Happy Holidays to All 2025 !

Konstantin Gorbatov, “A Winter Landscape”, 1896-1945, Pencil and Gouache on Paper Laid Down on Board, 36.1 x 48.2 cm, Private Collection

I would like to wish a Happy Holiday and a Great New Year to all my site’s visitors and subscribers, as well as a heart-felt thank-you to those whose donations supported this site’s cost and research. Thank you for all your comments, suggestions and needed article corrections. If you have not already subscribed to this site, please do so. Have a great holiday season and a year of good health, new friendships and exciting adventures! Chas (Ultrawolves)

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Born at the Volga River town of Stavropol (now Tolyatti) in May of 1876, Konstantin Ivanovich Gorbatov was a Russian Post-Impressionist painter known for his vibrant landscapes. Interested in art at an early age, he sketched the churches, houses and river landscapes of his hometown. In the 1890s, Gorbatov trained with the local artists in Samara and later relocated to Riga in 1896.

While studying civil engineering in Riga, Gorbatov continued his art training with evening classes. In 1904, he relocated to St. Petersburg and initially enrolled at the Baron Stieglitz School for Technical Draftsmanship before transferring to the Imperial Academy of Arts where Gorbatov studied under landscape painters Nikolay Dubovskoy and Alexander Kiselev. He began exhibiting his work in 1908 and was acknowledged for his distinctive style, a fusion of realism and the emerging impressionist style.

Critics praised Konstantin Gorbatov’s celebration of everyday Russian life and the harmony found in every detail of his work. The influence of the French Impressionists can be seen in his loose brushwork and plein-air light effects. Gorbatov drew on the Peredvizhniki (Wanderers) realist tradition while embracing modern impressionism. Thus, his landscapes appealed to those who loved the post-impressionist Russian art and those with a sentimental connections to old Russian locales.

Gorbatov left Russian in 1922, unwilling to adapt to the new Soviet regime, and sought refuge in Italy, eventually settling in Venice. He frequently traveled around Italy and painted local scenes, architecture and seascapes as well as Russian landscapes from memory. Gorbatov moved to Berlin in 1926 where there was a thriving community of Russian émigré artists.During the late 1920s, he began selling and exhibiting his work internationally.

The rise of the Nazi regime in the 1930s led to a decline in interest for Konstantin Gorbatov’s work as it did not align with the austere cultural ideology of Nazi art policies. Still a Soviet citizen, he was forbidden to leave German and soon fell into poverty. Despite the hardship of his life, Gorbatov continued to paint for himself.

After enduring the war years in besieged Berlin, Gorbatov died in May of 1945, shortly after the Allied victory in Europe. His final act, one of generosity to his homeland, was the bequest that all his unsold artwork be given to the Academy of Arts in Leningrad. Many of Gorbatov’s paintings are also housed in the collection of the Moscow Regional Art Museum.

Frank Brangwyn

The Artwork of Sir Frank William Brangwyn

Born at Bruges in May of 1867, Sir Frank William Brangwyn was a Welsh artist, painter, illustrator, watercolorist, printmaker and designer. A prolific artist, he created more than twelve-thousand works including ceramics, stained glass panels and windows, glass tableware, furniture, and both interior and exterior architectural designs.

One of four children born to ecclesiastical architect William Curtis Brangwyn and Eleanor Griffiths, Frank Brangwyn received his primary education at Westminster City School. However, he often played truant, spending time at his father’s workshop and sketching at the South Kensington Museum. Brangwyn later took an apprenticeship with progressive architect and designer Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo, a major influence in the Arts and Craft Movement. With a recommendation from Mackmurdo, he was able to enter the workshops of designer William Morris, one of the most significant cultural figures in Victorian England.

After one of his paintings sold at the 1884 Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy, Brangwyn joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve and began painting seascapes. Securing a berth on a freighter to Istanbul, he spent 1890 and most of 1891 at sea, visiting Spain, Morocco, South Africa and Zanzibar. Brangwyn created many paintings during these voyages. His 1890 “Funeral at Sea”, a work done with a largely gray palette, was awarded a medal at the 1891 Paris Salon. Brangwyn, while traveling with Scottish orientalist painter Arthur Melville, became particularly influenced by the bright light and colors of the southern countries. He altered his palette towards lighter colors and produced many paintings and drawings in Spain, Morocco, Egypt and Turkey.

In 1895, German-French art dealer Samuel Siegfried Bing commissioned Frank Brangwyn to decorate the exterior of his Parisian art gallery, the Galerie L’Art Nouveau. Pleased with the work, Bing encouraged him to broaden the scope of his art. Brangwyn began creating tapestry and carpet designs, murals, posters and stained-glass designs for Louis Comfort Tiffany. In 1896, he created a series of illustrations for a six-volume reprint of British orientalist Edward William Lane’s translation of “One Thousand and One Nights”. After collaborating with Japanese artist Urushibara Mokuchu on a 1917 series of woodblock prints, Brangwyn met a fellow collector of Asian art, industrial magnate Kojiro Matsukata, who later became his patron.

Although not an official war artist during the First World War, Brangwyn produced more than eighty poster designs during the conflict. The majority of these designs were donated to charities including the Red Cross, the Royal National Institute for the Blind, and the L’Orphelinat des Armées, a charity that supported French orphanages. Brangwyn also produced six lithographs for the Ministry of Information’s 1917 “Britain’s Efforts and Ideals” portfolio to raise money for the war effort. As the chairman of the English Committee for Diksmuide, a Belgian city torn apart by the war, he donated a series of woodcuts to aid in its reconstruction.

