My task for Part 4 is to develop research skills and is for the most part book based. Project 1 Stage 1 is information gathering and is cut and paste from the internet. That is by way of explaining the inconsistency of the text.
I have been given a list of ten artists for my fact finding mission.
Stage 1: Research
In any research it is
important that the information is taken from reliable, up to date sources and I
have used newspaper articles, the BBC and other sources that have a good
reputation.
Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh (1864-1933)
 |
M. M. Mackintosh
www.mackintosh-archtecture.gla..ac.uk |
This information is
taken from a BBC interview with Pamela Robertson Senior Curator of the
University of Glasgow’s Hunterian Gallery.
The saying that
behind every great man there must be a great woman has probably never been more
appropriate than when used to describe the love story and collaboration between Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife, Margaret MacDonald.
Mackintosh is
known throughout the world as Scotland's most famous architect, while history
has traditionally portrayed Margaret as the supportive spouse. But Margaret
MacDonald's contribution to her husband's creative output has recently shown
her to be a true artist, with Mackintosh himself admitting that he owed much of
his success to his wife.
Margaret
MacDonald Mackintosh (1864-1933) amassed a challenging and varied portfolio of work,
which showcased her range as an artist. Skilled in a variety of media such as
watercolour, metalwork, embroidery and textiles, she is reputed to be one of
the most talented artists of early 20th Century Britain.
Born in Tipton
near Wolverhampton, her Glasgow-born father's career took the family back to
the city in 1890 and it was here, at The Glasgow School of Art, that both
she and her much younger sister, Frances, began their journey into the
professional art world.
Frances,
Margaret's sister, was her first collaborator resulting in an ambitious
venture, the opening of the MacDonald Sisters Studio at 128 Hope Street,
Glasgow in the 1890s. Together they produced innovative work, with both their
styles drawing inspiration from Celtic imagery, literature, symbolism and
folklore.
At the turn of
the 20th Century a group of women were, for the first time in history, allowed
to attend day classes at the Glasgow School of Art. Margaret and Frances, with
Jessie Newbery, Ann Macbeth and Jessie M. King became known as The Glasgow
Girls and were instrumental in the evolution of decorative and interior design,
a design that became known as the 'Glasgow
Style'.
In 1892 Francis (Fra) Newbery, head of
Glasgow School of Art, introduced Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his friend,
fellow architectural student, Herbert MacNair, to the MacDonald
sisters. Newbery noticed similarities in their style of work and encouraged
them to collaborate and to exhibit. They formed The Glasgow Four, whose
creative output was heavily steeped in mysticism and symbolism.
At the time they
met, Charles Rennie Mackintosh was an apprentice architect at Glasgow firm Honeyman & Keppie and engaged to Jessie Keppie, his
employer's sister. In choosing to marry Margaret, Mackintosh may have lost
influential friends through the breaking of the engagement but he gained an
inspirational partner.
Margaret worked
closely with Mackintosh on interior design. Together they created futuristic
interiors which, today, still feel thoroughly modern. Margaret's influence on
Charles's life and work would prove to be one of the greatest partnerships in
art history.
The first
significant demonstration of their collaborative work came with a commission
from Catherine Cranston for
a tearoom interior. Tea rooms were fashionable in late-Victorian Glasgow,
places where intelligent, avant-garde thinkers met. The Mackintosh décor was
central to the success of Miss Cranston's White Dining Room, creating intense
interest in the city.
Margaret's art
would be highly influential to Mackintosh. Their roles as artist and designer
blurred once they began to collaborate. But her influence was more noticeable
on the interior rather than the exterior of his buildings.
 |
Embroidered silk, glass, appliquéd, beaded 1903
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/ |
In the early
1900s, the Mackintoshes worked on a series of interiors, including 120 Mains
Street (1900), the couple's first marital home; the House for an Art Lover (1901), a competition entry; the 'Rose
Boudoir' (1902), an exhibition setting; and the Room de Luxe at the Willow Tea Rooms, Glasgow (1903).
MacDonald was unquestionably involved in the creations shaping the look and
feel, producing decorative gesso panels for
them all.
Between 1895 and
1924 Margaret contributed to more than 40 exhibitions throughout Europe and
America and was celebrated in her time by many of her peers including her
husband who, in 1927, said, "You must remember that in all my
architectural efforts you have been half if not three-quarters of them." He believed that Margaret had genius, whereas
he had only talent.
Margaret
MacDonald was awarded numerous prizes jointly with her husband. Yet, when she
died, there was only brief mention of her in the press and subsequent writings
on art history have played down her significance. This was partly due to her
limited output but mainly due to living in the shadow of her much celebrated
and talented husband.
She survived
Mackintosh by five years, dying in London on 10 January, 1933.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/arts/margaret_macdonald
Leon Bakst (1866-1924)
 |
Leon Bakst
www.vam.ac.uk |
The information here came from
the V&A website.
Born in
Russia in 1866, Léon Bakst belonged to that young generation of European
artists who rebelled against 19th century stage realism, which had become
pedantic and literal, without imagination or theatricality.
There
were no specialist trained theatre designers, so painters like Vuillard in
France, Munch in Scandinavia and Léon Bakst and Alexandre Benois in Russia
turned their painting skills to theatre design.
Bakst’s
fame lay in the ballets he designed for the Diaghilev Ballets Russes, and huge
pageant spectaculars for dancer and patron, Ida Rubinstein.
Bakst
came into the theatre on the wave of choreographer Michel Fokine’s revolution
in Russian ballet. Fokine rejected full evening story ballets, like Swan Lake,
where the story was told in formal mime interspersed with virtuoso dances and
the ballerinas wore pink satin pointe shoes and tutus decorated with
appropriate symbols (e.g. lotus for Egypt, key pattern for Greece, vines and
leopard skin for bacchantes) whatever the subject or setting.
