one piece

'HERGÉ: The Man Who Created Tintin'

When the Belgian cartoonist Hergé died in 1983 at the age of 75, The New York Times saw fit to run only a brief, 182-word obituary, picked up from Reuters. But in the Francophone world, Hergé’s death was front-page news, inspiring the kind of orgylike coverage reserved in America for fallen statesmen and overdosed pop stars. Belgian politicians asserted Hergé’s greatness, while the French philosopher Michel Serres went so far as to declare that the cartoonist was the author who has had the “most impact on contemporary French life.”

Granted, many people on this side of the Atlantic are also fans of Hergé’s best-loved creation, the tuft-haired boy reporter Tintin, who, along with his trusty dog, Snowy, foiled serial bands of smugglers, gangsters, kidnappers, spies and crude ethnic caricatures across the pages of 24 book-length, Saturday-morning-serial-style adventures. But even Tintin’s most passionate American devotees may choke on the French author Pierre Assouline’s observation, in his scrupulous but stolid biography, HERGÉ: The Man Who Created Tintin (Oxford, $24.95), translated by Charles Ruas, that “today, some speak with some justification of a ‘Tintin century,’ signifying the 20th.” American exceptionalist that I am, I had presumed the 1900s belonged to Mickey Mouse or Batman — or maybe to that relative latecomer Bart Simpson. Though I like Tintin too, I wouldn’t even give him a decade. 

 via: The New York Times Book Review

"Collection of Collections"

From the moment you step into Partners & Spade’s shop you’ll know that you’re not in the typical retail environment. The space is as much to see as it is to buy, combining aspects of both a gallery and store. Though the idea of art and commerce isn’t especially new, Partners & Spade has successfully executed something fresh in the highly competitive field of Manhattan retail.

Every detail of the store is an opportunity for an unexpected touch of humor, including a comical cluster of security cameras that greets you at the door, or the impulse items only reachable by a 10 foot ladder. 

The shop is also a collection of collections that invites gallery owners, designers, artists, and creatives to share their work and collections, giving them a space to showcase items that they otherwise would not have an opportunity for. Several of our favorites include Mike Mills and Maira Kalman’s contributions to the store. Mills based his collection on memories, in particular 1971. A year in which he believes is the first year of his real memories. Stringing together magazine cut outs as well as illustrations of people and items from that year. Pieces from his collection can be bought as well as bartered. You’ll need to talk to the staff to find out which ones those are. Maira Kalman invited Rivka Schoenfeld an artist who’s contributed to M&Co in the past. Schoenfeld hand made a limited edition of wool hats all accompanied with a tote with each individually numbered. The hats are beautiful as well as endearing given that they are all hand made.

Partners & Spade will include a rotating list of contributors from the high and low. Elevating the mundane with objects as simple as a stapler and beautifying it to showcasing rare books and photographs that would sit comfortably behind a glass case at the Met. We can’t divulge everything here you’ll need to go and experience the shop yourself. 

via: The Scout

"Italics: Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution, 1968–2008"

Italian artists may be credited with such accomplishments as linear perspective (via Brunelleschi), chiaroscuro (via Caravaggio), and, pretty much every other formal tool comprising Western art. But their more recent creative triumphs have received notably less fanfare, so to speak—an oversight that Italian curator Francesco Bonami seeks to correct with his new exhibition, Italics: Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution, 1968–2008.

Italics debuted this summer at the Venice Biennale to much criticism from the locals, and the show recently mounted its first and only U.S. stop at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where it will remain on view through February 14, 2010.

via: The New Italian Renaissance -The Daily Beast

Martin dOrgeval: Touched by Fire

On February 1, 2008, a fire ripped through Deyrolle, the venerable Parisian entomology and taxidermy store, in business since 1831. The shop's historic collections of butterflies, rare insects, animals and minerals went up in smoke, and with them the memories of generations of schoolchildren, dreamers and enthusiasts fascinated by their motionless beauty. 

This stunning collection of photographs by Martin d'Orgeval captures the animals and insects that survived the disaster in situ, set against a chilling backdrop of charred woodwork and burned cadavers.

 

Vincent Van Gogh: The Complete Letters

 Van Gogh's letters are the best written by any artist. Engrossing, moving, energetic and compelling, they dramatise individual genius while illuminating the creative process in general. No wonder readers have long since taken them to heart. No wonder, either, that singers have used them in their songs ("Starry Night"), and film-makers as the basis of their movies (Lust for Life). Their mixture of humble detail and heroic aspiration is quite simply life-affirming.

