Month: January 2016

The Helsinki Central Railway Station

The Helsinki Central Railway Station

The Central Railway Station was designed by Eliel Saarinen in 1909 and the station was opened in 1919. The station is mostly clad in Finnish granite, and its distinguishing features are its clock tower and the two pairs of statues holding the spherical lamps, lit at night-time, on either side of the main entrance. The station is used by approximately 200,000 passengers per day, making it Finland’s most-visited building.

The four massive granite statues flank the entrance of Helsinki Central Railway Station. The “Stone Men” hold spherical lanterns that are lite at night. They are the work of a Finnish sculptor named Emil Wikström. He was a prolific and influential sculptor of monuments throughout Finland during the first half of the 20th century. Many of his works were inspired by local mythodology and heritage.

Nicola Verlato

Paintings by Nicola Verlato

“I started being interested in CG since I first saw Tron in movie theaters, back in 1982. What struck me was the obvious similarity between that new way to create images and the one of the fifteenth-century perspective, it seemed to me that it was possible, on a new level of complexity, to pick back up from where the masters of the Renaissance left off. The problem was that there was no way for a seventeen-year-old painter to get in touch with what was, at that time, extremely expensive technology. Almost ten years passed before I was able to get my hands on a PC and a 3D program to work with. The use of computers didn’t change my approach to painting, it just expanded the scope of what I can introduce in the representations and how much control I have over it.

I can now virtually introduce any element of our world—engineering structures, complex architectures, design objects—into the painting, as well as controlling difficult foreshortening and the reconstruction of faces with the added possibility of animating them. The real world can be put once again into the painting and manipulated to create new narrations and icons.“ – Nicola Verlato

John Steuart Curry

 

John Steuart Curry, “The Flying Codonas”, 1932, Oil and Tempera on Panel, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City

John Steuart Curry, born in Kansas in 1897, was an American painter whose career spanned from 1924 until his death in 1946. He was known, along with Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, as one of the three great painters of American Regionalism of the first half of the twentieth-century, 

The Regionalist artists were concerned with rural nostalgia and the American heartland associated with the area west of the Mississippi River, mainly Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas. Regionalism was essentially a revolt against the centralization of the Industrial Revolution; however, it also included images of rugged, independent men surviving life’s natural disasters.

In 1916, Curry enrolled in the Kansas City Art Institute but, after a month, transferred to the Art Institute of Chicago. He transferred once again to Pennsylvania’s Geneva College and graduated in 1921. Curry was employed as an illustrator until 1926, during which time he created illustrations for periodicals such as “Boys’ Life”, the “County Gentleman”, and “The Saturday Evening Post”. In 1932, Curry spent time traveling  throughout the United States with the Ringling Brothers Circus. During this time, he painted many circus-themed paintings including his 1932 “The Flying Codonas”, a family trapeze act that was conceivably the greatest circus act in the first half of the twentieth-century. 

 In 1936, John Curry was appointed artist-in-residence at the College of Agriculture of the University of Wisconsin, which built him a small studio.   He spent most of his time in the studio as he did not have classes to teach or any specific duties. This allowed him to freely travel throughout the state of Wisconsin and promote art and  provide instructions to students. 

Curry received commissions in 1936 for murals at the Department of Justice Building and the Main Interior Building in Washington D.C. He was elected in 1937 into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Member and became a full Academician in 1943. After this, he received a commission for a series of murals on Kansas topics for the Kansas State Capitol at Topeka. The third of the series, “Tragic Prelude”, depicting John Brown in front of troops killing each other, was considered too controversial to be installed. Curry was devastated and refused to sign the two completed works. 

John Steuart Curry returned to the University of Wisconsin where he continued to work until his death by heart attack in August of 1946 at the age of 48. In 1992, the Kansas Legislature apologized for its treatment of Curry and purchased the drawings related to his “Tragic Prelude” murals. 

Second Insert Image: John Steuart Curry, Untitled, (Touchdown Hero), 1940, Charcoal and Conté Crayon on Paper on Paperboard, 52.1 x 38.7 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: John Steuart Currey, “Under the Circus Tent”, circa 1932, Watercolor on Paper, 40.6 x 50.8 cm, Private Collection

Hermann Hesse: “Those Who Had Awoken”

 

Photographers Unknown, (Those Who Had Awoken)

“We who bore the mark might well be considered by the rest of the world as strange, even as insane and dangerous. We had awoken, or were awakening, and we were striving for an ever perfect state of wakefulness, whereas the ambition and quest for happiness of the others consisted of linking their opinions, ideals, and duties, their life and happiness, ever more closely with those of the herd.

