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Mats Gustafson’s Landscapes and Swans

 

Since the late 1970s, Mats Gustafson’s fashion illustrations have decorated the pages of magazines such as Interview, The New Yorker, and Vogue, among others. But by 1997, the artist began shifting his focus to the natural world, starting a series of pastel landscape studies. A couple of years later, Gustafson began drawing swans in the same minimalist style that had defined his work in the fashion industry. “It’d been an ongoing switch in my career—focusing on nature—but it was funny, because I picked the most fashionable parts of nature,” Gustafson said. “The swan is very much the supermodel among birds, and they’re very elegant. I was still looking for beautiful lines, but just in the natural world.”

The gallery John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, in New York City, is now showing “Mats Gustafson: Swan,” a collection of the illustrator’s early landscape and swan studies, as well as recent pieces and a digital wall installation. “I wanted to reduce, simplify, and get to the essence of things,” Gustafson said of the stark but romantic works. Herewith, some images from the exhibition, which is on display until January 23. 

via: Vanity Fair

 

'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

Vintage Posting

Original Pekarek's Tee

Valentin Zietara

 link: International Poster Center 

Tim Burton Retrospective

 On November 22, the Museum of Modern Art will open “Tim Burton,” a retrospective for the man who, it goes without saying, has brought us some of the most fantastical movies of the last two decades, from Beetlejuice to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Rather than cobbling together a predictable slew of movie stills, the curators have assembled a sprawling show of films, photos, props, and puppets, as well as dozens of immaculate, beautiful, and sinister drawings the director has done throughout his life. Much of the work has been stored in his London home for years. MoMA “contacted me and it forced me to open it up and look at everything,” Burton recently told New York. “It's like opening up an old closet or something — like ‘Oh! What's all this crap?’”

Lookout

In "The City Out My Window: 63 Views on New York," illustrator  Matteo Pericoli asks well-known New Yorkers to describe what they see from their windows. This is the view of David Byrne, the musician and artist. "I think of my view as pretty typical for a New Yorker. We look out our windows at other windows. That, in a way, mirrors our lives here -- we are constantly looking at each other, millions of us, on the streets and elsewhere."

link: "Window Watchers in a City of Strangers"

Get a Move On

 If you want to be moved and you're visiting or live in New York, I suggest you spend some kinetic time tomorrow at "Moving Pictures: A Symposium of Illustration and Motion." Moderator and organizer Lauren Redniss reveals a history of blind spots; Jody Rosen unveils “The Knowledge” of London taxi drivers (the "it" that every London cabbie must know); Joel Smith, a Saul Steinberg scholar, maps the artist's mind; NYPL artist-in-residence Richard McGuire screens the film Fear(s) of the Dark .

The event is FREE and open to the public at The New School Jazz Performance Space Arnhold Hall. It's tomorrow, November 11, 2009, from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m., at 55 West 13th Street, 5th floor, New York City. 

via: The Daily Heller

Interview with William Eggleston

This candid interview with photographer William Eggleston was conducted by film director

Michael Almereyda on the occasion of the opening of Eggleston's retrospective William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

A key figure in American photography, Eggleston is credited almost single-handedly with ushering in the era of color photography.

"Adventures of Prince Achmed"

If you ask the average person what the first feature-length animated film was, just about everyone will answer Walt Disney's "Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs". But Disney's film wasn't the first animated feature by a longshot. Arguably, that honor belongs to Lotte Reiniger's "Adventures of Prince Achmed". 

In 1923, Reiniger and her husband and business partner, Carl Koch began work on an ambitious project... a feature length silhouette puppet film based on "The One Thousand and One Nights". She worked with animator Bertold Bartosch and background artist Walter Ruttman for three years on the film. The paper cutouts were jointed using wires and delicately arranged on top of a lightbox, where it was photographed frame by frame. Reiniger continued to animate her distinctive silhouette films up into the mid-1970s. 

On Nov. 11 and 15 the artist Kara Walker will introduce one of the earliest feature-length animated films, Lotte Reiniger’s “Adventures of Prince Achmed” (1926), as restored by the Deutsches Filmmuseum.

"New York by Line: From Broadway to the Battery"

In 1967, a German illustrator going by the single name Robinson published a collection of pen-and-ink drawings called New York. Like so many non-natives before and after him—Hart Crane, E.B. White, Tom Wolfe—Robinson, whose given name was Werner Kruse, was able to see the city with uncommon clarity, and a single page of his book contains more detail than most of us process in a day.

Revealed in a new edition from Universe Publishing—New York: Line by Line, From Broadway to the Battery—the drawings most obviously evoke Saul Steinberg’s New Yorker work, particularly when Robinson’s whimsical skeins of pedestrians march across our streets. But Steinberg was a fabulist, creating a city of swooping giant calligraphies and anthropomorphic traffic. Robinson, by contrast, was giving us an ultracrisp experience of the overwhelming muchness of New York. His buildings are scrupulously accurate, down to the tiny tripartite cornices on the brownstones. The zigzaggy edges of the city mass and pile up until they practically spring out of the binding.

via: "Drawn to New York", New York Magazine

"The Unknown Hipster"

Born French (naturally), Unknown Hipster moved to New York to become a painter, a poet, or anything (within reason) art world related. All that can be said is that Unknown frequently appears at fashionable and cultural events without being necessarily on the list.