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Photographers Unknown, He Who Wished to Be Master of the Truth
He had to finish his books, this book he had written and rewritten, destroyed, renounced, destroyed once more, imagined once more, created once more, shortened and stretched out for ten years, this infinite book, of doubt, rebirth, modest grandiosity. He was inclined to destroy it forever, to offer his enemies their stupid victory, so they could go around clamoring that he was no longer able to write a book, that his mind had been dead for ages, that his silence was just proof of his failure. He burned or destroyed all the drafts, all the evidence of his work, all he left on his table were two manuscripts, side by side, he instructed a friend that this abolition was to continue. He had three abscesses in his brain but he went to the library every day to check his notes.
His death was stolen from he who wished to be master of his own death, and even the truth of his death was stolen from he who wished to be master of the truth. Above all the name of the plague was not to be spoken, it was to be disguised in the death records, false reports were given to the media. Although he wasn’t dead yet, the family he had always been ostracized from took in his body. The doctors spoke abjectly of blood relatives. His friends could no longer see him, unless they broke and entered: he saw a few of them, unrecognizable behind their plastic-bag-covered hair, masked faces, swaddled feet, torsos covered in jackets, gloved hands reeking of alcohol he had been forbidden to drink himself.
All the strongholds had collapsed, except for the one protecting love: it left an unchangeable smile on his lips when exhaustion closed his eyes. If he only kept a single image, it would be the one of their last walk in the Alhambra gardens, or just his face. Love kept on thrusting its tongue in his mouth despite the plague. And as for his death it was he who negotiated with his family: he exchanged his name on the death announcement for being able to choose his death shroud. For his carcass he chose a cloth in which they had made love, which came from his mother’s trousseau. The intertwined initials in the embroidery could bear other messages.
Hevré Guibert, A Man’s Secret, Written in Invisible Ink: Selected Stories, 2020, Translation by Jeffrey Zuckerman, Semiotexte Publishing
Born in Saint-Cloud, Hauts-de-Seine on the fourteenth of December in 1955, Hervé Guibert was a French author and photographer. Through his novels and autobiographical studies, he was influential in changing the French public’s attitudes towards the HIV/AIDS crisis. Guibert wrote
with aggressive candor, detachment, and passion, mixing diary writing, memoir, and fiction. His art and his writings were closely linked to his private life. Those of whom he wrote often became his friends, and his loved ones were often portrayed as celebrities, alternately idolized and exposed.
Guibert’s writing style was initially inspired by the work of Jean Genet and, later, Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, a post-war author who explored obsession and isolation through multiple perspectives. Three of Guibert’s lovers played an important role in his life and work: Thierry Jouno, director for the International Theater for the Deaf whom he met in 1976; philosopher and author Michel Foucault whom he met in 1977; and Vincent Marmousez, a teenager who inspired his 1989 novel “Fou de Vincent (Crazy for Vincent)”.
Born into the conservative middle-class family of a veterinary inspector and a former teacher, Hervé Guibert moved to Paris at the age of seventeen with the hope of becoming an actor or scriptwriter. After his rejection from a Paris film school, he entered the literary world and, by the age of twenty, was writing dating advice for the glossy women’s magazine “20 Ans (Twenty Years)”. In 1977, he published his autobiographical novel/diary, “La Mort Propagande (Death Propaganda)”.
Guibert was hired in 1978 as a photography critic by “Le Monde”, France’s evening newspaper, and successfully established himself as a photographer with a photographic literary volume containing intimate portraits of his great-aunts. In the same year, Guibert completed his second book “Les Aventures Singulières (The Singular Adventures)”, a collection of stories centered on a singular character, published through Éditions de Minuit in Paris. During the 1980s, Guibert was a reader at the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles (Institute for the Young Blind) in Paris. This experience became the basis for his 1985 “Des Aveugles” which won the Fénéon Prize for that year.
In 1981, Hervé Guibert published his “Image Fantôme (Ghost Image)”, an insightful collection of essays on various photographic forms such as family album portraits, photo-booth film strips, and pornographic Polaroids. In this work, Guibert presented photography as tactile, fetishistic and linked to frustrated desires. For a collaborative work with his
theatrical friend, opera and theater director Patrice Chéreau, Guibert shared a 1984 Best Screenplay César Award for the 1983 “L’Homme Blessé (The Wounded Man)”.
In 1987, Guibert was granted a two year residency scholarship at Villa Medicis, the site of the French Academy in Rome, where he studied with his friend, the openly gay writer and journalist Mathieu Lindon. In January of 1988, Guibert was given a positive diagnosis for AIDS and began work on recording what would be the remainder of his life. In June of 1989, he married Christine, the partner of director Thierry Jouno, so his royalty income would pass legally to her and her two children.
In 1989, Hervé Guibert published his highly erotic novella ““Fou de Vincent (Crazy for Vincent)”, a dramatization of his intermittent relationship with the impulsive and unpredictable teenager Vincent Marmousez. In 1990, Guibert revealed his HIV status in his real-life based novel “À l’Ami qui ne M’a Pas Sauvé la Vie (To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life)”. He described in this work the existential effect the virus had on his life, its impact on a 
complete generation of people, the deaths of friends and lovers, and how AIDS forever transformed humanity’s relationship with desire and sexuality.
Following the release of his 1990 novel, Guibert became the focus of media attention with interviews and several talk show appearances. He filmed scenes of his daily life with AIDS between July of 1990 and February of 1991. This film, “La Pudeur ou l’impudeur (Modesty of Shamelessness)”, produced by Pascale Breugnot, was broadcasted posthumously on French television in January of 1992. Guibert published two more additional auto-fictional novels that detailed the progression of his illness: the 1991 “Le Protocole Compassionnel” and the “L’Homme au Chapeau Rouge (The Man in the Red Hat)” which was published posthumously in 1992.
Hervé Guibert’s last work, “Cytomégalovirus” was a description of his hospitalization in the autumn of 1991 and the increasing blindness he suffered from his illness. In the second week of December in 1991, Guibert attempted suicide by taking digitalin, a heart medication
toxic in large doses. Two weeks later, he died at the age of thirty-six in Clamart, Hauts-de-Seine, on the twenty-seventh of December in 1991.
A consummate photographer and author, Hevré Guibert had published twenty-five books before his death, five of which were published in the last year of his life. Excellent translations of his work are now readily available through many sites. Several volumes of Guibert’s work can be read online at the Internet Archive
Notes: A selection from Hervé Guibert’s posthumously published “Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976-1991”, translated from the French by author Nathanaël, can be found at the Asymptote Journal site: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/nonfiction/herve-guibert-the-mausoleum-of-lovers/
A 2014 review of “Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976-1991” can be found at the Lambda Literary Organization site: https://lambdaliterary.org/2014/10/mausoleum-of-lovers-journals-1976-1991-by-herve-guiber/
Dennis Cooper’s blog has an excellent article on Guibert’s 1989 “To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life” that contains photography by Guibert, a biography, media trailers, book excerpts and a 1993 interview: https://denniscooperblog.com/spotlight-on-herve-guibert-to-the-friend-who-did-not-save-my-life-1989/
There is a noteworthy article by The New Yorker staff writer Julian Lucas from the print issue of September 21st in 2020 entitled “When a Virus Becomes a Muse”. This review of Hevré Guibert’s life and work can be found at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/21/when-a-virus-becomes-a-muse
Information written by Christine (Guibert) on Hervé Guibert’s partner Thierry Joune and the impact he had on Guibert’s writings can be found at: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/281395860/thierry-jouno
Top Insert Image: Ulf Andersen, “Hervé Guibert, Paris”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, 40.3 x 39. 2 cm, William Talbott Hillman Foundation
Second Insert Image: Hervé Guibert, “Sienne, 1979”, Edtition of 25, Gelatin Silver Print on Cartoline, 14.5 x 21.9 cm, Private Collection
Third Insert Image: Hervé Guibert, “L’Oisillon, Santa Caterina, Elba”, 1979, Gelatin Silver Print, 14 x 21.7 cm, Private Collection
Fourth Insert Image: Hervé Guibert, “Michel Foucault”, 1980, Gelatin Silver Print, 14.5 x 21.5 cm, Private Collection
Bottom Insert Image: Hans Georg Berger, “Hervé Guibert” Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, September 2020 Issue of The New Yorker
Derek Jarman, “Caravaggio”, 1986, Film Scene Gifs, Cinematography Gabriel Beristain, Cinevista (USA)
Born in Northwood, Middlesex in January of 1942, Michael Derek Elworthy Jarman was an English artist, film maker, costume and stage designer, writer and poet, and gay rights activist. His
film career began with experimental Super 8mm shorts and developed into such mainstream films as the 1986 historical drama “Caravaggio” and the 1989 “War Requiem”, that featured Laurence Olivier’s last screen performance.
As an author, Jarman published several works: a poetry collection entitled “A Finger in the Fishes Mouth”; two diaries, “Modern Nature” and “Smiling in Slow Motion”; two treatises on his art and films, “Chroma” and “The Last of England (aka Kicking the Pricks)”; and the 1984 “Dancing Ledge”, an autobiography of his life until the age of forty.
The son of Royal Air Force officer Lancelot Elworthy Jarman and Elizabeth Evelyn Puttock, Derek Jarman received his elementary education at the preparatory Walhampton School and Dorset’s Cranford School, a progressive boarding and day institution. Beginning in 1960, he studied Art and English at King’s College, London, 
which was followed in 1963 by four years of study at University College London’s Slade School of Fine Art. In the 1970s, Jarman embraced his homosexuality and became a public figure for the gay rights campaign.
Jarman’s first venture in film making was a series of experimental shorts filmed with Super 8mm film, a format he used frequently throughout his career. Among these films are the 1984 “Imagining October, an examination of art and politics at the end of the Cold War; 1985 “The Angelic Conversation”, an arthouse drama of homoerotic images combined with Judi Dench’s readings of Shakespeare sonnets; and 1990 “The Garden”, an arthouse allegory that examined the suffering and ostracism of a gay male couple during the AIDS crisis. “The Garden” was entered in 1991 into the 17th Moscow International Film Festival.
As a stage set and costume designer, Derek Jarman did the design work for the 1968 Sadler’s Wells Opera production of “Don Giovanni” at London’s newly renovated Coliseum in the West End. He was chosen as the production designer for director Ken Russell’s 1971 historical horror-drama “The Devil’s”, a controversial 
film for which Russell received the Best Foreign Director Award at the 1972 Venice Film Festival. Jarman’s work with this film, as well as his work on Russell’s 1972 “Savage Messiah”, gave him a transition into mainstream narrative filmmaking.
Jarman’s debut film was the 1976 “Sebastiane”, a story spoken in ancient Latin dialogue about the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. This film featured some of the first positive images of gay sexuality in British films. “Sebastiane” was influenced by films from the Italian arthouse oeuvre, particularly the cinematic style of Frederico Fellini. In 1977, Jarman began shooting scenes for the 1978 “Jubilee”, a heavily punk-influenced film that transports Queen Elizabeth I forward in time to an England troubled by the unemployment and rising inflation of the 1970s. Now considered a cult classic, the film was adapted in 2017 as a play for the Manchester Royal Exchange Theater.
