Author: ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon

https://www.instagram.com/wolvesofgray This blog is a refugee and a survivor of the Great Tumblr Inquisition of December 17th, 2018. I am gay artist, who received training at the Rhode Island School of Design, and now, a retired high-end fine art framer living in Maryland, USA. My interests and studies in life run a wide gamut from art to history and from the scientific to the esoteric. I have been building this blog of images and texts for the last eight years. My wish is that my posts pique the interest of viewers and encourage them to experience more.

Raymond Carrance

The Artwork of Raymond ‘Czanara’ Carrance

Born in Paris on the twenty-fourth of January in 1921, Raymond Carrance was a French photographer and book illustrator whose work became known under the name Czanara. One of the little-known erotic artists of the twentieth-century, he began his career as a costume and set designer for theatrical companies and as a graphic designer for commercial brands, among which was  France’s  mineral water company Perrier.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Raymond Carramce was commissioned to create elaborate etchings and lithographs as illustrations for published editions by author Pierre Jules Renard and playwright Cyrano de Bergerac. He also illustrated a 1951 edition of Henry du Montherlant’s classic theatrical play “La Ville Dont le Prince Est un Enfant (The City Whose Prince is a Child)”. Clarrance also received a commission for seventeen copper engravings as signed illustrations for a 1971 limited edition folio which included writer Jean Giono’s “Le Chant du Monde: Bourg-Le-Reine (The Song of the World)”. This folio was a special tribute to Jean Giono who had passed away on the eighth of October in 1970. 

As a photographer, Carrance’s private catalogue of homoerotic work is reminiscent of the magical-realist style of his contemporaries, the painters Paul Cadmus and Jared French. His images are simple compositions without extensive detail, distinctly European in style and reverential in nature. Carrance’s unique work contained both simple nude portraits and dreamlike scenes composed with overlaid graphics. The desired atmosphere of these collaged male nude scenes was established by layers of superimposed photographs depicting props, flowers, bodily details, or simple patterns and shadows. Carrance exhibited both his photographic and illustrative work in several venues throughout Paris during the 1960s and 1970s.

Raymond Carrance died in Paris on the fourth of June in 1998 at the age of seventy-seven. He passed in obscurity without heirs; his entire body of work was sold at auction. Carrance’s work was rediscovered by art collector David Deiss who acquired the contents of Carrance’s atelier from a Lyon bookseller upon his death. Focused on the discovery of unknown artists of significance, Deiss is responsible for publishing the 2007 monograph “Czanara: Photographs and Drawings”, an imprint of Carrance’s work through Antinous Press. This imprint was the first book published by creative director Sam Shahid’s new press.

Nicole Canet, publisher and owner of the Parisian gallery “Au Bonheur du Jour”, exhibited her collection of Carrance’s drawings and photographs at her gallery in 2010. The gallery and its publishing arm are known for their focus on early European homoerotic photographers; Canet is recognized for her work as a researcher and archivist of sexual sociology in Paris.  

Top Insert Image: Raymond Carrance, “Flanders,Belgium”, circa 1950-1960s, Vintage Print, 24 x 18 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Raymond Carrance, “Venice”, circa 1950-1940s, Vintage Print, 18 x 17 cm, Private Collection

Alfred Edward Housman: “The Colour of His Hair”

Photographers Unknown, The Colour of His Hair

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?
And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?
And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?
Oh they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

‘Tis a shame to human nature, such a head of hair as his;
In the good old time ’twas hanging for the color that it is;
Though hanging isn’t bad enough and flaying would be fair
For the nameless and abominable colour of his hair.

Oh a deal of pains he’s taken and a pretty price he’s paid
To hide his poll or dye it of a mentionable shade;
But they’ve pulled the beggar’s hat off for the world to see and stare,
And they’re haling him for justice for the colour of his hair.

Now ’tis Oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet
And the quarry gang on Portland in the cold and in the heat,
And between his spells of labour in the time he has to spare,
He can curse the God that made him for the colour of his hair.

Alfred Edward Housman, Oh Who Is That Young Sinner, First Draft Summer 1895
Published 1939, Collected Poems,’Additional Poems’, Number 18

Born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire in March of 1859, Alfred Edward Housman was an English classical scholar, educator and poet. Recognized as one of the foremost classicists of his era, he emerged as a poet with his 1896 “A Shropshire Lad”, a collection of works espoused by a simple youth preoccupied with the idea of early death. 

The eldest of seven children to Edward Housman and Sarah Jane Williams, Alfred Housman was educated at King Edward’s School in Birmingham and later at Bromsgrove School. In 1877 at the age of eighteen, he won a scholarship to St. John’s College, Oxford, where he studied the classics. Though introverted by nature, Housman developed strong friendships with two roommates, Moses John Jackson, who became the principal of Sind College in Karachi, and Alfred William Pollard, a future bibliographer and scholar of Shakespearean texts. 

At Oxford, Housman knew that emendation, the revision and  correction of scribal errors in classical texts, would be his life’s work. So, he studied accordingly. In 1879, Housman earned a first on his exam for Moderations but failed the Finals due to his neglect of ancient history and philosophy. He returned in September for the Michaelmas term to retake the exam and achieved the lower-grade pass degree. Housman, who was homosexual, fell in love at Oxford, for the first and only time, with his classmate Moses Jackson who was heterosexual. This unreciprocated love would remain a constant throughout Housman’s life and play a role in the creation of his poetry, an emotional and physiological experience for him.. 

After Oxford, Housman joined Jackson in London to work as a clerk in the Patent Office. They shared lodgings with Jackson’s brother Adalbert until 1885 at which time Housman found a flat of his own. Two years later, Jackson took a position in Karachi, India as an educator; he returned in 1889 to marry and resided with his wife and family in India until his retirement. Learning in 1922 that his friend, now back in England, was dying from stomach cancer, Housman wrote thirty-seven pages of poems that were published in early 1922. A copy of the collection was sent the hospital where Jackson was being treated. Jackson read the poems in October, a few months before his death in January of 1923. 

Housman’s most sustained period of poetry composition was during his professorship at University College. Of the work he produced during this period, his 1896 “A Shropshire Lad” became his best effort. After its rejection by Macmillan Company, it was published by Kegan Paul at Housman’s expense; at his insistence he took no royalties from Kegan Paul. Over two years, the book sold very slowly until Grant Richards, who became a lifelong friend, published five-hundred copies in 1897. Sold out, two more editions were printed and three-thousand copies sold by 1902. 

Profoundly affected by his mother’s death when he was twelve, Alfred Housman’s poetic themes largely dealt with time, seen by Housman as the enemy, and the inevitability of death. He frequently dealt with the plight of the young soldier, in which sympathy for the youth was balanced with patriotism of the nation. Housman also saw, through its changing seasons, death in nature; however, he regarded this manner of death with a stoic outlook rather than one of complete pessimism. Although the universe is seen in his poetry as cruel and hostile, his work also extolled the preciousness of both youth and youth’s beauty. 

In 1922, Housman published his “Last Poems” which greatly added to his reputation. His place in the poetic world was further enhanced by British composers setting his work to music. The cycle of poems from “A Shropshire Lad” were wet to music in 1904 by composer Arthur Somervell.  As of 2023, there have been six-hundred and forty-six musical settings of Housman’s poems. Among these are Ribert Vaughan Williams’s 1909 “On Wenlock Edge” for sting quartet, tenor and piano, George Butterworth’s 1911 “Six Songs fro A Shropshire Lad”, and John Ireland’s 1920 song cycle “Land of the Lost Content”.

Alfred Edward Housman died at the age of seventy-seven in April of 1936 at Cambridge, England. After his death, his brother Laurence published several collections of works by Housman among which include the 1936 “More Poems” and 1939 “Collected Poems”. In 1936, Laurence deposited an essay, “A. E. Housman’s ‘De Amicitia”” at the British Library with the proviso that it not be published for twenty-five years. This essay discussed Alfred Housman’s homosexuality and his love for Moses Jackson. Despite his own caution in public life and the conservative nature of the era, Housman was fairly open in his poetry about his love for Jackson.

Notes: A 2021 article by Veronica Alfano, a Research Fellow at Australia’s Macquarie University in Sydney, on the life of Alfred Edward Housman can be found at the Yellow Nineties 2.0 site located at: https://1890s.ca/aehousman_bio/

Alfred Edward Housman’s poem “Oh Who Is That Young Sinner” was written in the summer of 1895, a few months after the crimainal trial of poet Oscar Wilde on charges of gross indecency under the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which applied to same-sex activity. In his poem, Housman criticized the imprisonment of Wilde by stating that Wilde’s homosexuality was natural and created by god/nature and, as such, should not be condemned. Housman, himself gay, avoided the fate of his contemporary but, as seen in the poem, was very sympathetic to Wilde’s plight. Housman died before homosexuality was decriminalized in England during the 1960s.

More information on the trials of Oscar Wilde can be found at Professor Douglas O. Linder’s “Famous Trials” website located at: https://famous-trials.com/wilde/327-home

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Alfred Edward Housman”, 1894, Vintage Bromide Print

Second Insert Image: Agnes Miller Parker, Illustration for “A Shropshire Lad”, Woodcut, 1954 Edition, George G. Harrap, London

Third Insert Image: Francis Dodd, “A. E. Housman”, 1926, Charcoal on Paper, 37.5 x 27.3 cm National Portrait Gallery, London

Fourth Insert Image; Agnes Miller Parker, Illustration for “A Shropshire Lad”, Woodcut, 1954 Edition, George G. Harrap, London

Bottom Insert Image: Emil Otto Hoppé, “Alfred Edward Housman”, circa 1911, Vintage Bromide Print, 29.7 x 25 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

Konstantin Somov

Konstantin Somov, “The Boxer”, Portrait of Mikhailovich Snejkovsky, 1933, Oil on Canvas, 54.8 x 46 cm, Private Collection

Born in Saint Petersburg in November of 1869, Konstantin Andreyevich Somov was a Russian artist and founding member of the artistic movement Mir Iskusstva, World of Art, that became a major influence on Russian artists of the early twentieth-century. Konstantin Somov was the second son of Andrei Somov, an art historian and senior curator at the Hermitage Museum, and Nadezhda Konstantinovna, a talented musician and well-educated daughter of the Lobanovs nobility. 

Konstantin Somov attended the Karl May School in Saint Petersburg where he became close friends with classmates Dmitry Filosofov, later author and literary critic, and Alexandre Benois, future historian and influential designer for the Ballets Russes. At the age of twenty, Somov entered the Imperial Academy of Arts and studied from 1888 to 1897 under Ukrainian-born historical and portrait painter Ilya Repin. While at the academy, he developed lasting friendships with Sergei Diaghilev, the future founder of the Ballets Russes, and Léon Bakst, a painter who became an influential costume designer for Diaghilev’s company.

In the summer of 1895, Somov and Alexandre Benois stayed at a dacha in the village of Martyshkino near the coastal city of Oranienbaum. The landscapes he created and exhibited became his first major success with praise from both critics and artists. Somov graduated from the Academy in 1897 and continued his education at the Académie Colarossiin Paris. From 1897 to 1890, he worked on a portrait of Elizaveta Martynova, clothed in an old-fashioned dress, entitled “Lady in Blue”. Martynova was a painter, a graduate of the Imperial College of the Arts, who died at the age of thirty-six from tuberculosis. In this portrait finished four years before her death, Martynova’s delicate and trembling figure, frail with yellowish skin, stands alone in a park facing spectators with a face full of sorrow.

