Tag: expressionism

Alfred Kubin

The Artwork of Alfred Kubin

Alfred Leopold Isidor Kubin was born in Litoměřice of the Czech Republic, formerly Leitmeritz of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in April of 1877. An important representative of Symbolism and Expressionism, he was an Austrian printmaker, illustrator and author known for his dark, spectral and symbolic fantasies, often assembled into a series of thematic drawings. 

In 1892, Alfred Kubin began a four-year apprenticeship under landscape photographer and painter Alois Beer. After attempting suicide on his mother’s grave in 1896, he served one year in the Austrian Army before his release due to a mental breakdown. In 1898, Kubin studied at the atelier of German naturalist painter Ludwig Schmitt- Reutte which was followed by a short period of study at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. 

During his studies, Kubin became acquainted with the works of such Symbolist artists as Odilon Redon, Henry de Groux and Félicien Rops as well as the works of painter Edvard Munch and printmaker Max Klinger. His early works, mainly ink and wash drawings of fantastical or macabre subjects, were influenced by the aquatint techniques of Klinger and Francisco de Goya. Between 1902 and 1910, Kubin produced a small amount of oil paintings; however, his oeuvre consists mainly of watercolors, pen and ink drawings, and lithographs. 

Beginning in 1906 until his death, Alfred Kubin lived a withdrawn life at Schloss Zwickledt, the manor house of an eleventh-century estate in northern Austria near the German border. He was joined by his wife, translator Hedwig Kubin, the sister of noted German writer Oscar Schmitz, until her death in 1948. By 1911, Kubin had exhibited his work at Berlin’s Galerie Paul Cassirer and at both Vienna and Berlin Secessionist exhibitions. He was also associated with the Blaue Reiter group, a loose confederacy founded by Wassily Kardinsky and Franz Marc for Expressionist artists’ exhibitions and publication activities. Kubin showed his work at the 1913 Blaue Reiter exhibition in Berlin that was sponsored by the German avant-garde art and literary magazine “Der Strum”.

Kubin became well established professionally by the 1920s. Represented by Otto Kallir’s Neue Gallery in Vienna, he worked as a printmaker and book illustrator with such major German dealers as Hans Goltz, J. B. Neumann and Frita Gurlitt. Kubin created illustrations for works by American author Edgar Allan Poe, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, and German fantasy author Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffman, among others. He also supplied illustrations for the German fantasy magazine “Der Orchideengarten”. Founded in 1919 by freelance writers Karl Hans Strobl and Alfons von Czibulka, “The Orchid Garden” is considered the first fantasy magazine. 

Alfred Kubin worked on a series of illustrations intended for Austrian novelist Gustav Meyrink’s upcoming novel “The Golem”. However due to an extended printing delay, Kubin used the completed illustrations for his only literary work, the 1908 “Die Andere Seite (The Other Side)”, a fantasy novel set in an oppressive society. These illustrations introduced a more realistic style, executed with intense pen strokes and sometimes heightened with watercolor, that would characterize his work for the remainder of his career. 

Due to his isolation at Schloss Zwickledt, Kubin was able to live through the German Reich’s war years relatively undisturbed. He was able to exhibit some of his work; however, there was little demand for his drawings during the war years. In 1941, Otto Kallir’s Galerie St. Etienne in New York City held Kubin’s first American solo exhibition and would regularly exhibit his work after that show. Once the war had ended, Austria honored him with a retrospective in Vienna and later awarded him the Grand Austrian State Prize for Visual Arts in 1950. 

Hailed as a national treasure by Austria, Alfred Kubin was given a section for his work, known as the Kubin Kabinett, at the prestigious Neue Galerie in the city of Linz. He was awarded the Austrian Medal for Science and Art in 1957. A member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, Alfred Kubin died at his Zwickledt home in August of 1959 at the age of eighty-two.

Notes: The Kallir Research Institute, a nonprofit foundation, was established to expand upon the scholarship of art dealer and historian Otto Kallir. Primarily focused on Austrian and German expressionists, the Institute also specializes on artists who were sponsored by Otto Kallir. On its site, there is a short biography of Alfred Kubin and links to his work: https://kallirresearch.org/bio-alfred-kubin/

Top Insert Image: Nicola Perscheid, “Alfred Leopold Isidor Kubin”, 1898, Vintage Print

Second Insert Image: Alfred Kubin, “Prähistorische Büffel (Prehistoric Buffalo)”, circa 1907, Gouache and Tempera on Kataster Paper, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Alfred Kubin, “Prähistorische Vögel (Prehistoric Bird)”, circa 1906-07, Tempera on Kataster Paper, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Eric Schaal, “Portrait of Alfred Kubin”, 1958, Gelatin Silver Print, 9.4 x 7.4 cm, Private Collection

Ernst Neuschul

Ernst Neuschul, “Messias”, Self-Portrait, 1919, Oil on Canvas, 95.5 x 55.5 cm, Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, East Midlands, England

Born in 1895 in Aussig, North Bohemia now the Czech Republic, Ernst Neuschul was a painter of the German Expressionist movement. He was the eldest of three sons born to ironmonger Josef Neuschul and Jeanette Feldmann, members of the town’s prestigious and influential Jewish community. Neuschul received his primary education at Auseig’s State Gymnasium but left without graduating. 

Neuschul wanted to study at the Academy of Arts in Prague; however, his parents refused to financially support his attendance. He worked in Prague as a painter and attended courses at the Academy as an extern participant. Neuschul then went to Vienna, attended the K.K. Graphische Lehranstalt, and became captivated by the paintings of Austrian artists Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, as well as those by Oskar Kokoschka whose theories on vision played an important role in the development of Viennese Expressionism. 

