Edmund Dulac

The Illustrative Work of Edmund Dulac

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music History: Don Cherry

Francis Wolff, “Don Cherry, Recording Session for “Where is Brooklyn” Album”, November 11, 1966, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Gelatin Silver Print, Francis Wolff Mosaic Images/Corbis

Born at Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in November of 1936, Donald Eugene Cherry was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader and multi-instrumentalist. Pioneering in free jazz, avant-garde jazz and world fusion music, he is considered one of the most influential jazz musicians of the late twentieth-century.

Born to musical club owner Ulysses Cherry, an African-American, and Daisy Lee Fulson, a woman of Choctaw descent, Don Cherry grew up in a world of music. His father played trumpet and both his mother and grandmother played piano. Ulysses Cherry was the owner of Oklahoma’s Cherry Blossom Club, a jazz venue that hosted such musicians as Charles Henry Christian, one of the first electric guitarists and a key figure in bebop jazz, and Fletcher “Smack” Henderson, a pianist and one of the most influential arrangers and bandleaders in jazz history.

At the age of four, Cherry moved with his family to the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles where his father tended bar at Central Avenue’s Plantation Club, the center of the city’s jazz scene. Transferred to Jacob Riis High School, Cherry met jazz drummer Billy Higgins, who would later play with Ornette Coleman, Herbie Hancock and Thelonius Monk, among others.

By the early 1950s, Don Cherry, in his teenage years, was playing trumpet with jazz musicians in Los Angeles; he would occasionally play piano in trumpet player Art Farmer’s group. His attendance at a Los Angeles jam session with trumpeter Clifford Brown, drummer Larance Marable, and saxophonist Eric Dolphy led to Brown informally acting as Cherry’s mentor. In the late 1950s, Cherry toured for a period with tenor saxophonist James Earl Clay, who later made an appearance on Cherry’s 1988 “Art Deco” album for the A&M label.

Cherry first played with Ornette Coleman as a cornet player alongside double bass player Charlie Haden and drummers Billy Higgins and Ed Blackwell for Coleman’s first album, the 1958 “Something Else: The Music of Ornette Coleman” released by Contemporary Records. Well known for his free flowing harmonic structures, Cherry co-led “The Avant-Garde” 1960 sessions with John Coltrane, accompanied by Gharlie Haden and Ed Blackwell; the studio album was released by Atlantic in April of 1966.

After leaving Ornette Coleman’s quartet, Don Cherry explored and played with a variety of musicians in small groups during an extended trip to Scandinavia, Europe, India, Morocco, and South Africa. In the late 1960s, he and his wife, textile artist Monica Karlsson (aka Moki Cherry), settled in the small Swedish town of Tågarp. Cherry taught music classes with guest lecturers, performed with collaborators, and held workshops to explore the concept of an Organic Music Society.

Cherry continued to play trumpet and other instruments on recorded sessions. These included Allen Ginsberg’s 1970 “Songs of Innocence and Experience” and Coleman’s 1971 “Science Fiction”. He joined with saxophonist Dewey Redman and former Coleman players Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell to form the Old and New Dreams, which recorded four albums. Entering the genre of world fusion music, Cherry incorporated influences of African, Indian and Middle Eastern music into his playing.

Other playing opportunities for Cherry arrived throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Along with director Alejandro Jodorowsky and Emmy Award winner/keyboardist Ronald Frangipane, he co-composed the score for Jodorowsky’s 1973 surrealist film “The Holy Mountain”. Cherry played on jazz pianist Carla Bley’s impressive 1971 “Escalator over the Hill”, a triple LP set that covered a wide range of musical genres from avant-garde jazz to rock opera. He also played as a sideman for recordings by Lou Reed, Ian Dury, and Sun Ra.

In both 1980 and 1981, Don Cherry toured the United Kingdom and Europe with Ian Dury and his band, Blockheads, which included a Christmas Eve live broadcast by the BBC in London. In 1992, he performed in Mumbai, India with noted Indian violinist L. Shankar. This performance was captured in the award-winning documentary film “Rhythms of the World; Bombay and All the Jazz”. Cherry united in 1994 with the Red Hot Organization and the Watts Prophets to create the compilation album “Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool”, an album to raise awareness of the HIV/AIDS epidemic among African-Americans.

