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A mysterious painting could be an earlier plan for one of Mies van der Rohe's most revered residential projects

2021-08-09T17:32:00-04:00

“It’s been fifty years since Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s death and the details of his international career have been carefully archived. But a mysterious painting has surfaced that reveals what may be an early version of his master plan in Newark”

The supposed painting depicts what could have been a disastrous expansion of the footprint of van der Rohe’s iconic 1960 apartment complex.

Courtesy of Newark Public Library Digital Collections

His Colonnade Apartments are perhaps the foremost example of the “Towers in the Park” typology synonymous with the International Style in the northeast. The painting depicts a seven-tower scheme that expands the plot north of 6th Avenue by several blocks. A local architect named Gabriel Dal’Maso reportedly came into its possession after seeing it in a 2011 documentary about the Colonnade by the Austrian filmmaker Heidrun Holzfeind.

Dal’Maso began inspecting the painting in the midst of a one-man stand against a proposed development at an abandoned area adjacent to the Pavillion towers, where he was living at the time. The towers were sold into private hands in 2018 and again earlier this year to the tune of $77 million. JerseyDigs has more on the mystery Mies plans here.

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Historic Hollywood movie backdrops saved from the dumpster by Art Directors Guild

2019-12-26T11:15:00-05:00

Hillsides, houses, airports and cathedrals; cityscapes, landscapes and the ocean rocking toward the horizon; courtrooms and bedrooms, bungalows and castles; gas stations, skyscrapers, apartment buildings; the roofs of Paris and New York, corridors, tapestries, train depots and a mineshaft burrowing into an icy mountain. These are the 90 painted backdrops that remain of more than 200 saved through the Art Directors Guild Backdrop Recovery Project

The Los Angele Times takes a look at the Art Directors Guild Backdrop Recovery Project, a two-year-long effort aimed at saving some of the industry’s remaining iconic scene paintings.

Lynne Coakley, president of JC Backings, a Hollywood legacy scene painting company that produced iconic backdrops for movies that include Ben Hur, North By Northwest, and others, tells Mary McNamara of The Los Angeles Times, “It’s only in the last 10 years that we’ve started thinking of them as having historic value. For years, we thought of backings as a commodity; that’s our business.”

That perspective has changed in recent years as the value of these paintings has become better appreciated. Several of the works are heading to the new Renzo Piano Building Workshop-designed Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.

The Mona Lisa: Mysterious, on the move, and very popular

2019-08-13T10:03:00-04:00

Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting has been moved to a new room in the Louvre while its usual home is renovated. That’s causing some commotion for visitors.

This year, as the Salle des États, where the Mona Lisa painting has hung since 2005, is being renovated, a debate over how to address the growing number of tourists visiting the famous painting has come to a fore in Paris.

The exhibition hall, according to The New York Times, is being renovated in advance of a new exhibition celebrating the 500th anniversary of Da Vinci’s death that is set to debut in October.

Zaha Hadid's seminal artwork makes its Hong Kong debut

2017-03-17T19:17:00-04:00

Ceaseless experimentation was the root of Zaha Hadid's architectural practice, as depicted in her early drawings and paintings. The Serpentine Galleries and Zaha Hadid Design teamed up to showcase Hadid's artistic prowess in the exhibition, “Zaha Hadid: There Should Be No End To Experimentation”, which opened today at the ArtisTree gallery in Hong Kong.

Presenting Zaha Hadid's artwork in Hong Kong for the first time, the exhibition shows her paintings, calligraphic drawings, and rarely seen private sketch notebooks, along with VR experiences and screenings of archival footage.

Hafenstrasse Development; Hafenstrasse Development, Hamburg, Germany, 1989; © Zaha Hadid Foundation.

Concept Painting, Cardiff Bay Opera House, Wales, UK, 1994-1996; © Zaha Hadid Foundation.

Head over to Bustler for more about the exhibition.

Zaha Hadid show coming to Serpentine Sackler Gallery this winter

2016-08-30T04:00:00-04:00

An exhibition of rarely seen paintings, drawings and digital works by Zaha Hadid is due to open at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London this winter (8 December-12 February 2017), throwing new light on the late British-Iraqi architect’s accomplishments as an artist and calligrapher. [...] Sketches and paintings linked to major projects, both realised and unrealised, will go on show.

The remarkable early paintings of the late Dame Zaha Hadid

2016-03-31T14:37:00-04:00

Before Zaha Hadid completed her first built work, the Vitra Fire Station in Weil am Rhein, Germany, in 1994, she was largely considered to be a paper architect – but one whose paintings, with their magnificent treatment of scale, geometry and landscape, established her as an artistic force to be reckoned with.

