Year: 2023

Max Jacob: “The Winged Horse Contains My Passion”

Photographers Unknown, The Winged Horse Contains My Passion

The farmers call me by name on the roads
   as they might tell a skylark from a thrush
but they know the names of the animals better
than mine, for my name is Dolor.

If that which I love weighs upon my wound, it pains it;
if it weigh only upon summer, it is the field that suffers.

What will feed summer and my love if not that sorrow,
   since my love and summer can no longer feed on joy?

The swan disappears in the slant of branches,
and the naked muses take me in their arms;
the winged horse contains my passion
and the wild flowers spread for me.

Max Jacob, Ballad of the Country Exile, 1939 (Original French Composition)
Translation by Harvey Shapiro for Poetry, Volume 76 Issue 2, May 1950

Born in July of 1876 in Quimper, a prefecture of the Finistère department of Brittany, Max Jacob was a French poet, writer, critic and painter. His poetry, a complex blend composed of Breton, Parisian, Jewish and Roman Catholic elements, was instrumental to the new directions of modern poetry in the early twentieth-century. In addition to his birth name, Max Jacob used two pseudonyms for his writings, Morven le Gaëlique and Léon David. 

At the age of eighteen, Max Jacob relocated to Paris’s Montmartre artist community in 1894, a time when Symbolism was at its peak. He supported himself through a series of odd jobs including teaching piano and freelancing as an art critic. In the summer of 1901, Jacob met the twenty-year old Pablo Picasso who had arrived in Paris with no knowledge of the French language. Both struggling financially, they shared a studio flat on the Rue Ravignan and named their residence Bateau Laviour for its resemblance to laundry boats floating on the Seine. Through various social connections, Jacob and Picasso became friends with poet and novelist Guillaume Apollinaire and artists Jean Hugo, Christopher Wood, Jean Cocteau and Amedeo Modigliani. 

As a homosexual, Jacob attempted to achieve a sense of belonging in France, whose moral attitudes, politics, and institutions excluded him. Even though homosexuality had not technically been illegal under the Napoleonic Code since 1810, police still harassed gay men in the name of public order. Although Jacob was not involved in politics, he remembered the miscarriage of justice and antisemitism involved in the 1896-1899 Dreyfus Affair and saw first-hand the racist questioning of the French Jewish community regarding their patriotism. 

In the fall of 1906, Max Jacob told friends he received a vision of the Christ. After which, he began to embrace Catholicism and was eventually baptised in 1915. He fictionalized this spiritual vision in the 1911 “Saint Matorel (Saint Matthew)”, illustrated by Pablo Picasso, and the 1919 confessional work “La Defense de Tartufe”. Jacob began to find an audience for his literary work in France with his first collection of unique prose poetry, the 1917 “The Dice Cup” which was well received in Parisian literary circles. In 1921, he published a volume of free verse poetry entitled “Le Laboratoire Central”. 

Disenchanted with his life in Paris, Jacob sought a change and became a lay associate at the Benedictine community in Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire, where he lived on a small income earned from selling his gouache paintings. Jacob spent two long periods in association with the Benedictine community, the first from 1921 to 1928 and the second from 1936 to 1944. Though the church met his spiritual needs, he still had a series of infatuations with artistic men which he expressed through letters of spiritual and stylistic advice. Jacob later produced a series of love poems that proclaimed his desires, abeit in a heterosexual style similar to what Marcel Proust wrote about his chauffeur Alfred Agostinelli. 

Despite half of his live as a practicing Catholic and being awarded the Legion of Honor, Max Jacob was arrested by the Gestapo in February of 1944. Taken to the city of Orléans, he was place in a ten by ten meter military cell with sixty-five other Jewish men, women and children. On the twenty-sixth of February, Jacob and the others were packed into a train and hauled to the Gare d’Austerlitz in Paris. During his stay at this train station, Jacob sent out written pleas for help to his friends and influential people who might possibly intercede.

Jacob was next sent to the Drancy internment camp where, after surrendering his gold watch and money, he was registered and numbered. Given a green sticker, Jacob was scheduled to leave on transport number sixty-nine on the seventh of March. He developed severe pneumonia in the internment camp and, due to the lack of medicine, suffered severely for two days. Max Jacob died in the evening of the fifth of March, two days before the scheduled transport carried 1,501 people to Auschwitz.

Director Gabriel Aghion’s 2007 biographical drama “Monsieur Max” was a film that covered the life of Max Jacob from the First World War until his death in 1944. The role of Jacob was played by French actor and director Jean-Claude Brialy. This was Brialy’s last role before his death in May of 2007; he was survived by his partner, Bruno Finck. 

Notes: For those interested in more information on the life of Max Jacob, there are two excellent online articles worth reading:

Mardean Isaac’s 2021 article “Max Jacob and the Angel on the Wall” at the Arts & Letters section of the online Tablet located at: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/max-jacob-angel

Poetry editor Rosanna Warren’s October 2020 “The Death of Max Jacob”, excerpted from her book “Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters”, at the Arts & Culture section of The Paris Review located at: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/10/14/the-death-of-max-jacob/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Max Jacob”, 1922, Vintage Print

Second Insert Image: Amedeo Modigliani, “Max Jacob”, 1916, Paris, Oil on Canvas, 92.7 x 60.3 cm, Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio

Third Insert Image: Jean Cocteau, “Manuel Ortiz de la Zarate, Moishe Kisling, Max Jacob, Pablo Picasso, and Paquerette Meeting for Lunch”,  1916, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Roger Toulouse, “Max Jacob”, 1942, Oil on Canvas, 61.2 x 53 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, France

Flower Field Gif: https://rivermusic.tumblr.com

Segundo de Chomón: Film History Series

Segundo de Chomón, “Hôtel Électrique”, 1908, Running Time 8 Minutes, Producer and Distributor Pathé Frères

Soundtrack Courtesy of Japan’s Euodia Chamber Ensemble

Born in the Aragon city of Teruel in October of 1871, Segundo Victor Aurelio Chomón y Ruiz was a cinematographer, film director and screenwriter. A pioneer in camera and optical techniques, he is regarded as the most significant Spanish silent film director in the international context. Known for his technical quality and creativity, Chomón worked with the most important film companies of the time, including Italia Films and Pathé Frères. 

Segundo de Chomón was the son of Isaac Chomón Gil, a military doctor, and Luisa Ruiz Valero, born in the city of Calamocha located in the Teruel Province. It is believed he undertook engineering studies; however, there are no known records of graduation. Chomón resided in Paris between 1895 and 1897 where he discovered the cinematic works of Auguste and Louis Lumière, French pioneers best known for the films produced through their Cinématographe motion picture system. While in Paris, Chomón met French silent film actress Julienne Alexandrine Mathieu whom he would later marry. In addition to acting in Chomón’s films, Mathieu would collaborate with Chomón on scripts and special effects.

Between 1897 and 1898, Chomón fulfilled his military service in Cuba; upon his return to Paris, he became interested in film production. At Georges Méliès’s recently founded film company Star Films, Chomón worked alongside his wife in the workshop where they hand-colored film, frame by frame. He designed some celluloid templates that facilitated this work and achieved greater precision in color delimitation. With slight changes, this system was later patented by Pathé Frères under the name “Pathécolor”. At the turn of the century, Chomón relocated to Barcelona where, acting as an agent for Pathé Frères, he opened a workshop to publicize and distribute the company’s films. 

In 1901, Segundo de Chomón began making films on an independent basis with distribution through Pathé. His first film was the 1901 silent short “Descente du Mont Serrat”. In the following year, Chomón produced a series of films which were inspired by the stories he found through the book publisher Editorial Calleja. He experimented in this period with double exposures and techniques to create gigantic effects which he used successfully in his 1903 “Gulliver en ie Pais de los Gigantes”. Due to the quality of his films, Chomón received financial support for his filmmaking from Charles Pathé who desired to compete with Georges Méliès’s company, Star Films. 

Now a valuable asset to Pathé, Chomón relocated in 1905 back to Paris, where in addition to directing films, he was given charge of the color stenciling workshop. In 1907, he was selected to co-direct the remake of Pathé’s top director Ferdinand Zecca’s 1903 “Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ”. Chomón’s most productive years were between 1907 and 1912, a period in which he worked with Zecca and such talented directors as Gaston Velle and Émile Cohl. In 1912, Chomón accepted an invitation to make films in Italy. He worked on the special effects for other directors’ films, most notably Giovanni Pastrone’s 1914 epic “Cabiria”. Pastrone recipocally collaborated on Chomón’s last directorial film, the 1916 “La Guerra e il Sogno di Momi”. 

After his move to Italy, Segundo de Chomón’s own films became less frequent. In 1924, he worked in a collaboration with Swiss engineer Ernest Zellinger on a color cinema system for which they won the Gold Medal at the International Exhibition of Photography, Optics and Cinematography in Turin. Instead of directing his own films, Chomón primarily worked in visual effects for the films of others, including Italian actor and director Guido Brignone’s 1925 “Meciste in Hell” and French actor and director Abel Gance’s 1927 “Napoléon”. Both these directors were highly regarded: Guido Brignone was the first Italian director to win at the Venice Film Festival, and Gance’s epic “Napoléon” is widely considered one of the greatest and innovative films of the silent era, if not all time. 

Chomón was a meticulous and perfectionist technician who would spend months to perfect a special effect, even if it would only last a few seconds on screen. In his films, he used a vast repertory of special effect techniques including colorization of film, the use of models, double exposures, overprints, schüfftan effects (covering part of the camera’s view with a mirror to create an image with multiple parts), pyrotechnics, camouflage and crank pitch, the removal of an object while the camera is turned off and then on to cause a disappearance.

Best remembered for his special effect films, Segundo de Chomón died in Paris on the second of May in 1929 at the age of fifty-seven. Over the course of his career, he received credits on one hundred forty-five films from 1901 to 1916.

