Donald Deskey was a native of Blue Earth, Minnesota. He studied architecture at the University of California, but did not follow that profession, becoming instead an artist and a pioneer in the field of Industrial design. In Paris he attended the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, which influenced his approach to design. He established a design consulting firm in New York City, and later the firm of Deskey-Vollmer (in partnership with Phillip Vollmer) which specialized in furniture and textile design. His designs in this era progressed from Art Deco to Streamline Moderne.
He first gained note as a designer when he created window displays for the Franklin Simon Department Store in Manhattan in 1926. In the 1930's, he won the competition to design the interiors for Radio City Music Hall. In the 1940's he started the graphic design firm Donald Deskey Associates and made some of the most recognizable icons of the day. He designed the Crest toothpaste packaging, as well as the Tide bullseye. His company is still in operation in Cincinnati. A collection of his work is held by the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. He is regarded the American pioneer of industrial design, and contemporary American graphic design.
Grant Mudford, Containers, Gelatin silver print, 1979
GRANT MUDFORD (1944- ) Australia
Containers 1979
Gelatin silver print
Signed and dated on back
Framed size: H: 26 ½” x W: 30 ¾”
“Since he moved to Los Angeles from Australia in the late 1970s, Grant Mudford has composed photographs that crisply examine the streamlined geometries of West Coast architecture and landscape. Mudford has zeroed in on the abstract formal relationships lurking within the designs of gas stations, strip malls and apartment buildings. The geometrical arrangements highlighted in his photographs of the masterful modernist structures of Rudolf Schindler and Craig Ellwood have disclosed a link between their midcentury architecture and the contemporaneous hard-edge abstractions of L.A. painters John McLaughlin and Lorser Feitelson.” – Art in America, “Grand Mudford at Rosamund Felsen, September 2003
György Kepes, Lens Refraction, Gelatin silver print, 1939
GYÖRGY KEPES (1906-2001) Hungary/USA
Lens Refraction 1939
Signed: 6 (in a circle, on back); Gyorgy Kepes 1939 (in pencil on back)
Illustrated: New Bauhaus, 50 Jahre: Bauhausnachfolge in Chicago (Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv and Argon Verlag GmbH: 1987), p. 185
Framed size: H: 27 1/8” x W: 22 ¼”
György Kepes was a Hungarian-born painter, designer, educator and art theorist. After emigrating to the U.S. in 1937, he taught design at the New Bauhaus (later the School of Design, then Institute of Design, then Illinois Institute of Design or IIT) in Chicago. In 1947 He founded the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he taught until his retirement in 1974.
Carlotta Corpron, Light Cubes, Gelatin silver print c. 1947
CARLOTTA CORPRON (1901-1988) USA
Light Cubes c. 1947
Silver gelatin print, patinated steel frame
Signed: Carlotta M. Corpron, Denton, Texas, RM6 #1081.47 (stamped on back)
Framed size: H: 13 ¾” x W: 16 ¾”
Price: $40,000
Corpron became a teacher at Texas Woman’s University in 1935 and in 1942 she led a light workshop at Texas Woman’s University for photographer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Although he praised her rapport with her students, Moholy-Nagy did not encourage Corpron’s independent photography. More influential on her work was the arrival of Gyorgy Kepes, who came to Denton to write a book in 1944. His interest in Corpron’s work prompted her to produce several series of photographs that were the most original of her career. At his suggestion Corpron experimented by placing white paper cut in simple shapes within a perforated box that was open at one end. When flashlights were shined through the holes onto the paper shapes, interesting patterns of light and shadow were reflected. The resulting abstract photographs comprised Corpron’s “Light Patterns” series.
In her “Light Follows Form” series she extended her exploration of the modeling properties of light to three-dimensional form. In this series, she used light filtered through Venetian blinds or glass to dramatize a plaster cast of a Greek head. She also experimented with solarization, a process in which already exposed negatives are exposed. Works such as Solarized Calla Lilies (1948) convey a surreal elegance, but Corpron favored more original methods of expression. She regarded her “Space Compositions” and “Fluid Light Designs” series as her best work. In the former she used still-lifes composed of eggs, nautilus shells, or glass paperweights, usually combined with a curving reflective surface, to produce an illusion of receding three-dimensional space. She emphasized distortions of form that occurred in her egg photographs by experimentation during the development process. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Art Institute of Chicago, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth.
Lewis Hine, What It Costs The Child/Industry/Society, Silver gelatin print c. 1913-14
LEWIS HINE (1874-1940) USA
What It Costs The Child/Industry/Society c. 1913/14
Silver gelatin print
Signed in script on back
Framed size: H: 14 1/8” x W: 16 3/16”
Price: $20,000
***The same image is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Lewis Wickes Hine, photographer, sociologist and humanist, is best known for his insightful portraits of immigrants at Ellis Island and his unflinching views of housing and labor conditions in the United States. Studying and eventually teaching at the Ethical Culture School in New York City, Hine infused his humanist concerns into a style of documentary photography that set the standard for delivering a social message through his medium.
The Artist's Joke surveys the rich and diverse uses of satire by avant-garde and contemporary artists. The texts collected in this new reader from London's Whitechapel Gallery examine what Andre Breton called the “lightning bolt” of the unsettlingly comic, as seen in the anarchic wordplay of Duchamp, Picasso, the Dadaists, and Surrealists; Pop's fetish for kitsch and the comic strip; Bruce Nauman's sinister clowns and twisted puns; Richard Prince's joke paintings; art ambushed by feminist wit, from the Dadaism of Hannah Hoch in the 1920s to the politicized conceptualism of Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger in the 1980s; the serenely uncanny in Mike Kelley's installations and the risibly grotesque in Paul McCarthy's; and the strangely comic scenarios of artists as various as Maurizio Cattelan, Andrea Fraser, Raymond Pettibon, and David Shrigley. Artists' writings are accompanied and contextualized by the work of critics and thinkers including Freud, Bergson, Helene Cixous, Slavoj Zizek, Lewis Wickes Hine, Jorg Heiser, Jo Anna Isaak, and Ralph Rugoff.
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