Vitro Nasu

In Memoriam Jerome Liebling

Jerome Liebling, acclaimed founder of Hampshire College’s photography and video school, dies at 87

A Brooklyn native whose father was a waiter, Liebling was a child of the Depression who served in the 82nd Airborne Division in World War II before going on to study at Brooklyn College on the GI Bill.

His students included Ken Burns

Butterfly Boy

Interview (with photos)

What were some of the things that you went out looking for when you first started?

Well—mostly just the street, and what it gave back. There were a few wonderful documentary photographers, especially Helen Levitt, who was present and whose work I saw. All of the good people were trying to bring back pieces of the world as honestly as possible.

I studied with Jerome Liebling 20 years ago (it was the semester when I realized that I should stop trying to be a photographer). He was a remarkable teacher – warm and encouraging, but he didn’t get in the way of his students, and he told the truth without telling us what to do. The same with his work. Some of the photographs he once exhibited in the college gallery have burned themselves into my brain. They were arresting and complex – visually complete, beautiful, but full of questions he didn’t try to answer for the viewer.
Artists and teachers like Liebling are rare these days. He will be missed. via

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Michael Cacoyannis

Michael Cacoyannis, who died on July 25 aged 89, was the first Greek film-maker to achieve international renown, later becoming a respected theatrical and operatic producer in Paris, Frankfurt and New York.

Iphigenia (youtube)

Trained as an actor, he was an outstanding director of other players, especially actresses. He gave Melina Mercouri her first screen role, in Stella, as a femme fatale; he put the dark, tragic Elli Lambetti on the international map in A Girl in Black; he made a star of Irene Papas in Electra (1961), and drew impressive ensemble playing from Papas, Katharine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave and Geneviève Bujold in his film of Euripides’s The Trojan Women (1971). In Zorba the Greek, he coaxed an excellent performance from Lila Kedrova in a part originally intended for Simone Signoret.

Cousteau and Cacoyannis (previous post)

The Berlin Affair directed by Liliana Cavani is based on Quick Sand or Manji (see below left book cover)

The original title of the film, Interno Berlinese, can be translated as Inside Berlin or Interior berlines. The story is based upon Jun’ichirō Tanizaki.’s novel Quicksand, Manji, better known as The Buddist Cross 1928 -1930.

Makioka Sisiters

Makioka sister was translated by Edward Sidensticker

Junichiro Tanizaki was born on 24 July 1886

Japanese novelist, poet, and essayist, who dealt with the influence of the West on the old cultural heritage of his native country. After publishing novels written in a fairly orthodox style, Tanizaki fused traditional Japanese storytelling and experimental narrative. He emphasized the fabrication as the basis for fiction, stating that in both his reading and his writing he was “uninterested in anything but lies.”
“I read somewhere the other day that men who are too fond of the ladies when they’re young generally turn into antique-collectors when they get old. Tea sets and paintings take the place of sex.” (from Some Prefer Nettles, 1928)

Henry Miller loved the Key directed by Kon Ichikawa (nominated for the best film at Cannes – read Miller at Cannes)

John Fowles and Tanizaki at Midnight Eye

Liliana Cavani directed The Night Porter and Repley’s Game.

Lucian Freud and two childrean
Lucian Freud dies at 88

For an artist who has in recent years been selling for $30m for his best portraits, it’s easy to forget how far he fell out of fashion in the 60s and 70s. His highly skilled, original, instantly recognisable, figurative work was eclipsed by the ephemeral stardust of abstract, often unskilled artists…

A Freud was always distinctively a Freud, with idiosyncratic features. For all my admiration for his work, his noses, for example, tended towards the over-droopy, I would say.
His work changed, too, over his very long career – a sign of an original, curious artistic mind. (Harry Mount)

BBC obit (image + a video clip)

Painter’s room

Esther Freud
and her sisiter.. (see two clips of Hiideous Kinky starring Kate Winslet)

See more photos and paintings here, great collection

See Caroline (his second wife) and other images

Norman Jewison: 50 years in film (NPR) a true superstar

Hurricane trailer

Happy birthday Norman Jewison!
July 21, 1926
In the Heat of the nIght
Jesus Christ Superstar
Moon Struck
A Sodier’s Story
And Justice for All

Hansmann is a Berlin based photographer.
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Photographer find beauty in lost places

A Berlin-based photographer has captured the beauty of forgotten buildings from the communist era. Ex-Soviet hospitals and dried-up German breweries are among the dilapidated settings for the stunning series of photos.

See slideshow here

Drive In Theater

The Orpheum Theatre opened on April 15, 1912 – the same day the Titanic sank. Located on Water Street in New Bedford, Massachusetts, it was part of a Beaux-Arts building that was built in 1910 by a French-Canadian group known as Le Club des Francs-Tireurs (The French Sharpshooters Club).

See more abandoned Theaters (Previous post)

Theater Stories – Hiroshi Sugimoto, Orinda theater..more musing on this subject (Previous Post)

Old dog 1
Ginger, 12 years old Devil’s Tower, Wyoming

Senior Dogs Across America photographs and text by Nancy LeVine

Eight years ago, I began traveling the United States to photograph senior dogs.