Toned with influences from Russian Suprematism, futurism and deconstructivism, the pieces still stand alone today as testament to a giant talent, one whose singular vision of architecture has indelibly changed the profession, and the world we inhabit. Some belong to MoMA's collection, and many arose from her competition proposal for "The Peak" leisure club in Hong Kong, which she won only five years after graduating from architecture school at the AA.

From "The Peak" series (early 1980s):

From "The Peak":

"The Peak" Site Plan Line drawing:

"Malevich's Tektonik" painting (1974-76):

"The World (89 Degrees)" (1983):

Hadid showing "The Peak" to Margaret Thatcher:

Related: Zaha Hadid lectu...

Old Royal Naval College aims to restore 40,000 sq.ft of its Painted Hall, plan to be unveiled in NYC next month

2015-04-28T19:44:00-04:00

Arts patrons continue to support the restoration of the Painted Hall at the Christopher Wren-designed Old Royal Naval College at the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site in Greenwich, London. Over the next three years, the ORNC's three-stage conservation project would clean and restore the remaining 3,700 sq.m. (approx. 40,000 sq.ft) of the Painted Hall, sometimes dubbed "the Sistine Chapel of the U.K." The first phase restored 560 sq.m. of paintings in the Upper Hall back in 2013. The second phase focuses on the Lower Hall, the Vestibule, and the semi-underground King William Undercroft directly beneath the Painted Hall.

Housed inside King William Court, the Painted Hall was originally built as a dining hall for British naval veterans who lived at the Royal Hospital for Seamen. Once the hall was built, English painter James Thornhill began his 19-year endeavor of painting the interior from 1708 to 1727. As instructed, Thornhill's paintings largely pay tribute to the British Navy a...

Architectural historian discovers Chartres Cathedral has started faking it

2014-12-15T12:05:00-05:00

The first portion she pointed out was a pale ochre wall patterned with thin, perpendicular white lines mimicking mortar between masonry blocks. Looking upward we then saw panels of blue faux marbre, high above them gilded column capitals and bosses (the ornamental knobs where vault ribs intersect), and, nearby, floor-to-ceiling piers covered in glossy yellow trompe l’oeil marbling, like some funeral parlor in Little Italy.

Exhibition Review: 'Building the Picture: Architecture in Italian Renaissance Paintings'

2014-07-10T12:57:00-04:00

"Buildings in paintings have too often been viewed as background or as space fillers which play a passive or at best supporting role, propping up the figures that carry the main message of the picture. By looking afresh at buildings within paintings, treating them as active protagonists, it becomes clear that they performed a series of crucial roles."

Over 100 urban artists repaint a soon-to-be-demolished tower in Paris

2013-11-27T14:19:00-05:00

In the 13th Arrondisement in Paris, the brightly painted "Tour Paris 13" building -- is easy to spot from a distance. Described as the largest group exhibition of street art, Gallery Itinerance gathered over 100 urban artists representing 16 nationalities to use their artistic skills to repaint just about every corner of the old 9-floored tower right at the brink of its demolition -- making a vivid statement that "in the end, everything will just disappear in the rubble."

The completion of the Tour 13 project happened not long after the controversial decision to redevelop the historic 5 Pointz "graffiti mecca" in New York.

Here are more details of the project:

"For many months, the project voluntarily remained conﬁdential. Coordinated by
Mehdi Ben Cheikh, Director of Gallery Itinerance, with the support of the 13th Arrondisement City Hall and the consent of ICF Habitat La Sabliere, the building’s landlord, decided to appeal to more than one hundred street-art artists from ...

Rudy Yu's architecture of whimsy

2011-08-12T16:18:23-04:00

Blind alleys laid out like labyrinths. Steps climbing seemingly to nowhere. Roads crisscrossing and crossbreeding smaller roads. But despite the elaborate shapes and impossible angles, the cityscapes created by Filipino artist Rudy Yu make their own sense, aesthetically. They are cities [...] mapped out playfully, whimsically by an artist who, though inspired by the likes of M.C. Escher and Manuel Baldemor, puts his own idiosyncratic spin on space and matter that occupies it.

Gerry Judah

2011-06-22T11:56:22-04:00

Gerry Judah’s paintings are a direct response to conflict across the globe, and the impact of that violence, whether it is the consequence of war or natural disaster. At the same time, he is fascinated by changing urban landscape, and his paintings explore the dynamic of construction and destruction.