J. Carino

The Artwork of J. Carino

Based in Riverside, California, J. Carino is a figurative artist whose work illustrates the interconnection between man with his sense of self-awareness and the natural world, both literal and symbolic. A 2011 graduate of the Parsons School of Design in New York City, he works in a variety of mixed-media techniques and often uses distortion and abstraction in the construction of his work’s figures.

Carino’s images depict nude, queer figures, often monumental in size, who are set in landscapes both idyllic and suffused with danger. Applying ideas from his study of the decorative arts, he explores the concepts of queerness, self-identity, queer intimacy, sensuality, and man’s relationship with the natural world through images of richly colored and patterned, layered figures and flora. During the evolution of his work’s creation, Carino often adds and removes the layers of landscape and figures to achieve the desired result.

J. Carino’s work has appeared in multiple exhibitions both in the United States and overseas. These include both the Act 1 and Act 2 Summer Stage exhibitions at Auxier/Kline in New York, the 2021 online “Eye Candy” exhibition by the WB Gallery, the 2020 Art Pride International, and, in the United Kingdom, the 2022 collective “Come Out & Play” at London’s BEERS gallery and the 2019 exhibition at Rye’s McCully & Crane Gallery, among others.

Solo exhibitions of J. Carino’s paintings include the March 2023 “Genesis” at New York City’s Auxier Kline Gallery; the 2023 “Natural Disaster” at Monti * in Latina, Italy; the February/March 2024 “Emparadise” at the Mornya Rowe Gallery in New York City; the 2025 “Between Garden and Wilderness” at London’s Rhodes Contemporary Art; and, most recently, the 2025 “Carry It With You” at the Yossi Milo Gallery in New York City.

“Like many queer people, there is a dichotomy of wanting to be seen as a whole person, sexuality included, but also the fear of people seeing too much. My figures, often self portraits, inhabit landscapes of abundance and fertility, lush with ferns and fruit, like an eden where these fears dissipate. Through my work, I explore the complicated influence of intimacy, sexuality, and being seen, especially as it relates to gay relationships and our ability to connect with one another and ourselves.” —J. Carino

J. Carino’s work can be found at the artist’s site located at https://www.jcarinoart.com and also at the following gallery locations https://linktr.ee/j.carino.art

Top Insert Image: Tate Tullier, “Portrait of J. Carino”, 2025, Color Print, The Hopper Prize

Bottom Insert Image: J. Carino, “Carrying Beauty”, 2025 Oil and Acrylic on Linen,

Giambologna: “Oceanus”

Giambologna, “Oceanus”, 1576, Marble, Museo del Bargello, Florence, Italy

Born in the Flanders city of Douai in the year 1529, Jehan Boulongne, known as Giambologna, was a Flemish sculptor based in Italy, who was the last significant sculptor of the Italian Renaissance. Working in the period between the High Renaissance and the Baroque, Giambologna transformed the Florentine Mannerism of the mid-sixteenth century into a style of European significance.

In his youth, Giambologna studied in Antwerp under architect and sculptor Jacques Du Brœucq, a Flemish artist who worked in the Italianate style. In 1550, he relocated to Italy and studied the city’s Hellenistic sculptures, particularly those complex groupings of figures in action. Although heavily influenced by the work of Michelangelo, Giambologna developed his own Mannerist style with a particular emphasis on elegance and refined surfaces. Invested in the idea of beauty for its own sake, he created works that featured figures composed of graceful curves, sinuous lines and asymmetrical contrapposto stances.

Giambologna’s elongated Mannerist contoured figures revitalized the Florentine sculptural scene. He was a master of what became known in painting and sculpture as the figura serpentinata, the serpentine figure. Giambologna’s winding figures presented movement as well as expressions of aggression and fear. He enhanced the drama by offering his viewers more than a primary viewpoint of his work; Giambologna specifically created works that could be circled and viewed from all sides. All the features in his work required great technical skill and a precise calculation to both the work process and the stress being placed on his materials.

Giambologna was awarded his first commission by Cardinal Borromeo for a large-scale bronze “Neptune” and secondary figures for a civic fountain in Bologna that would commemorate the election of the Cardinal’s uncle as Pope Pius IV. The over-life-size bronze figure of Neptune was based on an earlier design by Giambologna for a fountain in the city of Florence. His completed figure of Neptune was erected on Bologna’s fountain in 1566. This work led to Giambologna becoming the most important court sculptor of the Medici family.

Giambologna’s celebrated works include the 1578-1580 bronze “Mercury in Flight”, the first version of which is housed at Bologna’s Medieval Museum; the 1574-1582 marble “Abduction of a Sabine Woman” at the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence; the 1562 marble “Samson Slaying a Philistine” at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; and the 1599 marble “Hercules and Nessus” in Florence’s Loggia dei Lanza.

A member of the prestigious Accademia delle Art del Disegno, Giambologna died in Florence at the age of seventy-nine in August of 1608. His work influenced later sculptors through his many pupils who traveled throughout Italy and northern Europe.

Notes: Oceanus was the Titan god of the River Okeanos and all of the earth’s rivers, wells and springs. In Giambologna’s sculpture, Oceanus stands with one foot atop the head of a river fish; this symbolizes his command over the animal and all river creatures. As with many of his sculptures, Giambologna carved his marble Oceanus in the round so the viewer can see the statue from all angles.

Commissioned in 1565, the 1576 marble “Oceanus” was designed for the piazza in front of the Pitti Palace and later erected on the axis of the Boboli Garden behind the palace. “Oceanus” was removed early in the seventeenth-century to a site on the Isolotto near Porta Romana. This great marble figure, with its mass of over two tons and height of over three meters, is now preserved in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence.

The art form of contrapposto, from the Latin ‘contraponere’ meaning ‘place against’, refers to an asymmetrical arrangement of the human figure in which the line of the arms and shoulders contrast with, while still balancing, those of the hips and legs.

