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.

George Washington Lambert

George Washington Lambert, “The White Glove”, 1921, Oil on Canvas, 106 x 78 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Born in September of 1873 in St. Petersburg, Russia, George Washington Thomas Lambert was an Australian portrait artist and a war artist during the First World War. After the death of his father, he and his English mother moved to Württemberg, Germany, to stay with Lambert’s maternal grandfather. Lambert received his education at Kingston College in Somerset, England, after which the family emigrated to Australia, arriving in Sydney in January of 1887.

In 1894, George Lambert began exhibiting his work at the Art Society and the Society of Artists in Sydney. After drawing pen and ink cartoons for a year at The Bulletin magazine, he began painting full time in 1896. Lambert won the Wynne Prize for his 1899 painting “Across the Blacksoil Plains”, a depiction of a heavily laden wagon pulled by a team of draft horses.

Lambert studied at the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney until 1900, after which he won a government traveling scholarship from New South Wales. He spent a few years traveling, first to Paris, and later to London where he exhibited work at the Royal Academy. At an exhibition in Barcelona in 1911, Lambert won a silver medal for his painting “The Sonnet”.

During the years of the First World War, George Lambert served as an official war artist. His painting “Anzac”, depicting the 1915 landings of forces on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey, is now in the Australian War Memorial collection located in Australia’s capital Canberra. In 1920, Lambert painted another notable work “A Sergeant of the Light Horse”, which he executed in London after retuning from Palestine.

Returning to Australia in 1921, Lambert had a successful solo show in Melbourne at the Fine Art Society. This was the year he painted “The White Glove”, a oil portrait depicting Miss Gladys Neville Collins, the daughter of lawyer J. T. Collins, trustee of the Public Library, Museums, and National Gallery of Victoria.

George Lambert posed Miss Collins in a manner suggestive of John Singer Sargent’s 1905 work “Portrait of Ena Wertheimer, ‘a vele gonfie”, with its black white-feathered hat and hand raised in front of chest. Miss Collins’s tilted head, half closed eyes, half open mouth, and almost bare right arm suggests individual sensuality, but also a form of codified behavior. Significantly different from the in-vogue contemporary brown-toned portraits, George Lambert, himself, described it as a wild, dashing portrait.

In 1922, the Art Gallery of New South Wales acquired the painting for six hundred guineas ( $53,000 in 2019), at the time the highest price paid by a public gallery for a portrait by an Australian artist. The work remains a part of its collection.

Ricardo Rico

Photography by Ricardo Rico

Ricardo Rico is a self-taught photographer working and living in São Paulo, Brazil. He is currently working on “The Lonely Project”, dealing with masculine beauty in physical and emotional forms. To date, there are nineteen issues of “The Lonely Project” available.

Ricardo Rico’s website is located at: https://www.ricardorico.com

The Lonely Project website is located at: https://thelonelyproject.com.br/revista/

Edward Ladell

Edward Ladell, “Still Life with Prawns and a Delft Pot”, c 1880, Oil on Canvas, 30.5 x 26 cm

Edward Ladell was a British painter known for his still-life paintings of flowers, fruit, and glass vessels, done in the style of seventeenth-century Dutch traditions.

Born in April of 1821 in Hasketon, United Kingdom, Edward Ladell spent his early years working at his father’s coach building business. He married Juliana Roope in July, 1848, and moved to the East Hill neighborhood of Colchester, with a daughter being born in 1860. It is thought that he may have been apprenticed as a pattern designer of a Flemish textile company in Colchester, a business central to the city’s economy since the seventeenth century.

Despite the lack of information on his art training, it is evident Edward Ladell was deeply familiar with the still-life paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Dutch and Flemish schools, either through museums or private collections. He successfully submitted an oil painting entitled “Study from Nature” to the Royal Academy exhibition in London in 1856. Ladell again exhibited his work three years later, at the annual exhibition, and established his career as a painter.

Throughout the first half of the 1860s, Edward Ladell painted his characteristic still-lifes, always with meticulous attention to detail and realism. By 1865, he stopped submitting works to the Royal Academy; listed as single on the 1871 census, it is suspected that serious illness or accident took the life of Ladell’s wife and daughter. It was not until 1868 that Ladell began to exhibit paintings again.