Frank Brangwyn became widely known for his mural work and received numerous commissions from both England and the United States. Originally commissioned to paint the altar recess of Saint Aidan’s Church in Leeds, he decided to work in glass mosaic due to the pollution in the air. This work, completed in 1916, covers the entire altar recess with scenes from the life of St. Aidan. Included among Brangwyn’s other mural commissions were the Great Hall of the Worshipful Company of Skinners for the Royal Exchange in London, the Missouri State Capitol Building, the Manitoba Legislative Building in Winnipeg, and a mural created specifically for exhibition at the 1915 San Francisco Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Brangwyn, in collaboration with muralists Diego Rivera and Josep Maria Sert, decorated the concourse of the RCA Building in New York City.

The most notable of Brangwyn’s mural commissions, due to both its size and its history, was the one requested by Edward Cecil Guinness, First Earl of Iveagh, in 1926. Brangwyn was to paint a pair of large canvases for the Royal Gallery of the House of Lords at Westminster. These canvases were to honor those peers and their family members who died in the First World War. Finished after the death of Edward Guinness, the life-size battle scenes were found by the House of Lords to be too grim and, thus, they refused the work. In 1928, the Lords offered a second commission, a series of sixteen large works which became known as the British Empire Panels. This series, completed in 1933, was viewed by the Lords who, considering them too colorful and lively for the proposed location, again refused the work.The sixteen canvas murals were later purchased in the following year by the Swansea City Council who installed them in the city’s Brangwyn Hall.

Frank Brangwyn became increasingly pessimistic after the House of Lords twice refused his work. During the 1930s, he began to dispose of his possessions, donating many of his and other artworks to museums in Britain and Europe, including the British Museum and the William Morris Gallery. In 1936, Brangwyn presented over four hundred works to the Arents House Museum in Bruges, Belgium. The two 1926 life-size battle scenes were included with the group of gifts he donated to the National Museum Wales between 1929 and 1935.

In 1944, Brangwyn, now recovered from his depression, secured Pre-Raphaelite illustrator Frederic Shields’s designs for architect Herbert Horne’s Chapel of the Ascension in London. This was an important achievement as the chapel was completely destroyed in 1940 during the bombing of London. One of Brangwyn’s last works was a 1950 series of illustrations for his friend Herbet Julyan’s book “Sixty Years of Yachts” published by London’s Hutchinson & Company. Frank William Brangwyn lived in his final years as a recluse in East Sussex until his death in June of 1956. His body was interred at St. Mary’s Catholic Cemetery, Kensal Green.

Among Sir Frank William Brangwyn’s many awards and honors were the 1902 Chevalier of the Legion of Honor; the Gold Medal of Venice and the Grand Prix of Milan, both in 1906; the 1911 Chevalier of the Order of the Crown of Italy; the 1919 Commander and Cross of the Order of Leopold I of Belgium; and the 1932 Albert Medal of the Royal Society of Arts. Brangwyn was awarded the title of Knight Bachelor, Great Britain in 1941.

Notes: The definitive Frank Brangwyn website is located at: https://frankbrangwyn.org

Sir Frank William Brangwyn was elected a full Royal Academician of the Royal Society of British Artists in 1910. The Royal Academy of Arts has a biography and a collection of his works at its website: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/name/frank-brangwyn-ra

An extensive biographical article on Frank Brangwyn can be found at the Chris Beetles Gallery website: https://www.chrisbeetles.com/artists/brangwyn-sir-frank-ra-hrsa-rsw-rws-prba-re-hrms-roi-1867-1956.html

A lecture on Frank Brangwyn’s British Empire Panels, written by University of Bristol’s Art History lecturer Dr. Sehra Jumabhoy, can be found at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery site: https://www.glynnvivian.co.uk/brangwyns-british-empire-panels/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Frank Brangwyn”, circa 1900, Vintage Print

Second Insert Image: Frank Brangwyn, “Study of Artichokes”, Date Unknown, Gouache and Pencil on Paper, 121 x 81 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Frank Brangwyn, “The Tarpit”, Date Unknown, Intaglio Etching on Paper, 65.4 x 73.3 cm, Museum Wales

Fourth Insert Image: Frank Brangwyn, “Bricklayers, Study for Rebuilding Belgium”, 1915, Black and Red Chalk on Buff Paper, 69 x 47 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Frank Brangwyn, “Makeing Sailors, The Gun”, circa 1917, “The Great War, Britain’s Efforts and Ideals” Series, Lithograph on Paper, 47.1 x 37.1 cm, Tate Gallery, London

Gilbert Lewis

The Portraits of Gilbert Lewis

Born at Hampton, Virginia in September of 1945, Gilbert Braddy Lewis was an American artist and art therapist. Over a span of five decades, he created portraits of friends and acquaintances, a collection of work that included an intimate series that represented the gay male experience in Philadelphia’s LBGTQ community.

Gilbert Lewis began his art training at the early age of seven and pursued the arts throughout his teenage years. After relocating to Philadelphia at the age of eighteen, he began studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts under such noted painters as Walter Stuempfig, Franklin Watkins, Hobson Pittman, and printmaker and muralist Morris Blackburn. Lewis was committed to his training and became particularly focused on the careful observation and life drawing taught in the curriculum of Thomas Eakins. After completing his certificate program in 1967, Lewis was awarded the eminent Cresson Traveling Scholarship, a two-year scholarship which enabled him to travel to Italy and study the Sienese and Florentine Renaissance artists.

Upon his return to the United States, Lewis enrolled at the Philadelphia College of Art, now the University of the Arts, where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1974. Lewis received his Masters Creative Arts Therapy degree at Philadelphia’s Hahnemann University in 1978. He obtained a position as art therapist at the Manchester House Nursing Center in Medea, Pennsylvania where he worked from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. The animated qualities in Lewis’s portraits of the seniors with whom he worked is evidence of the warm relationships he established with the residents.