After the founding of the Mir Iskusstva in 1898, Konstantin Somov served as an editorial board member and contributed illustrations and designs to its magazine edited by Sergei Dlaghilev. During the 1910s, he created a series of harlequin scenes and illustrations for a poetry volume by Alexander Blok. Somov’s work was now exhibited in the United States and Europe, particularly in Germany where a 1909 monograph on his work was published.

In 1910 at the age of forty, Somov met the eighteen-year old Methodiy Lukyanov who became his close longtime companion and part of the Somov family. Lukyanov helped in the household, organized exhibitions and became Somov’s trusted advisor and critic. Somov painted many portraits of Lukyanov, among which is a large 1918 portrait which depicted Lukyanov seated on a sofa in pajamas and robe; this work is now housed in St. Petersburg’s Russian Museum. Somov and Lukyanov’s relationship would continue for twenty-two years until Lukyanov’s death from tuberculosis in April of 1932.

Konstantin Somov had a penchant for drama and was drawn to the elegant but bawdy nature of French erotic writing of the 18th century. From 1907 to 1919, he worked on illustrations, some suggestive and others explicit, for “Le Livre de la Marquise”, an anthology of eighteenth-century erotic French poetry and prose by Lachos, Casanova and Voltaire. Somov’s work became more erotic as time progressed. The most explicit of these was an eight-hundred copy edition published in 1917 at St. Petersburg’s R. Golike & A. Vilborg & Company. 

Although initially greeted with enthusiasm, the Russian Revolution from 1917 to 1923 created a deterioration in living conditions. Shortly after the government nationalized his apartment, Somov was evicted; he did however manage to retain the rights to his own artwork. In December of 1923, Somov became part of the Russian Exhibiton and, as a member of the delagation, traveled to the United States where he represented the city of Petrograd. He never returned to to his homeland. After leaving the United States in 1925,  Somov settled in Paris where he reunited with his old friends Alexandre Benois, Léon Bakst and Benois’ niece, the painter Zinaida Serebryakova. 

Konstantin Somov, in terms of his artistic influences, felt closer to the Old Masters rather than the work of his contemporaries. He was particularly drawn to the work of eighteenth-century Rococo painter François Boucher known for his idyllic pastoral scenes. While in Paris, Somov predominantly painted miniatures and portraits. The still life became one of his favorite subjects and would perform an important role in his portraits as it added additional information on the sitter.

Even though established as a well-known artist, Somov continued to live a reclusive lifestyle. In June of 1930, he met Boris Mikhailovich Snejkovsky. Born in Odessa in July of 1910, Snejkovsky was the son of a captain of the Russian Volunteer Fleet and traveled frequently with his family until they settled in Paris. During the 1930s, Snezhkovsky would model, both clothed and nude, for many of Somov’s works including illustrations for an edition of “Daphnis and Chloe”. In February of 1923, Somov painted a portrait of his model entitled “The Boxer”, a half-length nude oil-portrait with boxing gloves on the wall. Snezhkovsky also served as the model for Somov’s 1937 “Obnazhennyl Iunosha (Nude Youth)” now in the State Russian Museum.

Konstantin Andreyevich Somov died in May of 1939, at the age of sixty-nine, in Paris, France. He is buried in the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery, south of Paris. In 2016, Russian art historian Pavel Golubev founded the Somov Society to preserve and study the life and works of Konstantin Somov. Goluvev curated the 2019 “Konstantin Somov, Uncensored” at Ukraine’s Odessa Fine Arts Museum and sponsored the 2019 colloquium “The Lady with the Mask: Homosexuality in the Art of Konstantin Somov” at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Top Insert Image: Konstantin Somov, “Self Portrait”, 1921, Pencil Watercolor on Paper, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Konstantin Somov, “Vladimir Aleksandrovich Somov”, Konstantin Somov’s Nephew, 1925, Oil on Canvas

Third Insert Image: Konstantin Somov, “Lady in Blue”, Portrait of Yelizaveta Martynova, 1897-1900, Oil on Canvas, 103 x 103 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia

Fourth Insert Image: Konstantin Somov, “Boris Snejkovsky with Cigarette”, 1938, Oil on Canvas, 46.4 x 38 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Konstantin Somov, “Daphnis and Chloe”, 1930, Watercolor Illustration, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, United Kingdom

 

 

Paul-Marc-Joseph Chenavard

Paul Chenavard, “Divine Tragedia”, 1865-1869, Oil on Canvas, 400 x 550 cm, Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay), France

Born in December of 1808 in the city of Lyon, Paul-Marc-Joseph Chenavard was a French painter who believed art’s goal was the advancement of society’s welfare and cultural development. A philosopher as well as a painter, he was well read and traveled. Throughout his life, Chenavard maintained a personal connection with both artistic and missionary groups. 

Chenavard initially entered the Palais Saint-Pierre, now the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon, where he studied alongside painter Joseph Benoit Gulchard, born in Lyon in November of 1806. Chenavard and Gulchard left the Palais in 1824 and took classes under classical sculptor Jean-François Legendre-Héral.

In 1825, Paul Chenavard entered Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts where he studied in the studio of Neo-classical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a historical painter best known for his portraits. Gulchard, with the assistance of the painters Paul-Jean and Hippolyte Flandrin, later entered the Paris studio of Ingres in 1827. In that year, Chenavard traveled to Italy where he first encountered the works of Michelangelo and other Renaissance masters. 

Chenavard created a relatively small body of distinctively styled work that reflect the influences he encounterd during his trip to Italy.  In 1888, he produced a charcoal drawing “The Last Judgement”, a densely packed scene of contorted bodies, horn-blowing angels and the crowned Archangel Michael. At the top of the scene is Christ depicted without the traditional halo, a statement of Chenavard’s humanistic beliefs. 

Paul Chenavard also created a large mural design entitled “The Battle Between the Gods of Olympus and the Giants”. The tableau, likely a presentational work, was executed on four sheets with architectural details pasted at the top. Similar in style to “The Last Judgement”, it contains a scene full of figures engaged in battle. Chenavard’s drawings, most likely an allegory of philosophical references, were exhibited at the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris and are currently housed in Lyon’s Musée des Beaux-Arts.

After the 1848 Revolution, Charles Blanc, the Director of Fine Arts reporting to the Minister of Public Instruction, commissioned a decoraton from Chenavard for the Paris Pantheon, which was to serve as a temple of humanity. For this project, Chenavard designed a mosaic for the main feature which would present an impartial treatment of all religious traditions. However in December of 1851, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte returned the Pantheon back to the authority of the Catholic Church, thus the project was abandoned.

For the 1869 Paris Salon, Paul Chenavard returned to the idea of illustrating religion’s history. He created his “Divine Tragedia” as a counterpoint to Dante Alighieri’s 1308-1321 “The Divine Comedy”. Accompanied with a booklet of commentary, Chenavard’s tableau was met with incomprehension from both the public and critics. It was considered too complex and overly filled with references to multiple philosophical ideas. 

Chenavard’s “Divine Tragedia” was purchased by the French government which designated the Musée du Louvre as the responsible organism for the work. Given to the collection of the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, the tableau was only exhibited for a short time until the museum’s 1974 exhibition. The “Divine Tragedia” was housed at the Louvre from 1974 to 1986, at which time it was added to the collection of the Musée d’Orsay. 

Paul-Marc-Joseph Chenavard died in Paris in 1895 at the age of eighty-seven. His body in interred at the new Cimetière de Loyasee at Lyon. 

Top Insert Image: Portrait of Paul Chenavard from Édouard Baldus’s “Histoire de Artisted Vivants”, 1852, Albumen Print from Wet Collodion Negative, 17.6 x 13.2 cm, Alma Kroeger Fund

Rouben Mamoulian: Film History Series

Rouben Mamoulian, “Applause”, 1929, Pre-Code Early Sound Film, Screenplay Garrett Fort and Beth Brown, Cinematography George J. Folsey, Running Time 80 Minutes, Paramount Pictures. 

Born in October of 1897 at the Georgian city of Tiflis in the Russian Empire, Rouben Mamoulian was a theatrical and film director noted for his contributions to cinematic art at the beginning of the sound era. Escaping the Soviet regime, he fled to England and later immigrated to the United States where he established his film career. 

Born to an ethnic Armenian family, Rouben Mamoulian studied criminal law at the University of Moscow. Interested in theater, he trained at the Moscow Art Theatre under theatrical director Yevgeny Bagrationovich Vakhtangov who produced some of the most original and bold productions of Russian theater after the Revolution. In 1918, Mamoulian founded a drama studio in his hometown of Tiflis, now Tbilisi. In 1920, he toured with the Russian Repertory Company to England, where he stayed to study drama at the University of London. 

Mamoulian began directing English stage productions in 1922. In the following year, he immigrated to the United States and became, at George Eastman’s request, the director of the American Opera Company in Rochester, New York. From 1925 to 1926, Mamoulian was head of Eastman’s School of Dance and Dramatic Action. During the late 1920s, he taught drama and directed productions at New York City’s Theater Guild. Mamoulian established himself in theatrical circles with his all-black cast production of Dorothy and Dubose Heyward’s 1927 “Porgy”. He would later direct George Gershwin’s 1935 Broadway production of “Porgy and Bess”. 

Rouben Mamoulian, in addition to his theater work, directed Paramount Pictures’s 1929 early sound film “Applause” at their Astoria Studio in Queens, New York. For his film debut, he decided that stylization would be better than realism if done with flourish and skill. For the opening scene of this story, Mamoulian employed a roving camera in a soundproof booth that tracked along a desolate street before turning to follow the sound of a marching brass band. A cutaway in the film then transports the audience to a band practicing in a seedy theater.

In addition to defying the wisdom of a stationary camera, Mamoulian recorded the dialogue on separate microphones and combined them in post-production. He also employed sounds at the end of scenes that anticipated the action about to happen. In order to impose spatial depth, rhythm and momentum to the film, Mamooulian overlaid scenes with sounds of train doors opening, car horns blaring and people singing in the background. This innovation, seemingly simple by today’s standards, made a bold cinematic statement in 1929 when the sound era was just developing.

In 1931, Rouben Mamoulian  directed “City Streets” for Paramount. This pre-code gangster film was written by famed detective-mystery author Dashiell Hammett; it featured Sylvia Sidney and the rising star Gary Cooper as the carnival worker who falls in love with the racketeer’s daughter. In the same year, Mamoulian directed the first sound version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. Considered by many critics as Mamoulian’s masterpiece, the film is known for Fredric March’s transformation between characters, made possible by Mamoulian’s innovative makeup and lighting effects. March was a winner, along with Wallace Beery in Vidor’s “The Champ”, for the Best Actor at the 1932 Academy Awards.

Mamoulian directed two more films for Paramount; the 1932 “Love Me Tonight”, one of the most accomplished of the early musicals due to his seamless blending of action and songs; and the 1933 “The Song of Songs”, a melodrama with Marlene Dietrich that was not well received by critics. Working now for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Mamoulian directed Greta Garbo in the 1933 biography “Queen Christina” and had great success with the 1935 “Becky Sharp”, an adaption of the novel “Vanity Fair”, which was the first feature released in Technicolor. After three more films with MGM that were not well received by the critics, Mamoulian took his talents to Twentieth-Century Fox. 

