Tule Clow

Paintings from the “Postanovka” Series by Tule Clow

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

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

Gustave Caillebotte

Paintings by Gustav Caillebotte

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Littleford

Robert Littleford, “Acrobat”, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

The Heliodor Tree Frog

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

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

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

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

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

Max Bernuth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leonardo Corredor, “João Knorr”

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

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

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

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

Henry Taylor Lamb

Paintings by Henry Taylor Lamb

Harry Taylor Lamb was born in 1883 at Adelaide, Australia, one of seven children to Horace Lamb, a professor of mathematics at Manchester University, and his wife Elizabeth Foot, sister-in-law to Charles Hamilton, 5th Earl of Abercom. Lamb grew up in Manchester where he first studied medicine at the Manchester University Medical School, from which he obtained a graduate scholarship in 1904. Despite this, he abandoned medicine and, with encouragement of his friend portrait artist Francis Dodd, changed his studies to art.

In January of 1906 at the age of twenty-two, Lamb traveled to London to study under Welsh etcher and painter Augustus John and Irish portrait painter William Orpen at their Chelsea Art School. In May of 1906, Lamb married Nina Forrest, known as Euphemia, who was an artist’s model and a member of the Bloomsbury Group: however, the relationship was short-lived with the divorce finalized in 1927. Lamb was acquainted with several members of the Group which included painter Vanessa Stephen and art critic Clive Bell, whom he knew from his earlier days in London, and critic and biographer Lytton Strachey, a friend for whom he later executed a small portrait in 1914 . Lamb painted a grand larger version of this portrait in 1914, which showed Strachey in his typical languid pose.

In 1907, Henry Lamb attended the Académie de La Palette in Paris, which at that time was under the direction of portrait painter Jacques-Émile Blanche. Upon his return to London, he took a studio at Number 8 Fitzroy Street and became a member of the Fitzroy Street Group, a supportive organization for artists established in 1907. Lamb was a co-founder of the Camden Town Group, a collective of English Post-impressionist artists established in 1911. In 1913, both groups merged to form the London Group. Now one of the oldest artist-led organizations, it holds open submission exhibitions for members and guest artists.

Lamb spent several summers on the South coast of Brittany where he painted his 1911 “Death of a Peasant”, portraying the tragic death of cancer victim Madame Favennec. For this painting, he experimented with a fifteenth-century technique of painting oils over a layer of tempera. Inspired to seek out more traditional scenes for his work, Lamb traveled in 1912 to Gola, a small island off the coast of County Donegal, Ireland. There he made many paintings of the Irish fishermen and their wives, including the 1912 “Irish Girls”, a post-impressionist work now in the Tate collection.

With the outbreak of the First World War, Lamb returned to his study of medicine, qualified as a doctor at Guy’s Hospital, and saw active service in the Royal Army Medical Corps as a battalion medical officer with the 5th Batalion. For his service with the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, he was awarded the Military Cross. Lamb also served in Palestine and on the Western Front. In February of 1918 before his end of service, he received a commission by the British War Memorials Commission to produce a large painting for a proposed Hall of Remembrance

Though he was not officially a military artist, Lamb produced many sketches of his time in the Palestine campaign and on the Macedonian Front, which would form the basis of future large-scale paintings. Two of his works from those sketches, the 1916 “Advanced Dressing Station on the Struma”, now in Manchester City Art Gallery, and the 1919 “Irish Troops in the Judaean Hills”, now in the Imperial War Museum, are considered among his best work.

In 1928, Henry Lamb married novelist and biographer Lady Margaret Pansy Pakenham, a daughter of the 5th Earl of Longford, and settled in the village of Coombe Bissett, in Salisbury, United Kingdom. He was appointed an official full-time war artist by the War Artists Advisory Committee during World War II; at which time, he painted portraits of soldiers and studies of servicemen at work throughout southern England. In the winter of 1941, he was attached to the 12th Canadian Army Tank Battalion and painted a series of personnel portraits.

