Corita Kent. La révolution Joyeuse @ Collège des Bernardins, Paris

Corita Kent. La révolution Joyeuse

Collège des Bernardins, Paris

5 octobre - 21 décembre 2024

CORITA KENT

"stop the bombing," 1967,

serigraph, 18 x 23 inches © 2024,

Corita Art Center, corita.org

CORITA KENT

"passion for the possible," 1969,

serigraph, 23 x 12 inches © 2024,

Corita Art Center, corita.org

CORITA KENT

We Can Create Life Without War Billboard, c. 1984.

Image courtesy of the Corita Art Center,

Los Angeles, corita.org

Le Collège des Bernardins présente "Corita Kent. La révolution joyeuse", première exposition en France dédiée à l'artiste américaine CORITA KENT (1918-1986) connue sous le nom de Sister Mary Corita. Son œuvre est à l'image de son parcours atypique : à la fois audacieuse, militante et pédagogue. À travers le regard de Corita Kent, c’est une époque à redécouvrir, celle des États-Unis des années 1950 à 1980. Sont également exposées les reproductions d'une vingtaine d'oeuvres et d'une trentaine de photographies.

Corita Kent fait le choix de la technique de la sérigraphie, qu’elle contribue à faire reconnaître comme un médium artistique à part entière. Ainsi, ses créations transmettent au plus grand nombre ses messages d'amour et de foi. Ses sérigraphies, audacieuses et colorées, combinent des images tirées de la publicité et de journaux avec des textes allant de versets bibliques à des slogans, des paroles de chansons et de la littérature. Dans le contexte des années 1960 et 1970, l’émancipation de la jeunesse, l’affirmation des mouvements féministes, l’émergence des courants de la contre-culture artistique américaine, la profusion des codes de la société de consommation sont pour Corita Kent des sources d’inspiration. Au cours des années 60, son travail se teinte d'un engagement plus politique, incitant les spectateurs à réfléchir à la pauvreté, au racisme, à la guerre et aux injustices sociales.

Cette exposition revient sur son parcours personnel, ses engagements et le nouveau langage graphique que l’artiste a lancé. "Corita Kent. La révolution joyeuse" revient aussi sur les "Mary's Day", journée de Marie de l'Immaculate Heart College, l'école dont Corita Kent a dirigé le département artistique. Sa vision extraordinaire et ses compétences artistiques en tant qu'enseignante ont contribué à transformer le petit campus en un haut lieu dynamique de l'innovation artistique et en un modèle singulier d'engagement communautaire et social.

Irregular Bulletin, une publication du département d’Art de l’Immaculate Heart College est présentée à cette exposition. De 1956 à 1963, Sister Madeleine Mary, le mentor de Corita Kent, édite le magazine, Irregular Bulletin, qui rompt avec les règles des magazines traditionnels. Corita Kent est responsable d'une grande partie de la documentation photographique des éditions ultérieures et est considérée comme la « photographe officielle ». L’édition présentée dans l’exposition est la plus complète à être publiée : elle compile les années 1959, 1960 et 1961, et compte plus de 400 pages. Ce numéro est unique car il donne un aperçu du voyage de Sister Madeleine Mary et Sister Mary Corita en Europe, commencé à New York. De novembre 1959 à janvier 1960, elles voyagent dans de nombreuses villes de France, d'Italie, de Grèce, de Turquie, d'Égypte et d'Espagne, prennent plus de 8 000 photographies et achètent des centaines de livres, d'objets d'art et d'artefacts, qui ont tous été envoyés au département d'art du collège et ont été ajoutés à la célèbre collection d'art populaire.

Footnotes and Headlines : A Play-Pray Book, premier livre d’écrits de Corita Kent, datant de 1967, préfacé par le p. Daniel Berrigan, est consultable sur un écran digital, dans cette exposition. Ce livre innovant combine des conceptions graphiques percutantes de Corita Kent avec des messages poignants et souvent politiquement “chargés”. En inversant délibérément la hiérarchie des titres et des notes de bas de page dans son titre, Corita Kent propose aux lecteurs de les considérer sur le même plan, soulignant l'importance d'une lecture lente et attentive. Corita Kent ne réinvente pas seulement la forme du livre mais crée aussi une nouvelle forme de prière. L’environnement proche et quotidien, les mots, les phrases, les notes de bas de pages, les titres, les publicités, devient un laboratoire joyeux et une source d’inspiration spirituelle : « Jouer, c’est prier, et prier, c’est jouer ».

