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If you want to understand how painting survived — and mattered — through the AIDS crisis, the culture wars of the 1980s, and the long shadow of Conceptualism, you have to look at Ross Bleckner. By the late 1970s, plenty of critics had declared painting dead, eclipsed by Minimalism and Conceptual art. Bleckner, trained at NYU alongside Sol LeWitt and Chuck Close and later at CalArts, didn't just keep painting — he made a case for why it still needed to exist. His early striped and geometric works absorbed the vocabulary of Op Art and hard-edge abstraction, but he pushed...

a blog on Lucio Fontana

Hans Waanders worth collecting

The Quiet Case for Collecting Art Invitations Walk into any serious ephemera collector’s home and you’ll eventually find a shoebox, a flat file, or a slim archival portfolio filled with printed invitations to gallery openings and museum exhibitions. To the uninitiated, these look like the kind of thing you’d toss without a second thought — a folded cardstock announcement that did its job the moment the date passed. But to a growing number of collectors, art historians, and archivists, printed exhibition invitations are among the most undervalued categories of collectible ephemera in the art world. What Exactly Is an “Art...

Wim Crouwel / The Gridnik   For examples of the many Crouwel designs www.ftn-books.com has in its inventory please click here and search for “crouwel” and find over 600 Wim Crouwel related items. The Gridnik: The Life and Quiet Rebellion of Wim Crouwel Amsterdam, 1967 The room was too quiet. Wim Crouwel stood beside a wall of proofs, watching people who normally had opinions about everything struggle to say anything at all. He had just shown them a new alphabet — one he had built not from centuries of calligraphic tradition, but from a grid. No curves. No diagonals where a diagonal wasn’t strictly...