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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Roxy Paine's First Dendroid

The artist Roxy Paine in the midst of working on Maelstrom, his latest Dendroid sculpture on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Jeremy Liebman

Artist, Roxy Paine has become known for his Dendroids, tree-like sculptures that have been placed in many public spaces around the world. I once encountered one of his Dendroids while taking a walk through Central Park. It was a striking juxtaposition between the natural environment and an artificial tree shimmering with a silver patina.

Dendroids are exemplary of Paine’s approach to his artwork, where he mirrors natural processes, drawing on the tension between organic and man-made environments. Paine has said: "I've processed the idea of a tree and created a system for its form. I take this organic majestic being and break it down into components and rules. The branches are translated into pipe and rod."

Paine’s first Dendroid was Imposter from 1999 and it was planted deep within the Swedish forest. This work is now at the Wanas Foundation, in Knislinge, Sweden.

Paine has created more than fifteen of these tree-like sculptures at places such as Madison Square Park, New York; Central Park, New York; Art Basel 39, Basel; and Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle.

Opening on April 28, 2009 Paine’s most recent Dendroid will be presented on the rooftop sculpture garden of the The Metropolitan Museum, in New York.

David Musgrave's New York Solo Premiere

David Musgrave at Luhring Augustine
531 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011

March 21 - April 18, 2009
Opening Friday, March 20th, 6-8 pm

This week power house gallery Luhring Augustine hosts David Musgrave's first solo exhibition in New York. The show features drawings and sculptures created over the past two years, which explore his ongoing preoccupation with the abstraction inherent in representation and the transformative capacity of materials.

Musgrave's work examines the relation between thoughts and things, ideas and objects. He produces images and forms that unsettle distinctions between inner and outer realms. The apparent accessibility of the simple human or animal schema that underpins much of his imagery forms a counterpoint to Musgrave's many-layered approach. His drawings often resemble documents of artifacts that hint at the primitive or the paranormal. Close viewing reveals a highly detailed evocation of fictive but perfectly plausible surfaces created with graphite.

Artist, William Delvoye's Cloaca

William Delvoye was the first artist to create a machine that imitates a human digestive system to produce excrement. This artwork, called Cloaca, has become the most famous artwork by the artist.

Cloaca was first exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, Belgium, in the fall of 2000. The end products were suspended in resin inside large glass jars, which were displayed on stainless steel shelves, with menus hanging beside them documenting what Cloaca had been fed. The jars and their accompanying menus sold well at $1,000 apiece.

Marina Abramović's First Performance Artwork

Marina Abramović, Rhythm 10, Part 2 | Photograph: Dezan Poznanovic, © Marina Abramović

Marina Abramović is one of the most prominent performance artists of our time. Born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1946, she began her career in the early 1970s and has continued to be active over three decades. She has described herself as the “grandmother of performance art”.

Abramović’s work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Her first performance, entitled Rhythm 10, was in 1973 and performed at a festival in Edinburgh. Like many of her performances, it explored elements of ritual and gesture.

As stated by the artist:

Preparation
I lay a sheet of white paper on the floor. I lay twenty knives of different shapes and sizes on the floor. I place two cassette recorders with microphones on the floor.

Performance
I switch on the first cassette recorder. I take the knife and plunge it, as fast as I can, into the flesh between the outstretched fingers of my left hand. After each cut, I change to a different knife. Once all the knives (all the rhythms) have been used, I rewind the tape. I listen to the recording of the first performance. I concentrate. I repeat the first part of the performance. I pick up the knives in the same sequence, adhere to the same rhythm and cut myself in the same places. In this performance, the mistakes of the past and those of the present are synchronous. I rewind the same tape and listen to the dual rhythm of the knives. I leave.