Month: August 2020

Ernst Steiner

Ernst Steiner – “Lebensbaum (Tree of Life)”, 1982, Oil on Canvas 

Born in Switzerland in 1935 Ernst Steiner moved to Austria in his twenties, studying at the Academies of Fine Arts and Applied Arts in Vienna. Influenced by the works of printmaker and illustrator Alfred Kubin and painter Marc Chagall, he rejected the abstract modernist trends and embraced post-war Vienna’s Fantastic Realism movement. This movement, influenced by artists such as Hieronymus Bosch and Matthias Grunewald, combined realistic motifs in enigmatic and non-rational ways. Their works employed conscious manipulation of detail to express esoteric meanings.

An ambidextrous artist, Steiner produced paintings, prints, theater stage sets, and designs for Austrian postage stamps. He also produced a series of “dream-tales” illustrative books. In his later years, Steiner’s study of music theory led to the creation of repetitive, geometric, mathematically precise designs, expressing what he believed to be the harmonies supporting the universe. 

“The Artist is Pontiff connecting the present with the beyond. . .a midwife for what wants to be revealed to the world.” -Ernst Steiner

Image reblogged with thanks to : https://elizabethminkel.com

Georgy Gurianov

Paintings by Georgy Gurianov

Born in 1961 in St. Petersburg, Russia, Georgy Gurianov was a musician, photographer and artist. Musically, he is best known as the drummer for Russia’s seminal rock band “Kino”. Gurianov studied at the V.A. Serov Leningrad Art School and became a founding member, along with visual artist Timur Novikov, of the Novye Khudozhniki, the New Artists movement. He also contributed to the concerts of composer and experimental artist Sergei Kuryokhin and his band, Ensemble Pop-Mekhanika. 

Through the 1980s, Gurianov painted neo-expressionist works, Including many posters for the first raves in Russia, a part of the New Artists movement. 

During the 1990s, Gurianov continued to be involved with music and art, serving as a founding member and honorary professor at Timor Novikov’s New Academy of Fine Arts which initiated a return to Classicism, celebrating the ideals of beauty and physical perfection. The Academy was also politically charged with its deliberate insertion of sexual ambiguity and homoeroticism in their works. 

Georgy Gurianov, at this time, was producing drawings and paintings of athletes, sailors, and soldiers, influenced by the Soviet Realist style of painter and graphic artist Aleksandr Deyneka. Private about his own sexual orientation, his paintings were quite explicit representing homosocial situations, particularly those aboard ships. Gurianov often painted the features of his friends, and himself, onto the characters in his tableaux, as seen in his 2000 “Argo” where he is standing at the helm.

Solo exhibitions of Georgy Gurianov’s work were held at the Marble Palace of the State Russian Museum in 1993, Moscow’s Regina Gallery in 1994, Gallery D-137 located in St. Petersburg in 2001, and Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum in 1997. 

A cult figure of the 1980s St. Petersburg underground movement, Georgy Gurianov died on July 20, 2013 in St. Petersburg at the age of fifty-two. His work is in many private collections worldwide.

Cormac McCarthy: “Anything is Possible”

Parva Scaena (Brief Scenes): Set Nineteen

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. 

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.” 

—Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West

Stone on Top of Stone

Photographer Unknown, (Stone on Top of Stone- Restoration)

“A third of thee dumbfounded, 33 degrees of masonry which are the controllers of mastery. Stone on top of stone, carry the U.S on my back as I travel through Rome. It’s God & I on my own,I ask for wisdom and wisdom is shown. What I have is common with Solomon is the position I take on this throne. Ancient ancestry of modern day slavery, there are thousands hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root with bravery.”
― Jose R. Coronado, The Land Flowing with Milk and Honey

Alexander Struys

Alexander Struys, “Birds of Prey: The Will”, 1876, Oil on Canvas, 160 x 135 cm, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

Born in Berchem, Belgium,in 1852, Alexander Theodore Honoré Struys was a genre and portrait painter of the Realistic style. At the age of six, he was already a student at the Academy of Dordrecht. He later became the student of biblical scene painter Polydore Beaufaux and romantic-historical painter Jozef Van Lerius at Antwerp’s Royal Acacemy of Fine Arts. 

