Bernard Perlin

Artwork by Bernard Perlin

Born in Richmond, Virginia in November of 1918, Bernard Perlin was an American painter and illustrator who was primarily known for his Magic Realism paintings and World War II posters supporting the American effort. He was the youngest child of Jewish immigrants from Russia and began his art studies at the encouragement of his high school teacher.

Perlin enrolled in the New York School of Design where he studied from 1934 to 1936. He enrolled in 1937 at the National Academy of Design and studied under painter and lithographer Leon Kroll. Perlin continued his studies at the Arts Student League under painter and graphic artist Isabel Bishop, mural painter William Palmer, and painter and printmaker Harry Sternberg. In 1938, he was awarded a Kosciuko Foundation Award which enabled him to continue his studies in Poland.

At the beginning of World War II, Bernard Perlin was rejected from military combat service as he was openly gay. However, he entered the graphics department of the Office of War Information for which he created patriotic propaganda posters to support the country’s war effort. Among his many wartime pieces are the 1943 “Let ‘Em Have It” war bonds advertisement and “Americans Will Always Fight for Liberty”, which depicted World War II marching with Continental Army soldiers from the American Revolutionary War.

Perlin continued his war effort as an artist-correspondent for Life Magazine from 1943 to 1944. While stationed in Greece for Life Magazine, Perlin went to the United States the first news and sketches from that country since the German invasion in 1941. At the war’s end in 1945, he began illustrative work at Fortune Magazine, a national business magazine with in-depth articles.

Bernard Perlin, influenced by the magic-realism movement, sought after the war to capture in his paintings everyday-life moments. His most famous work, “Orthodox Boys”, was painted in 1948. This painting depicted two Jewish boys standing in front of subway graffiti. Perlin’s 1945-1946 “The Leg”, a casein and tempera work on board, was the first postwar work by an American artist to be acquired by the Tate Museum in London.

Perlin moved to Italy for six years, where he produced magic-realist works done with a more brightly colored palette. After a brief stay in New York City, Perlin moved to Ridgefield, Connecticut, where he continued to paint until the 1970s. After several years of retirement, he began to paint again in 2012. After the completion of two new works, Perlin was given a retrospective of his work in 2013 at the Chair and the Maiden Gallery on Christopher Street in New York City.

Bernard Perlin met Edward Newell, a top fashion model in the 1950s and later the 1960s, at a 1954 New Year’s Eve party hosted by photographer George Platt Lynes. Their relationship that began in the summer of 1955 lasted for over fifty years until Perlin’s death. Newell and Perlin were married after it became legal in the state of Connecticut in 2008.

Bernard Perlin died at the age of ninety-five in January of 2014 at his home in Ridgefield, Connecticutt. His work can be found in museums and libraries, including the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Pritzker Military Museum and Library in Chicago.

Note: I have done research on Edward Newell without any success. I know that he was in Connecticut after Perlin’s death. If anyone has any information on Newell, please notify me through the comment section. Thank you.

Top Insert Image: George Platt Lynes, “Bernard Perlin”, 1940 Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Bernard Perlin, “His Home Over There”, circa 1942, YMCA/YWCA Poster, 69.5 x 102.5 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Bernard Perlin, “Let ‘Em Have It”, 1943, World War II Poster for War Bonds, 51 x 71 cm, Private Collection

Arthur Tress

The Photography of Arthur Tress

Born in Brooklyn, New York in November of 1940, Arthur Tress is an American photographer with an anthropological background who is known for his figurative work and staged psychological images . His career has encompassed a vast range of work from ethnographical and environmental documentation to modernist and magical-realistic images.

The youngest of four children born to European-Jewish parents, Arthur Tress became interested in photography early in his life. In his early teen-years, he photographed the buildings and abandoned amusement parks in the Brighton Beach and Coney Island neighborhoods. Tress studied painting at Bard College at Annandale-on-Hudson, New York where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1962.

After graduating, Tress moved to Paris, France, and briefly attended film school. He traveled extensively for four years around the world, particularly in Asia and Africa, where he developed an interest in the cultural and tribal beliefs of those he observed. Tress began to work in the field of ethnographical photography, which led to his first professional assignment as a U.S. government photographer recording the endangered folk cultures of Appalachian communities. Tress’s images from this period formed his 1960s series “Appalachia: The Disturbed Land”.

