A fine art, film, history and literature site oriented to, but not exclusively for, the gay community. Please be aware that there is mature content on this blog. Information on images and links to sources will be provided if known. Enjoy your visit and please subscribe.
Julien Duval, “Portand City of Rovinj, Croatia”, Date Unknown
Julien Duval, a professional photographer specializing in travel photography, interior design, and music photography, is based in Zagreb, the capital city of Croatia. Born in Normandy in western France, he lived most of his life in Besançon, located in eastern France close to the border with Switzerland. Duval majored in geography, obtaining a Masters degree in geography and started a PhD at the University of Franche-Comte in France.
Julien Duval, upon changing his field of study to photography, spent three years ofstudy in Paris. Photographers that he admires include Finish portrait photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen, American photo-journalist Steve McCurry, landscape photographer Max Rive from the Netherlands, and Croatian photographer Tošo Dabac, best known for his social photography of the1930s.
Combining his photography and geography skills with his desire to travel, Duvaltravels, preferably to remote places, to capture the beauty and simplicity of nature with his camera. Recent travels have taken him to the Plitvice Lakes National Park on the Croatian coast, the rural areas of Iceland, the streets of New York City, and the still less-visited national park of Durmitor in northern Croatia. His clients include tourist boards and agencies, hotels, corporate work, and global music festivals.
Lucian Freud, “Two Men”, 1967-1968, Oil on Canvas, 75 x 106.7 cm, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, UK
Insert: Lucien Freud, “Reflection with Two Children (Self Portrait)”, 1965, Oil on Canvas, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Born in December of 1922 in Berlin, Germany, Lucian Michael Freud belonged to the School of London, a group of artists dedicated to figurative painting, a controversial group when abstraction, at that time, dominated the art world . Compared to other painters in the London School, such as Francis Bacon, Freud’s work was viewed more conventional. His figures were painted without idealization, but with emphasis on the body’s imperfections and sexual features. The figures in Freud’s work, typically done in a limited tonal range of creamy tans and browns, often exhibited an unease or a disturbance at their current condition.
Lucian Freud’s wide textured brush strokes were influenced by the early Expressionist movement, particularly the work of Austrian painter Egon Schiele and Norwegian painter Edward Munch. By the end of the 1960s, Freud’s brush strokes became more layered and heavier, lending more texture to his expressive portraits portraying naked deformed or unpleasant bodies. During the 1980s and 1990s as he gain popularity,Freud began painting the portraits of many famous people, including, most notably, his portrait of the British Queen Elizabeth II.
Lucian Freud is famous for his series of self-portraits which he painted persistently over period of six decades. The self-portraits are intense, intimate and visceral, and chart his artistic development. While they are all recognizable as Freud, his approach to self-portraiture and painting from life shifted throughout his career. As an artist, Freud was always looking to extend his exploration of painting as a method of capturing not only the likeness or appearance of himself and his sitters, but also a sense of their emotional and psychological makeup.
Freud’s self-portraits are not always straightforward. There is a degree of transience as he appears in a drawn mirrored reflection, in fragments of unfinished works, or glimpsed in the margins of others’ portraits. He placed himself in a mythological guise in his 1949 “Actaeon (Self-Portrait with Antlers)” and as a partial face contained within his 1947 drawing “Flyda and Arvid”. Freud also placed his face partly peeking around a corner in his 1947 painting “Still Life with Green Lemon”. In this painting, although the green lemon is given a prominent central position on the canvas, Freud gave his peeking face equal weight, drawing the attention of the viewer.
Note: Lucian Freud began his painting “Two Men” while working on a full=length portrait of the same two men in which the naked figure is seen standing. He became so absorbed in what he was painting that he put the larger full-length project aside to finish his “Two Men”, a peaceful scene with undercurrents of suggestive tension.
Top Insert Image: Lucien Freud, “Reflection with Two Children (Self Portrait)”, 1965, Oil on Canvas, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Bottom Insert Image: Lucian Freud, “Doble Retrato (Double Portrait)”, 1985-1986, Oil on Linen, 78.8 x 88.9 cm, Private Collection
Photographers Unknown, (The World in Another Time)
“The river of his youth had been diverted and poured out broadly across the land to seep through dirt to the roots of crops instead of running in its bed. The river was no longer a river, and the desert was no longer a desert. Nothing was as it had been.
