Carl Van Vechten

The Photography of Carl Van Vechten

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

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

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 Upon her death in 1946, he became her literary executor and assisted in the printing of her unpublished writings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stéphane Bouquet: “That Type of Certainty Exists”

Photographers Unknown, That Type of Certainty Exists

If Yi Jui was the case
and Julio is still perhaps the case and it
will never again be the case that Bogdan despite a deep desire
to the contrary and thus if g
is true when B. (for example) puts his hand on me
with his proud smile for now being able to dictate
the events happening thus
it’s 99% certain that not-p if
that type of certainty exists let’s say it’s impossible
and the world makes itself scarce but we can
within 1% or so calculate the sadness beneath the CD
& empty January
on the return train
towards nothing and
finally a subtle outline waiting on the quay

Stéphane Bouquet, The Loves That Stay I, The Next Loves, Translated by Lindsay Turner, 2020, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York

As the birthday party
mentally accompanied by yesterday’s videostore salesman
who wrapped the gift. . . .
then dancing endlessly
will that be enough to make a special sonnet
where all the order
gathered yesterday into the combed perfection
of his hair

. . . .all the messedup order might sweetly
spread

Stéphane Bouquet, The Loves That Stay III, The Next Loves, Translated by Lindsay Turner, 2020, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York

Born at Paris in October of 1968, Stéphane Bouquet is a French author and translator, film critic and screenwriter, poet, actor and choreographer. The son of a French nurse and an American military man, his work covers a wide range of genres, disciplines and literary traditions.

Stéphane Bouquet earned his Master of Arts in the field of Economics at the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris. He is an established translator of poets from the New York School, a group of experimental painters and associated poets who lived and worked in the downtown area of Manhattan in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1949, painter Robert Motherwell had coined the name “New York School” for this group. Members included, among others, painters Larry Rivers, Hedda Sterne, and Alfred L. Copley as well as poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, Paul Blackburn, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara.

Bouquet’s work, both literary and formally innovative, covers a wide range of formats from intricate sonnets and lengthly sequential poems to prose reflections and dramatic compositions that explore personal relationships and contemporary urban life. Influenced by American poets Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler, Bouquet incorporates the spoken language of daily life and gay sexuality into his poems. He takes the energy from the poetry of the New York School and blends it with older forms of poetic attitudes from France and Europe to form a personalized approach to life’s details, accidents, and desires.

Stéphane Bouquet is the author of eight collections of poetry as well as a book of essays on poems, the 2018 “La Cité de Paroles (The City of Words)”. Two of these collections have been translated into English by poet Lindsay Turner: the 2019 “The Next Loves”, a collection of frank, sometimes rueful, love poems that trace the intimacy in contemporary gay life: and the 2023 “Common Life”, three poems, a play and three short stories of everyday queer life, politics, and social gatherings. Bouquet has also published three books on film history: the 2008 “Sergei Eisenstein”, Soviet pioneer in the theory and practice of film montage; the history of American filmmaker “Gus van Sant” in 2009, and the 2012 “Clint Fucking Eastwood”, an analysis of the popularity of Eastwood’s films in France .

As a screenwriter, Bouquet wrote twenty screenplays for feature films, non-fiction films and short films. Of these, he is best known for the 1998 comedy “1999” which he co-wrote with actor and comedian Franck Amiack; the 2000 comedy “Hors Jeu (Out of the Game)” directed by Bouquet and co-written with Amiack; the 2009 comedy short “Nuts” written and directed by Bouquet; and the 2024 television film “The First Eternal” written by Bouquet and now in pre-production. Bouquet also directed Palanquée Films’s 2013 “Douce Nuit (Silent Night)” and UniFrance’s 2009 “Gauche Droite (Left Right)” and 2013 “Maman est Là (Mom is Here)”.

Having a long-standing interest in performance arts, Stéphane Bouquet has given workshops for choreographers at the Centre National de la Danse in Paris and, for stage directors and actors, classes at Switzerland’s La Manufacture in Lausanna. He is a recipient of a 2003 Prix de Rome and a 2007 Mission Stendhal Award, a literary award promoted by the Institut François d’Italie and the French Embassy in Italy to reward the best translators of contemporary French literature to Italian.

Bouquet’s literary work has been featured in France and internationally at festivals, residencies, and events, including the 2017 Frankfurt Book Fair and the 2018 Toronto Festival of Authors.

Notes: A 2024 research article by poet and translator Lindsay Turner, entitled “Translating Utopia: Stéphane Bouquet’s Queer Futurities” can be found at Duke University Press’s Romantic Review website: https://read.dukeupress.edu/romanic-review/article-abstract/115/1/134/387783/Translating-UtopiaStephane-Bouquet-s-Queer?redirectedFrom=fulltext

For the Poetry Society of America, Lindsay Turner wrote a short article, entitled “Visiting Poet: Lindsay Turner on Stéphane Bouquet”, that discussed Bouquet’s 2019 “The Next Loves” poetic collection which she had translated into English: https://poetrysociety.org/poems-essays/visiting-poet/bouquet

The Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s “Full Stop” literary review has an article by writer John Steen on Stéphane Bouquet’s “The Next Loves” at: https://www.full-stop.net/2019/10/16/reviews/john-steen/the-next-loves-stephane-bouquet/

An English translation by Lindsay Turner of Stéphane Bouquet’s poem “As an Excuse” can be found at Louisiana State University’s online literary and arts journal “NDR” produced by graduate students in its MFA Program of Creative Writing: http://ndrmag.org/translations/2020/05/as-an-excuse/

Second Insert Image: Stéphane Bouquet, “Common Life”, February 2023, Translation by Lindsay Turner, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Stéphane Bouquet, “The Next Loves”, September 2019, Translation by Lindsay Turner, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York

Peter Glenville: Film History Series

Photographer Unknown, “Peter Glenville”, Date Unknown, Publicity Shot, Gelatin Silver Print

Born Peter Patrick Brabazon Browne at Hampstead, London in October of 1913, Peter Glenville was a British actor and distinguished director of both theater and film. He was born into the Irish-Catholic theatrical family of Shaun Glenville (née John Brown), one of the prominent comedic pantomime performers of British music halls, and Dorothy Ward, an English pantomime actress of a successful fifty-two year career.

