Year: 2020

Joseph Stella

Joseph Stella, “The Virgin”, 1926, Oil on Canvas, 100.8 x 98.4 cm, Brooklyn Museum, New York

Joseph Stella, “Purissima”, 1927, Oil on Canvas, 193 x 145 cm, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia

Born in Muro Lucano, Italy, in 1877, Joseph Stella came to the United States at the age of nineteen to study medicine. He soon, however, abandoned his medical studies and entered the New York School of Art, studying with painter and teacher William Merritt Chase. A remarkable draftsman, Stella worked from 1905 to 1909 as an illustrator, publishing drawings in magazine periodicals. He continued expressing himself in drawings throughout the different phases of his career.

Beginning his career as a Realist, Stella made a visit to Italy in 1909, and associated with artists involved in the Italian Futurism and Modernism art movements. He traveled to Paris in 1911 , often attending Gertrude Stein’s salon and meeting artists there. Stella began to incorporate Futurist principles into his artwork; however, he was also interested in the structure of the Cubists and the dynamic color of the Fauvists.. 

In January 1913, just after his return to New York from Paris, Stella submitted five works to the Armory Show’s Domestic Committee for possible inclusion in the February exhibition; they selected his oil on canvas “Still Life”.  In New York during the 1920s Stella, fascinated with the geometric architecture, assimilated the elements of  Cubism and Futurism in his works, an example of which is his “Brooklyn Bridge” with its sweeping diagonal cables. Working for the Federal Art Project, a WPA project in the 1930s,  he traveled extensively around the world, painting through a series of styles from realism to abstraction to surrealism.

By the late 1930s, Stella’s work attracted less attention than it had in the past decades, his style no longer relevant to the time. He became emotionally cut off from the New York art world. Stella’s 1939 retrospective exhibition at the Newark Museum, though successful as a presentation, was less enthusiastically reviewed than expected. Diagnosed with heart disease in the early 1940s, subject to periods of anxiety, Joseph Stella succumbed to heart failure in November of 1946. 

At the same time that Stella was painting his Italian Futurist works, he was also working in pastel colors producing works with stylized birds and landscapes with long, curvilinear rhythms and sharp silhouettes. It was from this style that Stella developed his Madonna paintings in the 1920s. His paintings, “The Virgin” and “Purissima”, with their naturalistic faces and totally stylized figures, are part of that series. These complex allegorical and religious works, with elaborate floral motifs, demonstrate Stella’s devotion to 15th century Italian painting and familiarity with the aesthetics of Catholic rituals.

Fabio Dolce

Photographer Unknown, Fabio Dolce: Underwater Dance

Born in Palermo, Sicily, Fabio Dolce started dancing at eleven years of age with ballroom dances. At sixteen, he began his ballet training and contemporary dance at the “Teatro Massimo di Palermo, later participating in several years of competitive Latin ballroom dancing. Dolce completed his studies of ballet at the National Academy of Rome. joining upon graduation the Cannes Jeune Ballet where he danced works by choreographers Jean-Christophe Maillot, George Balachine, Marc Ribaud, and Edward Cook. 

Joining the CCN Ballet de Lorraine at age twenty-one, Dolce performed for nine years, dancing a varied repertoire of works by Emanuel Gat, Merce Cunningham, and Vronislava Nijinska, among others. At thirty years old, he joined DeNada Dance Theater in 2017 for the company’s second national tour of  choreographer Carlos Pons Guerra’s seductive and provocative “Ham and Passion”, where Dolce  danced the roles of Anna in “Passionaria” and the role of Maria in “O Maria”. 

After working internationally for many years, Fabio Dolce is now a freelance dance artist, choreographer, and teacher, working in England and France. In France, he is a collaborative director with the dance company Antonino Ceresia, seeking funding for the new work “La Commedia Divino”. Dolce is also involved with the EU funded project “Lifelong Dancing”, a series of learning pathways about dance for adult educators.

Fabio Dolce’s website is located at: http://fabiodolce.com

John Steinbeck: “A Trip Takes Us”

Photographers Unknown, A Collection: A Trip Takes Us

“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, once a bum always a bum. I fear this disease incurable. 

I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself….A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we not take a trip; a trip takes us.” 

—-John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Conan Chadbourne

Digital Mathematical Images by Conan Chadbourne

Born in 1978, Conan Chadbourne received his BA in Mathematics and Physics from New York University in 2011. He has worked in the fields of experimental physics research, digital imaging and printing, graphic design, and documentary film production.. Chadbourne lives in San Antonio where he works as a freelance graphic designer and documentary film producer.

