Owen Rival

The Paintings of Owen Rival

Born in 1999 in Toronto, Owen Rival is a Canadian painter known for his highly contrasted and saturated everyday scenes. After studying both design and painting, he earned his Bachelor of Arts in Illustration at Providence’s Rhode Island School of Design in 2021. Rival is a recipient of the New York Academy of Art Summer Residency and the Dumfries House Artist Residency, a program delivered by Scotland’s Royal Drawing School and the Glasgow School of Art. He is also a member of the Society of Illustrators, a New York City-based professional society that promotes the art and history of illustration through exhibitions and competitions.

Through his work, Rival examines the seemingly mundane episodes of existence which include such monotonous chores as grocery shopping, washing clothes and brushing one’s teeth. Presented through the perspective of an observer, his paintings amplify these daily routines and transforms them into historic events. Married and now living as a couple with his wife and art collaborator Jenny, Rival paints scenes of domestic life that examine both the solitary moments and the interactions that occur in their Houston, Texas apartment.

Owen Rival’s paintings slowly evolve through an extensive work process: creating thumbnail sketches of a proposed scene, staging the scene, shooting photographs for foreground and background references, and lastly the gradual layering of color onto each drawn form on the canvas. His work is characterized by its strong lighting effects and visually complex compositions. Rival’s use of different colored LED lighting in the staged settings provides optional color highlights for the proposed work.

Rival pays particular interest in the color combinations for his work and often uses an inversion of traditional color associations to add both depth and complexity to the paintings. Instead of a realistic color palette, he chooses vibrant and contrasting tones to highlight important elements in the work and to amplify its mood, either conveying a sense of calm or injecting tension and stress.

In 2017 and 2018, Rival exhibited his paintings in group exhibitions held at Providence’s Waterman Building, the first permanent home of the Rhode Island School of Design and its first museum location. He exhibited his work in 2019 at the New York Academy of Art and, in the following year, at “The Color of My Land” exhibition at the RISD Museum Gelman Gallery.

Rival presented five new medium and large scale works at his first solo exhibition, “Chronic Maintenance”, in April and May of 2023 at the Monti8 Gallery in Latina, Italy. He had his first New York solo exhibition entitled “Long View” in May and June of 2023 at the Harkawik, Gallery 2 on Orchard Street in Manhattan. The show consisted of five acrylic paintings and four works on paper depicting domestic scenes at the Houston apartment.

Notes: Images of Owen Rival’s work, contact information, and social media sites can be found on his website located at: https://www.owenrival.com

The creative art site It’s Nice That has an article on Owen Rival’s life and paintings written by Olivia Hingley for its July 2022 posting. It can be found at: https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/owen-rival-art-180722#:~:text=Gifted%20with%20a%20clear%20perception,relatability%2C%20and%20striking%20visual%20complexity

The Harkawik Gallery is a contemporary art gallery with two locations, Orchard Street in New York and Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. The gallery’s website can be found at: https://www.harkawik.com

Top Insert Image: Owen Rival, “Groceries”, 2022, Acrylic on Canvas, 91.4 x 61 x 10.2 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Owen Rival, “Toronto”, 2021, Acrylic on Canvas, 60.1 x 76.2 cm, Private Collection

Martin Kosleck: Film History Series

Herbert Irving Leeds, “Martin Kosleck as Heller”, 1942, Film Clip Photo,“Manila Calling”, Cinematography Lucien N. Andriot, 20th Century Fox

Born in March of 1904 in Barkotzen, now Poland’s Barkocin, Martin Kosleck was a German film actor who began his career during the silent film era. He appeared in more than fifty films and numerous episodes of television series, as well as, roles on the Broadway stage. A talented artist, Kosleck supported himself between film roles as an impressionist-styled portrait painter whose work included portraits of Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Bette Davis. He had a solo exhibition of his portraits and other works in 1935 at the Los Angeles Museum that received great reviews.

Born Nicolale Yoshkin to a forester of German-Russian and Jewish lineage, Kosleck studied for six years at the Max Reinhardt Dramatic School located at the Palais Wesendonck in Berlin Tiergarten. His forte was Shakespearian roles, however, he also appeared in musicals and revues at both German and English theaters. At the age of twenty-three, Kosleck had his film debut in International Film AG’s 1927 “Der Fahnenträger von Sedan”, a silent film by Austrian director Johannes Brandt. Three years later, he appeared in director Carmine Gallone’s musical “Die Singende Stadt (The Singing City)” and Richard Oswald’s sci-fi horror film “Alrune”, both sound films.

In the early 1930s, Kosleck met and began a relationship with the actor Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, already an established artist in Weimar Germany’s film industry and close friend of Marlene Dietrich. This sometimes turbulent relationship would last until Twardowski’s death from a heart attack in 1958. During their early time together, the National Socialist Party under Adolph Hitler was growing in power. Kosleck, an outspoken critic of the Party, soon earned the animosity of the newly established Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels.

