Category: art history

Arman Manookian

Born in Constantinople, the capital city of the Ottoman Empire in May of 1904, Arman Tateos Manookian was an Armenian-American painter known for his oil paintings and murals of Hawaiian scenes. He was the eldest of three children born into an Armenian Apostolic Christian family in Istanbul who held their status and affluence despite the taxation and political dominance of the Islamic Turkish Pashas.

Arman Manookian’s initial education was acquired at the Catholic school of Saint Gregory the Illuminator, a branch of the Armenian Mekhitarist Brotherhood of Venice. During his early life, the hostilities against the Armenian Christian minority in Turkey increased until it became a genocidal rampage that led to more than one million deaths by 1918. On April twenty-fourth in 1915, Manookian’s eleventh birthday, six hundred local men, many of them writers, intellectuals and politicians, were rounded up and murdered; five thousand more men were dead within weeks. 

Manookian’s father, Arshag Manookian, had fled to France to escape the genocide; however, Arshag died in 1917 of the Spanish flu, a victim of the epidemic contracted and spread by returning French soldiers. Manookian, now in his mid-teens, took over the heavy burden of the family’s printing and publishing business in Constantinople. His mother eventually sold the business and gave Manookian a large sum of money that enabled him to sail aboard the “Re d’Italia” to the United States. He arrived at New York City’s immigration entry point, Ellis Island, on the twentieth of April in 1920. Manookian then traveled to Providence, Rhode Island where he lodged with his mother’s relative, Leo Stepanian who had an umbrella business. 

Recognized for his early artistic talent, Arman Manookian was given a 1920 state scholarship to study at Providence’s Rhode Island School of Design. He took the required first-year courses and, in 1921, focused on Commercial Illustration which he passed with high marks. By 1923, Manookian began listing his skills as a lithographer. He enlisted in the Marine Corps on the eighth of October in 1923, under the fraudulent claim that he had United States citizenship, to serve in the U.S, forces and achieve a new American identity. Manookian was assigned in November of 1924 to Major Edwin North McClellan of the Historical Division of the Marine Corps, whose project was a history of the Corp’s participation in World War One.

After he presented his recent sketches of military exercises in the Puerto Rican island of Culebra to Major McClellan, Manookian became the official illustrator for McClellan’s historical articles. The completed epic history would eventually contain over one-thousand pages of articles, not including their notes, and more than one hundred illustrations by Manookian. Many of these illustrations are currently housed in Washington DC’s Marine Historical Center. During his service in the Corps, Manookian created several portraits of Major McClellan’s family members as well as cover illustrations for “Leatherneck” magazine, instituted as the official Marine Corps publication in 1920.

When McClellan received a new posting at Pearl Harbor, Arman Manookian went with him to Hawaii. It was his stationing at Hawaii that transformed Manookian from an illustrator to an artist with an idealized historical and mythological view of the islands. He created many illustrations to accompany McClellan’s new historical writings on the Hawaiian islands that were later published in “Paradise of the Pacific”, a periodical promoting Hawaiian tourism and investment. A short profile of Manookian, in which he describes the Hawaiian islands as the mid-Pacific gardens of the Gods, was published in a 1927 issue of “Paradise of the Pacific”.

Discharged from the Marines in 1927, Manookian decided to remain in Honolulu. He filed a Marine Corps waver of transportation to the United States and began working as a illustrator for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. The opening of the Honolulu Academy of the Arts in April of 1927 gave Manookian the opportunity to hear lectures and attend programs that expanded his knowledge of both art and Hawaii. In 1928, he relocated to Makiki, a short distance from the Academy, and became a member of the Honolulu Artist’s Association. Manookian gave up using tempera paint at this time and focused on colorful oil paints in bold, flat areas without varnish or subtle gradations. This color sense reflected memories of his childhood and adolescent exposure to the myriad colored forms of the Byzantine world.

Arman Manookian’s portrayal of Hawaii, like Gauguin’s view of Tahiti, was an idealized vision of an Eden that never really existed except in the imagination of its Colonial inhabitants. Although his work presented the ecstatic vision of an artist, Manookian often secluded himself from others and had begun to increasingly experience mental lows. After the stock market crash of 1929, the  tourist-based Hawaiian economy began to falter and his mural commissions, based on the development of new buildings, began to slow. Manookian’s last mural commission was in December of 1930 for architect Louis Davis’s Waipahu Theater.

During this slow period, Manookian was living downstairs in architect Cyril Lemmon and Rebecca Lemmon’s Black Point home, occasionally painting and giving art lessons. He delivered his last painting “Flamingos in Flight” to the home of interior designer Charles Mackintosh on the seventh of May in 1931. Suffering from severe depression, Manookian  drank poison on the evening of May tenth while his hosts and friends were playing a parlor game upstairs. He stumbled upstairs and collapsed in the kitchen. Taken to Queen’s Hospital in Honolulu, Arman Manookian never regained consciousness and died that Sunday evening at the age of twenty-seven. A memorial exhibition of Manookian’s work was held later in the autumn of 1933 at the Honolulu Academy of the Arts.

Notes : Major Edwin North McClellan’s massive epic “History of U.S. Marines and Origin of Sea Soldiers”, with its many illustrations by Manookian, was never published due lack of finances during the Depression. The only complete record of the work exists on microfilm as recorded by the New York Public Library in 1954. 

Author and art historian John Seed wrote an article entitled “Arman Manookian: Fragile Paradise” which was originally published in the Honolulu Magazine:  https://www.geringerart.com/arman-manookian-fragile-paradise/

John Seed also has a lecture on the life and art of Arman Manookian in an YouTube video entitled “Arman Manookian: An Armenian Artist in Hawaii with John Seed”. 

Freelance writer Chris Gibbon wrote “The Ghost of Manookian” for the November 2021 issue of “Flux: The Current of Hawai’i”. This short biography can be found at: https://fluxhawaii.com/the-ghost-of-manookian/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Private Arman Manookian, Marine Corps Boot Camp”, circa 1923, Vintage Print

Second Insert Image: Arman Manookian, “Maui Snaring the Sun”, 1927, Ink Drawing, Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii

Third Insert Image: Arman Manookian, “Early Traders of Hawaii”, 1927, Oil on Canvas, Honolulu Museum of Art

Fourth Insert Image: Arman Manookian, “Pele”, Gridded Study for “Pele” Painting, Colored Pencil and Pencil on Paper, 21.9 x 29.8 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Arman Manookian, Untitled (The Mat Weaver), 2003, Oil on Canvas, 76.7 x 60 cm, Honolulu Museum of Art

 

François-Xavier Fabre

François-Xavier Fabre, “The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian”, 1789, Oil on Canvas, 198 x 148.5 cm, Musée Favre, Montpellier, France

Born at the medieval city of Montpellier in April of 1766, François-Xavier Fabre was a French painter of portraits, landscapes and historical subjects. He specialized in half-length portraits that were popular with the British community of Florence, Italy. 

After studying for several years at Montpellier’s art academy, François-Xavier Fabre joined neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David’s studio in Paris. His studies were funded by financier and art collector Philippe-Laurent de Joubert, the father of Laurent-Nicolas de Joubert, a friend of Fabre as well as an amateur artist. In 1787, Fabre painted a portrait of Laurent-Nicolas seated with arms crossed and dressed in waistcoat and shirt open at the neck, a simple and natural style made fashionable by Marie-Antoinette. This portrait is now housed in the Getty Center, Museum South Pavilion, in Los Angeles. 

An outstanding pupil, Fabre rose to prominence after winning the Prix de Rome in 1787. The upheavals of the French Revolution and his own monarchist sympathies led Fabre to relocate to Florence, Italy in 1793. He soon found patrons among the ranks of the Italian aristocrats who appreciated the elegance, precision, and realism of his portraits. Fabre became a member of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, the world’s oldest public institution of fine art training, where he taught painting. Rising to prominence in Florentine society, he became both a collector and dealer of art.

Although he remained a lifelong advocate of Jacques-Louis David’s Neoclassicism, François-Xavier Fabre eventually abandoned history painting due to changing fashions, lack of interest on the part of his patrons, and the onset of gout. He focused his work towards portraiture, landscapes, and printmaking. Between 1803 and 1804 in Florence, Fabre met Princess Louise Maximiliane Caroline Emanuel of Stolberg-Gedern, the former wife of Charles Edward Stuart, the Jacobite claimant to the English and Scottish thrones, and the later widow of Italian Count Vittorio Alfieri. 