Fascinated by youth and aging, Gilbert Lewis’s work focused on the beginning and the end of adulthood. While working at Manchester House during the day, he was creating gouache, watercolor, charcoal and graphite portraits of young men in the city at night. These portraits express Lewis’s attentiveness to convey the wide eyed awkwardness of those young men who sought both guidance and trust in their artistic relationship with him. Each sitter was encouraged to dress and pose themselves in a way that they would feel most comfortable. Frequent conversations were normal between artist and sitter; many of his models would bring their own music choices to the studio.

Lewis painted models every night from Monday to Friday. His models, often tall and slender, were usually portrayed directly looking at the viewer with a slightly awkward vulnerability. Using a soft color palette, Lewis would sometimes paint his figures against solidly-colored backgrounds. Not overly concerned with realism, Lewis was drawn towards the ethnographic approach to the detail and the sense of longing found in American frontier painter George Catlin’s depictions of the indigenous peoples on the Great Plains of the 1830s.

Gilbert Lewis taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art’s certificate and continuing education programs. He also supported himself throughout his entire career by working at Philadelphia’s art supply stores, including Blick Art Materials, South Street Art Supply, and Pearl Art and Craft Supply. Gilbert Lewis died at the age of seventy-eight on the seventh of December in 2023 at the Belvedere nursing home in Chester, Pennsylvania, from complications caused by Alzheimer’s disease.

Gilbert Lewis’s first solo exhibition was at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art’s Peale House Gallery in 1981. He had numerous solo exhibitions in Philadelphia, among which were the Rosenfeld and Noel Butcher galleries. His largest exhibition, “Becoming Men: Portrait Paintings by Gilbert Lewis”, was presented in 2004 at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York. Lewis’s work can be found in the permanent collections at Philadelphia’s Woodmere Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, and the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey.

“One of my motivations in painting has been to celebrate the beginning of adulthood for the young and the final period of life for the old,” Gilbert observes. “What struck me is that both young men and the old are ignored by society. Despite our ostensible focus on youth, young men are in a sort of nether world, no longer teenagers and yet not full adults. They’re in transition with no established identify and no real place in society.” —Gilbert Lewis

Notes: The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art has a short article written by Christian Bain entitled “Becoming Men: Portrait Paintings by Gilbert Lewis” in which Lewis discusses his work process and motivations for painting: https://leslielohman.org/exhibitions/becoming-men-portrait-paintings-by-gilbert-lewis

The WilliamWay LBGT Community Center in Philadelphia has a collection of paintings by Gilbert Lewis on its site located at: https://www.waygay.org/gilbert-lewis-1

Anthony Rullo was a portrait model who posed at least sixty times for Gilbert Lewis between 1986 and 1996. Rullo’s memories of Lewis and his mentorship are contained in a Visual Arts article by Peter Crimmins for Philadelphia’s WHYY newsletter: https://whyy.org/articles/gilbert-lewis-remembered-as-artist-mentor-to-phillys-gay-80s/

Second Insert Image: Gilbert Lewis, “Nude- Composition in Red and Green”, January 1985, Gouache on Board, 111.8 x 76.2 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Gilbert Lewis, “Seated Man with Shell”, circa 2020, Pastel on Paper, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Gilbert Lewis, Untitled (Young Man Standing with Legs Spread), 1987, Gouache on Paper, 76.2 x 55.9 cm, Private Collection

Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama, Untitled, circa 1970, Oil and Mixed Media on Canvas, 60 x 50.4 cm, Private Collection

Born at Matsumato, Nagano in March of 1929, Yayoi Kusama (草間彌生) is a Japanese contemporary artist whose work is based in conceptual art expressed primarily through sculpture and installations. She is actively engaged in painting, performance art, video art, fashion, and writing both poetry and fiction.

Kusama received training for a year at the Kyoto City University of Arts in the traditional Japanese painting style known as nihonga ( 日本画 ), an art form that typically uses mineral pigments and occasionally ink with other organic pigments on paper or silk. She was active in the New York City avant-garde scene throughout the 1960s, organizing “happenings” and experimenting with her series of “Mirror/Infinity” installations.

In 1969, Yayoi Kusama founded Kusama Enterprises, a commercial outlet selling clothing, bags, and even cars. These products feature her singular aesthetic, characterized by her liberal use of polka dots and dense, repeating patterns to create a sense of infinity. In 1973, Kusama returned to Japan. Two years later, seeking treatment for her obsessive-compulsive neurosis, she entered a facility where she lives and works to this day.

Kusama continues to produce paintings and sculpture, and, in the 1980s, added poetry and fiction to her range of creative pursuits. She exhibited at the Japanese pavilion of the 1993 Venice Biennale. Kusama’s dazzling mirrored pavilion room was filled with small pumpkin sculptures. Eventually, she produced a huge, yellow pumpkin sculpture with an optical pattern of black spots, for her a representation of an alter-ego or self-portrait.

In 2017, a fifty-year retrospective of Kusama’s work opened at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. That same year the Yayoi Kusama Museum was inaugurated in Tokyo. Other major retrospectives of her work have been held at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art in 1998, the Whitney Museum in 2012, and London’s Tate Modern in 2012.

“The machinery of the sky that confounds us on earth with endless transformations of clouds in the light of dawn does not compare to the extraordinary tenacity of human beings, the way of human life, the presentiment of approaching death, the existence of love, the brilliant coruscations of light and the dark scars of our lives, to say nothing of the incomprehensible form of the cosmos and the overwhelming mysteries of space, time, distance.”

—Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama

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Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell

The Paintings of Francis Cadell

Born at Edinburgh in April of 1885, Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell was a Scottish painter and watercolorist known for his portraits, central Edinburgh house interiors, and landscapes painted at Iona, Scotland’s west-coastal island. He was one of four Scottish Colourists, painters whose Post-Impressionist work had a formative influence on contemporary Scottish art and culture.

