Weimar

Friday, February 25, 2011

Indestructible Objects

Meret Oppenheim, Fur Gloves, 1936

Wilhelm Freddie, Zola's Writing Desk, 1936

Marcel Duchamp / Enrico Donati, Prière de Toucher (Please Touch), 1947

Meret Oppenheim, Turkey shoes, 1936

Elsa Shiparelli, Monkey Hair Shoes, 1938

Meret Oppenheim: Object (Luncheon In Fur), 1936

Marcel Marien, L'introuvable (Das Unauffindbare), 1937

Man Ray, Indestructible Object, 1921

Claude Cahun, Object, 1936

Marcel Jean, Specter of the Gardenia, 1936

Eileen Agar, Angel of Anarchy, 1936

Man Ray, Cadeau, 1921

Marcel Duchamp, Bottle Dryer, 1914

Hans Bellmer, The Doll, 1936

Ángel Ferrant, Maniquí (Mannequin), 1946

George Grosz / John Heartfield
Der wildgewordene Spießer Heartfield (Elektromechanische Tatlin-Plastik), 1920

Otto Morach, La boite a joujoux: The Blue Doll, 1918

Hanna Höch, DaDa Dolls, 1916

Luigi Veronesi, Devils, 1942

Puppets for "The Soldier's Tale" by Igor Stravinsky

Sophie Täuber, Military Guards (Die Wachen), 1918

Marionette for the play The King Stag (König Hirsch) by Carlo Gozzi, 1762

Alexandra Exter, L'Homme réclame [Publicity man], c. 1920

Pierre Klossowski, Diane et Acteon, c. 1975

et al., EN PASSANT, 2011

Denise Bellon, Salvador Dalí und sein Mannequin (Detail), 1938

Denise Bellon, Mannequin von André Masson (Detail), 1938

Marcel Duchamp, Why not sneeze Rose Sélavy?, 1921

André Breton wrote about Why not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy?:

I have in mind the occasion when Marcel Duchamp got hold of some friends to show them a cage which seemed to have no birds in it, but to be half-full of lumps of sugar. He asked them to lift the cage and they were surprised at its heaviness. What they had taken for lumps of sugar were really small lumps of marble which at great expense Duchamp had had sawn up specially for the purpose. The trick in my opinion is no worse than any other, and I would even say that it is worth nearly all the tricks of art put together.

Irina Polin, Butterfly 2009

Man Ray, L'énigme d'Isidore Ducasse, 1920 (Sewing Machine, Wool & Rope)

Joseph Beuys, Homogeneous Infiltration for Piano, 1966

Salvador Dalí, Hummer - oder aphrodisisches Telefon, 1936

Conroy Maddox, Onanistic Typewriter, 1940

Meret Oppenheim, Table with Bird's Legs, 1939

Isamu Noguchi, Monument to Heroes, 1943

Alexander Calder, Red and Black Waves on Grey Stalk, 1954

Leonid Sokov, Lenin and Giacometti, 1989

Georges Hugnet, Painted Stone in Form of a Mask, 1955

Jean Benoît, Antiquité du XXième siècle, 1965

Paul Joostens, Dada-Object, 1918

Kurt Schwitters, The Cathedral of Erotic Misery - Merzbau - Hanover - 1924

Wilhelm Freddie, Sex-paralyseappeal, 1936

Raoul Hausmann, The Spirit of Our Age - Mechanical Head, 1920

Oskar Schlemmer, Triadisches Ballett (Triadic Ballet), 1922. Costume

John Heartfield's and Rudolf Schlichter's Prussian Archangel assemblage (1920), depicts a pig-headed military officer that the artists suspended from the ceiling. The giant puppet is wrapped with a poster that reads "I come from Heaven, from Heaven on high" - the refrain from a well-known German Christmas carol. The sign dangling below further mocks the military: "In order to understand this work of art completely, one should drill daily for twelve hours with a heavily packed knapsack in full marching order in the Tempelhof Field [a military training ground in Berlin]." When the Prussian Archangel was exhibited in 1920 during the First International Dada Fair in Berlin, authorities charged the artists with defaming the German army. In the end, Schlichter and Heartfield were acquitted.

Paul Klee, Untitled (Big Eared Clown), 1925

Lyonel Feininger, Toy Town, 1925

Hermann Finsterlin, Study for a House of Sociability, project, c. 1920

Finsterlin, a painter, toy designer, and architectural visionary, is closely associated with the German Expressionist architecture of the 1920s, which privileged inspiration over rationalism. He was introduced to architect Bruno Taut and the Arbeitsrat für Kunst—a Berlin group of radical German architects, artists, and critics—when they invited amateurs to submit work for their 1919 Exhibition for Unknown Architects.

