Henry Ernest Schnakenberg

Henry Ernest Schnakenberg, “A Moment’s Rest”, circa 1930-1949, Oil on Canvas, 76.2 x 61 cm, Private Collection

Born at New Brighton, Staten Island, New York in September of 1892, Henry Ernest Schnakenberg was an American realist painter and etcher known primarily for his renderings of New York’s Central Park and other cityscapes. He began his art studies with evening classes at the Arts Student League in 1913. Schnakenberg’s experience of attending the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art at the city’s 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue, known now as the Armory Show, solidified his desire to be an artist. After that exposure, he began full-time classes at the League, that continued as three years of study under painter and printmaker Kenneth Hayes Miller.

After exhibiting two works at the Society of Independent Artists, Schnakenberg enlisted in the Army Medical Corps in 1917 at America’s entry into World War I. Discharged in 1919, he quickly returned to art, exhibiting alongside Joseph Stella at the Whitney Studio Club. Beginning in 1923, Schnakenberg taught for two years at the Art Students League and, later, became the League’s president in 1932. In addition to his teaching, he wrote essays and reviews throughout his career for art magazines.

Henry Schnakenberg regularly exhibited his work at the Society of Independent Artists as well as museum invitationals, including those at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He participated in the Carnegie International from 1920 to 1949 and exhibited alongside his mentor Kenneth Miller at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Beginning in 1932, Schnakenberg was represented by New York’s C.W. Kraushaar Galleries.

After completing mural commissions from the Treasury Department’s section of Fine Arts for post offices in Amsterdam, New York and Fort Lee, New Jersey, Schnakenberg relocated to Newtown, Connecticut. He would travel from there to paint the summer landscapes of Vermont and New England farmlands. A member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Henry Ernest Schnakenberg died at the age of seventy-eight in October of 1970 at Newtown. His body in interred at the Moravian Cemetery in New Dorp, New York.

Bottom Insert Image: Henry Ernest Schnakenberg, “Air Plants, Puerto Rico”, 1927, Oil on Canvas, 77.2 x 92.1 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, new York

__________________________________________

Ultrawolvesunderthefullmooon has slowly developed over its years into an informative art site that requires more extensive research. For the last ten years, I have relied on my own personal funds to maintain an advertisement-free environment. Now retired in an era of continuously rising costs, I am asking if the site’s visitors would please make a small donation of support to cover the site’s cost and its reference subscriptions.

Donations through the app at the side of the screen will prompt a notification that you are setting up a WordPress account. Your entry only allows WordPress to process your donation through the site’s Stripe account. There is no other obligation on your part; WordPress will only send an acknowledgement of your donation.

Please consider signing up for a free subscription to Ultrawolves. This enables notifications of its newest postings. To those who have used the comment section at the end of each article, I thank you for your support and suggestions as well as your alerts to the typos and errors found in the articles.

Sir Charles Lawes-Wittewronge

Sir Charles Lawes-Wittewronge, “The Death of Dirce”, 1906, Bronze, 252.7 x 172.7 x 195.6 cm, Tate Museum, Millbank, Westminster, London

Born at the seaside civil parish of Teignmouth, Devon in October of 1843, Sir Charles Bennet Lawes-Wittewronge, 2nd Baronet was an English athlete and sculptor. The only son of agricultural chemist Sir John Bennet Lawes of Rothamsted Manor, Herfordshire, and his wife Caroline Fountaine, Charles Bennet Lawes was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Natural Sciences in 1866.

At Eton, Lawes exhibited his exceptional athletic prowess in multiple sports including field and track, rowing and cycling. He claimed university titles in the half-mile, mile, and two mile track events between 1864 and 1865. In rowing, Lawes secured the Cambridge sculls (1862), the Henley Regatta diamond sculls (1863) and, as 1865 amateur champion oarsman, was part of the Cambridge crew in the 1865 Boat Race against Oxford. In 1899 at the age of fifty-six, he set competitive cycling’s amateur record of just over fifty-one minutes for the twenty-five mile course.

