Gori Mora

The Artwork of Gori Mora

Born in 1992 in Mallorca, one of Spain’s Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean, Gori Mora is a painter who currently lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. In 2011, he moved to Barcelona where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Barcelona University. Mora relocated to Glasgow in 2017 to study the Master of Letters in Fine Art Practice at the Glasgow School of Art. After the completion of his Master’s program, he was awarded a John Kinross Scholarship by the Royal Scottish Academy of Edinburgh to spend research time in Florence. Mora’s 2018 project “My Florence Souvenir” is now part of the Royal Scottish Academy of Edinburgh collection.

The focus of Gori Mora’s work is the exploration of the myriad effects that technology has on our social interactions, our intrinsic values, and our self-identification. Through examining human interactions on social networks, the roles and eroticism involved and the current trends of the platforms, Mora explores in his paintings both the queer community’s history and the heightened effect that technology has on the nature of desire.

Mora’s compositions, systematic arrangements of stylized objects and figures, are painted in oils on the reverse side of transparent plastic sheets made of polymethyl methacrylate. The prominent figures and objects in the front layer are painted first with subsequent layers of background added later to increase the depth of the image. The finished work is viewed from the smooth, unpainted side of the perspex sheet, with the thickness of that sheet creating a curious sense of depth to the image.

In Gori Mora’s work, parts of his scenes are sectioned off with screens or framed within mirrors that offer perspectives seen from different angles. Many of the male figures are portrayed either complete or fragmented in form and often shown in various states of repose. Objects seen everyday, such as socks, belts, glasses, smoking cigarettes and electronic devices, are carefully arranged throughout most of his images. In Mora’s work, there is a strong sense of illustrative graphic design seen in his balanced compositions, stylized forms, and use of background patterns.

Mora had his first solo exhibition in Spain in March of 2022, entitled “Layering Intimacy” at the Galeria Pelaires in Mallorca. His work has been shown in such group exhibitions as the MUTUO Cultural Art Center in 2015, the 2015 “Konvent Punt Zero” held at Barcelona’s Centre Cultural d’Art, the Museu de Porreres in Majorca in 2017, the Casa de Cultura de Felanitz in Majorca in 2019, the 2019 TRAMWAY exhibition in Glasgow, the 2020 “V2React” exhibition in Miami, BEERS London Gallery in 2021, The Royal Scottish Academy exhibition in 2021, and the Tuesday to Friday Gallery in Valencia in 2022, among others.

Note: Reverse painting on glass is an historic art form. It has been popular in Europe since ancient times; glass painted using this technique has even been found in Assyrian and Phoenician civilizations. Qualified as a “scientific art”, reverse glass painting reached its peak during the Renaissance period when it had widely influenced art in Venice, Italy. It was favored since the eighteenth-century by the Church and nobility throughout Central Europe and was widely used for sacred paintings and icons in the Byzantine Empire.

The technique was used by the middle of the nineteenth-century on folk art from Bohemia and Bavaria, and such commercial products as clock faces. By the middle of the twentieth-century, the technique of reverse painting had fallen out of fashion and nearly disappeared. With the creation and rapid rise in use of polymer glazing, new paint compositions were made by combining oil and acrylic paints that made reverse painting possible on these supports.

Gori Mora’s Instagram site can be located at: https://www.instagram.com/gori.mora/?hl=en

Second Insert Image: Gori Mora, “Smoke & Sand”, 2020, Oil on Perspex, 115 x 70 cm

Third Insert Image: Gori Mora, “Reverie”, 2021, Oil on Perspex, 101 x 105 cm

Jorge Eduardo Eielson: “A Silhouette of Blue Sparks”

Photographers Unknown, A Silhouette of Blue Sparks

un día tú un un dia                                          one day you one day
abrirás esa puerta y me verás dormido       will open that door and you will see me asleep
con una chispa azul en el perfil                     with a shilhouette of blue sparks
y verás tanbién mi corazón                            and you will also see my heart
y mi camisa de alas blancas                           and my white-winged shirt
pidiendo auxilio en el balcón                        crying for help on the balcony
y verás además                                                 and you will also see
verás un catre de hierro                                  you will see an iron cot
junto a una silla de paja                                 next to a straw chair
y a una mesa de madera                                 and a wooden table
pero sobre todo                                                in particular
verás un trapo inmundo                                 you will see a filthy rag
en lugar de mi alegría                                     instead of my joy
comprenderás entonces                                 then you will understand
cuánto te amaba                                               how much I loved you
y por qué durante siglos                                 and why for centuries
miraba sólo esa puerta y dibujaba                i only stared at that door and sketched
dibujaba y miraba esa puerta                        sketched and stared at that door
y dibujaba nuevamente                                  and sketched again
con gran cuidado                                             with great care
comprenderás además                                   you will also understand
por qué toda las noches                                 why every night
sobre mi piel cansada                                     among the thousand gold marks
entre mil signos de oro                                   and tattoos and majestic wrinkles
y tatuajes y arrugas majestuosas                  on my tired skin
me hacía llorar sobre todo                             what made me cry the most
un cicatriz que decía                                       was a scar tha said:
yo te adoro yo te adoro yo te adoro              i adore you i adore you i adore you

