Wednesday, 11 July 2012
Incredible Hand-Embroidered Issues of The New York Times
Incredible Hand-Embroidered Issues of The New York Times
Thursday, 7 June 2012
"The Radical Camera of New York's Photo League From 1936 to 1951"
Posted: 06 Jun 2012 09:40 PM PDT
Columbus, Ohio. Drawing on the depth of two great Photo League museum collections, the Columbus Museum of Art (CMA) and The Jewish Museum in New York City collaborated on an exhibition of nearly 150 vintage photographs. "The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936 – 1951", a formidable survey of the group’s history, its artistic significance, and its cultural, social and political milieu, will be on view at CMA through September 9th. Catherine Evans, exhibition co-curator and the William and Sarah Ross Soter Curator of Photography at the Columbus Museum of Art, observed that “This museum partnership is an extraordinary opportunity to showcase two in-depth collections. Because the images continue to have relevance today, it is especially important that the exhibition will be seen in four U.S. cities, reaching as broad an audience as possible.” The exhibition premiered at The Jewish Museum on November 4, 2011, to rave reviews. The New York Times called The Radical Camera a “stirring show,” and the New York Photo Review hailed it as “nothing short of splendid.” The New Yorker named the exhibition one of the top ten photography shows of 2011. Following its CMA presentation, The Radical Camera exhibition will travel to the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA (November 15, 2012 – February 24, 2013); and Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL (March 16 – June 16, 2013).
Friday, 1 June 2012
'Dangerous Beauty'
Posted: 31 May 2012 07:27 PM PDT
New York City - In the wake of the controversial ban on underweight models by Madrid’s fashion week, and the recent publicized death from anorexia of a Latin American model, the fashion industry and the media went into a short-lived frenzy of self reflection asking, what is too thin? The proposed ban drew support from only two other countries – Israel and India – while it was flatly rejected by the major fashion capitals of the world: Paris, London and New York. In a climate where whoever is thinner gets the job, the pressure to be thin is enormous and as these are the women and girls who are relentlessly photographed, they become style role models for a population fascinated with celebrity.
The Met in NYC goes "Naked Before the Camera"
Posted: 31 May 2012 10:00 PM PDT
New York City.- The Metropolitan Museum of Art is currently showing "Naked before the Camera", through September 9th. Since the beginning of art and in every medium, depicting the human body has been among the artist's greatest challenges and supreme achievements, as can so easily be seen by Museum visitors walking through the galleries of Greek and Roman statuary, African and Oceanic art, Old Master paintings, or Indian sculpture. Tapping veins of mythology, carnal desire, hero worship, and aesthetic pleasure, depictions of the nude have also triggered impassioned discussions of sin and sexuality, cultural identity, and canons of beauty. Controversies are often aroused even more intensely when the artist's chosen medium is photography, with its accuracy and specificity—when a real person stood naked before the camera—rather than traditional media where more generalized and idealized forms prevail. In the medium's early days—particularly in France, where Victorian notions of propriety held less sway than in England and America, and where life drawing was a central part of artistic training—photographs proved to be a cheap and easy substitute for the live model.
Friday, 11 May 2012
Photos by Tseng Kwong Chi with Keith Haring
Posted: 08 May 2012 08:56 PM PDT
Posted: 03 Apr 2012 11:57 PM PDT
New York City.- Affordable Art Fair (AAF) NYC continues to grow, having reached new highs in attendance numbers and sales. At last year's Spring New York fair, they had an attendance of 10,500, including over 3,000 people at the Private Preview alone, resulting in $2.2 million worth of art sales. This year's edition, which runs from April 19th through April 22nd at 7 West 34th Street, will offer over 75 galleries from the U.S. and almost a dozen countries internationally. With high-quality, original contemporary works from over 500 artists, you are sure to discover something you love. The Affordable Art Fair attracts a diverse audience including those who may never have bought original art before, as well as experienced buyers and collectors looking for new galleries and emerging artists. AAF are a young, fresh and accessible fair that opens the doors to buying original art to all audiences.
Pure Sixties, Pure Bailey, a Selling Exhibition at Bonhams in London
Posted: 10 May 2012 08:04 PM PDT
Thursday, 10 May 2012
Getty Center Showcases A Pivotal Photographic Works Exhibition
Posted: 09 May 2012 10:00 PM PDT
From the dawn of the medium to the 20th century. Drawn exclusively from the Getty Museum’s collection, the exhibition brings together the work of more than 25 innovative photographers, all of whom have left their distinctive mark on the history of the genre, including Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820–1884), Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864–1946), and Robert Adams (American, born 1937).