Lamb was elected as an associate of the Royal Academy in 1940, became a Trustee for the National Portrait Gallery in 1942, and served as a Trustee from 1944 to 1951 at the Tate Gallery, He became a full member of the Royal Academy in 1949. Henry Taylor Lamb died, at the age of seventy-seven, on October 8th in 1969 at the Spire Nursing Home in Salisbury, Wiltshire, and is buried in the churchyard at Coombe Bissett.

Retrospectives of Henry Lamb’s work have been held at the Salisbury Museum and the Poole Museum. His work can be found in collections across the country and aroundthe world, including the Tate Collection in London, the Imperial War Museum, the British Government Art Collection, and the National Gallery of Canada.

Note: Henry Lamb first met his friend Lytton Strachey at a party in London at the beginning of 1906. Strachey was gay and developed an enduring attraction to Lamb; however, his several attempts to seduce Lamb were unsuccessful. After Lamb returned to London in 1909 from his studies in Paris. Lytton introduced him to what would become known as the Bloomsbury Group. Among its members were Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E. M. Forster, Duncan Grant, and Bertram Russell.

Henry Lamb executed several paintings of his friend Strachey, which he included in his first solo exhibition at the Alpine Club Gallery in May and June of 1922. Among those works exhibited was his 1914 portrait “Lytton Strachey”, which showed Strachey seated against a large window at Lamb’s studio in Vale of Heath, Hampstead. Lamb emphasized Strachey’s gaunt, ungainly figure in his typical languid pose with a presented air of resigned intellectual superiority. The trees in the vista seen through the window are painted in a rhythmic, decorative manner consistent with Lamb’s essentially academic approach. Browns, violets, and greens predominate this palette which, woven into future compositions, would distinguish Lamb’s work from others in group exhibitions.

Insert Images from Top to Bottom::

Henry Lamb, “Self-Portrait, 1938, Oil on Canvas, 45.7 x 35.6 cm, Private Collection

Henry Lamb, “Phantasy”, 1912, Oil on Canvas, 86.4 x 61 cm, Tate Museum, London

Henry Lamb, “The Lady with Lizards”, 1900-1933, Oil on Canvas, 51.5 x 40.9 cm, Manchester Art Gallery

Henry Lamb, “Self_Portrait”, 1914, Oil on Panel, 36.8 x 31.8 cm, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Paul Klee

Paul Klee, “Tale à la Hoffmann”, 1921, Watercolor, Graphite, and Transferred Printing Ink on Paper Bordered with Metallic Foil Mounted on Cardboard, 40.3 x 32.1 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Paul Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, on December 18th of 1879. The son of German music teacher Hans Wilhelm Klee and Swiss singer Ida Marie Frick Klee, he was a talented violinist, who at the age of eleven received an invitation to play with the Bern Music Association. Klee’s attention turned from music to the visual arts; and he enrolled in 1898 at Munich’s Academy of Fine Arts where he studied under portrait painter Heinrich Knirr and painter and print maker Franz von Stuck.

By 1905, Klee had developed his signature techniques and had completed a series of eleven zinc-plate etchings entitled “Inventions”, which would be his first exhibited works. He also worked on a series of fifty-seven experimental works, drawings scratched on blackened glass with a needle, which included his 1906 “Portrait of My Father”. Klee’s artwork progress steadily over the nest five years, and led to his first solo exhibitions in 1910 at three Swiss cities.

During the winter of 1911, Paul Klee, through association with art critic Alfred Kubin, met and collaborated with other artists, including expressionist painter Franz Marc and abstractionist Wassily Kandinsky. After returning to Munich in 1914 from a trip to Tunisia, Klee was inspired by Tunisia’s lightly-lit landscapes and painted his first pure abstract, “In the Style of Kairouan”, a composition of colored circles and rectangles.

By 1917, critics began to cite Klee as one of the best young German artists, which led to his representation for several years by German art dealer Hans Goltz, who was a pioneer for the modernist art movement. Klee taught with great effect at the Brauhaus schools from 1921 to 1931, as did his friend Wassily Kandinsky. Along with expressionist artists Lyonel Feininger and Alexej von Jawlensky and with the support of art dealer Galka Scheyer, they formed “Die Blaue Vier (the Blue Four)” in 1923, which exhibited and lectured in the United States from 1924. A extensive collection of their work is housed in the Städtische Galerie in Munich’s museum Lenbachhaus.

