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“Picasso and Marie-Thérèse” comes two years after “Picasso: Mosqueteros,” which similarly filled the same Gagosian space to overflowing and presented, Picasso-wise, a hard act to follow.
It is the largest exhibition yet devoted to works that Picasso made from the late 1920s through the ’30s under the spell of a young mistress — the voluptuous, Roman-nosed, level-eyed, full-limbed Marie-Thérèse Walter — and it is a wonderfully motley, almost scattershot affair, brilliantly installed. Ranging through mediums and styles as it explores this single if constantly evolving subject, it confirms that when Picasso told Walter she had saved his life, he meant that she had also saved his art.
John Richardson is again the organizer, this time in collaboration with Diana Widmaier Picasso, an art historian whose mother, Maya Widmaier Picasso, born in 1935, is the only child of Picasso and Walter. There could be a better exhibition on the topic, I’m sure, going by paintings not in the show but reproduced in galleys of the catalog, due out in May. In addition, there are occasional small paintings and drawings that seem knocked out. But given the scope of what’s here, such shortcomings barely matter.
That Walter was the great passion of Picasso’s life is borne out by the erotic frisson that suffuses much of this exhibition. But l’amour fou — mad love — was also clearly productive, inventive love. As seen here, Walter is in constant flux, mutating throughout the show’s paintings, sculptures, drawings, occasional prints and even photographs. She appears actually to move in a tantalizingly brief video based on a flip-book Picasso made of her from photo-booth pictures.
More important, she inspires Picasso to review and preview nearly all the phases of his long career, up to and including his wild-style late paintings. These are presaged in some of the looser, small works and, with imposing monumentality, in a bright, bristling image of Maya, a dead ringer for her mother, fervently clutching a doll to her face as if it were a lover.
via: Roberta Smith Review -- The New York Times
Signed limited edition prints by artist Kim DeMarco, are available at RISD|WORKS.
The prints are inspired by the current exhibition "Cocktail Culture", at Museum of Art - Rhode Island School of Design, through July 31, 2011.
Images from Karel en Mienet 1 [link] and 2 [link] by Marietje Witteveen with illustrations by Eddy Dukkers (Eduard Willem Anton (Ed) Dukkers, 1923–96), ca. 1950. Follow those links to read the books (and 850 others) in full at a huge Dutch library site. BibliOdyssey featured it in 2009.
via: 50 Watts
A fine first edition of one of the earliest printed histories, the Nuremberg Chronicle (or Liber chronicarum) of July 1493, is for sale at Bonhams Printed Books and Manuscripts sale in London on 7 June. It is estimated at $40,000-50,000.
The most lavishly illustrated printed book of the 15th century, the Nuremberg Chronicle is, essentially, a history of the known world. One of the first books to combine text and illustration successfully it contains over 1800 woodcuts including world and European maps and city views. It is one of the most famous and sought after incunables – the technical term for books printed before 1500.
Written in Latin by Hartmann Schedel - in Germany the book is known as Schedel’s World History - it was produced in Nuremberg by Michael Wolgemut and published by Anton Koberger, the Renaissance equivalent of a publishing tycoon, who owned printing presses throughout Europe. Koberger’s godson, Albrecht Dürer, was apprenticed to Wolgemut between 1486 and 1489 when the initial commission was made and may well have participated in early work on the designs.
Of the 1,400-1,500 copies of the Nuremberg Chronicle in Latin, around 400 are thought to have survived. A version in German was produced six months afterwards in December 1493, of which 300 copies are still known to exist.
Photography is centered on light and time. Typically, they are not independent - the amount of light available tends to determine the amount of time needed for a photograph. Exposure usually needs to be done properly, because not doing so results in all kinds of unwanted effects, such as under- or overexposed images - or worse. Worse, of course, needn’t necessarily be worse. If you take black and white film and overexpose it, an object like the Sun will eventually show up not very white but the opposite: black. A well-known example of this is Minor White’s The Black Sun.
Recently, a couple of artists have been experimenting with extreme overexposures, over an extended period of time. Chris McCaw has been producing unique gelatin silver paper negatives, often with the path of the Sun on the sky literally burned away from the paper (Sunburn).
Hans-Christian Schink’s 1h is closer to White’s approach (in fact, it was partly inspired by White’s image), producing a negative first and a print later. In Schink’s case, there are no holes in the paper, instead the Sun’s path is pitch black. Being German, he also went for precision, an image might be called something like “7/11/2007, 5:27 pm - 6:27 pm, N 69°45.199’ E 020°29.497’”.
The resulting body of work is now available in book form, as Hans-Christian Schink: 1h. The artist started working on the process in 1999, but it took several years - and various refinements - to arrive at the final set-up, so the images in the book cover the years 2005-10 and both hemispheres, each including photographs taken even beyond the Arctic Circles.
Read more HERE
For “After Hours: Murals on the Bowery,” taking place on the occasion of the Festival of Ideas for a New City, seventeen international artists create site-specific paintings on roll-down security shutters of numerous commercial supply stores along the Bowery between Houston and Canal Streets. The project continues the rich history of art-making in the New Museum’s neighborhood, where artworks often appear in unexpected public locations.
At the invitation of the New Museum, the Art Production Fund selected a cross-generational, international group of artists, and approached proprietors of retail spaces along the Bowery who will host the murals for two months. In some cases, the murals may remain indefinitely.
Participating artists include Judith Bernstein, Matthew Brannon, Ingrid Calame, Chris Dorland, Elmgreen & Dragset, Ellen Gallagher, Amy Granat, Mary Heilmann, Jacqueline Humphries, Deborah Kass, pulp, ink, Glenn Ligon, Adam McEwen, Barry McGee, Sterling Ruby, Gary Simmons, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Lawrence Weiner.
Photo: Yana Paskova for The New York Times
Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the most devastating attack on American soil in modern times and the most hunted man in the world, was killed in a firefight with United States forces in Pakistan on Sunday, President Obama announced.
Read more HERE