Charles Bennet Lawes made the decision to become a sculptor after graduating from Trinity College. His initial training was in London under Irish sculptor John Henry Foley, a member of the Royal Academy who was considered the finest equestrian sculptor of the Victorian era. In 1869, Lawes studied in Berlin under German sculptor Hugo Hagen who was the director of the Christian Daniel Rauch Museum in Leipzig. After renting a studio in the Chelsea district of London, he exhibited his first work, “Girl at the Stream” at the Royal Academy in 1872. Two other works exhibited at the Royal Academy by Lawes were his “Daphne” in 1880 and “The Panther” in 1881.

After the death of his father in August of 1900, Charles Bennet Lawes became 2nd Baronet of Rothamsted Manor, assuming by Royal License the additional surname and arms of Wittewronge for himself and his heirs in 1902. In the same year, he was a co-founder of the Royal Society of British Sculptors and, from 1909 until his death, the society’s second president. Lawes exhibited his works at the Royal Society of British Sculptors, the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris where he received an honorable mention, and London’s 1908 Franco-British Exhibition, which ran concurrently with the Summer Olympics on the 140-acre west London site known as White City.

In 1906, Lawes executed his “The Death of Dirce”, a large bronze sculptural group that was based on the “Farnese Bull”, a massive marble Roman copy of an earlier Hellenistic sculpture that depicted the mythological punishment of Dirce, first wife of Lykos, King of Thebes. This bronze sculpture was exhibited at the Franco-British Exhibition. At the same time, Lawes’s colossal marble version of this work was shown at the Royal Academy. The marble “Death of Dirce” is now in the grounds of the public park area of Rothamsted, Hertfordshire. The bronze version, given after Lawes’s death by his widow, is installed at the entrance of the Tate Gallery, Millbank, London.

Sir Charles Bennet Lawes-Wittewronge married Marie Amelie Rose Fountaine on the eighth of April in 1869. He chaired the Lawes Agricultural Trust established by his father and supported the expansion of the Rothamsted estate’s agricultural experiments. A life-long Victorian patron of the arts, athletics and science, Lawes died at the age of sixty-eight in October of 1911 following an appendicitis operation. His body was cremated and interred at Golders Green Crematorioum, Golden Green, London. Charles and Marie Lawes’s only son John succeeded as the 3rd Baronet of Rothamsted in 1911. Marie Amelie Lawes died at the age of seventy-nine in August of 1928; she in interred with her husband at Golden Green, London.

Notes: There is a short biography on Sir Charles Lawes-Wittewronge at Harpenden History, a local history website presented by the Harpenden Museum in Rothamsted Park: https://www.harpenden-history.org.uk/harpenden-history/places-and-buildings/rothamsted/sir_charles_lawes-wittewronge

Top Insert Image: François Verheyden, “Sir Charles Lawes-Wittewronge”, 1883, Illustration for Vanity Fair Issue May 12 1883, London

Robert McAlmon: “The Possibility of All Things”

Photographers Unknown, The Possibily of All Things

Almost every night, Joyce and I met for apéritifs, and although he was working steadily on Ulysses, at least one night a week he was ready to stay out all night, and those nights he was never ready to go home at any hour. We talked of the way the free mind can understand the possibility of all things: necrophilia and other weird rites. We agreed in disliking mysticism, particularly the fake and sugared mysticism of many poets and writers. We spoke of what a strange man Robert Burton must have been to have compiled his Anatomy of Melancholy. and he didn’t know in the end a bit more about it than we did. Sir Thomas Browne, not to speak of Ezra Pound and Eliot and Moore and Shaw, we discovered, but sooner or later Mr. Joyce began reciting Dante in sonorous Italian. When that misty and intent look came upon his face and into his eye I knew that friend Joyce wasn’t going home till early morning.

Wyndham Lewis arrived for a stay in Paris and he was a different man from the Lewis of London. He was free and easy and debonair. Indeed, too many Englishmen will do on the continent what it does not do to do in London. Lewis was intent upon going to the Picasso exhibition; he must meet Picasso and Braque and Derain, although these painters of Paris were cagey and suspicious about English painters of talent. Picasso at the time was doing his pneumatic nudes, which always made me want to stick a pin in them to see if they would deflate.

Lewis was most gracious and jovial and instructed me with a constant flow of theories on abstraction and plastic values. It would not have done to let him know that I had heard most of what he was saying before, in New York. Somehow there was no wonder in Lewis’ discovery that the engineering demand of structures often give them an aesthetic value. The Egyptians, Greeks and Mayans seemed to have known that before Lewis.

