hung-art.hu/frames-e.html?/english/p/paizs_go/muvek/paizsg07.html

Top Insert Image: Jenö Paizs Goebel, “Self Portrait”, 1938, Oil, Tempera on Wood, 44 x 31.5 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Jenö Paizs Goebel, “Parisian Studio Still Life with Mirror”, 1945, Watercolor on Paper, 60 x 45 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Jenö Paizs Goebel, “In the Garden”, 1943, Oil on Wood, 75.5 x 67 cm, Private Collection

Artur Grucela

The Paintings of Artur Grucela

Born in 1987, Artur Grucela is a Polish figurative painter whose naturalistic, idyllic landscapes are populated by archetypical, often solitary, male figures caught in moments of introspection. His work explores the primal relationship of man to nature, as well as humanity’s lack of control over natural forces.

Raised in a small town in southern Poland, Grucela began drawing from an early age and became interested in painting during hie elementary school years. Primarily educated outside academic art institutions, Grucela frequently integrates themes from myths, allegories, and biblical symbolism into his work; he also draws upon motifs from art history, film noir productions, and classic literature.

Artur Grucela’s work, executed in either oils or acrylics on canvas, is inspired by the works of such artists as Early Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli; English etcher and painter William Blake: French illustrator and printmaker Gustave Dorè: Swiss Symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin; and Franz von Stuck, a German printmaker and painter of ancient mythology.

Grucela has exhibited twice with Miligram, a cooperative of young artists in Wroclaw, the first being the city’s 2009 “Represent” exhibition and, in the following year, the “Dzika Banda (Wild Bunch)” exhibition held at Warsaw. After the Miligram group disbanded, he began showing his work through POCO, the Pop & Contemporary Art Museum, founded in Tallinn by Estonian tech pioneer Linnar Viik.

Artur Grucela has exhibited in POCO’s many group exhibitions and country art fairs, including the 2012 inaugural show at the POCO gallery in Wroclaw and the Agora Cultural Center of Wroclaw in 2013. His paintings were included in the 2024 group show “Mystery Keepers” at Warsaw’s Sotto 63 Gallery and at the 2025 group show “Ethereal” at the Edji Gallery in Brussels.

Grucela currently lives and works in Piwniczna-Zdrój, a popular destination in the Western Carpathian mountain range of southern Poland. His work is contained in many private collections in Poland, Switzerland and the United States. A photo-stream collection of Artur Grucela’s work can be found at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/arturgrucela/

Second Insert Image: Artur Grucela, “Moonlight”, 2025, Oil on Canvas, 120 x 90 cm

Bottom Insert Image: Artur Grucela, “In the Eyes of Nature”, 2025, Oil on Canvas, 120 x 90 cm

José Moreno Carbonero

José Moreno Carbonero, “Gladiators After the Fight”, circa 1882, Oil on Canvas, 230 x 300 cm, Museo de Málaga, Museo de Prado Collection

Born at Málaga in March of 1858, José Moreno Carbonero was a Spanish decorator and painter, one of the last history painters of the nineteenth-century. A celebrated portraitist of Madrid’s upper classes, he was influenced by Spanish Romantic painter Mariano Fortuny, known for his historical and orientalist themed works.

The son of a carpenter, José Carbonero enrolled in Málaga’s School of Fine Arts in 1868 and also studied under Bernardo Ferrándiz Bádenes, a costumbrista painter and the Chair of Color and Composition at the Escuela de Bella Artes de San Telmo. While at Ferrándiz’s studio, Carbonero was introduced to history painting and his teacher’s revolutionary views of commitment to freedom, independence and nonconformity. In 1872 at the age of fourteen, he was awarded a gold medal at the Exhibition of the Lyceum of Málaga.

Carbonero visited Morocco in 1873 where, influenced by Mariano Fortuny’s portraits and exotic, orientalist court scenes, he began to create African-themed paintings. After receiving a scholarship from the Málaga government, he traveled to Paris and joined the studio of painter and sculptor Jean-Léon Gérôme, one of the three most successful artists of the Second French Empire. Carbonero became acquainted with art dealer/publisher Adolphe Goupil, who introduced him to the commercial popularity of small genre paintings known as tableautins, a form of art that afforded great success.

