Tag: portraiture

Ralph Eugene Meatyard

The Photography of Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Born at the city of Normal, Illinois in May of 1925, Ralph Eugene Meatyard was an American photographer, a visionary artist known for his black and white portraits of friends, posed family members in masks, and experimental abstracted compositions.

Raised in the city of Bloomington, Ralph Meatyard at the age of eighteen joined the United States Navy during World War 11. After his discharge from military service, he studied optometry through the government’s GI Bill at Williams College in Massachusetts. After his marriage to Madelyn McKinney, Meatyard and his wife relocated to Chicago where he began training as an apprentice optician. 

From 1950 to 1967, Meatyard worked at Tinder-Krausse-Tinder, a large optical firm in Lexington, Kentucky. After leaving the company, he opened his own business, Eyeglasses of Kentucky, that created lenses for glasses. The city of Lexington was the site of the University of Kentucky and, during the 1960s, the gathering place for the area’s writers and intellectuals, many of whom became Meatyard’s friends. Among these artists and writers were novelist Wendell Berry, visual artist Guy Davenport, photographers Jonathan Williams and James Baker Hall, and Trappist monk Thomas Merton, a poet who resided at Kentucky’s Abby of Gethsemani. 

In 1950, Ralph Meatyard purchased his first camera to photograph Michael, his first-born of three children. Having become interested in photography, he joined the Lexington Camera Club and the Photographic Society of America in 1954, working primarily with a Rolleiflex 6cm square medium format camera. During the 1950s, Meatyard attended a series of summer workshops created by Indiana University’s photography teacher Henry Holmes Smith. He also studied under Minor Martin White, a photographer known for his technical mastery and his strong sense of light and shadow. 

Meatyard embraced photography’s function as both a memory and documentary device. His images were populated with family and friends portrayed on suburban front stoops, beside cars, within backyards, and either outside or inside abandoned farmhouses. Meatyard’s subjects, dressed in everyday clothes, were photographed in tight focus from commonplace angles with just enough light. Addressing the issue of identity, he often portrayed family and friends behind costume-shop masks or paper bag faces. This single addition to a posed everyday scene radically altered the image’s context and hinted at an undiscovered story.

In 1956 through fellow photographer Frank Van Deren Coke, Ralph Meatyard entered his photographs in the “Creative Photography” exhibition held at the University of Kentucky. He frequented the Trappistine Abbey of Gethsemani where he shot a number of experimental photographs depicting his friend Thomas Merton posed on its grounds. In 1971, Meatyard collaborated with writer Wendell Berry on “The Unforeseen Wilderness”, a book about Kentucky’s Red River Gorge. The public response to this volume, which contained  photography by Meatyard, rescued the gorge from construction of a federally proposed Army Corps of Engineers dam.

Meatyard’s photography began to be known nationally in the early 1970s through several museum shows and its publication in magazines. He had shown his work in several exhibitions  alongside such photographers as Ansel Adams, Minor White, Harry Callahan, Edward Weston and Robert Frank. Over the course of his career, he produced a number of photographic series including “Romances”, “Dolls and Masks” and “Light on the Water”. Produced over a two year period, his final series of photographs, the 1974 “The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater”, contained sequential cryptic double portraits of friends and family members wearing masks and enacting symbolic dramas. 

A pioneering and inventive artist, Ralph Eugene Meatyard died at the age of forty-six from cancer in his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky on the seventh of May in 1972. He was survived by his wife Madelyn and three children: Michael, Melissa and Christopher. Meatyard was cremated and his ashes scattered in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge. His work is contained in several museums, among which are Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC, the John Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Notes: The name Lucybelle Crater in Meatyard’s final series was adapted by the artist from a character in Flannery O’Connor’s 1955 short story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”. Meatyard clearly intended that the identity of each person in the series not be known to the viewer of this work; he identified every character in this series with the same name: Lucybelle Crater. In each image, the Lucybell figure was portrayed by the artist’s wife, Madelyn Meatyard, who wore a costume-shop hag mask. This figure was paired with a family member or friend who wore a transparent mask that hid identity and aged the wearer.

“The Believer” is a quarterly literature, arts and culture magazine that specializes in criticism, literary non-fiction, and immersive reporting on contemporary issues. Investigative reporter and novelist Ted McDermott wrote an extensive article, “The Family Albums of Ralph Eugene Meatyard”, for its January 2007 issue: https://www.thebeliever.net/the-family-albums-of-ralph-eugene-meatyard/

Writer David A. Cory has a biographical article on Ralph Eugene Meatyard at the online photography magazine “F-Stop”: https://www.fstopmagazine.com/blog/2013/ralph-eugene-meatyard-by-david-cory/

San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery has an article on Ralph Eugene Meatyard that contains images from four of his series: https://fraenkelgallery.com/artists/ralph-eugene-meatyard

Top Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, (Self Portrait), 1964-1965, Gelatin Silver Print, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Second Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, (Self Portrait), 1958, Gelatin Silver Print, 28 x 35.6 cm, Fraenkel Gallery

Third Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, (Boy by Abandoned House), 1968-1969, Gelatin Silver Print, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Fourth Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled (Table and Chair), circa 1957-1958, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, (Wagon Wheel), 1957-1958, Gelatin Silver Print, 19.3 x 21.5 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

José Moreno Carbonero

José Moreno Carbonero, “Gladiators After the Fight”, circa 1882, Oil on Canvas, 230 x 300 cm, Museo de Málaga, Museo de Prado Collection

Born at Málaga in March of 1858, José Moreno Carbonero was a Spanish decorator and painter, one of the last history painters of the nineteenth-century. A celebrated portraitist of Madrid’s upper classes, he was influenced by Spanish Romantic painter Mariano Fortuny, known for his historical and orientalist themed works.

