Month: April 2018

Alfred Maurer

Alfred Maurer, “The Florentines”, 1929, Oil on Canvas on Plaster Board, The Phillips Collection, Washington DC

Around 1919, Alfred Maurer began two series, “Girls” and “Heads”, to which he would return until the end of his life. He adopted a relatively standard format, positioning his sitters alone or in small groups, most often in a simple frontal pose and three-quarter length. The series progresses from fairly representational and naturalistic depictions to more stylized and abstractions renderings. Although they tend to have generic features, they were based on models.

Influenced by a general return-to-order in the postwar years, these paintings convey classicism in both their traditional subject and their calm approach to figuration. They reconnect to the realist paintings that had originally established Alfred Maurer’s reputation, but incorporate a range of primitive, Renaissance, and modernist influences. Critics considered them as “modern madonnas” and noted their Byzantine elongations of the female body.Their deliberate awkwardness was celebrated as a powerful interpretation of non-Western masks and carvings.

Calendar: April 21

A Year: Day to Day Men: 21st of April

Weathered Log

April 21, 1868 was the birthdate of Alfred Henry Maurer, the American modernist painter.

Maurer’s 1901 oil painting “An Arrangement”, which was compared to the work of Whistler in its color sense and fluid handling of paint, made his reputation in the American art world. The painting received first prize at the 1901 Carnegie International Exhibition, whose jurors included Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer. In 1905, he won the third medal at the Liege Exposition in Belgium and a gold medal at the International Exposition in Munich.

At age thirty-six, in Paris, deviating from what everyone called “acceptable” painting styles, Alfred Maurer changed his methods sharply and from that point on painted only in a cubist or fauvist manner. His break from realism and new commitment to modernism, fostered by exposure to the art collected by his friends Gertrude and Leo Stein, subsequently cost him his international reputation. Four of his paintings from this period were included in the legendary Armory Show of 1913. He acquired esteem in avant-garde circles. He did not, however, find the popular following he needed to make a living and his father denied him any support.

For the next seventeen, increasingly depressed years, Maurer painted in a garret in his father’s house on the West Side of Manhattan and gained only limited critical acclaim. He participated in prestigious exhibitions, such as “The Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters” in 1916, a New York show which featured seventeen of the most significant native modernists of the time. He also exhibited regularly at the New York-based Society of Independent Artists and was elected their director in 1919. In 1924, the New York dealer Erhard Weyhe bought the contents of Maurer’s studio and represented the artist for the remainder of his career. The death of his mother in 1917, however, intensified his gradual withdrawal from the world.

In 1932, Alfred Maurer took his own life by hanging, several weeks after his father’s death. As the art historian Sheldon Reich observed, had Maurer been a European or remained in Europe in 1914, he would probably be discussed today in the same terms applied to Vlaminck or Derain, both principle members of the Fauvist Movement in Europe. Instead, he became a citizen of a country with very limited interest in bold artistic experimentation and took his place as part of that “tragic fraternity of artists who during their lifetimes have suffered the tortures of neglect.”

Maurer’s works are included today in the many museum collections: Carnegie Museum of Art, Chicago Art Institute, Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and National Museum of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution, among others.

Austen Henry Layard

Austen Henry Layard, “Depiction of Anzu (Tiamat) Pursued by Ninurta (Marduk)”, 1853, from the Book “Momuments of Nineveh”, Second Series, Plate 19/83, J. Murray Publisher, London

In Enûma Elish, a civil war between the gods was growing to a climactic battle. The Anunnaki gods gathered together to find one god who could defeat the gods rising against them. Marduk, a very young god, answered the call and was promised the position of head god.

To prepare for battle, Marduk makes a bow, fletches arrows, grabs a mace, throws lightning before him and fills his body with flame. He then makes a net to encircle Tiamat within it, gathers the four winds so that no part of her could escape, and creates seven powerful new winds such as the whirlwind and the tornado. Raising up his mightiest weapon, the rain-flood, Marduk then sets out for battle, mounting his storm-chariot drawn by four horses with poison in their mouths. In his lips he holds a spell and in one hand he grasps a herb to counter poison.