Martin Kosleck, after learning he had been tried in absentia and sentenced to death, escaped to Britain in 1931. The following year, he arrived in New York City and performed on Broadway in “The Merchant of Venice”. This play featured the return to acting, after an absence of thirteen years, of Maude Adams who at that time was the most popular stage actress in America. Kosleck’s role in this play was noticed by director Anatole Litvak who signed him with the Warner Brothers Studio; his first role was in directors William Dieterie and Busby Berkeley’s musical comedy “Fashions of 1934”.

Hans Twardowski also left Germany in 1931 after finishing his role in Viktor Tourjansky’s “Der Herzog von Reichstadt”. He traveled to the west coast of the United States and first appeared in Universal Studio’s 1932 pre-Code drama “Scandal for Sale”. Twardowski appeared in several war films with Kosleck, including “Confessions of a Nazi Spy”, “Espionage Agent” and “The Hitler Gang”. His acting career ended along with the war; however, he continued to write, direct and act in stage plays. A talented singer, he also sang tenor in a number of musicals.

In 1934, Kosleck was given a small role playing Propaganda Minister Goebbels in the highly controversial Warner Brothers’s drama “Confessions of a Nazi Spy” based on a book by FBI agent Leon Turron who had uncovered Nazi operations in the United States. Kosleck, inspired by his deep hatred of the Nazis, portrayed Goebbels with an icy demeanor and piercing sinister stare, a performance that made Kosleck the directors’ choice for roles depicting both criminals and Nazi villains. Between 1939 and 1944, he appeared as the bad guy in a total of twenty-two war films and crime thrillers that include “Espionage Agent”, “Nick Carter, Master Detective”, “Calling Philo Vance”, “Nazi Agent”, and Paramount Studios’s “The Hitler Gang”, the second of his three roles as Goebbels.

After the end of the Second World War, Martin Kosleck continued his work at Universal Studios with appearances in several horror films. The first of which was the role of Ragheb, the Arkam sect disciple, in the 1944 “The Mummy’s Curse”. This film was Universal’s fifth entry in its “Mummy” franchise as well as Lon Chaney Jr’s final appearance as the mummy Kharis. In 1945, Kosleck again co-starred with Chaney as the disturbed plastic surgeon Dr. Rudi Polden in “The Frozen Ghost”. He was in two Universal films in 1946: a supporting role in “She-Wolf of London” which starred June Lockhart who had just finished filming “Son of Lassie”, and “House of Horrors”, a film which contains one of Kosleck’s best horror film roles, the obsessed sculptor Marcel de Lange who controls the mad killer known as “The Creeper”.

In 1947 Kosleck unexpectedly married the German actress Eleonora van Mendelssohn. Born to an elite banking family in Berlin, she was both a sensitive and vulnerable woman who had married four times and, after an abortion, initially used morphine as a sedative but soon became addicted. With less film roles offered, Kosleck returned with his wife to New York city where he appeared on Broadway in Jean Giraudoux’s “La Folle de Chaillot”, a production starring John Carradine and Tony Award winner Martita Hunt, that was recognized as one of the best plays of 1948-1949. Kosleck also had an extensive career in television with appearances on such shows as “Hallmark Hall of Fame”, “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”, “The Outer Limits”, “The F.B.I.”, “Mission Impossible” and “Studio One”, among others.

Martin Kosleck’s last screen appearance was as Horst Borsht in Robert Day’s 1980 detective comedy “The Man with Bogart’s Face”. This film is also noted for being the last film appearance of George Raft. Martin Kosleck died at the age of eighty-nine following abdominal surgery at a Santa Monica convalescent home in Los Angeles County. His body was cremated; the location of his ashes are unknown.

Notes: Eleonora von Mendelssohn, already a fragile person, had taken the role of caregiver for both her hospitalized gay brother Francesco who had suffered a stroke and Kosleck who had attempted suicide over a love affair dispute. In January of 1951, Eleonora committed suicide with a toxic cocktail of ether, pills and injections. Her body was discovered by Hans Twardowski. To better understand the tragic life of Eleonora von Mendelssohn, I suggest reading the biographical article located at The Mendelssohn Society website: https://www.mendelssohn-gesellschaft.de/en/mendelssohns/biografien/eleonora-von-mendelssohn

A complete list of Martin Kosleck’s films and television appearances can be found at the Swiss film site Cyranos located at: https://www.cyranos.ch/smkosl-e.htm

An article entitled “The Cult of Actor Martin Kosleck in The Flesh Eaters” contains information on Kosleck’s work with Universal Studios. It can be found on the Cult Film Alley website located at: https://cultfilmalley.com.au/2022/05/12/the-cult-of-actor-martin-kosleck-in-the-flesh-eaters-1964/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Martin Kosleck”, Studio Publicity Film Shot, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Eugene Fords, “Berlin Correspondent”, (Virginia Gilmore, Sig Ruman, Martin Kosleck), 1942, Cinematography Virgil Miller, 20th Century Fox

