Tag: amsterdam

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Gerry Schum ( 1938 -1973)

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Rightfully he may be called one of the true pioneers of Video art.

Because of his early contribtions to the collection of the Stedelijk Museum resulted in an exhibition ( which catalogue is available at www.ftn-books.com) and the hsitory and development of Video art during the last 50 years. Th Stedelijk has made a permanent presentation of his :

Schum made Land Art as part of his Fernseh-Galerie Gerry Schum. The German television station Sender Freies Berlin broadcasted this film on 15 April 1969. Schum was looking for a way to show modern visual art to a wide audience. He achieved this by broadcasting his film and video productions on television, bypassing the traditional institutions. The TV programme showed recordings of artistic interventions in the landscape by eight artists, including Jan Dibbets, Barry Flanagan and Richard Long. Schum’s own sober camera work is an essential element of the visual end result. Jan Dibbets’ contribution 12 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective shows a tractor leaving behind a trapezium-shaped track on a beach. The position of the camera and the effect of the perspective mean that the viewer sees this shape as a rectangle. Dibbets was casting doubt on the reliability of representation via the camera and on the perception of the eye, as he had done previously in his ‘perspective corrections’.
It takes time to appreciate Video as an art form , but when you finally do so , there is an artist not te be missed and that is Gerry Schum.
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btw. The Gerry Schum catalogue was designed by Wim Crouwel.

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Michel Cardena a conceptual artist ( 1934-2015)

 

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MIGUEL ÁNGEL CÁRDENAS was born in El Espinal, Colombia, in 1934 and died in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 2015. He studied architecture at the Universidad Nacional in Bogota (1952-1953) and visual arts at the Academia de Bellas Artes (1955-1957) and the Escuela de Artes Gráficas in Barcelona (1962), before moving to the Netherlands where he lived for the remainder of his life and adopted the artistname Michel Cardena. In 1964 Cardena was included in the seminal exhibition “New Realists and Pop Art,” which travelled from the Gemeentemuseum The Hague to Vienna and Brussels. In 1972 Cardena established an artist-run space called the In-Out Center along with a group of Amsterdam-based international artists. The In-Out Center hosted exhibitions of early video and performance art in addition to supporting conceptual and collaborative projects. Cardena’s work is in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Moderna Museet, Sweden; Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Netherlands; and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands, among others. His work was recently exhibited at the Instituto de Vision, Bogota, Colombia (2015) and at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York (2017) and will be part of the exhibition ‘I am a native foreigner’ opened at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in September 2017.

Cardena is becoming more and more known and gaining importance for the conceptual art of the Sixties and Seventies. www.ftn-books.com has two important publications on the artist.

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Claes Oldenburg (1929)

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Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. They are a couple and the reason i mention this is that without Coosje van Bruggen , Oldenburg would never have become the great artist he now is. van Bruggen has written all monographs on Oldenburg and is mentioned in every publication. van Bruggen was his second wife, but undoubtedly the one who had the greatest influence on him and his works. It was about 15 years ago that i for the first time encountered in real life some other work by Oldenburg than the screw from the Boymans van Beuningen collection.

We visited the Guggenheim in Bilbao and there they were ( nowadays the space is occupied by the MATTER OF TIME by Serra) Immense sculptures made out of polyester and painted in bright colors in a Gehry surroundings. The ensemble of both reminded me of a Disneyland setting, but these sculptures were so impressive that i, for the first time, realized the importance of Oldenburg as a sculptor. It is still a rare occasion that i encounter a large Oldenburg but since the Bilbao sculptures i am looking with different eyes to all Oldenburg sculptures including the very familiar SCREW at the Boymans van Beuningen museum. www.ftn-books.com has some nice Oldenburg publications available including the Crouwel designed Stedelijk Museum catalogue from 1977 and the Crouwel designed poster for this exhibition.

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Jim Dine (1935)

He is for certain one of the greatest Pop Art artists if ever there was one. One from the first generation of Pop Art artists who rose to fame in the early 60’s and who even had some great exhibitions in the years to follow at the Stedelijk Museum and the Boymans van Beuningen museum in the Netherlands in the 60’s and 70’s. Both museum have since some great paintings in their collections , (left Stedelijk / right Boymans van Beuningen)

but the Stedelijk Museum stands out for me , because beside multiple art works in their collection they published one of the first simple orange/red catalogues designed by Wim Crouwel. This one devoted specially to the drawings of Jim Dine and available at www.ftn-books.com and this is Wim Crouwel classic

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But of course there are other Jim DIne titles also available at www.ftn-books.com

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Gisela Andersch (1913-1987)

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Another rather obscure artist for us in the Netherlands was Gisela Andersch. An artsits presented by Willem Sandberg with a special exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in 1961.

The catalogue for the exhibition was in one word….”SPECTACULAR”. It was not a catalogue but more a piece of art. The art being the cover and within  the stapled pages with the exhibition works. Cover was silkscreened upon the typical raw carton like paper Willem Sandberg was so fond of. Many people did not recognize the quality of this catalogue. But now that more and more collectors all over the world of Typography and catalogue design are appreciating the Stedelijk Museum catalogues, its importance is growing. This one is not collected for the artist, but for the combination of Sandberg excellent design together with the Andersch original art.

www.ftn-boooks.com has this Gisela Andersch catalogue available together with the van Abbemuseum one.

