1 pce.

Shootin' Shell 45 cap gun commercial ( Mattel )

Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay was born to a poor Ukrainian family in 1885, survived two World Wars, and died wealthy in Paris in 1979. In between, she co-founded the French avant-garde movement Orphism with her husband, the painter Robert Delaunay, claimed the first retrospective for a living female artist at the Louvre, and conceived -- as a practical side venture -- a brand that helped define the style of sophisticated authors (Nancy Cunard), international performers (Diaghilev’s Madrid dancers) and, indeed, much of 20th-century cosmopolitan culture.

Sonia described her textiles as mere “exercises in color” that informed her true passion, painting. But her work in fashion and the applied arts, via her Maison Delaunay design atelier, may well be her broader legacy. Such is the argument of “Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay,” an exhibition co-curated by Matilda McQuaid and Susan Brown at the Cooper-Hewitt, where it is on view this spring. Presenting a lush collection of some 250 screen-printed, hand-sewn and embroidered patterns, the show contextualizes Sonia-the-Designer with a handful of photographs, drawings and ephemera that illustrate the trajectory of her creative beginnings.

Read more HERE

Elizabeth Taylor 1932-2011

The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues.

~Elizabeth Taylor

Ellsworth Kelly: Reliefs 2009-2010

Ellsworth Kelly, now 87 years old, has distilled his palette and introduced forms never before seen in his work. In each work, he starts with a rectangular canvas that he carefully paints with many coats of white paint. A shaped canvas, painted black in all but two works, is placed on top. The exceptions are a luminous pale gray canvas and a single bright red canvas. The aluminum wall sculpture in the exhibition is lacquered a pure white.

The self-imposed restricted vocabulary Kelly uses in the new work focuses the eye on his compositions, which, with their sharp diagonals and dramatic curves, are among the most dynamic of his career.

The sources for these new forms can be discovered in the twenty works on paper on view in Ellsworth Kelly: Black and White Drawings, the exhibition in the gallery next door at 526 West 22nd Street. Most of these works on paper were made between 1954 and 1959, shortly after Kelly returned to New York after living in Paris for six years. The connection between these works and Kelly’s 2010 paintings underscores the artist’s unique vision over more than half a century.

via: Matthew Marks Gallery

“Modigliani: A Life.”

With his milky skin and sleepy eyes, Amedeo Modigliani was one of modern art’s fabled beauties. His life was box-office gold, a classic mortal tale of squalor and salvation. An artist-genius sinks under the weight of poverty, illness and addiction, dies at 35, leaving behind ruined lives — his distraught mistress kills herself and their unborn child — and a body of hugely popular art.

Is the story true? Only up to a point, and it’s what lies beyond that point that interests Meryle Secrest in her new biography,“Modigliani: A Life.” She lets basic facts stand — privation, illness, chemicals — but recasts the artist’s character from dissolute victim to active performer, one who controlled the way his life would be viewed by his contemporaries, and by history.

Modigliani was born in 1884 in Livorno, Italy, to a Sephardic Jewish line of intellectual aristocrats — they traced their lineage to Spinoza — and fiscal bunglers. Although by the time he came along family fortunes had long since evaporated, he tended to carry himself like a prince. And the experience of having survived a series of childhood health crises, including tuberculosis, only increased his sense of exceptionalism.

Unsurprisingly, he viewed artists as privileged beings. At 17, he wrote that as a species they had “different rights, different values than do normal, ordinary people because we have different needs which put us — it has to be said and you must believe it — above their moral standards.” Many adolescents play with such ideas. Modigliani went on to live them.

Read more: HERE

 

Scenes From the Tsunami

Original work from three graphic artists in Japan.

Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Yuichi Yokoyama

Tatsuro Kiuchi

via: nytimes.com

 

Power to the Imagination. Artists, Posters and Politics

The exhibition presents in excess of 180 works by approximately 90 internationally renowned artists and thus offers a fresh and comprehensive overview over protest and opposition movements in the course of the past 60 years.At the same time it highlights the tensions between utopia, the wish for participation and political history – looking at the newly reviewed protests this subject is highly topical. Artists’ posters tell the story of protest, commitment to freedom and human rights, the fight for equal rights and tolerance.

“Power to Fantasy” was the artist Pierre Soulages’ slogan of support to the students protesting in Paris in May 1968. The Post-War period when Picasso emphazised his support for peace with his doves of peace, was followed by the rebellions of the 60s.A decade later the freedom of minorities was at the centre of attention, and shortly after artists such as Joseph Beuys focussed on the pollution of the environment. By the mid-80s AIDS drew attention to discrimination and exclusion of minorities and equality was pursued by American artists especially, examples are Keith Haring or Jenny Holzer.

Globalisation after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 left its mark on posters by Robert Rauschenberg and others. The history of international protest, illustrated by powerful designs by the great artists of our times is equally the history of art of this time – narrated selectively, yet expressing an astonishing continuity and authenticity.

via: Kunstmeile Hamburg

Help Japan Poster

To raise relief funds for the devastating 8.9 earthquake and subsequent massive tsunami that struck Japan March 11, 2011. %100 of the proceeds go to the Japanese earthquake and tsunami relief.

The Wieden + Kennedy Tokyo office is currently deciding which NPO the funds will be going to. 

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Jun’ichirō Tanizaki: In Praise of Shadows 1933

Originally published in 1933 in Japanese, the English translation was published in 1977 and as the title hints at Jun’ichirō Tanizaki makes the claim that traditional Japanese objects such as lacquerware and the Japanese home itself have been made specifically for low light, or to be specific, the light produced as the day closes – for example the central living space in a traditional Japanese dwelling would always have a sand or neutral finish, all the best to subtly highlight an evenings fading light.

Why should this propensity to seek beauty in darkness be so strong only in Orientals? The West too has known a time when there was no electricity, gas, or petroleum, yest so far as I know the West has never been disposed to delight in shadows. Japanese ghosts have traditionally no feet; Western ghosts have feet, but are transparent. As even this trifle suggests, pitch darkness has always occupied our fantasies, while in the West even ghosts are clear as glass. This is true too of our household implements: we prefer colours compounded of darkness, they prefer the colours of sunlight. And of silverware and copperware: we love them for the burnish and patina, which they consider unclean, insanitary, and polish to a glittering brilliance. They paint their ceilings and walls in pale colours to drive out as many of the shadows as they can. We fill our gardens with dense plantings, they spread out a flat expanse of grass.

Read more: HERE

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