Vitro Nasu

A Conversation With Sophie Fiennes (OVER YOUR CITIES GRASS WILL GROW)

The film came about because I had met him on a few occasions through shows; his gallery knew that I liked his work. The gallery and he called me, somewhat spontaneously, saying “Come down to Barjac.” The gallery then called me back and said “He’s leaving Barjac… it’s an amazing moment and it is an extraordinary place. Why don’t you just come and see it?” So, it was a very loose invitation and when I got there I saw this extraordinary place. The filmmaker in me was completely challenged and there were so many possibilities somehow. I had to make a film there.

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Anselm Kiefer and Sophie Fiennes

Her mother’s death galvanised Sophie Fiennes, and now she has produced a brilliant documentary about the artist Anselm Kiefer .. (Times on Line UK)
Sophie is the sister of the movie star Ralph Fiennes.

Lucian Freud and two childrean
Lucian Freud dies at 88

For an artist who has in recent years been selling for $30m for his best portraits, it’s easy to forget how far he fell out of fashion in the 60s and 70s. His highly skilled, original, instantly recognisable, figurative work was eclipsed by the ephemeral stardust of abstract, often unskilled artists…

A Freud was always distinctively a Freud, with idiosyncratic features. For all my admiration for his work, his noses, for example, tended towards the over-droopy, I would say.
His work changed, too, over his very long career – a sign of an original, curious artistic mind. (Harry Mount)

BBC obit (image + a video clip)

Painter’s room

Esther Freud
and her sisiter.. (see two clips of Hiideous Kinky starring Kate Winslet)

See more photos and paintings here, great collection

See Caroline (his second wife) and other images

(Art/Graphics on youtube are by Serge Kantorowicz)

Max Jacob by Modigiliani

Max Jacob July 12 1876
Amedeo Modigliani July 12 1884
Max was 8 years older than Modi, they were both born on July 12.

Anna Akhmatova as an acrobat by Modi

Modi, Jeanne and Anna Akhmatova (previous post – read about Anna Akhmatova’s crucial role in Modigliani’s art)

(via)
Painting by Max Jacob, “Orpheus Attacked by the Brigands,” 1928, Philadelphia Museum of Art
For Jacob, an openly gay apostate Jew, the myth also carried personal significance. When Orpheus loses his wife Eurydice in the Underworld, he renounces women for the love of men, thus providing Jacob with an affirming image of homosexuality from classical antiquity.

Max called Modigliani Dedo..

Picasso said: ‘There’s only one man in Paris who knows how to dress and that is Modigliani.’ He didn’t say that as a joke. Modigliani, poor as he was, even to the extent of having to borrow three sous for the underground to go to the literary evenings at the Closerie des Lilas, was not only refined, but had an eclectic elegance. He was the first man in Paris to wear a shirt made of cretonne.

Max Jacob by Picasso (Via )

1876-1944. Met Picasso in 1901 and for some time shared a studio with him. Afterward, and for many years to follow, he lived three doors away from the artist on the Rue Ravignan. One of the key members of the group that formed around Apollinaire. A painter as well as poet, Jacob lived in extreme poverty, working at all manner of jobs throughout his life. Although born a Jew, he converted to Catholicism in 1915, six years after having a vision of Christ. In 1921 he moved from Paris to the small village of Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire, close to a Benedictine church, where he remained until his arrest by the Nazis in February 1944. He died the following month in the concentration camp at Drancy. (via)

Update: Max and Picasso were both so poor they shared the same overcoat, hat and gloves in winter. There was one bed. One went out and used the coat, the other stayed in and used the bed. What resolve! (via email thanks to Janet Paparelli.)

Cy Twombly dies in Rome

The artist, who was living in Italy and had suffered with cancer for several years, was hospitalised a few days ago, according to Eric Mezil.

Cy Twombly Gallery in Houston in front of the gallery’s largest painting, “Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor.”

Cy Twombly – April 25, 1928 – July 5, 2011

Guardian obit

Edwin Parker “Cy” Twombly Jr was born in Lexington, Virginia. Both his parents came from Maine. His father was a sports instructor and former baseball player whom Twombly admiringly described as still doing back flips at the age of 40: he was known as “Cy” after the legendary pitcher “Cyclone” Young. Twombly inherited his father’s nickname but not his athleticism.

Obit from Artsbeat NYtimes

Each line he made, he said, was “the actual experience” of making the line, adding: “It does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization.” Years later he described this more plainly. “It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture.”

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Q & A Cy Twombly with David Sylvester Art In America

Thicket

Wilder Shores of Love (see his sculptures)

His photographs also here

See paintings here (Guggenheim 2008)

Obit by Evan Garza (Huffpo with a nice slideshow)

It has been a hard days night – Peter Sellers as Laurence Olivier playing Richard III (The Beatles introduced Peter Sellers)

Richard III at Old Vic – see a slideshow from Laurence Olivier to Kevin Spacey, take a look at an embarrassment of Richards, past and present

Now is the winter of discontent on youtube – Laurence Olivier <> <> <> Ian McKellen

Looking for Richard (Al Pacino and Kevin Spacey who was brilliant)

Guarding the King

Brick Dude & rival .