Donald Eugene Cherry died at the age of fifty-eight of liver cancer in Málaga, Andalucia, Spain on the nineteenth of October in 1995. He was inducted into the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame in 2011.

Notes: Believing bebop and modal jazz were too limiting due to regular tempos, tones, chord changes and hormonic structures, jazz musicians in the late 1950s and early 1960s developed something new: free jazz. Seen as a return to primitive and often religious roots, this style drew heavily from world music (essentially culturally exotic compositions) and ethnic music traditions. Free jazz was never entirely distinct from other genres of jazz. It did, however, put a premium on the individual voice or sound of a musician, as opposed to the performer expressing the thoughts of the composer.

Modal jazz also emerged in the late 1950s. Its style used musical modes and scales rather than the complex and rapidly changing chord progressions, thus allowing greater improvisation. Miles Davis based his 1959 album “Kind of Blue” entirely on modality, giving each member of the ensemble a set of scales that encompassed the parameters of their improvisation. This facilitated more creative freedom with melodies. Ornette Coltrane, however, led the exploration of modal composition, producing such albums as “Africa/Brass”, “Giant Steps”, and “Live! at the Village Vanguard”.

Radio presenter and soul/R&B aficionado Wes Berwise’s WBSS Media: The Soul Purpose has a Don Cherry biography/discography on the site as well as several links to videos of Don Cherry playing his trumpet: https://wbssmedia.com/artists/detail/2883

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown,”Don Cherry at the Amougies Festival, Belgium”, 1969, Gelatin Silver Print, Angel City Jazz, Claremont, California

Second Insert Image: Don Cherry, “Art Deco”, 1988, (Don Cherry, James Clay, Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins), Van Gelder Studio, A&M Records

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Don Cherry”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print

Fourth Insert Image: Don Cherry, “Complete Communion, Live in Hilversum, the Netherlands”, May 9 1966, (Don Cherry, Bo Stief, Aldo Romano, Karl Berger, Gato Barbieri), DBQP Records

Fifth Insert Image: Daavid D. Spitzer, “Don Cherry, New York City” 1973, Gelatin Silver Print, 25.5 x 34.9 cm, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington DC

Bottom Insert Image: Don Cherry, “Live in Stockholm”, 2013, Recorded 1968 ABF House, 1971 Stockholm Museum of Modern Art, Caprice Records

Jan Preisler

Jan Preisler, “Black Lake”, circa 1904, Oil on Canvas, 111 x 153 cm, National Gallery, Prague

Born at the Litavka River town of Králův Dvůr in February of 1872, Jan Preisler was a Czech painter, decorative designer and art professor, a leading figure of Czech Symbolism and early Modernism.

The son of an iron foundry worker, Jan Preisler was educated at a municipal school in Popović. A loner by nature, his early talent at drawing enabled him to receive financial aid for studies in Prague. In 1887 at the age of fifteen, Preisler entered the recently opened School of Applied Arts, now the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design. He studied under Czech painter František Ženíšek, a member of the Generation of the National Theatre.

During his studies at school, Preisler became a member of Prague’s artists’ association, the Mánes Union of Fine Arts, and became one of its journal’s contributors. He created the cover for the 1896 inaugural issue of the Union’s journal “Volné Směry (Free Directions)” and served as the journal’s editor for several years. After graduating, Preisler shared a studio in Malostranská with Karel Špillar, a painter, graphic artist and fellow student under Ženíšek at the School of Applied Arts.

Jan Preisler initially painted in a Neo-Romantic style, a genre that arose in opposition to realism and naturalism, considering those formats to be misleading distortions of reality. As he progressed in his work, Preisler began to use the allegorical approach to symbolism. In the 1890s after studying the works of painters Alfons Mucha and Vojtěch Preissig, he began to experiment with the emerging Art Nouveau style.

Jan Preisler infused his paintings with poetic solitude and dreamlike mystery. The setting of a figure in a landscape is a typical feature of his paintings. In his development of the figure, Preisler’s understanding of that symbol changed from etheric levitating figures with symbolistic poses to their realistic rendering. This change in figural rendering was principally evidenced in the works from his loose “Black Lakes” series. Compact in content, those paintings build their stories from all the individual motifs.

In 1902, Preisler and his artist friend Antonin Gudechek traveled to Italy. In Vienna, he met French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Preisler was the organizer of the 1905 Prague Mánes Society exhibition of Edvard Munch’s works; Preisler designed the poster for this exhibition. He traveled to Paris in 1906, where attended a major retrospective of Paul Gauguin’s work at the Salon d’Automne.

