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.

Lynn Leland

Paintings by Lynn Leland

Born in Buffalo, New York in 1937, Lynn Leland studied at the Pratt Institute and Hunter College in New York, and continued his studies at the University of Delaware, where he achieved a Master’s Degree in Art History. After graduation, Leland worked as a dean of students at the New School in Manhattan. Awarded a Fulbright scholarship in 1961 to study in Europe, he attended the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, where he studied under the Scottish sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, widely considered as one of the pioneers of pop art.

Active in the art scene of 1960s New York, Leland exhibited his work at the A. M. Sachs Gallery and at the Simon Preston Gallery on the Lower East Side. On the recommendation of Metropolitan Museum of Art curator and historian Henry Geldzahler, Leland’s work was included in the influential exhibition “The Responsive Eye” held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965. This exhibition of one hundred twenty-five works, employing geometry and theories of perception and color, was organized by MoMA curator William Seitz and became one of the museum’s most popular shows at the time.

Lynn Leland’s work was also included in many group exhibitions, including the Brooklyn Museum Biennial in 1960, the “Optics and Kinetics” exhibition at Ohio University in 1965, “Multiplicity” at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art in 1966, and the “Harry Abrams Collection” exhibition in 1966 at the Jewish Museum in New York’s Upper East Side.

Leland’s artwork included abstract color compositions, wood block prints, watercolor paintings, landscape paintings and photography. Based partially on his interest in contemporary musical composition, Leland’s abstract work throughout the 1960s remained focused on the optical effect of ordered grids of colored circles. Becoming disillusioned with the art market by the early 1970s, he stopped entering exhibitions and focused on a career in the art education field..

Lynn Leland had a full career as a public school art educator in the New York City public school system, teaching art to junior high school students from the 1970s to 1990s. Upon his retirement, he moved to El Paso, Texas where he continued to pursue his interests in photography and painting, and exhibited his work locally. He was a member of the El Paso Art Association and the Photography Enthusiasts of El Paso. In order to be near his son Kipp Leland’s family, Lynn Leland moved to Helllertown, Pennsylvania, where he later passed away in 2019.

August Sander

August Sander: Portraits from “People of the Twentieth Century”

Born in 1876 in Herdorf, a small village east of Cologne in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, August Sander was a photographer, now viewed as a forefather of conceptual art and a pioneering documentarian of human diversity.

Sander spent his time, between 1897 and 1899, as a photographer’s assistant during his military service. In 1901, Sander started working for a photo studio in Linz, Austria, became a partner in 1902, and then the proprietor in 1904. By this time, he already had several exhibitions and purchases of his work by museums. After many successful exhibitions of his work, Sander relocated his studio to Cologne.

In 1911, August Sander began the first series of portraits for what would be his monumental project, “People of the Twentieth Century”, an archived and sustained photographic enterprise of twentieth-century man, These emphatically objective photographs from the years of the Kaisers, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime, and the early Federal Republic make up an unprecedented document of both the individual and the collective recent history of the German people.

In 1927, August Sander traveled through Sardinia for three months, where he took hundreds of photographs. A exhibition of his portraits at the Kölnische Kunstverein in 1927 received positive reviews from both critics and the public. This exhibition led to the 1929 publishing of Sander’s “Antlitz der Zeit (Faces of Our Time)”, which included the first sixty portraits from his twentieth-century series and an introduction by German novelist and essayist Alfred Döblin.

Under the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany, Sander’s work and personal life were greatly restrained. In 1934, Sander’s son Erich, a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party, was arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison, where he died shortly before the end of his sentence. The printing blocks for Sander’s “Antlitz der Zeit” were destroyed and unsold copies impounded in 1936 by the authorities, most likely due to the publication’s image of a heterogeneous German society of which the Nazi Party disapproved.

Despite the political situation in Germany between 1933 and 1945, August Sander continued working in his Cologne studio, portraying intellectuals, Jewish citizens, National Socialists, as well as regular people from the street. Many of these commercial portraits were included in his opus ”People of the Twentieth Century” where they became a political statement. Beginning in 1942, Sander started to relocate the most important parts of his negative archive to Kuchhausen, a small village in Westerwald, where he continued both his commercial photographic work and his project wor

Although August Sander’s main studio in Cologne was destroyed in a 1944 bombing raid, tens of thousands of his negatives, which he had left behind in the basement of a former apartment in Cologne, survived the war. In a later 1946 fire, approximately twenty-five thousand negatives were destroyed in the same apartment basement. In 1946, Sander continued his historical archive with a post-war photographic documentation of the bombed city of Cologne in 1946.

Sander sold a portfolio of four-hundred and eight photographs of Cologne, taken between 1920 and 1939, to the Kölnisches State Museum in 1953. These photos would form the 1988 book “Koõin wie es War (Cologne As It Was)””. In 1962 an edition of eighty photographs from the “People of the Twentieth Century” was published as a book entitled “German Mirror: People of the Twentieth Century”. Still working on his project at the age of eighty-eight, August Sander died of a stroke on April 20th in 1964. His body was buried next to his son Erich in Cologne’s Melaten Cemetery.