Arthur Tress was influenced by the photographers of The American Social Landscape, who in the tradition of straight, documentary photography focused on the aspects of the everyday environment, that is society’s practices, systems, and relationships as well as the boundaries between them. Members of this group included photographer Robert Frank known for his 1958 collection “The Americans”, Bruce Davidson known for his photographic study of East Harlem life, and Danny Lyons known for his documentary work on the civil rights movement. Tress was also impressed by such black and white cinematographers as Edward Tisse (1927 Battleship Potemkin), Gregg Toland (1941 Citizen Kane), and Boris Kaufman (1953 On the Waterfront).

Tress began to use his camera to raise environmental awareness about the human and economical costs of pollution. He documented the neglected areas of New York City’s urban waterfronts as well as the economic problems of New York’s inner city and their effects on its residents. From this body of work, two volumes of “Open Space in the Inner City” were published; the 1971 Volume One, an architectural drawing series of potential recreational areas in the city, and the 2010 Volume Two, a documentary series of inner city residents with a focus on urban teenagers.

In the summer of 1964, Arthur Tress stayed in San Francisco and photographed the city during a historic culture clash. San Francisco was the site of the launch of the Beatles’ first North American tour as well as the contentious 28th Republican National Convention at the Cow Palace that nominated Barry Goldwater of Arizona for President. During his time in the city, Tress became one of the photographers to shoot some of the first images of public LBGTQ life. After developing his negatives in a communal darkroom in the Castro District, he mounted two small exhibitions in North Bay galleries that summer. From this body of work, seventy images were later published as the 2012 “Arthur Tress: San Francisco 1964”.

Tress’s “Dream Collector” series began with a visit to a workshop designed to allow children the opportunity to make paintings and poetry from remembered dreams. He followed this visit with research on the nature of dreams, attendance at dream therapy sessions, and interviews with adults on their remembered dreams. Combining his interest in derelict urban spaces with ethnographical photography, Tress created a series of staged black and white photographic work with psychological undertones. One example of this series is the 1970 “Flood Dream”, an image of a child looking out a hole in a roof set against the background of a gray deserted beach.

An exhibition entitled “Arthur Tress, San Francisco 1964” was presented at San Francisco’s de Young Museum in 2012 accompanied by a monograph published by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Other monographs that examine Tress’s work include “Arthur Tress: The Dream Collector”, “Shadow: A Novel in Photographs”, and “Theatre of the Mind, Reeves and Arthur Tress: Fantastic Voyage: Photographs 1956-2000”.

In 2013, an exhibition of Tress’s work from “San Francisco 1964”, “Dream Collector” and “Theater of the Mind” was held at the Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts. A retrospective of Arthur Tress’s earlier works, entitled “Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows” was held from October 2023 to February 2024 at the John Paul Getty Center in Brentwood, Los Angeles.

Arthur Tress’s work is contained in many private collections and numerous museums and institutions including Stanford University, the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2021, an anonymous donor gave the University of Pennsylvania an outstanding collection of Arthur Tress photography. Penn Libraries now houses the largest collection, two thousand-five hundred photographic prints, of Tress’s work in the United States.

Notes: Arthur Tress, interested in Asian culture since his early travels, gathered together over the years a large personal collection of thirteen-hundred Japanese illustrated books. After a 2018 visit to Penn Libraries’ conservation department, he donated his entire Japanese collection to the university’s library.

