Tag: biography

Stellan Rye and “Der Student von Prag”: Film History Series

Josef Fenneker, Lithograph Film Poster for Arthur Robison’s 1935 Version of “Der Student von Prag”, Deutsche Kimemathek, Museum für Film and Fernsehen, Berlin

Born in July of 1880 at the Danish city of Randers, Stellan Rye was a film director and screenwriter active during the early twentieth-century. In his short career, he wrote and directed three productions: the 1913 “Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague)”; the 1914 “Der Flug in die Sonne (The Flight into the Sun)”; and the 1914 “Ein Sommernachtstraum in Unserer Zeit (A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Our Time)”, co-written with German actor and horror novelist Hanns Heinz Ewers. 

Rye joined the Reichsheer, the German Army, at the onset of World War I. Taken prisoner almost immediately, he died as a prisoner of war in France on the fourteenth of November in 1914 at the age of thirty-four. 

Stellan Rye is best known for the 1913 German silent horror film “Der Student von Prag”, considered to be the first German art film, a pioneering work that raised cinema from its fairground origins to a viable art form. The film is loosely based on several literary works: Alfred de Musset’s poem “The December Night”, Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “William Wilson”, and the German legend of the Renaissance alchemist and magician Johann Georg Faust. 

“Der Student von Prag” featured German actor Paul Wegener in his debut film role as the poor university student Balduin. He acted alongside Austrian actor John Gottowt in the role of Scapinelli, and Austrian-German actress Grete Berger as Balduin’s love interest Countess Margit. “Der Student von Prag” was art director and set designer Robert A. Dietrich’s first production in a career that spanned more than a hundred films. The film was shot on locations around Prague and at the Babelsberg Studios, now the oldest large-scale film studio in the world, having produced films since 1912.

In this horror story, poverty stricken Balduin signs a contract with the diabolical Scapinelli that will award Balduin one hundred-thousand gold pieces in exchange for any item in his lodgings. Scapinelli, dressed in all black, chooses Balduin’s reflection in the mirror and takes it away. During his courtship of Countess Margit, Balduin and Magrit are terrorized by his mirror double. Magrit, too frightened by the sudden appearances of the double, discontinues the courtship. Depressed, Balduin shoots his double with a pistol and it vanishes. However, Balduin himself becomes stricken and falls dead. The evil Scapinelli arrives, tears up the contract and departs happily.

German cinematographer Guido Seeber employed new technical camera effects of seamless double exposures to create one of his most notable accomplishments, the doppelgänger image of Balduin’s mirror double. An accomplished technician and a pioneer in his field, he also employed chiaroscuro, sharp contrasts between light and shadow, to create distinct areas on the sets. Hungarian composer and pianist Josef Weiss wrote the historic piano score that accompanied “Der Student von Prag”; it was the first film score written for a German language film.

Stellan Rye’s “Der Student von Prag” was both a critical and commercial success. The film tapped into the real sense of dissociation and alienation that was prominent in a society struggling with the collapse of the German Empire. The themes of the film became a major influence on German cinema produced during the years of the Weimar Republic. The insecurity and social changes that followed the deaths and devastation of the first World War became major themes for post-war German film makers.

Expressionism, developed as an avant-garde style before the war, remained popular during the Weimar Republic and extended to a wide range of the arts, including music, literature, dance and architecture. Stellan Rye’s “Der Student von Prag” was remade twice: Austrian Expressionist director Henrik Galeen’s 1926 version with Conrad Veidt, and German director Arthur Robison’s 1935 version with Austrian actor Anton Walbrook. Other notable films produced during this time period included Robert Wiene’s 1920 “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” and two films by Fritz Lang, the two-part 1922 “Dr. Mabuse”, and the 1927 “Metropolis”.

Notes: All insert images are film stills from the original 1913 “Der Student von Prag”, directed by Stellan Rye, that featured Paul Wegener, John Gottowt and Grete Berger.

A full-length version, with subtitles, of Stellan Rye’s “Der Student von Prag” can be found on the Internet Archive site located at: https://archive.org/details/der-student-von-prag-1913

Actress Grete Berger, born Margarethe Berg into an Austrian Jewish family, began her career in 1904 at the Deutsches Theater under prominent film and theater director Max Reinhardt. She was cast in several films directed by Stellan Rye or Paul Wegener, among which was her role in the 1913 “Der Student von Prag”. After the accession of power by the National Socialists in 1933, Berger fled with her husband to Italy where in April of 1944 they were arrested by the German occupational authorities. She was transferred, along with Austrian-Hungarian actor Jacob Feldhammer, in May of 1944 to the Auschwitz concentration camp where they were murdered on the twenty-third of May in 1944.

An 2023 article on Anton Walbrook, who performed the role of Balduin in Robinson’s 1935 version of “Der Student von Prag”, is located in the Film History Series of this site. A well known German actor who acted alongside some of Germany’s leading ladies, Walbrook, who was homosexual and the son of a Jewish mother, left Germany in 1936 to work for many years in the United States and England.

 

Mel Bochner

The Artwork of Mel Bochner

Born at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1940, Mel Bochner is one of the leading figures in the development of Conceptual art in New York during the 1960s and 1970s. He is a member of that generation of artists who were seeking to break free from Abstract Expressionism and traditional composition. A scholar as well as an artist, Bochner’s influential critical and theoretical essays have always been a central component of his work.

Bochner pioneered the use of language into the visual arts; language progressed from talking about art to becoming part of art itself. Over his career, he has consistently probed the conventions of both painting and language- the way we construct and understand them as well as the way their relationship to each other increases our awareness of the world to which we belong.

Born to a sign-painter father in an Orthodox Jewish home, Mel Bochner graduated in 1962 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Fine Arts. He studied philosophy briefly at Chicago’s Northwestern University before making the decision to relocate in 1964 to New York City where he began work as a guard in Manhattan’s Jewish Museum. Encouraged by art critic Dore Ashton, Bochner applied for and was granted a teaching position in art history at the city’s School of Visual Arts.

Bochner’s first exhibition, the 1966 “Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily To Be Viewed As Art” held at the School of Visual Arts, is now regarded as a seminal show in the Conceptual Art movement. Not having the necessary funds to frame all his original drawings, Bochner xeroxed copies of his friends’ works and inserted them in four black binders individually placed on four white pedestals. A later conceptual work, the 1998 “Event Horizon”, involved multiple pre-stretched canvases of various sizes, each marked with a horizontal line and the measurement of its length in inches. These canvases were arranged with the lines at the same height along the wall. Seen together, the canveses’ lines formed a horizon of a determined length.