Robert McAlmon, Don’t Be Common, Being Geniuses Together 1921-1927, McAlmon and the Lost Generation: A Self Portrait, 1962, Edited by Robert E. Knoll, University of Nebraska Press

Born at Clifton, Kansas in March of 1895, Robert Menzies McAlmon was an American modernist poet, novelist and publisher who, as an important expatriate in the 1920s, founded the Parisian publishing house Contact Editions. This avant-garde press published the works of such influential writers as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.

The youngest of ten children born to traveling minister John Alexander McAlmon and Bessie Urquhart, Robert McAlmon grew up in several rural mid-western towns. In 1916, he studied briefly at the University of Minnesota before his 1918 enlistment with the United States Army Air Corps. Upon military discharge from his San Diego, California station, McAlmon studied intermittently at the University of Southern California. His first poems, inspired by his fellow Army Air Corps team members, were published in the March 1919 issue of “Poetry”.

After a brief stay in Chicago where he met Italian-American writer Emanuel Carnevali, McAlmon relocated in 1920 to New York City where he was hired as an art school’s nude model. He quickly became acquainted with Greenwich Village’s literary circle, including artist and poet Marsden Hartley with whom he formed a life-long friendship. Along with physician and writer William Carlos Williams, McAlone founded the literary magazine “Contact” in 1921. Although never financially successful in its short life, the magazine’s four issues published early works from such modernist writers as Hilda Dolittle, Glenway Wescott, Wallace Stevens and Mina Loy.

On February 14th of 1921, Robert McAlmon entered into a marital arrangement with English writer Annie Winifred “Bryher” Ellerman, the heiress of a vast fortune and lover of Hilda Dolittle. This arrangement, which inspired much gossip, lasted four years and enabled Ellerman to receive control of her inheritance and gave McAlmon financial independence. In 1922, McAlmon moved to Paris where he founded the influential literary press Contact Editions. In addition to his own writings, McAlmon published Hemingway’s first work, “Three Stories and Ten Poems” (1923) and Gertrude Stein’s “The Making of Americans” (1925). He also provided financial support to James Joyce and assisted in the revision and typing of the Penelope section of Joyce’s “Ulysses”.

McAlmon published his first book of short stories, the 1922 “A Hasty Bunch”, with James Joyce’s printer Maurice Darantière in Dijon, France. Contact Editions published his second volume of short stories “Distinguished Air” (1925); two collections of poetry, “Portrait of a Generation” (1926) and “North America, Continent of Conjecture” (1929); and an experimental novel on a North Dakota prairie farm community, “Village: As It Happened Through a Fifteen Year Period” (1924). Two collections of McAlmon’s poetry were printed through other presses: “Explorations” (1921) was published by London’s Egoist Press, and “Not Alone Lost” (1937) by New Directions in Connecticut.

Robert McAlmon, who had openly stated his bisexuality, officially divorced Annie Winifred Ellerman in 1927. He closed Contact Editions and left Paris in 1929. McAlmon traveled over the next fifteen years, with visits to the United States, Mexico and Europe during which he drank heavily and, although he wrote, published little. McAlmon was a friend and a drinking buddy with James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, whom he introduced to the spectacle of bullfighting. He knew artist Jean Cocteau, surrealist writer René Crevel, novelist Raymond Radiguet, surrealist poet Louis Aragon and many others from the parties, bars and cafés he attended. McAlmon’s closer ties, however, were with avant-garde painter Francis Picabia and modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi.

After 1935, McAlmon wrote very little. He was interested in radical politics but his views were not supported by the expatriates in Paris. After the German occupation of France, McAlmon was trapped in Paris and eventually stricken with tuberculosis. In 1940, he was able to escaped France through Spain and returned to the United States where joined his brothers in El Paso, Texas. McAlmon sought treatment for his ailment in El Paso and worked with his brothers in a local surgical supply house.