He knew what had happened to the sage-lands. He himself had helped burn them. Then men like his father had seized the river without a trace of evil in their hearts, sure of themselves but ignorant, and children of their time entirely, with no other bearings to rely on. Irrigators and fruit-tree growers, they believed the river to be theirs. His own life spanned that time and this, and so he believed in the old fast river as much as he believed in apple orchards, and yet he saw that the two were at odds, the river defeated that apples might grow as far as Royal Slope. It made no more sense to love the river and at the same time kill it growing apples than it made sense to love small birds on the wing and shoot them over pointing dogs. But he’d come into the world in another time, a time immune to these contradictions and in the end he couldn’t shake old ways any more than he could shake his name.”
Franz Krüger, “Portrait of Prince Nikolai Saltykov”. 1850, Oil on Canvas, 98 x 79 cm, Hermitage Museum
Born into a noble family in September of 1797 at Grob-Radegast, Duchy of Anhalt-Dessau, Germany, Franz Krüger’s first studied with the local ornithologist I. F. Naumann, for whom he painted sketches of bird species. and printmaker Carl WilheIm Kolbe, who instilled in him the qualities of precise observation. In 1812, Krüger moved to Berlin where he studied at the Academy of the Arts until his graduation in 1814, continuing his studies independently.
Between 1818 and 1819, Krüger produced a series of paintings dedicated to the struggle of the German people against Emperor Napoleon. In 1820 at the Berlin Academy, he exhibited portraits of Prince Augustus of Prussia and Count August von Gneisenau, for which he received further royal commissions leading to him becoming one of the most popular portrait painters in Europe.
Franz Krüger became in 1825 a member and Professor of the Berlin Academy of the Arts, and later, became a court painter of the Prussian King Friedrich Wilheim III. In 1831, now a member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Art, he exhibited at the Winter Palace his painting “Parade ion the Opera Square in Berlin” and his “Equestrian Portrait of Friedrich Wilheim III of Prussia”. The large parade composition, done between 1824 and 1831, is now at the Berlin National Gallery and the equestrian portrait is at the Winter Palace’s Military Gallery.
Enjoying a special arrangement with the Russian Emperor Nicholas I, Franz Krüger left his most significant portraits of members of the Royal Family and nobility, as well as paintings and watercolors of court life, parades and military exercises, to the Hermitage Museum. These include perhaps his most famous portraits, those of Emperor Alexander I and his brother Nicholas I.
Born in October of 1736, Nikolai Saltykov was a member of the Saltykov noble family, who became a Russian Field Marshal and imperial courtier and the tutor of the future Russian Tsar Paul Iand his two sons, Constantine and Alexander. Catherine II of Russia made him vice-president of Russia’s Military Council and, ten years later, made him a member of the Order of Saint Andrew, a senator and member of the high court council.
The portrait of Nikolai Saltykov by Franz Krüger, done in 1850, depicts Saltykov at the age of fourteen, dressed in traditional court costume. By that time, Saltykov had already taken part, with his father, in the Russian advance to the River Rhine against Prussian forces in the Seven Years’ War and was a permanent member of the Semyonovsky Regiment, one of the oldest regiments of the Imperial Russian Army.
Felipe Jaramillo is a Columbian-born world fashion model living in Bogota, Republic of Columbia. Workking through Slater Model Management, he has done multiple photo shoots worldwide.
Magnus Hirschfeld, “Different from the Others”, 1919,Directed by Richard Oswald, Cinematography by Max Fassbender, Richard Oswald Film, Berlin
Video Soundtrack: “Meditation de Thais” by Joshua Bell
Born in May of 1868 in Kolberg, Prussia, Magnus Hirschfeld was a German physician and sexologist educated primarily in Germany, earning his doctoral degree in 1892. Observing the suicide rate of his gay patients, he became an outspoken advocate for sexual minorities. In May of 1897 Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, a campaign for social recognition of gay, bisexual, and transgender men and women, and against their legal persecution. Under Herschfeld’s leadership, the Committee gathered over five thousand signatures on a petition to overturn Paragraph 175, the section of the German penal code that criminalized homosexuality. It received little support in the Reichstag in 1898, made some progress later, until its demise with the Nazi Party took power.