In the 1960s, Bochner was one of the first artists to incorporate the physical gallery space into his art. Some of his works were actually drawn or painted on the gallery’s walls. His 1970 “Language is Not Transparent” presented the white-chalked sentence written on a dripping black square painted directly on the gallery wall. Bochner’s 1969-1970 installation at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, entitled “Theory of Painting”, involved newspapers, spray-painted with multi-sized blue rectangular shapes, spread on the floor of the enclosed exhibition space.

Along with artists Bruce Nauman and Joseph Kosuth both of whom integrated language into art, Bochner was an early proponent of photo-documentary art which included images of temporary works and performance art. Among his many photographic creations is the important 1966 “36 Photographs and 12 Diagrams”, an arranged collection of forty-eight 29 x 29 cm gelatin silver prints. Resistant to showing all the forty-eight mounted photographs and pen-and-ink drawings in their physical form, Bochner photographed each mounted piece and displayed the complete work as an assemblage of two-dimensional photographs, in essence a microcosm of the exhibition.

In the early 1970s, Mel Bochner began producing series of prints at San Francisco’s Crown Point Press. An avid print maker, Bochner has continuously explored new ways to experiment with traditional and non-traditional printmaking techniques. In 2022 for his latest edition of his iconic text “Howl”, he printed the piece with glitter and iridescent ink in a combination of shimmery copper, iridescent purple and glimmering black. As the viewer moves around the work, the purple shifts in tone depending on the viewer’s vantage point.

Bochner’s work covers a wide range of mediums including colorful paintings and prints containing words, cast pigmented works made from handmade paper, works on shaped canvases, and evocative installations. Among these many forms are the 1978 “Planar Arc”, three irregular shaped paper panels of different colors that are decorated with pastel marks; the 1999 “If the Color Changes (#?)”, a language piece written in gray-lettered German overlaid with scattered multi-colored alphabet letters; and the 1988 “Fourth Quartet”, four rectangular sheets of paper framed together in a pattern on which scattered geometric cubes were drawn in aquatint.

In 2007, Mel Bochner’s work was the subject of two major exhibitions in the United States: a focused retrospective of his language-based works at the Art Institute of Chicago; and a forty-year retrospective of Bochner’s drawings, that culminated a two-year museum tour, at the San Diego Museum of Art in California. Bochner’s works are contained in collections around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

Mel Bochner’s website, which includes exhibitions, artist texts, public projects and recent works, can be located at: http://www.melbochner.net

Notes: The online Artforum magazine has an article written by Princeton University Professor Carol Armstrong entitled “Mel Bochner: Photographs 1966-1969” that reviews Bochner’s work in connection with the 2002 Carnegie Museum show of the same name: https://www.artforum.com/events/mel-bochner-photographs-1966-1969-178514/

David Lasry’s Two Palms Gallery in New York represents the work of Mel Bochner. Its website has a comprehensive section that contains his works, exhibitions, and articles published by major art periodicals: https://www.twopalms.us/artists/mel-bochner#tab:slideshow

The Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco also represents the work of Mel Bochner. A collection of his work is available for viewing at: https://fraenkelgallery.com/artists/mel-bochner

The online ArtDependence Magazine has an interview with Mel Bochner entitled “The Art of Ideas” located at: https://artdependence.com/articles/the-art-of-ideas-an-interview-with-mel-bochner/

Second Insert Image: Mel Bochner, “Repetition- Portrait of Robert Smithson”, 2001, Charcoal and Pencil on Paper, 80 x 66 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Mel Bochner, “Portrait of Dan Flavin”, 1968, Ink on Graph Paper, Sheet 11.4 x 21.6 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Mel Bochner, “Wrap- Portrait of Eva Hesse”, 2001, Charcoal and Pencil on Paper, 64.8 cm Diameter, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Mel Bochner, “Thank You”, 2015, Four Color Direct Gravure Etching, Edition of 20, 55.9 x 45.7 cm, Private Collection

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

Photographers Unknown, Like Stones in the Walls of Old Churches

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hans Erni

The Artwork of Hans Erni

Born at the city of Lucerne in February of 1909, Hans Erni was a Swiss engraver, graphic designer, illustrator, painter and sculptor. He is best known for his Swiss postage stamp illustrations, lithographs for the Swiss Red Cross, and medal designs for the Swiss government and the International Olympic Committee.

The third of eight children born into a working-class family, Hans Erni attended the local Lucerne elementary school before entering an apprenticeship as a surveyor. Beginning at the age of fifteen, he apprenticed for three years as a draftsman until his entrance into the Lucerne School of Arts and Crafts in 1927. Erni continued his studies at the Académie Julian in Paris and Berlin’s School of Applied Arts under Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin. 

Between 1930 and 1933, Erni alternated stays in Lucerne and Paris where he became acquainted with contemporary French painting and influenced by the works of Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and Cubist painter Georges Braque. Through the Abstraction-Création group in Paris, Erni became acquainted with artists Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Constantin Brancusi, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian. During the early 1930s, he participated in several collective exhibitions and painted fresco murals in city of Lucerne.

After his travels to Belgium, Italy and England, Hans Erni began in 1936 to explore Abstraction with his first public mural commissions. This series of murals included frescoes for Lucerne’s General Building Cooperative, Switzerland’s section at the 1936 Triennale in Milan, and two educational murals entitled “Saline” and “Wasserkraftwerk (Hydroelectric Power Station)”. In 1937, Erni co-founded the Allianz, an association of Swiss abstract artists that advocated, with an additional emphasis on color, the concrete art theoriesof Swiss painter and designer Max Bill. Advancing the concept of Abstraction, Concrete Artists fully realized the idea that a painting could represent even an intangible algebraic formula rather than a person or an object.

Erni had his first major public success in 1939 with a mural, entitled “Switzerland: Vacation Land of the People”, that was specifically commissioned and displayed for the Zürich National Exhibition. In 1940, Erni entered into the Swiss Army where he served, until his discharge in 1945, as a camouflage painter due to his painting skills. In 1948, Erni presented his work in the painting competitions at the Summer Olympics held in London; he also participated between 1950 and 1952 in several Latin American exhibitions.

After a period of painting in Guinea and Mauritania, Hans Erni, along with Swiss graphic artists and illustrators Kurt Werth, Celestino Piatti, Alfred Pauletto and Hugo Wetli, organized a 1960 graphic design and painting exhibition in the Solothum canton city of Olten. He also exhibited his graphic design work in the 1964 Documenta Exhibition in the central German city of Kassel. Erni often employed allegories and figures, both contemporary and from Greek mythology. in his work. His symbolic Realist images presented large, powerful forms constructed with lines of a high degree of precision.

Erni created many works in the 1970s and 1980s among which were a tapestry “People, Viticulture and Fishing” for the cit of Küsnacht; a concrete relief mural “Primal Nature and the Work of Man” for the Téléverbier Valley Station in Médram, France; a mural “Man’s Advance into Space” for the Aerospace Hall of the Swiss Museum of Transport; and an aluminum relief “The Human Flight” for the United Nations building of the International Civil Aviation Organization in Montreal. Erni also created a thirty-meter long mural “Panta Rhei” for the auditorium of Lucerne’s Hans Erni Museum which was founded on his seventieth birthday in 1979. 

