André Castiagne

André Castaigne, “The Killing of Cleitus by Alexander”, 1898-1899, Engraving, The Century Magazine

Jean Alexandre Michel André was a French artist, engraver and book illustrator. He became an important artist in the Golden Age of Illustration in the United States, producing paintings and literary illustrations in both France and America. As a youth, Castaigne read prodigiously and studied classic Greek, Latin, French, and German literature. At the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, under Alexandre Cabanel and Jean-Léon Gérôme, he trained to become a painter in the Salon tradition.

Castaigne’s interest in visually interpreting history led him to become an illustrator as well as a portrait painter. His first of many illustrations appeared in “The Century” magazine around 1891, followed by over 160 illustrations before the end of 1895. Castaigne created more than thirty-six engravings about Alexander the Great for the 1898 to 1899 twelve-part series of “The Century” magazine.

André Castaigne’s engraving entitled “The Killing of Cleitus” shows the killing of Cleitus the Black, an officer of the Macedonian army led by Alexander the Great. At the Battle of the Granicus in 334 BC, Cleitus saved Alexander, who was under attack by the Persian commander Spithridates, by severing Spithridates’ hammer arm before he could strike the fatal blow. On the eve of the day he was to take possession of the Macedonian government, Alexander organized a banquet in the palace at Samarkand. During the drunken banquet, Cleitus, hearing he was to be posted in the steppes of Central Asia, uttered many grievances against Alexander and his royal legitimacy. This led to Alexander in anger throwing a javelin through Cleitus’ heart. In all four known texts of this story, it is shown that Alexander grieved for the death of Cleitus.

William Gass: “The Word Itself Has Another Color”

Photographers Unknown, The Colors: Pink and Blue

“The word itself has another color. It’s not a word with any resonance, although the e was once pronounced. There is only the bump now between b and l, the relief at the end, the whew. It hasn’t the sly turn which crimson takes halfway through, yellow’s deceptive jelly, or the rolled-down sound in brown. It hasn’t violet’s rapid sexual shudder or like a rough road, the irregularity of ultramarine, the low puddle in mauve like a pancake covered in cream, the disapproving purse to pink, the assertive brevity of red, the whine of green.”

—William Gass, On the Color Blue

William Gass, born in July of 1924 in North Dakota, was an American novelist, essayist, short-story writer, critic, and a philosophy professor, He taught for four years at the College of Wooster in Ohio, Perdue University for sixteen years, and Washington University in Saint Louis, where he was the David May Distinguished Professor in the Humanities from 1979 to 1999.

Gass wrote three novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven volumes of essays. Three of these essay collections won Nation Book Critics Circle Award prizes and one collection the 2006 “A Temple of Texts” won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. His 1995 novel “The Tunnel”, a bleak novel about the human condition which took twenty-six years to write, received the American Book Award. His novel “Middle C”, published in 2013, won the 2015 William Dean Howells Medal awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Gif images reblogged with thanks to a great visual site: https://thouartadeadthing.tumblr.com

Hartmut Neumann

Paintings by Hartmut Neumann

Born in 1954 in Delmenhorst, Hartmut Neumann is a German surrealist painter, sculptor and photographer. He studied painting and graphics at the University of Arts in Bremen under painter and sculptor Rolf Thiele from 1976 to 1980. In 1983 Neumann received a Scholarship Cité des Arts in Paris. Since 1992 he has been a professor at the University of Fine Arts Braunschweig.

Hartmut Neumann’s works, with their bright colors and dark backgrounds, construct a world of their own. They take the viewer into micro- and macrocosms, which initially seem untouched and harmonious, but on closer inspection reveal sinister abysses. In his pictorial language, elements of the real, the unconscious, mythology, and chance collide to create an unsettling symbiosis.

Neumann’s view of nature is at turns abstract, sculptural, utopian, or staged. The inexhaustible abundance of his formal repertoire is based on the idea of the “wunderkammer”, where artificial and natural are closely entwined. His enigmatic pictorial sealed places are characterised by opulence and richness of detail. What makes Hartmut Neumann unique in his contemporary landscapes is the way his work reveals the artificiality of nature, as contrived by the artist.