In 1903, Jan Preisler became the teacher of nude painting at Prague’s School of Applied Arts and, later in 1913, was designated Professor of Painting at the city’s Academy of Fine Arts. In the period between 1908 and 1918, Preisler was given several public commissions for decorative work at prominent buildings in Prague. Among these were the Palacky Room in the Municipal House of Prague, and mural work for the dining hall of the District House (now Grand Hotel) at Hradec Králové.

Jan Preisler died of pneumonia in April of 1918. He was survived by his wife of four years, Božena Pallas Preisler, and his two children. Preisler was interred in the family vault in Prague.

Notes: In Preisler’s 1904 “Black Lake”, a pale horse stands with a solitary nude figure at the edge of an ominous, dark pool; the scene is an allegory of introspection, nature, and the unconscious. Preisler’s subdued palette and lyrical composition evoke myth and reverie, rooted in both Art Nouveau elegance and Symbolist philosophy. This enigmatic “Black Lake” remains one of Preisler’s most haunting and iconic works.

Top Insert Image: Jan Preisler, “Self Portrait with Cigarette”, circa 1900, Oil on Linen, 50 x 45 cm, Galerie Kodl, Prague

Second Insert Image: Jan Preisler, “Riders in the Wood”, 1904, Pastel on Paper, 36 x 51 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Jan Preisler, “Portrait of the Artist’s Mother”, Date Unknown, Oil on Board, 39.4 x 33 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Jan Preisler, “Study for Young Beggar”, Date Unknown, Black Pencil and White Chalk on Paper, 28 x 31.5 cm, Private Collection

Alair de Oliveira Gomes

The Photography of Alair Gomes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jenö Paizs Goebel

The Artwork of Jenö Paizs Goebel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Artur Grucela

The Paintings of Artur Grucela

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

José Moreno Carbonero

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jean Giraud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sir Edward John Poynter

The Artwork of Sir Edward John Poynter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edward Melcarth

The Artwork of Edward Melcarth

Born at Louisville, Kentucky in January of 1914, Edward Melcarth was an American painter, photographer and sculptor who developed his own style, Social Romanticism, a Renaissance-influenced attempt to describe man’s idealized view of himself. Active in the post-World War II art scene, Melcarth spent most of his career in New York City where he painted and sculpted images of blue-color workers, sailors, hustlers, and tradesmen.

Known for his emotionally evocative and heroic portrayals of the male figure, Melcarth focused his work on masculinity, portraiture, religion and contemporary American culture. His images of working-class men showed their grit, brute strength and determination to overcome difficulty. At the same time, the images were visual vehicles that examined gay male desire in a society that found it socially unacceptable. Melcarth’s paintings ranged in size from smaller portraits to large-scale, complex scenes of interacting figures accentuated with light and shadow.

Edward Melcarth, born Edward Epstein, was the son of the wealthy Jewish couple, Edward Epstein Sr. and Eva Ehrmann. His grandfather was the noted Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey distiller Hilmar Ehrmann. Melcarth’s uncle was activist lawyer and author Herbert B. Ehrmann; his aunt Sara R. Ehrmann was a Boston civic activist and first president of the League of Women Voters.

Eva Ehrmann, after the 1920 death of her husband, remarried in 1926 to Sir Reginald Mitchell Banks, who was a Member of Parliament. The family moved to the United Kingdom where Melcarth spent his early formative years. To pursue his interests and a career, he studied at Chelsea College of Arts in London; painter Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 in Paris; and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In February of 1936, Melcarth rejected his family’s Jewish religion and changed his last name from Epstein to Melcarth, possibly a variation of Melqart, a protector god of ancient Semitic people. Although he considered himself both a communist and openly gay, he was briefly married in Paris from 1939 until the divorce in 1944. During World War II, Melcarth traveled with other American volunteers in 1943 to Persia where they constructed air strips for the allied forces. In 1944, he served as a seaman in the United States Merchant Marines until the end of the war. Melcarth returned to the United States in the fall of 1951 and taught briefly at Kentucky’s University of Louisville.

