YES MONKEY!

YesMonkey! checked this out for you:

Exhibition: 100 Best Posters of the year from Switzerland, Germany and Austria;

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For better images/digital versions/wider scope:

http://www.100-beste-plakate.de/2011/bildschau_11.htm

Rembrandt’s The Night Watch is a survivor painting.

A psychopath went crazy on it one day and stabbed through all the main characters that populate this painting. After restoring it, around 50 years later, it was stabbed again by a school teacher who then committed suicide.

It almost fell apart. All guesses were that The Night Watch is over.

After a long process of restoration, the painting healed again, only with a small scar right above the dog (found in the far right side of the painting) as proof of the assault.

In 1990, the painting was attacked yet again; this time by using sulfuric acid on the canvas.

Again, it was saved, and it healed.

Amazingly enough, The Night Watch, the most vandalized painting in the history of contemporary art, still stands gracefully in a low lit room at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

It’s an inspiration just to look at it.

(On Andy Warhol, Oldenburg, and the Pop Art movement…)

“What he (Andy Warhol) loved about American food, he said, was that it was always the same, so that the Queen of England could not get a better hot dog than anyone else. “A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking,” he once wrote. “All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it and you know it.” So repetition was integral to his vision, soup can after soup can after soup can, Marilyn after Marilyn, until the familiarity dissolves and we sense the miraculousness of the commonplace.

He once said, “The Pop artist did images that anyone walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second…all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all.” It would then be the function of the labels he used that they be recognized in split second by everyone who used the supermarket or the hardware store, who lived the culture, something in connection with which not knowing what it was was a mark of total alienation. “Who is that?” asked of a movie actor’s face, is the death of fame. “What is that?” asked of the American flag - or the hammer-and-sickle — betrays the visitor from distant galaxies. Uniqueness is not sought-for attribute, since it entails a form of oblivion and hence non-reality.

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The Abstract Expressionists were also sacramentalists, but chiefly as celebrants of paint. Paint symbolized paint for them. The paintiness of paint, its fluidity, its viscosity, the way it forms a skin, the way it wrinkles when it dries too thickly, the way it conceals and reveals, the way it pours, spatters, splashes, holds the hair marks of brushes - and the way it drips. Whatever they could dribble paint over became a work of art, the anything becomes holy when blessed.

Everything was painterly, dripped over, splashed on - as if they could not be considered art unless they were first and last made of paint.

Warhol’s own breakthrough is legendary and has often been told. It was filmmaker Emile di Antonio who was the agent of conversion. Here are his won words:

One night [this was summer 1960], I went over and had a bunch of drinks and he put 2 large paintings next to each other against the wall. Usually he showed me his work more casually, so I realized this was a presentation. He had painted two pictures of Coke bottles about six feet tall. One was just a pristine black-and-white Coke bottle. The other had a lot of abstract expressionist marks on it. I said “Come on, Andy, the abstract one is a piece of shit, the other one is remarkable. It’s our society, it’s who we are, it’s absolutely beautiful and naked and you ought to destroy the first one and show the other.”

Coca Cola is “who we are”: it is impossible not to hear the faint unmistakable Feuerbachian thesis in Di Antonio’s spirited words: Man is what Man eats. We are soft drinks, canned soup, hamburgers, potato chips, sweet pickles, ice cream cones. We are Pop. We are not paint. From where the impulse arose, to colossalize the Coke bottle, is one of the deep questions in the social history of modern times. The Coke bottle is one of the classic shapes of modern sensibility, and archeologists of the future will surely see inscribed in its silhouette the narrow-waisted female form, and infer from its form its function, to hold some sweet elixir of arousal and fulfillment.

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Warhol’s intuition was that nothing an artist could do would give us more of what art sought than reality already gave us. So it was crucial that things be shown as they are, without shadows, perspective, chiaroscuro, touch, paint.

Pop redeemed the world in an intoxicating way. I have the most vivid recollection of standing at an intersection in some American city, waiting to be picked up. There were used-car lots on two corners, with swags of plastic pennants fluttering in the breeze and brash signs proclaiming unbeatable deals, crazy prices, insane bargains. There was a huge self-service gas station on the third corner, and a supermarket on the fourth, with signs in the window announcing sales of Del Monte, Cheerios, Land O Lakes butter, Ling Island ducklings, Velveeta, Sealtest, Chicken of the Sea…Heavy trucks roared past, with logos on their sides. Lights were flashing. The sound of raucous music flashed out of the windows of automobiles. I was educated to hate all this. I would have found it intolerably crass and tacky when I was growing up as aesthete. As late as my own times, beauty was, in the words of George Santayana, “a living presence, or an aching absence, day and night.” I think it still is that for someone like Clement Greenberg or Hilton Kramer. But I thought, Good heavens. This is just remarkable!

