Tag: modernism

Gustave Van de Woestijne

The Paintings of Gustave Van de Woestijne

Born at Ghent in August of 1881, Gustave Van de Woestijne was a Belgian expressionist painter whose depictions of humble rural life were shaped by philosophical reflections and avant-garde Western-European trends. While influenced by the Parisian avant-garde, Symbolism and Flemish Expressionism, Van de Woestijne created his own distinctive painterly style.

Gustave Van de Woestijne was the younger brother of writer, poet and art historian Karel Van de Woestijne who, upon the death of their father, oversaw his care. In his youth, Gustave studied at the Ghent Academy for the Fine Arts. Through his brother, he received an intellectual education that, at a young age, opened the door to a world of sculpture, literature and classical music.

In 1900 at the age of nineteen, Van de Woestijne traveled with his brother Karl to the small village of Sint-Martens-Latem on the banks of the River Lys where Karl, who had brought French symbolism to Belgium, founded a colony of loosely affiliated artists from the Ghent Academy. In the company of the First Group of Latem, Van de Woestijne developed artistically and painted biblical and rural life scenes, as well as sensitive portraits of village figures, family members and friends..

Gustave Van de Woestijne, like his brother Karel, organized his life as well as his art around philosophical reflections. He was concerned with existentialist questions that later became magnified with religion. After leaving Sint-Martens-Latem in 1905, he briefly entered the Benedictine Order in Leuven. However after four weeks, Van de Woestijne decided against the monastic life. He was too driven by creative desire to entirely devote his life to the church. Van de Woestijne instead used his painting skills and his palette of subtle earthly colors to portray the Catholic virtues of simplicity, humility and hope.

After leaving Leuven, Van de Woestijne relocated to Etterbeek, a municipality of Brussels and, later, the village of Tiegem in West Flanders. The memories of his stay at the River Lys artist colony still continued to influence both theme and style of his paintings. During the First World War, Van de Woestijne and his family lived in Wales where he spent time in the company of artists Valerius De Saedeleer and George Minna. He painted allegories of the war situation and numerous portraits, including those of his fellow artists. Van de Woestijne also was acquainted with businessman and art collector Jacob de Graaf, who became patron to him and other members of the Latem group. 

Gustave Van de Woestijne returned to Belgium in 1913 where he met Brussels art patrons David and Alice van Buuren who purchased their first painting by the artist. Between 1928 and 1931, the couple commissioned seven still lifes from Van de Woestijne for their modernist Brussels house. Eventually, David and Alice van Buuren acquired thirty-two works by the painter, a major part of Van de Woestijne’s oeuvre. 

Gustave Van de Woestijne’s 1910 Flemish portrait, “The Farmer”, had displayed the beginning of his movement towards modernism through its refined realism, large areas of color and its symmetrically composed plain background. Various trips to Paris had exposed Van de Woestijne to the artistic avant-garde innovations in the works of Picasso, Modigliani and Rousseau. It was after his return to Belgium that his work became more related to the Modernist movement. Van de Woestijne incorporated those avant-garde developments into his own techniques to create a  personal modernist style: a meditative form of symbolism with expressionist and cubist visual elements.

Upon the death of his brother Karel in 1929, Van de Woestijne took over his brother’s position as director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Mechelen and also taught in Antwerp and Brussels. He continued to paint, predominately Christian scenes with a more neutral palette, until his death. Gustave Van de Woestijne died at the age of sixty-five on the twenty-first of April in 1947 at the Belgian city of Uccle. His body is interred in the historic Cemetery of Campo Santo, Sint-Amandsberg, Ghent.

Works by Gustave Van de Woestyne are held in many private collections and public collections that include the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, Van Buuren Museum & Gardens, and the Museum of Deinze and the Lys Region. 

Notes: Conceptual Fine Arts (CFA) has an article by Brussels-based curator and writer Evelyn Simons entitled “The Quotidian Avant-Garde of Gustave Van de Woestyne” on its website: https://www.conceptualfinearts.com/cfa/2020/08/31/gustave-van-de-woestyne/

The Museum of Fine Arts Ghent has a short article on Gustave Van de Woestijne in connection with its 2020-2021 collection exhibition of his work: https://www.mskgent.be/en/exhibitions/gustave-van-de-woestyne

A biography on Karel Van de Woestijne, considered possibly the most important post-symbolist poet to have written in the Dutch language, can be found on the Poetry International website: https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poets/poet/102-8508_Van-de-Woestijne

