Word: sseldorf
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...opening reception at Düsseldorf's glossy new Kunsthalle was mobbed by Ruhr Valley heiresses, bearded intellectuals, and art dealers from all over Europe. In the crush, nearly everyone failed to recognize the artist, Günter Haese, 43, a slender, shy man with an assembly-line haircut and an inexpensive suit. No one, however, could ignore the 27 works on display. Built of watch springs, mesh, tiny cogs and spirals, the small, precisely balanced wire constructions fluttered and danced at the slightest breath. Bearing cryptic names, such as Hermit, Flirt...
Haese's rise to fame is all the more surprising because he so sedulously refuses to court it. The son of a Kiel mechanical engineer, he moved to Düsseldorf to study at its prestigious art school. While there, he immersed himself in Zen Buddhism, discovered his modus operandi during a meditation in 1960 when his watch shattered into pieces. Today he, his wife, his nine-year-old son and their uncaged parakeet live in a Düsseldorf public housing project. Haese insists on keeping the apartment so clean that the entire family removes its shoes before...
Called the International Commercial Bank, the new institution was formed by London's Westminster Bank, Manhattan's Irving Trust Co., Chicago's First National Bank, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp., and Düsseldorf's Commerzbank. As an offspring of the rich (the five banks control resources totaling $18.8 billion), I.C.B. will start life with $8,800,000 capital plus another $16.4 million in loans from its parents. For deposits, it counts on tapping the volatile pool of Eurodollars -U.S. funds held in European hands -which has swelled from nothing to close...
Forward to Zero. To most artists, however, the real lure is Düsseldorfs tantalizing whiff of Zeitgeist. The city's brusque hurly-burly provides both their modern subject matter and technological means for expressing their art. Gotthard Graubner, an abstractionist, for example, paints on huge, cloudlike formations of polyester produced at nearby factories. Peter Brüning, who like Winfred Gaul, is fascinated with traffic and touring maps, points out that he lives in Düsseldorf because it is the geographical center of a "seemingly endless area where roads become the interconnecting arteries between every possible manifestation...
...city's very impersonality acts as a magnet for today's less flamboyant, more businesslike variety of artist. Gerhard Richter observes that "in Munich, the artist is too easily corrupted by the pleasant life. In Düsseldorf, the intellectual air is clean." For artists like Joseph Beuys, this is just the atmosphere for fresh beginnings. "What all of us have been doing," he says, "is trying to return to the zero points, to seek new essentials, to engage in meditations to lead us to the rediscovery of what lies behind our thwarted existence...