Jorge Eduardo Eielson, Albergo del Sole II, Room in Rome, 1952, Translation 2019 by David Shook

Born in Lima in 1924, Jorge Eduardo Eielson was a Peruvian poet, writer and artist. He is part of a generation of Peruvian poets to which the Surrealist works of artist and poet César Moro and writer Emilio Adolfo Westphalen played an important role. A Renaissance man with a curious mind who was not content cultivating a single form of art, Eielson produced work in multiple genres: poetry, painting, theater, novels, performance events and installations. Interested in archeology, science, and religion, he participated in all the post-war intellectual and artistic European trends: however, he valued his independence and never considered himself as belonging to any particular group or sect.

The son of a U.S. national of Scandinavian origin and a Peruvian mother, Jorge Eielson lived in an era of rich cultural growth and economic stability that was open to influences from international centers. Eielson learned English and French, read Rimbaud, Shelley and Mallarmé in the original languages, and savored such major poets as Whitman, Vallejo, Neruda and Borges. At the end of his secondary education, Eielson met writer and anthropologist José María Arguedas who introduced him to Lima’s artistic and literary circles and knowledge of the ancient Peruvian civilizations, a cultural history unknown to the young people at the time due to the system of colonial education.

Eielson began studies at the National University of San Marcos in 1941. At the age of twenty-one in 1945, he earned the National Poetry Award and, one year later, Peru’s National Drama Award. Eielson published two collections of poetry in the 1940s: “Reinos (Kingdoms)” published in 1944 and the 1947 “Canción y Muerte de Rolando”. In these years, he also enrolled in drawing and painting classes where he created his first canvases, works which were influenced by those of Paul Klee and Joan Mirò. In 1948, Eielson had his first exhibition, a collection of oils, acrylics, mobiles, and constructs of burned and colored wood, at a gallery in Lima. He wrote for various local publications and, in collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Jean Superville, curated an art review and lecture entitled “El Correo de Ultramar (The Overseas Post)”.

Awarded a film study scholarship by the French government, Jorge Eielson traveled to Paris in 1948 where he associated with the many international writers and artists in the Latin Quarter and Saint Germain des Près. At this time, Eielson discovered the work of Piet Mondrian and was soon invited by Uruguayan painter Arden Quine of the Madi group to exhibit his work with them at the first exhibition of abstract art, the Salon des Rèalitès, founded by French sculptor and editor Andrè Bloc. Following the Salon, Eielson exhibited with the avant-garde gallery Colette Allendy, through which he met and developed a long friendship with prominent visual artist Raymond Hains.

With the assistance of a UNESCO scholarship, Eielson traveled to Switzerland to begin writing again. In 1951 he continued his journey to Italy where, upon setting foot on the peninsula, he proclaimed Italy to be his elected land. Settled in Rome, Eielson wrote his 1952 collection of poems “Habitación en Roma (Room in Rome)”. Although he abandoned the extreme avant-garde art movement in the late 1950s, Eielson continued his painting and started to texturize his canvases using sand and clay to sculpt the canvas surface. Initially using these materials on his landscapes, Eielson moved towards figurative works using textiles of various kinds.

In the 1960s in Rome, Jorge Eielson met and began a relationship with the Sardinian artist and novelist Michele Mulas. Born in 1936 in Bari Sardo, a commune in the Province of Nuoro, Mulas became a forerunner of contemporary art due to his new and singular style which combined art and science. Their relationship would last for forty years until Mulas’s death of leukemia in 2002.

In 1963, Eielson began his first quipu, a reinvention of the ancient Andean recording device modernized with brilliant colored fabrics, knotted and tied on canvas. These works, exhibited in the 1964 Venice Biennale, gained him wide international recognition and led to exhibitions at New York’s MOMA and Nelson Rockefeller Collection, as well as the Salon De Mai in Paris. Returning to Peru in the 1970s, Eielson continued to write and began to focus on the study of pre-Columbian art.

