Hans von Marées

Hans von Marées, “Dre Jünglinge unter Orangenbäumen (Three Young Men under Orange Trees”, 1873-1875, Mixed Media on Panel, 187.5 x 145 cm, Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany

Born in 1837 in Elberfeld, Prussia to a wealthy banking family, Hans Von Marées studied at the Berlin Academy from 1853 to 1855. During 1854, he also studied at the studio of painter and printmaker Carl Steffeck. Marées worked in Munich for eight years, where he became influenced by the historical school of painting. In 1864 literary historian and poet Count Adolf von Schack sent Steffeck and Marées to Italy for further studies by copying the old masters.

While living in Italy from 1864 to 1870, Marées became a friend of art theorist Konrad Fiedler, who later became his patron, and the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand, who would design the architectural setting for Marées’s murals at the zoological museum. After his extended stay in Italy, Marées decided to settle in Italy permanently in 1873.

Residing in Naples in 1873, Hans Von Marées received his most important commission: the painting of the frescoes in the library of the newly built Stazione Zoologica, the zoological museum in Naples. Influenced by his exposure to Italian Renaissance art, his frescoes consisted of five scenes depicting figures in landscapes, intended to express the joys of sea and beach life.

After completing the frescoes, Von Marées moved to Florence, where he became acquainted with classical painter Anselm Feuerbach and the Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin, two leading members of the idealistic art group known as the “German Romans”. Von Marées shared the aesthetic views of philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand and German art theorist Adolph Konrad Fleder, which prompted him to embody the dream of the golden age of humanity in allegorical images, and to invest his works with expressive, creative elements

Von Marées initially specialized in portraiture but later turned to painting mythological subjects. He developed a complex and individualistic technique of overpainting tempera with layers of oil, creating a depth of color quite unlike the muted tones of his fellow artist Anselm Feuerbach.

During the 1880s, Marées painted four triptychs of importance: “The Judgement of Paris”, “The Hesperides”, “The Wooing”, and “Three Saints on Horseback”. The two triptych on mythological themes, “The Judgement of Paris” and “The Hesperides”, are marked by clearly arranged masses, rhythmical forms, and rather bright colors. Their two-dimensional and linear compositions anticipated the form of the art nouveau movement.

Hans Von Marées spent his last years of his life in Rome, supported by his patron, art theorist Konrad Fiedler. Although ambitious, he lacked self-confidence and, in the later part of his life, ceased to exhibit his work. Marées died in Rome at the age of 49 in June of 1887. He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery of Rome in the Rione of Testaccio. A retrospective of his work was shown at the Munich Exhibition in 1891, where his paintings were highly acclaimed.

E. M. Forster: “Madness is Not for Everyone”

Photographers Unknown, Beguiling the Senses and Enchanting the Mind: Photo Set Fourteen

“Madness is not for everyone, but Maurice’s proved the thunderbolt that dispels the clouds. The storm had been working up not for three days as he supposed, but for six years. It had brewed in the insecurities of being where no eye pierces, his surroundings had thickened it. It had burst and he had not died. The brilliancy of day was around him, he stood upon the mountain range that overshadows youth, he saw.”

—E. M. Forster, Maurice

Born on the first of January, 1879 in London, Edward Morgan Forster was a fiction writer and essayist. After his father’s death of tuberculosis in 1890, he and his mother moved to Rooks Nest in Hertfordshire until 1893. This house would serve as the inspiration for his future novel, the 1910 “Howard’s End”. An inheritance from his great-aunt Marianne Thornton in 1887 would enable Forster to live comfortably and pursue a career as a writer.

E. M. Forster attended King’s College Cambridge between 1897 and 1901. There he joined the discussion group known as the Apostles, whose members later constituted the Bloomsbury Group which included Leonard and Virginia Wolff, Giles Lytton Strachey, Clive and Venessa Bell, and artist Duncan Grant. After graduation Forster traveled through continental Europe, visiting Greece and Italy before returning to Surrey, England.

In 1914, by which time he had written all but one of his novels, E. M. Forster visited Egypt, Germany and India with fellow Bloomsbury Group member Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, the British political scientist and philosopher. During the First World War, Forster, a conscientious objector, served in the British Red Cross in Egypt as a Chief Searcher for missing men. Returning again to India in the early 1920s, he became the private secretary to Tukojirao III, the Maharajah of the state of Dewas; the story of which was told in his 1953 non-fiction work “The Hill of Devi”.

