Category: art

Anton Zoran Music was born in 1909 in Gorizia, a town then within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and today on the Italian border with Slovenia.

The barren, dusty landscapes of the Dalmatian coast would have a profound influence on his palette throughout his career. He studied in Zagreb, and spent the years 1934-35 travelling. In Spain, he copied works by El Greco and Goya, but fled upon the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.

In 1943 Music moved to Venice, where he was subsequently arrested and tortured by the Gestapo on the basis of his known political sympathies and suspicions that his artistic activities were a cover for espionage. Despite these charges, Music was invited to join the SS. He later recalled: “The idea of becoming an SS officer seemed so comical to me, in the state I was in, that I laughed outright. So they sent me to Dachau…”. During his time at the death camp Music secretly recorded the horrors around him, although he did not fully process his wartime experiences until many years later. A harrowing series of works on the subject titled We Are Not the Last was created during the 1970s, when the hilly landscape around Siena suddenly triggered memories of the piles of corpses that had surrounded him at Dachau. He exhibited extensively throughout the post-war period, dividing his time between Paris and Venice.

In 1956 he won the Grand Prize for Graphic Art at the Venice Biennale, and continued to paint unpopulated landscapes in dry, muted tones, in addition to a number of cathedral interiors, and a late series of moving and introspective self-portraits.

Thre is one famous publication that was designed by Willem Sandberg for the Music galerie de France exhibition in 1970. This publication is now for sale at www.ftn-books.com

At the age of seven, Alison Watt, the daughter of a painter, was deeply impressed by Ingres’ portrait of Madame Moissetier (1856). She graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 1988, after winning the John Player Portrait Award the previous year, and was subsequently commissioned to paint a portrait of the Queen Mother, which was added to the collections of the National Portrait Gallery. Her first oils on canvas were mainly figurative portraits or female nudes in bright, luminous settings. On the occasion of an exhibition at the Fruitmaker Gallery in Edinburgh in 1997, her work began to focus increasingly on the rendering of fabrics. A. Watt works on large-format canvases, which she paints alone, using scaffolding. Her colour of choice is white, which she blends with ochre, sienna, vermilion, grey, and black pigments to produce realistically modelled draperies of an almost sculptural nature. The materials she depicts are heavy or lightweight, crumpled, knotted, or suspended, with sensual folds sometimes reminiscent of anatomical details, such as women’s genitalia inspired by Gustave Courbet’s Origin of the World (1866). She exploits the suggestive power of drapery, producing chaste evocations of the presence or absence of a body: the empty sheets on a bed, the pleats of a dress, the loincloth of Christ.

In 2000 she became the youngest artist to present a monographic exhibition, Shift, at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. She then turned to a form of abstraction, exhibiting her polyptych Still and six other canvases at the Ingleby Gallery during the 2004 Edinburgh Festival. That same year, she exhibited the series Dark Light, which consisted of pictures of deep black swathes of fabric presented in a closed cubic space. From 2006 to 2008, she created a series of six large format pieces meant as reinterpretations of pieces from the permanent collection of the National Gallery in London: paintings by Ingres and Holbein, and Francisco de Zurbarán’s St. Francis in Meditation (1635–1639). Through her work, A. Watt goes beyond mere studies of drapery and reaches a dramatic, perhaps even mystical, dimension marked by the influence of the Masters.

www.ftn-books.com has one Alison Watt publication currently available

Erwin Eisch, a pioneer of the international Studio Glass movement, has helped establish the medium in Europe. His distinctively distorted glass vessels and imaginative sculptures of mould-blown glass challenge the distinctions between art forms and between realism and abstraction. Eisch began with functional vessels, including bottles, vases and steins, often distorting the hot glass, incorporating ceramic moulds and producing painted glass sculptures. Eisch uses glass, painting, drawing and printed graphics to overcome the borders between picture and sculpture. His later output includes drawings, paintings and prints. Eischs works incorporate vivid elements of imagination and fantasy, which supplement the reality that inspires him. This book includes essays, contributions by experts on his work, more than one hundred illustrations of Eischs work, and selected writings by the artist himself.

