I will follow up with the 1994 invitation card for the Jan Cunen exhibition in which Piet participated.
De Tilburgse Schoool
de Tilburgse School is the tile of a book with text by Geurt Imanse, former curator of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. De Tilburgse School has proven to be one of the most important new groups of Modern Art painters in the Netherlands.
Who are members of the Tilburgse School?. ..The painters that form this group are :
Marc Mulders, Reinoud van Vught, Guido Geelen, Paul van Dongen, Ronald Zuurmond.
Personally i think Marc Mulders is one of the most gifted painters in the Netherlands and his works always fascinate me, but do not neglect the works from the others…. in many cases they are equally interesting.
What makes these painters stand out? …true craftmanship and the search for new ways in expressing themselves and it shows in the books i have on all these artists at www.ftn-books.com
Shizuko Yoshikawa | 吉川 静子 | (1934)
Shizuko Yoshikawa is one of the artists that knows how to build a bridge between architecture and Modern Art. Swiss citizen but Jpanese born Yoshikawa was largely influenced by the ideas of design department of the Hochschule fur Gestaltung in Ulm.
One of the people who recognized that was the owner of gallery Artline in the Netherlands who held an exhibition in 1986 on Yoshikawa, presenting her color reliefs for the first time in the Netherlands. I wish i had seen her work at that time, Because my knowledge on art has grown over the years. If i now had a chance in aquiring a Yoshikawa work i really would consider to add it to my collection. It is the kind of art that grows on you and is appreciated more and ore over the years. Rooted in the sixties it has a little from everything a bit minimal art, a dash of Zero and perhaps a drop of Kinetic art makes a Yoshikawa work one of a kind.
Julia Ventura (1952)
Portuguese born, but working in both Lisbon and Amsterdam her works reflect her surroundings. There was a time in the mid Eighties that her work was widely available in the Netherlands because exhibitions were held at many places in the Netherlands including some renowned museums. But starting in the late Nineties her works were becoming more scarce and less available in the Netherlands. Her focus was no longer on the Netherlands and Portugal alone, but her works were presented in Switzerland, China and Spain too. Later i learned that most of her work is now being sold and available in Portugal itself . Julia Ventura is represented by some well known Portuguese galleries.
In her work, Júlia Ventura explores which role the photo can play in the representation of the self. Her initial work features black and white photos of herself in emotion-filled poses. In later work, in ingenious photos of her fingerprint which she adapts using all kinds of methods and techniques, she focuses on the suggestion of authenticity that emanates from the image.
www.ftn-books.com has one of the first Ventura publications available
David Redfern (1936-2014)
David Redfern is best known for his photography of musical performances and musicians. Here is the biography you can find on his site.
60’s JAZZ
David Redfern’s career began in the twilight jazz clubs of 1960’s London. He risked his one and only camera amongst the jiving teenage crowds. The British Trad boom was under way. His first published photos featured Kenny Ball, Chris Barber, George Melly, and the old Marquee Club.
TV
David began photographing TV Shows like ‘Ready Steady Go’ and ‘Thank Your Lucky Stars’ which were shot during the day. Here he made many of his now classic shots of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Dusty Springfield.
CLUB NIGHTS
Nights were spent at the 100 Club, Ronnie Scott’s or the Marquee, where he captured on film all the jazz greats from Miles Davis to Ella Fitzgerald.
US DAYS
These pictures were to contribute to what is now the most comprehensive jazz collection in Europe. To break into the commercial world by chasing the big American names, David became a regular visitor to the Jazz festivals in Newport, Antibes and Montreux, and the big rock festivals, photographing such greats as Hendrix and Dylan.
FIRST BOOK
By the 1970’s David had firmly established his name as one of the top music photographers in the business. In 1980 Pete Townsend’s Eel Pie Company published David Redfern’s Jazz Album. Lavishly illustrated with many of David’s finest jazz photographs, it was highly acclaimed by critics and public alike. In the same year, at Frank Sinatras request, David stepped into Terry O’Neill’s shoes as official tour photographer.
EXHIBITIONS
In the late ’80s several exhibitions featured the first 25 years:
- He showed his work along with Lord Lichfield and Lord Snowdon at the Kodak and Royal Photographic Society’s ‘Living Body’ exhibition. Based on the Channel 4 TV series, it was one of the biggest exhibitions ever held by Kodak.
- In 1990 he was invited to put on an exhibition in Cuba to coincide with the Jazz Festival there.
NOTTING HILL
At the beginning of 1989 David moved his music picture library REDFERNS to new premises in West London, a location now much favoured by the British music industry. The library expanded rapidly. Covering over 26,000 different artists and styles from every musical genre, and representing some 500 photographers and collections, it became the most comprehensive music picture library in the world, with over 205,000 items online.
