Unikcolors

Alexander Calder

2014-08-17T21:02:00.000-07:00

Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder (/ˈkɔːldər/; July 22, 1898 – November 11, 1976) was an American sculptor known as the originator of the mobile, a type of kinetic sculpture made with delicately balanced or suspended components which move in response to motor power or air currents. Calder’s stationary sculptures are called stabiles. He also produced numerous wire figures, notably for a miniature circus.

Early life

Alexander "Sandy" Calder was born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania on July 22, 1898. His father, Stirling Calder, was a well-known sculptor who created many public installations, a majority of them in nearby Philadelphia.
Sandy Calder's grandfather, sculptor Alexander Milne Calder, was born in Scotland, immigrated to Philadelphia in 1868, and is best known for the colossal statue of William Penn on top of Philadelphia City Hall's tower. Sandy Calder's mother, Nanette (née Lederer), was a professional portrait artist, who had studied at the Académie Julian and the Sorbonne in Paris from around 1888 until 1893. She moved to Philadelphia where she met Stirling Calder while studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Sandy Calder's parents married on February 22, 1895; his sister, Mrs. Margaret Calder Hayes, is considered instrumental in the development of the UC Berkeley Art Museum.^[2]
In 1902, Sandy Calder posed nude for his father’s sculpture The Man Cub, which is now located in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. That same year he also completed his earliest sculpture, a clay elephant.^[3] Three years later, Stirling Calder contracted tuberculosis, and Calder's parents moved to a ranch in Oracle, Arizona, leaving the children in the care of family friends for a year.^[4] The children were reunited with their parents in late March 1906 and stayed at the ranch in Arizona until fall of the same year.^[5]
After Arizona, the Calder family moved to Pasadena, California. The windowed cellar of the family home became Calder's first studio and he received his first set of tools. He used scraps of copper wire that he found in the streets to make jewelry and beads for his sister's dolls. On January 1, 1907, Nanette Calder took her son to the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, where he observed a four-horse-chariot race. This style of event later became the finale of Calder's wire circus shows.^[6] (Thomas Wolfe mocks the performances in his novel You Can't Go Home Again, in which Calder appears as a character named "Piggy Logan.")^[7]
In the fall of 1909, the Calder family moved back to Philadelphia, where Sandy briefly attended Germantown Academy, then moved to Croton-on-Hudson, New York.^[8] That Christmas, he sculpted a dog and a duck out of sheet brass as gifts for his parents. The sculptures were three-dimensional and the duck was kinetic because it rocked when gently tapped.^[9] In Croton, during his early high school years, Calder was befriended by painter Everett Shinn with whom he built a gravity powered system of mechanical trains. Calder described it, "We ran the train on wooden rails held by spikes; a chunk of iron racing down the incline speeded [sic] the cars. We even lit up some cars with candle lights".^[10] After Croton, the Calders moved to Spuyten Duyvil to be closer to the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City, where Stirling Calder rented a studio. While living in Spuyten Duyvil, Sandy Calder attended high school in nearby Yonkers. In 1912, Stirling Calder was appointed acting chief of the Department of Sculpture of the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, California.,^[11] and began work on sculptures for the exposition that was held in 1915.
During Sandy Calder's high school years (1912–1915), the family moved back and forth between New York and California. In each new location, Calder's parents reserved cellar space as a studio for their son. Toward the end of this period, Calder stayed with friends in California while his parents moved back to New York, so that he could graduate from Lowell High School in San Francisco. Calder graduated with the class of 1915.^{[citation needed]}

Life and career

In 1915, Calder decided to study mechanical engineering, and enrolled at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.^[12] When asked why he decided to study mechanical engineering instead of art Calder said, "I wanted to be an engineer because some guy I rather liked was a mechanical engineer, that's all." ^[13] At Stevens, Calder was a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity and excelled in mathematics.^[14] He was well-liked and the class yearbook contained the following description, "Sandy is evidently always happy, or perhaps up to some joke, for his face is always wrapped up in that same mischievous, juvenile grin. This is certainly the index to the man's character in this case, for he is one of the best natured fellows there is." ^[13]
In the summer of 1916, Calder spent five weeks training at the Plattsburg Civilian Military Training Camp. In 1918, he joined the Student’s Army Training Corps, Naval Section, at Stevens and was made guide of the battalion.^[15]
Calder received a degree from Stevens in 1919.^[12] For the next several years, he held a variety of engineering jobs, including working as a hydraulic engineer and a draughtsman for the New York Edison Company. In June 1922, Calder found work as a mechanic on the passenger ship H. F. Alexander. While the ship sailed from San Francisco to New York City, Calder worked on deck off the Guatemalan Coast and witnessed both the sun rising and the moon setting on opposite horizons. He described in his autobiography, "It was early one morning on a calm sea, off Guatemala, when over my couch—a coil of rope—I saw the beginning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the other."^[16]
The H.F. Alexander docked in San Francisco and Calder traveled up to Aberdeen, Washington, where his sister lived with her husband, Kenneth Hayes. Calder took a job as a timekeeper at a logging camp. The mountain scenery inspired him to write home to request paints and brushes. Shortly after this, Calder decided to move back to New York to pursue a career as an artist.

Red Mobile, 1956, Painted sheet metal and metal rods, a signature work by Calder - Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Calder moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students' League, studying briefly with Thomas Hart Benton, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and John Sloan.^[17] While a student, he worked for the National Police Gazette where, in 1925, one of his assignments was sketching the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus. Calder became fascinated with the circus, a theme that would reappear in his later work.
In 1926, Calder moved to Paris, visited the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and he established a studio at 22 rue Daguerre in the Montparnasse Quarter. In June 1929, while traveling by boat from Paris to New York, Calder met his future wife, Louisa James (1905-1996), grandniece of author Henry James and philosopher William James. They married in 1931. While in Paris, Calder met and became friends with a number of avant-garde artists, including Joan Miró, Jean Arp, and Marcel Duchamp. Calder and Louisa returned to America in 1933 to settle in a farmhouse they purchased in Roxbury, Connecticut, where they raised a family (first daughter, Sandra born 1935, second daughter, Mary, in 1939). In 1955 Alexander and Louisa Calder travelled around in India for three months, where Calder produced nine sculptures as well as some jewelry.^[18]
In 1962, Calder settled into his new workshop Carroi, which was of a futuristic design and overlooked the valley of the Lower Chevrière to Saché in Indre-et-Loire (France). He did not hesitate to offer his gouaches and small mobiles to his friends in the country. He even donated to the town a stabile trônant (enthroned stabile), which since 1974 has been situated front of the church: an anti-sculpture free from gravity.^{[citation needed]} Throughout his artistic career, Calder named many of his works in French, regardless of where they were destined for eventual display.
In 1966, Calder published his Autobiography with Pictures with the help of his son-in-law, Jean Davidson.
Calder died unexpectedly on November 11, 1976, shortly after opening a major retrospective show at the Whitney Museum in New York.

Artistic work

In 1926, at the suggestion of a Serbian toy merchant in Paris, Calder began to make toys. At the urging of fellow sculptor Jose de Creeft, he submitted them to the Salon des Humoristes. Later that fall, Calder began to create his Cirque Calder, a miniature circus fashioned from wire, string, rubber, cloth, and other found objects. Designed to fit into suitcases (it eventually grew to fill five), the circus was portable, and allowed Calder to hold performances on both sides of the Atlantic. He gave improvised shows, recreating the performance of a real circus. Soon, his Cirque Calder^[19] (usually on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art at present) became popular with the Parisian avant-garde.
In 1927, Calder returned to the United States. He designed several kinetic wooden push and pull toys for children, which were mass-produced by the Gould Manufacturing Company, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. His originals, as well as playable replicas, are on display in the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Throughout the 1930s, Calder continued to give Cirque Calder performances, but he also worked with choreographer Martha Graham, designing stage sets for her ballets and created a moving stage construction to accompany Eric Satie's Socrate in 1936.

Sculpture

The Cirque Calder can be seen as the start of Calder's interest in both wire sculpture and kinetic art. He maintained a sharp eye with respect to the engineering balance of the sculptures and utilized these to develop the kinetic sculptures Marcel Duchamp would ultimately dub as "mobiles", a French pun meaning both "mobile" and "motive." He designed some of the characters in the circus to perform suspended from a thread. For other sculptures, such as Policeman (1928), Calder transforms the graphic, all-black wire into an elegant series of loops and twists to create an animated figure.^[20]
In 1929, Calder had his first solo show of wire sculpture, in Paris at Galerie Billiet. The painter Jules Pascin, a friend of Calder's from the cafes of Montparnasse, wrote the preface to the catalog. A visit to Piet Mondrian's studio in 1930 "shocked" him into embracing abstract art.^[21]

Calder's theatrical set for a 1936 production of the symphonic drama Socrate.

It was the mixture of his experiments to develop purely abstract sculpture following his visit with Mondrian that led to his first truly kinetic sculptures, manipulated by means of cranks and pulleys, that would become his signature artworks. Calder’s kinetic sculptures are regarded as being amongst the earliest manifestations of an art that consciously departed from the traditional notion of the art work as a static object and integrated the ideas of motion and change as aesthetic factors.^[22]
By the end of 1931, he moved on to more delicate sculptures which derived their motion from the air currents in the room, using cutout shapes reminiscent of natural forms (birds, fish, falling leaves).^[23] Dating from 1932, Calder’s first hanging sculptures of discrete movable parts powered by the wind were christened “mobiles” by Marcel Duchamp.^[24] They were followed from 1934 by pieces which were set in motion by air currents.^[25] At the same time, Calder was also experimenting with self-supporting, static, abstract sculptures, dubbed "stabiles" by Jean Arp in 1932 to differentiate them from mobiles. In 1935-1936 he produced a number of works made largely of carved wood. At Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (1937) the Spanish pavilion included Alexander Calder's sculpture Mercury Fountain.
During World War II, Calder attempted to join the Marines as a camofleur, but was rejected. He continued to sculpt, adapting to a scarcity of aluminum during the war by returning to carved wood.^[26] Calder set about creating new works such as Seven Horizontal Discs (1946), which he was able to dismantle and send by mail despite the stringent size restrictions imposed by the postal service at the time.^[27]
Once the war was over, Calder began to cut shapes from sheet metal into evocative forms and would hand-paint them in his characteristically pure hues of black, red, blue, and white.^[28] Calder created a small group of works from around this period with a hanging base-plate, for example Lily of Force (1945), Baby Flat Top (1946), and Red is Dominant (1947). His 1946 show at the Galerie Louis Carré in Paris, comprised mainly of hanging and standing mobiles, made a huge impact, as did the essays for the catalogue written, at the artist's invitation, by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and curator James Johnson Sweeney.^[29] By the late 1950s, Calder produced mobiles almost exclusively for close friends and family.^[30]
In 1951, Calder devised a new kind of mobile/stabile combination, related structurally to his constellations. These "towers," affixed to the wall with a nail, consist of wire struts and beams that jut out from the wall, with moving objects suspended from their armatures.^[31] After 1965, an intermediate maquette, usually about one-fifth the final size, was often fabricated to test the wind resistance and to refine the structure.^[32]

Theatrical productions

As a renowned artist, part of Calder's repertoire includes pivotal stage sets for more than a dozen theatrical productions. Out of this numerous productions, his noted favorites were: Nuclea, Panorama, Horizon, Socrate, Work in progress.^[33] Calder would describe some of his stage sets as dancers performing a choreography due to their rhythmic movement.^[33] The production of the Socrate set in 1936 became a decisive moment in Calder's artistic development. Calder described it in these terms: «it serves as an indication of a good deal of my subsequent work».^[34] It helped him move from small indoor mobiles to monumental outdoor forms he had just begun experimenting with. He also abandoned motorization for freely moving mobiles.^[35]

Monumental works

Man, a sculpture by Alexander Calder for Expo 67, on Saint Helen's Island Parc Jean-Drapeau, Montréal, Quebec

In the 1930s, the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts gave Calder his first public commission, a pair of mobiles designed for the Museum's new theater.^[36] In the 1950s, Calder increasingly concentrated his efforts on producing monumental sculptures (his self-described period of "agrandissements").^[37] Notable examples are .125 for JFK Airport in 1957, La Spirale for UNESCO in Paris 1958 and Man (L'Homme), commissioned for Expo 67 in Montreal, Canada. Calder's largest sculpture until that time, 20.5 meters high, was El Sol Rojo, constructed outside the Aztec Stadium for the 1968 Summer Olympics "Cultural Olympiad" events in Mexico City.
In 1934, Calder made his first outdoor works in his Roxbury, Connecticut studio, using the same techniques and materials as his smaller works. Exhibited outside, Calder's initial standing mobiles moved elegantly in the breeze, bobbing and swirling in natural, spontaneous rhythms. In fact, the first few outdoor works were too delicate for strong winds, which forced Calder to rethink his fabrication process.
In 1936, he responded to the problem, changing his working methods. He began to create smaller scale maquettes that he then enlarged to monumental size. The small metal maquette, the first step in the production of a monumental sculpture, was already for Calder a sculpture in its own right. The larger works were made under his direction, using the classic enlargement techniques used in different ways by traditional sculptors, including his father and grandfather. Calder began to draw his designs on brown craft paper, which he enlarged using a grid. His large-scale works were created according to his exact specifications, while also allowing him the liberty to adjust or correct a shape or line if necessary.^[38]

La grande vitesse (1969), Grand Rapids, Michigan

He made most of his monumental stabiles and mobiles during this time^[when?] at Etablissements Biémont in Tours, France. Calder would create a model of his work, the research department (headed by M. Porcheron, with Alain Roy, François Lopez, Michel Juigner ...) would scale it up to final size, and then experienced boilermakers would complete the actual metalwork — all under Calder's watchful eye. Stabiles were made in carbon steel sheet metal, then painted in black or in primary colors. Some lightweight mobiles were made of aluminum or duralumin alloy. An exception was Man (L'homme), stainless steel 24 meters tall, which was commissioned by International Nickel Company of Canada (Inco).
In 1958, Calder collaborated with Jean Prouvé to construct the steel base of La Spirale, a monumental mobile for the UNESCO site in Paris. (Calder later gave Prouvé two mobiles—as well as a gouache with a dedication.)^[39] In June 1969, Calder attended the dedication of his monumental stabile La Grande Vitesse in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This sculpture is notable for being the first civic sculpture in the United States to receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.^[40]
Calder created a sculpture called WTC Stabile (also known as Bent Propeller), which in 1971 was installed at the entrance of the World Trade Center's North Tower in New York City. When Battery Park City opened, the sculpture was moved to Vesey and Church Streets.^[41] The sculpture stood in front of 7 World Trade Center until it was destroyed on September 11, 2001.^[42]
In 1974 Calder unveiled to the public two sculptures, Flamingo at Federal Plaza and Universe at Sears Tower,^[43] in Chicago, Illinois. The exhibition Alexander Calder: A Retrospective Exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, opened simultaneously with the unveiling of the sculptures.^[44] Originally meant to be constructed in 1979 for the Hart Senate Office Building, Mountains and Clouds was not built until 1985 due to government budget cuts. The massive project, constructed of sheet steel and weighing 35 tons, spans the entire nine-story height of the building's atrium in Washington DC. Calder designed the maquette in the last year of his life for the US Senate, and designated his assistant Carmen Segretario to construct the massive stabile.^[45]

Painting and printmaking

In addition to sculptures, Calder painted throughout his career, beginning in the early 1920s. He picked up his study of printmaking after moving to Paris in 1926, and continued to produce illustrations for books and journals.^[46] His many projects from this period include pen-and-ink line drawings of animals for a 1931 publication of Aesop’s fables. As Calder’s sculpture moved into the realm of pure abstraction in the mid-1930s, so did his prints. The thin lines used to define figures in the earlier prints and drawings began delineating groups of geometric shapes, often in motion. Calder also used prints for advocacy, as in poster prints from 1967 and 1969 protesting the Vietnam War.^[47]
As Calder’s professional reputation expanded in the late 1940s and 1950s, so did his production of prints. Masses of lithographs based on his gouache paintings hit the market, and deluxe editions of plays, poems, and short stories illustrated with fine art prints by Calder became available for sale.^[46]

Painted aircraft

Calders's South American-themed design applied to a Braniff Douglas DC-8-62 taken at Miami Airport in 1975

In 1972, Dallas, Texas, based Braniff International Airways commissioned Calder to paint a full-size Douglas DC-8-62 four engined airliner as a "flying canvas." George Stanley Gordon, founder of the New York City advertising agency Gordon and Shortt, approached Alexander Calder with the idea of painting a jet airliner. Calder responded that he did not paint toys and Gordon told him it was a real full sized airliner that he proposed that Calder paint. Calder immediately gave his approval and George knew that Braniff International, known for melding the worlds of fashion and design with the mysterious world of aviation, would be the perfect company to propose his idea of Calder painting one of their jets. Braniff Chairman Harding Lawrence was highly receptive to the idea and a contract was drawn up that called for the paining of one Douglas DC-8-62 jet liner and 50 gouaches for a total price of $100,000.00.^[48]
Models of the aircraft were sent to Calder at his Sache, France, studio in November 1972, and work commenced. Braniff announced the Calder collaboration to the public on June 4, 1973. The new Calder work was dubbed "South America With Flying Colors" to honor Braniff's service to South America, a region it had served since June 4, 1948. This was the first time that an artist had ever painted a jetliner used in regular airline service . Beginning in November 1972, Calder first painted six 1/25 scale Westway 6-foot (1.8 m) long models with unique designs that were inspired by Braniff's service to South America. The model painted with the design called "Humor" was chosen by Braniff to be painted on its Douglas DC-8-62 airliner which was registered as N1805 with the United States Federal Aviation Administration.^[49]^[49]
Painting began at the carrier's Dallas Love Field Operations and Maintenance Base at 7701 Lemmon Avenue, Dallas, Texas, on October 22, 1973. Calder supervised the painting of the aircraft at the Braniff base for a week and personally painted the two left side engine nacelles with two of his designs called "Beastie" and "Sunburst". While at the hangar Calder befriended many of the Braniff Maintenance and Engineering personnel and even painted his unique designs on their lunch pales and toolboxes. At the time, some of the employees did not like the designs but quickly changed their mind once they realized they became owner's of their own Calder masterpieces.^[49]^[50]
In 1975, Calder was commissioned to create a second airplane design, this time a Boeing 727–291, as a tribute to the US Bicentennial celebration. Calder, once again, painted four different designs on 1/25 scale Westway models of the Boeing 727 in various red, white, and blue-themed color schemes. This time a group of noted art curators chose the final design that was painted on the Braniff 727-291 registered as N408BN. Calder arrived at the Dallas Operations and Maintenance Base at the end of October 1975, to oversee the painting, and painted the left and right rear engine nacelles with two designs called "Sneaky Snake" and "Stars and Stripes". First Lady Betty Ford dedicated the special 200th anniversary jet at a special ceremony at Washington Dulles International Airport on November 17, 1975. The jet entered service in late November 1975, flying throughout Braniff's domestic United States and Mexico route system. The engine nacelles were eventually removed from the aircraft and donated to the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City.^[49]^[50]
Calder was working on a third Boeing 727 design for Braniff when he died in November 1976. The Mexico design was painted on several models for Braniff to select from. A dedication ceremony was conducted on February 18–20, 1977, at Acapulco, Mexico, for the "Salute To Mexico" themed aircraft, that included Calder's wife Louisa, who removed the cover over the 1/25 scale Westway model to reveal the new design. The scheme was never applied to any Braniff aircraft for an unknown reason. The Douglas DC-8-62 and Boeing 727-291 designs were removed and painted over, after 1978, in Braniff's new Ultra Color Scheme.^[49]^[50]

Painted automobile

1975 BMW 3.0 CSL painted by Calder

In 1975, Calder was commissioned to paint a BMW 3.0 CSL, which would be the first vehicle in the BMW Art Car Project.