Rouben Mamoulian directed two distinguished films for his new studio: the 1940 swashbuckler “The Mark of Zorro” with great performances by Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell and Basil Rathbone; and the 1941 “Blood and Sand”, a pageant of the rise and fall of a bullfighter which reunited Power and Darnell and also starred Rita Hayworth. After Otto Preminger secured the rights to Vera Caspary’s novel “Laura”, Darryl F. Zanuck approved Mamoulian to direct the film with Preminger as the producer. When problems developed between the cast and director, Mamoulian was fired and Preminger reshot all the footage. 

Through his career, Mamoulian felt strongly that a director should be given creative freedom; he was never tolerant of creative interference. Disillusioned with Hollywood, he returned to Broadway where he directed two major musical hits, the 1943 “Oklahoma!” and the 1945 “Carousel”. Mamoulian directed just two more films for MGM: “Summer Holiday” in 1948 and the 1957 musical “Silk Stockings”, which starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, featured music and lyrics by Cole Porter. Although he was scheduled to direct the 1958 film version of “Porgy and Bess”, the position of director was given to Preminger. In 1963, Mamoulian began shooting the 1963 epic “Cleopatra”; however, after six days of shooting, he was replaced with Joseph L. Mankiewicz. This was Mamoulian’s last involvement with a Hollywood film production.

Rouben Mamoulian was personally recruited in 1936 by the Directors Guild of America’s co-founder King Vidor to help organize fellow movie directors.  His strong allegiance to the Guild and unwillingness to compromise led to his being targeted in the 1950s Hollywood blacklisting. Mamoulian died of natural causes in December of 1987 at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California.

Note: Senses of Cinema, an online film site with interviews and extensive biographies of both actors and directors, has an interesting article on the 1929 “Applause”. Senses of Cinema can be found at: https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2002/cteq/applause/

Top Insert Image: Rouben Mamoulian, Self Portrait, circa 1939, Vintage Black and White Print, 20.3 x 25.4 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Rouben Mamoulian, “Myrna Loy”, 1932, “Love Me Tonight”, Cinematography Victor Milner, 104 Minutes, Paramount Pictures

Third Insert Image: Rouben Mamoulian, “Fredric March”, 1931, “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”, Cinematography Karl Struss, 98 Minutes, Paramount Pictures

Fourth Insert Image: Rouben Mamoulian, “Gary Cooper and Sylvia Sidney”, 1931, “City Streets”, Cinematography Lee Garmes, 83 Minutes, Paramount Pictures

Bottom Insert Image: Rouben Mamoulian, “Tyrone Power”, 1940, “The Mask of Zorro”, Cinematography Arthur C. Miller, 94 Minutes, Twentieth-Century Fox

Barry Webster: “The Whole Forest Goes Silent. . “

Photographers Unknown, The Whole forest Goes Silent

In the evenings, Sam performs exercises to prepare his body for love-making with Franz. He practices kissing (something he’d once hated) by smooching deer lips, antelope ears, frog anuses, and the great, whiskered muzzles of sleeping bison. He improves his petting skills by necking with juniper bushes and pine tree trunks with such passion that the bark snaps and sap runs, or with such tenderness that the whole forest goes silent and swallows nest in his hair.

Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones, 2012, Arsenal Pulp Press 

Born in Toronto in 1961, Barry Webster is a Canadian musician, translator, and writer of fiction, short stories, and non-fiction. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in English Literature at the University of Toronto and his Master of Arts in Creative Writing at Concordia University in Montreal. Webster is a classically trained pianist with two Associate Diplomas, ARCTs, from the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. Fluent in French, English and some German, he has translated some of his novels into French.

Webster’s first book of stories, “The Sound of All Flesh”, published by Porcupine’s Quill, won the 2005 ReLit Award for the best collection of Canadian short fiction; it was also a finalist for that year’s Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction presented by the Quebec Writers’ Foundation. This magic-realist collection of stories follows the lives of such people as a hydrophobic competitive swimmer, an opera singer who bathes in tubs of margarine for inspiration, and a travel writer whose terrified of having his photo taken. Webster’s stories from “The Sound of All Flesh” were short-listed for the National Magazine Award and the Canadian Broadcast Company-Quebec Prize.

Barry Webster’s 2012 novel entitled “The Lava in My Bones” is an ecologically-based novel, written in a magic-realist style, that is narrated from various perspectives. The storyline, divided into elemental sections such as rock, air, and water, follows Sam, a Canadian geologist, who attends an academic conference in Switzerland. There he meets the young, sexually active Franz, a swinger who  awakens Sam’s nascent homosexuality. “The Lava in My Bones” is a fantasy story through which the connection between lovers, the dysfunction of families, and personal links to the planet we inhabit are examined. Webster’s novel was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the Ferro-Grumley Foundation and Publishing Triangle’s annual Literary Award, and the 2013 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LBGTQ Emerging Writers presented by the Writers’ Trust of Canada.

Barry Webster has participated at numerous literary series, among which were the Saints and Sinners Festival in New Orleans, Berlin’s Takl Galerie Series, the National Gallery of Ottawa, Vancouver’s Raw Exchange, and muliple literary programs on CBC Radio. Webster’s work has appeared in various publications including The Toronto Star Event, The Washington Post, Fiddlehead Magazine, and The Globe and Mail, Canada’s foremost news media company. After periods in various European cities, Barry Webster currently resides in East Montreal.

“I once attended a panel discussion where the topic was ‘Canadian Literature: Quiet Writing for a Quiet Nation.’ Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers is anything but quiet. It rants, seethes, and uses humor as a machete. The hyper-sensual language and extravagant fantasy of the erotic trysts between the narrator, his lover ‘F,’ and the ghost of saint Catherine Tekakwitha changed my understanding of fiction. I realized that thinking outside traditional heterosexual binaries requires a new template and so-called ‘realism’ can simply reinforce the status quo. Beautiful Losers showed me that literature could re-imagine what sexuality can be rather than merely slavishly reproducing the surface of life.”

—-Barry Webster, Montreal, The Query Project, September 2015, Plenitude Magazine

Note: Barry Webster’s website, which include a list of his published work, can be found at: http://www.barrywebster.ca/index.html

Plenitude Magazine is Canada’s only queer literary magazine. It promotes the development and growth of LGBTQ+ literature through online publication. The magazine can be found at: https://plenitudemagazine.ca

Top Insert Image: Camille Martin, “Barry Webster”, 2018, Color Print, Rogue Embryo Website

Header Photo Set: Fifth Image: Francesco Merlini, “Hua Hin”, The Farang Series, Gelatin Silver Print

William Bruce Ellis Ranken

The Artwork of William Bruce Ellis Ranken

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland in April of 1881, William Bruce Ellis Ranken was a British painter and Edwardian of the English aesthetic movement of the late 19th century. Originated in the 1860s German Romanticism, Aestheticism valued the appearance of music, literature and the arts over their functions. The movement, which included such artists as William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, challenged Victorian culture by asserting Art did not have any instructive or ethical purpose; rather, the basic factor of art was beauty.

The son of Mary and Robert Burt Ranken, a wealthy and successful lawyer, William Ranken spent his childhood living on vast estates in Scotland and England. He attended Eton College and later the Slade School of Art where he studied under draftsman and painter Henry Tonks, one of the first British artists influenced by the French Impressionists. Among Ranken’s fellow students was Ernest Thesiger, the grandson of the 1st Lord Chelmsford and drama student who became a lifelong friend.

At the age of twenty-three, Ranken had his first exhibition of work at London’s Carfax Gallery which well received by artists and art critics. In his career, he worked in the mediums of watercolors, oils and pastels. In 1907, Ranken moved to the Chelsea area of London where he and his friend Thesiger began to associate with the Edwardian Aesthetes. They moved in London’s artistic, literary, and theatrical circles and became frequent guests at John Singer Sargent’s studio and friends with stage actress Beatrice Tanner, better known by her stage name Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Ranken also became a close friend with photographer Baron Adolph de Meyer, famed for his portraits of Queen Mary, John Barrymore, Lillian Gish and other celebrities.  

After the outbreak of World War I, William Ranken and John Singer Sargent traveled to America. Sargent introduced him to one of America’s leading patron and collector of the arts, Isabella Stewart Gardner, known for her intellectual curiosity and unconventional behavior. Through his connection with Gardner, Ranken received commissions to paint portraits of the wealthy, including the Vanderbilts, the Asters, and the Whitneys. Upon his return to England in the 1920s, he was given commissions from the British royal family and the aristocracy for portraits as well as interior images of their homes.

After the success of his American visit and his commissioned work in England, Ranken purchased Warbrook House, a historical estate built in 1724 by architect John James and located in Eversley, Hampshire. He undertook a considerable amount of repair work on the building; he also created paintings depicting several of its rooms. These works were included in Art Deco architect Basil Ionides’ 1926 “Color and Interior Decoration”. During England’s depression years of the 1930s, Ranken found the maintenance costs too extensive and made the decision to sell the estate in 1935 to Isabella Rosalind Humphreys-Owen, the daughter of Sir Edward Elias Sassoon, 2nd Baronet of Bombay. 

In addition to portraiture, William Ranken painted landscapes and did interior design work for architects. He worked alongside Basil Ionides on the remodeling of the renowned Claridges Restaurant, the height of luxury dining in London. Rankin pursued interests in music, embroidery, antiques and gardening. Among his many friends and patrons were such notables as songwriter Cole Porter; writer Violet Keppel Trefusis,; art collector Henry Davis Sleeper; William Lygon, the 7th Earl Beauchamp; Hugh Patrick Lygon; and American actress and interior designer Elsie de Wolfe. 

In March of 1941, William Bruce Ellis Ranken died suddenly from a cerebral hemorrhage in London. He was buried near his former Warbrook estate at the historic St. Mary’s Church in Eversley, North Hampshire. His sister, Janette Ranken-Thesiger, donated over two-hundred of his works to public galleries and museums in the United Kingdom. Ranken’s other works are in private collections and either damaged or destroyed during the air raids of World War II. His work can be found in the public collections of the National Museums of Northern Ireland, Glasgow Museum, Portsmouth Museum and the Government Art Collection of the United Kingdom, among others. 

Notes: Ernest Thesiger, who was bisexual, married Ranken’s sister, Janette Mary Fernie Ranken in 1917. The next year, Ranken painted Thesiger’s portrait; this painting is now housed in the Manchester City Galleries. Thesiger became a well-known English film and stage actor with appearances in Noël Coward’s 1925 “On with the Dance” and George Bernard Shaw’s 1923 “Saint Joan”. Friends with director James Whale since 1919, Thesiger was cast in Whale’s 1932 “The Old Dark House” and later given the role of Dr. Septimus Pretorius in Whale’s 1935 “Bride of Frankenstein”. 

As a member of the 2nd Battalion of the 9th London Regiment, Queen Victoria’s Rifles, Thesiger was sent to the Western Front in 1914, where he was wounded in the trenches. With his hands damaged, he developed sewing kits for soldiers similarly injured to provide activity and pain relief. In addition to his career as an actor, Thesiger became Vice Patron of the Embroiderers Guild. In 1960, he was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. In January of the following year, Ernest Thesiger died in his sleep from natural causes and was buried at Brompton Cemetery in London.