During the 1860s, Ladell, with an acknowledged reputation as a still-life artist, accepted a small number of private students. One of his students was Ellen Maria Levett, who most likely joined his studio class in the mid- 1870s. Ellen became his wife in October of 1878, after which they made their home in the city of Exeter, where Ellen gave birth to a son in 1880.

His domestic life settled, Ladell continued to expand his clientele through both regional exhibitions and the annual shows at the Royal Academy, the British Institute and the Suffolk Street Galleries in London. It was at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1880 that Ladell presented his “Still Life with Prawns and a Delft Pot”, which attracted attention from a number of critics who admired it for its realism and success at expressing shades and reflections.

Between 1880 and 1886, Edward Ladell became a highly regarded member of the Exeter community. He died after a brief respiratory illness on November 9, 1886, at the age of sixty-five, and is buried in the Higher Cemetery behind St. Mark’s Church in Exeter. Today, Edward Ladell’s works are held in the collections of the Museum of Croydon in London, the Royal Albert Museum in Exeter, the Reading Museum in Berkshire, and the Mercer Art Gallery in Harrogate, United Kingdom.

Oliver Sacks: “His Real, Inmost Story”

Photographers Unknown, His Real, Inmost Story

“If we wish to know about a man, we ask ‘what is his story–his real, inmost story?’–for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us–through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives–we are each of us unique.”

—Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

Hans Thoma

Hans Thoma, “Self Portrait in Front of a Birch Forest”, 1899, Oil on canvas, 94 x 75.5 cm, Städelscher Museums-Verein. Frankfurt

Hans Thoma, “Apollo und Marsyas”, 1886, Oil on Panel, 45 x 55 cm, Kunkel Fine Art, Munich

Born on October 2, 1839 at Bernau in the Black Forest of Germany, Hans Thoma, in his youth, spent his summers drawing and painting landscapes and portraits of family members. Between 1859 and 1866, he studied at the Karlsruhe Academy under landscape painter Johann Wilhelm Schirmer and history and portrait painter Ludwig des Coudres, who made a significant influence upon his career.

Hans Thoma entered the prestigious Düsseldorf Akademie in 1866, where he was introduced to modern French art. Two years later, he travelled to Paris, where he met painter Gustave Courbet, a leading painter in the Realism movement of France. Moving to Munich in 1870, Thoma shared a studio with realist painter Wilhelm Trübner and gradually changed his style, influenced by the German symbolist painters Hans von Marées and Arnold Böcklin.

From 1876 to 1899 Hans Thoma lived in Frankfurt am Main, where he made contact with avant-garde artistic circles, and gradually achieved artistic success. He returned to the city of Karlsruhe in 1899 as director of the Kunsthalle, the city’s art museum. His reputation as a painter became firmly established with a 1900 exhibition of thirty paintings in Munich, after which he regularly exhibited in Germany.

In 1909 a Hans Thoma Museum, showcasing his work, opened within the Karlsruhe Kunsthalle. Hans Thoma died in Karlsruhe in November of 1924 at the age of eighty-five. His art was formed by his early impressions of the simple life of his native district and his attraction to the works of the early German masters, such as Albrecht Altdorfer and Lucas Cranach the Elder. In his love of the details of nature, in his precise drawing of outline, and in his predilection for local coloring, Hans Thoma has distinct affinities with the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

Top Insert Image: Hans Thoma, “Frühling auf dem Gebirgssee (Spring on a Mountain Lake)”, 1898, Color Lithograph, The British Museum, London

Bottom Insert Image: Hans Thoma, “Archers”, 1887, Oil on Board, 95 x 64 cm, Berlin State Museum

Note: A collection of one hundred-fifty works by Hans Thoma can be found at the ArtRenewal site located at: : https://www.artrenewal.org/artists/hans-thoma/7785

Richard Siken: “Unfinished Duet”

