Tag: gay history

Adrian Lee Kellard

The Artwork of Adrian Lee Kellard

Born at New Rochelle, New York in January of 1959, Adrian Lee Kellard was a gifted American artist known for his uniquely-styled woodcuts and sculptures of religious and often homoerotic imagery. Although many of his works have a practical utility, each of Kellard’s creations holds a story, either a historic religious account or a personal circumstance.

Adrian Kellard was one of six children born into the working-class Irish-Italian Catholic family of Adrian Kellard Sr, a detective lieutenant, and Ordie Figliuzzi, a teacher at the local elementary Catholic school. In the early 1980s he attended the State University of New York, Purchase where he studied under Judith Bernstein, an American painter whose provocative works explored the connections between the political and the sexual. Kellard received his training in woodcuts and printmaking through his studies with internationally-known Uruguayan artist Antonio Frasconi. Through the SUNY Empire State Program, he relocated to New York City and apprenticed under multi-media artist Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, a gay activist whose work incorporated queer and Catholic iconography. 

Kellard’s work was influenced by an eclectic group of artists among whom were American modernist artist Marsden Hartley, impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh, and Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. His innate connection to the Catholic faith also exerted a strong influence on the themes of his work. Combining his Catholicism with his own homosexuality, Kellard utilized the figurative style of Byzantine iconography and the woodcut techniques of German Expressionism to examine the turbulent issues of the 1980s, particularly the suffering and deaths caused by the AIDS epidemic. Recurring images in his woodblock works depicted the suffering of Christ and the compassion exhibited to others by the Christian saints.

Although trained by Antonio Frasconi in the traditional techniques of woodblock printing, Adrian Kellard created a unique approach to printmaking and woodcutting. Instead of using the carved woodblock to print repetitive reverse images, he filled in the recesses of the woodblock with paint to create relief sculptures. Kellard would often combine these woodblock reliefs with found materials from his Upper West Side area of Manhattan to form large hanging or free-standing sculptural works. He later, through a suggestion from artist Lanigan-Schmidt, began to incorporate his Catholic imagery into more  functional pieces such as towel racks, calendars, desks, and folding screens. 

The first work by Kellard to achieve national exposure was his “Shrine”, also known as “The Wagon Piece”, that he entered into the 1985 group exhibition “Precious: An American Cottage Industry of the Eighties” held at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery. Constructed of latex paint on wood with added rope and hardware, the wheeled sculptural work is reminiscent of the mobile shrines of Catholic religious processions as well as the medieval mobile stages used for theatrical productions. 

On the “dying” side of “Shrine” is an image of a crucified Christ flanked by large clown faces. The bottom panel contains three faces of women, including that of the Virgin Mary,  who are all expressing grief. Written in the top panel is the quote taken from an eucharistic prayer  “Dying You Destroyed Death”.  The reverse, or “rising side”, of this work features a large face of Christ expressing sorrow. The bottom panel depicts an image of the Sacred Heart flanked by scenes of city and town dwellings. The top panel on this side contains the quote “Rising You Restored Life”. 

Adrian Kellard’s work was first shown at Soho’s Schreiber/Cutler Gallery in 1986 as the gallery’s inaugural exhibition. For the following five years, his work was featured in annual solo exhibitions as well as group exhibitions at the gallery. In 1987, Kellard was diagnosed with AIDS. Although the life-prolonging AZT medication was finally approved in 1989 to treat the virus, the drug still had debilitating side-effects and no long-term efficacy. Kellard made the decision not to take conventional medication and relied on alternative healing therapies to continue his active artistic life.

After his diagnosis, Kellard’s work became less overtly religious; a more compassionate tone, expressed through subdued colors, was evident. On the fourteenth of November in 1991, Adrian Lee Kellard died at the age of thirty-two from complications due to AIDS. His work continues to be exhibited in such venues as Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum, New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, Saint Louis University’s Museum of Contemporary Religious Art, the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton, and the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York. 

Notes: The largest collection of Adrian Kellard’s work is housed in the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art at the Saint Louis University in Missouri. Its articles on Adrian Kellard can be located at: https://mocra.wordpress.com/tag/adrian-kellard/

The Adrian Kellard Tribute Page, which is maintained by Kellard’s nephew Chris, contains a section in which Kellard’s friends reminisce about his latter days working at Kenn’s Broome Street in Manhattan. The Facebook page is located at: https://www.facebook.com/adriankellard/

Kellard’s early personal development of faith and compassion had a profound effect on his art and attitude towards others. An article written by Carl Siciliano, the founder and former executive director of the largest housing program for homeless LBGTQ youth, the Ali Forney Center, can be found at: https://outreach.faith/2023/10/how-saint-therese-of-lisieux-helped-my-gay-friend-as-he-was-dying-of-aids/

A 2023 dissertation for the State University of New York, Purchase  by Leigh Ann Colby entitled “Faith and Function: The Art of Adrian Kellard” can be read at:  https://soar.suny.edu/handle/20.500.12648/14012

Top Insert Image: Regina DeLuise, “Adrian Lee Kellard”, Date Unknown, Palladium Print

Second Insert Image: Regina DeLuise, “Adrian Kellard at His Studio”, 1989, Palladium Print, Museum of Contemporary Religious Art

Bottom Insert Image: Regina DeLuise, “Adrian Kellard in His Studio”, 1989, Palladium Print, Museum of Contemporary Religious Art

 

Ellsworth Kelly “Blue Orange”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Robert Philen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Giard

The Portrait Photography of Robert Giard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Cromwell: Film History Series

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photographers Unknown, I Sometimes Hear the Call to Return

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bryan Rogers

The Paintings of Bryan Rogers

Born in 1977 in Connecticut, Bryan Rogers is an American painter who creates stylized, densely wooded landscapes with waterfalls in which oversized male figures are entwined with the natural elements. His contemporary Art Nouveau-styled paintings form complex tapestries of rhythmic patterns that project an atmosphere of Edenic tranquility.   

Rogers sees queer identity as an intrinsic part of his work. The relationship of his paintings’ protagonists to both the organic and constructed spaces in which they are placed reflect the public and private spaces that people navigate during their daily life.

Bryan Rogers earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. He continued his studies at New York City’s Pratt Institute where he earned his Master in Fine Arts. From 2013 to 2019, Rogers was co-director of Honey Ramka Gallery, a private UltraContemporary gallery that was based in Brooklyn, New York until its closure. 

