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Born in Baghdati, Russian Empire (now Mayakovsky, Georgia) on July 19, 1893, Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was the youngest child of Ukrainian parents. When his father, a forester, died in 1906, the family moved to Moscow, where Mayakovsky joined the Social Democratic Labour Party as a teenager in 1908. Due to his family’s financial situation, Mayakovsky was dismissed from grammar school. He spent much of the next two years in prison due to his political activities.

In 1910, Mayakovsky began studying painting, soon realizing he had a talent for poetry. In 1912, he signed the Futurist manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, which included two of his poems. In 1913, he published his first solo project, Ya, a small book of four poems.

Mayakovsky’s early poems established him as one of the more original poets to come out of the Russian Futurism, a movement characterized by a rejection of traditional elements in favor of formal experimentation, and which welcomed social change promised by technologies such as automobiles. Specifically, Mayakovsky’s early poems lacked traditional metrical structure, relying instead on forceful rhythms, exaggerated imagery, and—perhaps most importantly—street language, considered unpoetic in literary circles at the time.

In 1915, Mayakovsky published A Cloud in Trousers, his first major work. The long poem took the poet’s stylistic choices to a new extreme, linking irregular lines of declamatory language with surprising rhymes.

Living in Smolny, Petrograd, in 1917, Mayakovsky witnessed the early Bolshevik insurrections of the Russian Revolution. This was a fruitful period for the poet, who greeted the revolution with a number of poetic and dramatic works, including Ode to the Revolution (1918), Left March (1918), the long poem 150,000,000 (1920), and Mystery-Bouffe (1918), a political satire and one of the first major plays of the Soviet era.

Mayakovsky returned to Moscow to create propoganda graphics and verses for the Russian State Telegraph Agency, and became involved in Left Front of the Arts, editing its journal, LEF. The journal’s objective was to “re-examine the ideology and practices of so-called leftist art, and to abandon individualism to increase art’s value for developing communism.”

In 1919, he published Collected Works 1909-1919, which further established his reputation. Mayakovsky’s popularity granted him unusual freedoms, relative to other Soviets. Specifically, he travelled freely, throughout the Soviet Union, as well as to Latvia, Britain, Germany, the United States, Mexico, and Cuba. In 1925, he published My Discovery of America.

Among the poet’s best-known longer poems are Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1924), a eulogy to the Soviet leader; and All Right! (1927). Around this time, Mayakovsky also wrote two satirical plays: The Bedbug (1928) and The Bathhouse (1929).

Mayakovsky had been working on the long poem With Full Voice since 1929, when on April 14, 1930, he allegedly shot himself directly in the heart. Ten days later, the officer investigating the poet’s suicide was himself killed, fueling speculation about the nature of Mayakovsky’s death. www.ftn-books.com has some nice publications on Maiakovski currently available.

After a few years of silence and not contributing any new news nor items on Piet Dirkx I finally found a reason to write again on Piet. Last week I found the BEELDEN IN DE KOEPEL II catalogue on Piet Dirkx. An important catalogue since it also shows some “‘t Venster” rooms in which Piet had one of his first exhibitions. The catalogue is now together with many art works available at www.ftn-books.com. Inquire for more information at www.ftnbooksandart@gmail.com

Just the focus on the early Frank van Hemert pastel that I acquired yesterday. I bought a series of 6 pastels of which two will become available in the coming months. Opened the frame to make the perfect photographs and examined the pastel in detail. Without the glass you can see the delicate pastel drawing as it should be. Signed and dated on the back and this week becoming available at FTN art at www.ftn-blog.com

One of the most internationally established contemporary Spanish painter, sculptor and draughtsman, Manolo Valdés was born in Valencia in 1942. He attended the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Carlos de Valencia and began his career in the 1960s as one of the founding members of Equipo Cronica, a group of artists who took inspiration from Pop Art to challenge the Spanish dictatorship of Franco and the History of Art itself. When the movement ended in 1981, Valdes continued his own artistic exploration centered on the appropriation and reinterpretation of masterpieces. He currently lives and work between Madrid, Spain and New York city, USA.

Manolo Valdés has developed an individual style that reviews History without detracting from the original subject. Quoting figures from well-known works of art by old masters such as Velázquez, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Fra Angelico, as well as twentieth-century masters such as Matisse, Picasso, and Lichtenstein, Valdés revitalizes these familiar images by taking them out of their original context. In both paintings and sculptures, he inflates the figure’s size, abstracting form and minimizing detail, while incorporating a lot of roughly applied paint and unusual materials. The timelessness of the image as the axis of the visual experience is the determining factor in his creations. In his works, image and matter are fused in a body of work that wanders between Pop Art and material art, between social and political commitment and a continuous search for reinvention.

www.ftn-books.com has the Beelden aan Zee catalogue now available.

