Pyotr Konchalovsky

Pyotr Konchalovsky, “Bathing Calvary (Horse Bathing), c 1928, Oil on Canvas

Born in February of 1876 in the village of Slavyanka, Russia, Pyotr Konchalovsky , at the age of eight, attended art school in Kharkov where he became interested in painting. His father, a book publisher now in Moscow, began to publish works by Romantic writer Mikhail Lermontov and novelist Aleksandr Pushkin, commissioning notable artists such as Vasily Surikov and Valentin Serov to produce illustrations for the works. Influenced by these artists, Konchalovsky attended classes at Moscow’s School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture.

In 1896 to 1898, Konchalovsky studied at the Academie Julian in Paris, later entering the Moscow Academy of Arts, from which he graduated in 1907. He traveled extensively over the next two years and, in 1907, attended the exhibition of Van Gogh’s works in Paris, which made a significant impact on his future works. This influence is noticeable in the work Konchalovsky produced between 1907 and 1910.

In 1909, Konchalovsky and his close associates, such as painters Robert Falk and Ilya Mashkov, founded the art group “Jack of Diamonds”, an early Russian avant-garde
movement that challenged the academic traditions and supported the post-impressionist, cubist and fauvist painters. Their first exhibition in Moscow was considered by some to be a scandal; but it initiated a cultural action that brought the new art forms to the public.

Konchalovsky painted landscapes, portraits, still lifes, and genre paintings, with simple compositions, lack of details, and with thick applications of color. Some of his most well-known works are the cubist paintings, “The Agave” and “The Dry Paints”, 1916 and 1913 respectively ; the post-impressionist 1946 “The Candlestick and Pears”; and the 1955 realist “The Strawberries”. Konchalovsky also painted portraits of outstanding figures, such as poets Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov, composer Sergey Prokofiev and theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold. He also illustrated a number of poems by Mikhail Lermontov.

The works of Pyotr Konchalovsky have been exhibited both in Russia and abroad. He was appreciated by the Soviet government and awarded with orders and medals. In 1943 Konchalovsky became a laureate of the Stalin Prize and, in 1947, received the rank of the USSR Academy of Arts member. Pyotr Konchalovsky died on the2nd of February in 1956 and is buried at the Novodevichie Cemetery in Moscow.

José Manuel Castro López

The Sculptural Works of José Manuel Castro López

Born in 1959 in Vilasuso, a village located in northwest Spain, José Manuel Castro López studied sculpture at the Escola de Canteros, a stone-masonry university in Pontevedra, Spain, from 1980 until 1985. Inspired by the mythology of his native Galician culture, José López believes that stones are spirits of the land and, as an artist, it is his role to to conjure them.

Starting with pieces of granite and quartz, José López grinds the natural stone into forms with creases and wrinkles, giving the illusion of sponge, clay forms, or soft, flowing fabrics. After the carving, he restores the stone’s original texture by removing any traces of his tool, resulting in the appearance of a slowly eroded natural stone. The added features he creates becomes very obvious against the stone’s natural appearance.

“My relationship with the stone is not physical, but magical. It recognizes me, it obeys me… we understand each other. My stones are not lifeless. They manifest themselves.” —-José Manuel Castro López

Zane Grey: “Every Second the Scene Changed”

Photographers Unknown, Parva Scaena (Brief Scenes): Set Twenty

“I sat there for a long time and knew that every second the scene changed, yet I could not tell how. I knew I sat high over a hole of broken, splintered, barren mountains; I knew I could see a hundred miles of the length of it, and eighteen miles of the width of it, and a mile of the depth of it, and the shafts and rays of rose light on a million glancing, many-hued surfaces at once; but that knowledge was no help to me. I repeated a lot of meaningless superlatives to myself, and I found words inadequate and superfluous. The spectacle was too elusive and too great. It was life and death, heaven and hell.”

—-Zane Grey, The Last of the Plainsmen

Ludwig von Hofmann

Ludwig von Hofmann, “Die Quelle (The Source)”, 1913, Oil on Canvas, Thomas Mann Archives, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich

A member of the avant-garde group “Eleven”, Ludwig von Hofmann was an active participant in the cultural movement “Berlin Succession”. He taught at the art school in Weimar, located in central Germany, and at the Dresden Academy of Arts, where he directed a course in monumental painting. Von Hoffman was a frequent illustrator for the arts and literary magazine “Pan”, which played an important role in the development of the Art Nouveau movement in Germany.

