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A special Donald Judd publication, 1993

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The Sikkens foundation chooses every year an artist for their prestigious Sikkens Award and in 1993 the honor was Donald Judd’s. He received the award for his entire oeuvre and delivered a lecture/speech on the subject and the importance of Piet Mondriaan on that occasion.  The title “SOME ASPECTS OF COLOR IN GENERAL AND RED AND BLACK IN PARTICULAR”. For years i tried to find the little book which was published on that occasion and presented to the invited audience. A beautiful little book , cahier stitching, designed by Rutger Fuchs, with a typical Donald Judd cover and finally i have found one for www.ftn-books.com. The book is not the perfect copy i would have wished for. On a scale from 1 to 10 i would rate it as 7.5 ,but given the fact that only about 400 copies have been published this is the best copy which is on the market at this moment and possibly the only one for a long time to come available and for sale, because these are scarce and extremely hard to find.

So if you think the Judd publication is  a “ghost” publication….it is not ! It is real!. Here is a short impression.

judd sik a

 

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Saul Steinberg (1914-1999)

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What have the Maeght foundation , Museum Boymans van Beuningen and the Stedelijk Museum in common? They all three organized exhibitions with Saul Steinberg. This is what i thought of before i started to look at information on the internet and found the foundation of Saul Steinberg  / saulsteinbergfoundation.org. This site starts with giving an overview on his life , but soon you discover that this is one of the great sites on art on the internet totally dedicated to Saul Steinberg. Try it and if interested in the artist you soon will loose yourself completely and spent a long time on this site discovering why Saul Steinberg was important. Here is the short intro from the Steinberg foundation on the artist and please do not forget that www.ftn-books.com has some nice publications available.

Famed worldwide for giving graphic definition to the postwar age, Saul Steinberg (1914-1999) had one of the most remarkable careers in American art. While renowned for the covers and drawings that appeared in The New Yorker for nearly six decades, he was equally acclaimed for the drawings, paintings, prints, collages, and sculptures he exhibited internationally in galleries and museums.

Steinberg crafted a rich and ever-evolving idiom that found full expression through these parallel yet integrated careers. Such many-leveled art, however, resists conventional critical categories. “I don’t quite belong to the art, cartoon or magazine world, so the art world doesn’t quite know where to place me,” he said. 1 He was a modernist without portfolio, constantly crossing boundaries into uncharted visual territory. In subject matter and styles, he made no distinction between high and low art, which he freely conflated in an oeuvre that is stylistically diverse yet consistent in depth and visual imagination.

 

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Hans Sonnenberg (1928-2017)

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Yesterday il learned that one of the icons in the dutch gallery scene has died. Hans Sonnenberg founded Delta gallery in Rotterdam, which opened its doors on 8 January 1962 and it was the first gallery in Rotterdam that concentrated exclusively on contemporary art. The role that Hans Sonnenberg played as gallery owner and collector in the Rotterdam art world cannot be overestimated. He succeeded time and again in bringing international developments to the harbour city. In addition, he was aware of the importance of a platform for Rotterdam artists. Sonnenberg has run Delta for an uninterrupted period of fifty years. In his opinion, the gallery owner should ideally be closely connected with the gallery. “The gallery and the gallery owner are one. They call me Mister Delta, but Delta is Hans Sonnenberg”, says the gallery owner in a recent publication.
www.ftn-books.com has some nice gallery Delta publications available.

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Jungwook Kim 김정욱….i need information please

 

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It is now almost 2 years ago that i acquired a beautiful Korean painting at auction by Jungwook Kim for our collection, but beside the origins and original purchase place of the painting / Gallery Skape in Seoul and its original purchase price, it is impossible for me to find more information on the painting or the artist. My question is …who can help?

I need the following information.

