Hervé Guibert

The Photography of Hervé Guibert

Born at Saint-Cloud, Hauts-de-Seine on the fourteenth of December in 1955, Hervé Guibert was a French author and photographer. The author of two-dozen published works, he wrote with aggressive candor, detachment, and passion through a mixture of diary writing, memoir, and fiction. Both his writings and photography were closely linked to his private life. The subjects of Guibert’s writings often became his friends; those whom he loved were often portrayed as celebrities, alternately idolized and exposed.

Guibert’s photographic oeuvre contains interior scenes and landscapes as well as portraits of family, friends and lovers. He worked in black and white with tones drawn to soft grays. Photographs of Guibert’s immediate surroundings, his bookcase or desk, were created with the same intensity as photographs of nudes in his bed. His work is both restrained and subtle, created more for his person or close friends rather than public exposure. Although most of his work remains elusive, never having been exhibited or published, those images that have appeared are cool, confident and emotionally warm.

Hervé Guibert was born into a conservative middle-class family of a veterinary inspector and his wife, a former teacher. He relocated to Paris at the age of seventeen with the hope of becoming an actor or scriptwriter. After his rejection from a Paris film school, Guibert entered the literary world and, by the age of twenty, was writing dating advice for “20 Ans (Twenty Years)”, a glossy women’s magazine. In 1977, he published his autobiographical novel, “La Mort Propagande (Death Propaganda)”.

In 1978, Guibert was hired as a photography critic for France’s evening newspaper “Le Monde”. He successfully established himself as a photographer with a photographic literary volume, “Suzanne and Louise”, containing intimate portraits of his great-aunts. In 1981, Hervé Guibert published his “Image Fantôme (Ghost Image)”, an insightful collection of mini-essays on various photographic forms such as family album portraits, photo-booth film strips, and pornographic Polaroids. In this work, Guibert presented photography as tactile, fetishistic and linked to frustrated desires.

In 1982, Hervé Guibert completed his “Les Aventures Singulières (The Singular Adventures)”. This collection of short stories, published through Éditions de Minuit in Paris, centered on a singular character’s life over a period of three years. He shared the Best Screenplay César Award in 1984 for a collaborative work with opera and theater director Patrice Chéreau on the 1983 film “L’Homme Blessé (The Wounded Man)”.

Guibert was granted in 1987 a two year residency scholarship at Villa Medicis, the site of the French Academy in Rome, where he studied with his friend, the openly gay writer and journalist Mathieu Lindon. In January of 1988, Guibert received a positive diagnosis for AIDS and began to record in his writings what would be the remainder of his life. He was the long-time friend of both Christine and her partner, film director Thierry Jouno, considered the man in Guibert’s life. Guibert married Christine to ensure that his royalty income would pass to her and her two children with Jouno.

In 1989, Hervé Guibert published his highly erotic novella ““Fou de Vincent (Crazy for Vincent)”, a dramatization of his earlier intermittent relationship with the impulsive and unpredictable teenager Vincent Marmousez. He revealed his HIV status in his 1990 real-life based novel “À l’Ami qui ne M’a Pas Sauvé la Vie (To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life)”. Following the release of this novel, Guibert became the focus of media attention with interviews and several talk show appearances.

Guibert’s last work, “Cytomégalovirus” was a description of his autumn 1991 hospitalization and the increasing blindness he suffered from his illness. In the second week of December in 1991, Guibert attempted suicide by taking digitalin, a heart medication toxic in large doses. Two weeks later, he died at the age of thirty-six in Clamart, Hauts-de-Seine, on the twenty-seventh of December in 1991.

Notes: An excellent article on Hervé Guibert’s 1981 essay volume “Ghost Image” can be found on British photographer Felix Pilgrim’s site: https://www.felixpilgrim.com/blog-1/herve-guiberts-ghost-image

The contemporary Vienna gallery Felix Gaudlitz, in collaboration with Attilia Fattori Franchini, organized a 2020 exhibition of Hervé Guibert’s photographic work entitled “…of lovers, time, and death”. The gallery’s article with several of Guibert’s photographs can be found at: https://felixgaudlitz.com/exhibitions/herve-guibert-of-lovers-time-and-death/

