Aziz Art May 2017

Keith Haring

Behjat Sadr

National Gallery,London

Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art

AZIZ ART May 2017

Director: Aziz Anzabi Editor : Nafiseh Yaghoubi Translator : Asra Yaghoubi Research: Zohreh Nazari

1-Keith Allen Haring 10-Tehran Museum of Contemporary 13- National Gallery 17-Behjat Sadr

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Keith Allen Haring

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Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) was an American artist and social activist whose work responded to the New York City street culture of the 1980s by expressing concepts of birth, death, sexuality, and war. Haring's work was often heavily political and his imagery has become a widely recognized visual language of the 20th century. Early life and education Keith Haring was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on May 4, 1958. He was raised in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, by his mother Joan Haring, and father Allen Haring, an engineer and amateur cartoonist. He had three younger sisters, Kay, Karen and Kristen.Haring became interested in art at a very early age spending time with his father producing creative drawings.His early influences included Walt Disney cartoons, Dr. Seuss, Charles Schulz, and the Looney Tunes characters in The Bugs Bunny Show.In Haring's teenage years, he left his religious background behind and hitchhiked across the country, selling vintage t-

shirts and experimenting with drugs.He studied commercial art from 1976 to 1978 at Pittsburgh's Ivy School of Professional Art but lost interest in it.He made the decision to leave after having read Robert Henri's The Art Spirit (1923) which inspired him to concentrate on his own art. Haring had a maintenance job at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and was able to explore the art of Jean Dubuffet, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Tobey. His most critical influences at this time were a 1977 retrospective of the work of Pierre Alechinsky and a lecture by the sculptor Christo in 1978. Alechinsky's work, connected to the international Expressionist group CoBrA, gave Haring confidence to create larger paintings of calligraphic images. Christo introduced him to the possibilities of involving the public with his art. Haring's first important one-man exhibition was in Pittsburgh at the Center for the Arts in 1978.

He moved to New York to study painting at the School of Visual Arts. He studied semiotics with Bill Beckley as well as exploring the possibilities of video and performance art. Profoundly influenced at this time by the writings of William Burroughs, he was inspired to experiment with the cross-referencing and interconnection of images.In his junior/senior year, he was behind on credits, because his professors could not give him credit for the very loose artwork he was doing with themes of social activism Early work He first received public attention with his public art in subways. Starting in 1980, he organized exhibitions at Club 57, which were filmed by the photographer Tseng Kwong Chi. Around this time, "The Radiant Baby" became his symbol. His bold lines, vivid colors, and active figures carry strong messages of life and unity. He participated in the Times Square

Exhibition and drew animals and human faces for the first time. That same year, he photocopied and pasted provocative collages made from cut-up and recombined New York Post headlines around the city.In 1981, he sketched his first chalk drawings on black paper and painted plastic, metal, and found objects. By 1982, Haring had established friendships with fellow emerging artists Futura 2000, Kenny Scharf, Madonna and Jean-Michel Basquiat.He created more than 50 public works between 1982 and 1989 in dozens of cities around the world.His "Crack is Wack" mural, created in 1986, is visible from New York's FDR Drive.He got to know Andy Warhol, who was the theme of several of Haring's pieces, including "Andy Mouse". His friendship with Warhol would prove to be a decisive element in his eventual success.

In December 2007, an area of the American Textile Building in the TriBeCa neighborhood of New York City was discovered to contain a painting of Haring's from 1979. International breakthrough In 1984, Haring visited Australia and painted wall murals in Melbourne (such as the 1984 'Detail-Mural at Collingwood College, Victoria') and Sydney and received a commission from the National Gallery of Victoria and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art to create a mural which temporarily replaced the water curtain at the National Gallery.He also visited and painted in Rio de Janeiro, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Minneapolis and Manhattan.He became politically active, designing a Free South Africa poster in 1985, and in 1986, painting a section of the Berlin Wall. He was interested in working with children and this inspired the project Citykids Speak on Liberty, which involved 1,000 children collaborating on a project for the centennial of the Statue of Liberty. When asked about the

