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.

Deceased--Jan Sawka

Jan Sawka
December 10th, 1946 to August 23rd, 2012

"PASSINGS: Jan Sawka"

Jan Sawka, Polish-born poster artist and architect, dies at 65

August 12th, 2012

Los Angeles Times

Jan Sawka, 65, a noted Polish American artist and architect whose designs included posters for theatrical productions and touring sets for the Grateful Dead, died Thursday after suffering a heart attack at his studio and home in High Falls, N.Y., his family said in a statement.

Sawka (pronounced SAFF-ka) had 70 solo shows at international museums and galleries, and his paintings, posters and prints hang in more than 60 museums around the world. He had just completed a multimedia piece titled "The Voyage" set to tour next year with former Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart.

In 2010, Sawka's work was featured as part of Westways magazine's cover art program on display at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. The artist painted his first impressions of Los Angeles after a day on the Sunset Strip in 1978.

"I took a notebook and markers and walked down Sunset Boulevard," Sawka told The Times. "It was awful and strangely beautiful how billboards dominated human life."

Sawka was born Dec. 10, 1946, in Zabrze, Poland, to a linguist mother and an architect father, who was imprisoned during the Stalin era.

Sawka completed two master's degrees — in painting and printmaking and in architectural engineering — and in his 20s became a star of the Polish poster school. Sawka was exiled from Poland in 1976 for his involvement in the Polish and American counterculture movements.

A year later, he moved to New York, where he produced editorial commentary drawings for the New York Times and designed theaters including the Harold Clurman, Jean Cocteau Repertory and Samuel Beckett.

Sawka was also known for his genre-bridging collaborations, including a 10-story set for the Grateful Dead's 25th anniversary tour and interactive sculptures inspired by Japanese technology studios. 

Jan Sawka [Wikipedia]

Jan Sawka's website

Deceased--Jean Giraud

Jean Giraud
May 8th, 1938 to March 10th, 2012

"Jean Giraud, or Moebius, dies at 73; master comics artist"

Moebius' signature became shorthand for singular and strange visions in comics. The French artist also contributed to the look of films such as 'Alien' and 'Tron.'

by

Geoff Boucher

March 11th, 2012

Los Angeles Times

Jean Giraud, an enduring figure in European comics whose fantasy and sci-fi work — which he signed with his alias, Moebius — deeply influenced alien-world imagery throughout pop culture, has died. He was 73.

Giraud died Friday night or Saturday morning after a battle with cancer, according to a statement from his publishing house, Dargaud, which went on to say the comics world had lost "one of its greatest masters."

In his native France, where for decades comics have attracted an older readership, Giraud is considered his country's most important figure in cartooning. His signature creation is "Les Aventures de Blueberry," the Old West saga that debuted in 1963 and followed a peripatetic U.S. Cavalry lieutenant nicknamed Blueberry. The final edition was published in 2005.

Former French Culture Minister Jack Lang told Reuters on Saturday that Giraud's legacy is a singular one. "Moebius has become a comic-book icon," Lang said. "In the '70s and '80s he was the figurehead of this unique art form in France."

In America, however, he is best known for his interstellar visions, which reached these shores in the monthly R-rated pages of "Heavy Metal," the English-language version of "Métal Hurlant," a magazine Giraud helped launch in 1975. He made it a brand name with characters such as Arzach, the silent figure who glides above alien canyons astride a great, leathery bird, and the cosmically surreal story of "The Airtight Garage."

The signature of Moebius became invested with a mystique and, like Federico Fellini in cinema, became shorthand for singular and strange visions in comics. The artist's famous fans included Fellini, George Lucas, James Cameron, Paulo Coelho, Stan Lee, Hayao Miyazaki and Ridley Scott.

Scott brought in the artist to contribute to the look of the 1979 space-horror classic "Alien," and Steven Lisberger, the writer-director of "Tron," sought him out to pin down the digital dreams of that pioneering 1982 Disney movie.