The son of a carpenter, José Carbonero enrolled in Málaga’s School of Fine Arts in 1868 and also studied under Bernardo Ferrándiz Bádenes, a costumbrista painter and the Chair of Color and Composition at the Escuela de Bella Artes de San Telmo. While at Ferrándiz’s studio, Carbonero was introduced to history painting and his teacher’s revolutionary views of commitment to freedom, independence and nonconformity. In 1872 at the age of fourteen, he was awarded a gold medal at the Exhibition of the Lyceum of Málaga.

Carbonero visited Morocco in 1873 where, influenced by Mariano Fortuny’s portraits and exotic, orientalist court scenes, he began to create African-themed paintings. After receiving a scholarship from the Málaga government, he traveled to Paris and joined the studio of painter and sculptor Jean-Léon Gérôme, one of the three most successful artists of the Second French Empire. Carbonero became acquainted with art dealer/publisher Adolphe Goupil, who introduced him to the commercial popularity of small genre paintings known as tableautins, a form of art that afforded great success.

After a study trip to Rome, Moreno Carbonero won a gold medal at Madrid’s 1881 National Exhibition of Fine Arts for his portrait “El Príncipe don Carlos de Viana”, now in the Prado Museum. Three years later, he won a second gold medal at the National Exhibition for his 1884 large-scale scene “La Conversión del Duque de Gandia”, which he painted during his time in Rome. Recognized for his ability, Carbonero received commissions from several official institutions including the Spanish Senate and the country of Argentina.

For the Conference Hall of the Spanish Senate, Carbonero created the 1888 “Entrada de Roger de Flor en Constantinopla”, a large-scale (350 x 550 cm) depiction of the Italian mercenary Roger de Flor and his troops entering Constantinople to relieve the Emperor from Turkish occupation. For this work, Carbonero did extensive research in Paris on the architecture, decoration and clothes of the Byzantine Empire, and created dozens of staging models and small paintings of individual warriors.  

Moreno Carbonero received the highest award at the 1888 Vatican Exposition and participated in the International Exhibitions held in Munich and Vienna. Other awards included a silver medal at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, a gold medal at the 1890 Budapest International Exposition, an honorary degree at the 1891 Berlin Universal Exposition, and the only gold medal at the 1893 World’ Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

In 1910, Moreno Carbonero received a commission from King Alfonso XIII of Spain for a commemorative painting to be given to the city of Buenos Aires to mark the city’s one-hundredth anniversary of the Argentine War of Independence. For this work, Carbonero proposed that the painting, “The Founding of Buenos Aires”, combine three symbolic representations for religion, justice and conquest. Its scene refers historically to the second (and permanent) founding of Buenos Aires on the Rio de la Plata, The 400 x 250 cm work depicts Juan de Garay with his sixty-three soldiers taking possession of the area on behalf of King Felipe II of Spain on the eleventh of June in 1580.

As a history painter, Carbonero was eclectic in his style and, due to his early success at creating small-scale genre paintings, excelled in drawing and clean brushwork. He was adamant about the historical accuracy of his paintings to the extent of repainting in 1924 some sections of his finished 1909 “The Founding of Buenos Aires” due to factual errors in its composition. In his scenes of large historical events, Carbonero put extra focus on portraying the reactions and feelings of the event’s participants.. 

Beginning in 1892 until his death, José Moreno Carbonero was an Academician and Professor of Live Drawing at Madrid’s Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. He died in Madrid at the age of eighty-two in April of 1942 and was buried in the city’s San Miguel Cemetery. His work is in many private and public collections; the collection of Málaga’s Museo de Belles Artes holds thirty works by Carbonero. 

Notes: Costumbrista painting was a localized branch of genre painting in Spain that had a realistic focus on precise representation of particular times and places, It captured the social and/or aesthetic behavior that characterized a human group belonging to a specific time, place, and culture, without any particular analysis of the depicted social scene. Artists who worked in this genre included Vincente Castell, José Villegas, Antonio Cabral Bejarano, and Leandro Ramón Garrido.

José Moreno Carbonero’s 1882 “Gladiadores Después del Combate (Gladiators After the Fight)” was submitted by the artist during his first year as a scholarship recipient in Rome. It was displayed in the Scholarship Recipients’ Section of the 1884 National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Rome. The inscription on the intrados of the pillar referred to the profession of the figures depicted in the scene and translated as follows: “The gladiatorial company of the aedile A. Suetius Certus will fight in Pompeii on May 31. There will be hunting and awnings.”

Top Insert Image: Christian Franzen, “José Moreno Carbonero”, 1898, December 15, 1898 Issue, “La Illustración Española y Americana”, Madrid, Spain

Second Insert Image: José Moreno Carbonero, “Portrait of H.R.H. King Alfonso XIII de Borbón”, 1927, Oil on Canvas, 74 x50 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: José Moreno Carbonero, “Bebiendo en la Fuente (Drinking from the Fountain, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 31.5 x 55.5 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: José Moreno Carbonero, “El Fumador de Kif”, 1890s, Oil on Canvas, 126 x 166 cm, Private Colllection

Bottom Insert Image: José Moreno Carbonero, “Study of a Guarani Man, Argentina”, 1922, Oil on Canvas, 32 x 26 cm, Private Collection

Bruno Vekemans

The Artwork of Bruno Vekemans

Born in 1952 at Berchem, a southern district of Antwerp, Bruno Vekemans was a Belgian painter, draftsman and etcher. Considered a post-modernist, he  was primarily concerned with figurative work which included portraits. Vekemans also created urban landscapes and anecdotal scenes with characters.

As a child and later a teenager, Bruno Vekemans was constantly engaged in drawing and painting. He enrolled at the Technicum de Londenstraat, an industrial arts and design school, where he took several courses in decoration. Vekemans also had some basic training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berchem. His skill at drawing was heavily influenced by his many visits to Antwerp’s Museum of Fine Arts where he studied the works of the Flemish masters as well as the early works of expressionist painter James Ensor.