Redfern is without a doubt a great photographer, artistically he is not the greatest of all his contemporaries, but his photographs are a historical document and must be admired by all who love music. Deavid Redfern books can be found at www.ftn-books.com
Joseph Semah (1948)
Joseph Semah is an israel/dutch artist who has been working the main part of his artistic life in the Netherlands. His works can be found in the Stedelijk Museum collection.
Artist Joseph Sassoon Semah was born in Baghdad (Iraq), where his grandfather Hacham Sassoon Kadoori (1885-1971) was the President of the Babylonian Jewish community. With his parents Joseph Semah was ’displaced’ to the State of Israel in 1950. In the mid-1970s Semah decided to leave Israel, describing this as a form of self-imposed exile. He lived and worked in London, Berlin and Paris. Since 1981 he has resided in Amsterdam. He regards himself as a ‘guest’ in the Western (art) world.
Reading into works of art using his native-language Hebrew as the framework, Semah signals a lack of knowledge about Judaism. He believes Jewish layers of meaning are not given enough attention in art history and feels compelled to rectify this: to fill the ‘empty page’. His extensive oeuvre consists of drawings, paintings, sculptures, installations, performances and texts.
www.ftn-books.com has some nice Semah titles available
Guillaume Bijl (1946)
The first Guillaume Bijl installation/exhibition i visited was the Guillaume bIjl installation he had made for the Witte de With venue in Rotterdam. It was the opening exhibition in 1990 for which Bijl had made . It was Für Garderobe keine Haftung .
In light of the newly created exhibition space at Witte de With, Bijl’s show could be seen as a critique of the spectacular and inflationary nature of fine art production as well as an ironical poke at the profusion of exhibitions and exhibition spaces. Guillaume Bijl’s exhibition at Witte de With presented a survey of his installations and objects from the eighties, in the form of a shopping mall.
Guillaume Bijl (1946) has been testing the relationship between art and consumer society since 1979, when he made his Art Liquidation Project. This work took the form of a mock government commissioned report in which he concluded that, in light of the proven uselessness of art, all areas devoted to the arts should be made suitable for more practical purposes. Since then, Bijl has been transforming museums and art galleries into fitness centers, lamp shops, carpet stores, travel agencies, driving schools, and so on. His imitations of spaces not traditionally associated with the arts are caught up in a perplexing interplay between fiction and reality. Even more confusion is caused by Bijl’s imitations of art spaces, such as his fictive exhibition Four American Artists (1987), or his fictive commercial fair installed at the art fair of Lyon in 1986, which also included an art store selling his paintings.
Bijl ironically points out the connection between the display of goods in shop windows and showrooms and the exhibition of objects in museums and galleries. In his installations, consumer items and museum objects seem interchangeable. Bijl’s logic assumes the complete abolition of real differences in the commercial rhetoric of consumer society.
www.ftn-books.com has some nice Guillaume Bijl publications available.
Lettering by Modern Artists
The above title is the same title as the exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1966. I recently acquired this catalogue which is now for sale at www.ftn-books.com and for me it makes clear the importance Modern Artists have for Modern typography. this is not the printed letter, but the much more free and personal lettering by artists on paper and canvas, making this a source of inspiration for modern typographers and designers and it shows clearly the way lettering can be used to make a splendid composition and be informative at the same time. A catalogue i can truly recommend.
Piet Dirkx weekly
I had to dig in my archives to find the subject of the Piet Dirkx weekly in the coming weeks and decided to show you some publications i have collected over the last 35 years.
The first is the invitation fot the artotheek Dordrecht presentation:
André van der Vossen (1893-1963)
A typical dutch abstract artist who was inspired by many of his great contemporaries. Autodidact he now has a nice following of admireres in the netherland who collect his work. You can recognize influences of Matisse, Miro and Calder in his works, specially when he uses torn papers to make his compositions. Compositions which are constructivist on first sight , but study them more closely they become far more loose and less rigid then the constructivist compositions of these times. I personally like his work very much and it is still very affordable to collect. Pollock and Soulages can be recognized within some of his compositions too, but with a very large difference. …..These works are sold at 1/10000 of their price levels.
Andre van der Vossen worked as a teacher at the Dienst Esthetische Vormgeving PTT and Joh, Enschede as a graphic designer and was member of Vrij Beelden, Creatie (Co-founder), de Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Parijs and with Liga Nieuwe Beelden.
www.ftn-books.com has a nice publication available at www.ftn-books.com
