George Sylvester Viereck: “Each by Strange Wisps to Strange Abysses Drawn”

Photographers Unknown, The Faces of man: Photo Set Twelve

Sweet is the highroad when the skylarks call,
When we and Love go rambling through the land.
But shall we still walk gayly, hand in hand,
At the road’s turning and the twilight’s fall?
Then darkness shall divide us like a wall,
And uncouth evil nightbirds flap their wings;
The solitude of all created things
Will creep upon us shuddering like a pall.

This is the knowledge I have wrung from pain:
We, yea, all lovers, are not one, but twain,
Each by strange wisps to strange abysses drawn;
But through the black immensity of night
Love’s little lantern, like a glowworm’s, bright,
May lead our steps to some stupendous dawn.

George Sylvester Viereck, The Wanderers

A controversial figure in America in the first-half of the twentieth century, George Sylvester Viereck was a multi-sided figure who gained fame as a journalist and neo-romantic poet; he also earned equal infamy as a publicist for pro-German causes. Born in Munich in December of 1884, he was the first-born son of Louis Viereck, a member of the Reichstag who was imprisoned in 1886 for attending socialist meetings, and San Francisco-born Laura Viereck, Louis’s first cousin. The family emigrated to the United States in 1896 and, five years later, Viereck’s father became an American citizen.

George Viereck studied at the City College of New York where he graduated in 1906. While still in college, he published, with the help of literary critic Ludwig Lewisohn, his first collection of poems in 1904. Viereck’s next collection, “Nineveh and Other Poems” published in 1905, brought him national fame. Several poems in this collection were written in the style of the Uranian movement, a movement of primarily gay male artists and philosophers in the English-speaking world from the 1870s to the 1930s.

From 1907 to 1912, Viereck developed a profound identification with Germany and became fascinated with all aspects of the German culture and people. In 1907, he published a vampire novel, “The House of the Vampire”, which was not only one of the first psychic-vampire stories but, also, one of the first known homosexual vampire novels. Viereck, in 1908, published his best-selling “Confessions of a Barbarian”, a collection of personal narratives on subjects such as morals, art, and both German and international culture. Viereck was invited in 1911 to lecture on American poetry at the University of Berlin. Due to his ardent support of Germany and pacifism during the period of estranged Anglo-German relations leading up to World War I, he was later expelled from several organizations and social clubs.

Outspoken in his views against America’s involvement in World War I, George Viereck founded and became editor of the German-sponsored magazine “The Fatherland”, which argued the German cause. He was later arrested and served time in a Washington D.C. jail, during which period his son George Jr. died as a combat casualty of the first world war which Viereck had vigorously opposed. In August of 1918, a mob stormed Viereck’s Mount Vernon home: and, in the following year, he was expelled from the Poetry Society of America. In 1919, Viereck wrote the book “Roosevelt”, a psycho-analytical study of Theodore Roosevelt and his attitude on matters of international interest, which was published by New York City’s Jackson Press.

After the end of the war, Viereck traveled throughout Europe and America interviewing many notable personalities, including Sigmund Freud, George Bernard Shaw, Adolf Hitler, Henry Ford, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, Benito Mussolini, and Albert Einstein, among others. In 1924, he published a collection of poetry, entitled “The Three Sphinxes and Other Poems”; the collection’s poem “Slaves” would be quoted several times in the 1968 psycho-thriller film “Twisted Nerve” and be the inspiration for its title.

George Viereck became a well-known supporter of National Socialism and a regular apologist for Germany. In 1933, he again met Hitler, who had become Germany’s leader, and gave a speech in 1934 at New York’s Madison Square Garden to an audience of twenty thousand in which he supported National Socialism without its antisemitism. In 1941 George Viereck established his own publishing house, Flanders Hall, in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, but was eventually indicted by the government for a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Convicted in 1942 for failing to register with the U. S. State Department as a National Socialist agent, he was imprisoned from 1942 to 1947.

In 1952, Viereck’s “Men Into Beasts”, a general memoir of the loss of dignity, brutality, and the situational homosexuality and rape he witnesse in jail, was published by Fawcett Publications. This book was shortly followed by two more works: the 1952 “Gloria: A Novel” and the 1953 “The Nude in the Mirror”. Between 1906 and 1953, he published twenty-three works in the genres of theater plays, poetry, works of fiction, and works of political discussion and criticism.

George Viereck’s literary works after his release from prison were not very successful, except for his “Men Into Beasts”, which would become one of the first original titles of 1950s gay novels. In 1955, he suffered a series of mild strokes and ceased his writing. George Sylvester Viereck died in March of 1962 in Holyoke, Massachusetts, of a massive cerebral hemorrhage at the age of seventy-seven.

Note: An interesting read on the emotional and psychological development of Viereck’s life, and his perception of his own sexuality, is Phyllis Keller’s “George Sylvester Viereck: The Psychology of a German-American Militant” from the MIT Press. It can be found at the JSTOR site: https://www.jstor.org/stable/202443

Soufiane Ababri

Drawings by Soufiane Ababri

Born in Rabat, Morocco in 1985, Soufiane Ababri is a multi-media artist who works in the fields of drawing, sculpture, film, and performance art. He graduated from the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 2010 and earned his Masters of Arts at Paris’s École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in 2014. Ababri divides his life and work between the cities of Paris, France, and Tangier, Morocco.

