here is some fun for valentines day, a dutch treat & planning ahead

a bit of a bummer for us as we are planning to visit The Netherlands and other european countries this summer or maybe San Francisco but wait the show is coming to New York City this fall at the Frick Collection October 22, 2013 thru January 19,2014 says the NYTimes.

but never fear art travels well, so do we.

Girl with a Hoop Earring: Fun with Vermeer

By Robin Cembalest Posted 02/14/13

Two beloved Vermeers have left Holland for a stint in the U.S. They’ll find their descendants stripped by Dalí, bedecked in toilet-paper rolls, and reincarnated by Cindy Sherman

The Girl with a Pearl Earring winked at me the other day.
San Francisco must be treating her well.

Vermeer’s enigmatic masterpiece has taken up residence at the de Young Museum, along with the 34 other Dutch Golden Age paintings on the road while their normal home, the Mauritshuis in the Hague, undergoes renovation.

The “Dutch Mona Lisa,” whose beauty and inscrutability have famously inspired art, fiction, product design, a Barbie, a Jonathan Richman song, and a whole lot of Flickr photos, doesn’t get out of Holland much, so for fans her U.S. tour—continuing at the High in Atlanta, and then the Frick—is like “the World Series, Super Bowl and Masters rolled into one magic moment,” as USA Today put it. At each venue, she will have a gallery all to herself.

Jan Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, ca. 1665, oil on canvas. To see her wink (sometimes), click here.COURTESY ROYAL PICTURE GALLERY MAURITSHUIS, THE HAGUE, BEQUEST ARNOLDUS DES TOMBE, 1903.

While The Girl With a Pearl Earring was hardly a wallflower at the Mauritshuis, she wasn’t quite the type to headline a show–until 2003, when she got her Hollywood break. Being played by Scarlett Johansson in Peter Webber’s film version of Tracy Chevalier’s novel brought the painting new fame; to the dismay of art historians, though, the audience sometimes concluded that the book’s main character, a maid who posed for Vermeer, was real.

Scholars don’t know who sat for the picture, which was not intended to be a specific portrait of anyone. That in itself wasn’t unusual in those days. What was unusual, says de Young curator Melissa Buron, was the three-quarter view, which highlights the sense that the woman is about to speak.

Adding to the Girl’s allure is her distinctive ultramarine turban—not exactly Dutch fashion at the time, either, but relatively easy to recreate in ours. Girl with a Bamboo Earring is from Awol Erizku’s photo series diversifying and updating art-history classics.

Awol Erizku, Girl with a Bamboo Earring, 2009, digital chromogenic print.COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND HASTED KRAEUTLER GALLERY, NYC.

Dutch Old Masters get a different twist in Hendrik Kerstens’s color photographs, up through Saturday at James Danziger. Each one depicts the artist’s daughter Paula in get-ups that evoke 17th-century portraits, but with their lovingly rendered hoods and bonnets replaced by bubble wrap, tin foil, and other humble materials. These in turn inspired high fashion when Alexander McQueen used them as fodder for his fall 2009 collection.

Hendrik Kerstens, Paper Roll, 2008, pigment print.COURTESY DANZIGER GALLERY.

Meanwhile, further south, another iconic Vermeer is also in California for a spell: this Saturday the Getty opens a special installation of Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, on loan for six weeks while Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum prepares for its reopening. She’ll be surrounded by other views of intimate interiors by Vermeer contemporaries including Jan Steen, Gerard ter Borch, and Pieter de Hooch.

This enigmatic beauty (who also has pearls, in a necklace on the table) has inspired speculation for centuries: Is the message from a lover? Does the map have a meaning? Is the woman pregnant, or just fashionably dressed?

Jan Vermeer, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, about 1662-1663, oil on canvas.COURTESY RIJKSMUSEUM, AMSTERDAM. ON LOAN FROM CITY OF AMSTERDAM (A. VAN DER HOOP BEQUEST).

These open-ended stories were a lifetime provocation for Dalí, who admired Vermeer’s precision and  reproduced the Dutch master’s content through the filter of his own unconscious. (Also, he set up an encounter between a rhino and a copy of The Lacemaker at the zoo, as you can see on YouTube).