At the outbreak of World War I, Ernst Neuschul avoided conscription by relocating to Kraków, Poland in 1916. He continued his studies at Kraków’s Art Academy studying under Art Nouveau artist Józef Mehoffer. In the summer of 1918 Neuschul went to Prague, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts under Franz Thiele. In Prague during August of that year, he met Lucie Lindermann, a Dutch-Javanese dancer raised in Berlin who performed under the name Takka-Takka, When the war ended, Neuschul entered Berlin’s Academy of Art where he was awarded the Rome Prize in 1918. 

In July 1919, Neuschul had his first solo exhibition of 39 works at Weinert’s salon in Prague. He and Lindermann took an apartment in Berlin and embarked on a series of trips to Java and the East Indies. Upon his return, Neuschul became involved with East Indian dance, wrote scripts for experimental films based on Asian myths, and designed dance costumes for his wife, who performed with them in theaters in Lucerne and other cities. On the twenty-fourth of July in 1922, Neuschul and Lucie Lindermann were married in Berlin; in the following years she became his most important model.

In 1926, Neuschul became a member of Berlin’s November Group, a collective of expressionist artists and architects who shared socialist values and sought a greater voice in the organization of art schools and new laws surrounding the arts. An important breakthrough came to Neuschul in 1927; for the first time, he was noticed by a broad public in Germany. Neuschul successfully participated in eight exhibitions, six of them in Berlin with his work praised in multiple press articles. In the same year Neuschul received a contract with Berlin’s renowned Neumann-Nierendorf Gallery, which now ensured the artist a regular income. In the following years he also participated in exhibitions in many German cities. 

On November 13, 1928, Ernest Neuschul and Lucie Lindermann divorced. In 1929 he became a member of the Reich Association of Visual Artists in Germany. Two years later, Neuschul took over the chair of drawing and painting at the Charlottenburg Municipal Art School. In 1933, Neuschul became the last chairman of the November Group before it was banned by the Nazis. At his last exhibition in February 1933 at the “Haus der Künstler” on Schöneberger Ufer in Berlin, his works on display were confiscated and many of them destroyed. Immediately after these events, Neuschul fled to Czechoslovakia. Lucie Lindermann and Neuschul’s later second wife Christl Bell saved the works in his Berlin studio and brought them to Aussig.

In mid-1935, Neuschul received an invitation to Moscow from the Moscow Artists’ Union. In September of1935, he and his wife Christl traveled to Moscow with forty works created between 1929 and 1934. The state newspaper Pravda reported very positively on his solo exhibition at the Museum of New Western Art in Moscow; as a result, Neuschul subsequently received a number of commissions. Among others, he was commissioned to paint portraits of Josef Stalin and Georgi Dimitroff. On January 1, 1936 Neuschul became a member of the Moscow Union of Artists and the Union of Soviet Artists. Shortly before the beginning of Stalin’s second purges, Ernst Neuschul received advice from Andrei Bubnov, the People’s Commissar for National Education, to leave Moscow as soon as possible.

In February 1936, Neuschul gave a lecture on the Soviet Union in Aussig. The Prague press’s June 1936 pictorial supplement “Die Welt am Sonntag” reported in detail on Neuschul’s stay in the Soviet Union. In 1937, his last exhibition took place in his hometown of Auseig. In this exhibition two of Neuschul’s works were cut up and smeared with swastikas. On the third of November in 1937, Neuschul left his hometown of Aussig for good and moved with his family to Prague before the Czechoslovak borderlands were annexed by Hitler’s Germany in 1938.

Neuschul became a member of the Oskar Kokoschka Club and gave lectures on Degenerate Art, a category that was given to his own work. In 1938, Neuschul was on the Nazi blacklist and, as a Sudeten German, was threatened with extradition to the Third Reich by the Czech authorities. On March 10, 1939, Neuschul deregistered with the police and continued to live as an “illegal” in Prague. Through a connection to the British Labour Party, he was able to prepare his family’s emigration to England. The German Wehrmacht, not yet connected to the Gestapo, issued the exit permit, and on March 24, 1939, the Neuschul family left for England via Holland. Neuschul’s mother, who stayed in Prague to care for Neuschul’s sick brother, was later murdered in Auschwitz with those family members still in Prague.

On May 19, 1939, Neuschul became a member of the Free German Artists Association in England. As a rejection of the past, he changed his name from Neuschul to Norland. Neuschul lived in the family house in London-Hampstead until the end of his life. On September 11, 1968, Ernest Neuschul died at the age of 73.

At the beginning of Ernst Neuschul’s artistic activity, expressionism was in vogue, with intense colors in abstract forms. For his own work, Neuschul transformed this style into the more concrete style of New Objectivity. Gradually socially critical themes found their way into his range of motifs. Neuschul depicted the fringe groups of society; he painted drunkards, women on the streets, and workers in the fields or at their machines. During his time in Moscow, Neuschul was given to understand that he should paint the workers in the style of Socialist Realism that expressed the ideal state. He rejected this idea and continued to paint what he saw and not what he was supposed to see. After the war, Neuschul continued to abstract his style, but like other émigrés who had left Germany, he was unable to match the success he had enjoyed before he fled. Neuschul was rediscovered in Germany in 2001, when the Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie, in cooperation with the Czech Republic, organized a four-week retrospective of his paintings in Regensburg.