Chadbourne  draws inspiration for his work from his experience in mathematics and the sciences. He is motivated by his fascination with the occurrence of mathematical and scientific imagery in traditional art forms, and the mystical, spiritual, or cosmological significance that is often attached to such imagery. 

Mathematical themes both overt and subtle appear in a broad range of traditional art: Medieval illuminated manuscripts, Buddhist mandalas, intricate tilings in Islamic architecture, restrained temple geometry paintings in Japan, complex patterns in African textiles, and geometric ornament in archaic Greek ceramics. Often this imagery is deeply connected with the models and abstractions these cultures use to interpret and relate to the cosmos, in much the same way that modern scientific diagrams express a scientific worldview.

Conan Chadbourn’s works have been exhibited at the Grace Museum in Abilene, Texas; The Art Center of Corpus Christi,;the Museum of Geometric and MADI Art in Dallas, Texas; and the Bridges Conference for Mathematics in the Arts.

“There are 212,987 distinct ways to partition a 4×4 grid of square tiles into component shapes composed of contiguous tiles, assuming any two such partitions are considered equivalent if they differ only by a symmetry transformation such as a rotation or reflection. There are exactly thirteen of these configurations which partition this grid of sixteen tiles into two component shapes of equal area, each composed of eight tiles. This image presents this set of thirteen equal divisions of this group of tiles.”

—Conan Chadbourne, Discussing his image “Concise Lesson in Uniform Partitions”

Thomas Eakins

Thomas Eakins, “Between Rounds”, 1898-99, Oil on Canvas, 127 x 101cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Most of Thomas Eakins’s paintings after 1886 were probing portraits; however, he returned to sporting subjects in the late 1890s with a series that he began after attending professional boxing matches at the Philadelphia Arena, which was then located diagonally across from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The resulting canvases were as revolutionary in their subject matter as his rowing scenes had been more than two decades earlier.

Thomas Eakins’s boxing and wrestling paintings are, however, even bolder in their subject matter than his early rowing pictures. Although the popular press, starting about 1900, featured images of prize fighting and accounts of boxers such as the famous John L. Sullivan, most artists turned away from depicting ring sports, which were associated with sanctioned violence, gambling, and alcohol.

Eakins fastidiously planned his “Between Rounds”. Every person portrayed in the painting posed for him. Eakins invited Billy Smith, a local featherweight, to pose for the boxer, asked other figures from the boxing world to re-enact their real-life roles in his Chestnut Street studio, and enlisted friends and relatives to pose for the spectators. The interior scenic location was the actual hall used by the fighters. 

Although the painting does not depict a specific bout, Thomas Eakins combined details from several to give it verisimilitude and worked diligently to capture the atmospheric effects of dust and smoke in the arena. As usual, he minimized the drama, showing Billy Smith catching his breath rather than struggling against Timothy Callahan, his unseen, and ultimately successful, opponent.

Henry Miller: “We All Derive from the Same Source”

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

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.” 

—Henry Miller

Louis Eugene Larivière

Louis Eugene Larivière, “Academic Drawing of a Nude Male with Arm Raised”, 1820, Black Pencil, Charcoal, and Stump on Paper, 58.6 x 43.7 cm, Private Collection

Born in Paris in December of 1800, Louis-Eugene Larivière was the second son of the painter André Philippe Larivière, and grandson of Charles Lepeintre, Painter to the Duke of Orleans. Three years separated Eugene from his elder brother, Charles-Philippe. The sons having   demonstrated natural abilities for painting, the father placed both with French painter Anne-Louis Girodet who in turn presented them to the Special School for Fine Arts: Charles-Philippe in 1813 and Louis-Eugene in February 1816.

Following in his older brother’s footsteps, Louis-Eugène Larivière participated in the historic composition competition as Girodet’s student. Ranked thirteenth, he did not enter the second round, but was noticed and, as a painter, was exempted from military service. Unfortunately, illness prevented Larivière from competing again in 1823; and the illness finished by carrying him off prematurely in June of 1923 at the age of twenty-one years old. 

A few family portraits by Louis-Eugène Larivière survive: one full of candor of his sister Pamela-Eugenie conserved at the Louvre; a protrait of his brother Edmond Larivière, and a “Self-Portrait”, both at the Museum of Picardy in Amiens. The works come from the collection of the painter Albert Maignan, the artist’s nephew by marriage who donated them to the Amiens Museum from the contents of the Lariviere brothers’ studio. 