In his career, Hans Erni designed twenty-eight high-relief medals as well as one official Commemorative coin for the Swiss Confederation. In recognition for his Olympic medal designs, he received the 1989 Sport Artist of the Year award from the United States Sports Academy, a private university offering masters and doctoral degrees in sport education. Erni designed ceramics, theatrical sets and costumes, illustrations for Swiss postage stamps, and art for Swiss bank notes in the 1940s. Although the bank notes were printed, they were never released due to unfounded political objections by a member of the Lucerne State Council.  

Beginning in 1989, retrospective exhibitions of Erni’s work were held in various cities. Two retrospectives were held in Japan, the first at the Himeji City Museum of Art and the second at the Itami City Museum of Art. In 1990, a retrospective was held at the Seibu Museum of Art in Funabashi, Japan, and at India’s Nehru Center in Bombay, now Mumbai. In 1995, Erni was guest of honor at the XI Biennial of International Sports and Arts in Madrid; Queen Sofia of Spain opened the exhibition and presented Erni with the Medal of Honor for his life’s work. 

In addition to his paintings and sculptures, Hans Erni created illustrations for approximately two hundred published books and images for ninety Swiss postage stamps. He continued to create work throughout his later years. Among his last works were a 2011 medal entitled “Forest is Life” for the United Nations International Year of Forests and the 2012 stained glass windows for the Protestant Church in Martigny, Switzerland. Hans Erni died at the age of one hundred and six in Lucerne on the twenty-first of March in 2015. 

The Hans Erni Museum, a detached hexagonal building, is part of the Swiss Museum of Transport complex in Lucerne. It houses an extensive collection of Erni’s work and provides insights into a life engaged with historical, cultural, technical and ecological themes. A public assemblage of Hans Erni’s work from private collections can be viewed at The Open Hans Erni Collection site located at: https://www.hans-erni-collection.org/en/

Notes: The online RTS magazine has ten short video documentaries (French language) in its Culture et Arts section at: https://www.rts.ch/archives/dossiers/3477775-hans-erni-un-artiste-emblematique-de-la-suisse.html

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Hans Erni”, circa late 1950s, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Hans Erni, “Drei Freunde (Three Friends)”, 1970, Watercolor and Ink on Paper, 28 x 40 cm, Private Collection, Australia

Third Insert Image: Hans Erni, “Dames des Décans- Pisces”, 1970, Lithograph on Arches Paper, Artist Edition, 50 x 65 cm, Private Collection, Switzerland

Fourth Insert Image: Hans Erni, “Badende”, 1960, Lithograph, 35 of 150 Edition, 47.7 x 39.7 cm, 1993 Catalogue “Hans Erni-Stiftung, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Franco Tettamanti, “Hans Erni, Lucerne”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Collection of Artist

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

Photographers Unknown, An Oracle Done Hiding At Last

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yashima Gakutei

Yashima Gakutei, “Carp Ascending a Waterfall”, 1892 (Edo Period), Surimono, Woodblock Print with ink and Color on Paper, 18.8 x 21.6 cm, Private Collection

Born in the Honshu city of Osaka circa 1786, Yashima Gakutei (八島岳亭) was a Japanese poet and artist known for the quality of his woodblock prints and his artistic contribution to Ukiyo-e (浮世絵)  a traditional poetic art form that flourished from the seventeenth to the nineteenth-century. Among the images depicted in ukiyo-e woodblock prints and paintings were landscapes, wrestlers and kabuki actors, dancers and courtesans, folk tales and historic scenes, and images of an erotic nature. 

Gakutei was the illegitimate son of the samurai Hirata under the Tokugawa shogunate established by Tokugawa Ieyasu (徳川 家康), one of the three Great Unifiers of Japan during the Edo period. Gakutei’s mother later married into the Yashima clan, thus granting him the name of Yashima Gakutei. He received his art training from master ukiyo-e printmakers Totya Hokkei (魚屋 北渓) and Katsushika Hokusai (葛飾 北斎) who, though best known for his woodblock print series “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, worked in multiple mediums including book illustration.

After his training, Yashima Gakutei settled at Osaka in the 1830s. He was known for his technical precision, his embossing skill, and his specialization in the traditional surimono art form, which some critics say surpassed that of his teacher Totya Hokkei. These surimono (摺物) woodblock prints were deluxe editions privately commissioned by poetry societies and wealthy patrons of the arts for special occasions, poetry competitions, and the celebration of the New Year. Gakutei employed lavish printing techniques on the finest homemade papers with generous use of gold, silver, bronze, and mica highlights, as well as embossing and lacquer-like effects. 

During his career, Gakutei also created images of landscapes and seascapes for books, a rarity among those artists who had studied under Hokusai. He received a commission to provide all the illustrations for the “Kyōka Suikoden (狂歌水滸伝)”, a volume of traditional Japanese poetry. Among Gakutei’s other works are a series of five surimono woodblock prints that featured young female musicians performing gagaku (雅楽), the traditional imperial court music from the Heian period (794 to 1185); a series of embossed woodblock prints depicting all the gods of fortune as beautiful women, or bijin (美人); and a privately issued and embossed surimono tetraptych entitled “The Ascent to Heaven”, a four-panel scene depicting the well known Japanese fairy story “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter”. 

As a poet, Yashima Gakutei wrote and illustrated many humorous poems in the kyōka (狂歌) style, a genre of Japanese tanka poetry that was prevalent in the Edo region, now the area of modern Tokyo. Formed within the tanka meter of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables per line, these short poems placed mundane or vulgar humor within elegant, poetic settings. Wordplay and puns were often used; a classic styled poem would often be given a vulgar twist at the end. 

As a translator, Gakutei is known for his translation of the sixteenth-century Chinese novel “Journey to the West (西遊記)”, one of the Classic Chinese Novels that is attributed to Ming dynasty poet and novelist Wu Cheng’en (吳承恩). This account of the legendary pilgrimage of Tang dynasty Buddhist monk Xuanzang was illustrated with woodblock prints created by Gakutei. 

Yashima Gakutei died in 1868, the same year as the Meiji Restoration that replaced the Tokugawa shogunate military government with a reinstallation of Emperor Meiji under a constitutional monarchy, thus ending Japan’s Edo period.

Notes: Many of the details of Yashima Gakutei’s life are shrouded in mystery. The Art Institute of Chicago indicates that he was known by several names including Yashima Harunobu, Horikawa Tarô,  and Gakutei Kyûzan, among others. The Ronin Gallery, the largest collection of Japanese prints in the United States, lists his birthplace as Edo under the name of Harunobu Sugawara. For my article, I am relying on information from the Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, Maine, which lists his birthplace as Osaka. 

