Claudio Massini

The Artwork of Claudio Massini

Born in Naples in 1955, Italian painter and photographer Claudio Massani spent his early years living in Trieste, a seaport on the Adriatic coast. At the beginning of the 1970’s, he obtained a diploma from Trieste’s art school and, following his family’s move to Naples, he attended Naples’s Academy of Fine Arts. During these years Massini’s works were based on performance actions with an urban and social context.

Starting in 1975, Massini developed his personal style of extremely precise relief canvases constructed of multiple layers of both organic and inorganic pigments. These he exhibited in the 1975 Rome Quadriennale, as part of “The New Generation” exhibition promoting Italian contemporary art, and in the 1976 Venice Biennale. After moving to Treviso in 1980, Massini focused his work on acrylic paintings, often with sculpture influences and bleak undertones.

An agreement with Naples’s contemporary art advocate and gallery owner Lucio Amelio led to Massini’s constant participation in important exhibitions, including a solo show in 1989 at the Lucio Amelio gallery. In the 1990s Massini channeled his energies and time into the development of the Padiglione Arte Contemporanea in Milan, a venue for meetings and exhibitions of national and international artists.

Over the course of his career, Claudio Massini has developed, through the research of different materials, a glazing technique of color and effects to place his painted elements on a relief plane only a few millimeters in thickness. The different elements, either opaque, translucent or dusty in appearance, retain their recognizable forms, such as stars, tables or flowers, in a balanced organic or architectural form.

Now living in Casier, Italy, Claudio Massini exhibited in 2003 at Bologna’s Gallery of Modern Art and at the Mücsarnok Kunsthalle in Budapest. In 2009, his solo show “Fili Fatali (Fatal Threads)” was exhibited at the Civic Museum Sartario in Trieste and six other galleries in the city. Massini’s exhibition “Lago Sacro (Sacred Logo)” was exhibited in 2010 at the San Zenone Civic Gallery in the city of Campione d’Italia. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Treviso, Casa Robegan, hosted Massini’s solo show “The Body of Painting”.

The artist: https://www.instagram.com/claudio_massini/?hl=en

Bottom Insert Image: Claudio Massini, “Joueur au Filet”, Date Unknown, Oil on Panel, 137.2 x 185.4 cm, Private Collection

Saint Irene Nursing Saint Sebastian

Artist Unknown (Florentine School), “Saint Irene Nursing Saint Sebastian”, 1600s, Oil on Canvas, 99 x 123 cm, Private Collection

“Saint Irene Nursing Saint Sebastian” is an incident in the legends of Saint Sebastian and of Saint Irene of Rome. It was not a prominent theme in the biographical literature of the saints until the latter years of the Renaissance. It became popular as a painting theme after 1610, eventually becoming a frequent subject until about the 1670s. By the 18th century, the subject became still less common, with the figure of Saint Irene being replaced by an angel.

In his biographical stories, Saint Sebastian survives his first “martyrdom” by a multitude of arrows during Roman emperor Diocletian’s persecution of Christians. He was, according to tradition, untied from the tree, or post, and his wounds treated by Saint Irene, an active Christian in Rome, whose husband had previously been executed. Saint Sebastian, later in life, undergoes his second “martyrdom”, this time suffering fatal injuries by thrown stones.

The scenes of Saint Irene tending to Sebastian are often shown taking place in darkness, typically in one of the catacombs of Rome, which was the subject of archeological examination in the early 1600s. Baroque artists often painted the scene as nocturnal, with illumination provided by a lantern, torch or candle, in the chiaroscuro style, an effect of contrasted light and shadow created by light falling unevenly or from a particular direction.

Saint Sebastian’s death is firmly located in Rome, where he was the third patron saint, with churches dedicated to him built on the legend’s locations of events. The Saint Sebastian and Saint Irene scene is found as an independent subject in the works of painters Georges de La Tour, Jusepe de Ribera, and Trophime Bigot. Although the subject was mainly painted by Italian artists, the scene were also painted by a number of artists from the Netherlands, including Hendrick ter Brugghen, a follower of Caravaggio, and Mannerist painter Joachim Wtewael.

