swimming freestyle

Bruce Conner

Bruce Conner, an artist internationally admired for his haunting, surrealistic sculptures and groundbreaking avant-garde films, died on Monday at his home in San Francisco. He was 74.

A key figure in the San Francisco Beat scene in the late 1950s, Mr. Conner first became known for his assemblages made from women’s nylon stockings, parts of furniture, broken dolls, fur, costume jewelry, paint, photographs and candles. These works, created between 1957 and 1964, had the aggressive appearance of avant-garde sculpture but at the same time seemed old and musty, like broken-down junk found in a forgotten attic or props for a scary Hitchcock-like movie. They were a vehement rejection of the optimistic, consumerist spirit of mainstream American society.

In the late 1950s, Mr. Conner also began an influential parallel career as an experimental filmmaker. Under the influence of his friend and fellow filmmaker Stan Brakhage, he created collages of found and new footage.

“A lot of things I’ve been involved in I’ve done because nobody else was doing them,” Mr. Conner once told an interviewer for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

Conner's 1966 short film, "Breakaway"

A Living Mural

Italian street mural artist, BLU has made a video (called MUTO), composed of a series of digital stills from street art from the streets of Buenos Aires.  Very cool.

(h/t Gizmodo)

A Monet Record

A record $80.4M price was paid for Monet's “Le Bassin aux Nymphéas,” at auction at Christie's Tuesday evening. 

A sea of hands shot in the air when that painting, “Le Bassin aux Nymphéas,” which had been expected to sell for $36 million to $47 million, came up on the block. Among at least six would-be buyers, a blond woman in the front row bid tenaciously against several Christie’s representatives on the telephone with clients. When the price hit nearly $70 million, Christopher Burge, Christie’s honorary chairman in the United States and one of the evening’s two auctioneers, leaned over and said to the woman, “Take as long as you like.” The woman, identified as Tania Buckrell Pos of Arts & Management International, a London company, ended up winning the painting on behalf of an unknown client, and the salesroom burst into applause. The previous record for a Monet, $41.4 million for “The Railroad Bridge at Argenteuil,” was set last month at Sotheby’s in New York.  (Link)

Lichtenstein: The Painter Who Loved Women

The NY Times on Roy Lichtenstein: Girls exhibit at the Gagosian Gallery in New York:

“Roy adored women.” And the anonymity of his subjects has exceptions. The smiling woman in “Sound of Music” is clearly Julie Andrews about to burst into song as musical notes stream through the window — although her cheer is undercut by the sharp black shadow that divides her face into areas of red and blue, not unlike the stripe of green in Matisse’s Fauve portrait of his wife in a hat.

Dating from 1962, 1963 and primarily 1964, the cartoon-based images here are dominated by industrial-strength red, yellow and blue, generously contoured with black lines. The onslaught of color and the seeming dumbness of the images are interrupted by the black-on-white balloons of speech or thought (or, sometimes, music), which have a complex visual and cognitive role in the Garbo-talks vein.

Dubai Opera House

A winner of many international competitions, theoretically influential and groundbreaking, a number of (Zaha) Hadid's winning designs were initially never built: notably, The Peak Club in Hong Kong (1983) and the Cardiff Bay Opera House in Wales (1994). In 2002 Hadid won the international design competition to design Singapore's one-north masterplan. In 2005, her design won the competition for the new city casino of Basel, Switzerland. In 2004 Hadid became the first female recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, architecture's equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Previously, she had been awarded a CBE for services to architecture. She is a member of the editorial board of the Encyclopædia Britannica. In 2006, Hadid was honoured with a retrospective spanning her entire work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In that year she also received an Honorary Degree from the American University of Beirut.  (Wikipedia)

Conceptual design for the Dubai Opera House by Zaha Hadid.

Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg (October 22, 1925 - May 12, 2008) was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art.

Rauschenberg has also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance. Rauschenberg had a tendency to pick up the trash that interested him on the streets of New York City and bringing it back to his studio to use it in this works.

In 1964 Rauschenberg was the first American artist to win the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale (Mark Tobey and James Whistler had previously won the Painting Prize). Since then he has enjoyed a rare degree of institutional support (Wikipedia)

The Lost Klimt Works

I've never heard this story.  From the Guardian UK:

It was all over. The Reich was finished, Hitler dead, his charred jaw bone all Russian pathologists could find of him in the smouldering ruins of Berlin. Hundreds of miles to the south, in Austria, an SS unit prepared to stage its own private apocalypse.