Top Insert Image: Gustave Van de Woestijne, “Self Portrait”, 1912, Oil on Canvas, 180 x 48 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Gustave Van de Woestijne, “Still Life with a White Jug”, 1922, Gouache on Paper, 76.5 x 55.5 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, Belgium

Third Insert Image: Gustave Van de Woestijne, “The Liquer Drinkers”, 1922, Oil on Canvas, 109.5 x 99 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp, Belgium

Bottom Insert Image: Gustave Van de Woestijne, “Fugue”, 1925, Oil on Canvas, 80.5 x 80 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, Belgium

Károly Kernstok

The Artwork of Károly Kernstok

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Géza Vörös

The Paintings of Géza Vörös

Born in 1897 in Nagydobrony, now the Ukrainian city of Velyka Dobron, Géza Vörös was a Hungarian painter. He studied at the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts under Ede Balló, a Hungarian graphic artist and painter best known for his portraits. After his studies, Balló lived and worked in Szolnok located on the Tisza River and the former mining town of Nagybánya (Baia Mare in Romania).

Géza Vörös painted landscapes, both rural and urban, still life arrangements, posed figurative works, and portraits. His stylized paintings reveal a keen sense of observation and subtle humor. Vörös’s work bears the objectivity of the Neo-Classical style as well as the elegant sensual aesthetic seen in works of Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts. 

In the early twentieth-century, Szentendre was a small provincial town on the Danube River, approximately twenty miles north of Budapest. During the period between the two World Wars, its established artist colony provided a shelter for numerous artists and writers. With Vörös’s arrival at Szentendre in 1929, his paintings changed from their earlier uninspiring shades of color to palettes of warm, soft colors. Vörös remained in the city until the 1940s, after which there is very little information on his life. 

Géza Vörös was a member of both the New Artists’ Association and the prestigious New Society of Artists. He was associated with Budapest-born painter Hugó Scheiber, a modernist painter whose work, initially executed in a post-Impressionist style, turned increasingly towards Futurism and German Expressionism. Scheiber was also a member of the New Society of Artists. 

Géza Vörös died in Budapest in 1957. A memorial retrospective of his work was organized in 1961 and held at Budapest’s Mücsarnok Kunsthalle, its historic Neoclassical styled Hall of Art. 

Note: If anyone has any additional biographical information on Géza Vörös, I would be interested in adding that to the biography. Please send it via my contact page. 

Top Insert Image: Géza Vörös, “Self Portrait”, 1935, Oil on Canvas, 60.5 x 50 cm, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest

Bottom Insert Image: Géza Vörös, “The Bird Preachers”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 70 x 70 cm, Private Collection

Francis Gerard Dillon

The Paintings of Gerard Dillon

Born in Belfast in 1916, Francis Gerard Dillon was an Irish painter and designer. He was one of the most imaginative folk-inspired Irish painters of the twentieth-century. Except for a drawing class in London and a short period at the Belfast Art School in the early 1930s, Dillon was a self-taught artist who developed his own particular style.

Interested in art, film and theater since childhood, George Dillon left school at the age of fourteen and traveled to London. He supported himself with odd jobs during the early 1930s followed by a position with a London decorating firm from 1934 to 1939. Dillon began to paint in 1936 and frequently visited the Connemara region which played a major influence on his work. There he painted many landscapes and portraits of the local people working the land.

With the outbreak of World War II, Dillon returned to Belfast and, over the next five years, developed his skill as a painter in Dublin and Belfast. In 1942 with the support of his friend Mary Harriet “Mainie” Jellett, an early abstract painter and promoter of Irish modern art, he had his first solo exhibition at The Country Shop in St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin. The paintings in the show, “Father Forgive Them Their Sins”, were focused on his concerns over the new war in Europe.

Beginning in 1943, Gerard Dillon was a regular contributor and committee member of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. Founded by Mary Jellett, it was a yearly exhibition of Irish abstract expressionism and avant-garde art that challenged the traditionalist Irish art movements supported by the Royal Hibernian Academy and National College of Art. In 1944, Dillon presented his work alongside the work of fellow Belfast painter George Campbell at painter John Lamb’s Portadown Gallery.

Dillon relocated to London in 1945; however, he continued to return to Connemara in the late 1940s and during the 1950s so he could paint in his favorite town of Roundstone. In 1951, Dillon was introduced to Belfast painter Noreen Rice, who was also a self-taught artist of surrealistic and primitive style. For the support and guidance given in her early career, Noreen Rice would regard both Dillon and George Campbell as her mentors for decades. 