After several years of preparation, Derek Jarman directed his next film, the 1979 adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”. His original adaptation was intended for a stage play; however, he ultimately decided to proceed with a film adaptation. Seeking a balance between the aspects of theater and film, Jarman reworked 
the text so it would capture the mystery of the original without the theatrics. Inspired by films produced by Hammer Film Productions, Jarman utilized voice-over narration, costumes from muliple eras, sounds of heavy breathing, and blue camera filters to create a film that was well received upon its release.
Jarman learned his HIV-positive diagnosis on the twenty-second of December in 1986. An outspoken advocate of gay rights, he openly spoke publicly about his condition and his struggle with the virus. Despite his illness, Jarman continued making both mainstream films and Super 8mm shorts. In 1987, his arthouse film “The Last of England” was released. This film dealt with the loss of English culture in the 1980s and the formation of the Section 28 Local Government Act that banned any “promotion” or discussion of homosexuality and thus stifled LGBT support groups.
Derek Jarman’s 1989 “War Requiem”, produced by Scottish novelist and director Don Boyd, brought Laurence Olivier out of retirement for his last screen appearance. For its soundtrack, the film used noted composer Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem”, a work he wrote for the consecration of the Coventry Cathedral. Violent war footage and poetry written by war hero Wilfred
Owen were overlaid on the score. While filming his 1990 “The Garden”, Jarman became seriously ill but managed to complete the work. This arthouse film was loosely based on Christ’s crucifixion; however, the film’s protagonist is a gay male couple whose idealistic existence is interrupted by arrest, humiliation, torture and death.
Now working in a simpler format due to his failing health, Jarman directed his 1991 “Edward II”, a romantic historical drama based on Christopher Marlowe’s 1594 play of the same name. This was followed by the 1993 experimental comedic-drama “Wittgenstein” based on the life of philosopher and professor Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose life and career were affected by periods of depression. By 1993, Jarman was dying of AIDS-related complications that had already rendered him partially blind and only able to see in shades of blue.
Despite his advancing illness, Derek Jarman completed his 1993 “Blue”, a single screenshot of saturated blue color with a background soundtrack by Simon Fisher Turner. Over the soundtrack, Jarman and some of his 
long-time collaborators described Jarman’s life and artistic vision. “Blue” made its debut at the 1993 Venice Biennale and later became part of the collections at the Centre Georges Pompidou, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Collection, and the Walker Art Institute in Minneapolis. Jarman’s final film was the 1994 “Glitterbug”, a documentary of his life as seen through home movies, that was posthumously aired on BBC Two’s episodic television show “Arena”.
Jarman died on the nineteenth of February in 1994 at the age of fifty-two at London’s St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. His body is interned in the graveyard at St. Clement’s Church, Old Romney, Kent. A blue English Heritage plaque honoring Derek Jarman’s life was placed at the site of his live-in studio at London’s Butler’s Wharf in 2019.
Notes: After his HIV-positive diagnosis, Jarman made the decision to leave London for a period and bought a small fisherman’s cabin, Prospect Cottage, on the beaches of Dungeness, Kent, with an inheritance received from his father. Using his creative energy, Jarman created a sculpture garden from discarded metal engine parts and local coastal plants. After his death, Prospect Cottage was purchased in 2020 through an Art Fund campaign and is now a public site overseen by the UK charity Creative Folkestone. Jarman’s archives from the cottage were placed on a long-term loan to the Tate Museum Archive.
An 2023 article by artist and curator Robert Priseman for “ART UK”, entitled “Derek Jarman’s Garden: A Heart of Creativity”, examines Jarman’s life at Prospect Cottage: https://artuk.org/discover/stories/derek-jarmans-garden-a-heart-of-creativity
“FILM London” has a short 2024 article on Jarman’s life and the Jarman Award for emerging artist filmmakers that was instituted in 2008: https://filmlondon.org.uk/flamin/about-derek-jarman
Alastair Curtis wrote an excellent 2023 article for “FRIEZE’ magazine on Derek Jarman’s final film “Blue” and its adaptation into a stage production: https://www.frieze.com/article/derek-jarman-blue-now-2023
Top Insert Image: Trevor Leighton, “Derek Jarman”, 1990, Bromide Fibre Print, 36.7 x 29 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London
Second Insert Image: Derek Jarman, “Caravaggio”, 1986, Cinematography Gabriel Beristain, Cinevista (USA), Umbrella Entertainment (Australia)
Third Insert Image: Steve Pyke, “Derek Jarman”, 1983, Bromide Print, 37.6 x 38 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London
Fourth Insert Image: Derek Jarman, “Sebastiane”, 1976, Cinematography Peter Middleton, Cinegate Ltd
Fifth Insert Image: David Thompson, “Derek Jarman”, 1992, Toned Archival Print on Kentmere Paper, 34.5 x 27.7 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London
Bottom Insert Image: Derek Jarman, “Jubilee”, 1978, Cinematography Peter Middleton, Cinegate Ltd
Artwork by Bernard Perlin
Born in Richmond, Virginia in November of 1918, Bernard Perlin was an American painter and illustrator who was primarily known for his Magic Realism paintings and World War II posters supporting the American 
effort. He was the youngest child of Jewish immigrants from Russia and began his art studies at the encouragement of his high school teacher.
Perlin enrolled in the New York School of Design where he studied from 1934 to 1936. He enrolled in 1937 at the National Academy of Design and studied under painter and lithographer Leon Kroll. Perlin continued his studies at the Arts Student League under painter and graphic artist Isabel Bishop, mural painter William Palmer, and painter and printmaker Harry Sternberg. In 1938, he was awarded a Kosciuko Foundation Award which enabled him to continue his studies in Poland.
At the beginning of World War II, Bernard Perlin was rejected from military combat service as he was openly gay. However, he entered the graphics 
department of the Office of War Information for which he created patriotic propaganda posters to support the country’s war effort. Among his many wartime pieces are the 1943 “Let ‘Em Have It” war bonds advertisement and “Americans Will Always Fight for Liberty”, which depicted World War II marching with Continental Army soldiers from the American Revolutionary War.
Perlin continued his war effort as an artist-correspondent for Life Magazine from 1943 to 1944. While stationed in Greece for Life Magazine, Perlin went to the United States the first news and sketches from that country since the German invasion in 1941. At the war’s end in 1945, he began illustrative work at Fortune Magazine, a national business magazine with in-depth articles.
Bernard Perlin, influenced by the magic-realism movement, sought after the war to capture in his paintings everyday-life moments. His most famous work, “Orthodox Boys”, was painted in 1948. This painting depicted two Jewish 
boys standing in front of subway graffiti. Perlin’s 1945-1946 “The Leg”, a casein and tempera work on board, was the first postwar work by an American artist to be acquired by the Tate Museum in London.
Perlin moved to Italy for six years, where he produced magic-realist works done with a more brightly colored palette. After a brief stay in New York City, Perlin moved to Ridgefield, Connecticut, where he continued to paint until the 1970s. After several years of retirement, he began to paint again in 2012. After the completion of two new works, Perlin was given a retrospective of his work in 2013 at the Chair and the Maiden Gallery on Christopher Street in New York City.
Bernard Perlin met Edward Newell, a top fashion model in the 1950s and later the 1960s, at a 1954 New Year’s Eve party hosted by photographer George Platt Lynes. Their relationship that began in the summer of 1955 lasted for over fifty years until Perlin’s death. Newell and Perlin were married after it became legal in the state of Connecticut in 2008.
Bernard Perlin died at the age of ninety-five in January of 2014 at his home in Ridgefield, Connecticutt. His work can be found in museums and libraries, including the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Pritzker Military Museum and Library in Chicago.
Note: I have done research on Edward Newell without any success. I know that he was in Connecticut after Perlin’s death. If anyone has any information on Newell, please notify me through the comment section. Thank you.
Top Insert Image: George Platt Lynes, “Bernard Perlin”, 1940 Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection
Second Insert Image: Bernard Perlin, “His Home Over There”, circa 1942, YMCA/YWCA Poster, 69.5 x 102.5 cm, Private Collection
Bottom Insert Image: Bernard Perlin, “Let ‘Em Have It”, 1943, World War II Poster for War Bonds, 51 x 71 cm, Private Collection
The Art of Trevor Southey
Born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Africa in 1940 to parents of colonialist Dutch descent, Trevor Jack Thomas Southey was a celebrated Mormon painter, print maker, sculptor and educator. His heritage
can be traced to European colonists who settled in Cape Town, South Africa in the seventeenth-century. Southey’s work celebrated the human form and sought to transform humanity by challenging viewers to rediscover their inner soul.
Trevor Southey’s early interest in art developed during periods of rheumatic fever that often confined him to bed with only pencils, paper, and art books from the school library. His formal art education began with studies at the Brighton College of Art in Sussex, England. A year later, Southey studied at the Natel Technical College in Durban, South Africa where he met and was baptized by Mormon missionaries. In the early 1960s, he served as a Latter Day Saints missionary with the organization’s South Africa Aid program.
Retaining his African and European origins, Southey emigrated to the United States in 1965 and studied at the Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah where he earned both his Bachelor and Master Degrees. Southey taught art education at the university
and became a founding member in 1966 of the highly significant Mormon Art and Belief Movement, an artist organization that was active until 1976. During his teaching career, Southey worked to establish a Mormon art form through his use of Latter Day Saint theology.
Despite his homosexuality, Trevor Southey married psychotherapist Elaine Fish, the daughter of Jesse Fish and Lucile Cottam, in 1967 after a brief courtship of several months. In an attempt to conform to the teachings of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, the couple settled down in the foothills of Utah’s Wasatch Mountains, built a homestead in Alpine and raised four children. Southey along with artists Neil Hadlock, Dennis Smith and Gary Ernest Smith founded a small artist community in Alpine during the 1970s.
Southey resigned from Brigham Young University’s faculty in 1977 and began to pursue a personal artistic career. Coming to terms with his homosexuality, Southey divorced Elaine Fish in 1982 after fifteen years of marriage and found himself excommunicated on the outskirts of Mormon society. Thirty 
years later, Southey’s reputation as an artist prompted an invitation to once again join the Church of the Latter Day Saints.
As a figurative Realist, Trevor Southey used the depiction of the physical body to portray the soul, a method employed frequently by painters and sculptors of the Renaissance period. He expressed human spirituality through commonplace figures of an ethereal nature in scenes that combined realism and personally related allegories. Southey’s work, focused on the Rocky Mountain area, examined environmental issues that effected the land particularly those concerns that dealt with urban planning. In 1985, he relocated his Salt Lake City studio to San Francisco where Southey’s artwork achieved both critical and popular success. His four children from his annulled marriage later joined him in San Francisco.
During the 1990s, Southey became an accomplished stained glass designer, sculptor and print maker. His many intaglio etchings exhibited the same elegance and delicate draftsmanship of his paintings. Southey’s “Full Bloom” intaglio series began as a pencil drawing of a woman he knew from church. In its final form, this
successful series of etchings became a universal symbol of resurrection and the cycle of life. Fully established now as an artist of note, Southey received commissions for both paintings and sculptures throughout the United States and the United Kingdom .
