Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Tadanori Yokoo

Tadanori Yokoo (横尾忠則, Yokoo Tadanori) born 1936 in Hyogo, is a Japanese graphic designer, illustrator, printmaker and painter.


Yokoo (pronounced "yoko-o") is one of Japan's most successful and internationally recognized graphic designers and artists. He began his career as a stage designer for avant garde theatre in Tokyo. His early work shows the influence of the New York based Push Pin Studio (Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast in particular) but Yokoo himself cites filmmaker Akira Kurosawa and writer Yukio Mishima as two of his most formative influences.


In the late 1960s he became interested in mysticism and psychedelia, deepened by travels in India. Because his work was so attuned to 1960s pop culture, he has often been (unfairly) described as the "Japanese Andy Warhol" or likened to psychedelic poster artist Peter Max, but Yokoo's complex and multi-layered imagery is intensely autobiographical and entirely original.


By the late 60s he had already achieved international recognition for his work and was included in the 1968 "Word & Image" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Four years later MoMA mounted a solo exhibition of his graphic work organized by Mildred Constantine. Yokoo collaborated extensively with Shuji Terayama and his theater Tenjo Sajiki. He has also starred as a protagonist in Nagisa Oshima's film Diary of a Shinjuku Thief.


In 1981 he unexpectedly "retired" from commercial work and took up painting. His career as a fine artist continues to this day with numerous exhibitions of his paintings every year, but alongside this he remains fully engaged and prolific as a graphic designer.




Monday, June 28, 2010

Gerrit Rietveld

In the fourth posting on the theme of architect/designer I am looking at Gerrit Rietveld (24 June 1888–26 June 1964) who was a Dutch furniture designer and architect. One of the principal members of the Dutch artistic movement called De Stijl, Rietveld is famous for his Red and Blue Chair and for the Rietveld Schröder House, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Rietveld designed his famous Red and Blue Chair in 1917. In 1918, he started his own furniture factory, and changed the chair's colors after becoming influenced by the 'De Stijl' movement, of which he became a member in 1919, the same year in which he became an architect.

Red and Blue Chair (1917)

He designed his first building, the Rietveld Schröder House, in 1924, in close collaboration with the owner Truus Schröder-Schräder. Built in Utrecht on the Prins Hendriklaan 50, the house has a conventional ground floor, but is radical on the top floor, lacking fixed walls but instead relying on sliding walls to create and change living spaces. The design seems like a three-dimensional realization of a Mondrian painting.


The Rietveld Schröder House. 
Note how similar in style the above detail looks to his Berlin Chair (1923)


Rietveld broke with the 'De Stijl' in 1928 and became associated with a more functionalist style of architecture known as either Nieuwe Zakelijkheid or Nieuwe Bouwen. The same year he joined the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne. He designed the "Zig-Zag" chair in 1934 and started the design of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which was finished after his death. He built hundreds of homes, many of which are in the city of Utrecht.

Zig-Zag Chair (1934)

His work was neglected when rationalism came into vogue but he later benefited from a revival of the style of the 1920s thirty years later.

 Dining Chair (1919)

Steel Chair (1927)

Steltman Chair (1963)

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Fernando Botero

Following on from my blog on the artist Roy Carruthers I thought it would be appropriate to feature the work of Fernando Botero. Fernando Botero Angulo (born 19 April 1932) is a Colombian figurative artist, self-titled "the most Colombian of Colombian artists" early on, coming to prominence when he won the first prize at the Salón de Artistas Colombianos in 1958.


In 1948, at the age of 16, Botero published his first illustrations in the Sunday supplement of the El Colombiano daily paper and used the money he received to pay for his high school education at the Liceo de Marinilla de Antioquia. 1948 was also the year Botero first exhibited, along with other artists from the region.


From 1949 to 1950, Botero worked as a set designer, before moving to Bogotá in 1951. His first one-man show occurred at the Galería Leo Matiz in Bogotá, a few months after his arrival. In 1952, Botero travelled with a group of artists to Barcelona, where he stayed only briefly before moving on to Madrid.


In Madrid, Botero studied at the Academia de San Fernando. In 1952, he traveled to Bogotá, where he had a personal exhibit at the Leo Matiz gallery. Later that year, he won the ninth edition of the Salón de Artistas Colombianos.


In 1953, Botero moved to Paris, where he spent most of his time in the Louvre. He lived in Florence, Italy from 1953 to 1954, studying the works of Renaissance masters.


Botero gained considerable attention in 2005 for his Abu Ghraib collection, which began as an idea he had on a plane, finally culminating in more than 85 paintings and 100 drawings.


The Circus collection followed in 2008, with 20 works of oil and watercolor. In an interview promoting his Circus collection, Botero said: "After all this, I always return to the simplest things: still lifes."




Thursday, June 24, 2010

Roy Carruthers

Roy Carruthers was born in South Africa in 1938 He is an Illustrator, Painter, Graphic Artist and Sculptor. Roy lived around the world after leaving South Africa, had a career in advertising, working in London in the late 1960's where I first came across him, and emigrated to the US in 1968. I stayed with him for a week at his home in Connecticut in 1969 when he was working at a New York advertising agency as an Art Director. In the 1970's Roy turned to painting as well as illustrating. Clearly influenced by the painter Fernando Botero's unique take on the human form he developed his own 'body' language in his paintings and lithographs.



 




Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Aubrey Beardsley

The third in my mini-series on illustrators of the past features Aubrey Beardsley who made a huge impact in his 25 years of life. Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (21 August 1872 – 16 March 1898) was an English illustrator and author. His drawings, executed in black ink and influenced by the style of Japanese woodcuts, emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the Aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James A. McNeill Whistler. Beardsley's contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau style and the poster movement was significant, despite the brevity of his career before his early death from tuberculosis.


Beardsley was born in Brighton on 21 August 1872. In 1883 his family settled in London, and in the following year he appeared in public as an "infant musical phenomenon," playing at several concerts with his sister. He attended Brighton, Hove and Sussex Grammar School in 1884, before moving on to attend Bristol Grammar School, where in 1885 he wrote a play, which he performed together with other students. At about the same time his first drawings and cartoons were published in the school newspaper of the Bristol Grammar School Past and Present. In 1888 he obtained a post in an architect's office, and afterwards one in the Guardian Life and Fire Insurance Company. In 1891, under the advice of Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, he took up art as a profession. In 1892 he attended the classes at the Westminster School of Art, then under Professor Fred Brown.


His six years of major creative output can be divided into several periods, identified by the form of his signature. In the early period his work is mostly unsigned. During 1891 and 1892 he progressed to using his initials - A.V.B. In mid-1892, the period of Morte D'Arthur and The Bon Mots he used a Japanese-influenced mark which became progressively more graceful, sometimes accompanied by A.B. in block capitals. He was aligned with the Yellow Book coterie of artists and writers. He was an art editor for the first four editions and produced many illustrations for the magazine. He was also closely aligned with Aestheticism, the British counterpart of Decadence and Symbolism. Most of his images are done in ink, and feature large dark areas contrasted with large blank ones, and areas of fine detail contrasted with areas with none at all.


Beardsley was the most controversial artist of the Art Nouveau era, renowned for his dark and perverse images and the grotesque erotica, which were the main themes of his later work. Some of his drawings, inspired by Japanese shunga, featured enormous genitalia. His most famous erotic illustrations were on themes of history and mythology; these include his illustrations for a privately printed edition of Aristophanes' Lysistrata, and his drawings for Oscar Wilde's play Salome, which eventually premiered in Paris in 1896.



He also produced extensive illustrations for books and magazines (e.g. for a deluxe edition of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur) and worked for magazines such as The Studio and The Savoy, of which is he a co-founder. Beardsley also wrote Under the Hill, an unfinished erotic tale based loosely on the legend of Tannhäuser, published in The Savoy. Beardsley was a caricaturist and did some political cartoons, mirroring Wilde's irreverent wit in art. Beardsley's work reflected the decadence of his era and his influence was enormous, clearly visible in the work of the French Symbolists, the Poster art Movement of the 1890s and the work of many later-period Art Nouveau artists like Pape and Clarke.


Beardsley was a public character as well as a private eccentric. He said, "I have one aim—the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing." Wilde said he had "a face like a silver hatchet, and grass green hair." Beardsley was meticulous about his attire: dove-grey suits, hats, ties, yellow gloves. He would appear at his publisher's in a morning coat and patent leather pumps.


Although Beardsley was aligned with the homosexual clique that included Oscar Wilde and other English aesthetes, the details of his sexuality remain in question. He was generally regarded as asexual—which is hardly surprising, considering his chronic illness and his devotion to his work. Speculation about his sexuality include rumors of an incestuous relationship with his elder sister, Mabel, who may have become pregnant by her brother and miscarried. Through his entire career, Beardsley had recurrent attacks of the disease that would end it. He suffered frequent lung hemorrhages and was often unable to work or leave his home.


Beardsley converted to Catholicism in March 1897, and would subsequently beg his publisher, Leonard Smithers, to “destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bad drawings...by all that is holy all obscene drawings." Smithers ignored Beardsley’s wishes, and actually continued to sell reproductions as well as forgeries of Beardsley's work.


Beardsley was active till his death in Menton, France, at the age of 25 on 16 March 1898 of tuberculosis.

Monday, June 21, 2010

Baccarat Paperweights

To literally 'round' off my recent blogs on glass I thought I'd feature some Baccarat paperweights. Baccarat glassware is produced by an important glass works founded in 1765 at Baccarat, France. Originally a producer of soda glass for windows, tableware, and industrial uses, Baccarat was acquired by a Belgian manufacturer of lead crystal in 1817 and since then has specialized in producing this type of glass. In 1823 the firm won its first gold medal in an international exposition for glass, and a showing of its works at the 1925 Exposition des Arts Decoratifs helped shape the Art Deco style. Among the many artistically significant works it has produced are the pieces by Émile Gallé.
The mainly C19th Millefiori paperweights pictured here require a great degree of skill in their manufacture and are highly collectable.