Cecil Tremayne Buller's Songs of Solomon

The prints of Canada’s Cecil Buller are both analytic and evocative, passionate and diagrammatic. It is a rare ability for an artist to dually describe events and subjects in such measured and balanced equal terms, but she does it with aplomb.

Cecil Tremayne Buller (1886 –1973) was born and raised in Montreal. She is well-known for producing a series of prints for her book Song of Solomon in 1929. She also provided illustrations for Cantique des cantiques which were published in Paris in 1931. I have selected some of these images to review for this article.

The Songs of Solomon set is one of the scrolls found in the last section of the Tanakh, and a book of the Old Testament. This set is unique within the Hebrew bible because it celebrates sexual love and the yearning between two lovers. The two each desire each other and rejoice in their intimacies; and we, as the audience, witness the lovers' erotic encounters. In a sense, one can even see the sweet engagement between the two lovers as they embrace, similarly to Antonio Canova's Cupid and Psyche. The feelings we take away from both pieces is the same.

Buller’s ability to transform the human figure from sinuous biomorphic forms into loosely fragmented sections that resemble the works of Fernand Leger and some of the German Expressionists, yet retain their organic origins, is amazing.

Her figures are engaged with each other to the exclusion of we the audience, who are privy to their encounters. The hunger and need of the figures for one another is earthy and basal. We feel their desire, and we can ourselves escape into their reverie for one another. Truly, Buller has evoked a sensual and gentle depiction of these two lovers, and we are blessed to know of it.

As for Buller’s artistic studies, she studied at the Art Association of Montreal, and the Art Students League, in New York City. In 1912, she went to Paris to where she studied with famed Fauve artist Maurice Denis. Four years later, she went to London to study printmaking at the Central School of Art and Design. While there, she met her future husband John J. A. Murphy; they eventually settled in New York City in 1918. She later returned to Montreal in 1961, and lived there the rest of her life.

Awards:
1945 the Pennell Prize from the Library of Congress
1947 and 1953 the Audubon Society Award
1949 the National Academy of Design Graphic Art Award

Public collections:
Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris
British Museum
Library of Congress
Metropolitan Museum of Art
National Gallery of Canada
New York Public Library

Ilya Bolotowsky's Bridge Between Cubism and Suprematism

Ilya Bolotowsky (Russian-American, 1907 –1981) was born in St. Petersburg. His family fled Russia on the eve of the Russian Revolution. They first went to Baku on the Caspian Sea in the Republic of Georgia, and then to Constantinople. Eventually his family immigrated to New York City in 1923, where he attended the National Academy of Design from 1924 to1930.

Bolotowsky was associated with an art group called "The Ten Whitney Dissenters," or simply "The Ten"; which included artists like Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, who rebelled against the academic system and held their own independent exhibitions.

He was a leading artist in early 20th c. abstraction in the United States. Influenced by Cubism, especially the work of Georges Braque, Paul Klee, and Hans Arp, Bolotowsky began his professional career as a figurative expressionist. His work sought for philosophical order through visual expression, embraced Cubism and geometric abstraction and was influenced by the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian.

Because Bolotowsky was later influenced by the De Stijl movement, which advocated the concept of an ideal order within the visual arts, he gradually eliminated biomorphic form and began to use flat, linear structure. He adopted Mondrian's use of horizontal and vertical geometric abstraction, and used a palette of primary and neutral color. The artwork of Constructivist Kazimir Malevich also had a powerful impact on Bolotowsky's work.

In 1936 Bolotowsky co-founded American Abstract Artists, a group that rejected American Scene painting in favor of an intellectual vision of order and clarity. It was a cooperative formed to promote the interests of abstract painters and to increase the public’s understanding of their art.

Bolotowsky worked for the Public Works of Art Project, and then for the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project in New York. His mural for the Williamsburg Housing Project in Brooklyn was one of the first abstract murals done under the Federal Art Project.