Top Insert Image: Yashima Gakutei, “Hotei”, circa 1927, “Allusions to the Seven Lucky Gods”, Woodblock Print with Karazuri Printing and Metallic Pigment, 21 x 18.4 cm, Ronin Gallery

Second Insert Image: Yashima Gakutei, “Muneyuki Shoots a Tiger”, circa 1829, Woodblock Print Surimono, 21 x 18.4 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Yashima Gakutei, “Furuichi Dance”, circa 1822, Woodblock Print with Ink and Color, Embossing and Metallic Pigments, 21 x 19 cm, Private Collection

Dirk Bogarde: Film History Series

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Voula Papaïoannou

The Photography of Voula Papaïoannou

Born at the historic city of Lamia in 1898, Voula Papaïoannou was a Greek photographer known for her documentation of the landscape and inhabitants of Greece. Her oeuvre is part of the School of Humanist Photography that emerged in the middle of the twentieth-century after the two World Wars. Instead of momentous events, humanist photography focused on everyday human experience, its nature, mannerisms and customs. 

Voula Papaïoannou studied at the Polytechnic University of Athens where she developed an interest in photography. She began her career in the 1930s with several exhibitions of refined, nostalgic images of Greece’s landscape, its architectural monuments, and ancient works of art. However, Papaïoannou’s relationship with the photographic medium shifted drastically at the onset of the Second World War. Deeply affected by the suffering endured by the civilian population of Athens, she began to use her camera to arouse the conscience of the people. 

Papaïoannou began to document the conflict’s background, her nation’s preparation for the war effort, and the departure of Greek soldiers to the front lines. She continued her work by documenting the period of German and Italian occupation and the ensuing economic blockade. Papaïoannou also created an emotional photographic series that revealed the emaciated children who were suffering from the great famine of 1941 to 1942.

Greece suffered comparatively much more than most Western European countries during the Second World War due to a number of factors. Heavy resistance led to immense German reprisals against civilians. Greece was also dependent on food imports; the British naval blockade coupled with transfers of agricultural produce to Germany led to a great famine. It is estimated that the Greek population declined by seven per cent during the Second World War. The country’s population also was affected by the rising hyperinflation, the fifth worst in economic history.

After the liberation of Greece, Voula Papaïoannou became a member of the photographic unit under the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation, a body dedicated  to assist and repatriate refugees. She toured the Greek countryside documenting the hardships of its rural population devastated by the 1944-1949 Civil War. The most well-known of all Papaïoannou’s work are her photographs which showed families and particularly children living under inhumane conditions. These photographs did not dwell on the sufferings of its subjects but rather told individual stories that focused on their dignity.

Papaïoannou’s work throughout the 1950s expressed Greece’s prevailing optimism, despite its two decades of suffering and thousand of deaths, in both the restoration of its traditional values and the future of mankind. Her photographs of the historic Greek landscape, shot during this period, were barren and drenched in light. Papaïoannou’s images of the Greek inhabitants, however, still showed a proud and independent people despite their poverty. 

In addition to work published in the press, two collections of Voula Papaïoannou’s photographs were produced by the Swiss publishing house Guilde du Livre: the 1953 “La Grèce: à Ciel Ouvert (Greece: Open Skies)” and “Iles Grecques (Greek Islands)” in 1956. Her work was later published in the posthumous collection “Images of Despair and Hope: Greece 1940-1960” as a complimentary volume to the 1995 Athens retrospective presented by gallery owners Mouseio Benake and Renes Xippas.

Voula Papaïoannou passed away in Athens, Greece in 1990 at the age of ninety-two. Her photographs are in both private and public collections, including the Benaki Museum of Greek Culture in Athens. Since her death, Papaïoannou’s work continues to be presented in many solo and group exhibitions including one at Barcelona’s cntemporary art and learning center, La Virreina Image Center.

The Benaki Museum of Greek Culture’s website is located at: https://www.benaki.org/index.php?lang=en

Note: All images of Voula Papaïoannou’s work in this article are from the collection of the Benaki Museum of Greek Culture unless otherwise noted. 

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Voula Papaïoannou”, Date Unknown, Benaki Museum of Greek Culture, Athens, Greece

Second Insert Image: Voula Papaïoannou, “View of Lycabettus from the Acropolis, Athens”, circa 1950, Gelatin Silver Print, 43 x 41.9 cm, Benaki Museum, Athens Greece

Third Insert Image: Voula Papaïoannou, “Women Transporting Mud for Road Construction, Sellades, Arta Prefecture”, 1946, Gelatin Silver Print, 43 x 34 cm, Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece

Bottom Insert Image: Voula Papaïoannou, “Mykonos”, circa 1959, Gelatin Silver Print, Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece

Ellsworth Kelly “Blue Orange”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Massimo Girotti and “Ossessione”: Film History Series

Luchino Visconti, “Ossessione (Obsession)”, 1943, Film Gifs of Massimo Girotti as Gino Costa, Cinematography Aldo Tonti and Domenico Scala, Industrie Cinematografiche Italiane

Born at the Macerata city of Mogliano in May of 1918, Massimo Girotti was an Italian film and stage actor whose career spanned seventy years. A swimmer and polo player, he was brought to the attention of film writer and director Mario Soldati who gave him a small part in his 1939 comedy “Dora Nelson”. Girotti began to be taken seriously after his appearances in Alessandro Blasetti’s 1941 adventure film “La Corona di Ferro (The Iron Crown)” and Roberto Rossellini’s 1942 war drama “Un Pilota Ritorna (A Pilot Returns)”. His rise to fame began with his role opposite Clara Calamai in Luchino Visconti’s 1943 crime drama “Ossessione”.

After the war years, Girotti was starring in several movies each year, among which were Roberto Rossellini and Marcello Pagliero’s 1946 melodrama “Desire” and Pietro Germi’s 1949 Mafia drama “In Nome dell Legge (In the Name of the Law)”, co-written by Federico Fellini. In 1950, Girotti starred in Michelangelo Antonioni’s first full-length feature, “Cronaci di un Amore (Story of a Love Affair)”. After playing Spartacus in Riccardo Freda’s 1952 “Spartaco”, he rejoined Visconti for the 1954 “Senso”, a historical melodrama co-written by Visconti, Suso Cecchi d’Amico and Tennessee Williams.  

In the following years, Massimo Girotti worked with several directors including Mauro Bolognini, best known for his 1960 drama “Il bell’Antonio (Handsome Antonio)” written by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Mario Alberto Lattuada who co-directed Federico Fellini’s 1950 “Luci del Varietà (Variety Lights)”. Girotti starred with Terence Stamp and Silvana Mangano in Pasolini’s 1968 surrealist psychological drama “Teorema (Theorem)”. He was cast two years later for Pasolini’s “Medea” in which he played opposite opera soprano Maria Callas. 

