Patrick Anthony Hennessy

The Paintings of Patrick Anthony Hennessy

Born in August of 1915 in Cork, Patrick Anthony Hennessy was an Irish realist painter known for his landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and trompe l’oeil paintings. Often considered an outsider of latter day Irish painting, he developed a distinctive personal style of carefully observed realism executed with highly finished surfaces that he faithfully followed throughout his career.

After his father’s battle death in 1917 during World War I, Hennessy’s mother remarried to John Duncan from Scotland in 1921; the family relocated to Arbroath, a royal burgh on the coast of Scotland where Duncan’s relatives resided. During his primary education at the Arbroath High School, Hennessy showed an aptitude for art and graduated in 1933 with the honor, Dux for Art, and an accompanying medal. In the autumn of that year, he entered the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design at the University of Dundee where he studied drawing and painting under portrait painter Edward Baird and noted landscape painter James McIntosh Patrick.

Patrick Hennessy, in addition to his art studies, wrote a ballet entitled “Paradise Lost” which was performed at the college in 1935. In each year of his course, he gained a First Class Pass, as well as winning first prize in 1934 and 1936 for the work he produced during summer breaks. Hennessy graduated with a First Class Distinction in 1937 and, with a scholarship, earned his Post-Graduate Diploma in 1938. During his studies, Hennessy met his life-long partner, British-Irish landscape and portrait painter Harry Robertson Craig who was also attending courses at Dundee. Aside from the period between 1939 and 1946 when they were separated by the war, they spent the rest of their lives together.

A month after finishing his post-graduate work, Hennessy entered his paintings in a group exhibition at the Art Galleries in Arbroath. Awarded an Annual Traveling Scholarship for further studies in Italy and France, he traveled to Europe in June of 1938. In Paris, Hennessy reunited with two friends, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde. whom he had met the previous year. Known as the two Roberts, these painters and theater set-designers had established both a lifelong romantic relationship and a professional collaboration in their art. Hennessy and the couple traveled together through the south of France until their arrival in Marseilles at the end of 1938.

Upon his return to Scotland, Patrick Hennessy was selected for the residential summer course at the historical arts center, Hospitalfield House, under painter James Cowie, an artist of detailed draftsmanship based on studies of the Old Masters. Two of Hennessy’s paintings from this period were accepted for the Annual Exhibition held by the Royal Scottish Academy. With war looming in the autumn of 1939 and feeling disenchanted by his time at Hospitalfield House, he made the decision to return to his native Ireland. On his arrival in Dublin, Hennessy was offered an exhibition in December of 1939 at abstract artist Mainie Jellett’s Country Shop gallery on St. Stephens Green in the city center.

After his well received exhibition, Hennessy was invited to join the Society of Dublin Painters with whom he would exhibit annually during the 1940s and early 1950s. Beginning in the early 1940s, a visual homosexual subtext began to be incorporated into some of Hennessy’s paintings. In addition to the work he produced for exhibition in this period, he also received many portrait commissions from clients. Hennessy began a long relationship with the Royal Hibernia Academy in 1941 with the acceptance of three of his paintings for their annual exhibition; he exhibited with the academy virtually every year from 1941 until his death.

In 1946, Patrick Hennessy reunited with Harry Robertson Craig who had recently been discharged from the intelligence branch of the British Army where he served during the Second World War. Prior to his service, Craig had extensively traveled throughout Europe where he painted landscapes and portraits. Hennessy and Craig soon moved to Crosshaven in Cork and later to the seaport town of Cobh on the southern coast of County Cork. In 1948, Hennessy had an exhibition at Dublin’s Victor Waddington Gallery, which had emerged as Ireland’s most important modern art venue. After a year as an associate, he became a full member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1949.

Hennessy’s work became noticed in North America when his published work “De Profundis” was included in the Contemporary Irish Painting Exhibition that toured various cities on the continent. The 1950s brought Hennessy a retrospective of his work from 1941 to 1951 at the Dublin Painters Society and several painting excursions to Italy and Sicily. One of his works at this time, “Bronze Horses of St. Marks”, was exhibited at London’s Royal Academy in 1954. In 1956, Hennessy had two major solo exhibitions of his work: London’s Thomas Agnew Gallery which showed thirty-eight paintings and Dublin’s Ritchie Hendriks Gallery which would be the main outlet for his work over twenty-two years.

In the winter of 1959, Patrick Hennessy became seriously ill with pneumonia. As a consequence, he and Harry Craig decided to spend the winter season in Morocco. After 1959, they never spent a full year in Ireland and increasingly spent time abroad. In the 1960s, Hennessy continued to be true to his personal style; however, as he did not follow the current trends in art, he began to receive less favorable reviews from the art critics. Finally in 1965, Chicago’s Guildhall Gallery, which had accepted his work for years, offered Hennessy a major exhibition in 1966. The success of which enabled him to become an artist with work on permanent display at the gallery and a scheduled annual exhibition.

In 1968, Hennessy made a permanent move to Tangier, Morocco where he painted prolifically for nine years to keep up with the demand from both the Hendriks and Guildhall Galleries as well as the Royal Hibernian Academy. A highly successful retrospective of Hennessy’s work was held in 1975 at the Guildhall Gallery. Three years later, he had his last show in Dublin at the Hendriks Gallery. After his move with Harry Craig to the Algarve in Portugal, Hennessy had little contact with Ireland and began to have health problems that soon grew more serious. In November of 1980, Craig brought him to a London hospital for treatment. Diagnosed with cancer, Patrick Hennessy died on the thirtieth of December in 1980.

Following cremation, Patrick Anthony Hennessy’s ashes were buried in London’s Golders Green Crematorium. He had left his entire estate to Harry Robertson Craig, with the proviso that on Craig’s death the Royal Hibernian Academy should be the beneficiary. Upon Craig’s death in 1984, this legacy was used to set up the biennial Hennessy Craig Scholarship for aspiring artists. Hennessy’s work, in addition to many private collections, can be found in major public collections including the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Ireland, the University Colleges of both Cork and Dublin, and the Crawford Art Gallery, among others.

Note: The Irish Museum of Modern Art has an excellent article on Patrick Hennessy’s connections which such figures as Francis Bacon, Elizabeth Bowen, Roger Casement and other artists. This Modern Irish Masters article can be found at: http://www.modernirishmasters.com/context/patrick-hennessy-context/#stags

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Patrick Hennessy and Harry Robertson Craig”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Patrick Hennessy, “Boy and Seagull”, 1949, Oil on Canvas, 52 x 38 cm, Irish Museum of Modern Art

Third Insert Image: Patrick Hennessy, “Cliffs of Etretat (Self Portrait)”, 1962, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Patrick Hennessy, “Portrait of Elizabeth Bowen at Bowenscourt”, 1957, Oil on Canvas, 91 x 71 cm, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland

Bottom Insert Image: Patrick Hennessy, “Men Bathing, Etretat”, circa 1954, Oil on Canvas, Date and Location Unknown

Edward Everett Horton Jr: Film History Series

James Hargis Connelly, “Edward Everett Horton Jr, circa 1930s, Publicity Photo, Gelatin Silver Print

Born in Brooklyn, New York in March of 1886, Edward Everett Horton Jr. was an American character actor. A veteran of the stage, he was one of the actors who made the transition to Hollywood at the advent of the sound era. The pretentiously mannered dictation and pompous disposition of Horton’s film character enabled him to succeed in the theatrical, dialogue-driven comedies and musicals of the 1930s. Slightly coded queer characters in these early films, played by such talented actors as Clifton Webb, Franklin Pangborn and Horton, acted as a juxtaposition to the romantic-male stereotypes of that era.

Edward Everett Horton attended Boys’ High School in Brooklyn and Baltimore’s City College, a liberal arts college-preparatory school in Maryland. He was a student at Oberlin College in Ohio until his expulsion for pretending to jump off one of the college’s buildings; he threw a dummy from the roof. Horton attended the art courses at Brooklyn’s Polytechnic Institute for one year and changed to courses at Columbia University. After his performance at the university’s “The Varsity Show of 1909”, Horton and Columbia University parted ways amicably.

Horton’s stage career began in 1906 during his college years. He sang, danced and played small roles in college productions, vaudeville and Broadway productions. Horton, as manager and lead actor, played shows with actor Franklin Pangborn at New York City’s Majestic Theater on Broadway. In 1908, he joined noted actor Louis Mann’s theater troupe and learned all the basics: props, sound effects, acting and stage management. In 1909, Horton played the hysterical husband in actress Theda Bara’s Broadway production of “A Fool There Was” to great reviews. This play later became the 1915 silent film of the same name with Belgian actor Edward José as the husband.

Edward Horton moved to Los Angeles, California in 1919 and joined the Thomas Wilkes theatrical company at Los Angeles’s Majestic Theater. He also received a contract for three films at Vitagraph Studios, one of the most prolific film producers at that time. Horton’s first starring film role was in the 1922 comedy “Too Much Business”. Lent to Paramount, he achieved his biggest success in silent film with the role of the very proper English butler in the 1923 “Ruggles of Red Gap”. Horton followed this success with the leading role of a young classical composer in the 1925 “Beggar on Horseback”. Between 1927 and 1929, he starred in eight two-reel silent comedies that were produced by Harold Lloyd for Paramount Pictures.

In 1925, Horton purchased the Encino neighborhood property in the San Fernando Valley that would be his residence until his death. The twenty-one acre property named Belleigh Acres contained his own house as well as houses for his brother and sister with their respective families. Desiring to produce his own theatrical plays, Horton leased the Vine Street Theater, later known as the Huntington Hartford, in February of 1928. Among the plays he performed at the theater was “The Nervous Wreck” which co-starred silent film actress Lois Wilson; Horton had played in the original 1923 production with the Thomas Wilkes company. Although he ceased his stage production in early 1930, Horton would appear in many local productions in his later years.

Edward Horton, through his silent-comedy work with Educational Pictures in the late 1920s, made an smooth transition to sound films. Stage-trained, he found film work easily and appeared in two films for Warner Brothers: director Roy Del Ruth’s 1928 horror film “Terror” and Archie Mayo’s live-action 1929 “Sonny Boy”. Horton appeared in many 1930s’ comedy features and became well known for his supporting-role characters. Among these film roles were the reporter in the 1931 “Front Page’; the husband in Ernest Lubitsch’s 1933 “Design for Living”; Fred Astaire’s friend Egbert in the 1934 “Gay Divorcee”; Horace Hardwick in the 1935 musical comedy “Top Hat” starring Astaire and Ginger Rogers; and the paleontologist Alexander Lovett in Frank Capra’s 1937 adventure-fantasy film “Lost Horizon”.

In the 1940s, Horton appeared in several notable films including the 1941 “Here Comes Mr. Jordan’, the 1944 “Arsenic and Old Lace” with Cary Grant and Raymond Massey, and the 1961 “Pocket Full of Miracles”, among others. He continued to appear in stage productions and, beginning in 1945, became the host for radio’s “Kraft Music Hall”. With a starting appearance on television’s “The Chevrolet Tele-Theater in December of 1948, Horton began a notable television career as a guest star on such shows as “I Love Lucy”, “Dennis the Menace” and “The Real McCoys”. However for many television viewers, he remains best known for his voice role as the wise narrator of Fractured Fairy Tales in the animated series “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show” which aired from 1959 to 1964.

Edward Horton’s long-term companion was the actor Gavin Gordon, who had been an actor with Horton’s theater company. They had both appeared in the 1931 Broadway production of Noël Coward’s “Private Lives” and in the 1961 film “Pocket Full of Miracles”. Fifteen years younger than Horton, Gordon starred as Greta Garbo’s leading man in the 1930 “Romance” and later played the role of Lord Byron in James Whale’s 1935 “The Bride of Frankenstein”. His distinctive voice enabled him to also appear in numerous radio dramas. Gavin Gordon died on his eighty-second birthday, the seventh of April in 1983.

Holding over one-hundred eighty acting credits, Edward Everett Horton was an actor with solid and professional performances throughout his career as a character actor. He passed away, at the age of eighty-four, in Los Angeles on the twenty-ninth of September in 1970. Horton’s remains are interred at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California. For his contributions to the motion picture industry, he has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6427 Hollywood Boulevard.

Notes: For those interested in more information on Edward Everett Horton, I recommend two sites which have biographical information as well as film clips of Horton’s work:

Dare Daniel- Podcast and Movie Reviews found at: https://daredaniel.com/2014/04/30/great-character-actors-edward-everett-horton/

The WOW Report article by writer and actor Stephen Rutledge located at: https://worldofwonder.net/bornthisday-beloved-character-actor-edward-everett-horton/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Edward Everett Horton Jr”, circa 1930s, Publicity Photo, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Cinematographer David Abel, “Fred Astaire and Edward Everett Horton Jr”, 1935, Film Shot from “Top Hat”, Director Mark Sandrich, RKO, Rko/Kobal/Shutterstock (5883758s)

Third Insert Image: Cinematographers David Abel and Joseph F Biroc, “Edward Everett Horton Jr and Eric Blore”, 1937, Film Shot from “Shall We Dance”, Director Mark Sandrich

Fourth Insert Image: Cinematographer Sol Polito, “Cary Grant, Josephine Hull, Edward Everett Horton Jr, Jean Adair and Peter Lorre”, 1944, Film Shot from “Arsenic and Old Lace”, Director Frank Capra

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Edward Everett Horton Jr and Carmen Miranda”, 1937, Publicity Shot for “Springtime in the Rockies”, Director Irving Cummings, Cinematographer Ernest Palmer

Christopher Wood

The Artwork of Christopher Wood

Born in Knowsley near Liverpool in April of 1901, Christopher Wood was an English painter who produced during his short life a well-crafted collection of vivid, personal canvases. Wood was one of few Englishmen who gained access to the fashionable Parisian art circles through which he developed a great friendship with Jean Cocteau. Like the artist Van Gogh, Wood experienced a level of emotional inner turmoil and over-sensitivity throughout his life.