Jewelry

Calder created 1,800 pieces of jewelry over the course of his career, many of them as gifts for friends and relatives. Several pieces reflect Calder's fascination with art from Africa and other continents.^[51] They were mostly made of brass and steel, with bits of ceramic, wood and glass. Calder rarely used solder; when he needed to join strips of metal, he linked them with loops, bound them with snippets of wire or fashioned rivets.^[52] Calder created his first pieces in 1906 at the age of eight for his sister's dolls using scraps of metal he found in the street.^[51]
For his lifelong friend Joan Miró, he set a shard of a broken porcelain vessel in a brass ring. Peggy Guggenheim received enormous silver mobile earrings and later commissioned a hammered silver headboard that shimmered with dangling fish.^[53] In 1942, Guggenheim wore one Calder earring and one by Yves Tanguy to the opening of her New York gallery, The Art of This Century, to demonstrate her equal loyalty to Surrealist and abstract art, examples of which she displayed in separate galleries.^[54] Others who were presented with Calder's pieces were the artist's close friend, Georgia O'Keeffe; Alexina Duchamp, wife of Marcel Duchamp; Jeanne Rucar, wife of the filmmaker Luis Buñuel; and Bella Rosenfeld, wife of Marc Chagall.^[55]

Tapestry

After being given a Masaya hammock in 1972, Calder commissioned 100 Nicaraguan weavers to make a host of new ones following eight of his own designs, along with a range of wall hangings. A collection of 14 further hand-woven wool tapestries in limited editions then followed.^[56]

Alex Katz

2014-08-04T01:00:00.000-07:00

Alex Katz (born July 24, 1927) is an American figurative artist. In particular, he is known for his paintings, sculptures, and prints and is represented by numerous galleries internationally.

Early life and career

Alex Katz was born to a Jewish family^[1] in Brooklyn, New York, as the son of an émigré who had lost a factory he owned in Russia to the Soviet revolution.^[2] In 1928 the family moved to St. Albans, Queens, where Katz grew up.^[3]
From 1946 to 1949 Katz studied at The Cooper Union in New York, and from 1949 to 1950 he studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. Skowhegan exposed him to painting from life, which would prove pivotal in his development as a painter and remains a staple of his practices today. Katz explains that Skowhegan’s plein air painting gave him “a reason to devote my life to painting.”^[4] Every year from early June to mid-September, Katz moves from his SoHo loft to a 19th-century clapboard farmhouse in Lincolnville, Maine.^[5] A summer resident of Lincolnville since 1954, he has developed a close relationship with local Colby College. From 1954 to 1960, he made a number of small collages of still lifes, Maine landscapes, and small figures.^[6] He met Ada Del Moro, who had studied biology at New York University, at a gallery opening in 1957.^[2] In 1960, Katz had his first (and only) son, Vincent Katz.
Katz has admitted to destroying a thousand paintings during his first ten years as a painter in order to find his style. Since the 1950s, he worked to create art more freely in the sense that he tried to paint “faster than [he] can think.”^[7] His works seem simple, but according to Katz they are more reductive, which is fitting to his personality.^[8] "(The) one thing I don’t want to do is things already done. As for particular subject matter, I don’t like narratives, basically."^[9]

Work

Katz achieved great public prominence in the 1980s.^[10] He is well known for his large paintings, whose bold simplicity and heightened colours are now seen as precursors to Pop Art.^[11]

Painting

Katz's paintings are divided almost equally into the genres of portraiture and landscape. Since the 1960s he has painted views of New York (especially his immediate surroundings in Soho), the landscapes of Maine, where he spends several months every year, as well as portraits of family members, artists, writers and New York society protagonists.^[12] His paintings are defined by their flatness of colour and form, their economy of line, and their cool but seductive emotional detachment.^[13] A key source of inspiration is the woodcuts produced by Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro.^[14]
In the early 1960s, influenced by films, television, and billboard advertising, Katz began painting large-scale paintings, often with dramatically cropped faces. Ada Katz, whom he married in 1958, has been the subject of over 250^[15] portraits throughout his career.^[16] To make one of his large works, Katz paints a small oil sketch of a subject on a masonite board; the sitting might take an hour and a half. He then makes a small, detailed drawing in pencil or charcoal, with the subject returning, perhaps, for the artist to make corrections. Katz next blows up the drawing into a "cartoon," sometimes using an overhead projector, and transfers it to an enormous canvas via "pouncing"—a technique used by Renaissance artists, involving powdered pigment pushed through tiny perforations pricked into the cartoon to recreate the composition on the surface to be painted. Katz pre-mixes all his colors and gets his brushes ready. Then he dives in and paints the canvas—12 feet wide by 7 feet high or even larger—in a session of six or seven hours.
Beginning in the late 1950s, Katz developed a technique of painting on cut panels, first of wood, then aluminum, calling them "cutouts". These works would occupy space like sculptures, but their physicality is compressed into planes, as with paintings.^[17] In later works, the cutouts are attached to wide, U-shaped aluminum stands, with a flickering, cinematic presence enhanced by warm spotlights. Most are close-ups, showing either front-and-back views of the same figure’s head or figures who regard each other from opposite edges of the stand.^[18]
After 1964, Katz increasingly portrayed groups of figures. He would continue painting these complex groups into the 1970s, portraying the social world of painters, poets, critics, and other colleagues that surrounded him. He began designing sets and costumes for choreographer Paul Taylor in the early 1960s, and he has painted many images of dancers throughout the years. One Flight Up (1968) consists of more than 30 portraits of some of the leading lights of New York’s intelligentsia during the late 1960s, such as the poet John Ashbery, the art critic Irving Sandler and the curator Henry Geldzahler, who championed Andy Warhol. Each portrait is painted using oils on both sides of a sliver of aluminium that has then been cut into the shape of the subject’s head and shoulders. The silhouettes are arranged predominantly in four long rows on a plain metal table.^[19]
After his Whitney exhibition in 1974, Katz focused on landscapes stating "I wanted to make an environmental landscape, where you were IN it."^[20] In the late 1980s, Katz took on a new subject in his work: fashion models in designer clothing, including Kate Moss and Christy Turlington.^[4] "I've always been interested in fashion because it's ephemeral," he said.^[21]

Printmaking

In 1965, Katz also embarked on a prolific career in printmaking. Katz would go on to produce many editions in lithography, etching, silkscreen, woodcut and linoleum cut, producing over 400 print editions in his lifetime. The Albertina, Vienna, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, hold complete collections of Katz print oeuvre. A print catalogue raisonné is due for release by the Albertina in the fall of 2011.

Public commissions

In 1977, Alex Katz was asked to create a work to be produced in billboard format above Times Square, New York City. The work, which was located at 42nd Street and 7th Avenue, consisted of a frieze composed of 23 portrait heads of women. Each portrait measured twenty feet high, and was based on a study Katz did from life. The billboard extended 247 feet long along two sides of the RKO General building and wrapped in thee tiers above on a 60-foot tower. Katz was commissioned in 1980 by the US General Service Administration's Art in Architecture Program to create an oil on canvas mural in the new United States Attorney’s Building at Foley Square, New York City. The mural, located inside the Silvio V. Mollo Building at Cardinal Hayes Place & Park Row, is 20 feet high by 20 feet wide.^[22] In 2005, Katz participated in a public art project Paint in the City commissioned by United Technologies Corporation and organized by Creative Time. The work, titled Give Me Tomorrow, reached 28 feet tall and 53 feet long on a billboard space above the Bowery Bar. Located on the corner of the Bowery and East Fourth Street in the East Village, the work was hand painted by sign painters and was installed during the summer of 2005.^[23]

Collaborations

Katz has collaborated with poets and writers since the 1960s, producing several notable editions such as "Face of the Poet"^[24] combining his images with poetry from his circle, such as Ted Berrigan, Ann Lauterbach, Carter Ratcliff, and Gerard Malanga. He has worked with the poet John Ashbery, creating publications entitled "Fragment"^[25] in 1966 and "Coma Berenices".^[26] in 2005. He has worked with Vincent Katz on "A Tremor in the Morning"^[27] and "Swimming Home".^[28] Katz also made 25 etchings for the Arion Press edition of Gloria with 28 poems by Bill Berkson. Other collaborators include Robert Creeley, with whom he produced "Edges"^[29] and "Legeia: A Libretto".^[30] and Kenneth Koch, producing "Interlocking Lives".^[31] In 1962, Harper’s Bazaar incorporated numerous wooden cutouts by Katz for a four-page summer fashion spread.
Numerous publications outline Katz's career's many facets: from Alex Katz in Maine^[32] published by the Farnsworth Art Museum to the catalogue Alex Katz New York,^[33] published by the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Alex Katz Seeing Drawing, Making,^[34] published in 2008, describes Katz's multiple stage process of first producing charcoal drawings, small oil studies, and large cartoons for placing the image on the canvas and the final painting of the canvas. Phaidon Press (2005) published an illustrated survey, Alex Katz by Carter Ratcliff, Robert Storr and Iwona Blazwick. In 1989, a special edition of Parkett was devoted to Katz, showing that he is now considered a major reference for younger painters and artists.^[35] Over the years, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Liam Gillick, Peter Halley, David Salle and Richard Prince have written essays about his work or conducted interviews with him.^[36]

Exhibitions

Since 1951, Alex Katz's work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally.^[3] Katz' first one-person show was an exhibition of paintings at the Roko Gallery in New York in 1954. In 1974 the Whitney Museum of American Art showed Alex Katz Prints, followed by a traveling retrospective exhibition of paintings and cutouts titled Alex Katz in 1986. The subject of over 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group shows internationally, Katz has since been honoured with numerous retrospectives at museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Jewish Museum, New York; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Colby College Museum of Art, Maine; Staaliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden; Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga and the Saatchi Gallery, London (1998).^[37] In 1998, a survey of Katz' landscape paintings was shown at the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, featuring nearly 40 pared-down paintings of urban or pastoral motifs.^[38]
Katz is represented by Gavin Brown's enterprise in New York, Timothy Taylor Gallery in London, and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris/Salzburg. Before showing with Brown, he had been represented by Pace Gallery for 10 years and by Marlborough Gallery for 30 years.^[39]

Collections

Katz's work is in the collections of over 100 public institutions worldwide, including the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Carnegie Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art; the Tate Gallery, London; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tokyo; the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and the Museum Brandhorst, Munich.^[40] In 2010, Anthony d'Offay donated a group of works by Katz to the National Galleries of Scotland and Tate.^[41] In 2011, Katz donated Rush (1971), a series of 37 painted life-size cutout heads on aluminum, to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the pieces installed frieze-like in its own space.^[42]

Recognition

Throughout his career, Katz has been the recipient of numerous awards, including The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for Painting in 1972, and in 1987, both Pratt Institute’s Mary Buckley Award for Achievement and The Queens Museum of Art Award for Lifetime Achievement. The Chicago Bar Association honored Katz with the Award for Art in Public Places in 1985. In 1978, Katz received the U.S. Government grant to participate in an educational and cultural exchange with the USSR.^[43] Katz was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for Painting in 1972. Katz was inducted by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1988, and recognized with honorary doctorates by Colby College, Maine (1984) and Colgate University, Hamilton, New York, (2005). In 1990 he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1994. He was named the Philip Morris Distinguished Artist at the American Academy in Berlin in 2001 and received the Cooper Union Annual Artist of the City Award in 2000. In addition to this honor, in 1994 Cooper Union Art School created the Alex Katz Visiting Chair in Painting with an endowment provided by the sale of ten paintings donated by the artist. In 2005, Katz was the honored artist at the Chicago Humanities Festival’s Inaugural Richard Gray Annual Visual Arts Series. In 2007, he was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Design, New York.^[37]
In October 1996, the Colby College Museum of Art opened a 10,000-square-foot wing dedicated to Katz that features more than 400 oil paintings, collages, and prints donated by the artist.^[44] In addition, he has purchased numerous pieces for the museum by artists such as Jennifer Bartlett, Chuck Close, Francesco Clemente, Elizabeth Murray. In 2004, he curated a show at Colby of younger painters Elizabeth Peyton, Peter Doig and Merlin James, who work in the same figurative territory staked out by Katz.^[2]
In 1996, Vincent Katz and Vivien Bittencourt produced a video titled Alex Katz: Five Hours, documenting the production of his painting January 3.^[45] and in 2008 he was the subject of a documentary directed by Heinz Peter Schwerfel, entitled What About Style? Alex Katz: a Painter's Painter.

Alexander Aleksandrovic Vesnin

2014-04-22T01:12:00.001-07:00

Alexander Aleksandrovic Vesnin (Russian: Александр Александрович Веснин) (1883, Yuryevets – 1959, Moscow), together with his brothers Leonid and Viktor, was a leading light of Constructivist architecture. He is best known for his meticulous perspectival drawings such as Leningrad Pravda of 1924.
In addition to being an architect, he was a theatre designer and painter, frequently working with Lyubov Popova on designs for workers' festivals, and for the theatre of Tairov. He was one of the exhibitors in the pioneering Constructivist exhibition 5x5=25 in 1921. He was the head, along with Moisei Ginzburg, of the Constructivist OSA Group. Among the completed buildings designed by the Vesnin brothers in the later 1920s were department stores, a club for former Tsarist political prisoners as well as the Likachev Works Palace of Culture in Moscow. Vesnin was a vocal supporter of the works of Le Corbusier, and acclaimed his Tsentrosoyuz building as 'the best building constructed in Moscow for a century'. After the return to Classicism in the Soviet Union, Vesnin had no further major projects.

Aleksandr Vesnin

2013-11-21T01:11:00.001-08:00

Aleksandr Vesnin

Alexander Vesnin
Photo by Alexander Rodchenko, 1924 (fragment)
Born	May 28 (16), 1883 Yuryevets
Died	September 7, 1959 Moscow
Nationality	Russian Empire, Soviet Union
Alma mater	Institute of Civil Engineers, Saint Petersburg

Practice	Vesnin brothers
Buildings	Dnieper Hydroelectric Station ZiL Palace of Culture

Abstract Composition. 1915c. M.T. Abraham Foundation

Selected Work

1934 Commissariat of Heavy Industry Project
1930 Oilworkers' Club, Baku [1]
1930-36 Likachev Palace of Culture, Moscow
1928 House of Film Actors, Moscow
1926 Mostorg department store, Moscow
1924 Leningradskaya Pravda project
1922-23 Palace of Labor project. [2]

References

S.N Khan-Magomedov, Alexander Vesnin and Russian Constructivism (Thames and Hudson, 1988)

Alexander Rodchenko

2013-11-13T10:31:00.001-08:00

Alexander Rodchenko

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This article is about the Russian artist. For the fictional Star Trek character, see Alexander Rozhenko.

Alexander Rodchenko
Birth name	Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko
Born	December 5, 1891 St. Petersburg
Died	December 3, 1956 (aged 64) Moscow
Nationality	Russian
Field	painting, photography
Movement	Constructivism

Alexander Rodchenko Dance. An Objectless Composition, 1915.

Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko (Russian: Алекса́ндр Миха́йлович Ро́дченко; 5 December [O.S. 23 November] 1891 – December 3, 1956) was a Russian artist, sculptor, photographer and graphic designer. He was one of the founders of constructivism and Russian design; he was married to the artist Varvara Stepanova.
Rodchenko was one of the most versatile Constructivist and Productivist artists to emerge after the Russian Revolution. He worked as a painter and graphic designer before turning to photomontage and photography. His photography was socially engaged, formally innovative, and opposed to a painterly aesthetic. Concerned with the need for analytical-documentary photo series, he often shot his subjects from odd angles—usually high above or down below—to shock the viewer and to postpone recognition. He wrote: "One has to take several different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again."