In 1972, Girotti had the role of Marcel in Bernardo Bertolucci’s erotic drama “Last Tango in Paris”, which starred Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider. Although he appeared mainly in character roles for the next thirty years, Girotti was in such notable films as Joseph Losey’s 1976 mystery drama “Monsieur Klein” nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as Visconti’s final film, the 1976 period drama “The Innocent”, an adaptation of Gabriele d’Annunzio’s novel “The Intruder”. 

Massimo Girotti had a starring role in Turkish-Italian director Ferzan Özpetek’s 2003 mystery drama “La Finestra di Fronte (Facing Windows)”. After completing the filming of his role, Massimo Girotti unexpectedly died of a heart attack in Rome on the fifth of January in 2003. “La Finestra di Fronte” was released at the end of February. For his role in the film, Girotti won the David di Donatello Award for Best Actor given by the Academy for Italian Cinema. 

The 1943 “Ossessione” is an Italian crime drama directed and co-written by Luchino Visconti for his directorial debut. Considered by some critics as the first Italian neorealist film, it was an unauthorized and uncredited adaptation of James M. Cain’s 1934 novel “The Postman Always Rings Twice”. Inspired by the details of the 1927 Ruth Snyder-Judd Gray case, the novel was adapted seven times as a film, twice as a play, and once as an opera and radio drama. Visconti’s unauthorized version was the second time as a film adaptation and followed French director Pierre Chenal’s 1939 “Le Dernier Tournant (The Last Turn in the Road)”.

“Ossessione” starred actress Clara Calamai as Giovanna Bragana, the ill-fated protagonist; Juan de Landa as Giovanna’s older husband Giuseppe Bragana; and Massimo Girotti as Gino Costa, the wandering tramp who begins an affair with Giovanna at the couple’s petrol station. This film became a turning point in Girotti’s film career as a serious actor and rising star; Clara Calami’s portrayal as the femme fatala, who conspired to murder her husband, became her most remembered role.  

Luchino Visconti’s film was made during the years of dictator Benito Mussolini’s far-right Fascist government which exerted censorship over many aspects of Italian life. Visconti originally sought to use an adaptation of a story by Italian realist writer Giovann Verga; however, that project was denied by the Fascist authorities who worried that its subject matter of bandits in Italy would tarnish the country. Visconti eventually collaborated with several filmmakers and writers, including Gianni Puccini and Giuseppe De Santis, to adapt a French translation of James Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice”.

Stark realism was one of the prominent aspects of the 1943 “Ossessione”. Visconti chose realistic Italian locations that were specifically rural and for the most part unromantic. His film did not idealize its characters; each character’s temperament and daily routines were captured through incisive glimpses. Visconti employed medium and long shots for nearly the whole story, with close-ups used only at those moments of intense emotion. Filming all the characters together as a complex larger cast, he used focus depth to highlight the variety of action occurring in the frame.   

“Ossessione” was competed and released in 1943; however, it was  not the innocent murder mystery that the authorities were expecting. After several screenings in Rome and northern Italy, outraged reactions from both Fascist and Church authorities led to the banning of the film and ultimately its destruction. All current prints of the film were made from a duplicate negative that Visconti had kept. As Visconti had never obtained the rights to film Cain’s novel and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer decided to produce its own authorized adaptation in 1946, Visconti’s “Ossessione” was not released in the United States until 1976. The Italian Ministry of Culture later placed Visconti’s film version on its preservation list of one hundred Italian films produced between 1942 and 1978. 

Notes: A biographical article on Massimo Girotti with film scenes from “Senso” and “La Finestra di Fronte” can be found at the European Film Star Postcards site located at: https://filmstarpostcards.blogspot.com/2019/09/massimo-girotti.html

In his screenplay of “Ossessione”, Luchino Visconti followed the general outline of Cain’s novel; however, he added an interlude segment in which Gino Costa is befriended by a street performer known as Io Spagnolo, the Spaniard. This role was played by Italian actor Elio Mancuzzo. An article on Mancuzzo’s life and his role in “Ossessione” can be found at: https://godsandfoolishgrandeur.blogspot.com/search?q=ossessione

Top Insert Image: Italian Postcard, “Massimo Girotti in La Corona di Ferro (The Iron Crown)”, Balleri & Fratini, Florence, Italy

Second Insert Image: Luchino Visconti, “Massimo Girotti as Gino Costa”, 1943, “Ossessione”, Cinematography Aldo Tonti and Domenico Scala, Industrie Cinematografiche Italiane  

Third Insert Image: Luchino Visconti, “Massimo Girotti and Clara Calamai”, 1943, “Ossessione”, Cinematography Aldo Tonti and Domenico Scala, Industrie Cinematografiche Italiane  

Fourth Insert Image: Luchino Visconti, “Massimo Girotti and Juan de Landa”, 1943, “Ossessione”, Cinematography Aldo Tonti and Domenico Scala, Industrie Cinematografiche Italiane  

Bottom Insert Image: Italian Postcard, “Massimo Girotti”, Publicity Card for Lux Film, Private Collection

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

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

For Robert Philen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Giard

The Portrait Photography of Robert Giard

Born at Hartford, Connecticut in July of 1939, Robert Giard was an American portrait, figurative and landscape photographer. He is best known for his black and white, unadorned portraits of American poets and authors, a two decade-long series that specifically focused on gay and lesbian writers.

Robert Giard received his Bachelor of Arts from Yale University where he majored in English Literature. He earned his Master of Arts in Comparative Literature at Boston University. After graduating, Giard taught at the private New Lincoln School in Manhattan, New York. In 1972, he began, entirely self-taught, to photograph portraits of friends, nude figurative works, and the landscapes of the South Fork region of Staten Island. Giard’s  early landscapes were mainly shot in late autumn to the beginning of spring when many of the homes were empty for the season. Included in these landscapes are photographs taken at The Creeks, artist Alfonso Ossario’s estate.

In 1974, Giard and his life partner, early childhood educator Jonathan Silin, settled in the popular resort hamlet of Amagansett on the south shore of Long Island, where they remained for nearly thirty years until Giard’s death. In 1985, Giard attended a performance at New York City’s The Public Theater of playwright and gay rights activist Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” which dealt with the AIDS crisis in the gay community. Sensing the enormity of the situation, he decided to use his photography to record the experiences, history and culture of the queer community. Combining his interests in literature and gay issues, Giard began documenting through portraits both the significant and new literary figures on the scene. 

