Year: 2015

Anton Kolig

Anton Kolig, “Stehender Männerakt (Standing Male Nude)”, 1924, Oil on Canvas, 104 x 73 cm.

Born in Moravia in 1886, Anton Kolig began his art studies at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts for two years beginning in 1904 under the tutelage of painter and poet Oskar Kokoschka. He then moved to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts from 1906 to 1912.

While at the Academy, Gustav Klimt invited Kolig to participate in one of the group modern art exhibitions. This exposure brought a certain amount of fame and resulted in a traveling scholarship to Paris in 1912. In 1913 Kolig traveled to Colmar and Boulogne-sur-Mer, as well as the Netherlands, finally settling in Cassis near Marseille.

At the outbreak of World War I, Kolig and many other avant-garde artists abandoned the city for the countryside. An enclave of artists congregated in the small town of Nötsch in the Gailtal Valley of southern Austria. They became known as the “Nötscher Kreis”, or the Nötsch Circle. This group of artists developed a regional variation of Expressionism.

Anton Kolig ranks among the major protagonists of this group, which included Sebastion Isepp, Franz Wiegle and Anton Mahringer. Central to Kolig’s work was the male nude. His wistful drawings of young men are full of power and tenderness. His nudes and self-portraits are coded psychological studies expressing mythologized emotional and mental states.

At the end of the war Kolig moved to Zurich where he stayed until 1925. In 1928, he was offered and accepted a chair at the Academy in Stuttgart, but in 1943 Kolig lost his position and resettled in Austria. Kolig and his wife were severely wounded in the bombing of Nötsch in 1944.

Kolig received several awards and prizes, among them the Golden Medal at the “German Arts” exhibition in Düsseldorf in 1928 and the Austrian State Prize in 1936. In 1929 the Carinthian government commissioned him to paint frescoes in the Landhaus in Klagenfurt which, along with his mosaic in the in the Salzburg Festspielhaus, were to be removed after the “Anschluss”, the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938.

Today, Kolig’s paintings hang in Salzburg at the Residenz Gallery and in Vienna at the Belvedere Gallery, the Vienna Museum of Fine Arts and the Leopold Museum.

Hirodhi Fuji

Hirodhi Fuji, “Scrat” and “Pokemon- Mew”, From the series “Conglomerate of Toys”, 3331 Arts Chiyoda

Born in 1960 in Kagoshima, Japan, Hirodhi Fuji graduated with a BA in 1983 and a MA in 1985, both from the Kyoto City University of Arts. He joined the Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers in 1986 and lived in Papua New Guinea for two years, teaching at the National Arts School.

Fuji established his artistic concept as “ways of transforming existences that are not valued by society into special existences.” Since returning to Japan, he has continued his creative work with local resources through materials acquired on the spot, technology, and collaborative relationships with people for community-based art projects.

Fuji established his “Kaekko Project” which offers a space for children to trade toys with each other, and for creating new pieces based on the collected toys.

The artist’s site: http://geco.jp

Henry Moore

 

Henry Moore, “Nuclear Energy”, Bronze Sculpture, The University of Chicago

On December 2nd of 1942, a team of scientists led by Italian émigré Enrico Fermi set the world’s first man-made, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in motion at Chicago Pile 1, the world’s first artificial nuclear reactor built under the original site of the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field.

This event was a decisive step toward the creation of the age of atomic energy, and critically, at the time, to the production of the atomic bomb for use in World War II. On December 2nd of 1967, the sculpture “Nuclear Energy” was unveiled on the campus of the University of Chicago as a memorial to the accomplishments of Fermi and his fellow physicists.

The twelve-foot tall bronze sculpture was commissioned by the University of Chicago and created by British artist Henry Moore, one of the most preeminent public sculptors of his generation. Moore designed, modeled, and cast the bronze sculpture between 1963 and 1967,  To Moore, it was both a celebration of this incredible human achievement, and also a warning against the dangers of harnessing such natural, physical power.

Winifred Turner

Winifred Turner, “Crouching Youth”, 1943, Cast Bronze and Plaster Model, 103 cm Height. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England

Winifred Turner, the daughter of the stone sculptor Alfred Turner, attended the Royal Academy Schools in London between 1924 and 1929. She was elected Fellow and Associate of the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 1930, exhibiting at the Royal Academy between 1924 and 1962. Turner taught at the Central School of Art and Design, a London public school for fine and applied arts, in the 1930s and into the early 1940s.

This highly stylised figure of “Crouching Youth” reflects Turner’s interest in ancient sculpture and also her passion for dance. The bronze has a green patina and smooth surface suggesting the sinuous forms of the young male body.

Highway Rest Stop

Photographer Unknown, (Highway Rest Stop), Selfie

He could easily imagine what people would say if they could see him now: exactly the same thing they’d say if someone had told them that Ray from work was a transvestite or that Ted from next door had anonymous gay sex at highway rest stops. They’d shake their heads with their heads with the standard combination of amusement, pity, and smug superiority, and say, Ha-ha-ha, poor Ray. Ho-ho-ho, poor Ted. At least I’m not like that. But we want what we want, Richard thought, and there’s not much we can do about it.

