Edward Melcarth

The Artwork of Edward Melcarth

Born at Louisville, Kentucky in January of 1914, Edward Melcarth was an American painter, photographer and sculptor who developed his own style, Social Romanticism, a Renaissance-influenced attempt to describe man’s idealized view of himself. Active in the post-World War II art scene, Melcarth spent most of his career in New York City where he painted and sculpted images of blue-color workers, sailors, hustlers, and tradesmen.

Known for his emotionally evocative and heroic portrayals of the male figure, Melcarth focused his work on masculinity, portraiture, religion and contemporary American culture. His images of working-class men showed their grit, brute strength and determination to overcome difficulty. At the same time, the images were visual vehicles that examined gay male desire in a society that found it socially unacceptable. Melcarth’s paintings ranged in size from smaller portraits to large-scale, complex scenes of interacting figures accentuated with light and shadow.

Edward Melcarth, born Edward Epstein, was the son of the wealthy Jewish couple, Edward Epstein Sr. and Eva Ehrmann. His grandfather was the noted Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey distiller Hilmar Ehrmann. Melcarth’s uncle was activist lawyer and author Herbert B. Ehrmann; his aunt Sara R. Ehrmann was a Boston civic activist and first president of the League of Women Voters.

Eva Ehrmann, after the 1920 death of her husband, remarried in 1926 to Sir Reginald Mitchell Banks, who was a Member of Parliament. The family moved to the United Kingdom where Melcarth spent his early formative years. To pursue his interests and a career, he studied at Chelsea College of Arts in London; painter Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 in Paris; and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In February of 1936, Melcarth rejected his family’s Jewish religion and changed his last name from Epstein to Melcarth, possibly a variation of Melqart, a protector god of ancient Semitic people. Although he considered himself both a communist and openly gay, he was briefly married in Paris from 1939 until the divorce in 1944. During World War II, Melcarth traveled with other American volunteers in 1943 to Persia where they constructed air strips for the allied forces. In 1944, he served as a seaman in the United States Merchant Marines until the end of the war. Melcarth returned to the United States in the fall of 1951 and taught briefly at Kentucky’s University of Louisville.

In February of 1952, Edward Melcarth traveled to Italy where he resided for a period at Venice’s Casa del Tre Oci, a modern neo-Gothic palace on the island of Giudecca. Melcarth returned to the United States in November of 1952 and made New York City his primary residence. His acquaintances and friends included writers Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal, photographer Thomas Painter, sexologist Alfred Kinsey, artist Henry Faulkner, art collector Peggy Guggenheim, and businessman Malcolm Forbes, who established a major collection of Melcarth’s work.

In 1957, Melcarth created a ceiling mural depicting theatrical muses for the newly renovated Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, originally the Globe Theatre, on 46th Street in Manhattan. Beginning in 1967, Melcarth worked on a two-year project of trompe l’oeil murals and sculpted busts for the rotunda at the luxurious Pierre Hotel that faces New York’s Central Park. The painted Italian landscape murals included mythological figures and couples viewed between illusionistic columns.

Edward Melcarth relocated to Venice in 1970 where he lived until his death from cancer at the age of fifty-nine in December of 1973. Throughout his career, he taught at the University of Louisville, Parsons School of Design, Columbia University, the University of Washington, and New York’s Art Students League. Melcarth received both a grant and the Childe Hassam purchase award from the Institute of Arts and Letters, Chicago Art Institute’s Altman Prize, and the National Academy of Design’s Thomas B. Clarke Award.

Notes: Edward Melcarth’s papers, correspondence, and writings are housed in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/edward-melcarth-papers-7865

An article by museum curator Hunter Kissel entitled “Illuminating the Underrepresented: Presenting Edward Melcarth” can be found at: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c3cc8a11aef1d1735f564f7/t/5cf29f0ad328900001e55860/1559404302304/IlluminatingTheUnderrepresented.pdf

The bi-monthly literary and history magazine Gay & Lesbian Review has an interview between writer Taylor Lewandowski and painter Richard Taddei, a former student and friend of Melcarth, on its site: https://glreview.org/article/richard-taddei-on-his-mentor-edward-melcarth/

Sir Charles Lawes-Wittewronge

Sir Charles Lawes-Wittewronge, “The Death of Dirce”, 1906, Bronze, 252.7 x 172.7 x 195.6 cm, Tate Museum, Millbank, Westminster, London

Born at the seaside civil parish of Teignmouth, Devon in October of 1843, Sir Charles Bennet Lawes-Wittewronge, 2nd Baronet was an English athlete and sculptor. The only son of agricultural chemist Sir John Bennet Lawes of Rothamsted Manor, Herfordshire, and his wife Caroline Fountaine, Charles Bennet Lawes was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Natural Sciences in 1866.

At Eton, Lawes exhibited his exceptional athletic prowess in multiple sports including field and track, rowing and cycling. He claimed university titles in the half-mile, mile, and two mile track events between 1864 and 1865. In rowing, Lawes secured the Cambridge sculls (1862), the Henley Regatta diamond sculls (1863) and, as 1865 amateur champion oarsman, was part of the Cambridge crew in the 1865 Boat Race against Oxford. In 1899 at the age of fifty-six, he set competitive cycling’s amateur record of just over fifty-one minutes for the twenty-five mile course.

Charles Bennet Lawes made the decision to become a sculptor after graduating from Trinity College. His initial training was in London under Irish sculptor John Henry Foley, a member of the Royal Academy who was considered the finest equestrian sculptor of the Victorian era. In 1869, Lawes studied in Berlin under German sculptor Hugo Hagen who was the director of the Christian Daniel Rauch Museum in Leipzig. After renting a studio in the Chelsea district of London, he exhibited his first work, “Girl at the Stream” at the Royal Academy in 1872. Two other works exhibited at the Royal Academy by Lawes were his “Daphne” in 1880 and “The Panther” in 1881.

After the death of his father in August of 1900, Charles Bennet Lawes became 2nd Baronet of Rothamsted Manor, assuming by Royal License the additional surname and arms of Wittewronge for himself and his heirs in 1902. In the same year, he was a co-founder of the Royal Society of British Sculptors and, from 1909 until his death, the society’s second president. Lawes exhibited his works at the Royal Society of British Sculptors, the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris where he received an honorable mention, and London’s 1908 Franco-British Exhibition, which ran concurrently with the Summer Olympics on the 140-acre west London site known as White City.

