The Josh Bolton Show
The Josh Bolton Show
Exploring the Roots of Modern Creativity
David Lee Csicsko’s distinctive artwork, stained glass, and mosaics beautify train stations, hospitals, churches, and universities across the United States. His many credits include designing the Obamas’ White House Christmas in 2012. David’s lively illustrations can also be seen in The Skin You Live In from the Chicago Children’s Museum, now in its 18th printing. Through his use of color, bold graphics and playful patterns, David Lee Csicsko celebrates the richness and diversity of life.
He's created five books for Trope Books, LGBTQ ICONS, SCIENCE PEOPLE, ICONIC COMPOSERS, FASHION ICONS and ICONIC ARTISTS.
Unlock the secrets of artistic evolution and interconnectedness as we journey through the pulsating worlds of Toulouse-Lautrec and his 1890s Paris, right through to the revolutionary pop art of Andy Warhol and the trailblazing creativity of Jean-Michel Basquiat. We promise a vibrant tapestry that connects the dots between different art movements and eras, exploring how artists like Keith Haring echoed the innovative spirit of their predecessors. From the aristocratic roots and artistic challenges of Toulouse-Lautrec to Warhol's iconic Campbell's soup cans, this episode reveals how these creators were not only shaped by their times but also became shapers of history.
Our guest, David, guides us through the intriguing life of Alexander Calder, whose engineering precision transformed the art world with his kinetic mobiles. Discover how Calder's encounters with the likes of Picasso and Mondrian in 1920s Paris ignited his imagination, leading to groundbreaking creations that redefined modern art. We also uncover the fascinating journeys of surrealist artists like Remedios Varo, who defied exclusion in Paris to thrive in the vibrant artistic community of Mexico, alongside iconic figures such as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
Celebrating artists who dared to break norms, we shed light on the self-taught trailblazers who carved their unique paths, like Lee Goethe, whose artistic genius gained recognition only posthumously. The stories of these passionate creators, alongside those of iconic art innovators, invite you to connect with the personal side of art. With insight from our featured artist Cisco Kid, who shares his own creative journey, this episode not only inspires but also challenges you to see art through a new lens, where history and creativity converge to shape our world.
if you enjoyed the show be sure to check out my info:
https://app.wingcard.io/ROB3SA64
Hello, hello everybody. Today is an interesting day, not your usual podcasting experience, but it'll be fun for those especially into art. Oh boy, david goes on an amazing journey of telling stories of these different people in his book that he drew. The one thing I recommend if you don't know who he's talking about, then it's safe to definitely try to google their name. I tried to get him to spell some of them. If you have access to chat gbt, kind of just mumble the words and she'll figure it out, kind of thing. But yeah, this is a really fun experience. Longer than usual, but hey, worth it. Tell me how you think in the comments.
Speaker 2:Have a good one, bye welcome to the josh bolton show where we dive into interesting and inspiring conversations. And now your host, j Josh Bolton, art Club Kid of the 1890s. And then, about 100 years later, you have Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, who basically got their start as Art Club Kids as well. So there's this connection.
Speaker 3:Okay, so there's a connection between the relationship. Like you said, they're not isolated little islands, right, and?
Speaker 2:they're also people of their time. Everything that they do is because of the time that they lived in. There's a real connection to that. They're mavericks in their time period.
Speaker 3:No, it's insane. They were for their time, they were very groundbreaking, but yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Kind of thing, yeah.
Speaker 3:So what were some of the artists in particular you thought? Were you mentioned to me the one poster artist? That's Chalusa the trek okay, um, okay, let's go into lusa. What was it specifically about their work that really got you going inspired to like be an artist, and stuff uh, so um, are we just chatting now for background, or are we actually taping? I just turned it on because this is really good. We can use this, we don't have to.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay, so do you want? I sent you information about my background. Did you look at that?
Speaker 3:Mm-hmm. Okay, yeah, but like I told you in the previous day's chat, I'm more coming at it. Like you tell me me and like let it unfold all right, all right, so.