Despite his many published works, Robert McAlmon died almost an unknown writer in his own country. He passed away, at the age of sixty, in February of 1956 at Desert Hot Springs, California. His body was interred at Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the 1990s, the first American editions of “Village”, “Post-Adolescence”, and “Miss Knight and Others” were published by the University of New Mexico Press. McAlmon’s memoir “Being Geniuses Together”, first published 1938 in London, was reprinted by Doubleday, New York in 1968.

Notes: The Internet Archive’s Open Library site has several books by Robert McAlmon that can be read online after free registration: https://openlibrary.org/search?q=robert+mcalmon&mode=everything

Top Insert Image: Berenice Abbott, “Robert McAlmon”, 1925-1930, Gelatin Silver Print, 24 x 19.4 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Robert McAlmon with Canadian Poet John Glassco and His Partner Graeme Taylor in Nice, France”, 1929, Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Ernest Hemingway and Robert McAlmon, Ronda, Spain”, 1923, Ernst Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Robert McAlmon”, circa 1930s, Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection

Bruno Vekemans

The Artwork of Bruno Vekemans

Born in 1952 at Berchem, a southern district of Antwerp, Bruno Vekemans was a Belgian painter, draftsman and etcher. Considered a post-modernist, he was primarily concerned with figurative work which included portraits. Vekemans also created urban landscapes and anecdotal scenes with characters.

As a child and later a teenager, Bruno Vekemans was constantly engaged in drawing and painting. He enrolled at the Technicum de Londenstraat, an industrial arts and design school, where he took several courses in decoration. Vekemans also had some basic training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berchem. His skill at drawing was heavily influenced by his many visits to Antwerp’s Museum of Fine Arts where he studied the works of the Flemish masters as well as the early works of expressionist painter James Ensor.

Vekemans was, however, basically self-taught; his own unique strong and mysterious style was developed after years of experimentation with shape and color. His painting underwent various modifications before its dramatic resolution in the 1990s. Vekemans started his experiments with different techniques in 1971, using collages, comics, and églomisé, the application of a design and gilding on the rear face of glass. He often started his work with various photos or images from magazines, to which he added, combined or eliminated elements.

In 1988, Bruno Vekemans focused on linear works, most of which were applications of gouache on patterned paper. He later replaced the patterned paper with seventeenth-century paper and also began experiments with oil paints on canvas. Vekemans simplified the image and used chiaroscuro to create different lighting effects. He used vibrant, intense colors, often transparent with different levels of opacity in tones tinged with blues, browns and blacks. Throughout his paintings, collages and drawings, Vekemans maintained an aura of solitude and mystery in both his portraits and cityscapes.

Vekemans frequently exhibited in the Netherlands, Belgium, Japan, Austria, France, Australia and the United States. His first verified exhibition was at Amsterdam’s Jaski Art Gallery in 2006. An important step in Vekemans’s career was his 2015 exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro. Other notable exhibitions were retrospectives at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires and Havana’s Museo Nacional de Belas Artes de Cuba where he exhibited his thematic series on Cuba. A posthumous retrospective of his work, “Bruno Vekemans: Zelfportrettten”, was held in 2023 at Antwerp’s Galerie Verbeeck-Van Dyck.

Bruno Vekemans passed away on the twenty-second of July in 2019, a week before his sixty-seventh birthday. In 2020, he was posthumously named an honorary citizen of the Antwerp municipality of Brasschaat.

Second Insert Image: Bruno Vekemans, “Man Met Koffer (Man with Suitcase)”, Date Unknown, Gouache on Paper, 79 x 57 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Bruno Vekemans, “Tango Dancer”, 1895, Gouache on Patterned Paper, 92 x 78 cm, Private Collection

Mark Sandrich: Film History

Mark Sandrich, “Shall We Dance”, May 7, 1937, Starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, “They All Laughed” Dance Sequence, Film Clip Gifs, Cinematography David Abel and Joseph F. Bloc, Music George Gershwin, Lyrics Ira Gershwin, RKO Radio Pictures

Born in New York City in October of 1900, Mark Sandrich was an American film director, writer and producer. He is considered one of the most gifted and least heralded directors of the 1930s and early 1940s. A splendid technician, Sandrich’s cinematic craftsmanship and intuitive sense of rhythm helped chart the golden era of Hollywood musicals.