While his parents’ act toured England’s theaters, Peter Glenville attended some of the country’s preeminent boarding schools, including the Jesuit-operated Stonyhurst College, a structured institution that encouraged both excellence and devotion in its students. Excelling in music, religious doctrine and his academic studies, Glenville played on the college’s rugby team, sang in the choir, and was president of its debating society. Drawn to the theater from an early age, he performed his first theatrical role in the school’s 1923 production of “The Last Practice”.

In 1932, Glenville entered Christ Church College, Oxford, as a law student; however, he spent most of his time in its theater department. Glenville became a member of the Oxford Union, the university’s debating society, and the youngest president to have served on the prestigious Oxford University Dramatic Society, the OUDS. After his time at Oxford, Glenville relocated to London where he began his acting career. He joined the leading Shakespearean company and performed at Stratford-upon-Avon’s Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and London’s Old Vic, the Royal Victoria Hall.

During the years of World War II, Peter Glenville remained in London during the Blitz bombings to perform at West End theaters opposite such stars as Vivien Leigh. He appeared in various leading roles in such productions as Edgar Wallace’s Chicago-gangland play “On the Spot” in London’s West End, and Mary Hayley Bell’s horror thriller “Duet for Two Hands” at London’s Lyric Theatre. Glenville, in addition to his acting, started overseeing performances and was eventually appointed Director of the Royal Victoria Hall.

Established as a prominent West End director by the mid-1940s, Glenville worked with such notable writers as Tennessee Williams, Jean-Paul Sartre, Graham Greene, and Terence Rattigan. In 1945, he met theatrical producer Hardy William “Bill” Smith who became both his professional and intimate life partner. In 1949, Glenville and Smith relocated from London to New York City where they continued their work in theater; Smith would produce his partner’s plays in both London and New York. Glenville made his New York directorial debut in October of 1949 with Terence Rattigan’s “The Browning Version” at the Coronet Theatre. In London and Manchester, he later directed Rattigan’s 1954 two one-act plays, collectively entitled “Separate Tables”, that starred Margaret Leighton and Eric Portman.

Peter Glenville followed his debut with several notable productions on Broadway and in Europe. From 1949 to 1973, he directed twenty-one Broadway productions. Among these are playwright William Archibald’s 1950 “The Innocents” based on “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James; Broadhurst Theatre’s 1951 production of “Romeo and Juliet” that featured Olivia de Havilland’s Broadway debut; Bridget Boland’s 1954 “The Prisoner” with Alec Guinness, staged at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theater and London’s Globe Theater; and Michael and Fay Kanin’s 1959 “Rashomon”. Performed at New York’s Music Box Theatre, “Rashomon” received three Tony Award nominations, one of which was Best Direction for Glenville.

In 1959, Grenville’s adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “Ah, Wilderness!” was presented as a musical entitled “Take Me Along”. For his performance as Sid Davis, Jackie Gleason received the Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Musical. Glenville directed the first production in English of Jean Anouilh’s 1959 “Becket or the Honour of God” in 1960. Starring Lawrence Olivier and Anthony Quinn, this play was nominated for five Tony Awards and won four, including Best Play and Best Actor for Anthony Quinn. Glenville continued his Broadway success with other award-winning musicals, comedies and serious dramas.

In the prime of his career, Peter Glenville began to work in the Hollywood film industry with many of the studios’ major stars. His first film with Columbia Pictures and BD Film Corporation was the 1955 psychological thriller “The Prisoner” with Alec Guinness and Jack Hawkins. Glenville stayed with Columbia Pictures for his second film, the the 1958 “Me and the Colonel”, a Golden Globe winning comedy with Danny Kaye. In addition to his directorial work, Glenville had an uncredited acting role in this production. His 1961 drama “Summer and Smoke” for Paramount Pictures received five nominations for the Academy Awards; Glenville was also nominated for a Directors Guild of America Award and the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion.

Glenville directed four more films for various studios, among which were the 1966 British comedy “Hotel Paradiso” for Metro Goldwyn Mayer that starred Alec Guinness and Gina Lollabrigida, and the 1967 American political drama “The Comedians”, an all-star production, although poorly received, that featured Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Lillian Gish, Peter Ustinov and upcoming actors Cicely Tyson and James Earl Jones. Most notable of Glenville’s films was the 1964 British historical drama “Becket”, an adaptation of Anouilh’s 1959 play that starred Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole and John Gielgud. Released by Paramount Pictures, the film was well received at the box office and earned multiple Academy Award nominations, winning the Best Screenplay. This film also won awards from the British Film Academy and British Society of Cinematographers, among others.

Following a Broadway production of Tennessee William’s “Out Cry” in 1973, Peter Glenville retired from active theatrical and film work due to the change in cinema towards violence and method acting. He and “Bill” Smith eventually moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where they developed a notable estate. They spent their final years entertaining their longtime friends and major political figures including heads of State and former Presidents. Peter Glenville died on the third of June in 1996 in New York City from a heart attack at the age of eighty-two.

Notes: Hardy William Smith was born in England on the first of December in 1916 and served in the United States Navy during World War II. After his discharge from service, he remained in England and began a career in the London theater. In 1945, Smith met Peter Grenville and began their long relationship. According to records, Smith resided in New York City and later at White Plains, New York, most probably after Glenville’s death in 1999. Hardy William Smith passed away on the third of October in 2001 at the age of eighty-four. His body is interred at the Gates of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York.

Smith was Grenville’s directorial assistant on his 1951 Broadway production of “Romeo and Juliet” at the Broadhurst Theatre. He also produced three other Broadway shows for Grenville: playwright Ugo Betti’s 1955 drama “Island of Goats” at the Fulton Theatre; Feydeau and Desvallierès’s 1957 comedy “Hotel Paradiso” at the Henry Miller’s Theatre; and Michael and Fay Kanin’s 1959 crime drama “Rashomon” at the Music Box Theatre.