Rogers primarily works in acrylic paints on panel in his basement studio at his partner’s family home. His vividly colored images are created through thin, transparent washes applied by detail brushes. Interested in the patterns and symmetry of nature and architecture, Rogers places his protagonists, variations of his partner and brother, in lushly-patterned luminescent landscapes. The flowing organic nature of these highly detailed settings are reminiscent of works by Alphonse Mucha as well as the Art Nouveau-styled San Francisco music posters of the 1970s. 

Bryan Rogers has exhibited his work throughout the United States and Europe. These include group exhibitions at New York City’s Spring/Break Art Show; The Hole, a contemporary gallery in New York City’s Tribeca district; and Art Athina, Greece’s contemporary art fair and one of the oldest such fairs in Europe. Rogers also participated in the 2022 “The Bathroom Show” as well as the 2021 and 2023 “Works on Paper” group exhibitions at New York City’s Monya Rowe Gallery. 

Past exhibitions of Rogers’ work also include the 2021 “Woodland” at the Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles; “Intimacy” in 2022 at art curator Taymour Grahne’s London gallery; the 2022 “The Container Garden” at New York’s Sears-Peyton Gallery; “I Am American” in 2023 at the contemporary Kutlesa Gallery in Goldau, Switzerland; and the 2024 “Here and There” at the Huxley-Parlour Gallery in central London. In New York City, Rogers’ solo exhibitions also included the 2022 “Woodland”, the 2023 “Duality: The Real and the Perceived” and the 2024 “Wallflowers”, all held at the Monya Rowe Gallery in the East Chelsea district of Manhattan. 

Inquiries about Bryan Rogers’ paintings and future exhibitions should be presented to his representative, Monya Rowe Gallery, 224 West 30th Street, #304, New York City.  

http://monyarowegallery.com/index.php

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Bryan Rogers in Studio”, 2024, Color Print, Artnet News, January 2024

Second Insert Image: Bryan Rogers, “Here and There”, 2024, Acrylic on Panel, 122 x 91.4 cm, Huxley-Parlour Gallery, London

Third Insert Image: Bryan Rogers, “Entangled”, 2024, Acrylic on Panel, 50.8 x 40.6 cm, Monya Rowe Gallery, New York

Albrecht Becker: Film History Series

Photographer Unknown, “Albrecht Becker”, circa 1930, Vintage Bromide Print

Born in 1906 at Thale, a town in Imperial Germany, Albrecht Becker was a German photographer, actor, and film production designer. Imprisoned in 1935 by the National Socialist regime on the charge of homosexuality, he was one of the few Germans to survive the Second World War and present testimony as a gay man for the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. 

The youngest of three sons born to a baker, Albrecht Becker was encouraged by his father towards a career in textiles. He studied through an apprenticeship in Thale and, upon graduation at the age of eighteen, moved to Würzburg where he could live more freely as a gay man. Although Paragraph 175 of the German code had been active since 1871, this code outlawing homosexual acts between men was not consistently enforced at this time. Becker began work in Würzburg as a department store sales clerk but, after showing talent as a window display designer, the store made arrangements for his studies at a design school in Munich. 

Becoming financially secure at the store, Becker bought his first Leica camera and saved money for trips outside of Germany. He traveled with his camera to Spain and later to Italy where he met Wenderer Brown, an American of the same age. During a trip to France, Becker met Brown in Paris where they were able to see both Maurice Chevalier and Josephine Baker on stage. Although the distance between their homes hindered regular meetings, their romantic friendship turned out to be fortuitous as Becker sent all the photos he had taken to Brown at the outset of the Second World War; Brown returned these safely stored photos to Becker in 1945.  

Albrecht Becker’s first long-term relationship was with Joseph Arbert, a professor twenty years his senior, who was Würzburg’s Director of the State Archive. During this ten year relationship, Becker was introduced to the art and literature circles of the city. In August of 1934, he traveled to the United States for a one month visit with his friend Wenderer Brown. Becker, still feeling secure as a gay man in Würzburg,  returned to Germany at the end of his visit. However, the Night of the Long Knives in June of 1934 had changed the atmosphere in Germany. The power struggle between Ernst Röhm,the commander of the Sturmabteilung (SA),  and Adolph Hitler resulted in the murder of hundreds of Hitler’s political enemies including the openly gay Ernst Röhm. As a result of Hitler’s consolidation of power, Nazi Germany became a dangerous environment for homosexuals and others. 

At the beginning of 1935, Becker was summoned to the police station, arrested and three months later tried under Paragraph 175. He did not contest the charges which ironically saved his life, Instead of being sent to the Dachau concentration camp, Becker was sentenced to three years in the Nuremberg prison. After serving his term, he was able to return to his position at the department store in Würzburg. Near the end of the war, he served in the Wehrmacht and was sent to the Russian Front where he served until 1944 in the radio corps at a distance from the front lines. 

Wounded by shrapnel on the army’s retreat through Ukraine, Albrecht Becker was transferred first to Vienna and then back to Germany where the American forces used him as a translator until 1947. After his release, Becker was offered a position with film production designer Herbert Kirchhoff that altered his life forever. After relocating to Hamburg, the two men collaborate on several films with Becker acting as set designer. His work on these films give Becker a place in the industry that eventually allowed him to work on other independent projects, including theater and opera.

Over the course of his career as art director or production designer, Becker worked on over one hundred-twenty productions in film, television episodes and television movies.. Among his early productions were Hungarian director Sándor Szlatinay’s 1951 musical romance “Woe to Him Who Loves”; German director Ulrich Erfurth’s comedies, the 1953 “Not Afraid of Big Animals” and 1954 “Columbus Discovers Kraehwinkel” that starred Charlie Chaplin’s sons, Charles Jr. and Sydney Chaplin; Hungarian director Paul Martin’s 1955 musical comedy “Ball at the Savoy” with stage and film actor Peter W. Staub; and Hungarian director Ákos Ráthonyi’s 1961 comedy cruise film, “Beloved Imposter”, filmed aboard the Hamburg Atlantic Line steamship T.S. Hanseatic.