Linguistic Professor Arnold Zwicky’s blog has an article, entitled “An Ideal Male Body”, that discusses both Giambologna’s marble “Oceanus” and his bronze work for the “Fountain of Neptune” at: https://arnoldzwicky.org/2023/09/15/an-ideal-male-body/

Top Insert Image: Hendrick Goltzius, “Portrait of Giambologna”, 1591, Mixed Media on Paper. Teylers Museum, Haarlem, The Netherlands

Second and Third Insert Images: Giambologna, “Oceanus”, 1576, Detail, Marble, Museo del Bargello, Florence, Italy

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Edward Jean Steichen

Photography by Edward Jean Steichen

Born on March 27, 1879, Éduard Jean Steichen was a Luxembourg-born American painter, photographer and curator, who was a key figure in the development of twentieth-century photography. His parents, Jean-Pierre and Marie Kamp Steichen, emigrated with Edward to the United States in 1880, originally settling in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and later moving to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1889.

In 1894, Steichen began attending Pio Nono College, a Catholic high school for boys in the city of St. Francis, where he was recognized for his drawing skills. After quitting high school, Steichen began a four-year apprenticeship in lithography with Milwaukee’s American Fine Art Company known for its advertisements and panoramic city views. In 1895, he acquired his first camera and became a co-founder with his friends of the Milwaukee Art Students League. Steichen’s first exhibited his photographs, a series of ten works, at the 1899 Second Philadelphia Photographic Salon held at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Éduard Steichen became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1900 and signed his papers as Edward J. Steichen; however, he continued the use of his birth name until after World War I. In April of 1900, he traveled to Paris to study art, both painting and photography. Through an introduction by photographer Clarence H. White, Steichen became a close friend and collaborator with photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who established the 1897 photographic magazine “Camera Notes”.

Steichen was elected in 1901 as a member of London’s Linked Ring Brotherhood which promoted photography as one of the fine arts. In 1902, Steichen was a co-founder, along with White and Stieglitz, of the Photo-Secession movement that promoted photography as a legitimate fine art on the same level as painting and sculpture. He began experimenting in 1904 with color photography and became one of the earliest to use the Autochrome process patented in France by Louis and Auguste Lumière. Steichen helped Stieglitz found New York City’s Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, which became a prominent venue for most avant-garde artists of the time.

After high quality half-tone reproductions of photographs became possible, the genre of fashion photography became established as a fine art. This was made possible by the works of Edward Steichen and French portrait photographer Baron Adolph de Meyer, Tasked by publisher Lucien Vogel in 1911 to promote fashion as fine art, Steichen took photos of couturier Paul Poiret’s designer gowns. Published in color for the April 1911 issue of “Art et Décoration”. two photos from this shoot were done in a soft-focus, aesthetically retouched style. The images idealized the garments beyond the exact description of its fabric and buttons, marking a strong distinction from former hard, sharp commercial images.

In 1940, the Museum of Modern Art in New York inaugurated the first department of photography in a museum; it was overseen by art historian and photographer Beaumont Newhall. In 1942, Steichen curated the museum’s exhibition “Road to Victory”, a series of photographs by enlisted Armed Force members, that also included images of aerial fighting engagements taken by automatic cameras on naval planes. In 1947, he was appointed Director of Photography, a position he used to expand and organize the collection. Steichen recognized new generations of photographers and exhitited early works by such artists as Henry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Robert Rauschenberg.

Among his accomplishments during his term as Director of Photography, Edward Steichen created the MOMA world-touring exhibition “The Family of Man”, a collection of five hundred photos depicting life, love, and death in sixty-eight countries. It was seen by nine million visitors and still holds the record for the most-visited photography exhibition. “The Family of Man” is now permanently housed, on continuous display, at Clervaux Castle in northern Luxembourg, the country of Steichen’s origin.

Steichen’s career did much to popularize and promote the medium of photography. Both before and since his death in March of 1973, photography, including his own, continued to appreciate as a collectible art form. In 2006, Steichen’s early 1904 pictorialist photograph “The Pond-Moonlight”, showing a wooded area and pond in Mamaroneck, New York, sold for US 2.9 million dollars. Steichen achieved the impression of color by manually applying layers of light-sensitive gums to the paper (the autochrome process not being available until 1907). Only three prints of “The Pond-Moonlight”, two being in museums, are known to exist.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Edward Steichen, Brâncusi, Voulangis, France”, circa 1922, Printed 1987, Gelatin Silver Print, 33 x 26.7 cm, Edward Steichen Trust

Second Insert Image: Edward Jean Steichen, “Walt Disney”, 1933, Gelatin Silver Print, 24.2 x 20 cm, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Museums, Washington DC

Third Insert Image: Edward Jean Steichen, “Gloria Swanson”, 1924, Printed 1960s, Gelatin Silver Print, 24 x 19.1 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Bottom Insert Image: Edward Jean Steichen, “George Gershwin”, 1927, Gelatin Silver Print, 24.1 x 19.2 cm, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Museums, Washington DC

Egon Schiele: “Freundschaft”

Egon Schiele, ““Freundschaft (Friendship)”, 1913, Watercolor, Gouache and Pencil on Paper, 48.2 x 32 cm, Private Collection

“Freundschaft” is marked by the Expressionist era’s embrace of emotional experience over physical reality through its emphasis on inner experiences. Egon Schiele’s depiction of the human form is distinctly characterized by its contorted and sculptural portrayal. Rather than a literal interpretation, he elongated both limbs and torsos with some features accented and others diminished. Schiele’s dynamic line work, an essential element in his portraiture works, creates both tension and movement within the composition.

As the majority of Schiele’s work was titled posthumously, “Freundschaft” is rather unique in that he titled it himself upon completion. There is no detailed information available on the identity of the depicted figures in this mixed-media work. The couple appear to be Egon Schiele and Walburga “Wally” Neuzil, an Austrian nurse who was both lover and muse to Schiele between 1911 and 1915.

In 1911, Wally Neuzil and Egon Schiele met in Vienna; she was seventeen and he was twenty-one at that time. It is possible that they met through Gustav Klimt, Schiele’s mentor for whom Neuzil was a model. Between 1911 and 1915, Neuzil modeled for some of Schiele’s most noted paintings. They lived together unmarried in Schiele’s Vienna home and eventually settled for a short period in Neulengbach, the lower Austrian district of Sankt Pölten-Land.

After returning to Vienna, Schiele established a studio in 1914 at Hietzing, one of Vienna’s suburbs. It was there that he became attracted to and decided to marry Edith Harms, one of two sisters who lived across the street from his studio. Upon learning this, Neuzil immediately left Schiele and never saw him again. She trained as a nurse in Vienna and began working at various military hospitals in the city. While working at a hospital in the city of Sinj, Dalmatia (now Croatia), Walburga Neuzil died from scarlet fever on the twenty-fifth of December in 1917 at the age of twenty-three.