In 1871 Struys exhibited his works in Ghent and traveled with his friend, painter Jan Van Beers (the Younger), to France and England, achieving little success in selling their work. After his return to Belgium, Stuys exhibited his painting “Birds of Prey: The Will” in 1876, creating a scandal due to its anti-clerical imagery. 

The following year, Alexander Struys was named a Professor at the Weimar Saxon-Grand Ducal Art School, which had just turned away form the academic tradition of idealized composition, setting the school apart from other established schools. He stayed in that position until 1882, moving to The Hague to concentrate for two years  on portrait work. His paintings of the impoverished people in the area received praise in the socially-conscious publications at that time. 

Leaving The Hague, Stuys settled in Mechelen, in the province of Antwerp, becoming head of its Royal Drawing Academy. In 1902 he joined the commission for the ninth exhibition of “Société des Beaux-Arts à Bruxelles” and, in 1905, became the society’s Vice-President. Alexander Struys also served on the committee for the “Exposition Rétrospective de l’Art Belge”, a celebration of Belgium’s 75th anniversary. 

Alexander Struys was a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium and the Institute of France. He passed on the 25th of March, 1941 in Uccle, Belgium.

Paul Jasmin

Paul Jasmin, “Rodney, Edie, and Bosco, Hollywood”, 1990, Silver Gelatin Print

Born in April of 1935, Paul Jasmin was an actor, illustrator, and painter before focusing on photography. He left his hometown of Helena, Montana, in 1954 to travel in the world and pursue an acting career in New York and Los Angeles. He performed small cameo roles in the 1959 “Riot in Juvenile Prison”, “Midnight Cowboy” in 1969, and Spike Jonze’s 2002 “Adaption”. Working with actors Virginia Gregg and Jeanette Nolan, Paul Jasmin provided one of the three vocals mixed together for the voice of Norman’s mother in Hitchcock’s “Psycho”.

From 1965 to 1975, Jasmin concentrated on painting and illustration. He provided illustrative work for the fashion campaigns of the luxury Valentino brand. Jasmin also illustrated the advertising poster for the 1972 American porno film “Bijou”, directed by dancer and choreographer Wakefield Poole. 

Urged by friend and photographer Bruce Weber, Paul Jasmin turned to photography, with his imagery focusing on the unknown people he discovered on his travels. He began doing work for commercial clients in the late 1970s, working for the brands SAKS, Nautica, and Mr.Porter. Jasmin’s current editorial work appears in Vogue, Teen Vogue, GQ, Details, V Magazine, V Man, and Vogue Hommes, among other publications,

Since 2002, Jasmin has produced a several photographic studies of life in California, including “Hollywood Cowboy”, published in 2002 by Arena Editions; the 2008 “Los Angeles”, published by Steidl: and “California Dreaming”, published by Steidl in 2011. His 2008 “Lost Angeles” series, a study of those ‘tarnished angels’ who come to Hollywood seeking their dreams, is considered one of his most prominent works. 

Paul Jasmin currently teaches photography at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

Carl Gustav Jung: “It is My Mind That Gives the World Color”

Photographers Unknown, (It is My Mind that Gives the World Color)

“It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can “experience” is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are . . . enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images.” 

― Carl Gustav Jung

Andrew Salgado

Paintings by Andrew Salgado

Born in 1982, Andrew Salgado is a Canadian artist living and working in London. He received his BFA from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 2005; he graduated in 2009 with a MFA form Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. Salgado’s work, striking a balance between abstraction and figuration, deals with questions of masculinity. His paintings are concerned with the political, social, and psychological aspects that effect his subjects. 

