Sunday, 15 March 2009
Jimi Hendrix - Alan Herr
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Alan Herr began his photographic interest in 1964 at the age of ten when he was given his first camera, a 35mm Pentax Spotmatic. A music lover, Alan began photographing performances of his favorite musical groups at age 12 in 1966. After submitting his work to Bill Graham of the Fillmore East, he was authorized as “House Photographer” at the Fillmore East and West in June of 1967 at the age of thirteen and was subsequently referred to affectionately by that elite professional group as “The Prodigy”. Photographing exclusively in color separated him from the photographic crowd very early and his works adorned the walls of the Fillmore immediately. With all-access passes to whatever shows he wished, Alan was photographing groups such as The Cream, The Who, Johnny Winter, Yes, Alice Cooper, Mountain, Jimi Hendrix and countless others. After seeing Frank Zappa in the early seventies, Alan found what would become his first musical love. Over the next fifteen years a working relationship and ultimately a friendship was formed with Zappa that inspires Alan to this day.
In the late 70’s Alan was accepted into and attended the prestigious “School of Visual Arts” in New York City working toward his goal of achieving the much prized Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Photography. Subsequently Alan was given the prized opportunity to assistant the legendary photographer Francesco Scavullo, where he honed his skills in every phase of the medium. By 1978 Alan began his commercial career photographing everything from beauty and runway to product photography and everything in between. Ranging from 35mm to 8 X 10 view cameras, no challenge was too demanding. His published photos are too numerous to mention. In 1999, Alan was approached by Paul Allen (Bill Gates’ ex partner), to sell his “Band of Gypsys” collection of Jimi Hendrix images to Mr. Allen’s “Experience Music Project” museum where Alan’s images will be displayed for generations representing that magical New Year’s Eve of 1969, the show when the “Band of Gypsys” album was recorded. His are the only color photographs in existence of that performance. Alan was only fifteen years old.
In 1982 Alan began a working relationship with the Bellette Hofmann Art Fine Gallery on Park Avenue that took him in several directions, not the least of which was the sale of fine art works by everyone from Rembrandt to Warhol as well as limited editions of his own photography. Alan ultimately became a partner in the Bellette Hofmann Fine Art Gallery that continued until Ms. Hofmann’s retirement in 1996 following the introduction and promotion of Yuriy Gorbachev, nephew of the legendary world leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the man that put an end to communism in the world as we now know it. Taking what he did from that worldwide, history making experience, Alan has continued to work with his photography as well as his now global fine arts sales skills and pursuits.
Tom Wesselmann
Artist: Tom Wesselmann, American (1931 - 2004)
Title: Monica Nude with Matisse
Year: 1992
Medium: Embossed Etching with Aquatint, signed and numbered in pencil
Edition: 57/75
Size: 38 x 60 inches
Tom Wesselmann, American (1931 - 2004)
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Tom Wesselmann was born in Cincinnati, studied at Hiram College and then at the University of Cincinnati, where he earned a degree in psychology in 1956. After two years in the army, he attended the Art Academy of Cincinnati and then went to New York to study at the Cooper Union Art School. Although his earliest works leaned toward abstract expressionism his style underwent a series of dramatic changes and eventually led to his becoming an important exponent of pop art.
In 1961, Wesselmann had his first one-man show in New York and began his most famous series, -Great American Nudes. Since then he has had frequent exhibits in prominent American and European galleries. His work has been included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Institute, Minneapolis, to name just three of a long, impressive list.
One year after 1961, he participated in the group exhibition 'New Realists' at the Sidney Janis Gallery, his international career with numerous exhibitions started off. The same year his first assemblages with the title 'Still Life' came into existence. In 1963 Wesselmann married his girl-friend and fellow student Claire Selley, who also was his most important model. He began a series of 'Bathtub Collages'. In 1966 the first of many one-man shows took place at the Janis Gallery. In 1964 Tom Wesselmann began with further series, e.g. 'Bedroom Paintings', 'Seascapes' and 'Smokers', which he continued until the early 1980s. In 1980 he published a treatise about his artistic development under the pseudonym Slim Stealingworth. In 1983 first 'Metal Works' were produced, which were based on the artist's drawings and sketches and which are still in the centre of the artist's interest. In 1994 a comprehensive retrospective took place at the Kunsthalle in Tübingen. Wesselmann died in New York on 17 December 2004. His choice of trivial motifs, thier monumentalisation, reduction to stereotypes, sexual embelematic as well as the use of bright colours made Wesselmann a co-founder of the American Pop-Art during the 1960s.
