Curators: Delphine Desveaux, Michaël Houlette, and Daniel Girardin
PLEASE NOTE: THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF MALE AND FEMALE NUDITY – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN
Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962) Estampe pour F. Marquis chocolatier-confiseur, Paris (Print for F. Marquis chocolate maker, Paris) Sans date (without date) Collection particulière, Paris
The ravishing sensuality of the nudes make all the hours spent assembling this archive worthwhile!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Jue de Paume for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Laure Albin Guillot (Paris, 1879-1962), a “resounding name that should become famous”, one could read just after World War II. Indeed, the French photographic scene in the middle of the century was particularly marked by the signature and aura of this artist, who during her lifetime was certainly the most exhibited and recognised, not only for her talent and virtuosity but also for her professional engagement.
A large number of the original prints and documents on show come from the collections of the Agence Roger-Viollet, which acquired Laure Albin Guillot’s studio stock in 1964. This archive, which now belongs to the City of Paris, recently became accessible after a long inventory process. Made up of 52,000 negatives and 20,000 prints, this source has made it possible to question the oeuvre and the place that the photographer really occupies in history. The photographer’s work could appear as a counter-current to the French artistic scene of the 1920s to 40s, whose modernity and avant-garde production attract our attention and appeal to current tastes. It is however this photography, incarnating classicism and a certain “French style” that was widely celebrated at the time.
If Laure Albin Guillot’s photography was undeniably in vogue between the wars, her personality remains an enigma. Paradoxically, very little research has been carried out into the work and career of this artist. Her first works were seen in the salons and publications of the early 1920s, but it was essentially during the 1930s and 40s that Laure Albin Guillot, artist, professional and institutional figure, dominated the photographic arena. As an independent photographer, she practised several genres, including portraiture, the nude, landscape, still life and, to a lesser degree, documentary photography. Technically unrivalled, she raised the practice to a certain elitism. A photographer of her epoch, she used the new means of distribution of the image to provide illustrations and advertising images for the press and publishing industry.
Curator: Gail Stavitsky, chief curator at the Montclair Art Museum
Many thankx to The Warhol Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs of the art in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
I think of myself as an American artist; I like it here. I think it’s so great. I feel I represent the U.S. in my art but I’m not a social critic: I just paint those objects in my paintings because those are the things I know best… I’ve heard it said that my paintings are as much a part of the fashionable world as clothes and cars.
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) BMW M1 Art Race Car 1979
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) BMW M1 Art Race Car (detail) 1979
Warhol and Cars: American Icons is the first exhibition to examine Warhol’s enduring fascination with automotive vehicles as products of American consumer society. This exhibition features more than forty drawings, paintings, photographs, and related archival material spanning from 1946 to 1986. As one of the most iconic and influential artists of the 20th century, Andy Warhol has helped to define America. His signature images of such American products and celebrities as Campbell’s soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor have become instantly recognisable. The majority of the work in the exhibition is from The Andy Warhol Museum’s collection.
The exhibition, organised by the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey, traces the development of Warhol’s work with cars throughout his career. Warhol and Cars highlights include drawing created in the 1940s; works on paper of the 1950s, as well as paintings and prints from the 60s, 70s and 80s. The exhibition is organised chronologically and thematically, tracing the development of Warhol’s work with cars throughout his career. Exhibition highlights include a rare, spontaneous drawing of the 1940s featuring a produce truck operated by Warhol’s brother Paul; works on paper of the 1950s, dating from the era of Warhol’s commercial magazine illustration; and paintings and prints from his important and poignant Car Crash series.
A key work is Twelve Cadillacs, part of a group of nine Warhol car paintings published in the November 1962 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, which commissioned Warhol to make a visual commentary on the phenomenon of the iconic American motor car. The repetition and grid organisation became a central feature of Warhol’s work. For the first time, Twelve Cadillacs will be juxtaposed with potential source images, as well as the related Seven Cadillacs and the hand-painted Lincoln Continental, both of which were also part of the Harper’s Bazaar commission. Also on view will be a related drawing and car model of Cadillacs from the Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Collection of American Automobile Art.
