Jan Preisler

Jan Preisler, “Black Lake”, circa 1904, Oil on Canvas, 111 x 153 cm, National Gallery, Prague

Born at the Litavka River town of Králův Dvůr in February of 1872, Jan Preisler was a Czech painter, decorative designer and art professor, a leading figure of Czech Symbolism and early Modernism.

The son of an iron foundry worker, Jan Preisler was educated at a municipal school in Popović. A loner by nature, his early talent at drawing enabled him to receive financial aid for studies in Prague. In 1887 at the age of fifteen, Preisler entered the recently opened School of Applied Arts, now the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design. He studied under Czech painter František Ženíšek, a member of the Generation of the National Theatre.

During his studies at school, Preisler became a member of Prague’s artists’ association, the Mánes Union of Fine Arts, and became one of its journal’s contributors. He created the cover for the 1896 inaugural issue of the Union’s journal “Volné Směry (Free Directions)” and served as the journal’s editor for several years. After graduating, Preisler shared a studio in Malostranská with Karel Špillar, a painter, graphic artist and fellow student under Ženíšek at the School of Applied Arts.

Jan Preisler initially painted in a Neo-Romantic style, a genre that arose in opposition to realism and naturalism, considering those formats to be misleading distortions of reality. As he progressed in his work, Preisler began to use the allegorical approach to symbolism. In the 1890s after studying the works of painters Alfons Mucha and Vojtěch Preissig, he began to experiment with the emerging Art Nouveau style.

Jan Preisler infused his paintings with poetic solitude and dreamlike mystery. The setting of a figure in a landscape is a typical feature of his paintings. In his development of the figure, Preisler’s understanding of that symbol changed from etheric levitating figures with symbolistic poses to their realistic rendering. This change in figural rendering was principally evidenced in the works from his loose “Black Lakes” series. Compact in content, those paintings build their stories from all the individual motifs.

In 1902, Preisler and his artist friend Antonin Gudechek traveled to Italy. In Vienna, he met French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Preisler was the organizer of the 1905 Prague Mánes Society exhibition of Edvard Munch’s works; Preisler designed the poster for this exhibition. He traveled to Paris in 1906, where attended a major retrospective of Paul Gauguin’s work at the Salon d’Automne.

In 1903, Jan Preisler became the teacher of nude painting at Prague’s School of Applied Arts and, later in 1913, was designated Professor of Painting at the city’s Academy of Fine Arts. In the period between 1908 and 1918, Preisler was given several public commissions for decorative work at prominent buildings in Prague. Among these were the Palacky Room in the Municipal House of Prague, and mural work for the dining hall of the District House (now Grand Hotel) at Hradec Králové.

Jan Preisler died of pneumonia in April of 1918. He was survived by his wife of four years, Božena Pallas Preisler, and his two children. Preisler was interred in the family vault in Prague.

Notes: In Preisler’s 1904 “Black Lake”, a pale horse stands with a solitary nude figure at the edge of an ominous, dark pool; the scene is an allegory of introspection, nature, and the unconscious. Preisler’s subdued palette and lyrical composition evoke myth and reverie, rooted in both Art Nouveau elegance and Symbolist philosophy. This enigmatic “Black Lake” remains one of Preisler’s most haunting and iconic works.

Top Insert Image: Jan Preisler, “Self Portrait with Cigarette”, circa 1900, Oil on Linen, 50 x 45 cm, Galerie Kodl, Prague

Second Insert Image: Jan Preisler, “Riders in the Wood”, 1904, Pastel on Paper, 36 x 51 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Jan Preisler, “Portrait of the Artist’s Mother”, Date Unknown, Oil on Board, 39.4 x 33 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Jan Preisler, “Study for Young Beggar”, Date Unknown, Black Pencil and White Chalk on Paper, 28 x 31.5 cm, Private Collection

John Minton

The Artwork of John Minton

Born in Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire in December of 1917, Francis John Minton was an English illustrator, painter, stage designer and educator. He studied art at St. John’s Wood School of Art in northern London from 1935 to 1938. Minton was introduced to the work of the French Neo-Romantic painters by his fellow student Michael Ayrton, who would become renowned for his writings and sculptural work. Between 1938 to 1939, he spent eight months studying art in France, often in the company of Ayrton, until the start of the second World War necessitated his return to England.

