Month: May 2020

Edward Jean Steichen

Photography by Edward Jean Steichen

Born on March 27, 1879, Edward Jean Steichen was a Luxembourg-born American painter, photographer and curator, who was a key figure in the development of twentieth-century photography. His parents, Jean-Pierre and Marie Kamp Steichen, emigrated with their son Edward to the United States in 1880, originally settling in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and later moving to Milwaukee in 1899.

Steichen, at the age of fifteen in 1894, began attending Pio Nono College, a Catholic boys’ high school where his drawing skill was first noticed. Quitting high school, he began a four year lithography apprenticeship with the American Fine Art Company of Milwaukee. Steichen acquired his first camera in 1895, joined with his friends in forming the Milwaukee Art Students League, and first exhibited his photographs at the Philadelphia Salon in 1899. Becoming a naturalized citizen in 1900, he traveled frequently between 1900 and 1922 to Paris to practice his painting.

After exhibiting in the Chicago Salon, Steichen received encouragement from photographer Clarence White, who would later establish the first educational institution in America to teach photography as a fine art. He was elected in 1901 as a member of London’s Linked Ring Brotherhood which promoted photography as one of the fine arts. In 1902 Steichen cofounded, along with White and  photographer and art patron Alfred Stieglitz, the Photo-Secession movement.

Edward Steichen began experimenting in 1904 with color photography, becoming one of the earliest to use the Autochrome process patented in France by Louis and Auguste Lumière. He also designed the first cover of Alfred Stieglitz’s quarterly photographic journal “Camera Work” which would frequently publish Steichen’s work. In Manhattan, New York, he helped Stieglitz found the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, establishing the first American foothold for modern art of all media.

After high quality half-tone reproductions of photographs became possible, the genre of fashion photography became possible as a fine art. Most of the credit for this goes to French portrait photographer Baron Adolph de Meyer and to Edward Steichen, who began in 1907 photographing well-dressed ladies strolling the Longchamp Racecourse at the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. Gven the task by publisher Lucien Vogel in 1911 to promote fashion as a fine art, Steichen took photos of couturier Paul Poiret’s designer gowns. Two of these in color were published in the April 1911 issue of the magazine “Art et Décoration”. The photos were done in a creative, soft-focus, aesthetically retouched style, idealizing the garment beyond the exact description of its fabric and buttons, and making a strong distinction from former hard, sharp commercial images.

In 1942, Edward Steichen curated New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “Road to Victory”, photographs by enlisted members of the Armed forces, including some made by automatic cameras of Navy planes engaged in fighting. Five duplicates of this exhibition toured the world. In 1940, the first department of photography in a museum was inaugurated at MOMA and was headed by art historian and photographer Beaumont NewHall. In 1947 Steichen was appointed Director of Photography, a position he used to expand and organize the collection, recognizing new generations of photographers and showing early works of Henry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Rauschenberg. 

Among his accomplishments during his term as Director of Photography, Edward Steichen created the MOMA world-touring exhibition “The Family of Man”, a collection of five hundred photos depicting life, love, and death in sixty-eight countries. It was seen by nine million visitors and still holds the record for the most-visited photography exhibition. “The Family of Man” is now permanently housed, on continuous display, at Clervaux Castle in northern Luxembourg, the country of Steichen’s origin. 

Steichen’s career, especially his activities at the Museum of Modern Art, did much to popularize and promote the medium of photography. Both before and since his death in March of 1973, photography, including his own, continued to appreciate as a collectible art form. In 2006, Steichen’s early 1904 pictorialist photograph “The Pond-Moonlight”, showing a wooded area and pond in Mamaroneck, New York, sold for US 2.9 million dollars. Steichen achieved the impression of color by manually applying layers of light-sensitive gums to the paper (the autochrome process not being available until 1907). Only three prints of “The Pond-Moonlight”, two being in museums, are known to exist.

