Exhibition: ‘Romy Schneider. Wien – Berlin – Paris’ at Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum for Film and Television, Berlin

Exhibition dates: 5th December 2009 – 29th August, 2010

 

Heinz Köster (German, 1917-1967) 'Romy Schneider, Berlin 1962' from the exhibition 'Romy Schneider. Wien – Berlin – Paris' at Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum for Film and Television, Berlin, December 2009 - August 2010

 

Heinz Köster (German, 1917-1967)
Romy Schneider, Berlin 1962
1962
Gelatin silver print
© Foto: Heinz Köster
Quelle: Deutsche Kinemathek

 

 

I seen to have become a little smitten by Romy Schneider. What charisma!

Marcus


Many thankx to the Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum for Film and Television for allowing me publish the images in the posting. Please click on the images for a larger version.

 

 

Heinz Köster (German, 1917-1967) 'Romy Schneider, Berlin 1962' from the exhibition 'Romy Schneider. Wien – Berlin – Paris' at Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum for Film and Television, Berlin, December 2009 - August 2010

 

Heinz Köster (German, 1917-1967)
Romy Schneider, Berlin 1962
1962
Gelatin silver print
© Foto: Heinz Köster
Quelle: Deutsche Kinemathek

 

Max Scheler (German, 1928-2003) 'Romy Schneider, Venice 1957' from the exhibition 'Romy Schneider. Wien – Berlin – Paris' at Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum for Film and Television, Berlin, December 2009 - August 2010

 

Max Scheler (German, 1928-2003)
Romy Schneider, Venice 1957
1957
Während Dreharbeiten zu SISSI – SCHICKSALSJAHRE EINER KAISERIN
R: Ernst Marischka, A 1957
Gelatin silver print
© Foto: Max Scheler
Quelle: Max Scheler Estate, Hamburg

 

 

The exhibition documents the eventful career of Romy Schneider, who by the late 1950s no longer wanted to be Sissi, and by the 1970s was a celebrated star of French cinema. A large number of unknown photographs of Romy Schneider, her film partners, and family from the 1950s and 1960s will be on display from the collections of the Deutsche Kinemathek. The exhibition will also present loans from private individuals and institutions from France and Austria …

The exhibition Romy Schneider. Wien – Berlin – Paris, which the Museum für Film und Fernsehen will present beginning on December 5th, documents the varied and wide-ranging career of Romy Schneider, who no longer wanted to be “Sissi” at the end of the 1950s and was celebrated as a star of French cinema in the 1970s.

Romy Schneider publicly bemoaned her roles in Germany and went to Paris to play women who did justice to her acting abilities and her expectations. She settled in France at the beginning of the 1970s, where she advanced to one of the biggest stars of French cinema. She won several awards and made films with nearly all the great directors and actors of that period. The paparazzi followed the actress at every turn, documenting her strokes of fate for the international popular press, and throughout her life Romy Schneider considered herself to be their victim. Romy Schneider died in Paris in May 1982. To this day, she is admired by millions of fans around the world as one of cinema’s international stars.

This homage, which can be seen in 450 sq. m. of exhibition space at the Filmhaus, treats both the diverse roles and changing image of the actress, as well as her representation in the media.

Pictures from films, the press and her private life are grouped according to recurring motifs and combined with film clips. Media installations show the interplay between projection and active self-promotion. Posters, costumes, correspondence and fan souvenirs will augment the presentation.

Numerous photographs from the 1950s and 1960s of Romy Schneider, her film partners and her family, largely unknown until now, originate from the collections of Deutsche Kinemathek. Loans from other institutions and private individuals will also be on view, for instance from the photographers F. C. Gundlach and Robert Lebeck, as well as from the personal archives of the film director Claude Sautet.

Press release from the Museum für Film und Fernsehen website [Online] Cited 25/05/2010 no longer available online

 

Installation view of the exhibition 'Romy Schneider. Wien – Berlin – Paris' at Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum for Film and Television, Berlin
Installation view of the exhibition 'Romy Schneider. Wien – Berlin – Paris' at Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum for Film and Television, Berlin
Installation view of the exhibition 'Romy Schneider. Wien – Berlin – Paris' at Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum for Film and Television, Berlin
Installation view of the exhibition 'Romy Schneider. Wien – Berlin – Paris' at Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum for Film and Television, Berlin

 

Installation views of the exhibition Romy Schneider. Wien – Berlin – Paris at Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum for Film and Television, Berlin
Photos © Marian Stefanowski

 

F. C. Gundlach (German, b. 1926) 'Romy Schneider, Hamburg 1961'

 

F. C. Gundlach (German, 1926-2021)
Romy Schneider, Hamburg 1961
1961
Gelatin silver print
© Foto: F. C. Gundlach

 

F. C. Gundlach (Franz Christian Gundlach) 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.

 

Alain Delon and Romy Schneider in 'La Piscine'/'Der Swimmingpool' 1969

 

Alain Delon and Romy Schneider in La Piscine/Der Swimmingpool
R- Jacques Deray, F/I 1969
Gelatin silver print
Foto/Quelle: Filmarchiv Austria, Wien

 

Romy Schneider and Alain Delon in 'La Piscine'/'Der Swimmingpool' 1969

 

Romy Schneider and Alain Delon in La Piscine/Der Swimmingpool
R- Jacques Deray, F/I 1969
Gelatin silver print
Foto/Quelle: Deutsche Kinemathek

 

Georges Pierre (French, 1927-2003) 'Romy Schneider, 1972'

 

Georges Pierre (French, 1927-2003)
Romy Schneider, 1972
1972
© Foto: Georges Pierre
Quelle: Cinemémathèque française

 

Robert Lebeck (German, 1929-2014) 'Romy Schneider, Berlin 1976'

 

Robert Lebeck (German, 1929-2014)
Romy Schneider, Berlin 1976
1976
Während der Dreharbeiten zu PORTRAIT DE GROUPE AVEC DAME/GRUPPENBILD MIT DAME
R: Aleksandar Petrovic, F/BRD 1976
Gelatin silver print
© Foto: Robert Lebeck

 

Romy Schneider and Claude Sautet during the shooting of 'UNE HISTOIRE SIMPLE' / 'A SIMPLE STORY' 1978

 

Romy Schneider and Claude Sautet during the shooting of UNE HISTOIRE SIMPLE / A SIMPLE STORY
1978
Gelatin silver print
Foto/Quelle: Yves Sautet, Paris

 

Claude Sautet

Claude Sautet (23 February 1924 – 22 July 2000) was a French author and film director. Born in Montrouge, Hauts-de-Seine, France, Sautet first studied painting and sculpture before attending a film university in Paris where he began his career and later became a television producer. He filmed his first movie, Bonjour Sourire, in 1955.

He earned international attention with Les choses de la vie, which he wrote and directed, like the rest of his later films. It was shown in competition at the 1970 Cannes Festival, where it was well received. The film also revived the career of Romy Schneider; she acted in several of Sautet’s later films. In his next film Max et les Ferrailleurs (1971) she played a prostitute, while in César et Rosalie (1972) she portrayed a married woman who copes with the reappearance of an old flame.

Vincent, Paul, François, et les Autres (1974) is one of Sautet’s most acclaimed films. Four middle-class men meet in the country every weekend mainly to discuss their lives. The film featured a cast of major stars of French cinema: Michel Piccoli, Yves Montand, Gérard Depardieu, and Stéphane Audran. He achieved even further critical success with Mado (1976).

His 1978 film A Simple Story (Une Histoire simple) was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The film featured Schneider again, this time as a dissatisfied working woman in her 40s. She won the César Award for Best Actress for her performance.

Text from the Wikipedia website

 

 

Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen
Potsdamer Straße 2
10785 Berlin

Opening hours:
Monday: 10.00 – 18.00
Tuesday: Closed
Wednesday: 10.00 – 18.00
Thursday: 10.00 – 20.00
Friday – Sunday: 10.00 – 18.00

Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum for Film and Television website

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Four exhibitions in Albert Street, Richmond: Pamela Rataj at Anita Traverso Gallery, Claudia Damichi at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Steve Randall at John Buckley Gallery and Robert Boynes at Karen Woodbury Gallery

April 2010

 

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. 'Tangent Bundle' 2009

 

Pamela Rataj (Australian)
Tangent Bundle
2009

 

Pamela Rataj. 'Ravel' 2009

 

Pamela Rataj (Australian)
Ravel
2009

 

Pamela Rataj. 'Kairos' 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 1
2009

 

Pamela Rataj. 'Faisceaux 4' 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

 

Claudia Damichi (Australian, b. 1972)
Birds eye
2010
Acrylic on canvas
46 x 41cm

 

Claudia Damichi (Australian, b. 1972) 'Star Gazer' 2009

 

Claudia Damichi (Australian, b. 1972)
Star Gazer
2009
Acrylic on canvas
46 x 41cm

 

Claudia Damichi (Australian, b. 1972) 'Gridlock' 2010

 

Claudia Damichi (Australian, b. 1972)
Gridlock
2010
Acrylic on canvas
41 x 46cm

 

Claudia Damichi (Australian, b. 1972) 'Reading between the lines' 2010

 

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.

Visit the Sophie Gannon website

 

Claudia Damichi (Australian, b. 1972) 'Look out' 2010

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Robert Boynes (Australian, b. 1942)
Days that we forgot
2010
Acrylic on canvas

 

Robert Boynes (Australian, b. 1942) 'Signal Driver' 2010

 

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

 

Robert Boynes (Australian, b. 1942)
Body Type 2
2010
Acrylic on canvas

 

Robert Boynes (Australian, b. 1942) 'Body Type 3' 2010

 

Robert Boynes (Australian, b. 1942)
Body Type 3
2010
Acrylic on canvas

 

Robert Boynes (Australian, b. 1942) 'Things we leave behind' 2009

 

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

 

Robert Boynes (Australian, b. 1942)
The layered moment
2009
Acrylic on canvas

 

Robert Boynes (Australian, b. 1942) 'Postscript' 2009

 

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

Sophie Gannon Gallery website

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Review: ‘Tacita Dean’ at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 6th June – 2nd August 2009

 

Photographs from the exhibition are in the chronological order that they appear.

 

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965) 'Grobsteingrab (floating)' 2009

 

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965)
Grobsteingrab (floating)
2009

 

 

“The subjects are connected to the medium I use. It’s all about light and time and phenomena to some extent, like a rainbow or a gust of wind or even an eclipse or a green ray, things like that. And this is the language of light. It’s not the language of binary pixels.”


Tacita Dean1

 

“The value of her [Dean’s] work, writes Winterson, is one of the virtues of art itself: it is an intervention into the rush of everyday life, holding up time and space for contemplation.”


Jeanette Winterson2

 

 

This is a dense, ‘thick’ exhibition by Tacita Dean at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne that rewards repeat viewing. The theatricality of each work and the theatricality of the journey through ACCA’s dimmed galleries (an excellent installation of the work!) makes for an engrossing exhibition as Dean explores the minutiae of memory and the significance of insignificant events: a contemplation on the space, time and materiality of the everyday.