Notes: The 1908 silent French comedy-fantasy film “Hôtel Électrique” was directed by Segundo de Chomón and produced by Pathé Frères. The film’s cast included just Segundo de Chomón as Betrand and his wife Julienne Mathieu as Laura. This eight-minute film is one of the earliest uses of stop motion animation in history, though it is not the first. Chomón used the technique in his 1906 film “Le Théâtre de Bob”, which animated puppets, and the American director J. Stuart Blackton used stop motion for his 1907 “The Haunted Hotel” produced by the American Vitagraph Company. However, the “Hôtel Électrique” is unique in its early use of pixilation, a technique using live actors as the frame-by-frame subjects.  

From 1907 to 1909, Julienne Mathieu was credited in at least forty-two films, many of them shot by Chomón with her assistance on special effects. She also appeared in films by Ferdinard Zecca, Gaston Velle, Albert Capellani, and Lucien Nonguet. Mathieu ended her film career in 1909. From 1912 to 1925, she is reported to have been living with her family in Turin, Italy. On the first of December in 1943, Julienne Alexandrine Mathieu died at the Ospizio della Carità (Hospice of Charity) in Chieri while the city was under German occupation after the fall of Fascist Italy.

In the Ultrawolves Archive, there is a 2018 article on Segundo de Chomón’s French 1908 colorized short silent film “La Grenouille (The Frog)”. This rather unusual film for the era can be located at: https://ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon.blog/2018/07/15/segundo-de-chomon-la-grenouille-the-frog/

Second Insert Image: Segundo de Chomón, “Les Roses Magiques (The Magic Roses)”, 1906, Pathé Frères

Third Insert Image: Segundo de Chomón, “La Voyage sur la Planète Jupiter”, 1909, Pathé Frères

Bottom Insert Image: Segundo de Chomón, “Les Oeufs de Paques (Easter Eggs), 1907, Pathé Frères

Alejandro Pasquale

The Artwork of Alejandro Pasquale

Born in Buenos Aires in 1984, Alejandro Pasquale is an Argentine painter. In 2002, he entered the Universidad Nacional de les Artes in Buenos Aires to pursue an arts education. Two years later, Pasquale left the university and continued his education under the tutelage of local artists. Among those artists active at this time in Buenos Aires was painter Eduardo Stupia who works almost extensively in black and white with occasional use of color. In both 2013 and 2014, Pasquale participated in Stupia’s workshops at the highly regarded Torcuato Di Tella University in Buenos Aires.

Alejandro Pasquale’s work resides in the art category of magic realism, a realistic portrayal of the world with additional mystical or cryptic elements. His intriguing drawings and paintings, predominately figurative, abound in highly detailed elements. With a background in art based on his love of nature, Pasquale places his figures in lush, natural surroundings; however, he obscures their faces and emotions through masks composed of foliage and flowers. With their sense of sight covered, the figures are removed from the external world and absorbed into a state of internal contemplation.

In 2011, Pasquale was recognized for his drawings in the Salon de Mayo held at the Provincial Museum of Fine Arts “Rosa Galisteo de Rodriguez” in Santa Fe, Argentina. In 2015, he was a finalist at the National Painting Biennial in the city of Rafaela. In the same year, Pasquale won the first award at the National Exhibition of Contemporary Art held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Junin, a provincial city of Buenos Aires. In 2017, he was awarded a scholarship to participate in the Encontro de Artistas Novos exhibition held at the Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Pasquale also participated in the Salón Nacional de Arts Visuales held in 2021 at Buenos Aires’s Palais de Glace.

Alejandro Pasquale is a regularly appearing artist with the Beinart Gallery in Melbourn, Australia; the Victor Lope Gallery in Barcelona, Spain; the Quimera Gallery in Buenos Aires, Argentina; the Stone Sparrow Gallery in New York City; and the Daniel Raphael Gallery in London. In addition to his many solo and group exhibitions, he continues to exhibit in many international art fairs. Alejandro Pasquale’s work is included in many private collections around the world. 

“The intention of my work is to be a necessary reminder that, even though we often overlook it, we are a horizontal part of the great network of living beings that co-inhabit this earth. We belong, on the day we allow ourselves to recognize this, to this immense and magical nature. We are nature.”  —Alejandro Pasquale

Notes: Images of Alejandro Pasquale’s work and contact information can be found at the artist’s website located at: https://alejandropasquale.com

Alejandro Pasquale’s work can also be seen at Saisho, an online art market site, and at the avante-garde Beinart Gallery where Pasquela has had several solo exhibitions. 

Saisho is located at: https://www.saishoart.com/alejandro-pasquale

Beinart Gallery is located at: https://beinart.org/collections/alejandro-pasquale

 

Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn

The Meditation Drawing Screenprints of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn

Born in London in October of 1881, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn was a Dutch spiritualist, theosophist, scholar and printmaker. Her father was Albertus Kapteyn, an engineer, inventor and the older brother of astronomer Jacobus Kapteyn. After working six years at the London site of the Westinghouse Air Brake Company, he was appointed Director General in 1887. Olga Kapteyn’s mother was Truus Muysken, an activist in social renewal and women’s emancipation. Among her circle of friends were playwright George Bernard Shaw and Russian anarchist Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin. 

Olga Kapteyn’s initial education was at the North London Collegiate School where she became close friends with Marie Stopes who became a leading plant paleobotanist and founder of Britain’s first birth control clinic. Near the turn of the century, the Kapteyn family moved to Zürich, Switzerland where Olga attended the School of Applied Arts. She continued her education with a major in Art History at the University of Zürich. 

In 1909, Olga Kapteyn married Iwan Hermann Fröbe, a Croatian-Austrian conductor and flutist with Zürich’s opera orchestra; his conducting career took the couple first to Munich and later in 1910 to Berlin. At the outset of World War I, Olga and Iwan left Berlin and returned to Zürich. After the birth of twin daughters, tragedy struck the family; Iwan Fröbe perished in a September 1915 plane crash near the city of Vienna. 

Five years later, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn traveled with her father to the Swiss village of Ascona, home to the Monte Verità Sanatorium. Albertus Kapteyn bought a nearby ancient farmhouse, the Casa Gabriella, which from 1920 onwards became Olga’s home. Fröbe-Kapteyn began to study Vedic philosophy, meditation and theosophy, a philosophical system which draws its teachings predominantly from Russian author and mystic Helena Blavatsky’s writings. Among her friends and influences at this time were Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, German poet Ludwig Derieth, and sinologist and theologian Richard Wilhelm whose translation of the “I Ching” is still regarded as one of the finest.

In 1928, Fröbe-Kapteyn built an informal research center near her home. Religion historian Rudolf Otto suggested a name derived from the ancient Greek for the center, Eranos, which translates as a banquet to which guests bring contributions. Carl Jung suggested its conference room serve as a symposium site for interdisciplinary discussion and research. The annual lecture program, Eranos Tagungen, began in August of 1933. A roster of intellecuals from various disciplines were invited to give lectures on a particular topic; these lectures were then published in the Eranos year book. To illustrate each symposium, Fröbe-Kapteyn devoted her time to finding images and symbols that would best illustrate the topic.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn’s research in archetypes took her to major libraries in Europe and America. These included, among others, the British Museum, the Vatican Library, New York City’s Morgan Library and Museum, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and Athen’s Archaeological Museum. Fröbe-Kapteyn created the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism, ARAS, which housed photographs of works of art, ritual images, and artifacts of sacred traditions, as well as, world-wide contemporary art. She amassed a collection of over six-thousand works, many of which were later used to illustrate Carl Jung’s writings. Today the New York-based institution, now under the auspices of the C.G. Jung Foundation, contains more than seventeen thousand images which are currently available online.

Fröbe-Kapteyn was interested in iconography since her childhood, an interest developed as she watched her father create images from photographic film in the darkroom. After following a lengthly series of meticulously drawn experiments in geometric abstraction, she produced a series of elaborate screen-prints between 1927 and 1934. Those prints combined the high energy of the Futurist art movement with her intense study of archetypical signs and symbols. Fröbe-Kapteyn’s prints were directly influenced by the English theosophist Alice Bailey, whom she met in the late 1920s. Bailey had used art as a tool in psychotherapy; through the drawing process, subconscious messages would be placed on paper or canvas. 

Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn’s prints and paintings exhibit great precision in their geometric shapes. They include diagrams of intersecting circles, which serve as an impetus for meditation, as well as, cryptic symbols enhanced with gold leaf and obscure figurative work. Fröbe-Kapteyn used a limited color palette, predominated by blue, red, gold and black. The rigid geometry of the image is reinforced by the choice of mostly cold colors which are opposed by the color black, symbolic of shadow and death, and the color gold, symbolic of light and life. The actual number of the screen-print sets Fröbe-Kapteyn produced is unknown.

A Swiss resident for most of her life, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn passed away at her Casa Gabriella in 1962 at the age of eighty-one years. The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism is still an active organization today and continues its mission with a new generation of lecturers and researchers.

Notes: A fourteen piece set of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn’s Meditation Drawing Screenprints, produced in 1930, is housed in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicage. They are available for viewing at: https://www.artic.edu/collection?artist_ids=Olga%20Fröbe-Kapteyn

Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn’s Meditation Drawing Screenprints,  available for sale, can also be found at the online site of Gerrish Fine Art located at: https://gerrishfineart.com/artist/olga-frobe-kapteyn/

The online site of the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism is located at: https://aras.org

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, Ascona”, 1933, Gelatin Silver Print, Fondazione Eranos Ascona

Second Insert Image: Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, “Reincarnation”, 1930, Screenprint, 49.7 x 36 cm Paper Size, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, “Swastika Meditation Drawing”, Screenprint with Gold Foil, Dimensions Unknown, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn and Guests”, 1958 Eranos Jungian Psychoanalysts’ Conference, Monte Verità, Ascona, Switzerland, Gelatin Silver Print, The Israeli Museum, Jerusalem

Jaime Gil de Biedma: “How Many Times Do I Remember From You”

Photographers Unknown, How Many Times Do I Remember From You

Do I ever remember
certain nights in June of that year,
almost blurry, of my adolescence
(it was in nineteen hundred it seems to me
forty nine)
because in that month
I always felt a restlessness, a small anguish
the same as the heat that began,
nothing else
than the special sound of the air
and a vaguely affective disposition.
They were the incurable nights
and fever.
The high school hours alone
and the untimely book
next to the wide open balcony (the street
freshly watered it disappeared
below, among the lighted foliage)
without a soul to put in my mouth.
How many times do I remember
from you, far away
nights of the month of June, how many times
tears came to my eyes, tears
for being more than a man, how much I wanted
morir
or dreamed of selling myself to the devil,
you never listened to me.
But also
life holds us because precisely
it is not how we expected it.