In
Fokine’s ballets, the theme dictated the style of the choreography, music and
design; the steps were imbued with meaning and emotion. As part of the creative
team, Bakst produced designs suited to each particular ballet - Orientalism in
Scheherazade and Cleopatra, Ancient Greece in Daphnis and Chloë and Narcisse,
Biedermeier in Carnaval and Spectre de la Rose, and 18th century style in The Good-Humoured
Ladies and The Sleeping Princess.
This
‘new ballet’ became the rage of Paris in 1909, when audiences went wild for the
colour, exoticism and barbarism, especially in the ballets designed by Bakst.
As Bakst
said:
‘it is goodbye to scenery designed by a painter
blindly subjected to one part of the work, to costumes made by any old
dressmaker who strikes a false and foreign note in the production; it is
goodbye to the kind of acting, movements, false notes and that terrible, purely
literary wealth of details which make modern theatrical production a collection
of tiny impressions without that unique simplicity which emanates from a true
work of art'.
His
depth of knowledge and feeling about period and place allowed him to absorb the
spirit of a culture and translate it into theatrical terms without destroying
the essence. He used primary colours in endless harmonies. Scheherazade created
a sense of rich, fevered claustrophobia and mystery. Against the background of
closed doors, the dancers became the richly coloured ‘brushstrokes,’ creating a
living canvas of sensuality and decadence.
Scheherazade
was a sensation, and Bakst’s designs spilled over into fashion and interior
design, sweeping away drab colours and introducing looser clothes.
Bakst’s
brilliant control of colour, line and decoration give his stage pictures a
visual rhythm. Colour and chromatic combinations were used emotionally and
sensuously - one shade sometimes expressed frankness and chastity, sometimes
sensuality, sometimes pride, sometimes despair.
These he
mixed in subtle shadings, say, using the 'despair' shade of green with the more
intense 'despair' in the blue range. There are some reds which are triumphal,’
he said, ‘and there are reds which assassinate'. The changing mood of a scene
was reflected by introducing colours gradually, visually paralleling the
emotion in the text. Serenity could be destroyed by suddenly introducing a
violently opposing colour just in a flash of brilliant lining or underskirt.
In
Daphnis and Chloe, against the cool, verdant setting the shepherds and
shepherdesses wore calm yellows, browns, greens, whites and a wealth of
decoration - geometric, soft waves, antique motifs such as stylised rams heads.
Into this calm scene came the more violent purples, dark blues, ochres of the
invading Brigands - jarring against the harmony with heavier fabrics and more
unstable patterns, like checkerboards and zigzags; in the next scene the
costumes were seen against hot rust red rocks, creating a harsh barbarism.
Surviving
costumes are richly decorated with myriad motifs and decorative shapes. Dense
surface textures mix appliqué with painting, dying, embroidery using flocking,
floss, beading, sequins, metal studs, braids and decoration, pearls and jewels.
Yet, after the designs, the finished costume can seem a disappointment. The
bare flesh at midriff, neck, arm and leg is actually well-fitting silk for the
principal dancers, cotton for the lower ranks.
This was
not just prudery or convention but a practical solution: with three or four
contrasting works in an evening, dancers had to change make-up in theatres
without proper washing facilities, so restricting the exposed areas to face and
hands helped them make fast costume changes in the short breaks between the
ballets. It has to be remembered that these costumes were seen under stage
lights and in movement and audiences certainly ‘saw’ bare flesh.
 |
| www.behingballet.com |
In 1910
Bakst settled in Paris where he found his preferred maker, Mme Muelle, with
whom he worked on productions for Diaghilev and Ida Rubinstein. He died in 1924
but after nearly 100 years his magic is as potent as ever, rediscovered by
every generation. His influence was such that people who have never heard his
name now see the world in a different way.
 |
Stunning work by Bakst
http://dorjeixchel.typepad.com |
ww.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/b/biography-of-leon-bakst/
Ethel Mairet (1872-1952)
 |
Ethel Mairet
arts.brighton.ac.uk |
This information is taken the
website of the University of the Creative Arts
Born Ethel Mary Partridge in Barnstaple, Devon, she studied
at the Municipal Science and Art School, Barnstaple, later gained a teaching
diploma in pianoforte from the Royal Academy of Music. She worked as a
governess, then married the Anglo-Ceylonese geologist Ananda Coomaraswamy and
lived in Ceylon and India from 1903 to 1907. There she studied and collected
the indigenous arts and crafts and began writing articles.
On her return to
England she made her first experiments in weaving at Broad Campden in the
Cotswolds where C.R. Ashbee was part of her circle. In 1913 she divorced and
married Philippe Mairet, moving first to Saunton, then to Shottery near
Stratford-upon-Avon, where she wrote A
Book on Vegetable Dyes (first,1916) and exhibited in the Englishwoman Exhibition, London.
 |
| arts.brighton.ac.uk |
She built and set up
her major workshop 'Gospels' in Ditchling, Sussex in 1918-20 and here trained
and employed a stream of 130 apprentices, assistants and workgirls until 1952.
