Month: March 2018

Su Xinping

Artwork by Su Xinping

Born in Jining City of Inner Mongolia in 1960, Su Xinping was accepted into the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts in 1979. Following completion of his studies at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1989, Su began to produce intimate black-and-white depictions of the social transformations occurring during the decade of open policy promoted by Deng Xiaoping. His works expressed a deep concern for the issues surrounding isolation and the lack of communication among the people at this time.

Su Xinping on his more recent works：“My recent work is about two themes – the urban landscape series and the toasting series. In the urban landscape series I want to express the impact of urbanisation on people. In the toasting series I use irony to reveal issues of city life and the interaction of people – particularly in business and politics.”

His works have been collected by the British Museum, San Fransico MOMA, National Gallery of Victoria (Australia), Fukuoka Museum of Art (Japan) and National Art Museum of China.

He is currently Vice President (2014) of China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA).

Calendar: March 15

A Year: Day to Day Men: 15th of March

Flesh Against Teal

On March 15, 1972, the film “The Godfather” has its New York City premiere.

“The Godfather” is a 1972 American crime film directed by Francis Ford Coppola based on Mario Puzo’s best selling novel of the same name. Published in 1969, it became the best selling published work in history for several years. Paramount Pictures originally found out about Puzo’s novel in 1967 when a literary scout for the company contacted then Paramount Vice President of Production Peter Bart about Puzo’s sixty-page unfinished manuscript. Bart believed the work was “much beyond a Mafia story” and offered Puzo a $12,500 option for the work, with an option for $80,000 if the finished work were made into a film. Despite Puzo’s agent telling him to turn down the offer, Puzo was desperate for money and accepted the deal.

Paramount Pictures wanted the film to be directed by an Italian American to make the film “ethnic to the core”. Sergio Leone was Paramount’s first choice to direct: but Leone turned down the option to work on his own gangster film. Paramount had offered twelve other directors the job with “The Godfather” before Coppola agreed. Coppola agreed to receive $125,000 and six percent of the gross rentals.

Coppola’s request to film on location was observed; approximately 90 percent was shot in New York City and its surrounding suburbs, using over 120 unique locations. Several scenes were filmed at the Filmways Studio in East Harlem. The remaining portions were filmed in California, or on-site in Sicily, except for the scenes set in Las Vegas because there were insufficient funds to travel there. Savoca and Forza d’Argro were the Sicilian towns featured in the film. The opening wedding scene was shot in a Staten Island neighborhood using almost 750 locals as extras.

The world premiere for “The Godfather” took place in New York City on March 15, 1972, almost three months after the planned release date of Christmas Day in 1971, with profits from the premiere donated to The Boys Club of New York. Before the film premiered, the film had already made $15 million from rentals from over 400 theaters. The following day, the film opened in New York at five theaters.

Tullio Crali

Tullio Crali, “Before the Parachute Opens (Prima che is Apra il Paracadute)”, 1939, Oil on Panel, Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Udine, Italy

Tullio Carli was an Italian artist associated with the Futurism movement. A self-taught painter, he was a late adherent to Futurism, not joining until 1929 at the age of nineteen. He is noted for realistic paintings that combine speed, aerial mechanization and the mechanics of aerial warfare. In 1928, he flew for the first time nad his experience as a pilot infuenced his later art.

In 1959 he published the first post-war Futurist manifesto “Sassintesi (Stone Syntheses)”, advocating a new form of expression using natural materials: stone, pebbles, and rocks formed of various minerals- “producing a harmonious compostion that relied much on the stones’ natural sybiosis with the cosmos.”

Image reblogged with thanks to http://bloghqualls.tumblr.com

Calendar: March 14

Year: Day to Day Men: March 14

Aries the Ram

The fourteenth of March in 1878 marks the birth date of Louis Nikola, a British magician, actor, director and author. Born Walter James Obree Smith in Southampton, he performed under the stage name of Louis Nikola, a persona he found in Australian novelist Guy Newell Boothby’s series of occultist criminal mastermind Dr. Nikola, an early Victorian forerunner to Fu Manchu.

