Tag: Painting

Mexican Mosaic: Frida, Trotsky, and the Tale of an Ice Axe | September 02 2025, 00:33

Nadia with a Frida Kahlo purse encounters a painting by Frida Kahlo in which Frida Kahlo is holding a letter dedicated to Leon Trotsky, and an hour later, we see an exhibition at another museum dedicated to the assassination of Trotsky. Such a revolutionary Mexican vibe.

By the way, here he is Leon, not Lev. And not Trotsky, but Bronstein. But these are trifles.

There is something to tell here, although the story is, of course, very well-known. Probably everyone knows that Trotsky was hiding in Mexico, and that Kahlo was his lover (Diego Rivera did not mind). In 1939, Stalin through Beria ordered to eliminate Trotsky, and on the second attempt, the NKVD succeeded.

The murder was carried out by Ramon Mercader. He came to Trotsky under the pretext of showing him a manuscript of an article supposedly in need of editing. He carried an ice axe under his coat. This Ramon’s mother was also a Soviet intelligence agent, who actually recruited her son. Additionally, her lover was close to the organizer of the previous, unsuccessful attack, when a bunch of bullets were fired at the bed behind which Trotsky and his wife were hiding, and not a single shot hit. In general, they did their job as best they could. Well, after six months, the ice axe came.

The Mexican police preserved this ice axe as evidence after the murder, and later exhibited it in a museum. When the museum’s director retired in the 1960s, he received the axe as a gift. For 40 years his daughter kept it under her bed, not really understanding its value.

It took nearly four decades for historian and collector, an espionage specialist Kitten Melton, to locate the ice axe and understand why the assassin sent by Joseph Stalin, Ramon Mercader, used it specifically to kill Trotsky. Actually, this ice axe is exhibited in the museum.

So, this is how Ramon gained trust. Trotsky was brought to Ramon by Sylvia Ageloff, who was Ramon’s mistress, plus Trotsky was very much in contact with Ramon’s mother. Sylvia was the daughter of Samuel Ageloff and Anna Maslova — Russian emigrants, who spoke Russian at home. In general, in all this environment, it’s difficult to stay alert, but Trotsky managed to.

By the way, the first thought — of course, an ice axe in hot Mexico is something that doesn’t catch the eye at all. Anyway, where did the ice axe come from? It turned out that it was normal, as there were no refrigerators, and ice was brought down from the mountains, which “worked” almost all year round with proper thermal insulation.

Ramon’s mother fled to the USSR. Ramon served a maximum of 20 years and also fled to the USSR, where he received a medal. Ramon Ivanovich Mercader was posthumously honored with the title Hero of the Soviet Union for the assassination of Lev Trotsky. And he received the Order of Lenin. The award was made for his actions as an agent of the Soviet special services. Why he became Ivanovich is unclear, it seems his father was Pau. Ramon died in Havana in 1978 from cancer, buried in Moscow, at the Kuntsevo Cemetery, under the name “Ramon Ivanovich Lopez.” Havana extradited him.

Frida Kahlo’s painting almost got destroyed after the assassination of Trotsky, “out of anger,” but it was saved, and is now one of the exhibits at the museum of women in art in Washington, from which our yesterday began.

A couple of very notable photos in the comments

Exploring Gender and Identity in Michael Davis’s “Madam XY” | August 18 2025, 14:09

We arrived in Sheperdstown yesterday, where there is a studio of a local artist, Michael Davis. His works are very interesting. In the studio, an enormous painting hangs on the whole wall, which immediately brings a smile to those somewhat versed in art, as it’s a riff on Madam X, and the artist decided to add Y — clearly alluding to transgender identity. At first, I thought it was his wife he painted (she seemed to be in charge at the studio yesterday, but perhaps they just resemble the XY model, so I didn’t ask). The strap on Madam XY has fallen, just like in Sargent’s original version before he repainted it and relocated it to avoid complete moral outrage.

A very talented artist. I will definitely visit his classes. Initially, I said “as much as 50 minutes to ride”, but now I think about it and will say “only 50 minutes to ride”.

#artrauflikes

Michael Timothy Davis Fine Art

From Miniare to Miniature: The Evolution of Book Illustration | August 14 2025, 14:52

How interesting, the word “Miniature” turns out not to derive from minimus (Latin), meaning “smallest”, but from miniare, meaning “to color with cinnabar or red lead”.

The word is connected to the practice of book illustration in the Middle Ages. You have probably seen images of medieval manuscripts with dense black text and a large, decorated initial letter. In the earliest bound books, they were not so ornate—just a big letter, colored red to stand out. In Italy, the verb miniare referred to the stage of painting red initials, usually left until last, and the art of illustration itself was called miniatura.

Over time, these initial decorations became increasingly complex, evolving into fully developed scenes with little figures, animals, and buildings. But, of course, since the scenes had to fit into the corner of a page, they were very small. And therefore, because a miniature in a book was like a tiny painting, the meaning of the word expanded—it came to denote any small version of something larger.

Rediscovering Peder Severin Krøyer: The Overlooked Impressionist | July 23 2025, 22:40

I haven’t posted anything about artists in a while. Today, I want to talk about an Impressionist you’ve probably never heard of, yet he deserves to be ranked alongside Degas, Manet, Monet, and Renoir. His name is Peder Severin Krøyer, a Danish painter from the second half of the 19th century.

Interestingly, a film about his wife, Marie Triepcke, was released in 2012. She was considered the most beautiful woman in Europe, and he — at least in Denmark — the most talented painter. She was an artist too, but eventually stopped painting entirely in his shadow. According to some sources, not without the influence of her brilliant husband, who actively convinced Marie of her lack of talent.

Posts like this are grouped under the hashtag #artrauflikes, and on beinginamerica.com in the Art Rauf Likes” section you can find all 152 entries (unlike Facebook, which forgets — or ignores — nearly half of them).

Understanding Lens Distortion in Oil Painting from IKEA Photo References | July 02 2025, 21:55

Before painting it with oil, I study the perspective in a specific photo from IKEA. And here it is very noticeable why photo references should be used cautiously for drawing: camera lenses introduce significant distortions (this was already known and visible, the question is which ones and how to fix them when transferring onto a canvas). Look at this, the ellipses in pink and green were added by me, as well as the vanishing point and lines to it. Everything on the edge is distorted. Pay attention, for instance, to the neck of the bottle on the left.

A good exercise to prepare everything in advance on the canvas.