Insert Image: Edward Steichen, “Bryant Park Breadline, New York”, 1933, Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection

Fernando Pessoa: “The First Property of Things is Motion” (Part Two)

Tattoo Art in Motion: Part Two

“Our problem isn’t that we’re individualists. It’s that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven’t done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Education of the Stoic

 

Feliu Elias

Feliu Elias, “The Gallery”, 1928, Oil on Wood, 520 x 630 cm, Museo Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona

Born in Barcelona, Spain in 1878, Feliu Elias was a painter, art critic, caricaturist, and writer. Known not only as the foremost political caricaturist in Catalonia, Elias was also a precursor to the American and European Neo-Objectivists and, as a painter, aligned with its movement away from expressionism and towards political outrage and action. 

Elias studied at the Hoyos Painting Academy and the Cercle Artistic de Sant Lluc in Barcelona. Gaining popularity as a political cartoonist under the pseudonum ‘Apa’, he founded in 1908 the satirical magazine “Papitu”. Elias also contributed political cartoons and comics to such magazines as “Mirador” and “L ‘Esquella de la Torraba”. After a series of his published drawings in “Papitu” offended the Spanish government in 1911, he fled to Paris.

In Paris, Feliu Elias became aware of the avant-garde movements and the artwork of Pablo Picasso. It was in Paris that he first began exhibiting his paintings at the Galeries Dalmau and the Faianç Catalá in 1915 with Les Arts i els Artistes, an artistic association promoting a strong cultural identity with Catalonia and a rejection of modernist symbolism. Elias devoted himself to painting in a Magic Realist style, portraying a realistic view of his world in landscapes and portraits while also adding mythical and allegorical elements.

Elias’s political cartoons in favor of the allied cause in World War I were collected in the book “Kameraden” which earned him the Cross of the Legion of Honor. He wrote a treatise entitled “L ‘Art de la Caricatura (The Art of Caricature)” and published critiques of art under the pseudonym of Joan Sacs. Elias published his art theories and wrote numerous monographs on the work of his friends and other contemporary artists, including the work of Spanish painter and ceramicist Xavier Nogués.

Feliu Elias taught art history for many years at Escola Superior dels Bells Oficis, an arts and technical school founded in Barcelona. He died in August of 1948 in Barcelona, Spain. Feliu Elias’s 1928 painting “The Gallery” was acquired by the Museo Nacional d’Art de Catalunya after its exhibition at the Barcelona World’s Fair of 1929.

Peter Bunnell” “A Private Point of View”

Artists Unknown, (A Private Point of View), Gay Film Gifs

“There is no single form or style of portraiture. Portraiture means individualism and as such means diversity, self-expression, private point of view. The most successful images seem to be those which exist on several planes at once and which reflect the fantasy and understanding of many.”

 -Peter Bunnell, Creative Camera International Year Book 1977, 1976, p. 167

Henry Cyril Paget

John Wickens, “Henry Paget, Fifth Marquis of Anglesey”, c 1905, National Trust of England

The Marquis of Anglesey is a title in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. The title was created in 1815 for Henry Paget, Second Earl of Uxbridge, who was a hero of the Battle of Waterloo, second in command to the Duke of Wellington. Other subsidiary titles held by the Marquis are Earl of Uxbridge, Middlesex, in the Peerage of Great Britain 91784), Baron Paget, de Beaudesert, in the Peerage of England (1553), and the titles of Irish Baronet, of Pias Newydd in the County of Anglesey, and of Mount Bagenal in the County of Louth. The family seat of the Marquis is Plas Newydd at Lianddaniel Fal, Anglesey. 

Born on June 16, 1875, Henry Cyril Paget, 5th Marquis of Anglesey, styled Lord Paget until 1880, held the title of Earl of Uxbridge between 1880 and 1898. Notable for squandering his inheritance on a lavish social life, he was the eldest son of Henry Paget, the 4th Marquis, by his wife Blanche Mary Carwen Boyd. After the death of his mother in 1877, Paget went to Paris to live with the French actor Benoít-Constant Coquelin, who was rumored to be his real father. 

At the age of eight, Henry Paget was taken to live at the family seat in Plas Newydd when his father re-married to an American heiress. Paget attended Eton Collage, later receiving private tuition. He learned painting and singing in Germany and spoke fluent French, good Russian, and grammatical Welsh. Paget became commissioned as a Lieutenant in the 2nd Volunteer Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. 

