Emanuel Xavier: “We All have Wings. . .”

Photographers Unknown, We All Have Wings

“Ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars;
see that ye not be troubled;
all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet”
-Matthew 24:6

1.
I escape the horrors of war
with a towel and a room
Offering myself
to Palestinian and Jewish boys
as a ‘piece’ to the Middle East
when I should be concerned with the untimely deaths
of dark-skinned babies
and the brutal murders
of light-skinned fathers

2.
I’ve been more consumed with how to make
the cover of local fag rags
than how to open the minds
of angry little boys
trotting loaded guns
Helpless in finding words
that will stop the blood
from spilling like secrets into soil
where great prophets are buried

3.
I return to the same spaces
where I once dealt drugs
a celebrated author gliding past velvet ropes
while my club kid friends are mostly dead
from an overdose or HIV-related symptoms
Marilyn wears the crown of thorns
while 4 out of the 5 weapons used to kill Columbine students
had been sold by the same police force
that came to their rescue
Not all terrorists have features too foreign
to be recognized in the mirror
Our mistakes are our responsibility

4.
The skyline outside my window
is the only thing that has changed
Men still rape women
and blame them for their weaknesses
Children are still molested
by the perversion of Catholic guilt
My ex-boyfriend still takes comfort
in the other white powder-
the one used solely to destroy himself
and those around him
Not the one used to ignite and create carnage
or mailbox fear

5.
It is said when skin is cut,
and then pressed together, it seals
but what about acid-burned skulls
engraved with the word ‘faggot’,
a foot bone with flesh
and other crushed body parts

6.
It was a gay priest that read last rites
to firefighters as towers collapsed
It was a gay pilot that crashed a plane
into Pennsylvania fields
It was a gay couple that was responsible
for the tribute of light
in memory of the fallen
Taliban leaders would bury them
to their necks
and tumble walls to crush their heads
Catholic leaders simply condemn them
as perverts
having offered nothing but sin
Queer blood is just rosaries scattered on tile

7.
Heroes do not always get heaven

8.
We all have wings . . .
some of us just don’t know why

Emanuel Xavier, War & Rumors of Wars, Selected Poems of Emanuel Xavier, 2021, Queer Mojo Publishing

Born in Brooklyn, New York in May of 1970, Emanuel Xavier is an American poet, author, editor, and LBGTQ activist. Associated with the East Village art scene of New York City, his roots include the underground ballroom pageant culture that originated in New York and the Nuyorican movement, a cultural and intellectual movement of poets, writers, musicians and artists of Puerto Rican descent. In addition to his success as a poet and a writer, Xavier is a strong advocate for gay youth programs and Latino gay literature.

Abandoned by a father he never knew, Emanuel Xavier was raised by his Ecuadorian mother and her live-in boyfriend. He grew up during the 1970s in the mostly immigrant community of Bushwick, a part of the Brooklyn community district. Xavier’s primary education was at a prdominantly white elementary school in Queens, where he experienced racism. Banished from his home at the age of sixteen after revealing that he was gay, Xavier survived on the streets as an underage prostitute at the Christopher Street piers by the West Side Highway.

While surviving on the streets, Xavier also became involved with the 1980s ball scene. This LBGTQ+ subculture of African-Americans and Latinos organized their own pageants in opposition to the racism experienced in the established drag queen pageant. Racially integrated houses, essentially alternative families of supportive friends, many estranged from their original homes, competed in multiple categories for trophies and cash prizes. Xavier befriended many members of the trans world and was active with the House of Xtravaganza. In 1998 with the help of dancer and choreographer Will Ninja, he established the House of Xavier and the Glam Slam, an annual downtown arts event.

Emanuel Xavier returned to his birth home under strict rules and graduated from the Grover Cleveland High School in Queens. He studied at St. John’s University where he received his BFA in communications. Xavier relocated to the West Village where he supported himself dealing at the city’s gay nightclubs and working at the local A Different Light, at that time one of a chain of four LGBT bookstores. In 1997, Xavier self-published his first volume of poetry, a chapbook entitled “Pier Queen” whose classic poems “Tradiciones” and “Nueva York” launched his career as a spoken word artist. This published collection became a trailblazing early example of a new generation of queer Latino writers. Xavier’s 1999 semi-autobiographical novel “Christ Like”, despite a small press run, was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and reprinted in 2009 by Rebel Satori Press.

In 2001 after the collapse of the World Trade Center, Xavier helped create Words to Comfort, a poetry benefit held a the New School in Manhattan. His poem “September Song”, included as part of the initial National September 11 Memorial & Museum website, was later published in his 2002 collection “Americano”. As an editor, Xavier was nominated for the Anthologies category of the Lambda Literary Award for his work on the 2005 “Bullets and Butterflies: Queer Spoken Word Poetry”. He published his third full-length collection “If Jesus Was Gay” in 2010 which was followed two years later by “Nefarious”. Both of these collections were selected by the American Library Association for its Over the Rainbow Book List.

Emanuel Xavier’s website, which includes video interviews, spoken word performances, and available copies of Xavier’s blacklisted poetry collections, can be found at: https://www.emanuelxavier.org

An interview between Emanuel Xavier and Charlie Vázquez, a founding member of Latino Rebels and the director of the Bronx Writers Center, can be found on the online Latino Rebels site located at: https://www.latinorebels.com/2016/07/25/radiance-gay-poet-emanuel-xavier-on-living-life-raw-and-pushing-back/

The Flying Train: Film History Series

Denis Shiryaev,“The Flying Train”, 1902, Cinematographer Unknown, 2015 Stabilized and Colorized Version

The German cities of Elberfeld and Barmen formed a commission in 1887 for the construction of an elevated railway or Hochbaln. In 1894, the commission chose the system by inventor and engineer Eugen Langen. In addition to his work in the development of the petrol engine, Langen was co-owner and engineer of the railway company Cologne Waggonfabrik van der Zypen & Charlier. Two years later, the order was licensed by the City of Dusseldorf, the capital city of North Rhine-Westphalia.

The suspended transport system, or monorail, was chosen to efficiently traverse the region’s hilly terrain and to circumvent the flood-prone river and high groundwater levels that impeded construction of traditional land-based transportation. Construction on the actual suspension railway began in 1898 and was overseen by the government’s master builder Wilhelm Feldmann. Built at a time when steel engineering was still a fairly new concept, this elevated transport system was the first to feature vehicles made entirely of steel.

Approximately nineteen-thousand tons of steel were used to produce the supporting framework and the railway stations; the total cost of the construction was sixteen-million gold marks. The railway was closed owing to severe damage during World War II but was reopened again in 1946. The Schwebabahn is famous for a 1950 incident when a young elephant, given a ride as a stunt, fell out a window and dropped twelve meters into the river below. The elephant survived with just a scrape and lived until the age of forty-three.

Now the world’s oldest operating monorail system, the Wuppertal Schwebebahn system was officially opened on the first day of March in 1901, only three years after construction began. Kaiser Wilhelm II and his entourage rode in its “Imperial Carriage” during the very first test run of the system. The thirteen kilometer, electrical powered transport linked the small cities and towns of Elberfeld, Barmen, Ronsdorf, Cronenberg and Vohwinkel. The cities were united originally in 1929 under the name of Barmen-Elberfield; however, in 1930 the name was changed to Wuppertal (Wupper Valley) as all the cities were situated around the Wupper River.

The original 1902 “The Flying Train” is a two-minute black and white documentary of a journey on the newly established Schwebebahn suspended rail system. It was shot on Biograph’s 68mm film stock, a format whose large image area afforded exceptional visual clarity and quality. The original black and white film is housed in the Film Collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

The video featured above is a version of the original 1902 “The Flying Train” that has been restored and updated by Denis Shiryaev, a Russian digital artist, currently based in Poland, known for his restoration of old videos from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He uses different computer processes to upscale the videos to 4K, increase the frame rate to sixty frames per second, and add color.

Shiryaev is the CEO and product director of the software service company Neutral Love as well as the project Manager of KMTT.

Note: Three versions of “The Flying Train”, that being the original 1902 film, Denis Shiryaev’s stabilized and colorized 2015 version, and a side by side comparison of the two versions, can be found at the online art magazine COLOSSAL located at: https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2020/08/the-flying-train-moma/

Émile Friant

Émile Friant, “L’Intérieur d’Atelier (The Studio Interior)”, 1879-1880, Oil on Apricot Panel, 46 x 38 cm, Private Collection

Born in Dieuze, a small city near Nancy in April of 1863, Émile Friant was a French artist who created works in oil and charcoal. Equally influenced by the culture and trends of Paris and Nancy, he rose to prominence with his version of Naturalism, an art form which appealed to the public both in France and abroad. Later after his exposure to the richness, beauty and architecture of the Orient, Friant’s naturalist style evolved into a latent Symbolism.