Warhol’s continued engagement with the theme of the automobile is seen in prints and paintings of the 1970s and 1980s based on Volkswagen advertisements, as well as in multiple photographs of European and American cars sewn together with thread into a format evocative of Warhol’s characteristic assembly-line aesthetic. An original BMW M-1 racing car that was hand-painted by Warhol will be on display in the entrance gallery. A film of Warhol painting a BMW in 1979 as part of the BMW Art Race Car Projects introduced by French race car driver Herve Poulin will be on view during the exhibition. The car is part of the BMW Museum’s collection in Munich and was last displayed in the United States at Grand Central Terminal in New York City in 2009.
Press release from The Warhol Museum website
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) 1978 BMW 320i Art Car Maquette 1978
Curator: Sarah Meister, Curator in the Department of Photography at MoMA
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Coin, Boulevard de la Chapelle et rue Fleury 76,18e June 1921 Matte albumen silver print 6 13/16 x 9 inches (17.3 x 22.9cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Abbott-Levy Collection. Partial gift of Shirley C. Burden
The first of two postings about the work of Eugène Atget, this exhibition at MoMA the first in twenty-five years to focus on his “Documents for artists.”
Atget was my first hero in photography and the greatest influence on my early black and white photography before I departed and found my own voice as an artist. Through his photographs, his vision, he remains a life-long friend.
Looking at Atget’s photos taught me so much about where to place the camera and how to see the world. He made me aware. For that I am eternally grateful.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to MOMA for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“These are simply documents I make.”
Eugène Atget
“One might think of Atget’s work at Sceaux as… a summation and as the consummate achievement of his work as a photographer – a coherent, uncompromising statement of what he had learned of his craft, and of how he had amplified and elaborated the sensibility with which he had begun. Or perhaps one might see the work at Sceaux as a portrait of Atget himself, not excluding petty flaws, but showing most clearly the boldness and certainty – what his old friend Calmettes called the intransigence – of his taste, his method, his vision.
John Szarkowski
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Cour, 7 rue de Valence June 1922 Matte albumen silver print 7 x 8 15/16 inches (17.8 x 22.7cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Abbott-Levy Collection. Partial gift of Shirley C. Burden
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Cour, 41 rue Broca 1912 Albumen silver print 6 5/8 x 8 1/4 inches (16.9 x 21cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Abbott-Levy Collection. Partial gift of Shirley C. Burden
The sign above the entrance to Eugène Atget’s studio in Paris read Documents pour artistes (Documents for artists), declaring his modest ambition to create photographs for others to use as source material in their work. Atget (French, 1857-1927) made more than 8,500 pictures of Paris and its environs in a career that spanned over thirty years, from the late nineteenth century until his death. To facilitate access to this vast body of work for himself and his clients, he organised his photographs into discrete series, a model that guides the organisation of this exhibition. The works are presented here in six groups, demonstrating Atget’s sustained attention to certain motifs or locations and his consistently inventive and elegant methods of rendering the complexity of the three-dimensional world on a flat, rectangular plate.
In 1925 the American artist Man Ray purchased forty-two photographs from Atget, who lived down the street from him in Montparnasse. Man Ray believed he detected a kindred Surrealist sensibility in the work, to which suggestion Atget replied, “These are simply documents I make.” This humility belies the extraordinary pictorial sophistication and beauty that is characteristic of much of Atget’s oeuvre and his role as touchstone and inspiration for subsequent generations of photographers, from Walker Evans to Lee Friedlander. This exhibition bears witness to his success, no matter the unassuming description he gave of his life’s work.
