6
The man who brought
high design to the
London undergroundThe London-based artists Langlands
& Bell will unveil a permanent installa-
tion in Piccadilly Circus tube station in
November. The piece will honour Frank Pick, the man who gave London’s public transport network
a visual identity that impressed the world in the 1920s and 1930s. Pick commissioned leading de-
signers and architects to create commercial art and graphic design for the London Underground,
including the irst versions of the roundel still used today to mark each station’s name. “I’m sure he
was a hard taskmaster, but he was also a visionary and a Utopian in his belief that art and design
could transform the world,” says Ben Langlands. Titled Beauty < Immortality, Langlands & Bell’s
text and roundel installation was commissioned by Art on the Underground and inspired by Pick’s
notes in the margins of a lecture he gave in 1917. J.P.PAINTING
Frankfurt. Technical tests on a painting
by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner at the Städel
Museum in Frankfurt have revealed a
second canvas underneath. Titled Café
Scene (1926), the earlier work was created
eight years after bad health and mental
illness had prompted the artist to leave
Berlin for rural Switzerland.
The painting on top, Sleigh Trip in the
Snow (1927-29), was donated to the Städel in
1987 by a Frankfurt businessman, Kurt Möll-
gaard. It was in Kirchner’s possession until
his death and sold from his estate.
Kirchner was in the habit of stretching
more than one canvas over the same frame.
In a 1918 letter, he asked the collector Carl
Hagemann to check with the buyers of two
of his works to see whether they had other
paintings underneath. “I have often had
to stretch three or four canvasses over
each other when I haven’t had any frames,”
he wrote.Though the Städel has a large collection
of works by the Brücke group, of which
Kirchner was a founding member, the
museum possesses few late works by the
artist. Many of the works Kirchner painted in
his home near Davos in Switzerland depicted
rural mountain life. Café Scene shows that
he maintained his interest in urban life even
after he left Berlin, where he had painted his
famous street scenes.
“The newly discovered Café Scene
enriches the Städel’s Expressionist collection
with a painting that strikingly illustrates the
stylistic changes in Kirchner’s oeuvre during
the 1920s,” Philipp Demandt, who was
recently appointed director of the Städel,
said in a statement. Both paintings are on
display in a small exhibition presenting res-
toration and research activities at the Städel
(until March 2017).
Catherine HickleyTHE ART NEWSPAPER Number 284, November 2016
News Artists
SLEIGH TRIP: © STÄDEL MUSEUM/ARTOTHEK. CAFÉ SCENE: © HORST ZIEGENFUSZ/STÄDEL MUSEUM. ATLAS: LORI E. SEID; © CHARLES ATLAS; COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND LUHRING AUGUSTINE, NEW YORK. TUBE: © LANGLANDS & BELL+44 (0)20 7734 8686
3 clifford street · london w1s 2lf
PRINCE HOARE
1755-FROM THE MASTER OF THE GIANTS ALBUMAcrobats
Pen and ink with monochrome ink wash
22 ¼ x 15 inches; 565 x 380 mm
Dated June ’79, lower centreKirchner’s Swiss sleigh
ride covered up Berlin
café society scene
Frankfurt museum discovers Expressionist canvas
from 1926 under another late painting
Langlands &
Bell’s tribute
to Frank PickWhen Atlas met
Merce and Bob, too
New York. “I’m a huge Raus-
chenberg fan. He has
been my main inspira-
tion all my artistic life,”
says the media artist
Charles Atlas, one of
the many contributors
who will help shape the
late artist’s forthcoming
survey when it travels to
the Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA) in New York in May- It opens at Tate Modern in
London in December.
Atlas told The Art News-
paper that it was his admiration for Rauschen-
berg’s work that first drew him to a performance
by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in
New York. Rauschenberg collaborated with Cun-
ningham on more than 20 performances from
1954 to 1964, creating sets, backdrops, costumes
and lighting.
“I went to see Rauschenberg’s work—that was
my introduction to Merce,” Atlas says. He went on
to work for a decade as the videographer-in-res-
idence for the dance company. One of the com-
pany’s stand-out productions for Atlas was Antic
Meet (1958), a comic set of ten dances for which
Rauschenberg designed costumes that included
dresses made from parachutes and blocky sweat-
ers with extra arms instead of neck holes.
The New York version of the Rauschenberg
retrospective “has been conceived as an open
monograph—as other artists, dancers, musicians
and writers came into Rauschenberg’s creative
life, their work will enter the exhibition”, a press
release says. Atlas is working with the MoMA
curator Leah Dickerman on the presentation
of the moving images in the exhibition. “I’m
designing how they’re shown and I’m making a
little piece out of some of the elements for nine
evening [events],” he says.
Helen Stoilas
- For an interview with Charles Atlas, see Review, p
Nubian masked army could
go on tour before heading
to new UK sculpture parkMuseums in Europe and the US have expressed
interest in displaying an army of Nubian masked ig-
ures by the British-Trinidadian artist Zak Ové, which
was installed in the courtyard of Somerset House for
the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in October.
The inal destination for the 40 life-size statues is a
planned sculpture park in Berkshire, west of London,
being set up by the Saudi Arabian-born collector
Hussam Otaibi, who part-owns a inancial services
irm in London. The park will be open to the public
some of the time and is expected to launch in twoyears. Otaibi purchased Ové’s Black and Blue: The
Invisible Man and The Masque of Blackness (2016)
for £300,000 from London’s Vigo Gallery. The work
was inspired by Ben Jonson’s play The Masque of
Blackness, which featured actors in blackface make-
up at a performance on the site of Somerset House in
the 17th century, when it was the home of James I’s
queen. Ové’s installation exists in three editions and
will join works by Nathaniel Rackowe, Piotr Lakomy
among others in the new park. Nick Hackworth,
the director of Otaibi’s collection, Modern Forms,
says there will be an emphasis on emerging artists
and new commissions, although Eduardo Paolozzi’s
1966 sculpture, Suwasa, which once stood in the
Economist Plaza in central London, will also go on
show there. A.S.Kirchner’s Sleigh Trip in the Snow (1927-29),
which was donated to the Städel in 1987, was
hiding a second canvas, Café Scene (1926)Media artist
Charles Atlas