Peterdi works on LP record covers

July 30, 2015 Leave a Comment

DARK VISIT. 1948 Relief etching on zinc 15-3/4 x 19-5/8 in. Ed. 30 UJ #043 photo: Brooklyn Museum of Art — DARK VISIT. 1948
Relief etching on zinc
15-3/4 x 19-5/8 in. Ed. 30 UJ #043
photo: Brooklyn Museum of Art

Yes, a detail of this Peterdi print appears on a record album.

Command Classics used Peterdi’s prints on four of their classical music jackets. They paired DARK VISIT with a fresh recording of Symphonie Fantastique by Berlioz.

Detail from Peterdi's DARK VISIT used on a Command Classics 35 mm LP record jacket “I just picked up a couple of titles on the Enoch Light produced Command Classics Stereo 35mm series of classical LPs ... The packaging is beautiful. Heavy-weight hardback book style covers with striking, understated art on off-white card stock.” [http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/command-classics-stereo-35mm-lps-recommendations.73614/] — Detail from Peterdi’s DARK VISIT used on a Command Classics 35 mm LP record jacket
“I just picked up a couple of titles on the Enoch Light produced Command Classics Stereo 35mm series of classical LPs … The packaging is beautiful. Heavy-weight hardback book style covers with striking, understated art on off-white card stock.” [http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/command-classics-stereo-35mm-lps-recommendations.73614/]

In 1959, Command Performance/Command Classics (later acquired by ABC Records) debuted with their 35mm [magnetic film] recordings on vinyl that could be played on the standard 33-1/3 rpm turntable already found in every home. The new magnetic film recordings allowed for wider separation of stereo tracks, heard as a definite improvement by audiophiles. The record jackets would showcase images by contemporary artists who gave permission for it.

note: Introduced c.1948, LP vinyl records required added protection from scratching, hence a more robust jacket. Now a printable 12.4″ x 12.4″ paperboard surface became available for marketing vinyl records. Early approaches featured dramatic photos of musicians and reproductions of famous paintings.

Original art and typography were not far behind, and from the ’50s to the ’80s a new art form flourished for all record jackets. In the branding of ‘pop culture’ it beautifully accommodated (and may have even prompted) the image-rich names found in the genre: Jefferson Airplane, Iron Maiden, Led Zeppelin, Sex Pistols, Motorhead, Guns ‘n Roses. What would Red Octopus be sans artwork? (It was an album of love songs having nothing to do with the color red nor a cephalopod mollusc—yet its iconic artwork continues to identify Jefferson Starship’s 1975 best-selling album.)

also, this to think about:

The rise of digital music threatens one of the greatest canvasses of art seen in the 20th Century—the record sleeve. Originally just a protective cover … it soon evolved into a space for artistic expression in its own right, very often becoming as important as the music itself. Sometimes, even more so: legend has it that the cover of New Order’s Blue Monday was so expensive to make that their label lost money on every copy sold.[http://www.shortlist.com/entertainment/music/50-coolest-album-covers]

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Exhibition catalog, Nov. 1939

July 24, 2015 Leave a Comment

...these bulls and rooster, awakened from the peace of my childhood, into the bloody turbulence of life today. [from the artist's statement in the exhibition catalog (1939 — “…these bulls and roosters, awakened from the peace of my childhood, into the bloody turbulence of life today. ” [from the artist’s statement inside the catalog]

Peterdi’s first show in the United States was at Julien Levy Gallery (November 1939) comprising 19 works direct–from–Paris, expressing that ‘bloody turbulence of life today.’

In 1939 Manhattan, neither bloody nor turbulent, newspaper reviewers saw Peterdi as an over-wrought young Surrealist—reminiscent of Soutine, only not as polite.

The Spanish Civil War had already stunned Paris. Refugees were streaming into France, artists were donating work to benefit Spanish orphans, friends were going to Spain to fight; fellow Hungarian Robert Capa was already making war photographs there. Thousands of visitors had seen Picasso’s iconic Guernica at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair.