Victor Vasarely
Artist: Victor Vasarely, Hungarian (1908 - 1997)
Title: Untitled I
Year: circa 1970
Medium: Aquatint Etching with Embossing, signed and numbered in pencil
Edition: FV 7/30
Paper Size: 37 x 37 inches
Victor Vasarely (Hungarian, 1908 - 1997)
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Hungarian-born Victor Vasarely is known as a founder of optical art. Vasarely was born in Pecs and grew up in Piešťany (then Pöstyén) and Budapest where in 1925 he took up medical studies at Budapest University. In 1927 he abandoned medicine to learn traditional academic painting at the private Podolini-Volkmann Academy. In 1928/1929, he enrolled at Sándor Bortnyik's Műhely (lit. "workshop", in existence until 1938), then widely recognized as the center of Bauhaus studies in Budapest. Cash-strapped, the műhely could not offer the whole range of its illustrious Bauhaus model, and concentrated on applied graphic art and typographic design.
Vasarely’s excellence in drawing was quickly noticed. In 1929 he painted his Blue Study and Green Study. In 1930 he married his fellow student Claire Spinner (1908-1990). Together they had two sons, Andre and Jean-Pierre. In Budapest, he worked for a ball-bearings company in accounting and designing advertising posters. Victor Vasarely became a graphics designer and a poster artist during the 1930’s who combined patterns and organic images with each other.
He studied at the Bauhaus Muhely in Budapest and in 1930 emigrated to Paris where he developed his particular vision which stems from the idea of democratizing the art object. Influenced greatly by the problems of the world's cities, he feels his work offers a solution by presenting a clear view of the "color-surface-perception" relationship.
Vasarely left Hungary and settled in Paris in 1930 working as a graphic artist and as a creative consultant at the advertising agencies Havas, Draeger and Devambez (1930-1935). His interactions with other artists during this time were limited. He played with the idea of opening up an institution modeled after Sándor Bortnyik Műhely’s and developed some teaching material for it. Having lived mostly in cheap hotels, he settled in 1942/1944 in Saint-Céré in the Lot département. After the Second World War, he opened an atelier in Arcueil, a suburb some 10 kilometers from the center of Paris (in the Val-de-Marne département of the Île-de-France). In 1961 he finally settled in Annet-sur-Marne (in the Seine-et-Marne département).
Over the next three decades, Vasarely developed his style of geometric abstract art, working in various materials but using a minimal number of forms and colours:
He has used the income from the sale of these "investigations," as he calls his prints, to establish a socio-cultural foundation in Aix-en-Provence, France, for the study of the integration of plastic beauty at all levels of the urban environment. He is represented in major museums all over the world and has received many artistic and honorary awards. Among these distinctions are the French Legion of Honor, the Guggenheim Prize, and the Gold Medal of the Triennale in Milan.
On 5 June 1970, Vasarely opened his first dedicated museum with over 500 works in a renaissance palace in Gordes (closed in 1996). A second major undertaking was the Fondation Vasarely in Aix-en-Provence, a museum housed in a distinct structure specially designed by Vasarely. It was inaugurated in 1976 by French president Georges Pompidou. Sadly the museum is now in a state of disrepair, several of the pieces on display have been damaged by water leaking from the ceiling. Also, in 1976 his large kinematic object Georges Pompidou was installed in the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Vasarely Museum located at his birth place in Pécs, Hungary, was established with a large donation of works by Vasarely. In 1982 154 specially created serigraphs were taken into space by the cosmonaut Jean-Loup Chrétien on board the French-Soviet spacecraft Salyut 7 and later sold for the benefit of UNESCO. In 1987, the second Hungarian Vasarely museum was established in Zichy Palace in Budapest with more than 400 works.
He died in Paris on 15 March 1997.
Mimmo Rotella
Artist: Mimmo Rotella, Italian (1918 - 2006)
Portfolio Title: Rotella
Title: Smile of Marilyn
Year: 2004
Medium: Portfolio of 12 Silkscreen & Collages, each signed and numbered in pencil
Edition: PA 9/20
Size: 13.5 x 14.75 inches (each print)
Mimmo Rotella, Italian ( 1918 - 2006 )
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Mimmo Rotella was born in Catanzaro on the 7th of October 1918, the son of a milliner. Following high school he moved to Naples where he began art studies (in 1941 he went to Rome after having obtained a post at the Ministry of Postal and Telecommunication Services). He did not stay long in the capital, however: on being called up he joined the course in the Officer-training School in Nocera. From here he was sent to the School for Non-commissioned Officers in Caserta (Campania). In 1944 he left the armed forces and then obtained his diploma at the Naples Art Academy. From 1944 until 1945 he taught draftsmanship at his city's Institute for Surveyors.
In 1945 he moved to Rome: following his figurative beginnings and first experimentations he elaborated a manner of pictorial expression of neo-geometrical matrix. His participation in exhibitions began in 1947 at the Mostra Sindacale di Arti Figurative. He also took part in all the annual exhibitions of the Art Club up until 1951, both in Rome and Turin. As an alternative expressive method 1949 saw him invent phonetic poetry which the artist called 'epistaltic' (a neologism lacking sense): this was a collection of words (also invented ones), whistles, sounds, numbers and onomatopoeic reiterate. In the same year he wrote its Manifesto which in 1955 was published by Leonardo Sinisgalli in "Civiltà delle Macchine". His first one-man exhibition, with abstract-geometrical works, was held in 1951 at the Galleria Chiurazzi in Rome (an exhibition which enjoyed little favour on the part of criticism).
Also in 1951 he had his first contact with French artists, exhibiting in Paris at the "Salon des Realistes Nouvelles". For the period bridging 1951-1952 he obtained a scholarship on the part of the Fullbright Foundation, thanks to which he was able to sojourn in the United States at the University of Kansas City with the appointment as Artist in Residence. Here he created a large mural composition and recorded phonetic poems with the accompaniment of percussion instruments. At Harvard University in Boston he held a performance of phonetic poetry and recorded other pieces for the Library of Congress in Washington.
In 1952 he also held a second one-man exhibition at the Rockhill Nelson Gallery in Kansas City. His sojourn in the United States offered the possibility of getting to know the works of the protagonists of the new art currents: Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, Twombly, Pollock and Kline.
Following his return to Rome in 1953 he experienced a drawn-out crisis during which he interrupted his pictorial production. Convinced that everything in art had already been done he improvised what he himself has defined as "Zen illumination": in short, the discovery of the advertising poster as artistic expression, as the message of the city. This saw the origin of the décollage - initially the collage - by way of glueing pieces of posters ripped off on the street onto canvas. Here Rotella adopted the collage as used by the cubists, 'contaminating' it with the dadaist and desecrating matrix of the objet trouvé. In Rome he showed the 'torn poster' for the first time in an exhibition entitled "Esposizione d'arte attuale" (1955).
He carried out the so-called "double décollage": that is, the poster firstly removed from the wall and then torn up in the studio. In this period he also made use of the retros d'affiche, using the verso of the posters with the result obtained of non-figurative and monochrome works.
He began to receive acknowledgements in 1956 with the Graziano Award, followed in 1957 by the Battistoni e della Pubblica Istruzione Award. With the Cinecittà series of 1958 he chose both the figures and faces of film posters, orientating his production towards works of a more figurative type.
Already recognized by criticism at the close of the 1950's as being an exponent of the "Young Roman Painting, Rotella was labelled as the 'poster ripper' or the 'painter of glued paper'. At night, armed with a penknife, he not only ripped off posters but also pieces of the metal sheeting and zinc of the mounting frames of the billboard zones of the Rome City Council. In 1958 he was visited in Rome by the French critic Pierre Restany, a meeting which was to lead to a long friendship. In the same year he was included in the Roman exhibition entitled "Nuove tendenze dell'arte italiana", organized by Lionello Venturi and held in the seat of the Rome-New York Art Foundation. In 1959 one of his works was reproduced in the review "Azimuth", founded in Milan by Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni.
The curiosity on the part of the public for the artist's extravagances, for a person who decidedly led a bohémien life, was crystallized in 1960 by way of a short film directed by Enzo Nasso dedicated to the Pittori arrabbiati [Angry Painters]. Here Rotella directed the 'soundtrack'.
In 1960 he 'joined' the Nouveau Réalisme group (although he did not sign its manifesto). The theoretician of this movement was Pierre Restany and included - amongst others - names like Klein, Tinguely, César, Spoerri, Arman and Christo. The group also included the French artists Hains, Villeglé and Dufrêne who in fact also worked on the collage, albeit in an autonomous way. By working in the most total isolation Rotella had anticipated the path of his French colleagues who were only exhibited for the first time in 1957 at the Galerie Colette Allendy in Paris.
Together with his décollages Rotella also created assemblages of objects bought from junk dealers: bottle caps and stoppers, pieces of rope, twine etc.
American Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism, together with the Informal and the spatial and matteric research works carried out in Italy at the time by Fontana and Burri, played an important role in directing Rotella's pictorial orientation. In 1960 he met De Kooning and Rothko in Rome.
In 1961 he took part in the historical Parisian exhibition entitled "A 40° au-dessus de Dada", supervised by Pierre Restany. In 1962 he talked about his own artistic operations at the School of Visual Arts in New York. In 1964 he was invited to take part in the Venice Biennial.
While the press increasingly more talked about the phenomenon of Affichisme Rotella moved to Paris where he began to elaborate a procedure of serial production by way of the projection of images in the negative on emulsified canvas. This operation was to be given the definition of Reportage by the artist or, and more specifically, Mec-Art in 1965 together with the art critic Otto Hanh and the painter Alain Jaquet. The same year saw his Parisian exhibition at the Galerie J.
Using typographical products, between 1967 and 1973 he created his Art-typo works, printing proofs freely chosen and reproduced on canvas. With this procedure he amused himself in insetting and superimposing advertising images: «I inverted my old approach: first I tried to disintegrate, now I try to reintegrate that matter, that reality».
At the beginning of the 1970's he carried out a number of works by directly acting on the advertising pages of magazines with the use of solvents, reducing these either to the state of the imprint (frottage) or quite simply cancelling them (effaçage). Two years later, in 1972, he published an audacious autobiography titled "Autorotella".
The "Plastiforme" were created in 1975: ripped posters placed on a polyurethane support with the intention of giving them tridimensionality.
In the same year he recorded his first Italian LP of phonetic poems, presented by Alfredo Todisco. In 1976 he took part in the International Recital of Sound Poetry - Poetry Action at the Atelier Annick Le Moine. Another experimentation carried out in those years was that of rolling up posters and closing them in plexiglass cubes.
On having left Paris in order to set up home and studio in Milan (1980), during the 1980's he elaborated his "Blanks" or coperture d'affiches : zeroed advertising posters covered with white sheets of paper - as happens for posters that are replaced or have finished their billboard lease - following a conceptual operation. 1984 saw him once again using brushes and acrylic colours in order to create the second cycle of works dedicated to the cinema: Cinecittà 2.
In 1986 he visited Cuba, exhibiting his works at the Havana University. During his stay he also took part in a performance: the laceration of posters in the Square of the city. During the same year he held a series of talks at the Domus Academy in Milan.
He then created his sovrapitture (overpaintings), inspired by the up-to-date theme of graffiti, pictorially intervening on the advertising posters that were torn and then glued on canvas (and from 1987 also ripped posters glued on a support of sheet metal). He drew anonymous writings, like the ones it is possible to read on city walls: signs, love notes and political slogans/epithets in a double message.
In 1990 he took part in the "Art et Pub" exhibition held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and in the "High and Low" exhibition held in New York at the Museum of Modern Art.
In 1991 he married the young Russian economist, Inna Agarounova, who in 1993 gave birth to Asya.
In 1992 he was conferred the title of Officiel des arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture, Jack Lang.
In 1994 he was invited to take part in "Italian Metamorphosis" held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 1996 he took part in "Face ... l'Histoire" at the Centre Pompidou and in the exhibition entitled "Halls of Mirrors" held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (an exhibition that was to tour the world, Rome included). 1996 also saw the Internet inauguration of a one-man exhibition which was diffused online - the first event of its kind in Italy.
In 1997 Rotella dedicated the cycle of works entitled "Felliniana" to the films by Federico Fellini.
In 1999 the Mayor of his natal city, Sergio Abramo, signed a City Council order authorizing Rotella to freely remove posters in Catanzaro and its environs.