After serving in the U.S. Air Force during World War II, Bolotowsky returned to New York, and resumed his art career, but looked to new artistic sources like the work of Alberto Giacometti. In the late forties, he began to create Neo-Plastic works in which he experimented with the pure elements of geometric painting shape, direction and form by using only straight lines in a plane.
Bolotowsky replaced Josef Albers as chairman of the art department at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He also taught at Long Island University, the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, and the University of New Mexico.

Member:
American Academy of the Arts and Letters
Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptures

Public collections:
Cleveland Museum of Art
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
National Museum of American Art
Philadelphia Museum of Art
the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
San Francisco Museum of Art
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Whitney Museum of American Art

Raymond Verdaguer's Smack-down Prints

Raymond Verdaguer, b.1947 in the French Pyrenees, is of Catalan descent but claims Canadian citizenship. He is a popular printmaker and illustrator, currently living in New York. What struck me about Verdaguer’s prints was their bold, direct statement; even if the image was simply executed. They pack a wallop, and some of them can knock you out of the proverbial park.

I like this work, and respond equally to his black/white and color pieces. They sing with a similar bravado of a Fernand Leger, an 20thc. French artist known for his vibrant Cubist compositions. The smack-you-in-the-face message of Verdaguer’s images is what makes him such a breath of fresh air in a medium often challenged by an audience who are ignorant of the technical hurdles we printmakers face when making an image, or lack patience deciphering subject and content. Verdaguer gets right to it, doesn’t mince words and communicates more directly than anyone I’ve seen for some time.

Since 1976, Verdaguer has made prints which have been published in numerous books, newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times, Harper 's Magazine, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Magazine, Libération, International Herald Tribune, Le Point, Le Monde diplomatique, amongst others . As a book illustrator, Verdaguer works for a number of major publishers in the U.S. and Europe ( Hachette Livre , Random House, Viking Penguin , etc.)

His images utilize strong compositions of shapes and contrasts. He usually deals with social-political-ethical issues. His illustrations show the disillusioned and suffering from an anthropological perspective. He presents to us the man suffering today as the one eternally suffering. Some of the subjects shown here deal with AIDS, mental illness, the human guinea pigs of medical genetic innovations, religion, human torture, fighting ignorance through education and man’s survival in war-ravaged areas. His work is candid and effective, which is the best thing I can say about anyone’s work, and so often cannot.

Verdaguer has shown his work in galleries throughout Canada, Croatia, France and New York City.

More of this printmaker’s highly desirable prints may be found at www.rverdaguer.com. Start collecting these now, folks.....

The Artistic Politics of David Alfaro Siqueiros

Okay, my friends, today we are talking about one of Mexico’s heavy-hitters, David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974, born José de Jesús Alfaro Siqueiros).  He was a Mexican painter/printmaker who worked with Diego Rivera and Jose Orozco, as part of the Mexican Muralist movement. Overall, Siqueiros believed art should be public, educational, and ideological. 

During his career, he visited the United sattes, the Soviet Union, and several Latin American countries as a guest lecturer and visiting artist. His prints are stellar examples of mass and volume and expressive abstraction. Their capacity to evoke passion and anger are beyond the world's sometimes limited scope of understanding of printmakers and the work they do. His background as a painter helped keep his original prints from Looking like prints, thus making them unique compared with his colleagues. 

Throughout his career, Siqueiros' art accentuated angles, muscles and joints of the human form in his portrayal of a strong, revolutionary figure. In addition, many works prominently feature hands, which could be interpreted as another symbol of heroic strength through work.

Born in  Chihuahua, but growing up in Guanajuato, many details of Siqueiros’ childhood were confusing, in part because he gave misleading information regarding his life. What is known is that Siqueiros was the second of three children. His father, Cipriano Alfaro, was well-off, and his mother, Teresa Siqueiros, watched after their children: David, his sister, Luz, and his brother "Chucho" (Jesús). When Siqueiros was four years old, his father sent the children to be raised by their paternal grandparents after his mother had died.