Top Insert Image: Adolph De Meyer, “William Bruce Ellis Ranken”, 1903, Vintage Print, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: William Bruce Ellis Ranken, “Battersea Power Station, London”, circa 1940, Oil on Canvas, 68.6 x 56.1 cm, Forens Art Gallery, Hull, England

Third Insert Image: William Bruce Ellis Ranken, “Hibiscus Flower”, 1922, Oil on Canvas, 137.2 x 106.7 cm, Nottingham Castle, England

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer  Unknown, “William Bruce Ellis Ranken”, circa 1900-1910, Gelatin Silver Print, Kirkcudbright Galleries

Ernst Neuschul

Ernst Neuschul, “Messias”, Self-Portrait, 1919, Oil on Canvas, 95.5 x 55.5 cm, Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, East Midlands, England

Born in 1895 in Aussig, North Bohemia now the Czech Republic, Ernst Neuschul was a painter of the German Expressionist movement. He was the eldest of three sons born to ironmonger Josef Neuschul and Jeanette Feldmann, members of the town’s prestigious and influential Jewish community. Neuschul received his primary education at Auseig’s State Gymnasium but left without graduating. 

Neuschul wanted to study at the Academy of Arts in Prague; however, his parents refused to financially support his attendance. He worked in Prague as a painter and attended courses at the Academy as an extern participant. Neuschul then went to Vienna, attended the K.K. Graphische Lehranstalt, and became captivated by the paintings of Austrian artists Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, as well as those by Oskar Kokoschka whose theories on vision played an important role in the development of Viennese Expressionism. 

At the outbreak of World War I, Ernst Neuschul avoided conscription by relocating to Kraków, Poland in 1916. He continued his studies at Kraków’s Art Academy studying under Art Nouveau artist Józef Mehoffer. In the summer of 1918 Neuschul went to Prague, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts under Franz Thiele. In Prague during August of that year, he met Lucie Lindermann, a Dutch-Javanese dancer raised in Berlin who performed under the name Takka-Takka, When the war ended, Neuschul entered Berlin’s Academy of Art where he was awarded the Rome Prize in 1918. 

In July 1919, Neuschul had his first solo exhibition of 39 works at Weinert’s salon in Prague. He and Lindermann took an apartment in Berlin and embarked on a series of trips to Java and the East Indies. Upon his return, Neuschul became involved with East Indian dance, wrote scripts for experimental films based on Asian myths, and designed dance costumes for his wife, who performed with them in theaters in Lucerne and other cities. On the twenty-fourth of July in 1922, Neuschul and Lucie Lindermann were married in Berlin; in the following years she became his most important model.

In 1926, Neuschul became a member of Berlin’s November Group, a collective of expressionist artists and architects who shared socialist values and sought a greater voice in the organization of art schools and new laws surrounding the arts. An important breakthrough came to Neuschul in 1927; for the first time, he was noticed by a broad public in Germany. Neuschul successfully participated in eight exhibitions, six of them in Berlin with his work praised in multiple press articles. In the same year Neuschul received a contract with Berlin’s renowned Neumann-Nierendorf Gallery, which now ensured the artist a regular income. In the following years he also participated in exhibitions in many German cities. 

On November 13, 1928, Ernest Neuschul and Lucie Lindermann divorced. In 1929 he became a member of the Reich Association of Visual Artists in Germany. Two years later, Neuschul took over the chair of drawing and painting at the Charlottenburg Municipal Art School. In 1933, Neuschul became the last chairman of the November Group before it was banned by the Nazis. At his last exhibition in February 1933 at the “Haus der Künstler” on Schöneberger Ufer in Berlin, his works on display were confiscated and many of them destroyed. Immediately after these events, Neuschul fled to Czechoslovakia. Lucie Lindermann and Neuschul’s later second wife Christl Bell saved the works in his Berlin studio and brought them to Aussig.

In mid-1935, Neuschul received an invitation to Moscow from the Moscow Artists’ Union. In September of1935, he and his wife Christl traveled to Moscow with forty works created between 1929 and 1934. The state newspaper Pravda reported very positively on his solo exhibition at the Museum of New Western Art in Moscow; as a result, Neuschul subsequently received a number of commissions. Among others, he was commissioned to paint portraits of Josef Stalin and Georgi Dimitroff. On January 1, 1936 Neuschul became a member of the Moscow Union of Artists and the Union of Soviet Artists. Shortly before the beginning of Stalin’s second purges, Ernst Neuschul received advice from Andrei Bubnov, the People’s Commissar for National Education, to leave Moscow as soon as possible.

In February 1936, Neuschul gave a lecture on the Soviet Union in Aussig. The Prague press’s June 1936 pictorial supplement “Die Welt am Sonntag” reported in detail on Neuschul’s stay in the Soviet Union. In 1937, his last exhibition took place in his hometown of Auseig. In this exhibition two of Neuschul’s works were cut up and smeared with swastikas. On the third of November in 1937, Neuschul left his hometown of Aussig for good and moved with his family to Prague before the Czechoslovak borderlands were annexed by Hitler’s Germany in 1938.

Neuschul became a member of the Oskar Kokoschka Club and gave lectures on Degenerate Art, a category that was given to his own work. In 1938, Neuschul was on the Nazi blacklist and, as a Sudeten German, was threatened with extradition to the Third Reich by the Czech authorities. On March 10, 1939, Neuschul deregistered with the police and continued to live as an “illegal” in Prague. Through a connection to the British Labour Party, he was able to prepare his family’s emigration to England. The German Wehrmacht, not yet connected to the Gestapo, issued the exit permit, and on March 24, 1939, the Neuschul family left for England via Holland. Neuschul’s mother, who stayed in Prague to care for Neuschul’s sick brother, was later murdered in Auschwitz with those family members still in Prague.

On May 19, 1939, Neuschul became a member of the Free German Artists Association in England. As a rejection of the past, he changed his name from Neuschul to Norland. Neuschul lived in the family house in London-Hampstead until the end of his life. On September 11, 1968, Ernest Neuschul died at the age of 73.

At the beginning of Ernst Neuschul’s artistic activity, expressionism was in vogue, with intense colors in abstract forms. For his own work, Neuschul transformed this style into the more concrete style of New Objectivity. Gradually socially critical themes found their way into his range of motifs. Neuschul depicted the fringe groups of society; he painted drunkards, women on the streets, and workers in the fields or at their machines. During his time in Moscow, Neuschul was given to understand that he should paint the workers in the style of Socialist Realism that expressed the ideal state. He rejected this idea and continued to paint what he saw and not what he was supposed to see. After the war, Neuschul continued to abstract his style, but like other émigrés who had left Germany, he was unable to match the success he had enjoyed before he fled. Neuschul was rediscovered in Germany in 2001, when the Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie, in cooperation with the Czech Republic, organized a four-week retrospective of his paintings in Regensburg.

Notes: The University of Birmingham, England, has a short article on Ernst Neuschul’s 1931 painting “Black Mother”, painted at a time in which the Nazi Party was making significant gains in elections. The article can be found at: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/lcahm/departments/historyofart/research/projects/map/issue3/arts-trail-pages/ernst-neuschul-black-mother.aspx

In 1924, Ernst Neuschul painted his biblical scene “Samson II”. An interesting article on its creation process can be found at Berlin’s Jewish Museum website located at: https://www.jmberlin.de/en/ernest-neuschul-samson-II

Top Insert Image: Helen Craig, “Ernst Neuschul”, circa 1960s, Gelatin Silver Print, Collection of Helen Craig

Second Insert Image: Ernst Neuschul, “Black Mother”, 1931, Oil on Canvas,  100.5 x 65.5 cm, Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester, England

Third Insert Image: Ernst Neuschul, “Laundress”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvass, 100.3 x 65.1 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Ernst Neuschul, “Woman ironing”, circa 1930, Oil on Canvas, 65 x 46 cm, Staattiche Museen, Berlin

Bottom Insert Image: Ernst Neuschul, “Meine Drei Frauen”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 81 cm, Private Collection 

Antoni Rząsa

The Artwork of Antoni Rząsa

Born in February of 1919 in Futoma, a village located at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, Antoni Rząsa was a Polish sculptor whose works were inspired by native folk art. He was born in an area where Catholic churches, having been erected since the sixteenth-century, were later  surrounded by Orthodox temples. The art of creating both practical and spiritual objects from wood was a common and flourishing tradition in Poland’s Subcarpathian Voivodeship.

Attracted by the characteristics of wood and its carving, Rząsa carried on local tradition and began combining the religious experience with the folk art of the region. His work presented to the viewer an uncharacteristic understanding of faith, suffering and humor. Rzasa’s figures of weeping Marys and Crucified Christs captivated both priests and atheists with their gestures and openness to more than one interpretation. In addition to his iconic figures, Rząsa also created figures drawn from family experiences and a series of carved chairs and benches with elements of flora and fauna.  

Antino Rząsa graduated from the High School of Fine Arts in Zakopane,  a southern Polish town in the region of Podhale. In 1938, he studied at the city’s School of Wood Industry under Polish sculptor Antoni Kenar, who was reforming the educational system by placing an emphasis on traditional folk art and its connection to contemporary art. In his own work, Kenar combined elements of the Podhale region with influences from Cubism and Art Déco.

In 1939, Rząsa’s studies were suspended with the outbreak of World War II. He joined the local guerrilla group in 1940 within which he served as a messenger runner. During his war service, Rząsa received notice that his mother had died in 1941. He returned to Zakopane in 1948 and resumed his studies under the guidance of Antoni Kenar at the School of Wood Industry. Rząsa graduated in 1952, the same year his father died. Invited by Kenar to teach sculpture at the school, he taught and lectured there until 1973. During his tenure, the school was renamed the Antoni Kenar Art School Complex after Kenar’s death in 1959.

Antoni Rząsa created the majority of his work through the creation of multiple series revolving around themes both secular and religious. His first series was the “Days of War” which covered a two year period from 1956 to 1958. In 1960, Rząsa started the one-year “Saint Annes”cycle and also began a twelve-year cycle entitled “The Pietas”. The most prolific of his series was “The Cycle of Crosses” which include six cycles created over a period of thirteen years from 1962 to 1975. 

Rząsa’s first group showing was the 1952 “Utility in Art” exhibition held in Zakopane. Other group exhibitions followed regularly In Berlin, Geneva, London, Warsaw, Shanghai and Beijing. In 1963, Rząsa had two solo exhibitions: the Artist and Viewer Gallery in Warsaw’s Łazienki Park and Kraków’s PAX Gallery. Other solo presentations included an exhibition at Warsaw’s Gallery of Sculpture in 1966, two shows in Zakopane in 1968 and 1973, and a 1972 solo exhibition in Chester, England. Polish directors Anna Micińska and Grzegorz Dubowski premiered their short 1973 biographical film “Portret Antoniego Rząsy (The Portrait of Antoni Rząsa)” at the Kraków Film Festival where they each were given a bronze award for their directorial work. 

In 1974, Antoni Rząsa with his wife Halina and son Marcin began construction of a home and gallery on Bogdańskiego Street in Zakopane. The next year, he showed his new work at a solo exhibition in Kraków’s Gallery of Contemporary Art. In 1976, Rząsa began his last Cycle of Crosses entitled “The Women of Ravensbrück” in honor of the one hundred and thirty thousand, mostly female, prisoners at that concentration camp. In July of the same year, the newly opened Antoni Rząsa Gallery on Bogdańskiego Street had its first exhibition.

