John Keith Vaughan

Paintings by Keith Vaughan

Born in August of 1912 in Selsey, England, John Keith Vaughan was a British painter and photographer who was one of the leading proponents of Neo-Romanticism. Britain’s foremost painter of male nudes before David Hockney and Patrick Procktor, he created muted depictions of anonymous male nudes set in abstract landscapes that expressed his internal struggle with his homosexuality. Due to legal laws against homosexuality, Vaughan was compelled to self-censor and veil his imagery due to legal risks and possible charges from obscenity laws.

Keith Vaughan attended Christ’s Hospital school. As an intending conscientious objector during the Second World War, he was conscripted into the Non-Combatant Corps, providing physical labor to the army. In 1942, stationed at Ashton Gifford in Wiltshire, Vaughan had his first exhibition of paintings at the Manchester Art Gallery.

During the war, Keith Vaughan became friends with painters Graham Sutherland, notable for his work in glass and fabrics, and John Minton, an illustrator and stage designer. In 1946 after leaving service, the three men shared living and studio premises. It was through their association that Vaughan became part, for a brief period, of the Neo=Romantic movement of the immediate post-war period. Upon his leaving the genre, his work, concentrating on studies of male figures, became increasingly more abstract.

During the years of the mid to late 1940s, Keith Vaughan produced around twenty-five paintings of male bathers, as well as scenes and drawings in gouache and other media. At Pagham, on the south coast of England between 1947 and 1948, Vaughan met John McGuinness, an ill-educated, working-class orphan from Liverpool. In some ways, the young man reminded Vaughan of his younger brother Dick, who was killed in the war seven years earlier, which led Vaughan to provide clothing, meals and an education for McGuinness.

McGuinness, with his large hands and athletic body, represented something raw and honest, embodying all the qualities that Vaughan was attracted to. McGuinness’s gentle, unaffected character allied him with nature in Vaughan’s imagination. John McGuinness’s broad, broken nose, fringe and rugged look make their appearance in several works from this time onwards. The 1947 oil painting “Standing Male Figure”, with its blue background, and the 1949 color lithograph “The Woodsman”, both shown above. are two of the works featuring McGuinness.

An art teacher at the Camberwell College of Arts and later at the Slade School, Keith Vaughan is also known for the journals he kept, published in 1966 and posthumously in 1989. A gay man who was troubled by his sexuality, Vaughan’s life is mostly revealed to us through these daily journals. Diagnosed with cancer in 1975, John Keith Vaughan committed suicide in London on November 4th of 1977, writing in his diary as the drug overdose took effect.

For more extensive information on the life of Keith Vaughan, I suggest the Keith Vaughan Society which is located at: https://www.thekeithvaughansociety.com

An article by award-winning poet and art critic Sue Hubbard on Keith Vaughan’s life and his photographic work on Pagham Beach can be found online at The London Magazine located at: https://www.thelondonmagazine.org/review-keith-vaughan-pagham-beach-photographs-collages-1930s/

Top Insert Image: Francis Goodman, “Keith Vaughan”, January 1947, Gelatin Silver Print, National Portrait Gallery, London

Middle Insert Image: Keith Vaughan, “Les Illuminations de Rimbaud, Parade”, 1975, Gouache on Wove Paper, 48 x 43 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Keith Vaughan, “Seated Bathers on the Shore”, 1945, Ink Charcoal Crayon and Gouache on Paper, Private Collection

Hugh Ramsay

Hugh Ramsay, “A Student of the Latin Quarter”, 1901, Oil on Canvas on Board, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Insert: Hugh Ramsay, “Self-Portrait in White Jacket”, 1901-02, Oil on Canvas, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Hugh Ramsay was an accomplished Australian artist whose portrait paintings achieved success in Australia and in France before his untimely death at the age of twenty-eight. Born in Scotland in 1877, he relocated with his family to Melbourne, Australia, in 1878. Ramsay enrolled at the National Gallery of Victoria School in 1894 under the tutelage of impressionist Frederick McCubbin and artist Bernard Hall, who tutored him on the importance of tone through careful study of Spanish master-painter Diego Valázquez.

