Deceased--Martin Sharp

Martin Sharp
January 21st, 1942 to December 1st, 2013

"Martin Sharp, Australian artist who came to symbolise the '60s, dies aged 71"

Psychedelic and pop art iconoclast, Sharp was an artist who stared into the universe and it winked back

by

Andrew Frost

December 1st, 2013

theguardian

Martin Sharp, the artist, filmmaker, designer and cartoonist, has died, aged 71. Much loved for his tenacious embodiment of the bohemian freedom of the 1960s, Sharp came to symbolise the era: he was a living connection to the group of expats who had made a ripple in the waters of swinging London, an artist who created psychedelic posters, magazine and album covers.

In the early 1960s, Sharp studied at the National Art School and for a brief time in the architecture department of Sydney University. A naturally gifted cartoonist, Sharp was also adept at causing controversy: a 1964 cartoon for University of NSW student magazine Tharunka resulted in the prosecution of its editors for obscenity.

In 1962, Sharp began work on Oz, an underground magazine he co-founded with Richard Neville and Richard Walsh. As its art director, Sharp created its trademark anti-establishment look and also contributed to the magazine – his satirical poem The Word Flashed Around The Arms, and a cover showing Neville and two friends pretending to urinate into a Tom Bass fountain, ultimately brought about the magazine’s demise. Prosecuted for obscenity, Neville and Walsh were sentenced to six months’ jail with hard labour and Sharp to four months. All three were released on bail pending an appeal, and were eventually acquitted.

Although Sharp initially spent just two years in London with Neville from 1967, the Oz, relaunched in the UK in 1967, became an iconic underground magazine of the late '60s. While in London, Sharp lived in a large palatial house in Chelsea, a home for the suburb’s bohemian art and rock scene. Sharp co-wrote the lyrics to Cream’s classic Tales of Brave Ulysses with housemate Eric Clapton and designed covers for the band’s Disraeli Gears and Wheels of Fire. Back in Sydney in 1970, Sharp established The Yellow House in Kings Cross, part share-house, part-alternative gallery, where exhibitions of paintings, sculptures, installations and happenings by Sharp and others were staged.

Sharp’s redesign of Luna Park in 1979 cemented his reputation as one of Australia’s leading pop artists, mixing psychedelic colours and icons with imagery derived from vaudeville and silent cinema. Sharp’s obsession with hippie-era vaudeville revivalist Tiny Tim, an unlikely participant in Woodstock and purveyor of novelty tunes, resulted in a decade-long effort to make Street of Dreams, a film about Tim and Luna Park, which was eventually screened at the Sydney Film Festival in 1988.

Another of Sharp’s obsessions was Arthur Stace, an ex-alcoholic who obsessively chalked the word Eternity onto Sydney’s footpaths during the 1950s and '60s. The word in its unmistakable rendering appeared in numerous Sharp paintings and prints and helped make Stace and his strange mission a part of Sydney official history. Sharpe continued to work as a painter during the '80s and '90s, but his output became sporadic. He was honoured with a number of recent survey exhibitions and retrospectives staged in various museums around the country.

Much of Sharp’s work was in commercial or semi-commercial contexts but this didn’t detract from their appeal: his posters for Nimrod Theatre are classic late 20th century pop art. Sharp was an iconoclast and, according to some who knew him, a wilful and obstinate dreamer, given to free association ramblings. A former enthusiast of LSD and nicotine, it was the smoking that finally did him in – he died of emphysema. The curious cultural collisions of Sharp’s work were produced by a time that will never come again but will live on through his work. Sharp stared into the universe and it winked back.

"Martin Sharp, psychedelic artist and Oz magazine founder, dies"

Martin Sharp, who designed album covers and posters for Cream, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, and who founded the radical Oz magazine, dies aged 71

by

Martin Chilton

December 2nd, 2013

The Telegraph

 Australian psychedelic artist Martin Sharp, a founder of the controversial Oz magazine who designed posters and album covers for Jimi Hendrix, Donovan and Bob Dylan, has died aged 71.

Sharp, who also designed memorable album covers for Cream's Disraeli Gears and Wheels Of Fire albums, died on Sunday December 1 following a prolonged struggle against emphysema.

He was born in Sydney in 1942 and after leaving the private Sydney boys' school Cranbrook, Sharp studied at the National Art School in East Sydney. He and fellow artist Garry Shead helped start an unofficial student newspaper at the school called The Arty Wild Oat.

He came to prominence in the Sixties after founding the famed Oz magazine with Richard Neville and Richard Walsh. The trio were twice charged with printing an obscene publication and a 1964 cover, showing Neville and two friends seemingly urinating on a sculpture, provoked fierce controversy.

Once his convictions were overturned on appeal in 1966, Sharp moved to London where he and Neville established London Oz along similar lines. In 1969, Sharp withdrew from the magazine and his place was taken by Felix Dennis.

 Sharp is best known for the psychedelic posters he designed for musicians. Sharp said the psychedelic experience changed his view of the world, adding: "There was a feeling of optimism, the possibility of the world working. That was definitely part of the experience."

Sharp would listen to music when he painted and was a Dylan fan. "He's singing about things which people didn't used to sing about, you know, moral issues and songs about the racial problems," Sharp said, "and The Times They Are a-Changin of course is a very dramatic song for those days, and still very valid. An amazing figure I think."

He was a friend of Eric Clapton (the pair lived in the same house in Chelsea for a time) and recalled: "Eric asked me to design the cover for Disraeli Gears. I loved record cover art and was very happy to do it. I was using fluorescent paints at the time. It was the height of psychedelia. Some of the ingredients in the cover are made up from Victorian decorative engravings. It was done in black and white first and then painted with fluorescent colours. I tried to capture the warm joyful liveliness of Cream's songs."

The artist was also outspoken in the causes of civil liberties and Aboriginal rights, saying once: "Art has been my way of having a say".

Sharp lived in Sydney for the final four decades of his life and among his work was one of the versions of the iconic clown's face entrance to Sydney's Luna Park. A fatal fire in the park's ghost train in 1979, in which six children died, changed his outlook on religion and made him a firm believer in God.

"We've lost a major figure and a great character," said Wayne Tunnicliffe, head of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Martin Sharp [Wikipedia]

Deceased--Arthur C. Danto

Arthur C. Danto
January 1st, 1924 to October 25th, 2013

"Arthur C. Danto, a Philosopher of Art, Is Dead at 89"

by

Ken Johnson

October 27th, 2013

The New York Times

Arthur C. Danto, a philosopher who became one of the most widely read art critics of the Postmodern era, championing avant-garde artists like Andy Warhol and proclaiming the end of art history, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 89.

The cause was heart failure, his daughter Ginger Danto said.

The author of some 30 books, including “Beyond the Brillo Box” and “After the End of Art,” Mr. Danto was also the art critic for The Nation magazine from 1984 to 2009 and a longtime philosophy professor at Columbia.

“His project, really, was to tell us what art is, and he did that by looking at the art of his time,” said Lydia Goehr, a Columbia University philosophy professor who has written extensively about Mr. Danto. “And he loved the art of his time, for its openness and its freedom to look any way it wanted to.”

Mr. Danto was pursuing a successful career in academic philosophy when he had a life-defining moment. As he recalled in numerous essays, it happened in 1964 when he encountered a sculpture by Andy Warhol in a New York gallery. It was “Brillo Box,” an object that seemed to Mr. Danto to differ in no discernible way from the real cardboard soap-pad container it copied.

If there was nothing visible in Warhol’s sculpture to distinguish it from an ordinary object, Mr. Danto wondered, what made it art? At a time when more and more artists were creating works lacking traditional artistic qualities, this was an urgent question.

Leaving aside that Warhol’s sculpture was made of silk-screened plywood, not cardboard, the defining feature of the sculptural “Brillo Box” was, in Mr. Danto’s view, that it had a meaning; it was about something — consumer culture, for one thing. The real Brillo box only had a functional purpose. But how would you know whether you were looking at a meaningful or a merely functional object? The short answer was, you knew because the Warhol box was presented as art in an art gallery.