In his later years, Albrecht Becker devoted himself to his photography and produced artistic images as well as commercial work for magazines and newspapers. While living in Vienna and Freiburg, he exhibited his photography and received private commissions. Becker’s photography cover a wide range of eclectic subjects from ushers at the Vienna Opera and Augustinian monks to Berlin gravediggers and ruins of the razed city of Küstrin in western Poland. 

Becker published his memoir, “Fotos sind Mein Leben (Photos Are My Life) in 1993 through the publisher Rosa Winkel. In 1997, he gave testimony on his life and experiences as a gay man in Germany for the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. Becker later told of his experiences during World War II for Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s 2000 documentary “Paragraph 175” produced through Channel Four Films. Albrecht Becker died of natural causes in Hamburg, Germany, in 2002 at the age of ninety-five. His private photo collection is now housed in Berlin’s Schwules Museum, founded in 1985 as a home for the history, culture and narratives of the LBGTQ community. 

Notes: The USC Shoah Foundation has an article with two interview clips entitled “Under the Shadow of Paragraph 175: Part 1: Albrecht Becker” located at: https://sfi.usc.edu/news/2015/03/8843-under-shadow-paragraph-175-part-1-albrecht-becker

The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust’s biography on Albrecht Becker can be found at: https://www.hmd.org.uk/resource/albrecht-becker/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Albrecht Becker”, circa 1930s-1940s, Vintage Print

Second Insert Image: Gustav Ucicky, “Zwei Blaue Augen (Two Blue Eyes)”, 1955, Cinematographer Ekkehard Kyrath, Production Design Albrecht Becker, Real-Film GmbH

Third Insert Image: Eugen York, “Die Letzte Nacht (The Last Night)”, 1949, Cinematographer Willy Wintestein, Production Design Assistant Albrecht Becker, Real-Film GmbH

Fourth Insert Image: Hans Deppe, “Die Freunde Meiner Frau (My Wife’s Friends)”, 1949, Cinematography Heinz Schnacketz, Production Design Assistant Albrecht Becker, Real-Film GmbH

Bottom Insert Image: Rinaldo Hopf, “Albrecht Becker and Friend”, circa 1980s-1990s, Color Print

Peter Hujar

The Photography of Peter Hujar

Born in Trenton, New Jersey in October of 1934, Peter Hujar was an American photographer known for his black and white portraits. Only marginally known during his lifetime, he has since been recognized as one of the major American photographers in the late twentieth-century. 

Peter Hujar never met his father, who abandoned his mother Rose Murphy during her pregnancy. He was raised by his Ukrainian grandparents in the rural landscape of Ewing Township. Hujar remained with his grandparents until his grandmother’s death in 1946. After which, Hujar lived with his mother and her second husband in New York City; however, the household situation was difficult. He left the home in 1950 at the age of sixteen to live independently. 

In 1953, Hujar entered Manhattan’s School of Industrial Design, later named the High School of Art and Design, where he expressed an interest in photography. Encouraged by his teacher, poet Daisy Aldan, Hujar became a photographic apprentice at a commercial studio where he mastered the technical processes of photography. Four years later, his photographic work had reached museum quality. In 1958, Hujar was able to accompany realist painter and watercolorist Joseph Raffael on study trip to Italy. 

Having been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, Peter Hujar returned to Italy in 1963, this time with painter and sculptor Paul Thek, to study and photograph the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Sicily. These images would later be featured in Hujar’s 1975 “Portraits in Life and Death” published with a written introduction by writer and critic Susan Sontag. Upon his return to New York City in 1964, Hujar became the chief assistant to commercial photographer Harold Krieger, widely known for his innovative advertising work and celebrity portraits. 

In the mid-1960s, Hujar met Andy Warhol and posed for four of Warhol’s short, silent black and white film portraits, the “Screen Shots” series. Four hundred and seventy-two of these three-minute films depicting New York’s cultural figures are known to have survived. In 1967, Hujar was selected as one of the photographers in a master class led by Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel. The quality of Hujar’s classwork led to assignments from Harper’s Bazaar and other publications; through this class, he met photographers Diane Arbus and Alexey Brodovitch. 

In 1967, Peter Hujar made the decision, at great financial sacrifice, to leave the commercial world and pursue his own photography that would reflect his true personal identity. Hujar and his lover at that time, political activist Jim Fouratt, witnessed the Stonewall riots in New York’s West Village. An influential artist and activist of the gay liberation movement, Hujar, although not actively involved with the Gay Liberation Front, shot the group photo that was used on many of its posters. In 1973, he settled into a loft above the East Village’s Eden Theater on Second Avenue where he resided for the rest of his life. 

Throughout the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, Hujar traveled in the art world of lower Manhattan shooting portraits of noted actors and writers including William Burroughs, Fran Lebowitz, drag queen actor Divine, Susan Sontag, and Rolling Stone writer Vince Aletti. He visited and shot photos at the area’s bars and also the abandoned West Side piers on the Hudson River, a gathering spot for artists and the gay community. In early 1981, Hujar met filmmaker and artist David Wojnarowicz who had become one of the prolific members of the avant-garde artists who used mixed media, graffiti and street art. After a brief period as Hujar’s lover, Wojnarowicz became his protégé and remained closely linked to him for the remainder of Hujar’s life. 

Peter Hujar was a consummate technician and master of the darkroom who produce images that, though stripped of excess, were highly emotional. His photography covered a wide range of subjects, including abandoned and ruined buildings, cityscapes, animals, portraits, still life, and nudes. Due to his connection with the sitter, Hujar excelled in portrait work and was able to achieve an intimate and honest pose for the camera that caught his sitter’s idiosyncrasies and inner feelings. He never used props in his portraits and focused entirely on the sitter as opposed to the backdrop of the shot. 

Hujar was diagnosed with AIDS in January of 1987. Ten months later at the age of fifty-three, he died at New York’s Cabrini Medical Center on the twenty-fifth of November. Hujar’s funeral was held at the Church of St. Joseph in Greenwich Village; he was buried at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Valhalla, New York. In his lifetime, Hujar had few substantial solo exhibitions and attracted little notice by the press. His only major show in his lifetime was a 1986 exhibition of seventy photographs curated by Sur Rodney Sur of New York’s Gracie Mansion Gallery. 