Although he works in many medias, Soufiane Ababri is best known for his homoerotic drawings of men portrayed in settings which depict a flourishing queer subculture. His scenes, either humorous or infused with emotion, are drawn from his life as a gay Moroccan immigrant in Europe. Ababri’s most acclaimed series, “Bed Works”, was initiated in 2016 and is still continuing today. These pencil portraits of men, drawn while lying down in bed, are conveyed in bold, energetic colors and explore Ababri’s interest in the nuances of masculinity and male intimacy.

Having a strong interest in sociology, Ababri’s oeuvre also deals with the idea of visual experience as an exercise in introspection, that is the artist sees the world as the world sees him. Ababri’s work, built from layers of personal and intimate events, also uses literary works, such as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1943 “Little Prince” and poet Frank O’Hara’s “A True Account of Talking to the Sun”, to examine the tensions, stigmas, and ambivalences in present day society.

Soufiane Ababri’s 2020 “Tanned But Still Angry” series consisted of seventeen colored pencil on paper drawings that Ababri developed over several years in reaction to police violence. These drawings depicted real scenes and situations experienced by Ababri himself and fellow members of the LGBT and POC communities. Fueled by the deaths of Adama Traoré in 2016 and George Floyd in May, the series not only powerfully displays injustice, but also, often poetically, emphasizes the need for equality.

Soufiane Ababri’s most recent solo show, the 2021 “Bunch of Queequeg”, named after the “Moby Dick” character, included all works from the continuing “Bed Work” series and was held at Praz-Delavallade in Los Angeles.The triptych drawing from that exhibition, seen in the above images, shows Ababri as Queequeg in the middle panel, with Ishmael in tight-fitting shorts on the right panel and three skewered severed heads on the left panel. In this work, Ababri considers not only the literature of colonialism and its lasting effects on daily life and culture, but also its presence in our most intimate relationships.

Ababri’s installation / performance pieces include the 2017 “Moving Frontiers: Do and Undo” at the Espace Doual’Art in Doula, CM; the 2018 “Humes l’Ordeur des Fleurs Pendant Qu’il en est Encore Temps” held at the Marathon des Mots in Toulouse, France; the 2018 “Here is a Strange and Bitter Crop” at Space in London; the 2019 “Tropical Concrete Gym Park” at the Glassbox in Paris; the 2019 “Memories of a Solitary Cruise” held at The Pill in Istanbul; and the 2020 “Something New Under the Little Prince’s Body” at the Dittrich & Schlechtriem in Berlin.

Soufiane Ababri has exhibited in Berlin, Brussels, and Istanbul. His work is in the collections of Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Pointou-Charente and Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne, and Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain, Pays de la Loire. In 2021 Ababri’s work was included in the Glasgow International Festival for Contemporary Art.

Note: Photos of Soufiane Ababri’s performance and artwork, as well as contact information, can be found at: https://soufianeababri.com

An interesting article, written by Joey Levenson, on Soufiane Ababri’s newest book and his use of intimacy as a means of social construct analysis can be found at: https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/soufiane-ababri-art-100821

Shirley Everett Johnson: “The End and Aim of Art”

Photographers Unknown, Twelve Portraits of Men

Howard then blurted out this proposition: “I say, fellows, let us form a new club, to be known as “The Cult of the Purple Rose.” What do you say?”

Lucian Denholm, the tall, slender man with a pensive face, who was really brilliant and therefore said little, was now the first to speak, because the name had been suggested by his Purple Tea. He was enthusiastic in favor of the scheme, and said he was complimented by the recognition of his efforts to be original. Then he outlined his plan.

“Oh, it will be simple lovely,” he said, “and so original! We will all wear purple roses, and write on purple linen, —I might say purple and fine linen, —use three cent purple stamps instead of the customary twos, and if any of us should ever write on white paper, he must invariably use purple ink.

“Besides, we would attract so much attention with our purple handkerchiefs and hat bands. It will be so gratifying to hear people remark how hideous they are, and we can be as truly happy as the end and aim of art will allow.

“And to carry it further, we can write purple verses and purple stories and tell purple lies, in lieu of commonplace white lies. And just as it has been shown how lying is a fine art, so much more will purple lying be art.”

—-Shirley Everett Johnson, The Cult of the Purple Rose, Section II, 1902

There is very little information on the life of Shirley Everett Johnson, the author of “The Cult of the Purple Rose”. It is known that he graduated from Harvard University with the class of 1895, which he joined following his sophomore year at the Louisville High School. Johnson was not known to have participated in any of the recognized extracurricular activities available at the college. During his life, he was a journalist and a banker in the state of Kentucky.

Johnson’s only published books are the 1901 “Conquering a Small Pox Epidemic in Kentucky” and the 1902 novel “The Cult of the Purple Rose: A Phase of Harvard Life”, which was published by Richard G. Badger of Boston’s Gorham Press.

