Month: November 2016

William Baziotes

William Baziotes, “Dwarf”, 1947, Oil on Canvas, 106.7 x 91.8 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York

William Baziotes was a New York painter whose lyrical and often mysterious works relied heavily on subject matter derived from biomorphism and Symbolist poetry. He was an integral part of the Abstract Expressionist circle and exhibited with them frequently. Like his peers, he was deeply committed to concerns of paint application and abstracted forms.

Yet his interest in the medium of paint was combined with many sources for his imagery to produce works that evoked particular moods, or dream-like states – often more closely related to European Surrealism than to Abstract Expressionism. This duality in his work was described as “biomorphic abstraction” and was influential to artists such as Mark Rothko.

Baziotes was one of the few Abstract Expressionist artists who remained committed to the figure. He took his early Surrealist-inspired explorations further by creating strange, primitive imagery that seems to have been pulled from the darkness of the subconscious. His works in this vein were described as “biomorphic abstraction” because of his use of organic forms and other figurative elements that were not easily identifiable.

Unlike his Abstract Expressionist peers, even Baziotes’ most experimental canvases contain a structured, almost grid-like composition that was influenced by early Cubism and the artist’s work with stained glass. In conjunction with this underlying structure, however, Baziotes also felt that art should evoke emotions and moods through color, shape, and paint application.

Albert Gleizes

Albert Gleizes, “L’Homme au Balcon”, Man on a Balcony (Portrait of Dr. Théo Morinaud), 1912, Oil on Canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Albert Gleizes was a French artist, theoretician, philosopher, a self-proclaimed founder of Cubism and an influence on the School of Paris. In 1912 Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger wrote the first major treatise on Cubism, Du “Cubisme”. Gleizes was a founding member of the Section d’Or group of artists.

He was also a member of Der Sturm, and his many theoretical writings were originally most appreciated in Germany, where especially at the Bauhaus his ideas were given thoughtful consideration. Gleizes spent four crucial years in New York, and played an important role in making America aware of modern art.

Jean Paul Mallozzi

Jean Paul Mallozzi, “We Come Here Often”, Oil on Panel on Cradled Wood

Jean Paul Mallozzi broadens his fascination with the human condition and the inherent, nuanced complexities of personal relationships, specifically intimate male relationships, which are often hyper-sexualized and informed by society’s rigid and conflicting constructs of masculinity, sexuality and identity.

“We Come Here Often is a personal piece that highlights the emotional bond the couple shares between themselves over a quiet bluff overlooking a cityscape in the distance. The light is coming from both men’s emotional states made visible and crossing over into each other merging together at that moment.” -John Seed, Huffington Post

Francesco Borromini

Baroque Architecture of Francesco Borromini

Francesco Borromini, byname of Francesco Castelli, was an Italian architect born in today’s Ticino who, with his contemporaries Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Pietro da Cortona, was a leading figure in the emergence of Roman Baroque architecture.

A keen student of the architecture of Michelangelo and the ruins of Antiquity, Borromini developed an inventive and distinctive, if somewhat idiosyncratic, architecture employing manipulations of Classical architectural forms, geometrical rationales in his plans and symbolic meanings in his buildings.

He seems to have had a sound understanding of structures, which perhaps Bernini and Cortona, who were principally trained in other areas of the visual arts, lacked. His soft lead drawings are particularly distinctive. He appears to have been a self-taught scholar, amassing a large library by the end of his life.

Probably because his work was idiosyncratic, his subsequent influence was not widespread but is apparent in the Piedmontese works of Camillo-Guarino Guarini and, as a fusion with the architectural modes of Bernini and Cortona, in the late Baroque architecture of Northern Europe.

Shaun Simpson

Shaun Simpson, (Robin Two Times)

Ribin’s first incarnation, Dick Grayson, debuted in Detective Comics #38 (April 1940). Conceived as a vehicle to attract young readership, Robin garnered overwhelmingly positive critical reception, doubling the sales of the Batman related comic books.

The early adventures of Robin included Star Spangled Comics #65–130 (1947–1952), which was the character’s first solo feature. Robin made regular appearances in Batman related comic books and other DC Comics publications from 1940 through the early 1980s until the character set aside the Robin identity and became the independent superhero Nightwing.

Robin was portrayed by Douglas Croft and Johnny Duncan, respectively, in the 1943 and 1949 fifteen chapter Batman serials. Burt Ward played him in the 1966–1968 Batman television series and the related 1966 film. In the two live-action movies Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, he was played by Chris O’Donnell.

G. K. Chesterton: “Suppose That a Great Commotion Arises”

Photographer Unknown, (The Commotion Outside)

“Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. a gray-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is apporached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good–“. At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmedieval practicality.

But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, today, tomorrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right, after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.”

-G. K. Chesterton, Heretics

 

Cesare Nebbia

Cesare Nebbia, The Dome of the Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome, 1585-1590

Cesare Nebbia was an Italian painter from Orvieto, Italy, who painted in the style of Mannerism, a European style that emerged in the latter part of the Italian High Renaissance. This style emerged around 1520 and lasted until the end of the 16th century in Italy, replaced by the Baroque style. While the Renaissance art emphasized proportion, balance and ideal beauty, Mannerism exaggerated such qualities, leading to asymmetrical or unnaturally elegant compositions, which favored compositional  tension and instability.

The Mannerist interior decoration of the Santa Maria Maggiore’s Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament was completed from 1587-1589 by a large team of artists, directed by Cesare Nebbia and Italian Draughtsman and painter Giovanni Guerra. Recent scholarship found that the hand of Nebbia drew preliminary sketches for many, if not all, of the frescoes that cover the walls.