Month: June 2020

Ubaldo Gandolfi

The Artwork of Ubaldo Gandolfi

Ubaldo Gandolfi was born in San Matteo della Decima, near Bologna, on 14 October 1728. His father, a man of some standing in society, allowed him to move to Bologna when he was barely over the age of ten in order to begin studying drawing. He studied under Baroque painter Felice Torelli before moving in 1748 to the school of painter Ercole Graziani the Younger. 

At the same time, Gandolfi began to frequent the Accademia Clementina and won the much-prized Fiori Award for attendance and for quality in the depiction of the nude in 1746. Gandolfi’s tireless practice of drawing from life, from posing models which became a constant feature of his mindset, was organized under the academic teaching of the anatomist Ercole Lelli.

Gandolfi’s first public success came in 1759 in the shape of an altarpiece with the “Assumption of the Virgin and Saints” for Castel San Pietro in Verona, preceded by a small rough clay model, now in the Uffizi Museum. The altarpiece owes a debt to the models of painter Guido Reni and to painters and teachers Ludovico and Annibale Carracci in the attitudes and gestures of its figures. Ubaldo’s renown grew to the point where he was made a full member of the Academy in 1760, and his work was  sought even by the Empress Catherine II of Russia.

Gandolfi’s colleagues in the Clementina entrusted him in 1766 with painting a fresco in the Eleventh Chapel in the Portico of St. Luke, depicting the Resurrection of Christ. “The Resurrection” is a magnificent example of Ubaldo Gandolfi’s fervent style with its evocative, theatrical character. For the senatorial nobility Gandolfi  produced ancient and modern myths, such as the “Four Seasons’” on a wall and “Aurora” on the ceiling at the Palazzo Segni Facchini.

In 1769 Gandolfi painted figurative frescoes for nobleman Conte Bentivoglio, who commissioned the decoration of the rooms on the ground floor of his palazzo in order to mark his term as magistrate. But Ubaldo Gandolfi’s ability to convey the solidity of his figures’ bodies was to allow the artist to produce superb results in secular fables, for instance in his 1770 paintings “Perseus and Andromeda” and “Diana and Endymion”, commissioned by  Senator Marchese Gregorio Casali; the “Mercury About to Behead  Argus” commissioned for the Marescalchi family palace; and the six mythological stories painted some time later for the Marescalchi family’s Palazzo Dall’Armi.

The painter’s renown grew in the field of religious painting thanks to his highly theatrical Baroque pieces, such as the Medicina Altarpiece in the church of San Mamante with its “Christ in Glory and Saints” or his “St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata”, a composition of passionate gesture. This highly productive decade ended with a large canvas for the church of Sant’ Agostino in Imola, depicting “St. Nicholas of Tolentino Preaching to the Crowds”.

Throughout his career, Ubaldo Gandolfi produced portraits of young girls, children, apprentices, men and women portrayed from life, and old men with intense features. These works, for instance the “Young Woman” now hanging in the Louvre, were extremely popular in the 1770s. In his graphic work, Gandolfi produced numerous very fine studies from life, displaying a certain inclination to portray the natural, an inclination that showed prominently in his pen and ink studies of heads.

Ubaldo Gandolfi died of malaria in Ravenna, where he had just recently moved, on July 24, 1781.

Jorge Luis Borges: “A Particular Sign, A Kind of Mark”

Photographers Unknown, (Numbers: One, Two, and Three)

“He told me that in 1886 he had invented an original system of numbering and that in a very few days he had gone beyond the twenty-four-thousand mark. He had not written it down, since anything he thought of once would never be lost to him. His first stimulus was, I think, his discomfort at the fact that the famous thirty-three gauchos of Uruguayan history should require two signs and two words, in place of a single word and a single sign. He then applied this absurd principle to the other numbers. In place of seven thousand thirteen he would say (for example) Maximo Pérez; in place of seven thousand fourteen, The Railroad; other numbers were Luis Melián Lafinur, Olimar, sulphur, the reins, the whale, the gas, the caldron, Napoleon, Agustin de Vedia. In place of five hundred, he would say nine. Each word had a particular sign, a kind of mark; the last in the series were very complicated…”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings 

Walter Nobbe

Paintings by Walter Nobbe

Walter Nobbe was born in 1941 in Malang, Indonesia, later moving with his family in 1950 to the Netherlands. He studied at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, graduating as a professor of art in 1963. Nobbe began teaching but later decided to concentrate on his painting; he was a master in drawing and painting the male figure. His first exhibition was held in 1966 at Felix Valk’s Galerie 20, which concentrated on the New Realist artists. 

