Ken Price’s work is so beautiful on the outside I kind of want to explore the inside too, don’t you?! Very excited to go check out the show at LACMA today. For more than fifty years, Ken Price, born in 1935 in Los Angeles, California, created remarkable and innovative works that have redefined contemporary sculpture and ceramics. His work is beyond beautiful. Read more here and here.
I went to see the Stanley Kubrick exhibit up at LACMA (which is a must see!), and some of my favorite things, amongst all of the amazingness on display, were a series of posters made by airbrush artist Philip Castle for a Clockwork Orange. With the help of Google I found a lot more equally incredible creations. Pretty rad.
Basil Gogos is an American illustrator best known for making some badass portraits of everyone’s favorite movie monsters. If you’ve never seen his paintings, you’re probably more familiar with Gogos’ cover art for Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine in the 1960s and 70s. He is the man responsible for elevating horror to high art!
On October 6, 1962, the first exhibit and sale of “The Vincent Price Collection of Fine Art” took place in a Sears store in Denver, Colo. Original works of the great masters – Rembrandt, Chagall, Picasso, Whistler and more – as well as those of the best contemporary artists at the time were offered for sale.
Items ranged in selling price from $10 to $3,000. Sears customers could also purchase items on an installment plan for as little as $5 down and $5 a month. Each work in the program was guaranteed as an original work of quality, just as Sears offered quality guarantees on its lawnmowers and TVs. The program was an instant success. So many pictures were snatched up the first day that an emergency shipment had to be flown in lest the walls be bare the next day.
The program expanded in the weeks that followed, adding exhibits in 10 additional Sears stores including Hartford, Conn., Harrisburg, Penn., San Diego, Calif., Evansville, Ind., Madison, Wis., and Oklahoma City, Okla. After the successful exhibition and sale of these first 1,500 pieces, the program was expanded nationwide to all of Sears stores throughout the country, bringing original works of fine art to the American public in unprecedented quantity and quality.
Works from the collection were also offered for sale through a special catalog in 1963 and 1964. In 1966, the Sears Vincent Price Gallery of Fine Art was opened in Chicago, Ill., providing a mass audience for talented, but less well-known, young artists. The collection also held temporary exhibits in several hundred communities throughout the country and permanent galleries operated in several cities
By 1971, when the program ended, more than 50,000 pieces of fine art passed through a constantly changing collection into American homes and offices.
“Reading is the real artform of insult,” explained Venus Xtravaganza in Paris Is Burning. “You get in a smart crack, and everyone laughs and ki-kis because you found a flaw and exaggerated it then you’ve got a good read going on… Vogueing is the same thing. Taking two knives and cutting each other up, but in a dance form.” This artistic competition born out of adversity draws comparisons with the early days of b-boy culture in the South Bronx, as Robbie Saint Laurent tells Regnault: “I think voguing was probably a gay version of breakdancing in a way. But it was only done pretty much in private. When it was in a club setting, it was more like a duel, people dancing with one another to see who can dance the best.”
During the mid 1990s Roy Lichtenstein abandoned comics and still lifes for the great world of interiors. The paintings are all rendered in his trademark, comic book-inspired style, but they definitely reflect a great appreciation for modern furniture and architecture, highlighting the simple forms and atmosphere of decorative apartment life during this time period.
I especially love how Lichtenstein-esque works hang on the walls of these homes, alongside Warhols of course!
Pretty excellent.
When you think of Czechoslovakia, I’ll bet toys don’t come to mind; you most likely think of communism, or maybe one of the ex-country’s Olympic athletes, perhaps your mouth waters at the thought of delicious Czech schnitzel, but I can almost guarantee that you don’t think of toys … unlessyou are familiar with the name Libuše Niklová (1934-1981).
Niklová revolutionized industrial toy design beginning in the 1950s with simple, sometimes surreal animal forms in rubber and plastic.
One of Niklova’s most famous creations is the cat with the accordion body, which dates back to 1963. Libuše Niklová saw the employees in the Fatra Napajedla factory developing a new toilet flush system that used a special accordion tube. In this way the accordion cat was born! Not only could you squeeze the tube body, but you could also make it move in all sorts of ways, which was pretty revolutionary at the time. The cat was the first one of the tube collection, which consists of 11 toys in all – ten animals and one baby.
There is a show up in Paris on the works of Niklova titled “Plastique Ludique.” It will be at the Musee de Arts Decoratifs, until November 6th, 2011, but just in case you can’t make it to France for the show, check out the book Gift Set – Toys and Monographs from Libuse Niklova!
Jason Mecier has a vision unlike most. He is an artist, and a creator or some pretty rad portraits, but he does not imagine his subjects in pastels or watercolors, pencil or acrylic; instead, Meceir creates his masterpieces out of junk – everything from bubble gum and pickles to sunglasses, deodorant, and makeup.
As a child Jason’s grandmother encouraged him to create masterpieces using whatever he could find, and he says, “I learned from her that I can make art out of anything I want to, and that there are no rules.” So true, so true.
In 2002 Meceir completed a true masterpiece. A project that he worked on for half a decade. A piece made of 185,252 pencils in the house of Jaina A. Davis in San Francisco, CA. It is called Pencil Vania—the “Forest of Pencils.”
“Shadow boxes become poetic theaters or settings wherein are metamorphosed the element of a childhood pastime.” – Joseph Cornell
Joseph Cornell was not a sculptor, a draftsman, or a painter. He never had professional training. He was first and foremost a collector. He loved to dig through old book shops, flea markets, and junk shops all over New York in search of beautiful, but forgotten objects – souvenirs, theatrical memorabilia, old prints and photographs, music scores, French literature – with which he would create his treasures.
The boxes are meant to enchant. To evoke ideas, memories, fantasies, and dreams; to create a feeling and an emotion that is child-like and playful, but overwhelmingly meaningful at the same time.