Arthur Tress’s website, which contains photographic series from 1963 to 2015, can be located at: https://arthurtress.com

An interview between author Robert Hirsch and Arthur Tress for the January/February 2013 issue of LightResearch magazine can be located at: https://lightresearch.net/interviews/ArthurTress.html

On September 14, 2024, California’s Cambria Center for the Arts Film Festival will be showing the documentary “Arthur Tress: Waters Edge”. A special exhibition of his work will be shown at the center’s Studio Gallery from September 1st to the 14th. Tickets are available at: https://www.my805tix.com/e/tress-1

For those interested, limited edition photographs occasionally are available through established auction sites. The J. Paul Getty Museum’s shop has a limited edition of signed posters for Arthur Tress’s 2023-2024 exhibition “Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows”: https://shop.getty.edu

Top Insert Image: Arthur Tress, “Self Portrait”, 2018, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Arthur Tress, “Young Man & Statue of Adonis, Key West, Florida”, 1980, Gelatin Silver Print

Third Insert Image: Arthur Tress, “Boy on Bike Crossing Williamsburg Bridge, New York”, 1969, Open Space in the Inner City Series, Gelatin Silver Print, Edition of 8, Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Fourth Insert Image: Arthur Tress, “Two Men, Two Rooms, New York”, 1977, Edition of 50, Gelatin Silver Print, 25 x 25 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Arthur Tress, Title Unknown, (Flies), 1984, Spray Paint Series, Gelatin Silver Print

Barry Webster: “The Whole Forest Goes Silent. . “

Photographers Unknown, The Whole forest Goes Silent

In the evenings, Sam performs exercises to prepare his body for love-making with Franz. He practices kissing (something he’d once hated) by smooching deer lips, antelope ears, frog anuses, and the great, whiskered muzzles of sleeping bison. He improves his petting skills by necking with juniper bushes and pine tree trunks with such passion that the bark snaps and sap runs, or with such tenderness that the whole forest goes silent and swallows nest in his hair.

Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones, 2012, Arsenal Pulp Press

Born in Toronto in 1961, Barry Webster is a Canadian musician, translator, and writer of fiction, short stories, and non-fiction. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in English Literature at the University of Toronto and his Master of Arts in Creative Writing at Concordia University in Montreal. Webster is a classically trained pianist with two Associate Diplomas, ARCTs, from the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. Fluent in French, English and some German, he has translated some of his novels into French.

Webster’s first book of stories, “The Sound of All Flesh”, published by Porcupine’s Quill, won the 2005 ReLit Award for the best collection of Canadian short fiction; it was also a finalist for that year’s Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction presented by the Quebec Writers’ Foundation. This magic-realist collection of stories follows the lives of such people as a hydrophobic competitive swimmer, an opera singer who bathes in tubs of margarine for inspiration, and a travel writer whose terrified of having his photo taken. Webster’s stories from “The Sound of All Flesh” were short-listed for the National Magazine Award and the Canadian Broadcast Company-Quebec Prize.

Barry Webster’s 2012 novel entitled “The Lava in My Bones” is an ecologically-based novel, written in a magic-realist style, that is narrated from various perspectives. The storyline, divided into elemental sections such as rock, air, and water, follows Sam, a Canadian geologist, who attends an academic conference in Switzerland. There he meets the young, sexually active Franz, a swinger who awakens Sam’s nascent homosexuality. “The Lava in My Bones” is a fantasy story through which the connection between lovers, the dysfunction of families, and personal links to the planet we inhabit are examined. Webster’s novel was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the Ferro-Grumley Foundation and Publishing Triangle’s annual Literary Award, and the 2013 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LBGTQ Emerging Writers presented by the Writers’ Trust of Canada.

Barry Webster has participated at numerous literary series, among which were the Saints and Sinners Festival in New Orleans, Berlin’s Takl Galerie Series, the National Gallery of Ottawa, Vancouver’s Raw Exchange, and muliple literary programs on CBC Radio. Webster’s work has appeared in various publications including The Toronto Star Event, The Washington Post, Fiddlehead Magazine, and The Globe and Mail, Canada’s foremost news media company. After periods in various European cities, Barry Webster currently resides in East Montreal.

“I once attended a panel discussion where the topic was ‘Canadian Literature: Quiet Writing for a Quiet Nation.’ Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers is anything but quiet. It rants, seethes, and uses humor as a machete. The hyper-sensual language and extravagant fantasy of the erotic trysts between the narrator, his lover ‘F,’ and the ghost of saint Catherine Tekakwitha changed my understanding of fiction. I realized that thinking outside traditional heterosexual binaries requires a new template and so-called ‘realism’ can simply reinforce the status quo. Beautiful Losers showed me that literature could re-imagine what sexuality can be rather than merely slavishly reproducing the surface of life.”