Information written by Christine (Guibert) on Hervé Guibert’s partner Thierry Joune and the impact he had on Guibert’s writings can be found at: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/281395860/thierry-jouno

A more extensive biographical article on Hervé Guibert, with additional links, can be found in this blog’s November 2024 archive: https://ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon.blog/2024/11/18/hevre-guibert-he-who-wished-to-be-master-of-the-truth/

Top Insert Image: Hervé Guibert, “Self Portrait”, 1985, Gelatin Silver Print, 23.7 x 30.2 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Hans Georg Berger, “Hervé Guibert and Poet Eugène Savitzkaya, New Year’s Eve, Rio nell’Elba, Italy”, 1984, Gelatin Silver Print, Semiotext(e)

Third Insert Image: Hervé Guibert, “Christine”, 1983, Gelatin Silver Print, 23.8 x 30.5 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Hans Georg Berger, “Hervé Guibert and Thierry Juono, Hotel Gellért, Gesellschaft”, 1983, Gelatin Silver Print

Kyle Dunn

The Artwork of Kyle Dunn

Born in 1990, Kyle Dunn is an American artist who creates sensuous and psychologically complex scenes on canvas and panels. His work is a meld of theatrical elements and personal introspection that explores those relationships between the artist and his subject, two people in love, and the individual and society.

Kyle Dunn received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Sculpture in 2012 from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. A modernist with a classical style, he began his career as a painter with a prolific series of images on canvas. In 2016, Dunn returned to his sculptural roots and created a visual language that employed three-dimensional elements constructed of epoxy resin, plaster and relief foam panels.

Dunn’s domestic tableaux and still lifes are staged, highly stylized images that include trompe l’oeil and bas-relief. All of his paintings contain a wealth of detail; your attention is drawn to the many thoughtfully placed objects that fill the canvas and surround its protagonists. Within Dunn’s melodramatic scenes, figures are staged in a variety of positions and activities that are open to the viewers’ own interpretations. His figures are often presented in solitary moments of self-reflection or scenes of domestic intimacy.

The lighting of each scene is an important component of Kyle Dunn’s work; the theatric lighting style of both horror and noir films is evident in his paintings. In many of Dunn’s paintings and bas-relief works, light comes from a strong, external source, located either from above or below, or the side through a window or open doorway. Blocks of sunlight flood into rooms in such images as “Hyacinth and Pears” and “Devil in the Daytime”. Scenes, such as “Midday” and “Downward Dog” present strong contrasts between light and shadow, an effect that highlights the scene’s subject and increases the drama of the depicted moment.

Kyle Dunn’s work was included in the 2022 “Fire Figure Fantasy: Selections from the ICA Miami’s Collection”, an exhibition of work housed by Miami’s Institute of Contemporary Art. His most recent exhibitions include a series of colorful nocturnal scenes in a successful April/May 2023 solo exhibition, entitled “Night Pictures”, at New York City’s P.P.O.W. gallery on Broadway. In June of 2024, Dunn had a solo institutional show, entitled “Matrix 194”, at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum, a nineteenth-century Gothic Revival structure in Connecticut. His solo exhibition “Devil in the Daytime” is currently on view from February 8th to March 29th in 2025 at the Vielmetter Gallery in Los Angeles.

Dunn has shown work in many international venues including the Marlborough Gallery in London, Amsterdam’s GRIMM gallery, the Maria Bernheim Gallery in Zurich, and Berlin’s Galerie Judin, among others. His work is in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Hong Kong’s Sunpride Foundation in Kowloon, and the X Museum in Beijing, China.

Notes: There is an excellent 2019 interview, entitled “Ghost World”, between Jessica Ross of Juxtapoz Art & Culture and Kyle Dunn located at: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/magazine/features/kyle-dunn-ghost-world/

The Maria Manetti Shrem Art Studio Program has a personal and well-documented December 2020 Visiting Artist Lecture by Kyle Dunn located on YouTube under the title: “Kyle Dunn: Art Studio Visiting Artist Lecture Series”.