A Note on the Prints
Atget made photographs with a view camera resting on a tripod. An example of his 24-by-18-centimeter glass plate negatives is on display here. Each print was made by exposing light-sensitive paper to the sun in direct contact with one of these negatives, which Atget numbered sequentially within each series. He frequently scratched the number into the emulsion on the negative, and thus it appears in reverse at the bottom of most prints. He also inscribed the number, along with the work’s title, in pencil on the verso of each print. These titles appear (with English translations where necessary) on the individual wall labels, preserving Atget’s occasionally idiosyncratic titling practices. The Abbott-Levy Collection at The Museum of Modern Art, to which the prints in this exhibition belong (except where noted), is composed of close to 5,000 distinct photographs and 1,200 glass plate negatives that were in Atget’s studio at the time of his death. The Museum purchased this collection in 1968 from photographer Berenice Abbott and art dealer Julien Levy, thanks to the unflagging efforts of John Szarkowski, then director of the Department of Photography, and in part to the generosity of Shirley C. Burden.
Fifth arrondissement
For more than thirty years, Atget photographed in and around Paris. Curiously, given the depth of this investigation, he never photographed the Eiffel Tower, generally avoided the grand boulevards, and eschewed picture postcard views. Instead Atget focused on the fabric of the city: facades of individual buildings (both notable and anonymous), meandering streetscapes, details of stonework and ironwork, churches, shops, and the occasional monument. Even a selective cross section of the photographs he made in the fifth arrondissement over the course of his career suggests that his approach, while far from systematic, might yet be termed comprehensive.
Courtyards
Atget clearly relished the metaphorical and physical aspects of the courtyard – a space that hovers between public and private, interior and exterior – and he photographed scores of them, both rural and urban. The motif was chosen as the backdrop for what was likely Atget’s first photograph of an automobile (Cour, 7 rue de Valence), and it was versatile enough to transform itself depending on where Atget placed his camera (see the two views of the courtyard at 27 quai d’Anjou). The dark areas that appear in the upper corners of some prints are the result of vignetting: a technique in which the light coming through the camera’s lens does not fully cover the glass plate negative, allowing Atget to create an arched pictorial space that echoed the physical one before his camera.
Wall text from the exhibition
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève June 1925 Gelatin silver printing-out-paper print 6 11/16 x 8 3/4 inches (17 x 22.2cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Abbott-Levy Collection. Partial gift of Shirley C. Burden
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Maison où Mourut Voltaire en 1778, 1 rue de Beaune 1909 Albumen silver print 8 9/16 x 7 inches (21.8 x 17.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Abbott-Levy Collection. Partial gift of Shirley C. Burden
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Balcon, 17 rue du Petit-Pont 1913 Albumen silver print 8 5/8 x 6 15/16 inches (21.9 x 17.7cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Abbott-Levy Collection. Partial gift of Shirley C. Burden
Eugène Atget: “Documents pour artistes“presents six fresh and highly focused cross sections of the career of master photographer Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927), drawn exclusively from The Museum of Modern Art’s unparalleled holdings of his work. The exhibition, on view at MoMA from February 6 through April 9, 2012, gets its name from the sign outside Atget’s studio door, which declared his modest ambition to create documents for other artists to use as source material in their own work. Whether exploring Paris’s fifth arrondissement across several decades, or the decayed grandeur of parks at Sceaux in a remarkable creative outburst at the twilight of his career, Atget’s lens captured the essence of his chosen subject with increasing complexity and sensitivity. Also featured are Atget’s photographs made in the Luxembourg gardens; his urban and rural courtyards; his pictures of select Parisian types; and his photographs of mannequins, store windows, and street fairs, which deeply appealed to Surrealist artists living in Paris after the First World War. The exhibition is organised by Sarah Hermanson Meister, Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.
Atget made more than 8,500 pictures of Paris and its environs in a career that spanned over 30 years, from the late-19th century until his death. To facilitate access to this vast body of work for himself and his clients, he organised his photographs into discrete series, a model that guides the organisation of this exhibition. More than 100 photographs are presented in six groups, demonstrating Atget’s sustained attention to certain motifs or locations and his consistently inventive and elegant methods of rendering the complexity of the three-dimensional world on a flat, rectangular plate.
