Year: 2020

František Kupka

František Kupka, “The Yellow Scale”, 1907, Self-Portrait, Oil on Canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas

František Kupka was born in September of 1871 in Opočno, a small town in Bohemia, now a part of the Czech Republic. From 1889 to 1892, he trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague where he painted historical and patriotic themes. Kupka later attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where he concentrated on allegorical and symbolic subjects, influenced by the works of Symbolist painter Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach. In 1904, Kupka exhibited his work at Vienna’s art association, the Kunstverein. 

Kupka settled in Paris by the spring of 1894 and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under figurative and portrait painter Jean-Pierre Laurens. Inspired by the Neo-Impressionist and Fauvist paintings he saw in Paris exhibitions, Kupka began experimenting with different styles, all while supporting himself as an illustrator of books and posters. In 1906 he exhibited for the first time at the Salon d’Automne, Paris’s annual art exhibition on the Champs-Élysées.

František Kupka’s 1909 painting “Piano Keyboard/Lake” marked a break in his representational style. His work became increasingly abstract beginning in 1910-11, reflecting his theories of color, motion and the link between music and painting. In 1931, he was a founding member of Abstraction-Création, a group formed to counteract the influence of Andre Breton’s surrealist group. 

Kupka had work shown in 1936 at the “Cubism and Abstract Art” exhibition at MOMA in New York City and, in the same year, at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. He regularly exhibited in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris, until his death. Having gained general recognition, he had several solo shows in New York and a 1946 retrospective of his work at the Galerie Mánes in Prague. František Kupka died in June of 1957 in Puteaux, France.

František Kupka was drawn to theosophy and Eastern philosophy. He saw deep links between music and visual art and believed fervently in the power of color. To that end, Kupka strove to dissociate color from its usual descriptive role, wanting to let it be expressive in itself, not just on the subject. In his first attempt at this theory,  he painted his 1907 “The Yellow Scale”, and produced a very personal painting in a single scale of yellow colors. Although a self-portrait, the subject of the painting was actually the color yellow, contrasted with just a few strokes of green.

Top Insert Image: František Kupka, “Self Portrait”, 1905, Oil on Canvas

Bottom Insert Image: František Kupka, “Meditation”, 1903, Oil on Canvas

Alma Thomas

Alma Thomas, “Light Blue Nursery”, 1968, Acrylic on Canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1891, Alma Woodsey Thomas was an expressionist abstract painter and art educator. As a teenager, she moved with her family to Washington, DC to escape the racism the family experienced in the South. Thomas attended Howard University, where she took classes taught by painter and educator Lois Mailou Jones and impressionist painter James V. Herring, who founded Howard University’s art department. 

Alma Thomas graduated in 1924 as the university’s first Fine Art graduate. She acquired her Masters in Art Education from New York’s Columbia University and studied abroad in Europe with the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. She was greatly influenced by the techniques of French Impressionism, through the still-lifes and landscapes of Berthe Morisot and Claude Monet.

Through her life, Thomas was involved with the history of black American intellectual life and participated in many organizations promoting such history and culture. Among these was the Little Paris Group, a literary circle of black public school teachers who met weekly in the 1940s. Alma Thomas also served as Vice President of the Barnett Aden Gallery, founded in 1947, as a black-owned non-profit art gallery. The gallery exhibited the work of all artists regardless of race; however, it was one of few places that showed black artists on equal footing with their white contemporaries.

After she retired, at the age of sixty-nine, from her career as an art teacher, Alma Thomas developed her own personal style. Inspired by the shifting light filtering between the leaves of trees in her garden, she began to paint her signature abstractions. Thomas was given her first solo show at the Dupont Theatre Art Gallery in 1960.

Although the work is abstract, the titles summon up specific moods and scenes, such as “Iris, Tulips, Jonquils, and Crocuses” in 1969, the 1973 “Snow Reflections on Pond”, and “Red Azaleas Singing and Dancing Rock and Roll Music” painted in 1976. The colorful rectangular dabs of paint, often arranged in circles or rows, allow the under-colors to emerge through the open spaces.

Alma Thomas died at the age of 86 in 1978 in Washington, DC. During her life she was included in many group shows centered around black artists. It was not until after her death that her work began being included in shows which did not focus on the unifying themes of race or gender identity, but rather was allowed to exist simply as art. Her work can be seen at many museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Smithsonian Museum. 