This led Mr. Danto to propose a new way of defining art. The term would be bestowed not according to any putatively intrinsic, aesthetic qualities shared by all artworks but by general agreement in the “artworld,” a community that included artists, art historians, critics, curators, dealers and collectors who shared an understanding about the history and theory of modern art.

If that community accepted something as art, whatever its form, then it was art. This required an educated viewer. “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry — an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld,” wrote Mr. Danto in his oft-quoted 1964 essay “The Artworld.”

Mr. Danto’s notion of the art world inspired what came to be known as the Institutional Theory of Art, an idea that was developed most fully by the philosopher George Dickie in the 1970s and that remains widely influential on thinking about contemporary art.

Mr. Danto also came to believe that in the contemporary world, no single style could dominate, as Abstract Expressionist painting had done in the 1950s. Pluralism would be the new order.

This led him to proclaim the end of art history. By this he meant not that people would stop making art, but that the idea of art progressing and evolving over time along one clear path, as it seemed to have done from the Renaissance through the late 19th century and into the first post-World War II decade, could no longer be supported by art of the late 20th century. After the ’60s, art had splintered and gone off in a multitude of directions, from Photorealist painting to the most abstruse forms of Conceptualism.

But if so many different kinds of things could be viewed as art, what, if anything, did they have in common? The common denominator, Mr. Danto concluded, was meaning, and that led him to propose that the art of our time was mainly animated by philosophy. Artworks in the Postmodern era could be viewed as thought experiments about such problems as the relationship between representation and reality; knowledge and belief; photography and truth; and the definition of art itself.

If the new art was philosophy incarnate, then the critic who was also a philosopher might have an advantage over the traditional critic when it came to understanding and explicating art. Mr. Danto got a chance to test himself in that capacity when he became the art critic for The Nation.

But while he won the National Book Critics Circle prize for criticism in 1990 for “Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present,” he was not universally admired.

The critic Hilton Kramer, writing in The New Criterion in 1987, likened Mr. Danto’s views to one of “those ingenious scenarios that are regularly concocted to relieve the tedium of the seminar room and the philosophical colloquium.”

Arthur Coleman Danto was born in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Jan. 1, 1924. He grew up in Detroit, spent two years in the Army and then studied art and art history at Wayne State University.

He aspired to be an artist, and he specialized in woodcuts, his daughter Ginger said. “He had quite a life as an artist,” she said, “but when he got money from the G.I. bill, he decided to study philosophy.” In 2010, Mr. Danto donated many of his prints and original woodblocks to the Wayne State University Art Collection.

He did graduate work in philosophy at Columbia University, and he studied with Maurice Merleau-Ponty on a Fulbright grant in Paris.

Mr. Danto began teaching at Columbia in 1951, earning his doctorate the following year. He continued to teach at Columbia until his retirement in 1992, after which he was named Johnsonian professor emeritus of philosophy.

Mr. Danto’s first wife, Shirley Rovetch, died in 1978. In addition to his daughter Ginger, who is a writer about art, Mr. Danto is survived by his wife, Barbara Westman Danto, and another daughter, Elizabeth Danto.

As The Nation’s art critic, Mr. Danto wrote extended reviews and essays about prominent artists, past and present, with philosophical insight, professorial erudition and, almost always, sympathy and curiosity. He avoided negative criticism, which he considered cruel.

His interests were catholic. “Unnatural Wonders: Essays From the Gap Between Art and Life” (2005), one of several volumes of collected reviews, includes essays on contemporaries like Damien Hirst, Barbara Kruger, Yoko Ono, Gerhard Richter and Matthew Barney and on past masters like Picasso, Giacometti and Leonardo.

His was the kind of art criticism that could engage even readers with no particular interest in art. “There is a lot of uninspired work in the galleries,” Mr. Danto once wrote. “But there is so much ingenious work, so much intelligence, so much dedication, and really so much high-mindedness in the art world that, were it shared by the rest of the world, we would have entered a golden age.”

"Arthur C. Danto, groundbreaking critic who declared ‘the end of art,’ dies at 89 in NYC"

October 27th, 2013

The Associated Press

Arthur C. Danto, a provocative and influential philosopher and critic who championed Andy Warhol and other avant-garde artists and upended the study of art history by declaring that the history of art was over, has died. He was 89.

Danto, art critic for The Nation from 1984 to 2009 and a professor emeritus at Columbia University, died of heart failure Friday at his Manhattan apartment, daughter Ginger Danto said Sunday.

An academically trained philosopher, Danto became as central to debates about art in the 1960s and after as critic Clement Greenberg had been during the previous generation. Danto was initially troubled, then inspired by the rise of pop art and how artists such as Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein could transform a comic strip or a soup can into something displayed in a museum, a work of “art.” Starting in the ‘60s, he wrote hundreds of essays that often returned to the most philosophical question: What exactly is art? Danto liked to begin with a signature event in his lifetime — a 1964 show at New York’s Stable Gallery that featured Warhol’s now-iconic reproductions of Brillo boxes.

“Is this man some kind of Midas, turning whatever he touches into the gold of pure art? And the whole world consisting of latent art works waiting, like the bread and wine of reality, to be transfigured, through some dark mystery, into the indiscernible flesh and blood of the sacrament?” Danto wrote in “The Artworld,” a landmark essay published in 1964.

“Never mind that the Brillo box may not be good, much less great art. The impressive thing is that it is art at all. But if it is, why not indiscernible Brillo boxes that are in the stockroom? Or has the whole distinction between art and reality broken down?”

Danto would refer to the show as the moment when art history ended and “progress could only be enacted on a level of abstract self-consciousness.” In such essays as “The End of Art,” Danto noted the progression of styles in the 19th and 20th century— impressionism, modernism, abstract expressionism, pop art. After the Brillo show, art had reached its ultimate expression and became a medium not of trends but of individuals — some brilliant, some ordinary, none advancing the overall narrative.

“When I first wrote about this concept, I was somewhat depressed,” Danto later observed. “But now I have grown reconciled to the unlimited diversity of art. I marvel at the imaginativeness of artists in finding ways to convey meanings by the most untraditional of means. The art world is a model of a pluralistic society in which all disfiguring barriers and boundaries have been thrown down.”

Danto would be praised by The New York Times’ Barry Gewen as “arguably the most consequential art critic” since Greenberg, an “erudite and sophisticated observer” who wrote with “forcefulness and jargon-free clarity.” But his ideas were not universally accepted. Danto frequently had to explain that art wasn’t dead, only art history.

Rival critics such as Hilton Kramer questioned whether the story was over and whether Warhol deserved to be part of it. In an essay published in The New Criterion in 1987, Kramer likened Danto’s views to one of “those ingenious scenarios that are regularly concocted to relieve the tedium of the seminar room and the philosophical colloquium.” He also dismissed Warhol’s work as “a further colonization of the aesthetically arid but nonetheless seductive territory” of avant-garde art.

In “What Art Is,” a book published in 2013, Danto responded that his “effort was to describe art differently from that of the conservative taste of most of the New York critics.”

“From my perspective, aesthetics was mostly not part of the art scene. That is to say, my role as a critic was to say what the work was about — what it meant — and then how it was worth it to explain this to my readers,” he wrote.

Danto’s other books included “Encounters and Reflections,” winner of a National Book Critics Circle prize in 1991, “Beyond the Brillo Box” and “After the End of Art.” He was an editor of The Journal of Philosophy, a contributor editor to Artforum and president of the American Philosophical Association.

Arthur Coleman Danto was born in Ann Arbor, Mich., and raised in Detroit. He served two years in the Army during World War II and was stationed in Italy and in North Africa. He then studied art and history at Wayne State University and received a master’s and doctoral degree from Columbia University, where he taught from 1952 to 1992 and chaired the philosophy department for several years. He was especially influenced by the 19th-century Germany philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and drew extensively upon Hegel in his theory of art history.

