Tag: painting

Bernard Perlin

Artwork by Bernard Perlin

Born in Richmond, Virginia in November of 1918, Bernard Perlin was an American painter and illustrator who was primarily known for his Magic Realism paintings and World War II posters supporting the American effort. He was the youngest child of Jewish immigrants from Russia and began his art studies at the encouragement of his high school teacher.

Perlin enrolled in the New York School of Design where he studied  from 1934 to 1936. He enrolled in 1937 at the National Academy of Design and studied under painter and lithographer Leon Kroll. Perlin continued his studies at the Arts Student League under painter and graphic artist Isabel Bishop, mural painter William Palmer, and painter and printmaker Harry Sternberg. In 1938, he was awarded a Kosciuko Foundation Award which enabled him to continue his studies in Poland.

At the beginning of World War II, Bernard Perlin was rejected from military combat service as he was openly gay. However, he entered the graphics department of the Office of War Information for which he created patriotic propaganda posters to support the country’s war effort. Among his many wartime pieces are the 1943 “Let ‘Em Have It” war bonds advertisement and “Americans Will Always Fight for Liberty”, which depicted World War II marching with Continental Army soldiers from the American Revolutionary War.

Perlin continued his war effort as an artist-correspondent for Life Magazine from 1943 to 1944. While stationed in Greece for Life Magazine, Perlin went to the United States the first news and sketches from that country since the German invasion in 1941. At the war’s end in 1945, he began illustrative work at Fortune Magazine, a national business magazine with in-depth articles.

Bernard Perlin, influenced by the magic-realism movement, sought after the war to capture in his paintings everyday-life moments. His most famous work, “Orthodox Boys”, was painted in 1948. This painting depicted two Jewish boys standing in front of subway graffiti. Perlin’s 1945-1946 “The Leg”, a casein and tempera work on board,  was the first postwar work by an American artist to be acquired by the Tate Museum in London. 

Perlin moved to Italy for six years, where he produced magic-realist  works done with a more brightly colored palette. After a brief stay in New York City, Perlin moved to Ridgefield, Connecticut, where he continued to paint until the 1970s. After several years of retirement, he began to paint again in 2012. After the completion of two new works, Perlin was given a retrospective of his work in 2013 at the Chair and the Maiden Gallery on Christopher Street in New York City. 

Bernard Perlin met Edward Newell, a top fashion model in the 1950s and later the 1960s, at a 1954 New Year’s Eve party hosted by photographer George Platt Lynes. Their relationship that began in the summer of 1955 lasted for over fifty years until Perlin’s death. Newell and Perlin were married after it became legal in the state of Connecticut in 2008.

Bernard Perlin died at the age of ninety-five in January of 2014 at his home in Ridgefield, Connecticutt. His work can be found in museums and libraries, including the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Pritzker Military Museum and Library in Chicago.

Note: I have done research on Edward Newell without any success. I know that he was in Connecticut after Perlin’s death. If anyone has any information on Newell, please notify me through the comment section. Thank you.

Top Insert Image: George Platt Lynes, “Bernard Perlin”, 1940 Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Bernard Perlin, “His Home Over There”, circa 1942, YMCA/YWCA Poster, 69.5 x 102.5 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Bernard Perlin, “Let ‘Em Have It”, 1943, World War II Poster for War Bonds, 51 x 71 cm, Private Collection

 

Diego Rodríguez de Silva Velázquez

Diego Velázquez, “Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob”, 1630, Oil on Canvas, 223 x 250 cm, Monasterio de El Escorial, San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Madrid, Spain

Born at the Andalusian city of Seville in May of 1599, Diego Rodríguez de Silva Velázquez was an artist of the Spanish Golden Age who rose to prominence in the court of King Philip IV of Spain and Portugal. His work became the archetype for the nineteenth-century realist and impressionist painters.

Diego Velázquez was the first child of notary Juan Rodriguez de Silva and Jerónima Velázquez who raised him in modest surroundings. As he exhibited an early inclination for art, Velázquez was apprenticed for six-years to painter Francisco Pacheco del Río, the founder of Seville’s art academy. His studies under Pacheco included literature and philosophy, perspective and proportion, and, as Pacheco was the official censor of Seville’s Inquisition, the academically strict representation of religious subjects.

Velázquez was one of the first Spanish artists to paint bodegones, realist depictions of kitchen scenes depicting still lifes of pantry objects such as food and drink. These paintings are known for their realism and chiaroscuro, dramatic lighting effects, as well as their religious background scenes. Those executed in 1618 include “Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha” and “Kitchen Scene with Christ at Emmaus”. During his period in Seville, Velázquez painted  his first full-length portrait, the 1620 “Sor Jerónima de la Fuente”, a depiction of the revered nun that was commissioned by the Franciscan order. 

Having established his reputation in Seville by the early 1620s, Diego Velázquez traveled to Madrid in April of 1622 and, at the request of Pacheco del Río, painted a portrait of poet Luis de Góngora. In December of 1622, he received a command to attend the court of King Philip IV’s minister, Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares. Velázquez lodged with Don Juan de Fonseca, Chaplain to the King, and painted his portrait. Satisfied with the work, King Philip IV commissioned a portrait and sat for Velázquez on the thirtieth of August in 1623. Upon the pleasure of the king, Velásquez received substantial funds and moved with his family to Madrid which became his home for the remainder of his life.

Velázquez was now established with a monthly salary and lodgings as well as payments for any future works. His work softened from the severity of the Seville period and the tones became more delicate. In 1627, Velázquez won a painting competition set by King Philip IV with a painting of the expulsion of the Moors, a work later destroyed in a 1734 fire. As a reward, he was appointed gentleman usher and received a daily allowance and yearly funds for clothes. Velázquez met painter Peter Paul Rubens in September of 1628 and accompanied him to view the work of Italian Renaissance painter Tiziano Vecellio (Titian) on display at the Royal Site of San Lorenzo de El Escorial. This meeting with Titian motivated Velázquez to travel to Italy to see the works of the Italian masters.

Diego Velázquez’s first trip to Italy, a major influence on his work, was sponsored in 1629 by King Philip IV. He traveled extensively and painted for a year and a half, a period of major history paintings. Among these were the 1629-1630 “Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob” and the 1630 “Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan”, two compositions of nearly life-sized figures presented as contemporary people with gestures and facial expressions seen in ordinary life. Following the example of the painters from Bologna, he switched to light gray grounds rather than the dark red ground of his earlier works; this became a regular practice that enabled greater luminosity. 

Velázquez returned to Madrid in 1631 and completed the first of many portraits featuring Philip IV’s infant son, “Prince Balthasar Charles with a Dwarf”, now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. For decorations at the Palacio del Buen Retiro, the king’s new palace, he painted equestrian portraits of the royal family and a large contemporary history painting, “The Surrender of Breda”, all executed in 1634 and 1635. Velázquez again returned to history paintings between 1636 and 1648 with“Aesop”,“Menippus”, and “Mars Resting”. As his royal appointment enabled him to avoid the censorship of the Inquisition, he became the first Spanish artist known to have painted the female nude, the 1644-1648 “Venus at her Mirror”. 

Diego Velázquez traveled in 1649 for his second and last trip to Italy where he bought paintings by many noted artists including Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. After painting a portrait of the Duke of Modena, Velázquez painted a portrait of Pope Innocent X, for which he was presented with a medal and gold chain. While in Rome, he painted a 1650 portrait of Juan de Pareja, one of his slaves and a notable painter in his own right; Velázquez freed de Pareja in November of that year. He returned by way of Barcelona to Spain in 1651 and proceeded to arrange and catalogue the paintings and three hundred pieces of statuary he had bought for King Philip IV.

Velázquez, upon his return, painted the 1656 “Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor)”, a scene of a group of children and women, one of which was Margaret Theresa, the eldest daughter of Philip IV’s new queen Mariana of Austria. Velázquez had placed himself next to a painting easel and the king and queen are seen reflected in a mirror on the back wall. Three years after the completion of this work, he received the honorary Cross of Saint James of the Order of Santiago. One of his last major works was the 1657 “Las Hilanderas (The Spinners)”, a scene based on Ovid’s myth of Arachna, a Lydian maiden credited with inventing linen cloth and nets.

The 1660 peace treaty between France and Spain was finalized with the marriage of Maria Theresa, the daughter of Philip IV and his first wife Elisabeth of France, and Louis XIV, known as the Sun King. Diego Velázquez was charged with the decoration of the Spanish pavilion and the surrounding area of the small Island of Pheasants. He returned to Madrid on the twenty-sixth of June and, on the thirty-first of July, was stricken with fever. After signing a will, Diego Velázquez died on the sixth of August; his wife died eight days later. Both were buried in the vault of the Church of San Juan Bautista. As the church was destroyed in 1809 by the French, the place of their interment is now unknown.

