Howard Roffman

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

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

Arman Manookian

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

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

Charles Henri Ford: “Better Watch Out for the Next Cyclone”

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

Tony Azito: Film History

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