C'est grâce à la collaboration avec le Corita Art Center, une trentaine d’œuvres originales de ses productions sérigraphiques seront exposées. Cette technique, érigée en médium artistique, lui permet en effet une reproduction en masse de ses visuels et de ses messages de paix. La sélection de photographies, diffusée grâce à des visionneuses de diapositives, dans le respect des consignes laissées par Corita Kent, sont prises principalement par Corita entre 1955 et 1968. Ces photographies rares donnent un aperçu de sa vie et de sa pratique artistique alors qu'elle était professeur et directrice du département d'art du Collège du Cœur Immaculé, et documentent l'histoire peu connue de la communauté d'étudiants, d'enseignants et de l'Ordre du Cœur Immaculé de Marie qui ont appris et enseigné dans ce collège autrefois renommé.

Lieu de dialogue avec les courants intellectuels et artistiques de la société et de son époque, le Collège des Bernardins accueille l’exposition de cette femme ancrée dans la société américaine et dans l’Église de la seconde moitié du XXème siècle. Comme les moines cisterciens du XIIIème siècle venus s’installer au Collège des Bernardins pour être au milieu du monde et de ses questionnements, Corita Kent a embrassé son époque, qu’elle aborde avec l’espérance chrétienne et joyeuse.

Le partenariat avec l’École des Arts Décoratifs de Paris témoigne de la place accordée aux dimensions graphiques de son oeuvre et à la dimension pédagogique de son enseignement. Dans le cadre d’un projet pédagogique, un workshop a été organisé à l'École des Arts Décoratifs du 23 au 27 septembre 2024, pour des élèves de 3ème année Design Textile et Matière et 4ème année Design Graphique. Ce partenariat avec le Collège des Bernardins permet à des étudiants de conceptualiser, proposer et réaliser sept bannières, en sérigraphie textile, (format de 70 x 140 cm), présentées dans cette exposition.

Exposition sur une proposition de Nicolas de Palmaert.

Commissariat de l’exposition : Clara Murawiec et Juliette Oudot, designers graphiques, diplômées de l'Ecole des Arts Décoratifs

Autres expositions consacrées à Corita Kent sur Wanafoto (Textes en anglais) :

Corita Kent: heroes and sheroes, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York (2021)

Corita Kent___Joyful Revolutionary, TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol, Innsbruck (2020)

Corita Kent: Works from the 1960s, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York (2019)

Corita Kent and the Language of Pop, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge (2015)

Power Up: Sister Corita and Donald Moffett, Interlocking, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, (2000)

Collège des Bernardins

20 rue de Poissy, 75005 Paris

www.collegedesbernardins.fr

Tacita Dean - Print Projects @ SMK, Copenhagen - National Gallery of Denmark

Tacita Dean - Print Projects

National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen

17 January - 18 May 2014

The life and death of a budgerigar. A Communist palace on the brink of being torn down. And the brown hessian-clad walls in the rooms housing Joseph Beuys’ installation in Darmstadt prior to their controversial renovation. “I am trying to trap something before it goes,” says the internationally acclaimed British artist Tacita Dean. Now, the Royal Collection of Graphic Art at Statens Museum for Kunst launches a new exhibition series by showing, for the first time ever, a full presentation of Tacita Dean’s graphic oeuvre.

Apart from the basic facts of time and place, Tacita Dean (b. 1965) actually has very little in common with the generation of Young British Artists with which she is often associated. Whereas artists such as Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst took the international art scene and media by storm in the 1990s, evincing no small flair for the sensational, Tacita Dean has quietly worked to the beat of her own drum, evincing a very different and far more subtle approach to art. And even though she has continuously explored new territories in her art, her works are always characterised by a strong sense of cohesion; a testament to an artist who found, right from the outset and with no hesitation, a mode of expression and subject matter that continues to engage and challenge.

Graphic art

Tacita Dean is first and foremost associated with her extensive production of 16mm films. Concurrently with her film work she has worked with a wide range of media, and in photogravure she found the potential for creating the same sense of depth that infuses the images of film. She realised and developed this potential in co-operation with the Danish specialist printer Niels Borch Jensen, who has handled her print work ever since they created her very first prints together. The exhibition in the Royal Collection of Graphic Art is the first ever to focus exclusively on Tacita Dean’s graphic art. Featuring more than 90 works, it shows the majority of her entire graphic oeuvre from 2001 to the present day.