The Peter Glenville Foundation’s online site is located at: https://peterglenville.org

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin is the repository of Peter Glenville’s correspondence, business records, clippings, appointment books and personal records that span the years from 1914 to 2001. A complete inventory of his papers can be found at: https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/findingAid.cfm?eadid=00395

Second Insert Photo: Photographer Unknown, “Richard Burton, Peter Glenville, Elizabeth Taylor”, 1967, Film Set of “The Comedians”, Cinematography Henri Decaē, Metro Goldwyn Mayer

Third Insert Image: Peter Glenville, “Becket”, 1964, Film Poster, Cinematography Geoffrey Unsworth, Paramount Pictures

Fourth Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Peter Glenville and Peter O’Toole”, 1963-64, “Becket” Film Set, Cinematography Geoffrey Unsworth, Paramount Pictures

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Peter Glenville”, 1963-64, “Becket” Film Set, Cinematography Geoffrey Unsworth, Paramount Pictures

Howard Roffman

The Photography of Howard Roffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charles Henri Ford: “Better Watch Out for the Next Cyclone”

Photographers Unknown, Better Watch Out for the Next Cyclone

And you may not have hair as curly as the alphabet
but if your googoo eyes were a bundle of germs
there’d be an epidemic
With your greenhorn complexion
and your grasswidow ways
you’d make a butcher kill a granite cow
and weigh the gravel out for hamburger.
I mean you’d start the eskimos stripteasing,
give dummies the shakes,
get  flyingcircuses  to  crawl  on  their  hands  and  knees.
No I wouldn’t put it past you.
Just let somebody set you on the fence,
by  gosh  foulballs  would  be  annulled
and home-runs the rule.
The weather forcast that overlooked you, baby,
sure better watch out for the next cyclone,
seeing how my uptown’s flattened,
and  my  downtown  a-waving  in  the  wind.

Charles Henri Ford, I Wouldn’t Put It Past You, The Breathless Rock, Flag of Ecstasy: Selected Poems, 1972, Black Sparrow Press, Los Angeles

Born in Hazelhurst, Mississippi in February of 1908, Charles Henri Ford was an American poet, novelist, and artist whose career spanned and influenced twentieth-century’s modernist era. In his lifetime, he exhibited his artwork in Europe and the United States, published over a dozen collections of poetry, directed experimental films, and edited the American literary and surrealist art magazine “View”.

Charles Henri Ford was the first of two children born into the southern Baptist family of Charles and Gertrude Cato Ford. He acquired his formal education at Catholic boarding schools in the American South and had one of his first poems published by The New Yorker magazine in 1927. Ford became part of the modernist literary movement with the publishing of his monthly “Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms” in 1929 and 1930. The magazine introduced new talents such as authors James Farrell and Paul Bowles as well as published submissions by such writers as Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams.

Through “Blues” magazine, Ford communicated with the young novelist Parker Tyler who introduced him to both the poetry and men in the Village areas of Manhattan. Together they collaborated on a novel, “The Young and the Evil”, a fragmented account of bohemian gay life, drag balls and cruising. After his magazine ceased publication, Ford traveled to France and became a member of Gertrude Stein’s salon in Paris. Through Stein, he became acquainted with members of the American expatriate community which included such artists and writers as Natalie Clifford Barney, Kay Boyle, Man Ray, Peggy Guggenheim, Janet Flanner and Djuna Barnes.

Ford had a brief affair with Barnes and traveled with her to Tangiers, Morocco where, while waiting for the publication of “The Young and the Evil”, he typed Barnes’s completed novel “Nightwood” for its publication. Ford returned in 1934 to Paris where he met Russian-born surrealist painter and designer Pavel Tchelitchew, a former Stein protégé whose work was gaining recognition. This creative and loving relationship developed into a strong, though occasionally tempestuous, bond that lasted for twenty-three years. In late 1934, Ford and Tchelitchew left Europe and returned to New York City where they settled into an East Side penthouse.

In 1938, Charles Henri Ford published his first full-length book of poems “The Garden of Disorder” which contained an introduction written by author William Carlos Williams. Influenced by the poetic works of Jean Cocteau, Ford felt that poetry had a relationship with all forms of art, be it a novel, essay or theatrical production. His poetry is easily noticed for its surrealistic format of short spurts of words; however, he also adapted his style to political poetry such as the work he published in the American Marxist magazine “New Masses” , at that time a politically oriented journal which covered anti-lynching and equal rights for women.

In 1940, Ford and Parker Tyler collaborated on the avant-garde and surrealist art magazine “View”, a quarterly publication that established New York as a center of surrealism. The magazine interviewed local artists as well as the many European surrealists who had fled the war in Europe. Contributions to the magazine came from many prominent artists including Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Henry Miller, Georgia O’Keeffe, Marc Chagall and René Magritte, among others. A publishing imprint of “View” magazine, View Editions, was established to publish monographs and volumes of poetry, two of which were André Breton’s 1946 “Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares” and Ford’s 1959 “Sleep in a Nest of Flames”.

Charles Henri Ford and Tchelitchew moved in 1952 to Europe where they continued their artistic careers. Ford had a 1955 photography exhibition “Thirty Images from Italy” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, followed by a 1956 solo exhibition of drawings and paintings in Paris. In July of 1957, Pavel Tchelitchew, now a United States citizen, died at the age of fifty-eight in Grottaferrata, Italy, with Ford by his bedside. His body was taken to Paris and interred in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Ford returned to New York City in 1962 and began to associate with the underground filmmakers and artists involved in the Pop movement. He began to experiment in collage images and created a series of lithographs with spliced-typefaces, acid colors, and pop culture images. A visual form of concrete poetry, these “Poem Posters” were exhibited in 1965 at New York’s prominent Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery on Madison Avenue. In the latter part of the 1960s, Ford focused on directing his own films, the first of which was the 1967 “Poem Posters”, a documentary of his recent exhibition, later entered into the Fourth International Avant-Garde Festival in Belgium. Ford’s second film, the 1971 “Johnny Minotaur”, was a surrealistic film-within-a-film that combined Greek mythology of Theseus and the Minotaur with erotic imagery of male anatomy and sexuality. Only one surviving print of the film is known.

Charles Henri Ford relocated in the early 1970s to Nepal where he purchased a house in Katmandu. In 1973, he hired local teenager Indra Tamang to cook and be his photography assistant. Tamang became basically Ford’s surrogate son, caretaker, and artistic collaborator for the rest of Ford’s life. They toured India and the Mid-East, resided for a period in Paris and Crete, and finally relocated to New York City. Ford purchased an apartment for himself and Tamang in The Dakota, a building that faced Central Park and was well known for its artistic tenants among whom was the actress Ruth Ford, Charles’s sister. Settled in the city, Ford created a series of art projects incorporating his collage materials and Tamang’s photography.