The son of a primary healthcare doctor, Wood began to draw at the age of fourteen while recuperating from septicemia, blood poisoning caused by bacteria. By 1920, he had studied architecture briefly at Liverpool University and painted a series of canvases in Wiltshire where his father had set up practice. However, Wood was mainly untutored and, due to his use of unusual perspective and bold color, his work is considered faux naïve, primitive or childlike, with resemblance to the canvases by self-taught French painter Henri Rousseau. Although untutored, Wood learned from his acquaintances in France and, in particular, adopted the elegant line of Cocteau’s drawings.

In London in 1920, Christopher Wood was invited by the visiting French art collector Alphonse Kahn to Paris, where he began studying drawing at the Académie Julian. Within a short time, Wood met painter Augustus John and, in the early summer of 1921, the Chilean diplomat José Antonio de Gandarillas. Wood, who was bisexual, moved into Gandarilla’s house at 60 La Montaigne although he kept his studio on the Rue des Sant Peres. Although Gandarillas was a married homosexual fourteen years older than Wood, their relationship lasted through Wood’s life. In addition to financial support, Gandarillas introduced Wood to Pablo Picasso, Georges Auric and Jean Cocteau, and to the use of opium.

In his work, Wood always remained attached to the presence of the human figure in his compositions. His work included self-portraits and sensitive renderings of fishermen and local people; working people were often idealized in his paintings as heroic or spiritual figures. In this regard, Wood’s work had much in common with Paul Gauguin’s Brittany paintings and with images Van Gogh made throughout his career. Initially dedicated to portraying exactly what he saw, Wood’s later canvases with their added contrasting scenic aspects, such as the 1930 “Zebra and Parachute, suggest a look forward to the beginnings of the surrealist movement.

During the years between 1922 and 1924, Christopher Wood and José Gandarillas traveled extensively throughout Europe and visited the northern region of Africa. By 1926, Wood had established himself as an artist and was chosen to make set designs for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes adaption of “Romeo and Juliet”. This commission occurred after the successful presentation of Wood’s largest and most ambitious work, the 1925 “Beach Scene with Bathers, Pier and Ships’, which was sold immediately and reproduced in the art journal “Colour” and in “Vogue” magazine. When his set designs were abandoned, Wood returned to London where he became a member of the newly formed contemporary art associations, the London Group and the Seven and Five Society.

It was during this period that Wood met Ben and Winifred Nicholson, a married couple, both painters, who supported his work. He also shared an interest with the Nicholson couple in still life and surrounding landscapes. Wood and the Nicholsons, now close personally and artistically, traveled together in Northumberland and Cornwall; they exhibited their new work together in April and May of 1927 at London’s Beaux Arts Gallery. In 1928, Wood again joined Ben and Winifred Nicholson on a second painting trip to Northumberland and Cornwall. There in St. Ives Wood, he met primitive artist Alfred Wallis, whose work played an important influence on Wood’s stylistic development.

Christopher Wood had a solo exhibition in April of 1929 at Tooth’s Gallery on London’s Bond Street where he met art patron Lucy Wertheim who purchased a painting and soon became one of his biggest supporters. In May of 1930, he had his next exhibition with Ben Nicholson that included paintings made in Brittany; this show at the George Bernheim Gallery in Paris was largely unsuccessful. Wood painted during a second stay in Brittany in June and July of 1930; these paintings were for an intended exhibition to open at London’s Wertheim Gallery in October.

In late July, Wood met his patron Lucy Wertheim in Paris to choose the paintings for the October exhibition at her gallery. At that meeting, there was a quarrel about guaranteed annual support from Wertheim. Traveling with his paintings, Wood met his mother and sister in Salisbury on the twenty-first day of August for lunch and a viewing of his new work. After saying his farewells and waiting for the train to London, Wood threw himself onto the tracks just as the train pulled into the station. He died immediately.

It was believed by many that, withdrawing from opium, Christopher Wood thought he was being pursued; he had been carrying a revolver with him at all times. In deference to his mother, Wood’s death was reported as accidental; however the jury at the inquest returned a verdict of suicide while of unsound mind. Ben and Winfred Nicholson, shaken by the event, hired a private detective to investigate the last days of Wood’s life. After reading the first report from the detective, they abandoned their investigation.

Christopher Wood was buried in the churchyard of All Saints Church in Broad Chalke, Wilshire, England. His headstone was carved by fellow artist Eric Gill. A posthumous exhibition of Wood’s work was held at the Wertheim Gallery in February of 1931; another exhibition followed in 1932 at the Lefevre Galley in London. In 1938, Wood’s work appeared at the Venice Biennale and a retrospective at the Redfern Gallery in the West End of London.

Note: A more extensive account of Christopher Wood’s life and notes on many of his most important paintings can be found at the online Art Story site located at: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/wood-christopher/

Another article on Christopher Wood containing many of his landscape paintings can be found at the Artistic Horizons site located at: https://httpartistichorizons.org/2020/11/30/christopher-wood/

Top Insert Image: Peter North, “Christopher Wood”, 1930, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Christopher Wood, “Tréboul”, 1930, Oil on Board, 52.5 x 71.5 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Christopher Wood, “Portrait of a Gentleman (Henri)”, circa 1925-26, Pencil on Paper, 50.5 x 35.5 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Christopher Wood, “Boat in Harbour, Brittany”, 1929, Oil on Board, 79.4 x 108.6 cm, Tate Museum, London

Bottom Insert Image: Christopher Wood, “Man with Cards”, 1925, Oil on Canvas, 70 x 57 cm, Philip Mould & Company

Féral Benga: Film History Series

Carl van Vechten, “Féral Benga”, 1937, Gelatin Silver Print

Born in Dakar in 1906, François Benga, better known by his stage name Féral, was a Senegalese actor, cabaret dancer, artist’s model, and nightclub owner. Although his principle art form was performance in film and stage, he left an equal legacy in visual arts with his immortalization in the works of such artists as painter James A. Porter, sculptor Richmond Barthé, and photographer George Platt Lynes.

The son of a wealthy French colonial administrator in Dakar, Benga relocated in 1923 at the age of seventeen to Paris where he worked in odd jobs to support himself. For a brief period in May of 1930, Benga danced with American-born Mexican dancer Myrtle Watkins at the Enfants-Terribles Restaurant. After auditioning for the Folies-Bergère, Paris’s famous cabaret club, he quickly became noticed among the public through his dances and close friendship with Josephine Baker, one of the most celebrated performers to headline at the Folies-Bergère. Baker was also the first black woman to star in a major motion picture, the 1927 “Siren of the Tropics”.

In the evenings, Féral Benga and Josephine Baker performed the “Danse Sauvage” to the delight of the French spectators, he wearing a loincloth and she dressed in a skirt of artificial bananas. The pair’s artistry and technical skill in dance was admired but also crudely exoticized by some of their audiences. Like Josephine Baker, Benga understood the commercialization of black culture and body in the artistic marketplace as well as his own marketability as an object of desire. Due to his skill as well as his popularity in Paris’s artistic and homosexual circles, Benga was able to appear in many cabaret revues throughout the 1930s.

In 1930, Benga had one of the starring roles in Jean Cocteau’s avant-garde film “La Sang d’un Poète (The Blood of a Poet)”, the first film of Cocteau’s “The Orphic Trilogy”. At this time, images of Benga began to appear as postcards, cabinet cards and other materials for consumption. British photographer Lucien Waléry, who had photographed many prominent people including Josephine Baker and Bessie Smith, took several photos of Benga including a portrait of him hoisting a machete in the air. This photographic pose inspired Harlem Renaissance artist Richmond Barthé to create his iconic 1935 bronze sculpture “Féral Benga”, a new and dramatic representation of the male figure.

In 1933, Benga and his partner, anthropologist and author Geoffrey Gorer, took a trip to Africa where they studied native dances performed in the remote parts of Africa. Inspired by this trip, Gorer wrote a 1935 book entitled “Africa Dances: A Book About West African Negroes” which, in addition to its vast visual documentation, is one of few existing texts which details Benga’s life. In 1935, artist James A. Porter painted a portrait of Féral Benga, dressed in the khaki uniform of the Senegalese Tirailleur, entitled “Soldado Senegales” which is now housed in the Anacostia Community Museum in Washington, DC. After the publication of “Africa Dances”, Benga and Gorer slowly drifted apart but kept in touch through letters.

Until the outset of World War II, Féral Benga lived a lavish lifestyle with an apartment near the Champs-Élysées, a custom Delahaye convertible, and his own small cabaret. In 1943, he performed a personally choreographed dance in the ballet “Tam Tam” held at the Olympia Theater. Trapped in France as a result of the German occupation, Benga was aware of the Nazi’s hateful opinions of French-speaking black men and hid for some time in the countryside. Though his hosts treated him well, the hard living conditions took a toll on both Benga’s physical and mental health.

From 1947, Benga owned, in partnership with bisexual filmmaker Nico Papatakis, a popular and fashionable cabaret-restaurant on Paris’s Left Bank called “La Rose Rouge”. Visited by the wealthy Parisian crowd, it featured over its eight years an African cabaret including drummers and dancers who, during the day, were African students studying at universities in the city. In 1951, Benga met his former partner George Gorer for the last time during Gorer’s trip to Paris. Due to changing times and bad business decisions, Benga was forced to close “La Rose Rouge” in 1956.

At this time, Féral Benga’s family in Senegal decided to welcome him back into the family circle, from which he had been disinherited at the age of seventeen. Submitting to familial pressure, he traveled back to Senegal and unexpectedly married a cousin. However, Benga soon returned to Paris where he died of a pulmonary embolism on the fourth of June in 1957. He rests in the Saint-Denis cemetery in Châtecauroux, France. Due to cemetary regulations, Benga’s funeral concession will expire in 2028.

Notes: In Manhattan, New York, Féral Benga was well known in the Harlem Renaissance artistic and social circles and seen by many as a gay icon. In 1938, the openly homosexual surrealist painter Pavel Tchelitchew painted a portrait of Benga entitled “Deposition”, a nude study of the dancer on his back. This portrait later was held by American writer and impresario Lincoln Kirstein, a co-founder of the New York City Ballet.

Jean Cocteau’s 1930 “La Sang d’un Poète” was produced by French nobleman Charles de Noailles; the cinematography was done by Georges Périnal, a renowned artist who also worked with, among others, directors Jean Grémillon, Charlie Chaplin, René Clair, and Otto Preminger. The film, a study of the main character’s obsession with fame and death, was a surrealistic work in which dreamlike states were intercut throughout the film. Its release was delayed a year due to rumors of anti-Christian messages and the threatened excommunication of its producer de Noailles from the Catholic Church. “La Sang d’un Poète” is available for viewing at the Internet Archive located through this link: https://archive.org/details/JeanCocteauLeSangDunPote1930

All Insert Images: Carl van Vechten, “Féral Benga”, Photo Shoot, 1937, Gelatin Silver Prints, Private Collections

Anton Walbrook: Film History Series

Born in Vienna in November of 1896, Adolf Anton Wilhelm Wohlbrück was an Austrian actor who settled in the United Kingdom under the name Anton Walbrook. He was descended from ten generations of actors, although his father, Adolf Ferdinand Wohlbrück, broke from the tradition and became a well known and successful stage clown. At the age of seven, his family relocated to Berlin. Wohlbrück left school in 1911, at the age of fifteen, to train as an actor under the prominent theater and film director Max Reinhardt.

Wohlbrück’s talent was quickly recognized and he was given a five-year contract to work with the Deutsches Theater. Still under contract, he enlisted and fought on both the western and eastern fronts before he was captured in France in 1917 to spend the rest of the war as a prisoner. After his return home, Wohlbrück met actress and director Hermine Korner who became a lifelong mentor and co-actor in several highly-praised stage productions. Although he enjoyed the classics, he also appeared in new stage productions and became drawn to the rapidly expanding German film industry.

In the early 1930s, Adolf Wohlbrück was cast in some exceptional movies among which were the 1933 cross-dressing musical comedy “Viktor and Viktoria” and the international 1934 Austrian operetta film “Masquerade” which later won the Best Screenplay at the Vienna Film Festival. Wohlbrück’s character in the 1934 film was Ferdinand von Heidenick, a charming, rather well-mannered, and slightly dangerous man. His following was built on films with such a character role; however, he also succeeded in other diverse roles in such films as the 1935 thriller “I Was Jack Mortimer”, director Arthur Robison’s 1935 German horror film “The Student of Prague”, and the 1936 action-packed historical drama “The Czar’s Courier”, based on Jules Verne’s novel “Michael Strogoff”.