Vekemans was, however, basically self-taught; his own unique strong and mysterious style was developed after years of experimentation with shape and color. His painting underwent various modifications before its dramatic resolution in the 1990s. Vekemans started his experiments with different techniques in 1971, using collages, comics, and églomisé, the application of a design and gilding on the rear face of glass. He often started his work with various photos or images from magazines, to which he added, combined or eliminated elements. 

In 1988, Bruno Vekemans focused on linear works, most of which were applications of gouache on patterned paper. He later replaced the patterned paper with seventeenth-century paper and also began experiments with oil paints on canvas.  Vekemans simplified the image and used chiaroscuro to create different lighting effects. He used vibrant, intense colors, often transparent with different levels of opacity in tones tinged with blues, browns and blacks. Throughout his paintings, collages and drawings, Vekemans maintained an aura of solitude and mystery in both his portraits and cityscapes.

Vekemans frequently exhibited in the Netherlands, Belgium, Japan, Austria, France, Australia and the United States. His first verified exhibition was at Amsterdam’s Jaski Art Gallery in 2006. An important step in Vekemans’s career was his 2015 exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro. Other notable exhibitions were retrospectives at  the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires and Havana’s Museo Nacional de Belas Artes de Cuba where he exhibited his thematic series on Cuba. A posthumous retrospective of his work, “Bruno Vekemans: Zelfportrettten”, was held in 2023 at Antwerp’s Galerie Verbeeck-Van Dyck. 

Bruno Vekemans passed away on the twenty-second of July in 2019, a week before his sixty-seventh birthday. In 2020, he was posthumously named an honorary citizen of the Antwerp municipality of Brasschaat.

Second  Insert Image: Bruno Vekemans, “Man Met Koffer (Man with Suitcase)”, Date Unknown, Gouache on Paper, 79 x 57 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Bruno Vekemans, “Tango Dancer”, 1895, Gouache on Patterned Paper, 92 x 78 cm, Private Collection

Ádám Mányoki

Ádám Mányoki, “Self Portrait”, circa 1711, Oil on Canvas, 87 x 61.5 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest

Born at the village of Szokolya in 1673, Ádám Mányoki  was an Hungarian portraitist, one of the most prominent figures of Hungarian Baroque art. His work is known for its refined style and accomplished depiction of human emotion.

Born into the family of a rural Protestant preacher, Ádám Mányoki’s early life was one of hardship as the family struggled financially. Recognizing the family’s situation and Mányoki’s artistic talent, a German staff officer named Dölfer took the responsibility for Mányoki’s upbringing and education in Hamburg and Lüneburg. Exposed to the classical ideas of beauty and proportion, Mányoki developed his skills under court painter Andreas Scheits in Hamburg and painter Nicolas de Largillière of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris. Both of these artists were acclaimed for their innovation within the Baroque tradition.

Mányoki’s formal education ended with a journey to Amsterdam where the Age of Enlightenment was flourishing. The Dutch Republic had a vibrant art scene with new ideas, literary salons, coffeehouses, and experiments with new techniques in the arts. Mányoki’s exposure to this atmosphere solidified his commitment to the art of portraiture as a means to capture the subtleties of human psychology. In 1703, he decided to relocate to Berlin where he secured patronage from King Frederick William I and established himself as a prominent member of the Prussian cultural elite. Mányoki painted several portraits of royal family members that were celebrated for their precision and sense of dignity.

After establishing his reputation in Germany, Ádám Mányoki traveled extensively in Europe seekings new  opportunities. He traveled to both Prague and Vienna where he received commissions from Emperor Charles VI, ruler of the Austrian Habsburg monarchy, and Empress Maria Theresa, who ascended to the throne after Charles VI’s death. Mányoki’s travels expanded his knowledge of both European history and the diverse approaches to painting. Between 1724 and 1731, he remained in Hungary where he created portraits of the Hungarian nobility and members of the Podmanitzky family, an influential lineage that played a key role throughout Hungary’s history.

After leaving Hungary, Mányoki resided in Dresden and Leipzig. He received royal patronage from Augustus III, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, and continued to paint works that were in keeping with the style of that era. Due to unresolved salary disputes, Mányoki resigned his position as court painter in 1753, an act which marked the end of his career. Ádám Mányoki died peacefully in Dresden, at the age of eighty-four, in August of 1757. 

Notes: Ádám Mányoki painted his 1711 “Self Portrait” while he was residing in Berlin. Influences from his studies of seventeenth-century Dutch and Germany painting can be seen in its composition. Mányoki used a technique of self-portraiture that had been popular since Rembrandt; a soft velvet hat with an upturned rim that casts a warm, brown shadow over the upper half of the face. The choice of colors and some of the portrait’s formal details can be traced to the work of the French portraitist to the Prussian court, Antoine Pesne. In the portrait, the posture of the figure and the shirt’s loose front opening may have been inspired by Mányoki seeing German Baroque artist Philip Kilian’s engraving of landscape painter Johann Heinrich Roos’s self-portrait.

Originally owned by Ádám Mányoki, the painting is documented in the Galerie Schleißheim from 1775. It was bought by the Association of Friends of the Art Museums, and from 1931 was on permanent deposit in museums with which the Friends were associated. From 1974 it has been in the Hungarian National Gallery.

Top Insert Image: Ádám Mányoki, “Portrait of János Podmaniczky”, 1724, Oil on Canvas, 91 x 76 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest

Second Insert Image: Ádám Mányoki, “Porträt einer Hofdame König August de Starken (Portrait of a Lady-in-Waiting to King Augustus III, the Strong)”, circa 1715, Oil on Canvas, 64 x 62 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Ádám Mányoki, “Portrait of Prince Ference Rákózci II”, 1712, Oil on Canvas, 75.5 x 67.5 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest

Gilbert Lewis

The Portraits of Gilbert Lewis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alberto Giacometti

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

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

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

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

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

Gustave Van de Woestijne

The Paintings of Gustave Van de Woestijne

Born at Ghent in August of 1881, Gustave Van de Woestijne was a Belgian expressionist painter whose depictions of humble rural life were shaped by philosophical reflections and avant-garde Western-European trends. While influenced by the Parisian avant-garde, Symbolism and Flemish Expressionism, Van de Woestijne created his own distinctive painterly style.