After unsuccessfully applying for the 1899 Traveling Art Scholarship, Ramsay was encouraged by portraitist John Longstaff to travel to Europe in September of 1900, which he financed by selling his paintings through the Art Union sales and with support from his older brother. Ramsay arrived in Paris in January of 1901, where he enrolled at the Académie Colarossi and was exposed to the Louvre collections and exhibitions of the work of his American and French contemporaries.

Hugh Ramsay’s 1901 “Portrait of James S Macdonald” was accepted by the conservative Paris Salon and, in 1902, three portraits and a still life were accepted by the progressive Société Nationale des Beaux Arts and displayed favorably. With his reputation increasing, Ramsay’s art connections permitted him access to the important social circles in London, particularly that of opera singer Dame Nellie Melba, who gave him a commission for a portrait.

Unfortunately, due to long hours spent working in the impoverished conditions of his studio and living quarters, Ramsay contracted tuberculosis and was advised to return to the warmer climates of Australia. Forced to abandon his international career, he returned home to Melbourne in August of 1902. In December, Dame Melba, on tour in Australia, organized Ramsay’s first and only solo exhibition at Myoora house in the Melbourne suburb of Toorak.

Despite his worsening condition, Hugh Ramsay continued to paint and exhibit at the Victorian Artists Society. The last paintings he produced are considered among his greatest, including “The Sisters”, a portrait of his own two sisters, seated and dressed in white, and painted in 1904. Gradually becoming weaker, Hugh Ramsay died at his family’s estate, Clydebank, in Essendon, Victoria, on March 5th 1906, a few weeks before his twenty-ninth year.

Ramsay’s realist portraits were characterized by Velazquez-inspired tonalism, prevalent in Melbourne during the 1890s. His quick and confident handling of oil lent his portraits a wonderful candidness which were indebted to the influence of American painter John Singer Sargent. Ramsay also worked within other genres, including narrative and mythological subjects, still life, urban scenes and landscapes.

A memorial exhibition of Hugh Ramsay’s work was held at the Fine Arts Society in 1906 and a retrospective at the national Gallery of Victoria in 1943. Ramsay’s achievements overseas and impact locally are remarkable given his short period of activity and relative inexperience. The fact that he had not yet matured fully affirms his exceptional artistic talents.

More of Hugh Ramsay’s work can be found at the National Gallery of Australia site located at: https://nga.gov.au/ramsay/works.cfm

Toshihiko Okuya

Artwork by Toshihiko Okuya

Born in November of 1955 in the Gifu Prefecture of Japan, Toshihiko Okuya started his art career in 1981 doing illustrative work for children’s and picture books, and magazines; he also produced illustrative puzzles and mazes for books and periodicals. Okuya became a lecturer in 1983, specializing in education for children. In 1989, he entered his paintings in the “Illustration in Japan1988” exhibition held by the Seibu Art Forum in Tokyo.

Toshihiko Okuya began work, starting in 1996, in the fields of graphic design and web design. In 2001, he began to combine his oil painting with computer graphics, first scanning his work into digital images and then adding effects on his computer. Okuya entered the 2001 Mikuni Town Exhibition, becoming a special prize winner in puzzle art. He won a prize for his oil paintings at the 44th Kanagawa Prefectural Art Exhibition in 2008 and a prize at the 2009 Epson Color Imaging Contest for Digital Art- Ink Jet Print Works.

The artist’s site is located at: http://quinbaya.com/okuya/#

George Quaintance

Paintings by George Quaintance

Born in 1902 in Stanley Virginia, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains, George Quaintance was a gay American artist, famous for his idealized, strongly homoerotic depictions of men in mid-twentieth century magazines. Growing up in a farm family, George Quaintance, showing an artistic potential, was encouraged by his parents to pursue art rather than forcing him into the family business of farming. At the age of eighteen, he enrolled at the Art Students League in New York City, studying painting, drawing, and dance. Quaintance’s first art assignments were producing anonymous graphic work for several advertising firms.

By 1934, Quaintance began to sell freelance cover illustrations to a variety of pulp magazines, such as Movie Humor, Snappy Detective Stories, Gay French Life, Ginger, and Tempting Tales. Using historical settings to justify the nudity or distance the subjects from modern society, his artwork featured idealized muscular, semi-nude or nude male figures; A common motif of his work was the theme of the Wild West, complete with cowboys on the ranch or camping out.