With seemingly inexhaustible curiosity, Atget photographed the streets of Paris. Eschewing picture-postcard views, and, remarkably, never once photographing the Eiffel Tower, he instead focused on the fabric of the city, taking pictures along the Seine, in every arrondissement, and in the “zone” outside the fortified wall that encompassed Paris at the time. His photographs of the fifth arrondissement are typical of this approach, and include facades of individual buildings (both notable and anonymous), meandering streetscapes, details of stonework and ironwork, churches, and the occasional monument.
Between March and June 1925, Atget made 66 photographs in the abandoned Parc de Sceaux, on the outskirts of Paris, almost half of which are on view in this exhibition. His approach was confident and personal, even quixotic, and his notations of the time of day for certain exposures read almost like diary entries. These photographs have long been recognised as among Atget’s finest, and this is the first opportunity for audiences outside of France to appreciate the full diversity and richness of this accomplishment.
Atget photographed the Jardin de Luxembourg more than any other Parisian park, likely reflecting his preference for its character and its proximity to his home and studio on rue Campagne-Première in Montparnasse. His early photographs there tend to capture human activity – children with their governesses or men conversing in the shade – but this gave way to a more focused exploration of the garden’s botanical and sculptural components following the First World War, and culminated in studies that delicately balance masses of light and shadow, as is typical of Atget’s late work.
Atget firmly resisted public association with the Surrealists, yet his work – in particular his photographs of shop windows, mannequins, and the street fairs around Paris – captured the eye of artists with decidedly avant-garde inclinations, such as Man Ray and Tristan Tzara. Man Ray lived down the street from Atget, and the young American photographer Berenice Abbott, while working as Man Ray’s studio assistant, made Atget’s acquaintance in the mid-1920s – a relationship that ultimately brought the contents of Atget’s studio at the time of his death to MoMA, almost 40 years later.
Atget clearly relished the metaphorical and physical aspects of the courtyard – a space that hovers between public and private, interior and exterior – and he photographed scores of them, both rural and urban. This exhibition marks the first time these pictures have been grouped together, allowing the public to appreciate previously unexplored aspects of the Abbott-Levy Collection, which includes prints of nearly 5,000 different images.
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Luxembourg 1923-1925 Matte albumen silver print 6 7/8 x 9 inches (17.5 x 22.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Abbott-Levy Collection. Partial gift of Shirley C. Burden
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Luxembourg 1923-1925 Matte albumen silver print 7 x 8 13/16 inches (17.8 x 22.4cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Abbott-Levy Collection. Partial gift of Shirley C. Burden
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Luxembourg 1902-1903 Albumen silver print 6 5/8 x 8 3/8 inches (16.8 x 21.3cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Abbott-Levy Collection. Partial gift of Shirley C. Burden
Jardin de Luxembourg
Atget photographed the Jardin de Luxembourg more than any other Parisian park, likely reflecting his preference for its character as well as its proximity to his home and studio on rue Campagne-Première in Montparnasse (about a ten-minute walk away). His photographs of the gardens made around 1900 tend to capture human activity (children with their governesses, men conversing in the shade), but this gave way to a more focused exploration of the garden’s botanical and sculptural components following the First World War and culminated in studies that delicately balance masses of light and shadow, typical of Atget’s late work.
Parc de Sceaux
Between March and June 1925, Atget made sixty-six photographs in the abandoned Parc de Sceaux, on the outskirts of Paris. His approach was confident and personal, even quixotic, and his notations of the time of day for certain exposures read almost like diary entries. John Szarkowski wrote of this body of work: “One might think of Atget’s work at Sceaux as… a summation and as the consummate achievement of his work as a photographer – a coherent, uncompromising statement of what he had learned of his craft, and of how he had amplified and elaborated the sensibility with which he had begun. Or perhaps one might see the work at Sceaux as a portrait of Atget himself, not excluding petty flaws, but showing most clearly the boldness and certainty – what his old friend Calmettes called the intransigence – of his taste, his method, his vision. Atget made his last photograph at Sceaux after its restoration had begun. He perceived that the effort to tidy the grounds in anticipation of their conversion to a public park would fundamentally alter the untended, decayed grandeur that had been his muse.”