The book which is now available at www.ftn-books.com is one of the earliest publications on this artist.

Louis Meijs was born  the 31th of March 1902.

He was the eldest child of a family with eight children, born in Scheveningen.

He was a very elegant person, a little vain with a big dose of charm and unexpected  humour.

During his whole life, he just had one painting lesson.

He was an intimate colourist in an impressionistic tradition.

He was specialized in painting the light and painting against the light the beautiful  colours.

Many qualities as honesty, professional skill and simplicity you find in his work.

He painted the beach scenes of Scheveningen, The Kurhaus, the Grand Hotel and also many flower still life.

He was a life time member of the Haagse Kunstkring

www.ftn-books.com has now a beautiful monograph on Meys available

Constantine Andreou was born in São Paulo, Brazil in 1917 to Greek parents who had immigrated to Brazil a few years prior.

In 1925, his family moved back to Greece where he settled in Athens until the end of World War II. During these years, Andreou dabbled in crafts and for a period worked as a carpenter making furniture while studying technical design.[6] He graduated in 1935.[5] In the same year, he started his study of sculpture,[5] the art form for which he would be most known later.

In 1939, Andreou participated at the Panellinio (Πανελλήνιο), but the judges disqualified his three sculptures.[6] In 1942], he tried again at the same competition and with the same artwork. The pieces were so lifelike, he was accused of cheating by copying nature. Three major personalities of the time in Greece, Memos Makris, John Miliades, and Nikos Nikolaou, came to his defense. As a result of the publicity, he had his first taste of fame and major exposure of his artwork.

In 1940, Greece entered World War II on the side of Allies, and by 1941, the country was under Nazi and Italian occupation. Andreou was initially drafted into the Hellenic Army in 1940 and during the occupation he was an active member of the Greek Resistance.

The war years and occupation did not stop Andreou from continuing his artwork and studies, and in 1945 he won a French scholarship to go to France.

Life in France (1945–2002)

In 1947, Andreou began using a new personal technique employing welded copper sheets. This new technique allowed him to create a new way to express his creation in a way completely unrelated to tradition.[6]

A major impact on Andreou’s method of expression and in the development of his personal “language” was his friendship with Le Corbusier. They first met in 1947 and worked together on and off until 1953.[6] At one time Le Corbusier asked Andreou, “Where did you learn how to work?” to which Andreou responded “I’m Greek, I carry the knowledge within me.”[6] This friendship instilled in Andreou Le Corbusier’s view of architecture as monumental sculpture and, conversely, sculpture subject to the laws of architecture.[8]

In the same period, Andreou became a member of a select group of philosophers, including Jean-Paul Sartre, who discussed various topics in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

Andreou had his first exhibition in Paris in 1951, where he demonstrated the transformation of his style. In the group exhibition “Seven Greek Sculptors”, Andreou was characterized as “the most famous Greek sculptor in the capital with a rich, varied and successful work”. By the end of the decade, Andreou was widely known in the French art scene and considered an equal to Mondrian, Picasso and Gastaud. In 1982, he was given the lead as chairman of the Paris “Autumn Salon” for sculpture.

In 1999, the library of the town La Ville-du-Bois, where Andreou resided while in France, was named in honor of Constantine Andreou.

Throughout his time in France, he regularly visited his friends and family in Greece and many times exhibited his work in various cities and islands there. In 1977, Andreou bought a centuries old winery on the island of Aegina.[17] He converted it into a house, after being influenced to buy a house on the island by his long time friend and colleague Nikos Nikolaou.

Later years and return to Greece (2002–2007)

Constantine Andreou died on October 8, 2007 in his house in Athens.

www.ftn-books.com has the galerie R. Nidrecourt catalogue available

Those who have been lucky enough to view the Herman de Vries exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Schiedam in 2014, know about the impressive room with the floor covered with rosebuds. This is one of the most iconic IN SITU works I have ever witnessed. The walls covered with framed dried plants and the floor covered with rosebuds made the room feel like a magical place. After the exhibition the room was cleared and the rosebuds were transformed into 325 + XXXI multiples and sold. This was the third time the rosebud covered floor was transformed into a multiple. The first was in 1984 ( edition of 25 copies), the second time in 1990 ( edition of 100) both published by the Eschenau Summer press and the third, which I have now available at www.ftn-books.com, in 2015 . I love the works by Herman de Vries and the future will learn that his works and projects will belong to the most significant art projects in the world of art.