Gustave Van de Woestijne was the younger brother of writer, poet and art historian Karel Van de Woestijne who, upon the death of their father, oversaw his care. In his youth, Gustave studied at the Ghent Academy for the Fine Arts. Through his brother, he received an intellectual education that, at a young age, opened the door to a world of sculpture, literature and classical music.

In 1900 at the age of nineteen, Van de Woestijne traveled with his brother Karl to the small village of Sint-Martens-Latem on the banks of the River Lys where Karl, who had brought French symbolism to Belgium, founded a colony of loosely affiliated artists from the Ghent Academy. In the company of the First Group of Latem, Van de Woestijne developed artistically and painted biblical and rural life scenes, as well as sensitive portraits of village figures, family members and friends..

Gustave Van de Woestijne, like his brother Karel, organized his life as well as his art around philosophical reflections. He was concerned with existentialist questions that later became magnified with religion. After leaving Sint-Martens-Latem in 1905, he briefly entered the Benedictine Order in Leuven. However after four weeks, Van de Woestijne decided against the monastic life. He was too driven by creative desire to entirely devote his life to the church. Van de Woestijne instead used his painting skills and his palette of subtle earthly colors to portray the Catholic virtues of simplicity, humility and hope.

After leaving Leuven, Van de Woestijne relocated to Etterbeek, a municipality of Brussels and, later, the village of Tiegem in West Flanders. The memories of his stay at the River Lys artist colony still continued to influence both theme and style of his paintings. During the First World War, Van de Woestijne and his family lived in Wales where he spent time in the company of artists Valerius De Saedeleer and George Minna. He painted allegories of the war situation and numerous portraits, including those of his fellow artists. Van de Woestijne also was acquainted with businessman and art collector Jacob de Graaf, who became patron to him and other members of the Latem group. 

Gustave Van de Woestijne returned to Belgium in 1913 where he met Brussels art patrons David and Alice van Buuren who purchased their first painting by the artist. Between 1928 and 1931, the couple commissioned seven still lifes from Van de Woestijne for their modernist Brussels house. Eventually, David and Alice van Buuren acquired thirty-two works by the painter, a major part of Van de Woestijne’s oeuvre. 

Gustave Van de Woestijne’s 1910 Flemish portrait, “The Farmer”, had displayed the beginning of his movement towards modernism through its refined realism, large areas of color and its symmetrically composed plain background. Various trips to Paris had exposed Van de Woestijne to the artistic avant-garde innovations in the works of Picasso, Modigliani and Rousseau. It was after his return to Belgium that his work became more related to the Modernist movement. Van de Woestijne incorporated those avant-garde developments into his own techniques to create a  personal modernist style: a meditative form of symbolism with expressionist and cubist visual elements.

Upon the death of his brother Karel in 1929, Van de Woestijne took over his brother’s position as director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Mechelen and also taught in Antwerp and Brussels. He continued to paint, predominately Christian scenes with a more neutral palette, until his death. Gustave Van de Woestijne died at the age of sixty-five on the twenty-first of April in 1947 at the Belgian city of Uccle. His body is interred in the historic Cemetery of Campo Santo, Sint-Amandsberg, Ghent.

Works by Gustave Van de Woestyne are held in many private collections and public collections that include the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, Van Buuren Museum & Gardens, and the Museum of Deinze and the Lys Region. 

Notes: Conceptual Fine Arts (CFA) has an article by Brussels-based curator and writer Evelyn Simons entitled “The Quotidian Avant-Garde of Gustave Van de Woestyne” on its website: https://www.conceptualfinearts.com/cfa/2020/08/31/gustave-van-de-woestyne/

The Museum of Fine Arts Ghent has a short article on Gustave Van de Woestijne in connection with its 2020-2021 collection exhibition of his work: https://www.mskgent.be/en/exhibitions/gustave-van-de-woestyne

A biography on Karel Van de Woestijne, considered possibly the most important post-symbolist poet to have written in the Dutch language, can be found on the Poetry International website: https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poets/poet/102-8508_Van-de-Woestijne

Top Insert Image: Gustave Van de Woestijne, “Self Portrait”, 1912, Oil on Canvas, 180 x 48 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Gustave Van de Woestijne, “Still Life with a White Jug”, 1922, Gouache on Paper, 76.5 x 55.5 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, Belgium

Third Insert Image: Gustave Van de Woestijne, “The Liquer Drinkers”, 1922, Oil on Canvas, 109.5 x 99 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp, Belgium

Bottom Insert Image: Gustave Van de Woestijne, “Fugue”, 1925, Oil on Canvas, 80.5 x 80 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, Belgium

Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari

The Photography of Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari

Born in 1899 at the Vilayhet of Aidin (Aydini), an administrative division of the Ottoman Empire, Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari was a Greek photographer whose work helped shape the image of Greece to Western culture. She was the first Greek photographer to export modern images of Greece abroad and thus influenced the future of Greek tourism. Later known by the pseudonym Nelly for her professional society portraiture, Elli Seraidari drew attention to Greece during the country’s turbulent interwar years, a period from 1918 to 1939 that resulted in economic, social, political, and military changes..

At the beginning of the Greco-Turkish War, the Aidini Massacre in the summer of 1919 uprooted Elli Seraidari’s family from their home and forced them to flee to the city of Smyrna. Seraidari relocated in 1920 with her brother to the German city of Dresden where they planned to study the arts. For two years, she studied photography under Franz Fiedler, known for his surrealist-inspired images, and Hugo Erfurth, a portraitist of early twentieth-century celebrities and cultural figures.

