Laboratory of the Imaginist Bauhaus

Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio (1902–1964) together with Asger Jorn founded this experimental laboratory in 1955 and Pinot-Gallizio continued to work at it until the end of his working life.  He was another of the founders of the Situationist International and he collaborated with Debord on the painting Abolition of Alienated Labor (1959-63).  He had quit the Situationist group in 1960, but continued on good terms with, as did his cohort, Jorn.  I've written about Jorn elsewhere on this blog and will do so again soon, but I want to concentrate here on Pinot Gallizio and his industrial painting techniques and concepts.  I once tried to use his idea of selling paintings by the yard.  I made huge paintings made up of smaller paintings and or scenes and sold them by section.  So I'm rather indebted to this great Italian painter and mean here to pay him back.  Consider it an act of Potlatch

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The next two are collaborations, the first with Debord and the second with Jorn.  The rest are paintings from after his break with the SI.

Lyubov Popova April 24, 1889 – May 25, 1924

She didn't  have the luxury of a long life, but in other regards Popova benefited from her family's wealth and influence, which put her in the right place and time for her gifts to flower.  Though she came from a bourgeois background, she embraced the proletarian revolution when it occurred (and died before the party turned its back on revolutionary principles and enforced a standard realism on working artists.)  The images below are only some of the paintings.  They're presented in reverse order, beginning with the Space Force Constructions from 1921, a hundred years ago.  The following few years (her last) were well spent designing patterns for fabrics, costumes  and sets for theater productions, layouts for books and executing other utilitarian projects. She also wrote a few manifestos.  The earlier paintings , those she made while a member of Malevich's Suprematist group, already betray her interest in presenting their ideal forms in actual space.  She began making the Cubist paintings in France under the tutelage of Metzinger and Le Fauconnier in 1912.  She was most deeply inspired by traditional Russian icons, whose spirit can be felt in all her great work, without it ever being explicit in its derivation.  She worked alongside women and men in forming the first great artist collectives, which became the models for those of my own youth, seventy years later.

7 Miniature Abstract Disks & Ovals

These seven little paintings have to do with the friendship of two often neglected but major Non-Objective painters and designers who were married to more famous male artists.  I won't mention the husbands here, because they're usually mentioned first.  These pictures are about Sophie Taeuber-Arp & Sonia Delauney (or Sophie Henriette Gertrud Taeube & Sarah Elievna Shtern), the first born in Suisse and the other in Russia.

Gil Cortez en LA

 

Siempre estarás sucio en mi corazón, cariño.

Elka Leigh Scott Schumann

 August 1935 - August 2021

A fiend of many years died last Sunday.  I knew her best as the mother of several dear friends and I see her teachings, good and bad as well, reflected in them all. I know that many people knew Elka better than I did, but I knew her for more than thirty five years and sat at her table and ate her food with her and her family and traveled and performed with her on more than one occasion, so I knew her pretty well.  Over the last few days I've read many tributes to her and don't really recognize the icon these tributes describe.  Elka was generous to her friends and benevolent to the thousands who met her through the famous theater she founded with her husband.  This is the public figure I see being memorialized on Facebook and in the press.  The loss I feel at this time is of someone who I enjoyed being around in more mundane circumstances.  I will always think of her because of the support stockings I wear that I first learned of from her daughter when they were prescribed for Elka.  I remember watching Peter struggling to put them on her one morning in the kitchen.  I will always remember Elka's great clutter of uncompleted projects that grew and shrank and grew again at the end of the kitchen table.  I think of her garden, which she maintained every year outside her house near the woodpile.  Several times I was sent to pick in it and I believe I helped weed on occasion.  I stayed for extended periods in the cabin by her house.  I used to watch horror movies in her basement with Tamar and the others in Max's room, the 1987 NBA Basketball Finals too.  I know it will feel very strange for her five offspring being in her house now that she is gone.