Trevor Southey did a series of illustrations for several books of poetry by writer, playwright and lecturer Carol Lynn Pearson. These include the 1976 “The Growing Season” and the 1987 “A Widening View”, both published by Bookcraft in Salt Lake City, as well as the 1967 “Beginnings” published by Trilogy Arts in Provo, Utah. Southey, along with Brigham Young University Professors Clyde W. Robinson and Donald R. Marshall, participated in a 1979 panel discussion with authors Diane Leigh and Brett Parkinson on the nature of art in the Church of the Latter Day Saints. This dialogue was later published in the Fall 1979 edition of “Century II”, the Brigham Young University journal for its College of Humanities.
In 2013, after a decade-long battle with prostate cancer and a recent diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease, Southey returned to Salt Lake City, Utah to be cared for by friends and relatives. His four children also relocated to be by his side. Trevor Southey died, at the age of seventy-five after a year at the Salt Lake City hospice, on the twentieth of October in 2015. His funeral service was held at the Dumke Auditorium of the
Utah Museum of Fine Arts. Southey’s work can be found in many private collections and both public and corporate institutions.
“ It made itself most known in my work. Even that work long preserved within the seeming sanctity of a subject like the traditional family would reflect that shunned part of my being. Works done innocently, once they were complete still held the whole truth within them. Perhaps no painting revealed that more clearly than Prodigal. Often while I refused to acknowledge this, others could read it quite clearly. Prodigal was conceived from Jesus’ parable of reconciliation and familial love. I feared the sensuality of this work, and indeed, it was gently declined by the clients. At its conception and execution, that sensuality was naive and even innocent, as was the deeper implications of content. Other works follow as a celebration of this new personal “home,’ this integration, the comfort of finally being one within oneself and one within a new society. Some of these images are almost embarrassingly overt, though that was by no means my intention.”
Trevor Southey, Gay, Excerpt from Warnock Fine Arts: Trevor Southey
Notes: Trevor Southey attracted controversy in 1981 with his “Flight Aspiration”, a painting of a flying nude man and woman that was part of a mural commissioned for the Salt Lake City International Airport. The mural was removed after protests by the American Family Association, a national anti-pornography group led locally by Romola Joy Beech, a well known Latter Day Saints conservative activist. After five years in storage at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, “Flight Aspiration” was placed into the museum’s permanent collection in 1986.
Duane Jennings, a long-time friend of Southey and author of the two-volume series “Stumbling Blocks and Stepping-Stones”, wrote a short article on the artist’s life for the online site “Affirmation: LBGTQ Mormons Families and Friends”: https://affirmation.org/trevor-southey-1940-2015/
The Affirmation site also has an article by Seba Martinez that discusses Southey’s personal experience in marriage, excommunication from the Church of the Latter Day Saints, and break-up of family bonds due to a loved one being homosexual: https://affirmation.org/pbs-documentary-mormons/
Selected for the LDS Film Festival, Nathan Florence’s 2022 film, “Bright Spark: The Reconciliation of Trevor Southey”, is a narrative documentary on Southey’s life and work. This film contains film clips of Southey with his work. “Bright Spark” can be found in its entirety on the PBS/MPT site: https://www.pbs.org/video/bright-spark-the-reconciliation-of-trevor-southey-ld2x8l/
The Trevor Southey website is located at: http://www.trevorsouthey.com
The Dabakis-Justesen Fine Art site has a presentation of Trevor Southey’s large-scale painting series “Warriors” for viewing and purchase: http://www.trevorsouthey.com/warriors/index.html
Second Insert Image; Trevor Southey, “Yuri”, 2000, “Warrior” Series, Oil on Canvas, 213.4 x 152.4 cm, Dabakis-Justesen Fine Art
Third Insert Image: Trevor Southey, “Transition”, 1980, Edition of 77, Etching, 20.3 x 15.2 cm, Private Collection
Fourth Insert Image: Trevor Southey, “Russ”, 1990, Prismacolor Pencil Drawing on Silkscreen, 76.2 x 55.9 cm, Private Collection
Diego Velázquez, “Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob”, 1630, Oil on Canvas, 223 x 250 cm, Monasterio de El Escorial, San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Madrid, Spain
Born at the Andalusian city of Seville in May of 1599, Diego Rodríguez de Silva Velázquez was an artist of the Spanish Golden Age who rose to prominence in the court of King Philip IV of
Spain and Portugal. His work became the archetype for the nineteenth-century realist and impressionist painters.
Diego Velázquez was the first child of notary Juan Rodriguez de Silva and Jerónima Velázquez who raised him in modest surroundings. As he exhibited an early inclination for art, Velázquez was apprenticed for six-years to painter Francisco Pacheco del Río, the founder of Seville’s art academy. His studies under Pacheco included literature and philosophy, perspective and proportion, and, as Pacheco was the official censor of Seville’s Inquisition, the academically strict representation of religious subjects.
Velázquez was one of the first Spanish artists to paint bodegones, realist depictions of kitchen scenes depicting still lifes of pantry objects such as food and drink. These paintings are known for their realism and chiaroscuro, dramatic lighting effects, as well as their religious background scenes. Those executed in 1618 include “Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha” and “Kitchen Scene with Christ at Emmaus”. During his period in Seville, Velázquez painted his first full-length portrait, the 1620 “Sor Jerónima de la Fuente”, a depiction of the revered nun that was commissioned by the Franciscan order.
Having established his reputation in Seville by the early 1620s, Diego Velázquez traveled to Madrid in April of 1622 and, at the request of Pacheco del Río, painted a portrait of poet Luis de Góngora. In December of 1622, he received a command to attend the court of King Philip IV’s minister, Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares. Velázquez lodged with Don Juan de Fonseca, Chaplain to the King, and painted his portrait. Satisfied with the work, King Philip IV commissioned a portrait and sat for Velázquez on the thirtieth of August in 1623. Upon the pleasure of the king, Velásquez received substantial funds and moved with his family to Madrid which became his home for the remainder of his life.
Velázquez was now established with a monthly salary and lodgings as well as payments for any future works. His work softened from the severity of the Seville period and the tones became more delicate. In 1627, Velázquez won a painting competition set by King Philip IV with a painting of the expulsion of the Moors, a work later destroyed in a 1734 fire. As a reward, he was appointed gentleman usher and received
a daily allowance and yearly funds for clothes. Velázquez met painter Peter Paul Rubens in September of 1628 and accompanied him to view the work of Italian Renaissance painter Tiziano Vecellio (Titian) on display at the Royal Site of San Lorenzo de El Escorial. This meeting with Titian motivated Velázquez to travel to Italy to see the works of the Italian masters.
Diego Velázquez’s first trip to Italy, a major influence on his work, was sponsored in 1629 by King Philip IV. He traveled extensively and painted for a year and a half, a period of major history paintings. Among these were the 1629-1630 “Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob” and the 1630 “Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan”, two compositions of nearly life-sized figures presented as contemporary people with gestures and facial expressions seen in ordinary life. Following the example of the painters from Bologna, he switched to light gray grounds rather than the dark red ground of his earlier works; this became a regular practice that enabled greater luminosity.
Velázquez returned to Madrid in 1631 and completed the first of many portraits featuring Philip IV’s infant son, “Prince Balthasar Charles with a Dwarf”, now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. For decorations at the Palacio del Buen Retiro, the king’s new palace, he painted equestrian portraits of the royal family and a large contemporary history painting, “The Surrender of Breda”, all executed in 1634 and 1635. Velázquez again returned to history paintings between
1636 and 1648 with“Aesop”,“Menippus”, and “Mars Resting”. As his royal appointment enabled him to avoid the censorship of the Inquisition, he became the first Spanish artist known to have painted the female nude, the 1644-1648 “Venus at her Mirror”.
Diego Velázquez traveled in 1649 for his second and last trip to Italy where he bought paintings by many noted artists including Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. After painting a portrait of the Duke of Modena, Velázquez painted a portrait of Pope Innocent X, for which he was presented with a medal and gold chain. While in Rome, he painted a 1650 portrait of Juan de Pareja, one of his slaves and a notable painter in his own right; Velázquez freed de Pareja in November of that year. He returned by way of Barcelona to Spain in 1651 and proceeded to arrange and catalogue the paintings and three hundred pieces of statuary he had bought for King Philip IV.
Velázquez, upon his return, painted the 1656 “Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor)”, a scene of a group of children and women, one of which was Margaret Theresa, the eldest daughter of Philip IV’s new queen Mariana of Austria. Velázquez had placed himself next to a painting easel and the king and queen are seen reflected in a mirror on the back wall. Three years after the completion of this work, he received the honorary Cross of Saint James of the 
Order of Santiago. One of his last major works was the 1657 “Las Hilanderas (The Spinners)”, a scene based on Ovid’s myth of Arachna, a Lydian maiden credited with inventing linen cloth and nets.
The 1660 peace treaty between France and Spain was finalized with the marriage of Maria Theresa, the daughter of Philip IV and his first wife Elisabeth of France, and Louis XIV, known as the Sun King. Diego Velázquez was charged with the decoration of the Spanish pavilion and the surrounding area of the small Island of Pheasants. He returned to Madrid on the twenty-sixth of June and, on the thirty-first of July, was stricken with fever. After signing a will, Diego Velázquez died on the sixth of August; his wife died eight days later. Both were buried in the vault of the Church of San Juan Bautista. As the church was destroyed in 1809 by the French, the place of their interment is now unknown.
Diego Velázquez has been honored through works of such artists as Édouard Manet, James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon, Fernando Botero, Herman Braun-Vega and Salvador Dali. In 2009, the “Portrait of a Man’, long attributed to a follower of Velázquez, was restored and found to have been painted by Velázquez himself. A portrait from a collection in the United Kingdom was through x-ray analysis found to be a previously unknown work by Velázquez.
Notes: A short 2003 essay on Diego Velázquez by Everett Fahy of the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art can be found at the museum’s site: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/vela/hd_vela.htm
The website for the Diego Velázquez Organization, which contains his complete oeuvre can be found at: https://diegovelazquez.org
The Museum del Prado has an article on Velázquez as well as images of all sixty-five paintings by the artist in its collection: https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/artist/velazquez-diego-rodriguez-de-silva-y/434337e9-77e4-4597-a962-ef47304d930d
Top Insert Image: Diego Velázquez, “Self Portrait”, circa 1645, Oil on Canvas, 103.5 x 82.5 cm, Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy
Second Insert Image: Diego Velázquez, “The Feast of Bacchus”, 1628-1629, Oil on Canvas, 165 x 225 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain
Third Insert Image: Diego Velázquez, “Maria Teresa of Spain (with Two Watches)”, 1652-1653, Oil on Canvas, 127 x 98.5 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria
Fourth Insert Image: Diego Velázquez, “The Surrender of Breda”, 1634-1635, Oil on Canvas, 307 x 367 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain
Bottom Insert Image: Diego Velázquez, “Juan de Pareja”, 1650, Oil on Canvas, 81.3 x 69.9 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Photography of Carl Van Vechten
Born at Cedar Rapids, Iowa in June of 1880, Carl Van Vechten was an American accomplished photographer, author, critic, and ardent supporter of Harlem Renaissance artists and writers. He was the youngest child of prominent banker Charles Duane Van Vechten and Ada Amanda Fitch, a talented musician who 
founded the Cedar Rapids Public Library. A passionate follower of music and theater from an early age, Van Vechten left Cedar Rapids after graduating high school to pursue his interests and advance his education in Chicago.