One of the most ambitious undertakings in the history of photography, the “People of the Twentieth Century” project occupied Sander for some 40 years, from the early 1920s until his death, during which he took portraits of hundreds of German citizens and then categorized them by social type and occupation — from farm laborers to circus performers to prosperous businessmen and aristocrats. Remarkable for their unflinching realism and deft analysis of character and lifestyle, Sander’s individual images stand out as high points of photographic portraiture and collectively propose the idea of the archive as art.

Although the Nazis confiscated the first publication of Sander’s work, and the majority of his negatives were later destroyed by fire, approximately eighteen hundred portrait negatives for “People of the Twentieth Century” survived, as well as Sander’s notes and plans. Together with the existing vintage prints, they have provided the basis for current reconstruction of Sander’s ambitious project in both book and exhibition form.

Middle Insert Image: August Sander, “Workmen in the Ruhr Region”, 1928, Silver Gelatin Print, August Sander Archive, VG, Bild-Kunst

Kelly Fearing

Kelly Fearing, “The Lifters”, 1944, Etching, 24.3 x 20.9 cm, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas

Born in Arkansas in 1918, Kelly Fearing was a painter, print maker, and teacher. He studied art at Louisiana Tech University and New York’s Columbia University, where he earned his Master’s Degree in 1950. He relocated to Fort Worth, Texas, in 1943 and joined the Fort Worth Circle, a progressive art colony, mostly young artists, which was active during the 1940s and 1950s.

Though not defined by a specific aesthetic, the Fort Worth Circle was important for moving beyond the realism and agrarian subject matter of American Regionalism, which dominated Texas art in the 1930s and 1940s. Kelly Fearing and his Fort Worth cohorts were the first artists in the state to respond in a significant way to European artists such as Picasso, Braque, Klee, Kandinsky, Modigliani, Ernst, Klee, and Miro.

After teaching from 1945 to 1947 at Texas Wesleyan, Kelly Fearing assumed the Professorship of Art in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught for forty years. A noted art educator, he co-authored several multi-volume art education textbooks from 1960 through the 1980s. As a pioneer in art education in America, Fearing founded The University of Texas Junior Art Project, the first visual arts outreach program of its kind in Texas. He became Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas in 1987 and, after his retirement, continued to work as a professional artist.

Kelly Fearing worked in almost all traditional mediums, with prominence in oil painting and collage work. The work from his Fort Worth years is abstract in form, surrealistic and filled with allegory., characteristics which would remain throughout the body of his work. Fearing’s art has been referred to as magical realist, mystical naturalist and Romantic surrealist.

Kelly Fearing died on March 13, 2011 from congestive heart failure at the age of ninety-two. More than 80 of his prints and drawings are in the Blanton Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

More works by Kelly Fearing can be found at: https://ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon.blog/2015/07/16/six-etchings-by-kelly-fearing-kelly-fearing-was/

Vasily Grossman: “Modest Peculiarities”

Photographers Unknown, Modest Peculiarities

“Human groupings have one main purpose: to assert everyone’s right to be different, to be special, to think, feel and live in his or her own way. People join together in order to win or defend this right. But this is where a terrible, fateful error is born: the belief that these groupings in the name of a race, a God, a party or a State are the very purpose of life and not simply a means to an end. No! The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and in his right to these peculiarities.”

—Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

Born into a Ukrainian Jewish family December of 1905, Vasily Semyonovich Grossman was a writer and a journalist. He trained as a chemical engineer at Moscow State University and, upon graduation, took a job in Stalino, now Donetsk, in south-eastern Ukraine. In the mid 1930’s, Grossman committed himself fully to writing; he published, by 1936, two collections of short stories and the novel “Glyukauf” and was accepted into the privileged Union of Writers in 1937. Grossman’s 1940 novel “Stepan Kol’chugin”, written over the course of three years, was nominated fro a Stalin Prize, but was deleted from the list by Stalin himself during his campaign of political repression.

When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Grossman, although exempt from military service, volunteered for the front lines where he spent almost three years. He became a war correspondent for the popular Red Army newspaper “Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star)”. Grossman covered the major battles, including the Battle of Stalingrad and the Battle of Berlin, and also published his novels as serials in newspapers. His 1950 novel “Stalingrad”, published under the name “For a Just Cause”, is based upon his experiences during the siege.

In his works, Vasily Grossman described Nazi ethnic-cleansing in occupied Ukraine and Poland, and the liberation by the Red Army of the extermination camps in Treblinka and Majdanek. His article “The Hell of Treblinka”, a collection of interviews taken from special work unit inmates who had escaped from Treblinka, was disseminated at the Nuremberg Trials as evidence for the prosecution.

Grossman, along with Ilya Ehrenburg, participated in the assembly of the five-hundred page “Black Book”, compiled by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in late 1944. This book documented the anti-Jewish crimes of the Holocaust and the participation of Jewish resistance members against the Nazi occupation during World War II. Upon the conclusion of the war, the book was denounced initially by the Russian Central Committee as anti-Soviet and finally refused publication in 1948.