Quaintance later moved to Los Angeles, where his artwork began to gather recognition and establish, in an illustrative form, the stereotype of the gay macho, sexually active man. He used young, attractive athletes as nude models; but he personally often posed nude as a model for his paintings. An influence on many upcoming homoerotic artists, Quaintance was in 1937 the highest-paid illustrator for Gay French Magazine, earning more than fifty thousand dollars for his illustrative work.

In 1938, Quaintance returned to Stanley, Virginia, with his companion Victor Garcia, a handsome, young man from Puerto Rico who became a prominent model for his 1940s photographs, his business associate, and life-long partner until Quaintance’s untimely death. Although Garcia was with Quaintance through the rest of his life, Quaintance also had a series of other lovers, many of whom became models for his paintings.

Quaintance’s paintings and illustrations appeared on the covers and inside most of the seminal physique and body-building magazines of the 1940s and 1950s, such as Physique Pictorial, Body Beautiful and Demi-Gods. In the early 1950s, Quaintance and Garcia moved to Rancho Siesta near Phoenix, Arizona, which became the home of Studio Quaintance, a successful business venture based around Quaintance’s artworks.

In Rancho Siesta, Quaintance articulated a vision that was unique, and that spawned dozens of imitators. He offered idealized male images to a hungry international audience; and he offered them in a context that was rugged, masculine, and romantic, as well as erotic. Quaintance presented Levi jeans as a garment that was sexy and serviceable. He also embraced Mexican, Native American, and Latino cultures and people in a way that avoided caricature and stereotyping. Quaintance realized America’s fascination with the West and gave all those fans a different cowboy role mode. He created a world where queer boys grew up to be queer men without the specter of homophobic intrusion.

George Quaintance died in a Los Angeles hospital of a heart-attack on his 55th birthday. His life-long partner Victor Garcia and long-time friend Tom Syphers inherited his estate. Quaintance’s works can be found in many private collections and museums.

Note: An excellent read on the life of George Quaintance is “Quaintance: The Short Life of an American Pioneer” by Ken Furtado and John Waybright

Titian

Tiziano Vecellio (Titian), “The Punishment of Tityus”, 1549, Oil on Canvas, 253 x 217 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain

Born in 1488-1490 in Pieve di Cadore, Republic of Venice, Tiziano Vecellio, known as Titian, was a Renaissance painter, considered the most important member of the sixteenth-century Venetian school. The mythology of Greco-Roman antiquity provided a great body of narrative themes for Titian. Beginning at 1540s, Titian set about visually reconstructing those legends and images. Following his 1546 visit to Rome in his later years, he renewed and deepened his study of the ancient myths.

In 1548 Titian received a commission from Mary of Hungary, sister of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Regent of the Netherlands, for a series of subjects drawn from Ovid’s description of the punishment of four sinners in Hades. He painted four large canvases of the Damned, depicting Tityus, Sisyphus, Tantalus and Ixion, all of whom were condemned to perpetual torture for incurring the displeasure of the gods. Of these four canvases, only the ones of Tityus and Sisyphus have survived.

“The Punishment of Tityus”, commissioned by Mary of Hungary, was done during a time when the imperial power of her brother, the Catholic Emperor Charles V, was in a critical time of confrontation with the Protestant princes, Ultimately after barely escaping capture, Charles V’s political situation compelled him in 1552 to ratify an agreement by which the new Protestant religion was granted equal rights with Roman Catholicism.

Titian’s style in this mid-century was concerned with impressively-scaled figures and dynamic composition of the scene’s structure. The theme in the four paintings, punishment as a determent for wrongs against authority, seems timely for that tumultuous period in history. The drama of Tityus’s punishment was conveyed by Titian’s use of fluid and assertive brushstrokes, the askew figure of Tityus, and its diagonal composition.

Note: Tityus was a Giant, the son of Zeus and the mortal Elara, daughter of King Orchomenus, ruler of Arcadia. Once grown Tityus, at the behest of goddess Hera, attempted to rape Leto, the daughter of Titans Coeus and Phoebe. Slain by Antemis and Apollo, the protective children of Leto, he was sent to Hades for punishment. Tityus was chained, stretched out, reaching forever for food and drink, and tortured by two vultures who eternally fed on his liver, which grew back every night.

