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galerie Nouvelles Images…”the end”

A few days ago it was a shock for me to learn that gallery Nouvelles Images will close its doors permanently. This gallery has been a long time institution in the dutch art world and one of the galleries that gave direction to the dutch art world. Ton Berends and later on Erik Bos were visionary gallery owners that meant a lot to the young artists and because of their influence opened doors to museums and foreign galleries. Beside that they were great art dealers who presented and represented many artists for the very first time in the Netherlands and on art shows.

I visited the gallery dozens of times and i always enjoyed the spacious rooms. My personal favorites were of course Dirkx, van Hemert, Geurts and Willem Hussem who’s heirs they have  represented for more than 30 years now. Nouvelles Images will not exist any more in the near future. So take a look at a great art institution in The Hague while you can. The gallery will close on the 1st of October 2018.

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www.ftn-books.com has many Nouvelles Images available

GALERIE NOUVELLES IMAGES SLUIT DE DEUREN

Sinds de oprichting in 1960 is NOUVELLES IMAGES (NI) een beeldbepalende en invloedrijke galerie in Nederland; eerst onder de visionaire leiding van initiator Ton Berends en vanaf 1989 onder de bevlogen aanpak van zijn opvolger Erik Bos.

Erik Bos is in december 2016 overleden en liet zijn nalatenschap ten goede komen aan de beeldende kunsten, in het bijzonder de fotografie via het Erik Bos Fonds, een fonds op naam van het Gemeentemuseum Den Haag. De galerie voortzetten was voor alle betrokkenen een grote wens.

Sinds vorig jaar maart werkten wij, de nieuwe directeur Marie Jeanne de Rooij en rechterhand Sander Creman, voortvarend aan de continuering van de galerie voortbouwend op de geschiedenis en reputatie van NOUVELLES IMAGES met een zichtbare focus op de gewenste vernieuwing.

Helaas is door de aanhoudend ongewisse kunstmarkt en de complexe overdracht van de galerie door de direct betrokkenen met pijn in het hart besloten de galerie met ingang van
1 oktober 2018 te sluiten.

NOUVELLES IMAGES dankt alle kunstenaars voor hun kunstenaarschap en vriendschap, en alle kunstliefhebbers die de kunst en de kunstenaars door de jaren heen met hun aankopen gesteund hebben.

NOUVELLES IMAGES organiseert van zaterdag 1 september t/m zondag 9 september een laatste verkooptentoonstelling met werken uit de collectie NI waarvan de opbrengst aangewend zal worden om de galerie goed af te sluiten voor de kunstenaars van de galerie en voor de direct betrokkenen. Meer informatie over deze tentoonstelling wordt op korte termijn bekend gemaakt.

Marie Jeanne de Rooij & Sander Creman

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Viktor & Rolf , 25 years in Fashion

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Viktor & Rolf celebrate this year their 25 years of cooperation jubilee. Working together and designing fashion in a very personal style with lots of humor. A success story which brought these dutch fashion designers fame and all over the world presenting their collections, opening exhibitions and resulting in a highly succesful internet store filled with pret a porter and fragrances . They call themselves FASHION ARTISTS and when you look at the catalogue that is available at www.ftn-books.com you can see why. The book is 100% Viktot & Rolf. Cover, the chosen black, printing and layout , everything breathes Viktor & Rolf.

For those living in Australia …know that there will be a Viktor & Rolf exhibition coming up in Melbourne in the National Gallery of Victoria.

 

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the Analogy between Jan Saudek and Katharina Behrend

When you literally strip all from your subject and leave her standing in front of a chosen background there is not much difference.

There is 70 years between these 2 photographs but when you tell me it is only 10 years i would believe it too. Katharina Eleonore Behrend made her photographs between 1904 and 1928 and the entire series which was still within her family was left to the Stichting Nederlands Fotoarchief in Leiden. The series shows an artistic point of view on daily life in the beginning of the 20th century and gives a perfect impression of the Netherlands around 1910. The art nude is somehow different….. it is classic in its pose and shows why photography can be great art too. Beautiful light and the perfect intriguing picture.

