Kiko Gianocca (Swiss, b. 1974) Untitled (touch wood) multiples (installation view) 2009 Burnt wood, resin Photo: Marcus Bunyan
A beautiful exhibition of objects by Swiss/Italian artist Kiko Gianocca at Gallery Funaki, Melbourne, one full of delicate resonances and remembrances.
Obelisk pendants in blackened and silvered wood, Neolithic standing stones, totemic, silent; The hole through the object akin to ‘seeing’ through time. Exposed wood on base (touch wood) as grounding.
The standing stone installation an altar piece, a dark reliquary (see image above)
Glass vessels with internal funnels filled with the gold detritus of disassembled objects, found pendants: Horse, Anchor, Four leaf clover, Swan, Hammer & sickle (see images below)
The distance between the bail – the finding that attaches the pendant to the necklace – and the remainder/reminder of the vessel itself. What a distance!
As Sally Mann would articulate, ‘What remains’1 …
Lives previous to this incarnation; jewels embedded in dust. The captured potency of displaced objects. Personal and yet anonymous at one and the same time.
Brooches of gloss and matt black resin plates. A plastic black, almost Rembrandt-esque.
On the reverse images exposed like a photographic plate, found images solidified in resin.
The front: the depths of the universe, navigating the dazzling darkness The back: memories, forgotten, then remade, worn like a secret against the beating chest. Only the wearer knows!
Here is a territorialization, “a double movement, where something accumulates meanings (re-territorialization), but does so co-extensively with a de-territorialization where the same thing is disinvested of meanings.”2
As Kiki Gianocca asks, “I am not sure if I grasp the memories that sometimes come to mind. I start to think they hold me instead of me holding them.”
Time is the distance between objects. No objects. Space is the distance between events. No events.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ “Mann’s fifth book, What Remains, published in 2003, is based on the show of the same name at the Corcoran Museum in Washington, DC and is in five parts. The first section contains photographs of the remains of Eva, her greyhound, after decomposition. The second part has the photographs of dead and decomposing bodies at a federal Forensic Anthropology Facility (known as the ‘body farm’). The third part details the site on her property where an armed escaped convict was killed. The fourth part is a study of the grounds of Antietam (the site of the bloodiest single day battle in American history during the Civil War. The last part is a study of close-ups of the faces of her children. Thus, this study of mortality, decay and death ends with hope and love.” Sally Mann. Wikipedia [Online] Cited 02/05/2010
2/ “For them (Deleuze and Guattari), assemblages are the processes by which various configurations of linked components function in an intersection with each other, a process that can be both productive and disruptive. Any such process involves a territorialization; there is a double movement where something accumulates meanings (re-territorialization), but does so co-extensively with a de-territorialization where the same thing is disinvested of meanings. The organization of a territory is characterized by such a double movement … An assemblage is an extension of this process, and can be thought of as constituted by an intensification of these processes around a particular site through a multiplicity of intersections of such territorializations.” Wood, Aylish. “Fresh Kill: Information technologies as sites of resistance ” in Munt, Sally (ed.,). Technospaces: Inside the New Media. London: Continuum, 2001, p. 166.
Edith Meisl-Bernhard Untitled 1965(?) Oil on canvas
I bought this luminous painting from Camberwell Market many years ago.
Tucked into the back of the canvas was the photostat review of an exhibition by Edith Meisl-Bernhard at the Katz Gallery in Tel Aviv in 1965, from which this painting presumably comes. It is the only thing that I can find out about the artist but what a life it seems: art training in Budapest and at the Rome Academy of Art; set design at the National Theatre and State Opera houses in Arad and Timisoara, Rumania; set design and costumes at the Israel Opera, Tel Aviv; and exhibiting artist. I have always treasured this painting – for the light, the colours and the atmosphere the artist creates within the picture frame. If anyone knows more about the artist could you please contact me. Thank you.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on the images for a larger version.
“Starting from stage decors, she produces a variety of landscapes with warmth and sensibility. Preserving a personal touch in colouring and in light and shade distribution, she succeeds in rendering in her works local colour and atmosphere, whether in Paris or Jerusalem, in mountainous Galileo or coastal Acre.”
Edith Meisl-Bernhard Untitled (detail) 1965(?) Oil on canvas
Edith Meisl-Bernhard exhibition at the Katz Gallery
Edith Meisl-Bernhard Untitled (detail) 1965(?)
Edith Meisl-Bernhard Untitled (detail) 1965(?)
Thankx to my friend Ian Lobb, here is the luminosity of the painting – without the colour you can easily see the tonal structure!!
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Sand Dunes, Carson Desert, Nevada 1867 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
The photograph shows O’Sullivan’s photographic wagon in which he developed his glass plates.
O’Sullivan died at the age of forty two but what photographs he left us! The human scales the sublime, literally; figures in the descriptive landscape. The last photograph is, if you will forgive the colloquialism, a doozy.
Marcus
“If the world is unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest it is not surprising things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiselled the mountains. Sublime places acknowledge limitations that we might otherwise encounter with anxiety or anger in the ordinary flow of events. It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming, but it is the vast spaces of nature that perhaps provide us with the finest, the most respectful reminder of all that exceeds us. If we spend time with them, they may help us to accept more graciously the great unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.”
Alain de Botton. The Art of Travel. London: Penguin, 2002, pp. 178-179.
Many thankx to Laura Baptiste and the Smithsonian American Art Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Lake in Conejos Cañon, Colorado 1874 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Black Cañon, Colorado River, From Camp 8, Looking Above 1871 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Buttes near Green River City, Wyoming 1872 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Cañon de Chelle, Walls of the Grand Canon about 1200 feet in height 1873 Albumen print Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment
Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan is the first major exhibition devoted to this remarkable photographer in three decades. The exhibition is on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., from Feb. 12 through May 9. The museum is the only venue for the exhibition.
Marcus
“Framing the West” – a collaboration between the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Library of Congress – offers a critical reevaluation of O’Sullivan’s images and the conditions under which they were made, as well as an examination of their continued importance in the photographic canon. It features more than 120 photographs and stereo cards by O’Sullivan, including a notable group of King Survey photographs from the Library of Congress that have rarely been on public display since 1876. The installation also includes images and observations by six contemporary landscape photographers that comment on the continuing influence of O’Sullivan’s photographs. Toby Jurovics, curator of photography, is the exhibition curator.
“Timothy H. O’Sullivan is widely recognised as an influential figure in the development of photography in America, so I am delighted that we have partnered with our colleagues at the Library of Congress to present this new assessment of his work and to expose a new generation to his forceful images,” said Elizabeth Broun, The Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
“In the years following the Civil War, the West was fertile ground for American photographers, but Timothy H. O’Sullivan has always stood apart in his powerful and direct engagement with the landscape,” said Jurovics. “Almost a century and a half after their making, his photographs still speak with an unparalleled presence and immediacy.”
O’Sullivan was part of a group of critically acclaimed 19th-century photographers – including A.J. Russell, J.K. Hillers and William Bell – who went west in the 1860s and 1870s. O’Sullivan was a photographer for two of the most ambitious geographical surveys of the 19th century. He accompanied geologist Clarence King on the Geologic and Geographic Survey of the Fortieth Parallel and Lt. George M. Wheeler on the Geographical and Geological Surveys West of the 100th Meridian. During his seven seasons (1867-1874) traversing the mountain and desert regions of the Western United States, he created one of the most influential visual accounts of the American interior.