Disappearing stories

The tactile, veiled qualities of photogravure are a particular favourite of Tacita Dean’s as she explores a recurring motif in her art: the relationship between memory and time, fiction and reality, unfolding her theme in a serial manner in storyboards that are almost filmic. Some of the motifs featured in the photogravures are still images from her films, while others come from old postcards, advertisements, and amateur photographs found in flea markets. Tacita Dean uses these images to construct narratives about major and minor historical or present-day events and actions. All of these more or less concrete stories are carried by the same ceaseless fascination with things that have disappeared or are about to disappear. In terms of narrative technique Tacita Dean takes an oblique approach. The narrative is almost never allowed to form a coherent story in the classical sense. The images are torn out of the grasp of narrative, transforming the absence of content into a strong visual presence.

CV – Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean has lived and worked in Berlin since 2000. She has studied art at e.g. Slade School of Fine Art in London and exhibited her work at numerous museums, including Tate Britain, London (2001), ARC Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris (2003), Schaulager, Basel (2006), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007), mumok: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Wien (2011), Tate Modern, London (2011), New Museum, New York (2012), and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013). She has also taken part in the Venice Biennial (2003 and 2005) and Documenta 13 (2012). She has received numerous awards, e.g. the Hugo Boss Award, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2006), and the Kurt Schwitters Award (2009). Throughout her career she has written about her art.

Accompanied by book

To coincide with the exhibition the SMK publishes the catalogue Tacita Dean – Print Projects. Article by Chief Curator Vibeke Vibolt Knudsen. Foreword by the former Director of the SMK Karsten Ohrt. 48 pages, lavishly illustrated. In Danish and English. ISBN: 978-87-92023-49-0

National Gallery of Denmark

Statens Museum for Kunst - SMK

Sølvgade 48-50, 1307 København

www.smk.dk

Paula Scher & Seymour Chwast, Graphic Designers at Philadelphia Museum of Art

Double Portrait:  Paula Scher and Seymour Chwast, Graphic Designers at Philadelphia Museum of Art
Curator: Kathryn Bloom Hiesinger
December 2, 2012 - April 14, 2013

Illustrator Seymour Chwast is graphic designer Paula Scher’s greatest influence, and also happens to be her husband. With a shared sensibility and approach to design, their work has transformed the fields in which they practice. Double Portrait:  Paula Scher and Seymour Chwast, Graphic Designers celebrates the achievements of this remarkably creative couple, whose illustrations and designs will be shown together for the first time. The exhibition in the Collab Gallery of the Museum’s Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building will include more than 300 images, selected and installed by Seymour Chwast (b.1931) and Paula Scher (b. 1948). On Saturday, December 1, they will be honored with the Design Excellence Award given by Collab, the group of design professionals and enthusiasts that supports the modern and contemporary design collection at the Museum.

“Thanks to the efforts and generosity of Collab, we are the only Museum in the country to regularly devote our galleries to exhibitions about contemporary designers,” notes Kathryn Bloom Hiesinger, Curator of European Decorative Arts after 1700. “It is an extraordinary opportunity to be able to view Scher and Chwast’s work, side by side, in a museum setting. Seen in concert, their iconic images, social commentary, and commercial relevance speak to graphic design’s ability to transcend the medium’s perceived boundaries.”

Both Seymour Chwast and Paula Scher understand graphics as expression, very often comic expression, and are drawn to eclectic influences and conceptual methods. Double Portrait explores the artists’ commonalities and differences in works ranging from record albums, books, magazine covers, and illustrations to posters, typefaces, trademarks, identities, and environmental graphics shown in videos and in the gallery.

The exhibition will demonstrate how Seymour Chwast’s vision was, and remains, deeply personal, inspired by sources as diverse as German Expressionist woodcuts, Victorian typography, children’s art, primitive art, folk art, and comic books. On view will be one of Seymour Chwast’s most iconic and still provocative works of the 1960s, his anti-war poster “End Bad Breath” (1968), designed in protest of the U.S. bombing of Hanoi. Both cartoon and illustration, the poster features Uncle Sam centered like the sun against a background of thick rays, his hugely open mouth filled with bombs and bombers.

End Bad Breath, 1967. SEYMOUR CHWAST, American, b. 1931. 