In 1941, John Minton joined the Pioneer Corps, a division of the British Army combatant corps used for light engineering tasks. He received a commission in a light infantry regiment in 1943, but was discharged in the same year on medical grounds. While in the army, Minton, collaborating with Michael Ayrton, designed sets and costumes for actor and theater director John Gielgud’s 1942 production of “Macbeth”. In the same year, they presented their paintings in a joint exhibition at London’s Leicester Galleries. Minton’s intense, realistic work was expressed in dark color schemes and included a self-portrait and cityscapes of streets and bombed buildings.

During the war years, Minton met painters Adrian Ryan and Lucian Freud and developed a close friendship which soon became an intimate sexual relationship with both men that lasted until the late 1940s. After he had seen Freud’s portrait of Francis Bacon, Minton commissioned in 1952 his own portrait from Freud. Between 1943 and 1946, Minton taught illustration at London’s Camberwell College of Arts. He often attended late night sessions at The Colony Room Club, a private members’ drinking and social club known for its debauchery, and visited jazz clubs that dotted London’s Soho district.

After he left Camberwell College, John Minton served as the head of the drawing and illustration department at the Central School of Art and Design from 1946 to 1948. During these years, he continued his own work and shared a studio, first with painters and theater set designers Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, and later with painter Keith Vaughan, all of whom were artists of the Neo-Romantic circle in that immediate post-war period.

Minton began a prolific period of work after 1945; besides entries in group exhibitions, he had seven solo shows at London’s prestigious Lefevre Gallery before 1956. Minton, in addition to creating his paintings and illustrative work, also became a tutor of painting in 1949 at the Royal College of Art, where he taught until the year before his death. By the mid-1950s with the arrival of the newly popular American Abstract Expressionism, Minton’s commitment to figural composition had begun to be seen as out-dated.

John Minton returned to the world of the theater and accepted a commission to design stage sets for two productions by playwright Ronald Duncan for London’s Royal Court Theater, “Don Juan” and “The Death of Satan”. While working at the theater, he met Kevin Maybury, an Australian carpenter working in the scenery department. A relationship soon developed and, by the winter, Maybury had moved into Minton’s house in Chelsea. Maybury became the model for several drawings by Minton and also posed for a portrait in which he is shown seated in his workshop surrounded by the tools of his trade.

Finding his work out of fashion and suffering from psychological problems, Minton began to self-medicate with alcohol. In April of 1956, he left the Royal College of Art on a one-year unpaid leave; his departure caused by a lack of confidence in his own ability as both teacher and painter, and by deep-seated doubts about the relevance of painting in the modern world. He started suffering from extreme mood swings and became more dependent on alcohol. John Minto was found dead on the 22nd of January in 1957. The coroner’s verdict was suicide.

John Minton’s final work, an ambitious large-scale painting, was incomplete at the time of his death and depicted a gravely injured man surrounded by distraught onlookers. On the day before Minton’s death, the painter Ruskin Spear had visited him at his studio and was told that Minton identified the dying figure with Hollywood actor James Dean, who had died two years previously in a car accident. The painting, known as the 1957 “The Death of James Dean”, is clearly unfinished; there were indications through friends that Minton never intended to finish it as he was worried about not being able to break out of his past style.

Minton’s range of work was wide and included designs for stamps, textiles and wallpapers; posters for the London Transport system and Ealing Studios, a television and film producer; large scale paintings for the Royal Academy and the Dome of Discovery exhibition space at the 1951 Festival of Britain; and numerous landscapes of the British countryside. However, he is best remembered for his illustrative work for books, both interior work and book jackets. Among these are poet Alan Ross’s travel book “Time Was Away-A Notebook in Corsica”, author Herbert Ernest Bates’s “The Country Heart”, and two ground-breaking cook books by food writer Elizabeth David.