His assignments with the King and Wheeler surveys gave O’Sullivan the freedom to record the Western landscape with a visual and emotional complexity that was without precedent. His photographs illustrated geologic theories and provided information useful to those settling in the West, but they also were a personal record of his encounter with a landscape that was challenging and inspiring.
Of all his colleagues, O’Sullivan has maintained the strongest influence on contemporary practice. The formal directness and lack of picturesque elements in his work appealed to a later generation of photographers who, beginning in the 1970s, turned away from a romanticised view of nature to once again embrace a clear, unsentimental approach to the landscape. Observations about his images by Thomas Joshua Cooper, Eric Paddock, Edward Ranney, Mark Ruwedel, Martin Stupich and Terry Toedtemeier appear in the exhibition and the catalog.
O’Sullivan (1840-1882) was born in Ireland. He emigrated to the United States with his family at the age of two, eventually settling in Staten Island, N.Y. Biographical details about O’Sullivan are spare, yet he is thought to have had his earliest photographic training in the New York studio of portrait photographer Mathew Brady. He is believed to have accompanied Alexander Gardner to Washington, D.C., to assist in opening a branch of the Brady studio in 1858, and when Gardner opened his own studio in Washington in 1863, O’Sullivan followed. O’Sullivan first gained recognition for images made during the Civil War, particularly those from the Battle of Gettysburg, and 41 of his images were published in Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War. O’Sullivan’s experience photographing in the field helped earn him the position as photographer for King’s survey. After his survey work, he held brief assignments in Washington with the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Treasury. O’Sullivan died of tuberculosis on Staten Island at the age of 42.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Green River Cañon, Colorado 1872 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Horse Shoe Cañon, Green River, Wyoming 1872 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Summit of Wahsatch Range, Utah (Lone Peak) 1869 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Shoshone Falls, Snake River, Idaho, View Across Top of Falls 1874 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) The Pyramid & Domes, Pyramid Lake, Nevada 1867 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Smithsonian American Art Museum 8th and F Streets, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20004
Many thankx to the Blanton Museum of Art for allowing me to reproduce images from the exhibition in the post. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Marcus
Olaf Breuning (Swiss, b. 1970) Brian 2008 C-print 60 x 70 inches Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York
Glenn Ligon (American, b. 1960) Lest We Forget 1998 Series including cast aluminium or bronze plaques, colour photographs of plaques on site Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York
Valeska Soares (Brazilian, b. 1957) Duet 2008 Hand-carved white marble Installation dimensions variable Private Collection
Tracey Emin (English, b. 1963) You Should Have Loved Me 2008 Warm white neon Courtesy of Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York
This February, The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin investigates the notion of desire in an exhibition of the same name. Curated by Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, Blanton curator of American and contemporary art and director of curatorial affairs, the exhibition features over fifty works from an international group of contemporary artists working in all media, including Glenn Ligon, Marilyn Minter, Petah Coyne, Bill Viola, Tracey Emin, Isaac Julien and many others. The accompanying illustrated catalogue will contain texts by art critics, fiction writers, poets, performing and visual artists, all written in direct response to the works of art in the exhibition.
Carlozzi states, “”Desire” is a complex human emotion and a driving force in our lives from childhood through old age. We all can recall examples of literature, film, and music that are rife with expressions of physical desire, but how do contemporary visual artists portray it, and all its attendant psychological states – anticipation, arousal, longing, regret, and so on? “Desire” assembles a really broad range of compelling works that together present a surprisingly diverse portrait of the experience.”
One provocative aspect of the exhibition is not its imagery, per se, but the manner by which many of the works translate intimate experiences into art a public expression. Marilyn Minter’s Crystal Swallow would seem to capture a private moment of visceral response, yet in such detail and exaggerated scale that it becomes a grotesque advertisement for arousal. Glenn Ligon’s series, Lest We Forget, commemorates those flickers of romantic fantasy that sometimes occur while people watching. And Tracey Emin’s You Should Have Loved Me is an accusation from a lover scorned, created with the neon light of public signage as if to broadcast raw feeling to an uncaring world.
Works by Kalup Linzy, William Villalongo, Olaf Breuning, James Drake, Petah Coyne, Gajin Fugita, Georganne Deen, Adam Pendleton, Peter Saul, Valeska Soares, Danica Phelps, Miguel Angel Rojas, Mads Lynnerup, Rochelle Feinstein, Richard Prince, Laurel Nakadate, Jesse Amado, Isabell Heimerdinger, Alejandro Cesarco, Eve Sussman, Robert Kushner, Luisa Lambri, Chris Doyle, and a dozen others, provide an engaging multi-generational exploration of desire. In addition, an informed selection of works of art from The Blanton’s print collection will add a historic counterpoint to the contemporary works on view.
Will Villalongo (American, b. 1975) The Last Days of Eden 2009 Cut velour paper Courtesy the artist and Susan Inglett Gallery, New York
William Villalongo (born December 14, 1975 in Hollywood, Florida) is an American artist working in painting, printmaking, sculpture, and installation. Currently based in Brooklyn, New York, Villalongo is also a professor at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York.
Villalongo typically focuses in his works on the politics of historical erasure, with a particular focus on the artistic reassessment of Western, American, and African Art histories. The artist states that his intention toward these reassessments evolves in part from the West’s histories of “taking African art objects and placing them on the side of the sofa to decorate, although that is not their purpose. We are obsessed with fitting a narrative, a story.”
His works engage with the black body, examining the influences of socialisation, history, occupation, dress, and speech on it. In many of his portraits, bodies emerge from “a tumult of white negative space cut out of black velour paper,” in ways that evoke leaves, branches, feathers, or slashes.
Villalongo is also influenced by Pablo Picasso, who incorporated African masks into his primitivist works, and Aaron Douglas who he credits as inspiring him. Villalongo reexamines the power dynamics of history and representation in his own pieces. “It’s problematic and interesting, and I wanted to think about how to use it and tell a story.”
Petah Coyne (American, b. 1953) Untitled #1103 (Daphne) 2002-2003 Mixed media 77 x 83 x 86 inches Collection of Julie and John Thornton
Petah Coyne (born 1953) is an American sculptor and photographer. She is known for her large-scale sculptures composed of unconventional, and often organic, materials, such as clay, silk, wax, and hair.
Bill Viola (American, 1951-2024) Becoming Light (still) 2005 Colour High-Definition video on plasma display mounted on wall 47.6 in x 28.5 in x 4 in (121 x 72.5 x 10.2cm) Performers: John Hay, Sarah Steben Photo: Kira Perov Courtesy Bill Viola Studio
Marilyn Minter (American, b. 1948) Crystal Swallow 2006 Enamel on metal Promised gift of Jeanne and Michael Klein, 2007
Blanton Museum of Art MLK at Congress (200 East MLK) Austin, Texas 78701
Many thankx to the MKG for allowing me to publish the photographs in this post. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Marcus
Kusakabe Kimbei (Japanese, 1841-1934) Sumo wrestlers c. 1880
Gerhard Riebicke (German, 1878-1957) Couple Performing German Dance c. 1930 Gelatin silver print 11.6 x 16.2 cm Bodo Niemann and Münchner Stadtmuseum
Gerhard Riebicke spent his childhood in Switzerland. He studied in Tübingen, worked as a tutor in Poznan, and appropriated the technique of self taught photographer. In 1909 he was a press photographer in Berlin. Gradually, his focus shifted to the sports and nudity culture photography (ball games, jumps, dance or bathing scenes).
