Tag: bacon

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Francis Bacon (continued)

In my opinion, Francis Bacon stands out as the artist whose exhibitions have been accompanied by the most captivating and splendidly curated catalogues. From oversized volumes with hundreds of pages to impeccable print quality, these catalogues truly do justice to Bacon’s masterpieces, often including multiple fold-out pages to showcase his iconic Triptychs with the utmost precision, just as one would experience in a prestigious museum

I have followed Bacon’s work closely over the years, and in 2001, I was particularly intrigued by the Gemeentemuseum’s ambitious exhibition on the artist, which also happened to be their most expensive and logistically challenging one to date. The plan was to have the catalogue printed in Singapore, but due to a previous commitment to the former museum director, the decision was made to entrust a Dutch publisher with the task. The initial print run was based on an estimate of the expected number of visitors, which unfortunately turned out to be significantly underestimated. Thanks to Bacon’s mesmerizing artworks, the catalogue proved to be a commercial triumph, with three editions being published and close to 8,000 copies sold in total. This success not only brought in considerable profit, but more importantly, it solidified Bacon’s status as one of the greatest modern artists of the 20th century.

This exhibition was also one of the last opportunities for art enthusiasts to view a large selection of Bacon’s works, including numerous Triptychs, all in one place. The Gemeentemuseum was fortunate enough to secure loans from both the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen and the estate of Francis Bacon, allowing for the display of a truly comprehensive collection of his paintings. It was during this exhibition that the masterpiece PARALYTIC CHILD WALKING ON ALL FOURS, acquired in the sixties, proved to be a valuable addition to the Gemeentemuseum’s impressive catalogue. In fact, the JAARBOEK even features a study by Josephus Jitta dedicated to this thought-provoking work.

www.ftn-books.com has many Francis Bacon related items available.

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Who is Who ….in Modern Art, version 1995

For those who want a crash course in Modern Art it is sufficient to study the english/ Japanese catalogue RIPPLE ACROSS THE WATER . A  publication  with over 350 pages, published on the occasion of the exhibition with the same name  in 1995. Some names: Francis Bacon, Jan Fabre, Marlene Dumas, de Cordier, Nauman, Pistoletto etc……..

Not only very worth collecting, but also published as an artist book. This makes the publication an absolute ” must have ” for those that take an interest in Modern Art of the last 50 years.

 

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A Paradise Lost (1935-1955)

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Here is the tile of a book a recently acquired. Title ….A PARADISE LOST and the subject is the Neo-Romantic Imagination In Britain from 1935-1955. To be honest… I never hear of this current in the Art scene, but when I opened the book I was struck with some famous names that i have known for all of my working life in art. Graham Sutherland was the first I recognized and then there was Lucian Freud and later again, Francis Bacon and Edward Burra. Leafing through the book it appeared that these now-famous names were presented together with lesser-known names but their art is not less appealing. It is typical for this Era and balances between realism and surrealism. This is a period which should be more in focus with the larger Museums in the world since it is a bridge between the realism of the early  20th century and the modern, abstract art as we know it. I can only highly recommend this book for those interested in this period. The book is now available at www.ftn-books.com

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Edward Quinn (1920-1997)

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Edward Quinn, or “Ted” as his family called him, was born 1920 in Ireland. Starting in the 1950s, he lived and worked as a photographer on the Côte d’Azur, which was a playground for celebrities from the world of show biz, art and business during the “Golden Fifties”. The rich and famous came to the Riviera to relax. But the movie stars recognized the importance of their off-screen image, and Quinn was in the right place at the right time, managing to capture spontaneous and enchanting images that documented the charm, sophistication and chic of a legendary era.

In 1951, Edward Quinn met and photographed Pablo Picasso for the first time. Their friendship lasted until Picasso’s death in 1973. This encounter with Picasso had a lasting influence on Quinn, both personally and in regard to his subsequent work. Quinn is the author of several books and films about Picasso.

Starting in the 1960s, Quinn concentrated his professional activities on artists, photographing such figures as Max Ernst, Alexander Calder, Francis Bacon, Salvador Dalí, Graham Sutherland and David Hockney. In the late 1980s, a close relationship – similar to his friendship with Picasso – developed between Quinn and Georg Baselitz.

From 1992 until his death in 1997, Edward Quinn lived in Altendorf near Zurich with his Swiss wife Gret. She passed away in 2011.

There was a special exhibion of the Quinn photographs he made of Pablo PIcasso at the Quadrat Museum in Bottrop. The exhibition poster is available at www.ftn-books.com

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Berlinde de Bruyckere (1964)

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For me Berlinde de Bruyckere stands for “poetic discomfort”.

The first time I encountered a work by de Bruyckere was the very fragile “donkey” Sculpture which is in the Caldenborgh collection. In the middle of the woods from his estate, the sculpture can be found on a semi-open space between wood and leaves. Made from lead and highly detailed this shows that the lead is soft, fragile and shows the vulnerability of the composition and the materials.

