Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

On New Year’s eve/day, we went to the Morgan library. This was the first time I’ve been in the new building since the reconstruction. The new architecture was designed by Renzo Piano and reopened in 2006.

I used to enjoy going through the large iron doors (at least, I think they are iron) which are still there, but are now permanently locked on what has become the side of the museum. There was something grand about it. There’s now a grand new entrance which is wheelchair friendly going through a large faceless glass entrance.

Once inside, you face a high ceilinged room with a great expanse of open space. Dining facilities are all about you, and it’s one of the better features of the building. A nice place to have a cup of tea/coffee and a spot of lunch.

Of course you’d go to the library for the exhibits on display. Closing this Sunday (today) is a show of the art of William Blake. While there, I took out my camera and started photographing some of the etchings and watercolors. No sooner had I shot two of them, than I was caught in my tracks by a guard asking me not to photograph anything. These are the two I did capture:

“Satan Smiting Job with Boils” by William Blake

Satan – “Head of a Damned Soul in Dante’s Inferno” by William Blake

However, I did learn that you can view the entire Blake exhibit by going online to here. There, all of the images are offered (at least through today.) The Book of Job is outstanding as are others from the Book of Europa. However, no photograph or reproduction can satisfy as much as standing in front of the actual article.

Also on display, through March 14th, is a show of Jane Austen’s manuscripts, letters and other artifacts. Being the visual person I am, of course the cartoons by James Gillray, which offer a glimpse of the society she dealt with, are an absolute riot. It was nice to be reminded of his brilliant work.

I was able to photograph several of them, but in two cases images I found on line were better than my soft photos. Here are three examples:

Tales of Wonder by James Gillray

Marital Harmonics by James Gillray

A Little Music or The Delights of Harmony by James Gillray

I was also fascinated with Austen’s letters. Having done a lot of research about Edgar Allan Poe, I’ve seen quite a few of his letters, and the two were writing at roughly the same time.

Letters did not come in envelopes. They were large-ish sheets of home-made paper that were folded into very small parcels and were sealed with wax. Since paper was valuable you did not waste any of it. Writing went from left to right, up and down and in the margins. Wherever there was empty space there was room for more writing. Letters were also contained to one sheet of paper since the carriage of the letter was expensive.

I don’t quite know how they managed their postal system, but it must have been somewhat arcane in comparison with today’s system of dropping a letter into the corner mailbox. I do know that Poe sometimes employed friends to carry letters to those he was writing.

The visit to the Morgan Library was entertaining and enjoyable. I’m sorry I don’t do it more often, certainly considering how close it is to my apartment.

The Brothers Quay have an exhibition on display at Parsons School of Design, 2 West 13th Street on the ground level. It’s on exhibit from now through October 4, 2009.

Stephen and Timothy Quay claim writers Franz Kafka and Robert Walser, animators Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica, puppeteers Wladyslaw Starewicz and Richard Teschner, and composers Leoš Janácek, Zdenek Liška, and Leszek Jankowski among their influences. All of these artists can be felt with each of the constructions on display.

1
On entering you see a darkened room with boxes about
the size of your torso – maybe 3′ x 4′ – on display.

Of to the side there’s a theater with constantly running films
showing Quay brother works. One of every kind of chair.

Within the boxes there are whole worlds.
Magnificent detail upon detail.

To the next box for a wholly different world.

Again the amazing detail is brought to the enclosure.

A couple of the boxes are seen through a prism.
The interior is magnified.

You have to get close to it to get real clarity.
You virtually enter these little rooms.

Some of these worlds seem enormous.

There are many closeups one could take given all there is to see.

This little scene is in the upper left box of the full view above.

The central character on the main stage.

You can get an idea of the cases and the display.
All contain their own little worlds.

Another magnifying glass focuses on a feather.

Just beyond the feathered quill there’s the writer.

The last box near the exit has a label within.

Many of the cases can be viewed
from three different perspectives.

- Last week there were the noisy attacks pro and con of the 09 Ottawa Animation Festival poster. It climaxed with Amid Amidi’s turn on Pete Emslie’s artwork attacking his caricatures as: “. . .tired Hirschfeld impersonations”. This isn’t quite a bad put down considering the almost 70 year brilliance of Al Hischfeld’s caricatures. Hirschfeld was an artist of the highest calibre, and to say one’s work looked like his is to say it looks like a Matisse or a Picasso.