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Albert Marquet (1875-1947)

 

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Albert Marquet is the next stage in Impressionism, which is of course Fauvisme of which mouvement he was one of the most important contributors. It took me a very long time to finally see  “live” a painting by Marquet. It was in the “Monet to Matisse” exhibition at the Haags Gemeentemuseum . The museum had the highlights from the Pushkin museum on loan for a short period. The exhibition drew record numbers of visitors ( almost 250.000 came to visit) and among the paintings on loan there were 2 Marquet paintings of which one was my personal favorite.

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The painting shows the river Seine and in a fog the silhouette of the Notre Dame on Ile Saint Louis can be seen. It is a magical painting , just a little black, some grey lines   and some white  makes one of the best and most beautiful Fauve paintings i had ever seen. In the morning without the visitors crowding the rooms of the museum, you could visit the exhibition before its opening. It was quiet then and every time i saw the painting i was impressed. As a book dealer i learned that Marquet was not unknown in the dutch art and collectors scene, because several publications were published of which some are available at www.ftn-books.com

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Hans Hartung (1904-1989)

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One of the exhibitions i thought to be one of the very best during the time i was working at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, was one curated by Franz Kaiser on the abstract artist Hans Hartung . Just one word describes the exhibition….impressive.

It showed that the art Hartung created was not just random, but a well thought over creation of abstract art in which a small sketch was turned into a large painting.

Here is the text on the exhibition:

Hans Hartung (b. Dresden, 1904) was regarded as one of the founding fathers of French Lyric Abstractionism, the European counterpart of American Abstract Expressionism: a term in which the word Expressionism refers to an extremely physical and spontaneous manner of painting. The members of the movement wanted, as it were, to work out their emotions on the canvas without any form of symbolism.

Hartung’s paintings displayed a plain ground covered with rough and apparently spontaneous brushwork, with all the paint spatters and brush marks that go with that way of painting. After his death, therefore, people were astounded when the study of unfinished pictures revealed that his paintings had not in fact been created in a wild and spontaneous way, but by carefully filling in predetermined outlines based in every detail, right down to the smallest flecks of paint, on sketches prepared in advance. This exhibition, which the Gemeentemuseum is holding to mark the hundredth anniversary of Hartung’s birth, reveals an artist who would better be described as a conceptual artist, were it not for the fact that conceptual art did not exist as a movement when he produced his works. In this first Dutch retrospective of Hans Hartung’s work, early drawings are presented next to the equivalent paintings, and early versions alongside later versions. The similarities in terms of motif are astonishing.

More about Hans Hartung: www.fondationhartungbergman.fr

There are some nice publications on Hartung available at www.ftn-books.com

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Carel Blazer (1911-1980)

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A great dutch photographer who is known for his Fifties and Sixties photography , but also for his active part in the resistance during WWII.

Some interesting periods during the life of Blazer made him a true international photographer.

After been educated at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich, he soon after travelled Spain to photograph the Civil war. After that period he travelled Italy and visited Rome to photograph this city which photographs were published in a book by Contact. Later there were travels to Asia and Sicily. On both occasions series of photographs were taken and published.

Willem Sandberg took an interest in these photographs and presented a selection at an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum which catalogue is available at www.ftnbooks.com

There are many titles which have these breathtaking Blazer photographs in them, so beside the ones that i have in my shop please locate 50’s and 60’s books at bookmarkets and look into the colofon to discover if photographs by Blazer are included.

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Henri Laurens (1885-1954)

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A long time i thought Laurens was not that important for Modern Art, but since i have seen his exhibition at the Museum Beelden aan Zee  ( catalogue available at www.ftn-books.com), I changed my ideas about his work. At first i thought him to be heavily inspired by Picasso, but in this show i discovered he really has a personal approach to art and a “signature” of his own.

left Picasso and right Laurens

He was a French sculptor best known for his Cubist collages, sculptures of nudes, and busts. The curving forms and simplified features of his oeuvre are reminiscent of ancient greek sculptures, though he also drew influence from his friendships with contemporary artists Georges Braque, Amedeo Modigiliani, Juan Gris, and Pablo Picasso. Born on February 18, 1885 in Paris, France, Laurens first worked as a stonemason before taking drawings classes and developing a strong interest in the works of Auguste Rodin. From 1914–1915 and extending until after the First World War, Laurens experimented with still lives and various new media, using wood and iron and eventually graduating to terracotta and bronze. He then went on to participate in the Venice Biennales of 1948 and 1950, and had a retrospective at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris in 1951.

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Ray Smith (1959)

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I first encountered the paintings by Ray Smith in 1992 at the Barbara Farber gallery, which catalogue is also available at www.ftn-books.com. These paintings are intense and “Rock and Roll”. Ray Smith could easily be seen as the child of Picasso and Frida Kahlo.

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He is a contemporary American artist, best known for his segmented paintings and sculptures combining elements of Cubism, printmaking, art historical reference, and collage into postmodern compositions. Often relating to Surrealism in his unreal juxtapositions, Smith’s work is also characterized by a unique kind of magical realism. He frequently utilizes anthropomorphic animals in his work in a manner akin to Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, stating about the creatures in his work: “They are beasts, but they are directly attached to a blueprint of our own existence.” Born in 1959 in Brownsville, TX on family land that was part of Mexico before the Texas Annexation, Smith grew up in Central Mexico, and continued to retain a cultural and geographic tie to the country. After attending art schools in both the United and Mexico, Smith ultimately settled in Cuernavaca while continuing to travel regularly to New York. Smith’s work can be found among the collections and exhibition histories of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.