In addition to recapitulating the The Lacemaker repeatedly, Dalí painted the mysterious Apparition of the Figure of Vermeer in the Face of Abraham Lincoln (what was he thinking about Lincoln?) and The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used as a Table (Phenomenologic Theory of Furniture-Nutrition), to name a few. Then there’s The Image Disappears (1938), an illusion that turns Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window into the profile of a bearded male—and back again. (Her head is his eye and her elbow his nose).

A study for the painting, now in “Drawing Surrealism” at the Morgan, tells us more about what was on Dalí’s mind. This one, clearly showing the optical illusion in the works, has two versions of the letter reader: one dressed, the other naked.

Salvador Dalí, Study for “The Image Disappears,” 1938, pencil on paper.©SALVADOR DALI, FUNDACIO GALA- SALVADOR DALI, ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK 2012 PHOTO ©2012 MUSEUM ASSOCIATES/LACMA, BY MICHAEL TROPEA PRIVATE COLLECTION.

It was Vermeer’s ability to confer nobility on the ordinary that attracted British photographer Tom Hunter. Hunter, who was living amidst squatters in Hackney, wanted to produce art that would help them in their struggle against authorities—not with “the usual stock of black and white images of the victims of society,” as he put it, but with serenity, beauty, dignity, light, and space. The girl in this photograph is reading an eviction order.

Tom Hunter, Woman Reading Possession Order, from the series “Persons Unknown,” 1997, cibachrome print.©TOM HUNTER, COURTESY THE ARTIST AND YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY.

Cindy Sherman captures Vermeer’s mood in black and white. Of course there is a letter-reader in the “Untitled Film Stills.”

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #5, 1977, gelatin silver print.COLLECTION MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK. HORACE W. GOLDSMITH FUND THROUGH ROBERT B. MENSCHEL. ©2013 CINDY SHERMAN.

If you can’t make it to the West Coast, remember that the East has plenty of Vermeers on public view, with five at the Met, three at the Frick, and three at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.–not bad considering that there are 36 extant works by the artist (including the one still missing from the Gardner theft).

Vermeer left relatively few documents about his sitters, or his symbols, but radiographs of one of the Met’s paintings yield tantalizing clues about his process. Originally, the figure in A Maid Asleep was accompanied by a man in the background and a dog in the doorway. Later, Vermeer replaced them with a mirror and a chair. With the love interest gone, we have to create the narrative ourselves.

Johannes Vermeer, A Maid Asleep, 1656–57, oil on canvas.THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, BEQUEST OF BENJAMIN ALTMAN, 1913 ACCESSION NUMBER: 14.40.611.

A squatter in Tom Hunter’s version of the scene.

Tom Hunter, A Woman Asleep, from the series “Persons Unknown,” 1997.©TOM HUNTER, COURTESY THE ARTIST AND YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY.

For The Music Lesson, Hiroshi Sugimoto photographed a wax tableau of the original painting installed in Madame Tussauds in Amsterdam.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, The Music Lesson, 1999, pigment print.©HIROSHI SUGIMOTO COURTESY PACE GALLERY.

The Pearl Earring girl pixelated in spools and made whole through the lens of an optical device, courtesy the art-history-riffing illusionist Devorah Sperber.

Devorah Sperber, After Vermeer 2, detail view, 2006, 5,024 spools of thread, stainless-steel ball chain and hanging apparatus, clear acrylic viewing sphere, metal stand.COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.

Museums are offering new ways to engage with Vermeer through social media. The Getty blog is asking people to send in a first sentence of the letter. The de Young Tumblr, following the Guardian’s lead, put out a call for imagined versions of the Girl’s story.

The next thing you know, Vermeer’s inscrutable beauties will be telling their own versions on Twitter. @girlwithapearlearring seems to be open.

Film still from Girl with a Pearl Earring.©JAPP BUITENDIJK.