Jaime Gil de Biedma, Nights of the Month of June, Fellow Travelers, 1959

Born in November of 1929 in Nava de la Asunción, Jaime Gil de Biedma y Alba was a Spanish poet. He is considered, among his readers, one of the most proficient Anglophiles in the field of contemporary literature originating from the Iberian Peninsula. Gil de Biedma belonged to the “Generation of ’50”, a group of poets born from the cultivated social realism that arose in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. He introduced new techniques into traditional Spanish literature through his use of both dramatic monologue and a diary form of intimate introspection.

Born into a Catalan family with strong conventional values, Jaime Gil de Biedma studied law both in Madrid and Salamanca. As a student in Madrid, he became acquainted with intellectuals such as Gabriel Ferrater and Carlos Barral, both of whom became influential Spanish poets. Gil de Biedma’s lifelong adherence to Anglo-American culture became firmly established by his Oxford studies as a law graduate in 1953 with his reading of works by T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Stephen Spender, who would go on to become United States Poet Laureate in 1965.

Gil de Biedma was also fascinated with the work of Spanish poet Luis Cernuda, a member of the “Generation of ’27” who went into self-exile during the Spanish Civil War. Although separated in age by twenty-seven years, both men had several traits in common: great respect for lyrical English, upbringing in a conventional bourgeois family, openness in regard to their homosexuality, and opposition to the Franco dictatorship. Gil de Biedma exchanged many letters with Cernuda and dedicated his 1959 poem “Nights of the Month of June” to him. In the fall of 1962, one year before Cernuda’s death in Mexico, he published a strong tribute to Cernuda that placed him above all other poets of the 1950s.

In regard to his poetry, Jaime Gil de Biedma is a member of Spain’s “Generation of ’50” which included such poets as José Ángel Valente, Francisco Brines Bañó, and Ángel González. The poets in this group, while focused on social issues, were all aware of the literary character of their verse. Partly due to Luis Cernuda’s influence, they introduced to Spain what is now known as poetry of experience, an immediate intellectual experience presented through narration by a fictional-self.

In his work, Gil de Biedma created bridges between English and his birth language of Spanish. He brought his poetry closer to the language spoken on the street by incorporating older Spanish poetic forms such as sestina. Attributed to the twelfth-century troubador Arnaut Daniel, sestina is a fixed verse form containing six stanzas of six lines each, normally followed by a three-line envoi, essentially a postscript in the form of a ballad or dedication. A perfectionist in the composition of his work, Gil de Biedma believed the essential experience in the first reading of a poem was not the understanding of the poem but rather the feeling the verses produce in the reader. The understanding will manifest, sooner or later, when the reader asks why he was so affected.

Gil de Biedma published his first work in 1952, “Versos a Carlos Barral”, a series of poems dedicated to his friend Carlos Barral, poet and literary publisher. This was followed in 1953 by “Segun Sentencia del Tiempo (According to the Judgement of Time)”. In his early work, Gil de Biedma strongly criticized the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. The title for his 1952 “Compañeros de Viaje (Travel Companions)” referred to a Trotskyist expression for Communist sympathizers. By the early 1950s, Franco was either suppressing or tightly controlling all political opponents across the spectrum, from communist to liberal democrats and Catalan separatists.

In 1965, Jaime Gil de Biedma published a collection of love poems imbued with eroticism entitled “Un Favor de Venus” which was followed by another socially-themed collection, the 1966 “Moralidades (Moralities)”. In 1969, he published his last collection of poems, “Poemas Póstumos (Posthumous Poems)” in which a disappointed Gil de Biedma confronted himself and the facades he had erected around his personal identity. After this volume, he published poems in various literary journals and wrote his 1974 memoir “Diario de un Artista Seriamente Enfermo (Diary of a Seriously Ill Artist)”. Diary entries from February and April of 1960 reveal that Gil de Biedma was already rereading his 1956 notes; in 1971, he began a lengthy and meticulous reconstruction of the written material.

As a homosexual during a strongly conservative period in Spain, Gil de Biedma was essentially forced to lead a double life. As part of a conservative family and, since 1955, holding an important position in the family’s Compañia General de Tabacos de Filipinas, he was a discreet and respectable executive. In the company of close friends, Gil de Biedma was openly gay with a quick wit and sharp tongue. At different times, he had suffered discrimination and blackmail. Gil de Biedma’s poetry was a reflection of this duality as, while he explored themes of love, romance and sex, he never disclosed the gender of the loved one.

Even at the end of his life, Jaime Gil de Biedma was adamant about keeping his poetry neutral. After learning that a journalist wanted to analyze his work from a gay literary point of view, he was distressed and went through great trouble to ensure that the journalist would not take that approach. Ten years before his death, Gil de Biedma stopped writing poetry. He had decided that the persona of the poet James Gil de Biedma had nothing left to say and, subsequently, abandoned that role in literary society. Three years after being diagnosed in 1987, Jaime Gil de Biedma died in Barcelona on the eighth of January in 1990 from complications due to AIDS.

Notes: For the thirtieth anniversary of Jaime Gil de Biedma’s death, Javier Gil Martin, a collaborator of the Adiós Cultural magazine, wrote an article on Gil de Biedma’s “Posthumous Poems”. This article can be found at the Adiós Cultural site located at: https://www-revistaadios-es.translate.goog/articulo/165/JAIME-GIL-DE-BIEDMA-/-POEMAS-POSTUMOS.html?_x_tr_sl=es&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc

Director Sigfrid Monleón’s 2009 biographical drama “El Cónsul de Sodoma (The Consul of Sodom) is a journey through the work and life of Catalan poet Jaime Gil de Biedma. It premiered at the San Sebastián International Film Festival in 2010. The film received five nominations at the Goya Awards, including Best Lead Actor (Jordi Mollá) and a Gaudi Awards nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role (Jordi Mollá).

Mime Misu: Film History Series

Mime Misu, “In Nacht und Eis (In Night and Ice)”, 1912, Written and Directed by Mime Misu, Film Runtime 42 Minutes, Continental-Kunstfilm, Berlin, Germany,

Remastered with English Subtitles and Score by Swiss Composer Christophe Sturzenegger

Born in January of 1888 at the county seat of Botosani in the northern part of Romania, Misu Rosescu was a pantomime artist, ballet dancer, film actor and director. He was nephew to the prominent writer Rahel Levin Varnhagen whose home became a center for the intellectual and political figures of German culture. Born into a family of musicians, artists and performers, Rosescu made his stage debut as a child performing ballet and pantomime.

Rosescu’s many talented performances were recognized and gained him free entrance into the Bucharest Art Academy. During his studies, he was assigned to the Royal National Theatre in the capital city of Bucharest. After his graduation with honors, Rosescu began a successful career appearing in theatrical performances at the provincial theaters of Romania. After his performance at the 1900 World Fair in Paris, Rosescu established his own theatrical production company and toured Berlin, Budapest, Vienna and London. 

Misu Rosescu, now using the name Mime Misu, entered into the growing film industry. In Paris, he was initially employed by Lux, a film production company located in the 14th arrondissement, and later at Pathé Frères which was becoming the world’s largest film equipment and production company. In 1912, Misu signed with Berlin’s newly established Continental=Kunstfilm which had just begun to release a mix of comedies, melodramas and documentaries. mis

Through Continental-Kunstfilm, Mime Misu wrote and directed three films in his first year. The 1912 silent film “Das Gespenst von Clyde (The Ghost of von Clyde)” was a media story of Count Arthur Hamilton who died in the British Castle of Clyde under mysterious circumstances. Misu’s 1912 “In Nacht und Eis (In Night and Ice)” was a silent adventure-disaster film depicting the recent sinking of RMC Titanic. Having achieved some success with his drama-documentary narrative style, Misu made the 1912 “Das Mirakel (The Miracle)”. Based on the thirteenth-century temptation legend of Sister Beatrice, the film later appeared under the title “Das Marienwunder: Eine alte Legende (The Miracle of Mary: An Old Legend)” due to legal rulings in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Misu made one more film in Germany, the 1913-1914 “Der Excentric Club”, for Projektions-AG Union, a Frankfurt film production company that soon moved to Berlin, the new center of the German film industry. He traveled to the United States where he made one film, the 1914 “Money God”, under his personal production company Misugraph-Film. Lacking support in the United States just as the First Great War began, Misu returned to Europe and settled with his new wife, Bertha, in Berlin’s inner-city district of Wilmersdorf. In 1915, he directed in the Netherlands his last film, a disaster film of a sinking ship entitled “Ontmaskerd (Unmasked)”; the credits list his birth name, Misu Rosecu, as director.

Mime Misu traveled to the United States every year from 1915 to 1917. He maintained office space in Berlin for his production company Misugraph-Film until 1921. There is, however, no record of any artistic activity from 1915 to 1921. In 1921, Misu apparently misrepresented himself as to his involvement with the Famous Players Film Company, a film venture owned by Paramount Pictures’ founder Adolph Zukor. This led to the publishing of their exchanged letters in Berlin’s film journal Fil-Kurier. An accomplished stage performer and director of six films, (Mime) Misu Rosescu died in Antwerp, Belgium in the summer of 1953. 

Among the films in his career, Mime Misu’s best known work is the 1912 “In Nacht und Eis’, the earliest surviving film depiction of the RMS Titanic disaster. Camera work was done by Willy Hameister, Emil Schünemann and Victor Zimmermann. Most of its footage was shot in a glasshouse studio inside the courtyard of Continental-Kunstfilm’s offices at 123 Chausseestrasse. Other footage was shot in Hamburg and, possibly, aboard the Hamburg-docked German ocean liner Kaiserin Auguste Victoria. 