Top Insert Image: Justin J. Wee, “Kyle Dunn, Brooklyn Studio”, 2021, Color Print, Galerie Magazine

Second Insert Image: Kyle Dunn, “Into the Crevasse”, 2019, Acrylic on Epoxy Resin, Plaster and Foam Panel, 121.9 x 175.3 x 5.1 cm

Bottom Insert Image: Kyle Dunn, “Window”, 2020, Acrylic on Epoxy Resin, Plaster, and Foam Panel, 162.6 x 137.2 x 6.4 cm, Private Collection

Diego Rodríguez de Silva Velázquez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Géza Vörös

The Paintings of Géza Vörös

Born in 1897 in Nagydobrony, now the Ukrainian city of Velyka Dobron, Géza Vörös was a Hungarian painter. He studied at the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts under Ede Balló, a Hungarian graphic artist and painter best known for his portraits. After his studies, Balló lived and worked in Szolnok located on the Tisza River and the former mining town of Nagybánya (Baia Mare in Romania).

Géza Vörös painted landscapes, both rural and urban, still life arrangements, posed figurative works, and portraits. His stylized paintings reveal a keen sense of observation and subtle humor. Vörös’s work bears the objectivity of the Neo-Classical style as well as the elegant sensual aesthetic seen in works of Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts.

In the early twentieth-century, Szentendre was a small provincial town on the Danube River, approximately twenty miles north of Budapest. During the period between the two World Wars, its established artist colony provided a shelter for numerous artists and writers. With Vörös’s arrival at Szentendre in 1929, his paintings changed from their earlier uninspiring shades of color to palettes of warm, soft colors. Vörös remained in the city until the 1940s, after which there is very little information on his life.

Géza Vörös was a member of both the New Artists’ Association and the prestigious New Society of Artists. He was associated with Budapest-born painter Hugó Scheiber, a modernist painter whose work, initially executed in a post-Impressionist style, turned increasingly towards Futurism and German Expressionism. Scheiber was also a member of the New Society of Artists.

Géza Vörös died in Budapest in 1957. A memorial retrospective of his work was organized in 1961 and held at Budapest’s Mücsarnok Kunsthalle, its historic Neoclassical styled Hall of Art.

Note: If anyone has any additional biographical information on Géza Vörös, I would be interested in adding that to the biography. Please send it via my contact page.

Top Insert Image: Géza Vörös, “Self Portrait”, 1935, Oil on Canvas, 60.5 x 50 cm, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest

Bottom Insert Image: Géza Vörös, “The Bird Preachers”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 70 x 70 cm, Private Collection

Eliot Hodgkin

Eliot Hodgkin, “Peeled Lemons”, 12/03/1958, Tempera on Board, 21.5 x 24.7 cm, Estate of Eliot Hodgkin, Exhibition: Royal Academy 1958

Born in Purley-on-Thames in June of 1905, Curwen Eliot Hodgkin was an English painter best known for his highly detailed still lifes. The only son of Charles Ernest Hodgkin and his wife Alice Jane Brooke, he was raised in a Quaker family related to Roger Eliot Fry, a prominent member of the Bloomsbury Group of artists. Eliot Hodgkin was also the younger cousin of abstract painter Sir Howard Hodgkin.

Hodgkin received his early education at the Harrow School from 1919 to 1923. His initial formal art training was in London at the independent Byam Shaw School of Art. He later enrolled at the Royal Academy School where he studied under painter and draughtsman Francis Ernest Jackson, a student of both William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant. Hodgkin left the Royal Academy to prepare works for an upcoming exhibition at Liverpool’s Basnett Gallery.

Eliot Hodgkin was very particular in the choice of subjects for his paintings; he would choose simple things, often natural objects, and meticulously arrange them against the painting’s background. Hodgkin originally painted in oils, both indoors and en plein air. Introduced in 1937 to a method of creating egg tempera by his friend and teacher Maxwell Armfield, he dedicated more of his time to painting indoors with egg tempera on primed hardboard. Hodgkin’s interest in egg tempera was influenced by the detailed work of such artists as Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbaran, known as the Spanish Caravaggio, and Adriaen Coorte, the Dutch Golden Age painter of small still lifes.