Diego Velázquez has been honored through works of such artists as Édouard Manet, James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon, Fernando Botero, Herman Braun-Vega and Salvador Dali. In 2009, the “Portrait of a Man’, long attributed to a follower of Velázquez, was restored and found to have been painted by Velázquez himself. A portrait from a collection in the United Kingdom was through x-ray analysis found to be a previously unknown work by Velázquez. 

Notes:  A short 2003 essay on Diego Velázquez by Everett Fahy of the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art can be found at the museum’s site: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/vela/hd_vela.htm

The website for the Diego Velázquez Organization, which contains his complete oeuvre can be found at: https://diegovelazquez.org

The Museum del Prado has an article on Velázquez as well as images of all sixty-five paintings by the artist in its collection: https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/artist/velazquez-diego-rodriguez-de-silva-y/434337e9-77e4-4597-a962-ef47304d930d

Top Insert Image: Diego Velázquez, “Self Portrait”, circa 1645, Oil on Canvas, 103.5 x 82.5 cm, Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy

Second Insert Image: Diego Velázquez, “The Feast of Bacchus”, 1628-1629, Oil on Canvas, 165 x 225 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain

Third Insert Image: Diego Velázquez, “Maria Teresa of Spain (with Two Watches)”, 1652-1653, Oil on Canvas, 127 x 98.5 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

Fourth Insert Image: Diego Velázquez, “The Surrender of Breda”, 1634-1635, Oil on Canvas, 307 x 367 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain

Bottom Insert Image: Diego Velázquez, “Juan de Pareja”, 1650, Oil on Canvas, 81.3 x 69.9 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Arman Manookian

Born in Constantinople, the capital city of the Ottoman Empire in May of 1904, Arman Tateos Manookian was an Armenian-American painter known for his oil paintings and murals of Hawaiian scenes. He was the eldest of three children born into an Armenian Apostolic Christian family in Istanbul who held their status and affluence despite the taxation and political dominance of the Islamic Turkish Pashas.

Arman Manookian’s initial education was acquired at the Catholic school of Saint Gregory the Illuminator, a branch of the Armenian Mekhitarist Brotherhood of Venice. During his early life, the hostilities against the Armenian Christian minority in Turkey increased until it became a genocidal rampage that led to more than one million deaths by 1918. On April twenty-fourth in 1915, Manookian’s eleventh birthday, six hundred local men, many of them writers, intellectuals and politicians, were rounded up and murdered; five thousand more men were dead within weeks. 

Manookian’s father, Arshag Manookian, had fled to France to escape the genocide; however, Arshag died in 1917 of the Spanish flu, a victim of the epidemic contracted and spread by returning French soldiers. Manookian, now in his mid-teens, took over the heavy burden of the family’s printing and publishing business in Constantinople. His mother eventually sold the business and gave Manookian a large sum of money that enabled him to sail aboard the “Re d’Italia” to the United States. He arrived at New York City’s immigration entry point, Ellis Island, on the twentieth of April in 1920. Manookian then traveled to Providence, Rhode Island where he lodged with his mother’s relative, Leo Stepanian who had an umbrella business. 

Recognized for his early artistic talent, Arman Manookian was given a 1920 state scholarship to study at Providence’s Rhode Island School of Design. He took the required first-year courses and, in 1921, focused on Commercial Illustration which he passed with high marks. By 1923, Manookian began listing his skills as a lithographer. He enlisted in the Marine Corps on the eighth of October in 1923, under the fraudulent claim that he had United States citizenship, to serve in the U.S, forces and achieve a new American identity. Manookian was assigned in November of 1924 to Major Edwin North McClellan of the Historical Division of the Marine Corps, whose project was a history of the Corp’s participation in World War One.

After he presented his recent sketches of military exercises in the Puerto Rican island of Culebra to Major McClellan, Manookian became the official illustrator for McClellan’s historical articles. The completed epic history would eventually contain over one-thousand pages of articles, not including their notes, and more than one hundred illustrations by Manookian. Many of these illustrations are currently housed in Washington DC’s Marine Historical Center. During his service in the Corps, Manookian created several portraits of Major McClellan’s family members as well as cover illustrations for “Leatherneck” magazine, instituted as the official Marine Corps publication in 1920.

When McClellan received a new posting at Pearl Harbor, Arman Manookian went with him to Hawaii. It was his stationing at Hawaii that transformed Manookian from an illustrator to an artist with an idealized historical and mythological view of the islands. He created many illustrations to accompany McClellan’s new historical writings on the Hawaiian islands that were later published in “Paradise of the Pacific”, a periodical promoting Hawaiian tourism and investment. A short profile of Manookian, in which he describes the Hawaiian islands as the mid-Pacific gardens of the Gods, was published in a 1927 issue of “Paradise of the Pacific”.

Discharged from the Marines in 1927, Manookian decided to remain in Honolulu. He filed a Marine Corps waver of transportation to the United States and began working as a illustrator for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. The opening of the Honolulu Academy of the Arts in April of 1927 gave Manookian the opportunity to hear lectures and attend programs that expanded his knowledge of both art and Hawaii. In 1928, he relocated to Makiki, a short distance from the Academy, and became a member of the Honolulu Artist’s Association. Manookian gave up using tempera paint at this time and focused on colorful oil paints in bold, flat areas without varnish or subtle gradations. This color sense reflected memories of his childhood and adolescent exposure to the myriad colored forms of the Byzantine world.

Arman Manookian’s portrayal of Hawaii, like Gauguin’s view of Tahiti, was an idealized vision of an Eden that never really existed except in the imagination of its Colonial inhabitants. Although his work presented the ecstatic vision of an artist, Manookian often secluded himself from others and had begun to increasingly experience mental lows. After the stock market crash of 1929, the  tourist-based Hawaiian economy began to falter and his mural commissions, based on the development of new buildings, began to slow. Manookian’s last mural commission was in December of 1930 for architect Louis Davis’s Waipahu Theater.

During this slow period, Manookian was living downstairs in architect Cyril Lemmon and Rebecca Lemmon’s Black Point home, occasionally painting and giving art lessons. He delivered his last painting “Flamingos in Flight” to the home of interior designer Charles Mackintosh on the seventh of May in 1931. Suffering from severe depression, Manookian  drank poison on the evening of May tenth while his hosts and friends were playing a parlor game upstairs. He stumbled upstairs and collapsed in the kitchen. Taken to Queen’s Hospital in Honolulu, Arman Manookian never regained consciousness and died that Sunday evening at the age of twenty-seven. A memorial exhibition of Manookian’s work was held later in the autumn of 1933 at the Honolulu Academy of the Arts.

Notes : Major Edwin North McClellan’s massive epic “History of U.S. Marines and Origin of Sea Soldiers”, with its many illustrations by Manookian, was never published due lack of finances during the Depression. The only complete record of the work exists on microfilm as recorded by the New York Public Library in 1954. 

Author and art historian John Seed wrote an article entitled “Arman Manookian: Fragile Paradise” which was originally published in the Honolulu Magazine:  https://www.geringerart.com/arman-manookian-fragile-paradise/

John Seed also has a lecture on the life and art of Arman Manookian in an YouTube video entitled “Arman Manookian: An Armenian Artist in Hawaii with John Seed”. 

Freelance writer Chris Gibbon wrote “The Ghost of Manookian” for the November 2021 issue of “Flux: The Current of Hawai’i”. This short biography can be found at: https://fluxhawaii.com/the-ghost-of-manookian/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Private Arman Manookian, Marine Corps Boot Camp”, circa 1923, Vintage Print

Second Insert Image: Arman Manookian, “Maui Snaring the Sun”, 1927, Ink Drawing, Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii

Third Insert Image: Arman Manookian, “Early Traders of Hawaii”, 1927, Oil on Canvas, Honolulu Museum of Art

Fourth Insert Image: Arman Manookian, “Pele”, Gridded Study for “Pele” Painting, Colored Pencil and Pencil on Paper, 21.9 x 29.8 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Arman Manookian, Untitled (The Mat Weaver), 2003, Oil on Canvas, 76.7 x 60 cm, Honolulu Museum of Art

 

François-Xavier Fabre

François-Xavier Fabre, “The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian”, 1789, Oil on Canvas, 198 x 148.5 cm, Musée Favre, Montpellier, France

Born at the medieval city of Montpellier in April of 1766, François-Xavier Fabre was a French painter of portraits, landscapes and historical subjects. He specialized in half-length portraits that were popular with the British community of Florence, Italy. 

After studying for several years at Montpellier’s art academy, François-Xavier Fabre joined neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David’s studio in Paris. His studies were funded by financier and art collector Philippe-Laurent de Joubert, the father of Laurent-Nicolas de Joubert, a friend of Fabre as well as an amateur artist. In 1787, Fabre painted a portrait of Laurent-Nicolas seated with arms crossed and dressed in waistcoat and shirt open at the neck, a simple and natural style made fashionable by Marie-Antoinette. This portrait is now housed in the Getty Center, Museum South Pavilion, in Los Angeles. 