Egon Schiele presented fifty works at the 49th Vienna Secession exhibition in 1918. His showing was a success that resulted in increased prices for his work and many portrait commissions. In the autumn of 1918, the Spanish flu pandemic reached Vienna. Edith Schiele, who was six months pregnant, died from the disease on the 28th of October. Schiele, who was very sick and in a weak condition, died three days after his wife. He was twenty-eight years old.

Notes: According to art historian and curator Jane Kallir, Egon Schiele’s “Freundschaft” was rejected for exhibition on moral grounds by the Munich Secession on the third of December in 1913. It was swiftly purchased privately by Albert von Keller, the President of the Sucession, for fifty marks.

Around 1915, Johannes Fischer created a series of photographs featuring fellow painter Egon Schiele in his studio at Hietzinger Hauptstraße 101. As a colleague and friend, Fischer often exhibited with Schiele, who was two years his junior. In the article’s first insert image, Schiele is looking directly into the camera, his head slightly inclined and his forehead furrowed. The artist’s stance and expression are reminiscent of his self-portraits, such as the 1912 “Self-Portrait with Lowered Head”. The painting in the photo’s background, “Shrines in the Forest II”, is housed at the Kamm Foundation.

Top Insert Image: Johannes Fischer, “Egon Schiele with the 1915 painting ‘Shrines in the Forest II’ in the background”, 1915, Vintage Print, 16.3 x 11.2 cm, Leopold Museum, Vienna, Austria

Second Insert Image: Egon Schiele, “Waldandacht II (Shrines in the Forest II)”, 1915, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 120 cm, Stiftung Sammlung Kamm

Bottom Insert Image: Egon Schiele, “Self-Portrait with Lowered Head”, 1912, Oil on Wood Panel, 337 x 422 cm, Leopold Museum, Vienna, Austria

Albrecht Dürer

Albrecht Dürer, “The Men’s Bath”, Date Unknown (1490-1528), Woodcut on Paper, 38.7 x 27.9 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

A printmaker and painter from Nuremberg, Albrecht Dürer is considered one of the most prolific and inventive artists in the German Renaissance. Dürer worked and traveled frequently to Italy during his studies of visual arts and spent time with a lifelong partner, Willibald Prickheimer, a German lawyer and humanist author.

Albrecht Dürer’s depiction of men relaxing in a public bath house was unusual in the early 1500s because it showed nudity without an accompanying mythological or biblical narrative. The print showcases Dürer’s ability to depict the male figure in various inventive poses and may feature portraits of some of his friends. Meant to be studied closely, the image includes visual puns such as the faucet placed near the man’s groin at left. The popularity of the print during Dürer’s lifetime may relate to the 1496 closure of the public bath in his hometown of Nuremberg to prevent a syphilis outbreak.

Notes: The “Ideas Made of Light” blog has an excellent article by its author, artist and UI designer Scott M.McDaniel, on Albecht Dürer’s “The Men’s Bathhouse” at: http://www.scottmcd.net/artanalysis/?p=702

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Brian Henry

The Photography of Brian Henry

Based in Maryland’s east coast city of Baltimore, Brian Henry is a self-taught, experimental analog photographer and explorer of abandoned sites. His work is an ongoing journal that documents architectural decay, explores the human body and its relationship to deserted spaces, examines emotions stirred by intimacy, fear and mortality, and uses the medium of photography as a narrative instrument.

Brian Henry became intrigued with analog photographic material and its capabilities during a traditional high school photography class. He became interested in how little alterations in the process changed the appearance of the image. Although Henry won a several scholarships to attend art school, he chose to apply his resources to his own unscripted, artistic journey. Henry has traveled a photographic journey up and down the East Coast of the U.S., as well as Europe and the Balkans.

For a period of nearly twenty years, Brian Henry has worked with different films, cameras and chemicals to understand how each affected the image of his subject. The equipment he prefers are the Pentx 67 with 55mm and Hp5 as well as Polaroid cameras and their films. Henry has learned and expanded upon traditional darkroom printing processes, often altering the prints and complimenting the subject with effects of distress and decay. He has at times buried the images in decaying buildings to achieve the correct effect for the each print’s unique irreplaceable mementos of time.

In 2019, Brian Henry participated in the seventh edition of the Revela’t Analog Photography Festival in Vilassar de Dalt near Barcelona, Spain. He has also presented his work in several group exhibitions including the 2018 “Fotofilmic17” at Galerie Binome in Paris and “The Male Gaze” at Seattle, Washington’s Gallery 1/1 in the United States. In 2019, Henry had is first solo exhibition, “Brian Henry: Silver Gelatin & Polaroid Prints” at the Steven Amedee Gallery in New York City.

Brian Henry and Greg Hatem are co-owners of Bazaar Curious Gifts at 3534 Chestnut Street in Baltimore’s iconic Hampden neighborhood. This is the gift shop for those seeking strange and unusual gifts, among which are an unique collection of natural history items, antique medical instruments, unique home decor items and other curious objects. The Bazaar Curious Gifts online shop is located at: https://www.bazaarbaltimore.com

“My work is an ongoing journal documenting architectural decay and my own mortality. I attempt to portray the beauty I see in these structures and occasionally include myself and others within them…. When I shoot Polaroid film, I consider it a unique souvenir of my experience. There’s something meaningful in creating something tangible within a space that will soon be destroyed. Other film mediums allow me to bend reality and add additional effects of distress and decay. In some instances, I have used photographic paper and film found in abandoned buildings. Other times, I have buried my images in decaying buildings for effects. It is all part of my attempts of connecting with a space.” —Brian Henry

Notes: The Thoughts & Photography of Johnny Martyr website has a 2019 interview with Brian Henry entitled “The Instant (Film) Decay of Brian Henry” at: https://johnnymartyr.wordpress.com/2019/03/21/the-instant-film-decay-of-brian-henry/

The fine art photography daily “LENS/CRATCH” has an article and interview with Brian Henry entitled “Beyond Instant Eros: Brian Henry’s Polaroids of Desire and Decay” at: https://lenscratch.com/2024/05/queer-photography-week-decay-mortality-brian-henry/

If you choose to repost some of Brian Henry’s photos, please credit the artist on the posting.