After the Warhol show, Danto pursued a definition of art that could be applied to both the Sistine Chapel and a Brillo box. He rejected the ancient Greek idea that art was imitation and the Renaissance ideal that art was defined by aesthetic pleasure. Danto was shaped by the 20th-century rise of “ready-mades,” ordinary objects turned into “art,” whether Warhol’s Brillo boxes or the urinal Marcel Duchamp submitted to galleries during World War I. In “What Art Is,” Danto concluded that art was “the embodiment of an idea,” defined not by how it looked but by what it had to say.

“Much of contemporary art is hardly aesthetic at all, but it has in its stead the power of meaning and possibility of truth,” he wrote in “What Art Is.”

Danto’s stature as a critic overshadowed his early career as an artist. He was an accomplished printmaker whose woodcuts were exhibited in the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art and elsewhere in the 1950s. He later donated his prints to Wayne State.

“When I became a critic, I met everyone under the sun. But I knew very few artists when I was an artist. Some printmakers, some second generation Abstract Expressionists. ... They were the great figures of my world, like Achilles and Agamemnon in ancient times,” he wrote in a 2007 essay about his own work.

“The heroes today are very different, and so the artists for whom they are heroes have to be very different. I could never have been an artist shaped by such heroes, though as a writer, I like their art well enough. I am glad to see that my work holds up despite that. In a way, I feel like an old master.”

Danto was married twice — to Shirley Rovetch, who died in 1978, and since 1980 to Barbara Westman. He had two children, Ginger and Elizabeth.

Arthur C. Danto [Wikipedia]

State lunatic asylum inmate and some simple drawings from the mind

Edward Deeds [left]

"Lost for years, drawings and artist find acceptance"

by

Donald Bradley

May 4th, 2013   

The Kansas City Star

A simple drawing, done with pencil on ledger paper, shows two hats, side by side.

One is a variety of top hat, the other a stocking cap with a long tail, tapering to the side.

Below, the artist has written, “WO MULE.”

Feel free to have a go at the artist’s message. He can’t help because he died in 1987. But Edward Deeds didn’t draw for you anyway, or for the art experts and critics now trying to understand his work.

As a young man on a south Missouri farm in the 1920s, he angrily chased his younger brother with a hatchet. Already an unruly, odd sort — prone to laugh for no reason — and a profound annoyance to his strict father, Deeds would eventually be diagnosed insane and committed for life to State Lunatic Asylum No. 3 in Nevada, Mo.

For the next 40 or so years, trapped inside the sprawling, red brick asylum with Gothic towers, Deeds drew pictures. Not for money or fame or any future eye. His future was there, the drawings his alone. He drew on plain ledger paper, both sides, paying no mind to the mental institution’s letterhead at the top and “Balance Due _$” at the bottom.

Portraits, landscapes, animals with hats. Some with cryptic captions.

If a 14-year-old boy hadn’t fished the drawings from a trash heap, nobody would be talking about Edward Deeds today. He wouldn’t be the hit of the outsider art world. And 283 drawings by this Ozarks farm boy who liked to hunt squirrels would not be priced at $16,000 per page (two drawings, front and back) at a New York gallery and on exhibit at a museum in Lausanne, Switzerland.

“Here was somebody who was essentially discarded,” said Neville Bean, a New York art designer whose husband bought Deeds’ album on eBay before the artist had even been identified. “His father didn’t want him around. He disappears into this giant Victorian institution.

“How moving is it that his art is now out in the world and this voice is finally being heard?”

What happened to Deeds was not uncommon. The asylums and giant state hospitals of the early past century held thousands, sometimes for the convenience of a family as much as compassion for a patient.

“Back in those days, a diagnosis was very subjective and anybody could petition a judge,” said John Emerick, medical director for New Directions Behavioral Health in Kansas City.

In the 1950s, antidepressants and drugs such as Librium, Thorazine and lithium began to lay the foundation for the modern era of psychiatric medicine. Today, according to Emerick, someone like Deeds would probably be put on medication and treated as an outpatient.

Family members say that although Deeds may well have been mentally ill, he wouldn’t have hurt his brother that day. They tell about the time he jumped in a river and saved that same brother, Clay, from drowning.

Clay’s daughter, Tudie Williams, said her dad lived the rest of his years with guilt.

“My father was a tough man, but sometimes at night he would cry, and we knew it was for Edward,” Williams said.

What truly got Edward Deeds put away was a fanciful spirit. He liked hunting and fishing and art more than plowing, something his father would not accept. Williams and her sister think Uncle Edward might have been autistic or hyperactive — certainly nothing deserving of banishment for life to an asylum.

But then came electroconvulsive therapy — ECT, also known as shock treatment, in which voltage high enough to cause seizures was shot into his brain.

In several of Deeds’ drawings, he perhaps makes reference to the ECT treatment. One, for example, shows a woman in a quill hat holding a bouquet of flowers. Above her is written “ECTLECTRC” next to a pencil.

Harris Diamant, the New York sculptor who bought Deeds’ work, thought him dyslexic and figured he meant “electric.” So Diamant, before Deeds’ identity was known, dubbed the artist “The Electric Pencil.”

Another possible allusion to ECT might be the eyes in Deeds’ portraits. Gaping but empty, disassociated. Like doll eyes. Haunting despite the fine draperies that frame the tidy faces.

Eyes from a land of electroconvulsive therapy?

One such portrait Deeds labeled “WHY DOCTOR.”

Diamant rushed into his apartment one day seven years ago and spread a bunch of drawings on his dining table.

He’d bought them from a man who had snagged the album on eBay for around $10,000 but soon suffered buyer’s remorse. He was a collector, not a dealer. So he contacted Diamant, who he knew had bid on the drawings earlier, and asked whether he was still interested.

“Absolutely,” Diamant told him and soon headed to Boston to swing a deal.

Diamant said he trembled when he looked at the drawings on his table that day.

“Content, form, color — gorgeous and nothing like I’d ever seen,” Diamant recalled in a phone interview from New York. “Those eyes … that stare. I knew the person who did these had a very unique view of the world.”
 
But he didn’t know who that person was. The artist had meticulously numbered each of 283 drawings but signed none. What Diamant had was a starting point. The letterhead on many album pages: State Lunatic Asylum No. 3 on some, State Hospital No. 3 on others.

For the next five years, Diamant and Bean tried to solve the mystery of the unknown artist. They made a short documentary film about “The Electric Pencil.” Bean put together a book. The couple traveled to Missouri, even hired a private detective.

During this time, The New York Times singled out the drawings of “The Electric Pencil” as being some of the most admired work at an outsider art fair.

Finally, on a winter day in 2011, a woman named Julie Phillips, while at work at her job in Springfield, glanced through a copy of the Springfield News-Leader and saw a drawing of a woman in a quill hat. Big eyes, pursed lips.

The newspaper story was about Diamant’s attempt to find the creator of some drawings.

Phillips looked close at the woman in the hat. She knew she’d seen her before. The drawing had been in her house.

“That’s Uncle Edward’s,” she whispered to herself.

Edward Deeds was born in 1908 in the Panama Canal Zone.

He was named after his father, who served in the Navy, and would be the oldest of five children.

When the father’s service was up, the family settled on a farm on the banks of the Finley River in Christian County, Mo. Chickens, turkeys, maybe a hog or two. Ed Deeds raised cattle, and his wife, Clara, became known for her Concord grape jelly.

Ed expected his oldest son to take a leading role in helping out on the farm, but Edward was more likely to pull pranks, goof around and be off hunting or fishing when work needed to be done. He cried and laughed at odd times and for no reason.

Things got so bad that when the family moved into a newer house on the property, Edward was made to stay behind in the old place. According to family lore, the end came when Clay went over to the old house and tormented Edward. The two got in a fight, and Edward grabbed the hatchet.

Ed Deeds, fed up, petitioned the court to have his son committed. The boy was out of control — obstinate and destructive, might even be colorblind, the father told officials. A decision was made to send Edward to the Missouri State School for the Feeble Minded in Marshall, Mo.