On the 20th of January, 1898, Henry Cyril Paget married his cousin Lilian Florence Chetwynd, maintaining an unconsummated marriage for six weeks at which time his cousin left. The marriage was annulled in 1900 and one year later changed to a legal separation. On the death of his father in October of 1898, Paget inherited his title and the thirty thousand acre family estates, providing an annual income of £110,000, equal to £12 million per year in 2019. Paget swiftly acquired a reputation for a lavish manner of living, spending his money on jewelry and furs, and throwing extravagant parties and theatrical performances.

Paget renamed the family’s country seat as “Anglesey Castle” and converted the family chapel into a 150 seat theater, named the Gaiety Theater. Dressed in opulent costumes, he took the lead role in productions of Shakespeare’s “Henry V” and Oscar Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband”. From 1899, most of the performances, performed before invited notable guests,  were a variety of song and dance numbers, sketches, and tableaux vivants, stationary posed scenes with actors and props. In 1901, the Gaiety Theater was open as a public entertainment venue after having been refurbished and fitted with electric stage lighting. 

During the next three years, Paget toured with his company around Britain and Europe. The company travelled with specially painted scenery and their own orchestra; many of their props were exact copies of furniture from Anglesey Castle. Each of Paget’s costumes was specially designed and made to order, either by couturiers or by the London costumiers Morris Angel. The company, which at its largest consisted of fifty performers and crew, required five trucks for the baggage and scenery. The Marquis travelled in a powerful Pullman motor car with a personal staff of four. When at Anglesey Castle, Paget kept actors in lodgings in the neighboring village of Llanfair. 

By 1904, despite his inheritance and income, Henry Paget had accumulated debts of £544,000 (£60 million in 2019):[ on June 11th he was declared bankrupt. Everything, including his jewelry and dressing gowns from Parisian shirtmaker Charvet, were sold to pay creditors. Paget ‘retired’ to France on an income of £3,000 a year,, accompanied by a manservant, first to Dinan in Brittany and finally to Monte Carlo.  On March 14, 1905 at the age of twenty-nine, Henry Cyril Paget, 5th Marquis of Anglesey, died at Monte Carlo’s Hotel Royale following a long illness of tuberculosis. His remains were returned to St. Edwen’s Church, Llanedwen, for burial. 

The title passed to Henry Paget’s cousin Charles Henry Alexander Paget,  who destroyed all the papers of the 5th Marquis and converted the Gaiety Theatre back into a chapel. It was at least in part owing to the debts left by the 5th Marquis that the family’s principal English estate at Beaudesert,  Staffordshire, had to be broken up and sold in the 1930s. The Paget family moved into the family seat Plas Newydd for their permanent residence.

Henry Cyril Paget’s outrageous and flamboyant lifestyle, his taste for cross-dressing, and the breakdown of his marriage, have led many to assume that he was gay. Lawyer and early gay rights reformer in England, Harford  Montgomery Hyde, author of “The Other Love”, viewed Paget in his 1970 writings as the most notorious aristocratic homosexual at this period. Heritage Studies professor Norena Shopland, specializing in LBGT and Welsh histories, wrote that Henry Paget should be included in the history of gender identity. However, there is no evidence for or against his having had any lovers of either sex. Upon Henry Paget’s death, the deliberate destruction of his papers by his cousin Charles Henry Paget has left the matter to speculation. 

In 2017 the actor and composer Seiriol Davies wrote and performed in his play “How to Win Against History”, a musical based on Henry Cyril Paget’s life. This award-winning show was performed at the 2017 Edinburgh Festival Fringe before going on tour in Wales and England. In 2019 the show had its Irish premiere at the Dublin Theater Festival.

Cornelius James McCarthy

Cornelius McCarthy, “The Great Façade”, 2007, Oil on Canvas

Cornelius “Neal” James McCarthy was born in 1935 into a family of Irish Catholic and Eastern European immigrant stock. 