Wall text from the exhibition
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Parc de Sceaux June 1925 Gelatin silver printing-out-paper print 7 x 8 7/8 inches (17.8 x 22.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Abbott-Levy Collection. Partial gift of Shirley C. Burden
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Parc de Sceaux, mars, 8 h. matin 1925 Gelatin silver printing-out-paper print 7 1/16 x 8 13/16 inches (17.9 x 22.4cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Abbott-Levy Collection. Partial gift of Shirley C. Burden
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Parc de Sceaux, 7 h. matin March 1925 Matte albumen silver print 6 15/16 x 9 1/16 inches (17.6 x 23cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Abbott-Levy Collection. Partial gift of Shirley C. Burden
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Fête du Trône 1925 Gelatin silver printing-out-paper print 6 7/16 x 8 7/16 inches (16.4 x 21.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Abbott-Levy Collection. Partial gift of Shirley C. Burden
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Fête de Vaugirard 1926 Gelatin silver printing-out-paper print 6 13/16 x 8 3/4 inches (17.3 x 22.2cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Abbott-Levy Collection. Partial gift of Shirley C. Burden
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Avenue des Gobelins 1925 Gelatin silver printing-out-paper print 8 1/4 x 6 1/2inches (21 x 16.7cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Abbott-Levy Collection. Partial gift of Shirley C. Burden
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Romanichels, groupe 1912 Gelatin silver printing-out-paper print 8 3/8 x 6 11/16 inches (21.2 x 17cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Abbott-Levy Collection. Partial gift of Shirley C. Burden
The Museum of Modern Art 11 West 53 Street New York, NY 10019 Phone:Â (212) 708-9400
Opening hours: 10.30am – 5.30pm Open seven days a week
A munificence of Minor White and the revelation of the object through contemplation could be found in the lecture by William Kentridge. As an artist you must keep repeating and constructively playing and something else, some new idea, some new way of looking at the world may emerge. As a glimpse into the working methodology of one of the world’s great artists the lecture was fascinating stuff!
“At four in the morning there are no lack of branches for the crow of doubt to land upon.”
On Memory
“Memory – both memory and the forgetting of memory. For example, the building of monuments [monuments to the Holocaust, to wars] takes the responsibility of remembering away.”
On Play
“We absolutely want to make sense of the world in that way. That’s one of the principles of play – that however much you distort and break things apart, in the end we will try to reconstruct them in some way to make sense of the world. I think that every child does it. It’s fundamental.”
On Looking
“It’s the capacity for recognition that makes a difference between order and disorder in looking at visual images. And it’s the vocabulary of recognisable images that we have inside us, which is completely vital to what it is to see. I don’t really buy the idea that order and disorder are the same.”
William Kentridge
First History of the Cinema
Performances of Transformation
~ Cinema
~ Shadow dancing
~ Eidophusikon (The Eidophusikon was a piece of art, no longer extant, created by 18th century English painter Philip James de Loutherbourg. It opened in Leicester Square in February 1781.Described by the media of his day as “Moving Pictures, representing Phenomena of Nature,” the Eidophusikon can be considered an early form of movie making. The effect was achieved by mirrors and pulleys.
~ Quick change artist
~ Stage magicians
The sedimented gaze of the early camera. The slow chemicals meant that the object had to wait under the camera’s gaze for minutes. People were held in place by stiff neck braces to capture the trace of their likeness. Congealed time.
On the other hand, in cinema, a tear forward becomes a repair in reverse.
By rolling the film in reverse there is a REVERSAL of time, a REMAKING of the world – the power to be more than you are – by reversing to perfection. You throw a book or smash a plate: in reverse they become perfect again, a utopian world.
YOU MUST GIVE YOURSELF OVER TO PLAY!