In 1906, Lawes executed his “The Death of Dirce”, a large bronze sculptural group that was based on the “Farnese Bull”, a massive marble Roman copy of an earlier Hellenistic sculpture that depicted the mythological punishment of Dirce, first wife of Lykos, King of Thebes. This bronze sculpture was exhibited at the Franco-British Exhibition. At the same time, Lawes’s colossal marble version of this work was shown at the Royal Academy. The marble “Death of Dirce” is now in the grounds of the public park area of Rothamsted, Hertfordshire. The bronze version, given after Lawes’s death by his widow, is installed at the entrance of the Tate Gallery, Millbank, London.

Sir Charles Bennet Lawes-Wittewronge married Marie Amelie Rose Fountaine on the eighth of April in 1869. He chaired the Lawes Agricultural Trust established by his father and supported the expansion of the Rothamsted estate’s agricultural experiments. A life-long Victorian patron of the arts, athletics and science, Lawes died at the age of sixty-eight in October of 1911 following an appendicitis operation. His body was cremated and interred at Golders Green Crematorioum, Golden Green, London. Charles and Marie Lawes’s only son John succeeded as the 3rd Baronet of Rothamsted in 1911. Marie Amelie Lawes died at the age of seventy-nine in August of 1928; she in interred with her husband at Golden Green, London.

Notes: There is a short biography on Sir Charles Lawes-Wittewronge at Harpenden History, a local history website presented by the Harpenden Museum in Rothamsted Park: https://www.harpenden-history.org.uk/harpenden-history/places-and-buildings/rothamsted/sir_charles_lawes-wittewronge

Top Insert Image: François Verheyden, “Sir Charles Lawes-Wittewronge”, 1883, Illustration for Vanity Fair Issue May 12 1883, London

Aleksei Ivanovich Borodin

Aleksei Ivanovich Borodin, “Tractor Drivers”, 1965-1980, Oil on Board, 95.3 x 132.1 cm, Private Collection

Born at Kirilovka, Samara Region in January of 1915, Aleksei Ivanovich Borodin was a Russian painter known for his figurative work and scenes of Russian rural life. After being orphaned during the Russian Civil War, he was placed in the care of a military educational orphanage for boys that trained them for military service.

After leaving the orphanage, Borodin entered Saratov Art and Industry High School and graduated in 1936 with a teacher’s diploma in painting and drawing. He also briefly studied under Russian Post-Impressionist painter Igor Grabar noted for his distinctive style of painting that bordered on Pointillism.

During World War II, Borodin was wounded during his service with an armored division of the Red Army. After the war, he returned to Saratov where he taught at his alma mater until the 1960s. Borodin relocated to Stalingrad, now Volgograd, where he was given a teaching position.

A member of the Russian Union of Artists since 1939, Aleksei Borodin participated in local, regional, Republican and Union-sponsored exhibitions from the early 1950s through the 1980s. Honored for his work, he was given a solo retrospective in 1986 at the Volgograd Art Museum, which now houses his most famous painting, the 1964 “Volgograd Farmers”.

Aleksei Ivanovich Borodin died in Volgograd at the age of eighty-nine in 2004. His paintings are in numerous private collections around the world. The majority of his oeuvre, however, is in the Saratov Art Museum, Volgograd Art Museum, and the Museum of Defense in Volgograd.

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Nicolas Monjo

The Paintings of Nicolas Monjo

Born at the Nouvelle-Aquitaine department of Lot-et-Garonne in 1975, Nicolas Monjo is a French self-taught contemporary painter. The central element of his work is the tenuous condition of humanity in a world that is both complex and often oppressive. To illustrate this fragility, Monjo presents the human figure enclosed, often crushed with others, inside the restrictive edges of the canvas.

Nicolas Monjo began painting at the age of twenty and, through study and technique, has developed his own unique style. His images are inspired by the complexities and sometimes tumultuous nature of human relationships, the struggles to overcome circumstances, and the power dynamics of a surrounding society.

Monjo’s vivid imagery features a tensive contrast between its harsh subject matter and the artistry of each painting’s composition. In an extremely personal way, he presents the fragility of the human condition that is often crushed by the harsh and cold world where the law of the strong prevails. Monjo’s figures are enclosed, both figuratively and literally, within the framework of the canvases they inhabit, a reminder of their inability to extricate themselves from their gloomy daily life.

Nicolas Monjo uses both acrylic and oil paints on his canvases with a preference for the colors gray and blue. Mixtures of oil and acrylic paint on the tablet are used for more marked relief effects. This soft, dark color palette creates a unique atmosphere for his evolving collection of characters. Mixed among these characters are recurring tropes such as rabbit ears, fish, dogs, gaping mouths and sunglasses. Other elements, almost always present in Monjo’s compositions, are the symbol of the heart, guitar, plates, forks and an abandoned glass on the floor. These are all objects that represent Monjo’s personal life.

Nicolas Monjo currently lives and works near the prefecture of Angouleme in the southwestern French department of Charente. His artwork is represented online by Bouillon d’Art at: https://www.bouillondart.com/en/93-monjo-nicolas

Monjo’s work can also be found at the online gallery Artsper located at: https://www.artsper.com/us/contemporary-artists/france/25687/nicolas-monjo

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Nicolas Monjo”, Color Print, Artsper Gallery

Bottom Insert Image: Nicolas Monjo, “Le Conte à Rebours”, Oil and Acrylic on Canvas, 130 x 97 cm, Private Collection

Mario Cattaneo

The Photography of Mario Cattaneo

In the period between the end of the Second World War in 1945 and the economic resurgence of the 1960s, Italy experienced enormous social and political transformations. Italian photographers responded to this post-war era by creating images that examined the realities of everyday life. These images, although seen as neo-realist or humanist in the tenor of social documentary photography, actually contained a wider range of motivations and styles.

Photojournalism thrived with the rapid growth of illustrated weekly magazines. At the same time, amateur photographic organizations sought to promote photography as a form of art. These photographers produced images of urban street life in the industrial cities of northern Italy. Southern Italy also became a primary source for the camera. While the site of the greatest post-war economic problems, southern Italy was a place of national unity, where local customs persevered amid Italy’s rapid modernization.

Born at Milan on the twenty-eighth of January in 1916, Mario Cattaneo was a significant but little-known Italian photographer who found the world of photographic clubs to be a place for his artistry and a framework for discussion and debate. Within those clubs, Cattaneo studied the technical aspects of photography,the works of established international photographers, and the theoretical and aesthetic concepts of the medium. The influences of French photographers Robert Doisneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson can be seen in Cattaneo’s attention to lighting and photo compositions.

