Fernando Botero

André Lhote (1885 - 1962)

La Vallée du Célé or Paysage du Lot

signed A. LHOTE (lower left)

oil on canvas

98,5 x 99,4 cm; 38¾ x 39⅛ in.

Painted in 1912.

Martyr Hill

Artist: O Louis Guglielmi (American, 1906-1956)

Date: c. 1933-1934

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, United States

Description

The eerie loneliness of Louis Guglielmi's painting Martyr Hill seems surreal. Yet the Grand Army of the Republic Hall in Peterborough, New Hampshire, actually looks much as it does in this painting. Guglielmi, who spent many summers at the MacDowell artist colony in Peterborough, knew the place well. He altered the scene slightly but effectively to create an uneasy, melancholy mood reflecting the troubles of the time.

Sweeping diagonal lines draw the viewer's attention to the GAR Hall, with its spiky finials and a cannon aimed to menace the viewer. In fact, the cannon stands on the opposite side of the hall’s lawn. Guglielmi removed the windows from the hall’s side wall, creating the solid red parallelogram he placed very near the dark front wall of the house in the foreground. This causes the eye to lurch disconcertingly from foreground to background. Nothing in the painting casts a shadow - the buildings therefore look oddly insubstantial. The sculpted bronze soldier on the Civil War Memorial, his head bent in sorrow, underlines the lack of a living person in the scene. The Nubanusit River flows under a bridge and out toward the viewer, who is left with no place to stand.

Kate Diehn-Bitt (German, 1900-1978)

An automatic translation:“Born in Schöneberg near Berlin in 1900, Kate (originally: Käthe) Diehn-Bitt was a middle-class daughter. Her training took place exclusively in various private art schools; After early marriage and the birth of her son in 1920, she began studying at the – again – private art academy in Dresden in 1929–31, where Woldemar Winkler (1902–2004) became her teacher, who later described her as “a very clever one , very self-confident, emancipated personality”. The Dresden art scene around Otto Dix, Otto Griebel and others must have been as impressive for Diehn-Bitt as the political atmosphere in the city. 

Back in Rostock, she set up her first studio in 1933; In 1935 she exhibited together with the sculptor Hertha von Guttenberg in the gallery of Wolfgang Gurlitt in Berlin - it would take until 1948 until another exhibition is dedicated to her in Schwerin. 

During the Nazi era, Kate Diehn-Bitt’s stepfather, Dr. Leo Glaser persecuted as a Jew; she herself and her work were deemed  “foreign”. After the end of the war, Diehn-Bitt was initially involved in cultural policy in the newly founded GDR, but after being sentenced to paint “not in a forward-looking or optimistic manner”, she withdrew from all functions in the 1950s and died in Rostock in 1978. All of the political-historical upheavals of the 20th century in Germany can be seen in her biography and work.”

https://www.kulturstiftung.de

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