In the 1990s, Ford edited an anthology of articles previously published over the seven-year history of “View” magazine. Published as “View: Parade of the Avant-Garde, 1940-1947”, the 1992 volume’s introduction was written by Ford’s longtime friend, author and composer Paul Bowles. In 2001, Ford published selections from his diaries in a volume entitled “Water from a Bucket: A Diary 1948-1957” that covered the period from his father’s death to the death of Tchelitchew. In the same year, he participated in a two-hour documentary on his life, entitled “Sleep in a Nest of Flames”, directed by James Dowell and John Kolomvakis for Symbiosis Films 2000.

On the twenty-seventh of September in 2002, Charles Henri Ford died in New York City at the age of ninety-four. In his will and testament, Ford left some paintings and the rights to his co-authored novel “The Young and Evil” to Indra Tamang. Ruth Ford died in August of 2009 at the age of ninety-eight; she bequeathed her and her brother’s apartments to Tamang who had been both companion and caretaker. In 2011, Tamang carried Ruth and Charles Ford’s ashes to Mississippi where they were buried in Brookhaven’s Rose Hill Cemetery.

Notes: Charles Henri Ford’s 1991 “Out of the Labyrinth: Selected Poems” is available in its entirety on the Document.Pub site: https://dokumen.pub/out-of-the-labyrinth-selected-poems-0872862518-9780872862517.html

An exhibition review entitled “Charles Henri Ford: Love and Jump Back” by Demetra Nikolakakis for “Musée: Vanguard of Photography Culture” magazine can be found at: https://museemagazine.com/culture/2021/2/25/exhibition-review-charles-henri-ford-love-and-jump-back

The Artforum magazine has an informative 2003 article, written by Michael Duncan, on Charles Henri Ford and his association with novelist Parker Tyler and artist Pavel Tchelitchew: https://www.artforum.com/columns/charles-henri-ford-165330/

The Film-Makers’ Cooperative site has short articles with stills on Charles Henri Ford’s two experimental films “Poem Posters” and “Johnny Minotaur”: https://film-makerscoop.com/filmmakers/charles-henri-ford

Matthew D. Kulisch, one of three curators for the Backwords Blog, wrote an article for the site entitled “Charles Henri Ford: Association and America’s First (Queer) Surrealist Artist” : https://www.backwordsblog.com/single-post/2016/10/12/charles-henri-ford-association-and-americas-first-queer-surrealist-artist

The September 2024 issue of Noah Becker’s “White Hot Magazine” has an article entitled “Love and Jump Back: Photography by Charles Henri Ford at Mitchell Algus”, written by Mark Bloch: https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/henri-ford-at-mitchell-algus/4984

Top Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Charles Henri Ford”, 1930-1940, Gelatin Silver Print, 26.4 x 21.9 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Charles Henri Ford, “Poem Poster (Gerald Malanga as Orpheus)”, circa 1965, Photolithograph, Image 98.4 x 68.1 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Third Insert Image: Robert Geisel, “Charles Henri Ford, The Dakota, NYC”, 1989, Vintage Print

Fourth Insert Image: Charles Henri Ford, “Poem Poster (Soul Map / Jayne Mansfield), circa 1965, Photolithograph, 99.1 x 69.2 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Arthur Tress, “Charles Henri Ford (and Indra Tamang), The Dakota, NYC”, 1997, Gelatin Silver Print, 27.9 x 35.6 cm, Brooklyn Museum, New York

Tony Azito: Film History

Photographer Unknown, “Tony Azito”, 1978, Publicity Photo Card, The AIDS Memorial, New York City

Born Antonio Zito in New York City on the eighteenth of July in 1948, Tony Azito was an American dancer and actor in both film and theater. After attending an audition in 1968 with friends at the Juilliard School, New York City’s performing arts conservatory, he was granted a full scholarship and became one of the first acting students to study under its director John Houseman. Influenced by the work of dancer and choreographer Anna Sokolow, Azito began to study modern dance, an unusual art form for a person of his height- six feet, three inches (190 cm).

Azito left the Juilliard School without finishing his degree, partly as a result of an argument with director Houseman, and performed with Anna Sokolow’s Theatre/Dance Ensemble for two years under the name Antonio Azito. He returned to drama in the 1970s and worked in off-Broadway productions, including several at the East Village’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club headed by director Wilford Leach. In 1971, Azito performed in John Dillon and Eric Bentley’s “The Red, White and Black”, a collaborative effort between La MaMa and the Columbia University School of the Arts.

In 1973, Tony Azito appeared in two productions, one of which was Wilford Leach and John Braswell’s production of the 1872 Gothic vampire novella “Camilla”. After appearing in the 1974 production of Nancy Fales’s “Ark”, he performed with the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Company in Leach’s 1974 “C.O.R.F.A. X. (Don’t Ask)” that toured Europe throughout remainder of the year. Azito’s debut on Broadway was as Samuel, a dancing role created especially for him, in avant-garde playwright Richard Foreman’s revival of “The Threepenny Opera” for the 1976 New York Shakespeare Festival. Azito continued his theater work with a role in Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1977 three-act musical “Happy End” at Broadway’s Martin Beck Theatre and Chelsea Theatre Center.

Azito’s next and best known role was the Sergeant of Police in theatrical producer Joseph Papp’s 1981-1982 modernized version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance” staged at New York City’s Uris and Minskoff Theatres. Azito’s performance earned him a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Musical and a Drama Desk Award in the same category. This Broadway version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s play ran for seven hundred and eighty-seven performances and won both a Tony Award for Best Revival and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Musical.

Tony Azito appeared once more with the New York Shakespeare festival, this time as Feste, the fool in the house of Countess Olivia, in William Leach’s 1986 production of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”. He continued working in theater with performances at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall, Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum at the city’s Music Center, and with the American National Theater Company at Washington DC’s Kennedy Center. Azito’s final Broadway role was Mr. Nick Cricker in William Leach’s 1988 musical “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”.

Walking back from a theater performance of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”, Azito was struck by a New York City taxi that left the scene. Both his legs were badly broken and it took several years until he could walk again. Azito’ss return to the stage was in the 1990 summer stock revival of Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s musical “She Loves Me” in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He later appeared in Edgar Gorey’s two-act revue “Amphigorey: A Musicale” staged in Boston as well as several productions of playwright Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties”.