Fabre and Louise of Stolberg-Gedern remained companions in Florence until the Countess’s death in January of 1824 at which time Fabre inherited her fortune. He returned to his hometown of Montpellier where he founded an art school and curated his extensive collection of books, 16th and 17th century Italian paintings and drawings, artwork by French contemporaries, and the collected artworks of Louise of Stolberg-Gedern. In 1828, the Musée Fabre was inaugurated in Montpellier. François-Xavier Fabre died at the age of seventy in Montpellier on the sixteenth of March in 1837. Upon his death, his entire art collection became part of the Musée Fabre. 

François-Xavier Fabre painted “The Martyrdom of St. Francis” in 1789 at the age of twenty-three. This was an academic work for submission at his second Académie réglementaire in Paris. Fabre was well-versed in the nude form at this time; he had painted the male nude during his apprenticeship under Jacques-Louis David. Fabre returned several times to the theme of St. Francis over the course of his career. Several of his St. Sebastian paintings are listed in Parisian sales between the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. 

Top Insert Image: François-Xavier Fabre, “Autoportrait âgé”, 1835, Oil on Canvas, 72.5 x 59 cm, Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France 

Second Insert Image: François-Xavier Fabre, “Abel’s Death”, 1790, Oil on Canvas, 147 x 198.5 cm, Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France

Bottom Insert Image: François-Xavier Fabre, “Portrait of Michal Bogoria Skotnick”, 1806, Oil on Canvas, 64 x 49.5 cm, National Museum, Kraków, Poland

Richard Stabbert

The Artwork of Richard Stabbert

Born in Red Bank, New Jersey in 1959, Richard Stabbert is an American painter, author and researcher. A self-taught artist, he creates small intimate paintings inspired by the memories of people, both past and present, who made an impression on his life. Depicting the casual and positive experiences in life, Stabbert’s sentimental and often whimsical work presents an idyllic retreat from the speed and commotion of the industrial world. 

Born to German immigrant parents, Stabbert spent time in his early years on the beaches of the New Jersey shoreline, a period in his life that provides both inspiration and reference for his work. Stabbert’s later summer experiences in Provincetown, Massachusetts, as well as the time he spent in Paris also serve as influences in his work. His paintings are known for their simple details, bold color composition and equally strong foregrounds and backgrounds, similar characteristics to those works in  the Naïve genre.

Richard Stabbert’s acrylic and chalk paintings, almost gestural in execution, evoke a casual spontaneity and relaxed sensuality. He creates his work through a limited color palette that is dominated by pink and blue tones. Central to the compositions are Stabbert’s male figures constructed simply with broad, almost impasto, brushwork heightened by strokes of deep black and shaded areas of lighter grays. The background vistas in his work have a flat rendering style composed of simplified details and expanses of tonal primary colors. 

Stabbert’s paintings have been included in the 2011 edition of “100 Artists of the Male Figure: A Contemporary Anthology of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture”; the 2011 “The Art of Man: Volumes 1-6”, a special anthology edition that includes artist interviews and work from six quarterly journals of “The Art of Man”; and Firehouse Publishing’s 2014 “Vitruvian Lens – Edition 5: Fine Art Male Photography”.

One of Richard Stabbert’s first solo exhibitions was “Été”at the Les Mots à la Bouche, an established bookshop and gallery in Paris. He also presented his work in the 2011 “Memories of Moments” held at New York City’s BrianRiley1ProjectSpace, a Broadway creative hub that provides a platform for artistic visions. Other gallery exhibitions include those at Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts in Brooklyn, New York; Asbury Park’s APEX Gallery in New Jersey; Provincetown’s Ray Wiggs Gallery in Massachusetts; the Sidetracks Art Gallery in New Hope, Pennsylvania; and Red Bank’s Susan Berke Fine Arts in New Jersey.

Stabbert is the author of the 2013 “Provincetown Memories: Paintings and Words” published in two editions through North Carolina’s Firehouse Publications. This work presents Stabbert’s simple sensual paintings alongside a personal journal of self-discovery, love, and intimate memories of both the beauty and freedom experienced during Provincetown summers.   

In addition to many private collections, Richard Stabbert’s paintings are housed in the permanent collection of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York City. His work is now available through Provincetown’s Art Love Gallery located at: https://www.artlovegallery.com  as well as Galerie MooiMan in Gronigen, Netherlands: https://www.mooi-man.nl

Richard Stabbert’s website, which includes new works and gallery contacts, is located at: http://rstabbert.com

Second Insert Image: Richard Stabbert, “Carry”, 2021, Acrylic and Chalk Paint on Canvas, 22.8 x 30.5 cm

Bottom Insert Image: Richard Stabbert, “Craig”, 2018, Acrylic on Canvas, 20,3 x 30.5 cm

María and Eduardo Dávila Portillo

Textiles by María and Eduardo Dávila Portillo

María and Eduardo Dávila Portillo are Venezuelan textile artists who create complex textile works fashioned from multiple materials. They have studied all aspects of their artwork from the sources of their materials to the traditional dyeing and weaving techniques of India, China, and the Andes Mountains of Venezuela.  

Maria Eugenia Dávila was born in Mérida, Venezuela in 1966; Eduardo Portillo, also born in 1966, is from the more northern city of Jajó, Venezuela. Since 1983, they have been devoted to creations fashioned from silk and natural dyes. Twenty years later, Dávila and Portillo studied and integrated their own country’s fibers, derived from bromeliads, palms and roots, into their silk fabric works. 

Long-lasting fibers from the moriche palm, the perennial curague, and the cactus family’s chique-chique had traditionally been used to produce threads, cords, and fishing nets. The incorporation of these fibers into the silk works of Dávila and Portillo gave their work a new look but also required new techniques for inducing color into the fibers. They eventually developed “Mosaics”, a convergence of all previously used patterns and natural dyes in their projects, which became a template for the integration of silk and Venezuelan fibers.

At the beginning of their career, María and Eduardo Dávila Portillo traveled to China and India to better understand the properties and production of silk as well as the traditional techniques of indigo dye making. They spent several years studying sericulture, or silk farming, in order to produce their own silk from a vertical integrated model in the mountains of Mèrida, Venezuela. Their silk farming project developed from silkworm larvae found in the Canary Islands and seeds from Morera trees, commonly known as mulberry trees. The leaves of these mulberry trees provide food for the silkworms, which when grown produce the silk threads that are transformed into textiles. 

Dávila and Portillo see color as an essential element of textile work, one that interacts smoothly with the work’s surface, fiber, texture and structure. Already fascinated by their local natural dyes, they became inspired by lecturer and artist Jenny Balfour-Paul’s 1998 botanical study “Indigo”. Dávila and Portillo traveled to Thailand, India and China to study this traditional organic source of blue color. The indigo plant is a shrub, either annual or perennial depending on the climate, whose leaves are processed to obtain the dye. Soaked in water and fermented, the leaves convert the colorless compound glycoside indican, naturally present in the plant, to the blue dye indigotin. 

María and Eduardo Dávila Portillo returned to Venezuela with indigo paste, powder, recipes, indigo seeds and the understanding that the process of indigo dye is more a culture than the color itself. Recognizing that the color blue one sees depends on the setting as well as the time of day, they created indigo tapestries of shaded mosaics and blocks to represent the various color perceptions. Dávila and Portillo’s tapestries from this project, depicting specific times of the day, were showcased in an exhibition that highlighted indigo’s historic color and culture, the December 2012 “Azul Indigo”, held at Caracas, Venezuela.

Dávila and Portillo are now experimenting in the colors of metal. Using metals as textile material, they are working with steel, bronze and copper in casting sculptural works of varied patinas and colors. Dávila and Portillo use their woven textiles to create shapes with folds and wrinkles. Molds of these textile shapes are then prepared for bronze casting. Dávila and Portillo’s exploration of the patina process led to the mixing of copper ribbons with metallic threads of copper, steel, gold and silver which are then woven into their tapestries.

María and Eduardo Dávila Portillo are recipients of a Smithsonian Art Research Fellowship and a Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Residency. Their work is recognized by UNESCO as a contribution to sustainable practices. Dávila and Portillo are members of the Textile Society of America, a platform dedicated to the exchange and diffusion of textiles. They share their vast knowledge by lecturing in conferences across the US, Central and South America, and Europe.

