Yuri Georges Annenkov

Yuri Georges Annenkov, Theater and Film Costume Design

Besides his renown as a painter and illustrator, Yuri Georges Annenkov was one of the top costume designers in French cinema from 1926 until the end of the 1950s. Born into a family of Imperial Russia’s cultural elite that suffered through the changes in political power, he was able to overcome the accusations of political radicalism that surrounded his family. This enabled Annenkov to study at the Stieglitz School of Art in Saint Petersburg, where Marc Chagall became one of his classmates.

Before the outbreak of the First World War, Annenkov traveled to Paris for further study, and began illustrating books and designing for the stage. In the period immediately after the Russian Revolution, he returned to Russian and was active in the Soviet Theater and outdoor performance shows, and also worked as a portraitist. Annenkov emigrated to Paris in 1924 where he settled and began designing ballet sets for American ballet choreographer George Balanchine and Russian ballet dancer and choreographer Léonide Massine.

In 1926, Yuri Georges Annenkov began what was to become a two-decade long career in movies. He was first engaged in 1926 to design the costumes for German film director F. W. Murnau’s production “Faust”, which would be Murnau’s last German film. From 1945 to 1955, Annekov was the president of the French Syndicate of Cinema Technicians.

Annenkov’s most important body of work in film were the costumes he designed for the post-war films of director Max Ophüls, which included “La Ronde”, a series of character vignettes with circular visual motifs, and the 1953 “The Earrings of Madame De. .”, a romantic drama for which Annenkov received an Oscar nomination for Best Costume Design.

The work Annenkov did as art director for Ophüls culminated with his brilliant costumes created for the director’s final film, the 1955 “Lola Montès”. The film is a deliberate exercise in overabundance and opulence, and here, guided by Ophüls, Annenkov’s use of the Baroque style is a subtle critique of excess. Filmed in Technicolor by cinematographer Christian Matras, “Lola Montès” had an important influence on the French New Wave cinema movement and has since become a cult classic.

Naur Calvalcante

Photography by Naur Calvalcante

Naur Cavalcante is a designer and photographer, specializing in portraiture and commercial advertising, working in both Três Lagoas and São Paulo, Brazil. His work has been presented in the magazines: “Revista Planter”, “Revista Ella”, “Em Focco”, and the online magazines “Image Amplified” and “Morphosis”.

More information on the artist’s work can be located at: https://naurcavalcante.46graus.com

Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo

Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, A Shepherd with a Flute, 1525 to 1540, Oil on Canvas, 98 x 78 cm, J. Paul Getty Museum

Born in Brescia, Republic of Venice in 1480, Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo was an Italian High Renaissance painter, noted for his coloring, chiaroscuro, and realism of his works. Little is known about his formative years; his first records attest to the fact that he was in the city of Parma in 1506, and a member of the Florentine painters’ guild in 1508.

During this period in Florence, Savoldo finished his 1510 “Elijah Fed by the Raven”, now residing at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. In 1515 he painted the “Portrait of a Clad Warrior”, which was wrongly identified previously with painter Gaston de Foix. Savoldo was interested, as was other contemporary northern Italian painters, in the traditions of the Flemish school; some of that influence can be seen in his “Temptation of Saint Anthony”, particularly in the depiction of the saint’s tempters. These Florentine works of Savoldo were appreciated by the commissioners from Venice, where Savoldo relocated sometime before 1520.

On June 15, 1524 Giovanni Savoldo signed a contract for an altarpiece for the church of San Domenico in Pesaro; this work now resides in Milan’s Brera Art Academy. The influence of the northern-Italian painter Giorgione’s use of color and mood can be felt in Savoldo’s poetic treatment of such works as his 1525 “Portrait of a Knight”. In 1527, Savoldo completed a “St. Hieronymus” for the residence of the Averoldi family in Brescia and, in the 1530s, a Nativity scene similar to Antonio de Corregio’s work of the same topic, which is now in the National Gallery in Washington DC.

In 1533 Savoldo painted his “Madonna with Four Saints” at the church of Santa Maria in Verona; and in 1537-1538 he executed the altarpiece for the main altar of Santa Croce, Brescia. He finished commissions for two Nativity paintings in 1540: one at the church of San Giobbe inVenice and one at the church of San Barnaba in Brescia. Showing influences by Titian and Lorenzo Lotto for clearly defined shapes in light, Savoldo’s 1540 “Magdalen” is a masterpiece of lighting effects, cloaked in an enigmatic white gown, almost completely veiled except for the face, with a sliver of red cloth sleeve emerging in a alluring fashion.