In February of 1952, Edward Melcarth traveled to Italy where he resided for a period at Venice’s Casa del Tre Oci, a modern neo-Gothic palace on the island of Giudecca. Melcarth returned to the United States in November of 1952 and made New York City his primary residence. His acquaintances and friends included writers Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal, photographer Thomas Painter, sexologist Alfred Kinsey, artist Henry Faulkner, art collector Peggy Guggenheim, and businessman Malcolm Forbes, who established a major collection of Melcarth’s work.

In 1957, Melcarth created a ceiling mural depicting theatrical muses for the newly renovated Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, originally the Globe Theatre, on 46th Street in Manhattan. Beginning in 1967, Melcarth worked on a two-year project of trompe l’oeil murals and sculpted busts for the rotunda at the luxurious Pierre Hotel that faces New York’s Central Park. The painted Italian landscape murals included mythological figures and couples viewed between illusionistic columns.

Edward Melcarth relocated to Venice in 1970 where he lived until his death from cancer at the age of fifty-nine in December of 1973. Throughout his career, he taught at the University of Louisville, Parsons School of Design, Columbia University, the University of Washington, and New York’s Art Students League. Melcarth received both a grant and the Childe Hassam purchase award from the Institute of Arts and Letters, Chicago Art Institute’s Altman Prize, and the National Academy of Design’s Thomas B. Clarke Award.

Notes: Edward Melcarth’s papers, correspondence, and writings are housed in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/edward-melcarth-papers-7865

An article by museum curator Hunter Kissel entitled “Illuminating the Underrepresented: Presenting Edward Melcarth” can be found at: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c3cc8a11aef1d1735f564f7/t/5cf29f0ad328900001e55860/1559404302304/IlluminatingTheUnderrepresented.pdf

The bi-monthly literary and history magazine Gay & Lesbian Review has an interview between writer Taylor Lewandowski and painter Richard Taddei, a former student and friend of Melcarth, on its site: https://glreview.org/article/richard-taddei-on-his-mentor-edward-melcarth/

Kunisada Utagawa

Kunisada Utagawa, “Archer Katsuta Taketaka”, Edo Period, 1603-1868, Color Woodblock Print, 37.3 x 25.8 cm, Private Collection

Kunisada Utagawa (歌川国貞), also known as Sandai Utagawa Toyokuni (三代歌川豊国), was considered the most popular and prolific Japanese ukiyo-e color woodblock artist in nineteenth-century Japan. His reputation far exceeded that of his contemporaries Andō Hiroshigo, Katsushika Hokusai, and Utagawa Kuniyoshi, all great masters of the tradition.

Details of Kunisada’s life are scarce; however, he was born in Honjo, an eastern district of Edo with the given name of Sumida Shōgorō IX (角田庄五朗). His family owned a small licensed ferry boat service which provided income for him to engage in painting and drawing. Kunisada’s early work impressed Utagawa Toyokuni, a distinguished master of ukiyo-e kabuki actor prints and second head of the famous Utagawa school of woodblock artists. Circa 1800, Kunisada was accepted as an apprentice in Toyokuni’s workshop and, keeping the tradition of master/apprentice, was given the name Kunisada (国貞).

Utagawa Kunisada’s early full-sized prints began to appear in 1809-1810. He was already an illustrator of e-hon, woodblock print illustrated books, in 1809 and was considered at least the equal to his teacher Toyokuni in regards to book illustrations. Kunisada was at this time creating actor portraits and urban scenes of Edo. By 1813, he was positioned in second place behind Toyokuni on a list of the most important ukiyo-e artists in Japan. Utagawa Kunisada would remain one of the trendsettters of Japanese woodblock printing until his death in january of 1865, on the fifteenth day of the twelfth month of the First Year of Genji.

Notes: For the woodblock print illustrated in the header, Utagawa Kunisada used the kabuki actor Iwai Shijaku I as the model for archer Katsuta Shinzaemon Takekata. Iwai Shijaku I, also known as Iwai Hanshirō VII, was the oldest son of Iwai Hanshirō V and a frequent model for works by Kunisada. Born in 1804, Shijaku I died in 1845.

Insert Image: Kunisada Utagawa, “Kabuki, Chushingura Act 11”, 1864/1865, Color Woodblock Ptint, “Seichu Gishi Den (Biographies of Loyal and Faithful Samurai” Series, Private Collection

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Charles Ludlam: Film and Theater History

Photographer Unknown, “Charles Ludham and Ridiculous Theatrical Company”, 1970, Production of “Bluebeard”, Publicity Photo, Gelatin Silver Print

Born at Northport, New York in April of 1943, Charles Ludlam was a prominent American actor, director and playwright known for his significant avant-garde contributions to Off-Broadway theater and his role in the development of gay and lesbian performance art. Ludlam also founded the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, which became renowned for its innovative productions.