Copyright 2013, ARTnews LLC, 48 West 38th St 9th FL NY NY 10018. All rights reserved.

jene

Cindy Sherman @ MOMA, my reflections

seeing  the spectacular exhibit at moma of Cindy Sherman’s work is impressive on many levels, first on the amount of prints and their physical size. it made me think about how it is when one starts off  working on a project we begin with smaller pieces because of affordability and i guess we don’t have the chops to tackle life size images much less larger than life.

what bothered me most were all the reflections in the glass  protecting the beautiful chromogenic prints. there wasn’t a place one could view the individual pieces were someone or something wasn’t reflected in the pictures glass. that was distracting enough but add to that were people crossing in front of you as you tried to read the descriptions written on the wall. does it take that much of an effort to walk around someone or a group in this instantgram world we are now confronted with? have people lost or not learned manners?

at home in the kitchen

but seeing such a massive show from one artist inspires me to keep on making what i do for myself. i keep telling mary to pursue her ‘self projects’ because i see them as exciting, well i see her as exciting but i won’t go into that now. it’s so hard for me as an artist to be working in the dark, but i think that’s where the most exciting of my work lays, when i don’t know where i am going but act as if i am following an inner voice. just do it.

after all aren’t we just energy converters.

as is sherman herself following in the footsteps of Claude Cahun ( 1894-1954) who was a forerunner of sherman and lady gaga. cahun was a french surrealist photographer,artist, writer, feminist, and radical activist who worked with ‘autoportraits’

claude cahun autoportrait with painted on nipples

‘All By Her Selves” is a comprensive retrospective curated by Francios Leperlier and Juan Vicente Aliaga originating at the Jeu de Paume in Paris now on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through June 3, 2012.

claude cahun

Cahun was born into a wealthy family of Jewish intellectuals from Nantes, France, but left in 1921 drawn to the frenetic, artistically and socially audacoius milieu of paris between wars. she considered herself  a born surrealist but was never accepted as part of the inner circle. nonetheless she did participate in several surrealist exhibits and was part of  the anit-fascist group ‘Contre-Attague.’

sherman as bacchus

but back to the sherman show. the amount of people who pass through moma’s door is amazing especially at $25.00 a head. the sherman show doesn’t have a special admission price as some shows do making even more money to do what with, buy art? one would think that the highpriest of moma art world would be able to solve the problem of the distracting reflections. is it a money problem? raise the price of the cafe’s latte’s or maybe just tilt the pictures downward, do something.

a personal story: i was lighting a CBS network news show overlooking a new york harbor celebration. the studio was enclosed in 1″ plexiglass with a panaroma view of the harbor. we did two shows that night one at sunset, or normal evening news show with the sun setting behind the anchor, a killer angle and the other one after dark same angle but different subject and fireworks. we used two different lighting systems one for each setup.

when the big muckymucks came down to test both looks we had nothing but reflections for the evening show from the lights reflecting in the plexiglass. horror on horror as everyone looked at each other. i hadn’t set this system up as someone eles had, but i was there and needed to fix it, i asked if i could have a moment to solve the problem. i got the stagehands to wrap some ‘blackwrap’ around the barndoors to eliminate the spill causing the ambient reflections.

when everyone came back and looked on camera a sigh of relief was uttered with jokes and laughter. problem solved everyone could go home and get a good nights sleep.

i can’t believe that not one at moma saw these reflections as a problem before the sherman exhibit opened. well maybe they didn’t care after all you’re inside and have paid your money.

i wonder how cindy feels? oh well. she’s probably in her studio creating another series based on reflections. one can only guess.

jene

Naked before the camera in New York

Well one of the true signs that spring has arrived in the city are  bulbs and bosoms busting out all over. i must say this is one of my favorite times of year. the other being fall with it’s colors and smells of dried leaves. so i guess it’s only fitting that so many wonderful naked photography shows are in town in some of the swanky neighborhoods and some not so naked.

the Gagosian Gallery has Avedon, murals & portraits opening May 4 through July 6 2012 always a show to see of course, here i s a sample of avedons notes to his printers of adjustments on prints. who needs photoshop?

printers notes

as is this one below at Metropolitan Museum of Art which is naked. they even have naked penis at the museum. why does america have such a taboo on penises. is it because the law makers are male and they hate to be compared to one another, but have no problem looking and comparing woman’s breasts?

tomorrow we are going to MOMA to see Cindy Sherman exhibit and dinner out courtesy of a friends invitation.

By Peggy Roalf  Thursday, April 5, 2012

The nude body, one of the subjects photographers have celebrated since the camera was invented, is presented in its many guises at an exhibition that opened last week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

While the body has been a central feature in art through the ages, the realism of photography could not help but capitalize on its erotic possibilities—and the show gracefully presents this theme along with some surprising examples from anthropological, medical, and forensic documentations of the mid- and-late 19^th century, including an 1860 photograph of a hermaphrodite by the great French photographer, Nadar.