For his first film role, Tony Azito was given the lead in Howard Goldberg’s 1975 gangster fantasy “Apple Pie”, now considered a musical cult classic. In 1980, he appeared in Mark Reichert’s neo-noir crime mystery “Union City”. Azito’s most memorable film role was a recreation of his Broadway role in Wilford Leach’s 1983 comedic film version of “The Pirates of Penzance”. He appeared in several more films including George Bowers’s 1985 comedy “Private Resort”, Norman Jewison’s 1987 romantic comedy “Moonstruck” and Howard Brookner’s 1989 “Bloodhounds of Broadway”. After a cameo as party dancer Digit Addams in the 1991 “The Addams Family”, Azito’s final film appearance was as the Librarian in the 1993 H.P. Lovecraft horror anthology “’Necronomicon: Book of the Dead”.

During his stay in the hospital after the hit and run taxi accident, Azito was diagnosed with cancer and had tested positive for HIV. He made the decision to fight the cancer with chemotherapy; however, it weakened his immune system to such an extent that his HIV infection became full-blown AIDS. Azito continued his performances in regional theater and appeared in several films before his retirement in 1994. Tony Azito died at the age of forty-six from AIDS on the twenty-sixth of May in 1995 at Manhattan’s Saint Vincent’s Catholic Medical Center. He was survived by his partner Frederick Bertolt Fritz Richter.

Notes: John Towsen’s “All Fall Down: The Craft & Art of Physical Comedy” has a short posting on Tony Azito that contains film clips from a live stage performance at New York’s Delacorte Theater as well as a scene from the 1984 ”Chattanooga Choo-Choo” : http://physicalcomedy.blogspot.com/2011/07/happy-birthday-tony-azito.html

A trailer for the 1975 cult class “Apple Pie” which showcases Tony Azito’s unique dancing style can be seen at the IMDB site: https://www.imdb.com/video/vi1287302169/?ref_=tt_vi_i_1

A musical number with Tony Azito from Wilford Leach’s 1983 film version of “The Pirates of Penzance” can be found at the Free Social Encyclopedia for the World: https://alchetron.com/Tony-Azito

There is a memorial Facebook page for Tony Azito that contains many images, anecdotes, film trailers and Azito’s 1972 “Sing Jumbalaya Sing” song published through Epic Records: https://www.facebook.com/p/Tony-Azito-100063528963851/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Tony Azito, New York City”, The AIDS Memorial, NYC

Second Insert Image: Al Hirschfeld, “Tony Azito (Study for The Pirates of Penzance)”, Ink on Paper, 27.9 x 21.6 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Tony Azito as Sergeant of Police”, Joseph Papp’s “The Pirates of Penzance”, 1981-1982, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Tony Azito”, Date Unknown, Color Print

Richard Stabbert

The Artwork of Richard Stabbert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arthur Tress

The Photography of Arthur Tress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Allen Barnett: “Like Stones in the Walls of Old Churches”

Photographers Unknown, Like Stones in the Walls of Old Churches

      Horst was also the one in the article with AIDS. Every day at 4 A.M., he woke to blend a mixture of orange juice and AL721—a lecithin-based drug developed in Israel from egg yokes and used for AIDS treatment- because it has to be taken when there is no fat in the stomach. For a while, he would muffle the blender in a blanket but stopped, figuring that if he woke us, we would just go back to sleep. He laughed doubtfully when I told him that the blender had been invented by a man named Fred who had died recently. It was also the way he laughed when Perry phoned to say their cat died.
      Stark asked Noah, “Don’t you think you were a little hard on Perry?”
      Noah said, “The next thing you know, he’ll be getting an agent.”
      I said, “We’re all doing what we can, Noah. There’s even a role for personalities like his.”
      He would look at none of us, however, so we let it go. We spoke of Noah among ourselves as not having sufficiently mourned Miguel, as if grief were a process of public concern or social responsibility, as if loss was something one just did, like jury duty, or going to high school. His late friend had been a leader at the beginning of the epidemic; he devised a training program for volunteers who would work with the dying; he devised systems to help others intervene for the sick in times of bureaucratic crisis. He was the first to recognize that AIDS would be a problem in prisons. A liberal priest in one of the city’s prisons once asked him, “Do you believer your sexuality is genetic or environmentally determined?”. Miguel said, “I think of it as a calling, Father.” Dead, however, Miguel could not lead; dead men don’t leave footsteps in which to follow. Noah floundered.
      And we all made excuses for Noah’s sarcasm and inappropriate humor. He once said to someone who had put on forty pounds after starting AZT, “If you get any heavier, I won’t be your pallbearer.” He had known scores of others who had died before and after Miguel, helped arrange their funerals and wakes. But each death was beginning to brick him into a silo of grief, like the stones in the walls of old churches that mark the dead within.

Allen Barnett, The Times as It Knows Us, Excerpt, The Body and Its Dangers, 1990, St. Martin’s Press, New York

Born in May of 1955 at Joliet, Illinois, Allen Barnett was an American short story writer, activist and educator. He initially studied theater at Chicago’s Loyola University and later relocated to New York City to further his studies and acquire work as an actor. Barnett studied at Manhattan’s The New School and at Columbia University where he earned his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in 1981.

In the late 1980s, Barnett worked for American music industry executive Herbert Breslin, who was influential in the early careers of many in the music field, most notably Luciano Pavarotti and Plácido Domingo. In 1986, Barnett published his first short story “Succor” in “Christopher Street”, an American gay-oriented magazine founded in New York City by publishers Charles Ortieb and Michael Denneny.

Learning of the published story, Herbert Breslin forwarded Allen Barnett’s short stories to St. Martin’s Press, a major Manhattan publisher with six imprints, that was founded by England’s Macmillan Publishers. Through St. Martin’s Press, Barnett’s short story “Philostorgy, Now Obscure” was published in “The New Yorker” magazine, a serious publisher of essays, fiction and journalism.

Barnett lived in New York City at a time when AIDS was building into an epidemic force. It became a vicious disease that was occurring within an environment of medical ignorance as well as indifference on the part of both the political and media establishments. Barnett was one of the earliest volunteers for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a task he continued year after year. He was also a co-founder in 1985 of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) that sought to end homophobic reporting by media organizations. Through the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, Barnett was an AIDS educator for New York’s 23rd Street YMCA.