At a running time of thirty-five minutes, “In Nacht und Eis” was shot in black and white with various scenes tinted to increase their impact. The film starred actors Waldemar Hecker as the telegrapher, Otto Rippert as the Captain, and Ernst Rückert as the First Officer. The Berlin Fire Department provided the flood waters necessary for the scenes of the Titanic’s sinking. “In Nacht und Eis” was considered a lost film until February of 1998. At that time, the German film archivist Horst Lange, after reading an article discussing this loss, informed the newspaper that he possessed a print of the film.

Note: The above video of “In Nacht und Eis” is from the Titanic Officers site which contains a multitude of articles on the ship’s officers and other aspects of the Titanic and its sinking. The Titanic Officers website can be found at: https://www.titanicofficers.com/articles.html

For those film buffs who are purists, there is a restored silent version, sans soundtrack, on the Internet Archive. This slightly shorter film with a runtime of thirty-four minutes is located at:  https://archive.org/details/silent-in-nacht-und-eis

Top Insert Image: Mime Misu, “Das Mirakel”, 1912, Publicity Photo on Cardstock

Bottom Insert Image: Mime Misu, “In Nacht und Eis”, 1912, (Otto Rippert and Ernst Rüchert) Film Clip Photo

Juan Adán Morlán

Juan Adán Morlán, “Luchadores de Florencia (Wrestlers of Florence)”, 1773, Terra Cotta, 36 x 40 x 28 cm, Uffizi Gallery, Florence

Born in March of 1741 in Tarazona, a provincial town of Zaragoza, Juan Adán Morlán was a Spanish painter and sculptor. The son of Juan and Manuela Morlán, he was baptized at the local parish church, Iglesia Parroquial San Pedro Apóstol, located in the town of Buenache de Alarcón. 

Juan Adán moved with his family around 1755 to Zargoza, the provincial capital, where he entered the workshop of Baroque architect and sculptor José Ramírez de Arellano. After being appointed sculptor to King Carlos III in 1740, José Ramírez had been commissioned in 1751 to oversee the work done at the capital’s Cathedral-Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar. Once the works at the Cathedral were finished in 1765, Juan Adán at the age of twenty-four traveled to Rome.

Juan Adán Morlán lived on the resources he had saved from his work at the Basilica until they were exhausted. He then approached Tomas de Azpuru y Jiménez, a native of Zaragoza and the appointed Charge d’Affaires of Spain who oversaw King Carlos III’s business in Rome. Through Jiménez’s assistance, Juan Adán received several commissions for work in Rome. Among these were sculpturing a copy of Camilo Rusconi’s 1718 marble “Saint John the Evangelist” and a drawing that was later presented to Francisco Preciado de la Vega, a scholar elected both prince and secretary of the Academy of Artists, as well as, an Arcade of the College of Roman Arcades.

Juan Adán was granted a pension from the government in October of 1767 and began work on new commissions in Rome. In 1773, he created his terracotta “Luchadores de Florencia (Wrestlers of Florence)” and sent it to the Academic Board in Rome which extended his pension. In the following year, Juan Adán created his “Compassio Mariae”, a terracotta sculpture of the Virgin Mary supporting the body of the dead Christ. This technical exercise was sent that same year to the Academy as a pensioner’s work. 

In January of 1775, Juan Adán Morlán was appointed an Academic of Merit at the Academy of Saint Luke in Rome. He reproduced his “Compassio Mariae” again in 1791 for the church of the Royal College of Pious Schools of San Fernando. For this, Juan Adán was appointed Academic of Merit of Saint Fernando. He returned to Spain in 1776, where the Lérida Cathedral council commissioned him to work in the city until 1782. During Juan Adán’s stay in Lérida, construction work authorized by King Carlos III was still proceeding at the new Cathedral of Lérida that would serve as a  replacement for abandoned Cathedral of St. Mary of la Seu Vella,. 

Juan Adán stayed in the province of Granada from 1783 to 1786, where he worked at a chapel in the city of Cámenes. He returned in 1783 to the king’s court in Madrid where he was appointed lieutenant-director of Sculpture under the directorship of Isidro Carnicero, who rose to his position upon the death of director Roberto Michel. In May of 1793, Juan Adán received the appointment of Chamber Sculptor to King Carlos IV, a honor which became effective in February of 1795. 

In 1795, Juan Adán Morlán sculpted the busts of Carlos IV and his wife Maria Luisa of Parma, the youngest daughter of Philip, Duke of Parma and fourth son of Philip V of Spain. Numerous portrait commissions at this time were made by the nobility; among these was the 1794 portrait of Prime Minister Manuel Godoy y Álvarez de Faria, Duke of Alcudia. In 1807, Juan Adán Morlán made the Relief of San Miguel at his chapel inside the Cathedral of Granada and, in the following year, created the Anteo Fountain in the gardens of Aranjuez. 

Juan Adán was appointed in 1811 the Director of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in San Fernando. In 1815, he became Chamber Sculptor to King Fernando VII who, after the defeat of the French invasion, was again legally recognized by the 1813 Treatry of Valençay as King of Spain.. A year after his royal appointment, Juan Adán Morlán died in Madrid on the 14th of June in 1816. He was buried in the Puerta de Fuencarral Cemetery in Madrid.

Top Insert Image: Juan Adán, “Manuel Godoy y Álvarez de Faria, Duke of Alcudia”, 1794, Marble, 72 x 53 x 35 cm, Real Academia de Belles Artes de San Fernando, Spain

Second Insert Image: Juan Adán Morlán, “Moisés (Moses)“, 1775, Terracotta, 67 x 32 x 30 cm, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid

Third Insert Image: Juan Adán, “San Juan Evangelista (St. John the Evangelist)“, 1767, Terracotta, 70 x 40 x 28 cm, Real Academia de San Fernando, Madrid

Bottom Insert Image: Juan Adán Morlán, “Priamo y Hector (Priam and Hector)”, 1770s, Terracotta, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid

Oswell Blakeston: “And the Moral Seems to Be. . .”

Photographers Unknown, And the Moral Seems to Be . . .

In winter, Miss Jansson paints in her very comfortable studio in Helsinki; but in summer, she comes to the island and draws Moomin.

Max said, “Don’t you ever feel inspired to paint the Finnish countryside in summer?”

“It’s all so damned green,” she answered.

Then she told us about the squirrel, the one squirrel which has appeared on the island; and it slept under her neck and tried to collect food there. As the relationship between artist and squirrel developed, the squirrel came to expect a game at four o’clock in the morning. Tove Jansson had to get out of bed and pretend to be a tree. The squirrel would run up and down her frozen limbs.

One day, the squirrel disappeared. He may have jumped on a floating plank, for later he was reported to have appeared on another island. It must have been the same squirrel, for he positively forced open the tent of some campers, and—he was not welcome. It was four o’clock in the morning. 

As soon as Miss Jansson learnt of the incident, she immediately rowed to the other island. She called. She stood about the place looking like a tree. But the squirrel never showed a whisker. Perhaps he’d sailed off again on a romantic Odyssey, looking for another squirrel and using his curly tail as a sail. And the moral seems to be that it is not enough to be a tree!

Oswell Blakeston, Sun At Midnight, 1958 Travel Book, The Archipelago, Page 85, Publisher Anthony Blond, London

Born to a family of Austrian origins in May of 1907, Henry Joseph Hasslacher was an English writer, poet, and filmmaker. He used the pseudonym Oswell Blakeston during his career, a reference to his mother’s maiden name and to English poet and essayist Osbert Sitwell.

Oswell Blakeston left his home at the age of sixteen; he subsequently became a stage magician’s assistant, a cinema organist, and an assistant cameraman at Gaumont Studios where he worked alongside the young David Lean. In August of 1927, Blakeston joined the staff of the Pool Group’s magazine “Close Up” as the protégé of the publication’s editor Kenneth Macpherson. He contributed a total of eighty-four articles to all but four of the journal’s issues, more than any other writer. 

While writing for “Close Up”, Blakeston worked in various capacities in the British film industry. In 1929, he first tested his directorial skills with the short film “I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside”, which was based on the popular British music hall song of the same name. Working alongside American photographer Francis Bruguière, Blakeston directed and produced the short 1930 film “Light Rhythms”. This strictly abstract film, one of the first in England, added new dimensions to Bruguière’s experimental photographic work through the use of moving light sources, superimpositions, and elements of music. The film score was composed by Jack Ellitt and played on piano by Donald Sosin. 

Among Oswell Blakeston’s early literary endeavors was his co-editorship with Herbert Jones of the small magazine “Seed” from 1932 to 1933. Under the pseudonym of Simon, he collaborated with novelist and screenwriter Roger Buford on the writing of four mystery novels: the 1933 “Murder Among Fiends”, “Death on the Swim” in 1934, the 1935 “Cat with a Moustache”, and “The Mystery of the Hypnotic Room” in 1949. Blakeston also wrote novels and story collections, as well as, ten volumes of poetry under his own name. His fifteen books of fiction were wide ranging in scope and included a number of works that mixed gay themes with suspense and detective plots.

Blakeston contributed writings to British writer and poet John Gawsworth’s published short-story anthologies. He also collaborated on works with Matthew Phipps Shiell, also known as M. P. Shiel, a writer of supernatural horror and science fiction whose “The Purple Cloud” remains his best known work. Blakeston is known in the literary world for a number of publication firsts. His 1932 “Magic Aftermath” was the first fiction published with a spiral binding and his 1935 crime novel “The Cat with the Moustache” contained one of the first descriptions of a hallucinatory experience with peyote or mescal.

