Cornel Brudașcu

The Paintings of Cornel Brudașcu

Born in the Sălaj County village of Tusa in 1937, Cornel Brudașcu is a Romanian painter who began his career under the his country’s former Communist regime of the 1960s. He studied painting at the Universitatea de Artă şi Design in the north-western city of Cluj-Napoca. Over the course of his career, Brudașcu’s work gradually progressed into gestural compositions that melded figurative forms with abstraction.

After his university graduation in 1962, Brudașcu began to establish an impressive body of work. However, while there were opportunities for exhibitions in the 1960s, there was no established art market in Romania. In the 1970s, the only decade in which the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu allowed cultural exchange with the West, Brudașcu and other artists became acquainted with contemporary American art through Western magazines, reading rooms, and informal networks. Publications, such as Germany’s “Popcorn” and London’s “Oz”, offered images of counter-culture music and art movements beyond the Iron Curtain.

As a member of Romania’s 1970s avant-garde painters, Brudașcu experimented with solarized photography and created a series of Pop Art paintings, photo- based portraits of friends as well as figures appropriated from magazines. These works gained him international recognition in 2015 due to their inclusion at the Tate Modern’s “The World Goes Pop” in London. Both the Centre Pompidou and Musee d’Art Moderne at the Ville de Paris have works from this series in their collections.

Following his Pop Art images, Cornel Brudașcu made a radical shift away from his previous work. This change was the result of new visual elements and a more personal approach to his paintings’ themes and genres. At unspecified times over a period of fifteen years, Brudașcu created a collection of simple graphic sketches and small, untitled paintings with dark burgundy hues. He interwove those works with male figurative paintings of a post-impressionist style that were tinged with a distinct homoeroticism. This painterly series of figurative works bear witness through their dream-like compositions to his slow, poetic journey of gay affirmation.

As with many other Romanian artists, the subject of hero and anti-hero is a dominate theme in Brudașcu’s paintings. Influenced heavily by the works of El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos) who reached his artistic maturity in Spain, Brudașcu’s fluid expressionist style inspired the many master-class students who attended his studio to be independent in their thinking and work. Throughout his career, Brudașcu’s oeuvre has maintained a balance of intimacy and cultural commentary that has united local Romanian histories with broader art movements.

Cornel Brudașcu has continued to exhibit his work since 2005. Among his solo exhibitions were shows at Galeria Plan B in Berlin, the VNH Gallery in Paris and Spatiu Intact in Cluj, Romania. His paintings have been presented in group exhibitions in Berlin, Hong Kong, London, Paris, Bucharest, New York, Ostrava, and Leipzig, among others. Brudașcu continues to live and work in Cluj-Napoca as a teacher at the internationally renowned Fine Arts School of Cluj.

Notes: Galleria Plan B has a biography and a selection of Cornel Brudașcu’s work at its website: https://www.plan-b.ro

The online Frieze Magazine has an article on Cornel Brudașcu by art and culture writer Kristian Vistrup Madsen at its site: https://www.frieze.com/article/cornel-brudascu

A second article on Cornel Brudașcu by Kristian Madsen, that includes several images from various stages of his work, is located at The Clavert Journal site: https://www.plan-b.ro/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Cornel-Brudascu-The-Calvert-Journal-2017.pdf

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Cornel Brudascu”, Color Print, The Calvert Journal 2017, United Kingdom

Second Insert Image: Cornel Brudașcu, Untitled (Faces on Red Field), 2024, Oil on Canvas, 50 x 40 cm, Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris

Bottom Insert Image: Cornel Brudascu, Untitled (Figure/Blue Lines), 2019, Oil on Canvas, 51.8 x 47.9 cm, Allison Jacques Gallery, London

James Owen Mahoney

James Owen Mahoney, “The Etruscans”, Circa 1932, Oil on Canvas, 208.3 x 167.6 cm, Private Collection

Born in Dallas, Texas in October of 1907, James Owen Mahoney was an American artist noted for his canvas paintings and contributions to the revival of mural painting in the United States. He majored in art at Southern Methodist University from which he graduated in 1928. Mahoney continued his education at the Yale University School of Fine Art where he studied under painter Eugene Savage, a muralist who was trained in Early Renaissance techniques. The acquisition of these formal and technical Renaissance practices resulted in Mahoney’s mastery of tonal gradations and figurative modeling.

In 1932, Mahoney’s impressive work earned him the Prix de Rome and fellowship at the American Academy; he occupied a studio at the Academy’s palazzo on the Janiculum Hill in western Rome. This opportunity gave Mahoney direct exposure to the grandeur of Italy’s art, architecture and culture, an experience that remained with him throughout life. After returning to New York in 1936, he made the decision to focus on the genre of mural painting, an art style supported by the Federal Arts Project and favored by the public.

James Owen Mahoney eventually emerged as one of the leading muralists in the country. He received many commissions, among which were several murals to be displayed at the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition, two murals for the New York World’s Fair of 1939, and murals for private residences in New York, Connecticut, and Texas. After winning a national competition, Mahoney painted a third mural for the 1939 World’s Fair: a painting, measured one hundred by thirty-four feet, for the Building of the Government of the United States.

In 1939, Mahoney accepted an invitation from Dean Gilmore Clarke to become a member of Cornell University’s faculty at its College of Architecture. During the next three years, he regularly traveled between his Ithaca studio and his New York City apartment. In 1942, Mahoney joined the U.S. Army Air Corps and was stationed, after an officer training course, with a British military unit where he specialized in interpreting aerial photographs of enemy positions. After the war, Mahoney returned to Cornell University, took residence at the campus Faculty Club, and renewed his teaching responsibilities.

Although he maintained his ideals from Yale University, James Own Mahoney adapted his art teachings on theory and methods to a form of modified surrealism that combined trompe l’oeil elements, i.e. visual illusions, with real found objects, a characteristic of mid-twentieth century American art. Mahoney continued his mural work, albeit on a smaller scale as public favor for grand-scale murals had fallen, as well as his verre églomisé (reverse glass paintings) for sites in Baltimore, Atlanta, Ithaca and other cities. All these works were distinguished by their impeccable craftsmanship, Art Deco opulence, and suitability to the site.

Mahoney served as chairman of Cornell University’s Department of Art, during which he fostered a program that brought contemporary artists to Cornell. These artists presented their views and participated in critiques of student art. An individual with a complex personality, Mahoney was an avid and perceptive reader with strong literary opinions; his interests ranged from aesthetic theory to the latest fiction. Although trained in Renaissance traditions, he had high regard for the bucolic images of Samuel Palmer, the neo-primitive works of Henri Rousseau and the simple small-scale paintings of Giorgio Morandi.

James Owen Mahoney died at the age of eighty on the nineteenth of October in 1987 in Ithaca, New York. He left his library of approximately seven-thousand five-hundred volumes to the Cornell University Libraries, all the paintings in his possession to Cornell University’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum, and his house and furnishings to the Unitarian Church of Ithaca.

Notes: James Owen Mahoney’s “The Etruscans=, painted in 1932 during his tenure in Italy, is a powerful work. Imbued with grandeur, it captured Mahoney’s attention to line, sculptural forms, tonal gradations, and Art Deco flamboyance. Equally conscious of the art of composition, he filled the large-scale canvas with a surprisingly intimate and engaging scene.

Verre églomisé refers to the process of applying both a painted design and gilding onto the rear face of glass. In this process, the artist’s natural methodology is reversed, with highlights applied first and background applied last.