The main part of Siqueiros’ life was spent between making his art and his interest in politics. Schooling aside, the opportunity to network with fellow students for political debate and marches and protests was a larger part of his educational experience. While in school, he came across the writings of Dr. Atl, who in 1906 published a manifesto calling for Mexican artists to look toward their ancestral roots to develop a national Mexican art style. This inspired the young artist to become active in politics. At the age of fifteen, Siqueiros was involved in a student strike at the Academy of San Carlos of the National Academy of Fine Arts, which eventually established of an “open-air academy”. Three years later, he and several of his friends from the School of Fine Arts joined Carranza’s Constitutional Army. In 1914, Siqueiros became interested in the army’s “post-revolutionary” infighting.  He traveled throughout Mexico during his military service and saw the difficult conditions of his country’s poor working class.  It instilled in him a lifelong passion to speak for the masses with his art and his political activities.

In 1919, he went to Paris and learned about Cubism, the work of Paul Cezanne and there he met Rivera, with whom he traveled to Italy to study the work of the Renaissance fresco painters. During this period, Siqueiros' artistic and political activities had become conjoined and  by 1921 he wrote a manifesto in Vida Americana, called "A New Direction for the New Generation of American Painters and Sculptors." He called for a "spiritual renewal" to bring back classical painting while infusing "new values" about the “modern machine” and the “contemporary aspects of daily life". Through this style, Siqueiros hoped to create a bridge between a national and universal art.

In 1922, Siqueiros returned to Mexico City work for the government with fellow artists Rivera and José Orozco painting murals in several prominent buildings. In 1923 Siqueiros helped found the Syndicate of Revolutionary Mexican Painters, Sculptors and Engravers, which addressed the problem of widespread public access through its union paper, El Machete, the weekly paper that became the official mouthpiece for the country's Communist Party. 

Siqueiros remained deeply involved in union labor activities, as well as the Mexican Communist Party, until he was jailed and eventually exiled in the early 1930s for his political connections.  Siqueiros produced a series of politically themed lithographs during this period, which were exhibited in the United States. His lithograph Head was shown at the 1930 exhibition “Mexican Artists and Artists of the Mexican School” at The Delphic Studios in New York City.   Siqueiros also worked in Los Angeles, where his murals there told the story of America's forceful relationship with Latin America. Siqueiros’s work was honored at the XXV Venice Biennale in the first ever Mexican exhibition with Orozco, Rivera and Rudolfo Tamayo in 1950, which recognized the international status of Mexican art. 

Siqueiros was involved with the Communist Party who in 1940 unsuccessfully tried to assassinate Leon Trotsky. In 1960, he  was unjustly arrested for openly attacking the President of Mexico and protesting the arrests of striking workers and teachers. While imprisoned Siqueiros continued to paint, and his works continued to sell.

He later settled in Cuernavaca where he lived until his death in 1974.

Most of this man's printmaking efforts were composed of strong figures, and the later colorful works, moved toward abstraction and abstracted brushwork that didn't look like his contemporaries. They are in fact quite curious pieces and call to mind spiritual musing upon his own travails and the seemingly bi-polar nature of his career path. I find the subtlety of his prints color, the massive weight of his self-portraits and the political bent of his action figures a reasonable and persuasive argument for his diverse subjects. In all, they relate closely to his painting style, and the somewhat chopped off compositions which remind me of El Greco's paintings of earthly and heavenly realms simultaneously depicted. There is also an element of Francisco Goya's Disasters of War prints with his butchered figures. Siqueiros butchers the body of Christ, showing his suffering, floating his body between the earth and heaven. 

Some people don't get those weirdly surreal images, but no matter. Siqueiros' work was consistent showing us the suffering of humanity, the suffering of the poor and the suffering of an artist as all artists suffer to bring forth their view of the world. His world wasn't a calm or happy place, but it was real, and it still speaks volumes for present-day Mexico's  suffering masses about the societal and political woes that have befallen that poor abandoned country.