Hartmut Neumann is a member of the Deutscher Künstlerbund, the German Association of Artists, and was a member of the board from 2000 to 2002. He lives in Cologne and Brunswick.

Insert Image: Hartmut Neumann, “Nachtsträufse (Luftwurzeln)”, 2022, Oil on Canvas 60 x 50 cm, Private Collection

Jeanette Winterson: “Writing on the Body”

Photographers Unknown, (Writings on the Body)

“Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, tap meaning into my body.”

–Jeanette Winterson, Writing on the Body

Giuseppe Capogrossi

Paintings by Giuseppe Capogrossi

Born in 1900 in Rome, Giuseppe Capogrossi, a new lawyer in his early twenties, devoted himself entirely to painting, joining painter Felice Carena’s atelier in Rome. He traveled frequently to Paris between 1927 and 1931, eventually joining with painters Corrado Cagli and Emanuele Cavalli, both of whom worked in a figurative style with pale and ethereal tones. These three were among the loose association of painters known as the Scuola Romana, which later published the “Manifesto of Plastic Primordialism” in 1933, a discussion on the presence of the archaic in the modern world.

In the mid-1930s, Giuseppe Capogrossi’s palette developed from pale into much darker tones. His figurative tonal paintings gradually, between 1945 and 1948, changed into an increasingly geometric abstract style. A decisive shift in his art took place in 1949 when Capogrossi developed a collection of irregular comb or fork shaped signs. Having no symbolic or allegorical meanings, these elements could be assembled and connected in numerous variations, determining the construction of the painting’s surface.

Immediate in their appeal but yet hard to decode, the paintings had a quality shared with the Art Informel movement of abstract expressionism. Capogrossi’s abstract comb paintings, known as “Superficies”, or Surfaces, were first exhibited in 1950 at the Galleria del Secolo in Rome. These “Superficies” soon became the style hallmark of Capogrossi’s work, dominating until the end of his career.

In 1951, Capogrossi joined abstract artists Mario Ballocco, Alberto Burri and Ettore Colla in showing work at gallery Aurora 41 in Rome, an occasion that marked the debut of the 1950-1951 group ‘Origine’. Primarily concerned with the promotion of abstract art, the group reacted against mainstream realist practices and advocated a simplified language meant to return art to its origins.

Capogrossi joined in 1952 the ‘Movimento Spaziale’, initiated by sculptor and theorist Lucio Fontana in Milan. The Spatial Movement, which lasted from 1947 to 1960, embraced the many changes affecting the country in the postwar era, especially scientific progress. The group advocated for a new spatial art that acknowledged recent inventions such as television and neon lighting.

Capogrossi took part in group exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum in 1953; the Venice Biennale in both 1954 and 1962; and the 1964 exhibition at Tate Gallery, London, as well as many solo exhibitions world wide. Capogrossi died in Rome on October 9, 1972. Two years later, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome organized his first major posthumous retrospective.

Michael Thomas Bidner

Photographer Unknown, “Michael Bidner Xeroxing His Face”, c. 1973, Archives and Special Collections, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario, Front Cover Image for the Catalogue “Michael Bidner: Raw”, McIntosh Gallery Publisher

Multi-media artist and photographer Michael Thomas Bidner was an Ontario artist who worked in print and mixed media, perhaps best known for his works in xerography and mail art. Born in 1944 in London, Ontario, Bidner graduated from the technical high school H.B. Beal Secondary and briefly attended the Ontario College of Art before dropping out to pursue his art independently.

During his career, Bidner worked with various media, including silkscreening, collage, slides, photography, and video. He used the name “Cloud” in some of his projects and often incorporated the shape of an upside down “Y” as a signature symbol. In the 1970s. Bidner produced or co-created a number of alternative art-based publications: “Adz'” magazine (founder), “Rag” magazine (co-founder), and “Rude” magazine (co-founder/art director).

In the mid-1970s, Xerox Canada Ltd. provided the McIntosh Gallery at the University of Western Ontario with one of their new color copier machines to help promote its use. In the spring of 1976, Michael Bidner and artist Michael Hayden exhibited their copy art and led a number of public workshops. Later that year, Bidner and Hayden were part of the “Color Xerography” group show at the Art Gallery of Ontario, which also included the work of Jaan Poldaas, Flavio Belli, Barbara Astman, and Robert Arn.