Considered to be among the genre known as proto-gay novels, “The Cult of the Purple Rose” is an odd, esoteric example of American college fiction, one which dealt with Harvard University’s student life at the very end of the nineteenth-century. The book’s preface states that the story concerns the lives of a few exceptional people and should not be taken as a full presentation of Harvard undergraduate life. Although a fictional work, some parts of the book are known to be factual. These include remarks made about publishers Herbert S. Stone and Ingalls Kimball, who as Harvard undergraduates were responsible for the 1894 “The Chap Book” and the 1893 “First Editions of American Authors”.

In “The College Pump” article, published in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin of April 19, 1958, there was an extract from a doctoral thesis by Maurice F. Brown Jr. which explored the late nineteenth-century, cultural climate of the Yard, the historical campus area of Harvard containing most of the freshman dormitories. This excerpt contained a discussion of “The Cult of the Purple Rose” and also a discussion on the Laodicean Club of 1893. There is speculation that what was known as The Cult of the Purple Rose may have actually been the Laodicean Club.

Whether regarded as fictional or factual-based, “The Cult of the Purple Rose” presented a portrait of Harvard University’s reaction to publications associated with the Aesthetic and Decadent movements of the late-nineteenth century. Both of these movements ran contrary to the established persona of Harvard University. The artists and writers of the Aesthetic movement tended to believe that the Arts should provide refined sensuous pleasure, rather than convey sentimental or moral messages. The Decadent movement followed an aesthetic ideology of excess and artificiality, and held to the view that human creativity and art were superior to logic and the natural world. Literary examples of these movements include “The Lark” and the literary quarterly “The Yellow Book”, both published in England.

The story within “The Cult of the Purple Rose” also presented the university’s perception and judgement of such prominent figures of the time as essayist Max Beerbohm whose works first appeared in “The Yellow Book”, illustratorAubrey Beardsley who co-founded “The Yellow Book”, and author Oscar Wilde. All three, among others, were members of the Aesthetic movement.

Notes:

In the Harvard Illustrated Magazine, Volume IV, October of 1902, there is a review of “The Cult of the Purple Rose”. Although the main aspects of the plot was considered to be nonsensical, the book was judged as clever and readable, at times witty, but by no means sincere. The type-work and cover were considered attractive and the book distinctly well made.

A full edition of “The Cult of the Purple Rose” can be found at the Internet Archive located at: https://archive.org/details/cultpurplerosea00presgoog/mode/2up

Jesús Carrillio

Paintings by Jesús Carrillio

Born in the Andalusian town of Córdoba, Jesús Carrillio is a Spanish multi-media artist who also uses the name Eltío Esse. He works in the fields of painting, photography, computer graphics and film making, Interested in drawing and color from an early age, Jesús Carrillio received his initial lessons in art from his older brother, the painter José Maria Carrillio.

At the age of sixteen, Jesús Carrillio attended the Priego Landscape School where he did landscape painting influenced by the school’s impressionistic style. His formal art training began at Granada’s Padre Suárez Institute where he studied art history, art theory, and aesthetics. In 1990, Carrillio attended the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Granada, where he majored in painting.

After graduating from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Jesús Carrillio moved in 1995 to the seaside city of Brighton, England, where he painted and worked as a postman. Three years later, he moved to Salamanca, Spain, where he enrolled in its University to study design and both audiovisual and multimedia techniques. Influences on Carrillio’s expressionistic work are the Italian and Flemish paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries , and his attraction to African culture and art.

Carrillio often uses computer software to enhance his painted images. Both his film and video art, as well as his unique animated and static GIFs, are designed to be viewed as projections at performances and installation projects. Carrillio’s photographic work and digital paintings are printed on brushed aluminum panels, a process in which, while darker areas of the image appear matte, the lighter areas of the image have a unique shimmer.

More information on Jesús Carrillio’s work, including commissioned pieces and contact information, can be found at his Artfinder site located at: https://www.artfinder.com/artist/eltioesse/

Andreas Georgiadis Kris

Andreas Georgiadis Kris, “Οι δύο φίλοι (The Two Friends)”, 1965, Oil on Canvas

Born in 1892 in Chania, a city on the northwest coast of Crete, Andreas Georgiadis Kris was a Greek painter whose work was influenced by the western art tradition. Due to the rebellion of the Greek Army against the rule of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent burning of the city of Chania, the family moved to Egypt in 1896, where Andreas Kris spent his childhood in Cairo and Ismailia. As he grew older, he became employed in the workshop of the interior contractor V. Vernardos, and later became an assistant painter and decorator under Orlando in Cairo. Recommended to the architectural firm of the Nistri brothers, Kris remained with this firm for three years.

