A Weekend in Amsterdam: Day 3, Helmut Newton at foam

Sorry, again, for the delay in blogposts. End of June was manic, and somehow the whole of July has suddenly booked up with stuff so I just keep forgetting about the blog!

A short one today, seeing as it keeps getting put on the back burner, and Amsterdam was like a whole month ago now (HOW did that happen...)

On recommendation from Barbara, our last exhibition was the Helmut Newton retrospective at foam. Although we love fashion and clothes and photography, we hadn't initially thought of visiting, but we were glad we did; not only did we escape the torrential rain for an hour or so, it was also beautifully curated, and radically different to photography exhibitions I had visited before. The last fashion photography exhibition I had visited was the Horst retrospective at the V&A a few years back, and thinking about the two exhibitions in comparison, representing two different eras of fashion and two different styles, I felt like the way foam displayed the work was totally reflective of the content and the themes they were trying to draw. Whereas Horst was perhaps more chronological in their method of display (obviously reflective of the type of museum the V&A is, and what the audience perhaps expected), it was clear that foam was aiming for a more in-depth, critical approach, treating the exhibition format more like a research process.

Saying that, it did have a bit of chronology, obviously because its a retrospective. But what they did pick out was Newton's commentary of the female body, and I particularly liked the later rooms, when it was clear that Newton had more to say using his photography. I really admired the filmic appeal of his work, the way he captured movement and illusion in his work. I loved the series', where they photography was less about the physical 'fashion' (as in the garments) and more about the model, the muses, the people who were the mannequins. It was clear that he had had that in mind - it was especially clear with his series of dummies, dressed and lit like 'real' women, so that the viewer would double-take on what they had seen. They also showed the documentary 'Helmut by June' (which I keep meaning to watch in full), which revealed his thinking and day-to-day process, and also showed that he wasn't a complete pervert, which one could easily assume from his super sexually-charged images.

It also made me really interested in June Browne, or Alice Springs as her artist name, who was Newton's partner in life and also in work. She was herself an established artist working in fashion photography, and the documentary made me interested in their influences on each other, as the theme from my previous posts about Rietveld and Van der Rohe. The exhibition also featured pieces of Newton's work that revolved around their personal life, such as this portrait below of June, beautifully lit and gorgeously framed. The colours of the walls, changing through the different themes and rooms, brought the photographs to life while also setting the stage of the era that it revolves around. The women, particularly towards the end of the exhibition, and the later work of Newton, feel strong, empowered, and exude a sensual strength that I hadn't seen before. The exhibition framed the women captured as active agents, and I was pretty convinced.

The exhibition ended with the famous 'Big Nudes' printed gloriously 'life size' as a final nod to women, groups of women who were unashamedly naked and strong. It was clear that the models and Newton worked exceptionally hard to create these images, of which some were an attempt to create the exact same image with clothing and without. Imagine trying to do this in film, its just a feat of repetition! 

I was thoroughly impressed with this exhibition, and could have stayed for even longer had it not been lunchtime (we were really, really hungry). If you're in Amsterdam, go check it out, not only is the work on display fantastic, the curation is top-notch with (thank god) really engaging captions and texts. Thanks Barbara for the tip!

A Weekend in Amsterdam: Day 2, The Shröder House in Utrecht

Our second day actually took us out of Amsterdam to Utrecht. It was the only pre-planned day of activities, as Hannah especially wanted to take us to see the Shröder House (which I didn't know about at all, but I LOVED once I got there). Basically, we can credit Andrew Graham Dixon's 'Art of the Low Countries' for our day trip an hour out of Amsterdam. Thank you BBC 4.

In the Stedelijk Museum the previous day, we saw this little model of the house with another mocked up room by Rietveld in the space, so it gave me a little taste of what I was going to see. It shared a room with Sandberg's posters, which gave me a sense of the dynamic of the Dutch art and design world at the time. It turned out that Rietveld and de Stijl happened to be working on the same aesthetic around the same time, and on discovering each other, Rietveld was embraced as an artist and designer rather than as a local furniture maker.

The house is only open through a guided tour, which we had thankfully booked in advance... otherwise we wouldn't have been able to see inside! The Shröder House was commissioned by Truus Shröder-Shräder, a Dutch socialite who married a lawyer, Fritz Shröder. The lived in a very large, luxurious apartment in Utrecht, but the couple had very different ideas about lifestyle, social status, and from the sounds of it, the material things within that space. Fritz introduced Rietveld to Truus, and let her change one of the rooms in the apartment to the way she wanted it; Rietveld built the infrastructure, of which one element was building in a lower ceiling. While her friends saw the room as very plain she loved the simplicity of it, and thus Truus and Rietveld's partnership began.