Savoldo’s use of deep, rich color gave his paintings dramatic tonal values. He defined his luminous, meticulously detailed figures by setting them against reflected or nocturnally lit scenes with unusual effects of light. Through the span of his career, Savoldo painted only forty paintings and had little influence on the course of Venetian painting. The exact date of is death is not known; in 1548 he was noted as still living but very old. Forgotten after his death, Savoldo’s reputation was revived with exhibitions of his work in the early twentieth century, and retrospectives held in 1990 in Brescia, Italy and Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Note: Giovanni Savoldo’s “A Shepherd with a Flute” is an example of the genre scenes that became popular in Venice in the early sixteenth century, when interest in pastoral poetry and drama also began to flourish. The figure of the shepherd is clearly delineated against his surroundings and appears almost luminous in the evening light through Savoldo’s use of deep, rich colors and expressive textures.

Image Insert: Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, “Magdalen”, 1540, Oil on Canvas, 89.1 x 82.4 cm, National Gallery of London

Mutsuo Takahashi: “Clean as Leather, Lustful as a Lily”

Photographers Unknown, The Parts and Pieces Making a Whole: Set Eleven

“Sleeping Wrestler
You are a murderer
No you are not, but really a wrestler
Either way it’s just the same
For from the ring of your entangled body
Clean as leather, lustful as a lily
Will nail me down
On your stout neck like a column, like a pillar of tendons
The thoughtful forehead
(In fact, it’s thinking nothing)
When the forehead slowly moves and closes the heavy eyelids
Inside, a dark forest awakens
A forest of red parrots
Seven almonds and grape leaves
At the end of the forest a vine
Covers the house where two boys
Lie in each others arms: I’m one of them, you the other
In the house, melancholy and terrible anxiety
Outside the keyhole, a sunset
Dyed with the blood of the beautiful bullfighter Escamillo
Scorched by the sunset, headlong, headfirst
Falling, falling, a gymnast
If you’re going to open your eyes, nows the time, wrestler”

—Mutsuo Takahashi, Sleeping Wrestler, Poems of a Penisist, 2012

Born in December of 1937 in the Fukuoka Prefecture of Japan, Mutsuo Takahashi is a poet, essayist and writer, known especially for his open writing about male homoeroticism. He spent his early years in the countryside of Japan. At three months old, Takahashi lost his father to pneumonia and was left, along with his sisters, by his mother in the care of his grandparents. After his mother returned from mainland China, the family moved to the port town of Moji, just as the air raids by the Allied Powers of World War Two intensified. It was at this time, watching the war in action with his classmates, that Takahashi became aware of his sexual identity, which became a common subject in his first book of poetry published in 1959.

Takahashi graduated from the Fukuoka University of Education, after which he moved to Tokyo in 1962. He continued writing poetry while employed at an advertising company. His first book, published in 1964, was “Rose Tree, Fake Lovers”, an anthology that described male to male erotic love in bold and direct language. Takahashi sent the collection to novelist Yukio Mishima who helped promote Takahashi’s work; a close relationship and friendship resulted that lasted until Mishima’s suicide in 1970.

During the 1960s and 1970s, there was a large existential trend in the literature and culture of Japan, which included an interest in eroticism. In collaboration with his two friends, surreal poet Chimako Tada and poet Shigeo Washisu, Mutsuo Takahashi created the literary journal “The Symposium (Kyōen)”, named after Plato’s famous dialogue.

Written in free verse through the 1970s, Takahashi’s poetry used homoeroticism as an important theme. An example of this is his long poem Ode (Homeuta)”, an epic one-thousand line erotic fantasy poem published by Winston Leyland. He also started writing prose at this time: the 1970 “Twelve Views from the Distance” about his early life, a 1972 surrealistic novella based on his trip to the gay underground of New York City entitled “A Legend of a Holy Place”, and the 1974 “Zen’s Pilgrimage of Virtue”, a homoerotic and humorous retelling of the Buddhist legend of Sudhana.

Traveling through the world, Mutsuo Takahashi broaden his themes by incorporating his knowledge of the history of world literature and art, often including poems of homage to important writers in his collections. In 2010, he produced a small book of poems to accompany an exhibition which presented the work of American assemblage artist and filmmaker Joseph Cornell. Still actively using free style verse,Takahashi also wrote traditional Japanese verse and novels, Nō and Kyōgen plays, works of literary criticism, and a libretto written for an opera by composer Akira Miyoshi.

