Tag: drawings

Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn

The Meditation Drawing Screenprints of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn

Born in London in October of 1881, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn was a Dutch spiritualist, theosophist, scholar and printmaker. Her father was Albertus Kapteyn, an engineer, inventor and the older brother of astronomer Jacobus Kapteyn. After working six years at the London site of the Westinghouse Air Brake Company, he was appointed Director General in 1887. Olga Kapteyn’s mother was Truus Muysken, an activist in social renewal and women’s emancipation. Among her circle of friends were playwright George Bernard Shaw and Russian anarchist Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin. 

Olga Kapteyn’s initial education was at the North London Collegiate School where she became close friends with Marie Stopes who became a leading plant paleobotanist and founder of Britain’s first birth control clinic. Near the turn of the century, the Kapteyn family moved to Zürich, Switzerland where Olga attended the School of Applied Arts. She continued her education with a major in Art History at the University of Zürich. 

In 1909, Olga Kapteyn married Iwan Hermann Fröbe, a Croatian-Austrian conductor and flutist with Zürich’s opera orchestra; his conducting career took the couple first to Munich and later in 1910 to Berlin. At the outset of World War I, Olga and Iwan left Berlin and returned to Zürich. After the birth of twin daughters, tragedy struck the family; Iwan Fröbe perished in a September 1915 plane crash near the city of Vienna. 

Five years later, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn traveled with her father to the Swiss village of Ascona, home to the Monte Verità Sanatorium. Albertus Kapteyn bought a nearby ancient farmhouse, the Casa Gabriella, which from 1920 onwards became Olga’s home. Fröbe-Kapteyn began to study Vedic philosophy, meditation and theosophy, a philosophical system which draws its teachings predominantly from Russian author and mystic Helena Blavatsky’s writings. Among her friends and influences at this time were Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, German poet Ludwig Derieth, and sinologist and theologian Richard Wilhelm whose translation of the “I Ching” is still regarded as one of the finest.

In 1928, Fröbe-Kapteyn built an informal research center near her home. Religion historian Rudolf Otto suggested a name derived from the ancient Greek for the center, Eranos, which translates as a banquet to which guests bring contributions. Carl Jung suggested its conference room serve as a symposium site for interdisciplinary discussion and research. The annual lecture program, Eranos Tagungen, began in August of 1933. A roster of intellecuals from various disciplines were invited to give lectures on a particular topic; these lectures were then published in the Eranos year book. To illustrate each symposium, Fröbe-Kapteyn devoted her time to finding images and symbols that would best illustrate the topic.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn’s research in archetypes took her to major libraries in Europe and America. These included, among others, the British Museum, the Vatican Library, New York City’s Morgan Library and Museum, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and Athen’s Archaeological Museum. Fröbe-Kapteyn created the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism, ARAS, which housed photographs of works of art, ritual images, and artifacts of sacred traditions, as well as, world-wide contemporary art. She amassed a collection of over six-thousand works, many of which were later used to illustrate Carl Jung’s writings. Today the New York-based institution, now under the auspices of the C.G. Jung Foundation, contains more than seventeen thousand images which are currently available online.

Fröbe-Kapteyn was interested in iconography since her childhood, an interest developed as she watched her father create images from photographic film in the darkroom. After following a lengthly series of meticulously drawn experiments in geometric abstraction, she produced a series of elaborate screen-prints between 1927 and 1934. Those prints combined the high energy of the Futurist art movement with her intense study of archetypical signs and symbols. Fröbe-Kapteyn’s prints were directly influenced by the English theosophist Alice Bailey, whom she met in the late 1920s. Bailey had used art as a tool in psychotherapy; through the drawing process, subconscious messages would be placed on paper or canvas. 

Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn’s prints and paintings exhibit great precision in their geometric shapes. They include diagrams of intersecting circles, which serve as an impetus for meditation, as well as, cryptic symbols enhanced with gold leaf and obscure figurative work. Fröbe-Kapteyn used a limited color palette, predominated by blue, red, gold and black. The rigid geometry of the image is reinforced by the choice of mostly cold colors which are opposed by the color black, symbolic of shadow and death, and the color gold, symbolic of light and life. The actual number of the screen-print sets Fröbe-Kapteyn produced is unknown.

A Swiss resident for most of her life, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn passed away at her Casa Gabriella in 1962 at the age of eighty-one years. The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism is still an active organization today and continues its mission with a new generation of lecturers and researchers.