In 1924, as a widow in her mid 30s with a teenage son and two pre-teen daughters, she sought a new place to live with her children. She wanted more space, some peace and quiet, and a view of nature. She commissioned Rietveld for the task as architect, but she had a very clear vision of what she wanted. She wanted open space, big windows, and a connection between the inside and outside. They found a piece of land on the outskirts of Utrecht, a plot that they described in an interview as 'a place truck drivers went to piss' at the end of a row of terraced houses. But the benefit of this plot was the land beyond it, which was a lovely field. Neither Truus or Rietveld had had much serious training in architecture, but with Rietveld's knowledge of furniture-making, they sought to create something completely radical.

The front door opens into a square porch with a door to the left and right, a door in front, and set of painted grey square steps to the second floor. The floor of the room is painted blue. There is no longer any objects (except for a few pieces of furniture) in the house, but once accustomed to the primary colours, smaller details become apparent; the different hooks for adults and children's coats; the clear glass post box; the tan leather strap on the back of the bench on the top square step, for leaning on as you use the phone. It was interesting to experience all these textures together. It felt all at once humble and sort of chaotically put together, and yet a lot of fun and ingeniously practical. 

The rest of the downstairs was made up of a simple kitchen, a 'maid's' room which never had a maid in it, Rietveld's studio, and a cosy study room. It very quickly became apparent that Truus and Rietveld were not just partners in work, but also eventually became lovers, in spite of Rietveld's wife and family. The best room on the ground floor was the study room, which had a black painted ceiling for bringing in the space, and lots of inbuilt furniture. It had two fold out tables, painted yellow and grey, and several benches and chairs to sit on, and best of all LOTS of shelving for lots of books. 

The upstairs however, was the real star of the show. Up the grey square steps and a very narrow black spiral staircase, the room opened up to the whole floorplan of the house flooded with the light. Where downstairs was divided, upstairs was completely open, with a view outside from all four sides of the house. the floor was marked out by different colours to signify each room, and could be cleverly enclosed at night or for privacy using several sliding doors, painted black and grey. In a space the the left of the stairs was a room for the two daughters. Their area was painted blue, with two beds in a L shape in the corner. They have their own balcony and bookshelf, and the room was displayed with one of Rietveld's famous tables. Next to their area was the oldest son's room, painted red. His room was larger, to accommodate his baby grand piano which today is replaced with one of Rietveld's Red and Blue chairs, with a large window facing out towards the view. Next to his room was the largest space in the upstairs, a dining and living area which encompassed a whole corner of the house. The most fascinating part was the huge windows that could open completely at the corner, thanks to a very clever 'L' window. One of the gallery assistants opened up the window, and enclosed some of the sliding doors to get a sense of how the space worked, and I could imagine how the house was constantly active and dynamically used. Opposite the room for the girls was the bathroom and Truus' bedroom, which also had it's small details. She had a tiny black drop down table for her alarm clock, and a very thin red shelf next to her bed for her glasses. Built into the cupboards was a sink, and next door in the bathroom was a lovely deep stone bath, a beautiful contrasting material to the glossy consistency of the coloured paint.

Particularly after our trip to the Tugendhat Villa in Brno, it made me think a lot about the role of the architect, but also their agenda. At the Tugendhat Villa, especially with the details that Magdalena shared about the house, you got the sense that the collaboration was very one-sided, towards the desires and influence of Mies Van der Rohe rather than the needs of the family. While the house is absolutely stunning, to me it never felt lived in, luxurious rather than warm and loved. The materials of the house and the furniture themselves felt precious, untouchable and actually kind of discomforting in concept - in some ways it felt a little bit sick. I absolutely loved it and loathed the concept of it at the same time. MVdR, probably tainted by the week, did not come across as a very nice guy at all. Not that that was the point, but it's interesting to find a person beyond the famous name.

The Shröder House on the other hand, in its materiality conveys the complete opposite, even though it is on paper the same kind of object. Both houses are commissioning famous designers/architects from Modernist movements, working at around the same time, commissioned by elite women as a new or second home. Both are situated in already established neighbourhoods, and are local anomalies to be stared at and noticed. Both buildings aimed to be a statement. But somehow, there is something about the Shröder House that makes it completely different to the Tugendhat Villa, which certainly makes the Rietveld seem like a totally different kind of person the Mies.