As a friend of Adolf Koch, he documented his school for physical education and nude culture. As a chronicler of the reform movement, he also maintained contacts with the Laban School of Hertha Feist and other dance and gymnastics schools Hedwig Hagemann, Berte Trümpi and Mary Wigman. He was represented in Hans Surén’s “The Man and the Sun” in 1924. After 1933 he concentrated on sports photography.
T.W. Salomon (attributed) Female Nude in Armchair c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 27.5 x 27.4cm Münchner Stadtmuseum
T.W. Salomon was a notable German photographer best known for his “Revuegirls” series from 1935. He was a contemporary of Erich Salomon, another influential German photographer, but there is no direct connection between the two.
Jan Mutsu Japanese Man with Tattoo c. 1955 Gelatin silver print 20.2 x 25.7cm Münchner Stadtmuseum
Josef Breitenbach (German-American, 1896-1984) Nude from the series This beautiful landscape 1963 Gelatin silver print 27.5 x 35.3cm Breitenbach Trust USA and Munchner Stadtmuseum
An exhibition with more than 250 original photos, books and folders with studies from the nude, including masterpieces from each period.
The representation of the unclothed human body has exuded a great fascination ever since time began. The exhibition Nude Visions invites visitors to embark on a journey through a collection of depictions of the human body spanning 150 years. More than 250 original photos, books and folders with studies from the nude will be on view, including masterpieces from each period: from photographs dating from the 19th century which seek their models in Classical Antiquity and the Renaissance, up to Surrealistic experiments and fashion and lifestyle photography. The exhibition illustrates changing ideals of beauty and moral perceptions, and reveals once again the constant attempt to balance between educational openness, titillation and curiosity.
“Without any doubt, there is nothing which draws the attention of the observer to it so much as the naked human body.” This comment of the journalist and photographer Kurt Freytag in1909 is as true today as it was then. The exhibition turns this fact to its advantage and deals with the historical, aesthetic and ideological development of images of the human body in photography. The show is divided into seven chapters devoted to the meaning and function of the unclothed human body in photography, and tracing the history of the medium: “Academies and Exotic Pictures in the 19th century,” “Art photography around 1900 (Pictorialism),” “Avant-gardes of the 20s and 30s,” “Artistic positions after 1945,” “Naturism,” “The Male Nude” and “Glamourous Nudes.” The first coloured Daguerreotypes of curvaceous ladies with blushing cheeks dating from 1855 meet the unflatteringly in-your-face and voyeuristic self-portrait of the photographer Frank Stürmer from 2004. These two photos mark the two ends of the spectrum covered by the exhibition, which illustrates the evolution of nude photography over sixteen decades by the example of more than 250 eminent works.
Nude photography is always, too, a process of negotiation between revealing and concealing. This exhibition makes clear the ambivalence of what is visible and what is unseen, of shame and curiosity, of legitimation and provocativeness. How nakedness is treated is closely bound up with the specific social context in which it occurs, the ideas of morality and the aesthetic ideal of an era. The motif of the nude is always influenced here both by the historical artistic tradition and reactions to contemporary impulses, which are interpreted by the photographer. Thus the movement for women’s emancipation, for instance, led to new ways of looking at both the female and the male body, as seen for example in the work of Herlinde Koelbl. Images which were still regarded as being scandalous at the beginning of the 20th century, triggering moral misgivings and controversy about a subject perceived as being delicate, would hardly bring a blush to the face of anyone living today. It is not only the motifs which have moved on, but also the reproducibility of the images and the extent of their media coverage impact on the awareness and significance of nakedness in society.
The origins of the history of nude photography lie in the so-called “academies,” which provided painters, graphic artists and sculptors with study objects in the 19th century and which followed the historical artistic models of Classical Antiquity and the Renaissance. Nude photography soon increasingly became emancipated from being a mere model for painting and sculpture, and developed artistic ambitions of its own: photographers discovered in the art of the fin de siècle, with its debt to Symbolism, the nude as a reflection of emotional states and yearnings. In the outgoing 19th century, with its bias towards the exact sciences, the human body served as an object for the study of movement, such as in the celebrated series shots by Eadweard Muybridge showing the sequence of motions in human movement.
Whereas historically staged scenes and compositions are still created in the sheltered environment of the atelier at the beginnings of photography, we find the first open-air nudes after 1870. Wilhelm von Gloeden, Guglielmo Plüschow and others took advantage of the light in the Mediterranean South to stage their visions of an earthly Arcadia. As a feature of the Lebensreform back-to-nature movement which gained ground from the turn of the century onwards, especially in Germany, nude photography became a torchbearer of the Naturist movement. The ornamentally arranged groupings of naked dancers which Gerhard Riebicke for example photographs, mainly in the German countryside, became a symbol for the liberation from the moral constraints of civilisation and industrialisation. The aesthetic of athletic bodies engaged in sporting activities or dancers in motion was taken up in the heroic physical ideal of the National Socialists and can later still be found in the cult of bodybuilding.
A new, more radical vision was developed by the Avant-garde movements after the 1920s, with their abstract and surrealistic experiments, such as the stories narrated in a play of light and shadow by František Drtikol or the deformed bodies in the works of Hans List. The theme of “glamour” plays a crucial role above all in fashion photography. That chapter poses the question as to what role is played in the debate on fashion by the way of showing the unclothed female body, by male desire and how perceptions change in the course of cultural history. Glamour can be seen in the erotic images from the Atelier Manassé, shown in soft focus, in Bert Stern’s portraits from the “last sitting” of Marilyn Monroe, up to and including Helmut Newton’s photos. In addition to these, selected works by amateurs as well as the male nude as an expression of gay emancipation will also be presented in pictures, particularly by Will McBride or Herbert Roettgen, who placed the representation of the naked male body in the focus of their work as an expression of their homosexuality, an emblem of their coming-out.
The depiction of the naked torso is shrouded in an aura of scandal and has always been a political bone of contention, whereby images of the bare human body send signals which differ according to their historical context: the photographic artists of the 1970s, working within the framework of body art and performance events, declared the directness of their own physical experience to be a political necessity. In retrospect, their work can be seen as a last desperate attempt to grapple with the vanishing concept of the subjective personality before the transition to the post-modern age. The private spaces of life too are meanwhile also illuminated in a quite different way than 25 years ago. The photographer Thomas Ruff deals in his works, which he imbues with a diffuse haziness by digital means, with the theme of the exhibitionism which can go as far as pornographic exposure of one’s own and others’ nakedness in internet forums. Nude Visions shows that the representation of the naked human body always also has something to do with the quest for insight into what human beings (and one’s own self) really are and what role they play in society.