The exhibition starts with 3 very large floating rocks (Grobsteingrab (floating), Hunengrab (floating) and Riesenbelt (floating) all 2009) printed on multiple pieces of photographic paper, the surrounds of the rocks painted out with matt black blackboard paint (see image at top of this posting). The rocks look like mountain massif and are printed at different levels to each other; they move up and down, earthed in the sense that the viewer feels their heavy weight but also buoyant in their surface shininess, seeming to float into the void. The textuality of the rocks is incredible, the suspension of the rocks fragmented by the fact that they are printed on multiple pieces of photographic paper, the edges of the paper curling up to dislocate the unity of form.

Opposite is the large multi-panelled T + I (Tristan + Isolde), a tour de force of Romantic landscape meets mythological journey (see image second from top). Sunshine searing through cloud lights the 25 Turner-esque black and white gravure panels that feature an inlet, fjord and ravine. Semi-legible words dot the landscape, reflecting on the legendary story: ‘undergrowth’, ‘dispute’, ‘brightening up’, ‘BLIND FOLLY’ and ‘the union involved in a manifestation(?)’ for example. Each panel is beautifully rendered and a joy to behold – my friend and I stood transfixed, examining each panel in minute detail, trying to work out the significance and relation between the writing and image. As with most of the work in the exhibition the piece engages the viewer in a dialogue between reality, story and memory, between light, space, time and phenomena.

After the small rear projected film Totality (2000) that shows the extraordinary event of a total eclipse of the sun by the moon for a period of two minutes and six seconds the viewer takes a short darkened passage to experience the major installation in the exhibition Merce Cunningham Performs ‘Stillness’ (in three movements) to John Cage’s composition 4’33” with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six performances; six films) 2007 (see images below).

The first thing you see is one image projected onto a small suspended screen, the rest of the installation blocked by a short gallery wall to the right. The dancer Merce Cunningham sits in studious calm and observes us. This in itself is magical but as we round the corner other screens of different sizes and heights come into view, all portraying Cunningham’s dance studio and him sitting in it from different angles, heights and distances (including close-ups of Cunningham himself). In the six screen projection the performances of Cunningham are sometimes in synch, sometimes not. The director Trevor Carlson, holding a stop watch, times the 3 movements of Cage’s musical piece 4’33” and directs Cunningham to change position at the end of every movement; his hands move, he crosses his legs and the performance continues.

The work is projected into the sculptural space using old 16mm film projectors and their sound mixes with the studied silence of the Cage work and white noise. The mirrors in the studio make spaces of infinite recess, showing us the director with the stop watch, the windows, the floor, the markings of the dancers hands on the mirrors surface adding another echo of past presences. As a viewer their seems to be an ‘openness’ around as you are pulled into a spatial and sound vortex, a phenomena that transcends normal spatio-temporal dimensionality. As people pass through the installation their shadows fall on the screens and become part of the work adding to the multi-layered feeling of the work. This is sensational stuff – you feel that you transcend reality itself as you observe and become immersed within this amazing work – almost as though space and time had split apart at the seams and you are left hanging, suspended in mid-air.

The next two films are my favourite pieces in the exhibition. Darmstädter Werkblock (2007) shows us the significance of insignificant markings – edges and intersections, textures, blends and bleeds, the minutiae of existence in the markings on the fabric of an internal wall (see photograph below). Here is light, wood panelling, texture and again the sound of the whirring of the film projector. Usually I am not a fan of this kind of work having seen enough ‘Dead Pan’ photography and photography of empty yet supposedly important spaces in my life, but here Dean’s film makes the experience come alive and actually mean something. Her work transcends the subject matter – and matter is at the point where these interstitial spaces have been marked by the abstract signs of human existence that constantly surround us.

In Michael Hamburger (2007) Dean reaches the empito-me of these personal narratives that inhabit everyday life. Film of an orchard with wind rustling through the trees, clouds drifting across the sky, rotting apples on the branches, fallen fruit on the ground and a clearing with a man looking up at the trees is accompanied by the industrial sounds of clicks and pops like that of an old radio (see photograph above). The swirling sound of the wind surrounds you in the darkened gallery space much as the panoramic screen of the projection seems to enfold you. The scene swaps to an interior of a house and shows the man, has face mainly in shadow, the film focusing on the different type of apples in front of him or on the aged wrinkles of his hands holding the apples. He talks intelligently and knowingly about the different types of apples and their rarity and qualities. This is Michael Hamburger (now dead which adds poignancy to the film) – poet, critic, memoirist and academic notable for his translations of the work of W. G. Sebald, one of Tacita Dean’s main influences (and also an author that I love dearly).

One can see echoes of Sebald’s work in that of Tacita Dean – the personal narratives accompanied by mythical and historical stories and pictures. The tactility of Hamburger’s voice and hands, his caressing of the apples with the summary justice of the tossing away of rotten apples to stop them ruining the rest of the crop is arresting and holds you transfixed. Old varieties and old hands mixed with the old technology of film make for a nostalgic combination. As John Matthews of ArtKritique has so insightfully observed in his review of this work Dean implicitly understands how objects can be elegies for fleeting lives.

After this work one should have a break – go to the front of the gallery and have a coffee and relax because this is an exhausting show!


The rest of the exhibition tends to tail off slightly, with less engaging but still interesting works.

In Die Regimentstochter (2005) (the name of a Donizetti opera) Dean uses a pile of 36 found and mutilated old opera and theatre programs from the 1930s and 1940s such as Staats Theatre, Berlin, Der Tanz and Deutsche Openhaus. These programs have had portions of their front covers roughly but clinically cut to reveal the inner pages beneath (see image below) and Dean uses them to comment on the politicisation of culture in Berlin’s mid-20th century history. The top of a powdered wigged head or the face of Beethoven has been revealed when the title of the work has been neatly removed along with something else:

“Each programme gives a tantalising glimpse of a title or a face through a small window cut into the embossed cover; we recognise Beethoven, Rossini, the face of a singer perhaps. When and by whom this incision in the cover was made, very neatly one might add, even more why these disfigured programmes were kept remains a mystery. A swift search in an archive would easily show what has been removed; most likely an embossed swastika, for these performances all happened during the Third Reich. Why they were removed is left to our imaginations; perhaps an avid theatre-goer livid at the co-option of culture by the regime, perhaps someone afraid they might be misinterpreted as fascist memorabilia, while wishing to retain the memories these performances triggered.”3

High up on a wall opposite these programs is the film Palast (2004) in which Dean reflects Berlin’s divided history in the jaded façade of the once iconic Palast, the government building of the former German Democratic Republic.4 Shards of light hit glass and reflections are fractured in their gridded panes (see images below). A bird is seen flying, viewed through the window and we see the stains on that window but in this film things feel a bit forced. Unlike the earlier Darmstädter Werkblock there is little magic here.

Again the minutiae of existence is examined in the final two films Noir et Blanc (2006), made on the last 5 rolls of Dean’s black and white double-sided 16mm film stock and Kodak (2006), both made at the Kodak factory in Chalon-sur-Saône before it closed it’s film production facilities (see images below). With the demise of the medium that she feels closest to Dean sought permission to film at the factory itself and both films examine that medium by turning it on itself.

“Dean became acutely aware of the threat to her chosen medium when she was unable to obtain standard 16mm black-and-white film for her camera. Upon discovering that the Kodak factory in Chalon-sur-Saône, France, was closing its film production facility, Dean obtained permission to document the manufacture of film at the factory, where cameras have never before been invited. The resulting rear-screen projection ‘Noir et Blanc’, filmed on the final five rolls Dean acquired, turns the medium on itself. The 44-minute-long work ‘Kodak’ constitutes a contemplative elegy for the approaching demise of a medium specific to Dean’s own practice. Kodak’s narrative follows the making of celluloid as it runs through several miles of machinery and explores the abandoned corners of the factory. On the day of filming, the factory also ran a test through the system with brown paper, providing a rare opportunity to see the facilities fully illuminated, without the darkness needed to prevent exposure, and underscoring the luster of the celluloid as the dull brown strips contrast with the luminous, transparent polyester.”5

As writer Tony Lloyd has commented, “The film “Kodak” documenting the manufacturing of film was as solemn and reverent as a Catholic mass and equally as dull and inexplicable.”6 I wouldn’t go that far but by the end of the exhibition the nostalgia for old technologies, the brown paper programs and the film strip as relic were starting to wear a bit thin, like the sprockets of an old film camera failing to take up the film.


At her best Tacita Dean is a fantastic artist whose work examines the measure of things, the vibrations of spirit in the FLUX of experience. Her work has a trance-like quality that is heavy with nostalgia and memory and reflects the machine-ations of contemporary life. In her languorous (thank you Tony Lloyd for that word, so appropriate I had to use it!) and dense work Dean teases out the significance of insignificant actions/events and imparts meaning and life to them. This is no small achievement.

As an exhibition this is an intense and moving experience. Go, take your time and enjoy!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

 

Footnotes

1/ Dean, Tacita quoted in Bunbury, Stephen.“Still Lives,” in The Age. Melbourne: Fairfax Publishing, A2 section, Saturday June 6th, 2009, p. 20

2/ Winterson, Jeanette, quoted in Bunbury, Stephen.“Still Lives,” in The Age. Melbourne: Fairfax Publishing, A2 section, Saturday June 6th, 2009, p. 20

3/ Anonymous. Product synopsis from Tacita Dean Die Regimentstochter [Paperback] on the Amazon website [Online] Cited 19/07/2009

4/ Anonymous. Description of Tacita Dean: ‘Palast’ on the Tate St. Ives website [Online] Cited 19/07/2009 no longer available online

5/ Anonymous. “The Hugo Boss Prize: Tacita Dean”, on the Guggenheim Museum website [Online] Cited 19/07/2009. No longer available online

6/ Lloyd, Tony. “Opnion: Tacita Dean at ACCA,” on the ArtInfo.com.au website [Online] Cited 19/07/2009. No longer available online


Many thankx to ACCA for allowing me to publish the photographs and art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image

 

 

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965) 'T & I (Tristan & Isolde)' 2006

 

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965)
T & I (Tristan & Isolde)
2006
Photogravure on twenty-five sheets
Sheet (each): 26 3/4 x 33 7/8″ (68 x 86cm)
Installation: 134 x 170″ (340.4 x 431.8cm)
Niels Borch Jensen Gallery and Edition, Berlin and Copenhagen

 

Through drawings and films, Dean makes work that is frequently characterised by a poetic sensibility and fragmented narratives exploring past and present, fact and fiction. In this monumental printed work, she addresses themes of collective memory and lost history by combining the romantic legend of ill-fated medieval lovers Tristan and Isolde (whose initials give this piece its title) with the real-life tragedy of British sailor Donald Crowhurst. Dean often uses the sea and other maritime themes in her work, including the tale of Crowhurst, which has appeared in several of her projects.