Widely known and respected as an actor in both theater and film, Wohlbrück built up his career and appeared alongside some of Germany’s best leading ladies. In 1936, he traveled to Hollywood to reshoot dialogue for the 1937 multinational film “The Soldier and the Lady”, director George Nichols Jr’s American version of “Michael Stogoff”. It was during this period in Hollywood that Wohlbrück changed his name to Anton Walbrook. Rather than return to Germany where, under the government’s law, he risked persecution due to being a homosexual and a person of mixed race in the first degree due to his mother being Jewish, Walbrook decided to settle in England. He continued acting in England and appeared in many European-continental character roles.

In the first six years of his film work in Britain, Anton Walbrook appeared in many film studies of men struggling to find their identities in a foreign land. These displaced person roles included Prince Albert in the 1937 “Victoria the Great” and its sequel, the 1938 “Sixty Glorious Years”; the role of Polish pilot and composer Stefan Radetzky in the 1940 “Dangerous Moonlight”; and the foreign domestic despot Paul Mallen in Thorold Dickinson’s 1940 version of the psychological thriller “Gaslight”. Walbrook also appeared on stage in the role of Otto in the first London production of “Design for Living” in January of 1939 playing opposite Diana Wynyard and Rex Harrison.

Walbrook appeared in several more film roles in England during the late 1940s, including the dashing “good” German officer Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff in the 1943 “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” and the tyrannical impersario in Michael Powell’s 1948 ballet film “The Red Shoes”, which received many nominations, a Golden Globe and two Academy Awards. One of Walbrook most unusual films of this time was the 1949 Gothic thriller “The Queen of Spades” in which he co-starred with Edith Evans. This fantasy-horror film, based on a short story by Alexander Pushkin, used sets from original baroque designs by English stage designer Oliver Messel. Some critics considered it one of the true classics of supernatural cinema.

After the end of the war, Anton Walbrook returned to his homeland Germany and accepted stage work in Munich. His most notable film performances for this early-1950s period are the two movies he did for German-French director Max Ophüls: the 1950 French film “La Ronde”, nominated for two Academy Awards and originally classified by New York film censors as immoral, and the 1955 historical romance film “Lola Montès”, the last completed film of Max Ophüls. Walbrook’s final film role was the duplicitous French army officer Major Esterhazy in the 1958 Dreyfus Affair dramatization “I Accuse!”, directed by José Ferrer.

After his last film, Walbrook performed in stage productions, both in Britain and Germany, often with appearances in comedies and musicals. He continued acting until his death of a heart attack in Feldafing, Bavaria, Germany in August of 1967. In accordance with his last testament, Walbrook was cremated and his ashes were interred in the churchyard of St. John’s Church, Hampstead, London.

Note: In 2020, author and archivist at the University of Exeter’s Special Collections Department James Downs published his monograph “Anton Walbrook: A Life of Masks and Mirrors”, the first Walbrook biography. Downs had previously written and presented conference papers on Walbrook and had curated the 2013 exhibition “Anton Walbrook: Star and Enigma” at the Bill Douglas Cinema Theater in Exeter, United Kingdom. More information on the biography can be found at: https://www.peterlang.com/document/1058817

Top Insert Image: JDA Riga, “Anton Walbrook as Michael Strogoff, The Czar’s Courier”, 1936, Bromide Postcard Print, 13.7 x 8.6 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

Second Insert Image: Anton Walbrook in “The Man from Morocco”, 1945, Director Mutz Greenbaum, Cinematographer Basil Emmett and Geoffrey Faithfull

Third Insert Image: Angus McBean, “Rex Harrison, Diana Wynyard, Anton Walbrook”, 1939, Gelatin Silver Print, 20.2 x 25.3 cm, Harvard Theater Collection, Harvard University

Fourth Insert Image: “Anton Walbrook as Jean Boucheron,The Rat”, “The Rat”, 1937, Director Jack Raymond, Cinematographer Freddie Young

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Anton Walbrook”, Date Unknown, Studio Photo Shot, 15.2 x 10.2 cm, Private Collection

Algernon Charles Swinburne: “There Was a Graven Image of Desire”

Photographers Unknown, A Graven Image of Desire

There was a graven image of Desire
            Painted with red blood on a ground of gold
            Passing between the young men and the old,
And by him Pain, whose body shone like fire,
And Pleasure with gaunt hands that grasped their hire.
            Of his left wrist, with fingers clenched and cold,
            The insatiable Satiety kept hold,
Walking with feet unshod that pashed the mire.
The senses and the sorrows and the sins,
            And the strange loves that suck the breasts of Hate
Till lips and teeth bite in their sharp indenture,
Followed like beasts with flap of wings and fins.
            Death stood aloof behind a gaping grate,
Upon whose lock was written Peradventure.

Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Cameo, Poems and Ballads, 1866

Born in London in April of 1837, Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet, novelist, playwright and critic. He was one of the most accomplished lyric poets of the Victorian era and was a renowned symbol of rebellion against the conservative values of his time. The explicit and often obsessive sexual themes in some of his work shocked many readers; however, his primary preoccupation, implicit in his poetry and explicit in his critical writings, was the nature and creation of poetic beauty.

The eldest of six children of a wealthy Northumbrian family, Algernon Charles Swinburne grew up at the family’s home, East Dene, in Bonchurch on the Isle of Wright and the London home at Whitehall Gardens in Westminster. Considered frail and nervous as a child, he had fearlessness and energy to the point of being reckless. From 1849 to 1853, Swinburne attended Eton College where he wrote poetry and won prizes in both French and Italian. He later attended Oxford’s Balliol College from 1856 to 1860 with a brief period of expulsion in 1859 for publicly supporting the attempted assassination of Napoleon III by Felice Orsini, a revolutionary leader who was convinced that Napoleon was the chief obstacle to Italian independence.

During his time at Oxford, Swinburne became a member of the painter Lady Pauline Trevelyan’s intellectual circle at her country house, Wellington Hall. He met the brothers William Michael and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painter Simeon Solomon, designer William Morris and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle of artists and writers. Swinburne spent his summer holidays at Capheaton Hall in Northumberland, which was the house of his grandfather, Sir John Swinburne, 6th Baronet. After his grandfather’s death in September of 1860, Algernon Charles Swinburne stayed with Scottish artist and poet William Bell Scott in Newcastle.

The following year, Algernon Charles Swinburne visited the French enclave of Menton on the Riviera and stayed at the Villa Laurenti to recover from excessive use of alcohol. In December of 1862, Swinburne traveled with William Scott and his guests to the coastal town of Tynemouth in northeast England and relocated to London where he began an active writing career. In 1866, Swinburne published his collection “Poems and Ballads” which brought him instant notoriety, especially the poems “Anactoria” and “Sapphos” written in homage of Sappho of Lesbos, the ancient Greek poet. Other poems in the volume include “The Leper”, “Hymn to Proserpine” and “The Triumph of Time”.

Swinburne is considered a poet of the Decadent Movement; centered in Western Europe, the movement followed the ideology of excess, the superiority of human fantasy and aesthetic hedonism over logic and the natural world. Many of Swinburne’s early works dealt with subjects considered taboo in the Victorian era and led to him becoming a person not welcomed in high society. Although he continued to write love and nature poetry, Swinbourne’s work after the first volume of “Poems and Ballads” became increasingly devoted to the issues of republicanism and revolutionary causes.

Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote in a variety of poetic forms, including Sapphic stanzas, an ancient Greek verse form of four unrhymed lines. He also devised a poetic variation, called the roundel, based on the medieval French Rondeau form. The roundel consists of nine lines each having the same number of syllables, plus a refrain after the third and last lines.The refrains are repeated to a certain stylized pattern: they must be identical to the beginning of the first line and must rhyme with the second line. Swinburne published a book of these particular poems entitled “A Century of Roundels” in 1883 dedicated to his poet friend Christina Rossetti, the sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Through out the 1860s and 1870s, Swinburne drank excessively and often, until his forties, suffered random physical collapses for which he required care until his recovery. In 1879, his friend and literary agent, Theodore Watts-Duncan, intervened during a time when Swinburne was dangerously ill. Watts-Duncan isolated Swinburne at a suburban home in Putney where he gradually withdrew him from alcohol and association with many former friends and habits. Swinburne stayed thirty years with Watts-Duncan who is generally credited with saving Swinburne’s life and encouraging him to continue writing to his old age. During his time in Putney, nature and landscape poetry began to predominate, as well as poems about children. Among this period’s works were the 1889 “Poems and Ballads, Third Series” and the 1904 “A Channel Passage and Other Poems”.

In addition to his poetry, Algernon Charles Swinburne published volumes of literary criticism. His familiarity with a wide range of world literatures contributed to a critical style rich in quotation, allusion, and comparison. Swinburne is especially noted for his studies of Elizabethan dramatists and many poets and novelists of French and English origins. He also wrote witty and insightful essays, notably “Notes on Poems and Reviews” and “Under the Microscope”, that were responses to criticism of his own works. Swinburne wrote one serial novel published under a pseudonym, the 1901”Love’s Cross-Currents”. A second novel, “Lesbia Brandon”, was unfinished at his death and is theorized, inconclusively, to be a thinly disguised autobiography.

Algernon Charles Swinburne died in London on the tenth of April in 1909 at the age of seventy-two. Even early critics, who took exception to his subject matter, commended his intricate and evocative imagery, alliteration, and bold, complex rhythms.

Notes: A collection of Algernon Swinburne’s poetry can be found at “My Poetic Side” located at: https://mypoeticside.com/poets/algernon-charles-swinburne-poems

Algernon Charles Swinburne was very impressed with the writings of fellow poet Victor Hugo. He visited the fief of Guernsey and Sark in the Channel Islands to follow in the footsteps of his hero. An article on Swinburne’s visit to Guernsey and Sark which includes excerpts of his poems to Hugo can be found at the Priaulx Library site located at: https://www.priaulxlibrary.co.uk/articles/article/victor-hugo-and-guernsey-algernon-charles-swinburne-king-sark

An extensive 2004 article on the life of Algernon Charles Swinburne by Rikky Rooksby for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography can be found at: https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-36389;jsessionid=9236C8557201601EE0BDA8060AD6D1FB?aulast=Gosse&date=1912&genre=book&sid=oup:orr&title=The%20life%20of%20Swinburne&mediaType=Article

Top Insert Image: Edward George Warris Hulton, “Algernon Charles Swinburne”, circa 1850-1909, Gelatin Silver Print, Hulton Archive

Second Inset Image: William Bell Scott, “Algernon Charles Swinburne”, 1860, Oil on Canvas, 45.7 x 33.2 cm, Balliol College, University of Oxford

Third Insert Image: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Algernon Charles Swinburne”, 1860, Pencil on Paper, 33 x 35.6 cm, Mark Samuels Lasner Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Algernon Charles Swinburne”, 1862, Watercolor on Paper, 17.8 x 15.2 cm, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, England

Emanuel Xavier: “We All have Wings. . .”

Photographers Unknown, We All Have Wings

“Ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars;
see that ye not be troubled;
all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet”
-Matthew 24:6

1.
I escape the horrors of war
with a towel and a room
Offering myself
to Palestinian and Jewish boys
as a ‘piece’ to the Middle East
when I should be concerned with the untimely deaths
of dark-skinned babies
and the brutal murders
of light-skinned fathers

2.
I’ve been more consumed with how to make
the cover of local fag rags
than how to open the minds
of angry little boys
trotting loaded guns
Helpless in finding words
that will stop the blood
from spilling like secrets into soil
where great prophets are buried

3.
I return to the same spaces
where I once dealt drugs
a celebrated author gliding past velvet ropes
while my club kid friends are mostly dead
from an overdose or HIV-related symptoms
Marilyn wears the crown of thorns
while 4 out of the 5 weapons used to kill Columbine students
had been sold by the same police force
that came to their rescue
Not all terrorists have features too foreign
to be recognized in the mirror
Our mistakes are our responsibility

4.
The skyline outside my window
is the only thing that has changed
Men still rape women
and blame them for their weaknesses
Children are still molested
by the perversion of Catholic guilt
My ex-boyfriend still takes comfort
in the other white powder-
the one used solely to destroy himself
and those around him
Not the one used to ignite and create carnage
or mailbox fear

5.
It is said when skin is cut,
and then pressed together, it seals
but what about acid-burned skulls
engraved with the word ‘faggot’,
a foot bone with flesh
and other crushed body parts

6.
It was a gay priest that read last rites
to firefighters as towers collapsed
It was a gay pilot that crashed a plane
into Pennsylvania fields
It was a gay couple that was responsible
for the tribute of light
in memory of the fallen
Taliban leaders would bury them
to their necks
and tumble walls to crush their heads
Catholic leaders simply condemn them
as perverts
having offered nothing but sin
Queer blood is just rosaries scattered on tile

7.
Heroes do not always get heaven

8.
We all have wings . . .
some of us just don’t know why

Emanuel Xavier, War & Rumors of Wars, Selected Poems of Emanuel Xavier, 2021, Queer Mojo Publishing

Born in Brooklyn, New York in May of 1970, Emanuel Xavier is an American poet, author, editor, and LBGTQ activist. Associated with the East Village art scene of New York City, his roots include the underground ballroom pageant culture that originated in New York and the Nuyorican movement, a cultural and intellectual movement of poets, writers, musicians and artists of Puerto Rican descent. In addition to his success as a poet and a writer, Xavier is a strong advocate for gay youth programs and Latino gay literature.