Residing presently in the seaside city of Zushi, Mutsuo Takahashi has been the recipient of a number of literary prizes in Japan, including the Yomiuri Literay Prize, the Takami Jun Prize, the Modern Poetry Hanatsubaki Prize, and, in 2000, the prestigious Kunshō Award fo his contributions to modern Japanese literature.

Alfred Schwarzschild

The Artwork of Alfred Schwarzschild

Alfred Schwarzschild was born in 1874, the second child of a wealthy Jewish family in Frankfurt, Germany. From 1890 to 1892, he studied under painter and draftsman Anton Burger in Kronberg and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. After leaving the Academy, Schwarzschild studied with painter and illustrator Wilhelm von Diez, an Academy Professor who had a major influence on his work. In 1903, Schwarzschild exhibited his work at the Paris Exhibition and received an Honorable Mention.

During World War I, Schwarzschild joined the Imperial German Flying Corps as an observer, where he shot aerial photographs of the terrain and drew sketches of the enemy positions. For his endeavors, he was awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class. In 1924, Schwarzschild married Theodora Luttner and later, with their three daughters, settled in the Isar River area of Munich, where he shared an artist studio with painter Albert Weisgerber, whose work formed the bridge between Impressionism and early Expressionism.

From 1901, Alfred Schwarzschild regularly entered work in the international art exhibition in the Royal Munich Glass Palace. In 1901 he was awarded a medal fo his figurative oil painting “Übermut (High Spirits)” at the Glaspalast, Munich.. Between 1905 and 1909, Schwarzschild was also regularly represented by his work in the annual Great Berlin Art Exhibition. Painting in styles ranging fro Art Nouveau to New Objectivity, he became the great portrait painter of the Munich upper class.

Besides his portraiture work, Alfred Schwarzschild designed many souvenir postcards. He created a series of postcards with the image of a Munich child as a motif, a series on the topic of Oktoberfest, and a series on Munich’s famous Hofbräuhaus restaurant, founded in 1589 by the Duke of Bavaria. Schwarzschild often used his youngest daughter as the model for the postcards.

When Germany can under the rule of the National Socialist Party who placed restrictions upon the Jewish population, Schwarzschild found it extremely difficult, due to his Jewish origins, to sell his artwork. He fled to England in 1936, with the hope of earning a living; his family arrived in England in 1938, at which time the Nazi Party seized all his German assets. During the war years and despite war-time scarcities, Schwarzschild continued his artwork using whatever materials were available.

Known for his portraiture work, figurative paintings, and postcard images, Alfred Schwarzschild lived and worked in the United Kingdom until his death in London on August 19th of 1948. His artwork was deemed unworthy by the Nazi Party on the basis of it being sectarian; however, many of his works have survived and are in private collections and European museums.

Arlene Gottfried

Photography by Arlene Gottfried

Born in August of 1959 in Coney Island, New York, Arlene Gottfried was a photographer who recorded scenes of ordinary life in some of New York City’s more impoverished neighborhoods. At the age of nine, Arlene Gottfired’s family moved to the Crown Heights area where its Puerto Rican culture caught her attention and expanded her world view. Later in the 1970s, her family moved to the Alphabet City neighborhoods of the East Village and the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Arlene Gottfried studied photography at the Fashion Institute of Technology where she was the only woman in her class. She later moved to Manhattan as a photographer for an advertising agency, where she did commercial work which at that time was a male-dominated profession. Switching to freelance work, Gottfried began shooting images for publications such as LIFE, the Village Voice, The New York Times Magazine, TIME, CBS News, and London’s The Independent. Her freelance work gave her the time and opportunity to wander the streets, always carrying a camera, and shoot her images spontaneously.

Gottfried’s subjects are consistently depicted with a sense of intimacy and curiosity, in which strangers are indistinguishable from friends. In every frame, no matter how tough the subject matter, there is never a sense of detached irony or coolness. She approached all her subjects with careful empathy and directness.

Gottfried produced several series of importance including the 1991 “The Eternal Light” series on the Eternal Light Community Singers, a choral group on the Lower East Side which she later joined, and her 2016 series “Mommie”, her last collection and an epic compilation containing forty years of work documenting the women in her family. Gottfried, a frequent visitor of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, was accepted into the Nuyorican downtown culture and documented her close friend Midnight’s years-long struggle with mental health problems in her 2003 series “Midnight”.