The second time was when a sculpture by de Bruyckere was presented in a showcase together with the walls hung with magnificent Bacon paintings in one of the rooms of the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag. It was a rare occasion that these two great artists were combined and I rarely have seen a more impressive and beautiful presentation of both these great artists.

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She makes three-dimensional sculptures, installations and aquarelles. Her older work has a minimalist character. Steel, stone and glass were her materials of choice. Gradually she leaves abstract motifs to seek recourse in recognisable forms and things, introducing the blanket, malleable lead and straw as materials.

More recently, she has extended her personal iconography with striking sculptures of (stuffed) horses and giant (once-) cuddly animals. The beauty of the materials she uses always has something of the fatal in it. The blankets in her sculptures protect and suffocate, the lead roses seduce and poison, the carpet of begonias bear witness to bloom and decay. She intentionally uses familiar forms to inspire thinking in viewers, to provide them with memories. Her preference lies with materials and forms that mirror ambiguity, something characteristic of the human experience. Beneath the delicate and sometimes deceptively endearing skin of her work is a yawning abyss. Death, fear and loneliness are recurrent themes, though never disconnected from life, love and beauty. Despite the great formal diversity of her works, there is a common thread running throughout her oeuvre in terms of choice of materials, techniques and the repeating of symbols and motifs.

Aside from her three-dimensional works, the artist has also always put her ideas on paper. These works (drawings and aquarelles, or aquarelle and gouache combined on old paper or cardboard) are often preparatory material for the sculptures but are autonomous works in themselves. Berlinde De Bruyckere does not impose ‘the’ interpretation of her works. She consciously leaves the door open for diverse understandings.

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www.ftn-books.com has now the book available which was published on the occasion of the 55th Biennale di Venezia. Text by J.M. Coetzee and of course the photographs on the installation by de Bruycker

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Brian Maguire (1951)

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This is an artist I really like since his painting is not only fast and contemporary, but he makes political statements with his painting that are important. This is possibly also the reason why his paintings are not found within the large museum collections. Only some daring museums that are not afraid to take a stand will add his works to their collection. But these works are important since, in. a an artistic way,  they confront you with the world around us that is easily and possibly conveniently forgotten.
Since the very beginning of his career in the 1970s, Brian Maguire has approached painting as an act of solidarity. He operates a truly engaged practice, compelled by the raw realities of humanity’s violence against itself, and the potential for justice.

Maguire’s preoccupations draw him to the margins of the art world—alternative space, prisons, women’s shelters, and psychiatric institutions—making shows in traditional gallery and museum spaces something of a rarity. Maguire’s most recent paintings directly confront issues of migration, displacement and human dignity in the face of the current global unrest. They are some of his most nuanced and ambitious to date, which he has crafted with larger brushes and thinned-down acrylic on canvas. He works slowly, using photographic sources, searching for that point where illustration ceases and art begins. This growing contrast between the seductive painterly aesthetic and the subject matter only adds to the potential impact of these formidable canvases.In 2018 Maguire released his newest publication that displays a substantial new artist monograph surveying his career to date. Maguire has shown extensively in Europe and the US, also participating in shows in Korea, China and Japan.

Recent solo exhibitions include: War Changes It’s Address, United Nations Headquarters, New York, USA, (2020); Scenes of Absence, Rubin Center, Texas University, TX, USA, (2019); Escenarios de ausencia, Art Museum Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, (2019); War Changes Its Address: The Aleppo Paintings, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, (2018); Concerned, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2018) and the European Parliament, Brussels (2012). Recent group exhibitions include: Naked Truth, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, (2018); Demise, Cleveland University Art Gallery, Cleveland, OH, USA, (2018); The sea is the limit, York Art Gallery, York, UK, (2016); Conversations, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2014) and Ni Una Mas, Leonard Pearlstein Gallery, Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA, (2010).

Maguire’s work is represented in the collections of Irish Museum of Modern Art; Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; Museum of Fine Art Houston, Texas; Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag, The Netherlands; Alvar Alto Museum, Finland.

www.ftn-books.com has one Maguire title available

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Graham Sutherland (1903-1980)

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When i looked for information on Sutherland I found this excellent article on the WIDEWALLS site.

One of the leading British artists of the 20th century, Graham Sutherland was widely known for his prints and paintings. Despite some other names coming to mind before him when talking about the art history, such as David Hockney, Francis Bacon, or Lucian Freud, there was a time when Sutherland ruled undisputed. From mid-1930’s, when he established his identity as a modern painter, to the 1950s, when his influence began to wane, there was a widespread consensus amongst fellow artists and critics that Sutherland was the most exciting and compelling voice in contemporary British painting.[1] He was even commissioned to paint a portrait of Winston Churchill, in what turned out to be one of the most famous cases of the subject disliking the artwork, which eventually led to its destruction.

