Category: ART

His birthday was two days ago. (January 23, 1922 – August 8, 2004) )

Remembering Leo (Brooklyn Rail)

Donald Kuspit was right to call Golub an existential/activist painter. Golub’s work enacts a real challenge to painting itself. He threw down the gauntlet right at the beginning, and waged a furious, muscular struggle with it the rest of his life. His art is agnostic and agonistic. It exists in the heat of battle, where everything is at risk. This lead, paradoxically, to constant renewal, so that Golub’s work was never done. And this is why, though he lived a long and productive life, to all of us who knew him, he died, Goddamnit, too soon. (David Levi-Strauss)

Leon and Nancy Spero, were a great art/activist duo. (Previous post)

Christian Boltanski: It’s a jumble out there
Christian Boltanski has filled Paris’s Grand Palais with a 50-tonne mountain of clothes, and the sound of 15,000 heartbeats. Adrian Searle is mesmerised

Boltanski, one of France’s leading artists, is compiling an ­archive of heartbeats that he intends to be housed, eventually, on a remote and inaccessible Japanese island. He has ­already collected over 15,000 ­individual recordings. One day, these beating hearts will all belong to the dead. If Boltanski’s art endures, one might also imagine that the visitors who make it to the island in the future have yet to be born.

More images here.

Christian Boltanski and Max Jacob: Deeply thought and felt. (Previous post)

Gymnasium Chases (Crown Point Press) a portfolio of photogravures by French artist Christian Boltanski, is based on a photograph of the 1931 graduating class of the Gymnasium Chases, a Jewish High School in Vienna. Although Boltanski has employed many of these portraits in altar-like installations, this is the first time the class is presented in its entirety.

Kenneth Noland color field artist is dead at 85 – Roberta Smith (Nytimes)

who painted some of the great emblems of the postwar American abstract style called Color Field painting, died Tuesday at his home in Port Clyde, Me. The cause was cancer, said his wife, Paige Rense, editor in chief of Architectural Digest. He was 85.
Born in Asheville, N.C., in 1924, he studied art at the adventurous, short-lived Black Mountain College (conveniently located just outside his hometown) from 1946 to 1948

Slide show :portrait of Kenneth Noland with his paintings.

Kenneth Noland from Anaba.

Shaped paintings by Paul Theroux

These “shaped paintings’? – Ken Noland’s characteristically unpompous description – are sculptural pieces, which also occupy our space. This is another way of saying that, gazing at them, we are also moving around them, reacting to them, and perhaps reminding ourselves that we are not alone.

Kenneth Noland and Diane Waldman 1977 interview 28 min.

Kenneth Noland (wikipedia)

Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis were fellow explores of colors and field. Kenneth influenced Ann Truit.