Received wisdom has it that the letters show Van Gogh as a tortured genius. Yet anyone who has actually read them (rather than watched the movie) will feel uncomfortable about this. There are, of course, harrowing stretches in which he frets about insanity, about poverty and about how others perceive him. But the great majority of them are impressive – even lovable – because, no matter how distressing their surrounding circumstances, they show an extraordinarily calm-sounding good sense and a beautiful directness in their account of complicated emotional states. This sense of balance, which frankly amounts to nobility, has been evident in all editions of his letters, ever since the first was published by his sister-in-law, Jo Bonger, in 1914. In this new edition it is even more vividly manifest.

via: guardian.co.uk

 

Hockney's iPhone Drawings

Lawrence Weschler, whose piece "David Hockney's iPhone Passion" appears in the New York Review of Books October 22, 2009 issue, discusses the new drawings that David Hockney has been making with the Brushes application on his iPhone. In a related podcast, Weschler talks about Hockney's other recent work—including a series of large-scale paintings that will be on view at Pace Wildenstein this fall—and his relationship to technology. 

 
 

Post No Bills

This cloth-covered paperback with foldout poster jacket presents Italian photographer Maurizio Montagna's black-and-white series Billboards.

Each of Montagna's photographs captures a billboard devoid of advertisement and, surrounding it, a landscape--sometimes densely urban, other times sparse, lonely and anonymous. 

'Lunar Baedeker'

 

 

A silver Lucifer

serves

cocaine in cornucopia

To some somnambulists

of adolescent thighs

draped

in satirical draperies

Peris in livery

prepare

Lethe

for posthumous parvenues

Delirious Avenues

lit

with the chandelier souls

of infusoria

from Pharoah’s tombstones

lead

to mercurial doomsdays

Odious oasis

in furrowed phosphorous

the eye-white sky-light

white-light district

of lunar lusts

             Stellectric signs

“Wing shows on Starway”

“Zodiac carrousel”

Cyclones

of ecstatic dust

and ashes whirl

crusaders

from hallucinatory citadels

of shattered glass

into evacuate craters

A flock of dreams   

browse on Necropolis

From the shores

of oval oceans

in the oxidized Orient

Onyx-eyed Odalisques

and ornithologists

observe

the flight

of Eros obsolete

And “Immortality”

mildews ...   

in the museums of the moon

“Nocturnal cyclops”

“Crystal concubine”

Pocked with personification

the fossil virgin of the skies

waxes and wanes

BY MINA LOY

 

“I alter material by organizing it unchanged. Each work is an organized area of identical elements. Neither successive nor additive, there is no result or sum.” – Peter Roehr

 

When the Frankfurt artist Peter Roehr died in 1968 at the young age of 23, he left behind several hundreds of works in which he pursued exclusively the idea of serial repetition. From found commonplace materials he created ever new montages of photographs, text, typography, objects, sound, and film probing the concept of redundancy. 

Roehr abstained from both making a statement and sticking to an individual style. His formal repertory is deliberately reduced to the selection of an object, the definition of the number of its repetitions, and their arrangement. The element used is still recognizable, although it becomes absorbed in the series, so that the original form and color scheme are subjected to a potentiating effect.

 Last year, the Städelsche Museums-Verein was able to acquire the artist’s ten Schwarze Tafeln (Black Panels) for the museum, a central work in which the method of a non-narrative serial arrangement of identical objects culminates.

Now that four decades have lapsed, the commonplace nature of Roehr’s works pushes to the fore even more vehemently. They become amazingly enhanced and turn into narrative formulations oscillating between ready-made and seriality, pop and minimal art, everyday life and abstraction. 

The exhibition Peter Roehr illustrates that Roehr’s strict formalism is much more complex and eloquent than it seems to be at first glance.

link: Städel Museum 

 

"Precious"

The movie Precious is the story of an overweight and abused Harlem single mother fighting to survive. The film came out of the Sundance Film Festival this year with the Audience and Grand Jury prizes, as well as Oprah Winfrey as a supporter.

Director Lee Daniels (Shadowboxer, The Woodsman, Monster's Ball) talks us through his journey.

Daniels reveals what attracted him to Precious, his preference for difficult subject matter, feeling an outsider in Hollywood and his conviction that there is a little bit of Precious in all of us. 

He also discusses lead actress Gabourey Sidibe, Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey's involvement in the film, the role of music, how the film's fantasy, humor and soundtrack help balance the harrowing elements, and his desire that African Americans not to be afraid of this film.

Listen here: The Treatment

 Poster by Ignition.