Louis Nikola began his career as a professional magician in 1901. Known for his painstaking perfection and inventive illusions, he performed throughout the world. Nikola’s “Card Castle” was one of the many highlights in his performances. After spreading a deck of cards on a tray, he would cover it with a silk scarf and slowly raise the scarf. At its height, the scarf would be removed to reveal a standing castle built from the cards. He would deliberately jog the tray and the castle would collapse due to its delicate construction. 

Nikola published some of his magic through a series entitled “The B.O.P. Magician” that appeared in the 1898-1899 Volume XXI of “The Boy’s Own Paper”, a British story-paper run by the Religious Tract Society to provide young male readers with a positive moral influence. In 1927, Nikola published “The Nikola Card System: A New Power for Magicians”, a card system for magic tricks more advanced than the previous “Si Stebbins” or “Eight Kings” stack systems. Even on close examination, the pre-arrangement of cards was seemingly impossible to detect. 

In 1934, Louis Nikola published a compendium of articles on fifty magic illusions entitled “Magical Masterpieces” in a collaboration with magic historian Will Goldston. Among the illusions in the volume were “The Incorrigible Cigars”, “A Message from Mars”, and “The Topsy Turvy Tea Table”. Nikola is credited with the invention of two major magic illusions: the “Magic Melding” in the early 1930s and, in collaboration with magician Roy Enoc, the “Milk Pitcher” circa 1917. 

In addition to his magic illusions, Louis Nikola was also an entertainer proficient in the art of hand shadows. Using a light source and his two hands, he would create shadow representations of  animals as well as historic and fictional characters. In 1913, Nikola published a small volume entitled “Hand Shadows: The Complete Art of Shadowgraphy” that contained, along with the illustrations of fifty hand shadows, instructions on lighting and hand exercises. A second edition was printed in 1921.

Beginning in 1913, Nikola was discovered by the British film industry who cast him in several films as a magician and a spiritualist. He was an actor in director Charles Raymond’s short 1913 “The Seer of Bond Street”, a six character story of a fake medium attempting to steal money from an heiress. Nikola was screenwriter, director and actor for the 1914 “Magic Squares”, an animation of paper squares and hand shadows.

Walter James Obree Smith died at the age of fifty-eight in South Harrow, London on the eleventh of November in 1936.

Edward Dickinson

Edwin Dickinson, Unknown Title, Date Unknown

Edwin Dickinson was an American painter and draftsman best known for psychologically charged self-portraits, quickly painted landscapes, which he called premier coups, and large, hauntingly enigmatic paintings involving figures and objects painted from observation, in which he invested his greatest time and concern.

The lesser known of his works are his ‘premiere coup’ portraits and nudes, his medium-sized paintings done entirely from imagination or incorporating elements from one of his drawings or done from observation over several days or weeks, including still lifes, portraits of others, both commissioned and not, and nudes.

Over time, Dickinson’s small paintings and drawings tended to converge in style. His ‘primiere coup’ paintings evolve from early works with forms constructed in thick impasto to later ones with a generally thinner use of paint and hazier forms, but he continued the practice of building forms in paint patches rather than first drawing contours. By contrast, Dickinson’s early drawings rely on firm contours and subtly nuanced shading to define clearly articulated forms.

The drawings and ‘primiere coup’ paintings of the period from the later 30′s to the early 60′s, apparently so different from his large, time-consuming studio paintings, often share with them the quality of the Freudian uncanny found in Edward Hopper’s work, a quality to which the hazy luminosity contributes.

Image reblogged with thanks to https://k250966.tumblr.com

Asgeer Jorn

Asger Jorn, “Green Ballet”, Oil on Canvas, 1960, Guggenheim Museum, New York

Asger Oluf Jörgensen was born in Vejrum, Denmark, on March 3, 1914. He visited Paris in the fall of 1936, where he studied at Fernand Leger’s Académie Contemporaine. During World WarII, Jorn remained in Denmark, painting canvases that reflected the influence of James Ensor, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Joan Miro, and contributing to the magazine “Helhesten (Ghost Horse)”, working on nine issues from 1941–44.