Due to this suppression of the book, Vasily Grossman began to question his loyal support of the Soviet regime. He also criticized the process of collectivization and the political repression of peasants during the Great Famine of 1932 to 1933, which resulted in the death by starvation of millions of Ukrainians. Persecuted by the state, only a few of Grossman’s works were published in his lifetime. In 1959 after submitting for publication his most prominent novel, “Life and Fate”, the Committee for State Security, KGB, raided his apartment, seized his manuscripts, notebooks and all typed copies, and refused publication for political reasons.

Vasily Grossman died of stomach cancer on September 14th in 1964. He was buried at the Troyekurovskoye Cemetery in Moscow. With the assistance of dissident researchers and writers, Grossman’s “Life and Fate” was retyped and finally published in the Soviet Union in 1988 after the initiation of the policy of glasnost. Other works by Grossman include “The People Immortal” published in 1943, and two posthumously published works published in 2010: “Everything Flows” and “The Road, Stories, Journalism, and Essays”.

Robert Delaunay

Robert Delaunay, “Manège de Cochons”, 1905-1918, Gouache and Watercolor on Paper, 52.5 x 49.8 cm, Private Collection

Born in Paris in April of 1885, Robert Victor Félix Delaunay was one of the earliest completely unrepresentational painters, whose work affected the development of abstract art.. In 1902, after finishing his secondary education, he was apprenticed for two years to study decorative arts with a theatrical designer located at the Impasse Ronsin in the Belleville district of Paris, where he worked on theater sets. At the age of nineteen, Delaunay left Ronsin to focus on his painting and entered six of his works at the 1904 Salon des Indépendants

Delaunay traveled to Brittany, where he was influenced by the Pont-Aven group, symbolist artists inspired by the pure color of Paul Gauguin’s works. The works he painted in Brittany he presented at the 22nd Salon des Indépendants. Between 1905 and 1907 Delaunay became friends with Henri Rousseau and Jean Metzinger, with whom he shared a 1907 exhibition at art dealer Berthe Weill’s gallery. Delaunay, familiar with the color theories of French chemist Michel-Eugéne Chevreul, started painting at this time in a Neo-Impressionist manner influenced by the work of Paul Cézanne.

After returning to Paris in 1908 from a year in military service, Robert Delaunay began painting multiple series of works in a style that used bold colors and was increasingly influenced by abstraction and cubism. These series included the 1909-1911 “The City”, the “Eiffel Tower” executed 1909-1912, and the 1912-1914 “Window” series. Delaunay started to use pure colors again early in 1912 and, at the end of the year, had painted his first two abstract paintings: the 1913 “Circular Forms” series and “The First Disk” series.

In 1910, Delaunay married textile and theater set designer Sonia Terk who, in 1964, would become the first female artist to have a retrospective at the Louvre. Together, with Czech painter and graphic artist František Kupka, they pioneered an offshoot of Cubism called Orphism, which today is seen as a key transition from Cubism into Abstract art. Orphism reintroduced the use of strong color during cubism’s monochromatic phase and was known for its geometric shapes.

In 1911, Robert Delaunay began exhibiting in Germany; he was invited by Vasily Kandinsky to participate in the first Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) exhibition held at Heinrich Thannhauser’s Moderne Galerie in Munich. Delaunay’s first solo major exhibition in Paris was held in 1912 at fashion designer Paul Poiret’s contemporary Galeries Barbazanges. This show, containing forty-six works from his impressionist period to his cubist Eiffel Tower series, gained him recognition as a monumental visionary artist.

During the period from the outbreak of war in 1914 to 1920, Delaunay and his wife spent the years in Spain and Portugal. In 1917 in Madrid, Delaunay met Russian art patron and ballet impresario Serge Diaghliev and designed the stage set for Diaghilev’s production of “Cleopatra”; Sonia Delaunay produced the designs for the porduction’s costumes. Delaunay would later produced illustrations for Chilean post Vicente Hudobro’s work “Tour Eiffel”. Both Robert and Sonia Delaunay exhibited their work from their time in Portugal at a 1920 show in Berlin’s Der Sturm gallery.

In 1921, Robert Delaunay returned to Paris where he continued to work in both figurative and abstract themes, with an 1922 exhibition of his new work at Galerie Paul Guillaume . He would later be introduced to artists in both surrealism and the Dada movement by poets André Breton and Tristan Tzara. In 1924, Delaunay started his “Runner” series of paintings and, in the next year, executed frescoes for the international Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris.

Delaunay returned to complete abstraction in 1930 and produce compositions with circular disks and color rhythms, sometimes executed in low relief. For the 1937 Paris International Exhibition, he participated in the design of large panels and colored reliefs to be used in the Aeronautics pavilions. Delaunay’s last works were decorations for the sculpture hall of the 1938 Salon des Tuileries, an annual painting and sculpture exhibition.