"It's one thing to be talented and work hard enough to put your spirit and soul in your work, and it's a totally other thing to have a spirit and soul that is so beautiful and wise that it deserves to be put into art," Lisberger said Saturday. Giraud was "a very rare man, a true master, and his life's work is a masterpiece."

Giraud would go on to contribute art or design work on such 1980s films as "Willow," "Masters of the Universe" and "The Abyss" and on 1997's "The Fifth Element."

Still, he was a bit player in Hollywood and a superstar of the page and canvas. The subtle paradox that tugs at the eye of his audience is that everything portrayed — the landscapes, denizens, technologies and even physics — is totally alien but also completely unified in presentation and rendered with the confident precision of a surveyor who has walked every inch of a property.

Another celebrated Moebius fan, Rick Carter, the production designer who won an Oscar for his art direction on the 2009 film "Avatar," said the effect is unsettling.

"The inspiration I always felt from the art of Moebius was that I believed he truly saw the imagery he depicted and was actually not making it up," Carter said Saturday. "His imagery appears as if it was sketched from a real-life subconscious world/existence."

Even as Giraud's productivity narrowed in recent years, his stature in the creative community seemed to grow as young illustrators, digital artists and video game designers looked to his work as a key compass point. In October 2010 the Fondation Cartier Pour L'Art Contemporain in Paris launched a lavish five-month exhibit of Giraud's work that included small, humble sketches and majestic wall-sized pieces.

The artist visited Los Angeles while the exhibit was underway and, in an interview with The Times, said he couldn't put a name to the restless nature of his imagination or the persistent disdain for repeating his past accomplishments.

"I have no explanation, but I am interested in being alive.… Art is the big door, but real life is a lot of small doors that you must pass through to create something new," he said.

"You don't always need to go far. If you are in the space station Mir and you need to fix something, you go outside, but not too far. If you travel too far you'll die. Outer space is not human, but you can visit. You need to be a little bit out there but you need to stay close to human."

Jean Henri Gaston Giraud was born in May 1938 (the month before Superman arrived in a small rocket from another planet in the pages of "Action Comics" No. 1) in the Paris suburb of Nogent-sur-Marne.

Although he had little formal training, his cowboy adventure tales were being published in Far West magazine by the time he was 18.

In his early 20s he became an apprentice of the Belgian artist Jije, best known for his work on "Spirou et Fantasio" and the western adventure that clearly informed "Blueberry."

The long journey from protege to titan left Giraud dizzy at times, and last year he said the adulation was a mystery in and of itself.

"They said that I changed their life," he told The Times. "'Your work is why I became an artist.' Oh, it makes me happy. But you know at same time I have an internal broom to clean it all up. It can be dangerous to believe it. Someone wrote, 'Moebius is a legendary artist.' A legend — now I am like a unicorn."

The artist's survivors include Isabelle Giraud, his wife and business partner.

Jean Giraud [Wikipedia]

Deceased--Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud
December 8th, 1922 to July 20th, 2011

Lucian Freud at 25 in 1947.

Girl With A Kitten

A Painter

"British painter Lucian Freud dies at 88"

Freud, whose works are highly prized by collectors, created subjects in anguished, anti-erotic poses. He used impasto, a technique involving the thick application of paint, to create his highly textured portraits.

by

David Ng

July 22nd, 2011

Los Angeles Times

Lucian Freud, a British artist who gained fame for his intense and deeply textural nude paintings, has died. He was 88.

Freud, the grandson of the pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, died Wednesday at his home in London following an illness, according to a representative for his New York dealer, William Acquavella.

The artist's best-known works feature subjects in anguished, anti-erotic poses, their psychology externalized onto their fleshy bodies. He liked to use impasto, a technique involving the thick application of paint, to create his highly textured portraits.

"I want paint to work as flesh," he once said. "As far as I am concerned, the paint is the person."