Edward, 18, promptly tried to kill himself by drinking antifreeze from the family’s Model A Ford. He didn’t want to leave home.

Doctors in Marshall soon determined him to be beyond their care. They labeled him insane and shipped him off to the lunatic asylum in Nevada.

Family members would visit often over the years, but not his father.

“Once my grandfather put him in, that was it,” Williams said from her home in Hawaii.

She and her family sometimes picnicked on the grounds of the asylum. Deeds always had his drawing tablet with him, Williams remembers. Once, when she was 6 or so, he asked her to draw a rainbow. She got her crayons out and did. Very bold colors, firm lines.

“That’s not a rainbow,” he told her. “Rainbows are fluffy.”

Then he drew one.

“That’s the one that’s in the album,” she said.

As time passed, Deeds withdrew and became sullen, hardly talking during family visits.

Paolo del Vecchio, director of the federal Center for Mental Health Services, said the only people confined for years these days are those like Reagan shooter John Hinckley Jr., who was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Del Vecchio’s take on Deeds’ drawings: “Remarkable.”

At some point, Deeds gave his handsewn album to Clay. But in 1969 when the family moved, Clay Deeds told the moving crew they could help themselves to anything left in the attic. That’s where the album was.

“My mother was so furious with him for years after that,” Phillips said. “We just knew it was gone forever.”

It would have been if not for the 14-year-old who not only pulled it from a trash bin in Springfield but then held on to it for 35 years. By then a Texas truck driver, he sold the album on eBay because he needed money, according to Bean.

Deeds’ work is what’s known as outsider art, meaning it doesn’t come from the traditional art world and the artist is not formally trained. The plantation drawings of Bill Traylor, a former slave, would be an example.

The backstory is always a big part of outsider art, said Tom Parker, associate director of the Hirschl & Adler Galleries in New York, the sole representative of Deeds’ drawings.

“They create against the odds,” Parker said Friday.

After Deeds’ work came to light in 2011, but before he had been identified, Lyle Rexer, a curator at the School of Visual Arts in New York, wrote of the mystery artist: “He may have models in mind, but they are overwhelmed or transformed by his imaginative conceits. This is not conceptual design making, but something that lies much deeper in the body and psyche of the artist.”

Now there’s a bookish mouthful about an Ozarks hill boy.

In 1973, Deeds, deemed harmless, was discharged to a nursing home in Ozark, Mo. He had been confined for nearly a half century, a life lost to a harsh time.

“But he drew,” said Phillips, a niece. “With all that separation and loneliness and thinking his life would always be inside that place, he drew. Now the world is finally hearing him. And we are all proud of that.”
She visited her uncle in the nursing home shortly before he died.

“He was old then, very gentle with kind eyes,” she remembered. “He usually looked down, like he didn’t want to be noticed.”

Edward Deeds died on a winter day in 1987, never knowing the hoopla his drawings would later stir. He hadn’t drawn for years because of arthritic hands. He filled his final days tending tomato plants he grew in pots.

“They told me close to the end that he had difficulty sleeping,” Phillips said, “that he would sit up for hours, through the night, in a chair.”
He was buried in a family plot not far from the old farm, the place he never wanted to leave.

Finally free, finally home.

"Who is the “Electric Pencil”?"

by

Vanna Le

February 9th, 2011

The New Yorker

In 1940, a fourteen-year-old boy saved an abandoned pile of artwork from a mound of trash off Seminole Street in Springfield, Missouri. The drawings, rendered on double-sided ledger paper, were charming depictions of women in quill hats, military men, deer, and horses, and spoke to a whimsical fascination with hillside animals. Some of the pages are printed with the letterhead “State Hospital No. 3,” an institution in Missouri that underwent several name changes; it had over the years been referred to as “Lunatic Asylum No. 3” and "State Hospital for the Insane No. 3.” The entire collection of drawings will be released next month in a fully illustrated, hundred-and-sixty-page hardcover volume called “The Drawings of the Electric Pencil.”

The artwork itself is fun to look at, more so because it whispers to the unsolved mystery of its creator. The artist’s identity remains unknown: the name “Electric Pencil” was invented by Harris Diamant, the art collector who now owns the drawings. For years, Diamant has been searching for the true identity of the Electric Pencil (he even hired a detective), and he has only recently made headway. In an e-mail he told me that he has been communicating with someone who believes the Electric Pencil may be her uncle: “I seemed to have just discovered the actual identity of the ‘E.P.’ It's not yet verified so I can't say much beyond that.”

It is believed that the drawings of the Electric Pencil are prime examples of outsider art, created by a patient at the mental institution named on the paper. Lyle Rexer, an art critic and curator who teaches at the School of Visual Arts, in New York City, writes an insightful essay in the book’s introduction that gives an analytical critique of the Electric Pencil’s artwork:

    The artist was meticulous for the most part in using the rule lines of the stationary as a guide to make sure his figures were oriented on the age, although his dyslexia prevented him from recognizing copying errors. Yet his precision and rigidity are less about fidelity to models than they are about trying to bring his visual fascinations in line with his ability. He may have models in mind, but they are overwhelmed or transformed by his imaginative conceits. This is not conceptual design making, but something that lies much deeper in the body and psyche of the artist.

Many more drawings...

The Electric Pencil: Drawings by Edward Deeds

The Drawings of the Electric Pencil

by

Lyle Rexer

ISBN-10: 057806832X
ISBN-13: 978-0578068329

And the film...

Deceased--Channa Horwitz

Channa Horwitz
May 21st 1932 to April 29th, 2013

"Channa Horwitz dies at 80; artist known for geometric paintings, drawings"

The L.A. native's approach was distinguished by its unusual combination of conceptual complexity and visual dynamism, even sensuality.

by

Holly Myers

May 3rd, 2013

Los Angeles Times

Channa Horwitz, an artist known for her dizzyingly intricate geometric drawings and paintings based on complex predetermined systems, died Monday of complications from Crohn's disease at St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica. She was 80.

In 1968, while still a student, Horwitz proposed a project for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's seminal exhibition "Art and Technology" that would have involved collaborating with engineers to suspend eight large, free-floating Plexiglas beams within the space of a magnetic field, accompanied by eight beams of light that would fluctuate in intensity depending on the position of the beams.

The project was not accepted — curator Maurice Tuchman later stated, according to the artist, that he did not believe women should be allowed to work with such industrial elements — but the drawing that Horwitz produced to graph the sequences of the light beams' movements became the basis for a series that she would pursue throughout her life. She called it Sonakinatography.

As she wrote in the magazine Flash Art in 1976: "I have created a visual philosophy by working with deductive logic. I had a need to control and compose time as I had controlled and composed two-dimensional drawings and paintings. To do this, I chose a graph as the basis for the visual description of time. I gave the graph a value: one inch became one beat or pulse in time. Using this graph, I made compositions that depicted rhythm visually."

Horwitz's approach was distinguished by its unusual combination of conceptual complexity and visual dynamism, even sensuality. Times art critic Christopher Knight described her works in a 2012 review as "patterned Minimalist drawings that breathe, pulsate and visually warp in most un-Minimalist ways. One colored dot follows another on big gridded sheets of graph paper. Systemic logic, which sustains industrial and digital societies, visually pops and fizzes, becoming a bountiful ritual chant."

Horwitz was born Channa Helene Shapiro in Boyle Heights on May 21, 1932, the first of two daughters. Her father, Louis Shapiro, was a self-taught electrician who developed and manufactured a line of blow-dryers used for pet grooming, founding the company Edemco. She began drawing at a young age.

After marrying and while raising three children, she took classes at Art Center School in Los Angeles (now Art Center College of Design) and Cal State Northridge. In 1972 she received a bachelor's degree from CalArts, where she studied with the renowned performance artist Allen Kaprow, participating in many of his "happenings." She created a happening of her own in 1971, transforming a staircase at the school into a grid of numbered and colored squares corresponding to one of her Sonakinatography drawings, arranging for dancers to move between them in a series of eight choreographed motions — a form of cross-media translation that she undertook on numerous occasions thereafter, often in collaboration with other artists.