One of three children born to Joseph William Ludlam and Marjorie Braun, Charles Ludlam was raised in Greenlawn, a rural hamlet of Huntington, Long Island. Interested in theater from an early age despite his parents’ discouragement, he directed, produced and performed plays during his senior year in high school. Works by such playwrights as Eugene O’Neill, Kan Kikuchi, and John August Strindberg were performed by local students in their “Students Repertory Theatre”, a small loft space in Northport’s Posey School of Dance.

Ludlam studied at New York’s Hofstra College in Hempstead as an openly gay individual and received his Bachelor of Arts in Dramatic Literature in 1964. After settling in New York City’s Greenwich Village area, he joined the Playhouse of the Ridiculous in 1966. This theatrical company, under the direction of John Vaccaro, was founded the year before by actor and director Ronald Tavel. Inspired by Hungarian producer and dramatist Martin Esslin’s book “Theater of the Absurd”, Tavel’s Playhouse of the Ridiculous set aside naturalistic acting and realistic settings, employed a broad acting style and surrealistic stage settings, and introduced bawdy elements of both queer and camp performance to experimental theater.

In 1967 at the age of twenty-four, Charles Ludlam decided to found his own theatrical group, The Ridiculous Theatrical Company, for which he would act as producer, director and playwright until his death. Though sometimes on welfare, Ludham wrote at least one play a year and raised enough money to keep his company alive. Early shows moved from one venue to another, until the company found a permanent home in a former nightclub at One Sheridan Square in late 1967. Ludham’s company soon found an appreciative audience with such productions as “Conquest of the Universe/When Queens Collide” (1968) and “Bluebeard” (1970), an adaptation of Well’s 1896 “The Island of Dr. Moreau”.

Ludlam’s works gradually became more structured plays that imitated a variety of sources from gothic novels and old movies to literary works by Shakespeare and operas by Richard Wagner. Using traditional approaches to comedy, these works were unconventional with humor but also conveyed serious undertones. Ludlam’s plays often contained sarcasm, cross-dressing, double-entendre, and melodramatics. He acted in many of his plays and was noted for his female roles. The only member of the theatrical company who surpassed Ludlam in the number of roles was his fellow Hofstra student and close friend Susan Carlson, also known as Black-Eyed Susan,

Over his career as a playwright, Charles Ludlam wrote twenty-nine theatrical plays for the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. His best known work is the three-act 1984 “The Mystery of Irma Vep”, a satiric blend of theatrical, literary and film genres that included such works as “Penny Dreadful”, “Wuthering Heights” and Hitchcock’s 1940 “Rebecca”. Titled with an anagram of the word ‘vampire’, the play has only two actors of the same sex, who cross-dressing into different costumes, between them play eight roles, The two-hour show has a large number of special effects and props as well as thirty-five costume changes. Opening off-Broadway in Greenwich Village, “The Mystery of Irma Vep” featured Ludlam and Everett Quinton, Ludlam’s lover, in the lead roles; both actors won the 1985 Obie Award for Ensemble Performance.

In film, Ludlam was involved in ten productions from 1971 to 1983. Among these were: his acting role in director James Bidgood’s 1971 experimental erotic art film “Pink Narcissus”; a role in German director and queer activist Rosa von Praunheim’s 1976 New York underground documentary “Underground and Emigrants”; screenplay and directorial work on his silent 1987 short “Museum of Wax”; a role in Jim McBride and Daniel Petrie Jr’s 1986 neo-noir romantic thriller “The Big Easy”; and a role in Andrew Horn’s 1983 tribute to old school Hollywood melodrama, “Doomed Love”.

Highly regarded as an instructor, Charles Ludlam taught or staged productions at New York University, Yale, and Carnegie Mellon University. He was awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. Ludlam won six Obie Awards over the course of his career and the 1986 Rosamund Gilder Award for distinguished achievement in theater.