Top Insert Image: Brian Henry, “Self Portrait”, Color Print

Second Insert Image: Brian Henry, “Presence”, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Brian Henry, Title Unknown (Self-Portrait), Gelatin Silver Print

Gonzalo Orquin

The Artwork of Gonzalo Orquin

Born in 1982 at Aracena, a town in the Sierra de Aracena and Picos de Aroche National Park, Gonzalo Orquín is a Spanish multi-media artist, painter and photographer. His oeuvre includes works on paper, oils on canvas, street art, and installations.

At an early age, Orquin relocated with his family to Seville, the provincial capital of the autonomous community of Andalusia. He studied Fine Arts at Spain’s University of Seville between 2000 and 2004. Orquin continued his studies at Italy’s University of Perugia in 2005. He later undertook a residency at the Fondazione Sant’Elia, the cultural center for the promotion of the artistic and cultural heritage of the Province of Palermo, where his work was inspired by the light and traditions of the surrounding area.

Gonzalo Orquin’s work is influenced by the traditional Spanish realism of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. through which he transforms the intimacy of everyday occurrences into measured dramatic events. His paintings consist of portraits and populated scenes, both interior and exterior, that are often created with a muted palette. Committed to the rights of the LBGTQ world, Orquin’w work, which displays a thoughtful depth of emotion, focuses on both gay and straight subjects with an eye to both the past and the present.

In 1999 at the age of sixteen, Orquin had his first exhibition in Seville. His first solo exhibition was held in Rome in 2006. In that year, Orquin received the Oltre i Libri Award from the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities. He has participated in group shows at Rome’s Royal Spanish Academy and St. Petersburg’s Museum of 20th and 21st Century Art. Orquin has presented his work in solo exhibitions at Rome’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MACRO), and the Leslie=Lohman Museum of Art in New York City.

As a photographer, Gonzalo Orquin is best known for his 2013 series “Si Quiero”, a collection of sixteen photographs of same-sex couples kissing in churches mainly located in Rome. Originally presented as part of “Trialogo”, a solo exhibition of his work in various mediums, these images were considered offensive by the diocese of Rome which threatened legal action. For the duration of the exhibition, these images were covered with black cardboard. Later exhibitions of the entire series were held at the Gallery MooiMan in Groningen, the Netherlands, and New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in April/May of 2015.

In 2023, Orquin presented his exhibition “Being Human-The Sea At Night Is Too Big” at Brussels’s MigratieMuseumMigration (MMM). This show focused on the stories and experiences of migrant and refugees arriving in Europe, either by sea to Italy or by land to Bosnia. The project was a collaboration with Italian photojournalist Francesco Malavolta which included a documentary film by French director Alex Forge who narrates Orquin’s work process and meetings with the migrants and refugees.

Gonzalo Orquin currently lives and works between Italy and Spain. A twenty-year retrospective exhibition of his work was held in Palermo, Italy in September of 2025. Orquin’s website is located at: https://www.gonzaloorquin.com

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Gonzalo Orquin”, 2021, Color Video Shot

Second Insert Image: Gonzalo Orquin, Untitled Still Life (Art Supplies), Oil on Canvas

Third Insert Image: Gonzalo Orquin, “Julian and Leo”, 2022, Oil on Canvas, 90 x70 cm

Bottom Insert Image: Gonzalo Orquin, “Un Muchacho Ruso”, 2022, Oil on Canvas, 45 x 45 cm

Cornel Brudașcu

The Paintings of Cornel Brudașcu

Born in the Sălaj County village of Tusa in 1937, Cornel Brudașcu is a Romanian painter who began his career under the his country’s former Communist regime of the 1960s. He studied painting at the Universitatea de Artă şi Design in the north-western city of Cluj-Napoca. Over the course of his career, Brudașcu’s work gradually progressed into gestural compositions that melded figurative forms with abstraction.

After his university graduation in 1962, Brudașcu began to establish an impressive body of work. However, while there were opportunities for exhibitions in the 1960s, there was no established art market in Romania. In the 1970s, the only decade in which the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu allowed cultural exchange with the West, Brudașcu and other artists became acquainted with contemporary American art through Western magazines, reading rooms, and informal networks. Publications, such as Germany’s “Popcorn” and London’s “Oz”, offered images of counter-culture music and art movements beyond the Iron Curtain.

As a member of Romania’s 1970s avant-garde painters, Brudașcu experimented with solarized photography and created a series of Pop Art paintings, photo- based portraits of friends as well as figures appropriated from magazines. These works gained him international recognition in 2015 due to their inclusion at the Tate Modern’s “The World Goes Pop” in London. Both the Centre Pompidou and Musee d’Art Moderne at the Ville de Paris have works from this series in their collections.

Following his Pop Art images, Cornel Brudașcu made a radical shift away from his previous work. This change was the result of new visual elements and a more personal approach to his paintings’ themes and genres. At unspecified times over a period of fifteen years, Brudașcu created a collection of simple graphic sketches and small, untitled paintings with dark burgundy hues. He interwove those works with male figurative paintings of a post-impressionist style that were tinged with a distinct homoeroticism. This painterly series of figurative works bear witness through their dream-like compositions to his slow, poetic journey of gay affirmation.

As with many other Romanian artists, the subject of hero and anti-hero is a dominate theme in Brudașcu’s paintings. Influenced heavily by the works of El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos) who reached his artistic maturity in Spain, Brudașcu’s fluid expressionist style inspired the many master-class students who attended his studio to be independent in their thinking and work. Throughout his career, Brudașcu’s oeuvre has maintained a balance of intimacy and cultural commentary that has united local Romanian histories with broader art movements.

Cornel Brudașcu has continued to exhibit his work since 2005. Among his solo exhibitions were shows at Galeria Plan B in Berlin, the VNH Gallery in Paris and Spatiu Intact in Cluj, Romania. His paintings have been presented in group exhibitions in Berlin, Hong Kong, London, Paris, Bucharest, New York, Ostrava, and Leipzig, among others. Brudașcu continues to live and work in Cluj-Napoca as a teacher at the internationally renowned Fine Arts School of Cluj.