Notes: The University of Birmingham, England, has a short article on Ernst Neuschul’s 1931 painting “Black Mother”, painted at a time in which the Nazi Party was making significant gains in elections. The article can be found at: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/lcahm/departments/historyofart/research/projects/map/issue3/arts-trail-pages/ernst-neuschul-black-mother.aspx

In 1924, Ernst Neuschul painted his biblical scene “Samson II”. An interesting article on its creation process can be found at Berlin’s Jewish Museum website located at: https://www.jmberlin.de/en/ernest-neuschul-samson-II

Top Insert Image: Helen Craig, “Ernst Neuschul”, circa 1960s, Gelatin Silver Print, Collection of Helen Craig

Second Insert Image: Ernst Neuschul, “Black Mother”, 1931, Oil on Canvas,  100.5 x 65.5 cm, Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester, England

Third Insert Image: Ernst Neuschul, “Laundress”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvass, 100.3 x 65.1 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Ernst Neuschul, “Woman ironing”, circa 1930, Oil on Canvas, 65 x 46 cm, Staattiche Museen, Berlin

Bottom Insert Image: Ernst Neuschul, “Meine Drei Frauen”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 81 cm, Private Collection 

Frank Stella

Frank Stella, “The Circuit Series”, 1982-1984, Woodcut and Relief Prints on Hand-Dyed Paper

Born in Malden, Massachusetts in May of 1936, Frank Philip Stella is an American painter, printmaker and sculptor known for his work in the fields of post-painterly abstraction and minimalism. He learned about the abstract modernist painters, such as Hans Hofmann and Josef Albers, during his studies at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Stella entered Princeton University with a major in history; there he met and became friends with abstract painter Darby Bannard and modernist art critic and  historian Michael Fried. 

Stella’s frequent visits to the many art galleries in New York City stimulated his artistic development. His work bears the influence of his exposure to the abstract expressionist work of such artists as action-painter Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline,  known for his signature style of black on white abstraction. After graduation, Stella moved to New York City where he established a studio and permanent residence. In 2015 he moved his studio space to Rock Tavern, a small New York town on the edge of the Stewart State Forest.  

After Frank Stella moved to New York, he focused exclusively on his painting and found his success after two accidental, but innovative, paintings. Known as the Black Paintings, they consisted of penciled lines drawn on raw canvas where the open spaces were partially filled with black house paint. Since that time, Stella has consistently developed increasingly complex variations of selected themes over the years. He has constantly challenged himself by working in sculpture, lithography, silk screen printing, etching  and offset lithography. 

After having established himself as a painter, Stella began making prints in 1967. He initially worked predominately with lithography, but also did intaglio prints and screen prints. Stella’s prints, like his paintings, were created in series and continued the aesthetic he had brought to his paintings. For his print production, Stella began working in 1967 with master printmaker and publisher Kenneth Tyler, owner of the print atelier Gemini Graphic Editions Limited. Known for the quality of its work, this print atelier drew many famous artists to its workshops including Jasper Johns, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Anthony Caro, and Robert Rauschenberg.

The sixteen prints of Frank Stella’s 1982 -1984 “Circuits Series” represented a dramatic shift in his attitude toward printmaking. While working on a series of sculptural relief paintings, Stella had the idea that the remnants from his sculptural work could be rolled with ink and used for relief printing. He noticed that the outlines of the different shapes cut from sheet metal had been incised into the plywood backing boards. Stella was struck by the layered network of lines and curved shapes traced onto the wood.

From this point in time, Stella’s print practice would be the influence for his work in other mediums, with each project pushing the boundaries of his printmaking. Working with Kenneth Tyler, he experimented with the “Circuit Series” in tandem with his developing relief paintings. By layering woodblocks and collaging them with etched metal plates, then printing them on specially crafted, hand-dyed sheets of oversize paper, Stella produced prints of innovational scale, complexity and bold color. This series was the first time Stella used color-stained paper and magnesium plates for printing. 

“The “Circuits Series” was inspired by the race tracks that Stella visited in the different parts of the world: the Talladega in Alabama, the Pergusa and Imola racetracks in Italy, and the Estoril in Portugal. Stella incorporated twisting and circular shapes within the series to convey the high-speed courses. In all the images of the series, the visual image of the racetrack remains consistent; however, the curvilinear shapes are sometimes highly irregular and become increasingly enhanced by the use of multiple colored inks. 

The National Gallery of Australia holds the most comprehensive collection of Frank Stella’s innovations in print, with over eleven-hundred prints, experimental proofs, and matrices, including more than one-hundred twenty related to the “Circuits Series”. Images from the series are in private and other public collections including Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery in New York, the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, and both the Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Top Insert Image: Bob Berg, “Frank Stella, New York Studio”, May 1995, Color Print, Getty Images

Second Insert Image: Frank Stella, “Imola Three I”, 1982, “Circuits” Series, Relief and Woodcut with Aquatint on Handmade, Hand-Colored Paper, 167.6 x 132.1 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Frank Stella, “Estoril Five II”, 1982, “Circuits” Series, Relief and Woodcut with Aquatint on Handmade, Hand-Colored Paper, 167.6 x 132.1 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Christopher Gregory (New York Times), “Frank Stella, New York City”, 2019, The Renate, Hans & Maria Hoffmann Trust

Sir William Dobell

The Artwork of Sir William Dobell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Orla Muff

Orla Muff, “Nana”, 1934, Oil on Canvas, 45.1 x 55.3 cm, Private Collection

Born in April of 1903 in Copenhagen, Orla Andreas Heinrik Jacobsen was a Danish painter and illustrator. From 1917 to 1921, he received his formal art education at the Copenhagen Technical School under Carl Lund, the leading theatrical artist of the time. In 1917, he adopted a change in name to Orla Muff. 

In 1918, Muff was awarded a distinguished seat at the Day’s Drawing Concourse, an event held by Children’s Aid, and had his first drawing printed on a postcard. In the same year he drew one hundred different illustrations depicting gnomes for a series of postcards, which was released in large editions several times. Muff’s illustrations for the early postcards were signed with an intertwined O and J standing for Orla Jacobsen. He continued to design postcards until the late 1960s; these later works were signed with Orla Muff.