After the creation of the Grand National Assembly in the Ottoman Empire led by Mustafa Demal Atatürk, a campaign against the indigenous Greek and Christian populations began. The brutal persecution and destruction led to massacres, forced deportations, executions, and the destruction of cultural and religious monuments. The Great Fire of Smyrna in September of 1922, a deliberate act by the government, forced the city’s population to flee from the Turkish military forces and seek shelter in Greece and elsewhere. Although Seraidari was abroad at the time, she joined the hundred of thousands refugees who were seeking a new life in Greece 

In the spring of 1924, Elli Seraidari relocated to Athens where she made the bold decision to establish a photography studio in the high-rent center of the city. Seraidari used her equipment from Dresden to produce specialized portraits as well as dance and nude photography. Her portrait work soon became status symbols for the culturally elite in Greece. Seraidari’s introduction of models and performers into images of the national treasures of the Greek landscape created a new narrative for the growing nation and increased Seraidari’s reputation. Among her most notable works of this early period are the 1925 nude portrait of prima ballerina Mona Paeva and the 1930 mid-air image of Russian dancer Elizaveta Nikolska, both taken at the Parthenon.

Elli Seraidari adopted a naive nationalistic and conservative approach to her work. Her style coincided with Greece’s need to produce an ideal view of the country and its people, both for internal and tourism purposes. Seraidari was appointed as an official photographer for the newly established Greek Ministry of Tourism. She also was commissioned by the Greek Archeological Service to photograph Greek antiquities, both architecture and sculpture. Seraidari’s creative eye imbued the images with a dramatic use of light and dark shadows, sharp horizontal and vertical lines, and camera angles that brought life to the subjects.

Seraidari’s association with Greece’s Fourth of August Regime, under the leadership of General Ioannis Metaxas, made her one of the country’s most prolific photographers. As a refugee in Greece, Seraidari’s view of Greece was idyllic. This matched the propaganda of the Metaxas regime to illustrate the continuity of the Greeks since Antiquity. Now a well-established artist, Seraidari photographed the events and athletes at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. Three years later, she was commissioned with the decoration of the Greek pavilion at the New York’s World Fair, for which Seraidari created gigantic collages that expressed the similarities between ancient and modern Greeks. 

While in New York, Elli Seraidari decided to remain in the United States, establish her commercial photographic portraiture, and seek new work in the fields of photo reportage and advertising. She continued to maintain her connections with the Greek elite, including shipping tycoons Aristotle Onassis and Stavos Niachos, and soon developed contacts in the White House. As her new work failed to align with any previous Greek stereotype, viewings of her work in the United States went largely unmentioned. 

After several excursions to Greece beginning in 1949, Seraidari returned to Greece in March of 1966 where she settled with her husband at Nea Smyrni, a municipality in South Athens, and ceased her photographic work. In 1985, Seraidari donated her photo archives and cameras to Athen’s Beanaki Museum. The Greek government and the Hellenic Center of Photography awarded her in 1987 with an honorary diploma and medal. In 1993, Seraidari received the Order of the Phoenix, an award for those in Greece who have excelled in the arts and sciences. This award was followed in 1996 by the Athens Academy’s Arts and Letters Award. Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari died in Nea Smyrni on the eighth day of August in 1998 at the age of ninety-seven.

Notes: The “Daily Art” has an article on Elli Seraidari’s work entitled “The Queen of Neoclassical Photography: Nelly” at its March 2024 edition: https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/greek-photographer-nelly/

Projects at Harvard has an article on the opposing photographic styles of two artists, British photographer Francis Firth and Elli Seraidari, both of whom shot images of the Acropolis and Parthenon: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/sites/projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/whoseculture/files/nelly_frith_photography_dpenizzotto_oct_7_21.pdf

The “Greece Is” newsletter has a July 2023 article on Elli Seraidari’s work entitled “Nelly’s: Setting the Image of Greece in the Mind of the World” which coincided with a major exhibition of her work at the Pireos 138 Benaki Museum: https://www.greece-is.com/nellys-setting-the-image-of-greece-in-the-mind-of-the-world/

The Benaki Museum has a lecture on Elli Seraidari’s life and her photography on YouTube under the title “Nelly’s: Reflections on the Life and Work of the Greek Photographer Elli Seraidari-Sougioultzoglou”.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari”, circa 1920s,  Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Elli Sougloultzoglou-Seraidari, “Temple de la Victoire Aptere, Athens”, 1925, Gelatin Silver Print, Banaki Museum Photographic Archives

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari”, Gelatin Silver Print, Impactalk Online Magazine 

Bottom Insert Image: Elli Sougloultzoglou-Seraidari, “Demetrius Karambatis on the Acropolis”, 1925, Gelatin Silver Print, Banaki Museum Photographic Archives

Piero Pompili

 

The Black and White Photography of Piero Pompili

Born in the Roman borgata of Borghesiana in June of 1967, Piero Pompili is an Italian photographer whose work explores working class people and the landscape of Italy’s major cities. A significant part of his oeuvre is the portraiture of local boxers, those epic heroes from central and southern Italy who fight daily in the cities. A project that has covered a twenty-year period, Pompili’s series establishes the boxers’ identities through their bodies, discipline and skill, as well as their fears and ambitions.

Fascinated by the social and urban landscapes of the inner Italian cities since his childhood, Piero Pompili developed a deep attachment to the energy and passion of the common people. His approach to photography is realistic, not idealized, and presents real people who struggle with doubt but accept discipline and sacrifice through commitment. Pompili focused his images not on the battle itself but rather the strenuous routine of daily workouts and the rituals practiced by the boxers before their entry into the ring.