Third Insert Image: Tim Whelan, “The Mad Doctor”, (Martin Kosleck and Basil Rathbone), 1941, Cinematography Ted Tetzlaff, Paramount Pictures

Fourth Insert Image: Leslie Goodwins, “The Mummy’s Curse”, (Peter Coe, Martin Kosleck, Kay Harding), 1944, Cinematography Virgil Miller, Universal Studios

Bottom Insert Image: Jean Yarbrough, “House of Horrors”, (Rondo Hatton and Martin Kosleck), 1946, Cinematography Maury Gertsman, Universal Studios

Martin Stommel

The Paintings of Martin Stommel

Born in 1969, Martin Stommel is a German contemporary painter whose dramatic and suspenseful compositions are a statement on the restlessness of the world. He first studied at Munich’s State Art Academy from 1994 to 1997 under Professor Bernhard Franz Weißhaar (Weisshaar), the academy’s Chair of Christian Art from 1978 to 2000. Stommel entered Berlin’s University of Arts, HdK, in 1998 where he studied under landscape painter and graphic artist Klaus Fußmann (Fussmann).

During the span of his academic studies, Stommel also trained under Russian painter and dissident Boris Georgievic Birger. Birger widely exhibited in Russia during the 1950s to the 1970s. After he joined the human rights movement, he was expelled in 1962, under the influence of Communist Party leader Nikita Khruschev, from the Moscow Union of Artists. Birger emigrated in 1990 to Bonn, Germany where he taught and exhibited until his death in 2001. Through his association with Birger, Stommel met several international artists, including Russian writer Lev Kopelev, German author and journalist Fritz Pleitgen, and Russian cellist Natalia Gutman.

In 2000, Martin Stommel met Austrian-born art historian and theorist Sir Ernst Gombrich in London. The author of many works of both cultural and art history, Gombrich is noted for his 1950 “The Story of Art” and 1960 “Art and Illusion”, a major work in the psychology of perception which influenced such writers as Umberto Eco and Thomas Kuhn. Gombrich encouraged Stommel towards figurative work and, during his last years of life, engaged in an exchange of supportive letters.

Stommel’s work exhibits the same bold brushwork and use of perspective as that used by sixteenth-century Venetian painter Jacopo (Tintoretto) Robusti, as well as, the intensity found in the figurative paintings of German modernist Max Beckmann who reinvented the religious triptych form. Stommel uses strong lighting techniques, carefully chosen colors, energetic diagonal movement, and elongated gestural bodies to create powerful visual experiences of tension and drama. His figures, rarely static, are full of energy and accentuated by bold black lines of pronounced shading

Between the years 2001 and 2007, Martin Stommel created a series of paintings and drawings of circus scenes as well as portraits of circus performers. His portraits included such famous clowns as the white-faced Francesco Caroli, Oleg Popov of the Moscow Circus, and David Larible known for his performances with Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus as well as Bernhard Paul and André Heller’s Circus Roncalli. Stommel’s circus portraits, along with still lifes and landscapes, were shown in his first solo exhibition in 2003 at the Museum Charlotte Zander in Bönnigheim, Germany. In the next year, he presented his circus paintings in the Principality of Monaco at the invitation of Prince Rainier III and his illustration series for the “Divine Comedy” at the Stadtmuseum in Bonn.

Stommel has regularly exhibited in solo shows throughout the years. In 2013, he exhibited at the Stiftung Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg which was followed by two shows at Frankfurt’s Galerie Mühlfeld & Stohrer in 2014 and 2015. Stommel’s “Lust and Expectation”, inspired by the world of dance, was held in 2019 at Gallery 70 in Tirana, Albania. In 2020, he had a second solo show at the same Gallery 70 location which showed large-format works, among which was his 2018 “Amazonenkampf (Fight of Amazons)”, a densely painted martial work of warriors and horses. Stommel’s 2022 “On Deliverance” exhibition, a series of works on the turmoil in the world, ran from April to July at Berlin’s Janine Bean Gallery, a dedicated supporter of local contemporary art.

Martin Stommel’s work has also been exhibited at the Kallmann Museum at Ismaning, Germany; Museum am Dom Trier, Germany; Cologne’s Lew Kopelew Forum; Munich’s Katholische Akademie in Bayern; Monaco’s Théâtre Princesse Grace; the Venice Biennial; as well as many galleries and art fairs in London, Cologne, Berlin, Lübeck and Munich, among others.