― Tom Perrotta, Little Children

Paul Marguerite

Paul Marguerite, “Le Couple de Cimetiere (The Cemetary Couple)”, Photograph

Born in 1983 to journalist parents, Paul Marguerite is an amateur photographer in Paris. He is also involved in a group of linguistic workshops known as the “Cours des Marguerites’” His parents, who remained focused in pictorial and literary circles after their journalists careers, introduced him to photography. Sensitive to the LGBTQI+ cause, Paul Marguerite was an official photographer for the Paris LGBT Pride events in both 2013 and 2014.

David Paynter

David Paynter, “Pumpkin Boy”, 1935. Oil on Linen, 73.7 x 76.2 cm, Private Collection

David Shillingford Paynter was born on March 5, 1900, to Arthur Stephen Paynter, a British missionary, and Anagi Weerasooriya, a Sinhalese woman from southern Sri Lanka. His two parents, both members of the Salvation Army, moved to Sri Lanka in 1904, where they founded a mission in Nuwara Eliya, and later, the Nuwara Eliya Children’s Home where they welcomed children who often had mixed or unknown parentage.

David Paynter attended Trinity College in Kandy, Sri Lanka, where he received a five-year scholarship to the Royal Academy in London. At the end of his fourth term, he won the Gold Medal for Art, and the Edward Stott Traveling Scholarship, which enabled him to study for two weeks in Italy. Deeply inspired by the Christian artwork of the Italian Renaissance, Paynter would reference these themes in his future work. 

Returning to Sri Lanka in 1925, Paynter began work on mural designs for the chapel of the Trinity College, an architectural work which exemplified the merging of a European world view with Sri Lankan culture. In 1929 the chapel was completed and he began his first mural. Six years later, Paynter’s four murals of Bible stories, transferred to the Sri Lankan people and landscapes, were complete: “Are You Able”, “Washing the Disciples’ Feet:, “The Good Samaritan”, and “The Crucifixion”.  The large-scaled depiction of “The Crucifixion” was the central image in the work; Paynter presented Christ, as a dark-skinned, clean-shaven native of the land, on a cross in  the gloom of a mangrove forest.    

David Paynter traveled to London for the third time in 1936, a trip which began a very productive and rewarding period in his career. His solo exhibition at London’s Wertheim Gallery resulted in recognition from art critics and journals in Europe. From 1923 to 1940, his paintings were shown every year at the Royal Academy in London. By invitation, Paynter entered his work in major international exhibitions in Rome and Delhi, an exhibition at Pittsburg’s Carnegie Institute, and at the 1964 World Fair in New York. 

In addition to the creations of many acclaimed theatrical set designs, Paynter was also a very accomplished portraiture artist. His clients ranged from the elite of Sri Lanka, to British Governors to the Prime Ministers of Sri Lanka; he also painted a portrait for Mahatma Gandhi, now in the Law College in Colombo, and, in 1954, a portrait for  Jawaharlal Nehru, then Prime Minister of India. 

David Paynter was appointed Director of Colombo’s  College of Fine Arts in 1940, a position in which he served for several years. During his service as director, he was honored with the Order of the British Empire. Paynter was involved in the social service work of the Nuwara Eliya Children’s Home his parents founded; in 1962, he founded an addition to the Children’s Home, the Salt Spring Farm at Kumburupiddi, where he permanently settled as a farmer. In 1968, Paynter  returned to his palette again to complete his final masterpiece, the mural known as “The Transfiguration” at the Chapel of the Transfiguration at Saint Thomas’ College at Mount Lavinia, Sri Lanka.

A pioneer who integrated Sri Lankan culture into the Western art tradition, David Shillingford Paynter died of a heart attack in June of 1975, at the age of seventy-five. He is buried in the Union Church Cemetery in Nuwara Eliya. 

“Having studied art for some time in Italy and France, I found that the painters there had painted their own countries and their own times. So I decided to paint in the way I did, with more or less Ceylon landscapes and more or less Ceylonese types. Besides, I intensely disliked many of the paintings of comparatively recent times where Christ has been portrayed as a blond Englishman and wearing Arab costume” -David Paynter

Top Insert Image: David Paynter, “A Study, Ceylon”, 1937, Oil on Canvas, 112 x 91.5 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: David Paynter, “L’Après-Midi (The Afternoon)”, 1935, Oil on Canvas, 99 x 122 cm, Rrighton and Hove Museums, United Kingdom

Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne, “The Artist’s Father, Reading L’Événement”, 1866, Oil on Canvas, 198.5 x 110.3 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

In “The Artist’s Father”, Cézanne explored his emotionally charged relationship with his banker father. Tension is particularly evident in the energetic, expressive paint handling, an exaggeration of Courbet’s palette knife technique. The unyielding figure of Louis-Auguste Cézanne, the newspaper he is reading, his chair, and the room are described with obtrusively thick slabs of pigment.

The Artist’s Father can be interpreted as an assertion of Cézanne’s independence. During the early 1860s, Cézanne rejected the legal and banking careers advocated by his father and instead studied art, a profession his father considered grossly impractical. In this calculated composition, he seated his father precariouly near the edge of the chair and tilted the perspectival slope of the floor as though trying to tip his father out of the picture, an effect heightened by the contrast between his father’s heavy legs and shoes and the delicate feet of the chair supporting him.

The framed painting displayed on the back wall is a still life that Cézanne painted shortly before “The Artist’s Father”, a statement of his artistic accomplishment. The newspaper L’Evénement refers to novelist Emile Zola, the childhood friend who championed Cézanne’s bid to study art in Paris and who became art critic for the paper in 1866. Cézanne’s father customarily read another journal.