A photograph of a reclining nude female by Julien Vallou de Villeneuve from 1853, which defines the notion of an “hourglass figure,” was made expressly to sell to artists who painted the female form. The use of photography by artists at the time is well known, and many took up the camera for this purpose themselves. One beautiful image of this genre is a photograph by the painter Thomas Eakins of male bathers from around 1883. But male nudity was rather strictly controlled and due to its scarcity, photographs that became available were avidly collected including an 1890s example of what could be considered soft-core porn, by the Italian photographer Guglielmo Plushow.

Man Ray’s 1930 Male Torso introduces Modernism in the middle section of the show, which also includes two classic nude studies by Edward Weston of Charis Wilson, on the sand, both from 1936. Other standouts from this period are Distortion #6, 1932 by Andre Kertesz, which prefigures the distorted nude figures that British photographer Bill Brandt became known for at the end of the 1940s (three of which are included), and a photograph by Irving Penn from 1949 that rivals the prehistoric Venus of Willendorf for its stately corpulence.

The exhibition takes some surprising turns in presenting scenes from the “Age of Aquarius,” including a 1971 photograph by Garry Winogrand of a Central Park be-in; an early 1970s shot by Larry Clark from “Teenage Lust;” and a pair of transgressive performance documents by Hanna Wilke, done at PS 1 in 1978 while the building was still in shambles. But the show is at its best in presenting the earliest uses of photography in capturing images of the naked human body for consumption by artists, scientists, collectors, and voyeurs.

Images above: Row 1, left to right: Thomas Eakins, Thomas Eakins and John Laurie Wallace on a Beach, ca. 1883; Brassai, L’academie Julian, 1932; Man Ray, Male Torso, 1930.
Row 2, left to right: Andre Kertesz, Distortion #6, 1932; Irving Penn, Nude No. 1, 1949; Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith, 1976. All courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Naked Before the Camera continues through September 6^th at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, at 82^nd Street, NY, NY.

i’ll have my clothes on for the shows and dinner, nothing like a hot piece of pasta falling in ones lap.

jene

things i am looking forward to do when i get back from hawaii….. woohoo

we are off to Hawaii [the big island]  tomorrow, apartment is secure from the neighborhood burglar, as secure as i can make it now, so don’t worry it never does any good anyways. have most of camera gear with me and i’ll try to be more careful this trip. i am sure i’ve over packed too much clothing but don’t know what we’ll run into. humpbacked whales breaching woohoo, redhot lava flows, volcanos active and not, lots of stars, sandy beaches, hawaiian shirts. plenty of sunscreen and cf cards.

this is our 1st year anversary after having put our dog to sleep ending her suffering. of course i have to dream about her last night. part of growing older being seperated from the ones we love. something to look forward to. oh well i’ve nothing but fond memories of her.

now if i could only figure out how to relieve my sons suffering but he’s not an honest person with anybody and without honesty there’s not going to be much progress. i think he’s on his way to living in a cardboard box and hollering curse words at passing people, talk about pain there it is. theres noting i can do about it.

yesterday we went to see ‘Crazy Horse’ at film forum, Celebrated documentary director Frederick Wiseman spent ten weeks with his camera exploring one of the most mythic places dedicated to women: ‘The Crazy Horse.’

Over the years this legendary Parisian cabaret club, founded in 1951 by Alain Bernardin, has become the Parisian nightlife ‘must’ for any visitors, ranking alongside the Eiffel Tower and The Louvre. which i thought was beautifully lit but it’s the crazy horse. what’s not to like except the length of the movie, but wonderful anyways.

these are some of the things i am looking forward to do when we get back. well these and getting ready for a joint exhibit with mary in Lancaster PA beginning in April. i will post more on the exhibit closer to the date when we figure out what’s going to be shown.

it’s so wonderful living in a cultural center, we get an opportunity to see so much as it comes through. walking down the street today i saw shoots coming up to meet the sun, they think it’s spring already. now if only i could get my wireless system to work. oh well.

heres the partial list:

Weegee at icp

Weegee: Murder Is My Business

January 20–September 2, 2012

For an intense decade between 1935 and 1946, Weegee (1899–1968) was one of the most relentlessly inventive figures in American photography. His graphically dramatic and often lurid photographs of New York crimes and news events set the standard for what has become known as tabloid journalism. Freelancing for a variety of New York newspapers and photo agencies, and later working as a stringer for the short-lived liberal daily PM (1940–48), Weegee established a way of combining photographs and texts that was distinctly different from that promoted by other picture magazines, such as LIFE. Utilizing other distribution venues, Weegee also wrote extensively (including his autobiographical Naked City, published in 1945) and organized his own exhibitions at the Photo League. This exhibition draws upon the extensive Weegee Archive at ICP and includes environmental recreations of Weegee’s apartment and exhibitions. The exhibition is organized by ICP Chief Curator Brian Wallis.

cindy sherman at moma:

Cindy Sherman. Untitled #466. 2008. Chromogenic color print, 8' 1 1/8 x 63 15/16" (246.7 x 162.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Robert B. Menschel in honor of Jerry I. Speyer. © 2011 Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman

February 26–June 11, 2012

The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Exhibition Gallery, sixth floor

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential artists in contemporary art. Throughout her career, she has presented a sustained, eloquent, and provocative exploration of the construction of contemporary identity and the nature of representation, drawn from the unlimited supply of images from movies, TV, magazines, the Internet, and art history. Working as her own model for more than 30 years, Sherman has captured herself in a range of guises and personas which are at turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting. To create her photographs, she assumes multiple roles of photographer, model, makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist, and wardrobe mistress. With an arsenal of wigs, costumes, makeup, prosthetics, and props, Sherman has deftly altered her physique and surroundings to create a myriad of intriguing tableaus and characters, from screen siren to clown to aging socialite.

Bringing together more than 180 photographs, this retrospective survey traces the artist’s career from the mid 1970s to the present. Highlighted in the exhibition are in-depth presentations of her key series, including the groundbreaking series “Untitled Film Stills” (1977–80), the black-and-white pictures that feature the artist in stereotypical female roles inspired by 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, and European art-house films; her ornate history portraits (1989–90), in which the artist poses as aristocrats, clergymen, and milkmaids in the manner of old master paintings; and her larger-than-life society portraits (2008) that address the experience and representation of aging in the context of contemporary obsessions with youth and status. The exhibition will explore dominant themes throughout Sherman’s career, including artifice and fiction; cinema and performance; horror and the grotesque; myth, carnival, and fairy tale; and gender and class identity. Also included are Sherman’s recent photographic murals (2010), which will have their American premiere at MoMA.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Sherman has selected films from MoMA’s collection, which will be screened in MoMA’s theaters during the course of the exhibition. A major publication will accompany the exhibition.

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The exhibition is organized by Eva Respini, Associate Curator, with Lucy Gallun, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography.

Major support for the exhibition is provided by Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley, The Modern Women’s Fund, and The William Randolph Hearst Endowment Fund.

Additional funding is provided by The Broad Art Foundation, David Dechman and Michel Mercure, Robert B. Menschel, Allison and Neil Rubler, Richard and Laura Salomon, The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Glenstone, Michèle Gerber Klein, Richard and Heidi Rieger, Ann and Mel Schaffer, and The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art.

Cindy Sherman knows all the world loves a clown

The Museum of Modern Art Announces a Retrospective of Cindy Sherman for 2012

NEW YORK, N.Y.- The Museum of Modern Art will present the exhibition Cindy Sherman, a retrospective survey tracing the groundbreaking artist’s career from the mid 1970s to the present, from February 26 through June 11, 2012. The exhibition will bring together more than 170 key photographs from a variety of the artist’s acclaimed bodies of work, for which she created myriad constructed characters and tableaus. The first comprehensive museum survey of Sherman’s career in the United States since 1997, it will draw widely from public and private collections, including the collection of The Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition is organized by Eva Respini, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.

art knowledge news

jene

thoughts for today, no nudes opps

i know it’s almost christmas time and a lot of people come here for the nude photos, some of my work is about human figure studies and yes at my age i still enjoy naked bodies. i’ve always thought bodies are beautiful even a 747 is a lovely designed body.

some internet groups i belong to don’t really enjoy my work, hey maybe i don’t still belong to them i’d better check. i am like groucho marx who said ‘he’d not join a group who’d have him’ or something like that. my previous post on cindy sherman is about an artist/photographer doing what they want to do and not worrying about what people thought about their work, picasso also comes to mind as another. yet people are clamoring for their work. i’ve one collector who said they wanted to hang my ‘Puppy love’ next to sherman. how cool is that?