Born into a modest family, his father a locksmith and mother a dressmaker, Émile Friant began work as a dressmaker at the age of fourteen. One of his mother’s wealthy clients, Madame Parisot, who had born no children with her husband, took an early interest in the young Friant. With the defeat of the Second French Empire in 1870 as a result of the Franco-Prussian War, the now-widowed Madame Parisot fled in 1871 with Émile Friant to the city of Nancy which was still part of France; his biological family followed soon after. This became an important move for Friant as the city of Nancy and its art institute, École des Beaux-Arts, would become a prominent artistic center of production during the Art Nouveau period.

After drawing classes at the École de l’Est. Friant enrolled at Nancy’s Institute of Design and Painting and became a favorite student of the director Louis-Théodore Devilly who had studied under Eugene Delacroix. Under Devilly’s tutorage, Friant focused purely on painting and produced studies of landscapes, still lifes, and later portraits which he sold a thirty francs apiece. Due to his talent, he was allowed at the age of fifteen to enter his work in exhibitions at Nancy’s Salon des Amis des Arts. After a year, the city of Nancy granted Friant a scholarship which enabled him to relocate alone to Paris. There he settled in an apartment on the Notre Dame des Champs in the autumn of 1879 and entered the atelier of the established academic painter Alexandre Cabanel.

During his first year in Paris, Émile Friant formed a strong friendship with three other artists from the Lorraine region: Victor Prouvé, Jules Bastien-Lapage, and Aimé Morot who encouraged Friant to end his academic training and complete his first two paintings. These works were “Intérieur d’Atelier (Interior of the Studio)” and “L’Enfant Prodique (The Prodigal Son)” which would be exhibited at the 1882 Paris Salon. In 1883 Friant entered the Prix de Rome with his “Œdipe Maudissant son Fils Polynice (Oedipus Cursing His Son Polynice)” but won only second place. Already successfully established with commissions for portraits, he entered the 1885 Prix de Rome with his second “Intérieur d’Atelier” which won him a second medal and exempted his work from approval by the submitting jury, an accomplished feat for an artist at the age of twenty-two.

At the Paris Salon of 1886, Friant entered portraiture with his other entries and won a scholarship from the French government which enabled him to travel. His first journey was to Holland where he studied portrait miniatures; his second and more important trip was to Tunisia where Friant became fascinated by the entire new world surrounding him: the brilliant natural light, the costumes of the inhabitants, and the architecture. Among the paintings he produced after the voyage were “Souk des Tailleurs (Souk of the Tailors)”, and “Port d’Alger (Port of Algiers)”.

After his return to Paris, Émile Friant exhibited his 1887 “Réunion des Canotiers de la Meurthe (Reunion of the Meurthe Boating Party)”at the 1888 Paris Salon. This large work, 116 x 170 cm, did not win any awards but was very popular, which encouraged Friant to paint another large work. His “La Toussaint (All Saints’ Day)” won the grand prize at the 1889 Paris Salon. In the same year, Friant was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor and won a gold medal and another traveling scholarship at the Universal Exposition in Paris. He also became part of the Société Nationale de Beaux-Arts which organized their own annual Salons on the Champ de Mars, thus aligning him with other more progressive artists of the period.

By the mid 1890s, Friant began introducing symbolic references into his work which had been a naturalistic and almost photographic representation of daily bourgeois life. He did however cater to the wishes of his affluent clientele; many of his later entries at the Salon were portraits commissioned by wealthy patrons. Friant also began to deal in the 1890s with American patrons who wanted to exhibit or commission a work. His “Les Fiançailles (The Engagements)” was chosen for the first Carnegie Annual Exhibition held in 1896 in Pittsburgh. Friant began working steadily with art dealer Roland Knoedler and art collector Henry Clay Frick, who would include Friant’s work in his newly established Frick Museum in New York City.

Émile Friant maintained a dedicated academic manner of creativity in his portraits even when this type of painting was attacked by the abstract modernists. He continued to exhibit through the years at the Salons in Paris and Nancy. In 1906, Friant was named professor of drawing at the École Nationale des Beaux Arts where he continued to teach the importance of the academic drawing method. He was appointed a professor of painting at the École des Beaux Arts in 1923 and was made a member of the Institut de France. A comprehensive retrospective of his work was published in 1930 by art critic Arséne Alexandre. At the age of sixty-nine, Émile Friant fell to his death in Paris on the 9th of June in 1932.

Top Insert Image: Émile Friant, “”Autoportrait, dit un Étudiant”, 1885, Oil on Panel, Museum of Fine Arts at Nancy, France

Second Insert Image: Émile Friant, “Portrait of William Rothenstein”, 1891, Pastel on Paper, 51 x 32.5 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Émile Friant, “Study for La Douleur”, 1899, Charcoal on Wove Paper, 47 x 40.6 cm, Dahesh Museum of Art, New York City

bottom Insert Image: Émile Friant, “The Meurthe Boating Party”, 1887, Oil on Canvas, 116 x 170 cm, Musée de l’Ecole de Nancy

Franklin Abbott: “I Tried to Hold the Angel Underneath Me”

Photographers Unknown, I Tried to Hold the Angel Underneath Me

I tried to hold the angel underneath me
to still the beating of his wings
with the beating of my heart
to part his lips with the sharp pink dagger of my tongue
to taste his ambrosia breath as it comes out
hard and fast from the purple pump of his lungs
to touch whatever I can of his density
             somewhere between color and form
             an almost intangible shimmering
                          amber smoke
to whisper in the wind of his ear
I want you inside and out
more than ever have I wanted
and see in this soft moving cloud/memory/
             premonition/waking dream
like fight through water
his trembling yes
that falls down into the yoke of my being and then I know
                          this silken cocoon
finely woven with my family fears
will one day relax
and i no longer caterpillar
will fly high, sweet and fast
into his invisible embrace

Franklin Abbott, The Golden Shadow, Mortal Love: Collected Poems, 1971-1992, 1996

Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1950, Franklin Abbot is an American psychotherapist, writer, poet, artist and gay activist. His formative years were spent in the cities of Birmingham, Buffalo and Nashville. In his youth, Abbott was always very independent in exercising his own individuality and found an outlet for his creative energy in the Order of DelMolay, a character and leadership development organization for young men.

Abbott earned his undergraduate degree at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, and his Master of Social Work at the University of Georgia. After college, he worked at a facility for mentally challenged adults and children and became active in other social activities. In 1979, Abbott became one of Atlanta’s first openly gay professionals when he began private practice as a psychotherapist specializing in individual, couples and family therapy.

During the 1970s, Franklin Abbott became associated with America’s radical faerie community. This community was a loose, global organization of mostly male queer people who shunned assimilation into mainstream society and focused on environmental issues, the numerous aspects of spirituality, and anarchism. Today, one of its main centers in the United States is a two-hundred acre faerie sanctuary/safe queer space at Short Mountain in central Tennessee, just southeast of Nashville. For twenty years, Abbott spent time at the community where he served as poetry editor of its unofficial journal “RFD” and worked with the journal “Changing Men”.

A leading organizer in Atlanta’s gay community, Abbott has facilitated many self-help and healing workshops on gay identity and other issues. He co-founded the Atlanta Circle of Healing and, in 2008, established the Atlanta Queer Literary Festival, now a year-round series of events, as well as a partnership with the Decatur Book Festival . Throughout the years, Abbott has maintained a close correspondence with many poets and activists, among these were Harry Hay, a co-founder of the Mattachine Society; San Francisco Renaissance poet James Broughton; and Haitian-born American poet Assotto Saint, who was a key figure in LGBT and African-American art and culture.

Franklin Abbott edited and published three anthologies on the issues of men and gender: the 1987 “New Men, New Minds: Breaking Male Tradition” discussing how men of today are changing the traditional roles of masculinity, the 1990 “Men and Intimacy: Personal Accounts of the Dilemmas of Modern Male Sexuality”, and the 1993 “Boyhood: Growing Up Male”, boyhood narratives and poems by accomplished writers from around the world. Abbott is the author of two books of poetry: the 2009 “Pink Zinnia” and “Mortal Love: Selected Poems, 1971-1998” published in 1996. As a songwriter and poet, he released in 2017 a compact disc entitled “Don’t Go Back to Sleep”.

