Category: lbgtq artists

Carlos Alfonzo

The Paintings of Carlos Alfonzo

Born in Havana in 1950, Carlos Alfonzo was a Cuban-American painter and ceramicist whose Neo-Impressionist style incorporated forms from Cuban Santeria, Catholic medieval mysticism, and tarot cards to form a symbolic vocabulary for his work. 

Carlos Alfonzo began his artistic training at the Academia de Belle Artes San Alejandro in Havana where he studied painting, print making and sculpture. After receiving his degree in 1973, Alfonzo attended the University of Havana where he received a degree in Art History in 1977. As a student, he began to introduce Afro-Cuban religious symbols from various sects into his work. Alfonzo, although raised as a Catholic, often blended pagan and Christian imagery to reveal their overlapping symbolisms as well as their connections to the issues of passion, masculine power, and sin.

During the 1970s, Alfonzo was an active participant in Cuba’s artistic community. However, he grew increasingly dissatisfied  with the country’s Revolution and discouraged by the travel restrictions and pervasive homophobia. In 1980, Alfonzo was deemed undesirable as a gay man by the Cuban government and, after several days of refuge with others at the Peruvian embassy, was able to leave Cuba during the Mariel Boat-Lift. An agreement arranged between Cuban-Americans in the United States and Fidel Castro allowed the release of many Cubans from the increasing restrictive conditions on the island. After a journey marred by violence, Alfonzo settled in Miami where he was able to explore both his art and his life. 

Carlos Alfonzo’s wildly energetic work was quickly embraced among the artistic circles in the United States. Three years after arriving in the United States, he was awarded a Cintas Fellowship in the visual arts and, in the next year, a 1984 Fellowship in Painting from the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington D.C. In the 1980s and 1990s, Alfonzo began to exhibit his work internationally and participated in a number of traveling exhibitions that concentrated on LatinX artists.

Alfonzo’s earliest work was inspired by the visible symbols contained within the propaganda produced under the Castro regime. Later works embraced the impressionistic work of such artists as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Alonzo’s work was also influenced by that of Cuban painter Wilfredo Óscar Lam y Castilla, an artist who fused Surrealist and Cubist approaches to art with images and symbols from Santeria. Many of Alonzo’s paintings contain subtle hints of his sexuality or invoke the fear and anger generated by the deaths of the AIDS epidemic. During the last year of his life, Alfonzo radically reduced his color palette and began an intense use of pictorial markings on large, dull-colored paintings that expressed a range of emotions.

Carlos Alfonzo, in addition to his paintings, produced a great number of works in clay and painted ceramics over a span of ten years. Interested in public works, he personally made and glazed all the ceramic tiles for his two iconic public murals in South Florida. The 1986 ceramic “Ceremony of the Tropics” at the Santa Clara Metro-Rail Station was a project of Miami’s Art in Public Places program overseen by artist and curator Cesar Trasobares. Alfonzo’s second ceramic mural was the 1991 site-specific “Brainstorm” commissioned by the Florida International University.  

Before he left Cuba, Alfonzo had two solo shows in Havana. The first was in 1976 at Galeria Amelia Pelaez and the second at Havana’s Museo Nacional in 1977. Alfonzo’s first solo exhibition in the United States, “Paradiso” which featured paintings, ceramics and works on paper, was held at New York City’s Hal Bromm Gallery on Madison Avenue in 1987. His other solo exhibitions were held at Houston’s McMurtey Gallery and the Osuna Gallery in Washington DC as well as the Bass Museum of Art and the Lannan Museum, both in Florida. 

In 1987, Alfonzo entered his work in the group exhibition, “Hispanic Art in the United States”, held at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts. His paintings were entered in the 1990 seminal  multi-venue show “The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s” at New York City’s Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art. This exhibition later traveled to the city’s The New Museum of Contemporary Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem. In 1991, Alfonzo’s paintings were chosen to be included in that year’s Whitney Biennial held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. 

Carlos Alfonzo lived and worked in Miami, Florida until his death in 1991 from a cerebral hemorrhage with AIDS-related complications at the age of forty-one. His work is held in many private collections and such public collections as the Miami Art Museum, the Kendall Art Center, Washington D.C.’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln, Nebraska, among others.

Notes: Art historian and curator Julia P. Herzberg has an extensive and informative article entitled “Carlos Alfonzo: Transformative Work from Cuba to Miami and the U.S.” on her site:  https://www.juliaherzberg.net/carlos-alfonzo

The online site of Miami’s New Times has an article by Isabella Marie Garcia entitled “The Dark Poignancy of Carlos Alfonzo’s Life” which covers the 2020 retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami: https://www.miaminewtimes.com/arts/things-to-do-in-miami-carlos-alfonzo-late-paintings-at-institute-of-contemporary-art-miami-14372933

The Farber Foundation’s The Archive: Cuban Art News has an article written by Janet Batet on Carlos Alfonzo’s late-career art: https://cubanartnewsarchive.org/2018/07/11/screaming-heads-and-still-lifes-the-late-career-art-of-carlos-alfonzo/

Top Insert Image: Ramiro Fernandez, “Carlos Alfonzo”, Date Unknown, Color Print, Miami New Times, May 2022

Second Insert Image: Carlos Alfonzo, Untitled, 1987, Acrylic on Paper, 76.2 x 56.5 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Carlos Alfonzo, Untitled, 1980-1989, Linocut Print, Artist Proof, 68.6 x 106.7 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Carlos Alfonzo, Untitled (Nine Figures Inside a Maze), 1979, Mixed Media on Paper on Board, 64.8 x 50.2 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Carlos Alfonzo, “Still Life with AIDS Victim”, 1990, Oil on Canvas, 213.4 x 213.4 cm, Private Collection

Dmitri Bouchène

The Artwork of Dmitri Bouchène

Born in St. Tropez, France at the Villa of General Allard in April of 1893, Dmitri Dmitriévitch Bouchène was a Russian painter and theatrical costume and set designer who worked in both the Russian Federation and France. In 1947, he became a naturalized citizen of France where he remained for the rest of his life. 

Dmitri Bouchène was a descendant of a French Huguenot family. His  great-grandfather had relocated from France to Catherine the Great’s Russia in 1685 due to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes which effectively expelled the Huguenots from France. After the death of his mother in 1895, Bouchène was raised by his aunts in St. Petersburg. He attended the Second Imperial Gymnasium and evening classes at the art school established by the Society for Encouragement and Promotion of Arts. It was at the Imperial Gymnasium that Bouchène met fellow  student Sergey Rostislavovich Ernst, with whom he would remain a loving partner for the rest of his life. 

Through a personal recommendation from Russian painter Nicolas Roerich to French painter Maurice Denis who was teaching at the Académie Ranson in Paris, Bouchène was able to attend the academy and study at Denis’s workshop. There he met and received lessons on intuitive painting from Henri Matisse. After returning to St. Petersburg in 1913, Bouchène resumed his studies in history and philology, the study of language in oral and written historical sources. From 1915 to 1917, he continued his drawing studies at the Society for the Promotion of Arts. 

Dmitri Bouchène, through the sponsorship of painter and theatrical designer Alexandre Benois, became part of the staff at the Hermitage Museum where he curated the department of porcelain, silver and jewels until 1925. A member of the Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) group since 1917, Bouchène was invited by Benois, under appointment by art critic Sergei Diaghilev, to participate in the group’s exhibitions at St. Petersburg’s Anichkov Palace. Bouchène entered paintings in the Mir Iskusatva exhibitions of 1918, 1922, and 1924.

Bouchène’s style of painting incorporated the motifs and methods of Catalan modernist painter Antoni Gaudí and Venetian painter Giovanni Canal. He executed easel paintings of still lifes and landscapes as well as set and scene designs for the theater. Bouchène also created graphic work for publishers, including bookplates for Akvilon Publishing in Petrograd. He participated in Russian landscape exhibitions, the 1922 First State Independent Art Exhibition at Berlin’s Galerie van Diemen, bookplate art exhibitions in Petrograd and Kazan, and the 1924 Russian Art Exhibition held at New York.

In 1925, Dmitri Bouchène asked for a leave of absence from the Hermitage Museum to travel with Sergey Ernst to Paris for a three month study program of art history. Permission was granted and they left Russia by way of the Estonian city of Tallinn, never to return. While exploring Paris, Ernst purchased a Delacroix painting he found at a low cost in a Parisian flea market; the resale of this work enabled them to buy a home. In 1926, Bouchène began his career in France with costume designs for prima ballerina Ann Pavlova.

In 1930 following this success, Bouchène began work as a costume and set designer for the Paris Opéra and Teatro alla Scala. He also created interior decor for Paris-based Maison Jansen and haute couture work for such fashion designers as Lucien Lelong and Nina Ricci. During the Second World War, both Bouchène and Ernst took an active part in the French Resistance. Bouchène continued his painting and design work after the war; Ernst established himself as an art critic and historian with three published monographs on noted Russian Silver Age artists: Zinaida Serebriakova, Alexandre Benois and Nicolas Roerich.  