Peter Hujar willed his entire artistic estate to novelist and historian Stephen Koch, a longtime friend. Since 1987, Koch has worked to place Hujar’s work in its rightful position in twentieth-century art. Photography curator Joel Smith assembled a collection of one hundred and sixty-four images from Peter Hujar’s work for a 2018 retrospective at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City. Hujar’s work has been exhibited throughout Europe and the United States and is housed in such public collection as the Metropolitan Museum of New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Notes: All images, unless noted, are from the Peter Hujar Archive which is located at: https://peterhujararchive.com

An exhibition of Paul Hujar’s work is currently being held at the Ukrainian Museum, 222 East 6th Street, New York City until the 1st of September, 2024. Article: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/peter-hujar-rialto-ukrainian-museum-2490813

An excellent 2018 article by the New Yorker’s longtime art critic Peter Schjeldahl, entitled “The Bohemian Rhapsody of Peter Hujar”, can be found at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/05/the-bohemian-rhapsody-of-peter-hujar

New York’s Pace Gallery has an online conversation moderated by the gallery’s curatorial director Oliver Shultz, entitled “Cruising Utopia”, that coincided with its 2020 exhibition of Hujar’s intimate photographs of queer culture: https://www.pacegallery.com/journal/conversation-on-peter-hujar-video/

Top Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “Self Portrait Jumping (1)”, 1974, Gelatin Silver Print, 63.2 x 58.1 cm, Fraenkel Gallery

Second Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “Christopher Street Pier #3”, 1976, Gelatin Silver Print, Peter Hujar Archive

Third Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “The Shareef Twins”, 1985, Gelatin Silver Print, Peter Hujar Archive

Fourth Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “Gary Schneider in Contortion #1”, 1979, Gelatin Silver Print, Peter Hujar Archive

Bottom Insert Image: Peter Hujar, “Candy Darling on Her Deathbed”, 1973, Gelatin Silver Print, Peter Hujar Archive

Bebe Backhouse-Oliver: “Take Me to the Ocean Where My Heart Once Drowned”

Photographers Unknown, Take Me to the Ocean Where My Heart Once Drowned

take me outside to the place we both knew so well
when i’d hold your hand while walking barefoot
even though the soil was littered with bindis
but i preferred the earth to know who i was
from the taste of my blood and the way it filled with grains of sand
than to have to speak my name in a language it could never understand
with a voice i was still discovering

take me to the mountain we would go to sit
and watch the stars fall past the edge of the earth
like they were always destined to do
let me think of the people i used to know when i was small
and remember the things i forgot about them
the pieces of gold that captured my heart into loving them
and the ways they hurt me that saw me quickly let them go

take me to the ocean where my heart once drowned
as people in barely-there swimsuits watched me stand
in waves that broke on the shoreline
as my bones shattered beneath the forceful hands of the sun
and all its reasons for keeping the world alive in a chorus of separate songs
let me dance in the sand one more time
while you take photographs of the footprints i leave behind
so i can remember their rhythm long after i’ve left them

take me to the tree outside the home where i grew up
and i’ll carve my name into its bark
beside the one i made at nine years old
i’ll climb its branches and stretch my arms out so
i’m taller than the leaves
and higher than the light that bleeds over them
i’ll feel the greatness of everything you’ve given me
the power of all i am
and i’ll know this to be a journey of infinite steps
that encase golden prayers in the face of a western wind
trusting i’ll be going home and knowing i’ll never be coming back

Bebe Backhouse-Oliver, the light that bleeds, more than these bones, 2023, Magabala Books, Broome, Australia

A descendant of the Bardi Jawi people of the Kimberley region of north-Western Australia, Bebe Backhouse-Oliver is a poet, writer, illustrator and leader of diverse community projects. His work embraces issues of love, loss, identity, sense of country, and both Aboriginal and gay existence. Oliver has for many years maintained his home in Naarm, the traditional Central Kulin Nation name for the specific area now known as Greater Melbourne.

In addition to studies in classical piano and composition, Bebe Oliver began writing at an early age,. His initial work was creative stories and, later, poetry and memoir-based journal-format stories. These written works served as an outlet for all the challenges he experienced as a young Aboriginal boy with a suppressed identity. Oliver’s first published work was a 2018 story he submitted for entry in author Anita Heiss’s biographical anthology entitled “Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia”.

Oliver relocated to Melbourne to study at the Victorian College of the Arts. After returning from a period of travel overseas, he became established as a producer and director of theater, festivals, and public art projects across Australia, New Zealand, France and Belgium. A leading designer of projects for diverse communities, Oliver is a co-chairperson of Melbourne’s biannual Blak & Bright First Nations Literary Festival; he is also a Board Director of the publishing house Magabala Books. Through his senior leadership positions, Oliver has fostered many opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists to showcase their work, thus allowing Traditional Culture to publicly thrive. 

In March of 2023, Magabala Books published “More Than These Bones”, Oliver’s debut collection of poems that details his journal through both heartbreak and self-discovery. Each poem is set in a different location and, often accompanied by a photograph or drawing, adds another dimension to his life story. Oliver’s writing is also featured in the anthology “Nangamay Mana Djurali”, a collection of voices from the Australian black queer community. Edited by Alison Whittaker and Steven Lindsay Ross, the anthology shows the diverse perspectives of life experienced by Aboriginal queer people in contemporary Australia. 

Bebe Backhouse-Oliver’s website is located at: https://www.bebeoliver.com

Notes Magabala Books is Australia’s leading Indigenous publisher. Committed to nurturing the talent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander storytellers, the publishing house offers awards, creative grants and scholarships. Magabala Books also sponsors cultural projects including audio-visual installations, recordings of elders’ stories, and developing the book illustration skills of Kimberley Aboriginal artists. The Magabala Books website is located at: https://magabala.com.au

“Tadra / Buar (To Dream)”, a poem by Bebe Oliver and Fiji poet Daniel Sipeli, can be found, with a video recitation by Oliver, at the Red Room Poetry website: https://redroompoetry.org/poets/bebe-backhouse/tadra-buar-dream/

Dmitri Bouchène

The Artwork of Dmitri Bouchène

Born in St. Tropez, France at the Villa of General Allard in April of 1893, Dmitri Dmitriévitch Bouchène was a Russian painter and theatrical costume and set designer who worked in both the Russian Federation and France. In 1947, he became a naturalized citizen of France where he remained for the rest of his life. 

