Category: antiquarian books

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Brian Clarke (1953)

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Brian Clarke was born in Oldham, Lancashire, to Edward Ord Clarke, a coal miner, and Lilian Clarke (née Whitehead). In 1965, aged 12, he applied for a place as the last intake of an education scheme existing in the North of England to enable artistically promising children to leave their secondary school and become full-time art students, and was accepted into Oldham School of Arts and Crafts on a scholarship.[4][5] In 1968 he and his family moved to Burnley, where he attended Burnley Art School, and in 1970 he enrolled in an architectural stained glass course at the North Devon College of Art and Design, where he went on to receive a first class distinction in their Diploma in Design.

Paintings, stained glass, screenprints, mosaic and tapestry by Clarke can be found in architectural settings and private and public collections internationally, including the Tate, Victoria and Albert Museum, Seibu Museum of Art in Tokyo, and the Corning Museum of Glass, New York.[13]

Major works include the Foster and Partners-designed Pyramid of Peace and Accord in Kazakhstan, Al Faisaliyah Center in Riyadh, and Stanstead Airport; the Pfizer World Headquarters in New York; the Stamford Cone in Connecticut; windows for Linköping Cathedral in Sweden; the Papal Chapel of the Apostolic Nunciature to Great Britain; the world’s largest stage sets (for Paul McCartney’s 1993 World Tour) and both the largest stained glass work in Great Britain and the largest in the world.

Other projects include ecclesiastical commissions in churches, mosques and synagogues (including the DarmstadtHolocaust Memorial) across Europe, the USA and the Middle East; the glass exterior of ‘Le Grand Bleu’, the Hotel du Department des Bouches-du Rhone, Marseille (with Will Alsop); the Lake Sagami Country Club, Japan (with Arata Isozaki); stage sets for the Dutch National Ballet, and sets for an opera of The Crucible directed by Hugh Hudson; King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Norte Shopping, Rio de Janeiro; the Spindles Shopping Mall, Oldham; the barrel-vaulted roof of Cavendish Arcade, Buxton;[22] the stained glass ceiling of Victoria Quarter, Leeds; windows for the 13th century Cistercian Abbaye de la Fille-Dieu, Romont, Switzerland; collaborations in stained glass with photographer Linda McCartney; and EP and album covers for The Human League, Paul McCartney, and EMI Classical

( the above text was copied from Wikipedia )

www.ftn-books.com has Brian Clarke titles available

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Hap Grieshaber (1909-1981)

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Hap Grieshaber is one of the great graphik artist from the 20th Century.

Personally i consider Hap Grieshaber, H.N.Werkman and Josua Reichert to be the top in graphic artists from the 20th century. Reichert is the best, but Grieshaber and Werkman are close in second spot.

Grieshaber is a typical 50’s /60’s artist. The first time i encountered his works i had a strong asscociation with the Catholic bid prints, inserted and collected in bibles by young people in the early 60’s.

But there is so much more to be discovered in his works than simple figures. The combination of abstract patterns in the background of slhouetted figures are typical Greishaber and make the composition to appear totally abstract. Willem Sandberg was a Grieshaber admirer and together they made one of the most iconic of all Sandberg / Stedelijk Museum catalogues

grieshaber cata a

This and other Grieshaber publications are available at www.ftn-books.com

Grieshaber was honoured with numerous prizes and retrospective exhibitions. He exhibited works at the documenta in 1959 and 1964. In honor of his 70th birthday in 1979, large retrospectives were shown in various museums in both parts of Germany. The last prize that Grieshaber was awarded in 1980 was the art prize of the town of Konstanz. Grieshaber died in 1981 in Eningen unter Achalm aged 72 years.

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Lawrence Weiner (1942) + discount

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Lawrence Weiner and the Netherlands is a combination which now exists for almost 50 years. His connections with dutch directors and curators is legendary and he has made several special projects with them in dutch. Weiner is considered as a post minimal artist and one of the founders of Conceptual art and that is the reason why his works blend so well within the collections of the more important dutch museum. The van Abbemuseum, Stedelijk and Gemeentemuseum have all works by Weiner in their collections.

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But Weiner is much more than a conceptual artist. He is a book designer and poet at the same time  and these little sketches with words can be blown up into facades and objects with words. One of the most memorable to me was the facade at the Ljubljana Modern Art museum with a Weiner object on one of the outside museum walls. Impredssive, recognizable. So to celebrate the longtime history that Lawrence Weiner has with the Netherlands there is a discount this week of 10%  on all items at www.ftn-books.com . use the discountcode : LawrenceWeiner10 and receive a 10% discount on all items including some marvelous Lawrence Weiner publications.

weiner sm a

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Donald Judd – sculpture, Untitled object

 

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It must have been somewhere around 1985. After a trip to the US and whta must have been a visit to Donald Judd’s studio, Flip Book, curator of the Modern Art department of the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag came back with the story of a purchase he had made of a Donald Judd sculpture. I heard that the price paid was around 60.000 guilders and personally i thought it unheard that a sculpture like this would have such an elevated price tag. I thought it much to expensive for a sculpture like this, but as time progresses. i became wiser and it became clear to me that Flip had made a wonderful and very important acquisition for the Gemeentemuseum. The sculpture has been since in the Beeldentuin of the Gemeentemuseum and is still as, or perhaps even more, impressive as it originally was.