Press release from the MKG website [Online] Cited 15/04/2010. No longer available online
Lehnert & Landrock was a photographic studio run by Rudolf Franz Lehnert and Ernst Heinrich Landrock active in Tunisia and Egypt in the early 20th century, noted for producing Orientalist images. Rudolf Franz Lehnert and Ernst Heinrich Landrock produced images of North African people, landscapes, and architecture for a primarily European audience. These images were mainly distributed in monographs, though also as original prints, photogravures, and lithographic postcards.
Around 1900, photography increasingly established itself as an artistic medium, with proponents like Frank Eugene attempting to conceal its true character through soft-focus lenses, gauze curtains, and post-processing of the image.
Herbert List (German, 1903-1975) Arab Boy with Desert Candles 1935 Gelatin silver print 29.7 x 22.5cm Herbert List-inheritance, Hamburg and Munchner Stadtmuseum
Four interesting exhibitions in Albert Street, Richmond – from the beautiful, formed leather sculptures of Pamela Rataj to the wonderfully vibrant tropical bird, chair and decorative pattern paintings of Claudia Damichi; from the intensely observed canvas environments of Steve Randall to the post-photographic silk-screen textualisations of Robert Boynes. Well worth a visit on a Saturday afternoon!
As always, many thankx to the galleries for allowing me to publish the images in this posting. Please click on the images for a larger version.
~ Pamela Rataj. The Morphology of Forgetting at Anita Traverso Gallery. 7th April – 1st May 2010
~ Claudia Damichi. The Bitter Sweet at Sophie Gannon Gallery. 30th March – 25th April 2010
~ Steve Rendall. Security, Storage and Recreation at John Buckley Gallery. 8th April – 1st May 2010
~ Robert Boynes. Postscript at Karen Woodbury Gallery. 7th April – 1st May 2010
Pamela Rataj. The Morphology of Forgetting at Anita Traverso Gallery
7th April – 1st May 2010
Pamela Rataj (Australian) Tangent Bundle 2009
Pamela Rataj (Australian) Ravel 2009
Pamela Rataj (Australian) Kairos 2009
How to draw a boundary between self and other, past time and today?
Patterns and forms in nature often resemble one another, connecting life forms in unexpected ways. Tide lines left in the sand resemble the grains found in a piece of wood, and the veins in a leaf or those in a hand.
The age lines in the trunk of a tree form as each outer layer covers the one preceding it and echoes its shape. This makes me think of the way past experience resurfaces as memory, receding or becoming more important at different times in our lives, as each new experience envelopes our previous states of being and yet is shaped by them.
The wrapped and layered forms in The Morphology of Forgetting explore coexistence and connection.
I dedicate this exhibition to my parents, whose recent deaths have helped me appreciate memory as a way to connect through time.
Pamela Rataj 2010
Press release from the Anita Traverso Gallery website [Online] Cited 10/04/2010. No longer available online
Pamela Rataj (Australian) Faisceaux 1 2009
Pamela Rataj (Australian) Faisceaux 4 2009
Claudia Damichi. The Bitter Sweet at Sophie Gannon Gallery
30th March – 25th April 2010
Claudia Damichi (Australian, b. 1972) Birds eye 2010 Acrylic on canvas 46 x 41cm
Claudia Damichi (Australian, b. 1972) Star Gazer 2009 Acrylic on canvas 46 x 41cm
Claudia Damichi (Australian, b. 1972) Gridlock 2010 Acrylic on canvas 41 x 46cm
Claudia Damichi (Australian, b. 1972) Reading between the lines 2010 Acrylic on canvas 46 x 41cm
Claudia Damichi’s surrealist still life paintings are characterised by vivid colours, elaborate patterns and distorted spatial proportions. In her paintings of domestic interiors, flowers, birds and furniture, colour is inflated and scale is playfully manipulated – solitary domestic interiors are reconfigured into places of fantasy and illusion. Inspired by the enduring aesthetic of modern industrial design, her surreal and theatrically staged scenarios self-consciously conjure a sense of the absurd. Graphic patterning, high-croma colour and whimsical compositions foster worlds that are at once playful and claustrophobic, satirical and real, tapping into an ambiguous nostalgia that leaves the viewer feeling that anything is possible.
Claudia Damichi (Australian, b. 1972) Look out 2010 Acrylic on canvas 46 x 56cm
Steve Rendall. Security, Storage and Recreation at John Buckley Gallery
8th April – 1st May 2010
Steven Rendall (Australian born Britain, b. 1969; Australia from 2000) Archive 1 2010 Oil on linen
Steven Rendall (Australian born Britain, b. 1969; Australia from 2000) Archive 2 2010 Oil on linen
Citing the British artist Walter Sickert as an important influence on his painterly style, Rendall’s work displays a form and content that has attracted the attention of both critics and collectors. A key work in the exhibition is a large-scale painting on un-stretched linen titled Fountain (Rosemary’s Baby) that sprawls across 4.5m. Certain fountains, along with other apparently arbitrary images of television monitors, speedboats, clothing racks, shelving units and museum interiors are recurring motifs in Rendall’s paintings.
Rendall aims to ‘collect and synthesise’ images from around his home and en route to and from his Brunswick studio. Passing observations of window displays, charity shops and various light industrial warehouses are registered and recorded in conjunction with the accumulation of promotional flyers spruiking leisure activities and museum experiences. This shambolic collection of images is transcribed into an array of compositions in Rendall’s paintings. Images occasionally materialise in unlikely places, such as the spectral diver’s head that is resting on a warehouse shelf in the appropriately titled Storage.
In the exhibition Security, Storage and Recreation, you are invited to enter the image bank of Steven Rendall; a ‘wake in fright’ experience where one can become immersed and caught up in the maelstrom of the artist’s visual language – a sequence of painterly dreams each similar yet different to the last.”
Press release from the John Buckley Gallery website [Online] Cited 10/04/2010 no longer available online
Steven Rendall (Australian born Britain, b. 1969; Australia from 2000) Flat Screens (Green) 2010 Oil on linen
Steven Rendall (Australian born Britain, b. 1969; Australia from 2000) Pipes 2010 Oil on linen
Steven Rendall (Australian born Britain, b. 1969; Australia from 2000) Claustrophobia 2010 Oil on linen
Steven Rendall (Australian born Britain, b. 1969; Australia from 2000) Redacted 2 2010 Oil on linen
Robert Boynes. Postscript at Karen Woodbury Gallery
7th April – 1st May 2010
Robert Boynes (Australian, b. 1942) Street Runner 2010 Acrylic on canvas and velvet 120 x 242cm
Robert Boynes (Australian, b. 1942) Days that we forgot 2010 Acrylic on canvas
Robert Boynes (Australian, b. 1942) Signal Driver 2010 Acrylic on canvas and velvet 120 x 190cm
Postscript is Robert Boynes’ second solo exhibition with Karen Woodbury Gallery. This series continues with his exploration of urban themes, contemporary experience and experimentation into ways of using paint. In this most recent body of work Robert has employed the use of text in juxtaposition to various materials such as wood and velvet. The text conveys a feeling of noise and urban clatter, acting as a context and environment for the figures within the work.