Stricken with cancer, Robert Delaunay lost mobility and his health gradually deteriorated. He died from cancer on October 25, 1941 in Montpellier, at the age of fifty-six. In 1952, Delaunay was reburied in Gambais, a commune in north-central France.

A Second Glance: Revisited

Photographers Unknown, A Second Glance: Revisited

“Everything goes forward like oiled clocks; for each minute of the dial there are a million noiseless clocks which tick off the rinds of time. We are traveling faster than the lightning calculator, faster than starlight, faster than the magician can think. Each second is a universe of time. And each universe of time is but a wink of sleep in the cosmogony of speed. When speed comes to its end we shall be there, punctual as always and blissfully un-denominated. We shall shed our wings, our clocks and our mantelpieces to lean on. We will rise up feathery and jubilant, like a column of blood, and there will be no memory to drag us down again.”

—Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

Tule Clow

Paintings from the “Postanovka” Series by Tule Clow

Tule Clow was born in Arcata, California, in 1977 and currently lives in St. Petersburg, Russia. She graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine, where she studied drawing under Thomas Cornell, known for his empirical drawings and paintings with themes of social justice. Clow later studied painting at the St. Petersburg Academy of Art from 2012 to 2018. Her work has been exhibited in both London and St. Petersburg galleries.

Between 2014 and 2018, Clow produced her “Copies” series of works, executed inside the Hermitage Museum, which consisted of painted fragmental scenes from the works of Titian, Jacopo Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese, the three great rival painters of the Italian Renaissance. Her 2016-2018 “Postanovka” series of paintings was the result of her investigation into postanovka, or постановка, the academic Russian art form of using live models in a staged set.

Gustave Caillebotte

Paintings by Gustav Caillebotte

French painter and art collector Gustave Caillebotte was born in 1848 in Paris to Céleste Daufresne and Martial Caillebotte, a wealthy textile mill owner. He began drawing and painting at a young age on his family’s estate in Yernes, located south of Paris. Caillebotte studied law, completing his law degree in 1868, and received his law license in 1870. Soon after his graduation, he was drafted to serve in the Franco-Prussian war as a member of the Garde Nationale de la Seine from July of 1870 to March of 1871.

Following the war, Caillebotte decided to pursue an artistic career. He visited the studio of Realist academic-painter Léon Bonnat, who reinforced his decision to take art as a serious career. In 1872, Caillebotte enrolled at the Êcole des Beaux-Arts and studied under Bonnat; however, he spent most of the time painting in his own studio at the family home. Within a short period of time, Caillebotte suffered several losses in his family life: his father died in 1874, his brother Rene in 1876, and his mother died in 1878. The family fortune was divided between the remaining two brothers, Gustave and Martial, both of whom agreed to the sale of the Yerres estate and moved to an apartment in Paris.

Beginning in 1874, Gustave Caillebotte met and befriended several artists who were working outside the influence of the Academie des Beaux-Arts; these artists included Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Pierre-Augustus Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Giuseppe De Nittis. Caillebotte made his artistic debut in 1876 at the Second Impressionist Exhibition in Paris, a show that would establish him as an indispensable figure in the group both artistically and financially. This loosely knit group of impressionist, avant-garde artists rejected the academic style of painting and the formality of the official Salon’s traditional exhibition protocols.

Caillebotte’s style, which so outraged the contemporary critics and academics, conversely inspired later artists to use some of his more radical compositional techniques. His paintings often contained highly unusual perspectives, such as viewpoints looking up from below at a slanting floor, and viewpoints gazing down from an indistinctive perch or standing on the edge of an intimate scene. Caillebotte also cropped his protagonists and scenes in an unconventional manner, such as the foreground figures in his 1877 “Rue de Paris; Temps de Pluie” and 1878 “The Painter Under His Parasol” whose lower body portions are beyond the image plane. These innovative techniques became features of future avant-garde artists from Van Gogh to Pablo Picasso.

Caillebotte helped finance and organize the Third Impressionist exhibition, in which he exhibited eight paintings. Included in this show was his best known work, the 1875 “Floor Scrapers”, which had been rejected and deemed vulgar by the official Salon in 1875 for its depiction of common laborers. Caillebotte played a major role as a source of patronage and financial support for artists, such as Monet and Pissarro who were still endeavoring to achieve more widespread success. His family wealth enabled his to pursue his own artistic career and provide support for his artistic friends whose means were limited; it also enabled him to collect their work, often purchased at inflated prices. In 1876 Caillebotte purchased several works by Monet, and also paid the rent for some of his friends’ studios. He was also a major force in convincing the Louvre Museum to purchase Édouard Manet’s 1863 controversial painting “Olympia”, which had caused a scandal at the Salon’s 1865 exhibition for its cold and prosaic treatment of the female nude.