During his long career, Freud made portraits of a number of public figures. He once painted supermodel Kate Moss naked and visibly pregnant. He reportedly engaged in animated negotiations with Buckingham Palace to create his 2001 portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, who sat fully clothed. The royal painting divided the public, with some criticizing it as glum and depressing.

Freud's paintings are highly prized among museums and collectors who have been willing to pay large sums for them. In 2008, his nude portrait of a heavy-set civil servant reclining on a sofa, "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping," sold for $33.6 million at a Christie's auction, a record figure at the time.

"Unlike many artists, his late works were among his most significant contributions," Paul Schimmel, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, said Thursday. "He got better, more ambitious and youthful. He was a very young elder statesman."

Born in Berlin in 1922, Freud was one of three sons of Austrian architect Ernst Freud and his German wife, Lucie. The family fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and eventually settled in London. Freud became a British citizen in 1939. As a boy, he studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London and the East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting. During World War II, the budding artist served with the British Merchant Navy.

Freud showed an early interest in a kind of portraiture that could strip away artifice and reveal the essence of his subjects. His first paintings were characterized by a spare, flat and emotionally uninflected style.

He gained attention for a series of paintings of his first wife, Kitty Garman, including a portrait titled "Girl with a White Dog," in which she exposes a breast while a canine dozes on her lap.

Though he is often described as a realist, Freud's work contains elements of other schools, including surrealism. One of his biggest influences was the painter Francis Bacon, another titan of the postwar art world, who became Freud's friend and helped to push his work in a more expressionist direction.

By the late '50s, Freud had embarked on what would become his signature style of textured nude paintings.

He often turned his gaze on himself. In several unflattering self-portraits, Freud painted himself in various states of undress, his aging body exposed. He frequently painted friends and close associates, and even created a nude portrait of his daughter Bella, a noted fashion designer.

"He was an extremely brave painter in the way he confronted his figures. He brought a whole new meaning to figurative painting and was extremely influential on the generations that followed," said Gretchen Berggruen, a co-owner of the John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco.

A major exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington in 1987 helped boost Freud's reputation in the United States. In 1993 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York held a retrospective of his work.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown L.A. held a retrospective in 2003 that was organized by the Tate Britain. The exhibition featured more than 100 paintings, drawings and prints, as well as new pieces.

"Freud is in reality a fine painter with a very narrow repertoire," Times art critic Christopher Knight wrote in his review of the show. Comparing him to artist Stanley Spencer, an earlier practitioner of nude portraiture, Knight wrote that "Freud's art is rarely so complex, but sometimes it does have the capacity to beguile."

Freud's personal life was a subject of much scrutiny and speculation. After his divorce from Garman, Freud was married for several years to Caroline Blackwood before they divorced. He fathered children from a number of relationships. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.

By some accounts a prickly personality, Freud reportedly did not get along with his brother Clement, the British TV personality who died in 2009.

"In company he was exciting, humble, warm and witty," his art dealer, Acquavella, said in a statement. "He lived to paint and painted until the day he died, far removed from the noise of the art world."

"Lucian Freud, Adept Portraiture Artist, Dies at 88"

by

William Grimes

July 21st, 2011

The New York Times

Lucian Freud, whose stark and revealing paintings of friends and intimates, splayed nude in his studio, recast the art of portraiture and offered a new approach to figurative art, died on Wednesday night at his home in London. He was 88.

He died following a brief illness, said William Acquavella of Acquavella Galleries, Mr. Freud’s dealer.

Mr. Freud, a grandson of Sigmund Freud and a brother of the British television personality Clement Freud, was already an important figure in the small London art world when, in the immediate postwar years, he embarked on a series of portraits that established him as a potent new voice in figurative art.

In paintings like “Girl With Roses” (1947-48) and “Girl With a White Dog” (1951-52), he put the pictorial language of traditional European painting in the service of an anti-romantic, confrontational style of portraiture that stripped bare the sitter’s social facade. Ordinary people — many of them his friends and intimates — stared wide-eyed from the canvas, vulnerable to the artist’s ruthless inspection.