His technique involves transferring photographic images to large silk screens and dragging paint through the mesh onto canvas. Robert thus has control in the manipulation of colour, density and translucency of the images. This process results in still moments that magnify and investigate everyday observable reality. The anonymous figures are juxtaposed with text and layering of saturated, contrasting colours, appearing objectified and ghostly.
These works embody a filmic quality, the multi-panelled paintings signify fragmented narratives and enquire into perceptions of time and space.
Text from the Karen Woodbury Gallery website [Online] Cited 10/04/2010 no longer available online
Robert Boynes (Australian, b. 1942) Body Type 2 2010 Acrylic on canvas
Robert Boynes (Australian, b. 1942) Body Type 3 2010 Acrylic on canvas
Robert Boynes (Australian, b. 1942) Things we leave behind 2009 Acrylic on canvas 120 x 180cm
Robert Boynes (Australian, b. 1942) The layered moment 2009 Acrylic on canvas
Robert Boynes (Australian, b. 1942) Postscript 2009 Acrylic on canvas 120 x 124cm
All galleries have closed except for Sophie Gannon Gallery, Richmond.
Sophie Gannon Gallery 2 Albert Street Richmond VIC 3121 Australia Phone: +61 3 9421 0857
Exhibition dates: 13th February – 11th April, 2010
Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976) 6 and 3 1931
One of my favourite artists – what a genius!
His exploration of colour and form is exquisite, sensitive and very moving – despite his belief that colours have no inherent emotional associations.
Marcus
Many thankx to the Hirshhorn Museum for allowing me to publish the images in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976) Rolling After 1925-28
Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976) Piano Keys 1932
Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976) Steps 1932
Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976) Untitled (Leaf Study) c. 1940
Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976) Structural Constellation, Transformation of a Scheme No.12 1950 Machine engraving on black vinylite mounted on board
Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976) Structural Constellation, Transformation of a Scheme No.23 1951 Machine engraving on black vinylite mounted on board
Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976) Structural Constellation, Transformation of a Scheme No.10 1950-51 Machine engraving on black vinylite mounted on board
Exhibition Illustrates Albers’ Sphere of Influence
The Hirshhorn possesses one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive collections of work by Josef Albers (b. Bottrop, Germany, 1888; d. New Haven, Connecticut, 1976). “Josef Albers: Innovation and Inspiration” presents nearly 70 works spanning the artist’s 55-year career, many on view for the first time. Supplementing pieces from the museum’s holdings are key objects on loan from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. Organised by senior curator Valerie Fletcher, the exhibition also includes documentary photographs and examples of Albers’ teaching aids, and concludes with a display of works by artists who knew, worked with, studied under or openly admired Albers. The exhibition opens on February 11 and runs through April 11, 2010.
Josef Albers: Innovation and Inspiration encompasses the artist’s distinguished career from 1917 to 1973. The exhibition begins with four early self-portrait prints dating from the years of World War I, followed by a group of boldly abstract compositions from Albers’ tenure at Germany’s revolutionary Bauhaus, where he taught alongside such remarkable modernists as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. Albers participated in the school’s utopian aspiration to improve modern life through manufacturing and design-ideas that resonated throughout Albers’ career. The Hirshhorn’s show includes a series of black-and-white designs intended for mass production in glass, such as “6 and 3” (1931, see above), and an illuminated display of eight glass panels, in which the artist modernised and transformed the medieval tradition of stained-glass windows, best characterised by “Fugue (B)” (1925-1928).
Following the Nazi party’s rise to power, the Bauhaus was forced to close in 1933. Albers fled to the United States, where he was recruited to head the art program at the new Black Mountain College in North Carolina. There, Albers introduced a modified Bauhaus curriculum and hired vanguard modernists as teachers. He enthusiastically taught his students how art could be made from virtually any material, which he demonstrated in some of his own works, such as three “Leaf Study” collages (c. 1940, see above). Albers continued to advocate the clear structures of geometric abstraction, still mostly in black, white and primary colours, but was open to different stylistic approaches. He also briefly adopted the biomorphic forms associated with surrealism, as seen in the work “Proto-Form (B)” (1938).
In 1949, at the age of 62, Albers became chairman of the art school at Yale University, with a mandate to transform it from a conservative academic program to a proponent of modern concepts and applications. Believing firmly that colours have no inherent emotional associations, he meticulously explored their nuances and combinations in his work. He eventually limited the shape and number of his forms, which resulted in a standardised format that he called “Homage to the Square,” for which he is best known. Two dozen “Homage to the Square” compositions fill the central gallery in the exhibition, inviting viewers to examine the subtle complexities of their perceptions. The vivid yellow-orange-reds of “Glow” (1966, see below) startle the eye, while the pale grays of “Nacre” (1965, see below) suggest cool neutrality. These images create optical illusions, challenging viewers’ visual acuity. This series concludes with the artist’s vivid red-print duo, “In Honor of the Hirshhorn Museum,” on view for the first time since the museum opened in 1974.
In addition, this exhibition includes examples from Albers’ “Structural Constellation” series of reliefs (1954-1964, see above), which anticipated op art with their linear patterns. The reliefs’ commonplace material-laminated plastic-also fulfils the utopian goal of making art affordable to everyone. The two largest paintings on view, both titled “Variant” (1973), were donated by the artist’s wife and foundation in 1979.
Albers remained active and influential until his death in 1976, and many of his pedagogical innovations have become standard methodology in art schools across the country. His explorations of abstract form and colour also inspired and stimulated generations of artists and designers. Shortly after his arrival in America, he became a co-founder of the American Abstract Artists group and participated in exhibitions across the country, from New York to Michigan and beyond. The Hirshhorn’s exhibition ends with an array of works by colleagues, students and admirers, among them: weavings by the artist’s wife, Anni Albers; abstract constructions by Burgoyne Diller; streamlined images of labor by Jacob Lawrence; a large op art painting by Richard Anuskiewicz; textured creations by Eva Hesse and Robert Rauschenberg; and a minimalist stacked wall sculpture by Donald Judd.”
Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986) Grey Blue & Black – Pink Circle 1929 Oil on canvas 36 x 48 in. (91.4 x 121.9cm) Dallas Museum of Art Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation
Many thankx to Shira Pinsker and The Phillips Collection for allowing me to reproduce the images in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“It is surprising to me to see how many people separate the objective from the abstract. Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colours put together so that they say something. For me that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint.”
“I long ago came to the conclusion that even if I could put down accurately the thing that I saw and enjoyed, it would not give the observer the kind of feeling it gave me. I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at – not copy it.”
Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986) Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV 1930 Oil on canvas 40 x 30 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Bequest of Georgia O’Keeffe Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) is fixed in the public imagination as a painter of places and things. She has long been recognised for her still lifes of flowers, leaves, animal bones and shells, her images of Manhattan skyscrapers, and her Lake George and New Mexico landscapes. Yet it was with abstraction that O’Keeffe entered the art world and first became celebrated as an artist. In the spring of 1916, she burst onto the New York art scene with a group of abstract charcoal drawings that were among the most radical works produced in the United States in the early twentieth century. As she expanded her repertoire in the years that followed to include watercolour and oil, she retained the fluid space and dynamic, organic motifs of these early charcoals.
