From the New York Times: Lawren Harris 1885-1970

Steve Martin Adds ‘Curator’ to His Wild and Crazy Résumé

By JORI FINKELSEPT. 25, 2015

Steve Martin and two curators have organized an exhibition of paintings by Lawren Harris. Credit John Francis Peters for The New York Times

LOS ANGELES — Steve Martin looked as if he were playing a fast-paced board game. Standing inside a gallery at the Hammer Museum here with its director and two curators, the tall actor was hunched over a small tabletop model of that very room.

The four took turns placing and replacing tiny pictures on the tiny museum walls. There was a lot of pointing and gesturing — though not quite the wild gesticulation of Mr. Martin’s most memorable characters. The goal was to hash out a preliminary arrangement of artworks before hanging the actual paintings.

“That’s a beautiful, moody iceberg picture,” Mr. Martin said, as an image no bigger than a business card — this one showing a soaring, snowy mountain peak — fell off a miniature wall.

Mr. Martin reached over to pick up the small reproduction and handed it to the museum’s director, Ann Philbin, who held the tape dispenser. “We’ve got to use stronger tape when we hang the paintings,” he said, with perfect comedic timing.

Yes, this multifaceted actor, comedian, New Yorker writer, novelist, semiprofessional magician and Grammy-winning banjo player, who has long been a serious collector of modern American painting, is adding a new role to his repertoire: art curator.

Working closely with two seasoned curators, Cynthia Burlingham from the Hammer Museum and Andrew Hunter from the Art Gallery of Ontario, he has organized a tightly focused, masterpiece-driven show, “The Idea of North,” to introduce the 20th-century Canadian painter Lawren Harris (1885-1970) to American museumgoers. It opens on Oct. 11 in Los Angeles before traveling to Boston and Toronto.

“He’s Canada’s greatest artist and nobody in America knows who he is, with a few exceptions,” said Mr. Martin, 70, who sees the show as a chance to use “my celebrity face” to try to draw attention to the painter he sees as a counterpart to Georgia O’Keeffe and Marsden Hartley.

Mr. Martin expressed disappointment that the Metropolitan Museum of Art had passed on the show. “I really wanted to have a venue in New York, but I’m very happy the show is going to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts,” he said.

Born in Ontario in 1885 into a manufacturing fortune, Harris helped to establish in 1920 the Group of Seven, painters who celebrated the vast, rugged Canadian terrain at a time when everything French was de rigueur. He soon developed a distinctive style, using flat expanses of color, spiky geometries like triangles and pyramids and a self-mirroring of forms to create highly stylized images of nature. Many of his favorite subjects, whether rays of sun skimming the surface of Lake Superior, dramatic Rockies peaks or hulking Arctic icebergs, are rendered in such strong, simplified volumes that they end up looking like architecture.

"North Shore, Lake Superior” by Canadian artist Lawren Harris. Credit NGC/via Family of Lawren S. Harris

Mr. Martin, who owns three paintings by Harris, spent much of the last two years working on the exhibition while also collaborating with Edie Brickell on a musical, “Bright Star,” headed for the Kennedy Center in Washington in December. The two also have a new album, “So Familiar,” coming out at the end of October.

“I always feel like all these things are linked,” he said, sitting in a small Hammer Museum study center, his eggplant-purple jacket and tie the color of some of Harris’s mountains.

“You might say it’s extreme to curate an art show and then do an hour banjo show, but it’s not that far off-center to me. And you apply the same principles to both — the first being, you do the best you can.

“Mountains in Snow: Rocky Mountain Paintings VII” by Canadian artist Lawren Harris. Credit The Thomson Collection/Art Gallery of Ontario

He carved out the time while enjoying family life — he and his wife, Anne Stringfield, have a young daughter. “For one, I don’t have a job,” he deadpanned.

