Robert Florey: Film History Series

Born in September of 1900 in Paris, Robert Florey was a French-American film director, screenwriter, journalist and actor. He is known for his early career’s avant-garde German expressionist style and for his later work as a reliable studio-system director to complete troubled productions.

Born Robert Fuchs, Florey spent his early years in Paris near the Montreuil studio of George Melies who was producing highly successful films with experimental camera effects. He appeared in a small role in Alfred Lind’s 1916 multi-reel silent film for Signet Films, “Le Cirque de la Mort (The Masque of Life)”. Florey initially worked as a film journalist and then became an assistant director and actor to silent film maker Louis Feuillade. Florey was assistant director for Feuillade’s 1921 “L’Orpheline” and the 1921 film serial “Parisette”. After these films, he relocated to the United States as a Hollywood journalist for the French weekly Cinemagazine. 

Having established himself in Hollywood, Robert Florey became the foreign publicity director for both Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks and the European advance manager for Rudolph Valentino. His first work as an assistant director in the United States was for Gothic Pictures’s 1925 silent drama “Parisian Nights”, that featured an early supporting role for Boris Karloff. Between 1925 and 1927, Florey was an assistant director at the newly established Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. Among his silent films with MGM were the 1926 “La Bohème” and 1927 “The Magic Flame”.

In his early years as a director, Florey did work for multiple studios. His first film was the 1927 silent romantic drama “One Hour of Love” for Tiffany Pictures. Other works included “The Romantic Age”, a silent drama for Columbia Pictures, and “Face Value” for Sterling Pictures, both in 1927. Florey co-wrote and co-directed with cinematic artist Slavko Vorkapić the 1928 silent experimental short “The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra”, a satire of Hollywood with rapid camera movement and superimposition. Widely released in theaters by FBO Pictures, the film is considered a landmark of avant-garde cinema and was entered into the National Film Registry.   

After accepting a contract with Paramount Pictures in 1928, Robert Florey directed the 1929 mystery drama “The Hole in the Wall”, which featured Edward G. Robinson and Claudette Colbert, and co-directed with Joseph Santley the first Marx Brothers film, the 1929 “The Cocoanuts”. After directing four films in Europe, Florey returned to Hollywood and worked for Universal Pictures. Originally given the directorship of the 1931 “Frankenstein”, he was replaced by director James Whale who cast Boris Karloff as the monster. Florey became the director for the 1932 “Murders in the Rue Morgue” with Bela Lugosi. With the help of cinematographer Karl Freund, he transformed Poe’s short story into a Americanized version of German Expressionist films. 

Between 1933 and 1935, Florey worked on fifteen B-movies for the Warner Brothers Studios, principally as director. Among these were the 1933 “Ex-Lady” with Betty Davis; the 1933 “The House on 56th Street” with Kay Francis; the 1934 “Smarty” with Joan Blondell and Warren William; and the 1935 “Woman in Red” with Barbara Stanwyck. From 1935 to 1940, Florey was a director for Paramount Pictures where he made fast-paced, cynically toned films with dramatic lighting. Among these were the 1936 “Hollywood Boulevard” with John Halliday and new actor Robert Cummings; the 1937 “King of the Gamblers” with Claire Trevor and Lloyd Nolan; and the 1937 “Daughter of Shanghai” with Anna May Wong. “Daughter of Shanghai” was later added to the National Film Registry in 2006.

Robert Florey directed three movies for Columbia Pictures in 1941. Among these was the 1941 “The Face Behind the Mask”, a film noir crime drama written from Thomas O’Connell’s play “Interim” specifically for actor Peter Lorre. Following his stay with Columbia, Florey began a ten-year period of freelance work as a director for different studios. Among these films were the Warner Brothers’ 1943 musical “The Desert Song”; Twentieth-Century Fox’s 1943 wartime film “Bomber’s Moon”; Warner Brothers’ 1946 horror film “The Beast with Five Fingers” that featured Peter Lorre; and Charlie Chaplin’s 1947 black comedy “Monsieur Verdoux”. 

After 1951, Florey devoted himself almost exclusively to work as a director in the medium of television. His methodic and quick-paced directing made him particularly suited to episodic television work. Forley’s initial work included two televised specials for Disney Studios in 1951, “The Walt Disney Christmas Show” and “Operation Wonderland”. Over the course of his career in television, he was responsible for over three hundred episodes of such shows as Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, Studio 57, General Electric Theater, Wagon Train, Zane Grey Theater, The Untouchables, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and The Outer Limits, among others. 

Robert Florey published a number of books on film history including the 1927 “Pola Negri”, a biography of Polish stage and screen actress Pola Negri; the 1927 “Charlie Chaplin”; and the 1966 “Le Lanterne Magique (The Magic Lantern)”, which documented the history of cinema. He was honored in 1950 with a knighthood in the French Légion d’Honneur. Robert Florey died in May of 1979 at the age of seventy-eight in Santa Monica, California. His body was interred at the Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles. 

“Florey was a free spirit who valued his personal liberty within the studio system (but) he never had the commercial clout to make that system work for him…he amused himself with second-string projects and B-picture budgets, relatively minor efforts on which he could word undisturbed, casually inserted a personal touch here and there.” —Film historian Richard Koszarski, Hollywood Directors:1914-1940, Oxford University Press, 1976

Second Insert Image: Robert Forley, “Ex-Lady”, Betty Davis, 1933, Warner Brothers Studio, Cinematography Tony Gaudio

Third Insert Image: Gertrude Mitchell, “Robert Florey”, 1936, Set of “Till We Meet Again”, Paramount Pictures, Gelatin Silver Print, Hulton Archives

Fourth Insert Image: Robert Forley, “Murders in the Rue Morgue”, Bela Lugosi, 1932, Universal Pictures, Cinematography Karl W. Freund

Bottom Insert Image: Robert Forley and Joseph Santley, “The Cocoanuts”, Harpo and Chico Marx, 1929, Paramount Pictures, Cinematography George J. Folsey and J. Roy Hunt

Terence Winch: “We Have Judged Our World”

Photographers Unknown, We Have Judged Our World

Small green couch in the living room. I come home at night and sit in it.
‘Law & Order’ is on TV. I have a glass of cheap cabernet and make eggs
for dinner. It gets later and later. I hit the mute button and listen
to the old clock on the piano tick, then tock. I wash my dishes.
I choose tomorrow’s work clothes.

I said to my barber, ‘Give me a haircut that looks exactly
like Frank Sinatra’s wig,’ and he did. My barber is a very nice, gay Egyptian.
I take a hot bath and listen to right-wing talk radio, which I find very relaxing.
I keep wondering where everyone went.

The dog was just here, I’m positive. I can smell dog. There’s another
strange odor in the bathroom. Perfumey. Or maybe it’s Lysol or 409.
The toothpaste is cinnamon flavored.
I spray a ‘Fresh Outdoors’ scent throughout the house.

Maybe I am all alone. Which is not what I really want. I want a party
going on in every room. I want guests in the guest room. I want people taking baths in the bathroom. I consult Each Day a New Beginning for today:
‘We have judged our world and all the situations and people in it
in terms of how their existence affects our own.’

I remember a conversation I had this afternoon with a colleague
about urban turtles. Could they really survive in the fast-paced city? Sure, he
said.
I don’t really care. A friend of mine died in November and I think about him
all the time. I stopped calling him because he never initiated contact with me
and I didn’t like that. But a week or so before he died, he said to me:
‘I always loved seeing you. I loved being in your presence.’
Now he is always talking to me from the beyond, as he had threatened to.
It’s his voice, then the tick tock of the clock, then his voice again.