Life and career

Rodchenko was born in St. Petersburg to a working-class family. His family moved to Kazan after the death of his father, in 1909.^[1] When Rodchenko decided to become an artist, he hadn't had any exposure to the art world. He drew much inspiration from his early influences, which were mainly art magazines that were available to him. In 1910, he began studies under Nikolai Feshin and Georgii Medvedev at the Kazan School of Art, where he met Varvara Stepanova, whom he later married.
After 1914, he continued his artistic training at the Stroganov Institute in Moscow. At this early time in his career, he began creating his first abstract drawings, influenced by the Suprematism of Kazimir Malevich, in 1915. The following year, he participated in "The Store" exhibition organized by Vladimir Tatlin, who was another formative influence in his development as an artist.
Rodchenko's work was heavily influenced by Cubism and Futurism, as well as by Malevich's Suprematist compositions, which featured geometric forms deployed against a white background. While Rodchenko was a student of Tatlin’s he was also his assistant, and the interest in figuration that characterized Rodchenko's early work disappeared as he experimented with the elements of design. He utilized a compass and ruler in creating his paintings, with the goal of eliminating expressive brushwork.^[2]
Rodchenko was appointed Director of the Museum Bureau and Purchasing Fund by the Bolshevik Government in 1920. He was responsible for the reorganization of art schools and museums. He taught from 1920 to 1930 at the Higher Technical-Artistic Studios (VKhUTEMAS/VKhUTEIN).
In 1921 he became a member of the Productivist group, with Stepanova and Aleksei Gan which advocated the incorporation of art into everyday life. He gave up painting in order to concentrate on graphic design for posters, books, and films. He was deeply influenced by the ideas and practice of the filmmaker Dziga Vertov, with whom he worked intensively in 1922.
Impressed by the photomontage of the German Dadaists, Rodchenko began his own experiments in the medium, first employing found images in 1923, and from 1924 on shooting his own photographs as well.^[3] His first published photomontage illustrated Mayakovsky's poem, "About This", in 1923.
From 1923 to 1928 Rodchenko collaborated closely with Mayakovsky (of whom he took several striking portraits) on the design and layout of LEF and Novy LEF, the publications of Constructivist artists. Many of his photographs appeared in or were used as covers for these journals. His images eliminated unnecessary detail, emphasized dynamic diagonal composition, and were concerned with the placement and movement of objects in space. During this period, he and Stepanova did the well-known painted panels of the Mosselprom building in Moscow. Their daughter, Varvara Rodchenko, was born in 1925.
Throughout the 1920s, Rodchenko's work was very abstract. In the 1930s, with the changing Party guidelines governing artistic practice, he concentrated on sports photography and images of parades and other choreographed movements.
Rodchenko joined the October circle of artists in 1928 but was expelled three years later being charged with "formalism". He returned to painting in the late 1930s, stopped photographing in 1942, and produced abstract expressionist works in the 1940s. He continued to organize photography exhibitions for the government during these years. He died in Moscow in 1956.

Rodchenko and Stepanova, 1920s

Influence

Much of the work of 20th century graphic designers is a direct result of Rodchenko's earlier work in the field. His influence has been pervasive enough that it would be nearly impossible to single out all of the designers whose work he has influenced. American conceptual artist Barbara Kruger owes a debt to Rodchenko's work.
His portrait of Lilya Brik^[4] has inspired a number of subsequent works, including the cover art for a number of music albums. Among them are the influential Dutch punk band The Ex, which published a series of 7" vinyl albums, each with a variation on the Lilya Brik portrait theme, the cover of Mike + the Mechanics album Word of Mouth, and the cover of the Franz Ferdinand album You Could Have It So Much Better. The poster for One-Sixth Part of the World was the basis for the cover of "Take Me Out", also by Franz Ferdinand.

The end of painting

In 1921, Rodchenko executed what were arguably some of the first true monochromes (artworks of one color). These paintings were first displayed in the 5x5=25 exhibition in Moscow. For artists of the Russian Revolution, Rodchenko's radical action was full of utopian possibility. It marked the end of easel painting – perhaps even the end of art – along with the end of bourgeois norms and practices. It cleared the way for the beginning of a new Russian life, a new mode of production, a new culture. Rodchenko later proclaimed, "I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue, and yellow. I affirmed: it's all over."^[5]

References and sources

References

Jump up ^ John E. Bowlt, "Aleksandr Rodchenko Experiments for the Future: Diaries, Essays, Letters, and Other Writings," Museum of Modern Art New York, 2005, Page 31.
Jump up ^ Milner, John, "Rodchenko, Aleksandr", Oxford Art Online
Jump up ^ Mrazkova, Daniela and Remes, Vladimir "Early Soviet Photographers." Museum of Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, 1982, ISBN 0-905836-27-8
Jump up ^ "1924 portrait". Picasaweb.google.com. 2007-09-09. Retrieved 2012-07-30.
Jump up ^ Akbar, Arifa (2009-01-27). "Drawing a blank: Russian constructivist makes late Tate debut". Independent.co.uk. Retrieved 2012-07-30.

Sources

"Aleksander Rodchenko: Design Is History". Designishistory.com. Retrieved February 22, 2012.
Dabrowski, Magdalena, Leah Dickerman, Peter Galassi, A. N. Lavrentʹev, and V. A. Rodchenko. Aleksandr Rodchenko. New York, N. Y.: Museum of Modern Art, 1998.
"History of Art: Alexander Rodchenko". All-art.org. Retrieved February 22, 2012.
Savvine, Ivan. "The Art Story: Modern Art Movements". Modern Art Movements. Theartstory.org. Retrieved February 22, 2012.
"THE COLLECTION". Moma.org. Retrieved February 22, 2012.

Alberto Giacometti

2013-11-12T11:32:00.002-08:00

Alberto Giacometti

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Alberto Giacometti
Portrait of A. Giacometti by Jan Hladík, 2002, etching
Born	10 October 1901 Borgonovo, Stampa, Graubünden, Switzerland
Died	11 January 1966 (aged 64) Chur, Graubünden, Switzerland
Nationality	Swiss
Field	Sculpture, Painting, Drawing
Training	The School of Fine Arts, Geneva
Movement	Surrealism, Expressionism, Cubism, Formalism
Awards	"Grand Prize for Sculpture" at 1962 Venice Biennale

Alberto Giacometti (Italian pronunciation: [alˈbɛrto dʒakoˈmetti]; 10 October 1901 – 11 January 1966) was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draughtsman, and printmaker. Alberto Giacometti was born in the canton Graubünden's southerly alpine valley Val Bregaglia and came from an artistic background; his father, Giovanni, was a well-known post-Impressionist painter. Alberto was the eldest of four children and was interested in art from an early age.

Early life

"Woman of Venice II", 1956, painted bronze sculpture, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Giacometti was born in Borgonovo, now part of the Swiss municipality of Stampa, near the Italian border. He was a descendant of Protestant refugees escaping the Italian Inquisition. His father, Giovanni Giacometti, was a painter. Alberto attended the School of Fine Arts in Geneva.
In 1922 he moved to Paris to study under the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, an associate of Auguste Rodin. It was there that Giacometti experimented with cubism and surrealism and came to be regarded as one of the leading surrealist sculptors. Among his associates were Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Bror Hjorth and Balthus.
Between 1936 and 1940, Giacometti concentrated his sculpting on the human head, focusing on the sitter's gaze. He preferred models he was close to, his sister and the artist Isabel Rawsthorne (then known as Isabel Delmer). This was followed by a unique artistic phase in which his statues of Isabel became stretched out; her limbs elongated.^[1] Obsessed with creating his sculptures exactly as he envisaged through his unique view of reality, he often carved until they were as thin as nails and reduced to the size of a pack of cigarettes, much to his consternation. A friend of his once said that if Giacometti decided to sculpt you, "he would make your head look like the blade of a knife." After his marriage to Annette Arm in 1946 his tiny sculptures became larger, but the larger they grew, the thinner they became. Giacometti said that the final result represented the sensation he felt when he looked at a woman.
His paintings underwent a parallel procedure. The figures appear isolated, are severely attenuated, and are the result of continuous reworking. Subjects were frequently revisited: one of his favorite models was his younger brother Diego Giacometti.^[2] A third brother, Bruno Giacometti, was a noted architect.

Later years

Alberto Giacometti by Reginald Gray. Paris.1965. published by The New York Times

Three Men Walking II, 1949, painted bronze sculpture Metropolitan Museum of Art

Woman with Her Throat Cut, 1932 (cast 1949), Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Cat, 1954, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Current 100 Swiss Franc banknote, front

Current 100 Swiss Franc banknote, back

In 1958 Giacometti was asked to create a monumental sculpture for the Chase Manhattan Bank building in New York, which was beginning construction. Although he had for many years "harbored an ambition to create work for a public square",^[3] he "had never set foot in New York, and knew nothing about life in a rapidly evolving metropolis. Nor had he ever laid eyes on an actual skyscraper", according to his biographer, James Lord.^[4] Giacometti's work on the project resulted in the four figures of standing women—his largest sculptures—entitled Grande femme debout I through IV (1960). The commission was never completed, however, because Giacometti was unsatisfied by the relationship between the sculpture and the site, and abandoned the project.
In 1962, Giacometti was awarded the grand prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale, and the award brought with it worldwide fame. Even when he had achieved popularity and his work was in demand, he still reworked models, often destroying them or setting them aside to be returned to years later. The prints produced by Giacometti are often overlooked but the catalogue raisonné, Giacometti - The Complete Graphics and 15 Drawings by Herbert Lust (Tudor 1970), comments on their impact and gives details of the number of copies of each print. Some of his most important images were in editions of only 30 and many were described as rare in 1970.
In his later years Giacometti's works were shown in a number of large exhibitions throughout Europe. Riding a wave of international popularity, and despite his declining health, he travelled to the United States in 1965 for an exhibition of his works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As his last work he prepared the text for the book Paris sans fin, a sequence of 150 lithographs containing memories of all the places where he had lived.
Giacometti died in 1966 of heart disease (pericarditis) and chronic bronchitis at the Kantonsspital in Chur, Switzerland. His body was returned to his birthplace in Borgonovo, where he was interred close to his parents. In May 2007 the executor of his widow's estate, French foreign minister Roland Dumas, was convicted of illegally selling Giacometti's works to a top auctioneer. The auctioneer, Jacques Tajan, was also convicted. Both were ordered to pay €850,000 to the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation.^[5]

Artistic analysis

Giacometti was a key player in the Surrealist art movement, but his work resists easy categorization. Some describe it as formalist, others argue it is expressionist or otherwise having to do with what Deleuze calls 'blocs of sensation' (as in Deleuze's analysis of Francis Bacon). Even after his excommunication from the Surrealist group, while the intention of his sculpting was usually imitation, the end products were an expression of his emotional response to the subject. He attempted to create renditions of his models the way he saw them, and the way he thought they ought to be seen. He once said that he was sculpting not the human figure but "the shadow that is cast."
Scholar William Barrett in Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1962), argues that the attenuated forms of Giacometti's figures reflect the view of 20th century modernism and existentialism that modern life is increasingly empty and devoid of meaning. "All the sculptures of today, like those of the past, will end one day in pieces... So it is important to fashion ones work carefully in its smallest recess and charge every particle of matter with life."
A new exhibition in Paris, since September 2011, shows how Giacometti strongly drew his inspiration for his work from Etruscan art.^[6]

Legacy

Exhibitions

Giacometti's work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including most recently Pushkin Museum, Moscow (2008); “The Studio of Alberto Giacometti: Collection of the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti,” Centre Pompidou, Paris (2007-2008); Kunsthal Rotterdam (2008); Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2009), Buenos Aires (2012); and Kunsthalle Hamburg (2013).

Public collections

Giacometti's work is displayed in numerous public collections, including the:

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
Art Institute of Chicago
Baltimore Museum of Art, in Baltimore, Maryland
Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, in Charlotte, North Carolina
Berggruen Museum, Berlin
Bündner Kunstmuseum, in Chur, Switzerland
Carnegie Museum of Art, in Pittsburgh
Detroit Institute of Arts
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.
J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, California
Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University
Kunsthaus Zürich
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, in Denmark
Museo Botero, in Bogotá, Colombia
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at University of East Anglia
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Tate, London
Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, in Iran

University of Michigan Museum of Art
Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Republic of Korea ^[7]

Art Foundations

The Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, having received a bequest from Alberto Giacometti's widow Annette, holds a collection of circa 5,000 works, frequently displayed around the world through exhibitions and long-term loans. A public interest institution, the Foundation was created in 2003 and aims at promoting, disseminating, preserving and protecting Alberto Giacometti's work.
The Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung established in Zürich in 1965, holds a smaller collection of works acquired from the collections of Pittsburgh industrialist G. David Thompson.

Alberto Giacometti
Photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Notable sales

In November 2000 a Giacometti bronze, Grande Femme Debout I, sold for $14.3 million.^[8] Grande Femme Debout II was bought by the Gagosian Gallery for $27.4 million at Christie's auction in New York City on May 6, 2008.^[9]
L'Homme qui marche I, a life-sized bronze sculpture of a man, became one of the most expensive works of art and the most expensive sculpture ever sold at auction on February 2, 2010 when it sold for £65 million (US$104.3 million) at Sotheby's, London.^[10]^[11] Grande tête mince, a large bronze bust, sold for $53.3 million just three months later.

Other legacy

Giacometti created the monument on the grave of Gerda Taro at Père Lachaise Cemetery.^[12]
In 2001 he was included in the Painting the Century 101 Portrait Masterpieces 1900-2000 exhibition held at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Giacometti and his sculpture L'Homme qui marche I appear on the current 100 Swiss Franc banknote.^[13]
According to Dr. Michael Peppiatt in a lecture at Cambridge University on July 8, 2010, Giacometti, who had a friendship with author/playwright Samuel Beckett, created a tree for the set of a 1961 Paris production of "Waiting For Godot".

Notes

Jump up ^ New York Times article on The Women of Giacometti exhibition, Pace Wildenstein Gallery 2005 [1]
Jump up ^ Tate Collection: Seated Man by Alberto Giacometti Retrieved July 13, 2007.
Jump up ^ http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/LotDetailsPrintable.aspx?intObjectID=5075599
Jump up ^ James Lord, Giacometti: A Biography, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1986, pp. 331-332 ISBN ISBN 978-0-374-52525-5 ISBN 0374525250
Jump up ^ "Conviction Upheld Against Former French FM in Giacometti Fraud". May 10, 2007. Retrieved 2008-04-16
Jump up ^ Giacometti and The Etruscans, La Pinacothèque de Paris
Jump up ^ http://leeum.samsungfoundation.org/html_eng/exhibition/exhibition_view.asp
Jump up ^ "Art record Picasso painting goes for £39m at auction". The Guardian (London). 2000-11-10. Retrieved 2010-04-23.
Jump up ^ Afp.google.com, Monet fetches record price at New York auction
Jump up ^ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8497287.stm Giacometti sculpture fetches £65m at Sotheby's auction
Jump up ^ Alberto Giacometti's Walking Man I Sells for a Record-Breaking $104,327,006 at Sotheby's
Jump up ^ Robert Whelan, "Robert Capa, the definitive collection", p8, Phaidon press 2001 ISBN 978-0-7148-4449-7
Jump up ^ Schweizer Nationalbank

References

Jacques Dupin (1962) "Alberto Giacometti", Paris, Maeght
Reinhold Hohl (1971) "Alberto Giacometti", Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje
Die Sammlung der Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung (1990), Zürich, Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft
Alberto Giacometti. Sculptures - peintures - dessins. Paris, Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1991-92.
Jean Soldini (1993) "Alberto Giacometti. Le colossal, la mère, le sacré", Lausanne, L'Age d'Homme
David Sylvester (1996) Looking at Giacometti, Henry Holt & Co.
Alberto Giacometti 1901-1966. Kunsthalle Wien, 1996
James Lord (1997) Giacometti: A Biography, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Alberto Giacometti. Kunsthaus Zürich, 2001; New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 2001-2002.
Yves Bonnefoy (2006) Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of His Work, New edition, Flammarion
Andreas Weiland, "The Sculptures of Alberto Giacometti / Seen in the Kunsthal Rotterdam (Giacometti Exhibition, October 18, 2008 – February 8, 2009)", in: Art in Society, issue # 10

http://www.art-in-society.de/AS10/Giacometti-3/Giacometti.html

Laurie Wilson, (2003) Alberto Giacometti: Myth Magic and the Man (Yale University Press)

Bibliography

Alberto Giacometti, Yves Bonnefoy, Assouline Publishing (February 22, 2011)
In Giacometti's Studio, Michael Peppiatt, Yale University Press (December 14, 2010)
Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of His Work, Yves Bonnefoy, New edition, Flammarion (2006)
Giacometti: A Biography, James Lord, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1997)
Looking at Giacometti, David Sylvester, Henry Holt & Co. (1996)
Alberto Giacometti, Herbert Matter & Mercedes Matter, Harry N Abrams (September 1987)
A Giacometti Portrait, James Lord, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (July 1, 1980)
Alberto Giacometti, Reinhold Hohl, H. N. Abrams (1972)
Alberto Giacometti, Reinhold Hohl, Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje (1971)
Alberto Giacometti, Jacques Dupin, Paris, Maeght(1962)
"The Dream, the Sphinx, and the Death of T", Alberto Giacometti, X magazine, Vol.1, No.1 (November 1959); An Anthology from X (Oxford University Press 1988).

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Alberto Giacometti.

The Alberto et Annette Giacometti Foundation website: [2]
Alberto Giacometti in the SIKART dictionary and database
Works of Alberto Giacometti:
Life of Alberto Giacometti:
- Chronology of his life with illustrations from the Museum of Modern Art
Exhibition at Kunsthaus Zürich from 27 February until 24 May 2009
Alberto Giacometti in the National Gallery of Australia's Kenneth Tyler Collection

Albert Oehlen, Rainald Goetz

2013-11-05T09:17:00.002-08:00

Albert Oehlen, Rainald Goetz: D.I.E
Artists’ book with drawings by Albert Oehlen and texts by Rainald Goetz
Texts in German
Hardcover, clothbound
24 x 33 cm
36 pages
13 tipped-in color illustrations
300 copies, numbered,
copies nrs. 1 to 50 signed by the artists
ISBN 978-3-935567-50-3
out of print

Albert Oehlen and Rainald Goetz have been friends for a long time and have realized many projects in tandem. With D.I.E they now publish their first artists’ book. Rainald Goetz has put 17 concretist texts of very few words opposite 13 abstract drawings by Oehlen, following the painter’s visual gestures in a like-minded spirit. Every line and squiggle in Oehlen’s large-format charcoal drawings falls in with an associative tangle that completely denies coherency. The texts on the pages facing the illustrations rule out any kind of makeshift sense: they are sound, image, narrative expectation, and argument. The book itself serves as an open space where free association rules, only pulled back by reason. It becomes an opening for letters and lines, images and words, a space for contents, moods, off-roads, and plausibilities.

