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Van Goghs Favorites III: Arthur Boyd Houghton – Our One-eyed Artist in America

«Until now I never knew Boyd H[oughton] was so interesting (…) Very strange. (…) After you have seen my Boyd Houghtons from the first year of the Graphics you will understand more clearly what I wrote about the importance of this master’s work.» Vincent van Gogh to Anton van Rappard, February and April 1883 (Letters […]
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Drawn Novel by Franz Erhard Walther

Until July 28, the Parisian Galerie Jocelyn Wolff presents drawing-based work by Franz Erhard Walther (*1939). The new work “Sternenstaub – A Drawn Novel” (2007/08) consists of several hundred (photocopies of) pencil-on-paper drawings tacked to the wall, each of them detailing memorable occurrences and encounters from the artist’s life – in a style vaguely reminiscent […]
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“Wie sind uns jetzt sicher.” Werner Spies zu Bernard Buffet

Not translated: Das Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt zeigt eine Retrospektive des lange verdrängten und vergessenen Malerstars der fünfziger und sechziger Jahre. In der Ausstellung “Tauchfahrten. Zeichnung als Reportage”, die 2004/2005 im Kunstverein Hannover und der Kunsthalle Düsseldorf stattfand, war Bernard Buffet mit zwei Industriereportagen der sechziger Jahre vertreten, mit einem Porträt der Burda-Werke […]
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Van Goghs Favorites II: Hubert Herkomer and the School of English Social Realism

“There is something virile in it – something rugged – which attracts me strongly (…) In all these fellows I see an energy, a determination and a free, healthy, cheerful spirit that animate me. And in their work there is something lofty and dignified – even when they draw a dunghill.” Vincent van Gogh, October […]
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Van Goghs Favorites I: Xylographism unbound – The influence of illustrated journal graphics on the art of Vincent van Gogh.

Only in recent years has one gained the insight that Vincent van Gogh was not only a collector of Japanese graphic prints, like many of his artist colleagues, but was also imbued by a passion for the pictorial art of illustrated journals of his times. This was mainly thanks to two exhibitions: One, in spring […]
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Menzel and Chodowiecki – “Unreigned” drawing

When he found himself obliged to the “Verein Berliner Künstler” due to a generosity bestowed upon him, Menzel decided to gladden his colleagues with a representative gift that was meant to recommend to them his own artistic program as a path to take. He painted the posthumous, life-sized portrait of the Berlin artist and miniaturist […]
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Robert Weaver II – Split-Level Books

In the 1980s, frustrated by the increasing restrictions in the field of magazine design, Weaver shifted the focus of his activities more and more to teaching at the New York Visual School of Arts and expanded a loose sequence of diary-like motif books he began with in the 1970s to form an independent complex of […]
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Robert Weaver – The other Pittsburgher

In his “Songs for Drella”, Lou Reed claimed that no Michelangelo could ever come from the hicktown of Pittsburgh. But this does not stand up to close examination. Robert Weaver is from Pittsburgh and in 1949, the same year the other Pittsburgher Andy Warhol, the subject of Reed’s cycle of songs, moved to the metropolis […]