Dmitri Bouchène was a descendant of a French Huguenot family. His  great-grandfather had relocated from France to Catherine the Great’s Russia in 1685 due to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes which effectively expelled the Huguenots from France. After the death of his mother in 1895, Bouchène was raised by his aunts in St. Petersburg. He attended the Second Imperial Gymnasium and evening classes at the art school established by the Society for Encouragement and Promotion of Arts. It was at the Imperial Gymnasium that Bouchène met fellow  student Sergey Rostislavovich Ernst, with whom he would remain a loving partner for the rest of his life. 

Through a personal recommendation from Russian painter Nicolas Roerich to French painter Maurice Denis who was teaching at the Académie Ranson in Paris, Bouchène was able to attend the academy and study at Denis’s workshop. There he met and received lessons on intuitive painting from Henri Matisse. After returning to St. Petersburg in 1913, Bouchène resumed his studies in history and philology, the study of language in oral and written historical sources. From 1915 to 1917, he continued his drawing studies at the Society for the Promotion of Arts. 

Dmitri Bouchène, through the sponsorship of painter and theatrical designer Alexandre Benois, became part of the staff at the Hermitage Museum where he curated the department of porcelain, silver and jewels until 1925. A member of the Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) group since 1917, Bouchène was invited by Benois, under appointment by art critic Sergei Diaghilev, to participate in the group’s exhibitions at St. Petersburg’s Anichkov Palace. Bouchène entered paintings in the Mir Iskusatva exhibitions of 1918, 1922, and 1924.

Bouchène’s style of painting incorporated the motifs and methods of Catalan modernist painter Antoni Gaudí and Venetian painter Giovanni Canal. He executed easel paintings of still lifes and landscapes as well as set and scene designs for the theater. Bouchène also created graphic work for publishers, including bookplates for Akvilon Publishing in Petrograd. He participated in Russian landscape exhibitions, the 1922 First State Independent Art Exhibition at Berlin’s Galerie van Diemen, bookplate art exhibitions in Petrograd and Kazan, and the 1924 Russian Art Exhibition held at New York.

In 1925, Dmitri Bouchène asked for a leave of absence from the Hermitage Museum to travel with Sergey Ernst to Paris for a three month study program of art history. Permission was granted and they left Russia by way of the Estonian city of Tallinn, never to return. While exploring Paris, Ernst purchased a Delacroix painting he found at a low cost in a Parisian flea market; the resale of this work enabled them to buy a home. In 1926, Bouchène began his career in France with costume designs for prima ballerina Ann Pavlova.

In 1930 following this success, Bouchène began work as a costume and set designer for the Paris Opéra and Teatro alla Scala. He also created interior decor for Paris-based Maison Jansen and haute couture work for such fashion designers as Lucien Lelong and Nina Ricci. During the Second World War, both Bouchène and Ernst took an active part in the French Resistance. Bouchène continued his painting and design work after the war; Ernst established himself as an art critic and historian with three published monographs on noted Russian Silver Age artists: Zinaida Serebriakova, Alexandre Benois and Nicolas Roerich.  

Dmitri Bouchène was deeply affected by the 1980 death of his longtime partner Sergey Ernst. He had considered Ernst and theatrical designer Alexandrer Benois as the two pillars that supported his life. Ernst was interred in a tomb located in the thirteenth division of the Montparnesse Cemetery in Paris. Bouchène died, thirteen years later, in February of 1993 at the age of ninety-nine. He was buried in the Montparnesse tomb alongside Sergey Ernst. Their tomb was inscribed with the words “What a Joy / You have Arrived” in honor of their long lives together.

In 1947, Bouchène’s friend, the art collector Frederik Johannes Lugt, established the Fondation Custodia at the eighteenth-century Hotel Turgot in Paris; this foundation is the custodian of Bouchène’s archives. Numerous private collection hold Bouchène’s paintings and graphic works.

The Dmitri Bouchène website, established by Pascal Davy-Bouchène, is located at: https://dimitri-bouchene.com

Tope Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Dmitri Bouchène in His Studio”, 1960, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Dmitri Bouchène, Costume Design for Claudio Monteverdi’s Opera “l’Incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppaea)“, 1953, Charcoal and Gouache on Paper, 33 x 23.5 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Dmitri Bouchène, “Flowers Against the Blue Background”, Gouache on Paper on Canvas, 105 x 76 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Dmitri Bouchène, Costume Design for Leoš Janáček’s 1954 Opera “Z Mrtvého Domu (House of the Dead)”, Charcoal and Gouache on Paper, 32 x 24 cm, Private Collection

Yves Paradis

The Photography of Yves Paradis

Born in Brittany in 1955, Yves Paradis is a French photographer known for his softly rendered black and white photographs which presented an idealized, timeless vision of gay life that differed from the prevailing gay photography of the period. During the 1980s, his work appeared regularly in the most popular gay periodicals of Europe.

The son of a farming family, Yves Paradis spent his formative years in rural France. He was introduced to photography at the age of thirteen by one of his teachers who recognized his struggles with writing. Given a space in the family’s attic by his father for a studio and dark room, Paradis was able to experiment with different techniques and develop his own images. His first photographs were portraits of his friends taken on holidays and, later, fellow soldiers during his national service in the army.

Paradis worked during the 1970s as a photojournalist with a focus on reportage-styled images of current events. Although he still experimented with homoerotic compositions, Paradis did not at this time considered art photography an option for a career. In 1979, France’s first commercially published gay magazine, “Gai Pied”, began its publication. Founded by journalist and activist Jean Le Bitouz, the magazine derived its title from a multilayered French pun that came from the word “guêpier”, meaning hornet’s nest. Paradis submitted a series of photographs he had taken of two soldiers kissing on an army tank; these images were accepted and published as a spread in the magazine.

Beginning in the 1980s, Yves Paradis worked regularly with “Gai Pied” and other European gay publications. His work featured images of sexually attractive men, not necessarily physically perfect, portrayed in realistic and romantic settings. Paradis did not champion the bar and club scene but rather found models through the gay press and random visits to the French provinces. In 1991, the first collection of Paradis’s photography, “Jois de Vivre (Joy of Life)” was published in London by Aubrey Walter. Soon after the volume’s publication, Paradis stopped photographing images and concentrated on individually printing his compositions. In 1998, a second edition of “Jois de Vivre” was published by Éditions Aubrey Walter, GMP Publications.