In 2008, a retrospective of Gottfried’s earlier black and white work was published as “Sometimes Overwhelming” by PowerHouse Books. Her “Barcalaitos and Fireworks”, a collection of images of New York’s Puerto Rican community in the 1970s, inspired by its poetry and music, was published in 2011.

Through her life, Arlene Gottfried continued to capture the excitement of everyday life in New York City. She died from complications of breast cancer, surrounded by friends and family. in August of 2017 at her home. Gottfried’s photographs are held in the collections of The Brooklyn Museum; The Jewish Museum; The Tang Teaching Museum, The North Carolina Museum of Art; and the New York Public Library.

Hanya Yanagihara: “A Little Life”

Photographers Unknown, A Collection of Seated Men

“He steps back, still looking. In the painting, Willem’s torso is directed toward the viewer, but his face is turned to the right so that he is almost in profile, and he is leaning towards something or someone and smiling. And because he knows Willem’s smiles, he knows that Willem has been captured looking at something he loves, he knows Willem in that instant is happy. Willem’s face and neck dominate the canvas and although the background is suggested rather than shown, he knows that Willem is at their table. He knows it from the way that JB has drawn the light and shadows on Willem’s face. He has the sense that if he says Willem’s name that the face in the painting will turn toward him and answer; he has the sense that if he stretches his hand out and strokes the canvas he will feel beneath his fingertips Willem’s hair, his fringe of eyelashes.

But he doesn’t do this, of course, just looks up at last and sees JB smiling at him, sadly. “The title card’s been mounted already,” JB says, and he goes slowly to the wall behind the painting and sees its title – “Willem Listening to Jude Tell a Story, Greene Street”-and he feels his beneath abandon him; it feels as if his heart is made of something oozing and cold, like ground meat, and it is being squeezed inside a fist so that chunks of it are falling, plopping to the ground near his feet.”

—Hanya YanagIhara, A Little Life

Born in Los Angeles, California in 1974, Hanya Yanagihara is American novelist, editor and travel writer. A fourth-generation resident of Hawaii, she graduated from Smith College, a private liberal arts women’s college in Massachusetts, in 1995. After graduating, Yanagihara worked as a publicist in New York for several years and, later as writer and editor, for the Condé Nast Traveler magazine. In 2015 she became a deputy editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

Yanagihara’s first novel “The People in the Trees”, published in 2013, was a fictional memoir of a scientific researcher who, after discovering a turtle with life-prolonging qualities, is convicted of child sexual abuse. It received praise as one of the best novels of 2013.

Hanya Yanagihara wrote her 2015 “A Little Life” over a period of eighteen months. A lengthly novel, it follows the lives of four friends in New York City through college to middle-age, with a focus on the character Jude, a lawyer with a mysterious background and unexplained health issues. A closeness develops between Jude and Willem, one of his three friends, which soon evolves into an intimate relationship troubled by Jude’s hidden past.

“A Little Life” is divided into seven distinct chronological parts, with flashbacks inserted throughout the narrative. The central focus is on the social and emotional lives of the four men, which, through these inner lives, discusses the strengths and limits of romantic love, friendship, and the relationships among men. Seen through shifting first-person perspectives as the story evolves, the narrative eventually focuses on Jude’s own traumatic personal experiences and his interactions with this small group of friends.

Andrea Pezzatti

Photography by Andrea Pezzatti

Andrea Pezzatti is a freelance photographer working in the fields of portraiture, commercial, and landscape photography. Based in both Montevideo and Paysandú, Uruguay, she has traveled worldwide, producing portfolios of her work in Italy, France, Spain, Argentina, and Sicily. Pezzetti is currently shooting her work with both the Canon Powershot GFX Mark iii and the Canon Eos 6D.

More examples of Andrea Pezzatti’s work can be found at her 500px site located at: https://500px.com/p/andreapezzatti?view=photos

James Baldwin: “The Child is Filled with Darkness”

Photographer Unknown, The Child is Filled with Darkness

“In a moment someone will get up and turn on the light. Then the old folks will remember the children and they won’t talk anymore that day. And when light fills the room, the child is filled with darkness. He knows that every time this happens he’s moved just a little closer to that darkness outside. The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about. It’s what they’ve come from. It’s what they endure. The child knows that they won’t talk any more because if he knows too much about what’s happened to them, he’ll know too much too soon, about what’s going to happen to him.”

—-James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues

“Sonny’s Blues” is a short story written by James Baldwin, originally published in 1957 in the Partisan Review, a small circulation quarterly New York City magazine dealing with politics, literature, and culture. Written in the first-person singular narrative style, the story presents the memories of a 1950s black teacher in Harlem as he reacts to his brother Sonny’s drug addiction, arrest, and recovery.

