True art takes note not merely of form but also of what lies behind.

Mahatma Gandhi

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Gujarati: મોહનદાસ કરમચંદ ગાંધી, IPA: [moɦənd̪äs kərəmtʃənd̪ gä̃d̪ʱi]) (2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948.) was a major political and spiritual leader of India and the Indian independence movement. He was the pioneer of Satyagraha—resistance to tyranny through mass civil disobedience, firmly founded upon ahimsa or total non-violence—which led India to independence and inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. He is commonly known in India and across the world as Mahatma Gandhi (Sanskrit: महात्मा mahātmā or “Great Soul”, an epithet given by Rabindranath Tagore) and as Bapu (Gujarati: બાપુ bāpu or “Father”). In India, he is officially accorded the honour of Father of the Nation. 2 October, his birthday, is commemorated each year as Gandhi Jayanti, a national holiday. On 15 June 2007, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution declaring 2 October to be the “International Day of Non-Violence”.

Gandhi first employed non-violent civil disobedience in South Africa, in the resident Indian community’s struggle for civil rights. Upon his return to India, he organized poor farmers and labourers to protest oppressive taxation and widespread discrimination. Assuming leadership of the Indian National Congress, Gandhi led nationwide campaigns for the alleviation of poverty, for the liberation of women, for brotherhood amongst different religious and ethnic groups, for an end to untouchability and caste discrimination, and for the economic self-sufficiency of India, but above all for Swaraj—the independence of India from foreign domination. Gandhi famously led Indians first in the disobedience of the British-imposed salt tax with the 400 kilometers (249 miles) Dandi Salt March in 1930, and later in an open call for the British to Quit India in 1942. He was imprisoned for many years, on numerous occasions, in both South Africa and India.

Gandhi practiced non-violence and truth in all situations, and advocated that others do the same. He lived simply, organizing an ashram that was self-sufficient in its needs. Making his own clothes—the traditional Indian dhoti and shawl, woven with yarn he hand spun on a charkha—he lived on a simple vegetarian diet; he also undertook long fasts as forms of both self-purification and social protest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi

There may be a history of modern art and a history of traditional art, but there can be no history of postmodern art, for the radically contemporary can never be delimited by any single historical reading.

Donald Kuspit

Donald Kuspit is an art critic and professor of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is a contributing editor at Artforum, Sculpture, and New Art Examiner magazines, the editor of Art Criticism, and the editor of a series on American Art and Art Criticism for Cambridge University Press. In 1997 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Contribution to Visual Arts from the National Association of Schools of Art and Design. He is a 1983 recipient of the College Art Association’s prestigious Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism. He has also been awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. An author of numerous articles, exhibition reviews, and catalog essays, Kuspit has written more than twenty books, including Redeeming Art: Critical Reveries (2000); Idiosyncratic Identities: Artists at the End of the Avant-Garde (1996); Daniel Brush: Gold without Boundaries (with Ralph Esmerian and David Bennett, 1998); Reflections of Nature: Paintings by Joseph Raffael (with Amei Wallace, 1998); and Chihuly (1998). He lives in New York City.

http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v2n1/gallery/kuspit_d/

The holy grail is to spend less time making the picture than it takes people to look at it.

Banksy

( a supposed picture of Banksy) Banksy is a well-known pseudo-anonymous English graffiti artist. He is believed to be a native of Yate, South Gloucestershire, near Bristol[1] and to have been born in 1974, but there is substantial public uncertainty about his identity and personal and biographical details. According to Tristan Manco, Banksy “was born in 1974 and raised in Bristol, England. The son of a photocopier engineer, he trained as a butcher but became involved in graffiti during the great Bristol aerosol boom of the late 1980s.” His artworks are often-satirical pieces of art on topics such as politics, culture, and ethics. His street art, which combines graffiti writing with a distinctive stencilling technique, is similar to Blek le Rat, who began to work with stencils in 1981 in Paris and members of the anarcho-punk band Crass who maintained a graffiti stencil campaign on the London Tube System in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His art has appeared in cities around the world. Banksy’s work was born out of the Bristol underground scene which involved collaborations between artists and musicians.