Allen Barnett only published one volume of short stories in his lifetime, “The Body and Its Dangers”, published in January of 1990 by St. Martin’s Press. This book is widely regarded as one of the most significant depictions of gay life at the height of the AIDS crisis. In 1991, Barnett’s collection was an nominee for the Hemingway Foundation / PEN Award and the winner of the Ferro-Grumley Award for the year’s best LBGTQ fiction. It also won a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction in the same year.

Barnett died in New York City from AIDS-related causes at the age of thirty-six on the fourteenth of August in 1991. A memorial service was held in mid-September at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.

Notes: One of Allen Barnett’s most notable short stories is “The Times as It Knows Us”. Contained within his 1990 “The Body and Its Dangers”, the story follows its protagonist, Clark, who struggles through life after the recent death of his lover. The full story is available for reading at Harvard’s Resources for Loss located at: https://scalar.fas.harvard.edu/resources-for-loss/the-times-as-it-knows-us-by-allen-barnett-contributed-by-colton-carter

Editor Tom Cardamone’s 2010 “The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered” contains twenty-eight essays including one by Christopher Bram that examines Allen Barnett’s life and work. Although there appears to be no recent reprints, used copies are available through various venues; it is also available on Kindle.

John Eric Broaddus

The Artwork of John Eric Broaddus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jubi Arriola-Headley: “An Oracle Done Hiding At Last”

Photographers Unknown, An Oracle Done Hiding At Last

Imagine now how your fingertips throb (1)
in silence, wild, (2) an oracle done hiding at last,
all the mystery made, (3) all the grave markers,
all the crude headstones – water-lost, (4) I think
by now the river must be thick (5) – red is the operative
word. (6) What a relief it would be to scream yourself hoarse, (7)
let the empty stage receive the light, (8) linger only with
healthy ideas. Salty ones. (9) God give us a long winter
and quiet music and patient mouths. (10) (We talk about God
because we want to speak in metaphors, (11)
como un demonio sin freno, (12) between hot dog stands
and hallelujahs.) (13) Change our fates, shoot down
the plagues, beginning with time, the children sing to you. (14)
Ha. (15) You have to face the underside of everything
you’ve loved; (16) there will be no more sons. (17)

1. Olga Broumas, (…imagine now/how your fingertips throb,,,)
2. Cecilia Vicuña, “Jungle Kill”
3. Carl Phillips, “Unbridled”
4. Natasha Trethewey, “Elegy for the Native Guards”
5. Natasha Trethewey, “Elegy” (I think by now the river must be thick)
6. Linda Dove, “Fear is a Hummingbird Drunk on Taillight”
7. Raymond McDaniel, “No, You Shut Up”
8. Jon Davis, “Gratitude”
9. Alain Border, “Sleep Log”
10. Adam Zagajewski, “A Flame”
11. Jericho Brown, “To Be Seen”
12. cecilia Vicuña, “Horticultura”
13. Matthew Olzmann, “My Invisible Horse and the Speed of Human Decency”
14. Arthur Rimbaud, “To A Reason”
15. Jubi Arriola-Headley
16. Adrienne Rich, “Twenty-One Love Poems” (Poem V)
17. Chelsea Dingman, “Elegy for Empty Rooms”

Jubi Arriola-Headley, Cento, original kink, 2020, Sibling Rivalry Press

Born in Boston, Jubi Arriola-Headley is a Black queer first-generation American poet and author whose work explores the issues of joy, manhood, and vulnerability. In his work, vulnerability is the key to preserving one’s own authenticity and humanity. With the hope that you will be loved regardless, one has to take the risk of being known for who you really are.

The son of Barbadian parents, Jubi Arriola-Headley is a descendent of a long line of Caribbean story tellers. He earned his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Miami and is a 2018 PEN American Emerging Voices Fellow. Arriola-Headley’s work explores the themes of masculinity, vulnerability, joy, rage and tenderness. His poems have been published with Southern Humanities Review, Nimrod, The Nervous Breakdown, and the Beloit Poetry Journal, among others.

Currently, Arriola-Headley is the author of two collections of poetry, the first being “original kink” published in 2020 by the Sibling Rivalry Press in Arkansas. This volume of poems, written in casual speech rhythm, relentlessly probes the issues of family dynamics, manliness, injustice, and cruelty, both self-inflicted and imposed. The “original kink” collection was the recipient of the 2021 Housatonic Book Award for Poetry presented by Western Connecticut State University.

Jubi Arriola-Headley’s second volume of poetry “Bound” was released in February of 2024 by Persea Books, a New York press co-founded by Michael and Karen Braziller. A collection of lyrical poems in varied poetic format, “Bound” boldly examines conventional notions of race, sexuality, gender and pleasure in an attempt to create a world where Black and queer individuals can live without trauma. Plotting a new path to life, Arriola-Headley points out what it means to be human and how we can find freedom and liberation in the very spaces we thought would destroy us.

Arriola-Headley is currently working on a memoir in an essay format. An essay from this work, entitled “Pissant”, explored his teenage years in 1980s Boston, the racism he faced, his queer desires, and the hyper-masculinity of his immigrant father. This excerpt won the first place 2023 Prize for Creative Nonfiction presented by Florida’s First Pages organization, a non-profit that recognizes and encourages emerging writers.

Jubi Arriola-Headley currently lives with his husband on ancestral Tequesta, Miccosukee, and Seminole lands in South Florida. His website, which contains selected poems, interviews and videos, is located at: https://www.justjubi.com

Notes: A video is available online at the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation site on YouTube showing Jubi Arriola-Headley reciting his poem “Superhero Origin Story (S. O. S.)”.

An October 2020 interview between Jubi Arriola-Headley and PEN America’s Jenn Dees and Michelle Franke can be located at the Pen America site: https://pen.org/the-pen-ten-jubi-arriola-headley/

A 2024 audio interview between Poetry Foundation’s Ajanaé Dawkins and Brittany Rogers and poet Jubi Arriola-Headley can be found at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/audio/1530526/jubi-arriola-headley-vs-masculinity?query=jubi%20a

Adrian Lee Kellard

The Artwork of Adrian Lee Kellard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dirk Bogarde: Film History Series

Photographer Unknown, “Sir Dirk Bogarde”, circa 1950s, Studio Portrait, Gelatin Silver Print, The Rank Organization, London

Born Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde at West Hampstead, London in March of 1921, Dirk Bogarde was an English actor, screenwriter and novelist. After becoming a matinee idol through his work in such films as the 1954 “Doctor in the House” and 1958 “A Tale of Two Cities”, he made a bold and provocative career decision to accept those challenging roles that pushed the scope of cinema.