Terence Winch, Urban Turtles, 2008, PoemHunter Archive

Born in the Bronx section of New York City in November of 1945, Terence Patrick Winch is an Irish-American poet, author and musician. His work frequently focuses on his early experiences in the Bronx, his Irish-American identity, and his interests in music. 

The son of Irish immigrants, Terence Winch spent his early years in the Irish neighborhood of the Bronx. He earned his Bachelor of Arts at Iona University in New Rochelle, New York, and received his Master of Arts in English from Fordham University in 1969. Just before completing his doctorate dissertation, Winch relocated to Washington D.C. in 1971. Iona College later awarded him a honorary doctorate degree in 2014. 

In the early 1970s, Winch joined a group of poets that met above the Community Book Shop in the Dupont Circle area of Washington D.C. Known as Mass Transit or the Dupont Circle School, this group included such writers and poets as Ed Cox, Tim Dlugos, Michael Lally, Tina Darragh, and Doug Lang, among others. The Mass Transit group published its own magazine, Mass Transit, and engaged in both public poetry readings and discussions on civil and gay rights, gender equality and civil activism. After the Community Book Shop closed in 1974, members met at other venues and some organized their own publishing press. Winch, along with Michael Lally and others, co-founded their publishing imprint, Some of Us Press.

Although primarily a poet, Terence Winch has also published both fiction and non-fiction works. He has to date published nine volumes of poetry and two story collections, the 1989 collection of short stories “Contenders” and 2004 collection of non-fiction stories “That Special Place”. Winch’s first volume of poetry, the 1985 “Irish Musicians/American Friends”, won an American Book Award. His second poetry collection, the 1994 “The Great Indoors”, was chosen by poet Barbara Guest, a Robert Frost Medal winner, for the 1996 Columbia Book Award. Winch’s most recent poetry collections include the 2018 “The Known Universe” and the 2023 “The Ship Has Sailed” published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. 

For twenty-four years, Winch worked for the Smithsonian Institute, a U.S. government complex of museums and both educational and research centers. For the majority of his time at the Smithsonian, Winch was Head of Publications at the National Museum of the American Indian. Between 1994 and 2008, he produced five recordings for the Smithsonian Institute that focused on Native American literature and music. Among these were “Creation’s Journey: Native American Music” and “Wood That Sings; Indian Fiddle Music of the Americas”. 

As a musician, Terence Winch played traditional Irish music from childhood. In 1977, he co-founded, along with his brother Jesse and his own son Michael, the band “Celtic Thunder” which plays both traditional and original Irish music. Winch wrote much of the band’s material for its three albums, the latest album being “This Day Too: Music from Irish America” on the Free Dirt label. The best known and most covered of Terence Winch’s compositions is the song “When New York Was Irish” from the Free Dirt-produced album of the same name. 

Winch received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Poetry and was named the winner of a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing. He was a regular book reviewer for the Washington Post from 1975 to 1981 and has contributed work to such publications as The Dictionary of Irish Literature, The Oxford Companion to American Poetry, and New York City’s The Village Voice. Winch has also interviewed many leading Irish authors for the cable television series “The Writing Life”; he was himself  interviewed for the series in 1998 by poet and Georgetown University’s Professor of English Roland Flint.

Notes: Terence Winch’s website, which covers his poetry, prose and music, can be found at: https://www.terencewinch.com/index.html

A short 2017 interview with Terence Winch conducted by Carolyn Farrar for Fordham University’s online Fordham News can be found at: https://news.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/seven-questions-with-terence-winch-musician-songwriter-poet-author/

William Theophilus Brown

The Artwork of William Theophilus Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Paul John Wonner

The Artwork of Paul John Wonner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aldo Pagliacci

Paintings by Aldo Pagliacci

Born in 1931 in San Benedetto del Tronto on the coast of  the Adriatic Sea, Aldo Pagliacci was an Italian painter and self-taught violin craftsman whose artistic talent was evident from an early age. At the age of twenty, he had already exhibited paintings at the Biennale of Venice and the Rome Quadrennial. After these exhibitions, Pagliacci relocated to Rome circa 1930.

In the 1890s, Italy had claimed Ethiopia was an Italian protectorate and tried to conquer the country unsuccessfully. In 1934, Ethiopia was one of the few independent states in a European-dominated Africa. After a border incident in December of 1934 between Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland, Benito Mussolini rejected all attempts at arbitration and, in October of 1935, invaded Ethiopia. In 1936, Pagliacci volunteered for military service as part of the invasion. 

During the second World War, Aldo Pagliacci served as a magazine correspondent but was captured by the British in 1941. Pagliacci was taken to a Rhodesian prisoner of war camp where he was assigned to decorate the camp church’s interior. He claimed he accomplished the task in four months fueled by the cognac and whiskey provided by two Franciscan friars. Sometime after his return to Italy in 1946, Aldo Pagliacci began a  twenty-year travel period in Central and South America. He lived and worked for extended periods in Mexico, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia and Venezuela. 

In 1971, Pagliacci established a studio in Rome and began a period of studio work and travel throughout northern Europe, specifically Germany, Sweden, Holland and Norway. It is known that he began his career as a maker of violins and cellos in Rome at this time. A Pagliacci violin, dated 1973 with a production number of fifty, was auctioned by Tarisio Fine Instruments & Bows in 2021.

No specific information exists as to where Pagliacci learned his skills at crafting musical instruments. Due to the very long and swinging f-shaped openings on the sides of the violin’s body, his violins are believed to be based on those of the Marches region of central Italy. Pagliacci’s models differ from the Landolfi violins of the Madrid area in that they are wider and rounder. The corners of Pagliacci’s violins are short and the arching is flat which produces a more powerful soloist tone. There is no specific knowledge on the number of music instruments he actually created; however it is speculated it was more than one hundred.

In about 1980, Aldo Pagliacci settled on Forio d’Ischia, an island southwest of the city of Naples. He would remain on Forio d’Ischia until his death in 1991. Pagliacci’s paintings are housed in the major museums of Central and South America as well as many private collections, including the collections  of Nelson Rockefeller and film actor Clifton Webb.

Notes: Musical instruments created by Pagliacci occasionally appear at auction sites. A violin, numbered eighty-five and dated 1985, sold through the privately owned London auction house Bonhams for £12,500 (14,542 Euros).

Top Insert Image: Aldo Pagliacci, “Fire in Santa Maria in Montesanto”, 1970, Oil on Canvas, 70 x 50 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Aldo Pagliacci, “In the Bakery”, 1954, Oil on Plywood, 55 x 41 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Aldo Pagliacci, “View of Rome, Ponte Mazzini”, 1948, Oil on Canvas, 75 x 65 cm, Private Collection

Ernst Thom

The Artwork of Ernst Thoms

Born in November of 1896 in the Weser River city of Nienburg, Ernst Thoms was a German painter associated with the New Objectivity movement. Mainly a self-taught artist, he is known for his Surrealist figures, landscapes, still life and portrait paintings, and theatrical sets. 

New Objectivity began in Germany during the 1920s as a reaction against the self-involvement and romantic longings of Expressionism. Expressionism had abandoned nature and artistic tradition and centered itself around emotional experience and inner turmoil in reaction to the modern world and the creation of personal identity. New Objectivity was one of several movements critical of expressionism; it professed both objectivity and utility, a return to  artistic tradition, and a straight-forward approach to art in all its fields.