Dick Hendrik Ket

Paintings by Dick Hendrik Ket

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Claudio Bravo Camus

Claudio Bravo Camus, “Antes del Juego (Before the Game)”, 1983, Oil on Canvas, 199 x 239 cm

Born in 1936, Chilean-born artist Claudio Bravo initially established himself as a society portrait painter in Chile and Spain, but he became better known for his vibrant still lifes of such everyday items as packages, crumpled paper, and draped fabric. Although he lived in Morocco for many years, it was the Spanish classical masters who inspired the provocative style of his hyperrealist paintings.

Though Bravo had some training under Chilean artist Miguel Venegas Cifuentes, he was primarily self-taught. He was only 17 years old when he had his first exhibition in 1954 at Salón 13 in Valparaíso. In the early 1960s Bravo moved to Spain, where he made his living painting portraits on commission, including pictures of Gen. Francisco Franco’s family members.

Bravo had his first New York City show in 1970. Two years later he settled in Tangier, Morocco, where he began to paint landscapes and animals as well as still lifes and portraits. His paintings regularly sold for impressive sums, with his 1967 “White Package” fetching more than $1 million in 2004. Bravo was, although, little known in Chile until a 1994 retrospective exhibition of his work at the Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts. He passed away in June of 2011 in Taroudant, Morocco.

Giulio Aristide Sartorio

Giulio Aristide Sartorio, “Artists Raise Venus” (The Locatelli Diptych), 1906, Oil on Canvas, Milan

Born into a two-generation Roman family of sculptors in February of 1860, Giulio Aristide Sartorio studied art, with emphasis on painting, among his family. In 1876, for a short time, he attended the classes of Romantic painter Francesco Podesti at the Academia di San Luca in Rome.

Sartorio started working for established architects and painters, in particular for the studio of the Spanish-styled painter Álvarez Catalá, whose works were in high demand by the art market. This profitable business enabled Sartorio to open his own studio in 1879 and start a personal career.

In 1923, Sartorio adapted a series of decorative panels, entitled “Artists Raise Venus”, previously displayed at the 1906 Milan Universal Exposition, for the Milanese house of the metallurgical entrepreneur Giovanni Locatelli, making formal changes in its context to align the panels to the atmosphere of the Victory of the Great War. In his customary poetic style, Giulio Sartorio portrayed an ideal classical and symbolic vision of Italy with its people revived to a new life after the achieved reunification.

Upon relocating the two panels to the Locatelli house, Sartorio added to each diptych panel the dates, in Roman numerals, of the entry into the war and of the Victory. On the solar disc supported by the three Graces, he added the legendary names of three decisive victory battles for Italy during the war: Karst, Piave, and Vittorio Veneto.

The new context of Sartorio’s diptych was to give a sense of hope to an Italy that had been able to unite its scattered forces in a grand effort of common rebirth. This was depicted by the dynamic group of young people on the left panel, raising together the statue of the goddess Minerva, a symbol of civil, military, artistic, and intellectual virtues.

Shane Berkery

Paintings by Shane Berkery

Born in April of 1992, Shane Keisuke Berkery is an Irish-Japanese contemporary artist based in Dublin, Ireland. His cultural background is a major influence on his work, appearing as a frequent theme in his paintings. Berkery graduated from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin in 2015.

Shane Berkery’s paintings are primarily centered around the human figure. He, a photographer as well, currently has several collections of work which are based his photos, including nudes and old family photos from his Japanese side. From the figures in his source material, Berkery seeks to create a sense of realism, giving attention to composition and color, while also including a sense of abstraction in the figure’s surroundings.

Berkery received the National University of Ireland’s Art and Design Award in 2015 and both the Hennessy-Craig and Whyte’s Awards at the Royal Hibernian Academy Annual Exhibition in 2016. His work was shown in a solo exhibition at the 2018 Start Art Fair in London. Berkery exhibited in a solo show at New York’s Contra Galleries in September of 2019.

Shane Berkery is represented by the Molesworth Gallery located in Dublin and the Chimera Gallery located in County Westmeath, Ireland. His painting “A Light” was placed in the Irish State Art Collection in February of 2016.