Baldwin’s story is set in New York City of the post–World War Two era, when an important political and cultural change was occurring. A diverse array of artists from all over the world, learning and borrowing ideas and techniques from each other, converged in the city and made New York a new cultural capital. Despite differences in style and subject matter, these artists were responding, through their work, to what they believed was America’s unique cultural and political crisis.

While the art scene in New York was rapidly expanding, thousands of African American soldiers were returning home from the war and heading north toward communities like Harlem. Instead of finding new job opportunities and equal rights, the returning men found newly constructed housing projects and vast urban slums. Hundreds of homes in Harlem had been leveled to build these housing projects, which would eventually become symbols of urban blight and poverty,. This experience would be faced by thousands of other African-Americans in the years after the war’s conclusion.

Although America in the 1950s was generally more conservative, the groundwork for the 1960s radical political movements was being laid. The civil rights movement, which had begun in the South earluer in the decade, had started to rapidly spread across the country as millions of African Americans began to seek equal rights. Written at this critical juncture in history, James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” is a testament to the frustration of life in the cities of America and this frustration’s eventual transformation into a political and artistic movement.

Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” was adapted for a short film of the same name by Gregory Scott Williams Jr for his second year project at New York University’s Graduate Film Program. Written and directed by Williams, the short, seventeen-minute film was produced by Seith Mann and starred actor Charles Parnell as the narrator-brother David, and New York-based poet and verbal stylist Saul Williams in the role of Sonny. The cinematography was by Cybel Martin, featuring the music of Gil Scott-Heron and Ray Charles with an original score by composer and pianist John Bickerton. The film can be found in its entirely at YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y9CDEfnKvQ

Willem Arondeus

The Artwork of Willem Arondeus

Born in Amsterdam in 1895, Willem Arondeus was a Dutch illustrator, painter and author. At the age of thirteen, he attended the former Quellinus School, now the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, where he devoted himself to decorative painting. After a family dispute about his homosexuality, he left home at the age of seventeen and severed contact with his family. Contrary to the general custom of the time, Arondeus, even at a young age, openly talked about his homosexuality in his social circles.

After meeting artists in the neighboring villages of Laren and Blaricum, Arondeus decided to pursue a career as an artist. Traveling to Rotterdam, he studied painting at the city’s school for sculptors, the Quellinus School. He started his writing: work in 1920: and he received, in 1923, a commission for a large mural to be installed in the Rotterdam City Hall. Arondeus moved into the countryside of the central Netherlands to the city of Apeldoom where, in 1933, he met and settled with Jan Tijssen, a young gardener who would remain his partner for the next seven years.

Despite their financial struggles between the years 1923 and 1939, Willem Arondeus produced a significant amount of artwork in this period. He worked as an illustrator for the publications of Dutch poets J. H. Leopold, Pieter Cornelis Boutens and Martinus Nijhoff. He also received commissions for calendars and charity stamps, and painted landscapes in the areas of Amsterdam, Blaricum in northern Holland, and on the Isle of Urk. From 1930 to 1932, Arondeus made nine tapestries with ornaments around the arms of Noord-Holland towns for the County Seat.

Around 1935, Willem Arondeus ceased his visual arts work and devoted himself to his writing. He published two novels in 1938; “Het Uilenhuis (The Owls House)” and “In de Bloeiende Ramenas (In the Blossoming Winter Radish)”, both completed with his illustrations in the fin de siecle style. which embraced symbolism and the decadence movement. In 1939 Arondeus published “Matthĳs Maris: De Tragiek van den Droom (The Tragedy of the Dream)”, a biography of the Dutch mystical painter Matthijs Maris, which eased his financial situation.

In May of 1940, the German army invaded and occupied the Netherlands, and required all, above the age of fifteen, to carry identity cards with all personal information, including religion. By 1941, realizing the danger of his work against the German occupation, Arondeus sent Tijssen back to their home in Apeldoorn. Soon after the invasion, he joined the Raad van Verzet, Council of Resistance, and in the spring of 1942, started an underground periodical “Brandarisbrief (The Brandaris Letter)”, named after the oldest Dutch lighthouse. With other graphical artists like Frans Duwaer, Willem Sandberg and Gerrit van der Veen, Arondeus started to hide Jewish citizens and to falsify identity cards, which eventually totaled over eighty thousand.

