The Hygienic is its own “site specific” work of art. As you walk along the sidewalk to the 1844 building on Bank and Golden streets in the heart of downtown New London, you’re hugged by rich architect.
Lili Elbe, birth name Einar Wegener, Einar also spelled Ejner, (born December 28, 1882, Vejle, Denmark died September 13, 1931, Dresden, Germany), Danish painter who was assigned male at birth, experienced what is now called gender dysphoria, and underwent the world’s first documented sex reassignment surgery. Born Einar Wegener, Elbe lived nearly her whole life as a man. Beginning early in the first decade of the 20th century, Elbe (then Wegener) studied art at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and met Gerda Gottlieb there. The two fell in love and got married about 1905. According to the
Wassily Kandinsky, Russian in full Vasily Vasilyevich Kandinsky, (born December 4 [December 16, New Style], 1866, Moscow, Russia died December 13, 1944, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France), Russian-born artist, one of the first creators of pure abstraction in modern painting. After successful avant-garde exhibitions, he founded the influential Munich group Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”; 1911–14) and began completely abstract painting. His forms evolved from fluid and organic to geometric and, finally, to pictographic (e.g., Tempered Élan, 1944). Kandinsky’s mother was a Muscovite, one of his great-grandmothers a Mongolian princess, and his father a native of Kyakhta, a Siberian town near the Chinese
What if Picasso, Braque and Gris were so radical, they weren t simply satisfied with deconstructing illusion, with teaching the art world to see reality in a new, abstract way? What