The most notable of these were Marianne Straub and Peter Collingwood. Her
output changed roughly with the decades, consisting of furnishing and dress
lengths, scarves and garments, using high quality yarns of wool, silk and
cotton - both hand and machine-spun and mostly vegetable-dyed. Her colourful
work was widely exhibited in England and abroad and was also sold from her
Brighton shop and from the workshop.
 |
Samples
arts.brighton.ac.uk |
Mairet travelled
widely in Europe, published six books and many articles, and circulated
pamphlets with her 'textile portfolios' or teaching packs which were loaned out
to schools and teacher training colleges from 1939 to 1952. A touring
retrospective exhibition of her work was organised by the Crafts Study Centre,
Bath in 1983.
http://www.csc.ucreative.ac.uk/
Anni Albers (1899-1994)
 |
Anni Albers
craftcouncil.org |
Here I’ve used text
from the Albers Foundation
Josef and Anni
Albers, lifelong artistic adventurers, were among the leading pioneers of
twentieth-century modernism. Josef Albers (1888–1976) was an influential
teacher, writer, painter, and color theorist—now best known for the Homages to the Square he painted
between 1950 and 1976 and for his innovative 1963 publication Interaction of
Color. Anni Albers (1899–1994) was a textile designer, weaver, writer, and
printmaker who inspired a reconsideration of fabrics as an art form, both in
their functional roles and as wall hangings.
The couple met in Weimar, Germany in 1922 at the Bauhaus. This new
teaching institution, which transformed modern design, had been founded three
years earlier, and emphasized the connection between artists, architects, and
craftspeople.
Before enrolling as a student at the Bauhaus in 1920, Josef had been a
school teacher in and near his hometown of Bottrop, in the north-western
industrial Ruhr region of Germany. Initially he taught a general elementary
school course; then, following studies in Berlin, he gave art instruction. At
the same time, he developed as a figurative artist and printmaker.
Once he was
at the Bauhaus, he started to make glass assemblages from detritus he found at
the Weimar town dump and from stained glass; he then made sandblasted glass
constructions and designed large stained-glass windows for houses and
buildings. He also designed furniture, household objects, and an alphabet. In
1925, he was the first Bauhaus student to be asked to join the faculty and
become a master. At the end of the decade he made exceptional photographs and
photo-collages, documenting Bauhaus life with flair. By 1933, when pressure from
the Nazis forced the school to shut its doors, Josef Albers had become one of
its best-known artists and teachers, and was among those who decided to close
the school rather than comply with the Third Reich and reopen adhering to its
rules and regulations.
Annelise Elsa Frieda Fleischmann went to the Bauhaus as a young student
in 1922. Throughout her childhood in Berlin, she had been fascinated by the
visual world, and her parents had encouraged her to study drawing and painting.
Having been brought up in an affluent household where she was expected simply
to continue living the sort of comfortable domestic life enjoyed by her mother,
she rebelled by deciding to be an artist and going off to an art school that
embraced modernism and where the living conditions were rugged and the
challenges immense. She entered the weaving workshop because it was the only
one open to her, but soon embraced the possibilities of textiles.
She and
Josef, eleven years apart in age, met shortly after her arrival in Weimar. They
were married in Berlin in 1925—and Annelise Fleischmann became Anni Albers. At
the Bauhaus, Anni experimented with new materials for weaving and became a bold
abstract artist. She used straight lines and solid colours to make works on
paper and wall hangings devoid of representation. In her functional textiles
she experimented with metallic thread and horsehair as well as traditional
yarns, and utilized the raw materials and components of structure as the source
of design and beauty.
 |
Anni Albers avoided representaional work
cover-magazine.com |
In 1925 the Bauhaus moved to the city of Dessau to a streamlined and
revolutionary building designed by Walter Gropius, the architect who had
founded the school. The Alberses—who had become friends with Paul and Lily
Klee, Wassily and Nina Kandinsky, Oscar and Tut Schlemmer and Lyonel and Julia
Feininger—eventually moved into one of the masters' houses designed by Gropius.
In November of 1933, Josef and Anni Albers were invited to the USA when Josef
was asked to make the visual arts the center of the curriculum at the newly established
Black Mountain College in North Carolina. They remained at Black Mountain until
1949, while Josef continued his exploration of a range of printmaking
techniques, took off as an abstract painter, made collages of autumn leaves,
kept writing, became an ever more influential teacher and wrote about art and
education.
Anni made extraordinary weavings, developed new textiles, and
taught, while also writing essays on design that reflected her independent and
passionate vision. Meanwhile, the Alberses began making frequent trips to
Mexico, a country that captivated their imagination and had a strong effect on
both of their art. They often said that, “In Mexico, art is everywhere”: this
was their ideal for human life.
In 1950, the Alberses moved to Connecticut. From 1950 to 1958, Josef
Albers was chairman of the Department of Design at the Yale University School
of Art. There, and as guest teacher at art schools throughout North and South
America and in Europe, he trained a whole new generation of art teachers. He
also continued to write,, paint, and make prints. In 1971, he was the first
living artist ever to be honored with a solo retrospective at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York. At the time of his death in New Haven, Connecticut
in 1976, he was still working on his Homages
to the Square and his Structural Constellations, deceptively
simple compositions in which straight lines create illusory forms, and which
became the basis of prints, drawings, and large wall reliefs on public
buildings all over the world.
In those same years, Anni Albers continued to
weave, design, and write. In 1963 she began to explore printmaking, and
experimented with the medium in unprecedented ways while developing further as
a highly original abstract artist. Her seminal text On Weaving was published in 1965.
 |
| albersfoundation.org |
The Alberses were in some ways like a two-person religious sect,
focusing above all on their work and happy to pursue it at a remove from the
trends and shifting fashions of the art world. They had an extraordinary relationship,
and, while never collaborating on art work other than their highly inventive
Christmas cards and Easter eggs, fostered one another’s creativity and shared
their profound conviction that art was central to human existence and that
morality and creativity were aligned.