Aware of the prevalence of false identity cards, the Nazi occupation began to compare the cards with the information found in the Municipal Archives. A plan to attack the Archives and destroy all the records was made by Willem Arondeus, Gerrit van der Veen and others. This attack took place on the evening of March 27 in 1943. A fire was set; with the collusion of the local fire brigade to forestall its extinguishing, thousands of cards were destroyed, which hindered the registration process.

Willem Arondeus was arrested on April 1st of 1943 and sentenced to death in June at a Nazi court held at Amsterdam’s Tropical Museum. He took full responsibility for the attack, with the hope others would be spared. Willem Arondeus, along with a group of twelve, was executed on July 1st of 1943 in the North Sea dunes of Overveen. In his last message before his execution, Arondeus, who had lived openly as a gay man before the war, asked his friend, Laura Carola Mazirel, the future jurist and human rights activist, to testify after the war that “Let it be known that homosexuals are not cowards.”

In 1984 the Dutch government posthumously awarded Resistance Memorial Cross to Willem Arondeus and the others. Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, honored Arondeus in 1986 as a Righteous Among The Nations for destroying Municipal Records of Amsterdam, the result of which prevented the German occupiers from locating many of the Dutch-Jewish population. In 2001 twenty of Arondeus’s homo-erotic poems, written during his life in Urk and inspired by the work of gay Dutch poet Pieter Cornelis Boutens, were published as “Aloof Strophes (Aloof Stanzas)”.

Timothy Liu: “Tiny Flares Corkscrew Up the Sky”

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

Faces sludging forward on the esplanade
to where we are. What we are is energy—
our bodies angled skyward as fading blooms
parachute towards the earth, the crowd
a spent militia—torn blankets left behind
as we march to the riverfront where
tiny flares corkscrew up the sky to release
delayed reports. The night gives up
its ghost—wreaths of smoke crowning floral
cornucopias that spill a motherlode
of fire onto both sides of the shore,
hoarse voices bellowing out rote words
learned in grade school that take on
meaning in a country of peace where
thousands scream through the dark, waiting
for that twenty-one gun salute.

Timothy Liu, A Boston Fourth, Poetry, July 1996

Born in 1965 in San Jose, California, Timothy Liu is an American poet and author residing in New York City. He earned his BA in English at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and his MA in Poetry at the University of Houston in Texas. Liu also studied at the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where he met his husband, the artist Christopher Arabadjis.

Liu considers poet and critic Richard Howard, Welsh poet Leslie Norris, and American writer and literary critic Gordon Lish as his mentors. His poetry, based formally on the meter of syllables, explores the themes of identity, violence, sexuality, with the narrator as witness. His works also deal with cultural taboos and situations largely left out of poetic writing.

Timothy Liu’s work includes: the 1992 “Vox Angelica” which won the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America; “Say Goodnight”, published in 1998 and winner of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award; the 2004 “Of Thee I Sing” winnerof the Poetry Book of the Year Award from Publishers Weekly; the 2005 “For Dust Thou Art”; “Don’t Go Back to Sleep” in 2014; and “Tin House” published in 2018..

Liu’s most recent works include “Luminous Debris: New and Selected Legerdemain 1992-2017” published in 2018 by Barrow Street Books and a finalist in the 2019 Thom Gunn Awards; and his twelfth book of poems, “Let It Ride” published in 2019, which explores how the necessities of life and art join to provide a path forward at midlife.

Timothy Liu has served as a core faculty member at Bennington College’s Writing Seminars and is currently a Professor of English at William Paterson University in New Jersey. His journals and papers are archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.

For more information on Timothy Liu, including books and poems: https://www.timothyliu.net

Forrest Williams

Paintings by Forrest Williams

Born in North Carolina, Forrest Williams is an American figurative painter who lives and works in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts. His extensive education began at Edinburgh University in Scotland where he graduated in 1985 with honors in English Literature and Art History. He next studied at Davidson College in North Carolina, where he earned his BA in English Literature. In 1989, Williams attended the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, earning Honors in Theater. He earned his Masters of Fine Art in Painting at the New York Academy of Art in 1994.

Most of Forrest William’s figurative paintings contain individual male figures, clothed or nude, in subjective spaces. Similar to the work of Hopper, there is a psychological undercurrent of loneliness and a lack of connection between the characters in the presented scenes. The paintings are staged sets, often with decorative elements, such as arrows, whose figures represent the iconic man caught between desire and doubt, and intimacy and uncertainty. .