In the late 1950s Gerard Dillon moved away from landscape painting and moved into complete abstraction. He was surrounded by the abstract expressionist movement and exposed to works by Mark Rothko, William de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Antonio Tàpies and Asger Jorn, all of whom were exhibiting at the Tate. It is possible that collage artist and painter Richard Hamilton, while staying with Dillon in London in 1950s, influenced Dillon who began working with collage, found objects, and repetitions of color and patterns for large-scale composition pieces. After moving to Dublin, Dillon received a double honor in 1958 with his representation of Ireland at New York City’s Guggenheim International Exhibition and his representation of Great Britain at Pittsburg’s International Exhibition.

Dillon’s three brothers tragically passed away within quick succession of one another between 1962 and 1966. This traumatic period gravely affected his state of mind; Dillon’s work turned into a form of escapist art as he tried to cope with the loss. Throughout this period he returned continuously to the motif of the clown and the figure of Pierrot, a theme also explored by other artists in the Ulster group. At the end of the 1960s, there was a pronounced shift in Dillon’s work. The impact of his loss followed by suffering a stroke in 1967 affected his artistic output. The reoccurring motifs of clown and Pierrot became submerged in surreal, fantastical landscapes and geometric patterns. Dillon was also struggling with finding a way to express his sexuality. His deep interest in self-analysis developed a series of symbolic motifs, most often masked figures, which came to represent himself within his art.

Gerard Dillon continued his painting, made tapestries, and designed theatrical sets and costumes for playwright Seán O’Casey’s 1968 “Juno and the Paycock”. During the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Dillon withdrew his work from the Belfast branch of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art; however, he also gave work for gallery owner Sheelagh Flannigan’s October 1969 exhibition supporting relief for the victims of the Belfast riots. During his last years of illness, Francis Gerard Dillon continued to be actively involved in a children’s art workshop at Dublin’s National Gallery of Ireland. On the 14th of June in 1971, he died of a second stroke at the age of fifty-five. Dillon’s grave, as requested, is unmarked in Belfast’s Milltown Cemetery. 

Note: Gerard Dillon was both a homosexual and a religious man. There is one entry in his diary of a homosexual encounter that resulted in a sense of guilt; that incident aside, there is no other empirical evidence concerning encounters in his life. Karen Reihill, the author of “Gerard Dillon: Art and Friendships”, points to a probable love on Dillon’s part for the painter Daniel O’Neill, another self-taught artist from Belfast who, along with Dillon and George Campbell, was a member of a small artists’ colony in Conlig, County Down. Reihill also pointed to Dillon’s association with two members of the modernist White Stag Group: British painters Basil Rákóczi, who was known to be bisexual, and Kenneth Hall, who was homosexual.

Top Insert Image: Gerard Dillon, “Self Portrait”, Date Unknown, Pen and Ink Drawing on Paper, 16.5 x 11.4 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Gerard Dillon, “Hole in the Hill”, circa 1959, Mixed Media and Collage, 45 x 59 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Gerard Dillon, “Self Portrait with Pierrot and Nude”, circa 1960s, Oil on Board, National Gallery of Ireland

Bottom Insert Image: Gerard Dillion, “Marine Movement”, Date Unknown, Mixed Media on Canvas, 40 x 51 cm, Private Collection

Edward Burra

Paintings by Edward Burra

Born in South Kensington in March of 1905, Edward John Burra was an English painter, printmaker, and draftsman best known for his depictions of the urban underworld and New York City’s Harlem culture of the 1930s. He attended preparatory school at Northaw Place, located in Hertfordshire, until 1917 when he suffered from pneumonia and had to continue his education at home. His education ranged wider than most boys of his class, including a great understanding of French literature.

Burra struggled his whole life with rheumatoid arthritis and a debilitating blood disease which meant that he was never able to use an easel in the conventional way. He was basically forced to sit and work mostly in watercolor, unfashionable at the time, on thick paper laid flat on a table. The fluidity of the watercolor medium, though, allowed Burra to produce a smooth finish, even though he was working with an arthritic hand. Although Burra was briefly a member of the 1930s’ One Unit collective of Modernist artists , his ill health prevented him from actively joining artistic groups and cliques. He, for the most part, protected his privacy and went his own way in the art world.

Edward Burra began his art training in 1921 with a tutor, Miss Bradley, who lived in the coastal town of Rye, East Sussex. At the age of sixteen, he studied at the Chelsea School of Art for two years. From 1923 to 1925, Burra studied at the Royal College of Art under draftsman and etcher Randolph Schwabe and portrait and landscape painter Raymond Coxon. In his time at Chelsea, he established friendships which would support him his whole life; these included the costume designer Beatrice Dawson, photographer Barbara Ker-Seymer, and, perhaps his closest friend, William Chappell, a ballet dancer who became a fellow traveler and Burra’s introduction to avant-garde dance.