Dávila and Portillo’s work is part of public and private collections worldwide, including the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, England; Longhouse Reserve, a sixteen-acre garden and sculpture museum in East Hampton, New York; the Cooper Hewitt-Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City; the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio; and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Notes:  The Art Institute of Chicago has an interview with textile artists Dávila and Portillo led by Associate Textile Conservator Isaac Faccio, entitled “Anatomy of a White Dwarf: On Life, Home, and Weaving” at: https://www.artic.edu/articles/1134/anatomy-of-a-white-dwarf-on-life-home-and-weaving

Wilton, Connecticut’s sculpture and textile gallery Browngrotta Arts is a representative of Dávila and Portillo’s work in the United States. An article on the artists’ work and an inventory of available textiles can be found at the Browngrotta Arts site: https://browngrotta.com/artists/Eduardo-Maria-Eugenia-Davila-portillo

Second Insert Image: Dávila and Portillo, “Océano Cósmico”, 2022, Detail, Silk, Moriche, Alpaca, Cotton, Indigo and Copper Leaf, 150 x 79 cm, Browngrotta Arts

Third Insert Image: Dávila and Portillo, “Encontrada”, 2013, “New Territories” Series, Cast Bronze, 21 x 22 cm, Museum of Art and Design, New York 

Bottom Insert Image: Dávila and Portillo, “Clev 1”, 2019, Detail, Silk, Alpaca, Moriche, Metallic Fiber, Silver Leaf, Natural Dyes, 209 x 63cm, Private Collection

Arthur Tress

The Photography of Arthur Tress

Born in Brooklyn, New York in November of 1940, Arthur Tress is an American photographer with an anthropological background who is known for his figurative work and staged psychological images . His career has encompassed a vast range of work from ethnographical and environmental documentation to modernist and magical-realistic images.

The youngest of four children born to European-Jewish parents, Arthur Tress became interested in photography early in his life. In his early teen-years, he photographed the buildings and abandoned amusement parks in the Brighton Beach and Coney Island neighborhoods. Tress studied painting at Bard College at Annandale-on-Hudson, New York where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1962.

After graduating, Tress moved to Paris, France, and briefly attended film school. He traveled extensively for four years around the world, particularly in Asia and Africa, where he developed an interest in the cultural and tribal beliefs of those he observed. Tress began to work in the field of ethnographical photography, which led to his first professional assignment as a U.S. government photographer recording the endangered folk cultures of Appalachian communities. Tress’s images from this period formed his 1960s series “Appalachia: The Disturbed Land”. 

Arthur Tress was influenced by the photographers of The American Social Landscape, who in the tradition of straight, documentary photography focused on the aspects of the everyday environment, that is society’s practices, systems, and relationships as well as the boundaries between them. Members of this group included photographer Robert Frank known for his 1958 collection “The Americans”, Bruce Davidson known for his photographic study of East Harlem life, and Danny Lyons known for his documentary work on the civil rights movement. Tress was also impressed by such black and white cinematographers as Edward Tisse (1927 Battleship Potemkin), Gregg Toland (1941 Citizen Kane), and Boris Kaufman (1953 On the Waterfront). 

Tress began to use his camera to raise environmental awareness about the human and economical costs of pollution. He documented the neglected areas of New York City’s urban waterfronts as well as the economic problems of New York’s inner city and their effects on its residents. From this body of work, two volumes of “Open Space in the Inner City” were published; the 1971 Volume One, an architectural drawing series of  potential recreational areas in the city, and the 2010 Volume Two,  a documentary series of inner city residents with a focus on urban teenagers.  

In the summer of 1964, Arthur Tress stayed in San Francisco and photographed the city during a historic culture clash. San Francisco was the site of the launch of the Beatles’ first North American tour as well as the contentious 28th Republican National Convention at the Cow Palace that nominated Barry Goldwater of Arizona for President. During his time in the city, Tress became one of the photographers to shoot some of the first images of public LBGTQ life. After developing his negatives in a communal darkroom in the Castro District, he mounted two small exhibitions in North Bay galleries that summer. From this body of work, seventy images were later published as the 2012 “Arthur Tress: San Francisco 1964”. 

Tress’s “Dream Collector” series began with a visit to a workshop designed to allow children the opportunity to make paintings and poetry from remembered dreams. He followed this visit with research on the nature of dreams, attendance at dream therapy sessions, and interviews with adults on their remembered dreams. Combining his interest in derelict urban spaces with ethnographical photography, Tress created a series of staged black and white photographic work with psychological undertones. One example of this series is the 1970 “Flood Dream”, an image of a child looking out a hole in a roof set against the background of a gray deserted beach.

An exhibition entitled “Arthur Tress, San Francisco 1964” was presented at San Francisco’s de Young Museum in 2012 accompanied by a monograph published by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Other monographs that examine Tress’s work include “Arthur Tress: The Dream Collector”, “Shadow: A Novel in Photographs”, and “Theatre of the Mind, Reeves and Arthur Tress: Fantastic Voyage: Photographs 1956-2000”.

In 2013, an exhibition of Tress’s work from “San Francisco 1964”, “Dream Collector” and “Theater of the Mind” was held at the Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts. A retrospective of Arthur Tress’s earlier works, entitled “Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows” was held from October 2023 to February 2024 at the John Paul Getty Center in Brentwood, Los Angeles.

Arthur Tress’s work is contained in many private collections and numerous museums and institutions including Stanford University, the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2021, an anonymous donor gave the University of Pennsylvania an outstanding collection of Arthur Tress photography. Penn Libraries now houses the largest collection, two thousand-five hundred photographic prints, of Tress’s work in the United States. 

Notes: Arthur Tress, interested in Asian culture since his early travels, gathered together over the years a large personal collection of thirteen-hundred Japanese illustrated books. After a 2018 visit to Penn Libraries’ conservation department, he donated his entire Japanese collection to the university’s library.

Arthur Tress’s website, which contains photographic series from 1963 to 2015, can be located at:  https://arthurtress.com

An interview between author Robert Hirsch and Arthur Tress for the January/February 2013 issue of LightResearch magazine can be located at:  https://lightresearch.net/interviews/ArthurTress.html

On September 14, 2024, California’s Cambria Center for the Arts Film Festival will be showing the documentary “Arthur Tress: Waters Edge”. A special exhibition of his work will be shown at the center’s Studio Gallery from September 1st to the 14th. Tickets are available at: https://www.my805tix.com/e/tress-1

For those interested, limited edition photographs occasionally are available through established auction sites. The J. Paul Getty Museum’s shop has a limited edition of signed posters for Arthur Tress’s 2023-2024 exhibition “Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows”: https://shop.getty.edu

Top Insert Image: Arthur Tress, “Self Portrait”, 2018, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Arthur Tress, “Young Man & Statue of Adonis, Key West, Florida”, 1980, Gelatin Silver Print

Third Insert Image: Arthur Tress, “Boy on Bike Crossing Williamsburg Bridge, New York”, 1969, Open Space in the Inner City Series, Gelatin Silver Print, Edition of 8, Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Fourth Insert Image: Arthur Tress, “Two Men, Two Rooms, New York”, 1977, Edition of 50, Gelatin Silver Print, 25 x 25 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Arthur Tress, Title Unknown, (Flies), 1984, Spray Paint Series, Gelatin Silver Print

 

Mel Bochner

The Artwork of Mel Bochner

Born at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1940, Mel Bochner is one of the leading figures in the development of Conceptual art in New York during the 1960s and 1970s. He is a member of that generation of artists who were seeking to break free from Abstract Expressionism and traditional composition. A scholar as well as an artist, Bochner’s influential critical and theoretical essays have always been a central component of his work.

Bochner pioneered the use of language into the visual arts; language progressed from talking about art to becoming part of art itself. Over his career, he has consistently probed the conventions of both painting and language- the way we construct and understand them as well as the way their relationship to each other increases our awareness of the world to which we belong.

Born to a sign-painter father in an Orthodox Jewish home, Mel Bochner graduated in 1962 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Fine Arts. He studied philosophy briefly at Chicago’s Northwestern University before making the decision to relocate in 1964 to New York City where he began work as a guard in Manhattan’s Jewish Museum. Encouraged by art critic Dore Ashton, Bochner applied for and was granted a teaching position in art history at the city’s School of Visual Arts.

Bochner’s first exhibition, the 1966 “Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily To Be Viewed As Art” held at the School of Visual Arts, is now regarded as a seminal show in the Conceptual Art movement. Not having the necessary funds to frame all his original drawings, Bochner xeroxed copies of his friends’ works and inserted them in four black binders individually placed on four white pedestals. A later conceptual work, the 1998 “Event Horizon”, involved multiple pre-stretched canvases of various sizes, each marked with a horizontal line and the measurement of its length in inches. These canvases were arranged with the lines at the same height along the wall. Seen together, the canveses’ lines formed a horizon of a determined length.

In the 1960s, Bochner was one of the first artists to incorporate the physical gallery space into his art. Some of his works were actually drawn or painted on the gallery’s walls. His 1970 “Language is Not Transparent” presented the white-chalked sentence written on a dripping black square painted directly on the gallery wall. Bochner’s 1969-1970 installation at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, entitled “Theory of Painting”, involved newspapers, spray-painted with multi-sized blue rectangular shapes, spread on the floor of the enclosed exhibition space.