Photographer Unknown, Unfinished Duet

- At first there were too many branches
  so he cut them and then it was winter.
  He meaning you. Yes. He would look out
  the window and stare at the trees that once
  had too many branches and now seemed
  to have too few. Is that all? No, there were
  other attempts, breakfasts: plates served,
  plates carried away. He doesn’t know
  what to do with his hands. He likes the feel
  of the coffeepot. More than the hacksaw?
  Yes, and he likes flipping the chairs,
  watching them fill with people. He likes
  the orange juice and toast of it, and waxed
  floors in any light. He wants to be tender
  and merciful. That sounds overly valorous.
  Sounds like penance. And his hands?
  His hands keep turning into birds and
  flying away from him. Him being you.
  Yes. Do you love yourself? I don’t have to
  answer that. It should matter. He has a
  body but it doesn’t matter, clean sheets
  on the bed but it doesn’t matter. This is
  where he trots out his sadness. Little black
  cloud, little black umbrella. You miss
  the point: the face in the mirror is a pale
  and naked hostage and no one can tell
  which room he’s being held in. He wants
  in, he wants out, he wants the antidote.
  He stands in front of the mirror with a net,
  hoping to catch something. He wants to
  move forward into the afternoon because
  there is no other choice. Everyone in this
  room got here somehow and everyone in
  this room will have to leave. So what’s left?
  Sing a song about the room we’re in?
  Hammer in the pegs that fix the meaning
  to the landscape? The voice wants to be
  a hand and the hand wants to do something
  useful. What did you really want? Someone
  to pass this with me. You wanted more.
  I want what everyone wants. He raises
  the moon on a crane for effect, cue the violins.
  That’s what the violins are for. And yes,
  he raises the moon on a crane and scrubs it
  until it shines. So what does it shine on?
  Nothing. Was there no one else? Left-handed
  truth, right-handed truth, there’s no pure
  way to say it. The wind blows and it makes
  a noise. Pain makes a noise. We bang on
  the pipes and it makes a noise. Was there
  no one else? His hands keep turning into
  birds, and his hands keep flying away
  from him. Eventually the birds must land.

—Richard Siken, Unfinished Duet, Crush

Born in New York City in February of 1967, Richard Siken is an American painter, poet, and filmmaker. He studied at the University of Arizona, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and later a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry.

Richard Siken is one of the co-founders and editors of Spork Press, established in 2001. Besides publishing its “Spork” literary magazine, the press produces novels and chapbooks, some of which were released in serial form. Siken received a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment of the Arts and two Arizona Commission on the Arts grants.

Influenced by the 1991 death of his boyfriend, Richard Siken wrote his collection of poems “Crush” which was published by Yale University Press.. A powerful literary work that is confessional, gay, and infused with eroticism, “Crush” won the 2004 Yale Younger Poets Competition, and received the Lambda Literary Award for “Gay Men’s Poetry” in 2005, and the Thom Gunn Award from Publishing Triangle in 2006. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Siken’s most recent work, his second book of poems, “War of the Foxes”, was released from Copper Canyon Press in 2015. With interwoven lyrics, fables, portraits and landscapes, Siken confronts the ways in which we look to art for meaning and purpose. The poems in “The War of the foxes” show the fallacies inherent in a search for truth, both in the world outside and within the self.

Richard Siken currently lives and works in Tucson, Arizona.

Paul Manship

Paul Manship, “Actaeon”, 1925, Gilt Bronze, Alexis Rudier Fondeur, 120.7 x 130.8 x 33.7 cm, Cooper Hewitt Museum

Born in December of 1885 in St. Paul, Minnesota, Paul Manship was an American sculptor whose subjects and modern style were largely inspired by classical sculpture. After attending Mechanical Arts High School, he took evening classes at the St. Paul Institute School of Art from 1892 to 1903, but left to work as a designer and illustrator. In 1905 Manship enrolled briefly in the Art Students League in New York City under Hermon Atkins MacNeil, a sculptor trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

Soon after his arrival to New York, Paul Manship became an assistant to stone sculptor Solon Borglum, whom he credited as the master who had most influenced him. With money saved, he enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia from 1907-08 under sculptor Charles Grafly. Moving back to New York, Manship worked at the studio of Viennese sculptor Isidore Konti, where he modeled a decorative relief entitled “Man with Wild Horses”, later shown at the National Academy of Design in 1908.

In 1909 at the age of twenty-three, Paul Manship received a three-year scholarship, the coveted American Prix de Rome, to study at the American Academy in Rome. His early work was influenced by Rodin’s expressive style but, after traveling throughout Italy and Greece, he developed an appreciation for Hellenistic statues and for Egyptian, Assyrian, and Minoan artwork. This affinity for archaic work influenced Manship’s unified linear style of sculpture for which he is well known; his novel approach represented a break from the popular Beaux-Arts style of his former teachers.

After three years abroad, Manship settled in New York City in 1912, where he began a successful career that would last fifty years. His arresting sculptures, with their freely modeled simple forms and dramatic gestures, were in demand in the New York art world. In February of 1913 Manship had a solo exhibition of his work at New York’s Architectural League. An instant success with critics and the public, it resulted in many private and public commissions.