With the rise of the national socialist party in Germany, Magnus Hirschfeld was badly beaten by a group of võlkisch activists who attacked him on the streeet. In 1933, his Institute for the Research of Sexuality was sacked, the staff beaten, and its contents of books and documents burned on the street. At the time of the book burning, Hirschfeld was on a world speaking tour. He never returned to Germany, eventually near the end of his life, settling in Nice, France. Magnus Hirschfeld died in Nice on May 14, 1935 and is buried in the Caucade Cemetery.
Enacted in 1871, the German penal code’s Paragraph 175 sentenced thousands of accused German homosexual men to jail terms for “unnatural vice between men.” In 1919, director Richard Oswald and psychologist Dr.Magnus Hirschfeld created a film intended to expose the unjust Paragraph 175 and help liberate the “third sex” from legal persecution and public scorn. It was the first movie to portray homosexual characters beyond the usual innuendo and ridicule.
“Different from the Others” casts Conrad Veidt as Paul Korner, a gay concert pianist blackmailed by a closeted crook named Bollek. When Korner’s budding romance with Kurt Sivers, a handsome young music student, played by Fritz Schulz,runs afoul of Bollek’s extortion, Korner goes to the German courts for protection. But the draconian Paragraph 175 makes criminals out of both accuser and accused, ultimately costing Korner his career, his freedom, and his life.
One of the first gay-themed films in the history of cinema, “Different from the Others” was banned at the time of its release, later burned by the Nazis and was believed lost for more than forty years. Using recently discovered film segments, still photos and censorship documents from different archives, Filmmuseum Muenchen has resurrected this truly groundbreaking silent film for DVD.
Second Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Magnus Hirschfeld with his partner, Li Shiu Tong in Nice, France”. 1934-1935, Gelatin Silver Print
Third Image Insert: Magnus Hirschfeld, on the right, with his partner Tao Li, at the fourth conference of the World League for Sexual Reform in 1932. Tao Li’s father, Li Kam-tong, a wealthy Hong Kong business man, approved of his son’s relationship with Hirschfeld.
Charles Burchfield, “House of Mystery”, 1924, Watercolor over Graphite on Heavy Textured Cream Wove Paper Laid on Cardboard and Varnished, 74 x 60 cm, Art Institute of Chicago
Insert: Charles Burchfield, “Orion in December”, 1959, Pencil and Watercolor on Paper, 101 x 84 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC
Born in Ashtabula Harbor, Ohio, Charles Ephraim Burchfield was a Modernist painter known for passionate watercolor scenes of nature and townscapes. During his life, he often drew inspiration from the urban atmosphere of Buffalo, New York, and the small town settings in Salem, Ohio.
Charles Burchfield won a scholarship to attend the Cleveland School of Art, where he studied under the Modernist watercolor painter Henry G. Keller, graduatingin 1916. He developed his own particular style, working in a dry-brush technique, by the summer of 1915, sketching and painting around Salem, Ohio. Burchfield painted in an almost Fauvist style with broad areas of simple colors and, adding in 1917, visual motifs expressing human, often disturbing, moods. Painting consistently, he produced half of his life-time work while living in Salem from 1915 to 1917.
Starting in 1919, initially to provide financially for his wife and children, Burchfield painted small-town and industrial scenes in the style of the Regionalist movement with the intent to sell them in the New York art market. After the approach in 1928 to the Frank Rehn Gallery in New York, the successful sales of his work enabled him to resign his wallpaper design employment at Birge & Co in Buffalo and paint full-time. These large watercolors of small towns and industries, often resembling oil paintings, which continued until 1943, are the ones most associated with him.
Attempting to regain a lost intensity, Charles Burchfield again returned in 1943 to the enthusiasm of his earlier work, developing large, visionary renditions of nature envisioned with heightened colors, swirling brush strokes, and exaggerated forms. Using the skills he mastered in his middle years, he attempted to show an era of human history where men saw spirits in natural objects and forces of nature. He also returned to watercolors done in his youth, reworking and enlarging them by adding sections of paper to the original sheets.
Charles E. Burchfield died on January 10th of 1967 at the age of seventy-three, after spending most of his life in West Seneca, New York. He is buried in Oakwood Cemetery in the Village of East Aurora, New York. The largest collection of his paintings are in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo.
—Arthur O’Shaughnessy, Ode, Poems of Arthur O’Shaughnessy
Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy was a British poet, born in March of 1844 in London to Irish parents. In June, 1861, he became a transcriber in the library of the British Museum, reportedly through the influence of English writer and politician Sir Edward Lytton. Two years later, O’Shaughnessy became a herpetologist in the museum’s zoological department.
