Jacques Le Moyne
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_le_Moyne
1564 —
A French artist and member of Jean Ribault’s expedition to the New World.
Illustrated Native American (Floridian) life and culture
Also the Flora and Fauna of North Florida
Where Ponce de Leon had landed 50 years earlier.
Until well into the 20th century, knowledge of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues was extremely limited, and largely confined to the footnotes of inaccessible ethnographic bibliographies, where he figures as the writer and illustrator of a short history of Laudonniere’s attempt in 1564-5 to establish a Huguenot settlement in Florida.
In 1922, however, Spencer Savage, librarian of the Linnean Society, discovered a group of fifty-nine watercolors of plants contained in a small volume, purchased by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1856 solely for its fine sixteenth-century French binding.
The discovery shed new light on Le Moyne as one of the first, and most important artists to explore and document The New World.
Savage’s discovery prepared the way for subsequent attribution to Le Moyne, as the creator of many other important groups of drawings and watercolors representing France in The Renaissance.
William Bartram
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bartram
1773 —
Embarked upon a four-year journey through eight southern colonies.
Bartram made many drawings and took notes on the native flora and fauna,
and the native American Indians (Floridians).
In 1774, he explored the St. Johns River,
Wrote of encounters with aggressive alligators,
Arriving at a Seminole village called Cuscowilla,
Bartram was met with a torch-lit, celebratory feast,
Happily hosted by Ahaya The Cowkeeper, Chief of the Alachua people.
Ahaya was amused by Bartram’s interest in the local plants and animals.
He began calling the Englishman “Puc Puggy” (The Flower Hunter).
Bartram continued his exploration, moving south into the Alachua Savannah.
(Paynes Prairie)
He wrote and illustrated of his discoveries in his book,
Travels through North & South Carolina, East & West Florida,
Cherokee Country, and The Country Of Chactaws.
Including a detailed account of the soil and natural productions of those regions,
combined with the equally keen Observations on the Manners of the Indians.
Published in 1791, the document is now simply known as BARTRAM’S TRAVELS,
considered one of the most important documents of the late 18th Century.
and which is today simply known as Bartram’s Travels.
E. G. Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis, in their book,
Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley,
name Bartram as “the first naturalist who penetrated the dense tropical forests of Florida.”
John James Audubon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_James_Audubon
1820 — The Birds Of America
1831 — Arrives in St. Augustine
The Naturalist, Ornithologist, Writer, and Artist arrives in St. Augustine, Florida.
He hunts birds, and visits plantations throughout North Florida.
Travels extensively on the Halifax and St. Johns Rivers.
Audubon’s next Florida adventure starts in Charleston, South Carolina, boarding a large cutter waiting in the harbor. After a five-day sail down the southeast coast, his expedition reaches Indian Key, a small island in the shallows of Cape Sabal, on the eastern edge of Florida Bay.
It is there he meets (and hires) James Egan, a Bahamian man who had moved to the Keys ten years before, and who become a most trusted and experienced local guide.
It was James who introduced Audubon to the extrordinary rookery on Sandy Key, home to thousands of Tropical Birds, many nesting at the time.
“ Seldom have I experienced greater pleasure than when on the Florida Keys, under a burning sun, after pushing my bark for miles over a soapy flat, I have striven all day long, tormented by myriads of insects, to procure a Heron new to me, and have, at length, succeeded in my efforts.”
With Egan’s help, Audubon made it as far as The Dry Tortugas, discovering many more birds, and an abundance of sealife, including the Green Turtles, for which the expanse of shallow coral reefs is named.
After a stop to drop off Egan back on Indian Key, Audubon made his way back to Charleston, excited by what he had see at Florida’s most southern tip.
The Second Seminole War stopped his scheduled 1837 expedition of Florida’s west coast, but he did return, and on future trips, stopped to visit his old friend (original guide) James Egan, who had built a home at the mouth of the Miami River, where he lived for 3o years.
Jeff Cardenas
1995 —
DELUXE SIGNED LIMITED FIRST EDITION OF CARDENAS’ MARQUESA, ONE OF ONLY 52 COPIES PRINTED,
WITH AN ADDITIONAL SUITE OF SIX PHOTOGRAPHIC PRINTS BY THE AUTHOR
CARDENAS, JEFFREY
Marquesa: A Time & Place with Fish.
(Stone Harbor, New Jersey)
Meadow Run Press, (1995)
Jeffrey Cardenas’ journal of his six-week sojourn in the Marquesas is delightful — fine observation of marine natural history and a subtle feel for a silent and beautiful place, the whole infused with a reflective harmony born of the writer’s uncommon contentment in his isolation.”
— Peter Matthiessen
Octavo, original full black morocco,
w/ six loose black-and-white (5X7) photographic prints
printed buff paper folder, original cloth clamshell box.
$1250.
Deluxe signed limited first edition, number 19 of 47 copies for sale (out of an entire edition of 52 copies), with an additional suite of six black-and-white photographic prints of underwater landscapes shot by the author in the Marquesas and housed in the original printed paper folder, housed together in the original clamshell box.
The six black-and-white photographs in the special suite, which depict underwater landscapes in the Marquesas, were all taken by the author and were all printed from the original negatives. Published the same year as the first trade edition.
A beautiful copy in fine condition.
“The fishing is great, but Marquesa is much more than a book about great fishing. Jeff Cardenas’ book is a meditation, an evocation of a place so perfect and sensuous that putting it down gave me a momentary sense of loss and nostalgia for a place I have never yet been. It was as if I were stepping into a Walter Anderson painting.”