After a study trip to Rome, Moreno Carbonero won a gold medal at Madrid’s 1881 National Exhibition of Fine Arts for his portrait “El Príncipe don Carlos de Viana”, now in the Prado Museum. Three years later, he won a second gold medal at the National Exhibition for his 1884 large-scale scene “La Conversión del Duque de Gandia”, which he painted during his time in Rome. Recognized for his ability, Carbonero received commissions from several official institutions including the Spanish Senate and the country of Argentina.

For the Conference Hall of the Spanish Senate, Carbonero created the 1888 “Entrada de Roger de Flor en Constantinopla”, a large-scale (350 x 550 cm) depiction of the Italian mercenary Roger de Flor and his troops entering Constantinople to relieve the Emperor from Turkish occupation. For this work, Carbonero did extensive research in Paris on the architecture, decoration and clothes of the Byzantine Empire, and created dozens of staging models and small paintings of individual warriors.

Moreno Carbonero received the highest award at the 1888 Vatican Exposition and participated in the International Exhibitions held in Munich and Vienna. Other awards included a silver medal at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, a gold medal at the 1890 Budapest International Exposition, an honorary degree at the 1891 Berlin Universal Exposition, and the only gold medal at the 1893 World’ Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

In 1910, Moreno Carbonero received a commission from King Alfonso XIII of Spain for a commemorative painting to be given to the city of Buenos Aires to mark the city’s one-hundredth anniversary of the Argentine War of Independence. For this work, Carbonero proposed that the painting, “The Founding of Buenos Aires”, combine three symbolic representations for religion, justice and conquest. Its scene refers historically to the second (and permanent) founding of Buenos Aires on the Rio de la Plata, The 400 x 250 cm work depicts Juan de Garay with his sixty-three soldiers taking possession of the area on behalf of King Felipe II of Spain on the eleventh of June in 1580.

As a history painter, Carbonero was eclectic in his style and, due to his early success at creating small-scale genre paintings, excelled in drawing and clean brushwork. He was adamant about the historical accuracy of his paintings to the extent of repainting in 1924 some sections of his finished 1909 “The Founding of Buenos Aires” due to factual errors in its composition. In his scenes of large historical events, Carbonero put extra focus on portraying the reactions and feelings of the event’s participants..

Beginning in 1892 until his death, José Moreno Carbonero was an Academician and Professor of Live Drawing at Madrid’s Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. He died in Madrid at the age of eighty-two in April of 1942 and was buried in the city’s San Miguel Cemetery. His work is in many private and public collections; the collection of Málaga’s Museo de Belles Artes holds thirty works by Carbonero.

Notes: Costumbrista painting was a localized branch of genre painting in Spain that had a realistic focus on precise representation of particular times and places, It captured the social and/or aesthetic behavior that characterized a human group belonging to a specific time, place, and culture, without any particular analysis of the depicted social scene. Artists who worked in this genre included Vincente Castell, José Villegas, Antonio Cabral Bejarano, and Leandro Ramón Garrido.

José Moreno Carbonero’s 1882 “Gladiadores Después del Combate (Gladiators After the Fight)” was submitted by the artist during his first year as a scholarship recipient in Rome. It was displayed in the Scholarship Recipients’ Section of the 1884 National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Rome. The inscription on the intrados of the pillar referred to the profession of the figures depicted in the scene and translated as follows: “The gladiatorial company of the aedile A. Suetius Certus will fight in Pompeii on May 31. There will be hunting and awnings.”

Top Insert Image: Christian Franzen, “José Moreno Carbonero”, 1898, December 15, 1898 Issue, “La Illustración Española y Americana”, Madrid, Spain

Second Insert Image: José Moreno Carbonero, “Portrait of H.R.H. King Alfonso XIII de Borbón”, 1927, Oil on Canvas, 74 x50 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: José Moreno Carbonero, “Bebiendo en la Fuente (Drinking from the Fountain, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 31.5 x 55.5 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: José Moreno Carbonero, “El Fumador de Kif”, 1890s, Oil on Canvas, 126 x 166 cm, Private Colllection

Bottom Insert Image: José Moreno Carbonero, “Study of a Guarani Man, Argentina”, 1922, Oil on Canvas, 32 x 26 cm, Private Collection

Jean Giraud

Jean Giraud. Illustrations for “The Eyes of the Cat”, 1978, Graphic Novel,

Born at Nogent-sur-Marne in May of 1938, Jean Giraud, known as Moebius, was a French artist, writer, and cartoonist who worked in the Franco-Belgian “bandes dessinées” tradition. These “drawn or strip stories” have been a long tradition in Belgium and France that, starting in 1945, became a major style on the comic scene. Among the most popular “bandes dessinées” are “Herge’s “The Adventures of Tintin”, Andre Franquin’s “Gaston”, and Pierre (Peyo) Guilford’s “Smurf”.