Jorge Eielson published a novel entitled “El Cuerpo de Giulia-No (The Body of Julia-n)” in 1971. Peru’s National Institute of Culture published most of Eielson’s collective poetry in 1976 under the title of “Poesia Escrita (Written Poetry)”. In 1977, Eielson published another collection of poems entitled “Canto Visible (The Visible Edge)”. This was followed by a second novel, the 1987 “Primera Muerte de Maria (Maria’s First Death)” published by the Fondo de Cultura Economica in Mexico.

In 1978, Eielson received a Guggenheim Fellowship for a lecture in New York City. At the end of the decade, he and Michele Mulas moved to Milan, Italy, where Eielson would spend the rest of his life writing and producing his art which continued to be exhibited around the world. An anthology of Eielson’s poetry was published in 1990 by Vuelta of Mexico City under the supervision of the Mexican poet and diplomat Octavio Paz, the winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature. In that year, Eielson was also invited by Paz to attend the International Center for Contemporary Art in Mexico. Eielson returned to Peru to participate, along with Peruvian-born visual artist Jorge Piqueras, in the last Trujillo Biennial which also included artists from neighboring countries. In 2002, he gave his last public interview through a streaming video organized by Fundación Telefónica.

Following the death of Michele Mulas in 2002, Jorge Eielson’s own health significantly deteriorated. He passed away in Milan, Italy, in March of 2006. Eielson’s ashes were laid to rest beside his partner’s ashes in a small cemetery in Bari Sardo, a municipality in the Italian region Sardinia. Over the course of his life, he published one hundred forty-four works in three hundred and seventy five publications, translated in five languages. Eielson’s artwork is held in the collections, among others, of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru and the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas.

Notes: A more extensive article on Jorge Eielson’s life and work can be found at: http://www.jorgeeielson.org

An interesting article entitled “Jorge Eduardo Eielson and Sound Poetry” written by Luis Alvarado discusses Eielson’s experiments in vocal poetry, or vocal structures, and the period at the end of the 1960s when performances became his focus. The article can be located at: https://ubu-mirror.ch/media/sound/eielson/Alvaro-Luis_JORGE-EDUARDO-EIELSON-AND-SOUND-POETRY.pdf

Second Insert Image: Jorge Eduardo Eielson, “Canto Visible”, 1960, “Texto Para Cantar”, One of $ Textos

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Jorge Eduardo Eielson and Michele Mulas in Sardinia”, Summer of 1935, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Jorge Eduardo Eielson, “Quipus 36 T-1”, 1969, Acrylic and Fabric on Canvas, 130 x 130 x 24 cm, Private Collection

Dương Xuân Quyền

Paintings by Dương Xuân Quyền

Born in the Son Duong district of Vietnam in 1987, Dương Xuân Quyền is an artist and educator currently working at Tan Trao University in Tuyen Quang, Vietnam. He is a graduate of the Fine Arts Program at the Hanoi National University of Education.

Dương Xuân Quyền works in the Vietnamese tradition of carved-woodblock printing on black paper as a familiar way to express the contemporary issue of gay relationships to the public. Having produced the initial print work, Quyền then enriches the image with colors from acrylic or oil paints. His current work contains images of male couples as well as lush, tropical scenes of natural habitat.

From 2011 to 2015, Quyền regularly participated in the Northwest-Viet Bac Exhibition, one of the seven regional contemporary art exhibitions in the country. He also organized a 2015 group exhibition entitled “Sac Autumn” at Hanoi’s Exhibition Hall 16 in Ngo Quyen.

Dương Xuân Quyền had his first solo exhibition in 2017 entitled “Love People of the Same Sex”, a collection consisting of twenty-two paintings and embellished wood-carved etchings on paper. In his work, he used tropical foliage and water taro leaves as the background for his presentations of male couples in romantic poses.

In 2020, Quyền won the Third-Place Prize at the Northwestern Fine Arts Exhibition-Region III exhibition for his series “Delayed Appointment I,II,III”. In 2021, he again entered the same exhibition and won another Third-Place Prize, this time for his series “My Side Tells Stories About the Days Apart I, II, III”. Quyền’s second solo exhibition was held in Hanoi in 2022 and entitled “Vertical Flowers”. The show consisted of twenty-eight, large oil and acrylic paintings which depicted Duoc Mung leaves, a native plant well-known to the public.

Insert Image: Dương Xuân Quyền, “Awakening Lovers”, 2020, Oil on Canvas, 80 x 100 cm, Private Collection

Images of Dương Xuân Quyềns artwork can be found at his Instagram site located at: https://www.instagram.com/xuanquyenstudio/?hl=en

Elijah Burgher

The Artwork of Elijah Burgher

Born in Kingston, New York in 1978, Elijah Burgher is an American artist who produces both figurative and abstract colored pencil drawings, paintings and prints of sigils. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, and his Master of Fine Arts at Chicago’s Art Institute. Burgher currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. His work is represented by the Horton Gallery in Dallas, New York’s contemporary PPOW Gallery, and Western Exhibitions in Chicago.