Salman Toor

Paintings by Salman Toor

Born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1983, Salman Toor studied painting and drawing at Ohio Wesleyan University, and received his MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, in 2009. His work, usually done with oil paints on canvas or wooden panels, has ranged in style from meticulously executed nineteenth century-styled history painting to loosely painted, abstracted figurative work with design elements from both Eastern and Western pop culture.

Salman Toor straddles two continents with his art, living a dual life in New York City and Lahore. Inspired by pop culture from both the Subcontinent and the Western world, he enjoys painting scenes that represent South Asians who, like him, are living a life that’s in between cultures. Toor hopes to portray both the ordinary and the unusual that’s associated with his homeland in his works.

Toor finds inspiration in the history of European paintings, particularly in the Baroque, Romantic and Impressionist artists such as Peter Paul Rubens, Diego Velázquez, and Johannes Vermeer. He has also been inspired by the works of Eastern artists such as Nainsukh, an important practitioner of Pahari miniature painting, and Bichitr, Emperor Jahangir’s court painter who combined Indian landscapes with European perspective.

Salman Toor’s paintings tell stories of lives lived between two cultures. Using his own experiences, he paints narratives, often mixtures of coziness, leisure and sensuality, dealing with the issues of his figures’ identity, those of brownness and queerness, and those between Western and Eastern culture. Toor examines the vulnerability within today’s public and private life and the sense of community in the world-wide queer identity.

In Toor’s work, multi-ethnic couples dance, embrace in bars, share wine and cigarettes, and experience both reunions and comforting moments. Through his paintings depicting the everyday and special moments of his characters, Toor presents a relatable experience to the viewer. While his works illustrate the hard-won gains made by queer society in social life, they also reveal the tension and anxiety of crossing national and moral boundaries in a world where religious and ethnic identity supplants diversity

Salman Toor currently lives in the East Village and works out of a studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn. He has exhibited at several solo exhibitions, including New Delhi’s Nature Morte Gallery in December 2019, New York’s Marianne Boesky Gallery in January 2020, and New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in March 2020. Toor has also participated in significant group shows such as the Kochi Biennale in 2016, and the inaugural Lahore Biennale in 2018.

“I’ve been exposed to things in Pakistan that don’t allow me to take these liberties (gained) for granted. Being queer—I accepted it for a very long time, but I never really celebrated it. And I want to celebrate it now.” -Salman Toor, January 2020

Middle Inser Ingae: Salman Toor, “Reading”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas

Esther Hammerman

Esther Hammerman, Untitled (East River), post 1950, Oil on Canvas, 59.1 x 44 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Esther Hammerman, Untitled (Football), Date Unknown, Mixed Media, Private Collection

Born Esther Wachsmann in Wieliczka, Poland in 1886, Esther Hammerman and her husband Baruch owned a small import business in Vienna, Austria. Along with raising four daughters, Hammerman stitched wall hangings and needlework tapestries. The family fled the Nazis during their takeover of Austria in 1938, first landing in Trinidad, and then the British West Indies where they spent the war years interned in a camp. Upon the end of the war, Esther Hammerman and her family managed to immigrate to New York City.

Encouraged in her artwork by her youngest daughter and son-in-law, Esther Hammerman began painting. She entered two works in a national competition at New York’s Whitney Museum, winning a prize and beginning her career, at the age of sixty, as a serious painter in New York. In 1950, Hammerman joined her youngest daughter’s family in San Francisco, where her exhibited work was again well received.

During her twelve years in the Bay Area, Esther Hammerman had one-woman shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, and the Oakland Museum of California. In 1963 she returned to New York in failing health, living with her daughter Nadja’s family, but continued painting and showing her work both in New York and California.

Esther Hamerman painted somewhat naturalistically; although. she also abstracted forms and flattened the perspective of her compositions. Her palette was jewel-like and beautifully nuanced. Hammerman devised a personal style by painting in oils on canvas or canvas board, and then outlining the forms in India ink. Occasionally, she used photographs or printed images for reference; but she then transformed the subject in a personal way.

Esther Hammerman died in New York in April of 1977. Completing some seventy-five works that include paintings, drawings, and watercolors, she received recognition and several honors during her lifetime. Fifty pieces of Hammerman’s work remain with her family who withdrew her work from public view in 1993.