Notes: Galleria Plan B has a biography and a selection of Cornel Brudașcu’s work at its website: https://www.plan-b.ro

The online Frieze Magazine has an article on Cornel Brudașcu by art and culture writer Kristian Vistrup Madsen at its site: https://www.frieze.com/article/cornel-brudascu

A second article on Cornel Brudașcu by Kristian Madsen, that includes several images from various stages of his work, is located at The Clavert Journal site: https://www.plan-b.ro/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Cornel-Brudascu-The-Calvert-Journal-2017.pdf

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Cornel Brudascu”, Color Print, The Calvert Journal 2017, United Kingdom

Second Insert Image: Cornel Brudașcu, Untitled (Faces on Red Field), 2024, Oil on Canvas, 50 x 40 cm, Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris

Bottom Insert Image: Cornel Brudascu, Untitled (Figure/Blue Lines), 2019, Oil on Canvas, 51.8 x 47.9 cm, Allison Jacques Gallery, London

James Owen Mahoney

James Owen Mahoney, “The Etruscans”, Circa 1932, Oil on Canvas, 208.3 x 167.6 cm, Private Collection

Born in Dallas, Texas in October of 1907, James Owen Mahoney was an American artist noted for his canvas paintings and contributions to the revival of mural painting in the United States. He majored in art at Southern Methodist University from which he graduated in 1928. Mahoney continued his education at the Yale University School of Fine Art where he studied under painter Eugene Savage, a muralist who was trained in Early Renaissance techniques. The acquisition of these formal and technical Renaissance practices resulted in Mahoney’s mastery of tonal gradations and figurative modeling.

In 1932, Mahoney’s impressive work earned him the Prix de Rome and fellowship at the American Academy; he occupied a studio at the Academy’s palazzo on the Janiculum Hill in western Rome. This opportunity gave Mahoney direct exposure to the grandeur of Italy’s art, architecture and culture, an experience that remained with him throughout life. After returning to New York in 1936, he made the decision to focus on the genre of mural painting, an art style supported by the Federal Arts Project and favored by the public.

James Owen Mahoney eventually emerged as one of the leading muralists in the country. He received many commissions, among which were several murals to be displayed at the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition, two murals for the New York World’s Fair of 1939, and murals for private residences in New York, Connecticut, and Texas. After winning a national competition, Mahoney painted a third mural for the 1939 World’s Fair: a painting, measured one hundred by thirty-four feet, for the Building of the Government of the United States.

In 1939, Mahoney accepted an invitation from Dean Gilmore Clarke to become a member of Cornell University’s faculty at its College of Architecture. During the next three years, he regularly traveled between his Ithaca studio and his New York City apartment. In 1942, Mahoney joined the U.S. Army Air Corps and was stationed, after an officer training course, with a British military unit where he specialized in interpreting aerial photographs of enemy positions. After the war, Mahoney returned to Cornell University, took residence at the campus Faculty Club, and renewed his teaching responsibilities.

Although he maintained his ideals from Yale University, James Own Mahoney adapted his art teachings on theory and methods to a form of modified surrealism that combined trompe l’oeil elements, i.e. visual illusions, with real found objects, a characteristic of mid-twentieth century American art. Mahoney continued his mural work, albeit on a smaller scale as public favor for grand-scale murals had fallen, as well as his verre églomisé (reverse glass paintings) for sites in Baltimore, Atlanta, Ithaca and other cities. All these works were distinguished by their impeccable craftsmanship, Art Deco opulence, and suitability to the site.

Mahoney served as chairman of Cornell University’s Department of Art, during which he fostered a program that brought contemporary artists to Cornell. These artists presented their views and participated in critiques of student art. An individual with a complex personality, Mahoney was an avid and perceptive reader with strong literary opinions; his interests ranged from aesthetic theory to the latest fiction. Although trained in Renaissance traditions, he had high regard for the bucolic images of Samuel Palmer, the neo-primitive works of Henri Rousseau and the simple small-scale paintings of Giorgio Morandi.

James Owen Mahoney died at the age of eighty on the nineteenth of October in 1987 in Ithaca, New York. He left his library of approximately seven-thousand five-hundred volumes to the Cornell University Libraries, all the paintings in his possession to Cornell University’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum, and his house and furnishings to the Unitarian Church of Ithaca.

Notes: James Owen Mahoney’s “The Etruscans=, painted in 1932 during his tenure in Italy, is a powerful work. Imbued with grandeur, it captured Mahoney’s attention to line, sculptural forms, tonal gradations, and Art Deco flamboyance. Equally conscious of the art of composition, he filled the large-scale canvas with a surprisingly intimate and engaging scene.

Verre églomisé refers to the process of applying both a painted design and gilding onto the rear face of glass. In this process, the artist’s natural methodology is reversed, with highlights applied first and background applied last.

Top Insert Image: James Owen Mahoney, “The Red Bird”, Oil on Canvas, 195.9 x 182.6 cm, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University

Second Insert Image: James Owen Mahoney, “Legend”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 160 x 2223.5 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: James Owen Mahoney, “Allegorical View of South Texas”, 1936, Mural Oil on Canvas, Hall of State, The State of Texas Building, Dallas, Texas

Bottom Insert Image: James Owen Mahoney, “Sunday Afternoon”, Oil on Canvas Stretched on Hardboard Panel, 121.9 x 152.4 cm, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University

Jules Aarons

The Photography of Jules Aarons

Born in the New York City borough of The Bronx in October of 1921, Jules Aarons was an American space physicist and photographer. He is recognized for his scientific studies of radio-wave propagation as well as his documentary photography of Boston’s mid-twentieth century ethnic neighborhoods.

The son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Jules Aarons was raised in a working-class environment during the economic challenges of the interwar period, which included the Great Depression era that affected many families in the manufacturing trades. He studied at City College of New York and graduated in May of 1942 with a Bachelor Degree in Education. After serving in the Army Signal Corps during World War II, Aarons studied physics at Boston University, where he earned his Master of Science in Physics in 1949.

As a Fulbright scholar, Aarons completed his Doctorate in Science at the University of Paris in 1954. He specialized in the study of ionospheric scintillations, the rapid fluctuations in radio wave amplitude and phase caused by irregularities in the ionosphere’s electron density, and their effects on communication and navigational systems. From 1948 to 1981, Arrons worked as senior scientist at the Air Force Geophysics Research Laboratory at Hanscom Field in Massachusetts; his research led to improvements in satellite and global positioning technology.