Notes: Martin Stommel’s website with current exhibition and contact information is located at: http://martin-stommel.deadwings.de/de

A short video in which Martin Stommel discusses his work can be found in the videos category at Gallery 70’s YouTube site located at: https://www.youtube.com/@gallery70/videos

Second Insert Image: Martin Stommel, “Jesus Asleep”, 2022, Oil on Linen, 260 x 175 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Martin Stommel, “Girls at the Pool”, 2024, Oil on Canvas, 57 x 52 cm, Gallery 70, Chicago (Available)

Robert Hamberger: “He Bequeths the Gift of Breath”

Photographers Unknown, He Bequeths the Gift of Breath

And they all forsook him and fled. And there followed him a certain young
man, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body; and the young men laid
hold on him: And he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked.
St Mark, Chapter 14, Verses 50-52

He’s my firmament.
I hang on every word,
lassoed by considering the lilies,
by camels and needle eyes,
bread of life and light of the world.

I studied his mouth, hour by hour,
until I confessed a thirst for his throat
exposed below the beard,
his wrists, slender gazelles
when loose sleeves slip to reveal them.

What could I do
but give up everything
to sip his shadow?
He admits me to his gaze,
permits my passion. He lets me stay.

I could have been the woman
who stroked the edge of his robe,
who wiped his heels with her hair.
His men buzz as if he’s honey
as if we might swallow him whole.

Tonight’s moon notes his cry
among the camellias.
He kneels to call the air father.
Saints snore while I shiver in linen,
keeping my chilly vigil.

My prayer marries his:
Run with me now where no God
can catch us. He walks instead
to swords and spears and glamour,
one man kissing another.

When they prod a blade at my ribs
I leap from their net,
wrestle free from my sheet
as water strips a skin.
My glimmer swims naked through fig trees.

He leaves me to my betrayal
between the olive groves.
He bequeaths the gift of breath
to my body’s temple.

Robert Hamberger, Gethsemane Nude, Torso, 2007, Redbeck Press, Bradford, West Yorkshire, UK

Born in Whitechapel, East London in 1957, Robert Hamberger is an English poet, author and educator. He studied English Literature from 1975 to 1978 at Sussex University, a highly-ranked university in Brighton, United Kingdom. Hamberger was awarded his Master of Arts in Social Work from Leicester University in 1988.

Following his graduation, Hamberger worked for thirty-eight years in social work for the Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, and West Sussex County Councils. During his residence in the East Midlands, he established the Corby Writers’ Workshop and the Wellingborough Writers’ Workshop. Hamberger also participated in the East Midlands Art’s first New Voices Tour and edited four anthologies by local writers. He currently resides in Brighton with his husband Keith Rainger, who lends his translation skills to Hamberger’s work.

Robert Hamberger prefers writing outside the literary mainstream. He has particular interests in working-class, pro-feminist, radical and queer writings. He uses his own experiences of fatherhood, marriage and separation, loss of friends and queer identity as the foundations for his examinations of love, death and memory. As such, his work remains very personal and true to his self-identity. In addition to publishing his work, Hamberger has taken part in numerous readings online as well as poetry festivals and workshops. Most recent of these was the October 2023 reading and panel on “Genre-Bending and Queering Words” at the Coast is Queer Festival held at Sussex University.

Hamberger’s first full-length collection of poems “Warpaint Angel” was published by Five Leaves Press in 1997. Its poetry explores the experience of fatherhood and existence as son, the meaning of family and friendship as well as the nature of love. The volume is a mixture of casual, frank narratives and lyrical poems both tough and delicate. Hamberger’s “Rule of Earth”, a winner in the 2000 Poetry Business Competition, is a chapbook that contains a sequence of twenty-one love sonnets. These sonnets describe both the daily routines and ecstasy of a gay relationship, which is unexpectedly impacted by heart disease.

Robert Hamberger’s 2002 collection of first-person poems, “The Smug Bridegroom”, explores the experiences of fatherhood, love and change which, through shifts in family relationships, lead to both a marriage breakup and renewal of hope. The 2007 “Torso”, Hamberger’s third full-length collection, continues his exploration of existence as father, son, lover and poet. Included among its sequences are a celebration of Federico Garcia Lorca’s love sonnets, elegies for a friend, and queer interpretations of sacred texts.

Hamberger’s fourth collection entitled “Blue Wallpaper” was published by Waterloo Press several months prior to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2019. Divided into six subtitled sections, this volume of sixty-one personal poems contains sonnets, elegies, free verse, and other poetic forms with the topic of love between men frequently central. Among the poetry in “Blue Wallpaper” are works centered on familial memories from Hamberger’s youth, his mother’s dementia, the poets he admires, mythical and natural creatures, the work of Arthur Rimbaud, and the deaths of close friends during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. “Blue Wallpaper” was shortlisted for the 2020 Polari Prize, an annual United Kingdom literary prize established for LBGTQ+ literature.