Notes: A fourteen piece set of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn’s Meditation Drawing Screenprints, produced in 1930, is housed in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicage. They are available for viewing at: https://www.artic.edu/collection?artist_ids=Olga%20Fröbe-Kapteyn

Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn’s Meditation Drawing Screenprints,  available for sale, can also be found at the online site of Gerrish Fine Art located at: https://gerrishfineart.com/artist/olga-frobe-kapteyn/

The online site of the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism is located at: https://aras.org

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, Ascona”, 1933, Gelatin Silver Print, Fondazione Eranos Ascona

Second Insert Image: Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, “Reincarnation”, 1930, Screenprint, 49.7 x 36 cm Paper Size, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, “Swastika Meditation Drawing”, Screenprint with Gold Foil, Dimensions Unknown, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn and Guests”, 1958 Eranos Jungian Psychoanalysts’ Conference, Monte Verità, Ascona, Switzerland, Gelatin Silver Print, The Israeli Museum, Jerusalem

John Brock Lear Jr.

The Artwork of John Brock Lear Jr.

Born in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania in June of 1910, John Brock Lear Jr was an American artist best known for his figurative and landscape works. He attended the Chestnut Hill Academy, an all-male college preparatory school in Greater Philadelphia, where he showed an early talent in art. Inspired by two uncles who were painters, Lear studied at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, now the University of the Arts, under Thornton Oakley, a protege of illustrator Howard Pyle. 

John Lear Jr’s work as an artist was centered on freelance illustration and creating paintings and drawings for exhibition. In 1931, he traveled to England for the first time and became drawn to the country’s landscapes. Lear continued his visits to England over the course of his life and, through memories and photos, created many striking landscapes in oils. He always referred to these works as ‘records’, the natural world captured with an artist’s eye. 

Lear also produced what he described as ‘creations’, dreamlike landscapes, surrealistic or symbolic in content, composed of realistic and yet disparate images. Composition and color were the major emphasis in these works which he considered closer to rendering rather than painterly in quality. Lear’s creations were not dystopian but often whimsical and brightly colored. Central to most of these dreamlike landscapes are male figures rendered in a style that shows influences by mid-century artists such as George Tooker and Paul Cadmus. 

During World War II, John Lear Jr served in the Army’s calvary division at Fort Reilly in Kansas. Recognized for his artistic talent, he was employed to illustrate Army training manuals, booklets and charts. During his service period, Lear also painted several portraits of generals and officers. Though he did not experience the horrors of war overseas, the destruction of life caused by that war influenced aspects of Lear’s surrealist work. After his military discharge, Lear returned to Chestnut Hill where he remained for the duration of his life. As an educator, he taught illustration at Pennsylvania’s Rosemont College and was an instructor at both Philadelphia’s Hussian School of Art and the University of the Arts.

A longtime associate of the many art organizations in the Philadelphia area, Lear never married and passed away at the age of ninety-eight in September of 2008 in Glenside, Pennsylvania. He is buried at Doylestown Cemetery in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. 

John B. Lear Jr exhibited his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions. His work appeared in many shows at Philadelphia’s  Hahn Gallery, known for its national and international contemporary work, and the Woodmere Art Museum, which houses a collection of Lear’s work. Other permanent collections of Lear’s work can be found in the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Florida Gulf Coast Art Center, and the Reading Public Museum, among others. In addition to public collections, Lear’s work is in many private collections in the United States and abroad.

Top Insert Image: John Brock Lear Jr, “Male Figure Study with Roman Helmet”, 1983, Graphite on Wove Paper, 31.8 x 22,2 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: John Brock Lear Jr, “Landscape with Figures”, circa 1960, Watercolor, 64.8 x 45.7 cm, Private Collection 

Bottom Insert Image: John Brock Lear Jr, “Construction”, Date Unknown, Graphite on Wove Paper, Private Collection

Étienne-Louis Boullée

Architectural Design by Étienne-Louis Boullée

Born in Paris in February of 1728, Étienne-Louis Boullée was a architect, theorist, and teacher. Though regarded as one of the most visionary and influential architects in French neoclassicism, he saw none of his most extraordinary designs come to life. 

Throughout the late 1700s, Boullée taught, theorized, and practiced architecture in a characteristic style consisting of geometric forms on an enormous scale, an excision of unnecessary ornamentation, and the use of repetitive columns and other similar elements of regularity and symmetry. Boullée’s focus on polarity, offsetting opposite design elements, and his use of light and shadow were highly innovative for the period.