Umbrellas of Chez Bricks here

Nov 2008 by Dotdude
See Spike and Daisy from Jtwine’s blog.

Ursonate – female voice <> <> Ursonate 2

Ursonate Kurt Schwitters gif and text

Ursonate Steven Schick and and Shahrokh Yadegari

Merzbau via

Kurt Schwitters (20 June 1887 – 8 January 1948)

In 1918, his art was to change dramatically as a direct consequence of Germany’s economic, political and military collapse at the end of the First World War.
“In the war, things were in terrible turmoil. What I had learned at the academy was of no use to me and the useful new ideas were still unready…. Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments; and this is Merz. It was like a revolution within me, not as it was, but as it should have been.

Review of Nowhere boy
Artist Sam Taylor-Wood surprises us with an old-fashioned, affecting film exploring John Lennon’s early years, writes Philip French

Sam Taylor Wood follows the examples of artists Julian Schnabel and Stev McQueen of crossing over to make mainstream films.

Nowhere Boy was dedicated to late Anthony Minghella.

Sam Taylor Wood

Some links to her art
Men Crying – 2004 – see Daniel Craig, Benecio Del Toro, Dobert Downey Jr + more)

Ghosts X

In Pictures - Guardian gallery

Wrecked

OBE honor <> and here
The 44-year-old Turner prize nominee has now been made an OBE and says it is an “incredible honour”.

Sam Taylor Wood is twice a cancer survivor and is currently living and raising a child with Aaron Johnson who played John Lennon in the biopic.

Happy birthday Michael Cacoyannis.. found this film, Women in Black, I have not seen.
Life is Trouble, Death is Not from Zorba the Greek (this many of us have seen).

Previous post (Michael Cacoyannis with Jacques Cousteau)

Richard Strauss birthday too. (June 11) – ( A Space Odyssey 2001)

Burleske is not a Burka.

THE WOMAN WHO LIVED . – AND DIED – BY THE GUN.

Malalai is one of the only police women in Kandahar. Unlike other women in the region, Malalai works alongside men, apprehending criminals and restoring justice in one of the most dangerous cities in the nation. When working outside her home and office she is always armed beneath her burka.

Jurgen Trautwein Trashmyart

Leonora with Max Ernst and Paul Eluard Photo by Lee Miller

Leonora Carrington was 94 years old

Leonora Carrington, a British-born Surrealist and onetime romantic partner of Max Ernst whose paintings depicted women and half-human beasts floating in a dreamscape of images drawn from myth, folklore, religious ritual and the occult, died on Wednesday in Mexico City, where she lived. She was 94.

See Green Tea, or La Dame Ovale, a 1942 painting by Carrington from
Guardian Obit

English surrealist painter and sculptor regarded as a national treasure in Mexico

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Leonora Carrington and The Debutante (Youtube) – Excerpt from Documentary,”The Flowering of the Crone: Leonora Carrington

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Gary Hines

Jessica Hines homepage

Through the remembrances of his wartime friends and through my own journeys to Vietnam in 2007 and 2008, I retraced Gary’s “footsteps” using his letters and photographs as guides. I continue to make discoveries about wartime in Vietnam as experienced by its veterans. The visual record of those experiences continues to unfold.”

NewYorker (with slideshow)

Lens Culture

Female Drug Addiction in Afganistan
Raphaela Persson

Boxing Girls in Kabul
Raphaela Persson

Allora Calzadilla (NYtimes)

The Caribbean-based artist collaborative Allora and Calzadilla will represent USA at this year’s Venice Biennale. For the American Pavilion they are preparing a an exhibition consisting of 6 new projects, titled “Gloria”, which will involve performances by professional gymnasts, custom-made pipe organ with a fully functioning A.T.M. and a 52-ton military tank turned upside down and topped with a treadmill and an Olympic runner (via Happyfamousartists)

Previous post Allora and Calzadilla

The Last Movie Part I (see the film)

The Last Movie the film that buried a visionary…

The movie won the Critics Prize at the Venice Film Festival; despite this, it failed financially and critically after a two-week run at New York City’s Cinema (wiki the Last Movie)

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BBC Dennis Hopper Documentary

Jean Tinguely

Rauchenberg

Then I had Easy Rider, and I couldn’t get another movie, so I lived in Mexico City for a couple of years. I lived in Paris for a couple of years. I didn’t take any photographs, and then I went to Japan and saw a Nikon used. I bought it, and I just started, like an alcoholic. I shot 300 rolls of film. That was the beginning of me starting again, and then I went digital

See more photos starting with the photo of Paul Newman by Dennis Hopper here. (Chasing Light)

Ed Ruscha 1964 Photographd by Dennis Hopper

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The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.

Willem de Kooning April 24, 1904

Well, I have my beautiful de Kooning
to aspire to. I think it has an orange
bed in it, more than the ear can hold

Frank O’Hara
(See Summer Couch from – In Memory of My Feelings)