In 1910, Andreas Kris traveled to Athens and took the entrance exam at its School of Fine Arts, which gave him admittance to the third class under portraiture painter Dimitris Geraniotis. After the start of the Balkan Wars, Kris volunteered for military duty in 1912, joined a unit of Garibaldi volunteers known as the Red Tunics, and later, in the Battle of Drisco, suffered the loss of an eye at the city of Kriftsi in Greece. After leaving military service, Kris resumed his studies at the School of Fine Arts where, from 1914 to 1923, he trained under Ceorgios Roilou, Georgios Jakovibis, and Spyridon Vikatos, all portraiture and genre painters of the Munich School tradition.

In 1922, Andreas Kris was awarded first prize in the Panhellenic Arts Competition for his work depicting the 1826 heroic exit of the Greeks from their city of Missolonghi, which was under siege by the Turkish army during the Greek War of Independence. He later won first prize in an exhibition at Athens’ Polytechnic which secured him a four-year scholarship to study in Europe. Kris studied in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and at three free academies, including the Julian Academy. During this scholarship period, he frequently traveled throughout Europe to study the masterworks in the museums of Paris, Madrid, Antwerp, Brussels, and Ghent. From these studies, Kris produced a series of twenty-five studies based on the works of Ruben, Van Dyke, Velasquez, and Jusepe de Ribera.

Returning to Greece in 1929, Andreas Kris had his first solo exhibition at Athens’s Parnassos Hall; his collection of forty works received critical attention from Zacharias Papantoniou, who was the Director of the National Gallery. In August of 1929, Kris received the Heracles Voltos Scholarship form the University of Athens, which enabled him to study, both in Paris and Rome, the development and techniques of western European art.

Andreas Kris traveled and studied for seven years in Italy, which included a one-year training period at the Regia Seuola per Industrie Artistiche under fresco painter Mario Roversi. In 1930, Andreas Kris’s oil painting “Manna” was accepted for the new work exhibition at the Salon in Paris’s Grand Palais on Champs-Élysées. At the 1934 Venice International Exhibition, Kris entered three works, one of which was his “Portrait of a Friend”. After contributing to the oversight of the 1935 restoration work on Athens’s Old Royal Palace’s murals, he was selected to send one of his works to the 1936 International Exhibition in Sydney, Australia. Later in the same year, Kris exhibited works, which included portraits, in two collective shows held at the Atelier Gallery.

Andreas Kris was appointed as the Chair of Painting at Athens’s School of Fine Arts in 1947, where he taught composition and color studies for fourteen years. Invited to show his work at the 25th Venice International Exhibition held in 1950, he exhibited ten paintings, of which his work of chiaroscuro, entitled “The Fall”, received critical acclaim. Kris participated in the 1957 Mediterranean Exhibition held in Alexandria and, two years later, showed eighty paintings at a retrospective of his work held at Athens’s Parnassos Hall.

In 1962, the Ioannina Gallery, which holds a collection of over five hundred works, mounted a thirty-two work retrospective of Kris’s oeuvre and awarded him a gold medal in recognitions of his military service and contribution to the arts. From 1965 to 1970, Andreas Kris held the elected post of President of the Chamber of Arts, a position he used to lobby the government for legislation providing pensions for retired artists. He regularly participated in the annual Panhellenic Exhibitions and in group exhibitions abroad, including shows in Belgrade, Bucharest and Moscow.

Andreas Georgiadis Kris died in 1981. In December of 1986, the Director of the National Gallery presented the first complete retrospective of Kris’s oeuvre as a tribute to his career as a painter. Andreas Kris’s work is held in many national museums, public institutions, and private collections in Greece and abroad.

Top Insert Image: Andreas Georgiadis Kris, Still Life, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 46 x 55.5 cm, National Gallery of Greece

Middle Insert Image: Andreas Georgiadis Kris, “The Praying Man, Nude Study”, Date Unknown, Graphite on Paper

Bottom Insert Image: Andreas Georgiadis Kris, “Jeune Homme au Gilet Vert”, 1943, Oil on Canvas, 60.5 x 50 cm, Private Collection

Joseph Hansen: “Wider Than a Man’s Two Stretched Arms”

Photographers Unknown, An Assemblage of Hands

“The waterwheel was twice a man’s height, wider than a man’s two stretched arms. The timbers, braced and bolted with rusty iron, were heavy, hand-hewn, swollen with a century of wet. Moss bearded the paddles, which dripped as they rose. The sounds were good. Wooden stutter like children running down a hall at the end of school. Grudging axle thud like the heartbeat of a strong old man.”

Joseph Hansen, Death Claims, 1973

Born in Aberdeen, South Dakota in July of 1923, Joseph Hansen was a poet and American crime novelist, best know for his series of novels featuring the gay private detective Dave Brandstetter. After his family settled in Altadena, California, Hansen attended the Pasadena Community College, where he focused on literature. Inspired by the ease with which Walt Whitman viewed his own sexual identity and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call to be true to one’s self, Hansen made the decision to embrace his gay identity at an early age.

Beginning his writing career in the genre of poetry, Hansen’s first published work was a poem submitted in 1952 to The New Yorker magazine. While employed part-time at bookstores, he continued writing poetry for various magazines, including the Los Angeles-based ONE, the first pro-gay publication in the United States. Hansen’s early fiction efforts, under various pseudonyms, were also first published by ONE He also used pseudonyms for his early pulp writings of gay erotica. A total of six early fictional works, including his first novel “Strange Marriage”, published in 1965, were under the names of either James Colton or Rose Brock.