Burra delighted in travel. In the summer of 1925 while in Italy, he met landscape painter Paul Nash, who at that time was already well-know for his work as a war artist in World War One. In October of that year, Burra visited Paris accompanied by William Chappell and, in 1926, visited Paris and stayed in both Florence and Siena, Italy with his family. Later, in the mid 1930s, he landed in Harlem, New York, at the height of its cultural Renaissance; he had been fascinated with its culture since his early exposure to imported American jazz music. Burra’s paintings of the places he visited in the world were not made on location. Blessed with a photographic memory, he reworked images of Paris, Marseilles, and Harlem at his parents’ eleven-acre estate in Rye where he continued to live until his death.

Edward Burra has his first solo exhibition at London’s Leicester Galleries in 1929 which was followed with a second show in May of 1931. In October of 1929, he exhibited with the London Group and showed his woodblock prints at the Society of Wood-Engravers exhibition at London’s Redfern Gallery, this would be followed in November of 1942 with a solo exhibition of his paintings.  In October of 1931, Burra exhibited in the show “Recent Developments in British Painting”, alongside Paul Nash,, Ben Nicolson, John Armstrong and Edward Wadsworth, at Arthur Tooth & Sons gallery in London. Beginning in July of 1952, at the age of forty-seven, until his death, Burra had multiple solo exhibitions at the Lefevre Gallery, one of London’s most prestigious galleries. 

Edward Burra had a sharp eye for contemporary urban life and also a deep knowledge and affection for art of the past. His 1926 “Market Day”, showing two black sailors sauntering along a chaotic dockside, contains a wealth of detail from its merchant ships unloading and couples courting to the bowl of fruit balanced on the head of a woman and the jazzy necktie on one of the sailors. In his 1929 “The Two Sisters”, Burra took the eighteenth-century conventional genre of a group of people gathered socially and, showing his satirical wit, depicted the two women with pronounced rouge, lipstick and open dresses, being served by a maid who on closer look is a man in drag. Another work in 1929, “Dockside Cafe, Marseilles” shows clearly two male transvestites by the bar and a standing sailor wearing ballet shoes with criss-crossed ribbons. Burra’s life, however, cannot be read directly from his art. Although drawn to the clubs and cafés, he was a non-participating observer of these scenes which he stored in his memory for future works. 

Best known for his early images of city life, Edward Burra continued to develop his painting throughout his career. Beginning in the mid-1930s and into the war years, his work darkened with images of the cruelty of the war and the tragedy of the innocents who killed or were killed. In the 1950s, Burra started painting images of the British countryside, whose consoling pastures evolved into ones with rusting machinery, animal skulls, and an increasing sense of unease. In the 1960s through the mid-1970s, his work directly commented on the rapid change in the countryside around him. The farm tractors, lorries, and diggers in Burra’s work transform into monstrous machines ripping through the landscape. 

Following the death of his mother in the 1960s, Burra moved into a small cottage on the grounds of the family’s estate. His sister came to visit and there were occasional motoring holidays with his close friend William Chappell. Burra continued, however, to be obsessed with his painting to the exclusion of all else. After breaking his hip in 1974, his health declined quickly. Edward Burra died, at the age of seventy-one, in Hastings, East Sussex, on the 22nd of October in 1976.

Although he declined associate membership in the Royal Academy in 1963, Edward Burra accepted the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, the CBE, in 1971. A retrospective of his work was held at the Tate Gallery in 1973; in conjunction with the exhibition, the Arts Council of Great Britain produced “Edward Burra”, a documentary on his life and work. In June of 2011, Edward Burra’s 1948 watercolor “Zoot Suits”, depicting two well-dressed men in Harlem, set a record at Sotheby’s for a work by the artist when it sold for 2,057,250 Pounds.