The artists’ book D.I.E is published in a limited edition of 300 numbered copies, the first 50 of them signed by both artists. All texts are in German.

http://www.holzwarth-publications.de/pages_buecher/_eng/oehlen-goetz.html

Albert Gleizes

2013-10-22T01:45:00.000-07:00

Albert Gleizes

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Jump to: navigation, search

"Gleizes" redirects here. For the French writer, see Jean-Antoine Gleizes.

Albert Gleizes
Albert Gleizes, circa 1920
Birth name	Albert Léon Gleizes
Born	December 8, 1881 Paris
Died	June 23, 1953 (aged 71) Saint-Rémy-de-Provence
Nationality	French
Field	painting, writing
Movement	Cubism, Abstract art, Abstraction-Création

Albert Gleizes (8 December 1881 – 23 June 1953), was a French artist, theoretician, philosopher, a founder of Cubism and an influence on the School of Paris. Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger wrote the first major treatise on Cubism, Du "Cubisme", 1912. Gleizes was a founding member of the Section d'Or group of artists. He was also a member of Der Sturm, and his many theoretical writings were originally most appreciated in Germany, where especially at the Bauhaus his ideas were given thoughtful consideration. Gleizes spent four crucial years in New York, and played an important role in making America aware of modern art. He was a member of the Society of Independent Artists, founder of the Ernest-Renan Association, and both a founder and participant in the Abbaye de Creteil.^[1] Gleizes exhibited regularly at Léonce Rosenberg’s Galerie de l’Effort Moderne in Paris; he was also a founder, organizer and director of Abstraction-Création. From the mid-1920s to the late 1930s much of his energy went into writing (e.g., La Peinture et ses lois (Paris, 1923), Vers une conscience plastique: La Forme et l’histoire (Paris, 1932) and Homocentrisme (Sablons, 1937).^[2]

Early life

Albert Gleizes, 1909, Bords de la Marne, oil on canvas, 54 x 65 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon

Albert Gleizes, 1910, La Femme aux Phlox (Woman with Phlox)), oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm, exhibited Armory Show, New York, 1913, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Born Albert Léon Gleizes and raised in Paris, he was the son of a fabric designer who ran a large industrial design workshop. He was also the nephew of Léon Comerre, a successful portrait painter who won the 1875 Prix de Rome. The young Albert Gleizes did not like school and often skipped classes to idle away the time writing poetry and wandering through the nearby Montmartre cemetery. Finally, after completing his secondary schooling, Gleizes spent four years in the 72nd Infantry Regiment of the French army (Abbeville, Picardie) then began pursuing a career as a painter. Gleizes began to paint self-taught around 1901 in the Impressionist tradition. His first landscapes from around Courbevoie appear particularly inspired by Sisley or Pissarro.^[3] Although clearly related to Pissarro in technique, Gleizes' particular view-points as well as the composition and conception of early works represent a clear departure from the style of late Impressionism. The density with which these works are painted and their solid framework suggest affinities with Divisionism which were often noted by early critics.^[1]
Gleizes was only twenty-one years of age when his work titled La Seine à Asnières was exhibited at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1902. The following year Gleizes exhibited two paintings at the Salon d'Automne. In 1905 Gleizes was among the founders of l'Association Ernest-Renan, a union of students opposed to military propaganda. Gleizes was in charge of the Section littéraire et artistique, organizing theater productions and poetry readings. At the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon (Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, 1906), Gleizes exhibited Jour de marché en banlieue. Tending towards 1907 his work evolved into a Post-Impressionist style with strong Naturalist and Symbolist components.^[3]

Gleizes and others decide to create an association fraternelle d'artistes and rent a large house in Créteil. The Abbaye de Créteil was a self-supporting community of artists that aimed to develop their art free of any commercial concerns. For nearly a year, Gleizes along with other painters, poets, musicians and writers, gathered to create. A lack of income forced them to give up their cherished Abbaye de Créteil in early 1908 and Gleizes moved to rue du Delta near Montmartre, Paris. In 1908 Gleizes exhibited at the Toison d'Or in Moscow. The same year, showing a great interest in color and reflecting the transient influence of Fauvism, the work of Gleizes became more synthetic with a proto-Cubist component.^[4]^[5]

Albert Gleizes, 1911, Portrait de Jacques Nayral, oil on canvas, 161.9 x 114 cm, Tate Modern, London. This painting was reproduced in Fantasio: published 15 October 1911, for the occasion of the Salon d'Automne where it was exhibited the same year.

Gleizes' Fauve-like period was very brief, lasting several months, and even when his paint was thickest and color brightest, his concern for structural rhythms and simplification was dominant. His geometric simplifications at this time were more akin to Pont-Aven School and Les Nabis principles than to Paul Cézanne. His landscapes of 1909 are characterized by the reducing of forms of nature to primary shapes.^[1]
During the summer of the same year his style became linear and stripped, broken down into multiple forms and facets with attenuated colors, close to that of the painter Henri Le Fauconnier. In 1910 a group began to form which included Gleizes, Metzinger, Fernand Léger and Robert Delaunay. They met regularly at Henri le Fauconnier's studio on rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, near the Boulevard de Montparnasse. These soirées would often included writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Roger Allard, René Arcos, Paul Fort, Pierre-Jean Jouve, Alexandre Mercereau, Jules Romains and André Salmon.^[3] Together with other young painters, the group wanted to emphasise a research into form, in opposition to the Neo-Impressionist emphasis on color. From 1910 onwards, Albert Gleizes was directly involved with Cubism, both as an artist and principle theorist of the movement.^[4]^[5]

Cubism

The crucial years

Gleizes' evolvement in Cubism saw him exhibit at the twenty-sixth Salon des Indépendants in 1910. He showed his Portrait de René Arcos and L'Arbre, two paintings in which the emphasis on simplified form had already begun to overwhelm the representational interest of the paintings. The same tendency is evident in Jean Metzinger's Portrait of Apollinaire in the same Salon.^[4] When Louis Vauxcelles wrote his initial review of the Salon he made a passing and imprecise reference to Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger and Henri le Fauconnier, as "ignorant geometers, reducing the human body, the site, to pallid cubes." Guillaume Apollinaire, in his account of the same salon at the Grand Palais (in L'Intransigeant, 18 March 1910^[6]), remarked "with joy" that the general sense of the exhibition signifies "La déroute de l'impressionnisme," in reference to the works of a conspicuous group of artists (Gleizes, Delaunay, Le Fauconnier, Metzinger, André Lhote and Marie Laurencin).^[7]^[8] In Gleizes' paintings of the crucial year 1910, writes Daniel Robbins, "we see the artist's volumetric approach to Cubism and his successful union of a broad field of vision with a flat picture plane. [...] The effort to grasp the intricate rhythms of a panorama resulted in a comprehensive geometry of intersecting and overlapping forms which created a new and more dynamic quality of movement.^[1]
Gleizes then exhibited at the 1910 Salon d'Automne with the same artists, followed by the first organized group showing by Cubists, in Salle 41 of the 1911 Salon des Indépendants (La Femme aux Phlox (Woman with Phlox)) together with Metzinger, Delaunay, le Fauconnier and Léger. The result was a public scandal which brought Cubism for the first time to the attention of the general public (Picasso and Braque were exhibiting in a private gallery selling to a small circle of connoisseurs).
At the 1911 Salon d'Automne (room 8) Gleizes exhibited his Portrait de Jacques Nayral and La Chasse (The Hunt), with, in addition to the group of Salle 41, André Lhote, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Villon, Roger de La Fresnaye and André Dunoyer de Segonzac. In the fall of that year, though the intermediary of Apollinaire, he met Pablo Picasso for the first time and joined the Puteaux Group which held meetings in the studio of Jacques Villon (Gaston Duchamp) and also included Villon's brothers, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Marcel Duchamp, amongst others. Many of these artists also frequented the cafés Le Dôme, La Closerie des Lilas, La Rotonde, Le Select, and La Coupole in Montparnasse.^[3]

People crowded into our room, they shouted, they laughed, they got worked up, they protested, they luxuriated in all kinds of utterances. (Albert Gleizes, on the Salon d'Automne exhibition of 1911)^[9]

Albert Gleizes, 1912, Les Baigneuses (The Bathers), oil on canvas, 105 x 171 cm, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

Gleizes exhibited his Les Baigneuses (The Bathers) at the 1912 Salon des Indépendants; a show marked by Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, which itself caused a scandal even amongst the Cubists. This was followed by a group show at the Gallery Dalmau in Barcelona, another exhibit in Moscow (Valet de Carreau), the Salon de la Société Normande in Rouen, and the Salon de la Section d'Or, October 1912 at the Galerie de la Boétie in Paris.^[3]
1911 through 1912, drawing to some extent on theories of Henri Poincaré, Ernst Mach, Charles Henry and Henri Bergson, Gleizes began to represent the object, no longer considered from a specific point of view, but rebuilt following a selection of successive viewpoints (i.e., as if viewed simultaneously from numerous viewpoints, and in four-dimensions). This technique of relative motion is pushed to a its highest degree of complexity in the monumental Le Dépiquage des Moissons (Harvest Threshing) (1912). This ambitious work, with Delaunay's City of Paris, is one of the largest paintings in the history of Cubism.
At the Salon d'Automne of 1912 Gleizes exhibited L'Homme au Balcon (Man on a Balcony), now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.^[10] The Cubist contribution to the 1912 Salon d'Automne created a controversy in the Municipal Council of Paris, leading to a debate in the Chambre des Députés about the use of public funds to provide the venue for such barbaric art. The Cubists were defended by the Socialist deputy, Marcel Sembat.^[4]^[11] Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, in preparation for the Salon de la Section d'Or, published a major defence of Cubism, resulting in the first theoretical essay on the new movement, entitled 'Du "Cubisme" (published by Eugène Figuière in 1912, translated to English and Russian in 1913).^[12]

Theory

Albert Gleizes, 1912, L'Homme au Balcon, Man on a Balcony (Portrait of Dr. Théo Morinaud), oil on canvas, 195.6 x 114.9 cm (77 x 45 1/4 in.), Philadelphia Museum of Art. Completed the same year that Albert Gleizes co-authored the book Du "Cubisme" with Jean Metzinger. Exhibited at Salon d'Automne, Paris, 1912, Armory show, New York, Chicago, Boston, 1913. Purchased from the Armory Show by Arthur Jerome Eddy

In Du "Cubisme" Gleizes and Metzinger wrote: "If we wished to relate the space of the [Cubist] painters to geometry, we should have to refer it to the non-Euclidian mathematicians; we should have to study, at some length, certain of Riemann's theorems." Cubism itself, then, was not based on any geometrical theory, but corresponded better to non-Euclidean geometry than classical or Euclidean geometry. The essential was in the understanding of space other than by the classical method of perspective; an understanding that would include and integrate the fourth dimension.^[13] Cubism, with its new geometry, its dynamism and multiple view-point perspective, not only represented a departure from Euclid's model, but it achieved, according to Gleizes and Metzinger, a better representation of the real world: one that was mobile and changing in time. For Gleizes, Cubism represented a "normal evolution of an art that was mobile like life itself."^[4] In contrast to Picasso and Braque, Gleizes' intent was not to analyze and describe visual reality. Gleizes had argued that we cannot know the external world, we can only know our sensations.^[4] Objects from daily life⎯guitar, pipe or bowl of fruit⎯ did not satisfy his complex idealistic concepts of the physical world. His subjects were of vast scale and of provocative social and cultural meaning. Gleizes' iconography (as of Delaunay, Le Fauconnier and Léger) helps to explain why there is no period in his work corresponding to analytic Cubism, and how it was possible for Gleizes to become an abstract painter, more theoretically in tune with Kandinsky and Mondrian than Picasso and Braque, who remained associated with visual reality.^[1]
Gleizes' intent was to reconstitute and synthesize the real world according to his individual consciousness (sensations), through the use of volumes to convey the solidity and structure of objects. Their weight, placement and effects upon each other, and the inseparability of form and color, was one of the principal lessons of Cézanne. Forms were simplified and distorted, each shape and color modified by another, rather than splintered. His concern was to establish weight, density and volumetric relationships among sections of a broad subject. Gleizes himself characterized the 1910–11 phase of his work as an "analysis of volume relationships," though it bears little relation to the traditional use of the word "analytical" in our understanding of Cubism.^[1]

"We laugh out loud when we think of all the novices who expiate their literal understanding of the remarks of a cubist and their faith in absolute truth by laboriously placing side by side the six faces of a cube and both ears of a model seen in profile." (Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger)^[9]

Albert Gleizes, 1913, L'Homme au Hamac (Man in a Hammock), oil on canvas, 130 x 155.5 cm, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York

A central theme of Du "Cubisme" was that access to the true essence of the world could be gained by sensations alone. The sensation offered by classical painting was very limited: to only one point of view, from a single point in space and frozen in time. But the real world is mobile, both spatially and temporally. Classical perspective and the formulations of Euclidean geometry were only conventions (to use Poincaré's term) that distance us from the truth of our sensations, from the truth of our own human nature. Man sees the world of natural phenomena from a multitude of angles that form a continuum of sensations in perpetual and continuous change. The Cubists' aim was to completely eschew absolute space and time in favor of relative motion, to grasp through sensory appearances and translate onto a flat canvas the dynamical properties of the four-dimensional manifold (the natural world). Only then could one achieve a better representation of the mobile reality of our living experience. If Gleizes and Metzinger write in Du "Cubisme" that we can only know our sensations, it is not because they wish to disregard them, but, on the contrary, to understand them more deeply as the primary source for their own work. In reasoning this way, Gleizes and Metzinger demonstrate that they are successors to Cézanne, who insists that everything must be learnt from nature: "Nature seen and nature felt... both of which must unite in order to endure."^[4]^[14]^[15]

1913–1918

Albert Gleizes, 1913, Portrait de l’éditeur Eugène Figuière (The Publisher Eugene Figuiere), oil on canvas, 143.5 x 101.5 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon

Albert Gleizes, 1914, Woman with animals (La dame aux bêtes) Madame Raymond Duchamp-Villon, oil on canvas, 77 5/16 x 45 15/16 inches (196.4 x 114.1 cm). The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

Albert Gleizes, 1915, Composition pour Jazz, oil on cardboard, 73 x 73 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Albert Gleizes, 1921, Composition bleu et jaune (Composition jaune), oil on canvas, 200.5 x 110 cm

In February 1913, Gleizes and other artists introduced the new style of European modern art to an American audience at the Armory Show (International Exhibition of Modern Art) in New York City, Chicago and Boston. In addition to Man on a balcony (l'Homme au Balcon) no. 196, Gleizes exhibited at the Armory Show his 1910 Femme aux Phlox (Woman with Phlox), Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.^[16]^[17]
Gleizes published an article in Ricciotto Canudo's Montjoie entitled Cubisme et la tradition. It was through the intermediary of Canudo that Gleizes would meet the artist Juliette Roche; a childhood friend of Jean Cocteau and daughter of Jules Roche, an influential politician of the 3rd Republic.^[3]
With the outbreak of World War I, Albert Gleizes re-enlisted in the French army. He was put in charge of organizing entertainment for the troops and as a result was approached by Jean Cocteau to design the set and costumes for the William Shakespeare play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, along with Georges Valmier.^[3]
Discharged from the military in the fall of 1915, Gleizes and his new wife, Juliette Roche, moved to New York, where they would meet regularly with Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Jean Crotti (who would eventually marry Suzanne Duchamp). It is at this time that Gleizes witnessed, with a critical eye, the readymades of Marcel Duchamp. After a short stay at the Albemarle Hotel Gleizes and his wife settled at 103 West Street, where Gleizes painted a series of works inspired by jazz music, skyscrapers, luminous signs and the Brooklyn Bridge. Here Gleizes met Stuart Davies, Max Weber, Joseph Stella, and participated in a show at Montross Gallery with Duchamp, Crotti and Metzinger (who remained in Paris)^[3]
From New York City, the couple sailed to Barcelona where they were joined by Marie Laurencin, Francis Picabia and his wife. The group spent the summer painting at the resort area of Tossa del Mar and in December Gleizes had the first solo exhibition of his works at the Galería Dalmau in Barcelona. Returning to New York city in 1917, Gleizes began writing poetic sketches in verse and in prose, some of which were published in Picabia's Dada periodical 391. Traveling to Bermuda, he painted a number of landscapes but when the war in Europe ended he returned to France where his career evolved more towards teaching through writing and he became involved with the committee of the Unions Intellectuelles Françaises.^[3]^[4]
During the winter of 1918 at the Gleizes' rented house in Pelham New York, writes Daniel Robbins, Albert Gleizes came to his wife and said, "A terrible thing has happened to me: I believe I am finding God." This new religious conviction resulted not from any mystical visions but instead from Gleizes' rational confrontation of three urgent problems: collective order, individual differences and the painter's role. Although Gleizes did not join the Church until 1941, his next twenty-five years were spent in a logical effort not only to find God but also to have faith.^[1]
From 1914 and extending to the end of the New York period, Gleizes' nonrepresentational paintings and those with an apparent visual basis existed side by side, differing only, writes Daniel Robbins, in "the degree of abstraction hidden by the uniformity with which they were painted and by the constant effort to tie the plastic realization of the painting to a specific, even unique, experience."^[1] Gleizes approached abstraction conceptually rather than visually and in 1924 his intricate dialectic caused him to produce two amusing paintings which departed from his usual subject matter: the Imaginary Still Lifes, Blue and Green. In effect, writes Robbins, "Gleizes would have inverted Courbet's "Show me an angel and I will paint you an angel" to be "As long as an angel remains an unembodied ideal and cannot be shown to me, I'll paint it."^[1]