Einstein Tower in Potsdam-Berlin by Erich Mendelsohn, 1919-22

Georg Baselitz, My New Hat, 2003

"I paint German artists whom I admire. I paint their pictures, their work as painters, and their portraits too. But oddly enough, each of these portraits ends up as a picture of a woman with blonde hair. I myself have never been able to work out why this happens." - Georg Baselitz

German aquamanile depicting Airstotle’s girlfriend Phyllis riding him around the garden after Aristotle warned Alexander the Great about women. Copper alloy, 1400 AD.

The author wound up for an afterenactment by a magnificent transformation scene

Some of the images provided by http://mondo-blogo.blogspot.com

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Eugen Schönebeck

Eugen Schönebeck, c. 1965

Eugen Schönebeck was born in Heidenau near Dresden in 1936. In 1954, he enrolled at the College of Applied Arts in East Berlin. He left the German Democratic Republic in the following year for West Berlin to study at the city’s Academy of Fine Arts. In his years at the academy from 1955 to 1961, he became familiar with the more recent developments in European art and showed himself impressed by the works of Nicolas de Staël, Jean Fautrier, Henri Michaux, Wols, Hans Hartung, and others.

Eugen Schönebeck, Mao-Tse-tung, 1965

In 1957, he made friends with Georg Baselitz. An intense exchange of ideas about art ensued, which was to last for five years. Shortly after the publication of “Pandemonium II – Manifesto”, a poster-sized leaflet with texts by both artists, their collaboration found an end in 1962. Schönebeck had already turned his back to gestural painting at that time and gradually come to the conclusion that art had to be pointing a way forward. In Pandemonium II, he and Baselitz had called for a new art which was to detach itself from the prevailing abstract painting of Art Informel and Tachisme. This was how they hoped to open up a new approach to reality. “I regard the abyss of sincerity as a raison d’être, a bestiary, an entire life, an inner swelling force", Schönebeck emphasized in the “Manifesto”.

Eugen Schönebeck, Tortured Man, 1963

Schönebeck’s paintings and drawings from that time show mutated beings that seem to float between the world of the dead and the world of the living – fragmented and torn, oscillating between abstraction and figuration. The painting “Tortured Man” (above) describes a ghastly slaughter. We see the mutilated limbs of a man whose intestines are spilling to the floor.

Eugen Schönebeck, Ginster, 1963

These often grotesque works by Schönebeck draw on the childhood of the artist, who was only nine years old when the war was over, but still remembers the disfigured bloated corpses floating in the Elbe River and the German hordes marching through the destroyed scenery in and around Dresden. Schönebeck's and Baselitz's pictures were among the earliest works by German postwar artists giving form to the traumatic loss of belief in the lasting values of Fatherland and family.

Georg Baselitz, Acker, 1962

Schönebeck broke an explicit taboo with these pictures. In a manner more radical than his colleagues dared embarking on, he began giving a face to the dismantling of the pride in a German identity that was based on the crimes of World War II. Günter Grass, who enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts to study sculpture in 1953, later remarked in regard to those years that “arts ran the risk to drift off into the non-committal . . . the non-representational triumphed. Whether here or over there [in the German Democratic Republic]: who reflected circumstances in his pictures, was at loggerheads with reality, was dismissed by the jury.”

Eugen Schönebeck, Crucifixion, 1963

From 1963 on, Schönebeck, who had left the GDR as an anti-Stalinist and now found himself unable to return to his home country after the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, developed a growing political awareness in the confrontation with the European Left. In this atmosphere, he began to explore the subject of crucifixion which until 1964 was to manifest itself in four paintings which cleared a path for figures and colors. With these works, the artist succeeded in proceeding to an aesthetics which he would, within only one year, transform into an unmistakable style that had no real precursors and has remained without followers.

Eugen Schönebeck, True Man, 1964

It was the painting “True Man” (above) that rang in the new style in 1964. Schönebeck made a series of portraits of persons which might be called “Heroes of the East.” These are followed by two pictures showing Lenin and Mao as well as large-size portraits of the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Russian writer Boris Pasternak, and the Mexican painter and communist activist David Alfaro Siqueiros. For these paintings Schönebeck relied on a flat kind of style which he had learnt in a mural training course in the GDR.

Eugen Schönebeck, Majakowski, 1965

There was no market for such paintings at that time. In 1967, Schönebeck painted his last pictures and withdrew from the art scene. Though several of Schönebeck's works are to be found in important public collections, he has been largely forgotten among art historians. A current exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Francfort wants to correct this by assembling almost all his surviving canvases, of which there are about thirty in number, as well as thirty works on paper.