Month: February 2015

Macbeth

Artist Unknown, “Macbeth, Banquo, and the Three Witches”, 1803, Published by John and Josiah Boydell, London

In 1789, the publisher John Boydell opened the Shakespeare Gallery, an exhibition space in London’s Pall Mall showcasing paintings that exclusively represented scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. The Gallery was a bid to revive historical painting in contemporary British art, a genre thought to be of great public benefit because of its morally instructive messages. The works of Shakespeare had become very popular and integral to British identity by the middle of the eighteenth century.

The Gallery opened in May 1789 with an exhibition of thirty-four canvases by eighteen British artists. By 1796 there were eighty-four canvases exhibited, along with dozens of smaller paintings. Once the exhibition was mounted, reproductive engravings of the paintings produced by an in-house team of forty-six printmakers were available to purchase, either as a large portfolio of ninety prints or as a luxurious illustrated edition of the plays.

The above “Macbeth, Banquo, and the Three Witches” was an illustration from a bound 1803 portfolio by Boydell Publishers entitled “A Collection of Prints, from Pictures Painted for the Purpose of Illustrating the Dramatic Works of Shakespeare, by the Artists of Great Britain”.

Alexandre Dumas: “. . Time Has No More Measure, Space Has No More Distance”

 

Photographer Unknown, (Open Shutters)

“Nothing makes time pass or shortens the way like a thought that absorbs in itself all the faculties of the one who is thinking. External existence is then like a sleep of which this thought is the dream. Under its influence, time has no more measure, space has no more distance.”

― Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers

William Shakespeare: “How Infinite in Faculty!”

Photographer Unknown, (Reflection of a Man)

‘What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!”

-William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Act Twp, Scene Two

John Latham

John Latham: Conceptual Art, Books and Glass

Born in February of 1921, John Latham was a Zambia-born British conceptual artist, educated at Winchester College. After the Second World War, he studied art, first at the Regent Street Polytechnic and then at the Chelsea College of Art and Design. Latham married fellow artist and collaborator Barbara Steveni in Westminster in 1951.

The spray can became Latham’s primary medium for his work. In addition to spray paint, Latham tore, sawed, chewed and burnt books to create collage material for his work, such as the 1960 “Film Star” series. In 1966, he took part in the Destruction in Art Symposium in London led by artist and political activist Gustav Metzger along with Fluxus artists such as Yoko Ono, Wolf Vostell and Al Hansen.

Latham’s “skoob” (books written backwards) works, using books or materials derived from them, had the power to shock. He moved from collages to towers of books which he then burnt, awakening uncomfortable echoes of the Nazi regime’s public burning of banned books.

From 1983 Latham lived and worked at his house, Flat Time House in Peckham. In 1991 he produced “God is Great (no. 2)”, a conceptual artwork featuring copies of the Bible, Quran, and a volume of the Talmud, each cut in two and attached to a sheet of glass. In 2005 Tate Britain held an exhibition of Latham’s work.Latham died a year later at Kings College Hospital, Camberwell, on January 1st 2006.

Boris Artzybasheff

Boris Artzybasheff:   Illustrations from the “Machinalia” Series

Boris Artzybasheff was born in Kharkov, Ukraine in 1899 to the writer Mikhail Petrovich Artsybashev and Anna Vasilyevna Kobushko. In his early childhood, he left his homeland and traveled to America, arriving at Ellis Island, New York on June 17, 1919. In his early days in the United States, Artzybasheff worked as an illustrator and designed stage sets for Michel Fokine’s Russian Ballet and the Ziegfeld Theatre. Artzubasjeff was naturalized in 1925 as a United States citizen.

Artzybasheff continued working as an illustrator of books and advertisements in New York City. Fortune Magazine commissioned Artzybasheff to work on the cover of the April 1941 issue. This cover illustration propelled Artzybasheff’s career as a magazine illustrator. Throughout the rest of his career, he produced more than 200 covers for Time Magazine, as well as numerous maps and ads for magazines.

Artzybasheff’s illustrations range from portraits of prominent figures to anthropomorphisations of machinery. During his lifetime, Artzybasheff won the John Newberry Award for book illustrations and was a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Boris Artzybasheff passed away in July 1965 in Connecticut.

Ruth Wall

Ruth Wall, Untitled, Date Unknown, Collage on Paper, 14 x 13 Inches, Private Collection

Ruth Wall, an abstract expressionist painter and lithographer, was born in Wyoming in 1917. After moving to a homestead on an Indian reservation in Utah, Ruth quickly completed school by 16 and left home for California to start her university studies. After working with the Women’s Air Force, Wall enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts where she studied painting. She studied with other prominent Bay Area abstract expressionists such as David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Hassel Smith until her graduation in 1952. She continued her painting career until her passing in Paris, France.