After his studies with Carl Lund, Orla Muff began a period of travel through Europe where he studied in Sweden, Holland, France and Germany. He achieved acclaim early in his career as a designer of elaborate Art Deco styled sets for prominent European revues and theatrical productions. Included among these designs were sets for performances at Copenhagen’s Folk Theater, Austrian-born theatrical producer Max Reinhardt’s Theater in Berlin, and Norway’s Mayol Theater in Oslo. 

In addition to his set designs, Muff began easel painting in the early 1930s; he created portraits, figurative works, and abstract paintings. His work is characterized by a refined sophistication and a predominantly light-toned color scale. Muff’s abstract compositions, executed in the styles of the Art Deco and Cubist movements, often contain mythologically inspired figures set in largely monochromatic backgrounds. 

Painted in his early thirties, Orla Muff’s 1934 “Nana” is an Art Deco derived, Expressionist oil portrait of a young, high-spirited woman, shown smoking a cigarette and set against a mottled turquoise background. Muff’s use of strong lighting effects produced a dramatic and psychologically penetrating portrait of this young woman.

During the course of his career, Orla Muff exhibited successfully in many European exhibitions and was the recipient of juried awards and prizes. Among his notable works are “Leda and the Swan” exhibited in 1940; the 1940 oil on canvas “Tropical Jungle Women”; a 1947 series of wooden sculptural figures based on Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales;  a 1957 series of illustrations from the Bible for use in films; and posters, costume designs, and theater decorations executed in 1921 and 1922  for performances of Anderson’s tales at the Mayol Theater in Oslo. 

Orla Muff died in the city of Copenhagen in December of 1984. A small collection of personal correspondence from Orla Muff to Dr. Raymond Piper, as well as a photo of the artist and photos of Muff’s artwork, can be found in the Special Collections of the University of West Georgia.

Notes: An extensive collection of Orla Muff’s illustrated postcards can be found at the Danish Postcard Artists site located at: https://www.piaper.dk/postkortkunstnere/Postkortkunstnere/Orla_Muff/Orla_Muff.htm   

A collection of fifty-five images of Orla Muff’s music sheet covers is located at the online Illustrated Sheet Music site: https://www.imagesmusicales.be/search/illustrator/Muff/11874/ShowImages/80/Submit/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Orla Muff”, Date Unknown, Collection of the Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen

Second Insert Image: Orla Muff, Music Sheet Cover for “Smaragden”, Composer Einar Cronhammer, 1923

Third Insert Image: Orla Muff, Music Sheet Cover for “Han är Söt och Rar”, Composer Harald Mortensen, 1925

Bottom Insert Image: Orla Muff, Music Sheet Cover for “Femina”, Composer Sven Rüno, 1923

Marsden Hartley

Paintings by Marsden Hartley

Born in Lewiston, Maine on January 4th of 1877, Marsden Edmund Hartley was an American Modernist painter, poet, essayist and author.  The youngest of eight children, he remained, at the age of fourteen, with his father in Maine after the death of his mother, his siblings having moved to Ohio after the death. A year later in 1892, he joined his family in Cleveland, Ohio, where he began formal art training at Cleveland’s School of Art under a scholarship.

In 1898, Hartley relocated to New York City to study painting under Impressionist William Merritt Chase at the New York School of Art; he also associated with member artists from  the National Academy of Design. Hartley became a close friend and admirer of allegorical and seascape painter Albert Pinkham Ryder, whom he often visited at his Greenwich Village studio. He also read the writings of Walt Whitman and the American  transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau.

Between 1900 and 1910, Marsden Hartley spent his summers in the city of Lewiston, located in southern Maine, and the region of western Maine near the village of Lovell. During these summers, he painted what are considered his first mature works, images of Kezar Lake located near the town of Lovell, and Maine’s hillsides and mountains. In 1909, Hartley exhibited these paintings at his first solo exhibition in art promoter Alfred Stieglitz’s internationally-known Gallery 291, located in Manhattan. Impressed by Hartley’s work, Stieglitz introduced him to the work of the European Modernist artists, such as Picasso, Kandinsky and Matisse.

Hartley traveled to Europe in April of 1912, the first of many visits, and in Paris became acquainted with Gertrude Stein and her circle of  writers and artists. He was encouraged by Stein, along with poet Hart Crane and novelist Sherwood Anderson, to write as well as paint. Disenchanted after living in Paris for a year, Hartley relocated to Berlin in April of 1913 where he became friends with Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, and continued his painting. Of his work done in Berlin, two of his still life paintings, inspired by the work of Cézanne, and six charcoal drawings were included in the historic 1913 Armory Show in New York.

Marsden Hartley’s work during this period in Berlin was a combination of German Expressionism and abstraction; his work was also inspired by the pageantry of the German military, though his view of the military changed with the outbreak of war in 1914. In Berlin, Hartley developed a close relationship with a lieutenant in the Prussian Armed Forces, Karl von Freyburg, who was a cousin of Hartley’s friend Arnold Ronnebeck. Infatuated with Freyburg, Hartley would use him as a recurring motif in his works. Although Freyburg survived the Battle of the Marne, for which he was awarded the Iron Cross, he died on October 7th in 1914, at the age of twenty-four, during the Battle of Arras. Hartley was devastated at the announcement of Freyburg’s death.

The works Hartley produced shortly after Freyburg’s death were variations on his post-war themes. However, along with the regimental plumes in his paintings, there were now numbers and letters which had deep significance to Hartley. They included the “K.v.F.” of Freyburg’s initials, coded references to the Iron Cross, Freyburg’s age and regiment numbers, and black and white checkered patterns which referenced Freyburg’s favorite game, chess. Two examples of these memorial pieces are “Portrait of a German Officer” and “Portrait No. 47”, both painted in Berlin and seen in the images above.