Post-Cubism

By 1919 the pre-war sense of the Cubist movement had been virtually shattered. Paris was overshadowed by a strong reaction against those visions of common effort and revolutionary construction which Gleizes continued to embrace, while the avant-garde was characterized by the anarchic and, to him, destructive spirit of Dada. Neither alternative held any appeal for him and, with the Salons dominated by a return to classicism, his old hostility to Paris was constantly nourished. Gleizes' attempt to resuscitate the spirit of the Section d'Or was met with great difficulty, despite support by Alexander Archipenko, Georges Braque and Léopold Survage.^[1] His own organizational efforts were directed towards the re-establishment of a European-wide movement of abstract artists in the form of a large travelling exhibition, the Exposition de la Section d’Or, in 1920; it was not the success he had hoped for. Cubism was passé for younger artists, although Gleizes, on the contrary, felt that only its preliminary phase had been investigated.^[2]
It was the revival of the Section d'Or which ensured that Cubism in general and Gleizes in particular would become Dada's preferred target.^[18] Similarly, an effort to organize an artists' cooperative received the support of Robert Delaunay, but of no other major artists.^[1] The polemic resulted in the publication of Du cubisme et des moyens de le comprendre by Albert Gleizes, followed in 1922 by La Peinture et ses lois, within which appear the notion of translation and rotation that would ultimately characterize both the pictorial and theoretical aspects of Gleizes' art.^[3] His post-Cubist style of the twenties—flat, forthright, uncompromising—is virtually Blaise Pascal's "Spirit of Geometry."^[1]
Gleizes was in nearly every sense a maverick Cubist, perhaps the most unyielding of them all; both in his paintings and writings (which had a big impact on the image of Cubism in Europe and the United States). He developed a single-minded, thoroughly uncompromising Cubism without the diversion of a classical alternative. During the 1920s Gleizes worked on a highly abstract brand of Cubism. In addition to his shows at Léonce Rosenberg's L'Effort Moderne, the dealer-publisher Povolozky printed his writings. His art was indeed backed by a prodigious theoretical effluence, most notably in La Peinture et ses lois (first published in La Vie des Lettres, October 1922). Gleizes fused aesthetic, metaphysical, moral and social priorities to describe the status and function of art.^[18]
In La Peinture et ses lois writes Robbins, "Gleizes deduced the rules of painting from the picture plane, its proportions, the movement of the human eye and the laws of the universe. This theory, later referred to as translation-rotation, ranks with the writings of Mondrian and Malevich as one of the most thorough expositions of the principles of abstract art, which in his case entailed the rejection not only of representation but also of geometric forms."^[2] Flat planes were set in motion simultaneously to evoke space by shifting across one another, as if rotating and tilting on oblique axes. Diagrams entitled "Simultaneous movements of rotation and shifting of the plane on its axis" were published to illustrate the concept. His painting of 1920–1922, submitted to the same rigor, were not Cubist in any conventional sense; but they were Cubist in their concern with planimetric space, and in their relationship (synthesis) with subject-matter. Indeed, the abstract appearance of these compositions is misleading. Gleizes had always remained committed to synthesis. He described how artists had freed themselves from the 'subject-image' as a pretext to work from the 'subjectless-image' (nebulous forms) until they came together. The images known from the natural world combined with those nebulous forms were made 'spiritually human'. Though Gleizes considered his works as initially nonrepresentational and only afterwards as denotational.^[18]
Before World War I, Gleizes had always been identified as a Cubist avant-garde. And during the twenties he continued to hold a prominent position, but he was no longer identified with the avant-garde since Cubism had already been replaced by Dada and Surrealism. Even after historians began their attempts to analyze the vital role played by Cubism, the name of Albert Gleizes was always mentioned because of his early and important participation in the movement. Gleizes had never ceased to call himself a Cubist and theoretically a Cubist he remained. In many ways his theories were close to those developed by Mondrian, though his paintings never submitted to the discipline of primary colors and the right angle; they were not Neo-Plastic (or De Stijl) in character. In fact, his works from the late 1920s through the 1940s looked like nothing else that was being done, and indeed, they were rarely seen in the art world because Gleizes deliberately distanced himself from extensive participation in the Parisian scene.^[2]
Gleizes realized that his evolution towards 'purity' carried with it the risk of alienation from the 'mentality of the milieu', but he saw it as the sole means of arriving at a new type of art that could reach a mass audience (just as the French murals of the 11th and 12th centuries). In Du Cubisme et les moyens de comprendre (1920), Gleizes went so far as to envisage the mass-production of painting; as a means of undermining the market system and thus the status of artworks as commodities. 'The multiplication of pictures,' Gleizes wrote, 'strikes at the heart of the understanding and the economic notions of the bourgeois.'^[18]
Following the death of Jules Roche, the Gleizes' had enough independent income and real estate to pursue their goals without bowing to material considerations, unlike many other artists. The Gleizes' spent more and more time at the family home in Serrières, in Cavalaire, and an even quieter location on the French Riviera, both associating with people more sympathetic to their social ideas. Gleizes became active in the Union Intellectuelle and lectured extensively in France, Germany, Poland and England, while continuing to write. In 1924–25 the Bauhaus (where certain ideals analogous to his own were practiced) requested a new book on Cubism (as part of a series which included Wassily Kandinsky's Point and Line to Plane, Paul Klee's Pedagogical Notebooks, and Kasimir Malevich's The Non-Objective World^[4]). Gleizes, in response, would write Kubismus (published in 1928) for the collection of Bauhausbücher 13, Munich. The publication of Kubismus in French the following year would bring Gleizes closer to Delaunay.^[1]^[3] In 1924 Gleizes, Léger and Amédée Ozenfant opened Académie Moderne.^[4]
In 1927, still dreaming of the communal days at the Abbaye de Créteil, Gleizes founded an artist's colony at a rented house called the Moly-Sabata in Sablons near his wife's family home in Serrières in the Ardèche département in the Rhône Valley.^[3]^[4]
Léonce Rosenberg, in 1929, commissioned Gleizes (replacing Gino Severini) to paint decorative panels for his Parisian residence, which would be installed in 1931. The same year Gleizes was part of the committee of Abstraction-Création (founded by Theo van Doesburg, Auguste Herbin, Jean Hélion and Georges Vantongerloo) that acted as a forum for international non-representational art, and counteracted the influence of the Surrealist group led by André Breton. By this time, his work reflected the strengthening of his religious convictions and his 1932 book, Vers une conscience plastique, La Forme et l’histoire examines Celtic, Romanesque, and Oriental art. On tour in Poland and Germany, he gave lectures titled Art et Religion, Art et Production and Art et Science and wrote a book on Robert Delaunay but it was never published.^[3]^[4]

Installation shot of the Cubist room, 1913 Armory Show, published in the New York Tribune, February 17, 1913 (p. 7). Left to right: Raymond Duchamp-Villon, La Maison Cubiste (Projet d'Hotel), Cubist House; Marcel Duchamp Nude (Study), Sad Young Man on a Train (Nu [esquisse], jeune homme triste dans un train) 1911-12 (The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice); Albert Gleizes, l'Homme au Balcon, Man on a Balcony (Portrait of Dr. Théo Morinaud), 1912 (Philadelphia Museum of Art); Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2; Alexander Archipenko, La Vie Familiale, Family Life (destroyed)

In 1934 Gleizes began a series of paintings that would continue for several years, in which three levels are identified: static translation, corresponding to his researches of the 1920s; mobile rotation, corresponding to his researches into coloured cadences of the late 1920s and early 1930s; and simple grey arcs which, Gleizes argues, gives the 'form' or unifying 'rhythm' of the painting. The level of 'translation' is generally a geometrical figure evoking a representational image, unlike the work of the early 1930s. These works no longer articulate the strict non-representation of Abstraction Création. Léonce Rosenberg—who had already published Gleizes extensively in his Bulletin de l'Effort Moderne, but had not previously shown much enthusiasm for his painting—was deeply impressed by Gleizes' paintings (which followed from his 1934 research) at the Salon d'Automne. This was the beginning of a close relationship with Gleizes, which continued through the 1930s and is reflected in a stream of correspondence.^[4]
In 1937, Gleizes was commissioned to paint murals for the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne at the Paris World’s Fair. He collaborated with Delaunay in the Pavillon de l'Air and with Léopold Survage and Fernand Léger for the Pavillon de l'Union des Artistes Modernes. At the end of 1938, Gleizes volunteered to participate in the free seminars and discussion groups for young painters set up by Robert Delaunay at his Paris studio.^[3]^[4] Then Gleizes, in collaboration with Jacques Villon, conceived the idea of executing a mural for the auditorium of the Ecole des Arts et Métiers; the latter was rejected by the school authorities as too abstract, but immense panels by Gleizes survive as Four Legendary Figures of the Sky (San Antonio, TX, McNay A. Inst.). Other examples of this ambitious public style include The Transfiguration (1939–41; Lyon, Mus. B.-A.).
In the late 1930s, the wealthy American art connoisseur Peggy Guggenheim purchased a great deal of the new art in Paris including works by Albert Gleizes. She brought these works to the United States which today form part of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
During World War II, Gleizes and his wife remained in France under the German occupation. In 1942 Gleizes began the series of Supports de Contemplation, large scale, entirely non-representational paintings that are both very complex and very serene.^[4] Materials being difficult to obtain during the war, Gleizes painted on burlap, sizing the porous material with a mixture of glue and paint. He had used burlap in some of his earliest paintings and now found it favorable to his vigorous touch, for it took the most powerful strokes even while preserving the matte surface he so valued. In 1952, Gleizes realized his last major work, a fresco titled Eucharist that he painted for a Jesuit chapel in Chantilly.^[4]
Albert Gleizes died in Avignon in the Vaucluse département on 23 June 1953 and was interred in his wife's family mausoleum in the cemetery at Serrières.

Legacy

Albert Gleizes, 1912, Les ponts de Paris (Passy), The Bridges of Paris (Passy), oil on canvas, 60.5 x 73.2 cm, Museum Moderner Kunst (mumok), Vienna. Published in Du "Cubisme", 1912

"Gleizes' individual development, his unique struggle to reconcile forces," writes Daniel Robbins, "made him one of the few painters to come out of Cubism with a wholly individual style, undeflected by later artistic movements. Although he occasionally returned to earlier subjects... these later works were treated anew, on the basis of fresh insights. He never repeated his earlier styles, never remained stationary, but always grew more intense, more passionate. [...] His life ended in 1953 but his paintings remain to testify to his willingness to struggle for final answers. His is an abstract art of deep significance and meaning, paradoxically human even in his very search for absolute order and truth." (Daniel Robbins, 1964)^[1]

Commemoration

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the publication of Du "Cubisme" by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, the Musée de La Poste in Paris presents a show entitled "Gleizes – Metzinger. Du cubisme et après," from 9 May to 22 September 2012. Over 80 paintings and drawings, along with documents, films and 15 works by other members of the Section d'Or group (Villon, Duchamp-Villon, Kupka, Le Fauconnier, Lhote, La Fresnaye, Survage, Herbin, Marcoussis, Archipenko...) are included in the show. A catalogue in French and English accompanies the event. A French postage stamp is issued representing works by Gleizes (Le Chant de Guerre, 1915) and Metzinger (L'Oiseau Bleu, 1913). This is the first time that a museum has organized an exhibit showcasing both Gleizes and Metzinger together.^[19]

Gallery

Albert Gleizes, La Chasse (The Hunt), 1911, oil on canvas, 123.2 x 99 cm. Published in L'Intransigeant, 10 October 1911, "Les Peintre Cubistes" 1913, by G. Apollinaire, and 'Au Salon d'Automne', Revue d'Europe et d'Amerique, Paris, October 1911. Exhibited at the 1911 Salon d'Automne, Valet de Carreau (Jack of Diamonds), Moscow, 1912, and Galerie de la Boétie, Salon de la Section d'Or, Paris, 1912
Albert Gleizes, 1910-12, Les Arbres (The Trees), oil on canvas, 41 x 27 cm. Reproduced in Du "Cubisme", 1912
Albert Gleizes, 1911, Le Chemin, Paysage à Meudon, oil on canvas, 146.4 x 114.4 cm. Exhibited at Salon des Indépendants, 1911, Salon des Indépendants, Bruxelles, 1911, Galeria J. Dalmau, Barcelona, 1912, Galerie La Boétie, Salon de La Section d'Or, 1912, stolen by Nazi occupiers from the home of collector Alphonse Kann during World War II, returned to its rightful owners in 1997^[20]
Albert Gleizes, 1911, Paysage (Landscape), oil on canvas, 71 x 91.5 cm. Reproduced frontispiece catalogue Galeries Dalmau, Barcelona, 1912
Albert Gleizes, 1911, Stilleben, Nature Morte, Der Sturm postcard, Sammlung Walden, Berlin. Collection Paul Citroen, sold 1928 to Kunstausstellung Der Sturm, requisition by the Nazis in 1937, and missing since.
Albert Gleizes, 1912, Landschaft bei Paris, Paysage près de Paris, Paysage de Courbevoie, oil on canvas, 72.8 x 87.1 cm, missing from Hannover since 1937
Albert Gleizes, 1913, Les Bateaux de pêche (Fischerboote), oil on canvas, 165 x 111 cm, exhibited Salon d'Automne, Paris, 1913–14, no. 770, Manes Moderni Umeni, Vystava, Prague, 1914, no. 44
Albert Gleizes, 1914, Paysage avec un arbre, Landscape with trees (Landschaft mit Baumen), oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm, Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York
Albert Gleizes, 1915, Composition, For "Jazz", Pour "Jazz", oil on board, 73 x 73 cm. In a photograph first published in the Xeic York Herald, later reprinted in The Literary Digest, 27 October 1915, Gleizes can be seen at work on this painting
Albert Gleizes, c.1920, Figures planes (Trois personnages assis), dimensions approximately 126 x 100 cm, location unknown. Exhibited Der Sturm, Berlin, 1921 (no. 927) and reproduced in Gleizes 1927, p. 97
Page from the periodical Fantasio, 15 October 1911, featuring Portrait de Jacques Nayral by Albert Gleizes (1911) and Le goûter (Tea Time) by Jean Metzinger (1911)
Armory Show, International Exhibition of Modern Art, Chicago, 1913. The Cubist room, Gallery 53 (northeast view), Art Institute of Chicago, March 24–April 16, 1913. Gleizes' Man on a Balcony is exhibited to the right

Agnes Denes

2013-10-20T12:58:00.000-07:00

Agnes Denes

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Agnes Denes
Tree Mountain located in Ylöjärvi, Finland
Born	1931 (age 81–82) Budapest, Hungary
Nationality	American
Training	New School, Columbia University
Movement	Conceptual Art
Works	Visual Philosophy, Wheatfield, Tree Mountain
Website	http://www.agnesdenesstudio.com/

Agnes Denes (Dénes Ágnes; Budapest, 1931) is a Hungarian-born American conceptual artist based in New York. She is known for works in a wide range of mediums - from poetry and philosophy writings, to complex hand and computer rendered diagrams (which she terms Visual Philosophy), sculpture, and international environmental installations, such as Wheatfield -- A Confrontation (1982), a two-acre wheatfield in downtown Manhattan.^[1]

Biography and Early Career

Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1931,^[2] her family survived the Nazi occupation and moved to Sweden in the mid-1940s. As a teenager, they relocated again to the United States. She has said that the repeated change in language caused her to focus on the visual arts - having "suddenly been silenced."^[3] She studied painting at the New School and Columbia University in New York, and exhibited and sold some of her work.^[3] She soon abandoned painting, due to the constraints of the canvas, and focused broadly on ideas she could explore in other mediums.^[1] "I found its vocabulary limiting"^[3]
She has since participated in more than 450 exhibitions at galleries and museums throughout the world, and has written 6 books.^[4] At some point in the late 1960s-1970s, she was married and has one son, Robert T. Frankel.^[5]

Selected works

What ties it all together is Ms. Denes’s insistence on marrying ambitious intellectual ideas with exquisite formal execution. In contrast to many of her conceptual and land-art peers, she has always been deeply involved with drawing. - Carol Kino, New York Times.^[1]

Ecological

In the history of art there have been a few artists’ artists—individuals who have emphasized in their work the raising of provocative questions and who have also tested the limits of art by taking it into new, unforeseen areas and by using it for distinctly new functions. Agnes Denes is one of these special artists. -Art historian Robert Hobbs, 1992^[6]

Rice/Tree/Burial 1968, Eco-Logic, Sullivan County, New York; re-created 1977 at Artpark ^[7]

As a pioneer of Land Art, Agnes Denes created Rice/Tree/Burial in 1968 in Sullivan County, New York. Acknowledged as the first site-specific performance piece with ecological concerns,^[1] it was enacted ten years later on an expanded scale at Artpark in Lewiston, New York. This performance piece involved planting rice seeds in a field in upstate New York, chaining surrounding trees and burying a time capsule filled with copies of her haiku. “It was about communication with the earth,” Ms. Denes said, “and communicating with the future.”"^[1]^[8]

Wheatfield, a Confrontation 1982 Manhattan, Battery Park City landfill ^[9]^[10]^[11]^[12]

Arguably her best known work. It was created during a six-month period in the spring, summer, and fall of 1982 when Denes, with the support of the Public Art Fund, planted a field of golden wheat on two acres of rubble-strewn landfill near Wall Street and the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan (now the site of Battery Park City and the World Financial Center).

Tree Mountain-a living time capsule 1996, Ylöjärvi, Finland^[13]^[14]^[15]

A monumental earthwork reclamation project and the first man-made virgin forest, situated in Ylöjärvi, Western Finland. The site was dedicated by the President of Finland upon its completion in 1996 and is legally protected for the next four hundred years.