In 1877, Caillebotte was the central organizer of the Third Impressionist Exhibition, which now had become an independent, unofficial and distinctly avant-garde salon. Although an important force in the avant-garde movement, his work did not explore the effects of light as did the other members’ work. Caillebotte was more a Realist in style, more aligned with the early works of Monet, Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet. He exhibited seventeen paintings at the seventh impressionist exhibition and, along with Monet, refused to participate in the final 1886 exhibition due to tensions between artists.

Gustave Caillebotte relocated to a property in Petit-Gennevilliers, a suburb on the Seine River, in 1881. A former yacht racer, he became active in constructing yachts and spent a majority of his time discussing philosophy, politics, literature and art with his brother Martial and good friend Augustus Renoir. By the early 1890s, Caillebotte was barely painting; he had stopped producing the large canvases for which he was known in the previous decades. In 1894, at the age of forty-five, while working in his home garden, Caillebotte collapsed and died suddenly of a stroke. He is buried at the famous Pere Lachaise Cemetery in southeastern Paris.

Following his death, Caillebotte’s estate, in keeping with his will, attempted to make a generous donation of his large collection of paintings, which contained both his and other artists’ works, to the French State. The 1894 donation spurred controversy, which emphasized the still prevalent French Academy’s resistance to avant-garde art and artists. Academy officials, with the artist Jean-Leon Gerome in the lead, attempted to prevent the transfer of the works by the Impressionists and the important Post-Impressionists, such as Paul Cézanne, to the French National Museum.

These impressionist works had been consistently refused admission to the official Salons through the years; and the art establishment continued to oppose acceptance of what they referred to as unhealthy art. Only a portion of the works in the collection, of which only two were by Caillebotte, were ultimately accepted. In 1911, nearly thirty works from Caillebotte’s collection were purchased by Albert C. Barnes, an American physician, businessman, and art collector; these works form the core of the extensive collection of Modernist works at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Until the 1950s, when Caillebotte family members began selling works from their private collection, including paintings by Caillebotte as well as works by other artists he had acquired, Caillebotte’s work was for the most part forgotten. Most of these works from the private collections were eventually purchased by Albert Barnes in 1954 and added to the Barnes Foundation. With the purchase of Caillebotte’s 1877 “Paris Street, Rainy Day” by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1964, the work of Caillebotte was brought again to the attention of collectors and the public.

Tope Insert Image: Gustave Caillebotte, “Self Portrait”, 1892, Oil on Canvas, 40.5 x 32.5 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Second Insert Image: Gustave Caillebotte, “The Orange Trees”, 1878, Oil on Canvas, 154.9 x 116.8 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Third Insert Image: Gustave Caillebotte, “Balcony, Boulevard Haussmann”, 1880, Oil on Canvas, 69 x 62 cm, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madird

Bottom Insert Image: gustave Caillebotte, “Self Portrait in the Park at Yerres”, 1875-1878, Oil on Canvas, 64 x 48 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Yukio Mishima: “Someone, Somewhere, Had Tied Up the Darkness”

Photographers Unknown, Someone, Somewhere, Had Tied Up the Darkness

“Someone, somewhere, had tied up the darkness, he thought as he went: the bag of darkness had been tied at the mouth, enclosing within it a host of smaller bags. The stars were tiny, almost imperceptible perforations; otherwise, there wasn’t a single hole through which light could pass.

The darkness in which he walked immersed was gradually pervading him. His own footfall was utterly remote, his presence barely rippled the air. His being had been compressed to the utmost – to the point where it had no need to forge a path for itself through the night, but could weave its way through the gaps between the particles of which the darkness was composed.”

—Yukio Mishima, Acts of Worship: Seven Stories

When Yukio Mishima committed ritual suicide in November 1970, he was only forty-five. He had written over thirty novels, eighteen plays, and twenty volumes of short stories. During Mishima’s lifetime, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize three times and had seen almost all of his major novels appear in English.

While the flamboyance of Yukio Mishima’s life and the apparent fanaticism of his death, through the ritual rite of seppuku, have dominated the public’s perception of his achievement, Japanese and Western critics alike are in agreement that Mishima’s literary gifts were prodigious.

A short biography of Yukio Mishima can be found on this site. For a more extensive biography on Yukio Mishima: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20201124-yukio-mishima-the-strange-tale-of-japans-infamous-novelist

Robert Littleford

Robert Littleford, “Acrobat”, 2019

Robert Littleford is an illustrator and designer. He studied at the Royal College of Art in London, where he earned his Master’s Degree in Illustration. Littleford’s work is mainly figurative and naive in style; his figures usually appear without facial definition and with extremities undefined. The influences on his work include the figurative, populist style of painter Fernand Leger, the pop art of David Hockney, and the ethnographical works of Henri Rousseau.

Littleford has exhibited his work at solo and group shows in London, New York, and Los Angeles. His paintings and illustrations have appeared in publications and advertisements, including The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Conde Nast Traveller, National Geographic, and the Toronto Globe and Mail. Littleford has also created designs for both textiles and tshirts for such clients as Neiman Marcus, Harrods, Jeff Banks, and Paul Smith.

