Month: August 2018

Anton Rooskens

Anton Rooskens, “Nachtvogels (Night Birds)”, 1949, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 70 cm, Private Collection

Anton Rooskens attended the Technical School in Venlo, southeastern Netherlands, in the years 1924-1934. He moved to Amsterdam in 1935. As a painter Rooskens was an autodidact. In the 1930s he painted mainly landscapes, influenced by the paintings of van Gogh.

In 1945 Rooskens visited the exhibition “Kunst in Vrijheid (Art in Freedom)” in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It was at the “Art in Freedom” exhibition that Rooskens first saw African sculptures. The simplified shapes and figures  inspired his work visibly in the years after the war. He was also influenced by  the early avant-garde Cubist art movement.

Since 1946 Anton Rooskens frequently had contact with the painters Appel, Corneille and Brands; later, in 1948 he met the Dutch painter Constant Nieuwenhuys. This group of artists founded “The Experimental Group” which later became part of the CoBrA movement, a short-lived but highly influential artist collective in Paris. Its approximately thirty members became known for their vigorously spontaneous, rebellious style of painting, using loose, gestural marks and strong colors.

Rooskens created his own language of magical signs in black, yellow, ocher, blue and red. He painted compositions where masks and shields are tangled in coloured surfaces and lines. The imaginary creatures that remind us of the CoBrA movement became important in Rooskens’ paintings until his death in 1976.

Calendar: August 30

A Year: Day to Day Men: 30th of August

The One Budded Cross

August 30, 1797 was the birthdate of English author, Mary Shelley.

Writer Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin on August 30, 1797, in London, England. She was the daughter of philosopher and political writer William Godwin and famed feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. While Shelley  didn’t have a formal education, she did make great use of her father’s extensive library. Shelley found a creative outlet in writing.

In 1814, Mary began a romance with one of her father’s political followers, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married. Together with Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, Mary and Shelley left for France and travelled through Europe. Upon their return to England, Mary was pregnant with Percy’s child. Over the next two years, she and Percy faced ostracism, constant debt, and the death of their prematurely born daughter. They married in late 1816, after the suicide of Percy Shelley’s first wife, Harriet.

In 1816, Mary and Percy Shelley famously spent a summer with Lord Byron, John William Polidori, and Claire Clairmont near Geneva, Switzerland, where Mary conceived the idea for her novel “Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus”. The Shelleys left Britain in 1818 for Italy, where their second and third children died before Mary Shelley gave birth to her last and only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley.

In 1822, Percy Shelley drowned when his sailing boat sank during a storm near Viareggio, in northern Tuscany, Italy. A year later, Mary Shelley returned to England and from then on devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and a career as a professional author. The last decade of her life was dogged by illness, probably caused by the brain tumor that was to kill her at the age of 53 in February of 1851.

Until the 1970s, Mary Shelley was known mainly for her efforts to publish her husband’s works and for her 1818 anonymously published “Frankenstein” novel, which remains widely read and has inspired many theatrical and film adaptations. Recent scholarship has yielded a more comprehensive view of Mary Shelley’s achievements.

Studies of her lesser-known works support the growing view that Mary Shelley remained a political radical throughout her life. Mary Shelley’s works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practiced by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romantic-era ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and the Enlightenment political theories articulated by her father, William Godwin.

Albert Weisgerber

Albert Weisgerber, “Garçon nu Assis dans un Bois”, 1912, Oil on Board

Albert Weisgerber was a German painter whose work forms a bridge between the Impressionist and early Expressionist movements. He studied at the Munich Art Academy and became friends with Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Karl Arnold. Weisgerber is known today for his cartoons, illustrations, as well as his paintings. He joined the German army in World War I, was promoted to the rank of major and was killed at the age of 37 while participating in the Battle of Fromellles in France.

Reblogged with thanks to http://flashandfootle.tumblr.com

The Field: Congratulations to the Victor

Photographer Unknown, (Congratulations to the Victor), Computer Graphics

“Somewhere in the world there is a defeat for everyone. Some are destroyed by defeat, and some made small and mean by victory. Greatness lives in one who triumphs equally over defeat and victory.”
― John Steinbeck, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights 

Hang Massive, “The Secret Kissing of the Sun and Moon”

Hang Massive, “The Secret Kissing of the Sun and the Moon”, 2018, The first single from the Album “Luminous Emptiness”

The founding members of Hang Massive are Danny Cudd from the UK and Markus Offbeat from Sweden. Both seasoned global travellers they met on the shores of Goa, India where for many years they had passed the winter months. From India they travelled back to Europe and this is where they began to play music together, initially in the streets and then increasingly performing live at venues and festivals world wide.

Their first official collaboration release was in 2013 with Bristol based producer Bleeker and saw the resonant tones of the hang fused with high quality UK style house production resulting in an awesome four track EP. This was followed in 2014 by the release of their second live album “As It Is” which demonstrated a much evolved playing style, more developed compositions and a significant increase in production quality. 2015 saw the release of two more collaborative projects of very differing styles.