An outstanding pupil, Fabre rose to prominence after winning the Prix de Rome in 1787. The upheavals of the French Revolution and his own monarchist sympathies led Fabre to relocate to Florence, Italy in 1793. He soon found patrons among the ranks of the Italian aristocrats who appreciated the elegance, precision, and realism of his portraits. Fabre became a member of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, the world’s oldest public institution of fine art training, where he taught painting. Rising to prominence in Florentine society, he became both a collector and dealer of art.

Although he remained a lifelong advocate of Jacques-Louis David’s Neoclassicism, François-Xavier Fabre eventually abandoned history painting due to changing fashions, lack of interest on the part of his patrons, and the onset of gout. He focused his work towards portraiture, landscapes, and printmaking. Between 1803 and 1804 in Florence, Fabre met Princess Louise Maximiliane Caroline Emanuel of Stolberg-Gedern, the former wife of Charles Edward Stuart, the Jacobite claimant to the English and Scottish thrones, and the later widow of Italian Count Vittorio Alfieri. 

Fabre and Louise of Stolberg-Gedern remained companions in Florence until the Countess’s death in January of 1824 at which time Fabre inherited her fortune. He returned to his hometown of Montpellier where he founded an art school and curated his extensive collection of books, 16th and 17th century Italian paintings and drawings, artwork by French contemporaries, and the collected artworks of Louise of Stolberg-Gedern. In 1828, the Musée Fabre was inaugurated in Montpellier. François-Xavier Fabre died at the age of seventy in Montpellier on the sixteenth of March in 1837. Upon his death, his entire art collection became part of the Musée Fabre. 

François-Xavier Fabre painted “The Martyrdom of St. Francis” in 1789 at the age of twenty-three. This was an academic work for submission at his second Académie réglementaire in Paris. Fabre was well-versed in the nude form at this time; he had painted the male nude during his apprenticeship under Jacques-Louis David. Fabre returned several times to the theme of St. Francis over the course of his career. Several of his St. Sebastian paintings are listed in Parisian sales between the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. 

Top Insert Image: François-Xavier Fabre, “Autoportrait âgé”, 1835, Oil on Canvas, 72.5 x 59 cm, Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France 

Second Insert Image: François-Xavier Fabre, “Abel’s Death”, 1790, Oil on Canvas, 147 x 198.5 cm, Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France

Bottom Insert Image: François-Xavier Fabre, “Portrait of Michal Bogoria Skotnick”, 1806, Oil on Canvas, 64 x 49.5 cm, National Museum, Kraków, Poland

Richard Stabbert

The Artwork of Richard Stabbert

Born in Red Bank, New Jersey in 1959, Richard Stabbert is an American painter, author and researcher. A self-taught artist, he creates small intimate paintings inspired by the memories of people, both past and present, who made an impression on his life. Depicting the casual and positive experiences in life, Stabbert’s sentimental and often whimsical work presents an idyllic retreat from the speed and commotion of the industrial world. 

Born to German immigrant parents, Stabbert spent time in his early years on the beaches of the New Jersey shoreline, a period in his life that provides both inspiration and reference for his work. Stabbert’s later summer experiences in Provincetown, Massachusetts, as well as the time he spent in Paris also serve as influences in his work. His paintings are known for their simple details, bold color composition and equally strong foregrounds and backgrounds, similar characteristics to those works in  the Naïve genre.

Richard Stabbert’s acrylic and chalk paintings, almost gestural in execution, evoke a casual spontaneity and relaxed sensuality. He creates his work through a limited color palette that is dominated by pink and blue tones. Central to the compositions are Stabbert’s male figures constructed simply with broad, almost impasto, brushwork heightened by strokes of deep black and shaded areas of lighter grays. The background vistas in his work have a flat rendering style composed of simplified details and expanses of tonal primary colors. 

Stabbert’s paintings have been included in the 2011 edition of “100 Artists of the Male Figure: A Contemporary Anthology of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture”; the 2011 “The Art of Man: Volumes 1-6”, a special anthology edition that includes artist interviews and work from six quarterly journals of “The Art of Man”; and Firehouse Publishing’s 2014 “Vitruvian Lens – Edition 5: Fine Art Male Photography”.

One of Richard Stabbert’s first solo exhibitions was “Été”at the Les Mots à la Bouche, an established bookshop and gallery in Paris. He also presented his work in the 2011 “Memories of Moments” held at New York City’s BrianRiley1ProjectSpace, a Broadway creative hub that provides a platform for artistic visions. Other gallery exhibitions include those at Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts in Brooklyn, New York; Asbury Park’s APEX Gallery in New Jersey; Provincetown’s Ray Wiggs Gallery in Massachusetts; the Sidetracks Art Gallery in New Hope, Pennsylvania; and Red Bank’s Susan Berke Fine Arts in New Jersey.

Stabbert is the author of the 2013 “Provincetown Memories: Paintings and Words” published in two editions through North Carolina’s Firehouse Publications. This work presents Stabbert’s simple sensual paintings alongside a personal journal of self-discovery, love, and intimate memories of both the beauty and freedom experienced during Provincetown summers.   

In addition to many private collections, Richard Stabbert’s paintings are housed in the permanent collection of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York City. His work is now available through Provincetown’s Art Love Gallery located at: https://www.artlovegallery.com  as well as Galerie MooiMan in Gronigen, Netherlands: https://www.mooi-man.nl

Richard Stabbert’s website, which includes new works and gallery contacts, is located at: http://rstabbert.com

Second Insert Image: Richard Stabbert, “Carry”, 2021, Acrylic and Chalk Paint on Canvas, 22.8 x 30.5 cm

Bottom Insert Image: Richard Stabbert, “Craig”, 2018, Acrylic on Canvas, 20,3 x 30.5 cm

Mel Bochner

The Artwork of Mel Bochner

Born at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1940, Mel Bochner is one of the leading figures in the development of Conceptual art in New York during the 1960s and 1970s. He is a member of that generation of artists who were seeking to break free from Abstract Expressionism and traditional composition. A scholar as well as an artist, Bochner’s influential critical and theoretical essays have always been a central component of his work.

Bochner pioneered the use of language into the visual arts; language progressed from talking about art to becoming part of art itself. Over his career, he has consistently probed the conventions of both painting and language- the way we construct and understand them as well as the way their relationship to each other increases our awareness of the world to which we belong.

Born to a sign-painter father in an Orthodox Jewish home, Mel Bochner graduated in 1962 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Fine Arts. He studied philosophy briefly at Chicago’s Northwestern University before making the decision to relocate in 1964 to New York City where he began work as a guard in Manhattan’s Jewish Museum. Encouraged by art critic Dore Ashton, Bochner applied for and was granted a teaching position in art history at the city’s School of Visual Arts.

Bochner’s first exhibition, the 1966 “Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily To Be Viewed As Art” held at the School of Visual Arts, is now regarded as a seminal show in the Conceptual Art movement. Not having the necessary funds to frame all his original drawings, Bochner xeroxed copies of his friends’ works and inserted them in four black binders individually placed on four white pedestals. A later conceptual work, the 1998 “Event Horizon”, involved multiple pre-stretched canvases of various sizes, each marked with a horizontal line and the measurement of its length in inches. These canvases were arranged with the lines at the same height along the wall. Seen together, the canveses’ lines formed a horizon of a determined length.

In the 1960s, Bochner was one of the first artists to incorporate the physical gallery space into his art. Some of his works were actually drawn or painted on the gallery’s walls. His 1970 “Language is Not Transparent” presented the white-chalked sentence written on a dripping black square painted directly on the gallery wall. Bochner’s 1969-1970 installation at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, entitled “Theory of Painting”, involved newspapers, spray-painted with multi-sized blue rectangular shapes, spread on the floor of the enclosed exhibition space.

Along with artists Bruce Nauman and Joseph Kosuth both of whom integrated language into art, Bochner was an early proponent of photo-documentary art which included images of temporary works and performance art. Among his many photographic creations is the important 1966 “36 Photographs and 12 Diagrams”, an arranged collection of forty-eight 29 x 29 cm gelatin silver prints. Resistant to showing all the forty-eight mounted photographs and pen-and-ink drawings in their physical form, Bochner photographed each mounted piece and displayed the complete work as an assemblage of two-dimensional photographs, in essence a microcosm of the exhibition.

In the early 1970s, Mel Bochner began producing series of prints at San Francisco’s Crown Point Press. An avid print maker, Bochner has continuously explored new ways to experiment with traditional and non-traditional printmaking techniques. In 2022 for his latest edition of his iconic text “Howl”, he printed the piece with glitter and iridescent ink in a combination of shimmery copper, iridescent purple and glimmering black. As the viewer moves around the work, the purple shifts in tone depending on the viewer’s vantage point.

Bochner’s work covers a wide range of mediums including colorful paintings and prints containing words, cast pigmented works made from handmade paper, works on shaped canvases, and evocative installations. Among these many forms are the 1978 “Planar Arc”, three irregular shaped paper panels of different colors that are decorated with pastel marks; the 1999 “If the Color Changes (#?)”, a language piece written in gray-lettered German overlaid with scattered multi-colored alphabet letters; and the 1988 “Fourth Quartet”, four rectangular sheets of paper framed together in a pattern on which scattered geometric cubes were drawn in aquatint.