McCarthy’s earliest artistic influence was probably through the artifacts and images used to promote Catholic devotion with which he grew up. Through these he became familiar with the compositions of the masters of the Italian Renaissance. Formal study was completed in the 1950s at Goldsmith’s School of Art, London, followed by a tour of Italy visiting all the principal art collections and monuments. 

McCarthy was greatly influenced by the work of Pablo Picasso after seeing the first post-war exhibition in London in 1960. Later he was influenced b British artist Keith Vaughan. Always painting, McCarthy developed his own style, alternating between a  near cubist approach to soft, almost two-dimensional handling of the paint strokes. He painted both individual portrait-like images as well as groups of men, clothed and unclothed. 

McCarthy’s paintings are sensual yet not erotic as though his drive was to maintain a dignity in the genre of male figurative painting. Many of his works included somewhat brittle statements of addressing the manner in which the stigma of admiration of the male nude by ‘corporate types’ carried a message beyond the canvas. While McCarthy’s paintings are for the most part tender and sensitive interactions between men, he was unafraid to make some important ‘political’ statements. And his importance as a twentieth-century painter is heightened by this discovery.

In 2007, the book “Cornelius McCarthy” was published by Adonis Art in London, with introduction and commentaries written by  American actor Peter Dobson. Now widely regarded as a true master of paintings depicting the male form, Cornelius McCarthy is widely collected in England, the rest of Europe, and especially the United States. 

He died unexpectedly in November of 2009.

Joseph Campbell: ” Your Dreams Are Composed by an Aspect of Yourself”

The Parts and Pieces Making a Whole: Set Seven

“Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual”, points out when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggest that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, you will have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together as one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.”

—Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

René Lalique

René Lalique, Serpents Pectoral, 1899, Gold and Enamel, Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal

The eccentricity and the fragility of René Lalique jewelry made it unwearable for most women of the Belle Époque, with the exception of some figures from the financial and artistic elite like the actress Sarah Bernhardt, the socialite and art patron Countess Greffulhe or the Folles Bergère vedette and dancer Liane Pougy. The British Armenian-born  financier and oil magnate, Calouste Gulbenkian, bought them however, to privately display in showcases in his mansion on Avenue d’Iéna in Paris.

These jewelry pieces dating from the early twentieth century perfectly illustrate the René Lalique’s uniqueness and sense of observation coupled with a highly fanciful imagination. Lalique is considered to be the inventor of modern jewelry, breaking away from the statuesque and soulless jewelry of the time. Bodice pieces, chokers and combs highlight the originality of materials, never or little used until then in jewelry, such as horn, ivory, translucent enamel, glass and ornamental stones. The delight in exploring the glassy depths of moonstone would later inspire Lalique’s research into glass. 

Before his turn to mass production of glass, Lalique’s unique serpents-motif objects were in the top tier of his jewelry creations. The Gulbenkian Serpents pectoral, made in 1899, is one of the great examples of René Lalique’s jewelry production, not only for the mastery of its execution, as for the theme chosen. Reptiles were a source of inspiration to which Lalique returned throughout his life not only for jewelry, but also for his glass, bronzes, and other creations.

Classified as a pectoral instead of a brooch due to its 21 cm. size, the serpents pectoral is made up of nine serpents entwined to form a knot from which the bodies of the other eight fall in a cascade, the ninth rising in the centre, at the top of the jewel. The reptiles, in the attack position, have their mouths open from which strings of pearls were hung as was apparently the case with a similar pectoral, whereabouts now unknown, which was highlighted at the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1900 and reproduced in a publication of the period.

This nine-serpents pectoral was acquired by Calouste Gulbenkian directly from Rene Lalique in 1908. It now resides in Lisbon’s Museu Calouste Gulbenkian with over 100 works of René Lalique collected by Gulbenkian in his lifetime.

