Franz Theodor Büchler (1904 - 1990) was a German writer and
visual artist.
In 1934, Büchler published his first volume of poetry.
His tragedy Sunanda, after Duke Bernhard Büchler's third
drama, was removed from the program in 1942 shortly before the premiere in
Leipzig by the "Reich Dramaturgy" of the Ministry for Public
Enlightenment and Propaganda.
At the end of the Second World War, Büchler was forced to
leave Strasbourg. He and his family reached Baden-Baden penniless and in 1947
their apartment had to be vacated for the French occupation and the family
found accommodation in Unterlauchringen.
In 1950, Büchler returned to Baden-Baden and lived in the
Lichtental district until his death .
Private first class in retirement Bedřich Abeles, Ph.D., was born June 23, 1925 in Vienna in a Czech-Austrian family.
The Abeles family lived in the town of Bielsko-Biała in Poland until Bedřich’s eighth birthday, and in 1933 they moved to Prague. Bedřich had grown up in Poland and he had to learn Czech when they arrived in Czechoslovakia. He attended elementary school and grammar school in Prague, from which he was however later expelled for his Jewish origin. The family was already aware of the Nazi threat and in July 1939 they thus sent their son from Prague to England in the so-called Winston transport.
A relative took care of him in England and Bedřich was to study the Grammar School in Maidenhead, but he left the school soon after and began working in London. He was earning his living by washing dishes and as a cook and waiter. He rented a room and he has been fully independent since he was fourteen years old.
He began to realize he needed more education, and later he thus completed his secondary school leaving exams. On May 11, 1943 he joined the Czechoslovak army in England and later the 311th Bomber Squadron of the Royal air Force, where he served as a ground engineer. His family was murdered in concentration camps during the war.
After the liberation he went to Prague and studied physics at the Faculty of Science at Charles University. In 1949 he emigrated to Israel, where he again worked as a waiter, and after receiving his doctoral degree in physics he found employment as a mathematics teacher in the meteorological institute. Later he began working in the Weizmann Institute of Science. In 1956 he moved to the USA where he worked in the company Radio Corporation of America and in Exxon Mobil. He was renowned as a physicist; among other, he invented a thermoelectrical generator for use in space flights.
Abeles died in Leicester, England on 14 December 2020, aged 95.
Friday, September 6, 2024
William Benjamin Morel was a volunteer in the Abraham
Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.
Born in Wilmington, NC in 1906, he became a merchant marine
officer in 1935. Morel arrived in Spain on March 22, 1937 and made it back to
the US alive on December 31, 1938, aboard the President Harding.
San Sebastian-born Ben from Wolverhampton is a history lover
and professional lingerie designer.
"What I mostly enjoy about my work is the same thing
that I enjoy about interior design. It is creativity and freedom. I'm a
historicist, so my personality and the style and the creativity all stem from
this creative compulsive obsession with the past."
Ben, 33, specialises in Victorian Maximalist designs,
incorporating his passion for antiques and obsessions with the Edwardian era
into each of his designs.
With a painted white face and head, wearing an all-white
ensemble save for long black gloves and gigantic black platform stiletto boots,
Gena Marvin teeters as she balances on snow-covered rocks. She poses for a
photograph, the sea rippling gently in the background behind her contorted
figure, frozen still in the arctic chill.
It’s a striking scene that opens the new documentary
“Queendom,” which follows the queer Russian performance artist as she creates
artwork that challenges societal expectations and political situations — and
the backlash she faces for it.
The performances, and Marvin’s very existence as a queer
person, are not without their risks, including physical violence, threats and
homophobic abuse. one performance sees Marvin tape the colours of the Russian
flag around her body and walk as part of an anti-police protest calling for the
freedom of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny. The action ultimately
results in Gena’s expulsion from college in Moscow for “expressing a negative
view towards the government”.
Throughout the film, Marvin experiences this hate and
intolerance, whether it’s being beaten or abused while in public, or chastised
by her grandparents for not following a traditional job or career path. Their
relationship is often a fraught one that Galdanova felt essential to highlight
in the film.