Dmitri Bouchène was deeply affected by the 1980 death of his longtime partner Sergey Ernst. He had considered Ernst and theatrical designer Alexandrer Benois as the two pillars that supported his life. Ernst was interred in a tomb located in the thirteenth division of the Montparnesse Cemetery in Paris. Bouchène died, thirteen years later, in February of 1993 at the age of ninety-nine. He was buried in the Montparnesse tomb alongside Sergey Ernst. Their tomb was inscribed with the words “What a Joy / You have Arrived” in honor of their long lives together.

In 1947, Bouchène’s friend, the art collector Frederik Johannes Lugt, established the Fondation Custodia at the eighteenth-century Hotel Turgot in Paris; this foundation is the custodian of Bouchène’s archives. Numerous private collection hold Bouchène’s paintings and graphic works.

The Dmitri Bouchène website, established by Pascal Davy-Bouchène, is located at: https://dimitri-bouchene.com

Tope Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Dmitri Bouchène in His Studio”, 1960, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Dmitri Bouchène, Costume Design for Claudio Monteverdi’s Opera “l’Incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppaea)“, 1953, Charcoal and Gouache on Paper, 33 x 23.5 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Dmitri Bouchène, “Flowers Against the Blue Background”, Gouache on Paper on Canvas, 105 x 76 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Dmitri Bouchène, Costume Design for Leoš Janáček’s 1954 Opera “Z Mrtvého Domu (House of the Dead)”, Charcoal and Gouache on Paper, 32 x 24 cm, Private Collection

Přemysl Koblic

The Photography of Přemysl Koblic

Born in July of 1892 in Prague, Přemysl Koblic was a Czech avant-garde photographer and educator whose theoretical findings and photographic practices significantly influenced the development of photography in Czechoslovakia. In addition to his experiments in photographic chemistry, Koblic promoted the emergence of new black and white photographic materials with such firms as Foma, Ako, and Neobrom.. 

The son of a chemical engineer, Přemysl Koblic began his studies in 1911 at Prague’s Czech Technical University; however, his education was  interrupted by the onset of World War I. After basic training, Koblic was sent at the end of 1915 to the Isonzo Front in Slovenia where he served as an army photographer with the 91st Infantry Regiment. Koblic finished his military service in the summer of 1918 and returned to his studies at the Czech Technical University. He graduated in 1919 and initially worked as an assistant at the university’s sugar-manufacturing department. Two years later, he became an administrator at Czechoslovakia’s Patent Office, where he managed patents covering photography, prints and food until 1935. 

Přemysl Koblic, who used his own small-format cameras, was a lifelong experimenter. He published his first technical texts prior to the First World War and, by 1920, was already a member of the Amateur Photographers’ Club in the Prague neighborhood of Královské Vinohrady. Among its members were such notable photographers as Alois Zych, Robert A. Šimon, Augustin Myška, František Oliveriusand, and Stanislav Krofta who joined upon his return from the United States. In 1923, Koblic joined a rival Prague photographic club that was later known as the Nekázanka. 

While post-war photographic work in Czechoslovakia during the early 1920s tended to create beautiful images, Koblic was interested in photographing the civilians of Prague during their daily work routines, the wait for trains, and travel through the bustling city streets. He felt that the essence of photography was found in the depiction of movement, life and activity. For him, the presentation of personal movement in the city, surrounded by its shapes, colors, lights and tones, was the highest form of photography as it depicted man in his own creation. Koblic was a pioneer in photography of the modern city, a theme that was further developed by others in the early 1940s.

When the country was affected by an economic crisis in the early 1930s, Přemysl Koblic collaborated with the Brno Film-Photo group of the Left Front which was led by economic theorist Lubomir Linhart. However, his work differed from the emerging photojournalism of the Communist periodicals that often published anonymous images by photo reporters. In the 1930s, Koblic published two books, the 1937 “Fotografování Vidí Svêt (Photography Sees the World)” and “Zvêtšování (Enlarging)” in 1938. Both of these volumes contained perfectly arranged photo appendices and samples of recent photographic work.

In 1936, Koblic became editor-in-chief of “Fotoografický Obzor (Photographic Horizon)” magazine and compiled the 1937 almanac edition for “Československá Fotografie (Czechoslovak Photography)”. He also closely collaborated with “Fotografie” magazine led by photographer and theorist Karel Hermann, a long-time friend. Koblic shared his photographic discoveries in numerous articles and through courses and lectures at local photo clubs and public venues. His photographic work and the technology he used greatly influenced the generation of magazine photographers in the late 1930s, including such artists as Josef Voříšek and Jan Lukas, as well as those of the later 1950s. 

For his entire life, Přemysl Koblic was connected with the Vršovice section of Prague; he converted his apartment on Ruskâ Street into an experimental photographic and chemical laboratory. Although he focused on other Prague locations, he depicted Vršovice in all its seasons and published many of these photographs equipped with texts. Koblic’s photographs were unique in their spontaneity; he could, without any hesitation, effortlessly shoot his subject within a second. Beginning in the 1930s, Koblic worked with a motion blur that gave a unique dynamic to his photographs. The most famous and frequently published of these works was the series done in 1948 at the Sokol Festival, entitled “Čtvrtá Dimense (The Fourth Dimemsion)”, for which he used a wide-angle camera. 

In the early 1950s, Koblic became involved in the Czechoslovak Union of Socialist Photography and the “Nova Fontografie (New Photography)” magazine that began publication in 1950 and promoted socialist realism in Czech photography. His photographs were quite distinctive from the average productions of that period. Although Koblic tried to comply with magazine’s desire for images with a socialist presence, his life-long interest in the documentary depiction of reality, including social relations, continued to be prevalent in his work.

Perceived by the general public as a clerk with a hard-earned status, Přemysl Koblic was involved in many hobbies and obsessions. His involvement in photographic chemistry led to the creation of the developer Pextral which became a standard for many years. He also constructed a series of photographic apparatuses including the Pohotovka, a prompt device. Koblic was interested in the chemistry aspect of the food industry and patented a process for yogurt production. He researched natural medications, made astronomical observations, and studied early European linguistics. All these interests, added to his homosexual orientation, made Koblic an eccentric figure for his time. 

Přemysl Koblic died in Prague in November of 1955 at the age of sixty-three. Due to the efforts of Czech photographer and historian Rudolph Skopec, the Moravian Gallery in Brno acquired part of Koblic’s work and Prague’s National Technical Museum became the guardian of a substantial collection of Koblic’s positive and negative images. 

Notes: For the research on this article, I am indebted to authors Jan Mlčoch, Pavla Vrbová, and Romana Kmochová for their informative articles on the photographic history of Czechoslovakia and Přemysl Koblic’s life and work. Their introductory article and “Prague in Pictures by Přemysl Koblic” are located at: https://eshop.ntm.cz/static/_dokumenty/1/6/2/8/8/00350_premysl_koblic-aj_m21_ukazka.pdf

An 2017 article on Czech Avant-Garde photography by Mariana Holá can be found on the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism located at: https://www.rem.routledge.com/articles/overview/photography

Top Insert Image: Jan Beran, “Přemysl Koblic”, Date Unknown, Vintage Print, 30 x 32.8 cm, Moravská Galerie

Second Insert Image: Přemysl Koblic, “Praha-Vršpvoce Depot”, circa 1930s, Vintage Print

Third Insert Image: Přemysl Koblic, “View of a Village from Above”, 1939, Vintage Print

Fourth Insert Image: Přemysl Koblic, “The Jewish Cemetery”, 1930-1939, Vintage Print, 29 x 39 cm, Moravská Galerie 

Bottom Insert Image: Přemysl Koblic, “Prague Street Scene”, 1946, Vintage Print, Moravská Galerie

Sir Francis Cyril Rose

The Artwork of Sir Francis Cyril Rose

Born at the grand English estate of Moor Park, Hertfordshire in September of 1909, Sir Francis Cyril Rose, 4th Baronet of the Montreal Roses, was an English painter who received strong support throughout the 1930s from his patron, American novelist and art collector Gertrude Stein. Although he created many works of art, Rose’s artistic output was as erratic as his lifestyle was audacious and extravagant. Despite Stein’s endeavors to generate a sustained interest in his work, Francis Rose remained one of the more obscure artists of his generation.

Descended from Spanish nobility, Francis Rose inherited his British baronetcy while still a child. He received his initial education from the Jesuits at Beaumont College in Old Windsor, Berkshire, as well as lessons from private tutors abroad. In 1926 at the age of seventeen, Rose relocated to Paris where he resided as an expatriate until 1936. He studied under avant-garde painter and typographic artist Francis Picabia, an early figure in the Dada Movement, and Spanish muralist and theater set designer Josep Maria Sert.

In 1930, Rose had his first exhibition, alongside Salvador Dali, at the Paris  gallery of modern art patron Marie Cuttoli. By this time, he had already designed costumes and scenery for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe, some of which were in collaboration with artist Christopher Wood. Rose would design theater sets and costumes again in 1939 for Lord Berners’s ballet production “Cupid and Psyche” at London’s Sadler’s Wells Theater. During the 1930s, he spent several years studying Chinese poetry and art in China; he later traveled extensively in Europe and North Africa with his future wife, Frederica Dorothy Carrington. 