Van Vechten entered the University of Chicago in 1899 where he studied a variety of topics including music, art and opera. Developing an interest in writing, he contributed work to the “University of Chicago Weekly”. After graduating from the university in 1903, Van Vechten accepted the position of columnist for the “Chicago American”, a growing afternoon edition newspaper. During this period, he began his experiments in photography, a passion for which he later gained widespread recognition.
After moving to New York City in 1906, Carl Van Vechten was hired by “The New York Times” as an assistant to its music critic. This position allowed him to continue his interest in opera through travels to Europe. In 1908, Van Vechten became the newspaper’s Paris correspondent and, upon his return to the
United States in 1909, became the first American critic of modern dance. He later became the drama critic for the “New York Times” during 1913 and 1914. During a 1913 musical premiere in Paris, Van Vechten met and became a life-long friend and champion of American author and poet Gertrude Stein. Upon her death in 1946, he became her literary executor and assisted in the printing of her unpublished writings.
Having finished with writing both fiction and critical, Van Vechten at the age of fifty began photographing his large circle of friends with a 35 mm Leica camera, given to him by the Mexican painter, ethnologist and art historian Miguel Covarrubias. Van Vechten’s earlier career as a New York Times writer and his theater connections through his actress wife, Fania Marinoff, provided him access to new and established artists as well as cultural figures of the time. Van Vechten’s photographic portfolio became a collection of America’s cultural icons of the early to middle 1900s.
Carl Van Vechten’s portraits were usually busts or half-length poses in front of backdrops. Although he employed an assistant for lighting setups, Van Vechten was skilled in the techniques of photographic development. The subjects of his portraits included such notables as playwright Eugene O”Neill, novelist and poet Gertrude Stein, actress Anna May Wong, social activist Langston Hughes, actress and singer Pearl Bailey, and many others. Van Vechten’s photographs were exhibited at New York City’s luxury department 
store Bergdorf Goodman in 1933, the Museum of the City of New York in 1942, the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1951, and at annual Leica Exhibitions between 1934 and 1936.
Van Vechten strongly felt that his documentary photographic work of the mid-1900s should be available for scholarly research. During his lifetime, he donated his collection of manuscripts, letters, clippings and photographs to several university libraries. The Museum of the City of New York houses an extensive collection of over two-thousand images. In 1966, the United States Library of Congress acquired a collection of fourteen-hundred photographs that had been the property of Saul Mauriber. Originally a busboy at the Stage Door Canteen during World War II, Mauriber was Van Vechten’s photographic assistant for twenty years; he organized the collection and later became the photographic executor for Van Vechten’s estate.
As an author, Carl Van Vechten published several volumes of essays on a variety of subjects between 1915 and 1920, during which time he acted as an informal literary scout for the newly formed publisher Alfred A. Knopf. The publisher printed seven novels by Van Vechten between
1922 and 1930, including the 1922 “Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works”, a fictionalized autobiographical work built around the Harlem Renaissance, and the 1930 “Parties: Scenes from Contemporary New York Life”, a satirical portrait of upper-bohemian New Yorkers and Harlem jazz clubs.
Active in both writing and photography in his latter years, Carl Van Vechten died in December of 1964 at the age of eighty-four in New York City. His ashes were scattered over the Shakespeare Garden in the city’s Central Park. Van Vechten’s personal papers, a collection of nineteen-hundred Kodachrome slides, and his series “Living Portraits: Color Photographs of African Americans from 1939 to 1964” are housed at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. His work is also housed in Tennessee’s Fisk University, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, among others.
Notes: While in Europe in 1907, Carl Van Vechten married Anna Snyder, his long time friend from Cedar Rapids. Their marriage lasted for five years; the divorce was finalized in 1912. Two years later, he married American-Russian actress and dancer Fania Marinoff. This marriage lasted for fifty
years during which the couple played a prominent role in the Harlem Renaissance. After a successful fifty year career, Marinoff died from pneumonia at the age of eighty-one in November of 1971.
From the beginning of their relationship, Fania Marinoff was aware of Van Vechten’s romantic and sexual relationships with men. Most notable of these was his relationship with Richmond journalist Mark Lutz, who was introduced to Van Vechten at a 1931 party hosted by Hunter Stagg, editor of “The Reviewer” literary magazine. Lutz became a model for Van Vechten’s early photographic work and would maintain a close relationship until Van Vechten’s death. Upon Mark Lutz’s death in 1968, all his correspondence with Van Vechten, some ten-thousand letters, were destroyed as per his wishes. His collection of photographs by Van Vechten were donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
A November 2023 article by Anne McCrery for the Library of Virginia’s “The Uncommon Wealth”, entitled “Authors of All Four Sexes” examines Hunter Stagg, his friendship with Van Vechten and Lutz, and the literary renaissance of Richmond, Virginia: https://uncommonwealth.virginiamemory.com/blog/2023/11/22/hunter-stagg/
The Elisa Rolle/ Queerplaces website has a biographical article on Carl Van Vechten that includes a collection of his portrait photographs gathered by Tony Scupham-Bilton: http://www.elisarolle.com/queerplaces/a-b-ce/Carl%20Van%20Vechten.html
Top Insert Image: Mark Lutz, “Carl Van Vechten, Villa Curonia, Florence, Italy”, 1935, Gelatin Silver Print
Second Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “Vincent Price”, 1939, Bromide Print, Marquette University, Wisconsin,
Third Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “Mark Lutz, Rhinebeck, New York”, July 1936, Gelatin Silver Print, 35.3 x 27.9 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Fourth Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “James Earl Jones”, May 1961, Vintage Gelatin Silver Print, 34.5 x 24 cm, Private Collection
Bottom Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “John Gielgud”, 1936, Vintage Print, 25.3 x 18 cm, Estate of Carl Van Vechten, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC
Photographers Unknown, Because the Rain is Stopping
from The Next Loves: I
His look and it took maybe 3
hellos / seconds
only his head underneath the blue hoodie
he takes off
because the rain is stopping look here’s
the planner’s confirmation and
someone’s holding an imaginary map of the conversation we’ll say
that and that
the streets will be all orderly
if I stay close inside
the zones he surveys
but it isn’t easy
imagining that the table and the lamp and the evening
sound like his breathlessness when he uncovers me and cleans
from The Next Loves: V
Red t-shirt and husky voice
we do yoga together much less strong
than I am but so much more beautiful
at the end in savasana when we’re supposed to become
one of those vibrations in the air and the ritual bell
sets us
almost behind absence I can only
think like an animal to live oh oh
oh that long slime desire
stretched out 2 meters away if I
rolled over on him really would that from now on be the only
hope of slowing
because of the sweetness in your bones
the quickness of death against which I recite a rose
is a rose is a rose is a rose
Stéphane Bouquet, The Next Loves, 2019, Translation by Lindsay Turner, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York
Born at Paris in October of 1968, Stéphane Bouquet is a French author and translator, film critic and screenwriter, poet, actor and choreographer. The son of a French nurse
and an American military man, his work covers a wide range of genres, disciplines and literary traditions.
Stéphane Bouquet earned his Master of Arts in the field of Economics at the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris. He is an established translator of poets from the New York School, a group of experimental painters and associated poets who lived and worked in the downtown area of Manhattan in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1949, painter Robert Motherwell had coined the name “New York School” for this group. Members included, among others, painters Larry Rivers, Hedda Sterne, and Alfred L. Copley as well as poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, Paul Blackburn, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara.
Bouquet’s work, both literary and formally innovative, covers a wide range of formats from intricate sonnets and lengthly sequential poems to prose reflections and dramatic compositions that explore personal relationships and contemporary urban life. Influenced by American poets Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler, Bouquet incorporates the spoken language of daily life and
gay sexuality into his poems. He takes the energy from the poetry of the New York School and blends it with older forms of poetic attitudes from France and Europe to form a personalized approach to life’s details, accidents, and desires.
Stéphane Bouquet is the author of eight collections of poetry as well as a book of essays on poems, the 2018 “La Cité de Paroles (The City of Words)”. Two of these collections have been translated into English by poet Lindsay Turner: the 2019 “The Next Loves”, a collection of frank, sometimes rueful, love poems that trace the intimacy in contemporary gay life: and the 2023 “Common Life”, three poems, a play and three short stories of everyday queer life, politics, and social gatherings. Bouquet has also published three books on film history: the 2008 “Sergei Eisenstein”, Soviet pioneer in the theory and practice of film montage; the history of American filmmaker “Gus van Sant” in 2009, and the 2012 “Clint Fucking Eastwood”, an analysis of the popularity of Eastwood’s films in France .
As a screenwriter, Bouquet wrote twenty screenplays for feature films, non-fiction films and short films. Of these, he is best known for the 1998 comedy “1999” which he co-wrote with actor and comedian Franck Amiack; the 2000 comedy “Hors Jeu (Out of the Game)” directed by 
Bouquet and co-written with Amiack; the 2009 comedy short “Nuts” written and directed by Bouquet; and the 2024 television film “The First Eternal” written by Bouquet and now in pre-production. Bouquet also directed Palanquée Films’s 2013 “Douce Nuit (Silent Night)” and UniFrance’s 2009 “Gauche Droite (Left Right)” and 2013 “Maman est Là (Mom is Here)”.
Having a long-standing interest in performance arts, Stéphane Bouquet has given workshops for choreographers at the Centre National de la Danse in Paris and, for stage directors and actors, classes at Switzerland’s La Manufacture in Lausanna. He is a recipient of a 2003 Prix de Rome and a 2007 Mission Stendhal Award, a literary award promoted by the Institut François d’Italie and the French Embassy in Italy to reward the best translators of contemporary French literature to Italian.
Bouquet’s literary work has been featured in France and internationally at festivals, residencies, and events, including the 2017 Frankfurt Book Fair and the 2018 Toronto Festival of Authors.