  • A complete biography of Jungwook Kim
  • has anybody photographs of this artist and if so at work in the studio?
  • have there been museum or gallery presentations in Europe or US beside the Berlin and Istanbul ones?
  • Are there US or European museums that collect work by this artist

Any help and information is appreciated. Thank you….

wilfried

 

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Minimal Art / 1968 curated by Enno Develing … a pdf file

This is a special blog on Minimal art . This time i am offering my readers a real treat.

As you might know the Gemeentemuseum published in the late nineties a cd rom containing the PDF files of possibly the 3 most important and sought after Minimal Art exhibition catalogues which were held in Europe in the late sixties. A European first…..All three were curated by Enno Develing and all three were accompanied by a simple but important catalogue. All these catalogues ( LeWitt, Minimal Art,  Carl Andre) sold out completely and because of the demand and art historical importance we decided to buy some antiquarian 2nd hand copies, strip them from their backbones and scan them as PDF files for future use and disclosure to students and publish them in a very limited number on cd rom.

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At that time i bought the CD rom. The CD rom player on my Mac disappeared, but i kept the files on my hard drive including the Carl Andre, LeWitt and Minimal Art catalogues in pdf format . You can view the Minimal Art catalogue here:  MINIMAL ART

For the complete CD ROM or separate files of the other catalogue please visit www.ftn-books.com

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King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima into Zero art ( Staudt and Leblanc)

HRH King of the Netherlands, Koning Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima collect Zero art. It was yesterday evening that there was a 90 minute interview with King Willem-Alexander on the occasion of his 50th birthday on prime time television.  An open and honest interview in which i learned to appreciate more the person Willem-Alexander is. I am still opposed to a King or Queen as head of state, but this was the first time i admired this King and learned that he and his wife Maxima appreciate Zero art. At the beginning of the interview , where Wilfried de Jong ( interviewer) was received in the entrance hall of the kings home, villa Eikenhorst. Willem- Alexander showed 2 of the works from his collection, the first was a work by Klaus Staudt ( he referred to it as being from a german artist) and the other was not mentioned at all , but i am for 99% sure it was a TORSIONS painting by Walter Leblanc.

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Both great works of art and it makes me curious about the other works in their collection. To celebrate the Kings birthday there will be a 10% discount today on the entire inventory of www.ftn-books.com and an invitation to the King to look at the great books i have in my collection on ZERO art.

We live nearby and it will be an honor to show you some nice ZERO publications.

discount code only the 27th and the 28th of april: Koningsdag2017

 

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Giovanni Nicolai (1984)

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Down under in Italy, in the region of Bari works a young artist by the name of Giovanni Nicolai. I did not know him, never met him, but we recently contacted each other about a purchase. He mailed me that he was a fan of Massimo Rao and because of this fascination was inspired by him which resulted in very personal and somehow typical italian classical portraits. He sent me some examples and i was very much convinced that these works deserve to be known outside Italy too. Therefore this blog with some examples of his works. It is Modern art with some abstraction but also a very classical touch within them.

The small faces  of the portraits resemble a little bit the lean figures by Alberto Giacometti, but the atmosphere breathes Massimo Rao.

Not the surrealist setting of Massimo Rao, but recognizable poetic portraits. Very nice to look at and subtil in their execution. If you want more information on Giovanni Nicolai do not hesitate to contact me and i will gladly supply you with his email address. The publications on Massimo Rao are available at www.ftn-books.com

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Francois Morellet (1926-2016)

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It was 7 years ago that the Peter Stuyvesant collection was sold by Sothebys Amsterdam. Within this collection there were some very important Morellet paintings. Large , complex and typical Morellet. As i learned later one of them was bought by Joop van Caldenborgh. The initiator and founder of the Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar. This painting was fantastic and showed for me why Morellet has become one of my favorite painters of all time.  The painting from the BAT collection was estimated between 20.000 and 30.000 euro, but had a hammer price of euro 432.750. Which is 14x the maximum estimated price.