Bidner was also interested in philately and mail art, coining the term “artistamp” to refer to his postage art. In 1984, he organized the first international exhibition of mail art, titled “Artistampex”, in London, Ontario. Networking and letter-writing with mail artists in Canada and abroad, Bidner began compiling a groundbreaking database of artists and artwork entitled “Standard Artistamp Catalogue and Handbook”. Unfortunately, Bidner’s declining health prevented him from finishing the project.

Following unsuccessful attempts to place his collection at a Canadian art institution, Bidner’s personal collection of original postage art was given to the Artpool Art Research Center in Budapest, Hungary in 1989. A strong supporter of gay and marginal communities, Michael Bidner passed away of AIDS in 1989.

Peter Samuelson

Peter Samuelson, “Self Portrait in the Bird Room”, 1952, Oil on Board, 81.3 x 63.5 cm, Private Collection

British artist Peter Samuelson, born in Salisbury in 1912, 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 prevades the romantically colored canvases and drawings, with a line quality that suggests the decorative sensitivity of 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.

Pablo Neruda: “Wet was the Light”

Photographer Unknown, (Wet was the Light), Model Unknown

“Green was the silence, wet was the light,
the month of June trembled like a butterfly.”
― Pablo Neruda

Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, known best by his pen name Pablo Neruda, was a Nobel Prize winning Chilean poet and diplomat. He became known nationally as a poet when he was thirteen years old, writing in various styles. He wrote surrealist poems, political manifestos, historical epics, an autobiography, and love poems of great passion. Often considered the national poet of Chile, Neruda wrote the collection “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair” in 1924 at the age of twenty. The poem above is from his collection “100 Love Sonnets”, published in 1959.

Carlos Estévez

Carlos Estévez, “Cludad Reloj (Clock City)”, 2019, Oil and Watercolor Pencil on Canvas, 96 x 96 Inches

Born in Havana in 1969, Miami-based painter and ceramicist Carlos Estévez is known for creating captivating, thought-provoking works in a wide range of media that poetically evoke and express the complexities of the human condition as well as the universal truths that shape our lives. He has done residencies in the Academia de San Carlos, Mexico, the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, and the Citê Internationale des Arts in Paris.

Estévez’s most recent series is his collection entitled “Cities of the Mind” which features nine large-format paintings, all created between 2017 and 2019, that reference the artist’s fascination with city plans. Inspired by the Havana of his youth, the Medieval European cities to which he has traveled extensively as an adult, and his abiding interest in symbolic cosmology and origin stories. Estévez has created in this new body of work personal maps of the human mind influenced by ancient cartography. These works equally address the complicated inner lives that mark the human condition as well as our proclivity for interpreting the world through a self-referential lens.

Carlos Estévez’s work is held in a number of notable public collections, including the National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana; the Museum of Fine Art, Boston; the Pérez Art Museum, Miami; the Denver Art Museum; and the Ludwig Forum for International Art, among others. Estévez’s honors include a 2019 Oscar B. Cintas Fellowship; a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant in 2015; and the Grand Prize in the First Salon of Contemporary Cuban Art in Havana awarded in 1995.

Richard Avedon: “The Force of It Grows So Strong”

Faces of Man: WP Photo Set Six

“I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment. They become in a sense. . .symbolic of themselves. I often feel that people cone to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller- to find out how they are. So they are dependent on me. I have to engage them. Otherwise there is nothing to photograph. The concentration has to come from me and involve them.

Sometimes the force of it grows so strong that sounds in the studio go unheard. Time stops. We share a brief, intense intimacy. But it is unearned. It has no past. . .no future. And when the sitting is over- when the picture is done -there is nothing left except the photograph. . .the photograph and a kind of embarrassment. They leave. . .and I don’t known them. I have hardly heard what they have said.

If I meet them a waek later in a room somewhere, I expect they won’t recognize me. Because I don’t feel I was really there. At least the part of me that was. . .is now in the photograph. And the photographs hava a reality for me that the people don’t. It is through the photographs that I know them. Maybe it is in the nature of being a photographer. I am never really implicate. I don’t have to have any real knowledge. It is all a question of recognitions.”