Ultimately the Shröder House seems to be built, in some ways, for love. It feels like its built with enthusiasm and spontaneity, for the needs of a moment which ended up defining how one used the house. It feels like it grew and changed over time, adding pieces here and there when the idea came, and it sounded like Truus had the ultimate say on how it looked and felt. Pieces like the leather strap on the bench in the porch, feel like a practical lightbulb moment. It was a house that the teenage children was embarrassed by, but then proud of later on in life. In spite of it being an empty showroom, like the Tugendhat Villa is as well, it feels like someone lived there for several decades, which of course Truus lived in until she died in 1985. In that way, the Shröder House is more convincing as a defiant statement of a way of life for a widowed woman and her children, opposite to the decadence of the old Art Nouveau, and the new glamour of Modernism expressed by architects like MVdR.

When a plot of land opposite the house opened for sale, Truus bought the land for Rietveld to pursue his real dream - designing social housing. Today these still exist, but now as a school and studios. Tragically, a viaduct and motorway was built right next to the Shröder House before Truus' death in the 1980s. She remarks in the same interview that she thought at the time it should have been knocked down, that it is no longer the same house without the view. But what I can appreciate in its restoration is the real spectrum of design and architecture that was happening in this period, despite the umbrella term of Modernism, and without the house, I'm not sure you can really tell from individual pieces of furniture in museum collections. While I am no expert, and probably will never be as knowledgeable as some of my friends and tutors are on this period in central European design, I love seeing and experiencing it as an observer of their everyday lives and relationships. While it was all radical, it was real and heartfelt by passionate people.

My last thought, which Hannah and I discussed at breakfast the next day, is how important the role of women are in the process of iconic buildings. Both Lilly Reich and Truus Shröder-Schräder were clearly essential to the identity of both houses, and both women it seems, created for the love of their work and in partnership with people they loved. It's a shame that these women get pushed under the water while names like Mies Van der Rohe and Rietveld overshadow their contribution. I keep trying to find books about Lilly Reich, and come out of libraries empty-handed. It just goes to show that it's still, several decades later, an enormous problem that needs solving by the new generations of design historians by getting past the rhetoric and looking for the details.

A Weekend in Amsterdam: Day 1, Stedelijk Museum

So somehow, in amongst everything, Hannah and I spontaneously squeezed in a speedy trip to Amsterdam for my birthday. We realised that we could only visit a few things in that time, we weren't about to attempt and Museumsplein escapade. And so we prioritised our two top interests - Design, and Miffy, obviously. We arrived in good time in the morning, so first stop was the Stedelijk Museum. I hadn't really had much time to research beforehand what was going on, but thankfully the Stedelijk's permanent collection was really satisfying regardless of the exhibitions they had going on. On arrival, it seemed like a pretty diverse collection of modern design, the earliest pieces (from what I remember) being from the late 1800s. This suited us pretty well, as it made most of the objects 20th century, a top period for us!

The building seems smaller, but more spacious than the V&A, and I would say the curation is a little more sparse - I guess this suited Hannah and I because it meant we could see all the rooms and exhibitions without much rushing. As well as two galleries organised in the classical chronological order, picking out specific Dutch designs in particular movements in the 20th century, several rooms were dedicated to big Dutch designers, as well as fantastic curation of contemporary art albeit with a clear design edge. While some objects were very familiar to us - Paintings by Mondrian, furniture by Rietveld, etc. etc. - it was a real discovery process for us to figure out the timeline of Western design movements, their overlapping and responses to each other (embarrassingly we had forgotten our dates for de Stijl and Bauhaus, Art Nouveau and Art Deco...it turns out its a fun game to guess what is from which movement), as well as finding some fantastic designers that we hadn't known before.

Mostly the individual rooms were small and self-contained, with a theme within the room and the objects very curiously close and easily-touchable...The Dutch clearly trust their visitors! But it was great to be able to get so close to the work and see all the details that you wouldn't normally be able to access over barriers. We also enjoyed the way they had designed some of their plinths to effortlessly float in the space, not disturbing the link between the paintings and sculpture. We were impressed with what they had chosen to collect - we liked how they had chosen to collect and display parts of the process of making 'art', such as plan drawings of Picasso's Guernica. It was nice to go around and pick out objects that seemed interesting in the context, and to pull out why they were in a design collection.