Note: The insert image is Alma Thomas’s “Grassy Melodic Chat”, an acrylic on canvas painting done in 1976. It is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Rainer Maria Rilke: “Be Ahead of All Parting”

Photographer Unknown, Be Ahead of All Parting

“Sei allem Abschied voran, als wäre er hinter

dir, wie der Winter, der eben geht.

Denn unter Wintern ist einer so endlos Winter,

daß, überwinternd, dein Herz überhaupt übersteht.

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were

behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.

For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter

that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Be Ahead of All Parting, (The Sonnets to Orpheus: Book 2: Xiii), First Stanza

A short biography of Rainer Rilke is located at: https://ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon.blog/2020/09/10/the-shadow-and-the-light/

Image reblogged with many thanks to: https://doctordee.tumblr.com

Frank O’Hara: “We are Flesh and Breathe”

Photographer Unknown, We are Flesh and Breathe

“When I am feeling depressed and anxious and sullen

all you have to do is take your clothes off

and all is wiped away revealing life’s tenderness

that we are flesh and breathe and are near us

as you are really as you are I become as I

really am alive and knowing vaguely what is

and what is important to me above the intrusions

of incident and accidental relationships

which have nothing to do with my life

when I am in your presence I feel life is strong

and will defeat all its enemies and all of mine

and all of yours and yours in you and mine in me

sick logic and feeble reasoning are cured

by the perfect symmetry of your arms and legs

spread out making an eternal circle together

creating a golden pillar beside the Atlantic

the faint line of hair dividing your torso

gives my mind rest and emotions their release

into the infinite air where since once we are

together we always will be in this life come what may”

—Frank O’Hara, Poem (A la Recherche d’Gertrude Stein), 1959

Born on March 27, 1926 in Baltimore, Maryland, Francis Russell O’Hara was an American poet, writer, and art critic. He spent his youth in Grafton, Massachusetts, and studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston from 1941 to 1944. In service during World War II, O’Hara was stationed as a sonar man on the destroyer USS Nicholas in the South Pacific.

When education funding became available to veterans, Frank O’Hara attended Harvard University. Despite his love of music and expertise on the piano, he switched his major to English and graduated with a degree from Harvard in 1959. While at Harvard O’Hara met poet and art critic John Ashbery and began publishing his own poems in the Harvard Advocate, the art and literary magazine of the college.

O’Hara did his graduate work at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, winning a major scholarship, the Hopwood Award, given to aspiring writers. After a failed attempt at a novel, he wrote ninety poems in a few months and two plays. O’Hara received his MA in English Literature in 1951 and moved in September of that year to New York City with Joe Lesueur, who was his roommate and sometime lover for the next eleven years. Settled in New York City, he continued to write seriously while employed at the Museum of Modern Art, where he became an assistant curator.

O’Hara’s early poetic work was considered both provocative and provoking. In 1952, his first volume of poetry, “A City Winter, and Other Poems”, with drawings by artist Larry Rivers, attracted favorable attention. O’Hara also wrote essays on painting and sculpture, and reviews for the magazine ArtNews which were considered brilliant.

Frank O’Hara’s association with painters Larry Rivers, Jackson Pollock, and Jasper Johns, leaders of the New York School group of writers and artists, became a source of inspiration for his highly original poetry..O’Hara attempted to produce with words the effects these artists had created on canvas. In certain instances, he collaborated with the painters to make “poem-paintings,” paintings with word texts.

In the summer of 1959, Frank O’Hara met Canadian ballet dancer Vincent Warren, often described as the true love of O’Hara’s life. Appearing in O’Hara’s poetry, Warren became the subject of O’Hara’s best love poems, including “Poem (A la Recherche d’Gertrude Stein)”, “Les Luths”, “Poem (So Many Echos in My Head)”, and “Having a Coke With You”. Many of these poems to Warren are collected in the volume “Love Poems (A Tentative Title)”, published in 1965.

Frank O’Hara’s poetry is basically autographical, based more on his observations of life rather than the exploration of his past. An urban poet, he constantly wrote during his daily routine, recording his thoughts for later use or sending them off in letters. O’Hara was known to treat poetry as something to be done in the moment with a frank directness that often erased the line between public and private. Influenced by Puerto Rican-American poet William Carlos Williams, he also used everyday language and simple statements, split at intervals, in the form of staccato.