Born Mark Rex Goldstein, Mark Sandrich was the son of England-born Rabbi Jacob Goldstein and Hungarian-born Klara Jacobson Sandrich. Trained as a physicist at New York’s Columbia University, he began his career in the film industry in 1922 as a prop man after offering advice during a studio film shooting. Sandrich began directing short two-reel silent comedies in 1926 and 1927, the first of these being “Jerry the Giant” for Fox Film Corporation. In 1928, he directed his first feature film, the silent one-hour drama “Runaway Girls”, distributed by the newly founded Columbia Pictures.

Sandrich continued directing short films in 1929 and eventually directed more than thirty-five shorts by the middle of 1933. His first title as screenwriter was a co-credit with Nat Carr for the 1930 short film “Gunboat Ginsberg”. In 1933, Sandrich directed and co-wrote his last short film, “So This is Harris!”, a pre-code musical comedy produced by Lou Brock and released in August by RKO Radio Pictures. The film won an Oscar in 1934 for Best Short Subject (Comedy) at the 6th Academy Awards.

With the shooting of “So This is Harris!” finished, Mark Sandrich began to focus on feature films. In 1933, he directed his first feature film with sound, “Melody Cruise”, a successful musical comedy that established him as a commercial director. In the same year, Sandrich did some uncredited second unit work with Thornton Freeland’s musical “Flying Down to Rio” which, although they were not the headliners, was the first screen pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. In 1934, he directed the first proper Astaire-Rogers musical “The Gay Divorcee”. This successful film received five Academy Award nominations, winning the Music (Song) Oscar for Con Conrad and Herb Magidson’s “The Continental”.

In 1935, Sandrich’s “Top Hat”, a film specifically written for Astaire and Rogers, was released to major box office success. In addition to its many dance numbers, this Oscar-nominated musical included comedic scenes that added to its appeal. Sandrich followed this film with the 1936 “Follow the Fleet”, an Astaire-Rogers film that featured Lucille Ball and Betty Grable in early screen roles. He reunited Astaire and Rogers in two more films: the 1937 “Shall We Dance” with orchestral work and lyrics by George and Ira Gershwin, and Sandrich’s last collaboration with the dance duo, “Carefree”, which focused less on musical numbers and more on comedy.

Mark Sandrich directed three comedy musicals featuring comedian Jack Benny: the 1939 “Man About Town” and, both in 1940, “Buck Benny Rides Again” and “Love Thy Neighbor”. His 1941 skillful romantic comedy for Paramount Pictures, “Skylark”, featured Claudette Colbert and Ray Milland. In 1941, Sandrich directed one of his best and probably most watched film, the musical :Holiday Inn” with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire. An enormous success, the film featured Irving Berlin’s Oscar-winning song “White Christmas”.

During the years of World War II, Sandrich produced several films, the first of which was the 1943 “Proudly We Hail”, a patriotic drama about a group of nurses in the Pacific war zone. Paulette Goddard was nominated for an Academy Award for her supporting role as nurse Lt. Joan O’Doul. In 1944, Sandrich directed two films, the 1944 “Here Come the Waves”, a musical comedy featuring Bing Crosby and Betty Hutton, and “I Love A Soldier”, a soap opera set in the war with Paulette Goddard and Sonny Tufts.

In 1945, Mark Sandrich began pre-production work on the Irving Berlin musical “Blue Skies” with Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby. At that time, he was also serving as president of the Directors Guild as well as attempting to maintain a good family life with his wife and two sons. One of the most influential and trusted Hollywood directors, Mark Sandrich died suddenly of a heart attack on the fourth of March at the age of forty-four. His body was interred at the Home of Peace Memorial Park in East Los Angeles, California.

Notes: Mark Sandrich’s sister Ruth Harriet Louise (Goldstein) was the first woman photographer active in Hollywood and, later, chief studio portrait photographer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. His two sons, Mark Sandrich Jr. and Jay Sandrich, are both directors in film and television.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Mark Sandrich on Set”, Studio Photo, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Mark Sandrich, “Here Come the Waves”, December 1944, Film Poster, Cinematography Charles Lang, Music Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, Paramount Pictures

Third Insert Image: Mark Sandrich, “Melody Cruise”, June 1933, Film Poster, Cinematography Bert Glennon, Music Max Steiner, RKO Radio Pictures

Bottom Insert Image: Mark Sandrich, “Holiday Inn”, August 1942, Film Poster, Cinematography David Abel, Music Irving Berlin, Paramount Pictures

Ádám Mányoki

Ádám Mányoki, “Self Portrait”, circa 1711, Oil on Canvas, 87 x 61.5 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest

Born at the village of Szokolya in 1673, Ádám Mányoki was an Hungarian portraitist, one of the most prominent figures of Hungarian Baroque art. His work is known for its refined style and accomplished depiction of human emotion.