The son of wealthy surgeon Dr. Francis Cadell and Mary Hamilton Boileau, Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell was raised on Edinburgh’s prestigious Moray Estate and privately tutored at the Edinburgh Academy. At the age of sixteen, he studied at the Académie Julian in Paris where he became acquainted with the city’s early-Fauvist painters, most notably Henri Matisse. Between 1902 and 1905, Cadell alternated his residency between Paris and Edinburgh as he undertook a professional career.

In 1907, Cadell studied at Munich’s Akademie der Bildender Künste, one of the oldest art academies in Germany, before returning to Scotland in 1908. Between the deaths of his mother and his terminally ill father, he had his first solo exhibition at Edinburgh’s Doig, Wilson and Wheatley’s Gallery in 1908 where he sold thirty paintings. With an inheritance from his father’s death, Cadell secured a studio on George Street in central Edinburgh in 1909. It was at this time that he met painter Samual John Peploe, who became his life-long friend and a fellow Scottish Colourist.

With financing from old schoolfriend and now patron Patrick Ford, Francis Cadell undertook a painting excursion to Venice in 1910. This inspiring experience gave him more confidence in his use of bright colors and loosened his approach to painting. The work from this trip, however, sold poorly which resulted in the undermining of Cadell’s trust in gallery dealers. From 1911 to 1927, he sold his work only privately, with Glasgow art dealer Alexander Reid purchasing many of his works. After the declaration of war in 1914, Cadell passed his medical tests and joined the 9th Battalion of The Royal Scots in 1915 with whom he served on the French frontlines. Wounded twice, Cadell was discharged in 1919 and was awarded the General Service and Victory medals.

After his discharge from military service, Cadell spent much of his adult life in Scotland, painting in Edinburgh during the spring and autumn, on Iona during the summer, and usually resting indoors during the winter. He closely collaborated with his friend Samuel Peploe, often painting together on Iona, and developed an interest in the Art Deco movement. Cadell began to paint still lifes and figure studies, tightly-cropped compositions usually presented at an angle, and increasingly brilliantly colored interior scenes.

From the early to mid-1920s, Francis Cadell restrained the use of perspective and shadow in his still lifes. These post-war images were characterized by their vivid, acidic colors and strict composition. Using flat areas of color and disregarding shadows, Cadell stylized the forms to such an extent that it could be seen as a two-dimensional pattern within a strictly limited framework. He later developed a style in which black remained the dominant color and was increasingly used to outline features.

Cadell served from 1923 to 1936 as a Council member of the influential Edinburgh architecture, conservation and planning organization, the Cockburn Association also known as the Edinburgh Civic Trust. He died from cancer at the age of fifty-four in December of 1937 and was interred with his family in Dean Cemetery, a historically important Victorian cemetery west of Edinburgh’s city center. Cadell’s paintings and watercolors are housed in many private collections and are on public display in the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland.

Notes: ART UK has a 2020 article by modern art curator and auction house specialist Alice Strang, entitled “The Making of a Scottish Colourist: Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell”, on its site: https://artuk.org/discover/stories/the-making-of-a-scottish-colourist-francis-campbell-boileau-cadell

The Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell Organization has a biography and a large collection of the artist’s works on its site: https://francis-campbell-boileau-cadell.org

Top Insert Image: Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell, “Self Portrait”, Date Unknown, Black Chalk on Paper, 56 x 38.5 cm, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Second Insert Image: Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell, “Self Portrait”, circa 1914, Oil on Canvas, 113.1 x 86.8 cm, National Galleries of Scotland

Bottom Insert Image: Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell, “Life Study”, Date Unknown, Conte on Paper, 34.3 x 29.2 cm, Private Collection

Nicolas Monjo

The Paintings of Nicolas Monjo

Born at the Nouvelle-Aquitaine department of Lot-et-Garonne in 1975, Nicolas Monjo is a French self-taught contemporary painter. The central element of his work is the tenuous condition of humanity in a world that is both complex and often oppressive. To illustrate this fragility, Monjo presents the human figure enclosed, often crushed with others, inside the restrictive edges of the canvas.

Nicolas Monjo began painting at the age of twenty and, through study and technique, has developed his own unique style. His images are inspired by the complexities and sometimes tumultuous nature of human relationships, the struggles to overcome circumstances, and the power dynamics of a surrounding society.

Monjo’s vivid imagery features a tensive contrast between its harsh subject matter and the artistry of each painting’s composition. In an extremely personal way, he presents the fragility of the human condition that is often crushed by the harsh and cold world where the law of the strong prevails. Monjo’s figures are enclosed, both figuratively and literally, within the framework of the canvases they inhabit, a reminder of their inability to extricate themselves from their gloomy daily life.

Nicolas Monjo uses both acrylic and oil paints on his canvases with a preference for the colors gray and blue. Mixtures of oil and acrylic paint on the tablet are used for more marked relief effects. This soft, dark color palette creates a unique atmosphere for his evolving collection of characters. Mixed among these characters are recurring tropes such as rabbit ears, fish, dogs, gaping mouths and sunglasses. Other elements, almost always present in Monjo’s compositions, are the symbol of the heart, guitar, plates, forks and an abandoned glass on the floor. These are all objects that represent Monjo’s personal life.

Nicolas Monjo currently lives and works near the prefecture of Angouleme in the southwestern French department of Charente. His artwork is represented online by Bouillon d’Art at: https://www.bouillondart.com/en/93-monjo-nicolas

Monjo’s work can also be found at the online gallery Artsper located at: https://www.artsper.com/us/contemporary-artists/france/25687/nicolas-monjo

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Nicolas Monjo”, Color Print, Artsper Gallery

Bottom Insert Image: Nicolas Monjo, “Le Conte à Rebours”, Oil and Acrylic on Canvas, 130 x 97 cm, Private Collection

Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti, “The Artist’s Mother”, 1950, Oil on Canvas, 89.9 x 61 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Born at the city of Borgonovo in October of 1901, Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss draftsman, painter, printmaker and sculptor whose work was particularly influenced by Cubism and Surrealism. Around the age of thirty-five, he left Surrealism to deepen his understanding of figurative compositions. Although known for his figurative sculptures, Giacometti’s figurative paintings were equally as present after 1957.