Speaker 2:So basically I um, I could draw before I could walk. I was one of those uh art kids who, where I grew up, um, in the 1960s in northwest Indiana, which is a blue color town, if you were the art kid you did a lot of posters and so I did posters for the school play, uh, school events, the, the red cross, an uncle who was in the steel mills and he ran for office and I did his posters, um, when I was like 10 and uh, but in probably around like 18, in the 1870s, he only lived to be 32. So he died. We have to look up the math, but he died basically in 1901.
Speaker 2:But he was from a very aristocratic family. They were very wealthy, they lived in the south of France, they had a title, his parents were first cousins and if you marry your first cousin you're going to have some really bad DNA. So his whole family was very tall and elegant and when he was young he fell walking down the steps and his leg never really properly healed and a year later he broke the other leg by falling off of a horse. So sadly, again because of the bad DNA, his bones didn't heal properly. So he kind of grew from the waist up. So he was under five feet tall and his family was this tall, elegant people, very wealthy, went to parties, went hunting, all the things he couldn't do. But while he was recovering from these falls, uh, his mother encouraged him to draw and he drew in his sketchbook and he had this natural drawing ability and so, um, the mother decided when he was in his early 20s to send him to Paris and he studied at a small art school where he also met fellow artist Vincent Van Gogh, and they hang out together. And then he also met a model who was posing for the school, whose name was name was suzanne valedon, who later he winds up having a, a close, intimate relationship. They were together for like two years.
Speaker 2:Um, he also, uh, was a, was an inventor of, of, of this style, and um he, so he went to the, to the bars and the clubs and the cabarets of paris which were also in it, which were all in the same area, an area known as Pigalle, and, um, he told the people at, uh, this famous nightclub called the Moulin Rouge that he would love to make a poster for them. He did and it sort of was put up all over town and, uh, it just was a great success for this nightclub. And then he got a studio um and worked there. He did paintings, he did, he did drawings, he but he's mostly known for posters and he made the poster become an art form. Uh. And then, uh, he became romantically involved with suzanne veledon, who could draw very naturally.
Speaker 2:She was not aristocratic, she was always out of money. Her mother was a poor washerwoman and she dropped out of school to become an artist model. She had this amazing red hair. She also was amused to artists from the French Impressionists, like Renoir. He painted her several times. She had this amazing red hair. There are some very famous paintings that she's in, and one there's a famous painting by Toulouse-Lautrec of a bareback rider and she was the model for that because she had worked in the circus but fell and then hurt her back and then basically earned a living being a model for these artists and he really encouraged her to keep drawing. And then he said you know, you should paint, and she was afraid to paint because she didn't have training. So he talked to a fellow artist who was older, edgar Degas, who recognized her abilities and he took her under his wing. She kind of learned painting by painting, alongside with Edgar Degas, and they had this amazing life.
Speaker 2:Sadly, the life of a club kid is filled and wrought with problems. There's all these to opium, but also he was the life of the party and he also this is also the early days of photography and so he would go to a place where one could smoke opium and he would get inventive, really inventive, and sometimes he would dress in drag or he would dress in a kimono. His art is very inspired compositionally by the fact that the doors to trading in the East had just opened, so things were being imported from Japan into Paris, and that's when he was aware of Japanese composition, which he then incorporated into his head. But there's all these really great pictures of him dressed as a geisha, dressed as a woman, dressed as a clown, dressed as Pierrot, a famous French clown character. He was very active, but then the life and being so, so small, anyway, he got sick, wound up, collapsing, had sort of a nervous breakdown. But to prove that he was well, he drew pictures of horses that he loved and they released him and then he got sick again and then, sadly, he passed away at like age 32. Wow.
Speaker 2:But even though he was of diminutive size, he's considered the father of modern art and also a giant among artists. And what's interesting about his art is that it's very drawing based. It's not painterly in the way that previous painters had painted, he's really kind of using the brush to draw and apply the way you would with pastels or colored chalk or colored pencil. Anyway, he's a fascinating figure. And then there's this connection, the fact that he earned his living making art and posters for these cabarets.