This success of Manship’s solo show was followed with two more exhibitions of his work in November of 1913, moving his career briskly forward. A show at the Berlin Photographic Company in 1914 resulted in the sale of almost one hundred of Manship’s bronze pieces. He was honored by his peers for this achievement with a gold medal at the San Francisco Panama-Pacific Exposition in 1915.

Some of Paul Manship’s most notable works are: the set of monumental bronze gates at the entrance to the New York Zoological Park in the Bronx area of New York, erected as a memorial to Paul Rainey; the Prometheus Fountain in Rockefeller Center, New York City, which ultimately became his signature work despite his disappointment with the subject; and the “Time and Fates Sundial” with the accompanying four “Moods of Time”, executed in plaster of Paris, for the reflecting pool of the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City.

Paul Manship, at the top of his profession, was bestowed with many honors: membership in the Academia Nacional de las Bellas Artes in Argentina in 1944; membership in Paris’ Academie des Beaux-Arts in 1946; membership in l’Accademia di San Luca in Rome in 1952, the gold medal for sculpture by the National Institute of Arts and Letters in New York City in 1945; membership in the French Legion of Honor; and election to president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1948.

“I’m not especially interested in anatomy, though naturally I’ve studied it. And, although I approve generally of normally correct proportions, what matters is the spirit which the artist puts into his creation—the vitality, the rhythm, the emotional effect.” —Paul Manship

Richard Siken: “I Am the Wind”

Photographer Unknown, I Am the Wind

“I am the wind and the wind is invisible, all the leaves tremble but I am invisible, blackbird over the dark field but I am invisible, what fills the balloon and what it moves through, knot without rope, bloom without flower, galloping without the horse, the spirit of the thing without the thing, location without dimension, without a within, song without throat, word without ink, wingless flight, dark boat in the dark night, shine without light, pure velocity, as the hammer is a hammer when it hits the nail and the nail is a nail when it meets the wood and the invisible table begins to appear out of mind, pure mind, out of nothing, pure thinking, hand of the mind, hand of the emperor, arm of the empire, void and vessel, sheath and shear, and wider, and deeper, more vast, more sure, through silence, through darkness, a vector, a violence, and even farther, and even worse, between, before, behind, and under, and even stronger, and even further, beyond form, beyond number, I labor, I lumber, I fumble forward through the valley as winter, as water, a shift in the river, I mist and frost, flexible and elastic to the task, a fountain of gravity, space curves around me, I thirst, I hunger, I spark, I burn, force and field, force and counterforce, agent and agency, push to your pull, parabola of will, massless mass and formless form, dreamless dream and nameless name, intent and rapturous, rare and inevitable, I am the thing that is hurtling towards you…”

—Richard Siken, Lovesong of the Square Root of Negative One, War of the Foxes

Richard Siken currently lives and works in Tucson, Arizona.

Sunil Gupta

The Photographic Work by Sunil Gupta

Born in New Delhi, India in 1953, Sunil Gupta is an artist, educator, photographer, and curator. He studied at the London’s Royal College of Art and completed his doctoral program at the University of Westminster in 2018. He has been involved with independent photography as a critical practice since the 1970s focusing on race, migration and queer issues. Gupta’s work has been instrumental in raising awareness around the political realities for international gay rights and the visible tensions between tradition and modernity, both public and private.

In the mid-1970s, Gupta studied under Lisette Model at the New School for Social Research and became interested in the idea of gay public space. It was during this period that he shot his early street series “Christopher Street, New York”, documenting the daily lives of gay men in lower New York City.

In the 1980s, Gupta constructed his “Exiles” series, consisting of documentary images of Indian gay men in the architectural spaces of Delhi, which with images and texts described the conditions for gay men in India at that time. His series with the fictional name, “Mr. Malhotra’s Party”, was shot twenty years later and updates this theme during a time in which queer identities are more open and also reside in virtual space on the internet and in private parties.

Gay nights at local clubs in Delhi are always sign-posted as private parties in a fictitious person’s name to get around Section 377, a British colonial law, which still criminalizes homosexuality in India. Mr Malhotra is is the ubiquitous Punjabi refugee who arrived post partition and contributed to the development of the city.

