Good morning art reads:
1. New York Painter Natalie Frank is set to publish new illustrations of Grimm's Fairy Tales this spring, in conjunction with a show at the Drawing Center. The project is not for the light hearted, but Frank's images burst with richness, causing Grimm's haunting tales to cross the historical divide to speak to traumas we still feel today. Bloomberg has the story:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-02/not-safe-for-kids-the-nudity-and-torture-edition-of-grimms-fairy-tales
(Image by Tom Powel Imaging Inc.)
2. Artist Günther Förg died in December, 2013 and continues to be woefully unknown in the United States. Förg looks like a sensitive monochrome painter to American eyes, somewhere between Barnett Newman and Brice Marden, but the reality of his work is much more complex. Skarstedt Gallery in New York is currently showing Förg's lead paintings, a review of which can be found here:
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2015/04/artseen/gu776nther-fo776rg-lead-paintings
3. Few writers captured New York in the first half of the 20th century quite like Joseph Mitchell. The Bottom of the Harbor and McSorley's Old Saloon are American classics, vivid, colorful windows into a time now lost. He mentions artists only with passing mention, yet Mitchell's accounts of low rent New York form the actual backdrop for many of the artists that developed the MoMA story of Modern Art. Janet Malcolm reviews Thomas Kunkel's new biography of Mitchell in the New York Review of Books:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/apr/23/joseph-mitchell-master-writer-city/
This week's video:
3. George Maciunas was one of the fathers of Fluxus art. In 1966, he abandoned his camera to make this film from scratch in his studio, entitled Artype. I stumbled across the film on Youtube last week and was blown away. There is a Dada impulse at work here, a true anti-art approach that can be jarring, but this is an immense video. 1960s Op Art and the international dispersal of Bauhaus geometries mix with experimental film and widening definitions of photography in this extraordinary work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cz_wpCYvzF0
Poem for the week:
If you don't know the work of Frederick Seidel, you are missing out one of history's true strange spirits. Seidel is an upper west side dandy, rich and mannered, and one gets the impression that he has tasted it all, stayed in every wonderful hotel, and has a standard of the good life far beyond the mere glimpses that one gets from time to time from the other side of the window. However, when a reader understands this feature of Seidel, that's when he becomes truly dangerous:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n07/frederick-seidel/two-poems
One click deeper:
If you would like to know more about Seidel, his Paris Review interview can be found here:
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5952/the-art-of-poetry-no-95-frederick-seidel