I realized that the important purchases for the collections of the Gemeentemuseum were all done from the late Sixties until the first years of the Nineties. It started with Minimal art by LeWitt, Judd and Andre, continued with some Schoonhoven, Weiner in the Eighties and perhaps the last important acquisition is the carrousel by Bruce Nauman. Since very little important acquisitions have been made, with one exception. I think the Paul Thek object will prove to be important in the future.

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On all the mentioned artists, publications are available at www.ftn-books.com

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Sol LeWitt- Horizontal Brushstrokes

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It is a long history that Sol LeWitt has with Den Haag. In the early days of his career he became befriended with Enno Develing who in 1967 organized as cuartor a breathtaken and important first Mininal exhibition with Sol LeWitt. In later years Sol LeWitt made some tiles in a open multiple edition for the shop of the Gemeentemuseum and again a decade later he designed the staircase and a shopping bag for the Gemeentemuseum. At the end of his career he stayed loyal to Den Haag and had a very nice exhibition in 2002 with his brushstroke paintings and prints at the Livingstone gallery. This catalogue is now available at www.ftn-books.com

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John Zinsser (1961)

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A master in Blue . A bit like Yves Klein had his favorit color too  and executed many of his paintings in Blue. Zinsser uses the available commercial paints with their standard bright colors.

John Zinsser’s abstract paintings investigate formal properties of gestures, supports, color, and paint through simple actions and two-toned compositions that explore the relationship between figure and ground. After studying art history at Yale, Zinsser relocated to New York, where he has remained since the 1980s. Color is a preeminent concern for Zinsser; he typically works with naturally occurring commercially available colors such as cobalt blue or cadmium red. The properties and values of the ground determine what colors and forms he chooses to include in the foreground. “I always put a faith in materials first—that paint has a kind of authority of its own,” he says. “Paint has a unique power to assert tactile reality, pushing toward a larger visual and bodily response.”

For me personally il compare his paintings with the one Tomas Rajlich has done in the last 2 decades / also monochrome paintings with working the paint over that it the paint is moulded into a shape. Both arftists i like very much, but for me personally i prefer the Rajlich paintings , because i have met Tomas on several occasions and beside an excellent painter he is a an aimable person.

www.ftn-books.com has a nice Zinsser catalogue available.

zinsser

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Ed van der Elsken ( continued )

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A just reason to devote another blog to Ed van der Elsken. Van der Elsken is without a doubt one of our greatest photographers from last century, but what makes van der Elsken special for me personally is that his photographs are the scenes and events i remember from my youth. Artistically they are among the very best, but emotionally there is an extra quality for me personally. The exhibitions showing a selection of his best color photography is now on show at the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam ( https://www.nederlandsfotomuseum.nl) and is very well worth visiting. In the cellar there is an extra asset to this exhibition….. a 15 minute slideshow which is among the very best and informative slide shows i have ever seen. The exhibition is on view until the 6th of October 2019.

www.ftn-books.com has some classic van der Elsken books available.

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Mark Boyle (1934-2005)

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I think it was Hans Locher as a curator who brough the works by Mark Boyle for the first time to the Netherlands. I remember the exhibition was reviewed and it made me go to the Haags Gemeentemuseum. It was the time of music by the Soft Machine and shows with liquid slides to accompany the music. Upstairs in the rooms of the museum were the objects/ earth by Mark Boyle. Boyle made exact replcias of the soli and pavements he found interesting and hang them on the wall like paintings. I thought and think these objects are still fascinating and to my knowledge Boyle is still unique in his approach to art.

These so called earth  studies were highly accurate painted casts that operate somewhere between painting and sculpture – involve the meticulous re-creation of randomly chosen areas of the Earth’s surface using resin and fibreglass (as well as real materials from the site) and have been exhibited internationally. Past shows have included the British Pavilion at the XXXIX Venice Biennale in 1978, Beyond Image – Boyle Family (Hayward Gallery, London) in 1986 and Boyle Family (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh) – a major retrospective held in 2003.

www.ftn-books.com has several Mark Boyle and Boyle family catalogues available.

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Chaim Soutine (1893-1943)

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Soutine is what you call an artists artist. Somebody who fame grew because of the admirations of his contemporary artists. For me personally stands for three moments in time . All related to art. The first was a moment i witnessed the auction of a Soutine painting in the mid Seventies nad i was amazed because it fetched  an unexpected serious high bid, The second was when i read the spectacular story by Roald Dahl. The one in which a sailor is tatooed on his back by Soutine and an art dealer who tries to obtain this painting and last the timne i visited a dutch gallery and saw a painting of a dead ox by Marc Mulders and it instantly reminded of the Soutine paintings i had seen at one time. ( left Soutine/ right Marc Mulders)

Now i finally have another Soutine catalogue available. Soutine publications are scarce and this one is once again part of my inventory . Now it is for sale at www.ftn-books.com . This is the first one i found in the last 10 years.

soutine paris

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Sigfrido Martin Begue (1959-2010)

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Mix Gino Severini with Hergé and put in some of the great poster art of the 20th century and you will have an idea of the works of Sigfrido Martin Begue. He is the third of the lesser known artists i would like to propose to you.

The first time i heard about Begue was when he was having an exhibition at the Living Room. I did not see the exhibition myself, but years later i acquired the catalogue for my inventory and saw for the first time why thsi artist is so attractive to me.

It is is this mix of the absurd and the comic like style i like so much. Just take a look at these 2 examples and you know exactly what i am talking about.

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