Tope Insert Image: Barbara Ker-Seymer, “Edward Burra”, 1933, Photograph, 4.5 x 3.5 cm, Tate Museum, London

Second Inser Image: Edward Burra, “Flowering Vegetables”, 1957-59, Watercolor and Pencil on Paper, 134.5 x 76.5 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Edward Burra”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Tate Museum, London

Bottom Insert Image: Edward Burra, “Ropes and Pullies”, 1942-43, Watercolor and Pencil on Paper, 109.9 x 76.8 cm, Private Collection

Marsden Hartley

Paintings by Marsden Hartley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hedda Sterne

The Artwork of Hedda Sterne

Born Hedwig Lindenberg in Bucharest, Romania, in 1910, Hedda Sterne received a rich primary education that included the study of multiple languages, German philosophy, and art history. With the encouragement of Modernist painter and professor Max Hermann Maxy, Sterne began her formal art education in 1918. Her first teacher was the Realist sculptor Frederic Stock, a professor at the Bucharest National University of the Arts. 

As early as 1924, Hedda Sterne gravitated to the Constructivist, Dada, and Surrealist artist communities of Bucharest and Paris. She took classes in ceramics atVienna’s Museum of Fine Arts and, in 1929, enrolled at the University of Bucharest, where she studied under literary and art critic Tudor Vianu, and philosophers Nae Ionescu, and Mircea Florian. In addition to her early work with Frederic Stock, Sterne worked in the studio of Surrealist painter Marcel Janco, who was a co-founder of the Dada movement, and became a close friend with Surrealist painters Victor Brauner and his brother Théodore Brauner, realist painter Jules Perahim, classical painter Medi Wexler, and surrealist poet Gheorghe Dinu.

In the late 1930s, Sterne began her work in the mediums of painting and collage. Drawn to the Surrealist practice of automatism, a process which allows the subconscious mind control over the formation of a work, Sterne  developed her own unique style of collage. Sterne’s collage work was first recognized in 1939 at the Fiftieth annual Salon des Indépendants in Paris, where her work was singled out by painter Jean Arp, who recommended her work to art patron and collector Peggy Guggenheim. After the outbreak of World War II and the Bucharest pogrom, Sterne was able to acquire the necessary visas for travel, which enabled her to embark from Lisbon and sail to New York in October of 1941. 

Settling in Manhattan, Hedda Sterne established an apartment and studio on East 50th Street and soon developed a close friendship with Peggy Guggenheim, a close neighbor on Beekman Place. Sterne re-united with many Surrealistic artists she had known in Paris, including Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and André Breton. She also began a close friendship with author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, whom she encouraged to illustrate his own book “The Little Prince”. Involved with the circle of New York School of artists, Sterne’s work was included in surrealism’s seminal exhibition in the United States, “The First Papers of Surrealism”,  held in October of 1942 at Manhattan’s Whitelaw Reid Mansion.

By 1943 Sterne’s work was regularly show in exhibitions at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery, including the 1943 “Exhibition by 31 Women”. In November of 1943, Sterne had her first solo show in the United States at the Manhattan’s Wakefield Gallery, organized by art dealer and collector Betty Parsons. This began a nearly forty-year collaboration between Sterne and Parsons, who represented her after the opening of her own gallery, the Betty Parsons Gallery, in 1947.

Throughout her career, Hedda Sterne’s diverse series of artwork were a reflection of the changing world around her.  In the 1940s, she began to draw inspiration from the motion, architecture and scale of her new New York surroundings.  Following a visit to Vermont with her husband and fellow artist Saul Steinberg, Sterne began studying farm machinery, as well as the construction sites and harbors of New York and post-war Paris. By the 1950s, these Machine paintings and drawings had evolved into a series about motion itself.   Often utilizing commercial spray paint to invoke a feeling of speed, Sterne’s large gestural canvases of the mid-1950s were inspired by city bridges and her travels on highways around the United States.

Hedda Sterne began, in the 1960s, to explore new themes in her work, expanding beyond the inspiration of her immediate surrounding to include her interests in science and philosophy.  The qualities of light and space were often a central focus of investigation in Stern’s work.  While on a Fulbright Fellowship in Venice in 1963, she experimented with mosaic and refined a series entitled “Vertical-Horizontals”, paintings that invoked an expansive, horizontal landscape, whose reach, however, was confined within a vertical format. Later in the decade, as drawing took on a more central role in her practice, Sterne developed dense and intricate organic abstractions in series entitled “Lettuces and Baldanders”.

In addition to exploring both physical and conceptual subjects in her work, Sterne also produced both geometric and organic abstractions.  Among her largest series of works on canvas are her 1980s “Patterns of Thought” paintings, in which she, now in her seventies, explored the universality of signs and symbols through prismatic geometric structures.  While doing this series, Sterne also developed various drawings and loose studies of nature, with elaborate organic structures and ghostly apparitions emerging from the page.