As “Queendom” was filming in April 2021, Russia invaded
Ukraine. Scenes from the film show Marvin taking part in anti-war protests,
being arrested, and then summoned to court for evading the military draft. This
marked a turning point for her. “I realized the heaviness of the situation. I
didn’t want to be in jail, or participate in this war and kill other people.
That was not an option,” said Marvin, who cut contact with her grandparents
during this time for their safety. In April 2022, Marvin moved to Paris. She
has since been granted asylum and has built a life and community there, having
walked in the recent Paris Fashion Week for Chinese label Windowsen.
The Baltimore Ravens are a professional American football
team based in Baltimore, Maryland.
The name "Ravens" was inspired by Edgar Allan
Poe's poem The Raven. Chosen in a fan contest that drew 33,288 voters, the
allusion honours Poe who spent the early part of his career in Baltimore and is
buried there. As The Baltimore Sun reported at the time, fans also "liked
the tie-in with the other birds in town, the Orioles, and found it easy to
visualize a tough, menacing black bird". Edgar Allan Poe also had distant
relatives who played football for the Princeton Tigers in the 1880s through the
early 1900s. These brothers were famous players in the early days of American
football.
André Lauren Benjamin (1975), better known as André 3000, is
an American rapper, singer-songwriter, musician, and actor.
Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, he is best known for
being one-half of the Southern hip hop duo Outkast, alongside fellow
Atlanta-based rapper Big Boi. Benjamin is widely regarded as one of the
greatest rappers of all time.
In 2004 Benjamin was voted by People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals (PETA) as the "World's Sexiest Vegetarian
Celebrity".
Benjamin posed for a print advertising campaign by Declare
Yourself, a campaign encouraging voter registration among youth for the 2008
United States presidential election. In the ads by photographer David
LaChapelle, he had his mouth gagged by a bow-tie in a symbolic function.
Robert Earl Paige (1936) is a multi-disciplinary artist and arts
educator working across textile design, painting, collage, and sculpture based
in Woodlawn, Chicago.
As an artist and textile designer allied with the Black Arts
Movement, Robert E. Paige trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
and worked at the architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Sears
Roebuck & Company and Fiorio Milano design house in Italy.
Paige was raised in Chicago's South Side where he continues
to live and work, further developing his longstanding career in the decorative
arts. His work visually and conceptually interrogates political and cultural
themes that reflect both historical and contemporary African American art
references, as well as traditional textile practices of West Africa.
For much of his career Paige considered himself a
"ghost artist", as much of his work went into circulation without the
attachment of his name as a designer, although his "Kool-Aid Color"
textile designs helped popularize West African patterns to American shoppers.
He is now an artist in residence at the Dusable Museum and
has expanded his creative practice beyond textiles and is experimenting in
painting, drawing, and ceramics. His work has since been exhibited in major art
institutions and museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, Salon 94
Design Gallery in New York, The Hyde Park Art Center, and Kavi Gupta Gallery in
Chicago.
Robert Stuart Fitzgerald (1910 –1985) was an American poet,
literary critic and translator whose renderings of the Greek classics
"became standard works for a generation of scholars and students".
He was best known as a translator of ancient Greek and
Latin. He also composed several books of his own poetry. He was a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Chancellor of the Academy of
American Poets. From 1984 to 1985 he was appointed Consultant in Poetry to the
Library of Congress, a position now known as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry,
the United States' equivalent of a national poet laureate, but did not serve
due to illness. In 1984 Fitzgerald received a L.H.D. from Bates College.
Jack Agüeros (1934 –2014) was an American community
activist, poet, writer, and translator, and the former director of El Museo del
Barrio.
After serving for four years in the United States Air Force
as a guided missile instructor, he attended Brooklyn College on the G.I. Bill,
intending to become an engineer. Inspired by Bernard Grebanier, a charismatic
professor of English, and his lectures on Shakespeare, Agüeros began writing
plays and poems, and instead graduated with a B.A. in English literature and a
minor in speech and theatre.
