Author: Sue Wong

Many considered the Hollywood couple to be “lavender lovers,” a name given to a male-female pair who marry for convenience and to conceal the true nature of their stigmatized sexual orientation. Whether it was a marriage of convenience or a romantic affair, Rudolph Valentino and Natacha Rambova became one of Hollywood’s power couples of the 1920s. He was Hollywood’s first sex symbol. She was a spiritualist costume designer who dabbled in acting but would later…

Edward Jean Steichen (March 27, 1879 – March 25, 1973) was a Luxembourgish American photographer, painter, and curator, renowned as one of the most prolific and influential figures in the history of photography. Steichen was credited with transforming photography into an art form.[2] His photographs appeared in Alfred Stieglitz’s groundbreaking magazine Camera Work more often than anyone else during its publication run from 1903 to 1917. Stieglitz hailed him as “the greatest photographer that ever…

The oil on canvas painting, Expectation Stoclet Frieze, illustrates artist Gustav Klimt’s gold phase as he incorporates flourishing tones of gold and bronze to accentuate his Egyptian inspired painting. The artist had co-partnered with his colleagues Adolphe Stoclet and Josef Hoffmann to create the masterpiece. An arrangement of patterns are strategically placed throughout the artwork, shades in colours of gold to transcend the piece. Klimt had traced his drawing to marble plate, and then had…

Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866. He grew up in a bourgois, cultured family and learned to play the piano and the cello. In 1886 he began to study law and economics at the Moscow University. After passing his exams he started a teaching career at the Moscow Faculty of Law. He had many interests and apparently a great gift to teach himself different skills. In 1895 Kandinsky saw an exhibition of French…