Top Insert Image: James Owen Mahoney, “The Red Bird”, Oil on Canvas, 195.9 x 182.6 cm, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University

Second Insert Image: James Owen Mahoney, “Legend”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 160 x 2223.5 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: James Owen Mahoney, “Allegorical View of South Texas”, 1936, Mural Oil on Canvas, Hall of State, The State of Texas Building, Dallas, Texas

Bottom Insert Image: James Owen Mahoney, “Sunday Afternoon”, Oil on Canvas Stretched on Hardboard Panel, 121.9 x 152.4 cm, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University

Jules Aarons

The Photography of Jules Aarons

Born in the New York City borough of The Bronx in October of 1921, Jules Aarons was an American space physicist and photographer. He is recognized for his scientific studies of radio-wave propagation as well as his documentary photography of Boston’s mid-twentieth century ethnic neighborhoods.

The son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Jules Aarons was raised in a working-class environment during the economic challenges of the interwar period, which included the Great Depression era that affected many families in the manufacturing trades. He studied at City College of New York and graduated in May of 1942 with a Bachelor Degree in Education. After serving in the Army Signal Corps during World War II, Aarons studied physics at Boston University, where he earned his Master of Science in Physics in 1949.

As a Fulbright scholar, Aarons completed his Doctorate in Science at the University of Paris in 1954. He specialized in the study of ionospheric scintillations, the rapid fluctuations in radio wave amplitude and phase caused by irregularities in the ionosphere’s electron density, and their effects on communication and navigational systems. From 1948 to 1981, Arrons worked as senior scientist at the Air Force Geophysics Research Laboratory at Hanscom Field in Massachusetts; his research led to improvements in satellite and global positioning technology.

In 1957, Jules Aarons formed the Joint Satellite Studies Group, an international collective that studied atmospheric effects on satellite signals. This group expanded to become the Beacon Satellite Studies; its ionospheric monitoring stations proved useful in designs for the Air Force’s space-based communication and navigation systems. In 1981, Aarons became a research professor in Boston University’s astronomy department and helped establish the university’s Center fo Space Physics in 1987. Throughout his decades-long research, he published over one hundred scientific papers and authored three books on such topics as radio astronomy, magnetic storm phases and ionospheric scintillations.

Aarons’s interest in photography began in his youth and continued through his college classes and later scientific work. His many travels around the world for seminars and studies offered opportunities for his photography. Interested in a social documentary approach to photography, Aarons was influenced by the work of Sid Grossman, a co-founder of New York’s Photo League; Austrian-born humanist photographer Lisette Model; French humanist photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson: and the Hungarian-French photographer and filmmaker Brassaï who captured the essence of Paris in his work.

Jules Aarons is known primarily for his late 1940s and early 1950s street-photography of Boston’s ethnically diverse West End and its predominantly Italian North End neighborhoods. During the process of developing his own unique style, he initially began taking photographs of the West End in 1947 to document Boston’s streets and people. Using a double-lens Rolleiflex, Aarons tried to capture the West End’s social environment without being intrusive. To avoid any formal posing, he shot informal photos of ordinary people in public settings, mostly without their knowledge.

After retiring from Massachusetts’s Hanscom Field Laboratory in 1981, Aarons became a professor at Boston University where he led projects on space physics. It was at this time that he ceased his photography, not for lack of time, but due the fact that his eyes had grown too irritated by darkroom chemicals. A research professor emeritus of astronomy and space physics as well as an acclaimed photographer, Jules Aarons died at the age of eighty-two in Boston on the twenty-first of November in 2008.

Jules Aarons’s work is in the permanent collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Bibliotheque Nationale and Bibliotheque Historique in Paris, and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, among others. In addition to his scientific works, he published six volumes of photographs and essays, the most recent being the 2006 “Public Spaces/Public Moments: The Photographs of Jules Aarons” published through Boston’s Kayafas Gallery.

Notes: All images, unless noted, are from the Jules Aarons Estate/ Kayafas Gallery, Boston

The Jules Aarons website is located at: https://www.julesaarons.com

The Red River Paper Blog has a 2020 article by Arthur H. Bleich entitled “Jules Aarons: Mind of a Scientist, Eye of an Artist” on its site: https://www.redrivercatalog.com/blog/jules-aarons-mind-of-a-scientist-eye-of-an-artist.html?srsltid=AfmBOorECX90BByO-Zo1RQ895pqACtLGBdKeknSDhM6yu9isuMmSzD9K

Award-winning author William Landay has a 2010 article on Jules Aarons entitled “The Street Photography of Jules Aarons” on his website: https://www.williamlanday.com/2010/02/02/the-street-photography-of-jules-aarons/

Top Insert Image: Kalman Zabarsky, “Jules Aarons”, circa 2001, Gelatin Silver Print, Brown University Bridge, Vol 5 No. 10, October 2001

Second Insert Image: Jules Aarons, “Self Portrait”, “West End, Boston” Series. Gelatin Silver Print, Jules Aarons Estate/Kayafas Gallery, Boston

Third Insert Image: Jules Aarons, Untitled (Group Photo of Nine Boys), “West End, Boston” Series, Gelatin Silver Print, Jules Aarons Estate, Kayafas Gallery, Boston

Bottom Insert Image: Jules Aarons, Untitled (Lounging). 1947-1953, “North End, Boston” Series, . Gelatin Silver Print, Jules Aarons Estate/Kayafas Gallery, Boston

Astolfo Petrazzi

Astolfo Petrazzi, “Still Life of Flowers and Winged Animals in a Landscape”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 182.5 x 223 cm, Private Collection

Born at the city of Siena in November of 1580, Astolfo Petrazzi was an Italian painter and draftsman of the Baroque period. The Baroque style of art, encouraged by the Catholic Church as a counter force to the austerity of Protestantism, was a flamboyant style with deep color, grandeur, contrast, movement and dramatic detail.

The son of Lazzaro di Giovan Francesco da Modena, a hatter by trade, and his wife Lucrezia, Astolfo Petrazzi was raised in a family of modest means with connections to local artisan circles. His artwork was firmly rooted in Siena’s artistic traditions. Unlike the art of Florence, Siena’s artists preferred a more decorative style with rich colors and figures that were elegant and dignified. Sienese paintings favored scenes of miraculous events often executed with dreamlike coloration; allegories, classical myths and portraits were not depicted in their work.

Petrazzi was predominantly a student of Late-Mannerist painters and printmakers Francesco Vanni, who had received commissions from Pope Clement VIII, and Ventura Salimbeni, the half-brother of Vanni and fresco painter for Pope Sixtus V. He also studied under Pietro Sorri, a Sienese painter known for his portraits and historical scenes. Petrazzi was influenced by other artists from Siena including painter Alessandro Casolani and Vincenzo Rustici whose “Virgin with Child and St. Catherine of Siena” was known to him.

In the second decade of the 1600s, Astolfo Petrazzi traveled in Italy and developed a new style, influenced by the various artworks he encountered. Petrazzi’s work became a blend of naturalism, a derivative of Caravaggio’s work, that was evident in paintings by late-Mannerist artist Francesco Rustici, and the direct realism exhibited in the paintings of early-Baroque Florentine artist Mateo Rosselli.

In the 1620s, Petrazzu traveled to Rome where he studied the classical trends that had emerged in contemporary Roman art. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, classicism had gradually departed from its earlier course of simplicity and emphasis on form. By the first quarter of the seventeenth-century, classicism had adopted an overly strong sense of orderliness, predictability, and an emphasis on rigorous teaching methods and discipline.

After his return to Siena in 1624-1625, Astolfo Petrazzi’s work changed, particularly influenced by the work of two Baroque painters: Guido Reni who had worked for many years under Pope Urban VIII, and Domenico Zampieri who, although not as successful as Reni, received many commissions from the Vatican and wealthy patrons over the course of his career. The influence of both painters’ work can be seen in Petrazzi’s 1631 “Last Communion of St. Jerome” and the 1639 “Young John the Baptist Comforted by Angels”.

