Frank Beacham's Journal

August Strindberg, Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter, was born 174 years ago today

August Strindberg, Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter, was born 174 years ago today.

A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades. During that time he wrote over 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis and politics.

A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques.

From his earliest work, Strindberg developed forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition so innovative that many were to become technically possible to stage only with the advent of film. He is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature and his, The Red Room (1879), has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel.

During the 1890s, he spent significant time abroad engaged in scientific experiments and studies of the occult. A series of psychotic attacks between 1894 to 1896 (referred to as his "Inferno crisis") led to his hospitalization and return to Sweden. Under the influence of the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, he resolved after his recovery to become “the Zola of the Occult.”

In 1898, he returned to playwriting with To Damascus, which, like The Great Highway (1909), is a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage.

His A Dream Play (1902) — with its radical attempt to dramatize the workings of the unconscious by means of an abolition of conventional dramatic time and space and the splitting, doubling, merging and multiplication of its characters — was an important precursor to both expressionism and surrealism.

Jeff Koons is 68 years old today

Jeff Koons is 68 years old today.

Koons is an artist known for his reproductions of banal objects — such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror-finish surfaces. He lives and works in both New York City and his hometown of York, Pennsylvania.

His works have sold for substantial sums of money, including at least one world record auction price for a work by a living artist.

On November 12, 2013, Koons’s Balloon Dog (Orange) sold at Christie's Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale in New York City for $58.4 million, above its high $55 million estimate, becoming the most expensive work by a living artist sold at auction.

The price topped Koons’s previous record of $33.7 million and the record for the most expensive living artist, held by Gerhard Richter, whose 1968 painting, Domplatz, Mailand, sold for $37.1 million at Sotheby’s on May 14, 2013.

Balloon Dog (Orange) was one of the first of the Balloon Dogs to be fabricated, and had been acquired by Greenwich collector Peter Brant in the late 1990s.

In May 2019, another of his sculptures, Rabbit (1986), was auctioned for $91.1 million, again breaking the auction record for an artwork by a living artist.

Critics are sharply divided in their views of Koons. Some view his work as pioneering and of major art-historical importance. Others dismiss his work as kitsch — crass and based on cynical self-merchandising. Koons has said that there are no hidden meanings in his works, nor any critiques.

Paul Cézanne, French painter, was born a 184 years ago today

Cézanne in a self portrait

Paul Cézanne, French painter, was born a 184 years ago today.

Cézanne was a Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the conception of artistic endeavor to a new and radically different world of art.

He formed the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism.

The line attributed to both Matisse and Picasso that Cézanne "is the father of us all" cannot be easily dismissed.

Pyramid of Skulls, 1901

Painting by Paul Cézanne

Louis Comfort Tiffany died on this day, 90 years ago

Louis Comfort Tiffany made this window for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago

“Color,” said Louis Comfort Tiffany, “is to the eye what music is to the ear.”

Tiffany, who died on this day 90 years ago, was the son of the founder of Tiffany & Co., the famous jeweler. But the younger Tiffany found his own success as an artist and designer, most famous for his work with stained glass.

Tiffany is the American artist most associated with the Art Nouveau and Aesthetic movements. He was affiliated with a prestigious collaborative of designers known as the Associated Artists, which included Lockwood de Forest, Candace Wheeler, and Samuel Colman.

Tiffany designed stained glass windows and lamps, glass mosaics, blown glass, ceramics, jewelry, enamels and metalwork.

In 1881, Tiffany helped redesign the interior of a house in Hartford, Conn., owned by Mark Twain, who was making his name after the publication of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”

The work was followed a year later by a commission with a much higher profile: redecorating the White House. Chester Arthur had been thrust into office after the assassination of President James Garfield in 1881. He hired Tiffany to remodel the mansion to suit his refined tastes.

Tiffany redecorated several rooms, and he also installed a large stained-glass screen in the Entrance Hall. But his mark on the White House did not last. Twenty years later, in 1902, Theodore Roosevelt ordered a major renovation that swept away the building’s Victorian touches — including Tiffany’s screen.

Thanks New York Times

Men of the Docks, 1912

Painting by George Wesley Bellows

"Sloppy Joe's" in Key West, Florida, 1936

Painting by Waldo Pierce

That’s Ernest Hemingway with the baseball cap leaning in on the bar in the foreground. The artist, Waldo Pierce, is off to the side.

Alzira, Rachael's sister and Pierce's wife is at the bar getting a drink from legendary bartender, Al Skinner, who worked at Sloppy Joe's until his death in 1949.

The Silver Slipper dance hall, part of the original Sloppy Joe's tavern in Key West, Florida is in the background.

Christopher Street, Greenwich Village, 1934

Painting by Beulah Bettersworth

Evelyn Nesbit was a popular chorus girl and artists’ model whose liaison with renowned architect Stanford White immortalized her as "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing"

Nesbit in a 1903 portrait by Gertrude Käsebier

Evelyn Nesbit was a popular chorus girl and artists’ model whose liaison with renowned architect Stanford White immortalized her as "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing."

In the early part of the 20th century, the figure and face of Evelyn Nesbit was everywhere, appearing in mass circulation newspaper and magazine advertisements and on souvenir items and calendars. It made her a cultural celebrity.

Her career began in her early teens in Philadelphia and continued in New York, where she posed for a cadre of respected artists of the era, including James Carroll Beckwith, Frederick S. Church and notably, Charles Dana Gibson, who idealized her as a “Gibson Girl.”

She had the distinction of being an early “live model” in an era when fashion photography as an advertising medium was just beginning its ascendancy. As a stage performer, and while still a teenager, she attracted the attention of the then 47-year-old architect and New York socialite, Stanford White, who became her lover and dedicated benefactor.

Nesbit achieved world-wide notoriety when her jealous husband, multi-millionaire Harry Kendall Thaw, shot and murdered Stanford White on the rooftop theatre of Madison Square Garden on the evening of June 25, 1906, leading to what the press would call “The Trial of the Century.”

Nesbit died at age 82 in 1967.

 

Room in Brooklyn, 1932

Painting by Edward Hopper

Henri Matisse was born 153 years ago today

Matisse in 1933

Henri Matisse was born 153 years ago today.

A French artist known for his use of color and his fluid and original draughtsmanship, Matisse was also a printmaker and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter.

Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.

Although he was initially labelled a Fauve (wild beast), by the 1920s he was increasingly hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting.

His mastery of the expressive language of color and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art.

Matisse died in 1954 in Nice, France.

Dance, 1910

Painting by Henri Matisse

Blue Nude (II), 1952

Painting by Henri Matisse