Your Weekly Mixx! DAF’s Weekly Mixx is a selection of contemporary artworks and/or art related videos chosen from artist and gallery submissions and from our own search for new and interesting works. This week, we feature the work of Gemmy Woud-Binnedjik, Brad Jesson, Iva Gueorguieva, Rachel Ducker, Warren King, Coroso Zundert, Gemma Capdevila, and short video Aether – a spatial audio-visual collaboration between musician Max Cooper and architects Satyajit Das and Regan Appleton. It plays on the beauty of fundamental natural forms – waves, surfaces, symmetries and surreal landscapes, as the building blocks and underlying structure of the world around us – a modern interpretation of the luminiferous aether.
DAF Group Feature: Vol. 171
Your Weekly Mixx! DAF’s Weekly Mixx is a selection of contemporary artworks and/or art related videos chosen from artist and gallery submissions and from our own search for new and interesting works. This week, we feature the work of Antony Gormley, Flora Borsi, Herakut, Kyle Stewart, Max Serradifalco, Murray Mcculloch, Scott Marr, Tony Cragg and a video by More Than who recently commissioned a unique art exhibition for dogs from British artist and inventor Dominic Wilcox. Wilcox’s interactive exhibits include ‘Cruising Canines’ – an open car window simulator, ‘Dinnertime Dreams’ – an oversized 10 foot dog bowl filled to the brim with hundreds of play balls to look like dog food, and ‘Watery Wonder’ – a series of dancing water jets that jump from one dog bowl to the next for dogs to chase. A selection of paintings and drawings created in a dog’s colour spectrum are also on display at the exhibition for the visiting dogs to enjoy.
Helen Levitt: 1913-2009
Since I’m inarticulate, I express myself with images. —Helen Levitt
Born on August 31, 1913 in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, New York, Helen Levitt was once called (by David Strauss in a 1997 Artforum International article) “the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time.” Perhaps this lack of recognition stems from Levitt’s tendency to be an “intensely private” person who did not seek fame and rarely gave interviews. Perhaps it was because she did not wish to assign “social meaning” to her photographs—a lesson she learned after meeting photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson—that a photograph could “stand up by itself.”
Leaving high school in her senior year, Levitt began working in 1931 for the commercial portrait photographer J. Florian Mitchell, who was known to the family. “I helped in darkroom printing and developing,” she said. “My salary was six bucks a week.” It was during this time that she taught herself photography.
Levitt was influenced by the photographic styles of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, and Ben Shahn. She met and accompanied Cartier-Bresson on a photographic shoot of the Brooklyn waterfront in 1935 and the following year, bought a second hand Leica, the camera Cartier-Bresson preferred. Between 1938-39, Levitt was mentored by and worked with Walker Evans but she gave more credit to photographer Ben Shahn and his gritty photos of New York of the 1930s.
Levitt found success early on, and in July 1939, her work was published in Fortune magazine. In 1940, her Halloween photograph was included in the inaugural exhibition at Museum of Modern Art as part of its new photography section. In 1943, Levitt had her first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (Helen Levitt: Photographs of Children March 10-April 18).
In a rare interview in 2001 for NPR, Levitt talked about her street photography: “It was a very good neighbourhood for taking pictures in those days, because that was before television, there was a lot happening. And then the older people would sometimes be sitting out on the stoops because of the heat. They didn’t have air conditioning in those days. It was, don’t forget, in the late ’30s. So those neighbourhoods were very active.” (listen to/read the interview)
Levitt also worked in film and spent most of her time from 1949-59 as a full-time film editor and director. Notably, during this period, she worked on two documentary films, In the Street with friend and painter Janice Loeb and the writer James Agee, and The Quiet One (1948). The Quiet One writers, Sidney Meyers, Loeb, and Levitt, were nominated for the Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Academy Award. The film was also nominated for Best Documentary Feature. The National Board of Review named it the second best film of 1949. Levitt continued working in film making for almost twenty-five years.
When Levitt returned to photography in 1959, she was among the first photographers to work in colour. She received Guggenheim fellowships in 1959 and 1960 for these projects. Sadly, a great deal of Levitt’s early colour work was stolen from her New York apartment in the late 1960s.