In his work, Elijah Burgher uses ideas from occult and magic traditions to address queer sexuality, sub-cultural formations, and the history of abstraction. He also creates sigils, symbols of magical power, inspired by different esoteric systems, including the works of English illustrator and occultist Austin Osman Spare, who trained as a draughtsman at the Royal College of Art in South Kensington. Burgher’s sigils encode symbols of wishes and desires through their shape, and the compositions of their elements and color.

Burghers colored pencil drawings of nude male figures, often featuring images of friends, illustrate scenes from his daily life and environment. Acting as ritual relics, they have an erotic quality that anchors their abstract components into reality.

Elijah Burgher had solo exhibitions of his work in several galleries including the 2018 “Nudes in the Forest” at the Ivan Gallery in Bucharest, Romania; “Bachelors” at New York’s Zieher Smith and Horton Gallery in 2016; and “Elijah Burgher, Topple the Table of Correspondences’ in 2011 at 2nd Floor Projects in San Francisco, among others. As a resident artist at Western Exhibitions in Chicago, Burgher has had several solo exhibitions in its gallery from 2012 to 2020.

Burgher has also shown his work in multiple group exhibitions from 2000 to 2021, including the 2014 Gwangin Biennial, Asia’s most important contemporary art exhibition which was held in the Republic of Korea; New York City’s 2014 Whitney Biennial; “The Temptation of AA Bronson” exhibition held in 2013 at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, Netherlands; the 2020 “intimacy: New Queer Art from Berlin and Beyond” held at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva, Switzerland; and “Secret Language” held in 2021 at the Ivan Gallery in Bucharest, among others.

In 2011, Elijah Burgher held a Residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in New York City and a Fire Island Artist Residency in Long Island, New York.

Note: an interview with Elijah Burgher can be found at the Inside/Within web art archive located at: http://insidewithin.com/elijah-burgher/

Elijah Burgher’s works can be found at the P.P.O.W. Gallery site located at https://www.ppowgallery.com/artists/elijah-burgher#tab:thumbnails

Bottom Insert Image: Elijah Burgher,, “Bachelor with Demons (Sleezy)”, 2015, Colored Pencil on Paper

Burgess (Jess) Franklin Collins

The Artwork of Jess Collins

Born in Long Beach, California in August of 1923, Burgess (Jess) Franklin Collins was an American visual artist best known for his elaborate collages that addressed science, mysticism, sexuality, history and popular culture. In his early years, he read books which ranged from Proust to L. Frank Baum, listened to classical music, and constructed scrapbooks with a great aunt.

In 1942, Jess Collins entered the California Institute of Technology to study chemistry; however with the start of World War II, he was drafted in 1943 into the Army Corps of Engineers. Collins worked in a junior position at the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on the production of plutonium for atomic bombs until 1946. Upon his release from military service, he continued his education at California Institute and graduated with honors in the field of radiochemistry. Collins was given a position at the Hanford Atomic Energy Project located on the Columbia River in the state of Washington.

During his employment at the Hanford site, Jess Collins began adult education classes to study painting. Due to his growing concerns about the nature of his work in the atomic energy sector and the future of the industry, he left his position and decided to pursue a full-time career in the arts. Collins moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and began to study art: first at the University of California at Berkeley and later at the California School of Fine Arts. Due to an estrangement with his family, Collins changed his name during this period of study to the singular Jess.

At the California School of Fine Arts, Jess studied with visual artist Elmer Bischoff, a forerunner of Abstract Expressionism in the Bay Area; abstractionist painter Edward Corbett, known for his use of the color black in his work; painter Hassel Smith, whose work went through a succession of art forms from plein air to figurative expressionism; and Clyfford Still, whose work encompassed a wide range of materials. Jess quickly became a member of the 1950s San Francisco art scene and was actively engaged in exhibitions, poetry readings and other creative activities in the area.

In 1951, Jess met poet Robert Duncan, a member of the Black Mountain College and one of the most influential post-war American poets. They began a lifelong romantic relationship that evolved into a domestic household and an artistic collaboration that became central to the development of their art and poetry. This relationship lasted until Duncan’s death in 1968, thirty-seven years later. Along with abstract expressionist Harry Jacobus, Jess and Duncan opened the King Ubu Gallery in 1952, a venue which became an important exhibition space for alternative art in San Francisco.