Abstraction dominated O’Keeffe’s output in the early part of her career and remained a fundamental language for her thereafter. Some of her abstractions have no recognisable source in the natural world; others distill visible reality into elemental, simplified forms. For O’Keeffe, abstraction offered a way to portray what she called the “unknown” – intense thoughts and feelings she could not express in words and did not rationally understand. Her abstractions recorded an array of emotions and responses to people and places. At the heart of her practice was an affinity for the flux and sinuous rhythms of nature. Through swelling forms and sumptuous colour, O’Keeffe depicted the experience of being in nature – so enveloped by its sublime mystery and beauty that awareness of all else is suspended.
The artistic achievement of Georgia O’Keeffe is examined from a fresh perspective in Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction, a landmark exhibition debuting this winter at The Phillips Collection. While O’Keeffe (1887-1986) has long been recognised as one of the central figures in 20th-century art, the radical abstract work she created throughout her long career has remained less well-known than her representational art. By surveying her abstractions, Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction repositions O’Keeffe as one of America’s first and most daring abstract artists. The exhibition, one of the largest of O’Keeffe’s work ever assembled, goes on view February 6 – May 9, 2010.
Including more than 125 paintings, drawings, watercolours, and sculptures by O’Keeffe as well as selected examples of Alfred Stieglitz’s famous photographic portrait series of O’Keeffe, the exhibition has been many years in the making.
While it is true that O’Keeffe has entered the public imagination as a painter of sensual, feminine subjects, she is nevertheless viewed first and foremost as a painter of places and things. When one thinks of her work it is usually of her magnified images of open flowers and her iconic depictions of animal bones, her Lake George landscapes, her images of stark New Mexican cliffs, and her still lifes of fruit, leaves, shells, rocks, and bones. Even O’Keeffe’s canvasses of architecture, from the skyscrapers of Manhattan to the adobe structures of Abiquiu, come to mind more readily than the numerous works – made throughout her career – that she termed abstract.
This exhibition is the first to examine O’Keeffe’s achievement as an abstract artist. In 1915, O’Keeffe leaped into the forefront of American modernism with a group of abstract charcoal drawings that were among the most radical creations produced in the United States at that time. A year later, she added colour to her repertoire; by 1918, she was expressing the union of abstract form and colour in paint. First exhibited in 1923, O’Keeffe’s psychologically charged, brilliantly coloured abstract oils garnered immediate critical and public acclaim. For the next decade, abstraction would dominate her attention. Even after 1930, when O’Keeffe’s focus turned increasingly to representational subjects, she never abandoned abstraction, which remained the guiding principle of her art. She returned to abstraction in the mid 1940s with a new, planar vocabulary that provided a precedent for a younger generation of abstractionists.
Abstraction and representation for O’Keeffe were neither binary nor oppositional. She moved freely from one to the other, cognisant that all art is rooted in an underlying abstract formal invention. For O’Keeffe, abstraction offered a way to communicate ineffable thoughts and sensations. As she said in 1976, “The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint.” Through her personal language of abstraction, she sought to give visual form (as she confided in a 1916 letter to Alfred Stieglitz) to “things I feel and want to say – [but] havent [sic] words for.” Abstraction allowed her to express intangible experience – be it a quality of light, colour, sound, or response to a person or place. As O’Keeffe defined it in 1923, her goal as a painter was to “make the unknown – known. By unknown I mean the thing that means so much to the person that he wants to put it down – clarify something he feels but does not clearly understand.”
This exhibition and catalogue chronicle the trajectory of O’Keeffe’s career as an abstract artist and examine the forces impacting the changes in her subject matter and style. From the beginning of her career, she was, as critic Henry McBride remarked, “a newspaper personality.” Interpretations of her art were shaped almost exclusively by Alfred Stieglitz, artist, charismatic impresario, dealer, editor, and O’Keeffe’s eventual husband, who presented her work from 1916 to 1946 at the groundbreaking galleries “291”, the Anderson Galleries, the Intimate Gallery, and An American Place. Stieglitz’s public and private statements about O’Keeffe’s early abstractions and the photographs he took of her, partially clothed or nude, led critics to interpret her work – to her great dismay – as Freudian-tinged, psychological expressions of her sexuality.
Cognisant of the public’s lack of sympathy for abstraction and seeking to direct the critics away from sexualised readings of her work, O’Keeffe self-consciously began to introduce more recognisable images into her repertoire in the mid-1920s. As she wrote to the writer Sherwood Anderson in 1924, “I suppose the reason I got down to an effort to be objective is that I didn’t like the interpretations of my other things [abstractions].” O’Keeffe’s increasing shift to representational subjects, coupled with Stieglitz’s penchant for favouring the exhibition of new, previously unseen work, meant that O’Keeffe’s abstractions rarely figured in the exhibitions Stieglitz mounted of her work after 1930, with the result that her first forays into abstraction virtually disappeared from public view.”
Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986) Series I, No. 4 1918 Oil on canvas 20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6cm) Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation
Many thankx to the Alte Pinakothek for allowing me to reproduce the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Marcus
Cabinet Frame German, around 1680 Image: Paul Troger, Simeons Lobgesang
Golden frame, Auricle or Lutmarahmen Dutch, around 1660 Image: Caspar Netscher, Shepherd’s Scene
Foliage frame German, around 1639 Image: Anonymous artist
The Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen do not just own vast holdings of framed pictures but also a huge collection of frames. For this exhibition, however, the selection was not made in the frame depot but solely in the painting depot at the Alte Pinakothek. It is only there in the museum’s holdings that the history of collecting frames and pictures can be traced. Some 4000 frames and pictures were sifted through and recorded, from which a selection of 92 frames was made. This exhibition focuses on the art and history of frames from four centuries, encompassing 16th-century case frames to Classicist and Empire style frames. This presentation covers all types of frame, from highly elaborate ones to miniature versions. Of particular note are the Dutch cabinet and Lutma frames, as well as inlaid examples and trophies from the Rococo period.
Artistic highlights in the exhibition are the frames made by Paul Egell (1691-1752), Melchior Hefele (1716-98) and Johann Wolfgang von der Auwera (1708-58). Frames by and after Joseph Effner (1687-1745), François Cuvilliés the Elder (1695-1768), Karl Albrecht von Lespilliez (1723-96) and Leo von Klenze (1784-1864) provide a fulminant conclusion to the exhibition.
Exploring the holdings of the Alte Pinakothek led the curator to impressive exponents of the art of the frame that originally came from the following galleries and cabinets: from the Grune Galerie at the Residenz in Munich, from the castles and palaces of Schleißheim, Nymphenburg, Ansbach, Bayreuth, Mainz, Passau and Wurzburg, and from the collections in Dusseldorf, Mannheim and Zweibrucken.
The picture-framer, Karl Pfefferle, shows the various techniques used in making and gilding frames by looking at selected examples. The exhibition also provides an overview of the history of frames in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen which, thanks to the provenance of some of the works, are of particular interest as well as displaying an incredibly variety.
A comprehensive 264-page catalogue accompanies the exhibition and includes a number of contributions on the production of frames, the depiction of frames in paintings and the history of frame collecting in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen. An essay by Verena Friedrich provides an insight into the most recent research on the history of frames carried out in Wurzburg.”