Though closely aligned with the work of conceptual and minimalist artists like Sol Lewitt, Mel Bochner and Agnes Martin, Horwitz worked in relative isolation for much of her career, without the public acclaim those artists enjoyed. That tide has shown signs of turning, however. She has had several shows in Germany in recent years, and was featured in the Hammer Museum's biennial Made in L.A. in 2012. In the last few months, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and invited to participate in this year's Venice Biennale. Her most recent show is up through June 8 at Francois Ghebaly Gallery in Culver City.

Anne Ellegood, senior curator at the Hammer Museum, met Horwitz in 2010 and was drawn to her work immediately. "I am impressed by her commitment to her practice over a very long period of time," she said, "often with little critical, curatorial or commercial recognition. I admire the fact that once she identified a working methodology that both provided her with structure and infinite space for exploration, she stuck with it. She never wavered from her commitment to her work."

Hammer Museum...

In the early 1960s Channa Horwitz (b. 1932 Los Angeles) made a discovery that was crucial for her artwork: by limiting her visual language to simple logical systems and sequences, she could open herself to innumerable possibilities. Her embrace of a rules-based conceptualism gave her an enormous sense of freedom, and she has been making geometric abstract drawings and paintings employing predetermined systems ever since. Seeking to capture time and motion—she dubbed her series of drawings initiated in the 1960s Sonakinatography to reflect her commitment to sona (sound) and kina (movement)—Horwitz lays down her drawings on graph paper, the lines and squares rendered in deep black or the colors of the spectrum to create oftentimes deliriously intricate patterns. The logic of her renderings is quickly usurped by a sense of awe about the great mysteries of life and the inevitable entwining of chance and structure that characterizes daily existence. For all their conceptual rigor, her remarkable drawings undulate with great rhythm and intensity. The selection for Made in L.A. includes examples from Horowitz’s series Sonakinatography, Canon, and Matrix, demonstrating the range of her remarkable output over the past five decades.

Physicist, bongo player, artist...[Ofey] Richard Feynman

 Cathy McAlpine Myers

 Cathy McAlpine Myers

1968

 Dancer at Gianonni's Bar

1968

 Female Posing

1968

 Girl with a Doll

 Nude from Behind

Jennifer Ouellette...

Think physicist Richard Feynmann’s only artistic hobby was playing the bongos? Surprise! He also dabbled in art. This week, Brain Pickings featured “The Art of Ofey” (his artsy nom de plume), a selection of Feynman’s sketches and drawings. “I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world.”

Many more at...

Richard Feynman's Works of Art

Richard Feynman [Wikipedia]

Buffoon or political manipulator--Charles Krafft

"Charles Krafft and the Conundrum of Nazi Art"

by

Rachel Arons

March 24th, 2013

The New Yorker

Last month, an article by Jen Graves in Seattle’s weekly paper The Stranger exposed the artist Charles Krafft as a white nationalist and Holocaust denier, and former admirers of his work are now stripping it from their walls. Krafft, who is sixty-five, has been a respected figure in the Seattle art world for decades; his work has been shown in galleries around the world and featured in Harper’s, Artforum, and The New Yorker. Since the nineties, he has been known for combining decorative ceramics with loaded political imagery—delftware plates and other objects commemorating Nazi atrocities, porcelain AK-47s and hand grenades, perfume bottles with swastika stoppers, and a teapot and other pieces in the shape of Hitler’s head. In the past, many art collectors and curators had interpreted this work as a critique of bigoted and totalitarian ideologies. Now, the revelations about Krafft’s repugnant personal opinions have cast his work in a new light, and brought up knotty questions about how an artist’s intent should influence our evaluation of his work. We have precedents for heinous personal beliefs coinciding with creative brilliance (Ezra Pound, Richard Wagner), and bigotry embodied in works of great formal achievement (“The Birth of a Nation,” “Triumph of the Will”), but this is an unusual case of an artist’s ideological extremism so suddenly exposed, and so plainly relevant to his art.

In recent articles discussing Krafft’s Holocaust denial, one of the main ideas gaining traction is that he has been duping the art world by passing off as ironic Nazi imagery that was, in reality, intended as homage or propaganda. Graves, who is the Stranger’s art critic and, in 2009, featured Krafft’s ceramic AK-47 on a list of the best works of art ever made in Seattle, raised the possibility that Krafft had been “using the guise of art and irony to smuggle far-right symbols into museums, galleries, collectors’ homes, and upscale decor shops,” and wrote that, according to old friends of Krafft, he has “laughed in private at the liberal-leaning art establishment he’s fooled with his art.” An article on the blog The Weeklings, re-published at Salon under the headline “We Let Charles Krafft Fool Us,” asked, “If Charles Krafft…is capable of fooling thousands into thinking him a forward-thinking genius, who else are we currently paying, or worshiping, to fill us with surreptitious hatred?”

But Krafft has, in fact, been vocal about his views: as Graves pointed out, he has posted links to Holocaust denial articles and other anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on Facebook, where he has over two thousand friends, and he has appeared multiple times on white-nationalist podcasts like the White Network (whose “about” page reads, “We recognize that different races and ethnic groups cannot live together in peace on the same soil,” and “We do not hesitate to identify and criticize Jews and will not allow them to hide amongst us”). One video producer, who made a short portrait of Krafft for a Seattle TV network in 2007, told me by e-mail that she chose to exclude interview footage of Krafft sharing his opinions on the Holocaust. “Charlie and I discussed whether or not to include his holocaust views on the day we shot the video,” she wrote. “He didn’t want to be censored. I told him that if I put anything about that subject in the video no one would listen to anything else he had to say…I struggled with this decision at the time. I want to allow the artist to tell their story but I didn’t want this video to become platform for the Charlie’s political views and conspiracy theories.”

Others proved similarly—and understandably—loathe to give Krafft’s views a stage and so chose, instead, to tuck them under the rug. In a conversation by phone, Krafft told me that the curators of an exhibition currently running at the Halle Saint Pierre museum in Paris asked him to revise a questionnaire he’d completed for them after he listed as his “heroes” the famous Holocaust deniers Paul Rassinier and Sylvia Stolz. (In France, as in a number of other European countries, Holocaust denial is a crime.) The curators, who did not respond to my e-mails asking them to confirm this, wrote to Krafft following the publication of Graves’s story to let him know the museum had pulled his work from the show. Fred Owens, who helped draw attention to Krafft’s views on Facebook and on his blog prior to the Stranger article, told me, “I think I was kind of waiting for somebody else to say something, and maybe everybody else was waiting for somebody else to say something.”

But in addition to exaggerating the art world’s ignorance of Krafft’s beliefs, the “He Fooled Us” line of thinking sets up a false dichotomy between ironic, critical artistic uses of Nazi imagery and propagandistic ones. In fact, the modes of Krafft’s artistic representations—and of most artistic representations of Nazi or Holocaust imagery—are more fraught, and demand a more precise treatment.

“Ironic” is not, and has never been, an adequate characterization of Krafft’s work. There is, to be certain, an element of irony, in the sense of an incongruence or disruption of expectations, in Krafft’s combination of dainty decorative objects and disturbing political iconography, and in series like his “Forgiveness” perfume bottles and soap bars, whose logo is the swastika, or his china reliquaries made from clay mixed with cremated human remains. But, according to people knowledgeable about Krafft and his career, his intentions have always been somewhat ambiguous, and his work difficult to classify.