A Forest for Australia reforestation of Red Gum, She Oak, and Paperbark trees in Melbourne Australia 1998 ^[16]^[17]^[18]

6000 trees of an endangered species with varying heights at maturity were planted into five spirals by the artist, creating a step pyramid for each spiral when the trees are fullgrown. The trees help alleviate serious land erosion and desertification threatening Australia.

Nieuwe Hollandse Waterlinie Master Plan, 2000

A 25 year master plan to unite a 100 kilometer-long string of forts dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Incorporating water and flood management, urban planning, historical preservation, landscaping, and tourism into a single plan.

North Waterfront Park Masterplan, Berkeley, California, 1988-91. Site plan and art concept.^[19]

A conceptual masterplan was developed for the conversion of a 97-acre municipal landfill, surrounded by water on three sides in the San Francisco Bay, into an oasis for people and nature.

Visual Philosophy

Ms. Denes as a highly original thinker and visualizer whose work rewards the close attention it demands. -Grace Glueck, New York Times.^[20]

Agnes Denes drawings in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution Museums
Beginning in 1968, she began an intensive exploration of philosophy through art. The result was "an amazing body of work, distinguished by its intellectual rigor, aesthetic beauty, conceptual analysis, and environmental concern." -Jill Hartz, retrospective editor, Cornell University^[5]

Paradox and Essence (Philosophical Drawings), 1976, Published by Tau/ma Press, Rome, Italy, in English and Italian. Edition of 200; 60 pages^[21]
Sculptures of the Mind, 1976, Published by the University of Akron Press, Akron, Ohio. Edition of 1,000, 250 signed and numbered; 50 pages^[22]
Isometric Systems in Isotropic Space: Map Projections (from the Study of Distortions Series, 1973-1979), 1979. Published by Visual Studies Workshop Press, Rochester, New York. Edition of 200 hardback copies in silver foil, signed and numbered by the artist; edition of 600 in paperback; 100 pages, color and black and white throughout, 29 original drawings specially created for the book, 22 transparent pages.^[23]

Original drawings for Isometric Systems, from the Museum of Modern Art Collection

Early Philosophical Drawings, Monoprints, and Sculpture 1970-1973^[24]

Sculpture

A gallery exhibition can only suggest how far and wide the polymathic Ms. Denes has ranged over material and mental worlds during the past four decades. It would take a full-scale museum retrospective to do that. -Ken Johnson, New York Times 2012^[25]

Sculptures of the Mind 1968-2012 [1]^[25] See gallery website for 10 images of pieces in the exhibit.

Writing

See three titles under Visual Philosophy, above.
Book of Dust: The Beginning and the End of Time and Thereafter 1989 Published by Visual Studies Workshop Press, Rochester, New York. Edition of 1,100 of which 200 are signed with an original artwork. Insert ("The Debate - 1 Million B.C. - 1 Million A.D.); 200 pages, 16 full-page duotones [2]
The Human Argument, 2008 Spring Publications, Putnam, Connecticut.^[26]
Poetry Walk—Reflections: Pools of Thought, 2000 Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Art Museum.[3]

Retrospective Cataloges

Agnes Denes: Perspectives, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1974 [4]
Agnes Denes: Sculptures of the Mind / Philosophical Drawings by Amerika Haus Berlin, 1978^[27]
Agnes Denes 1968 -1980, Gary Garrels curator, Hayden Gallery, MIT, Boston, 1980^[28]
Agnes Denes: Concept into Form, Works : 1970-1990, Arts Club of Chicago, 1990^[29]
Agnes Denes by Jill Hartz, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1992 [5]
The Visionary Art of Agnes Denes: An Exhibition of 85 Works, Gibson Gallery, 1996 [6]
Project for Public Spaces, a Retrospective, Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University, Lewisburg PA; 2003^[30]

Public Collections

The Museum of Modern Art, has 14 pieces in the permanent collection.^[31]
The Metropolitan Museum has 5 pieces in the permanent collection.^[32]
The Whitney Museum of American Art has 3 pieces in the permanent collection.^[33]
An additional 43 public museums include pieces in their permanent collections^[34]

She is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York.

Awards

Four fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; Four grants from the New York State Council on the Arts; The DAAD Fellowship, Berlin, Germany (1978); American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award (1985); Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT (1990);^[35] Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (1998);^[36] Jill Watson Award for Transdisciplinary Achievement in the Arts from Carnegie Mellon University (1999);^[37] Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2007);^[38] Ambassador’s Award for Cultural Diplomacy (2008) from the American Embassy in Hungary.

External links

YouTube Video: Agnes Denes at the Creative Time Summit 2010 [7]
YouTube Video: Radical Nature - Environmental Activism, at Barbican Centre, London Interview of Denes, images of Wheatfield [8]
YouTube Video: Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers - Exhibition at SculptureCenter, Long Island City, NY. [9]
Agnes Denes at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects Representative Gallery for Agnes Denes
Agnes Denes: Sculptures of the Mind: 1968 to Now, Exhibition Site at Leslie Tonkonow Gallery Nov 15, 2012 - Jan 19, 2013

Ad Reinhardt

2013-10-18T10:04:00.004-07:00

Ad Reinhardt

American,( 1913–1967)

- About this artist

Source: Oxford University Press

American painter and writer. He was renowned for his work as an abstract painter and for his influence on Minimalism; he also wrote and lectured throughout his life, using these forms to deal with matters he felt were best left out of painting. He set his date of birth in the context of a personal, cultural and political chronology, describing it as having taken place nine months after the Armory Show had ended, on the eve of Europe’s entry into World War I and during the year in which Kazimir Malevich painted the first geometric abstract painting. Extensive travel throughout the world fed his encyclopedic interests.

Reinhardt studied (1931–5) literature and then art history under Meyer Schapiro (b 1904) at Columbia University, New York, where he gained a broad-based arts education; also under Schapiro’s influence he became involved in what were then considered radical campus politics. Reinhardt was editor of the humorous campus publication Jester, for which he created covers in a flattened Cubist style.

Reinhardt’s decision to be an artist was strengthened by his years at Columbia, but his practical training as a painter came primarily after graduation, first at the National Academy of Design and, from 1936 to 1937, at the American Artists’ School on 14th Street. There he was affected by the alternatives proposed by the painters who ran the school, Francis Criss (b 1901) and Carl Holty (1900–73), to the then dominant Social Realism: Criss favoured asymmetrical geometry in his urban landscapes; Holty flattened and divided figures and objects into complex and broad shapes of solid colour. Reinhardt became a member in 1937 of the American Abstract Artists (AAA), of which Holty was chairman; Reinhardt also became affiliated to the Artists’ Union and the American Artists’ Congress, through both of which he met Stuart Davis, who became a great inspiration to him. Reinhardt thus allied himself with the forward-thinking American artistic–political groups of the late 1930s.

From 1936 to 1941 Reinhardt was among the relatively few abstract artists employed in the Easel Division of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP). His numerous paintings that resulted consisted of collage-based, solid-toned, linear, interlocking, geometric forms, such as Abstract Painting (1940; priv. col., see Lippard, 1981, pl. 20) in which his circular and rectilinear shapes were composed as variations on small, cut-paper collages. Reinhardt seemed to have reached immediate artistic maturity. During the early 1940s his original Cubist-derived geometry grew in complexity, as organic and gestural markings gradually replaced precise, hard-edged forms. Though the foundation of his art was collage, as the decade progressed his paintings and drawings were characterized by an embellished linear activity comparable to the incipient Abstract Expressionism of some of his colleagues, as in Number 18 (1949; New York, Whitney). Reinhardt’s work was included in The Ideographic Picture, the group exhibition organized in 1947 by Barnett Newman at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York; among others taking part were Newman himself, Hans Hofmann and Theodoros Stamos. Apart from a year’s interruption for military service from 1944 to 1945, throughout the 1940s Reinhardt’s art focused progressively on a gestural and linear abstraction related to Abstract Expressionism.

When Reinhardt’s funding from the WPA/FAP came to an end in 1941 he began a period of commercial and industrial jobs and freelance graphic work. He was associated with the vanguard PM newspaper as an artist–reporter from 1942 to 1947, producing memorably incisive cartoons. His earliest solo shows occurred in 1943 and 1944 and recognition quickly followed. In 1944 his work was first acquired by a public collection, A. E. Gallatin’s Museum of Living Art (this collection was donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1946). Reinhardt joined the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1946, where he remained throughout his life. In 1947 he took up a post at Brooklyn College, teaching art history.

There are definite links between Reinhardt’s work and that of the Abstract Expressionists, particularly with Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Reinhardt’s abhorrence, however, of the biomorphism, emotionalism and cult of individuality favoured by the Abstract Expressionists led him to produce geometric paintings dominated by grid structures and by variations of a single colour, for example Red Painting (1952; New York, Met.) and Black painting (1952–3; see Colour interaction, colour pl. VIIId), signalling a break with them. Curved forms were eliminated in favour of horizontal and vertical brick-like strokes of paint. Ragged, sinuous edges were purged. His new perception of the work of Piet Mondrian and his personal contact with Josef Albers, with whom he taught in the Yale University Art Department from 1952 to 1953, were catalysts for this return to the geometric. The solid symmetrical blocks of colours characteristic of his late paintings appeared by 1952. These rectilinearly and then squarely structured monochrome paintings were first painted in shades of blue or red and culminated in Reinhardt’s final black series, for example Abstract Painting, Black (1960–66; London, Tate). With these ‘ultimate’ paintings, Reinhardt merged his art and his aesthetics, concentrating the viewer’s attention on gradations of colour of such subtlety that they were nearly impossible to see. Reinhardt’s early identification with the New York School was challenged by his more potent role as the precursor of Minimalism and conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s. His reductive paintings, buttressed by some of his most complex prose, insisted on the primacy of direct observation unattended by literary or naturalistic association. These dark and seemingly invisible works were composed in nine-part, Greek cross blocks. Reinhardt pursued this form exclusively until his death.

Patterson Sims

Jagdish Swaminathan

2013-08-22T05:19:00.000-07:00

Achievements of Jagdish Swaminathan

Jagdish Swaminathan is one of the most significant modern artists of India. He has the skill to express himself easily in words. He was among the co-founders of the Group 1890. Indian art received an all new direction by him and he started working towards a new set of values based on an indigenous identity. His mystical bent of mind is mirrored in his paintings. The account below throws more light on the achievements of Jagdish Swaminathan.

Early Life

Jagdish Swaminathan was born in Simla on 21st June, 1928.

Education and Career

Education in art of Jagdish Swaminathan involved short time spans at the Delhi Polytechnic and then in Poland. He worked in Delhi for the Congress Socialist Party. He became a member of the Communist Party in the year 1947 but left it in 1953. He carried on his work of writing and translation and painting as well. In order to study graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, he won a scholarship in 1958. After six months he came back to Delhi and started working with the artist Sailoz Mookherjea. He also provided his talent for the weekly magazine Link From 1958 to 1962. He wrote a regular political column and acted as its art critic. He launched the exhibition of Group 1890 in the year 1963 at the Rabindra Bhavan Art Gallery, New Delhi. This step worked well for the repute of the group. He also founded and edited the art bulletin Contra in 1966. As an art critic, he hit the supremacy of the Western art world and emphasized the requirement to revive the nature of Indian art.

Style

Jagdish Swaminathan is more apprehensive about having an arousing viewpoint in relation to the understanding. The graphic potential of his imagery is discovered in his paintings. His paintings have copious variations and blend of imagery with brilliant colors. All this recommended the incline of inner being of an individual parting the gross and the sullied. Jagdish Swaminathan left back his previous well ordered color-geometry and brush paintings during 1990s. He moved back to repossess the immaculate freshness of symbols as utilized in the tribal air putting in the pigments with his fingers. He introduced the tribal art of Central India into contemporary focal point through Bharat Bhavan. Reminiscent of the Indian miniature is echoed in his use of flat colors and spaces in his early works.

Awards and Accolades

Jagdish Swaminathan was among the first artists who have the honor to have received Nehru Fellowship in 1968–70. He achieved this fellowship through his thesis titled ‘Relevance of the Traditional Neumen to Contemporary Art’. Despite the fact that it is incomplete, it was the commencement of appreciating the tribal psyche. He had a number of solo exhibitions in India and he participated in group exhibitions as well. These group exhibitions include the Tokyo Biennale in1965 and the first International Triennale India in 1968. He also has the credit to be a member of the intercontinental jury at the Sao Paulo Biennale in the year1969.
Jagdish Swaminathan was considered about the tribal traditions. He continued addressing the people in order to make efforts to take the tribal expression to a good position in the international art and cultural fore. He made sincere attempts to guide people who have a taste for culture to value it and also the human endeavor in broader point of view. He breathed his last in 1994 in New Delhi but achievements of Jagdish Swaminathan will always make us feel his presence amongst us.

Achievements of Nandalal Bose

2013-08-22T05:18:00.001-07:00

Achievements of Nandalal Bose

Nandalal Bose was a remarkable painter of Bengal school of art. He was mentored by both Abanindranath Tagore and Havell. His artistic capabilities are echoed by his oeuvre. His works beautifully represented his nationalistic impulses. Many critics consider his artistic works among India's finest modern paintings. Along with his favorite students (Beohar Rammanohar Sinha and others), he took-up the momentous task of beautifying the original manuscript of the Constitution of India.
In 1976, the Archaeological Survey of India, Department of Culture, Government of India acknowledged his works among the nine artists, whose work not being antiquities, were hence forth to be considered as art treasures. He played an important role in the renaissance of art in India along with his co painters. Achievements of Nandalal Bose have made him shine like a star among the most notable Indian painters.

Early Life of Nandlal Bose

Nandalal was born in Kharagpur in Monghyr district of Bihar on 3rd December, 1883. His father was the manager of Kharagpur Tahsil of Raja of Darbhanga. His mother died when he was eight years of age but she influenced him strongly all through his life.

Education of Nandlal Bose

When Nadalal Bose’s primary education in Bihar was completed, he was sent to Calcutta for higher studies. He was not cut out for conventional academia. This fact was fairly obvious from his fruitless brush with higher education. He was convinced by his stretch with academics that there is just one thing in life for him and it was Art.

Career of Nandlal Bose

Nandalal Bose was deeply influenced by the murals of Ajanta as a young artist. He was among those artists who desired the revival of classical Indian culture. He fashioned a black on white linocut print of Gandhi walking with a staff to mark the 1930 event of Gandhi's arrest for protesting against the British salt tax. Jawaharlal Nehru asked him to sketch the emblems for the Government of India’s awards, including the Padmashri and the Bharat Ratna. His brilliance and original style were acknowledged by well-known artists and art critics like Ananda Coomaraswamy, Gaganendranath Tagore and O.C.Ganguli. These art lovers felt that objective criticism was essential for the growth of painting and laid the foundation of the Indian Society of Oriental Art.
In 1922 he was appointed as the principal of the Kala Bhavana (College of Arts) at Tagore's International University Santiniketan.

Style of Nandlal Bose

Nanadalal’s inventiveness spoke several languages. It was a merge of India’s arty traditions and scores of contemporary styles. His simplistic soulful expressions had a complexity by the Sino Japanese influence.
It is difficult to categorize his opus under any specific school. His project on Ajanta frescos depicted his intrinsic ability to deal with lines and held a tone of classicism. Flat spaces in Mughal and Rajasthani paintings find their approach into his work in Kala Bhavan of his career.
There is a distinctive post-impressionist air in Sabari Paintings. The Chaitanya series and Haripura-Posters were a superb sonnet to the Bengali Folk tradition.

Famous Paintings of Nandlal Bose

His classic works comprise paintings of scenes from Indian village life, Indian mythologies and women. Nandalal used to make use of an array of materials and subjects, especially subjects selected from Mahabharata, Ramayana, Hindu mythologies, Lord Budhha’s life, Budhhist Jataka and also from human life and nature. His famous paintings include Sati, Swayamvara of Damayanthi, Agni, New Clouds and The Sacrifice of Gandhari.

Awards and Achievements

In 1954, Nandalal Bose was honored with the title award of Padma Vibhushan. A prize of Rs. 500 was awarded to him at the first art exhibition organized in 1908 for his painting Shiva-Sati. He received a silver medal in Allahabad Painting Exhibition and gold medal in Lucknow Exhibition. In 1956, he was the second artist to be chosen Fellow of the Lalit Kala Akademi, India's National Academy of Art. Numerous universities bestowed honorary Doctorates on him. Vishvabharati University honored him the title of Deshikottama. The Academy of Fine Arts, Calcutta bequeathed him with the Silver Jubilee Medal. He also received the Tagore Birth Centenary Medal in 1965 by the Asiatic Society of Bengal.
His discoveries and experiences presented India with the modern face of art. At the same time, he kept the instinctive, aboriginal roots together. He was the first Indian artist to react meaningfully to the various linguistic facets of the Indian art tradition. He breathed his last at the age of 83 in 1966 but his works are still breathing in his memory.

Ben Avram

2013-03-21T10:24:00.003-07:00

Ben Avram , Indian Painter
Ben Avram is regarded as the artist of richness, who has brought east and west together in his paintings.

Ben Avram was born in 1941, in Mumbai. He immigrated to Israel in 1956. He received his education from Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem and he has trained under the illustrious Israeli Art professors, Jossi Stern and Jona Mach. Ben Avram is regarded as the artist of profusion, who has brought together east and west, the Eastern tradition of his parents home and the Western tradition of painting taught at Bezalel. He has also received training under the celebrated Israeli artist Avram Ofek, considered as his patron.

Ben Avram set up his first studio in Meah She`arim in Jerusalem in 1964. Since then he has exhibited his work throughout Canada and USA in numerous shows till 1978. The works of Ben Avram can be regarded as the `mixture of the surrounding ultra orthodox environment, together with his secular approach, creating the most amazing paintings- full of Jewish mysticism and symbolism, yet colourful and joyful`. He had also exhibited a solo show in 1977 in Safrai Gallery, Jerusalem. His artworks were demonstrated both at the Art Expo in New York and at art exhibitions in Los Angeles between the years 1981 to 1985. His artworks are embellished throughout Israel, adorning the Israeli Prime Minister`s home, his Office and the Jerusalem Municipality. At present he is residing in Jerusalem and his artworks are shown at the Blue and White Art Gallery in the Old City on a regular basis.