Cattaneo’s first photographs, the series of images known as “La Fera del Sinigaglia”, were taken at Milan’s traditional flea market in the commune of Sinigaglia. The images he captured included portraits, articles for sale, and moments of spontaneous human interactions, often between buyers and sellers. Started in 1950, Cattaneo’s “Alleys” series explored the vibrant, and sometimes violent, everyday life found in Naples’s alleyways and also captured the hidden beauty and human stories found among the city’s narrow passages. A collection of these Naples images was later published in 1992 by Electra under the title “Vicoli”.

After his return to Milan, Mario Cattaneo became interested in the leisure and entertainment of Milanese youth during the economic boom of the post-World War II era. His photographs were taken at amusement parks, dance halls, and Sunday excursions at the Idroscalo, a city park with artificial lake that offered boating and swimming events as well as open-air concerts, bars and nightclubs. The images of Cattaneo’s three series “Luna Park”, “Una Domenica all’Idroscalo (A Sunday at the Idroscalo)” and “Giovanni al Juke Box” present the hope and carefree spirit of the young Milanese generation in newly adopted social activities and imported fashions.

Cattaneo continued working in Milan from 1964 to 1977 during which time he created two more series: the 1964-1965 “Caravaggio” and the 1973-1977 “Pop Festival”. Alongside his social and cultural presentations of Italy, Cattaneo produced travel images shot during his explorations of diverse cultures, among which were several trips to India.

In 1991, the Federazione Italiana Associazioni Fotografiche (FIAF), an Italian photography confederation that supported amateur groups, named Mario Cattaneo “Author of the Year” and dedicated a traveling exhibition to his work. He received awards and recognition in Italy and overseas, including first prize in the competition “Racconto e Reportage Fotografico (Storytelling and Photographic Reportage)” held in Fermo. In 1996, “La Fera del Sinigaglia”, with editing by W. Tucci Caselli, was published by the Fondazione E. Monti.

Mario Cataneo died in 2004 on the last of his many journeys to India. Following a donation from his heirs in 2006, the Mario Cattaneo collection has been owned by the Fondazione Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea in the Italian commune of Cinisello Balsamo. The photographic collection comprises over one hundred-ninety thousand film negatives, slides, prints, and contact sheets. This extensive collection attests to Cattaneo’s work between 1950 and 2004 as well as his ability to capture the beauty inherent in humanity, even within the simplest single shot.

Notes: Images of the Mario Cattaneo Collection of the Fondazione Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea can be found online at: https://www.mufocosearch.org/autori/AUF-10090-0000020?pageCurrent=1#paginationTop

The Italian photographic website The Mammoth Reflex has a short article on the work of Mario Cattaneo with several images at: https://www.themammothreflex.com/grandi-fotografi/2020/07/14/mario-cattaneo-mostra-cielo-aperto-cinisello-balsamo/

Top Insert Image: Mario Cattaneo, “Osteria”, 1970, Gelatin Silver Print, Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea

Second Insert Image: Mario Cattaneo, “Giovanni”, Juke box Series, 1960-1962, Gelatin Silver Print, Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea

Third Insert Image: Mario Cattaneo, “Napoli”, 1954, Gelatin Silver Print, Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea

Bottom Insert Image: Mario Cattaneo, “Napoli”, 1954, Gelatin Silver Print, Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea

Anton Carte

The Paintings of Antoine (Anton) Carte

Born at Mons, the provincial capital of Hainaut in December of 1886, Antoine (Anton) Carte was a Belgian painter and lithographer of the Flemish Expressionist movement who initially worked in the Symbolist style of the Sint-Martens-Latem artist colony. Along with painter and engraver Louis Buisseret, he founded the Groupe Nervia which supported new artists in Hainaut and fostered the traditional Gallo-Romance art of the ethnic French-speaking southern region of Belgium.

The son of a woodworker, Anton Carte was an apprentice at the studio of Belgian painter and designer Frantz Depooter for a period of fourteen years. He began his formal training at the Academy of Mons in 1897 and finished his training in 1908 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. It was at the Academy of Mons that Carte met Louis Buisseret, the man who would become his lifelong faithful friend. At the Royal Academy, both men studied under artists of the Symbolist movement: muralist painter Constant Montald, painter and mosaic artist Émile Fabry, and painter Jean Delville, a poet and leading exponent of the Belgian Idealist art movement during the 1890s.

A 1912 scholarship enabled Carte to travel to Paris where he stayed for two years at the studio of set and costume designer Léon Samoylovich Bakst and renowned French organ designer Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. During this period, Carte and Bakst worked for the Ballets Russes founded by Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev. Among other acquaintances in Paris, Carte came in contact with French Symbolist painter and theoretician Maurice Denis and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, a French muralist painter of allegorical and antiquity scenes.

After initially working in the Symbolist style, Anton Carte became a Flemish Expressionist after the First World War. Encouraged by Louis Buisseret, he exhibited a series of illustrations for a work by Belgian poet and playwright Emile Verhaeren at the 1917 Salon de l’Illustration in Brussels. Carte also illustrated editions of Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1895 “Massacre of the Innocents” and Marcel Wolfer’s 1914 “Writings of November”.

Carte exhibited with the Flemish Expressionists at the 1923 Paris Salon d’Automne, an annual multi-disciplinary event. In 1924, he traveled to the United States and, in the following year, had a major retrospective at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute. This show resulted in the sale of all sixty paintings presented at the show; it also ensured Carte’s success with the American public.

Although mostly known for his paintings, Anton Carte designed posters in the 1920s and 1930s which included work for the Aéro Club de Belgique, the 1930 International Exposition at Antwerpen/Anvers, and Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. Carte also created stained-glass windows, most notably the 1927 windows for a newly constructed building at the University of Mons-Hainaut in Wallonia, Belgium. Between 1935 and 1940, he undertook numerous commissions with glassmaker F. P. Colpaert for stained-glass windows at the Church of Saint Philippe de Neri at the Abbey of La Cambre and a stained-glass series, “The Way of the Cross”, for the Notre Dame de la Cambre.

Carte, along with Buisseret and Léon Eeckman, founded the Expressionist art association Groupe Nervia in 1928. This group was committed to an intimate human art tinged with Symbolism and Italian art techniques. Carte began teaching in 1929 at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de la Cambre in Brussels; however, as he did not agree with the first director’s ideas, Carte left in 1932 to become Professor of Decorative and Monumental Art at the Brussels Academy.