First, he challenges the leader of the Anunnaki gods, the dragon of the primordial sea Tiamat, to single combat and defeats her by trapping her with his net, blowing her up with his winds, and piercing her belly with an arrow.

Then, he proceeds to defeat King, who Tiamat put in charge of the army and who wore the Tablets of Destiny on his breast, and “wrested from him the Tablets of Destiny, wrongfully his” and assumed his new position. Under his reign humans were created to bear the burdens of life so the gods could be at leisure.

Calendar: April 20

A Year: Day to Day Men: 20th of April

The Rising of the Sun

Harold Clayton Lloyd was born on April 20, 1893 in Burchard, Nebraska.

Harold Lloyd was an American actor, comedian, director, producer, screenwriter, and stunt performer who is best known for his silent comedy films. He ranks alongside Chaplin and Keaton as one of the most popular and influential film comedians of the silent film era. Lloyd made nearly 200 comedy films, both silent and sound, between 1914 and 1947.

His films frequently contained “thrill sequences” of extended chase scenes and daredevil physical feats, for which he is best remembered today. Lloyd desperately hanging from the hands of a skyscraper clock high above the street in the 1923 film “Safety Last” is one of the most enduring images in all of cinema. This was achieved through using camera angles and successively taller buildings to create the illusion of distance and perspective, always keeping the street below in full view. Lloyd, however, did many other dangerous stunts in his films himself.

Harold Lloyd moved away from playing tragicomic personas; he started portraying the  ‘everyman’ with that character’s unwavering confidence and optimism. The persona Lloyd referred to as his “Glass” character (often named “Harold” in the silent films) was a much more mature comedy character with greater potential for sympathy and emotional depth, and was easy for audiences of the time to identify with.  To create his new character Lloyd donned a pair of lensless horn-rimmed eyeglasses but wore normal clothing.

In 1924 Harold Lloyd became the independent producer of his own films. These included his most accomplished mature features “Girl Shy”, “The Freshman” (his highest-grossing silent feature), “The Kid Brother” and “Speedy”, his final silent film. The 1929 film “Welcome Danger”  was originally a silent film but Lloyd decided late in the production to remake it with dialogue. All of these films were enormously successful and profitable, and Lloyd would eventually become the highest paid film performer of the 1920s.

In the early 1960s, Lloyd produced two compilation films, featuring scenes from his old comedies, “Harold Lloyd’s World of Comedy” and “The Funny Side of Life”.  The first film was premiered at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival, where Lloyd was fêted as a major rediscovery. The renewed interest in Lloyd helped restore his status among film historians. Lloyd was honored in 1960 for his contribution to motion pictures with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame located at 1503 Vine Street.

Jesùs Leguizamo

Paintings by Jesùs Leguizamo

Jesùs Leguizamo was born in the colonial city of Pamplona located in Norte de Santander in eastern Colombia. Since childhood, Jesùs had a great interest in the arts, film, and visual images in general and had the opportunity to study fine arts at the National University of Colombia where he obtained his degree. He decided to settle in the capital Bogotà after graduating, where he lives and works.

In his depictions of people, Jesùs erases and blurs that which defines the human being – the face. Through expressive brushstrokes, he creates poignant works which explore human fragility and how this can be expressed in the medium of paint. His haunting paintings come across as intimate peeks into someone’s emotional state of mind or a memory which has begun to fade, leaving incomplete snippets in your mind.

“I want to show the portrait of modernity, I am interested materiality of the human body and its fragile image. In my paintings I represent the distortion and also alter the representation of the body. In this way, I use the expressive gesture of oil to deform the identity of the subjects. This physiological transformation of face and body in the picture takes as a starting point photography because it is a clearer picture of modern man. When I’m painting the picture I feel the urge to eliminate, the need to erase the essence of the individual in the picture surface. Through my work I want to reflect on the passage of time and the portrait of the current era.“- Jesùs Leguizamo