In his later life, Petrazzi painted a great number of works; however, they were increasingly repetitious in genre and composition with a progressive decline in quality. His last documented commissions were dated to 1648; these included frescoes from the life of Job for Siena’s Church of Saint Rocco..

Through his life, Petrazzi maintained a productive workshop in Siena, established a drawing academy, and contributed significantly to Siena’s artistic life through both frescoes and murals. Astolfo Petrazzi died on the eleventh of August in 1653 at the age of fifty-two at the Parish of Saint Martino of his native Siena. He was entombed in the Siena Cathedral.

Notes: A more extensive biography of Astolfo Petrazzi can be found at: https://grokipedia.com/page/astolfo_petrazzi

The Stephen Ongpin Fine Art site has a short biography on Astolfo Petrazzi: https://www.stephenongpin.com/artist/241205/astolfo-petrazzi

Top Insert Image: Astolfo Petrazzi, Title Unknown (Standing Figure Placing Scapular(?) on Kneeling Figure), Pen and Brush with Brown Ink, 31,3 x 22.2 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Second Insert Image: Astolfo Petrazzi, “Madonna of the Rosary with the Blessed Saints”, 1640-1660, Oil on Canvas, 254 x 151 cm, Museum of Sacred Art of Val d’Arbia, Buonconvento, Italy

Third Insert Image: Astolfo Petrazzi, “The Figure of Justice Flanked by Two Figures”, circa 1630, Pen and Brown Ink on Paper, 22.3 x 15.4 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Astolfo Petrazzi, “A Shepherd Playing the Catera”, Early 1600s, Oil on Canvas, 122.2 x 93 cm, Private Collection

Elia Tomás

The Paintings of Elia Tomás

Born in Italy, Elia Tomás is a talented visual artist currently based in Madrid. His first memories of art originate from his uncle who painted landscapes that, although devoid of any human element, remained full of personality. After achieving a degree in psychology, Tomás decided to begin a new chapter in his life. After thirty-two years of life in Italy, he relocated in 2011 to Spain, distancing himself from everything he knew to pursue his own unique style of art.

Tomás’s work focuses on the human element; the narratives of his subjects are expressed through portraiture, both individual and group. The majority of his work examines the concept of self-discovery through relationships and memories, both personal and of others. Within a continuous process of redefinition, the subjects of Tomás’s paintings either search backwards in time for those aspects they lack or live with intense intimacy in the present. Included within that process of self-discovery is an examination of masculinity and what that concept means personally and to society.

Elia Tomás defines his painting as synthetic in that each canvas is developed from a carefully de-contextualized set of photographic material; the photos are either self-produced or contained with private or historical archives. Tomás places emphasis on the style of his brushwork to create balances between faithful depictions and abstractions. He often alters faces and bodies with the brushwork to evoke the attention and emotions of his paintings’ spectators. Tomás’s color palette has developed throughout his career from an earlier blue-toned palette to a more chromatically complex one with some emphasis placed currently on yellows and pinks.

Tomás has consistently exhibited his work over the years, the initial public showing being the 2010 “Landing Point” at Palazzo Ducale in Genova. His paintings have appeared in both solo and group exhibitions in Italy, Spain, Albania, and the United States.

Notes: Unless noted as private collection, all works by Elia Tomás are in the collection of Elia Tomás/Saatchi Art Gallery.

Original work by Elia Tomás can be obtained through Saatchi Art Gallery: https://www.saatchiart.com/EliaTomas

The Elia Tomás website is located at: https://eliatomas.com

Bottom Insert Image: Elia Tomás, “Hiding the Tracks No.1”, 2011, Acrylic on Canvas, 116.8 x 96.5 cm, Private Collection

Peter Keetman

The Photography of Peter Keetman

Born at the Wupper River city of Elberfeld in April of 1910, Peter Keetman was a German photographer, a member of the avant-garde Fotoform and a formative force in the evolution of subjective photography.

In the post-war period of the 1950s, inter-human subjectivity was seen as a significant means to correct the errors of objectified wartime politics. This concept of subjectivity, taught by photographer Otto Steinert, influenced the Essen school of photography and formed the basis of a new movement, subjective photography, that championed the exploration of both the inner psyche and human condition rather than the outside world.

Born to consul and banker Alfred Keetman and Käthe Simons, Peter Keetman attended the Bavarian State Institute for Photography, later known as the State Academy for Photographic Design, Munich. After his graduation, he worked in Duisburg as an assistant to portrait photographer Gertrud Hesse and, later, industrial photographer Carl Heinz Schmeck in the Wurm River city of Aachen.

In 1940, Keetman was called into Germany’s Army where he served as a member of its Railway Pioneers, a division that converted Russian rail lines from broad gauge to German standard gauge, thus enabling the transport of Germany’s troops and supplies into Russia. In 1944, Keetman returned from the war; however, a serious injury during his service left a permanent disability. He resumed his studies by finishing his master class at the Bavarian State Institute for Photography in 1947-1948. In this period, Keetman assisted prominent New Objectivist photographer Adolf Lazi with the planning of “The Photographie 1948” exhibition in Stuttgart’s State Museum of Applied Arts.

In 1949, Peter Keetman became a founding member of Fotoform, a six-member avant-garde group that sought to revive the creative possibilities of photography that had been extinguished by the propaganda of Nazi cultural policy. The group adhered to personal expression and formalism, the study of art by comparing form and style, often through unusual compositional framings and darkroom manipulation. Keetman played a major role in the evolution of subjective photography; his work was presented at the 1951 “Subjective Photography” exhibition and within its accompanying catalogue.

Beginning in 1948, Keetman’s work appeared in all major German and many international photography magazines. He united within his wort the two main aesthetic currents of his era: the modernist attention to form, experimentation, and abstraction, and subjectivity’s wish for a humanistic approach to the depiction of the world, both cities and nature..The motifs of Keetman’s images were drawn from nature, architecture, people and industry; he was particularly adept at depicting the detail and sturcture of even ordinary objects.

Among all his collective works, Peter Keetman’s most noted series was his “Volkswagen: A Week at the Factory”, where he captured images of car parts and assembly lines. Begun on Easter of 1953, this series was more than conventional industrial photographs or documentation of the production process. Keetman included long shots in which the vastness of the factory halls dominate, and close ups with a high degree of abstraction taken under natural light.

Peter Keetman died in Marquartstein, Bavaria at the age of eighty-eight in March of 2005. For his photographic work, he was awarded the David -Octavius-Hill Medal from the German Photographic Academy, and the Cultural Award of the German Society of Photography. Keetman’s work is held in many private collections and such public institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago, the city of Wolfburg’s Art Museum, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, among others.

Top Insert Image: Peter Keetman, “Self-Portrait with Camera”, 1957, Gelatin Silver Print, 17.2 x 23.3 cm, Stiftung F.C. Gundlach

Second Insert Image: Peter Keetman, “Trister Bahnhof (Dreary Train Station)“, 1954, Ferrotyped Gelatin Silver Print on Agfa Paper, 30.8 x 23.9 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Peter Keetman, “Mensch und Natur (Man and Nature /My Own Shoe)”, 1948, Ferrotyped Gelatin Silver Print, 41.3 x 50.8 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Peter Keetman, “Volkswagen Work/Welding the Dash Panel and Roof of the Beetle, Assembly Hall 2”, 1953, Gelatin Silver Print, 25.8 x 26.8 cm, Private Collection

Richard Lindner

Richard Lindner, “The Meeting”, 1953, Oil on Canvas, 152.4 x 182.9 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Born at Hamburg in November of 1901, Richard Lindner was a German-American painter and illustrator. Unique as an artist, he created his own oeuvre: hard-edged paintings with stretches of color that melded human figures with machine-like elements. Lindner’s paintings in the 1960s used the sexual symbolism of advertising and investigated definitions of gender roles in the media.