Born into the family of a rural Protestant preacher, Ádám Mányoki’s early life was one of hardship as the family struggled financially. Recognizing the family’s situation and Mányoki’s artistic talent, a German staff officer named Dölfer took the responsibility for Mányoki’s upbringing and education in Hamburg and Lüneburg. Exposed to the classical ideas of beauty and proportion, Mányoki developed his skills under court painter Andreas Scheits in Hamburg and painter Nicolas de Largillière of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris. Both of these artists were acclaimed for their innovation within the Baroque tradition.

Mányoki’s formal education ended with a journey to Amsterdam where the Age of Enlightenment was flourishing. The Dutch Republic had a vibrant art scene with new ideas, literary salons, coffeehouses, and experiments with new techniques in the arts. Mányoki’s exposure to this atmosphere solidified his commitment to the art of portraiture as a means to capture the subtleties of human psychology. In 1703, he decided to relocate to Berlin where he secured patronage from King Frederick William I and established himself as a prominent member of the Prussian cultural elite. Mányoki painted several portraits of royal family members that were celebrated for their precision and sense of dignity.

After establishing his reputation in Germany, Ádám Mányoki traveled extensively in Europe seekings new opportunities. He traveled to both Prague and Vienna where he received commissions from Emperor Charles VI, ruler of the Austrian Habsburg monarchy, and Empress Maria Theresa, who ascended to the throne after Charles VI’s death. Mányoki’s travels expanded his knowledge of both European history and the diverse approaches to painting. Between 1724 and 1731, he remained in Hungary where he created portraits of the Hungarian nobility and members of the Podmanitzky family, an influential lineage that played a key role throughout Hungary’s history.

After leaving Hungary, Mányoki resided in Dresden and Leipzig. He received royal patronage from Augustus III, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, and continued to paint works that were in keeping with the style of that era. Due to unresolved salary disputes, Mányoki resigned his position as court painter in 1753, an act which marked the end of his career. Ádám Mányoki died peacefully in Dresden, at the age of eighty-four, in August of 1757.

Notes: Ádám Mányoki painted his 1711 “Self Portrait” while he was residing in Berlin. Influences from his studies of seventeenth-century Dutch and Germany painting can be seen in its composition. Mányoki used a technique of self-portraiture that had been popular since Rembrandt; a soft velvet hat with an upturned rim that casts a warm, brown shadow over the upper half of the face. The choice of colors and some of the portrait’s formal details can be traced to the work of the French portraitist to the Prussian court, Antoine Pesne. In the portrait, the posture of the figure and the shirt’s loose front opening may have been inspired by Mányoki seeing German Baroque artist Philip Kilian’s engraving of landscape painter Johann Heinrich Roos’s self-portrait.

Originally owned by Ádám Mányoki, the painting is documented in the Galerie Schleißheim from 1775. It was bought by the Association of Friends of the Art Museums, and from 1931 was on permanent deposit in museums with which the Friends were associated. From 1974 it has been in the Hungarian National Gallery.

Top Insert Image: Ádám Mányoki, “Portrait of János Podmaniczky”, 1724, Oil on Canvas, 91 x 76 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest

Second Insert Image: Ádám Mányoki, “Porträt einer Hofdame König August de Starken (Portrait of a Lady-in-Waiting to King Augustus III, the Strong)”, circa 1715, Oil on Canvas, 64 x 62 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Ádám Mányoki, “Portrait of Prince Ference Rákózci II”, 1712, Oil on Canvas, 75.5 x 67.5 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest

Aage Storstein

The Paintings of Aage Storstein

Born at the historic city of Stavanger in July of 1900, Aage Storstein was a Norwegian painter, draftsman and graphic artist who focused his studies on historical art as well as his own contemporary style. Although particularly interested in early Renaissance art, Storstein found inspiration in the work and unique style of Picasso.