Abandoned by a father he never knew, Emanuel Xavier was raised by his Ecuadorian mother and her live-in boyfriend. He grew up during the 1970s in the mostly immigrant community of Bushwick, a part of the Brooklyn community district. Xavier’s primary education was at a prdominantly white elementary school in Queens, where he experienced racism. Banished from his home at the age of sixteen after revealing that he was gay, Xavier survived on the streets as an underage prostitute at the Christopher Street piers by the West Side Highway.

While surviving on the streets, Xavier also became involved with the 1980s ball scene. This LBGTQ+ subculture of African-Americans and Latinos organized their own pageants in opposition to the racism experienced in the established drag queen pageant. Racially integrated houses, essentially alternative families of supportive friends, many estranged from their original homes, competed in multiple categories for trophies and cash prizes. Xavier befriended many members of the trans world and was active with the House of Xtravaganza. In 1998 with the help of dancer and choreographer Will Ninja, he established the House of Xavier and the Glam Slam, an annual downtown arts event.

Emanuel Xavier returned to his birth home under strict rules and graduated from the Grover Cleveland High School in Queens. He studied at St. John’s University where he received his BFA in communications. Xavier relocated to the West Village where he supported himself dealing at the city’s gay nightclubs and working at the local A Different Light, at that time one of a chain of four LGBT bookstores. In 1997, Xavier self-published his first volume of poetry, a chapbook entitled “Pier Queen” whose classic poems “Tradiciones” and “Nueva York” launched his career as a spoken word artist. This published collection became a trailblazing early example of a new generation of queer Latino writers. Xavier’s 1999 semi-autobiographical novel “Christ Like”, despite a small press run, was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and reprinted in 2009 by Rebel Satori Press.

In 2001 after the collapse of the World Trade Center, Xavier helped create Words to Comfort, a poetry benefit held a the New School in Manhattan. His poem “September Song”, included as part of the initial National September 11 Memorial & Museum website, was later published in his 2002 collection “Americano”. As an editor, Xavier was nominated for the Anthologies category of the Lambda Literary Award for his work on the 2005 “Bullets and Butterflies: Queer Spoken Word Poetry”. He published his third full-length collection “If Jesus Was Gay” in 2010 which was followed two years later by “Nefarious”. Both of these collections were selected by the American Library Association for its Over the Rainbow Book List.

Emanuel Xavier’s website, which includes video interviews, spoken word performances, and available copies of Xavier’s blacklisted poetry collections, can be found at: https://www.emanuelxavier.org

An interview between Emanuel Xavier and Charlie Vázquez, a founding member of Latino Rebels and the director of the Bronx Writers Center, can be found on the online Latino Rebels site located at: https://www.latinorebels.com/2016/07/25/radiance-gay-poet-emanuel-xavier-on-living-life-raw-and-pushing-back/

Sir William Dobell

The Artwork of Sir William Dobell

Born in Cooks Hill, New South Wales in September of 1899, Sir William Dobell was an Australian portrait and landscape artist. The youngest of seven children born to Robert Way Dobell and Margaret Emma Wrightson, his talents as an artist was evident even in his early life. Dobell was a painter best known for his portraits which used an expressive style to create vivid portrayals of character. In the post-World War II era of great conservatism in Australian art and politics, he was a witty and incisive observer of social manners and morals.

At the age of fourteen, Dobell left school to work in a draper’s shop and attend drawing classes in the latter part of the day. In 1916, he apprenticed to an architect which enabled him to pursue draftsmanship. Eight years later, Dobell moved to Sydney for a position as draftsman at Wunderlich Limited, a manufacturer of terra cotta and ironwork. In February of 1924 at the age of twenty-five, he enrolled as an art student at the now Julian Ashton Art School. Dobell was one of the first nine students to study at Ashton, where he attended classes under artist and drawing teacher Henry Gibbons and landscape painter George Lambert.

William Dobell achieved some modest success in 1929 when his painting of dancers, “After the Matinee”, won the third prize in the Australian Art Quest held at Sydney’s State Theater. In the same year, he was awarded a Society of Artists Traveling Scholarship for his painting of a seated male nude. Using this scholarship, Dobell traveled to London and enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art where he studied under painters Henry Tonks and Philip Wilson Steer, both of whom were influenced by the French Impressionists. At the Slade, Dobell won first prize in 1930 for his painting of a nude study.

After visiting Holland to see the work of Rembrandt, Dobell returned to London where he sketched its streets and shared a painting studio with John Passmore, also one of the first students to study under Gibbons at Ashton. Dobell spent almost a decade in London during the depression years of the 1930s; he supplemented his small income by working as a film extra and, in 1936 to 1937, decorating the Glasgow Fair’s Wool Pavilion with other Australian artists. Dobell’s work during these years ranged from depictions done with compassion, such as “The Charlady” and “The Street Singer” to works more satirical such as “Mrs South Kensington” and the 1936 scene of the ghostly dead figure “Dead Landlord”.

William Dobell, with war imminent and his father dying, returned to Australia in 1938. This was the year when modern art was becoming recognized in Australia; the Contemporary Art Society was formed and Australia’s first exhibitions of Modernism were sponsored by Sir Keith Murdoch, journalist and founder of the Murdoch media empire. Dobell initially taught at East Sydney Technical School, now the National Art School, before joining the war effort as a camouflage painter and later as a war artist. In addition to his war paintings, he continued to paint portraits adjusting his technique to the personality of the sitter. Works at this time include the 1940 “The Cypriot”, “The Scrapper” in 1941, and the two 1943 portraits “Billy Boy” and “Brian Penton”.

In 1943, Dobell painted a modern expressionist style portrait of his fellow war camouflager Joshua Smith. The work was a break from the realism favored at that time. After “Mr Joshua Smith” won the 1943 Archibald Prize considered to be the most prestigious portrait prize in Australia, opponents of the decision, mostly conservatives in Sydney’s art world, contested the decision in court. After curators and critics gave evidence supporting Dobell’s work, the case was thrown out. However, the two years of legal dispute and headline publicity took a toll on Dobell, a private man by nature, to such an extent that he did not paint for a year. In 1958, the portrait “Mr Joshua Smith” was nearly destroyed in a fire but, after extensive efforts, was subsequently restored.

William Dobell retreated in 1944 to the family holiday home in Wangi Wangi on the shores of Lake Macquarie where his sister Alice nursed him back to health. He began sketching again in late 1945; but he tended to shun public life and eventually submitted his resignation from the Board of Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1947. Dobell again won the Archibald Prize in 1948 for his portrait “Margaret Olley” and also received the Wynne Prize for his landscape “Storm Approaching Wangi”. Two visits to New Guinea inspired him and renewed his fascination with color as seen in his two works “Kanana” and “The Thatchers”.

In the 1950s, Dobell developed a friendship with novelist and playwright Patrick White, the future 1973 Nobel Prize winner for Literature who inspired by Dobell’s painting “The Dead Landlord” wrote the 1961 two-act play “The Ham Funeral”. Dobell also painted two important portraits in 1957: “Dame Mary Gilmore” depicting the political activist and social reformer, and “Helena Rubinstein”, a portrait of the cosmetic manufacturer and one of the wealthiest women in the world. This portrait, for which he had worked on versions for six years. won the Australian Women’s Weekly portrait prize and was reproduced in the two-million readership magazine.

In 1960 William Dobell was commissioned to produce a series of cover-portraits for Time Magazine. That same year he won his third Archibald Prize with the portrait “Dr. MacMahon”. Settled in his country home in Wangi Wangi, Dobell continued to paint inventively and lived a quiet life; everyone at the local pub knew him as simply Bill. He received in 1965 the rank of Knight of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Dobell celebrated his seventieth birthday in 1969 and, in the next year, was honored with a major exhibition for his work at the New Castle Art Gallery. In May of 1979, a month after the exhibition, William Dobell died at his Wangi Wangi estate.

A gay man with a preference for a private life, William Dobell never married and left his entire estate to the Sir William Dobell Art Foundation. The foundation, among its many activities, awards the Dobell Australian Drawing Biennial, named in his honor. Given through The National Art School, it is one of the highest value prizes for drawing in Australia. William Dobell was cremated with Anglican rites and his ashes are interred at Newcastle Memorial Park in Beresfield, New South Wales.

Notes: A biography by Judith White, entitled “William Dobell: Yours Sincerely”, discusses Dobell’s life and lists the collections housing what are considered Dobell’s most notable works. The article can be found at the Art Collector website located at: https://artcollector.net.au/william-dobell-yours-sincerely/

An interesting two-section article on the life of artist and educator Henry Gibbons and his role at the Julian Ashton Art School, written by Laurie Thomas and Peter Kreet, can be found in painter John Beeman’s Fine Art site located at: https://www.john-beeman.com/henry_gibbons.html

Second Insert Image: William Dobell, “Mr Joshua Smith”, 1943, Oil on Canvas, 122 x 81 cm, Sir William Dobell Foundation

Third Insert Image: William Dobell, “Self Portrait”, 1932, Oil on Wood Panel, 35 x 27 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Fourth Insert Image: William Dobell, “The Boy George”, circa 1928, Oil on Canvas, 71.5 x 56.5 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: William Dobell, “The Cypriot”, 1940, Oil on Canvas, 123.3 x 123.3 cm, Queensland Art Gallery, Australia

Gori Mora

The Artwork of Gori Mora

Born in 1992 in Mallorca, one of Spain’s Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean, Gori Mora is a painter who currently lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. In 2011, he moved to Barcelona where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Barcelona University. Mora relocated to Glasgow in 2017 to study the Master of Letters in Fine Art Practice at the Glasgow School of Art. After the completion of his Master’s program, he was awarded a John Kinross Scholarship by the Royal Scottish Academy of Edinburgh to spend research time in Florence. Mora’s 2018 project “My Florence Souvenir” is now part of the Royal Scottish Academy of Edinburgh collection.

The focus of Gori Mora’s work is the exploration of the myriad effects that technology has on our social interactions, our intrinsic values, and our self-identification. Through examining human interactions on social networks, the roles and eroticism involved and the current trends of the platforms, Mora explores in his paintings both the queer community’s history and the heightened effect that technology has on the nature of desire.

Mora’s compositions, systematic arrangements of stylized objects and figures, are painted in oils on the reverse side of transparent plastic sheets made of polymethyl methacrylate. The prominent figures and objects in the front layer are painted first with subsequent layers of background added later to increase the depth of the image. The finished work is viewed from the smooth, unpainted side of the perspex sheet, with the thickness of that sheet creating a curious sense of depth to the image.

In Gori Mora’s work, parts of his scenes are sectioned off with screens or framed within mirrors that offer perspectives seen from different angles. Many of the male figures are portrayed either complete or fragmented in form and often shown in various states of repose. Objects seen everyday, such as socks, belts, glasses, smoking cigarettes and electronic devices, are carefully arranged throughout most of his images. In Mora’s work, there is a strong sense of illustrative graphic design seen in his balanced compositions, stylized forms, and use of background patterns.

Mora had his first solo exhibition in Spain in March of 2022, entitled “Layering Intimacy” at the Galeria Pelaires in Mallorca. His work has been shown in such group exhibitions as the MUTUO Cultural Art Center in 2015, the 2015 “Konvent Punt Zero” held at Barcelona’s Centre Cultural d’Art, the Museu de Porreres in Majorca in 2017, the Casa de Cultura de Felanitz in Majorca in 2019, the 2019 TRAMWAY exhibition in Glasgow, the 2020 “V2React” exhibition in Miami, BEERS London Gallery in 2021, The Royal Scottish Academy exhibition in 2021, and the Tuesday to Friday Gallery in Valencia in 2022, among others.

Note: Reverse painting on glass is an historic art form. It has been popular in Europe since ancient times; glass painted using this technique has even been found in Assyrian and Phoenician civilizations. Qualified as a “scientific art”, reverse glass painting reached its peak during the Renaissance period when it had widely influenced art in Venice, Italy. It was favored since the eighteenth-century by the Church and nobility throughout Central Europe and was widely used for sacred paintings and icons in the Byzantine Empire.

The technique was used by the middle of the nineteenth-century on folk art from Bohemia and Bavaria, and such commercial products as clock faces. By the middle of the twentieth-century, the technique of reverse painting had fallen out of fashion and nearly disappeared. With the creation and rapid rise in use of polymer glazing, new paint compositions were made by combining oil and acrylic paints that made reverse painting possible on these supports.