Following Josef’s death, Anni Albers
helped oversee her husband’s legacy while expanding her own printmaking and
textile design until her death in 1994. In 1984, Anni wrote," . . . to
comprehend art is to confide in a constant." She and Josef lived their
lives devoted to that irrefutable, uplifting constant.
http://albersfoundation.org/artists/biographies/
Lucienne Day (1917-2010)
 |
Lucienne Day
www.theguardian |
This is
the obituary for Lucienne Day written by Fiona MacCarthy in the Guardian on 3rd
February 2010
Lucienne Day, who has died aged
93, was the foremost British textile designer of her period. Day's furnishing
fabrics, of which the most famous was the Festival of Britain abstract pattern
Calyx, hung in every "contemporary" living room in Britain. The
reality of "art for the people", dreamed about by the Victorian
William Morris, was finally achieved by a female designer in the middle of the
20th century.
 |
Calyx - Lucienne Day
www.theguardian |
Lucienne drew on the English
tradition of patterns based on plant forms that went back as far as Morris. She
took motifs drawn from nature – flowers, grasses, shoots, the intricate
patterns of the landscape – and transformed them into something absolutely new.
Part of their success was the implied message of regrowth and optimism for a
Britain only just recovering from war.
She was also deeply influenced by
European abstract painting. Her textiles speak the visual language of
Kandinsky, Miró and Klee. It pleased her to think that people who could not
afford to buy a painting for their living room could at least own a pair of
abstract patterned curtains. Many of Day's printed fabrics were made in long
production runs, which kept the price affordable. She made the link between
mass production and fine art.
Born Désirée Lucienne Conradi,
she was brought up in the comfortable south London suburbs. Her mother was
English and her father Belgian. She went to a convent school and always kept a
distinctly continental reticence and chic. From a very early age she was
focused on designing, and studied at Croydon School of Art and then, from 1937
to 1940, at the Royal College of Art. It was there, in her final year, that she
first met the furniture designer Robin Day.
Decades later they were still,
very touchingly, describing that meeting as the start of a true romance.
Perhaps the secret lay in Lucienne's professional autonomy. Their partnership
was often, wrongly, compared to that of their contemporary American designers
Charles and Ray Eames. Ray Eames's professional work was merged with, and in
some degree subsidiary to, her husband's, whereas Lucienne's career was always
distinct.
Lucienne set out on her career at
a period when design was only just beginning to emerge as a recognisable
profession. In that sense she was a pioneer. Her first freelance designs were
for dress fabrics. But she quickly moved into the more democratic area of
furnishing fabrics, broadening her scope to include carpets, wallpapers and
table linens. Her work formed part of what she later described as a
"tremendous surge of vitality" after the war. Her success was part
and parcel of the Homes for the People movement, the Britain Can Make It
exhibition, and the proselytising spirit of the Council of Industrial Design.
Calyx, the first design that
brought her real fame, was exhibited at the Festival of Britain in 1951. A
large expanse of it hung in the Homes and Gardens pavilion, in the
"contemporary" dining room designed by Robin. The pattern of
free-floating cusps or mushroom caps, Lucienne's fresh interpretation of the
geometry of nature, was screen-printed on linen. The original colouring – so
redolent of the festival – was sharp yellow, orange, black and white on an
olive ground.
Heal's Fabrics were the
manufacturers of Calyx. So unconfident were they of its success that they paid
only half of the £20 that Lucienne had wanted to charge for the design. They
had the decency to pay her the other £10 later, once the pattern had won a gold
medal at the Milan Triennale and the international design award of the American
Institute of Decorators. Day was the first British designer ever to have won
this very influential American award.
Calyx was followed by the related
pattern Flotilla, a subtle composition of marine abstract shapes. This was
printed on rayon "for people who like Calyx but have smaller windows and
purses", as Lucienne said at the time. It retailed at 16s 9d (84p) a yard and
was chosen for the budget "People's House" at the Ideal Home
exhibition in 1952.
Lucienne's collaboration with
Heal's Fabrics continued for another 20 years and – as with Robin's enduring
relationship with Hille, the furniture manufacturers – became one of the
legendary partnerships of 20th-century British design. She was also designing
fabrics for Edinburgh Weavers and British Celanese, carpets for Tomkinsons and
Royal Wilton, wallpapers for Crown and an enormously successful range of glass
cloths for Thomas Somerset. You still sometimes spot the ghosts of these in
aged kitchens, and they were recently relaunched by the fashion designer and
modernism enthusiast Margaret Howell. With her wallpapers for the German firm
of Rasche and her patterns for Rosenthal ceramics, Lucienne was one of
Britain's rare international stars. She was much in demand to serve on the many
international design juries of the time.
Through the 1950s, Lucienne's
designs became gradually more linear, reminiscent of Ben Nicholson's paintings
and the pottery of the Swedish designer Stig Lindberg. She played with new
typography – as in Graphics, another famous prizewinning design – and with
ancient calligraphy, in Runic and Script. She introduced small sticklike
figures in her rather eerie double-take design Spectators.
In the 1960s, she moved on to
blocks, zigzags and stripes of pure bright colour, the equivalent of Patrick
Heron's paintings of that period. Her designs were usually made in gouache on
paper, and are works of art in themselves: the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester,
has a considerable collection.
My first meeting with Lucienne
was in the early 1960s, only weeks after I had been appointed the Guardian's
design correspondent. I remember it as nerve-wracking to visit her and Robin in
the house in Chelsea I had so often seen in the "lifestyle" features
then burgeoning in newspapers and magazines. The Days had even been featured in
an advertisement for Smirnoff vodka: Lucienne disconcertingly resembled the
young Vivien Leigh. The design stars were less alarming than I had imagined,
Lucienne displaying a reassuring streak of practicality.
In the 1970s, Lucienne made a
risky transition from industrial design to craft. At the time she was
consultant to the John Lewis department stores and had been commissioned to
design a set of five shutter doors for the store in Newcastle. Seeing the
designs on her drawing board, an architect friend assumed these were designs
for embroidery. Day's "silk mosaic" tapestries evolved from there.