In Salgado’s most recent work,  colorful, symbolic, and compositional elements are the driving force of the painted image, but a complex interweaving of figures remain a common thread. His subjects are depicted in a fantastical, often ominous tableaux, with any combination of patterns, abundance, and excess play upon the painted surface. References to the tradition of figurative painting, both historic and contemporary, are recognizable, including those to  Matisse, Gauguin, and Francis Bacon.

Since 2010, Andrew Salgado has had many solo exhibitions in London, New York , Zagreb, Toronto, Cape Town, Basel, and most recently in 2019 at the Untitled Art Fair in Miami. He was the youngest artist to receive a survey-exhibition at The Canadian High Commission in London. An openly gay artist, Salgado frequently donates to charities including Pride London, Stonewall, Diversity Role Models, Pride London, and GLAAD. His donations to the Terrence Higgins Trust are of particular note, having have raised over £100,000 since 2014.

Salgado’s works are in both public and private collections worldwide, including the Government of Canada, The Jordanian Royal Family, London’s prominent legal firm Simmons & Simmons, and the Esquinazi Collection.

The artist’s site : https://andrewsalgado.com

Bottom Insert Image: Andrew Salgado, “Buzzati’s War”, 2023, Oil and Oil Pastel on Linen, 95 x 85 cm

Mark Manders

Sculptural Work by Mark Manders

Born in 1968 in Volkel, The Netherlands, Mark Manders currently lives and works in Ronse, Belgium. He first studied graphic design, but soon changed his studies to sculpture, becoming interested in the paralleled evolution of humans and objects.

Mark Manders is best known for his rough-hewn, unfired clay sculptures, often later cast in bronze, and his installations of randomly arranged objects. Over thirty years of work, Mark Manders has developed an endless self-portrait in the form of sculpture, still life, and architectural plans. His works present mysterious and evocative tableaux that allow viewers to construct their own narrative conclusions and meanings.

Manders’ first conception of the self-portrait, inspired by an interest in writing, was more literal and employed language and the written word in the form of an autobiography. He later began to explore the architecture of story telling, focusing on structure, rather than on specific content. This early realization has resulted in a continually expanding body of sculptural investigations of form, meaning and narrative.

In 2010, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles opened a major retrospective of Mark Manders’ work entitled “Parallel Occurrences / Documented Assignments”,  which later traveled to the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, through 2012. Manders represented the Netherlands in 2013 at the 55th Venice Biennale. He also had solo exhibitions at Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, Italy, and the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea in Santiago de Compostel, Spain, both in 2014, Manders has had three solo exhibitions at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, with locations both in Los Angeles and New York City.

Mark Mander’s 2017 sculptural work “September Room (Room with Two Reclining Figures and Composition with Long Verticals”, shown in image one, is now part of the Minneapolis Sculptural Garden at the Walker Art Center. Positioned in one of the Garden’s original formal quadrants, Manders’s commission consists of a grouping of five bronze sculptures combining human forms, architecture, and everyday objects, to suggest both the ancient and new.

Walter Martin Baumhofer

Walter Baumhofer, Cover Art for “Doc Savage” Magazines

Born in November of 1904 to German immigrant parents, Walter Martin Baumhofer grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He went on a scholarship to Pratt Institute, studying under illustrator and muralist Dean Cornwell and painter Harold Winfield Scott. In 1925, Baumhofer began drawing interior illustrative work for “Adventure”magazine’s stories. Upon Harold Scott’s suggestion, he started to submit cover paintings to the pulp magazines. 

Baumhofer’s first pulp cover appeared on Clayton Publication’s ”Danger Trail” in 1926. His masterful cover paintings from the golden era of “Dime Detective”, “Dime Mystery”, “Dime Western”, “Pete Rice”, “Doc Savage”, and “The Spider” were among the most iconic images in pulp art history. The design and execution of Baumhofer’s work combined an impressive combination of sensational brushwork with a theatrical flair for composing striking scenes of intriguing villains, rugged heroes, and steadfast women. Some five hundred and fifty pulp covers grace his resume.