Banksy does not sell photos of street graffiti or mount exhibitions of screenprints in commercial galleries

Originality is merely an illusion

Happy Birthday MC Escher

Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972) is one of the world’s most famous graphic artists. His art is enjoyed by millions of people all over the world, as can be seen on the many web sites on the internet.

He is most famous for his so-called impossible structures, such as Ascending and Descending, Relativity, his Transformation Prints, such as Metamorphosis I, Metamorphosis II and Metamorphosis III, Sky & Water I or Reptiles.

But he also made some wonderful, more realistic work during the time he lived and traveled in Italy.

Castrovalva for example, where one already can see Escher’s fascination for high and low, close by and far away. The lithograph Atrani, a small town on the Amalfi Coast was made in 1931, but comes back for example, in his masterpiece Metamorphosis I and II .

M.C. Escher, during his lifetime, made 448 lithographs, woodcuts and wood engravings and over 2000 drawings and sketches. Like some of his famous predecessors, – Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer and Holbein-, M.C. Escher was left-handed.

Apart from being a graphic artist, M.C. Escher illustrated books, designed tapestries, postage stamps and murals. He was born in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, as the fourth and youngest son of a civil engineer. After 5 years the family moved to Arnhem where Escher spent most of his youth. After failing his high school exams, Maurits ultimately was enrolled in the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem .

After only one week, he informed his father that he would rather study graphic art instead of architecture, as he had shown his drawings and linoleum cuts to his graphic teacher Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, who encouraged him to continue with graphic arts.

After finishing school, he traveled extensively through Italy, where he met his wife Jetta Umiker, whom he married in 1924. They settled in Rome, where they stayed until 1935. During these 11 years, Escher would travel each year throughout Italy, drawing and sketching for the various prints he would make when he returned home.

Many of these sketches he would later use for various other lithographs and/or woodcuts and wood engravings, for example the background in the lithograph Waterfall stems from his Italian period, or the trees reflecting in the woodcut Puddle, which are the same trees Escher used in his woodcut “Pineta of Calvi”, which he made in 1932.

M.C. Escher became fascinated by the regular Division of the Plane, when he first visited the Alhambra, a fourteen century Moorish castle in Granada, Spain in 1922.

During the years in Switzerland and throughout the Second World War, he vigorously pursued his hobby, by drawing 62 of the total of 137 Regular Division Drawings he would make in his lifetime.

He would extend his passion for the Regular Division of the Plane, by using some of his drawings as the basis for yet another hobby, carving beech wood spheres.

He played with architecture, perspective and impossible spaces. His art continues to amaze and wonder millions of people all over the world. In his work we recognize his keen observation of the world around us and the expressions of his own fantasies. M.C. Escher shows us that reality is wondrous, comprehensible and fascinating.

 

http://www.mcescher.com/Biography/biography.htm

 

I do not think that obsession is funny or that not being able to stop one’s intensity is funny.

Happy Birthday Jim Dine

For over thirty years, the artwork of Jim Dine has represented the cutting-edge of contemporary artistic thought. As Dine’s popularity endures, so does much of his personal imagery. His images vary as much as the media with which he renders them does; in general, however, they evoke a fascination with the body.

Some of the artist’s corporeal references are obvious, such as the series of self-portrait, assemblage pieces of 1959 that substitute articles of clothing for actual body parts. Other references are more obscure. For example, his tool images – a symbol that reappears throughout his work – recall memories and emotions buried within the body (in this case, memories from his childhood).

