Leo Dohmen

Horace Pippin

Horace Pippin (February 22, 1888 – July 6, 1946) was a self-taught African-American painter. The injustice of slavery and American segregation figure prominently in many of his works.

A Pennsylvania State historical Marker was placed at 327 Gay St., West Chester, Pennsylvania to commemorate his accomplishments and mark his home where he lived at the time of his death.^[1]

He was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Goshen, New York. There he attended segregated schools until he was 15, when he went to work to support his ailing mother.^[2] As a boy, Horace responded to an art supply company’s advertising contest and won his first set of crayons and a box of watercolors. As a youngster, Pippin made drawings of racehorses and jockeys from Goshen’s celebrated racetrack. Prior to 1917, Pippin variously toiled in a coal yard, in an iron foundry, as a hotel porter and as a used-clothing peddler.^[3] He was a member of St. John’s African Union Methodist Protestant Church.

Pippin served in the 369th infantry, the famous Harlem Hellfighters, in Europe during World War I, where he lost the use of his right arm after being shot by a sniper. He said of his combat experience:

I did not care what or where I went. I asked God to help me, and he did so. And that is the way I came through that terrible and Hellish place. For the whole entire battlefield was hell, so it was no place for any human being to be.

I love this guy’s work, his story telling, and his humility as an artist.

Palmer Hayden

Palmer C. Hayden (January 15, 1890 – February 18, 1973) was an American painter who depicted African-American life. He painted in both oils and watercolors, and was a prolific artist of his era.

Hayden took his inspiration from the environment around him, focusing on the African American experience. He tried to capture both rural life in the South, as well as urban backgrounds in New York City. Many of these urban paintings were centered in Harlem. The inspiration for “The Janitor Who Paints” came from Cloyde Boykin, a friend of Palmer’s. Boykin was also a painter who supported himself through janitorial work. Hayden once said, “I painted it because no one called Cloyde a painter; they called him a janitor.” Many people consider this painting to be an expression of the tough times Palmer was having.

I love this guy’s story telling.

John Heartfield

Of the Berlin group, John Heartfield remains the best known and revered as a result of his single-minded devotion to anti-Nazi political activism. However, his early montages were collaborative efforts that resemble the work of all the other Dadaists. He and George Grosz experimented with cut-up pieces of newspaper and photos of their fellow artists, and produced many of the early designs for Dada posters and manifestos.

Edward Burra

One of the oddest and most interesting artists I have come across.

BONA TIBERTELLI DE PISIS

BONA TIBERTELLI DE PISIS. 1926 – 2000. (Bona de Mandiargues) I hope I’m not talking about 2 artists. (Chalk it up to stupidity.) I was in Paris in the early 1970s which would have been this artist’s prime. Perhaps she walked by me in a book store. Or slapped my face in a cafe. Who knows how close we come to meeting each other in this world.

Joan Miro

Joan Miro was a revolutionary. He did not want to change us, so much as wake us up. We were mud with eyes and we had to open them.

Joan Miró i Ferrà (Catalan: [ʒuˈam miˈɾo]; 20 April 1893 – 25 December 1983) was a Catalan, Spanishpainter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona. A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his native city of Barcelona in 1975, and another, the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, was established in his adoptive city of Palma de Mallorca in 1981.

Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride. In numerous interviews dating from the 1930s onwards, Miró expressed contempt for conventional painting methods as a way of supporting bourgeois society, and famously declared an “assassination of painting” in favour of upsetting the visual elements of established painting. (Wikipedia)

Grete Stern

Like many women artists Grete Stern had an interesting life. Choosing the life of an artist was difficult for men, but for women there were many more obstacles including the chauvinism of their colleagues.

Grete Stern was an emigre from Nazi Germany who moved to England and finally to Argentina. The images in her work grow into new images. I find her work exciting and very clever. If I had seen her work when I was young I would have said that she had a great influence on me. Many of her(visual) ideas are similar to my own. But I only discovered her recently.Although much of her work had a commercial/utilitarian purpose, illustrating dreams of readers of a woman’s magazine, the images stand on their own without explanation.

My Hair Is On Fire

 

Alfred Eisenstaedt

Alfred Eisenstaedt (December 6, 1898 – August 23, 1995) was a German-born American photographer and photojournalist. One of the most prolific photographers of the twentieth century, he began his career in pre-World War II Germany, and after moving to the U.S., achieved prominence as a staff photographer for Life Magazine, which featured more than 90 of his pictures on its covers with over 2,500 photo stories published.

Among his most famous cover photographs was the V-J Day celebration in New York City of “an exuberant American sailor kissing a nurse in a dancelike dip [that] summed up the euphoria many Americans felt as the war came to a close.”^[1] Eisenstaedt was “renowned for his ability to capture memorable images of important people in the news, including statesmen, movie stars and artists” and for his candid photographs, taken with a small 35mmLeica camera and typically with only natural lighting.^[1]

Jaromir Funke

Jaromír Funke (1896–1945) was a pioneer of modern photography. In 1922, he set out on the road to abstraction, ultimately developing a school of his own: “Photogenism.” He responded to the inspiration of Cubism and also made exemplary works in the styles of New Objectivity and Constructivism. In the Twenties, he became one of the first photographers to accept Poetism and Surrealism. With the exception of Jaroslav Rössler, Funke was the only important Czechoslovak photographer to grasp the international context of avant-garde photography, painting, and sculpture.

Even a bottle of wine looks like the Gestapo. Suspicion and paranoia seem to whisper in every photo. (Or perhaps I am reading into his photographs because he worked before and during WW2.