Speaker 2:In the same way that in the late 1970s Keith Haring goes to New York, jean-michel Basquiat goes to New York, they both are club kids who create art that was used in these nightclubs and that's how they earn their living. So there's this through line of places that artists can go and find places to work, and I myself did the logo of a famous club in Chicago when I was in my early 20s that just closed after its 40th anniversary. It was called Berlin and it was a very famous bar for alternative types and a place for sort of visual misfits to hang out and have a great time. And I did a lot of art for that nightclub. I created the logo, which was a crazy looking guy holding a martini glass with bulging eyes, and then I did art for various events that they had. So we're all connected.
Speaker 3:Right, I'm looking up the logo for that one. That's cool. That's a really cool dude.
Speaker 2:Yeah and thanks, and I also designed the lettering. It was all cut out of black and white contact paper, which was a style that I invented after I went to art school.
Speaker 3:That's really cool. I like it. That's a shame it didn't make it though.
Speaker 2:It had a long, long life. It had a very long life, but we were all shocked when it closed. Even the New York Times wrote about it.
Speaker 3:Oh, I bet, Yeah't see if it's 40 years, that's definitely a a pillar of that area yeah, um. So what other things did you do? Um, that also connects to the artist that you drew the the 50 different uh heads for your book so I um, I have two nicknames for myself.
Speaker 2:one is I'm the art handyman, because I can work, for I'm very fortunate that I can. I design mosaics, I design large stained glass windows, I design books, I create logos, I painted murals, so I'm very lucky that what I do is very adaptable. And the other nickname I have for myself is that I'm a visual detective, and so with these pictures I'm describing the artists that I'm drawing, but I'm giving you suggestions visually, of what their art looks like.
Speaker 3:So within each picture.
Speaker 2:Yes, so like, for example, the image that I did of Alexander Calder, american artist who invented the mobile. His head becomes the base and you can see there are shapes floating around. That you totally get it. And he was not a brooding artist, he was a happy-go-lucky fellow. He kind of looked like a really tough teddy bear. He was kind of burly. He's usually frowning in a lot of pictures, but he was quite friendly and he made these amazing things that were very, very playful. So, uh, he uh. If we'd like, we can talk about him now yeah, let's go into it okay, so, uh, alexander calder um was american.
Speaker 2:He was from Philadelphia. His grandfather created the statue of Penn on the top of the Capitol building of Philadelphia William Penn and then his father was an artist, his mother was an artist. He had natural abilities. He went to engineering school, I think. He went to Carnegie Mellon and then he married. He was a privileged so back then people would go to Paris, and so he went to Paris in the 1920s and became friends with all the greats. He became friends with Picasso. He was friends with Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, who were collectors of modern art and the avant-garde. They knew everybody, he and his wife, and they went and visited Mondrian, who was a Dutch artist who traditionally started out painting landscapes, and then he got really interested in creating these sort of grids of strong black lines that kind of look like modernist stained glass windows, but just with squares and these arrangements.
Speaker 2:But instead of using a ruler, he actually very painstakingly by hand painted these straight lines, which would take a really long time, and he also used basically primary colors. The primary colors are red, yellow and blue, um, and he also used black and white, and so, uh, calder and his wife went over to visit and he showed him the new paintings, and calder was so excited he said you know, if you made these move, they would be really fantastic. And uh, mondrian said I don't want to make paintings that move, you've got a studio, you make paintings that move. And so then he went home and invented the mobile, which was shapes that he cut out of metal and then fastened them with wires to rods and then arranged them very carefully so they would float in space. So what he did was truly no one had ever done anything like this before. It was totally revolutionary to sort of have this sort of something that crosses the line from painting and sculpture and movement together to create the mobile.
Speaker 2:And then another buddy of his was Miro, who was a Spanish artist who was in charge of picking the artist to work on a World's Fair. That was in Paris in the 30s, just before the outbreak of World War II, and also when so Picasso was invited to draw. And about this time the fascists had bombed a small town called Guernica in the mountains of Spain and innocent children and women were killed by these bombs that were dropped. And so he did this enormous painting, which is the biggest anti-war painting in existence. It's. It's incredibly big, it's like 75 feet by by, 15 feet tall, and it's just of the pain and anguish, but it's done in a very modern way. So there are like horses that are screaming and women that are screaming and holding their dead children.