Charles Ludlam was diagnosed with AIDS in March of 1987 and died in May at the age of forty-four from pneumocysttis pneumonia (PCP) at Saint Vincent’s Hospital in New York. His obituary appeared on the front page of the “New York Times” newspaper; an essay on Ludlam’s life and art by American novelist and writer Andrew Holleran appeared in the gay-oriented newspaper “Christopher Street”. Charles Ludlam was interred at Saint Patrick’s Cemetery in Huntington, Suffolk County, New York.

Notes: Everett Quinton, Charles Ludlam’s lover, inherited the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. A January 2023 memorial article by Thomas Keith on the company and its history can be found at the American Theatre website: https://www.americantheatre.org/2023/01/30/everett-quinton-humble-hard-working-never-less-than-fabulous/

An excellent April 2013 article entitled “Your Primer on the Great Charles Ludlam” can be found on WordPress’s “Travalanche” site: https://travsd.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/on-charles-ludlam/

The WarholStars organization’s website has an article written by Gary Comenas on the history of Theater of the Ridiculous and its connections to Ronald Tavel, John Vaccaro and Charles Ludlam at: https://warholstars.org/ridiculous.html

The LiteraryWorld website has an article on Charles Ludlam and the theatrical productions of the Theater of the Ridiculous at: https://literaryworlds.coas.wmich.edu:7000/4034/

An Interview with Charles Ludlam with New York writer and queer theater scholar Don Shewey can be found at Shewey’s website: https://www.donshewey.com/theater_articles/charles_ludlam_CITA.html

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Charles Ludlam”, circa 1970s, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Charles Ludlam, “Stage Blood”, 1974, Evergreen Theatre, Publicity Poster, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Jack Robinson, “Charles Ludlam in Long Robe and Floral Headdress”, December 21 1970, Gelatin Silver Print, Jack Robinson, Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Fourth Insert Image: Charles Ludlam, “Big Hotel- A Farce”, 1968, Vintage Poster, Tambellini’s Gate Theater, Designer Jack Smith, 36 x 21 cm, Private Collection.jpg

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Charles Ludlam”, circa 1970-1980, Gelatin Silver Print

Peter Adair: Film History

Peter Adair, Director and Cinematographer

Born at Santa Monica, California in November of 1943, Peter Adair was an award-winning American director and cinematographer. As a documentary film maker, he used the personal stories of ordinary people to record the progress of the gay liberation movement and the effects of the later AIDS epidemic.

Peter Adair was the only son of three children born to John Adair, a distinguished anthropology professor at Cornell University who studied the Zuni and Navaho nations, and Casey Adair, editor for the literary journal “New Mexico Quarterly” and her husband’s many research publications. Peter Adair grew up in New Mexico where he was an outsider, participant and observer of the cultures his father was studying. His venture into making films began with the gift of a movie camera from his parents on his high school graduation.

In 1967 near the end of his academic studies at Antioch College, Adair completed his first major documentary, “Holy Ghost People”. Directed and narrated by Adair, the film documents the church service of a faith-healing and snake-handling Pentecostal community in Scrabble Creek, West Virginia. Recognized by anthropologist Margaret Mead as being one of the best ethnographic films made, “Holy Ghost People” is used in anthropology and documentary film classes.

After recognizing his gay sexual orientation, Peter Adair collaborated with his sister Nancy Adair and four other LBGTQ members of the Mariposa Film Group to direct his production of the 1977 “Word is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives”. This documentary intercuts interviews with twenty-six people from the United States, ranging in age from eighteen to seventy-seven, who speak of their experiences as gay men or lesbians. Each interviewee shared their experiences of ‘coming out’, falling in love, and their struggles against discrimination, prejudice and stereotypes. In production for five years with over two-hundred interview sessions, “Word is Out” was the first feature-length documentary about lesbian and gay identity made by LBGTQ film makers; it was selected for preservation in the United States Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2022.

Adair worked on a series of projects in 1984, the first of which was his directorial and production work on “Stopping History”, a film for the Public Broadcasting Service, which examined ethical questions centered on nuclear weapons. Documenting the nonviolent blockade at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where most nuclear U.S. nuclear weapons are made, the film asked viewers to consider nuclear war and its incurrable destruction. Later in 1984, Adair acted as consultant and did additional camerawork for Rob Epstein’s “The Times of Harvey Milk”. He also produced a series of tutorial videos for the Project Read adult literacy program of the San Francisco Public Library.