Reveling in Louise Nevelson's Printed Surfaces

I have known and admired the work of Louise Nevelson, but after reading her biography, I came to understand more about a strong-willed and powerful woman; one whose difficulties to pursue her art made her leave behind her husband and child, struggle for years without financial security and whose goal to be seen as an artist, not a ‘female’ artist, were ahead of the norm.

Discovering her prints was a pleasure, and as expected, their surfaces and the adventurous spirit with which she made them show us an artist truly forging her path toward innovation, and exploration to push the boundaries of a medium.  Nevelson’s prints tend in some degree to push visually toward cubism, as was her often heard credit to the influences of Picasso and Hofmann. She also pushed the printed medium with deeply embossed and etched plates, trying to make the paper bend to her will as she did with his found object sculptures. One can also see where her influences upon other notable painter/printmakers like Frank Stella and Jasper Johns occur.

The variety of her images reflects an consistent curiosity about tactile and rich surfaces and leaves us with an incontrollable desire to go put our hands on them. I am including a biography on Nevelson for those of you wanting to know more about a remarkable artist.

Louise Nevelson was born Leah Berliawsky (1899-1988) in Perislav , Poltava Governorate in the former Russian Empire. When she was three years old, her family emigrated to the United States, settling in Rockland, Maine, in 1905. She saw both of her parents suffer from depression, due in part to the adjustments to living in America, and being isolated in a small Jewish community. It was during high school that Nevelson decided to study art. Before moving to New York City, she married a wealthy businessman, Charles Nevelson, and they had one son, Myron(Mike), but her in-laws disapproved of her artistic interests and she eventually divorced  her husband in 1941.

In the 1930s Nevelson studied at the Art Students League of New York with Kimon Nicolaides and she went to Europe (Munich) to study with the renowned Hans Hoffmann. After returning to New York, Louise met and became an assistant to the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. She also studied with sculptor Chaim Gross. She continued to experiment with other artistic mediums, including lithography and etching,  but eventually decided sculpture would be her medium.

Nevelson worked for the WPA teaching art to children in Brooklyn until 1939. She exhibited her work in several smaller shows in the 1930s, received her first solo show at the Nierendorf Gallery in 1941. Her work consisted mainly of found objects and collage, speaking to her interests in Cubism and Surrealism. The scale of her work later grew to a monumental size, and when critics reviewed her pieces, it was praised until it was known Nevelson was a woman. A reviewer of her 1941 exhibition at Nierendorf Gallery stated: "We learned the artist is a woman, in time to check our enthusiasm. Had it been otherwise, we might have hailed these sculptural expressions as by surely a great figure among moderns." Sexism being rampant in the art world, it wasn’t ready, it seemed, for a talented ‘female’ sculptor. Nevelson believed that art reflected the individual, and chose to take on her role as an artist, not specifically a female artist. “I'm not a feminist. I'm an artist who happens to be a woman.”  Her opinion of discrimination within the art world bordered on the belief that artists not gaining success based on their gender suffered moreso from a lack of confidence. 

Nevelson visited Latin America, and was inspired by ancient Mayan ruins and Guatemalan steles. Her 1958 series of exhibitions were highly praised, and in 1959 Nevelson was included in MoMA's Sixteen Americans exhibition alongside Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. The scale of her sculptures and the influence of Latin American ancient art are credited as putting "Nevelson's sculpture in league with the grand scale of Abstract Expressionist painting, as well as the earlier mural painting of Rivera.” Nevelson took found objects and spray-painted them to disguise their original purposes. She gave credit to Picasso and Hofmann’s influence of Cubism as to her extensive use of discarded objects, and she was influenced by Native American art, dreams, and archetypes. 

From 1957 to 1958, she was president of the New York Chapter of Artists' Equity. That year, she was featured on the cover of Life magazine. In 1962 her work was selected for the 31st Venice Biennale, and from 1962 to1964 she became national president of Artists' Equity. In 1967 the Whitney Museum hosted the first retrospective of Nevelson's work, showing over one hundred pieces, including work from the 1930s to the late 60s, and four years later  the Walker Atr Center curated a major traveling exhibition of her work. 