Poster, offset lithograph, 37 x 24 inches

In his poster “War is Good Business: Invest Your Son” (1967), Seymour Chwast used a collage style of Victorian wood-block typography, photography, and bright color to create a dense, visually busy surface that activates his ironic text message.

Paula Scher is best known for her innovative reimagining of typography as a communicative medium, her work divided largely between the fields of graphic identity and environmental graphics. Her identity program and posters for New York’s Public Theater (from 1994), will be featured in Double Portrait, including the graphic language designed for The Public Theater which reflects street typography with unconventional placements and uses of different sizes, weights, and styles of type.

Best of Jazz, 1979. PAULA SCHER, American, b. 1948. 

Offset lithograph, poster, 26 x 35 inches. For CBS Records

Paula Scher's poster for the theater’s production of “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk” (1995) sets the play’s title and theater logos around the silhouetted image of the tap artist in different visual rhythms which convey the sound of the performance. Paula Scher’s environmental graphics for the New Jersey Performing Arts Center’s Lucent Technologies Center for Arts Education (2001), utilizes super graphics to redraw the exterior of the sixty-year old school building in typography with painted words loudly announcing the school’s program as “Theater, Music, Dance.”

SEYMOUR CHWAST SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Seymour Chwast studied at New York’s Cooper Union and, after graduating, co-founded the Push Pin Studios in 1954 with classmates Milton Glaser and Edward Sorel.  Widely influential, Push Pin broadened the boundaries of modern design by reintroducing historic graphic styles and techniques, transforming them into a new, contemporary vocabulary. Throughout a varied career in promotion and publishing, Seymour Chwast’s designs have been used in advertising, animated films, and editorial, corporate, and environmental graphics for such clients as Mobil, Sony, Forbes, and Columbia Records, and his illustrations have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Time.

Seymour Chwast, Photograph by John Madera

Seymour Chwast has created more than 100 posters and has designed and illustrated more than 40 children’s books. His work has been the subject of Seymour Chwast: The Left Handed Designer (Abrams, 1985) and Seymour: The Obsessive Images of Seymour Chwast (Chronicle, 2009). Museums such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Library of Congress have collected his posters, and he has lectured and exhibited worldwide.

PAULA SCHER SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Paula Scher holds a BFA from the Tyler School of Art and a Doctor of Fine Arts Honoris Causa from the Corcoran College of Art and Design, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and Moore College of Art & Design. She began her professional career as an art director in the mid-1970s designing record covers for CBS and Atlantic Records, developing an eclectic approach to typography that became highly influential. In 1991, Scher became a partner in Pentagram, the distinguished international design consultancy. Scher has developed identity and branding systems, promotional materials, environmental graphics, packaging, and publication designs for a broad range of major corporate and institutional clients including, among others, the Museum of Modern Art, New York City Ballet, the Metropolitan Opera, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the New York Philharmonic, Bloomberg L.P., Citibank, Microsoft, Tiffany & Co. and the Sundance Film Festival as well as the Public Theater and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Paula Scher, Photograph by Branson Veal

Paula Scher has been the recipient of hundreds of industry honors and awards and served on numerous boards. Her work is represented in the permanent collections of museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. She has lectured and exhibited all over the world, and has taught for more than 20 years. She has authored numerous articles and is a frequent design contributor to The New York Times, GQ and other publications. In 2002, Princeton Architectural Press published her career monograph Make It Bigger as well as her map-based paintings, installations, drawings, and prints in Paula Scher: Maps, in 2011.

Both Paula Scher and Seymour Chwast have received the medal of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, their profession’s highest honor, Chwast in 1985, Scher in 2001. In 1983 and 1998, respectively, Chwast and Scher have been inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame.

Curator: Kathryn Bloom Hiesinger, Curator of European Decorative Arts after 1700

The Philadelphia Museum of Art

Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building, Collab Gallery

Museum's website: www.philamuseum.org

DESIGN EXCELLENCE AWARD

In conjunction with Double Portrait: Paula Scher and Seymour Chwast, Graphic Designers, Collab will present the 2012 Design Excellence Award to the artists on the evening of December 1, 2012. The Design Excellence Award honors a renowned designer or manufacturer who has enriched the world with his or her unique creative vision. The award ceremony will take place in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Van Pelt Auditorium and will include an illustrated lecture by the artists.