After serving as an apprentice painter between 1911 and 1914, Ernst Thoms studied for a few months at the Hanover School for the Decorative and Applied Arts before he was called to military service in World War I. At the start of the war, he was captured and held as a prisoner of war in England for five years until 1919. Released at the war’s end, Thoms returned to the Hanover School in 1920 where he studied under painter and graphic artist Fritz Burger-Mühlfeld, known largely for his later abstract works. While studying at Hanover, Thoms became acquainted with painter Grethe Jürgens, also a student of Burger-Mühlfeld, and her circle of New Objectivity artists. 

In the 1920s with reparations for the war and tariffs on its products, Germany’s economy reached a point of super inflation where millions of marks were worthless. Thoms survived by working as a house painter. However in 1924, he found work as a painter of advertisements and theatrical stage sets at Hanover’s opera house. Thoms had his first show in 1926 at the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover. The Kestner Society, a Hanover art institution to promote the arts,  gave him a solo exhibition in 1928 at Berlin’s Galerie Neumann- Nierendorf. Thoms also showed work at exhibitions in Amsterdam, Stockholm and other German cities between 1928 and 1932. 

As a New Objectivity artist, Ernst Thoms worked in an unsentimental style that was often imbued with lyrical or fanciful qualities. His works presented ordinary and undramatic subject matter; however having been influenced by the works of Giorgio de Chirico, Thoms inserted elements of magic realism within the spaces of his scenes. An example is his 1926 “Junk Shop”, an interior scene inhabited by three customers who are surrounded by a myriad of artifacts set at different angles. Thoms’ 1926 “Dachboden (Attic)” is another interior scene that is composed of angular spaces which contain either objects or disclose other locations. “Dachboden” was included in his first exhibition and was purchased by the Hanover State Museum.

In 1931, Thoms joined the Hanover Secession. one of a wave of secessions that constituted a break between avant-garde artists and conservative standard bearers of European academic and official art. The Vienna Secession, which favored the Art Nouveau style, remains the most influential of the various secessions; it was inspired by the 1892 Munich and 1898 Berlin secessions. During the second World War, Thoms was conscripted by the German Reich to military service and served from 1939 to 1940. During the war, both his house and studio were struck by Allied bombing; all of the works that were still his personal possessions were destroyed..

After the end of the second World War, Ernst Thoms continued his painting and returned to Hanover in 1950. He was given a retrospective of his work on his sixtieth birthday by the Kunstverein Hanover, one of the oldest and most renowned art associations in Germany. In 1964, Thoms was awarded the Grand Cross of Merit of the Lower-Saxony Order of Merit. Established in 1815, the Lower Saxony Order of Merit recognizes the subjects of the Kingdom of Saxony for distinguished civic service and virtue; the Grand Cross is the highest of the three classes of crosses. 

Beginning in 1968, Thoms suffered from deteriorating eyesight but continued to paint into his last years. He died at the age of eighty-six in May of 1983 at Wietzen near his birthplace of Nienburg. Thoms is buried in the Kräher Weg in Nienburg/Weser Cemetery.

Top Insert Image: Ernst Thoms, “Selbstbildnis (Self Portrait)”, 1926, Oil on Cardboard, 35.7 x 27 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Ernst Thoms, “Im Lager”, 1917, Gouache on Paper, Museum Nienburg/Weser

Third insert Image: Ernst Thoms, “Fischerdorf in Schweden”, 1931, Mixed Media Ink Watercolor, Museum Nienburg/Weser

Bottom Insert Image: Ernst Thoms, “Selbstbildnis (Self Portrait)”, 1932, Oil on Canvas, 29.4 x 25.5 cm, Private Collection

Frances Faye: Music History

Photographer Unknown, “Frances Faye, circa 1940s, Vintage Studio Portrait, Collection of Tyler Alpern

Born in Brooklyn, New York in November of 1912, Frances Faye was an American cabaret and show-tune singer, recording artist, and pianist. She entertained audiences at sold-out shows in major nightclubs throughout the world over a career that spanned forty-five years. 

Born Frances Cohen to a working-class family in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, Frances Faye attended Girls’ High School on Nostrand Avenue and planned to become a teacher. However at the age of fifteen, she was asked to fill in for a piano player who was scheduled for a banquet. A theatrical agent, who had attended the banquet, was impressed with Faye’s performance and signed her to a contract. Despite her parent’s entreaties, Faye was playing two months later in a Chicago nightclub at a salary of two hundred dollars a week.

Originally an accompanist on piano, Faye became a solo act while working in a popular nightclub in Detroit. She continued her professional career in New York City at the Club Richman, located near Carnegie Hall. Faye quickly developed a following of loyal fans at the Prohibition-era speakeasy Club Calais where she was booked solid for most of 1931. While still in her teens, Faye went from playing in New York City speakeasies to such venues as Harlem’s Cotton Club and La Martinique on West 57th Street. La Martinique launched the careers of many singers of the era and was the location for premiere parties  among which was Walt Disney’s 1941 party for the Broadway premiere of “Dumbo”.

As her popularity grew, Frances Faye began working forty-eight weeks in one year’s time. She incorporated all the popular songs of the era into her performances including “Singing in the Rain” and “Love for Sale”. Faye played the Showplace in Lynbrook, Long Island in 1929 and entertained the passengers onboard the transatlantic S.S. Belgenland of the Red Star Line in 1931. She shared billing with Bing Crosby in January of 1932 at New York City’s Paramount Theater. In 1933, Faye was performing at Chicago’s Chez Paree, known for its glamorous atmosphere, elaborate dance numbers and top entertainers.

By the middle of the 1930s, Faye was established as a New York entertainer. She sold out venues and captured the audiences with her song delivery and strong piano playing. Typically doing three shows an evening, Faye became known, according to newspaper and radio commentator Walter Winchell, as “The Syncopating Cyclone-Originator of Zaz-Zu-Zaz”. Her contracts kept being extended and her salary kept rising. In 1938 Faye played at Billy Rose’s Casa Manana, a large outdoor amphitheater and restaurant in Fort Worth, Texas, known for its fountains and large revolving stage. Booked into London’s Paradise Club for a fortnight, Faye performed for over three months due to the demand. 

In 1936, Bing Crosby, who had a long-term contract with Decca Records,  brought Frances Faye to the company’s recording studio for her first record, a single containing “No Regrets” and “You’re Not the Kind of a Boy”. After she finished a performance in Chicago, she traveled to California to make an appearance in the Paramount 1937 comedy-romance “Double or Nothing”. Faye plays, with her usual energetic style, the musical number “After You” and scats in duets with Martha Raye and Bing Crosby. She stayed a few months in Los Angeles and performed nightly at its Famous Door nightclub. During one of her free times, Faye heard Bruz Fletcher sing his ballad “Drunk with Love” at the Sunset Strip’s Club Bali. This song would become one of her signature works.

During the 1940s, Faye transformed both herself and her style. After losing weight, she bought a new wardrobe and appeared in public dressed more elegantly. Latin rhythms, which characterized her later work, began appearing in her songs. The frenzied piano style of Faye’s work in the 1930s was replaced with a rich rhythmic accompaniment of guitar, bass and drums. Her 1946 album “Frances Faye” for International was more lyrical than her earlier works. Among the songs in this album was her first rendition of gay singer Bruz Fletcher’s “Drunk with Love”. Over her career, Faye included this song in her performances and on three separate albums. 

In the late 1940s, Frances Faye was still playing to big crowds but had already begun performing on the new medium of network television. She rarely toured at this time and preferred only shows in Las Vegas, Florida, and her home state of California.  Faye found a new source of income as a recording artist. She recorded for ten years with Capitol Records and then moved to Bethlehem Records, a major 1950s jazz label founded by Gus Wildi, For the four albums she recorded at Bethlehem, Faye worked with such musicians as Herbie Mann, Frank Rosolino, and Maynard Ferguson, as well as with conductor and arranger Russ Garcia. Some of the musicians were willing to record without credit due to contractual problems. 