By the middle of the 1930s, Hodgkin had established himself as a painter of still lifes, landscapes and murals through regular exhibitions at the Royal Academy. Between 1934 and 1981, he took part in all the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions. Three of Hodgkin’s works, including the 1939 “October”, were purchased at the summer exhibitions by the Chantrey Bequest founded by wealthy portrait sculptor and painter Sir Francis Chantrey. These three works were later presented to the Tate Gallery collection in London. In 1938, Hodgkin had his first solo exhibition at the Picture Hire Gallery on London’s Brook Street where he showed twenty-three works painted during a ten month span.

During the years of World War II, Eliot Hodgkin joined the Air Raid Precautions, an organization of wardens supporting citizens during air raids, and worked for the Home Intelligence Division of the Ministry of Information. He continued his painting during the war and produced paintings contrasting the ruins of London’s bomb sites with the vegetation that thrived in the devastation. For his work, he received a commission as part of the War Artists Scheme, a project devised and administered by Kenneth Clark, the Director of the National Gallery.

Hodgkin taught briefly as a teacher in 1936 at the Westminster School of Art. He was offered the position of academic at the Royal Academy of Art in 1959; however, he declined in order to concentrate on his painting. Hodgkin wrote a novel, “She Closed the Door” in 1931 and, in the following year, six articles on mural decorations for the book “Fashion Drawing” published by Chapman and Hall. In 1949, he published “A Pictorial Gospel”, a collection of old master illustrations of the Gospel story. His last published work was an article entitled “How I Paint in Temper” for the Society of Painters in Tempera’s 1967 yearbook.

Eliot Hodgkin continued his painting until his late seventies. Due to eyesight difficulties, his work slowly diminished until it stopped completely in 1979. During the last years of his life, he suffered from axatia, loss of full control of his bodily movements. Eliot Hodgkin died in May of 1987 at the age of eighty-one; his ashes are buried in the churchyard of St. John’s Ladbroke Grove in London.

“Why tempera?… Because tempera enables me most nearly to achieve the effects I am aiming at… I try to show things exactly as they are, yet with some of their mystery and poetry, and as though seen for the first time. And it seems to me that, in trying to depict “a World in a grain of sand”, perhaps the best medium is tempera, because it combines clarity and definition with a certain feeling of remoteness.” – Eliot Hodgkin, 1946, Royal Watercolor Society Catalogue

Note: More extensive information on Eliot Hodgkin’s life and work can be found at The Estate of Eliot Hodgkin website located at: https://www.eliothodgkin.com

Top Insert Image: Howard Coster, “Eliot Hodgkin”, 1953, Silver Gelatin Print, 22.9 x 17.8 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

Second Insert Image: Eliot Hodgkin, “Five Gladiolus Bulbs”, 04/03/1954, Tempera on Board, 10.2 x 13.7 cm, Private Collection, Exhibited at Leicester Galleries in 1956

Third Insert Image: Eliot Hodgkin, “Portrait of Douglas Fitzpatrick”, Date Unknown (circa 1930), Pencil and Watercolor, 58.4 x 47 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Eliot Hodgkin, “Orto Chiuso, Malcontenta, Italy”, 1957, Oil on Canvas, 24.2 x 19.7 cm, Private Collection, Exhibition Waddesdon 2019

Sergey Svetlakov

Paintings and Drawings by Sergey Svetlakov

Born in 1961 in the city of Kazan located on the Volga River in southwest Russia, Sergey Svetlakov is a painter and stage designer. His oeuvre includes psychological portraits from life, still lifes, and figurative paintings and drawings of nude models. Svetlakov graduated in 1981 from the Kazan Art School; founded in 1895, it is one of the oldest art institutions in Russia. He graduated with honors in 1986 from Saint Petersburg’s Theater Academy, a state institute for theater, music and cinematography, where he was an art director of drama and musical theater.

Svetlakov worked for several years as a set designer in theaters throughout the country. His most notable work during this period was costume design for composer Edison Denisov’s 1981 opera “L’Ecume des Jours” which was based on Boris Vlan’s novel of the same name. The opera’s 1986 world premiere took place at the Opéra-Comique in Paris with later performances at Perm’s Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Theater in 1989 and the Staatsoper Stuttgart in late 2012.

In the early 1990s, Sergey Svetlakov ceased working on theater productions and focused on portraits, nude studies and still lifes. In his carefully detailed work, he attempts to join the traditions of academic Realism with the style of Neo-Classicism. In his still lifes, the fruit, vases and other objects retain their natural material weight against the heavy folds of arranged, patterned drapery. For his portraits and nude studies, Svetlakov works only from models and strives to convey the beauty and inner life of his sitters, usually ordinary people with various types of social backgrounds.