 

Louise Nevelson Plaza, is located in downtown New York City and features a collection of her works. She donated her papers to the Archives of American Art The Farnsworth Art Museum, in Rockland, Maine, houses the second largest collection of her works.  Nevelson has a place-setting  in Judy Chicago's 1974–1979The Dinner Party^.. Upon her death, Nevelson’s estate was estimated to be worth at least $100 million. 

Awards:

National Medal of Arts

National Institute of Arts and Letters

American Academy of Arts and Letter Gold Medals

Creative Arts Award in Sculpture,  Brandeis University

Harvard University, honorary degree

Rutgers University, honorary degree

The Prints of Dada's Co-Founder, Marcel Janco

Marcel Janco (Iancu) (1895-1984) a Romanian and Israeli artist, was the co-founder of Dadaism and a leading advocate of Constructivism. Janco was the eldest of four children, born in Bucharest to a wealthy Jewish family. He attended Gheorghe Şincai School and studied drawing with Iosef Isor. At Gheoghe Lazar High School, Janco met and became friends a number of soon to be influential people like Tzara, Vinea, Jacques C. Costin. Janco’s friends and collaborators often described him as melancholy, very handsome and charismatic. He was considered one of the leading Romanian Jewish intellectuals of his generation, very knowledgeable and was well-read in French literature. 

            

In October 1912, Marcel worked as Editor and Graphic Designer for the Symbolist magazine Simbolul, but he later moved on to work for a daily paper called Seara.  After the start of WWI, Marcel left Bucharest for Switzerland where he studied Chemistry at the  University of Zurich, then switched to Architecture and studied at the Federal Institute of Technology.  He and his brother Jules earned their living as cabaret performers; where Marcel played the accordion. It was here that they met Hugo Ball  in Cabaret Voltaire. Marcel was personally involved with the acts and performances at  Cabaret Voltaire which attracted people to their performances like the notable theorist Vladimir Lenin and psychiatrist Carl Jung. The Voltaire group later called themselves Dadaists. Janco illustrated the their advertisements, and his prints were used as to illustrate their almanacs, but conflicts with his friend Tzara lead him and Hans Arp to leave the Dadaists and they joined  a number of art Constructivist groups like Neue Kunst,  Das Neue Leben  and Artistes Radicaux.

It was also in December 1919, after Marcel went to France, that he met and married Amélie Micheline "Lily" Ackermann. Two years later, the Jancos moved to Romania, where they had one daughter, but another daughter died in infancy. The Jancos divorced  in 1930, and Marcel later remarried, this time to Clara "Medi" Goldschlager, the sister of Jacques G. Costin. The couple had one child, Deborah Theodora. 

The next few years saw Janco widely involved in architecture, and editing and illustrating for several journals and exhibiting his art. Janco opened up his own business, Birou de Studii Moderne, officially run by the fictitious Marcel Iuliu Iancu, and it was at this time that Janco had a "revolutionary" vision to change the face of urban design. Early in 1922, Janco and Vinea founded the historically important and longest-running Romanian avant-garde political/art magazine, called Contimporanul to which Janco contributed some 60 illustrations, 40 articles on art and architecture, and included a number of his architectural designs. Janco was also largely responsible for the magazine’s feature issue on Surrealism. He maintained a link between 

Contimporanul and Der Sturm, which republished his drawings, and the Vienna-based magazine MA also published samples of his graphics. Janco, with M.H. Maxy,   curated the Contimporanul International Art Exhibit of 1924, which reunited the major currents of Europe's modern art. It included works by Constantin Brancusi  Hans Arp, Klee, Richter, and Kurt Schwitters.  Janco also illustrated Pillat and Perpessisius’s Antologia poeţilor de azi, and produced drawings for Camil Baltzar's erotic Strigări trupeşti lîngă glezne. Around 1926, he joined with the Bucharest art collective Criterion, which exhibited at Dalles Hall in 1933, and he represented the Bucharest collective Arta Nouă, exhibiting at the Maison d'Art club.  He took on students in his Bucharest studio, including the future painter-photographer Hedde Sterne, Once Janco finally received his architect certification in 1934,  he wrote a text about the need and opportunity in Bucharest for modernist urban planning, called Urbanism, nu romantism. In 1935, Janco published Către o arhitectură a Bucureştilor, which recommended a "utopian" project to solve the city's social crisis. 