Ratan Parimoo

2013-03-21T10:23:00.002-07:00

Ratan Parimoo, Indian Painter
Ratan Parimoo is reckoned as one of the most prominent art historians and painters in modern India.

"The Romanticists` explanation of creativity convinced me so that the painterly skills seemed to me to be more in the realm of technique as in the case of craftsman and the creativity implied what a painter could be beyond this. That is why how a poet or literary person sees the world around him, gets involved with experiences of life and how they effect his emotions, are according to me the sort of situations that a `feeling person` encounters, contributing to the making of the creatively endowed artist."---Ratan Parimoo. Ratan Parimoo is reckoned as one of the most prominent art historians and painters in modern India.

To Ratan Parimoo the life of an artist is full of imagination, where an individual stays with the feelings and experiences that he or she has gathered from life. This notion is reflected through his paintings. Viewers can feel the urge in order to express the world as he conceptualises it. Ratan Parimoo has served as the Faculty of Fine Arts, in M.S. University, Baroda. The subjects of his teaching were Art history and Aesthetics. The genre or style that is reflected through his paintings cannot be bracketed. He floats smoothly from one form of manifestation to another.

Ratan Parimoo was born in 1936 in Srinagar, Kashmir. Illustrious artist Naina Dalal is the proud wife of this celebrated painter. Ratan Parimoo obtained his graduation in Fine Arts from the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda in 1955. Afterwards he obtained M.A. in (Fine) Creative Painting, Post Graduate Diploma in Museology under M.S. University, Baroda in 1957. Ratan Parimoo obtained his graduate degree in History of Art from London University in 1963. He obtained Ph.D. in Art history from M.S. University, Baroda in 1972. He has ornamented the esteemed posts of- Lecturer in Art History, Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda 1959; Reader and Head, Department of Art History and Aesthetics 1966; Professor in Art History and Aesthetics from the years 1966 to 1978; and also the Dean, Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda from the years 1975 to 1981.

Apart from these posts, Ratan Parimoo was also the member of Executive Board, Lalit Kala Akademi, Delhi from the years 1981 to 84; Member of UGC Panel Art History/Museology in 1982; Executive Secretary, Indian Association of Art Historians from 1982 to 88; Member, UGC Pay Scale Revision Committee in 1985; Member, Central Advisory Board Museums, Government of India in 1987; Member, History of Science, Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi from 1993 to 95; Member, UGC Panel for Art History/Fine Arts from 1994 to 97; Member, Art Purchase Committee, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi from the years 1998 to 2000; Member, Programme Committee, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi from the years 2002 to 2005.

Throughout his professional career he has exhibited his creations in various solo and group exhibitons. The worthy exhibitions are-- 1958 First one-man show, Srinagar; 1972 Retrospective Exhibition at Rabindra Bhavan, Delhi; 1973 & 1975 One-man show, Mumbai; 1976 One-man show, Delhi; 1979 One-man show, Ahmedabad; 1999 Retrospective Exhibition at Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai; 1999 Retrospective Exhibition Part II, at Cymroza Art Gallery, Mumbai; 2000 Retrospective Exhibitions, Ahmedabad, Baroda; 1955 onwards National Exhibitions of Lalit Kala Academy, New Delhi; in the years 1956,57, 58,59 Baroda Group of Artists Exhibitions in Bombay; 1962 South Asian Artists, Durham, U.K; in the years 1964,1965 & 1975 Joint shows with Naina Dalal at Mumbai, Delhi and I.P.C.L., Baroda; in the years 1975,1976 Alumni Exhibition, Faculty of Fine Arts, Silver Jubilee, Mumbai, Baroda; 1990 organised and exhibited with eight Baroda artists, CMC Ltd., New Delhi; 1991-92 Artists Against Communalism, Delhi; 1992 Birla Academy of Art, Calcutta, Silver Jubilee Exhibition, West Zone; 1995 Bharat Bhavan Biennale, Bhopal; 1995 Tribute to Husain on 80th Birthday, Aurodhan Gallery, New Delhi; 1996 Contemporary Indian Painting, Bombay Art Society, Mumbai; 1997 Major Trends in Indian Art, Lalit Kala Academy, New Delhi; 1997 Participated in Artist`s Camps: 1996 Pavagarh, 1976, Srinagar, Kashmir.

Some of Ratan Parimoo`s creations include-- Woman with Matka, oil on board (Exhibited, National Exhibition of Art, LKA, New Delhi); Habba Kadal, oil on board, 1957 (Exhibited, Baroda Group of Artists, Mumbai); Lotus Valley, digital print (original with Air India, oil on board); Baroda Station I, oil on board; Marriage Procession, oil on canvas; Baroda Station II, oil on canvas; Still life with Kashmiri objects, oil on canvas; Kashmiri Family, oil on canvas; Rice Fields, oil on canvas; Kingdom of Cards, oil on canvas; Dal Lake, oil on canvas; Baroda Station III, oil on canvas; Baroda Zoo, oil on canvas; Tongas, oil on board; Composition (Scarlet Pearls), oil, sand, encaustic on board; Composition, encaustic on canvas; Bio-morphic Forms, oil on canvas; Fear, Despair, Death (Fear: Dragon`s Visit), oil on canvas; Self Portrait as Icarus Transformed, oil on canvas; Sea of Eyes, oil on canvas; Dromedary as Nemesis, oil on canvas; Dromedary as Nemesis, oil on canvas; Penumbra, oil on canvas; Road of Nirvana, oil on canvas; Water Buffaloes, oil on canvas; Dance of Death II, oil on canvas; Mahishasuramardini, oil on canvas; Encounter with Nothingness, oil on canvas.

As a recognition to this outstanding talent, numerous laurels have been conferred upon Ratan Parimoo, like-- Cultural Scholarship for Painting, Govt. of India 1957-59; Commonwealth Scholarship to study in London for the years 1960-63; obtained First prize in Painting, Annual Exhibition, J & K. Cultural Academy in 1966; Rockefeller 3rd Grant to study and travel to USA in 1974 and Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship 1991-1993. Ratan Parimoo in a widespread way has written and published many articles and books on classical Indian and Modern Indian art as well as in films. His main aim was to evolve a new direction in art historical studies. Some books written by him are-- `Paintings of the Three Tagores` (Published in 1973); Studies in Modern Indian Art (Published in 1975); Life of Buddha in Indian Sculpture (Published in 1982); Sculptures of Sheshashayi Vishnu (Published in 1983); The Paintings of Rabindranath Tagore (Published in 1989); The Pictorial World of Gaganendranath Tagore (Published in 1995); Studies in Indian Sculpture (Published in 1999); Ceaseless Creativity, Paintings, Prints and Drawings, edited by Gauri Parimoo Krishnan, published in 1999.

The creations of Ratan Parimoo embellishes places like-- Hermitage, Leningrad; National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi; Punjab University, Chandigarh; Air India, Mumbai; Shyamal Builders, Vadodara; Gujarat State Lalit Kala Akademi, Ahmedabad; Sahitya Kala Parishad, New Delhi; Madhavan Nair Foundation, Cochin; Cymroza Art Gallery, Mumbai; Welcome Group of Hotel, Vadodara.

Shukla Sawant

2013-03-21T07:27:00.000-07:00

OUTSIDE THE FOLD

Shukla Sawant

Anant Art Gallery - New Delhi

F 213-B, Lado Sarai, 110030 New Delhi, India

August 18, 2009 - September 18, 2009

A Look at Shukla Sawant

by Alana Hunt

The first images one sees upon entering Shukla Sawant’s current solo exhibition, "Outside the Fold," are of a young woman’s peeling hands holding an open book close to her body. The tightness of the image makes you wonder – if we could see just beyond the frame (or outside the fold), – would we find her face, looking down and reading the pages that rest in her hands, or is she holding the book close to her while gazing off somewhere else? Walk to the end of the room, and there lit softly against the back wall, is a woman’s face now crystallized and hovering itself within the pages of a solid glass book.

What does it mean for a woman to read?

In different times, in different places, to different people and across different kinds of reading material the possible answers to this question appear impossibly endless. But for Pandita Ramabai, the subject of Sawant’s new body of work "Remembering Pandita," reading within the context of nineteenth century India was something that carried her outside the fold of social and religious norms and into a life of radical questioning – particularly in regard to the kinds of social injunctions against women laid down by religious texts. It is this spirit of dissent and heresy that Sawant’s "Remembering Pandita" seeks to celebrate,

However, the story of Pandita Ramabai is only half of the work that makes up Sawant’s "Outside the fold"; "Sirop and Desert Islands and Other Texts" is the other. Similarly drawing upon history (and books), "Sirop and Desert Islands and Other Texts" takes the touristic vision of Mauritius as a tropical paradise and turns it inside out, revealing some of the darker histories such island mono-economies possess through an exploration of indentured labour as a part of colonial ventures and its contemporary legacy. This body of work, which includes print, photography, souvenir scratch cards and a range of sculptural installations involving whips and sugar, stairs and handcuffs, is really brought together by the use of sound that hauntingly connects across the exhibition space both the materials and ideas. Seagulls squawking as waves hit the shore just don’t seem so innocent and sugar isn’t quite so sweet – appearing instead, somehow sharp and dangerous.

On the whole, Shukla Sawant’s "Outside the Fold" is a new body of work that explores histories. But history, as Walter Benjamin has argued, is not something stuck in the past but rather a dialectical image created by the collision of the past into the present – so, in relation to Sawant’s evocation of the past in "Outside the Fold" we can ask: what do the stories of a radical nineteenth century Indian woman and indentured labour in Mauritius illuminate for us in Delhi today?

Vivek Vilasini

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Vivek Vilasini

Born 1964 in Trishur, Kerala, India
Lives and works in Bangalore, India

Before multimedia artist and photographer Vivek Vilasini began studying art and sculpture with traditional Indian craftsmen he was a radio officer at the All India Marine College in Kochi.

In his art Vilasini is known for working with the social structures prevalent in contemporary Indian society. He is interested in defining cultural identity while also taking a critical stance on globalisation.

In the photo collage Between one Shore and several Others (Just what is it…after Richard Hamilton) from 2008, Vilasini refers to an iconic work of art by Richard Hamilton. Hamilton was a British painter and collage artist who, with his 1965 collage Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?, created one of the very first Pop Art works. Vilasini uses digital manipulation to reinterpret Hamilton’s iconic image, imbuing it with a particularly Indian sensibility. By using image fragments from Indian popular culture, from news media, advertising, and Bollywood films he meshes Eastern and Western iconographies. Vilasini reintroduces predefined roles in a new context while discussing the modern global age. For example, the work explores how the vitality of modern Indian art is born out of economic and political change, media impacts, and by the rivalry between cultural traditions and globalisation.

Vilasini’s collage highlights how our own history is always related to social history – to the mutual interdependencies affecting the development of both. Thus, the work can affect and generate cultural and social awareness in the spectator.

Stine Kleis Hansen

Vivek Valasini

Between one Shore and several Others
(Just what is it...after Richard Hamilton), 2008

Hema Upadhyay

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Hema Upadhyay

Born 1972 in Baroda, Gujarat, India
Lives and works in Mumbai, India

From a high vantage point – above the shacks with their blue plastic cover-ings seeking to ward off the merciless rain – Hema Upadhyay looks out across her city, Mumbai. Upadhyay views the city as a provisory entity that may disappear or be removed at any time, a disturbing object of desire. By placing photographs of herself in her works she looks for her own place within this city of dreams. Her paintings, collages, and sculptural installations keep coming back to themes such as one’s native soil, loss, migration, and belonging.

Upadhyay was born and raised in Baroda, where, in the early 1990s, she began studying painting and subsequently graphic art at the Faculty of Fine Arts. While still a student, she began infusing her works with personal narratives. In 1998 she moved to Mumbai to embark on a new life in this metropolitan city. In her mind, this relocation became intermingled with her family’s memories of their enforced relocation from Pakistan in connection with the 1947 Partition. She peopled her surfaces with photographs of herself while struggling to gain access to her new city.

I Have a Feeling That I Belong, a work from 2001 – part of a series entitled Sweet, Sweat Memories – sees the artist poised on the balcony of a tall building, letting her gaze glide across the complex while her body is balanced precariously close to the edge. Critics have interpreted this autobiographical positioning of herself in the role of the main protagonist as a gender-specific comment on spatial issues. These works are characterised by a deliberate play with scale, dimensions, and a sense for diminishing forms, for reducing scale.

A particularly poignant work from 2002 was a site-specific installation entitled The Space in Between You and Me created for the Khoj International Artists’ Workshop in Mysore. Upadhyay wrote a letter to her family by sowing millet seeds in the soil. The letters sprung up, grew, and gradually withered away – “as if they never existed”.

As far back as 2002 she had already begun work on the first versions of her site-specific installation depicting Dharavi in Mumbai, Asia’s largest slum. If, in earlier works, her multifaceted self enjoyed a sense of freedom and imagination, hovering in the sky above the confines of the slums, the installation Dream a Wish – Wish a Dream was more directly concerned with the materiality of existence, with its details – and with a confrontation with the vulnerability that characterises modern urban life in third-world cities.

The installation 8 feet x 12 feet (2009) – which is made out of aluminium sheets, car scraps, enamel paints, tarpaulins, pieces of metal and found objects – swallows up the room, creating a compact whole. Upadhyay is interested in space in its physical sense – in the people, objects, dwellings, and roads that fill out the space and make the city come alive. The installa-tions bring about a bodily experience, possessed of a strong physical at-traction, while also celebrating the wishes, dreams, and hopes that are part of life in the slums, too.

Vidya Shivadas

Hema Upadhyay

8 feet x 12 feet, 2009

Kiran Subbaiah

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Kiran Subbaiah

Born 1971, Sidapur, India
Lives and works in Bangalore, India

Formally trained as a sculptor, Kiran Subbaiah works in a range of media, including assemblage, video and internet art. A common approach of his practice is subverting the form and function of objects, through which he questions the relationship between use and value, highlighting contradictions inherent in everyday life. Irony, deadpan humour and a crude aesthetic provide Subbaiah with simple binaries: functional/defunct, action/reaction and cause/effect to tease out his ideas and observations.

Often found-object sculptures are manipulated by Subbaiah into paradoxes. Thirst, 1998, presents a glass tumbler that is anything but refreshing, in that it contains pebbles and is precariously balanced between mouth-drying materials: a mound of salt and a tower of plaster, cloth, tissue paper, expanded polystyrene and cotton wool. Love All, 1999, is a football with a tessellated surface studded by unlit matches positioned for kick-off on a circle of matchbox lighting strips, threatening to ignite the ball should a match commence.

In public spaces, Subbaiah uses the language and format of street-signs and official notices. With phrases such as ‘Prohibitions Strictly Forbidden’ and ‘Ignore This Corner’ or symbols such as a bicycle with feet instead of wheels, he challenges the authority of such common directions over the public who are expected to adhere to their rules.

The artist becomes actor in his videos, performed in an earnest, deadpan seriousness. Flight Rehearsals, 2003, extends Subbaiah’s interest in subversion beyond objects, to an overturning the conception of gravity and scale. The camera is angled so Subbaiah appears to ‘fly’, having discovered the secret of flight is to repeatedly jump before gravity has time to act. The action moves to a bedroom, where a ringing alarm clock in the “foreground” is actually oversized and distant, creating an unsettling distortion of the sense of space as first perceived.

Under the heading of net.art on his website (www.geocities.com/antikiran), Subbaiah presents a number of internet and computer-based projects. These include a series of downloadable mock-viruses that simulate an attack on the computer, complete with shrieks of pain from the machine. Computer viruses interest the artist particularly as something that exists between function and dysfunction - their purpose is to drain the use-value out of a computer.

Subbaiah’s website also presents as yet unrealised ideas and propositions, which are themselves social commentaries. These include a toilet roll dispenser that prints sheets with up-to-the-minute news reports, reflecting on the contemporary appetite for uninterrupted access to information and the speed with which news is disposed. He also proposes an amplifier and loud-speaker for bicycle horns, to help cyclists combat the brutal use of vehicular horns in Indian cities. Commenting not only on noisy urban life, but on the tendency to fight fire with fire, rather than more peaceful solutions.

The artist considers his work as a form of emancipation, whereby objects no longer need to conform to their original use potential. He sees this extended by defining them art objects – as he states ‘I see the whole advantage of making art in the fact that it need not serve any purpose.’

Rebecca Morrild

Kiran Subbaiah

Flight Rehearsals, 2003

Dayanita Singh

2013-01-28T22:02:00.002-08:00

Dayanita Singh

Born 1961 in New Delhi, India
Lives and works New Delhi, India

Dayanita Singh is a photographer known for portraits and interior views of Indian domestic life, especially urban-middle and upper-class families documented in the Steidl publication, Privacy, 2003. Singh reveals the nature of relationships between family members and communities. Her abiding interest in poignant narratives is made accessible to her audience through the medium of photography. She uses alternative means to achieve accessibility that supersedes the gallery system. For instance she has produced posters and calendars that are distributed openly with the expectation that the viewer will take the work home and install it within her own domestic space. This is a response to and comments on the commodification of art and culture prevalent today as well as a means of shifting the interior views of her broad audience.

Her first photographic series documented the tabla maestro Zakir Hussain. This developed for Singh into a symbiotic relationship with her subject, as well as the medium of photography. She gained insight and a sense of Hussain’s way of life, while capturing him, which in turn provided insights for him into his photographic presence revealing over their extended exchange depths of his character that were not previously apparent. This relationship initiated a journey of self-discovery both for Singh and her subjects that has resulted in numerous intimate and elegant images.