Working in a combination of Symbolist and Art Nouveau styles, Ludwig von Hofmann’s paintings included antique and biblical themes, and idyllic landscapes inhabited by surreal or mythological creatures. His work aspired to portray beauty in form, using unique and strong color combinations, and often presented a veiled eroticism in its figures. Von Hofmann’s symbolist work is both decorative and idealized, with verdant forests, blossoming fields, and naked or clothed figures whose skin or flowing garments are lit by the sun.

In 1903, von Hofmann was appointed a professor at the Weimar Saxon Grand Ducal Art School. He was later named a Professor at the Academy of Arts in Dresden in 1916, remaining there until 1931. In his later years, von Hofmann predominately worked in the Art Nouveau style, producing engravings and illustrations, and designing libraries, residential rooms and theaters.

The production of Ludwig von Hofmann’s work slowed in the 1930s, with some of his work labeled “degenerate art’ by the National Socialist Party in 1937. He retired to the town of Pillnitz, a section of east Dresden, where he died in August of 1945.

Top Insert Image: Ludwig von Hofmann, “Badende am Schwarzen Felsein ( Bathers on the Black Rock)”, 1930, Oil on Canvas

Bottom Insert Image: Ludwig von Hofmann, “Men, Boys and Horses in a Landscape”, circa 1910, Pastel on Paper

Claudio Massini

The Artwork of Claudio Massini

Born in Naples in 1955, Italian painter and photographer Claudio Massani spent his early years living in Trieste, a seaport on the Adriatic coast. At the beginning of the 1970’s, he obtained a diploma from Trieste’s art school and, following his family’s move to Naples, he attended Naples’s Academy of Fine Arts. During these years Massini’s works were based on performance actions with an urban and social context.

Starting in 1975, Massini developed his personal style of extremely precise relief canvases constructed of multiple layers of both organic and inorganic pigments. These he exhibited in the 1975 Rome Quadriennale, as part of “The New Generation” exhibition promoting Italian contemporary art, and in the 1976 Venice Biennale. After moving to Treviso in 1980, Massini focused his work on acrylic paintings, often with sculpture influences and bleak undertones.

An agreement with Naples’s contemporary art advocate and gallery owner Lucio Amelio led to Massini’s constant participation in important exhibitions, including a solo show in 1989 at the Lucio Amelio gallery. In the 1990s Massini channeled his energies and time into the development of the Padiglione Arte Contemporanea in Milan, a venue for meetings and exhibitions of national and international artists.

Over the course of his career, Claudio Massini has developed, through the research of different materials, a glazing technique of color and effects to place his painted elements on a relief plane only a few millimeters in thickness. The different elements, either opaque, translucent or dusty in appearance, retain their recognizable forms, such as stars, tables or flowers, in a balanced organic or architectural form.

Now living in Casier, Italy, Claudio Massini exhibited in 2003 at Bologna’s Gallery of Modern Art and at the Mücsarnok Kunsthalle in Budapest. In 2009, his solo show “Fili Fatali (Fatal Threads)” was exhibited at the Civic Museum Sartario in Trieste and six other galleries in the city. Massini’s exhibition “Lago Sacro (Sacred Logo)” was exhibited in 2010 at the San Zenone Civic Gallery in the city of Campione d’Italia. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Treviso, Casa Robegan, hosted Massini’s solo show “The Body of Painting”.

The artist: https://www.instagram.com/claudio_massini/?hl=en

Bottom Insert Image: Claudio Massini, “Joueur au Filet”, Date Unknown, Oil on Panel, 137.2 x 185.4 cm, Private Collection

Saint Irene Nursing Saint Sebastian

Artist Unknown (Florentine School), “Saint Irene Nursing Saint Sebastian”, 1600s, Oil on Canvas, 99 x 123 cm, Private Collection

“Saint Irene Nursing Saint Sebastian” is an incident in the legends of Saint Sebastian and of Saint Irene of Rome. It was not a prominent theme in the biographical literature of the saints until the latter years of the Renaissance. It became popular as a painting theme after 1610, eventually becoming a frequent subject until about the 1670s. By the 18th century, the subject became still less common, with the figure of Saint Irene being replaced by an angel.