—-Barry Webster, Montreal, The Query Project, September 2015, Plenitude Magazine

Note: Barry Webster’s website, which include a list of his published work, can be found at: http://www.barrywebster.ca/index.html

Plenitude Magazine is Canada’s only queer literary magazine. It promotes the development and growth of LGBTQ+ literature through online publication. The magazine can be found at: https://plenitudemagazine.ca

Top Insert Image: Camille Martin, “Barry Webster”, 2018, Color Print, Rogue Embryo Website

Header Photo Set: Fifth Image: Francesco Merlini, “Hua Hin”, The Farang Series, Gelatin Silver Print

Igor Sychev

The Paintings of Igor Sychev

Born in February of 1987 in the northern city of Nadym, Igor Sychev is a Russian artist known for his Magic-Realistic figurative paintings. At the age of five years having shown an inclination towards the arts, his parents enrolled him in the city’s art school where he studied until the age of sixteen. Sychev left Nadym upon graduation and relocated to Novosibirsk, the capital of Siberia, where he entered the Faculty of Industrial Design at the State Academy of Architecture, Design and Fine Arts.

After graduating from the Academy in 2010, Sychev moved to Moscow, which as Russia’s capital offered wider prospects for a career and self-expression. He soon obtained employment as an industrial designer and created designs for furniture and interior spaces. In 2011 while working in the design field , Sychev began a personal study of oil painting techniques. Over the next ten years, Igor Sychev gradually redirected his energies into pursuing a career as a painter.

In addition to the primary medium of oil paints, Igor Sychev also produces works in the mediums of watercolor, pencil, sepia and charcoal. His work is inspired by the works of the recognized Master artists , such as Michelangelo’s “David”, who viewed the nude male body as a source of beauty, Other influences on Sychev’s work include the paintings of Lucian Freud and Egon Schiele, the large-scale expressive paintings of Paolo Troilo, painter Gregory Little’s boldly colored figures in everyday scenes, and Portuguese painter Carlos Barahona Possollo’s male nude paintings.

As the present politics and attitudes in Russia are predominantly homophobic, Igor Sychev has not been able to exhibit in galleries or museums. He holds his private exhibitions in establishments offered by friends. Sychev’s work is held in many private collections throughout the world, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Denmark, and South Africa, among others.

Images of Igor Sychev’s paintings, watercolors and drawings, as well as contact information, can be found at the artist’s website located at: https://www.igorsychev.com

Bottom Insert Image: Igor Sychev, “Concrete Colours” Sketch, Date Unknnown, White/Black Pencil and Pen on Paper, Artist Collection (Available)

Luchita Hurtado

The Artwork of Luchita Hurtado

Born in Maiquetia, Venezuela in November of 1920, Luchita Hurtado was a painter whose work, with its strong feminist and environmental themes, crossed many different cultures and art movements. Although her career spanned over eight decades, she only received wide recognition for her art towards the end of her life.

In her early years, Luchita Hurtado lived in New York City with her mother, older sister and aunts. She studied Fine Art at the Art Student League and volunteered at “La Prensa”, the largest and oldest daily Spanish-language newspaper in the United States, where she met her first husband, Chilean journalist Daniel de Solar. In 1938 at the age of eighteen, Hurtado married Daniel de Solar and had two children together. The family relocated to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic after an invitation with a request to start a newspaper arrived from Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic.

Returning to the United States, Hurtado and her family settled back in New York City where they associated with many artists and journalists, among whom were Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo, artist and landscape designer Isamu Noguchi, surrealist artist and collector Wolfgang Paalen, and Japanese-American dancer Ailes Gilmour, who was Noguchi’s half-sister. In 1942, Hurtado divorced de Solar and subsequently married Wolfgang Paalen. Beginning in 1944, Luchita Hurtado produced window displays and painted murals for Bloomingdale’s, a luxury department store in New York City. She also did freelance work as an illustrator for the mass media company Condé Nast and worked as a muralist for the Lord and Taylor department store in the city.