During the war years, Anton Carte finished the stained-glass windows he had started with F. P. Colpaert but later withdrew to his house in Wauthier Braine to find some calm. After the war, Carte painted frescoes in the chapel and in the Great Hall of Orval, a community within the French commune of Montigny-Lengrain. At the inauguration of his eight large stained-glass windows at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Koekelberg, Carte entrusted painter Jacques Maes with the completion of his project.

A complete artist throughout his life, Anton Carte produced drawings, engravings, book illustrations, posters, lithographs, banknotes, stamps, fresco designs, sculptures, stained glass windows, theater sets, ceramics and carpets. Tired at the age of sixty-seven, Anton Carte died on the fifteenth of February in 1954 at his home on the Rue de l’Ermitage in Ixelles, Belgium.

Notes: The Anton Carte Foundation has a more extensive biography of Carte’s life as well as an extensive collection of his artwork at their site: https://www.antocarte.art/en

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Anton Carte, L’Art Belge”, June 30 1920, Vintage Print

Second Insert Image: Anton Carte, “The Carter”, 1925-1930, Oil on Canvas, Anton Carte Foundation, Brussels, Belgium

Third Insert Image: Anton Carte, “Bénédiciié”, 1921, Oil on Canvas, 150 x 178 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Anton Carte, “The Boatman”, circa 1938, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 80 cm, Collection of the Province of Walloon Brabant

Botton Insert Image: Anto Carte, “The Passer (The Effort)”, 1920, Oil on Canvas, 130 x 90 cm, Private Collection

Hervé Guibert

The Photography of Hervé Guibert

Born at Saint-Cloud, Hauts-de-Seine on the fourteenth of December in 1955, Hervé Guibert was a French author and photographer. The author of two-dozen published works, he wrote with aggressive candor, detachment, and passion through a mixture of diary writing, memoir, and fiction. Both his writings and photography were closely linked to his private life. The subjects of Guibert’s writings often became his friends; those whom he loved were often portrayed as celebrities, alternately idolized and exposed.

Guibert’s photographic oeuvre contains interior scenes and landscapes as well as portraits of family, friends and lovers. He worked in black and white with tones drawn to soft grays. Photographs of Guibert’s immediate surroundings, his bookcase or desk, were created with the same intensity as photographs of nudes in his bed. His work is both restrained and subtle, created more for his person or close friends rather than public exposure. Although most of his work remains elusive, never having been exhibited or published, those images that have appeared are cool, confident and emotionally warm.

Hervé Guibert was born into a conservative middle-class family of a veterinary inspector and his wife, a former teacher. He relocated to Paris at the age of seventeen with the hope of becoming an actor or scriptwriter. After his rejection from a Paris film school, Guibert entered the literary world and, by the age of twenty, was writing dating advice for “20 Ans (Twenty Years)”, a glossy women’s magazine. In 1977, he published his autobiographical novel, “La Mort Propagande (Death Propaganda)”.

In 1978, Guibert was hired as a photography critic for France’s evening newspaper “Le Monde”. He successfully established himself as a photographer with a photographic literary volume, “Suzanne and Louise”, containing intimate portraits of his great-aunts. In 1981, Hervé Guibert published his “Image Fantôme (Ghost Image)”, an insightful collection of mini-essays on various photographic forms such as family album portraits, photo-booth film strips, and pornographic Polaroids. In this work, Guibert presented photography as tactile, fetishistic and linked to frustrated desires.

In 1982, Hervé Guibert completed his “Les Aventures Singulières (The Singular Adventures)”. This collection of short stories, published through Éditions de Minuit in Paris, centered on a singular character’s life over a period of three years. He shared the Best Screenplay César Award in 1984 for a collaborative work with opera and theater director Patrice Chéreau on the 1983 film “L’Homme Blessé (The Wounded Man)”.

Guibert was granted in 1987 a two year residency scholarship at Villa Medicis, the site of the French Academy in Rome, where he studied with his friend, the openly gay writer and journalist Mathieu Lindon. In January of 1988, Guibert received a positive diagnosis for AIDS and began to record in his writings what would be the remainder of his life. He was the long-time friend of both Christine and her partner, film director Thierry Jouno, considered the man in Guibert’s life. Guibert married Christine to ensure that his royalty income would pass to her and her two children with Jouno.

In 1989, Hervé Guibert published his highly erotic novella ““Fou de Vincent (Crazy for Vincent)”, a dramatization of his earlier intermittent relationship with the impulsive and unpredictable teenager Vincent Marmousez. He revealed his HIV status in his 1990 real-life based novel “À l’Ami qui ne M’a Pas Sauvé la Vie (To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life)”. Following the release of this novel, Guibert became the focus of media attention with interviews and several talk show appearances.

Guibert’s last work, “Cytomégalovirus” was a description of his autumn 1991 hospitalization and the increasing blindness he suffered from his illness. In the second week of December in 1991, Guibert attempted suicide by taking digitalin, a heart medication toxic in large doses. Two weeks later, he died at the age of thirty-six in Clamart, Hauts-de-Seine, on the twenty-seventh of December in 1991.

Notes: An excellent article on Hervé Guibert’s 1981 essay volume “Ghost Image” can be found on British photographer Felix Pilgrim’s site: https://www.felixpilgrim.com/blog-1/herve-guiberts-ghost-image

The contemporary Vienna gallery Felix Gaudlitz, in collaboration with Attilia Fattori Franchini, organized a 2020 exhibition of Hervé Guibert’s photographic work entitled “…of lovers, time, and death”. The gallery’s article with several of Guibert’s photographs can be found at: https://felixgaudlitz.com/exhibitions/herve-guibert-of-lovers-time-and-death/

Information written by Christine (Guibert) on Hervé Guibert’s partner Thierry Joune and the impact he had on Guibert’s writings can be found at: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/281395860/thierry-jouno

A more extensive biographical article on Hervé Guibert, with additional links, can be found in this blog’s November 2024 archive: https://ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon.blog/2024/11/18/hevre-guibert-he-who-wished-to-be-master-of-the-truth/

Top Insert Image: Hervé Guibert, “Self Portrait”, 1985, Gelatin Silver Print, 23.7 x 30.2 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Hans Georg Berger, “Hervé Guibert and Poet Eugène Savitzkaya, New Year’s Eve, Rio nell’Elba, Italy”, 1984, Gelatin Silver Print, Semiotext(e)

Third Insert Image: Hervé Guibert, “Christine”, 1983, Gelatin Silver Print, 23.8 x 30.5 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Hans Georg Berger, “Hervé Guibert and Thierry Juono, Hotel Gellért, Gesellschaft”, 1983, Gelatin Silver Print

Piero Pompili

The Black and White Photography of Piero Pompili

Born in the Roman borgata of Borghesiana in June of 1967, Piero Pompili is an Italian photographer whose work explores working class people and the landscape of Italy’s major cities. A significant part of his oeuvre is the portraiture of local boxers, those epic heroes from central and southern Italy who fight daily in the cities. A project that has covered a twenty-year period, Pompili’s series establishes the boxers’ identities through their bodies, discipline and skill, as well as their fears and ambitions.