Speaker 2:And the other artist, who was also from Spain to exhibit at the Spanish pavilion in Paris, created something that was classical, and Nero, the Spanish artist who was in charge of picking the art, said no, no, no, we want something modern. So he asked his buddy, alexander Calder, to create a fountain. Well, calder, being the inventive guy that he was, decided I'm not going to make a fountain that has water. My fountain will have mercury, liquid mercury in it. So he created this steel sculpture that kind of looks like an alien, that's a lobster, it's very strange looking. And instead of water flowing through it, mercury flowed through the sculpture and just across the way was the giant. You can find photos of this and you'll see Guernica is in the back.
Speaker 2:So again these are all these artists who were mixing and hanging out with each other, sharing ideas. Paris is the hotbed of creativity in the 1920s and 1930s, before World War II starts, where everything halts and all creativity really comes to an end. Once the Germans, the Nazis, invade Paris, everything comes to a halt and people flee. We all know how horrible World War II was, so it affects everything. And then Calder came back home, kept making art and just was inventive and inventive. Also, he made cool knives and forks and platters. He did weavings. He designed jewelry. Again, because of his friendship with all these famous people, peggy Guggenheim, after the war, starts her own art museum in Venice and he designed a headboard for her, as well as mobile silver jewelry that that when the wearer would wear it these earrings they would float um below their ears and move was it like on fish line or something.
Speaker 3:So you it looked, it wasn't officially it was like wires, wires in wires okay, that's really cool, though I didn't realize he was the one that introduced, like the dangling part of a earring well, he just took it further, he made it intellectual and he made it more complex.
Speaker 2:I mean, there already was dangling earrings, but his moved on purpose.
Speaker 3:Oh, that's really cool. That's really cool. What else happened with him? What other people did he interact with in your own book?
Speaker 2:uh well, so, um, we describe him as as, as an artist who ran away to join the circus. So early on he built this circus out of with cloth and wire and made figures, dancers, trapeze artists, and the whole thing could fit into a suitcase, and then he would open it up and make it move. There are films of him building it that you can see if you Google Calder Circus. It's pretty incredible, but he just constantly was inventing things all the time.
Speaker 3:So yeah, he was never satisfied. Once he made something he had to go make another, one kind of thing.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't say he wasn't satisfied. I would say that he was propelled by his creativity. He was constantly being inventive.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 1:He was an artist.
Speaker 2:And so he constantly was making things, but he was also breaking the rules in the way that Picasso broke the rules by introducing cubism and abstract figurative painting and his various styles. Picasso was a rule breaker, toulouse-trec was a rule breaker, calder was a rule breaker and it's like a springboard that other people saw and they kind of opened the doors for other artists to be more experimental of open the doors for other artists, to be more experimental, would you say.
Speaker 3:For most, if not all of the artists had a tendency to be the air quote, rule breaker kind of thing in your book in most cases, yes, but some artists, you know, were very, very quiet.
Speaker 2:They were not wild people. Some, some like like mondrian, was a very um, soft-spoken man, um, lived a very strong aesthetic life. He only wore certain colors, he arranged his apartments. He was really inspired by jazz. Eventually he comes and he lived in New York until he died, after he left the Netherlands and then he lived in Paris.
Speaker 2:But then artists are also, like, sometimes not let into certain societies. So there was a Spanish woman named Remedios Vero and she was very talented, came to to left Spain, came to Paris, saw the work of surrealists like Salvador Dali and others and was really inspired by surrealism. But the surrealist group was very macho and didn't really approve of the idea of women being artists, so she wasn't really allowed to be in. And so she went back to Spain and worked as an artist and as an illustrator for advertising companies back in the 30s. And then she came back to Paris and then World War II started and the Spanish Civil War started. So if you were a Spaniard and you had left Spain, you couldn't get back in. So she was smuggled out and wound up in Mexico where eventually she met like-minded women like herself who were super creative. And so there were about four or five women who were either expats in Mexico, in Mexico City, either from England or from Spain or from Paris, who were her pals and they kind of went off and did their own thing.
Speaker 2:But her paintings are really extraordinary.
Speaker 2:I keep thinking that high school students would love her work because it's filled with so much detail and there's this sense of mystery I was showing a painting of hers to a friend of mine, I said, oh, it's like seeing a seance come to life, that in her paintings there's always like these sort of windmills or wheels, and the wind is making a structure like a little tiny castle or a turret where someone is writing something.