On the twenty-sixth of January in 1980, Antoni Rząsa died and was buried in the Cemetery for People of Merit at the Pęksowy Brzyzk Cemetery in Zakopane. He was survived by his son Marcin and wife Halina Rząsa, who died on the fourteenth of December in the same year. Rząsa’s work is included in the collections of the Polish Army Museum; the National Museums in Warsaw, Kraków, and Poznań; the Reconciliation Chapel of the Ark of the Lord Church in Kraków-Fieńczyce; and in private collections in the United States, Denmark, Belgium, France, Italy and the Vatican. The Antoni Rząsa Gallery is currently managed by Marcin Rząsa and family.

The Antoni Rząsa Gallery website contains images of Rząsa’s work, testimonials from his friends, and contact information. The site address is: https://antonirzasa.pl/en/

Top Insert Image: Krystyna Gorazdowska, “Antoni Rząsa”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Antoni Rząsa, “Thoughtful”, 1960, Wood, 67.5 x 29 x 21.5 cm.

Third Insert Image: Antoni Rząsa, “Pieta Tobruku”, 1960, Polychrome Wood, 121 x 81 x 45 cm

Bottom Insert Image: Antoni Rząsa, “Pieta Tobruku”, 1960, Reverse, Polychrome Wood, 121 x 81 x 45 cm

Robin Francis Blaser: “Though It May Be One”

Photographers Unknown, Though It May Be One

the truth flies     hungry, at least     and otherous,
of which—-though it may be one—-Kafka said troublingly,
it has many faces

the faces one wants, tripping the light shadows of     its
skin colours     of its wordy swiftness, angry and solvent,
of its loud remarks

                                             as of feeding flocks                              one
year, one, among the smallest birds in the Northwest, flew
into the house          a darting, panic thought          at the walls
and grasses            perched on the top right corner of the frame

of Tom Field’s painting wherein adulterous Genji is found
out—so Lady Murasaki reads from her blue scroll—-and
permitted me to take it in my hand          soft, intricate

mind          honouring          and lift it out into the air
and the next year, again, one flew into the house,
almost certain, like a visitor, gold-crowned          winged

floating about          odd discoveries          and alighted on the brim
of the lasagna dish          my hand trembled as I took it up
and moved slowly to lift it out of the window          into

the air          a kind of thinking          like everybody else
looking          for a continuing contravention of limits and
of substance

                                                                                          for Sharon Thesen

Robin Blaser, A Bird in the House, The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser, 2006, University of California Press

Born in Denver, Colorado in May of 1925, Robin Francis Blaser was an American-Canadian poet, essayist and editor. A member of San Francisco’s Berkeley Poetry Renaissance of the 1940s, he established himself as a key figure on the west coast of British Columbia and a prominent influence among Canadian experimental poets.

The son of Ina Mae McCreedy and Robert Augustus Blaser, Blaser spent his early years at small railroad depots in the desert areas of Idaho where his grandmother worked as a telegrapher. Through the efforts of his mother and grandmother, he was able to attend the University of California at Berkeley where he studied under the renowned German historian Ernst Kantorwicz, known for his 1957 work on medieval political theology “The King’s Two Bodies”. In 1946, Blaser met poets Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan and participated in the cultural scene which would be known as the Berkeley Renaissance. Along with Black Mountain poets Robert Creeley and Charles Olson, they were pioneers in the emerging new postmodern poetry movement.

Robin Blaser graduated in 1955 with a Master of Arts in Literature and a Master in Library Science. His degree in library science enabled him to obtain a position in Boston at Harvard’s Widener Library. During his four years in Boston, Blaser met fellow poets John Wieners, Ed Marshall and Steve Jonas; he would take weekend trips to New York City to visit poets Frank O’Hara and Donald Allen. After a year of traveling in Europe, Blaser returned in 1960 to San Francisco where, over the next five years, he wrote such poems  as “The Moth Poem” and the first four works of “Image-Nations”, a series that he continued to expand over three decades.

By 1965, the Berkeley scene had changed; friends were feuding and Jack Spicer had just died in August from alcoholism at the age of forty. In the following year, Blaser read his work at a poetry festival in Vancouver and accepted a teaching position in the English department at the newly-opened Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. In 1974, he became a Canadian citizen and met his life-long love David Farwell. They would reside together in a gracious duplex on Trafalgar Street in the Kitsilano neighborhood of Vancouver for thirty-five years until Blaser’s death. In 1986, Blaser took early retirement from the university but continued to write, lecture, and teach at Naropa University’s summer writers’ program in Boulder, Colorado.

Robin Blaser was a prolific writer; he wrote eleven books of essays; fourteen collections of poetry;  the libretto for an opera entitled “The Last Supper” by English composer Sir Harrison Birtwistle: and several works of translation. He studied the classics written in the original Latin and Greek and was fluent in German, French, Portuguese, and Italian. Following the example of German-born American historian and political theorist Hannah Arendt, Blaser sought through his poetry to restore the public world as a space where differences could be seen through multiple points of views. 

Blaser’s poetry is filled with fragments, allusions, intersections of memory and myth, and concepts from philosophers and other poets. Like his friend Jack Spicer, he used the serial-poem format that enabled him to repeatedly return  to ideas through different angles. Most prominent of these works are the numbered “Image Nations” and the series “The Truth is Laughter”, a part of his 1993 “The Holy Forest”. Blaser sought to redefine the lyric as not something presented by a solitary, insular voice but rather by a world larger than one human experience.

Robin Blaser’s collections of poetry include the 1964 “The Moth Poem”, the 1968 “Cups”, “Syntax” in 1983, and the 1995 “Nomad”. His poetry and prose has been published into three collections: the 2007 “The Holy Forest”, Miriam Nichol’s  2006 “The Fire”, and the 2002 “Even on Sunday: Essays, Readings and Archival Materials on the Poetry and Poetics of Robin Blaser”. He received the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry’s Lifetime Recognition Award in 2006. Two years later, Blaser’s 2007 “The Holy Forest” was awarded the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize. 

In 2005, Blaser received the Order of Canada, the country’s highest civilian honor, for a lifetime of outstanding achievement, dedication to the community and service to the nation. After a fierce struggle with cancer, Robin Francis Blaser passed away at the St. James Cottage Hospice in Vancouver on the seventh of May in 2009. He was survived by his brother, sister and loving partner David Farwrll, who passed away unexpectedly in January of 2020 at their Vancouver home. Robin Blaser papers, correspondence, and photographs are housed in the Special Collections and Rare Books department of the Simon Fraser University.

Notes: For those interested, I have noted two articles written about Robin Blaser’s poetry and life. The first one is the Dooneyscafe August 2003 article written by Blaser’s intimate friend Stan Persky. This article which covers the early formative years of Blaser’s poetry can be found at: https://dooneyscafe.com/about-robin-blaser/

A second article is Miriam Nichols 2017-2018 “I Am Writing a Biography”. This article contains many sections dealing with Robin Blaser’s life and his “project” as a poet. This article can be found at the Itinéraires website located at: https://journals.openedition.org/itineraires/3663?lang=en

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Robin Blaser at Berkeley”, 1960, The Electronic Poetry Center, Buffalo, New York

Geoffrey Laurence

The Artwork of Geoffrey Laurence

Born in Paterson, New Jersey in 1949, Geoffrey Laurence is an American painter, illustrator, educator and designer of both graphic and interior work. Although considered an artist of the realism school, he is more concerned with the emotional responses that can be achieved through various painting techniques. Laurence finds figurative painting to be artificial by its very nature and, thus, an abstraction of the observed life-experience. For him, the goal of all painting is to engage the viewer in an emotional narrative.

Geoffrey Laurence’s parents were naturalized Americans, refugees from Europe and Holocaust survivors. At four years of age, Laurence moved with his family to England where he received his education. In 1965, he entered London’s Byam Shaw School of Art where he studied under geometric painter Bridget Riley. After receiving his London Certificate in Art and Design in 1968, Laurence studied graphic design for a year under poster artist Tom Eckersley at the London College of Printing. In 1969, he studied under Frederick Gore, the Head of the Painting Department, at Saint Martins School of Art where he earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1972.

Laurence moved to New York City in 1992 and attended the New York Academy of Art where he studied with painter and draftsman Eric Fischl and realist painter Vincent Desiderio. Laurence received his Master of Fine Arts Cum Laude in 1995. He worked freelance for the next tweety years in different art-related fields. Laurence was an illustrator for several magazines, including “Woman’s World” and “Look Now”, as well as a graphic designer for such companies as Pineapple and British Petroleum. 

In the fashion industry, Geoffrey Laurence created a range of t-shirts for Walt Disney, the British online clothing retailer Burton and the UK-based global retailer French Connection. He also created work for fashion designer Katherine Hamnett and such companies as PampleMouse and Muscle Sport. During the 1990s, Laurence did interior design work for restaurants including London’s Zen restaurant chain. His design work has appeared in Vogue Magazine, the Royal Institute of British Architects magazine and the London Evening Standard. In addition to applying his skills to freelance work, Laurence continued his focus on figurative drawing and painting, work which regularly appeared in exhibitions. 

Exposed to art since early childhood, Laurence has always been fascinated with the history of its development from early cave paintings to European masterworks. He sees art, which is older than verbal language, to be a major part of being human, that distinction which establishes human identity and elevates man from mere mechanical life. Laurence’s work has evolved over the course of his career and developed into two general themes. The first is maintaining a balanced link between pre-1900 classical painting and work of a more contemporary nature. The second is the continuation of a meaningful visual response to the Holocaust, a personal dedication resulting from his being the offspring of concentration camp survivors.

Geoffrey Laurence has been painting and exhibiting his work both in the United States and Europe for over forty-five years. In addition to group and solo gallery exhibitions, his work has been exhibited at the Brighton Museum in the United Kingdom; Taos, New Mexico’s Van Vechten-Lineberry Museum; Sacramento’s Center for Contemporary Art; the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art in Wisconsin; and Chicago’s Zhou B Art Center, among others. Laurence was recently a finalist at the 2023 ARC Art Renewal Centre Salon in New York City.

Among Laurence’s many honors have been the 1995 Walter Erlebacher Award, the 2004 Robert Rauschenberg Award, the 2006 George Sugarman Foundation Grant, the 2017 Palm Art Award, the 2018 PoetsArtists/Bauhaus Award, and the 2023 Robert Rauschenberg Grant. Laurence has taught at the Santa Fe Art Institute, the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art, the Santa Fe School of Art at SFCC, Seattle’s Gage Academy of Fine Art, and Santa Fe’s Bettina Steinke Studio. He is currently represented in the United States by Richard J. Demato Fine Arts Gallery in Romeo, Michigan.

Geoffrey Laurence’s website, which includes technical resources for artists, classes, and contact information, can be located at: http://www.geoffreylaurence.com

Second Insert Image: Geoffrey Laurence, “Animal Nature”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 76.2 x 50.8 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Geoffrey Laurence, “The Brother”, 2006, Oil on Canvas, 96.5 x 71.1 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Geoffrey Laurence, “Hold Fast”, 2004, Oil on Canvas, 198.1 x 182.9 cm, Private Collection

Robert Wiene: Film History Series

Robert Wiene, “The Hands of Orlac”, 1924, Silent Horror Film, Running Time 99 Minutes, Cinematography Günther Krampf and Hans Androschin, Producer Pan-Film

Robert Wiene was born in April of 1873 in the German Empire city of Breslau, now the city of Wroclaw in Poland. He was a German film director, producer and screenwriter who worked in a variety of genres including the German Expressionist movement of the early twentieth-century. Wiene was the elder son of theatrical actor Karl Wiene and the brother of Conrad Wiene, who also entered the German film industry. 