While traveling in France in his early twenties, Francis Rose became a close acquaintance of author Gertrude Stein who helped launch his painting career by commissioning several of his works, including a portrait of herself, for her own art collection. Stein had discovered Rose’s paintings in a Parisian gallery in the late 1920s and eventually bought one hundred-thirty of his works. Through Stein’s support, Rose was able to exhibit his work in Paris, London and New York. He  also created illustrations for “The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook”, a publication by Stein’s lifetime partner, Alice Babette Toklas. Although the friendship between the three personalities wavered at times, Alice Toklas asked Rose to design Gertrude Stein’s grave site memorial.

In 1938, Rose completed what is considered one of his most successful paintings, “L’Ensemble”, an oil on canvas mural that depicted his circle of friends which included Jean Cocteau, Gloria Stein,  Alice Toklas, Christian Bérard, Pavel Tchelitchev and Natalie Barney, among others. This mural was exhibited in the following year at the  Petit Palais Musée des Beauz Arts in Paris. Called to military service at the beginning of World War II, Rose served as a disciplinary sergeant in the Royal Air Force. In 1942, Francis Rose exhibited his work at the “Imaginative Art Since the War” exhibition held in London’s Leicester Galleries; this exhibition was organized by Frederica Dorothy Carrington, one of two daughters to Sir Frederick Carrington.

Francis Rose and Dorothy Carrington were married in 1942; however, as Rose was a noted homosexual, the marriage eventually ended. By 1954, Carrington had permanently settled, without Rose, on the Corsican island of Ajaccio; their divorce was finalized in 1966. Carrington became one of the twentieth-century’s leading scholars on the island’s culture and history. In 1971, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and, in the next year, a member of the Royal Society of Literature. Carrington became a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1995.

In 1938, Rose gave an American stockbroker the power of attorney to manage his fortune; however, this stockbroker was involved in, and later convicted of, an embezzlement scheme. Rose lost most of his fortune and was nearly destitute by the end of the second World War. He spent his final years in a state of poverty, helped financially by friends foremost among whom was photographer Cecil Beaton. In an attempt to achieve some financial success, Rose published a memoir in 1961 entitled “Saying Life: The Memoirs of Sir Francis Rose”. This memoir discussed both his exploits, many which had factual issues, and his associations with the famous and artistic personalities of the time. “Saying Life”, however. was not the financial success that he needed. 

Sir Francis Cyril Rose died in London on the nineteenth of November in 1979 at the age of seventy. He had exhibited in London and Paris in the 1950s and 1960s with major retrospective in London and Brighton in 1966. Another third retrospective of Rose’s work was given at London’s England & Co in 1988. In addition to private collections, his work is included in London’s England & Co Gallery, the Stein-Tolkas Collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Notes:  The Nick Harvill Libraries has a biographical article with quotes entitled “Lord Chaos: The Life of Sir Francis Rose” at:  https://www.nickharvilllibraries.com/blog/lord-chaos-the-life-of-sir-francis-rose

Time Magazine has an archive review of Sir Francis Roses’s July 1949 exhibition of new work at London’s Gimpel Fils Gallery. The review is located at;   https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,888553,00.html

Top Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Sir Francis Rose”, Date Unknown, Bromide Print, The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive

Second Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Cecil Beaton, Gertrude Stein, Sir Francis Rose”, 1939, Bromide Print, 24 x 23.8 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London, England

Third Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Sir Francis Rose and Gertrude Stein, Bilignin”, 1939, Gelatin Silver Print from Original Negative, The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive

Bottom Insert Image: Francis Goodman, “Emma Tollemache and Sir Francis Rose”, 9 December 1947, Gelatin Silver Print from Original Negative, National Portrait Gallery, London, England

Emma Tollemache (née Manasseh) wrote the poetry collection “In the Light”. A limited edition of 250 copies with illustrations by Sir Francis Rose was published by Marlowe Galleries.

Feliciano Centurión

The Textile Art of Feliciano Centurión

Born in the city of San Ignacio, Misiones in March of 1962, Feliciano Centurión was a Paraguayan artist known for his painting and textile work that incorporated painting, knitting, crocheting and embroidering. He was raised in a matriarchal household where he was taught the traditional crafts normally associated with women’s work.

Feliciano Centurión’s family fled to Formosa, Argentina to escape the military dictatorship of Paraguayan President Alfredo Stroessner. He received his initial art education in the visual arts at Formosa’s Oscar R. Albertozzi School of Fine Arts. Centurión permanently relocated to Buenos Aires where he studied painting at the Ernesto de la Cárcova Superior School of Fine Arts and the Prilidiano Pueyrredón School of Fine Arts. He earned the National Professor and Superior Professor of Painting degrees. 

Centurión incorporated ordinary household items into his artwork, such as blankets (frazadas), handkerchiefs, and pillowcases which he purchased at local street markets. His textile work followed the weaving traditions held by the indigenous Guaraní people of the interior regions of South America, particularly those of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia. Centurión also integrated the technique of ñandutí, an intricate method of lace weaving that was traditionally taught from mother to daughter. His design motifs included images of both flora and fauna as well as diaristic texts. 

After surviving the dictatorships in both Paraguay and Argentina, Feliciano Centurión thrived in Argentina after the collapse of the country’s authoritarian regime in 1983. He became associated with the Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas, a cultural center operated by the University of Buenos Aires, where he became acquainted with the work of other young artists. Centurión incorporated the kitsch references and queer aesthetics of these artists into his painting and embroidery work now being done on inexpensive, patterned blankets. Established as an artist, he participated in thirty-one solo exhibitions in Argentina and Paraguay between 1990 and 1996. 

Diagnosed with HIV in 1992 at a time when no accessible treatments were available, Centurión began chronicling his declining health by weaving texts into increasingly smaller and more intricate fabrics. At a time when government policies and media reports stigmatized the virus and its victims, he expressed humanizing, sentimental notions of comfort and intimacy into his fabric work. Centurión’s works were composed of bright colors and animals, such as snails and crocodiles, remembered from his childhood. His blankets celebrated both his matriarchal upbringing and Paraguay heritage; he used his embroidered work to express his queer identity and elevate the status of textile art. 

Feliciano Centurión had his first solo exhibition in 1982 at the Estimulo del Belles Artes in Asunción, Paraguay, and represented Paraguay at the fifth Havana Biennial in 1994. His final works, a series of embroidered pillows, were made while he was hospitalized. Centurión died on the seventh of November of 1996 at the age of thirty-four in Buenos Aires. 

A retrospective of Centurión’s work was exhibited in 2018 at the 33rd São Paulo Biennial in Brazil. The Americas Society/Council of Americas (AS/COA) held the first solo exhibition of his work in the United States from February to November of 2020. Held at its Park Avenue gallery in New York City, this exhibition received the support of the WaldenGallery, Galeria Millan, and Cecilia Brunson Projects as well as the City of New York. Centurión’s work is included in the current 2024 exhibition, “The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art”, at London’s Barbican Art Gallery until the 26th of May.

Notes: The exhibition catalogue “Feliciano Centurión: Abrigo” from the Americas Society/Council of Americas’s 2020 exhibition, which contains the exhibited work and an extensive biography, can be located at: https://www.as-coa.org/sites/default/files/archive/FelicianoCenturionPocketBook.pdf 

The Visual AIDS site has a tribute page to Centurión which contains a short biography and an online collection of over fifty images of his work: https://visualaids.org/artists/feliciano-centurion

Second Insert Image: Feliciano Centurión, “Flamencos”, circa 1990, Acrylic on Blanket, 42 x 53 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Feliciano Centurión, “Surubí”, 1992, Acrylic and Varnish on Blanket, 200 x 190 cm, Private Collection

Claude Cahun

The Photography of Claude Cahun

Born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob in October of 1894 to a literary Jewish family in Nantes, Claude Cahun was a French surrealist photographer, sculptor and author. She was the niece of avant-garde symbolist writer Marcel Schwob and the great-niece of historian and Orientalist writer David Léon Cahun. 

Cahun adopted the pseudonym Claude Cahun in 1914 for its gender neutrality, Claude being a French name that can be used by any gender with the same spelling and pronunciation. After experiencing antisemitism in the Nantes school system, Claude Cahun attended the private Parsons Mead School in Ashtead, Surrey, and continued her education at the University of Paris, Sorbonne. 

Claude Cahun’s father, newspaper publisher Maurice Schwob, divorced his wife after her permanent internment at a psychiatric facility. In 1909, he met the widowed Marie Eugénie Rondet Malberbe and, after a lengthly courtship, married her in 1917. Claude Cahun had met Marie Malberbe’s daughter, Suzanne Alberte Malberbe, previously at school in 1909. They were already years into their lifetime artistic and romantic partnership by the time their parents married. 

In 1922, Cahun and Malberbe, now an established designer, illustrator and photographer under the name Marcel Moore, settled in Paris. At their home, they held salon meetings attended by Paris’s intellectuals and artists. As prominent members of the Parisian art world, Cahun and Moore would host such notables as poet and painter Henri Michaux, writer Adrienne Monnier, Surrealist leader and theorist André Breton, and American-born bookseller and publisher Sylvia Beach.

