Photo By Gail
Artist Beauford Delaney (1907 – 1979) met writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin in 1940. Finding common ground on multiple fronts – intellectual, social, and artistic – the two gay men began a friendship that would last 38 years.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Dark Rapture (James Baldwin) By Beauford Delaney
All Photos By Gail
An absolute highlight of my recent London vacation was a visit to Sotheby’s for a tour of Freddie Mercury: A World of His Own, featuring the entire contents the late icon’s estate, Garden House. Virtually everything Freddie ever owned will be sold off in 6 separate auctions starting September 6th. Presented here is Freddie’s antique jukebox, a 1941 Wurlitzer model 850 Peacock design. Designed by Paul Fuller (1897–1951), this multi-colored illuminated Wurlitzer delighted Freddie with its depictions of two peacocks at the front.
Continue reading Eye On Design: Freddie Mercury’s Peacock Wurlitzer Juke Box
Photo By Gail
In 1941, while convalescing from a serious illness, Henri Matisse devised a fresh approach to his interest in repeated motifs: a drawing series that he would published in 1943 as Themes and Variations. Comprising 162 drawings organized into 17 groups, the series mostly depicts female figures reclining or relaxing in chairs. This example, Woman Resting in an Interior (1941) is characterized by the contrast of charcoal and paper and of flatness and depth, as well as by its fluid, energetic line. Other studies in Themes and Variations use a much cleaner line to render the subject. As a whole, the series demonstrates the artist’s commitment to capturing a drawing’s essence through serial reworking.
Photographed in the Morgan Library in Manhattan.
Photo By Gail
O. (Osvaldo) Louis Guglielmi (1906 – 1956) described Terror In Brooklyn (1941), one of his best known works, as “a premonition of war and tragedy.” On a desolate Brooklyn street, three nuns are shown entrapped by life-size bell jar; they seem to cower in the presence of a bandaged pelvis that hangs, like a crucifix or relic, from a nearby building. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: O. Louis Guglielmi, Terror In Brooklyn
Photo By Gail
Morris Hirshfield (1872 – 1946) began to paint at the age of 65, after retiring from a career making women’s coats, suits and slippers. The flattened, decorative forms of Inseparable Friends (1941) echo his garment-making work. Without distinguishing between the floor and the wall, Hirshfield creates a room through thee planes of shapes and patterns: the women at their mirror, the tasseled curtain above them, and the plant and shoes at their feet. While Hirshfield’s compositions are simplified and stylized, he aimed for meticulous, realistic detail and believed that his figures represented the human body “better than the camera can do.”
Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.