Paul Nougé: Photographs

Paul Nougé, Woman Frightened By A Ball of String, 1929-30

Paul Nougé, born in Brussels on 13 February 1895 and died in Brussels on 6 November 1967, was a Belgian poet, founder and theoretician of surrealism in Belgium, sometimes known as the "Belgian Breton".

Paul Nougé (1895–1967)- Magnetic table, 1929-1930.

Paul Nougé, Coat suspended in space, c. 1929-1930

Paul Nougé, Le bras révélateur

Paul Nougé, Les oiseaux vous poursuivent

Suzan Frecon : paper

Suzan Frecon

Suzan Frecon is an abstract painter who works with line and geometric shape using fluid, monochrome washes. She is critically acclaimed for her sensitive arrangement of color, form, and texture and for the philosophical resonance of her art. Her works are composed with subtle, interacting arrangements of color - usually earth toned - and which are applied with meticulous attention to the physical qualities of paint. Each work is the result of a thoughtful, laborious process in which the artist sketches and revises a composition, usually evolved from previous works. She then executes a "plan" rooted in geometric and volumetric calculations and precisely defined spatial relationships. She proceeds gradually, guided by intuition; the result is a complex amalgamation of preparation and instinct, order and chance. Pictorial associations are never intentional, and Frecon refuses to imbue her paintings with symbolic undertones.Her almost tactile use of color heightens the visual experience of her work, and depending on the light source and viewing angle, different perceptions emerge. Her forms change from positive to negative, and colors and surfaces vary in terms of density and reflexivity.

Daguerreotypes Spur Book on John Dillwyn Llewelyn

This story begins in 1973 with a man in Wales tidying up the mess in his garage and discovering a box of daguerreotypes. Uncertain whether to throw it out, he waited until his brother-in law asked advice from a friend who was a photographer and documentary filmmaker. The friend, Noel Chanan, strongly advised him to hold tight onto a box that must be brimful of history.

And so it proved. The box held 30 or 40 family images from the early 1840s by John Dillwyn Llewelyn, an amateur scientist and pioneering British photographer; the man who owned that box, and his sister, were Llewelyn’s great-great-grandchildren. Mr. Chanan has now written a book, the first major showing of Llewelyn’s work for a wide public since the mid-19th century.

Read more here.

Janet Malcolm: The Emily Dickinson Series

Janet Malcolm, Abyss (from the Emily Dickinson series), 2013, Paper collage, 15 x 23 inches

At Lori Bookstein Fine Art. See the exhibit online here.

The New York Review of Books

Deborah Lou Turbeville, American fashion photographer died last October, 2013. She is credited with adding a darker, almost Gothic more brooding element to fashion photography beginning in the early 1970s.

Fashion photography was notoriously done in well-lit spaces, Turbeville wanted to create images that were edgier that with a sensuality and strangeness, glamour and decay. She created her own worlds inhabited by pale, haunted eyed models many times photographed in derelict buildings. In 2009, Women's Wear Daily wrote that Tuberville transformed "fashion photography into avant-garde art, — a distinction all the more striking in that she was almost completely self-taught.

The worlds Turbeville created are many times de rigueur in fashion photography today. She was the only woman and the only American in the triumvirate of Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin and herself who changed fashion photography from safe to one that shocked the viewer. It wasn't just about the clothes anymore, Turbeville created her own dark fairy tales where the model and the clothes all became part of the Turbeville world. 

Books with Turbeville's photographs

Bryan Nash Gill

If there is, indeed, nothing lovelier than a tree, Connecticut-based artist Bryan Nash Gill shows us why. Creating large-scale relief prints from the cross sections of trees, the artist reveals the sublime power locked inside their arboreal rings. Gill creates patterns not only of great beauty but also year-by-year records of the life and times of fallen or damaged logs. He rescues the wood from the property surrounding his studio and neighboring land, extracts and prepares blocks of various species (including ash, maple, oak, spruce, and willow), then makes prints by carefully following and pressing the contours of rings and ridges until the intricate designs transfer from tree to paper. The results are colored, nuanced shapes—mesmerizing impressions of the structural integrity hidden inside each tree. These exquisitely detailed prints are collected and published here for the first time, with an introduction by esteemed nature writer Verlyn Klinkenborg and an interview with the artist describing his labor-intensive printmaking process. Also featured are Gill's series of printed lumber and offcuts, such as burls, branches, knots, and scrubs. Woodcut will appeal to anybody who appreciates the grandeur and mystery of trees, as well as those who work with wood and marvel at the rich history embedded in its growth.
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