FTN-blog

Inspired by a projcet that my wife was doing for her work. I noticed the raised interest in the classic designs of William Morris and the use of these complex, but classic designs in Modern and Contemporary interior designs. Contemporary furniture and lightning is chosen with a background on one of the walls designed by William Morris. And not one, but i saw the use of William Morris wallpapers in multiple of her designs.

 

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Throughout his life, William Morris was fascinated by textiles and the techniques he needed to master to produce the effects he saw and admired in historical furnishings.

Satisfying his need for a manual as well as an intellectual engagement with design, textiles also offered Morris the scope to develop his talent for pattern across a huge number of different products. The V&A has extensive collections of his work in textiles – ranging from examples of his first experiments in embroidery in the early 1860s through to the imposing tapestry panels he helped to create only a few years before his death.

These dessigns now certainly have proven to be timeless. Many of these are over 150 years old, but they remain fresh and my guess is they  still will be used in another 100 years.

 

The above publication is available at www.ftn-books.com

For me the period between the two world wars ( Interbellum ) is the strongest for Peter Alma. In these years he made his most important works. Communist and artist at the same time, he was very much influenced by the socialist and communist art from the early decades of the 20th century.

Among his friends Hildo Krop, Berlage and Charley Toorop. Unfortunately he never became the famous artist he would have deserved to be. This means that his (graphic) works can be bought at very reasonable prices and at auction you can become outright lucky for some 50 Euro or so. I compare his graphics with the best Gerd Arntz made in his prime and beside their artistic value these works belong to the strongest graphic works from then first half of the 20th century.

www.ftn-books.com has the Stedelijk Museum Alma catalogue available.

BTW. the above catalogue was designed by another great from last century. Piet Zwart did the design.

You might find his sculptures a bit outdated, but they are still strong and are in most cases part of dutch history. There is Lely , the man who designed the AFSLUITDIJK, the DOKWERKER and many others that are equal iconic. Andriessen was one of the most important sculptors from the first part of 20th century in the Netherlands, but his works seem to be almost forgotten. That is the reason of this blog. Andriessen is important for dutch art and deserves some extra attention. 

A nice touch is this cinematictribute from the  POLYGOON JOURNAAL in which his 70th birthday is commemorated.

 

The following Andriessen publication are available at www.ftn-books.com

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I had not heard of Kemeny before i visited the Cobra Museum where an exhibition was held on Zoltan & Madeleine Kemeny in 2004 (items available at www.ftn-books.com)

Zoltan Kemeny was born on March 21, 1907, in the hamlet of Banica, Transylvania, then part of Hungary. As an adolescent he learned to paint under the tutelage of a naïve sign painter. Apprenticed to a cabinet maker in 1921, he began to study technical drawing for furniture making in 1923. From 1924 to 1927 Kemeny took courses in architecture and interior decoration at the School of Decorative Arts in Budapest. Thereafter he enrolled in the School of Fine Arts in Budapest, where he studied painting from 1927 to 1930.

In 1930 Kemeny settled in Paris; he abandoned painting and for the next decade worked as a designer of forged metal objects, a fashion designer and at other trades. After spending the years 1940 to 1942 in Marseille, Kemeny moved to Zürich. There he resumed painting and supported himself as a fashion designer and, from 1952, as an editor for a fashion magazine. His first solo exhibition took place at the Galerie des Eaux-Vives in Zürich in 1945. The following year the artist’s first one-man show in Paris was held at the Galerie Kléber, and he met Dubuffet. Subsequent to this encounter with Dubuffet, Kemeny began to introduce commonplace found objects such as pebbles, beads and dried grass into his works, to produce collage and reliefs with crude, rough surfaces.

The character of Kemeny’s work changed markedly in 1951 when he made his first translucent, colored reliefs, in which objects are attached to glass sheets. He sometimes enhanced the luminosity of these reliefs by placing an electric light behind the glass. By 1954 the artist began to renounce crude materials in favor of metal, the medium he continued to use throughout his life. Kemeny obtained Swiss citizenship in 1957. In 1959 he was honored with a retrospective at the Kunsthaus Zürich. He gave up his work as a fashion designer to devote himself exclusively to sculpture in 1960, the year of his first one-man exhibition in New York, at the Sidney Janis Gallery. He executed several major commissions in his last years, including a brass sculpture for the municipal theater in Frankfurt. Zoltan Kemeny died on June 14, 1965, in Zürich.

 

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The day before yesterday i wrote a blog on the ZEVEN series by Frank van Hemert. But it was far from complete. On another bookshelf i found the book Reconstructie , published by the Haags Gemeentemuseum and written by Franz Kaiser . This contains several more paintings from the ZEVEN series. The reason why i had missed this is that i put the book apart from the rest of the Frank van Hemert publications, since most of the paintings it contains have been painted with the Red/Pink color that has caused so much trouble for Frank. Most of these paintings are considered to be lost, since the paint drips literally on the floor and unfortunately there is at this moment no solution to preserve them. I am a collector and i have been warned to be careful with these paintings and therefore i had placed the catalogue at hand….just to remember to be careful, but here are the paintings still in their prime condition, but after 30 years it is highly probable that most of these have been damaged beyond repair and must be considered lost.

(except for the painting above the text, the condition is excellent of this superb painting)