Faye’s shows became a fixture at the Sunset Strip’s Interlude and later at the downstairs nightclub Crescendo where she would be booked for months in a row. Many celebrities came to see her performances including Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, and Frank Sinatra, among others. While playing at the Hotel Riviera to capacity crowds, Faye tripped over a bath mat in her hotel room and broke her hip. For a period of eight years, she was in pain, had to endure three major operations and could not work for long periods of time. Faye used both crutches and cane to continue her performances. Due to the extent of her injury, she would appear already seated at her piano as the curtains parted. After a hip surgery alleviated her pain, Faye continued performing on tour into the early 1980s. 

In 1978, Frances Faye appeared in her second film, “Pretty Baby” directed by Louis Malle; she played the role of an elderly cocaine-sniffing madam and retired from entertainment in the early 1980s. After a series of strokes, Frances Faye died at the age of seventy-nine in November of 1991 in the home she shared with her long-term partner Teri Shepherd.

Notes:  Frances Faye had two brief marriages in the 1940s. The first was with Abe Frosch in January of 1942; the second was former football star Sam Farkas in October of 1944. At a nightclub in the late 1950s, Faye met the much younger, twenty-two year old woman named Teri Shepherd who became her life-long companion. Faye was very frank about her sexual orientation even as the press and her album covers referred to Shepherd as Faye’s secretary.

The majority of the information in this article was found in painter and educator Tyler Alpern’s extensive biography on Frances Faye, “Frances Faye: Let Me Hear It Now”. The article, the most complete of any of the sources I found on the internet, contains many anecdotes by friends and musicians who knew her. If you are interested in Faye’s accomplishments and life, this is the article to read. It is located at http://tyleralpern.com/Faye.html

I also recommend watching photographer Bruce Weber’s 2001 film journal “Chop Suey”. Narrated by Weber, this highly-pesonal, eclectic film looks back at Weber’s career, his subjects and the subtext of his work. Among the many archival film sections of the film are segments of Frances Faye performing aa well as segments in which Teri Shepherd discusses her life with Faye. The film is available on many venues including Tubi (free), Amazon Prime, and Apple TV

Top Insert Image: Maurice Seymour Studio, “Frances Faye”, Publicity Photo, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Frances Faye, “Relaxin’ with Frances Faye”, 1956, 33 i/3 Vinyl, Bethlehem Records

Third Insert Image: Theodore Reed, “Double or Nothing”, (Frances Faye and Martha Raye), 1937, Film Clip Photo, Cinematographer Karl Struss, Paramount Pictures

Fourth Insert Image: Frances Faye, “No Reservations”, 1955, 33 1/3 Vinyl, Mono, Capitol Records

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Frances Faye”, circa 1950s, Studio Portrait, Gelatin Silver Print

Season’s Greetings 2023

Happy Holidays to Everyone!

I thank you for your comments and really appreciate your visits to my site. Have a great holiday season and a year of health, new friendships and exciting adventures!

The food gifs have been made by the talented cinematographic artist Daria Khoroshavina who is based in Moscow, Russia. Her project Kitchen Ghosts is about food, drinks and other little precious moments of life captured and looped in live photographs.

The Kitchen Ghosts project has been noticed and loved by many brands which led to successful collaborations with Pepsi, Martell, Blue Angel vodka, Schweppes, Amazon, Samsung and others.

The Kitchen Ghosts website is located at: https://kitchenghosts.carbonmade.com

Daria Khoroshavina is represented by:
glasshouseassignment
Kari Anderson
kari@glasshouseassignment.com

Anthony Asquith: Film History Series

Alexander Bassano, “Anthony Asquith”, 1927, Whole Plate Glass Negative, National Portrait Gallery, London

Born in November of 1902 in London, Anthony Asquith was an English film director. He was the son of Margot Asquith and Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith, who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1908 to 1916. Along with Alfred Hitchcock, Carol Reed and David Lean, Anthony Asquith was one of the internationally acclaimed British film directors at the top of the profession in the 1950s and 1960s.

A reluctant aristocrat, Anthony Asquith was educated at the private Eaton House, Winchester College in Hampshire and, from 1921 to 1925, Balliol College, Oxford. Although he was interested in music, he decided to pursue a career in the rapidly growing British film industry. Asquith traveled in 1920 to Hollywood to observe American film production techniques. In England, he made his debut as a silent film director with the 1927 British black comedy “Shooting Stars”. Asquith followed the comedy with the 1928 drama “Underground”, a story of four lives that intersect in London’s underground tube network.

Asquith’s work in silent film was influenced by the German Expressionist film movement and was experimental in nature. This can be seen in his best-known silent film, the 1930 “A Cottage on Dartmoor”, known for its meticulous and emotional frame composition. Asquith’s tense, shocking thriller, which stylistically brings to mind the early work of Alfred Hitchcock, is filled with innovative camera work by Stanley Ridwell and fast editing work to produce an eerie and unpredictable atmosphere. In his role of director, Asquith was a master of atmosphere and extracted the most emotion from dramatic situations. He became known as an actor’s director and was able to get some of the finest performances from Britain’s greatest actors.

The majority of Anthony Asquith’s oeuvre was divided between semi-documentaries and the adaptation of plays and novels. These he staged in a stylistically restrained, tasteful, but nuanced manner. In collaboration with English playwright Terence Rattigan as screenplay writer, Asquith directed film adaptations of ten famous plays written by Rattigan. Among these adaptations were the 1948 “The Winslow Boy”, “The Browning Version” in 1951, and the 1940 “French Without Tears”, Rattigan’s first successful play which premiered in 1936. 

One of Asquith’s best known films is the 1938 “Pygmalion”, an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 stage play, which Asquith co-directed with its star Leslie Howard. A critical success even in the United States, the film received multiple Academy Award nominations; Bernard Shaw won an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay. Asquith’s most successful postwar film was probably his 1952 adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Ernest”; it still remains today, after seventy years, the best adaptation of  Oscar Wilde’s work. 

In the 1960’s, Anthony Asquith was directing lavish all-star productions. He was one of only three British directors who were directing major international motion picture productions in that time period. Asquith directed the 1963 British comedy-drama film “The V,I.P.s” with a large cast that included Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Maggie Smith, Rod Taylor, Orson Welles and Margaret Rutherford, among others. The film, shot from a screenplay by Terence Rattigan, was distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Margaret Rutherford, cast as the Duchess of Brighton, won the Academy Award and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress. 

Asquith’s next project was the 1964 “The Yellow Rolls-Royce” with a screenplay by Rattigan and production by Anatole de Grunwald. The twenty-three member cast of this drama included such stars as Rex Harrison, Ingrid Bergman, Shirley MacLaine, Omar Sharif and George C. Scott. In the early part of 1967, Asquith was signed to direct the 1968 big screen adaptation of Australian author Morris West’s “The Shoes of the Fisherman”. This American political drama of Vatican and Cold War intrigue included a major cast with such stars as Laurence Olivier and Anthony Quinn. Due to ill health in November of 1967, Asquith dropped out of its production. 

The Honorable Anthony Asquith died in February of 1968 of cancer, at the age of sixty-five, in London, England. He was buried at All Saints Churchyard, Sutton Courtenay in Berkshire, England. Over the course of his career, Asquith directed forty-two films and was instrumental in the formation of the London Film Society. In his honor, the British Academy Award for Best Music is named the Anthony Asquith Award. 