In 1957, Jules Aarons formed the Joint Satellite Studies Group, an international collective that studied atmospheric effects on satellite signals. This group expanded to become the Beacon Satellite Studies; its ionospheric monitoring stations proved useful in designs for the Air Force’s space-based communication and navigation systems. In 1981, Aarons became a research professor in Boston University’s astronomy department and helped establish the university’s Center fo Space Physics in 1987. Throughout his decades-long research, he published over one hundred scientific papers and authored three books on such topics as radio astronomy, magnetic storm phases and ionospheric scintillations.

Aarons’s interest in photography began in his youth and continued through his college classes and later scientific work. His many travels around the world for seminars and studies offered opportunities for his photography. Interested in a social documentary approach to photography, Aarons was influenced by the work of Sid Grossman, a co-founder of New York’s Photo League; Austrian-born humanist photographer Lisette Model; French humanist photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson: and the Hungarian-French photographer and filmmaker Brassaï who captured the essence of Paris in his work.

Jules Aarons is known primarily for his late 1940s and early 1950s street-photography of Boston’s ethnically diverse West End and its predominantly Italian North End neighborhoods. During the process of developing his own unique style, he initially began taking photographs of the West End in 1947 to document Boston’s streets and people. Using a double-lens Rolleiflex, Aarons tried to capture the West End’s social environment without being intrusive. To avoid any formal posing, he shot informal photos of ordinary people in public settings, mostly without their knowledge.

After retiring from Massachusetts’s Hanscom Field Laboratory in 1981, Aarons became a professor at Boston University where he led projects on space physics. It was at this time that he ceased his photography, not for lack of time, but due the fact that his eyes had grown too irritated by darkroom chemicals. A research professor emeritus of astronomy and space physics as well as an acclaimed photographer, Jules Aarons died at the age of eighty-two in Boston on the twenty-first of November in 2008.

Jules Aarons’s work is in the permanent collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Bibliotheque Nationale and Bibliotheque Historique in Paris, and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, among others. In addition to his scientific works, he published six volumes of photographs and essays, the most recent being the 2006 “Public Spaces/Public Moments: The Photographs of Jules Aarons” published through Boston’s Kayafas Gallery.

Notes: All images, unless noted, are from the Jules Aarons Estate/ Kayafas Gallery, Boston

The Jules Aarons website is located at: https://www.julesaarons.com

The Red River Paper Blog has a 2020 article by Arthur H. Bleich entitled “Jules Aarons: Mind of a Scientist, Eye of an Artist” on its site: https://www.redrivercatalog.com/blog/jules-aarons-mind-of-a-scientist-eye-of-an-artist.html?srsltid=AfmBOorECX90BByO-Zo1RQ895pqACtLGBdKeknSDhM6yu9isuMmSzD9K

Award-winning author William Landay has a 2010 article on Jules Aarons entitled “The Street Photography of Jules Aarons” on his website: https://www.williamlanday.com/2010/02/02/the-street-photography-of-jules-aarons/

Top Insert Image: Kalman Zabarsky, “Jules Aarons”, circa 2001, Gelatin Silver Print, Brown University Bridge, Vol 5 No. 10, October 2001

Second Insert Image: Jules Aarons, “Self Portrait”, “West End, Boston” Series. Gelatin Silver Print, Jules Aarons Estate/Kayafas Gallery, Boston

Third Insert Image: Jules Aarons, Untitled (Group Photo of Nine Boys), “West End, Boston” Series, Gelatin Silver Print, Jules Aarons Estate, Kayafas Gallery, Boston

Bottom Insert Image: Jules Aarons, Untitled (Lounging). 1947-1953, “North End, Boston” Series, . Gelatin Silver Print, Jules Aarons Estate/Kayafas Gallery, Boston

Astolfo Petrazzi

Astolfo Petrazzi, “Still Life of Flowers and Winged Animals in a Landscape”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 182.5 x 223 cm, Private Collection

Born at the city of Siena in November of 1580, Astolfo Petrazzi was an Italian painter and draftsman of the Baroque period. The Baroque style of art, encouraged by the Catholic Church as a counter force to the austerity of Protestantism, was a flamboyant style with deep color, grandeur, contrast, movement and dramatic detail.

The son of Lazzaro di Giovan Francesco da Modena, a hatter by trade, and his wife Lucrezia, Astolfo Petrazzi was raised in a family of modest means with connections to local artisan circles. His artwork was firmly rooted in Siena’s artistic traditions. Unlike the art of Florence, Siena’s artists preferred a more decorative style with rich colors and figures that were elegant and dignified. Sienese paintings favored scenes of miraculous events often executed with dreamlike coloration; allegories, classical myths and portraits were not depicted in their work.

Petrazzi was predominantly a student of Late-Mannerist painters and printmakers Francesco Vanni, who had received commissions from Pope Clement VIII, and Ventura Salimbeni, the half-brother of Vanni and fresco painter for Pope Sixtus V. He also studied under Pietro Sorri, a Sienese painter known for his portraits and historical scenes. Petrazzi was influenced by other artists from Siena including painter Alessandro Casolani and Vincenzo Rustici whose “Virgin with Child and St. Catherine of Siena” was known to him.

In the second decade of the 1600s, Astolfo Petrazzi traveled in Italy and developed a new style, influenced by the various artworks he encountered. Petrazzi’s work became a blend of naturalism, a derivative of Caravaggio’s work, that was evident in paintings by late-Mannerist artist Francesco Rustici, and the direct realism exhibited in the paintings of early-Baroque Florentine artist Mateo Rosselli.

In the 1620s, Petrazzu traveled to Rome where he studied the classical trends that had emerged in contemporary Roman art. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, classicism had gradually departed from its earlier course of simplicity and emphasis on form. By the first quarter of the seventeenth-century, classicism had adopted an overly strong sense of orderliness, predictability, and an emphasis on rigorous teaching methods and discipline.

After his return to Siena in 1624-1625, Astolfo Petrazzi’s work changed, particularly influenced by the work of two Baroque painters: Guido Reni who had worked for many years under Pope Urban VIII, and Domenico Zampieri who, although not as successful as Reni, received many commissions from the Vatican and wealthy patrons over the course of his career. The influence of both painters’ work can be seen in Petrazzi’s 1631 “Last Communion of St. Jerome” and the 1639 “Young John the Baptist Comforted by Angels”.

