Functional Design

Victor Horta’s Art Nouveau: Belgian Master of Organic, Sinuous Design

Art Nouveau is often flowery, organic, and asymmetrical, its flowing forms corresponding visually to musical movement. With all its various forms and translations firmly rooted in the second half of the 19th century, Art Nouveau served as the doorway to our modern age.

Primarily dating from the 1890s, until the outbreak of World War I (1914), Art Nouveau was the refinement of an aesthetic reaction to the excesses of the industrial revolution, with its mirror-twin progeny: technological triumphs and deplorable social conditions. artes fine arts magazineMore

Contemporary Ceramics: Porcelain by ‘Hare with Amber Eyes’ Author, Edmund de Waal

A confession: I “read” text and images, but less frequently objects. My last experience with ceramics was a very poor pot I threw in high school, though I came to know Steuben glass about that time through a first girlfriend’s engineer father.

Pottery is pretty old stuff. Legions of archeologists have reconstructed the pre-Homeric world from large and small shards of crockery and crude and elegant drawings on jars I’ve seen. Pottery is craft, a complex mix of ideational design and its physical execution on wheels, “throwing” and then glazing, temperamental kilns and their mysterious temperature swings, and an amalgam of material, equipment, knowledge, experience, and luck. artes fine arts magazineMore

Judy Kensley McKie Studio Furniture, Objects at Boston’s Gallery NAGA

www.artesmagazine.com — Grazing Horse Table, 2012, cast bronze (edition of 8), 30x55x16″

Embodying all that is joyful, beautiful and visually engaging, Judy Kensley McKie’s studio furniture and objects combine the energy, craft and sensations of magical animism and artistic mysticism from her own very personal perspective. Her work makes us inwardly smile.

Her current show at Gallery NAGA in Boston displays her gifts in basic very accessible forms and sensitive details. And yet, her work, like other great art or design goes beyond the physical, the visual and material craft to an ethereal visceral presence. We not only see her pieces but we literally emotionally feel them. Each is always enhanced by some twist of irony or dignified humor in all of her furniture and funtional objects. This adds to their magic, their wonderful spirituality. artes fine arts magazineMore

Urban Branding Should be Part of our Civic Dialogue

As last summer’s London Olympics demonstrated, the major organizing device for the Games was what is referred to as “The Look of the Games.” Everything from event tickets to athlete bibs to athlete villages to sports venue enhancements to signage was part of this “brand effort.”

Above: Exhibiting the “Look of the Games,” this huge magenta angular construction is unmistakably part of London 2012. Its form is derived directly from the Olympics’ graphics, font and typeface of the 2012 logo.

This approach has been significantly instituted since the 1968 Mexico City Games. It has been more or less applied over the last 44 years. London did a particularly good job visually connecting the events and the metropolitan and regional environment. This effort can be considered a major if not temporary effort in the establishment and enhancement of the civic environment as brand. It is urban branding. artes fine arts amagazineMore

Boston’s Gallery NAGA Highlights ‘Furniture with Soul II’

Following up on the first exhibition (June-July 2012), and based on David Savage’s book, Furniture With Soul, Gallery NAGA is currently presenting a new group of studio artists’ work that focuses upon a younger ensemble of practitioners. Ranging from classically-referenced to organically inspired, this exhibit is made up of strong beautiful elements throughout. Here elegance and materials speak to function and form in a conversation of different voices and varying perspectives.

This studio furniture grouping is comprised mostly of large pieces, demonstrating the stylish and elegant craftmanship of each practitioner. Curated by author/craftsman David Savage, this exhibit is a showcase for emerging stars in the studio furniture international firmament. There is a grace and purpose to these functional sculptural elements. Like the previous show of established masters, the work here again transcends art and design, beauty and purpose. artes fine arts magazineMore

Boston’s Gallery NAGA Features Work of Master Furniture Builders

Gallery NAGA is perhaps the premiere studio furniture venue in America, certainly one of the best in the world. Their current exhibit, Furniture with Soul, adds to the gallery’s unique and long history of showcasing the best studio furniture by the most notable practitioners in the field. This exhibition is thematically based on David Savage’s book, Furniture with Soul.

One of the most meaningful and perhaps extraordinary aspects of the best of studio furniture is the fact that it transcends both art and design. It is beautiful and functional, and even more, becomes something visceral. artes fine arts magazineMore

Arts and Crafts Styling of Early 20th C. Architects, Greene & Greene

Experiencing the creative work of architectural brothers, Greene & Greene, is like sipping a rare, richly-made wine—offering sensory delights from the firm of two authentic American Arts and Crafts masters. As the brothers Greene—Charles and Henry—worked primarily in California, they created the ‘gold standard’ for the Arts and Crafts design style. Their work, both as entire projects and in the detail found there, serves as an exquisite example of design, presented in clear, concise and elegant terms. artes fine arts magazineMore

Utrect’s Rietveld-Schroeder Huis: Early Modern Architecture Masterpiece

On a recent trip to Europe, my plane had an extended layover in Amsterdam. So, on a pre-planned quest, I journeyed by train from the airport to the ancient university city of Utrecht, The Netherlands, to see the austere, sculptural house—the Rietveld-Schroeder Huis, designed and built in 1924, by Gerrit Rietveld (left: photo by Mark Favermann).

A Dutch architect and furniture designer of extraordinary talent, Rietveld (1888-1964) was still an architectural student in 1916, when he started his own furniture factory in his hometown of Utrecht. His father had a joinery business at which he had previously worked. Rietveld then apprenticed in a jeweler’s studio. During his student years, he became familiar with the work and theories of other Dutch artists and designers. Ever experimenting with form, materials and construction methods, he produced a variety of furniture designs, and especially iconic chairs, in a straightforward strategically simplified, yet abstracted way. artes fine arts magazineMore

Photography Retrospective: Rose Hartman’s ‘Incomparable Women of Style’

There is nothing that can be said or seen about the internationally famed, New York City based, Rose Hartman or her iconic photographs, that hasn’t found its way into an interview, an article, or a juicy gossip column—be it in the pages of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Women’s Wear Daily, New York Times, New York Post—or for that matter talked about on every major TV, cable and radio station, here and abroad. One only has to Google her name to be deluged by Hartman mentions.

And let us not forget her countless appearances—we call them Hartman Sightings—at the plushest of openings, the most intimate suppers, and trendiest fashion orgies, where the Fashion Queen of Social Documentation—her realm is All Things Beautiful—inevitably becomes the center attention, if not the topic of conversation. Not that Hartman, a strikingly energetic blond bombshell, every bit as eye-intriguing as the subjects she photographs, insists on this. But this is how star power works. artes fine arts magazineMore

Early Modern Architectural Treasures in Former Soviet Republic, Georgia

When we think of the great art nouveau cities of Europe, images of Paris’s Metropolitan and Barcelona’s Gaudi-lined streets come to mind. Even high up in the Baltics, Riga has firmly established itself as one of Europe’s iconic art nouveau cities, with its own particular brand of modernism.

Yet there is one city that is nearly bypassed on each and every list, whose name has only started to be recognised by art nouveau aficionados – Tbilisi.

Above: Narikala Fortress, Tblisi, Georgia. Photo: G. Gaeser, 2011

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