In 2007, Mel Bochner’s work was the subject of two major exhibitions in the United States: a focused retrospective of his language-based works at the Art Institute of Chicago; and a forty-year retrospective of Bochner’s drawings, that culminated a two-year museum tour, at the San Diego Museum of Art in California. Bochner’s works are contained in collections around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

Mel Bochner’s website, which includes exhibitions, artist texts, public projects and recent works, can be located at: http://www.melbochner.net

Notes: The online Artforum magazine has an article written by Princeton University Professor Carol Armstrong entitled “Mel Bochner: Photographs 1966-1969” that reviews Bochner’s work in connection with the 2002 Carnegie Museum show of the same name: https://www.artforum.com/events/mel-bochner-photographs-1966-1969-178514/

David Lasry’s Two Palms Gallery in New York represents the work of Mel Bochner. Its website has a comprehensive section that contains his works, exhibitions, and articles published by major art periodicals: https://www.twopalms.us/artists/mel-bochner#tab:slideshow

The Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco also represents the work of Mel Bochner. A collection of his work is available for viewing at: https://fraenkelgallery.com/artists/mel-bochner

The online ArtDependence Magazine has an interview with Mel Bochner entitled “The Art of Ideas” located at: https://artdependence.com/articles/the-art-of-ideas-an-interview-with-mel-bochner/

Second Insert Image: Mel Bochner, “Repetition- Portrait of Robert Smithson”, 2001, Charcoal and Pencil on Paper, 80 x 66 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Mel Bochner, “Portrait of Dan Flavin”, 1968, Ink on Graph Paper, Sheet 11.4 x 21.6 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Mel Bochner, “Wrap- Portrait of Eva Hesse”, 2001, Charcoal and Pencil on Paper, 64.8 cm Diameter, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Mel Bochner, “Thank You”, 2015, Four Color Direct Gravure Etching, Edition of 20, 55.9 x 45.7 cm, Private Collection

Hans Erni

The Artwork of Hans Erni

Born at the city of Lucerne in February of 1909, Hans Erni was a Swiss engraver, graphic designer, illustrator, painter and sculptor. He is best known for his Swiss postage stamp illustrations, lithographs for the Swiss Red Cross, and medal designs for the Swiss government and the International Olympic Committee.

The third of eight children born into a working-class family, Hans Erni attended the local Lucerne elementary school before entering an apprenticeship as a surveyor. Beginning at the age of fifteen, he apprenticed for three years as a draftsman until his entrance into the Lucerne School of Arts and Crafts in 1927. Erni continued his studies at the Académie Julian in Paris and Berlin’s School of Applied Arts under Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin. 

Between 1930 and 1933, Erni alternated stays in Lucerne and Paris where he became acquainted with contemporary French painting and influenced by the works of Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and Cubist painter Georges Braque. Through the Abstraction-Création group in Paris, Erni became acquainted with artists Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Constantin Brancusi, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian. During the early 1930s, he participated in several collective exhibitions and painted fresco murals in city of Lucerne.

After his travels to Belgium, Italy and England, Hans Erni began in 1936 to explore Abstraction with his first public mural commissions. This series of murals included frescoes for Lucerne’s General Building Cooperative, Switzerland’s section at the 1936 Triennale in Milan, and two educational murals entitled “Saline” and “Wasserkraftwerk (Hydroelectric Power Station)”. In 1937, Erni co-founded the Allianz, an association of Swiss abstract artists that advocated, with an additional emphasis on color, the concrete art theoriesof Swiss painter and designer Max Bill. Advancing the concept of Abstraction, Concrete Artists fully realized the idea that a painting could represent even an intangible algebraic formula rather than a person or an object.

Erni had his first major public success in 1939 with a mural, entitled “Switzerland: Vacation Land of the People”, that was specifically commissioned and displayed for the Zürich National Exhibition. In 1940, Erni entered into the Swiss Army where he served, until his discharge in 1945, as a camouflage painter due to his painting skills. In 1948, Erni presented his work in the painting competitions at the Summer Olympics held in London; he also participated between 1950 and 1952 in several Latin American exhibitions.

After a period of painting in Guinea and Mauritania, Hans Erni, along with Swiss graphic artists and illustrators Kurt Werth, Celestino Piatti, Alfred Pauletto and Hugo Wetli, organized a 1960 graphic design and painting exhibition in the Solothum canton city of Olten. He also exhibited his graphic design work in the 1964 Documenta Exhibition in the central German city of Kassel. Erni often employed allegories and figures, both contemporary and from Greek mythology. in his work. His symbolic Realist images presented large, powerful forms constructed with lines of a high degree of precision.

Erni created many works in the 1970s and 1980s among which were a tapestry “People, Viticulture and Fishing” for the cit of Küsnacht; a concrete relief mural “Primal Nature and the Work of Man” for the Téléverbier Valley Station in Médram, France; a mural “Man’s Advance into Space” for the Aerospace Hall of the Swiss Museum of Transport; and an aluminum relief “The Human Flight” for the United Nations building of the International Civil Aviation Organization in Montreal. Erni also created a thirty-meter long mural “Panta Rhei” for the auditorium of Lucerne’s Hans Erni Museum which was founded on his seventieth birthday in 1979. 

In his career, Hans Erni designed twenty-eight high-relief medals as well as one official Commemorative coin for the Swiss Confederation. In recognition for his Olympic medal designs, he received the 1989 Sport Artist of the Year award from the United States Sports Academy, a private university offering masters and doctoral degrees in sport education. Erni designed ceramics, theatrical sets and costumes, illustrations for Swiss postage stamps, and art for Swiss bank notes in the 1940s. Although the bank notes were printed, they were never released due to unfounded political objections by a member of the Lucerne State Council.  

Beginning in 1989, retrospective exhibitions of Erni’s work were held in various cities. Two retrospectives were held in Japan, the first at the Himeji City Museum of Art and the second at the Itami City Museum of Art. In 1990, a retrospective was held at the Seibu Museum of Art in Funabashi, Japan, and at India’s Nehru Center in Bombay, now Mumbai. In 1995, Erni was guest of honor at the XI Biennial of International Sports and Arts in Madrid; Queen Sofia of Spain opened the exhibition and presented Erni with the Medal of Honor for his life’s work. 

In addition to his paintings and sculptures, Hans Erni created illustrations for approximately two hundred published books and images for ninety Swiss postage stamps. He continued to create work throughout his later years. Among his last works were a 2011 medal entitled “Forest is Life” for the United Nations International Year of Forests and the 2012 stained glass windows for the Protestant Church in Martigny, Switzerland. Hans Erni died at the age of one hundred and six in Lucerne on the twenty-first of March in 2015. 

The Hans Erni Museum, a detached hexagonal building, is part of the Swiss Museum of Transport complex in Lucerne. It houses an extensive collection of Erni’s work and provides insights into a life engaged with historical, cultural, technical and ecological themes. A public assemblage of Hans Erni’s work from private collections can be viewed at The Open Hans Erni Collection site located at: https://www.hans-erni-collection.org/en/

Notes: The online RTS magazine has ten short video documentaries (French language) in its Culture et Arts section at: https://www.rts.ch/archives/dossiers/3477775-hans-erni-un-artiste-emblematique-de-la-suisse.html

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Hans Erni”, circa late 1950s, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Hans Erni, “Drei Freunde (Three Friends)”, 1970, Watercolor and Ink on Paper, 28 x 40 cm, Private Collection, Australia

Third Insert Image: Hans Erni, “Dames des Décans- Pisces”, 1970, Lithograph on Arches Paper, Artist Edition, 50 x 65 cm, Private Collection, Switzerland

Fourth Insert Image: Hans Erni, “Badende”, 1960, Lithograph, 35 of 150 Edition, 47.7 x 39.7 cm, 1993 Catalogue “Hans Erni-Stiftung, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Franco Tettamanti, “Hans Erni, Lucerne”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Collection of Artist

John Eric Broaddus

The Artwork of John Eric Broaddus

Born in New York in 1943, John Eric Broaddus was an artist who worked in several mediums including painting, illustration, and performance art. He was one of the prominent figures of the New York City art scene throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

John Eric Broaddus was one of the most creative and innovative artist to approach the book form. He was a pioneer in the field before the book, as a physical art piece, became an accepted genre of the contemporary art world. Not concerned with the integration of text and image, Broaddus used the pages of books as scaffolds for his colored, cut-out visual esthetic effects. His work is different from other book artists as his creations are unique, not limited editions or multiples.

Broaddus’s 1979 “Meridian Passage” is a volume of hand painted pages in acrylic, tempera, watercolor and ink combined with abstract cut-outs. This volume is in the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Legion of Honor. Broaddus’s 1982 “Xylocaine” was a volume whose pages were altered with acrylic, ink, glitter, tempera and watercolor and then overlaid with cut-out xeroxes. “Xylocaine” was the first artist book purchased by Robert and Ruth Sackner, prominent collectors who had previously focused on collecting only works of concrete and visual poetry.