Claude Cahun is known primarily for her highly staged self-portraits and tableaux that incorporated visual surrealistic elements. She began shooting her series of self-portraits at the age of eighteen while studying at the University of Paris. During the 1920s, Cahun’s self-portraits featured her attired in such various guises as an angel, doll, body builder, aviator, vampire and Japanese puppet. Some of these images, which presented a blurring of gender indicators and behaviors, are believed to have been taken with Marcel Moore behind the camera. Cahun and Moore collaborated on many projects and equally shared the credit for their collage work. 

In 1925, Cahun published “Heroines”, a series of monologues based upon female fairy tale characters intertwined with witty comparisons to contemporary women. She was active during 1929 in the experimental theater group Le Pateau for which she played Elle in “Barbe-Bleue (Bluebeard)”,and Satan in “Le Mystère d’Adam”. In 1930, Cahun published “Aveux non Avenus (Disavowed Confessions)”, a book of essays and recorded dreams illustrated with photomontages by Marcel Moore. 

In 1932, Cahun joined the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, a coalition of revolutionary artists and writers who eventually mobilized against war and fascism. It was through this group that she met Breton and surrealist writer René Crevel. Cahun participated in a number of surrealist exhibitions, including the London International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Gallery and the Exposition Surréaliste d’Objets at the Charles Ratton Gallery in Paris, both in 1936. 

With the rise of antisemitism in 1937, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore fled Europe and settled on the island of Jersey. After German troops invaded Jersey in 1940, they reverted to their original names and masqueraded themselves as being sisters. For several years, Cahun and Moore heroically risked their lives by producing and distributing anti-Nazi fliers to the German soldiers. Many of the anti-Nazi fliers contained translated snippets of BBC reports on the Nazis’ crimes and insolence: these BBC excerpts were pasted together to create rhythmic poems and harsh critiques. Cahun and Moore would don their best dresses and attend German military events at which they secretly placed their pamphlets in cigarette boxes and in soldier’s pockets or on their chairs.

In 1944, Cahun and Moore were arrested and sentenced to death. Their home and property was confiscated and much of their art was destroyed by the Germans. Cahun and Moore survived, saved by the 1945 liberation of Jersey from German occupation. Cahun’s health, however, never recovered from her treatment in the prison. She died at Saint Helier, Jersey, in December of 1954 at the age of sixty and was buried in St. Brelade’s Church, one of the twelve ancient parish churches on the island. After Cahun’s death, Moore relocated to a smaller home in Jersey. She died by suicide in February of 1972 at the age of seventy-nine. Moore is buried alongside Cahun in St. Brelade’s Church. 

Claude Cahun’s work was largely unrecognized until forty years after her death. Her participation with the Parisian Surrealists, predominately male, brought an element of diversity to their creative work through her gender non-conforming photography and writings. Cahun’s work was meant to upset the conventional understanding of photography as a document of reality. Her poetry and writings challenged the prevailing gender roles as well as social and economic boundaries. 

Notes: All images, unless noted, are part of the Jersey Heritage Collections of the Bailiwick of Jersey.

An extensive article on Marcel Moore and Claude Cahun, entitled “Marcel Moore, Her Life and Art”, written by the JHT Curator of Art Louise Downie can be found at the Jersey Heritage Organization’s site. This article primarily covers the life of Moore who was a successful illustrator, photographer and fashion designer. The article is located at: https://www.jerseyheritage.org/media/PDF-Heritage-Mag/marcel%20moore.pdf

The November 4th 2020 edition of the online The Art Newspaper has an extract from author Jeffrey H. Jackson’s history book “Paper Bullets” which outlines Cahun and Moore’s artistic campaign against the Germans during World War II. The article is located at: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2020/11/04/extract-or-how-artist-couple-claude-cahun-and-marcel-moore-resisted-the-nazis-with-their-paper-bullets

Top Insert Image: Claude Cahun, “Autoportrait”, 1927, Gelatin Silver Print, Jersey Heritage Collections

Second Insert Image: Claude Cahun, “Self Portrait with Roger Roussot in Barbe-Bleue (Bluebeard)”, 1929, Gelatin Silver Print, Jersey Heritage Collections

Third Insert Image: Claude Cahun, “Self Portrait”, Date Unknown, Color Crayon and Ink on Paper, Jersey Heritage Collections

Fourth Insert Image: Claude Cahun, “Self Portrait in Orchards”, 1939, Gelatin Silver Print, Jersey Heritage Collections

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore”, circa 1929-30, Gelatin Silver Print, Jersey Heritage Collections

Jimmy DeSana

The Photography of Jimmy DeSana

Born in Detroit in November of 1949, Jimmy DeSana was an American artist and a key figure in New York City’s East Village punk art and New Wave scene in the 1970s and 1980s. His work, as a conceptual artist, conveyed that ers’s radical spirit and initiated a new approach to photographing the human body.

Born James Arthur DeSana, DeSana spent his early years in Atlanta, Georgia. His interest in photography began as a teenager through photographing the city’s suburban landscapes and both friends and acquaintances. DeSana studied at the University of Georgia where he he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1972. For his thesis, he printed the 1972 series “101 Nudes”, a collection of fifty-six halftone black and white photographs of nude and partially nude figures posed inside or just outside houses. The figures, friends as well as himself, were seen from different viewpoints and sometimes only partially. Those partial anatomical views were reminiscent of earlier abstract work created by visual artist Man Ray. 

In 1973, Jimmy DeSana relocated to New York City and settled in the vibrant East Village area of Manhattan. As a street photographer doing commercial assignments for magazines as well as occasional record-album commissions, he shot the musicians who habituated late-night clubs and bars. These portraits included punk and New Wave figures such as Debbie Harry, Billy Idol, Richard Hell, Laurie Anderson and others. This commercial work supported DeSana’s photographic artwork in the studio. He was also active in the new correspondence art movement in which artists mailed their work through chain letters. Mailed out in 1973, DeSana’s nude self-portrait was later featured in a 1974 magazine published by the Canada’s conceptual artist collective, General Idea. 

In 1978, DeSana’s photographs of the human body were shown in Washington D.C. at the “Punk Art” exhibition sponsored by the Washington Project for the Arts. In 1979, he had his first exhibition at the Stefanotti Gallery on West 57th Street in New York City. In the same year, DeSana published his first collection entitled “Submission”. a volume of surreal, queer and humorous images that  situated his life and art within the queer and counterculture experiences. The published volume was created in collaboration with author William S. Burroughs.

In 1980, Jimmy DeSana began to experiment with color photography. His “Suburban” series continued his use of human bodies twisted into androgynous sculptural forms that challenged the viewer. In this series, DeSana began to also photograph commonly found objects in staged surrealistic settings.The images of this exploration of sexuality, gender and consumer issues had almost a nightclub atmosphere with their powerful, almost garish, colors of vibrant greens, pinks and mauves. To create his staged tableaus, DeSana used tungsten lights that imbued the surrealistic scenes with unnatural pigments. 

Shortly after 1985, DeSana was diagnosed with HIV and began to experience its symptoms. Continuing his work, he began the “Remainders” series that marked a move from the human body toward abstracted objects. This series featured everyday objects, such as balloons and aluminum foil, seated in dreamlike atmospheres lit in spectral hues.

Jimmy DeSana died, at the age of forty, from an AIDS-related illness at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center on the twenty-seventh of July in 1990. He left his estate to photographer and filmmaker Laurie Simmons who, in collaboration with Salon 94 Gallery, managed the estate for nearly a decade. The DeSana estate is currently co-managed by Simmons and New York City’s contemporary P.P.O.W. Gallery, one of Manhattan’s longest-running galleries now based in the city’s Tribeca district.

The photography volume “Jimmy DeSana: Suburban” was published by Del Monico Books/Brooklyn Museum in 2015 and included texts by filmmaker Laurie Simmons as well as art curators Dan Nadel and Elisabeth Sussman. A 2022 edition entitled “Jimmy DeSana: Submission” was published, also by Del Monico, with texts by Simmons, author Drew Sawyer, and Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak. The first museum retrospective of DeSana’s work, curated by Simmons and Drew Sawyer, was held in late 2022 at the Brooklyn Museum.

Notes: All images in the header group, unless noted otherwise, are from the Estate of Jimmy DeSana, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

Top Insert Image: Jimmy DeSana, “Smoke: Self-Portrait”, 1985, Gelatin Silver Print, Estate of Jimmy DeSana, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

Second Insert Image: Jimmy DeSana, “Cowboy Boots”, 1984, Vintage Cibachrome Print, 48.3 x 32.4 cm, Estate of Jimmy DeSana, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

Third Insert Image: Jimmy DeSana, “Cardboard”, 1985, Silver Dye Bleach Print, 48.3 x 32.4 cm, Estate of Jimmy DeSana, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Jimmy DeSana, Untitled (Self-Portrait with Graduation Cap), 1978, Polaroid Photo, Diego Cortez No Wave Collection, Cornell University

William Theophilus Brown

The Artwork of William Theophilus Brown

Born at Moline, Illinois in April of 1919, William Theophilus Brown was an American artist who became prominent as a member of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, a group of 1950s and 1960s artists in San Francisco who abandoned Abstract Expressionism and favored a return to figuration in painting.