In the 1950s, Blakeston was a frequent contributor to “ArtReview” and other periodicals including “John O’ London’s Weekly” and “What’s On in London”. In addition to his novels and poetry, Blakeston published cookbooks, travel adventures, works on photography and cinematography, and two books on animals, “Working Cats” and “Zoo Keeps Who?”. Most of his  literary work was produced for publication by small presses and speciality publishers and thus is no longer in print. Recent interest in Blakeston’s writings has resulted in reprints of his more popular works; more obscure volumes appear occasionally at more specialized venues.

Blakeston met painter Max Chapman at the end of the 1920s. Chapman had attended London’s Byam Shaw School of Art where he studied under and became friends with painter Charles Ricketts. Ricketts and his life-time companion Charles Shannon were part of the literary and artistic circle that included Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. Blakeston and Chapman became life-long partners and lived together at a residence named “Lobster Pot” in Mousehole, a small fishing village in Cornwall. Through his association with Chapman, Blakeston met and became friends with modernist writer Mary Francis Butts and poet and author Dylan Thomas.

Both Blakeston and Chapman became fixtures of the Cornish artistic scene. Blakeston’s paintings were a mix of abstract and expressionistic imagery executed in a small scale. His 1982 “Adolescence”, though influenced by Chapman’s work, is stylistically closer to the Pop Art movement; it is currently housed in the collection of the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. Blakeston exhibited his artwork in over forty solo shows and one-hundred group shows. In 1981, he shared an exhibition with Max Chapman at the Middlesbrough Art Gallery. Blakeston’s paintings are housed in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, Belfast’s Ulster Museum, the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, and galleries in Poland, Finland and Portugal. 

Blakeston and Chapman’s portraits were drawn by painter and sculptor Sven Berlin, a member of the St. Ives artistic community: Blakeston’s portriat in 1939 and Chapman’s in 1941. These portraits became part of a series entitled “St. Ives Personalities”, that is now held in a private collection. A portrait of Blakeston painted by Max Chapman was part of a 1976 exhibition of portraits held at the Camden Art Centre. Oswell Blakeston died on the 4th of June in 1985. Max Chapman continued to paint until his death, fourteen years later, on the 18th of November in 1999. 

Notes: Although listed at the British Film Institute registry and mentioned in Michael O’Pray’s “The British Avant-Garde Film 1926 to 1995”, Oswell Blakeston’s film “I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside” seems not available for viewing. His 1930 “Light Rhythms” is however available for viewing at the Light Cone Experimental Film site located at: https://lightcone.org/en/film-5793-light-rhythms 

Since the 1930s, one of Oswell Blakeston’s passions was the history and architecture of follies, costly ornamental buildings with no practical purpose that were usually built in gardens or parks. He amassed a collection of county files, notes and clippings on the subject. A short article on this topic can be found at The Folly Flâneuse’s site located at: https://thefollyflaneuse.com/oswell-blakestons-folly-suitcase/

Additional information on Oswell Blakeston’s life and published works can be found at the Social Networks and Archival Context site located at: https://snaccooperative.org/ark:/99166/w6087wx3#biography-collapse

Top Insert Image: Howard Coster, “Oswell Blakeston”, 1930s, Photo Session, Half-Plate Negative Print, National Portrait Gallery, London

Second Insert Image: Oswell Blakeston, “Pass the Poison Separately”, 1976, Publisher Catalyst, Ontario

Third Insert Image: Oswell Blakeston and Francis Bruguière, “Few Are Chosen, Studies in the Theatrical Lighting of Life’s Theatre”, 1931, First Edition, Scholartis Press, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Oswell Blakeston, “The Night’s Moves”, 1961, First Edition, Publisher Gaberbocchus Press, London

Bottom Insert Image: Howard Coster, “Oswell Blakeston”,  1930s, Photo Session, Half-Plate Film Negative Print, National Portrait Gallery, London

Joe Brainard: “Strange Astounding Plots”

Photographers Unknown, Strange Astounding Plots

            “After a white reception in the crystal room of the Hotel
Kenmore, Mrs. George Eustic (Patricia Hays) and her husband
left on a wedding trip to the Pocono Mountains, Pa. They will
live in good old Noodleville.” (Home.)

Where the friendly purple heart is.

            I like to do things. I like to eat, and things like that. I like
the things that go on around me. People are nice. And, really, I
like this place I live in. However, some people don’t.

Sally doesn’t.

            Sick at heart, the trembling girl shuddered at the words
that delivered her to this terrible horrible fate of the East.
“Nasty!” How could she escape from this oriental monster
into whose hands she had fallen–this strange man whose face
none had seen.

Smile!

It is only a little picture,
            In a little silver frame,
And across the back is written
            My darling mother’s name.
                                                                    (Valentine)

Pink and purple and orange ones with Venetian rose buds
Imported from Venetian
In eleven thrilling volumes

                        I heard a shot—I saw him run—then I saw her fall—the
woman I love. My leg was broken—and my gun was gone! I had
only one thought—(tee hee!)—his strange, astounding plots
must be avenged—he must die for a coward at my hands! He had
the courage of a lion and the cunning of a rat. He came running
towards me when—suddenly, I—

Ran.
Forgetting the ripped lace, $35, green violence, & free samples.

“I always run when I hear 3 rings!”

. . ..and remember those swell picnics in Birch Grove?

Joe Brainard, Picnic or Yonder Comes the Blue, The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, 2012 The Library of America

Born in Salem, Arkansas in March of 1942, Joe Brainard was an American writer, poet, and artist associated with the New York School, a group of artists and writers who drew inspiration from the contemporary avant-garde art movements. His innovative body of work included paintings, collages, assemblages, album and book cover designs, as well as, theatrical costume and set designs. As a poet, Brainard was a pioneer in the New York literary movement for his use of comics as a poetic medium. 

Brainard spent his childhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma where, during his high school years, he became friends with future poets Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup and Ted Berrigan. He worked as the art editor for five issues of the high school’s literary journal, “The White Dove Review”, published in the 1959/1960 school year. Brainard had a modest solo exhibition of his artwork, which included some of his first collages, at the small local art center The Gallery. He  briefly attended the Dayton Art Institute in the autumn of 1960 before his move to New York City.

After reuniting in New York City with his high school friends, Joe Brainard shared an East Village apartment on East 6th Street with Ted Berrigan. The city’s many museums, art galleries and movie theaters became a source of inspiration for him. By September of 1961, Brainard had enrolled at the Art Student League and was studying under portrait painter Robert Brackman who was known for his large figurative works. Despite his financial struggles, Brainard continued to produce collages and small assemblages in the city and, later, in Boston during his ten-month stay in 1963. 

In late December of 1963, through the assistance of Ted Berrigan, Brainard began sharing an apartment on East 9th Street with the poet Tony Towle. The assemblages he created in 1964 at this new space went into his first New York solo exhibition at the Alan Gallery in January of 1965. Brainard became a member of both the artistic and literary circles in New York. Among his circle of friends were poets and writers such as Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery, and artists such as Alex Katz, Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, and Fairfield Porter.

Joe Brainard began his art career during the early Pop Art movement; however, the wide breadth of his work resists categorization. As a unified whole, the same qualities are apparent in everything he produced: bold simplicity, accuracy of execution, humor, and a low-key sense of the ordinary as sacred. Brainard was able to find the essential details in life experiences and, both vividly and spontaneously, express them in his work. In essence, he was able to locate the extraordinary in the ordinary, as well as make the extraordinary seem ordinary.

During his lifetime, Brainard was the author of five personal publications and collaborated on an additional nineteen publications with other poets and writers. The best known of the personal work are his “I Remember” volumes that were radical departures from the conventions of the traditional memoir. The 1970 “I Remember” depicts his Oklahoma childhood in the 1940s and 1950s as well as his life in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s. His life stories, told through a stream of consciousness, list remembered moments prefixed by the phrase “I remember. . .”. Two sequels followed: the 1972 “I Remember More” and the 1973 “More I Remember More”. 

Joe Brainard produced several comic book collaborations with poets and was well regarded for his work as a theatrical set designer and visual artist. Among Brainard’s many New York School friends was poet, author and publisher Kenward Gray Elmslie who became a long-time partner. Elmslie’s Z Press published many works by the New York School, including works which combined Brainard’s art with Elmslie’s own poems. Elmslie also collaborated on operas with Jack Benson and Ned Rorem, and also worked with lyricist John Latouche.

After his success as an artist and poet, Brainard retired from the art world in the early 1980s and devoted his last years to reading. He died in New York City, at the age of fifty-two,  on May 25th of 1994 from AIDS-induced pneumonia. Brainard’s art can be found in many private collections and in the public collections of the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. 

Note: An article “Joe Brainard in 1961-1963”, written by his friend and fellow poet Ron Padgett, contains photographs of Brainard’s early works, many never seen by the public. This article can be found at: https://www.ronpadgett.com/Joe%201961-63.pdf

Top Insert Image: Pat Padgett, “Joe Brainard, Calais, Vermont”, 1992, Color Print, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Joe Brainard, “Hot Fudge Sunday”, 1965, C Comics No. 2, Boke Press, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Joe Brainard, “48 Squares”, Date Unknown, Gouache, Graphite, Ballpoint Pen, Felt Tip Marker and Paper Collage on Paper, 34.3 x 27 cm, Private Collection 

Bottom Insert Image: Joe Brainard, Untitled (Still Life), 1968, Watercolor on Paper, Private Collection

Julien Nguyen

The Paintings of Julien Nguyen

Julien Nguyen’s work is firmly situated in the academics of art history and its philosophies as well as the informalities of everyday life; his images are often populated with fellow artists, lovers and friends who have posed for him in his Los Angeles studio. A history enthusiast, Nguyen uses the past as a lens through which he views, analyzes, and recreates the present moment. He harmoniously blends iconographic images, such as Renaissance altarpieces, with more contemporary components, such as video-game graphics, to create tableaux of lavish colors and delicate forms that speak to his personal life. 

Nguyen works consistently in his studio to develop a more traditional studio practice, as well as, further improve his skills and techniques. He works in oil paints and tempera on a variety of substrates including canvas and linen, wood panel, and copper and aluminum sheets. Besides tableaux with posed acquaintances, Nguyen has produced carefully planned, complicated devotional images of traditional subjects such as Saint John the Baptist, the Virgin Mary, and the Temptation of Christ. 