Kept in an asylum for four years, the peasant poet John Clare escaped in 1841 and walked over eighty miles to his home in Northamptonshire. Suffering from poor mental health, Clare was attempting to reunite with Mary, his idealized first love, unaware she had died three years prior. In 1995 with his personal life in crisis and mental health fragile, Robert Hamberger retraced poet John Clare’s route over a four-day walk. In June of 2021, he published his finished “A Length of Road”, a work part memoir, part-literary criticism and part travel-log. The volume is a deep, poetic exploration of the issues of class, gender, grief, masculinity and sexuality as seen through Hamberger’s own life as well as the autobiographical writings of poet John Clare.

Notes: Robert Hamberger”s website, which contains readings on videos, interviews, writings and contact information, can be located at: https://www.roberthamberger.co.uk

Popsublime is an interesting literary, film and pop culture review site that has be publishing online since 2010. It has a review by the site’s author on Robert Hamberger’s 2002 “The Smug Bridegroom”. The article is located at: https://popsublime.blogspot.com/2010/08/robert-hamberger-smug-bridegroom-five.html

Agnes Martin

The Artwork of Agnes Martin

Born in March of 1912 at the town of Macklin located in Saskatchwan, Agnes Bernice Martin was a Canadian-American abstract painter known for her minimalist and abstract expressionist style. Martin’s patterned work, both delicate and awe inspiring, established a connection between the arts of writing and painting.

One of four children born to Scottish Presbyterian farmers, Agnes Martin spent her formative years in Vancouver before relocating to the state of Washington in 1931 to assist her pregnant sister. She studied at the College of Education of Western Washington University and later received her Bachelor of Arts in 1942 from the Teacher College of New York’s Columbia University. During her studies, Martin was exposed to the artwork of sculptor and painter Joan Miró and abstract expressionist painters Adolph Gottlieb and Arshile Gorky. Inspired by their work, she began to take studio classes and seriously work towards a career as an artist.

In 1947, Martin attended the Summer Field School of the University of New Mexico in Taos and, through lectures by Zen Buddhist scholar Daisetsu Teltaro Suzuki, became interested in Asian disciplines and ethics as a tool to manage her journey in life. Following her graduation, Martin enrolled at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque where she taught art classes. She resumed her studies at Columbia University and in 1952 earned her Master of Fine Arts in Modern Art.

At the invitation of gallery owner Betty Parsons, Agnes Martin settled in New York City for a period of ten years beginning in 1957. She lived in a loft within the Coenties Slip area, a historic section of nineteenth-century buildings surrounded by the city’s financial district. Originally an area with an artificial inlet for loading and unloading cargo ships, Coenties Slip became both home and studio space for ground breaking artists from the late 1950s to the early 1960s. The area also served as a haven for the queer community in the 1960s. Among Martin’s friends and neighbors were Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Adolph Reinhardt, and Lenore Tawney, for whom she wrote an essay included in the brochure of Tawney’s first solo exhibition.

Although not documented until 1962, Martin was known to have schizophrenia, the struggle of which was largely a private and individual affair. She was frequently hospitalized to control its symptoms among which were aural hallucinations and states of catatonia. Martin was aided by her friends from the Coenties Slip who enlisted the support of a respected psychiatrist who was both friend and art collector. The full impact of this illness on her life is unknown.

In 1967, Agnes Martin abandoned the art world and her life in New York. After a period of travel in Canada and the western United States, she settled in Mesa Portales, New Mexico in 1968 where she rented a fifty-acre property until 1977. On this property, Martin built several adobe brick structures herself. She did not paint any works during the period from 1968 to 1971 and distanced herself from social events and the public eye. In 1973, Martin returned to art with the creation of thirty serigraphs for a portfolio entitled “On a Clear Day”.

An admirer of Mark Rothko’s work, Martin simplified her own work to its basic elements, a process to encourage a perception of perfection and emphasize the painting’s transcendental quality. Her work’s signature style focused on grids, lines and fields of subtle color. In the early 1960s, Martin created square 182cm canvases using only black, white and brown; these were covered with dense, minute and lightly defined graphite grids. Her paintings, while minimalist in form, differed from other minimalist works as her work retained small flaws and noticeable traces of the artist’s hand. Martin’s paintings and her writings both reflected her interest in Eastern philosophy, an aspect which became increasingly more dominant after 1967.

In 1974, Agnes Martin returned to painting with 30cm square and 182cm square canvases that represented a new exploration characterized by vertical and horizontal lines in a palette of yellows, pinks and blues. These were exhibited in 1975 at her first show at New York’s prestigious Pace Gallery. During her time in Taos, Martin continued her use of light pastel washes on the grids and bands of her paintings but reduced the scale of her work to a square of 152cm. She also modified the grid structure she had been using since the late 1950s; the pencil lines were now being drawn intuitively without a ruler.

In 1976, Martin made her only completed film, “Gabriel”, a seventy-eight minute silent film, except for seven moments at which excerpts from Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” occur for two or three minutes. Unscripted, the film was shot with a handheld camera and presented the story of a young boy who wanders in the natural landscape of rural New Mexico. Martin’s goal was to make a film about happiness and innocence; an angel’s name, representing innocence, was used for the title of the film.

