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Yearly Archives: 2020
Ariadne F. Naxos [born 1959]
[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa.]
NAXOS, Ariadne F. (born 1959)
Fortress of Solitude
2020
oil on canvas / 16 inches by 16 inches
The title suggests a connection with Kal-El, a fictional character from popular culture better known as Clark Kent. But the image itself is more reminiscent of the conclusion of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the creature’s trek north into the arctic and oblivion.
Ms Naxos attended the Atelier Fusilli in Rome where she studied with Sergio Carbonara.
This and another of her works have been given to the collection in honor of the “Baron Corvo Festival” held at Northwest Iowa Normal College in 1913 — with the hope that it will be staged again soon.
David Hahn [contemporary]
[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]
HAHN, David (contemporary)
“Moonlit Pasture”
oil on canvas panel / 8 inches by 10 inches
n.d.
Hahn is a contemporary Bucks County artist represented by several galleries. One of them says of him that:
Hahn’s work strives for an atmospheric harmony and symmetry that evolves from the landscape. His compositions are achieved by a balancing of color, bringing contrasting hues into areas dominated by opposing colors, thus, creating a mosaic unified by the patterns of light. The reality of trees, brooks, and waterfalls loose themselves in a visual transcendent poetry.
In his twenty years of painting, Hahn has studied other American Impressionists, Edward Redfield and his student, George Sotter, in particular, giving his style roots in the French Impressionism of the 19th Century. Many Americans, Redfield among them, studied under the French Impressionists and brought the school of thinking back to this country. The Pennsylvania Impressionism that evolved from this trans-Atlantic school has many distinctive painters, each seeking to transfer the energy of a moment’s vision onto canvas.
Hahn has exhibited throughout Bucks County and has taken top awards in several of the area’s juried shows, among them are the Tinicum Arts Festival, The Riverside Festival of the Arts, and the Chestnut Hill Fall for the Arts. He has, also, been the subject of three one man exhibitions at the Stover Mill Gallery in Tinicum Township. In April, Hahn was awarded Best of Show and Honorable Mention in the Doylestown Art League’s 2006 47th Annual Members Juried Show. In July 2006, he was awarded Honorable Mention at the Tinicum Arts Festival. In 2007, he was awarded the George Christian Award in the Doylestown Art League’s Juried Exhibition, 4th prize in the Lititz Juried Art Show and 2nd prize in the Tinicum Arts Festival. In September 2007, Hahn participated in the 78th Juried Art Exhibition at Phillips Mill.
The melancholy color palette invites comparison with another small work, “Woman in a Park at Evening“, a much earlier piece by Antonio Maria Aspettati.
This is one of a group of five works given anonymously in memory of Amity Burroughs Flynn.
Edmund E. Niemann [1909-2005]
[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]
NIEMANN, Edmund E. (1909-2005)
“Plateau”
ink and casein on paper / 18 inches by 22 1.5 inches
n.d.
The collection’s second work by Niemann, this is even more abstract than “Stop on Red” and with greater contrast in tone and value. That the collection is not rich with abstraction may be a comment on either local taste or the availability of art in the regional market.
This is one of a group of five works given anonymously in memory of Amity Burroughs Flynn.
Eric Kahn [born 1949]
[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]
KAHN, Eric (born 1949)
“Waterfront View of New York”
oil on canvas panel / 13 1/4 inches by 15 1/4 inches / signed
n.d.
Eric Kahn (Born 1949) is active/lives in Pennsylvania, New Jersey. Kahn is known for landscape painting. This is one of several view we have of the New York harbor at several points in its history.
This is one of a group of five works given anonymously in memory of Mary Grace Tabor Bernhard.
Joseph C. Claghorn [1869-1947]
[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]
CLAGHORN, Joseph C. (1869-1947)
“Hill Country”
soft ground etching / 8 7/8 inches by 9 7/8 inches (image)
n.d. (ca1930)
Philadelphia born, Joseph Conover Claghorn (1869-1947) was active/lived in District of Columbia, Maryland, Pennsylvania as a painter and etcher whose subjects included landscapes, figures, portraits, and buildings such as Independence Hall in Philadelphia. He was also an instructor in arts and crafts and is known for a mural he painted for the Chamber of Commerce in Florida.
This is one of five works given anonymously in memory of Amity Burroughs Flynn.
