CREATIVE ART January 1933
A Magazine of Fine and Applied Art]
Frederick A. Blossom [Editor]
New York: Albert and Charles Boni, Inc., Volume 12, Number 1: January 1933. Original edition. Printed wrappers. [82] pp. Illustrated articles and period advertisements. Cover photograph Terra Cotta Head of a Japanese Girl by Isamu Noguchi. Wrappers lightly worn and soiled with mild spine roll and a chip to lower corner, but a very good copy.
8.25 x 11.5 vintage magazines with 82 pages of editorial content plus vintage advertisements. “Creative Art” meaning architecture, painting, drawing, furniture design, interior decoration and the decorative arts! Given the cast of characters -- 1933 stands as a fertile year for the twentieth century arts and for art deco in particular. Creative Art became an American Magazine in 1932—after a clean split from "The Studio" of London—able to puruse and promote a vision of domestic art in all of its many manifestations, from painting to photo-murals.
Contents include:
- Color Plate by Boris Artzybasheff.
- Boris Artzybasheff by Bruce Lockwood. Nine pages with black and white artwork by Boris Artzybasheff.
- The Basis of American Taste by Royal Cortissoz. Ten pages with black and white artwork.
- Isamu Noguchi by Julien Levy. Seven pages with 11 black and white artworks by Isamu Noguchi.In January 1933 Julien Levy’s beautifully illustrated six-page monographic essay on Noguchi’s work, the first ever published, appeared as the cover story in Creative Art. In it, Levy attributes a “bi-polarity” to Noguchi’s work: “He is always attempting a nice balance between the abstract and the concrete, the relating of fact to meaning, while specifically he exercises a vigorous interpretation of oriental and western aims.”Levy accounts for Noguchi’s catholic tastes and diverse talents as a search for a singular style. He strongly encourages the artist to follow in the direction of the portrait heads, which he applauds for “applying the formal elements of sculpture to enhance the psychological implications of a portrait” to such a successful degree that “if the portraits were featureless, there should still remain a sort of impression of the subject.” By contrast, he warns Noguchi against his proclivity for the purely abstract; Levy called the latest large-scale figures in aluminum, including Miss Expanding Universe, “only half-realized, amorphous.” The essay concludes: “At first glance, Noguchi appears to have lost connection with the logical continuity of his past progress, but one cannot predict toward what end this tangent may lead.” The Noguchi feature had repercussions over several issues. In March, Creative Art ran a notice to identify the photographer whose pictures “aroused so much favorable comment” as F. S. Lincoln, Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained biologist and mechanical engineer. His talents as an art photographer were discovered by Buckminster Fuller, when Lincoln, seeing one of his exhibits, offered to make photographs of it as speculation in publicity. In May a heated round of lengthy letters between Robert Josephy, a designer, and Julien Levy was published. Josephy admonished Levy for his use of the term “style” and admired Noguchi’s attempts to be true to himself: “and if at twenty-eight he has not yet done his masterpieces, there is still no need for him to embrace any such rationalization of artistic sterility.” Levy defended his position. Josephy rebutted. Levy let his case rest. But the essay and exchange marked Isamu Noguchi as a controversial Modernist, even within the informed art press.
- Caricatures by Frueh.
- News and Gossip by Walter Gutman.
- Departments include Calendar of Exhibitions, Current Events in the Art World, Review of Books and The Art Market
- Includes vintage advertisements
"I am thrilled by machinery’s force, precision and willingness to work at any task, no matter how arduous or monotonous it may be. I would rather watch a thousand ton dredge dig a canal than see it done by a thousand spent slaves lashed into submission... I like machines." - Boris Artzybasheff
Boris Artzybasheff was born in Russia in 1899, the son of a successful author. During the Revolution he emigrated to America and settled in New York City. His early work included designing women’s clothing, painting ornaments, lettering in an engraver’s shop and drawing caricatures for the New York World magazine. Eventually he received several commissions to paint murals for local restaurants, which led to his designing stage sets for Michael Fokine’s Russian Ballet. In the late 1930’s his illustrations began to appear in Life and Fortune magazines and in 1941 he produced his first cover for Time magazine. Over the next twenty years Artzybasheff would create more than two hundred cover illustrations for Time.
"In my long experience as an intimate witness of Noguchi’s work, I believe that whatever the external entities of his coordinate translating may be, they represent a faithful manifest of the intellectual and harmonic being, Noguchi. In my estimation, the evoluting array and extraordinary breadth of his conceptioning realizations document a comprehensive artist without peer in our time."– R. Buckminster Fuller
Isamu Noguchi [1904 - 1988] was among the most influential sculptors of the twentieth century. Noguchi was born in Los Angeles to an Irish-American teacher and editor and a Japanese poet. He was raised in Japan until, at age 18, he was sent back to the United States to study. In 1926 Noguchi won one of the first Guggenheim fellowships and traveled to Paris, where he worked for six months as a studio assistant to sculptor Constantin Brancusi. In addition to his sculptural work, he created furniture and lighting for the Herman Miller Company, designed sets for choreographers Martha Graham and George Balanchine and collaborated with architect Louis I. Kahn.