Inspired by a gift from Duncan of “ Une Semaine de Bonté”, Max Ernst’s surrealist collage book, Jess began making collages, or Paste-Ups, in the early 1950s. These works, which combined text and image fragments from engravings, photographs, jigsaw pieces, and comic strips, became increasingly more complex over time. Eventually the Paste-Ups would contain thousands of distinct pieces. In 1959, Jess began a series of thirty-two works, entitled “Translation”. Each of the works were painted, enlarged reproductions of found images, such as children’s book illustrations and scientific drawings from old Scientific American periodicals, After being copied on new canvases, the paintings were combined with literary texts from such authors as William Blake, Gertrude Stein, and Plato.

The “Scavenger” series was based on painted or repainted canvases found in thrift shops. Thick layers of paint were applied covering parts of the former works while leaving other image areas exposed for viewing. Built in layers, the thick new paint reinterpreted the existing work with its added texture and images. The 1959 “Narkossos” began as a pencil drawing for a painting that was based on the myth of Narcissus. This initial drawing became a large scale mixed-media work of graphite rendering and paste-up fragments featuring references from literary and popular culture. This large-scale work with original artist’s frame is currently housed in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

For the remainder of his life, Jess lived and worked in San Francisco except for a period of travel with Duncan in the mid-1950s to Europe and the Black Mountain College. The couple entertained their extensive but intimate circle of friends at their large Victorian home in the Mission District. The household was filled with artworks by Jess and their many friends, Duncan’s vast library, the couple’s recorded music collection, and many beautiful domestic objects salvaged by Jess from thrift shops. Jess had a major retrospective of his work in 1993-1994 which toured museums in San Francisco, Buffalo, and Washington, DC.

Jess died of natural causes at his San Francisco home on the second of January in 2004 at the age of eighty. His work appears in major museum collections around the country including: the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. and the Museum of Modern Art and the Fine Arts Museums, San Francisco. His work is now represented by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York City.

Note: The Jess Collins Trust established an archive for Jess’s papers and writings in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. The Trust, which contains images of Jess’s work, exhibition and event information, and information on Robert Duncan’s work, can be found at: https://jesscollins.org

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Jess, Berkeley, California”, 1956-57, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Helen Adam, “Jess Collins, Beach Near Pidgeon Point”, Date Unknown

Third Insert Image: Jess Collins, “Untitled (Car and Male Nude), Date Unknown, Collage, 30.5 x 20.3 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Jess Collins and Robert Duncan, Stinson Beach”, 1958-59

Alireza Shojaian

The Artwork of Alireza Shojaian

Born in Tehran in September of 1988, Alireza Shojaian is an Iranian artist. Shojaian received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from Tehran’s Islamic Azad University in 2014. Encouraged in his art studies by one of his professors, he began to explore his queer identity in his work through themes and narratives. Shojaian pursued his Masters of Fine Arts for two years at the Islamic Azad University; however, as his final thesis project was queer art, he was denied his degree.

In 2015, Shojaian’s artwork, the majority of which were prints, appeared in several group exhibitions in Tehran including shows at Laleh Art Gallery and Vista Art Gallery. He also exhibited work at the 2015 Printmaking Exhibition held at the Cultural Section of the Embassy of Cote d’Ivoire.

The prevalent theme in Alireza Shojaian’s work is homosexuality in both identity and relationships. His work reflects on his own personal experiences as a queer person and the queer history of western Asia and its context in present society. Created with acrylics and color pencils, Shojaian’s images depict male figures, most often nude, in both portrait form and group presentations. His drawings present intimate relationships, often entwined and embracing, sometimes fighting; however, they all attempt to present real stories that are mutual to all human beings. Through his art, Shojaian attempts to fight societal prejudice against LGBTQ people and make space for non-heteronormative masculine identities.

Unable to exhibit work dealing with issues affecting the queer community in an open dialogue with the Iranian people, Shojaian relocated in 2016 to Beirut, Lebanon, as a place with more freedom to develop his art and identity. His university professor in Tehran, who knew of Shojaian’s sexual orientation, connected him with the owner of the ArtLab Gallery in Beirut, Antoine Haddad, who offered him a solo show. Shojaian entered the Beirut art scene with two solo exhibitions at the Artlab Gallery: the 2017 “Corpe à Corps” and “Sweet Blasphemy” held in 2018.

The title for the “Sweet Blasphemy” exhibition was taken from Turkish writer Elif Shafak’s novel entitled “The Forty Rules of Love”. This exhibition was centered on the love story of Persian poet Jalai ad-Din Muhammed Rumi and fellow poet Shams-i-Tabrizi. After years living together in the Turkish city of Konya, Shams left Rumi, who after Sham’s untimely death dedicated his writings to his departed lover. The main image of the show consisted of a partially nude male figure, either asleep or dead, lying on a white blanket. Eight additional drawings, all modeled by Lebanese artist Mo Khansa, were included in the highly successful sold-out show.