Born in Ohio in 1935, Dine grew up working at a family-owned hardware store. Upon moving to New York in 1959, he immediately became part of the avant-garde art scene. At the time, many other artists responded to the broader culture with deadpan popular imagery; meanwhile, Dine created a unique style, electing to combine elements from popular culture with personal content. Using this as a guiding principle, he then selected images to represent both his inner self and his artistic persona. Eventually these images, including hearts, skulls, clothing, and tools, reached iconic status in his art, for they became blatantly self-referential.

The process of art-making itself, for Dine, is indeed a highly personal experience. In the case of his printmaking, Dine started with a basic image. Each time the artist viewed the image before him, he would respond to it by drawing gestural marks and adding bits of color. Dine returned to his work several times, gradually adding to the background atmosphere and subtly manipulating the lines surrounding the image. Every individual process brought about its own conclusion – whether or not the artwork produced the desired emotional effect – and as a whole, the finished piece represents a culmination of his satisfaction.

http://www.tandempress.wisc.edu/tandem/gallery/dine/dine.htm

The artist is an educator of artists of the future . . . who are able to understand and in the process of understanding perform unexpected — the best — evolutions.”

Happy Birthday Saul Steinberg

Saul Steinberg (1914-1999) was one of America’s most beloved artists, renowned for the covers and drawings that appeared in The New Yorker for nearly six decades and for the drawings, paintings, prints, collages, and sculptures exhibited internationally in galleries and museums. Steinberg’s art, equally at home on magazine pages and gallery walls, cannot be confined to a single category or movement. He was a modernist without portfolio, constantly crossing boundaries into uncharted visual territory. In View of the World from 9th Avenue, his famous 1976 New Yorker cover, a map delineates not real space but the mental geography of Manhattanites. In other Steinbergian transitions, fingerprints become mug shots or landscapes; graph or ledger paper doubles as the facade of an office building; words, numbers, and punctuation marks come to life as messengers of doubt, fear, or exuberance; sheet music lines glide into violin strings, record grooves, the grain of a wood table, and the smile of a cat.

Through such shifts of meaning from one passage to the next, Steinberg’s line comments on its own transformative nature. In a deceptively simple 1948 drawing, an artist (Steinberg himself) traces a large spiral. But as the spiral moves downward, it metamorphoses into a left foot, then a right foot, then the profile of a body, until finally reaching the hand holding the pen that draws the line.

This emblem of a draftsman in the act of generating himself and his line epitomizes a fundamental principle of Saul Steinberg’s work: his art is about the ways artists make art. Steinberg did not represent what he saw; rather, he depicted people, places, and even numbers or words in styles borrowed from other art, high and low, past and present. In his pictorial imagination, the very artifice of style, of images already processed through art, became the means to explore social and political systems, human foibles, geography, architecture, language and, of course, art itself.

Saul Steinberg was born in Romania in 1914. In 1933, after a year studying philosophy at the University of Bucharest, he enrolled in the Politecnico in Milan as an architecture student, graduating in 1940. The precision of architectural drafting taught him the potential of a spare two-dimensional line to describe a complex three-dimensional form. During the 1930s, Steinberg applied this lesson to the cartoons he began publishing in Milan for the twice-weekly satirical magazine Bertoldo. The incisive wit of these images would distinguish much of his art, long after he abandoned the strict cartoon format. By 1940, Steinberg’s drawings were appearing in Life magazine and Harper’s Bazaar. The following year, anti-Jewish racial laws in Fascist Italy forced him to flee. While in Santo Domingo in 1941 awaiting a US visa, he started publishing regularly in The New Yorker.