Note: A digital copy of Franklin Abbott’s “Mortal Love: Collected Poems, 1971-1992” can be found in the digital collections of the Georgia State University Library located at: https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/digital/collection/lgbtq/id/1547

A two-hour video of a 2018 interview between Franklin Abbott and film producer Kate Kunath on Abbott’s life and work can be found at the online site OUTWORDS which captures and preserves the stories of LBGTQ+ elders in order to build community and catalyze social change. The interview is located at: https://theoutwordsarchive.org/interview/abbott-franklin-2/

Sir William Dobell

The Artwork of Sir William Dobell

Born in Cooks Hill, New South Wales in September of 1899, Sir William Dobell was an Australian portrait and landscape artist. The youngest of seven children born to Robert Way Dobell and Margaret Emma Wrightson, his talents as an artist was evident even in his early life. Dobell was a painter best known for his portraits which used an expressive style to create vivid portrayals of character. In the post-World War II era of great conservatism in Australian art and politics, he was a witty and incisive observer of social manners and morals.

At the age of fourteen, Dobell left school to work in a draper’s shop and attend drawing classes in the latter part of the day. In 1916, he apprenticed to an architect which enabled him to pursue draftsmanship. Eight years later, Dobell moved to Sydney for a position as draftsman at Wunderlich Limited, a manufacturer of terra cotta and ironwork. In February of 1924 at the age of twenty-five, he enrolled as an art student at the now Julian Ashton Art School. Dobell was one of the first nine students to study at Ashton, where he attended classes under artist and drawing teacher Henry Gibbons and landscape painter George Lambert.

William Dobell achieved some modest success in 1929 when his painting of dancers, “After the Matinee”, won the third prize in the Australian Art Quest held at Sydney’s State Theater. In the same year, he was awarded a Society of Artists Traveling Scholarship for his painting of a seated male nude. Using this scholarship, Dobell traveled to London and enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art where he studied under painters Henry Tonks and Philip Wilson Steer, both of whom were influenced by the French Impressionists. At the Slade, Dobell won first prize in 1930 for his painting of a nude study.

After visiting Holland to see the work of Rembrandt, Dobell returned to London where he sketched its streets and shared a painting studio with John Passmore, also one of the first students to study under Gibbons at Ashton. Dobell spent almost a decade in London during the depression years of the 1930s; he supplemented his small income by working as a film extra and, in 1936 to 1937, decorating the Glasgow Fair’s Wool Pavilion with other Australian artists. Dobell’s work during these years ranged from depictions done with compassion, such as “The Charlady” and “The Street Singer” to works more satirical such as “Mrs South Kensington” and the 1936 scene of the ghostly dead figure “Dead Landlord”.

William Dobell, with war imminent and his father dying, returned to Australia in 1938. This was the year when modern art was becoming recognized in Australia; the Contemporary Art Society was formed and Australia’s first exhibitions of Modernism were sponsored by Sir Keith Murdoch, journalist and founder of the Murdoch media empire. Dobell initially taught at East Sydney Technical School, now the National Art School, before joining the war effort as a camouflage painter and later as a war artist. In addition to his war paintings, he continued to paint portraits adjusting his technique to the personality of the sitter. Works at this time include the 1940 “The Cypriot”, “The Scrapper” in 1941, and the two 1943 portraits “Billy Boy” and “Brian Penton”.

In 1943, Dobell painted a modern expressionist style portrait of his fellow war camouflager Joshua Smith. The work was a break from the realism favored at that time. After “Mr Joshua Smith” won the 1943 Archibald Prize considered to be the most prestigious portrait prize in Australia, opponents of the decision, mostly conservatives in Sydney’s art world, contested the decision in court. After curators and critics gave evidence supporting Dobell’s work, the case was thrown out. However, the two years of legal dispute and headline publicity took a toll on Dobell, a private man by nature, to such an extent that he did not paint for a year. In 1958, the portrait “Mr Joshua Smith” was nearly destroyed in a fire but, after extensive efforts, was subsequently restored.

William Dobell retreated in 1944 to the family holiday home in Wangi Wangi on the shores of Lake Macquarie where his sister Alice nursed him back to health. He began sketching again in late 1945; but he tended to shun public life and eventually submitted his resignation from the Board of Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1947. Dobell again won the Archibald Prize in 1948 for his portrait “Margaret Olley” and also received the Wynne Prize for his landscape “Storm Approaching Wangi”. Two visits to New Guinea inspired him and renewed his fascination with color as seen in his two works “Kanana” and “The Thatchers”.

In the 1950s, Dobell developed a friendship with novelist and playwright Patrick White, the future 1973 Nobel Prize winner for Literature who inspired by Dobell’s painting “The Dead Landlord” wrote the 1961 two-act play “The Ham Funeral”. Dobell also painted two important portraits in 1957: “Dame Mary Gilmore” depicting the political activist and social reformer, and “Helena Rubinstein”, a portrait of the cosmetic manufacturer and one of the wealthiest women in the world. This portrait, for which he had worked on versions for six years. won the Australian Women’s Weekly portrait prize and was reproduced in the two-million readership magazine.

In 1960 William Dobell was commissioned to produce a series of cover-portraits for Time Magazine. That same year he won his third Archibald Prize with the portrait “Dr. MacMahon”. Settled in his country home in Wangi Wangi, Dobell continued to paint inventively and lived a quiet life; everyone at the local pub knew him as simply Bill. He received in 1965 the rank of Knight of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Dobell celebrated his seventieth birthday in 1969 and, in the next year, was honored with a major exhibition for his work at the New Castle Art Gallery. In May of 1979, a month after the exhibition, William Dobell died at his Wangi Wangi estate.

A gay man with a preference for a private life, William Dobell never married and left his entire estate to the Sir William Dobell Art Foundation. The foundation, among its many activities, awards the Dobell Australian Drawing Biennial, named in his honor. Given through The National Art School, it is one of the highest value prizes for drawing in Australia. William Dobell was cremated with Anglican rites and his ashes are interred at Newcastle Memorial Park in Beresfield, New South Wales.

Notes: A biography by Judith White, entitled “William Dobell: Yours Sincerely”, discusses Dobell’s life and lists the collections housing what are considered Dobell’s most notable works. The article can be found at the Art Collector website located at: https://artcollector.net.au/william-dobell-yours-sincerely/

An interesting two-section article on the life of artist and educator Henry Gibbons and his role at the Julian Ashton Art School, written by Laurie Thomas and Peter Kreet, can be found in painter John Beeman’s Fine Art site located at: https://www.john-beeman.com/henry_gibbons.html

Second Insert Image: William Dobell, “Mr Joshua Smith”, 1943, Oil on Canvas, 122 x 81 cm, Sir William Dobell Foundation

Third Insert Image: William Dobell, “Self Portrait”, 1932, Oil on Wood Panel, 35 x 27 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Fourth Insert Image: William Dobell, “The Boy George”, circa 1928, Oil on Canvas, 71.5 x 56.5 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: William Dobell, “The Cypriot”, 1940, Oil on Canvas, 123.3 x 123.3 cm, Queensland Art Gallery, Australia

Gori Mora

The Artwork of Gori Mora

Born in 1992 in Mallorca, one of Spain’s Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean, Gori Mora is a painter who currently lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. In 2011, he moved to Barcelona where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Barcelona University. Mora relocated to Glasgow in 2017 to study the Master of Letters in Fine Art Practice at the Glasgow School of Art. After the completion of his Master’s program, he was awarded a John Kinross Scholarship by the Royal Scottish Academy of Edinburgh to spend research time in Florence. Mora’s 2018 project “My Florence Souvenir” is now part of the Royal Scottish Academy of Edinburgh collection.

The focus of Gori Mora’s work is the exploration of the myriad effects that technology has on our social interactions, our intrinsic values, and our self-identification. Through examining human interactions on social networks, the roles and eroticism involved and the current trends of the platforms, Mora explores in his paintings both the queer community’s history and the heightened effect that technology has on the nature of desire.

Mora’s compositions, systematic arrangements of stylized objects and figures, are painted in oils on the reverse side of transparent plastic sheets made of polymethyl methacrylate. The prominent figures and objects in the front layer are painted first with subsequent layers of background added later to increase the depth of the image. The finished work is viewed from the smooth, unpainted side of the perspex sheet, with the thickness of that sheet creating a curious sense of depth to the image.