In September of 1984, Theatre Rhinoceros, a San Francisco-based theater company, presented “The AIDS Show: Artists Involved with Death and Survival”, a production that addressed the social impact of HIV/AIDS and the fears it generated on the LBGTQ community. Peter Adair and Rob Epstein collaborated as directors on a 1986 documentary film of the same name that became one of the first to examine the impact of AIDS on the arts community. Along with personal narrations by Adair and Epstein, excerpts from the original play were combined with interviews between the play’s creators and its performers to form a hybrid of drama and documentation.

After learning of his own positive HIV status, Adair wrote and directed the 1991 “Absolutely Positive”, a documentary that examined the uncertainty within which asymptomatic HIV positive people dwell. After interviewing over one-hundred people, Adair and his producer Janet Cole selected eleven people at different stages of the disease. “Absolutely Positive” contains the interviews of these eleven individuals and examines their lives both before and during their illness. In 1995, Adair collaborated with interactive product creator Haney Armstrong to produce an interactive legal drama-adventure game. “In the 1st Degree” was a CD-Rom in which the player examined evidence, interviewed witnesses and presented the case at trial. Noted for its sequences, it became the second-place finalist in Computer Game Review’s 1995 Best FMV of the Year.

In January of 1996, Peter Adair received San Francisco’s The Frameline Award, given to a person who had made a major contribution to LBGTQ representation in film, television or the media arts. Six months later, Adair died at the age of fifty-two from complications of AIDS in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. He was survived by his life partner Rudy Norton, his father John Adair, and sisters Margo and Nancy. Peter Adair was posthumously inducted into the San Francisco Rainbow Honor Walk in 2022. His papers are housed in the James C, Hormel LBGTQIA Center of the San Francisco Public Library.

Notes: The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) has a short article “Remembering Peter Adair” on its website: https://bampfa.org/event/remembering-peter-adair

An on-the-air June 1991 FreshAir interview between PBS host Terry Gross and Peter Adair concerning his HIV-positive status is archived at: https://freshairarchive.org/segments/filmmaker-peter-adair-being-hiv-positive

An article on the production of Peter Adair’s documentary “Absolutely Positive”, written by historian and digital storyteller Brendan McHugh, for Public Broadcasting Service’s station KQED can be found at: https://www.kqed.org/arts/13906624/absolutely-positive-hiv-aids-activism-peter-adair-doris-butler

Milestone Films has an excellent article on the background and production of Peter Adair and Rob Epstein’s “The AIDS Show” film at: https://milestonefilms.com/products/copy-of-common-threads-stories-from-the-quilt

Henry Ernest Schnakenberg

Henry Ernest Schnakenberg, “Indians Trading with the Half Moon”, 1941, One of Four Fresco Murals, Post Office Fort Lee, NewJersey

Born at New Brighton, Staten Island, New York in September of 1892, Henry Ernest Schnakenberg was an American realist painter and etcher known primarily for his renderings of New York’s Central Park and other cityscapes. He began his art studies with evening classes at the Arts Student League in 1913. Schnakenberg’s experience of attending the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art at the city’s 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue, known now as the Armory Show, solidified his desire to be an artist. After that exposure, he began full-time classes at the League, that continued as three years of study under painter and printmaker Kenneth Hayes Miller.

After exhibiting two works at the Society of Independent Artists, Schnakenberg enlisted in the Army Medical Corps in 1917 at America’s entry into World War I. Discharged in 1919, he quickly returned to art, exhibiting alongside Joseph Stella at the Whitney Studio Club. Beginning in 1923, Schnakenberg taught for two years at the Art Students League and, later, became the League’s president in 1932. In addition to his teaching, he wrote essays and reviews throughout his career for art magazines.

Henry Schnakenberg regularly exhibited his work at the Society of Independent Artists as well as museum invitationals, including those at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He participated in the Carnegie International from 1920 to 1949 and exhibited alongside his mentor Kenneth Miller at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Beginning in 1932, Schnakenberg was represented by New York’s C.W. Kraushaar Galleries.

After completing mural commissions from the Treasury Department’s section of Fine Arts for post offices in Amsterdam, New York and Fort Lee, New Jersey, Schnakenberg relocated to Newtown, Connecticut. He would travel from there to paint the summer landscapes of Vermont and New England farmlands. A member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Henry Ernest Schnakenberg died at the age of seventy-eight in October of 1970 at Newtown. His body in interred at the Moravian Cemetery in New Dorp, New York.