Fascinated by the social and urban landscapes of the inner Italian cities since his childhood, Piero Pompili developed a deep attachment to the energy and passion of the common people. His approach to photography is realistic, not idealized, and presents real people who struggle with doubt but accept discipline and sacrifice through commitment. Pompili focused his images not on the battle itself but rather the strenuous routine of daily workouts and the rituals practiced by the boxers before their entry into the ring.

In April of 2017, Pompili published his “Gladiatori Moderni”, a collection of photographs printed through media company Salzgeber’s book division Bruno Gmuender. The photographs of these modern gladiators were taken in the borgatas of Rome and Naples, within both the gyms and the catacombs where ancient gladiators prepared for their battles.

Pompili’s work was featured in 2023 at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto (MART). In conjunction with the exhibition, MART published the exhibition catalogue “Piero Pompili: Pugili”.

Note: The April 2nd 2017 edition of The Advocate has a short biographical article on Piero Pompili and a collection of images from the “Gladiatori Moderni” at its online site: https://www.advocate.com/books/2017/4/02/modern-gladiators#rebelltitem1

Top Insert Image: Piero Ppmpili, “Self Portrait”, May 2025, Instagram

Bottom Insert Image: Piero Pompili, “Lukaska”, 2018, “Gladiatori Moderni” Series, Gelatin Silver Print

Bernardino del Boca

The Artwork of Bernardino del Boca

Born in the Piedmont commune of Crodo in August of 1919, Bernardino del Boca was an Italian painter, illustrator, and educator. Although best known for his book illustrations, he co-founded the publisher “L’età dell’Acquario (The Age of Aquarius)” and was the director of and contributor to its journal of the same name. Del Boca’s artwork had a crucial impact on the New Age and Theosophical movements in Italy during the 1970s.

Bernardino del Boca was the son of Giacomo del Boca and Rosa Silvestri, parents of noble lineage who owned the Fonte Rossa mountain springs and spa in Crodo. He was introduced to Spiritualism and Theosophy at an early age by a related princess of the noble Hungarian Esterházy family who took him on several trips throughout Europe. While in the French city of Nice, del Boca met Princess Djavidan Hanem of Egypt who suggested he keep a journal. His early spiritual and genealogical interests combined with his writings became a crucial component of his future artistic production.

In 1921, del Boca and his family moved to Novara where he received his initial education. Although skilled in drawing, he did not excel in other subjects. In 1932, del Boca was given the opportunity to enter the Institut le Rosey, a renowned international boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland. At the school, he became became friends with roommates Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who later became Shah of Iran, and Ananda Mahidol, the future monarch of Siam (Thailand).

In June of 1935, Bernardino del Boca enrolled at the Brera Art High School in Milan, an extension of the Accademia della Belle Arti di Brera whose teachers taught at both locations. Among his teachers were figurative painter and printmaker Felice Casorati and modernist Neoclassical painter Achille Funi. Del Boca graduated in 1939 and, in the same year, had his first solo exhibition. Two years later, he held an exhibition in Domodossola and was a participant at the Thirteenth Exposition of Figurative Arts of the Fascist Unions held in Turin.

Called into military duty during the Second World War, del Boca served in Verona and later in Florence. He left Italy in 1946 and relocated in Siam (Thailand) where he lived first in Singapore and then Bangkok as a portraitist. Returning to Singapore in 1947, he worked as an architect and interior designer. In October of that year, del Boca received his second Buddhist initiation at the Temple of Han on the Linga Archipelago’s island of Nawa Sangga. In a collaboration with artist Robin A. Kilroy, he held an exhibition in September of 1948 at the Queen Victoria Memorial in Penang. “Nightly Face”, del Boca’s first novel was published in 1948; his second novel “Nawa Sangga” was published in the following year.

After holding the position of honorary consul in Singapore, Bernardino del Boca returned to Italy in 1949. Two years later, he took part in a collective exhibition at the Broletto di Novara, a medieval architectural structure in the city’s center. Del Boca returned to teaching while continuing to paint, write and lecture. He became the president of the theosophical group “Besant-Arundal”, a position del Boca held for forty years. After serving as a member of Italy’s National Institute for Geographic Research and Cartographic Studies, del Boca published a university-level anthropology manual for students entitled “Sotia dell’Antropologia” in 1964.

Del Boca, in a collaboration with Theosophist and publisher Edoardo Bresci, founded the journal “L’Età dell’Acquario- Rivista Sperimentale del Nuovo Piano di Coscienza (The Age of Aquarius- Experimental Journal of the New Plane of Consciousness)” in 1970. During the next seven years, he would publish four more works including the 1971 “La Dimensione Umana (The Human Dimension)” and “La Quarta Dimensione (The Fourth Dimension)” in 1977. After his retirement from teaching in 1978, del Boca relocated to Piedmont.

During the 1980s, Bernardino del Boca attempted to create a series of Aquarian communities he called Villaggi Verde, or Green Villages. In 1986, he relocated to the first and only village that was completed, the Villaggi Verde of San Germano di Cavallirio. In addition to publishing two more works, “Il Servizio” and “Un Paese de Amare”, del Boca organized collective trips to southern and eastern Asia, gave lectures, edited and contributed to “L’Età dell’Acquario”, and organized conferences.

After living a productive life as a Theosophist, anthropology scholar, illustrator and painter as well as an advocate for sexual liberation, Bernardino del Boca died on the ninth of December in 2001 at the age of eighty-two in the hospital at Borgomanero, Novara. His artistic production was, for the most part, neglected until the 1960s when the “visionary” aspect of his art was analyzed for the first time. During his lifetime, del Boca rarely exhibited his work. Only through a series of recent publications, conferences, and posthumous exhibitions, particularly those held at the Foundation Bernardino del Boca in 2015 and 2017, have del Boca’s artworks been thoroughly studied and promoted.