Along with artists Bruce Nauman and Joseph Kosuth both of whom integrated language into art, Bochner was an early proponent of photo-documentary art which included images of temporary works and performance art. Among his many photographic creations is the important 1966 “36 Photographs and 12 Diagrams”, an arranged collection of forty-eight 29 x 29 cm gelatin silver prints. Resistant to showing all the forty-eight mounted photographs and pen-and-ink drawings in their physical form, Bochner photographed each mounted piece and displayed the complete work as an assemblage of two-dimensional photographs, in essence a microcosm of the exhibition.

In the early 1970s, Mel Bochner began producing series of prints at San Francisco’s Crown Point Press. An avid print maker, Bochner has continuously explored new ways to experiment with traditional and non-traditional printmaking techniques. In 2022 for his latest edition of his iconic text “Howl”, he printed the piece with glitter and iridescent ink in a combination of shimmery copper, iridescent purple and glimmering black. As the viewer moves around the work, the purple shifts in tone depending on the viewer’s vantage point.

Bochner’s work covers a wide range of mediums including colorful paintings and prints containing words, cast pigmented works made from handmade paper, works on shaped canvases, and evocative installations. Among these many forms are the 1978 “Planar Arc”, three irregular shaped paper panels of different colors that are decorated with pastel marks; the 1999 “If the Color Changes (#?)”, a language piece written in gray-lettered German overlaid with scattered multi-colored alphabet letters; and the 1988 “Fourth Quartet”, four rectangular sheets of paper framed together in a pattern on which scattered geometric cubes were drawn in aquatint.

In 2007, Mel Bochner’s work was the subject of two major exhibitions in the United States: a focused retrospective of his language-based works at the Art Institute of Chicago; and a forty-year retrospective of Bochner’s drawings, that culminated a two-year museum tour, at the San Diego Museum of Art in California. Bochner’s works are contained in collections around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

Mel Bochner’s website, which includes exhibitions, artist texts, public projects and recent works, can be located at: http://www.melbochner.net

Notes: The online Artforum magazine has an article written by Princeton University Professor Carol Armstrong entitled “Mel Bochner: Photographs 1966-1969” that reviews Bochner’s work in connection with the 2002 Carnegie Museum show of the same name: https://www.artforum.com/events/mel-bochner-photographs-1966-1969-178514/

David Lasry’s Two Palms Gallery in New York represents the work of Mel Bochner. Its website has a comprehensive section that contains his works, exhibitions, and articles published by major art periodicals: https://www.twopalms.us/artists/mel-bochner#tab:slideshow

The Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco also represents the work of Mel Bochner. A collection of his work is available for viewing at: https://fraenkelgallery.com/artists/mel-bochner

The online ArtDependence Magazine has an interview with Mel Bochner entitled “The Art of Ideas” located at: https://artdependence.com/articles/the-art-of-ideas-an-interview-with-mel-bochner/

Second Insert Image: Mel Bochner, “Repetition- Portrait of Robert Smithson”, 2001, Charcoal and Pencil on Paper, 80 x 66 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Mel Bochner, “Portrait of Dan Flavin”, 1968, Ink on Graph Paper, Sheet 11.4 x 21.6 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Mel Bochner, “Wrap- Portrait of Eva Hesse”, 2001, Charcoal and Pencil on Paper, 64.8 cm Diameter, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Mel Bochner, “Thank You”, 2015, Four Color Direct Gravure Etching, Edition of 20, 55.9 x 45.7 cm, Private Collection

Hans Erni

The Artwork of Hans Erni

Born at the city of Lucerne in February of 1909, Hans Erni was a Swiss engraver, graphic designer, illustrator, painter and sculptor. He is best known for his Swiss postage stamp illustrations, lithographs for the Swiss Red Cross, and medal designs for the Swiss government and the International Olympic Committee.

The third of eight children born into a working-class family, Hans Erni attended the local Lucerne elementary school before entering an apprenticeship as a surveyor. Beginning at the age of fifteen, he apprenticed for three years as a draftsman until his entrance into the Lucerne School of Arts and Crafts in 1927. Erni continued his studies at the Académie Julian in Paris and Berlin’s School of Applied Arts under Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin. 

Between 1930 and 1933, Erni alternated stays in Lucerne and Paris where he became acquainted with contemporary French painting and influenced by the works of Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and Cubist painter Georges Braque. Through the Abstraction-Création group in Paris, Erni became acquainted with artists Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Constantin Brancusi, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian. During the early 1930s, he participated in several collective exhibitions and painted fresco murals in city of Lucerne.

After his travels to Belgium, Italy and England, Hans Erni began in 1936 to explore Abstraction with his first public mural commissions. This series of murals included frescoes for Lucerne’s General Building Cooperative, Switzerland’s section at the 1936 Triennale in Milan, and two educational murals entitled “Saline” and “Wasserkraftwerk (Hydroelectric Power Station)”. In 1937, Erni co-founded the Allianz, an association of Swiss abstract artists that advocated, with an additional emphasis on color, the concrete art theoriesof Swiss painter and designer Max Bill. Advancing the concept of Abstraction, Concrete Artists fully realized the idea that a painting could represent even an intangible algebraic formula rather than a person or an object.

Erni had his first major public success in 1939 with a mural, entitled “Switzerland: Vacation Land of the People”, that was specifically commissioned and displayed for the Zürich National Exhibition. In 1940, Erni entered into the Swiss Army where he served, until his discharge in 1945, as a camouflage painter due to his painting skills. In 1948, Erni presented his work in the painting competitions at the Summer Olympics held in London; he also participated between 1950 and 1952 in several Latin American exhibitions.

After a period of painting in Guinea and Mauritania, Hans Erni, along with Swiss graphic artists and illustrators Kurt Werth, Celestino Piatti, Alfred Pauletto and Hugo Wetli, organized a 1960 graphic design and painting exhibition in the Solothum canton city of Olten. He also exhibited his graphic design work in the 1964 Documenta Exhibition in the central German city of Kassel. Erni often employed allegories and figures, both contemporary and from Greek mythology. in his work. His symbolic Realist images presented large, powerful forms constructed with lines of a high degree of precision.

Erni created many works in the 1970s and 1980s among which were a tapestry “People, Viticulture and Fishing” for the cit of Küsnacht; a concrete relief mural “Primal Nature and the Work of Man” for the Téléverbier Valley Station in Médram, France; a mural “Man’s Advance into Space” for the Aerospace Hall of the Swiss Museum of Transport; and an aluminum relief “The Human Flight” for the United Nations building of the International Civil Aviation Organization in Montreal. Erni also created a thirty-meter long mural “Panta Rhei” for the auditorium of Lucerne’s Hans Erni Museum which was founded on his seventieth birthday in 1979. 

In his career, Hans Erni designed twenty-eight high-relief medals as well as one official Commemorative coin for the Swiss Confederation. In recognition for his Olympic medal designs, he received the 1989 Sport Artist of the Year award from the United States Sports Academy, a private university offering masters and doctoral degrees in sport education. Erni designed ceramics, theatrical sets and costumes, illustrations for Swiss postage stamps, and art for Swiss bank notes in the 1940s. Although the bank notes were printed, they were never released due to unfounded political objections by a member of the Lucerne State Council.  

Beginning in 1989, retrospective exhibitions of Erni’s work were held in various cities. Two retrospectives were held in Japan, the first at the Himeji City Museum of Art and the second at the Itami City Museum of Art. In 1990, a retrospective was held at the Seibu Museum of Art in Funabashi, Japan, and at India’s Nehru Center in Bombay, now Mumbai. In 1995, Erni was guest of honor at the XI Biennial of International Sports and Arts in Madrid; Queen Sofia of Spain opened the exhibition and presented Erni with the Medal of Honor for his life’s work. 

In addition to his paintings and sculptures, Hans Erni created illustrations for approximately two hundred published books and images for ninety Swiss postage stamps. He continued to create work throughout his later years. Among his last works were a 2011 medal entitled “Forest is Life” for the United Nations International Year of Forests and the 2012 stained glass windows for the Protestant Church in Martigny, Switzerland. Hans Erni died at the age of one hundred and six in Lucerne on the twenty-first of March in 2015. 