I was never a raving fan of Hischfeld’s work, though I couldn’t help but respect his lifelong consistency, clean art and beautiful ink work. However, when I went to an exhibit which toured NY through the Public Library a few years ago. This exhibit initiated at the National Portrait Gallery/Smithsonian and moved across the country.

It was after seeing this work, in person, that I began to see Hirschfeld himself. Somehow we ended up at the same venues for four or five occasions at this late point in his life. I was always too shy to go up to him to introduce myself.

Surprisingly, Hirschfeld’s caricatures were the stunning gems throughout the show. (There were also those beautiful Joe Morgan celebrity caricatures as well as setups and drawings from Disney’s Mother Goose Goes Hollywood (see this post.)

By the age of 18, Al Hirschfeld had been an art director for Louis Selznick, Sam Goldwyn and Universal Pictures. His connection with movies and movie stars was set for the rest of his life. He befriended Miguel Covarrubias in 1923 when they shared a studio and many interests.

In 1924 he left to study painting in Paris and traveled extensively for the next few years. In the interim he began to pubslish celebrity caricatures. Dick Maney, intrigued by the actor Sasha Guitry, noticed and liked a caricature on a playbill that Hirschfeld had done. Maney brought it to the attention of the New York Herald Tribune. Thus was began Hirschfeld’s career in the newspapers – including 20 years at the Tribune where he even acted as Moscow Theater correspondent for the paper.

After he had done the Marx Brothers’ collage caricature he was on a bee-line to great success.

The Night at the Opera 1935, a collage.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

A 1928 caricature of Scottish comedian, Harald Lauder, printed in the NYTimes.
This was one of the earliest published and a good start to a career.

A 1939 drawing of dancer Bill Bojangles in the show, The Hot Mikado.
Designer, Nat Karson and Producer, Hassard Short stand to the right.

This 1946 caricature of the Cradle Will Rock shows composer,
Marc Blitzstein at the piano surrounded by the cast.

This 1950 caricature of Walter Winchell shows the
style fully formed including the imbedded NINA.

Presidential candidate Wendell Willkie was painted for
American Mercury magazine in May of 1944.

A 1949 painting of H.L.Mencken as the first of a series of covers for
American Mercury magazine, Lawrence Spivak, publisher, commissioned it.

Edward R. Murrow in a painting done for TV Guide in 1956.

Good caricature is an artform of its own.
Great caricature can be as brilliant as art can get.

- Here’s a booklet that Karl Cohen sent me, the catalogue of an exhibition of Joanna Quinn‘s stunningly beautiful drawings for the National Media Museum in Bradford, West Yorkshire. This show will be held from October 16, 2009 – February 21, 2010. The catalogue has me watering at the mouth and gets me wondering if I can visit this show.
Perhaps there’s some venue in the US that would be interested in proogramming something so attractive and valuable.

Take a look at this catalogue:

(Click any image to enlarge.)

________________________

- The ever-creative John Schnall sent me a video of a recent piece he did. As a film, it’s pure promo but as a creative endeavor it’s pretty sensational. I thought I’d like to share, so here it is: Glympse.

- Joseph Stella is one of my all-time favorite artists. His most famous paintings were all done in the early part of the Twentieth Century. (All of the paintings here were done between 1918 and 1929.) He admired the Futurist painters of Italy. He brought the same sensibility to America when he landed as an Italian immigrant.

The Brooklyn Bridge – 1919

This is one of two interpretations of the Brooklyn Bridge which Stella painted. It was ultimately a byproduct of a competition among artists. Georgia O’Keefe, John Marin, and Albert Gleizes are among the artists who also painted the bridge. Stella was so moved by the subject that he came back for a second shot at it.

__
New York Interpreted: The White Way I / New York Interpreted: The White Way II

Stella developed a small series of charcoal drawings and paintings which he named, “New York Interpreted.” They certainly pushed his philosphies in art, and moved American Art forward.

New York Interpretated: The Skyscrapers – 1920-21

The Gas Tank – 1918

Factories – 1918

As you can see with this work, he was as adept at realistic drawing and painting as he was at Futurism. But, of course, that’s expected of any good artist.

The Red Flower – 1929

These two paintings are very much in the spirit of many of the flowers that Georgia O’Keefe painted. However, his symbolism comes heavily whereas O’Keefe’s is barely noticeable.