Lindner’s career as an artist began at the age of forty after his arrival in New York City. Acknowledged as a significant and unique European-American painter, he was represented by prestigious galleries, including New York’s Cordier & Ekstrom and Betty Parson Gallery, and the Claude Bernard Gallery in Paris. Lindner had solo exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Berkeley’s University Art Museum, the Walker Center in Minneapolis, and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris.

Richard Lindner did not fit into any modernist or post-modernist category. He was erroneously categorized as a precursor of Pop Art. Lindner, however, regarded himself as a hard-edge painter with roots in European culture, particularly that of Germany in the Weimar years from 1919 to 1933. His work emerged from the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) in the 1920s, a reaction against German Expressionism that created a new realism with a grim but precise, satirical edge. Another source, perhaps more important, was the work of French painter Fernand Léger whose figurative work consisted of formalized, mechanical bodies with bold outlines; after 1927, this work became more organic and irregular.

Thoroughly knowledgable about European art, Lindner thought of himself as a European artist in exile, having escaped safely from the clutches of the German government in the 1930s. He adored New York’s cosmopolitan nature as well as its glamorous and seedier sides, aspects of which were used as themes in his work. Lindner’s paintings were created from the icons of American fantasy: Times Square, Coney Island, Hollywood, Las Vegas and Disneyland. His works displayed an iconographic human circus removed from reality, fantastic and dangerous at the same time.

“The Meeting” is considered Lindner’s first masterpiece; it is, surely, one of the odder paintings of the latter half of this century. Inside an impossibly claustrophobic room, Lindner has assembled tokens of obsession as well as friends and family: a buffoonish King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Lindner’s sister Lissy, the artist as a child with his aunt, and friends Hedda Sterne, Evelyn Hofer, and Saul Steinberg. The compositional anchors of the “The Meeting”, however, are a corseted woman whose back is toward us and a large cat who stares at the viewer in an accusatory manner. The bits-and-pieces quality of the painting is typical of Lindner’s compositions, although the space seen here is more “realistic” than the abstracted environments that were to follow. The isolation of each figure stems from Lindner’s collage-like sensibility. The portraits of Sterne and Steinberg, for instance, are based on photographs and their incongruity is due, in part, to the artist’s working methods. But Lindner’s best paintings don’t surrender to fragmentation, they flirt with it, and symbolic and pictorial density of “The Meeting” goes beyond cleverness.”

—Mario Naves, Richard Lindner: A New Yorker in Washington, The New Criterion, Art January 1997

Notes: In 1967, the “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album appeared to wide acclaim at the height of Beatlemania. It was one of the most successful albums with more than eleven million copies sold in the United States alone. British painter Peter Blake designed the album cover which featured over seventy faces of recognizable people from Marilyn Monroe and Mae West to Marlon Brando and Edgar Allan Poe. Of all these famous faces, there was only one face that depicted a painter: Richard Lindner.

Second Insert Image: Richard Lindner, Untitled, Colored Lithograph, 44/125 Edition, 1975, “Eugène Ionesco” Series, 38.5 x 52 cm, Mourlot Printer, Paris

Bottom Insert Image: Richard Lindner, “Checkmate”, 1966, Cut-and-Paste Papers, Watercolor, Pencil, Crayon and Ink on Paper, 60.6 x 45.6 cm, Museum of Modern Art

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Ralph Eugene Meatyard

The Photography of Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Born at the city of Normal, Illinois in May of 1925, Ralph Eugene Meatyard was an American photographer, a visionary artist known for his black and white portraits of friends, posed family members in masks, and experimental abstracted compositions.

Raised in the city of Bloomington, Ralph Meatyard at the age of eighteen joined the United States Navy during World War 11. After his discharge from military service, he studied optometry through the government’s GI Bill at Williams College in Massachusetts. After his marriage to Madelyn McKinney, Meatyard and his wife relocated to Chicago where he began training as an apprentice optician.

From 1950 to 1967, Meatyard worked at Tinder-Krausse-Tinder, a large optical firm in Lexington, Kentucky. After leaving the company, he opened his own business, Eyeglasses of Kentucky, that created lenses for glasses. The city of Lexington was the site of the University of Kentucky and, during the 1960s, the gathering place for the area’s writers and intellectuals, many of whom became Meatyard’s friends. Among these artists and writers were novelist Wendell Berry, visual artist Guy Davenport, photographers Jonathan Williams and James Baker Hall, and Trappist monk Thomas Merton, a poet who resided at Kentucky’s Abby of Gethsemani.

In 1950, Ralph Meatyard purchased his first camera to photograph Michael, his first-born of three children. Having become interested in photography, he joined the Lexington Camera Club and the Photographic Society of America in 1954, working primarily with a Rolleiflex 6cm square medium format camera. During the 1950s, Meatyard attended a series of summer workshops created by Indiana University’s photography teacher Henry Holmes Smith. He also studied under Minor Martin White, a photographer known for his technical mastery and his strong sense of light and shadow.

Meatyard embraced photography’s function as both a memory and documentary device. His images were populated with family and friends portrayed on suburban front stoops, beside cars, within backyards, and either outside or inside abandoned farmhouses. Meatyard’s subjects, dressed in everyday clothes, were photographed in tight focus from commonplace angles with just enough light. Addressing the issue of identity, he often portrayed family and friends behind costume-shop masks or paper bag faces. This single addition to a posed everyday scene radically altered the image’s context and hinted at an undiscovered story.

In 1956 through fellow photographer Frank Van Deren Coke, Ralph Meatyard entered his photographs in the “Creative Photography” exhibition held at the University of Kentucky. He frequented the Trappistine Abbey of Gethsemani where he shot a number of experimental photographs depicting his friend Thomas Merton posed on its grounds. In 1971, Meatyard collaborated with writer Wendell Berry on “The Unforeseen Wilderness”, a book about Kentucky’s Red River Gorge. The public response to this volume, which contained photography by Meatyard, rescued the gorge from construction of a federally proposed Army Corps of Engineers dam.

Meatyard’s photography began to be known nationally in the early 1970s through several museum shows and its publication in magazines. He had shown his work in several exhibitions alongside such photographers as Ansel Adams, Minor White, Harry Callahan, Edward Weston and Robert Frank. Over the course of his career, he produced a number of photographic series including “Romances”, “Dolls and Masks” and “Light on the Water”. Produced over a two year period, his final series of photographs, the 1974 “The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater”, contained sequential cryptic double portraits of friends and family members wearing masks and enacting symbolic dramas.

A pioneering and inventive artist, Ralph Eugene Meatyard died at the age of forty-six from cancer in his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky on the seventh of May in 1972. He was survived by his wife Madelyn and three children: Michael, Melissa and Christopher. Meatyard was cremated and his ashes scattered in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge. His work is contained in several museums, among which are Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC, the John Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Notes: The name Lucybelle Crater in Meatyard’s final series was adapted by the artist from a character in Flannery O’Connor’s 1955 short story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”. Meatyard clearly intended that the identity of each person in the series not be known to the viewer of this work; he identified every character in this series with the same name: Lucybelle Crater. In each image, the Lucybell figure was portrayed by the artist’s wife, Madelyn Meatyard, who wore a costume-shop hag mask. This figure was paired with a family member or friend who wore a transparent mask that hid identity and aged the wearer.