In addition to his paintings, Julien Nguyen has collaborated with designers in the fashion field. He first worked with Cosima Gadient and Christa Bösch, the founders of the avant-garde fashion label Ottolinger. The designers’ 2017 Fall collection was based on Nguyen’s painting “The Baptism”, which shows a young man being baptized in a silvery river. The Spanish luxury fashion house Loewe partnered with Nguyen for its Fall/Winter 2023 Paris Fashion Week show that was held in January of that year. He created three artworks for Loewe: a miniature watercolor on vellum, done in the style of Elizabethan portraitist Nicholas Hilliard, which depicted his muse Nikos decorated with messages and symbols, and two digital artworks that featured Nikos in a Paris hotel. The watercolor miniature was the feature image on the show’s invitation. 

Two works by Nguyen, “Executive Function” and “Executive Solutions”, which depicted nymphs and demons on the front page of The New York Times,  were included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial in New York City. He had solo exhibitions at Munich’s Kunstverein München in 2014, New York’s Swiss Institute in 2018, and Cincinnati’s Comtemporary Art Center in 2019. 

Julien Nguyen participated in a group show, titled “Positioner”, from October through December at the Matthew Marks Gallery in Los Angeles in 2018. He had his first major solo exhibition, titled “Pictures of a Floating World”, from June to August in 2021 at the Matthew Marks Galllery in the Chelsea district of New York City. Nguyen’s next solo exhibition at the Matthew Marks Gallery will be in Los Angeles from June 24 to August 12 in 2023. This will be his first one-person show in Los Angeles in seven years; it will feature fourteen new paintings and works on paper. 

“(Julien Nguyen) achieves what few artists manage, the acceptance that nothing is new and nothing lasts, that we inhabit a world built beautifully from the rubble of other worlds, and that is is here we make our stand.”  —Travis Diehl

Note: Julien Nguyen’s painting “Semper Solus” was up for auction at Sotheby’s in October of 2022. After receiving fourteen bids, the oil and tempera on wood panel portrait sold for 453,600 Pounds (503 723 US Dollars).

Further information on Julien Nguyen’s 2023 Los Angeles exhibition can be found at the online site of the Matthew Marks Gallery located at: https://matthewmarks.com/exhibitions/julien-nguyen-06-2023/

Second Insert Image: Julien Nguyen, “Study for the Temptation of Christ”, 2019, Oil on Panel, 62.2 x 52 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Julien Nguyen, “Hic Manebimus Optime”, 2021, Oil on Linen on Panel, 51 x 41 cm, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

Charles Sprague Pearce

Charles Sprague Pearce, “The Arab Jeweler”, 1882, Oil on Canvas, 116.8 x 80.9 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Born in Boston, Massachusetts in October of 1851, Charles Sprague Pearce was an American artist, one of the generation of American artists who in increasing numbers settled in France after the Civil War. Strongly influenced by the predominant European styles of the period, he explored a wide range of both subjects and artistic expressions throughout his successful career as an expatriate.

Born into a wealthy family, Charles Sprague Pearce was immersed from an early age in a setting which stimulated his appreciation of the arts. His parents were accomplished at the violin and piano; Pearce’s father was a dealer in Chinese porcelains, objects that would later influence many of the works in his mid-career. He was enrolled by his parents in the prestigious Boston Latin School where he was recognized for his artistic talent. After graduating, Pearce worked with his father at his Chinese import business, Shadrach H. Pearce and Company, for five years. Deciding to pursue a career as an artist, he left Boston for Paris in August of 1873. 

After his arrival, Pearce enrolled in the atelier of academic painter Léon Bonnat who had achieved recognition for his historical paintings, genre scenes and portraits. In his career, Pearce would also produce work in these same categories. Léon Bonnat’s strong influence can be seen in Pearce’s earliest works, inspired by his ambitious travels, in their treatment of light and shadow, and in the modeling of the subject. In the course of his career, Pearce initially concentrated on historical paintings that often portrayed biblical stories; he produced primarily portraits in the middle portion of his career. Pearce’s final works consisted of mainly pastoral and generic scenes depicting peasants in the French countryside.

Orientalist themes had begun to appear in many works at the Paris Salon. Paintings presented by Eugène Delacroix, Eugène Fromentin, and Jean-Léon Gérôme revealed the customs, dress, and landscape of Eastern countries with an almost realistic precision. Charles Pearce and American painter Frederick Arthur Bridgman, also a student at Bonnat’s atelier, left for Egypt in the latter part of 1873 and spent three months traveling down the Nile River. Besides the attraction that the exotic East presented to the two artists, Pearce had contracted consumption and felt that the warmer climate would aid in his recovery. Both men produced a wealth of drawings and immersed themselves in a culture that was unfamiliar to their own.  In 1974, Pearce traveled again, this time to Algeria, where he spent the winter months absorbing its culture and daily life. As a result of this trip, new paintings of orientalist themes were added to his body of work. 

After his return  to Paris, Pearce made his Paris Salon debut in 1876 with the portrait of the American author and historical activist Ellen Hardin Walworth. Despite his travel experiences and many orientalist works, he made the decision to enter a portrait for his first exhibition at the Salon. For the 1877 Salon, Pearce decided to exhibit a historical scene and entered his “La Mort du Premier Né (Death of the First Born). This biblical scene of mourning Egyptians with the coffin of their dead child contained, based on his first hand knowledge, integrated Eastern details in its composition. Even though Pearce worked on Biblical themes, his work continued to show a predominating interest in Orientalism and the depiction of ethnographic detailing. “La Mort du Premier Né” established Pearc’s reputation as a serious artist and was later exhibited in Boston, New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.

Charles Sprague Pearce continued to exhibit biblical works at the Paris Salons of 1879, where he presented “Le Sacrifice d’Abraham”, and 1881, where he earned honorable mention for his “Décollation de Saint Jean-Baptiste (The Beheading of St. John the Baptist)”. This black ink and white gouache drawing on wove paper was later exhibited at Pennsylvania’s Academy of Fine Arts and received a first-place honor. In 1882, Pearce executed his “The Arab Jeweler”, an ambitious oil on canvas portrayal of a native craftsman, now housed in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. His interest in Orientalism and the exotic drew him to the rage of Japanese work that was prevalent in the galleries and publications of Paris. Pearce’s 1883 “Femme á l’ Éventail (Lady with a Fan)”, depicting a European woman dressed in her kimono and holding a fan, examplifies his placement of oriental objects into his work.

At the 1883 Salon, Pearce presented a peasant themed work “Porteuse D’eau (The Water Carrier)” for which he won a third-class medal. Two years later, he moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, a rural commune twenty-seven kilometers from the center of Paris, where he would remain for the rest of his life. In 1885, Pearce exhibited “Peines de Coeur (Troubles of the Heart)” at the Salon; this painting, depicting one girl consoling another, won the Temple Gold Medal for best figure painting at the Pennsylvania Academy exhibition. In the late 1880s, Pearce continued his peasant themed work and began to add pastoral paintings to his oeuvre. He remained a consistent yearly exhibitor at the Salon and participated in several international shows in England, Belgium, Germany and the United States. 

Beginning with his election to the jury of the Universal Exposition of 1889, Charles Sprague Pearce became involved in a number of ambitious activities. These included chairing both the Paris advisory committee for Chicago’s 1893 World Columbian Exposition and the Paris committee for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis. Pearce also helped organize the first large scale American art exhibition in Belguim for the 1894 Antwerp World’s Fair. Even though he adopted a preference for typical French style and subject matter, he was still interested in promoting other American artists, particularly those with a link to France. For his contributions in the field of art, he was named a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1894. 

In his work, Pearce addressed the interest of the times, ranging from an obsession with the mid and far-East to the more socially driven goals in the depiction of the peasant. He had fully immersed himself in the life and artistic culture of Paris and gained acclaim while maintaining his support for other American artists and exhibitions. Pearce’s last exhibition at the Salon was in 1906 when he presented “Jeune Picarde (Young Girl of Picardie)”. He died in Auvers-sur-Oise in May of 1914. 

Among Charles Sprague Pearce’s many honors are Chevalier, Order of King Leopold, Belgium in 1895; Chevalier, Order of Red Eagle, Prussia in 1897; and Chevalier, Order of Red Eagle, Denmark in 1898. Pearce was also Vice President and founding member of The Paris Society of American Painters; Associate National Academician of the National Academy of Design, New York in 1906; and posthumously promoted to National Academician of the National Academy of Design; New York in 1920.

Top Insert Image: Charles Sprague Pearce, “Self Portrait”, 1876, Oil on Canvas Laid on Board, 33.3 x 25.7 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Charles Sprague Pearce, “Auvers-sur-Oise”, circa 1894, Oil on Canvas, 82.6 x 95.9 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Charles Sprague Pearce, “Paul Wayland Bartlett”, 1890, Oil on Canvas, 150.5 x 117.8 cm, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Fourth Insert Image: Charles Sprague Pearce, “La Mort du Premier Né (Death of the First Born)”, circa 1877, Oil on Canvas, 97.8 x 130.8 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Charles Sprague Pearce at His Studio, Auvers-sur-Oise”, 1895, Vintage Print

 

 

Edward Prime-Stevenson: “The Pale Blue and Fawn of a Lieutenant”

Photographers Unknown, The Pale Blue and Fawn of a Lieutenant

“The kiosque-garden was somewhat crowded. At a table, a few steps away, sat only one person: a young Hungarian officer in the pale blue and fawn of a lieutenant of the well known A-Infantry Regiment. He was not reading, though at his hand lay one or two journals. Nor did he appear to be bestowing any great amount of attention on the chattering around him, in that distinctively Szent-Istvánbely manner which ignores any kind of outdoor musical entertainment as a thing to be listened-to. An open letter was lying beside him, on a chair; but he was not heeding that. I turned his way; we exchanged the usual sacrament saluts, in which attention I met the glance, by so means welcoming, of a pair of peculiarly brilliant but not shadowless hazel eyes; and I sat down for my coffee. I remember that I had a swift, general impression that my neighbor was of no ordinary beauty of physique and elegance of bearing even in a land where such matters are normal details of personality. And somehow it was also borne in upon me promptly that his mood was rather like mine. But this was a vague concern. What was Hecuba to me? -or Priam, or Helen, or Helenus, or anybody else, when for the moment I was so out of tune with life!”

