Roland Heyder's Sexy Surrealism

Roland H. Heyder (1956 - ) is a German painter who, according to the latest information I could find, is based in Tenerife in the Canary Islands.

There are plenty of images of his work on the internet, but little in the way of biographical information. His web site is here, and from there you can link to "vita" for a few details. Heyder says he is self-taught and early-on was inspired by Salvador Dalí and Surrealism as well as Magical Realism.

I find his art more difficult to pigeonhole. Like Dalí, Heyder paints in a smooth, hard-edge style. But his subjects are seldom distorted in a Dalíesque manner. Nor is there any claim that he is tapping into his Freudian subconscious, as the actual Surrealists claimed (largely falsely, I think).

What Heyder does do is juxtapose items in wide-open settings that evoke the spatial feeling of Dalí and some other Surrealists. He also usually includes gorgeous, nude or partly-clad women in psychologically ambiguous situations.

It takes a lot of work to create paintings like Heyder's. Yet he has created a large number of them, so he's clearly a hard worker. Click on the images below to enlarge.

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Photo of Roland Heyder at work
His website states: "In terms of technique, I generally work on canvas prepared with at least two coats of gesso. I do a pencil sketch on paper, then on the canvas before painting with acrylic and then in oil." But this photo shows him painting directly in what seems to be oil in a top-down "window shade" manner. To do this, he would have to have spent time clearly defining his images and carefully establishing colors and their placement before staring the final painting.

4000 Miles from the Washington coast - 1986
Juxtapositions with a Surrealist feeling.

Bedrohtes Stilleben (Threatened Still Life) - 1995
More of the same, but with a whiff of Magical Realist Giorgio de Chirico.

Kapitulation - 1986

Museumseinbruch (Museum Break-In) - 1996

Die neue Welt (The New World) - 1990

Das Bild vom Frieren (Picture of Freezing) - 1984
Note the expression on the face of the woman at the left; this enlivens what otherwise would have been a static scene.

Das Castell - 2011
This is about as Surrealistic as Heyder gets.

Der alte Mann und das Meer (The Old Man and the Sea) - 1997
The title is the same as that of an Ernest Hemingway novella, though its subject was entirely different from what Heyder shows here.

Die Königin (The Queen) - 1998
Chess allegory.

Viktoria - 2012
Something to do with her -- or the African falls?

Jules Rolshoven: From Expatriate to Taos

Julius Rolshoven (1888-1930) spent about 40 years of his life in Italy, as this Wikipedia entry states. He was born in Detroit, studied art at Cooper Union, and then went off to Germany for a while before going to Italy where he studied under Frank Duveneck. After Italy entered the Great War, he moved to Taos, New Mexico where he soon became part of its art colony scene. Postwar, he continued to travel between Taos and Florence.

A somewhat different take on his biography is here. It says he was in Paris studying at the Académie Julian and didn't move to Florence more or less permanently until 1902. It mentions that he was "forced" to leave Italy. Perhaps that had to do with family ties to Germany.

Although there is little information about him on the internet and not many examples of his work, Rolshoven's lifestyle indicates that he was either a commercially successful painter or else had independent wealth, perhaps coming from his father's jewelry business.

His European-oriented paintings are usually pleasing and skillfully done. In Taos, his style shifted, perhaps due to the surroundings or maybe because of influence by other artists. I prefer his traditional works.

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The Singer Lady Lillian Hune Henschel (née Bailey) - 1896

Nude Model Reading a Sketchbook - c.1900

Young Woman in Florence

Assisi Market Girls

Dona Tosca - 1923

Taos War Chief

Which Victor Guerrier Painted These Pictures?

Not long ago I came across some frothy paintings of elegant women in various Paris settings. By their costumes, the period of those settings is the Belle Époque of the 1890s and early 1900s.

The artist was Victor Guerrier. Various web sites credit those paintings to a Victor Guerrier whose dates are 1893-1968. But there seems to have been another French painter named Victor Guerrier who lived 1858-1953. There is essentially no biographical information about either man.

Given his dates and the Belle Époque settings, it would seem that the earlier Guerrier should have been the artist. The style of the signatures on the paintings hints at that as well. But if all those art auction, etc. websites state that the 1893-1968 Guerrier was the artist, then he would have to have concentrated on the Belle Époque as an artistic faux-sentimentalist, having been a boy in those times.

