Felice Casorati was an Italian painter, sculptor, and printmaker. The paintings for which he is most noted include figure compositions, portraits and still lifes, which are often distinguished by unusual perspective effects. Born in Novara he showed an early interest in music and art. To please his parents he studied law at the University of Padua until 1906, but his ambition to be a painter was confirmed in 1907 when a painting of his was shown in the Venice Biennale. The works he produced in the early years of his career are naturalistic in style, but after 1910 the influence of the symbolists and particularly of Gustav Klimt turned him toward a more visionary approach. In 1915 he had a solo exhibition at the Rome Secession III, where he showed several paintings and the first of his sculptures. His military service in World War I began that year and lasted until his discharge in 1917. In 1918, "intrigued by the decadent atmosphere of Turin with its sinister views", he settled there with his mother and two sisters. His works of the next decade typify, in their emphasis on geometry and formal clarity, the "return to order" then prevalent in the arts as a reaction to the war. Although many critics found his work cold, cerebral, and academic, Casorati achieved international recognition as a leading figure in this movement. Often working in tempera, Casorati drew inspiration from his study of Renaissance masters, especially Piero della Francesca, as in his 1922 portrait entitled Silvana Cenni. This symmetrical composition of a seated woman in a white dress is perhaps the best-known of the artist's works. In it, the careful rendering of volumes results paradoxically in a sense of unreality which is characteristic of Casorati's art. In 1925, Rafaello Giolli summarized the disconcerting aspects of Casorati's art—"The volumes have no weight in them, and the colors no body. Everything is fictitious: even the living lack all nervous vitality. The sun seems to be the moon ... nothing is fixed or definite"—and argued that these very qualities give his work its originality, and connect him to the metaphysical painters. Casorati himself wrote, in 1931: "In taking up, against me, the old polemic of classicism and romanticism, people rail against intellectualized and scholastic order, accuse my art of being insincere, and willfully academic—in a word, of being neoclassical. ... since my art is born, so to speak, from within, and never has its source in changing "impressions", it is quite natural that ... static forms, and not the fluid images of passion, should be reflected in my works". Briefly arrested in 1923 for his involvement with an anti-Fascist group, Casorati subsequently avoided antagonizing the regime. Beginning in 1923, he opened his studio to the young art students of Turin. One of his famous students was the Italian painter Enrico Accatino. After 1930 the severity of Casorati's earlier style softened somewhat and his palette brightened. He continued to exhibit widely, winning many awards, including the First Prize at the Venice Biennale of 1938. He was also involved in stage design. He died in Turin in 1963.
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Image size: 1392 x 1600 pixel. 351 KB Date: Saturday, 19 February 1944 Place: USS Arthur Middleton, off Engebi, Eniwetok Atoll, Marshalls Islands Photographer: Ray R. Platnick United States Marine Corps Private Theodore James Miller (February 12, 1925 - March 24, 1944) of Hennepin County, Minnesota assigned to Company K, 3rd Battalion, 22nd Marine Independent Regiment returns to Coast Guard-manned attack transport USS Arthur Middleton (APA-25) at 1400 Hours after two days of combat on Engebi. Engebi was the first of the Eniwetok Atoll to be invaded by American forces. In Operation "Fragile" the 1st and 2nd Battalions landed on February 18, 1944, with 3rd Battalion in reserve. Opposing the landing force was Colonel Toshio Yano and the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Mobile Shipborne Brigade, which numbered 736 officers and men, including 44 personnel from the 61st Keibitai (garrison) detachment. In addition to his men's rifles and sidearms, Yano had available two flame throwers, two 75mm mountain guns, three 20mm guns, two 120mm naval guns, two twin-mount 13mm AA machine guns, three light tanks and a variety of machine guns, mortars, and grenade dischargers. Because they themselves landed only six weeks before the American onslaught, the Japanese did not have time to prepare the kind of defenses encountered at Tarawa and Iwo Jima. Instead they prepared trenches covered with palm fronds and camouflage called "spider holes." Marines threw in smoke grenades, pinpointed the exits, and attacked with mortars, flamethrowers and explosives. In the attack on Engebi American losses were 78 killed, 166 wounded, and 7 missing, totaling 251 casualties. All of Engebi's defenders were killed, except for nineteen prisoners taken. Miller himself was killed during the invasion of Ebon Atoll a month later. 25 Japanese, including six civilians (two women and two children among them), put up a 20-minute fire-fight that left Miller and another Marine dead and eight others wounded. Seventeen Japanese, including one woman, were killed. Marshallese natives brought the children to safety behind American lines. Ebon was declared secure after the Japanese radio station was destroyed and all Japanese civilians killed or captured. Ebon was abandoned by American forces on March 25, 1944. This photo, widely distributed in the United States after Miller's death, was one of the few to openly portray the stress of combat to the American public. Source: National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) http://www.worldwar2database.com/gallery3/index.php/wwii1674
Original Second World War artworks produced as propaganda for the Ministry of Information have gone online and are now freely available on Wikimedia Commons. More than 350 pieces have gone online so far, but there are plans to digitise the entire collection of almost 2,000 art works. We present a selection here. See this Wikimedia page for more.