Made in a technique developed from traditional patchwork, they are abstract
patterns built up with tiny pieces of shot silk, often as small as one
centimetre square, which glow and shimmer.
Working with two assistants,
Lucienne was involved in the construction of her tapestries as well as the
designing. Some were sold privately or given to friends; some were made to
commission. One of the most spectacular is the tapestry known as the Window
(1986), commissioned for the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster
– a huge abstract colour-burst commemorating a designer whose life revolved
around texture and colour.
 |
The Window tapestry - Lucienne Day
http://www.gac.culture.gov.uk/ |
Lucienne was too shy to find
public roles easy. But she saw the importance of female visibility in a largely
male-dominated profession. Only the fifth woman to be elected to the elite
Faculty of Royal Designers for Industry, she became the first female Master
(1987-89). She steeled herself to get through the occasions when she had to
preside at a dinner or make a platform speech. Five years later she was
succeeded by another iconic female master, the fashion designer Jean Muir, and
one always sensed a certain rivalry between the design world's two grandes
dames.
Lucienne was a woman of rare
talent and great courage. Her personal achievement was triumphally revealed in
the Days' joint retrospective exhbition at the Barbican Centre, London, in
2001. She balanced a demanding career, a secure domestic life and the
upbringing of her much-loved daughter Paula at a time when such a balance was
anything but usual: women designers everywhere are in her debt. She is survived
by Robin and Paula.
• (Désirée) Lucienne Day, designer,
born 1 January 1917; died 30 January 2010
http://www.theguardian.com/
Magdalena Abakanowicz (born 1930)
 |
Magdalena Abakanowicz
kultura.wp.pl
|
The University of Texas at
Austin publish this information about this artist.
Born to a family of landed
gentry, Magdalena Abakanowicz was profoundly affected both by her solitary
childhood and by the devastation of World War II. She learned to escape from
loneliness and cruelty by taking refuge in imagination, but her imaginings
inevitably reflected her world. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw,
Poland, from 1950 to 1954, when socialist realism was the official mode, yet
she preferred to paint huge gouaches of abstract plants and natural forms.
Encouraged by the master weaver
Maria Laszkiewicz, Abakanowicz soon began working with natural fibers. In the
1960s, she created weavings of flax, hemp, horsehair, sisal, and wool. Her use
of natural materials and organic forms was an expression of her resistance to
the totalitarian regime and the strictures of socialist realism. Unlike many
women weavers of that time and place, Abakanowicz rejected utilitarian concerns
to create large reliefs and freestanding forms called Abakans: bulbous, flowing,
organic, abstract forms hanging from a wall or ceiling. These works, with their
densely textured surfaces that do not invite touch, are haunting and ominous
rather than domestic.
 |
Working on Abakans
www.abakanowicz |
After the popular revolution
sparked by the labor-union movement Solidarity, socialist realism was no longer
the dominant mode of expression. As other artists in Poland turned to abstraction,
Abakanowicz became interested in the evocative power of human imagery, but
implicit rather than explicit, as in her series of Garments that suggest standing figures by means
of their empty clothes.
Although she worked for many
years outside the official art system in Poland, Abakanowicz attained
international renown. Her fiber works were exhibited widely in museums
throughout Europe during the 1970s. The retrospective organized by the Museum
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1982 brought her critical acclaim in the
United States. Since then, her works have been exhibited and acquired by many
museums and collectors around the world.
From the 1970s through the 1990s,
Abakanowicz created many series of figure sculptures, all meditating on aspects
of collective life and conformity. Starting withAlterations, she glued
burlap sacking and other rough fabrics over metal frames and plaster casts of
nude bodies. As demand for her sculptures increased, Abakanowicz had her burlap
figures cast into bronze editions.
In some figures, the artist
eliminated heads and necks; in others, the hands or feet and even the entire
front or rear of the body, as in the monumental Backs of 1976–82. The largest
works consist of regimented figures, from as few as four to more than ninety
identical figures. Their repetition in rows evokes the dehumanization and
anonymity of totalitarian societies.
In contrast, Figure on a Trunk features a lone human form, presented
on a stage of sorts, as if for our approval, judgment, or condemnation. The
anonymous personage appears to be a dried-up, hollowed-out husk—a mere shell or
remnant of flesh, emptied of life and energy. Headless, the figure evokes an
effigy, passively waiting for change and completion. The bench on which he
stands seems stable, yet it rests on two logs that could roll out from
underneath, suggesting a precarious balance.
 |
Figure on a Trunk - 1998 bronze
www.abakanowicz |
Zandra Rhodes (born 1940)
 |
Zandra Rhodes
zandralandwordpress.com |
Zandra Rhodes has an
extensive website and this is taken from the biography section
Zandra Rhodes was born in Chatham, Kent, UK in 1940 and introduced to
the world of fashion by her mother, a fitter for the Paris fashion House of
Worth and later a lecturer at Medway College of Art. Zandra studied at Medway
College of Art, Kent UK, and then at The Royal College of Art in London. Her major
area of study was printed textile design.
Her early textile designs were considered too outrageous by the
traditional British manufacturers so she decided to make dresses from her own
fabrics and pioneered the very special use of printed textiles as an intrinsic
part of the garments she created. In 1967 she opened her first shop: The Fulham
Road Clothes Shop in London with Sylvia Ayton. In 1969 she set up on her own
and took her collection to New York where Diana Vreeland featured her garments
in American Vogue, after which she started selling to Henri Bendel in NY,
followed by Sakowitz, Neiman Marcus and Saks. In the UK, Zandra was given her
own area in Fortnum and Mason, London. She was Designer of the Year in 1972 and
in 1974 Royal Designer for Industry. In 1975 she founded her own shop off
Bond Street London and boutique area in Marshall Fields, Chicago.