Krafft is famous for being an iconoclast, an autodidact, and a lifelong contrarian and provocateur. Throughout the nineteen-seventies he lived off-the-grid in Fishtown, an artists’ colony in the Skagit Valley, where he immersed himself in Tibetan Buddhism and Eastern mysticism and made paintings of landscapes and anthropomorphic birds in the style of his hero, the Northwest School painter and mystic Morris Graves. In 1980, he moved back to Seattle, where he continued painting and exhibiting his work and where, in the early nineties, he decided to learn ceramic painting so that he could create a tile portrait of his childhood hero, the hotrod pinstriper Kenneth Howard, a.k.a. Von Dutch, who had become his pen pal. He took china painting classes with a group of “little old ladies,” and began making the ceramic plates that would become his Disasterware series, commemorating both natural disasters, like earthquakes and floods, and political ones, like the Bombing of Dresden and the explosion of the Hindenburg.

Krafft’s art became increasingly politicized in the mid-nineties, when he traveled to Slovenia to collaborate with the arts collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (N.S.K.), and ended up accompanying its founding band, Laibach, on the end of a European tour. He was at their performance in Sarajevo on the day the Dayton Agreement was signed, ending the Bosnian War. Laibach is known for its ambiguous, deadpan appropriation of Fascist, religious, and Third Reich imagery (their name, the German word for the city Ljubljana under Nazi occupation, was banned in Slovenia for part of the eighties). They are by some accounts Marxists, but have also been accused of espousing rightwing and nationalist ideas; when asked about their views in the past they’ve given cryptic responses like, “We are Fascists as much as Hitler was a painter.”

Krafft described N.S.K.’s aesthetic to me as a “salad of symbols,” and his work has, since the mid-nineties, reflected a similar fondness for iconographic mixtures too slippery, and too agnostic, to be understood as straight political critique. According to “Villa Delirium,” a 2002 book about Krafft’s work, the idea for the “Forgiveness” series came about when an N.S.K. member exclaimed, “Ah, the smell of blood and snow. If I could bottle that scent I’d create a new fragrance for the twenty-first century and call it ‘Forgiveness.’” An early bust Krafft made of Hitler contained that line inscribed on its base and Delft bunny rabbits on either side. That piece, with its politically loaded but elliptical quote and jarring juxtaposition of the quaint and the terrible, is representative of the style for which Krafft has since become known.

Sometime after his first trip to Slovenia (he has returned several times since), Krafft became interested in Romanian history, particularly the life story of the Archbishop Valerian Trifa, who was deported from the United States in the nineteen-eighties after being investigated by the Department of Justice for his involvement with the Fascist Iron Guard, and for helping to incite a pogrom against Jews in Bucharest in 1941. Krafft came to believe the charges against Trifa were specious; it was from there, he wryly told me, that he “went off the tracks” and became a Holocaust denier. He dates his official interest in “revisionism” to around 2001.

But the contradictions and ambiguities of Krafft’s early ceramics have not disappeared. The now-infamous “Idaho” Hitler teapot, which he made in 2003, and which contains overt references to neo-Naziism, almost certainly reflects Krafft’s anti-Semitism (the base of the teapot contains in Germanic font the inscription “Idaho,” a state known for being a gathering place for white supremacists). But Krafft is not making a straight tribute to Hitler in that piece any more than he was in pieces twenty years ago—or, if he is, then he is not doing a very good job. The teapot, which was originally owned by a Jewish collector, was donated to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and exhibited there in 2007. Timothy Burgard, who curated the show and wrote a detailed, thoughtful analysis of Krafft’s piece in the exhibition catalogue, said in a P.R. statement the museum shared with me that,

    So far, no art world professional or member of the public that has viewed this ten-year-old (2003) teapot in person or in reproduction has perceived any interpretation other than a critical one, given that the infamous dictator is rendered as a kitschy teapot, not to mention the unflattering rendering of his demonic-looking eyes, which are so suggestive of blind rage…If the artist were to state now, ten years after its creation, that this teapot was intended as an homage to its subject, it appears to have failed in visual terms.

There isn’t, in other words, a clear line between “irony” and “homage” in Krafft’s work, and it’s a mistake to assume, as many members of the art world apparently have, that an ironic artistic appropriation of Nazi symbols safely amounts to an anti-Nazi critique. As Susan Sontag pointed out in her 1975 New York Review of Books essay “Fascinating Fascism,” one of the consequences of the kitsch or campy use of Nazi imagery, even if it is intended critically, is that it can normalize those images, desensitizing us to their power by mingling them with more banal ones. “Shocking people…also means inuring them,” she wrote of the famous poster of Robert Morris half-naked wearing a Nazi helmet, “as Nazi material enters the vast repertory of popular iconography usable for the ironic commentaries of Pop Art.”

This is only one of the points of moral murkiness surrounding the artistic reproductions of Nazi imagery. In 2002, the Jewish Museum in New York held an exhibit called “Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art,” which featured the work of, among others, the Polish artist Zbigniew Libera, known for controversial LEGO models of concentration-camp scenes (Krafft has expressed his admiration). Most of the artists featured in the show were Jewish, and their work attempted to confront the horror of the Holocaust, not negate or dispute it. And yet, in the foreword to a catalogue of essays accompanying the exhibit, James E. Young, the director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, raised questions that we could just as soon apply to Krafft’s work:

    We have every right to ask whether such obsession with these media-generated images of the past is aesthetically appropriate. Or whether by including such images in their work, the artists somehow affirm and extend them, even as they intend mainly to critique them and our connection to them. Yet this ambiguity between affirmation and criticism seems to be part of the artists’ aim here. As offensive as such work may seem on the surface, the artists might ask, is it the Nazi imagery itself that offends, or the artists’ aesthetic manipulations of such imagery? Does such art become a victim of the imagery it depicts? Or does it actually tap into and thereby exploit the repugnant power of Nazi imagery as a way merely to shock and move its viewers? Or is it both, and if so, can these artists have it both ways?

The richness of these questions, and their relevance to Krafft’s work, is one indication that his art should not be pulled out of museums and galleries as a result of our new knowledge. The impulse to pack his swastikaed perfume bottles and Hitler teapots away is inevitable—museums and galleries don’t want to promote his conspiracy theories, and don’t want to feel complicit in his bigotry. But ridding ourselves of Krafft’s art, like avoiding or ignoring his beliefs, does a disservice to our understanding of the larger questions now surrounding his work. Tim Detweiler, an arts consultant and curator in Seattle who was interviewed with Graves on Studio 360, told Kurt Andersen: “If I had a show of Charlie’s work right now, and this came out during the run of it, the best thing that a museum could do is have a panel and try to educate people as to how this changes things, and get comments from as many experts as possible.”

It’s worth mentioning that, in the past few years, Krafft has produced some lesser-known, or unknown, artwork with a direct, didactic relationship to his Holocaust denial. Around 2008, he made a miniature diorama of a dwarf family in Auschwitz for the John Erickson Museum of Art. The museum never exhibited the piece, probably because Krafft’s accompanying artist’s statement made fairly clear that his intentions were to minimize the Holocaust:

    Denial or ‘trivialization’ of the received history of this sixty-year-old set of events has been declared a criminal act by nine European governments and the United Nations. The idea of the Holocaust as the single episode of the 20th century whose consequentiality seems only to increase as it recedes into the past raises questions about scale in relation to the proper commemoration of an incident of such psychic magnitude. These issues are what the sensationalized theme and reduced size of this exhibition are attempting to address.

Several years ago Krafft made “Fowlschwitz,” a metal sculpture of a birdhouse built to look like Auschwitz that, he told me, was also inspired by his “interest in revisionism.” The name alone belittles the death camps.

Pieces like those should be ignored, not because they reflect a morally repugnant misreading of history, but because they are narrowly didactic, which makes them bad art. Perhaps Krafft’s obsession with Holocaust conspiracy theory is costing him his creativity; that would be karmically interesting. But his work that contains contradictions—a “salad of symbols” too freewheeling to parse. That work is worth continuing to examine, even if we are disgusted by Krafft’s current personal beliefs and unsure exactly to what extent, or for how long, they have been informing his work. It should always be difficult to look at art about Nazis. Now that looking at Krafft’s art is even more difficult, we shouldn’t look away.