Robert Littleford is the designer and illustrator for “Adventure Walk Maps”, a city map series for London, Paris, Rome, and New York, among others. He was the illustrator for Bruce Bromley’s poetry book, “The Life in the Sky Comes Down: Essays, Stories, Essay/Story”, which examines life in New York after the Twin Towers fell. Littleford also illustrated Philip Dundas’s novel “Daniel, at Sea”, an old man’s life story from Franco’s Spain to the eastern coast of the United States. He is the author and illustrator of “The Yellow Coyote”.

“Drawing is the spiritual heart of many processes in art, from architecture and design to painting and sculpture. In a world increasingly dominated by digital representation, my practice seeks to explore and raise the profile of the importance of the human connection and fascination with the hand-drawn.’ —Robert Littleford

The artist’s site is located at: https://hand-drawn.site

Manuel Ramos Otero: “The Pendulum of the Body”

Photographers Unknown, The Parts and Pieces Making a Whole: Set Thirteen

La muerte no fue la clave del secreto,
?Qué cuento no comienza en el crepúsculo?
?Qué cangrejo no busca su fantasma
en los fuegos fúnebresdel tiempo?
?Qué brujo no sabe que la luna
sostiene el péndulo del cuerpo?

Adánico regreso hasta la sombra.
Añosa regresión hasta el silencio.

Sin hilos. Sin agujas. sin cenizas.
Mi novio no havuelto de su tumba.

?Qué triangular el traje de mis nupcias!

Es perfecto este tálamo sin sangre.
Estoy en las ruinas del castillo.
Arranco los erizos de lacrare.
La orina se desborda de la copa.
Que nunca soledad. Que llegue nadie.

Death was not the key to secrecy,
What story does not start at twilight?
What crab does not look for its ghost in the funeral fires of time?
What a warlock does not know that the moon supports the pendulum of the body?

Adamic return to the shadow.
My years regress to silence.

Without threads. Without needles. without ashes.
My boyfriend has not returned from his grave.

How to triangulate the suit of my nuptials?

This bloodless thalamus is perfect.
I am in the castle ruins.
I pluck the lacrare hedgehogs.
The urine overflows from the glass.
That never loneliness. Let no one arrive.

–Manuel Ramos Otero, El Libro de la Muerte

Over the passage of time, Puerto Rican literature evolved from the art of oral story telling to its present-day status. Originally, written works by the native islanders of Puerto Rico were prohibited and repressed by the Spanish colonial government. Only those authors who were commissioned by the Spanish Crown to document the chronological history of the island were allowed to write. In the late 19th century, with the arrival of the first printing press and the founding of the Royal Academy of Belles Letters, Puerto Rican literature finally began to flourish.

Born in Manati, Puerto Rico, in 1948, Manuel Ramos Otero is widely considered to be one of the first openly homosexual writers of the Puerto Rican diaspora.. Throughout his literary career, he boldly put his homosexuality at the core of his poetic, fiction, and non-fiction work. Feeling repressed and persecuted in his homeland because of the openness of his sexuality, Ramos Otero left Puerto Rico and relocated to New York City in 1968, where he received in 1979 his Master’s Degree in Literature from New York University.

Otero’s writings, primarily semi-autobiographical pieces that dealt with themes of exile and rejection, are often considered controversial because of their unabashedly political, feminist and homoerotic subject matters. Exiled from Puerto Rico, Otero felt rejected in the United States because his writing did not deal with issues of race and class status that had become expected of Latino writers. Using urban gay Puerto Rican male writers as his protagonists, he explored New York City’s gay subculture of the 1970s and 1980s, with its drugs, hustlers, prostitution, and dark sexual playgrounds found beneath the rotting piers of the Greenwich Village and Chelsea waterfronts.

In September of 1971, Ramos Otero founded Aspasguanza, a theatrical workshop in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His traveling theater performed as part of the 1980 celebration of Fuegos Funebres in the historical district of Old San Juan in Puerto Rico. Dressed in a black kimono with face painted white, Ramos Otero enacted the character of Tsuchigumo, a spider found in Noh dramas, Japanese mythology, and comic Japanese performances.

During the decade of the 1970s, Ramos Otero traveled and collaborated creatively with his live-in partner, John Anthes, whose relationship is highlighted in much of Otero’s semi-autobiographical writing. In 1975, Otero founded the publishing group El Libro Viaje, which was devoted to increasing the publication of Puerto Rican authors in the United States. His highly experimental 1976 novel “La Novelabingo ( The Bingo Novel)”, was published through this press. After Anthes’s death in 1979, Otero dedicated two of his works to him: “Ritos Cancelado (Canceled Rites)” and “Ceremonia de Bienes y Raices (Ceremony of Goods and Roots)”.

In 1980, Ramos Otero would later meet and develop a relationship with the Puerto Rican painter Angel Rodríguez-Díaz. In one of his better known stories, “Descuento”, Otero described a painting by Rodriquez-Dias, which would illustrate the cover of his last book of stories, “Página en Blanco Staccato”. This illustration of a Japanese Noh drama character would serve as inspiration for the theater performance at the 1980 Fuegos Funebres festival.