STUDENT DESIGN COMPETITION

2012 marks the 20th anniversary of Collab’s Student Design Competition, which challenges area college students studying architecture and industrial design to be inspired by themes closely associated with the annual Design Excellence Award winner and corresponding exhibition. The 2012 challenge associated with Double Portrait: Paula Scher and Seymour Chwast, Graphic Designers is entitled "Game On" and asks students to redesign and/or repackage an iconic game or create their own. The judges, prominent figures in the commercial and academic design world, will review the submissions and select the winners in a day-long review at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Monday, November 19, 2012. The top three winners receive monetary awards, and their work will be featured on the Museum website.

ArtRage Painting Software

With ArtRage you can do better images !

This one is just for fun.

I made it in 2 minutes for you with stencil tool :)

ArtRage is a computer painting package designed to provide a natural and easy to use environment for producing art on your computer. By providing realistic tools such as oil paints and pencils, and simulating the real world dynamics of those media, ArtRage allows any user to play around with paint without the expense and mess of its real world counterpart. By providing Tracing tools, ArtRage lets any level of user produce paintings based on photographs or other existing images. ArtRage 1 was released as a free product in 2004 and went on to win a number of online awards, followed by the first place in Microsoft’s ‘Does Your App Think In Ink’ contest for Tablet PC applications (2004). ArtRage 2 introduces a wide range of new features and technology improvements that allow everyone from amateur hobbyists to professional artists to get deeper in to the process of painting, without losing the ease of use, sense of realism, and friendly feel that made ArtRage 1 successful. ArtRage 2.5 introduced powerful new tools such as rulers and stencils which also work the same way as their real-world counterparts.

http://www.artrage.com/

Sketches Online Gallery Ed Velandria

A recent front page article in the Los Angeles Times entitled "Subway Sketchers Create an Online Community" featured NYC artist, Ed Velandria and documented his use of the paint and drawing software, ArtRage. In a graphic commentary on the intersection of technology and everyday life, Velandria uses the time he spends on his daily subway rides from Brooklyn to Manhattan to sketch portraits of other subway riders on his laptop computer with ArtRage and a digital drawing tablet. ArtRage, by Ambient Design, allows to paint and draw realistically. Users can use artistic tools such as oils, pencils, Crayons, airbrush, chalk and markers. There are also choices of canvas size, paper grains, stencils and layers. Velandria loves the simplicity of ArtRage and how it allows him to capture the essence of his subjects quickly. "My ultimate goal is to really capture the soul of a person." His subway sketching has caught the attention of other artists from around the world too. There is now an online community of "sketchers" that Velandria stays in touch with. He has about 500 subway sketches available online and his gallery has received more than 4,000 views.

The entire LA Times story can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/artrage. To see Ed Velandria's subway portrait gallery: http://tinyurl.com/5b9how. For more information about ArtRage: www.artrage.com/artrage.html.

Three Million ArtRage Downloads

In November 2007 the total number of downloads of ArtRage Starter Edition - Ambient Design’s free natural painting application - exceeded three million copies. Since its first release in February 2004 more than three million copies of the Starter Edition of ArtRage have been downloaded from Ambient Design’s website. ArtRage Starter Edition is now at version 2.5 and has had many updates and improvements since its first release. Schools, hobbyists and people who just like getting messy with paint have been downloading and using the Starter Edition of ArtRage. "It was just six months ago we passed the two million download milestone, and now we’re at three million downloads of ArtRage Starter Edition. It’s exhilarating to see the quality of artworks being produced. We’ve had great feedback from people who became disillusioned with the cost and hassle of using traditional art media but have started painting again in ArtRage." - Andy Bearsley, Technical Director of Ambient Design Ltd. ArtRage Starter Edition is a fully-featured natural painting application. It has tools which look and feel like their real-world counterpart. For example, the oil paints mix and smear like real oil paints on real canvas. They even leave bristle marks from the virtual brush in the paint strokes. It is easy to use for new users while having features and technology powerful enough for advanced users. New features in the 2.5 release include rulers, DPI support, more image import/export formats, and many other new features and enhancements. The Starter Edition of ArtRage is free to use with no time limits. It is also has *no* adware, spyware or other malware. It is available in English, French and German languages, for Windows and as a Universal Binary for MacOSX. Recently Ambient Design also released ArtRage 2.5 Plus Edition on CD for purchase. This is the perfect way for people to share the unique painting experience of ArtRage with friends as a gift this holiday season. ArtRage 2.5 Starter Edition can be downloaded from this web address:

http://www.artrage.com/artragedown.html

Saul Bass: The Hollywood Connection

 

Source: Skirball Cultural Center - Left: Saul Bass in his studio, circa 1974; courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. - Right: Saul Bass–designed poster for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo; © Paramount Pictures.