But when talking about Harris’s paintings, Mr. Martin stayed away from quick one-liners, often pausing to find the right words and details to capture his experiences. He said he was first drawn to the work “maybe 20 years ago” in Canada, where he has done both comedy writing and filming. “I would stop at these amazing bookstores — big bookstores in little towns — and pick up books on Harris or the Group of Seven.”

“I would call them powerful, emotional landscapes,” he said, sounding more relaxed in the role of a fan than when talking about himself. “You can marvel at a 19th-century American landscape painting because you can’t believe you can see every leaf on every tree. But here there are no leaves and no trees, or nothing that looks like a living tree, and the response is much more emotional, I think.”

Rare and important, eggshell thin, figural, Acoma pottery turkey by Lucy M. Lewis 1900-1992

Available for purchase here

Lucy Martin Lewis passed away on March 12, 1992 at a supposed age of 93. Her year of birth is not known. She spent nearly all her life atop the high mesa of Acoma Pueblo, making pottery since the age of 7. She is largely responsible for the revival of Mimbres black-on-white pottery designs which are more than 1,000 years old. She was famous, as well, for her exquisite polychrome designs and her fine-line and lightning designs.

Always thanking Mother Earth for the clay, taking only as much clay as she needed, working the clay with only her hands, forming the vessel from coils of clay, scraping the walls with tools fashioned from gourds, painting the vessel with slips and paints made from clay and vegetal sources and, finally, firing the finished pieces in an outdoor handmade kiln. Lucy signed her pottery as Lucy M. Lewis. Lucy Lewis was one of the most widely respected potters from her pueblo. She was the last of the Acoma matriarchs. She followed pueblo tradition in every step of pottery production.

 

Considered one of the matriarchs of American Indian pottery, Lucy M. Lewis was born and raised on Sky City mesa, a land formation more than three hundred feet high in Acoma Pueblo, west of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Since there were no schools on the mesa, Lewis received no formal education or art classes. She learned pottery as a young child from her great-aunt and other Acoma Pueblo women. Lewis was instrumental in reviving eleventh-century, Mimbres-style pottery, characterized by black lines on white slip.
Lewis married and had nine children. She handled the household chores, helped her husband with the farming, and still found time for her pottery. Because of Acoma Pueblo’s remote location, Lewis was never helped – or interfered with – by archaeologists, museum curators, collectors, or tourists. She also did not travel to powwows or fairs, though she occasionally sold her pottery in the closest town, 20 miles away.
Lewis’s pottery first became known outside the pueblo in 1950, when she received a blue ribbon at the Annual Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial in Gallup, New Mexico. During the 1980s and 1990s Lewis received awards from the American Crafts Council, the College Art Association, the state of New Mexico, and the Honolulu Academy of Fine Arts. Lewis continued to pot well into her 80s. Some of her daughters and grandchildren also create pottery.

NMWA Exhibitions

A Living Tradition: Pueblo Pottery from the Collection, 2007
The Legacy of Generations: Pottery by American Indian Women, 1997
 

- See more at: http://nmwa.org/explore/artist-profiles/lucy-m-lewis#sthash.UbTWNBLF.dpuf

Considered one of the matriarchs of American Indian pottery, Lucy M. Lewis was born and raised on Sky City mesa, a land formation more than three hundred feet high in Acoma Pueblo, west of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Since there were no schools on the mesa, Lewis received no formal education or art classes. She learned pottery as a young child from her great-aunt and other Acoma Pueblo women. Lewis was instrumental in reviving eleventh-century, Mimbres-style pottery, characterized by black lines on white slip.
Lewis married and had nine children. She handled the household chores, helped her husband with the farming, and still found time for her pottery. Because of Acoma Pueblo’s remote location, Lewis was never helped – or interfered with – by archaeologists, museum curators, collectors, or tourists. She also did not travel to powwows or fairs, though she occasionally sold her pottery in the closest town, 20 miles away.
Lewis’s pottery first became known outside the pueblo in 1950, when she received a blue ribbon at the Annual Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial in Gallup, New Mexico. During the 1980s and 1990s Lewis received awards from the American Crafts Council, the College Art Association, the state of New Mexico, and the Honolulu Academy of Fine Arts. Lewis continued to pot well into her 80s. Some of her daughters and grandchildren also create pottery.