John Eric Broaddus’s 1983 “France I” was constructed from a found geographical codex of over a hundred pages that was altered with paint, ink, colored pencil, glitter and sculptural cuttings. Through the use of clever cutting, a photograph of children would appear on the other side of the leaf as a gigantic statue within a dark blue abstraction. For his two-volume 1985 “Above the Trees”, Broaddus used two identical books with spray-painted pages on which were added stuck-on images, drawings and intricately cut-out shapes. This work’s elaborate, vividly-colored and highly sculptural pages demonstrated his interest in both detail and drama.

Broaddus was known for his theatrical scene sets, among which were those for the Provincetown Playhouse’s 1988 production of Justin Ross and John Epperson’s “I Could Go on Lip-Synching”. However, he was better known for the highly original costumes, constructed of found objects, that he wore for his art performance work. Broaddus would appear in his costumes on the streets of New York and in such iconic places as Studio 54 and Xenon, two of the city’s most famous nightclubs. In November of 1974, he made an appearance in a white oriental costume, carrying a bamboo umbrella, at avant-garde artist Charlotte Moorman’s 11th Avant-Garde Festival held at Shea Stadium in the New York borough of Queens.

A vibrant and pioneering artist who contributed to the artistic history of New York City, John Eric Broaddus died from AIDS at the age of forty-seven in 1990. His artwork is housed in many private collections and the world’s major art institutions including London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, Spain’s National Library in Madrid, and the Seibu Museum in Tokyo, among others.

A limited edition artist book, entitled “Spin 1/2 : Books, Paintings and Memorabilia by John Eric Broaddus” was published in conjunction with the 1990 exhibition of his work at the Center for Book Arts on 27th Street in Manhattan. In addition to its multi-colored silkscreen illustrations, a forward introduction was written by Jan van der Wateren, the Keeper and Chief Librarian of the National Art Library at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

The award-winning short documentary “Books of Survival: The Art of John Eric Broaddus” was produced and directed by Gabriella Mirabelli under a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Released in 2000 with screenings worldwide, the film reconstructs the artist’s life through intimate interviews with close friends, family and collectors of his art.

Notes: A collection of John Eric Broaddus’s papers, reviews of his work, interviews, symposium records, and memorabilia are housed in the ArchivesSpace at the University of Iowa. Correspondence and artist greeting cards are contained in the Archival and Manuscript collection of Northwestern University’s McCormick Library.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “John Eric Boarddus”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Estate of John Eric Boarddus

Second Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “John Eric Boarddus in Costume”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Estate of John Eric Boarddus

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “John Eric Broaddus, 11th Avant-Garde Festival, Queens, New York”, 1974, Color Print, Mixed Media Performance Documentation, Estate of John Eric Broaddus

Ellsworth Kelly “Blue Orange”

Ellsworth Kelly, “Blue Orange”, 1957, Oil on Canvas, 40.6 x 30.5 cm, Private Collection

Using elements of Color Field, hard-edge painting and Minimalism, Ellsworth Kelly created a distinctive personal style of graceful, simple forms skillfully executed with an unassuming technique. He began making abstract paintings in 1949. Three years later, Kelly discovered the late work of Claude Monet and began to paint more effortlessly using large formats and monochrome colors. By the end of the 1950s, his paintings had bridged the gap between reductive Minimalism and American Geometric Abstraction. 

Kelly gifted his 1957 “Blue Orange” to painter Robert Indiana. The painting,  a physical memory of the bond between two iconic American painters,  is inscribed on the reverse with “EK 1957 FOR ROBERT AN ORANGE PEEL FROM PIER 7”. It was Kelly who introduced Indiana to the New York City’s famed Coenties Slip area, a section of Manhattan’s financial district that became the home of many ground-breaking American artists. Finding themselves neighbors, Kelly and Indiana forged a bond that eventually turned into a close and intimate friendship that sparked their creative energy and influenced their entire careers. 

In the early 1960s, Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Indiana’s relationship eventually came to an end. The heartbreak Indiana felt ultimately led him to create his iconic LOVE imagery. Designed in 1965 for the Museum of Modern Art, Indiana’s tricolor arrangement for the “LOVE” Christmas card -red, blue and green- was seemingly influenced by Kelly’s most recognizable color palette. Although born from sadness and loss, Indiana’s four-letter word became the hope and optimism that would ultimately shape his career. 

Kelly’s early development was influenced by the geometric and biomorphic works of Jean and Sophie Taeber-Arp as well as the work of Henri Mattisse whose paintings he saw while living in Paris between 1949 and 1952. Kelly’s main concerns, like those of Matisse, were based on the pursuit of pure form and color. He always looked to nature for his inspiration, either through photographs he had taken of his surroundings or the simple everyday experiences of his life. 

The sweeping organic shape of Kelly’s “Blue Orange” is a study in nature that is both abstracted and two-dimensional. Emitting a warm orange glow, it is both minimal, yet powerful, and perfectly formed in its simplicity. Kelly used the simple organic form of an orange peel held against a clear blue sky to create an intimate exploration of pure color and form. Until his death, Robert Indiana kept this painting in his collection- a memory of a shared experience on southern Manhattan’s Pier 7 sixty years prior. 

Robert Indian passed away in his home on the nineteenth of May in 2018, just a few weeks before the opening of his sculptural retrospective at the Albright-Know Art Gallery. Ellsworth Kelly’s “Blue Orange” was later put up for auction at Christie’s New York and sold in November of 2018 for USD 2, 772, 500. 

Insert Image: Hans Namuth, “Agnes Martin, Robert Indiana and Ellsworth Kelly, 1958”, 1991, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Hans Namuth Estate

Tullio Crali

The Paintings of Tullio Crali

Born in the Montenegro town of Igalo in December of 1910, Tullio Crali was a Dalmatian Italian artist associated with Futurism, an artistic and social movement that emphasized speed, dynamism, technology, youth and the achievements of the industrial age. A self-taught artist who painted in a variety of styles, Crali is most closely associated with the genre of aeropittura, the aerial landscape views that dominated Futurism during the 1930s.

In 1922, Tullio Crali moved with his family to Gorizia in northeastern Italy where, three years later, he attended the local technical institute. While a student, Crali discovered Futurism through readings of Giornale il Napoli’s art periodical “Mattino Illustrato”. Trading his school textbooks for books on art, Crali became acquainted with the treatises written by such Futurist artists as Filippo Tommaso Marnetti, Umberto Boccioni, and Ardengo Soffici. 

Encouraged by Marnetti and Sofronio Pocarini, the founder of the Giuliano Futurists, Crali became an official member of the movement in 1929 and undertook an intense period of artistic experimentation. The first presentation of his paintings occurred at the second annual Goriziana d’Arte Exhibition. In 1931, a signed manifesto on aeropainting, entitled “Manifesto of Aeropittura”, launched a new vision in art that united the Futurists’ passions for battle, machines and patriotism. It also altered conventional artistic detail and perspective through the promotion of  aerial views.

Tullio Crali’s earliest aeropaintings, such as the 1929 “Aerial Duel” and “Aerial Squadron”, were similar to other Futurist works.  However, he continued his endeavors to communicate the dynamics and experience of flight to the viewer. Despite recognizable details such as clouds, wings and propellers, Crali’s later paintings challenged conventional realism by his use of dynamic perspectives, simultaneous viewpoints and the combination of figurative and abstract elements.

Tullio Crali began the 1930s with one of his most famous works, “Le Forze della Curva”, an intensely colored painting that glorified the power and speed of an automobile on a curved road. He was later invited to exhibit as one of the “7 Furturists from Padua” and later at the 1932 Italian Futurist Aeropitori in Paris and Brussls. In 1936, Crali exhibited hs “Lotta Grecoromana (Greek Roman Wrestling)” and “Lotta Livera (Wrestling Match)” at Italy’s second National Exhibition of Sports. These paintings were later selected for the 1936 International Olympic Exhibition of Sports Art in Berlin. 

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Crali was the undisputed champion of the Italian artistic-futurist scene and a vocal advocate of the movement under Marnetti’s leadership. In 1943, he again exhibited at the Quadrennial of Art in Rome and, in the next year, at the last exhibition of the Futurists in Venice. As a soldier during the war, Crali served at the Masking Centers of Civitavecchia, first in Rome and Parma and then later in Macerata and Gorizia. At the end of the war, he was arrested in Gorizia by Italian-Slav partisans; Crali was one of twenty prisoners from the one hundred-fifty arrested who survived.

Tullio Crali moved at the war’s end with his wife and child to Turin where he taught and continued to exhibit. Instead of decreeing the end of Futurism as others had done, he dissociated himself and began exhibiting at Milan’s Galleria Bergamini. In 1951, Crali began the first of a series of “Diaries”, a collection of impressions, preparatory sketches and travel memoirs, that would continue for more than thirty years. From 1950 to 1959, he remained in Paris where he produced a series of canvases and drawings that were praised by the French critics. 