Among Sunil Gupta’s published works are the monographs: “Wish You Were Here: Memories of a Gay Life” published by Yoda Press, New Delhi in 2008; and “Pictures From Here”, published by Chris Boot Ltd., New York, in 2003. Along with photographer Charan Singh, whose work is informed by HIV/AIDS work in India, Sunil Gupta exhibited in 2008 “Dissent and Desire” at Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum, which was accompanied by the book, “Delhi: Communities of Belonging”.

Sunil Gupta is a Professorial Fellow at UCA, Farnham, and Visiting Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London, and was the Lead Curator for the Houston Foto-Fest in 2018. Gupta’s work is in many private and public collections including, George Eastman House; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Royal Ontario Museum; Tate Museum in London; and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Note: For those interested in Sunil Gupta’s work, a lecture at the International Center of Photography by Sunil Gupta on his life and work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aPdzwCKvP4

Bottom Insert Image: Sunil Gupta, “The New Pre-Raphaelites 3%”, 2007, Color Print. jpg

Max Dupain

Max Dupain, “Tea Towel Trio”, 1934, Silver Gelatin Print, 29.5 x 22 cm

Born in April of 1911 in Sydney, Australia, Maxwell Spencer Dupain was an Australian photographer whose influential style of commercial photography emphasized the geometric forms of his industrial and architectural subjects. He studied at both the East Sydney Technical College and the Julian Ashton Art School between 1933 and 1935, and apprenticed with commercial photographer Cecil Bostock from 1930 to 1934.

During World War II, Max Dupain worked for the army camouflage unit; upon deployment, he worked for the Australian Department of Information until 1947. When he returned to his studio work, Dupain concentrated on more abstract architectural and industrial imagery instead of his previous portraiture and landscape work. This more abstract imagery established him as one of the most significant Modernist photographers in Australia.

Living in Sydney all his life, Dupain photographed the city from the 1930s until his death in July of 1992. Although traveling a few times abroad, including photographing the Seidler Australian Embassy in 1988, he was chiefly interested in the beaches and cities of Australia. Dupain’s photographic series of Australia’s beach culture are his most enduring images, with his 1937 “Sunbaker”, a low-angle shot of a male sunbather on the beach, becoming an icon of the Australian life.

Simple and direct in his work, Max Dupain, feeling that color was restricting in its objectivity, remained an adherent to black and white photography. His work has been collected by most of the major galleries in Australia and resides in many private collections. Dupain’s work was featured at the Photographer’s Gallery in London to celebrate his eightieth birthday, At the age of eighty-two, he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1982. Maxwell Dupain continued his work in photography until his death in July of 1992.

Note: Max Dupain’s collection of twenty-eight thousand archived negatives are now catalogued and preserved in the New South Wales State Library located in Sydney.

Michel Serres: “A Variety of Contingency”

Photographers Unknown, A Variety of Contingency

“The skin is a variety of contingency: in it, through it, with it, the world and my body touch each other, the feeling and the felt, it defines their common edge. Contingency means common tangency: in it the world and the body intersect and caress each other. I do not wish to call the place in which I live a medium, I prefer to say that things mingle with each other and that I am no exception to that. I mix with the world which mixes with me. Skin intervenes between several things in the world and makes them mingle.”

—Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies

Images reblogged with thanks to https://fuzzynavelfan.tumblr.com

Vangelis Kyris

Photography by Vangelis Kyris

Born in Athens, Greece, Vangelis Kyris started his multi-faceted career as the fashion editor of Gynaika, one of Greece’s top women’s popular magazines. Recognized for his artistic vision, he began his photographic work through collaborations with Vogue, Elle Magazine, Marie Clare, and Lacoste, which led to international projects with Puma and Nina Ricci.

Vangelis Kyris’ body of work includes not only fashion editorials but also celebrity portraits, including those of Woody Allen, model Gisele Bundchen, actress Jerry Hall, and French electronic-composer Jean Michel Jarre. He participated in Georgio Armani’s 2004 book “Facce da Sport (Faces in Sport)” and in the 2016 museum-digital archive project entitled “Emotions of the Athletic Body” held at the Armani/Silos fashion art museum in Milan.

Religion, nature in its different geographical locations, and the perplexed emotions of human beings in its varied forms are mixed with Vangelis Kyris’ obsession for beauty to form the themes behind his photographic works. To these works, he adds a sensibility to the forms and culture of Hellenic civilization, often paying tribute in his photographs to Greek painter Yannis Tsarouchis.