The Tropical Sonata – 1921

- Yesterday’s NYTimes featured an article about the forthcoming Walt Disney Family Museum to open in October in San Francisco. Former deputy director of the Harvard University Art Museums, Richard Benefield, will run the Museum. It’d be nice if a genuine animation historian were somehow involved.

I enjoyed seeing the reason Diane Disney Miller gave for feeling the necessity of the museum. A 1994 biography by Marc Eliot, “Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince,” that depicted him as a bigot angered her. Neal Gabler’s book, “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination,” also upset her. That book gave an unflattering picture of Disney’s marriage, despite the fact that the family opened all their records to Gabler.

Ms. Miller also feels that the “Empire” has passed Walt over as a person in their attempt to globally brand the Disney name. Reportedly, this comment has confused the directors of studio Disney. After all, “. . . the company recently issued collectible figurines in his likeness and runs a fan club and magazine dedicated to him.”

Diane Disney Miller hopes the museum will portray a complete picture of her father, offering positive as well as not-so-positive material to the public. The museum will include, for example, a video about Disney’s friendly testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 and acknowledge the bitter animators’ strike in 1941.

Too bad the SF Chronicle won’t be around to give us a good report on the opening. Regardless, I’ll have to schedule a trip to the city to see this site once it opens. In the meantime, the Museum’s site is already up and running offering some bits of information and an operating book store (which doesn’t sell Gabler’s book, but does offer numerous John Canemaker tomes.)

- April 4th through May 9 Paul Glabicki will have a solo show in NYC at the Kim Foster Gallery, 529 West 20th St. in NYC.

Paul is a friend who came up through the film world at about the same time as I. His interest was always more into the experimental, Independent film, and his work was always exquisitely detailed and complex films. We often found each other at the same festivals in differing categories.

I received some information about his upcoming show, and I’m posting some of the information and statements that were sent me by the gallery.

Paul Glabicki is an experimental film animator whose work has appeared at major film festivals, as well as national and international museum exhibitions. His animation work has been carefully crafted by means of thousands of meticulous hand-drawn images on paper. His films have screened at such prestigious sites as the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, the Cannes Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, and the Venice Biennale. He has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Amencan Film Institute, and several grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

His new drawing series titled “ACCOUNTING for…” began with a Japanese artifact acquired by the artist several years ago: an accounting ledger book dating from the 1930s.

The relentless record keeping, the beauty of the mark-making, musings about its contents and purpose, the fact that it survived and came into his possession, the patterns that emerged when the book was carefully taken apart and arranged on a wall, the suggestion (by changes in the writing style) that more than one person made the marks, and other thoughts, images, and responses grew out of the artist’s interaction with the book.

Paul was interested in the book as a found personal, temporal object imbedded with meaning, function and mystery. Most intriguing to him was the fact that it made a leap from past to present written day-by-day; month-by-month, entry-by-entry, mundane and utilitarian (not intended to be an aesthetic object), recorded in time, and revealing patterns and rhythm over the duration of its writing.

The opening reception is Saturday April 4th 6-8pm.

You can see a 10 min short by Paul, Object Coverstion, on YouTube here.

- Tatia Rosenthal‘s clay animated feature, $9.99, will make its NY debut as part of the Lincoln Center Festival: New Directors/New Films. Her film will be screened twice:

Sunday March 29th at 70pm at MOMA and
Wednesday April 1st at 9pm at the Walter Reade Theater in Lincoln Center.

Tickets can be bought on line or at the door for $10.

.

.

A show of photographs by artist, Patti Smith opened last night at:

the Robert Miller Gallery
524 West 26th Street
(212) 366 4774

The show will run from March 19 through April 18th.
Like everything else from this extraordinary artist, the work is beautiful, poetic and well worth your interest. Go.
.

- Speaking of wrenching, following the sad events leading to the death of Natasha Richardson was so sad.

Months ago Heidi and I happened to be sitting just behind her and Liam Neeson at a performance of Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the Roundabout Theater. They made a couple of small quiet comments during the show. She rested her head on his shoulders several times. I’m sure they felt unwatched (as much as any celebrity in public can be) and were so obviously in love with each other.

The funeral home used for the wake is a block away from____They left at intermission,
my studio. It’s listed as “Greenwich Village Funeral Home,____though they undoubtedly
but they obviously use another name over their front door.___went backstage to see
___________________________________________________Ms. Linney. Throughout this entire week’s events, I was only able to think of the two of them as they were at that performance. She with head on his shoulder. Alive and human.