Gori Mora’s Instagram site can be located at: https://www.instagram.com/gori.mora/?hl=en

Second Insert Image: Gori Mora, “Smoke & Sand”, 2020, Oil on Perspex, 115 x 70 cm

Third Insert Image: Gori Mora, “Reverie”, 2021, Oil on Perspex, 101 x 105 cm

Jorge Eduardo Eielson: “A Silhouette of Blue Sparks”

Photographers Unknown, A Silhouette of Blue Sparks

un día tú un un dia                                          one day you one day
abrirás esa puerta y me verás dormido       will open that door and you will see me asleep
con una chispa azul en el perfil                     with a shilhouette of blue sparks
y verás tanbién mi corazón                            and you will also see my heart
y mi camisa de alas blancas                           and my white-winged shirt
pidiendo auxilio en el balcón                        crying for help on the balcony
y verás además                                                 and you will also see
verás un catre de hierro                                  you will see an iron cot
junto a una silla de paja                                 next to a straw chair
y a una mesa de madera                                 and a wooden table
pero sobre todo                                                in particular
verás un trapo inmundo                                 you will see a filthy rag
en lugar de mi alegría                                     instead of my joy
comprenderás entonces                                 then you will understand
cuánto te amaba                                               how much I loved you
y por qué durante siglos                                 and why for centuries
miraba sólo esa puerta y dibujaba                i only stared at that door and sketched
dibujaba y miraba esa puerta                        sketched and stared at that door
y dibujaba nuevamente                                  and sketched again
con gran cuidado                                             with great care
comprenderás además                                   you will also understand
por qué toda las noches                                 why every night
sobre mi piel cansada                                     among the thousand gold marks
entre mil signos de oro                                   and tattoos and majestic wrinkles
y tatuajes y arrugas majestuosas                  on my tired skin
me hacía llorar sobre todo                             what made me cry the most
un cicatriz que decía                                       was a scar tha said:
yo te adoro yo te adoro yo te adoro              i adore you i adore you i adore you

Jorge Eduardo Eielson, Albergo del Sole II, Room in Rome, 1952, Translation 2019 by David Shook

Born in Lima in 1924, Jorge Eduardo Eielson was a Peruvian poet, writer and artist. He is part of a generation of Peruvian poets to which the Surrealist works of artist and poet César Moro and writer Emilio Adolfo Westphalen played an important role. A Renaissance man with a curious mind who was not content cultivating a single form of art, Eielson produced work in multiple genres: poetry, painting, theater, novels, performance events and installations. Interested in archeology, science, and religion, he participated in all the post-war intellectual and artistic European trends: however, he valued his independence and never considered himself as belonging to any particular group or sect.

The son of a U.S. national of Scandinavian origin and a Peruvian mother, Jorge Eielson lived in an era of rich cultural growth and economic stability that was open to influences from international centers. Eielson learned English and French, read Rimbaud, Shelley and Mallarmé in the original languages, and savored such major poets as Whitman, Vallejo, Neruda and Borges. At the end of his secondary education, Eielson met writer and anthropologist José María Arguedas who introduced him to Lima’s artistic and literary circles and knowledge of the ancient Peruvian civilizations, a cultural history unknown to the young people at the time due to the system of colonial education.

Eielson began studies at the National University of San Marcos in 1941. At the age of twenty-one in 1945, he earned the National Poetry Award and, one year later, Peru’s National Drama Award. Eielson published two collections of poetry in the 1940s: “Reinos (Kingdoms)” published in 1944 and the 1947 “Canción y Muerte de Rolando”. In these years, he also enrolled in drawing and painting classes where he created his first canvases, works which were influenced by those of Paul Klee and Joan Mirò. In 1948, Eielson had his first exhibition, a collection of oils, acrylics, mobiles, and constructs of burned and colored wood, at a gallery in Lima. He wrote for various local publications and, in collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Jean Superville, curated an art review and lecture entitled “El Correo de Ultramar (The Overseas Post)”.

Awarded a film study scholarship by the French government, Jorge Eielson traveled to Paris in 1948 where he associated with the many international writers and artists in the Latin Quarter and Saint Germain des Près. At this time, Eielson discovered the work of Piet Mondrian and was soon invited by Uruguayan painter Arden Quine of the Madi group to exhibit his work with them at the first exhibition of abstract art, the Salon des Rèalitès, founded by French sculptor and editor Andrè Bloc. Following the Salon, Eielson exhibited with the avant-garde gallery Colette Allendy, through which he met and developed a long friendship with prominent visual artist Raymond Hains.

With the assistance of a UNESCO scholarship, Eielson traveled to Switzerland to begin writing again. In 1951 he continued his journey to Italy where, upon setting foot on the peninsula, he proclaimed Italy to be his elected land. Settled in Rome, Eielson wrote his 1952 collection of poems “Habitación en Roma (Room in Rome)”. Although he abandoned the extreme avant-garde art movement in the late 1950s, Eielson continued his painting and started to texturize his canvases using sand and clay to sculpt the canvas surface. Initially using these materials on his landscapes, Eielson moved towards figurative works using textiles of various kinds.

In the 1960s in Rome, Jorge Eielson met and began a relationship with the Sardinian artist and novelist Michele Mulas. Born in 1936 in Bari Sardo, a commune in the Province of Nuoro, Mulas became a forerunner of contemporary art due to his new and singular style which combined art and science. Their relationship would last for forty years until Mulas’s death of leukemia in 2002.

In 1963, Eielson began his first quipu, a reinvention of the ancient Andean recording device modernized with brilliant colored fabrics, knotted and tied on canvas. These works, exhibited in the 1964 Venice Biennale, gained him wide international recognition and led to exhibitions at New York’s MOMA and Nelson Rockefeller Collection, as well as the Salon De Mai in Paris. Returning to Peru in the 1970s, Eielson continued to write and began to focus on the study of pre-Columbian art.

Jorge Eielson published a novel entitled “El Cuerpo de Giulia-No (The Body of Julia-n)” in 1971. Peru’s National Institute of Culture published most of Eielson’s collective poetry in 1976 under the title of “Poesia Escrita (Written Poetry)”. In 1977, Eielson published another collection of poems entitled “Canto Visible (The Visible Edge)”. This was followed by a second novel, the 1987 “Primera Muerte de Maria (Maria’s First Death)” published by the Fondo de Cultura Economica in Mexico.

In 1978, Eielson received a Guggenheim Fellowship for a lecture in New York City. At the end of the decade, he and Michele Mulas moved to Milan, Italy, where Eielson would spend the rest of his life writing and producing his art which continued to be exhibited around the world. An anthology of Eielson’s poetry was published in 1990 by Vuelta of Mexico City under the supervision of the Mexican poet and diplomat Octavio Paz, the winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature. In that year, Eielson was also invited by Paz to attend the International Center for Contemporary Art in Mexico. Eielson returned to Peru to participate, along with Peruvian-born visual artist Jorge Piqueras, in the last Trujillo Biennial which also included artists from neighboring countries. In 2002, he gave his last public interview through a streaming video organized by Fundación Telefónica.

Following the death of Michele Mulas in 2002, Jorge Eielson’s own health significantly deteriorated. He passed away in Milan, Italy, in March of 2006. Eielson’s ashes were laid to rest beside his partner’s ashes in a small cemetery in Bari Sardo, a municipality in the Italian region Sardinia. Over the course of his life, he published one hundred forty-four works in three hundred and seventy five publications, translated in five languages. Eielson’s artwork is held in the collections, among others, of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru and the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas.

Notes: A more extensive article on Jorge Eielson’s life and work can be found at: http://www.jorgeeielson.org

An interesting article entitled “Jorge Eduardo Eielson and Sound Poetry” written by Luis Alvarado discusses Eielson’s experiments in vocal poetry, or vocal structures, and the period at the end of the 1960s when performances became his focus. The article can be located at: https://ubu-mirror.ch/media/sound/eielson/Alvaro-Luis_JORGE-EDUARDO-EIELSON-AND-SOUND-POETRY.pdf

Second Insert Image: Jorge Eduardo Eielson, “Canto Visible”, 1960, “Texto Para Cantar”, One of $ Textos

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Jorge Eduardo Eielson and Michele Mulas in Sardinia”, Summer of 1935, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Jorge Eduardo Eielson, “Quipus 36 T-1”, 1969, Acrylic and Fabric on Canvas, 130 x 130 x 24 cm, Private Collection

John Dall: Film History Series

Photographer Unknown, “John Dall”, 1948, Publicity Shot for Universal International, Gelatin Silver Print

Born in New York City in May of 1920, John Dall Thompson was an American stage and film actor. The younger of two sons born to Charles Thompson and Henny Worthington, he moved with his family in the 1920s to Panama, where his father was employed as a civil engineer for airport construction. After performing at a local theater, Dall first gave thought to the possibility of acting as a career. Due to the death of Charles Thompson by suicide in 1929, the family chose to return to New York City.

John Dall attended the Horace Mann School, a private college-preparatory school in the Bronx, and enrolled at Columbia University with the intention of studying engineering. He soon left the university and studied at the Pasadena Playhouse and the Theodore Irvine School of Theater. Dall also took theater courses in New Orleans at the Petit Theatre, a historic French Quarter playhouse founded in 1916.

Dall performed for six years in various stock companies, primarily the Children’s Theater founded in New York City in 1924 by British actress and playwright Clare Tree Major. He also worked in several theater companies headed by such performers as Academy Award winner Aline MacMahon, actor Arthur William Byron, and stage and screen actress Edith Atwater. During the 1941-1942 season, Dall had small roles on Broadway which included the 1920 science-fiction play “R.U.R.” by Czech writer Karel Čapek. In 1942-1943, Dall had the lead role of Quizz Martin in the touring production of Maxwell Anderson’s “The Eve of St Mark” which later moved to Broadway.

John Dall’s performance in the Broadway version of “The Eve of St Mark” caught the attention of the wife of Jack Warner, founder of Warner Brothers Pictures. This resulted in a film contract with the studio; a proviso was added to the contract that allowed Dall personal time for stage performances. Dall’s first film with Warner Brothers was director Irving Rapper’s 1945 “The Corn is Green”, a drama starring Bette Davis as a schoolteacher bringing education to a Welsh coal mining town. Dall played the lead role of miner Morgan Evans and was nominated for the 1946 Academy Award / Best Supporting Actor.

Impressed with the film rushes for “The Corn is Green”, Warner Brothers signed Dall to a new contract. He became one of the studio’s six contract players that were to be built into stars; the others included Lauren Bacall, Dane Clark, Faye Emerson, Robert Hutton and William Prince. In 1944, Dall returned to the stage with the lead role in playwright Norman Krasna’s highly successful “Dear Ruth”, which eventually ran for six-hundred and eighty performances. The film rights to the play, however, were purchased by Paramount Studio which cast William Holden in Dall’s original role.

Warner Brothers purchased the film rights to John Patrick’s play “Hasty Heart” with the intention of giving the lead film role to John Dall. In 1945, Dall performed “Hasty Heart” on a three-month stage tour. However as it took several more years before the film was started, casting changes gave the lead role to Irish-British actor Richard Todd. In May of 1946, Warners released Dall from his contract after filming only one role for the studio.

Although Paramount Studio cited interest in signing Dall for an adaption of ”The Wayfarers” based on Becky Chambers’s series of books, Dall signed a seven-year contract with David Selznick’s Vanguard Films in May of 1946. He performed “Hasty Heart” during the summer theater season but was never given any roles by Selznick. Signing with Universal International, he played Canadian actress Deanna Durbin’s love interest in Irving Pichel’s 1947 musical comedy “Something in the Wind”. Dall next appeared in a supporting role in Michael Gordon’s 1948 post-Civil War drama “Another Part of the Forest”.

Founded by Alfred Hitchcock and his longtime associate Sidney Bernstein at the end of World War II, Transatlantic Pictures chose John Dall for one of the lead roles in its first production. Dall and actor Farley Granger played the two killers who matched wits with James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s Technicolor 1948 crime thriller “Rope”. On its theatrical release, the film performed poorly at the box office; screenwriter Arthur Laurents attributed the poor performance to audience uneasiness with the homosexual undertones between the characters played by Dall and Granger.

Dall did an hour episode for the ABC anthology radio series “Theater Guild on the Air” and then appeared on Broadway in an adaption of Jean-Paul Satre’s “Red Gloves” with Charles Boyer. In 1949, he made his television debut in The Chevolet Tele-Theatre’s production “Miracle in the Rain”. Dall appeared as one of the leads in Joseph H. Lewis’s 1950 crime film-noir “Gun Crazy” playing opposite femme-fatale actress Peggy Cummins. He later had supporting roles in the 1950 crime film-noir “The Man Who Cheated Himself”, playing opposite Lee J. Cobb and Jane Wyatt, and in a revival on Broadway of the romantic drama “The Heiress”, playing alongside Basil Rathbone.

Throughout the 1950s, John Dall appeared in stock productions of such plays as “Gramercy Ghost”, “The Hasty Heart”, “Born Yesterday” and “The Man Who Came to Dinner”. He worked extensively in television and appeared in guest roles on such shows as Studio One in Hollywood, General Electric Theater, Schlitz Playhouse, The Clock, Broadway Television Theater, and Lights Out. In 1955, Dall returned to Broadway for writer and director Leslie Stevens’s “Champagne Complex”.