commercialism of his work, Haring said: "I could earn more money if I just painted a few things and jacked up the price. My shop is an extension of what I was doing in the subway stations, breaking down the barriers between high and low art."By the arrival of Pop Shop, his work began reflecting more socio-political themes, such as anti-Apartheid, AIDS awareness, and the crack cocaine epidemic. He even created several pop art pieces influenced by other products: Absolut Vodka, Lucky Strike cigarettes, and Coca-Cola.In 1987 he had his own exhibitions in Helsinki, Antwerp, and elsewhere. He also designed the cover for the benefit album A Very Special Christmas, on which Madonna was included. In 1988 he joined a select group of artists whose work has appeared on the label of Chateau Mouton Rothschild wine. Haring also created public murals in the lobby and ambulatory care department of Woodhull Medical and Mental Health Center on Flushing Avenue, Brooklyn. .

A rare video of Haring at work shows his energetic style. Haring wrote: "I am becoming much more aware of movement. The importance of movement is intensified when a painting becomes a performance. The performance (the act of painting) becomes as important as the resulting painting." When his friend Jean-Michel Basquiat died of an overdose in New York in 1988, he paid homage to him with his work A Pile of Crowns, for Jean-Michel Basquiat Haring was openly gay and was a strong advocate of safe sex;however, in 1988, he was diagnosed with AIDS. In 1989, he established the Keith Haring Foundation to provide funding and imagery to AIDS organizations and children's programs, and to expand the audience for his work through exhibitions, publications and the licensing of his images. Haring used his imagery during the last years of his life to speak about his illness and to generate activism and awareness about AIDS.In 1989, he was invited by the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center to join a show of site-specific

artwork for the building at 208 West 13th Street. Haring chose the second-floor men's room for his mural Once Upon a Time.In June, on the rear wall of the convent of the Church of Sant'Antonio .he painted the last public work of his life, the mural "Tuttomondo" Fashion Haring collaborated with Grace Jones, whom he had met through Andy Warhol. In 1985, Haring and Jones worked together on the two live performances Jones at the Paradise Garage, which Robert Farris Thompson has called a "epicenter for black dance". Each time, Haring covered Jones' body with graffiti. He also collaborated with fashion designers Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren on their A/W 1983/84 Witches collection, with his artwork covering the clothing which was most famously worn by a pink-wigged Madonna for a performance of her song "Like a Virgin" on the British pop-music programme Top of the Pops and the American TV dance program Solid Gold.Haring also collaborated with David Spada, a jewelry designer,

to design the sculptural adornments for Jones. Influences Haring's work very clearly demonstrates many important political and personal influences. Ideas about his sexual orientation are apparent throughout his work and his journals clearly confirm its impact on his work. Heavy symbolism speaking about the AIDS epidemic is vivid in his later pieces, such as Untitled (cat. no. 27), Silence=Death and his sketch Weeping Woman. In some of his works—including cat. no. 27—the symbolism is subtle, but Haring also produced some blatantly activist works. Silence=Death is almost universally agreed upon as a work of HIV/AIDS activism. Death Haring died on February 16, 1990 of AIDS-related complications. As a celebration of his life, Madonna declared the first New York date of her Blond Ambition World Tour a benefit concert for Haring's memory and donated all proceeds from her ticket sales to AIDS charities including AIDS

Project Los Angeles and amfAR; the act was documented in her film Truth or Dare. Additionally, Haring's work was featured in several of Red Hot Organization's efforts to raise money for AIDS and AIDS awareness, specifically its first two albums, Red Hot + Blue and Red Hot + Dance, the latter of which used Haring's work on its cover. Exhibitions Haring contributed to the New York New Wave display in 1981 and in 1982, and had his first exclusive exhibition in the Tony Shafrazi Gallery. That same year, he took part in Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany, as well as Public Art Fund's "Messages to the Public" in which he created work for a Spectacolor Board in Times Square. He contributed work to the Whitney Biennial in 1983, as well as in the São Paulo Biennial. In 1985, the CAPC in Bordeaux opened an exhibition of his works, and took part in the Paris Biennial. Since his death Haring has been the subject of several international retrospectives. His art was the subject of a 1997 retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York,

curated by Elisabeth Sussman. In 1996, a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia was the first major exhibition of his work in Australia. In 2008 there was a retrospective exhibition at the MAC in Lyon, France. In February 2010, on occasion of the 20th anniversary of the artist's death, Tony Shafrazi Gallery showed an exhibition containing dozens of works from every stage of Haring's mature work.In March 2012, a retrospective exhibit of Haring's work, Keith Haring: 1978-1982, opened at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.In April 2013, Keith Haring: The Political Line opened at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Le Cent Quatre In November 2014, then at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, California.