Together with philosopher and politician Peter Blokhuis and painter-sculptor Pat Andrea, Nobbe formed the ABN group, a group of young painters who were considered the top echelon of the new Dutch Realist painters. His high level of craftsmanship makes his paintings stand out from the others, Nobbe’s work is represented in museums and galleries in the Netherlands, Belgium and France, as well as in private collections.

In 1972, Walter Nobbe started to design for the Netherland Dance Theater, designing ballets for dancers and choreographers Cliff Keuter, Jiří Kylián and Nacho Duato. His production designs include “Overgrown Path, the “Dream Dances”, “Bolero”, and “Arenal”. Nobbe has worked with dance companies throughout the world: the English National Ballet in London, The Culberg Ballet of Sweden, and the Houston Ballet in Texas. Nobbe’s ballet “Overgrown Path” is one of his three works in the repertoire of the American Ballet Theater.

Marcel Proust: “Those Profound Slumbers”

Photographer Unknown, (Those Profound Slumbers)

“Then from those profound slumbers we awake in a dawn, not knowing who we are, being nobody, newly born, ready for anything, the brain emptied of that past which was life until then. And perhaps it is more wonderful still when our landing at the waking-point is abrupt and the thoughts of our sleep, hidden by a cloak of oblivion, have not time to return to us gradually, before sleep ceases. Then from the black storm through which we seem to have passed (but we do not even say ‘we’), we emerge prostrate without a thought, a ‘we’ that is void of content.”

–Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

Felix d’Eon

Illustrations by Felix d’Eon

Guadalajara-born artist Felix d’Eon is influenced by multiple historical art styles, including vintage American comics, Edwardian fashion, illustrations from children’s books, and the prints of Edo period Japan. Doing careful research in costumes, settings, and the style of a period, he gives his work, done on antique paper, the illusion of antiquity, D’Eon’s thoroughness and accuracy allows his illustration to appear taken from the pages of an art history textbook. 

D’Eon uses the vintage illustrative style, with its delicate romance and aesthetics, as a tool for narratives of both marginalized and historically oppressed gay communities. He employs this technique in his illustrations, both erotic and provocative, to challenge the modern-day stigmas, still present, around same-sex relationships. 

Ultimately, D’Eon’s illustrations read as an alternative history for the queer people he draws. None of his characters suffer from tragic endings or acts of injustice like they perhaps might have in the past or even present day. Instead, D’Eon recreates the world not as it was or is, but imagines the world as it can be. 

Felix d’Eon has produced a series of tarot card illustrations and is currently working on a series of astrological signs painted with queer subjects. Many of his illustrations can be found for purchase at the artist’s site at Society6:  https://society6.com/felixdeon

Rodrigo Muñoz Ballester

Rodrigo Muñoz Ballester, “Manuel” Series, 1983-1985, La Luna de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

Born in Tangier in 1950, Rodrigo Muñoz Ballester was a draftsman, illustrator and a sculptor. He was considered one of the most representative draftsmen of Madrid’s “La Movida”, a countercultural movement that took place during Spain’s transition after Francisco Franco’s death in 1975. One of Rodrigo’s few works in the comic genre was “Manuel”, an experimental and unconventional work, telling the tale of an nonreciprocal gay love story through an autobiographical character. The “Manuel” series was published in the oversize pages of the monthly magazine “La Luna de Madrid” between 1983 and 1985.

Rodrigo’s technical perfection and his mastery of perspective are evidence of his training as an architect and his study of Fine Art. In his illustrative work, he shows his fondness for realism and the classical paintings in the Prado Museum; he also recognizes the influence of the painters he admires, such as Edward Hopper and fashion illustrator Antonio López.

In 2005, a compilation of Rodrigo Muñoz Ballester’s work, containing “Manuel” and seven other works not published in La Luna de Madrid, was published, entitled “Manuel No Está Solo”, by Sins Entido, a Spanish publisher committed to graphic novels. Unfortunately, this compilation book is currently out-of-print.