Digital artist Marina Amaral specializes in photo colorization and recently updated the last images of a 14-year-old Polish prisoner in Auschwitz. Breathing life into the black-and-white pictures, Amaral managed to visually emphasize the tragic past of Czeslawa Kwoka.
Grese, Irma, was born on 07-10-1923 in Wrechen, to Alfred Grese, a dairy worker, and Berta Grese. Irma Grese was the third of five children. In 1936, her mother committed suicide by drinking hydrochloric after discovering that Alfred Grese had had an affair with a local pub owner's daughter.
Thread by @WhoresofYore: This is Claude Cahun (1894-1954), the best Jewish, French, gay, writer, photographer, surrealist, and anti-fascist W you never heard of. Thread Cahun was born Lucy Schwob, in 1894 to a prominent intellectual, Jewish family – whic…
Найденные черепа богов или демонов, возможно, доказывают контакты Третьего рейха с инопланетянами, считают специалисты.
Photograph by Pierre Jahan/Archives des museés nationaux Beginning in 1938, the threat of war prompted a large-scale evacuation of France’s public art collections. The storage sites ch…
Soldiers separated from their loved ones during World War II gazed at photographs of their sweethearts, and wrote love letters in the hopes that one day, they would be reunited and start a family. One soldier, Gilbert Bradley, wrote his letters, too, but he could never keep a photo of…
Art and Artists, Paintings, Painters, Prints, Printmakers, Illustration, Illustrators
With the release of our latest Bolt Action book ‘Germany Strikes‘ what better excuse do we need to revisit a splendid guide to the uniforms and insignia of the Polish army during the early stages of WWII. If you’re interested in how to best paint and collect a Polish army to face the German and...
Acoustic location was used from mid-WW1 to the early years of WW2 for the passive detection of aircraft by picking up the noise of the engines. Passive acoustic location involves…
Grainy black and white footage from in 1944 shows seven bare-footed women outside a brick house said to be a military-run brothel in Songshan, China, as it was liberated from Japan.
Durante los conflictos bélicos del siglo XX, especialmente las dos Guerras Mundiales, tejer se convirtió en un asunto de capital importancia. Fue doblemente útil: servía para proveer de prendas de …
A look at kissing during World War II.
Much as once a week I like to take time off to cover warships (Wednesdays), on Sunday, I like to cover military art and the painters, illustrators, sculptors, and the like that produced them. Comba…
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Learn about the Altaussee Salt Mines that became the storage place of 6500 pieces of Nazi-looted art rescued by the Monuments Men at the end of WWII.
L'histoire de l'Humanité est pleine de moments absolument incroyables. Certains sont tragiques, d'autres sont magnifiques, d'autres tout simplement drôles....
It was the loneliness of the 12-year-old that first drew me, Emma Craigie, to Helga Goebbels. She was the oldest of the six children taken by their parents, Joseph and Magda Goebbels, into Hitler’s Berlin bunker on April 22 1945. Their tale had barely been written about and had never been the subject of a... Read more »
Studying history helps us understand how past events have shaped the present. We not only learn about ourselves and how we came to be but also develop the ability to avoid mistakes and create better paths for our societies.
Art.IWM ART LD 626. image: A portrait of Pearson on duty looking up at the sky and holding a respirator.
A new exhibition spotlights images captured by Henryk Ross, a Polish Jew who had arrived at the Lodz Ghetto with a camera, secretly using it to document the suffering within
Jean-Marie Donat’s TeddyBär collection of surreal photographs from the mid-20th century proves it is still possible to discover genuine unearthliness in a vintage find
Sve o Finskoj i Fincima, kulturi, muzici, istoriji, običajima, hrani, umetnosti, jeziku, prirodi i svemu što čini Finsku tako čarobnom.
The remarkable frame is one of 1,270 images that Richard Schneider digitized from a trove of 41,000 glass negatives created by Hitler's personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann.