Atlantic Ave. b/ Bruce Helander
Gift to Wendy
Palm Beach Cottage
Coca Cola Wall
Mother Theresa w/Machine Gun/ Assault Rifle
Freedom Tower
Florida’s Artistic Past
Boca Raton Museum of Art
b/ Joseph B. Treaster
Dec. 4, 2018
MIAMI — Winslow Homer loved fishing for tarpon in the Florida Keys and along the Gulf Coast. John Singer Sargent dropped into Ormond Beach to paint a portrait of John D. Rockefeller and visit friends in Miami. Louis Comfort Tiffany, of stained-glass fame, went to St. Augustine for his wife’s health and later lived and painted in the winters in Miami.
Long before Art Basel Miami Beach brought sizzling cultural glamour to South Florida, some of America’s best-known artists — and some not as well known — were laying down an eclectic trail of art in a state best known for its beaches, unfailing sunshine and end-of-the-beyond characters.
The artists and such renowned photographers as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange created a significant body of Florida work that has quietly accumulated and rarely been exhibited.
Now, during Art Basel Miami Beach, an art museum about an hour’s drive up the coast from Miami is showing scores of paintings and photographs that provide glimpses of Florida as it morphed from wild frontier to vacationland and, eventually, to one of the most populous states. Most of the work in the show at the Boca Raton Museum of Art,
“Imagining Florida: History and Myth in the Sunshine State,” is from the late 1800s and the first half of the 20th century.
One engraving of a magnolia is from 1754.
The show runs through March 24
A montage of seascapes and landscapes, portraits of elegant people, working people, sunsets and beaches and swamps, logging and road building, alligators, Native Americans, chain gangs and scenes from Eatonville, a once and always small town near Orlando in the middle of the state, one of the first black communities to coalesce in America after emancipation.
The Florida work lacks the unifying stylistic threads and deliberateness of, say,
The Hudson River Valley School or Texas Regionalism.
Yet it reflects the uncharted, herky-jerky way that Florida came to be Florida.
“This is an important story to be told,” said Irvin M. Lippman, the executive director of the Boca museum. “It’s a diverse story, an eclectic story, a never-ending story.”
Mr. Lippman said he considered souvenirs from the decades of pre-Disney roadside attractions and gift shops in Florida as noteworthy. And he is displaying a stuffed alligator, a hand-painted photograph from the Parrot Jungle and other irresistible and, these days, seldom-seen mementos.
“Why not extend the conversation?” he asked. Like the painters and the photographers, he said, the souvenir makers “were also creating memories.”
Some artists and photographers went to Florida on assignment as illustrators for magazines and newspapers. Some were invited by foundations and wealthy patrons. Some were drawn by family connections. Others were among the tens of thousands of Americans sent to Florida for military training in World War II. A few were home grown.
Florida was a getaway place for Homer for nearly 20 years beginning in the mid-1880s. After working with Rockefeller, Sargent, on his one trip to Florida in 1917, painted portraits in Miami and scenes at James Deering’s Villa Vizcaya.
Tiffany built a winter home in Miami in the early 1920s, and in 1925 he painted a beach scene that is in the show.
Henry Flagler, the Florida developer and a founder, with Rockefeller, of Standard Oil, set up artists’ studios in his Hotel Ponce de León in St. Augustine.
“It was one his strategies for attracting tourists,” said Jennifer Hardin, the curator of the paintings, watercolors and engravings.
Frederick Carl Frieseke, an Impressionist, lived as a child with an uncle in Jacksonville. He painted the show’s “Hunting Alligators, Pink Sea” and “Fishing, Jacksonville,” from memory, decades later in Giverny, the village near Paris that Claude Monet made famous.
Frederic Remington stopped over in Tampa on assignment for The New York Journal to illustrate the Spanish-American War in Cuba.
Ms. Hardin, the chief curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Fla., until 2015, found some of the paintings unframed in the files of a New York gallery and in storage at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington.
WPA —
Hurricane Monument (Islamorada)
Miami Beach Post Office (Ponce de Leon Landing)
Dupont Building (Cypress Ceiling)
CHRISTO —
Pink Islands / Biscayne Bay
Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Christo Vladimirov Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude
a married couple who created environmental works of art.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude were born on the same day,
June 13, 1935
Christo in Gabrovo, Bulgaria
Jeanne-Claude in Morocco.
Periods:
Contemporary art,
Nouveau réalisme
Notable work: Running Fence; The Gates; The Floating Piers
Known for: Environmental art
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG —
American painter
Born: October 22, 1925, Port Arthur, TX
Died: May 12, 2008, Captiva, FL
Milton Ernest “Robert” Rauschenberg was an American painter and graphic artist
whose early works anticipated the pop art movement.
Rauschenberg is well known for his “combines” of the 1950s,
in which non-traditional materials and objects
were employed in various combinations.
Periods:
Postmodernism,
Contemporary art,
Modernism,
Abstract expressionism,
Modern art,
Pop art,
Neo-Dada
Movies: Robert Rauschenberg: Man at Work, Chuck Close
Influenced by: Marcel Duchamp, Josef Albers, Tatyana Grosman
Quotes
There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.
You begin with the possibilities of the material.
I did a twenty foot print and John Cage is involved in that because he was the only person I knew in New York who had a car and who would be willing to do this.