Speaker 2:Or one of her most amazing paintings is an image of a woman in a tiny little hut that's on stilts with the little staircases, and then she's feeding the moon, the man in in the moon, a crescent moon with a face, the milky way. So the milky way is, um up above her and it's being ground into a porridge and she's feeding it with a spoon. So she's like telling you this whole mystery, this whole story. So her, all of her paintings have a great sense of narration. There's a story that's happening, something is happening. It has a lot to do with science fiction, a lot to do with imagination. Um, they're really wonderful paintings and there are three different kinds of styles going on in them.
Speaker 3:um, but she's she's one of my favorites yeah, you were telling me about this yesterday when we were chatting. Um, I didn't know about the story about her being banished from her own country. That's interesting. So in Mexico, was there any nuances or events that happened to her?
Speaker 2:um, that, no, she was, she was, she was. I mean, she went to mexico city because, you know, in mexico you speak spanish and that was her, her, her language.
Speaker 2:Um, but they're also mexico city was thriving as an intellectual center in in the 1940s and 50s okay and so a lot was happening also um very important spanish, not not very important Mexican artists who were um working um also in Mexico city, was a married couple, a very wild married couple um named Diego Rivera and his wife was Frida Kahlo. Diego Rivera became one of the most famous muralists in Mexico city and and um the mural had kind of died, but he made it, he reinvented it. So you've probably seen pictures of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican in Rome that Michelangelo painted, which is this enormous ceiling that tells stories. And then there's the last judgment, which is the whole wall in this giant chapel which people adore and love, but not since Michelangelo, had people gotten really excited about murals. And so Diego Rivera is from a wealthy family, he's very educated, from a wealthy family. He's very educated. He marries Frida. They go to live in Paris for a while. There he meets Picasso, he meets the surrealist, he meets the cubist, and so he, for a while, while he's in Paris, does all these cubist inspired paintings.
Speaker 2:Then he comes back to Mexico and they're not very interested in that, but there's a growing sense of nationalism. So he starts doing these murals um that tell the story of mexico and mexico's past. At the same time he gets work in the united states and he comes to detroit and, um, there's an amazing mural of his about the auto industry in at the detroit institute of art. Um, that he was hired to paint and that's a huge success. That tells the story of the auto industry. And then everyone wants him to paint things. So he goes to California and he paints murals in San Francisco and then he gets this giant commission from Rockefeller in New York City. So he goes there with his wife, but at the same time he becomes a committed communist. And so there are two kinds of communism pure communism, which is what he believed in, and then there's the communism that came out of World War II, which is very different. And when Rockefeller, the big industrialist American rich guy, saw this, he was freaked out and fired him. So he went back to Mexico and then lived there until he died.
Speaker 2:But he was a giant man and his wife, frida, was very tiny and diminutive. But when Frida was young she was riding a bus and was in a bus accident and it shattered her pelvis. So she was unable to have children and she had to wear these corsets for the rest of her life. But she also embraced sort of the national folk costume of Mexico and so she wore long velvet dresses and sort of peasant blouses.
Speaker 2:And she's famous for doing these very intense, imagined self-portraits uh, picture of her as a deer running a lot of um, a lot of catholicism shows up in her work. Where people are bleeding, there's the sacred heart, um, there's. There's an image she did of the two fridas where she's painting and like her twin sister. She didn't have a twin sister, this is her imagination, but she's very much a surrealist and she had pet monkeys. They lived in what was known as the Blue House, this gorgeously painted Blue House.
Speaker 2:But she suffered intensely because of this accident that she had when she was young and sadly she died early on. But she's become so um like. Her popularity is bigger than it's ever been. It just keep. Every year when they have an exhibit of frida kahlo, people show up in droves to see it and in some ways her shadow um surpasses her husband, who was the most famous artist of mexico, but now she's really thought of as a great master. Even though his work is still marvelous. It just sort of doesn't attract the same attention and doesn't have the mystery that her pieces have. People love Frida Kahlo's work. They're both in the book.
Speaker 3:That's awesome. So you touched on something specific. I'd like you to explain a little better. You said the mystery of the art is what compels people. What specifically, when you mean the mystery of it, is what you're trying to explain?