Note: A history of the relationship between John Minton, Lucian Freud and Adrian Ryan, interspersed with images of their work, can be found at the online Museum Crush magazine located at: https://museumcrush.org/art-sex-and-death-the-unholy-trinity-of-freud-minton-and-ryan/

Top Insert Image: Rollie McKenna, “John Minton”, 1951, Bromide Print, 24.5 x 19.4 cm, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Second Insert Image: John Minton, “John Minton”, circa 1953, Oil on Canvas, 35.6 x 25.4 cm, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Third Insert Image: John Minton, “The Life Model”, 1948, Oil on Canvas, 63.5 x 76 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: John Deakin, “John Minton, Soho”, 1951, Gelatin Silver Print, Michael Hoppen Gallery

John Craxton

Paintings by John Craxton

Born to pianist and composer Harold Craxton and his wife Essie in October of 1922, John Leith Craxton RA, was an English painter. Considered too young to attend nude life drawing at the Chelsea School of Art, he instead studied at Paris’s Academie Julian and later at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in 1929. With the outbreak of war in Europe, he returned to London and completed his training at Westminster School of Art and the Central School of Arts and Crafts.

Rejected for military service, Craxton attended Goldsmiths College, part of the University of London, and had his first solo exhibition was in London in 1942 at the Swiss Cottage Café. In 1943, Craxton traveled through the Pembrokeshire woodlands with artist and designer Graham Sutherland, who had recently begun painting surreal, organic landscapes in oils. Returning to London, he had his first major solo show in 1944 at the Leicester Galleries, known for its exhibitions of modern international artists.

John Craxton’s work was considered part of the Neo-Romantic revival which sought to provide meaning and content to the modern existence. His early works done before 1945 showed the influences of artists Graham Sutherland and painter and printmaker Samuel Palmer whose visionary Shoreham landscapes had a great effect on both Craxton and Sutherland. Craxton was also heavily influenced by his friend and patron Peter Watson, a wealthy gay English art collector who provided financial assistance to Craxton, as well as Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud among others.

With the end of the Second World War, John Craxton began to travel extensively from 1946 to 1966, during which time he visited Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Istanbul, and Italy. However, his main interest was in Greece, and especially the island of Crete, where he permanently settled in 1970 with return visits to Paris and London. Writing in his memoirs, American painter and food writer Richard Olmey remembered Craxton’s visits to Paris during the summer of 1951: “Most nights, John Craxton, a young English painter, arrived to share my bed; we kept each other warm. He moved in a bucolic dreamworld, peopled with beautiful Greek goat herders. Soon he left for Greece.“

In 1951, Craxton designed the stage sets for the production of French composer Maurice Ravel’s longest work, “Daphnis et Chloé”, a retelling of the romance tale from the second century concerning the love between the goatherd Daphnis and the shepherdess Chloé. Craxton was able to use his experiences in Greece as a basis for his set designs. The Sadler’s Wells Ballet, now The Royal Ballet, performed Ravel’s work at Covent Garden in central London. In 1968, Craxton produced costumes and scenery for one more ballet: the 1968 performance of Igor Stravinsky’s “Apollo” performed at the Royal Opera House.

John Craxton exhibited his works in England and Greece, with a major retrospective of his work shown at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1967. He his work has appeared in print magazines; he also illustrated English writer Patrick Leigh Fermor’s series of books, and produced lithographs for several anthologies edited by poet and critic Geoffrey Grigson. Elected a Royal Academician in 1993, Craxton also became a British Honorary Consul of Crete. In 2006, Craxton and his long-term partner Richard Riley were united in an official Civil Partnership. John Craxton died in 2009 at the age of eighty-seven, survived by his husband Richard.