Wiene traveled during his formative years with his family throughout Central and Western Europe; he lived in Stuttgart, Vienna, Dresden and Prague. Wiene studied law at the University of Berlin and the University of Vienna where he earned his law degree. He practiced law in the central German city of Weimar until 1908. At which time, Wiene relocated to Vienna for a position as manager of a theatrical company; this position gave him the opportunity to perform in its stage productions. 

Robert Wiene’s initial participation in the German film industry was writing the screenplay for director Friedrich Müller’s 1913 silent film “Die Waffen der Jugend (The Weapons of Youth)”. This film is now considered a lost film. In the following year, Wiene directed his first film, “Er Rechts, Sie Links (He This Way, She That Way)”, a marital short comedy for the Berlin-based Messter Film. Messter Film became the center of the German film industry and played a prominent role in the development of the longer-running feature film. Between 1914 and 1918, Wiene wrote the screenplays for fifteen movies he directed for Messter Film. 

In 1919, Wiene and Austrian film director Heinz Hanus founded the “Association of Film Directors in Vienna”. This association was a member of what would become the Filmbund, a professional support group for the Austrian film industry which was on the verge of collapse. In 1920, Wiene directed what is probably his best known film, the 1920 silent horror film “Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari”, considered the archetypal work of German Expressionist cinema. The script was written by Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz, both pacifists, and was inspired by their experiences with the military during World War I.  

After the success of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, Robert Wiene became an independent director for the remainder of his career. In 1923 for Neumann-Film-Produktion GmbH, he directed and wrote the screenplay for the 1923 silent drama “Raskolnikow”, an adaption of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s epic 1866 novel “Crime and Punishment”. An avant-garde psychological drama, it starred Ukrainian-born actor Gregori Chmara and premiered in Berlin. This film also had a strong influence on the development of German cinema.

Wiene continued to direct and write screenplays for silent films until 1928. His final silent film was the 1928 “Unfug der Liebe (Folly of Love)” for Max Glass Film. Austrian director Max Glass wrote the screenplay and produced the film, which starred Maria Jacobini and the British actor Jack Trevor. Wiene directed his first sound film, the 1930 drama “Der Andere (The Other)”, at Berlin’s Terra Studios. He shot a French-language version entitled “The Prosecutor Hallers” immediately afterwards with different actors at the same studio. Wiene directed three more films in 1931: “Panik in Chicago”, “Der Liebesexpress (The Love Express)”, and in collaboration with French director Pierre Billon, “Nuits de Venise (Venetian Nights)”. 

In 1933, Robert Wiene directed “Taifun (Typhoon)”, a drama film based on writer Melchior Lengyei’s 1911 play of the same name. This was Wiene’s last film in Germany. In May of 1933 four months after the National Socialist Party took power, the film was banned. The film was seen by the censors as portraying Asian characters as more noble than Europeans; the censors were also concerned the film’s portrayal of the French justice system as incompetent might undermine the audience’s faith in the German system. The film was heavily reshot with an altered plot under the title “Polizeiakte 909”; the Japanese were now portrayed as unsympathetic villains. 

Wiene relocated to Budapest in 1933 and never returned to Germany. In September of that year, he started directing the 1934 “Eine Nacht in Venedig (One Night in Venice)” for Hunnia-Film, at that time the most significant sound film studio in Hungary. Two versions were shot simultaneously, a German language film and a Hungarian version with Hungarian actors. After finishing the film, Wiene traveled to London and finally to Paris where he attempted to make a sound remake of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” with artist Jean Cocteau. 

Robert Wiene died in Paris from cancer on the seventeenth of July in 1938, ten days before the end of production on his spy thriller “Ultimatum”. The film was finished posthumously by his friend Robert Sildmak, a prominent film director at Universal Films in Hollywood. Robert Wiene was buried at Paris’s Bagneux Cemetery in a temporary concession plot that was later recycled. There is no trace of his grave today. Only twenty of the ninety films Wiene created are currently known to exist. 

Note: Robert Wiene’s 1924 silent horror film “The Hands of Orlac” was based on French writer Maurice Renard’s novel “Les Mains d’Orlac”. It starred Russian Empire-born actress Alexandra Sorina and the prominent German-born British actor Conrad Veidt, who had played the murderous somnambulist in Wiene’s “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”. The film was shot at the studios of Listo Film in Vienna and had its Berlin premiere in September of 1924.

Several reconstructed versions of the film exist today with new sound scores by such composers as Henning Lohner, Paul Mercer, and Donald Sosin. German-émigré film director Karl Freund, as a final assignment with Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, directed a 1935 adaption of Renard’s novel under the title “Mad Love”. This film starred Peter Lorre as Dr. Gogol, Frances Drake as Yvonne Orlac, and Colin Clive, known for his 1931 role of Henry Frankenstein, as the somnambulist Stephen Orlac.  

In 1960, French filmmaker Edmond T. Gréville directed both an English and French version of “The Hands of Orlac”, based on his screenplay of Renard’s novel, that starred Mel Ferrer, Dany Carrel, Lucile Saint-Simon and Christopher Lee. The film’s cinematography was done by Desmond Dickinson and featured a score by French pianist and jazz composer Claude Bolling. 

Second Insert Image: Robert Wiene, “The Hands of Orlac”, 1924, (Alexandra Sorina and Conrad Veidt), Cinematography Günther Krampf and Hans Androschin

Third Insert Images: Robert Wiene, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, 1930, (Conrad Veidt), Cinematography Willy Hameister

Fourth Insert Image: Robert Wiene, “The Hands of Orlac”, 1924, (Conrad Veidt), Cinematography Günther Krampf and Hans Androschin

Bottom Insert Image: Robert Wiene, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, 1930, (Werner Drauss and Conrad Veidt), Cinematography Willy Hameister

Steve Huston

The Paintings of Steve Huston

Born in 1959 and raised in Alaska, Steve Huston is an American painter, draftsman and educator. He graduated with his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Prior to graduation, Huston was creating illustrations for such clients as Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Paramount Pictures, Caesar’s Palace, and Universal Studios. 

As an academic, Huston taught life drawing and painting, as well as, composition and anatomy at the Art Center College of Design. He later taught such classes at Warner Brothers Studios, Disney’s Animation and Gaming Divisions, Blizzard Entertainment, and DreamWorks Studios. In 1995, Huston began a career as a fine artist; he won top prizes for his work at both the 1995 and 1996 California Art Club Gold Medal Exhibitions. 

Passionate about having an artistic life, Steve Huston has created and taught art for the last forty years. He ia a painter of both landscapes and figurative works. Among Huston’s figurative works are scenes of men engaged in activities that require energy and movement, either in labor or sport. He has created an extensive series that depicts the sport of boxing; this Boxer series reveals both the tension and the energy that pervades the sport. Huston’s Worker series presents men intensely engaged in heavy labor work that requires both strength and stamina. These manual workers are depicted in the everyday tasks of carrying wooden beams, lifting large wooden crates, and moving objects.

Among those sources which have influenced Huston’s artwork are the works of Rembrandt and Italian Renaissance painter Titian; the early American Tonalist painters such as George Inness and Charles Eaton; the art projects of the the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration; and the graphic power and heroic character of the American Comic Book form. 

Steve Huston’s work has been featured in American Art Collector, Art News, Southwest Art, Harper’s Bazaar, American Artist and Western Art & Architecture, among other publications. His work has been exhibited at the Academy of Art College of the Carnegie Art Museum, the Pasadena Museum of Contemporary Art, London’s Albemarle Gallery, the Sullivan Goss Gallery in Santa Barbara and the Timothy Yargar Fine Art Gallery in Beverly Hills. Huston was also a frequent exhibitor at New York City’s prestigious Eleanor Ettinger Gallery from 1998 to its closing in 2013.

Steve Huston’s website, which features images of his work, livestream classes and limited edition prints, can be found at: https://stevehustonart.com

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Steve Huston”, 2019, Color Print for CGArchives January 2019

Second Insert Image: Steve Huston, Figure Studies from Sketchbook, Brown Ink and Gouache on Paper

Bottom Insert Image: Steve Huston, Title Unknown, (Three Workers), Date Unknown, Worker Series, Oil on Canvas

Gaston Goor

Gaston Goor, “Homere et les Bergers (Homer and the Shepherds)”, 1940, Oil on Panel, 81.3 x 119.4 cm, Private Collection

Born in Lunéville, the capital city of Lorraine in October of 1902, Gaston Goor was a highly accomplished, albeit controversial, French illustrator, painter, muralist and sculptor. He is best known for his illustrations in “Amitiés Particulières (Special Friendships)” and other works by French writer and diplomat Roger Peyrefitte, his primary patron. 

The son of Auguste Léon Goor and Marie Angèle Berthe Becker, Goor entered the École des Beaux-Arts at the age of seventeen. He left his native province in 1925 to travel to Paris where he worked in the studio of painter and writer Amédée Ozenfant. In 1917, Ozenfant and painter Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, had founded the doctrine of Purism, a style of art in which elements are represented as robust simplified forms with minimal detail. Through his association with Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, Goor was introduced to modern art and prominent artists such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and  Jean Lurçat, best known for his tapestries. 

During his stay in Versailles, Gaston Goor was introduced by poet André Salmon to author André Gide who guided him to the profession of illustrator. Working with Capitole Editions, Gore became a prominent artist and created illustrations for forty volumes under that title. He created illustrations for Léon Daudet’s “Écrivains et Artistes”, Henry de Montherlant’s “L’Etoile du Soir”, Lucien Daudet’s “Le Voyage de Shakespeare”, and François Mauriac’s “Hommes Devant Dieu”. Goor also provided illustrations for both the Horizons de France and the Trianon editions.

In 1929, Goor was commissioned to produce decorative work for the Colonial Exhibition in Paris. After a study trip to Morocco, he returned Versailles where he worked briefly for its Department of Fine Arts before locating to the resort town of Hyères where his family had settled. Goor’s nude studies of the young model Jean Joerimann caught the attention of writer Jean Renaud Icard who gave him an exhibition in his Lyon gallery. After the exhibition, Goor received a commission to illustrate Icard’s latest book “Mon Page”. 

In the 1930s, Gaston Goor received private commissions, both illustrative and decorative, from wealthy clients and art collectors. Among these prominent men was the owner of a large luxury hotel in Hyères, who was the father of Jean Joerimann, the model for the “Mon Page” illustrations and an unreciprocated love interest for Goor. In 1942, he received a commission from architect Maurice Novarina to create murals for the Church of Douvaine in the Auvergne-Rhõne-Alpes regional city of Haute-Savoie.

While in Haute-Savoie, Goor was accused by German police of helping Jewish people to cross the Swiss border; as a result, he was given ‘voluntary worker’ status and sent to the camp near Zittau in Saxony. Noticed for his talents, Goor was employed as an artist; he remained in the camp until February of 1945 when the city of Dresden was destroyed by Allied bombing. After the war, Goor initially returned to Paris before he moved to Cannes for an exhibition of his work. 