Speaker 2:So her pictures are very mysterious, looking. There's a strong sense of imagination. Again, there's this sense of narration. When you look at a Frida Kahlo painting, it looks like she's telling you a story, but they're also very mysterious and all of that, I think, captivates people's imaginations and people are really compelled to look at her paintings. And also the fact that she was in a great deal of pain, but she was an artist and she felt compelled to draw and paint all the time. She was always working, even sometimes in bed. There are these pictures of her painting, a painting from her bed or in a wheelchair. It's really an extraordinary life and an amazing woman, very strong and very powerful with her visual sense of identity.
Speaker 3:That's awesome. Yeah, I just looked up some of her stuff. That is a very unique style that she has. It's a heads up, David. By the way, I just got the notification. I got 10 minutes to only send you a new link, so we can continue.
Speaker 2:Sure, you want to just talk about three more artists link so we can continue.
Speaker 3:Uh, sure you want to just talk about three more artists? Okay, yeah, uh, we got 10 minutes so I will open. Um, actually, when this one ends, it'll close and kick us. Then just click the link again and come back in okay, you got it so I'll cut all that out. Um, yeah, let's go into one more artist. Uh, real quick. Um of the the. How much time do we have? We got like eight ish minutes before it kicks up. Okay, that's right click the link again and just come back on it uh.
Speaker 2:So another artist who is new and emerging and very popular um is visa butler, who is an african-amerAmerican woman who her paintings are made as quilts. She does these intense, almost photographic-like but in crazy color combinations, sort of telling stories of Black history or showing just sort of wonderful imagery with finely dressed African-Americans. Sometimes they're wearing something that's new and sometimes her clothing that she puts the people in reflects an older generation or a sense of grandeur, like the Gilded Age, like the 1890s. But she always draws African Americans as part of her art. But what makes it so fascinating is it's done as a quilted painting. She has this amazing sewing machine that can turn in any direction. It's basically if you imagined you had a bunch of fabric and your sewing machine was like the size of a coffee can that you can move it in any direction and you can change the color of the threads very easily. Her art is totally needs to be looked at. It's very celebrated now. It's rather extraordinary and wonderful.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's definitely one. When I, when I edit this, I'm going to add it in the beginning that when you listen to different artists, look them up on google while you're listening to this, if you can, because it helps, like seeing it and hearing you tell the story too yeah yeah, that's that's where I looked her up right now. That's where I'm like yes, it really is. Just it's a quilt, but it looks very well done.
Speaker 2:It looks like a painting yeah, they, they totally look painted but they're not. If you look, it's all made of amazing pieces of fabric. And also she works with someone um in uh in the netherlands that makes these um batik and she, she creates the patterns and they, they produce it in a variety of colors and they're very intricate. They also sort of celebrate um african fabrics, um that she pulls, but she also creates her own with images of birds and fans and money, all kinds of things that's super cool.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I like her first one. If you google it, it's actually a photo of her and then um one of her quotes behind her, so she's newer in the she's a contemporary artist who's working today.
Speaker 2:Um, she went to uh howard university, uh, which is the famous african-american um college, and there, uh, she was aware of what she calls candy color.
Speaker 3:Candy color. Candy color.
Speaker 2:That they're keyed up bright colors. She refers to them as candy colors. So she uses all these like bright colors, like bright pink, purples and blues and lime, greens and yellows, very high keyed up color.
Speaker 3:Is it more like bright the eye is better?
Speaker 2:no-transcript. So I think we summed up.
Speaker 1:Corita.
Speaker 2:You want to talk about Corita Kent.
Speaker 3:No sorry.
Speaker 2:I think we finished talking about Beeson Butler, didn't we?
Speaker 3:That is correct.
Speaker 2:yes, Hold on. Let me just turn off this call.
Speaker 3:Your mic just suddenly got really soft.
Speaker 2:Can you hear me?
Speaker 3:Yeah, much better now.