David Diao (1943, China) is one of the key figures in the recent history of conceptual painting. Entering the New York art world in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, Diao first engaged in the complex position of painting in the aftermath of the Abstract Expressionists and the formalist critical debates that followed them, successfully pushing painting into conceptual territory while allowing him to deal with aesthetics, history as well as personal narrative in his painting. Diao’s unique aesthetic sensibility has undergirded a long career that is now attracting renewed interest from major institutions, critics, and curators around the world. www.ftn-books has the important HET KRUITHUIS catalogue now available. This is the catalogue in which Diao was introduced to a European audience. Text by Kees Broos

Artistic Statement: Conscious Abstraction!

In an abstract work, the materials step forward and become a significant part of the work itself. A good painting is conscious of its own physical properties and of the space around it, and inquires into its own existence.

Abstract painting has a central role in my artistic practice. I use abstraction in various media – such as fabric collages and flags – as a tool with which to dissolve and open up rigidly-defined categories and forms. My paintings and fabric collages have a special dialogue. Often the fabric collages may be recreated as paintings, or vice versa. In terms of content, I work to create meanings that deal with gender history – as indicated, for example, through the juxtaposition of works and materials.

The abstract paintings arise on the basis of systematic compositions, geometric divisions, forms and colours that mimic or utilise visual techniques and structures drawn from the craft traditions of various cultures. Several of the works contain for example references to Navajo rugs, Swedish rag rugs and patchwork quilts. The various references are combined in the painting, where they are absorbed in each other’s logic. In the abstract expression, the intention is thus not to find the universal form, but rather to seek to achieve a form that is constantly changing. When, in the individual works, I operate with several signals at once, the aim is to open up the work in both sensual and symbolic terms. My ambition is that the works should have a simultaneously tactile and spiritual quality. I work with their physicality. They refer to the body and to the physical conditions with which each individual is endowed.

In relation to media, I work a lot with textiles in various formats. The flag, as object, phenomenon and symbol for identification, is something that interests me. I use the authority and authenticity of the flag to deconstruct and reconstruct ideas and concepts about ourselves and others. In several works dealing with issues of identification, I am interested in the possibilities and limitations, as well as the hierarchies, that we ourselves create and pass on – particularly in relation to the position of women.

Besides the material itself, I often use the title of a work to clarify its statement, such as in the painting Bedcover for Sonia Delaunay, 2006. Delaunay sewed an abstract bedspread for her son with the title Blanket, 1911, which was originally considered to be a craftwork, but is today regarded as a work of art. For me, this bedspread stands as a symbol of the relationship between art and life which is essential in my artistic practice.

The Revolver Winckelmann publication is now available at www.ftn-books.com

Alf Lechner is one of the most important German sculptors.
His material is massive steel. Since 1960 Lechner has been designing constructive and concrete sculptures, which gain their form through calculated dividing, cutting and splitting of cubes and globes. Clear, rational thoughts precede the technical work and can be understood in the actual produced works. Even though he achieves freer solutions in techniques like compressing, folding and bursting of steel, they are still results of a controlled action while being fully aware of the material along with decades of experience in the use of strength, energy and the consequential physical reactions.

Here, in his hometown Munich, there are several large-size sculpture in public spaces, like the collection of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, the sculpture space at the Alte Pinakothek or the monumental stele at the Gasteig.
In 1995 Alf Lechner became a member of the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste. Since 2001 he has been living and working together with his wife Camilla in Obereichstätt, where he turned an old ironworks and former stone pit into a spectacular sculpture park with living space, studios and exhibition halls. The Alf Lechner Foundation with its impressive Lechner Museum in Ingolstadt is the keeper of his extensive work.

www.ftn-books.com has now the 1968 galerie Heseler catalog available. The catalogue has an original silkscreened cover.

The last 2 years i acquired several works by Fons Brasser. Some I have kept in my personal collection, but now I have acquired 2 more works. One bleeding drawing and one zink object. To day I will focus on the drawing. The drawing is in pristine condition. framed behind passe partout by Brasser and signed, dated and titled in pencil. The pictures will tell the story but know that the drawing is now for sale at ftn art.