The only child of insurance agents Raymond Giraud and Pauline Vinchon, Jean Giraud was raised by his grandparents after his parents’ divorce. Introverted with health issues, he found both escape and comfort in Fontenay-sous-Bois’s small theater where he watched its many American Western B-movies. In his formative years at the Saint-Nicolas boarding school, Giraud began drawing Western-themed comics and became acquainted with the Belgian comics, “Tintin” and the weekly comic magazine “Spirou”.

At college, Giraud became a lifelong friend of future comic artist Jean-Claude Mézières, creator of the sci-fi comic series “Valérian and Laureline”. His first freelance commercial success was a 1956 series of humorous Western comic shorts, “Frank of Jeremie”, for the “Far West” magazine published by Mireille. Giraud continued to publish comics, both Western and French historical, for a variety of magazines. During this period, his style was heavily influenced by Belgium comic artist Joseph “Jijé’ Gillain, whose work was regularly published by Fleurus Presse in Paris. Through Fleurus, Giraud published his first three illustrated books.

Jean Giraud’s most famous works include the “Blueberry” series, a collaboration with writer Jean-Michel Charlier, that featured one of the first anti-heroes in Western comics. Under the pseudonym Moebius, he created surreal, almost abstract-styled fantasy and sci-fi comics. Among these was the series of short graphic stories, “Arzach”, that followed a silent warrior who rode a pterodactyl creature. As a designer and storyboard artist, Giraud constributed to such adventure and sci-fi films as “Alien” (1979), “Tron” (1982), “The Abyss” (1989), and “The Fifth Element” (1997). His designs for Ridley Scott’s “Alien”, the attire of the Nostromo’s crew and particularly their spacesuits, appeared on screen exactly as designed.

The 1978 “The Eyes of the Cat” was Giraud’s first collaboration with the filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, who became a close friend and co-author. The portfolio-sized, 56-plate book was never meant for widespread distribution. It was printed in a limited edition of five hundred copies as an internal thank you gift for friends and clients of French comic publisher Les Humanoides Associes. Due to popular demand, it was reprinted on bright yellow paper in 2013 as a hardcover edition entitled “The Eyes of the Cat: The Yellow Edition”. In 2021, the story was reissued as a softcover by publisher Humanoids, Inc.

“The Eyes of the Cat” tells the text-free story of a cat who is attacked by an eagle as it wanders through a decaying city in the future. Told through a series of twelve by sixteen inch (30.5 x 40.6 cm) detailed black and white lithographic illustrations, the tale is both gritty and violent. The mood of the story was influenced by Alejandro Jodorowsky’s association with the Panic Movement, a surrealistic collective he founded in 1962. The movement concentrated on chaotic and surreal performance art; it often staged shocking events designed as a response to the mainstream acceptance of surrealism.

Note: A short August 2020 article on “The Eyes of the Cat”, written by Ben Herman, can be found at the “1st Comics News” site: https://www.firstcomicsnews.com/comic-book-cats-number-33-the-eyes-of-the-cat/

A more extensive March 2012 biography of Jean “Moebius” Giraud, written by Kim Thompson, can be found at “The Comics Journal” website: https://www.tcj.com/jean-moebius-giraud-1938-2012/

Lambiek Comiclopedia, an excellent source for information on all comic illustration, has a biography of Jean Giraud with illustrations on its site: https://www.lambiek.net/artists/g/giraud.htm

Top Insert Image; Photographer Unknown, “Jean Giraud”, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Jean Giraud, “Les Réparateurs”, Illustration for “Le Monde d’Edena (The Aedena Cycle) #6”, 1988-1994, Marvel/Epic Comics

Bottom Insert Image: Nicolas Guérin, “Jean Giraud (Moebius)”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print

__________________________________

If you find this article and the site interesting, please sign up for a free subscription and consider a possible donation to maintain the upkeep of the site and its reference sources. Suggestions for articles are always welcome through the comment sections at the bottom of any article’s page.