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For us “mortals” this is completely out of reach, but still some great works by Morellet can be had at affordable prices , because Morellet contributed in many ways, to excellent publications in which original silkscreens or lithographs were included. One of these publications is available at www.ftn-books.com ( for availability inquire/ p.o.a.), together with many other rare Morellet publications from the 60’s and 70’s.

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After a short period of figurative/representational work, Morellet turned to abstraction in 1950 and he adopted a pictorial language of simple geometric forms: lines, squares and triangles assembled into two-dimensional compositions. In 1961, he was one of the founders of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV), with fellow artists Francisco Sobrino, Horatio Garcia-Rossi, Hugo DeMarco, Julio Le Parc, Jean-Pierre Yvaral (the son of Victor Vasarely) and Joël Stein, François Molnar and Vera Molnar (the last two left the group shortly after). Morellet began at this time to work with neon tube lighting.

From the 1960s on, Morellet worked in various materials (fabric, tape, neon, walls…) and in doing so investigated the use of the exhibition space in terms similar to artists of installation art and environmental art. He gained an international reputation, especially in Germany and France, and he was commissioned to create work for public and private collections in Switzerland, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands and the U.S.A.

Morellet , french, but in his approach to art more cosmopolitan, because he must be influenced by the minimal artists that were starting to appear on the art scene during the 60’s and early 70’s. He experimented with lines, grids, and light and developed an art form recognizable as being Morellet. an important artist and for me personally one of the greatest from last century.

 

 

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Lucebert (1924-1994)

Everywhere i come across Lucebert (Lubertus Jacobus Swaanswijk) nowadays. Re-editions of his poems, paintings at auction and exhibitions in galleries and museums. There is a huge interest in his works since 20 years or so, but before that period he was hardly known  as a painter , but nowadays he is considered as one of the leading dutch artists from the 20th century . In his early years he was very much influenced by Cobra , but soon he developed his personal style which for me is a crossing between Cobra and Art Brut. He became known for his poems, but when you ask about Lucebert nowadays, people think of him first and foremost as a painter and because of this interest it is harder and harder to find the early publications on his paintings and etchings. There are some by Nouvelles Images, but the most important ones come from the pubvlications series of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Publications in which original etchings were bound and therefore are highly collectable ( and expensive) publications. www.ftn-books.com has a nice selection of classic and collectable Lucebert publications.

for more information on Lucebert visit http://lucebertstichting.nl

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Saatchi Art and online art dealing

This morning i was surprised to see an annual report on online Art dealing by Saatchi. According to Saatchi there is a tremendous growth in on online art business, but you have to be careful which artists to pick to make a sound investment. I must say…..works by some of these artists really look good and prices are still on the verge of affordable ( $ 1000-$5000) . But what struck me most is that Saatchi is creating a market for artist who THEY represent. This is only a very small percentage of artists in the world who are creating their works but, do not have the representation nor the time and money to wait before a sale is realized.

My advise to build a small collection, is to find the artist(s) you really like, visit his or her studio, start building a relation as a collector with the artist and follow him/her over the years and when you have some money to spare buy directly from the artist and support them in every other way you can, by introducing them to friends/ collectors and keeping contact to follow him/her. This way you are helping the artist to build a following of supporters and you will support them with your appreciation and your purchase(s) over the years. This is much nicer than to make an online purchase and have the work send to your home address in a “beautiful “crate and not having seen where it comes from. To appreciate a work in the best way, is to see where it was created and to meet the person that created it. It makes the picture complete and the art you look at has not become a piece of decoration but a true work of art that you chose by yourself by having a choice from many other works that were created over a much longer period than the new ” last years models” which are presented by online galleries.

This is the way i have been collecting all of my life. For those who want to know which artists belong to the core of our collection. Here are the pics. Look at them and when you want to have more info do not hesitate to contact me at www.ftn-books.com or

wvdelshout@ziggo.nl

The report by Saatchi can be downloaded here: https://d3t95n9c6zzriw.cloudfront.net/invest-in-art/iia-2016-report-digital.pdf