In 1970, Joseph Hansen published “Fadeout”, the first novel under his own name, which became the introductory novel for his Dave Brandstetter series. Similar in style to a Raymond Chandler character, Hansen’s protagonist was an openly gay insurance investigator, who embodied the tough, stoic, and no-nonsense personality of the classic, private detective. Published two years before the Stonewall riots, a heroic, central literary character, who was a homosexual and not a one-dimensional figure, was revolutionary for that period in history. The importance of the detective’s personal life, his dealing with the death of his partner, his aging and his loneliness, expanded the psychological dimension of the hardboiled genre and, at the same time, offered the genre’s enthusiasts a gay man’s point of view.

Cited now as a groundbreaker in both crime and gay fiction, the gay character of Brandstetter was originally rejected by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1973 because the editor thought that subscribers were not ready for homosexuality in their novels , especially not presented as a part of ordinary social life. Just as the mystery novels of Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall can be read collectively as a long discussion of Swedish society, the twelve-volume series of “Brandstetter” can be read as a chronicle of gay lives in California during the 1960s and 1970s. Hansen showed the heterosexual world through this series that being gay is no more homogenizing than any other social category.

Joseph Hansen won the 1992 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America. For his 1991 “A Country of Old Men”, the final novel in the Brandstetter series, he won a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men’s Mystery. Hansen created a second investigative series, the 1988 “Bohannon’s Book”, which consisted of five novellas, centered on the character of a former deputy sheriff. This was followed in 1993 by the five novella sequel “Bohannon’s Country”. Hansen won a second Lambda Literary Award in 1993 for his novel “Living Upstairs”, the story of a young gay man coming of age.

Jospeh Hansen was active in the Gay Rights Movement and was a co-founder in 1965 of the influential gay publication “Tangents”. He produced a radio program on Los Angeles’s KPFX in 1969 entitled “Homosexuality Today” and helped with the planning for the first Gay Pride Parade in Hollywood, held in 1970. Since his first publications in early gay tabloids, Hansen strove for an inclusive civil society without divisions in regards to race or sexual orientation.

Described in the American Hard-Boiled Crime Writers anthology as the father of the gay mystery novel, Joseph Hansen died on November 24th of 2004 of heart failure at his Laguna Beach home in California. He was predeceased by his wife of fifty-one years, artist and educator Jane Bancroft, a lesbian with whom he shared an arrangement to have same-sex lovers, and a daughter who later transitioned and changed her name. According to friends, Hansen also had two long-term male lovers.

”Of all the writers who contributed to the LA poetry renaissance in the second half of the 20th century, Joseph Hansen probably gave the most and got the least in return. Most significantly, Hansen was one of the co-founders of the Beyond Baroque poetry workshop (now the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center), a free and open-to-the-public gathering that has met on Wednesday evenings in Venice for 45 years. Along with John Harris, Hansen established an accessible public workshop with serious standards of literary excellence. The fact that Hansen won a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship for his fiction a couple of years after starting the workshop only reinforced his stature as the workshop’s standard-bearer.”

—Bill Mohr

Eliot Elisofon

Eliot Elisofon,“Marcel Duchamp Descending a Staircase”, 1952, Gelatin Silver Print, Image Size 33.5 x 26.8 cm, Mead Art Museum, Amherst College

Born in New York City in April of 1911 to immigrant parents, Eliot Elisofon, born Meyer Eliot Elicofon, was a photojournalist and a documentary photographer. His humble upbringing and childhood struggles inspired his career as a photographer; the human condition with all its struggles became the central focus of his work.

Elisofon graduated from Fordham University in 1933 and first produced advertising photographs for Vogue and Mademoiselle magazines. By 1937, he was regularly contributing work to Life magazine on a variety of subjects, including theater, military exercises, coal miners, and elite society events. In 1936, Elisofon became a founding member of the Photo League, a cooperative of New York photographers who covered creative and social causes. One of its more active members, he gave lectures, collaborated with sociologist and photographer Lewis Hine on the “Men at Work” project, and taught courses on flash photography and photojournalism.

In 1937, Eliot Elisofon became associated with filmmaker Willard Van Dyke, Harper’s Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch, Beaumont Newhall, the photography curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and Tom Maloney, the editior of U.S. Camera magazine. His first exhibition of his New York street photography was shown at the Pennsylvania Museum of Art and New York’s avant-garde Julien Levy Gallery, In 1938, Elisofon’s “Playgrounds of Manhattan” was shown at the New School, a progressive arts college in New York City.