Dating from the drawings of his youth, Giacometti used his mother Annetta Giacometti, either alone or with other family members, as a model for his numerous works, both paintings and sculpture. Annetta Giacometti, a formidable presence in Giacometti’s life, returned after the war years to the family home in Stampa, Switzerland. This was the place where Alberto would spend the summers and create most of his mother’s portraits beginning from the end of the 1940s. There are at least five portraits of Annetta Giacometti known to have been painted in 1949.

As attested in his writings, Alberto Giacometti gave the most attention when painting a portrait to the the eyes of the model and the volumes of the nose. His 1950 “The Artist’s Mother”, painted in the family home in Stampa, is composed of layers upon layers of linear brushstrokes. Around the edges, the paint is laid on thinly to create a internal frame, a common element that appears in later works. In the center, the figure is painted more heavily in dark and bright lines that bristle with energy.

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“The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.” -Alberto Giacometti

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

Anton Carte

The Paintings of Antoine (Anton) Carte

Born at Mons, the provincial capital of Hainaut in December of 1886, Antoine (Anton) Carte was a Belgian painter and lithographer of the Flemish Expressionist movement who initially worked in the Symbolist style of the Sint-Martens-Latem artist colony. Along with painter and engraver Louis Buisseret, he founded the Groupe Nervia which supported new artists in Hainaut and fostered the traditional Gallo-Romance art of the ethnic French-speaking southern region of Belgium.

The son of a woodworker, Anton Carte was an apprentice at the studio of Belgian painter and designer Frantz Depooter for a period of fourteen years. He began his formal training at the Academy of Mons in 1897 and finished his training in 1908 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. It was at the Academy of Mons that Carte met Louis Buisseret, the man who would become his lifelong faithful friend. At the Royal Academy, both men studied under artists of the Symbolist movement: muralist painter Constant Montald, painter and mosaic artist Émile Fabry, and painter Jean Delville, a poet and leading exponent of the Belgian Idealist art movement during the 1890s.

A 1912 scholarship enabled Carte to travel to Paris where he stayed for two years at the studio of set and costume designer Léon Samoylovich Bakst and renowned French organ designer Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. During this period, Carte and Bakst worked for the Ballets Russes founded by Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev. Among other acquaintances in Paris, Carte came in contact with French Symbolist painter and theoretician Maurice Denis and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, a French muralist painter of allegorical and antiquity scenes.

After initially working in the Symbolist style, Anton Carte became a Flemish Expressionist after the First World War. Encouraged by Louis Buisseret, he exhibited a series of illustrations for a work by Belgian poet and playwright Emile Verhaeren at the 1917 Salon de l’Illustration in Brussels. Carte also illustrated editions of Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1895 “Massacre of the Innocents” and Marcel Wolfer’s 1914 “Writings of November”.

Carte exhibited with the Flemish Expressionists at the 1923 Paris Salon d’Automne, an annual multi-disciplinary event. In 1924, he traveled to the United States and, in the following year, had a major retrospective at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute. This show resulted in the sale of all sixty paintings presented at the show; it also ensured Carte’s success with the American public.

Although mostly known for his paintings, Anton Carte designed posters in the 1920s and 1930s which included work for the Aéro Club de Belgique, the 1930 International Exposition at Antwerpen/Anvers, and Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. Carte also created stained-glass windows, most notably the 1927 windows for a newly constructed building at the University of Mons-Hainaut in Wallonia, Belgium. Between 1935 and 1940, he undertook numerous commissions with glassmaker F. P. Colpaert for stained-glass windows at the Church of Saint Philippe de Neri at the Abbey of La Cambre and a stained-glass series, “The Way of the Cross”, for the Notre Dame de la Cambre.

Carte, along with Buisseret and Léon Eeckman, founded the Expressionist art association Groupe Nervia in 1928. This group was committed to an intimate human art tinged with Symbolism and Italian art techniques. Carte began teaching in 1929 at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de la Cambre in Brussels; however, as he did not agree with the first director’s ideas, Carte left in 1932 to become Professor of Decorative and Monumental Art at the Brussels Academy.

During the war years, Anton Carte finished the stained-glass windows he had started with F. P. Colpaert but later withdrew to his house in Wauthier Braine to find some calm. After the war, Carte painted frescoes in the chapel and in the Great Hall of Orval, a community within the French commune of Montigny-Lengrain. At the inauguration of his eight large stained-glass windows at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Koekelberg, Carte entrusted painter Jacques Maes with the completion of his project.

A complete artist throughout his life, Anton Carte produced drawings, engravings, book illustrations, posters, lithographs, banknotes, stamps, fresco designs, sculptures, stained glass windows, theater sets, ceramics and carpets. Tired at the age of sixty-seven, Anton Carte died on the fifteenth of February in 1954 at his home on the Rue de l’Ermitage in Ixelles, Belgium.

Notes: The Anton Carte Foundation has a more extensive biography of Carte’s life as well as an extensive collection of his artwork at their site: https://www.antocarte.art/en

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Anton Carte, L’Art Belge”, June 30 1920, Vintage Print

Second Insert Image: Anton Carte, “The Carter”, 1925-1930, Oil on Canvas, Anton Carte Foundation, Brussels, Belgium

Third Insert Image: Anton Carte, “Bénédiciié”, 1921, Oil on Canvas, 150 x 178 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Anton Carte, “The Boatman”, circa 1938, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 80 cm, Collection of the Province of Walloon Brabant

Botton Insert Image: Anto Carte, “The Passer (The Effort)”, 1920, Oil on Canvas, 130 x 90 cm, Private Collection

Nicola Samorì, “In Principio era la Fine”

Nicola Samorì, “In Principio era la Fine (In the Beginning was the End)”, 2016, Oil on Copper Plate, 40 x 30 cm

Born at the northern Emilia-Romagna city of Forli in May of 1977, Nicola Samori is an Italian artist trained in the traditions of seventeenth-century Renaissance painting and sculpture. His figurative works translates these techniques into contemporary images.