In April of 2017, Pompili published his “Gladiatori Moderni”, a collection of photographs printed through media company Salzgeber’s book division Bruno Gmuender. The photographs of these modern gladiators  were taken in the borgatas of Rome and Naples, within both the gyms and the catacombs where ancient gladiators prepared for their battles. 

Pompili’s work was featured in 2023 at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto (MART). In conjunction with the exhibition, MART published the exhibition catalogue “Piero Pompili: Pugili”. 

Note: The April 2nd 2017 edition of The Advocate has a short biographical article on Piero Pompili and a collection of images from the “Gladiatori Moderni” at its online site: https://www.advocate.com/books/2017/4/02/modern-gladiators#rebelltitem1

Top Insert Image: Piero Ppmpili, “Self Portrait”, May 2025, Instagram

Bottom Insert Image: Piero Pompili, “Lukaska”, 2018, “Gladiatori Moderni” Series, Gelatin Silver Print

 

Bernadett Timko

The Artwork of Bernadett Timko

Born in Hungary in 1992, Bernadett Timko is a figurative painter who works primarily in oil paints on linen or wood panel. Using a muted but diverse color palette, she captures a wide range of subjects and moods. 

Timko’s initial art training was at the Secondary School of Fine Art in Nyíregyháza, Hungary. She relocated to London to continue her education at Heatherley’s School of Fine Art where she studied figurative painting, printmaking, etching and sculpture. As part of The New School of Art, Timko was a portrait painting tutor in 2023 at the Dairy Studios located within the Old Malling Farm in Lewes, East Sussex. 

Bernadett Timko’s work draws some influence from the emotional atmosphere of classical Hungarian paintings. Despite their display of aesthetic harmony, her works occasionally  contain undercurrents of rebellion and challenge to traditional conventions. Timko’s figures and objects are prominently presented, often highlighted, against a more artistically textured, somber background. She paints both interiors and portraits. However due to Timko’s fascination with people and the presence they emit, portraiture is her main focus. 

Timko regularly exhibits her work at the prestigious Central London art institution, Mall Galleries, her representative in England. Among her many  awards are two First Prize Winsor & Newton Young Artist Awards from the Royal Institute of Oil Painters (2015 and 2019); two Phyllis Roberts Awards (2015 and 2018); the 2016 Lynn Painter-Stainers Young Artist Award for her painting “Studio 7”; and the 2017 Prince of Wales Portrait Award from the Royal Society of Portrait Painters.

Notes: An extensive 2023 studio interview with Bernadett Timko for Britain’s online magazine “Artists & Illustrators” can be found at: https://www.artistsandillustrators.co.uk/featured-artist/in-the-studio-with-bernadett-timko/

Top Insert Image: Dan Higginson, “Bernadett Timko”, Idle Hands Society Interview, May 2022

Bottom Insert Image: Bernadett Timko, “Studio 7”, 2016, Oil on Linen, 152 x 150 cm, Winner of the 2016 Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize

 

Carl Van Vechten

The Photography of Carl Van Vechten

Born at Cedar Rapids, Iowa in June of 1880, Carl Van Vechten was an American accomplished photographer, author, critic, and ardent supporter of Harlem Renaissance artists and writers. He was the youngest child of prominent banker Charles Duane Van Vechten and Ada Amanda Fitch, a talented musician who founded the Cedar Rapids Public Library. A passionate follower of music and theater from an early age, Van Vechten left Cedar Rapids after graduating high school to pursue his interests and advance his education in Chicago.

Van Vechten entered the University of Chicago in 1899 where he studied a variety of topics including music, art and opera. Developing an interest in writing, he contributed work to the “University of Chicago Weekly”. After graduating from the university in 1903, Van Vechten accepted the position of columnist for the “Chicago American”, a growing afternoon edition newspaper. During this period, he began his experiments in photography, a passion for which he later gained widespread recognition.

After moving to New York City in 1906, Carl Van Vechten was hired by “The New York Times” as an assistant to its music critic. This position allowed him to continue his interest in opera through travels to Europe. In 1908, Van Vechten became the newspaper’s Paris correspondent and, upon his return to the United States in 1909, became the first American critic of modern dance. He later became the drama critic for the “New York Times” during 1913 and 1914. During a 1913 musical premiere in Paris, Van Vechten met and became a life-long friend and champion of American author and poet Gertrude Stein. Upon her death in 1946, he became her literary executor and assisted in the printing of her unpublished writings.

Having finished with writing both fiction and critical, Van Vechten at the age of fifty began photographing his large circle of friends with a 35 mm Leica camera, given to him by the Mexican painter, ethnologist and art historian Miguel Covarrubias. Van Vechten’s earlier career as a New York Times writer and his theater connections through his actress wife, Fania Marinoff, provided him access to new and established artists as well as cultural figures of the time. Van Vechten’s photographic portfolio became a collection of America’s cultural icons of the early to middle 1900s.

Carl Van Vechten’s portraits were usually busts or half-length poses in front of backdrops. Although he employed an assistant for lighting setups, Van Vechten was skilled in the techniques of photographic development. The subjects of his portraits included such notables as playwright Eugene O”Neill, novelist and poet Gertrude Stein, actress Anna May Wong, social activist Langston Hughes, actress and singer Pearl Bailey, and many others. Van Vechten’s photographs were exhibited at New York City’s luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman in 1933, the Museum of the City of New York in 1942, the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1951, and at annual Leica Exhibitions between 1934 and 1936.  

Van Vechten strongly felt that his documentary photographic work of the mid-1900s should be available for scholarly research. During his lifetime, he donated his collection of manuscripts, letters, clippings and photographs to several university libraries. The Museum of the City of New York houses an extensive collection of over two-thousand images. In 1966, the United States Library of Congress acquired a collection of fourteen-hundred photographs that had been the property of Saul Mauriber. Originally a busboy at the Stage Door Canteen during World War II, Mauriber was Van Vechten’s photographic assistant for twenty years; he organized the collection and later became the photographic executor for Van Vechten’s estate.