Paul Klee began teaching at the Dusseldorf Academy in 1931, After the emergence of the Nazi Party to power, he was denounced as a cultural Bolshevist by the emerging Nazi Party; his home was searched by the Gestapo; and he was relieved of his professorship at the Düsseldorf Academy. Klee and his family emigrated to Switzerland in late 1933, where he continued his most prolific year of work, producing nearly five hundred works in 1933. Back in Germany in 1937, seventeen of Klee’s work were included in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in July at the Institute of Archaeology in the Hofgarten; over one hundred of Klee’s works in public collections were seized by the Nazi Party.

Beginning in late 1933, Klee began developing symptoms of scleroderma, an autoimmune disease which results in the hardening of connective tissue. Enduring the pain, he was able to continue his work; his simpler and larger designs, with heavier lines and geometric forms, enabled him to keep up his large output over his final years. Paul Klee died in Muralto, Locarno, Switzerland, on the 29th of june 1940. He is buried at Schosshalden Cemetery, Bern, Switzerland. His legacy composes approximately nine thousand works of art.

Note: Paul Klee loved the tales of the German poet, writer and painter Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, who was nicknamed “Ghost Hoffmann” in his own country. Klee’s mixed-media “Tale à la Hoffmann” appears to be loosely based on the poet’s best-known 1814 lyrical tale, “The Golden Pot”, a magical story that switches back and forth between high fantasy and everyday life in Dresden.

“The Golden Pot” recounts the trials of the pure and foolish young Anselmus and his efforts to gain entry to Atlantis, the heaven of poetry. The tree from which he first heard fateful voices speaking to him might thus be on the left; the odd, tubelike construction on the right possibly represents the glass bottle in which Anselmus found himself briefly imprisoned. The tale’s repeated references to time are reflected in the two clocks, and the vessel in the center may stand for the golden pot with the fantastic lily that gives the story its name.

Bottom Insert Image: Paul Klee, “Self-Portrait Full Face, Resting Head in Hand”, 1909, Watercolor on Paper on Cardboard, 16.7 x 13.7 cm, Private Collection

Bernard Steffen

The Artwork of Bernard Steffen

Born in Neodesha, Kansas, in 1907, Bernard Steffen was a lithographer and painter noted for his considerable output of work as a participant in the Works Progress Administration’s program for the arts. Besides his lithographic work, he produced many murals, depicting local histories, in United States Post Offices from 1934 to 1941.

Bernard Steffen graduated from Neodesha High School circa 1925; he then attended the Kansas City Art Institute on a scholarship. In 1928 Steffen received a scholarship to the Colorado Springs Art Institute, where he and Thomas Hart Benton roomed together. An early member of the Regionalist art movement. Benton became a lifelong friend and mentor to Steffen, whose style and preference for rural subject matter was influenced by Benton.

Steffen became a member of the American Artist’s Congress, a group established in New York City in 1935 to endorse government support for art unions and to promote a social-realist style in American painting. He worked as a staff artist for the Resettlement Administration, and painted murals for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), including one in 1938 for the US Post Office in Neodesha, Kansas. Steffen was a teacher and treasurer for the National Serigraph Society, and worked comfortably in the varied mediums of oil, tempera, lithography and screen printing.

The strong influence of Thomas Hart Benton’s style is seen in Bernard Steffen’s work. There is a strong contrast in the dark and light tones of his works, and his figures are broad and simplified, intended as representations of types rather than individuals.. Steffen was sympathetically drawn to the rural workers who appear in his prints and paintings of the 1930s; and he frequently emphasized agricultural themes. His subject matter, however, does not derive entirely from Benton’s influence, but also from his own experiences while growing up in Kansas.

Steffen also studied with Stanton McDonald Wright, the American modernist painter, who, along with Morgan Russell and Patrick Henry Bruck, were the only American artists to define a common aesthetic philosophy and issue a manifesto. The influence of Wright’s style can be seen in the emphasis Steffen applied towards underlying compositional structure. Like other artists of the 1930s, Steffen produced works which provided a connection between the artist and his worker subjects.

After his work with the WPA, Bernard Steffen relocated his residence to Woodstock, New York, where he set up a studio. In 1977 he was diagnosed with ALS; however, he continued to produce art by holding a brush in his stiff hand and stippling the canvas. He married painter Eleanor Lipkins in June of 1978. Two years later, Bernard Steffen passed away, with his wife by his side, on July 10, 1980 at the age of seventy-two. He is buried at the Artists Cemetery in Woodstock, Ulster County, New York.

His lithography and silk screen prints are in the collections of The Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, University of Michigan Art Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, and the Block Museum at Northwestern University. Many of his prints are part of the Library of Congress collection.

Note: A devastating fire in 1977 destroyed Bernard Steffen’s Woodstock, New York, home and studio, along with all of his artwork. What survives today are works previously sold or in galleries and museums at that time.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, Bernard Steffen at Gallery Showing, Date Unknown

Middle Insert Image: Bernard Steffen, “Pulling Corn (Fodder Chopper)”, Date Unknown, Serigraph in Color,, 27.9 x 35.2 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Bernard Steffen, “S Curve”, 1940, Lithograph on Paper, 24.1 x 21 cm, Private Collection

Ernesto Garcia Cabral

The Illustrative Work of Ernesto Garcia Cabral

Ernesto Garcia Cabral, know as El Chango, was the most prolific illustrator, caricaturist, and cartoonist in the history of Mexican journalism. Despite a successful sixty-year career and the production of over twenty-five thousand illustrations, he was never widely known outside of Mexico, with the exception of France, where his work appeared in several publications.

Ernesto Cabral was born in Huatusco, Veracruz, Mexico in December of 1890 to Vincent and Aurelia Garcia Cabral. As a boy, he displayed artistic ability with drawings of his classmates and landscapes; his first known illustrative work appeared in a Veracruz newspaper in 1900. Cabral received a scholarship in 1907 to study at the San Carlos Art Academy in Mexico City, where he studied under painter Germán Gedovius, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Munich and a master of the chiaroscuro technique.

Cabral’s professional career, as an illustrator and caricaturist, began in 1909 with his employment at “The Tarantula,” a weekly paper of humor and politics published in Mexico City. While at the paper, he illustrated political activist Aquiles Serdán’s telegraphed eyewitness reports of the Mexican Revolution; these ten illustrations by Cabral are the first known images of the Revolution. In 1911, Cabral was invited by editor Mario Vitoria to co-found “Multicolor”, one of Mexico’s first political satire magazines which took an anti-revolutionary stance and was fueled by criticism of President Francisco Madero”s administration.

With somewhat suspicious timing, Ernesto Cabral was offered a government-sponsored scholarship to leave Mexico and study art in Paris in February of 1912, just when “Multicolor” fell into trouble with President Madero and the Mexican government’s administration. While studying there, Cafral worked as an illustrator for the several French publications: the humor magazines “Le Rire” and “La Baïonnette”, and the mildly risqué erotic magazine “La Vie Parisienne”. He also became associated with important artists such as Diego Rivera, sculptor and painter Fidas Flizondo, and painter Angel Zarraga.

At the beginning of World War I, Cabral was given another government stipend which took him to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he remained until 1917 or 1918. While living there, he illustrated for Argentina’s newspapers “La Nación” and “Caras y Caretas”, among others, and for the Chilean publications “Revista Popular” and “Los Diez de Chile”.

On his return to Mexico in 1918, Cabral began to illustrate primarily in color and produced many illustrations, including art deco images, and caricatures for publications, such as “Revista de Revistas”, “El Semanario Nacional” and “Compañia Editorial Excélsior”. Established as a prominent caricaturist, Ernesto Cabral produced a prolific amount of editorial work throughout the 1920s and 1930s, during which time he also served as president of the National Union of Cartoonists.

