Month: March 2018

Hans Emi

Hans Emi, “Der Techniker und Seine Umwelt”, Date Unknown, Color Lithograph on Paper, Edition of 21

Hans Emi was a Swiss graphic designer, painter, illustrator, engraver and sculptor. He studied art at the Academic Julian in Paris and later in Berlin. He is known for having illustrated postage stamps, his lithogrphs for the Swiss Red Cross and his participation on the Olympic Committee.

On January 10, 2009 Hans Emi received the Swiss Award for Lifetime Accomplishment. In his career, he designed about 300 posters and several murals (for the Red Cross, the International Olympic Committee, the United Nations, the International Civil Aviation Organization, and many other public and private enterprises. Throughout his career as an artist, he illustrated about 200 books and created designs for 90 postage stamps and 25 medals.

Fong Qi Wei

Fong Qi Wei, Gifs from His Series “Time is a Dimension”

Fong Qi Wei is an photographer and computer graphic artist based in Singapore.

“For me, Time in Motion adds more questions about what time is, compared to Time Is a Dimension. Is this how simultaneous instances of time can be perceived coherently? Are the ‘time tunnel’ GIFs showing light being slowed down? Who knew time could be so trippy?”- Fong Qi Wei

Calendar: March 27

Year: Day to Day Men: March 27

The Slithering Snake

The twenty-seventh of March in 1902 marks the birth date of Charles Bryant Lang Jr., one of the outstanding cinematographers of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Modest and yet a perfectionist, he spent the majority of his career at Paramount Studios where he contributed to its reputation for visual style.

Born in Bluff, Utah, Charles Lang studied law at the University of Southern California, but soon joined his father, photographic technician Charles Bryant Lang Sr., at an East Los Angeles film laboratory in 1918.  Lang apprenticed as a laboratory assistant and still photographer before becoming an assistant cameraman. He worked with cinematographers Harry Kinley Martin and Lesley Guy Wilky who often collaborated with William C. DeMille. Quickly promoted, Lang soon worked with William DeMille and, later, followed him to Paramount Studios.

In 1929, Lang became a full director of photography at Paramount Studios. He was part of a team of cinematographers working at the studio that included such craftsmen as Victor Milner, Karl Struss and Lee Garmes. At this time, Paramount dominated the Academy Awards for cinematography, especially in the genre of black and white romantic and period film. The style of lighting that Lang introduced in Fred Borzage’s 1932 “A Farewell to Arms” became heavily identified with all of Paramount’s films during the 1930s and 1940s. 

Charles Lang excelled in the use of chiaroscuro, light and shade, and was adept at creating a mood for every genre. His film work in this period included Henry Hathaway’s 1935 drama-fantasy “Peter Ibbetson”. Frank Borzage’s 1936 comedy drama “Desire” with Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper, and Mitchell Leisen’s 1939 screwball comedy “Midnight”, scripted by Billy Wilder and starring Claudette Colbert and Don Ameche. Lang was especially appreciated by female stars, such as Dietrich, Hepburn and Helen Hayes, due to his ability to photograph them to their best advantage, often with subdued lighting and diffusion techniques. 

Lang’s lighting effects adapted perfectly to the expressionist neo-realism of the 1950s film noir. His expert techniques strongly contributed to the mood in such films as Billy Wilder’s 1939 “Ace in the Hole” with Kirk Douglas as the exploitive newspaper reporter, and Sydney Boehm’s 1953 crime drama “Big Heat” with Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame. The success of such films as the 1954 “Sabrina” and the 1959 “Some Like It Hot”, all nominees for Lang’s cinematography, owed much of their success to his camera work. 

Though he preferred black and white photography, Lang became equally proficient in color photography. He worked with different processes, including Cinerama and VistaVision, on richly-textured and sweeping outdoor westerns such as John Sturges’s 1960 “The Magnificent Seven” and John Ford and Henry Hathaway’s 1962 “How the West Was Won’.  Lang also did the cinematography for romantic thrillers such as Stanley Donen’s 1963 romantic mystery “Charade” with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, and William Wyler’s art theft film “How to Steal a Million” with Audrey Hepburn, Peter O’Toole and Charles Boyer. 

Charles Lang won an Academy Award Oscar, the second time he received a nomination, for his work on “Farewell to Arms”. He was nominated eighteen times which tied him with cinematographer Leon Shamroy who did most of his work for 20th Century Fox. In 1991, Lang received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Cinematographer for a career that included one hundred and fourteen feature films. Charles Lang died in Santa Monica, California in April of 1998 at the age of ninety-six. 

Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington, “Queria ser Pájaro (I Wanted to be a Bird)”, 1960

Leonora Carrington was a British-born Mexican artist, surrealist painter and novelist. Expelled from two schools for her rebellious nature, her family sent her to Mrs Penrose’s Academy of Art in Florence, Italy. In 1927, at the age of ten, she had her first contact with Surrealism, meeting French poet and one of the founders of the movement Paul Éluard. In 1935, Carrington attended the Chelsea School of Art in London for one year, and then transferred to the Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts which was established by the modernist painter Amédée Ozenfant.

Leonora Carrington, attracted to Max Ernst’s paintings at the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936, later met Ernnst in 1937 when they bonded and eventually settled in southern France. They supported and coroborated on each other’s artistic endeavors. In 1939, Carrington painted her 1937-1938 “Self Portrait / The Inn of the Dawn Horse”, a dream-like scene with her perched on the edge of a chair facing a hyena with her back to a flying rocking horse. Later in 1939, she painted the “Portrait of Max Ernst”, a surrealist winter scene with Ernst wearing a mauve, feathery coat standing in front of a frozen horse.

Ernst, considered a degenerate artist and arrested by  the Nazis, fled to New York with the help of Peggy Guggenheim, who he later married in 1941. Carrington, devastated and having fled to Spain, suffered from a nervous breakdown. She was treeted with powerful drugs, fled from the asylum and sought shelter in the Mexican Embassy. Carrington was helped by Renato Leduc, the Mexican ambassador, who ageed to a marriage of convenience, and took her away to Mexico. After a divorce, she stayed in Mexico, creating a mural named “El Mundo Magico de los Mayas”, influenced by native folk stories. The mural is now residing in the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City.

Leonora Carrington was one of the last surviving participants of the Surrealist Movement of the 1930s. She focused on magical realism and alchemy in her artwork and used autobiographical detail and symbolism in her paintings. Carrington was not interested in the writings of Sigmund Freud, as was other participants of surrealism. Carrington was also a founding member of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Mexico during the 1970s. She designed “Mujeres Conciencia / Women’s Awareness” in 1973, a poster to the Women’ Liberation Movement, depicting a surrealist new Eve. She understood that psychic freedom and political freedom were both neccessary for women’s emancipation.

 

Donal O’Keeffe, “Dead Ahead”

Donal O’Keeffe, “Dead Ahead”

‘Dead Ahead’ is a postcard animation to the world of the horror movie genre. Our intrepid travellers head out into the wilderness on their road trip only to find one nightmare scenario after the other. With each step forward a new monster emerges paying homage to such classics as Friday the 13th, Jaws and Pet Sematary.

(Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)

Calendar: March 26

Year: Day to Day Men: March 26

Light Casts Shadows

The twenty-sixth of March in 1911 marks the birth date of Tennessee Williams, an American playwright and screenwriter. Along with contemporaries Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of American drama in the twentieth-century. 

Born Thomas Lanier Williams III in Columbus, Mississippi, Tennessee Williams attended the University of Missouri at Columbia, where he studied journalism. Bored by his classes, he began entering his poetry, essays, stories and plays in writing contests. His first two submitted plays were the 1930 “Beauty is the Word” and the 1932 “Hot Milk at Three in the Morning”. For his 1930 play, which discussed rebellion against religious upbringing, he became the first freshman at the university to receive honorable mention in a writing contest.

After studying a year at St. Louis’s Washington University, Williams transferred in the autumn of 1937 to the University of Iowa where he graduated in 1938 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. He later studied at The New School’s Dramatic Workshop in New York City. In acknowledgement of his Southern accent and roots, Williams adopted the professional name Tennessee Williams in 1939. After working a series of menial jobs, he was awarded a small grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in recognition for his play “Battle of Angels”. 

Using these funds, Tennessee Williams relocated to New Orleans in 1939 to write for the Works Progress Administration of the government’s New Deal Program. He lived for a time in New Orlean’s French Quarter, specifically at 722 Toulouse Street, the setting for his 1977 play “Vieux Carré”. Due to his receiving the Rockefeller grant, he was given a six-month contract as a writer for the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio.

During the winter of 1944-1945, Williams’s memory play “The Glass Menagerie” based on his short story “Portrait of a Girl in Glass”, was produced in Chicago to good reviews. The play moved to New York City where it became an instant, long-running hit on Broadway. With this success, he traveled widely with his partner Frank Merlo, often spending summers in Europe. For Williams, the constant traveling to different cities stimulated his writing. 