There were solo exhibitions of her paintings in the later 1950s and early 1960s at the De Young Museum in San Francisco and the Oakland Museum of Art. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Santa Rosa Junior College, the Oakland Museum of California, the Judah L. Magnes Museum, and The Ames Gallery are among the places that featured her work in retrospective solo or in group shows in the 1980s.

Jaques Augustin-Catherine Pajou

Jaques Augustin Pajou, Academic Male Study, 1785, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 82 cm, Private Collection

Insert: Jaques Augustin Pajou, “Academic Male Study”, 1787, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 82 cm, Private Collection

The son of famous sculptor Augustin Pajou, Jacques-Augustin-Catherine Pajou was born in August of 1766 in Paris, France. He was a historical and portrait painter in the Classical style, with the emphasis on form, simplicity, proportion and the clarity of formal structure. In 1784, Pajou became a student at Paris’ Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture.

In 1792, accompanied with painter Louis-François Lejeune and economist Jean-Baptiste Say, Jacques Pajou became a member of the Compagnie des Arts de Paris. This military unit of the French Revolutionary Wars, organized by the Louvre, consisted of students of literature, the arts, and sciences, particularly from the École des Beaux-Arts and the École de Droit. Pajou, during this period, was stationed in Sedan, an administrative district in north-east France.

After demobilization, Jacques Pajou was a member of the General Arts Community of Paris, a revolutionary institution, founded by painters Jacques-Louis David and Jean ll Restout, to replace the Royal Academy. This movement succeeded in abolishing the Academy in September of 1793 during the French Revolution, burning paintings and books. It was later restored as a division of the Institute of France in 1803 by Napoleon Bonaparte.. Jacques Pajou served as Secretary for the General Arts Community’s president, painter Joseph-Marie Vien.

Under the First French Empire, ruled by Napoleon Bonaparte, Jacques Pajou was commissioned to paint a portrait of Louis-Alexandre Berthier, Marshal and chief of staff to Napoleon, which is now on view at Versailles. In 1812, Pajou was awarded a gold medal for his depiction of Napoleon offering clemency to the Royalists who had taken refuge in Spain. In 1814, he painted three tableaux, displayed at the Paris Salon, which celebrated the Bourbon Restoration, the period in France following the first fall of Napoleon and the restoration of a conservative government under Louis XVII and Charles X.

Citing poor health, Jacques-Augustin-Catherine Pajou resigned in 1823 from most of the associations of which he was a member. After experiencing increasing poor health and a year of continual tremors, Pajou died in November of 1828, while residing in Paris. His body was interred at the Père-Lachaise Cemetery.

Hernan Bas

Paintings by Hernan Bas

Born in 1978 in Miami, Florida, Hernan Bas is an American painter whose work presents a world composed of personal and historical references. Graduated from the New World School of the Arts in 1996, Bas creates his multilayered, densely textured works of art, by combining the mediums of woodcut, linoleum print, airbrush or gold leaf with painting,.

Hernan Bas takes his inspiration from literature, history and contemporary culture, presenting in his work references to Romanticism and Nihilism, and literary allusion to such writers as Robert Frost and Oscar Wilde. Inspired by the aesthetics of the male androgynous dandy, Bas constructs narratives of adolescent exploration, which often serve as metaphors for a sexual and sensual awakening.

Portrayed usually alone in sprawling natural surroundings, the figures in Bas’s large-format paintings reside in a utopian world of innate sensuality, painted with lush, abundant brushstrokes. The stories of their adventures are woven together with classical poetry, mythology, religious stories, the paranormal, and classical literature.

Hernan Bas’s 2017 exhibition at the gallery Victoria Miro Mayfair was inspired by the lore and romanticism of life at Cambridge, England. Following a period of research while in residence at Jesus College Cambridge in 2016, Bas developed new subject matter including the famed ‘Night Climbers of Cambridge’, a group of students whose nocturnal ascents of the ancient buildings of the university and town, taking photographs while trying to avoid detection, gained them a cult following during the early decades of the twentieth century.

Loosely based on vintage men’s fashion magazine covers, the Bas’s most recent work depicts male magazine-cover celebrities surrounded by a choreographed array of artifacts, accessories and architectural elements that point to the idea of identity. Infused with an aura of eroticism and decadence, and loaded with codes and double-meanings, these recent works of Hernan Bas further point to the intricacies of self-identity, while celebrating moments of transformation from the ordinary to the extraordinary.