Marsden Hartley returned to the United States in early 1916. He traveled and painted from 1916 to 1921 in Provincetown, New York, New Mexico, and Bermuda. Although his works still contained some German iconography, he also painted other subjects, often with homoerotic undertones. After an auction of one hundred of his works at New York’s Anderson Gallery in 1921, Hartley returned to Europe and created still lifes and landscapes using the drawing medium of silverpoint. 

Throughout the 1930s, Hartley spent summers and autumns in New Hampshire painting scenes of its mountains. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, he spent time painting in Mexico which was followed by a year in the Bavarian Alps. After a few months in Bermuda in 1935, Hartley traveled by ship to Blue Rocks, Nova Scotia, where he lived for two summers with the Mason family, who earned their living as fishermen. The deaths of the two Mason brothers, drowned in a hurricane, greatly affected Hartley and inspired a series of portrait paintings and seascapes. Hartley returned to Maine in 1937 where he remained for the rest of his life. He died in Ellsworth, Maine, at the age of sixty-six, on September 2nd of 1943.

Marsden Hartley was not overt about his homosexuality and often diverted attention to other aspects of his work. Most of his works, such as “Portrait of a German Officer”, a homage to Freyburg, and his 1916 “Handsome Drinks”, one of the first paintings Hartley did after his reluctant 1916 return to the United States, are coded in their reference to his sexuality. When he reached his sixties, he no longer felt unease and his works became more intimate, such as his two 1940 paintings “Flaming American (Swim Champ)” and the  “Madawaska-Acadian Light-Heavy”, seen in one of the above inserts. 

Top Inset Image: Marsden Hartley, “Green Landscape with Rocks, No. 2”, 1935-1936, Oil on Board, 33 x 45.4 cm, Brooklun Museum, New York

Second Insert Image: Richard Tweedy, “Marsden Hartley”, 1898, Oil on Canvas, 66 x 45.7 cm, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Third Insert Image: Marsden Hartley, “Abstraction”, 1912-1913, Oil on Canvas, 118 x 101 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Marsden Hartley, “Madawaska-Acadian Light-Heavy”, 1940, 101.6 x 76.2 cm, Chicago Art Institute

Amadeo de Souza Cardoso

The Artwork of Amadeo de Souza Cardoso

Born in November of 1887 in the town of Manhule, Amadeo de Souza Cardoso was one of the first generation of Portuguese modernist painters. Known for the exceptional quality of his work, his short career covered all the historical avant-garde movements of the early twentieth=century. 

The son of a wealthy landowner and vintner, Amadeo, at the age of eighteen, traveled to Lisbon and entered the Superior School of Fine Arts where he developed his skills as a designer and caricaturist. In November of 1906, he traveled to Paris with his friend and painter Francisco Smith and lived in an apartment on the Boulevard de Montparnasse. After a caricature he had drawn during a dinner was published  in Portugal’s “O Primerro de Jameiro” newspaper, Amadeo decided to devote himself to painting. 

In 1908, Amadeo de Souza Cardoso established himself at a studio located at 14 Cité Falguière , which became a social gathering place for Portuguese artists including Manuel Bentes, Eduardo Viana, and Domingos Rebelo, among others. At this time, Amadeo began to attend the ateliers of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Viti, where he studied under the Spanish painter Angalada Camarasa, whose use of intense coloring presaged the arrival of Fauvism. 

In 1911, Amadeo exhibited his work in the Salon des Indépendents and soon became close friends with writers and artists such as Gertrude Stein, Amedeo Modigliani, Alexander Archipenko, Robert Delaunay, and the Italian Futurists Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini.  In 1912, Amadeo published his album, “XX Dessuab”, containing twenty drawings with a forward written by author Jerome Doucet, and republished Gustave Flaubert’s “La Légende de Saint Julien to l’Hospitalier” in a calligraphic manuscript with illustrations. Amadeo de Souza Cardoso participated in two important exhibitions in 1913: the Armory Show in the United States that traveled to New York City, Boston and Chicago, and the Erste Deutsche Herbstsalon held at the Galerie Der Strum in Berlin. These two exhibitions were the first to present the new wave of modern art to the public. Seven of the eight works Amadeo displayed at the Armory show sold; three of these were purchased by lawyer and art critic Arthur Jerome Eddy, a prominent member of the first generation of American modern art collectors.

Returning to Portugal in 1914, Amadeo began experimentation in all the new forms of artistic expression, and married Lucia Pecetto, whom he had previously met during his 1908 stay in Paris. In April of 1914, he sent three new works for an exhibition at the London Salon; however, due to the outbreak of World War I, the show was canceled. During the war years, Amadeo maintained contact with other Portuguese artists and poets and reunited with Robert and Sonia Delaunay who had relocated to Portugal. In 1916, he published his “Twelve Reproductions” through Tipografia Santos in Porto and exhibited a collection of one hundred-fourteen works at a solo exhibition in Oporto and later in Lisbon, entitled “Abstraccionism”. 

At this time, the Cubist movement had  expanded throughout Europe and was an important influence to Amadeo de Souza Cardoso’s  style of analytical cubism. He continued to explore expressionism and, in his last works, experimented with many new techniques. In 1918, Amadeo was stricken with a skin disease which impeded his painting. On the 25th of October in 1918, Amadeo de Souza Cardoso died, at the age of thirty, in Espinho, Portugal, of the Spanish influenza, a pandemic which savaged the world at the end of World War I. 