Elisofon was hired in 1939 as a photographer in the Federal Writers’ Project, a WPA New Deal Program, for its series “These Are Our Lives”, which contained thirty-seven life histories of both black and white farm laborers, factory and mill workers, and workers in service occupations or on relief. Beginning in 1942, Elisofon was a war correspondent and a photographer for Life magazine; he was the only photographer to accompany General Patton throughout the North African Campaign. These photographs taken during the campaign became part of the exhibition “The Tunisian Triumph”, which opened in June of 1943 at MOMA and later traveled to twenty cities. Elisofon continued to be associated with Life and other magazines until 1972.

Over the years, Eliot Elisofon traveled to six continents and nineteen books of his work were published during his lifetime. During his photographic journeys around the African continent, Elisofon assembled a collection of African art and took over eighty thousand images; the art and photographs are now part of the collection of the National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC.

Eliot Elisofon’s photograph “Marcel Duchamp Descending a Staircase” was shot for a ten-page article written by Winthrop Sargeant on Marcel Duchamp, a key member of the Dada movement, for the April 28, 1952, issue of Life magazine. One of Duchamp’s most significant works was his early 1912 painting “Nude Descending a Staircase”, a cubist image in the manner of the chronophotography work of Eadweard Muybridge, who was a pioneer in the study of movement and measurement through multiple image photography. Elison’s 1952 time-lapse photograph of Duchamp descending a flight of stairs was done as a tribute to Duchamp’s famous painting; the image above is one of the two staged shots that Elisofon produced in the photo shoot.

Top Insert Image: Eliot Elisofon, “Self Portrait with Speed Graphic Camera, New York City”, 1936, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Marcel Duchamp, “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)”, 1912, Oil on Canvas, 151.8 x 93.3 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Nebojša Zdravković

Paintings by Nebojša Zdravković

Born in Belgrade in 1959, Nebojša Zdravković is a Serbian artist known for his precise drawing and dynamic color palette. He graduated with a Masters Degree in the Arts and was granted a scholarship by the Spanish government for his post-graduate studies in Madrid.

Zdravković’s images of male eroticism are executed using a highly expressive color range in a classic impressionistic style. He paints primarily from life, using models for reference, with a particular focus on the effect of light upon his subjects and the posed surroundings.

Nebojša Zdravković, who lives and works in Belgrade, is a member of theAssociation of Fine Artists of Serbia, ULUS. His work has been exhibited at many group shows and at solo exhibitions in Paris, London, Belgrade, Athens, and Cyprus. Zdravković had solo exhibitions at London’s Adonis Art Gallery in 2002 and 2003.

James Schuyler: “I Remember Very Well the Morning”

Photographers Unknown, I Remember Very Well the Morning

Coming from the deli
a block away today I
saw the UN building
shine and in all the
months and years I’ve
lived in this apartment
I took so you and I
would have a place to
meet I never notice
that it was in my view.

I remember very well
the morning I walked in
and found you in bed
with X. He dressed
and left. You dressed
too. I said, “Stay
five minutes.” You
did. You said, “That’s
the way it is.” It
was not much of a surprise.

Then X got on speed
and ripped off an
antique closet and an
air conditioner, etc.
After he was gone and
you had changed the
Segal lock, I asked
you on the phone, “Can’t
you be content with
your wife and me?” “I’m
not built that way”,
you said. No surprise.

Now, without saying
why, you’ve let me go.
You don’t return my
calls, who used to call
me almost every evening
when I lived in the coun-
try. “Hasn’t he told you
why?” “No, and I doubt he
ever will.” Goodbye. It’s
mysterious and frustrating.

How I wish you would come
back! I could tell
you how, when I lived
on East 49th, first
with Frank and then with John,
we had a lovely view of
the UN building and the
Beekman Towers. They were
not my lovers, though,
You were. You said so.

James Schuyler, This Dark Apartment, The Morning of the Poem, 1980

Born in November of 1923 in Chicago, Illinois, James Marcus Schuyler was a poet who won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his collection “The Morning of the Poem”. He spent his childhood years in East Aurora, New York, and, after high school graduation, attended Bethany College in West Virginia from 1941 to 1943. During World War Two, Schuyler served on a Navy destroyer in the North Atlantic; he remained in the U.S. Navy until 1947.

After moving to New York City in the late 1940s, Schuyler worked for the National Broadcasting Company and became friends with the English poet and playwright W. H. Auden. In 1947, he relocated to the Isle of Ischia in Italy, where he shared an apartment and worked for two years as Auden’s secretary. While in Italy, Schuyler attended the University of Florence .

James Schuyler returned to New York City in 1950; the next year he was introduced to poets Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery at a New York party. The three poets shared an apartment on 49th Street in Manhattan and worked closely together, often contributing to each other’s writing projects. In this early period of Schuyler’s writing, he wrote two play productions: “Presenting Jane”, performed at the Cambridge, Massachusetts, Poet’s Theatre in 1952 and “Shopping and Waiting: A Dramatic Pause” performed in 1953 at New York’s American Theater for Poets.

By the middle of the 1950s, Schuyler was a writer and art critic for Art News magazine and was curating for circulating exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art. Among the artists he befriended were Larry Rivers, William and Elaine de Kooning, Jane Freilicher, and landscape and portrait painter Fairfield Porter. Schuyler would live with Porter and his family at their homes for twelve years from 1961 to 1973; he dedicated his first major collection of poems, the 1969 “Freely Espousing”, to Fairfield Porter and his wife Anne. This collection received the Frank O’Hara Prize for Poetry in 1969.