After his return to London from India, Forster completed the last of his novels published in his lifetime, the 1924 “A Passage to India”, for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. During the 1930s and 1940s, Forster became a notable broadcaster on BBC Radio and became associated with the British Humanist Association,which opposed censorship and advocated for penal reform and individual liberty.For his published work, he was awarded a Benson Medal by the United Kingdom’s Royal Society of Literature in 1937.

E. M. Forster was open about his homosexuality to his close friends, but not to the public. He had a number of male lovers during his adult life; but he was at his happiest during a two-year relationship with the young policeman Bob Buckingham, who later married. After Buckingham’s marriage, both Buckingham and his wife continued to be included in Forster’s social circle. Others in his social circle included writer Christopher Isherwood, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, composer Benjamin Britten, Belfast-novleist Forrest Reid, writer and editor of “The Listener” J. R. Ackerley, and socialist poet Edward Carpenter and Edward’s lover George Merrill.

Forster’s “Maurice” was written between 1913 to 1914, revised twice in 1932 and 1959, and finally published posthumously in 1971. A tale of gay love in early twentieth-century England, it follows the protagonist Maurice Hall from his school days into a relationship in his older years. The novel was inspired by the cross-class relationship between poet Edward Carpenter and his working-class partner George Merrill, both of whom served as the models for Forster’s gay characters, Maurice Hall and Alec Scudder.

After completing a first draft by 1914, Forster tentatively showed the novel to select friends, and continued to do so over the forthcoming decades, reworking it as time passed. The openly gay novelist Christopher Isherwood saw the draft in its various revisions on a few occasions, and repeatedly implored Forster to publish it. However, Forster continued to insist on it not being published.

Despite the passing of time and of individuals, to whom he felt the revelation of his homosexuality would hurt most, Forster believed there had been no profound progression since the days of Oscar Wilde’s conviction, an incident that flooded the papers when he was sixteen, and thought that public attitudes had only incrementally shifted, from, in his words, ‘ignorance and terror to familiarity and contempt’. Instead, he bequeathed the manuscript of “Maurice” to Isherwood, and, a year after Forster’s death, the novel was finally published.

E. M. Forster was elected an honorary fellow of King’s College Cambridge in January of 1946. He declined a knighthood in 1949 and was made a Companion of Honor in 1953. Forster was honored in 1969 with membership in England’s Order of Merit, and, through his lifetime, received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature in sixteen separate years. E. M. Forster died at the age of ninety-one of a stroke on June 7th, 1970 in Coventry, Warwickshire. His ashes were scattered in the rose garden of Coventry’s crematorium, near Warwick University.

Note: E. M. Forster had five books published in his lifetime, one published posthumously, and one, “Arctic Summer”, never finished. His work included “Where Angels Fear to Tread”. published in 1905; the 1907 “The Longest Journey”; “A Room with a View”, published in 1908; the 1910 “Howard’s End”; “Passage to India” published in 1924; and his “Maurice” published in 1971. Although Forster was against having his work presented in any form other than literature, all his books, with the exception of “The Longest Journey”, his personal favorite and most autobiographical, have been made into either plays, films, or both.

An article by Professor Kate Symondson on E. M. Forster’s gay fiction can be found at the British Library’s site located at: https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/e-m-forsters-gay-fiction

The Darmstadt Artists’ Colony

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The Darmstadt Artists’ Colony

Between 1899 and 1914, the Mathildenhöhe (Mathilda Heights) of Darmstadt, a city in the state of Hesse, Germany, was the site of the legendary Artists’ Colony. It was founded by the young and ambitious Ernst Ludwig, Grand Duke of Hesse, who was the grandson of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and brother to Alexandra who married Tsar Nicholas II, the last Emperor of Russia.

Grand Duke Ludwig was determined to turn his state into a cradle of modern design and art on the highest level. To attain this goal, he commissioned some of the most talented artists of the time to become members of the Colony, including Vienna’s distinguished architect Joseph Maria Olbrich, one of the Vienna Secession founders, and self-taught Peter Behrens, who would become Germany’s top architect in the decade to follow.

Situated close to the city centre, the Artists’ Colony became a sensational experimental field for artistic innovations in which the sovereign and a group of young artists realized their vision of a fusion of art and life. Their intention was to revolutionize architecture and interior design in order to create a modern living culture with an integration of both housing and work space. The whole human life-style was to be reformed to gain in beauty and happiness as well as in simplicity and functionality.