Crali relocated in 1960 to Egypt where, for a seven year period, he served as the Director of Painting at the Italian School of Art in Cairo. He gave interviews on futurist art at Radio Cairo and organized both exhibitions and conferences. In 1968, Crali returned to Italy and resumed his futurist commitment by participating in several exhibitions; however, he rejected joining any official movement and focused on his own research of spatial paintings. In 1970, Crali exhibited at the first post-war Futurist Aeropainting Exhibition at Milan’s Galleria Blu. In 1975, he participated in the fifth “Central European Conference on Painting Between 1890 and 1930” held in Gorizia. 

Tullio Crali created, in 1977 at his Milan studio, the Futurist Documentation Center for his students’ research. He was invited to write an introductory article for the catalogue of 1978 exhibition at Venice’s Galleria Spazio Due. A designer of jewelry in his early career, Carli exhibited his 1956 collection of aircraft jewelry at the Vicenza Jewelry Fair of 1986. Beginning in 1987, he formed a long and productive relationship with the Pattuglia Acrobatica della Frecce Tricolori, an organization of Italian acrobatic air pilots. A 1993 series of aeropainting canvases was dedicated by Carli to this precision team of pilots. 

Between 1986 and 1990, Cralie participated in several important exhibitions: the exhibition of his mechanical lithographs in Russia; an exhibition at Arte Giuliana in Melbourne, Australia; a solo exhibition entitled “Aeronautical Structures” at Lima, Peru; and a prominent place at the exhibition, “Futurismo Veneto”, a collaborative presentation with noted architect Salvan Rebeschini and other Veneto region artists. In 1994, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto (MART) held a retrospective of Carli’s paintings, sculptures, and other works. Carli later presented forty of his works and a great amount of documentation, books and manuscripts on Futurism to the museum.

Tullio Carli died in Milan on the fifth of August in 2000 at the age of eighty-nine. He is interred, as he requested, at the commune of Macerata, his family’s home in central Italy. Carli’s work is held by many modern art museums, including New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Italy’s Mart Rovereto, and London’s Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, as well as many private collections.

Notes: All images of Tullio Crali’s work, unless noted, are from the Futurali Cultural Foundation. The official Tullio Crali website is located at: https://www.tulliocrali.com

A short article, written by Perwana Nazif, on Tullio Crali with several images of his work can be found at the Coeval Magazine website: https://www.coeval-magazine.com/coeval/tullio-crali

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Tullio Crali (Right) with Aviator and Artist Steve Poleskie, Milan”, 1983, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Tullio Crali, “I Sommersi II (The Submerged II)”, 1933, Oil on Canvas, Futurcrali Cultural Association

Third Insert Image: Tullio Crali, “Monoplano Jonathan”, 1987, Oil on Canvas, Futurcrali Cultural Association

Fourth Insert Image: Tullio Crali, “I Sotterranei (The Dungeons)”, 1934, Oil on Canvas, 80 x 70 cm, Futurcrali Cultural Association

Bottom Insert Image: Tullio Crali, “Autoritratto (Self Portrait)”, 1935, Oil on Plywood Panel, 42 x 36 cm, Futurcrali Cultural Association

 

 

Bryan Rogers

The Paintings of Bryan Rogers

Born in 1977 in Connecticut, Bryan Rogers is an American painter who creates stylized, densely wooded landscapes with waterfalls in which oversized male figures are entwined with the natural elements. His contemporary Art Nouveau-styled paintings form complex tapestries of rhythmic patterns that project an atmosphere of Edenic tranquility.   

Rogers sees queer identity as an intrinsic part of his work. The relationship of his paintings’ protagonists to both the organic and constructed spaces in which they are placed reflect the public and private spaces that people navigate during their daily life.

Bryan Rogers earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. He continued his studies at New York City’s Pratt Institute where he earned his Master in Fine Arts. From 2013 to 2019, Rogers was co-director of Honey Ramka Gallery, a private UltraContemporary gallery that was based in Brooklyn, New York until its closure. 

Rogers primarily works in acrylic paints on panel in his basement studio at his partner’s family home. His vividly colored images are created through thin, transparent washes applied by detail brushes. Interested in the patterns and symmetry of nature and architecture, Rogers places his protagonists, variations of his partner and brother, in lushly-patterned luminescent landscapes. The flowing organic nature of these highly detailed settings are reminiscent of works by Alphonse Mucha as well as the Art Nouveau-styled San Francisco music posters of the 1970s. 

Bryan Rogers has exhibited his work throughout the United States and Europe. These include group exhibitions at New York City’s Spring/Break Art Show; The Hole, a contemporary gallery in New York City’s Tribeca district; and Art Athina, Greece’s contemporary art fair and one of the oldest such fairs in Europe. Rogers also participated in the 2022 “The Bathroom Show” as well as the 2021 and 2023 “Works on Paper” group exhibitions at New York City’s Monya Rowe Gallery. 

Past exhibitions of Rogers’ work also include the 2021 “Woodland” at the Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles; “Intimacy” in 2022 at art curator Taymour Grahne’s London gallery; the 2022 “The Container Garden” at New York’s Sears-Peyton Gallery; “I Am American” in 2023 at the contemporary Kutlesa Gallery in Goldau, Switzerland; and the 2024 “Here and There” at the Huxley-Parlour Gallery in central London. In New York City, Rogers’ solo exhibitions also included the 2022 “Woodland”, the 2023 “Duality: The Real and the Perceived” and the 2024 “Wallflowers”, all held at the Monya Rowe Gallery in the East Chelsea district of Manhattan. 

Inquiries about Bryan Rogers’ paintings and future exhibitions should be presented to his representative, Monya Rowe Gallery, 224 West 30th Street, #304, New York City.  

http://monyarowegallery.com/index.php

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Bryan Rogers in Studio”, 2024, Color Print, Artnet News, January 2024

Second Insert Image: Bryan Rogers, “Here and There”, 2024, Acrylic on Panel, 122 x 91.4 cm, Huxley-Parlour Gallery, London

Third Insert Image: Bryan Rogers, “Entangled”, 2024, Acrylic on Panel, 50.8 x 40.6 cm, Monya Rowe Gallery, New York

Carlos Alfonzo

The Paintings of Carlos Alfonzo

Born in Havana in 1950, Carlos Alfonzo was a Cuban-American painter and ceramicist whose Neo-Impressionist style incorporated forms from Cuban Santeria, Catholic medieval mysticism, and tarot cards to form a symbolic vocabulary for his work. 

Carlos Alfonzo began his artistic training at the Academia de Belle Artes San Alejandro in Havana where he studied painting, print making and sculpture. After receiving his degree in 1973, Alfonzo attended the University of Havana where he received a degree in Art History in 1977. As a student, he began to introduce Afro-Cuban religious symbols from various sects into his work. Alfonzo, although raised as a Catholic, often blended pagan and Christian imagery to reveal their overlapping symbolisms as well as their connections to the issues of passion, masculine power, and sin.

During the 1970s, Alfonzo was an active participant in Cuba’s artistic community. However, he grew increasingly dissatisfied  with the country’s Revolution and discouraged by the travel restrictions and pervasive homophobia. In 1980, Alfonzo was deemed undesirable as a gay man by the Cuban government and, after several days of refuge with others at the Peruvian embassy, was able to leave Cuba during the Mariel Boat-Lift. An agreement arranged between Cuban-Americans in the United States and Fidel Castro allowed the release of many Cubans from the increasing restrictive conditions on the island. After a journey marred by violence, Alfonzo settled in Miami where he was able to explore both his art and his life. 

Carlos Alfonzo’s wildly energetic work was quickly embraced among the artistic circles in the United States. Three years after arriving in the United States, he was awarded a Cintas Fellowship in the visual arts and, in the next year, a 1984 Fellowship in Painting from the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington D.C. In the 1980s and 1990s, Alfonzo began to exhibit his work internationally and participated in a number of traveling exhibitions that concentrated on LatinX artists.

Alfonzo’s earliest work was inspired by the visible symbols contained within the propaganda produced under the Castro regime. Later works embraced the impressionistic work of such artists as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Alonzo’s work was also influenced by that of Cuban painter Wilfredo Óscar Lam y Castilla, an artist who fused Surrealist and Cubist approaches to art with images and symbols from Santeria. Many of Alonzo’s paintings contain subtle hints of his sexuality or invoke the fear and anger generated by the deaths of the AIDS epidemic. During the last year of his life, Alfonzo radically reduced his color palette and began an intense use of pictorial markings on large, dull-colored paintings that expressed a range of emotions.

Carlos Alfonzo, in addition to his paintings, produced a great number of works in clay and painted ceramics over a span of ten years. Interested in public works, he personally made and glazed all the ceramic tiles for his two iconic public murals in South Florida. The 1986 ceramic “Ceremony of the Tropics” at the Santa Clara Metro-Rail Station was a project of Miami’s Art in Public Places program overseen by artist and curator Cesar Trasobares. Alfonzo’s second ceramic mural was the 1991 site-specific “Brainstorm” commissioned by the Florida International University.  