After a thirty-year hiatus, Paradis produced a new series of photographs in 2021, a collection that continued his original sense of design and disposition. His work is included in numerous private and public collections, including the National Museum of Wales and the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, United Kingdom. Individual works by Paradis are available through East London’s Henry Miller Fine Art as well as auction house Barbarossa Maison de Ventes, both which are focused on masculine art.

Notes: The Gay Men’s Press, founded in 1979 by Aubrey Walter, David Fernback and Richard Dipple, was the forerunner and the source for the Editions Aubrey Walter imprint which published Yves Paradis first collection of photographs. A short history of the GMP can be found at: https://gmppubs.wordpress.com/a-short-history-of-gay-mens-press/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Yves Paradis”, Portrait for Henry Miller Fine Art

Second Insert Image: Yves Paradis, “Jean-Paul et l’Acropole”, 1986, Gelatin Silver Print, Henry Miller Fine Art

Bottom Insert Image: Yves Paradis, “Le Jeune Homme aux Pied Nus”, 1986, Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection

John Horne Burns: “That City in the Middle of the Sea”

Photographers Unknown, That City in the Middle of the Sea

Hal walked around the Galleria. He stuck his hands into his pockets, swaggered a little, and tried to smile at everyone. Often his smiles were returned. But he didn’t follow them up. His was the disinterested smile of God the Father surveying the world after the sixth day. And Hal had never seen so many soldiers whose free time hung like a weight on their backs, as their packs had hung in combat. They sat at the outside tables of the bars and drank vermouth. They wore shoulder patches of three divisions. Their faces were seamy or gentle or questioning or settled or blank. No other people in the Galleria Umberto had so many nuances on their lips as the Americans Hal saw there.

After looking in all the shop windows and all the posters and traversing both sides of the X-shaped pavement that bisected the Galleria, Hal sat down at one of the tables. He knew that he was in the tiniest yet the greatest city of the world. But it hadn’t the fixed pattern of a small town. It was a commune of August, 1944, and its population changed every day. These people who came to the Galleria to stand and drink and shop and look and question were set apart from the rest of the modern world. They were outside the formula of mothers and wives and creeds. The Galleria Umberto was like that city in the middle of the sea that rises every hundred years to dry itself m the sun.

John Horne Burns, The Gallery, Excerpt: Third Portrait (Hal), 1948, Harper & Brothers, New York

Born at Andover, Massachusetts in October of 1916, John Horne Burns was an American writer who, in his short life, published three works of which the best known was the 1947 best-seller “The Gallery”, An author whose first publication was well-received by critics, Burns  and his work eventually became largely forgotten.

The eldest of seven children of an upper middle-class Irish Catholic family, John Horne Burns was educated at St. Augustine’s School by the Sisters of Norte Dame and later at the Phillips Academy where he studied music. At Harvard University, Burns studied and became fluent in French, German and Italian; he also wrote several fictional works, none of which were published. Burns graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1937 with a Bachelor of Arts in English, magna cum laude. After his graduation, he became a teacher at the Loomis School, a private boarding and day preparatory school in Windsor, Connecticut.

Although opposed to America’s decision to enter World War II, Burns was drafted as a private into the United States Army in 1942. He attended the Adjutant General’s School in Washington D.C. and received a commission as Second Lieutenant. Sent overseas in 1943, Burns served as a military intelligence officer in the cities of Casablanca and Algiers. Later transferred to Italy, he spent a year and a half censoring mail sent by prisoners of war. Burns lived during this period of service near the Galleria Umberto I, a partially destroyed shopping arcade frequented by soldiers, prostitutes and beggars. This galleria would provide the setting for his first novel. Burns was discharged from military service in 1946, at which time he returned to his teaching position at Loomis School. 

A man of both isolationist tendencies and an intense competitive nature, John Burns completed his first novel “The Gallery” in 1946 while teaching at the Loomis School. Published in 1947, the novel is composed of nine portraits of local women and soldiers interspersed with eight recollections narrated by an anonymous American soldier. Issues raised in the novel include economic and social inequities, homosexual experiences in the military, the impact of the Allied occupation on the population of Naples, and the assertion of individuality within the war effort. “The Gallery”, an unconventionally structured literary work, received high praise from critics and such writers as Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Heller, Edmund Wilson, and Gore Vidal.  

Burns became a man sought for his views on literature and would occasionally write a complimentary review. However, he became well-known for his strong, often caustic, reviews of both his peers and more established writers including such prominent men as Thomas Wolfe, Somerset Maugham, and James Michener. In 1949, Burns published his second novel, the satirical “Lucifer with a Book” that was based on his life experiences at the Loomis boarding school. He expected better reviews than those received by his first novel; however, the critical response to this work was dismal. 

Disheartened by the reviews, John Burns returned in 1950 to Italy where, designated a famous author by the local paper, he settled in Florence’s Hotel Excelsior, a famous expatriate gathering place along the Arno River. Burns wrote and published his third novel, the 1952 “A Cry of Children”. In this novel, he told the story of a man with a brilliant career as a concert pianist who is led by his mistress into a bohemian world of vice and depravity, only to be redeemed later by the very things he left behind. Although Burns’s third work also received uniformly negative reviews, some critics still thought that Burns was a writer of future distinction.

While working on a fourth novel, Burns supported himself by writing an article on the city of Florence for the American travel magazine “Holiday”. He eventually gained a reputation in Florence as a person who drank to excess and complained of rivals, critics and both friends and enemies. At the end of July in 1953, the publishing firm Harper & Brothers rejected Burns’s fourth book “The Stranger’s Guise”. In August while sailing with his Italian boyfriend just south off the port city of Livorno, Burns had a seizure. Five days later on the eleventh of August, he was dead of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of thirty-six. 

Tom Burns, John’s younger brother, hired a well-connected American lawyer in Rome to investigate Burns’s death; however, nothing suspicious was found. Originally interred in Italy, John Burns’s body was later exhumed by his family and buried at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, Massachusetts. His short stories, poems, articles, photographs, and novels, including his final unpublished “The Stranger’s Guise”, are housed in the collections of the Boston University.