Hernan Bas had solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2009, Miami’s Rubell Family Collection in 2008, and the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami in 2002. He currently, October 17 to December 10 2020, is showing at gallery Ocula in Paris. Hernan Bas’s work has also been widely exhibited in group exhibitions, including shows at the Venice Biennale, the Busan Biennale, the Aspen Art Museum, and the Whitney Biennial, among many others.

Hernan Bas has work in the permanent collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Detroit Institute of Arts; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and others.

Second Insert Image: Hernan Bas, “The Palm Tree Enthusiast”, 2021, Acrylic and Gouache on Arches Paper, 76.2 x 57.2 cm, Anat Ebgi Gallery

Bottom Insert Image: Hernan Bas, “A Gathering of Minds (The Agoraphobic), 2021, Acrylic on Linen, 182.9 x 153.4 x 4.45 cm, Anat Ebgi Gallery

Thomas Downing

Thomas Downing, “Untitled”, 1950, Acrylic on Unprimed Canvas, 243.8 x 225.4 cm, Private Collection

Born in 1928 in Suffolk, Virginia, American painter Thomas Downing initially studied English literature at Randolph-Mason College in Ashland, Virginia, receiving his Bachelor of Arts in 1948. After frequent visits to exhibitions held at Randolph-Mason and local museums, he eventually decided to study art. Downing moved to New York City to study at the Pratt Institute of Art, where he was influenced by the New York School of painters. With a grant given to him in 1950 by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, he was able to travel and study in Europe, briefly enrolling in the Académie Julien in Paris.

In Paris, Thomas Downing secured a position as a studio assistant for the painter Fernand Léger in 1951, eventually exhibiting a series of his own gouaches at Paris’ Galerie Huit. After a short service in the US Army, he moved in 1953 to Washington, DC, working as a high school teacher. Downing attended summer sessions at Catholic University, where he studied under and was influenced by painter Kenneth Nolan, one of the founders of the Washington Color School of painting, a flourishing abstract art movement emphasizing pure color. An established member of Washington’s art community by 1958, Downing had his first one-man show with the Sculptors Studio in 1959. By the early 1960s, he began producing canvases that were composed of grids and circles of dots of varying color, a motif which became recognizable as his body of work.

Thomas Downing’s work explores the formal possibilities of color and color-space, establishing that as the sole subject of his compositions. His circles of varying hues and colors seem to float in an undefined space, with each set of color appearing on a flat plane, but collectively presenting a depth of space. Downing’s specific color choices suggest the modern design principles of the Bauhaus movement, particularly the color-space theories of painter and instructor Josef Albers.

Following a series of successful solo shows in the DC area, several of Downing’s dot paintings were included in Clement Greenberg’s 1964 traveling exhibition “Post-Painterly Abstraction” and the New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s influential 1965 exhibition “The Responsive Eye”. In 1966, Downing included a series of shaped canvases to his works in the “Systematic Painting” show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Downing taught at the Corcoran School of Art from 1965 to 1968, influencing artists such as Sam Gilliam and Rockne Krebs. He moved to New York to teach at the New School of Visual Art, and after a brief tenure at the University of Houston in 1975, settled in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In his later years, he had many exhibitions, including tow at the Osuna Gallery in Washington, DC, in 1979 and 1980, and one at The Phillips Collection in 1985, the year of his death.

Thomas Downing’s work is in a number of collections, both private and public, including the National Gallery of Art and the Phillips Collection, both in Washington, DC, and the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California.

Salomon-Léon Sarluis

The Artwork of Salomon-Léon Sarluis

Born in the Hague in October of 1874, French painter Salomon-Léon Sarluis, known as Léonard Sarluis, studied at the École des Beaux-Arts before moving to Paris in 1884 where he became a well known figure on its boulevards. He was a student of the French Symbolist painter Armand Point and of the French novelist Élémir Bourges, who was strongly linked with the Decadent and Symbolist movements in literature. Sarluis was also associated with the openly gay poet Jean Lorrain, who is remembered for his contributions to the satirical weekly Le Courrier Français and his Decadent novels and short stories.