Puppy love

do i think my work should be considered with these artist, why not ? all though i am not reinventing the wheel, well maybe my own red wagon. well then i am doing what i want more or less as this graphic shows ‘whats the problem ?’

ok no problem

 well since it is christmas week i’ll give in a little and post what i call an ‘Angel ‘ yes it’s a nude….. my public demands it.

Angel

have a safe and happy holiday !

jene

American artist Cindy Sherman Awarded the 2012 Roswitha Haftmann Prize

ZURICH.- The Board of the Roswitha Haftmann Foundation has awarded the 2012 Roswitha Haftmann Prize – worth CHF 150,000 – to the American artist Cindy Sherman (born 1954). Sherman is one of the leading exponents of staged photography. She uses mostly herself – her own body – as her model; yet the concept underlying her work is anything but self-referential. She has reinvented role photography. Her roleplay, which begins in the studio as a performance, ultimately reaches its audience in the form of a photograph. Her works transcend the boundaries of the exhibitionistic, and are all the more provocative because they are not intended to be viewed as self-portraits. Rather, through her alternating roles, Sherman parodies stereotypical representations of womanhood and explores the meaning of female identity in a male-dominated society. She investigates the processes of physical, psychological and sexual repression and the taboos that surround them, depicting them in the form of sometimes garish, overdrawn ‘reproductions’.

Sherman references the techniques and forms of advertising, cinema and classical painting, but moves freely within these creative parameters. Her initial breakthrough came with a series of black and white photographs created between 1977 and 1980: the ‘Untitled Film Stills’ seemingly emulating images from Italian Neo-Realism and American film noir. They were followed by her first photo series in colour that dealt with the issue of sexual objectification, in which prosthetic limbs and mannequins were her preferred props. Later came the ‘History Portraits’ that replicated the composition of celebrated paintings easily recognizable to the viewer, as well as series on topics such as Hollywood and clowns.

Sherman draws her audience into conflict-laden situations. The individual identity that she presents is confronted with a collective sub-conscious, artificial beauty with natural brutality. Sherman’s particular talent lies in her ability at once to attract and repel the viewer with works that are both profoundly unsettling and enduringly fascinating. In the opinion of the Roswitha Haftmann Foundation jury, she is the leading artist of filmic and photographic self-exploration after Andy Warhol. It is in recognition of these artistic achievements that she has been awarded the Roswitha Haftmann Prize.

PRIZEWINNER AND AWARD CEREMONY
Cindy Sherman was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey in 1954. She studied painting at the State University College in Buffalo, New York and, during that time, also began working with photography. Her first important work, ‘Bus Riders’ (1976), was created while she was still a student.

She currently lives and works in New York. Her works appear in the collections of some of the world’s most prestigious art museums, not only in the US but also in Europe and, indeed, Mexico and Israel. Cindy Sherman is the twelfth artist to receive Europe’s most valuable art prize and the fourth woman to do so, after Maria Lassnig, Mona Hatoum and Vija Celmins . The award, worth CHF 150,000, will be presented on 10 May 2012 at the Kunsthaus Zürich.

SPECIAL ACCOLADE FOR HARUN FAROCKI
The Prize was originally the initiative of Roswitha Haftmann (1924-1998), whose Foundation has awarded it since 2001 to a living artist who has created an oeuvre of outstanding quality. The winner is chosen by the Foundation Board, which includes the directors of the Kunstmuseum Bern , the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Kunsthaus Zürich as well as other members co-opted by the Board. The deed of foundation provides for the jury to award special prizes at its discretion. It has now chosen to do so for the third time, and is bestowing on film director Harun Farocki a prize of CHF 75,000.

Author, lecturer and filmmaker Harun Farocki was born in 1944 in what is now the Czech Republic and from 1966 to 1968 studied at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin, where he now lives. He has established a reputation as a film critic and screenwriter and has completed more than 100 productions since 1966, predominantly documentaries, essay films and story films. Many of the works he has created since 2000 have been shown in exhibitions and museums ranging from the São Paulo Art Biennial to documenta 12. He curates exhibitions for art societies and museums. The Bourdelle Muse

jene

originally published in Art Knowledge News