Before he left Cuba, Alfonzo had two solo shows in Havana. The first was in 1976 at Galeria Amelia Pelaez and the second at Havana’s Museo Nacional in 1977. Alfonzo’s first solo exhibition in the United States, “Paradiso” which featured paintings, ceramics and works on paper, was held at New York City’s Hal Bromm Gallery on Madison Avenue in 1987. His other solo exhibitions were held at Houston’s McMurtey Gallery and the Osuna Gallery in Washington DC as well as the Bass Museum of Art and the Lannan Museum, both in Florida. 

In 1987, Alfonzo entered his work in the group exhibition, “Hispanic Art in the United States”, held at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts. His paintings were entered in the 1990 seminal  multi-venue show “The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s” at New York City’s Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art. This exhibition later traveled to the city’s The New Museum of Contemporary Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem. In 1991, Alfonzo’s paintings were chosen to be included in that year’s Whitney Biennial held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. 

Carlos Alfonzo lived and worked in Miami, Florida until his death in 1991 from a cerebral hemorrhage with AIDS-related complications at the age of forty-one. His work is held in many private collections and such public collections as the Miami Art Museum, the Kendall Art Center, Washington D.C.’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln, Nebraska, among others.

Notes: Art historian and curator Julia P. Herzberg has an extensive and informative article entitled “Carlos Alfonzo: Transformative Work from Cuba to Miami and the U.S.” on her site:  https://www.juliaherzberg.net/carlos-alfonzo

The online site of Miami’s New Times has an article by Isabella Marie Garcia entitled “The Dark Poignancy of Carlos Alfonzo’s Life” which covers the 2020 retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami: https://www.miaminewtimes.com/arts/things-to-do-in-miami-carlos-alfonzo-late-paintings-at-institute-of-contemporary-art-miami-14372933

The Farber Foundation’s The Archive: Cuban Art News has an article written by Janet Batet on Carlos Alfonzo’s late-career art: https://cubanartnewsarchive.org/2018/07/11/screaming-heads-and-still-lifes-the-late-career-art-of-carlos-alfonzo/

Top Insert Image: Ramiro Fernandez, “Carlos Alfonzo”, Date Unknown, Color Print, Miami New Times, May 2022

Second Insert Image: Carlos Alfonzo, Untitled, 1987, Acrylic on Paper, 76.2 x 56.5 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Carlos Alfonzo, Untitled, 1980-1989, Linocut Print, Artist Proof, 68.6 x 106.7 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Carlos Alfonzo, Untitled (Nine Figures Inside a Maze), 1979, Mixed Media on Paper on Board, 64.8 x 50.2 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Carlos Alfonzo, “Still Life with AIDS Victim”, 1990, Oil on Canvas, 213.4 x 213.4 cm, Private Collection

Max Beckmann

The Artwork of Max Beckmann

Born in February of 1884 at Leipzig in the Province of Saxony, Max Carl Friedrich Beckmann was a German painter, printmaker, sculptor and writer who is often classified as an Expressionist artist, a term and movement he rejected during his lifetime. He pursued a very personal artistic path that examined the themes of redemption, terror, eternity and fate.

The youngest child born to Carl and Antonie Beckmann, Max Beckmann exhibited artistic talent at an early age. At the age of sixteen, he enrolled at the Weimar Grand Ducal Art Academy where he completed his studies in three years. Beckmann moved to Paris in 1903 and was deeply impressed by the works of Paul Cézanne. Returning to Germany in 1904, he settled in Berlin and, in 1910, began exhibiting work with the Berlin Secessionist artists. Beckmann also had a show at Galerie Paul Cassirer, which represented the Secessionists and French artists, notably Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh. 

At a time when abstractionist work was developing in Germany, Beckmann was exploring figuration and narrative works with fragments of myths, bible stories, and obscure allegories. He was recognized for his history paintings and portraits of muted palettes and impressionistic brushwork. At the outbreak of World War I, Beckmann volunteered as a medical orderly in Belgium; however, the traumatic experiences he suffered in the field led to a nervous breakdown in July of 1915. He was eventually discharged from military service in 1917. 

Max Beckmann relocated to Frankfurt for his recovery, but his experiences in the war changed the scope of his work. The romantic compositions of his early work were replaced by more angular forms; his use of paint became more subdued and his palette darkened. Beckmann’s post-war subjects, often depicted more violently, centered around issues of political intolerance, social injustice and poverty. His cynical, crowded, and turbulently colored canvases were populated by characters caught in the chaos of post-World War I urban life. During this immediate post-war period, Beckmann also focused on etching and lithography. He created several black and white print portfolios, among which was the 1918-1919 “Hell” which featured scenes of a devastated Berlin.

Beckmann began teaching a master class in 1925 at Frankfurt’s Städel School and its School for Applied Arts. Having achieved widespread critical and commercial success, he was widely exhibited in Europe and America and his work was held in important museums and many private collections. Beckmann was among the leading artists who practiced the new realist style known as the Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity. His work was among those featured in art historian Gustav Hartlaub’s public survey on New Objectivity held at the Kunsthalle Mannheim in 1924. 

As the National Socialist Party in Germany increased its dominance in the early 1930s, modern art became increasingly under attack. Beginning in 1933, exhibitions of modern art toured several German cities solely for the purpose of defaming the work of modern artists, which included Max Beckmann and his contemporaries. The director of Berlin’s National Gallery, Ludwig Justi, attempted to protect its modern art collection by establishing special exhibition rooms in its Museum of Contemporary Art. However, after Adolf Hitler assumed power, Beckmann’s paintings were among those collected and exhibited in the Degenerate Art Exhibition that toured Germany until 1939.

Although he attempted to keep a low profile, Beckmann lost his teaching position in April of 1933. On the day the Degenerate Art Exhibition opened in March of 1937, he and his second wife Quappi relocated to Amsterdam, never to return to Germany. Beckmann joined a large exiled community and remained in contact with his supporters. During this period, he held a teaching position and created over two hundred and fifty paintings, the majority of which were his self-portraits. In 1938, Beckmann traveled to London and gave a speech at the New Burlington Galleries as part of the Exhibition of Twentieth Century German Art.

In September of 1947, Max Beckmann relocated to the United States and was given a teaching position at Saint Louis’s Washington University Art School where he taught alongside German-American printmaker Werner Drewes. In 1948, Beckmann had his first retrospective in the United States at the City Art Museum in Saint Louis. Art collector Morton D. May became his patron and student; he later donated a large collection of Beckmann’s work to the City Art Museum.

In the autumn of 1949, Beckmann and his wife Quappi relocated to a 69th Street apartment in Manhattan, New York where he accepted a teaching professorship at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. In 1950, Beckmann had a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale and also painted his “Falling Man”, an oil on canvas work similar to the falling men illustrations he created for a 1943-1944 edition of Goethe’s “Faust II”. On the twenty-seventh of December in 1950, Max Beckmann was struck down by a heart attack not far from his building while on his way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to view one of his paintings. 

After his death, Max Beckmann’s work was rarely seen in the United States, except for retrospectives held in 1964 and 1965 by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. However since the late twentieth century, retrospectives have been held in major cities throughout Europe and the United States. Many of his late paintings are displayed in American museums, with the Saint Louis Art Museum holding the largest public collection in the world. A new record for a German Expressionist work occurred with the 2017 sale of Max Beckmann’s 1938 “Hölle der Vögel (Birds’ Hell)” at Christie’s London for 45.8 million dollars (42.09 million Euros).

Notes: The Harvard Art Museums has a collection of eighty-five works by Max Beckmann, the majority of which consists of prints and drawings. Images of this collection can be found at: https://harvardartmuseums.org/collections/person/27201

A biography of Max Beckmann and short articles on six of his more important paintings can be found at the non-profit Art Story site located at: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/beckmann-max/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Max Beckmann in Armchair”, circa 1920-1930, Black and White Print, 8.5 x 5.9 cm, Tate Museum, London

Second Insert Image: Max Beckmann, “Frontal Self Portrait with House Gable in Background”, 1918, Drypoint Print, 49.8 x 37.5 cm, Harvard Museums/Fogg Museum

Third Insert Image: Max Beckmann, “Café Music”, 1918, Drypoint Print, Harvard Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Fourth Insert Image: Max Beckmann, “Self Portrait (Still Life with Globe as the Cover of Portfolio)”, 1946, “Day and Dream” Portfolio Series, Lithograph, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Art Museum

Bottom Insert Image: Mas Beckmann, “Der Vorhang hebt sich (The Curtain Rises)”, 1923, Drypoint Print, 29.7 x 21.7 cm, Harvard Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum

Sir Francis Cyril Rose

The Artwork of Sir Francis Cyril Rose

Born at the grand English estate of Moor Park, Hertfordshire in September of 1909, Sir Francis Cyril Rose, 4th Baronet of the Montreal Roses, was an English painter who received strong support throughout the 1930s from his patron, American novelist and art collector Gertrude Stein. Although he created many works of art, Rose’s artistic output was as erratic as his lifestyle was audacious and extravagant. Despite Stein’s endeavors to generate a sustained interest in his work, Francis Rose remained one of the more obscure artists of his generation.