As an author, Carl Van Vechten published several volumes of essays on a variety of subjects between 1915 and 1920, during which time he acted as an informal literary scout for the newly formed publisher Alfred A. Knopf. The publisher printed seven novels by Van Vechten between 1922 and 1930, including the 1922 “Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works”, a fictionalized autobiographical work built around the Harlem Renaissance, and the 1930 “Parties: Scenes from Contemporary New York Life”, a satirical portrait of upper-bohemian New Yorkers and Harlem jazz clubs.

Active in both writing and photography in his latter years, Carl Van Vechten died in December of 1964 at the age of eighty-four in New York City. His ashes were scattered over the Shakespeare Garden in the city’s Central Park. Van Vechten’s personal papers, a collection of nineteen-hundred Kodachrome slides, and his series “Living Portraits: Color Photographs of African Americans from 1939 to 1964” are housed at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. His work is also housed in Tennessee’s Fisk University, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, among others.

Notes: While in Europe in 1907, Carl Van Vechten married Anna Snyder, his long time friend from Cedar Rapids. Their marriage lasted for five years; the divorce was finalized in 1912. Two years later, he married American-Russian actress and dancer Fania Marinoff. This marriage lasted for fifty years during which the couple played a prominent role in the Harlem Renaissance. After a successful fifty year career, Marinoff died from pneumonia at the age of eighty-one in November of 1971.

From the beginning of their relationship, Fania Marinoff was aware of Van Vechten’s romantic and sexual relationships with men. Most notable of these was his relationship with Richmond journalist Mark Lutz, who was introduced to Van Vechten at a 1931 party hosted by Hunter Stagg, editor of “The Reviewer” literary magazine. Lutz became a model for Van Vechten’s early photographic work and would maintain a close relationship until Van Vechten’s death. Upon Mark Lutz’s death in 1968, all his correspondence with Van Vechten, some ten-thousand letters, were destroyed as per his wishes. His collection of photographs by Van Vechten were donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

A November 2023 article by Anne McCrery for the Library of Virginia’s “The Uncommon Wealth”, entitled “Authors of All Four Sexes” examines Hunter Stagg, his friendship with Van Vechten and Lutz, and the literary renaissance of Richmond, Virginia: https://uncommonwealth.virginiamemory.com/blog/2023/11/22/hunter-stagg/

The Elisa Rolle/ Queerplaces website has a biographical article on Carl Van Vechten that includes a collection of his portrait photographs gathered by Tony Scupham-Bilton: http://www.elisarolle.com/queerplaces/a-b-ce/Carl%20Van%20Vechten.html

Top Insert Image: Mark Lutz, “Carl Van Vechten, Villa Curonia, Florence, Italy”, 1935, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “Vincent Price”, 1939, Bromide Print, Marquette University, Wisconsin, 

Third Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “Mark Lutz, Rhinebeck, New York”, July 1936, Gelatin Silver Print, 35.3 x 27.9 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Fourth Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “James Earl Jones”, May 1961, Vintage Gelatin Silver Print, 34.5 x 24 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “John Gielgud”, 1936, Vintage Print, 25.3 x 18 cm, Estate of Carl Van Vechten, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Howard Roffman

The Photography of Howard Roffman

Born in Philadelphia in April of 1953, Howard Roffman is an American lawyer, marketing director, author and photographer. He is best known for his work on the Star Wars franchise as Lucasfilm’s head of Licensing and for his series of photographic art books of gay-positive images published in Berlin by Bruno Gmünder. 

The son of a Jewish family in a white middle-class section of Philadelphia, Howard Roffman’s interest in photography and awareness of his gay identity began early in his life. He attended the University of Pennsylvania and, later, the University of Florida College of Law where he received his Doctor of Law degree in 1977. Roffman served as a law clerk on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and later at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, a law firm in Washington DC.

As an author, Roffman spent years of research for his first nonfiction book, the 1976 “Presumed Guilty: Lee Harvey Oswald in the Assassination of President Kennedy”, a volume published by A.S. Barnes that examined the Warren Commission Report. His second nonfiction work, “Understanding the Cold War: A Study of the Cold War in the Interwar Period”, was published by the Associated University Press in 1977.  

Howard Roffman joined Lucasfilm in 1980 initially as legal counsel but was eventually promoted to general counsel. In 1986, he became the company’s Vice-President of Licensing, a position that included overseeing daily operations, identification of licensing partners, and the execution of agreements. Roffman was instrumental in the 1991 launch of the Star Wars novel franchise. Timothy Zahn’s “Heir to the Empire”, the first of this novel series, was on The New York Times Best Seller list for nineteen weeks. 

In 1999, Roffman was appointed President of Lucas Licensing, a subsidiary of Lucasfilm that owns the licensing rights to the “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” film series. In this position, he acted as Executive Producer for the highly successful “Star Wars: In Concert” tour, a series of concerts featuring a choir and symphony orchestra synced with footage from the Star War saga films displayed on a three-story LED screen. 

In early 2012, Howard Roffman became a Senior Advisor at Lucasfilm; however in the latter part of the year, he returned to full-time management of the Star Wars franchise. Roffman’s leadership with Star Wars licensing has been credited for redefining the licensed merchandise business. His work became the template used by many major media companies, including Disney which acquired Lucasfilm in 2012. Chosen by Brandweek magazine as the 1997 Entertainment Marketer of the Year, Roffman was inducted into the Licensing Hall of Fame in 2012. 

In 1991, Roffman began a career in photography through his meeting a young gay San Francisco couple who were seeking a photographer. By introducing his work to people on the street as well as at fairs and malls, he developed his skills and gradually built an impressive body of work. Over the last three decades, Roffman has published twenty-three volumes of portraiture photography and numerous magazine articles and calendars. After many years of shooting black and white film, he presented his first collection of digital color images in January of 2009, “Private Images, Bel Ami”, published through Bruno Gmünder.