The Hans Erni Museum, a detached hexagonal building, is part of the Swiss Museum of Transport complex in Lucerne. It houses an extensive collection of Erni’s work and provides insights into a life engaged with historical, cultural, technical and ecological themes. A public assemblage of Hans Erni’s work from private collections can be viewed at The Open Hans Erni Collection site located at: https://www.hans-erni-collection.org/en/

Notes: The online RTS magazine has ten short video documentaries (French language) in its Culture et Arts section at: https://www.rts.ch/archives/dossiers/3477775-hans-erni-un-artiste-emblematique-de-la-suisse.html

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Hans Erni”, circa late 1950s, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Hans Erni, “Drei Freunde (Three Friends)”, 1970, Watercolor and Ink on Paper, 28 x 40 cm, Private Collection, Australia

Third Insert Image: Hans Erni, “Dames des Décans- Pisces”, 1970, Lithograph on Arches Paper, Artist Edition, 50 x 65 cm, Private Collection, Switzerland

Fourth Insert Image: Hans Erni, “Badende”, 1960, Lithograph, 35 of 150 Edition, 47.7 x 39.7 cm, 1993 Catalogue “Hans Erni-Stiftung, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Franco Tettamanti, “Hans Erni, Lucerne”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Collection of Artist

John Eric Broaddus

The Artwork of John Eric Broaddus

Born in New York in 1943, John Eric Broaddus was an artist who worked in several mediums including painting, illustration, and performance art. He was one of the prominent figures of the New York City art scene throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

John Eric Broaddus was one of the most creative and innovative artist to approach the book form. He was a pioneer in the field before the book, as a physical art piece, became an accepted genre of the contemporary art world. Not concerned with the integration of text and image, Broaddus used the pages of books as scaffolds for his colored, cut-out visual esthetic effects. His work is different from other book artists as his creations are unique, not limited editions or multiples.

Broaddus’s 1979 “Meridian Passage” is a volume of hand painted pages in acrylic, tempera, watercolor and ink combined with abstract cut-outs. This volume is in the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Legion of Honor. Broaddus’s 1982 “Xylocaine” was a volume whose pages were altered with acrylic, ink, glitter, tempera and watercolor and then overlaid with cut-out xeroxes. “Xylocaine” was the first artist book purchased by Robert and Ruth Sackner, prominent collectors who had previously focused on collecting only works of concrete and visual poetry.

John Eric Broaddus’s 1983 “France I” was constructed from a found geographical codex of over a hundred pages that was altered with paint, ink, colored pencil, glitter and sculptural cuttings. Through the use of clever cutting, a photograph of children would appear on the other side of the leaf as a gigantic statue within a dark blue abstraction. For his two-volume 1985 “Above the Trees”, Broaddus used two identical books with spray-painted pages on which were added stuck-on images, drawings and intricately cut-out shapes. This work’s elaborate, vividly-colored and highly sculptural pages demonstrated his interest in both detail and drama.

Broaddus was known for his theatrical scene sets, among which were those for the Provincetown Playhouse’s 1988 production of Justin Ross and John Epperson’s “I Could Go on Lip-Synching”. However, he was better known for the highly original costumes, constructed of found objects, that he wore for his art performance work. Broaddus would appear in his costumes on the streets of New York and in such iconic places as Studio 54 and Xenon, two of the city’s most famous nightclubs. In November of 1974, he made an appearance in a white oriental costume, carrying a bamboo umbrella, at avant-garde artist Charlotte Moorman’s 11th Avant-Garde Festival held at Shea Stadium in the New York borough of Queens.

A vibrant and pioneering artist who contributed to the artistic history of New York City, John Eric Broaddus died from AIDS at the age of forty-seven in 1990. His artwork is housed in many private collections and the world’s major art institutions including London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, Spain’s National Library in Madrid, and the Seibu Museum in Tokyo, among others.

A limited edition artist book, entitled “Spin 1/2 : Books, Paintings and Memorabilia by John Eric Broaddus” was published in conjunction with the 1990 exhibition of his work at the Center for Book Arts on 27th Street in Manhattan. In addition to its multi-colored silkscreen illustrations, a forward introduction was written by Jan van der Wateren, the Keeper and Chief Librarian of the National Art Library at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

The award-winning short documentary “Books of Survival: The Art of John Eric Broaddus” was produced and directed by Gabriella Mirabelli under a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Released in 2000 with screenings worldwide, the film reconstructs the artist’s life through intimate interviews with close friends, family and collectors of his art.

Notes: A collection of John Eric Broaddus’s papers, reviews of his work, interviews, symposium records, and memorabilia are housed in the ArchivesSpace at the University of Iowa. Correspondence and artist greeting cards are contained in the Archival and Manuscript collection of Northwestern University’s McCormick Library.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “John Eric Boarddus”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Estate of John Eric Boarddus

Second Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “John Eric Boarddus in Costume”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Estate of John Eric Boarddus

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “John Eric Broaddus, 11th Avant-Garde Festival, Queens, New York”, 1974, Color Print, Mixed Media Performance Documentation, Estate of John Eric Broaddus

Adrian Lee Kellard

The Artwork of Adrian Lee Kellard

Born at New Rochelle, New York in January of 1959, Adrian Lee Kellard was a gifted American artist known for his uniquely-styled woodcuts and sculptures of religious and often homoerotic imagery. Although many of his works have a practical utility, each of Kellard’s creations holds a story, either a historic religious account or a personal circumstance.

Adrian Kellard was one of six children born into the working-class Irish-Italian Catholic family of Adrian Kellard Sr, a detective lieutenant, and Ordie Figliuzzi, a teacher at the local elementary Catholic school. In the early 1980s he attended the State University of New York, Purchase where he studied under Judith Bernstein, an American painter whose provocative works explored the connections between the political and the sexual. Kellard received his training in woodcuts and printmaking through his studies with internationally-known Uruguayan artist Antonio Frasconi. Through the SUNY Empire State Program, he relocated to New York City and apprenticed under multi-media artist Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, a gay activist whose work incorporated queer and Catholic iconography. 

Kellard’s work was influenced by an eclectic group of artists among whom were American modernist artist Marsden Hartley, impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh, and Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. His innate connection to the Catholic faith also exerted a strong influence on the themes of his work. Combining his Catholicism with his own homosexuality, Kellard utilized the figurative style of Byzantine iconography and the woodcut techniques of German Expressionism to examine the turbulent issues of the 1980s, particularly the suffering and deaths caused by the AIDS epidemic. Recurring images in his woodblock works depicted the suffering of Christ and the compassion exhibited to others by the Christian saints.

Although trained by Antonio Frasconi in the traditional techniques of woodblock printing, Adrian Kellard created a unique approach to printmaking and woodcutting. Instead of using the carved woodblock to print repetitive reverse images, he filled in the recesses of the woodblock with paint to create relief sculptures. Kellard would often combine these woodblock reliefs with found materials from his Upper West Side area of Manhattan to form large hanging or free-standing sculptural works. He later, through a suggestion from artist Lanigan-Schmidt, began to incorporate his Catholic imagery into more  functional pieces such as towel racks, calendars, desks, and folding screens. 

The first work by Kellard to achieve national exposure was his “Shrine”, also known as “The Wagon Piece”, that he entered into the 1985 group exhibition “Precious: An American Cottage Industry of the Eighties” held at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery. Constructed of latex paint on wood with added rope and hardware, the wheeled sculptural work is reminiscent of the mobile shrines of Catholic religious processions as well as the medieval mobile stages used for theatrical productions. 

On the “dying” side of “Shrine” is an image of a crucified Christ flanked by large clown faces. The bottom panel contains three faces of women, including that of the Virgin Mary,  who are all expressing grief. Written in the top panel is the quote taken from an eucharistic prayer  “Dying You Destroyed Death”.  The reverse, or “rising side”, of this work features a large face of Christ expressing sorrow. The bottom panel depicts an image of the Sacred Heart flanked by scenes of city and town dwellings. The top panel on this side contains the quote “Rising You Restored Life”. 

Adrian Kellard’s work was first shown at Soho’s Schreiber/Cutler Gallery in 1986 as the gallery’s inaugural exhibition. For the following five years, his work was featured in annual solo exhibitions as well as group exhibitions at the gallery. In 1987, Kellard was diagnosed with AIDS. Although the life-prolonging AZT medication was finally approved in 1989 to treat the virus, the drug still had debilitating side-effects and no long-term efficacy. Kellard made the decision not to take conventional medication and relied on alternative healing therapies to continue his active artistic life.

After his diagnosis, Kellard’s work became less overtly religious; a more compassionate tone, expressed through subdued colors, was evident. On the fourteenth of November in 1991, Adrian Lee Kellard died at the age of thirty-two from complications due to AIDS. His work continues to be exhibited in such venues as Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum, New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, Saint Louis University’s Museum of Contemporary Religious Art, the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton, and the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York. 