Robert Giard’s portraits included such notable figures as poet and writer Allen Ginsberg, poet and essayist Adrienne Cecile Rich, playwright Edward Albee III, poet and performance artist Assotto Saint, and novelist Michael Cunningham, a later literary Pulitzer Prize winner. A selection of the more than five hundred portraits Giard had amassed at the time were published in 1997 as an anthology entitled “Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers” by MIT Press. This collection served as the companion volume to the New York Public Library’s 1998 exhibition of the same name. 

In his later years, Giard began working on a portrait documentation of the three hundred twenty-one grant recipients of the Thanks Be To Grandmother Winifred Foundation, which supported until 2001 projects by women fifty-four years or older that benefitted other mature women. These grants supported research and artistic projects as well as those with social, economic or medical problems. Before his death, Giard had successfully photographed two hundred and forty-one of the women grantees. He traveled extensively across the country by train, bus or plane and kept a diary of his travels and his visits with the diverse group of women he met. 

While traveling to a portrait session in Chicago, Robert Giard passed away on the sixteenth of July in 2002 at the age of sixty-two. His published version of “Particular Voices” won the 1997 Lambda Literary Foundation Award for Best Photography/Art Book. A recipient of many awards and grants, Giard had a long and distinguished solo and group exhibition career in the United States. His work is in the public collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York Public Library, San Francisco Public Library, and the Library of Congress. Giard’s complete archive is housed in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in its American Collection.

The Robert Giard Foundation was formed in 2002 to preserve his photographic legacy, promote his work for educational purposes and encourage young photographers. The annual Robert Giard Fellowship is a ten-thousand dollar grant given to visual artists whose work addresses gender, sexuality and issues of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender identity. 

In 2005, Crones’ Cradle Conserve Press published “The Grandmother Winifred Journals” 1996-2002” which contains all Giard’s images of the women grantees plus his diary entries that documented each session.

Notes: Although the Robert Giard Foundation site has not been updated since 2022, the Robert Giard Grant Cycle is still active. The pertinent addresses are:  https://robertgiardfoundation.org  and  https://www.queer-art.org/giard-grant

The Lambda Literary Foundation has a biographical article on Robert Giard on the Gale Literature Resource Center site. It can be accessed through your library system’s card:  https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA92049131&sid=sitemap&v=2.1&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7E9af9193c&aty=open-web-entry

Top Insert Image: Toba Tucker, “Robert Giard”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Private  Collection

Second Insert Photo: Robert Giard, “Portrait of the Photographer”, (Self-Portrait), 1982, Gelatin Silver Print, 25.4 x 20.3 cm, Estate of Robert Giard

Bottom Insert Photo: Robert Giard, “Newton McMahon”, 1981, Gelatin Silver Print, 35.6 x 35.6 cm, Private Collection

Tullio Crali

The Paintings of Tullio Crali

Born in the Montenegro town of Igalo in December of 1910, Tullio Crali was a Dalmatian Italian artist associated with Futurism, an artistic and social movement that emphasized speed, dynamism, technology, youth and the achievements of the industrial age. A self-taught artist who painted in a variety of styles, Crali is most closely associated with the genre of aeropittura, the aerial landscape views that dominated Futurism during the 1930s.

In 1922, Tullio Crali moved with his family to Gorizia in northeastern Italy where, three years later, he attended the local technical institute. While a student, Crali discovered Futurism through readings of Giornale il Napoli’s art periodical “Mattino Illustrato”. Trading his school textbooks for books on art, Crali became acquainted with the treatises written by such Futurist artists as Filippo Tommaso Marnetti, Umberto Boccioni, and Ardengo Soffici. 

Encouraged by Marnetti and Sofronio Pocarini, the founder of the Giuliano Futurists, Crali became an official member of the movement in 1929 and undertook an intense period of artistic experimentation. The first presentation of his paintings occurred at the second annual Goriziana d’Arte Exhibition. In 1931, a signed manifesto on aeropainting, entitled “Manifesto of Aeropittura”, launched a new vision in art that united the Futurists’ passions for battle, machines and patriotism. It also altered conventional artistic detail and perspective through the promotion of  aerial views.

Tullio Crali’s earliest aeropaintings, such as the 1929 “Aerial Duel” and “Aerial Squadron”, were similar to other Futurist works.  However, he continued his endeavors to communicate the dynamics and experience of flight to the viewer. Despite recognizable details such as clouds, wings and propellers, Crali’s later paintings challenged conventional realism by his use of dynamic perspectives, simultaneous viewpoints and the combination of figurative and abstract elements.

Tullio Crali began the 1930s with one of his most famous works, “Le Forze della Curva”, an intensely colored painting that glorified the power and speed of an automobile on a curved road. He was later invited to exhibit as one of the “7 Furturists from Padua” and later at the 1932 Italian Futurist Aeropitori in Paris and Brussls. In 1936, Crali exhibited hs “Lotta Grecoromana (Greek Roman Wrestling)” and “Lotta Livera (Wrestling Match)” at Italy’s second National Exhibition of Sports. These paintings were later selected for the 1936 International Olympic Exhibition of Sports Art in Berlin. 

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Crali was the undisputed champion of the Italian artistic-futurist scene and a vocal advocate of the movement under Marnetti’s leadership. In 1943, he again exhibited at the Quadrennial of Art in Rome and, in the next year, at the last exhibition of the Futurists in Venice. As a soldier during the war, Crali served at the Masking Centers of Civitavecchia, first in Rome and Parma and then later in Macerata and Gorizia. At the end of the war, he was arrested in Gorizia by Italian-Slav partisans; Crali was one of twenty prisoners from the one hundred-fifty arrested who survived.

Tullio Crali moved at the war’s end with his wife and child to Turin where he taught and continued to exhibit. Instead of decreeing the end of Futurism as others had done, he dissociated himself and began exhibiting at Milan’s Galleria Bergamini. In 1951, Crali began the first of a series of “Diaries”, a collection of impressions, preparatory sketches and travel memoirs, that would continue for more than thirty years. From 1950 to 1959, he remained in Paris where he produced a series of canvases and drawings that were praised by the French critics. 

Crali relocated in 1960 to Egypt where, for a seven year period, he served as the Director of Painting at the Italian School of Art in Cairo. He gave interviews on futurist art at Radio Cairo and organized both exhibitions and conferences. In 1968, Crali returned to Italy and resumed his futurist commitment by participating in several exhibitions; however, he rejected joining any official movement and focused on his own research of spatial paintings. In 1970, Crali exhibited at the first post-war Futurist Aeropainting Exhibition at Milan’s Galleria Blu. In 1975, he participated in the fifth “Central European Conference on Painting Between 1890 and 1930” held in Gorizia. 