One of Vangelis Kyris’ most recent series is his collaboration with Bulgarian photographer and dancer Anotoli Georgiev, entitled “A Voyage Within”. This portrait series is seen through the context of a global travel, starting from Asia and Africa and ending in Greece. The creative portraits take their roots form the local traditions, are printed on canvas, and hand-embellished by Georgiev to give them a third-dimension through texture and volume. With this addition, contemporary photography joins with the traditional methods of tea-dyeing and thread corrosion.

“The Voyage Within” website featuring the works of Vangelis Kyris and Anatoli Georgiev, curated by Erica Vassiliou, can be found at: https://avoyagewithin.com/about-us/

Alfonso Ossorio

The Artwork of Alfonso Ossorio

Born in August of 1916 in Manila, Alfonso Ossorio was an abstract expressionist artist of Hispanic, Filipino, and Chinese heritage. At the age of fourteen, he moved to the United States and attended Portsmouth Abbey School in Rhode Island, graduating in 1934. Ossorio studied fine art at Harvard University from 1934 to 1938, and continued his studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. He became a United States citizen in 1933.

Discovered by art dealer and collector Betty Parsons, Alfonso Ossorio had his first show, featuring his Surrealist-influenced works at New York’s Wakefield Gallery in 1940. Following World War II service in the US Army as a medical illustrator, tasked with drawing surgical procedures on injured soldiers, he took some respite in the Berkshires, a region in western Massachusetts known for its outdoor activities. It was there at the 1948 Tanglewood Music Festival that Ossorio met Edward Dragon, a ballet dancer, who would be Ossorio’s life-long partner.

Through his connection with Betty Parsons, Ossorio became acquainted with the work of Jackson Pollock. Becoming both an admirer and a collector of Pollock’s expressionist work, he and Pollock soon developed a close friendship and reciprocal influence on each others work. Later in 1951, through critic and art historian Michel Tapié, Ossorio established a contact between Pollock and the young Parisian gallery owner Paul Facchetti who realized Pollock’s first solo exhibition in Europe in 1952.

In Paris in 1951, Ossorio and Edward Dragon frequently met with artist Jean Dubuffet and his wife Lili. While they were visiting, Jean Dubuffet wrote the text for his monograph on Ossorio entitled, “Peintures Initiatiques d’Alfonso Ossorio” and introduced Ossorio to art critic and collector Michel Tapié. Tapié organized a one-man show at the Studio Paul Facchetti of Ossorio’s small, luminous “Victorias Drawings”, which Ossorio made while visiting the Philippines. Produced using Ossorio’s experimental drawing technique of wax-resistant crayon on Tiffany & Co. stationary, the works in this series are counted as some of Ossorio’s most innovative.

Dubuffet’s interest in art brut opened up new vistas for Ossorio, who found release from society’s preconceptions in the previous unstudied creativity of insane asylum inmates and children. In the 1950s, Ossorio began to create works resembling Dubuffet’s assemblages. He affixed shells, bones, driftwood, nails, dolls’ eyes, cabinet knobs, dice, costume jewelry, mirror shards, and children’s toys to the panel surface. Ossorio called these assemblages congregations, with the term’s obvious religious connotation.

On the advice of Pollock, Ossorio and Edward Dragon purchased an expansive 60-acre estate, The Creeks, in East Hampton, Long Island, New York, in 1951, where they lived for more than forty years. Alfonso Ossorio died in New York City in 1990. Half his ashes were scattered at The Creeks estate and the other half came to rest nine years later at Green River Cemetery, alongside the remains of many other famous artists, writers and critics.

Alfonso Ossorio’s works can be found at The Creeks, the Harvard Art Museum in Massachusetts, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Housatonic Museum of Art in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, among others.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Alfonso Ossorio”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print

Middle Insert Image: Alfonso Ossorio, “Double Portrait”, 1944, Watercolr, Black Ink on Paper, 35.5 x 50.8 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Bottom Insert Image: Alfonso Ossorio, “Dunstan Thompson”, 1942, Watercolor, Gouache and Ink on Paper, 64.8 x 52.1 cm, Private Collection

Walt Whitman: “I Exist As I Am”

Photographer Unknown, I Exist As I Am

“I exist as I am, that is enough,

If no other in the world be aware I sit content,

And if each and all be aware I sit content.

One world is aware, and by the far the largest to me, and that is myself,

And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years,

I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait.