Theophilus Brown was a member of a family descended from early-American intellectuals. His great-grandfather was friends with writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson; Brown’s father was an inventor and chief designer with the John Deere Company in Illinois. At the age of eleven, Brown painted a portrait which his father submitted to a regional art contest juried by the iconic midwestern artist Grant Wood. Brown received a third place award which was presented personally by Wood. 

In 1941, Brown received his Bachelor of Arts in music from Yale University where he became lifetime friends with composer and violist Paul Hindemith as well as novelist and poet Eleanore Marie Sarton. Brown was called after his graduation for military service in World War II. After the completion of his military service, Brown took advantage of the G.I. Bill and relocated to Paris where he worked under cubist painters Fernand Leger and Amedeo Ozenfant. In his travels, he met many artists among whom were Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Georges Braque, and Willem de Kooning who had a major influence on Brown’s early work. Brown was also acquainted with several composers including John Cage, Samuel Barber and Igor Stravinsky. 

In 1950, Theophilus Brown initially relocated to New York where he became deeply immersed in the evolving school of Abstract Expressionism. Over the course of his studies at the University of California, Berkeley, Brown began to develop his own unique voice. He  eventually realized that the genre of abstract expressionism was not an ideology he wanted to pursue. Brown graduated with his Master of Fine Arts in 1952. It was in his University of California classes that he met fellow student and painter Paul John Wonner who became his lifelong partner. Wonner earned both his Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts as well as his Master of Library and Information Science at UC Berkeley.

Brown and Wonner shared a studio space in Berkeley at the same building where painters Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff had workspaces. These artists got together for drawing sessions and began to incorporate painter David Park’s reintroduction of the human figure into their own works. Collectively, the group became part of the Bay Area Figurative Movement. This movement was a diverse range of artistic practices that united the figurative form with both the formality and vigorous painting techniques of Abstract Expressionism. The exploration of these two movements together created new works in the fields of landscape, portraiture, still life and nude paintings. 

In 1956, Theophilus Brown’s paintings of football players, presented as abstracted bodies in motion, appeared in an issue of Life magazine. The paintings caught the attention of Los Angeles gallery owner Felix Landau who began to exhibit Brown’s work. In the following year, Brown’s work was included in the Oakland Museum’s Bay Area Figurative Painting Exhibition. He and Wonner moved to Malibu in the early 1960s and became part of the Southern California art scene. The years in Santa Monica and Malibu were very productive for Brown with works on both canvas and paper of beach scenes that featured mostly male nudes set in carefully crafted abstract landscapes. In these works, he stripped away the detail and focused on shape, form, and light.

Brown taught at the University of California, Davis between 1975 and 1976. His relationship with Wonner endured until the death of Wonner in 2008. A daily painter into his ninth decade, Theophilus Brown died in San Francisco on the eighth of February in 2012 at the age of ninety-two. His papers are housed in the Archives of American Art, a research center of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. Brown’s work is housed in both private and public collections including Sacramento’s Crocker Museum of Art which has a collection of eighteen-hundred works by Theophilus Brown and Paul Wonner.

Notes: In May of 2020, writer Erin Clark wrote a carefully researched article on Theophilus Brown entitled “The Charmed Life of Theophilus Brown” for the online Artworks magazine. This article is located at: https://artworksmag.com/theophilus-brown/

Matt Gonzalez, a close friend and fellow artist with Theophilus Brown and Paul Wonner, wrote an article in 2011 for The New Fillmore entitled “A Friendship with Theophilus Brown”. This article is available on Art & Politics: The Matt Gonzales Reader located at:  https://themattgonzalezreader.com/2011/09/05/theophilus-brown/

The WordPress site Art Matters has an extensive collection of short articles written over a period of years about Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown. This collection can be found at: https://trgtalk.wordpress.com/category/artists/brown-wm-theophilus/

The Theophilus Movie website contains several video clips of Theophilus Brown and a section to fundraise the production of biographical documentary on Brown’s life and work. The Theophilus site is located at: https:/www.theophilusmovie.com

Second Insert Image: William Theophilus Brown, “Portrait”, 2001, Ink Wash and Gouache on Paper, 35.6 x 27.9 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: William Theophilus Brown, United (Football), 1956, Oil on Paper,  106.7 x 139.7 cm, Kim Eagles-Smith Gallery, Mill Valley, California

Bottom Insert Image: William Theophilus Brown, “Self Portrait”, 1994, Acrylic on Canvas, 30.5 x 30.5 cm, Private Collection

 

 

Paul John Wonner

The Artwork of Paul John Wonner

Born in Tucson, Arizona in April of 1920, Paul John Wonner was an American painter who rose to prominence in the 1950s through his association with the Bay Area Figurative Movement. He was best known for his abstract expressionist styled still-life paintings. 

After moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, Paul Wonner earned a Bachelor’s degree in 1941 at Oakland’s California College of Arts and Crafts, now the California College of the Arts. During his military service stationed in San Antonio, Texas, he continued his studies and set up a neighborhood studio. In 1946, Wonner was discharged and quickly relocated to New York City to continue his art career. He worked as a commercial designer and attended classes at the Art Student League as well as symposiums at Robert Motherwell’s studio. 

In 1950, Wonner returned to his studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1952 and his Master of Arts in 1953. Wonner also earned his Master Degree of Library and Information Science in 1955, a requirement for most professional librarian positions in the United States. After graduation, Paul Wonner worked in the late 1950s as a librarian for University of California, Davis, and as a lecturer during the 1960s at the Otis Art Institute and UC Santa Barbara.

At UC Berkeley in 1950, Paul Wonner met fellow painting student William Theophilus Brown who became his lifelong partner. During their studies at the University of California, Wonner and Brown shared a studio space in Berkeley at the same building as painters Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn. Together these artists incorporated the figurative style of David Park’s paintings into their own works. This group became a part of what became known as the Bay Area Figurative Movement. In 1957, Wonner joined eleven other artists for the Oakland Museum of Art’s Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting Exhibition.

In the early 1960s,  Wonner and Theophilus Brown moved to Malibu where they became part of the Southern California art scene. In 1968, Wonner became a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and began to tutor as an artist in different areas of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. In 1976, he and Brown settled in San Francisco, where as an abstract realist, Wonner continued painting his still lifes and later figurative works. A prolific painter, Paul John Wonner died in April of 2008 in San Francisco; he was survived by his partner Theophilus Brown who died in February of 2012.

Interested in art as an adolescent, Wonner’s initial art training began when his parents hired a local California artist to assist him with his drawing amid his secondary school years. Wonner started his painting career during a time when abstract expressionism was at its height. In Berkeley during his association with the Bay Area Figurative Movement, Wonner’s work was similar to the figurative style of  many of his fellow artists. However, his work still retained the vigorous brushwork and strong coloring of the abstract expressionists. 

Beginning in 1956, Paul Wonner painted a series of works on paper and canvas that depicted multiple male bathers and boys with bouquets. By the end of the 1960s, he had abandoned his loose, figurative style and concentrated on a hyper-realistic form of still-life images. Although Wonner used the the Dutch Baroque still-life tradition as a historical source, he typically incorporated objects from contemporary life in his works. 

In the late 1970s, Wonner’s style turned crisp with an emphasis on sharp shadows and bright lighting effects. As he matured in his painting skills, Wonner’s later works portrayed his subjects distinctly separated through the use of surrealistically rendered vacant spaces. In his most recent figurative work, Wonner’s human figures are situated in arrangements and settings that are vaguely allegorical in nature.  

Paul Wonner’s paintings and other artworks are housed in both private and public collections all over the United States, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, New York city’s Soloman R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Cocker Museum of Art in Sacramento, California, which has an extensive collection of both Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown’s work.

Notes: The online Artnet site has an extensive collection of works by Paul Wonner that are available for sale. Images of these works can be found at: https://www.artnet.com/artists/paul-john-wonner/

Scott Shields, the Associate Director and Chief Curator of the Crocker Art Museum, discusses the work of both Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown at the Heather James Fine Art site. In addition to the video discussion, the site includes many images of Wonner and Brown’s work. The Heather James site is located at: https://www.heatherjames.com/multimedia/wonner-and-brown-scott-shields-interview/

Top Insert Image: Frank J. Thomas, “Paul Wonner”, circa 1950s, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Paul Wonner, “Model and Mirror”, 1964-65, Pencil on Paper, 43.2 x 35.6 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Rose Mandel, “Paul Wonner”, 1954, Gelatin Silver Print

Fourth Insert Image: Paul Wonner, Untitled, Watercolor and Pencil on Paper, 43.2 x 35.6 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Lincoln Yamaguchi, “Richard Diebenkorn, Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown at Berkeley”, 1955, Gelatin Silver Print

Agnes Martin

The Artwork of Agnes Martin

Born in March of 1912 at the town of Macklin located in Saskatchwan, Agnes Bernice Martin was a Canadian-American abstract painter known for her minimalist and abstract expressionist style. Martin’s patterned work, both delicate and awe inspiring, established a connection between the arts of writing and painting. 