Comprehensive surveys of Levitt’s work were held at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1980 and at the Laurence Miller Gallery in 1987. However, it was not until 1991 that she gained significant recognition when the first national retrospective of her work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was held. The exhibition showed at other major museums including the International Center for Photography, New York (1997), and the Centre National la Photographie, Paris (2001). In 2007, Helen Levitt: Un Art de l’accident poetique, opened at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris. In 2008, Levitt was the recipient of the Spectrum International Photography Prize which included a major retrospective at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany. Also in the fall of 2008, a major retrospective was held at FOAM Museum in Amsterdam. In that same year, Levitt received the Francis Greenburger award for excellence in the arts.
On March 29, 2009, Helen Levitt died in her sleep at the age of 95.
James Agee (1909-1955), a good friend of Levitt, wrote “Helen Levitt’s photographs seem to me as beautiful, perceptive, satisfying, and enduring as any lyrical work that I know. In their general quality and coherence, moreover, the photographs as a whole body, as a book, seem to me to combine into a unified view of the world, an uninsistent but irrefutable manifesto of a way of seeing, and in a gentle and wholly unpretentious way, a major poetic work.“
Sources: New York Times, NPR, Artsy, Lawrence Miller Gallery
All images copyright © The Estate of Helen Levitt
Man Ray: 1890 – 1976
Born Emmanuel Radnitzky on August 27, 1890 in Philadelphia, PA, Man Ray was an influential artist, best known for his avant-garde photography. He was a leading figure (and the only American) to play a significant role in the Dada and Surrealist movements.
Ray grew up in Brooklyn, New York and showed artistic ability at an early age. He studied drawing under Robert Henri and George Bellows at the Francisco Ferrer Social Center (Modern School). Upon his completion of his classes, Ray lived in the art colony of Ridgefield, New Jersey. There, he illustrated, designed and produced small pamphlets (Ridgefield Gazook – 1915) and A Book of Diverse Writings.
Ray had his first solo show at the Daniel Gallery in New York in 1915 and shortly after became interested in photography. Around the same time, he became friends with Marcel Duchamp with whom he founded the Society of Independent Artists in 1916. In 1920, along with Duchamp, Katherine Dreier, Henry Hudson, and Andrew McLaren, Ray founded the Société Anonyme, a group that sponsored lectures, concerts, publications, and exhibitions of modern art.
In 1921, May Ray moved to Paris where he settled for twenty years. He became involved with Dada and Surrealist artists and writers such as Jean Cocteau, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Paul Eluard, Pablo Picasso, and others. While in Paris, Ray worked with different media and produced a variety of works. In 1922, he began experimenting with his version of a photogram which he called a “rayograph” – the process of creating images from placing objects on photo-sensitive paper. Ray likened his technique to painting saying that he was “painting with light”.
In the 1920s and 30s Ray earned a steady income as a portrait photographer and as one of the foremost fashion photographers for Harper’s Bazaar, Vu, and Vogue. In the late 1920s Ray won recognition for his experiments with Sabattier (solarization process) and many of the Surrealists followed his example of using photography in their works.
Man Ray also made his mark in the avant-garde film circles in the 1920s. In “Le Retour à la Raison”, he created his first “cine-rayographs’ – sequences of cameraless photographs. Other films including “Emak Bakia” (1926), L’Etoile de Mer” (1928), and Les Mystères du Château de Dé” (1929) are now classics of the Surrealist film genre.
In 1940, at the beginning of World War II, Man Ray left Paris and moved to Los Angeles where he focused on painting and creating objects. While there, he also met and married Juliet Browner, a dancer and artists’ model. He remained in LA until 1951 when he returned to his home in Paris. He continued working in a variety of mediums, but it was to be his photography that would have the greatest impact on 20th century art. In 1963, he published his autobiography “Self-Portrait”.
Man Ray died in Paris on November 18, 1976. His epitaph at the Cimetière du Montparnasse, reads: “unconcerned, but not indifferent”. Juliet Browner died in 1991 and she was interred in the Ray’s tomb. Her epitaph reads, “together again”. Before her death, Browner had set up a charitable trust and donated much of Ray’s work to museums.
Sources: MOMA, Guggenheim Museum, Wikipedia Images: USC, Ciudad de la Pintura
DAF Group Feature: Vol. 170
Your Weekly Mixx! DAF’s Weekly Mixx is a selection of contemporary artworks and/or art related videos chosen from artist and gallery submissions and from our own search for new and interesting works. This week, we feature the work of Andrew Hem, Andy Scott, Meredith Marson, Ostinelli & Priest, Sigalit Landau, Vadim Stein, Wolf Ademeit, Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor and the video All the art in London in one day by Alex Gorosh who documents his attempt to see every piece of art in London in one day. (in collaboration with Art Fund U.K.’s National Art Pass)
Henri Cartier-Bresson: 1908 – 2004
Born on August 22, 1908, in Chanteloup, Seine-et-Marne, near Paris, Henri Cartier-Bresson is considered by many to be the father of modern photo-journalism.
In 1927, Cartier-Bresson studied painting at the Lhote Academy in Paris under Cubist painter and sculptor André Lhote. He turned to photography in 1931 when he acquired a Leica 35mm camera – a camera that, unlike its bulky predecessors, was ideal for capturing action.
Cartier-Bresson preferred an unobtrusive (“a fly on the wall”) approach to photography. This approach helped to develop the real-life reporting (candid photography), that has influenced generations of photo-journalists.
Cartier-Bresson traveled the world photographing “the times” in Russia, China, Cuba, India, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Turkey, Europe, and the United States. He photographed events such as the funeral of Gandhi, the fall of Beijing, and the liberation of Paris. Cartier-Bresson’s main body of work however was of human activities and the institutions of society. In every country, he sought out market places, weddings, funerals, people at work, children in parks, adults in their leisure time, and other every-day activities.
During the Battle of France, in June 1940, Cartier-Bresson was captured by German soldiers and spent 35 months in prisoner-of-war camps doing forced labour under the Nazis. He escaped in 1943 and began working for MNPGD, a secret organization that aided prisoners and escapees. At the end of the war, Cartier-Bresson directed “Le Retour” (The Return), a documentary on the repatriation of prisoners of war and detainees.
In 1947, along with Robert Capa, David Seymour, William Vandivert, and George Rodger, Cartier-Bresson founded the co-operative agency “Magnum Photos”. The aim of Magnum was to allow photographers to “work outside the formulas of magazine journalism”.
In 1952, Cartier-Bresson published a book of his photographs entitled ” Images à la Sauvette” (images on the run), with the English title “The Decisive Moment”. In the 1960s he created 16 portraiture stories entitled “A Touch of Greatness” for the the London magazine “The Queen”. The stories profiled personalities such as Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Miller, Robert Kennedy and others.
In 1968, Cartier-Bresson left Magnum Photos and photography in general, focusing once again on drawing and painting. He retired from photography completely by 1975 and had his first exhibition of his drawings at the Carlton Gallery in New York in 1975.
From 1975 on, Cartier-Bresson continued to focus on drawing. In 1982 he was awarded the Grand Prix National de la Photographie in Paris, and in 1986, the Novecento Prize in Palermo, Italy. In 1988, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held an exhibition of his photographs, “Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Early Work”.
In 2003, Cartier-Bresson, along with his wife Martine Franck and their daughter Mélanie, launched the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, to provide a permanent home for his collected works and an exhibition space for other artists. Cartier-Bresson died peacefully on August 3, 2004 in Montjustin, Provence. He was buried in the cemetery of Montjustin, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, France.
For a complete biography of Henri Cartier-Bresson, visit the HCB Foundation or for a good source of photos visit Magnum Photos.
Sources: Met Museum, HCB Foundation, Wikipedia
DAF Group Feature: Vol. 169
Your Weekly Mixx! DAF’s Weekly Mixx is a selection of contemporary artworks and/or art related videos chosen from artist and gallery submissions and from our own search for new and interesting works. This week, we feature the work of Sofia Bonati, Amy Gesner, Chrystal Wagner, Lisa Kristine, Izumi Kato, Jonathan Nyik Fui, Mike Dargas, Nazar Bilyk and a time lapse video of the making of Etnias (Ethnicities), a larger-than-life work created by Brazilian artist Eduardo Kobra for the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. The 3,000 square metre mural depicts Indigenous faces from the five continents, and was created at Porto Maravilha in Rio.
DAF Group Feature: Vol. 168
Your Weekly Mixx! DAF’s Weekly Mixx is a selection of nine contemporary artworks and/or art related videos chosen from artist and gallery submissions and from our own search for new and interesting works. This week, we feature the work of Anne Lemanski, Cameron Mathieson, Elizaveta Porodina, Linus Lundin (aka YASH), Andrea Myers, JR, Meryl McMaster, Aida Muluneh and the short film “Balance” by photographer/director Tobias Hutzler, inspired by Rigolo Swiss Nouveau Cirque artist Maedir Eugster.
Tobias Hutzler - BALANCE from Tobias Hutzler on Vimeo.
Andy Warhol: 1928 – 1987
Born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Andy Warhol was a painter, printmaker, and filmmaker and a pivotal figure in the formation of the Pop Art movement.
Warhol was the son of working-class Slovakian immigrants. His frequent illnesses in childhood often kept him bedridden and at home. During this time, he formed a strong bond with his mother. It was what he described as an important period in the formation of his personality and skill set.
Warhol studied at the School of Fine Arts at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh (now Carnegie Mellon University), majoring in pictorial design. In 1949, he moved to New York City where he quickly became successful in magazine illustration and advertising, producing work for publications such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and the The New Yorker.
Much of Warhol’s work in the 1950s was commissioned by fashion houses and he became known for his whimsical ink drawings of I. Miller shoes. In 1952, Warhol’s illustrations for Truman Capote’s writings were exhibited by the Hugo Gallery in New York and he exhibited at several other venues in the 1950s including a 1956 group show at the Museum of Modern Art. Warhol received several awards during this decade from the Art Directors Club and the American Institute of Graphic Arts.
Warhol was enthralled with Hollywood celebrity, fashion, and style and by the early 1960s these interests were reflected in his artwork. Borrowing images from popular culture, Warhol’s “Pop Art” paintings were characterized by repetition of everyday objects such as soup cans, Coca Cola bottles, and 100 dollar bills. He also began painting celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Elizabeth Taylor.
Most of Warhol’s paintings were produced in his studio, he called “The Factory”, with the help of assistants. Photographic images were screen-printed on to painted backgrounds and mechanically repeated – a process that mimicked the manufacturing industry and parodied mass consumption. During the Factory years, Warhol associated with and “groomed” a variety of artists, writers, musicians, and underground celebrities including Edie Sedgwick, Viva, writer John Giorno, and filmmaker Jack Smith.
Warhol worked prolifically in a range of media including painting, photography, drawing, sculpture, and film. Between 1963 and 1968 he produced more than 60 films and about 500 short “screen test” portraits of his studio visitors. His most popular and successful film was Chelsea Girls, made in 1966.
On June 3, 1968, Warhol and art critic/curator Mario Amaya, were shot by Valerie Solanas after she was turned away from the Factory studio. Warhol’s wound was almost fatal and would affect him physically and mentally for the rest of his life. (Amaya was released after treatment for bullet grazes across his back.)
The 1970s was a quieter decade for Warhol who concentrated more on portrait commissions for celebrities such as Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Michael Jackson, and others. He founded Interview Magazine and in 1975 published “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol” which expressed the idea that “Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art.” During the 1970s Warhol was also involved in a number collaborations with young artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente and Keith Haring.
In general, Andy Warhol was consistently ambiguous on the meaning of his work and appeared indifferent and ambivalent. He denied that his artwork carried any social or political commentary.
Warhol died in New York City on February 22, 1987 of a cardiac arrhythmia while recovering from routine gallbladder surgery. In his will, almost his entire estate was dedicated to the “advancement of the visual arts”. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts was founded in that same year and it remains one of the largest grant-giving organizations for the visual arts in the United States today.
Sources: MOMA, Guggenheim, National Gallery of Canada, Andy Warhol Foundation, Wikipedia
DAF Group Feature: Vol. 167
Your Weekly Mixx! DAF’s Weekly Mixx is a selection of nine contemporary artworks and/or art related videos chosen from artist and gallery submissions and from our own search for new and interesting works. This week, we feature the work of David Breuer-Weil, Floyd Elzinga, Gilles Bensimon, Gil Maia, Igor Melnikov, JR, Marchal Mithouard (aka Shaka), Mohau Modisakeng and Zeng Fanzh.
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