Nicholas Fox Weber's Blog, page 26

Diana by Despiau

The new art was not just different in style and subject matter.

What distinguished it above all was its candor. That candor

was about materials, about artistic technique, and about

the human psyche. Crowninshield’s Despiau bronze

sculpture Diana was reproduced in Town & Country

magazine in March 1929, precisely when it was being

shown in the exhibition being held in Rooms 207 and 208

of the Harvard Cooperative Society Building. There was a

brief text under the illustration. The piece was described

as “unaffected and straightforward” ­–­­­odd values

for Town & Country perhaps, but essential to the goals

of the three young men at Harvard.

PATRON SAINTS FIVE REBELS WHO OPENED AMERICA TO A NEW ART 1928 –1943

 

 

 

 

 

Diana by Despiau, from Town & Country magazine, 1929

Warburg House

The art that Eddie Warburg knew best before college was what he

could find by walking downstairs in his parents’ house. This was a

neo-Gothic Francois Premier­–style mansion overlooking the Central

Park reservoir at 5th Avenue and Ninety-second Street (today it is the Jewish Museum).

PATRON SAINTS FIVE REBELS WHO OPENED AMERICA TO A NEW ART

1928-1943

The Warburg House at 1109 5th Avenue, c. 1920

The art that Eddie Warburg knew best before college was w...

The art that Eddie Warburg knew best before college was what he

could find by walking downstairs in his parents’ house. This was a

neo-Gothic Francois Premier­–style mansion overlooking the Central

Park reservoir at 5th Avenue and Ninety-second Street (today it is the Jewish Museum).

PATRON SAINTS FIVE REBELS WHO OPENED AMERICA TO A NEW ART

1928-1943

The Warburg House at 1109 5th Avenue, c. 1920

BPL Murals

On Lincoln Kirstein, Patron Saint

At home in Boston he studied decorated books and bought volumes illustrated by Gustave Doré,

Aubrey Beardsley, and Arthur Rackham, of whose work the best collection was in the public library.

Lincoln also greatly admired the large allegorical murals there: Puvis de Chavannes’s The Muses of

Inspiration, Edwin Austin Abbey’s The Quest and Achievement of the Holy Grail, and John Singer

Sargent’s Judaism  and Christianty.

The Hound & Horn

[image error]The one rule was that whatever (Lincoln) Kirstein cared about,

he cared about vehemently. His freshman year at Harvard he

and some associates started an undergraduate magazine called

The Hound & Horn, the first issue of which came out in the fall of 1927.

Lincoln Kirstein

Lincoln Kirstein at twenty-two and Edward M.M. Warburg at eighteen

(both in their junior year at Harvard), starting something they called the

Harvard Society for Contemporary Art (housed in two small rooms on the

second floor of a building on Harvard Square)…exhibiting, for the first time,

the works of Lachaise, Thomas Hart Benton, Arthur B. Davis, Edward Hopper…

presenting Buckminster Fuller’s then shocking and revolutionary Dymaxion

House and Alexander Calder’s astonishing and enchanting Circus…

establishing a vital precedent for New York City’s Museum of Modern Art,

which was later to introduce the work of Modigliani, Seurat, Arp, Kirchner,

Rodin, Kandinsky, Klee, and Brancusi…bringing George Balanchine to this

country to create the first American ballet school and company.

Balthus – A Conversation with Nicholas Fox Weber

Read a Conversation about Balthus with Nicholas Fox Weber here:

http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/1099/foxweber/interview.html

 

MAN RAY, Balthus, Gelatin silver print. Circa 1930.

Gabriele Münter, Wassily Kandinsky, 1906

Gabriele Münter, Wassily Kandinsky, 1906.

The year before Münter painted this, Kandinsky

had started to live with her in Munich, where he

had gone from Russia after practicing law in

Moscow. He went to Germany to devote himself

to art full-time.

                                    –The Bauhaus Group

Sinthian Tennis

Inaugurated in March 1998, the Sinthian Medical

Center was the first of its kind to be built by

Le Kinkeliba in Senegal. Plans have been made

to build a tennis court near the medical center

in memory of Pierre Otolo’s son Cris, who died at

age fifteen. In the meantime, Pierre had the idea

that we could give the locals a taste of the sport

by equipping them with rackets, and so he gave

me six fine new rackets and a bag of old tennis

balls to take with me on this trip.

Sinthian Part 2

The temperature was 113 degrees Fahrenheit. Nonetheless, Yuki

and Moustapha and I headed out into the dirt parking area at

Sinthian to demonstrate tennis. The ball bounced amazingly well.

Then Saliou, another Senegalese friend who works with us, joined

in, and then I handed a racket to one of the local boys who

was watching, and gave him a few pointers. The boy was a natural,

and soon enough we were swapping rackets back and forth.

Nick Murphy and several other local kids joined the game, with

players going in and out.  – NFW, April 17, 2013