“I want the viewer to viscerally feel that the figure is real, like in dreams and memories where the details fade but recognition is there nonetheless.” —Shane Keisuke Berkery

The artist’s website can be found at: https://www.shaneberkery.com

Louis Fratino

The Artwork of Louis Fratino

Born in 1993, near Annapolis, Maryland, Louis Fratino received his BFA in Painting. with an emphasis on illustration, from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2015. He is a recipient of a Yale Norfolk Painting Fellowship in 2014 and a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Painting, studying in Berlin from 2015 to 2016. When he returned to the United States, Fratino settled in New York City, working part-time as an art handler and selling tickets at the Guggenheim.

Living and working in Brooklyn, New York, Fratino’s first gallery show was at Manhattan’s Siklema Jenkins & Co in 2019 and his first institutional solo exhibition was at the Des Moines Art Center in November of 2021. He has exhibited in group shows at the Yossi Milo and the D.C. Moore galleries and in solo shows at Thierry Goldberg, Antoine Levi, and Monya Rowe. Fratino has also done residency studies at Pioneer Works, the Artha Project, and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program.

Known primarily for his graphic but tender representations of queer intimacy, Fratino draws upon his own intimate experiences, memories, and fantasies to portray the everyday lives of gay men in New York City, often using historical art references in his work. His paintings often embody the visual style of early 20th century modernists like Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse.

Top Insert Image: Martin Zad, “Louis Fratino”, 2020, Color Print, Whitewall Magazine January 2022

Bottom Insert Image: Louis Fratino, “Anemones and Shells”, 2021, Etching with Aquatint and Drypoint on Hahnemuble White Paper, Edition of 25, Image Size 60 x 45.1 cm

Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud, “Two Men”, 1967-1968, Oil on Canvas, 75 x 106.7 cm, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, UK

Insert: Lucien Freud, “Reflection with Two Children (Self Portrait)”, 1965, Oil on Canvas, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Born in December of 1922 in Berlin, Germany, Lucian Michael Freud belonged to the School of London, a group of artists dedicated to figurative painting, a controversial group when abstraction, at that time, dominated the art world . Compared to other painters in the London School, such as Francis Bacon, Freud’s work was viewed more conventional. His figures were painted without idealization, but with emphasis on the body’s imperfections and sexual features. The figures in Freud’s work, typically done in a limited tonal range of creamy tans and browns, often exhibited an unease or a disturbance at their current condition.

Lucian Freud’s wide textured brush strokes were influenced by the early Expressionist movement, particularly the work of Austrian painter Egon Schiele and Norwegian painter Edward Munch. By the end of the 1960s, Freud’s brush strokes became more layered and heavier, lending more texture to his expressive portraits portraying naked deformed or unpleasant bodies. During the 1980s and 1990s as he gain popularity, Freud began painting the portraits of many famous people, including, most notably, his portrait of the British Queen Elizabeth II.

Lucian Freud is famous for his series of self-portraits which he painted persistently over period of six decades. The self-portraits are intense, intimate and visceral, and chart his artistic development. While they are all recognizable as Freud, his approach to self-portraiture and painting from life shifted throughout his career. As an artist, Freud was always looking to extend his exploration of painting as a method of capturing not only the likeness or appearance of himself and his sitters, but also a sense of their emotional and psychological makeup.

Freud’s self-portraits are not always straightforward. There is a degree of transience as he appears in a drawn mirrored reflection, in fragments of unfinished works, or glimpsed in the margins of others’ portraits. He placed himself in a mythological guise in his 1949 “Actaeon (Self-Portrait with Antlers)” and as a partial face contained within his 1947 drawing “Flyda and Arvid”. Freud also placed his face partly peeking around a corner in his 1947 painting “Still Life with Green Lemon”. In this painting, although the green lemon is given a prominent central position on the canvas, Freud gave his peeking face equal weight, drawing the attention of the viewer.

Note: Lucian Freud began his painting “Two Men” while working on a full=length portrait of the same two men in which the naked figure is seen standing. He became so absorbed in what he was painting that he put the larger full-length project aside to finish his “Two Men”, a peaceful scene with undercurrents of suggestive tension.