Steinberg’s association with The New Yorker continued for almost sixty years, resulting in nearly 90 covers and more than 1,200 drawings that elevate the language of popular graphics to the realm of fine art (many of these images are now available on http://www.cartoonbank.com). His career in the art world kept pace with his work for The New Yorker and other magazines. Steinberg’s first one-artist exhibition was held in 1943 at the Wakefield Gallery, New York. Three years later, he was among the “Fourteen Americans” in a landmark show at The Museum of Modern Art, his works exhibited alongside those of Arshile Gorky, Isamu Noguchi, and Robert Motherwell. Three major New York galleries have represented Steinberg, beginning with Betty Parsons and Sidney Janis and, since 1982, PaceWildenstein (www.pacewildenstein.com). To date, more than eighty solo shows of his art have been mounted in galleries and museums throughout America and Europe, including a retrospective in 1978 at the Whitney Museum of American Art and another at IVAM, the Institute for Modern Art in Valencia, Spain, in 2002. A traveling ambassador for American postwar art, Steinberg created one section of the Children’s Labyrinth mural at the 1954 Milan Triennial and a panoramic collage entitled The Americans for the US Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. At the Galerie Maeght in Paris in 1966, he collaged the walls with Le Masque.

The works in Le Masque evolved from Steinberg’s famous “masks”: brown-paper cut-outs or paper bags on which he drew all manner of faces to disguise himself and his friends, and then had the motley characters photographed by Inge Morath, alone or in groups, in a variety of interior and outdoor settings (www.ingemorath.org). The idea of disguise is central to Steinberg’s art. In the world as he saw it, everyone wears a mask, whether real or metaphorical. People invent personas through clothing, hairstyles, furniture, and posture; cities define themselves by their architecture, nations by their icons.

Steinberg likened these masquerades to the stylistic mannerisms of art. A style, after all, whether Cubism or Madison Avenue advertising, Pop Art or primitivism, converts reality into pictorial artifice. The use of style to lay bare cultural fictions pervades Steinberg’s work. Majestic Art Deco mountains loom behind the plain rendering of a small Wyoming town, revealing the grandiloquent self-image of the American West. In Georgetown Cuisine, style sends an enigmatic message about the circumscribed concerns of suburban wives: on a magazine reproduction of five women opening boxes (probably an advertisement for kitchenware), Steinberg drew over the faces in a cartoon style and turned the object of their attention into a primitivistic sculpture. The battle of the sexes becomes a graphic stand-off between male-speak geometry and feminine Art Nouveau flourishes. Steinberg appropriated the bold letters of billboards in an untitled work of 1971, but misnamed the colors in the words “BLUE” and “RED,” “YELLOW” and “GREEN” to signal the duplicitous address of advertising promotions. Paris is reduced to the flowery curves of an Art Nouveau Métro station and triangular-plan buildings that mark out wishfully broadened and empty vistas. With no cars in sight and pedestrians confined to the sidewalks, Steinberg’s Paris emerges as an idealized city seen through its urban architectural styles. Style and content are coincident in Las Vegas, crayoned in a casino’s garish hues and frenetic barrage of forms. The gambling woman, nearly all head and pocketbook, hits the jackpot at a slot machine. Her prize, however, is not money or chips but geometric shapes, while the symbols on the machine are as juvenile as the dream of instant riches. The multiplicity of graphic styles can also carry meaning, as in Canal Street, where the congestion of one of New York’s busiest thoroughfares becomes a congestion of linear modes–scribbled cars and stick-figure crowds flanked by spiky, pseudo-Cubist architectural implosions; in the background, a pair of ominous, heavily cross-hatched skyscrapers close off the street.

In another work, a 1964 drawing of a living room populated by different graphic motifs, Steinberg himself described the expressive potential of found styles. The drawing depicts “a conversation between people….A very hard outside with a soft inside sits on a straight-backed chair talking to a fuzzy spiral. On the sofa there is a boring labyrinth speaking to a hysterical line, a giggling, jittery bit of calligraphy. Then there is a dialogue between concentric circles and a spiral. The concentric circles represent the frozen, prudent people, the porcupine and turtle people. The spiral can look like a series of concentric circles….But actually the essence of spirals is different from the essence of concentric circles.”