In 1978, Agnes Martin left her Portales home and moved to Galisteo, near Santa Fe. Her broad-striped paintings became more luminous, a result derived from the application of diluted acrylic color over a ground of multiple layers of white pigment. Martin’s work evolved again in the 1990s; the early symmetric bands of color in her paintings began to be composed of varying widths. In 1991, Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum hosted a retrospective of Martin’s work, which was followed in the next year by a retrospective held at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.

Following the Whitney show, Martin moved to Taos, New Mexico where she lived and worked for the remainder of her life. She introduced a new palette of color in her work which included a spectrum of greens and saturated orange. In her very last paintings, Martin reintroduced the geometric elements from her 1950s work; she placed dark triangles and rectangles against gray grounds but kept the graphite lines that were a integral part of all her work. Agnes Martin passed away in Taos, New Mexico at the age of ninety-two in December of 2004.

Agnes Martin was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Clinton in 1998 and was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2004. In 1994, the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos renovated its Pueblo-Revival building and dedicated a wing to Martin’s work. Since her first solo exhibition in 1958, Martin participated in many international exhibitions including three Venice Biennales, two Whitney Biennials and the 1972 Documenta in Kassel, Germany. In 2016, the same year the Guggenheim Museum held a retrospective of her work, Agnes Martin’s 1965 graphite and oil on canvas “Orange Grove” sold at auction for $13.7 million dollars.

Notes: Despite sharing several meaningful and long-term relationships in Oregon, New Mexico, and New York City, Agnes Martin never specifically acknowledged her sexuality in interviews or writings during her life. Martin kept her sexuality hidden, often even from close acquaintances.

An article on Agnes Martin written by William Peterson for the November 2013 “New Mexico Mercury” can be found at: http://newmexicomercury.com/blog/comments/some_late_thoughts_on_the_early_work_of_agnes_martin

An extensive biography of Agnes Martin, written by Christopher Régimbal and entitled “Agnes Martin: Life and Work”, can be found at the Art Canada Institute site located at: https://www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/agnes-martin/

Top Insert Image: Dorothy Alexander, “Agnes Martin”, 1978, Gelatin Silver Print, Art Canada Institute, Toronto

Second Insert Image: Agnes Martin, “Self Portrait”, circa 1947, Encaustic on Canvas, 66 x 49.5 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Agnes Martin, “With My Back to the World”, 1997, 152.4 x 152.4 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Fourth Insert Image: Agnes Martin, “Portrait of Daphne Vaughn”, 1947, Oil on Canvas, 50.8 x 40.6 cm, Private Collection

Fifth Insert Image: Agnes Martin, “Summer”, 1965, Watercolor, Ink and Gouache on Paper, 22 x 23.5 cm, Private Collection of Patricia Lewy, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Gianfranco Gorgoni, “Agnes Martin in Cuba, New Mexico”, 1974, Detail, Gelatin Silver Print, Art Canada Institute, Toronto

Rockwell Kent

The Wood Engravings of Rockwell Kent

Born in Tarrytown, New York in June of 1882, Rockwell Kent was an American painter, graphic artist, writer and adventurer. A profoundly independent and thoughtful man, he acquired through his personal experience and skills a great respect for the dignity of labor and an appreciation of indigenous societies and cross-cultural encounters.

In his formative years, Rockwell Kent spent much of his life in the area of New York City. He attended the Horace Mann School, a private school and member of the Ivy Preparatory School League. In the fall of 1900, Kent studied composition and design at the Art Students League under painter, printmaker and curator Arthur Wesley Dow. He studied in the summers between 1900 and 1902 at one of the first plein air painting schools in America, Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art, under Impressionist painter William Merritt Chase.

In the fall of 1902, Kent entered the New York School of Art, founded by William Chase, where he studied under painter Robert Henri, one of the pioneers of the Ashcan School of American realism. He became an apprentice during the summer of 1903 to painter and naturalist Abbott Handerson Thayer, one of the first to write about disruptive patterning to break up an object’s outlines, now known as Thayer’s Law. Kent earned his Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from New York’s Columbia University which prepared him for occasional work as an architectural renderer and carpenter. While at Columbia, Kent developed a close friendship with Carl Zigrosser who later founded New York’s Weyhe Gallery and became Curator of Prints and Drawings at Philadelphia’s Museum of Art.

Rockwell Kent was a transcendentalist and mystic in the tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. He found his inspiration in the austerity and primordial beauty of the wilderness. After his five-year residence on Monhegan Island in Maine, Kent lived for extended periods in Minnesota, Newfoundland, Alaska, Vermont, Tierra del Fuego, Ireland and Greenland. His landscapes and seascapes from these locales show a Symbolist viewpoint of the natural world. Kent published ten memoirs, complete with illustrations, of his travel years. The first of these volumes was the 1920 “Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska”, an account of his and his eldest son’s 1918 fall and winter exploration of Fox Island in Alaska’s Resurrection Bay.