In Gori Mora’s work, parts of his scenes are sectioned off with screens or framed within mirrors that offer perspectives seen from different angles. Many of the male figures are portrayed either complete or fragmented in form and often shown in various states of repose. Objects seen everyday, such as socks, belts, glasses, smoking cigarettes and electronic devices, are carefully arranged throughout most of his images. In Mora’s work, there is a strong sense of illustrative graphic design seen in his balanced compositions, stylized forms, and use of background patterns.

Mora had his first solo exhibition in Spain in March of 2022, entitled “Layering Intimacy” at the Galeria Pelaires in Mallorca. His work has been shown in such group exhibitions as the MUTUO Cultural Art Center in 2015, the 2015 “Konvent Punt Zero” held at Barcelona’s Centre Cultural d’Art, the Museu de Porreres in Majorca in 2017, the Casa de Cultura de Felanitz in Majorca in 2019, the 2019 TRAMWAY exhibition in Glasgow, the 2020 “V2React” exhibition in Miami, BEERS London Gallery in 2021, The Royal Scottish Academy exhibition in 2021, and the Tuesday to Friday Gallery in Valencia in 2022, among others.

Note: Reverse painting on glass is an historic art form. It has been popular in Europe since ancient times; glass painted using this technique has even been found in Assyrian and Phoenician civilizations. Qualified as a “scientific art”, reverse glass painting reached its peak during the Renaissance period when it had widely influenced art in Venice, Italy. It was favored since the eighteenth-century by the Church and nobility throughout Central Europe and was widely used for sacred paintings and icons in the Byzantine Empire.

The technique was used by the middle of the nineteenth-century on folk art from Bohemia and Bavaria, and such commercial products as clock faces. By the middle of the twentieth-century, the technique of reverse painting had fallen out of fashion and nearly disappeared. With the creation and rapid rise in use of polymer glazing, new paint compositions were made by combining oil and acrylic paints that made reverse painting possible on these supports.

Gori Mora’s Instagram site can be located at: https://www.instagram.com/gori.mora/?hl=en

Second Insert Image: Gori Mora, “Smoke & Sand”, 2020, Oil on Perspex, 115 x 70 cm

Third Insert Image: Gori Mora, “Reverie”, 2021, Oil on Perspex, 101 x 105 cm

Guillaume Coustou II

Guillaume Coustou II (the Younger), “Ganymede”, circa 1760, Marble, 152.5 cm, Victoria & Albert Museum, South Kensington

Born in Paris in March of 1716, Guillaume Coustou II, or the Younger, was a French sculptor of the late French Baroque and early Neo-Classical period. He was the son of Guillaume Coustou, royal sculptor to Louis XIV and his successor Louis XV, and nephew to sculptor Nicolas Coustou, chancellor of the Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris. Guillaume Coustou II initially trained at the family’s atelier, during which time his work earned him the 1735 Prix de Rome.

Guillaume Coustou II relocated to Rome where he studied from 1736 to 1739 at the French Academy in Rome. As his father was too infirm to carry out commissions for the royal residence at Château de Marly, he returned to Paris in 1739 where he worked on the “Horse Trainers”, two full-size Carrara marble sculpted groups showing rearing horses with their groom. Completed in two years and installed at Marly in 1745, Coustou’s sculptures were moved twice, first in 1794 to Paris’s Place de la Concorde and finally in 1984 to a former courtyard, now the Cour Marly, in the Richelieu wing of the Louvre Museum.

Guillaume Coustou II was accepted in 1742 as a member at the Academy of Painting and Sculpture and began a successful career as a sculptor. He worked fluently in the contemporary styles of French art. During the late Baroque period, Coustou sculpted his 1742 “Seated Vulcan”, a sixty-nine cm tall marble figure of the Greek god of fire as a reception piece for the French Royal Academy. While during the sentimental early Neo-Classical period in France, he created his circa 1760 marble “Ganymede”.

Ganymede is a divine Greek hero whose homeland was Troy; he was the most beautiful of mortals and was abducted by the god Jupiter, taking the form of an eagle, to serve as Zeus’s wine cup-bearer in Mount Olympus. The myth, popular with French eighteenth-century artists, was largely known to them from Roman poet Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”. Housed in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Coustou’s marble “Ganymede”, at 152 cm in height, stands with his weight on his left foot with right knee slightly bent. His right had holds a shallow cup and his left is place affectionately on an eagle perched on the tree trunk supporting the figure on the right.

Guillaume Coustou II produced portrait busts as well as his mythological and religious subjects. His most prominent and ambitious official commission was the “Tomb of Louis, Dauphin of France and Marie-Josephe of Saxony” for the Catholic cathedral in Sens, Burgundy, eastern France. The original design for the monument was created by the engraver and art critic Charles-Nicolas Cochin, who from 1755 to 1770 had the title of the King’s Administrator of the Arts. The monument was started by Coustou and later finished by his pupil, Rococo and Neo-Classical sculptor Pierre Julien who had studied at Coustou’s atelier.

Among the pupils Guillaume Coustou II taught in his atelier and at the Academy were Claude Dejoux, who became an academician at the Royal Academy and sculptor to King Louis XVI of France; Pierre Julien, one of the original members of the Institut de France and a chevalier of the Legion of Honor; and Dutch sculptor Johannes Widewelt who became royal sculptor to the Danish Court in 1759 and known for his fifty-four monuments on the grounds of Crown Prince Frederik the Fifth’s Jægerspris Castle in eastern Denmark.

Guillaume Coustou II passed away in Paris on the 13th of July in 1777.

Top Insert Image: François-Hubert Drouais, “Guillaume Coustou the Younger”, 1758, Oil on Canvas, 130 x 97 cm, Palace of Versailles, France

Second Insert Image: Guillaume Coustou II (the Younger), “Ganymede”, circa 1760, Marble, 152.5 cm, Victoria &Albert Museum, South Kensington, Niche View

Bottom Insert Image: Guillaume Coustou II (the Younger), “Apollo”, 1753, Marble, 180 x 80 cm, Chateau Versailles, France

Francisco Martins

The Photography of Francisco Martins

Born in Cascais, a municipality of Lisbon in 1980, Francisco Martins is a Portuguese photographer, illustrator and graphic designer. He developed his drawing skills from a very young age; the focus of his artwork became the human body depicted in a realistic style. Spending long hours drawing faces and bodies, Martins was captivated by the idea of capturing on paper a subject at a particular moment in time, in effect rendering the subject timeless and beyond mortality.

Throughout his art history studies, Martins felt especially inspired by the works produced during the Renaissance and Late Baroque periods, the Classical art of Europe’s seventeenth-century and the works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which included such artists as William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and, later, William Morris and John William Waterhouse. Martins was also inspired by the portraits of past monarchs who, considered to have been anointed by God, were depicted in divine postures surrounded by auras of light and magical atmospheres.

Francisco Martins, drawn to these painting styles and techniques, began to apply these same principles to his own artwork. Along with his love for nature, he has a deep fascination for Greek and Celtic mythology, as well as the folklore of his native Portugal. Martins’s book collection of fairy tales and local lore told by elders around fires on cold nights played an important role in shaping his graphic style.

Between 2000 and 2004, Martins attended Lisbon’s Institute of Art, Design, Technology and Communication where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design. After graduation, Martins began to experiment in photography. He combined photography with his illustrative techniques to create hyper-realistic illustrations that depicted scenes from ancient myths. As his photographic skills matured, Martins began to focus more on fashion and his favorite form of expression, portrait photography.

Begun in 2016, Francisco Martins’s “LongIsBeautiful” project is a photographic series that celebrates that which is different and aims to break down labels and stereotypes. Primarily it is an attempt to break rigid trends in the fashion industry, elevate the industry’s fundamental values, and confront society’s rigid expectations of what a man’s image should be. The project also glorifies the image of men in communion with Nature, a communion exemplified by Native Americans and Brazilian and Polynesian native cultures.

The “LongIsBeautiful” project associates long hair with the sixth sense and sees it as a celebration of the natural world of which we are a part. Societies, especially ancient ones, believed that hair was more than an aesthetic attribute; a person threatened or in danger would feel one’s hair rise up on the back of his neck, an unconscious perception of a warning. The project depicts modern man as a being who recognizes and respects the importance of the natural environment.

Concurrently with his “LongIsBeautiful” project, Martins began a project entitled “RedIsBeautiful”, a photographic series that was started with the goal of ending the negative stigma that is usually associated with red hair. The rarest of all hair colors on the planet, less than two percent of the world’s population, red hair is often an excuse for bullying, derogatory comments, harassment and even hate crimes. There are high incidents of both depression and suicides among those with red hair due to such occurrences. In Martins’s vision, red hair plays a major role in fairy tales and should be recognized as an exceptional trait. His project hopes to increase self-esteem and shape the fashion world into a more accepting and appreciative industry.