The ROSA DAMASCENA edition is now available at www.ftn-books.com

Hans Bellmer….for over Fifty years now a long time favorite of mine and over the years I collected many books on this artist. NOw I have added one that I did not encounter before. It is the 1966 Museum Ulm catalogue. A thin one , but still an excellent and scarce publication, which is now available at www.ftn-books.com together with other collectable Bellmer books.

Joe Allen (born 1955) is a British artist. He is known for a series of large-sized paintings on wood and for small portraits of artists.

Allen was born in Airdrie, Scotland. When attending school he took private lessons from C. M. Cameron, a Scottish painter of landscapes and also attended art classes at the Glasgow School of Art. He started his vocational education at St Martins School of Art in London and gained his degree as Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Fine Art at the Camberwell School of Art. Subsequently he gained the Master of Art Degree at the Royal Academy School in London.

In 1983 he started lecturing at Art Colleges in Newcastle and London, later he taught at the Centro de Arte Verrochio near Siena. From 1984 to 2007 he was a lecturer at the European Art Academy in Trier. He lives in London und Trier (Germany).

References to works from various periods in the history of art are to found in his paintings. They evoke reminiscences of Piero della Francesca, Velázquez, Titian or John Constable. Also an influence by impressionist painters such as Édouard Manet, Claude Monet or Pissarro and masters van Gogh and Cézanne can be detected. Although he spent most of his adult life outside Scotland Allen can also be seen as standing in the tradition of the Glasgow Boys.

In 2007 Allen started a series of more than thirty small portraits of famous painters (and persons related to painters) among them Rembrandt, Delacroix, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Mark Rothko and David Hockney. 

www.ftn-books.com has the galerie Ariadne catalog now available

William Pye, an internationally acclaimed sculptor, exhibited eleven important pieces in the Secret Garden in May 2019. He worked closely with the Trustees to create a very special show, which enthused a wide audience, from art lovers to those new to sculpture and also children. His fascinating pieces are made principally from stainless steel and cast bronze; and water is integral to most of his work. William Pye is inspired by the extraordinary qualities of water and the natural laws of hydrostatics, and how these can be manipulated.

He has held exhibitions at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum, Venice; in Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro; in the USA, Hong Kong and Japan; and many in the UK. His work is found in private gardens and public places. These include a major commission on London’s South Bank; sculpture in the Mariinsky Concert Hall, St Petersburg; in the Serpent Garden, Alnwick Castle; in Drammen town centre, Norway; and in Muscat, Oman. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors, an Honorary Fellow of the RIBA and President of the Hampshire Sculpture Trust.

www.ftn-books.com has now the scarce Redfernn catalog from 1969 available.

Paintings…..At close inspection difficult to read and almost abstract, they slowly open themselves up and become legible when the viewer takes a step back and looks at them once again from a distance. The jagged, blurry lines that distort our view from close-up reveal themselves to be pixels or the lines of electronic interference that sometimes distort the images on a television screen.

From a distance, however, the lines become neutralised and the scenes depicted becomes so clear that we wonder why we didn’t see them properly in the first place. “Dallas – 1963”, for example, depicts a scene from the assassination of John F. Kennedy, while “Poland – 1944” presents a view of the ominous gate of the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz.

Nevertheless, for the artist it is not important what the image actually depicts, but rather the way in which that image is represented. Eddy De Vos does not practise politics with his paintings. He neither condones nor criticises the events taking place in these images. He merely appropriates them to investigate, experiment and analyse his own ideas of what painting is and can be today in the age of the plethora of global, digital images.

What we see is not an objective document of the respective event, but rather one possible way of seeing it. In doing so, De Vos raises important questions about visual and cognitive perception and breathes new life into the medium of painting, thus opening new possibilities for a medium that refuses to die despite the numerous near deaths that it has suffered throughout the 20th century. The MUHKA publication is available at www.ftn-books.com