Tullio Crali created, in 1977 at his Milan studio, the Futurist Documentation Center for his students’ research. He was invited to write an introductory article for the catalogue of 1978 exhibition at Venice’s Galleria Spazio Due. A designer of jewelry in his early career, Carli exhibited his 1956 collection of aircraft jewelry at the Vicenza Jewelry Fair of 1986. Beginning in 1987, he formed a long and productive relationship with the Pattuglia Acrobatica della Frecce Tricolori, an organization of Italian acrobatic air pilots. A 1993 series of aeropainting canvases was dedicated by Carli to this precision team of pilots. 

Between 1986 and 1990, Cralie participated in several important exhibitions: the exhibition of his mechanical lithographs in Russia; an exhibition at Arte Giuliana in Melbourne, Australia; a solo exhibition entitled “Aeronautical Structures” at Lima, Peru; and a prominent place at the exhibition, “Futurismo Veneto”, a collaborative presentation with noted architect Salvan Rebeschini and other Veneto region artists. In 1994, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto (MART) held a retrospective of Carli’s paintings, sculptures, and other works. Carli later presented forty of his works and a great amount of documentation, books and manuscripts on Futurism to the museum.

Tullio Carli died in Milan on the fifth of August in 2000 at the age of eighty-nine. He is interred, as he requested, at the commune of Macerata, his family’s home in central Italy. Carli’s work is held by many modern art museums, including New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Italy’s Mart Rovereto, and London’s Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, as well as many private collections.

Notes: All images of Tullio Crali’s work, unless noted, are from the Futurali Cultural Foundation. The official Tullio Crali website is located at: https://www.tulliocrali.com

A short article, written by Perwana Nazif, on Tullio Crali with several images of his work can be found at the Coeval Magazine website: https://www.coeval-magazine.com/coeval/tullio-crali

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Tullio Crali (Right) with Aviator and Artist Steve Poleskie, Milan”, 1983, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Tullio Crali, “I Sommersi II (The Submerged II)”, 1933, Oil on Canvas, Futurcrali Cultural Association

Third Insert Image: Tullio Crali, “Monoplano Jonathan”, 1987, Oil on Canvas, Futurcrali Cultural Association

Fourth Insert Image: Tullio Crali, “I Sotterranei (The Dungeons)”, 1934, Oil on Canvas, 80 x 70 cm, Futurcrali Cultural Association

Bottom Insert Image: Tullio Crali, “Autoritratto (Self Portrait)”, 1935, Oil on Plywood Panel, 42 x 36 cm, Futurcrali Cultural Association

 

 

Richard Cromwell: Film History Series

Photographer Unknown, “Richard Cromwell”, circa 1930s, Publicity Photo Shoot, Columbia Pictures

Born in Long Beach, California in January of 1910, Richard Cromwell was an American film, stage and television actor. Hardly recognized today for his film work, he enjoyed a rapid rise to stardom that, accompanied with radio and personal appearances, culminated in a White House invitation from President Herbert Hoover.

Born LeRoy Melvin Radabaugh, the second of five children to inventor Roy Ralph Radabaugh and Euphame Belle Stocking, Richard Cromwell received his initial education at the Long Beach public schools. In 1918, his father died suddenly, one of the many who perished from the Spanish Flu pandemic. As an artistically creative teenager, Cromwell enrolled through a scholarship at Los Angeles’s Chouinard Art Institute. His oil painting and mask-making were impressive and led to commissions from such film legends as Colleen Moore, Joan Crawford, Tallulah Bankhead, Beatrice Lillie, and Greta Garbo. 

Cromwell opened his own art studio in Hollywood; however, his interest in the theater eventually led him into an acting career. He initially worked as a scenery set designer for community theater productions and quickly acquired acting roles. Cromwell’s first film role was a walk-on cowboy in the “Song of the Dawn” number of directors John Murray Anderson and Walter Lantz’s 1930 “King of Jazz” for Universal Pictures. Encouraged by friends, he auditioned for lead role in Columbia Studio’s 1930 remake of Henry King’s 1921  classic silent film “Tol’able David”. Despite the lack of a resume, Cromwell won the role and, given the screen name Richard Cromwell by Columbia’s Harry Cohn, was heavily supported by the studio’s publicity department.

Richard Cromwell’s successful role as David, played alongside actors Noah Beery Sr. and John Carradine, led to a multi-year contract with Columbia Studio. Between 1931 and 1932, he had roles in three films for Columbia and one film “The Age of Consent” for RKO Radio Pictures. With the assistance of award-winning actress Marie Dressler, Cromwell was given the lead role opposite Dressler in Metro Goldwyn Mayers’ 1932 comedy-drama “Emma”. Now an actor in demand, he began a series of roles as the sensitive hero in predominately melodramatic films such as Cecil B. DeMille’s 1933 “This Day and Age” and Albert S. Rogell’s 1934 “Among the Missing”. 

In 1935, Cromwell appeared in seven films, two of which were particularly noteworthy. In director George Marshall’s 1935 drama, “Life Begins at 40”, he played ex-convict Lee Austin opposite bank manager Kenesaw H. Clark, played by actor and social commentator Will Rogers in his final film role. For director Henry Hathaway’s 1935 adventure film “The Lives of a Bengal Lancer”, Cromwell played the role of the young Lieutenant Donald Stone alongside actors Gary Cooper and Franchot Tone. The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning the Assistant Director Award with nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture. 

Departing from films for a period, Richard Cromwell made his Broadway stage debut in the 1936 “So Proudly We Hail”. As his popularity in films began to fade, he acted in supporting roles in William Wyler’s 1938 “Jezebel”, playing opposite Henry Fonda and Bette Davis, and John Ford’s 1939 biographical drama “Young Mr. Lincoln”, playing the defendant Matt Clay who is represented by lawyer Abe Lincoln, played by Henry Fonda. In the early 1940s, Cromwell acted in several enemy agent and crime films including the 1942 “Baby Face Morgan” until his service with the United States Coast Guard during the last two years of World War II.

After his return to California at the war’s end, Cromwell found roles to be sparse and retired from film work. His last acting role was in Edward L. Cahn’s 1948 crime drama “Bungalow 13” for 20th Century Fox which starred British detective-actor Tom Conway. By chance, Cromwell met promising actress Angela Lansbury, sixteen years his junior, with whom he eloped and married in September of 1945. The marriage was short, however; they separated within a few months and were divorced by the end of the year. The main cause was Cromwell’s latent homosexuality, verified years later by Lansbury. After the divorce, Lansbury and Cromwell maintained a sincere friendship until his death. 

Richard Cromwell settled comfortably into his artwork. Retuning to his birth name of Roy Radabaugh, he built a studio on his property and became an established potter and ceramicist, especially admired for his creative tile designs. Cromwell signed in July of 1960 with producer Maury Dexter for 20th Century Fox’s production “The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come” which starred singer Jimmie Rodgers. Diagnosed with liver cancer a few months later, Cromwell withdrew from production and was replaced by character actor Chill Wells. 