One of four children born to Scottish Presbyterian farmers, Agnes Martin spent her formative years in Vancouver before relocating to the state of Washington in 1931 to assist her pregnant sister. She studied at the College of Education of Western Washington University and later received her Bachelor of Arts in 1942 from the Teacher College of New York’s Columbia University. During her studies, Martin was exposed to the artwork of sculptor and painter Joan Miró and abstract expressionist painters Adolph Gottlieb and Arshile Gorky. Inspired by their work, she began to take studio classes and seriously work towards a career as an artist. 

In 1947, Martin attended the Summer Field School of the University of New Mexico in Taos and, through lectures by Zen Buddhist scholar Daisetsu Teltaro Suzuki, became interested in Asian disciplines and ethics as a tool to manage her journey in life. Following her graduation, Martin enrolled at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque where she taught art classes. She resumed her studies at Columbia University and in 1952 earned her Master of Fine Arts in Modern Art. 

At the invitation of gallery owner Betty Parsons, Agnes Martin settled in New York City for a period of ten years beginning in 1957. She lived in a loft within the Coenties Slip area, a historic section of nineteenth-century buildings surrounded by the city’s financial district. Originally an area with an artificial inlet for loading and unloading cargo ships, Coenties Slip became both home and studio space for ground breaking artists from the late 1950s to the early 1960s. The area also served as a haven for the queer community in the 1960s. Among Martin’s friends and neighbors were Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Adolph Reinhardt, and Lenore Tawney, for whom she wrote an essay included in the brochure of Tawney’s first solo exhibition. 

Although not documented until 1962, Martin was known to have schizophrenia, the struggle of which was largely a private and individual affair. She was frequently hospitalized to control its symptoms among which were aural hallucinations and states of catatonia. Martin was aided by her friends from the Coenties Slip who enlisted the support of a respected psychiatrist who was both friend and art collector. The full impact of this illness on her life is unknown. 

In 1967, Agnes Martin abandoned the art world and her life in New York. After a period of travel in Canada and the western United States, she settled in Mesa Portales, New Mexico in 1968 where she rented a fifty-acre property until 1977. On this property, Martin built several adobe brick structures herself. She did not paint any works during the period from 1968 to 1971 and distanced herself from social events and the public eye. In 1973, Martin returned to art with the creation of thirty serigraphs for a portfolio entitled “On a Clear Day”.

An admirer of Mark Rothko’s work, Martin simplified her own work to its basic elements, a process to encourage a perception of perfection and emphasize the painting’s transcendental quality. Her work’s signature style focused on grids, lines and fields of subtle color. In the early 1960s, Martin created square 182cm canvases using only black, white and brown; these were covered with dense, minute and lightly defined graphite grids. Her paintings, while minimalist in form, differed from other minimalist works as her work retained small flaws and noticeable traces of the artist’s hand. Martin’s paintings and her writings both reflected her interest in Eastern philosophy, an aspect which became increasingly more dominant after 1967.

In 1974, Agnes Martin returned to painting with 30cm square and 182cm square canvases that represented a new exploration characterized by vertical and horizontal lines in a palette of yellows, pinks and blues. These were exhibited in 1975 at her first show at New York’s prestigious Pace Gallery. During her time in Taos, Martin continued her use of light pastel washes on the grids and bands of her paintings but reduced the scale of her work to a square of 152cm. She also modified the grid structure she had been using since the late 1950s; the pencil lines were now being drawn intuitively without a ruler. 

In 1976, Martin made her only completed film, “Gabriel”, a seventy-eight minute silent film, except for seven moments at which excerpts from Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” occur for two or three minutes. Unscripted, the film was shot with a handheld camera and presented the story of a young boy who wanders in the natural landscape of rural New Mexico. Martin’s goal was to make a film about happiness and innocence; an angel’s name, representing innocence, was used for the title of the film. 

In 1978, Agnes Martin left her Portales home and moved to Galisteo, near Santa Fe. Her broad-striped paintings became more luminous, a result derived from the application of diluted acrylic color over a ground of multiple layers of white pigment. Martin’s work evolved again in the 1990s; the early symmetric bands of color in her paintings began to be composed of varying widths. In 1991, Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum hosted a retrospective of Martin’s work, which was followed in the next year by a retrospective held at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.

Following the Whitney show, Martin moved to Taos, New Mexico where she lived and worked for the remainder of her life. She introduced a new palette of color in her work which included a spectrum of greens and saturated orange. In her very last paintings, Martin reintroduced the geometric elements from her 1950s work; she placed dark triangles and rectangles against gray grounds but kept the graphite lines that were a integral part of all her work. Agnes Martin passed away in Taos, New Mexico at the age of ninety-two in December of 2004.

Agnes Martin was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Clinton in 1998 and was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2004. In 1994, the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos renovated its Pueblo-Revival building and dedicated a wing to Martin’s work. Since her first solo exhibition in 1958, Martin participated in many international exhibitions including three Venice Biennales, two Whitney Biennials and the 1972 Documenta in Kassel, Germany. In 2016, the same year the Guggenheim Museum held a retrospective of her work, Agnes Martin’s 1965 graphite and oil on canvas “Orange Grove” sold at auction for $13.7 million dollars. 

Notes: Despite sharing several meaningful and long-term relationships in Oregon, New Mexico, and New York City, Agnes Martin never specifically acknowledged her sexuality in interviews or writings during her life. Martin kept her sexuality hidden, often even from close acquaintances. 

An article on Agnes Martin written by William Peterson for the November 2013 “New Mexico Mercury” can be found at: http://newmexicomercury.com/blog/comments/some_late_thoughts_on_the_early_work_of_agnes_martin

An extensive biography of Agnes Martin, written by Christopher Régimbal and entitled “Agnes Martin: Life and Work”, can be found at the Art Canada Institute site located at: https://www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/agnes-martin/

Top Insert Image: Dorothy Alexander, “Agnes Martin”, 1978, Gelatin Silver Print, Art Canada Institute, Toronto

Second Insert Image: Agnes Martin, “Self Portrait”, circa 1947, Encaustic on Canvas, 66 x 49.5 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Agnes Martin, “With My Back to the World”, 1997, 152.4 x 152.4 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Fourth Insert Image: Agnes Martin, “Portrait of Daphne Vaughn”, 1947, Oil on Canvas, 50.8 x 40.6 cm, Private Collection

Fifth Insert Image: Agnes Martin, “Summer”, 1965, Watercolor, Ink and Gouache on Paper, 22 x 23.5 cm, Private Collection of Patricia Lewy, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Gianfranco Gorgoni, “Agnes Martin in Cuba, New Mexico”, 1974, Detail, Gelatin Silver Print, Art Canada Institute, Toronto

Karlheinz Weinberger

The Photography of Karlheinz Weinberger

Born in Zürich in June of 1921, Karlheinz Weinberger was a self-taught Swiss photographer who over his sixty year career documented the outsider culture of rebellious male youths and working-class men. He used the pseudonym “Jim”, taken from a popular 1930 song written by German-Austrian composer Hanns Eisler, for his photographic work from 1948 to 2000.    

From 1936 to 1939, Karlheinz Weinberger attended Zürich’s grammar school and began taking photographs with his first camera. He became a member of the Bund der Nuturfreunde (Association of Nature Enthusiasts) photography club where he developed greater skills in both photographing and processing. In 1942, Weinberger was called for military training after which he served a period of active military service. At the end of the Second World War, he gained temporary employment as a carpet and furniture salesman but also endured periods of unemployment. 

Beginning in 1948, Weinberger became an active member of Zürich’s famous underground gay club “Der Kreis (The Circle)”. He began in the mid-1950s to publish his photos in the underground gay journals “Der Kreis”, printed through the club, and “Club68” Karlheinz Weinberger, Untitled Portrait, Zurich, circa 1970s, Gelatin Silver Print, Karlheinz Weinberger Estatefounded by a small team of former Kreis members. Weinberger  published more than eighty photographs though “Der Kreis” until the journal’s last issue in 1967. It should be noted that “Der Kreis”, besides being the only gay publication to include editorial content in three languages, was the most important European journal promoting the legal and social rights of gay men at that time.

During the 1950s, Karlheinz Weinberger spent his summer holidays in the Mediterranean area where he took portraits on the coasts and islands of Italy and during later excursions into Morocco. Weinberger’s images of sailors, fishermen, beach goers, and dockworkers were later published in “Mediterranean”,  a 2021 posthumous volume, the third of a series through the Swiss publisher Sturm & Drang.

From 1955 to his retirement in 1986, Weinberger was employed in the warehouse department of the Siemens-Albis factory in Zürich; this day-time position provided the finances for his off hours’ photographic work. In 1958, Weinberger met and photographed the young rocker Jimmy Oechslin in the streets of Zürich. Oechslin introduced him to Switzerland’s growing gang culture known by the German term Halbstarker, meaning ‘half-strong’. Groups of Zürich’s young people, influenced by the many aspects of American culture, were looking for an identity of their own. They established an antiauthoritarian subculture based on American film, rock music, customized jean clothing and the riding of motorcycles. 

