#Val Seitz | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

l2fmpnathan · 4 years ago

Photo

Research VICTOR VASARELY

evasively was born in Pecks and grew up in Postmen (now Pisani, Slovakia) and Budapest, where, in 1925, he took up medical studies at Eotvos Loran University.

In 1927, he abandoned medicine to learn traditional academic painting at the private Pasolini-Volkmann Academy. In 1928/1929, he enrolled at Sandor Bortnick’s private art school called Muhly (lit. "Workshop", in existence until 1938), then widely recognized as Budapest's center of Bauhaus studies.

Cash-strapped, the muhly could not offer all that the Bauhaus offered. Instead, it concentrated on applied graphic art and typographical design.

In 1929, he painted his Blue Study and Green Study.

In 1930, he married his fellow student Claire Spinner (1908–1990).

Together they had two sons, Andre and Jean-Pierre.

Jean-Pierre was also an artist and used the professional name 'Viral'.

In Budapest, he worked for a ball-bearings company in accounting and designing advertising posters.

Vasa rely became a graphic designer and a poster artist during the 1930s combining patterns and organic images with each other.

Outdoor Vasarely artwork at the church of Palos in Pecks

Vasarely left Hungary and settled in Paris in 1930.

He worked as a graphic artist and as a creative consultant at the advertising agencies Havas, Draeger, and Defames (1930–1935).

His interactions with other artists during this time were limited.

He thought of opening an institution modelled after Sandor Bortnick’s muhly and developed some teaching material for it.

Having lived mostly in cheap hotels, he settled in 1942/1944 in Saint-Care in the Lot department. After the Second World War, he opened an atelier in Arcelia, a suburb about 10 kilometers from the center of Paris (in the Val-de-Marne department of the Île-de-France).

In 1961, he finally settled in Anent-sur-Marne (in the Seine-et-Marne department).

Vasarely eventually went on to produce art and sculpture using optical illusion.

Over the next three decades, Vasarely developed his style of geometric abstract art, working in various materials but using a minimal number of forms and colors:

1929–1944: Early graphics: Vasarely experimented with textural effects, perspective, shadow and light.

His early graphic period resulted in works such as Zebras (1937), Chess Board (1935), and Girl-power (1934).

1944–1947: Les Fusses Routes – On the wrong track: During this period, Vasarely experimented with cubistic, futuristic, expressionistic, symbolistic and surrealistic paintings without developing a unique style.

Afterwards, he said he was on the wrong track.

He exhibited his works in the gallery of Denise René (1946) and the gallery René Bertheau (1947).

Writing the introduction to the catalogue, Jacques Prévert placed Vasarely among the surrealists.

Prévert creates the term imaginaries (images + noir, black) to describe the paintings.

Self Portrait (1941) and The Blind Man (1946) are associated with this period.

1947–1951: Developing geometric abstract art (optical art): Finally, Vasarely found his own style.

The overlapping developments are named after their geographical heritage.

Defer refers to the works influenced by the white tiled walls of the Paris Defer – Rocher au metro station.

Ellipsoid pebbles and shells found during a vacation in 1947 at the Breton coast at Belle Île inspired him to the Belles-Isles works.

Since 1948, Vasarely usually spent his summer months in Gourdes in Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur.

There, the cubic houses led him to the composition of the group of works labelled Gourdes/Cristal.

He worked on the problem of empty and filled spaces on a flat surface as well as the stereoscopic view.

Tribute to Malevich (1954), Ciudad Universitario de Caracas

1951–1955: Kinetic images, black-white photography’s: From his Gourdes works he developed his kinematic images, superimposed acrylic glass panes create dynamic, moving impressions depending on the viewpoint.

In the black-white period he combined the frames into a single pane by transposing photography’s in two colors.

Tribute to Malevich, a ceramic wall picture of 100 m2 (1,100 sq ft) adorns the University of Caracas, Venezuela which he co-designed in 1954 with the architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva, is a major work of this period.

Kinetic art flourished and works by Vasarely, Calder, Duchamp, Man Ray, Soto, Tonguely were exhibited at the Denise René gallery under the title Le Movement (the motion).

Vasarely published his Yellow Manifest.

Building on the research of constructivist and Bauhaus pioneers, he postulated that visual kinetics (plastique cinétique) relied on the perception of the viewer who is considered the sole creator, playing with optical illusions.

Supernovae (1959–61) in Tate Modern

1955–1965: Folklore planetaries, permutations, and serial art: On 2 March 1959, Vasarely patented his method of unites plastique’s.

Permutations of geometric forms are cut out of a colored square and rearranged.

He worked with a strictly defined palette of colors and forms (three reds, three greens, three blues, two violets, two yellows, black, white, gray; three circles, two squares, two rhomboids, two long rectangles, one triangle, two dissected circles, six ellipses) which he later enlarged and numbered.

Out of this plastic alphabet, he started serial art, an endless permutation of forms and colors worked out by his assistants.