Between 1948 and 1959, Tennessee Williams had seven of his plays produced on Broadway: “Summer and Smoke” (1948), “The Rose Tattoo” (1951), “Camino Real” (1953), “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1955), “Orpheus Descending” (1957), “Garden District” (1958), and “Sweet Bird of Youth” (1959). For these, he was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes, three New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, three Donaldson Awards, and a Tony Award. All of these plays, except for “Camino Real” and “Garden District”, were adapted into motion pictures. Williams’s 1957 one-act play “Suddenly, Last Summer” was adapted by William and Gore Vidal into the 1959 film of the same name. His play “Night of the Iguana”, which premiered on Broadway in 1961, was later adapted by John Huston and Anthony Veiller into the 1964 film of the same name. 

After the successes of the 1940s and 1950s, Williams went through a period of personal turmoil and theatrical failures. Although he continued to write, his work suffered from his increasing alcohol and drug consumption. On the twentieth of September in 1963, Williams’s partner of forty-two years, Frank Merlo, died from inoperable lung cancer. Depressed by the loss as well as the time spent in and out of treatment facilities, he felt increasingly alone despite a short relationship with aspiring writer Robert Carroll. Tennessee Williams was discovered dead at the age of seventy-one in his suite at New York’s Hotel Elysée on the twenty-fifth of February in 1983 from a toxic level of Seconal.

Notes: Beginning in the late 1930s,Tennessee Williams had several short-term relationships with men he met in his travels. In 1948 at the Atlantic House in Provincetown, Massachusetts, he met Italian-American actor Frank Melo who was leaning against the porch railing. According to his memoirs, Williams felt his time with Melo in his Manhattan and Key West homes were some of his happiest and most productive years. However, William’s alcohol, drug use and promiscuity put a strain on their relationship. In 1962 after Melo was diagnosed with lung cancer, Williams move Melo into the Manhattan apartment and stayed by his side until his death in 1963.

Carlo Crivelli

Carlo Crivelli, “Madonna and Child”, 1480, Tempera and Gold on Panel, 37.7 x 25.4 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Carlo Crivelli was probably the most individual of the 15th century Venetian painters, an artist whose highly personal and mannered style carried Renaissance forms into an unusual expressionism.

Crivelli’s works were exclusively sacred in subject. Although his classical, realistic figure types and symmetrical compositions follow the conventions of Renaissance painting, his unusual overall treatment transforms these conventions into a personal expression that is both highly sensuous and strongly Gothic in spirit. Crivelli’s figures, clad in richly patterned brocades that are painted with an almost incredible attention to detail, are closely crowded together in sumptuously ornamental settings to produce flat, hieratic compositions that are devotional and removed from the world of the viewer.

His unique use of sharp outlines surrounding every form and the excessive pallor and flawlessness of complexion in his figures give his scenes the quality of shallow sculptured relief. There is an exaggerated expression of feeling in the faces of his figures, usually pensive and dreamy but sometimes distorted with grief, and in the mannered gestures of their slender hands and spidery fingers; this expression is closer to the religious intensity of Gothic art than to the calm rationalism of the Renaissance.

In this painting the troupe-l’oeil details are played against the doll-like prettiness of the Madonna. The apples and fly are symbols of sin and evil and are opposed to the cucumber and the goldfinch, symbols of redemption. Crivelli’s signature is painted on what looks like a piece of paper attached to the watered-silk cloth with wax.

Human-Headed Winged Lion

Human-Headed Winged Lion (Lamassu), 883-859 BC, Gypsum Alabaster, Nimrud (Ancient Kalhu), Mesopotamia, Metropolitan Museum of Art

From the ninth to the seventh century B.C., the kings of Assyria ruled over a vast empire centered in northern Iraq. The great Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II ruling from 883 to 859 BC undertook a vast building program at Nimrud.

The new capital occupied an area of about nine hundred acres, around which Ashurnasirpal constructed a mudbrick wall that was 120 feet thick, 42 feet high, and five miles long. In the southwest corner of this enclosure was the acropolis, where the temples, palaces, and administrative offices of the empire were located. In 879 B.C. Ashurnasirpal held a festival for 69,574 people to celebrate the construction of the new capital.

Set at its gates were beasts of the mountains and seas, fashioned out of white limestone and alabaster. Among such stone beasts is the human-headed, winged lion pictured here. The horned cap attests to its divinity, and the belt signifies its power. The sculptor gave these guardian figures five legs so that they appear to be standing firmly when viewed from the front but striding forward when seen from the side. Lamassu protected and supported important doorways in Assyrian palaces.