In 1968 Crowhurst sailed from England for a solo, round-the-world yacht race and never returned. In T & I Dean connects the tale of this lost sailor to the story of Tristan and Isolde – whose tragic love story also hinges on sea voyages – through her majestic depiction of a barren, rocky coastline looking seaward. This work, based on a found postcard, includes the white, cryptic notes that Dean often scribbles on her prints and drawings. Here the musings include “start” and “stage 4,” clear theatrical directions, as well as fragments of a poem by “WSG” about an artist killed in an accident. The twenty-five-sheet composition suggests a cinematic narrative sequence, while reading it as a unified image has a breathtaking, visionary impact. The rich velvety texture of the photogravure medium contributes a nineteenth-century patina that is ideally suited to the intensity and foreboding melancholy of the subject.

Publication excerpt from The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights since 1980, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007, p. 269

 

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965) 'Banewl' 1999

 

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965)
Totality
16mm colour film
2000

 

16mm film projector used by Tacita Dean to project 'Merce Cunningham Performs 'Stillness''

 

16mm film projector used by Tacita Dean to project Merce Cunningham Performs ‘Stillness’

 

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965) ‘Merce Cunningham Performs ‘Stillness’ (in three movements) to John Cage’s composition 4’33” with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six performances; six films)’ 2007

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965) ‘Merce Cunningham Performs ‘Stillness’ (in three movements) to John Cage’s composition 4’33” with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six performances; six films)’ 2007

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965) ‘Merce Cunningham Performs ‘Stillness’ (in three movements) to John Cage’s composition 4’33” with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six performances; six films)’ 2007

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965) ‘Merce Cunningham Performs ‘Stillness’ (in three movements) to John Cage’s composition 4’33” with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six performances; six films)’ 2007

 

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965)
Merce Cunningham Performs ‘Stillness’ (in three movements) to John Cage’s composition 4’33” with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six performances; six films) (stills)
2007

 

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965) 'Darmstädter Werkblock' 2007 (still)

 

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965)
Darmstädter Werkblock (stills)
16mm colour film, optical sound
18 minutes, continuous loop
2007

 

 

Take one of her best pieces, Darmstädter Werkblock 2007, which looks for most of its long eighteen minutes like an exploration of an empty room, which it is. The camera pans the space, exploring the frayed fringes of its empty, textile-clad, burnt brown walls. It settles on holes, tears, seams and faded spots marking where placards used to hang. We are formally intrigued, but also curious why we should care so much about this particular empty room in what we can vaguely sense is a museum. Perhaps we are even a little bored. Only later – not in the film itself, but in the accompanying materials – are we told that these rooms usually house the “Block Beuys”, a section of the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt arranged by Beuys himself over the decade and a half between its opening and the artist’s death. The Block is mired in controversy now that the walls, which are actually left over from when the rooms showed medieval artefacts, but which evoke and mirror Beuys’s own work, are slated for renovation.

Text from Philip Tinari. “Meditations on time,” in Tate Etc. issue 23: Autumn 2011 on the Tate website 1 September 2011 [Online] Cited 18/03/2019

 

Stills taken from the 16mm film Darmstädter Werkblock (2007) filmed in the seven rooms that make up Block Beuys, Joseph Beuys’s installation in Darmstadt’s Hessisches Landesmuseum. In September 2007, the museum announced that they intended to renovate the rooms, and to remove the brown jute wall coverings and gray carpet that had become such a feature of the installation. The decision caused much upset in Germany and beyond. Unable to document the rooms for copyright reasons, Dean requested that instead she might document the walls and carpet and the details of the space that surround Beuys’s work without making any visual reference to the work itself. The resulting film concentrated on the patches and the stains and the labor of those who have been maintaining the space over the last four decades – the parallel entropy of the museum space with the ageing of the work itself.

Text from Google Books

 

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965) 'Michael Hamburger' 2007 (still)

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965) 'Michael Hamburger' 2007 (still)

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965) 'Michael Hamburger' 2007 (still)

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965) 'Michael Hamburger' 2007 (still)

 

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965)
Michael Hamburger (stills)
16mm colour anamorphic, optical sound
28 minutes
2007

 

Continuing her recent collection of film portraits, Tacita Dean’s Michael Hamburger is a moving portrayal of the poet and translator, a resident of Middleton in Suffolk and great friend of W.G. Sebald. It represented Dean’s first commission in Britain since 1999.

For its 28 minutes, the film quietly observes the poet in his study and among the apple trees in his garden. Sunlight dissolves the frames of the windows, the most insubstantial of thresholds between this home, only one-room-deep, and what lies outdoors; a rainbow marks its watery geometry in the sky; and the apples age upon the ground, shrunken, and yet somehow becoming more intensely themselves.

Although Hamburger is said to have despaired of reviews of his poetry which declared that he is ‘better known as a translator’, we might detect a similar deprecation of his self, by himself, in the film which shares his name. Unwilling, perhaps unable, to talk of his past and his migrations, most especially fleeing Nazism in 1933, he talks poignantly, instead, of his apple trees, of where they have come from, and of their careful cross-breeding. Purity is dismissed, and one senses with an awkward pathos that the poet is translating himself.

Anonymous text. “Michael Hamburger: Tacita Dean,” on the FVU website [Online] Cited 18/03/2019

 

Tacita Dean’s portrait of the poet and translator Michael Hamburger was filmed, at his home in rural Suffolk, in the last year of his life. Set against muted autumn colours, and with Hamburger performing an evocative, anecdotal inventory of the harvest from his apple orchard, the piece is a bittersweet reminder of time’s passing that deftly captures, and quietly honours, an exemplary 20th century literary figure.

 

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965) 'Die Regimentstochter' 2005

 

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965)
Die Regimentstochter (The Daughter of the Regiment)
2005

 

Die Regimentstochter is the latest in a series of projects made from material turned up in flea markets, in this case, a series of 36 antique opera programs from the 30s and 40s found in the flea markets of Berlin. Like the found photographs in Dean’s 2001 FLOH, these souvenirs remain unexplained by text. They retain the silence of the lost object, and they share a riddle: each program gives a tantalising glimpse of a title or a face through a small window cut into the embossed cover. Readers will recognise Beethoven, Rossini, or perhaps a singer. A swift search in an archive would easily confirm what has been removed, but it seems likely that the missing piece is a swastika. These performances all happened during the Third Reich. When and by whom the incision was made, and why these programs were both worth disfiguring and worth keeping, remains a mystery.

Text from the Amazon website

 

“Things no longer visible thus enhance our view of the past, and gaps, paradoxically, become memorials that engage the beholder’s imagination more actively than a didactic demonstration could. Merely by showing what remains, Tacita Dean not only calls up in our mind’s eye a specific historical situation and its abysses, but also erects an anti-monument to the forms customarily taken by the culture of memory.”

Andreas Kaernbach

 

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965) 'Die Regimentstochter' 2005

 

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965)
Die Regimentstochter (The Daughter of the Regiment)
2005

 

They look lined up like a modern art object. The 36 opera program books are not considered as works of art. Nevertheless, the British and Berlin-based artist Tacita Dean turned them into a work of art.

“An incidental finding inspired Tacita Dean to her artwork,” tells the House of History. “At a Berlin flea market she discovered in the year 2000 36 opera program booklets from the years 1934 to 1942. Conspicuous were the title pages: from each of the booklets was a part cut out, including from the program of the eponymous opera “The Regimental Daughter” by Gaetano Donizetti (world premiere 1840). “Said part of the title pages of those notebooks was reserved for the swastika symbol. This was cut off by the previous owners. Why, that can only be speculated, continues the house of history. “Was it shame, the fear of being punishable or even a “private” act of resistance before the end of National Socialism? The program books in any case seem to have been of great cultural value to the former owner. “

“Whatever the motives that made the owner or the owner of the program booklets of the Berlin opera from 1934 to 1942 come to shears in order to remove the Nazi swastikas from the cover pages of the booklets: The voices speak of the desire to conclude with a time that one does not want to be reminded of – a basic motive of German post-war history that stood in the way of an honest confrontation with the era of National Socialism for a long time, “said the Minister of Culture.

With her work, Tacita asks Dean questions about dealing with the Nazi past. Which motive behind it and who had heard the booklets remains open until today. Tacita Dean has created a work of art from these finds, which poses subtle questions about the examination of the Nazi past – but in a way that goes beyond purely historical reflection and awakens additional associations. What does that object, created by the artist from Canterbury, say about the relationship between art and politics? “Can the opera narratives be separated from the political environment in which they were performed and played?” asks the President of the Foundation for the History of the Federal Republic of Germany, Prof. Dr Hans Walter Hütter.

Monika Grütters continues: “The fact that the dark part of our identity does not disappear through concealment and suppression, and that it becomes visible again even where it was attempted to be eradicated, impressively shows Tacita Dean’s work Regimentstochter. That is why I very much welcome the fact that this unique work of art has a place in the collection which, in view of its significance in contemporary history, necessarily belongs to it – a place in the House of History which, unlike any other museum in Germany, presents German history from 1945 in all its facets illustrated and also devoted to the effects of National Socialism on the political and cultural life in post-war Germany.”

Daniel Thalheim. “NS-Vergangenheit als Kunst – 36 Programmhefte aus der Nazi-Zeit im Haus der Geschichte,” on the ARTEFAKTE: Das Journal für Baukultur und Kunst website 2nd September 2015 [Online] Cited 17/03/2019 translated from the German by Google Translate.

 

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965) 'Palast' 2004

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965) 'Palast' 2004

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965) 'Palast' 2004

 

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965)
Three stills from the film Palast
2004

 

 

A major survey of work by the internationally acclaimed British artist Tacita Dean will open at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) on June 6th, 2009.

In a great coup for Melbourne, fourteen recent projects by this celebrated contemporary artist will come together in what is the largest survey of Dean’s work to ever be shown outside of Europe.

Tacita Dean is one of Britain’s most accomplished and celebrated contemporary artists. She won the New York Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss award in 2007, was a Turner Prize nominee in 1998, and has had numerous solo exhibitions in Europe – at the Schaulager in Basel, DIA Beacon in New York, the de Pont Museum in the Netherlands, the Tate Britain, UK, the Musee d’art Moderne in Paris, France and the Villa Oppenheim in Berlin, to mention just a few.

Dean was also recently given the highly prestigious title of Royal Academician, awarded sparingly to alumni’s of the revered London art school who have achieved greatness in their work.

Tacita Dean was born in Canterbury in 1965, and moved to Berlin in 2000 after being awarded a DAAD residency. Early works focused on the sea – most famously she explored the tragic maritime misadventures of amateur English sailor Donald Crowhurst. Since moving to Berlin she has devoted her attention to the architecture and cultural history of Germany, a recurring theme also being the salvaging, saving and collecting of things lost. Many of her works rest on the icons of modernism, heroic failures and forgotten utopian ideals.

Dean is best known for her work with 16mm film, although she also works with photography, print and drawing. The qualities of filmmaking itself play a central role in her works – which hauntingly capture the passing of time, space and the mysteries of the natural world.

Her work occupies a place between fact and fiction. As British author Jeanette Winterson says, “Her genius, with her slow, steady, held frames, is to allow the viewer to dream; to enter without hurry, without expectation, and to accept, as we do in a dream, a different experience of time, and a different relationship to everyday objects.”