“The Believer” is a quarterly literature, arts and culture magazine that specializes in criticism, literary non-fiction, and immersive reporting on contemporary issues. Investigative reporter and novelist Ted McDermott wrote an extensive article, “The Family Albums of Ralph Eugene Meatyard”, for its January 2007 issue: https://www.thebeliever.net/the-family-albums-of-ralph-eugene-meatyard/

Writer David A. Cory has a biographical article on Ralph Eugene Meatyard at the online photography magazine “F-Stop”: https://www.fstopmagazine.com/blog/2013/ralph-eugene-meatyard-by-david-cory/

San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery has an article on Ralph Eugene Meatyard that contains images from four of his series: https://fraenkelgallery.com/artists/ralph-eugene-meatyard

Top Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, (Self Portrait), 1964-1965, Gelatin Silver Print, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Second Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, (Self Portrait), 1958, Gelatin Silver Print, 28 x 35.6 cm, Fraenkel Gallery

Third Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, (Boy by Abandoned House), 1968-1969, Gelatin Silver Print, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Fourth Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled (Table and Chair), circa 1957-1958, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, (Wagon Wheel), 1957-1958, Gelatin Silver Print, 19.3 x 21.5 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Edmund Dulac

The Illustrative Work of Edmund Dulac

Born at the southern French city of Toulouse in October of 1882, Edmund Dulac was a French British-naturalized illustrator of books and magazines as well as designer of banknotes and stamps. Best known as an illustrator of gift books and children’s books, he was one of the illustrators who worked during the Golden Age of Illustration, that period from 1875 to 1920 which marked an upsurge in the quality of illustrated books.

Born the only child of Pierre Henri Aristide Dulac and Marie Catherine Pauline Rieu, Edmund Dulac grew up in a comfortable bourgeois household and was educated at the Lycée de Toulouse. By the age of sixteen, he was creating professional art nouveau work. Dulac studied law at the University of Toulouse for two years before enrolling at the École des Beaux Arts in 1900. While at school, he roomed with his close friend and fellow student Émile Rixens, who became a painter of landscapes and historical scenes.

In 1903, Dulac was awarded a scholarship to the Académie Julien in Paris where he studied for a short period. An impulsive marriage in December of 1903 to Alice May de Marini, an American thirteen years his senior, quickly dissolved. By 1904, he had left for England to pursue his artistic career. Dulac was immediately successful and joined both the London Sketch Club and the St. John’s Art Club. Settled in London’s Holland Park, he received his first commission: illustrations for an edition of Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” and nine other volumes of work by the Brontë sisters to be published by J. M. Dent & Company.

Edmund Dulac’s career flourished between 1890 and 1920, a period when British book illustration was unrivaled. Through his connections with the London Sketch Club, he began associations with London’s Leicester Gallery and publisher Hodder & Stoughton. The gallery commissioned illustrations which they sold at an annual exhibition; publishing rights for reproducing Dulac’s illustrations in yearly gift books were handled by Hodder & Stoughton. Through this partnership, Dulac illustrated multiple editions, which included “Stories from the Arabian Nights”, Shakespeare’s “Tempest”, “Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales”, “The Serpent Prince”, and “Ali Baba and Other Stories”.

Dulac also collaborated with his friends, impresario Sir Thomas Beecham and dramatist William Butler Yeats, on various theater productions. In 1920, he composed music for Yeat’s production of “At the Hawk’s Well”. Dulac, along with Yeats and Ezra Pound, staged Japanese Nō productions for which he designed costumes and stage sets as well as music compositions. The hardships of World War I, however, were still intensely felt in England by 1920; policy decisions and an economic depression made the publishing of elaborately illustrated book editions a rarity.

Though concerned about his income, Edmund Dulac managed on what he earned from portraits and frequent commissions by the Hearst newspaper chain for “American Weekly” cover illustrations. He widened the scope of his work to newspaper caricatures, theater costume and set designs, medals, banknotes and postage stamps. Among these stamp series were issues to celebrate King George VI’s coronation and the 1948 Summer Olympics in London.

By World War II, Dulac had become the leading authority on postage stamp design. To fulfill Charles de Gaulle’s request for a stamp to unite France’s colonies against Germany, he designed a series of stamps depicting the Cross of Lorraine, a sixteenth-century heraldic cross that soon became a symbol of Free France. For his final wartime work, Dulac designed a Victory stamp series, the 1944 “Marianne de Londres”. He used the widow, Léa Rixens, of his college friend Émile Rixens as the model for Marianne, the national personification of the French Republic since the French Revolution.

Dulac lived in London with British author and translator Helen Beauclerk from 1924 until his death. He illustrated two of her novels, “The Green Lacquer Pavilion” (1926) and “The Love of the Foolish Angel” (1929); she, in turn, often posed as the model for some of Dulac’s illustrations. At the close of his career, Dulac returned to illustrating children’s books with the same perfection that had characterized his earlier works. His final commission was for an edition of Milton’s “The Masque of Comus”. Halfway through this project, Edmund Dulac died from his third heart attack on the twenty-fifth of May in 1953 at the age of seventy.

Notes: A collection of Edmund Dulac’s papers, correspondence and musical compositions is house at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin.

A prolific illustrator, Edmund Dulac illustrated dozens of books, some of which required twenty to forty images. The Art Passions website discusses twenty of Dulac’s best known illustrative projects with images from each: https://www.artpassions.net/dulac/dulac.html

A more extensive study of the illustrators in the Golden Age of Illustration can be found in the Illustration History section of the Norman Rockwell Museum: https://www.illustrationhistory.org/essays/childrens-book-illustrators-in-the-golden-age-of-illustration

Top Insert Image: Howard Coster, “Edmund Dulac”, 1938, Half-Plate Film Negative Print, National Portrait Gallery, London

Second Insert Image: Edmund Dulac, “Caricature of John Singer Sargent in His Studio”, Date Unknown, Watercolor and Ink on Paper, 62.2 x 52.1 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Edmund Dulac, Design for a Rug, Date Unknown, Pencil and Gouache on Paper, 12.5 x 9 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Edmund Dulac, “Inspector James Pryde S.C.”, 1915, Pencil, Pen and Ink, Watercolor and Bodycolor on Artist’s Board, 29.6 x 27.5 cm, Private Collection

Alair de Oliveira Gomes

The Photography of Alair Gomes

Born at Valença, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro in December of 1921, Alair de Oliveira Gomes was a Brazilian photographer whose work fixated on the depiction of the male body. Over the three decades of his photographic career, Gomes produced one hundred-seventy thousand images, the majority of which still remains unpublished.

During his early career and life, Alair Gomes dealt with an environment where the expression of one’s queer identity was fraught with danger. He often worked in secrecy and faced challenges as a photographer of homoerotic images. In the repressive and strictly controlled political climate that succeeded the 1964 military coup in Brazil, photojournalism focused on exposing the abuses of power perpetrated by the regime, while another significant branch of photography placed its focus on issues of social exclusion and cultural identity. Within the Brazilian heteronormative culture, Alair Gomes was one of very few photographers of the homoerotic tradition.

The son of a civil servant, Alair Gomes spent his formative years in Brazil’s capital, Rio de Janeiro. During his early childhood, he studied the violin and won a local photography competition. At his father’s request, Gomes studied civil engineering and the philosophy of science, that branch of philosophy that examines the foundations, methods, implications and reliability of science. He graduated with a degree from the National School of Engineering at the University of Brazil in 1944. In the following year, Gomes was appointed as a civil engineer for the Brazilian Railway Company.

In 1946, Gomes collaborated with José Francisco Coelho and other friends to found the literary review MAGOG. He abandoned his profession as an engineer to devote himself to the study of modern physics, mathematics and biology. With a 1961 philosophy grant from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Gomes spent a year in the United States where he, in addition to his studies, associated with New York’s academic and artistic communities. From 1964 to 1976, Gomes participated in numerous international conferences on the philosophy of science.

Gomes began turning to photography in the mid to late 1960s. He traveled to Europe in 1965 for the first time; during this six-month trip, Gomes visited museums and began his photographic career through the use of a borrowed camera. In 1977, Gomes decided to devote himself specifically to the development of his photographic work, which initially focused almost exclusively on the men at Rio de Janeiro’s beaches.