Williams exhibited in group show a the Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Oregon, and later had his first solo show there, in which all his work sold. These shows were followed with other solo shows, including three at the Heather Marx Gallery in San Francisco between 2002 and 2007, a 2010 solo show entitled “Crossways” at the Marx & Savattero Gallery in San Francisco, and five solo shows at the AMP Gallery in Provincetown between 2014 and 2019.

“I remember reading that the young Balthus was deeply influenced by Derain’s remark, ‘The only purpose of painting today is the recovery of lost secrets.’ That observation was made almost a hundred years ago now, but it still resonates with me.” — Forrest Willams

The artist’s site can be found at : http://www.forrestwilliams.net

Lorenz Frølich

Paintings by Lorenz Frølich

Born in Copenhagen, Denmark in October of 1820, Lorenz Frølich was a painter, illustrator, etcher and graphic artist. He initially studied in Copenhagen under painter Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, now referred to as the Father of Danish painting, and in Dresden between 1843 to 1846 under fresco painter Eduard Julius Bendemann. Frølich later traveled to Paris and studied under historical painter Thomas Couture from 1852 to 1853.

During his academic period, Frølich was influenced, by the impressionist movement through his friends Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Alfred Stevens, and constantly exhibited his work at the salons. Through his friendship with painter Thorald Læssøe, Frølich met painter and graphic artist John Thomas Lundbye, an encounter which swiftly turned into a close relationship. Existing correspondence between the two men shows their friendship was both intellectual and romantic, and lasted until at least 1840.

Nordic sagas and the Danish landscape became the focus of both Frølich’s and Lundbye’s work as they traveled the country to depict the national flora, landscapes and local people. The two artists also did extensive illustrative work, specifically for children’s books. There are several personal works showing the strong bond and collaboration between the two artists during this period: a 1839 portrait of Frølich by Lundbye, now in the Hirschsprung Collection; Frølich’s 1939 “Portrait of the painter J. Th. Lyndbye”; caricatures made by Frølich in 1839 of Lyndbye as a dog; and Frølich’s drawing of the two artists painting outside in June 1839.

Lorenz Frølich produced original etchings for the 1853-55 “Illustreret Danmarkshistorie for Folket (Illustrated Danish History for the People)”; the 1844 “De Tvende Kirketaarne (The Second Church Tower)” by Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger; and the 1845 “Die Götter des Nordens (Gods of the North)”. Frølich’s illustrative work for author Hans Christian Andersen’s stories and the editions published by Pierre-Jules Hetzel in Paris, particularly Frølich’s realistic and candid depictions for the work “Mademoiselle Lili à Paris”, brought him recognition as a renowned illustrator.

Frølich was part of a circle of young Danish artists that, during the 1830s and 1840s, directed their attention towards the creation of a nationalistic form of Nordic art, with the aim of imitating nature in its purest form. He married Carolina Charlotta in de Betou in 1855 and was appointed a professor at Copenhagen’s Royal Danish Academy of Art in 1877. For the celebration of Frølich’s eightieth birthday held in November of 1900, Danish composer and violinist Carl Nielsen wrote the “Kantate til Lorenz Frølich-Festen”. Lorenz Frølich died in 1908 in Hellerup, Denmark.

Insert Image: Lorenz Frølich, “Self Portrait”, 1860s, Oil on Canvas, 22 x 18 cm, Private Collection

John Rechy: “The Coming of the Night”

Photographers and Artists Unknown, The Coming of the Night, Gay Film Gifs

“Did those “new gays” spinning about like giddy tops in discos care to know that dancing with someone of the same sex was punishable as “lewd conduct” then? Still, a club in Topanga Canyon boasted a system of warning lights. When they flashed, lesbians and gay men shifted—what a grand adventure!—and danced with each other, laughing at the officers’ disappointed faces! How much pleasure—and camaraderie, yes, real kinship—had managed to exist in exile. Did those arrogant young people know that, only years ago, you could be sentenced to life in prison for consensual sex with another man? A friend of his destroyed by shock therapy decreed by the courts. Another friend sobbing on the telephone before he slashed his wrists— Thomas’s hands on his steering wheel had clenched in anger, anger he had felt then, anger he felt now. And all those pressures attempted to deplete you, and disallow— “—the yearnings of the heart,” he said aloud. Yet he and others of his generation had lived through those barbaric times—and survived—those who had survived—with style.”

—John Rechy, The Coming of the Night

Born in March of 1931 in El Paso, Texas, during the Depression, John Francisco Rachy is a writer, playwright, essayist and literary critic. He attended Texas Western College, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in English. Rachy continued his education at the New School for Social Research in New York City, studying under Hiram Haydn, a Random House senior editor. Rachy’s semi-autobiographical works explore the world of social and sexual outsiders and draw upon his gay sexuality and Mexican-American heritage.