Notes: The largest collection of Adrian Kellard’s work is housed in the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art at the Saint Louis University in Missouri. Its articles on Adrian Kellard can be located at: https://mocra.wordpress.com/tag/adrian-kellard/

The Adrian Kellard Tribute Page, which is maintained by Kellard’s nephew Chris, contains a section in which Kellard’s friends reminisce about his latter days working at Kenn’s Broome Street in Manhattan. The Facebook page is located at: https://www.facebook.com/adriankellard/

Kellard’s early personal development of faith and compassion had a profound effect on his art and attitude towards others. An article written by Carl Siciliano, the founder and former executive director of the largest housing program for homeless LBGTQ youth, the Ali Forney Center, can be found at: https://outreach.faith/2023/10/how-saint-therese-of-lisieux-helped-my-gay-friend-as-he-was-dying-of-aids/

A 2023 dissertation for the State University of New York, Purchase  by Leigh Ann Colby entitled “Faith and Function: The Art of Adrian Kellard” can be read at:  https://soar.suny.edu/handle/20.500.12648/14012

Top Insert Image: Regina DeLuise, “Adrian Lee Kellard”, Date Unknown, Palladium Print

Second Insert Image: Regina DeLuise, “Adrian Kellard at His Studio”, 1989, Palladium Print, Museum of Contemporary Religious Art

Bottom Insert Image: Regina DeLuise, “Adrian Kellard in His Studio”, 1989, Palladium Print, Museum of Contemporary Religious Art

 

Yashima Gakutei

Yashima Gakutei, “Carp Ascending a Waterfall”, 1892 (Edo Period), Surimono, Woodblock Print with ink and Color on Paper, 18.8 x 21.6 cm, Private Collection

Born in the Honshu city of Osaka circa 1786, Yashima Gakutei (八島岳亭) was a Japanese poet and artist known for the quality of his woodblock prints and his artistic contribution to Ukiyo-e (浮世絵)  a traditional poetic art form that flourished from the seventeenth to the nineteenth-century. Among the images depicted in ukiyo-e woodblock prints and paintings were landscapes, wrestlers and kabuki actors, dancers and courtesans, folk tales and historic scenes, and images of an erotic nature. 

Gakutei was the illegitimate son of the samurai Hirata under the Tokugawa shogunate established by Tokugawa Ieyasu (徳川 家康), one of the three Great Unifiers of Japan during the Edo period. Gakutei’s mother later married into the Yashima clan, thus granting him the name of Yashima Gakutei. He received his art training from master ukiyo-e printmakers Totya Hokkei (魚屋 北渓) and Katsushika Hokusai (葛飾 北斎) who, though best known for his woodblock print series “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, worked in multiple mediums including book illustration.

After his training, Yashima Gakutei settled at Osaka in the 1830s. He was known for his technical precision, his embossing skill, and his specialization in the traditional surimono art form, which some critics say surpassed that of his teacher Totya Hokkei. These surimono (摺物) woodblock prints were deluxe editions privately commissioned by poetry societies and wealthy patrons of the arts for special occasions, poetry competitions, and the celebration of the New Year. Gakutei employed lavish printing techniques on the finest homemade papers with generous use of gold, silver, bronze, and mica highlights, as well as embossing and lacquer-like effects. 

During his career, Gakutei also created images of landscapes and seascapes for books, a rarity among those artists who had studied under Hokusai. He received a commission to provide all the illustrations for the “Kyōka Suikoden (狂歌水滸伝)”, a volume of traditional Japanese poetry. Among Gakutei’s other works are a series of five surimono woodblock prints that featured young female musicians performing gagaku (雅楽), the traditional imperial court music from the Heian period (794 to 1185); a series of embossed woodblock prints depicting all the gods of fortune as beautiful women, or bijin (美人); and a privately issued and embossed surimono tetraptych entitled “The Ascent to Heaven”, a four-panel scene depicting the well known Japanese fairy story “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter”. 

As a poet, Yashima Gakutei wrote and illustrated many humorous poems in the kyōka (狂歌) style, a genre of Japanese tanka poetry that was prevalent in the Edo region, now the area of modern Tokyo. Formed within the tanka meter of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables per line, these short poems placed mundane or vulgar humor within elegant, poetic settings. Wordplay and puns were often used; a classic styled poem would often be given a vulgar twist at the end. 

As a translator, Gakutei is known for his translation of the sixteenth-century Chinese novel “Journey to the West (西遊記)”, one of the Classic Chinese Novels that is attributed to Ming dynasty poet and novelist Wu Cheng’en (吳承恩). This account of the legendary pilgrimage of Tang dynasty Buddhist monk Xuanzang was illustrated with woodblock prints created by Gakutei. 

Yashima Gakutei died in 1868, the same year as the Meiji Restoration that replaced the Tokugawa shogunate military government with a reinstallation of Emperor Meiji under a constitutional monarchy, thus ending Japan’s Edo period.

Notes: Many of the details of Yashima Gakutei’s life are shrouded in mystery. The Art Institute of Chicago indicates that he was known by several names including Yashima Harunobu, Horikawa Tarô,  and Gakutei Kyûzan, among others. The Ronin Gallery, the largest collection of Japanese prints in the United States, lists his birthplace as Edo under the name of Harunobu Sugawara. For my article, I am relying on information from the Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, Maine, which lists his birthplace as Osaka. 

Top Insert Image: Yashima Gakutei, “Hotei”, circa 1927, “Allusions to the Seven Lucky Gods”, Woodblock Print with Karazuri Printing and Metallic Pigment, 21 x 18.4 cm, Ronin Gallery

Second Insert Image: Yashima Gakutei, “Muneyuki Shoots a Tiger”, circa 1829, Woodblock Print Surimono, 21 x 18.4 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Yashima Gakutei, “Furuichi Dance”, circa 1822, Woodblock Print with Ink and Color, Embossing and Metallic Pigments, 21 x 19 cm, Private Collection

Voula Papaïoannou

The Photography of Voula Papaïoannou

Born at the historic city of Lamia in 1898, Voula Papaïoannou was a Greek photographer known for her documentation of the landscape and inhabitants of Greece. Her oeuvre is part of the School of Humanist Photography that emerged in the middle of the twentieth-century after the two World Wars. Instead of momentous events, humanist photography focused on everyday human experience, its nature, mannerisms and customs. 

Voula Papaïoannou studied at the Polytechnic University of Athens where she developed an interest in photography. She began her career in the 1930s with several exhibitions of refined, nostalgic images of Greece’s landscape, its architectural monuments, and ancient works of art. However, Papaïoannou’s relationship with the photographic medium shifted drastically at the onset of the Second World War. Deeply affected by the suffering endured by the civilian population of Athens, she began to use her camera to arouse the conscience of the people. 

Papaïoannou began to document the conflict’s background, her nation’s preparation for the war effort, and the departure of Greek soldiers to the front lines. She continued her work by documenting the period of German and Italian occupation and the ensuing economic blockade. Papaïoannou also created an emotional photographic series that revealed the emaciated children who were suffering from the great famine of 1941 to 1942.

Greece suffered comparatively much more than most Western European countries during the Second World War due to a number of factors. Heavy resistance led to immense German reprisals against civilians. Greece was also dependent on food imports; the British naval blockade coupled with transfers of agricultural produce to Germany led to a great famine. It is estimated that the Greek population declined by seven per cent during the Second World War. The country’s population also was affected by the rising hyperinflation, the fifth worst in economic history.

After the liberation of Greece, Voula Papaïoannou became a member of the photographic unit under the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation, a body dedicated  to assist and repatriate refugees. She toured the Greek countryside documenting the hardships of its rural population devastated by the 1944-1949 Civil War. The most well-known of all Papaïoannou’s work are her photographs which showed families and particularly children living under inhumane conditions. These photographs did not dwell on the sufferings of its subjects but rather told individual stories that focused on their dignity.

Papaïoannou’s work throughout the 1950s expressed Greece’s prevailing optimism, despite its two decades of suffering and thousand of deaths, in both the restoration of its traditional values and the future of mankind. Her photographs of the historic Greek landscape, shot during this period, were barren and drenched in light. Papaïoannou’s images of the Greek inhabitants, however, still showed a proud and independent people despite their poverty. 

In addition to work published in the press, two collections of Voula Papaïoannou’s photographs were produced by the Swiss publishing house Guilde du Livre: the 1953 “La Grèce: à Ciel Ouvert (Greece: Open Skies)” and “Iles Grecques (Greek Islands)” in 1956. Her work was later published in the posthumous collection “Images of Despair and Hope: Greece 1940-1960” as a complimentary volume to the 1995 Athens retrospective presented by gallery owners Mouseio Benake and Renes Xippas.

Voula Papaïoannou passed away in Athens, Greece in 1990 at the age of ninety-two. Her photographs are in both private and public collections, including the Benaki Museum of Greek Culture in Athens. Since her death, Papaïoannou’s work continues to be presented in many solo and group exhibitions including one at Barcelona’s cntemporary art and learning center, La Virreina Image Center.