― Richard Avedon

Miguel Ángel Battegazzore

Miguel Ángel Battegazzore, “Series en Tríadas”, 1976, Oil on Canvas, 88 x 64 cm

Painter and set designer, Miguel Ángel Battegazzore was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, on January 22, 1931. Growing up during the 1950s, he was inspired by Abstract Expressionism, the art culture at the time. Battegazzore graduated from the National School of Fine Arts in 1958 where he studied with muralist Miguel A. Pareja. During the years from 1961 to 1967, Battegazzore made study tours to Europe, Africa, and various countries in North and South America.

Battegazzaro taught for many years at the National School of Fine Arts, the Film School of Uruguay (ECU), and at the Faculty of Humanities and Sciences of the University of the Republic. He was awarded the Carlos Maria Herrera Municipal Scholarship, named in honor of the Uruguayan portraitist, and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Scholarship.

In the evolution of his work, Miguel Battegazzora went from abstraction to figurative work, producing a very personal and updated interpretation of the symbolic world that had been established by Joaquín Torres García, considered the father of Latin American Constructivism. Battegazzaro took the organization which was basic to Torres’ symbolic work and deconstructed it, inserting disorder and randomness into his own paintings.

Battegazzaro had exhibited worldwide with shows in Lisbon, London, Venice, and the United States. He is also the author of “Joaquín Torres García:
The Plot and the Sign”, published in 1999 by the Municipal Government of Maldonado. His work is on exhibition in the Juan Manuel Blanes Municipal Museum in Montevideo, the National Museum of Visual Arts of Uruguay, and the Maldonado Museum of American Art.

Eliran Kantor

Eliran Kantor, “Creation of Stars”, 2019, Oil on Canvas

Born in 1984 at Bat-Yam, Israel, Eliran Kantor grew up in Gan-Yavne, a town founded in 1991 located in central Israel adjacent to the city of Ashdod. . He is currently living and working in Berlin.

A self-taught painter and illustrator, Kantor was hired at the age of twenty-one to direct and design national advertising campaigns for major companies, such as Visa and the French multi-national automobile manufacturer Renault. In 2006, he left the advertising buisiness to concentrate on his art, focusing on works for album covers. Kantor has painted illustrations for over 175 album covers and is currently issuing editions of his images.

The artist’s site: http://www.elirankantor.com

Michael Leonard

Paintings by Michael Leonard

Born in Bangladore, India, in 1933, Michael Leonard studied graphic design and illustration at St Martin’s School of Art, London, from 1954 to 1957, after which he worked as an illustrator. His first exhibition as a painter was in 1972

Leonard achieves great realism with flesh-colored tones and evokes a sensuality of the human figure, recalling Leonardo’s painting, achieving a new classic style of the nude. The contrast between the tonal range in the oil paintings with the initial drawings, which served as studies of finished and detailed pencil figures for the paintings, reveals Leonard’s virtuosity as the leading international painter of figurative art today.

Leonard’s works are in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in Lon, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Boymans van Beumingen Museum in Rotterdam, to name a few. It has also been the subject of several monographs, written by critics Lincoln Kirstein and Edward Lucie-Smith, and is cited in numerous articles, magazines, anthologies, and catalogs. Michael Leonard currently lives in London.

Insert Image: Michael Leonard, Untitled, 1997, Illustration for “The Joy of Gay Sex”, Colored Pencil on Paper

Knut Hamsun: “The Secret Power of the Word”

The Black and White Collection: WP Set Seven

“The poet must always, in every instance, have the vibrant word… that by it’s trenchancy can so wound my soul that it whimpers…. One must know and recognize not merely the direct but the secret power of the word; one must be able to give one’s writing unexpected effects. It must have a hectic, anguished vehemence, so that it rushes past like a gust of air, and it must have a latent, roistering tenderness so that it creeps and steals one’s mind; it must be able to ring out like a sea-shanty in a tremendous hour, in the time of the tempest, and it must be able to sigh like one who, in tearful mood, sobs in his inmost heart.”
― Knut Hamsun