Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Lascaux cave paintings



Located in southwestern France, Lascaux is the site of several cave paintings widely regarded to be some of the earliest artworks discovered to date. The works were accidentally discovered in teh 1940s by teenage boys. After hundreds of visitors a day partially destroyed the works by simply exhaling their carbon dioxide, the caves were closed so that the paintings could be restored to their previous glory.

The majority of the paintings are of animal figures, and the site has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Full of mysticism and black mold, the caves have continued to be a constant source for speculation, and restricted access.

Friday, April 17, 2009

Picasso and Hirst's Firsts


Picasso's first Cubist work, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)




Damien Hirst's first major dead animal work, A Thousand Years, 1990

Monday, April 6, 2009

First retrospective of the photographer Liselotte Grschebina



Woman with a Camera: Liselotte Grschebina
April 5 to June 28, 2009
Martin-Gropius-Bau

The Martin-Gropius-Bau
presents the first retrospective of the avante-garde photographer Liselotte Grschebina (1908–1994). The exhibition features 100 photos taken by the relatively obscure artist in Germany and Palestine between 1929 and the 1940s.

Grschebina’s life was similar to other artists at the time who were living in Weimar Germany and trying to create work under the impending Nazi regime. Her work exemplifies the energizing spirit of cultural innovation during the time of the Weimar Republic, as well as the golden age of photography when artists were just beginning to see the potential with the medium.

Born in Germany, the artist was forced to leave her home in 1934 when she immigrated to Palestine and opened a studio in Tel-Aviv. Grschebina’s talent developed without major recognition until after her death, when a hidden body of work was discovered by her son in his apartment. In 2000, he gave the entire archive – including some 1,800 photographs – to the Israel Museum.

The current retrospective at the Martin-Gropius-Bau reveals the art of a young woman who in the period of the Weimar Republic was inspired by the New Sobriety (Neue Sachlichkeit). The Neue Sachlichkeit was distinguished by clarity of form and structure and the beauty of simple things. At the same time it had a documentary character, which concentrated on the essence of an object. Grschebina developed this style further in her new home in Palestine and integrated her work with that of the influential group of German photographers, who came with the fifth wave of immigration and settled mainly in Tel Aviv.

Friday, April 3, 2009

Pop Artist James Rosenquist's First Break


Photo of James Rosenquist in his Aripeka, Florida studio, 1988. Photo by Russ Blaise

The American painter James Rosenquist is one of the protagonists of the pop-art movement. It's interesting to trace his past as a billboard painter and events leading up to his first one-man show in 1962 at Richard Bellamy's Green Gallery.

The following article by Alexi Worth was published in Artforum in 2002.

JAMES ROSENQUIST, a headstrong twenty-two-year-old from Minneapolis, arrived in New York in 1955. After a year at the Art Students League his money ran out, so he took a job as a chauffeur for a wealthy couple who provided room and board, along with a studio where he could make his smeary impastoed abstractions. It was a comfortable situation-no expenses, plenty of time to paint--and it's easy to imagine a young artist settling into it. But Rosenquist was restless. In Minnesota he had worked summers painting billboards; now he applied to Local 230 of the International Sign and Pictorial Painters Union and got his first assignment, painting a Hebrew National Salami ad on Flatbush Avenue.

, James Rosenquist 'Flowers and Females'

For the next three years he worked all over the city. In a union dominated by middle-aged Italians, he was an oddball. Glaringly young, blond, and disproportionately talented, he rose quickly to become head painter. Surviving photographs of Rosenquist on scaffolding have a Tom Sawyerish glamour, but in fact the work was repetitive and dangerous. In 1959, after two painters fell to their death, Rosenquist quit and rented a studio in Coenties Slip, on a now all but vanished three-block strip that has been called Manhattan's Bateau-Lavoir.

Sign painting had given him skills that no other young artist had. The other Coenties artists--among them Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Jack Youngerman, and Robert Indiana (Rauschenberg and Johns lived a couple of blocks away, on Pearl Street)-reinforced Rosenquist's growing impatience with the prevailing AbEx aesthetic. In the new studio, he began collecting magazine images and stapling them to the wall, making small photocolages. Enlarging those fragments to billboard scale re-created a sensation that Rosenquist had first had while working on his commercial jobs: of being suspended in the middle of an image, in effect immersed in it, so that a commonplace visual texture-hair or skin or fabric--became unrecognizable, Brobdingnagian, mysterious.

The first dealer to see the "soft, closeup imagery" of these first half-dozen Pop paintings was the Upper East Side gallerist Allan Stone, who dropped by in mid-1961. It was the only false start of Rosenquist's career. As the artist remembers it, Stone was positive, but vague. "He was reading the newspaper and kind of halfway glancing at the pictures. He said, 'I'd-like to hang one of those in my office ... in about a year or so.'" Ileana Sonnabend, who came along with Stone, was more enthusiastic, but she didn't yet have a gallery. The same was true of Ivan Karp (soon to be named director of Leo Castelli), who visited the Coenties studio shortly afterward. At this point, things get muddy: Did Karp bring Richard Bellamy--another gallery director with a famously sharp eye--on a subsequent visit? Or did Bellamy come on his own initiative? Either way, Bellamy showed up. A week later he came back with the collector Robert Scull. As Rosenquist remembers it, "Scull came in and says, 'Oh, fantastic! Wonderful! A gre at American spirit,' and he walked out the door." Rosenquist didn't know it, but this odd, almost furtive appearance was pivotal. With Scull, Bellamy's financial backer, on board, Rosenquist's career was on the move.

James Rosenquist, Flamingo Capsule

The next week, Bellamy said he'd like to bring some more collectors, Burton and Emily Tremaine. "So they came down, and this old lady wearing Lolita glasses said, 'I'd like to buy ... that one.' And Dick says, 'I'm sorry, it's already sold to Bob Scull.'" Rosenquist was taken aback, and not just because he hadn't been told about the Scull sale. "I took Dick aside and said 'I don't want to sell them.'" Bellamy, the least mercantile of art dealers, had to persuade the wary young artist that selling paintings was a good idea. "Think it over," he concluded. A few months later, in February 1962, Rosenquist's first solo opened at Bellamy's Green Gallery, with all but one of the paintings already spoken for. Looming ahead were the now mythic group exhibitions--beginning the same year with "The New Realists" at Sidney Janis and, in 1963, "Sixteen Americans" at MOMA and "Six Painters and the Object" at the Guggenheim--which would provide a context for the coolly flamboyant aesthetic that Rosenquist had pioneered in hi s Coenties studio. But that afternoon, none of this was apparent. The future looked promising, but blank. Rosenquist and his friend Ray Donarski set up a whiskey-only bar for the opening. And then the two of them sat down on the gallery floor, waiting, "wondering if anybody would show up."

In this monthly column, Artforum talks with renowned artists about the incident or encounter that first brought them public recognition.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.