The Camera Art of Ori Gersht at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Posted: 09 May 2012 10:19 PM PDT
Thursday, 26 April 2012
National Academy of Sciences says Cave Painters Were Realists ~ DNA Study Finds
Posted: 23 Apr 2012 05:42 PM PDT
LOS ANGELES, CA - Cave painters during the Ice Age were more like Leonardo da Vinci than Salvador Dali, sketching realistic depictions of horses they saw rather than dreaming them up, a study of ancient DNA finds. It's not just a matter of aesthetics: Paintings based on real life can give first-hand glimpses into the environment of tens of thousands of years ago. But scientists have wondered how much imagination went into animal drawings etched in caves around Europe. The latest analysis published online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences focused on horses since they appeared most frequently on rock walls. The famed Lascaux Cave in the Dordogne region of southwest France and the Chauvet Cave in southeast France feature numerous scenes of brown and black horses. Other caves like the Pech Merle in southern France are adorned with paintings of white horses with black spots.
Saturday, 14 April 2012
Posted: 13 Apr 2012 05:46 PM PDT
MADRID.- Lluís Reverter, secretary general of ”la Caixa” Foundation, opened A Floating World. Photographs by Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986), accompanied by the exhibition curators, Florian Rodari, Martine d'Astier de la Vigerie. The exhibition was organised and produced by ”la Caixa” Social Outreach Programmes in cooperation with the Donation Jacques Henri Lartigue, the body established to conserve and disseminate the donation that the photographer made to the French government in 1979, and which loaned all the pieces in the exhibition at CaixaForum Madrid.
As part of its cultural programmes, ”la Caixa” Social Outreach Programmes focuses particularly on the most contemporary art, work created in the 20th and 21st centuries. In exhibitions devoted to the cinema cine and photography, ”la Caixa” seeks to illustrate the influence that images exercise on contemporary sensibilities and to highlight the role that the great 20th-century visual artists play in defining our vision of the world. To this end, ”la Caixa” has organised anthological exhibitions devoted to such great names in photography as Eugène Atget, Robert Doisneau, William Klein, Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Willy Ronis and filmmakers like Charles Chaplin and Federico Fellini.
On this occasion, ”la Caixa” Social Outreach Programmes presents the first major anthological exhibition devoted in Spain to Jacques Henri Lartigue (Courbevoie, 1894 – Nice, 1986), without doubt one of the greatest photographers of the last century. Entitled A Floating World. Photographs by Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986), the show illustrates the interests of a man devoted to exploring, with the greatest sensitivity and under an appearance of happiness and nonchalance, the emerging concerns of a period marked by radical change.
The fact that Lartigue took photographs for his own pleasure has made it impossible for either curators or critics to really classify his work. As a result, his photographs are usually presented in chronological order, or grouped by theme. On this occasion, however, the organizers have decided to go one step further and to demonstrate, from a approach never before taken with this artist, the extent to which these images, admired for their grace and beauty, form a unique document that illustrate a period and a way of life that have since disappeared; that of the French bourgeoisie in the last century.
A Floating World. Photographs by Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986) features more than 230 exhibits. Of these, 182 are modern prints of Lartigue’s photographs, whilst the show also includes 18 modern recreations of his stereoscopic pictures with their original three-dimensional effect. Lartigue took these pictures with a stereoscopic camera, a device very much in fashion at the time, in the attempt to capture reality in all its dimensions.
The Passing of Time
Even from childhood, Jacques Henri Lartigue was obsessed with remembering all his experiences, and it was this obsession that led him to make photography an instrument of memory. This need to remember, so deeply rooted in the young Lartigue, was closely related to his desire to “trap” happiness. He saw memory and happiness as two realities that are exposed to the same threat of disappearing, and his genius was in photographing neither memory nor happiness, but what constitutes their essence: fragility. In Lartigue’s photographs, happiness is always related to the human body and its interaction with the space around it. Happy people are buffeted by waves or gusts of wind, struck by sunlight. Bodies constantly lose their verticality and rise up again from the ground. To photograph happiness, the artist needs the ability to capture almost imperceptible movements: a sudden, fleeting gaze, a gesture made whilst falling off-balance.
1894-1986: a lifetime devoted to taking photographs
Jacques Henri Lartigue occupies a very special place in the history of photography: that of a talented amateur who always spoke of painting as his principal passion and regarded photography as a secondary occupation. However, from 1902, when he was eight years old, until his death in 1986, taking photographs was like breathing for him. Lartigue was born in Courbevoie, near Paris, in 1894, into a family of industrialists. His father bought him his first padre camera when he was eight years old, and at a very young age Jacques Henri began to keep a diary formed by photographs and short texts. This habit stayed with him all his life, and the diaries now form an extraordinary document portraying the lifestyle of a generation that discovered, amongst other things, fashion, sport, and motor racing. Throughout his life, Lartigue conserved the fresh outlook of childhood and the insatiable curiosity of youth. His photographs celebrate the present moment whilst concealing the anguish that the passing of time caused him.