 

Saul Bass: The Hollywood Connection, an exhibition focusing on the graphic designer’s acclaimed work for the American film industry, was presented at the Skirball Cultural Center from January 4 through April 1, 2007. The exhibition included more than 20 movie posters and six soundtrack-album covers designed by Saul Bass for such films as Vertigo (1958), Anatomy of a Murder (1959), Exodus (1960) and In Harm’s Way (1965). It also featured, on continuous loop, a rare 22-minute montage —edited by Saul Bass and his wife, Elaine— of many of Bass’s motion-picture title sequences, from The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) to The Age of Innocence (1993). These are recognized as among the most innovative title sequences ever produced in Hollywood. Alternately screened with the montage were Why Man Creates (1968), the Oscar-winning short documentary Saul Bass produced and co-directed with Elaine Bass.

SAUL BASS (1920–1996) attended the Art Students League in Manhattan in his native New York. He then studied at Brooklyn College under the painter, designer and educator Gyorgy Kepes, a Hungarian émigré who had collaborated with Bauhaus artist and professor László Moholy-Nagy in 1930s Berlin. Gyorgy Kepes introduced his student to the Bauhaus movement and to Russian Constructivism, the styles of which influenced Saul Bass’s art.

Following his schooling, Saul Bass began working as a commercial artist in New York, but he felt constrained by the creative limitations of the city’s advertising agencies. Saul Bass moved to Los Angeles in 1946 and opened his own studio, Saul Bass & Associates, in 1952. During his distinguished career, Saul Bass became a graphic-design legend for conceiving the corporate identity packages of such companies as AT&T, Warner Communications and United Airlines. The logos he created for these business giants are considered among the most instantly recognized in 20th-century American popular culture.

Award-winning filmmaker Otto Preminger was the first to offer Saul Bass the opportunity to design a title sequence, for the film Carmen Jones (1954). Saul Bass approached the formerly unremarkable moments before the film began as an opportunity to set audience mood and enhance entertainment value, not just list credits. The following year, for the opening sequence to Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm, Saul Bass used an animated paper cut-out of a disjointed arm, which helped draw the audience into the film’s tale of drug addiction from the very first frames. On view will be the now-famous and often-imitated title sequence for The Man with the Golden Arm along with the poster and soundtrack-album cover, both of which repeated the disjointed-arm motif. Taken together, these works reveal the visual identity Saul Bass created for the film as a whole.

From this groundbreaking early work, Saul Bass would eventually work with illustrious filmmakers Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, John Frankenheimer, Billy Wilder and many more. These directors valued Saul Bass’s innovative use of animation, live action and dynamic typography. Saul Bass —who, beginning with Spartacus (1960), worked in collaboration with his wife, Elaine— created more than 50 title sequences and fully integrated advertising campaigns for such celebrated films as North by Northwest (1959) West Side Story (1961), Vertigo, Exodus and Grand Prix (1966). The title sequences for these films were featured in the exhibition’s montage. For Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Saul Bass not only contributed the title sequence but helped to storyboard the film. A reproduction of Bass’s storyboard for the film’s classic shower scene were also displayed in the exhibition.

After winning, in 1969, the Academy Award for Best Documentary, Short Subjects, for Why Man Creates, an animated film exploring the nature of creativity, Saul Bass took a nearly decade-long hiatus from film work and focused on his landmark graphic-design campaigns for companies worldwide.

The Basses returned to the movies in the 1980s, producing the title sequences, among many others, for Danny De Vitos’s War of the Roses (1989), Billy Crystal’s Mr. Saturday Night (1992) and Martin Scorcese’s GoodFellas (1990) and Cape Fear (1991). The montage in the exhibition includes these later works. In 1991 and 1993–1996, Saul Bass designed the official posters for the Academy Awards, all of which were displayed in the exhibition. Saul Bass had served as a member of the Academy’s Board of Governors for nine years.

Saul Bass: The Hollywood Connection was on view in the Skirball’s Ruby Gallery and Hurd Gallery. The exhibition was presented as part of the Skirball’s Our California series, exploring the changing cultural, social and civic forces that have shaped California.