Gary Jennings: “The Journeyer”

Photographer Unknown, (The Journeyer)

“I let no chance go by untaken. I never hesitated to follow where my curiosity beckoned. I willingly went where there was danger in beauty and beauty in danger. I had experiences in plenty. Many were enjoyable, some were instructive, a few I would rather have missed. But I had them, and I have them still in memory. If, as soon as tomorrow, I go to my grave, it will be no black and silent hole. I can paint the darkness with vivid colors, and fill it with music both martial and languorous, with the flicker of swords and the flutter of kisses, with flavors and excitements and sensations, with the fragrance of a field of clover that has been warmed in the sun and then washed by a gentle rain. . .”
― Gary Jennings, The Journeyer

Pierre-Charles Simart

 

Pierre-Charles Simart, “Oreste réfugié à l’autel de Pallas (Oreste Taking Refuge at the Altar of Pallas)”, 1840, Marble, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, Normandy, France

The son of a carpenter from Troyes in Champagne, Pierre-Charles Simart was born on the 27th of June in 1806. At the age of seventeen, he received a 300 francs yearly scholarship from his hometown to attend sculpture classes in Paris. In 1833, Simart won the first Grand Prix de Rome for his bas-relief in plaster “Le Vieillard et les Enfants”, its inspiration taken from the Aesop tale “The Disunited Children of the Laborer”.

Pierre-Charles Simart studied at the French Academy in Rome from 1834 to 1839. He was the pupil of engraver and medalist Antoine Desboeufs and sculptor Charles Dupaty, a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts. Simart also received instruction from the neo-classical sculptors Jean-Pierre Cortot and James Pradier, both teaching at the Académie des Beaux-Arts.

Simart’s first notable work was the “Disc Thrower’, of which models in plaster are located at the Louvre and at the Museum of Troyes. His marble sculpture “Orestes Taking Refuge at the Altar of Pallas” was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1840. Between 1840 and 1843, Simart executed many works including two bas-reliefs for the Hotel de Ville at Paris, two large figures entitled “Justice” and “Abundance” for the columns of the Barrière du Tróne, the marble statue “Philosophy” in the Library of Luxembourg, and the bust of M. Jourdan now at the Museum of Troyes.

After his 1841 marriage, Pierre-Charles Simart sculpted his marble standing group “Virgin and Child” for the altar of the Virgin in the Cathedral of Troyes, and for several years, worked on the decoration of the tomb of Napolean I and the ceiling of the Carré at the Louvre. A pair of Caryatid sculptures, executed by Pierre Simart, were later installed on the upper level of the Pavilion Sully at the former Palais de Louvre during a major renovation and decoration project in 1857.

Simart was elected a member of the Académie des Beaux Arts in 1852 and an Officer of the Legion of Honour in 1856. In 1857, he composed the group sculpture “Art Demanding Inspiration from Poesy”, producing a model which was executed in marble after his death in Paris on May 27th of 1857.

Edward Clifford

Watercolors by Edward Clifford

Edward Clifford was associated with the Aesthetic Movement in England, an intellectual and artistic movement emphasizing nature and beauty more than social or political themes in the arts and literature. Clifford was also honorary Secretary of the Church Army, the evangelizing branch of the Church of England, which did missionary work among the slums of England.

Born in Bristol, England in 1844, Clifford studied at the Royal Academy Schools. He painted landscapes, portraits and historical subjects in oil and watercolor and had many aristocratic patrons. From 1877 to 1892, Clifford exhibited at the Royal Academy, Society of British Artists, and Institute of Painters in Watercolors, the Grosvenor Gallery, the New Gallery and elsewhere. 

Clifford’s Royal Academy paintings are conventional Victorian portraits: but, at the Grosvenor Gallery and elsewhere, he showed Biblical and allegorical scenes. His Biblical paintings show the influence of symbolic painter Holman Hunt, one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Clifford was also influenced by Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones and the group of artists who gathered and exhibited at the Dudley gallery in London. 

Often visiting India and the Kashmir region to learn methods of controlling leprosy, Clifford later traveled to Hawaii in 1888. While visiting the leper colony located in Kalaupapa, he met Father Damien, the Belgium Roman Catholic priest whose name became recognized for his charity work and fight against leprosy. After returning to England, Clifford made watercolor paintings from his Hawaiian portrait sketches, later used for illustrations in the 1889 published account of his journey “Portrait of Joseph Damien de Veuster”. 

Edward Clifford died in 1907 in England. His works are in many public collections including the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Harvard University Portrait Collection, London’s National Portrait Gallery, and the Nation Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. 