Beginning during a period when art existed for the sake of its beauty alone, the progress of the Artists’ Colony was slow; however, after 1901, the program gradually became more rational and realistic. This change was evident, among other things, in the numerous buildings created on the Mathildenhöhe from 1900 to 1914. Though at first the artists concentrated on the construction of private villas, they later created apartment houses and workers’ homes in an effort to face the arising questions of their time’s life and housing.

The ensemble of the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony is considered today to be one of the most impressive records of the dawning of modern art. Its appearance is still marked primarily by the buildings of the architect Joseph Maria Olbrich, who notably created the remarkable silhouette of the Colony, facing the city of Darmstadt, with his Wedding Tower and the Exhibition Building, both completed in 1908.

The Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt is basically an open-air museum where the artwork is present in the form of its buildings, fountains and sculptures. At the same time, Joseph Olbrich’s 1901 Ernst-Ludwig House, the former studio house and spiritual centre of the artists’ colony, is now a museum that presents fine and decorative art from the members of the artists’ colony. The unique integrity of the building complex is today a first-class cultural attraction, and the lively. contemporary centre of the Darmstadt’s cultural landscape.

Note: The original Artists’ Colony group, headed by Joseph Maria Olbrich, included painter, decorative artist, and architect Peter Behrens; decorator Hans Christiansen; decorator Patriz Huber; sculptor Ludwig Habich; visual artist Rudolf Bosselt; and decorative painter Paul Bürck. Between 1904 and 1907, the group was joined by ceramicist Jakob j Scharvogel, glass blower Josef Emil Schneckendorf, and book craftsman Friedrich W Kleukens.

After Joseph Olbrich’s death in 1908, architect and designer Albin Müller led the group. Under Müller’s leadership, the group expanded with majolica craftsman Bernhard Hoetger, goldsmiths Ernst Riegel and Theodore Wende, and Emanuel Margold, a student of painter Hans Hoffman.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Paintings by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye was born in London to parents who worked as nurses for the National Health Service after emigrating from Ghana. She briefly studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design before attending the Falmouth College of Arts, where she earned her undergraduate degree in 2000. Yiadom-Boakye completed her MA degree in Fine Art at the Royal Academy Schools in 2003.

Yiadom-Boakye’s figurative oil paintings contain predominantly black fictional characters, existing in no specific place or time, who are presented without our concerns or anxieties but with contemplative expressions and relaxed gestures. This absence of a fixed narrative prompts the viewers to project their own meanings onto the scene. While the complex politics of painting black figures is an essential part of her work, Yiadom-Boakye’s main emphasis at the start is always the actual language of painting and how that relates to its subject matter.

Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings are rooted in a traditional formal manner in regards to such considerations as line, color, and scale. However, Yiadom-Boakye’s choice of subjects and her handling of the paint medium is distinctly contemporary in style. The characteristic dark palette of her work, with its raw and muted colors, creates a feeling of stillness that contributes to the timeless nature of her subjects.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s work was recognized in 2010 by Nigerian curator and art critic Okwui Enwezor, who gave her an exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. In the same year, she had her first solo show, entitled “Essays and Documents” at the Jack Shainman Gallery, a contemporary art gallery in New York City, which now represents her work.

In January of 2017, Yiadom-Boakye had a second solo show at the Shainman Gallery entitled “In Lieu of a Louder Love”. In the paintings of this show, her style shifted slightly and featured a new, warmer color scheme. The figures in her works included boldly colored clothing, and more detailed and vibrant backgrounds of yellow, orange and green.

Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings were included in the Ghanaian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Her work is conserved in numerous institutional collections, including London’s Tate Collection, New York’s The Museum of Modern Art, the Art Gallery Museum of Southern Australia in Adelaide, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, among others.

Note: The Tate Museum in London is holding a survey of Yiadom-Boakye’s work, from December 2nd of 2020 to May 9th of 2021, after which it will later travel to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilboa, Spain.

Salem Beiruti

Salem Beiruti, “Cernunnos”, 2020, Digiatal Art Print with Watercolor and Gold Gouache

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.

Salem Beiruti’s “Cernunnos” is based on model Francesc Gascó.

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/

Jameson Fitzpatrick: “A Poem for Pulse”

Photographers Unknown, A Poem for Pulse

“We must love one another whether or not we die.