Always having a true passion for literature, O’Shaughnessy published his first collection of poetry “Epic of Women” in 1870, followed in 1872 by the poetry collection “Lays of France”.In 1873 he married, at the age of thirty, Eleanor Marston, the daughter of author John Westland Marston. After the 1874 publishing of “Music and Moonlight”, his third poetry collection, O’Shaughnessy and his wife wrote and published a volume of children stories entitled “Toyland” in 1875.
After the publishing of “Toyland”, O’Shaughnessy did not produce any more volumes of poetry during the rest of his life. His last collection of poetry ,“Songs of a Worker”, was published posthumously in 1881. Both of the children of the marriage died in infancy; his wife Eleanor died in 1879. Arthur O’Shaughnessy died in London on January 30, 1881, at the age of thirty-seven from a fever. He is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in London.
Arthur O’Shaughnessy was strongly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite artists and writers, among whom were his friends, painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and novelist Ford Madox Brown. He was also influenced by the contemporary French poetry translations of Paul Verlaine, the poetry of Sully Prudhomme, and the works of Algarnon Charles Swinburne, known for the use of alliteration in his verse.
Known for his much anthologized poem “Ode”, Arthur O’Shaughnessy is chiefly remembered for his later transcendental work that was influenced by the French Symbolist movement. His “Epic of Women”, with its poems using repetitive initial consonant sounds and rhythmic pace, is considered by many to be his best work.
Frederick Evans, “Aubrey Beardsley (With Hands)”, 1893, Platinum Print and Photogravure, Wilson Center for Photography, London
Born in London in June of 1853, Frederick H. Evans was a British photographer known fo his images of architectural subjects. Before becoming a full-time photographer in 1898, he was a bookseller. While working as a clerk in London’s breweries, Aubrey Beardsley spent his lunch breaks browsing in Evan’s second-hand bookshop, developing his artistic and literary tastes from the wide variety of books.
As a result of his visits, Aubrey Beardsley became close friends with Frederick Evans, who was developing his photographic technique of monochrome printing involving a platinum process. Using his new process, Evans shot this portrait of Beardsley in 1893.
This portrait of Aubrey Beardsley was used in the editions of his early published works and has become the defining image of the artist. It became known as the ‘gargoyle portrait’, for Beardsley’s pose resembles the famous carved figure on the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.
Born in August of 1872, Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was an English author and illustrator. His black ink drawings were influenced by Japanese woodcuts, and emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James McNeill Whistler. Beardsley’s contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau and poster styles was significant despite his early death from tuberculosis in March of 1898, at the age of twenty-five.
Image reblogged with many thanks to a great photographic history site: https://artblart.com
Edward Francis Burney, “Seated Nude”, 1790-1800, Watercolor, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven,, Conneticutt
Edward Francis Burney, “Self Portrait”, 1785-1800, Watercolor, 18 x 14 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London
Born on September 7th of 1760 in Worcester, England, Edward Francis Burney became a student at the Royal Academy School of Art in 1776, at the age of sixteen. During this time, he made two fine drawings of the Antique School, which are now in the Royal Collection in London. Receiving encouragement from portrait painter Joshua Reynolds, then the president of the school, Burney exhibited several works at the Royal Academy of Art between the years 1780 to 1803.
Though he was a capable portraitist, painting family and friends, and also historical scenes, Burney worked mainly as an illustrator, devoting a greater part of his career to book illustrations. In 1780, he exhibited three illustrations for his cousin, author Fanny Burney’s 1778 coming-of age novel “Evelina”. One of these illustrations was later engraved and used in the 1791 edition of the novel. Burney created a set of thirteen illustrations for a 1799 edition of Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, now in the collection of the Huntington Library in California.
Influenced by the satirical style of painter and social critic William Hogarth, Edward Burney produced a rococo-styled set of four large watercolors, satirizing the contemporary musical and social life. Considered his most important work, these pieces from the 1820s are: “The Waltz”, “The Triumph of Music”, “Amateurs of Tye-Wig Music” and “The Elegant Establishment for Young Ladies”. Burney may have intended to publish prints of the paintings and to sell both originals and prints. There was a substantial market for satirical prints during this period. The four pictures were, however, never published.