Top Insert Image: Edward Clifford, “Portrait of a Boy”, 1872, Chalk on Paper on Board, 21 x 19 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Edward Clifford, “Tito Melema”, Date Unknown, Pencil, Watercolor, and Bodycolor with Gum Arabic, 36.8 x 30.5 cm, Private Collection. Tito Melema was the Greek husband of Romola de Bardi, the heroine of George Elliot’s 1862 novel “Romola”, set in Renaissance Florence. The watercolour is a somewhat rare example of Clifford using a secular and contemporary literary subject.

Roland Barthes: “Touch Me like the Delayed Rays of a Star”

The Black and White Collection: WP Set Eight

“The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.”
― Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography 

Born in 1915, Roland Gérard Barthes was a French social critic, literary critic and essayist whose writings on semiotics, the formal study of symbols and signs pioneered by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, helped establish structuralism and the New Criticism as leading intellectual movements. He studied at the University of Paris, receiving a degree in classical letters in 1939 and grammar and philology, the historical study of literary texts and language, in 1943.

After working from 1952 to 1959 at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Barthes was appointed to the École Pratique des Hautes Études. In 1976 he became the first chairman of literary semiology at the College de France. His first book “Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (Writing Degree Zero)” was a literary manifesto that examined the arbitrariness of the constructs of language. His following four books applied the same critical reasoning to the mythologies, or hidden assumptions, behind cultural phenomena from advertising and fashion to the Eiffel Tower and wrestling.

By the late 1970s, Barthes’s intellectual stature was virtually unchallenged, and his theories had become extremely influential not only in France but throughout Europe and in the United States. Other leading radical French thinkers who influenced or were influenced by him included the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, socio-historian Michel Foucault, and philosopher Jacques Derrida.

In 1980 Roland Barthes died at the age of 64 from injuries suffered after being struck by an automobile in Paris. Several posthumous collections of his writings have been published, including the 1982 “A Barthes Reader”, edited by his friend and admirer Susan Sontag, and the 1987 “Incidents”. The latter volume revealed Barthes’s homosexuality, which he had not publicly acknowledged. A three volume set entitled “Oeuvres Complétes (Complete Works)” was published in 1993 to 1995.

Tina Schwarz

Tina Schwarz, Untitled, 2014, Acrylic, Oil, Pastels, and Ink on Canvas

Born in 1977 in Friedberg, Germany, Tina Schwarz completed a residency at Hooper Projects, a private residency program for artists located in Los Angeles. She is inspired by the graphics and drawings of the Old Masters, whose basic designs she sketches on paper, using them as starting points for her paintings. Schwarz combines these motifs with the theme of linking historical and current events. 

Allegorical in nature, Tina Schwarz’s creations establish reference points between current political developments and the philosophies of artists such as Francisco Goya. The human body in its vulnerability and physical presence, often broken up in form and transformed, is presented as the central focus of her work. Paintings by Tina Schwarz has been exhibited at both Slag Gallery in New York City and Galerie Korfeld in Berlin.

Duane Michals

Duane Michals, “Narcissus”, 1986, Photo Shoot, Model Unknown

Duane Michals was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, on February 18th, 1932. After taking art classes at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, he attended the University of Denver, receiving his undergraduate degree in 1953. In 1956 after his military service, Michals moved to New York where he studied at Parsons School of Design, later working as a graphic designer for magazines “Dance” and “Time”.

A 1958 Russian tour of portraiture photography started Michals’ artistic career. His photographs in the mid-1960s consisted of mainly deserted sites in New York. In 1966, Michals started to structure his photographs as multiframe compositions, with subjects enacting set narratives. The writing of captions in the margins of his photographs began in 1974 and, later in 1979 the incorporation of paint into his treatment of the printed images.

Duane Michals’s narrative pieces rely on the sequencing of multiple images to convey a sense of alienation and disequilibrium. In his world, the literal appearance of things is less important than the communication of a concept or story. In his portraiture, however, Michals relies wholly on his subjects’ appearance and self-chosen poses to establish their identity. He believes in a direct approach for his portraiture instead of his usual metaphoric approach.