Love can’t block a bullet

but it can’t be destroyed by one either,

and love is, for the most part, what makes Us Us—

in Orlando and in Brooklyn and in Kabul.

We will be everywhere, always;

there’s nowhere else for Us, or you, to go.

Anywhere you run in this world, love will be there to greet you.

Around any corner, there might be two men. Kissing.”

—Jameson Fitzpatrick, A Poem for Pulse, Excerpt, Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, 2017

Poet and professor, Jameson Fitzpatrick holds a BA and an MFA from New York University, where he now teaches in the Expository Writing Program. His verse defines the cutting edge of contemporary American poetry, telling and retelling the regularity and specificity of contemporary gay experience.

Fitzpatrick’s first publication was the 2014 chapbook “Morrisroe: Erasure” which consists of twenty-four erasures of texts describing a hookup by the avant-garde photographer Mark Morrisroe, who was a pioneer for the more direct, intimate and confrontational, late twentieth-century queer art. Fitzpatrick’s chapbook, inspired by a “man of a certain age” whom he loved, explores the art of those lost to AIDS.

Jameson Fitzpatrick’s second work was the 2018 chapbook “Mr. &” which is centered on the long title poem whose sections purposely slide into one another with slips in logic and lurching sequence structure. The shorter poetic pieces present a modernist view of marriage as a politically ambiguous institution, recently also available to same-sex couples.

His most recent publication is the 2020 “Pricks in the Tapestry”, published by Birds, LLC, a small independent poetry press. The book is a record of Jameson Fitzpatrick’s feelings and thoughts of his life during his mid-to-late twenties, which shows the difficulties a poet has using the self as the subject in a lyric form, Written from the narrative base of Cherry Grove and the Fire Island Pines of Long Island, New York, the characters are placed between the time-held, orgiastic perception of the area and its immense artistic history.

Jameson Fitzpatrick’s poems have appeared in The American Reader, The Awl, The Literary Review, Best New Poets 2017, The New Yorker, and Poetry magazine, among other publications. He is a 2017 NYSCA / NYFA Fellow in Poetry and currently lives in New York City.

Notes: The complete “A Poem for Pulse” can be found at the website “All Your Pretty Words” located at: https://allyourprettywords.tumblr.com/post/145923858388/a-poem-for-pulse-jameson-fitzpatrick

David Felsenthal’s Interview-discussion with Jameson Fitzpatrick on his “Pricks in the Tapestry” can be found at the online magazine “The Believer” located: https://believermag.com/logger/a-review-of-pricks-in-the-tapestry-by-jameson-fitzpatrick/

Matthew Rankin, “The Tesla World Light”: Film History Series

Matthew Rankin, “The Tesla World Light”, 2017

“The Tesla World Light” is a eight-minute 2017 black and white avant-garde film by Montreal director Matthew Rankin which imagines the latter days of inventor Nikola Tesla in New York City in 1905. It is a fanciful mixture of elements from Tesla’s life including his pleas to J. P. Morgan for funding and his love for a “electric” pigeon. The film sources interviews with Tesla and letters by Tesla found in the Library of Congress.

In the film, Matthew Rankin combined pixilation with a technique called light-animation, which involves moving a light source in the frame to produce light rays. He estimated he used as many as fifteen thousand sparklers to produce the effects, along with flashlights, LEDs, and fluorescent lamps.

Matthew Rankin adopted a visual-music approach to the film. He worked with sound artist Sasha Ratcliffe, who recreated Tesla’s device, the Tesla Spirit Radio, which received and transmitted the sound of light waves with the intensity varying according to its vibrations. Much of the background sound in the film was produced by this machine.

Produced by Julie Roy, an executive producer at the Canadian National Film Board, “The Tesla World Light” stars Robert Vilar as Tesla, with cinematography by Julian Fontaine and music by Christophe Lamarche. The film had its world premiere in official competition in May at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival and was selected for the Annecy International Animated Film Festival.

“The Tesla World Light” received an honorable mention in the Best Canadian Short Film category at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival and received a listing on Canada’s Top Ten list of short films. It also won the 2018 Canadian Screen Award for Best Animated Short Films.

Countee Cullen: “We Hide the Heart that Bleeds”

Photographer Unknown, We Hide the Heart that Bleeds

“We shall not always plant while others reap

The golden increment of bursting fruit,

Not always countenance, abject and mute,

That lesser men should hold their brothers cheap;

Not everlastingly while others sleep

Shall we beguile their limbs with mellow flute,

Not always bend to some more subtle brute;

We were not made to eternally weep.