“Although I was sparing with the big individual close-ups, I was tempted in the scene where Edith Evan’s voice goes up three octaves on a single syllable when she says the word “hanndb-a-g”. On films, as you know, voices haven’t need to be raised to reach the back of the gallery. We take care of that, and actors and actresses keep their voices right down. In the case of (the character) Lady Bracknell, however, it was different: she is a monster anyway and she is more than life-size, and certainly Edith Evans IS life-size. I didn’t try to modify her performance in any way, because it seemed to me to be splendid.”  —Anthony Asquith on directing “The Importance of Being Ernest”

Notes: It was Asquith’s father, Herbert Henry Asquith, serving as Home Secretary, who ordered Oscar Wilde’s arrest for his homosexual behavior. This arrest for indecent behavior led to Wilde’s incarceration in the Reading Jail and personally destroyed the playwright. The arrest and imprisonment of Wilde affected gay culture in Britain for most of the twentieth-century. The irony of Herbert Henry Asquith’s participation in this event is that Anthony Asquith, his youngest son, was gay.

English theatrical actress Edith Evans is considered the greatest actress on the English stage in the twentieth-century. Over a career of more than fifty years, she appeared in modern and classical roles in the West End of London and on Broadway in New York City. In 1946, Edith Evans was made a Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, the equivalent of a knighthood. 

Film historian Peter Cowie, a specialist in Swedish cinema, wrote an excellent article for the Criterion Channel on the Anthony Asquith’s life and his major film adaptations. The article can be found on the Criterion Channel’s website located at: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4495-anthony-asquith

Top Insert Image: Howard Coster, “Anthony Asquith”, 1935, Bromide Print, 15.8 x 11.2 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

Second Insert Image: Anthony Asquith, “A Cottage on Dartmoor”, (Hans Adalbert Schiettow and Norah Baring), 1921, Cinematography Stanley Rodwell

Third Insert Image: Anthony Asquith, “Libel”, 1959, Film Pster, Cinematography Robert Krasker 

Fourth Insert Image: Anthony Asquith, “The Net”, (James Donald and Phyllis Calvert), 1953, Cinematography Desmond Dickinson

Bottom Insert Image: Ernest Cyril Stanborough, “Anthony Asquith”, 1930s, Bromide Print, 22.7 x 17.7 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

Marylyn Dintenfass

The Artwork of Marylyn Dintenfass

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1943, Marylyn Dintenfass is an American painter, printmaker and sculptor known for the dynamic color palette of her oil paintings. She graduated from New York’s Queens College in 1965 with a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts. During her studies, Dintenfass worked with abstract expressionist painter John Ferren and muralist Barse Miller. She developed her own style of abstract expressionism and acquired an appreciation for the wide range of materials available. 

Though mostly known for her paintings, Marylyn Dintenfass was first recognized for her sculptural mixed-media installations. Her use of ceramics, epoxies, pigments, wax, steel, lead and wood expanded the traditional definitions of ceramic work. The installation sculptures and architectural reliefs Dintenfass created were unique to her organic and structural personal style. For her work, she constructed a pictographic language that consisted of symbols and the fusion of curves and lines. 

After a tour of museums in Paris, Rome and Amsterdam, Dintenfass traveled to Jerusalem in 1966. She studied etching and worked with Swiss painter Ruth Bamberger known for her textile design and fresco work. Through interactions with artists and intellectuals in the city, Dintenfass was given her first architectural commission; the design of Jerusalem’s first disco. She worked with a wide range of materials to fashion shapes, surfaces, textures, colors and light; these components became intrinsic parts of her developing artistic form .

Marylyn Dintenfass received large-scale installation commissions for the State of Connecticut’s Superior Courthouse; the New York Port Authority’s 42nd Street Bus Terminal; IBM’s headquarters in San Jose, Atlanta and Charlotte; and the Ben Gurion University in Israel, among others. In 2010, Dintenfass produced “Parallel Park”, a site-specific work for the exterior walls of the Lee County Justice Center’s parking garage in Ft. Myers, Florida. Each of her twenty-three images were enlarged tenfold to a size  ten by seven meters through the utilization of digital software. These were then  printed with archival ink on Kevlar fabric. Installed on all four facades of the garage, Dintenfass’s patterned images recalled the friezes and frescoes of Medieval as well as Italian Futurist artists. 

Dintenfass’s paintings combine the intense gestural movements of Abstract Expressionism with the repetitive image technique from Pop Art. Central to her work are both the underlying grid reference and the adjustability of the modular sections in their relationships to others. These structural aspects lend stability to Dintenfass’s exuberantly colored and dramatic abstractions. Her abstract images often contain formations of circles or stripes that are formed over alternating layers of high gloss or matte textures.

Marylyn Dintenfass has shown her work in more than sixty national and international exhibitions including solo shows at the Queens Museum of Art, the Greenville County Museum of Art and the Mississippi Museum of Art, among others. Her work was included in the 2008 inaugural exhibition of New York’s Museum of Arts and Design. Works by Dintenfass are housed in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.

Dintenfass was awarded the Silver Medal at the First International Exhibition held in Mino, Japan, and the Ravenna Prize at the 45th Concorso Internazionale Della Ceramica D’Arte in Faenza, Italy. She was also a member of the faculty at New York City’s Parsons School of Design  for ten years. Dintenfass was a visiting professor at Norway’s National College of Art and Design, the Brezel Academy of Art and Design in Israel, Canada’s Sheridan College, and New York City’s Hunter College. 

Notes: Due to the large-scale format of work by Marylyn Dintenfass, the best way to view her art is through exhibitions. Her website, which includes exhibitions and publications as well as video interviews, is  located at: https://www.marylyndintenfass.com

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, Marylyn Dintenfass at “Parallel Park”, 2011, Permanent Public Installation, Fort Meyers, Florida

Second Insert Image: Marylyn Dintenfass, “Token Thorn Prick”, “Drop Dead Gorgeous” Series, 2012, Oil on Canvas, 254 x 195.6 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, Installation of “Things Are Not What They Seem” Exhibition, Date Unknown

Dunbar Dyson Beck

The Paintings of Dunbar Dyson Beck

Born in Delaware, Ohio in 1903, Dunbar Dyson Beck was an American painter, muralist, educator, and designer of both interiors and exteriors, as well as theatrical sets and costumes. He studied at Northwestern University in Chicago before earning his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Yale University in 1926. Beck was invited to teach at Yale during the following academic year. In 1927, he won the prestigious Prix de Rome for his painting “Adoration”. This scholarship enabled Beck to spend three years studying at Rome’s American Academy and travel extensively  in Europe and Africa to study traditional arts. 

Upon his return to New York in 1930, Beck taught at Columbia University and then at Cooper Union’s School of Art. He began to receive several important commissions for altar paintings, murals and portraits. Beck painted a mural in 1934 for the lobby of New York City’s Radio City Music Hall. He also received a commission from Theodor Steinway to execute a gold-leaf decorative frieze on the side of a custom Steinway piano for President Roosevelt’s White House. Beck’s decoration represented the five musical forms indigenous of America: a New England barn dance, a lone cowboy playing a guitar, the Virginia reel, black field hands singing, and an Indian ceremonial dance.

Dunbar Beck’s commissioned work in New York included both mosaics and murals for the Rockefeller Center on Fifth Avenue, as well as, murals for the 1939-1940 World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows- Corona Park. In the late 1930s, Beck met Eleanor McClatchy, president of the McClatchy publishing company, who recognized his talents and encouraged his relocation to Sacramento, California  where he could live and work. McClatchy became Beck’s most important patron with commissions ranging from stage sets for Sacramento’s Eagle Theater to design work for the Sacramento Bee, the fifth-largest newspaper in California.