One of Svetlakov’s models, Denis, was an actor who had placed an advertisement in the local paper in order to make extra money. Svetlakov’s “Portrait of Denis: Actor, Juggler and Fashion Model” is a painting, done primarily in a red palette, that presents an intense figure of Ukrainian, Russian, Greek, and Tater origins. This portrait won the second-place 2020 BP Portrait Award from the National Gallery in London.

Sergey Svetlakov has exhibited widely across Europe, the United States and Japan. In April of 2000, he entered his work in Moscow’s Zero Gallery as part of the exhibition for the Manege Art Fair. Other group exhibitions include the 2012 Art Asia in Miami; the Art Hamptons-USA 2013 exhibition at Gallery G-77 in Kyoto, Japan; the 2014 Affordable Art Show at Galerie MooiMan in Groningen, the Netherlands; and the Affordable Art Shows held at Galerie MooiMan in Milan, Italy and in Maastricht, the Netherlands, both in 2015.

Svetlakov also had a solo exhibition of his work at Penates, formerly the estate of portrait painter Ilya Repin and now a museum and UNESCO World Heritage Site. One of his most recent works, “The Youth from Moldavia” was exhibited at the 2021 Royal Society of Portrait Painters’ Annual Exhibition held at the Mall Galleries in London.

Sergey Svetlakov’s life and work was the subject of a documentary for the “Property of the Republic” series produced and aired by Russian National Television in 1991. For many years, the prestigious London auction house, MacDougall’s, has been selling Svetlakov’s work as part of its Russian art series. Sergey Svetlakov currently lives and maintains a studio in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Sergey Svetlakov’s website, with images and contact information, can be located at: https://sergeysvetlakov.com

Second Insert Image: Sergey Svetlakov,, “Anton Karavaev”, Date Unknown, Graphite Pencil on Paper Life Drawing

Bottom Insert Image: Sergey Svetlakov, “Portrait of Dmitry”, Date Unknown, Graphite Pencil on Paper Life Drawing

Mario Mafai

Paintings by Mario Mafai

Born in Rome in February of 1902, Mario Mafai was an Italian painter. He and his wife, the sculptor Antonietta Raphaël, founded the Scuola Romana art movement. With its firm approach to European Expressionism, the Scuola Romana sought to counter the orderly, neoclassical character of Novecento Italiano, the Italian art movement founded in 1922 which rejected European avant-garde movements and became associated with Fascism.

Although Italian dictator Mussolini had little personal regard for the visual arts, he understood its value as propaganda. For years, his regime supported artists regardless of style, from the futurists who hated tradition to the classically inspired Novecento group which was initiated by art critic Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini’s mistress. Artists of varying degrees of political commitment entered the official exhibitions and received awards given by the regime for their work. The regime decreed in 1927 that all exhibitions must be authorized by the government and published in the official journal of record, the Gazzette Ufficiale. While the state did not dictate art’s content, it established control over the structure that enabled the art to reach a wider audience.

Mario Mafai left traditional education early in his training and, along with fellow student Gino Bonichi, chose to attend the free Scuola Libera di Nudo, a life drawing component of Rome’s Academy of Fine Art. Most of Mafai’s formative art training was gained through readings in the Fine Arts Library at Palazzo Venezia and by studying artwork at Rome’s many galleries and museums. Influenced by the style of modernist painter and printmaker Giorgio Morandi, Mafai focused on the tonal quality of his work; he represented everyday objects with subtle color graduations that lent a magical existence to the painted image. Mafai painted from reality and portrayed his many views of the city of Rome with a fresh sense of curiosity.

In 1925 during their studies at the Academy, Mafai met Antonietta Raphaël, a graduate in piano from London’s Royal Academy of Music, who was studying sculpture and painting. They began a lifelong relationship that encompassed both their private life and the arts. In 1927, they relocated into apartment number 325 on Via Cavour which soon became a meeting place for the literati of Rome, among which were the poets Giuseppe Ungaretti and Libero de Libero, and artists such as Corrado Cagli and Mafai’s friend Gino Bonichi, known in the art world as Scipione.

