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by Jack Siegel

David LaChapelle Retrospective

I really enjoyed reading the following article by Limara Salt on the Dazed & Confused website.

David LaChapelle: Retrospective

Paris plays host to a special exhibition covering 20 years of David LaChapelle’s photography.

20 years worth of work by cult American photographer David LaChapelle will take over a building usually used to display French coins and medals. His over the top style became synonymous during the rise of celebrity culture as his work reflected everything that the new dawn of celebrity represented; sex, drugs, money, greed, high-fashion and excess of all kinds. Although it’s become his calling card he has since moved on to different themes of a more serious nature such as natural disasters, war and the media, spirituality and consumption and his choices for the work to display seem to indicate that he’s aiming for more attention and plaudits on the new angle his career has taken.

He claims his new work was inspired by the negative view of money and in the main room of the exhibition lays a huge mural of his vision of the apocalypse. The views and aim of his work may have changed but it still remains essentially LaChapelle; Detail from Decadence: The Insufficiency of All Things Attainable (2008) shows the victims of consumerism naked and in pain surrounded by luxury products and gold pigs mid coitus and Holy War (2008) might display soldiers battered and bloodied yet holding Blackberries in front of ferris wheels and oil rigs but they’re all perfectly toned and muscular.

Although he’s clearly anxious and interested in being known as an artist more so than a celebrity photographer, earlier images are present in the exhibition, all of which are bright, loud and dripping with irony. Milk Maidens, 1996 shows a models squirting milk from her breast into another models cornflakes, Elton John rides a leopard print piano in a room covered in bananas and cherries in Elton John: Never Enough, Never Enough, 1997 and 2001’s Death by Hamburger shows just that; a pair of legs sprawled underneath a giant inflatable burger.

LaChapelle’s work is regularly displayed in museums all over the world (one in Mexico opened the same week as the retrospective) but this collection is the largest and most prolific of a man who helped create an age whilst making fun of it.

David LaChapelle: Retrospective at the Monnaie de Paris, Paris, runs from the 6th of Feburary until the 31st of May.

John Lindquist

Paul has a brother who takes very good photos.
He's shot for French Vogue, British Harper's Bazaar and the Sunday Times to name but a few. Check him out at Big Head Studio.

The Pre-Raphaelites

I have always really liked the ethereal paintings of the pre-Raphaelites.

The secret society was founded in 1848 by a group of English painters including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, John Everett Millais, Frederic George Stephens, Thomas Woolner and William Holman Hunt.

They take their name not as a result of their imitation of the work of High Italian Renaissance master Raphael but their rejection of it. They saw the work of Raphael and his Mannerist followers as mechanistic in approach and believed that the Classical poses and elegant compositions had corrupted the academic opinion on how art should be taught. Instead, they hailed the intense colours and minutiae of naturalistic detail of Quattrocento Italian and Flemish art.

The Mermaid, John William Waterhouse, 1900

Ophelia, John Everett Millais, 1851-2

The Lady of Shalott, John William Waterhouse, 1888 (based on the enchanting 1842 poem by Tennyson)

Interlude

Another great pic by Jack Siegel...

Rodchenko and Popova: defining Constructivism

COMING SOON...

Tonight...

Russian Constructivism (Mayakowski).
Exhibition opening tonight at the Tate Modern. How excited am I.

Guernica

Doing some work on Guernica today. Its Picasso's first propagandist work and was an attempt to stop the rush to Civil war in Spain in the late thirties. He was so struck with "The systematic destruction of an undefended town behind the lines, ignoring possible military targets, whose object was the demoralisation of the civilian population" (Christopher Green) that he spent five weeks creating this massive 25 x 11ft canvas which uses the terror of a confrontation with a bull/minotaur in a context of contemporary, real events. As Green writes, this mural was a very "public political statement, a statement that externalised his [Picasso's] most 'inner' obsessions in the service of the 'outer' world of events."

The Skullset

Do you think Jack Siegel's photos are genius or not? Are his photos beautiful just because his subjects are? Ponder here.

HOKUSAI

You're probably familiar with the first image, The Great Wave, which the unforgettable Japanese printmaker of the Edo period, now known as Tokyo, Katsushika Hokusai (born 1760-1849).

The Great Wave off Kanagawa (the work's full title), features in a series of woodblock prints called Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (c. 1831) which were created both as a response to the recent travel boom in Asia and as a result of Hokusai's inherent obsession with the volcano and her surroundings.

It was this series which also includes Red Fuji and View of Fuji from a Boat at Ushibori (above) that secured Hokusai's influential place in art history allowing his work to influence artists as far afield as France (Van Gogh was as equally obsessed with the artist as he himself had been with Fuji) and Spain.

In my opinion, Hokusai's images capture an Orient unrivalled elsewhere, so different from those Western Academic oils of mysterious dark-skinned Eastern women falling all over the place in sumptuous arabesques.