Zandra’s own lifestyle is as dramatic, glamorous and extrovert as her
designs. With her bright pink hair, theatrical make-up and art jewellery, she has
stamped her identity on the international world of fashion. She was one of the
new wave of British designers who put London at the forefront of the
international fashion scene in the 1970′s. Her unique use of bold prints,
fiercely feminine patterns and theatrical use of colour has given her garments
a timeless quality that makes them unmistakably a Rhodes creation. In 1977 she
pioneered the pink and black jersey collection with holes and beaded safety
pins that earned her the name of “Princess of Punk”. Her posters from
this period have been a continuous inspiration for make-up artists and are collector’s
items.
She has designed for clients as diverse as Diana, Princess of Wales,
Jackie Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor and Freddie Mercury of the rock group ‘Queen’.
She continues to clothe and design for the rich and famous around the world
from royalty to rock stars including: HRH Princess Michael of Kent, Debbie
Harry, Bianca Jagger, Kylie Minogue, Anastasia, Paris Hilton, Joan Rivers and
the late Isabella Blow.
 |
Zandra designed for Princess Diana
www.guardian.com |
Zandra’s dresses are the ultimate dress-up dress. Helen Mirren, star
of “The Queen” wore a Zandra Rhodes when she received her award from BAFTA and
Sarah Jessica Parker dressed up in a Zandra for “Sex and the City”. Her vintage
pieces have long been collected by Tom Ford and Anna Sui and have been worn by
Kelly Osborne, Ashley Olsen, Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell.
Zandra Rhodes collections are sold in the top stores and boutiques
around the world but her work does not just stop with dresses and printed textiles.
It encompasses various exciting licences including jewellery, wrapping paper,
china for Royal Doulton and furs for Pologeorgis in New York. She has also
collaborated with MAC to produce a limited edition make-up range.
Since 2000 Zandra’s career has diversified into designing sets and
costumes for the opera. She first worked for San Diego Opera, who invited her
to do costumes for The Magic Flute. After The Magic Flute, she was asked to
design both sets and costumes for Bizet’s Pearl Fishers in 2004. This has
toured around the USA and Canada, including San Francisco, New York, Washington
National Opera and L’Opera de Montreal.
 |
Set for Aida - Zandra Rhodes
www.guardian.com |
Most recently, she worked with Houston Grand Opera on
Egyptian-inspired designs for Verdi’s ‘Aida’, which then showed at the English
National Opera 2007 and encored in 2008. This same Aida was the opening
and closing opera for San Francisco Grand Opera in 2011 and will be performed
in San Diego April of 2013.
Additionally, Zandra has set up the Fashion and Textile Museum in London
which was officially opened May 2003 by HRH Princess Michael of Kent. Mexican
architect Ricardo Legorreta designed the museum, which is in stunning pink and
orange, and already has a preservation plaque. The museum is dedicated to
showing the work of fashion and textile designers from the 1950′s onwards. This
museum has created several notable exhibitions: “My Favorite Dress”, “The
Little Black Dress”, and Zandra’s very own “Zandra Rhodes: A Lifelong Love
Affair with Textiles”, which is a major monographic exhibition exploring the
forty year career of the iconic British Designer herself. Since the
original opening of this exhibition, “Zandra Rhodes: A Lifelong Love Affair
with Textiles” has been exhibited in several museums in cities across the world,
including The Franz Meyer Museum in Mexico City, RMIT in Melbourne, Australia,
Corso Como in Milan, and most recently at the Mingei in San Diego.
Zandra was made a Commander of the British Empire in 1997 in
recognition of her contribution to fashion and textiles and has nine Honorary
Doctorates from Universities in both the UK and USA. In May 2010 she was
installed as Chancellor of the University of the Creative Arts (UCA) at the
Banqueting House, Whitehall UK.
http://www.zandrarhodes.com/about
Judy Chicago (born 1939)
 |
Judy Chicago
www.guardian.com |
This information is
taken from an article in the Observer by Rachel Cooke on Sunday 4th
November 2012
Judy Chicago isn't
a great one for false modesty – or modesty of any kind, come to that. When she
talks about her work, words such as "monumental" and
"major" fall quickly and easily from her lips. As a young woman, she
says, she wanted not only to paint and draw, but to "set her sights on
history" – her aim was to bag herself a place in the canon. As for her
elaborate 1979 mega sculpture The
Dinner Party, a provocatively feminist work which celebrates the lives and
work of 1,038 notable women, you can forget what the critics say (the late
Robert Hughes called it: "Mainly cliché… with the colours of a Taiwanese
souvenir factory"; Hilton Kramer of the New York Times called it: "Very bad art… failed art… art so mired
in the pieties of a cause that it quite fails to capture any independent
artistic life of its own"). They're just plain wrong. "I've watched
it change people's lives," says Chicago. "And the fact that the Elizabeth A Sackler Center [for Feminist Art, where The Dinner Party is permanently housed] accounts for a
third of all the traffic to the Brooklyn
Museum is testament to the
importance of it."
 |
Detail from The Dinner Party - Mary Wollstonecraft's place
Judy Chicago 1974-79
www.theguardian.com |
To be fair, this is what a life spent working with your
back against the wall does for a girl: either you crumple and disappear, or you
develop a Teflon exterior, a shiny veneer of undentable confidence. Chicago is
72. She began her career in the 60s, long before political correctness and
women's studies classes were invented, and her "dinosaur" professors
at the University of California, Los Angeles, pretty much hated what she was
doing right from the start.