In his biographical stories, Saint Sebastian survives his first “martyrdom” by a multitude of arrows during Roman emperor Diocletian’s persecution of Christians. He was, according to tradition, untied from the tree, or post, and his wounds treated by Saint Irene, an active Christian in Rome, whose husband had previously been executed. Saint Sebastian, later in life, undergoes his second “martyrdom”, this time suffering fatal injuries by thrown stones.

The scenes of Saint Irene tending to Sebastian are often shown taking place in darkness, typically in one of the catacombs of Rome, which was the subject of archeological examination in the early 1600s. Baroque artists often painted the scene as nocturnal, with illumination provided by a lantern, torch or candle, in the chiaroscuro style, an effect of contrasted light and shadow created by light falling unevenly or from a particular direction.

Saint Sebastian’s death is firmly located in Rome, where he was the third patron saint, with churches dedicated to him built on the legend’s locations of events. The Saint Sebastian and Saint Irene scene is found as an independent subject in the works of painters Georges de La Tour, Jusepe de Ribera, and Trophime Bigot. Although the subject was mainly painted by Italian artists, the scene were also painted by a number of artists from the Netherlands, including Hendrick ter Brugghen, a follower of Caravaggio, and Mannerist painter Joachim Wtewael.

E. E. Cummings, “Miracles Are to Come”

Beguiling the Senses and Enchanting the Mind: Photo Set Twelve

“Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are by somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn, a human being; somebody who said to those near him,when his fingers would not hold a brush ‘tie it into my hand’-

nothing proving or sick or partial. Nothing false,nothing difficult or easy or small or colossal. Nothing ordinary or extraordinary,nothing emptied or filled,real or unreal;nothing feeble and known or clumsy and guessed. Everywhere tints childrening, innocent spontaneous,true. Nowhere possibly what flesh and impossibly such a garden,but actually flowers which breasts are among the very mouths of light. Nothing believed or doubted; brain over heart, surface:nowhere hating or to fear;shadow, mind without soul. Only how measureless cool flames of making;only each other building always distinct selves of mutual entirely opening;only alive. Never the murdered finalities of wherewhen and yesno,impotent nongames of wrongright and rightwrong;never to gain or pause,never the soft adventure of undoom,greedy anguishes and cringing ecstasies of inexistence; never to rest and never to have:only to grow.

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.”

—-E E Cummings, Introduction, Collected Poems

Dick Hendrik Ket

Paintings by Dick Hendrik Ket

Born in 1902 in the small port town of Den Helder, The Netherlands, Dick Ket was a magic realist painter. He was born with a serious heart defect, probably a symptom of Fallot, incurable at that time and causing insufficient nourishment of tissues and organs.

In his childhood, Ket was encouraged by two teachers who appreciated his artistic talent. His drawing teacher, Johan C. Kerkemeijer directed him toward the techniques of oil painting. His science teacher Henri Adrien Naber, an author and theosophist, encouraged him to look into the relationship between geometry and mysticism.

After studying art at the Kunstoefening Arnhem Academy from 1922 to 1925, Ket could no longer travel, becoming debilitated by chronic fatigue and growing phobias. He lived in seclusion with his parents in the small town of Bennekom, not venturing out of the house until after 1930. Ket’s exposure, through reproductions, to the art of painter Neue Sachlichkeit in 1929 led him to concentrate his work in the magic realist style.

Housebound by his illness, Dick Ket painted still lifes and self portraits. His meticulously composed still lifes are always centered on the same themes and are often composed of the same objects: empty bowls, eggs, bottles, newspapers and musical instruments. These objects are arranged in different angles to each other, painted as viewed from above, and seen casting strong shadows.

During the period from 1930 to 1940, Dick Ket’s health progressively deteriorated, leading to his early death at age thirty-seven in September of 1940. Over the course of his career, Dick Ket produced approximately one hundred-forty paintings, a third of which were self portraits. Among the museums containing Ket’s work in their collections are the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Arnhem Museum, and the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam.

Top Insert Image: Dick Ket, “Self Portrait”, 1935, Conté Crayon and White Crayon on Paper, 113 x 75 cm, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Bottom Insert Image: Dick Ket, “Self Portrait”, Date Unknown, Conté Crayon on Paper

Brian Catling: “Gravity Filled the Moment”

Photographers Unknown, The Faces of Man: Photo Set Nine

“One solitary tear crept through the scars of his face, through the diagrams of constellations and the incised maps of influence and dominion. A liquid without a name, it being made of so many emotions and conflicts, each cancelling the other out until only salt and gravity filled the moment and moved down through his expression.”