Two of Agüeros's poems were included in one of the first
anthologies of Puerto Rican literature, Borinquen, edited by Maria Teresa Babin
and Stan Steiner, which was published by Knopf in December 1974. The two poems,
"Canción del Tecato" and "El Apatético", are both in
Spanish and appear in the section "Where am I at? The Youth," which
also includes Pedro Pietri's well-known poem "Puerto Rican Obituary".
Following yesterday's post on Albert Wagner: One Bad Cat.
ONE BAD CAT is about the transformative role art plays in the tumultuous life of 82 year-old, African-American, renowned "outsider" artist Reverend Albert Wagner. He has been a lightening rod for controversy his entire life. Racism, ego and lust led him to the brink of ruin. Miraculously turned onto religion at age 50, he was inspired by God to paint, and become a famous artist for a mostly White clientele. From a racist Southern upbringing, in his later years his artwork railed against the lifestyles of members of the African-American community, which created as many detractors as champions. Near the film's conclusion, an ailing Albert comes to terms with his checkered past. Was Albert's penitence real and did he achieve redemption through his art?
The Reverend Albert Wagner (1924-2006) was born to sharecroppers in rural Arkansas, where he remembered loving to draw imaginary cars and airplanes (he had never been in either). His mother told him that if she had the money to send him to art school he might become a great artist. He left school after the third grade and eventually moved north to Cleveland, Ohio with his mother and brothers.
After many years in the furniture moving business, Albert's childhood dream of becoming an artist came true. While cleaning up his house for his fiftieth birthday party, he was inspired by drips and splatters of paint that had stained an old board. From that moment he devoted himself to his art. His three story East Cleveland house is now home to both his People Love People House of God Ministry (basement) and the Rev. Albert Wagner museum and studio.
Literally thousands of his drawings, paintings, sculptures and constructions were on display in every room of this unmistakable three story home. The Reverend's work is often religious, illustrating lessons from the Bible, but he also expresses his feelings on social matters and illustrates scenes from his childhood in the rural south.
He has been widely exhibited around the country, including shows at the Akron Museum of Art and the American Visionary Museum of Art in Baltimore. Reverend Wagner was the subject of an expose "Faith in Paint" in LIFE MAGAZINE, May 25, 1998.
Arthur Cadwgan Michael was a Welsh painter and illustrator. He is largely known for his early black and white work, pictures of the First World War in the Illustrated London News and book illustrations.
Arthur J. Vidich (1922-2006) was a long-term member of the faculty at the New School for Social Research as a professor of Sociology (1960-1991).
He published dozens of books, papers, and edited anthologies, notably Small Town in Mass Society: Class, Power, and Religion in a Rural Community (1958).
This collection contains material documenting his teaching, writing, lectures, and other academic and professional work spanning his entire career.
Art Lucs was a multidisplinary artist and was a member of Propeller Gallery, until his death in 2018. In addition to exciting work in the field of Generative Art, he was also involved in several large scale public art projects.
“Fifteen years ago I started taking photographs of the pond near our home, while standing in the same place every day — an activity that I have since applied to other locations as well. Along with these day-to-day photos, I began taking rapid sequence photographs as I moved through various. landscapes, such as the route of the Toronto Subway and the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto. I then used each photo collection to create a composite image made up of individual multi-layered transparencies. The end result is always a slow surprise, evoking a dreamlike memory and the spirit of each unique location."
Arthur O. Roberts is professor-at-large at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon, where he began teaching in 1953 after he received a Ph.D. in church history at Boston University. He is nationally known as the author of numerous books and as a Quaker scholar.
His two most recent books are Prayers at Twilight and Exploring Heaventhe first exemplary of his gifts as a poet, the second as a writer of prose. His professional career began as a Friends minister, and he never abandoned his pastoral call during years of academic service. Through the written word and through the spoken word from lectern and pulpit, he has profoundly influenced students and peers. Arthur and his wife, Fern, live at Friendsview Retirement Community in Newberg.
Ilya Vartanyan is one of Moscow’s top photographers.