Notes: Author and researcher Elisa Rolle has an article about Bernardino del Boca on her Queer Places website that examines his work as a pioneer of the sexual and homosexual liberation movement in Italy. The article also discusses his book“Long Night in Singapore” that won the 1951 Gastaldi National Award but caused a scandal: http://www.elisarolle.com/queerplaces/a-b-ce/Bernardino%20del%20Boca.html

A more extensive biographical article on Bernardino del Boca that delves more deeply into the theosophical aspects of his art can be found on the World Religions and Spirituality Project site: https://wrldrels.org/2021/05/20/bernardino-del-boca/

The Fondazione Bernardino del Boca site is located at: https://www.fondazionebernardinodelboca.it

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Bernardino del Boca with Cat”, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Inset Image: Bernardino del Boca,, “La Quatro Dimensione, L’Evoluzione della Coscienza”, Original Publication 1977, , L’Età dell’Acquario 1995 Edition

Third Insert Image: Bernardino del Boca, “Sviatovida”, circa 1970, Fondazione Bernardino del Boca

Fourth Insert Image: Bernardino del Baco, “La Dimensione Umana”, Original Publication 1975, New Edition by Fondazione Bernardino del Boca

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Bernardino del Boca”, Gelatin Silver Print

Károly Kernstok

The Artwork of Károly Kernstok

Born in Budapest in December of 1873, Károly Kernstok was a Hungarian painter and a leading member of Á Nyolcak (The Eight). “The Eight” was an avant-garde art movement of Hungarian painters who were active in Budapest between 1909 and 1918. This group of artists, connected to the Post-Impressionist movement, were advocates of the rise of Modernism in all aspects of the arts.

In 1892 at the age of nineteen, Kernstok traveled to Berlin where he studied under Hungarian painter and educator Simon Hollósy, one of the prominent representatives of Hungarian Naturalism and Realism. After a year’s study with Hollósy, Kernstok studied at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1893 to 1896. He returned to Hungary in 1897 and painted his “Haulers” and “Agitátor”, an early composition with socialist undertones. Kernstok was awarded a bronze medal for a painting exhibited at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris. In 1901, he exhibited at the International Exposition of Art of the City of Venice and the Venice Biennale.

After inheriting an estate in 1905 in the Central Transdanubia town of Nyergesújfalu, Károly Kernstok became a prominent leader of the “Neos”, a radical group of artists who rejected the naturalism promoted by the Nagybánya artists’ colony that was mainly composed of plein-air painters from Hollósy’s Free School in Munich. Although some of the Neo artists had studied briefly at the Nagybánya colony, the group was heavily influenced by French Post-Impressionist painters such as Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Henri Matisse. During the 1930s, Kernstok would establish an art school in the Nyergesújfalu region of Hungary.

Kernstok returned to Paris in 1906 where he became notably influenced by the works of Henri Matisse who, along with painter André Durain, was considered a leading proponent of Fauvism at the time. Kernstok’s style changed; he began to paint large-scale decorative compositions and stylized scenes that emphasized forms and lines. The rhythmic forms and strong contrasting colors of Kernstok’s 1910 “Riders on the Shore”, characterized by a synthesis of Post-Impressionism and Expressionism, shows Matisse’s strong Fauvist influence. A year later in 1911, he painted “Male Nude Leaning Against a Tree”, another example of Fauvism’s brilliant colors in figure and landscape.

After his return to Hungary, Károly Kernstok became an influence on the art group known as “The Eight”. Although a short-lived movement lasting only nine years from 1909 to 1918, the group consisted of major Hungarian artists, writers and composers. Its complex style encompassed the rationalism of Cubism, the decorative use of strong colors from Fauvism, and the depth of emotion found in German Expressionist works. Among those associated with the “The Eight” were painters Lajos Tihanyi and Róbert Berény, sculptors Vilmos Fémes Beck and Márk Vedres, writer and poet Endre Ady, and composer Béla Bartók. During his period with “The Eight”, Kernstok painted major frescoes and designed glass windows in 1911 for the Schiffer Villa and the County Hall of Debrecen, the second-largest city in Hungary.

In August of 1919, the Hungarian Soviet Republic, a short-lived communist state that lasted only one hundred thirty-three days, collapsed after its failure to reach an agreement with the Triple Entente which consisted of the French Third Republic, the Russian Empire and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. As a result, many artists including Kernstok emigrated to Berlin where they lived and worked. Influenced by Germany’s artistic trends, Kernstok painted a series of natural landscapes and a 1921 expressionist scene of “The Last Supper”.

In 1926, Károly Kernstok returned to Budapest and remained there for the rest of his life. He developed in his later years an interest in Etruscan frescoes and that culture’s use of mythological scenes and chiaroscuro. Kernstock produced graphic works that included etchings and drypoint engravings on copper, among which is his 1932 “Flowering Desert”. Among the paintings he executed are the 1933 “The Rape of Saint Helen” and the 1934 “Burial”. His lectures and the articles on art published in newspapers and art journals greatly extended his influence among the Hungarian painters.

After a long career of group shows and exhibitions at major Hungarian museums, Károly Kernstok died in June of 1940 in his home city of Budapest. His work is held in many private collections and public institutions, most notably the Hungarian National Gallery at Buda Castle in Budapest and the MODEM Centre for Modern and Contemporary Art in Debrecen. A major retrospective of Kernstok’s work was held at Budapest’s Metropolitan Centre for Popular Culture in 1951. Due to the rising interest in the early Modernism, major exhibitions of works by the early Hungarian modernists, especially those executed by “The Eight”, were held in 2010-2011 at the Janus Pannonius Museum in Pécs, Hungary, and at the 2012 Bank Austria Art Forum in Vienna, a collaboration between Vienna’s Museum of Art and the Hungarian National Gallery.