Boullée studied under architects Germain Boffrand of the Académie Royale d’Architecture, and Jacques-François Blondel of the Ecole des Arts, where he studied until 1746. He was immediately appointed a professor of architecture at the newly established Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, under its director, civil engineer Jean-Rodolphe Perronet, This professorship gave Boullée access to public commissions and an opportunity to engage his architectural vision within France’s social and economic progress.

Étienne-Louis Boullée was elected to the Académie Royale d’Architecture in 1762, and was appointed chief architect to Frederick II of Prussia. From 1762 to 1778, he designed a number of private houses, most of which no longer exist, and several grand Parisian hotels, which included the Hôtel de Brunoy, demolished in 1939, and the still-existing Hôtel Alexandre, on the Rue de la Ville-l’Évèque. 

Boullèe’s reputation and vision as an architect rests mainly on his teachings and his drawn designs which span the years from France’s Revolution in 1784 to Napoleon’s rise to power and Egyptian expedition in 1790. Boullée’s project drawings, as a collection, represented  the necessary institutions for an ideal city or state. They displayed no direct political affiliations with any of the reigning doctrines or parties during this span of time; rather they adopted a belief in scientific progress symbolized in monumental forms, a dedication to celebrate the grandeur of a Nation, and, more often than not, a meditation on the sublime sobriety of death.

During this period, Boullée produced a continuous series of elaborate architectural designs beginning with a metropolitan cathedral and a colosseum for Paris, both designed in 1782. He designed a monumental-sized museum in 1783, which was followed by a cenotaph, or memorial tomb, for Isaac Newton in 1784. The design for a new reading room at the Royal Library was finished in 1785; and in 1787, Boullée finished plans for a new bridge over the Seine River.

In the late 1780s after the Revolution, severe illness forced Boullée to retire to his country house outside of Paris, where he finished the final architectural designs of his career. These included design plans for: a monument in celebration of the “Féte Dieu”, one of the most popular of the Revolutionary festivals; a monument to ‘Public Recognition’; and plans, finished in 1792, for both a national and a municipal palace. In silent protest against the terror spread by  the Revolution, Boullée also designed a reconstruction of the Tower of Babel which took the from of a pure cone on a cubic base, with a trail of figures winding in a spiral, hand to hand to the top; this sturcture would by seen by the nation as a symbol of hope for a unified people with a common language.

Étienne-Louis Boullée died in Paris on February 4th of 1799, at the age of seventy. During his life, he taught some of the most prominent architects of his day including Jean Chalgrin the designer of Paris’s Arc de Tromphe, and Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, who anticipated the use of simple modular elements in construction,. Boullée’s book “Architecture, Essai sur l’Art”, a collection of papers, notes and letters arguing for an emotionally committed Neoclassicism, was posthumously published in 1953.

‘Yes, I believe that our buildings, above all our public buildings, should be in some sense poems. The images they offer our senses should arouse in us sentiments corresponding to the purpose for which these buildings are intended.” — Étienne-Louis  Boullèe

Henry Moore

Henry Moore, “Sheep”, Drawings, Lithographs and Sculptures

The sculptor Henry Moore saw a stark link between the rock that was both his material and inspiration, and the grazing calmness of sheep.  The animals stand out in the landscape in the same, oblique way, providing an aesthetic of both fitting in and being anomalous; they litter the vista in a way that is puzzling and warmly mysterious.

Roger Deakin, the English cinematographer,  saw this relationship himself when walking the Rhinogs where he writes of seeing that same relationship that sparked Moore’s fascination with sheep:  “I watched a ewe standing between two big rocks the shape of goat’s cheeses.  They were just far enough apart to allow the animal in, and I began to understand the relationship Henry Moore perceived between sheep and stones.  He saw sheep as animate stones, the makers of their own landscape.”

This permeable position between the maker and the made is perhaps what attracted the sculptor to the animal, leading him to produce a range of sketches in pen and ink (largely a ball-point pen in fact) that would make up his eventual 1980 publication, Henry Moore’s “Sheep Sketchbook”.

Egon Schiele

Works by Egon Schiele

Born on June 12 of 1890, Egon Schiele was an Austrian painter and a  protégé of Gustav Klimt. Schiele was a major figurative painter of the early 20th century, noted for the intensity and the raw sexuality of his work.He produced many self-portraits, of which many were naked self-portraits.  The twisted body shapes and the expressive line that characterize Schiele’s paintings and drawings mark the artist as an early exponent of Expressionism.