—-Brian Catling, The Vorrh

Franz Betz: Music History

Photographer Unknown, “Franz Betz in His Role as Wotan”, 1876

Born in March of 1835 at the Rhine River city of Mainz, Germany, Franz Betz was a bass-baritone opera singer known for his performances in operas by Richard Wagner. He received his training in the city of Karlsruhe, home of the Baden State Theatre opera house. Betz made his debut, at the age of twenty-one, in 1856 at the Court Theater of Hanover in Wagner’s “Lohengrin”, part of the “Knight of the Swan”legend, but most recognizable for the”Bridal Chorus”, still played at weddings today.

Framz Betz’s successful performance in 1859 at the Berlin State Opera, singing the role of Don Carlo in Giuseppe Verdi’s “Emani”, resulted in a permanent contract with the company and his becoming one of Wagner’s most trusted singers. He sang the role of Hans Sachs in the world premier of Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nümberg” at Munich in 1868, eventually singing the role over one hundred times.

Im May of 1872, Betz was one of the four soloists in the performance of “Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony” to mark the laying of the foundation stone for the Bayreuth Festival Theater, built by Richard Wagner for the sole use of his works. At the Beyreuth Theater in 1876, Betz sang the role of Wotan in the operas “Das Rheingold” and “Die Ring des Nibelungen”.

Franz Betz continued to sing lyric and lyric-dramatic roles well into his career as a singer of Wagner’s operas. For instance, he sang, in the same season of 1863, both the role of Telramund, a heavy dramatic part, and the lyric part of Valentin in “Faust”. Betz’s voice deepened as he grew older; and in consequence, Wagner added to his operas the role of König Marke, a lyrical bass role without a low tessitura and, in the same year, the role of Wotan. Betz’s enormous repertoire ranged from the roles of Don Giovanni and Wolfram, through Pizarro and Posa, to the roles of Holländer, Amonasro, Sachs and Wotan, expanding finally to Falstaff in 1894.

During the period from 1882 to 1890, Betz held the position of president of the German trade union for stage artists, technicians and administrative staff, the Genossenschaft Deutscher Bühren-Angelhöger. Although singing in a few London concerts in 1882 and 1889, he never sang elsewhere outside of Germany. Franz Betz died in Berlin on the 11th of August in 1900 and is buried at the Protestant Wilhelm Memorial Cemetery in the Westend district of Berlin.

Note: The photographs show Franz Betz as Wotan, bearded and with shield, in Richard Wagner’s opera “Die Ring des Nibelungen” performed in Bayreuth. The photo card is entitled Costume Portraits of the Bayreuther Festival Thater, and was published by Joseph Albert, Munich, in 1876.

Top Insert Image: Loescher & Petsch, “Franz Betz”, circa 1870, Cardstock Photo, 8.6 x 5.5 cm, Kunstbibliothek, Berlin

Bottom Insert Image: Verlog von J. Albert, “Franz Betz as Wotan”, Costüm Portraits, 1876, Card Stock Photo, Berlin

Claudio Bravo Camus

Claudio Bravo Camus, “Antes del Juego (Before the Game)”, 1983, Oil on Canvas, 199 x 239 cm

Born in 1936, Chilean-born artist Claudio Bravo initially established himself as a society portrait painter in Chile and Spain, but he became better known for his vibrant still lifes of such everyday items as packages, crumpled paper, and draped fabric. Although he lived in Morocco for many years, it was the Spanish classical masters who inspired the provocative style of his hyperrealist paintings.

Though Bravo had some training under Chilean artist Miguel Venegas Cifuentes, he was primarily self-taught. He was only 17 years old when he had his first exhibition in 1954 at Salón 13 in Valparaíso. In the early 1960s Bravo moved to Spain, where he made his living painting portraits on commission, including pictures of Gen. Francisco Franco’s family members.

Bravo had his first New York City show in 1970. Two years later he settled in Tangier, Morocco, where he began to paint landscapes and animals as well as still lifes and portraits. His paintings regularly sold for impressive sums, with his 1967 “White Package” fetching more than $1 million in 2004. Bravo was, although, little known in Chile until a 1994 retrospective exhibition of his work at the Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts. He passed away in June of 2011 in Taroudant, Morocco.