If anyone knows the truth about this puzzling matter, please let us know in Comments.

Here are some of those paintings.

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À la terrasse

Cafe sociery
This looks to be set just before or after the Great War.

Élégantes à Paris
By the Luxembourg grounds, the Panthéon in the background. I don't notice the McDonald's I sometimes visit that should be at the far right of the image.

Femme Élégante

Flower shopping
Guerrier painted several flower shopping scenes.

La Brasserie Mollard

La promenade
Is that the Café de la Paix in the background?

The Terrace

Le menu

Scene on the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne (now the Avenue Foch)

Edward Okuń , Polish Nouveau-Symbolist

Around the time I visited Poland's National Museum, a few paintings by Edward Okuń (1872–1945) were in the same room as many of those by the more famous Symbolist Jacek Malczewski. But the gallery guidebook stressed that in portraits, his style tended to be Art Nouveau. His Wikipedia entry does not categorize him.

Okuń came from what the entry calls an aristocratic family, and he had an inheritance that probably left him free to pursue art pretty much as he desired. He began his training in Czarist Warsaw and them moved on to Munich and Paris. During the first two decades of the 20th century he was in Italy, thereby avoiding the Great War battles in Poland and only returned to Warsaw after the 1920-21 Soviet-Polish war. He continued to visit Italy and painted there. Okuń was not able to escape World War 2 and was in Warsaw during the 1944 uprising and German retaliation.

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Portrait of the Artist's Wife - 1904

Philistines - 1904

View Through Window - 1905

The Winner - 1910

Self-Portrait - 1913

Musica Sacra - 1915

The War and Us - 1923

Naples Bay and Vesuvio - 1937

The Retro World of Pierre de Mougins

There are plenty of images on the internet of Pierre de Mougins' paintings, but almost nothing in the way of biographical information. This link will have to do.

Mougins was born in 1966 in Antony, France (a little ways west of Orly airport), claims to be self-taught and inspired by the likes of de Chirico and 1920s painters. He has lived in Berlin in recent years where he has begun painting on stones.

The paintings that interest me the most have an Art Deco look to them. There is something about the passage of time that allows us to create an image (not necessarily accurate) in our minds that is a distillation of a past era. Which is part of what Mougins does, though he can't completely escape influences from his own times.

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De fête au café

Au Lapin Agile
The Lapin Agile was an artists' hangout on Montmartre around the turn of the 20th century. It still exists.

billiards

How Long is Now

Rue de la soie

Jazz club

La grande parade

Suze
Well, that's my guess as to the title. It could be reference to a French drink or possibly to 1930s cabaret singer Suzy Solidor, who the blonde strongly resembles.

Riviera scene

backstage

dancer

In the Auction Room

William Arthur Breakspeare, Victorian Painter

William Arthur Breakspeare (1855-1914) was from Birmingham, getting much of his art training there. He spent a brief period in Paris, and lived in London starting in 1881 while retaining ties to Birmingham. His Wikipedia entry contains those and a few other details. There is little else about him on the Internet.

Breakspeare could paint competently and was able to made a career as an artist in Victorian and Edwardian times. His subjects tended to be 17th century scenes, pianos and pretty women. And his interpretations of these were conventional most of the time. As is the case for many lesser-known artists, he occasionally could make paintings worth noting.

Here are examples of Breakspeare's paintings.

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The Contract
In theory, this might be an illustration or otherwise a reference to literature or an historical event because there is little intrinsic meaning in the depiction.

The Eve of Battle
The same applies here.  There is little in the way of the drama or tension I would expect in a real-world pre-battle situation.  In this painting, the men at the table seem quite calm and satisfied.  The cavalier at the right has a look of concern, but serves no dramatic purpose unless the painting is an illustration of an historical or literary source.

If Music be the Food of Love
Breakspeare usually included pianos where music was part of the action.  Here the man seems to be playing an organ.

Distant Thoughts
More of a sketch than a finished work, but interesting in that regard.

Resting
One of his better-known works.  Pretty fancy girl for a harvester.

The Alluring Student
Hmm.  A piano also beckons.

The Reluctant Pianist
This looks like the same piano and bench, but away from the window.

Blue Eyes
She is the same woman wearing the same dress as in the previous painting.

The End of the Evening
Finally, a scene that's not Victorian.  Very Edwardian in spirit, I'd say.