In his later life, Petrazzi painted a great number of works; however, they were increasingly repetitious in genre and composition with a progressive decline in quality. His last documented commissions were dated to 1648; these included frescoes from the life of Job for Siena’s Church of Saint Rocco..

Through his life, Petrazzi maintained a productive workshop in Siena, established a drawing academy, and contributed significantly to Siena’s artistic life through both frescoes and murals. Astolfo Petrazzi died on the eleventh of August in 1653 at the age of fifty-two at the Parish of Saint Martino of his native Siena. He was entombed in the Siena Cathedral.

Notes: A more extensive biography of Astolfo Petrazzi can be found at: https://grokipedia.com/page/astolfo_petrazzi

The Stephen Ongpin Fine Art site has a short biography on Astolfo Petrazzi: https://www.stephenongpin.com/artist/241205/astolfo-petrazzi

Top Insert Image: Astolfo Petrazzi, Title Unknown (Standing Figure Placing Scapular(?) on Kneeling Figure), Pen and Brush with Brown Ink, 31,3 x 22.2 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Second Insert Image: Astolfo Petrazzi, “Madonna of the Rosary with the Blessed Saints”, 1640-1660, Oil on Canvas, 254 x 151 cm, Museum of Sacred Art of Val d’Arbia, Buonconvento, Italy

Third Insert Image: Astolfo Petrazzi, “The Figure of Justice Flanked by Two Figures”, circa 1630, Pen and Brown Ink on Paper, 22.3 x 15.4 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Astolfo Petrazzi, “A Shepherd Playing the Catera”, Early 1600s, Oil on Canvas, 122.2 x 93 cm, Private Collection

Elia Tomás

The Paintings of Elia Tomás

Born in Italy, Elia Tomás is a talented visual artist currently based in Madrid. His first memories of art originate from his uncle who painted landscapes that, although devoid of any human element, remained full of personality. After achieving a degree in psychology, Tomás decided to begin a new chapter in his life. After thirty-two years of life in Italy, he relocated in 2011 to Spain, distancing himself from everything he knew to pursue his own unique style of art.

Tomás’s work focuses on the human element; the narratives of his subjects are expressed through portraiture, both individual and group. The majority of his work examines the concept of self-discovery through relationships and memories, both personal and of others. Within a continuous process of redefinition, the subjects of Tomás’s paintings either search backwards in time for those aspects they lack or live with intense intimacy in the present. Included within that process of self-discovery is an examination of masculinity and what that concept means personally and to society.

Elia Tomás defines his painting as synthetic in that each canvas is developed from a carefully de-contextualized set of photographic material; the photos are either self-produced or contained with private or historical archives. Tomás places emphasis on the style of his brushwork to create balances between faithful depictions and abstractions. He often alters faces and bodies with the brushwork to evoke the attention and emotions of his paintings’ spectators. Tomás’s color palette has developed throughout his career from an earlier blue-toned palette to a more chromatically complex one with some emphasis placed currently on yellows and pinks.

Tomás has consistently exhibited his work over the years, the initial public showing being the 2010 “Landing Point” at Palazzo Ducale in Genova. His paintings have appeared in both solo and group exhibitions in Italy, Spain, Albania, and the United States.

Notes: Unless noted as private collection, all works by Elia Tomás are in the collection of Elia Tomás/Saatchi Art Gallery.

Original work by Elia Tomás can be obtained through Saatchi Art Gallery: https://www.saatchiart.com/EliaTomas

The Elia Tomás website is located at: https://eliatomas.com

Bottom Insert Image: Elia Tomás, “Hiding the Tracks No.1”, 2011, Acrylic on Canvas, 116.8 x 96.5 cm, Private Collection

Peter Keetman

The Photography of Peter Keetman

Born at the Wupper River city of Elberfeld in April of 1910, Peter Keetman was a German photographer, a member of the avant-garde Fotoform and a formative force in the evolution of subjective photography.

In the post-war period of the 1950s, inter-human subjectivity was seen as a significant means to correct the errors of objectified wartime politics. This concept of subjectivity, taught by photographer Otto Steinert, influenced the Essen school of photography and formed the basis of a new movement, subjective photography, that championed the exploration of both the inner psyche and human condition rather than the outside world.

Born to consul and banker Alfred Keetman and Käthe Simons, Peter Keetman attended the Bavarian State Institute for Photography, later known as the State Academy for Photographic Design, Munich. After his graduation, he worked in Duisburg as an assistant to portrait photographer Gertrud Hesse and, later, industrial photographer Carl Heinz Schmeck in the Wurm River city of Aachen.

In 1940, Keetman was called into Germany’s Army where he served as a member of its Railway Pioneers, a division that converted Russian rail lines from broad gauge to German standard gauge, thus enabling the transport of Germany’s troops and supplies into Russia. In 1944, Keetman returned from the war; however, a serious injury during his service left a permanent disability. He resumed his studies by finishing his master class at the Bavarian State Institute for Photography in 1947-1948. In this period, Keetman assisted prominent New Objectivist photographer Adolf Lazi with the planning of “The Photographie 1948” exhibition in Stuttgart’s State Museum of Applied Arts.

In 1949, Peter Keetman became a founding member of Fotoform, a six-member avant-garde group that sought to revive the creative possibilities of photography that had been extinguished by the propaganda of Nazi cultural policy. The group adhered to personal expression and formalism, the study of art by comparing form and style, often through unusual compositional framings and darkroom manipulation. Keetman played a major role in the evolution of subjective photography; his work was presented at the 1951 “Subjective Photography” exhibition and within its accompanying catalogue.

Beginning in 1948, Keetman’s work appeared in all major German and many international photography magazines. He united within his wort the two main aesthetic currents of his era: the modernist attention to form, experimentation, and abstraction, and subjectivity’s wish for a humanistic approach to the depiction of the world, both cities and nature..The motifs of Keetman’s images were drawn from nature, architecture, people and industry; he was particularly adept at depicting the detail and sturcture of even ordinary objects.

Among all his collective works, Peter Keetman’s most noted series was his “Volkswagen: A Week at the Factory”, where he captured images of car parts and assembly lines. Begun on Easter of 1953, this series was more than conventional industrial photographs or documentation of the production process. Keetman included long shots in which the vastness of the factory halls dominate, and close ups with a high degree of abstraction taken under natural light.