Hedda Sterne was a prolific artist who maintained  a daily practice of making art throughout a career that spanned nine decades. Her work intersected with some of the most important movements and figures of twentieth-century art. Even though affected by macular degeneration, she continued to create new work in her eighties and nineties; unable to paint by 1998, she still drew. Her vision and movement affected by two strokes between 2004 and 2008, Sterne passed away in April of 2011 at the age of one hundred.

In 1977 Hedda Sterne was honored with her first retrospective exhibition of her work at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey. Her second retrospective entitled “Hedda Sterne: Forty Years” was held at New York’s Queens Museum in 1985. Her third retrospective was held in 2006, entitled “Uninterrupted Flux: Hedda Sterne; A Retrospective:, at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois.

Top Insert Image: Henri Cartier-Bresson, “Hedda Sterne”, 1961, Silver Gelaton Print.   Second Image: Edith Glogau, “Hedda Sterne, October 1932 Issue of Die Bühne Magazine, Vienna;   Third Image: Lilian Bristol, “Hedda Sterne in Her Studio with Her Portrait of Joan Mitchell”, 1955;   Bottom Image: Nina Leen, Hedda Sterne and New York School of Painters, January 1951 Life Magazine Photo

More information on Hedda Sterne’s life and a complete body of her work cna be found at the Hedda Sterne Foundation located at: https://heddasternefoundation.org

Charles Burchfield

Charles Burchfield, “House of Mystery”, 1924, Watercolor over Graphite on Heavy Textured Cream Wove Paper Laid on Cardboard and Varnished, 74 x 60 cm, Art Institute of Chicago

Insert: Charles Burchfield, “Orion in December”, 1959, Pencil and Watercolor on Paper, 101 x 84 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Born in Ashtabula Harbor, Ohio, Charles Ephraim Burchfield was a Modernist painter known for passionate watercolor scenes of nature and townscapes. During his life, he often drew inspiration from the urban atmosphere of Buffalo, New York, and the small town settings in Salem, Ohio. 

Charles Burchfield won a scholarship to attend the Cleveland School of Art, where he studied under the Modernist watercolor painter Henry G. Keller, graduating  in 1916. He developed his own particular style, working in a dry-brush technique, by the summer of 1915, sketching and painting around Salem, Ohio. Burchfield painted in an almost Fauvist style with broad areas of simple colors and, adding in 1917, visual motifs expressing human, often disturbing, moods. Painting consistently, he produced half of his life-time work while living in Salem from 1915 to 1917. 

Starting in 1919, initially to provide financially for his wife and children, Burchfield painted small-town and industrial scenes in the style of the Regionalist movement with the intent to sell them in the New York art market. After the approach in 1928 to the Frank Rehn Gallery in New York, the successful sales of his work enabled him to resign his wallpaper design employment at Birge & Co in Buffalo and paint full-time. These large watercolors of small towns and industries, often resembling oil paintings, which continued until 1943, are the ones most associated with him.

Attempting to regain a lost intensity, Charles Burchfield again returned in 1943 to the enthusiasm of his earlier work, developing large, visionary renditions of nature envisioned with heightened colors, swirling brush strokes, and exaggerated forms. Using the skills he mastered in his middle years, he attempted to show an era of human history where men saw spirits in natural objects and forces of nature. He also returned to watercolors done in his youth, reworking and enlarging them by adding sections of paper to the original sheets. 

Charles E. Burchfield died on January 10th of 1967 at the age of seventy-three, after spending most of his life in West Seneca, New York. He is buried in Oakwood Cemetery in the Village of East Aurora, New York. The largest collection of his paintings are in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo. 

Bernard Vista

Paintings by Bernard Vista

Born in 1968 in the city of Pakil in the Laguna Province of the Philippines, modernist painter Bernard Vista paints larger than life depictions of the rustic Philippine countryside and its people, focusing on their customs and traditions. He is a follower of the traditional ‘tipos dei pais’ art form, which showed Philippine’s different inhabitants in their native costumes worn during colonial times.

A graduate of the Fine Arts program of the University of Saint Tomas, Bernard Vista was influenced by his mentors: neo-realist painter  Cesar Legaspi and modern abstractionist painter H.R. Ocampo, both awarded as Filipino National Artists for their work.

Vista became a member of the Saturday Group of Artists established in July of 1968 by painter Cesar Lagapi. This group, which became a premier art institution in the country, introduced interactive painting activities and helped to financially support artists in difficulty. Vista is also a founding member of the Guevarra Group of Artists, along with painter and sculptor Dominic Rubio, sculptor Jerry Morada, and painters Gig and Vincent de Pio. 