(The creative process is produced by standardized tools and impersonal actors which questions the uniqueness of a work of art.)

In 1963, Vasarely presented his palette to the public under the name of Folklore planetaries.

1965–: Homage à hexagon, Vega: The Tribute to the hexagon series consists of endless transformations of indentations and relief adding color variations, creating a perpetual mobile of optical illusion.

In 1965 Vasarely was included in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Responsive Eye, created under the direction of William C. Seitz.

His Vega series plays with spherical swelling grids creating an optical illusion of volume.

Kedzie-Ga, 1970, Screen-print in colors, Edition of 250, 50.8 cm × 50.8 cm (20.0 in × 20.0 in)

In October 1967, designer Will Burton invited Vasarely to make a presentation to Burton’s Vision '67 conference, held at New York University.

On 5 June 1970, Vasarely opened his first dedicated museum with over 500 works in a renaissance palace in Gourdes (closed in 1996).

A second major undertaking was the Foundation Vasarely in Aix-en-Provence, a museum housed in a distinct structure specially designed by Vasarely.

It was inaugurated in 1976 by French president Georges Pompidou, two years after his death.

Sadly, the museum is now in a state of disrepair, several of the pieces on display have been damaged by water leaking from the ceiling.

Also, in 1976 his large kinematic object Georges Pompidou was installed in the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Vasarely Museum located at his birthplace in Pecks, Hungary, was established with a large donation of works by Vasarely.

In the same decade, he took a stab at industrial design with a 500-piece run of the upscale Suomi tableware by Timo Sarajevan that Vasarely decorated for the German Rosenthal porcelain maker's Studio Linnie.

In 1982, 154 specially created serigraphs were taken into space by the cosmonaut Jean-Loup Chrétien on board the French-Soviet spacecraft Salyut 7 and later sold for the benefit of UNESCO.

In 1987, the second Hungarian Vasarely museum was established in Zach Palace in Budapest with more than 400 works.

He died age 90 in Paris on 15 March 1997.

A new Vasarely exhibit was mounted in Paris at Muse end Herbed in 2012.

In 2019, a temporary exhibition of Vasarely's work entitled Le Partage des Forms was displayed in the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

1970–1996: Vasarely Museum in the Saint-Firmin Palace in Gourdes, Vaucluse, France (closed in 1996)

1976: Foundation Vasarely, Aix-en-Provence, France

1976: Vasarely Museum, Pecks, Hungary

1987: Vasarely Museum, Zach Palace, Buda, Budapest, Hungary

2 notes · View notes

back-and-totheleft · 3 years ago

Text

The Doors and JFK at 30

In the late 1980s and early ‘90s, few American filmmakers were as restless as Oliver Stone. He fired off seven movies from 1986 to 1991, each one a shotgun blast of confrontational ideas and virtuosic style. “Platoon” won four Oscars. “Wall Street” summed up an era of excess.

Stone was particularly busy in 1991. He started the year with “The Doors,” a psychedelic rise-and-fall biopic about the rocker Jim Morrison, played by Val Kilmer. He ended the year with “JFK,” a kaleidoscopic portrait of the hunt for truth in the wake of a national tragedy.

Thirty years later, “JFK” and “The Doors” remain fascinating artistic artifacts, brimming with the brash confidence of a director on a hot streak. They also X-ray some of the cultural fault lines that continue to divide the United States three decades later.

“JFK,” a three-hour epic featuring a stacked ensemble cast, both reflected and anticipated a country in thrall to conspiracy theories. “The Doors” dramatized the agony and ecstasy of the counterculture, revealing why the sex-and-drugs scene was seen as equal parts alluring and revolting.

The films parallel each other in striking ways. Stone, a veteran of the Vietnam War, was then Hollywood’s boldest chronicler of the 1960s, and both of his 1991 projects represent attempts to reckon with that decade’s knotty legacies. They blurred fact and fabrication, memory and myth.

In the eyes of many observers at the time, neither film was an unqualified success. “The Doors” drew mixed reviews and flailed at the box-office. “JFK” performed well on both fronts, but some historians and commentators assailed its fast-and-loose relationship with the factual record.

But in many respects, facts were beside the point.

‘Speculations’ and ‘nightmares’

In 1964, the Warren Commission concluded that President John F. Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald and that Oswald had acted alone. Stone was far less convinced, and “JFK” was intended as his “counter-myth.”

Kevin Costner, nearing the apex of his star power and industry clout, stars as New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who investigated the events surrounding Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963.

Garrison’s crusade takes the viewer on a dizzying tour of midcentury American paranoia. He eyes a sprawling cast of potential culprits: the CIA, the Mafia, Cuban freedom fighters, the military-industrial complex — the shadowy men behind what Stone calls our “untold history.”

“The movie was misunderstood as advancing one particular conspiracy theory, when in fact it was exploring several,” said Matt Zoller Seitz, a veteran film critic and the author of a 2016 book about Stone’s career. “It gave the conspiracy mindset a bigger and more prestigious platform, and I think without ‘JFK’ you don’t get ‘The X-Files,’ for example.”