In 1946, Luchita Hurtado and husband Wolfgang Paalen traveled to Mexico to research pre-Columbian art. A research article by Paaalen, with photographs taken by Hurtado, was published in the 1952 edition of the French literary and artistic journal “Cahiers d’Art”. After her divorce from Wolfgang Paalen, Hurtado moved to Los Angeles in 1951 with fellow painter Lee Mullican, whom she married in the late 1950s. Lee Mullican would remain with her until his death in 1998.

In 1970, Hurtado founded the feminist group, Los Angeles Council of Women Artists. She participated in their first exhibition at the Long Beach Museum of Art, “Invisible/Visible”, which was organized by multi-media artist Judy Chicago and sculptress Dextra Frankel. In 1974, Hurtado had a solo exhibition at the Woman’s Building, a non-profit arts and education center which focused the women’s movement and feminist art.

Except for her two exhibitions and work produced for Bloomingdale’s and Conde Nast, Luchita Hurtado’s artwork was largely unknown until 2015. Ryan Good, who was cataloguing the estate of Hurtado’s deceased husband Lee Mullican, found paintings signed “LH” among others in the collection. He showed these paintings to Paul Soto, founder of Los Angeles’s Park View Gallery, who gave Hurtado her second ever solo exhibition, “Luchita Hurtado: Selected Works, 1942-1952”, a two-month show which opened in November of 2016. Hurtado was ninety-six years old at the opening of the show.

With the recognition generated by the solo exhibition, Luchita Hurtado’s career erupted. Her work was included in the Hammer Museum’s 2018 “Made in L. A.” exhibition and received a good review from the L.A. Times and favorable critical reception. Hurtado’s paintings caught the attention of Hans Ulrich Obrich, a Swiss art curator and the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, two prestigious galleries located in central London. He gave Hurtado her first international solo exhibition entitled “Luchita Hurtado: I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn”.

Luchita Hurtado’s work contain elements from the avant-garde and modernist movements of the twentieth-century, including magical realism, abstraction, and surrealism. She used womb imagery in her works long before it appeared in the feminist art movement of the late 1970s. One of Hurtado’s best known series of works is the “I Am” images of the 1960s, self-portraits painted by her looking down at her own body. Taking up the issue of climate change, Hurtado painted more specific environmental themes, some of which contained block-lettered texts such as “Mother Earth” and “We Are Just a Species”.

Hurtado’s artwork depicting nude women contain loosely surrealistic forms that draw inspiration from pre-Columbian art, cave paintings, and abstraction in sculpture and paintings. Through her work, she focused attention on the edges of the body and the language used to bridge the gap between ourselves and others. Hurtado expressed this connection through images that coupled the intimate gestures of the body with the vastness of the sky and earth.

In February of 2020, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art held a retrospective of Luchita Hurtado’s work. She remained active in the arts until her death, at the age of ninety-nine, in August of 2020. Hurtado was named as one of ‘Time” magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2019. Her work is in many private collections and public collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Note: An interesting article on the life of Luchita Hurtado, which includes early photographs and video of Hurtado discussing her life , can be found at the Whipple Russell Architects site located at: https://whipplerussell.com/blog/critically-acclaimed-in-her-90s-modernist-luchita-hurtado

Second Inser Image: Luchita Hurtado, “Birth”, 2019, Acrylic on Linen, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Luchita Hurtado, “Encounter”, 1971, Detail, Oil on Canvas, 12 x 243 cm, Hauser and Wirth Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Oresti Tsonopoulos, “Luchita Hurtado”, 2018

Felice Casorati

The Paintings of Felice Casorati

Born in December of 1883 in Novara, Felice Casorati was an Italian artist known for his sculptures and paintings, which were rendered from unusual perspectives and often featured obscure symbols. He spent his formative years in the northeastern city of Padua where he developed an interest in literature and music. Casorati studied law at the University of Padua, graduating in 1906, and frequented the atelier of painter and sculptor Giovanni Viannello.

Casorati began painting in 1902; his earliest paintings were influenced by the symbolism of the Vienna Secession, a movement, closely related to Art Nouveau, which sought to unite all the disciplines of art into one movement. These early works of Casorati were exhibited at the 1907 Venice Biennale. Casorati’s adherence to symbolist ideals was reinforced after meeting and seeing the work of Austrian painter Gustav Klimt, one of the founders of the Vienna Secession, at the 1910 Vienna Biennale.