Bernard Vista has had successful solo exhibitions at Galerie Joaquin in San Juan, Manila,  and Galerie Joaquin in Singapore. A former resident-artist at the Artesan Gallery in Singapore, Vistas’s work can be found in many private collections. 

Jeffrey Smart

Paintings by Jeffrey Smart

Influenced by the Australian modernism of the 1940s, Jeffrey Smart dedicated himself to the representation of the modern city. He executed each painting with classical precision and included repetitious architectural motifs, referencing the Renaissance perspective. Smart painted stark portrayals of contemporary life, choosing as his subject matter the highways, trucks, factories, and even the vacant lots of everyday scenes.

Jeffrey Smart was born in Adelaide, Australia, in 1921. He studied part-time in the late 1930s at the South Australian School of Arts and Crafts under painter Marie Tuck and Rupert Bunny, a master of figure composition. Beginning in 1939, Smart also trained at the Adelaide Teachers College for two years. In this period, Smart visited the studio of Adelaide-based artist Doritt Black, who introduced him to the rules of dynamic symmetry, as seen in the work of the Old Masters and developed by avant-garde artists such as Braque, Cézanne, and Léger. 

The 1940s were a period of artistic growth and raise to fame for Smart, who started to exhibit in group shows alongside other emergent Australian artists, including Jaqueline Hick and Horace Trennery, and was given in his first solo show at Kosminsky Gallery in Melbourne in 1944. In 1945, Smart painted “The Waste Land I” and “The Wasteland II”. These desolate rural views, inspired by T.S. Eliot’s poem of the same name, point to the development of the artist’s distinctive hyper-clear and timeless version of landscape painting.

Between 1948 and 1950, Smart travelled to America and Europe, and then moved in Paris in 1949 to study at the Académie Montmartre under Fernand Léger. His several visits to European museum collections in this period will bring Smart to become particularly fascinated with the art of Giorgione, Giovanni Bellini, and especially Piero della Francesca, whose clarity of forms and rigorous use of perspective would greatly influence Smart’s works. In 1950, he lived on the island of Iachia in the bay of Naples, painting alongside contemporaries Donald Friend, Michael Shannon, and Jacqueline Hick. 

Upon his return to Australia in 1951, the artist settled in Sydney, where he will remain for the next twelve years. In the same year he won the Commonwealth Jubilee Prize for his 1951 painting “Wallalroo”, a scene from the daily life of that copper mining town. During his years in Sydney, Smart also worked as an art teacher and art critic at the Daily Telegraph while continuing to paint landscapes. Works from this period, such as the 1962 “Copper Park” and “The Cahill Expressway”, painted also in 1962, mark the beginning of Smart’s mature style, characterized by an increased hyper-clarity and meticulously crafted compositions.

The year 1963 was crucial in the artistic and personal life of Jeffrey Smart, who resumed his travels around Europe and permanently moved to Rome with Australian artist and partner Ian Bent. Thoughout the 1960s and 1970s, Smart’s artistic career gained momentum thanks to prominent solo shows and exhibitions in his homeland of Australia and around the world, including the 1967 solo exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in London and the American touring group show “The Australian Painters 1964-1966”. 

In 1971, Smart purchase a farmhouse in the countryside of Arezzo, a  small town in Tuscany, where he would remain for the rest of his life. This move marked the start of the most prolific period in the his career. Starting from the 1970s, Smart dedicated himself to interpreting the landscape of modern Italy, mixing his own personal and imaginary relationship with the land with his precision details of climate, life, and landscape. While most of his work includes landscapes, in the 1980s and 1990s, Smart produced a small number of portraits and self-portraits, contrasting the accurate likeness with visionary urban settings. 

Jeffrey Smart’s last work entitled “Labyrinth” was completed in 2011, at which time he officially retired. The artist died in Arezzo in 2013 at the age of ninety-two. Even though he lived as an expatriate for most of his life, the majority of his works is now housed by Australian museums and galleries. 

“My only concern is putting the right shapes in the right colors in the right places. It is always the geometry” —Jeffrey Smart

Top Insert Image: Robert Walker, “Jeffrey Smart in Studio”, 1967, Print from Negative, 2.4 x 3.6 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales

Second Insert Image: Jeffrey Smart, “The Picnic”, 1980, Oil and Acrylic on Canvas, 106 x 70.7 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Jeffrey Smart, “Labyrinth, 2011, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 100 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Bottom Insert Image: Jeffrey Smart, “The Surfers Bondi”, 1963, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection

Francis de Erdelry

Francis de Erdelry, “The Welder”, 1942, Oil on Canvas, 51 x 41 Inches, The Wolfsonian-Florida International University

Born in Hungary in 1904, Francis De Erdely grew up during the first World War. Depicting the atrocities of war in his sketches and early paintings, the artist was eventually banished from Hungary by early Gestapo members. After his studies were completed at the Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest, he studied at the Real Academie de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid and at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris.