In the early morning of July 24, 1966, Frank O’Hara was struck by a jeep on the beach of Fire Island, New York. He died the next day of a ruptured liver, at the age of forty. O’Hara was buried in Green River Cemetery on Long Island. Painter Larry Rivers, along with poet Bill Berkson, art critic Edwin Denby, and René d’Hamoncourt, Director of the Museum of Modern Art, delivered eulogies. His long-time lover Vincent Warren, devastated by the loss, returned to Canada and became a celebrated dancer and dance historian, passing away in October of 2017.

Note: More extensive information on Frank O’Hara’s life and work can be found at the Poetry Foundation located at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/search?query=frank+o%27hara

Peter Samuelson

Paintings by Peter Samuelson

Born in Salisbury in 1812, British artist Peter Samuelson studied at Eton College where his artistic aptitude was first noticed. He later studied at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts in Paris before moving to Holland to work as an illustrator. Following his service in the Second World War, Samuelson returned in 1947 to England again working as an illustrator and, later, as a set designer in the London theater. 

In the early 1950s, Peter Samuelson helped his mother run a boarding house in Torquay, Cornwall, on the English Channel. It was here that the majority of his work from the 1950s and 1960s was produced, consisting of brightly colored portraitures and life studies of the boardinghouse’s lodgers. A zen-like calm pervades  the romantically colored canvases and drawings, with a line quality that suggests the decorative sensitivity of artists Jean Cocteau and Christian Bérard.

Samuelson returned to London in 1952, where he opened his own boarding houses, and continued his practice of using lodgers and guests as subjects. The artist, though shy in nature, was able to capture life and movement fluidly in his work, distilling with great skill the essence of his subjects, often merely observed in the public spaces of the boarding houses. Not a social person, Samuelson never actively sought representation or a gallery exhibition; but he did sell pieces to friends and gave some as gifts to friends and models.

Samuelson abandoned painting almost entirely in 1965, spending the latter years of his life in restoring Oriental rugs. In the 1980s, as his health began to decline, his friends placed work in galleries, including an exhibition at Leighton House Museum in London, resulting in some critical acclaim. A book of his work entitled “Post War Friends”, containing paintings and drawings, was published in 1987 by GMP Publishers, London. Peter Samuelson died in 1996. 

Mikolaj Kaczmarek

Photographer Unknown, “Combattants de la Grande Polgne (Fighters of Greater Poland)”, 1918-19, Colorization by Mikolaj Kaczmarek

Mikolaj Kaczmarek is a Polish graphic artist and photographer. Recognized for the quality of his colorization work on historical photos, he now works in conjunction with Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance and the Polish National Fund. 

Examples of Kaczmarek’s work, including photos and histories of Polish freedom-fighters during World War II, can be found at: https://www.facebook.com/KolorHistorii/?ref=page_internal

Michael Triegel

The Artwork of Michael Triegel

Born in December of 1968 in Erfurt, Michael Triegel is a German painter, illustrator and graphic artist based in Leipzig. From 1990 to 1997, Michael Triegel studied at the renowned Hochschule fьr Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, where he was taught by Arno Rink, a painter in the German figurative tradition.

The Academy in Leipzig is closely associated with the New Leipzig School, a movement in German art that arose following the fall of the Berlin Wall, of which the painter Neo Rauch, a proponent of social realism, is the most important representative.The members of this association largely use the same figurative form language, though they vary widely in terms of their technique. 

In terms of their subject matter and execution, Michael Triegel’s paintings are instilled with the atmosphere of the early European Renaissance. He works in the style of the old masters, applying layer upon layer with a very refined technique that compliments his ability for realistic detail. Triegel’s paintings are a celebration of pure figurative painting, with classic religious and profane motifs, which look like altarpieces but, at the same time, appear alienating and surreal.

In 2010, Michael Triegel, commissioned by the Bishop of Regensburg, painted the official portrait of Pope Benedict XVI, which resulted in international recognition of his work.

Insert Image: Michael Triegel, “Hermes”, 2008, Mixed Media on Linen

William Strang

William Strang, “Lady with a Red Hat”, 1918, Oil on Canvas, 102.9 x 77.5 cm, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, Scotland

William Strang, born in February of 1859, was a Scottish painter and printmaker, known for his illustrating the works of writer and preacher John Bunyan, poet Samuel Coleridge, and novelist Joseph Rudyard Kipling. 