A. S. Ryatt: “Moving Out of Time”

Photographers Unknown, (Moving Out of Time)

“So—I went on, on my own—deeper and deeper into the silent Tunnel of the Ride—not so sure of where I was and yet not anxious either, not concerned about my companions nor even about the nearness of—certain friends. The trees were beech, and the buds, just breaking, fiercely brilliant, and the new, the renewed light on them—intermittent diamond—but the depths were dark, a silent Nave. And no birds sang, or I heard none, no woodpecker tapped, no thrush whistled or hopped. And I listened to the increasing Quiet—and my horse went softly on the beech-mast—which was wet after rain—not crackling, a little sodden, not wet enough to plash. And I had the sensation, common enough, at least to me, that I was moving out of time, that the way, narrow and dark-dappled, stretched away indifferently before and behind, and that I was who I had been and what I would become—all at once, all wound in one—and I moved onward indifferently, since it was all one, whether I came or went, or remained still. Now to me such moments are poetry. [Randolph Henry Ash]”

—-A.S. Byatt, Possession

Ray Bradbury: “The Sky was Woven into the Trees”

Artist Unknown, (The Sky was Woven into the Trees), Computer Graphics, Endless Loop Animation Gif

“And he was gesturing up through the trees above to show them how it was woven across the sky or how the sky was woven into the trees, he wasn‘t sure which. But there it was, he smiled, and the weaving went on, green and blue, if you watched and saw the forest shift its humming loom.”

—Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

Giulio Aristide Sartorio

Giulio Aristide Sartorio, “Artists Raise Venus” (The Locatelli Diptych), 1906, Oil on Canvas, Milan

Born into a two-generation Roman family of sculptors in February of 1860, Giulio Aristide Sartorio studied art, with emphasis on painting, among his family. In 1876, for a short time, he attended the classes of Romantic painter Francesco Podesti at the Academia di San Luca in Rome.

Sartorio started working for established architects and painters, in particular for the studio of the Spanish-styled painter Álvarez Catalá, whose works were in high demand by the art market. This profitable business enabled Sartorio to open his own studio in 1879 and start a personal career.

In 1923, Sartorio adapted a series of decorative panels, entitled “Artists Raise Venus”, previously displayed at the 1906 Milan Universal Exposition, for the Milanese house of the metallurgical entrepreneur Giovanni Locatelli, making formal changes in its context to align the panels to the atmosphere of the Victory of the Great War. In his customary poetic style, Giulio Sartorio portrayed an ideal classical and symbolic vision of Italy with its people revived to a new life after the achieved reunification.

Upon relocating the two panels to the Locatelli house, Sartorio added to each diptych panel the dates, in Roman numerals, of the entry into the war and of the Victory. On the solar disc supported by the three Graces, he added the legendary names of three decisive victory battles for Italy during the war: Karst, Piave, and Vittorio Veneto.

The new context of Sartorio’s diptych was to give a sense of hope to an Italy that had been able to unite its scattered forces in a grand effort of common rebirth. This was depicted by the dynamic group of young people on the left panel, raising together the statue of the goddess Minerva, a symbol of civil, military, artistic, and intellectual virtues.

Shane Berkery

Paintings by Shane Berkery

Born in April of 1992, Shane Keisuke Berkery is an Irish-Japanese contemporary artist based in Dublin, Ireland. His cultural background is a major influence on his work, appearing as a frequent theme in his paintings. Berkery graduated from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin in 2015.

Shane Berkery’s paintings are primarily centered around the human figure. He, a photographer as well, currently has several collections of work which are based his photos, including nudes and old family photos from his Japanese side. From the figures in his source material, Berkery seeks to create a sense of realism, giving attention to composition and color, while also including a sense of abstraction in the figure’s surroundings.

Berkery received the National University of Ireland’s Art and Design Award in 2015 and both the Hennessy-Craig and Whyte’s Awards at the Royal Hibernian Academy Annual Exhibition in 2016. His work was shown in a solo exhibition at the 2018 Start Art Fair in London. Berkery exhibited in a solo show at New York’s Contra Galleries in September of 2019.

Shane Berkery is represented by the Molesworth Gallery located in Dublin and the Chimera Gallery located in County Westmeath, Ireland. His painting “A Light” was placed in the Irish State Art Collection in February of 2016.

“I want the viewer to viscerally feel that the figure is real, like in dreams and memories where the details fade but recognition is there nonetheless.” —Shane Keisuke Berkery

The artist’s website can be found at: https://www.shaneberkery.com