After his death, Amadeo de Souza Cardoso’s work was shown in a 1925 retrospective in France which was well received by both critics and the public. Ten years later, the Souza-Cardoso Prize was established in Portugal to distinguish modern painters. Amadeo’s work remained relatively unknown until 1952, when a exhibition of his work in Portugal regained the public’s attention. Since then, only two retrospectives have been held, one in 1958 and one in 2016, both at the Grand Palais in Paris.

Tope Insert Image: Amadeo de Souza Cardoso, “The Hawks”, 1912, India Ink on Paper, 27 x 24.3 cm, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum

Bottom Insert Image: Amadeo de Souza Cordoso, “Self Portrait”, 1913, Graphite on Paper, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum

Harald Kreutzberg

Hans Robertson, “Portrait of Harald Kreutzberg”, 1931

Born in Liberec, Czech Republic in December of 1902, Harald Kreutzberg was a modern dancer and choreographer, known for his roles in both traditional ballets and expressive dance dramas. He played a major role in the development of the expressionist modern dance in Germany. 

Trained at the Dresden Ballet School, Kreutzberg studied under two of the most important figures in modern dance, Mary Wigman and Rudolf Laban, and was a critical link in the aesthetic lineage that gave rise to American choreographer and composer Alwin Nikolais, choreographer and dance educator Hanya Holm, and many other U.S. choreographers. 

In 1926, Harald Kreutzberg was in Swiss theater choreographer Max Terpis’s “Don Morte”, a version of Edgar Allen Poe’s novel “The Masque of the Red Death”.  A year later, he appeared in the plays “Turnadot and Jedermann” and as Puck for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, both directed by Max Reinhardt. Kreutzberg  accompanied Reinhardt to New York City where he began a tour of the United States, Canada, and Europe with the dancer Yvonne Georgi. 

While his impact on expressionist modern dance was sweeping Europe, in the United States, Kreutzberg was considered by many as a major force in the development of the male modern dancer. He was not afraid to challenge the gender norms in his time. Kreutzberg tended to incorporate feminine movements and costuming in his performances, especially alongside his dance partner Yvonne Georgi. He specifically inspired male dancers by breaking the stereotypical roles of princes, birds, and mythical gods. 

With their international tours from 1928-1931, Kreutzberg and Yvonne Georgi exposed the public to the style of expressionist dance. Many gay male dancers in Germany also pursued their careers during the years of the National Socialist government. He was the most notable among them as his long-term partnership with his accompanist and composer Friedrich Wilckens was an open secret. While other gay men were imprisoned and forced to wear a pink triangle, Kreutzberg was allowed to tour throughout Germany and abroad.

In 1943, Harald Kreutzberg appeared as a jester in Georg Willhelm’s film “Paracelsus”, in which he performed a modern hypnotic dance. Choreographer George Balanchine and writer Lincoln Kirstein invited him to share a program with the New York City Ballet in the late 1940s. Kreutzberg established his own dance school in 1955 in Bern, Switzerland, and retired from the stage in 1959. He continued to choreograph for others and teach at his school until his death in Bern on April 25, 1968. 

Insert Image: German photographer Hans Robertson, who specialized in the genre of dance, took this photo, on December 11, 1902, showing  Harald Kreutzberg wearing a headdress for a performance at the Volksbühne in Berlin.  

Otis Huband

Paintings by Otis Huband

Born in Fredericksburg, Virginia in 1933, Otis Dare Huband Jr, after serving a tour of duty in the Navy, attended the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. He returned to Virginia to complete both his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Virginia Commonwealth University. Huband  then travelled to Italy to study in 1963-64 at the Academia de Bella Arta in Perugia.

Otis Huband returned from Europe in 1964 and moved to Houston in  the following year. Upon his arrival, he bypassed the local gallery scene by choice, opting instead to concentrate most of his time in his studio. In addition, Huband also worked as an art instructor at the University of Houston, the current Glassell School of Art, Rice University, and the Art League of Houston. He retired from his educational work in 1982 and now works full-time on his daily painting. 

Huband’s paintings are abstractions rich with thoughtful color, form and figure. It was his emphasis on figurative subject matter that gave his work a place within Houston’s art history. However, his style of expressionism showcases not only the human figure, but also dynamic energy, produced by the use of powerful colors and bold strokes.

Otis Huband has had multiple solo shows, starting with the Studio Gallery in Oakland, California in 1957 and the Pyramid Gallery in Richmond, Virginia in 1959, and continuing until his recent shows at the Valley House Gallery in Dallas, Texas in 2019 and at the Foltz Fine Art in Houston in 2020. He has had two major retrospectives of his work: the 1993 “Otis Huband: The Artist and His Collection” at The Museum of Printing History in Houston, and the 2010 “The Figurative Revelations of Otis Huband: A Fifty-Year Retrospective” at William Reaves Fine Art in Houston. 

Alma Thomas

Alma Thomas, “Light Blue Nursery”, 1968, Acrylic on Canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1891, Alma Woodsey Thomas was an expressionist abstract painter and art educator. As a teenager, she moved with her family to Washington, DC to escape the racism the family experienced in the South. Thomas attended Howard University, where she took classes taught by painter and educator Lois Mailou Jones and impressionist painter James V. Herring, who founded Howard University’s art department. 

Alma Thomas graduated in 1924 as the university’s first Fine Art graduate. She acquired her Masters in Art Education from New York’s Columbia University and studied abroad in Europe with the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. She was greatly influenced by the techniques of French Impressionism, through the still-lifes and landscapes of Berthe Morisot and Claude Monet.

Through her life, Thomas was involved with the history of black American intellectual life and participated in many organizations promoting such history and culture. Among these was the Little Paris Group, a literary circle of black public school teachers who met weekly in the 1940s. Alma Thomas also served as Vice President of the Barnett Aden Gallery, founded in 1947, as a black-owned non-profit art gallery. The gallery exhibited the work of all artists regardless of race; however, it was one of few places that showed black artists on equal footing with their white contemporaries.