Her early working life was lonely and she was mostly
broke. "I didn't make myself an outsider," she says. "The art
world made me an outsider. Of course, isolation is essential to the creative
act. You have to be with yourself, with your ideas. Virginia Woolf talked about
it as fishing: you sit on the shore, you drop your line, and you wait for the
fish to jump. But I also had to protect myself from the craziness, all the
antagonism, around me. It was difficult. I'm not going to say it was anything
else. Not everybody could have managed it."
What did she sacrifice along the way? "Children.
There was no way on this earth I could have had children and the career I've
had. But you know what? I don't care how much I had to give up. This was
what I wanted. You have to make choices. You can't have everything in
life."
Chicago is speaking to me from her home in New Mexico – a
historic railroad hotel that looks like it has come straight out of an old
western – and the delay on the line is contriving to make our conversation
sound even more earnest than it would be if she was sitting opposite me. A
portentous pause precedes her answers; jokey comments (on my part) are out of
the question, being more likely to misfire than cheap Catherine wheels.
We're talking ahead of what you might call her British
moment. Next month will see no fewer than three shows of her work in the UK.
The biggest of these will be at the Ben Uri Gallery in north London – better
known as the London Jewish Museum of Art – which will house the first British
museum survey of her work, featuring pieces from Chicago's personal archive as
well as loans from public collections in the US. Meanwhile, there will be two
smaller shows at Riflemaker in Soho (Deflowered, an exhibition of early work
including Birth Hood, Flight Hoodand Bigamy Hood – depictions of male and female
genitalia sprayed in automotive lacquer on to a car hood) and The Black-E in
Liverpool (Voices from the Song of Songs, a series of paired
prints).
Is she thrilled by this interest? Yes, in her own
somewhat cool way. "One of my goals since the permanent housing of The Dinner Party in 2007 has been to develop an awareness
that it is only one piece in a really large body of work. In the UK there's not
a lot of understanding of my work, except for The
Dinner Party."
This is certainly true. But with Chicago, all roads lead
inevitably to The Dinner
Party, the monumental installation she created between 1974 and 1979, with
the help of numerous volunteers and at a cost of about $250,000. This is what
she will be remembered for, and she knows it. The piece consists of a
triangular table, 48ft long at each side (the triangle is a symbol of
equality). The table is laid with 39 place settings, each one designed to
reflect the accomplishments of the woman whose name is embroidered on the
runner beside it – among the women included are Hildegard of Bingen, Mary
Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf.
Beneath the table is a "heritage
floor", the names of a further 999 women (Catherine of Aragon, Colette,
Clytemnestra) inscribed on its tiles. It sounds uncontroversial, celebrating,
as it does, the history of women through applied arts such as embroidery and
china painting. But then you look at the plates. Each one is decorated
with a symbol that resembles a vulva. Depending on your point of view,
this is either reductive, vulgar and semi-pornographic, or it's celebratory, taboo-breaking
and bracingly political.
 |
| The Dinner Party - the whole work |
Is Chicago tired of talking about it? Not at all. Her
abiding relationship with The
Dinner Party is, for her,
simply another aspect of its legacy. "It's unusual for an artist to stay
involved with a work after they've finished it for as long as I did. It took 26
years to find a permanent home for it, but unless that happened, it was in
danger of repeating the story it recounted– by which I mean the repeated
erasure of women from history. I was not released from the piece until it was
housed."
And since it went to Brooklyn, have attitudes to it
softened? In 1979 some galleries refused to show it at all. "Well, it
doesn't have the charge it had for the dinosaur critics of my generation,"
she says. "The Dinner Party marks
the moment when history changed, and we reclaimed the right to deal with our
own subject matter, in our own way – and young people take all that for
granted."
This doesn't mean its work is done. "I read
Caitlin Moran's How to Be a
Woman," says Chicago, her twangy voice rising indignantly.
"There's a chapter where she says: let's admit it, girls, for the last
100,000 years women have basically done fuck all. I'm like: excuse me? She's a
smart girl and yet so ignorant. So, yes, there's been change, and no, there
hasn't been change."
Art-world statistics, in particular, still make for
depressing reading. Work by women artists comprises just 3-5% of major
permanent collections in the US and Europe. "It's alarming. In our
institutions, women are still an add-on to a male-centred curriculum," she
says.
Chicago was born Judith Cohen in – you guessed it –
Chicago (she changed her name in the 60's by way of a feminist statement, though
it was galling to discover that she required her husband's signature for this
to be legal). Her father, Arthur, worked nights at the post office; her mother,
May, was a secretary. Arthur was active in the Communist party, and in the 50's
found himself a victim of McCarthyism.
"Starting out, several things sustained me. One was
my burning desire to make art. Another was when I realised what women before me
had gone through in order for me to have the opportunities that I had. When I
felt rejected, I thought about Elizabeth Blackwell [the first woman in the US
to receive a medical degree]. At medical school, no one spoke to her for two
years. Women used to spit on her in the street. I thought: if she can do it, I
can. But the most important thing was the family. I had a wonderful
father, with wonderful values. He believed it was possible to change the world.
Yet at school, children's newspapers portrayed people like him as evil. There
was a contradiction between my experience and what the world was saying, and I
had to learn to trust my experience."
At three, she began to draw. At five, she started
attending classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. She studied for her degree
at UCLA, but it wasn't until graduate school that the themes that have
dominated her work since began to emerge. Her professors were
dismayed-bordering-on-horrified by works such as Bigamy, in which an abstract
penis was "stopped in flight" before it could unite with its vaginal
equivalent (this work connected to the death of her first husband, who had died
in a car crash).