The Benaki Museum of Greek Culture’s website is located at: https://www.benaki.org/index.php?lang=en

Note: All images of Voula Papaïoannou’s work in this article are from the collection of the Benaki Museum of Greek Culture unless otherwise noted. 

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Voula Papaïoannou”, Date Unknown, Benaki Museum of Greek Culture, Athens, Greece

Second Insert Image: Voula Papaïoannou, “View of Lycabettus from the Acropolis, Athens”, circa 1950, Gelatin Silver Print, 43 x 41.9 cm, Benaki Museum, Athens Greece

Third Insert Image: Voula Papaïoannou, “Women Transporting Mud for Road Construction, Sellades, Arta Prefecture”, 1946, Gelatin Silver Print, 43 x 34 cm, Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece

Bottom Insert Image: Voula Papaïoannou, “Mykonos”, circa 1959, Gelatin Silver Print, Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece

Ellsworth Kelly “Blue Orange”

Ellsworth Kelly, “Blue Orange”, 1957, Oil on Canvas, 40.6 x 30.5 cm, Private Collection

Using elements of Color Field, hard-edge painting and Minimalism, Ellsworth Kelly created a distinctive personal style of graceful, simple forms skillfully executed with an unassuming technique. He began making abstract paintings in 1949. Three years later, Kelly discovered the late work of Claude Monet and began to paint more effortlessly using large formats and monochrome colors. By the end of the 1950s, his paintings had bridged the gap between reductive Minimalism and American Geometric Abstraction. 

Kelly gifted his 1957 “Blue Orange” to painter Robert Indiana. The painting,  a physical memory of the bond between two iconic American painters,  is inscribed on the reverse with “EK 1957 FOR ROBERT AN ORANGE PEEL FROM PIER 7”. It was Kelly who introduced Indiana to the New York City’s famed Coenties Slip area, a section of Manhattan’s financial district that became the home of many ground-breaking American artists. Finding themselves neighbors, Kelly and Indiana forged a bond that eventually turned into a close and intimate friendship that sparked their creative energy and influenced their entire careers. 

In the early 1960s, Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Indiana’s relationship eventually came to an end. The heartbreak Indiana felt ultimately led him to create his iconic LOVE imagery. Designed in 1965 for the Museum of Modern Art, Indiana’s tricolor arrangement for the “LOVE” Christmas card -red, blue and green- was seemingly influenced by Kelly’s most recognizable color palette. Although born from sadness and loss, Indiana’s four-letter word became the hope and optimism that would ultimately shape his career. 

Kelly’s early development was influenced by the geometric and biomorphic works of Jean and Sophie Taeber-Arp as well as the work of Henri Mattisse whose paintings he saw while living in Paris between 1949 and 1952. Kelly’s main concerns, like those of Matisse, were based on the pursuit of pure form and color. He always looked to nature for his inspiration, either through photographs he had taken of his surroundings or the simple everyday experiences of his life. 

The sweeping organic shape of Kelly’s “Blue Orange” is a study in nature that is both abstracted and two-dimensional. Emitting a warm orange glow, it is both minimal, yet powerful, and perfectly formed in its simplicity. Kelly used the simple organic form of an orange peel held against a clear blue sky to create an intimate exploration of pure color and form. Until his death, Robert Indiana kept this painting in his collection- a memory of a shared experience on southern Manhattan’s Pier 7 sixty years prior. 

Robert Indian passed away in his home on the nineteenth of May in 2018, just a few weeks before the opening of his sculptural retrospective at the Albright-Know Art Gallery. Ellsworth Kelly’s “Blue Orange” was later put up for auction at Christie’s New York and sold in November of 2018 for USD 2, 772, 500. 

Insert Image: Hans Namuth, “Agnes Martin, Robert Indiana and Ellsworth Kelly, 1958”, 1991, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Hans Namuth Estate

Robert Giard

The Portrait Photography of Robert Giard

Born at Hartford, Connecticut in July of 1939, Robert Giard was an American portrait, figurative and landscape photographer. He is best known for his black and white, unadorned portraits of American poets and authors, a two decade-long series that specifically focused on gay and lesbian writers.

Robert Giard received his Bachelor of Arts from Yale University where he majored in English Literature. He earned his Master of Arts in Comparative Literature at Boston University. After graduating, Giard taught at the private New Lincoln School in Manhattan, New York. In 1972, he began, entirely self-taught, to photograph portraits of friends, nude figurative works, and the landscapes of the South Fork region of Staten Island. Giard’s  early landscapes were mainly shot in late autumn to the beginning of spring when many of the homes were empty for the season. Included in these landscapes are photographs taken at The Creeks, artist Alfonso Ossario’s estate.

In 1974, Giard and his life partner, early childhood educator Jonathan Silin, settled in the popular resort hamlet of Amagansett on the south shore of Long Island, where they remained for nearly thirty years until Giard’s death. In 1985, Giard attended a performance at New York City’s The Public Theater of playwright and gay rights activist Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” which dealt with the AIDS crisis in the gay community. Sensing the enormity of the situation, he decided to use his photography to record the experiences, history and culture of the queer community. Combining his interests in literature and gay issues, Giard began documenting through portraits both the significant and new literary figures on the scene. 

Robert Giard’s portraits included such notable figures as poet and writer Allen Ginsberg, poet and essayist Adrienne Cecile Rich, playwright Edward Albee III, poet and performance artist Assotto Saint, and novelist Michael Cunningham, a later literary Pulitzer Prize winner. A selection of the more than five hundred portraits Giard had amassed at the time were published in 1997 as an anthology entitled “Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers” by MIT Press. This collection served as the companion volume to the New York Public Library’s 1998 exhibition of the same name. 

In his later years, Giard began working on a portrait documentation of the three hundred twenty-one grant recipients of the Thanks Be To Grandmother Winifred Foundation, which supported until 2001 projects by women fifty-four years or older that benefitted other mature women. These grants supported research and artistic projects as well as those with social, economic or medical problems. Before his death, Giard had successfully photographed two hundred and forty-one of the women grantees. He traveled extensively across the country by train, bus or plane and kept a diary of his travels and his visits with the diverse group of women he met. 

While traveling to a portrait session in Chicago, Robert Giard passed away on the sixteenth of July in 2002 at the age of sixty-two. His published version of “Particular Voices” won the 1997 Lambda Literary Foundation Award for Best Photography/Art Book. A recipient of many awards and grants, Giard had a long and distinguished solo and group exhibition career in the United States. His work is in the public collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York Public Library, San Francisco Public Library, and the Library of Congress. Giard’s complete archive is housed in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in its American Collection.

The Robert Giard Foundation was formed in 2002 to preserve his photographic legacy, promote his work for educational purposes and encourage young photographers. The annual Robert Giard Fellowship is a ten-thousand dollar grant given to visual artists whose work addresses gender, sexuality and issues of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender identity. 

In 2005, Crones’ Cradle Conserve Press published “The Grandmother Winifred Journals” 1996-2002” which contains all Giard’s images of the women grantees plus his diary entries that documented each session.

Notes: Although the Robert Giard Foundation site has not been updated since 2022, the Robert Giard Grant Cycle is still active. The pertinent addresses are:  https://robertgiardfoundation.org  and  https://www.queer-art.org/giard-grant

The Lambda Literary Foundation has a biographical article on Robert Giard on the Gale Literature Resource Center site. It can be accessed through your library system’s card:  https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA92049131&sid=sitemap&v=2.1&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7E9af9193c&aty=open-web-entry

Top Insert Image: Toba Tucker, “Robert Giard”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Private  Collection

Second Insert Photo: Robert Giard, “Portrait of the Photographer”, (Self-Portrait), 1982, Gelatin Silver Print, 25.4 x 20.3 cm, Estate of Robert Giard

Bottom Insert Photo: Robert Giard, “Newton McMahon”, 1981, Gelatin Silver Print, 35.6 x 35.6 cm, Private Collection

Tullio Crali

The Paintings of Tullio Crali

Born in the Montenegro town of Igalo in December of 1910, Tullio Crali was a Dalmatian Italian artist associated with Futurism, an artistic and social movement that emphasized speed, dynamism, technology, youth and the achievements of the industrial age. A self-taught artist who painted in a variety of styles, Crali is most closely associated with the genre of aeropittura, the aerial landscape views that dominated Futurism during the 1930s.

In 1922, Tullio Crali moved with his family to Gorizia in northeastern Italy where, three years later, he attended the local technical institute. While a student, Crali discovered Futurism through readings of Giornale il Napoli’s art periodical “Mattino Illustrato”. Trading his school textbooks for books on art, Crali became acquainted with the treatises written by such Futurist artists as Filippo Tommaso Marnetti, Umberto Boccioni, and Ardengo Soffici. 