At an early age, Strang attended Dumbarton Academy, a mixed secondary school, after which he worked in a counting-house of a shipbuilding firm for fifteen months. He left for London, at the age of sixteen, in 1875 to study art at the Slade School, under painter and etcher Alphonse Legros. Strang achieved success as an etcher, and became assistant master in the etching class. An original member of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers in 1880, he exhibited his work at their first show in 1881. 

Strang worked in a multiple of techniques, including etching, drypoint, mezzotint, engraving, lithography, and wood cut. A privately produce catalogue of his engravings contained more than three hundred items. His work on poet William Nicholson’s “Ballad of Aken Drum” is known for its strong drawing and clear,

delicate shadow tones. Strang provided fourteen illustrations for the 1910 edition of John Bunyan’s series “The Pilgrim’s Progress”, and produced a series of etchings and woodcuts, from 1896 to 1903, illustrating Samuel Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. 

William Strang painted a number of portraits, nude figures in landscapes, and groups of peasant families. These were exhibited at several German exhibitions, at The International Society, and at the Royal Academy. His decorative biblical series of Adam and Eve, commissioned for the private library of the Hodson family in the West Midlands, was exhibited at the Whitechapel Exhibition in 1910. 

In later years Strang developed a style of drawing in red and black chalk, with the whites and high lights rubbed out, on paper stained with water color. His method gave his work the qualities of delicate modeling, and refined form and gradations. Strang drew portraits in this manner of many members of the Commonwealth’s Order of Merit for the royal library at Windsor Castle. 

William Strang was elected a member of The International Society in 1905, elected as an associate engraver of the Royal Academy in 1906, and became a master of the Art Workers Guild in 1907. He died in April of 1921 and was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery in London. In 1955, his son David, also an artist, gifted impressions of the bulk of William Strang’s etchings to the National Gallery of Scotland. 

Note: William Strang’s “Lady with a Red Hat” is a portrait of author and garden designer Vita Sackville-West. The strong colors of her outfit and her assertive pose with elbow extended conveys her flamboyant personality. An independent thinker, stylish and assertive, Vita Sackville-West shocked Edwardian society by her affairs with other women.

Vita Sackville-West published more than a dozen collections of poetry and thirteen novels. She was twice awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature: in 1927 for her epic “The Land” and in 1933 for her “Collected Poems”. She was the inspiration for the protagonist of the 1928 “Orlando: A Biography” by her friend and lover Virginia Woolf. 

Insert Note: When William Strang exhibited his self-portrait at the Royal Academy in 1919, he gave it the simple title “A Painter”. Drawing on Impressionism and Symbolism, he had been one of the innovators of the modern style in Britain; but the symmetry of this work and the figure’s direct gaze is very reminiscent of the self-portraits of Rembrandt. Here, in his old age, Strang refers to a traditional model of the artist as a workman secluded in his studio. The painting is in the collection of the Tate Museum, London.

The Word is Sprawl

Photographers Unknown, The Word is Sprawl

Verb: sprawl; third-person singular present “sprawls”; present participle “sprawling”; simple past and past participle “sprawled”. 

“There was no special place for him or his little affairs, and he was forbidden to sprawl on sofas and explain his ideas about the manufacture of this world and his hopes for the future. Sprawling was lazy and wore out sofas, and little boys were not expected to talk.”

—-Rudyard Kipling, Baa Baa, Black Sheep, 1888

“A shrewd blow, it caught him off balance, and after one ineffectual stagger he sprawled backward and lay for a moment staring up in blank surprise.”

—-Herman Whitaker, Cross Trails: The Story of One Woman in the North Woods, 1914

The Old English word “spreawilian”, meaning ‘to move convulsively’, has cognates, words having the same linguistic derivation as another, in the Scandinavian languages, such as the Norwegian “sprala”, the Danish “spraelle”, and the North Frisian “spraweli”. These words probably ultimately came from the Proto-Indo-European root “sper-“, meaning ‘to strew’. Usage as a verb meaning ‘to spread out’ is noted as early as 1300 AD. Usage meaning ‘to spread or stretch in a careless manner’ is attested to be from 1745 AD.

Mary Jane Oliver: “Wild Geese”

Photographer Unknown, Wild Geese

“You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body 

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.” 

—Mary Oliver, Wild Geese, Dream Works, 1986

Mary Jane Oliver was born in September of 1935 in Maple Heights, a semi-rural suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. She was an American poet whose work was inspired by nature, rather than the human world, which arose from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild. 

As a child, Mary Oliver spent a large amount of her time outside, walking or reading in the pastoral countryside. Writing poetry at the age of fourteen, Oliver was able, at the age of seventeen, to visit the home of the late poet Edna St. Vincent Milley, located in Austerlitz, New York. There she met the late poet’s sister Norma Milley, with whom she formed a friendship. Mary Oliver and Norma spent the next six to seven years at the “Steepletop” estate archiving Edna St. Vincent Milley’s papers. 

Mary Oliver’s first collection of poems “No Voyage and Other Poems: was published in 1963 when she was twenty-eight. While teaching at Case Western Reserve University, her fifth collection of poetry, “American Primitive”, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984, Mary Oliver became Poet in Residence at Bucknell University in 1986; Writer in Residence at Sweet Briar College in 1991; and later she held the Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College, Vermont, until 2001.

Mary Oliver’s 1990 “House of Light” won the Christopher Award and the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award ,and her 1992 “New and Selected Poems” won the National Book Award. For its inspiration, her work turns towards nature, and the sense of wonder it instillss. Oliver’s poetry is grounded in her memories of Ohio and her adopted home of New England, mostly centered around her life in Provincetown in the 1960s. 

Influenced by Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emerson, and Shelley, Oliver’s work is fulled with imagery of her daily walks, which refuse to acknowledge the boundaries between nature and the observing self. Known for her unadorned language and common themes, she has been compared to Emily Dickinson, with whom she shared an affinity for solitude and inner monologues.

On a return visit to Austerlitz, in the late 1950s, Oliver met photographer Molly Malone Cook, who would become her partner for over forty years. They settled largely in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they lived together until Cook’s death in 2005. Oliver continued to live there until she relocated to Florida. She valued her privacy and gave very few interviews. 

In 2012, Mary Oliver was diagnosed with lung cancer, was treated and given a good prognosis. She ultimately died of lymphoma on January 17, 2019 at her home in Florida at the age of eighty-three.

Charles Bargue

Charles Bargue, “The Albanian Sentinel in Cairo”, Detail, 1877, Oil on Panel, 28 x 21 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Painter and lithographer Charles Bargue was born in France in 1826/1827. He was a student of academic painter and sculptor Jean-Léon Gérôme. Bargue worked closely with Gérôme and was influenced by his style, which included Orientalist scenes and historical genre. Bargue travelled extensively throughout North Africa, and the Balkans, where he executed many portraits with meticulous detail of the local people. 

Bargue is mostly remembered for his “Cours de Dessin”, which was conceived in collaboration with Gérôme and became one of the most influential classical drawing courses. This comprehensive course was published between 1866 and 1871 by Goupil & Cie, a leading art dealership and printing company in Paris. 

This course is used by many academies and ateliers which focus on classical Realism. Aided by one hundred ninety-seven lithographs, students were guided from plaster casts to the study of master drawings and finally to drawing from a living model. Among the artists whose work is based on the study of Bargue’s plate work are Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh, who copied the complete set in 1880 to 1881.

Charles Bargue died on April 6th in 1883 in France. His last painting “Bashi-Bazouks Playing Chess”, was completed by Jean-Léon Gérôme and is now conserved in the Malden Public Library in Malden, Massachusetts.

Christopher Isherwood: “The World Seems So Fresh”

Photographers Unknown,, The World Seems So Fresh

“A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. It’s as though it had all just come into existence.

I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.” 

— Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

Christopher Isherwood was a novelist, screen-writer, and playwright who used his expeiences as a gay man for the theme of some of his  writings. Isherwood was born into a privileged lifestyle near Manchester in the north of England in 1904. He developed strong friendships during his boarding school years, later collaborating with school friend Wystan Auden to write three plays : “The Dog Beneath the Skin” in 1935, the 1936 “The Asceent of F6”, and “On the Frontier” in 1938.

Asked to leave Cambridge University in 1925, Isherwood took part-time jobs, briefly attended medical school, and progressed with his first two novels, “All the Conspirators” published in 1928 and “The Memorial” published in 1932. He moved to Berlin in 1929, where he taught English and explored his homosexuality. 

Isherwood ’s  experiences and developed friendships with Gerald Hamilton and Jean Ross provided material for his 1935 “Mr. Norris Changes Trains” and his 1939 “Goodbye to Berlin”. These were later published together as “The Berlin Stories”, which established Isherwood’s reputation as an important writer and inspired the 1951 play “I Am a Camera” and the 1966 musical “Cabaret”. 

While living in Berlin, Isherwood often returned to London where he took his first movie-script job, working with Viennese director Berthold Viertel on the 1934 film “Little Friend”. He also worked on his book“Lions and Shadows”, published in 1938, a fictionalized  autobiography of his education, both in and out of school in the 1920s. Traveling in January of 1938, Isherwood, accompanied by Wystan Auden, journeyed to China to write his 1939 “Journey to a War” about the Sino-Japanese conflict. 

Isherwood and Auden emigrated to the United States in January of 1939, Auden to Manhattan and Isherwood to Hollywood, where he met and became friends with Truman Capote and British novelist and playwright Dodie Smith. On November 6, 1946, Christopher Isherwood became an American citizen. While living in California with photographer William Caskey, he and Caskey traveled in 1947 to South America, after which they published the 1949 “The Condor and the Crows”, with prose by Isherwood and photographs by Caskey. 

On Valentine’s Day in 1953, at the age of forty-eight, Isherwood met eighteen-year old Don Bachardy on the beach at Santa Monica. Despite the age difference, this meeting began a partnership that, though interrupted by affairs and separations, continued until the end of Isherwood’s life. During this period they were together, Isherwood, with Bachardy typing, finished his 1954 novel “The World in the Evening” and taught modern English literature at (now) California State University, Los Angeles. The two became a well-known and well-established couple in California society with many Hollywood friends.

Isherwood was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1981, and died of the disease on the 4th of January, 1986, at his Santa Monica home, aged 81. His body was donated to medical science and his ashes later scattered at sea.

Note: Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel “A Single Man” is considered by many to be his finest achievement. The story depicts a day in the life of George, a middle-aged gay Englishman who is a professor at a Los Angeles University. In the novel, the professor, unable to cope with the sudden death of his partner Jim, encounters different people who give him insight into the possibilities of being alive and human in the world. The novel was adapted into the drama film “A Single Man”, in 2009, directed by fashion designer Tom Ford, and starring Colin Firth who, for his role in the film, was nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award.

Notes: An interesting, more extensive article on the life of Christopher Isherwood can be found at The Isherwood Foundation located at: https://www.isherwoodfoundation.org/biography.html

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Christopher Isherwood (left) and Don Bachardy”,  late 1970s.

Bottom Insert Photo: George Platt Lynes, “Christopher Isherwood”, 1935, Heliogravure, Private Collection

Osiris-Antinous

Artist Unknown, “Osiris-Antinous”, 117-138 AD, Parian Marble, 241 x 77 x 79 cm, Musei Vaticani, Vatican City, Italy

This marble statue represents the Bithynian Greek youth Antinous, the favorite of Emperor Caesar Traianus Hadrianus. Born in the city of Claudiopolis, in now north-west Turkey, in November between 110 and 12 AD, according to early sources, Antinous was most likely the son of farmers or merchants. Having been taught to read and write, he would have had a basic education as a child.

Although little is known in surviving records about Antinous’s life, it is likely he first met Emperor Hadrian in June of 123 AD, during Hadrian’s visit to Claudiopolis while touring the Roman Empire. It is probable, due to Antinous’s young age, that Hadrian sent him to Italy, where he most likely was schooled at the paedgagium, the school to train young men as servants for the imperial palace, located at the Caelian Hill. Hadrian continued his tour of the Empire, returning to Italy in September of 125 AD, when he settled at his villa in Tibur. 

It was within three years that Antinous became Hadrian’s personal favorite, for Antinous was known to be in Hadrian’s personal retinue on his journey to Greece in 128 AD. It is known that Hadrian believed Antinous to be intelligent, and they both shared a love of hunting, which was seen as a manly pursuit in Roman culture. Early sources are explicit that the relationship between Hadrian and Antinous was sexual; and there is no evidence that Antinous ever exploited Hadrian for personal or political gain. 