Sir Edward John Poynter

The Artwork of Sir Edward John Poynter

Sir Edward John Poynter was an English designer, draftsman and painter who became best known for his large-scale historical paintings. A leading artists of Neo-Classicism in Victorian England, he made paintings that were early innovators of the Aesthetic Movement. Poynter created works in watercolor and fresco; he also produced designs for stained glass, tiled mosaics and ceramics.

Edward Poynter was the only son of four children born to architect Ambrose Poynter and Emma Forster, the grand-daughter of sculptor Thomas Banks. He studied between 1848 and 1852 at Westminster School and Brighton College, and later at the studio of watercolorist Thomas Shotter Boys. In the winter of 1853, Poynter traveled to Rome where he worked in the studio of Frederic Leighton, a classical painter and sculptor of the academic style. Upon his return to England, he entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1855.

Relocating to Paris in 1856, Poynter entered the leading, private atelier of Swiss painter Charles Gleyre and, later, the École des Beaux Arts where he met his fellow students: illustrator George Du Mauier, and painters James McNeill Whistler and Thomas Armstrong. Poynter began working for a London glassworks firm in 1860; six years later, he married Agnes MacDonald, the daughter of Scottish Reverend George Brown MacDonald and Hannah Jones. At this time, he was creating illustrations for magazines, such as the “London Society”, and books including the popular 1880 “Bible Gallery” by the Dalziels engravers.

Edward Poynter began exhibiting Orientalist paintings at London’s Royal Academy in 1861. He traveled to Venice in 1868 to study decorative mosaics; upon his return in the following year, Poynter was elected as a member of the Royal Academy. He received commissions for a series of frieze designs for the Royal Albert Hall, and a mosaic of Saint George and the Dragon for the British Houses of Parliament. In 1871, Poynter was appointed the first Slade Professor at London’s University College where he served until his resignation in 1875. After he left the college, he was appointed the director and principal of the National Art Training School located in South Kensington.

During his years at the National Art Training School, Poynter made several reforms to its operation and published a series of art history textbooks. He also executed many commissioned public painting projects for which he is remembered, including the 1880 “Visit to Aesculapius”, now at the Tate Gallery, and “The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon”, created in 1890 and now at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. In 1894, Poynter was appointed Director of the National Gallery, London where he achieved a number of important acquisitions. These included works by Rembrandt, Antonio di Puccio Pisano (Pisanello), Titian, Francisco de Goya., Lorenzo Monaco, and Francisco de Zubaran.

Edward Poynter retired from the National Gallery in 1905 but retained the directorship until 1918. He was knighted in 1896, created Baronet of Albert Gate, in the city of Westminster in 1902, and received the Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order in 1918. As his health failed, Poynter sold his extensive collection of master drawings..

Sir Edward John Poynter, 1st Baronet GCVO, PRA died on the twenty-sixth of July in 1919 at his house and studio in Kensington and is buried in London’s Saint Paul’s Cathedral. Considered primarily as an academic artist, Sir Edward Poynter’s contribution to art history is significant. In his position as director of the National Gallery, he issued in 1899 the first complete illustrated catalog of its collection.

A cosmopolitan artist, Poynter did not shrink from portrayal of the nude or works that glorified its sensual qualities. Modernists frequently criticized his artwork and presented him as the embodiment of the stilted “Victorian Olympian”. However, Poynter’s work in art education and art-historical survey texts became the model for the next generation of educators and researchers.

Notes: The Eclectic Light Company website has an article on Edward Poynter’s life and work at: https://eclecticlight.co/2024/08/09/edward-poynters-classical-stories-1-to-1880/

The Art Gallery of New South Wales has a short article on Edward Poynter’s 1881-1890 “The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon” on its website: https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/learn/learning-resources/artworks-in-focus/sir-edward-john-poynter/

Top Insert Image: Alexander Bassano, “Sir Edward John Poynter, 1st Bt”, 1883, Half-Plate Negative Print, National Portrait Gallery, London

Second Insert Image: Edward Poynter, “Orpheus and Eurydice”, 1862, Oil on Canvas, 51.2 x 71.1 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Sir Arthur Stockdale Cope, “Portrait of Sir Edward Poynter, Bt, PRA”, 1911, Oil on Canvas, 110.5 x 85.1 cm, Royal Academy of Arts

Bottom Insert Image: Edward Poynter, “Catapulta (The Catapult)”, 1868, Oil on Canvas, 155.5 x 183.8 cm, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle on Tyne, United Kingdom

Edward Melcarth

The Artwork of Edward Melcarth

Born at Louisville, Kentucky in January of 1914, Edward Melcarth was an American painter, photographer and sculptor who developed his own style, Social Romanticism, a Renaissance-influenced attempt to describe man’s idealized view of himself. Active in the post-World War II art scene, Melcarth spent most of his career in New York City where he painted and sculpted images of blue-color workers, sailors, hustlers, and tradesmen.