Included in this exhibition is Dean’s revered film installation, Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s composition 4’33” with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007, which was recently presented at the DIA Beacon in New York, and the 2007 work Michael Hamburger. Two new wall-based works especially created for this exclusive ACCA exhibition will also feature.

Dean is also known for creating ‘asides’ – totally absorbing texts on the subjects explored in her work. She will contribute texts on all the projects included in the exhibition for a catalogue which will be published to coincide with this unique ACCA survey.

The exhibition has been curated by ACCA’s Artistic Director, Juliana Engberg and follows an early 2002 exhibition of Dean’s work curated by Engberg for the Melbourne International Arts Festival.

“Tacita’s works continue to enthral and inspire me. Not only has she rescued relics from history and restored them with a visual dignity and affection in her wonderful film projects, but increasingly she rescues the traditional art forms of drawing, print making, painting, photography and film from a digital abyss,” says Juliana Engberg. “Her works have a truth and quiddity about them, but also a playful artifice and technical tactic to bring out the tactile and material in all she deals with. Tacita is a sublime story-teller, a narrator of odysseys and attempts. She is a true artist sojourner.

In this selection of works made since 2004 we grasp the breadth of her practice and her pursuit of the time-honoured landscape, portrait and abstract genres,” she says.”

Text from the press release from the ACCA website [Online] Cited 17/07/2009. No longer available online

 

Tacita Dean. 'Noir et Blanc [Still]' 2006

 

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965)
Noir et Blanc [Still]
16mm black-and-white Kodak film
2006

 

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965) 'Kodak' 2006 (still)

 

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965)
Kodak (still)
16mm colour and b/w film optical sound
44 minutes loop system
2006

 

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965) 'Kodak' 2006 (still)

 

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965)
Kodak (still)
16mm colour and b/w film optical sound
44 minutes loop system
2006

 

As Dean said in a Guardian article back in February: “Digital is not better than analogue, but different. What we are asking for is coexistence: that analogue film might be allowed to remain an option for those who want it, and for the ascendency of one not to have to mean the extinguishing of the other.”

In the same text, she wrote of the difference between film and digital as “not only emulsion versus pixels, or light versus electronics, but something deeper – something to do with poetry.” This poetry is exactly what she explored in one of her landmark films, Kodak (2006), a 45-minute examination of the production process of celluloid itself at a French factory fated for early closure because of a lack of demand. A film about the making of film, it hinged on the sort of super-aestheticised conceit that has become her staple. This is a tactic which allows her to turn even time itself into a structural device, as she did in 2008 with a film called Amadeus, which depicts a 50-minute crossing of the English Channel in a small fishing boat of the same name.

Philip Tinari. “Meditations on time,” in Tate Etc. issue 23: Autumn 2011 on the Tate website 1 September 2011 [Online] Cited 18/03/2019

 

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965) 'Kodak' 2006 (still)

 

Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965)
Kodak (still)
16mm colour and b/w film optical sound
44 minutes loop system
2006

 

 

Australia Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)
111 Sturt Street, Southbank
Victoria 3006, Australia
Phone: 03 9697 9999

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Friday 10am – 5pm
Weekends & Public Holidays 11am – 5pm
Monday closed
Open all public holidays except Christmas Day and Good Friday

ACCA website

Tacita Dean on the Marian Goodman website

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Exhibition photographs: ‘Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire’ Melbourne Winter Masterpieces at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 13th June – 4th October, 2009

 

Installation view of the interior forecourt of the National Gallery of Victoria showing banners for the exhibition Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire

 

Installation view of the interior forecourt of the National Gallery of Victoria showing banners for the exhibition Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

 

Installation photographs from the latest Winter Masterpieces blockbuster Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire from the media preview on the day the exhibition opened at NGV International, Melbourne. Thank you to Jemma Altmeier, Media and Public Affairs Administrator at the NGV for the invitation. Photographs were taken using a digital camera, tripod and available light.

Fantastic to see my friend and curator of the exhibition, Dr Ted Gott, at the opening. Congratulations on a wonderful show!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

 

© All photographs copyright Dr Marcus Bunyan 2009 and the National Gallery of Victoria. All rights reserved. Photographs may not be reproduced without permission.

Photographs proceed from the beginning to the end of the exhibition in chronological order.


Many thankx to the National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

 

Entrance to the 'Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire' Winter Masterpieces exhibition at NGV International, Melbourne

 

Entrance to the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

3 panel video installation of the Catalan countryside around where Salvador Dali lived from the exhibition 'Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces' at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

 

3 panel video installation of the Catalan countryside where Salvador Dali lived. 13 minutes duration from the exhibition Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Early work from the 'Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire' Winter Masterpieces exhibition at NGV International, Melbourne

 

Early work from the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

'Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire' Winter Masterpieces exhibition at NGV International, Melbourne

To the left 'View of the Cadaques from the Creus Tower' 1923; to the right 'Table in front of the Sea. Homage to Eric Satie' 1926 from the 'Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire' Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

 

To the left View of the Cadaques from the Creus Tower 1923; to the right Table in front of the Sea. Homage to Eric Satie 1926 from the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

 

In the centre 'The First Days of Spring' 1929; to the right 'Surrealist composition' 1928 from the 'Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire' Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

 

In the centre The First Days of Spring 1929; to the right Surrealist composition 1928 from the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Salvador Dalí (Spanish 1904-1989, worked in United States 1940-1948) 'The First Days of Spring' 1929

 

Salvador Dalí (Spanish 1904-1989, worked in United States 1940-1948)
The First Days of Spring
1929
Oil on canvas
The Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg, Florida
Worldwide Rights: © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, VISCOPY, 2009
In the USA: © Salvador Dalí Museum Inc., St. Petersburg, FL, 2009

 

Installation view with 'The Age' art critic Associate Professor Robert Nelson at centre right and 'The hand. The remorse of conscience' 1930 at far right, from the 'Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire' Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

 

Installation view with The Age art critic Associate Professor Robert Nelson at centre right and The hand. The remorse of conscience 1930 at far right, from the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Salvador Dalí (Spanish 1904-1989, worked in United States 1940-1948) 'Daddy Longlegs of the evening - Hope!' 1940

 

Salvador Dalí (Spanish 1904-1989, worked in United States 1940-1948)
Daddy Longlegs of the evening – Hope!
1940
Oil on canvas
40.6 x 50.8cm
The Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg, Florida
Worldwide Rights: © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, VISCOPY, 2009
In the USA: © Salvador Dalí Museum Inc., St. Petersburg, FL, 2009

 

Salvador Dalí (Spanish 1904-1989, worked in United States 1940-1948) 'The disintegration of The persistence of memory' 1952-1954

 

Salvador Dalí (Spanish 1904-1989, worked in United States 1940-1948)
The disintegration of The persistence of memory
1952-54
Oil on canvas
25.4 x 33.0cm
The Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg, Florida
Worldwide Rights: © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, VISCOPY, 2009.
In the USA: © Salvador Dalí Museum Inc., St. Petersburg, FL, 2009

 

Salvador Dalí (Spanish 1904-1989, worked in United States 1940-1948) 'Soft self-portrait with grilled bacon' 1941

 

Salvador Dalí (Spanish 1904-1989, worked in United States 1940-1948)
Soft self-portrait with grilled bacon
1941
Oil on canvas
61.0 x 51.0cm
Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres (0043)
© Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala- Salvador Dalí, VISCOPY, 2009

 

Salvador Dalí (Spanish 1904-89, worked in United States 1940-48) 'Memory of the child-woman' 1932

 

Salvador Dalí (Spanish 1904-1989, worked in United States 1940-1948)
Memory of the child-woman
1932
Oil on canvas
99.1 x 120.0cm
The Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg, Florida
Worldwide Rights: © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, VISCOPY, 2009
In the USA: © Salvador Dalí Museum Inc., St. Petersburg, FL, 2009

 

Installation view with 'Memory of the child-woman' 1932 at right from the 'Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire' Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

 

Installation view with Memory of the child-woman 1932 at right from the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Salvador Dalí (Spanish 1904-1989, worked in United States 1940-1948) 'Lobster Telephone' 1936 (installation view)

 

Salvador Dalí (Spanish 1904-1989, worked in United States 1940-1948)
Lobster Telephone (installation view)
1936
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Installation view of the exhibition 'Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire' Winter Masterpieces exhibition at NGV International, Melbourne

Installation view of the exhibition 'Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire' Winter Masterpieces exhibition at NGV International, Melbourne

 

Jewellery gallery at the 'Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire' Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

 

Jewellery gallery at the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

 

Salvador Dalí (Spanish 1904-89, worked in United States 1940-48)Alemany and Ertman Incorporated (New York, manufacturer United States late 1940s) 'Bleeding world, pendant' 1953

 

Salvador Dalí (Spanish 1904-1989, worked in United States 1940-1948)
Alemany and Ertman Incorporated (New York, manufacturer United States late 1940s)
Bleeding world, pendant
1953
Gold, rubies, pearls, diamonds
The Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg, Florida
Worldwide Rights: © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, VISCOPY, 2009
In the USA: © Salvador Dalí Museum Inc., St. Petersburg, FL, 2009

 

Television with film installation at 'Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire' Winter Masterpieces exhibition at NGV International, Melbourne

 

Televisions with film installation from the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Salvador Dalí (Spanish 1904-89, worked in United States 1940-48) Philippe Halsman (Latvian / American 1906-79, worked in France 1931-40) 'Dalí Atomicus' 1948, printed 1981

 

Salvador Dalí (Spanish 1904-1989, worked in United States 1940-1948)
Philippe Halsman (Latvian/American 1906-1979, worked in France 1931-1940)
Dalí Atomicus
1948, printed 1981
Gelatin silver photograph
26.7 x 34.3cm
Image rights of Salvador Dalí reserved. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2009
© Philippe Halsman / Magnum

 

Installation of black and white photography from the exhibition 'Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire' Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne with Dr Ted Gott, curator of the exhibition, with back to camera at centre

 

Installation of black and white photography from the exhibition Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne with Dr Ted Gott, curator of the exhibition, with back to camera at centre
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Reproduction of 'Gala foot. Stereoscopic paintings' 1975-1976 in an installation using mirrors that would have been originally used to obtain the stereoscopic effect

 

Reproduction of Gala foot. Stereoscopic paintings 1975-1976 in an installation using mirrors that would have been originally used to obtain the stereoscopic effect
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Final exhibition space from the 'Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire' Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

 

Final exhibition space from the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

 

Salvador Dalí (Spanish 1904-1989, worked in United States 1940-1948) 'The Ecumenical Council' 1960

 

Salvador Dalí (Spanish 1904-1989, worked in United States 1940-1948)
The Ecumenical Council
1960
Oil on canvas
299.7 x 254.0cm
The Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg, Florida
Worldwide Rights: © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, VISCOPY, 2009
In the USA: © Salvador Dalí Museum Inc., St. Petersburg, FL, 2009

 

Final gallery space from the 'Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire' Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne featuring 'The Ecumenical Council' 1960

Final gallery space from the 'Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire' Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne featuring 'The Ecumenical Council' 1960

 

Final gallery space from the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne featuring The Ecumenical Council 1960
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

 

 

National Gallery of Victoria (International)
180 St Kilda Road, Melbourne

Opening hours: Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire is open 7 days a week and until 9pm every Wednesday from 17 June

Tickets
Adult: $23
Concession: $18
Child: $11 (ages 5-15)
Family (2 adults + 3 children): $60
NGV Member Adult: $16
NGV Member Family: $40

Unlimited entry tickets
Adult: $55
Concession: $45
NGV Member Adult: $40

National Gallery of Victoria Dali website

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Review: ‘Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia’ at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 21st March – 12th July, 2009

 

Roy de Maistre (Australian, 1894-1968) 'Colour Composition derived from three bars of music in the Key of Green' 1935 from the exhibition 'Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia' at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, March - July, 2009

 

Roy de Maistre (Australian, 1894-1968)
Colour Composition derived from three bars of music in the Key of Green
1935
Oil and pencil on composition board
Private Collection

 

 

Despite some interesting highlight pieces this is a patchy, thin, incoherent exhibition assembled by the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney now showing at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne. Featuring a hotchpotch of work ranging across fields such as drawing, architecture, photography, painting, film, graphic design, craft, advertising, Australiana and aboriginal works the exhibition attempts to tell the untold story of Modernism in Australia to little effect. Within the exhibition there is no attempt to define exactly what ‘Modernism’ is and therefore an investigation into Modernism in Australia is all the more confusing for the visitor as there seems to be no stable basis on which to build that investigation. Perhaps reading the catalogue would give a greater overview of the development of Modernism in Australia but for the average visitor to the exhibition there seems to be no holistic rationale for the inclusion of elements within the exhibition which, much like Modernism itself, seems eclectically gathered from all walks of life with little regard for narrative structure.