A few male acacemy drawings by Eugene can be found at the Amiens Museum  similar to the image above. One of them is inscribed on the verso, “Eugène Larivière. 18 août 1817”, and countersigned by his teacher, the painter Pierre-Narcisse Guérin ,who corrected the student exercises of the Fine Arts students that day. Another academy drawing, dated 1818, and a few anatomical studies are know to exist in private collections. 

Gregory Maquire: “The Edge of Things”

R Breathe Photography, Untitled, (The Edge of Things)

“Birds know themselves not to be at the center of anything, but at the margins of everything. The end of the map. We only live where someone’s horizon sweeps someone else’s. We are only noticed on the edge of things; but on the edge of things, we notice much.” 

—Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

Image reblogged with thanks to https://thouartadeadthing.tumblr.com

Salem Beiruti

Paintings by Salem Beiruti

Born in Lebanon, Salem Beiruti is a conceptual artist and illustrator residing in Madrid. Working after graduation as an art director in the fields of advertising, graphics, and fashion design, he has more than seventeen years of client and freelance work. Upon his move to Madrid, Beiruti became a full=time illustrator and artist. 

Beiruti’s skillful digital illustrations are unique and inspired by such artists and photographers as Patrick Fillion, Paul Freeman, Issauro Cairo, and Francisco Prato. His project  of mixed-media works “Morphosis” is a result of his personal journey as a man of an Arabic mid-eastern culture and its traditions to the man he is today. The art book was published in June of 2017 by German publisher Bruno Gmnuender.

For those interested in purchasing a print, Art of Salem is offering all prints at a 40% discount for Easter 2021. Please reference Ultrawolves when ordering. Thank you.   https://www.instagram.com/artistsalem/

Toussaint Dubreuil

 

Toussaint Dubreuil, “Apollo Victorious Over the Python”, Date Unknown, Black Ink and Stone Wash on Paper, Private Collection

Born in 1561 in Paris, Toussaint Dubreuil was a French painter associated with the Second School of Fontanebleau, a period of the arts during the late Renaissance that, centered on the royal palace,  became crucial in the formation of Northern Mannerism in France.

A man of noble character, Dubreuil was a master lute player, horseman, and skilled as a jouster. His works, many of which have been lost, are in the late Mannerist style, with highly elongated and undulating forms and crowded compositions. Many of Duvreuil’s themes included mythological scenes and scenes taken from fictional literature by such writers as Italian poet Torquato Tasso, the French poet Pierre de Ronsard, and the ancient Greek novelist Heliodorus of Emessa.   

In twenty years Toussanint Dubreuil had mastered all the significant innovations of the Mannerists in Italy and France. Not content with being their brilliant heir, he had achieved recognition, outshining contemporary painters Martin Fréminet and Ambroise Dubois, as the uncontested master of the Second School of Fontainebleau. Late in his brief career, Dubreuil  began working in a new, eloquently clear style which in France paved the way for the Baroque Classicism of painters Laurent de La Hyre, Simon Vouet and Nicolas Poussin. 

First painter to King Henry IV, Toussaint Dubreuil, after a short career, passed away on November 22, 1602, leaving behind him the image of a painter being exceptionally intelligent and notably skilled in drawing and the nude.

Jesús Holguin: “The Sense of Secrets”

Parva Scaena (Brief Scenes): Set Nineteen

“What i like about Photography is that it takes moments that should have been forgotten, and just freezes them, and allows us to share it with everyone and share it with future generations. But there is also the sense of secrets in the picture, or the stuff you don’t know, or don’t see. You don’t really know what happened before or after a picture; its time is just frozen in that moment.” 

—Jesús Holguin

Pierre Grivolas

Pierre Grivolas  “ Les Flagellants au XIVe Siècle (Procession of Flagellants in the Fourteenth Century)”, 1867, Oil on Canvas, 175 x 208 cm, Calvet Museum, Avignon, France

Born in Avignon, France, in September of 1823, Pierre Grivolas was a French painter known for portraits, landscapes and genre scenes. Recognizing Grivolas’s early talent for drawing, his parents enrolled him in art classes. He won first prize in the 1843 Biennial Design Contest, sponsored by Avignon’s art foundation, La Foundation Calvet, a collection of historical and art legacies. The prize included a cash award which enabled Grivolas to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. 

At the École des Beaux-Arts, Grivolas met and was influenced by leader of the French Romantic movement Eugène Delacroix, neo-classical painter Dominique Ingres, and Hippolyte Flandrin, known today for his monumental decorative paintings. The outbreak of the February Revolution in 1848 forced Grivolas to return to his Avignon. Six years later, he became one of the first members of the Félibrige, a literary and cultural association founded by Frédéric Mistral and other writers to promote and defend the Provençal language.