There is little information available on the remainder of Gaston Goor’s life. This period was marked by several disappointments, including that his other illustrations for the “Satyricon” were not published. It is known that Goor retired and remained in Hyènes until his death from cancer at the French Riviera city of Toulon on the thirteenth of December in 1977.

Note: Gaston Goor’s illustrations for Volume I and Volume II of Roger Peyrefitte’s
“Les Amitiés Particulières” can be found on E. Neagle’s site “Homo Fabula: At the Intersection of Art & Luterature” located at: https://homofabula.blogspot.com/2017/05/front-free-endpaper-gaston-goor.html

Top Insert Image: Gaston Goor, “Mythological Subject”, 1947, Lead Graphite on Paper, 21 x 27 cm, Catherine Gide Collection

Second Insert Image: Gaston Goor, “The Battle of San Romano after Paulo Ucello”, 1970, Oil and Pastel Highlights on Panel, 94 x 121 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Gaston Goor, Mougin Vase, “The Fairy of the Water Lilies”, Height 31 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Gaston Goor, “Eros and Hymenaeus”, 1949, Oil on Canvas, 37 x 45 cm, Private Collection

Michael Walsh: “Whispering to the Nearby Warriors”

Photographers Unknown, Whispering to the Nearby Warriors

        At Jeffers Petroglyphs

By their initials and first names
           scratched into quartzite

underfoot, I know the culprits: Otto
           like a fancy scar

on a buffalo’s flank, Sven
           muddling the lines of a glyph,

the meaning of its shape forgotten, and Judy
           who needed to record the date

of defacement. I hear her story from the guide:
           how she stole her father’s chisel,

chipped her way into a turtle’s back,
           how much shame she brought

to her family in this search for the lost meanings
           hidden within the shapes of the letters,

written on a shell next to the sun, an attempt,
           if I’m generous,

to contrast two languages and find,
           in the mixed -up symbols,

the trees of her homeland cut down long ago.
           She still lives. I believe, on some days,

wherever she is, she hears the forest mumbling
           when the wind blows across the carved twigs

of her name, out here, whispering to the nearby warriors,
           asking forgiveness for this trespass.

Michael Walsh, The Kids Who Carved into Petroglyphs, The Dirt Riddles, 2021

Michael Walsh is a poet and writer, an independent scholar, and a creative writing instructor. With an early interest in writing, he began his studies at Illinois’s Knox College in 1993. Walsh studied under Poet-in-Residence Sheryl St. Germain and the Philip Sydney Post Professor of English Robin Metz, both of whom made an impact on his writing career. Supported by his professors, Walsh was able, as a Queer student, to connect and have meaningful conversations with the faculty. He graduated with his Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing in 1997.

After a period of reflection on his past studies during a stay at his family’s farm, Walsh entered the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities from which he graduated with his Master of Fine Arts in Creative and Professional Writing. His first collection of poetry, “The Dirt Riddles”, was published in 2010 by the University of Arkansas Press; this volume won the Miller Williams Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. Walsh’s poetry collections also include two chapbooks through Red Dragonfly Press, the 2003 “Adam Working the Garden” and the 2011 “Sleepwalks”. His 2021 “Creep Love”, published by Autumn House Press, was a Lambda Poetry Award finalist.

Michael Walsh is the editor of the 2022 “Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology”, the first eco-queer anthology of contemporary nature poetry that magnifies and centers LBGTQ+ voices and perspectives. It contains work from over two hundred queer writers from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Expanding the genre of nature poetry and offering new views on queerness and the natural world, the anthology features poets Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Bianco and Allen Ginsber, as well as, emerging poets such as Jari Bradley, Alicia Mountain and Eric Tan.

In recognition for his work, Walsh was awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship in Poetry and a Jerome Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship. After residing in Minneapolis for more than two decades, Michael Walsh now lives with his husband in the Driftless region of southwest Wisconsin where he continues to develop his eco-queer and literary teachings.

Michael Walsh’s website, which includes information on readings, lectures and poetry manuscript reviews, is located at: https://www.michaeltwalsh.com

Header Image (Eight): Danny Lyon, “Showers”, 1968, Gelatin Silver Print, Detail, 35.6 x 27.9 cm, Private Collection

Top Insert Photo: Adam Nelsen, “Michael Walsh”, Date Unknown, Color Print

Angus McBean

The Photography of Angus McBean

Born in the Monmouthshire city of Newbridge on the eighth of June in 1904, Angus Rowland McBean was a Welsh photographer and set designer associated with the Surrealist movement. He went through two main creative periods in his forty-year career: pre-World War II in which he experimented successfully with surrealist images and post-war when his portraiture photography became more conventional and focused on theatrical and entertainment artists.

Angus McBean was the eldest and only son of Clement McBean, of Scottish descent, and Irene Sara Thomas, of Welsh descent. His father, after his military career in the South Wale Borderers, became a surveyor in the mining industry which necessitated frequently moving his family. McBean had his primary education at the Monmouth School for Boys and later attended the Newport Technical College where he developed an interest in photography. At the age of fifteen, McBean bought his first camera and created sets, props and costumes for the amateur dramatic productions at Monmouth’s Lyceum Theater.

In 1925, McBean’s father died from tuberculosis which he had contracted while fighting in the trenches during World War I. After his fathers death, McBean relocated to London where he worked in the antiques department of Liberty’s, London’s luxury department store on Regent Street. In his free time, McBean engaged in photographing his friends, making masks, and attending theater performances in the West End. He left Liberty’s in 1931, grew a distinctive beard, and began a career in photography. McBean served as an apprentice at the New Grafton Street Studio owned by photographer Hugh Cecil who taught him photographic techniques. After a year, McBean established his own studio on Belgrave Road in Victoria, London.

The turning point in Angus McBean’s career came in 1935 when Welsh actor and dramatist Ivor Novello asked him to create masks for playwright Clemence Dane’s adaption of author Max Beerbohm’s “The Happy Hypocrite”. Pleased with the masks, Novello commissioned McBean to take portrait photographs for the production. In 1937, McBean received a commission from the British weekly illustrated journal “The Sketch” for a photograph of actress Beatrix Lehmann in Eugene O’Neill’s “Mourning Becomes Electra”. This portrait was inspired by the surrealist art of the era. McBean, in collaboration with artist Roy Hobdell, produced a series of surrealist-styled portraits of leading actresses for a weekly series which ran until the beginning of World War II. 

After the war, McBean established a new studio on Endell Street in London. One of his first commissions was to photograph the American actress Clare Luce who was appearing in “Anthony and Cleopatra” at Stratford-on-Avon’s Shakespeare Memorial Theater. McBean next produced a series of portraits that incorporated notable objects from the lives of his sitters: Ivor Novello is shown with bound editions of his musicals and Cecil Beaton is surrounded by pages from his scrapbooks. In the 1940s and 1950s, he was the most important photographer of theater and dance personalities. Among his many sitters were Audrey Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Noel Coward, Mae West, Katharine Hepburn, Margot Forteyn and Robert Helpmann. 

Angus McBean’s career took a new direction in the 1950s and 1960s as he began shooting color photographs for album covers. He photographed Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Shirley Bassey and the Beverley Sisters, and Spike Mulligan for his album “Milligan Preserved”. McBean also was responsible for the 1963 cover art of The Beatles album “Please, Please Me” which showed the group leaning over the balcony at the EMI offices in London. Six years later, he was to recreate the shot for the the proposed “Get Back” album; however, the recreated shot later appeared on the two retrospectives of the group’s work “1962-1966” and “1967-1970”. 

In the 1960s, McBean purchased Flemings Hall in Bedingfield, Suffolk and undertook a major renovation project; this estate would be his home until his death. In this period, he gradually reduced the number of commissions he accepted but continued to work on selected projects. In 1984, McBean appeared as a special guest in musician-composer David Sylvian’s music video “Red Guitar”. Sylvian, who has a strong interest in McBean’s work, was directly inspired by McBean’s 1938 surrealistic portrait of cinema and theatrical actress Flora Robson. 

Over the course of his career, Angus McBean produced two hundred and eighty portrait photographs; he was also produced seventy-nine self portraits. In 1990, McBean fell ill on a holiday in Morocco and, after returning to England, died at Ipswich Heath Road Hospital on the 9th of June in 1990, eighty-six years after his birth. His work is in many private and public collections including London’s National Portrait Gallery, the Mander & Mitchenson Collection at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal National Theater Archive, and the Shakespeare Center Library and Archive in Stratford-on-Avon. 

Note: In the spring of 1942, Angus McBean’s career was temporarily ruined when he was arrested in the city of Bath for criminal acts of homosexuality. He was sentenced to four years in prison; however he was released in the autumn of 1944. After the end of the second World War, McBean was able to successfully resume his career. In the late 1940s, he formed a close, yet brief, relationship with male model Sebastian Minton. McBean helped Minton, who had ambitions of becoming an actor, put together a photographic portfolio for studio presentations.

Note: If anyone knows the identity of the actress in the fourth photo of the header photo array, please send me that information via the contact page. Thank you.

Top Insert Image: Angus McBeam, “Self Portrait”, circa 1951, Bromide Print, 29.4 x 26 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

Second Insert Image: Angus McBean, “Surrealist Beach Scene with a Male Figure”, circa 1949, Hand-Colored Silver Print, 50.5 x 67.0 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Angus McBean, “Vivien Leigh ‘Twelfth Night’ Old Vic Tour”, 1961, Bromide Print, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Angus McBean, “Choreographer and Dancer Berto Pasuko”, 1947, Gelatin Silver Print, 37.5 x 28.6 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Angus McBean, “Binkie Beaumont, Angela Baddeley and Emlyn Williams”, 1947, Bromide Print, 38 x 29.7 cm, Harvard Theater Collection, Harvard University, National Portrait Gallery

Amalas Rosa

The Artwork of Amalas Rosa

Amalas Rosa is a visual artist known for combining her skills at illustration with story telling. She spent her formative years in Germany where she was exposed to the wide range of European comics, particularly those from France and Belgium: “Tin Tin”, “Lucky Luke”, “Asterix” and “Gaston”. In later years, Amalas discovered the graphic work done in the genre of anime, as well as the illustrative work of manga comics.

Born into a family with strong interest in the arts, Amalas grew up surrounded by artwork and began drawing at an early age, first characters from fairy tales and later the people around her. Through her parents, she was exposed to a wide range of interests: museums, the pleasure of reading, music, photography, and both fine art and illustrations. Although she had an early interest in the field of archaeology, Amalas decided to study for a career as an illustrator, a field which enabled her to use both her writing and drawing talents. 

In her studies, Amalas Rosa studied integrated design, which included fashion and product design, as well as typography and illustration. Drawn with an extensive knowledge of color theory, her illustrations are known for their technical perspective and abundance of small detailed objects carefully placed throughout her scenes. Amalas’s characters also are created with the same amount of attention to detail in their dress, posture and expression. Amalas, a skilled photographer, will often shoot images of interesting objects, scenery and architecture for both inspiration and detailed references for her work. 

Amalas almost always starts an illustration with her characters and their environment. Once the initial idea is formed, she develops her illustrations through a lengthly and technical process. First, a rough sketch of the setting and the characters is drawn; then the lines of both are cleaned up. Perspective lines are place on the sketch to map and solidify the area. Using these lines, Amalas draws the surface areas that surround the characters.