Discovered by chance, late in life, in 1963, when he was nearly 70 years old, by John Szarkowski, then curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Lartigue became known and recognized in his native France and throughout the world thanks to the glory he achieved in the United States. In 1974, the French president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, invited Lartigue to take his official photograph. It was the firm friendship that grew up between the two that persuaded Lartigue to donate his entire work to the Republic in 1979.
There are only young, beautiful women in Lartigue’s universe. The constant quest for happiness and beauty that he had embarked on in youth completely excludes all deformity, all sign of aging, staying at arms-length from anything that might mar a sunny day or remind us of ugliness and death.
In spring 1910, when he was not yet 16, Lartigue discovered fashion and, above all, models. For months, his camera slung over his shoulder, he patrolled the avenues around the Bois de Boulogne, near his home, where distinguished ladies used to walk out at particular times to show off their new dresses. However, every jump is followed by a fall, every ascent by a descent. Leaps, somersaults and climbs nearly always end in the crash to earth, in a big splash, and in laughter. Lartigue’s photographs are imbued with a light tone as they defy gravity.
However, what our young photographer sought to capture was not their fashionable garments but, rather, the elegance of the women themselves. His first portraits of these promenading ladies are marked by new distance, revealing the fear he felt towards the female universe, a fear caused by the difference in ages and by his sexual desire. Affected by his erotic feelings, Lartigue hides. Hence the oblique framing he uses to portray these women, the very low angle he adopts. As he gains in experience, however, Lartigue’s gaze changes, and he looks his lovers in the eye. In contrast to the rest of his work, Lartigue explicitly asks these languid ladies to do nothing, not to move.
In Search of the Unknown
In the early-20th century, everyone dreamed about enjoying the new pleasures offered by speed and sport and of exploring the new territories that this modern age was constantly discovering. The young photographer and his brother Zissou also played out such dreams as children, dressing up as their favorite heroes: aviators, racing drivers, explorers of distant worlds, etc. Caps, goggles and fur coats turn their wearers into extraterrestrials. This group of photographs features a new type of explorers, masked figures weighed down by their peculiar attire, practically unable to move.
Finally, the last section in the exhibition illustrates Lartigue’s fascination with the infinite and nature, where people confront their solitude. In this part of Lartigue’s work, individuals appear to have little more consistency than a blade of straw; they are like ghosts swayed by winds or drifting at the mercy of the waves. Our time on earth is ephemeral; that is what these images repeat to us constantly as they show the impossibility of holding onto happiness and remind us that we are but transitory inhabitants of this world.
Saturday, 7 April 2012
LEGO ® Sculptures
Posted: 06 Apr 2012 09:44 PM PDT
SPRINGFIELD , MASS. – If you build it, they will come. And New York artist Nathan Sawaya has built some amazing sculptures out of common LEGO® building bricks. The Art of the Brick, an exhibition of Sawaya’s work, will be on view from June 16 through September 5 at the Michele and Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts at the Quadrangle. There is a special exhibition fee of $5 per person in addition to museum admission for all visitors ages 3 and up. The Brick Lab, a play area stocked with LEGO bricks at the Science Museum, is included in the special exhibition ticket. Visitors to The Art of the Brickwill have the opportunity to see Sawaya at work on a new piece on Saturday, July 31.
Friday, 6 April 2012
George Eastman House Camera Book Illustrates History of Photography
Posted: 05 Apr 2012 08:14 PM PDT
Wednesday, 4 April 2012
"Wish You Were Here: The Buffalo Avant-garde Survey"
Posted: 02 Apr 2012 09:32 PM PDT
BUFFALO, NY.- Wish You Were Here: The Buffalo Avant-garde in the 1970's surveys a creative ecology that flourished in Buffalo in the 1970s comprising a loosely organized group of collaborative, interdisciplinary artistic communities spanning the visual arts, film, video, performance, literature, and music. Looking back on the art and ideas these groups propagated, one might argue that aspects of postmodern and contemporary art were seeded during this time, and that Buffalo was one of a group of geographic pockets that provided fertile ground for these concepts and methodologies to take hold. Wish You Were Here identifies some of these concepts and examines the various threads of connectivity and collaboration that made Buffalo a site of radical creativity. On exhibition March 30th–July 8th at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.
Herb Ritt's
Posted: 03 Apr 2012 01:19 AM PDT
LOS ANGELES, CA.- Herb Ritts (American, 1952–2002) was a Los Angeles based photographer who earned an international reputation for his unique images of fashion models, nudes, and celebrities. From the late 1970s until his untimely death from AIDS in 2002, Ritts's ability to create photographs that successfully bridged the gap between art and commerce was not only a testament to the power of his imagination and technical skill but also marked the synergy between art, popular culture, and business that followed in the wake of the Pop Art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. On view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center, April 3rd through August 26th, Herb Ritts: L.A. Style explores Ritts’s extensive photographic career, including a selection of renowned and previously unpublished photographs, as well as his directorial projects. A major portion of the works in the exhibition was newly acquired by the Getty Museum through purchase and in the form of a generous gift from the Herb Ritts Foundation.