Deceased--Richard Artschwager

Richard Artschwager
December 26th, 1923 to February 9th, 2013

"Richard Artschwager dies; painter and sculptor was 89"

Artschwager created sculptures carefully crafted from wood and often covered in Formica. His paintings, mostly limited to black acrylic, were applied to cheap materials and derive from photos.

by

Christopher Knight

February 11th, 2013

Los Angeles Times

Richard Artschwager, an artist who turned his apprenticeship as a cabinetmaker into a distinctive approach to making sculptures and paintings that defy easy categorization, died Saturday in Albany, N.Y., following a brief illness. He was 89.

A retrospective of Artschwager's work, which travels to the UCLA Hammer Museum in June, closed Feb. 3 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan. It was the Whitney's second Artschwager retrospective and will be the third to be shown in Southern California. The first was co-organized by the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art in 1979, while the Whitney's 1988 retrospective was also seen that year at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Artschwager is primarily known for three unique bodies of work. His sculptures, carefully crafted from wood and often covered in a veneer of ordinary Formica, establish a subtle tension between the conventional utility of furniture and the perceived uselessness of art. His paintings, mostly limited to black acrylic applied to a cheap building material known as Celotex board, frequently derive from photographs, but they are given unexpected material heft with the addition of heavy, light-reflective metal frames.

Finally, an installation aspect took the form of small, lozenge-shaped pieces of black wood or vinyl decals that the artist inserted into unexpected architectural places. The shape recalls the space to be filled in with black pencil or ink on a computerized questionnaire like a standardized exam or election ballot, or the hole in an old IBM punch-card. Artschwager called these abstract lozenges "Blps" — pronounced "blips" — and their subtle references suggest that a meaning or an answer is located someplace else. He deployed them like perceptual black holes that draw curious energy from the spaces around them.

What unites Artschwager's disparate sculptures, paintings and Blps is their exploration of the vagaries of perception. A viewer is never quite certain of exactly what he is looking at — including the object's status as art. For instance, merely through different colored shapes of laminate veneer, a plain waist-high cube might also describe a solid table, the empty space beneath it and the thin tablecloth on top of it.

Coming of age in the 1950s, when emotion was at the core of Abstract Expressionist painting and sculpture and the purity of different mediums was paramount, Artschwager instead turned to sense perception to make art that crossed established boundaries. Furniture was a touchstone for the development of his work.

"Handle" (1962) was the breakthrough piece. A rectangle 4 feet wide and 30 inches high is beautifully crafted from a cylinder of honed and polished wood. Although three-dimensional like a sculpture, it hangs on the wall like a painting. Made of wood, like a painting's traditional frame, it only encloses a view of the wall behind it. Meant to be grasped, as any handle would, it cannot be touched because it is a work of art.

Artschwager was getting a "handle" on the direction his art would take for the next 50 years. Painting, sculpture, context and perception seem to collapse into themselves in this eccentric object, as the old categories are being erased. Qualities that would soon be attributed to Pop, Minimal and Conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s are all present.

"Portrait I," also from 1962, further elaborated his interests. An ordinary bedroom dresser is topped by a framed picture of a slightly grinning man. The wood grain of the dresser is hand-painted, its swirls a pastiche of Abstract Expressionist gestures, while the photo-based painted portrait is blurred and out of focus, defeating the commemorative purpose.

"Portrait II," made the following year, accelerated his evolution. This dresser has no drawers, forsaking function, while the face in the picture has been replaced by a solid plane of Formica that is the same material from which the dresser/pedestal is made.

Formica was patented in 1913 as an electrical insulation substitute "for mica," a silicate that resists electrical current, but after World War II it gained widespread popularity as a decorative laminate. Artschwager applied its low-art properties to high-art purposes. He exploited the plastic's artificial pictorial qualities, since it imitates not only natural materials such as stone and wood but the brushwork in abstract paintings.

Artschwager often used Formica that looks like burl wood, a deformity of the grain that grows in trees under stress. Burl also finds a wry precedent in the elaborate wood veneers of 18th century aristocratic French furniture, widely considered a pinnacle of achievement in the European history of decorative art. Applied to modern geometric forms like cubes and plinths, Artschwager made sculptures that have the strange sense of being ordinary objects that are simultaneously pictures of objects.

As a support for paintings that often focus on architectural subjects chosen from reproductions in newspapers, magazines and books, Artschwager used Celotex board rather than canvas. Celotex is a textured building material that, like the original Formica, is also used as insulation. Its random pattern of surface whorls captures little puddles of thinned acrylic paint, blurring any image painted on it. Artschwager used the property to advantage.

"Untitled (Tract House)," from 1967, one of eight Artschwager works in the Museum of Contemporary Art's collection, is emblematic. An ordinary, boxy middle-class house fills the image, which is taken from a black and white photograph. The Celotex makes it as fuzzy as a TV picture on the fritz. The bulky silver frame gives the dissolving scene some heft, but something also seems askew. It takes a moment to realize that the composition's perspective is out of whack.

Follow the sidewalk leading to the home's entry, and the trajectory of the path just misses the stairs and the front door, landing in the bushes and bumping into a blank wall. The more you attempt to reconcile the domestic entry, the more the image of home seems to fall apart. The eccentric painting pictures the convention that says you can't go home again.

"Untitled (Destruction)" (1980), also in MOCA's collection, shows a tall building midway into an explosive demolition, apparently being razed to make way for something new. As the big, once sturdy building falls apart, your eyes struggle to pull together the fuzzy scene into a coherent whole. In a metaphoric struggle between life and death, collapse and construction, creation and ruin are held in pictorial tension.

In the 1990s Artschwager made an extensive series of sculptures in the form of shipping crates. On one hand they acknowledged the new internationalization of art, where at any given moment thousands of artworks (and artists) are in transit to someplace else. On the other, the sealed boxes convert the gallery or museum where they are shown into a mausoleum — a tomb for art that is ostensibly hidden inside. The container holds the hidden meaning, or else it is the visible meaning itself.

Richard Ernst Artschwager was born Dec. 26, 1923, in Washington, D.C., the son of German and Ukrainian parents. When his father contracted tuberculosis, the family relocated to Las Cruces, N.M.

In 1941 he enrolled at Cornell University to study science, but he was drafted into the Army to serve in Europe during World War II. Following the war, during a 1946 posting in Vienna, he met and married Elfriede Wejmelka, his first of four wives. Three marriages ended in divorce.

Discharged the following year, Artschwager returned to Cornell to finish his undergraduate degree. Encouraged by Elfriede, he moved to New York City to study at the studio school established by Amédée Ozenfant, a French expatriate artist. To support his new family, he set art aside in the early 1950s and took up a variety of odd jobs, including lathe operator, baby photographer and bank clerk. Eventually he decided to design, make and sell furniture. A devastating studio fire in 1958 destroyed his inventory.

In the wake of the disaster, Artschwager began to reconsider his abandoned plan to be an artist, and he used his experience as a cabinetmaker to explore the possibilities. He was 38 when he made "Handle" and "Portrait I," the works that announced the beginning of his rapidly maturing art. He began to be included in group exhibitions and had his first solo exhibition as a mature artist at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1965. His first Los Angeles solo exhibition was at Eugenia Butler Gallery in 1970.

Artschwager showed at numerous galleries and museums in the United States and internationally, including at Documenta in Kassel, Germany, and at the Venice Bienale. His final gallery exhibition last October at Gagosian Gallery in Rome featured five laminate sculptures of upright and grand pianos. Utilizing the Formica patterns to make references to early 20th century artists as diverse as Kazimir Malevich and Henri Matisse, they also made a retrospective nod to his first piano sculpture in 1965.

Artschwager, who lived in the small village of Hudson, N.Y., is survived by his wife, Ann Sebring; his children Eva, Clara and Augustus Theodore, and by his sister, Margarita.