Press release from the Alte Pinakothek website [Online] Cited 11/03/2010 no longer available online
Mannerist framework South German, around 1600 Image: Bartholomew Spranger, Lamentation of Christ 1546-1611
Ornamental frame in the style of the Rococo Mannheim, around 1750 Image: Adriaen van der Werff, Nocturnal Children’s Swarm
Rococo style Ansbach, around 1740 Image: Johann Christian Sperling, Margrave Carl Wilhelm Friedrich of Brandenburg-Ansbach as a 13-year-old boy
Alte Pinakothek Barer Straße 27 D-80799 Munich Phone: +49 (0)89 23805 216
Exhibition dates: November 20th 2009 – March 14th, 2010
Many thankx to Marie Skov and Martin-Gropius-Bau for allowing me to reproduce the photographs in this posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Marcus
F.C. Gundlach (German, 1926-2021) The Whole Day on the Beach Gizeh/Egypt 1966 in Brigitte, Issue 8/1966
F. C. Gundlach
F. C. Gundlach (Franz Christian Gundlach; 16 July 1926 – 23 July 2021) was a German photographer, gallery owner, collector, curator und founder. In 2000 he created the F.C. Gundlach Foundation, since 2003 he has been founding director of the House of Photography – Deichtorhallen Hamburg.
His fashion photographs of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, which in many cases integrated social phenomena and current trends in the visual arts, have left their context of origin behind and found their way into museums and collections. Since 1975 he also curated many internationally renowned photographic exhibitions. On the occasion of the reopening of the House of Photography in April 2005, he curated the retrospective of the Hungarian photographer Martin Munkácsi. Here, the exhibitions A Clear Vision, The Heartbeat of Fashion and Maloney, Meyerowitz, Shore, Sternfeld. New Color Photography of the 1970s from his collection were presented since 2003. Most recently he curated the exhibitions More Than Fashion for the Moscow House of Photography and Vanity for the Kunsthalle Wien 2011.
F.C. Gundlach (German, 1926-2021) Erich von Stroheim during the shooting of “Alraune”, Munich 1952 Gelatin silver print
The Bloody Pit of Horror: Alraune (1952) film poster
Erich von Stroheim
Erich Oswald Hans Carl Maria von Stroheim (born Erich Oswald Stroheim; September 22, 1885 – May 12, 1957) was an Austrian-American director, actor and producer, most noted as a film star and avant garde, visionary director of the silent era. His masterpiece adaptation of Frank Norris’s McTeague titled Greed is considered one of the finest and most important films ever made. After clashes with Hollywood studio bosses over budget and workers’ rights issues, von Stroheim was banned for life as a director and subsequently became a well-respected character actor, particularly in French cinema. For his early innovations as a director, von Stroheim is still celebrated as one of the first of the auteur directors. He helped introduce more sophisticated plots and noirish sexual and psychological undercurrents into cinema. He died in 1957 in France of prostate cancer at the age of 71. Beloved by Parisian neo-Surrealists known as Letterists, he was honoured by Letterist Maurice Lemaitre with a 70-minute 1979 film entitled “Erich von Stroheim.”
Alraune is a 1952 West German science fiction directed by Arthur Maria Rabenalt and starring Hildegard Knef and Erich von Stroheim. The film involves a scientist (von Stroheim), who creates a woman who is beautiful and yet soulless, lacking any sense of morality.
F.C. Gundlach (German, 1926-2021) Cary Grant. A Star goes to the Ball Berlin 1960 in Film und Frau, Issue 16/1960 Gelatin silver print
Jean-Luc Godard (born 3 December 1930) is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the 1960s French New Wave film movement.
Like his New Wave contemporaries, Godard criticised mainstream French cinema’s “Tradition of Quality”, which “emphasised craft over innovation, privileged established directors over new directors, and preferred the great works of the past to experimentation.” As a result of such argument, he and like-minded critics started to make their own films. Many of Godard’s films challenge the conventions of traditional Hollywood in addition to French cinema. In 1964, Godard described his and his colleagues’ impact: “We barged into the cinema like cavemen into the Versailles of Louis XV.” He is often considered the most radical French filmmaker of the 1960s and 1970s; his approach in film conventions, politics and philosophies made him arguably the most influential director of the French New Wave. Along with showing knowledge of film history through homages and references, several of his films expressed his political views; he was an avid reader of existential and Marxist philosophy. Since the New Wave, his politics have been much less radical and his recent films are about representation and human conflict from a humanist, and a Marxist perspective.
In a 2002 Sight & Sound poll, Godard ranked third in the critics’ top-ten directors of all time (which was put together by assembling the directors of the individual films for which the critics voted). He is said to have “created one of the largest bodies of critical analysis of any filmmaker since the mid-twentieth century.” He and his work have been central to narrative theory and have “challenged both commercial narrative cinema norms and film criticism’s vocabulary.” In 2010, Godard was awarded an Academy Honorary Award, but did not attend the award ceremony. Godard’s films have inspired many directors including Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Brian De Palma, Steven Soderbergh, D. A. Pennebaker, Robert Altman, Jim Jarmusch, Wong Kar-wai, Wim Wenders, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Charlotte Rohrbach (German, 1902-1981) F. C. Gundlach photographing for German magazine Film und Frau (Film and Woman) in Berlin 1955, model Grit Hübscher, stole by Staebe-Seger 1955 Gelatin silver print
F.C. Gundlach (German, 1926-2021) Grit Hübscher. White atlas coat by Sinaida Rudow Berlin 1954
F.C. Gundlach (German, 1926-2021) Berlinale. Elsa Maxwell and Gina Lollobrigida, film ball in the Palais am Funkturm, X Berlinale 1960 in Film und Frau, Issue 16/1960 Gelatin silver print
Elsa Maxwell
Elsa Maxwell (May 24, 1883 – November 1, 1963) was an American gossip columnist and author, songwriter, and professional hostess renowned for her parties for royalty and high society figures of her day.
Maxwell is credited with the introduction of the scavenger hunt and treasure hunt for use as party games in the modern era. Her radio program, Elsa Maxwell’s Party Line, began in 1942; she also wrote a syndicated gossip column. She appeared as herself in the films Stage Door Canteen (1943) and Rhapsody in Blue (1945), as well as co-starring in the film Hotel for Women (1939), for which she wrote the screenplay and a song.
Gina Lollobrigida
Luigina “Gina” Lollobrigida (born 4 July 1927) is an Italian actress, photojournalist and sculptor. She was one of the highest profile European actresses of the 1950s and early 1960s, a period in which she was an international sex symbol. As her film career slowed, she established second careers as a photojournalist and sculptor. In the 1970s, she achieved a scoop by gaining access to Fidel Castro for an exclusive interview.
She has continued as an active supporter of Italian and Italian American causes, particularly the National Italian American Foundation (NIAF). In 2008, she received the NIAF Lifetime Achievement Award at the Foundation’s Anniversary Gala. In 2013, she sold her jewellery collection, and donated the nearly $5 million from the sale to benefit stem cell therapy research.