From the late 1950s, when he began using a stiffer brush and moving paint in great swaths around the canvas, Mr. Freud’s nudes took on a new fleshiness and mass. His subjects, pushed to the limit in exhausting extended sessions, day after day, dropped their defenses and opened up. The faces showed fatigue, distress, torpor.

The flesh was mottled, lumpy and, in the case of his 1990s portraits of the performance artist Leigh Bowery and the phenomenally obese civil servant Sue Tilley, shockingly abundant.

The relationship between sitter and painter, in his work, overturned traditional portraiture. It was “nearer to the classic relationship of the 20th century: that between interrogator and interrogated,” the art critic John Russell wrote in “Private View,” his survey of the London art scene in the 1960s.

William Feaver, a British critic who organized a Freud retrospective at Tate Britain in 2002, said: “Freud has generated a life’s worth of genuinely new painting that sits obstinately across the path of those lesser painters who get by on less. He always pressed to extremes, carrying on further than one would think necessary and rarely letting anything go before it became disconcerting.”

Lucian Michael Freud was born in Berlin on Dec. 8, 1922, and grew up in a wealthy neighborhood near the Tiergarten. His father, Ernst L. Freud, an architect who was Sigmund Freud’s youngest son, married Lucie Brasch, the heiress to a timber fortune, and the family enjoyed summers on the North Sea and visits to a family estate near Cottbus.

In 1933, after Hitler came to power, the Freuds moved to London, where Lucian attended progressive schools but showed little academic promise. He was more interested in horses than in his studies, and entertained thoughts of becoming a jockey.

In 1938, he was expelled from Bryanston, in Dorset, after dropping his trousers on a dare on a street in Bournemouth. But his sandstone sculpture of a horse earned him entry into the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. He left there after a year to enroll in the East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting in Dedham, where he studied with the painter Cedric Morris. While it is true that the school burned to the ground while he was there, the often repeated story that Mr. Freud accidentally started the fire with a discarded cigarette seems unlikely.

In 1941, hoping to make his way to New York, Mr. Freud enlisted in the Merchant Navy, where he served on a convoy ship crossing the Atlantic. He got no nearer to New York than Halifax, Nova Scotia, and after returning to Liverpool developed tonsillitis and was given a medical discharge from the service.

Mr. Freud was a bohemian of the old school. He set up his studios in squalid neighborhoods, developed a Byronic reputation as a rake and gambled recklessly (“debit stimulates me,” he once said). In 1948, he married Kitty Garman, the daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein, whom he depicted in several portraits, notably “Girl With Roses,” “Girl With a Kitten” (1947) and “Girl With a White Dog” (1950-51). That marriage ended in divorce, as did his second marriage, to Lady Caroline Blackwood. He is survived by many children from his first marriage and from a series of romantic relationships.

His early work, often with an implied narrative, was strongly influenced by the German Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) painters like Georg Grosz and Otto Dix, although his influences reached back to Albrecht Dürer and the Flemish masters like Hans Memling.

On occasion he ventured into Surrealist territory. In “The Painter’s Room” (1943), a zebra with red and yellow stripes pokes its head through the window of a studio furnished with a palm tree and sofa. A top hat sits on the floor.

Mr. Freud later rejected Surrealism with something like contempt. “I could never put anything into a picture that wasn’t actually there in front of me,” he told the art critic Robert Hughes. “That would be a pointless lie, a mere bit of artfulness.”

A decisive influence was Francis Bacon, a fellow artist at the 1954 Venice Biennale and the subject of one of his most famous works, a head painted in oil on copper in 1952. Bacon’s free, daring brushwork led Mr. Freud to abandon the linear, thinly painted portraits of the 1940s and move toward the brushy, searching portrait style of his mature work, with its severely muted palette of browns and yellows.