Ramos Otero taught writing and literature at Rutgers University, York College, LaGuardia Community College, and Lehman College. In addition to being a writer, he fostered and strengthened the literary community by helping to organize conferences and gatherings of Puerto Rican writers in the United States. Throughout his life, Ramos Otero participated in literary collaborations and maintained close friendships with other influential Puerto Rican authors, including Rosario Ferré, Ana Lydia Vega, and Magalí García Ramis.

Manuel Ramos Otero returned to his hometown of Manati in 1990 to live out his final days, He died from complications of HIV/AIDS in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on October 7th of 1990 at the age of forty-two. Ramos Otero is remembered for his well-regarded short stories, his essays on literary criticism, and for his two published works, the 1985 “El Libro de la Muerte”, which includes his Epitaphios Cycle of poems, and his “Invitacion al Polvo”, a work posthumously published in 1991 that directly addresses topics around the AIDS crisis.

Columbia University’s Archives houses a collection of Ramos Otero’s personal and professional correspondence, notebooks, reviews, photographs and newspaper clippings which range from infancy to his death. Included in this collection are many letters from Otero to his mother discussing his relationship with John Anthes; there are also letters from Anthes to Otero’s mother.

Notes: A full translation of Manuel Ramos Otero’s work “Vivre del Cuento”, translated as “The Scheherazade Complex”, can be found at the Fordham University Library located at: https://www.fordham.edu/download/downloads/id/463/scheherazade_complex

For those interested, a more extensive study of Manuel Ramos Otero’s life, including a history of his Traveling Theater, can be found at The Free Library located at: https://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+Travelling+Theater+of+Manuel+Ramos+Otero.-a0557578965

The Heliodor Tree Frog

Hans-Jürgen Henn and Alfred Zimmermann, “Heliodor Tree Frog”, Date Unknown, Heliodor and Gold, 15 cm in Height, Henn Gems

Designed by Hans-Jürgen Henn and Alfred Zimmermann, the “Heliodor Tree Frog” was intricately fashioned by master gemstone carver Alfred Zimmermann. The frog and its perch was carved from richly colored Ukrainian heliodor, a member of the beryl family known for its hexagonal crystals, vitreous luster, and range of color. The amphibian’s gemstone perch is set on a base of eighteen-carat yellow gold; the combined materials allude to the various textures of an exotic tree trunk in the wild.

One of the most renowned lapidary artists of the last several decades, Alfred Zimmerman is a member of an Idar-Oberstein family of gemstone carvers. Originally an apprentice of Gerd Dreher, a fourth-generation stone carver, Alfred Zimmerman is also known for working in the “Fabergé” tradition. Zimmerman’s frequent subjects are either soldiers or peasants in folkloric attire but he is well known for animal carvings of transparent crystalline minerals. Zimmermann has recently retired after a long career of finely executed sculptures.

The third-generation of the Henn family in the gemstone trade, Hans-Jürgen Henn has over fifty years of experience in the trade. From an early age, he combined his passion for precious stones with mountaineering, during which he was always searching for the rare and undiscovered. Henn, the first to coin the expression Kashmir Peridot, had the passion and foresight to preserve the Dom Pedro Aquamarine as a single, dramatic stone. This stone, the largest aquamarine ever cut, was fashioned by Bernd Munsteiner, and gifted to the Smithsonian Institute in 2011.

For information on exhibitions, jewelry, and objects of art, the Henn Gemstone website is located at: https://henngems.de/home/

Max Bernuth

Max Bernuth, “Ringende Jûnglinge (Ringing Youngsters)“, 1913, Oil on Canvas on Chipboard, 90 x 69 cm, Private Collection

Born in July of 1872 in Leipzig, Germany, Friedrich Albin Max Bernuth was a painter, book illustrator, and educator. After completing his primary education at a community school in Leipzig, he became an apprentice at a lithographic firm and was able, with a scholarship, to study at the Leipzig Academy. Bernuth, through the mediation of renowned print maker Max Klinger, was given patronage to study at the prestigious Munich Academy under Professor Alexander von Liezen-Mayer, the Hungarian-born illustrator and history painter.

Bernuth, in the period between 1894 to 1902, lived and worked in the cities of Munich and Innsbruck; it was in this period that he produced his most known works. His reputation as an illustrator grew, beginning with his employment at the illustrated weekly magazine “Die Jugend (Youth)”, founded in 1896 to promote new trends in the arts. Many of Bernuth’s lithographs and drawings of glass makers and woodworkers, created during his trips to the Bavarian Forest area of Germany, were published in “Die Jugend”.

While residing in Innsbruck, Max Bernuth met and married, in November of 1901, Emile Beate Elise Pötter, the daughter of carpenter Christoph Pötter and Albertine Hulda Zwade. Beginning in 1902, Bernuth was a professor of the figurative class at the Elberfeld School of Applied Arts, an arts and crafts school located in the German city of Wuppertal. Among the students he taught were secessionist painter Otto Friedrich Weber, architect and sculptor Amo Breker, and impressionist painter Carl Moritz Schreiner.