“Through hard work and an imaginative vision, Herb Ritts fashioned himself into one of the top photographers to emerge from the 1980s,” says Paul Martineau, curator of the exhibition and associate curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum. “This exhibition will reconsider and broaden our understanding of Ritts’s career, particularly in the areas of fashion and figure studies.”
By the mid-1980s, Ritts’s aesthetic had coalesced into a distinctive style. His creative output was enormous, and he appeared to be able to switch gears effortlessly between his jobs in fashion and portraiture and his personal work with the nude. After shooting a commercial job, Ritts often took advantage of the location, props, and models to make his own pictures. To accommodate his growing business, Ritts established a studio in Hollywood and assembled a creative team of assistants, stylists, and printers who strove to exceed his high expectations. Like his contemporaries, Ritts rarely printed his own work. Through a pain staking selection process, he editioned his best pictures and had them printed in gelatin silver or platinum, varying the papers, levels of contrast, and tone to realize his artistic vision.
Ritts’s portraits of celebrities such as Richard Gere, Britney Spears, Mel Gibson, and Madonna introduce the exhibition. His anti-glamour style of portraiture made celebrities look more natural and allowed them to reveal inner qualities, making them more accessible to fans. By the late 1980s, Ritts’s reputation as a shaper of fame made him a celebrity in his own right, and the iconic status of such photographs as Richard Gere, San Bernardino (1977) and Madonna, Hollywood (1986) made a photograph by Ritts a rite of passage among Hollywood insiders.
The exhibition continues with Ritts’s fashion photographs, many of which drew inspiration from painting, sculpture, film, and the work of such leading fashion and portrait photographers as Richard Avedon, Horst P. Horst, George Hurrell, Irving Penn, and Louise Dahl Wolfe. Ritts had an extraordinary ability to synthesize and incorporate these influences into a new and easily recognizable style. As hundreds of magazine spreads demonstrate, Ritts kept top fashion editors happy by providing dazzling pictures designed to sell clothes along with others that simply celebrated beauty. Ritts also made use of locations around Los Angeles and especially loved Southern California’s natural light. For instance, Ritts harnessed the forces of nature, strong sunlight and gale-force wind in Versace, Veiled Dress, El Mirage (1990) to create an unforgettable image that communicates feminine strength and beauty.
Turning to Ritts’s work with the nude, the exhibition examines how Ritts—along with his contemporaries Robert Mapplethorpe and Bruce Weber—provoked a radical change in how the nude was depicted. His forte was an ability to analyze the body from a variety of angles and create compositions that abstracted it in ways that communicate strength and poise. Working mostly outdoors, Ritts enjoyed relating the body to the natural world and rendered his nudes with a verve and elegance that became the dominant hallmarks of his pictures. In Man with Chain, Los Angeles (1985), model Tony Ward is seen bending at the waist, as if struggling under the chain’s massive weight. The extraordinary sense of movement is not only forward but also upward in a tortuous S-curve that has been long associated with the dramatic, writhing bodies of seventeenth-century Baroque painting and sculpture. Ritts’s work also includes portraits of well-known athletes and dancers. In the exhibition are a series of photographs of the critically acclaimed American dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones. In these photographs, Ritts captured Jones while he danced, framing him against a pure white background, making his muscled body look like a piece of sculpture. He also photographed famous athletes including Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Olympic gold-medalist Greg Louganis. For Louganis’s portrait Ritts positioned the diver on a makeshift pedestal and placed a low spotlight on him. The carefully arranged pose and lighting show off Louganis’s muscled torso and back, while the prominent shadows recall the mysterious aura of film noirs of the 1940s.
Although Ritts had no prior experience with film, Madonna convinced him to direct his first music video for her song “Cherish” (1989), which is included in the exhibition along with other music videos and commercials. Ritts enjoyed the creative challenge that film presented, allowing him to extend the sense of movement so important to his still photography to the moving image. From 1989 until 2002, Ritts directed thirteen music videos and more than fifty commercials. Some of his music industry clients included Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, Britney Spears, and Shakira, while his commercial clients were mainly fashion and cosmetic companies such as Chanel, Lancôme, Estée Lauder, and Calvin Klein.
Ritts’s intimate portraiture, his modern yet classical treatment of the nude, and his innovative approach to fashion brought him international acclaim and placed him securely within an American tradition of portrait and magazine photography that was begun by Richard Avedon and Irving Penn.
Visit the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Center at : http://www.getty.edu/
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