MILTON GLASER - OBITUARY

 

MILTON GLASER – OBITUARY

This is a summary of the obituary by Deyan Sudjic that was published in the Guardian newspaper of 11^th July 2020.

Milton Glaser

The American graphic designer Milton Glaser was born on 26^th June 1929 and died on 26^th June 2020.  He is chiefly remembered for the ‘I love NY’ logo which he designed.

Sudjic describes Glaser’s ‘I love NY’ logo as ‘entirely characteristic of his approach to design, and at the same time an atypical one-off’.  In 1976, New York State had commissioned an advertising agency – Wells Rich Green – to produce a campaign to turn around public perceptions of New York and attract tourists.  Glaser’s initial sketch of the ‘I love NY’ logo was done on the back of an envelope in a taxi: it is now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.  The logo is distinctive of Glaser’s ability to blend words and images to send a powerful message.  It also shows his ‘magpie-like way of picking up and repurposing visual ideas that were already in the air’.  Sudjic writes: ‘he was not a plagiarist, but he was exceptionally fluent in making use of the many languages of design’.  Glaser donated the ‘I love NY’ logo and received no payment for it at any time.  ‘It was a love letter to a city that had allowed him to go to college without paying tuition fees, and in which he lived and worked for most of his life’.  Glaser was born in the Bronx, New York City.  His parents were Hungarian-Jewish immigrants who owned a dry cleaning and tailoring shop. 

Sudjic concludes his obituary thus: ‘Glaser reminds us of a US that we can admire.  He designed its logos, its magazines and record covers, its cafes, its posters and its book jackets’.

STATUES ARE LIES. Jonathan Jones in The Guardian Website, 21st July 2020

STATUES ARE LIES.  Jonathan Jones, in The Guardian Website, 21^st July 2020

Statues are lies, selfies in bronze – and you can’t bring history to life with dead art.  Why are we obsessed with putting up statues of new heroes to replace old villains like Edward Colston?  Reducing history to celebrity culture won’t help anyone understand the full scale and horror of slavery.  Jonathan Jones.

This is a summary of the article by Jonathan Jones which was published on The Guardian website on 21^st July 2020.

Statues are lies

Marcel Duchamp’s porcelain urinal which he submitted to a New York art exhibition 103 years ago caused the death of the statue as an art form.  Why, then, in the 21^st Century are we ‘obsessing about putting up statues of new heroes to replace the old villains?  All this political radicalism is being betrayed by artistic conservatism’.

The deposition of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol was a ‘dadaist act of creativity’ but the ensuing conversation about a replacement statue has been ‘sterile’, and ‘adds nothing to anyone’s understanding of slavery’ in the context of the British Empire.

A statue is ‘no more than a crude symbol’.  The survival of so many Victorian era statues in British cities arises from the view of 19^th Century historians that ‘history was “created by great men” and their leadership’.  This view was ‘killed’ by the Great War, and it also ‘killed the statue’.  Duchamp’s urinal was first exhibited in 1917; Duchamp’s brother died on the western front in that war.  The British national war memorial, erected after the Great War, is a ‘stark, abstract image of infinite loss and suffering too vast to be contained in a statue of some supposedly heroic figure’.  Edwin Lutyens intended the Cenotaph to be a temporary monument, but ‘it became permanent by popular demand’.  ‘The crass lie of a sculpture’ was rejected and in its place, ‘the contemplative modern poetry’ of the Cenotaph was found to be acceptable.

Slavery is a tragedy equivalent to the First World War.  Jones asks what kind of artwork ‘could convey the scale and nature of the crime’ of Britain’s slave trade 1500 – 1860s. 

Jones considers the Second World War and concludes that it ‘defied anything a figurative sculpture could say’.  He considers the Motherland colossus at Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), and concludes that it is an ‘empty and inhuman display of Stalinist kitsch that does not admit the true chaos of battle’.

Jones asks whether the Shoah (Holocaust) could be commemorated with a statue of a prisoner at Auschwitz, and he concludes that it could not.  He refers to Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin which is abstract: a ‘piece of prime real estate is rendered valueless by making it, for ever, a cemetery of abstract empty tombs’.

Jones writes about the ‘dark abyss beneath Cape Coast Castle in Ghana …. where thousands of captured Africans waited to be dragged in chains onto British ships in the 18^th Century’.  Jones urges that ‘this void – this sepulchral black hole that tells a terrible truth about British guilt – should somehow be brought back to Britain … which surely it can by means of contemporary art, instead of another statue – another token symbol’.

CHRISTO: OBITUARY

Christo (Christo Vladimirov Javachef): Obituary

This is a summary of the obituary of Christo Vladimirov Javachef – known as Christo - which was published in The Guardian newspaper on 2^nd June 2020.  The author is Charles Darwent.

Christo

Christo Vladimirov Javachef was born in Gabrovo, in the Bulgarian Balkans in 1935.  His mother was a secretary at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia; his father was a chemist who ran a state fabric factory.  ‘Their milieu was as progressive as the hardline communism of the Peoples’ Republic of Bulgaria allowed’.

From the age of 17, for four years, Christo studied at the academy where his mother worked: ‘he was an ardent exponent of Soviet socialist realism’.  In 1956 Christo moved to Prague to study theatre design and he ‘at last encountered European modernism’.  Christo subsequently moved, via Vienna, to Paris, and in the process became stateless.  There, Christo married Jeanne-Claude Planchon, ‘the daughter of an aristocratic French general’, and, together with their son Cyril they moved to New York in 1964 as illegal immigrants.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude worked together on the many large scale artworks which became their life’s work.  Darwent writes: ‘In the more than five decades of their collaboration they would complete 22 projects; rather more – 37 – were still unrealised at the time of Jeanne-Claude’s sudden death at the age of 74’.  ‘After 1994, their projects were signed “Christo and Jeanne-Claude”, and their earlier works retroactively catalogued as such’.

The wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin was prompted in 1971 by the receipt of a postcard from a friend in Berlin.  Christo’s request to wrap the building was turned down by the Bundestag in 1977, 1981 and 1987.  Approval was granted in 1994.  Darwent writes that Christo said that ‘the Reichstag was the only structure in a still-divided Berlin “that was under the jurisdiction of the Americans, the Soviets, the English, the French and the two Germanys”.  Like the artist himself, it sat on a no-man’s land between warring political systems.  “To me, as a Bulgarian refugee who fled communism, east-west relations are important” he said’.

Darwent writes: ‘At dawn on 24 June 1995, 90 professional rock climbers abseiled from the roof of the Reichstag unfurling 100,000 square metres of aluminised fabric as they went.  At a stroke, the hulk built under Wilhelm I was transformed into a piece of classical sculpture.  The point of this aesthetic reinvention was to put the building back into public ownership.  The wrapping of the Reichstag had only been made possible by the support of the people.  The Reichstag was owned not by (the then Chancellor) Kohl, but by “the German nation, by 80 million Germans”’.’

For all their works, Christo and Jeanne-Claude refused any sponsorship.  All their works were ‘too big to fit in a gallery, too expensive to own’. 

Christo Vladimirov Javachef died on 31^st May 2020 at the age of 84.

RICHARD ANUSZKIEWICZ: OBITUARY

RICHARD  ANUSZKIEWICZ:  OBITUARY

Richard Anuszkiewicz: Obituary

This is a summary of the obituary of Richard Anuszkiewicz which was published in The Guardian newspaper on 30^th May 2020.  The author is Charles Darwent.

Richard Anuszkiewicz

Richard Anuszkiewicz was born 23^rd May 1930.  He grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania, near to his contemporary Andy Warhol.  Like Warhol’s family, Richard Anuszkiewicz’s family ‘was working class, religious and came from Mitteleuropa’.   In 1947 Richard Anuszkiewicz won a National Scholastic Art award, and in the next year a full scholarship to the Institute of Art in Cleveland, Ohio.  He graduated from here in 1953 with a BA in Fine Arts.  Richard Anuszkiewicz then obtained a Master’s at Yale.

At Yale, Anuszkiewicz began painting seriously, and, as he put it ‘non-objectively’.  His chief tutor was Josef Albers, formerly of the Bauhaus.  After Yale, Anuszkiewicz, studied 1955-56 for a teaching degree at Kent State University, Ohio. 

In 1957 Anuszkiewicz moved ‘to a New York still in thrall to the abstract expressionists’.  In 1960 Anuszkiewicz was offered a show at the Contemporaries gallery on Madison Avenue.  After Alfred Barr – Director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) – bought one of Anuszkiewicz’s works – Fluorescent Complement (1960) – the show became ‘an overnight success’. 

Fluorescent Complement (1960) is a work in which yellow/green discs of colour float on a background which is blue, but with a white central area.  The yellow/green discs move disconcertingly on the blue background, and in the white centre the yellow/green discs appear to erupt towards the viewer. 

‘By 1961 there was a waiting list for his eye-popping pictures’.  A MoMA exhibition in 1965 – The Responsive Eye – brought Anuszkiewicz’s work to a wider audience.  This exhibition ‘would define what had lately been dubbed op (optical) art'.  Anuszkiewicz and the British painter Bridget Riley were ‘the stars of the show’.  This 1965 exhibition was ‘the high point of his career’.  Darwent writes how Anuszkiewicz’s works were ‘hard to live with’: space and colour move constantly and ‘trip each other up’ with no resolution.

In the next two decades, Anuszkiewicz moved on to more mathematical works.  A number of exhibitions of Anuszkiewicz’s works were held in the years since 2013.  Unlike Riley, there was no resurgence of interest in Anuszkiewicz, but this did not seem to concern him. 

Richard Anuszkiewicz died on 19^th May 2020 at the age of 89.

JOAN EARDLEY: TIME A MAJOR EXHIBITION WAS HELD

JOAN EARDLEY: TIME A MAJOR EXHIBITION WAS HELD

This is a summary of an article by Libby Brooks in The Guardian newspaper which was published on 26^th May 2020

Joan Eardley: Time a major exhibition was held

Joan Eardley’s recognition internationally was stalled by her death from breast cancer at the age of 42.  Family, friends and admirers are calling for a major exhibition as the centenary of her birth approaches.  At this challenging time for art galleries due to the COVID 19 pandemic, another particular challenge is to honour Joan Eardley in the autumn of 2021. 

The art historian Frances Spalding is quoted, referring to Joan Eardley’s ‘immersive experience of just vast waste and vast seas and vast areas of cliff at Catterline, a small village on the Kincardineshire coast’.  Frances Spalding also refers to Joan Eardley’s work done at Townhead, Glasgow.  Joan Eardley’s paintings of children in Townhead are widely celebrated.  At Catterline Joan Eardley ‘created her elemental panoramas of land and sea in thickly textured paint’.

Joan Eardley died in 1963: she had been too ill to attend her first solo exhibition in London that year.

GILLIAN WISE: OBITUARY

GILLIAN WISE: OBITUARY

This is a summary of the obituary by Charles Darwent that was published in the Guardian newspaper of 9^th May 2020.

Gillian Wise

The British artist Gillian Wise was born on 16^th February 1936 and died on 11^th April 2020.  She worked in geometric abstraction.

Her style was based in the ‘Soviet model of art-making’.  Wise graduated from the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London in the early 1960s.  In 1961 she became the youngest member of the British constructivists – the group that had been founded by Victor Pasmore in the early 1950s.  But by this time, Darwent writes, ‘the idea of a geometric abstraction that was in some way political – and, more specifically, aligned to the left – had come to be seen as both out of date and faintly dangerous.  Like others of the group, Wise was taken up by Drian, a gallery founded by a Lithuanian refugee, Halima Nalecz, to show work spurned by blue-chip dealers of Mayfair’.

In 1963 Wise exhibited with Anthony Hill in a show called Reliefs / Structures at the ICA in London.  ‘Metal Relief with Horizontal Elements (1962)’ is a work by Wise and Hill which is now in the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland.  In 1969, Hill won a British Council scholarship to research the history of Russian constructivism in the USSR: she studied in Leningrad.  Also in 1969, Hill exhibited in Helsinki in a show organised by the British abstractionist Jeffrey Steele.  Hill then left the constructivists to be a founder member of the Systems group.  Hill’s most successful years then followed, with definitive Systems group exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery, London and at the Polytechnic of Central London.  Darwent writes: ‘The group fell apart in 1975 on disagreements over its position on Marxism’.

In 1979 Wise was commissioned to produce a work for a stairwell at Cinema 1 at the Barbican Centre, London.  This work – ‘The Alice Walls’ – was in place for the building’s opening in 1982.  Wise was mystified as to why she should have been given the commission.  In an interview of 2017 she said: “It was certainly contrary to the prevailing prejudice of the art establishment”.  Wise received no acknowledgement for the work and was not invited to the opening of the building.

After ‘The Alice Walls’, Wise left Britain and lived in the USA and then Paris where she had a precarious existence.   In 2014 a plaque was placed at ‘The Alice Walls’, naming Gillian Wise as its maker.