John Rachy’s writing career began with the short story “The Fabulous Wedding of Miss Destiny”, a gay-oriented story which received the Longview Foundation Fiction Prize in 1961. His first published work, the largely autobiographical novel “City of Night”, was published in 1963 by Grove Press. The novel chronicles the journey of a young Mexican-American from the border town of El Paso into the gay underworld of Times Square, Hollywood Boulevard and the French Quarter of New Orleans during the 1950s. Selling sixty-five thousand hardcover copies, it remained on the New York Times best-seller list for twenty-five weeks and became an international bestseller.

Following the success of “City of Night”, John Rachy has written a large body of work, both fiction and non-fiction. Among his fiction works are: the “Numbers” published in 1967;; “Rushes” published in 1979; the 1999 “The Coming of the Night”; and the 2017 “After the Blue Hour”. Rachy’s non-fiction works include the 1977 “The Sexual Outlaw”, an account of three days and nights in the 1970s sexual underground of Los Angeles, and the 2004 “Beneath the Skin”, an anthology of his essays and literary reviews from The New York Times, Evergreen Review, The Nation, and other publications..

The first novelist to receive PEN-USA-West’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997, John Rachy is also the recipient of the 1999 Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement presented by Publishing Triangle, an American association of gay men and lesbians in the publishing industry. He is currently a faculty member at the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California. In 2018 Rachy’s 2017 novel “After the Blue Hour” won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction.

Note: An interesting read is biographical author Charles Casillo’s 2002 “Outlaw: The Lives and Careers of John Rechy”, a book which examines the dichotomy of John Rechy’s life as both a respected author and professor, and a hustler on Hollywood Boulevard, with insights from Rachy himself and his family, friends, and colleagues.

Harald Kreutzberg

Hans Robertson, “Portrait of Harald Kreutzberg”, 1931

Born in Liberec, Czech Republic in December of 1902, Harald Kreutzberg was a modern dancer and choreographer, known for his roles in both traditional ballets and expressive dance dramas. He played a major role in the development of the expressionist modern dance in Germany.

Trained at the Dresden Ballet School, Kreutzberg studied under two of the most important figures in modern dance, Mary Wigman and Rudolf Laban, and was a critical link in the aesthetic lineage that gave rise to American choreographer and composer Alwin Nikolais, choreographer and dance educator Hanya Holm, and many other U.S. choreographers.

In 1926, Harald Kreutzberg was in Swiss theater choreographer Max Terpis’s “Don Morte”, a version of Edgar Allen Poe’s novel “The Masque of the Red Death”. A year later, he appeared in the plays “Turnadot and Jedermann” and as Puck for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, both directed by Max Reinhardt. Kreutzberg accompanied Reinhardt to New York City where he began a tour of the United States, Canada, and Europe with the dancer Yvonne Georgi.

While his impact on expressionist modern dance was sweeping Europe, in the United States, Kreutzberg was considered by many as a major force in the development of the male modern dancer. He was not afraid to challenge the gender norms in his time. Kreutzberg tended to incorporate feminine movements and costuming in his performances, especially alongside his dance partner Yvonne Georgi. He specifically inspired male dancers by breaking the stereotypical roles of princes, birds, and mythical gods.

With their international tours from 1928-1931, Kreutzberg and Yvonne Georgi exposed the public to the style of expressionist dance. Many gay male dancers in Germany also pursued their careers during the years of the National Socialist government. He was the most notable among them as his long-term partnership with his accompanist and composer Friedrich Wilckens was an open secret. While other gay men were imprisoned and forced to wear a pink triangle, Kreutzberg was allowed to tour throughout Germany and abroad.

In 1943, Harald Kreutzberg appeared as a jester in Georg Willhelm’s film “Paracelsus”, in which he performed a modern hypnotic dance. Choreographer George Balanchine and writer Lincoln Kirstein invited him to share a program with the New York City Ballet in the late 1940s. Kreutzberg established his own dance school in 1955 in Bern, Switzerland, and retired from the stage in 1959. He continued to choreograph for others and teach at his school until his death in Bern on April 25, 1968.

Insert Image: German photographer Hans Robertson, who specialized in the genre of dance, took this photo, on December 11, 1902, showing Harald Kreutzberg wearing a headdress for a performance at the Volksbühne in Berlin.