Giving yourself over to what the medium suggests, you follow the metaphor back to the surface. Following the activity [of play] back to its root. Projecting forwards, projecting backwards. There is endless rehearsal, constant repetition, then discovering the nature of the final shot or drawing to be made. New ideas get thrown around: leaning into the experience, the experiment, the repetition, the rehearsal.
Four elements
1/ something to be seen
2/ the utopian perfection: perfectibility
3/ the grammar of learning that action
4/ Greater ideas, further ideas and thoughts; potentiality and its LOSS
Further meanings arise
How is this achieved?
Rehearsal, repetition
New thoughts will arise being led by the body in the studio NOT in the mind. Not conceptual but the feeling of the body walking in the studio.
The physical action as the starting point not the concept.
Six different degrees of tension
1/ Least tension in the body possible: slumped
2/ Relaxed
3/ Neutral
4/ Purpose: an impulse to make things happen – desire
5/ Insistence: listen to me, this is very important
What the body suggests is the construction of an image.
There are different degrees of tension in these performances. What do they suggest? This reverse osmosis from one state to another?
Third History of Cinema
Technologies of Looking
Pre-cinematic devices – a process of seeing in the world, of looking. Produces a reconfigured seeing, the invisible made [moving] visible.
Stereoscope
3D world made into a 2D image put back into 3D by our brains. The nature of binocularity, of depth perception. We see an illusion of depth, a construction by the eyes. Our brain is a muscle combining the two images. Depth of Field (DOF): focusing at different distances, we are inside the field of the image. Peripheral vision is blanked off; we look through a magnifying glass. A machine for demonstrating seeing.
There are erotics built into the language of the etching, but there is also a logic built into the machine used for etching. The Proof print, arriving at the first state. Going on the journey from artist as maker to artist as viewer through the mechanism of the etching press.
Artist/Maker unknown Claude Glass, manufactured in England 18th century V & A
Claude Glass
“A Claude glass (or black mirror) is a small mirror, slightly convex in shape, with its surface tinted a dark colour. Bound up like a pocket-book or in a carrying case, black mirrors were used by artists, travellers and connoisseurs of landscape and landscape painting. Black Mirrors have the effect of abstracting the subject reflected in it from its surroundings, reducing and simplifying the colour and tonal range of scenes and scenery to give them a painterly quality).”
The Claude glass was standard equipment for Picturesque tourists, producing instant tonal images that supposedly resembled works by Claude. “The person using it ought always to turn his back to the object that he views,” Thomas West explained in his Guide to the Lakes. “It should be suspended by the upper part of the case… holding it a little to the right or the left (as the position of the parts to be viewed require) and the face screened from the sun.”
Object Type
A Claude Glass – essentially a small, treated mirror contained in a box – is a portable drawing and painting aid that was widely used in the later 18th century by amateur artists on sketching tours. The reflections in it of surrounding scenery were supposed to resemble some of the characteristics of Italian landscapes by the famous 17th-century painter and sketcher Claude Lorrain, hence the name.
Materials & Use
The ‘glass’ consists of a slightly convex blackened mirror, which was carried in the hand and held up to the eye. The image thus seen was the scenery behind – rather than in front of – the user. The mirror’s convexity reduced extensive views to the dimensions of a small drawing. The use of a blackened rather than an ordinary silvered mirror resulted in a somewhat weakened reflection, which stressed the prominent features in the landscape at the expense of detail. It also lowered the colour key. A larger version of this device is said on occasion to have been fixed to the windows of horse-drawn carriages in order to reflect the passing scenery.
Artist / Maker unknown Claude Glass, manufactured in England 18th century V & A
Anamorphic Mirror
A counter intuitive way of drawing; turning 2D into 3D. The landscape has no edge, like a carrousel.
A LINK TO THE ENDLESS CIRCLING AND WALKING AROUND THE STUDIO!