Ernesto Cabral is mostly remembered today for the posters and lobby cards he executed during The Mexican Golden Age of Cinema, which roughly spanned the years from 1936 to 1956. His style was solidified in the mid-1950s, beginning with his design for the 1956 Mexican comedy film “El Rey de Mexico”. Cabral’s specialty was illustrations for comedy films. Although he did advertising work for several different studios, his most frequent assignments were for films produced by Mier y Brooks, a prominent studio during Mexico’s Golden Age. Cabral’s dynamic compositions, with their bold colors and cartoonish caricatures, were innovative in the field of film advertising and helped establish the careers of Mexican actors and comedians like Germán Valdés, aka Tin Tan, and Mario Moreno, also known as Cantiflas.

Cabral continued, during the 1960s, producing work for publications like “Hoy”, “Jueves de Excélsior:, and the newspaper “Novedades”, in which he provided illustrations on the Cold War, the Vietnam conflict, and social upheaval in the world. The winner of the 1961 Mergenthaler Prize by the Inter-American Press Association, Ernesto Garcia Cabral passed away on August 8, 1968 in Mexico City at the age of seventy-seven.

A collection of Ernesto Cabral’s movie posters with descriptions can be located at: http://www.santostreet.com/subpages/ArtistCabral.htm

Peter Churcher

Paintings by Peter Churcher

Born in Brisbane, Australia, in 1964, Peter Churcher is a portrait and figurative painter in the realist tradition. He holds a Bachelor of Music with Honors from Melbourne University which he acquired in 1986. Traveling through Europe after gaining his Licentiate for Piano Performance from Trinity College in London, Churcher visited many galleries and decided to return to his original passion, painting. He studied at Melbourne’s Victorian College, now Deacon University, where in 1992 he earned his BFA in Painting.

Churcher first showed his work in the group exhibition “Artworks II: Thirty Emerging Melbourne Artists” held at the South Melbourne Town Hall. After entering his work in two group exhibitions at Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, he gave his first solo show at the gallery in 1994. Since that time Churcher has held solo exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, and has been represented in many group exhibitions across the country.

Peter Churcher’s work deals primarily with the human subject in portraiture and group figurative narratives. His subjects are ordinary people sighted on the streets, who are presented on the canvas with their own personalities and natural enthusiasms. A number of commissioned portraits for both private and public personalities are also contained in Churcher’s body of work.

As a commissioned officer during the Persian Gulf War, Churcher was, in 2002, appointed to be Australia’s official war artist. Traveling to the Persian Gulf and Diego Garcia, he recorded the people and operations of the Royal Australian Navy and Royal Australian Air Force. Churcher’s work captured many aspects of army life not covered by the press photographers. His images of Australia’s flying officers and pilots, the sailors, and the engine-room stokers aboard the HNAS Kanimbla are now included in the collection of the Australian War Memorial.

Peter Churcher’s work is represented in many major public, corporate and private collections throughout Australia and overseas including the National Gallery of Australia and The National Portrait Gallery, both in Canberra; The Australian War Memorial; and Parliament House in Victoria, among others.

Peter Churcher is represented in Australia by Philip Bacon Galleries in Brisbane and Australian Galleries in Melbourne and Sydney. He is currently living and working in Barcelona, Spain. Churcher’s most recent solo show is at Lauraine Diggins Fine Art in Melbourne through April 16th of 2021.

Top Insert Image: Peter Churcher, “Hostel”m 2017, Oil on Canvas, 116 x 98 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Peter Churcher, “The Young Painter”, 2014, Oil on Canvas, 78 x 60 cm, Private Collection

Walter Stuempfig

Paintings by Walter Stuempfig

Walter Stuempfig was one of Philadelphia’s most highly regarded painters of the mid-twentieth century. He is known primarily for his landscapes of the Philadelphia area and the shores of New Jersey. Stuempfig’s work is often pervaded with a sense of poetic melancholy that has led to his frequent classification as a romantic realist.

Born in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia in January of 1914, Walter Stuempfig’s initial education was at the Germantown Academy from which he graduated in 1930. He spent a year studying architecture at the University of Pennsylvania before enrolling, in October of 1931, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Stuempfig studied under modernist illustrator and painter Henry McCarter, the impressionist landscape painter Daniel Garber and realist landscape painter Francis Speight.