Samori, interested in art from an early age, was encouraged by his family to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. Using both realism and chiaroscuro, he pushes his imagery to it dissolution, taking its form to a breaking point. Samori’s images are dark, baroque canvas works whose surfaces have often been altered by the physical manipulation of scraping, diluting, tearing and slashing.

Nicola Samori has consistently exhibited his work in group and solo shows throughout Italy and the world since 1998. Solo exhibitions include the 2002 “Enigma Uomo: Il fuoco della Rinascita” at Bologna”s L’Ariete Artecomtemporanea; the 2003 “Del Miti Memorie” at the Tafe Gallery in Perth, Australia; and the 2008 “Pandemie” at the Galleria Allegretti Contemporanea in Bergamo. Samori’s work was included as part of the Italian Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale.

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Notes: Nicola Samorì revisité : double exposition « Des milliers d’instants

Paul (Pavel) Kotlarevsky

Paul Kotlarevsky, “Man Reading”/”Shoveling Sand on the Seine”, circa 1916, Double-Sided Oil on Canvas, 78.8 x 98.5 cm, Private Collection

Born in 1885 at the Iset River city of Yekaterinburg to a merchant family of the timber trade, Paul (Pavel) Kotlarevsky was a Russian painter and graphic artist who experimented in various artistic styles, predominately Cubism and Fauvism. He worked in a number of genres that included portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and collages.

Although formally educated as a lawyer, Kotlarevsky developed a passion for art in his early years. His parents, as a reward for his graduation, sponsored his trip abroad to view the art of Europe. Traveling with his wife and son, Kotlarevsky studied Western historic and contemporary art traditions in Rome and Vienna, finally reaching Paris in 1913. Kotlarevsky decided at the onset of the First World War to fight alongside the French army instead of returning to Russia. While he was fighting, the Russian Revolution completely changed his homeland; his family lost everything that they had owned.

Paul Kotlarevsky decided to remain in France. However, as his qualifications as a lawyer were not recognized in France, Kotlarevsky decided to pursue his interest in painting and enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He became a member of the Parisian artistic circles and associated with numerous artists. Among these were Russian painter and Dada poet Serge Charchoune, French Cubist painter Henri Victor Gabriel Le Fauconnier, a leading figure among the Montparnasse Cubists, and Spanish painter Francisco Bores, a close associate of Pablo Picasso and Henry Matisse.

Having lost his Russian possessions and unable to fully support his family through his artistic work or legal knowledge, Kotlarevsky worked in a series of menial jobs that included driving a truck and working at Les Halles, the central fresh food market in Paris. He continued his painting and experimented with a variety of styles. Kotlarevsky was, however, drawn predominantly to the shifting perspective points and dynamic geometry of Cubism as well as the color theories and expressive gestures of Fauvism. He exhibited his work in 1933 at the Salon des Indépendants, an annual independent art exhibition held in Paris.

Paul Kotlarevsky’s work was influenced by many of the contemporary French Cubist and Fauvist painters including Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and artist and theoretician Albert Gleizes. Kotlarevsky’s 1913-1915 “Still Life with Fruit Bowl” is a reflection of his admiration for the work of Braque. Similar to many of the Russian émigré artists living in Europe during the early part of the twentieth-century, Kotlarevsky’s body of work combined and united French and Russian artistic traditions. His work featured many of the characteristics of Russian avant-garde traditions that can also be seen in the work of artists such as Cubo-Futurist painters and designers Lyubov Popova, Aleksandra Ekster, and Natalia Goncharova, co-founder of Rayonism, one of Russia’s first abstract art movements.

Paul Kotlarevsky died after a long illness in Paris in 1950 and was interred at the Russian cemetery of Saint-Geneviève-de-Bois near Paris. His works are mainly in private collections.

Notes: Kotlarevsky’s “Man Reading”, executed circa 1916, is a double-sided painting with his “Shoveling Sand on the Seine” on the obverse. The more colorful and intimate composition of “Man Reading” with its numerous planes and geometric elements is backed by the dynamic view of workers shoveling sand outside a large-scale view of an angled city. These two works are excellent examples of Cubism with their shifting perspective points and dissected compositions.

Top Insert Image: Paul Kotlarevsky, “Portrait of a Lady in a Scarf”, Date Unknown, Pencil and Gouache on Paper, 36 x 24 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Paul Kotlarevsky, “Still lIfe with Violin”, circa 1913-1915, Watercolor with Pastel and Collage on Paper, 46 x 34 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Paul Kotlarevsky, “Still Life with Fruit Bowl”, 1913-1915, Watercolor, Gouache, Ink and Collage on Card, 27 x 29 cm, Private Collection

Edward Saidi Tingatinga

The Artwork of Edward Saidi Tingatinga

Born in 1932, Edward Saidi Tingatinga was a self-taught Tanzanian artist who developed a unique painting style that evolved into an urban traditional art form. Once established as an artist, he taught his style to many students, both local and foreign.

Edward Saidi Tingatinga was born in 1937 to a family of subsistence farmers at the small village of Mindu in southern Tanzania near the border of Mozambique. He left his village in 1957 and worked on a sisal plantation in the Tanga district. Tingatinga traveled in the latter part of 1957 to Dar-es-Salaam where he labored in construction jobs and as a gardener until 1961. He relocated to the Mikoroshoni district where he met and married his wife Agatha Mataka. After the birth of his son Daudi, Tingatinga became employed in 1968 as a ward attendant at the public Muhimbili Hospital.