As an independent artist, Francisco Martins’s work has appeared in many periodicals including Umbigo Magazine, Egoísta Magazine, DIF Magazine, PARQ Magazine, Computer Arts Portugal Magazine and MC1R Magazine, among others. He has also done photographic work with guitarist Steve Vai for Ibanez Guitars.

Martins’s work was featured in two compendiums of illustrations from worldwide artists by the German art publishing house TASCHEN. His images appeared in “Illustration Now: Volume 3” and “Illustration Now: Portraits”, as well as in the promotional calendars and diaries. Martins’s work was also featured in the official catalogues for the 2009 Lisbon Offf festival and the 2010 Offf in Paris.

Francisco Martins’s work can be found at his Instagram site located at: https://www.instagram.com/franciscomartinsphotography

Francisco Martins’s Behance site, which combines his three fields of graphic work, illustration and photography, is located at: http://www.behance.net/FrancMartins

Second Insert Image: Francisco Martins, “João David, Cascais”, 2019, “LongIsBeautiful” Project, Black and White Print

Third Insert Image: Francisco Martins, “Chris Pritchard, Cascais”, 2015, “RedIsBeautiful” Project, “NC1R?-The Magazine for Redheads, Issue 5, 2016

Bottom Insert Image: Francisco Martins, “António Godinho, Cascais”, 2018, “RedIsBeautiful” and “LongIsBeautiful” Projects, Color Print

Dziga Vertov: Film History Series

Dziga Vertov, “Man with a Movie Camera”, 1929, Film Scene Gifs, Cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman, Silent Film, Running Time 68 Minutes, All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration/Dovzhenko Film Studios

“Man with a Movie Camera” is a 1929 experimental film which was written and directed by the Soviet pioneer documentary film and newsreel director Dziga Vertov. His filming practices and theories influenced the cinéma vérité style of documentary film-making which combined improvisation with the use of the camera to unveil truth or hidden subjects. This style would sometimes involve stylized set-ups and interaction, at times provocative, between the filmmaker and the subject.

The cinematographer was Mikhail Kaufman, the younger brother of Vertov and the actor who played the man of the film. The film was edited by Vertov’s wife, Yelizaveta Svilova, who became known for her documentaries on World War II and for her work as co-director of the 1945 “The Fall of Berlin”, the 1946 Stalin Prize winner. The film is famous for its cinematic techniques which included multiple exposures, fast and slow motion, split screens, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, and jump cuts, in which footage from a scene is removed to render a jump in time.

“Man with a Movie Camera” presents urban life in Moscow, Kyiv, and Odesa during the late 1920s. Ordinary Soviet citizens are shown, from dawn to dusk at work and at play, in scenes where they interact with the structure of everyday life. Divided into six separate parts, one for each film reel printed, the film is done in an avant-garde style with varying subject matter. Mixed in with scenes of laborers at work and sporting scenes are scenes of Mikhail Kaufman traveling to locations and setting up his camera, as well as Svilova cutting and editing strips of film. Several staged situations are also on the film, including a spliced scene of falling chess pieces played backwards.

Dziga Vertov was a member of a movement of filmmakers know as the kinoks whose mission was to abolish all non-documentary styles of film making. Most of his films were controversial and despised by many filmmakers. Vertov’s “Man with a Movie Camera” was a response to critics who rejected his previous film “A Sixth Part of the World”. Produced in 1926, it depicted through a travelogue format the multitude of Soviet people in remote areas and the wealth of the nation. Although well received by Pravda, the newspaper of the Communist Party, prominent critics gave it bad reviews.

“Man with a Movie Camera” was not always a highly regarded work; it was criticized for both its stark experimentation and for its staging. Vertov’s Soviet contemporaries criticized its focus on form rather than content. The pace of the film’s editing, four times faster than a typical film of the era, with about seventeen hundred individual shots, bothered many viewers and critics. Today it is regarded by many as one of the great films ever made; it ranked nine in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll of the world’s best films. Throughout the years, many notable composers have written soundtracks for the film.

Note: Dziga Vertov’s “Man with a Movie Camera” in its entirety can be seen on YouTube and on the DailyMotion website located at: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x21992b

Arthur George Murphy

Lithographs by Arthur George Murphy

Born in Tiffin, Ohio in January of 1906, Arthur George Murphy was a lithographer, painter and educator. He began his initial art education at the Cleveland School of Art. After relocating to New York City, Murphy studied for two years at the Art Students’ League under painter and illustrator Boardman Robinson and anatomy and figure drawing teacher George Bridgeman.

Murphy worked for a short time as a cartoonist for Chicago and New York newspapers. In 1930, he relocated to San Francisco where he continued his studies at the California School of Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Art Institute. Murphy also studied briefly at Colorado Springs’ Broadmoor Art Academy from 1932 to 1934. After his studies, he abandoned commercial art to devote his time to fine art.

In August of 1935, the Federal Art Project was established as part of the New Deal program to fund visual arts in the United States. It was one of five Federal Project Number One projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression era. Between 1935 and 1940, Arthur Murphy worked on California’s Federal Art Project for which he produced murals and almost one hundred lithographs. Included among his many works are lithographs documenting the construction of both the Golden Gate and San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridges.

During the years of World War II, Arthur George Murphy served as a war artist and correspondent in the South Pacific area. After his discharge from service, he relocated permanently to Connecticut where he taught at the Whitney School of Art, which became part of Paier College, Bridgeport, in 1954, and at the private Quinnipiac College located in Hamden, Connecticut.

Exhibitions of Murphy’s work included a 1934 mural for a public works project in southern California, an exhibition at the San Francisco Art Association in 1937, an exhibition at the De Young Museum in 1939, a 1941 solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art, and an exhibition at the Newark Museum of Art in New Jersey.

Arthur George Murphy died at the age of eighty-five in Old Saybrock, Connecticut in 1991. His work is housed in both private and public collections including that of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of American Art, Philadelphia’s Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the University of Kentucky Art Museum, among others.

Top Insert Image: Arthur George Murphy, “Ballet Dancers, Ballet Russe”, 1939, Lithograph, 41.3 x 29.2 cm, Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota

Bottom Insert Image: Arthur George Murphy, “Steel Riggers, Bay Bridge”, 1936, Lithograph, 39.4 x 30.5 cm, Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota

Jorge Eduardo Eielson: “A Silhouette of Blue Sparks”

Photographers Unknown, A Silhouette of Blue Sparks

un día tú un un dia                                          one day you one day
abrirás esa puerta y me verás dormido       will open that door and you will see me asleep
con una chispa azul en el perfil                     with a shilhouette of blue sparks
y verás tanbién mi corazón                            and you will also see my heart
y mi camisa de alas blancas                           and my white-winged shirt
pidiendo auxilio en el balcón                        crying for help on the balcony
y verás además                                                 and you will also see
verás un catre de hierro                                  you will see an iron cot
junto a una silla de paja                                 next to a straw chair
y a una mesa de madera                                 and a wooden table
pero sobre todo                                                in particular
verás un trapo inmundo                                 you will see a filthy rag
en lugar de mi alegría                                     instead of my joy
comprenderás entonces                                 then you will understand
cuánto te amaba                                               how much I loved you
y por qué durante siglos                                 and why for centuries
miraba sólo esa puerta y dibujaba                i only stared at that door and sketched
dibujaba y miraba esa puerta                        sketched and stared at that door
y dibujaba nuevamente                                  and sketched again
con gran cuidado                                             with great care
comprenderás además                                   you will also understand
por qué toda las noches                                 why every night
sobre mi piel cansada                                     among the thousand gold marks
entre mil signos de oro                                   and tattoos and majestic wrinkles
y tatuajes y arrugas majestuosas                  on my tired skin
me hacía llorar sobre todo                             what made me cry the most
un cicatriz que decía                                       was a scar tha said:
yo te adoro yo te adoro yo te adoro              i adore you i adore you i adore you

Jorge Eduardo Eielson, Albergo del Sole II, Room in Rome, 1952, Translation 2019 by David Shook

Born in Lima in 1924, Jorge Eduardo Eielson was a Peruvian poet, writer and artist. He is part of a generation of Peruvian poets to which the Surrealist works of artist and poet César Moro and writer Emilio Adolfo Westphalen played an important role. A Renaissance man with a curious mind who was not content cultivating a single form of art, Eielson produced work in multiple genres: poetry, painting, theater, novels, performance events and installations. Interested in archeology, science, and religion, he participated in all the post-war intellectual and artistic European trends: however, he valued his independence and never considered himself as belonging to any particular group or sect.