Top Insert Image: Lucien Freud, “Reflection with Two Children (Self Portrait)”, 1965, Oil on Canvas, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Bottom Insert Image: Lucian Freud, “Doble Retrato (Double Portrait)”, 1985-1986, Oil on Linen, 78.8 x 88.9 cm, Private Collection

Franz Krüger

Franz Krüger, “Portrait of Prince Nikolai Saltykov”. 1850, Oil on Canvas, 98 x 79 cm, Hermitage Museum

Born into a noble family in September of 1797 at Grob-Radegast, Duchy of Anhalt-Dessau, Germany, Franz Krüger’s first studied with the local ornithologist I. F. Naumann, for whom he painted sketches of bird species. and printmaker Carl WilheIm Kolbe, who instilled in him the qualities of precise observation. In 1812, Krüger moved to Berlin where he studied at the Academy of the Arts until his graduation in 1814, continuing his studies independently.

Between 1818 and 1819, Krüger produced a series of paintings dedicated to the struggle of the German people against Emperor Napoleon. In 1820 at the Berlin Academy, he exhibited portraits of Prince Augustus of Prussia and Count August von Gneisenau, for which he received further royal commissions leading to him becoming one of the most popular portrait painters in Europe.

Franz Krüger became in 1825 a member and Professor of the Berlin Academy of the Arts, and later, became a court painter of the Prussian King Friedrich Wilheim III. In 1831, now a member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Art, he exhibited at the Winter Palace his painting “Parade ion the Opera Square in Berlin” and his “Equestrian Portrait of Friedrich Wilheim III of Prussia”. The large parade composition, done between 1824 and 1831, is now at the Berlin National Gallery and the equestrian portrait is at the Winter Palace’s Military Gallery.

Enjoying a special arrangement with the Russian Emperor Nicholas I, Franz Krüger left his most significant portraits of members of the Royal Family and nobility, as well as paintings and watercolors of court life, parades and military exercises, to the Hermitage Museum. These include perhaps his most famous portraits, those of Emperor Alexander I and his brother Nicholas I.

Born in October of 1736, Nikolai Saltykov was a member of the Saltykov noble family, who became a Russian Field Marshal and imperial courtier and the tutor of the future Russian Tsar Paul I and his two sons, Constantine and Alexander. Catherine II of Russia made him vice-president of Russia’s Military Council and, ten years later, made him a member of the Order of Saint Andrew, a senator and member of the high court council.

The portrait of Nikolai Saltykov by Franz Krüger, done in 1850, depicts Saltykov at the age of fourteen, dressed in traditional court costume. By that time, Saltykov had already taken part, with his father, in the Russian advance to the River Rhine against Prussian forces in the Seven Years’ War and was a permanent member of the Semyonovsky Regiment, one of the oldest regiments of the Imperial Russian Army.

Charles Burchfield

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edward Francis Burney

Edward Francis Burney, “Seated Nude”, 1790-1800, Watercolor, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven,, Conneticutt

Edward Francis Burney, “Self Portrait”, 1785-1800, Watercolor, 18 x 14 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

Born on September 7th of 1760 in Worcester, England, Edward Francis Burney became a student at the Royal Academy School of Art in 1776, at the age of sixteen. During this time, he made two fine drawings of the Antique School, which are now in the Royal Collection in London. Receiving encouragement from portrait painter Joshua Reynolds, then the president of the school, Burney exhibited several works at the Royal Academy of Art between the years 1780 to 1803.

Though he was a capable portraitist, painting family and friends, and also historical scenes, Burney worked mainly as an illustrator, devoting a greater part of his career to book illustrations. In 1780, he exhibited three illustrations for his cousin, author Fanny Burney’s 1778 coming-of age novel “Evelina”. One of these illustrations was later engraved and used in the 1791 edition of the novel. Burney created a set of thirteen illustrations for a 1799 edition of Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, now in the collection of the Huntington Library in California.

Influenced by the satirical style of painter and social critic William Hogarth, Edward Burney produced a rococo-styled set of four large watercolors, satirizing the contemporary musical and social life. Considered his most important work, these pieces from the 1820s are: “The Waltz”, “The Triumph of Music”, “Amateurs of Tye-Wig Music” and “The Elegant Establishment for Young Ladies”. Burney may have intended to publish prints of the paintings and to sell both originals and prints. There was a substantial market for satirical prints during this period. The four pictures were, however, never published.

Edward Francis Burney died, unmarried, in London on December 16th of 1848, at the age of eighty-eight. He was buried in Marylebone, England.