During the late 1930s Janco’s family and other Romanian Jews began to see and experience a wave anti-Semitism with the rise of Hitler and his followers. When the anti-semitic National Christian Party took power, Janco was coming to terms with the Zionist ideology, describing Israel as the "cradle" and "salvation" of Jews. In 1941, Marcel and his family left Romania and relocated to Israel. Once they were settled, he worked as an architect for the city of Tel Aviv, and he designed and helped to preserve Israel’s national parks. 

While in Israel, Janco became a noted participant in the development of local Jewish art, and he lectured at the Seminar Hakibbutzim college.   In May 1953, when he came across a deserted Palestinian Arab village, Ein Hod, Janco felt that the place should not be demolished, but rebuilt as an artist colony.  He became the colony’s first mayor and instituted a strict code for its settlement. The Ein Hod colony was also important in that the architecture cultivated pre-existing Arab-style masonry instead of building new buildings. Janco was also a founding member of Ofakim Hadashim. Also, during this period, Janco exhibited his artwork widely throughout Europe and had a retrospective of his art in New York City, in 1950.

Janco's studio in Ein Hod, IsraelJanco made concerted efforts to preserve connections with Romania, and his Ein Hod studio became home to other Romanian Jewish emigrants fleeing communism. As for Janco’s buildings, the Romanian communist regime largely ignored his architectural contributions, and after the Romanian Revolution of 1989, Janco's buildings were subject to legal battles. Only three of his buildings (as of 2008) are listed in the National Register of Monuments.

Janco’s artistic influences spanned Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, German Expressionism,  Dada, Constructivism, and Surrealism. A lot of his prints were linocuts and silkscreens. His covers and illustrations for Simbolui are generally considered Art Nouveau and  Symbolist, but his own artistic preferences were closer to Cezanne and Cubism. Janco himself claimed that Dada was not as much a fully-fledged new artistic style as "a force coming from the physical instincts", directed against "everything cheap". His own work featured Dada found art, and supposedly he was the first Dadaist to experiment with everyday objects rearranged as art. He credited Paul Klee with having helped him "interpret the soul of primitive man". Around 1919, Janco had come to agree with Schwitters and van Doesburg to describe Constructivism as a needed transition from "negative" Dada. Futurism was of interest after Janco’s 1930 encounter with Marinetti.  Another major influence on Janco's work was Expressionism, via Die Brucke and  Kokoshcke, and later reactivated by his work with Der Sturm. After 1930, Janco returned to "analytic" Cubism. In discussing architecture, Janco first theorized that Abstract-Expressionistic decorations needed to an integral part of the basic architectural design. He said his own architectural work was entirely dedicated to functionalism, which included his furniture designs. By the time of World War II, he returned to Expressionism and then moved into the realm of pure abstraction, which he believed represented the artistic "language" of a new age. Soon after moving to Israel, Janco began painting brightly colored landscapes, and later he developed an interest in the Jewish tradition of interpreting symbols. Finally, Janco saw his Ein Hod project as the culmination of his work, and called it "my last Dada activity". 

Janco in Ein Hod in the 1950s

Awards:

Some of his works represented Romania at New York City’s “Futurist” show,1936

Dizengoff Prize, 1945, 1946, 1950, 1951

One of three artists displayed at first Israeli pavilion at Venice Biennale, 1952

Israel Prize, 1967

"Worthy of Tel Aviv" distinction, 1982

The Bucharest Art Museum (MNAR) organized a centennial Marcel Janco exhibition

The Cotroceni Palace featured Janco’s work in the "Jewish Art of Romania" retrospective, 2000