One of my favourites was Willem Sandberg, who had an almighty role of director and designer for the Stedelijk Museum from 1937 - 1962, but had been involved as a graphic designer for the museum since 1928. Dream jobs much, I imagine that doesn't happen much anymore. A typographer, printer and curator, he designed many of the museum exhibition posters and programmes, before and during his time as director of the museum. He at first resented the museum as a house of 'the past' but changed his feelings after becoming director. What's fascinating is that part of the deal of becoming director was that he would still be able to design the catalogues. He believed that the catalogue was just as important to the exhibition as the exhibition itself, designing 320 catalogues for the museum, even after he became director when he would design in the evenings after the day's work in the museum. Here's a fab article about him on the Eye Magazine website if you want to know more.

It's a shame we hadn't really learned much about him, and after seeing his work and hearing his achievements, I feel a bit embarrassed not to have known about him before... I loved looking at his catalogues, and it makes me even more excited to do a type course at some point. His use of colour and shape is playful and (to me) very illustrative, and graphically eye-catching. I would certainly have subscribed to his catalogues.

Another artists that caught our attention was Karel Appel, a Dutch painter, writer and poet who was a member of the group CoBrA, an avant-garde group of artists. Sandberg commissioned him to paint the walls of the refreshment room, and enjoyed it so much that Appel was brought back to paint a mural on the former restaurant, what is now the opening room of the museum. It's such a happy, vibrant and dynamic image, and when at this scale is just breath-taking. The central oval 'flower' is actually a window, which means the light made that particular area really sparkle. I also loved the way that he played with the space, overlapping and moving from wall to wall to ceiling, making for an energetic bunch of characters.

Our last favourite was actually from a temporary exhibition of Jan Dibbets, a Dutch conceptual photographer. The exhibition was a re-exhibiting of Dibbets Colour Studies from the 1970s, several close up colour photographs of the shiny hoods of cars. The studies had been newly printed to be several metres high, exhibited alongside Dibbets original prints from 1976, (no bigger than an A4 if I remember rightly) which he had printed as large as possible by the technology of the time. From afar, they looked like meticulous paintings, and the photographs were displayed beautifully in these vast galleries with lots of natural light. They looked amazing framed in doorways at this large scale. I really appreciated that these works were displayed in a 'design' museum, because I think it's important that contemporary art is put in the context of design, and how something like scale in the process, made possible through new technologies over time, of making art can make such a dramatic different to the way it captures its audience. In a way, the work was totally new, just because it was that much bigger.

 I was going to try and condense the trip to one single blogpost, but I can tell its going to have to be in a few posts...so bear with me while I write up the next two! Lots of fun things happening this week including (shameless plug) our publication launch! Have a look at this Eventbrite for all the details and maybe you can come down and check out what we've been up to for the last month!

Just as a last note, in light of Brexit, I'm really glad Hannah and I got to visit before the trip would be tainted by the fact that we won't be part of Europe anymore. After taking this course, its even clearer to me that our industry as well as others relies on togetherness, collaboration and consistent criticality of ourselves and each other. It's without doubt that we will miss the diversity that for me, makes Britain what it is. I really think that even though I and so many of my friends voted Remain, we have to continue to believe that we can change things, change people's minds and feelings, otherwise Leave then really will have won. In spite of it, I still feel very much a European, as well as a citizen of the World. I hope that in our industry we can continue to open up, engage and develop the ways we share design with each other.

London Craft Week: Wang Dongling Calligraphy Performance

This post was written for the Design China blog, which you can see here.

On the 6^th May, The British Museum welcomed the world-renowned calligrapher Professor Wang Dongling for his first public performance in London for this year’s London Craft Week. Taking centre stage in the Great Court, four rolls of paper were laid and taped onto the marble floor at the entrance of the museum, where a crowd gathered in wait of a performance by ‘China’s greatest living calligrapher’.

            Wang took a slender brush in his hand, a sixty-centimetre-long bamboo handle with a short drop of hair, and dipped it into a red bucket. He wore an all-black outfit with bright red socks, matching the bucket of ink. Beginning in the top right hand corner, Wang starts to paint; he holds the brush but the very end of the handle, his body in a constantly hunched position, knees slightly bent. After a few characters, written vertically on the page, Wang walked back up towards the bucket to re-ink his brush. The pace is efficient, confident, perhaps less sentimental and more calculated than I imagined the process to look like. The ‘mad cursive’ script is difficult to decipher – the characters become abstract lines and gestures, pulling out the traces of the body from the painting.