Howard Roffman serves as the Executive Vice President of the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Film Society. He has aided in the financing of several acclaimed documentary film projects. Among these were directors David Weissman and Bill Weber’s 2011 “We Were Here”, which illuminated the personal and community issues raised by the AIDS epidemic, and directors Jeff Orlowski, Jerry Aronson and Paula DuPré Pesmen’s 2012 “Chasing Ice”, a multi-year chronicle of the earth’s melting glaciers. 

Howard Roffman’s photographic work is represented by Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art, a gallery that specializes in vintage and contemporary photography: https://wesseloconnor.com

Notes: The September 2019 issue of the online Metrosource magazine has an article on Howard Roffman’s photographic career at: https://metrosource.com/howard-roffman-gay-nude-photographer-star-wars/

Medium: Human Stories & Ideas has a short article on Howard Roffman and a link to a 2017 video interview entitled “Messing with a Classic” in which he discusses Lucasfilm and his work with “Star Wars” saga: https://medium.com/@wayofthewarriorx/howard-roffman-tv-interview-guy-who-was-in-charge-of-the-eu-l-l-ca33735117d2

Second Insert Image: Howard Roffman, “Pictures of Fred”, 2000, Bruno Gmünder, Berlin, Germany

Third Insert Image: Howard Roffman, “John, Gary and Kris by the Stoop”, 1995, Gelatin Silver Print, Edition of 25, 36 x 36 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Howard Roffman, “Three”, January 1997, Second Edition, Bruno Gmünder, Berlin, Germany

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

Robert Giard

The Portrait Photography of Robert Giard

Born at Hartford, Connecticut in July of 1939, Robert Giard was an American portrait, figurative and landscape photographer. He is best known for his black and white, unadorned portraits of American poets and authors, a two decade-long series that specifically focused on gay and lesbian writers.

Robert Giard received his Bachelor of Arts from Yale University where he majored in English Literature. He earned his Master of Arts in Comparative Literature at Boston University. After graduating, Giard taught at the private New Lincoln School in Manhattan, New York. In 1972, he began, entirely self-taught, to photograph portraits of friends, nude figurative works, and the landscapes of the South Fork region of Staten Island. Giard’s  early landscapes were mainly shot in late autumn to the beginning of spring when many of the homes were empty for the season. Included in these landscapes are photographs taken at The Creeks, artist Alfonso Ossario’s estate.

In 1974, Giard and his life partner, early childhood educator Jonathan Silin, settled in the popular resort hamlet of Amagansett on the south shore of Long Island, where they remained for nearly thirty years until Giard’s death. In 1985, Giard attended a performance at New York City’s The Public Theater of playwright and gay rights activist Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” which dealt with the AIDS crisis in the gay community. Sensing the enormity of the situation, he decided to use his photography to record the experiences, history and culture of the queer community. Combining his interests in literature and gay issues, Giard began documenting through portraits both the significant and new literary figures on the scene. 

Robert Giard’s portraits included such notable figures as poet and writer Allen Ginsberg, poet and essayist Adrienne Cecile Rich, playwright Edward Albee III, poet and performance artist Assotto Saint, and novelist Michael Cunningham, a later literary Pulitzer Prize winner. A selection of the more than five hundred portraits Giard had amassed at the time were published in 1997 as an anthology entitled “Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers” by MIT Press. This collection served as the companion volume to the New York Public Library’s 1998 exhibition of the same name. 

In his later years, Giard began working on a portrait documentation of the three hundred twenty-one grant recipients of the Thanks Be To Grandmother Winifred Foundation, which supported until 2001 projects by women fifty-four years or older that benefitted other mature women. These grants supported research and artistic projects as well as those with social, economic or medical problems. Before his death, Giard had successfully photographed two hundred and forty-one of the women grantees. He traveled extensively across the country by train, bus or plane and kept a diary of his travels and his visits with the diverse group of women he met. 

While traveling to a portrait session in Chicago, Robert Giard passed away on the sixteenth of July in 2002 at the age of sixty-two. His published version of “Particular Voices” won the 1997 Lambda Literary Foundation Award for Best Photography/Art Book. A recipient of many awards and grants, Giard had a long and distinguished solo and group exhibition career in the United States. His work is in the public collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York Public Library, San Francisco Public Library, and the Library of Congress. Giard’s complete archive is housed in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in its American Collection.

The Robert Giard Foundation was formed in 2002 to preserve his photographic legacy, promote his work for educational purposes and encourage young photographers. The annual Robert Giard Fellowship is a ten-thousand dollar grant given to visual artists whose work addresses gender, sexuality and issues of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender identity. 

In 2005, Crones’ Cradle Conserve Press published “The Grandmother Winifred Journals” 1996-2002” which contains all Giard’s images of the women grantees plus his diary entries that documented each session.

Notes: Although the Robert Giard Foundation site has not been updated since 2022, the Robert Giard Grant Cycle is still active. The pertinent addresses are:  https://robertgiardfoundation.org  and  https://www.queer-art.org/giard-grant

The Lambda Literary Foundation has a biographical article on Robert Giard on the Gale Literature Resource Center site. It can be accessed through your library system’s card:  https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA92049131&sid=sitemap&v=2.1&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7E9af9193c&aty=open-web-entry

Top Insert Image: Toba Tucker, “Robert Giard”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Private  Collection

Second Insert Photo: Robert Giard, “Portrait of the Photographer”, (Self-Portrait), 1982, Gelatin Silver Print, 25.4 x 20.3 cm, Estate of Robert Giard

Bottom Insert Photo: Robert Giard, “Newton McMahon”, 1981, Gelatin Silver Print, 35.6 x 35.6 cm, Private Collection