Intrigued by the teenagers’ edgy look as well as their attitude towards authority, Karlheinz Weinberger began documenting this post-war generation on Zürich’s streets and at local festivals. He later established an improvised portrait studio at the apartment shared with his mother. During this period, Weinberger  became the one of the first photographers granted permission to document the local chapter of the Hells Angels motorcycle club. Between 1964 and 1976, he worked as a freelancer for various sports magazines and specialized in sports reporting in Switzerland and East Germany. 

Karlheinz Weinberger, Untitled, Portrait from 2011 "Jeans", Swiss Institute, New York CitySince 1963, Weinberger presented his work in various group exhibitions in Zürich, Israel, Italy, Canada and the United States. In 1968, he won a prize for his sports photographs at the NIVON Holland competition. Weinberger’s first solo exhibition, entitled “The Hooligans 1955-1960” was held in 1980 at Zürich’s Migros Club School, a recreation and education center. The first institutional exhibition of Weinberger’s work to a wider audience was a major retrospective entitled “Intimate Stranger” held in 2000 at Zürich’s Design Museum. Consisting exclusively of vintage prints mostly developed in Weinberger’s home lab, the show documented his close, but still outsider, view of the Halbstarker gangs. This exhibition later traveled to Vancouver, Canada.

Karlheinz Weinberger passed away in December of 2006 in Zürich at the age of eighty-five. The Galerie Esther Woerdehoff is the owner of the Weinberger Estate which is housed in the Swiss Social Archives in Zürich. In February and March of 2011, the Swiss Institute at St. Marks Place in New York City held an exhibition of Weinberger’s vintage prints curated through the collaboration of the Karlheinz Weinberger Estate and Gianni Jetzer, Curator-at-large at Washington DC’s Hirshhorn Museum. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Swiss Institute published a portfolio of fifty-four images entitled “Karlheinz Weinberger: Jeans”. 

In August of 2017 in conjunction with a large retrospective exhibition at Les Rencontres d’Arles, the German publisher Steidl released French and English editions of “Swiss Rebels”, a collection of Weinberger’s homoerotic images of rockers, bikers, construction workers and athletes. In 2018, publisher Starm & Drang released “Karlheinz Weinberger: Sports” , a collection of work discovered after the artist’s death in 2006. The volume, the second in its series, included one hundred-thirty images taken from thousands of negatives, slides and prints that documented bike races, wrestling matches and weight-lifting events.

Notes: The online magazine on contemporary culture Kvadrat Interwoven has an excellent article on Karlheinz Weinberger’s early career written by Larissa Kasper. This article can be located at: http://kvadratinterwoven.com/foto-jim-zurich

A timeline of Karlheinz Weinberger’s life is available at the Gallery Esther Woerdehoff site, the executor of his estate. This information is located at: https://ewgalerie.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Weinberger_en-2022.pdf

Second Insert Image: Karlheinz Weinberger, Untitled Portrait, Zürich, circa 1970s, Gelatin Silver Print, Karlheinz Weinberger Estate

Fourth Insert Image: Karlheinz Weinberger, Untitled, Portrait from 2011 “Jeans”, Swiss Institute, New York City

Stanley Stellar

Photography by Stanley Stellar

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1945, Stanley Stellar is an American photographer whose five decades of work captured the beauty and vitality of the LBGTQ community of New York City. His work followed its life through the 1969 Stonewall Riots, the first Gay Pride Parades and evolving Gay Liberation Movement, as well as the realities of the HIV/AIDs epidemic. As a participant and a documenter, Stellar produced works that have become historic and cultural references for both the young and old.

Stanley Stellar studied photography and graphic design at New York City’s Parsons School of Design, one of the oldest schools of art and design in New York City. Upon graduation, he began work as art director for the advertising agency Art Direction. Stellar’s career during the 1970s  included countless book designs as well as editorial design and art direction for numerous magazines and publishing houses.

Stellar’s purchase of a Nikon camera in 1976 began his career as a photographer. Among the artists who influenced him were fashion and portrait photographer Richard Avedon, Peter Hujar known for his black and white portraits, and Bruce Davidson, a regular photographer for “Life” and “Look” magazines. Stellar, however, developed his own style and began photographing unequivocally gay images of men that reflected the world he knew. 

Stanley Stellar’s work concentrated on the everyday life of gay men in New York City. He initially began taking street photographs of men with tattoos on their arms, as an inquiry about a tattoo made the request for a photograph easier. Stellar shot many images of gay men walking and gathering on Christopher Street as well as meeting at the abandoned warehouses and piers in Manhattan’s West Village.

One of Stellar’s most iconic street photographs, the first to be mass-produced on postcards, was a 1970 photo of a young man, who after having his arm tattoos photographed, lifted his shirt to show two bright bird tattoos on each chest muscle. Taken at a time when tattooing was illegal in New York City, this single shot by Stellar became a homoerotic image nobody had ever made before.

Stanley Stellar’s early design experiences, essentially photo-journalism, are apparent in all of his work; they all  display a simplicity of composition, recurrence of themes, and honest unembellished depictions of the subject. Throughout most of Stellar’s years of documentation, homosexuality was still illegal in many states; it was not until 2003 that all laws against same-sex activity were invalidated. Stellar’s photographs captured the confidence, intimacy and the energy of the LBGTQ community through all those difficult years.

Stellar’s photography has been shown in many galleries throughout the United States and Europe and has been featured in many international magazines. From May to July in 2011, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art featured an exhibition of Stellar’s work entitled “Stanley Stellar: Photographer”. This exhibition coincided with the release of Stellar’s 2011 publication “The Beauty of All Men”, curated by author and publisher Peter Weiermair. In 2018, Stellar published a second collection of photographs entitled “Into the Light: Photographs of the NYC Gay Pride Day from the 70s Till Today”, through the Bruno Gmeunder Press.

Represented by the Kapp Kapp Gallery on Manhattan’s Walker Street, Stanley Stellar had three solo exhibitions in the gallery. The first show was the 2019 “Photographs 1979-1992” which was followed in 2020 by “Night Life”, an exhibition of twenty-four images documenting New York’s queer nightlife between 1981 and 1992. Stellar’ third exhibition with Kapp Kapp was the 2022 “Stanley Stellar: The Piers (1976-1983)” which featured a suite of unseen photographs of the Christopher Street Piers. The Piers exhibition was held at the grand opening of Kapp Kapp’s Tribeca gallery. 

“When I was an editorial art director in the 70s, I used to think I wanted to design other people’s photographs graphically. Possess them in that way. Then in 1976, it became clear to me that I wanted to take my own images of what I had never freely seen, of who and what I was hungry to see, to record my existence through my individual vision of it. 

A combination of masculinity, detail, individuality and human vulnerability catches my eye. Men who are at home within themselves, alive in their ability to share some spark of their humanity with me. Men who have an inner life and an inner light that I recognize within me, within both of us.” —-Stanley Stellar

Notes: Stanley Stellar’s website with archived images and contact information is located at: https://www.stellarnyc.com

Kapp Kapp Gallery’s article on Stanley Stellar’s exhibitions can be found at: https://www.kappkapp.com/artists/stanley-stellar/media

David McGillivray’s 2023 article entitled “Six Pictures by Iconic Photographer Stanley Stellar that Captured Male Beauty in All Its Glory” is located at the Attitude section of Yahoo News: https://uk.news.yahoo.com/6-pictures-iconic-photographer-https://uk.news.yahoo.com/6-pictures-iconic-photographer-stanley-130415741.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAIwNAmykxGP71NvJgEczfNbjN6iGpmJ3cDlrIaDDOBhi0Wq4U-

New York-based writer Miss Rosen has written a short article about Stanley Stellar on her photography site Blind located at: https://www.blind-magazine.com/stories/new-york-queer-love-on-the-west-side-piers/

Tony Wilkes’s January 2022 article on Stanley Stellar for the online art magazine AnOther, can be found at: https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/13813/a-lost-utopia-stanley-stellar-s-portraits-at-new-york-s-gay-piers-kapp-kapp

Top Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “Portrait of Stanley Stellar”, 1981, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Stanley Stellar, “Late Afternoon”, 1980, The Piers Series,  Gelatin Silver Print

Third Insert Image: Stanley Stellar, Untitled, circa 2000s, Color Print

Fourth Insert Image: Stanley Stellar, “Danny, September”, 1982, The Piers Series, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Stanley Stellar, “At a Pay Phone on the Corner of Christopher and Bleecker Streets, NYC”, 1981, Gelatin Silver Print

Raymond Carrance

The Artwork of Raymond ‘Czanara’ Carrance

Born in Paris on the twenty-fourth of January in 1921, Raymond Carrance was a French photographer and book illustrator whose work became known under the name Czanara. One of the little-known erotic artists of the twentieth-century, he began his career as a costume and set designer for theatrical companies and as a graphic designer for commercial brands, among which was France’s mineral water company Perrier.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Raymond Carramce was commissioned to create elaborate etchings and lithographs as illustrations for published editions by author Pierre Jules Renard and playwright Cyrano de Bergerac. He also illustrated a 1951 edition of Henry du Montherlant’s classic theatrical play “La Ville Dont le Prince Est un Enfant (The City Whose Prince is a Child)”. Clarrance also received a commission for seventeen copper engravings as signed illustrations for a 1971 limited edition folio which included writer Jean Giono’s “Le Chant du Monde: Bourg-Le-Reine (The Song of the World)”. This folio was a special tribute to Jean Giono who had passed away on the eighth of October in 1970. 