By the 1930s after exhibiting his works in numerous exhibitions, Bernuth achieved a prominent place in Wuppertal’s art culture. He received many commissions as a portrait artist, and became known for his genre and animal images; eventually he became one of the best-known book illustrators in Germany. In October of 1932, Bernuth moved to Bad Reichenhall, a city in Upper Bavaria known for its natural beauty. He relocated in 1939 to the kochhäusl in Bayerisch Gmain, a municipality in Bavaria, where he lived and worked until his passing on April 1st of 1960.

A member of the German Association of Artists, Max Bernuth was influenced by the works of his teacher Max Klinger, the Symbolist lithographer Otto Greiner, and Realist artist Adolph Menzel, who is considered one of the most prominent German painters of the 19th century . A proponent of the metaphysical and ethical system of Arthur Schopenhauer, Bernuth was interested in classical literature, the poetic epics of Homer, and the novels of Miguel de Cervantes and Hans Jakob von Grimmelshausen.

Top Insert Image: Max Bernuth, “Dream”, 1913, Calendar Illustration, Lithograph

Middle Insert Image: Max Bernuth, “Schmiede in Niederbayern (Forge in Lower Bavaria)”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas

Bottom Insert Image: Max Bernuth, “Pantherspiele (Panther Games)”, 1899, Illustration for Jugend, Band 2, University of Heidelberg

Leonardo Corredor, “João Knorr”

Leonardo Corredor, “João Knorr”, Los Angeles Photo Shoot for Man About Town, January 2019

Born in Mérida, Venezuela, and based in New York City, Leonardo Corredor is a photographer and art film director. Before his photography career, he was professional model, named Best Venezuelan Model in 2007. Since his first appearance as an actor in 2010, Corredor has appearred in several acting roles on television series, including “Control Remoto”, “Dum Dum”, and “La Merienda”. He has also hosted Telemundo’s show “Invasion Casera”.

In 2012 Corredor became a creative director and fashion photographer for webzines, print magazines and fashion advertisers, including Essential Homme, Man About Town, Rollercoaster Magazine, Portrait, Fashionably Male, and Solar Magazine, among others. He is represented by The Industry MGMT, a artist and model management agency, focused on still and motion photography, with offices in New York and Los Angeles.

Examples of Leonardo Corredor’s photographic and video work can be found at his site located at: https://www.leonardocorredor.com

Ashim Shanker: “In Union Shall You Drift”

Photographers Unknown, In Union Shall You Drift

“There will be times in which things appear hopeless. You will begin to doubt everything around you. You will even begin to doubt yourself. You will think things will never look up and you may be in the deepest, darkest, loneliest place in the world. Everything which had once been infused with wonder may appear disappointing and harsh. You may grow cynical and come to believe that this is simply the way the world is…that one must bear with the unforgiving realities of the world and only hope that it doesn’t get worse. You might grow suspicious of others, as adults tend to do, and close yourself off from the rest of the world. You might just look to the past and reminisce about better days…or you might just dwell in one place for a little too long and become nostalgic for the future. Just remember—regardless of where you are, what experiences you have, and who you have become—that there will always be those who have loved you. Those whom you may have taken for granted, but have nonetheless, always had you in their hearts and in their hopes and wishes. Lives that you have touched: whether you realize it or not. To separation you may venture, but indissolubly in union shall you drift…you will always be at the whims of forces, both great and small, and far beyond your capacity to control. That’s how all our stories go. Innumerable arcs intersect and scatter into a vast indefinite sea.”

—Ashim Shanker, Don’t Forget to Breathe

Born in Allentown, Pennsylvania to Indian immigrants, Ashim Shanker graduated from Pennsylvania State University and briefly worked in the wireless communications industry in New York. He struggled early in life with the complexities of identity and found writing to be a suitable outlet for analyzing the many contradictions he faced on a daily basis. The page became the medium for all the questions that had no particular answer.

Shanker relocated to Japan in 2003 and spent the next eleven years as a teacher and a content planner for textbooks and software. While working at several jobs, he continued to write and, in 2008, published his first novel of his absurdist Migrations fiction series, “Don’t Forget to Breathe”. Still living in Japan, Shanker finished the second installment of the series, “Only the Deplorable”, in 2013, as well as his first book of short stories and poems, “Sinew of the Social Species”, which was published in 2014.

Ashim Shanker moved back to the United States for his graduate work and completed a Master’s Degree in International Educational Policy at Harvard University. His teaching experience in international and public school environments have contributed to his fervent advocacy for systemic reform in global educational policy and delivery.

Shanker contributed to educational research publications in collaboration with UNICEF and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). He also contributed to a collection of educational case studies profiled in the 2018 book. “Building Bridges to the Future”.

In 2019, Ashim Shanker completed his third novel in the Migrations series, “Inward and Toward”, and released his second book of short stories entitled “branches para parallax leapfrog” in 2020.