Jorn traveled to Swedish Lapland in the summer of 1946, met Constant Nieuwenhuys in Paris that fall, and spent six months in Jerba, Tunisia, from 1947–48. His first solo exhibition in Paris took place in 1948 at the Galerie Breteau. At about the same time the group Cobra (an acronym for Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam) was founded by Karel Appel, Constant, Guillaume Cornelis Beverloo, Christian Dotremont, Jorn, and Joseph Noiret. The group’s unifying doctrine was the complete freedom of expression with an emphasis on color and brushwork. Jorn edited monographs of the group’s Bibliothèque Cobra before disassociating himself from the movement.

Jorn’s activities included painting, collage, book illustration, prints, drawings, ceramics, tapestries, commissions for murals, and, in his last years, sculpture. He participated in the movement Internationale Situationniste and worked on a study of early Scandinavian art between 1961 and 1965. His first solo show in New York took place in 1962 at the Lefebre Gallery. From 1966 Jorn concentrated on oil painting and traveled frequently, visiting Cuba, England and Scotland, the United States, and Asia. Jorn died on May 1, 1973, in Aarhus, Denmark.

Calendar: March 13

Year: Day to Day Men: March 13

Perched

The thirteenth of March in 1930 marks the discovery of Pluto, the ninth largest and tenth most massive known object to directly orbit the sun of this system. Like other objects in the Kulper belt, the circumstellar disc in the outer solar system, Pluto primarily consists of rock and frozen volatiles such as methane, ammonia and water. 

In the 1840s, French astronomer and mathematician Urbain Le Verrier used Newtonian mechanics to predict the position of the, as yet, undiscovered planet Neptune after analyzing deviations in the orbit of Uranus. Subsequent observations of Neptune in the late 1800s led astronomers to speculate that Uranus’s orbit was being affected by another planet beside Neptune. 

In 1906, wealthy astronomer and mathematician Percival Lowell began an extensive project at the Lowell Observatory to search for a possible ninth planet, that he termed Planet X. Lowell and astronomer William H. Pickering had by 1909 suggested several possible celestial coordinates for this Planet X. Lowell continued his search, with calculations established by mathematical genius Elizabeth Langdon Williams, without any success until his death in 1916. 

Unknown to Lowell, his research surveys had captured two faint images of Pluto on March 19th and April 7th of 1915; however, these images were not recognized as being of Pluto. There exists fourteen other known observations of Pluto which predate its discovery, the earliest being that of the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory on the 20th of August in 1909.

In 1919, Percival Lowell’s widow, Constance Lowell, entered into a ten-year legal battle with the Lowell Observatory over her husband’s legacy. The search for the unknown planet did not resume until 1929. American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, at the age of twenty-three, continued Lowell’s quest. His task was to systematically image the night sky in pairs of photographs. Each pair would be examined to determine if any objects had shifted position. This was done through the use of a blink comparator that shifts back and forth between photographs to create the illusion of movement for any object that had changed position in the photographs. 

On the 18th of February in 1930, after a year of searching, Tombaugh detected a possible moving object on the photographic plates taken on January 23rd and 29th. A photograph of lesser quality taken on the 21st helped confirm the movement. After the Lowell Observatory had taken additional photographs to confirm the discovery, a telegram with the news was sent to the Harvard College Observatory on the 13th of March in 1930. 

The name Pluto came from the Roman god of the underworld; it is also an epithet for Hades, the Greek equivalent of Pluto. As one Plutonian year corresponds to 247.94 Earth years, Pluto will be back in the same position of its discovery in 2178. On the twenty-ninth of July in 2005, astronomers at Caltech announced the discovery of a new trans-Neptunian object, named Eris, which is substantially more massive than Pluto and the most massive object discovered in the solar system since Neptune’s moon, Triton, in 1846.