The son of a U.S. national of Scandinavian origin and a Peruvian mother, Jorge Eielson lived in an era of rich cultural growth and economic stability that was open to influences from international centers. Eielson learned English and French, read Rimbaud, Shelley and Mallarmé in the original languages, and savored such major poets as Whitman, Vallejo, Neruda and Borges. At the end of his secondary education, Eielson met writer and anthropologist José María Arguedas who introduced him to Lima’s artistic and literary circles and knowledge of the ancient Peruvian civilizations, a cultural history unknown to the young people at the time due to the system of colonial education.

Eielson began studies at the National University of San Marcos in 1941. At the age of twenty-one in 1945, he earned the National Poetry Award and, one year later, Peru’s National Drama Award. Eielson published two collections of poetry in the 1940s: “Reinos (Kingdoms)” published in 1944 and the 1947 “Canción y Muerte de Rolando”. In these years, he also enrolled in drawing and painting classes where he created his first canvases, works which were influenced by those of Paul Klee and Joan Mirò. In 1948, Eielson had his first exhibition, a collection of oils, acrylics, mobiles, and constructs of burned and colored wood, at a gallery in Lima. He wrote for various local publications and, in collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Jean Superville, curated an art review and lecture entitled “El Correo de Ultramar (The Overseas Post)”.

Awarded a film study scholarship by the French government, Jorge Eielson traveled to Paris in 1948 where he associated with the many international writers and artists in the Latin Quarter and Saint Germain des Près. At this time, Eielson discovered the work of Piet Mondrian and was soon invited by Uruguayan painter Arden Quine of the Madi group to exhibit his work with them at the first exhibition of abstract art, the Salon des Rèalitès, founded by French sculptor and editor Andrè Bloc. Following the Salon, Eielson exhibited with the avant-garde gallery Colette Allendy, through which he met and developed a long friendship with prominent visual artist Raymond Hains.

With the assistance of a UNESCO scholarship, Eielson traveled to Switzerland to begin writing again. In 1951 he continued his journey to Italy where, upon setting foot on the peninsula, he proclaimed Italy to be his elected land. Settled in Rome, Eielson wrote his 1952 collection of poems “Habitación en Roma (Room in Rome)”. Although he abandoned the extreme avant-garde art movement in the late 1950s, Eielson continued his painting and started to texturize his canvases using sand and clay to sculpt the canvas surface. Initially using these materials on his landscapes, Eielson moved towards figurative works using textiles of various kinds.

In the 1960s in Rome, Jorge Eielson met and began a relationship with the Sardinian artist and novelist Michele Mulas. Born in 1936 in Bari Sardo, a commune in the Province of Nuoro, Mulas became a forerunner of contemporary art due to his new and singular style which combined art and science. Their relationship would last for forty years until Mulas’s death of leukemia in 2002.

In 1963, Eielson began his first quipu, a reinvention of the ancient Andean recording device modernized with brilliant colored fabrics, knotted and tied on canvas. These works, exhibited in the 1964 Venice Biennale, gained him wide international recognition and led to exhibitions at New York’s MOMA and Nelson Rockefeller Collection, as well as the Salon De Mai in Paris. Returning to Peru in the 1970s, Eielson continued to write and began to focus on the study of pre-Columbian art.

Jorge Eielson published a novel entitled “El Cuerpo de Giulia-No (The Body of Julia-n)” in 1971. Peru’s National Institute of Culture published most of Eielson’s collective poetry in 1976 under the title of “Poesia Escrita (Written Poetry)”. In 1977, Eielson published another collection of poems entitled “Canto Visible (The Visible Edge)”. This was followed by a second novel, the 1987 “Primera Muerte de Maria (Maria’s First Death)” published by the Fondo de Cultura Economica in Mexico.

In 1978, Eielson received a Guggenheim Fellowship for a lecture in New York City. At the end of the decade, he and Michele Mulas moved to Milan, Italy, where Eielson would spend the rest of his life writing and producing his art which continued to be exhibited around the world. An anthology of Eielson’s poetry was published in 1990 by Vuelta of Mexico City under the supervision of the Mexican poet and diplomat Octavio Paz, the winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature. In that year, Eielson was also invited by Paz to attend the International Center for Contemporary Art in Mexico. Eielson returned to Peru to participate, along with Peruvian-born visual artist Jorge Piqueras, in the last Trujillo Biennial which also included artists from neighboring countries. In 2002, he gave his last public interview through a streaming video organized by Fundación Telefónica.

Following the death of Michele Mulas in 2002, Jorge Eielson’s own health significantly deteriorated. He passed away in Milan, Italy, in March of 2006. Eielson’s ashes were laid to rest beside his partner’s ashes in a small cemetery in Bari Sardo, a municipality in the Italian region Sardinia. Over the course of his life, he published one hundred forty-four works in three hundred and seventy five publications, translated in five languages. Eielson’s artwork is held in the collections, among others, of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru and the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas.

Notes: A more extensive article on Jorge Eielson’s life and work can be found at: http://www.jorgeeielson.org

An interesting article entitled “Jorge Eduardo Eielson and Sound Poetry” written by Luis Alvarado discusses Eielson’s experiments in vocal poetry, or vocal structures, and the period at the end of the 1960s when performances became his focus. The article can be located at: https://ubu-mirror.ch/media/sound/eielson/Alvaro-Luis_JORGE-EDUARDO-EIELSON-AND-SOUND-POETRY.pdf

Second Insert Image: Jorge Eduardo Eielson, “Canto Visible”, 1960, “Texto Para Cantar”, One of $ Textos

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Jorge Eduardo Eielson and Michele Mulas in Sardinia”, Summer of 1935, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Jorge Eduardo Eielson, “Quipus 36 T-1”, 1969, Acrylic and Fabric on Canvas, 130 x 130 x 24 cm, Private Collection

Eliot Hodgkin

Eliot Hodgkin, “Peeled Lemons”, 12/03/1958, Tempera on Board, 21.5 x 24.7 cm, Estate of Eliot Hodgkin, Exhibition: Royal Academy 1958

Born in Purley-on-Thames in June of 1905, Curwen Eliot Hodgkin was an English painter best known for his highly detailed still lifes. The only son of Charles Ernest Hodgkin and his wife Alice Jane Brooke, he was raised in a Quaker family related to Roger Eliot Fry, a prominent member of the Bloomsbury Group of artists. Eliot Hodgkin was also the younger cousin of abstract painter Sir Howard Hodgkin.

Hodgkin received his early education at the Harrow School from 1919 to 1923. His initial formal art training was in London at the independent Byam Shaw School of Art. He later enrolled at the Royal Academy School where he studied under painter and draughtsman Francis Ernest Jackson, a student of both William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant. Hodgkin left the Royal Academy to prepare works for an upcoming exhibition at Liverpool’s Basnett Gallery.

Eliot Hodgkin was very particular in the choice of subjects for his paintings; he would choose simple things, often natural objects, and meticulously arrange them against the painting’s background. Hodgkin originally painted in oils, both indoors and en plein air. Introduced in 1937 to a method of creating egg tempera by his friend and teacher Maxwell Armfield, he dedicated more of his time to painting indoors with egg tempera on primed hardboard. Hodgkin’s interest in egg tempera was influenced by the detailed work of such artists as Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbaran, known as the Spanish Caravaggio, and Adriaen Coorte, the Dutch Golden Age painter of small still lifes.

By the middle of the 1930s, Hodgkin had established himself as a painter of still lifes, landscapes and murals through regular exhibitions at the Royal Academy. Between 1934 and 1981, he took part in all the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions. Three of Hodgkin’s works, including the 1939 “October”, were purchased at the summer exhibitions by the Chantrey Bequest founded by wealthy portrait sculptor and painter Sir Francis Chantrey. These three works were later presented to the Tate Gallery collection in London. In 1938, Hodgkin had his first solo exhibition at the Picture Hire Gallery on London’s Brook Street where he showed twenty-three works painted during a ten month span.

During the years of World War II, Eliot Hodgkin joined the Air Raid Precautions, an organization of wardens supporting citizens during air raids, and worked for the Home Intelligence Division of the Ministry of Information. He continued his painting during the war and produced paintings contrasting the ruins of London’s bomb sites with the vegetation that thrived in the devastation. For his work, he received a commission as part of the War Artists Scheme, a project devised and administered by Kenneth Clark, the Director of the National Gallery.