Steinberg worked in a wide range of media, often packing several into a single image. Traditional media abound–ink, pencil, charcoal, crayon, watercolor, oil, and gouache–as do novel devices. He designed rubber stamps of people, birds, horsemen, and crocodiles, imprinting his compositions with their reiterative forms as well as with official-looking but purposely unreadable rubber-stamp seals. In Steinberg’s art, handwriting takes on the character of a drawing medium: he invented an elegant, but again unreadable, calligraphy with which he manufactured “documents”–fake certificates, diplomas, passports, and licenses whose illegibility deprives officialdom of its self-proclaimed authority. Although he primarily drew on paper, Steinberg also turned photographs into drawing surfaces, inking wheels below a shot of a bread loaf and, above it, a horizon dotted with houses and a gas station: a baked car speeding down an American highway. In the early 1950s, he drew on objects or entire rooms and had a photographer document the results, as in the empty bathroom whose tub he filled with a lounging woman.

It is not surprising that Steinberg’s first forays into sculpture were three-dimensional comments on the draftsman’s work. The wood Drawing Tables of the 1970s comprise arrangements of hand-carved, eye-fooling simulations of pens, pencils, brushes, rulers, sketchbooks, and seals. And if drawing tables and their implements can be carved, they can also be drawn. The pristine ink and pencil abstraction of 1969 with an artist (right) seated at a drawing table is not about the Cubism it emulates. Cubism, Steinberg tells us, is just one of many styles in which you can draw–and through which you can think.

Steinberg defined drawing as “a way of reasoning on paper,” and he remained committed to the act of drawing in an era dominated by large-scale painting and sculpture. Throughout his long career, he used drawing to think about the semantics of art, reconfiguring stylistic signs into a new language suited to the fabricated temper of modern life. He was, as the title of one of his books has it, the “inspector,” seeing through every false front, every pretense. Sometimes with affection, sometimes with irony, but always with virtuoso mastery, Saul Steinberg peeled back the carefully wrought masks of 20th-century civilization.

http://www.saulsteinbergfoundation.org/life_work.html

 

Only by his action can a man make (himself/his life) whole . . . . You are responsible for what you have done and the people whom you have influenced

Happy Birthday Maragaret Bourke-White

NAME: Margaret Bourke-White

BIRTHDATE: June 14, 1904

BIRTHPLACE: The Bronx, New York

FAMILY BACKGROUND: Her father, Joseph White, was of Polish-Jewish background. He was an inventor and an engineer. He believed in equality in education and opportunity for all his children. Margaret’s mother, Minnie Bourke, was of Irish-English ancestry and was a loving and nurturing mother. Minnie was completing her college degree at the time of her death. Margaret was married twice; once to Everett Chapman, when she was but 18 years old; and to Erskine Caldwell, the writer, in 1939, after they had worked together. They divorced in 1942.

EDUCATION: Margaret Bourke-White attended several universities throughout the United States while pursuing a degree in Herpetology (the study of reptiles). They included Columbia University in New York, the University of Michigan, Purdue University in Indiana, Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and she received her degree in 1927 from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.

Margaret began to study photography as a hobby while a very young woman. She developed the styles and techniques that she needed for various formats on her own. Her father was also somewhat of a camera enthusiast and he exposed her to the wonders of the photographic lens as a youngster.

DESCRIPTION OF ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Margaret Bourke-White is a woman of many firsts. She was a forerunner in the newly emerging field of photojournalism, and was the first female to be hired as such. She was the first photographer for Fortune magazine, in 1929. In 1930, she was the first Western photographer allowed into the Soviet Union.

Henry Luce hired her as the first female photojournalist for Life magazine, soon after its creation in 1935, and one of her photographs adorned its first cover (November 23, 1936). She was the first female war correspondent and the first to be allowed to work in combat zones during World War II, and one of the first photographers to enter and document the death camps. She made history with the publication of her haunting photos of the Depression in the book You Have Seen Their Faces, a collaboration with husband-to-be Erskine Caldwell. She wrote six books about her international travels. She was the premiere female industrial photographer, getting her start in Cleveland, Ohio, at the Otis Steel Company around 1927.