In the 1940s, Beck painted a series of eight paintings which focused on the theme of prize-fighting. These works were inspired by an unpublished play of unknown origin entitled “TheNational Ring”. In these works, Beck created the presence of a boxing match with his dramatic placement of compositional elements and his use of theatrical lighting effects. He used architectural elements, diagonal perspectives and concentric circles to create movement; his figures, with their raised fists and muscular arms, are highlighted as it they were spotlit for an unseen audience. Similar to the fight scenes painted by George Bellows, anticipation and emotional tension in Beck’s work are emphasized as details are minimized. 

Settled in Sacramento, Dunbar Beck made many contributions to the local art scene, among which were the Sacramento Art Deco Society and the Sacramento Public Library Program. He also served as set designer for the Sacramento Civic Theater and became an architectural preservationist for the Sacramento area. Beck was a juror for exhibitions held at Sacramento’s Kingsley Art Club and completed murals and mosaics for local churches. He executed fourteen oil paintings depicting the “Stations of the Cross” and a series of stain glass windows for St. Rose’s Chapel in South Sacramento. Beck also executed work for churches in New York, Texas and Pennsylvania. 

Dunbar Dyson Beck died of cancer, at the age of eighty-three, in February of 1986 at a Sacramento convalescent home. In addition to his work in prominent public places, Beck’s work is housed at Smith College and in private collections. His 1934 portrait of American architect William Adams Delano resides in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

Notes: The Sacramento Public Library in collaboration with the Sacramento Art Deco Society has a YouTube video, entitled “Dunbar Dyson Beck: Renaissance Master of Poverty Ridge”, that is narrated by local historian Bruce Marwick.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Dunbar Dyson Beck”, Date Unknown, Vintage Print

Second Insert Image: Dunbar Dyson Beck, “Palais des Papes, Avignon”, 1928, Watercolor on Paper, 31.8 x 23.8 cm, Private Colledtion

Third Insert Image: Dunbar Dyson Beck, “Self Portrait”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, Crocker Art Museum, Sacrament, California

Bottom Insert Image: Dunbar Dyson Beck, “Allegory of Charity”, 1925, Oil on Canvas, 132 x 104.1 cm, Private Collection

Jacques J. Rancourt: “Where to Begin?”

Photographers Unknown, Where to Begin?

First, we’re skinny-dipping,
Sam & I, in a pond in Tennessee,

which is his idea, I should say,
& the tree with the rope swing
looms darker

than the dark night sky.

Second, the harvest moon,
which we came here to see,

is nowhere to be found,
instead the sky burning with stars
I can’t see without my glasses

that Sam describes for me.

Third, I’ve made no promises
to monogamy, but am not sure
about those who have.

I spent my twenties riding
trains through cities leaving
behind hotel rooms

of men who may
or may not have been-

I never asked. The world of men
who have sex with men
is a chrysalis, a paper lantern

the hornets fill
with sound. Underwater, our feet
keep touching. Sorry, Sam says

sorry, sorry, sorry.

I imagine his wife after
a bath, wrapping her hair
in a towel. I imagine

the cluster of small towns
I come from,

each with its own abandoned factory
with its own broken windows-
The world of men

who have sex with men
keeps to itself as the rock
hurled through the last

intact glass. you know? Sam says
about fidelity as we stroke

from one shore
to the next. What we don’t do

doesn’t matter. He towels off,
the moon peers over
the ridge, silvers the pond

at its skirts & the bed
beneath me, which is dark
& crowded with dead leaves.

Jacques J. Rancourt, Where to Begin?, The Baffler, Issue: Mind Cures No. 41, September 2018

Born in 1987 in southern Maine, Jacques J. Rancourt is an American poet, editor and educator who spent his formative years living with his father in an off-the-grid cabin at the Appalachian Trial’s northern terminus. In 2009, he received a Bachelor of Arts in English and Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Maine, Farmington. Rancourt earned his Master of Fine Arts in Poetry in 2011 from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. During his studies at Wisconsin University, he served as the poetry editor for Devil’s Lake, the graduate-run journal of its creative writing program.

As an educator, Rancourt has worked as a middle-school principal, English Curriculum Coordinator and English teacher in Palo Alto, California. He also designed in 2014-2015 a core communications curriculum for an enrichment school program in Singapore. Rancourt has taught creative writing classes at the university level and served as an undergraduate thesis advisor. He has led workshops for prison inmates, underserved youth in the Upward Bound program, and summer high-school students at Stanford, Duke and Northwestern Universities. Rancourt currently lives with his husband in San Francisco, California.

Jacques Rancourt’s first full-length collection “Novena” was published by Pleiades Press in February of 2017. Inspired by the novena, a nine-day Catholic prayer seeking intercession from the Virgin Mary, the poems in this volume explore the complex issues of faith, beauty, desire and justice. The intercession sought by this “Novena” is a prayer for the outcasts and the maligned, LBGTQ people, those in prison and all those who continue to suffer. This collection, a fresh poetic exploration of the Roman Catholic faith interwoven with surreal and supernatural elements, was awarded the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize. 

Rancourt’s 2018 chapbook “In the Time of PrEP” is a sequence of interrogative poems that examines how the AIDS crisis had shaped and continues to shape queer identities. Born in the year the anti-retroviral drug AZT was released, Rancourt examines the gap between past and present generations, those who watched loved ones die and the later generation distanced from the crisis. As in his “Novena” collection, he draws on Biblical imagery to illustrate both the risk and joy of desire that is seen in every aspect of nature.

Jacques Rancourt’s second full-length collection, “Broken Spectre” was a 2019 editor’s choice selection for the Alice James Award. This volume is about the voices of those who have passed, our connections to the past, and our navigation of the present aa well as the future. Through the poems in this collection, Rancourt seeks not only to reconcile own his past and future but also those of the LBGTQ community as a whole. The poems in “Broken Spectre”, varying in structure, create a visual art form across the page. Rancourt uses line breaks, overlapping lines, and lines isolated by white spaces as visual elements to sculpt each poem’s final shape.

Fellowships held by Rancourt include:  a five month residency from the Cité Internationale de Arts in Paris, a Halls Emerging Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. He was awarded scholarships from both the Sewanee Writers’s Conference and Bread Loaf, the oldest writers’ conference in the United States. 

In addition to his published collections, Jacques Rancourt’s individual poems have been published in magazines such as the Boston Review, New England Review, Southern Review, Georgia Review, and Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. His work has also appeared in such anthologies as Dzanc Book’s “Best of the Net” and Dorianne Laux’s 2014 “Best New Poets” from Samovar Press. 

“Reading, after all, is a practice in empathy. After the AIDS crisis had begun to settle, there seemed to be an “Eisenhower Years” movement where the queer narrative was flattened in order to become more digestible and heteronormative for a straight audience. We were rebranded and made approachable, and as a result, part of the wide and beautifully diverse representation of our queer community was suppressed. My hope for the queer community is that our art, which has never shied away from representing our true selves, can continue to come out and be embraced fully by a more open-minded, non-queer audience.”