My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite,

I laugh at what you call dissolution,

And I know the amplitude of time.

—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, Part 20, Leaves of Grass

“Song of Myself”, one of the most famous of Walt Whitman’s works and a poem that represents the core of his poetic vision, was one of the original twelve pieces in the 1855 first edition of “Leaves of Grass”, published at Whitman’s own expense. Originally published without sections, the final edition consists of thirteen hundred lines arranged in fifty-two separate but connected works.

Like most of the other poems in “Leaves of Grass”, this poem was revised extensively, reaching its final form in 1881. “Song of Myself” is a sprawling combination of biography and poetic meditation, with Whitman using symbols and sly commentary to get at important issues. Composed in a series of vignettes with small, precisely drawn scenes, the poem is written in Whitman’s signature free verse style.

This poem did not take on the title “Song of Myself” until the 1881 edition. Previous to that it had been titled “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American” and, in the 1860, 1867, and 1871 editions, simply “Walt Whitman.” The poem’s shifting title is suggestive of the theme Whitman examined in this piece. As Walt Whitman, the specific individual, melts away into the abstract “Myself”, the poem explores the possibilities for communion between individuals.

Following its 1855 publication, “Song of Myself” was immediately singled out by critics and readers for particular attention, and the work remains among the most acclaimed and influential in American poetry. Public acceptance, however, was slow in coming. Social conservatives denounced the poem as disregarding norms of morality due to its obvious depictions of human sexuality.

Note: An interesting read from The Walt Whitman Archive is James E Miller’s “Sex and Sexuality” which deals with the themes of sex and sexuality in Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”. The commentary can be found at: https://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/encyclopedia/entry_49.html

Rotimi Fani-Kayode

The Photographic Work of Rotimi Fani-Kayode

Photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode, the son of a chieftain of Ife, the ancestral capital of the Yoruba people, was born in Lagos, Nigeria in 1955, He moved at the age of eleven, with his family to Brighton, England, in order to escape the Nigerian Civil War. Fani-Kayode studied at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and later at the Pratt Institute in New York, where he earned his MFA in 1983.

After graduating, Fani-Kayode returned to England, settling permanently, to pursue a career in photography. A prominent figure in the Black British art scene, he was a founding member and the first chairman of Autograph ABP, the Association of Black Photographers, in 1968. During the height of the AIDS crisis and in response to the homophobia in both England and his home country of Nigeria, Fani-Kayode photographed images that called attention to the politics of race, dignified queer black culture and homoerotic desire, and explored cultural differences and identity.

Using ancestral rituals and multi-layered symbolism joined with archetypal motifs from both African and European cultures, Fani-Kayode depicted the black male body as the focal point to probe the boundaries of erotic and spiritual fantasy, and sexual and cultural differences. He saw his work as a way to explore the position of the black body in the imagery of the Western cultures and to contest the narrowness of the Yoruba mindset in terms of homosexuality. Fani-Kayode , using the dramatic lighting of chiaroscuro and the transformation of Yoruba mythological symbols and rituals, presented intimate moments of queer sexuality as a means of personal and political survival.

Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s photographs have been exhibited internationally since 1985, with numerous solo exhibitions in London, Boston, New York, and Cape Town. In 2003, his work was featured in the African Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale and, in 2011, in ARS 11 at the Kiasma-Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland. Fani-Kayode’s work is represented in the collections of numerous institutions and private collectors including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Walther Family Foundation, Harvard University’s Hutchins Center, and the Kiasma-Museum of Contemporary Art, among others.

One of the most significant names in the history of black photography, Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s career was cut short by his untimely death at the age of thirty-four in December 1989. Many of his photographs were created in collaboration with his late partner Alex Hirst and are collected in the posthumous 1996 publication “Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Alex Hirst: Photographs”. His work is represented by Autograph ABP, London.

“My identity has been constructed from my own sense of otherness, whether cultural, racial or sexual. The three aspects are not separate within me. Photography is the tool by which I feel most confident in expressing myself. It is photography therefore – Black, African, homosexual photography – which I must use not just as an instrument, but as a weapon if I am to resist attacks on my integrity and, indeed, my existence on my own terms. — Rotimi Fani-Kayode, “Traces of Ecstasy”, Ten-8, Number 28, 1988.

Note: All photographic work shown was a collaborative effort by Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Alex Hirst. Images reblogged with thanks to Autograph ABP, London.