Top Insert Image: John Craxton, “Tree Trunk and Ruin”, 1944, Watercolor, Ink and Gouache on Paper, 21 x 14.5 cm, Private Collection

Middle Insert Image: Wolfgang Suschitzky, “John Craxton in Hydra, Greece”, 1969, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: John Craxton, “Self Portrait”, 1946-1947, Oil on Paper, 32.3 x 23.2 cm, Private Collection

Pavel Tchelitchew

The Artwork of Pavel Tchelitchev

Born in October of 1898 in Dubrovka, a settlement of the Russian Empire, Pavel Tchelitchev was a surrealist painter and a costume and set designer. He was an exponent of the Neo-Romantic movement, a group which included French fashion designer and illustrator Christian Bérard and the Russian painters Eugène and Leonid Berman. This group, active in Paris during the 1920’s, drew their inspiration from Picasso’s ‘Blue’ and ‘Pink’ periods and the metaphysical paintings of de Chirico.

The only son of an aristocratic landowning family, Tchelitchev was educated by private tutors and expressed an early interest in art and ballet. After the 1917 revolution, his family was forced to flee Russia and settled in Ukraine. Tchelitchev studied at the Kiev Academy and at the studio of painter Aleksandra Ekster, one of the most experimental women of the avant-garde Art Deco movement. After graduation, he worked from 1920 to 1923 as a designer and builder of theater sets in both Odessa and Berlin.

During the early 1920s, Pavel Tchelitchev, who was openly homosexual, met American pianist Allen Tanner in Berlin; the two men became lovers and moved together to Paris in 1923 to pursue the artistic careers. That year in Paris, Tchelitchev became acquainted with Gertrud Stein, who introduced him to the Sitwell sisters and the Gorer family, both wealthy families who supported the arts. He developed a long-standing close friendship with Edith Sitwell, which led to frequent correspondence between them and the painting of six portraits of Sitwell.

In Paris, Tchelitchev created multimedia painting, film and dance experiences that led to collaborative works with choreographer George Balanchine, later the founder of the New York City Ballet, and ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who founded the preeminent Ballets Russes. Tchelitchev’s first show in the United States was a group exhibition at New York’s newly opened Museum of Modern Art in which he showed his drawings. In 1934, he left his lover Allen Tanner and moved to New York City with his new partner, poet Charles Henri Ford, whom he had met in 1933 shortly after Ford’s arrival in Paris.

Pavel Tchelitchev continued to collaborate with choreographer Balanchine and was introduced to writer and co-founder of the New York City Ballet, Lincoln Kirstein, who became Tchelitchev’s greatest patron. For seven years tarting in 1940, Tchelitchev produced illustrations for the literary and art magazine “View”, whose coverage of the avant-garde and surrealist art scene was published by Ford and gay poet and film critic Parker Tyler.

Tchelitchev’s earliest paintings, abstract in style, were influenced by his study in Kiev with Ekster and by the Russian Constructivist and Italian Futurist movements. With his move to Paris in the 1920s, he became influenced by the assertive emotions contained within the brushstrokes of the French Neo-Romantic artists. Tchelitchev continued to experiment with new styles throughout his career and eventually incorporated elements of fantasy and surrealism with multiple perspectives into his body of work.

Pavel Tchelitchev became a United States citizen in 1952 and moved to Italy with Charles Henri Ford in 1949. He died, with his partner by his side, in July of 1957 in Grottaferrata, Italy. His body is buried in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery. Tchelitchew’s works can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His correspondence, writings, photographs and printed material are housed in the Archives at Yale University.

Note: For those interested in a more comprehensive study of Tchelitchew’s life and work, I recommend James Thrall Soby’s 1942 “Tchelitchew: Paintings, Drawings” published by New York’s Museum of Modern Art. This volume in its entirety can be found at: https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_3117_300061977.pdf

Top Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Pavel Tchelitchew”, circa 1930s, Bromide Print, 22 x 18.7 cm, National Portrait Gallry, Washington DC

Second Insert Image: Pavel Tchelitchew, “Fallen Man”, Date Unknown, Gouache on Paper, 65 x 50 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Pavel Tchelitchew, “Study for Bathers”, 1938, Ink on Paper, 44.5 x 28 cm, Private Collection