“JFK” is the near opposite of a by-the-books historical docudrama. The film is a lurid panorama of half-truths and speculation. Stone’s approach alienated some op-ed writers and commentators, who criticized the director months before the movie even premiered.

The columnist George Will huffed that Stone was “a man of technical skill, scant education and negligible conscience.” Walter Cronkite, the CBS newscaster who broke the news of Kennedy’s killing to the nation, reportedly decried the “mishmash of fabrications and paranoid fantasies.”

The film critic Roger Ebert offered up what might be the most salient interpretation, though, writing in a 2002 retrospective: “I have no opinion on the factual accuracy of ... ‘JFK.’ I don’t think that’s the point. This is not a film about the facts of the assassination, but about the feelings.”

“I have no doubt Cronkite was correct, from his point of view. But I am a film critic and my assignment is different than his. He wants facts. I want moods, tones, fears, imaginings, whims, speculations, nightmares,” Ebert wrote.

It is here where “JFK” still reverberates in the addled, deeply fractured America of 2021 — not as a literal account of events but as a collage of issues that still tug at the national fabric, justifiably or not: distrust of government, skepticism of institutions, conspiracy theories, rabbit holes.

“I look at ‘JFK’ now and I see Covid denialists who make it seem as if the virus was created by scientists out of ‘The X-Files,’ the same ones who are going to inject us with DNA from bees, or whatever,” Seitz said. “I think there was a genie that was let out of the bottle with that movie.”

“It is a deranged film when you stand back from it,” Seitz said with a laugh.

Nevertheless, many people around the world still doubt the official narrative of the Warren Commission report and hope more information comes to light.

Jay O. Sanders, a character actor who played Lou Ivon, one of the investigators on Garrison’s team, said in an interview earlier this year that, to this day, strangers still approach him on the street and ask him who he believes killed Kennedy.

“The moment we explored in the film was one of the most important moments to countless people in this country," Sanders said. "It was a loss of innocence. It was a loss of hope."

‘Doors’ to self-destruction

Stone is said to have been intoxicated by The Doors ever since he first heard their music while serving in Vietnam. “The Doors,” a hallucinatory and borderline campy biopic about the dark poet of Nixon-era rock-and-roll, was the director’s acid-kissed homage.

“The Doors” charts Morrison’s rise and vertiginous descent into alcoholism, drug abuse, live-concert antics, cruelty and general R-rated debauchery. It is a frequently unflattering character study — and one that was razzed for exaggerating the musician’s behavior.

“In a way, it feels like the movie Jim Morrison would’ve hallucinated as he was dying,” Seitz said. “There’s a lot of deliberately disorienting touches ... that make you feel like you’re on drugs.”

The film climaxes with a raucous concert in Miami. Kilmer’s Morrison antagonizes the audience, clashes with police officers and appears to expose himself onstage. He bellows what amounts to a personal manifesto and philosophical mission statement: “No limits! No laws!”

The movie is freewheeling but nonetheless adheres to the standard rock god biopic conventions, the stuff of the John C. Reilly parody flick “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.” It also functions as a sociopolitical Rorschach test.

You might be gripped by Stone’s reverential vision of Morrison (who died in 1971 at 27) as a counterculture prophet who urged his adoring fans to stop being “slaves” to the starchy American establishment.

But then again, you might see “The Doors” as a cautionary tale — wittingly or otherwise — about the excesses of the peace-and-love years, with Kilmer’s version of Morrison as a Dionysian narcissist who symbolized the destructiveness of heedless social rebellion.

Oliver Gruner, an academic at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K., explored these contradictions in his 2016 monograph “Screening the Sixties: Hollywood Cinema and the Politics of Memory,” a look at how the American film industry has dramatized the decade.

“Here was a film that on the one hand celebrates an individual associated with hippie lifestyles, but on the other seems vehemently skeptical of the counterculture,” Gruner wrote.

America in 2021 is still conflicted on what to make of that frenzied decade. “The Doors” is not a film about politics, yet the chaos at its core might help us understand why the norm-smashing spirit of the ‘60s split the country and riled soon-to-be-ascendant social conservatives.

In a mixed review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin offered this crisp description of Stone’s larger-than-life subject: “Nowhere did the best and worst of the '60s collide as messily as they did in Jim Morrison.”

But in the course of 141 minutes, she wrote, Stone is not entirely “successful in offering any final assessment of either the ‘60s or his hero than in bringing both back with strange and spectacular power.” The same might be said of “JFK,” a movie of urgent questions without clear-cut answers.

But maybe that was by design.

It has been said that America never got over the ‘60s. Stone seemed to intuit as much. How can you conclude a story that never really ended?

-Daniel Arkin, ‘JFK’ and ‘The Doors’ at 30: Why Oliver Stone’s portraits of the '60s still resonate," NBC News, Oct 2 2021 [x]

#nbc news #oliver stone #matt zoller seitz #the doors #jfk #anniversary

0 notes