In 1944, Francis de Erdely made his way west, settling briefly in New York and then, finally in Los Angeles, where he found his place as an American artist. Along with fellow Modernist painters Bentley Schaad, Sueo Serisawa, and Richard Haines, De Erdely became instrumental in the West Coast Modernist movement. Depicting the regional minorities of African and Mexican heritage, he was interested in conveying a sense of strong social commentary.

Francis de Erdely exhibited widely  across the U.S. as well as in Australia and Belgium, gaining local as well as international recognition. After serving as Dean of the Pasadena Art Museum School in 1945, he became a faculty member at the University of Southern California. His academicism always emphasized awareness and sensitivity to the fragilness of the human condition, often showing humanity’s suffering in harsh, angular, distended compostions.

Francis de Erdely’s work is in the collections at the Chicago Institue of Art, The Melbourne National Museum, and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

Top Insert Image: Francis de Erdely, “Self Portrait”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 69.2 x 64.1 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Francis de Erdely, Untitled (Worker in Hard Hat and Gloves)”, 1945, Oil on Canvas, 111.8 x 86.4 cm, Laguna Art Museum, California

Machado Silvetti

Machado Silvetti, “Asian Art Study Center”, 2016, Terra-Cotta Facade, Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida,

The Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, is famed for its ornate Venetian-Gothic mansion named “Cà d’Zan”, meaning “House of John” referring to John Ringling, one of the famed owners of the Ringling Brothers Circus, who resided in the mansion with his wife. Construction started in 1924 on the mansion that was designed by New York architect Dwight James Baum. Baum’s design embodied the palazzos that line the Venice canals, emulating the Italian decor that the Ringlings fell in love with on their many trips to the Mediterranean.

The Boston firm Machado Silvetti used the showpiece structure of the mansion as a precedent for their design for the museum’s extension of the Asian Art Study Center. This new project included the conversion of approximately 18,000 square feet of preexisting gallery space from a temporary exhibition area to permanent galleries. Catering to the museum’s developing Asian collection, the scheme also included a gut renovation of the west-wing galleries, located to the southwest.

The most visually striking aspect of the project is the shimmering terra-cotta facade of the new addition. Asked for a monumental entrance to museum, Machado Silvetti created something unique to the site. More than three thousand jade-colored tiles clad the elevated extension, the color a nod to the  natural surroundings but in opposition to the original pink Italian buildings. The facade with the tiles’ large mass helps combat heat gain while also acting as a barrier wrapping the extension from the elements.

Studio Libeskind

Studio Libeskind, “Vanke Pavilion”, 2015 Milan Expo

The Vanke Pavilion is an exhibition hall and event space, designed by Daniel Libeskind’s architectural studio,  that was built for 2015 Milan Expo. Its design, based on the theme of the event, “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life,” draws inspiration from ancient Chinese dragons which, legend has it, wielded power over weather and agriculture in early China.

The twisting exterior is clad in over 4,000 faceted porcelain tiles, resembling the scales of a gargantuan reptile. Each is embossed with a geometric motif and treated with a custom metallic glaze. This reflective coating causes the pavilion take on a fiery glow that shifts from red to gold depending on the angle of the sun. Ingeniously, the glaze also contains titanium dioxide which, when exposed to direct sunlight, breaks down organic deposits in the atmosphere, purifying the air around the pavilion.

Fabio Novembre

Fabio Novembre, The S.O.S. Chair, 2003, Fiberglass, Polyurethane

Fabio Novembre was born in Milan in 1966. An architect since 1992, he became famous through a large series of design projects for restaurants, nightclubs and shops in Italy and abroad, as well as through his unique pieces of Italian furniture designed for Cappellini, Driade and Flaminia.

Novembre proposes works that highlight curvaceous forms and elegant and innovative lines. He often emphasizes sex within his creations. He stands on the boarders of provocation and poetry, contemporary art and design with his pieces.

The S.O.S. line is a joinable system of armchairs and chaise longue realized in a cubic form with a structure in lacquered matt black fiberglass. The sitting area is covered with a bielastic stitch spread in polyurethane and PVC, in a golden color.