Felice Casorati spent the years between 1908 and 1911 in Naples, where he often visited the Museo di Capodimonte and viewed the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the Dutch Renaissance painter whom he particularly admired. Casorati relocated to Verona in 1911, where, along with poet and engraver Umberto Zerbinati and painter and graphic artist Pino Tedeschi, he founded the periodical “La Via Lattea (The Milky Way)”, for which he executed several symbolist woodcuts. For a brief period between 1914 and 1915, he abandoned his secessionist style and made expressionist woodcuts in the manner of Tuscan artists, such as Lorenzo Viani and Moses Levy.

Casorati’s first solo exhibition of his symbolist-influenced work was at the 1915 Secession III show held in Rome. Before being drafted into the Italian Army in 1915, he also executed his first sculptures in varnished terra cotta, a medium also favored by his friend, the sculptor Arturo Martini. After the end of World War I, Casorati settled at Turin in 1918 and became a prominent figure in the intellectual and artistic circles, including the conservative Return to Order movement which called for the rejection of the avant-garde in favor of a more traditionalist approach.

In Turin, Felice Casorati established friendships with composer and pianist Alfredo Casella and with the anti-fascist, political activist Piero Gobetti, who founded in February of 1922 the weekly magazine “De Rivoluzione Liberale”. Casorati supported the magazine and Gobetti , in return, championed Casorati’s work in Marxist writer and journalist Antonio Gramsci’s weekly newspaper, the “Ordine Nuovo”. Due to his radical associations, Casorati was arrested with an anti-Fascist group by the authorities for a brief period in 1923 and, subsequently, avoided antagonizing the regime.

The work Casorati produced in the 1920s was radically different from his pre-war work, which he now considered to be immature. The figures in his new work were solidly constructed and set securely in spaces organized by linear perspective theories established in the Italian Renaissance period of the fifteenth-century. Casorati was also influenced by Italian painter Andrea Mantegna’s work with its dramatically foreshortened figures, and the work of painter Piero della Francesca, known for his mathematical treatises and geometrically-composed paintings.

In 1922, Felice Casorati painted what is considered his most famous work “Silvana Cenni”, a portrait inspired by the work of Piero della Francesca, which features a stern woman in a seated, symmetrical, frontal view positioned in front of an open window. This tempera work on canvas, composed of carefully rendered volumes, became an iconic portrait of the traditional and period art of Italy which is now known as Magical Realism.

Beginning in 1923, Casotati opened his atelier to young art students in Turin, many of who would form Torino’s Group of Six, and emerging artists such as self-taught artist and writer Quinto Martini. He was also the co-founder of the Antonio Fontanesi Fine Arts Society, which organized exhibitions of both nineteenth-century and contemporary Italian and foreign art. Casorati was appointed a Professor of Interior Design in 1928 at Turin’s Accademia Albertina, a post he held until appointed as its Chair of Painting in 1941.

Felice Casorati was commissioned by his patron, Turin industrialist Ricardo Gualino, to work with architect Alberto Sartoris on the Piccolo Teatro in Milan and other decorative works. Casorati also designed costumes and sets for Milan’s Teatro alla Scala and the Maggio Musicale, the annual arts festival in Florence. Once again working with Sartoris, he designed a building for part of the Piedmontese Pavilion at the 1927 International Biennale in the city of Monza. Casorati exhibited his work widely throughout Italy and won the First Prize at the 1939 Venice Biennale.

The majority of Casorati’s later paintings were done in a softer palette with a more gentle perspective. He produced over one hundred-fifty prints in his lifetime, in which he experimented with a variety of techniques that incorporated slate, papyrus and terra cotta matrixes. The simplified mannequin-like figures, which featured in Casorati’s prints of the late 1920s, remained in his etchings, linocuts, and lithographs for the length of his career.

Felice Casorati passed away on March 1, 1963. Most of his important works are in Italian private and public collections, including Trieste’s Modern Art Revoltella Museum and Rome’s National Gallery of Modern Art. Museums holding Casorati’s art in their collections include the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Musrum of Fine Arts in Boston, among others.