They, too, strove; they, too showed signs of strength and greatness. But as we saw it, whereas we marked men represented Nature’s determination to create something new, individual, and forward-looking, the others lived in the determination to stay the same. For them mankind–which they loved as much as we did–was a fully formed entity that had to be preserved and protected. For us mankind was a distant future toward which we were all journeying, whose aspect no one knew, whose laws weren’t written down anywhere.”

-Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

Henrik Arrested Uldalen

Paintings by Henrik Arrested Uldalen

The Norwegian artist Henrik Aarrestad Uldalen combines the skills of a classical figurative painter with a contemporary approach. His work depicts people in dream-like states of floating or swimming, peacefully engaged in their inner thoughts. His realistic approach captures the human form with a surreal atmosphere, reflecting the tranquility that his models are experimenting. His work does not intend to capture photographic realism but rather an emotional realism that conveys the moment of floating in nothingness.

Lyonel Feininger

Artwork by Lyonel Feininger

Born in July of 1871, Lyonel Charles Adrian Feininger was an American-born German painter, the son of a concert violinist and a singer and pianist from Germany. In 1887, he followed his parents to Europe where he attended the drawing and painting class at Hamburg’s Gewerbeschule. From 1888 to 1892, Feininger studied at Berlin’s Königliche Kunst-Akademie and later attended the private art school of the Italian sculptor Filippo Colarossi in Paris.

Feininger, along with Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Alexej von Jawlensky, founded the Die Blauen Vier group in 1924. He presented work at Berlin’s 1931 Kronprinzen-Palais, the first comprehensive retrospective of the group’s work. In 1933, Feininger relocated to Berlin; however, as his situation in Berlin intensified under the National Socialist government, he emigrated to the United States in 1937. That same year, Feininger was declared a degenerate artist and four-hundred of his works were confiscated by Goebbel’s Reich Chamber of Culture.

Lyonel Feininger did not achieve his breakthrough as an artist in the United States until 1944, the year of his successful retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Beginning in 1945, he held summer courses at North Carolina’s prestigious art colony, Black Mountain College. At this highly influential college, Feininger met such notables as Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, a pioneer of modernist architecture, and theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. Feininger’s classes, his written work and later watercolors were essential parts of the development of Abstract Expressionist painting in the United States. 

Lyonel Feininger died in New York City in January of 1956 at the age of eighty-four. A major retrospective of his work was held in 2011 to 2012. It initially opened at the Whitney Museum of Art from June to October of 2011 and then traveled to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts where it was viewed from January to May of 2012. 

Top Insert Image: Andreas Feininger, “Lyonel Feininger”, 1928, Gelatin Silver Print on Board, 34.4 x 25.6 cm, Bauhaus Archive Berlin, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Lyonel Feininger, “Gaberndorf II”, 1924, Oil on Canvas, 100.2 x 78.1 cm, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri 

Paul Freemann : Heroics and Heroics II

Paul Freeman’s Photography Books: Heroics and Heroics II

“Heroics was not meant to be a ‘serious’ homage. It was meant to be a bit ironic, with elements of costume drama and theatre. It’s a tongue in cheek reflection of how heterosexual men have always highly rated their own heroism and bravery and glamorized their greatness with these over the top erotic monuments. It was meant to reference a time (back in ancient Rome and Greece) when the beautiful naked male was publicly celebrated in art. When I traveled through Europe some years back, I took hundreds of photos of some of the very erotic male statues that exist as a consequence of this Renaissance in art, and which occupy very public places in most of the major cities.

It always amused and perplexed me that the  masses of humanity who rush hurriedly by these works of art in their daily commute, would still baulk at the idea of the naked male as a thing of art in their ‘real lives.’ ‘Heroics’ is just another mild middle finger held up at all those absurd notions, even though it’s a pretty polite finger.  I thought by spelling out some of the themes of statuary found in Rome and London, by using real men, I could highlight the absurdity of disgust at the nude male by heterosexual men when they gloried in it in their own shrines.” – Paul Freeman