With work spanning five decades from 1917-1967 we are presented with, variously, Robert Klippel’s kitsch Boomerang table from 1955, Robin Boyd’s ‘House of Tomorrow’ from 1949, Wolfgang Sievers ‘new objective’ photographs, Berlei’s scientific system for calculating beauty in woman in use till the 1960s, swimsuits from the 1920s-1940s, Featherston chairs from the Australian pavilion at the 1967 Expo, a recreation of Australian architect Harry Seidler’s office (the most interesting part of this being the books he had in his office library: Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van de Rohe and Concerning Town Planning by Le Corbusier) and the wind tunnel test model of the Sydney Opera House in wood from 1960. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera …

Highlight pieces include the above mentioned test model of the Sydney Opera House which is stunning in its scale and woodenness, in it’s simplicity of shape and form. Other highlight pieces are the colour music compositions of Roy de Maistre which were the tour de force of the show for me, true revelations in their rhythmic synchronic Moebius-like construction with layered planes of colour swirling in purples, greens and yellows. The large vintage photographic print of Sunbaker (1934) by Max Dupain was also a revelation with it’s earthy brown tones, the blending of the atmospheric out of focus foreground with the clouds behind, the architectural nature of the outline of the body almost like the outline of Uluru, the darkness of the head with the sensuality of the head and shoulders framed against the largeness of the hand resting on the sand. Lastly the two paintings and one rug by French artist Sonia Delaunay are a knockout. It says something about an exhibition when the best work in the show are two paintings by a French artist seemingly plucked at random to show external influences on Australian artists and designers.

While the exhibition does attempt to portray the breadth of the development of Modernism in Australia ultimately it falls well short in this endeavour. The most striking example of this shortcoming is the true star of the exhibition – the building that is Heide II itself. Commissioned by John and Sunday Reed and designed by the Victorian architect David McGlashan of the architectural firm McGlashan and Eversit in 1963 the building epitomises everything that is good about architectural Modernism and it’s form overshadows the exhibition itself. In this building we have beautiful spaces and volumes, an amazing staircase down into the lower area, suspended decking overlooking gardens, the blending of inside and outside areas, large expanses of glass to view the landscape, nooks and studies for privacy and the simplicity and eloquence of form that is Modernist design. With money one can indulge in the best of elitist Modernism. With position, position, position one can side steep the alienation of the city and the spread of surburbia where the dream of Australians owning a home of their own still continues in the vast, tasteless expanses of McMansion estates.

Robert Nelson in his review of this exhibition sees the car as creating the suburbs and Modernism as the emptying of the city after 6pm, the lessening of community and the devaluing of space he insists that there is little difference between a Californian bungalow in the suburbs and a utopian geometric neo-Corbusian box by Harry Seidler because they were equally shackled to motor transport.1 This is to miss the point.

Although Modernism in its basic form influenced most walks of life in Australia from swimsuit design to milk bars, from cinema to naturism, from bodies to advertising the most effective expressions of Modernism are architectural (as evidenced by Heide II) and were only open to those with money, power and position. Although Le Corbusier’s concept of public housing was a space ‘for the people’ the most interesting of his houses were the private commissions for wealthy clients. And so it proves here. One can imagine the parties on the deck at Heide II in the 1960s with men in their tuxedo and bow ties and woman in their gowns, or the relaxation of the Reed’s sitting in front of their fire in the submerged lounge. For the ordinary working class person Modernism brought a sense of alienation from the aspirational things one cannot buy in the world, an alienation that continues to this day; for the privileged few Modernism offered the exclusivity of elitism (or is it the elitism of exclusivity!) and an aspirational alienation of a different kind – that of the separation from the masses.

Go to Heide for the glorious gardens, the wonders of Heide II but don’t go to this exhibition expecting grand insights into the basis of Australian Modernism for that story, as Robert Nelson rightly notes, remains as yet untold.

Dr Marcus Bunyan


Many thankx to Heide Museum of Modern Art for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

An excellent review of the exhibition by Jill Julius Matthews, “Modern times: The untold story of modernism in Australia,” (reCollections Volume 4 number 1) can be found on the Journal of the National Museum of Australia website [Online] Cited 20/02/2019

 

1/ “Emanating from Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, Modern Times “explores how modernism transformed Australian culture from 1917 to 1967.” But something is missing. The overwhelming modern development in these 50 years was the proliferation of automotive transport, which redefined the layout and function of Australian cities.The cars created the suburbs; and as the individual bungalow drew out the vast dormitories of Sydney and Melbourne, the city centre was spiritually drained, dedicated to bureaucratic and commercial premises.The story at Heide emphasises the gradual triumph of the tall buildings of the CBD. It doesn’t really reflect how these abstract monuments didn’t contain a soul after 6pm.Although the project makes such a big deal of being interdisciplinary, the social history doesn’t have a robust geographical basis. And because of this, the exhibition and book fail to handle the new alienation that modernism brings: the evacuation of the city and the insularity of suburban people in bungalows with little street life and roads increasingly deemed unsafe for children.

What does it really matter if a house looks like a Californian bungalow or a utopian geometric neo-Corbusian box by Harry Seidler? In social terms, they’re structurally the same, equally retracting from a sense of community and equally shackled to motor transport. In this sense, the styles are immaterial, except that one of them gives you a feeling of intimacy while the other has a bit more light and is easily wiped with a sponge.

At the end of the chosen period, the folly of the dominant suburban pattern came to be understood in its dire ecological consequences. Alas, it was too late. The modernist devaluation of space had already occurred, and our whole society had been reorganised around petrol.”

Robert Nelson. The Age. Wednesday 6th May, 2009

 

 

Roy de Maistre (Australian, 1894-1968) 'Arrested Movement from a Trio' 1934 from the exhibition 'Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia' at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, March - July, 2009

 

Roy de Maistre (Australian, 1894-1968)
Arrested Movement from a Trio
1934
Oil and pencil on composition board
72.3 × 98.8cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

 

Roy de Maistre (Australian, 1894-1968) 'Rhythmic composition in yellow green minor' 1919

 

Roy de Maistre (Australian, 1894-1968)
Rhythmic composition in yellow green minor
1919
Oil on paperboard
85.3 x 115.3cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
© Caroline de Mestre Walker

 

In late 1918, Roy de Maistre collaborated with fellow artist Roland Wakelin in exploring the relationship between art and music. Their experiments produced Australia’s first abstract paintings, characterised by high-key colour, large areas of flat paint and simplified forms. The works received critical acclaim, but modernist developments were largely derided by the conservative establishment.

This painting exemplifies de Maistre’s theory of colour harmonisation based on analogies between colours of the spectrum and notes of the musical scale. It is also aligned with de Maistre’s search for spiritual meaning through abstraction, akin to other artists such as Kandinsky who were interested in the ideas of the theosophy and anthroposophy movements, spiritualism and the occult.

Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website

 

Roy de Maistre (Australian, 1894-1968) 'Colour chart' c. 1919

 

Roy de Maistre (Australian, 1894-1968)
Colour chart
c. 1919
30.5 x 40.5cm
Oil on cardboard
Gift of the executors of the artist’s estate 1968
Art Gallery of New South Wales
© Caroline de Mestre Walker

 

Sonia Delaunay (Ukraine, b. 1885 moved Paris 1905-1979) 'Rhythm' 1938

 

Sonia Delaunay (Ukraine, b. 1885 moved Paris 1905-1979)
Rhythm
1938
Oil on canvas

 

Wolfgang Sievers (German Australian 1913-2007) '"House of Tomorrow" exhibition at Exhibition Building, Melbourne' 1949

 

Wolfgang Sievers (Australian born Germany, 1913-2007)
“House of Tomorrow” exhibition at Exhibition Building, Melbourne
1949
Gelatin silver print
National Library of Australia

 

Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski (Australian born Poland, 1922-1994) 'Nymphex' 1966

 

Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski (Australian born Poland, 1922-1994)
Nymphex
1966
Gelatin silver photograph from electronic image
50.6 x 60.8cm
Gift of Dr George Berger 1978
Art Gallery of New South Wales
@ Estate of Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski

 

Rayner Hoff (Australian born United Kingdom, 1894-1937) 'Decorative portrait - Len Lye' 1925

 

Rayner Hoff (Australian born United Kingdom, 1894-1937)
Decorative portrait – Len Lye
1925
Marble
30.5 x 22.5 x 16.5cm
Purchased 1938
Art Gallery of New South Wales

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Sunbaker' 1934 printed 1937

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Sunbaker
1934 printed 1937
Gelatin silver print

 

Grace Cossington Smith (Australia, 1892-1984) 'Rushing' c. 1922

 

Grace Cossington Smith (Australia, 1892-1984)
Rushing
c. 1922
Oil on canvas on paperboard
65.6 x 91.3cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
© Estate of Grace Cossington Smith

 

Cossington Smith captures the drama of a crowd in Rushing, which depicts commuters clamouring down to the ferries of Circular Quay to get home after work. The flying scarf and fallen hat emphasise the speed at which the travellers are moving and the peril and claustrophobia of a, mostly faceless, city crowd. The steep gangplank and diagonal composition accentuates the dynamism of the painting.

A brilliant colourist, Cossington Smith’s work of the early 1920s adopts a darker palette than the vivid colours she is usually associated with. Inspired by a visit to Sydney in 1920 by the tonalist painter and teacher Max Meldrum, her paintings became studies in tone, rather than colour, a practice she had abandoned by 1925.

Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website

 

Robert Klippel (Australian, 1920-2001) 'Boomerang' coffee table 1955

 

Robert Klippel (Australian, 1920-2001)
Boomerang coffee table
1955

 

 

The Powerhouse Museum travelling exhibition Modern times: the untold story of modernism in Australia explores how modernism transformed Australian culture from 1917 to 1967, a period of great social, economic, political and technological change. From the ideals of abstraction and functionalism to the romance of high-rise cities, new leisure activities and the healthy body, modernism encapsulated the possibilities of the twentieth century. This exhibition is the first interdisciplinary survey of the impact of modernism in Australia, spanning art, design, architecture, advertising, photography, film and fashion.

Modern times is presented at Heide across all four of the Museum’s gallery spaces. It unfolds in thematic sections highlighting key stories about international exchange, the modern body, modernist ‘primitivism’, the city, modern pools, and the Space Age. Comprising over 300 objects and artworks, it showcases works by major artists including Sidney Nolan, Margaret Preston, Albert Tucker, Grace Cossington Smith, Max Dupain, Wolfgang Sievers, and Clement Meadmore, key architects Robin Boyd, Roy Grounds and Harry Seidler, and designers Fred Ward and Grant and Mary Featherston. An installation, Cannibal Tours, by Madrid-based Australian artist Narelle Jubelin is a contemporary adjunct to the exhibition.

Inspired by the futurist visions of various European avant-gardes, modernist ideas were often controversial and shaped by many competing positions. Modern times reveals how these ideas were circulated and took hold in Australia, via émigrés, expatriates, exhibitions, films and publications. Australian contact with significant international modernist sources, such as the Bauhaus school in Germany, occurred through figures such as influential artist and teacher Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, who taught Bauhaus principles at Geelong Grammar, and renowned architect Harry Seidler, who played a central role in shaping the modern city in Australia. Hirschfeld-Mack’s extraordinary film Colour Light Play of 1923 is shown for the first time in Australia, and Seidler’s 1948 studio, designed on his arrival from New York, has been re-created for the exhibition.

While modernism was international in character, an ‘Australian modernism’ was first championed in the 1920s by artist Margaret Preston, whose promotion of Aboriginal forms and motifs was important to the understanding of their artistic value. Preston’s designs, Len Lye’s stunning animation Tusalava (1929), Robert Klippel’s boomerang table (c. 1955) and other works show the development of a vernacular modernism.

Other highlights of Modern times include works from the visionary experiment in colour theory by Roy de Maistre and Roland Wakelin in 1919, a model of Robin Boyd’s innovative House of Tomorrow (1949), the iconic Featherston wing sound chairs from the Australian pavilion at the 1967 Montreal Expo, and a large wooden model for Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House.

Text from the Heide Museum of Art website [Online] Cited 06/06/2009. No longer available online

 

Athlete and movie-star Annette Kellerman's 'Modern Kellerman Bathing Suit for Women' which became commercially available by the mid-1920s. The one-piece bathing suit became Kellerman's trademark.

 

Athlete and movie-star Annette Kellerman’s Modern Kellerman Bathing Suit for Women which became commercially available by the mid-1920s. The one-piece bathing suit became Kellermans trademark
Gift of Dennis Wolanski Library, Sydney Opera House, 2000
Photo: Powerhouse Museum

 

'On hot summer days cool off with Tooth's KB Lager', advertising poster (about 1940)

 

On hot summer days cool off with Tooth’s KB Lager
About 1940
Advertising poster
Colour and process lithograph, artist name “Parker” in image lower right
100.4 x 75.4cm
Sydney Living Museums

 

Grant Featherston (Australian, 1922-1995) and Mary Featherston (Australian, b. London 1943, migrated to Australia 1952) 'Expo mark II sound chair' 1967

 

Grant Featherston (Australian, 1922-1995) and Mary Featherston (Australian, b. London 1943, migrated to Australia 1952)
Expo mark II sound chair
1967
Aristoc Industries
Polystyrene, polyurethane foam, Dunlopillo foam rubber, Pirelli webbing, fibreglass, hardwood, sound equipment, upholstery fabric
Powerhouse Collection

 

The Expo Mark II sound chair, adapted for the Australian domestic market after Expo 67 in Montreal.

A cloth-covered high back winged chair with a circular base. The chair has a circular orange cloth covered cushion in the base and an integral full-width headrest. Two 125mm diameter inserts are pressed into the top of the back of the chair where speakers are fitted inside it. There is a cylindrical knob on the side of the chair.

 

National Archives of Australia. 'A modernist vision of Australia - The interior of the Australian Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal' 1967

 

National Archives of Australia
A modernist vision of Australia: Grant and Mary Featherston’s wing sound chairs were a feature of the Australian Pavilion, designed by architect James Maccormick with exhibits selected by Robin Boyd, at Expo 67 in Montreal, 1967
1967

 

In 1967 Australia participated in the International and Universal Exposition held in Montreal, Canada. Australia’s Expo ’67 theme was the ‘Spirit of Adventure’. In the 30,000 square feet glass-walled Australian Pavilion, developed by the Australian Government and designed by Robin Boyd, exhibits explored Australian science, arts, people and development. The pavilion was designed as a ‘haven’ of ‘space and tranquillity’ floating above an Australian bushland setting. Inside, 240 innovative sound chairs offered ‘foot-weary Expo visitors’ the chance to hear the voices of famous Australians describing the exhibits, in French as well as English. The Great Barrier Reef was re-created in a lagoon beneath the pavilion while wallabies and kangaroos could be viewed in a sunken enclosure.

Text from the National Museum of Australia website [Online] Cited 20/02/2019

 

James Birrell (Australian, 1928-2019) 'View of the elevated restaurant, Centenary Pool, Brisbane' Nd

 

James Birrell (Australian, 1928-2019)
View of the elevated restaurant, Centenary Pool, Brisbane
Nd
Powerhouse Museum

 

 

“A major exhibition opening for Sydney Design 08 in August, Modern times looks closely at the transformation of modern city life. The advent of cars, freeways, skyscrapers and new entertainment such as cinemas, milk bars, swimming pools, cafes and pubs are all legacies of modernism as revealed through the exhibition. The exhibition spans five decades from 1917 to 1967 – a tumultuous period marked by global wars, economic depression, a technological revolution and major social changes – out of which a modern cosmopolitan culture was shaped.

“The modernist movement was inspired by various European avant-gardes that projected visions of a better future, shaped by many competing positions. It was through émigrés, expatriates, exhibitions and publications that modernism become known in Australia,” Ann Stephen said. Encompassing art, design and architecture, Modern times focuses on seven themes: 1. the human body, image and health; 2. international influences and exchanges; 3. Indigenous art and modernism; 4. Interdisciplinary projects with retailers; 5. city landscapes and urban life; 6. public pools and milk bars; and 7. the space age.

Several great modern public pools were designed in Australia initially as part of an international swimming boom in the 1930s and boosted by the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. These will be shown on a large, immersive, panoramic audio visual screen celebrating the most Australian of past-times, being poolside. The earliest 1920s swimming costumes by silent film star Annette Kellerman, several decades of Australian icon ‘Speedo’ cossies and an early bikini will also be on display.

The much-loved corner milk bar from the 1930s will also be recreated in the exhibition for visitors to enter, complete with lolly jars, milkshakes and a juke box.

Other story highlights in the exhibition include Robin Boyd’s ‘House of Tomorrow’ that featured at the 1949 Modern Home Exhibition in Melbourne; and Boyd’s memorable Australian pavilion at the 1967 Montreal Expo that showcased Australian design including the iconic Featherston wing sound chairs and hostess uniforms designed by Zara Holt, wife of then prime minister Harold Holt.

Modernism also inspired new forms of public art and design like the abstract fountains by Tom Bass on Sydney’s former P&O building and Robert Woodward’s El Alamein Memorial Fountain, a popular tourist site in Sydney’s Kings Cross. Modernism shaped an exultant explosion of experiment as part of the Space Age informing such spectacular architectural feats as Roy Grounds’ dome for the Australian Academy of Science in Canberra and Jørn Utzon’s internationally-acclaimed Sydney Opera House, both featured in the exhibition.”

Ruzan Haruriunyan, “Modern Times: Untold Story Of Modernism In Australia,” on the Huliq News website [Online] Cited 20/02/2019

 

Heide II exterior

Heide II interior

 

Hedie II photographs by Rory Hyde. More photos of Heide are on his Flickr photoset

Heide II – commissioned by John and Sunday Reed 1963, designed 1964, constructed 1964-1967

Designed by Melbourne architect David McGlashan of McGlashan Everist, it was intended as “a gallery to be lived in” and served as the Reeds’ residence between 1967 and 1980. The building is considered one of the best examples of modernist architecture in Victoria and awarded the Royal Institute of Architects (Victorian Chapter) Bronze Medal – the highest award for residential architecture in the State – in 1968. It is currently used to display works from the Heide Collection and on occasion projects by contemporary artists.

Text from the Wikipedia website

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 'Australia Square Tower' 1968

 

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Australia Square: a keyhole to the future [Australia Square Tower]
1968
Gelatin silver print
49.9 × 39.2cm
Courtesy of Max Dupain and Associates

 

Jeff Carter (Australian, 1928-2010) 'At the Pasha Nightclub, Cooma' c. 1957-1959

 

Jeff Carter (Australian, 1928-2010)
At the Pasha Nightclub, Cooma
c. 1957-1959
Gelatin silver print

 

 

Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia, edited by Ann Stephen, Philip Goad and Andrew McNamara, Powerhouse Publishing, 2008 (paperback).

Heide Museum of Modern Art
7 Templestowe Road,
Bulleen, Victoria 3105

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday
Public holidays
10am – 5pm

Heide Museum of Art website

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Review: ‘Samson and Delilah’ Australian film directed by Warwick Thornton

May 2009

 

The Players

Rowan McNamara, Marissa Gibson, Mitjili Napanangka Gibson and Scott Thornton

 

Rowan McNamara as Samson and Marissa Gibson as Delilah in 'Samson and Delilah'

 

Rowan McNamara as Samson and Marissa Gibson as Delilah

 

 

This is a tough nugget of a film, an absolute gem. It is a love story.

The deceptively simple narrative takes you into the dark side of Aboriginal life in the remote desert communities of central Australia. It pulls no punches taking the viewer on a empathetic ride into the lives of two young people struggling to find their reason for being on this earth. Here is violence, abuse, rape and addiction with the subtle hope of redemption.

Samson is addicted to petrol sniffing. Delilah tries to ignore him. She looks after her grandmother who is an artist, pushing her around in an wheelchair, feeding her medicine and taking her to the health clinic. Samson forces himself on Delilah, sleeping next to her but never with her. Then her grandmother dies and Delilah is blamed by the women elders of the community. Samson’s addiction escalates. He steals a car and with Delilah in tow they flee to Alice Springs to live under a flyover and sniff petrol, to be looked down upon by tourists in trendy cafes. Things get worse before they get (slightly) better.

That is the bare bones of the story. But I want to talk about other things.