Ángel Zárraga

Paintings by Ángel Zárraga

Ángel Zárraga y Argūelies was born in 1886 in the Barrio de Analco of Durango, Mexico. He attended the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in Mexico City and the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes. In 1904 with the help of his family, Zárraga made a study trip to Europe, where he visited and exhibited in Spain, France, and Italy. He also attended courses at the Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium.

In 1906 Zárraga exhibited some of his paintings in the Museo del Prado. Thirty of his paintings were exhibited in 1907 at Mexico City’s Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, two of which were purchased by the government. In 1909 Zárraga exhibited his work at the International Exhibition in Munich. During the same year, he exhibited in the Salon at the Piazzale Donatello in Florence and also participated at the Biennale di Venezia. 

In 1910 Zárraga exhibited at the International in Rome and while in Rome, painted a portrait of the Baroness Lombroso. He sent a group of twenty-five finished canvases to Mexico in 1910, selling four to the Mexican government and four to private collectors. 

Ángel Zárraga, upon his return to Europe in 1911, decided to call Paris his home. From 1914 to 1921, his work was in a Cubist style, but after 1921 his work became influenced by the painting styles of Paul Cézanne and Italian painter Giotto di Bondone. 

In Paris, Zárraga painted a succession of murals at the Château de Vert-Cœur; in the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris: and at the Mexican Embassy. He also exhibited his paintings at the Salon d’Automne, an annual Parisian art exhibition at the Grand Palais.

In 1941 with the outbreak of World War II, Zárraga returned to his home country of Mexico, where he painted murals at the Club de Banqueros and in Monterrey Cathedral, the main Catholic church and the home of the Archdiocese of Monterrey.. Ángel Zárraga died of pneumonia on September 22, 1946.

Bruce Weber, “Andy Minsker”

Bruce Weber, “Andy Minsker”, Cover Photo for Per Lui Magazine, Issue Number 29, July/August, 1985

Andrew Claude Minsker was born on March 20, 1962, in Portland, Oregon. He was named National Golden Gloves Champion in 1983 and National United States Amateur Champion by the American Boxing Federation in 1983. During his career, he tried out for the US Olympic Boxing Team, becoming the United States Olympic Trials Champion in 1984.

Minsker was a very disciplined boxer, training five days a week, every week, for the fifteen years of his career. By the time he retired from boxing, he had fought 344 matches, had never been knocked off his feet, and had won first-round knockouts against both the Yugoslav and British Commonwealth champions. In 1981 he smashed his right hand on an opponent’s head, causing major damage to his hand which was only partially repaired. Minsker continued fighting bouts, covering up his weakness, for an additional ten years, until his retirement in 1991.

Andrew Minsker was the subject of a documentary by photographer Bruce Weber entitled “Portrait of a Boxer”, a black and white film interspersed with color shots and mixed with jazz songs.The film focuses on Minsker as a coach training a group of kids in his boxing club.

Andrew Minsker is now coporate president of Andrew Minsker, Ltd, Inc, and has been with Postive Impact Unlimited in Milwaukee since 1988. Minsker continues to runs his boxing club in Oregon.

Image reblogged with many thanks to a great visual site: https://doctordee.tumblr.com

 

Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe, “Jack Walls”, 1982, Gelatin Silver Print, Getty Museum

Chicago-born artist Jack Walls has been a vital part of the New York art world for over 30 years. While his visual artwork primarily focuses on painting and collage, Walls is also a writer, poet and performer. In the early 1980s in New York, he met and lived as a couple with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, sitting for photographs and becoming his muse. This relationship lasted until Mapplethorpe’s untimely death in March of 1989. Since then, Walls has become a source of inspiration for a new generation of young artists including: New York City photographer Ryan McGinley, sculptor Dan Colen, and the late multi-media artist Dash Snow. Jack Walls currently lives and works in Hudson, New York.

Painter and poet Jack Walls is considered an ‘inside outsider’ when it comes to his own art which extends across all mediums including drawing, photo collage, poetry and painting. Each work is discovered through Walls’ personal patterns and discipline. As he navigates from one series to the next, he repeats and refashions successful themes. The overall effect fashions a cohesive narrative while still emphasizing his personal style.