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Herbert Marcuse was my colleague. (…) He hated Garage Sale (by Martha Rossler). For him it celebrated the values of the bourgeoisie, when it ought instead, as he saw it, to be the mission of art to criticize these values. (…) He could not assimilate it (Garage Sale) to his own views on the moral agency of art, which were very largely Ruskinian. And I, on the other hand, was never able to grasp how aesthetic beauty was going to transform society into political utopia in which he believed, For one thing, I knew too many aesthetes who were moral monsters - how much good did beauty do them?

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What Pop artists, what Warhol and Oldenburg, Lichtenstein and Rosenquist were saying was what I in effect spontaneously said at that anonymous intersection, wherever it was: This is remarkable. The Abstract Expressionist Coca Cola Bottle was in its own right marvelous emblem of the effort to make art out of ordinary signs, but, as Di Antonio saw, it was something of an artistic monster. Its drips and swipes of expressionistically used paint pointed in one direction, the iconography of the Coke bottle in another. It tried to fuse two artistic imperatives into one when in fact they contradicted each other. One imperative insisted on the difference between art and life and the other imperative insisted on their oneness. “I am for an art…that does something other thansit on its own ass in the museum,” Oldenburg wrote, in one of the great manifestos. “I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero. I am for an art that embroils itself with everyday crap & still comes out on tip.”

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In any case, if these were a single work in the century I would like to own, it would be it, the Abstract Expressionist Coca-Cola Bottle, with its visible tension between two philosophies of art, two philosophies of life, a battleground on which a war between the dear commonplace world an some other exalted, idealized world, begun with Plato in the dawn of metaphysics, continues to be waged.”

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On the 9th of November 2010, the Contemporary Art Evening Auction at Sotheby’s in New York sold Andy Warhol’s “Coca-Cola [4] Large Coca-Cola” (1962), an acrylic, pencil and Letraset on canvas (81 3/4 x 56 3/4 in. 207.6 x 144.1 cm.) for $35,362,500.

Warhol’s painting, which was the last of four paintings of individual Coca-Cola bottles executed in 1961 and 1962, and the largest of the group, was disputed by eight bidders.

Arabic Typography Explosions I started exploring but gave up on due to lack of ink, and passion.

Art Nouveau - French for New Art - is the style of, as I like to call it, decor, ornament, making things look beautiful and enchanting, just for the sake of beauty and enchantment, without emphasizing on a functional - for the lack of a better word - side of the elements used.

Art Nouveau was one of the few styles that encompassed everything; design arts, architecture, furniture and product design all the way to fashion and graphics. Even till today, Art Nouveau influenced and inspired motion graphics is found everywhere.

The identifying visual quality of the Art Nouveau style is the organic plantlike lines. Freed from gravity, it flows with elegant grace as it defines, modulates, and decorates a given space. Vine tendrils, flowers, birds, and the human female form were a frequent motif from which this fluid line was adapted.

In earlier three-dimensional design, ornaments often were mere decorative elements applied to the surface, but in Art Nouveau the basic forms and shapes were formed by, and evolved with, the design of the ornament. This was, to say the least, revolutionary. It unified structure, decoration and an intended function.

One of the most awesome Art Nouveau pioneers is the czech artist Alphonse Mucha - who designed the above shown piece. Mucha just loved using the female figure in his work - it may be the most reoccuring element. Mucha’s women project an archetypal sense of unreality. They’re exotic and sexy and and sensuous, and yet maidenlike. 

Simply beautiful.

This is one of my ultimate favorite pieces of Mucha’s work; a poster for Job cigarette papers, 1898. Mucha just delighted in filling up the total space with animated form and ornament.

Although looked down at by some designers, no one can deny that Art Nouveau was, and still is, one of the most influential styles.

I’m usually on the team of people favoring functional design, just using what you need in order to communicate a specific message across, going with the slogan of: Use it, or lose it.

But to each their own. I cannot deny the beauty of Art Nouveau inspired work. It’s a delight to look at.

One of my favorite contemporary artists is Gabriel Moreno. His work is obviously directly derived from the forms and visual identity of the Art Nouveau period. Just a little more hip and modernized.

Art Nouveau; FTW.

speaking of using something - in your design - just because you like it.

No introductions needed for one of Van Gogh’s master pieces; The Starry Night.