Kent spent his early years as a painter in New Hampshire where he painted a series of landscapes and several views of Mount Monadnock, the most prominent mountain peak in southern New Hampshire. These works were first shown at the Society of American Artists in a 1904 New York City exhibition. In 1905, he began his five-year stay on Maine’s Monhegan Island; the series of paintings he produced during this period were shown in 1907 at New York’s Clausen Galleries to critical acclaim. The New Hampshire and the Monhegan paintings are the foundation for Kent’s reputation as an early American Modernist painter.

In the 1920s, Rockwell Kent began a career in illustration and contributed drawings for the covers of many leading magazines. Acknowledging Kent’s success with his 1920 illustrated “Wilderness”, publisher George Palmer Putnam and others incorporated Kent as ‘Rockwell Kent, Inc” to support him in his Vermont homestead while he completed his Alaskan paintings for a 1920 exhibition at New York’s Knoedler Galleries. Approached by publisher Thorne Donnelley for an illustrated version of “Two Years Before the Mast”, Kent suggested he instead illustrate an edition of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick; or, The Whale”. After researching whaling lore and visiting whaling museums, Kent created two-hundred and eighty illustrations for the 1930 three-volume set of “Moby Dick”, of which one thousand copies were printed by Donnelley’s Lakeside Press.

In 1927, Kent purchased Asgaard, an Adirondack farmstead in upstate New York, which became his residence and studio for the remainder of his life. In the summer of 1929, he traveled to Greenland on a painting expedition. Determined to paint and write, Kent spent two years between 1931 and 1935 living in a tiny fishing settlement above the Arctic Circle. His paintings from this period include some of the largest and most lauded of his career. Becoming more politically active as World War II drew near, Kent, on commission from the Treasury Department, painted two murals at the Federal Triangle Post Office in Washington DC that supported, in small letters of a Native Alaskan language, the decolonization of Puerto Rico.

In spite of his critical views on American foreign policy, Rockwell Kent remained America’s foremost draftsman of the sea. He produced a series of pen and ink maritime drawings for the American Export Lines during World War II. In 1946, Kent completed a second series for the Rahr Malting Company, a worldwide supplier to breweries, wineries and distilleries. These works were published in the 1946 “To Thee!: A Toast in Celebration of a Century of America 1847-1947”, a volume Kent wrote and designed to celebrate American freedom and democracy and the important role immigrants play in forming America’s national identity.

In 1948, Kent was elected to the National Academy of Design as an Associate member; he became a full Academician in 1966. Kent passed away due to a heart attack at his Adirondacks home in March of 1971 at the age of eighty-eight. He had participated in the 1936 formation of the American Artists’ Congress and later served as an officer of the Artists’ Union of America as well as the Artists’ League of America. In 1948, Kent had sought election as a New York Congressman under the American Labor Party banner.

New York’s Columbia University houses Rockwell Kent’s personal collection of thirty-three hundred working sketches and drawings, most of which were unpublished. The Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution houses an extensive collection of Kent’s correspondence. His work is contained in many private collections and is both housed and exhibited in major museums throughout the United States.

Notes: A May 2023 online edition of “Modernism/modernity” has an excellent and extensive article, written by Colgate University Visiting Professor of Writing and Rhetoric Jonathan Najarian, entitled “And Words Were Images to Him; Narrative Remediation in Rockwell Kent” located at: https://modernismmodernity.org/articles/najarian-narrative-remediation-rockwell-kent

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Rockwell Kent”, circa 1920, Vintage Print

Second Insert Image: Rockwell Kent, “Dan Ward’s Stack, Ireland”, 1926-1927, Oil on Canvas, 86 x 112 cm, Hermitage State Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

Third Insert Image: Rockwell Kent, “Workers of the World, Unite!”, 1937, Wood Engraving on Paper, Cover Illustration for 1937 Issue of the New Masses, 20.3 x 15.2 cm, Plattsburgh State Art Museum, New York

Fourth Insert Image: Rockwell Kent, “Endless Energy for Limitless Living”, 1946, Oil on Canvas on Board, 111.8 x 121.9 cm, Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio

Bottom Insert Image: Rockwell Kent, “Mountain Climber”, 1933, Wood Engraving on Paper, 20 x 14.9 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Karlheinz Weinberger

The Photography of Karlheinz Weinberger

Born in Zürich in June of 1921, Karlheinz Weinberger was a self-taught Swiss photographer who over his sixty year career documented the outsider culture of rebellious male youths and working-class men. He used the pseudonym “Jim”, taken from a popular 1930 song written by German-Austrian composer Hanns Eisler, for his photographic work from 1948 to 2000.