Collections Haring's work is in major private and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Bass Museum, Miami; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.Haring did a wide variety of public works, including the infirmary at Children's Village in Dobbs Ferry, New York,and the second floor men's room in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in Manhattan, which was later transformed into an office and is known as the Keith Haring room.

Tehran Museum of Contemporary

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Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, also known as TMoCA, is among the largest art museums in Iran. It has collections of more than 3000 items that include 19th and 20th century's world-class European and American paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures. TMoCA also has one of the greatest collections of Iranian modern and contemporary art. The museum was inaugurated by Empress Farah Pahlavi in 1977, just two years before the 1979 Revolution.TMoCA is considered to have the most valuable collections of modern Western masterpieces outside Europe and North America Background The museum was designed by Iranian architect Kamran Diba, who employed elements from traditional Persian architecture. It was built adjacent to Laleh Park, Tehran, and was inaugurated in 1977.The building itself can be regarded as an example of contemporary art, in a style of an underground New York Guggenheim Museum. Most of the museum area is located underground with a circular

walkway that spirals downwards with galleries branching outwards.Western sculptures by artists such as Ernst, Giacometti, Magritte and Moore can be found in the museum's gardens After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Western art was stored away in the museums vault until 1999 when the first post-revolution exhibition was held of western art showing artists such as Hockney, Lichtenstein, Rauschenburg and Andy Warhol.Now pieces of the Western art collection are shown for a few weeks every year but due to conservative nature of the Iranian establishment, most pieces will never be shown. It is considered to have the most valuable collection of Western modern art outside Europe and the United States, a collection largely assembled by founding curators David Galloway and Donna Stein under the patronage of Farah Pahlavi.It is said that there is approximately £2.5 billion worth of modern art held at the museum.

The museum hosts a revolving programme of exhibitions and occasionally organises exhibitions by local artists. A touring exhibitions was planned for autumn 2016 in Berlin, Germany, consisting of a three-month tour of sixty artworks, half Western and half Iranian. The show was to run for three months in Berlin, then travel to the Maxxi Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome for display from March through August.However, the plan has been indefinitely postponed because the Iranian authorities have failed to allow the paintings to leave the country. Also in 2017, a larger touring exhibition is planned for the Hirshhorn Museum in

Washington, D.C.It is hoped that revenue from these tours will allow the museum to upgrade the infrastructure as well as purchase new art, something it hasn't done for over forty years. Criticism Purchasing expensive art work and opening the contemporary art museum in Tehran by the empress was a controversial topic at the day in 1977, as social and economic inequalities were rising and the government was a dictatorship not tolerating the rising opponents. Le Monde art critic André Fermigier wrote an article called "A museum for whom and for what?", "questioning the link between an Iranian child and a Picasso or a Pollock

National Gallery

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The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900.The Gallery is an exempt charity, and a non-departmental public body of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.Its collection belongs to the public of the United Kingdom and entry to the main collection is free of charge. It is among the most visited art museums in the world, after the Musée du Louvre, the British Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Unlike comparable museums in continental Europe, the National Gallery was not formed by nationalising an existing royal or princely art collection. It came into being when the British government bought 38 paintings from the heirs of John Julius Angerstein, an insurance broker and patron of the arts, in 1824. After that initial purchase the Gallery was shaped mainly by its early directors, notably Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, and by private donations, which comprise two-thirds of the

collection.The resulting collection is small in size, compared with many European national galleries, but encyclopaedic in scope; most major developments in Western painting "from Giotto to Cézanne"are represented with important works. It used to be claimed that this was one of the few national galleries that had all its works on permanent exhibition, but this is no longer the case. The present building, the third to house the National Gallery, was designed by William Wilkins from 1832 to 1838. Only the façade onto Trafalgar Square remains essentially unchanged from this time, as the building has been expanded piecemeal throughout its history. Wilkins's building was often criticised for the perceived weaknesses of its design and for its lack of space; the latter problem led to the establishment of the Tate Gallery for British art in 1897. The Sainsbury Wing, an extension to the west by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, is a notable example of Postmodernist architecture in Britain. The current Director of the National Gallery is Gabriele Finaldi.