Although he lived the majority of his life in Norway, Aage Storstein traveled to Paris to study during the 1920s. He studied at Académie Ranson, the private art school founded by painter Paul Ranson in 1908; the Académie de la Grande Chaumière which was free from the strict Academic rules of painting; and the Académie Colarossi, a school founded as an alternative to the government-sanctioned, more conservative École des Beaux Arts. In 1926, Storstein studied under Norwegian painters Henrik Sørenson and Per Lasson Krohg, both of whom had been students of Henri Matisse.

In Paris, Storstein was greatly influenced by the modernist paintings of that period and began his own distinctive style of Cubism. Although best know for his figurative compositions, Storstein’s landscapes were always central to his art. His landscapes, a blend of nature with human structure, were painted with analytical precision, simplified forms, and soft colors.

Aage Storstein’s first exhibition was held at the 1924 Høstutstillingen (Autumn Exhibition) in Oslo, Norway. the first of twelve exhibitions at this venue in his lifetime. In 1937, his work was exhibited at the International Exhibition in Paris, a significant event in which forty-four countries participated. Storstein won the 1938 competition for the design of the West Gallery of the Oslo City Hall. For this site, he created a series of Cubist murals that depicted Norwegian life and the country’s history and mythology.

Beginning in 1946, he taught at the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts where he later became head professor. Among Storstein’s students were such artists as modernist abstractionist Gunnar S. Gundersen, painter Halvdan Ljøsne, and painter/photographer Rolf Aamot, known for his electronic tonal images and film work.

In 1961, Aage Storstein was given a retrospective exhibition of his work at Norway’s largest gallery, Kunstnernes Hus, that contained works drawn from both public and private collections. Aage Storstein died in Norway in May of 1983 at the age of eighty-two. His work is in many private collections as well as the collections of the Oslo National Gallery and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

Top Insert Image: Aage Storstein, “Self Portrait”, 1931, Oil Cardboard and Paper on Panel, 21 x 17 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Aage Storstein, “Human Rights”, 1949, Mural Fresco, Detail, Oslo City Hall

Bottom Insert Image: Aage Storstein, “Mannshode (Man’s Head)”, Date Unknown, Oil on Plate, 30.5 x 23.5 cm, Private Collection

Aleksei Ivanovich Borodin

Aleksei Ivanovich Borodin, “Tractor Drivers”, 1965-1980, Oil on Board, 95.3 x 132.1 cm, Private Collection

Born at Kirilovka, Samara Region in January of 1915, Aleksei Ivanovich Borodin was a Russian painter known for his figurative work and scenes of Russian rural life. After being orphaned during the Russian Civil War, he was placed in the care of a military educational orphanage for boys that trained them for military service.

After leaving the orphanage, Borodin entered Saratov Art and Industry High School and graduated in 1936 with a teacher’s diploma in painting and drawing. He also briefly studied under Russian Post-Impressionist painter Igor Grabar noted for his distinctive style of painting that bordered on Pointillism.

During World War II, Borodin was wounded during his service with an armored division of the Red Army. After the war, he returned to Saratov where he taught at his alma mater until the 1960s. Borodin relocated to Stalingrad, now Volgograd, where he was given a teaching position.

A member of the Russian Union of Artists since 1939, Aleksei Borodin participated in local, regional, Republican and Union-sponsored exhibitions from the early 1950s through the 1980s. Honored for his work, he was given a solo retrospective in 1986 at the Volgograd Art Museum, which now houses his most famous painting, the 1964 “Volgograd Farmers”.

Aleksei Ivanovich Borodin died in Volgograd at the age of eighty-nine in 2004. His paintings are in numerous private collections around the world. The majority of his oeuvre, however, is in the Saratov Art Museum, Volgograd Art Museum, and the Museum of Defense in Volgograd.

_________________________________________________

Wilfried Sätty

The Collages of Wilfried Sätty

Born at Bremen in April of 1939, Wilfried Sätty, birth name Wilfried Podriech, was a German graphic artist who became known for his assemblages, black and white collage art, and lithographs. After the end of World War II, Sätty’s early life took place within the surreal landscape of Bremen’s heavily-bombed ruins.