“Full, saturated colors have an emotional significance that I want to avoid,” he once said. To the artist and Freud biographer Lawrence Gowing, he said, “For me the paint is the person.” Mr. Freud’s dingy studio became his artistic universe, a grim theater in which his subjects, stripped bare and therefore unidentifiable by class, thrust into contorted positions, submitted to the artist’s unblinking, merciless inspection.

The sense of the artist-model relationship is suggested by “Reflection With Two Children,” a 1965 self-portrait showing Mr. Freud seen from below, the vantage point of a dog looking at its master. Two children, almost miniature in scale, are shunted to the side of the canvas. A glaring light overhead contributes to the impression of the artist as all-powerful inquisitor.

His female subjects in particular seemed not just nude but obtrusively naked. Mr. Freud pushed this effect so far, Mr. Russell once noted “that we sometimes wonder if we have any right to be there.” By contrast, his horses and dogs, like his whippets Pluto and Eli, were evoked with tender solicitude.

“I’ve got a strong autobiographical bias,” he told Mr. Feaver, the British critic. “My work is entirely about myself and my surroundings.”

On rare occasions Mr. Freud took on something akin to official portraits. He painted the collector Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, fully clothed, in “Man in a Chair” (1985). His stern 2001 portrait of Queen Elizabeth, showing the royal head topped by the Diamond Diadem, divided the critics and public.

Some critics hailed the picture as bold, uncompromising and truthful. Arthur Morrison, the arts editor of The Times of London, wrote, “The chin has what can only be described as a six-o’clock shadow, and the neck would not disgrace a rugby prop forward.” The newspaper’s royal photographer said Mr. Freud should be thrown into the Tower of London.

These were deviations. Much more in the Freud vein was his portrait of a man sprawled on a couch holding a dormant rat (“Naked Man With Rat,” 1977-78). The animal’s tail, draped across the model’s left thigh, nearly makes contact with his genitals, producing an ineffably creepy effect.

Mr. Freud remained deeply unfashionable in the United States for many decades, but in 1987 the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington exhibited his work in a show that no New York museum would take on. This was a watershed event. Mr. Hughes proclaimed him “the greatest living realist painter,” and a Freud cult soon developed. In 1993 the Metropolitan Museum of Art organized a retrospective of his work.

“It is an attempt at a record,” Mr. Freud said, describing his work on the occasion of his retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in 1974. “ I work from the people that interest me and that I care about, in rooms that I live in and know.”

"Lucian Freud paints new muse - artist one third of his age"

Lucian Freud has a new muse – an artist who is less than a third his age.

by

Stephen Adams

March 31st, 2009

The Telegraph

The British painter, 86, whose former subjects include Jerry Hall, Kate Moss and benefits supervisor Sue Tilley, is close to finishing a nude of 25-year-old Perienne Christian.

The slim brunette is herself a painter, who studied at Bath Spa College of Arts and then The Prince's Drawing School in London.

She was introduced to Freud in January last year by her tutor Catherine Goodman, after he said he was looking for a model.

She said: "My tutor thought that I might fit the bill."

Soon afterwards Christian met him for breakfast and later that day his assistant informed her Freud wanted her to start.

She said she had been modelling for him up to three times a week for up to five hours a time.

"It has taught me about dedication," she said. "It is very inspiring to be around somebody who is such a brilliant painter and is so dedicated to his craft."

But Christian, who has a boyfriend, stressed that their relationship was purely professional.

Freud's latest work is bound to fetch millions.

Last May his painting of plump Jobcentre worker Sue Tilley naked on a sofa, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, sold at Christie's in New York for $33.6m (£17.2m at the time). That broke the world record for a painting by a living artist.

Christian has painted a rival self-portrait that appears on her own website, although it would probably sell for considerably less than his version.

She currently has an exhibition at the RK Burt Gallery near Tate Modern in Southwark with works priced up to a more modest £1,000.

Lucian Freud [Wikipedia]

WebMuseum: Freud, Lucian

Perienne Christian