Top Insert Image: Károly Kernstok, “Önarckép (Self Portrait)”, 1903, Oil on Panel, 52 x 41.5 cm, Private Collection

Second Inset Image: Károly Kernstok, “Riders on the Shore”, 1910, Oil on Canvas, 214 x 292.5 cm, Hungarian National Gallery

Third Insert Image: André Kertész, “Károly Kernsstok’s Studio, Berlin”, 1925, Gelatin Silver Print, 6.8 x 7.8 cm, Art Institute of Chicago

Bottom Insert Image: Károly Kernstok, “Önarckép (Self Portrait in White Hat)”, circa 1900, Oil on Canvas, 80 x 60 cm, Hungarian National Gallery

Alvin Baltrop

The Photography of Alvin Baltrop

Born in Bronx borough of New York in December of 1948, Alvin Baltrop was a working-class American photographer who extensively documented the dilapidated Hudson River piers and New York City’s clandestine gay culture during the 1970s and 1980s.

Alvin Baltrop was the younger son of Dorothy Mae Baltrop who had moved from Virginia to the Bronx with her eldest son James. He discovered photography while attending junior high school and began photographing with a twin-lens Yashica camera. Baltrop studied under the older photographers in his neighborhood and taught himself the techniques of film development. During the Vietnam War, he enlisted in 1969 as a medic in the U.S. Navy and photographed his fellow crew members. After his military service ended in 1972 with an honorable discharge, Baltrop returned to New York City where he worked in a variety of odd jobs, including as a street vendor and cab driver.

In December of 1973, a truck laden with asphalt crashed through Manhattan’s elevated West Side Highway between West Twelfth and Gansevoort Streets and forever closed that section of highway to the south. The abandoned and dilapidated Hudson River piers to the west of the closed highway presented opportunities both as art platforms and meeting places. Fifteen years elapsed before the elevated structure was fully dismantled; the location served during this time as a major New York experimental art and social venue.

In 1973, Alvin Baltrop enrolled in the School of Visual Arts where he studied photography until 1975. Interested in photographing the Hudson River piers, he became a self-employed mover of household furniture and belongings, work that allowed him to spend more time with his photography. Although initially terrified of the area, Baltrop constantly photographed the West Side piers from 1975 to 1986, particularly those piers that bordered Greenwich Village starting at the meatpacking district and extending south to Christopher Street.

Baltrop often shot images at the piers for several days and lived inside his moving van parked nearby. Capturing both the personalities and the structure of the piers, he became a well-known member of its artistic and gay community and remembered every person he photographed. Baltrop eventually became established as both friend and confidant to many of those who frequented the pier areas.

Although his work had both documentary and aesthetic value, Baltrop had great difficulty in finding a gallery to sponsor an exhibition of his work during his lifetime. In 1977, he had a small solo show at the Glines, a non-profit gay art organization best known for producing Harvey Fierstein’s 1982 “Torch Song Trilogy”. Baltrop also had an exhibition of his “Pier” series at an East Village gay bar where he occasionally was employed as a bouncer. However, the established photography galleries, even those that presented explicit homoerotic work, were unreceptive to Baltrop’s work.

As a result, Alvin Baltrop never gained the finances necessary to print the vast majority of his thousands of negatives or to properly care for those he managed to print. The majority of his printed photographs are small, approximately 13 x 18 centimeters (5 x 7 inches), however, he did print a few larger images. His photographs of the Hudson River pier area constitute a significant record of a lost era of New York City’s industrial landscape and the gay culture’s pre-AIDS history. While his photography was documentary in nature, its studied compositions, intimacy, and the attention to both light and shadow attest to an artistic ambition.

Baltrop was befriended by the New York City glass artist and writer John Drury in the late 1990s. Drury, who recognized Baltrop’s photographic abilities, nominated him for a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award for the Arts. Baltrop received a diagnosis of cancer in the 1990s, a time when he was impoverished and without insurance for care. After only a few exhibitions during decades of photographic work, Alvin Baltrop passed away due to complications from cancer and diabetes at the age of fifty-five in New York City on the first day of February in 2004.

In 2012, a retrospective solo exhibition entitled “Perspectives 179-Alvin Baltrop: Dreams into Glass”, which included almost one hundred gelatin silver prints, was held at Houston’s Contemporary Art Museum. New York’s Bronx Museum of Art, custodian of many Baltrop photographs and negatives, held a 2019 retrospective of his work, entitled “The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop”, that included works from Baltrop’s private archive never before viewed by the public.

Alvin Baltrop’s work has also been included in several exhibitions at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art including its 2015 “America is Hard to See”, 2016-2017 “Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection”, 2020 “Around Day’s End: Downtown New York, 1970-1986” and the 2024 “Trust Me”, an exhibition of intergenerational artists.

Unless noted otherwise, all photographs in this article are used courtesy of The Alvin Baltrop Trust, @ 2010, The Alvin Baltrop Trust / Artist Rights Society (ARS) and Galerie Bucholz, New York. All rights reserved.

Notes: New York’s Museum of Modern Art has an article on Alvin Baltrop, along with several images from its collection, on its website at: https://www.moma.org/artists/48461-alvin-baltrop

An extensive biography of Alvin Baltrop, composed by the Alvin Baltrop Trust and drawn from audio recordings and interviews, can be found at the global strategic-consultancy Third Streaming site located at: http://www.thirdstreaming.com/alvin-baltrop-biography

Issue 4 of GAYLETTER Magazine has a short biography on the life of Alvin Baltrop written by Chris Stewart entitled “Alvin Baltrop’s Days on the Piers” located at: https://gayletter.com/alvin-baltrops-days-on-the-piers/

PIN-UP magazine has an article by Alejandro Carrion entitled “Masculinity Under Construction” that discusses, among other artists, the Hudson River pier area and Alvin Baltrop’s photography at: https://www.pinupmagazine.org/articles/sexy-construction-workers-urban-homoeroticism

Top Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, “Self Portrait with Alice”, 1975, Ektachrome Slide, The Alvin Baltrop Trust

Second Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, “The Piers ( Sunbathing Platform with Tava Mural)”, 1976-1985, Gelatin Silver Print, The Alvin Baltrop Trust

Third Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, “The Piers (Two Men)”, 1975-1986, Gelatin Silver Print, Edition of 25, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, Untitled (Three Sunbathers), 1975-1986, Gelatin Silver Print, 24 x 35 cm, Printed 2005, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Alvin Baltrop, Untitled (Male Portrait), 1975-1986, Gelatin Silver Print, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, and The Alvin Baltrop Trust

Kyle Dunn

The Artwork of Kyle Dunn

Born in 1990, Kyle Dunn is an American artist who creates sensuous and psychologically complex scenes on canvas and panels. His work is a meld of theatrical elements and personal introspection that explores those relationships between the artist and his subject, two people in love, and the individual and society.