World War II Shortly before the outbreak of World War II the paintings were evacuated to various locations in Wales, including Penrhyn Castle and the university colleges of Bangor and Aberystwyth. In 1940, as the Battle of France raged, a more secure home was sought, and there were discussions about moving the paintings to Canada. This idea was firmly rejected by Winston Churchill, who wrote in a telegram to the director Kenneth Clark, “bury them in caves or in cellars, but not a picture shall leave these islands”.Instead a slate quarry at Manod, near Blaenau Ffestiniog in North Wales, was requisitioned for the Gallery's use. In the seclusion afforded by the paintings' new location, the Keeper (and future director) Martin Davies began to compile scholarly catalogues on the collection, helped by the fact that the Gallery's library was also stored in the quarry. The move to Manod confirmed the importance of storing paintings at a constant temperature and humidity, something the Gallery's conservators had long suspected

but had hitherto been unable to prove.This eventually resulted in the first air-conditioned gallery opening in 1949. For the course of the war Myra Hess, and other musicians, such as Moura Lympany, gave daily lunch-time recitals in the empty building, to raise public morale at a time when every concert hall in London was closed.A number of art exhibitions were held at the Gallery as a complement to the recitals. The first of these was British Painting since Whistler in 1940, organised by Lillian Browse,who also mounted the major joint retrospective Exhibition of Paintings by Sir William Nicholson and Jack B. Yeats held from 1 January – 15 March 1942, which was seen by 10,518 visitors.Exhibitions of work by war artists, including Paul Nash, Henry Moore and Stanley Spencer, were also held; the War Artists' Advisory Committee had been set up by Clark in order "to keep artists at work on any pretext".In 1941 a request from an artist to see Rembrandt's Portrait of Margaretha de Geer (a new acquisition) resulted in the

"Picture of the Month" scheme, in which a single painting was removed from Manod and exhibited to the general public in the National Gallery each month. The art critic Herbert Read, writing that year, called the National Gallery "a defiant outpost of culture right in the middle of a bombed and shattered metropolis".The paintings returned to Trafalgar Square in 1945.

Behjat Sadr

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Behjat Sadr also known as Behjat Sadr Mahallāti 29 May 1924 - 11 August 2009 was an Iranian modern art painter whose works have been exhibited in major cities across the world, such as New York, Paris, and Rome.Sadr is known for her paintings that utilizing a palette knife on canvases to create impressionistic paintings featuring visual rhythm, movement and geometric shapes. Biography Behjat Sadr Mahallāti was born to Mohammad Sadr-e Mahallāti and Qamar Amini Sadr in Arak, Iran on 29 May 1924 Sadr began her studies at the University of Tehran faculty of fine arts. After her graduation, she won a scholarship to the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome at the Naples Academy of Fine Arts. Sadr's first major exhibition was at the twenty-eighth Venice Biennial in 1956. In 1957, Sadr returned to the University of Tehran as a member of faculty and taught there for almost 20 years.There she met and married her second husband Morteza Hannaneh

(a well known Iranian musician and composer) and had her only daughter, Kakuti (Mitra) Awarded the Royal Grand Prize at Tehran Biennial 1962. In 1979, after the Islamic Revolution in Iran started Sadr and her daughter moved to Paris. Sadr was diagnosed with breast cancer in the late 1990s, but continued to paint. She died at age 85 of a heart attack on 11 August 2009 in Corsica. Legacy Sadr was the first female contemporary painter to be considered on the same level as her male colleagues in Iran. In 2006, Sadr was the subject of a documentary film called Behjat Sadr: Time Suspended, directed by Mitra Farahani.Which includes footage of the artist at work as well as extensive interviews.

Group Exhibitions 1956 – Venice Biennial, Venice, Italy 1957 – Venice Biennial, Venice, Italy 1957 – Galleria Il Pincio, Rome, Italy 1962 – Venice Biennial, Venice, Italy 1962 – The 3rd Tehran Painting Biennial, Tehran, Iran 1962 – São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo, Brazil 1987 – "Iranian Contemporary Art: Four Women", Foxley Leach Gallery, Washington DC

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