With these areas established, Amalas Rosa slowly adds all the scene’s objects into the drawing; these range from large tables and cabinets to smaller detailed items such as electrical cables and cups. In the next stage, a block of single color is initially used to establish the drawn characters. Once this is accomplished, Amalas chooses a color palette suitable for the mood of the illustration. The colors of this palette are then applied to the work with consideration to both light and shadow. To finish her work, Amalas applies layered tones as a final adjustment.

Amalas was in her mid-teens when she first created a fantasy story line with two male characters: Aran and Tao. Over time, these characters further evolved into persons of specific heritage: Aran became the Syrian son of a single mother and Tao became a member of a large Taiwanese family. Separated for a period when Tao and his family moved away, the close childhood friends were later reunited to share the experiences and emotions of life in the city. Over time, Amalas continued to expand these characters through her own memories, feelings and experiences. In a collaboration with writer Suzanne Samin, both artist and writer are further developing Aran and Tao into an illustrated graphic novel format that would continue their life story.

Amalas Rosa’s social media sites are located at:  https://www.tumblr.com/amalasdraws  and  https://twitter.com/AmalasRosa

For literary and graphic illustrative work, Amalas Rosa can be contacted through her agent at the Azantian Literary Agency. 

Prints of Amalas Rosa’s artwork are available at the online INPRNT gallery located at: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/amalasrosa/

Second Insert Image: Amalas Rosa, “God’s Bathroom Floor”, 2021, Digital Art, Cover Art for Atmosphere’s 7 Inch Vinyl “God’s Bathroom Floor”, Rhymesayers Entertainment, Art Director Alex Everson

Bottom Inset Image: Amalas Rosa, “Sharing Food is Love”, 2021, Aran and Tao as Adults, Digital Art, 4000 x 5000 Pixels, 600 DPI, Artist Collection

Mauritz Stiller: Film History Series

Mauritz Stiller, “Vingarne (The Wings)”, 1916, Silent Film Scenes, Screenwriters Axel Esbensen and Mauritz Stiller, Cinematography Julius Jaenzon, Original Running Time 69 Minutes, Distributor Svenska Biografteatem

Born in July of 1883 in Helsinki, Mauritz Stiller, birth name Moshe Stiller, was a Swedish film director of Finnish Jewish descent known for his pioneering work in the Swedish film industry. His family of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage originally lived in Russia and Poland before settling in Finland. At that time, these countries were autonomous regions of the Imperial Russia under Emperor Alexander III. 

Mauritz Stiller was raised by family friends after the death of his father in 1887 and the subsequent suicide of his mother. Interested in acting from an early age, he was offered the opportunity to practice his acting skills in the city theaters of Åbo and Helsinki. In his twenties, Stiller received a draft notice to enter the army of Czar Nicholas II, who as the last Emperor of Russia had ascended to the throne in November of 1894. Instead of entering service, Stiller chose exile and settled in Sweden where he later became a citizen in 1921. 

By 1912 at the age of twenty-nine, Stiller had become a member of Sweden’s developing silent film industry. He initially was a scriptwriter, actor and director for short silent films. Stiller appeared as an actor in four films in 1912, his first being the role of a passenger in the 1912 “Trädgårdsmästaren (The Gardener). After these four films, Stiller focused on his writing and directing; he acted in only two more of his films: the 1914 “När Svärmor Regerar (When the Mother-in-Law Reigns)” and the 1916 “Vingarne (The Wings)”. 

As his skills developed, Mauritz Stiller began directing feature-length productions. His 1918 feature “Thomas Graals Bästa Bam (The First Child of Thomas Graal)” received critical acclaim. This comedy on the best way to raise children starred actor and director Victor Sjöström and the stage and film actress Karin Molander. By 1920, Stiller had directed more than forty films and was considered a leading figure in the Swedish film industry. Among these films was the 1919 sixteenth-century crime drama “Herr Arnes Pengar (Sir Arne’s Treasure)” based on author Selma Lagerlöf’s 1903 “The Treasure”. This silent film was the first to feature illustrator Alva Lundin’s handwritten artistic title cards.

Stiller met a young actress named Greta Gustafsson at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm. He cast her in the secondary but important role of Elizabeth Dohna in his 1924 romantic drama film “Gösta Berlings Saga (The Atonement of Gosta Berling)”. In 1925, Stiller accepted an offer from Louis B. Mayer to direct for Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios. He relocated to the United States accompanied by Gustafsson, soon to be given her acting name Greta Garbo, and the actor Einer Hanson, who had appeared in Stiller’s films. Both actors became successful at  MGM; although Hanson achieved greater success with his move to Paramount Pictures.

Mauritz Stiller was assigned to direct the 1926 “The Temptress”, Greta Garbo’s second film with Metro Goldwyn Mayer. After repeated arguments with the studio’s executives, he was replaced on the film by Fred Niblo, who had recently finished work as principal director on the 1925 silent epic “Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ”, the third highest-grossing silent film in history. His contract terminated, Stiller was immediately signed by Paramount Pictures for whom he made three successful films in 1927. However because of continuing disagreements with Paramount’s executives, Stiller was terminated in the middle of his fourth film.

Mauritz Stiller returned to Sweden in 1927; he died in Stockholm from pleurisy, an infection in his lungs, at the age of forty-five in November of 1928. His body is interred at the Northern Cemetery in the Solna Municipality of Stockholm. For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Stiller was given a star in 1960 on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. A monument in Stiller’s honor was erected in the southern Swedish city of Kristianstad.

Notes: Mauritz Stiller’s 1916 silent film “Vingarne (The Wings)” was adapted from Danish author Herman Joachim Bang’s 1902 novel “Mikaël”, based on the life of sculptor Auguste Rodin. The novel would serve, eight years later, as the source for director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1924 silent film “Mikaël: The Story of the Third Sex”. Besides being an early homosexual-themed film, “Vingarne” is noted for its plot presented through flashbacks, as well as its use of a framing story, a main narrative that sets the stage for a set of shorter stories. The film is largely lost; only thirty minutes of its original seventy minute length still survives. There are several versions of the remaining film with added soundtracks on YouTube.

“Vingarne” tells the story of a devious countess (Danish actress Lili Bech) who comes between gay sculptor Claude Zoret (Norwegian actor Egil Eide) and his bisexual lover and model Mikaël (Swedish actor Lars Hanson). This leads to Zoert’s death at the base of a statue depicting Mikaël as the mythological winged Icarus. It should be noted that openly gay Swedish actor Nils Asther, later a Hollywood star, had his first film role, albeit uncredited, in Stiller’s “Vingarne”. 

A biography of Nils Asther can be found in the Film History Series archive of this site. 

Top Insert Image: Arnold Genthe, “Mauritz Stiller” Date Unknown, Photo Proof

Second Insert Image: Mauritz Stiller, “Hotel Imperial”, 1927, Film Poster, Cinematographer Bert Glennen, Production Famous Players-Lasky, Paramount Pictures

Third Insert Image: Roger Tillberg, “Greta Garbo and Mauritz Stiller”, 1925, Gelatin Silver Print

Fourth Insert Image: Mauritz Stiller, “The Street of Sin”, 1928, Film Poster, Cinematographer Bert Glennon, Harry Fischbeck and Victor Milner, Production Adolph Zucker and Jesse Lasky, Paramount Pictures

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Mauritz Stiller, Pola Negri,  George Siegmann”, 1927, Film Set of “Hotel Imperial”, Gelatin Silver Print

Carlos Farneti

Carlo Farneti, Illustrations from “Les Fleurs du Mal” by French poet Charles  Baudlaire, 1935 Edition, Publisher Gibert Jeune, Paris

Born in Naples in January of 1892, Carlo Farneti was an Italian artist known for his illustrations. He moved to Paris in 1926 where he illustrated works by notable writers from Europe and the United States. It was in Naples, where he lived, that Farneti had his first solo exhibition at the Galleria Corona in 1924; however, he established his career as an illustrator in France. 

Carlo Farneti illustrated a 1927 edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Nouvelles Histoires Extraordinaires (Extraordinary Tales)” with one-hundred forty-eight etchings. He next created original illustrations for Émile Zola’s 1928 “La Terra” which was published in a large quarto format with a limited edition of sixty. For the 1935 edition of poet Charles Baudelaire’s 1857 “Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil)”, Farneti created sixteen color plates and one hundred illustrations. Printed on vellum, the volume had a limited edition of three-thousand numbered copies. For a three volume limited edition set of Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary: Moeurs de Province” published by Javal and Bordeaux, Farneti created over one-hundred original drawings for volume three of this work.

During his career, Farneti provided at the request of wealthy amateurs an impressive number of original drawings. He would often add illustrations to already published works, as well as, augmenting literary volumes with larger compositions in accompanying folders.

In 1933 at the request of a patron, Farneti embellished an existing volume of Mirbeau’s 1927 work “The Garden of Supplices” with two-hundred thirty colored pencil drawings, placed in the margins or in the background of the texts. He also included a folio of ten large pastel compositions on gray Casson plates. In that same year, Carlo Farnet illuminated, with one-hundred five drawings, an original edition of novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s 1932 “Voyage au Bout de la Nuit (Travel to the End of the Night)”.

An accomplished illustrator who worked with notable writers, Carlo Farneti’s died on the tenth of November in 1961. 

Bottom Insert Image: Carlo Farneti, Illustration for Théatre du Grand Guignot, “Les Nuits du Bagne”, 1928, Vintage Poster, 58.4 x 38.1 cm, Publisher R. Balestrieri, Paris

Ben Kimura

The Art of Ben Kimura

Born in 1947, Ben Kimura (木村べん) was a Japanese artist known for his gay erotic artwork. As noted by historian and artist Gengoroh Tagame, he and Sadeo Hasogawa were among the central figures in Japan’s resurgence of gay artwork in the 1970s.  

Ben Kimura began his career in 1978 as an illustrator and cover artist for “Barazoku”, Japan’s first commercially circulated gay men’s magazine. The monthly magazine, edited by Bungaku Itō, began publication in July of 1971 and published four-hundred issues, the last being in 2008. Kimura was a regular art contributor until his departure in 1989. During this time, he was also a major contributor for cover and story illustrations for “Sabu”magazine. 

Kimura also contributed illustrations to the early yaoi magazines “June” and “Allan”, both male to male romance-fiction magazines for a female audience. His work for these magazines placed him among the first gay artists to achieve crossover success with a female audience. 

Ben Kimura’s artwork was highly sought after by the Japanese gay publications throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Unique among contemporary Japanese homoerotic artists, his work typically depicted masculine, handsome men rendered in a style that was romantic and sensual rather than explicitly pornographic. Kimura’s fit and stylish young men evoked both familiarity and a sense of nostalgia for life’s past encounters . 

In addition to work done for periodicals, Kimura self-published two collections of his homoerotic illustrations. The first collection was the 1997  “Tan-Pan Body (画集)” which was primarily a collection of cover art done for Sabu magazine prior to 1997. Kimura’s second collection “Go-One Boy (作品集)” was published in 1998. 

Ben Kimura died from a pulmonary embolism at the age of fifty-six on the eighteenth of February in 2003. As a tribute, a second printing of his “Tan-Pan Body” was reissued shortly after his death. Kimura’s collected works are managed by his partner and artistic executor Kihira Kai.