The EP “Many Rivers Ensemble” featured a small group of musicians with a range of acoustical instruments, who in one improvised recording session sculpted a beautiful and other worldly listening experience. The following EP “Marine Migration” was the first release from the new collaboration with Glastonbury based producer J Rokka and featured a breaks style single which was subsequently remixed by a range of well known artists such as Gaudi and Atomic drop.

The Prince

Photographer Unknown, (The Prince), Photo Shoot

“Men nearly always follow the tracks made by others and proceed in their affairs by imitation, even though they cannot entirely keep to the tracks of others or emulate the prowess of their models. So a prudent man should always follow in the footsteps of great men and imitate those who have been outstanding. If his own prowess fails to compare with theirs, at least it has an air of greatness about it. He should behave like those archers who, if they are skilful, when the target seems too distant, know the capabilities of their bow and aim a good deal higher than their objective, not in order to shoot so high but so that by aiming high they can reach the target.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli

Beatrice Cuming

Beatrice Cuming, “Chubb”, 1941, Oil on Canvas, Lyman Allyn Art Museum

The early 20th century in the United States was a time of rapid expansion and industrialization fueled in part by waves of immigration. A decade of exuberance followed World War I before the stock market crash of 1929 initiated the Great Depression of the 1930s. Abstraction and European modernism filtered into American art, while a realistic, regional style simultaneously held sway, resulting in a mix of subjects and styles.

Many artists were drawn to the energy and bustle of the modern city, awash in crowds and transformed by industry, skyscrapers and the automobile. Beatrice Cuming’s painting, “Chubb”, shows a submarine being built in the Groton, Connecticut shipyard during World War II. Cuming’s canvas affirmed New London’s long connection to the sea and celebrated industry at a time when the nation was consumed with the war effort.

Calendar: August 29

A Year: Day to Day Men: 29th of August

The Trenchcoat

August 29, 1900 was the birthdate of artist and architect Oscar Ernest Nitzchke.

Oscar Nitzchke entered the Ecole des Beauz-Arts in Geneva in 1917 and the Atelier Laloux-Lemaresquier in Paris in 1920. In the years 1921 and 1922 he studied at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris and began working in the office of the Swiss-French architect and designer Le Corbusier. Nitzchke joined the Atelier du Palais de Bois in 1923 under Auguste Perret, the French architect who pioneered the use of reinforced concrete in architecture.

In 1936 Nitzchke made a set of presentation drawings for a building for a private client, Maison de la Publicite, that failed to reach completion. These drawings were later acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and displayed at the Pompidou Center in Paris.

In December of 1938, Oscar Nitzchke came to the United States to become Associate Professor at the School of Architecture at Yale University, and to work with the architecture firm of Harrison & Fouilhoux in New York as head of design research. While working with Harrison & Fouilhoux, Nitzchke took part in the design of the Alcoa Building in Pittsburgh and the Los Angeles Opera House projects. During the time he was with the firm, he also worked on the design for the Mellon National Bank and Trust Company in Pittsburgh, and the United Nations Headquarters in New York City.

Nitzchke worked with the firm Harrison & Abromovitz for fifteen years. He left to become the head of design for Jim Nash Associates in New York, a position he held from 1958 to 1961. Nitzchke retired in the early 1970s. In 1981 Nitzchke’s architecture designs were shown at the Paris Exposition at the Pompidou Center; in 1985 at the Institut Francais d’Architecture in Paris, and at New York’s Cooper Union in 1985.

Despite becoming deaf in 1951, Nitzchke continued to develop imaginative projects for competitions such as the San Salvador Cathedral in 1953-1954, with its soaring concrete shell vaults. In 1970, he retired to Paris, preparing drawings for exhibitions of his work, living with his family until his death in 1991.

Although he built little and seldom appears in standard histories of modern architecture, Oscar Nitzchke was much admired among avant-garde architects. During his fifty years in practice, he consistently produce innovative designs that remain surprisingly fresh. His later work articulated form and materials in their marked legibility of functions. An example of this were Nitzchke’s designs for prefabricated buildings with the use of external corrugated copper and steel cladding, which made no attempt to imitate traditional materials as earlier prefabricated buildings had.

Spencer Means, “Balcony at Casa Calvet”

Spencer Means, “Balcony at Casa Calvet”, Barcelona, Spain

Casa Calvet is a building, built between 1898 and 1900, designed by Antoni Gaudi for a textile manufacturer which served as both a commercial property and a residence. It is located at Carrer de Casp 48, Eixample district of Barcelona.

Gaudí scholars agree that this building is the most conventional of his works, partly because it had to be squeezed in between older structures and partly because it was sited in one of the most elegant sections of Barcelona. Its symmetry, balance and orderly rhythm are unusual for Gaudí’s works.

However, the curves, the double gable at the top, and the projecting oriel at the entrance are almost baroque in its drama. Modernist elements are evident in the isolated witty details. Bulging balconies alternate with smaller, shallower balconies.

Friedrich Nietzsche: “I Sail with All Winds Straight Ahead”

Finding Ten and Two

“Understanding what makes you ‘tick’ isn’t half as much fun as finding out what makes you ‘tock’!”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Since I grew weary of the search
I taught myself to find instead
Since cross winds caused my ship to lurch
I sail with all winds straight ahead.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science