PLACE OF DEATH: Connecticut

DATE OF DEATH: August 27, 1971

http://www.lkwdpl.org/wihohio/bour-mar.htm

The freedom of every artist is essential.

Happy Birthday Christo

Christo (born as Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, Bulgarian: Христо Явашев) and Jeanne-Claude (born as Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon) are a married couple who create environmental installation art. Their works include the wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin and the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris, the 24-mile-long curtain called Running Fence in Marin and Sonoma counties in California, and most recently The Gates in New York City’s Central Park.

Coincidentally Christo and Jeanne-Claude were born on the exact same date – 13 June 1935.

Although their work is visually impressive and often controversial as a result of its scale, the artists have repeatedly denied that their projects contain any deeper meaning than their immediate aesthetic. The purpose of their art, they contend, is simply to make the world a “more beautiful place” or to create new ways of seeing familiar landscapes. Art critic David Bourdon has described Christo’s wrappings as a “revelation through concealment.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christo_and_Jeanne-Claude

To restrict the artist is a crime. It is to murder germinating life.

Happy Birthday Egon Schiele

Egon Schiele was born June 12, 1890, in Tulln, Austria. After attending school in Krems and Klosterneuburg, he enrolled in the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Vienna in 1906. Here he studied painting and drawing but was frustrated by the school’s conservatism.

In 1907, he met Gustav Klimt, who encouraged him and influenced his work. Schiele left the Akademie in 1909 and founded the Neukunstgruppe with other dissatisfied students.

Upon Klimt’s invitation, Schiele exhibited at the 1909 Vienna Kunstschau, where he encountered the work of Edvard Munch, Jan Toroop, Vincent van Gogh and others.

On the occasion of the first exhibition of the Neukunstgruppe in 1909 at the Piska Salon, Schiele met the art critic and writer Arthur Roessler, who befriended him and wrote admiringly of his work. In 1910, he began a long friendship with the collector Heinrich Benesch. By this time, Schiele had developed a personal expressionist portrait and landscape style and was receiving a number of portrait commissions from the Viennese intelligentsia.

Seeking isolation, Schiele left Vienna in 1911 to live in several small villages. He concentrated increasingly on self-portraits and allegories of life, death, and sex and produced erotic watercolors. In 1912, he was arrested for “immortality” and “seduction”; during his 24-day imprisonment, he executed a number of poignant watercolors and drawings.

Schiele participated in various group exhibitions, including those of the Neukunstgruppe in Prague in 1910 and Budapest in 1912; the Sonderbund, in 1912; and several Secession shows in Munich, beginning in 1911.

In 1913, the Galerie Hans Goltz, Munich, mounted Schiele’s first solo show. A solo exhibition of his work took place in Paris in 1914. The following year, Schiele married Edith Harms and was drafted into the Austrian army. He painted prolifically and continued to exhibit during his military service. His solo show at the Vienna Secession of 1918 brought him critical acclaim and financial success.

He died several months later in Vienna, at age 28, on October 31, 1918, a victim of influenza, which had claimed his wife three days earlier.

http://www.leninimports.com/egon_schiele_bio.html#awbiog

 

 

We see nothing truly until we understand it.

Happy Birthday John Constable

John Constable (11 June 1776 – 31 March 1837) was an English Romantic painter. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home—now known as “Constable Country”—which he invested with an intensity of affection. “I should paint my own places best”, he wrote to his friend John Fisher in 1821, “painting is but another word for feeling”.

His most famous paintings include “Dedham Vale” of 1802 and “The Hay Wain” of 1821. Although his paintings are now among the most popular and valuable in British art, he was never financially successful and did not become a member of the establishment until he was elected to the Royal Academy at the age of 52. He sold more paintings in France than in his native England.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Constable