In April of 128, Emperor Hadrian laid the foundation stone for a temple to Venus and Rome in the city of Rome, likely accompanied at the ritual by Antinous. From the middle of 128 to late September or early October of 130, Hadrian and Antinous, with an entourage, traveled to Greece, Syria, Arabia, Judaea, Libya, Alexandria, and Egypt, where they assembled at Heliopolis to set sail upstream as part of a flotilla along the Nile River. On their journey up the river, Hadrian and Antinous stopped at the Hermopolis Magna, the primary shrine to the god Thoth, leader of the eight principal deities of Egypt. 

In October of 130, during the period for the festival to Osiris, Antinous fell into the river, his death most likely resulting from drowning. Hadrian was devastated by the death; the local priesthood immediately deified Antinous, identifying him with Osiris due to the manner of his death. In keeping with Egyptian custom, Antinous’s body was mummified by priests and interred the following year, most likely, at Hadrian’s estate in Tibur, Italy, where an inscribed obelisk was erected.

Although the public and formal divination of humans was reserved for the Emperor and members of the imperial family, Hadrian declared Antinous a god and created a formal cult devoted to him, which was highly unusual and done without permission of the Senate. The cult  of Antinous spread through the Empire, especially between 133 and 138, the year of Hadrian’s death, with some seeing Antinous as hero or god, and into Egypt, where Antinous was seen primarily as a benevolent god who could aid and cure his worshipers.

Note: The iconographic model of “Osiris-Antinous”, shown above, was intended to express the regal and divine nature of the figure. The marble statue was donated to Pope Benedict XIV, and was placed in the Capitoline Museum in 1742. Pope Gregory XVI requested for it to be transferred to the Vatican in 1838 so it could be displayed in its new Egyptian Museum.

Émile Fabry

Émile Fabry, “Portrait de Suzanne (Fabry) et de Barthélémy”, 1920, Lithograph Colored with Gouache on Wove Paper, 37.5 x 46 cm, Private Collection, Belgium

Born in Verviers, Belgium in 1865, Émile Fabry was an artist who studied under portrait and landscape painter Jean-François Portaels, who is regarded as the founder of the Belgian Orientalist school. An influential artist of the Symbolist movement in Belgium, Fabry was a member of prominent artist groups such as Pour L’Art (Art for Art’s Sake) and La Rose+Croix, a series of Symbolist art salons hosted in Paris in the 1890s.

With the advent of World War One in continental Europe, Émile Fabry sought refuge in St. Ives, England. The issues of war and peace became recurrent themes in his work, continuing even after the battles had ended. In 1919, Fabry, along with Jean Delville, Albert Ciamberlani and Constant Montald, founded L’Art Monumental, an idealistic artist group which evolved from the Symbolist movement. Using classical forms and iconographic traditions, the group desired to elevate the spirit of the people by a shared sense of beauty in the construction of new monuments and public buildings.

Émile Fabry’s 1920 hand-colored lithograph “Portrait of Suzanne (Fabry) and Barthélémy” is an overlay image of two profiles, one of his son Barthélémy and one of his daughter Suzanne. Illustrative of his creative process, the soldier and young woman are depicted in an idealized way, with the stoic, long gaze reminiscent of the rigidity of a sculpture. Fabry  used a indistinct, dotted technique of coloring, combining elements of Pointillism and Symbolism, to give the figures a sense of liveliness.

Émile Fabry regularly used his family members as models for his work. There is an existing photo of Suzanne Fabry posing for this work which shows how Fabry focused his composition on her profile. Drawn to the subject of the war on several occasions, Fabry used his own children as models for this work to create a more personal portrayal of the war.

In addition to his paintings, Émile Fabry did the decorative mosaic work in pavilions of the 1880 National Exhibition at the Cinquanteniare of Brussels and, with Belgian architect Victor Horta, the decorations in the large Art Nouveau townhouse, the Hotel Solvay. In 1932, Émile Fabry was made a Commander in the Order of Leopold, the oldest and highest order in Belgium, founded by King Leopold in 1832. He died in 1966 at the age of one hundred and one years old. 

Tope Insert Image: Émile Fabry, “Printemps”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 219 x 130 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Émile Fabry, “The Faun’s Song”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 138.1 x 122.5 cm, Private Collection