Alireza Shojaian exhibited his work at the Beirut Art Fair in 2017 and 2018. He relocated to Paris in 2019 after being offered by the French Embassy in Lebanon an art residency with the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Shojaian served as resident-in-art at La Villa les Pinsons in 2019 to 2020 and at Château de Lourmarin in 2021. His work was most recently presented in “Ombres D’Hommes” held at Nice’s Depardieu Gallery and in a group exhibition at Paris’s Lafalande Gallery, both in 2021.

Alireza Shojaian’s personal website, containing images, contact information and press coverage, can be found at: https://www.alirezashojaian.com

Note: A more extensive biography on Alireza Shojaian, including images of his work, can be found in the November 30th of 2018 issue of Queer Here located at: https://wearequeerhere.com/queerart

Middle Insert Image: Alireza Shojaian, “Remi”, 2021, Acrylic and Color Pencil, 60 x 60 cm, Private Collection

Corrado Cagli

The Artwork of Corrado Cagli

Born in the city of Ancona in February of 1910, Corrado Cagli was an Italian painter of Jewish heritage. Little information on his formative years is available; however, it is known that, at the age of five, his family relocated to Rome. Cagli grew up in a largely assimilated secular family, who had come to terms with its Jewish religion as antisemitism became more aggressive in Fascist Italy. His ties to his Italian heritage were always strong; even in his later years of exile from Italy, it was important for him to maintain a tie with his homeland.

Corrado Cagli’s first commissioned work was a 1927 mural painted on a building in Via Sistina, the street at the top of Rome’s Spanish Steps. In the following year, Cagli received another commission in Rome for a mural in Via Vantaggio. He had a remarkably early success in Italy; still in his twenties in the early 1930s, he was already famous nationally. Cagli had his first solo exhibition in 1932 at Rome’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna and showed at the Milan Triennale in 1936.

Along with other artists such as Emanuele Cavalli and Giuseppe Capogrossi, Cagli was a member of the Scuola Romana, an art movement of Expressionist painters in Rome who were active between 1928 and 1945. A rising star of the Scuola Romana, Cagli was supported by Italy’s Fascist regime despite being both Jewish and a homosexual. He was chosen to represent Italy at the 1930 Paris Exposition, the Venice Biennale, and other prestigious expositions.

In 1938, the Leggi Razzial were promulgated by the Fascist government; this series of laws enforced racial discrimination in Italy, directed mainly against Jewish Italians and inhabitants of Italy’s colonies. Two of Corrado Cagli’s murals were censored by the government as they did not fit with the regime’s rhetoric and stylistic preferences. With the enactment of the Racial Laws, Cagli was forced into exile, first to Paris, a place he had visited as a young star painter from Italy, and then to the United States, where he later became a citizen. His first showing was at the Julien Levy Gallery, a source for surrealist work.

Corrado Cagli rarely had a proper studio during his exile years, which made painting difficult. Most of his work done in the United States is on paper. Cagli had always valued drawing as an art form; in his exile, they became the primary instrument of his artistic search. His use of paper as a medium was also the result of a crisis he went through with his idea of painting. In the 1930s, despite having been forced into exile, Cagli still retained the artistic ambitions of Italy and saw painting as a public art essential to constructing an Italian national identity.

Cagli enlisted in the United States Army and was recognized for his artistic talent. During his training he painted barracks, made his own drawings, and illustrated a military magazine. Later during the war, he worked as a military artist drawing scenes from the campaigns. Cagli fought at the 1944 Normandy landings and, later, in Belgium and Germany. Near the end of the war, he drew a series of dramatic drawings based on the liberation of the Buschenwald concentration camp.

After the war, Cagli returned in 1948 to Rome and made it his permanent residence. Because of his past as a former regime-endorsed artist and a Jewish exile from Fascism, Cagli did not fit into any of the factions of Italy’s post-war heated cultural disputes. He arrived into Italy’s art world with a metaphysical route towards abstraction which was opposite to the Neo-Cubist trend that dominated postwar Italian painting. Settled in Italy, Cagli began a series of experimental works in multiple mediums, including ceramics, mosaics, tapestries, architectural decoration, ballet scenery, and costumes.

Corrado Cagli helped organize the Galleria La Cometa in Rome and, along with poet Libero De Libero, created an artistic circle of musicians, writers, architects, painters and sculptors. He was involved with New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s 1949 exhibition, “20th Century Italian Art” and facilitated the 1950 opening of the Catherine Viviano Gallery in New York City. In August of 1972, Cagli was commissioned as the official banner painter for the Palio di Siena, the twice yearly equestrian competition held in Siena, Italy.