“My time with Robert was a learning experience; there was so much to absorb being around him. We worked all the time, everything was about work, but you didn’t really feel like you were working. And yes, it was glamorous, we were invited everywhere. We were very social, we were young… we travelled. He was smart, but not in an intellectual way because he never read books, he was a canny observer, his aesthetic and taste were better than most. Needless to say there wasn’t too much about Robert that was average.”

—Jack Walls, Interview with Eduardo Gion Espejo-Saavedra for GPS Radar, September of 2017   

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

Jai Peng Fang: Music History

Jai Peng Fang, “Forever” 永远

Jia Peng Fang was born in April of 1958 in Jiamusi, China. He is a virtuoso of the erhu, the Chinese violin. He has played in hundreds of live concerts throughout China and Japan, as well as recording for movies, television and radio. 

At an early age, in 1966 and under the influence of his older brother, Jai Peng Fang began to learn to play erhu. At the age of sixteen, his brother helped him go to Beijing to study the Erhu with the most experienced players. From 1974 to 1976, Fang stayed with his aunt and practiced with the erhu. After the Great Karasan Earthquake, he joined the Navy Song and Dance Band until, as part of the Cultural Revolution, he was forced to return to his native Jama as an agricultural worker. 

After the Cultural Revolution, upon the advice of a former teacher, Fang decided to enter a music school. In 1978 he studied and applied to Central Conservatory of Music. After being recommended by Zhou Yaozhen in 1979, he officially became the erhu player of the Central National Orchestra as a performer in the Folk section. After six years as a professional erhu player, Fang was appointed deputy director of the orchestra department.

In 1988, Jia Peng Fang moved to Japan and enrolled in the Master of Arts Degree Program in Music at the Tokyo University of Arts. Upon graduating with his masters degree, he was admitted as a member of the China Musicians Association and became director of the Erhu Chinese Society. Upon graduation he also started participating in the production of Katsuhisa Hattori’s albums and concerts and began large-scale professional performances.

Jia Peng Fang has performed in the United Nations General Assembly Hall in New York, and in Carnegie Hall, playing with the Tokyo Pops Orchestra and New York Pops Orchestra. In 1997, Fang’s brilliant performances with his orchestra at Carnegie Hall in New York solidified his position in the world of music.

One of Jai Peng Fang’s most beautiful and moving melodic songs, “Silent Moon”, contained in the 1999 album “River”, was used as a musical mat in a famous video tribute dedicated to the great martial arts master Yip Man, master of Bruce Lee. The video shows the Grandmaster’s abilities in his Wing Chun style, images taken a few weeks before he died.

Anna Hyatt Huntington

The Sculptural Work of Anna Hyatt Huntington

A master of naturalistic animal sculputes, Anna Hyatt Huntington was born in 1876 in Cambridge, Massachusetts to Adiella Hyatt, an amateur landscape artist, and Alpheus Hyatt, a professor of paleontology and zoology at Harvard University and MIT. During her childhood years, she developed a passion for drawing and an extensive knowledge of anatomy and animal behavior.

After studying several years to become a concert violinist, Huntington switched her studies to sculpture under portrait sculptor Henry Hudson Kitson at his Boston studio. Her first one-woman show, consisting of forty animal sculptures, was held in 1900 at the Boston Arts Club. During this year, Huntington produced her first commissioned work; two Great Danes cut from blue granite for wealthy Boston merchant Thomas Lawson.

After the death of her father and marriage of her sister, Huntington  left Boston, moving to New York City. She attended the city’s Art Students League, studying under marble sculptor George Grey Barnard and Hermon MacNeil, whose sculptures concentrated on American Indian subjects. Huntington studied briefly under Gutzon Borgium, the designer of Mount Rushmore, but left after criticizing his knowledge of animal anatomy. Choosing to be more independent, she started spending most of her time at the Bronx Park Zoo and circuses to model animals. The result of her observations there were her first major works: the 1902 equestrian work “Winter Moon” and the 1908 “Reaching Jaguar”.