The film is the traditional three acts but the narrative reads like an oral history only shown in images: themes are repeated over and again with subtle variations, like the arc of great music reiterating the flow of energy. There is little dialogue which intensifies the sounds of the desert, the band that plays on the verandah and the ringing of telephones. Every human seems to be alienated from the landscape. The Aborigines seem to be just floating on the surface of the land like everyone else, just struggling to survive. The landscape towers above the participants. Unlike our usual perception of Aboriginal people being in touch with the earth through the Dreamtime, here the director Warwick Thornton seems to suggest otherwise, until right at the end of the film.

Delilah is the strength in the film. It is her stoicism, her strength that helps Samson see it through. She ends up pushing Samson in the same wheelchair that she pushed her grandmother around in. His loss of strength is palpable, his addiction ongoing. You believe this story, the non-professional actors grounding you in the red dust of the desert.

There are several remarkable elements that lift this film to sublime places. Some of them are the most moving moments I have seen in a film in many a year:

The soundtrack, like a disjointed heartbeat, that accompanies their life under the flyover. The soundtrack of Samson’s rock and roll competing with Delilah’s music in her 4 wheel drive as one fades into the other.

Samson and Delilah sitting outside the health centre in white plastic chairs picking their feet off the ground so they won’t get bitten by ants.

Samson sitting in the wheelchair in the middle of the road at night, rocking back and forward on the wheels of the chair, so off his face that he is oblivious of the approaching 4 wheel drive until it is right upon him. Exceptional.

Delilah, towards the end of the film, washing the body of Samson with soap while he sits in a trough of water. More sensuality, more sexuality packed into 30 seconds than you will ever see in a full blown love scene. Amazing.

Samson, his head under a blanket under the flyover. The scene fades not to black as it does regularly in this film but to 80% of black and hovers there, just under the level of consciousness, before the sun rises again. This is masterful, poetic film making.

Samson, taking his ghetto blaster outside at night, dancing under the light of the verandah to rock and roll music watched by Delilah from her refuge in a 4 wheel drive. This scene is so beautiful, so genuine. The natural grace of Samson’s dancing opens Delilah’s eyes towards him. For the audience it is a revelatory, transcendent moment that crosses space and time as great cinema does. It grips you in an esoteric awareness: we are all human, we all live on the same earth. We all dance.

.
Go and see this film. It is one of the finest ever made in Australia. Besides a beautiful love story it will take you to places and connect with your heart like no other. It’s not perfect by any means (in terms of some improbabilities in the narrative) but this can be forgiven in the arc of the story telling. It is harrowing there is no doubt, but in the almost timeless ebb and flow of the film, in the communion with the infinite, something that defines human existence, this film stands above all else.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

 

 

Township in 'Samson and Delilah'

Marissa Gibson and Mitjili Napanangka Gibson in 'Samson and Delilah'

 

Marissa Gibson and Mitjili Napanangka Gibson

 

Rowan McNamara as Samson in 'Samson and Delilah'

 

Rowan McNamara as Samson

 

Rowan McNamara as Samson in 'Samson and Delilah'

 

Rowan McNamara as Samson

 

 

Samson and Delilah website

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Exhibition: ‘Helen Levitt: A Memorial Tribute’ at the Laurence Miller Gallery, New York

Exhibition dates: 9th May – 26th June, 2009

 

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) 'New York, NY' 1945 from the exhibition 'Helen Levitt: A Memorial Tribute' at the Laurence Miller Gallery, New York, May - June, 2009

 

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York, NY
1945
Gelatin silver print

 

 

Further to my earlier posting about the passing of renowned New York photographer Helen Levitt comes this wonderful exhibition at the Laurence Miller Gallery in New York. How I wish I was in that city to see it – what a joy!

Below are a selection of 1940’s black and white photographs from the exhibition.

Dr Marcus Bunyan


Many thankx to Laurence Miller Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

 

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) 'Kids Dancing, New York' c. 1940 from the exhibition 'Helen Levitt: A Memorial Tribute' at the Laurence Miller Gallery, New York, May - June, 2009

 

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
Kids Dancing, New York
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print

 

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) 'Kids graffiti, New York' c. 1938

 

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
Kids graffiti, New York
c. 1938
Gelatin silver print

 

 

Laurence Miller Gallery will present a memorial tribute to Helen Levitt from May 9 – June 26, 2009. Helen Levitt passed away in her Greenwich Village home on March 29, at the age of 95. Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, a show of her work entitled Passages, which Helen had approved, was already in the works, and her death caused a momentary pause in how to proceed. It was decided that Helen would not have wanted her passing to intrude upon best laid plans. Hence, guided by her spirit, we celebrate her legacy with this exhibition, her twelfth at Laurence Miller Gallery.

Helen Levitt: A Memorial Tribute will present a series of passages, in both colour and black-and-white, from her extraordinary 70-year career. Featured will be her pictures of animals, which were among her earliest as well as last pictures taken; a little-known series of portraits taken on the subway using Walker Evans’ camera; children’s street drawings; elderly folks in conversation; and children at play, the photographs for which she is most well-known. Helen Levitt’s classic and rarely seen silent film, In the Street, from 1948, will be shown as well.

One of the tribute’s highlights will be a selection of never-before-exhibited “first proofs.” These early documents of her working methods are often unique. Some are vintage, others were printed as late as the 1970’s, but all were printed by Helen in her bathroom that doubled as the darkroom. Often they are variants of iconic images, and often they are sequences of several shots taken at the same time. They all reveal the photographer’s “dance” as she observes boys climbing up a tree, a large family gathering on the front stoop, two men seated beside a curious cat, or four boys peering into a pool hall. In combination with the film In the Street, the early sequences reinforce her reputation as a cinematographer, and are genuine and valuable records of the working methods of a canny and poetic photographer.”

Text from the Laurence Miller Gallery website [Online] Cited 12/05/2009. No longer available online

 

 

In the Street
1948
Directed and edited by Helen Levitt
Cinematography by NYC photographers James Agee, Helen Levitt, Janice Loeb
Re-edited version rereleased by Levitt in 1952 with musical score by Arthur Kleiner
16mm film photographed in Harlem

 

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) 'New York' c. 1942

 

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1942
Gelatin silver print

 

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) 'Three Girls Playing Dress Up, New York' c. 1940

 

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
Three Girls Playing Dress Up, New York
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print

 

 

Helen Levitt (1913-2009) short biography

Helen Levitt’s playful and poetic photographs, made over the course of sixty years on the streets of New York City, have delighted generations of photographers, students, collectors, curators, and lovers of art in general. The New York Times described her as: “a major photographer of the 20th century who caught fleeting moments of surpassing lyricism, mystery and quiet drama on the streets of her native New York”. Throughout her long career, Helen Levitt’s photographs have consistently reflected her poetic vision, humour, and inventiveness as much as they have honestly portrayed her subjects – men, women, and children acting out a daily drama on the sidewalks and stoops of New York City’s tenements.

She shot and edited the film In the Street with Janice Loeb and James Agee, providing a moving portrait of her still photography. Levitt’s first major museum exhibition was at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, and a second solo show, of colour work only, was held there in 1974. Major retrospectives of her work have been held at several museums: first in 1991, jointly at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; in 1997 at the International Center for Photography in New York; and in 2001 at the Centre National la Photographie in Paris.

In 2007 “Helen Levitt: Un Art de l’accident poetique” opened at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris; in 2008, the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany chose Ms. Levitt as the recipient for the Spectrum International Photography Prize which was accompanied by a major retrospective; and FOAM Museum Amsterdam, mounted another major retrospective in October, 2008. She was a 2008 recipient of the Francis Greenburger award for excellence in the arts.

Text from the Laurence Miller Gallery website [Online] Cited 29/01/2019

 

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) 'New York [Children with Soap Bubbles, New York City]' c. 1940

 

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York [Children with Soap Bubbles, New York City]
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print

 

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) 'New York' c. 1940

 

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print

 

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) 'Kid in Tree with Mask, New York' c. 1942

 

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
Kid in Tree with Mask, New York
c. 1942
Gelatin silver print

 

 

Laurence Miller Gallery

Laurence Miller Gallery is now operating as a private dealer and consultant with no physical exhibition space.

Laurence Miller Gallery website

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Exhibition: ‘The best is often the Memories: Photographic Portraits of Romy Schneider’ at Museum für Kunst Und Gewerbe, Hamburg

Exhibition dates: 6th February – 13th April, 2009

 

Will McBride (American, 1931-2015) 'Romy Schneider, Paris, 1964' from the exhibition 'The best is often the Memories: Photographic Portraits of Romy Schneider' at Museum für Kunst Und Gewerbe, Hamburg, Feb - April, 2009

 

Will McBride (American, 1931-2015)
Romy Schneider, Paris, 1964
1964
Gelatin silver print

 

 

The legend that was Romy!

I have never known the filmography of Romy Schneider, never come across this actress before sad to say. But now I do. What great photographs. What a beautiful woman: sensitive, vivacious, stunning. A soul I would have liked to have known.

Marcus


Many thankx to the Museum für Kunst Und Gewerbe for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

 

Romy Schneider (German: born Rosemarie Magdalena Albach; 23 September 1938 – 29 May 1982) was a German-French actress. She began 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 Luchino Visconti’s Ludwig (1973). Schneider moved to France, where she made successful and critically acclaimed films with some of the most notable film directors of that era.

Read more about Romy Schneider on the Wikipedia website

 

Peter Brüchmann (German, 1932-2016) 'Romy Schneider, Munich, 1968' from the exhibition 'The best is often the Memories: Photographic Portraits of Romy Schneider' at Museum für Kunst Und Gewerbe, Hamburg, Feb - April, 2009

 

Peter Brüchmann (German, 1932-2016)
Romy Schneider, Munich, 1968
1968
Gelatin silver print

 

Peter Brüchmann

Born in Berlin, Peter Brüchmann trained to be a photographer with the fashion and portrait photographer Lotte Söhring and subsequently completed a traineeship at the German press agency dpa. In the 1950s and 1960s he worked for well-known magazines, such as Schöner Wohnen, Stern and Bild am Sonntag. Brüchmann is primarily known for his portraits of celebrities of the movie and music industry. In 2008 the photographer participated in the group exhibition Die Erinnerung ist oft das Schönste – Fotografische Porträts von Romy Schneider, an exhibition comprising portraits of the famous Franco-German actress Romy Schneider, held at the Stiftung Opelvillen Rüsselheim, Germany. Today Peter Brüchmann works as a freelance photographer for several national and international magazines. Numerous of his photographs are among the collections of the German Historical Museum in Berlin.

 

Roger Fritz (German, 1936-2021) 'Romy Schneider, Paris, 1961'

 

Roger Fritz (German, 1936-2021)
Romy Schneider, Paris, 1961
1961
Gelatin silver print

 

 

Herbert List, Max Scheler, Roger Fritz, F. C. Gundlach, Will McBride, Peter Brüchmann, Werner Bokelberg, Helga Kneidl and Robert Lebeck took photos of Romy Schneider in quite different ways, as a young girl, in her film roles, together with her children, apparently unobserved in everyday situations or in set poses and dressed up in various costumes, merry or pensive, beautiful and fragile. More than 140 pictures will be on show, of which about 40 are being exhibited for the first time.