The Katharina Eleonore Behrend 1904-1928 book is available at www.ftn-books.com

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Piet Stockmans (1940)

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Stockmans worked for Koninklijke Mosa in Maastricht as an industrial designer for a great part of his artistic life, but since 1989 he is a free lance designer and became very well known for his extremely fragile ceramics and his cooperation with the great culinary chefs of Europe.

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If you look at the eyes of Stockmans you discover where he found his favorite color beside the white of his ceramics. He frequently uses the color of pale blue on the edge of his egg shell ceramics. windlights , coffee cups and small vases have in many cases a blue edge. The edge together with the use of the fragile material is the signature of Piet Stockmans. Nice to know is that his products are fully handmade, all unique because all are made and finished by hand and still affordable. A true ceramic artist on whom www.ftn-books.com has some nice publications available.

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Furniture catalogues…. impressive and highly collectable

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Many of you have sometime in their lives took home a furniture catalogue. No, not the one from IKEA  or Habitat, but one from one of the more prestigious designers like Vitra, Herman Miller, Alessi, Foscarelli or Cassina. These are the ones that matter and because they have almost unlimited funds for promotion at their sisposal their catalogues belong to the very best. The best photographers, designers and printers are selected and with them they make beautiful timeless books/catalogues/editions for their products. Even better….because they are just promotional material many of these are lost or replaced making them scarce and highly collectable items. To start a collection ….just visit your local furnituer mall, selct the best store with the most prestigious furniture name and ask them for some product catalogues so you can do your choosing at home. My guess is you will leave the store with a bundle of catalogues and have started your own collection. Beside these free publications some of these companies have their own line of publications. One of them is Cassina who have produced several prestigious books on their products and designers over the decades. www.ftn-books.com has the ones on Le Corbusier and Mackintosh now for sale.

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El Lissitzky (1890-1941)

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Here is an artist who’s works were very well known from the very first beginning of his career. Suprematism being one of the key collection parts of the Stedelijk Museum, El Lissitzky soon became part of this great and important collection. Because of this large collection part, an interest in his works was aroused from the very first beginning resulting in some purchases by important collectors and acquiring works by museum for their collections. Among them; Stedelijk Museum, Haags Gemeentemuseum, Boymans van Beuningen and the van Abbemuseum.

There is so much to be told about El Lissitzky as an artist because he was a true multi talented artist. A Painter, sculptor , architect and designer all within the same person. One aspect of his career i would like to mention specially. His graphic design.

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El Lissitzky is the 9th person from the left

During his stay in Germany Lissitzky also developed his career as a graphic designer with some historically important works such as the books Dlia Golossa (For the Voice), a collection of poems from Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Die Kunstismen (The Artisms) together with Jean Arp. In Berlin he also met and befriended many other artists, most notably Kurt Schwitters, László Moholy-Nagy, and Theo van Doesburg. Together with Schwitters and van Doesburg, Lissitzky presented the idea of an international artistic movement under the guidelines of constructivism while also working with Kurt Schwitters on the issue Nasci (Nature) of the periodical Merz, and continuing to illustrate children’s books. The year after the publication of his first Proun series in Moscow in 1921, Schwitters introduced Lissitzky to the Hanover gallery kestnergesellschaft, where he held his first solo exhibition. The second Proun series, printed in Hanover in 1923, was a success, utilizing new printing techniques. Later on, he met Sophie Küppers, who was the widow of Paul Küppers, an art director of the kestnergesellschaft at which Lissitzky was showing, and whom he would marry in 1927.

There are some really nice El Lissitzky publications available at www.ftn-books.com.

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William T. Wiley ( 1937 )

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Two catalogues available at www.ftn-books.com and not many more that i know of, make William T. Wiley a rather obscure artist for me, but i realize that is the case only for me, because outside the Netherlands, specially in the US, his name is well known and growing with the year.

His art is typical for the West Coast of the US, but has also something of Jan Fabre and Gunter Brus in it. It has certainly much more humor and at the same time it is very typical for the art Wiley creates and not anything else.

Maybe the importance of Wiley is that he educated some of the great Contemporary artists like Bruce Nauman. Here is what Wikipedia says about it:

He was born in Bedford, Indiana. Raised in Indiana, Texas, and Richland, Washington, Wiley moved to San Francisco to study at the California School of Fine Arts where he earned his BFA in 1960 and his MFA two years later. In 1963, Wiley joined the faculty of the UC Davis art department with Bay Area Funk Movement artists Robert Arneson and Roy DeForest. During that time Wiley instructed students including Bruce Nauman, Deborah Butterfield, and Stephen Laub. According to Dan Graham, the literary, punning element of Nauman’s work came from Wiley. Wiley also acknowledges the effect Nauman had on his own work.