The night whose sable breast relieves the stark,

White stars is no less lovely being dark,

And there are buds that cannot bloom at all

In light, but crumple, piteous, and fall;

So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds,

And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.”

—-Countee Cullen, From the Dark Tower, Copper Sun, 1927

Born on May 30, 1903, Countee Cullen was an American poet, novelist, children’s writer, and playwright who was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Raised in a Methodist parsonage by the Reverend Frederick A. Cullen and his wife, he attended and graduated with honors from the De Witt Clinton High School in The Bronx, New York. In 1922, Cullen entered New York University.

Already having written poems since the age of fourteen, Cullen’s first published poems were in The Crisis magazine, under the leadership of W. E. B. Du Bois, and Opportunity, a magazine of the National Urban League. Soon after this, he began to be published in Harper’s, the Century Magazine, and Poetry, founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe. Cullen won several awards, including second prize in a contest, sponsored by the Poetry Society of America, for his poem “Ballad of the Brown Girl”.

Countee Cullen graduated from New York University in 1923. In 1925, Harper & Brothers published Cullen’s first volume of verse, “Color”, and he was admitted to Harvard University to pursue a masters in English. Written in a traditional style, “Color” celebrated black beauty anddeplored the effects of racism. A landmark of the Harlem Renaissance, the book contained “Incident” and “Heritage”, probably Cullen’s most famous poems, and “Yet Do I Marvel”, his poem on racial identity and injustice. A year after his volume’s publication, Cullen graduated from Harvard with a masters degree in 1926.

Cullen worked as assistant editor for Opportunity magazine, where his column, “The Dark Tower”, increased his literary reputation. His poetry collections “The Ballad of the Brown Girl” and “Copper Sun”, both published in 1927, explored similar themes as “Color”, but they were not so well received. Many in the black community felt he did not give the subject of race the same attention he had given it previously..

Countee Cullen was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1928 which enabled him to study and write abroad. He traveled back and forth several times between France and the United States during the years 1928 to 1934, publishing four volumes of poetry by 1929. Shortly after in the early 1930s, Cullen’s work was almost completely free of racial subject matter, focused instead on idealized beauty and classic romantic subjects.

Cullen’s only novel “One Way to Heaven”, a social comedy of lower-class blacks and the bourgeoisie in New York City, was published in 1932. He taught French, English, and creative writing at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in New York City from 1934 until the end of his life. In his last years, Cullen wrote mostly for the theater, including adapting the novel “God Sends Sunday” into the 1946 Broadway musical “St. Louis Woman”.

Countee Cullen developed his Eurocentric style of writing from his exposure to Graeco-Roman Classics and English Literature, work he was exposed to while attending prestigious universities like New York University and Harvard. Cullen found inspiration in Greek mythology to explore the themes of race and identity in his work. Influenced also by the Romantic movement of writers, he believed African-American poets’ use of a more traditional style of writing poetry would allow the building of bridges between the black and white communities.

Countee Cullen died from high blood pressure and acute kidney injury on January 9, 1946. He is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City. The Harlem branch of the New York Public Library was named the Countee Cullen Library in his honor. In 2013, Cullen was inducted into the New York Writers Hall of Fame.

Insert Image: Winold Reiss, “Countee Cullen”, 1925, Pastel Portrait on Illustration Board, 76.1 x 54.7 cm, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC

Note: “From the Dark Tower” is a sonnet that focuses on the injustices of racism, as the speaker notes that white people deprive black people of the fruits of their labor. However, the speaker, who is black, is confident that this will not be the case forever, ultimately suggesting that such hardships build strength and resiliency. In turn, the speaker sets forth the optimistic belief that black people will one day triumph over racist oppression and reap the rewards of their hard work.

Leo Maximus

Illustrations by Leo Maximus

Leo Maximus is a French graphic artist based in Paris and Montreuil, Ile-de-France. He studied graphic design and illustration in Paris.

In his initial illustrations, Maximus used a rectangular format with strong shadowing and bold calligraphy which combined the feel of vintage advertisement with eroticism . For his current “Purgatoire” Series, Leo Maximus used a circular format in his compositions called a tondo. This format, popular during the Renaissance, was used traditionally for religious scenes in paintings and reliefs. In this new series, Leo Maximus has softened his colors and tones to produce a more classical effect.