Hardly any other star has left us with so many different and conflicting images as Romy Schneider. She was photographed thousands of times – and yet she always remained enigmatic. Some of the photographers whose work is presented in this exhibition only met Romy once – Herbert List, for instance, captured her as a teenager around 1954 on pictures which remained unknown until recently – or accompanied her throughout her life, like Robert Lebeck, who succeeded in taking disturbingly personal pictures of her from the 1950s through to shortly before her death.

These snapshots conjure up once again the legend that was Romy, while at the same time making a powerful statement which reveals the transitoriness of existence. Because that is the core of what a photo does: it creates an image in order to bear lasting witness to an event which happened – yet at the very moment of capturing the image on film, it is no more than the proof that the fleeting moment has passed.

The photos by Herbert List, Werner Bokelberg, Peter Brüchmann, Roger Fritz and Max Scheler are being shown publicly for the first time. This also applies to the majority of the photos by F. C. Gundlach and Will McBride. The pictures by Helga Kneidl and Robert Lebeck have already appeared in books about Romy Schneider. These volumes are however now out of print.

Text from the Museum für Kunst Und Gewerbe website

 

Herbert List (German, 1903-1975) 'Romy Schneider, Munich, 1954'

 

Herbert List (German, 1903-1975)
Romy Schneider, Munich, 1954
1954
Gelatin silver print

 

Herbert List

Herbert List (7 October 1903 – 4 April 1975) was a German photographer, who worked for magazines, including VogueHarper’s Bazaar, and Life, and was associated with Magnum Photos. His austere, classically posed black-and-white compositions, particularly his homoerotic male nudes, taken in Italy and Greece being influential in modern photography and contemporary fashion photography.

Photographer

In 1929 he met Andreas Feininger who inspires his greater interest in photography and who gives him a Rolleiflex camera. From 1930 he began taking portraits of friends and shooting still life, is influenced by the Bauhaus and artists of the surrealist movements, Man Ray, Giorgio De Chirico and Max Ernst, and creates a surrealist photograph titled Metaphysique in a style he called fotografia metafisica in homage to De Chirico, his most important influence during this period. He used male models, draped fabric, masks and double-exposures to depict dream states and fantastic imagery. He has explained that his photos were “composed visions where [my] arrangements try to capture the magical essence inhabiting and animating the world of appearances.”

In 1936, in response to the danger of Gestapo attention to his openly gay lifestyle and his Jewish heritage, List left Germany for Paris, where he met George Hoyningen-Huene with whom he travelled to Greece, deciding then to become a photographer. During 1937 he worked in a studio in London and held his first one-man show at Galerie du Chasseur d’Images in Paris. Hoyningen-Huene referred him to Harper’s Bazaar magazine, and 1936-1939 he worked for Arts et Metiers GraphiquesVerveVoguePhotographie, and Life. List was unsatisfied with fashion photography. He turned back to still life imagery, continuing in his fotografia metafisica style.

From 1937 to 1939 List traveled in Greece and took photographs of ancient temples, ruins, sculptures, and the landscape for his book Licht über Hellas. In the meantime he supported himself with work for magazines Neue LinieDie Dame and for the press from 1940-1943, and with portraits which he continued to make until 1950. In List’s work the revolutionary tactics of surrealist art and a metaphysical staging of irony and reverie had been honed in an the fashion industry that relied on illusion and spectacle which after World War II returned to a classical fixation on ruins, broken male statuary and antiquity.

Text from the Wikipedia website

 

F. C. Gundlach (German, 1926-2021) 'Romy Schneider, Hamburg, 1961'

 

F. C. Gundlach (German, 1926-2021)
Romy Schneider, Hamburg, 1961
1961
Gelatin silver print

 

F. C. Gundlach

F. C. Gundlach (Franz Christian Gundlach; born 16 July 1926 in Heinebach, Hesse; died 23 July 2021, Hamburg, Germany) is 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 VisionThe 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.

The fashion photographer

F. C. Gundlach attended the Private Lehranstalt für Moderne Lichtbildkunst (Private School for Modern Photography) under Rolf W. Nehrdich in Kassel from 1946 to 1949. Subsequently, he began publishing theatre and film reports in magazines such as Deutsche Illustrierte, Stern, Quick and Revue as a freelance photographer.

His specialisation in fashion photography began in 1953 with his work for the Hamburg-based magazine Film und Frau, for which he photographed German fashion, Parisian haute couture and fur fashion campaigns. Additionally he photographed portraits of artists such as Romy Schneider, Hildegard Knef, Dieter Borsche and Jean-Luc Godard. For Film und Frau, but also for Stern, Annabelle, Twen and other magazines, F. C. Gundlach has since made fashion and reportage trips to the Near, Middle and Far East as well as to Central and South America. Under an exclusive contract with the magazine Brigitte, he photographed many of the trendsetting fashion pages until 1983, a total of more than 160 covers and 5,000 pages of editorial fashion. In the 1970s and 1980s he worked in South America, Africa, but above all in New York and on the American west coast.

His retrospective solo exhibitions, such as ModeWelten (1985), Die Pose als Körpersprache (1999), Bilder machen Mode (2004) or F. C. Gundlach. The photographic work (2008) were shown in many museums and galleries in Germany and abroad.

 
“He is a photographer whose images show the knowledge of the dominant role of fashion as a cultural social factor. For this reason, he rarely presented the phenomena of fashion in isolation, but rather linked them to the phenomenology of everyday reality and placed them in the socio-cultural context from which they ultimately originated. F. C. Gundlach proves to be a photographic artist with a will to style, a mastery of staging and the ability to shape the photographic image at his leisure, who arranges his models in ever new formal constellations: as a photographer of extraordinary aesthetic quality.”

~ Klaus Honnef

 
“As a fashion photographer who makes use of a recording medium, the photographer must live, think and feel entirely in his time. Fashion photographs are always interpretations and stagings. They reflect and visualise the zeitgeist of the present and anticipate the spirit of tomorrow. They offer projection screens for identification, but also for dreams, wishes and desires. And yet fashion photographs say more about a time than documentary photographs pretending to depict reality.”

~ F.C. Gundlach


Text from the Wikipedia website

 

Werner Bokelberg (German, 1937-2024) 'Romy Schneider, London, 1968'

 

Werner Bokelberg (German, 1937-2024)
Romy Schneider, London, 1968
1968
Gelatin silver print

 

Helga Kneidl (German, b. 1939) 'Romy Schneider, Paris, 1972'

 

Helga Kneidl (German, b. 1939)
Romy Schneider, Paris, 1972
1972

 

Helga Kneidl (German, b. 1939) 'Romy Schneider, Paris, 1973'

 

Helga Kneidl (German, b. 1939)
Romy Schneider, Paris, 1973
1973

 

 

Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
Steintorplatz, 20099 Hamburg

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Sunday 10am – 6pm
Thursday 10am – 9pm
Closed Mondays

Museum für Kunst Und Gewerbe website

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Exhibition: ‘Edward Burtynsky: The Residual Landscapes’ at The Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, Banff, Alberta

Exhibition dates: 7th February – 26th April, 2009

 

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955) 'Silver Lake Operations #1, Lake Lefroy, Western Australia 2007' from the exhibition 'Edward Burtynsky: The Residual Landscapes' at The Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, Banff, Alberta, Feb - April, 2009

 

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955)
Silver Lake Operations #1, Lake Lefroy, Western Australia 2007
2007

 

 

One of the great photographers of the world.

Enjoy some of his images and for more photographs please visit his website.


Many thankx to The Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

 

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955) 'Tanggu Port, Tianjin, China 2005' from the exhibition 'Edward Burtynsky: The Residual Landscapes' at The Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, Banff, Alberta, Feb - April, 2009

 

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955)
Tanggu Port, Tianjin, China 2005
2005

 

Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.

These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire – a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.

Edward Burtynsky quoted on The Whyte Museum website

 

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955) 'Oxford Tire Pile #8, Westley, California 1999' 1999

 

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955)
Oxford Tire Pile #8, Westley, California 1999
1999

 

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955) 'Nickel Tailings #30, Sudbury, Ontario, 1996'

 

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955)
Nickel Tailings #30, Sudbury, Ontario, 1996
1996

 

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955) 'Nickel Tailings #31, Sudbury, Ontario 1996'

 

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955)
Nickel Tailings #31, Sudbury, Ontario 1996
1996

 

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955) 'Feng Jie #4, Three Gorges Dam Project, Yangtze River, 2002'

 

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955)
Feng Jie #4, Three Gorges Dam Project, Yangtze River, 2002
2002

 

These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear,” said Edward Burtynsky, photographer. “We are drawn by desire – a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.

Speaking of his “Quarries” series, Burtynsky has said, “The concept of the landscape as architecture has become, for me, an act of imagination. I remember looking at buildings made of stone, and thinking, there has to be an interesting landscape somewhere out there, because these stones had to have been taken out of the quarry one block at a time. I had never seen a dimensional quarry, but I envisioned an inverted cubed architecture on the side of a hill. I went in search of it, and when I had it on my ground glass I knew that I had arrived.”

Text from The Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies

 

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955) 'Shipbreaking #1, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000'

 

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955)
Shipbreaking #1, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000
2000

 

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955) 'Bao Steel #2, Shanghai, China, 2005'

 

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955)
Bao Steel #2, Shanghai, China, 2005
2005

 

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955) 'Iberia Quarries #3, Bencatel, Portugal, 2006'

 

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955)
Iberia Quarries #3, Bencatel, Portugal, 2006
2006

 

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955) 'China Quarries #8, Xiamen, Fujian Province, 2004'

 

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955)
China Quarries #8, Xiamen, Fujian Province, 2004
2004

 

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955) 'Dam #6 ,Three Gorges Dam Project, Yangtze River, 2005'

 

Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, b. 1955)
Dam #6, Three Gorges Dam Project, Yangtze River, 2005
2005

 

 

 

Trailer for the film Manufactured Landscapes in which Jennifer Baichwal documents Edward Burtynsky doing what artists do – making art, in this case photographing Bangladesh and China as he observes the “manufacturer to the world”.

 

 

Edward Burtynsky Manufactured Landscapes

 

 

The Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies
111 Bear Street, Banff, Alberta
T1L 1A3 Canada
Phone: 1 403 762 2291

Opening hours:
Thursday – Monday 11am – 5pm
Tuesday and Wednesday – CLOSED

The Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies website

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Europeana: connecting cultural heritage – digital paintings, books, films and archives

November 2008

 

Europeana – the European digital library, museum and archive

 

 

Europeana – the European digital library, museum and archive – is a project that began in July 2007. The website gives users direct access to some 2 million digital objects, including film material, photos, paintings, sounds, maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers and archival papers.

The digital content will be selected from that which is already digitised and available in Europe’s museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections. The website aims to have representative content from all four of these cultural heritage domains, and also to have a broad range of content from across Europe. The interface will be multilingual. Initially, this may mean that it is available in French, English and German, but the intention is to develop the number of languages available following the launch.”

 

 

Europeana collections website

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