After moving from Armenia to Moscow in 1994, Vartanyan has been a regular contributor on all glossy magazines without exception: Vogue, GQ, Tatler, Esquire, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, InStyle, etc.
“Dreams of Armenia” is a chronicle of the photographer’s trips back to his homeland. The photographs tell the story of one of the world’s most ancient civilizations, its culture and traditions, along with breathtaking landscapes. The country itself inspires the author, leading him across ages and generations.
Through his photographs, he tells his own story connecting him with his land. “Dreams of Armenia” is also the photographer’s self-portrait, through which he shares his experiences and impressions, using all sorts of details: landscapes, colors, emotions and images of people from various generations.
Vartanian spent the years of 2009-2014 working on his first major project in Armenia. For years, he documented life on the streets of Armenian cities and villages, visiting the country’s amazing natural wonders. He documented the life-pulse of this ancient land: the unusual beauty of the faces, subtle details conveying people’s characters and emotions, stunning views and landscapes. Over the years, Vartanian put together a unique chronicle, which made up his album and the collection of his exhibition about Armenia.
August 2017 was the 100th birthday of Arthur Walters, one of Scotland's oldest war heroes. The WWII veteran was celebrating with his family when four Royal Marines showed up, presenting Arthur with a very special beret.
Arthur signed up in 1935, so they gave him the navy-blue beret worn by the Marines at the time (the green beret was introduced in the 1940s). He said "I can still remember getting on my bike and peddling into Birmingham to sign up on 10 July, 1935. It feels like yesterday".
When asked about life in the Marines, he added "Well, I drank a lot of beer."
Arthur Charles Henri Herzog (1862 - 1913), was a Swiss
painter, best known for his Swiss landscapes and orientalist scenes.
Self portrait, 1905
In 1884, he joined a French scientific expedition to Algeria.
He painted oriental subjects observed in Algeria which he sent to Neuchâtel,
some of these paintings are preserved, but the large part of his work disappeared
in a fire in the docks of Marseille on his return.
In 1897, he made a long trip to Egypt and brought back new
orientalist paintings. He left Switzerland again in 1900 to take up a teaching
position at the National Internado of Chile. He returned in 1905 and exhibited
again at the Friends of the Arts of Neuchâtel.
A. J. Meek is an American photographer, teacher, and writer.
Meek is known for his selenium toned silver gelatin contact
prints made with an 8 x 20 banquet camera of landscapes in Louisiana and the
American West and for images that are a balance between the documentary
tradition and the fine arts.
The core of Meek's work was photographing the landscape in
his adopted State of Louisiana. People, gardens, churches, sugar cane mills,
rural landscapes, and heavy industry in the Louisiana were many of his
subjects. He used large format cameras (8 x 20 banquet, 8 x 10 field, and 4 x 5
field). Other projects included the Highlands of Scotland, American West, the
central valley of California, and the Boboli Gardens in Florence.
Selected to serve on the Board of Advisors to the former
Civil War Center at Louisiana State University inspired his ten-year study
photographing the major battlefield parks. His work has been exhibited in
national and international museums, galleries, and included in many public and
private collections. Prints and negatives from his archives before 1996 have
been acquired by The Historic New Orleans Collection.
Doris Amelia Blackburn (née Hordern; 1889 –1970) was an
Australian social reformer and politician.
She served in the House of Representatives from 1946 to
1949, the second woman after Enid Lyons to do so. Blackburn was a prominent
socialist and originally a member of the Labor Party. She was married to
Maurice Blackburn, a Labor MP, but he was expelled from the party in 1937 and
she resigned from the party in solidarity.
Her husband died in 1944, and she was elected to his former
seat at the 1946 federal election – the first woman elected to parliament as an
independent. However, Blackburn served only a single term before being
defeated. She later served as president of the Women's International League for
Peace and Freedom.
Daan Kolthoff is a writer, living between the hills of Wellington, New Zealand and, when not writing, meditating or walking the hills, he is usually researching, reading about or ordering berets from around the world.
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