Dick Hendrik Ket

Paintings by Dick Hendrik Ket

Born in 1902 in the small port town of Den Helder, The Netherlands, Dick Ket was a magic realist painter. He was born with a serious heart defect, probably a symptom of Fallot, incurable at that time and causing insufficient nourishment of tissues and organs.

In his childhood, Ket was encouraged by two teachers who appreciated his artistic talent. His drawing teacher, Johan C. Kerkemeijer directed him toward the techniques of oil painting. His science teacher Henri Adrien Naber, an author and theosophist, encouraged him to look into the relationship between geometry and mysticism.

After studying art at the Kunstoefening Arnhem Academy from 1922 to 1925, Ket could no longer travel, becoming debilitated by chronic fatigue and growing phobias. He lived in seclusion with his parents in the small town of Bennekom, not venturing out of the house until after 1930. Ket’s exposure, through reproductions, to the art of painter Neue Sachlichkeit in 1929 led him to concentrate his work in the magic realist style.

Housebound by his illness, Dick Ket painted still lifes and self portraits. His meticulously composed still lifes are always centered on the same themes and are often composed of the same objects: empty bowls, eggs, bottles, newspapers and musical instruments. These objects are arranged in different angles to each other, painted as viewed from above, and seen casting strong shadows.

During the period from 1930 to 1940, Dick Ket’s health progressively deteriorated, leading to his early death at age thirty-seven in September of 1940. Over the course of his career, Dick Ket produced approximately one hundred-forty paintings, a third of which were self portraits. Among the museums containing Ket’s work in their collections are the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Arnhem Museum, and the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam.

Top Insert Image: Dick Ket, “Self Portrait”, 1935, Conté Crayon and White Crayon on Paper, 113 x 75 cm, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Bottom Insert Image: Dick Ket, “Self Portrait”, Date Unknown, Conté Crayon on Paper

George Tooker

Paintings by George Tooker

George Clair Tooker, Jr. was an American figurative painter whose works are associated with the Magic Realism and Social Realism movements. Working with the then-revitalized tradition of egg tempera, Tooker addressed issues of modern-day alienation with subtly eerie and often visually literal depictions of social withdrawal and isolation. He was one of nine recipients of the National Medal of Arts in 2007.

Images from Top to Bottom;

George Tooker, “The Subway”, 1950, Egg Tempera on Composition Board, 46 x 92 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

George Tooker, “Divers”, 1962, Egg Tempera on Gessoed Panel, 30 x 46 cm, Private Collection

George Tooker, “Lunch”, 1964, Egg Tempera on Gessoed Panel, 50.8 x 66 cm, Columbus Museum of Art

George Tooker, “Window II”, 1956, Egg Tempera on Panel, 61 x 46 cm, Collection of James and Barbara Palmer

Jared French

Top Image: Jared French, “Evasion”, 1947, Tempera on Canvas Mounted to Panel, 54.5 x 29.2 cm, Cleveland Museum of Art

Bottom Image: Jared French, “Learning”, 1946, Egg Tempera on Gesso Panel, 61.6 x 58.4 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

French was well regarded during the 1940s and 1950s as one of the most accomplished and fascinating magic realist painters. A still understudied group of artists, the magic realists revived painstaking old master techniques to make convincing their enigmatic images that address a wide range of personal and social concerns. Part of a series of works French made to chronicle the human condition, “Evasion” symbolizes an individual’s attempt to deny the physical self. As such, the painting manifests tensions regarding sexual mores in mid 20th-century America. While it is reductive to attribute French’s iconographic interest in “Evasion” solely to his bisexuality, the fact remains that French was one of the first American artists whose same-sex desires were recognized and acknowledged by contemporaries who viewed his work.

Note: For those interested in more information on Jared French, I recommend Emily Sachar’s “Jared French’s State Park: A Contextual Study”, which was submitted for he Master of Arts degree. It includes a chapter of French’s artistic circle of friends, including his freindship with Paul Cadmus, as well as several images of French’s most notable works. The article can be found at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1289&context=hc_sas_etds