Notes: A 2024 research article by poet and translator Lindsay Turner, entitled “Translating Utopia: Stéphane Bouquet’s Queer Futurities” can be found at Duke University Press’s Romantic Review website: https://read.dukeupress.edu/romanic-review/article-abstract/115/1/134/387783/Translating-UtopiaStephane-Bouquet-s-Queer?redirectedFrom=fulltext
For the Poetry Society of America, Lindsay Turner wrote a short article, entitled “Visiting Poet: Lindsay Turner on Stéphane Bouquet”, that discussed Bouquet’s 2019 “The Next Loves” poetic collection which she had translated into English: https://poetrysociety.org/poems-essays/visiting-poet/bouquet
The Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s “Full Stop” literary review has an article by writer John Steen on Stéphane Bouquet’s “The Next Loves” at: https://www.full-stop.net/2019/10/16/reviews/john-steen/the-next-loves-stephane-bouquet/
An English translation by Lindsay Turner of Stéphane Bouquet’s poem “As an Excuse” can be found at Louisiana State University’s online literary and arts journal “NDR” produced by graduate students in its MFA Program of Creative Writing: http://ndrmag.org/translations/2020/05/as-an-excuse/
Second Insert Image: Stéphane Bouquet, “Common Life”, February 2023, Translation by Lindsay Turner, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York
Bottom Insert Image: Stéphane Bouquet, “The Next Loves”, September 2019, Translation by Lindsay Turner, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York
Photographer Unknown, “Peter Glenville”, Date Unknown, Publicity Shot, Gelatin Silver Print
Born Peter Patrick Brabazon Browne at Hampstead, London in October of 1913, Peter Glenville was a British actor and distinguished director of both theater and film. He was born into the Irish-Catholic theatrical family of Shaun Glenville (née John Brown), one of the 
prominent comedic pantomime performers of British music halls, and Dorothy Ward, an English pantomime actress of a successful fifty-two year career.
While his parents’ act toured England’s theaters, Peter Glenville attended some of the country’s preeminent boarding schools, including the Jesuit-operated Stonyhurst College, a structured institution that encouraged both excellence and devotion in its students. Excelling in music, religious doctrine and his academic studies, Glenville played on the college’s rugby team, sang in the choir, and was president of its debating society. Drawn to the theater from an early age, he performed his first theatrical role in the school’s 1923 production of “The Last Practice”.
In 1932, Glenville entered Christ Church College, Oxford, as a law student; however, he spent most of his time in its theater department. Glenville became a member of the Oxford Union, the university’s debating society, and the youngest president to have served on the prestigious Oxford University Dramatic Society, the OUDS. 
After his time at Oxford, Glenville relocated to London where he began his acting career. He joined the leading Shakespearean company and performed at Stratford-upon-Avon’s Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and London’s Old Vic, the Royal Victoria Hall.
During the years of World War II, Peter Glenville remained in London during the Blitz bombings to perform at West End theaters opposite such stars as Vivien Leigh. He appeared in various leading roles in such productions as Edgar Wallace’s Chicago-gangland play “On the Spot” in London’s West End, and Mary Hayley Bell’s horror thriller “Duet for Two Hands” at London’s Lyric Theatre. Glenville, in addition to his acting, started overseeing performances and was eventually appointed Director of the Royal Victoria Hall.
Established as a prominent West End director by the mid-1940s, Glenville worked with such notable writers as Tennessee Williams, Jean-Paul Sartre, Graham Greene, and Terence Rattigan. In 1945, he met theatrical producer Hardy William “Bill” Smith who became both his professional and intimate life partner. In 1949, Glenville and Smith relocated from London to New York City where they continued their work in theater; Smith would produce his partner’s plays in both London and New 
York. Glenville made his New York directorial debut in October of 1949 with Terence Rattigan’s “The Browning Version” at the Coronet Theatre. In London and Manchester, he later directed Rattigan’s 1954 two one-act plays, collectively entitled “Separate Tables”, that starred Margaret Leighton and Eric Portman.
Peter Glenville followed his debut with several notable productions on Broadway and in Europe. From 1949 to 1973, he directed twenty-one Broadway productions. Among these are playwright William Archibald’s 1950 “The Innocents” based on “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James; Broadhurst Theatre’s 1951 production of “Romeo and Juliet” that featured Olivia de Havilland’s Broadway debut; Bridget Boland’s 1954 “The Prisoner” with Alec Guinness, staged at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theater and London’s Globe Theater; and Michael and Fay Kanin’s 1959 “Rashomon”. Performed at New York’s Music Box Theatre, “Rashomon” received three Tony Award nominations, one of which was Best Direction for Glenville.
In 1959, Grenville’s adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “Ah, Wilderness!” was presented as a musical entitled “Take Me Along”. For his performance as Sid Davis, Jackie Gleason received the Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Musical. Glenville directed the first production in English of Jean Anouilh’s 1959 “Becket or the Honour of God” in 1960. Starring Lawrence Olivier and Anthony Quinn, this play was nominated for five Tony Awards and won four, including Best Play and Best Actor for Anthony Quinn. Glenville continued his 
Broadway success with other award-winning musicals, comedies and serious dramas.
In the prime of his career, Peter Glenville began to work in the Hollywood film industry with many of the studios’ major stars. His first film with Columbia Pictures and BD Film Corporation was the 1955 psychological thriller “The Prisoner” with Alec Guinness and Jack Hawkins. Glenville stayed with Columbia Pictures for his second film, the the 1958 “Me and the Colonel”, a Golden Globe winning comedy with Danny Kaye. In addition to his directorial work, Glenville had an uncredited acting role in this production. His 1961 drama “Summer and Smoke” for Paramount Pictures received five nominations for the Academy Awards; Glenville was also nominated for a Directors Guild of America Award and the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion.
Glenville directed four more films for various studios, among which were the 1966 British comedy “Hotel Paradiso” for Metro Goldwyn Mayer that starred Alec Guinness and Gina Lollabrigida, and the 1967 American political drama “The Comedians”, an all-star production, although poorly received, that featured Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Lillian Gish, Peter Ustinov and upcoming actors Cicely Tyson and James Earl 
Jones. Most notable of Glenville’s films was the 1964 British historical drama “Becket”, an adaptation of Anouilh’s 1959 play that starred Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole and John Gielgud. Released by Paramount Pictures, the film was well received at the box office and earned multiple Academy Award nominations, winning the Best Screenplay. This film also won awards from the British Film Academy and British Society of Cinematographers, among others.
Following a Broadway production of Tennessee William’s “Out Cry” in 1973, Peter Glenville retired from active theatrical and film work due to the change in cinema towards violence and method acting. He and “Bill” Smith eventually moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where they developed a notable estate. They spent their final years entertaining their longtime friends and major political figures including heads of State and former Presidents. Peter Glenville died on the third of June in 1996 in New York City from a heart attack at the age of eighty-two.
Notes: Hardy William Smith was born in England on the first of December in 1916 and served in the United States Navy during World War II. After his discharge from service, he remained in England and began a career in the London theater. In 1945, Smith met Peter Grenville and began their long relationship. According to records, Smith resided in New York City and later at White Plains, New York, most probably after Glenville’s death in 1999. Hardy William Smith passed away on the third of October in 2001 at the age of eighty-four. His body is interred at the Gates of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York.
Smith was Grenville’s directorial assistant on his 1951 Broadway production of “Romeo and Juliet” at the Broadhurst Theatre. He also produced three other Broadway shows for Grenville: playwright Ugo Betti’s 1955 drama “Island of Goats” at the Fulton Theatre; Feydeau and Desvallierès’s 1957 comedy “Hotel Paradiso” at the Henry Miller’s Theatre; and Michael and Fay Kanin’s 1959 crime drama “Rashomon” at the Music Box Theatre.
The Peter Glenville Foundation’s online site is located at: https://peterglenville.org
The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin is the repository of Peter Glenville’s correspondence, business records, clippings, appointment books and personal records that span the years from 1914 to 2001. A complete inventory of his papers can be found at: https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/findingAid.cfm?eadid=00395
Second Insert Photo: Photographer Unknown, “Richard Burton, Peter Glenville, Elizabeth Taylor”, 1967, Film Set of “The Comedians”, Cinematography Henri Decaē, Metro Goldwyn Mayer
Third Insert Image: Peter Glenville, “Becket”, 1964, Film Poster, Cinematography Geoffrey Unsworth, Paramount Pictures
Fourth Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Peter Glenville and Peter O’Toole”, 1963-64, “Becket” Film Set, Cinematography Geoffrey Unsworth, Paramount Pictures
Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Peter Glenville”, 1963-64, “Becket” Film Set, Cinematography Geoffrey Unsworth, Paramount Pictures
The Photography of Howard Roffman
Born in Philadelphia in April of 1953, Howard Roffman is an American lawyer, marketing director, author and photographer. He is best known for his work on the Star Wars 
franchise as Lucasfilm’s head of Licensing and for his series of photographic art books of gay-positive images published in Berlin by Bruno Gmünder.
The son of a Jewish family in a white middle-class section of Philadelphia, Howard Roffman’s interest in photography and awareness of his gay identity began early in his life. He attended the University of Pennsylvania and, later, the University of Florida College of Law where he received his Doctor of Law degree in 1977. Roffman served as a law clerk on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and later at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, a law firm in Washington DC.
As an author, Roffman spent years of research for his first nonfiction book, the 1976 “Presumed Guilty: Lee Harvey Oswald in the Assassination of President Kennedy”, a volume published by
A.S. Barnes that examined the Warren Commission Report. His second nonfiction work, “Understanding the Cold War: A Study of the Cold War in the Interwar Period”, was published by the Associated University Press in 1977.
Howard Roffman joined Lucasfilm in 1980 initially as legal counsel but was eventually promoted to general counsel. In 1986, he became the company’s Vice-President of Licensing, a position that included overseeing daily operations, identification of licensing partners, and the execution of agreements. Roffman was instrumental in the 1991 launch of the Star Wars novel franchise. Timothy Zahn’s “Heir to the Empire”, the first of this novel series, was on The New York Times Best Seller list for nineteen weeks.
In 1999, Roffman was appointed President of Lucas Licensing, a subsidiary of Lucasfilm that owns the licensing rights to the “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” film series. In this position, he acted as Executive Producer for the highly successful “Star Wars: In Concert” tour, a series of 
concerts featuring a choir and symphony orchestra synced with footage from the Star War saga films displayed on a three-story LED screen.
In early 2012, Howard Roffman became a Senior Advisor at Lucasfilm; however in the latter part of the year, he returned to full-time management of the Star Wars franchise. Roffman’s leadership with Star Wars licensing has been credited for redefining the licensed merchandise business. His work became the template used by many major media companies, including Disney which acquired Lucasfilm in 2012. Chosen by Brandweek magazine as the 1997 Entertainment Marketer of the Year, Roffman was inducted into the Licensing Hall of Fame in 2012.
In 1991, Roffman began a career in photography through his meeting a young gay San Francisco couple who were seeking a photographer. By introducing his work to people on the street as well as at fairs and malls, he developed his skills and gradually built an impressive body of work. Over the 
last three decades, Roffman has published twenty-three volumes of portraiture photography and numerous magazine articles and calendars. After many years of shooting black and white film, he presented his first collection of digital color images in January of 2009, “Private Images, Bel Ami”, published through Bruno Gmünder.
Howard Roffman serves as the Executive Vice President of the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Film Society. He has aided in the financing of several acclaimed documentary film projects. Among these were directors David Weissman and Bill Weber’s 2011 “We Were Here”, which illuminated the personal and community issues raised by the AIDS epidemic, and directors Jeff Orlowski, Jerry Aronson and Paula DuPré Pesmen’s 2012 “Chasing Ice”, a multi-year chronicle of the earth’s melting glaciers.