Eileen Cowin’s earlier photographs seemed to belong to the genre of the domestic snapshot. They purported to be slice-of-life images of families at the dinner table, or couples conversing in the living room or the master bedroom. Just beneath the surface, however, was an element of artifice—a self-conscious pose or an odd disconnection between characters that subtly undermined the illusion of spontaneous intimacy.

In her new photographs, the theatrical element has been made explicit. Men in trench coats or nondescript suits and women in slinky red dresses posture against a deeply shadowed background, arranged in tableaux that seem derived from film or art history. Their gestures are broad and symbolic, the situations in which they find themselves suggest the conventions of film noir and their faces are frequently obscured by shadow, hair or hat, heightening the suggestion that they are meant to represent types rather than individuals.

Voyeurism is a recurring theme—several works feature figures peering from behind Venetian blinds. When the characters are not observing each other, they make it clear by their studied poses that they are aware they are being watched. At times, their deliberate, archetypal movements echo Kabuki theater. Like the film stills that these photographs imitate, Cowin’s images suggest freeze-frame shots from mysterious narratives. The work that offers the closest approximation of traditional narrative consists of four panels: in the first, a woman in a red silk shift peers through a Venetian blind; in the second, she stands with her back to us, holding a crumpled letter and staring at a telephone. The third image shows her again peering through the blind, this time in close-up, and the fourth presents what is apparently the object of vision: a man branded with the stripe pattern of the Venetian blind, rummaging through an unmade bed.

While Cowin’s earlier, domestic photographs focused on the terrors of familial intimacy, these new images crackle with sexual tension, even when the characters are all men. As in film noir, these tableaux suggest that the rituals of male bonding and competition are essentially a matter of pose. If women fit into this world at all, it is as glamorous and potentially dangerous objects of desire. Although Cowin inevitably celebrates such conventions, through her deliberately self-mocking artifice, she also challenges them. This is also true of the works that refer to art history. Cowin’s treatment of the odalisque as a television viewer, or her presentation of a veiled Magritte heroine before her painted representation, casts a sheen of absurdity over Western art’s tendency to objectify women. Cowin’s photographs are great fun, but they bear a hidden stinger.

gallery Min publication available at www.ftn-books.com

Among the recently acquired gallery Min catalogues I personally find the one on Jo Ann Callis the most intriguing.therefore I decided to place the interview I found with her in this blog:

Jo Ann Callis is a photographer based in Los Angeles. After graduating from CalArts, she began teaching there in 1976 and is still a faculty member of the School of Art’s Program in Photography and Media. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2009, the J. Paul Getty Museum presented a retrospective of her work in Los Angeles titled Woman Twirling. Callis has received three NEA Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In this interview, Jo Ann Callis opens up about how art kept her sane as a young mother in an unhappy marriage, the impact mentor Robert Heinecken had on her life and career, and her process when going on a photoshoot.

TGL: How was your childhood?

JC: I had a middle class upbringing in Cincinnati Ohio. My father graduated as an electrical engineer but later went into the furniture business and my mother was an elementary school teacher. My sister and I became the victims of sibling rivalry, and I developed a sense of competition because of it. Sometimes that can be beneficial because it can give one drive to succeed and a lot of times that can be uncomfortable and detrimental.

Art was in my life from age eight. I took art classes for kids on Saturdays at the art museum. Somebody said I was good and that is all I needed to hear. I found something I had talent for and which I loved so much. It gave me a passion for making things and studying art. I went to college for two years and then got married. A year later at 20 I gave birth to my son and we moved to Greater Los Angeles. I had another son two years later. At 22 I was ill prepared to take on my new roles in life and to be away from any family support. I was the mother of two sons when all I really intended was to be was an artist.

TGL: What was it like being a young mother in California? 

JC: I was a homemaker and mother of two with big responsibilities for such a young person, but I attended sculpture classes at night at a community college to keep my sanity. Art helped me get through those most difficult years. I was driven to find a way to emotionally survive and art did that for me since I was a young child.

TGL: Were you making art at the time? 

JC: Besides going to night school for art, I was making paper collages at home. That was the best I could do then. Making art at night school became my salvation, it was a place to feel whole and to have a little piece of life away from family a couple times a week, at least.

TGL: You got your degree from UCLA. When did you decide to go back to school? 

JC: In 1970 I decided I wanted and needed my degree. I was thinking about getting out of my marriage, but I didn’t even have a college diploma yet and wondered how I would support myself and the children. At UCLA, I finished my undergraduate degree and then did my graduate studies there too. In 1976, before I completed my 3rd year of grad school I began teaching part time at CalArts. It was crazy. I didn’t know what I was doing at all, but I had a job, even though I had only been using a camera for 3 years before I started teaching others. I was very nervous and insecure about that, even though I was 36 years old at that time.