Dirk Bogarde was the eldest of three children born to Ulric van den Bogaerde, the art editor of London’s “The Times”, and former Scottish actress Margaret Niven. When living conditions became crowded at the family’s north London home, he lived for a period with relatives in Scotland where he attended Glasgow’s University College School and Allan Glen’s High School of Science. Under a 1937 scholarship, Bogarde completed a two-year study of commercial art at the Chelsea College of Art where he attended classes led by draftsman and sculptor Henry Moore.

Bogarde worked as a commercial artist and set designer in the late 1930s. Interested in acting, he apprenticed with Sally Latimer and John Penrose’s Amersham Repertory Players and made his acting debut, albeit with only one line, at the small, independent Q Theater in west London. Bogarde’s stage debut in London’s West End occurred a few months later in John Boynton Priestley’s 1939 comedic drama “Cornelius”. In the same year, he made his film debut as an uncredited extra in Anthony Kimmins’s 1939 musical comedy “Come On George!” which starred George Formby and Patricia Kirkwood.

After Nazi Germany, the Slovak Republic and the Soviet Union invaded Poland, Dirk Bogarde joined the Queen’s Royal Regiment in 1940 as an officer in the Air Photographic Intelligence Unit. He eventually achieved the rank of Major and, in his five years of active duty, was awarded seven medals for his service. In addition to his military duties, Bogarde painted and wrote poetry during the war; his paintings of England’s war effort are housed in London’s Imperial War Museum. As a member of the Photographic Intelligence Unit, Bogarde, at the age of twenty-four, was at the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, an experience that had a profound, lasting effect on him.

Bogarde returned to acting after the war and made his first appearance, under the stage name of Dirk Bogarde, in the 1947 BBC studio production of Michael Clayton Hutton’s “Power Without Glory” held at London’s Fortune Theater. After signing a contract in 1947 with the entertainment conglomerate The Rank Organization, he was given the role of a police radio caller in John Carstairs’s 1947 film noir “Dancing with Crime”. His first credited role was that of the sweet-talking footman William Latch in Ian Dalrymple and Peter Proud’s 1948 drama “Sin of Esther Waters”. Initially given a supporting role in this proposed Stewart Granger film, Bogarde was chosen for the lead role after Granger left the production. His acting skill opposite Kathleen Ryan in this 1948 film led to a long-term contract with the Rank studio.

After three years as an apprentice Rank actor, Dirk Bogarde was given the role of a young criminal in Basil Dearden’s 1950 crime thriller “The Blue Lamp”. The film became the most successful feature of the year and established Bogarde as an actor of note. His role as the cop killer Tom Riley was the first of many intense but fascinating villains he would play. A few years later, Bogarde became one of the most popular British actors in the 1950s through his role as a medical student in Ralph Thomas’s 1954 light comedy “Doctor in the House”. One of the most successful films in the Rank Organization’s history, the comedy spawned six sequels and both a television and radio series. .

After meeting black-listed American expatriate director Joseph Losey, Bogarde appeared as convict Frank Clemmens in Losey’s successful 1954 crime film noir “The Sleeping Tiger”. Their association would result in several important films a decade later, most notably the 1963 chilling British drama “The Servant” and the 1967 Cannes Film Festival Special Jury winner “Accident”. Bogarde starred in over a dozen films during the 1950s including Philip Leacock’s successful 1956 “The Spanish Gardener”, Ralph Thomas’s 1958 adaptation of “A Tale of Two Cities”, and Anthony Asquith’s 1959 “Libel”, in which Bogarde played three different roles opposite Olivia de Havilland.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Bogarde acted alongside many renowned stars and under many talented directors. He played the decadent valet Hugo Barrett in Losey’s 1963 “The Servant” which earned him a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award. Bogarde starred as a German industrialist in Luchino Visconti’s 1969 “The Damned” which also featured Swedish actress Ingrid Thulin. Two years later, he portrayed Gustav von Aschenbach in Visconti’s adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novel “Death in Venice”. For the Charles Vidor/George Cukor 1960 biographical romance film “Song Without End”, Bogarde portrayed Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt; his co-stars were French actresses Capucine and Genevière Page.

Dirk Bogarde left acting in 1977 and began a second career as an author. The first work published was a memoir that described his childhood and early career as an actor entitled “A Postillion Struck by Lightning”. Highly literate with an elegant and thoughtful style, Bogarde wrote over his twenty-year literary career fifteen best-selling books of which nine were memoirs and six novels. He was also the author of numerous essays, reviews and poems for print publications.

Bogarde had a minor stroke in November of 1987. Nine years later, he underwent angioplasty and suffered a major stroke following the operation. Although paralyzed on one side and his speech affected, Borgarde completed the final volume of his autobiography and also published an edition of his journalism. In 1992, he was created a Knight Bachelor in the United Kingdom. On the eighth of May in 1999 at the age of seventy-eight, Sir Dirk Bogarde died in his London home from a heart attack. His body was cremated and his ashes scattered at his former estate, Le Pigeonnier, in Grasse, southern France.

Notes: Dirk Bogarde was in a life-long relationship with English actor Anthony Forwood, who was born Ernest Lytton Leslie Forwood in October of 1915 as a descendent of the Forwood Baronetcy, an English landed-gentry family. After Borgarde had gained success in his acting career, he moved to a cottage at the Forwood family home, Buckinghamshire’s Bendrose Estate. Bogarde eventually bought the adjoining estate where he and Forwood lived in its renovated main house until 1960. After residing in both France and Italy for many years, they returned to London in early 1988. Anthony Forwood, who had been previously diagnosed with liver cancer and Parkinson’s disease, passed away at the age of seventy-two in May of 1988.