On May 7 1945, they arrived at Immendorf Castle in southern Austria. The German soldiers already billeted there were ordered to leave. That morning, German forces in Austria had signed their surrender, to take effect the next day; for these SS men, it was the last night of the war.

Schloss Immendorf was a beautiful setting for their final night of power and freedom. The castle's massive fortifications were softened with sloping tiled roofs, so that it resembled a Loire chateau, set in spacious parkland, with ivy growing up the walls. A curving staircase led to a grand interior full of art treasures, stored here by the Reich to save them from air raids on Vienna.

Among this store were 13 paintings by Gustav Klimt. It seems that these were on view in the castle apartments: the Nazis, the castle's owner later reported, looked at the paintings with appreciation, and one was heard to say that it would be a "sin" for the Russians to get their hands on them.

The next day, the SS unit laid explosives in the castle's four towers and walked out. One man went back and lit a fuse, and a tower burst into flames. As the fire spread, explosives in the other towers detonated. Schloss Immendorf burned for days. Nothing survived of its interior, and the gutted shell was later demolished. According to the eyewitness reports that reached Vienna months later, amid the chaos of defeat, not a single work of art survived.

Joseph Solman

Joseph Solman (born 1909, d. 16 April 2008) was an American painter, a founder of The Ten, a group of New York City Expressionist painters in the 1930s. His best known works include his "Subway Gouaches" depicting travellers on the New York subways.

Brought to America from Russia as a child in 1912, Joseph Solman was a prodigious draftsman and knew, in his earliest teens, that he would be an artist. He went straight from high school to the National Academy of Design, though he says he learned more by sketching in the subway on the way back from school late at night: people “pose perfectly when they’re asleep.” In 1929, Solman saw the inaugural show at the Museum of Modern Art featuring Seurat, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Cezanne. It changed his life – and his art. (Wikipedia)

AutoAuto!

From the Guardian UK:

...Over the next few weeks, Von Richthofen will get through 20 or so of these cars, as part of his show AutoAuto!, opening tonight in London. With co-performers Frank Valet and Rolf Clausen, he will destroy one car per evening - by using it as a drumkit. "This is great, this is the bass drum," says Von Richthofen, punching his way around the windows, listening out for any specially resonant spots. "Then this is more like the snare."

Von Richthofen insists the show has no message - in fact, he attributes its success, across Germany and at other international venues including Edinburgh, to the lack of finger-wagging. With its comedy routines, human beatbox impersonations of jazz trombone, and a James Brown riff on car horns, the show is designed to raise smiles, not issues. "The message is very clear," says Von Richthofen earnestly, while Valet practises something on a handbrake. "Don't drive them, play them. The car can be a great instrument.

Doris Lee

An exhibit of works by Doris Lee is currently at D. Wigmore Fine Art in New York.  From the NY Times:

She was not a greatly original painter; she had no qualms about trying anything that struck her fancy, even if it had struck others’ fancies first. Milton Avery, whom she knew well, was clearly a big influence. But she made art intently from the early 1930s until the late 1960s, when poor health interceded. And she had just enough of everything — touch, color sense, humor, love of painting, sophistication — to distinguish herself.

In the 1930s Ms. Lee worked in the regional realism that was in vogue in those isolationist times. Her career took off in 1935, when her Rockwellesque “Thanksgiving Dinner” won the Logan Prize in the annual at the Art Institute of Chicago. The current exhibition at Wigmore focuses on the 1940s and ’50s, when she worked her way from Modernist reprises of early American folk art — like the charming “Violinist, Woodstock,” with its large, heavily draped window overlooking a dramatically flattened landscape — to a more abstracted style indebted to Avery as well as to Paul Klee, Ben Shahn and Alexander Calder. All three artists can be sensed in “Summer Souvenirs,” which gathers a still life of biomorphic shapes and delicate lines into a red jar.

Ms. Lee moved between art and illustration, fine and commercial, with similar ease.  She taught painting and illustrated books, including “The Great Quillow” (1944) by James Thurber. Richard Rodgers was such a big fan that he had Ms. Lee illustrate the 1951 “Rodgers and Hart Songbook” (1951) and commissioned paintings from her based on his Broadway hits.

Ms. Lee once said of her motive for art making, “What I feel is a sort of violence,” a quotation that was repeated in the press far more than she would have liked. I think this “violence” was simply ambition — lots of it.