After she retired, at the age of sixty-nine, from her career as an art teacher, Alma Thomas developed her own personal style. Inspired by the shifting light filtering between the leaves of trees in her garden, she began to paint her signature abstractions. Thomas was given her first solo show at the Dupont Theatre Art Gallery in 1960.

Although the work is abstract, the titles summon up specific moods and scenes, such as “Iris, Tulips, Jonquils, and Crocuses” in 1969, the 1973 “Snow Reflections on Pond”, and “Red Azaleas Singing and Dancing Rock and Roll Music” painted in 1976. The colorful rectangular dabs of paint, often arranged in circles or rows, allow the under-colors to emerge through the open spaces.

Alma Thomas died at the age of 86 in 1978 in Washington, DC. During her life she was included in many group shows centered around black artists. It was not until after her death that her work began being included in shows which did not focus on the unifying themes of race or gender identity, but rather was allowed to exist simply as art. Her work can be seen at many museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Smithsonian Museum. 

Note: The insert image is Alma Thomas’s “Grassy Melodic Chat”, an acrylic on canvas painting done in 1976. It is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Alfonso Ossorio

The Artwork of Alfonso Ossorio

Born in August of 1916 in Manila, Alfonso Ossorio was an abstract expressionist artist of Hispanic, Filipino, and Chinese heritage. At the age of fourteen, he moved to the United States and attended Portsmouth Abbey School in Rhode Island, graduating in 1934. Ossorio studied fine art at Harvard University from 1934 to 1938, and continued his studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. He became a United States citizen in 1933.

Discovered by art dealer and collector Betty Parsons, Alfonso Ossorio had his first show, featuring his Surrealist-influenced works at New York’s Wakefield Gallery in 1940. Following World War II service in the US Army as a medical illustrator, tasked with drawing surgical procedures on injured soldiers, he took some respite in the Berkshires, a region in western Massachusetts known for its outdoor activities. It was there at the 1948 Tanglewood Music Festival that Ossorio met Edward Dragon, a ballet dancer, who would be Ossorio’s life-long partner. 

Through his connection with Betty Parsons, Ossorio became acquainted with the work of Jackson Pollock. Becoming both an admirer and a collector of Pollock’s expressionist work, he and Pollock soon developed a close friendship and reciprocal influence on each others work. Later in 1951, through critic and art historian Michel Tapié, Ossorio established a contact between Pollock and the young Parisian gallery owner Paul Facchetti who realized Pollock’s first solo exhibition in Europe in 1952.

In Paris in 1951, Ossorio and Edward Dragon frequently met with artist Jean Dubuffet and his wife Lili. While they were visiting, Jean Dubuffet wrote the text for his monograph on Ossorio entitled, “Peintures Initiatiques d’Alfonso Ossorio” and introduced Ossorio to art critic and collector Michel Tapié. Tapié organized a one-man show at the Studio Paul Facchetti of Ossorio’s small, luminous “Victorias Drawings”, which Ossorio made while visiting the Philippines. Produced using Ossorio’s experimental drawing technique of wax-resistant crayon on Tiffany & Co. stationary, the works in this series are counted as some of Ossorio’s most innovative. 

Dubuffet’s interest in art brut opened up new vistas for Ossorio, who found release from society’s preconceptions in the previous unstudied creativity of insane asylum inmates and children. In the 1950s, Ossorio began to create works resembling Dubuffet’s assemblages. He affixed shells, bones, driftwood, nails, dolls’ eyes, cabinet knobs, dice, costume jewelry, mirror shards, and children’s toys to the panel surface. Ossorio called these assemblages congregations, with the term’s obvious religious connotation.

On the advice of Pollock, Ossorio and Edward Dragon purchased an expansive 60-acre estate, The Creeks, in East Hampton, Long Island, New York, in 1951, where they lived for more than forty years. Alfonso Ossorio died in New York City in 1990. Half his ashes were scattered at The Creeks estate and the other half came to rest nine years later at Green River Cemetery, alongside the remains of many other famous artists, writers and critics. 

Alfonso Ossorio’s works can be found at The Creeks, the Harvard Art Museum in Massachusetts, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Housatonic Museum of Art in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, among others.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Alfonso Ossorio”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print

Middle Insert Image: Alfonso Ossorio, “Double Portrait”, 1944, Watercolr, Black Ink on Paper, 35.5 x 50.8 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Bottom Insert Image: Alfonso Ossorio, “Dunstan Thompson”, 1942, Watercolor, Gouache and Ink on Paper, 64.8 x 52.1 cm, Private Collection

Karl Hofer

Karl Hofer, “Jüngling am Fenster (Youth at the Window)”, 1933, Oil on Canvas, Museum Wiesbaden, Germany

Born in 1878 in Karlsruhe, Germany, Karl Hofer was a painter notable for his extensive contributions to the German Expressionist movement. Figurative, conservatively rendered working-class Germans most often adorn his canvases, with his subjects and style varied over the course of his career. The classical portraits of his early years gave way to politically charged Expressionist figures, which, during the Nazi regime, were denounced as “degenerate art”. These finally morphed into his Cubist-inspired compositions of post-war life.

Hofer received little recognition during his early career, and never joined an Expressionist painting group like Die Brücke. By the end of his life, however, Hofer was considered one of the greatest German painters of his time, and his works can now be found in many collections around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Kunsthalle Mannheim in Germany.

Source: artqueer

Dick Goody

Dick Goody, “Haberman Cutting the Grass”, 2017, Oil on Canvas, 54 x36 Inches, Broad Museum, Michigan State University

Professor of Art Dick Goody is an expressionist painter whose work depicts figures, landscapes and still lifes that at times feel to be autobiographical. He earned a master of Fine Arts Degree from the Slade School of Fine Art in London.