NMWA Exhibitions

A Living Tradition: Pueblo Pottery from the Collection, 2007
The Legacy of Generations: Pottery by American Indian Women, 1997
 

- See more at: http://nmwa.org/explore/artist-profiles/lucy-m-lewis#sthash.UbTWNBLF.dpuf

Incredible set of 4 embossed, die-cut, German Halloween decoration figures. Ca. 1910.

 Available for purchase here

Available for purchase here

Available for purchase here

Available for purchase here

Eames Lounge Chair. Today Show debut 1956.

Circus and Carnival outsider art.

 My current original work is available for purchase here

The color field abstractions of Tegene Kunbi.

Tegene Kunbi (1980) was born and raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. From 1998 to 2004 he, too, received his art training at the university. In 2007 he received the prestigious DAAD scholarship. A year later he moved to Berlin to further develop his painting there at the Universitat der Kunste.

His work is a reflection of an inner dialogue that culminates in a battle for structure. His rhythmic compositions betray both his African roots (landscapes, farmland and bustling markets) and, secondly, his stay in Germany (the 'Gründlichkeit "the orderly). Those two worlds he combines layer by layer to colorful and geometric grids. Under this apparent harmony of colors is a source of inner discord.

Recently he exhibited for Margaret Thatcher Projects and the Goethe Institut (Göttingen, Germany). (courtesy Tasting Art) 

From Africanah.org
 Oftentimes in the artist’s compositions, color is stacked. This dynamic arrangement of color may be viewed in works such as End Day (2013), where bold strokes of red and purple sweep across the composition. A myriad of activity is hinted at underneath, and can still be sensed in the strata of green, violet and blue.

Paintings such as Mold (2013) highlight the variation in his application of the paint. From light and translucent to thick and voluminous brushstrokes, the resulting surface is rich with texture and a history of saturated layers built one on another.
Tegene Kunbi was born in Ethiopia in 1980. He received his BFA from the University of Addis Ababa in 2004. Through 2009 he continued his education at the Universität der Künste Berlin. Recent exhibitions include Galerie Gerken (Berlin, DE) and the Goethe Institute (Göttingen, DE.). The artist is the recipient of the prestigious DAAD scholarship.

He evokes worlds – he is an alchemist like Klee, Rothko, Mitchell, Diebenkorn and Frankenthaler. Kunbi had me thinking of Kandinsky on the spirituality of art.
Kunbi lives and works in Berlin, having left Addis Ababa to further his painting studies with an esteemed group of professors at the Universität der Künste Berlin.
The artist’s deliberate compositions of geometric form and color express the artist’s constant mind’s eye view on his native landscape, its clothing and the mural paintings of his homeland. His rhythmic compositions translate his African roots – the lay of the land, the narrow streets, and the color-saturated bustling, crowded marketplaces filled with textiles and daily necessities.

 The artist’s deliberate compositions of geometric form and color express the artist’s constant mind’s eye view on his native landscape, its clothing and the mural paintings of his homeland. His rhythmic compositions translate his African roots – the lay of the land, the narrow streets, and the color-saturated bustling, crowded marketplaces filled with textiles and daily necessities.

All images are courtesy of The Margaret Thatcher Project
The artists website is here

Tribal Life in Old Lyme: Canada’s Colorblind Chronicler and his Connecticut Exile from The Public Domain Review

Abigail Walthausen explores the life and work of Arthur Heming, the Canadian painter who — having been diagnosed with colourblindness as a child — worked for most of his life in a distinctive pallete of black, yellow, and white.

