FTN-blog

Alfred Reth, Alfred Roth-his real name, was born in 1884 in Budapest (Hungary). Son of a doctor, he moved to Paris in 1905, after he had travelled a lot in Italy. Living in Montparnasse, he attended the academy Jacques Emile Blanche, where he studying drawing. During a second trip to Italy, Alfred Reth studied a few months to the Beaux-Arts in Florence.
He came back to Paris in 1907. The Cubist influence was perceptible in his works, portraits, still lives, landscapes. When he discovered the hindu art in museums, Reth decided to study it scientifically in 1908. Thus he tried to applied mystical principles to his work. A very important exhibition was devoted to him to the Gallery Der Sturm in Berlin in 1913. He exhibited more than 80 cubist paintings and drawings; his originality in Cubism has been to seek “a balance between masses together”.
With the declaration of war in 1914, Alfred Reth enlisted in the French army and was quickly reformed.
From 1910, the artist participated in collectives exhibitions in France and abroad, including yearly Parisian Salons (Salon d’Automne, the Salon des Independants, Salon des Tuileries, etc…). He was a founding member of the Abstraction-CreationFair and the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. Many Parisian galleries exhibited his work (Denise Rene Gallery, Galerie Berthe Weill…).
During and after the First World War, Alfred Reth returned to a more realistic painting. He probably stopped painting a few years until 1920. In 1920, Reth renewed with the most daring of his artistic past, then leading to solutions that were similar to Delaunay’s chromatic circles.
Gradually, his work evolved toward a whole abstraction, without any concern for representation, association or equivalent.
Alfred Reth died in Paris on September 15th, 1966, after an exhibition he got in Chicago.

www.ftn-books.com has two scarce Reth publications available.

In his artistic research, Carlos Amorales is interested mainly in language and the impossibility/possibility of communicating through means that are unrecognizable or not codified: sounds, gestures, and symbols. Amorales experiments at the limits between image and sign with an array of platforms: animation, video, film, drawing, installation, performance, and sound. His practice is based on different forms of translation: instruments that become characters in his films, letters that become shapes, and narratives unfold as non-verbal actions. As the basis for many of his explorations,

Amorales has used Liquid Archive: a project composed of shapes, lines and nodes instead of words that he started in 1998 and continued to nourish for over ten years. In addition to Liquid Archive, he has developed other alphabets and systems that he uses to translate texts that range from museum labels to short stories. The works of Amorales exist in an alternate world of their own making, parallel to ours; constantly evolving at the same rhythm that they are produced.

www.ftn-books.com has the Amorales /Stedelijk Museum now for sale.

Constantin Meunier, in full Constantin Emile Meunier, (born April 12, 1831, Etterbeek, Belgium—died April 4, 1905, Ixelles), Belgian sculptor and painter, one of the principal social-realist artists of the late 19th century in Europe.

Meunier began his career as a sculptor, but during the years 1857–84 he pursued only painting. After visiting some mines and factories, Meunier demonstrated in his paintings a humanitarian interest in labourers, focusing particularly on the miners of the Borinage, dockworkers of Antwerp, metalworkers, and women labourers.

In 1882, under the sponsorship of the Belgian government, Meunier went to Spain, where he produced paintings primarily on religious subjects. After returning to Belgium, he began to explore in bronze sculpture the social themes that had dominated his earlier paintings. The empathy and respect with which he viewed his subjects (e.g., The Fire-Damp Explosion, 1887) renders Meunier’s work universal rather than political. His notable works include The Docker (1905) and a large sculptural group, Monument to Labour, which was installed in the Place de Trooz, Brussels, in 1930.

www.ftn-books.com has several publications available on Meunier

Mordecai Ardon (1896-1992) is considered by many to be Israel’s greatest painter. He studied at the Bauhaus (1921-25) under Klee, Kandinsky, Feininger and Itten. The influence of the Bauhaus and especially of Paul Klee on his artistic development was profound and lasted a life time. The other great source of inspiration were the Old Masters, especially Rembrandt, and El Greco. After graduating from the Bauhaus he studied the painting techniques of the Old Masters under Max Doerner, at the Munich Academy (1926). These dual, seemingly contradicting elements, forged the character of his painting throughout the 70 years of his artistic career. Ardon’s unique position in Modern Art stems from the union of these two opposites in his paintings: A Modern, Expressionist, and mainly Abstract, style, with the classical painting technique of the Old Masters. The depth and richness of his colours owe their quality to this technique. He liberated them from the figurative context of the Old Masters, and turned them into tools for the creation of his original contribution to Modern Art of the 20th Century.
 

www.ftn-books.com has some nice and classic Ardon titles available.

To start with…..I admire both equally. One is one of the greatest graphic artists from the last century…. the other one of the most influential graphic designers of the last century and they worked together for the last Masereel catalogue I just added to my inventory. FM is a small book , even by 50’s standard, but it oozes quality on every page….and it was probably the first time Masereel was presented in the Netherlands, making this even more important. The book is now available at www.ftn-books.com

Settled in Paris in 1960, and graduated from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1964. From 1966, his work was visible in several personal and group exhibitions, Impact at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Céret, Distances to the Museum of Modern Art of the city of Paris in 1969, alongside Jaques Poli and Hervé Télémaque, or Twelve Years of Contemporary Art at the Grand Palais in 1972. In 1987, it was at the Galerie de France that he presents his work, then in 1994 at the Maeght gallery, Barcelona. He regularly exhibits in both public and private institutions.

In 1968, he participated in the establishment of the Art department of the University of Vincennes-Paris VIII. He taught there from 1969 to 1975. He then taught at the École des Beaux-Arts in Marseille-Lumigny, then at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris for nearly twenty years.

Joël Kermarrec’s works have entered the collections of various museums and public institutions, such as those of the Museum of Modern Art of the city of Paris, the Center Georges Pompidou, the Maeght Foundation, the FNAC, the CNAP, and FRAC Ile-de-France, PACA, and Languedoc-Roussillon.

www.ftn-books.com has the 1970 galerie Withofs catalogue available

in the coming weeks 3 forgotten Piet Dirkx cigar boxes

Piet Dirkx cigarbox 836

Svavar Gudnason (1909-1988) was the leading Icelandic avant-garde artist and one of Europe’s most noteworthy painters of the 1940´s and 50´s. He became acquainted with the famous  Cobra, and was the first Icelandic artist to develop an abstract expressionist style. CoBrA was formed by Asger Jorn, Karen Appel, Constant Corneille, Christian Dotremont,  and Joseph Noiret on November 8, 1948 in the Café Notre-Dame in Paris. Gudnason‘s works are to be found in major modern art museums in Europe and Scandinavia, for example in Louisiana in Denmark and the CoBrA Museum in the Netherlands.

The Cobra Museum catalogue is available at www.ftn-books.com