The Starry Night was painted during what is known as the Post-Impressionism phase in the late 19th century. As already indicated in the name, impressionists were mostly concerned with optical realism; the impression of the something, as opposed to anatomical/scientific realism, the actual, “real” nature of the something. Van Gogh, along with Gauguin, were mainly concerned with and explored emotional content in their work.

Van Gogh shared the Impressionist passion for landscape. The Starry Night illustrates his genius for intense, expressive color, his powerful imagery, and his strong sense of line. Their movement from left to right is counteracted by the hills cascading in the opposite direction. Stabilizing the animated surface of the sky are the verticals of the two foreground cypress trees and the church spire.

Because Van Gogh painted The Starry Night while in a mental asylum, it has been seen as the reflection of a disturbed mind - which is basically bullshit given the great control of formal elements and technical skill it took to paint such a beauty.

I love Van Gogh - just because he is so…human. He’s disturbed and twisted and dark and far from perfect - he’s great and genius and his work addresses my emotions and intellect as a human being rather than the society-idialized uniformed version of myself.

I appreciate that.

Before I start talking about this gorgeous poster, I just wanna say that Armin Hoffman is a verified Dude; one of my all time favorite designers - and he basically just kicks ass for a living.

In my Design history class back when I was still cute, the final exam’s last question was: After a semester of being introduced to the history of design, who is your favorite designer, and why? My answer was Armin Hoffman - because he kicks ass for a living.

Awesome stuff.

Designed in 1959, Armin Hoffman created that beautiful poster for the Basel theater production of Giselle.

Hoffman was one of the pioneers when it came to applying deep aesthetic values and understanding of form. He seeks a dynamic harmony, where all the parts of the design are unified. His number one design element that reoccurs over and over in his work is: Contrast. He sees the relationship of contrasting elements as the means of invigorating visual design.

These contrasts include [and while I list them here, refer back to Giselle]: light to dark, curved lines to straight lines, form to counterform, soft and hard, dynamic to static, with resolution achieved when the designer brings the total into an absolute harmony.

When we look at Giselle the contrast between elements is astounding. An organic, kinetic, and soft photographic image contrasts intensely with geometric, static, and hard-edged typographic shapes. The verticality of the poster is emphasized by, first of all, the format (duh), the vertical nature of the photograph and the vertical type (which in so many many cases looks hideous and I just resent it - vertical type - but here I almost wanna kiss it.)

Notice the tight kerning of the letters (the spaces between the letterforms) which, in my opinion, reestablishes the word “Giselle” as one tight, solid entity to be juxtaposed against the almost blurred, soft image of the ballerina.

Armin Hoffman currently lives in Basel, Switzerland. One of my friends who took part in a workshop there around 2 years ago was fortunate enough to pay him a visit! I almost *died* looking at her pictures with him and his beautiful wife Dorothea - who Armin Hoffman opened a design studio with back in the day. Above is a picture of the *real* Giselle poster in Armin Hoffman’s Archive. *Jizz*

That’s Dorothea!! She was explaining to a bunch of students the plain genius of Giselle.

seriously, that is one yummy poster.

awesomeness; CHECK.

[Picasso, Guernica - 1973, Oil on canvas]

So, Pablo Picasso’s work falls into many categories according to the style he adopted at a point in time. Guernica was painted during what is known to be the Analytic Cubism Phase - which basically meant approaching space differently, throw the one vantage point thing out of the window and insert the multiple vantage points; et voila: simultaneous views on a flat surface.

Talk about genius.

Guernica depicts Picasso’s take on the civil war in Spain between Republicans and the Fascist army. It combines several traditional motifs that have been wrapped up in a new surrealist dress. Consistent with its theme of death and dying, the painting is nearly devoid of color, although there is considerable tonal variation within the range of black to white. If you look closely, the painting is divided in three sections; a compositional structure that depicts the old triptychs of the Middle Ages. (Notice the semi triangle in the middle, that divides the painting to three).

Some of the motifs used are: The dying horse that represents the death of civilization, though it may be rescued by the woman with a lamp (Liberty) rushing toward it. Another expression of hope, as well as the light of reason, appears in the motif combining the shape an eye with the sun’s rays and a lightbulb. On the left, a woman holds a dead baby on her lap in a pose reminiscent of Mary supporting Christ in Michelangelo’s Pieta.

Also, Picasso’s characteristic distortions emphasize the physical destruction of war. Eyes are twisted in and out of their sockets, ears and noses are slightly out of place. Although the integrity of the human form in maintained, it is subject to mutilation.

Picasso lent Guernica to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, stipulating that it remains there until democratic government was restored in Spain. In 1981, Guernica was returned to Spain.