Postmen of the Wilderness by Arthur Heming, 

first published in his Drama of the Forests

For most of his life, Arthur Heming, “painter of the great white north”, painted in a monochrome scheme of black, white, and yellow tones, choosing this style at least nominally because of an early diagnosis of color blindness. These possibly self-imposed restrictions lasted inexplicably until the age of sixty, when a full, nearly technicolor palette suddenly splashed across his canvases. Thematically, he worked with scenes whose colors were appropriately blanched: winter hunting and trapping expeditions that he took for the Hudson Bay Company and alongside people of the First Nations. His narrow focus in painting mirrored his work as a traveler, novelist, and illustrator, and the commercial nature of his output certainly influenced the mixed reception he received in the art market. In Canada he existed as an outsider of both the trapping communities he traveled with in the north and of his peers in the fine art world. His best work is transcendent, calling to mind the rich velvety grayscale of Gerhard Richter’s realistic paintings, while his weakest work is the sort of mystic wolf lore that later became the vernacular of furry bedspreads and black crewneck sweatshirts. Heming was conflicted about both his place in his homeland and his status as an artist. This is perhaps why he was so eager to find an adopted home for many consecutive summers in a distinctively non-arctic landscape, a farming community on the Long Island Sound, Old Lyme Connecticut.
While the Florence Griswold artist colony in Old Lyme Connecticut is generally touted as the “birthplace of American Impressionism”, Heming left a few distinctively Canadian marks on the communal dining room. First, there is his contribution to the collection of panels painted by artists who resided there; his, which depicts a lone canoe flying over rapids as seen from above, stands out from the rest because of its stark black and white color scheme and the narrow focus of its detail. Rather than a miniature painting of the pastoral Connecticut landscape, his seems like a snapshot of a larger, wilder, uncontainable narrative.

Shooting Death’s Rapids (1906), Heming’s contribution to the dining room 

panels at the Old Lyme artists’ colony

Barn find Bentley from The Steeple Times September 1, 2015

It’s in the Mail

“Barn find” 1934 Bentley owned by press magnate Esmond Harmsworth (later 2^nd Viscount Rothermere) to be sold at Silverstone Auctions sale at Salon Privé 2015

Esmond Harmsworth – later 2^nd Viscount Rothermere – led a remarkable life. Eton educated, an MP at the tender age of 21 and subsequently chairman of Associated Newspapers from 1932 to 1971 and of Daily Mail & General Trust Ltd from 1938 to 1978, Harmsworth purchased a ‘Derby’ Bentley 3½ litre three-position drophead coupé by Thrupp & Maberly new in 1934. That car, now in “barn find” condition is to be sold this week at the Salon Privé sale at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire.

It’s in the Mail –1934 ‘Derby’ Bentley 3½ litre three-posiition drophead coupé by

Thrupp and Maberly. 

 

Esmond Harmsworth, later 2nd Viscount Rothermere (1898 – 1978)

The interior of the car has certainly seen better days

Harmsworth’s car – which cost him £1,100 as a bare chassis and a further £500 for its coachwork (the equivalent of a total of £102,000 today) – remained in his ownership through the war but then was not heard of again until 1952 when it was sold for £800 to the works director of the Standard Telephone Company, Alfred Mason, for £800 (the equivalent of £22,000 today). His widow sold it to the athletics administrator and anti-drugs campaigner Sir Arthur Gold CBE (1917 – 2002) in 1965 for £180 (the equivalent of £3,200 today).

Now described as an “unmolested relic”, the car has been untouched since the 1950s and is offered with a guide price of £60,000 to £80,000. It will be sold this Friday, 4^th September 2015.

To book tickets to Salon Privé, click here. Prices for full entry range from £95 to £270 plus VAT and booking fees.

The Steeple Times

Important Marvel Bronze Age comic book. X-Men Giant Size. Volume 1 Number 1. 1975

Available for purchase here

Are you ready for some football? We have lots of cool old stuff in stock right now for you.

 All available for purchase here

 

 

  All available for purchase here

From The Comics Journal: The Art of "Dwig" Dwiggins.