Encouraged by Marnetti and Sofronio Pocarini, the founder of the Giuliano Futurists, Crali became an official member of the movement in 1929 and undertook an intense period of artistic experimentation. The first presentation of his paintings occurred at the second annual Goriziana d’Arte Exhibition. In 1931, a signed manifesto on aeropainting, entitled “Manifesto of Aeropittura”, launched a new vision in art that united the Futurists’ passions for battle, machines and patriotism. It also altered conventional artistic detail and perspective through the promotion of  aerial views.

Tullio Crali’s earliest aeropaintings, such as the 1929 “Aerial Duel” and “Aerial Squadron”, were similar to other Futurist works.  However, he continued his endeavors to communicate the dynamics and experience of flight to the viewer. Despite recognizable details such as clouds, wings and propellers, Crali’s later paintings challenged conventional realism by his use of dynamic perspectives, simultaneous viewpoints and the combination of figurative and abstract elements.

Tullio Crali began the 1930s with one of his most famous works, “Le Forze della Curva”, an intensely colored painting that glorified the power and speed of an automobile on a curved road. He was later invited to exhibit as one of the “7 Furturists from Padua” and later at the 1932 Italian Futurist Aeropitori in Paris and Brussls. In 1936, Crali exhibited hs “Lotta Grecoromana (Greek Roman Wrestling)” and “Lotta Livera (Wrestling Match)” at Italy’s second National Exhibition of Sports. These paintings were later selected for the 1936 International Olympic Exhibition of Sports Art in Berlin. 

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Crali was the undisputed champion of the Italian artistic-futurist scene and a vocal advocate of the movement under Marnetti’s leadership. In 1943, he again exhibited at the Quadrennial of Art in Rome and, in the next year, at the last exhibition of the Futurists in Venice. As a soldier during the war, Crali served at the Masking Centers of Civitavecchia, first in Rome and Parma and then later in Macerata and Gorizia. At the end of the war, he was arrested in Gorizia by Italian-Slav partisans; Crali was one of twenty prisoners from the one hundred-fifty arrested who survived.

Tullio Crali moved at the war’s end with his wife and child to Turin where he taught and continued to exhibit. Instead of decreeing the end of Futurism as others had done, he dissociated himself and began exhibiting at Milan’s Galleria Bergamini. In 1951, Crali began the first of a series of “Diaries”, a collection of impressions, preparatory sketches and travel memoirs, that would continue for more than thirty years. From 1950 to 1959, he remained in Paris where he produced a series of canvases and drawings that were praised by the French critics. 

Crali relocated in 1960 to Egypt where, for a seven year period, he served as the Director of Painting at the Italian School of Art in Cairo. He gave interviews on futurist art at Radio Cairo and organized both exhibitions and conferences. In 1968, Crali returned to Italy and resumed his futurist commitment by participating in several exhibitions; however, he rejected joining any official movement and focused on his own research of spatial paintings. In 1970, Crali exhibited at the first post-war Futurist Aeropainting Exhibition at Milan’s Galleria Blu. In 1975, he participated in the fifth “Central European Conference on Painting Between 1890 and 1930” held in Gorizia. 

Tullio Crali created, in 1977 at his Milan studio, the Futurist Documentation Center for his students’ research. He was invited to write an introductory article for the catalogue of 1978 exhibition at Venice’s Galleria Spazio Due. A designer of jewelry in his early career, Carli exhibited his 1956 collection of aircraft jewelry at the Vicenza Jewelry Fair of 1986. Beginning in 1987, he formed a long and productive relationship with the Pattuglia Acrobatica della Frecce Tricolori, an organization of Italian acrobatic air pilots. A 1993 series of aeropainting canvases was dedicated by Carli to this precision team of pilots. 

Between 1986 and 1990, Cralie participated in several important exhibitions: the exhibition of his mechanical lithographs in Russia; an exhibition at Arte Giuliana in Melbourne, Australia; a solo exhibition entitled “Aeronautical Structures” at Lima, Peru; and a prominent place at the exhibition, “Futurismo Veneto”, a collaborative presentation with noted architect Salvan Rebeschini and other Veneto region artists. In 1994, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto (MART) held a retrospective of Carli’s paintings, sculptures, and other works. Carli later presented forty of his works and a great amount of documentation, books and manuscripts on Futurism to the museum.

Tullio Carli died in Milan on the fifth of August in 2000 at the age of eighty-nine. He is interred, as he requested, at the commune of Macerata, his family’s home in central Italy. Carli’s work is held by many modern art museums, including New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Italy’s Mart Rovereto, and London’s Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, as well as many private collections.

Notes: All images of Tullio Crali’s work, unless noted, are from the Futurali Cultural Foundation. The official Tullio Crali website is located at: https://www.tulliocrali.com

A short article, written by Perwana Nazif, on Tullio Crali with several images of his work can be found at the Coeval Magazine website: https://www.coeval-magazine.com/coeval/tullio-crali

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Tullio Crali (Right) with Aviator and Artist Steve Poleskie, Milan”, 1983, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Tullio Crali, “I Sommersi II (The Submerged II)”, 1933, Oil on Canvas, Futurcrali Cultural Association

Third Insert Image: Tullio Crali, “Monoplano Jonathan”, 1987, Oil on Canvas, Futurcrali Cultural Association

Fourth Insert Image: Tullio Crali, “I Sotterranei (The Dungeons)”, 1934, Oil on Canvas, 80 x 70 cm, Futurcrali Cultural Association

Bottom Insert Image: Tullio Crali, “Autoritratto (Self Portrait)”, 1935, Oil on Plywood Panel, 42 x 36 cm, Futurcrali Cultural Association

 

 

Bryan Rogers

The Paintings of Bryan Rogers

Born in 1977 in Connecticut, Bryan Rogers is an American painter who creates stylized, densely wooded landscapes with waterfalls in which oversized male figures are entwined with the natural elements. His contemporary Art Nouveau-styled paintings form complex tapestries of rhythmic patterns that project an atmosphere of Edenic tranquility.   

Rogers sees queer identity as an intrinsic part of his work. The relationship of his paintings’ protagonists to both the organic and constructed spaces in which they are placed reflect the public and private spaces that people navigate during their daily life.

Bryan Rogers earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. He continued his studies at New York City’s Pratt Institute where he earned his Master in Fine Arts. From 2013 to 2019, Rogers was co-director of Honey Ramka Gallery, a private UltraContemporary gallery that was based in Brooklyn, New York until its closure. 

Rogers primarily works in acrylic paints on panel in his basement studio at his partner’s family home. His vividly colored images are created through thin, transparent washes applied by detail brushes. Interested in the patterns and symmetry of nature and architecture, Rogers places his protagonists, variations of his partner and brother, in lushly-patterned luminescent landscapes. The flowing organic nature of these highly detailed settings are reminiscent of works by Alphonse Mucha as well as the Art Nouveau-styled San Francisco music posters of the 1970s. 

Bryan Rogers has exhibited his work throughout the United States and Europe. These include group exhibitions at New York City’s Spring/Break Art Show; The Hole, a contemporary gallery in New York City’s Tribeca district; and Art Athina, Greece’s contemporary art fair and one of the oldest such fairs in Europe. Rogers also participated in the 2022 “The Bathroom Show” as well as the 2021 and 2023 “Works on Paper” group exhibitions at New York City’s Monya Rowe Gallery. 

Past exhibitions of Rogers’ work also include the 2021 “Woodland” at the Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles; “Intimacy” in 2022 at art curator Taymour Grahne’s London gallery; the 2022 “The Container Garden” at New York’s Sears-Peyton Gallery; “I Am American” in 2023 at the contemporary Kutlesa Gallery in Goldau, Switzerland; and the 2024 “Here and There” at the Huxley-Parlour Gallery in central London. In New York City, Rogers’ solo exhibitions also included the 2022 “Woodland”, the 2023 “Duality: The Real and the Perceived” and the 2024 “Wallflowers”, all held at the Monya Rowe Gallery in the East Chelsea district of Manhattan. 

Inquiries about Bryan Rogers’ paintings and future exhibitions should be presented to his representative, Monya Rowe Gallery, 224 West 30th Street, #304, New York City.  

http://monyarowegallery.com/index.php

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Bryan Rogers in Studio”, 2024, Color Print, Artnet News, January 2024

Second Insert Image: Bryan Rogers, “Here and There”, 2024, Acrylic on Panel, 122 x 91.4 cm, Huxley-Parlour Gallery, London

Third Insert Image: Bryan Rogers, “Entangled”, 2024, Acrylic on Panel, 50.8 x 40.6 cm, Monya Rowe Gallery, New York