Edoardo Gelli

Edoardo Gelli, “Portrait of a Buttero”, Date Unknown, 44.6 x 32.4 cm, Private Collection

The painter and engraver Edoardo Gelli was born in Savone, Italy, in September of 1852, to parents of Lucca origin. He began his artistic studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, where he attended the courses of sculptor Carlo Dal Poggetto. Gelli also followed for six months the lessons of painter and etcher Antonio Fontaneis held at the Academy of Lucca in 1868.

In the same year, Edoardo Gelli had his first exhibition at the Promotrice of Florence where he entered a landscape painting. He moved to Florence to complete his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, with painter Antonio Ciseri, known for his religious subjects. Although Gelli’s body of work is oriented to the re-enactment of seventeenth and eighteenth-century settings, he also produced many portraits and scenes of historical genre.

Edoardo Gelli established a career as a portraitist with many illustrious and famous figures in the upper bourgeoisie sitting for his works. In 1886, he received a royal commission to work for the Austro-Hungarian Imperial court, where he painted a portrait of Franz Joseph I, the Emperor of Austria. It was during his three years of service to the Emperor that Gelli painted the 1887 portrait of his former teacher, Carlo Dal Poggetto, which is currently preserved at the National Museum of Palazzo Mansi in the city center of Lucca.

Chiefly known for his genre and costume portraits, Gelli’s work may be compared with those of Italian genre painter Francesco Vinea and Tito Conti, the Florence-based painter of genre costume or historical subjects. A talented artist with a vibrant palette and fine brushwork, he received a series of awards and became an Honorary Academician of the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence.

Gelli entered his “The Lost Chord” in the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, informally known as the St. Louis World’s Fair, in Missouri, United States. He retired from public exhibitions in the 1910s, preferring to paint in private. Edoardo Gelli died in Florence in 1933. Several of his works can be seen at the Pinacoteca di Lucca, Italy.

Insert Image: Edoardo Gelli, “Young Odalisque Smoking Narghilè”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 158 x 117 cm, Private Collection

Note: A buttero is a herder from the Maremma, the coastal region of Tuscany, Italy, or the Pontine Marshes to the south, who tendered livestock, predominantly cattle, from the back of his working-breed horse. The attire of the butteri has its roots in the fourteenth and fifteenth-centuries, when many pastoral workers found better pay as mercenaries. Returning to an agricultural lifestyle, they brought with them items of military dress.

Stephen Busken, “Jesse Metcalfe”

Stephen Busken, “Jesse Metcalfe”, 2014, Photo Shoot, Styled by Monty Jackson

Stephen Busken, the son of a bakery owner in Cincinnati, Ohio, is a portrait, fashion, and architecture photographer living and working in East Los Angeles. Known for injecting his energetic personality into his work, he combines his technical knowledge with his artistic sense to create both soulful and elegant images.

Busken has done a long series of portrait work, shooting images of interior designer Jeremiah Brent, multi-media artist Petra Cortright, floral designer Eric Butterbaugh, and painter Zachary Crane, among others. He has also done corporate work for such clients as Lexus, Bravo, Vogue, Interview, Traditional Home, Esquire, Interiors Magazine, and MM Magazine.

This series of photographs is the second photo shoot by Stephen Busken of actor Jesse Metcalfe. The first shoot was a black and white image series for the June 20th, 2015 issue of Flaunt, a digital American satirical fashion and cultural magazine which engages art with technology.

Yukio Mishima: “The Dark Nectar in the Little Room”

Photographer Unknown, (The Dark Nectar in the Little Room)

“Suddenly the full long wail of a ship’s horn surged through the open window and flooded the dim room – a cry of boundless, dark, demanding grief; pitch-black and glabrous as a whale’s back and burdened with all the passions of the tides, the memory of voyages beyond counting, the joys, the humiliations: the sea was screaming. Full of the glitter and the frenzy of night, the horn thundered in, conveying from the distant offing, from the dead center of the sea, a thirst for the dark nectar in the little room.”

Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

Born in January of 1925, Yukio Mishima, pseudonym Hiraoka Kimitake, was an author, poet, playwright, actor, model and director. He is widely considered to be one of the most important Japanese writers of the twentieth century.