Chicago, though, was not to be put off. She did exactly
what she wanted to do. Her career is categorised not only by its content, but
by the way she jumps from medium to medium (she went to car-body school to
learn how to use an airbrush; more recently she has worked in glass). "I'm
not like most artists," she says. "I'm not career driven. Damien
Hirst's dots sold, so he made thousands of dots. I would, like, never to do that!
It wouldn't even occur to me." Nor would it occur to her to minimise the
importance of those who help her in the studio.
"The difference between me
and other artists is that I acknowledge the people who work with me. Henry
Moore had hundreds of 'assistants'. But they were really collaborators. They
brought their skills and knowledge, but when he was interviewed, he made them
leave while he jumped in front of the best sculpture in the room. It's a whole
unexamined area of the art world, this hidden collaboration."
Before we hang up, I must ask: has she read Vagina, Naomi Wolf's new
book? "Yeah, I've read it. The reviews were so vitriolic, I wondered: what
in God's name did she say that set off such a firestorm? It was exactly the
same kind of vitriol that met The
Dinner Party."
And what did she think? "It could
have been an important book. Some of the issues she raises about how women view
their bodies are important, and some of the fury about that comes out of shame.
But it's not an important book because she completely avoided the subject of genital
mutilation."
Is she likely to return to the subject
of the vagina herself? "Probably not. I say this all the time. When I was
young in the 70's, we cast the dialogue entirely around gender. We assumed all
women were our friends and all men were our enemies. That was a completely
erroneous assumption. It has to do with values, not gender. Some of the best
feminists are men. Gender is part of a larger structure of oppression and
injustice." A dry laugh. "I guess you could say that my eyes were
lifted from my vagina."
Issey Miyake (born 1938)
 |
Issey Miyake
www.biography.com |
Although I tried to
resist Wikipedia because it’s not always reliable there was little else on the internet
about Issey Miyake’s work just lots about the brand.
Miyake was born
22 April 1938 in Hiroshima,
Japan. As a seven year-old, he witnessed and survived the atomic bomb dropped
on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.[2] He studied graphic
design at the Tama Art University in Tokyo, graduating in
1964. After graduation, he worked in Paris and New
York City. Returning to Tokyo in 1970, he founded the Miyake Design Studio,
a high-end producer of women's fashion.
In the late
1980s, he began to experiment with new methods of pleating that would allow both flexibility of
movement for the wearer as well as ease of care and production. In which the
garments are cut and sewn first, then sandwiched between layers of paper and
fed into a heat press, where they are pleated. The fabric's 'memory' holds the
pleats and when the garments are liberated from their paper cocoon, they are
ready-to wear. He did the costume for Ballett
Frankfurt with pleats in a
piece named "the Loss of Small Detail" William Forsythe and also work on ballet "Garden
in the setting".
 |
Issey Miyake designed for the Ballet Frankfurt
mds.isseymiyake.com |
He had a long
friendship with Austrian-born pottery artist Dame Lucie Rie.
She bequeathed to him her substantial collection of ceramic and porcelain buttons, which he
integrated into his designs and presented in new collections.
He also
developed a friendship with Apple's Steve Jobs and produced the black turtlenecks
which would become a part of Jobs' signature attire. Jobs said, "So I
asked Issey to make me some of his black turtlenecks that I liked, and he made
me like a hundred of them."[1]
In 1994 and
1999, Miyake turned over the design of the men's and women's collections respectively,
to his associate, Naoki Takizawa, so that he
could return to research full-time. In 2007, Naoki Takizawa opened his own
brand, supported by the Issey Miyake Group and was replaced, as a Creative
Director of the House of Issey Miyake, by Dai Fujiwara.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issey_Miyake
Tracey Emin (born 1963)
 |
Tracey Emin
www.the guardian.com |
This is from the
artists website.
Tracey
Emin’s art is one of disclosure, using her life events as inspiration for works
ranging from painting, drawing, video and installation, to photography,
needlework and sculpture. Emin reveals her hopes, humiliations, failures and
successes in candid and, at times, excoriating work that is frequently both
tragic and humorous.
Emin’s
work has an immediacy and often sexually provocative attitude that firmly
locates her oeuvre within the tradition of feminist discourse. By
re-appropriating conventional handicraft techniques – or ‘women’s work’ – for
radical intentions, Emin’s work resonates with the feminist tenets of the
‘personal as political’. In Everyone I’ve Ever Slept With, Emin used the
process of appliqué to inscribe the names of lovers, friends and family within
a small tent, into which the viewer had to crawl inside, becoming both voyeur
and confidante.
 |
Everyone I ever slept with - Tracey Emin 1995
faculty.vassar.edu |
Her interest in the work of Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele
particularly inform Emin’s paintings, monoprints and drawings, which explore
complex personal states and ideas of self-representation through manifestly
expressionist styles and themes.
Tracey
Emin was born in London in 1963, and studied at Maidstone College of Art and
the Royal College of Art, London. She has exhibited extensively internationally
including solo and group exhibitions in Holland, Germany, Japan, Australia and
America. In 2007 Emin represented Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale, was made
a Royal Academician and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal
College of Art, London, and a Doctor of Letters from the University of Kent and
Doctor of Philosophy from London Metropolitan University. During the Edinburgh
Festival in 2008, Emin’s survey exhibition ’20 Years’ opened at the Scottish
National Gallery of Modern Art and then toured on to Centro de Arte
Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain and the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland (March
19th – June 21st 2009). In May 2011, Emin had a major solo exhibition at the
Hayward, London. Emin currently lives and works in London.
Comment
It has been noticeable
that living artists have a very different web presence to deceased ones. There is much more information about artists
who have died simply because their eminence has generated a wealth of writing
and comment. They can be examined retrospectively.
When an artist is
living they tend to have a personally generated web presence and use it as part
of their brand. It is simply a marketing
tool.