Alair Gomes created an immense collection of black and white photographs, shot on the beach or through a telephoto lens from his balcony, that were devoted to the beauty and nudity of the male body. These images were reworked and ordered in carefully constructed sequences to form several series of visual compositions. Among these works are “Sonatinas”, the “four feet” series, “Beach Triptychs”, and “A Window in Rio”. Gomes’s most ambitious work, “Symphony of Erotic Icons” (1966-1978), is composed of thousands of images, sometimes shot at unusual angles, that detail slight variations of the nude body. The choreographic sequence of each rhythmic subset is evocative of music scores.

Gomes was a professor of Philosophy of Science at the Biophysics Institute of the Federal University in Rio de Janeiro. He was also a professor of Contemporary Art at the School of Visual Arts for the Brazilian Ministry of Culture. Gomes later became an advisor at the National Institute of Visual Arts (National Foundation for the Arts, Rio de Janeiro). Between 1976 and 1984, he exhibited his photographs in New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and Toronto.

A highly cultured man who was active as a writer, critic and university professor, Alair Gomes was a collector of books, pictures, and films; he had kept copious journals as well as instructive notes on how his photography should be displayed. Gomes died, at the age of seventy-one, from a stabbing at his Rio de Janeiro home by an unknown attacker in August in 1992. Upon his death, Gomes’s entire archive was donated to the National Library of Brazil and the Foundation Cartier pour Art Contemporain in Paris.

In 2001, the Foundation Cartier organized a major monographic exhibition of Alair Gomes’s work, which was accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue. Since then, his work has gradually achieved international attention, having featured in the 30th São Paulo Biennial and the Maison Eoropéenne de la Photographie in Paris. Gomes’s photographs are now in the Foundation Cartier in Paris, Madrid’s Loewe Foundation, and New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown,”Alair Gomes, Rio de Janeiro”, May 1980, Gelatin Silver Print, Ronca Clube Magazine, April 2016

Second Insert Image: Alair Gomes, “A Window in Rio No.120, Opus 2”, Gelatin on Plate, 23.3 x 17.2 cm, Coleção Gilberto Chateaubriand MAM Rio

Third Insert Image: Alair Gomes, “Sítio Burle Marx”, “Botãnica” Series, Gelatin Silver Print, 30 x 20 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Alair Gomes, Untitled, Greco-Roman Statue, “Viagens” Series, Collection of Renata Phoenix, Museum of Modern Art

Jenö Paizs Goebel

The Artwork of Jenö Paizs Goebel

Born at Budapest in June of 1896, Jenö Paizs Goebel was a Hungarian painter, a prominent representative of modern painting in the first half of the twentieth-century. Influenced by both Post-Impressionism and Surrealism, his works primarily contain lyrical abstraction, emotionally charged color, and a natural perspective.

Born Gőbel Jenő Dezső Gyula, Jenö Paizs Goebel was the son of Hungarian silk painter Mihály Gőbel and Tekla Piroska Liebmann. Beginning in 1915, he initially studied at the glass painting department of the Hungarian Royal National School of Arts and Crafts. Goebel continued his studies at Budapest’s Academy of Fine Arts from 1916 to 1924 under realist painter Tivadar Zemplényi and István Réti, plein-air painter and co-founder of the noted Nagybánya artists’ colony in Romania.

A talented artist in his early career, Goebel received a 1924 Nemes Marcell Scholarship from the Szinyei Pál Merse Society which enabled him to travel. He painted at the Nagybánya artist colony for six months, traveled to Paris where Goebel saw the works of Paul Cezanne and Giorgio de Chirico, and stayed for a period in the French commune of Barbizon where he studied the work of Hungarian Impressionist landscape painter László Paál. In 1925, Goebel was part of a group exhibition held at the Galerie Zodiaque in Paris; his work was also shown in the same year at Budapest’s Ernst Museum.

In 1926, Jenö Paizs Goebel painted in the riverside town of Szentendre and became one of the 1928 co-founders of its Painters Society. During this period in the late 1920s, his work was influenced by the paintings of impressionist László Paál and those of István Szőnyi, a fellow artist from the Nagybánya artist colony. Goebel adopted a painting style that utilized thin, flexible lines and enameled, clean surfaces. Works in this period included the 1926 “Self Portrait Leaning on a Table” and the 1927 “Saint Sebastian”, both now housed in the Hungarian National Gallery. Goebel received a silver medal for the works he exhibited at the 1929 Barcelona World Exhibition.

A significant change occurred in Goebel’s artwork in the early 1930s. The former enameled effect with its contrasting light and shadow was replaced with a decorative, carefully edited style. Now aligned with international Surrealism, he created compositions of myth and magic that contained symbolic elements within metaphysical spaces. The colors and decorative elements of the paintings evoke the techniques Goebel acquired as a glass painter. These dream-realm images, often depicting thick vegetation, can be interpreted as a visual refuge from the rising specter of upcoming war in Europe. Among the works created in this period was Goebel’s best known work, the 1931 “The Golden Age: Self-Portrait with Pigeons”.

After the first half of the 1930s, Jenö Paizs Goebel’s style changed again. The fantastic elements of his former work were absent; his style had become more relaxed with lighter atmospheric effects. Most of his work’s themes were now centered on life in Szentendre where he would live until his death. Simple rural motifs, scenes of local circuses, and self-portraits became the focus of Goebel’s paintings. These cheerful, finely-nuanced works, fashioned with delicate brushstrokes, were shown in a 1943 group exhibition at the local art center, Alkotás Művészház.

Jenö Paizs Goebel died at the age of forty-eight in Budapest on the twenty-third of November in 1944. Retrospectives of his work have been held over the years at the Budapest Art Gallery, the Hungarian National Gallery, the Szentendre Art Gallery, the Ferenczy Museum, and the Budapest History Museum. Goebel’s work can be found in many private collections and such public collections as the Janus Pannonius Museum, Hungarian National Gallery and the Ferenczy Museum.

Notes: Fine Arts in Hungary has a short article on Jenö Paizs Goebel’s “The Golden Age” on its website: https://www.hung-art.hu/frames-e.html?/english/p/paizs_go/muvek/paizsg07.html

Top Insert Image: Jenö Paizs Goebel, “Self Portrait”, 1938, Oil, Tempera on Wood, 44 x 31.5 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Jenö Paizs Goebel, “Parisian Studio Still Life with Mirror”, 1945, Watercolor on Paper, 60 x 45 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Jenö Paizs Goebel, “In the Garden”, 1943, Oil on Wood, 75.5 x 67 cm, Private Collection

Artur Grucela

The Paintings of Artur Grucela

Born in 1987, Artur Grucela is a Polish figurative painter whose naturalistic, idyllic landscapes are populated by archetypical, often solitary, male figures caught in moments of introspection. His work explores the primal relationship of man to nature, as well as humanity’s lack of control over natural forces.

Raised in a small town in southern Poland, Grucela began drawing from an early age and became interested in painting during hie elementary school years. Primarily educated outside academic art institutions, Grucela frequently integrates themes from myths, allegories, and biblical symbolism into his work; he also draws upon motifs from art history, film noir productions, and classic literature.

Artur Grucela’s work, executed in either oils or acrylics on canvas, is inspired by the works of such artists as Early Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli; English etcher and painter William Blake: French illustrator and printmaker Gustave Dorè: Swiss Symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin; and Franz von Stuck, a German printmaker and painter of ancient mythology.

Grucela has exhibited twice with Miligram, a cooperative of young artists in Wroclaw, the first being the city’s 2009 “Represent” exhibition and, in the following year, the “Dzika Banda (Wild Bunch)” exhibition held at Warsaw. After the Miligram group disbanded, he began showing his work through POCO, the Pop & Contemporary Art Museum, founded in Tallinn by Estonian tech pioneer Linnar Viik.