Anna Huntington shared a studio with sculptor Abasteria St. Leger Eberle for several years, collaborating in partnership on works for two years. Two of their collaborative works were: “Men and Bull”, which won a bronze medal at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition and “”Boy and Goat Playing” which was exhibited at the gallery of the Society of American Artists in 1906. Between 1906 and 1910, Anna Huntington, confident of her skills, traveled several times between New York, Paris and Naples, working on commissions and exhibiting her works.

After an early model of a Joan of Arc equestrian statue gained honorable mention in the 1910 Paris Salon, Huntington received a commission by the City of New York to produce a life-sized bronze statue from the model. After extensive research on medieval armor at the Metropolitan Museum and a search for the perfect horse model, Huntington finished the large-scale “Joan of Arc” clad in a full suit of medieval armor. The unvieling occurred on December 6th of 1915, marking it as New York City’s first monument made by a woman, and the first monument to feature a real woman of history as its subject.

In 1923 Anna Huntington married her husband, railroad heir and philanthropist Archer Milton Huntington, who supported her work both financially and emotionally. Anna Huntington continued to work on her sculptures, winning new commissions including the equestrian work “El Cid Campeador”, the cast-aluminum “Fighting Stallions” at Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina, and “Diana” installed in 1948 at the National Academy of Design. 

In the late 1930s, Anna and Archer Huntington donated their Fifth Avenue townhouse to the National Academy of Design. A few years later, as Archer Huntington became quite ill, they donated their Haverstraw, New York, estate and zoo to the state of New York. In 1931, Anna and Archer Huntington established  Brookgreen Gardens, the first public sculpture garden in the United States. 

Following Archer Huntington’s death in 1955, Anna Huntington returned to full-time art work, despite being in her 80s. Between 1959 and 1966, she completed five more equestrian statues, including one of the late nineteenth century writer and activist  José Marti, one of a young Abraham Lincoln, and one of a young Andrew Jackson. On Huntington’s ninetieth birthday in 1966 she was still working, reportedly on a bust of the composer Charles Ives. Around the end of the 1960s, Huntington finally retired from creative work. She died on October 4, 1973, in Redding, Connecticut, following a series of strokes at the age of 97.

Note:  The Brookgreen Gardens contain many of Huntington’s works and many figures by other artists, the acquisitions being a boon to struggling artists of the Depression era. Now a National Historic Landmark, it is the most significant collection of figurative sculpture, in an outdoor setting, by American artists in the world. It also has the only zoo accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, and contains thousands of acres of Wildlife Preserve.

William Brickel

Watercolors by William Brickel

Born in England near the Welsh border in 1994,  William Brickel studied Fine Art Photography at Cumberwell College of Arts, graduating in 2017 and earned his Masters Degree the following year at the Royal Drawing School in London. 

The human figure is a recurrent and central concern in Brickel’s work. Depicted with contorted bodies, the figures gaze away from the center and the viewer toward the edge of the picture plane, looking beyond the other figures and the cramped surroundings. If not alone, the brooding figures, when they appear in pairs or groups, playfully and wistfully wrap around and caress one another with enormous, unwieldy hands.

Backgrounds are often more suggestive than explicit; but mindful attention is given to the patterns of fabrics and, particularly, the gradations of light on the forms. A great deal of skill is exhibited in William Brickel’s watercolors. It is not a very tolerant medium; mistakes are hard, almost impossible, to correct and even oil from your skin can effect the paper’s absorption of the color. 

William Brickel’s work has been featured in group and solo exhibitions in the United Kingdom and Europe. His work will be featured at the 2020 Marfa International Exhibition at the August 13th to 16th event held at George Hall in Marfa, Texas.

Note: An extensive collection of William Brickel’s recent work can be found at the Samuele Visentin Gallery’s website located at: https://www.samuelevisentin.com/artists/30-william-brickel/works/

Insert Image: William Brickel, “A Small Room Upstairs”, 2021, Oil on Canvas, 160 x 129.5 cm, Private Collection

 

Henri Cartier-Bresson: “Visually Preceived Forms”

The Faces of Man:WP Photo Set Seven

“To take photographs is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge in the face of fleeing reality. It is at that moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.
To take photographs means to recognize—simultaneously and within a fraction of a second—both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one’s head, one’s eye, and one’s heart on the same axis.”

― Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers