Category: art history

Károly Kernstok

The Artwork of Károly Kernstok

Born in Budapest in December of 1873, Károly Kernstok was a Hungarian painter and a leading member of Á Nyolcak (The Eight). “The Eight” was an avant-garde art movement of Hungarian painters who were active in Budapest between 1909 and 1918. This group of artists, connected to the Post-Impressionist movement, were advocates of the rise of Modernism in all aspects of the arts. 

In 1892 at the age of nineteen, Kernstok traveled to Berlin where he studied under Hungarian painter  and educator Simon Hollósy, one of the prominent representatives of Hungarian Naturalism and Realism. After a year’s study with Hollósy, Kernstok studied at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1893 to 1896. He returned to Hungary in 1897 and painted his “Haulers” and “Agitátor”, an early composition with socialist undertones. Kernstok was awarded a bronze medal for a painting exhibited at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris. In 1901, he exhibited at the International Exposition of Art of the City of Venice and the Venice Biennale.

After inheriting an estate in 1905 in the Central Transdanubia town of Nyergesújfalu, Károly Kernstok became a prominent leader of the “Neos”, a radical group of artists who rejected the naturalism promoted by the Nagybánya artists’ colony that was mainly composed of plein-air painters from Hollósy’s Free School in Munich. Although some of the Neo artists had studied briefly at the Nagybánya colony, the group was heavily influenced by French Post-Impressionist painters such as Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Henri Matisse. During the 1930s, Kernstok would establish an art school in the Nyergesújfalu region of Hungary.

Kernstok returned to Paris in 1906 where he became notably influenced by the works of Henri Matisse who, along with painter André Durain, was considered a leading proponent of Fauvism at the time. Kernstok’s style changed; he began to paint large-scale decorative compositions and stylized scenes that emphasized forms and lines. The rhythmic forms and strong contrasting colors of Kernstok’s 1910 “Riders on the Shore”, characterized by a synthesis of Post-Impressionism and Expressionism, shows Matisse’s strong Fauvist influence. A year later in 1911, he painted “Male Nude Leaning Against a Tree”, another example of Fauvism’s brilliant colors in figure and landscape. 

After his return to Hungary, Károly Kernstok became an influence on the art group known as “The Eight”. Although a short-lived movement lasting only nine years from 1909 to 1918, the group consisted of major Hungarian artists, writers and composers. Its complex style encompassed the rationalism of Cubism, the decorative use of strong colors from Fauvism, and the depth of emotion found in German Expressionist works. Among those associated with the “The Eight” were painters Lajos Tihanyi and Róbert Berény, sculptors Vilmos Fémes Beck and Márk Vedres, writer and poet Endre Ady, and composer Béla Bartók. During his period with “The Eight”, Kernstok painted major frescoes and designed glass windows in 1911 for the Schiffer Villa and the County Hall of Debrecen, the second-largest city in Hungary.

In August of 1919, the Hungarian Soviet Republic, a short-lived communist state that lasted only one hundred thirty-three days, collapsed after its failure to reach an agreement with the Triple Entente which consisted of the French Third Republic, the Russian Empire and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. As a result, many artists including Kernstok emigrated to Berlin where they lived and worked. Influenced by Germany’s artistic trends, Kernstok painted a series of natural landscapes and a 1921 expressionist scene of “The Last Supper”.

In 1926, Károly Kernstok returned to Budapest and remained there for the rest of his life. He developed in his later years an interest in Etruscan frescoes and that culture’s use of mythological scenes and chiaroscuro.  Kernstock produced graphic works that included etchings and drypoint engravings on copper, among which is his 1932 “Flowering Desert”. Among the paintings he executed are the 1933 “The Rape of Saint Helen” and the 1934 “Burial”. His lectures and the articles on art published in newspapers and art journals greatly extended his influence among the Hungarian painters. 

After a long career of group shows and exhibitions at major Hungarian museums, Károly Kernstok died in June of 1940 in his home city of Budapest. His work is held in many private collections and public institutions, most notably the Hungarian National Gallery at Buda Castle in Budapest and the MODEM Centre for Modern and Contemporary Art in Debrecen. A major retrospective of Kernstok’s work was held at Budapest’s Metropolitan Centre for Popular Culture in 1951. Due to the rising interest in the early Modernism, major exhibitions of works by the early Hungarian modernists, especially those executed by “The Eight”, were held in 2010-2011 at the Janus Pannonius Museum in Pécs, Hungary, and at the 2012 Bank Austria Art Forum in Vienna, a collaboration between Vienna’s Museum of Art and the Hungarian National Gallery.

Top Insert Image: Károly Kernstok, “Önarckép (Self Portrait)”, 1903, Oil on Panel, 52 x 41.5 cm, Private Collection

Second Inset Image: Károly Kernstok, “Riders on the Shore”, 1910, Oil on Canvas, 214 x 292.5 cm, Hungarian National Gallery 

Third Insert Image: André Kertész, “Károly Kernsstok’s Studio, Berlin”, 1925, Gelatin Silver Print, 6.8 x 7.8 cm, Art Institute of Chicago

Bottom Insert Image: Károly Kernstok, “Önarckép (Self Portrait in White Hat)”, circa 1900, Oil on Canvas, 80 x 60 cm, Hungarian National Gallery

Alvin Baltrop

The Photography of Alvin Baltrop

Born in Bronx borough of New York in December of 1948, Alvin Baltrop was a working-class American photographer who extensively documented the dilapidated Hudson River piers and New York City’s clandestine gay culture during the 1970s and 1980s. 

Alvin Baltrop was the younger son of Dorothy Mae Baltrop who had moved from Virginia to the Bronx with her eldest son James. He discovered photography while attending junior high school and began photographing with a twin-lens Yashica camera. Baltrop studied under the older photographers in his neighborhood and taught himself the techniques of film development. During the Vietnam War, he enlisted in 1969 as a medic in the U.S. Navy and photographed his fellow crew members. After his military service ended in 1972 with an honorable discharge, Baltrop returned to New York City where he worked in a variety of odd jobs, including as a street vendor and cab driver.

In December of 1973, a truck laden with asphalt crashed through Manhattan’s elevated West Side Highway between West Twelfth and Gansevoort Streets and forever closed that section of highway to the south. The abandoned and dilapidated Hudson River piers to the west of the closed highway presented opportunities both as art platforms and meeting places. Fifteen years elapsed before the elevated structure was fully dismantled; the location served during this time as a major New York experimental art and social venue.  

In 1973, Alvin Baltrop enrolled in the School of Visual Arts where he studied photography until 1975. Interested in photographing the Hudson River piers, he became a self-employed mover of household furniture and belongings, work that allowed him to spend more time with his photography. Although initially terrified of the area, Baltrop constantly photographed the West Side piers from 1975 to 1986, particularly those piers that bordered Greenwich Village starting at the meatpacking district and extending south to Christopher Street. 

Baltrop often shot images at the piers for several days and lived inside his moving van parked nearby. Capturing both the personalities and the structure of the piers, he became a well-known member of its artistic and gay community and remembered every person he photographed. Baltrop eventually became established as both friend and confidant to many of those who frequented the pier areas. 

Although his work had both documentary and aesthetic value, Baltrop had great difficulty in finding a gallery to sponsor an exhibition of his work during his lifetime. In 1977, he had a small solo show at the Glines, a non-profit gay art organization best known for producing Harvey Fierstein’s 1982 “Torch Song Trilogy”. Baltrop also had an exhibition of his “Pier” series at an East Village gay bar where he occasionally was employed as a bouncer. However, the established photography galleries, even those that presented explicit homoerotic work, were unreceptive to Baltrop’s work.

As a result, Alvin Baltrop never gained the finances necessary to print the vast majority of his thousands of negatives or to properly care for those he managed to print. The majority of his printed photographs are small, approximately 13 x 18 centimeters (5 x 7 inches), however, he did print a few larger images. His photographs of the Hudson River pier area  constitute a significant record of a lost era of New York City’s industrial landscape and the gay culture’s pre-AIDS history. While his photography was documentary in nature, its studied compositions, intimacy, and the attention to both light and shadow attest to an artistic ambition.

Baltrop was befriended by the New York City glass artist and writer John Drury in the late 1990s. Drury, who recognized Baltrop’s  photographic abilities, nominated him for a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award for the Arts. Baltrop received a diagnosis of cancer in the 1990s, a time when he was impoverished and without insurance for care. After only a few exhibitions during decades of photographic work, Alvin Baltrop passed away due to complications from cancer and diabetes at the age of fifty-five in New York City on the first day of February in 2004. 

In 2012, a retrospective solo exhibition entitled “Perspectives 179-Alvin Baltrop: Dreams into Glass”, which included almost one hundred gelatin silver prints, was held at Houston’s  Contemporary Art Museum. New York’s Bronx Museum of Art, custodian of many Baltrop photographs and negatives, held a 2019 retrospective of his work, entitled “The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop”, that included works from Baltrop’s private archive never before viewed by the public. 

Alvin Baltrop’s work has also been included in several exhibitions at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art including its 2015 “America is Hard to See”, 2016-2017 “Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection”, 2020 “Around Day’s End: Downtown New York, 1970-1986” and the 2024 “Trust Me”, an exhibition of intergenerational artists.

Unless noted otherwise, all photographs in this article are used courtesy of The Alvin Baltrop Trust, @ 2010, The Alvin Baltrop Trust / Artist Rights Society (ARS) and Galerie Bucholz, New York. All rights reserved. 

Notes: New York’s Museum of Modern Art has an article on Alvin Baltrop, along with several images from its collection, on its website at: https://www.moma.org/artists/48461-alvin-baltrop

An extensive biography of Alvin Baltrop, composed by the Alvin Baltrop Trust and drawn from audio recordings and interviews, can be found at the global strategic-consultancy Third Streaming site located at: http://www.thirdstreaming.com/alvin-baltrop-biography

Issue 4 of GAYLETTER Magazine has a short biography on the life of Alvin Baltrop written by Chris Stewart entitled “Alvin Baltrop’s Days on the Piers” located at: https://gayletter.com/alvin-baltrops-days-on-the-piers/

PIN-UP magazine has an article by Alejandro Carrion entitled “Masculinity Under Construction” that discusses, among other artists, the Hudson River pier area and Alvin Baltrop’s photography at: https://www.pinupmagazine.org/articles/sexy-construction-workers-urban-homoeroticism

Top Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, “Self Portrait with Alice”, 1975, Ektachrome Slide, The Alvin Baltrop Trust

Second Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, “The Piers ( Sunbathing Platform with Tava Mural)”, 1976-1985, Gelatin Silver Print, The Alvin Baltrop Trust 

Third Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, “The Piers (Two Men)”, 1975-1986, Gelatin Silver Print, Edition of 25, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, Untitled (Three Sunbathers), 1975-1986, Gelatin Silver Print, 24 x 35  cm, Printed 2005, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, Untitled (Male Portrait), 1975-1986, Gelatin Silver Print, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, and The Alvin Baltrop Trust 

Kyle Dunn

The Artwork of Kyle Dunn

Born in 1990, Kyle Dunn is an American artist who creates sensuous and psychologically complex scenes on canvas and panels. His work is a meld of theatrical elements and personal introspection that explores those relationships between the artist and his subject, two people in love, and the individual and society. 

Kyle Dunn received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Sculpture in 2012 from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. A modernist with a classical style, he began his career as a painter with a prolific series of images on canvas. In 2016, Dunn returned to his sculptural roots and created a visual language that employed three-dimensional elements constructed of epoxy resin, plaster and relief foam panels.

Dunn’s domestic tableaux and still lifes are staged, highly stylized images that include trompe l’oeil and bas-relief. All of his paintings contain a wealth of detail; your attention is drawn to the many thoughtfully placed objects that fill the canvas and surround its protagonists. Within Dunn’s melodramatic scenes, figures are staged in a variety of positions and activities that are open to the viewers’ own interpretations. His figures are often presented in solitary moments of self-reflection or scenes of domestic intimacy. 

The lighting of each scene is an important component of Kyle Dunn’s work; the theatric lighting style of both horror and noir films is evident in his paintings. In many of Dunn’s paintings and bas-relief works, light comes from a strong, external source, located either from above or below, or the side through a window or open doorway. Blocks of sunlight flood into rooms in such images as “Hyacinth and Pears” and “Devil in the Daytime”. Scenes, such as “Midday” and “Downward Dog” present  strong contrasts between light and shadow, an effect that highlights the scene’s subject and increases the drama of the depicted moment.

Kyle Dunn’s work was included in the 2022 “Fire Figure Fantasy: Selections from the ICA Miami’s Collection”, an exhibition of work housed by Miami’s Institute of Contemporary Art. His most recent exhibitions include a series of colorful nocturnal scenes in a successful April/May 2023 solo exhibition, entitled “Night Pictures”, at New York City’s  P.P.O.W. gallery on Broadway. In June of 2024, Dunn had a solo institutional show, entitled “Matrix 194”, at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum, a nineteenth-century Gothic Revival structure in Connecticut. His solo exhibition “Devil in the Daytime” is currently on view from February 8th to March 29th in 2025 at the Vielmetter Gallery in Los Angeles. 

Dunn has shown work in many international venues including the Marlborough Gallery in London, Amsterdam’s GRIMM gallery, the Maria Bernheim Gallery in Zurich, and Berlin’s Galerie Judin, among others. His work is in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Hong Kong’s Sunpride Foundation in Kowloon, and the X Museum in Beijing, China. 

Notes: There is an excellent 2019 interview, entitled “Ghost World”,  between Jessica Ross of Juxtapoz Art & Culture and Kyle Dunn located at: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/magazine/features/kyle-dunn-ghost-world/

The Maria Manetti Shrem Art Studio Program has a personal and well-documented December 2020 Visiting Artist Lecture by Kyle Dunn located on YouTube under the title: “Kyle Dunn: Art Studio Visiting Artist Lecture Series”.

Top Insert Image: Justin J. Wee, “Kyle Dunn, Brooklyn Studio”, 2021, Color Print, Galerie Magazine

Second Insert Image: Kyle Dunn, “Into the Crevasse”, 2019, Acrylic on Epoxy Resin, Plaster and Foam Panel, 121.9 x 175.3 x 5.1 cm

Bottom Insert Image: Kyle Dunn, “Window”, 2020, Acrylic on Epoxy Resin, Plaster, and Foam Panel, 162.6 x 137.2 x 6.4 cm, Private Collection

Bernadett Timko

The Artwork of Bernadett Timko

Born in Hungary in 1992, Bernadett Timko is a figurative painter who works primarily in oil paints on linen or wood panel. Using a muted but diverse color palette, she captures a wide range of subjects and moods. 

Timko’s initial art training was at the Secondary School of Fine Art in Nyíregyháza, Hungary. She relocated to London to continue her education at Heatherley’s School of Fine Art where she studied figurative painting, printmaking, etching and sculpture. As part of The New School of Art, Timko was a portrait painting tutor in 2023 at the Dairy Studios located within the Old Malling Farm in Lewes, East Sussex. 

Bernadett Timko’s work draws some influence from the emotional atmosphere of classical Hungarian paintings. Despite their display of aesthetic harmony, her works occasionally  contain undercurrents of rebellion and challenge to traditional conventions. Timko’s figures and objects are prominently presented, often highlighted, against a more artistically textured, somber background. She paints both interiors and portraits. However due to Timko’s fascination with people and the presence they emit, portraiture is her main focus. 

Timko regularly exhibits her work at the prestigious Central London art institution, Mall Galleries, her representative in England. Among her many  awards are two First Prize Winsor & Newton Young Artist Awards from the Royal Institute of Oil Painters (2015 and 2019); two Phyllis Roberts Awards (2015 and 2018); the 2016 Lynn Painter-Stainers Young Artist Award for her painting “Studio 7”; and the 2017 Prince of Wales Portrait Award from the Royal Society of Portrait Painters.

Notes: An extensive 2023 studio interview with Bernadett Timko for Britain’s online magazine “Artists & Illustrators” can be found at: https://www.artistsandillustrators.co.uk/featured-artist/in-the-studio-with-bernadett-timko/

Top Insert Image: Dan Higginson, “Bernadett Timko”, Idle Hands Society Interview, May 2022

Bottom Insert Image: Bernadett Timko, “Studio 7”, 2016, Oil on Linen, 152 x 150 cm, Winner of the 2016 Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize

 

Niko Kok

The Artwork of Niko Kok

Born in the Netherlands, Niko Kok is a Dutch visual artist who works in multiple mediums. From 1973 to 1978, he studied in the sculpture department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Strongly influenced during the 1940s and 1950s by the Brauhaus and De Stijl movements, the Gerrit Rietveld Academie focuses on the artist’s individual expression and the role and influence of autonomous visual art.

Kok brings a nearly fifty-year career in the steel industry to his artwork. In 1972, he began his employment at Tata Steel IJmuiden where he had the unique opportunity to engage with a diverse range of materials. This exposure increased Kok’s creative spirt and allowed him to devise new techniques for his artwork, including the employment of graphite crucibles, formerly used to measure nitrogen levels in steel, as a tool for his rubbings on paper. 

Over forty years, Niko Kok has transformed ordinary shapes and materials into visual creations by using the specific properties of his chosen material in multiple and often unusual ways. The recurring themes that underlie his aesthetic ideology are simplicity and contrast. Kok has worked with stone, paper, fabric, metal, glass, wood shards, and both steel and iron wire. He has also created rubbings and geometrically designed works with graphite and paper; his Tear Series combined different pieces of torn paper arranged in patterns with added graphite effects. 

A pivotal point in Niko Kok’s artistic career occurred during his travel in 1979 to Centre Pompidou in Paris. He visited the former atelier of the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, an artist whose work had emphasized clean geometrical lines and the inherent properties of the materials used. Kok is also inspired by the Minimal Art movement, an extreme form of abstract art that emerged in the late 1950s and flourished into the 1970s. Minimalism saw art as its own reality. No attempt was made to represent an outside experience or emotion; the artwork’s medium and its form was the reality. 

From 1990 to 2006, Kok created a series of small sculptures using black, white and red granite. The “Double Cube”, “Column” and “Stacking” series were fashioned of either polished or unpolished granite stones fitted together to form perfectly squared sculptures of various heights. Using his knowledge of material properties, Kok has also worked with granite spheres, a shape capable of motion in every direction. Once the sphere is bisected, the two existing hemispheres each possess stability. Even after being pushed off balance, their equilibrium brings them back to rest.

Among his exhibitions, Niko Kok presented his graphic work at a 2012 exhibition at the Swiss Art Space in Lausanne, Switzerland. Hie participated in a solo exhibition at Artphy in 2019 held at Onstwedde, Netherlands. In the following year, Kok was part of a collaborative Artphy exhibition held in the same city. He currently lives and maintains a studio in the Dutch town of Heemskerk, Netherlands. 

Kok’s work has been exhibited and sold through the Alfa Gallery, an artist-operated space with locations in both the Miami Design District and the Chelsea area of New York City. His website, which include images of his work and contact information, can be found at: https://nicokok.exto.org

Top and Bottom Insert Images: Nico Kok, “Self Portrait”, 1988, Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection

Middle Insert Image: Niko Kok, “Cubes and Cubes”, 2018, Plastic on Base, 96 x 96 x9.4 cm, Private Collection

Jacques Sultana

The Artwork of Jacques Sultana

Born to a judge and his wife at a Breton village in 1938, Jacques Sultana was a French contemporary, post-war painter, graphic artist and designer who worked during his career in a combination of Art Nouveau and Symbolist styles. He was a prolific painter and produced a large number of photo-realistic canvases throughout his career depicting both clothed and nude male figures.

Expelled from the family home at the age of twenty-two due to his homosexuality, Sultana decided in 1963 to relocate to Paris where he found residence in the 16th arrondissement. During the 1970’s, Sultana created a remarkable series of graphite drawings centering on male nudes and employing surrealist or psychedelic motifs. Of these, his 1975 graphite on paper “L’Oiseau Rare” is considered one the best in the series.

After a period as an art teacher, Jacques Sultana began working in 1978 as a graphic designer and illustrator. He created fashion trade advertisements for several clients, among which was Eminence, a French manufacturer of men’s swimsuits and underwear. Sultana also created illustrations for the distiller Pernod and automobile manufacturer Renault as well as the French Ministry of the Navy for which he illustrated all the service’s military outfits. 

Beginning in 1994 until his death, Sultana devoted himself entirely to painting, most often male nudes in a hyper-realistic and often homoerotic style. He died at the age of seventy-four on the twenty-fourth of July in 2012 at his longtime 16th arrondissement home in Paris. 

A retrospective of Jacques Sultana’s work, entitled “Jacques Sultana, Pentre Hyper-Réaliste”, was held in March to April of 2022 at Paris’s Galerie du Passage in coordination with the publication of an art book of the same name. Sultana’s work can be found in many private collections including the collections of Pierre Passebon and Jean-Paul Gaultier. 

Notes: There is a dearth of biographical information on Jacques Sultana’s life as well as details on his paintings. If anyone has more information, please share it. I am particularly interested in the time he spent in Paris and the titles of his work. 

Top Insert Image: Jacques Sultana, “La Pantalon Rouge”, 2001, Oil and Acrylic on Masonite, 63 x 38.5 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Jacques Sultana, “Tendresse”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 55 x 46 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Jacques Sultana, “Marche de Soho”, 1997, Oil on Canvas, 64 x 45 cm, Private Collection

Henri Evenepoel

The Artwork of Henri Evenepoel

Born at the city of Nice in October of 1872, Henri-Jacques-Edouard Evenepoel was a French-born Belgium artist who became associated with the Fauvist movement. Fauvism was an art movement that emphasized simplification of the subject, unconstrained brushwork and pure, strong colors over the representational values favored by the Impressionists. Inspired by the teachings of Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau, Fauvist artists included Henri Matisse, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, and Georges Braque, among others.

Born into a cultured family, Henri Evenepoel initially trained at a small art school in Sint-Josse-ten-Noode before attending the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels between 1889 and 1890. He entered Paris’s Ecole des Beaux-Arts In 1892 where he studied under Gustave Moreau and became acquainted with fellow students Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault, Edgar Maxence, and Albert Marquet. Evenepoel’s first exhibition of work occurred in April of 1894 at the Salon des Artistes Français with the portrait “Louise in Mourning”, a standing pose of his cousin Louise van Mattemburgh. 

Evenepoel continued working in portraiture and exhibited four portraits in 1895 at the Salon de Champs-de-Mars, the annual exhibition of the Sociéte Nationale des Beaux-Arts. His favorite subjects were his family and friends often presented against a neutral background, a style influenced by James Whistler and Édouard Manet. Evenepoel also painted somber-toned urban and genre scenes, designed advertising posters, and produced lithographs and etchings. In 1897, he purchased a Pocket Kodak camera and became technically proficient in developing and printing his own work. Over the course of his short life, Evenepoel shot almost nine hundred photographs, both portraits and novel studio images. 

For health reasons, Henri Evenepoel decided to travel to Algeria in October of 1897 and remained there for a six-month stay. Over this period, he painted a series of Orientalist subjects, many of them street scenes painted in the bright colors of the Fauvist style. During his winter months in Algeria, Evenepoel’s first solo exhibition was held at the Brussels Cercle Artistique from December in 1897 to January in 1898. After returning to Paris in May of 1898, he began to achieve both commercial and critical success. 

During Evenepoel’s lifetime, most of the painters considered to be modernists were generically known as impressionists. Although a modernist in the choice of his subjects, Evenepoel was a realist more in line with the works of Gustav Courbet and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, who had influenced his Parisian scenes. Marked by a refined and poetic sensibility, Evenepoel’s works were centered on artistic and idealistic considerations rather than the basic presentation of the subject.

At the beginning of successful career as an artist, Henri Evenepoel died of typhus on the twenty-seventh day in December of 1899 at the age of twenty-seven. There have been several retrospectives of Evenepoel’s work, the earliest being in 1913 and 1932 at the Galerie Georges Giroux in Brussels. Institutions holding later retrospectives include Antwerp’s Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts in 1953 and Brussels’s Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in 1972. 

Notes: An obsessive drawer, Henri Evenepoel traversed Paris on a daily basis while the city was preparing for the 1900 World Fair. He always carried a sketchbook with him and recorded all that he saw. The result was thousands of works from quick sketches to elaborate drawings of people and city scenes. In addition to sixteen paintings, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium houses over thirty drawings, several prints, letters from the artist to his father, and over eight hundred negatives which are currently being digitalized. 

The International Study Group has an article entitled “Henri Evenepoel, The Man and His Art” located at: https://isgbrussels.be/index.php/event/henri-evenepoel-man-and-his-art

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam holds a collection of twelve works by Henri Evenepoel: https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/prints/person/34602/evenepoel-henri

The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium contains a rich collection of Henri Evenepoel’s works on paper, mainly drawings, pastels, and watercolors executed between 1868 and 1914. An article on his life and work can be found at: https://fine-arts-museum.be/uploads/exhibitions/files/evenepoel_visitors_guide.pdf

Second Insert Image: Henri Evenepoel, “Orange Market at Blida”, 1898, Oil on Canvas, 81 x 125 cm, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

Bottom Insert Image: Henri Evenepoel, “Nude from the Rear in Gustave Moreau’s Studio”, 1894, Oil on Canvas on Panel, 47.2 x 36.5 cm, Private Collection

Jan Toorop

The Art of Johannes (Jan) Toorop

Born in the Purworejo Regency of the southern Central Java province of the Dutch East Indies in December of 1858, Jan (Jean) Theodorus Toorop was a Dutch-Indonesian painter who influenced the development of Dutch modern art at the beginning of the twentieth century. Gifted and sensitive to new ideas, he originally was influenced by Amsterdam Impressionism and later worked in the Symbolist, Art Nouveau, and Pointillist styles. 

The third of five children born to civil servant Christoffel Theodorus Toorop and Maria Magdalena Cooke, Johannes “Jan” Toorop lived on the island of Bangka, an important mining center in Asia, until he was nine years old. He received his initial education in the city of Batavia, now Jakarta, on the island of Java. In 1869, Toorop traveled to the Netherlands where he continued his education in Delft and Amsterdam. Beginning in 1880, he entered a two-year course of art education with studies under Impressionist painter August Allebé at Amsterdam’s Rijksakademie, home to the Amsterdam Impressionist movement.  

In 1883, Toorop enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and became an active member of the avant-garde with travels to Paris and London. He remained in Brussels until 1886, during which time he befriended and shared a studio with Belgian painter William Degouve de Nuncques who became known for his symbolist nocturnal landscapes. In 1883, Toorop joined L’Ensor, an association of artists  opposed to conservative tendencies in art. In the following year, he became a member of Les XX (Les Vingts), the successor group to L’Ensor that centered its theories on the integration of decorative and major arts. 

In 1884, Jan Toorop exhibited his work with the Groupe des Artistes Indépendants in Paris; his first solo exhibition was held in Paris in 1885. He traveled on several occasions to England where he became acquainted with the Pre-Raphaelites and such artists as James Whistler and William Morris. During the mid-1880s, Toorop created work in a variety of styles including Realism, Impressionism, and both Neo and Post-Impressionism. 

After his marriage in 1886 to Annie Hall, the daughter of a wealthy, landed English family and a student of music and the French language, Toorop divided his painting between lodgings in England, Brussels, The Hague, and later the Dutch seaside resort town of Katwijk aan Zee. It was in this period that he developed his own personal style of Symbolism: curvilinear designs with stylized gracile figures and dynamic lines based on motifs from the Javanese culture. In 1892, Toorop exhibited these works at the Salon de la Rose + Croix in Paris and at The Hague’s Circle for the Arts, of which he was a founding member. 

Jan Toorop became influenced in the mid 1890s by the Art Nouveau movement, known in the Netherlands as Noul Stil (New Style) or Nieuwe Kunst (New Art), and created several commercial poster and advertisement designs in this style. After exhibitions in Copenhagen, Dresden and Munich in 1898. he began an extended period of residence at a small marketplace house located in the seaside town of Domburg situated on the northwest coast of the Dutch province of Zeeland. Among Toorop’s many associates at Domburg were such artists as Piet Mondrian, one of the founders of the De Stijl art movement, and Dutch seascape painter Marinus Zwart.

Toorop converted to Roman Catholicism in 1905 and shortly afterward changed his name to Johannes and divorced his wife. In addition to his book illustrations and poster works, he began to produce religious works, including stained glass designs in a more geometrical linear style. After several years of residence at the Dutch city of Nijmegen, Toorop relocated in 1916 to The Hague. Beginning in 1917, he suffered from a partial paralysis that increasingly affected his later production, a series of works inspired by both religion and mysticism. 

Considered to be the most avant-garde artist in the Netherlands at the turn of the twentieth-century, Johannes (Jan) Toorop died at the age of sixty-nine in The Hague at the beginning of March in 1928. His works are in many private collections and such public collections as the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterio and the Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle, both in the Netherlands. 

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Jan Toorop”, circa 1920-1923, Vintage Photograph, Getty Images

Second Insert Image: Jan Toorop, “Delftsche Sloalie”, 1894, Lithograph, Illustration for Delft Salad Oil Advertisement, Limegreen and Black over Pink Ink on Paper, 86 x 56 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Jan Toorop, “Madonna and Child”, 1924, Pencil and Colored Crayons on Paper, 26.5 x 21 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Jan Toorop, “Self Portrait”, 1915, Black Chalk on Paper, 23.3 x 20 cm, Kunstmuseum, The Hague

Derek Jarman: Film History Series

Derek Jarman, “Caravaggio”, 1986, Film Scene Gifs, Cinematography Gabriel Beristain, Cinevista (USA)

Born in Northwood, Middlesex in January of 1942, Michael Derek Elworthy Jarman was an English artist, film maker, costume and stage designer, writer and poet, and gay rights activist. His film career began with experimental Super 8mm shorts and developed into such mainstream films as the 1986 historical drama “Caravaggio” and the 1989 “War Requiem”, that featured Laurence Olivier’s last screen performance.

As an author, Jarman published several works: a poetry collection entitled “A Finger in the Fishes Mouth”; two diaries, “Modern Nature” and “Smiling in Slow Motion”; two treatises on his art and films, “Chroma” and “The Last of England (aka Kicking the Pricks)”; and the 1984 “Dancing Ledge”, an autobiography of his life until the age of forty.

The son of Royal Air Force officer Lancelot Elworthy Jarman and Elizabeth Evelyn Puttock, Derek Jarman received his elementary education at the preparatory Walhampton School and Dorset’s Cranford School, a progressive boarding and day institution. Beginning in 1960, he studied Art and English at King’s College, London, which was followed in 1963 by four years of study at University College London’s Slade School of Fine Art. In the 1970s, Jarman embraced his homosexuality and became a public figure for the gay rights campaign. 

Jarman’s first venture in film making was a series of experimental shorts filmed with Super 8mm film, a format he used frequently throughout his career. Among these films are the 1984 “Imagining October, an examination of art and politics at the end of the Cold War; 1985 “The Angelic Conversation”, an arthouse drama of homoerotic images combined  with Judi Dench’s readings of Shakespeare sonnets; and 1990 “The Garden”, an arthouse allegory that examined the suffering and ostracism of a gay male couple during the AIDS crisis. “The Garden” was entered in 1991 into the 17th Moscow International Film Festival.

As a stage set and costume designer, Derek Jarman did the design work for the 1968 Sadler’s Wells Opera production of “Don Giovanni” at London’s newly renovated Coliseum in the West End. He was chosen as the production designer for director Ken Russell’s 1971 historical horror-drama “The Devil’s”, a controversial film for which Russell received the Best Foreign Director Award at the 1972 Venice Film Festival. Jarman’s work with this film, as well as his work on Russell’s 1972 “Savage Messiah”, gave him a transition into mainstream narrative filmmaking.

Jarman’s debut film was the 1976 “Sebastiane”, a story spoken in ancient Latin dialogue about the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. This film featured some of the first positive images of gay sexuality in British films. “Sebastiane” was influenced by films from the Italian arthouse oeuvre, particularly the cinematic style of Frederico Fellini. In 1977, Jarman began shooting scenes for the 1978 “Jubilee”, a heavily punk-influenced film that transports Queen Elizabeth I forward in time to an England troubled by the unemployment and rising inflation of the 1970s. Now considered a cult classic, the film was adapted in 2017 as a play for the Manchester Royal Exchange Theater.

After several years of preparation, Derek Jarman directed his next film, the  1979 adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”. His original adaptation was intended for a stage play; however, he ultimately decided to proceed with a film adaptation. Seeking a balance between the aspects of theater and film, Jarman reworked the text so it would capture the mystery of the original without the theatrics. Inspired by films produced by Hammer Film Productions, Jarman utilized voice-over narration, costumes from muliple eras, sounds of heavy breathing, and blue camera filters to create a film that was well received upon its release.

Jarman learned his HIV-positive diagnosis on the twenty-second of December in 1986. An outspoken advocate of gay rights, he openly spoke publicly about his condition and his struggle with the virus. Despite his illness, Jarman continued making both mainstream films and Super 8mm shorts. In 1987, his arthouse film “The Last of England” was released. This film dealt with the loss of English culture in the 1980s and the formation of the Section 28 Local Government Act that banned any “promotion” or discussion of homosexuality and thus stifled LGBT support groups.

Derek Jarman’s 1989 “War Requiem”, produced by Scottish novelist and director Don Boyd, brought Laurence Olivier out of retirement for his last screen appearance. For its soundtrack, the film used noted composer Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem”, a work he wrote for the consecration of the Coventry Cathedral. Violent war footage and poetry written by war hero Wilfred Owen were overlaid on the score. While filming his 1990 “The Garden”, Jarman became seriously ill but managed to complete the work. This arthouse film was loosely based on Christ’s crucifixion; however, the film’s protagonist is a gay male couple whose idealistic existence is interrupted by arrest, humiliation, torture and death.

Now working in a simpler format due to his failing health, Jarman directed his 1991 “Edward II”, a romantic historical drama based on Christopher Marlowe’s 1594 play of the same name. This was followed by the 1993 experimental comedic-drama “Wittgenstein” based on the life of philosopher and professor Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose life and career were affected by periods of depression. By 1993, Jarman was dying of AIDS-related complications that had already rendered him partially blind and only able to see in shades of blue. 

Despite his advancing illness, Derek Jarman completed his 1993 “Blue”, a single screenshot of saturated blue color with a background soundtrack by Simon Fisher Turner. Over the soundtrack, Jarman and some of his long-time collaborators described Jarman’s life and artistic vision. “Blue” made its debut at the 1993 Venice Biennale and later became part of the collections at the Centre Georges Pompidou, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Collection, and the Walker Art Institute in Minneapolis. Jarman’s final film was the 1994 “Glitterbug”, a documentary of his life as seen through home movies, that was posthumously aired on BBC Two’s episodic television show “Arena”.

Jarman died on the nineteenth of February in 1994 at the age of fifty-two at London’s St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. His body is interned in the graveyard at St. Clement’s Church, Old Romney, Kent. A blue English Heritage plaque honoring Derek Jarman’s  life was placed at the site of his live-in studio at London’s Butler’s Wharf in 2019. 

Notes: After his HIV-positive diagnosis, Jarman made the decision to leave London for a period and bought a small fisherman’s cabin, Prospect Cottage, on the beaches of Dungeness, Kent, with an inheritance received from his father. Using his creative energy, Jarman created a sculpture garden from discarded metal engine parts and local coastal plants. After his death, Prospect Cottage was purchased in 2020 through an Art Fund campaign and is now a public site overseen by the UK charity Creative Folkestone. Jarman’s archives from the cottage were placed on a long-term loan to the Tate Museum Archive. 

An 2023 article by artist and curator Robert Priseman for “ART UK”, entitled “Derek Jarman’s Garden: A Heart of Creativity”, examines Jarman’s life at Prospect Cottage: https://artuk.org/discover/stories/derek-jarmans-garden-a-heart-of-creativity

“FILM London” has a short 2024 article on Jarman’s life and the Jarman Award for emerging artist filmmakers that was instituted in 2008: https://filmlondon.org.uk/flamin/about-derek-jarman

Alastair Curtis wrote an excellent 2023 article for “FRIEZE’ magazine on Derek Jarman’s final film “Blue” and its adaptation into a stage production: https://www.frieze.com/article/derek-jarman-blue-now-2023

Top Insert Image: Trevor Leighton, “Derek Jarman”, 1990, Bromide Fibre Print, 36.7 x 29 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

Second Insert Image: Derek Jarman, “Caravaggio”, 1986, Cinematography Gabriel Beristain, Cinevista (USA), Umbrella Entertainment (Australia)

Third Insert Image: Steve Pyke, “Derek Jarman”, 1983, Bromide Print, 37.6 x 38 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

Fourth Insert Image: Derek Jarman, “Sebastiane”, 1976, Cinematography Peter Middleton, Cinegate Ltd

Fifth Insert Image: David Thompson, “Derek Jarman”, 1992, Toned Archival Print on Kentmere Paper, 34.5 x 27.7 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

Bottom Insert Image: Derek Jarman, “Jubilee”, 1978, Cinematography Peter Middleton, Cinegate Ltd

Bernard Perlin

Artwork by Bernard Perlin

Born in Richmond, Virginia in November of 1918, Bernard Perlin was an American painter and illustrator who was primarily known for his Magic Realism paintings and World War II posters supporting the American effort. He was the youngest child of Jewish immigrants from Russia and began his art studies at the encouragement of his high school teacher.

Perlin enrolled in the New York School of Design where he studied  from 1934 to 1936. He enrolled in 1937 at the National Academy of Design and studied under painter and lithographer Leon Kroll. Perlin continued his studies at the Arts Student League under painter and graphic artist Isabel Bishop, mural painter William Palmer, and painter and printmaker Harry Sternberg. In 1938, he was awarded a Kosciuko Foundation Award which enabled him to continue his studies in Poland.

At the beginning of World War II, Bernard Perlin was rejected from military combat service as he was openly gay. However, he entered the graphics department of the Office of War Information for which he created patriotic propaganda posters to support the country’s war effort. Among his many wartime pieces are the 1943 “Let ‘Em Have It” war bonds advertisement and “Americans Will Always Fight for Liberty”, which depicted World War II marching with Continental Army soldiers from the American Revolutionary War.

Perlin continued his war effort as an artist-correspondent for Life Magazine from 1943 to 1944. While stationed in Greece for Life Magazine, Perlin went to the United States the first news and sketches from that country since the German invasion in 1941. At the war’s end in 1945, he began illustrative work at Fortune Magazine, a national business magazine with in-depth articles.

Bernard Perlin, influenced by the magic-realism movement, sought after the war to capture in his paintings everyday-life moments. His most famous work, “Orthodox Boys”, was painted in 1948. This painting depicted two Jewish boys standing in front of subway graffiti. Perlin’s 1945-1946 “The Leg”, a casein and tempera work on board,  was the first postwar work by an American artist to be acquired by the Tate Museum in London. 

Perlin moved to Italy for six years, where he produced magic-realist  works done with a more brightly colored palette. After a brief stay in New York City, Perlin moved to Ridgefield, Connecticut, where he continued to paint until the 1970s. After several years of retirement, he began to paint again in 2012. After the completion of two new works, Perlin was given a retrospective of his work in 2013 at the Chair and the Maiden Gallery on Christopher Street in New York City. 

Bernard Perlin met Edward Newell, a top fashion model in the 1950s and later the 1960s, at a 1954 New Year’s Eve party hosted by photographer George Platt Lynes. Their relationship that began in the summer of 1955 lasted for over fifty years until Perlin’s death. Newell and Perlin were married after it became legal in the state of Connecticut in 2008.

Bernard Perlin died at the age of ninety-five in January of 2014 at his home in Ridgefield, Connecticutt. His work can be found in museums and libraries, including the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Pritzker Military Museum and Library in Chicago.

Note: I have done research on Edward Newell without any success. I know that he was in Connecticut after Perlin’s death. If anyone has any information on Newell, please notify me through the comment section. Thank you.

Top Insert Image: George Platt Lynes, “Bernard Perlin”, 1940 Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Bernard Perlin, “His Home Over There”, circa 1942, YMCA/YWCA Poster, 69.5 x 102.5 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Bernard Perlin, “Let ‘Em Have It”, 1943, World War II Poster for War Bonds, 51 x 71 cm, Private Collection

 

Trevor Southey

The Art of Trevor Southey

Born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Africa in 1940 to parents of colonialist Dutch descent, Trevor Jack Thomas Southey was a celebrated Mormon painter, print maker, sculptor and educator. His heritage can be traced to European colonists who settled in Cape Town, South Africa in the seventeenth-century. Southey’s work celebrated the human form and sought to transform humanity by challenging viewers to rediscover their inner soul.

Trevor Southey’s early interest in art developed during periods of rheumatic fever that often confined him to bed with only pencils, paper, and art books from the school library. His formal art education began with studies at the Brighton College of Art in Sussex, England. A year later, Southey studied at the Natel Technical College in Durban, South Africa where he met and was baptized by Mormon missionaries. In the early 1960s, he served as a Latter Day Saints missionary with the organization’s South Africa Aid program. 

Retaining his African and European origins, Southey emigrated to the United States in 1965 and studied at the Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah where he earned both his Bachelor and Master Degrees. Southey taught art education at the university and became a founding member in 1966 of the highly significant Mormon Art and Belief Movement, an artist organization that was active until 1976. During his teaching career, Southey worked to establish a Mormon art form through his use of Latter Day Saint theology. 

Despite his homosexuality, Trevor Southey married psychotherapist Elaine Fish, the daughter of Jesse Fish and Lucile Cottam, in 1967 after a brief courtship of several months. In an attempt to conform to the teachings of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, the couple settled down in the foothills of Utah’s Wasatch Mountains, built a homestead in Alpine  and raised four children. Southey along with artists Neil Hadlock, Dennis Smith and Gary Ernest Smith founded a small artist community in Alpine during the 1970s.

Southey resigned from Brigham Young University’s faculty in 1977 and began to pursue a personal artistic career. Coming to terms with his homosexuality, Southey divorced Elaine Fish in 1982 after fifteen years of marriage and found himself excommunicated on the outskirts of Mormon society. Thirty years later, Southey’s reputation as an artist prompted an invitation to once again join the Church of the Latter Day Saints.

As a figurative Realist, Trevor Southey used the depiction of the physical body to portray the soul, a method employed frequently by painters and sculptors of the Renaissance period. He expressed human spirituality through commonplace figures of an ethereal nature in scenes that combined realism and personally related allegories. Southey’s work, focused on the Rocky Mountain area, examined environmental issues that effected the land particularly those concerns that dealt with urban planning. In 1985, he relocated his Salt Lake City studio to San Francisco where Southey’s artwork achieved both critical and popular success. His four children from his annulled marriage later joined him in San Francisco. 

During the 1990s, Southey became an accomplished stained glass designer, sculptor and print maker. His many intaglio etchings exhibited the same elegance and delicate draftsmanship of his paintings. Southey’s “Full Bloom” intaglio series began as a pencil drawing of a woman he knew from church. In its final form, this successful series of etchings became a universal symbol of resurrection and the cycle of life. Fully established now as an artist of note, Southey received commissions for both paintings and sculptures throughout the United States and the United Kingdom . 

Trevor Southey did a series of illustrations for several books of poetry by writer, playwright and lecturer Carol Lynn Pearson. These include the 1976 “The Growing Season” and the 1987 “A Widening View”, both published by Bookcraft in Salt Lake City, as well as the 1967 “Beginnings” published by Trilogy Arts in Provo, Utah. Southey, along with Brigham Young University Professors Clyde W. Robinson and Donald R. Marshall, participated in a 1979 panel discussion with authors Diane Leigh and Brett Parkinson on the nature of art in the Church of the Latter Day Saints. This dialogue was later published in the Fall 1979 edition of “Century II”, the Brigham Young University journal for its College of Humanities.

In 2013, after a decade-long battle with prostate cancer and a recent diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease, Southey returned to Salt Lake City, Utah to be cared for by friends and relatives. His four children also relocated to be by his side. Trevor Southey died, at the age of seventy-five after a year at the Salt Lake City hospice, on the twentieth of October in 2015. His funeral service was held at the Dumke Auditorium of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. Southey’s work can be found in many private collections and both public and corporate institutions.

“ It made itself most known in my work. Even that work long preserved within the seeming sanctity of a subject like the traditional family would reflect that shunned part of my being. Works done innocently, once they were complete still held the whole truth within them. Perhaps no painting revealed that more clearly than Prodigal. Often while I refused to acknowledge this, others could read it quite clearly. Prodigal was conceived from Jesus’ parable of reconciliation and familial love. I feared the sensuality of this work, and indeed, it was gently declined by the clients. At its conception and execution, that sensuality was naive and even innocent, as was the deeper implications of content. Other works follow as a celebration of this new personal “home,’ this integration, the comfort of finally being one within oneself and one within a new society. Some of these images are almost embarrassingly overt, though that was by no means my intention.”

Trevor Southey, Gay, Excerpt from Warnock Fine Arts: Trevor Southey

Notes: Trevor Southey attracted controversy in 1981 with his “Flight Aspiration”, a painting of a flying nude man and woman that was part of a mural commissioned for the Salt Lake City International Airport. The mural was removed after protests by the American Family Association, a national anti-pornography group led locally by Romola Joy Beech, a well known Latter Day Saints conservative activist. After five years in storage at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, “Flight Aspiration” was placed into the museum’s permanent collection in 1986.

Duane Jennings, a long-time friend of Southey and author of the two-volume series “Stumbling Blocks and Stepping-Stones”, wrote a short article on the artist’s life for the online site “Affirmation: LBGTQ Mormons Families and Friends”: https://affirmation.org/trevor-southey-1940-2015/

The Affirmation site also has an article by Seba Martinez that discusses Southey’s personal experience in marriage, excommunication from the Church of the Latter Day Saints, and break-up of family bonds due to a loved one being homosexual: https://affirmation.org/pbs-documentary-mormons/

Selected for the LDS Film Festival, Nathan Florence’s 2022 film, “Bright Spark: The Reconciliation of Trevor Southey”, is a narrative documentary on Southey’s life and work. This film contains film clips of Southey with his work. “Bright Spark” can be found in its entirety on the PBS/MPT site: https://www.pbs.org/video/bright-spark-the-reconciliation-of-trevor-southey-ld2x8l/

The Trevor Southey website is located at: http://www.trevorsouthey.com

The Dabakis-Justesen Fine Art site has a presentation of Trevor Southey’s large-scale painting series “Warriors” for viewing and purchase: http://www.trevorsouthey.com/warriors/index.html

Second Insert Image; Trevor Southey, “Yuri”, 2000, “Warrior” Series, Oil on Canvas, 213.4 x 152.4 cm, Dabakis-Justesen Fine Art

Third Insert Image: Trevor Southey, “Transition”, 1980, Edition of 77, Etching, 20.3 x 15.2 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Trevor Southey, “Russ”, 1990, Prismacolor Pencil Drawing on Silkscreen, 76.2 x 55.9 cm, Private Collection

 

Diego Rodríguez de Silva Velázquez

Diego Velázquez, “Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob”, 1630, Oil on Canvas, 223 x 250 cm, Monasterio de El Escorial, San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Madrid, Spain

Born at the Andalusian city of Seville in May of 1599, Diego Rodríguez de Silva Velázquez was an artist of the Spanish Golden Age who rose to prominence in the court of King Philip IV of Spain and Portugal. His work became the archetype for the nineteenth-century realist and impressionist painters.

Diego Velázquez was the first child of notary Juan Rodriguez de Silva and Jerónima Velázquez who raised him in modest surroundings. As he exhibited an early inclination for art, Velázquez was apprenticed for six-years to painter Francisco Pacheco del Río, the founder of Seville’s art academy. His studies under Pacheco included literature and philosophy, perspective and proportion, and, as Pacheco was the official censor of Seville’s Inquisition, the academically strict representation of religious subjects.

Velázquez was one of the first Spanish artists to paint bodegones, realist depictions of kitchen scenes depicting still lifes of pantry objects such as food and drink. These paintings are known for their realism and chiaroscuro, dramatic lighting effects, as well as their religious background scenes. Those executed in 1618 include “Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha” and “Kitchen Scene with Christ at Emmaus”. During his period in Seville, Velázquez painted  his first full-length portrait, the 1620 “Sor Jerónima de la Fuente”, a depiction of the revered nun that was commissioned by the Franciscan order. 

Having established his reputation in Seville by the early 1620s, Diego Velázquez traveled to Madrid in April of 1622 and, at the request of Pacheco del Río, painted a portrait of poet Luis de Góngora. In December of 1622, he received a command to attend the court of King Philip IV’s minister, Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares. Velázquez lodged with Don Juan de Fonseca, Chaplain to the King, and painted his portrait. Satisfied with the work, King Philip IV commissioned a portrait and sat for Velázquez on the thirtieth of August in 1623. Upon the pleasure of the king, Velásquez received substantial funds and moved with his family to Madrid which became his home for the remainder of his life.

Velázquez was now established with a monthly salary and lodgings as well as payments for any future works. His work softened from the severity of the Seville period and the tones became more delicate. In 1627, Velázquez won a painting competition set by King Philip IV with a painting of the expulsion of the Moors, a work later destroyed in a 1734 fire. As a reward, he was appointed gentleman usher and received a daily allowance and yearly funds for clothes. Velázquez met painter Peter Paul Rubens in September of 1628 and accompanied him to view the work of Italian Renaissance painter Tiziano Vecellio (Titian) on display at the Royal Site of San Lorenzo de El Escorial. This meeting with Titian motivated Velázquez to travel to Italy to see the works of the Italian masters.

Diego Velázquez’s first trip to Italy, a major influence on his work, was sponsored in 1629 by King Philip IV. He traveled extensively and painted for a year and a half, a period of major history paintings. Among these were the 1629-1630 “Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob” and the 1630 “Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan”, two compositions of nearly life-sized figures presented as contemporary people with gestures and facial expressions seen in ordinary life. Following the example of the painters from Bologna, he switched to light gray grounds rather than the dark red ground of his earlier works; this became a regular practice that enabled greater luminosity. 

Velázquez returned to Madrid in 1631 and completed the first of many portraits featuring Philip IV’s infant son, “Prince Balthasar Charles with a Dwarf”, now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. For decorations at the Palacio del Buen Retiro, the king’s new palace, he painted equestrian portraits of the royal family and a large contemporary history painting, “The Surrender of Breda”, all executed in 1634 and 1635. Velázquez again returned to history paintings between 1636 and 1648 with“Aesop”,“Menippus”, and “Mars Resting”. As his royal appointment enabled him to avoid the censorship of the Inquisition, he became the first Spanish artist known to have painted the female nude, the 1644-1648 “Venus at her Mirror”. 

Diego Velázquez traveled in 1649 for his second and last trip to Italy where he bought paintings by many noted artists including Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. After painting a portrait of the Duke of Modena, Velázquez painted a portrait of Pope Innocent X, for which he was presented with a medal and gold chain. While in Rome, he painted a 1650 portrait of Juan de Pareja, one of his slaves and a notable painter in his own right; Velázquez freed de Pareja in November of that year. He returned by way of Barcelona to Spain in 1651 and proceeded to arrange and catalogue the paintings and three hundred pieces of statuary he had bought for King Philip IV.

Velázquez, upon his return, painted the 1656 “Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor)”, a scene of a group of children and women, one of which was Margaret Theresa, the eldest daughter of Philip IV’s new queen Mariana of Austria. Velázquez had placed himself next to a painting easel and the king and queen are seen reflected in a mirror on the back wall. Three years after the completion of this work, he received the honorary Cross of Saint James of the Order of Santiago. One of his last major works was the 1657 “Las Hilanderas (The Spinners)”, a scene based on Ovid’s myth of Arachna, a Lydian maiden credited with inventing linen cloth and nets.

The 1660 peace treaty between France and Spain was finalized with the marriage of Maria Theresa, the daughter of Philip IV and his first wife Elisabeth of France, and Louis XIV, known as the Sun King. Diego Velázquez was charged with the decoration of the Spanish pavilion and the surrounding area of the small Island of Pheasants. He returned to Madrid on the twenty-sixth of June and, on the thirty-first of July, was stricken with fever. After signing a will, Diego Velázquez died on the sixth of August; his wife died eight days later. Both were buried in the vault of the Church of San Juan Bautista. As the church was destroyed in 1809 by the French, the place of their interment is now unknown.

Diego Velázquez has been honored through works of such artists as Édouard Manet, James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon, Fernando Botero, Herman Braun-Vega and Salvador Dali. In 2009, the “Portrait of a Man’, long attributed to a follower of Velázquez, was restored and found to have been painted by Velázquez himself. A portrait from a collection in the United Kingdom was through x-ray analysis found to be a previously unknown work by Velázquez. 

Notes:  A short 2003 essay on Diego Velázquez by Everett Fahy of the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art can be found at the museum’s site: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/vela/hd_vela.htm

The website for the Diego Velázquez Organization, which contains his complete oeuvre can be found at: https://diegovelazquez.org

The Museum del Prado has an article on Velázquez as well as images of all sixty-five paintings by the artist in its collection: https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/artist/velazquez-diego-rodriguez-de-silva-y/434337e9-77e4-4597-a962-ef47304d930d

Top Insert Image: Diego Velázquez, “Self Portrait”, circa 1645, Oil on Canvas, 103.5 x 82.5 cm, Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy

Second Insert Image: Diego Velázquez, “The Feast of Bacchus”, 1628-1629, Oil on Canvas, 165 x 225 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain

Third Insert Image: Diego Velázquez, “Maria Teresa of Spain (with Two Watches)”, 1652-1653, Oil on Canvas, 127 x 98.5 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

Fourth Insert Image: Diego Velázquez, “The Surrender of Breda”, 1634-1635, Oil on Canvas, 307 x 367 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain

Bottom Insert Image: Diego Velázquez, “Juan de Pareja”, 1650, Oil on Canvas, 81.3 x 69.9 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Carl Van Vechten

The Photography of Carl Van Vechten

Born at Cedar Rapids, Iowa in June of 1880, Carl Van Vechten was an American accomplished photographer, author, critic, and ardent supporter of Harlem Renaissance artists and writers. He was the youngest child of prominent banker Charles Duane Van Vechten and Ada Amanda Fitch, a talented musician who founded the Cedar Rapids Public Library. A passionate follower of music and theater from an early age, Van Vechten left Cedar Rapids after graduating high school to pursue his interests and advance his education in Chicago.

Van Vechten entered the University of Chicago in 1899 where he studied a variety of topics including music, art and opera. Developing an interest in writing, he contributed work to the “University of Chicago Weekly”. After graduating from the university in 1903, Van Vechten accepted the position of columnist for the “Chicago American”, a growing afternoon edition newspaper. During this period, he began his experiments in photography, a passion for which he later gained widespread recognition.

After moving to New York City in 1906, Carl Van Vechten was hired by “The New York Times” as an assistant to its music critic. This position allowed him to continue his interest in opera through travels to Europe. In 1908, Van Vechten became the newspaper’s Paris correspondent and, upon his return to the United States in 1909, became the first American critic of modern dance. He later became the drama critic for the “New York Times” during 1913 and 1914. During a 1913 musical premiere in Paris, Van Vechten met and became a life-long friend and champion of American author and poet Gertrude Stein. Upon her death in 1946, he became her literary executor and assisted in the printing of her unpublished writings.

Having finished with writing both fiction and critical, Van Vechten at the age of fifty began photographing his large circle of friends with a 35 mm Leica camera, given to him by the Mexican painter, ethnologist and art historian Miguel Covarrubias. Van Vechten’s earlier career as a New York Times writer and his theater connections through his actress wife, Fania Marinoff, provided him access to new and established artists as well as cultural figures of the time. Van Vechten’s photographic portfolio became a collection of America’s cultural icons of the early to middle 1900s.

Carl Van Vechten’s portraits were usually busts or half-length poses in front of backdrops. Although he employed an assistant for lighting setups, Van Vechten was skilled in the techniques of photographic development. The subjects of his portraits included such notables as playwright Eugene O”Neill, novelist and poet Gertrude Stein, actress Anna May Wong, social activist Langston Hughes, actress and singer Pearl Bailey, and many others. Van Vechten’s photographs were exhibited at New York City’s luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman in 1933, the Museum of the City of New York in 1942, the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1951, and at annual Leica Exhibitions between 1934 and 1936.  

Van Vechten strongly felt that his documentary photographic work of the mid-1900s should be available for scholarly research. During his lifetime, he donated his collection of manuscripts, letters, clippings and photographs to several university libraries. The Museum of the City of New York houses an extensive collection of over two-thousand images. In 1966, the United States Library of Congress acquired a collection of fourteen-hundred photographs that had been the property of Saul Mauriber. Originally a busboy at the Stage Door Canteen during World War II, Mauriber was Van Vechten’s photographic assistant for twenty years; he organized the collection and later became the photographic executor for Van Vechten’s estate.

As an author, Carl Van Vechten published several volumes of essays on a variety of subjects between 1915 and 1920, during which time he acted as an informal literary scout for the newly formed publisher Alfred A. Knopf. The publisher printed seven novels by Van Vechten between 1922 and 1930, including the 1922 “Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works”, a fictionalized autobiographical work built around the Harlem Renaissance, and the 1930 “Parties: Scenes from Contemporary New York Life”, a satirical portrait of upper-bohemian New Yorkers and Harlem jazz clubs.

Active in both writing and photography in his latter years, Carl Van Vechten died in December of 1964 at the age of eighty-four in New York City. His ashes were scattered over the Shakespeare Garden in the city’s Central Park. Van Vechten’s personal papers, a collection of nineteen-hundred Kodachrome slides, and his series “Living Portraits: Color Photographs of African Americans from 1939 to 1964” are housed at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. His work is also housed in Tennessee’s Fisk University, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, among others.

Notes: While in Europe in 1907, Carl Van Vechten married Anna Snyder, his long time friend from Cedar Rapids. Their marriage lasted for five years; the divorce was finalized in 1912. Two years later, he married American-Russian actress and dancer Fania Marinoff. This marriage lasted for fifty years during which the couple played a prominent role in the Harlem Renaissance. After a successful fifty year career, Marinoff died from pneumonia at the age of eighty-one in November of 1971.

From the beginning of their relationship, Fania Marinoff was aware of Van Vechten’s romantic and sexual relationships with men. Most notable of these was his relationship with Richmond journalist Mark Lutz, who was introduced to Van Vechten at a 1931 party hosted by Hunter Stagg, editor of “The Reviewer” literary magazine. Lutz became a model for Van Vechten’s early photographic work and would maintain a close relationship until Van Vechten’s death. Upon Mark Lutz’s death in 1968, all his correspondence with Van Vechten, some ten-thousand letters, were destroyed as per his wishes. His collection of photographs by Van Vechten were donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

A November 2023 article by Anne McCrery for the Library of Virginia’s “The Uncommon Wealth”, entitled “Authors of All Four Sexes” examines Hunter Stagg, his friendship with Van Vechten and Lutz, and the literary renaissance of Richmond, Virginia: https://uncommonwealth.virginiamemory.com/blog/2023/11/22/hunter-stagg/

The Elisa Rolle/ Queerplaces website has a biographical article on Carl Van Vechten that includes a collection of his portrait photographs gathered by Tony Scupham-Bilton: http://www.elisarolle.com/queerplaces/a-b-ce/Carl%20Van%20Vechten.html

Top Insert Image: Mark Lutz, “Carl Van Vechten, Villa Curonia, Florence, Italy”, 1935, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “Vincent Price”, 1939, Bromide Print, Marquette University, Wisconsin, 

Third Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “Mark Lutz, Rhinebeck, New York”, July 1936, Gelatin Silver Print, 35.3 x 27.9 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Fourth Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “James Earl Jones”, May 1961, Vintage Gelatin Silver Print, 34.5 x 24 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “John Gielgud”, 1936, Vintage Print, 25.3 x 18 cm, Estate of Carl Van Vechten, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Howard Roffman

The Photography of Howard Roffman

Born in Philadelphia in April of 1953, Howard Roffman is an American lawyer, marketing director, author and photographer. He is best known for his work on the Star Wars franchise as Lucasfilm’s head of Licensing and for his series of photographic art books of gay-positive images published in Berlin by Bruno Gmünder. 

The son of a Jewish family in a white middle-class section of Philadelphia, Howard Roffman’s interest in photography and awareness of his gay identity began early in his life. He attended the University of Pennsylvania and, later, the University of Florida College of Law where he received his Doctor of Law degree in 1977. Roffman served as a law clerk on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and later at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, a law firm in Washington DC.

As an author, Roffman spent years of research for his first nonfiction book, the 1976 “Presumed Guilty: Lee Harvey Oswald in the Assassination of President Kennedy”, a volume published by A.S. Barnes that examined the Warren Commission Report. His second nonfiction work, “Understanding the Cold War: A Study of the Cold War in the Interwar Period”, was published by the Associated University Press in 1977.  

Howard Roffman joined Lucasfilm in 1980 initially as legal counsel but was eventually promoted to general counsel. In 1986, he became the company’s Vice-President of Licensing, a position that included overseeing daily operations, identification of licensing partners, and the execution of agreements. Roffman was instrumental in the 1991 launch of the Star Wars novel franchise. Timothy Zahn’s “Heir to the Empire”, the first of this novel series, was on The New York Times Best Seller list for nineteen weeks. 

In 1999, Roffman was appointed President of Lucas Licensing, a subsidiary of Lucasfilm that owns the licensing rights to the “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” film series. In this position, he acted as Executive Producer for the highly successful “Star Wars: In Concert” tour, a series of concerts featuring a choir and symphony orchestra synced with footage from the Star War saga films displayed on a three-story LED screen. 

In early 2012, Howard Roffman became a Senior Advisor at Lucasfilm; however in the latter part of the year, he returned to full-time management of the Star Wars franchise. Roffman’s leadership with Star Wars licensing has been credited for redefining the licensed merchandise business. His work became the template used by many major media companies, including Disney which acquired Lucasfilm in 2012. Chosen by Brandweek magazine as the 1997 Entertainment Marketer of the Year, Roffman was inducted into the Licensing Hall of Fame in 2012. 

In 1991, Roffman began a career in photography through his meeting a young gay San Francisco couple who were seeking a photographer. By introducing his work to people on the street as well as at fairs and malls, he developed his skills and gradually built an impressive body of work. Over the last three decades, Roffman has published twenty-three volumes of portraiture photography and numerous magazine articles and calendars. After many years of shooting black and white film, he presented his first collection of digital color images in January of 2009, “Private Images, Bel Ami”, published through Bruno Gmünder.