Dall’s first film role after a span of eight years was that of the Roman soldier Marcus Glabus, based on the life of Roman military commander Gaius Claudius Glaber, in Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 epic historical drama “Spartacus”. This film won four Academy Awards and had the highest ranking box office in Universal Studio’s history until “Airport” in 1970. Dall’s final film performance was as the villain Zaren in George Pal’s 1961 science-fiction film “Atlantis, the Lost Continent”.

As to John Dall’s personal life, there is very little verifiable written record. According to music journalist Phil Milstein, at the time of his death Dall had lapsed into alcoholism and was living with his partner, actor Clement Brace. While visiting London in October of 1970, John Dall sustained a serious fall. He died three months later of cardiac arrest, a complication of myocarditis, at his Beverly Hills home in January of 1971 at the age of fifty. His body was donated to medical science. Dall’s papers and correspondence are housed at the Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills, California.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “John Dall”, Date Unknown, Studio Publicity Shot, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Joseph A. Valentine, “John Dall, James Stewart and Farley Granger”, 1948, Film Shot from “Rope”, Director Alfred Hitchcock

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Donald O’Connor, Deanna Durbin and John Dall”, 1947, Pulicity Shot for “Something in the Wind”, Director Irving Pichel, Cinematographer Milton R. Krasner

Fourth Insert Image: Sol Polito, “John Dall and Bette Davis”, 1945, Film Shot from “The Corn is Green”, Director Irving Rapper

Fifth Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “John Dall”, Date Unknown, Publicity Shot, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Russell Harlan, “John Dall”, 1950, Film Shot from “Gun Crazy”, Director Joseph H. Lewis

Hart Crane: “A Perfect Cry Shall String Some Constant Harmony”

Photographers Unknown, A Perfect Cry Shall String Some Constant Harmony

As silent as a mirror is believed
Realities plunge in silence by . . .

      I am not ready for repentance;
   Nor to match regrets. For the moth
        Bends no more than the still
      Imploring flame. And tremors
        In the white falling flakes
                   Kisses are – –
        The only worth all granting.

                It is to be learned–
      This cleaving and this burning,
           But only by the one who
          Spends out himself again.

                  Twice and twice
         (Again the smoking souvenir,
      Bleeding eidolon!) and yet again.
        Until the bright logic is won
         Unwhispering as a mirror
                   Is believed.

Then, drop by caustic drop, a perfect cry
Shall string some constant harmony,–
Relentless caper for all those who step
The legend of their youth into the noon.

Hart Crane, Legend

Born in Garrettsville, Ohio in July of 1899, Harold Hart Crane was an American modernist poet considered one of the most influential poets of his generation. He was admired by many artists including playwright Eugene O’Neill, essayist Alan Tate, poet and playwright E.E. Cummings, and writer William Carlos Williams. Important American poets such as John Berryman and Robert Lowell cited Crane as a significant influence.

The son of successful business man Clarence Crane and Grace Edna Hart, Hart Crane had a stressful childhood in which his parents constantly fought. Raised in part by his grandmother in Cleveland, he read continuously in his grandmother’s extensive library which contained the complete editions of such poets as Robert Browning, Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson. As he aged, Crane broadened his interest with writers such as philosopher Plato, novelist Honore de Balzac, and Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. His formal education was undermined by long absences from school caused by constant arguments between his parents.

In 1916, Crane left Cleveland without graduating and relocated to New York with the hope of passing the entrance exam to Columbia University. Once settled in New York City, he made the decision to abandon college and concentrate on a literary career. Crane met other writers in the city and became exposed to the various art movements prevalent at that time. As a result of his parents’ divorce in 1917, Crane’s mother and grandmother relocated to New York City and moved into his one-bedroom apartment.

To escape the pressures of family life, Hart Crane attempted to enlist in the army but was rejected due to his young age. He relocated to Cleveland and worked in a munitions factory during World War I. After the war, Crane worked briefly as a reporter for the local “Cleveland Plain Dealer”, worked in New York City for the “Little Review”, and then returned to Cleveland as an employee in his father’s candy company. Tensions between him and his now Cleveland-based family finally erupted in the spring of 1921. This led to Crane resettling back in New York City and two-years of non-communication with his father.

Throughout the early 1920s, Crane published poems in small but respected literary magazines, including “Little Review” and “Seven Arts”, which gained him respect among the avant-garde. By 1922 he had already written many of the poems that would be included in his first collection, “White Buildings”, finished in 1924 and published in 1926. This collection was written when he was falling in love with the Danish merchant mariner Emil Opffer. Their relationship, one of intense sexual passion and occasional turmoil, inspired “Voyages”, a sequence of erotic poems in praise of love. Other poems in the collection include “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen”, set in contemporary times with Faustus representing a poet seeking ideal beauty, and the notable “Chaplinesque”. Produced after watching Charlie Chaplin’s 1921 film “The Kid”, the poem portrayed Crane’s personal outlooks towards adversity and innocence.

By 1924, Hart Crane had already started the first drafts of his ambitious “The Bridge”, a long poem of fifteen sections with a finished length of sixty pages. Using the Brooklyn Bridge as the poem’s symbol, the poem celebrates the American experience from explorer Christopher Columbus to the 1910 opening of the newly constructed East River Tunnel. The Brooklyn Bridge functioned as a source of inspiration and a symbol of the unique American optimism.

The optimism seen in Crane’s “White Buildings” was not quite indicative of his emotional state at that time. In the spring of 1923, he was working at an advertising agency, a job he found tedious and unrewarding. The tumult and loud noises of city life spoiled Crane’s concentration and made his writing difficult. By 1926, his intense relationship with Opffer had faded; this was followed by more conflicts with his mother and the deaths of both his father and grandmother.

Hart Crane began to seek solace in alcohol and sexual encounters. With his inheritance, he fled his mother and traveled to Europe. Crane associated with many prominent figures in Paris’s expatriate community, including Harry Crosby, the owner of the fine art Black Sun Press, who offered Crane the use of his country estate. There Cane wrote a key part of “The Bridge” but continued his alcohol use and engaged in multiple sexual encounters with Marseilles sailors.

Through money lent by Crosby, Crane was able to return to the United States where he finally finished “The Bridge”, which received upon its publication poor reviews from the critics. His pattern of self-destructive behavior, with its alternating depression and elation, continued. Crane entered a creative slump from which he could not recover. He applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship with the intention to study European culture and American poetry. Granted the fellowship, Crane decided instead to travel in 1931 to Mexico where he had a heterosexual romance with Peggy Baird, the divorced wife of writer Malcolm Cowley. The poem “The Broken Tower”, one of his last published works, emerged from the affair.

Despite the relationship with Peggy Baird, Hart Crane returned to his homosexual activities. Still feeling himself a failure, he returned to New York aboard the steamship Orizaba. During the voyage, Crane was beaten up after making sexual advances to a male crew member. Drinking heavy and leaving no suicide note, he jumped overboard into the Gulf of Mexico just before noon on the 27th of April in 1932. Crane’s body was never recovered. His father’s tombstone carries the inscription: ‘Harold Hart Crane 1899-1932 Lost at Sea’.

Hart Crane’s correspondence, manuscripts, documents, drawings and paintings are housed in the archival collections of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University. In the collection are most of the original manuscripts of his major works with corrections and additions in Crane’s hand. Included in this collection are “The Bridge”, “White Buildings” and “West Indies Poems”.

Note: An online collection of Hart Crane’s work can be found in the Digital Collections of the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin. The site is located at: https://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15878coll32

Erwin Olaf

The Photography of Erwin Olaf

Born in Hilversum, the Netherlands in July of 1959, Erwin Olaf Springveld is a Dutch photographer known for both his personal and commercial work. He is primarily known for his lush large-format color prints of staged scenes that depict complex and dramatic narratives.

Erwin Olaf studied journalism at the School of Journalism in Utrecht. an important Dutch city with roots back to the eighth-century. He started his photographic career by documenting pre-AIDS gay liberation in Amsterdam’s 1980s nightlife. This work soon led to Olaf’s personal exploration of varied series shot in both black-and-white and color. Assuming the role of both photographer and director, he currently shoots cinematic-styled tableaux whose arrangements and diluted color palettes evoke memories of the early 1960s.

Olaf has been commissioned to photograph advertising campaigns for large international companies including Microsoft, Nokia and Levi’s. His bold approach to photography has led to a number of prestigious collaborations, among which have been Louis Vuitton, Vogue Magazine, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Throughout his forty-year career, Olaf has maintained an activist approach to equality. His diverse series center around the issues of society’s marginalized individuals, including people of color, women and the LBGTQ+ community.

Erwin Olaf designed the national side of the 2013 Euro coins for King Willem-Alexander Koning, which commemorated two-hundred years of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Olaf served in 2017 as the official portrait artist for the Dutch royal family. In 2018, he completed a triptych of photographic and filmic tableaux depicting periods of sudden change in major world cities and their effects. Olaf became a Knight of the Order of the Lion of the Netherlands in 2019 after five-hundred works from his oeuvre were added to the collection of the Rijksmuseum. He was awarded the Netherlands’ prestigious Johannes Vermeer Award, as well as Photographer of the Year at the International Color Awards, and Kunstbeeld magazine’s Dutch Artist of the Year.

Among the many photographic series produced by Olaf are the 2005 “Hope, Grief, Rain” which centers on the suspended moment when emotional reaction begins; the 2012 “Berlin” series shot outside of the studio in six different locations in Berlin, sites reminiscent of the city’s past; the 2020 “Im Wald” which was shot purely on location and highlighted isolated people in their relationship to nature; and the 2001-2002 “Paradise Portraits”, a series of close-up shots of party goers at Amsterdam’s renowned Club Paradiso on New Year’s Eve in 2000.

Erwin Olaf’s work has been shown in major galleries throughout the world, including London’s prestigious photographic space Hamiltons Gallery, Berlin’s Wagner + Partner Gallery, Amsterdam’s Flatland Gallery, and the Galerie Magda Danysz in Paris. Museum exhibitions have included the Haifa Museum of Art in Israel, the Fondation Oriente Museu in Macau, the Museo de Arte Contemporaine de Rosario in Argentina, the National Art Gallery in Sofia, Bulgaria, and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.

In the spring of 2019, Olaf’s work was the subject of a double exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag and The Hague Museum of Photography, as well as a solo exhibition at the Shanghai Center of Photography. In the summer of 2021, the Kunsthalle München mounted a major exhibition of 220 artworks, including Olaf’s two most recent series, the 2020 “April Fool” and “Im Wald”, the latter of which was made specially for this show.

Note: More information of Erwin Olaf’s work and extensive exhibitions, including videos in which he explains his work, can be found at London’s Hamiltons Gallery website located at: https://www.hamiltonsgallery.com/artists/erwin-olaf/overview/

Erwin Olaf’s website, which includes contact information and an extensive list of exhibitions, is located at: https://www.erwinolaf.com/art

Top Insert Image: Erwin Olaf, “Self Portrait”, Date Unknown, Color Print

Second Insert Image: Erwin Olaf, “Chessmen XII”, 1988, Gelatin Silver Print, 37.5 x37.5 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Erwin Olaf, “Kleines Requiem II”, 2022, Color Print, Edition of Ten, 110 x 110 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Erwin Olaf, “Self Portrait”, 1985, Gelatin Silver Print, Futomuseum Den Haag, The Hague, The Netherlands

David Trinidad: “My Spirits Are Lifted”

Photographers Unknown, My Spirits Are Lifted

Depressed because my
book wasn’t nominated
for a gay award,

I lie on my couch
watching—not listening to—
the O.J. trial.

Byron, who senses
something’s wrong, hides under the
bed until Ira

comes home, carrying
a bouquet of beautifully
wrapped tulips. I press

the mute button. “This
is your prize,” he says. “Guess what
they’re called.” A smile in-

voluntarily
overcomes my frown. “What?” “Red
Parade.” “That sounds like

the name of an old
Barbie outfit,” I say. “That’s
exactly what I

told the florist. And
you know what she told me?” “What?”
“When she was a girl,

she turned her Barbie
into Cleopatra: gave
her an Egyptian

haircut and painted
her nipples blue.” “How cool.” “Yeah,
but now she thinks that

her doll would be worth
eight hundred dollars if she
hadn’t messed it up.”

Once in water, the
tulips begin to unclench—
ten angry fists. Their

colors are fierce, like
Plath’s “great African cat,” her
“bowl of red blooms.” Poor

Sylvia, who so
desperately wanted awards,
and only won them

after she was dead.
Byron jumps up, Ira sits
down and massages

my feet. “You guys.” My
spirits are lifted by their
tulips, kisses, licks.

David Trinidad, Red Parade, Plasticville, Turtle Point Press, 2000

Born in Los Angeles, California in 1953, David Trinidad is a contemporary American poet know for his masterful use of popular-culture references in his work. He attended California State University at Northridge where, as an undergraduate, he took Introduction to Literature with poet Ann Stanford. It was Stanford who introduced Trinidad to the genre of found poetry in 1972.