Notes: Writer Jerry Portwood has an interview with essayist David Margolick, author of “Dreadful”, a biography on the life of John Horne Burns, at the online July issue of Out magazine: https://www.out.com/entertainment/art-books/2013/07/18/john-horne-burns-gay-icon-david-margolick-gallery-military

The Lambda Literary also has a 2013 interview with author David Margolick that covers  John Burns’s life and legacy: https://lambdaliterary.org/2013/07/david-margolick-john-horne-burns-and-the-dreadful-life/

A dissertation by Mark Travis Bassett entitled “John Horne Burns: Toward a Critical Biography” can be read as a free PDF download from MOspace, an online thesis extension of the University of Missouri: https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/35623

An online version of John Horne Burns’s 1948 “The Gallery” can be read for free at the Internet Archive site located at: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.168101/page/n5/mode/2up

For those interested, author David Margolick’s 2014 biography on John Burns, “Dreadful”, was published by Other Press and is available as both an ebook and paperback through various retailers.

Přemysl Koblic

The Photography of Přemysl Koblic

Born in July of 1892 in Prague, Přemysl Koblic was a Czech avant-garde photographer and educator whose theoretical findings and photographic practices significantly influenced the development of photography in Czechoslovakia. In addition to his experiments in photographic chemistry, Koblic promoted the emergence of new black and white photographic materials with such firms as Foma, Ako, and Neobrom.. 

The son of a chemical engineer, Přemysl Koblic began his studies in 1911 at Prague’s Czech Technical University; however, his education was  interrupted by the onset of World War I. After basic training, Koblic was sent at the end of 1915 to the Isonzo Front in Slovenia where he served as an army photographer with the 91st Infantry Regiment. Koblic finished his military service in the summer of 1918 and returned to his studies at the Czech Technical University. He graduated in 1919 and initially worked as an assistant at the university’s sugar-manufacturing department. Two years later, he became an administrator at Czechoslovakia’s Patent Office, where he managed patents covering photography, prints and food until 1935. 

Přemysl Koblic, who used his own small-format cameras, was a lifelong experimenter. He published his first technical texts prior to the First World War and, by 1920, was already a member of the Amateur Photographers’ Club in the Prague neighborhood of Královské Vinohrady. Among its members were such notable photographers as Alois Zych, Robert A. Šimon, Augustin Myška, František Oliveriusand, and Stanislav Krofta who joined upon his return from the United States. In 1923, Koblic joined a rival Prague photographic club that was later known as the Nekázanka. 

While post-war photographic work in Czechoslovakia during the early 1920s tended to create beautiful images, Koblic was interested in photographing the civilians of Prague during their daily work routines, the wait for trains, and travel through the bustling city streets. He felt that the essence of photography was found in the depiction of movement, life and activity. For him, the presentation of personal movement in the city, surrounded by its shapes, colors, lights and tones, was the highest form of photography as it depicted man in his own creation. Koblic was a pioneer in photography of the modern city, a theme that was further developed by others in the early 1940s.

When the country was affected by an economic crisis in the early 1930s, Přemysl Koblic collaborated with the Brno Film-Photo group of the Left Front which was led by economic theorist Lubomir Linhart. However, his work differed from the emerging photojournalism of the Communist periodicals that often published anonymous images by photo reporters. In the 1930s, Koblic published two books, the 1937 “Fotografování Vidí Svêt (Photography Sees the World)” and “Zvêtšování (Enlarging)” in 1938. Both of these volumes contained perfectly arranged photo appendices and samples of recent photographic work.

In 1936, Koblic became editor-in-chief of “Fotoografický Obzor (Photographic Horizon)” magazine and compiled the 1937 almanac edition for “Československá Fotografie (Czechoslovak Photography)”. He also closely collaborated with “Fotografie” magazine led by photographer and theorist Karel Hermann, a long-time friend. Koblic shared his photographic discoveries in numerous articles and through courses and lectures at local photo clubs and public venues. His photographic work and the technology he used greatly influenced the generation of magazine photographers in the late 1930s, including such artists as Josef Voříšek and Jan Lukas, as well as those of the later 1950s. 

For his entire life, Přemysl Koblic was connected with the Vršovice section of Prague; he converted his apartment on Ruskâ Street into an experimental photographic and chemical laboratory. Although he focused on other Prague locations, he depicted Vršovice in all its seasons and published many of these photographs equipped with texts. Koblic’s photographs were unique in their spontaneity; he could, without any hesitation, effortlessly shoot his subject within a second. Beginning in the 1930s, Koblic worked with a motion blur that gave a unique dynamic to his photographs. The most famous and frequently published of these works was the series done in 1948 at the Sokol Festival, entitled “Čtvrtá Dimense (The Fourth Dimemsion)”, for which he used a wide-angle camera. 

In the early 1950s, Koblic became involved in the Czechoslovak Union of Socialist Photography and the “Nova Fontografie (New Photography)” magazine that began publication in 1950 and promoted socialist realism in Czech photography. His photographs were quite distinctive from the average productions of that period. Although Koblic tried to comply with magazine’s desire for images with a socialist presence, his life-long interest in the documentary depiction of reality, including social relations, continued to be prevalent in his work.

Perceived by the general public as a clerk with a hard-earned status, Přemysl Koblic was involved in many hobbies and obsessions. His involvement in photographic chemistry led to the creation of the developer Pextral which became a standard for many years. He also constructed a series of photographic apparatuses including the Pohotovka, a prompt device. Koblic was interested in the chemistry aspect of the food industry and patented a process for yogurt production. He researched natural medications, made astronomical observations, and studied early European linguistics. All these interests, added to his homosexual orientation, made Koblic an eccentric figure for his time. 

Přemysl Koblic died in Prague in November of 1955 at the age of sixty-three. Due to the efforts of Czech photographer and historian Rudolph Skopec, the Moravian Gallery in Brno acquired part of Koblic’s work and Prague’s National Technical Museum became the guardian of a substantial collection of Koblic’s positive and negative images. 