The most productive period in James Schuyler’s career occurred in the late 1969s and extended through the 1970s. He coauthored a novel, entitled “A Nest of Ninnies”, with John Ashbery in 1969 and produced three major collections of poetry: “The Crystal Lithium” in 1972, the 1974 “Hymn to Life”, and the 1980 “The Morning of the Poem”, of which the title poem is considered to be among the best long poems of the postmodern era. Numerous other works have been published throughout the years, including a 1989 recording entitled “Hymn to Life and Other Poems” produced by Watershed Intermedia.

James Schuyler was a central figure in the New York School, an informal group of poets, painters, musicians and dancers active in vanguard of New York City’s 1950-60s avant-garde art scene. He was a Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow of the American Academy of Poets, a recipient of the Longview Foundation Award in 1961, and a 1985 recipient of the Whiting Award given to emerging writers.

James Marcus Schuyler died in Manhattan following a stroke, in April fo 1991, at the age of sixty-seven. His ashes are interred at the Little Portion Friary, Mount Sinai, Long Island, New York. The major collection of his papers are in the Mandeville Department of Special Collections at San Diego’s University of California.

Note: Although James Schuyler revealed very little of his personal life, it is known that he was gay and had a relationship with military man and writer William Eric Aalto, near the end of Aalto’s life. Aalto is featured in Schuyler’s long, prose poem “Dining Out with Doug and Frank”, which describes a meal with Aalto , and poet and critic Douglas Crase and his partner, professor in plant pathology Frank Polach. Schuyler also had a relationship with American realist, city-scape artist Frank Button, who was also associated with the New York School art movement.

The long conversational poem “Dining Out with Doug and Frank” can be found at: https://www.ronnowpoetry.com/contents/schuyler/DiningOut.html.

For those interested, twelve of James Schuyler’s poems can be found in their entirety at the Poetry Foundation located at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/james-schuyler#tab-poems

Francesc Català-Roca

Photography by Francesc Català-Roca

Born in in Valls, Tarragona, in March of 1922, Francesc Català-Roca was a Spanish photographer, the first of a brilliant generation of photographers to emerge in the post-civil war era of 1950s Spain.

After the Spanish Civil War, during Franco’s dictatorship, Català-Roca travelled extensively throughout Spain. An eye witness to the changes that slowly transformed the country, he frequented groups of artists and intellectuals, with whom he influenced and exchanged ideas. Having embraced the neorealist photography of the time, Català-Roca is best known for his documentary images of Spain and for his portraits of contemporary artists and intellectuals.

Francesc Català-Roca started his apprenticeship at the age of thirteen in the photographic studio of his father, Pere Català Pic , a writer and a representative of Catalan avant-garde movement. At an early age, he established a studio as a portraitist and, in 1948, worked independently as a photojournalist for magazines such as “Destino” and “La Vanguardia”. Executed predominately in a black and white, minimalist style, Català-Roca’s photography dealt with a variety of themes from landscapes to cityscapes, and artistic documentation to ethnography

Català-Roca’s first photographic book, published in 1952, portrayed one of Spain’s most famous creations, the Sagrada Familia designed by Antoni Gaudi, the famous Catalan architect. In 1954 he had his first exhibition of his black and white work. In the same year, Català-Roca was commissioned to illustrate books by Luis Romero and Juan Antonio Cabezas on Barcelona and Madrid, respectively.

These two commissions enabled Francesc Català-Roca to show his vision of these cities. His many images of Barcelona, with which he had a direct connection, reflect a sophisticated city working to modernize itself; while the images of 1950s Madrid are characterized by its post-war poverty. Repeatedly throughout his career, Català-Roca explored not only the busiest city streets but explored the more obscure areas, such as he did with Barcelona’s Barrio Chino and the shantytowns that surrounded the city.

Català-Roca’s oeuvre contains two hundred thirty-one thousand works, published in over one thousand books, of which eighty are photo-albums. In addition to his books, he directed films of which the best known are the 1952 “Piedras Vivas”, a documentary about the Holy Family which won first prize at Italy’s Festival of Ancona in the same year; the 1958 “Rapsodia de Sangre”, a film of a young pianist whose concert becomes a slogan in the demonstrations against the 1956 invasion of Hungary; the 1966 short film “Tierra de Conquistadores”; and the 1969 “Ditirambo”, a tragic story of an atypical hero whose life changes unexpectedly.

Francesc Català-Roca also made documentaries on such famous artists as painter Joan Miró, abstract painter Josep Guinovart, and monumental public sculptor Eduardo Chillida. Català Roca passed away, after a long and fruitful career full of merits and awards, on March 15, 1998 in Barcelona . In 1998, a homage to his work was presented by Barcelona’s Primavera Fotográfica and, in May of 2000, an extensive retrospective was held in Barcelona’s La Fundación Joan Miró.