After a career that spanned thirty-nine films, Richard Cromwell died from liver cancer in Hollywood on the eleventh of October in 1960 at the age of fifty. His body is interred at Fairhaven Memorial Park in Santa Ana, California. Cromwell has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame within walking distance of Angela Lansbury’s star. Materials relating to his radio performances are housed at the Thousand Oaks Library. Cromwell’s memorabilia and ceramic work are housed at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills. 

Notes: Roy Ralph Radabaugh, Richard Cromwell’s father, was an inventor whose claim to fame was his patented invention, the “Amusement Park Swing” ride, also known as the “Monoflyer”. Variations of the amusement park ride can still be seen in use at most carnivals today. 

Top Insert Image: George Hoyningen-Huene, “Richard Cromwell”, 1934, Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Roy William Neill, “That’s My Boy”, 1932, Cinematographer Joseph H, August, Columbia Pictures

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Franchot Tone, Richard Cromwell, and Gary Cooper”, Film Location of “The Lives of a Bengal Lancer”, 1934, Director Henry Hathaway, Cinematography Charles Lang, Paramount Pictures

Fourth Insert Image: Henry Hathaway, “The Lives of a Bengal Lancer”, 1935, Cinematography Charles Lang, Paramount Pictures

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Richard Cromwell”, circa 1935-1950, Publicity Photo

Mark Wunderlich: “I Sometimes Hear the Call to Return”

Photographers Unknown, I Sometimes Hear the Call to Return

This was the time of year we would go into the frozen forest—
leaves stripped, only a few birds ticking in the bare trees, fields shorn,

corn trash a dull gold. Sometimes snow would fall, and I can recall
the exact sound of its muffling, quieting whiteness crackling down.

Of our hunting party, only two of us are alive—
grandparents long dead, father and nephew dead, their bones

all on the ridge top with the others. The town is shabbier now,
middle classes disappeared, leaving the ancient, the angry and the slow.

My cousin is returning home—to a place he reviled—
having run out his luck in the West. His plan

is to move into the garage on the old homestead, which of course
is no plan at all. I sometimes hear the call to return,

come back to the shady valley with its reliable breeze,
the crumbling brindle bluffs, a brandy old fashioned made with 7UP

waiting for me on the sticky bar of the Golden Frog,
recognition registering with those I meet when they see

my father looking back from inside my aging face. That place
don’t fade—the one that made me—bone isotopes belie

the soil’s iron and chalk, my talk inflected (sorry sounds like sore).
What’s more is that I want to go, but won’t.

I’ll stay here, 2000 miles away, amidst an older Eastern decay.
It turns out I have some local dead here as well:

Fifth Great-Grandfather Christian Servoss—colonial Dutchman
from the Palatine, who died in some wintertime foolishness

crossing the frozen Mohawk. His two boys watched him
and his horses drown in that not-very-impressive watercourse.

One of those boys made it to Iowa, and disappeared,
but not before he reproduced, becoming Fourth Great-Grandfather

to yours truly, and so on. My remaining colonial dead
lie in the dirt near Palatine Bridge, their names effaced

from marble by acid rain. I wish I didn’t care about them, but I do.
It matters to have this ghost clan near—this family I never knew.

Mark Wunderlich, My Local Dead, 2022, Poem-A-Day, Academy of American Poets

Born at Winona, Minnesota in 1968, Mark Wunderlich is an American poet and educator. A serious poet who experiments with content, form and style, he constructs compositions whose lines conjure memories and sensory experiences. Wunderlich’s work covers a wide range of themes: the struggles of nature, the shared essence of man and beast, the preservation of self-respect, and human desire.

Raised in the rural Buffalo County of Wisconsin, Wunderlich attended Concordia College’s Institute for German Studies before transferring to study English and German literature at the University of Wisconsin. After earning his Bachelor of Arts, he attended New York City’s Columbia University School for the Arts where he earned his Master of Fine Arts. Wunderlich’s graduate thesis at Columbia was the poetry collection, “The Anchorage”, which he finished in 1999 while living in Provincetown, Massachusetts. At Provincetown, he became friends with poet Stanley Kunitz, a mainstay of the town’s literary community and a former New York State Poet Laureate.  

Mark Wunderlich’s debut collection of poems “The Anchorage” was  published in 1999 by the University of Massachusetts Press and later received the Lambda Literary Award. Accepting the body as the soul’s anchor, this autobiographical collection of poems examines the body’s movement through a landscape of desires. Presented through lyrical letters and intimate dialogues, the diversely formatted poems discuss the dichotomies between love and illness, urban and rural life, homosexual desire and familial tensions. 

Wunderlich’s second collection, “Voluntary Servitude”was published in 2004 by Minnesota’s Graywolf Press. The protagonist in these poems is both servant and master to family, memory, sex and lover. The physical and psychological limitations and releases of relationships, particularly at the breaking point, are examined through these works. Using a variety of poetic forms at different levels of emotion, Wunderlich presents these complications of human desire through a series of images set in alternating vistas from rural Wisconsin to exotic destinations such as Austria and Turkey.

Mark Wunderlich’s third collection of poems was the 2014 “The Earth Awaits” published by Graywolf Press. The majority of these poems are what Wunderlich calls ‘house prayers’ fashioned after those in the late eighteenth-century prayer-books written by Pennsylvania-settled German immigrants. The title itself, “The Earth Awaits” is a reference to an Anglo-Saxon ritual prayer song said or sung during the honey harvest to prevent the swarming of bees. In these poems, Wunderlich evokes, using folklore and historical sources, the time when every setting, thought and action was permeated with ritual. 

The fourth collection by Wunderlich is the 2021 “God of Nothingness” published by Graywolf Press. The poems in this collection again address, with the same personal, queer and rural aesthetics, the issue of ordinary rural life in the natural world. These poems embrace regret, grief and death as they dwell on the issues of family bonds, nature, and the experience of one’s self identity. Infused with familial ghosts and haunting memories, this entire collection serves as a narrative map of Wunderlich’s life. 

Mark Wunderlich was awarded two fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Poetry Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and a Fellowship from the Amy Lowell Trust, created in honor of imagist poet Amy Lawrence Lowell. 

As an educator, Wunderlich has taught at Stanford University, Ohio University, Columbia University, San Francisco State University and Barnard College. At Vermont’s Bennington College, he is a member of the literature faculty and Director of the Graduate Writing Seminars. 

Mark Wunderlich’s official site is located at: https://www.markwunderlich.com

Note: The Virtual Memories Show has a podcast interview, Episode 417, with Mark Wunderlich located at: https://chimeraobscura.com/vm/

As a general note for those interested in poetry, I would recommend the online Contemporary Poetry Review which contains a wide range of both contemporary and historic writers. A review of Wunderlich’s “The Earth Awaits” is also on this site: https://www.cprw.com