"Richard Artschwager, Painter and Sculptor, Dies at 89"

by

Ken Johnson

February 10th, 2013

The New York Times

Richard Artschwager, a painter and sculptor whose witty, contradictory mixing of artistic genres made him one of the most critically admired artists to emerge in the 1960s, died early Saturday in Albany. He was 89.

His death, at a hospital, followed a recent stroke, his wife, Ann, said.

The death also followed by less than a week the closing of a career retrospective of Mr. Artschwager’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan, his second to be mounted there. He lived in Hudson, N.Y., in Columbia County.

At a time when most artists worked in clearly determined styles, Mr. Artschwager slyly confounded the usual categories. His most famous sculpture, “Table With Pink Tablecloth,” from 1964, is something of a cross between Pop Art and a Minimalist cube by Donald Judd: a box neatly veneered with pieces of colored Formica to create the image of a wooden table with a square pink tablecloth draped on it.

Mr. Artschwager went on to produce variations on the forms of chairs, tables, doors and other domestic objects in styles ranging from severely geometric to surrealistically distorted.

In the late 1960s, he invented an abstract form he called a “blp,” a small, black, oblong shape that he would recreate in various materials and install in unexpected places to punctuate, mysteriously, gallery and museum spaces. He also placed dozens of “blps,” in the form of reliefs, stencils or decals, outside museums for viewers to go hunting for or stumble upon. Some are to be found on the elevated High Line park in Lower Manhattan near the site of the Whitney’s future home.

Mr. Artschwager’s paintings were often paradoxical. He painted black and white copies of found photographs — group portraits, pictures of buildings and other anonymous images — on textured Celotex panels, a common building material. Ostentatious frames made of painted wood, Formica or polished metal were usually part of the total piece.

He once said: “Sculpture is for the touch, painting is for the eye. I wanted to make a sculpture for the eye and a painting for the touch.”

Richard Ernst Artschwager was born on Dec. 26, 1923, in Washington. His father, a German immigrant, was a botanist, trained at Cornell University; his mother, a Ukrainian immigrant, was an artist who studied at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington and at the National Academy of Design in New York. In 1935, the family moved to Las Cruces, N.M., a better climate for the artist’s father, who had tuberculosis.

Like his father, Mr. Artschwager studied at Cornell, concentrating on mathematics and sciences, though he was deeply interested in art. Before completing his degree he was drafted into the Army in 1944 and saw combat in Europe, suffering a slight wound at the Battle of the Bulge. Afterward he was assigned to counterintelligence in Vienna, where he met and, in 1946, married his first wife, Elfriede Wejmelka.

Back in the United States after the war, Mr. Artschwager completed his bachelor’s degree at Cornell but soon, with his wife’s strong encouragement, decided to become an artist. He moved to New York and began attending the Studio School of the painter Amédée Ozenfant, who, along with Le Corbusier Foundation in Paris, had founded a form of late Cubism called Purism.

By then the couple had a child, and Mr. Artschwager supported his family as a bank clerk and then a furniture maker.

In the early ’50s he stopped making art and went into business building furniture until a fire destroyed his workshop in 1958. Resuming art making, he had his first exhibition — of paintings and watercolors of Southwestern landscapes — at the Art Directions Gallery in New York.

In 1960, an exhibition of assemblages by the sculptor Mark di Suvero inspired Mr. Artschwager to begin using his woodworking skills to make his own sculpture. A year later, a photograph picked up on the street prompted him to start making paintings based on black and white photographs.

A big break came when he sent, unsolicited, a note and slides to the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York’s leading showcase for new art. The gallery quickly took him on for a group show that included Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. He remained with Castelli for 30 years.

It was at the Castelli gallery, in 1965, that Mr. Artschwager had the first show of work that was recognizably his own. During the ensuing decades he participated in many important international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale and Documenta, in Kassel, Germany.

The Whitney produced its first Artschwager retrospective in 1988-89. It later traveled to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Madrid, Paris and Düsseldorf. His last solo exhibition with Gagosian Gallery was last fall at its branch in Rome featuring sculptures of pianos.

“Early and late, his work stood out for its blunt, mute weirdness,” Holland Cotter wrote in The New York Times in reviewing the recent Artschwager retrospective at the Whitney. A 1963 sculpture, “Portrait II,” for example, resembles a bedroom dresser with no drawers and a sheet of Formica where a mirror might be. The table in “Table Prepared in the Presence of Enemies” (1993) “looks like a low-rise guillotine,” Mr. Cotter wrote.

He added: “Violence is implicit in a lot of Mr. Artschwager’s art, which may be the most intriguing thing about it, the element that gives bite to what would otherwise pass for Magrittean whimsy.”

Mr. Artschwager’s political views were less apparent. In 2003, he painted three identically framed portraits, of a blank President George W. Bush, a smiling Osama bin Laden and a grim-looking one of himself. “Each painting looks cracked, creviced and soiled, as if just dug up from rubble,” Mr. Cotter observed.

Mr. Artschwager was married four times, the first three marriages ending in divorce. In addition to his wife, the former Ann Sebring, he is survived by his daughters Eva Artschwager and Clara Persis Artschwager; a son, Augustus Theodore Artschwager; a sister, Margarita Kay, and a grandson.

David Nolan, whose Manhattan gallery has shown drawings by Mr. Artschwager, said the artist had recently exhibited new paintings and works on paper that he created on a return to New Mexico, inspired in part by the colors of the landscape there he had known so well as a boy.

A lecture by  Jennifer Gross of Yale University...

"Richard Artschwager, Whose Multifarious Work Defied Categorization, Dies at 89"

by

Andrew Russeth

February 9th, 2013

GalleristNY

Richard Artschwager, who crafted a protean and enigmatic body of work over the course of more than half a century, has died. He was 89. David Nolan Gallery and Gagosian Gallery, which both presented his work in New York, confirmed his death.

Given Mr. Artschwager’s thrillingly diverse output, it’s difficult to pin his fame to any particular series. He made haunting grayscale paintings, often of domestic scenes and architecture, on textured Celotex and sculptures with Formica—“the great ugly material,” he said of the stuff—and wood that often resembled functional objects like pianos, chairs and tables, betraying the artist’s work as a furniture maker in the 1950s. But he also made curious little pieces that he called “blps,” knockwurst-shaped works that he sometimes installed throughout the city. All the while, he handily sidestepped the reigning art movements of the day, indulging elements of Minimalism (in his sculptures) and Pop art (in his paintings) while playfully ignoring their strictures.

Just a week ago, a major retrospective of his work—titled “Richard Artschwager!”—ended its run at the Whitney Museum. As part of the show, “blps” were installed throughout West Chelsea, where the Whitney will open its new museum in 2015. The show was his second career-spanning show at the museum, and will travel to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles later this year.

He had major shows at Paris’s Centre Pompidou in 1989, Vienna’s MAK in 2002 and the Deutsche Guggenheim in 2003, and made multiple appearances in numerous important international exhibitions, like the Venice Biennale and Documenta, in Kassel, Germany, which he was featured in an astounding five times.

Richard Ernst Artschwager was born in Washington, D.C., and moved with his family in the 1930s to New Mexico, which he continued to visit. (Drawings he made there were the subject of a 2012 show at Nolan.) He attended Cornell before joining the military and fighting in World War II. He was injured in the Battle of the Bulge. Later, he did intelligence work for the United States.

After returning to New York in the late 1940s, he graduated from Cornell, studied with the Cubist painter Amedée Ozenfant and worked as a baby photographer. He later worked as a furniture maker, though he left that profession in 1958 after a fire ravaged his studio in downtown Manhattan, committing himself more fully to art. A series of shows followed, and he had his first exhibition with Leo Castelli in 1965. He would be represented by the dealer for years.

In a statement, Gagosian Gallery, which presented its first solo show with Mr. Artschwager in 2002, said that “Richard forged a richly maverick path, confounding the genres and limits of art while forever changing how we view and understand space and the everyday objects that occupy it.”

He is survived by his wife, Ann Artschwager, and three children.
 
Richard Artschwager [Wikipedia]