Léonard Sarluis traveled widely throughout Italy, visiting Naples, and Russia. Upon his return to Paris, he exhibited at the Salon de la Rose Croix and the Salon des Artistes Français, and at a number of other Parisian galleries. With designer Armand Point, Sarluis created the poster for the fifth exhibition at the Salon des Artistes Français, depicting Perseus holding the severed head of novelist Émile Zola, who was rejected by the Symbolists for his Naturalist social commentary.

Working under the influence of Point, Léonard Sarluis combined a technique inspired by the Old Masters with a style that was sensual and very modern. He liked to work on a grand scale, and his monumental “Nero”, exhibited at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris, was greatly admired by muralist painter Puvis de Chavannes. In 1919 Sarluis had a solo exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim, one of the oldest galleries in Pairs and a leader in avant-garde art.

In 1923, Sarluis produced illustrations based on novelist Gaston Pavloski’s 1912 mystical “Voyage to the Land of the Fourth Dimension”. For a number of years, Sarluis worked on a series of three hundred-sixty paintings entitled “A Mystical Interpretation of the Bible”, which were shown at the Grafton Galleries in London in 1926.

Léonard Sarluis’s inspiration was emblematic of a turn of the century that combined nostalgia for an imagined past, decadent themes and sometimes cloudy mysticism. A provocative character and dandy, and a friend of Oscar Wilde, Salomon-Léon Sarluis died in 1949 in Paris.

Émile Louis Salomé

Émile Louis Salomé, “The Prodigal Son”, 1863, Oil on Canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille, France

Born in Lille, France, in December of 1833, Émile Louis Salomé was a painter of genre scenes, portraits and still lifes. He received his initial art training from his father Louis Adolphe Salomé, an engraver and lithographer. Émile Salomé entered the Academic Schools of Lille around 1845 and exhibited his works for the first time at the Paris Salon of 1859.

In 1862 Émile Salomé shared with his fellow painter Carolus-Duran a four-year scholarship grant from the city of Lille to complete their studies at Rome’s Wicar workshop, bequeathed to the city of Lille by painter and art collector Jean Baptiste Wicar. His studies completed, Salomé settled in his hometown of Lille, establishing a strong regional reputation for his works.

Émile Salomé was admitted to the Society of Sciences, Agriculture and the Arts of Lille in 1878. He continued to exhibit his work at the Paris Salon from 1861 until his death in August of 1881 at the age of forty-seven. A retrospective of his works was held in 1881 at the Palais Rameau in Lille.

Émile Salomé’s work can be found at the Museum of Art and History in Neuchâtel, Switzerlnd; the Musée Benoit de Puydt in Bailleul, France; the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon, France; and the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, which holds Salomé’s 1863 “The Prodigal Son” in its collection.

Paul Cadmus

Paul Cadmus, “The Fleet’s In!”, 1934, Tempera on Canvas, 94 x 170 cm, Naval History and Heritage Command, U.S. Navy Art Collection

Paul Cadmus, “The Fleet’s In!”, 1934, Etching, 18.9 x 35.7 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Paul Cadmus’s work is imbued with the compositions of the Renaissance period, the firm and expressive lines of Jean-Auguste Ingres, and the sharp, figurative appearance of Magical Realism. However, Cadmus received his greatest influence from his lover and fellow painter Jared French, with whom he studied and traveled extensively. French instilled within Cadmus the traditions of the Old Masters that became a fundamental part of his work.

Cadmus is best known for his erotic depictions of nude male figures, charged with satire, social criticism, and a strongly idealized sexuality. He first gained recognition for his 1934 Public Works of Art Project (WPA) tempera painting “The Fleet’s In!”, where the controversy of a group of sailors he pictured carousing among prostitutes and homosexuals inspired a public outcry.

The tempera “The Fleet’s In!” was removed in 1934 from the WPA exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC before public viewing by order of the US Secretary of the Navy and transferred to the custody of the US Department of the Navy. it was not seen in a public exhibition until September of 1981, when it was shown, on loan, in a traveling Cadmus retrospective. Upon the retrospective’s end in July of 1982, the painting’s repository remained the US Navy’s Art Collection, which has continued the practice of loaning it to domestic and international museums.