Speaker 2:Okay. Andy Warhol Okay, I was going to say we should talk about Andy Warhol next, because he's someone people will know.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So Andy Warhol is a really amazing and probably the most famous artist in the world. Um, his popularity is is huge and continues to grow um all the time. Uh, andy Warhol was a shy kid, uh, growing up um in Pittsburgh. Uh, his mother was a devout Byzantine Catholic. They went to church all the time. He was very sickly as a child and he looked at movie magazines as a kid. Of the famous movie stars back in the day like Marilyn Monroe and Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant and all of the sort of like classic movie stars.
Speaker 2:He goes to art school, then he moves to New York and gets a job doing fashion illustration for the fancy department stores in New York, like Bergdorf, goodman and Henry Bendel, and he just kind of keeps drawing and uh does these amazing drawings that uh are having a very special kind of look to them. They're they're done with a blot, with blotter paper that he would draw it and then blot the paper and then he would take the leftover part to keep working with the rest of the drawing. Eventually he has this idea that so his famous thing for saying is everyone, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. So he is a pop artist and so other artists like Roy Lichtenstein, who looked at comics and made paintings based on on comics that were either in the Sunday newspapers, when you would get the comic section, or inspired by comic books like superheroes. He kind of follows along with this, but then he looks at everyday objects and finds beauty in an everyday object. So one of his famous early things is he recreated the Brillo box. Brillo was a household cleaner like Comet Cleanser, but it was Brillo, and he made these boxes out of wood and then silk screened his cutout version of a Brillo box and reassembled them. And in the gallery you saw these boxes of Brillo, but they weren't cardboard boxes, they were hand-silk screened, made out of plywood boxes.
Speaker 2:Then he finds fascination with the everyday object, something as simple and as common as a can of Campbell's soup, which every kid grew up drinking or having tomato soup from Campbell's Super popular it was, it was cheap, it was a canned good and in the 50s and 60s moms and parents liked the ease of making dinner out of a can, um. And so he looks at these, at these Campbell soup cans, and creates, um, these large silkscreen prints, uh, based on Campbell soup graphics, but he hand cuts it and makes and silkscreens them, um, and that kind of really took off, uh. And then he looks at um, remembering how much he loved movie stars. He starts to take these. He looks at a newspaper photograph or a photograph from a magazine and he Xeroxes a bunch of times. So by copying and recopying using a commercial copier like a Xerox machine or a photocopier, he keeps playing with it until if you take a piece of Xerox and you keep making Xeroxes from other copies, you lose and add things. So he then blows that up, burns it onto a silkscreen, silkscreens it in black and then adds color to it. So you have the famous images of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor.
Speaker 2:Then he also looked at the news and it's the time of race riots in the 60s, a time of social change, tension in the United States. So he looks at these horrific pictures of race riots and blows them up and then makes art out of it. He also looks at car crashes that he sees in newspapers and blows that up, makes that into a piece of art. The same thing with um, the electric chair, um, and and famously, uh, the nation was in love with, uh, John F Kennedy. They were also really in love with Jackie Kennedy, and when Kennedy was assassinated he looked at Newscrew photographs and turned that into a whole series, including the grieving Jackie Kennedy at Kennedy's funeral. He made all of this into art. So what's interesting is that it's a mirror and a record of the time we lived in back then.
Speaker 2:But he's made changes. He's blown it out of proportion. He's used the commercial tools in the same way that Toulouse-Lautrec made commercial posters for nightclubs and cabarets in the 1890s in Paris. Andy Warhol is just embracing the world he lives in and making it into art and this causes this crazy change in the art world. So until he comes along, there was a movement called abstract expressionism, which is very grungy and very aggressive kind of paintings. But he turns it into pop art. He's using popular references like a Campbell's soup can or a Brillo box, and he kind of takes the world by storm.
Speaker 2:And then he starts his own magazine called Interview Magazine, where he gets to hang out with all the people that he admired a long time ago. But he's a very shy, shy, shy, uh gay man who is hiding um. At a time when gay people were not quite so welcomed he was even shunned by fellow artists, uh, like robert russianberg and jasper johns, who were a gay couple, but they were like the tough straight guys. He was very much kind of a shy feminine man who had bad skin, wore makeup to hide the bad skin, and then is he was losing his hair. So he wore these wigs all the time, um, so he could be glamorous in the way that he was making these what he thought were glamorous. And then he becomes friends with all the who's who of the time, and um was constantly hanging out with fashion designers like Halston and Liza Minnelli and goes to parties with Elizabeth Taylor, and so he has this amazing life. But he's a completely self-invented human. He did not come from money, he did not come from privilege. He got the door open by his own brilliance and his own way of being just so inventive. So he's a really fascinating guy.