            We were lucky to witness such a large piece. In contrast to his wild, heavy works with enormous brushes, finished in one swooping round of black, this piece felt bird-like, fluttering and dainty with its small characters on a vast page. This piece took time. A meditative hour was created in the hot and noisy atrium, with Wang solely concentrated on the calligraphy as we looked on in awe. He didn’t even stop for water. The lines fade in and out of focus as the ink dries on the brush, forming an undulating surface from the paper. The occasional swift flick of the brush for elongated characters surprised the audience, bringing his movement back into focus.

            As he came to the end of his performance by signing the piece in the bottom left corner, a round of applause echoed through the hall. He went to the microphone – he smiled and told us that the script is the Heart Sutra, and that the piece is meant to be seen as both calligraphy and abstract painting. While the piece lay out in the bright light to dry, we walked around it in reverence to what he had just seen; Not only had we observed the product of a master maker, but also the dance of his craft.

London Craft Week: Contemporary Chinese Craft

This post was written for the Design China blog, which you can see here.

As part of this year’s London Craft Week, the China Design Centre hosted two exhibitions displaying an array of work by both established, and up-and-coming Chinese practitioners. The gallery space is hosting one of them; ‘Jingdezhen Ceramics – The Next Generation’ brought together by The Pottery Workshop. The Pottery Workshop was established in Hong Kong in 1985, but have since expanded to four other locations. Jingdezhen, has its biggest facility, and has become a hub for a community of craftspeople in the renowned ‘Porcelain Capital’. This exhibition displayed some of the finest and most innovative works from Jingdezhen’s Pottery Workshop, from illustrative sculpture pieces, to minimal contemporary art objects. 

            Several large works are included in the show. Caroline Cheng, the director of The Pottery Workshop, displays a piece from her series ‘Prosperity’, an outstretched silhouette of a bell-sleeved robe made of a swarm of minute, blue ceramic butterflies, with a single white butterfly. Cheng describes her work as a metaphor for China, as a gathering of unique personalities and cultures coming together to create; both the detail and the whole are significant. The ceramic garment hangs to the side of the room, overseeing contemporaries in the exhibition.             
At the opposite side of the room, the furniture by July Zhou and J Design present witty interpretations of Chinese contemporary ceramics. Two chairs consist of a dark mahogany frame, holding the unusual bowl-shaped ceramic seat, decorated with bamboo painted in the traditional colours of blue and white, but with added flecks of red. A traditional icon of Chinese calligraphy translated onto ceramics is cleverly transformed into something unexpected. Displayed aside is a chair and table set in the style of Ming furniture, only wood is replaced by transparent lucite, bringing to the forefront historical references in a contemporary setting. What might have been decorative wooden panels in the back and seat of the chair, and the centre of the table, is replaced with dark blue ceramic tiles with decorative white illustrations. 

            Smaller ceramic objects dotted the room with a variety of styles, techniques and approaches to the material. Colourful splatters of ceramic fold into organic, cowrie-shell forms in Bian Xiao Dong’s ‘Cocoons’, in a delicious combination of pink, lilac, mint and acid yellow. In a similar vein, Lu Jin’s collection of vessels create a row of pomegranate shapes, with gently hammered surfaces and golden crowns. Some objects were more illustrative; Perched on a shelf are Li Zhen Ming’s pandemonium of miniature parrots, with fluffy white feathers and pink features, in different nesting positions. The most narrative in the exhibition is the collaborative work of Ouyang Liang and Guo Zhen Zhen, a crowd of ceramic characters collectively called the ‘Monkey King’. Several androgynous figures look as thought they are swaying to a distant tune. 

            However, among my personal favourite selection for the show was an assortment of brushes by Yang Dong Mu. Although an unusual addition to a ceramics show, it highlighted the interdisciplinary function of the Jingdezhen Pottery Workshop, which supports an array of craftsmen as well as ceramicists. Framed in the corner of the room, the brushes and their accessories were also examples of contemporary reimaginings of traditional Chinese craft, using natural forms in bamboo to guide the shapes of the brush handles and rests. The exhibition overall, demonstrated the vast understandings of Chinese craft within one of the China’s dynamic arts communities, combining new and old, nature and machine, into work that is refreshing and distinct.