Bottom Insert Image: Henry Ernest Schnakenberg, “Air Plants, Puerto Rico”, 1927, Oil on Canvas, 77.2 x 92.1 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, new York

Sir Charles Lawes-Wittewronge

Sir Charles Lawes-Wittewronge, “The Death of Dirce”, 1906, Bronze, 252.7 x 172.7 x 195.6 cm, Tate Museum, Millbank, Westminster, London

Born at the seaside civil parish of Teignmouth, Devon in October of 1843, Sir Charles Bennet Lawes-Wittewronge, 2nd Baronet was an English athlete and sculptor. The only son of agricultural chemist Sir John Bennet Lawes of Rothamsted Manor, Herfordshire, and his wife Caroline Fountaine, Charles Bennet Lawes was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Natural Sciences in 1866.

At Eton, Lawes exhibited his exceptional athletic prowess in multiple sports including field and track, rowing and cycling. He claimed university titles in the half-mile, mile, and two mile track events between 1864 and 1865. In rowing, Lawes secured the Cambridge sculls (1862), the Henley Regatta diamond sculls (1863) and, as 1865 amateur champion oarsman, was part of the Cambridge crew in the 1865 Boat Race against Oxford. In 1899 at the age of fifty-six, he set competitive cycling’s amateur record of just over fifty-one minutes for the twenty-five mile course.

Charles Bennet Lawes made the decision to become a sculptor after graduating from Trinity College. His initial training was in London under Irish sculptor John Henry Foley, a member of the Royal Academy who was considered the finest equestrian sculptor of the Victorian era. In 1869, Lawes studied in Berlin under German sculptor Hugo Hagen who was the director of the Christian Daniel Rauch Museum in Leipzig. After renting a studio in the Chelsea district of London, he exhibited his first work, “Girl at the Stream” at the Royal Academy in 1872. Two other works exhibited at the Royal Academy by Lawes were his “Daphne” in 1880 and “The Panther” in 1881.

After the death of his father in August of 1900, Charles Bennet Lawes became 2nd Baronet of Rothamsted Manor, assuming by Royal License the additional surname and arms of Wittewronge for himself and his heirs in 1902. In the same year, he was a co-founder of the Royal Society of British Sculptors and, from 1909 until his death, the society’s second president. Lawes exhibited his works at the Royal Society of British Sculptors, the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris where he received an honorable mention, and London’s 1908 Franco-British Exhibition, which ran concurrently with the Summer Olympics on the 140-acre west London site known as White City.

In 1906, Lawes executed his “The Death of Dirce”, a large bronze sculptural group that was based on the “Farnese Bull”, a massive marble Roman copy of an earlier Hellenistic sculpture that depicted the mythological punishment of Dirce, first wife of Lykos, King of Thebes. This bronze sculpture was exhibited at the Franco-British Exhibition. At the same time, Lawes’s colossal marble version of this work was shown at the Royal Academy. The marble “Death of Dirce” is now in the grounds of the public park area of Rothamsted, Hertfordshire. The bronze version, given after Lawes’s death by his widow, is installed at the entrance of the Tate Gallery, Millbank, London.

Sir Charles Bennet Lawes-Wittewronge married Marie Amelie Rose Fountaine on the eighth of April in 1869. He chaired the Lawes Agricultural Trust established by his father and supported the expansion of the Rothamsted estate’s agricultural experiments. A life-long Victorian patron of the arts, athletics and science, Lawes died at the age of sixty-eight in October of 1911 following an appendicitis operation. His body was cremated and interred at Golders Green Crematorioum, Golden Green, London. Charles and Marie Lawes’s only son John succeeded as the 3rd Baronet of Rothamsted in 1911. Marie Amelie Lawes died at the age of seventy-nine in August of 1928; she in interred with her husband at Golden Green, London.

Notes: There is a short biography on Sir Charles Lawes-Wittewronge at Harpenden History, a local history website presented by the Harpenden Museum in Rothamsted Park: https://www.harpenden-history.org.uk/harpenden-history/places-and-buildings/rothamsted/sir_charles_lawes-wittewronge

Top Insert Image: François Verheyden, “Sir Charles Lawes-Wittewronge”, 1883, Illustration for Vanity Fair Issue May 12 1883, London