FTN-blog

Most people do not know his name, but Janco is an important name in art since he was one of the founding members of the DADA mouvement in Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich in 1916. He then moved back to Romania , where he lived from 1922 until he fled in 1941 from National Socialism to Palestine. He founded an artist village near Haifa and lived until his death in Israel. Perhaps that is the reason why most of his works can be found outside Europe. Still his work is important and that is finally recognised by some of the large Museums in Europe which held some exhibitions on Janco and his graphic Works in the past 2 decades. Not confident enough to publish a large run of the catalogue, the KUNSTHAL partcipated in a small limited edition of only 320 (numbered 297) copies of which i finally found a copy. This book is now for sale at www.ftn-books.com

I have written numerous blogs on the great galeries in the world from the past to present, but this time it is no gallery but and Art Dealer who shaped the art landscape in the Netherlands for over 45 years now. Ivo Bouwman stands for the best in 19th and early 20th century paintings and drawings and has played a part in building many great collections over the last 45 years. Just take a look at his site: https://www.ivobouwman.nl/en/

and leaf through his catalogues of which some examples are now available at www.ftn-books.com and you see the impressive list of great artists and their art and the quality he stands for. If there is one person i can recommend for your appraisal of 19th and early 20th century art it must be Ivo Bouman , because of his expertise on this period.

Born in 1953 in Saïda, Algeria, Jean-Michel Alberola lives and works in Paris. During his thirty-year career he has produced a protean body of work that straddles figurative, abstract and conceptual art. Gouaches, sculptures, artists’ books and films represent the different facets of his exploration of the fragility of beauty, ambiguity of perception, the role of the artist and the purpose of art. With the mixture of humour and lyricism characteristic of an engaged artist, he combines artistic reflections with political and social questions, making this one of the more interesting and iportant artists from his generatio. www,ftn-books.com has a few titles on Alberola available.

The painter Marie-Louise von Motesiczky was born in Vienna in 1906. Leaving Vienna immediately after the Anschluss with Germany in 1938, she and her mother Henriette arrived in England in 1939 where they were to spend the rest of their lives.

Several critically acclaimed exhibitions, especially in Liverpool, London, New York and Vienna, have acquainted the public with Motesiczky’s oeuvre which comprises portraits, self-portraits, still-lifes, landscapes and allegorical paintings. During her lifetime, the main body of her work was kept together by the artist then passed to the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust. Much of that work is now distributed among public collections in the UK, Ireland, Austria, Germany, Holland and in one case, the United States. 

www.ftn-books.com has the Franke gallery exhibition catalogue now available.

Pessers was born on 3 January 1899 in Tilburg. She attended the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Her teachers included Gustave De Smet, Jan van Delft, Antoon Derkinderen, Gerard Jacobs [nl], Constant Permeke, Henri Van Haelen, and Albert Verschuuren [nl]. Her work was included in the 1939 exhibition and sale Onze Kunst van Heden (Our Art of Today) at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. In 1941 she married P.M.C. Jansen.

Pessers died on 22 May 1986 in Heeze. Her work is in the Noordbrabants Museum and the Van Abbemuseum

www.ftn-books.com has the Noordbrabants MUseum catalogue from 1981 available

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!