For more extensive information on the censorship of Paul Cadmus’s paintings, please visit Anthony J. Morris’s dissertation entitled “The Censored Paintings of Paul Cadmus, 1934-1940: The Body as the Boundary Between the Decent and Obscene”, 2010, Department of Art History and Art, Case Western Reserve University. The dissertation can be found at:

https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=case1270569282&disposition=inline

Pyotr Konchalovsky

Pyotr Konchalovsky, “Bathing Calvary (Horse Bathing), c 1928, Oil on Canvas

Born in February of 1876 in the village of Slavyanka, Russia, Pyotr Konchalovsky , at the age of eight, attended art school in Kharkov where he became interested in painting. His father, a book publisher now in Moscow, began to publish works by Romantic writer Mikhail Lermontov and novelist Aleksandr Pushkin, commissioning notable artists such as Vasily Surikov and Valentin Serov to produce illustrations for the works. Influenced by these artists, Konchalovsky attended classes at Moscow’s School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture.

In 1896 to 1898, Konchalovsky studied at the Academie Julian in Paris, later entering the Moscow Academy of Arts, from which he graduated in 1907. He traveled extensively over the next two years and, in 1907, attended the exhibition of Van Gogh’s works in Paris, which made a significant impact on his future works. This influence is noticeable in the work Konchalovsky produced between 1907 and 1910.

In 1909, Konchalovsky and his close associates, such as painters Robert Falk and Ilya Mashkov, founded the art group “Jack of Diamonds”, an early Russian avant-garde
movement that challenged the academic traditions and supported the post-impressionist, cubist and fauvist painters. Their first exhibition in Moscow was considered by some to be a scandal; but it initiated a cultural action that brought the new art forms to the public.

Konchalovsky painted landscapes, portraits, still lifes, and genre paintings, with simple compositions, lack of details, and with thick applications of color. Some of his most well-known works are the cubist paintings, “The Agave” and “The Dry Paints”, 1916 and 1913 respectively ; the post-impressionist 1946 “The Candlestick and Pears”; and the 1955 realist “The Strawberries”. Konchalovsky also painted portraits of outstanding figures, such as poets Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov, composer Sergey Prokofiev and theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold. He also illustrated a number of poems by Mikhail Lermontov.

The works of Pyotr Konchalovsky have been exhibited both in Russia and abroad. He was appreciated by the Soviet government and awarded with orders and medals. In 1943 Konchalovsky became a laureate of the Stalin Prize and, in 1947, received the rank of the USSR Academy of Arts member. Pyotr Konchalovsky died on the2nd of February in 1956 and is buried at the Novodevichie Cemetery in Moscow.

Ludwig von Hofmann

Ludwig von Hofmann, “Die Quelle (The Source)”, 1913, Oil on Canvas, Thomas Mann Archives, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich

A member of the avant-garde group “Eleven”, Ludwig von Hofmann was an active participant in the cultural movement “Berlin Succession”. He taught at the art school in Weimar, located in central Germany, and at the Dresden Academy of Arts, where he directed a course in monumental painting. Von Hoffman was a frequent illustrator for the arts and literary magazine “Pan”, which played an important role in the development of the Art Nouveau movement in Germany.

Working in a combination of Symbolist and Art Nouveau styles, Ludwig von Hofmann’s paintings included antique and biblical themes, and idyllic landscapes inhabited by surreal or mythological creatures. His work aspired to portray beauty in form, using unique and strong color combinations, and often presented a veiled eroticism in its figures. Von Hofmann’s symbolist work is both decorative and idealized, with verdant forests, blossoming fields, and naked or clothed figures whose skin or flowing garments are lit by the sun.

In 1903, von Hofmann was appointed a professor at the Weimar Saxon Grand Ducal Art School. He was later named a Professor at the Academy of Arts in Dresden in 1916, remaining there until 1931. In his later years, von Hofmann predominately worked in the Art Nouveau style, producing engravings and illustrations, and designing libraries, residential rooms and theaters.

The production of Ludwig von Hofmann’s work slowed in the 1930s, with some of his work labeled “degenerate art’ by the National Socialist Party in 1937. He retired to the town of Pillnitz, a section of east Dresden, where he died in August of 1945.

Top Insert Image: Ludwig von Hofmann, “Badende am Schwarzen Felsein ( Bathers on the Black Rock)”, 1930, Oil on Canvas

Bottom Insert Image: Ludwig von Hofmann, “Men, Boys and Horses in a Landscape”, circa 1910, Pastel on Paper