In 1934, Stuempfig won the William Emlen Cresson Memorial Travel Scholarship for study abroad. He traveled frequently to Europe, and he was deeply influenced by the European masters, particularly Nicolas Poussin, Caravaggio, and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. From his initial exhibition in 1932 until 1966, Stuempfig regularly exhibited in the annual exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy. He had his first successful exhibition, as an American realist painter, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1942 “Artists for Victory” show.

Discovered by art gallery director R. Kirk Askew, Stuempfig had his first one man show in 1943 at the Durlacher Brothers Gallery in New York. His show was sold out on opening night, with both the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art adding his work to their collections. Stuempfig continued to be represented by the Durlacher Brothers Gallery through 1961. In 1947, the Corcoran Gallery purchased his painting “Two Houses” which had won second prize in the biennial competition that year for contemporary American paintings.

Walter Stuempfig had married his wife Lila Hill, a sculptor who also studied at the Pennsylvania Academy, in 1935. Upon his wife’s death in 1946, he concentrated more intensely on his artwork. working from his studio in the Chestnut Hill area of northwest Philadelphia. Stuempfig would spend his summers painting at New Jersey’s shore area and the Manayunk area of Philadelphia. In 1948, he became an instructor in drawing and composition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, where he taught until his death, after a long illness, in November of 1970.

As a painter, Walter Stuempfig worked independently, and remained outside the mainstream of the contemporary artistic movements. He was a prolific artist, producing over fifteen hundred works of figure compositions, landscapes and architectural subjects, portraits, and still lifes, all done in the style of romantic realism. Stuempfig had a subtle and polished painting technique; his figurative work had a great subjectivity, which was often infused with nostalgia and personal sentiment.

Walter Stuempfig’s paintings can be found in many private and public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Top Insert Image: Walter Stuempfig, “Queen of the Seas Casino”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 48.1 x 55.9 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Walter Stuempfig, “Sturgeon”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 45.7 x 35.6 cm, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts

Étienne-Louis Boullée

Architectural Design by Étienne-Louis Boullée

Born in Paris in February of 1728, Étienne-Louis Boullée was a architect, theorist, and teacher. Though regarded as one of the most visionary and influential architects in French neoclassicism, he saw none of his most extraordinary designs come to life.

Throughout the late 1700s, Boullée taught, theorized, and practiced architecture in a characteristic style consisting of geometric forms on an enormous scale, an excision of unnecessary ornamentation, and the use of repetitive columns and other similar elements of regularity and symmetry. Boullée’s focus on polarity, offsetting opposite design elements, and his use of light and shadow were highly innovative for the period.

Boullée studied under architects Germain Boffrand of the Académie Royale d’Architecture, and Jacques-François Blondel of the Ecole des Arts, where he studied until 1746. He was immediately appointed a professor of architecture at the newly established Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, under its director, civil engineer Jean-Rodolphe Perronet, This professorship gave Boullée access to public commissions and an opportunity to engage his architectural vision within France’s social and economic progress.

Étienne-Louis Boullée was elected to the Académie Royale d’Architecture in 1762, and was appointed chief architect to Frederick II of Prussia. From 1762 to 1778, he designed a number of private houses, most of which no longer exist, and several grand Parisian hotels, which included the Hôtel de Brunoy, demolished in 1939, and the still-existing Hôtel Alexandre, on the Rue de la Ville-l’Évèque.

Boullèe’s reputation and vision as an architect rests mainly on his teachings and his drawn designs which span the years from France’s Revolution in 1784 to Napoleon’s rise to power and Egyptian expedition in 1790. Boullée’s project drawings, as a collection, represented the necessary institutions for an ideal city or state. They displayed no direct political affiliations with any of the reigning doctrines or parties during this span of time; rather they adopted a belief in scientific progress symbolized in monumental forms, a dedication to celebrate the grandeur of a Nation, and, more often than not, a meditation on the sublime sobriety of death.

During this period, Boullée produced a continuous series of elaborate architectural designs beginning with a metropolitan cathedral and a colosseum for Paris, both designed in 1782. He designed a monumental-sized museum in 1783, which was followed by a cenotaph, or memorial tomb, for Isaac Newton in 1784. The design for a new reading room at the Royal Library was finished in 1785; and in 1787, Boullée finished plans for a new bridge over the Seine River.

In the late 1780s after the Revolution, severe illness forced Boullée to retire to his country house outside of Paris, where he finished the final architectural designs of his career. These included design plans for: a monument in celebration of the “Féte Dieu”, one of the most popular of the Revolutionary festivals; a monument to ‘Public Recognition’; and plans, finished in 1792, for both a national and a municipal palace. In silent protest against the terror spread by the Revolution, Boullée also designed a reconstruction of the Tower of Babel which took the from of a pure cone on a cubic base, with a trail of figures winding in a spiral, hand to hand to the top; this sturcture would by seen by the nation as a symbol of hope for a unified people with a common language.

Étienne-Louis Boullée died in Paris on February 4th of 1799, at the age of seventy. During his life, he taught some of the most prominent architects of his day including Jean Chalgrin the designer of Paris’s Arc de Tromphe, and Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, who anticipated the use of simple modular elements in construction,. Boullée’s book “Architecture, Essai sur l’Art”, a collection of papers, notes and letters arguing for an emotionally committed Neoclassicism, was posthumously published in 1953.

‘Yes, I believe that our buildings, above all our public buildings, should be in some sense poems. The images they offer our senses should arouse in us sentiments corresponding to the purpose for which these buildings are intended.” — Étienne-Louis Boullèe

Benoît Audran the Elder

Etchings by Benoît Audran the Elder

Born in Lyons, France, on November 23, 1661. Benoît Audran the Elder, second son of engraver Germain Audran, was an engraver, He received his primary instruction in engraving from his father; Benoît Audran later continued his studies under his uncle, the master engraver Gérard Audran, who was appointed engraver to King Louis XIV.

Although he never equalled the style of his uncle’s work, Benoît Audran established his own reputation with his many engravings of historical subjects and portraits. His style was bold and clear, in both the drawing of his figures and the fine expression of his characters. Benoît Audran’s many portraits include those of the French statesman Jean Baptiste Colbert; Joseph Clement of Bavaria, Archbishop of Cologne; and Swiss soldier and politician Samuel Frisching,.

Benoît Audran the Elder also produced several hundred engravings based on the works of various master artists. These include: “The Baptism of Jesus Christ” after the work of Italian Baroque painter Albani; “The Savior with Martha and Mary” and “St. Paul Preaching at Ephesus”, both after the neoclassical painter Eustache Le Suerur; and “The Accouchement of Marie de Medicis”, after Flemish artist Paul Rubens. Among Audran the Elder’s best works are the two engravings:, “The Seven Sacraments”, after the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, and “The Bronze Serpent”, after Charles Le Brun’s 1649 painting of the same name.

Benoît Audran engraved two plates, one in 1716 and one in 1717, which depicted David in his struggles with Goliath. Both of these works are ascribed as being based on the work of Mannerist Italian painter Daniele de Volterra, who is remembered for his association with Michelangelo.

Benoît Audran the Elder became a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1709 and was appointed engraver to King Louis XIV, a post which included a pension. Audran died in 1721 in the village of Ouzouer, near Sens in north-central France.

Note: Inscription content on “David and Goliath” engravings: Lettered with dedication to the Prince de Chelamar, with his titles, followed by ‘Benoit Audran, graveur ordin. du Roy, dedie cette copie d’une des deux peintures de Michel Ange Buonarotta qu’occupent les surfaces d’une grande pierre, representant le même sujet du combat de David et de Goliath en deux differentes attitudes, laquelle a été présenté par son Ex. a Louis le Grand à Marly le 25 Juillet de l’année 1715 au nom de Monseign. Judice son frère, Grand Maître du Palais Apostolique.’ With date ‘A Paris le 31 Decembre 1716’

Top Insert Image: Benoît Audran the Elder, “Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Colbert”, 1676, Engraving, Palace of Versailles Research Center

Bottom Insert Image: Benoit Audran the Elder,, “George Monck, First Duke of Albemarle”, 1707, Engraving After Adriaen van der Werff, After Frabcis Barlow, Private Collection

Marcel Proust: “We See the World Multiply Itself”

Photographers Unknown, We See the World Multiple Itself

“Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.”

—Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume Six: Time Regained and A Guide to Proust

Born into a comfortable household in the Parisian borough of Auteuil in July of 1871, Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a novelist, essayist and critic. The event of his birth took place during the suppression of the Paris Commune, a revolutionary socialist government that seized control of Paris for two months, and the consolidation of the French Third Republic, which would last until World War II. These vast changes in France’s existence played an important role in Proust’s most prominent work, “In Search of Lost Time”.

Marcel Proust suffered from poor health throughout his life. When he was nine, he experienced the first attack of the asthma that would constrict and dominate his life. As a child, he spent long holidays in the village of Illiers, a commune in north central France, where he took pleasure in the natural surroundings. This village would become the model for the fictional town of Combray, later described within “In Search of Lost Time”. In 1882 Proust, at age eleven, became a pupil at the Lycée Condorcet, a prestigious high school in Paris, where he received an award for excellence in literature. Illness, however, disrupted his education.

Proust, in spite of his poor health, served a year, from 1889 to 1890, in the French army, stationed at Coligny Barracks in the river port city of Orléans. As a young man, Proust frequented the art and literary salons of Paris, including the salon of Madame Geneviève Straus, the mother of Proust’s school friend Jacques Bizet; the salon of French painter Madeleine Lemaire; and the salon of Madame Arman de Caillavet, the mother of playwright and close friend Gaston de Caillavet. Among those who knew him, he was considered a dilettante with a lack of self-discipline and a need to impress others with his knowledge.

Marcel Proust was involved in writing from an early age. He published a regular society column in the journal “Le Mensuel” from 1890 to1891. Proust co-founded in 1892 the literary journal “Le Banquet”, in which he regularly published articles through subsequent years. In the summer of 1894 and for three weeks in 1895, Proust and French composer Reynaldo Hahn were invited by Madame Lemaire to her château de Réveillon. The two young men began an intense affair, Proust’s only real liaison, that would last two years and evolve into a lifetime friendship.

In 1896, a collection of Proust’s early writings, including drawings by Madame Lemaire, was published in an expensive edition with a forward written by poet Anatole France. In the same year, Proust began working on what would be an unfinished work. Many of the themes in “In Search of Lost Time”, including the enigma of memory and the necessity of reflection, are articulated in this unfinished work. Failing to resolve the plot, Proust gradually abandoned the work in 1897 and stopped entirely in 1899. This work, dealing with the relationship between writers and society, was published posthumously in 1952 by Éditions Gallimard under the title “Jean Santeuil”.

In 1908, after publishing in journals works which imitated other writers, Marcel Proust began to solidify his own style. Beginning in 1909 at the age of thirty-eight, Proust started work on his magnum opus, the seven volume “In Search of Lost Time”. This novel is his most prominent work, known both for its length and its theme of involuntary memory. The story follows the narrator’s recollections of his childhood and experiences into adulthood during the late 1800s and early 1900s of aristocratic France, and examines his reflection on the loss of time and lack of meaning to the world.

Proust established the structure of the novel early in the process, but kept adding new material and edited one volume after another for publication. He continued to work on it until his final illness in the autumn of 1922 forced him to stop. The last three volumes of the novel only existed in draft form, with oversights and fragmented passages, at Proust’s death in November of 1922. These last three volumes were edited and published posthumously by his younger brother Robert Proust. The finished novel totaled about thirty-two hundred pages and featured more than two thousand characters.

Marcel Proust never openly admitted to his homosexuality, although his family and close friends either knew or suspected it. His romantic relationship with composer Reynaldo Hahn and his infatuation with his chauffeur and secretary, Alfred Agostinelli, are well documented. Proust was also one of the men identified by police on a January 1918 raid on a male brothel run by Albert Le Cuziat. Although the influence of Proust’s sexuality on his writing is debatable, his “In Search of Lost Time” discusses gay life at length and features several main characters, both men and women, who are either homosexual or bisexual.

Note: An interesting and informative biography on the life of Marcel Proust by Elyse Graham for “The Modernist Lab” can be found at: https://campuspress.yale.edu/modernismlab/marcel-proust/