Hodgkin taught briefly as a teacher in 1936 at the Westminster School of Art. He was offered the position of academic at the Royal Academy of Art in 1959; however, he declined in order to concentrate on his painting. Hodgkin wrote a novel, “She Closed the Door” in 1931 and, in the following year, six articles on mural decorations for the book “Fashion Drawing” published by Chapman and Hall. In 1949, he published “A Pictorial Gospel”, a collection of old master illustrations of the Gospel story. His last published work was an article entitled “How I Paint in Temper” for the Society of Painters in Tempera’s 1967 yearbook.

Eliot Hodgkin continued his painting until his late seventies. Due to eyesight difficulties, his work slowly diminished until it stopped completely in 1979. During the last years of his life, he suffered from axatia, loss of full control of his bodily movements. Eliot Hodgkin died in May of 1987 at the age of eighty-one; his ashes are buried in the churchyard of St. John’s Ladbroke Grove in London.

“Why tempera?… Because tempera enables me most nearly to achieve the effects I am aiming at… I try to show things exactly as they are, yet with some of their mystery and poetry, and as though seen for the first time. And it seems to me that, in trying to depict “a World in a grain of sand”, perhaps the best medium is tempera, because it combines clarity and definition with a certain feeling of remoteness.” – Eliot Hodgkin, 1946, Royal Watercolor Society Catalogue

Note: More extensive information on Eliot Hodgkin’s life and work can be found at The Estate of Eliot Hodgkin website located at: https://www.eliothodgkin.com

Top Insert Image: Howard Coster, “Eliot Hodgkin”, 1953, Silver Gelatin Print, 22.9 x 17.8 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

Second Insert Image: Eliot Hodgkin, “Five Gladiolus Bulbs”, 04/03/1954, Tempera on Board, 10.2 x 13.7 cm, Private Collection, Exhibited at Leicester Galleries in 1956

Third Insert Image: Eliot Hodgkin, “Portrait of Douglas Fitzpatrick”, Date Unknown (circa 1930), Pencil and Watercolor, 58.4 x 47 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Eliot Hodgkin, “Orto Chiuso, Malcontenta, Italy”, 1957, Oil on Canvas, 24.2 x 19.7 cm, Private Collection, Exhibition Waddesdon 2019

Gordon Coster

The Photography of Gordon Coster

Born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1906, Gordon H. Coster was an American photographer known for his abstracted industrial images and his photojournalism documenting civil rights and labor issues. Interested in photography from an early age, he joined the Baltimore Camera Club in the early 1920s and garnered a reputation when his modernistic images were accepted in international photographic salons. At nineteen years old, Coster’s 1925 Bauhaus-inspired image of Baltimore’s Washington Monument, “Shadow of the Washington Monument”, was published in the Baltimore Sun’s rotogravure section.

From 1920 to 1925, Gordon Coster worked for the Bachrach Portrait Studio in Baltimore. Once photography replaced drawing in advertising illustration, he moved to New York City where he became employed by the prestigious Underwood & Underwood. Originally the largest producer and distributor of stereoscopic and other photographic images, the photographic studio became a pioneer in the field of news bureau photography. Coster secured his place in the field by creating innovative advertising and industrial photo-illustrations for newspapers, magazines and catalogues.

From the beginning of 1927 through 1936, Coster documented labor union activities. He relocated to Chicago in 1930 where he founded a mid-western branch of Underwood & Underwood. During his years in Chicago, Coster developed an unique artistic style for his evening cityscapes. These experimental works presented an abstracted perspective of Chicago’s buildings, shot with tilted angles and occasionally through unfocused lenses. Coster shifted his career to photojournalism with freelance work for such periodicals as Life, Scientific American, Time, Fortune, and Holiday.

Gordon Coster’s personal commitment to the welfare of his fellow citizens led to many extensive documentary projects. In the late 1930s, he produced many projects dedicated to American life in the mid-west. Coster created a series on the lives of wheat farmers and a detailed photo-documentary on the Tennessee Valley Authority Dam Project. Passed in 1933, the TVA project, though controversial at the time, transformed the wild Tennessee Valley river system into a stable region with flood-control, safe navigation, electrification, and economic development. Through the 1930s and 1940s, Coster documented the impact of World War II on the U.S. home front through images of factories repurposed for military production, women assembly-line workers, and rallies to support the troops.

In 1946 Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy, who founded the Chicago Institute of Design, invited Coster to lecture at the institute’s course “The New Vision in Photography” alongside such eminent photographers as Paul Strand, Erwin Blumenfeld and Berenice Abbott. Coster returned to lecture in 1950 to 1951 and later in 1960 with a focus on socially-oriented themes. In 1955, Edward Steichen selected Coster’s work for inclusion in the landmark exhibition “The Family of Man” held at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art.

Gordon Coster ceased his photographic work in 1964 and eventually retired in 1982. He passed away in 1988 at the age of sixty-two. Coster’s work has been included in exhibitions at Houston’s Contemporary Art Museum, the Stephen Daiter Gallery in Chicago, London’s Viewfinder Gallery, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Notes: Gordon Coster’s photographic work is included in the current 2023 exhibition “Trick Photography and Visual Effects” (January 19 to March 18) at the Keith de Lellis Gallery located at 41 East 57th Street in New York City.

A major collection of Gordon Coster’s work, including over twenty-five thousand prints, negatives, transparencies, and film reels, is housed at the Research Center of the Chicago History Museum.

Top Insert Image: Gordon Coster, “Self Portrait”, circa 1945, Gelatin Silver Print, 20.3 x 25.4 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Gordon Coster, “Eliot Elisofon”, 1942, Gelatin Silver Print, Life Magazine Cover July 13, 1942, International Center of Photography

Bottom Insert Image: Gordon Coster, “Chicago Outdoor Street Market”, 1944, Gelatin Silver Print, Life Magazine Collection, 33.7 x 26.7 cm, International Center of Photography

John Dall: Film History Series

Photographer Unknown, “John Dall”, 1948, Publicity Shot for Universal International, Gelatin Silver Print

Born in New York City in May of 1920, John Dall Thompson was an American stage and film actor. The younger of two sons born to Charles Thompson and Henny Worthington, he moved with his family in the 1920s to Panama, where his father was employed as a civil engineer for airport construction. After performing at a local theater, Dall first gave thought to the possibility of acting as a career. Due to the death of Charles Thompson by suicide in 1929, the family chose to return to New York City.

John Dall attended the Horace Mann School, a private college-preparatory school in the Bronx, and enrolled at Columbia University with the intention of studying engineering. He soon left the university and studied at the Pasadena Playhouse and the Theodore Irvine School of Theater. Dall also took theater courses in New Orleans at the Petit Theatre, a historic French Quarter playhouse founded in 1916.

Dall performed for six years in various stock companies, primarily the Children’s Theater founded in New York City in 1924 by British actress and playwright Clare Tree Major. He also worked in several theater companies headed by such performers as Academy Award winner Aline MacMahon, actor Arthur William Byron, and stage and screen actress Edith Atwater. During the 1941-1942 season, Dall had small roles on Broadway which included the 1920 science-fiction play “R.U.R.” by Czech writer Karel Čapek. In 1942-1943, Dall had the lead role of Quizz Martin in the touring production of Maxwell Anderson’s “The Eve of St Mark” which later moved to Broadway.

John Dall’s performance in the Broadway version of “The Eve of St Mark” caught the attention of the wife of Jack Warner, founder of Warner Brothers Pictures. This resulted in a film contract with the studio; a proviso was added to the contract that allowed Dall personal time for stage performances. Dall’s first film with Warner Brothers was director Irving Rapper’s 1945 “The Corn is Green”, a drama starring Bette Davis as a schoolteacher bringing education to a Welsh coal mining town. Dall played the lead role of miner Morgan Evans and was nominated for the 1946 Academy Award / Best Supporting Actor.

Impressed with the film rushes for “The Corn is Green”, Warner Brothers signed Dall to a new contract. He became one of the studio’s six contract players that were to be built into stars; the others included Lauren Bacall, Dane Clark, Faye Emerson, Robert Hutton and William Prince. In 1944, Dall returned to the stage with the lead role in playwright Norman Krasna’s highly successful “Dear Ruth”, which eventually ran for six-hundred and eighty performances. The film rights to the play, however, were purchased by Paramount Studio which cast William Holden in Dall’s original role.