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Rudolf Steiner …. art & architecture

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Yesterday my wife an i visited the ‘ DE PARADE ” a cultural fair with music and performances. a great evening and great fun on the fairground and at the time we left it was still light enough to distinguish the buildings in the surroundings. We took a shortcut to the tramstop and ….there it was …. a great building used nowadays as a care home for older people. architecture by J.W.E. Buijs en J.B. Lursen from 1924, commissioned by the dutch anthroposophic society and heavily inspired by the architecture of Rudolf Steiner.

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This was a great building and for me a total surprise, because i never had seen it before nor heard about it. It brought back memories and i remembered the large inventory we had during the Spiritual in Art exhibition which was organized by the Haags Gemeentemuseum together with the Los Angeles County Museum which catalogues are still available at www.ftn-books.com. The exhibition showed the importance of the iedeas of rudolf Steiner and the influence these ideas had on the art and artist of the Interbellum and shortly after.

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Sonsbeek…an exhibition park near Arnhem

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A City and its Exhibition

It was in 1948 that a councillor, a VVV tourism official and the mayor of Arnhem launched an initiative for a contemporary art exhibition on a scale unprecedented in Europe. Their aim was to give the city which had experienced so much destruction during the Second World War a totally new appeal.

Processing the traumatic wartime experience

Sonsbeek ’49 opened that following year with over two hundred works displayed along the paths in the park. Most of these were figurative sculptures created since the turn of the century. A recurring theme among the newer works was the processing of Holland’s traumatic wartime experience, such as Nel Klaassen’s monumental Honour the Woman which still stands in Arnhem.

Connected to the present

In subsequent editions of the exhibition, the idea was the same. Sculptures by internationally renowned artists were presented to Arnhem’s public: Auguste Rodin, Ossip Zadkine, Henri Moore, Pablo Picasso, John Rädecker and Hildo Krop. After each edition the Arnhem council selected some of the exhibited works for permanent display in the city. Often, these were works that referred to the war, such as Ossip Zadkine’s Phoenix which found a permanent place in front of the town hall. Since the beginning, SONSBEEK has always been closely concerned with contemporary issues and current affairs.

Selected by a curator based on a specific theme

After the first four editions, one every three years and each similarly presented, SONSBEEK seemed to have become a tradition. Until in 1971 SONSBEEK broke with that tradition and quite literally went off the beaten track with a show compiled for the first time by a curator and expressing a specific theme. Sonsbeek Buiten de Perken was assembled by Wim Beeren, then chief curator at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. The exhibits abandoned their pedestals, some even left the city and the country. Prominent conceptual artists such as Claes Oldenburg, Wim T. Schippers, Robert Smithson and Nam June Paik turned the exhibition into a milestone for avant-garde art. SONSBEEK became synonymous with progressive and experimental, thematic art shows.

SONSBEEK has constantly played a pioneering role through its novel presentations of art in public space. In collaboration with the curatorial collective ruangrupa, SONSBEEK once again brought art to the public in 2016. SONSBEEK ’16: transACTION marked the start of a quadrennial, the 12th edition will take place in 2020.

www.ftn-books.com has some of the Sonsbeel catalogues still available

 

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Piet Warffemius (1956)

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It took me 2 decades to finally appreciate Piet Warffemius his works. Personally i was not that much convinced by his early graphic works , but from the moment he depicted branches and leaves in his paintings and translated them into cortensteel “outside” sculptures, i was convinced of their quality and now we have almost 7 years now our own Warffemius sculpture ” van een naar twee” in our garden.

It is not unique, it comes from an edition of 5 copies but that does not matter. For us it was our first and until now our only outside sculpture. The most beautiful aspect is that the sculpture present itself differnntly with the change of the seasons. Cortensteel is not a evry friendly material but corrosion gives it a beautful reddisch browm patine which blends perfect with flowers and plants.

Since i have been collecting Warffemius books and found some extra ones which are now for sale at www.ftn-books