Part 4 Project 1 Stage 1

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.

Project 1

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 3^rd 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 4^th 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.

As of 2012, he is one of the co-Directors of 21 21 DESIGN SIGHT, Japan's first design museum.

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.

http://www.traceyeminstudio.com/biography/

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.