Howard Roffman’s photographic work is represented by Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art, a gallery that specializes in vintage and contemporary photography: https://wesseloconnor.com
Notes: The September 2019 issue of the online Metrosource magazine has an article on Howard Roffman’s photographic career at: https://metrosource.com/howard-roffman-gay-nude-photographer-star-wars/
Medium: Human Stories & Ideas has a short article on Howard Roffman and a link to a 2017 video interview entitled “Messing with a Classic” in which he discusses Lucasfilm and his work with “Star Wars” saga: https://medium.com/@wayofthewarriorx/howard-roffman-tv-interview-guy-who-was-in-charge-of-the-eu-l-l-ca33735117d2
Second Insert Image: Howard Roffman, “Pictures of Fred”, 2000, Bruno Gmünder, Berlin, Germany
Third Insert Image: Howard Roffman, “John, Gary and Kris by the Stoop”, 1995, Gelatin Silver Print, Edition of 25, 36 x 36 cm, Private Collection
Bottom Insert Image: Howard Roffman, “Three”, January 1997, Second Edition, Bruno Gmünder, Berlin, Germany
Fyodor Antonovich Bruni, “The Brazen Serpent”, 1841, Oil on Canvas, 565 x 852 cm, The Mikhailovsky Palace, The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
Born in Milan in December of 1801, Fyodor Antonovich Bruni was a Russian Academic painter of Swiss-Italian descent. He was the son of Swiss citizen Antonio Baroffi-Bruni, a Gold Medal of Honor officer of the 
Austrian army and commissioned painter to Tsar Paul I and the royal Kurakin and Baryatinsky families.
Exhibiting a talent in art from a very early age, Fyodor Bruni learned his basic artistic skills from his father before enrolling at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. His education was sponsored by Italian count Giulio Renato Litta, both a fellow high-ranking Austrian officer and countryman to Fyodor Bruni’s father. Bruni received an excellent education under the guidance of such artists as portraitist Grigory Ugryumov, anatomical-drawing professor Vasily Shebuyev, and historical painter Andrei Ivanov. During this study period, Bruni created his first self-portrait, a romanticized image dressed in an open shirt, now housed in The State Russian Museum.
In 1818, Bruni entered his “Samson and Delilah” in a competitive examination at the Academy. Failing to achieve the gold medal, he continued his studies in Italy. Bruni, however, was no longer receiving support from Count Litta and subsisted on financial support from his father until Antonio Baroffi-Bruni’s death in 1825. In Italy, Bruni created several large historical compositions including the 1824 “The Death of Camilla, Horace’s Sister” and
1825 “St. Cecilia”, but received no compensation for his efforts. After copying Raphael’s frescoes “The Triumph of Galatea” and”The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple” in 1827, Bruni received the patronage and assistance of Princess Zinaida Volkonskaya, a German-Russian composer and writer as well as the wife of Prince Nikita Volkonsky, aide to the Royal Court.
Supported now by a patron, Fyodor Bruni began to produce compositions focused on Roman and Ancient Greek mythologies, among these are the 1827 “The Awakening of the Graces” and the 1828 “A Bacchante Giving Cupid a Drink”. In February of 1827, he informed Russia’s Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts that he had begun work in Italy on a large painting entitled “The Brazen Serpent”, based on an Old Testament story of Moses leading the Jewish people out of Egypt. In early 1828, Bruni was awarded a five-year stipend with the purpose of improving his painting skills, through an edict issued by Nicolas I, Emperor of Russia and Grand Duke of Finland.
During an earlier trip to London, Bruni met and fell in love with Angelica Serni, the well-educated daughter of a wealthy French hotelier. Although he desired to wed her, he could not secure her parents’ consent to marriage due to his financial condition at that time. In the spring of 1830, Bruni attempted to enter his “Bacchante” at a juried exhibition in Rome. The jury declined its 
entry due to the semi-nude depiction and as a gesture of respect for the Lenten season. Bruni was awarded, while working in Italy in 1834, the title of Academician in consideration of all his achievements. The next year, he married Angelica Serni in Rome, a ceremony attended by many known Russian artists and Roman patrons.
At the Emperor’s order, Fyodor Bruni and his wife relocated to Russia where they settled in St. Petersburg at a house belonging to the Imperial Academy. Now an established professor of the second degree, he taught painting students and created murals for the Winter Palace’s church as well as an image in 1837 of the deceased novelist and playwright Alexander Pushkin. In August of 1838, Fyodor Bruni returned with his wife to Italy, now as a wealthy, established artist favored by the Russian Emperor, and continued work on his large-scale composition, “The Brazen Serpent”.
In December of that year, the heir to the Russian throne, Grand Duke Alexander Nikolayevich, visited Bruni’s studio and promoted an exhibition of works by Russian artists in Rome. The Grand Duke commissioned a series of projects from these artists; he particularly praised Bruni’s composition “The Mother of God” and purchased it for his 
own collection. A series of four “Mother of God” paintings were also commissioned by Grigory Rakhmanov, a member of the Imperial Court, for installation at a Greek Russian church.
Fyodor Bruni finished his great work “The Brazen Serpent” in 1841 and took it to St. Petersburg where it was exhibited in a hall at the newly restored Winter Palace. Later in the year, he returned once more to Rome and, during his four-year residency, created twenty-five sketches that would form the foundation of a frescoe series at St. Petersburg’s Saint Isaac’s Cathedral. Bruni painted several of these frescoes; the rest were executed by artists under his direction. This series of frescoes were completed in 1853 and the sketches are now housed in The State Russian Museum. Bruni became the Custodian of the Gallery at the Hermitage Museum in 1849. As a part of his duties, he twice traveled abroad to acquire new works of art for the Hermitage collection.
In 1855, Bruni became the Rector of the Sculpture and Painting Department at St. Petersburg’s Imperial Academy of the Arts. As he aged, he became more reclusive, often disappearing for weeks at a time. Bruni often
openly expressed an intolerance towards younger artists; due to this behavior, he was forced to resign his position in 1871. Despite this behavior, Bruni was awarded a honorary Professorship at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts and at Rome’s Academy of San Luca. Fyodor Antonovich Bruni died in August of 1875, at the age of seventy-six, in St. Petersburg and was interred in the city’s Tikhvin Cemetery.
Fyodor Bruni’s 1841 monumental oil painting “The Brazen Serpent” was completed after fifteen years of work. His earliest known sketch on the subject is dated at 1824; his general sketch of the composition was under-painted on board in 1833. Bruni began work in Italy on the final version in the same year, with alternate periods of work on other projects in Italy and Russia. On the fifteenth of April in 1841, he decided his great work was completed.
“The Brazen Serpent” was first exhibited in Rome and received the approval of its population. At the end of June, the painting was sent to Russia and exhibited in September at the Winter Palace and later at the Academy of Arts. After a public exhibition in 
1842, Emperor Nicolas I purchased the painting and awarded Bruni the Order of St. Vladimir of the fourth level. Now part of the State Russian Museum, it is considered to be the largest Russian history painting and the largest in the museum’s collection.
The theme of “The Brazen Serpent” is based on a Book of Numbers account within the Bible’s Old Testament that chronicles Moses’s leading the people of Judah through the waterless desert areas of Egypt. When the people loose their faith in Moses’s leadership, a punishment in the form of a rain of poisonous serpents descends upon them. Moses, commanded by the Lord, erected a brazen serpent in their midst. Those individuals, who had repented and looked at the brazen serpent with true faith, lived and the bites inflicted by the serpents were healed.
Notes: There is some discrepancy in regards to the Milan birth date of Russian painter Fyodor Antonovich Bruni. While several sources cited June of 1799 as Bruni’s birthdate, I deferred to Russia’s Voronezh Regional Art Museum and Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery that cite his birthdate as December of 1801.
Top Insert Image: Arkady Lvov, “Fyodor Antonovich Bruni, Rector of the Imperial Academy of Arts”, circa 1855-1860, Photolithograph by A. Transhel
Second Insert Image: Fyodor Bruni, “Mother of God with the Eternal Child”, mid-1830s, Oil on Cardboard, 69.5 x 47 cm, Private Collection
Third Insert Image: Fyodor Bruni, “Study for Madonna in Gloria”, mid-1830s, Pencil on Paper, 58 x 44 cm, Private Collection
Fourth Insert Image: Fyodor Bruni, “Bacchant”, 1858, Oil on Canvas, 91.2 x 71.5 cm, The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Fifth Insert Image: Fyodor Bruni, “Two Male Models”, circa 1820-1830, Pencil on Paper, The Russian Academy of the Arts, St. Petersburg
Bottom Insert Image: Fyodor Antonovich Bruni, “The Brazen Serpent”, 1841, Detail, Oil on Canvas, 565 x 852 cm, The Mikhailovsky Palace, The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
Born in Constantinople, the capital city of the Ottoman Empire in May of 1904, Arman Tateos Manookian was an Armenian-American painter known for his oil paintings and murals of Hawaiian scenes. He was the eldest of three children born into an 
Armenian Apostolic Christian family in Istanbul who held their status and affluence despite the taxation and political dominance of the Islamic Turkish Pashas.
Arman Manookian’s initial education was acquired at the Catholic school of Saint Gregory the Illuminator, a branch of the Armenian Mekhitarist Brotherhood of Venice. During his early life, the hostilities against the Armenian Christian minority in Turkey increased until it became a genocidal rampage that led to more than one million deaths by 1918. On April twenty-fourth in 1915, Manookian’s eleventh birthday, six hundred local men, many of them writers, intellectuals and politicians, were rounded up and murdered; five thousand more men were dead within weeks.
Manookian’s father, Arshag Manookian, had fled to France to escape the genocide; however, Arshag died in 1917 of the Spanish flu, a victim of the epidemic contracted and spread by returning French soldiers. Manookian, now in his mid-teens, took over the heavy burden of the family’s printing and publishing business in Constantinople. His mother eventually sold the business and gave Manookian a large sum of money that enabled him to sail
aboard the “Re d’Italia” to the United States. He arrived at New York City’s immigration entry point, Ellis Island, on the twentieth of April in 1920. Manookian then traveled to Providence, Rhode Island where he lodged with his mother’s relative, Leo Stepanian who had an umbrella business.
Recognized for his early artistic talent, Arman Manookian was given a 1920 state scholarship to study at Providence’s Rhode Island School of Design. He took the required first-year courses and, in 1921, focused on Commercial Illustration which he passed with high marks. By 1923, Manookian began listing his skills as a lithographer. He enlisted in the Marine Corps on the eighth of October in 1923, under the fraudulent claim that he had United States citizenship, to serve in the U.S, forces and achieve a new American identity. Manookian was assigned in November of 1924 to Major Edwin North McClellan of the Historical Division of the Marine Corps, whose project was a history of the Corp’s participation in World War One.
After he presented his recent sketches of military exercises in the Puerto Rican island of Culebra to Major McClellan, Manookian became the official illustrator for McClellan’s historical articles. The completed epic history would eventually contain over one-thousand pages of articles, not including their notes, and more than one hundred illustrations by Manookian. Many of these illustrations are currently housed in Washington DC’s Marine Historical 
Center. During his service in the Corps, Manookian created several portraits of Major McClellan’s family members as well as cover illustrations for “Leatherneck” magazine, instituted as the official Marine Corps publication in 1920.
