Sunday 17 August 2014

Alexander Calder

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]
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]






Monday 4 August 2014

Alex Katz


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.

Tuesday 22 April 2014

Alexander Aleksandrovic Vesnin

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.

Thursday 21 November 2013

Aleksandr Vesnin


Aleksandr Vesnin
Alexander Vesnin
A.Rodchenko 1924 portrait of A.Vesnin.jpg
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
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.

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)

Wednesday 13 November 2013

Alexander Rodchenko

Alexander Rodchenko

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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]

See also

References and sources

References
  1. 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.
  2. Jump up ^ Milner, John, "Rodchenko, Aleksandr", Oxford Art Online
  3. Jump up ^ Mrazkova, Daniela and Remes, Vladimir "Early Soviet Photographers." Museum of Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, 1982, ISBN 0-905836-27-8
  4. Jump up ^ "1924 portrait". Picasaweb.google.com. 2007-09-09. Retrieved 2012-07-30.
  5. Jump up ^ Akbar, Arifa (2009-01-27). "Drawing a blank: Russian constructivist makes late Tate debut". Independent.co.uk. Retrieved 2012-07-30.
Sources