Cagli was awarded the Guggenheim Prize in 1946 and, in 1954, the Marzotto Prize, given by the Marzotto fashion company for his contributions to the cultural rebirth of Italy after the war. Corrado Cagli died in Rome in 1976.

Notes: An article on Corrado Cagli’s 1936 mural “The Battle of San Marino”, now housed in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, can be found in a previous posting on this site.

An interview between author Raffaele Bedarida and Alessandro Cassin, Director of Centro Primo Levi, entitled “Corrado Cagli, the American Years” can be found online at Printed_Matter located at: http://primolevicenter.org/printed-matter/corrado-cagli-the-american-years/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Corrado Cagli”, Circa 1930s

Second Insert Image: Corrado Cagli, “Ritmi Cellulari in Chiave di Giallo, 1949, Mised Media on Canvas on Paper, 90 x 70 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Corrado Cagli, “narcissus”, Date Unknown, Silkscreen Print, Edition of 50,, Sheet Size 90 x 85 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Corrado Cagli in His Studio in Rome”, December 1969, Radiocorriere Magazine, Gelatin Silver Print

Alfonso Ossorio

Alfonso Ossorio, “T.R.Russell E/M 2nd Class”, 1943, Ink, Gouache and Watercolor on Paper Mounted to Paperboard, 22 3/8″ x 18 ¼”

Born in Manila to affluent Filipino parents from the province of Negros Occidental, Alfonso Ossorio received European and American education in the 1940s and 1950s, which placed him in the fortunate position of witnessing pivotal moments in Western modern art. From 1934 to 1936 he studied fine art at Harvard University and continued his studies at the Rhode island School of Design.

Ossorio’s early work was influenced by surrealism and later was influenced by his friend Jackson Pollock. In the early part of the 1950s he was pouring paint onto canvas in the style of the abstract expressionists. Ossorio had a lifelong engagement with Catholicism which entered into his work. After meeting Dubuffet, whose art brut movement interested Ossorio, he started creating assemblages which he called congregations, with the term’s obvious religious connotation.

Note: Other works by Alfonso Ossorio are available on this site. Search for “Alfonso Ossorio”.

Paul Richmond

Paul Richmond: Paintings from His “War Paint” Series

“I created War Paint because I was interested in exploring the concept of identity – how we construct our sense of self and choose to reveal it to others. As a young gay man, I grew up feeling inadequate by the standards of masculinity that were presented to me. War Paint is about ignoring the status quo and boldly wearing the colors that represent who we are and how we relate to the world around us.

Everyone faces battles in their daily lives, and how we prepare for them is an important part of who we are. I hope people feel a sense of recognition or connection with the psychological states of the figures depicted in War Paint and maybe even create a story in their own minds about where they are heading or from what battlefield they are returning.” -Paul Richmond

Joseph Christian Leyendecker

Paintings by Joseph Christian Leyendecker

Born in March of 1874 in Montabaur, a collective-municipality of the German Empire, Joseph Christiana Leyendecker was a German-American illustrator, best known for his book and advertising illustrations. In 1862, the family immigrated to Chicago, Illinois, where Leyendecker’s uncle, Adam Ortseifen, was vice-president of the McAvoy Brewing Company, one of Chicago’s largest breweries before Prohibition. At the age of sixteen, J. C. Leyendecker joined the engraving house of J. Manz & Company as an apprentice.

Leyendecker later advanced to the level of full-time staff artist at Manz & Company and completed his first commercial commission there, sixty Bible illustrations for an edition published by Manz. He enrolled at the Chicago Art Institute, where he began formal training in drawing and anatomy under the Dutch-American artist John Vanderpoel. The first in-print acknowledgement of Leyendecker’s artwork was in the April-September 1895 issue of the “Inland Printer” which described his work for Manz and featured a sketch and two book cover illustrations done for publisher E. A. Weeks.

In 1896, J. C, Leyendecker and his younger brother Francis Xavier, also an illustrator, traveled to Paris where they both enrolled at the Académie Julian under the tutelage of painters Adolphe Bouguereau and Jean-Paul Laurens, and the etcher and painter Benjamin Constant, who was best known for his portraits and Oriental subjects. While studying the Neo-classical painting style of the academy, both brothers also became familiar with the popular style of illustrated advertisements executed by such artists as Jules Cherêt, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Alphonso Mucha, a prominent member of the French Art Nouveau movement.

Upon return to the United States in 1897, the Leyendecker brothers settled in Chicago’s Hyde Park area and opened a studio in the Fine Arts Building on South Michigan Street. Joseph Leyendecker received his first commission for a Saturday Evening Post cover on May 20th of 1897, which began a forty-four year association with the magazine. During his career, he created three-hundred twenty-two cover paintings for the Saturday Evening Post; he also did work for Collier’s magazine where he produced forty-eight cover illustrations.