After joining the American Artists agency in 1937, Baumhofer made the transition to slick glossy magazines, initially starting at “Liberty”, a weekly general-interest magazine. With his successful work there, he added to his resume “Collier’s”, “Cosmopolitan”, “Redbook”, “Esquire”, “The American Weekly”, and “Woman’s Day”. In the 1950s, Baumhofer worked for men’s rugged adventure magazines, such as “Argosy”, “Outdoor Life”, “True”, and “Sports Afield”, producing vivid calendar pieces as well as cover and interior work..

Retiring from freelance magazine illustration, Baumhofer created landscapes, portraits, and Western scenes for fine art galleries. Due to the rise of television and the decline of pulps and reader’s magazines in the late 1950s to the early 1960s, his illustrations were not in demand. Very little illustrative work by Baumhofer was done in the 1960s and the 1970s. 

Walter Martin Baumhofer passed away on September 23, 1987 at the age of eighty-two. In the world of pulp magazine aficionados, he is renowned for his paintings, innovative design work, and his high standards.

Note: Doc Savage is a fictional character of the competent man hero type, a physician, scientist, adventurer, detective, and punisher of evil-doers. He first appeared in “Doc Savage”, Magazine #1, in March of 1933, with the series ending in the summer of 1949. In all, a total of 181 issues were published in various entries and alternative titles. Stories were written by Lester Dent and the magazine was published by Henry Ralston and John Nanovic of Street and Smith Publications. It was Walter Baumhofer who created the visual image of Doctor Clark Savage, Junior. Editor Stan Lee of Marvel Comics credited Doc Savage as being the forerunner to modern superheroes.

China Miéville: “I Have Danced with the Spider”

Photographer Unknown, (I Have Danced with the Spider)

“Its substance was known to me. The crawling infinity of colours, the chaos of textures that went into each strand of that eternally complex tapestry…each one resonated under the step of the dancing mad god, vibrating and sending little echoes of bravery, or hunger, or architecture, or argument, or cabbage or murder or concrete across the aether. The weft of starlings’ motivations connected to the thick, sticky strand of a young thief’s laugh. The fibres stretched taut and glued themselves solidly to a third line, its silk made from the angles of seven flying buttresses to a cathedral roof. The plait disappeared into the enormity of possible spaces.

Every intention, interaction, motivation, every colour, every body, every action and reaction, every piece of physical reality and the thoughts that it engendered, every connection made, every nuanced moment of history and potentiality, every toothache and flagstone, every emotion and birth and banknote, every possible thing ever is woven into that limitless, sprawling web.

It is without beginning or end. It is complex to a degree that humbles the mind. It is a work of such beauty that my soul wept…

..I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.”

–China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

Herbert List

Herbert List, Title Unknown, (Fishmonger),  London, 1964, Silver Gelatin Print

“The pictures I took spontaneously, with a bliss-like sensation, as if they had long inhabited my unconscious, were more often more powerful than those I had painstakingly composed. I grasped their magic as in passing.”

Herbert List

Note: A biography of Herbert List can be found in the November 2021 archive of this site.

Carl Jung: “The Summons of the Voice”

His Butt: Beguiling the Senses and Enchanting the Mind: Photo Set Ten

“The fact that a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing … He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths … There are not a few who are called awake by the summons of the voice, whereupon they are at once set apart from the others, feeling themselves confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing. In most cases it is impossible to explain to the others what has happened, for any understanding is walled off by impenetrable prejudices. “You are no different from anybody else,” they will chorus or, “there’s no such thing,” and even if there is such a thing, it is immediately branded as “morbid”…He is at once set apart and isolated, as he has resolved to obey the law that commands him from within. “His own law!” everybody will cry. But he knows better: it is the law…The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization — absolute and unconditional— of its own particular law … To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being … he has failed to realize his own life’s meaning.” 

—Carl Jung