Projects
I have been charting the next chapter(s) of my practice, and I will start in California with the development of three projects, two of which, involving Auguste Rodin and George Grosz, I have already been working on for several years, and a third which I just cannot pass, so great is the luck to have stumbled upon rare works by Antonin Artaud.
Auguste Rodin
"Les inédits"
Firstly, I plan to continue working assiduously to consolidate the notion that Auguste Rodin is in a way still producing work at a distance of more than a hundred years from his passing, thanks to the behest he left to the French State, which through the musée Rodin, is mandated to cast in bronze the plasters the master bequeathed to France in 1916.
Had it not been for Rodin’s extraordinary foresight, we wouldn't be able to enjoy the bronze casts of such timeless models as the monumental Balzac, which was first cast in bronze in the mid-thirties, or of the Gates of Hell, cast for the first time in the late twenties, therefore decades after Rodin’s passing.
I have been graced with the honor to actively participate in the discovery and casting in bronze of a major “inédit” by Rodin, which lay dormant in the plaster of “Meditation, or the Inner Voice."
Consequently, I have received indications from several top American museum curators that they would like to participate in the development of this narrative, thus following the example set by illustrious American collectors and curators such as Jules Mastbaum, Bernie Cantor, Albert Elsen and Ruth Butler.
George Grosz
"Snippets"
Second, I have been able to pull together close to twenty exceptional works on paper by George Grosz. They are dated from the early 20’s to the 40’s, so from the middle of the Weimar Republic’s Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), all the way through to Grosz’s years in America.
Most notably, there are several large inks from the early 40’s which are illustrations for Ben Hecht’s “1001 Afternoons In New York,” an exceptional collection of short stories of which the relevance to today’s world is just as poignant as that of the sheets from the Weimar years, a period I already had the occasion to explore through the immensely successful exhibition “Der Kandidat,” which I presented during the run-up to the election of the current President of the United States.
I plan to put together a publication featuring these works, and will most likely use an innovative publishing platform developed by the Getty, which allows for the simultaneous presentation of data in the traditional printed form, in digital E-book -ready for dissemination by Amazon and Apple, and as a website. I suspect that the so-called Quire will be the norm for scholarly publications in the near future.
Antonin Artaud
"Self-portrait & portraits"
Lastly but not least, also in the realm of cross-pollination between literature and art (I remain faithful to my studies in Comparative Literature and Art History at Cornell), I have had the good fortune to get my hands on an exceptional self-portrait by Antonin Artaud, and on a set of ten vintage photographs of the “poète maudit,” and so have been consumed by a hunt for books by and on Artaud, such as the original American edition of Susan Sontag’s “Antonin Artaud Selected Writings.”
Although I haven’t decided what to do with these rare works, surely I will somehow share them with the LA public, and make a publication out of this rich material.
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