In 1900, the brothers moved to New York City, which had established itself as the commercial advertising capital of the nation, and set up shop in the Bryant Park Studios. It was here in New York City that the two brothers would each establish a successful career as an illustrator. In 1903 at the age of twenty-nine, J. C. Leyendecker met Charles Beach, a young man from Ontario, Canada, who was looking for work as a model. Beach became the main inspiration for the Arrow Collar Man, a model for Leyendecker’s other commissions, and, later, his business manager. He was also Leyendecker’s life partner for the majority of their lives.

J. C. Leyendecker helped define the modern magazine cover as a unique art form. Conveying a wide range of human emotions, his paintings were done in his hallmark style of crisp, wide and controlled brushstrokes accented by bold highlights. Leyendecker’s greatest fame, however, came from his menswear commissions. In 1905, he convinced the advertising director of Cluett, Peabody & Company, a clothing manufacturer, to utilize a single male image to represent all of their products. The result was not only the first major branding initiative in advertising but also the first real advertising campaign ever launched. The campaign of Leyendecker’s handsome, stylishly dressed man, the Arrow Collars and Shirts Man, was so successful that the Cluett company’s market share grew to ninety-six per cent.

This Arrow Collars and Shirts Man resonated with the public and became the established image of the ideal, fashionable American male, an icon that helped mold the idea of a glamorous lifestyle and the Roaring Twenties. Leyendecker followed this success with illustrations of chiseled-faced men wearing suits from The House of Kuppenheimer, socks from the Interwoven Stocking Company, and underwear from the Cooper Underwear company. Starting in 1912, Leyendecker began a successful series of twenty commissioned advertisements for the cereal company Kellogg’s, which featured children and adolescents enjoying bowls of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.

Both having achieved success in New York City, the two Leyendecker brothers decided to relocate in 1914 to New Rochelle, a suburb of New York City. A number of illustrators and other artists had already relocated to this community, including Norman Rockwell, Frederic Remington, and Orson Lowell. The Leyendeckers built a fourteen room mansion with two studio workspaces; upon the residence’s completion, they were joined by their sister, Mary Augusta, and Charles Beach. This estate, which became the site of numerous large galas hosted by Leyendecker and Beach, would be the residence for their final years together.

During the First World War, J. C. Leyendecker created posters in support of the nation’s war effort; these were used to urge young men to enlist, promote the purchase of war bonds, and urge the general public to conserve resources necessary for the military. After years of tension in the New Rochelle residence, both Frank and Mary Augusta Leyendecker moved out in 1923; Frank Leyendecker died of an overdose in the following year.

Although affected greatly by his brother’s death, Leyendecker’s commercial success continued to increase throughout the 1920s. However, by the end of the 1930s, the demand for Leyendecker’s style of imagery had waned; the use of illustration in advertisements had begun to be overshadowed by the growing use of photographic imagery. By 1945, editorial changes at the Saturday Evening Post caused the end of Leyendecker’s long relationship with the magazine. Leyendecker found his finances failing; he was able to keep himself solvent through calendar commissions and covers for William Randolph Hearst’s magazine, The American Weekly.

J. C. Leyendecker outlived many of his friends. He died of an acute coronary occlusion, at the age of seventy-seven, on July 25th of 1951 at his New Rochelle estate. Only five individuals attended his funeral; Norman Rockwell and three of Leyendecker’s favorite male models acted as pallbearers. Leyendecker is buried, alongside his parents and brother Frank, at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City. What was left of his estate, including a number of original canvases, was divided between Charles Beach, his forty-nine year partner, and his sister Mary Augusta.

Charles Allwood Beach died of a heart attack on June 21st of 1954 at New Rochelle. The register for St. Paul’s Church, New Rochelle, indicates interment at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, Westchester County, New York. Beach is noted as being interned in January of 1975 at the Ferncliff Mausoleum, Unit 8, Niche L-0001; however, this section is not open to the public

Paul Cadmus and Truman Capote

Paul Cadmus, “Playground”, 1948, Egg Tempera on Panel, 59.7 x 44.5 cm, Georgia Museum of Art

Paul Cadmus remembered Capote at an outdoor café in Venice shortly after the war. “Truman lifted his cape up and down, up and down, and said, “Come to Taormina! Come to Taormina!”“ Cadmus recalled. The painter took Capote’s advice and met him at the Italian resort. One day Capote returned from the post office with the mail. “I bring tidings of disaster!” he shouted. “Tennessee’s play is a great success!” “I always liked Truman”, said Cadmus. “He didn’t give a damn what people thought of his voice or anything else. Brave little thing”.