Trinidad earned his Bachelor of Arts in English at California State University in 1979. Relocating to New York City in 1988, he studied at Brooklyn College where he earned in 1990 his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. Among the poets who have influenced Trinidad are Ann Stanford, Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton, Ted Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara. In particular, the autobiographical style of such poets as Sexton, whose work he discovered in 1975, and O’Hara can be seen in Trinidad’s work.

While at Northridge, Trinidad edited its literary journal “Angel’s Flight” and became friends with poet Rachel Sherwood, fellow student and co-founder of “Angel’s Flight”. An automobile accident in July of 1979 severely injured Trinidad and proved fatal for Rachel Sherwood. Her friends established the annual Rachel Sherwood Poetry Prize at Northridge in her honor; Trinidad also created the Sherwood Press and published, in collaboration with Yarmouth Press, the 1981 book of Sherwood’s poetry “Mysteries of Afternoon and Evening”.

In the early 1980s, David Trinidad was one of a group of poets active at the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, California. The group, which included such writers as Dennis Cooper, Amy Gerstler and Bob Flanagan, gave readings and published literary books and magazines such as “Little Caesar Magazine” and “Barney: The Modern Stone-Age Magazine”. Through interchange of ideas and poems between the collective’s members, Trinidad met other poets such as Tim Dlugos from New York and Elaine Equi from Chicago.

While living in New York City, Trinidad was active in The Poetry Project at Saint Mark’s Church from 1990 to 1991 and in The Writer’s Voice at the West Side YMCA Center for the Arts. In 1991, he published his first book of poems, entitled “Pavane”. Trinidad has authored seventeen volumes of poetry which include the 1985 “Monday, Monday”; the 1987 “November”; the 1994 “Answer Song”, which includes the more focused and intimate poem “Driving Back from New Haven” based on a conversation with AIDS-diagnosed poet Tim Dlugos; and the 2007 “Late Show” which contains the long prose poem “Classic Layer Cakes”. Trinidad’s most recent work is the 2022 “Digging to Wonderland: Memory Pieces”.

In addition to his own work, David Trinidad has edited several collections of Tim Dlugos’s poetry: the 1996 “Powerless: Selected Poems 1973-1990”; the Lambda Literary Award winner “A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos” published in 2011; and the 2021 “New York Diary”. He has also edited collections of works by Ann Stanford and Emily Dickinson, as well as co-edited the 2007 anthology “Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry”.

Since 1996, Trinidad has been with the Writers at Rutgers Reading Series of the Department of English at Rutgers University and the Masters of Fine Arts Creative Writing Program at New York City’s The New School for Social Research. Trinidad’s awards include, among others, the Michael Tuck Foundation Fellowship from Brooklyn College, New York’s Fund for Poetry Award, Blue Mountain Center Fellowship from New York, and an artist’s fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. David Trinidad’s personal papers are housed at Fales Library at New York University.

Notes: In 2015, a candid interview with David Trinidad was conducted by educator and lecturer Bryan R. Monte for the Amsterdam Quarterly which publishes and promotes writing and art in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. This informative interview can be found at the Amsterdam Quarterly’s site: https://www.amsterdamquarterly.org/aq_issues/aq14-radio-tv-film/david-trinidad-straighforward-and-candid/

The black and white image of three tulips was taken by the award-winning English photographer Dianna Jazwinski who is based in West Sussex. An editorial photographer, she specializes in gardens, plants, forals for horticultural magazines, and books and catalogues. Jazwinski’s website is located at: https://diannajazwinski.co.uk

Tom Tyron: Film History Series

Photographer Unknown, “Tom Tyron”, Date Unknown, Publicity Photo, Gelatin Silver Print

Born in Hartford, Connecticut in January of 1928, Thomas Lester Tyron was an American actor and novelist. He grew up in Wethersfield and, in 1943 at the age of seventeen, enlisted in the U.S. Navy where he spent three years as a radio operator in the South Pacific. After his discharge from service in 1946, Tyron joined the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Massachusetts where he was employed as a set designer and assistant stage manager. He also studied at Yale University and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts.

Encouraged by actress Gertrude Lawrence and her husband, producer Richard Aldrich, Tyron entered into acting. His first appearance on New York City’s Broadway was a role in Arthur Kober and Joshua Logan’s 1952 musical “Wish You Were Here”. In 1953, Tyron was in two productions on Broadway, “Cyrano de Bergerac” and Shakespeare’s “Richard III”. His television appearances at this time include an episode of the 1955 daytime drama series “The Way of the World” and the two-part episode “King of the Dakotas” as a guest-star of NBC’s Western series “Frontier”.

Tom Tyron moved to Hollywood in 1955 and was given a contract by Paramount Studios. In his film debut for the studio, he was given second-billing in Michael Curtiz’s 1956 crime drama “The Scarlet Hour” which starred actress Carol Ohmart. Lent to Allied Artists, Tyron was given the lead role as Private Mason in Charles F. Haas’s 1956 World War II film “Screaming Eagles”. In the same year, he appeared in a supporting role acting opposite Charlton Heston and Anne Baxter in Paramount’s Western film “Three Violent People”, directed by Rudolph Maté. In 1958, Tyron had the starring role as husband/alien Bill Farrell in Gene Fowler’s horror science fiction film “I Married a Monster from Outer Space”, now a cult classic.

Most of Tyron’s acting was in the medium of television with appearances in episodes of popular drama and Western series. These included Playhouse 90, Zane Grey Theater, Lux Video Theater, Jane Wyman’s Fireside Theater, Studio 57, Wagon Train, The Big Valley, The Millionaire, and The Twentieth-Century Fox Hour. Tyron’s longest running role in television was as Texas John Slaughter in the Disney series of movies of the same name which ran from 1958 to 1961. The “Jack Slaughter” series was based on the historical American lawman John Horton Slaughter. Born in 1841, Slaughter was a cowboy, poker player and sheriff who earned a reputation fighting outlaws and hostiles in the Arizona and New Mexico territories.

Tom Tyron appeared in several films for Twentieth-Century Fox; the first of which was a starring role as Mahlon, a brother of Ruth, in Henry Koster’s 1960 biblical CinemaScope film “The Story of Ruth”. In 1961, he had a starring role as Private first class Roth in Raoul Walsh’s Korean War film “Marines, Let’s Go”. Tom Tyron appeared in two films in 1962: the Disney space-age satire “Moon Pilot”, in which he starred alongside Brian Keith, Edmond O’Brien and Tommy Kirk, and Fox Studio’s epic black and white war-drama “The Longest Day” which featured a large international ensemble cast.

Tyron’s most notable starring role was as the ambitious Catholic priest, Stephen Fenmoyle, in Otto Preminger’s 1963 drama film “The Cardinal”, based on the 1950 novel of the same name. Shown through a series of memory flashbacks during the Cardinal’s formal ceremony of institution, the film was shot in multiple locations and touched on issues of interfaith marriage, racial bigotry, sex outside of marriage and the rise of fascism. “The Cardinal” was the highest-grossing film of 1963 and won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Drama. Tom Tyron received a nomination for the Golden Globe Best Actor in a Drama.

Tom Tyron followed this success with appearances in two more films: a supporting role in the 1958 epic war film directed by Preminger “In Harm’s Way” and a leading role in Arnold Levin’s 1965 calvary Western “The Glory Guys”, with a screenplay written by Sam Peckinpah. Tyron appeared in several television performances in the late 1960s including a live television performance of “The Fall of the House of Usher”, the 1967 television movie remake of “Winchester ’73”, and episodes of The Big Valley and Bob Hope’s Chrysler Theater.

Disillusioned with acting, Tyron retired from the profession in 1969 and, inspired after seeing “Rosemary’s Baby” in the theater, began to successfully write mystery and horror novels. His best known work is the 1971 psychological horror novel “The Other”, a story of a boy whose evil twin-brother might be responsible for a 1930s’ series of deaths. Tyron adapted the novel into a film of the same name that was released in 1972. The film was directed by Robert Mulligan and shot entirely on location in California; actor John Ritter made one of his early film appearances in the role of Rider. Tyron’s 1973 folk-horror novel “Harvest Home”, a story of dark pagan rituals in a small New England town, was adapted into a television mini-series “The Dark Secret of Harvest Home” which starred Bette Davis.

Tom Tyron wrote “Crowned Heads”, a collection of novellas inspired by the legends of Hollywood. The first in the series was the novella “Fedora”, a story of the relationship between a reclusive former actress and her plastic surgeon. This tale was adapted by Billy Wilder for his 1978 German-French drama film “Fedora” which starred William Holden and Marthe Keller, best known for her role in “Marathon Man”. Tyron wrote two more novels: the 1989 “The Night of the Moonbow”, the story of a harassed boy at summer camp who turns to violence, and the 1991 “Night Magic”, the story of a NYC street magician who is offered real magic. “Night Magic” was published posthumously in 1995.

Starting in 1955, Tyron was in a brief marriage to Ann L. Noyes, the daughter of a stockbroker; the couple divorced three years later in 1958. During the 1970s, he was in a romantic relationship with Clive Clerk, an interior designer, television actor, and one of the original cast members of the Broadway hit “A Chorus Line”. They lived together in a Tyron’s apartment at Central Park West in New York City. From 1973 to 1977, Tyron was in a relationship with John Calvin Culver, a Broadway revival stage actor. Culver also performed in pornographic films under the name of Casey Donovan. The relationship ended as Tyron was deeply closeted and grew increasingly disturbed by Donovan’s notoriety.

An actor with appearances in eighteen films and numerous television series, Tom Tyron passed away in September of 1991 at the age of sixty-five in Los Angeles, California. The announced cause of death was stomach cancer; however, Tyron’s literary agent, G. Thomas Holloway, later stated the stomach cancer was related to Tyron’s HIV-positive status. At the time of his death, Tyron had asked to keep this information private as he did not want his readers or relatives to know.

Second Insert Image: Arthur E. Arling, “Tom Tyron and Elana Eden”, 1960, Publicity Shot for “The Story of Ruth”, Director Henry Koster, Gelatin Silver Print

Third Insert Image: NBCU Photo Bank, “Tom Tyron as Lin McAdam”, “Winchester ’73”, 1967, Publicity Film Shot, Gelatin Silver Print

Fourth Insert Image: Jean Bourgoin and Walter Wottitz, “Tom Tyron”, 1962, Film Shot “The Longest Day”, Directors ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, and Bernhard Wicki

Robert Arthur: Film History Series

Photographer Unknown, “Robert Arthur”, 1948, Publicity Photo “Yellow Sky”, Gelatin Silver Print

Born in Aberdeen, Washington in June of 1925, Robert Paul Arthur was an American motion picture actor, primarily of youthful secondary roles, who appeared in thirty-five feature films and numerous episodes of television series.

Robert Arthur graduated in 1943 from the Aberdeen High School, where he had won a radio announcing contest. He attended the University of Washington and was in the U.S. Navy training program. While at the university, Arthur also maintained a professional career as a radio announcer. Relocating to Los Angeles, he was soon given his first role as Rosalind Russell’s teenage son Frankie in Michael Curtiz’s 1945 comedy-drama for Warner Brothers, “Roughly Speaking”.

Arthur was soon given a contract with Warner Brothers and appeared in three more films in 1945, including the role of Jimmy in Frederick de Cordova’s “Too Young to Know” and an uncredited role in the film noir “Mildred Pierce”. Between 1946 and 1948, he appeared in seven films, the most notables being the 1946 biographical-musical on the life of Cole Porter, “Night and Day”, and Walter Lang’s 1947 Technicolor musical with Betty Grable “Mother Wore Tights”, later nominated for American Film Institute’s 2006 list for Greatest Movie Musicals.

In 1948, Robert Arthur appeared in the role of Ken McLaughlin in Twentieth Century Fox’s western “Green Grass of Wyoming”; he had a credited role with his name appearing on the publicity posters. In the same year, Arthur appeared as Bull Run in William A. Wellman’s western “Yellow Sky” which starred Gregory Peck, Richard Widmark and Anne Baxter. This film from Twentieth Century Fox was praised by critics for its cinematography, screenplay and its realistic Western style. In 1949 , Arthur appeared as Sergeant Mc Illhenny in a major film of the era “Twelve O’Clock High”. Directed by Henry King, the film was nominated for four Academy Awards, of which it won two, and later became a television series that ran for three years.

Robert Arthur appeared as a supporting actor in seventeen films between 1950 and 1960. Among these films were Billy Wilder’s 1951 film noir “Ace in the Hole”, Richard Brooks’s 1953 war film “Take the High Ground”, and Nathan Juran’s 1957 submarine war film “Hellcats of the Navy” which starred Ronald Reagan, Nancy (Reagan) Davis, and Arthur Franz. Arthur’s last film before leaving acting was the 1961 “Wild Youth” in which he played the role of Frankie, an escapee from a detention Honor Farm.

In the early days of television in the 1950s, Arthur appeared in supporting roles on several series. Among these were the syndicated western “Frontier Doctor” with actor Rex Allen and ABC’s eight-year drama-western “The Lone Ranger”, which starred Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels.