Howard Roffman serves as the Executive Vice President of the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Film Society. He has aided in the financing of several acclaimed documentary film projects. Among these were directors David Weissman and Bill Weber’s 2011 “We Were Here”, which illuminated the personal and community issues raised by the AIDS epidemic, and directors Jeff Orlowski, Jerry Aronson and Paula DuPré Pesmen’s 2012 “Chasing Ice”, a multi-year chronicle of the earth’s melting glaciers. 

Howard Roffman’s photographic work is represented by Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art, a gallery that specializes in vintage and contemporary photography: https://wesseloconnor.com

Notes: The September 2019 issue of the online Metrosource magazine has an article on Howard Roffman’s photographic career at: https://metrosource.com/howard-roffman-gay-nude-photographer-star-wars/

Medium: Human Stories & Ideas has a short article on Howard Roffman and a link to a 2017 video interview entitled “Messing with a Classic” in which he discusses Lucasfilm and his work with “Star Wars” saga: https://medium.com/@wayofthewarriorx/howard-roffman-tv-interview-guy-who-was-in-charge-of-the-eu-l-l-ca33735117d2

Second Insert Image: Howard Roffman, “Pictures of Fred”, 2000, Bruno Gmünder, Berlin, Germany

Third Insert Image: Howard Roffman, “John, Gary and Kris by the Stoop”, 1995, Gelatin Silver Print, Edition of 25, 36 x 36 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Howard Roffman, “Three”, January 1997, Second Edition, Bruno Gmünder, Berlin, Germany

Fyodor Antonovich Bruni

Fyodor Antonovich Bruni, “The Brazen Serpent”, 1841, Oil on Canvas, 565 x 852 cm, The Mikhailovsky Palace, The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Born in Milan in December of 1801, Fyodor Antonovich Bruni was a Russian Academic painter of Swiss-Italian descent. He was the son of Swiss citizen Antonio Baroffi-Bruni, a Gold Medal of Honor officer of the Austrian army and commissioned painter to Tsar Paul I and the royal Kurakin and Baryatinsky families. 

Exhibiting a talent in art from a very early age, Fyodor Bruni learned his basic artistic skills from his father before enrolling at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. His education was sponsored by Italian count Giulio Renato Litta, both a fellow high-ranking Austrian officer and countryman to Fyodor Bruni’s father. Bruni received an excellent education under the guidance of such artists as portraitist Grigory Ugryumov, anatomical-drawing professor Vasily Shebuyev, and historical painter Andrei Ivanov. During this study period, Bruni created his first self-portrait, a romanticized image dressed in an open shirt, now housed in The State Russian Museum.  

In 1818, Bruni entered his “Samson and Delilah” in a competitive examination at the Academy. Failing to achieve the gold medal, he continued his studies in Italy. Bruni, however, was no longer receiving support from Count Litta and subsisted on financial support from his father until Antonio Baroffi-Bruni’s death in 1825. In Italy, Bruni created several large historical compositions including the 1824 “The Death of Camilla, Horace’s Sister” and 1825 “St. Cecilia”, but received no compensation for his efforts. After copying Raphael’s frescoes “The Triumph of Galatea” and”The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple” in 1827, Bruni received the patronage and assistance of Princess Zinaida Volkonskaya, a German-Russian composer and writer as well as the wife of Prince Nikita Volkonsky, aide to the Royal Court.

Supported now by a patron, Fyodor Bruni began to produce compositions focused on Roman and Ancient Greek mythologies, among these are the 1827 “The Awakening of the Graces” and the 1828 “A Bacchante Giving Cupid a Drink”. In February of 1827, he  informed Russia’s Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts that he had begun work in Italy on a large painting entitled “The Brazen Serpent”, based on an Old Testament story of Moses leading the Jewish people out of Egypt. In early 1828, Bruni was awarded a five-year stipend with the purpose of improving his painting skills, through an edict issued by Nicolas I, Emperor of Russia and Grand Duke of Finland.

During an earlier trip to London, Bruni met and fell in love with Angelica Serni, the well-educated daughter of a wealthy French hotelier. Although he desired to wed her, he could not secure her parents’ consent to marriage due to his financial condition at that time. In the spring of 1830, Bruni attempted to enter his “Bacchante” at a juried exhibition in Rome. The jury declined its entry due to the semi-nude depiction and as a gesture of respect for the Lenten season. Bruni was awarded, while working in Italy in 1834, the title of Academician in consideration of all his achievements. The next year, he married Angelica Serni in Rome, a ceremony attended by many known Russian artists and Roman patrons.

At the Emperor’s order, Fyodor Bruni and his wife relocated to Russia where they settled in St. Petersburg at a house belonging to the Imperial Academy. Now an established professor of the second degree, he taught painting students and created murals for the Winter Palace’s church as well as an image in 1837 of the deceased novelist and playwright Alexander Pushkin. In August of 1838, Fyodor Bruni returned with his wife to Italy, now as a wealthy, established artist favored by the Russian Emperor, and continued work on his large-scale composition, “The Brazen Serpent”.

In December of that year, the heir to the Russian throne, Grand Duke Alexander Nikolayevich, visited Bruni’s studio and promoted an exhibition of works by Russian artists in Rome. The Grand Duke commissioned a series of projects from these artists; he particularly praised Bruni’s composition “The Mother of God” and purchased it for his own collection. A series of four “Mother of God” paintings were also commissioned by Grigory Rakhmanov, a member of the Imperial Court, for installation at a Greek Russian church. 

Fyodor Bruni finished his great work “The Brazen Serpent” in 1841 and took it to St. Petersburg where it was exhibited in a hall at the newly restored Winter Palace. Later in the year, he returned once more to Rome and, during his four-year residency, created twenty-five sketches that would form the foundation of a frescoe series at St. Petersburg’s Saint Isaac’s Cathedral. Bruni painted several of these frescoes; the rest were executed by artists under his direction. This series of frescoes were completed in 1853 and the sketches are now housed in The State Russian Museum. Bruni became the Custodian of the Gallery at the Hermitage Museum in 1849. As a part of his duties, he twice traveled abroad to acquire new works of art for the Hermitage collection.

In 1855, Bruni became the Rector of the Sculpture and Painting Department at St. Petersburg’s Imperial Academy of the Arts. As he aged, he became more reclusive, often disappearing for weeks at a time. Bruni often openly expressed an intolerance towards younger artists; due to this behavior, he was forced to resign his position in 1871. Despite this behavior, Bruni was awarded a honorary Professorship at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts and at Rome’s Academy of San Luca. Fyodor Antonovich Bruni died in August of 1875, at the age of seventy-six, in St. Petersburg and was interred in the city’s Tikhvin Cemetery. 

Fyodor Bruni’s 1841 monumental oil painting “The Brazen Serpent” was completed after fifteen years of work. His earliest known sketch on the subject is dated at 1824; his general sketch of the composition was under-painted on board in 1833. Bruni began work in Italy on the final version in the same year, with alternate periods of work on other projects in Italy and Russia. On the fifteenth of April in 1841, he decided his great work was completed.

“The Brazen Serpent” was first exhibited in Rome and received the approval of its population. At the end of June, the painting was sent to Russia and exhibited in September at the Winter Palace and later at the Academy of Arts. After a public exhibition in 1842, Emperor Nicolas I purchased the painting and awarded Bruni the Order of St. Vladimir of the fourth level. Now part of the State Russian Museum, it is considered to be the largest Russian history painting and the largest in the museum’s collection.

The theme of “The Brazen Serpent” is based on a Book of Numbers account within the Bible’s Old Testament that chronicles Moses’s leading the people of Judah through the waterless desert areas of Egypt. When the people loose their faith in Moses’s leadership, a punishment in the form of a rain of poisonous serpents descends upon them. Moses, commanded by the Lord, erected a brazen serpent in their midst. Those individuals, who had repented and looked at the brazen serpent with true faith, lived and the bites inflicted by the serpents were healed. 

Notes:  There is some discrepancy in regards to the Milan birth date of Russian painter Fyodor Antonovich Bruni. While several sources cited June of 1799 as Bruni’s birthdate, I deferred to Russia’s Voronezh Regional Art Museum and Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery that cite his birthdate as December of 1801.

Top Insert Image: Arkady Lvov, “Fyodor Antonovich Bruni, Rector of the Imperial Academy of Arts”, circa 1855-1860, Photolithograph by A. Transhel 

Second Insert Image: Fyodor Bruni, “Mother of God with the Eternal Child”, mid-1830s, Oil on Cardboard, 69.5 x 47 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Fyodor Bruni, “Study for Madonna in Gloria”, mid-1830s, Pencil on Paper, 58 x 44 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Fyodor Bruni, “Bacchant”, 1858, Oil on Canvas, 91.2 x 71.5 cm, The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Fifth Insert Image: Fyodor Bruni, “Two Male Models”, circa 1820-1830, Pencil on Paper, The Russian Academy of the Arts, St. Petersburg

Bottom Insert Image: Fyodor Antonovich Bruni, “The Brazen Serpent”, 1841, Detail, Oil on Canvas, 565 x 852 cm, The Mikhailovsky Palace, The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg