Skip to content

Tag: exhibitions

Fight the Power with Joy

Theo Inglis, whose book Mid-Century Modern Graphic is published this month, has a lovely post on the AIGA Eye on Design blog about the work of artist, teacher, activist, and designer Corita Kent:

In 1962, Kent saw work by Andy Warhol for the first time, and her aesthetic changed markedly, becoming bolder, flatter, more abstract and brighter, often with saturated, almost fluorescent, colors. Her new style was so successful that it became became known as “nun art,” and was often imitated. Her adherence to the Pop Art aesthetic was well suited to her joyous aims: Kent said she wanted her art to “give people a lift” and help them get “more fun out of life.”

Pop Art’s celebration of the urban everyday also empowered Kent to introduce more quotidian sources into her text works. During the ’60s, she began to incorporate lyrics from pop songs, advertising slogans, and snippets of text seen on signs and packaging into her work, often pairing them with religious text. It was a move that elevated the ordinary to the spiritual, and became a frequent theme in Kent’s art and teaching. She found delight in the commonplace, and believed that the divine could be seen anywhere, even amidst the chaos of the modern city. Kent often took her students on urban expeditions—even day-long trips to gas stations and car lots—armed with cameras and viewfinders.

The largest ever exhibition of Corita Kent’s work in the UK, Corita Kent: Power Up, is currently on display at House of Illustration in King’s Cross until May 12.

Theo’s book is available May 7 from Pavilion Books. 

Comments closed

Will Eisner Centenary

On the centenary of his birth, The Society of Illustrators in New York is celebrating the life of cartoonist Will Eisner with an exhibition of his work, including original artwork from his graphic novels A Contract with God (1978) and Life on Another Planet (1983), and over 40 pages of originals from The Spirit (1940–1952) newspaper section.

At the Village Voice R.C. Baker looks back at Eisner’s career:

Humanity leavened with contradiction, pathos, and humor describes the cast of characters Eisner (1917–2005) created in his trailblazing career, most notably in the adventures of a heavy-fisted, lighthearted crime-buster, the Spirit.

The Spirit has been called the Citizen Kane of comics, and it would be accurate to say that Eisner and Orson Welles — the actor/writer/director who brought Charles Foster Kane to life in that 1941 masterpiece — sprouted from the same loam of pulp magazines and cliff-hanging radio serials. Welles then apprenticed in classical theater, while Eisner studied narratives almost as psychologically complex (and more innately American): reams of newspaper strips and Sunday funnies. Both auteurs expanded their mediums in ways we still reckon with today.

Similarly, at Forbes, Rob Salkowitz looks at Eisner’s enduring legacy:

In 1941, comics were not considered high art; they were barely considered art at all. But to a 23 year-old cartoonist named Will Eisner who was just about to debut a new feature called “The Spirit,” comics possessed limitless storytelling potential. “Eventually and inevitably, [comics] will be a legitimate medium for the best of writers and artists,” said the young creator.

Over the next 75 years, Eisner was proved right, due in large part to his own output through the course of a remarkable career that saw him invent significant chunks of the comics’ storytelling vocabulary, pioneer the use of comics for education and training, establish a critical method for teaching and analyzing visual storytelling and virtually invent the long-form comics format known as the graphic novel. A large part of the $1 billion annual publishing enterprise and the multi-billion dollar entertainment, events, media and licensing industries that derive from it, are attributable directly to Eisner’s efforts and innovations.

The Guardian has republished a version of Neil Gaiman’s essay on Eisner from his collection of odds and ends The View from the Cheap Seats1:

Will’s life is, in miniature, a history of American comics. He was one of the very first people to run a studio making commercial comic books, but while his contemporaries dreamed of getting out of that ghetto and into more lucrative and respectable places – advertising, perhaps, or illustration, or even fine art – Will had no desire to escape. He was trying to create an artform.

In seven pages – normally less than 60 panels – he could build a short story worthy of O Henry; funny or tragic, sentimental or hardbitten, or simply odd. The work was uniquely comics, existing in the place where the words and the pictures come together, commenting on each other, reinforcing each other. Eisner’s stories were influenced by film, by theatre, by radio, but were ultimately their own medium, created by a man who thought that comics was an artform, and who was proved right.

And Print has reposted Michael Dooley essay, originally for written AIGA, on Eisner’s best known work, The Spirit:  

The field was already becoming glutted with simplistic adolescent power fantasies, but The Spirit had the texture of real life. He was decidedly not a costumed super-hero but simply a plainclothes sleuth who was prone to frequent noir-like pummelings from two-bit goons. He also displayed an ironic, smart aleck-y sense of humor, highly unique for this genre.

The strip, at seven or eight pages, reimagined itself every time. One week the format might be a fairy tale, another week a seven-page poem. Sometimes the Spirit would be shoved off to the sidelines or shunted altogether if Eisner felt so inclined. A Gerhard Shnobble episode – Eisner’s personal favorite – is a philosophical contemplation of man’s place in the universe disguised as a cops-and-criminals yarn. The Spirit was the first major milestone in his lifetime goal to explore and elevate comics as a mature literary form.

I first came across Will Eisner and The Spirit in The Penguin Book of Comics by George Perry and Alan Aldridge (previously mentioned here). It was a tease — little more than a page of artwork and a couple of short paragraphs on Eisner’s genius. I didn’t actually read a complete strip until years later when I came across a series of reprints from Kitchen Sink Press in a comics shop in London. I could only afford to buy one issue — which collected 3 or 4 stories I think — but it was enough to get me hooked.

Critics tend to focus on the later strips where the Spirit is often peripheral to the stories. These are surely more inventive than Eisner’s early comics. But I miss the Spirit when he is not central to story. He is like Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe — forever getting knocked on the head, and forever waking up in the arms of women who look like Ava Gardner or Lauren Bacall. It doesn’t sound like much, but Eisner imbued even these simple stories with a charm and sophistication that makes them a pleasure to read. 

Will Eisner: The Centennial Celebration 1917–2017 is at The Society of Illustrators, March 1–June 3 2017.

Comments closed

Robert Rauschenberg and the Subversive Language of Junk

Rauschenberg’s ‘muse wall’, a collection of objects and images that inspired him, in his print shop, Captiva, Florida, around 1979. Photograph: Emil Fray/Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
Rauschenberg’s ‘muse wall’, a collection of objects and images that inspired him, in his print shop, Captiva, Florida, around 1979. Photograph: Emil Fray/Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

With a major Robert Rauschenberg retrospective opening at Tate Modern in December, Alex Needham, writing for The Guardian, visits the late artist’s island home of Captiva, Florida:

Rauschenberg started visiting in 1962, before moving to Captiva nine years later, describing it as “the foundation of my life and my work… the source and reserve of my energies”. His work by then had become ambitious and complicated; Captiva forced a return to simplicity, and the first things he produced were a selection of wall sculptures made from battered cardboard boxes.

For the world beyond Captiva’s white sands, however, a reacquaintance with Robert Rauschenberg is long overdue. In Britain, there has been no major retrospective of his work since 1981, while the last big US survey, at the Guggenheim in New York, took place in 1997. That will change next month, when Tate Modern opens a London retrospective; it will then move to Moma in New York next May, and after that to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Rauschenberg left a bold and indelible mark on the 20th century. His combines, which integrated the flotsam and trash of everyday life, including the artist’s own duvet in Bed (1955), were neither painting nor sculpture, and proved that anything could be the material of art. At Tate Modern, pride of place will be given to Monogram 1955–59, a horizontal canvas on which perches a stuffed goat with a tyre around its midriff; the work thrilled and scandalised when it was first shown at Castelli’s gallery in New York, and rapidly became synonymous with the artist’s iconoclasm. Since then, his relevance has only increased, says Leah Dickerman, co-curator of the new retrospective: “When you open a gallery and see the art that’s made out of the stuff of the real world, that’s coming off the walls, that’s interdisciplinary in its approach, all that is the legacy of Rauschenberg.”

 

Detail from Rauschenberg’s Mirthday Man (1997)
Detail from Rauschenberg’s Mirthday Man (1997)

Also at writing for The Guardian, Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City and The Trip to Echo Spring, looks back over Rauschenberg’s career:    

Making the combines, Rauschenberg felt he was cracking “the secret language of junk”. They could be composed of anything: a goat corseted by a tire; a stuffed bald eagle. One of the very first, Untitled (Man with White Shoes), contained – deep breath – fabric, newspaper, a photograph of Jasper Johns, a handwritten letter from Rauschenberg’s son, a drawing by Twombly, glass, mirror, tin, cork, a pair of the artist’s socks and painted leather shoes, dried grass and a taxidermied Plymouth Rock hen.

All the same, there’s a limit to how much world you can cram into a sculpture, and as Rauschenberg’s success grew he became increasingly fascinated by replication. Back in 1952, he’d experimented with transfer drawing, and in 1958 he embarked on a grand project of illustrating Dante’s Inferno using lighter fluid to transfer images on to paper. In 1962, Andy Warhol introduced him to a far more sophisticated technique: the wizardry of using photographic images on silkscreen canvases.

Now he could reuse and resize his own photos and those he snipped from newspapers and magazines, giving him an unprecedented power of composition. Anything could be incorporated: John F Kennedy; a water tower; Bonnie and Clyde. As he gleefully observed of the silkscreen paintings: “It’s as much like Christmas to me as using objects I pick up on the street.” He was giddy for them, until in 1964 he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. Terrified of stasis, the next day he called his New York studio and asked his assistant to burn all the screens.

See also: Hal Foster on Rauschenberg retrospective for the London Review of Books,  

Comments closed

Willem Sandberg: From Type to Image

Sandberg1

Writing for The Guardian, Simon Garfield (Just My Type), visits the first UK retrospective Dutch designer and curator Willem Sandberg:

“This is printed on wallpaper, very asymmetric … an amazing thing really,” Fraser Muggeridge, the curator, says as he shows me his collection of Sandberg ephemera in his studio in London’s Smithfield. It is a space Sandberg would have admired, with its display of promotional work for emerging artists and galleries crowding in from the walls. “I don’t think he was trying to make the most perfect work, but it was always free-spirited and arresting.” His letters were highly sculptural, revealing negative space; at first glance a torn “T” becomes a sideways “E”. They speak of his obsession not only with making intricate objects by hand, but also with solid branding: his graphics for the Stedelijk created a look and mood for a museum that today would require a huge budget and corporate pitching.

Astonishingly, most of Sandberg’s catalogues and posters were a sideline, designed in the evenings and at weekends. Sandberg was the director of the museum from 1945 to 1962, and his close relationship with the local state printer produced an identity that transformed the Stedelijk into one of Europe’s first truly modern galleries. He created what he liked to refer to as an “Anti-Museum”, rejecting the traditional dark and hushed rooms and creating something bright and accessible, a place of social interaction. He championed young artists, and he succeeded in attracting people who had barely set foot in a museum before. There was a shop, a learning centre and a cafe, all brave innovations in the middle of the century. As was Sandberg’s scheme to get the Stedelijk a little more noticed in the city: he painted the entire building white.

sandberg4

Willem Sandberg: From Type to Image‘ is at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, UK until 4 September.

Comments closed

Ladybird: Designed for Small, Tiny Hands

9780723293927

As previously mentioned, Ladybird By Design is an exhibition of over 200 of original book illustrations from the late 1950s to early 1970s currently on display at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill on Sea.

In this short film, Lawrence Zeegen, curator of the exhibition and author of the accompanying book, and Jenny Pearce, daughter of former Ladybird editorial director Douglas Keen, talk about the history of Ladybird and what made the books so special:

Comments closed

Aldus Manutius and the Roots of the Paperback

aldus

The New York Times visits ‘Aldus Manutius: A Legacy More Lasting Than Bronze‘, an exhibition of nearly 150 books from the press Aldus founded in Venice in 1494:

Gutenberg may have invented the movable-type printing press, used to create his monumental Bibles. But anyone who has ever sat in a cafe, or in the bath, with a paperback owes a debt to Aldus and the small, cleanly designed editions of the secular classics he called libelli portatiles, or portable little books.

“It’s become a cliché to call them the forerunners of the Penguin Classics,” G. Scott Clemons, the president of the Grolier Club, said during a recent tour of the installation in progress. “But the concept of personal reading is in some ways directly traceable to the innovations of Aldus’s portable library…”

…The Aldine Press, in its start-up phase, emphasized Greek and Latin lexicons and grammar manuals. In 1495, Aldus began publishing the first printed edition of Aristotle. In 1501, he released the first of his small octavo editions of the classics, books “that could be held in the hand and learned by heart (not to speak of being read) by everyone,” as he later wrote. The show includes 20 libelli portatiles, all bearing Aldus’s printer’s mark, a dolphin curled around an anchor. (The colophon is still used today by Doubleday.) Some of the books were treated as treasures, and customized with magnificent decoration that harked back to the tradition of illuminated manuscripts. Others were workaday volumes, filled with marginal scribbles….

…Aldus’s contributions to the art of printing [include the] first italic typeface, which he created with the type cutter Francesco Griffo, a shadowy fellow who broke with Aldus acrimoniously and then slugged a man to death with an iron bar before reputedly meeting his own demise at the end of a hangman’s rope. Italics, which were intended to mimic the humanist handwriting of the day, first appeared in a modest five words in a 1500 edition of the letters of St. Catherine and soon spread to other Aldines, and beyond.

And then there was the roman typeface devised for a 1496 book by the humanist scholar Pietro Bembo — the inspiration for the modern font Bembo, still treasured by book designers for its grace and readability.

“The book itself is almost frivolous,” Mr. Clemons said of the text, which recounts a trip to Mount Etna. “But it launched that very modern typeface.”

The exhibition runs until April 25, 2015.

Comments closed

Paul Rand, Master of Brand Identity

IBM14

At the New York Times, Ken Johnson reviews Everything is Design: The Work of Paul Rand, a new exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York:

Considering the punchy, wildly inventive covers he created in the 1950s for books by Henry James, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Herbert Marcuse, you might suppose that he aligned with the liberal intellectual wing of that period’s culture. From the late ’50s on, when he began working directly for corporations to shape their public identities, it seems he pledged allegiance to corporate America.

What he did for companies like IBM, ABC and, unfortunately, Enron, was to give each a unified public identity by visual means. He didn’t just create logos; he applied his designs to many facets of a businesses, from business cards and letterheads to product packages, and he required absolute uniformity in all those aspects. What was the secret of Mr. Rand’s success? One of several books about design that he wrote and illustrated is open to a page where he talks about the logo he created in 1962 for ABC, the image of three sans-serif, lowercase letters on a disc. Referring to a picture of the logo that’s heavily, almost but not quite illegibly blurred, he asks, “How far out of focus can an image be and still be recognized?” Pretty far, if it’s a Rand design.

That’s important because, unlike fine art works, graphic images are meant to survive less than ideal conditions. Awareness of that necessity is a big part of what makes Mr. Rand a godfather of today’s image-saturated media world. If it gives some politically oriented viewers pause to think of his evidently unwavering faith in American capitalism and of how he imprinted corporate identities on the minds of millions, that just makes his story all the more interestingly complicated.

PR4

There’s also an interesting review of the exhibition by Amelia Stein at The Guardian:

Rand liked to argue that manipulation is integral to design. It is a designer’s job, he wrote in Thoughts on Design (1947), to manipulate ingredients in a given space – to manipulate symbols through juxtaposition, association and analogy. These days, it is difficult to separate logos and branding from other, more insidious forms of manipulation. A recent return to flatness in corporate design – emblematized by Apple’s decision to abandon skeuomorphism in 2013 – could be seen as an attempt to invoke Rand’s heyday, when consumers trusted a brand’s visual cues to communicate some essential truth.

This is an important aspect of Rand’s legacy, enormous and complicated as it is. Although Everything is Design stops short of addressing the lasting implications, artistic and otherwise, of Rand’s work, it provides us with a necessary basis from which to do so… [Looking] at Rand is valuable if we want not just to be as good as Rand, but to understand the complexity of what it is to be good.

The exhibition runs February 25 — July 19, 2015.

Comments closed

Ladybird by Design

ladybird-by-design-4

The Guardian‘s Kathryn Hughes visits Ladybird By Design, an exhibition of over 200 original illustrations from the golden age of Ladybird Books:

To enter Ladybird’s world again is to relearn a universe that is both strange yet uncannily familiar. Inevitably the books express the values of their times. In the Peter and Jane series (aka Key Words Reading Scheme), Peter tends to hang out with Daddy in the garage, while Jane helps Mummy get the tea. Fair-haired and blue-eyed, every one in the children’s world looks exactly like them, apart from Pat the dog.

Still, if Ladybird books were conservative on gender and race, they were positively brisk on class. The world of Peter and Jane – and all the other children who appear in the Ladybird universe doing magic tricks, going to the shops, taking batteries apart or learning to swim – is both modern and modest. As illustrated by Berry, Wingfield and Martin Aitchison, the children appear to live in one of the postwar new towns. Their home is probably privately owned but it could conceivably be a newly built council house. Their adventures involve going on a train or to the beach with Mummy and Daddy. There are no prep-school japes here, no solving of improbable mysteries or clifftop rescues.

Perhaps this achievable utopia was a compensatory fantasy for the illustrators who, born around 1920, had mostly known childhoods far harder than this. Busy providing a safe, stable environment for their own little Peters and Janes, men such as Berry and Wingfield showed a world where things were, on the whole, getting better. Modernity increasingly presses into the frame: Jane and Peter eat off a table that looks like knock-off Habitat, Mummy wears slacks and Daddy even starts to help with the washing-up. More disruptive changes, though, are kept at a safe distance. Carnaby Street, with all its troubling freedoms, has no place in the Ladybird world, nor does the cold war or Vietnam.

For those of you who didn’t grow up in the UK, Ladybird Books were slim illustrated hardcover books for children. They were educational, or at least ‘improving’, and so creepy that I think they’ve actually scarred the national psyche. If you are of certain age, the books trigger a shiver of queasy nostalgia — without Ladybird Books the horrifying weird of The League of Gentleman or Scarfolk is just inconceivable — and yet I still think of them fondly. Sort of.
9780723293927
The exhibition, which opens later this week, takes its title from a forthcoming Penguin book called Ladybird by Design. Written by Lawrence Zeegen, Professor of Illustration and Dean of the School of Design at the London College of Communication, the book celebrates 100 years of Ladybird, and examines the social and design history of the publisher. It is sure to be smashing.

1 Comment

BUONA LA PRIMA! An Exhibition of the Best Italian Book Design

Jean-Cayrol-Notte-e-nebbia-Nonostante-edizioni

Italian design journalist Stefano Salis has kindly let me know about BUONA LA PRIMA!, an exhibition he has curated for the Artelibro Festival in Bologna later this month. For the exhibition, a committee of 15 professionals in the field of editorial graphics has selected the best Italian books covers published published in the past year. All 45 finalists (three for each judge) can be viewed on the Artelibro website, and visitors can vote for their favourite.

Paolo-Ventura-The-Napoleonic-Soldier-and-Other-Stories-Un-sedicesimo-34-rivista-libro-Corraini-Edizioni

In addition to the prize assigned by popular vote, the jury of experts will also award a ‘Critics Prize’ to the best cover, in conjunction with the votes expressed by Ricardo Franco Levi, President of Artelibro, Romano Montroni, President of the Italian Center for the Book, and Giovanni Gregoletto, bibliophile and owner of Cantine Gregoletto that sponsor the exhibition.

The two winners will be announced on Sunday, September 21 at 12:30, with a toast at Palazzo Re Enzo.
COPERTINA BAUMAN DEFINITIVO
Niccolò-Machiavelli-Il-principe-Utet
BUONA LA PRIMA! opens Friday, September 12th at 6pm, in the Biblioteca d’Arte e di Storia di San Giorgio in Poggiale.

Comments closed

Simon Schama on Illustrator Quentin Blake

quentin-blake-ft-magazine

Simon Schama profiles artist and illustrator Quentin Blake for the FT Weekend Magazine:

Blake comes straight out of this 18th-century tradition of rococo mischief, the arabesque ride through the storyline. I ask him if he ever thought of painting full-time? He tells me that he didn’t think he could make a living as a painter and then, more importantly, that his instinct was always for the marriage of words and image, the connections that propel a tale forwards. Though everyone who loves his work will have their own laugh-out-loud moments… Blake doesn’t think of himself as a humorist.

“The humour is a by-product [of the story]. You draw the scene, what people are doing, their reaction to it, and if it’s funny, it comes out. There are certain books where you play it for laughs but it’s always more interesting in a dramatic situation.”

‘Inside Story’, an exhibition of Blake’s work, opens at the House of Illustration in London July 2, 2014.

1 Comment

Shepard Fairey: Obey This Film

endless-power-canvas_final

Love it or hate it, Shepard Fairey’s bold graphic style with its limited colour-palette and appropriated pop culture imagery, is immediately recognizable and much-imitated.

In this interesting short film by Brett Novak,  the Los Angeles-based artist talks openly about his work, influences, and, yes, the Obama ‘Hope’ poster:

 

An exhibition of new work by Fairey is currently on display — alongside prints by the artist Jasper Johns — at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in the Fairey’s home town of Charleston, South Carolina.

Comments closed

Jasper Johns: Regrets

regrets-jasper-johns

At the Financial TimesJulie L. Belcove talks to 83-year-old painter Jasper Johns about ‘Regrets’, a new series of paintings to be exhibited at MOMA next month:

Johns began “Regrets” after he came across an old photograph in a 2012 auction catalogue from Christie’s, London – though he seems little concerned with the image’s context or provenance. “It was a sale of – who’s the other artist? Francis Bacon.” On the block was Bacon’s “Study for Self-Portrait” (1964) and the catalogue had published the source material, a portfolio of photo­graphs found in Bacon’s studio after his death in 1992. Taken by the photographer John Deakin, the pictures were of Bacon’s friend and fellow artist Lucian Freud. Bacon had married Freud’s body with his own face in “Self-Portrait”. “This is the one that struck me,” Johns says, pointing to the image of Freud perched on the quilt-covered bed and hiding his face in his hand, newspapers at his feet. The photograph was paint-splattered and torn, with a large chunk of the lower left side missing ­altogether, and the creases and voids – the photograph as object – were as interesting to Johns as the image itself. “Bacon mistreated the photographs ­physically, is what it looks like,” Johns says. “I just saw that and it caught my eye.”

‘Jasper Johns, Regrets’ opens at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on March 15, 2014.

Comments closed