When McClellan received a new posting at Pearl Harbor, Arman Manookian went with him to Hawaii. It was his stationing at Hawaii that transformed Manookian from an illustrator to an artist with an idealized historical and mythological view of the islands. He created many illustrations to accompany McClellan’s new historical writings on the Hawaiian islands that were later published in “Paradise of the Pacific”, a periodical promoting Hawaiian tourism and investment. A short profile of Manookian, in which he describes the Hawaiian islands as the mid-Pacific gardens of the Gods, was published in a 1927 issue of “Paradise of the Pacific”.
Discharged from the Marines in 1927, Manookian decided to remain in Honolulu. He filed a Marine Corps waver of transportation to the United States and began working as a illustrator for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. The opening of the Honolulu Academy of the Arts in April of 1927 gave Manookian the opportunity to hear lectures and attend programs that expanded his knowledge of both art and Hawaii. In 1928, he relocated to Makiki, a short distance from the Academy, 
and became a member of the Honolulu Artist’s Association. Manookian gave up using tempera paint at this time and focused on colorful oil paints in bold, flat areas without varnish or subtle gradations. This color sense reflected memories of his childhood and adolescent exposure to the myriad colored forms of the Byzantine world.
Arman Manookian’s portrayal of Hawaii, like Gauguin’s view of Tahiti, was an idealized vision of an Eden that never really existed except in the imagination of its Colonial inhabitants. Although his work presented the ecstatic vision of an artist, Manookian often secluded himself from others and had begun to increasingly experience mental lows. After the stock market crash of 1929, the tourist-based Hawaiian economy began to falter and his mural commissions, based on the development of new buildings, began to slow. Manookian’s last mural commission was in December of 1930 for architect Louis Davis’s Waipahu Theater.
During this slow period, Manookian was living downstairs in architect Cyril Lemmon and Rebecca Lemmon’s Black Point home, occasionally painting and giving art lessons. He delivered his last painting “Flamingos in Flight” to the home of interior designer Charles Mackintosh on the seventh of May in 
1931. Suffering from severe depression, Manookian drank poison on the evening of May tenth while his hosts and friends were playing a parlor game upstairs. He stumbled upstairs and collapsed in the kitchen. Taken to Queen’s Hospital in Honolulu, Arman Manookian never regained consciousness and died that Sunday evening at the age of twenty-seven. A memorial exhibition of Manookian’s work was held later in the autumn of 1933 at the Honolulu Academy of the Arts.
Notes : Major Edwin North McClellan’s massive epic “History of U.S. Marines and Origin of Sea Soldiers”, with its many illustrations by Manookian, was never published due lack of finances during the Depression. The only complete record of the work exists on microfilm as recorded by the New York Public Library in 1954.
Author and art historian John Seed wrote an article entitled “Arman Manookian: Fragile Paradise” which was originally published in the Honolulu Magazine: https://www.geringerart.com/arman-manookian-fragile-paradise/
John Seed also has a lecture on the life and art of Arman Manookian in an YouTube video entitled “Arman Manookian: An Armenian Artist in Hawaii with John Seed”.
Freelance writer Chris Gibbon wrote “The Ghost of Manookian” for the November 2021 issue of “Flux: The Current of Hawai’i”. This short biography can be found at: https://fluxhawaii.com/the-ghost-of-manookian/
Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Private Arman Manookian, Marine Corps Boot Camp”, circa 1923, Vintage Print
Second Insert Image: Arman Manookian, “Maui Snaring the Sun”, 1927, Ink Drawing, Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii
Third Insert Image: Arman Manookian, “Early Traders of Hawaii”, 1927, Oil on Canvas, Honolulu Museum of Art
Fourth Insert Image: Arman Manookian, “Pele”, Gridded Study for “Pele” Painting, Colored Pencil and Pencil on Paper, 21.9 x 29.8 cm, Private Collection
Bottom Insert Image: Arman Manookian, Untitled (The Mat Weaver), 2003, Oil on Canvas, 76.7 x 60 cm, Honolulu Museum of Art
François-Xavier Fabre, “The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian”, 1789, Oil on Canvas, 198 x 148.5 cm, Musée Favre, Montpellier, France
Born at the medieval city of Montpellier in April of 1766, François-Xavier Fabre was a French painter of portraits, landscapes and historical subjects. He specialized in half-length 
portraits that were popular with the British community of Florence, Italy.
After studying for several years at Montpellier’s art academy, François-Xavier Fabre joined neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David’s studio in Paris. His studies were funded by financier and art collector Philippe-Laurent de Joubert, the father of Laurent-Nicolas de Joubert, a friend of Fabre as well as an amateur artist. In 1787, Fabre painted a portrait of Laurent-Nicolas seated with arms crossed and dressed in waistcoat and shirt open at the neck, a simple and natural style made fashionable by Marie-Antoinette. This portrait is now housed in the Getty Center, Museum South Pavilion, in Los Angeles.
An outstanding pupil, Fabre rose to prominence after winning the Prix de Rome in 1787. The upheavals of the French Revolution and his own monarchist sympathies led Fabre to relocate to Florence, Italy in 1793. He soon found patrons among the ranks of the Italian aristocrats who appreciated the elegance, precision, and realism of his portraits. Fabre became a member of
the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, the world’s oldest public institution of fine art training, where he taught painting. Rising to prominence in Florentine society, he became both a collector and dealer of art.
Although he remained a lifelong advocate of Jacques-Louis David’s Neoclassicism, François-Xavier Fabre eventually abandoned history painting due to changing fashions, lack of interest on the part of his patrons, and the onset of gout. He focused his work towards portraiture, landscapes, and printmaking. Between 1803 and 1804 in Florence, Fabre met Princess Louise Maximiliane Caroline Emanuel of Stolberg-Gedern, the former wife of Charles Edward Stuart, the Jacobite claimant to the English and Scottish thrones, and the later widow of Italian Count Vittorio Alfieri.
Fabre and Louise of Stolberg-Gedern remained companions in Florence until the Countess’s death in January of 1824 at which time Fabre inherited her fortune. He returned to his hometown of Montpellier where he founded an art school and curated his extensive collection of books, 16th and 17th century
Italian paintings and drawings, artwork by French contemporaries, and the collected artworks of Louise of Stolberg-Gedern. In 1828, the Musée Fabre was inaugurated in Montpellier. François-Xavier Fabre died at the age of seventy in Montpellier on the sixteenth of March in 1837. Upon his death, his entire art collection became part of the Musée Fabre.
François-Xavier Fabre painted “The Martyrdom of St. Francis” in 1789 at the age of twenty-three. This was an academic work for submission at his second Académie réglementaire in Paris. Fabre was well-versed in the nude form at this time; he had painted the male nude during his apprenticeship under Jacques-Louis David. Fabre returned several times to the theme of St. Francis over the course of his career. Several of his St. Sebastian paintings are listed in Parisian sales between the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.
Top Insert Image: François-Xavier Fabre, “Autoportrait âgé”, 1835, Oil on Canvas, 72.5 x 59 cm, Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France
Second Insert Image: François-Xavier Fabre, “Abel’s Death”, 1790, Oil on Canvas, 147 x 198.5 cm, Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France
Bottom Insert Image: François-Xavier Fabre, “Portrait of Michal Bogoria Skotnick”, 1806, Oil on Canvas, 64 x 49.5 cm, National Museum, Kraków, Poland
Photographers Unknown, Better Watch Out for the Next Cyclone
And you may not have hair as curly as the alphabet
but if your googoo eyes were a bundle of germs
there’d be an epidemic
With your greenhorn complexion
and your grasswidow ways
you’d make a butcher kill a granite cow
and weigh the gravel out for hamburger.
I mean you’d start the eskimos stripteasing,
give dummies the shakes,
get flyingcircuses to crawl on their hands and knees.
No I wouldn’t put it past you.
Just let somebody set you on the fence,
by gosh foulballs would be annulled
and home-runs the rule.
The weather forcast that overlooked you, baby,
sure better watch out for the next cyclone,
seeing how my uptown’s flattened,
and my downtown a-waving in the wind.
Charles Henri Ford, I Wouldn’t Put It Past You, The Breathless Rock, Flag of Ecstasy: Selected Poems, 1972, Black Sparrow Press, Los Angeles
Born in Hazelhurst, Mississippi in February of 1908, Charles Henri Ford was an American poet, novelist, and artist whose career spanned and influenced twentieth-century’s modernist era. In his lifetime, he exhibited his artwork in Europe and the United
States, published over a dozen collections of poetry, directed experimental films, and edited the American literary and surrealist art magazine “View”.
Charles Henri Ford was the first of two children born into the southern Baptist family of Charles and Gertrude Cato Ford. He acquired his formal education at Catholic boarding schools in the American South and had one of his first poems published by The New Yorker magazine in 1927. Ford became part of the modernist literary movement with the publishing of his monthly “Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms” in 1929 and 1930. The magazine introduced new talents such as authors James Farrell and Paul Bowles as well as published submissions by such writers as Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams.
Through “Blues” magazine, Ford communicated with the young novelist Parker Tyler who introduced him to both the poetry and men in the Village areas of Manhattan. Together they collaborated on a novel, “The Young and the Evil”, a fragmented account of bohemian gay life, drag balls and cruising. After his magazine ceased publication, Ford traveled to France and 
became a member of Gertrude Stein’s salon in Paris. Through Stein, he became acquainted with members of the American expatriate community which included such artists and writers as Natalie Clifford Barney, Kay Boyle, Man Ray, Peggy Guggenheim, Janet Flanner and Djuna Barnes.
Ford had a brief affair with Barnes and traveled with her to Tangiers, Morocco where, while waiting for the publication of “The Young and the Evil”, he typed Barnes’s completed novel “Nightwood” for its publication. Ford returned in 1934 to Paris where he met Russian-born surrealist painter and designer Pavel Tchelitchew, a former Stein protégé whose work was gaining recognition. This creative and loving relationship developed into a strong, though occasionally tempestuous, bond that lasted for twenty-three years. In late 1934, Ford and Tchelitchew left Europe and returned to New York City where they settled into an East Side penthouse.
In 1938, Charles Henri Ford published his first full-length book of poems “The Garden of Disorder” which contained an introduction written by author William Carlos Williams. Influenced by the poetic works of Jean Cocteau, Ford felt that poetry had a relationship with all forms of art, be it a novel, essay or theatrical production. His poetry is easily noticed for its surrealistic format of short spurts of words; however, he also adapted his style to political poetry such as 
the work he published in the American Marxist magazine “New Masses” , at that time a politically oriented journal which covered anti-lynching and equal rights for women.
In 1940, Ford and Parker Tyler collaborated on the avant-garde and surrealist art magazine “View”, a quarterly publication that established New York as a center of surrealism. The magazine interviewed local artists as well as the many European surrealists who had fled the war in Europe. Contributions to the magazine came from many prominent artists including Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Henry Miller, Georgia O’Keeffe, Marc Chagall and René Magritte, among others. A publishing imprint of “View” magazine, View Editions, was established to publish monographs and volumes of poetry, two of which were André Breton’s 1946 “Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares” and Ford’s 1959 “Sleep in a Nest of Flames”.