Impressed by the number of tourists who purchased western-styled paintings from Zairian artists, Tingatinga began to paint in 1968 and soon developed his own particular style of colorful, crowded paintings of fantastic animals and dancing tribesmen, as well as scenes of village life. The paintings sold well and soon developed into a distinctly urban art form. Through the support of the National Arts of Tanzania (NAT), Tingatinga regularly sold his paintings and began to teach his technique to students.

The traditional Tinga Tinga style of painting most often depicted the native fauna and flora of Tanzania, rendered in both a naïve and surrealistic style on single-colored backgrounds. Due to their availability, masonite substrates and highly-saturated, brilliantly colored industrial paints were used to create the artwork. Current Tinga Tinga painters now paint a variety of subject themes on stretched muslim and canvas. Many of these artists still uphold the traditional use of bicycle enamel paints.

Edward Tingatinga, who had established himself as a successful artist, was shot in 1972 by police in a case of mistaken identity during the officers’ search for a gang of bank robbers. He died at the age of forty years on the way to the hospital. Six-year old Daudi Tingatinga and his younger sister Martina were left in the care of their mother, Agatha. Growing up in a state of poverty, neither sibling received any formal education. Edward Tingatinga’s fellow artists formed the Tinga Tinga Arts Cooperative in his honor; this cooperative later became a school for artists from Dar-es-Salaam and Zanzibar. The traditional art form of Tinga Tinga was passed onto Daudi and Martina by their uncle Salum Mussa, known as “Mzee Lumumba”, who had received his art education from their father.

Notes: The Tingatinga Arts Cooperative Society website is located at: https://tingatinga.ch/en/about.php

An article entitled “Tinga Tinga: An African Tale” written by feature editor Kate Bystrova for the Commonwealth Secretariat’s independent magazine, “Global: The International Briefing”, can be located at: https://www.global-briefing.org/2014/09/tinga-tinga-an-african-tale/

The Tinga Tinga Arts Cooperative has a biographical article on Edward Saidi Tingatinga in its January 2022 edition located at: https://www.tingatingaart.com/blogs/articles/edward-saidi-tingatinga

Top Insert Image: Jesper Kirknaes, “Edward Saidi Tingatinga”, Date Unknown, Color Print, January 2022 Issue of Tinga Tinga Art

Second Insert Image: Edward Saidi Tingatinga, “Le Lion”, 1971, Oil on Masonite, 61 x 71.5 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image, Edward Saidi Tingatinga, Untitled, Enamel on Board, 61 x 61 cm, Private Collection

Bernardino del Boca

The Artwork of Bernardino del Boca

Born in the Piedmont commune of Crodo in August of 1919, Bernardino del Boca was an Italian painter, illustrator, and educator. Although best known for his book illustrations, he co-founded the publisher “L’età dell’Acquario (The Age of Aquarius)” and was the director of and contributor to its journal of the same name. Del Boca’s artwork had a crucial impact on the New Age and Theosophical movements in Italy during the 1970s.

Bernardino del Boca was the son of Giacomo del Boca and Rosa Silvestri, parents of noble lineage who owned the Fonte Rossa mountain springs and spa in Crodo. He was introduced to Spiritualism and Theosophy at an early age by a related princess of the noble Hungarian Esterházy family who took him on several trips throughout Europe. While in the French city of Nice, del Boca met Princess Djavidan Hanem of Egypt who suggested he keep a journal. His early spiritual and genealogical interests combined with his writings became a crucial component of his future artistic production.

In 1921, del Boca and his family moved to Novara where he received his initial education. Although skilled in drawing, he did not excel in other subjects. In 1932, del Boca was given the opportunity to enter the Institut le Rosey, a renowned international boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland. At the school, he became became friends with roommates Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who later became Shah of Iran, and Ananda Mahidol, the future monarch of Siam (Thailand).

In June of 1935, Bernardino del Boca enrolled at the Brera Art High School in Milan, an extension of the Accademia della Belle Arti di Brera whose teachers taught at both locations. Among his teachers were figurative painter and printmaker Felice Casorati and modernist Neoclassical painter Achille Funi. Del Boca graduated in 1939 and, in the same year, had his first solo exhibition. Two years later, he held an exhibition in Domodossola and was a participant at the Thirteenth Exposition of Figurative Arts of the Fascist Unions held in Turin.

Called into military duty during the Second World War, del Boca served in Verona and later in Florence. He left Italy in 1946 and relocated in Siam (Thailand) where he lived first in Singapore and then Bangkok as a portraitist. Returning to Singapore in 1947, he worked as an architect and interior designer. In October of that year, del Boca received his second Buddhist initiation at the Temple of Han on the Linga Archipelago’s island of Nawa Sangga. In a collaboration with artist Robin A. Kilroy, he held an exhibition in September of 1948 at the Queen Victoria Memorial in Penang. “Nightly Face”, del Boca’s first novel was published in 1948; his second novel “Nawa Sangga” was published in the following year.

After holding the position of honorary consul in Singapore, Bernardino del Boca returned to Italy in 1949. Two years later, he took part in a collective exhibition at the Broletto di Novara, a medieval architectural structure in the city’s center. Del Boca returned to teaching while continuing to paint, write and lecture. He became the president of the theosophical group “Besant-Arundal”, a position del Boca held for forty years. After serving as a member of Italy’s National Institute for Geographic Research and Cartographic Studies, del Boca published a university-level anthropology manual for students entitled “Sotia dell’Antropologia” in 1964.

Del Boca, in a collaboration with Theosophist and publisher Edoardo Bresci, founded the journal “L’Età dell’Acquario- Rivista Sperimentale del Nuovo Piano di Coscienza (The Age of Aquarius- Experimental Journal of the New Plane of Consciousness)” in 1970. During the next seven years, he would publish four more works including the 1971 “La Dimensione Umana (The Human Dimension)” and “La Quarta Dimensione (The Fourth Dimension)” in 1977. After his retirement from teaching in 1978, del Boca relocated to Piedmont.