The oil on Goody’s canvas works are flat, nuanced, ambiguous and reflect a somewhat consistent color palate, especially his use of the color of red.  On his previous work, Goody used direct words and writing passages which would often dominate the composition. In “Haberman Cutting the Grass”, there is an economy of form and colors in this figure-centered composition and a lack of any graphics..

Edward Munch

Edward Munch, “Bathing Men”, 1907, Oil on Canvas, 81 x 90 Inches, Ateneum, Helsinki, Finland

“Bathing Men” is one of the later works of expressionist artist and printer Edward Munch. Born in Norway in 1863, Munch played a major role in German Expressionism and the art form that later followed; namely because of the strong mental anquish that was displayed in many of his works.

Many of Munch’s works depict life and death scenes, love, and terror. The patterns in his work would often focus on the feeling of loneliness. These emotions were depicted by the contrasting lines, the darker colors, blocks of color, somber tones, and a concise and exaggerated form, which depicted the darker side of the art which he was designing. Munch, a close contemporary of Sigmund Freud, is often and rightly compared with Van Gogh, who was one of the first artists to paint what the French artist called “the mysterious centers of the mind.”

Christian Schad

Christian Schad, “Sirius”, 1915, Swiss Stone Lithograph

Christian Schad was a painter and printmaker who was preoccupied with Futurism, Cubism, and later, Expressionism. In 1915, Schad, along with his friend Walter Serner, published “Sirius: A Monthly Magazine for Literature and Art,” in Zurich. The magazine was forced to close after only seven issues. Schad designed the advertising posters and a full page woodcut for each issue.

Schad’s works of 1915–1916 show the influence of Cubism and Futurism. During his stay in Italy in the years between 1920 and 1925, he developed a smooth, realistic style that recalls the clarity he admired in the paintings of Rapael. Upon returning to Berlin in 1927 he painted some of the most significant works of the New Objectivity movement.

In 1918 Schad began experimenting with cameraless photographic images inspired by Cubism. This process had been first used, in the years 1834 and 1835, by William Henry Talbot who made cameraless images, that is, prints made by placing objects onto photosensitive paper and then exposing the paper to sunlight. By 1919 Schad was creating photograms from random arrangements of discarded objects he had collected such as torn tickets, receipts and rags. He is probably the first to do so strictly as an art form, preceding Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagyby at least a year or two.

Xoloti Polo

 

Xolotl Polo, Unknown Title, Acrylic on Canvas

Polo Xolotl is a Mexican artist born in 1964. Polo first expressed an interest in painting during early childhood by absorbing as much of his artist parent’s knowledge as possible. He studied graphic design at the Iberoamicana AC University and took part in workshops on painting at the regional Fine-Arts institute in Morelos, Mexico.

For years, Xolotl found himself influenced by the history and environment of his country. His progressive transformation led to canvases in which he plays with light and dynamic images, combining abstraction and figuration to portray seemingly torn silhouettes. His work has been exposed during numerous collective and personal exhibits in Mexico. The artist’s paintings also figure in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico, the Javier de la Rosa Museum in the Canary Islands, as well as in the Mexican Embassy in Washington D.C.

Asgeer Jorn

Asger Jorn, “Green Ballet”, Oil on Canvas, 1960, Guggenheim Museum, New York

Asger Oluf Jörgensen was born in Vejrum, Denmark, on March 3, 1914. He visited Paris in the fall of 1936, where he studied at Fernand Leger’s Académie Contemporaine. During World WarII, Jorn remained in Denmark, painting canvases that reflected the influence of James Ensor, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Joan Miro, and contributing to the magazine “Helhesten (Ghost Horse)”, working on nine issues from 1941–44.

Jorn traveled to Swedish Lapland in the summer of 1946, met Constant Nieuwenhuys in Paris that fall, and spent six months in Jerba, Tunisia, from 1947–48. His first solo exhibition in Paris took place in 1948 at the Galerie Breteau. At about the same time the group Cobra (an acronym for Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam) was founded by Karel Appel, Constant, Guillaume Cornelis Beverloo, Christian Dotremont, Jorn, and Joseph Noiret. The group’s unifying doctrine was the complete freedom of expression with an emphasis on color and brushwork. Jorn edited monographs of the group’s Bibliothèque Cobra before disassociating himself from the movement.

Jorn’s activities included painting, collage, book illustration, prints, drawings, ceramics, tapestries, commissions for murals, and, in his last years, sculpture. He participated in the movement Internationale Situationniste and worked on a study of early Scandinavian art between 1961 and 1965. His first solo show in New York took place in 1962 at the Lefebre Gallery. From 1966 Jorn concentrated on oil painting and traveled frequently, visiting Cuba, England and Scotland, the United States, and Asia. Jorn died on May 1, 1973, in Aarhus, Denmark.

Wenzel Hablik

Wenzel Hablik, “Gewitter an der Stör”, 1910, Oil on Canvas, Dimensions Unknown, Wenzel Hablik Museum, Itzehoe, Germany

Wenzel August Hablik was a graphic artist, painter architect, designer and craftsman associated with the German Expressionism movement. He was trained as a master cabinetmaker in Vienna and Prague; however, when he settled in Itzehoe he pursued architectual and interior design projects. He produced designs for furniture, textiles, jewelry and wallpapers.

He is best known for his etchings and paintings and his links with the major German Expressionist movements and figures, including the Arbeitsrat fur Kunst and The Glass Chain. In 1909 he published his “Schaffende Kräfte” (Creative Forces), a portfolio of twenty etchings of crystaline structures.  His visual art is known for its highly imaginative aspects.