Artur Grucela has exhibited in POCO’s many group exhibitions and country art fairs, including the 2012 inaugural show at the POCO gallery in Wroclaw and the Agora Cultural Center of Wroclaw in 2013. His paintings were included in the 2024 group show “Mystery Keepers” at Warsaw’s Sotto 63 Gallery and at the 2025 group show “Ethereal” at the Edji Gallery in Brussels.

Grucela currently lives and works in Piwniczna-Zdrój, a popular destination in the Western Carpathian mountain range of southern Poland. His work is contained in many private collections in Poland, Switzerland and the United States. A photo-stream collection of Artur Grucela’s work can be found at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/arturgrucela/

Second Insert Image: Artur Grucela, “Moonlight”, 2025, Oil on Canvas, 120 x 90 cm

Bottom Insert Image: Artur Grucela, “In the Eyes of Nature”, 2025, Oil on Canvas, 120 x 90 cm

José Moreno Carbonero

José Moreno Carbonero, “Gladiators After the Fight”, circa 1882, Oil on Canvas, 230 x 300 cm, Museo de Málaga, Museo de Prado Collection

Born at Málaga in March of 1858, José Moreno Carbonero was a Spanish decorator and painter, one of the last history painters of the nineteenth-century. A celebrated portraitist of Madrid’s upper classes, he was influenced by Spanish Romantic painter Mariano Fortuny, known for his historical and orientalist themed works.

The son of a carpenter, José Carbonero enrolled in Málaga’s School of Fine Arts in 1868 and also studied under Bernardo Ferrándiz Bádenes, a costumbrista painter and the Chair of Color and Composition at the Escuela de Bella Artes de San Telmo. While at Ferrándiz’s studio, Carbonero was introduced to history painting and his teacher’s revolutionary views of commitment to freedom, independence and nonconformity. In 1872 at the age of fourteen, he was awarded a gold medal at the Exhibition of the Lyceum of Málaga.

Carbonero visited Morocco in 1873 where, influenced by Mariano Fortuny’s portraits and exotic, orientalist court scenes, he began to create African-themed paintings. After receiving a scholarship from the Málaga government, he traveled to Paris and joined the studio of painter and sculptor Jean-Léon Gérôme, one of the three most successful artists of the Second French Empire. Carbonero became acquainted with art dealer/publisher Adolphe Goupil, who introduced him to the commercial popularity of small genre paintings known as tableautins, a form of art that afforded great success.

After a study trip to Rome, Moreno Carbonero won a gold medal at Madrid’s 1881 National Exhibition of Fine Arts for his portrait “El Príncipe don Carlos de Viana”, now in the Prado Museum. Three years later, he won a second gold medal at the National Exhibition for his 1884 large-scale scene “La Conversión del Duque de Gandia”, which he painted during his time in Rome. Recognized for his ability, Carbonero received commissions from several official institutions including the Spanish Senate and the country of Argentina.

For the Conference Hall of the Spanish Senate, Carbonero created the 1888 “Entrada de Roger de Flor en Constantinopla”, a large-scale (350 x 550 cm) depiction of the Italian mercenary Roger de Flor and his troops entering Constantinople to relieve the Emperor from Turkish occupation. For this work, Carbonero did extensive research in Paris on the architecture, decoration and clothes of the Byzantine Empire, and created dozens of staging models and small paintings of individual warriors.

Moreno Carbonero received the highest award at the 1888 Vatican Exposition and participated in the International Exhibitions held in Munich and Vienna. Other awards included a silver medal at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, a gold medal at the 1890 Budapest International Exposition, an honorary degree at the 1891 Berlin Universal Exposition, and the only gold medal at the 1893 World’ Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

In 1910, Moreno Carbonero received a commission from King Alfonso XIII of Spain for a commemorative painting to be given to the city of Buenos Aires to mark the city’s one-hundredth anniversary of the Argentine War of Independence. For this work, Carbonero proposed that the painting, “The Founding of Buenos Aires”, combine three symbolic representations for religion, justice and conquest. Its scene refers historically to the second (and permanent) founding of Buenos Aires on the Rio de la Plata, The 400 x 250 cm work depicts Juan de Garay with his sixty-three soldiers taking possession of the area on behalf of King Felipe II of Spain on the eleventh of June in 1580.

As a history painter, Carbonero was eclectic in his style and, due to his early success at creating small-scale genre paintings, excelled in drawing and clean brushwork. He was adamant about the historical accuracy of his paintings to the extent of repainting in 1924 some sections of his finished 1909 “The Founding of Buenos Aires” due to factual errors in its composition. In his scenes of large historical events, Carbonero put extra focus on portraying the reactions and feelings of the event’s participants..

Beginning in 1892 until his death, José Moreno Carbonero was an Academician and Professor of Live Drawing at Madrid’s Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. He died in Madrid at the age of eighty-two in April of 1942 and was buried in the city’s San Miguel Cemetery. His work is in many private and public collections; the collection of Málaga’s Museo de Belles Artes holds thirty works by Carbonero.

Notes: Costumbrista painting was a localized branch of genre painting in Spain that had a realistic focus on precise representation of particular times and places, It captured the social and/or aesthetic behavior that characterized a human group belonging to a specific time, place, and culture, without any particular analysis of the depicted social scene. Artists who worked in this genre included Vincente Castell, José Villegas, Antonio Cabral Bejarano, and Leandro Ramón Garrido.

José Moreno Carbonero’s 1882 “Gladiadores Después del Combate (Gladiators After the Fight)” was submitted by the artist during his first year as a scholarship recipient in Rome. It was displayed in the Scholarship Recipients’ Section of the 1884 National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Rome. The inscription on the intrados of the pillar referred to the profession of the figures depicted in the scene and translated as follows: “The gladiatorial company of the aedile A. Suetius Certus will fight in Pompeii on May 31. There will be hunting and awnings.”

Top Insert Image: Christian Franzen, “José Moreno Carbonero”, 1898, December 15, 1898 Issue, “La Illustración Española y Americana”, Madrid, Spain

Second Insert Image: José Moreno Carbonero, “Portrait of H.R.H. King Alfonso XIII de Borbón”, 1927, Oil on Canvas, 74 x50 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: José Moreno Carbonero, “Bebiendo en la Fuente (Drinking from the Fountain, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 31.5 x 55.5 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: José Moreno Carbonero, “El Fumador de Kif”, 1890s, Oil on Canvas, 126 x 166 cm, Private Colllection

Bottom Insert Image: José Moreno Carbonero, “Study of a Guarani Man, Argentina”, 1922, Oil on Canvas, 32 x 26 cm, Private Collection

Jean Giraud

Jean Giraud. Illustrations for “The Eyes of the Cat”, 1978, Graphic Novel,

Born at Nogent-sur-Marne in May of 1938, Jean Giraud, known as Moebius, was a French artist, writer, and cartoonist who worked in the Franco-Belgian “bandes dessinées” tradition. These “drawn or strip stories” have been a long tradition in Belgium and France that, starting in 1945, became a major style on the comic scene. Among the most popular “bandes dessinées” are “Herge’s “The Adventures of Tintin”, Andre Franquin’s “Gaston”, and Pierre (Peyo) Guilford’s “Smurf”.

The only child of insurance agents Raymond Giraud and Pauline Vinchon, Jean Giraud was raised by his grandparents after his parents’ divorce. Introverted with health issues, he found both escape and comfort in Fontenay-sous-Bois’s small theater where he watched its many American Western B-movies. In his formative years at the Saint-Nicolas boarding school, Giraud began drawing Western-themed comics and became acquainted with the Belgian comics, “Tintin” and the weekly comic magazine “Spirou”.