In the mid-1950s, Wilfried Sätty entered into a three-year apprenticeship as a mechanical engineer. After his training, he worked as an engineer in the construction of Brasilia, a modern, planned city development in Brazil to replace Rio de Janeiro as the nation’s capital. Sätty relocated in 1961 to San Francisco, California where he settled in North Beach’s artistic bohemian community and worked as a draftsman for the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. Inspired by the creativity of the city’s psychedelic sub-culture, Sätty began in 1966 to create pictorial collages; some of these were sold as poster prints.

After establishing a studio on San Francisco’s Powell Strret, Sätty created the first of his assemblage installations, “The North Beach U-Boat”, a warren of rooms containing mirrors, dolls, oriental carpets, and other discarded material found in the trash bins of wealthy residents. During the 1970s, he created animations, colored artwork, lithographic prints, and hundreds of black and white collages. These collages were well-received and were used as illustrations in both establishment periodicals and counter-culture publications.

Poster artists accepted Wilfried Sätty as a peer due to his designs for rock concert advertisements. However, his work was rooted in the more somber and utopian German Surrealism, an art expression that he accented with bits of the bizarre and grotesque. Generally excluded from gallery exhibitions, Sätty turned to publishing his work. Using printing presses to multiply and overprint his collages, he published two volumes of collages; the first of which was “The Cosmic Bicycle”, a collection of seventy-nine collages published in 1971 through “Rolling Stone” magazine’s imprint Straight Arrow Books. Sätty’s second volume from Straight Arrow Books was the 1973 “Time Zone”, a collection of collages in the form of a wordless novel akin to the collage books of Max Ernst.

Sätty created illustrations for the 1976 “The Annotated Dracula” which contained an introduction, notes and bibliography by Romanian-American author and poet Leonard Wolf. He also created eighty black and white illustrations for Crown Publishing Group’s 1976 “The Illustrated Edgar Allan Poe”, a collection of Poe’s horror and literary short stories. Sätty is, however, perhaps best known for his commissioned work for Terence McKenna’s anthology book “The Archaic Revival”, published in May of 1992 by Harper Collins. This collection of essays, interviews and narrative adventures is illustrated through Sätty’s black and white collages depicting themes of ancient cultures seen through modern technology, optical art, and sacred religious architecture.

Beginning in the late 1970s, Wilfred Sätty’s work drew inspiration from the dramatic and often unruly events in the history of San Francisco; these collages cover the period from the 1848 Gold Rush to the 1890s. Sätty died in January of 1982, at the age of forty-two, from an accidental fall from a ladder at his Powell Street home. His final work, “Visions of Frisco: An Imaginative Depiction of San Francisco during the Gold Rush & the Barbary Coast Era”, was published posthumously in 2007 by art historian Walter Medeiros.

Notes: The Wilfried Sätty website is located at: https://satty.art/#top

The online “FoundSF”, a San Francisco digital history archive, has an article on Wilfried Sätty and his “North Beach U-Boat” project: https://www.foundsf.org/Satty_and_the_%22North_Beach_U-Boat%22

“Melt”, an archive of esoteric and contemporary culture, has an article on Wilfried Sätty that includes a biography as well as several images of his artwork: https://visualmelt.com/Wilfried-Satty

San Francisco artist and educator Ryan Medeiros has an article on Wilfried Sätty entitled “Wilfried Sätty; The Psychedelic Alchemist of Collage” on his website: https://ryanmedeiros.substack.com/p/wilfried-satty-the-psychedelic-alchemist

On John Coulthart’s “(feuilleton)” website, there is an article entitled “Wilfried Sätty and the Cosmic Bicycle” that examines Sätty’s life and the publishing of his 1971 book of collages: https://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2025/09/10/wilfried-satty-and-the-cosmic-bicycle/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Wilfried Sätty”, circa 1960-1970s, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Wilfried Sätty, “Listen, Sweet Dreams”, 1967, Lithographic Psychedelic Poster, 88 x 59 cm, Orbit Graphic Arts, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Wilfried Sätty, “Stone Garden”, circa 1960s, Lithographic Psychedelic Poster, 88 x 58 cm, Printed at East Totem West, California, Private Collection