Having failed physically to qualify for military service, Mishima worked for a Toyota factory, and after World War II, he studied law at the University of Tokyo. His first novel, “Kamen no Kokuhaku (Confessions of a Mask)” is a partly autobiographical work that describes with exceptional brilliance a young gay man who must mask his sexual preferences from the Imperial Japanese society around him. This work brought Mishima immediate acclaim, after which he devoted his full energies to writing.

Mishima followed up his success with several novels whose main characters are tormented with either psychological or physical problems, or obsessed with unattainable goals. Among these works are: “Ai no Kawaki (Thirst for Love)” published in 1950 and “Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors)” published in 1954. In addition to novels, essays, and short stories, Mishima wrote plays of Japanese Nõ drama which included “Kindai Nõgaku Shu (Five Modern Nõh Plays)” in 1956 and “Sado Kõshaku Fujin (Madame de Sade)” in 1965.

Yukio Mishima’s “The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea” was published in Japan in 1963 and translated into English by writer and scholar John Nathan in 1965. The novel explores the vicious nature of youth that is sometimes mistaken for innocence. The protagonist Noboru, a thirteen year old boy, is thrilled when a his widowed mother is romanced by a sailor, who Noboru idolizes as a rugged heroic man of the sea. When the sailor gives up life onboard the ship for marriage, rejecting what Noboru holds sacred, Noboru and his friends respond with violence.

Mishima was deeply attracted to the austere patriotism and martial spirit of Japan’s past, which he contrasted unfavorably to the materialistic Westernized people and the prosperous society of Japan in the postwar era. On November 25, 1970, after having that day delivered the final installment of his work “The Sea of Fertility” to his publisher, Mishima and four of his students, Shield Society followers, seized control of the commanding general’s office at a military headquarters near downtown Tokyo.

After giving a ten minute speech from a balcony to assembled servicemen below and getting an unsympathetic response, Mishima committed seppuku in the traditional manner, disemboweling himself with his blade, followed by decapitation at the hands of a follower.

Notes: Photographer Eikoh Hosoe took the insert photograph of Yukio Mishima. The link that follows is a talk Hosoe gave at a Twentieth Masters Tribute to Yukio Mishima: https://americansuburbx.com/2010/06/eikoh-hosoe-subject-matter.html

For a more extensive biography on Yukio Mishima: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20201124-yukio-mishima-the-strange-tale-of-japans-infamous-novelist

Henry Scott Tuke

Henry Scott Tuke, “T.E. Lawrence as a Cadet”, 1921-22, Oil on Canvas, 42.5 x 52.7 cm, Clouds Hill Dorset, National Trust

Born in York on June 12th of 1858 into a prominent Quaker family, Henry Scott Tuke was an English visual artist, both a painter and photographer. His father was Daniel Hack Tuke, a well-known medical doctor specializing in psychiatry, who campaigned for the humane treatment of the insane. In 1859 the Tuke family moved to Falmouth, where Daniel Tuke established a practice.

Encouraged to draw and paint from an early age, Henry Scott Tuke was enrolled in 1870 at Irwin Sharpe’s Quaker school in Weston-super-Mare, where he remained until the age of sixteen. In 1875, he enrolled at the Slade School of Art under etcher and painter Alphonse Legros and historical painter Sir Edward Poynter. Tuke won a scholarship which supported his training at the Slade and his 1880 studies in Italy. Between 1881 and 1883, he was in Paris where he met Realist movement painter Jules Bastien-Lepage, who was associated with the beginning of Naturalism. It was Bastien-Lepage who encouraged Tuke to paint en plein air, painting outdoors within the landscape.

While studying in France, Tuke decided to move to Newlyn Cornwall where many of his Parisian and Slade School friends, including painters Thomas Cooper Gotch and Albert Chevallier Tayler, had already formed the Newlyn School of painters. Attracted to the fishing village’s fantastic light, cheap living and the availability of inexpensive models, these artists were fascinated by the everyday life in the harbor and nearby villages and took this as the subject of many of their paintings.

After he exhibited his work at London’s Royal Academy of Art, Tuck received several important commissions. With his style of rough, visible brushstrokes, more impressionistic than those of the other painters, he distanced himself after a short time from the Newlyn School. During the 1880s, Tuke became friends with Oscar Wilde and other prominent poets and writers including poet and cultural historian John Addington Symonds. In 1885, Tuke returned to Falmouth, a secluded part of Cornwall with a mild climate where many of his major works were produced.

In his time at Falmouth, Tuke focused on maritime scenes and portraits, earning most of his income from his work as a maritime painter. He used a converted old fishing boat as a studio and living quarters in the summer and, in winter, rented two rooms in a cottage situated between Pennance Point and Swanpool Beach. This cottage remained Tuke’s permanent base until his death. While living there, he produced his 1888-89 “All Hands to the Pumps”, showing sailors manning the pumps during a rough sea storm; “The Sailing Lesson” in 1892; and the 1914 ship portrait “Four Masted Barque”, commissioned by its owner.

Henry Scott Tuke became an established artist and was elected to full membership of the Royal Academy in 1914. Sometime in 1923, he visited Jamaica and Central America. There he created from 1923 to 1924 several watercolor scenes, such as “Tobacco Cay, British Honduras”. However in penetrating the interior of Belize, Tuke became ill and was forced to return home, where he never fully recovered his health. After a long illness and suffering a heart attack in 1928, he died, a year later, in March of 1929. In his will Tuke left generous amounts of money to some of the men, who as boys, had been his models.

Moving between Cornish-based artist colonies and the London art scene, Tuke presented a stylistic fusion of progressive en plein air paintings executed with a vivid palette and loose impressionistic handling of lighting and brushwork. Although remembered today mainly for his oil paintings of young men, Tuke, in addition to his achievements as a figurative painter, produced as many portraits of ships as he did human figures. A prolific artist, he produced over thirteen-hundred known works during his career.

Note: Among Henry Scott Tuke’s friends and models was a high school cadet, T. E. Lawrence, who later became famous as the iconic Lawrence of Arabia. In the painting “T. E. Lawrence as a Cadet”, done at Newporth Beach, near Falmouth, Tuke painted the young Lawrence getting dressed after a swim. As Lawrence was in his thirties in the early 1920s, it is most likely that this scene was composed using an earlier sketch drawn by Tuke, possibly from 1905.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Henry Scott Tuke”, Date Unknown, Vintage Print, Tate Museum, London

Second Insert Image: Henry Scott Tuke, “Jamaica”, 1924, Oil on Panel, 39.5 x 32 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Henry Scott Tuke, “The Green Waterways”, 1926, Oil on Canvas, 122 x 112 cm, Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, Lancashire, England

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “William Ayers Ingram and Henry Scott Tuke, Pennance Point”, Date Unknown, Vintage Print, Tate Museum, London

Juliusz Martwy

Juliusz Martwy, “At Night”, 2008, Watercolor, Ink, Acrylic and Collage on Paper, 25 x 35 cm, Artist’s Private Collection

Born in Warsaw in 1977, Juliusz Lewandowski, known as Juliusz Martwy, is a self-taught Polish artist. He began his career with illustrations for an edition of French writer Isidore Lucien Ducasse’s “The Songs of Maldoror”, written under his nom de plume Comte de Lautréamont, and illustrations for the literary works of Marquis de Sade, famous for his libertine sexuality. Martwy draws inspiration for his work from the figurative styles of expressionism, cubism, the New Objectivity, and Russian traditional painting.

An important part of Martwy’s collective works are the autobiographical threads, through which he presents the universal problems of human nature. He deals with social, political and moral issues in his paintings, both historical and contemporary, such as the past civil war in Spain, the French Revolution, and the current political situation in Poland.

Apart from multi-faceted genre scenes, Juliusz Martwy paints intimate figurative portraits within spaces that depict small narrative, often erotic, incidents. His palette varies from scenes executed in tones of exclusively one color to those with either contrasting or complimentary colors. The portrayed figures, who readily express their emotions to the viewers, are composed through the use of strong lines and blocks of color.

In 2011, Martwy had his initial exhibition of work at London’s Showcase Richmix Gallery in Bethnal Green. He entered his work at the 2011 Modern Fine Art International Artists Group Exhibition held at London’s Westbank Gallery. Martwy also showed in the 2011 Polish Erotic Art exhibition held at the Museum of Eroticism in Cracow, and later in 2014, as part of the Group Exhibition of EroArt at Warsaw’s Erotic Expo. In 2017, Martwy had a solo exhibition at the Talinn Portrait Gallery in Estonia. His work has been available through the Catharine Miller Gallery located in the Chelsea area of London.

More of Juliusz Martwy’s work and contact information may be found at the artist’s Behance site: https://www.behance.net/juliuszlewandowski