Singh’s earliest photographic series are in black and white. With an absence of colour articulating departure, memory and loss and are depicted most tenderly in Go Away Closer, 2007. With her accordion book, Chairs, 2001 Singh gave 10 books each to friends she felt were vital points of contact and asked them to disseminate the books to other friends, resulting in a sort of aural transfer of her visual production. The concertina format permits expandability making her books constant works-in-progress and allows for a teleological sequencing. Singh has transformed 7 of her journeys into a series of accordion books known as Sent a Letter, 2008 which are like portable museums. Each is addressed to a fellow traveller. Sent a Letter is encased in a handmade cloth box that reads “SENT A LETTER to my friend on the way he dropped it. Someone came and picked it up and put it in his pocket”, embodying the circularity and random nature of disseminating Singh’s ideas while continuing her engagement with intimate subjects through making the books small-scale and cherished objects.

Ladies of Saligao, 2005 is a series in which she photographed women from the village in Goa where she lives. The prints were hung at the local community centre and the women were encouraged to carry their prints home from the exhibition to install in their own homes.

Another significant series is Singh’s documentation over a period of 13 years of Mona Ahmed, her closest friend. Singh maps Mona’s intimate life, her adopted daughter, banishment from the community of eunuchs for alcoholism and her eventual illegal activities in a cemetery. Singh has documented several subjects, tracking complex and difficult lives. These images of people working, celebrating or resting show life without embellishment.

Singh captures a sense of poignancy not only with human beings but with buildings as well. Her more recent photographs, the Blue Book Series has introduced the element of colour into her work. Although Singh has preferred small-scale and finely printed photography, she has recently been experimenting with other formats.

Savita Apte

Dayanita Singh

Dream Villa 11 - 2007, 2008

Sudarshan Shetty

2013-01-28T22:01:00.005-08:00

Sudarshan Shetty

Born 1961 in Mangalore, India
Lives and works in Mumbai, India

Sudarshan Shetty is particularly well known for his large-scale sculptures and installations. His work takes its point of departure in a lyrical world full of playfulness and freedom, unfettered by political questions. Through everyday-like fragments he presents a fascinating combination of the representational and the abstract that reveals different facets of modern society. In addition to this, Shetty often employs simple, subtle distortions in his works, e.g. distortions of scale. In so doing, he breaks down conventions and creates new ideals in an attempt at counteracting existing systems. Shetty has always worked with the concept of boundaries within the realms of the personal, the psychological, the social, and the carnal. He uses specially selected materials to celebrate and define such boundaries and their inevitable demise.

Shetty’s early paintings, later installations, and most recent kinetic sculptural assemblages all evince a keen interest in the macabre, the playful, and the seductive. But just as his works consistently evoke emotional responses in his audiences, his works are also contemplative and insightful. In the monumental work Untitled from 2006 he shows a mechanical sculptural installation that animates the cow. In India the cow is regarded as sacred. It is a symbol of goodness, fertility, and the feminine; a kind of mother goddess for the Hindu. Some Indian states even have a ban against slaughtering cows and oxen. Shetty’s sculpture consists of two life-sized skeletal cows, their hooves placed on top of each other. The sculpture was created in connection with a series of works entitled Love, which investigates the phenomenon of love as something that is at turns comical, ironic, and perverse.

In Shetty’s works the cows are quite literally naked – cut to the bone. At the same time, they pretend to be making love even though they cannot possibly move. However, the act of physical love taking place between the cows strikes us as neither insistent nor provocative, precisely because the placing of the cows does not facilitate it. The work also turns love into something mechanical: If a spectator passes too closely by the sculpture, the movement sets off a hammer that strikes the udder of one of the cows. To Shetty the main issue does not concern seeing and experiencing the work of art as an aesthetic object; rather, it has to do with how machines and objects in the world have a fleeting, ephemeral quality. In the work he demonstrates an interest in the cow as a national and historical symbol, as something with a jester-like potential for the comically sublime. His inappropriate interventions against the familiar posit his works in a changeable interspace located somewhere between universally shared frames of reference and intimate, private experiences.

Stine Kleis Hansen

Sudarshan Shetty

Untitled (Double Cow from the show Love), 2006

Tejal Shah

2013-01-28T22:01:00.002-08:00

Tejal Shah

Born 1979 in Bhilai, India
Lives and works in Mumbai, India

Tejal Shah works in video, photography, performance and installation, blurring boundaries of subject matter and visual language. Informed by a range of sources from different histories and cultures, including her life experiences and stories from the disenfranchised subcultures, Shah is primarily concerned with issues of identity, politics, gender and sexuality.

Shah has been working with the body as a gendered and sexualised entity from the outset of her mature work. Much of which is focused on the social and biological constructs of gender. Protagonists are often women, transgendered or transsexual people who have been marginalised by the historical narrative. Shah’s work both references and transcends otherness.

What are you? 2006, explores the malleable language of gender, physically manipulated not only by her chosen subjects, the hirja (transgender) community, but also through the deployment of various forms of media. A two-channel video installation with both screens positioned together {Please clarify, is this side by side? Top to bottom? Face to face? Front to back?}, super-8 is fused with video-style footage, which flows into formal portraiture, woven within found footage not only to reflect an interest in the formal aspects of her work but also replicating the complexities of the hirjas’ life and the ways in which they negotiate and live with their identity.

A vortex of emotion and aesthetics - at once celebratory, humorous and fantastical, the work becomes a site of contestation and transformation where the hirja protagonists become the potential artisans of a new vision; the work becomes an emphatic form of activism that proposes a utopian vision of gender.

Produced during the artist’s residency in Paris, the video There is always something absent, 2007–08, follows Shah’s interest in the systematic control of women’s sexuality, madness and mental illness. Collaborating with the Paris-based dancer and choreographer Marion Perrin, the work critically deals with the historical and social constructs, such as female hysteria.

The narrative focuses on the story of Augustine, a patient at the Salpêtrière Hospital from 1875 to 1880. Through the juxtaposition of images from past and present, which creates an affinity that links us to the women trapped by the ‘hospitality’ of the Salpêtrière, combined with the clinical recitals from Dr. Charcot’s notes, Shah questions accepted historical imaginings and social constructs of gender; it is only when the protagonist escapes, disguised as a man, is she finally allowed to express her feelings.

As well as the exploration of gender and sexuality, Shah also deals with the concepts of religion, national identity, self and community in her acclaimed film, I Love My India, 2003. Situated within the conditions of state sponsored genocide against the minority Indian Muslim community in Gujarat (2002), Shah dispels the purported notion of India as one of the world’s largest democracies. Filmed and narrated by the artist in the banal location of a public recreational ground at Nariman Point, Mumbai, combined with the format of an opinion poll, the candid and direct testimonies ranging from loss, apathy, prejudice and ignorance not only question democracy at a local level but also humanity. Within the post-9/11 context, the video asks the viewer to re-examine his own political stance and poses the questions whether it has become more acceptable to commit such acts of violence when the war on terror has been positioned as a universal cause and the bulwark of democracy.

Leila Hasham

Tejal Shah

I Love My India, 2003

Jagannath Panda

2013-01-28T22:00:00.002-08:00

Jagannath Panda

Born 1970 in Bhubaneswar, Orissa, India
Lives and works in New Delhi, India

Jagannath Panda holds two masters’ degrees in Sculpture, one from the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University, Baroda, 1994, and a later degree from the Royal College of Art, London, 2002. Panda is known for creating images that are deceptively simple. Often, his works consist of light, linear drawings and melting or liquid shapes placed on the surface. At the same time, the works also reflect conflicts between ecology and development, nature and technology.

Panda’s works are often inspired by his immediate surroundings: Orissa, his native state, and his current home in chaotically urban New Delhi. For example, he mixes the traditional palm leaf drawings of Orissa with architectural motifs showing multinational enterprises and call centres from New Delhi. In so doing, the artist illustrates the paradoxical co-existence of different worlds while also highlighting how the success of the business community is creating palpable change within Indian society.

Through his art, Panda brings together many binary opposites, juxtaposing nature and culture, the urban and the rural, tradition and innovation, and the figurative and the abstract. In his works he brings together these opposing scenarios to form a coherent whole through deft colour treatment and a personal aesthetic sensibility.

Animal life also plays an important part in the artist’s circle of motifs. Animals represent people, gods, or the cycle of life. The work God and Goat from 2007 casts a goat as the main protagonist. The goat is a symbol for sacrifices to the gods, but in some cases it can also be an avatar of the god Prakriti. In Hinduism, Prakriti represents Mother Nature, and it may be in order to accentuate this symbolism that Panda has an umbilical cord, terminating in a red cloth ball, emanate from the goat’s belly. The goat is also decked out in a range of patterns reminiscent of embroidery and painted in the colours red, black, and white. These colours can represent the three spiritual qualities: ’Sattva’, goodness and happiness; 'Rajaher’, passion and movement; and finally ’Tamas’: darkness and ignorance.

Panda’s staging of the goat reclining on a pewter box is a testament to an enchanted universe where modern-day rationality locks horns with religion and fantasy. India’s contrasts between past and present are powerfully expressed in the artist’s work.

Stine Kleis Hansen

Jagannath Panda

God and Goat, 2007

Nalini Malani

2013-01-28T21:59:00.005-08:00

Nalini Malani

Born 1946 in Karachi, Pakistan
Lives and works in Mumbai, India

Nalini Malani emerged at a time when the Indian art scene was male dominated. Amongst a new generation of women artists who wove personal narratives and histories into their practice, her early works were cathartic autobiographies. The female protagonists of her paintings expressively negotiate family relationships. With a focus on the body, interaction and layering becomes a metaphor to illustrate the complexities of Indian society and the emotions they elicit: oppression, anxiety, self absorption and anger.

Working initially with overtly Indian themes, Malani eventually sexualised and de-gendered her female protagonists, highlighting the extreme roles for women in Indian society from urban proletarian to street acrobat. Her focus has been on unconventional women – Mad Meg from Breughel’s painting, Medea, Sita, Radha, Akka, Alice from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Some of these women existed, others are legend, each subverted male dominated social customs to define new roles. Figures appear in isolation or intertwined – not in expected contexts but in multilayered narratives open to interpretation.

Malani started to receive international acclaim in the 1980s and in the 1990s she became part of India’s first-generation of video artists. Her practice also encompasses multi-media installation and experimental theatre, although painting and drawing remain central. Her experimentation in post-painterly media is for her a means of retrieving the early experience of learning to paint. Video provides unrestricted spatial and temporal density with which to explore a painterly approach.

Always attuned to global discourses which shape female identity Nalini uses a singularly personal idiom which weaves local history and social issues to communicate her position. Her works are populated with appropriated and reappropriated imagery, which furthers her narrative, in itself often a telling and a retelling within a work. Her collaboration in the performance Medeamaterial inspired her to explore human emotions and their expression through bodily changes.

In her installations she combines painting with light and shadow. The first of these works came about following a stage-set designed by the artist for a theatre production in which actors interacted with painted forms on stage, in her art installations, however, the human presence is removed. These works further explore layering especially as she paints onto transparent cylinders that rotate with light projected through them to populate the room with shadows. Referencing Buddhist prayer wheels whose rotations express a desire for change within the stability of cyclical continuity; the cylinders’ revolutions and images build a continuous narrative of epic proportions that appears and vanishes simultaneously. Accompanied by music and text, the historical, cultural, personal and psychological elements combine to present allegories of political and ecological dangers, with images recalling the horrors of war, the industrial revolution, and the utopia/dystopia that followed.

The twelve piece suite entitled Tales of Good and Evil featured in Indian Highway allude to forms of communication and oral transmission of tales, myths and legends of Indian origin which were transmitted through the centuries via the great commercial arteries of roads which linked north and south and east and west.

Savita Apte, Rebecca Morrild

Nalini Malani

Part Object, 2008

Bose Krishnamachari

2013-01-28T21:59:00.002-08:00

Bose Krishnamachari

Born 1963 in Kerala, India
Lives and works in Mumbai, India

Bose Krishnamachari is an artist and curator whose artistic practice includes bold abstract paintings, figurative drawings, sculpture, photography and multimedia installations. While stylistically varied, a common thread throughout his work is a critique of power structures that operate within the art world and more broadly in contemporary society. In his first solo show in 1990, Krishnamachari deployed a minimalist style, producing an abstract black on black with white perforated paper, reminiscent of Braille. As viewers could neither touch nor read the language an ironic comment on contemporary culture, and art gallery decorum in particular could be understood.

In both his art and his curating, Krishnamachari examines the art historical canon and exposes its inequalities. De-Curating – Indian Contemporary Artists, 2003, included 94 sketches and paintings of living Indian artists – both well-established and emerging practitioners. The works resulted from three years of travelling across India, meeting, talking, photographing and drawing. This journey was, in his words, ‘a hand-made tribute to the memory of that “whole-time worker”, the artist’ and undermines the value judgements of art history, presenting the artists as equally significant. Krishnamachari’s desire to support and promote lesser-known artists also extends to his curatorial activities he has previously devised exhibitions that offer Indian artists visibility in larger cities and opportunities for exposure within the international contemporary art world.

Other works by Krishnamachari look beyond the art world, and seek to examine the psyche of the ‘average Mumbaikar’ and make visible what he describes as the ‘ocean of anxieties that have arisen from the everyday question of acceptance’. One series includes six large ballpoint pen portraits of household staff from the artist’s Mumbai residence, as well as 108 photographic portraits of individuals who participant in the artist’s life, keeping alive the encounters he had with them. These works are a reminder of how the wealth and class are still dividers in contemporary Indian society.

The large-scale multimedia installation Ghost / Transmemoir 2008 takes a different approach to mapping Mumbai. The work comprises 108 used tiffin boxes suspended from a frame and wired with headphones and miniature screens. Tiffin boxes play a central role in Indian life, with millions being filled daily by housewives, collected, exchanged, re-exchanged and sorted until the right home-cooked lunch reaches the right office-worker. Overall, the installation captures some of the buzz and chaos of the street, while the small screens present interviews with people from Mumbai. These portray their thoughts, celebrations, frustrations, religions and emotions, and are a reminder of the individual voices and stories to be found amongst a total of 20.8 million Mumbaikar.

In another installation, Krishnamachari takes a more overtly political standpoint, commenting on the press conference platforms used by the perpetrators of war to justify their actions. White Builders and the Red Carpets, 2008, presents 108 microphones on a long red table, poised for a press conference. Behind the table, 13 white chairs with backs shaped like imposing architectural forms, represent the kind of powerful individuals who would address the press at such an event symbolising their ambitions as ‘builders’ - who perpetuate wars for economic gain. The specific number of chairs is also a reference to Leonard Da Vinci’s The Last Supper and a reminder of the frequent role played by religion in the culture of war. White Builders and the Red Carpets is also a commentary on the distribution of information, and how crucial it may be for survival in the new media era where numerous 24 hour news channels operate where once there was scant distribution and access to such media.

Rebecca Morrild

Bose Krishnamachari

Ghost / Transmemoir, 2006-08

Riyas Komu

2013-01-28T21:58:00.005-08:00

Riyas Komu

Born 1971, Kerala, India
Lives and works in Mumbai and Kerala, India

Riyas Komu earned his MA in Fine Arts from the Sir JJ School of Art, Mumbai, in 1999, and in 2007 he attracted attention in Europe with his exhibition at the Venice Biennial.

The artist’s oeuvre spans several media and genres, but his primary vehicles are sculpture, photography, and video installations. Strong political undercurrents are a distinctive feature of Komu’s art. Affected by his father’s political views and his own experiences as an active member of political groupings, his works are not content to simply relate a story or hang on a wall; they look back at the spectator. Komu’s works often refer to India as a country of paradoxes where immense wealth and indescribable poverty cohabit side by side. In recent years India has acquired a new status as a giant in Asia by dint of its continued economic and population growth, exceeded only by China. But even though the country has experienced economic growth, it performs less well in terms of standard indicators for development; here the country ranks alongside low-income countries.

Through his art, Komu calls attention to the complex nature of India, his works reflecting both hope and despondency.

Komu is also a passionate fan of football. In the work Left Legs Series from 2008 he manages to bring together his fascination with sports and his political awareness. In a series of sculptures of strangely amputated left legs made of concrete, steel, and salvaged teak from Kerala – his native region – he imitates the legs of real football players. The legs feature complex carvings and surreal anatomical details, and are flayed to reveal sinews, muscles, and ligaments The artist refers to how such athletic legs may feel sometimes, pitting the proud and heroic against the weakened and damaged. The work was created in connection with a series of works entitled The Iraq Project; a series which focuses on how Iraqi football has been caught up in political power struggles during the reign of Saddam Hussein and during the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Komu has created an ambivalent work: by referring to the athlete’s body, it incarnates pain and loss for every victory and every defeat. By using symbolism and iconographies of varying kinds, the artist offers his spectators a creative space for contemplation.

Stine Kleis Hansen

Riyas Komu

Left Leg Series, 2008

Unikcolors

Alexander Calder

Early life

Life and career

Artistic work

Sculpture

Theatrical productions

Monumental works

Painting and printmaking

Painted aircraft

Painted automobile

Jewelry

Tapestry

Alex Katz

Early life and career

Work

Painting

Printmaking

Public commissions

Collaborations

Exhibitions

Collections

Recognition

Alexander Aleksandrovic Vesnin

Aleksandr Vesnin

Selected Work

References

Alexander Rodchenko

Alexander Rodchenko

Contents

Life and career

Influence

The end of painting

See also

References and sources

Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti

Contents

Early life

Later years

Artistic analysis

Legacy

Exhibitions

Public collections

Art Foundations

Notable sales

Other legacy

Notes

References

Bibliography

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Albert Oehlen, Rainald Goetz

Albert Gleizes

Albert Gleizes

Contents

Early life

Cubism

The crucial years

Theory

1913–1918

Post-Cubism

Legacy

Commemoration

Gallery

Agnes Denes

Agnes Denes

Contents

Biography and Early Career

Selected works

Ecological

Visual Philosophy

Sculpture

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Retrospective Cataloges

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Ad Reinhardt

Ad Reinhardt

American,( 1913–1967)