design
fisun.guner
A cult suggests unhealthy worship, and there’s more than a whiff of that in the heady decadence of the V&A’s latest art and design blockbuster, The Cult of Beauty. This is an exhibition which examines how the influence of a small clique of artists grew to inspire ideas not only about soft furnishings and the House Beautiful, but to influence a whole way of life, teaching the aspiring Victorian bohemian how, in the words of Oscar Wilde, “to live up to the beauty of one’s teapot”. And as one might expect, the exhibition is beautifully designed, in a way that suggests you might have stumbled Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Although there are thematic links between many of the movie posters designed by Bill Gold between 1942 and 2003, especially in the talismanic use of telephones (Dial M for Murder, Klute, The Front Page) and guns (Casablanca, Deliverance, the Dirty Harry films), what’s remarkable is the range of styles he used in creating numerous iconic works. It seems unlikely that the designer responsible for the conventional rendering of James Cagney in patriotic garb in Yankee Doodle Dandy (Gold’s debut) could have conceived the frilly pink collage of My Fair Lady, the blobbed, multicoloured hippie images Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Koltai’s stage designs have been seen in countless operas and theatre productions around the world, and yielded many awards. Of Hungarian extraction, he was born in Berlin in 1924 and granted entry to the UK in 1939. He served with British Intelligence at the Nuremberg Trials before going on to train at the Central School of Art and Design, where he later became head of theatre design. He was created a CBE in 1983. At 86, he remains associate designer for the Royal Shakespeare Company.He now lives in France, where he takes objects found on nearby farms, predominantly metal but also wood, and Read more ...
theartsdesk
Third in our summer book extracts series is the theatre designer Tobias Hoheisel, whose designs for Glyndebourne Opera's Janáček productions remain iconic, and more recently designed English National Opera's Boris Godunov.Born in Frankfurt, Hoheisel trained in design in Berlin and was strongly influenced by the theatre of Peter Stein/Karl-Ernst Herrmann, Luc Bondy, Robert Wilson and Ariane Mnouchkine. Patrice Chereau’s Ring cycle in Bayreuth and the world-class Berlin orchestras inculcated in him a love of opera and music.Hoheisel produced landmark Janáček stagings for Glyndebourne in Katya Read more ...
howard.male
It’s hard to believe that it’s 30 years since the release of The Clash's London Calling, an album that sounds as vital, immediate and relevant today as it did then. Yet there are probably people who remain more familiar with London Calling’s iconic cover than the music contained on the two discs of shiny black vinyl that came with it. Perhaps that’s one reason a new exhibition inspired by London Calling is about the cartoonist and illustrator Ray Lowry, rather than The Clash or the album itself. Lowry, who died in 2008, designed the sleeve, and the curators have come up with the excellent Read more ...
fisun.guner
Does form always have to follow function? Is ornamentation really such a heinous crime? Or is Modernism itself the enemy of the people? The second part of this excellent five-part series – fab archive footage, great interviews with designers young enough to no longer be beholden to the Modernist creed – focused on the founding of the Bauhaus and the Modernist aesthetic. And after juggling a lot of questions, it gently guided us towards more or less the same position as Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House, though in a far more respectful, design-conscious way: Modernism worked in theory but Read more ...
Jasper Rees
As co-directors of opera, Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser's fidelity to each other's artistic vision is one thing. Their devotion to Rossini is also relatively unusual. Their loyalty to and faith in their designers is almost as deep. In this ravishing set of photographs, memorialising five of their productions at the Royal Opera House, the set designs are all by Christian Fenouillat, costume designs are by Agostino Cavalca and lighting is by Christophe Forey. Click on the images to view them. Read theartsdesk Q&A with Caurier and Leiser. [bg|OPERA/Jasper_Rees/Leiser_Caurier]
Madama Read more ...
fisun.guner
Like Philippe Starck, whose Alessi tripod lemon squeezer is a bit like an evil-looking Louise Bourgeois spider, Ron Arad emerged in the Eighties as something of a “rock‘n’roll” designer. It’s a label that’s stuck, as has its sexy variant “post-punk”. The latter came about after his break-through Rover Chair (1981; main picture) found its first customer in Jean-Paul Gaultier. The Rover Chair was a clever salvage job: an old battered leather Rover car seat mounted on curved steel. It was perfect for the 1980s bachelor pad and, aptly, made its television debut on Top Gear under Jeremy Read more ...
fisun.guner
Modernist art movements are a lot like totalitarian regimes. They produce their declaratory manifestos, send forth their declamatory edicts, and, before you know it, a Year Zero mentality prevails: the past must be declared null and void. Seeking to overturn 1,000 years of Western civilisation with a universal aesthetic utopia of brightly coloured squares and boldly delineated lines, a confident Theo van Doesburg, founding member and chief theorist of the Dutch movement De Stijl, wrote, “What the Cross represented to the early Christians, the square represents to us all. The square will Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Victoria and Albert Museum intends on 22 February to disperse its collection of musical instruments to other venues, to allow more room for fashion and textile exhibits. Conductor Christopher Hogwood and composer Oliver Knussen are two more well-known names in the list of more than 5,100 signatories to the petition lodged at 10 Downing Street asking for the move to be prevented. theartsdesk invited big hitters on either side to debate the case - Roxy Music designer Anthony Price makes the fashion case, while conductor Laurence Cummings heads the musician's view. And we ask you: What Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Design for Life is a new BBC2 series about the philosophy of Philippe Starck, he of the iconic ‘space rocket’ lemon-juicer, in the form of an Apprentice-style reality show. It was also an intriguing insight into the control exercised by producers of such shows - for, unlike The Apprentice et al, the choice of contestants and the nature of the challenges were left to Starck himself. ‘Bloody terrifying’ was how Joe Houlihan, the executive producer, described to me the experience of delegating his powers to somebody who didn’t have the imperatives of television foremost in his mind.But back to Read more ...