Related film screenings: During the run of Saul Bass: The Hollywood Connection, the Skirball presented free Tuesday afternoon screenings of the following films for which Saul Bass created the title sequences and advertising campaigns: Psycho (January 9) Vertigo (January 23), Anatomy of a Murder (February 6) and Bonjour Tristesse (February 27). The Skirball also showing Phase IV, a rarely screened science-fiction film directed by Saul Bass (February 22).

 

The Exhibition was developed with the curatorial guidance of the FILM ARCHIVE OF THE ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS AND SCIENCES.

 

SAUL BASS: THE HOLLYWOOD CONNECTION
January 4–April 1, 2007

SKIRBALL CULTURAL CENTER
2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90049

Updated

Andy Warhol: Drawings 1942 - 1987 - Exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel

Andy Warhol: Drawings 1942 - 1987

Kunstmuseum Basel

May 5 - July 19, 1998

The traveling exhibition, which begins in Basel, is the first retrospective presentation of Andy Warhol's graphic works. The 230 drawings on display represent all periods of the creative activity of this popular and exacting artist. The early works from the 1950's made use of the possibilities of commercial design and, lacking any inner contradiction, raised them to "high art". The drawings executed between 1960 and 1963 are among the fundamental works of pop art, a period which the exhibition also documents with some of Warhol's paintings. A large area is devoted to the important late drawings produced between 1972 and 1987 and seldom revealed to the public.

Andy Warhol was one of the founders of American pop art and is the most single-minded of its representatives. He became famous for the silk screen prints which he had been creating since 1962. Warhol's art took up the advertising messages of the society of the mass media, the images of products in super markets, film stars, all of these recurring symbols and icons: works of an enormous inner energy which appear to passively propagate themselves. Although Warhol radically distanced himself from the "elite" culture of drawing, he was active throughout his life as an incredibly skilled and diligent draftsman. Because many of Warhol's drawings were not made for the purpose of being sold, thousands have appeared in his estate.

"Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art." This provocative statement is, in fact, least applicable to his drawings. But it formed the basis for Warhol's thoroughly American art - for the art of an American of European parents who had emigrated from present-day Slovakia. Warhol's father worked in Pittsburgh on construction sites and as a miner. His mother sold self-made paper flowers and the traditional hand-painted Easter eggs from her native country. When Warhol finally moved to New York in 1949, his mother immediately followed him. She actively participated in the work of her much-admired son and, as Warhol had entrusted her with everything which had to do with calligraphy including his signature, she "signed" his name on many of his works.

In 1972, the Karl August Burckhardt-Koechlin Fonds enabled the Kupferstichkabinett of the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel to acquire six outstanding Warhol drawings dating from 1962. The collection, which was later substantially enlarged, led to the contact with the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh where Warhol's estate is housed. Together with it, and in collaboration with the Andy Warhol Foundation of the Visual Arts in New York, it was possible to realize this retrospective exhibition of his drawings. Most of the works are on loan from the estate in the custody of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in New York. Other lenders have contributed works to strengthen specific accents. In Basel, additionally, some of Warhol's important paintings as well as selected serigraphs have been juxtaposed with the drawings.

The exhibition rooms of the Kunstmuseum Basel allow the visitor to become thoroughly acquainted with the three major phases of Warhol's drawings and paintings. Part 1 in the mezzanine displays the numerous charming and diversely-playful early works from the 1950's. An internal staircase leads to Part 2, four rooms on the first floor with the 1990-1963 drawings which were fundamental for pop art. A 1960 painting on loan from Pittsburgh, one of Warhol's earliest images of a soup can, supplements this group. The second and third parts of the exhibition are joined by a spacious hall displaying three large canvases from the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, executed between 1962 and 1967, and two paintings dating from 1980-1986. Warhol's late drawings, created between 1972 and the time of his death in 1987 and following an interruption devoted to film, are exhibited as Part 3 in seven rooms at the rear of the first floor. It includes examples of some of his silk screen prints for which his drawings provided the preliminary linear structure.

The catalogue of some 280 pages, with texts by Mark Francis and Dieter Koepplin, includes color or duotone reproductions of all 230 drawings. The volume measures 31 cm x 24 cm. A hardcover edition has been published by Shirmer/Mosel Verlag. An English edition will be published in 1999.

KUNSTMUSEUM BASEL

www.kunstmuseumbasel.ch