Texts from the Wikipedia website
F.C. Gundlach (German, 1926-2021) Op Art Silhouette. Jersey coat by Lend Paris 1966 in Brigitte, Issue 4/1966 Gelatin silver print
From November 2009 the Martin-Gropius-Bau presents the definitive retrospective of F.C. Gundlach’s extensive photographic work with the exhibition F.C. Gundlach – Photographic Work. F.C. Gundlach is one of the most famous fashion photographers worked for the most important magazines and publications from the middle of the 1950’s to 1990. Among other many famous pictures the most comprehensive presentation of F.C. Gundlach’s work shows many fameless facets of F.C. Gundlach’s work to date. After years of research, the curators Klaus Honnef, Hans-Michael Koetzle, Sebastian Lux and Ulrich Rüter present for the first time numerous unknown images as vintage prints alongside F.C. Gundlach’s famous photo icons.
The intention of the exhibition is to present the unique aesthetics of F.C. Gundlach’s photography, his roots in photojournalism, his focus on series and sequences, his narrative approach. Furthermore, the exhibition alludes to social and cultural issues over several decades.
The exhibition includes the experimental photography of his early years, especially those from Paris during the 1950’s, his remarkable portraits of German and international movie stars and film-directors as well as F.C. Gundlach’s early photo reportages and photographs of children.
For the first time, F.C. Gundlach’s work for magazines is presented on a larger scale. Magazine covers and a comprehensive collection of double-page spreads show his photographs within the magazines’ context, especially in Film und Frau (1951-1965) and Brigitte (1963-1986). Among photographs, title pages and a comprehensive selection of double pages of his pictures will be shown in context of the magazines. The exhibition illustrates that Gundlach has always been open to technical innovations in photography (35mm cameras, flash or colour photography).
His fashion productions took him both to Paris and New York and to Egypt and Morocco. This multiple printed photographs were been to special motifs in his work. F.C. Gundlach’s impressive travel reportages occurred amongst others in Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Japan, Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam and will be present in Berlin the first time. Original documents of his vita illustrate the life of the photographer. Moreover, the show illustrates the internationalisation of his work due to extensive traveling. Documents and archival material give a brief outline of the artist’s life and work.
F.C. Gundlach himself has commented his functioning in a 60 min. interview-film, which was exclusively produced for the exhibition by filmmaker Reiner Holzemer. The exhibition presents: a life’s work of photography between documentary representation and staged artificiality, between practical and experimental photography.
F.C. Gundlach, born in 1926 in Heinebach (Hesse), is considered the most significant fashion photographer of the young Federal Republic of Germany. For more than four decades of fashion photography, he wrote fashion history with his work and shaped the perception of fashion in Germany decisively. He set the stage for the ever-changing vogues, defined postures and gestures of models, chose props and locations and thus reflected the ideals of beauty and the history of fashion against a changing social background. F.C. Gundlach worked on assignment for various magazines. His first publications were reportages, theatre- and movie reports. Through his work for the magazine Film und Frau he became a fashion photographer. His photographs have been published in many distinguished magazines such as: Deutsche Illustrierte, Stern, Revue, Quick, Elegante Welt, Film und Frau, Annabelle, Brigitte, Twen and Deutsch. For Brigitte alone F.C. Gundlach photographed more than 5500 pages as well as about 180 magazine covers.
Press release from the Martin-Gropius-Bau website [Online] Cited 05/03/2010. No longer available online
F.C. Gundlach (German, 1926-2021) Slow. Karin Mossberg Nairobi/Kenia 1966 in Brigitte, Issue 9/1966 Gelatin silver print
Karin Mossberg was born on January 1, 1947 in Linkoping, Ostergotland, Sweden as Agneta Anna Karin Mossberg. She is an actress, known for The Big Cube (1969), La vida nueva de Pedrito de Andía (1965) and Les pianos mécaniques (1965).
F.C. Gundlach (German, 1926-2021) Simone d’Aillencourt. Sheath dress by Horn Berlin 1957 in Film und Frau, Issue Spring/Summer 1957 Gelatin silver print
Simone D’Aillencourt
Simone D’Aillencourt or d’Aillencourt (née Daillencourt, born 22 September 1930) is a retired French model. Her career in modelling, during which she achieved significant success, took place from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s. She is best known as the subject of Melvin Sokolsky’s “Bubble” photographic series taken in Paris for Harper’s Bazaar in 1963. She had two daughters during her marriage to José Bénazéraf.
Simone D’Aillencourt was born on 22 September 1930 in Vizille, the daughter of Leon and Anna Daillencourt.
Her activities in the modeling profession began in England. D’Aillencourt began her successful career in Edinburgh in 1954 after a visit by Lucie Clayton. She posed for the British magazine Vogue and then went back and forth between Britain and France. She worked regularly for Pierre Cardin, sometimes for Jacques Heim, and posed for various magazines such as Elle, L’Officiel, Vogue Paris or also Le Jardin des Modes. Due to her job, she traveled many times, posing for William Klein for whom she would become one of his favourites, Irving Penn, John French, Richard Avedon, or also French photographer Georges Dambier or Jeanloup Sieff, who “often photographed” according to him. Independent while the agencies are then little developed, she was contacted by Eileen Ford and invited to New York. She then met the influential Diana Vreeland, which further propelled her career.
In early 1963, D’Aillencourt was selected by Melvin Sokolsky for his “Bubble” series for Harper’s Bazaar. She had her test shot in colour taken in New York, which the staff of Harper’s Bazaar approved. She flew to Paris on 20 January 1963 to have her photos taken by Sokolsky. During the shoot, the Bubble that D’Aillencourt was in was lowered too far into the Seine, which damaged the designer shoes that she was wearing.
D’Aillencourt made her final series of photographs in India, with photographer Henry Clarke, in 1969 after a successful career of 15 years. Throughout her career, she always kept with the trends over time, from the sophistication of the 1950s to the greatest freedom of clothing the following decade. Some time after she stopped modelling, she founded a modelling agency in Paris, Model International, which quickly grew, and then a second agency of a more modest size, Image. She was married to José Bénazéraf, their second daughter Béatrice also having integrated modeling as a booker. In 2008, D’Aillencourt attended the festival at Hyères to celebrate the exhibitions of Sokolsky’s work.
F.C. Gundlach (German, 1926-2021) Op Art Swimsuit. Brigitte Bauer, Op Art swimsuit by Sinz Vouliagmeni Greece 1966 Gelatin silver print
F.C. Gundlach (German, 1926-2021) Rainweather, party sunshiny. Three poplin coats by Staebe-Seger Berlin 1955 Gelatin silver print
F.C. Gundlach (German, 1926-2021) Romy Schneider Hamburg 1961 in Film und Frau, Issue 11/1962 Gelatin silver print
Romy Schneider
Romy Schneider (23 September 1938 – 29 May 1982) was a film actress and voice actress born in Vienna and raised in Germany who held German and French citizenship. She started her career in the German Heimatfilm genre in the early 1950s when she was 15. From 1955 to 1957, she played the central character of Empress Elisabeth of Austria in the Austrian Sissi trilogy, and later reprised the role in a more mature version in Visconti’s Ludwig. Schneider moved to France, where she made successful and critically acclaimed films with some of the most notable film directors of that era.
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
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