Peter Keetman died in Marquartstein, Bavaria at the age of eighty-eight in March of 2005. For his photographic work, he was awarded the David -Octavius-Hill Medal from the German Photographic Academy, and the Cultural Award of the German Society of Photography. Keetman’s work is held in many private collections and such public institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago, the city of Wolfburg’s Art Museum, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, among others.

Top Insert Image: Peter Keetman, “Self-Portrait with Camera”, 1957, Gelatin Silver Print, 17.2 x 23.3 cm, Stiftung F.C. Gundlach

Second Insert Image: Peter Keetman, “Trister Bahnhof (Dreary Train Station)“, 1954, Ferrotyped Gelatin Silver Print on Agfa Paper, 30.8 x 23.9 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Peter Keetman, “Mensch und Natur (Man and Nature /My Own Shoe)”, 1948, Ferrotyped Gelatin Silver Print, 41.3 x 50.8 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Peter Keetman, “Volkswagen Work/Welding the Dash Panel and Roof of the Beetle, Assembly Hall 2”, 1953, Gelatin Silver Print, 25.8 x 26.8 cm, Private Collection

Ralph Eugene Meatyard

The Photography of Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Born at the city of Normal, Illinois in May of 1925, Ralph Eugene Meatyard was an American photographer, a visionary artist known for his black and white portraits of friends, posed family members in masks, and experimental abstracted compositions.

Raised in the city of Bloomington, Ralph Meatyard at the age of eighteen joined the United States Navy during World War 11. After his discharge from military service, he studied optometry through the government’s GI Bill at Williams College in Massachusetts. After his marriage to Madelyn McKinney, Meatyard and his wife relocated to Chicago where he began training as an apprentice optician.

From 1950 to 1967, Meatyard worked at Tinder-Krausse-Tinder, a large optical firm in Lexington, Kentucky. After leaving the company, he opened his own business, Eyeglasses of Kentucky, that created lenses for glasses. The city of Lexington was the site of the University of Kentucky and, during the 1960s, the gathering place for the area’s writers and intellectuals, many of whom became Meatyard’s friends. Among these artists and writers were novelist Wendell Berry, visual artist Guy Davenport, photographers Jonathan Williams and James Baker Hall, and Trappist monk Thomas Merton, a poet who resided at Kentucky’s Abby of Gethsemani.

In 1950, Ralph Meatyard purchased his first camera to photograph Michael, his first-born of three children. Having become interested in photography, he joined the Lexington Camera Club and the Photographic Society of America in 1954, working primarily with a Rolleiflex 6cm square medium format camera. During the 1950s, Meatyard attended a series of summer workshops created by Indiana University’s photography teacher Henry Holmes Smith. He also studied under Minor Martin White, a photographer known for his technical mastery and his strong sense of light and shadow.

Meatyard embraced photography’s function as both a memory and documentary device. His images were populated with family and friends portrayed on suburban front stoops, beside cars, within backyards, and either outside or inside abandoned farmhouses. Meatyard’s subjects, dressed in everyday clothes, were photographed in tight focus from commonplace angles with just enough light. Addressing the issue of identity, he often portrayed family and friends behind costume-shop masks or paper bag faces. This single addition to a posed everyday scene radically altered the image’s context and hinted at an undiscovered story.

In 1956 through fellow photographer Frank Van Deren Coke, Ralph Meatyard entered his photographs in the “Creative Photography” exhibition held at the University of Kentucky. He frequented the Trappistine Abbey of Gethsemani where he shot a number of experimental photographs depicting his friend Thomas Merton posed on its grounds. In 1971, Meatyard collaborated with writer Wendell Berry on “The Unforeseen Wilderness”, a book about Kentucky’s Red River Gorge. The public response to this volume, which contained photography by Meatyard, rescued the gorge from construction of a federally proposed Army Corps of Engineers dam.

Meatyard’s photography began to be known nationally in the early 1970s through several museum shows and its publication in magazines. He had shown his work in several exhibitions alongside such photographers as Ansel Adams, Minor White, Harry Callahan, Edward Weston and Robert Frank. Over the course of his career, he produced a number of photographic series including “Romances”, “Dolls and Masks” and “Light on the Water”. Produced over a two year period, his final series of photographs, the 1974 “The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater”, contained sequential cryptic double portraits of friends and family members wearing masks and enacting symbolic dramas.

A pioneering and inventive artist, Ralph Eugene Meatyard died at the age of forty-six from cancer in his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky on the seventh of May in 1972. He was survived by his wife Madelyn and three children: Michael, Melissa and Christopher. Meatyard was cremated and his ashes scattered in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge. His work is contained in several museums, among which are Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC, the John Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Notes: The name Lucybelle Crater in Meatyard’s final series was adapted by the artist from a character in Flannery O’Connor’s 1955 short story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”. Meatyard clearly intended that the identity of each person in the series not be known to the viewer of this work; he identified every character in this series with the same name: Lucybelle Crater. In each image, the Lucybell figure was portrayed by the artist’s wife, Madelyn Meatyard, who wore a costume-shop hag mask. This figure was paired with a family member or friend who wore a transparent mask that hid identity and aged the wearer.

“The Believer” is a quarterly literature, arts and culture magazine that specializes in criticism, literary non-fiction, and immersive reporting on contemporary issues. Investigative reporter and novelist Ted McDermott wrote an extensive article, “The Family Albums of Ralph Eugene Meatyard”, for its January 2007 issue: https://www.thebeliever.net/the-family-albums-of-ralph-eugene-meatyard/

Writer David A. Cory has a biographical article on Ralph Eugene Meatyard at the online photography magazine “F-Stop”: https://www.fstopmagazine.com/blog/2013/ralph-eugene-meatyard-by-david-cory/

San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery has an article on Ralph Eugene Meatyard that contains images from four of his series: https://fraenkelgallery.com/artists/ralph-eugene-meatyard

Top Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, (Self Portrait), 1964-1965, Gelatin Silver Print, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Second Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, (Self Portrait), 1958, Gelatin Silver Print, 28 x 35.6 cm, Fraenkel Gallery

Third Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, (Boy by Abandoned House), 1968-1969, Gelatin Silver Print, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Fourth Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled (Table and Chair), circa 1957-1958, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, (Wagon Wheel), 1957-1958, Gelatin Silver Print, 19.3 x 21.5 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Edmund Dulac

The Illustrative Work of Edmund Dulac

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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