TGL: You took classes with Robert Heinecken at UCLA. 

JC: He changed my life, because he supported and respected the work I was making. He is the one who recommended me to teach at CalArts. Without his encouragement, I don’t think I would have had the courage to go into photography. A few years later, he introduced me to my second husband, who recently passed away.

TGL: Was your husband a photographer too? 

JC: No, he was a wonderful artist will a huge imagination and a great sense of humor that he brought into his art.  He was playful and drew, painted, and made installations in the desert. His day job was on the Santa Monica Pier. He didn’t have a career in art, but he drew pictures until almost the day he died. Art sustained us both and it was a good marriage.

TGL: Your art is very surreal, but you are not a surrealist. How would you describe your process?

JC: When I made work, I started to think about ideas and how I could make pictures around those ideas or emotions. I wasn’t thinking that I was a Surrealist or how a Surrealist would do it. I was just following my intuition somewhat like free-association bringing me to something I could work on to express myself.  Perhaps that is why my photos can look surreal; they may not make sense logically, but I hoped there was an emotional intelligence in play.

TGL: Did you plan out your photoshoots or improvise? 

JC: I planned out my shoots, because I have to know what props I needed or what the model looked like and how to direct them to make the photo I had imagined. I would go to a location first just to become more familiar with where to set up my camera to make the picture I had in mind. When I converted my garage into a studio I started making all my photos in that space from then on.

TGL: How did you choose your models?

JC: They were mostly people I knew or friends of friends. I wanted them to look somewhat androgynous. I didn’t want bodies that were particularly one way or the other. They were not portraits of any individual person. They were not objects either because they were human beings that I hoped could stand-in for a person in general, not any one person. I love the relationships between the objects and what the objects conjure up in one’s mind. I enjoy taking the familiar and making it unfamiliar, showing it in a way that gives it a different importance.  

TGL: When did you get your first exhibition? 

JC: A friend of mine had scheduled a show at the “Woman’s Building” downtown. She couldn’t make the show for some reason and asked me if I wanted to use her space, which I did. That was my first exhibition in 1975. I also sent my work to competitions and got into many exhibitions that way.

TGL: You came up during a time when we didn’t talk about women artists the way we do now. How did you feel as a woman artist? 

JC: I just felt I was an artist and not a Woman artist with a capital “W.” It was the time of the Women’s Liberation Movement with the bra burning etc. right when I came into my own ideas on art-making. Feminism was very strong, and I got criticism because I often cropped out the heads of female models so we wouldn’t get involved in their identity. Critics saw it as treating women like objects. In a way I was, but not because I didn’t respect them. They were actors in a play. When you go to a play the curtain opens and you see the actors in the set. Everything is intentional; the setups in my photos are fabricated for that purpose. The pictures don’t look natural because they are metaphors for communicating a feeling, emotion or an unknown narrative. Just like in a play you never think the actors are living their lives on that stage, they are acting out some made-up drama.

TGL: Your work has a strong relationship to theater and mise en scene. Could you describe your creative process?

JC: First I think up some idea that excites and challenges me. I make sketches of how I want the photo to turn out. I organize what needs to be done to make that happen and shoot the picture.  

TGL: You are represented by ROSEGALLERY in Santa Monica, a gallery that specializes in contemporary photography. What is important for you in the relationship between an artist and gallerist? 

JC: I think it is trust, honesty, and respect for each other and what they each do that are the most important things in that close relationship. Each has an important role to play in getting one’s art out into the world for others to see and appreciate. It is essential that the gallery works at that goal, and it is important that the artist makes the art so each of them can survive. I adore Rose and her staff, I owe a lot of my success to them and their support of what I do besides their willingness to go the extra mile to make sure others can see it too.  

TGL: Who would you like to have dinner with that you don’t already know?

JC: I’d like to meet Georgio Morandi, a painter whose work I adore.

TGL: What advice would you like to give to The Genius List’s readers?

JC: Do what you are passionate about if you can while still paying the bills as you pursue your goals. I had no choice because making art was the only thing I really wanted to do. I thought teaching art was a way to satisfy that need to carry on in the only profession I was capable of doing well. It was worth the struggles because I have had a rich and fulfilling life so far.

The signed Jo Ann Callis catalog is still available at www.ftn-books.com