In his later years, Robert Arthur went into business and became active in several causes. He became an activist for gay rights on behalf of senior citizens, assisted in the founding of Project Rainbow, and was a co-founder of the Log Cabin Republicans which advocated for equal rights for LBGTQ+ Americans. Robert Arthur died in Aberdeen, Washington, on the first of October in 2008 at the age of eighty-three.

Note: The “Clayton Moore The Lone Ranger” website has a short article in which Robert Arthur reminisces on his experience with Clayton Moore on the western series. The short piece on Arthur can be found at the Clayton Moore site: https://claytonmoore.tripod.com/arthur.html

Top Insert Photo: Photographer Unknown, “Robert Arthur”, circa 1950-55, Publicity Shoot, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Charles Land, “Robert Arthur”, 1951, Film Scene “Ace in the Hole”, Director Billy Wilder

Third Insert Image: Charles Land, “Kirk Douglas and Robert Arthur”, 1951, Film Scene “Ace in the Hole”, Director Billy Wilder

Bottom Insert Image: Joseph MacDonald, “Robert Arthur and Gregory Peck”, 1948, Film Scene “Yellow Sky”, Director William A. Wellman

Randall Lake

Artwork by Randall Lake

Born in California in 1947, Randall Lake is an American artist who, influenced by an exhibition of work by Van Gogh, paints oil landscapes, still-lifes and portraits in an impressionistic realist style. He is currently based in Utah with a studio in Salt Lake City and a studio in his Spring City cottage home.

Lake traveled to France and studied French in 1968 at the Sorbonne of the University of Paris. When the events of the May 1968 protests closed the university, he continued his studies at the Academie Julian under painter Claude Schurr. In addition to his painting studies, Lake completed his English Degree, Cum Laude, in 1970 at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In 1972, he studied with Belgium designer and color-abstract painter Gustave Singier at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts.

Randall Lake was an instructor in English at the Sorbonne from 1970 to 1973. He studied printmaking in 1973 under English printmaker and painter Stanley William Hayter at the Atelier 17, an experimental workshop that was influential in the teaching and promotion of printmaking in the twentieth-century. After four years of teaching, Lake settled in Utah where he studied under English-born portrait artist Alvin Gittins at the University of Utah. He earned his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1977 and became in 1978 a visiting member of the Department of Art Studio faculty at the university.

Lake continuously searches for new subjects and techniques for his work. Over time, his journey in art has reflected his journey in life, from the traditional landscapes executed as a Mormon to the more daring works as an openly gay man. Lake is drawn to the atmosphere that was present in the nineteenth-century, the lifestyle, the arts and the architecture. He paints from life and location to capture the essence of the subject and the moment. Seeking a change in his work, Randall Lake has begun experimenting with the elements of Abstraction and Fauvism, a movement which emphasized painterly qualities of brushwork and strong color.

Randall Lake is the recipient of many awards for his work, including the 2003 Grand Prix du Peintre Maudit from Salt Lake City’s Guthrie Institute, the 2015 and 2016 Award of Merit for the Spring City Plein Air Competition, ant the 2001 and 2006 Governor of Utah Award for Fine Art, among others. His work is in many private and public collections, including the Jinling Library in Nanjing, China; Utah State Collection of Art; Wyoming State Collection; Utah Museum of Fine Art; and the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York.

Note: A video portrait of Randall Lake by Michael Schoenfeld for RadioWest Films can be found at: https://films.radiowest.org/film/randall-lake

An article on Randall Lake’s work, with quotes by the artist, can be found at the Springville Museum of Art website located at: https://www.smaexhibition-self.org/randall-lake.html

Randall Lake’s website, containing his work, gallery events and contact information, can be found at: https://www.randalllake.com/page/11302/collection

Second Insert Image: Randall Lake, “Afternoon Nap”, 1991, Pastel on Paper, 35.6 x 45.7 cm

Bottom Insert Image: Randall Lake, “Self Portrait with Model”, 1992, Oil on Canvas, 91.4 x 76.2 cm

Reinaldo Arenas: “As Long As the Sky Whirls”

Photographers Unknown, As Long As the Sky Whirls

For Lázaro Gómez

As long as the sky whirls
You will be my redemption and my doom,
magnetic vision,
lily in underwear,
salvation and madness
every night waiting.
As long as the sky whirls
no infernal could be a stranger
because I have to take care that that would not harm you,
No joy would go by inadvertent
Because in some way I have to reveal it to you,
As long as
the sky
whirls
you will be the truth of myself,
the song and the venom,
the danger and the ecstasies,
the vigil and the sleep,
the dread and the miracle.
As long as the sky whirls . . . but perhaps the sky whirls?
Well: as long as the sky exists.

As long as
the sky
exists
you will be my pain most noticeable,
my loneliness most tragic
my bewilderment unanimous
my perpetuous silence
and my absolute consolation.
As long as the sky exists . . . but perhaps the sky exists?
Well: as long as you yourself exist.
As long as
you yourself
exist
you will be the mirror and the time,
the infinity and the imminent,
the memory and the unusual
the defeat and the verse,
my enemy and my image.
Because there would be no more suns than the ones you yourself radiate
like there would be no other penance than to know that you exist.
But perhaps you do exist?

New York (May 1985)

Reinaldo Arenas, Mientras el Cielo Gire, 1989, English Translation 3003 Lázaro Gómez Carriles

Born in Aguas Claras in July of 1943, Reinaldo Arenas Fuentes was a gay Cuban poet, playwright and novelist known for his criticism of Fidel Castro, the Cuban Revolution and the ensuing government in Cuba. He was the author of the memoir “Before Night Falls”, written after Arenas’s escape to the United States in 1980. The memoir narrates his experience in the Cuban dissident movement and years as a political prisoner.

After moving to the city of Holguin as a teenager at age fourteen, Reinaldo Arenas became employed at a guava paste factory. Around 1958 when living conditions in the city worsened, he decided to join Castro and his revolutionary movement. Arenas spent ten days at the guerrilla headquarters in Velasco but was turned away. Once the guerrilla commandant realized that President Fulgencio Bastista’s secret police were already searching for Arenas, he accepted him into the group.

At the age of sixteen, Arenas was awarded a scholarship at La Pantoja, a captured Batista military camp that was converted into a polytechnic institute. Students attending took major courses in Marxist-Leninism in which they had to master the USSR manuals of the Academy of Sciences and the Political Economy. Cuban Marxist theorist Blas Roca’s “Foundations of Socialism in Cuba” was also required reading. Arenas graduated with a degree as an agricultural accountant, but would later describe his education as indoctrination.

In the early 1960s, Reinaldo Arenas relocated to Havana where he enrolled in a planning course at the University of Havana. While in the program, he worked for the National Institute for Agrarian Reform. During this time, Arenas began to live his life as a gay man, albeit secretly for fear of ending up in a Military Unit to Aid Production (UMAP), a term which basically described a concentration camp for Christians, suspected Cuban dissidents and LBGT people. A previous relationship Arenas had with a man, later arrested and sent to a UMAP camp, led to Arenas being listed as a gay man by the Cuban Committee for the Defense of the Revolution.

Throughout his life, Arenas developed friendships and had relationships with many gay men. Various friends and acquaintances he knew pledged their loyalty to the Cuban regime in exchange for their safety. Many became informers for the government and reported other men, often friends or those with whom they had relationships. The government’s intention, in addition to seeking out dissidents, was to find gay and bisexual men and either persecute and jail them or turn them into informers. Although the reward for cooperation with the regime meant life outside of prison, the price to pay for living as an informer was to participate publicly in acts of repudiation denouncing your anti-regime beliefs or homosexuality.

In 1963, Reinaldo Arenas moved to Havana to study at the School of Planification and later at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Havana, where he studied literature and philosophy. He began working in 1964 at the National Library José Marti. Maria Teresa Freye de Andrade, who was the director of the National Library, officially transferred Arenas from his position at the National Institute for Agrarian Reform to a position at the National Library. When Fidel Castro appointed Police Captain Sidroc Ramos as the library’s director, Areans left his position at the library and became an editor for the Cuban Book Institute until 1968.

Arenas’s writings were beginning to gain recognition in the Cuban literary world in the 1960s. He received a literary award for his 1967 novel “Singing from the Well” at the Cirilo Villaverde National Competition held at the National Union of Cuban Writers and Artists. In the year before, Arenas’s “El Mundo Allucinante (This Hallucinatory World)” was awarded First Honorable Mention by the National Union of Cuban Writers and Artists. Although there was no better entry in the competition for that year, the judges refused to give the First Prize to Arenas; as a result, no First Prize was given in 1966. By 1967, Arenas’s critical writings and openly gay life were bringing him into conflict with Cuba’s communist government.

From 1968 to 1974, Reinaldo Arenas was a journalist and editor for the literary magazine “The Cuban Gazette”. In 1974, Arenas was charged and convicted of ideological deviation and publishing abroad without official consent. He escaped from prison and tried a failed attempt to leave Cuba on a tire inner tube. Rearrested in southern Havana, Areanas was imprisoned in El Moro Castle, used at that time as a prison for rapists and murderers. By writing letters for illiterate prisoners, he maintained his life in prison and was able to obtain paper for his own scholarly work. Arenas was caught and severely punished for attempting to smuggle his work out of prison. Threatened with death, he was forced to renounce his work and was finally released in 1976.

Arnenas fled to the United States during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift, a mass migration organized by Cuban Americans with the consent of Cuban President Fidel Castro. In 1987, Arenas was diagnosed with the AIDS virus. He continued to write, speak against the Cuban government, and mentor many Cuban exile writers. After battling AIDS for three years, Reinaldo Arenas died of an intentional overdose of drugs and alcohol in December of 1990 in New York City. In 2012, he was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display on Chicago’s North Halsted Street, which celebrates LGBT contributions of world history and culture.

Reinaldo Arenas published a significant oeuvre of work in his life. In addition to his two poetic volumes “El Centro” and “Leprosorio”, he wrote a set of five novels, the “Pentagonia” series, which recounts life in post-revolutionary Cuba. Volumes included in this series are “Singing from the Well”, “Farewell to the Sea”, “Palace of the White Skunks”, the satirical “Color of Summer” and “The Assault”. Arenas’s second and best-known novel “Hallucinations”, also published under the name “The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando”, was smuggled out of Cuba and first published in France in 1969.

Arenas’s autobiography “Before Night Falls”, written after his escape from Cuba and published in English in 1993, was listed on the 1993 New York Times Best Books of the Year. This book became the 2000 film of the same name, directed by painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel; the role of Arenas was played by Spanish actor Javier Bardem. The film version of the book was listed as one of the Top Ten Movies of the Year by the American Film Institute, nominated for the Golden Lion at the 2001 Venice International Film Festival with filmmaker Schnebel winning the Grand Jury Prize and Bardem winning Best Actor.

Reinaldo Arenas’s papers, typescript drafts, essays, interviews, newspaper articles, correspondence and other documents are housed in the Princeton University Library.

Note: Several interesting articles on Reinaldo Arenas and his work can be found on the eclectic blog website Byron’s Muse. The articles can be located at: https://byronsmuse.wordpress.com/tag/reinaldo-arenas/

Radek Husak

The Artwork of Radek Husak

Born in Poland in 1984, Radek Husak ia a contemporary process-driven mixed-media artist whose works in the expanded field of print. He earned his Master of Fine Arts from the Royal College of Art and is currently based in London.

Through his research and experimentation, Husak developed a new approach to printmaking. He works with pigment transfers twinned with carbon-drawn elements that are either placed on paper or sandblasted aluminum panels. Blasting through the outer layer of aluminum reveals a reflective inner core upon which the pigment transfers are placed. These images are then embellished with paint, soft pastels, bodycolor, and carbon and color pencils.

Radek Husak’s work is inspired by art history, fashion, and queer theory. He combines the tradition of the nude with the large color-elements of 1950s and 1960s Pop Culture. Husak’s images, with their overlapping figurative forms, create in essence a static glitch. The edges of one body blurs and melts into the next, thereby creating sense of movement. The resulting movement effect of these bold, modern images bring to mind the early movement studies by French scientist and photographer Étienne-Jules Marey, which he produced in the 1800s.

Husak creates works in the abstract form and constructs these images by taking elements of nature, such as skies, clouds and anatomical features, fragmenting and rearranging them to form flowing patterns. He also has produced figurative work in other mediums including ceramics and stained glass.

Radek Husak has shown his work in 2021 and 2011 at the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair in London. The Grove Gallery and Quantus Gallery, both in London, are the venues for Husak’s first solo show, entitled “Duality” which is running from November 23 until December 22 in 2022.

Radek Husak’s work can be seen at his website located at: http://www.rhusak.co.uk His work can also be seen at Artsy located at: https://www.artsy.net/show/grove-gallery-duality?sort=partner_show_position

Bottom Insert Image: Radek Husak, “Saint Sebastian (SS5)”, 2022, Pigment Transfer, Bodycolor, Carbon and Color Pencils and Collage on Sandblasted Aluminum, Edition of 3, 84 x 60 cm, Private Collection

Tag: queer history