Edward Francis Burney died, unmarried, in London on December 16th of 1848, at the age of eighty-eight. He was buried in Marylebone, England.
Photographers Unknown, (On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous)
“That was the day I learned how dangerous a color can be. That a boy could be knocked off that shade and made to reckon his trespass. Even if color is nothing but what the light reveals, that nothing has laws, and a boy on a pink bike must learn, above all else, the law of gravity.”
—Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Born in October of 1988 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong (born Vuro’ng Quóc Vinh) is a Vietnamese American post, essayist and novelist. Raised by his grandmother, he and the family fled Vietnam due to discrimination, and settled in a Philippine refugee camp, where after time, they achieved asylum in the United States and settled in Hartford, Conneticutt.
After an initial education in Glastonbury, Conneticutt, Vuong searched for an educational venue which would suit him. He first studied marketing at Pace College in New York, and finally enrolled at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. There Vuong studied nineteenth-century English literature, under poet and novelist Ben Lerner, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Vuong received his B.A. in English from Brooklyn College and his M.A. in poetry from New York University.
Ocean Vuong’s first small publication “Burnings”, published by Sibling Rivalry Press, was a 2011 “Over the Rainbow” selection for notable books on non-heterosexuality by the American Literary Association. His first full-length collection “Night Sky with Exit Wounds” was released by Copper Canyon Press in 2016, with a second printing the following year. Vuong’s first novel “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” was published by Penguin Press in June of 2019.
Openly gay and practicing Zen Buddhist, Ocean Vuong is an assistant professor in the MFA Program for Writers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He was awarded fellowships from Poets House, Kundiman, the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Vuong’s awards include the Pushcart Prize in 2014, the Whiting Award for Poetry in 2016, the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2017, the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2020, and the NAAAP Pride Award in 2020.
“Besides being a vehicle for the poem’s movement, I see form as … an extension of the poem’s content, a space where tensions can be investigated even further. The way the poem moves through space, its enjambment or end-stopped line breaks, its utterances and stutters, all work in tangent with the poem’s conceit.”
—Ocean Vuong, Discussing the relationship between form and content in his work.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, in December of 1926, David Levine was an American artist and illustrator. He studied painting at the Pratt Institute in New York and, later in 1946, attended Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, graduating with a degree in education. Levine also studied under painter and teacher Hans Hoffman, whose teaching had a significant influence on post-war American avant-garde artists, including Helen Frankenthaler and Larry Rivers.
Along with doing illustrative work for publications, David Levine produced a body of paintings, many of which were destroyed in a later 1968 fire. Most of Levine’s paintings are watercolors, including portraits of ordinary citizens, seaside images of distinctive architecture, and scenes of vacationers enjoying the day at the beach. He often painted scenes of garment workers, remembering the workers in his father’s garment factory, and scenes of the bathers and amusement rides at Coney Island, a section of his Brooklyn hometown.
Together with portrait artist Aaron Shikler, David Levine founded a salon for artists interested in collective sketching and painting, the Painting Group, in 1958. In the early 1960s, he developed his skills as a political illustrator. He illustrated his first work for The New York Review of Books in 1963, subsequently drawing more than thirty-eight hundred caricatures of famous artists, writers and politicians for the Review’s publication. Levine produced other work of combined equal quantity for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone Magazine, Time, Sports Illustrated, and Playboy, among others.
David Levine was elected in 1967 into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member and became a full Academician in 1971. His work has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums, and several collections have been published, including Knoph’s 1978 “The Arts of David Levine” and the book “American Presidents”, published in 2008 by Knoph, which features his drawings of U.S. Presidents, covering a span of five decades.
In 2006, David Levine was diagnosed with macular degeneration, and with the gradual loss of his vision, produced no new work after April of 2007. A man who drew people of all political persuasions with the same acid treatment, David Levine died in December of 2009 of cancer at the age of eighty-three.
“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”
—-Jim Jarmusch, MovieMaker Magazine #53-Winter, January 22, 2004
Born in Santiago, Chile, Sergio Larrain was an experimental photographer, considered to be the most important of the Chilean photographers. His depictions of his homeland in the 1950s and1960s were taken with a documentarian’s instinct, the scenes creatively presented with vertical frames, deep shadows and low angles. Most notable were Larrain’s intense images of the children of Santiago living on the banks of the Mapocho River and his series of images which captured the mood of late 1950s London.