By 1937–1939, a crescendo of departures from Paris by foreign-born artists had begun in earnest. The family of American sculptor Richard Hollander insisted he come home and were able to accommodate his idea of bringing Gabor Peterdi along as a guest. Their ship arrived in New York harbor mid-August 1939, just two weeks before Hitler would invade Poland.

notes:
The bombing of Guernica (26 April 1937) was an aerial attack on the Basque town … carried out at the behest of the Spanish nationalist government by its allies [the German and Italian air forces]. [Wikipedia]

When setting out to revisit Paris in 1936, Julien Levy recalled, ‘I felt some intimation that Europe was exploding; I thought, well, I will explode with it if it happens. … I sensed that an irreversible process was begun …. To stretch back a hand, to exert some effort, would have no effect upon the inevitable events of the next two years …’
[Memoir of an Art Gallery, originally published New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977.]

Watercolor paintings

July 21, 2015 Leave a Comment

OAHU III. 1968 watercolor on paper [Arches] 26 x 32 in. — OAHU III. 1968
watercolor on paper [Arches]
26 x 32 in. studio photo

Peterdi has always worked with watercolors, and his retrospectives have usually included some of them. Since watercolor is seldom considered as significant a medium as oils or even prints, it’s less common to find a show devoted to it.

But in 1968, a Peterdi exhibition at the Honolulu Academy of Arts showed only watercolor paintings including OAHU III (above).

Gabor Peterdi’s resplendent watercolor impressions of Hawaii are in the Academy’s upstairs gallery. Their installation without hard-edged traditional mats is a happy one. Line and color now flow easily across the softly irregular edges of hand-pressed paper from one painting to the next. These abstractions of the Islands are excitingly personal, unbrainwashed and unbiased … Though a short-time resident, Peterdi already thinks and feels as a ‘kamaaina’ (‘roots in the soil’). Coming from old lands, he has felt the hard bright newness of this young group of islands … though [the paintings appear] non-objective, their patterns of varied brush-work and colors dancing in inventive textures sing clearly of Hawaii. With every viewing of this show (I’ve been six times and hope to go again before it closes), the vitality of its excitement is always new.

Juliette May Fraser
“Abstractions are Exciting, Personal”
Honolulu Star Bulletin, 26 May 1968

Massacre of the Innocents

July 18, 2015 Leave a Comment

Many classical paintings have been created around a biblical narrative known as the Massacre of the Innocents. Peterdi was familiar with it in works by Rubens, Cranach the Elder, Breugel the Elder, Tintoretto, and Ghirlandaio, to mention a few.

Peterdi’s MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS (1954) is his version—in modern dress. The context is WW II, with aerial bombardment.

As a U.S. soldier at the front, he had survived heavy artillery fire, had seen rotting corpses in battlefields, witnessed the liberation of a Nazi camp. He made drawings of it all, in real-time. Years afterward, he continued to process these images in his paintings and prints.

Ralph E. Shikes wrote,

The theme of Gabor Peterdi’s ‘The Massacre of the Innocents’ is as old as Christian art, the style as young as today, the effect, if studied, as shocking as that of Bruegel’s painting. Bombers attack. Tracer bullets make patterns in the sky. The earth is a shambles of horror, chaos abounds. It is a study in planes, lines, forms—and is a powerful comment. [The Indignant Eye; the Artist as Social Critic in Prints and Drawings from the Fifteenth Century to Picasso (Boston: Beacon Press 1969) p.394]

notes: the title refers to Herod the Great’s order to execute all male children the age of two years or less, in and around Bethlehem; Gospel of Matthew 2:16 [The New English Bible]

To see a partial list of well-known classical images on this theme, try http://www.textweek.com/art/massacre_of_innocents.htm.

at the Ernst Museum, Budapest

July 13, 2015 Leave a Comment

catalog for Peterdi's debut exhibition Ernst Museum, Budapest—October 1930 — catalog for Peterdi’s debut exhibition
Ernst Museum, Budapest—October 1930

Peterdi Gábor “ ... a tiszta tűz bennem maradt” Ernst Museum, Budapest — April 12–May 23, 2007 — Peterdi Gábor “ … a tiszta tűz bennem maradt”
Ernst Museum, Budapest — April 12–May 23, 2007

ERNST MUSEUM Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery then as now located at Nagymező utca 8, Budapest now under the curatorship of the Hungarian National Gallery — ERNST MUSEUM
Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery
then as now located at Nagymező utca 8, Budapest
now under the curatorship of the Hungarian National Gallery