—Jacques J. Rancourt, In the Time of PrEP: An Interview with Jacques J. Rancourt, The Georgia Review, Conversations, Fall 2023

Notes: Jacques Rancourt’s website, which includes books and events, can be located at: https://www.jacquesrancourt.com

An extensive and informative conversation occurred between Jacques Rancourt and Interlochen Review editors Genevieve Harding and Darius Atefat-Peckham in October of 2017. Rancourt went into great detail discussing his life, work process, and his passion for poetry. This session can be found at the Interlochen Review site: http://www.interlochenreview.org/jaques-rancourt-2

An interview between writer Divya Mehrish and Rancourt on his 2019 collection “Broken Spectre” can be found at the online literary site The Adroit Journal located at: https://theadroitjournal.org/issue-thirty-nine/a-conversation-with-jacques-j-rancourt/

The BiGLATA Book Club has a video interview and reading with Jacques J. Rancourt on his work process and “Broken Spectre” collection. It is located on YouTube as BiGLATA Book Club: Broken Spectre with Author Jacques J. Rancourt Williams Alumni

Owen Rival

The Paintings of Owen Rival

Born in 1999 in Toronto, Owen Rival is a Canadian painter known for his highly contrasted and saturated everyday scenes. After studying both design and painting, he earned his Bachelor of Arts in Illustration at Providence’s Rhode Island School of Design in 2021. Rival is a recipient of the New York Academy of Art Summer Residency and the Dumfries House Artist Residency, a program delivered by Scotland’s Royal Drawing School and the Glasgow School of Art. He is also a member of the Society of Illustrators, a New York City-based professional society that promotes the art and history of illustration through exhibitions and competitions.

Through his work, Rival examines the seemingly mundane episodes of existence which include such monotonous chores as grocery shopping, washing clothes and brushing one’s teeth. Presented through the perspective of an observer, his paintings amplify these daily routines and transforms them into historic events. Married and now living as a couple with his wife and art collaborator Jenny, Rival paints scenes of domestic life that examine both the solitary moments and the interactions that occur in their Houston, Texas apartment.

Owen Rival’s paintings slowly evolve through an extensive work process: creating  thumbnail sketches of a proposed scene, staging the scene, shooting  photographs for foreground and background references, and lastly the gradual layering of color onto each drawn form on the canvas. His work is characterized by its strong lighting effects and visually complex compositions. Rival’s use of different colored LED lighting in the staged settings provides optional color highlights for the proposed work.

Rival pays particular interest in the color combinations for his work and often uses an inversion of traditional color associations to add both depth and complexity to the paintings. Instead of a realistic color palette, he chooses vibrant and contrasting tones to highlight important elements in the work and to amplify its mood, either conveying a sense of calm or injecting tension and stress.

In 2017 and 2018, Rival exhibited his paintings in group exhibitions held at Providence’s Waterman Building, the first permanent home of the Rhode Island School of Design and its first museum location. He exhibited his work in 2019 at the New York Academy of Art and, in the following year, at “The Color of My Land” exhibition at the RISD Museum Gelman Gallery. 

Rival presented five new medium and large scale works at his first solo exhibition, “Chronic Maintenance”, in April and May of 2023 at the Monti8 Gallery in Latina, Italy. He had his first New York solo exhibition entitled “Long View” in May and June of 2023 at the Harkawik, Gallery 2 on Orchard Street in Manhattan. The show consisted of five acrylic paintings and four works on paper depicting domestic scenes at the Houston apartment.

Notes: Images of Owen Rival’s work, contact information, and social media sites can be found on his website located at: https://www.owenrival.com

The creative art site It’s Nice That has an article on Owen Rival’s life and paintings written by Olivia Hingley for its July 2022 posting. It can be found at: https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/owen-rival-art-180722#:~:text=Gifted%20with%20a%20clear%20perception,relatability%2C%20and%20striking%20visual%20complexity

The Harkawik Gallery is a contemporary art gallery with two locations, Orchard Street in New York and Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. The gallery’s website can be found at: https://www.harkawik.com

Top Insert Image: Owen Rival, “Groceries”, 2022, Acrylic on Canvas, 91.4 x 61 x 10.2 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Owen Rival, “Toronto”, 2021, Acrylic on Canvas, 60.1 x 76.2 cm, Private Collection

Martin Kosleck: Film History Series

Herbert Irving Leeds, “Martin Kosleck as Heller”, 1942, Film Clip Photo,“Manila Calling”, Cinematography Lucien N. Andriot, 20th Century Fox

Born in March of 1904 in Barkotzen, now Poland’s Barkocin, Martin Kosleck was a German film actor who began his career during the silent film era. He appeared in more than fifty films and numerous episodes of television series, as well as, roles on the Broadway stage. A talented artist, Kosleck supported himself between film roles as an impressionist-styled portrait painter whose work included portraits of Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Bette Davis. He had a solo exhibition of his portraits and other works in 1935 at the Los Angeles Museum that received great reviews. 

Born Nicolale Yoshkin to a forester of German-Russian and Jewish lineage, Kosleck studied for six years at the Max Reinhardt Dramatic School located at the Palais Wesendonck in  Berlin Tiergarten. His forte was Shakespearian roles, however, he also appeared in musicals and revues at both German and English theaters. At the age of twenty-three, Kosleck had his film debut in International Film AG’s 1927 “Der Fahnenträger von Sedan”, a silent film by Austrian director Johannes Brandt. Three years later, he appeared in director Carmine Gallone’s musical “Die Singende Stadt (The Singing City)” and Richard Oswald’s sci-fi horror film “Alrune”, both sound films.

In the early 1930s, Kosleck met and began a relationship with the actor Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, already an established artist in Weimar Germany’s film industry and close friend of Marlene Dietrich. This sometimes turbulent relationship would last until Twardowski’s death from a heart attack in 1958. During their early time together, the National Socialist Party under Adolph Hitler was growing in power. Kosleck, an outspoken critic of the Party, soon earned the animosity of the newly established Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels. 

Martin Kosleck, after learning he had been tried in absentia and sentenced to death, escaped to Britain in 1931. The following year, he arrived in New York City and performed on Broadway in “The Merchant of Venice”. This play featured the return to acting, after an absence of thirteen years, of Maude Adams who at that time was the most popular stage actress in America. Kosleck’s role in this play was noticed by director Anatole Litvak who signed him with the Warner Brothers Studio; his first role was in directors William Dieterie and Busby Berkeley’s musical comedy “Fashions of 1934”. 

Hans Twardowski also left Germany in 1931 after finishing his role in Viktor Tourjansky’s “Der Herzog von Reichstadt”. He traveled to the west coast of the United States and first appeared in Universal Studio’s 1932 pre-Code drama “Scandal for Sale”. Twardowski appeared in several war films with Kosleck, including “Confessions of a Nazi Spy”, “Espionage Agent” and “The Hitler Gang”. His acting career ended along with the war; however, he continued to write, direct and act in stage plays. A talented singer, he also sang tenor in a number of musicals. 

In 1934, Kosleck was given a small role playing Propaganda Minister Goebbels in the highly controversial Warner Brothers’s drama “Confessions of a Nazi Spy” based on a book by FBI agent Leon Turron who had uncovered Nazi operations in the United States. Kosleck, inspired by his deep hatred of the Nazis, portrayed Goebbels with an icy demeanor and piercing sinister stare, a performance that made Kosleck the directors’ choice for roles depicting both criminals and Nazi villains. Between 1939 and 1944, he appeared as the bad guy in a total of twenty-two war films and crime thrillers that include “Espionage Agent”, “Nick Carter, Master Detective”, “Calling Philo Vance”, “Nazi Agent”, and Paramount Studios’s “The Hitler Gang”, the second of his three roles as Goebbels.

After the end of the Second World War, Martin Kosleck continued his work at Universal Studios with appearances in several horror films. The first of which was the role of Ragheb, the Arkam sect disciple, in the 1944 “The Mummy’s Curse”. This film was Universal’s fifth entry in its “Mummy” franchise as well as Lon Chaney Jr’s final appearance as the mummy Kharis. In 1945, Kosleck again co-starred with Chaney as the disturbed plastic surgeon Dr. Rudi Polden in “The Frozen Ghost”. He was in two Universal films in 1946: a supporting role in “She-Wolf of London” which starred June Lockhart who had just finished filming “Son of Lassie”, and “House of Horrors”, a film which contains one of Kosleck’s best horror film roles, the obsessed sculptor Marcel de Lange who controls the mad killer known as “The Creeper”.