Charles Henri Ford and Tchelitchew moved in 1952 to Europe where they continued their artistic careers. Ford had a 1955 photography exhibition “Thirty Images from Italy” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, followed by a 1956 solo exhibition of drawings and paintings in Paris. In July of 1957, Pavel Tchelitchew, now a United States citizen, died at the age of fifty-eight
in Grottaferrata, Italy, with Ford by his bedside. His body was taken to Paris and interred in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.
Ford returned to New York City in 1962 and began to associate with the underground filmmakers and artists involved in the Pop movement. He began to experiment in collage images and created a series of lithographs with spliced-typefaces, acid colors, and pop culture images. A visual form of concrete poetry, these “Poem Posters” were exhibited in 1965 at New York’s prominent Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery on Madison Avenue. In the latter part of the 1960s, Ford focused on directing his own films, the first of which was the 1967 “Poem Posters”, a documentary of his recent exhibition, later entered into the Fourth International Avant-Garde Festival in Belgium. Ford’s second film, the 1971 “Johnny Minotaur”, was a surrealistic film-within-a-film that combined Greek mythology of Theseus and the Minotaur with erotic imagery of male anatomy and sexuality. Only one surviving print of the film is known.
Charles Henri Ford relocated in the early 1970s to Nepal where he purchased a house in Katmandu. In 1973, he hired local teenager Indra Tamang to cook and be his photography assistant. Tamang became basically Ford’s surrogate son, caretaker, and artistic collaborator for the rest of Ford’s life. They toured India and the Mid-East, resided for a period in Paris and Crete, and finally relocated to New York City. 
Ford purchased an apartment for himself and Tamang in The Dakota, a building that faced Central Park and was well known for its artistic tenants among whom was the actress Ruth Ford, Charles’s sister. Settled in the city, Ford created a series of art projects incorporating his collage materials and Tamang’s photography.
In the 1990s, Ford edited an anthology of articles previously published over the seven-year history of “View” magazine. Published as “View: Parade of the Avant-Garde, 1940-1947”, the 1992 volume’s introduction was written by Ford’s longtime friend, author and composer Paul Bowles. In 2001, Ford published selections from his diaries in a volume entitled “Water from a Bucket: A Diary 1948-1957” that covered the period from his father’s death to the death of Tchelitchew. In the same year, he participated in a two-hour documentary on his life, entitled “Sleep in a Nest of Flames”, directed by James Dowell and John Kolomvakis for Symbiosis Films 2000.
On the twenty-seventh of September in 2002, Charles Henri Ford died in New York City at the age of ninety-four. In his will and testament, Ford left some paintings and the rights to his co-authored novel “The Young and Evil” to Indra Tamang. Ruth Ford died in August of 2009 at the age of ninety-eight; she bequeathed her and her brother’s apartments to Tamang who had been both companion and caretaker. In 2011, Tamang carried Ruth and Charles Ford’s ashes to Mississippi where they were buried in Brookhaven’s Rose Hill Cemetery.
Notes: Charles Henri Ford’s 1991 “Out of the Labyrinth: Selected Poems” is available in its entirety on the Document.Pub site: https://dokumen.pub/out-of-the-labyrinth-selected-poems-0872862518-9780872862517.html
An exhibition review entitled “Charles Henri Ford: Love and Jump Back” by Demetra Nikolakakis for “Musée: Vanguard of Photography Culture” magazine can be found at: https://museemagazine.com/culture/2021/2/25/exhibition-review-charles-henri-ford-love-and-jump-back
The Artforum magazine has an informative 2003 article, written by Michael Duncan, on Charles Henri Ford and his association with novelist Parker Tyler and artist Pavel Tchelitchew: https://www.artforum.com/columns/charles-henri-ford-165330/
The Film-Makers’ Cooperative site has short articles with stills on Charles Henri Ford’s two experimental films “Poem Posters” and “Johnny Minotaur”: https://film-makerscoop.com/filmmakers/charles-henri-ford
Matthew D. Kulisch, one of three curators for the Backwords Blog, wrote an article for the site entitled “Charles Henri Ford: Association and America’s First (Queer) Surrealist Artist” : https://www.backwordsblog.com/single-post/2016/10/12/charles-henri-ford-association-and-americas-first-queer-surrealist-artist
The September 2024 issue of Noah Becker’s “White Hot Magazine” has an article entitled “Love and Jump Back: Photography by Charles Henri Ford at Mitchell Algus”, written by Mark Bloch: https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/henri-ford-at-mitchell-algus/4984
Top Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Charles Henri Ford”, 1930-1940, Gelatin Silver Print, 26.4 x 21.9 cm, Private Collection
Second Insert Image: Charles Henri Ford, “Poem Poster (Gerald Malanga as Orpheus)”, circa 1965, Photolithograph, Image 98.4 x 68.1 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Third Insert Image: Robert Geisel, “Charles Henri Ford, The Dakota, NYC”, 1989, Vintage Print
Fourth Insert Image: Charles Henri Ford, “Poem Poster (Soul Map / Jayne Mansfield), circa 1965, Photolithograph, 99.1 x 69.2 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Bottom Insert Image: Arthur Tress, “Charles Henri Ford (and Indra Tamang), The Dakota, NYC”, 1997, Gelatin Silver Print, 27.9 x 35.6 cm, Brooklyn Museum, New York
Photographer Unknown, “Tony Azito”, 1978, Publicity Photo Card, The AIDS Memorial, New York City
Born Antonio Zito in New York City on the eighteenth of July in 1948, Tony Azito was an American dancer and actor in both film and theater. After attending an audition in 1968 with friends at the Juilliard School, New York City’s performing arts conservatory, he was granted
a full scholarship and became one of the first acting students to study under its director John Houseman. Influenced by the work of dancer and choreographer Anna Sokolow, Azito began to study modern dance, an unusual art form for a person of his height- six feet, three inches (190 cm).
Azito left the Juilliard School without finishing his degree, partly as a result of an argument with director Houseman, and performed with Anna Sokolow’s Theatre/Dance Ensemble for two years under the name Antonio Azito. He returned to drama in the 1970s and worked in off-Broadway productions, including several at the East Village’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club headed by director Wilford Leach. In 1971, Azito performed in John Dillon and Eric Bentley’s “The Red, White and Black”, a collaborative effort between La MaMa and the Columbia University School of the Arts.
In 1973, Tony Azito appeared in two productions, one of which was Wilford Leach and John Braswell’s production of the 1872 Gothic vampire novella “Camilla”. After appearing in the 1974 production of Nancy Fales’s “Ark”, he performed with the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Company in Leach’s 1974 “C.O.R.F.A. X. (Don’t Ask)” that toured Europe throughout remainder of the year. Azito’s debut on 
Broadway was as Samuel, a dancing role created especially for him, in avant-garde playwright Richard Foreman’s revival of “The Threepenny Opera” for the 1976 New York Shakespeare Festival. Azito continued his theater work with a role in Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1977 three-act musical “Happy End” at Broadway’s Martin Beck Theatre and Chelsea Theatre Center.
Azito’s next and best known role was the Sergeant of Police in theatrical producer Joseph Papp’s 1981-1982 modernized version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance” staged at New York City’s Uris and Minskoff Theatres. Azito’s performance earned him a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Musical and a Drama Desk Award in the same category. This Broadway version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s play ran for seven hundred and eighty-seven performances and won both a Tony Award for Best Revival and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Musical.
Tony Azito appeared once more with the New York Shakespeare festival, this time as Feste, the fool in the house of Countess Olivia, in William Leach’s 1986 production of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”. He continued working in theater with performances at New York 
City’s Radio City Music Hall, Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum at the city’s Music Center, and with the American National Theater Company at Washington DC’s Kennedy Center. Azito’s final Broadway role was Mr. Nick Cricker in William Leach’s 1988 musical “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”.
Walking back from a theater performance of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”, Azito was struck by a New York City taxi that left the scene. Both his legs were badly broken and it took several years until he could walk again. Azito’ss return to the stage was in the 1990 summer stock revival of Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s musical “She Loves Me” in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He later appeared in Edgar Gorey’s two-act revue “Amphigorey: A Musicale” staged in Boston as well as several productions of playwright Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties”.
For his first film role, Tony Azito was given the lead in Howard Goldberg’s 1975 gangster fantasy “Apple Pie”, now considered a musical cult classic. In 1980, he appeared in Mark Reichert’s neo-noir crime mystery “Union City”. Azito’s most memorable film role was a recreation of his Broadway role in Wilford Leach’s 1983 comedic film version of “The Pirates of Penzance”. He appeared in several more films including George Bowers’s 1985 comedy “Private Resort”, Norman Jewison’s 1987 
romantic comedy “Moonstruck” and Howard Brookner’s 1989 “Bloodhounds of Broadway”. After a cameo as party dancer Digit Addams in the 1991 “The Addams Family”, Azito’s final film appearance was as the Librarian in the 1993 H.P. Lovecraft horror anthology “’Necronomicon: Book of the Dead”.
During his stay in the hospital after the hit and run taxi accident, Azito was diagnosed with cancer and had tested positive for HIV. He made the decision to fight the cancer with chemotherapy; however, it weakened his immune system to such an extent that his HIV infection became full-blown AIDS. Azito continued his performances in regional theater and appeared in several films before his retirement in 1994. Tony Azito died at the age of forty-six from AIDS on the twenty-sixth of May in 1995 at Manhattan’s Saint Vincent’s Catholic Medical Center. He was survived by his partner Frederick Bertolt Fritz Richter.
Notes: John Towsen’s “All Fall Down: The Craft & Art of Physical Comedy” has a short posting on Tony Azito that contains film clips from a live stage performance at New York’s Delacorte Theater as well as a scene from the 1984 ”Chattanooga Choo-Choo” : http://physicalcomedy.blogspot.com/2011/07/happy-birthday-tony-azito.html
A trailer for the 1975 cult class “Apple Pie” which showcases Tony Azito’s unique dancing style can be seen at the IMDB site: https://www.imdb.com/video/vi1287302169/?ref_=tt_vi_i_1
A musical number with Tony Azito from Wilford Leach’s 1983 film version of “The Pirates of Penzance” can be found at the Free Social Encyclopedia for the World: https://alchetron.com/Tony-Azito
There is a memorial Facebook page for Tony Azito that contains many images, anecdotes, film trailers and Azito’s 1972 “Sing Jumbalaya Sing” song published through Epic Records: https://www.facebook.com/p/Tony-Azito-100063528963851/
Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Tony Azito, New York City”, The AIDS Memorial, NYC
Second Insert Image: Al Hirschfeld, “Tony Azito (Study for The Pirates of Penzance)”, Ink on Paper, 27.9 x 21.6 cm, Private Collection
Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Tony Azito as Sergeant of Police”, Joseph Papp’s “The Pirates of Penzance”, 1981-1982, Gelatin Silver Print
Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Tony Azito”, Date Unknown, Color Print