—Edward Prime-Stevenson (Xavier Mayne), Imre: A Memorandum, 1906, The English Book Press, Naples, Italy

Born in Madison, New Jersey in January of 1858, Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson was an American author and journalist. Under his birth name or some variant, he wrote with some success many different types of literature including magazine fiction, literary and music criticism, travel essays, poetry, and works on esoteric subjects such as cartomancy, a form of fortune telling interpreted through randomly chosen cards. Prime-Stevenson is also known for his young adult books, written in his early career, and his later overtly homosexual works that place him among America’s earliest gay authors.

Edward Prime-Stevenson was the youngest of five children born to Presbyterian minister Paul E. Stevenson and Cornelia Prime who was born in a distinguished family of academic and literary figures. After studies in both the classics and law, he received his Juris Doctor degree and became a member of the American Bar Association. However, Prime-Stevenson never practiced law but chose instead to pursue a literary career. During the 1880s, he began a career as a critic in York City for Harper’s Weekly, a political magazine, and as book reviewer and music critic for the weekly Independent. 

Near the end of the 1880s, Prime-Stevenson met a pivotal figure in both his personal and professional life: Harry Harkness Flagler who was heir to part of the Standard Oil fortune and eventual president of the New York Philharmonic Society. Both men shared a love of music and literature; however in 1893, they became estranged just before Flagler’s marriage to Anne Lamont. Prime-Stevenson dedicated his last two books to Flagler, a man he continued to admire.

At the age of twenty-nine, Prime-Stevenson began to publish young-adult books whose stories were centered on close homoerotic friendships among adolescents. The first of these was the 1887 “White Cockades: An Incident of the Forty-Five”, a romance-adventure set during the 1745 Jacobite uprising in England. This was followed by the 1891 “Left to Themselves: Being the Ordeal of Philip and Gerald”, a fast-paced boys’ adventure tale in the tradition of Horatio Alger, which followed the lives of young Gerald Saxton and the older youth Philip Touchstone. During their developing relationship, the two boys are shipwrecked on an island and later discover they are being stalked by a mysterious, predatory figure.

Well educated and speaking several languages, Edward Prime-Stevenson had interests in both European and Asian literature as well as esoteric subject matter. In 1897, Edward Prime Stevenson published “The Square of Sevens, and the Parallelogram: An Authoritative Method of Cartomancy with a Prefatory Note”. Published through New York’s Harper & Brothers, this elaborately produced volume of seventy two pages purported to show the mysteries of card-divination.

Prime-Stevenson left the United States at the turn of the century to travel throughout Europe; as he traveled, he continued to freelance for newspapers in both London and New York. A large inheritance from a maternal uncle enabled Prime-Stevenson to settle permanently in Europe where he divided his time between Florence, Italy, and the Swiss city of Lausanne on the shore of Lake Geneva. This inheritance also allowed him to travel freely and to self-publish and distribute books on a variety of subjects. 

Prime-Stevenson used his birth name for his important studies on homosexuality. For his two book-length works on homosexuality, he took great care to insulate himself, through the use of the pseudonym Xavier Mayne, from the reprisal common to the period in which he worked. Prime-Stevenson’s 1901 novel “Imre: A Memorandum” was privately printed, under the name Xavier Mayne, by the Naples publisher Rispoli. This novel, an openly homosexual romance story, marked a turning point in LBGTQ literature due to its positive ending.  Previous publications on the topic emphasized misfortune and often death as a result of such relationships. The novel’s lead character Oswold, who is spending the summer at a Budapest language school, meets the Hungarian calvary soldier Imre at a cafe nestled in the city. Despite all the circumstances that surround them, their relationship continues to endure.

Edward Prime-Stevenson’s second major work was the 1908 “The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life”. This non-fiction work is a defense of homosexuality grounded in scientific and historical research. Throughout his career, Prime-Stevenson sought to dispel falsehoods surrounding the history and social acceptance of homosexuality. Seeking to defend homosexuality as a natural result of human evolution, he offered his theory of intersexes; Prime-Stevenson identified two of the intersexes while leaving room for more to be defined in the future. He rejected the binary of masculine and feminine, both of which fail to describe the vast majority of humanity, in favor of a broader spectrum of sexual identity. 

Using the terms Uranian and Uraniad, which align with gay and lesbian respectively, Prime-Stevenson attempted to define these types, call attention to historical examples, and critique the societal condemnation and persecution of such individuals as degenerate or criminal. To provide the historical, legal, and scientific context for his work, he read almost everything then available about homosexuality. Prime-Stevenson interviewed physicians, psychiatrists, and workaday people from many different backgrounds. His conclusions, then not generally accepted socially or scientifically, stated homosexuality was neither an abnormality nor a disease. It was in fact inborn, a normal and natural temperament. This study, perhaps the first to approach homosexuality from a scientific, historical, personal and legal point of view, is recognized today as a landmark in queer literature by academics around the world.

While in Capri during his European stay, Edward Prime-Stevenson met the French novelist and poet Jacques d’Adelsward-Fersen, who was in self-imposed exile with his long-time lover Anthony “Nino” Cesarini, a model for many known artists. Prime-Stevenson dedicated his work “La Biblioteca di Dayneford” to d’Adelsward; this work is the only one translated into Italian by Prime-Stevenson. Using a printer in Florence, he published, under his real name, a collection of short stories in 1913 entitled “Her Enemy, Some Friends, and other Personage”, which contained numerous references and information on homosexuality. In 1928, Prime-Stevenson published a volume of music criticism entitled “Long-Haired Iopas: Old Chapters from Twenty-Five Years of Music-Criticism” through The Italian Mail, a Florence press.

 Prime-Stevenson continued his writing throughout the 1920s and 1930s, primarily articles about music. With the outbreak of World War ii, he retreated to the neutral city of Lausanne, Switzerland. Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson died in Lausanne of a heart attack on the twenty-third of July in 1942 at the age of seventy-four. Today, he is remembered as having marked a turning point in English literature and for being an outstanding observer of the early 20th century LGBT scene. 

Note: For those interested, the Oxford University Press has an article by Kristin M. Franseen in their Music & Letters section, Volume 101, Issue 2 entitled “Onward to the End of the Nineteenth Century: Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Queer Musicological Nostalgia”. The article considers the intertextual relationships between his musical and sexological writings. The article is located online at: https://academic.oup.com/ml/article/101/2/300/5760330

Jackie Moran: Film History Series

Photographer Unknown, “Jackie Moran”, circa 1940s, Vintage Promotion Shot, 20.3 x 25.4 cm, Private Collection

Born in Mattoon, Illinois in January of 1923, John Edward Moran was an American film actor who is credited for roles in thirty-seven films. He is known primarily for his roles in youth-oriented films, particularly the roles of Huckleberry Finn and Buck Rogers’s sidekick Buddy Wade.

Discovered by actress and film producer Mary Pickford, Moran was taken by his mother to Hollywood, California for a 1935 screen test. Initially signed to Columbia Pictures, he was given the screen name of Jackie Moran and was cast in a significant number of supporting film roles. At the age of thirteen, he appeared in three 1936 films: the debut role of Tommy Blake in Elliott Nugent’s romantic comedy “And So They Were Married”, the uncredited role of Duckfoot in director Eric C. Kenton’s crime film “Counterfeit”, and the role of young Paul Darnley in Wesley Ruggles’s drama “Valiant is the Word for Carrie”. 

After appearing in “Outcast” and “Michael O’Halloran” in 1937, Jackie Moran played the co-star role of Huckleberry Finn in David O. Selznick’s 1938 Technicolor “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” with actor Tommy Kelly as Tom. Moran received critical praise for his natural acting skills and went on to star in several films produced by Republic and Monogram studios. In 1939, he had a role in Joseph Santley’s 1939 drama “The Spirit of Culver” where he acted alongside fellow child actors Jackie Cooper and Freddie Bartholomew. 

Cast in a cameo role for the 1939 “Gone With the Wind”, Moran played Doctor Meade’s son who, furious at his brother’s death in the war, enlists in the Confederate Army to seek revenge. Moran was next signed by Universal Pictures to play the role of Buddy Wade in its 1939 science fiction film “Buck Rogers”, a serial based on the original 1928 magazine stories and comic strip. The twelve-part serial starred Larry (Buster) Crabbe as Buck Rogers who, assisted by his sidekick Buddy, fights the evil dictator Killer Kane. The role of Kane was played by character actor Anthony Warde known for his portrayal of unsavory henchmen. Produced on a limited budget, this serial saved money on special effects by using sets and background shots from previous science fiction movies.

In eleven of his films, Jackie Moran was teamed up with child star Marcia Mae Jones, who initially co-starred with him in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” as Tom Sawyer’s cousin Mary. They also appeared in supporting roles for Deanna Durban’s 1938 musical “Mad About Music”, an exclusive boarding school film which went on to receive four Academy Award nominations. Robert F. McGowan, known for his “Our Gang” comedy shorts, cast Moran and Jones as the stars in four Monogram Studio productions that idealized life in pre-World War II America. These were the 1938 adventure film “Barefoot Boy” and a trio of films in 1940: the school dance film “Tomboy”, the mystery film “Haunted House” and the drama “The Old Swimmin’ Hole”. 

Moran continued to act in films during the years of World War II. His last major production was in David O. Selznick’s  1944 epic drama film “Since You Went Away”, an Oscar nominee for Best Picture in which Moran played a grocer’s son opposite Shirley Temple. In 1945 to 1946 near the end of his film career,  he played in a collection of teenage musical comedies produced by Columbia and Monogram studios. Among these were a lead role in the comedy-mystery “There Goes Kelly” and co-starring roles in Columbia’s “Let’s Go Steady” and Monogram’s “High School Hero”. Moran’s final film role was in Columbia’s 1946 college drama “Betty Co-Ed”.  