Warner Brothers purchased the film rights to John Patrick’s play “Hasty Heart” with the intention of giving the lead film role to John Dall. In 1945, Dall performed “Hasty Heart” on a three-month stage tour. However as it took several more years before the film was started, casting changes gave the lead role to Irish-British actor Richard Todd. In May of 1946, Warners released Dall from his contract after filming only one role for the studio.

Although Paramount Studio cited interest in signing Dall for an adaption of ”The Wayfarers” based on Becky Chambers’s series of books, Dall signed a seven-year contract with David Selznick’s Vanguard Films in May of 1946. He performed “Hasty Heart” during the summer theater season but was never given any roles by Selznick. Signing with Universal International, he played Canadian actress Deanna Durbin’s love interest in Irving Pichel’s 1947 musical comedy “Something in the Wind”. Dall next appeared in a supporting role in Michael Gordon’s 1948 post-Civil War drama “Another Part of the Forest”.

Founded by Alfred Hitchcock and his longtime associate Sidney Bernstein at the end of World War II, Transatlantic Pictures chose John Dall for one of the lead roles in its first production. Dall and actor Farley Granger played the two killers who matched wits with James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s Technicolor 1948 crime thriller “Rope”. On its theatrical release, the film performed poorly at the box office; screenwriter Arthur Laurents attributed the poor performance to audience uneasiness with the homosexual undertones between the characters played by Dall and Granger.

Dall did an hour episode for the ABC anthology radio series “Theater Guild on the Air” and then appeared on Broadway in an adaption of Jean-Paul Satre’s “Red Gloves” with Charles Boyer. In 1949, he made his television debut in The Chevolet Tele-Theatre’s production “Miracle in the Rain”. Dall appeared as one of the leads in Joseph H. Lewis’s 1950 crime film-noir “Gun Crazy” playing opposite femme-fatale actress Peggy Cummins. He later had supporting roles in the 1950 crime film-noir “The Man Who Cheated Himself”, playing opposite Lee J. Cobb and Jane Wyatt, and in a revival on Broadway of the romantic drama “The Heiress”, playing alongside Basil Rathbone.

Throughout the 1950s, John Dall appeared in stock productions of such plays as “Gramercy Ghost”, “The Hasty Heart”, “Born Yesterday” and “The Man Who Came to Dinner”. He worked extensively in television and appeared in guest roles on such shows as Studio One in Hollywood, General Electric Theater, Schlitz Playhouse, The Clock, Broadway Television Theater, and Lights Out. In 1955, Dall returned to Broadway for writer and director Leslie Stevens’s “Champagne Complex”.

Dall’s first film role after a span of eight years was that of the Roman soldier Marcus Glabus, based on the life of Roman military commander Gaius Claudius Glaber, in Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 epic historical drama “Spartacus”. This film won four Academy Awards and had the highest ranking box office in Universal Studio’s history until “Airport” in 1970. Dall’s final film performance was as the villain Zaren in George Pal’s 1961 science-fiction film “Atlantis, the Lost Continent”.

As to John Dall’s personal life, there is very little verifiable written record. According to music journalist Phil Milstein, at the time of his death Dall had lapsed into alcoholism and was living with his partner, actor Clement Brace. While visiting London in October of 1970, John Dall sustained a serious fall. He died three months later of cardiac arrest, a complication of myocarditis, at his Beverly Hills home in January of 1971 at the age of fifty. His body was donated to medical science. Dall’s papers and correspondence are housed at the Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills, California.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “John Dall”, Date Unknown, Studio Publicity Shot, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Joseph A. Valentine, “John Dall, James Stewart and Farley Granger”, 1948, Film Shot from “Rope”, Director Alfred Hitchcock

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Donald O’Connor, Deanna Durbin and John Dall”, 1947, Pulicity Shot for “Something in the Wind”, Director Irving Pichel, Cinematographer Milton R. Krasner

Fourth Insert Image: Sol Polito, “John Dall and Bette Davis”, 1945, Film Shot from “The Corn is Green”, Director Irving Rapper

Fifth Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “John Dall”, Date Unknown, Publicity Shot, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Russell Harlan, “John Dall”, 1950, Film Shot from “Gun Crazy”, Director Joseph H. Lewis

R. H. Ives Gammell

The Paintings of R. H. Ives Gammell

Born into a wealthy Providence, Rhode Island family in 1883, Robert Hale Ives Gammell was an American artist, one of the last American artists who were trained in the French Academic tradition of the late nineteenth-century. His work shows the influence of French Neoclassical painters Jacque-Louis David and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, as well as Academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. Gammell was also inspired by the work of his teachers: William Sargeant Kendall, with whom he studied from 1906 to 1914, and Boston artist William McGregor Paxton who mentored him from 1928 to 1930.

R. H. Ives Gammell attended Groton School, a private college-preparatory boarding school, where he spent much of his personal time drawing. His formal art education began at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts under Impressionist painters Joseph DeCamp, Edmund C. Tarbell, and Philip Leslie Hale. Gammell later studied in Paris at the Académia Julian and the Atelier Baschet under genre painter Henri Royer and portrait artist William Laparra. Although he had intended to stay five or six years in France, these studies in Paris were interrupted by his service in the United States military during World War I.

Upon his return to the United States, Gammell briefly returned to his studies at the Boston Museum School. However, he was frustrated as he felt that, although the standards established by the great nineteenth-century painters were generally accepted and understood, the procedures and principles for the construction of large figural compositions and imagined scenes were not being taught. Trained as an impressionist, Gammell was interest in painting decorative subjects in the academic tradition. He began his career in the Boston tradition with portraits, nudes and interior scenes with primarily female figures. As he matured, Gammell turned to ancient history, Greek mythology, literary and religious scenes, and psychology particularly that of C. G. Jung, for his subjects.

R. H. Ives Gammell produced many works in the 1930s; however, the recognition that he was working against the current trend in art and other stress factors led to a nervous breakdown in 1939. While recovering, Gammell read Carl Jung’s “Psychology of the Unconscious” and discovered an approach to a series of paintings based on poet Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven”. Read while a sixteen-year old student, this poem had held Gammell’s imagination and formed the basis of a number of sketches. He now saw Jung’s work as a link between myths, symbols, poetry and the recurring emotional patterns of human life.

Gammell had begun planning in 1941 the sequence of images that would embrace many of the themes he had considered throughout his career. His “Hound of Heaven” series consisted of twenty-three large format oil on canvas paintings, each being 200.7 x 68.6 cm in size. These illustrations of Thompson’s poem contain images and symbols drawn from various ancient and modern sources and conjure up deep human responses. The series, completed and exhibited in 1956, is considered by many to be Gammell’s greatest achievement, one which represented his artistic aims and ideas.

Starting in the 1940s, R. H. Ives Gammell taught at the Fenway Studios in Boston. His classes included the study of anatomy, memory drawing and the sight-size method, a technique that ,when viewed from a set vantage point, presents the drawing and subject with exactly the same dimensions. Among his many students were painters Robert Cormier and Richard Frederick Lack, the founder of Classical Realism; Robert Douglas Hunter known for his academic still lifes; and Samuel Rose known for his realistic and surreal subjects.

Gammell publish a book of art criticism in 1946 entitled “Twilight of Painting”, in which he argued that the tradition of European craftsmanship was undermined by modern art with its emphasis on abstraction. He also wrote a monograph on the Boston painter Dennis Miller Bunker, one of the first biographies on this innovator of Impressionism, and the 1961 book “Shop Talk of Edgar Degas”, a discussion of Degas’s connection to the act of painting. Gammell wrote a book of essays entitled “The Boston Painters: 1900-1930”, an examination of the genesis, contributions and motivations of the Boston School artists, many of whom Gammell knew personally. This volume was published posthumously.

Robert Hale Ives Gammell died, at the age of eighty-eight, in his Boston home in April of 1981. His papers, diaries, and notebooks with sketches are housed in the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Museum.

Note: A transcript of an 1973 Oral History interview with painter Robert Douglas Hunter, in which he discusses his years as a student of H. R. Ives Gammell, can be found at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art sit located at: https://www.aaa.si.edu/download_pdf_transcript/ajax?record_id=edanmdm-AAADCD_oh_212739

Second Insert Image: R.H. Ives Gammell, “The Predicament”, 1958, Oil on Canvas

Third Insert Image: R. H. Ives Gammell, “William” 1915, Oil on Canvas, 74.9 x 59 cm, Provincetown Art Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Robert Ives Gammell, “The fates”, circa 1930, Oil on Paper, 26.7 x 28.6 cm, Private Collection