Notes: For the research on this article, I am indebted to authors Jan Mlčoch, Pavla Vrbová, and Romana Kmochová for their informative articles on the photographic history of Czechoslovakia and Přemysl Koblic’s life and work. Their introductory article and “Prague in Pictures by Přemysl Koblic” are located at: https://eshop.ntm.cz/static/_dokumenty/1/6/2/8/8/00350_premysl_koblic-aj_m21_ukazka.pdf

An 2017 article on Czech Avant-Garde photography by Mariana Holá can be found on the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism located at: https://www.rem.routledge.com/articles/overview/photography

Top Insert Image: Jan Beran, “Přemysl Koblic”, Date Unknown, Vintage Print, 30 x 32.8 cm, Moravská Galerie

Second Insert Image: Přemysl Koblic, “Praha-Vršpvoce Depot”, circa 1930s, Vintage Print

Third Insert Image: Přemysl Koblic, “View of a Village from Above”, 1939, Vintage Print

Fourth Insert Image: Přemysl Koblic, “The Jewish Cemetery”, 1930-1939, Vintage Print, 29 x 39 cm, Moravská Galerie 

Bottom Insert Image: Přemysl Koblic, “Prague Street Scene”, 1946, Vintage Print, Moravská Galerie

Sir Francis Cyril Rose

The Artwork of Sir Francis Cyril Rose

Born at the grand English estate of Moor Park, Hertfordshire in September of 1909, Sir Francis Cyril Rose, 4th Baronet of the Montreal Roses, was an English painter who received strong support throughout the 1930s from his patron, American novelist and art collector Gertrude Stein. Although he created many works of art, Rose’s artistic output was as erratic as his lifestyle was audacious and extravagant. Despite Stein’s endeavors to generate a sustained interest in his work, Francis Rose remained one of the more obscure artists of his generation.

Descended from Spanish nobility, Francis Rose inherited his British baronetcy while still a child. He received his initial education from the Jesuits at Beaumont College in Old Windsor, Berkshire, as well as lessons from private tutors abroad. In 1926 at the age of seventeen, Rose relocated to Paris where he resided as an expatriate until 1936. He studied under avant-garde painter and typographic artist Francis Picabia, an early figure in the Dada Movement, and Spanish muralist and theater set designer Josep Maria Sert.

In 1930, Rose had his first exhibition, alongside Salvador Dali, at the Paris  gallery of modern art patron Marie Cuttoli. By this time, he had already designed costumes and scenery for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe, some of which were in collaboration with artist Christopher Wood. Rose would design theater sets and costumes again in 1939 for Lord Berners’s ballet production “Cupid and Psyche” at London’s Sadler’s Wells Theater. During the 1930s, he spent several years studying Chinese poetry and art in China; he later traveled extensively in Europe and North Africa with his future wife, Frederica Dorothy Carrington. 

While traveling in France in his early twenties, Francis Rose became a close acquaintance of author Gertrude Stein who helped launch his painting career by commissioning several of his works, including a portrait of herself, for her own art collection. Stein had discovered Rose’s paintings in a Parisian gallery in the late 1920s and eventually bought one hundred-thirty of his works. Through Stein’s support, Rose was able to exhibit his work in Paris, London and New York. He  also created illustrations for “The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook”, a publication by Stein’s lifetime partner, Alice Babette Toklas. Although the friendship between the three personalities wavered at times, Alice Toklas asked Rose to design Gertrude Stein’s grave site memorial.

In 1938, Rose completed what is considered one of his most successful paintings, “L’Ensemble”, an oil on canvas mural that depicted his circle of friends which included Jean Cocteau, Gloria Stein,  Alice Toklas, Christian Bérard, Pavel Tchelitchev and Natalie Barney, among others. This mural was exhibited in the following year at the  Petit Palais Musée des Beauz Arts in Paris. Called to military service at the beginning of World War II, Rose served as a disciplinary sergeant in the Royal Air Force. In 1942, Francis Rose exhibited his work at the “Imaginative Art Since the War” exhibition held in London’s Leicester Galleries; this exhibition was organized by Frederica Dorothy Carrington, one of two daughters to Sir Frederick Carrington.

Francis Rose and Dorothy Carrington were married in 1942; however, as Rose was a noted homosexual, the marriage eventually ended. By 1954, Carrington had permanently settled, without Rose, on the Corsican island of Ajaccio; their divorce was finalized in 1966. Carrington became one of the twentieth-century’s leading scholars on the island’s culture and history. In 1971, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and, in the next year, a member of the Royal Society of Literature. Carrington became a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1995.

In 1938, Rose gave an American stockbroker the power of attorney to manage his fortune; however, this stockbroker was involved in, and later convicted of, an embezzlement scheme. Rose lost most of his fortune and was nearly destitute by the end of the second World War. He spent his final years in a state of poverty, helped financially by friends foremost among whom was photographer Cecil Beaton. In an attempt to achieve some financial success, Rose published a memoir in 1961 entitled “Saying Life: The Memoirs of Sir Francis Rose”. This memoir discussed both his exploits, many which had factual issues, and his associations with the famous and artistic personalities of the time. “Saying Life”, however. was not the financial success that he needed. 

Sir Francis Cyril Rose died in London on the nineteenth of November in 1979 at the age of seventy. He had exhibited in London and Paris in the 1950s and 1960s with major retrospective in London and Brighton in 1966. Another third retrospective of Rose’s work was given at London’s England & Co in 1988. In addition to private collections, his work is included in London’s England & Co Gallery, the Stein-Tolkas Collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Notes:  The Nick Harvill Libraries has a biographical article with quotes entitled “Lord Chaos: The Life of Sir Francis Rose” at:  https://www.nickharvilllibraries.com/blog/lord-chaos-the-life-of-sir-francis-rose

Time Magazine has an archive review of Sir Francis Roses’s July 1949 exhibition of new work at London’s Gimpel Fils Gallery. The review is located at;   https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,888553,00.html

Top Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Sir Francis Rose”, Date Unknown, Bromide Print, The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive

Second Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Cecil Beaton, Gertrude Stein, Sir Francis Rose”, 1939, Bromide Print, 24 x 23.8 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London, England

Third Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Sir Francis Rose and Gertrude Stein, Bilignin”, 1939, Gelatin Silver Print from Original Negative, The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive

Bottom Insert Image: Francis Goodman, “Emma Tollemache and Sir Francis Rose”, 9 December 1947, Gelatin Silver Print from Original Negative, National Portrait Gallery, London, England

Emma Tollemache (née Manasseh) wrote the poetry collection “In the Light”. A limited edition of 250 copies with illustrations by Sir Francis Rose was published by Marlowe Galleries.