As a photographer, Carrance’s private catalogue of homoerotic work is reminiscent of the magical-realist style of his contemporaries, the painters Paul Cadmus and Jared French. His images are simple compositions without extensive detail, distinctly European in style and reverential in nature. Carrance’s unique work contained both simple nude portraits and dreamlike scenes composed with overlaid graphics. The desired atmosphere of these collaged male nude scenes was established by layers of superimposed photographs depicting props, flowers, bodily details, or simple patterns and shadows. Carrance exhibited both his photographic and illustrative work in several venues throughout Paris during the 1960s and 1970s.

Raymond Carrance died in Paris on the fourth of June in 1998 at the age of seventy-seven. He passed in obscurity without heirs; his entire body of work was sold at auction. Carrance’s work was rediscovered by art collector David Deiss who acquired the contents of Carrance’s atelier from a Lyon bookseller upon his death. Focused on the discovery of unknown artists of significance, Deiss is responsible for publishing the 2007 monograph “Czanara: Photographs and Drawings”, an imprint of Carrance’s work through Antinous Press. This imprint was the first book published by creative director Sam Shahid’s new press.

Nicole Canet, publisher and owner of the Parisian gallery “Au Bonheur du Jour”, exhibited her collection of Carrance’s drawings and photographs at her gallery in 2010. The gallery and its publishing arm are known for their focus on early European homoerotic photographers; Canet is recognized for her work as a researcher and archivist of sexual sociology in Paris.  

Notes: For those interested, the Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art gallery has an extensive collection of Raymond Carrance’s photographs, drawings and engravings on their site. The gallery also carries the work of such artists as Jim French, Jean Cocteau and Greg Gorman, among others. Their site is located at: https://wesseloconnor.com/exhibits/czanara/index.php

Auteur Shutter: Studies in Photography has an excellent article entitled “Czanara (Raymond Carrance): Homoerotic Surrealist Photography”, including various reference links, on its site: https://auteurshutter.wordpress.com/2025/07/04/czanara-raymond-carrance-exploring-homoerotic-surrealist-photography/

Top Insert Image: Raymond Carrance, “Flanders, Belgium”, circa 1950-1960s, Vintage Print, 24 x 18 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Raymond Carrance, “Venice”, circa 1950-1940s, Vintage Print, 18 x 17 cm, Private Collection

Konstantin Somov

Konstantin Somov, “The Boxer”, Portrait of Mikhailovich Snejkovsky, 1933, Oil on Canvas, 54.8 x 46 cm, Private Collection

Born in Saint Petersburg in November of 1869, Konstantin Andreyevich Somov was a Russian artist and founding member of the artistic movement Mir Iskusstva, World of Art, that became a major influence on Russian artists of the early twentieth-century. Konstantin Somov was the second son of Andrei Somov, an art historian and senior curator at the Hermitage Museum, and Nadezhda Konstantinovna, a talented musician and well-educated daughter of the Lobanovs nobility. 

Konstantin Somov attended the Karl May School in Saint Petersburg where he became close friends with classmates Dmitry Filosofov, later author and literary critic, and Alexandre Benois, future historian and influential designer for the Ballets Russes. At the age of twenty, Somov entered the Imperial Academy of Arts and studied from 1888 to 1897 under Ukrainian-born historical and portrait painter Ilya Repin. While at the academy, he developed lasting friendships with Sergei Diaghilev, the future founder of the Ballets Russes, and Léon Bakst, a painter who became an influential costume designer for Diaghilev’s company.

In the summer of 1895, Somov and Alexandre Benois stayed at a dacha in the village of Martyshkino near the coastal city of Oranienbaum. The landscapes he created and exhibited became his first major success with praise from both critics and artists. Somov graduated from the Academy in 1897 and continued his education at the Académie Colarossiin Paris. From 1897 to 1890, he worked on a portrait of Elizaveta Martynova, clothed in an old-fashioned dress, entitled “Lady in Blue”. Martynova was a painter, a graduate of the Imperial College of the Arts, who died at the age of thirty-six from tuberculosis. In this portrait finished four years before her death, Martynova’s delicate and trembling figure, frail with yellowish skin, stands alone in a park facing spectators with a face full of sorrow.

After the founding of the Mir Iskusstva in 1898, Konstantin Somov served as an editorial board member and contributed illustrations and designs to its magazine edited by Sergei Dlaghilev. During the 1910s, he created a series of harlequin scenes and illustrations for a poetry volume by Alexander Blok. Somov’s work was now exhibited in the United States and Europe, particularly in Germany where a 1909 monograph on his work was published.

In 1910 at the age of forty, Somov met the eighteen-year old Methodiy Lukyanov who became his close longtime companion and part of the Somov family. Lukyanov helped in the household, organized exhibitions and became Somov’s trusted advisor and critic. Somov painted many portraits of Lukyanov, among which is a large 1918 portrait which depicted Lukyanov seated on a sofa in pajamas and robe; this work is now housed in St. Petersburg’s Russian Museum. Somov and Lukyanov’s relationship would continue for twenty-two years until Lukyanov’s death from tuberculosis in April of 1932.

Konstantin Somov had a penchant for drama and was drawn to the elegant but bawdy nature of French erotic writing of the 18th century. From 1907 to 1919, he worked on illustrations, some suggestive and others explicit, for “Le Livre de la Marquise”, an anthology of eighteenth-century erotic French poetry and prose by Lachos, Casanova and Voltaire. Somov’s work became more erotic as time progressed. The most explicit of these was an eight-hundred copy edition published in 1917 at St. Petersburg’s R. Golike & A. Vilborg & Company. 

Although initially greeted with enthusiasm, the Russian Revolution from 1917 to 1923 created a deterioration in living conditions. Shortly after the government nationalized his apartment, Somov was evicted; he did however manage to retain the rights to his own artwork. In December of 1923, Somov became part of the Russian Exhibiton and, as a member of the delagation, traveled to the United States where he represented the city of Petrograd. He never returned to to his homeland. After leaving the United States in 1925,  Somov settled in Paris where he reunited with his old friends Alexandre Benois, Léon Bakst and Benois’ niece, the painter Zinaida Serebryakova. 

Konstantin Somov, in terms of his artistic influences, felt closer to the Old Masters rather than the work of his contemporaries. He was particularly drawn to the work of eighteenth-century Rococo painter François Boucher known for his idyllic pastoral scenes. While in Paris, Somov predominantly painted miniatures and portraits. The still life became one of his favorite subjects and would perform an important role in his portraits as it added additional information on the sitter.

Even though established as a well-known artist, Somov continued to live a reclusive lifestyle. In June of 1930, he met Boris Mikhailovich Snejkovsky. Born in Odessa in July of 1910, Snejkovsky was the son of a captain of the Russian Volunteer Fleet and traveled frequently with his family until they settled in Paris. During the 1930s, Snezhkovsky would model, both clothed and nude, for many of Somov’s works including illustrations for an edition of “Daphnis and Chloe”. In February of 1923, Somov painted a portrait of his model entitled “The Boxer”, a half-length nude oil-portrait with boxing gloves on the wall. Snezhkovsky also served as the model for Somov’s 1937 “Obnazhennyl Iunosha (Nude Youth)” now in the State Russian Museum.

Konstantin Andreyevich Somov died in May of 1939, at the age of sixty-nine, in Paris, France. He is buried in the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery, south of Paris. In 2016, Russian art historian Pavel Golubev founded the Somov Society to preserve and study the life and works of Konstantin Somov. Goluvev curated the 2019 “Konstantin Somov, Uncensored” at Ukraine’s Odessa Fine Arts Museum and sponsored the 2019 colloquium “The Lady with the Mask: Homosexuality in the Art of Konstantin Somov” at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Top Insert Image: Konstantin Somov, “Self Portrait”, 1921, Pencil Watercolor on Paper, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Konstantin Somov, “Vladimir Aleksandrovich Somov”, Konstantin Somov’s Nephew, 1925, Oil on Canvas

Third Insert Image: Konstantin Somov, “Lady in Blue”, Portrait of Yelizaveta Martynova, 1897-1900, Oil on Canvas, 103 x 103 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia

Fourth Insert Image: Konstantin Somov, “Boris Snejkovsky with Cigarette”, 1938, Oil on Canvas, 46.4 x 38 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Konstantin Somov, “Daphnis and Chloe”, 1930, Watercolor Illustration, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, United Kingdom