From 1936 to 1939, Karlheinz Weinberger attended Zürich’s grammar school and began taking photographs with his first camera. He became a member of the Bund der Nuturfreunde (Association of Nature Enthusiasts) photography club where he developed greater skills in both photographing and processing. In 1942, Weinberger was called for military training after which he served a period of active military service. At the end of the Second World War, he gained temporary employment as a carpet and furniture salesman but also endured periods of unemployment.

Beginning in 1948, Weinberger became an active member of Zürich’s famous underground gay club “Der Kreis (The Circle)”. He began in the mid-1950s to publish his photos in the underground gay journals “Der Kreis”, printed through the club, and “Club68” founded by a small team of former Kreis members. Weinberger published more than eighty photographs though “Der Kreis” until the journal’s last issue in 1967. It should be noted that “Der Kreis”, besides being the only gay publication to include editorial content in three languages, was the most important European journal promoting the legal and social rights of gay men at that time.

During the 1950s, Karlheinz Weinberger spent his summer holidays in the Mediterranean area where he took portraits on the coasts and islands of Italy and during later excursions into Morocco. Weinberger’s images of sailors, fishermen, beach goers, and dockworkers were later published in “Mediterranean”, a 2021 posthumous volume, the third of a series through the Swiss publisher Sturm & Drang.

From 1955 to his retirement in 1986, Weinberger was employed in the warehouse department of the Siemens-Albis factory in Zürich; this day-time position provided the finances for his off hours’ photographic work. In 1958, Weinberger met and photographed the young rocker Jimmy Oechslin in the streets of Zürich. Oechslin introduced him to Switzerland’s growing gang culture known by the German term Halbstarker, meaning ‘half-strong’. Groups of Zürich’s young people, influenced by the many aspects of American culture, were looking for an identity of their own. They established an antiauthoritarian subculture based on American film, rock music, customized jean clothing and the riding of motorcycles.

Intrigued by the teenagers’ edgy look as well as their attitude towards authority, Karlheinz Weinberger began documenting this post-war generation on Zürich’s streets and at local festivals. He later established an improvised portrait studio at the apartment shared with his mother. During this period, Weinberger became the one of the first photographers granted permission to document the local chapter of the Hells Angels motorcycle club. Between 1964 and 1976, he worked as a freelancer for various sports magazines and specialized in sports reporting in Switzerland and East Germany.

Since 1963, Weinberger presented his work in various group exhibitions in Zürich, Israel, Italy, Canada and the United States. In 1968, he won a prize for his sports photographs at the NIVON Holland competition. Weinberger’s first solo exhibition, entitled “The Hooligans 1955-1960” was held in 1980 at Zürich’s Migros Club School, a recreation and education center. The first institutional exhibition of Weinberger’s work to a wider audience was a major retrospective entitled “Intimate Stranger” held in 2000 at Zürich’s Design Museum. Consisting exclusively of vintage prints mostly developed in Weinberger’s home lab, the show documented his close, but still outsider, view of the Halbstarker gangs. This exhibition later traveled to Vancouver, Canada.

Karlheinz Weinberger passed away in December of 2006 in Zürich at the age of eighty-five. The Galerie Esther Woerdehoff is the owner of the Weinberger Estate which is housed in the Swiss Social Archives in Zürich. In February and March of 2011, the Swiss Institute at St. Marks Place in New York City held an exhibition of Weinberger’s vintage prints curated through the collaboration of the Karlheinz Weinberger Estate and Gianni Jetzer, Curator-at-large at Washington DC’s Hirshhorn Museum. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Swiss Institute published a portfolio of fifty-four images entitled “Karlheinz Weinberger: Jeans”.

In August of 2017 in conjunction with a large retrospective exhibition at Les Rencontres d’Arles, the German publisher Steidl released French and English editions of “Swiss Rebels”, a collection of Weinberger’s homoerotic images of rockers, bikers, construction workers and athletes. In 2018, publisher Starm & Drang released “Karlheinz Weinberger: Sports” , a collection of work discovered after the artist’s death in 2006. The volume, the second in its series, included one hundred-thirty images taken from thousands of negatives, slides and prints that documented bike races, wrestling matches and weight-lifting events.

Notes: The online magazine on contemporary culture Kvadrat Interwoven has an excellent article on Karlheinz Weinberger’s early career written by Larissa Kasper. This article can be located at: http://kvadratinterwoven.com/foto-jim-zurich

A timeline of Karlheinz Weinberger’s life is available at the Gallery Esther Woerdehoff site, the executor of his estate. This information is located at: https://ewgalerie.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Weinberger_en-2022.pdf

Second Insert Image: Karlheinz Weinberger, Untitled Portrait, Zürich, circa 1970s, Gelatin Silver Print, Karlheinz Weinberger Estate

Fourth Insert Image: Karlheinz Weinberger, Untitled, Portrait from 2011 “Jeans”, Swiss Institute, New York City