Well-known in her native Poland, Wisława Szymborska received international recognition when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. In awarding the prize, the Academy praised her “poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.”
Szymborska, a heavy smoker, died in her sleep of lung cancer Wednesday evening at her home in the southern city of Krakow, her personal secretary Michal Rusinek said.
The Museum of Contemp. Art Tokyo (MOT) shows his work in a separate room, a smart gesture. (Thanks to Mario A )
Buildings Poking Their Eyes Out
1997 2’ x 16’ x 5’
A: One Eye Out, B: Two Eyes Out, C: Four Eyes Out
Corrugated fiberglass, rolled galvanized metal, wax, fiberboard, pigments
Photo: Erma Estwick
Dennis Oppenheim (Previous post has many links to interviews, his bio etc)
His work is based on the ethics of the Other or, in Levinas’ terms, on “ethics as first philosophy”. For Levinas, the Other is not knowable and cannot be made into an object of the self, as is done by traditional metaphysics
Like Diane Arbus Helen Frankenthaler came from a wealthy family, unlike Arbus, Helen was at home in the 1% world enjoying access to influential people, to a life of comfort and, to laughter.
With Motherwell
(Motherwell upstairs and Helen below) As the Wifewell of Robert Motherwell, she enjoyed entertaining guests, threw a big party. They were the Olivier and Vivien of the art world, elegant, erudite (Motherwell was) and grand.
Helen and Motherwell divorced, Nancy Spero and Leon Golub they were not.. (an enduring activists/artists who painted violence.)
In 1953 Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland were both profoundly influenced by Helen Frankenthaler’s stain paintings they were brought to her studio in 1953 by critic Clement Greenberg her lover at the time, the artist was not there.
If Helen did not date Clement what would have happend to Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis?
In 1972, Ms. Frankenthaler made a less successful foray into sculpture, spending two weeks at Mr. Caro’s London studio. With no experience in the medium but aided by a skilled assistant, she welded together found steel parts in a way that evoked the work of David Smith.
Although she enjoyed the experience, she did not repeat it. Knoedler gave the work its first public showing in 2006.
“For a very long time I had a photo of one of her sculptures in my wall, a bronze, looking a bit like a blown up film canister, and no one recognized that it was her work. But when told, many would gasp and sat, now, I really like that, I didn’t know she did anything like that , so lovely, amazing, really. I like many of her paintings but, as with Twombly, I prefer the sculptures.”
“I think this is hers, but it’s not the piece I fell in love with.”
Over on Artnet, Charlie Finch declares that Ms. Frankenthaler “was another one of those painters who, like the recently deceased George Tooker, basically made one painting,” Mountains and Sea (1952)—which, he writes, “inspired so many lazy imitations in studios across the world, including that of Frankenthaler herself.”
Frankenthaler did take a highly public stance during the late 1980s “culture wars” that eventually led to deep budget cuts for the National Endowment for the Arts and a ban on grants to individual artists that still persists. At the time, she was a presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts, which advises the NEA’s chairman.
In a 1989 commentary for the New York Times, she wrote that, while “censorship and government interference in the directions and standards of art are dangerous and not part of the democratic process,” controversial grants to Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe and others reflected a trend in which the NEA was supporting work “of increasingly dubious quality. Is the council, once a helping hand, now beginning to spawn an art monster? Do we lose art … in the guise of endorsing experimentation?”
John Chamberlain, a multi-tasking artist who made sculptures out of crushed, often vibrantly painted automobile parts that came to define his career while flouting connections to any single movement or trend, has died. He was 84.
Mr. Chamberlain had been ill for a number of years. Critic Charlie Finch first reported the news on Artnet. An immediate cause of death was not available.
Before DIA-Beacon opened,and the large collection of Chamberlain was being installed, working there…remember driving around in a sissor lift at dusk, seeing the sun set across the Hudson, through the beautiful window designed by Robert Irwin & streaming through the huge Privit centered in the Chamberlain gallery..crazy light in all that cust and twisted Detroit..His work grew on me…took quite a while..
Privit at DIA Beacon
Dooms Day Flotilla
The interview is great…never seen it..such a regular guy..and the list of names…so funny…I wish we could have brought him into talk with all the construction crews…they would have liked him and then got it…in general they did not understand why we were building this incredible space for a bunch of wrecked metal…Listening to him I think he would have got their attention.
Here are some photos of eleven good men whose lives were cut short with Aids. R.I.P
Klaus Nomi Derek Jarman and Tony Perkins in the middle.
Klaus Nomi died on August 6, 1983 – he was 39.
Perkins died on September 12, 1992.. Berry Berenson (Perkins’ wife), was killed on American Airlines Flight 11 during the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.
Derek Jarman died In 1994 London, aged 52.
Arthur Russell died on April 4, 1992, at the age of 40
Foucault died in Paris on 25 June 1984, he was 58.
Tseng Kwo-Chiand Herman Costa having a blast at photobooth (Thanks Herman for this photo). Martin Wong with lunchboxes
Tseng and Martin – pride of Chinese Americans!
In 1990, TSENG died at age 39 in NY.
Martin Wong died on 12 August 1999 in San Francisco.. He was 53.
“All these years, I’ve felt Manhattan was just another island-jail. A bigger jail with more distractions but a jail nonetheless. It just goes to show that there are more than two hells. I left one kind of hell behind and fell into another kind. I never thought I would live to see us plunge again into the dark ages. This plague — AIDS — is but a symptom of the sickness of our age.” Reinaldo Arenas
See photos and paintings of Foujita here. (Courtesy of Mario A who has a great Foujita album on FB ).
Taking a studio in Montparnasse, he met artists such as Modigliani and is said to have studied dance with Isadora Duncan. His paintings, which initially sold well, drew comment for the milk white color of the skin of the women he portrayed.
After a stint working and traveling in South America, Foujita returned to Japan in the 1930s, where he produced propaganda art for the military. He eventually returned to France, where he converted to Catholicism and died in 1968. (via)
Guen I.
Guen (this is how he signed his art) came to live in Honolulu in the mid 70′s after he suffered a stroke in NYC. He lived in Japan in the Summer and the Winter in Honolulu. Guen became a mentor to my sister Fung-Ching Kelling during his stays in Honolulu.
.. Inokuma and Foujita shared a house when they escaped wartime Paris. He talked about how Foujita bought the train tickets at the train station (today Musee d`Orsay) and that he only took a Matisse painting and left everything else in Paris. They stayed in the countryside more than month living in the same house.
He showed us a special spot that Isamu Noguchi loved on the island of Oahu and showed us the beauty of natural rocks.
In NY Guen Inokuma (sensei) and his wife Fumiko took my sister and I to Mark Rothko’s apartment and told us what he knew of Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Yoko Ono and Isamu Noguchi were his good friends.
Painting (via artnet)
Title : City Composition (3)
Medium : Oil on Canvas
Size : 30 x 40 in. / 76.2 x 101.6 cm.
Year : 1966 -
Contemporary Japanese Art from the Collection of B.H. Rockefeller
The museum catalog listed a painting called “Wall Street” by Genichiro Inokuma exhibited at San Francisco Museum of Art.
Passlof studied with de Kooning at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and later moved to New York in the 1940s to continue individual instruction with him. Her work is included in collections like that the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, and she was a faculty member of the College of Staten Island. (via artforum)
Hawthorne
Thoreau
An obit from Jeffery Collins (see a video of Milton Resnick and Pat)
and Max Ernst
or or Mrs William James
– 
Derek
with lunchboxes