After studying music and forestry in the United States, Sergio Larrain, with the assistance of a British Council scholarship, traveled to Europe and the Middle East, working for various European magazines, joining the staff of the Brazilian magazine “O Cruzeiro” in 1956. The images he shot in London during his travels caught the attention of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who, a founding member of Magnum Photos, invited Larrain to join the international photographic collective.
Sergio Larrain joined Magnum Photos in 1959 as an associate, becoming a full member in 1961. After that, Larrain worked in photography professionally for only ten years until 1972. A follower of the Bolivian philosopher Oscar Ichazo, heretreated from public and professional life to live in the remote mountain village of Tulahuén, where he took up meditation and the art of calligraphy. Sergio Larrain died in Tulahuén on February 7th of 2012.
Of the four photographic books published in Larrain’s lifetime, “Valparaiso”, published in 1991, made the greatest impression on the public and fellow photographers. Sergio Larrain began photographing the famous Chilean port of Valparaiso throughout the 1950s. In 1963, he returned, accompanied by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, to spend more time in the city, exploring and photographing the bohemian lifestyle of the port-side neighborhoods.
Sergio Larrain’s “Valparaiso” was republished in 1993 as an extended edition of the work, which included photographs from the series he had taken in the 1950s. In 2016, a new edition of the work was released by Xavier Barral Editions of Paris which included eighty unpublished images and Larrain’s handwritten and typed notes, letters, and drawings. Through these texts, Sergio Larrain expressed his emotions and his faith in the importance of yoga meditation, revealing the sensitivity extended throughout his work.
Note: Upon being developed, a set of Sergio Larrain’s photographs shot in the 1950s outside Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris revealed that a couple, unnoticed at the time of the shoot, was in the frame. This discovery provided the inspiration for Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar’s 1959 short story “The Devil’s Drool”, which in turn inspired Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 classic mystery thriller “Blow-Up”.
Top Insert Image: Sergio Larrain, “School Boys, Santiago, Chile”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Magnum Photos
Born in 1858 in Saint John’s, Newfoundland, Maurice Brazil Prendergast was a post-impressionist artist who worked in watercolor, oil paints, and mono-type. At a young age with very little schooling, he was apprenticed to a commercial artist in Boston, where he became influenced by the bright-colored and flat-patterned work. A shy, reserved individual, Prendergast remained a bachelor throughout his life, closely attached to his artist brother Charles, a gifted craftsman and artist.
Starting in 1892, Prendergast studied for three years in Paris at the Atelier Colarossi, under painter Gustave Courtis,and at the Académie Julian. During one of his early stays in Paris, he met the Canadian landscape painter James Morrice. Under the influence of Morrice, Prendergast began sketching on wood panels scenes of elegantly dressed women and children at the seaside resorts of Saint-Malo and Dieppe. Later, drawing inspiration from the post-impressionists Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, he developed a more sophisticated modern style, with boldly contrasting, jewel-like colors, and flattened, patterned forms rhythmically arranged on a canvas.
Returning home in 1895, Prendergast shared a studio with his brother, continuing in his work to focus on people strolling in parks, on the beach, or traveling the city streets. A trip to Venice in 1898 exposed him to the genre scenes of early Renaissance narrative painter Vittore Carpaccio and encouraged him toward even more complex and rhythmic arrangements. Prendergast also became one of the first Americans to embrace the work of Cézanne, understanding and using Cézanne’s expressive use of form and color.
A successful exhibition of the work Prendergast produced in Venice was held in 1900 at the Macbeth Galleries in New York. In 1907 he traveled to France; where,after contact with the Fauvist movement, he started painting works with startling bright colors and staccato brushstrokes. Later in 1907, Prendergast exhibited his new work in a show with the group of artists known as The Eight, exponents of the Ashcan School.
In 1913 Prendergast was invited to participate in the famed Armory Show in New York City which was largely arranged by his friend, landscape painter Arthur B.Davies. In 1914, he settled in New York, along with his brother Charles, where he enjoyed great success with collectors such as Duncan Phillips, and attracted a number of important patrons, including John Quinn, modern art collector Lillie B. Bliss, and Dr. Albert Barnes, the founder of the Barnes Foundation.
During his final years of his career, Maurice Prendergast spent his time sketching during the summers in New England and painting in New York in the winters. In frail health by 1923, he died a year later, in February of 1924, at the age of sixty-five.