-i Here’s what for me was a real treat to scan and post. I had some limited access to actual drawings by Bill Tytla of the Devil from Fantasia’s Night on Bald Mountain sequence.
The drawings are mostly roughs by Tytla, and they give a good sample of what his actual work looked like.

I don’t need to write about it; let me just give you these mages.

A good example of a Tytla drawing.

Here’s the clean up of the same drawing.

Later in the same scene.

Some Tytla sketches.

Animation roughs don’t get any more beautiful than this.

A side-peg pan.

Rough heads.

Art. What else need be said?
The individual drawings are stunning, and they’re
in service to a brilliantly acted sequence.
It will never get better.

- I love Ben Shahn’s work and have since I first saw it in NY at a show at the Jewish Museum when I was in college. Shahn was enormously successful during the 50s, 60s & 70s; he was politically unpopular in the 80s and 90s. Now his work is considered passé by a lot of art critics since so much of it is politically motivated.

Shahn had an enormous influence on the NY crowd of the 50s, particularly those connected with the Art Student’s League. This included John and Faith Hubley, who studied painting there under Joseph Hirsch, and became closely associated with Gregorio Prestopino (who looks to have been an acolyte of Ben Shahn’s.) One can see the heavy influence of Shahn on a lot of John’s backgrounds in Adventures of an * or Moonbird.

In fact, all graphics of the 50′s and early 60s
flew off the back of Ben Shahn’s work, and it wasn’t until Peter Max and The Yellow Submarine that art, illustration and, by association, animation seriously moved away from his beautiful line work.

Recently, John Canemaker showed me a book he had in his collection which Shahn had illustrated. I have a number of them, and they all look similar. Lots of white space, careful and poised compositions, textural lines with blacks and dark greys. They’re beautiful.

I thank John for lending me the book to post. It’s large, and I won’t post all of the pages, but I will have to break it into a couple of posts if I want to display it nicely. So this is the first. Usually, I don’t post the text of the book pages, but here the type and text is as much a part of the composition as the linework.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

Here’s the house that ends Hubley’s Moonbird.
It’s part of the long pan that appears below.

- Paul Glabicki is an artist who started out as an animator and has moved away from the moving picture to the framed image. He’s written to me about an upcoming art show opening in Chelsea this coming weekend.

From the gallery’s publicity release:Paul Glabicki transcribes each page of a 1930s Japanese accounting ledger as a foundation and underlying structure to create new images. Layered over each transcribed page are maps, calendars, counting systems, etc. – bits of incoming daily information.

Paul’s letter to me tells about his transition from animation to the gallery world:

A break from animation a few years ago evolved into several drawing projects. The new work doesn’t move, but has clearly evolved from all that has come before. The ACCOUNTING FOR series is an ongoing transcription of a 1930s Japanese accounting ledger, layered (or continued) with new entries/information of my own (I should have
30 works in the solo show, with 3 ledger pieces in the January-Feb group exhibit). Things may be set in motion again at some future point, but for now, I’m enjoying hand and pencil/pen on paper.

The show will open Saturday at the KIM FOSTER GALLERY
(529 West 2Oth Street / New York, NY 1OO11 / tel/fax 212.229.OO44)

Hours: Tuesday thru Saturday, 11am — 6pm

I’ve long been a fan of Paul’s films, so I’m excited about viewing his artwork, and I’d encourage you to take a look as well.

Here are two more of the drawings on exhibit:

Accounting #4 | Accounting #18

Christmas officially passed last Tuesday, Jan. 6th – sometimes called “Little Christmas”, the feast of the Epiphany and the 12th day of Christmas. I took down the decorations in the studio today and as with past years spent a bit of time treviewing the many cards that were sent to me. (Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get out a card this year. There were pressured deadlines at work, and a health crisis for my mother at home. My time was so limited, Christmas became an after thought.)

However, I received so many beautiful and original cards that it’s probably imprudent for me to select any for display. Just the same, I would like to point out a couple of them.

I’d received a card from a good friend which was printed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s an Eyvind Earle painting of Santa in Central Park. It’s a gem, as might be expected.

Dick and Harriet Rauh have sent their annual linoleum block print of floral patterns.
It’s always a treat to get their card.

Patrick McDonnell sent a card that was virtually green. Seeds were implanted in the paper, and I’ve already planted the card in soil for the Spring blossoms.

Finally, John Canemaker & Joe Kennedy sent us an original painting of the ocean,
bubbling and forcing its way toward us.