Sutherland’s artistic career included several significant changes in direction. After specializing in engraving and etching, he began achieving fame as a printmaker. His early pastoral prints display the influence of the English Romantic Samuel Palmer, whereby prefiguring Sutherland’s later involvement within the Neo-Romantic movement in Britain. However, the famous 1929 Wall Street Crash bankrupted many of his collectors, thus forcing Sutherland to turn to other sources of income. He worked as an illustrator until he visited Pembrokeshire, becoming completely captivated by it, and subsequently, turning to painting as a primary medium for his expression. The artist continued to draw inspiration from Pembrokeshire countryside and its enthralling anthropomorphic natural forms for the rest of his life.[2] When working on landscapes, Sutherland’s working method included seizing on a detail such as a dead tree, boulder, thorn bush, everything that according to the artist, required a separate existence. He would sketch this on the spot, and later a studio painting would evolve. Sutherland wasn’t the first to do so – many landscape artists before him had done pretty much the same, but his studio hand moved considerable further from what his outdoor eye had seen. Neo-romantic at the core, his work inspired others such as Paul Nash, John Craxton, and John Piper. Over time, Sutherland began to reveal himself as a vivid colorist with an original sense of harmonies. He somewhat banished the dark and heavy tones which he had used earlier, though preserving the sharp black and white oppositions and using acid pinks and mauves, orange and light blue, emerald, chrome yellow, and scarlet.

www.ftn-books.com has some nice Graham Sutherland titles available

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Barrie Cooke (1931-2014)

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For me Barrie Cooke stands for the excellent taste Rudi Fuchs has in art and the beautiful designed catalogue Gracia Lebbink made for the Cooke exhibition in the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in 1992. I can not remember if Cooke was present at the opening, but i still remember the first impression his paintings made on me when i first saw them in the exhibition rooms in the Gemeentemuseun. These paintings were personal and overwhelming and reminded me of the ones Francis Bacon made.

left Cooke and right Bacon

At that time Fuchs had become very interested in Irish art and presented Cooke shortly after he had had an exhibition with works by Jack B. Yeats

An artists’ artist, he won enormous respect from his peers over several generations for his utter commitment and the integrity of his vision. He was a passionate fisherman and the natural world was always at the heart of his work. His figure paintings and portraits are also exceptional.

His paintings are cherished for their dynamic, immediate, visceral connection with their subject matter. Early training at Skowhegan in the US and at Oskar Kokoschka’s School of Vision in Salzburg helped to shape the urgent vitality of his pictorial approach – a vitality reflected in the artist’s personality.

Having grown up in Bermuda and studied in the US, he went to England in 1954 to revisit his roots but found little to engage him. So he took a ferry to Ireland and, he said, felt at home even as he walked down the gangplank.

Irish life
He settled in rural Co Clare where he and his first wife, Harriet Cooke, lived in some poverty. Later he moved to Thomastown, Co Kilkenny, with ceramic artist Sonja Landweer, who introduced him to Rudolf Steiner’s ideas on natural processes. His next move was to a remote house overlooking Lough Arrow in Co Sligo.

The Barrie Cooke Gemeentemuseum catalogue designed by Gracia Lebbink is available at www.ftn-books.com

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Michelangelo Pistoletto (1933)

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I know his work and recognize it by his reflecting surfaces and mirror like qualities , but Pistoletto is much more than an artist who uses a “Gimmick”. Now , 85 years of age he has proven to be one of the most influential Italian artists from the last century and his works have spread all over the world . (I even have illy collection cups by Pistoletto in my collection ;-).

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Why is he, i think, so important?…. Probably this is because he stayed true to his art and has developed it into a very personal and recognizable form which is now appreciated by many. Pistoletto had had his exhibitions in the Netherlands in the van Abbemuseum and Stedelijk Museum and has built steadily an appreciative audience because of these exhibitions in the Netherlands since his earliest one at the van Abbemuseum in 1986. Arte Povera is Pistoletto ….and within his works he brings together Fluxus and conceptual art. The admiration of Bacon started his art career, but since he has walked his own path of “REFLECTION”.

Here are some of the books www.ftn-books.com has on Pistoletto in collection

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Leon Kossoff (1926)

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One of the grand old masters of British painting is Leon Kossoff. Kossoff is not very well known outside Great Britain , but had his exhibitions in one of the most prestigious museum for modern art, the Louisiana museum in Denmark. Beside that occasion he was presented on the Venice Biennale and in several group exhibitions in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. In 1956, Kossoff joined Helen Lessore’s Beaux Arts Gallery, located on Bruton Place in London. In 1959, Kossoff began to teach at the Regent Street Polytechnic, the Chelsea School of Art, and the Saint Martin’s School of Art, all in London. While teaching, he continued his artistic career, and soon started featuring in galleries and shows, along with his friend Frank Auerbach and other artists such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Keith Critchlow a school friend from Saint Martin’s. During this time, Kossoff moved his studio to Willesden Junction, and in 1966, moved his studio to Willesden Green. It is not only his friendship with Auerbach, Bacon and Freud that his paintings deserve to be known better, but the quality of them stands out from many of the rest from his generation and he deserves a place next to his three famous friends and not behind them. Kossoff is a great painter. There are 2 publications available at www.ftn-books.com

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