In 1927, Mario Mafai had his first exhibition, organized by the National Association of Artists, at a gallery in Via Margutta. His second show was held in the following year at the 94th Exhibition of the Society of Amateurs and Connoisseurs of Fine Arts. Along with a collective group of young artists, Mafai exhibited his strong anti-impressionistic paintings at the 1929 Young Painters Convention held at the Palazzo Doria. He was deeply critical of Mussolini’s urban transformation of Rome, which razed many working-class housing districts. This criticism was particularly expressed in Mafai’s 1936-1939 “Demolition of the Suburbs”, a series of city views illustrating the destruction of these districts.

In 1938, Italy passed and began enforcing its discriminatory Racial Laws, This was a series of separate bills, between 1938 and 1944, that excluded Italian Jews and native inhabitants of the colonies from school, academia, politics, finances, and the professional world. Civil rights and travel were restricted, books were banned, and assets and property eventually taken. Mario Mafai and his wife experienced the cruelty of Fascism personally, as Antonietta Raphaël was the daughter of a Lithuanian rabbi. He and his wife left Rome and relocated to Genova where they found help from friends and collectors of their art.

Despite being declared a second-class citizen with no rights, Mafai was drafted into the reserve Italian forces during World War II. During the war years, he painted his “Fantasies” series, violent war scenes inspired by Francisco de Goya’s engravings “Disasters of War”. Mafai’s brutal reflections on the war depicted soldiers as sinister, spectral forms committing brutal acts against civilians. Mafai returned to Rome in 1943 and continued working on his principal themes.

At the end of Mussolini’s dictatorship, the importance of Mafai’s work became widely recognized. Entered in exhibitions throughout Italy, his paintings won many awards. For a period starting in 1957, Mafai rejected his previous artistic path of figurative work and started using a bold smashing of colors and shapes in an abstract form. Thirty of these works, which reduced the image to its essence, were shown in an exhibition entitled “Ropes”.

Mario Mafai died in Rome on the 31st of March in 1965. After his death, he was celebrated with an important retrospective of his work at Rome’s Ninth Quadrennial in 1965. Established as a widely exhibited sculptor, Antonietta Raphaël died ten years later in Rome.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Mario Mafai in His Studio”, 1938, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Mario Mafai, “Paesaggio (Lungara)”, 1948, Oil on Canvas, 38 x 41 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Mario Mafai, “Self-Portrait”, 1928, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Mario Mafai, “Osteria al Neon”, 1952, Oil on Canvas, 77 x 77 cm, Private collection, Rome

John Minton

The Artwork of John Minton

Born in Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire in December of 1917, Francis John Minton was an English illustrator, painter, stage designer and educator. He studied art at St. John’s Wood School of Art in northern London from 1935 to 1938. Minton was introduced to the work of the French Neo-Romantic painters by his fellow student Michael Ayrton, who would become renowned for his writings and sculptural work. Between 1938 to 1939, he spent eight months studying art in France, often in the company of Ayrton, until the start of the second World War necessitated his return to England.

In 1941, John Minton joined the Pioneer Corps, a division of the British Army combatant corps used for light engineering tasks. He received a commission in a light infantry regiment in 1943, but was discharged in the same year on medical grounds. While in the army, Minton, collaborating with Michael Ayrton, designed sets and costumes for actor and theater director John Gielgud’s 1942 production of “Macbeth”. In the same year, they presented their paintings in a joint exhibition at London’s Leicester Galleries. Minton’s intense, realistic work was expressed in dark color schemes and included a self-portrait and cityscapes of streets and bombed buildings.

During the war years, Minton met painters Adrian Ryan and Lucian Freud and developed a close friendship which soon became an intimate sexual relationship with both men that lasted until the late 1940s. After he had seen Freud’s portrait of Francis Bacon, Minton commissioned in 1952 his own portrait from Freud. Between 1943 and 1946, Minton taught illustration at London’s Camberwell College of Arts. He often attended late night sessions at The Colony Room Club, a private members’ drinking and social club known for its debauchery, and visited jazz clubs that dotted London’s Soho district.

