Earl Childress

Frank Stella's Assistant Large Scale Print on Plexiglass

1990

José Yalenti, (1895-1967) Brazilian Photographer "Beiras" (Sides) Photo, numbered 5/15, circa 1950, (printed later) on premium luster photo paper with ultrachrome ink. Art: 15" H x 11" W; Frame: 20 1/4" H x 14 1/4" W. Provenance: Dickinson Roundell Gallery José Yalenti’s Architecture photos seem at first disorienting, abstract black & white and grey surfaces, cut through by startlingly straight lines and a variety of surface textures. Much of his work is of mid-century Latin American architecture, by the likes of Oscar Niemeyer and Roberto Burle Marx. José Yalenti was born in São Paulo, Brazil in 1895. On April 28, 1939, a group of photography aficionados, including Yalenti, formed the Foto Clube Bandeirante, later changed to Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante, or FCCB. Starting in the late 1940s, a contingent of FCCB photographers began creating photographs of abstracted architectural motifs (as in Architecture or Twilight), and eventually became known as the Escola Paulista, or “Paulista School.” Yalenti was among the members of the unofficial Paulista School. Between 1945 and 1960, the Paulista School photographers explored the rapidly changing formal qualities of São Paulo. By photographing skyscrapers and stairways at steep angles, creating closely cropped compositions from found geometric motifs, and capturing the flattening effects of shadows, Paulista School photographers investigated the new physical perspectives emerging in the urban environment. They created a distinctively Modern aesthetic that used strong contrasts of light and dark, geometric forms, linear compositions, and collapsed space to assert photography’s status as an artistic medium. As part of their pursuit of photographic Modernism, Yalenti and his fellow Brazilians adapted the stylistic innovations of U.S. and European photographers such as f.64, New Objectivity, Dada, Surrealism, and the Bauhaus, to the Brazilian context. Along with his FCCB compatriots—Thomaz Farkas, Geraldo de Barros, and German Lorca, among others—Yalenti explored the formal properties of black-and-white image-making. Yalenti and the Paulista’s School’s abstract photographs responded to the new trends in Brazilian Modernist architecture being developed by young architects in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. In 1939, Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, and Affonso Reidy broke ground on the Ministry of Education and Health Building (MES), the building that would define Brazilian architectural modernism. The Rio-based team combined elements of Le Corbusier’s undecorated structural purity with Brazilian regional design to produce a more organic and “tropical” Modernism that responded to the local culture and climate. The sinuous and sensuous curves of Yalenti’s photograph are directly influenced by stylistic developments in architecture at the MES, including the building’s covered entry and its organically abstract contours. By 1957, when Yalenti created Architecture or Twilight, Brazil was globally recognized as an architectural leader. MoMA in New York City organized a popular exhibition of Brazilian architecture in 1943 (“Brazil Builds”), and highlighted the country again in its survey show "Latin American Architecture since 1945," that ran from 1955–56. Brazilian photography...

Sorry for the reflection on the plexi. In the early 1980s, the Polaroid Foundation invited Hungarian-born painter and photographer György Kepes (1906-2001) to use the 20x24 Polaroid camera. The resulting carefully staged compositions summarize many of his artistic concerns, employing such objects as prisms, flowers, and graphic papers to manipulate the effects of light and form. György Kepes 1906-2001 was a Hungarian-born painter, photographer, 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 1967 He founded the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he taught until his retirement in 1974. Kepes was born in Selyp, Hungary. His younger brother was Imre Kepes, ambassador in Argentina, father of András Kepes journalist, documentary filmmaker and author. At age 18, he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, where he studied for four years with Istvan Csok, a Hungarian impressionist painter. In the same period, he was also influenced by the socialist avant-garde poet and painter Lajos Kassak. Kepes gave up painting temporarily and turned instead to filmmaking. In 1930, he settled in Berlin, where he worked as a publication, exhibition and stage designer. Around this time, he designed the dust jacket for Gestalt psychologist Rudolf Arnheim's famous book, Film als Kunst (Film as Art), one of the first published books on film theory. In Berlin, he was also invited to join the design studio of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the Hungarian photographer who had taught at the Dessau Bauhaus. When, in 1936, Moholy relocated his design studio to London, Kepes joined him there as well. Kepes was lured to Brooklyn College by Russian-born architect Serge Chermayeff, who had been appointed chair of the Art Department in 1942. There he taught graphic artists such as Saul Bass. In 1944, he published Language of Vision, an influential book about design and design education. In part, the book was important because it predated three other influential texts on the same subject: Paul Rand, Thoughts on Design (1946), László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (1947), and Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception (1954). In 1947, Kepes accepted an invitation from the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT to initiate a program there in visual design, a division that later became the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (c1968). Some of the Center's early fellows included artists Otto Piene, Vassilakis Takis, Jack Burnham, Wen-Ying Tsai, Stan Vanderbeek, Maryanne Amacher, Joan Brigham, Lowry Burgess, Peter Campus, Muriel Cooper, Douglas Davis, Susan Gamble, Dieter Jung, Piotr Kowalski, Charlotte Moorman, Antoni Muntadas, Yvonne Rainer, Keiko Prince, Alan Sonfist, Aldo Tambellini, Joe Davis, Bill Seaman, Tamiko Thiel, Alejandro Sina, Don Ritter, Luc Courchesne, and Bill Parker...