Known for his emotionally evocative and heroic portrayals of the male figure, Melcarth focused his work on masculinity, portraiture, religion and contemporary American culture. His images of working-class men showed their grit, brute strength and determination to overcome difficulty. At the same time, the images were visual vehicles that examined gay male desire in a society that found it socially unacceptable. Melcarth’s paintings ranged in size from smaller portraits to large-scale, complex scenes of interacting figures accentuated with light and shadow.

Edward Melcarth, born Edward Epstein, was the son of the wealthy Jewish couple, Edward Epstein Sr. and Eva Ehrmann. His grandfather was the noted Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey distiller Hilmar Ehrmann. Melcarth’s uncle was activist lawyer and author Herbert B. Ehrmann; his aunt Sara R. Ehrmann was a Boston civic activist and first president of the League of Women Voters.

Eva Ehrmann, after the 1920 death of her husband, remarried in 1926 to Sir Reginald Mitchell Banks, who was a Member of Parliament. The family moved to the United Kingdom where Melcarth spent his early formative years. To pursue his interests and a career, he studied at Chelsea College of Arts in London; painter Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 in Paris; and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In February of 1936, Melcarth rejected his family’s Jewish religion and changed his last name from Epstein to Melcarth, possibly a variation of Melqart, a protector god of ancient Semitic people. Although he considered himself both a communist and openly gay, he was briefly married in Paris from 1939 until the divorce in 1944. During World War II, Melcarth traveled with other American volunteers in 1943 to Persia where they constructed air strips for the allied forces. In 1944, he served as a seaman in the United States Merchant Marines until the end of the war. Melcarth returned to the United States in the fall of 1951 and taught briefly at Kentucky’s University of Louisville.

In February of 1952, Edward Melcarth traveled to Italy where he resided for a period at Venice’s Casa del Tre Oci, a modern neo-Gothic palace on the island of Giudecca. Melcarth returned to the United States in November of 1952 and made New York City his primary residence. His acquaintances and friends included writers Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal, photographer Thomas Painter, sexologist Alfred Kinsey, artist Henry Faulkner, art collector Peggy Guggenheim, and businessman Malcolm Forbes, who established a major collection of Melcarth’s work.

In 1957, Melcarth created a ceiling mural depicting theatrical muses for the newly renovated Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, originally the Globe Theatre, on 46th Street in Manhattan. Beginning in 1967, Melcarth worked on a two-year project of trompe l’oeil murals and sculpted busts for the rotunda at the luxurious Pierre Hotel that faces New York’s Central Park. The painted Italian landscape murals included mythological figures and couples viewed between illusionistic columns.

Edward Melcarth relocated to Venice in 1970 where he lived until his death from cancer at the age of fifty-nine in December of 1973. Throughout his career, he taught at the University of Louisville, Parsons School of Design, Columbia University, the University of Washington, and New York’s Art Students League. Melcarth received both a grant and the Childe Hassam purchase award from the Institute of Arts and Letters, Chicago Art Institute’s Altman Prize, and the National Academy of Design’s Thomas B. Clarke Award.

Notes: Edward Melcarth’s papers, correspondence, and writings are housed in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/edward-melcarth-papers-7865

An article by museum curator Hunter Kissel entitled “Illuminating the Underrepresented: Presenting Edward Melcarth” can be found at: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c3cc8a11aef1d1735f564f7/t/5cf29f0ad328900001e55860/1559404302304/IlluminatingTheUnderrepresented.pdf

The bi-monthly literary and history magazine Gay & Lesbian Review has an interview between writer Taylor Lewandowski and painter Richard Taddei, a former student and friend of Melcarth, on its site: https://glreview.org/article/richard-taddei-on-his-mentor-edward-melcarth/