Descended from Spanish nobility, Francis Rose inherited his British baronetcy while still a child. He received his initial education from the Jesuits at Beaumont College in Old Windsor, Berkshire, as well as lessons from private tutors abroad. In 1926 at the age of seventeen, Rose relocated to Paris where he resided as an expatriate until 1936. He studied under avant-garde painter and typographic artist Francis Picabia, an early figure in the Dada Movement, and Spanish muralist and theater set designer Josep Maria Sert.

In 1930, Rose had his first exhibition, alongside Salvador Dali, at the Paris  gallery of modern art patron Marie Cuttoli. By this time, he had already designed costumes and scenery for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe, some of which were in collaboration with artist Christopher Wood. Rose would design theater sets and costumes again in 1939 for Lord Berners’s ballet production “Cupid and Psyche” at London’s Sadler’s Wells Theater. During the 1930s, he spent several years studying Chinese poetry and art in China; he later traveled extensively in Europe and North Africa with his future wife, Frederica Dorothy Carrington. 

While traveling in France in his early twenties, Francis Rose became a close acquaintance of author Gertrude Stein who helped launch his painting career by commissioning several of his works, including a portrait of herself, for her own art collection. Stein had discovered Rose’s paintings in a Parisian gallery in the late 1920s and eventually bought one hundred-thirty of his works. Through Stein’s support, Rose was able to exhibit his work in Paris, London and New York. He  also created illustrations for “The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook”, a publication by Stein’s lifetime partner, Alice Babette Toklas. Although the friendship between the three personalities wavered at times, Alice Toklas asked Rose to design Gertrude Stein’s grave site memorial.

In 1938, Rose completed what is considered one of his most successful paintings, “L’Ensemble”, an oil on canvas mural that depicted his circle of friends which included Jean Cocteau, Gloria Stein,  Alice Toklas, Christian Bérard, Pavel Tchelitchev and Natalie Barney, among others. This mural was exhibited in the following year at the  Petit Palais Musée des Beauz Arts in Paris. Called to military service at the beginning of World War II, Rose served as a disciplinary sergeant in the Royal Air Force. In 1942, Francis Rose exhibited his work at the “Imaginative Art Since the War” exhibition held in London’s Leicester Galleries; this exhibition was organized by Frederica Dorothy Carrington, one of two daughters to Sir Frederick Carrington.

Francis Rose and Dorothy Carrington were married in 1942; however, as Rose was a noted homosexual, the marriage eventually ended. By 1954, Carrington had permanently settled, without Rose, on the Corsican island of Ajaccio; their divorce was finalized in 1966. Carrington became one of the twentieth-century’s leading scholars on the island’s culture and history. In 1971, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and, in the next year, a member of the Royal Society of Literature. Carrington became a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1995.

In 1938, Rose gave an American stockbroker the power of attorney to manage his fortune; however, this stockbroker was involved in, and later convicted of, an embezzlement scheme. Rose lost most of his fortune and was nearly destitute by the end of the second World War. He spent his final years in a state of poverty, helped financially by friends foremost among whom was photographer Cecil Beaton. In an attempt to achieve some financial success, Rose published a memoir in 1961 entitled “Saying Life: The Memoirs of Sir Francis Rose”. This memoir discussed both his exploits, many which had factual issues, and his associations with the famous and artistic personalities of the time. “Saying Life”, however. was not the financial success that he needed. 

Sir Francis Cyril Rose died in London on the nineteenth of November in 1979 at the age of seventy. He had exhibited in London and Paris in the 1950s and 1960s with major retrospective in London and Brighton in 1966. Another third retrospective of Rose’s work was given at London’s England & Co in 1988. In addition to private collections, his work is included in London’s England & Co Gallery, the Stein-Tolkas Collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Notes:  The Nick Harvill Libraries has a biographical article with quotes entitled “Lord Chaos: The Life of Sir Francis Rose” at:  https://www.nickharvilllibraries.com/blog/lord-chaos-the-life-of-sir-francis-rose

Time Magazine has an archive review of Sir Francis Roses’s July 1949 exhibition of new work at London’s Gimpel Fils Gallery. The review is located at;   https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,888553,00.html

Top Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Sir Francis Rose”, Date Unknown, Bromide Print, The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive

Second Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Cecil Beaton, Gertrude Stein, Sir Francis Rose”, 1939, Bromide Print, 24 x 23.8 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London, England

Third Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Sir Francis Rose and Gertrude Stein, Bilignin”, 1939, Gelatin Silver Print from Original Negative, The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive

Bottom Insert Image: Francis Goodman, “Emma Tollemache and Sir Francis Rose”, 9 December 1947, Gelatin Silver Print from Original Negative, National Portrait Gallery, London, England

Emma Tollemache (née Manasseh) wrote the poetry collection “In the Light”. A limited edition of 250 copies with illustrations by Sir Francis Rose was published by Marlowe Galleries.

Feliciano Centurión

The Textile Art of Feliciano Centurión

Born in the city of San Ignacio, Misiones in March of 1962, Feliciano Centurión was a Paraguayan artist known for his painting and textile work that incorporated painting, knitting, crocheting and embroidering. He was raised in a matriarchal household where he was taught the traditional crafts normally associated with women’s work.

Feliciano Centurión’s family fled to Formosa, Argentina to escape the military dictatorship of Paraguayan President Alfredo Stroessner. He received his initial art education in the visual arts at Formosa’s Oscar R. Albertozzi School of Fine Arts. Centurión permanently relocated to Buenos Aires where he studied painting at the Ernesto de la Cárcova Superior School of Fine Arts and the Prilidiano Pueyrredón School of Fine Arts. He earned the National Professor and Superior Professor of Painting degrees. 

Centurión incorporated ordinary household items into his artwork, such as blankets (frazadas), handkerchiefs, and pillowcases which he purchased at local street markets. His textile work followed the weaving traditions held by the indigenous Guaraní people of the interior regions of South America, particularly those of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia. Centurión also integrated the technique of ñandutí, an intricate method of lace weaving that was traditionally taught from mother to daughter. His design motifs included images of both flora and fauna as well as diaristic texts. 

After surviving the dictatorships in both Paraguay and Argentina, Feliciano Centurión thrived in Argentina after the collapse of the country’s authoritarian regime in 1983. He became associated with the Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas, a cultural center operated by the University of Buenos Aires, where he became acquainted with the work of other young artists. Centurión incorporated the kitsch references and queer aesthetics of these artists into his painting and embroidery work now being done on inexpensive, patterned blankets. Established as an artist, he participated in thirty-one solo exhibitions in Argentina and Paraguay between 1990 and 1996. 

Diagnosed with HIV in 1992 at a time when no accessible treatments were available, Centurión began chronicling his declining health by weaving texts into increasingly smaller and more intricate fabrics. At a time when government policies and media reports stigmatized the virus and its victims, he expressed humanizing, sentimental notions of comfort and intimacy into his fabric work. Centurión’s works were composed of bright colors and animals, such as snails and crocodiles, remembered from his childhood. His blankets celebrated both his matriarchal upbringing and Paraguay heritage; he used his embroidered work to express his queer identity and elevate the status of textile art. 

Feliciano Centurión had his first solo exhibition in 1982 at the Estimulo del Belles Artes in Asunción, Paraguay, and represented Paraguay at the fifth Havana Biennial in 1994. His final works, a series of embroidered pillows, were made while he was hospitalized. Centurión died on the seventh of November of 1996 at the age of thirty-four in Buenos Aires. 

A retrospective of Centurión’s work was exhibited in 2018 at the 33rd São Paulo Biennial in Brazil. The Americas Society/Council of Americas (AS/COA) held the first solo exhibition of his work in the United States from February to November of 2020. Held at its Park Avenue gallery in New York City, this exhibition received the support of the WaldenGallery, Galeria Millan, and Cecilia Brunson Projects as well as the City of New York. Centurión’s work is included in the current 2024 exhibition, “The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art”, at London’s Barbican Art Gallery until the 26th of May.

Notes: The exhibition catalogue “Feliciano Centurión: Abrigo” from the Americas Society/Council of Americas’s 2020 exhibition, which contains the exhibited work and an extensive biography, can be located at: https://www.as-coa.org/sites/default/files/archive/FelicianoCenturionPocketBook.pdf 

The Visual AIDS site has a tribute page to Centurión which contains a short biography and an online collection of over fifty images of his work: https://visualaids.org/artists/feliciano-centurion

Second Insert Image: Feliciano Centurión, “Flamencos”, circa 1990, Acrylic on Blanket, 42 x 53 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Feliciano Centurión, “Surubí”, 1992, Acrylic and Varnish on Blanket, 200 x 190 cm, Private Collection