In 1877, Pierre Grivolas became a founding member, along with writer Baptiste Bonnet, sculptor Jean Barnabé Amy, and others, of the Societa Belibrenco dé Paris. whose literary arm was the journal “Lou Viro-Souléu”, The monthly literary journal, published from 1889 to 1912, contained literary texts, and reports of the poetry Floral Games and other Parisian festivals. 

Pierre Grivolas became Director of the École des Beaux-Arts d’Avignon from 1878 until his death. During his tenure, he emphasized plain air, or outdoor, painting over the prevalent Academicism, and became credited with creating the art movement known now as “Novelle École d’Avignon”, In 1894 to 1896, Pierre Grivolas, sometimes accompanied by his younger brother Antoine, a still-life painter, traveled through the small villages of France, living like shepherds and capturing the colors of the mountain landscapes in their paintings. Provencal French painter 

Pierre Grivolas passed away in Avignon on February 5, 1906. His works are in many museums, including “Procession of Communiantes” at the Alauch Museum, the 1858 “Interior of a Spinning Mill” at the Louis Vouland Museum, and “Self-Portrait” at the Palace of the Roure.

Kamrooz Aram

Kamrooz Aram, “Arabesco”, 2019, Oil, Oil Crayon, Wax Pencil, and Pencil on LInen, 157 x 137 cm, Private Collection

Born in 1978 in Shiraz, Iran, Kamrooz Aram received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2001 and his MFA from Columbia University in 2003. His work is rooted in the practice and history of painting; in addition, he also works in the fields of photography, collage, sculpture, and exhibition design. Aram’s work is a blend of Modernism with ornamental, often non-Western, art.

Aram’s recent exhibitions often function as full installations, combining painting, sculpture, collage, and exhibition design to create an overall experience. His solo exhibitions have included  the 2019 “Arabesque” at the Green Art Gallery in Dubai; “An Object, A Gesture” at New York’s FLAG Foundation in 2018; “FOCUS: Kamrooz Aram” at Fort Worth’s Modern Art Museum in 2018; and “Ornament for Indifferent Architecture” at Belgium’s Museum Dhondt-Dhaenena in 2017.

Rainer Maria Rilke: “(Life) Holds You in Its Hand”

 

Photographers Unknown, A Collection: Life Holds You in Its Hand

“So don’t be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don’t know what work they are accomplishing within you?”

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Born in Prague, Czechia, in December of 1875, Rainer Maria Rilke  was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets. He was unique in his efforts to expand the realm of poetry through new uses of imagery and syntax and with an aesthetic philosophy that rejected the precepts of Christianity and worked to reconcile beauty and suffering. 

In 1899 Rilke made the first of two pivotal trips to Russia, discovering what he called his spiritual fatherland in both the Russian people and the landscape. There he met Leo Tolstoy, L O Pasternak, and the peasant poet Spiridon Droschin, whose poems he translated into German. These trips provided Rilke with the poetic material and inspiration essential to his developing philosophy of existential materialism and art as religion. 

Rilke’s verse became firmly fixed in his major poetry collection “Newe Gedichte (New Poems)”, with its verses becoming more objective, evolving from an impressionistic personal vision to the representation of this vision with impersonal symbolism. The major influence of this was Rilke’s association with French sculptor Auguste Rodin, under whom he worked as a secretary from 1905 to 1906. These verses employed a simple vocabulary to describe subjects experienced in everyday life, transforming his observations into art. 

In the last few years of his life, Rilke was inspired by such French poets as Paul Valery and Jean Cocteau, and wrote most of his last verses in French. Rilke suffered from illness his whole life and died of leukemia in 1926 while staying at the Valmont sanatorium near Lake Geneva.

“Letters to a Young Poet” is a collection of ten letters written by twenty-seven year-old Rainer Rilke to Franz Xaver Kappus, a nineteen year-old officer cadet at the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt, Austria. Kappus corresponded with the poet from 1902 to 1908, seeking his advice as to the quality of his poetry, and in deciding between a literary career or a career as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army.These letters offer insight into the ideas and themes that appear in Rilke’s early poetry and his working process.

“Remarkable, this journey from the youthful music of Bohemian folk poetry… to Orpheus, remarkable how… his mastery of form increases, penetrates deeper and deeper into his problems! And at each stage now and again the miracle occurs, his delicate, hesitant, anxiety-prone person withdraws, and through him resounds the music of the universe; like the basin of a fountain he becomes at once instrument and ear.”

—Herman Hesse, My Belief: Essays on Life and Art,  (A summary of Rainer Maria Rilke’s evolution as a poet)