Anamorphic drawing and cone shaped mirror
William Kentridge studio Photo by John Hodgkiss Art Tatler
The Studio
In the studio you gather the pieces together like a kind of Zoetrope. You may arrive at a new idea, a new starting point. Repetition, going around and around your head (at four in the morning!). There must be a truce between the artist as maker and the artist as viewer. As in earlier times, you walk the cloisters, you promenade.
You find the walk that is the prehistory of the drawing, that is the prehistory to the work.
A multiple, fragmented, layered performance of walking. You are trying to find the grammar of the studio – the necessary stupidity. Making a space for uncertainty. The conscious suppression of rationality. At some point, emerging, escaping the Zoetrope, from the physical making, something will be revealed. The spaces open up by the stupidities. Something new emerges.
THIS IS THE SPACE OF THE STUDIO.
Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia
William Kentridge: Five Themes
Thursday 8 March – Sunday 27 May 2012 Exhibition open daily 10am – 6pm
Exhibition dates: 27th November – 7th December, 2008
Patrick Christie (Australian) Black COCKatoo 2008 53 x 44cm ink on paper with hand embossing
This is the first exhibition by artist Patrick Christie exhibiting at Green-Wood gallery in South Melbourne. The ink illustrations are a mixed bag featuring native botanical specimens, beetles of various varieties and colourful birds – a red COCK, a blue peaCOCK and a black COCKatoo (the ‘cocks’ of the title). While the beetle images and the cowboy illustrations feel flat and uninspired it is the larger flower arrangements and the beautifully detailed birds that hold the attention.
With an abundance in the rendering of their subject matter both produce an uplifting cornucopia – vase, flowers, fruit and material overflowing; feathers of the Black COCKatoo repeating and blending like an Escher drawing into the gum leaves behind. The hand marks the page again and again forming exquisite line. Dutch still life of the 17th century come to mind with the flower arrangements and whilst I like the embossed word COCK under the bird images I am not sure it is really necessary. The drawings are strong enough to stand on their own.
There is real talent here. Yes the exhibition needed more conceptual rigour as the whole did not match the sum of the parts. Yes the framing needs attention especially in the bird series, where simpler frames with more space around the images would have let the work breathe but these things can be addressed. For an artist what needs to be there from the start is passion, a good eye and the talent to develop a personal language that is vibrant, interesting and unique – that can be nurtured and developed over many years. This exhibition sets Patrick Christie squarely on this path.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Patrick Christie (Australian) 5 Wasps 2008 67 x 50cm ink on paper
![Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962) 'Estampe pour F. Marquis chocolatier-confiseur, Paris [Print for F. Marquis chocolate maker, Paris]' sans date (without date) from the exhibition 'Laure Albin Guillot: The Question of Classicism' at Jeu de Paume, Paris, February - May, 2013](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/albinguillot_13-web.jpg "Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962) 'Estampe pour F. Marquis chocolatier-confiseur, Paris [Print for F. Marquis chocolate maker, Paris]' sans date (without date) from the exhibition 'Laure Albin Guillot: The Question of Classicism' at Jeu de Paume, Paris, February - May, 2013")
![Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962) 'Les tierces alternées, illustration pour les Préludes de Claude Debussy [The third alternative, illustration for Claude Debussy Preludes]' 1948](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/laure-albin-guillot-les-tierces-alternes-illustration-pour-les-prludes-de-claude-debussy-1948-web.jpg "Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962) 'Les tierces alternées, illustration pour les Préludes de Claude Debussy [The third alternative, illustration for Claude Debussy Preludes]' 1948")
![Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962) 'Nudite de Jeune Femme [Nude of a Young Woman]' c. 1950](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/laure_albin-guillot_nudite_de_jeune_femme-web.jpg "Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962) 'Nudite de Jeune Femme [Nude of a Young Woman]' c. 1950")
![Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962) 'Sans titre [women with crossed legs on a plinth]' 1937](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/albinguillot_sanstitre-web.jpg "Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962) 'Sans titre [women with crossed legs on a plinth]' 1937")
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
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