FTN-blog

A longtime fascinationfor Gielijn Escher resulted in buying at auction a roll with Nederlands Kamerorkest posters. These were all early 70’s posters and the first impression was that they resembled Wim Crouwel’s poster from that era, but studying these they were less rigid. Brighter colors and lettering for wehich he later would become famous ( WATERLANDCONCERTEN),…. the best was yet to come. They were all signed by Gielijn Escher and now i am offering these at www.ftn-books.com

www.ftn-books.com

Designer and collector

At the age of seventeen, Gielijn Escher decided to become a poster designer. His passion for collecting began very early. At the age of six he began collecting orange wrappers and labels from orange crates. Four years later he started his, now vast, collection of posters

Gielijn Escher studied in at the Institute for Applied Arts Education (IvKNO), the forerunner of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam the 1960s. He has made announcements for dance and theatre performances, concerts and exhibitions. Typical of Escher’s independent vision was that he also had great admiration for more commercial designers such as Frans Mettes and Cor van Velsen. In the early 1970s Escher discovered the work of early-twentieth-century designer Lucian Bernhard and his contemporaries. Since then, Bernhard’s very simple and highly stylised Sachplakate have been a great source of inspiration for the designer.

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Even early on Emil Nolde was moved by the thought of finding a permanent home for his work: “an independent, free foundation”, that was to be opened to the public. To achieve this, after the residential and studio house in Seebüll was completed in 1946, he and his wife founded the Ada and Emil Nolde Foundation Seebüll.

In the preamble Nolde wrote: ” … in our little estate in pastorally simple nature – figuratively speaking – the seeking, spiritual wanderer from every country should find a special place where he can be given a little happiness and artistic-spiritual relaxation.”
The Nolde Foundation Seebüll has the task of managing Emil Nolde’s extensive estate in Seebüll in accordance with the artist’s sensibilities, preserving his work for posterity, and circulating it worldwide.

This is how the foundation introduces itself on its internet site and with over 60000 visitors yearly it has proven to be far more that a outing on a rainy day. Seebull is important and i am proud that i have acquired a small mid Nineties collection of its poster publications which is now available at www.ftn-books.com. Here are some examples.

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Jasper Morrison is a leading designer, considered to be one of the most accomplished product designers of his generation. Morrison is best known for his work in furniture, lighting, electrical products and tableware. Morrison believes the role of the designer is not to invent form, but rather to be open to the surrounding world, reapplying form to meet new purposes. He is especially interested in those everyday objects that are so good in their design they almost go unnoticed. One of the best recent examples is his Oplight. On the wall just a round object, but whenlighted it lights the wall as if being a sunny object in the middle of a wall. The book that Flos published on thsi architectural lamp is now available at www.ftn-books.com

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A lesser known, but to me a highly important artist in the Netherlands was Loes van der Horst, she became one. of the first who had becaem a totally abstract/ constructivist artist. Mix Hussem, Carel Visser and Ansuya Blom , shake and …..there is the cocktail that represents Loes van der Horst.

It is the kind of art i like most and because not many museums have work by van der Horst in their collections ( the Kroller Muller has a fairly large collection) it is still to be acquired through auctions at reasonable prises. This is such an artist i can highly recommend.

www.ftn-books.com has the privately published DE GETEKENDE RUIMTE available.

Weather condition a 1 on a scale of 1 to 10 , so the worst imaginable possible, but after entering this wonder of architecture we fell in love with the building. Functional to host the collection of the Boymans van Beuningen museum, but beside being functional the building has so much to offer. Corners, see through moments, vistas, a roof garden, town view and a restaurant for some nice snacks and of course art, but ….. here is in my personal opinion…. a tiny problem. The buidling is fantastic, but in the building itself there were at least 4 spaces suitable to present small exhibitions and they were not there. A room was filled with the building history and concept of Het DEPOT, the other for the restauration progress of the Boymans, One was filled with 3 large objects by John Block and the largest of them all with one black mechanical work of art and the rest was empty. With so many important and beautiful items at hand it should not be any problem to organise some nice small exhibitions with works directly from out of HET DEPOT. Boymans should use this space and not wait another 3 to 4 years before they can open again. But still an impressive addition to the landscape of dutch museums. well worth visiting!

Today, after visiting the recently opened HET DEPOT ( by Boymans van Beuningen ) we visited the Alexander Calder exhibition at DE KUNSTHAL. It was less informative than the Calder exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag some years ago, but if was more pleasing to the eye with some beautiful examples of Mobiles and one maquette for a large sculpture that was so impressive, that i think, together with the Brancusi we saw in Prague some years ago, was among the best sculptures i have ever seen ..

I did not count them , but there were some 20 Calder sculptures on show together with kinetic works by others that were inspired by Calder. Calder is of course in a league of his own, but some examples were well worth seeing and were certainly no misfits among the Calders. I have taken some photographs to give an impression of the exhibition and keep in mind that www.ftn-books.com has some nice Calder material for sale.

The below items are available at www.ftn-books.com

In Italy he is called a “Grande Artista” outside Italy his art is hardly known. If i look at his paintings i can see them among other works of art from the Fifties and Sixties , but i think his use of color is far more mediterranean than others. Certainly not Pop Art , but a bit more like the later paintings by Constant. Still they are nice to look at and they deserve to be be known by far more people thanhis admirers in Italy. The Monograph from 1971 publsihed by Edzioni P. Petrus is now available at www.ftn-books.com.