Tope Insert Image: Francesc Català-Roca, Title and Date Unknown, (Viewers), Gelatin Silver Print

Middle Insert Image: Francesc Català-Roca, Self-Portrait in Park Güell, 1953, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Francesc Català-Roca, Barcelona, 1950, Gelatin Silver Print

Frank Steeley

Frank Steeley, “Lettering for Schools and Colleges”, 1902, G.W. Bacon and Company, Limited, London

Born in Birmingham in 1863, Frank Steeley was a draftsman and graphic designer. The son of a goldsmith who worked in the jewelry trade, he illustrated a set of thirty-six first grade drawing cards for the publisher G. W. Bacon and Company, Ltd, which was published circa 1893 as Bacon’s “Excelsior” Drawing Cards.

Steeley, in collaboration with Bernard H. Trotman, produced the 1901 design book “The New Art Geometry: or, Geometrical Drawing Applied to Design”, which was also published by Bacon and Company. The exercises in this book, which used common tools such as t-squares and protractors, formed a graduated syllabus for upper level elementary classes and for classes in schools of art.

In 1902, Frank Steeley produced the book “Lettering for Schools and Colleges”, a collection containing his designs for forty-two complete alphabets, with sets of numerals, initials, and monograms. Between 1903 and 1904, he published his two-volume series “Nature Drawing and Design”. These books, examples of early Art Nouveau design work, described the process of using the natural forms of flowers and leaves to create patterns and simple line drawings. Both the book and the two-volume series were published by G.W. Bacon and Company.

Frank Steeley passed away in 1951 at the age of eighty-eight. Due to the historical and artistic significance of the work, Steeley’s books have been reprinted frequently and are still used as a basis for design study.

Marvin K. White: “And When I Placed My Lips on His”

Photographers Unknown, Doubles

When I learned of Gregory’s death
I cried silently
But at the funeral
Giiiirl! I’m telling you
I rocked Miss Church
Hell I fell to my knees twice
Before I reached my seat
Three people had to carry me
To my pew
I swayed and swooned
Blew my nose
On any and every available sleeve
The snot was flying everywhere
Then when I finally saw his body
My body jerked itself
Right inside that casket
And when I placed my lips on his
Honey the place was shaking
I returned to my seat
But not before passing by his mother
Who I’m sure at this point
Was through with me
I threw myself on her knees
Shouting “Help me
Help me Jesus”
When someone in the choir
Sang out “Work it girl
Wooooork it”
I was carried out
Kicking and screaming
Ushered into the waiting limo
Which sped me to his family’s house
Where I feasted
On fried chicken
Hot water corn bread
Macaroni and cheese
Johnny Walker Black
Finally in my rightful place

Marvin K. White, Last Rights, Last Rights, 2004

Born in Oakland, California, Marvin K. White is a poet, performer, playwright, public theologian, visual artist, and community arts organizer. He graduated with a Masters of Divinity from the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. White holds a fellowship in the national African-American poetry organization, Cave Canem, and is a former member of the board of Fire & Ink, a national black LGBT writers’ organization.

White has authored four collections of poetry which were published by RedBone Press. His 2004 “Last Rights” contains poems which portray the caring, humor, despair, the kinship of friends and family, and the unqualified love that occurs in the everyday lives of the gay community. It was nominated as a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. In the same year, his second collection “Nothin’ Ugly Fly” was published. This collection of poems, both witty and intense, explores a boy’s life from its unpredictable and dangerous beginning to his becoming a man, a growth achieved through his love for another man. This collection was also a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.

In 2011, Marvin K. White followed his previous work with two new collections. His “Status”, a compilation of several years of Facebook statuses, is a collection of wisdoms, remembrances, lessons in life, riddles, and guiding principles, told in both poem and prose. The book is small in size and reads as if it was a conversation over a cup of coffee.White’s “Our Name Be Witness” is composed of freely written prose poems, spoken in women’s voices, that describe the complicated communities of neighborhoods, and the aspirations and heart of their people. Aside from the introductory poem, “Devil’s food”, the following prose poems do not possess titles and range from three pages to a few short lines.

White’s work has appeared in many anthologies including “The Road Before Us: 100 Black Gay Poets”, “Bad Boys and Barbarians: New Gay Writing”, and “My Brothers Keeper”, as well as local and national publications. He is the co-editor of “If We Have to Take Tomorrow: HIV, Black Men and Same Sex Desire”. White’s poetry has been adapted for stage at San Francisco’s Theater Rhinoceros; he has performed his own work at the 2014 BAN7 Festival held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Beginning as a Teaching Artist for WritersCorps, Marvin K. White continues to lead creative arts and writing workshops for a range of audiences, from youth centers for runaway kids to black gay support groups to literary conferences, faith communities and social justice organizations. He is cofounder of B/GLAM, the Black Gay Letters and Arts Movement, an organization located in the Bay Area of California, whose goal was to preserve, present and incubate black gay artistic expressions.

Note: More information on Marvin K. White and his current projects can be found at his site located at: https://www.marvinkwhite.com/copy-of-home-house-1