Zinaida Serebriakova, “Nude”. Oil on Canvas. 73 by 50 cm. At MacDougall’s Russian Auction, December 3, 2009. Est: £1,000,000-1,500,000.
via www.artdaily.org
Art Boobs
Art Boobs is about fine art that prominently features female breasts. It prefers the voluptuousness of the Venus of Willendorf
over the hardbodied Venus de Milo.
It celebrates the idea that throughout history societies have often tolerated artistic nudity more than actual nudity.
It could have been called Artits.
The author is male, Dutch and married to an artist.
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Nov 14
Nov 13
Nov 11
Ferenc Berko: Bombay, 1941
Vintage gelatin silver print, 11 7/8 x 9 13/16 inches
Ferenc Berkó (1916-2000) is part of long tradition of Hungarian émigré photographers, which includes Brassaï, Robert Capa, André Kertész, László Moholy-Nagy and Martin Munkásci. Influenced by some of the great Bauhaus teachers at a young age, Berko explored numerous genres and various styles. Within every period of his career, his work was concurrent with the artistic developments of the time. This is the first exhibition from Berko’s estate and is a partial survey of his black and white work from the 1930s through the early 1950s. Subsequent shows will highlight his innovations in color and his deep interest in nature.
Ferenc Berko was born to a Jewish family in Hungary in 1916. Following his mother’s death in 1921, Berko moved with his father and his sister to Dresden, Germany. At the age of twelve, with his father’s health deteriorating, Berko was adopted by a family in Berlin. His foster parents gave Berko his first camera and encouraged his creative pursuits. His foster mother, in particular, was a patron of the arts and many well respected modernist figures at the time, like Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and László Moholy-Nagy, would often visit their home. Berko was especially influenced by Moholy-Nagy, who became a friend and mentor.
In 1933, with the growth of anti-Semitism in Germany, Berko was sent to England to finish his studies in philosophy. While in London, he became active in the photography and film circles and met Emil Otto Hoppé, who became a mentor. Following school, Berko moved to Paris where he continued to collaborate with his wife Mirte on a series of nude photographs. In 1937 he made a trip back to Hungary and photographed Jews in Budapest. In 1938, with Nazi influence on the rise, Berko moved to India to become a filmmaker. Beyond learning cinematography, he experimented with the photographic process, creating photograms as well as prints with multiple negatives, while at the same time continuing his passion for investigating the world through an eye for beauty and form.
Moholy-Nagy invited Berko to teach photography and film at the New Bauhaus, the Institute of Design in Chicago. Unfortunately, Moholy-Nagy died just before Berko arrived in 1947. Berko’s work in Chicago focused on the abstraction of the urban landscape, continuing his interest in modernism, while developing work that had a direct dialogue with the current developments of Abstract Expressionism.
In 1948, the Berkos’ close friend in Chicago, Walter Paepcke, an industrialist and patron of the Institute of Design, invited them to visit Aspen in hopes they would make it home. Initially, the Berkos turned down the offer and returned to London in hopes of regaining their former life. Dismayed with post war London, Berko moved to Aspen in 1949 as the official photographer for the Goethe Bicentennial and then the Aspen Institute and Aspen Music Festival and School. In Aspen, Berko’s visual and intellectual palettes were nourished; he had finally found a place where he felt both respected and inspired.
Berko’s work has been collected by the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; International Center of Photography, New York; Musée d’Elysée, Lausanne; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Near the end of his life, “60 Years of Photography: The Discovering Eye” (Edition Stemmle, 1995) and “Berko: Photographs” (Graphis, 1999) were published.
Gitterman Gallery
170 East 75th Street 10021 New York, NY
Nov 10
In art we lust
Blake Gopnik (Washington Post Staff Writer):
After well over a century of prim coverups, literal and metaphorical, of the sexual content of the greatest nudes in art, experts have been waking up to the erotic, even pornographic, potential. “I think it’s essential that we understand them as objects in the context of men wanting to look at naked women,” says Amelia Jones, a pioneer of feminist art history who teaches at the University of Manchester in England. Over the past decade or two, most of her colleagues have abandoned the genteel distinction Sir Kenneth Clark insisted on, in a famous lecture series in Washington in 1953, between the chaste “nude,” cleansed by an artwork’s aesthetic and philosophical ambitions, and pictures of the pruriently “naked,” meant to get a rise out of viewers.
Nov 06
Nov 02
Oct 30
Helmut Newton, Sylvia in my Studio, Paris 1981 Unique Polaroid © Estate of Helmut Newton
Polaroid: Exp.09.10.09
Featuring: Nobuyoshi Araki | David Bailey | Peter Blake | Elliott Erwitt | Walker Evans | Ralph Gibson | Jim Goldberg | Philippe Halsman | Barbara Kasten | André Kertész | William Klein | Robert Mapplethorpe | Mary Ellen Mark | Helmut Newton | Marc Quinn | Rankin | Lucas Samaras | Andy Warhol
9 October - 28 November 2009
ATLAS Gallery 49 Dorset Street, London W1U 7NF +44 (0)20 722 441 92 www.atlasgallery.com Mon - Fri 10am - 6pm . Sat 11am - 5pm
Oct 28
MICKALENE THOMAS Why Can’t We Just Sit Down And Talk It Over screenprint in 32 colors, 2006
signed edition of 40
Sheet size: 19 1/2 x 30 inches
Oct 27
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley - Messalina returning from the bath
The publisher Leonard Smithers was a brilliant but shady character who operated on the fringes of the rare book trade, issuing small, clandestine editions of risqué books with the boast: ‘I will publish the things the others are afraid to touch’. Smithers encouraged Beardsley’s interest in French, Latin and Greek texts of this kind and commissioned drawings to illustrate Aristophanes’s famously bawdy satirical play Lysistrata and the Satires of the late Roman poet Juvenal. Beardsley made a number of drawings which illustrate Juvenal’s misogynistic Sixth Satire, ‘Against Woman’.
Juvenal cites the Empress Messalina as an exemplar of feminine lust and degeneracy, describing her nightly visits to the stews of ancient Rome where she posed as a prostitute in order to indulge her desires. In an earlier drawing of 1895 Beardsley had depicted her leaving the palace, disguised and attended only by a maid. In this second and more powerful treatment of the subject, he chose to illustrate the lines in which the poet describes Messalina returning to the palace, angry that her lusts remain unsatisfied.