At college, Giraud became a lifelong friend of future comic artist Jean-Claude Mézières, creator of the sci-fi comic series “Valérian and Laureline”. His first freelance commercial success was a 1956 series of humorous Western comic shorts, “Frank of Jeremie”, for the “Far West” magazine published by Mireille. Giraud continued to publish comics, both Western and French historical, for a variety of magazines. During this period, his style was heavily influenced by Belgium comic artist Joseph “Jijé’ Gillain, whose work was regularly published by Fleurus Presse in Paris. Through Fleurus, Giraud published his first three illustrated books.

Jean Giraud’s most famous works include the “Blueberry” series, a collaboration with writer Jean-Michel Charlier, that featured one of the first anti-heroes in Western comics. Under the pseudonym Moebius, he created surreal, almost abstract-styled fantasy and sci-fi comics. Among these was the series of short graphic stories, “Arzach”, that followed a silent warrior who rode a pterodactyl creature. As a designer and storyboard artist, Giraud constributed to such adventure and sci-fi films as “Alien” (1979), “Tron” (1982), “The Abyss” (1989), and “The Fifth Element” (1997). His designs for Ridley Scott’s “Alien”, the attire of the Nostromo’s crew and particularly their spacesuits, appeared on screen exactly as designed.

The 1978 “The Eyes of the Cat” was Giraud’s first collaboration with the filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, who became a close friend and co-author. The portfolio-sized, 56-plate book was never meant for widespread distribution. It was printed in a limited edition of five hundred copies as an internal thank you gift for friends and clients of French comic publisher Les Humanoides Associes. Due to popular demand, it was reprinted on bright yellow paper in 2013 as a hardcover edition entitled “The Eyes of the Cat: The Yellow Edition”. In 2021, the story was reissued as a softcover by publisher Humanoids, Inc.

“The Eyes of the Cat” tells the text-free story of a cat who is attacked by an eagle as it wanders through a decaying city in the future. Told through a series of twelve by sixteen inch (30.5 x 40.6 cm) detailed black and white lithographic illustrations, the tale is both gritty and violent. The mood of the story was influenced by Alejandro Jodorowsky’s association with the Panic Movement, a surrealistic collective he founded in 1962. The movement concentrated on chaotic and surreal performance art; it often staged shocking events designed as a response to the mainstream acceptance of surrealism.

Note: A short August 2020 article on “The Eyes of the Cat”, written by Ben Herman, can be found at the “1st Comics News” site: https://www.firstcomicsnews.com/comic-book-cats-number-33-the-eyes-of-the-cat/

A more extensive March 2012 biography of Jean “Moebius” Giraud, written by Kim Thompson, can be found at “The Comics Journal” website: https://www.tcj.com/jean-moebius-giraud-1938-2012/

Lambiek Comiclopedia, an excellent source for information on all comic illustration, has a biography of Jean Giraud with illustrations on its site: https://www.lambiek.net/artists/g/giraud.htm

Top Insert Image; Photographer Unknown, “Jean Giraud”, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Jean Giraud, “Les Réparateurs”, Illustration for “Le Monde d’Edena (The Aedena Cycle) #6”, 1988-1994, Marvel/Epic Comics

Bottom Insert Image: Nicolas Guérin, “Jean Giraud (Moebius)”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print

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Sir Edward John Poynter

The Artwork of Sir Edward John Poynter

Sir Edward John Poynter was an English designer, draftsman and painter who became best known for his large-scale historical paintings. A leading artists of Neo-Classicism in Victorian England, he made paintings that were early innovators of the Aesthetic Movement. Poynter created works in watercolor and fresco; he also produced designs for stained glass, tiled mosaics and ceramics.

Edward Poynter was the only son of four children born to architect Ambrose Poynter and Emma Forster, the grand-daughter of sculptor Thomas Banks. He studied between 1848 and 1852 at Westminster School and Brighton College, and later at the studio of watercolorist Thomas Shotter Boys. In the winter of 1853, Poynter traveled to Rome where he worked in the studio of Frederic Leighton, a classical painter and sculptor of the academic style. Upon his return to England, he entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1855.

Relocating to Paris in 1856, Poynter entered the leading, private atelier of Swiss painter Charles Gleyre and, later, the École des Beaux Arts where he met his fellow students: illustrator George Du Mauier, and painters James McNeill Whistler and Thomas Armstrong. Poynter began working for a London glassworks firm in 1860; six years later, he married Agnes MacDonald, the daughter of Scottish Reverend George Brown MacDonald and Hannah Jones. At this time, he was creating illustrations for magazines, such as the “London Society”, and books including the popular 1880 “Bible Gallery” by the Dalziels engravers.

Edward Poynter began exhibiting Orientalist paintings at London’s Royal Academy in 1861. He traveled to Venice in 1868 to study decorative mosaics; upon his return in the following year, Poynter was elected as a member of the Royal Academy. He received commissions for a series of frieze designs for the Royal Albert Hall, and a mosaic of Saint George and the Dragon for the British Houses of Parliament. In 1871, Poynter was appointed the first Slade Professor at London’s University College where he served until his resignation in 1875. After he left the college, he was appointed the director and principal of the National Art Training School located in South Kensington.

During his years at the National Art Training School, Poynter made several reforms to its operation and published a series of art history textbooks. He also executed many commissioned public painting projects for which he is remembered, including the 1880 “Visit to Aesculapius”, now at the Tate Gallery, and “The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon”, created in 1890 and now at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. In 1894, Poynter was appointed Director of the National Gallery, London where he achieved a number of important acquisitions. These included works by Rembrandt, Antonio di Puccio Pisano (Pisanello), Titian, Francisco de Goya., Lorenzo Monaco, and Francisco de Zubaran.

Edward Poynter retired from the National Gallery in 1905 but retained the directorship until 1918. He was knighted in 1896, created Baronet of Albert Gate, in the city of Westminster in 1902, and received the Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order in 1918. As his health failed, Poynter sold his extensive collection of master drawings..

Sir Edward John Poynter, 1st Baronet GCVO, PRA died on the twenty-sixth of July in 1919 at his house and studio in Kensington and is buried in London’s Saint Paul’s Cathedral. Considered primarily as an academic artist, Sir Edward Poynter’s contribution to art history is significant. In his position as director of the National Gallery, he issued in 1899 the first complete illustrated catalog of its collection.

A cosmopolitan artist, Poynter did not shrink from portrayal of the nude or works that glorified its sensual qualities. Modernists frequently criticized his artwork and presented him as the embodiment of the stilted “Victorian Olympian”. However, Poynter’s work in art education and art-historical survey texts became the model for the next generation of educators and researchers.

Notes: The Eclectic Light Company website has an article on Edward Poynter’s life and work at: https://eclecticlight.co/2024/08/09/edward-poynters-classical-stories-1-to-1880/

The Art Gallery of New South Wales has a short article on Edward Poynter’s 1881-1890 “The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon” on its website: https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/learn/learning-resources/artworks-in-focus/sir-edward-john-poynter/

Top Insert Image: Alexander Bassano, “Sir Edward John Poynter, 1st Bt”, 1883, Half-Plate Negative Print, National Portrait Gallery, London

Second Insert Image: Edward Poynter, “Orpheus and Eurydice”, 1862, Oil on Canvas, 51.2 x 71.1 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Sir Arthur Stockdale Cope, “Portrait of Sir Edward Poynter, Bt, PRA”, 1911, Oil on Canvas, 110.5 x 85.1 cm, Royal Academy of Arts

Bottom Insert Image: Edward Poynter, “Catapulta (The Catapult)”, 1868, Oil on Canvas, 155.5 x 183.8 cm, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle on Tyne, United Kingdom