After he left Camberwell College, John Minton served as the head of the drawing and illustration department at the Central School of Art and Design from 1946 to 1948. During these years, he continued his own work and shared a studio, first with painters and theater set designers Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, and later with painter Keith Vaughan, all of whom were artists of the Neo-Romantic circle in that immediate post-war period.

Minton began a prolific period of work after 1945; besides entries in group exhibitions, he had seven solo shows at London’s prestigious Lefevre Gallery before 1956. Minton, in addition to creating his paintings and illustrative work, also became a tutor of painting in 1949 at the Royal College of Art, where he taught until the year before his death. By the mid-1950s with the arrival of the newly popular American Abstract Expressionism, Minton’s commitment to figural composition had begun to be seen as out-dated.

John Minton returned to the world of the theater and accepted a commission to design stage sets for two productions by playwright Ronald Duncan for London’s Royal Court Theater, “Don Juan” and “The Death of Satan”. While working at the theater, he met Kevin Maybury, an Australian carpenter working in the scenery department. A relationship soon developed and, by the winter, Maybury had moved into Minton’s house in Chelsea. Maybury became the model for several drawings by Minton and also posed for a portrait in which he is shown seated in his workshop surrounded by the tools of his trade.

Finding his work out of fashion and suffering from psychological problems, Minton began to self-medicate with alcohol. In April of 1956, he left the Royal College of Art on a one-year unpaid leave; his departure caused by a lack of confidence in his own ability as both teacher and painter, and by deep-seated doubts about the relevance of painting in the modern world. He started suffering from extreme mood swings and became more dependent on alcohol. John Minto was found dead on the 22nd of January in 1957. The coroner’s verdict was suicide.

John Minton’s final work, an ambitious large-scale painting, was incomplete at the time of his death and depicted a gravely injured man surrounded by distraught onlookers. On the day before Minton’s death, the painter Ruskin Spear had visited him at his studio and was told that Minton identified the dying figure with Hollywood actor James Dean, who had died two years previously in a car accident. The painting, known as the 1957 “The Death of James Dean”, is clearly unfinished; there were indications through friends that Minton never intended to finish it as he was worried about not being able to break out of his past style.

Minton’s range of work was wide and included designs for stamps, textiles and wallpapers; posters for the London Transport system and Ealing Studios, a television and film producer; large scale paintings for the Royal Academy and the Dome of Discovery exhibition space at the 1951 Festival of Britain; and numerous landscapes of the British countryside. However, he is best remembered for his illustrative work for books, both interior work and book jackets. Among these are poet Alan Ross’s travel book “Time Was Away-A Notebook in Corsica”, author Herbert Ernest Bates’s “The Country Heart”, and two ground-breaking cook books by food writer Elizabeth David.

Note: A history of the relationship between John Minton, Lucian Freud and Adrian Ryan, interspersed with images of their work, can be found at the online Museum Crush magazine located at: https://museumcrush.org/art-sex-and-death-the-unholy-trinity-of-freud-minton-and-ryan/

Top Insert Image: Rollie McKenna, “John Minton”, 1951, Bromide Print, 24.5 x 19.4 cm, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Second Insert Image: John Minton, “John Minton”, circa 1953, Oil on Canvas, 35.6 x 25.4 cm, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Third Insert Image: John Minton, “The Life Model”, 1948, Oil on Canvas, 63.5 x 76 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: John Deakin, “John Minton, Soho”, 1951, Gelatin Silver Print, Michael Hoppen Gallery

Wayne Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud, Oil Paintings

Wayne Thiebaud is an American painter best known for his colorful works depicting commonplace objects—pies, lipsticks, paint cans, ice cream cones, pastries, and hot dogs—as well as for his landscapes and figures. He is associated with the Pop art movement because of his interest in objects of mass culture, although his early works, executed during the fifties and sixties, slightly predate the works of the classic pop artists.

Thiebaud uses heavy pigment and exaggerated colors to depict his subjects, and the well-defined shadows characteristic of advertisements are almost always included in his work.

Note: An extensive article on the life and work of Wayne Thiebaud is “City, River, Mountain: Wayne Thiebaud’s California” written by Margaretta M. Lovell. It can be found at the Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art site located at: https://editions.lib.umn.edu/panorama/article/wayne-thiebauds-california/