Old dog 2
Gussy Sue, 15 years old, Laurel, Montana

Photo by me
Las Vegas New Mexico – Plaze Hotel (Previous post) – and not an abandoned place.

(Art/Graphics on youtube are by Serge Kantorowicz)

Max Jacob by Modigiliani

Max Jacob July 12 1876
Amedeo Modigliani July 12 1884
Max was 8 years older than Modi, they were both born on July 12.

Anna Akhmatova as an acrobat by Modi

Modi, Jeanne and Anna Akhmatova (previous post – read about Anna Akhmatova’s crucial role in Modigliani’s art)

(via)
Painting by Max Jacob, “Orpheus Attacked by the Brigands,” 1928, Philadelphia Museum of Art
For Jacob, an openly gay apostate Jew, the myth also carried personal significance. When Orpheus loses his wife Eurydice in the Underworld, he renounces women for the love of men, thus providing Jacob with an affirming image of homosexuality from classical antiquity.

Max called Modigliani Dedo..

Picasso said: ‘There’s only one man in Paris who knows how to dress and that is Modigliani.’ He didn’t say that as a joke. Modigliani, poor as he was, even to the extent of having to borrow three sous for the underground to go to the literary evenings at the Closerie des Lilas, was not only refined, but had an eclectic elegance. He was the first man in Paris to wear a shirt made of cretonne.

Max Jacob by Picasso (Via )

1876-1944. Met Picasso in 1901 and for some time shared a studio with him. Afterward, and for many years to follow, he lived three doors away from the artist on the Rue Ravignan. One of the key members of the group that formed around Apollinaire. A painter as well as poet, Jacob lived in extreme poverty, working at all manner of jobs throughout his life. Although born a Jew, he converted to Catholicism in 1915, six years after having a vision of Christ. In 1921 he moved from Paris to the small village of Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire, close to a Benedictine church, where he remained until his arrest by the Nazis in February 1944. He died the following month in the concentration camp at Drancy. (via)

Update: Max and Picasso were both so poor they shared the same overcoat, hat and gloves in winter. There was one bed. One went out and used the coat, the other stayed in and used the bed. What resolve! (via email thanks to Janet Paparelli.)

Love Is Such an Old-Fashioned Word – by Blaire Broussa (Via the Walrus)
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world” — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Read this delightful story here

When Felix Bronislav met Helen Ferapont in 1937, she was already an expert in Panini’s sutras on Sanskrit grammar. She was working on her dissertation under Nikolai Trubetzkoy in Prague, and her Ph.D. thesis was to be a discussion of the deification of speech found in Hindu Scripture. (continue here)

Blaire Broussa the winner of SLS contest First place

Blaire Broussa’s blog Voice in the Wilderness

Excerpt from Love is such an old fashioned word

Helen went to revolutionary China to study both Mandarin and the praying-mantis school of Tai-Chi in Shandong province, writing verbose and melancholy letters back to Felix, ending each epistle with luxurious postscripts in a calligraphy that dripped libidinously off the page:

Cy Twombly dies in Rome

The artist, who was living in Italy and had suffered with cancer for several years, was hospitalised a few days ago, according to Eric Mezil.

Cy Twombly Gallery in Houston in front of the gallery’s largest painting, “Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor.”

Cy Twombly – April 25, 1928 – July 5, 2011

Guardian obit

Edwin Parker “Cy” Twombly Jr was born in Lexington, Virginia. Both his parents came from Maine. His father was a sports instructor and former baseball player whom Twombly admiringly described as still doing back flips at the age of 40: he was known as “Cy” after the legendary pitcher “Cyclone” Young. Twombly inherited his father’s nickname but not his athleticism.

Obit from Artsbeat NYtimes

Each line he made, he said, was “the actual experience” of making the line, adding: “It does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization.” Years later he described this more plainly. “It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture.”

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Q & A Cy Twombly with David Sylvester Art In America

Thicket

Wilder Shores of Love (see his sculptures)

His photographs also here

See paintings here (Guggenheim 2008)

Obit by Evan Garza (Huffpo with a nice slideshow)

Herman
and the Cat.. another photo from writing & the feline muse.

Herman Hesse Statue at Calw
On Monday 2nd July 1877 at 18:30 Hermann Hesse was born in a flat on the second floor of Marktplatz 6, Calw, opposite the town hall, and lived there for the greater part of his youth.

“Gluck” means… luck, fortune, happiness. ‘The very sound of it’, Hesse says, ‘brings forth that feeling of lightness, life and joy.’

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. It is a very serious task, young man, and possibly a tragic one. HERMANN HESSE, The Glass Bead Game

The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught – HERMANN HESSE, The Glass Bead Game

Ninon Hesse – an art historian who married Hesse and became very important in his life (photos here)

See his paintings here

Max Von Sydow and the Steppenwolf and Tango Steppenwolf (remixed – Pierre Clementi, Max Von Sydow and Dominque Sanda)

Siddhartha trailer – (cinematography by Sven Nykvist)

Herman Hesse wiki

Sigmund Freud “praised Peter Camenzind as one of his favorite readings.