In 1947 Kosleck unexpectedly married the German actress Eleonora van Mendelssohn. Born to an elite banking family in Berlin, she was both a sensitive and vulnerable woman who had married four times and, after an abortion, initially used morphine as a sedative but soon became addicted. With less film roles offered, Kosleck returned with his wife to New York city where he appeared on Broadway in Jean Giraudoux’s “La Folle de Chaillot”, a production starring John Carradine and Tony Award winner Martita Hunt, that was recognized as one of the best plays of 1948-1949. Kosleck also had an extensive career in television with appearances on such shows as “Hallmark Hall of Fame”, “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”, “The Outer Limits”, “The F.B.I.”, “Mission Impossible” and “Studio One”, among others. 

Martin Kosleck’s last screen appearance was as Horst Borsht in Robert Day’s 1980 detective comedy “The Man with Bogart’s Face”. This film is also noted for being the last film appearance of George Raft. Martin Kosleck died at the age of eighty-nine following abdominal surgery at a Santa Monica convalescent home in Los Angeles County. His body was cremated; the location of his ashes are unknown.

Notes: Eleonora von Mendelssohn, already a fragile person, had taken the role of caregiver for both her hospitalized gay brother Francesco who had suffered a stroke and Kosleck who had attempted suicide over a love affair dispute. In January of 1951, Eleonora committed suicide with a toxic cocktail of ether, pills and injections. Her body was discovered by Hans Twardowski. To better understand the tragic life of Eleonora von Mendelssohn, I suggest reading the biographical article located at The Mendelssohn Society website: https://www.mendelssohn-gesellschaft.de/en/mendelssohns/biografien/eleonora-von-mendelssohn

A complete list of Martin Kosleck’s films and television appearances can be found at the Swiss film site Cyranos located at: https://www.cyranos.ch/smkosl-e.htm

An article entitled “The Cult of Actor Martin Kosleck in The Flesh Eaters” contains information on Kosleck’s work with Universal Studios. It can be found on the Cult Film Alley website located at: https://cultfilmalley.com.au/2022/05/12/the-cult-of-actor-martin-kosleck-in-the-flesh-eaters-1964/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Martin Kosleck”, Studio Publicity Film Shot, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Eugene Fords, “Berlin Correspondent”, (Virginia Gilmore, Sig Ruman, Martin Kosleck), 1942, Cinematography Virgil Miller, 20th Century Fox

Third Insert Image: Tim Whelan, “The Mad Doctor”, (Martin Kosleck and Basil Rathbone), 1941, Cinematography Ted Tetzlaff, Paramount Pictures

Fourth Insert Image: Leslie Goodwins, “The Mummy’s Curse”, (Peter Coe, Martin Kosleck, Kay Harding), 1944, Cinematography Virgil Miller, Universal Studios

Bottom Insert Image: Jean Yarbrough, “House of Horrors”, (Rondo Hatton and Martin Kosleck), 1946, Cinematography Maury Gertsman, Universal Studios

 

Martin Stommel

The Paintings of Martin Stommel

Born in 1969, Martin Stommel is a German contemporary painter whose dramatic and suspenseful compositions are a statement on the restlessness of the world. He first studied at Munich’s State Art Academy from 1994 to 1997 under Professor Bernhard Franz Weißhaar (Weisshaar), the academy’s Chair of Christian Art from 1978 to 2000. Stommel entered Berlin’s University of Arts, HdK, in 1998 where he studied under landscape painter and graphic artist Klaus Fußmann (Fussmann). 

During the span of his academic studies, Stommel also trained under Russian painter and dissident Boris Georgievic Birger. Birger widely exhibited in Russia during the 1950s to the 1970s. After he joined the human rights movement, he was expelled in 1962, under the influence of Communist Party leader Nikita Khruschev, from the Moscow Union of Artists. Birger emigrated in 1990 to Bonn, Germany where he taught and exhibited until his death in 2001. Through his association with Birger, Stommel met several international artists, including Russian writer Lev Kopelev, German author and journalist Fritz Pleitgen, and Russian cellist Natalia Gutman.

In 2000, Martin Stommel met Austrian-born art historian and theorist Sir Ernst Gombrich in London. The author of many works of both cultural and art history, Gombrich is noted for his 1950 “The Story of Art” and 1960 “Art and Illusion”, a major work in the psychology of perception which influenced such writers as Umberto Eco and Thomas Kuhn. Gombrich encouraged Stommel towards figurative work and, during his last years of life, engaged in an exchange of supportive letters.

Stommel’s work exhibits the same bold brushwork and use of perspective as that used by sixteenth-century Venetian painter Jacopo (Tintoretto) Robusti, as well as, the intensity found in the figurative paintings of German modernist Max Beckmann who reinvented the religious triptych form. Stommel uses strong lighting techniques, carefully chosen colors, energetic diagonal movement, and elongated gestural bodies to create powerful visual experiences of tension and drama. His figures, rarely static, are full of energy and accentuated by bold black lines of pronounced shading

Between the years 2001 and 2007, Martin Stommel created a series of paintings and drawings of circus scenes as well as portraits of circus performers. His portraits included such famous clowns as the white-faced Francesco Caroli, Oleg Popov of the Moscow Circus, and David Larible known for his performances with Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus as well as Bernhard Paul and André Heller’s Circus Roncalli. Stommel’s circus portraits, along with still lifes and landscapes, were shown in his first solo exhibition in 2003 at the Museum Charlotte Zander in Bönnigheim, Germany. In the next year, he presented his circus paintings in the Principality of Monaco at the invitation of Prince Rainier III and his illustration series for the “Divine Comedy” at the Stadtmuseum in Bonn.

Stommel has regularly exhibited in solo shows throughout the years. In 2013, he exhibited at the Stiftung Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg which was followed by two shows at Frankfurt’s Galerie Mühlfeld & Stohrer in 2014 and 2015. Stommel’s “Lust and Expectation”, inspired by the world of dance, was held in 2019 at Gallery 70 in Tirana, Albania. In 2020, he had a second solo show at the same Gallery 70 location which showed large-format works, among which was his 2018 “Amazonenkampf (Fight of Amazons)”, a densely painted martial work of warriors and horses. Stommel’s 2022 “On Deliverance” exhibition, a series of works on the turmoil in the world, ran from April to July at Berlin’s Janine Bean Gallery, a dedicated supporter of local contemporary art. 

Martin Stommel’s work has also been exhibited at the Kallmann Museum at Ismaning, Germany; Museum am Dom Trier, Germany; Cologne’s Lew Kopelew Forum; Munich’s Katholische Akademie in Bayern; Monaco’s Théâtre Princesse Grace; the Venice Biennial; as well as many galleries and art fairs in London, Cologne, Berlin, Lübeck and Munich, among others. 

Notes: Martin Stommel’s website with current exhibition and contact information is located at: http://martin-stommel.deadwings.de/de

A short video in which Martin Stommel discusses his work can be found in the videos category at Gallery 70’s YouTube site located at: https://www.youtube.com/@gallery70/videos

Second Insert Image: Martin Stommel, “Jesus Asleep”, 2022, Oil on Linen, 260 x 175 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Martin Stommel, “Girls at the Pool”, 2024, Oil on Canvas, 57 x 52 cm, Gallery 70, Chicago (Available)