Little is known of Jackie Moran’s remaining forty-four years outside of what was stated by his lawyer Robert Doyle and other acquaintances in obituaries. In the 1950s, he became a script writer for secondary movies. A scriptwriter named John E. Moran produced four scripts in the 1960s for American film director and producer Russ Meyer who was known for his successful series of campy sexploitation movies. These film scripts included “Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!”, “Good Morning and. . .Goodbye!”, “Common Law”, and “Wild Gals of the Naked West”. In the last two films, John E. Moran was credited with small roles. 

In his later years, Moran worked in public relations for the Roman Catholic Diocese in Chicago. He relocated in 1984 to the historic town of Greenfield, Massachusetts where he wrote a novel entitled “Six Step House”. On the twentieth of September in 1990, Jackie Moran succumbed to lung cancer at the age of sixty-seven in Greenfield’s Franklin Medical Center. After a private funeral, Jackie Moran’s ashes were scattered, as requested in his will, on the backstretch of the Del Mar Racetrack, a thoroughbred horse racing facility in Del Mar, California.

Note: For those interested, the entire Universal Studios’s 1939 “Buck Rogers” serial can be found, courtesy of ComicWeb Serial Cliffhanger Theater, at the DailyMotion website located at: https://www.dailymotion.com/playlist/x4qzsf

Film Gifs of the opening credits of Chapter One of the Buck Rogers serial can be found in this site’s article entitled “Buck Rogers: Tomorrow’s World”.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Jackie Moran as Huckleberry Finn”, 1938, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”, Director David O. Selznik, Cinematographer James Wong Howe

Second Insert Image: Cinematographer Jerome Ash, “Jackie Moran and Buster Crabbe”, 1939, Film Shot from “Buck Rogers” Serial Film, Director Ford Beebe and Saul Goodkind

Third Insert Image: Movie Poster, “The Old Swimmin’ Hole”, 1940, Jackie Moran and Marcia Mae Jones, Director Robert F. McGowan, Cinematographer Harry Neumann

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Jackie Moran”, Date Unknown, Original 35mm Color Transparency, Private Collection

Joseph Fortuné Séraphin Layraud

Joseph Fortuné Séraphin Layraud, “Étude de Torse”, 1861, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 81 cm, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France

Born in October of 1833 at the commune of La-Roche-sur-le-Buis, Joseph Fortuné Séraphin Layraud was a French painter and, in his later years, a professor at Académie des Beaux-Arts in Valenciennes. The son of Jean Pierre Paul Layraud and Marie Anne Amic, he painted historical scenes, landscapes, religious and mythological subjects, and portraits.

Joseph Layraud began his initial art training in 1853 at the historic port city of Marseille. He relocated to Paris in 1856 and studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts under Léon Cogniet and Tony Robert-Fleury, both painters of portraits and historical scenes. After finishing his studies, Layraud traveled to Rome where he took up residence at the Villa Medici until 1870. He distinguished himself as a painter of history and portraits; the work he exhibited at the 1863 Rome Exhibition won the Grand Prix de Rome. 

After his stay in Rome, Layraud traveled through Italy and Portugal where he produced primarily landscapes and portraits. He entered several works at the 1872 Paris Salon for which he was awarded medals. In 1876, Layraud painted the “Portrait of the Portuguese Royal Family” which portrayed the members of the ruling House of Braganza, King Luis I dressed in a hunter’s outfit, his wife Maria Pia of Savoy, and their two children, Carlos I and Infante Afonso. This painting is now housed in the Palácio Nacional da Ajuda in Lisbon. Layraud’s two portraits of Queen Maria Pia, executed in the same year, are also housed in this national collection,

While in Lisbon, Joseph Layraud also painted a portrait of Elisa Friederike Hensler, Countess of Edla. She was a Swiss-born American actress and singer, who married the former King Ferdinand II of Portugal, Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. After leaving Portugal, Layraud returned to France where he exhibited his work in both the 1889 and 1900 Expositions Universelles held in Paris. In recognition of his work, Layraud was appointed Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in 1890, with a later promotion to Officer in 1903.

In 1892, Layraud received an appointment as professor at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Valenciennes. Among his many pupils were such artists as Naturalist painter and printmaker Jules Chaine, portrait painter Max Albert Decrouez, and Lucien Hector Jonas, a painter of both religious and military scenes. Joseph Layraud lived in Valenciennes until his death in October of 1913; he is buried at the Communal Cemetery of St. Roch in Valenciennes. 

Layraud’s work can be found in the Musée d’Orsay, Valenciennes’s Musée des Beaux-Arts, the Ajuda National Palace, Musée Saint-Loup in Troyes, and the Smith College Museum of Art in Massachusetts, among others.

Top Insert Image: Joseph Layraud, “The Artist in His Studio”, (Recto), 1899, Oil on Canvas, 97 x 66 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Joseph Layraud, “Der Morgen Danach (The Morning After)”, 1884, Oil on Panel, Dimensions and Location Unknown

Roland Caillaux

The Artwork of Roland Caillaux

Born in January of 1905, Roland Ferdinand Caillaud was a French film and theater actor, as well as, an illustrator and painter. Known professionally as Roland Caillaux, he was a key figure among the literary and artistic celebrities who lived and worked in Saint-Germain-des-Prés of Paris’s sixth Arrondissement. 

The son of a wealthy Parisian family, Roland Caillaux inherited enough money upon the death of his parents to enable him to live a comfortable life free from financial restriction. He had a residence at  5 Rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie in the sixth Arrondissement of Paris and maintained a studio space on the Rue Boulard in the fourteenth Arrondissement. Caillaux was openly homosexual and enjoyed the relative freedom of Paris in the 1930s. He developed friendships with many of the writers, artists and filmmakers of the period including Jean Cocteau, Maurice Sachs, François Sentein, Jean Marais, Marcel Carné, and Jean Genet, among others. 

In his lifetime, Caillaux was best known as a film and theater actor. His first appearance, an uncredited role, was in director Jaque Catelain’s 1924 drama film “La Galerie des Monstres”, a story of a young married couple’s tribulations after they join a circus. After playing the role of Le Sergent in Jene Renoir’s 1928 “Tire au Flanc”, Caillaux was given the role of Grippe-Soleil in Tony Lekain and Gaston Ravel’s 1929 “Figaro”, a film adaption of the 1778 Beaumarchais play “The Marriage of Figaro”. In the same year, he had a role in René Hevil’s film “Le Ruisseau (The Stream)”, and appeared onstage in a brief run of Vladmir Kirchon and Andreï Ouspenski’s play “La Rouille” at the Théâtre de l’Avenue in Paris. 

The height of Roland Caillaux’s acting career occurred in 1930 with appearances in two films: “Soyons Gais” and composer John Daumery’s comedy musical “Le Masque d’Hollywood” directed by Clarence Badger. In the same year, he was in two theatrical performances: playwright Georges Neveux’s first notable work “Juliette ou la Cié des Songes” and Edmond Haraucourt’s “La Passion” held at the Comédie-Française. In 1932, Caillaux appeared in two films: the character of André Duval, Sergent de Spahis, in Rex Ingram and Alice Terry’s “Baroud” and a lead role in Georges Lacombe’s comedy “Ce Cochon de Morin”. His final film role was Lieutenant Jean Dumontier in Jean Benoît-Lévy and Marie Epstein’s 1934 “Itto” which, filmed in French Morocco, received a nomination for Best Foreign Film at the 1935 Venice Film Festival.

As a visual artist during the period from 1940 to 1960, Caillaux worked in his Rue Boulard studio where he produced landscapes, portraits, lithographs and drawings. The rare erotic works he produced were meant to be circulated among his circle of friends in the arts, cinema and music worlds. In Paris in 1945, Roland Caillaux produced what is probably his best known illustrated work, “Vingt Lithographies pour un Livre que J’ai Lu (Twenty Lithographs for a Book I Read)”, a folio of twenty homoerotic lithographs loosely presented in printed wrappers within a cloth folding box.

Caillaux’s “Vingt Lithographies pour un Livre que J’ai Lu” was published in a small run of one-hundred fifteen copies without the name of the author, illustrator or printer. The lithographs were accompanied by text, attributed to novelist and playwright Jean Genet, that contain variant excerpts from two poems, “Notre Dame-des-Fleurs” and “The Parade”. These two poetic works by Genet were later published in a limited edition run, entitled “Poems”, in 1948 by Editions L’Arbalète. 

Roland Caillaux passed away in Paris in December of 1977. Many of his illustrations, not publicly seen before, were discovered by Nicole Canet of Paris’s Galerie Au Bonheur du Jour and subsequently exhibited. Caillaux’s works are housed in many private collections and frequently appear in international auctions. 

Note: The spelling of Roland Caillaud’s birth name was written with a “d”; however, throughout his career as an actor and draftsman, he wrote his last name with an “x”. In regards to his drawings, those not erotic were signed Roland Caillaux; while the erotic drawings were signed with a “spider” signature, a small spider web with an “x” in the middle.

Nicole Canet’s Galerie Au Bonheur du Jour, located in the heart of Paris, represents work by Caillaux and other artists in the fields of painting, illustration and photography. The gallery also publishes a wide collection of catalogues. Galerie Au Bonheur du Jour is located online at: https://www.aubonheurdujour.net 

Top Insert Image: Dora Maar (Henriette Théodora Markovitch), “Portrait of Roland Caillaux”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Roland Caillaux, “Sailor”, 1932, Oil on Canvas on Cardboard, 26 x 21 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Dora Maar (Henriette Théodora Markovitch), “Portrait of Roland Caillaux”, 1935, Gelatin-Argent Negative on Flexible Support in Cellulose Nitrate, 18 x 13 cm, Le Centre Pompidou, Paris