An extensive history of Dirk Bogarde’s film career, written by feature correspondent Sophie Monks Kaufman for the BBC, is located at: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210322-why-dirk-bogarde-was-a-truly-dangerous-film-star

The official website of the Dirk Bogarde Estate, which contains his book illustrations, personal recordings and home movies, is located at: https://dirkbogarde.co.uk

The Key Military website has a 2021 biographical article in its “Britain at War” series, written by Ellie Evans, on Dirk Bogarde’s service during World War II: https://www.keymilitary.com/article/military-man-behind-matinee-idol

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Sir Dirk Bogarde”, circa 1950s, Studio Publicity Photo, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Basil Dearden, “Dirk Bogarde as Matt Sullivan”, 1952, “The Gentle Gunman”, Cinematography Gordon Dines, Ealing Studios

Third and Fourth Insert Image: Director John Schlesinger, “Dirk Bogarde as Robert Gold”, 1965, “Darling”, Cinematography Kenneth Higgins, Vic Films Production, Appia Films, and Joseph Janni Production

Fifth Insert Image: Director Basil Dearden, “Dirk Bogarde as Melville Farr”, 1961, “Victim”, Cinematography Otto Heller, Rank Film Distributors

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Dirk Bogarde and Anthony Forwood”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Dirk Bogarde Estate

Ellsworth Kelly “Blue Orange”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reginald Shepherd: “Late Rain Clings to Your Leaves, Shaken by Light Wind”

Photographers Unknown, Late Rain Clings to Your Leaves, Shaken by Light Wind

For Robert Philen

You are like me, you will die too, but not today:
you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:
if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been
set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost
radio, may never be an oil painting or
Old Master’s charcoal sketch: you are
a concordance of person, number, voice,
and place, strawberries spread through your name
as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me
of some spring, the waters as cool and clear
(late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind),
which is where you occur in grassy moonlight:
and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium
or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star
in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving
from its earthwards journeys, here where there is
no snow (I dreamed the snow was you,
when there was snow), you are my right,
have come to be my night (your body takes on
the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep
becomes you): and you fall from the sky
with several flowers, words spill from your mouth
in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees
and seas have flown away, I call it
loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you,
a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all,
and free of any eden we can name

Reginald Shepherd, You, Therefore, 2007, Fata Morgana, Green Tower Press

Born in New York City in April of 1963, Reginald Shepherd was an American poet, essayist and educator. A careful observer of language, he was a skilled craftsman who could transform fragments of potential poetic material into cohesively molded poetry.

The son of Blanche Berry, Reginald Shepherd spent his early years with his sister Regina Graham in the housing projects of Bronx, New York. Although raised amid the hardships of the tenements, he found inspiration in the many books that his mother was able to afford. Following the death of his mother just prior to his fifteenth birthday, Shepherd and his sister were cared for by their aunt Mildred Swint at her crowded, three-room house in Macon, Georgia.

Shepherd earned his Bachelor of Arts at Bennington College in Vermont, and his Master of Fine Arts degrees in Creative Writing at Rhode Island’s Brown University and the University of Iowa. In his last year at the University of Iowa, he was awarded the 1993 Discovery Prize by New York’s 92nd Street Y, a prominent arts and cultural center in Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Reginald Shepherd published his first collection of poetry, “Some Are Drowning”, in 1994 through the University of Pittsburgh Press. This collection of passionate poems was chosen by poet and professor Carolyn Forché for the Association of Writers & Writing Program’s Poetry Award. Shepherd’s second collection “Angel, Interrupted”, a volume of lyrical, introspective and streetwise poems, was published in 1996. This was followed three years later by “Wrong”, a poetic collection seen through a historical perspective of events marked by desire, disease, and difference, all aspects of human consciousness.

In 2003, Shepherd’s “Otherhood” was published through the University of Pittsburgh Press. This fourth collection explored the issues of desire, power, blackness, whiteness and the relationship of man and the natural world. “Otherhood”, which referenced these themes through alternating rapid and hypnotic rhythms, was a finalist for the 2004 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize administered by the Academy of American Poets.

Reginald Shepherd’s last volume of poetry in his lifetime, “Fata Morgana” was published in 2007 by Green Tower Press. An intense and mournful collection of lyrical poems fashioned from a mixture of mythology, personal experience, natural science and politics, “Fata Morgana” explored the journey through personal sorrow and loss until its transformative end. This collection by Shepherd was the winner of the Silver Medal of the 2007 Florida Book Awards.

Shepherd was the editor of the 2004 “The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries” and the 2008 “Lyric Postmodernisms”. He was the author of the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist “Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry” and its sequel “A Martian Muse: Further Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry” published posthumously in 2010. A posthumous collection of Shepherd’s poetry, entitled “Red Clay Weather”, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2011.

Reginald Shepherd died in Pensacola, Florida, on the tenth of September in 2008 after a long battle against colon cancer. He was survived by his long-term partner Robert Philen, his sister Regina Graham and his aunt Mildred Swint. A National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Foundation grant winner, Shepherd published over four-hundred poems in his career in both collections and anthologies.

Shepherd taught both Literature and Creative Writing at Cornell University, the University of West Florida, Northern Illinois University, and Antioch University in Yellow Springs, Iowa. He was the recipient of a 1993 Paumanok Poetry Award, the 1994-1995 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, an Illinois Arts Council Poetry Fellowship in 1998, and a 2000 Saltonstall Foundation poetry grant.

“The poem, when it is at its best, when we are at our best, is a kind of agon (struggle) between the poet and the language, and the poet has to bring all his or her resources to bear, or it’s not a real struggle at all, just a performance.”- Reginald Shepherd, “Taking Dictation from a Martian Muse”, Blog Entry, January 2007

Notes: In addition to his poetic and essay writings, Reginald Shepherd authored a poetry, literature and art blog for many years. This site contains many articles discussing Shepherd’s own poetic thought-process as well as the work of those poets he admired. Reginald Shepherd’s Blog can be found at: http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com

A review of Reginald Shepherd’s 2008 collection of essays “Orpheus in the Bronx” originally appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of “Rain Taxi”, a Minneapolis-based book review and literary quarterly publication. It is currently available for reading on The Mumpsimus blog located at: https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2019/07/orpheus-in-bronx-by-reginald-shepherd.html

On the Poetry Foundation site, there several poems as well as a section in which Shepherd offers a revealing portrait of himself and his poetry: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/reginald-shepherd

A 2003 extensive interview between Reginald Shepherd and writer Brenda Gaines Hunter for Pleiades Magazine has been reissued through the Medium site at: https://medium.com/@bgaineshunter/an-interview-with-reginald-shepherd-e4c60dd328df