During the 1980s, Bernardino del Boca attempted to create a series of Aquarian communities he called Villaggi Verde, or Green Villages. In 1986, he relocated to the first and only village that was completed, the Villaggi Verde of San Germano di Cavallirio. In addition to publishing two more works, “Il Servizio” and “Un Paese de Amare”, del Boca organized collective trips to southern and eastern Asia, gave lectures, edited and contributed to “L’Età dell’Acquario”, and organized conferences.

After living a productive life as a Theosophist, anthropology scholar, illustrator and painter as well as an advocate for sexual liberation, Bernardino del Boca died on the ninth of December in 2001 at the age of eighty-two in the hospital at Borgomanero, Novara. His artistic production was, for the most part, neglected until the 1960s when the “visionary” aspect of his art was analyzed for the first time. During his lifetime, del Boca rarely exhibited his work. Only through a series of recent publications, conferences, and posthumous exhibitions, particularly those held at the Foundation Bernardino del Boca in 2015 and 2017, have del Boca’s artworks been thoroughly studied and promoted.

Notes: Author and researcher Elisa Rolle has an article about Bernardino del Boca on her Queer Places website that examines his work as a pioneer of the sexual and homosexual liberation movement in Italy. The article also discusses his book“Long Night in Singapore” that won the 1951 Gastaldi National Award but caused a scandal: http://www.elisarolle.com/queerplaces/a-b-ce/Bernardino%20del%20Boca.html

A more extensive biographical article on Bernardino del Boca that delves more deeply into the theosophical aspects of his art can be found on the World Religions and Spirituality Project site: https://wrldrels.org/2021/05/20/bernardino-del-boca/

The Fondazione Bernardino del Boca site is located at: https://www.fondazionebernardinodelboca.it

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Bernardino del Boca with Cat”, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Inset Image: Bernardino del Boca,, “La Quatro Dimensione, L’Evoluzione della Coscienza”, Original Publication 1977, , L’Età dell’Acquario 1995 Edition

Third Insert Image: Bernardino del Boca, “Sviatovida”, circa 1970, Fondazione Bernardino del Boca

Fourth Insert Image: Bernardino del Baco, “La Dimensione Umana”, Original Publication 1975, New Edition by Fondazione Bernardino del Boca

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Bernardino del Boca”, Gelatin Silver Print

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

Kyle Dunn

The Artwork of Kyle Dunn

Born in 1990, Kyle Dunn is an American artist who creates sensuous and psychologically complex scenes on canvas and panels. His work is a meld of theatrical elements and personal introspection that explores those relationships between the artist and his subject, two people in love, and the individual and society.

Kyle Dunn received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Sculpture in 2012 from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. A modernist with a classical style, he began his career as a painter with a prolific series of images on canvas. In 2016, Dunn returned to his sculptural roots and created a visual language that employed three-dimensional elements constructed of epoxy resin, plaster and relief foam panels.

Dunn’s domestic tableaux and still lifes are staged, highly stylized images that include trompe l’oeil and bas-relief. All of his paintings contain a wealth of detail; your attention is drawn to the many thoughtfully placed objects that fill the canvas and surround its protagonists. Within Dunn’s melodramatic scenes, figures are staged in a variety of positions and activities that are open to the viewers’ own interpretations. His figures are often presented in solitary moments of self-reflection or scenes of domestic intimacy.

The lighting of each scene is an important component of Kyle Dunn’s work; the theatric lighting style of both horror and noir films is evident in his paintings. In many of Dunn’s paintings and bas-relief works, light comes from a strong, external source, located either from above or below, or the side through a window or open doorway. Blocks of sunlight flood into rooms in such images as “Hyacinth and Pears” and “Devil in the Daytime”. Scenes, such as “Midday” and “Downward Dog” present strong contrasts between light and shadow, an effect that highlights the scene’s subject and increases the drama of the depicted moment.

Kyle Dunn’s work was included in the 2022 “Fire Figure Fantasy: Selections from the ICA Miami’s Collection”, an exhibition of work housed by Miami’s Institute of Contemporary Art. His most recent exhibitions include a series of colorful nocturnal scenes in a successful April/May 2023 solo exhibition, entitled “Night Pictures”, at New York City’s P.P.O.W. gallery on Broadway. In June of 2024, Dunn had a solo institutional show, entitled “Matrix 194”, at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum, a nineteenth-century Gothic Revival structure in Connecticut. His solo exhibition “Devil in the Daytime” is currently on view from February 8th to March 29th in 2025 at the Vielmetter Gallery in Los Angeles.

Dunn has shown work in many international venues including the Marlborough Gallery in London, Amsterdam’s GRIMM gallery, the Maria Bernheim Gallery in Zurich, and Berlin’s Galerie Judin, among others. His work is in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Hong Kong’s Sunpride Foundation in Kowloon, and the X Museum in Beijing, China.

Notes: There is an excellent 2019 interview, entitled “Ghost World”, between Jessica Ross of Juxtapoz Art & Culture and Kyle Dunn located at: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/magazine/features/kyle-dunn-ghost-world/

The Maria Manetti Shrem Art Studio Program has a personal and well-documented December 2020 Visiting Artist Lecture by Kyle Dunn located on YouTube under the title: “Kyle Dunn: Art Studio Visiting Artist Lecture Series”.

Top Insert Image: Justin J. Wee, “Kyle Dunn, Brooklyn Studio”, 2021, Color Print, Galerie Magazine

Second Insert Image: Kyle Dunn, “Into the Crevasse”, 2019, Acrylic on Epoxy Resin, Plaster and Foam Panel, 121.9 x 175.3 x 5.1 cm

Bottom Insert Image: Kyle Dunn, “Window”, 2020, Acrylic on Epoxy Resin, Plaster, and Foam Panel, 162.6 x 137.2 x 6.4 cm, Private Collection