David Levine

David Levine: Coney Island Watercolors

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in December of 1926, David Levine was an American artist and illustrator. He studied painting at the Pratt Institute in New York and, later in 1946, attended Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, graduating with a degree in education. Levine also studied under painter and teacher Hans Hoffman, whose teaching had a significant influence on post-war American avant-garde artists, including Helen Frankenthaler and Larry Rivers.

Along with doing illustrative work for publications, David Levine produced a body of paintings, many of which were destroyed in a later 1968 fire. Most of Levine’s paintings are watercolors, including portraits of ordinary citizens, seaside images of distinctive architecture, and scenes of vacationers enjoying the day at the beach. He often painted scenes of garment workers, remembering the workers in his father’s garment factory, and scenes of the bathers and amusement rides at Coney Island, a section of his Brooklyn hometown.

Together with portrait artist Aaron Shikler, David Levine founded a salon for artists interested in collective sketching and painting, the Painting Group, in 1958. In the early 1960s, he developed his skills as a political illustrator. He illustrated his first work for The New York Review of Books in 1963, subsequently drawing more than thirty-eight hundred caricatures of famous artists, writers and politicians for the Review’s publication. Levine produced other work of combined equal quantity for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone Magazine, Time, Sports Illustrated, and Playboy, among others.

David Levine was elected in 1967 into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member and became a full Academician in 1971. His work has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums, and several collections have been published, including Knoph’s 1978 “The Arts of David Levine” and the book “American Presidents”, published in 2008 by Knoph, which features his drawings of U.S. Presidents, covering a span of five decades.

In 2006, David Levine was diagnosed with macular degeneration, and with the gradual loss of his vision, produced no new work after April of 2007. A man who drew people of all political persuasions with the same acid treatment, David Levine died in December of 2009 of cancer at the age of eighty-three.

Maurice Brazil Prendergast

Artwork by Maurice Prendergast

Born in 1858 in Saint John’s, Newfoundland, Maurice Brazil Prendergast was a post-impressionist artist who worked in watercolor, oil paints, and mono-type. At a young age with very little schooling, he was apprenticed to a commercial artist in Boston, where he became influenced by the bright-colored and flat-patterned work. A shy, reserved individual, Prendergast remained a bachelor throughout his life, closely attached to his artist brother Charles, a gifted craftsman and artist.

Starting in 1892, Prendergast studied for three years in Paris at the Atelier Colarossi, under painter Gustave Courtis, and at the Académie Julian. During one of his early stays in Paris, he met the Canadian landscape painter James Morrice. Under the influence of Morrice, Prendergast began sketching on wood panels scenes of elegantly dressed women and children at the seaside resorts of Saint-Malo and Dieppe. Later, drawing inspiration from the post-impressionists Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, he developed a more sophisticated modern style, with boldly contrasting, jewel-like colors, and flattened, patterned forms rhythmically arranged on a canvas.

Returning home in 1895, Prendergast shared a studio with his brother, continuing in his work to focus on people strolling in parks, on the beach, or traveling the city streets. A trip to Venice in 1898 exposed him to the genre scenes of early Renaissance narrative painter Vittore Carpaccio and encouraged him toward even more complex and rhythmic arrangements. Prendergast also became one of the first Americans to embrace the work of Cézanne, understanding and using Cézanne’s expressive use of form and color.

A successful exhibition of the work Prendergast produced in Venice was held in 1900 at the Macbeth Galleries in New York. In 1907 he traveled to France; where, after contact with the Fauvist movement, he started painting works with startling bright colors and staccato brushstrokes. Later in 1907, Prendergast exhibited his new work in a show with the group of artists known as The Eight, exponents of the Ashcan School.

In 1913 Prendergast was invited to participate in the famed Armory Show in New York City which was largely arranged by his friend, landscape painter Arthur B. Davies. In 1914, he settled in New York, along with his brother Charles, where he enjoyed great success with collectors such as Duncan Phillips, and attracted a number of important patrons, including John Quinn, modern art collector Lillie B. Bliss, and Dr. Albert Barnes, the founder of the Barnes Foundation.

During his final years of his career, Maurice Prendergast spent his time sketching during the summers in New England and painting in New York in the winters. In frail health by 1923, he died a year later, in February of 1924, at the age of sixty-five.