Kyle Dunn received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Sculpture in 2012 from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. A modernist with a classical style, he began his career as a painter with a prolific series of images on canvas. In 2016, Dunn returned to his sculptural roots and created a visual language that employed three-dimensional elements constructed of epoxy resin, plaster and relief foam panels.

Dunn’s domestic tableaux and still lifes are staged, highly stylized images that include trompe l’oeil and bas-relief. All of his paintings contain a wealth of detail; your attention is drawn to the many thoughtfully placed objects that fill the canvas and surround its protagonists. Within Dunn’s melodramatic scenes, figures are staged in a variety of positions and activities that are open to the viewers’ own interpretations. His figures are often presented in solitary moments of self-reflection or scenes of domestic intimacy.

The lighting of each scene is an important component of Kyle Dunn’s work; the theatric lighting style of both horror and noir films is evident in his paintings. In many of Dunn’s paintings and bas-relief works, light comes from a strong, external source, located either from above or below, or the side through a window or open doorway. Blocks of sunlight flood into rooms in such images as “Hyacinth and Pears” and “Devil in the Daytime”. Scenes, such as “Midday” and “Downward Dog” present strong contrasts between light and shadow, an effect that highlights the scene’s subject and increases the drama of the depicted moment.

Kyle Dunn’s work was included in the 2022 “Fire Figure Fantasy: Selections from the ICA Miami’s Collection”, an exhibition of work housed by Miami’s Institute of Contemporary Art. His most recent exhibitions include a series of colorful nocturnal scenes in a successful April/May 2023 solo exhibition, entitled “Night Pictures”, at New York City’s P.P.O.W. gallery on Broadway. In June of 2024, Dunn had a solo institutional show, entitled “Matrix 194”, at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum, a nineteenth-century Gothic Revival structure in Connecticut. His solo exhibition “Devil in the Daytime” is currently on view from February 8th to March 29th in 2025 at the Vielmetter Gallery in Los Angeles.

Dunn has shown work in many international venues including the Marlborough Gallery in London, Amsterdam’s GRIMM gallery, the Maria Bernheim Gallery in Zurich, and Berlin’s Galerie Judin, among others. His work is in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Hong Kong’s Sunpride Foundation in Kowloon, and the X Museum in Beijing, China.

Notes: There is an excellent 2019 interview, entitled “Ghost World”, between Jessica Ross of Juxtapoz Art & Culture and Kyle Dunn located at: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/magazine/features/kyle-dunn-ghost-world/

The Maria Manetti Shrem Art Studio Program has a personal and well-documented December 2020 Visiting Artist Lecture by Kyle Dunn located on YouTube under the title: “Kyle Dunn: Art Studio Visiting Artist Lecture Series”.

Top Insert Image: Justin J. Wee, “Kyle Dunn, Brooklyn Studio”, 2021, Color Print, Galerie Magazine

Second Insert Image: Kyle Dunn, “Into the Crevasse”, 2019, Acrylic on Epoxy Resin, Plaster and Foam Panel, 121.9 x 175.3 x 5.1 cm

Bottom Insert Image: Kyle Dunn, “Window”, 2020, Acrylic on Epoxy Resin, Plaster, and Foam Panel, 162.6 x 137.2 x 6.4 cm, Private Collection

Richard Stabbert

The Artwork of Richard Stabbert

Born in Red Bank, New Jersey in 1959, Richard Stabbert is an American painter, author and researcher. A self-taught artist, he creates small intimate paintings inspired by the memories of people, both past and present, who made an impression on his life. Depicting the casual and positive experiences in life, Stabbert’s sentimental and often whimsical work presents an idyllic retreat from the speed and commotion of the industrial world.

Born to German immigrant parents, Stabbert spent time in his early years on the beaches of the New Jersey shoreline, a period in his life that provides both inspiration and reference for his work. Stabbert’s later summer experiences in Provincetown, Massachusetts, as well as the time he spent in Paris also serve as influences in his work. His paintings are known for their simple details, bold color composition and equally strong foregrounds and backgrounds, similar characteristics to those works in the Naïve genre.

Richard Stabbert’s acrylic and chalk paintings, almost gestural in execution, evoke a casual spontaneity and relaxed sensuality. He creates his work through a limited color palette that is dominated by pink and blue tones. Central to the compositions are Stabbert’s male figures constructed simply with broad, almost impasto, brushwork heightened by strokes of deep black and shaded areas of lighter grays. The background vistas in his work have a flat rendering style composed of simplified details and expanses of tonal primary colors.

Stabbert’s paintings have been included in the 2011 edition of “100 Artists of the Male Figure: A Contemporary Anthology of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture”; the 2011 “The Art of Man: Volumes 1-6”, a special anthology edition that includes artist interviews and work from six quarterly journals of “The Art of Man”; and Firehouse Publishing’s 2014 “Vitruvian Lens – Edition 5: Fine Art Male Photography”.

One of Richard Stabbert’s first solo exhibitions was “Été”at the Les Mots à la Bouche, an established bookshop and gallery in Paris. He also presented his work in the 2011 “Memories of Moments” held at New York City’s BrianRiley1ProjectSpace, a Broadway creative hub that provides a platform for artistic visions. Other gallery exhibitions include those at Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts in Brooklyn, New York; Asbury Park’s APEX Gallery in New Jersey; Provincetown’s Ray Wiggs Gallery in Massachusetts; the Sidetracks Art Gallery in New Hope, Pennsylvania; and Red Bank’s Susan Berke Fine Arts in New Jersey.

Stabbert is the author of the 2013 “Provincetown Memories: Paintings and Words” published in two editions through North Carolina’s Firehouse Publications. This work presents Stabbert’s simple sensual paintings alongside a personal journal of self-discovery, love, and intimate memories of both the beauty and freedom experienced during Provincetown summers.

In addition to many private collections, Richard Stabbert’s paintings are housed in the permanent collection of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York City. His work is now available through Provincetown’s Art Love Gallery located at: https://www.artlovegallery.com as well as Galerie MooiMan in Gronigen, Netherlands: https://www.mooi-man.nl

Richard Stabbert’s website, which includes new works and gallery contacts, is located at: http://rstabbert.com

Second Insert Image: Richard Stabbert, “Carry”, 2021, Acrylic and Chalk Paint on Canvas, 22.8 x 30.5 cm

Bottom Insert Image: Richard Stabbert, “Craig”, 2018, Acrylic on Canvas, 20,3 x 30.5 cm

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

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