Framed!

Dead Cats at Moonlight – The Art of Clare Victor “Dwig” Dwiggins

BY Paul Tumey Aug 31, 2015

There was a time when childhood in America meant using dead cats at moonlight to get rid of a wart. It meant throwing things at the teacher when her back was turned. It meant firecrackers in ant piles.
The early American newspaper comics celebrated this wild aspect of childhood.
One of the prime — and perhaps widest — tributaries into screwball comics is the “wild child” concept. Without works like Wilhelm Busch’s Max Und Moritz (1865) and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884), there might not be Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad as we know it.  Creators like Richard Outcault (The Yellow Kid, Kelly’s Kindergarten) and Rudolph Dirks (The Katzenjammer Kids) are well known and documented. A few years after Dirk’s irks and Outcault’s jolts, we encounter the madcap School Days (1909 and 1912)  the graceful, nostalgic, and slightly erotic re-imagining of the wild child comic by the free-spirited master who called himself “Dwig.”

SCHOOL DAYS by Clare Victor Dwiggins – August 5, 1909 (collection Paul Tumey)

Like Outcault’s “Kelly” comics, Dwig’s half-pages foreshadow Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder’s best work with Mad and Goodman Beaver. There are so many details and gags. It’s all combined organically into a tour de force of manic energy and chaos. Note the leering men in the window – they represent the school board and have decided they must do anything to keep the beautiful school teacher from resigning. There’s the alpha boy Pip Gint who has set up a Breughel-like contraption in which a fat boy chases a bucket of sweets and powers a ride. Animals, kids, adults swim in a rich soup of words (which in themselves are literary caricatures with mis-written letters, comical misspellings, slang, and invented words).

Who was the masterful artist behind this comic?
For about the first third of his busy and active career, Clare Victor “Dwig” Dwiggins (1877-1958) employed an effervescent, dense and decorative visual style. He also drew numerous depictions of appealing and slightly screwy Gibson Girls, which tied in to his Bohemian take on life.

But, around 1913, something happened – and Dwig shifted. The sexy women and screwball exuberance of his work changed to a simpler, less dense, more abstract style. He became obsessed with dwelling in the idyllic past of his small town childhood growing up in the mid-west in the late 1800’s — putting the names of his boyhood chums into his work, and disappearing into his studio for hours every day to live in simpler times.

SCHOOL DAYS by CLare Victor Dwiggins – October 26, 1926

Today, these indulgent and loving depictions of boyhood by Dwig can seem cloying and overly sentimental, but Dwig was sincere and authentic in this work. Perhaps one reason his later work fails to connect with many readers today is simply that we did not have the sorts of adventures he did — digging up dead cats at moonlight to remove one’s face with punk water, or tramping around the country with a pack of friends. If he were working today, perhaps Dwig would be turning out a comic strip version of “Freaks and Geeks.”

Pages from BILL’S DIARY, which collected a late Dwig series

Forgotten today, Dwig was one of the most productive cartoonists and illustrators of his generation. In addition to dozens of comic strip series published in American newspapers, Dwig created interesting and graceful art for hundreds of postcards, books and magazines articles and covers. He was an astonishingly fast and prolific creator. Once, he was working at his drawing table when something suddenly made him leap away from it, and a second later, his cabin studio by an upstate New York lake was struck by lightning, shattering his drawing board! It seems that Dwig was so quick not even lightning could catch him!

SEATLESS SAM, THE SUBWAY GINK by Clare Victor Dwiggins – October 28, 1911

Here is a 30-minute documentary about Dwig’s art I’ve made for this column. It represents a version of one-third of “Forgotten Funnies: Images of American in the Comics of Percy Winterbottom, Dwig, and Ving Fuller,” a presentation I will be delivering November 10, 2015 at Ben Katchor’s New York Comics and Picture-Story Symposium. Many thanks to Jane Davidson for her help and support.