Cecil Tatton-Winter [1896-1954]
[From the Community collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]
TATTON-WINTER, Cecil William [1896-1954]
Parliament Square, London
etching / 11 inches by 14.5 inches (image)
1920s
The son of William Tatton-Winter, “Cecil served in the army during the First World War, and considered making the army his career, but took his father’s advice and became an architect instead, also producing etchings and paintings in watercolour.” Though the artistic conception here was by Tatton-Winter, it was etched by Edward King, who has also signed the print.
This is one of five works given anonymously in memory of Amity Burroughs Flynn.
Martin J. Slattery [1928–?]
[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]
SLATTERY, Martin Joseph, jr [born 1928]
Manhattan
oil on canvas panel / 16 inches by 20 inches
1940s
Compare this urban abstraction with the slightly larger “Stop on Red” by Edmund Edward Niemann. Niemann was a highly regarded mid-century New York City artist who studied at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League. Slattery on the other hand is known only from this single painting, yet they both represent mid-century abstraction of a high quality. How Slattery came to the attention of the Bendix family is uncertain, though we continue to research his identity.
Seymour Remenick [1923-1999]
[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]
REMENICK, Seymour [1923–1999]
Portrait of a Man
undated (but probably circa 1950s)
oil on wood panel / 8 inches by 6 inches
Agincourt’s longstanding association with Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley dates from its founding in 1853. The story of those origins is celebrated on “Founders’ Day” but it is also reflected less obviously in the Community Collection. Seymour Remenick‘s portrait of an unidentified subject is one instance.
Remenick studied art successively at three schools, finally at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art (PAFA) where he taught in the 1970s. Diane Huygens (born 1928), daughter of Gerrit and Truus Huygens of rural Grou, studied art in Philadelphia during the 1950s and may have known Remenick as faculty or a fellow student. This portrait comes to us from the Huygens family in memory of their aunt Diane.
The FitzGerald-Flynns
REQUIESCAT IN PACE
But not too much pace.
Of all the historical styles that might be represented in Agincourt’s architecture, several have been a particular challenge for me — and some are downright creepy. It reminds me that my architectural education fell at the end of the Modern Movement when a spartan Bauhaus æsthetic held sway and “less was [deemed to be] more”. So when half-term mayor Ed Flynn went to that great campaign stump in the sky, I knew he’d have to go out in classical style — literally.
Ed’s anticipation of his passing would probably have focused on long-term remembrance on Earth, rather than building up treasures in Heaven: Ed attended church services in a very public way but it was a campaign strategy more than something genuinely spiritual. His widow Amity is another story, though I don’t know anything about her religious affiliation. I’ll ask around. So, whether planned by Ed himself or by Mrs Flynn posthumously, I knew the FitzGerald Flynn interment at The Shades would be above ground and in the cemetery’s sole mausoleum. Ed’s ego demanded nothing less than an erection of some kind. And yet…
His passing so soon after the World’s Columbian Exposition — will we be renaming that in the spirit of revised political correctness, I wonder; why would we want to have celebrated the European “discovery” of a world that was new to them but certainly not to the inhabitants already here? — meant that the ever fashion-forward Flynn would have chosen the new Classical Revival style popularized at the fair. And that, of course, has challenged me with an unfamiliar architectural idiom: I know it conceptually but have never actually tried to work within it. The simpler a style, the more obvious my missteps will be to my critics. Complexity is easy; minimalism, not so much.
Ed and Amity have been referenced in these pages multiple times; proportionally more than they might warrant. But I still hope to do the Flynns justice in design for their eternal rest, if for no other reason than Amity, who became such a warm and likable person as soon as Ed was out of the picture.
Stay tuned.
The city is a multi-sensory encounter.
“Architecture is actually a lot better than it looks”. Or so said Cecil Elliott, former department chair at NDSU. It put me in mind of the elephant described by five blind men.
An early exercise in the Agincourt Project asked students to map a place — where they live, where they grew up, a favorite place they visited as children — but to map it as an experience other than visual. How would they describe their hometown as an acoustic encounter? Or an olfactory one? Many of my childhood memories involve the smells of home: the Argo Plant of the Corn Products Co. (a stench that had become so familiar we didn’t notice it); a local bakery run by a Hungarian refugee from the ’56 uprising; and if the wind was wrong, the aroma of the sewage treatment plant across the river. If it were an acoustic map, the examples would generate something quite different.
Pavement in Midwestern American small towns have become fairly uniform. But at one time it might have varied from one block to the next, both sidewalks and street pavement. 
We’re fortunate to own 2,000 Purington Pavers, manufactured at Galesburg, Illinois during the years 1890-1930. Hundreds of small Midwestern communities paved their heavily-traveled business districts with these durable monsters — each of which weighs about eight pounds!