Bernard Vista

Paintings by Bernard Vista

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

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

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

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

Joseph Hirsch

Joseph Hirsch, “Mercy Ship”, 1943, Oil on Canvas, 122 x 97 cm , US Navy Art Collection

Born in Philadelphia in 1910, Joseph Hirsch won a four-year scholarship from the city of Philadelphia at the age of seventeen. He studied the realist tradition of painter Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, now the University of the Arts. After graduation, Hirsch studied privately in New York City under social realist painter George Luks, a founder of the Ashcan School of painting and one of the “Eight”, a group which favored painting scenes of urban life.

After the death of George Luks in 1933, Hirsch studied with painter Henry Hensche, who impressed with the colors of the impressionists, had started his own studio in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The awarding of a Woolley Fellowship in 1935 enabled Hirsch to expand his experiences by traveling throughout Europe for one year. He visited Egypt and areas of Asia before his return to the United States in November of 1936. During the 1930s, Joseph Hirsch’s art career received a boost through employment with the Works Progress Administration in Philadelphia, for whom he completed murals for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Building and the city’s Municipal Court.

During World War II as a member of the Associated American Artists, Hirsch worked for Abbott Laboratories where he produced artworks to illustrate the war effort. The most widely produced war bond poster was his 1942 “Till We Meet Again”. Continuing his style of capturing ordinary people and moments, Hirsch worked with fellow artist Georges Schreiber at the Pensacola Naval Air Station documenting Naval aviation training. From there he went to the South Pacific to document the efforts of Navy medicine and, later, covered Army operations on the Italian front and in North Africa.

Joseph Hirsch was a founding member of the Artists Equity, organized in 1949 in New York City to protect the rights of visual artists. Awarded a 1949 Fulbright Fellowship, Hirsch and his family resided for a period in France for study and work. During this time, the political climate in the United States became hostile to those holding unpopular views. This led to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s speech in 1950 denouncing Communists in the US State Department. Awarded a year extension on his Fellowship, Hirsch sold his Cape Cod home and remained with his family in Paris.

In March of 1952 on the floor of the House of Representatives, Congressman George Dondero denounced Artist Equity as a front organization for Communists. This resulted in blacklisting a number of Artist Equity member artists and the denouncement of Hirsch as a Communist sympathizer. Due to this action, Hirsch and his family did not return to the United States until 1955. After his return, Hirsch continued his successful career of selling paintings and working on commissions. In the 1960s to 1970s, Hirsch experimented by using a series of layered image planes, instead of lines of perspective, to suggest depth on his canvases. This series of figurative images appear as snapshots that captured its subjects in mid-action instead of posed postions.

Joseph Hirsch taught at the National Academy of Design from 1959 to 1967, and the Art Students League of New York from 1967 until his death in September of 1981, He was also artist-in-residence a the University of Utah, Utah State University, Dartmouth College and Brigham Young University. The Library of Congress twice awarded him the Joseph Pennell Prize for Lithography for his 1944 “Lunch Hour” and the 1945 “The Confidence”. Among many other awards, he won the 1968 Carnegie Prize by the Carnegie Museum of Art for his body of work.

Note: Joseph Hirsch’s 1943 “Mercy Ship” depicts the U.S. Navy Hospital ship, USS Solace, with its crew. Functioning as a floating medical treatment facility, the Navy’s hospital ships operated under the laws laid down by the Geneva Convention, as such they were unarmed, fully illuminated at night, and painted white.

Built as the passenger ship SS Iroquois in 1927, it was acquired by the US Navy in July of 1940, renamed Solace, converted into a hospital ship, and commissioned on August 9, 1941. She was at Pearl Harbor on the day of the attack, December 7th of 1941, where she pulled men from the burning oil-covered water and evacuated crews of damaged ships. The USS Solace received seven battle stars for her distinguished service in World War II.

Top Insert Image: Juley & Son, “Joseph Hirsch”, 1959,Juley&Son, Gelatin Silver Print, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Second Insert Image: Joseph Hirsch, “Window in Spring”, 1948, Oil on Canvas, 111.8 x 60.1 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Joseph Hirsch, “The Naked Man”, 1959-1962, Oil on Canvas, 188.6 x 130.1 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Bottom Insert Image: Joseph Hirsch, “Satisfaction Plus”, 1943, Oil on Canvas, 109.2 x 129.5 cm, Naval History and Heritage Command Museum