Speaker 2:And then, also on the cover of the book, is Jean-Michel Basquiat. Andy Warhol at this time is quite a bit older. He's in his 50s and Basquiat is in his early 20s and they start hanging out together. 50s and Basquiat is in his early 20s and they start hanging out together and and um, andy Warhol says, why don't we do some large paintings together? So they do these really large paintings where Andy Warhol um has his team of assistants um create things like the. The Pegasus logo from an old gas company, um is repeated on these giant canvases that are maybe like 12 feet by eight feet high or 14 feet wide by 10 feet tall. And then he does it very, very carefully. And then Basquiat, who was like this pure raw talent, just draws really quickly with with paint, just squeeze out of the, out of the tube he does Sometimes he doesn't even bother mixing it, just uses the color that he finds and creates these amazing, very um, like a tempest in a teapot kind of thing, these very tumultuous um, very interesting um kind of imagery that didn't exist in the fine art world. It's raw, it looks very much like work that a high school kid might make or somebody who is, but also, but he comes from the sort of a graffiti background, um, and and so all of that is sort of coexisting with with the contrast of what Andy Warhol does.
Speaker 2:Um and around the same time, um coming up is is an amazing artist named Keith Haring, who he and his dad love drawing, like Disney cartoons and Batman comics. When he was a kid. He goes to school, drops out, goes to art school, drops out and starts drawing on the subways and making art for the various big dance clubs in New York in the late 70s and early 80s. Big dance clubs in in new york in the in the late 70s and early 80s. And um, he kind of eventually takes the world by storm by drawing in the subway. It's like covered on the news. He's this novelty, he's the new kid in town, um, but he's a contemporary of of warhol and and basquiat um, and basquiat dated madonna for for for a short hot minute. I mean, these guys got around, they interacted, they were the Toulouse track of the 1890s, but now they're doing it in the late 1970s and early 80s.
Speaker 2:And then sadly, aids comes along and Keith Haring sadly died of AIDS as a young man. But before he died he became really famous and traveled around the world and also dealt with difficult subjects like apartheid in Africa and also made posters that were basically made in anger at how horrible the Reagan administration was and not sort of letting medicine be available or even being researched. So there again, basquiat is a person of his time. Toulouse-trec is a person of his time, the 1890s. Kiering is making art that is both angry and comical at the same time with his like crawling babies and people break dancing. Um, he's really a fascinating guy and sadly his life is cut short. But what's really fascinating is that what both uh, basquiat and, um, keith Haring did no one had done this kind of work. They really kind of changed art. It made it stand on its head and also just was so different, like they're real mavericks of their time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, honestly, it sounds silly and I probably have heard it. I didn't even know Warhol was a gay man. That's where, like hearing that I'm like wow, I didn't know. That Makes a lot more sense now. It was hidden for a gay man.
Speaker 2:That's where, like hearing, that I'm like wow, I didn't know. That makes a lot more sense. It was, it was. It was hidden for a long time. Um uh, his friends knew. Um uh. There's a very good documentary called the Andy Warhol diaries that Netflix put out about two years ago. That's worth watching because it tells this whole history and it's really fascinating okay, I'll have to definitely look that up.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that was interesting for me. I mean, I always knew, like, the way he did things. It was very different, very edgy I think, but I didn't realize he was that edgy during that time. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Now, one thing, as we've been going on this wonderful journey I've been curious about for art general is it for an artist to intentionally push the boundaries to make society uncomfortable? Is it worth the risk of being alienated and not getting normal jobs in your view? Or art should be expressed the way the artist sees it, no matter what the consequences are?
Speaker 2:Well, we all have to survive. We also have to pay our rent, we need warm clothes, we need food. An artist does what he can to survive. Some artists they catch on very quickly. They're very fortunate. Other artists can suffer and struggle their whole time and it really depends upon the individual. There's been a field which was sometimes called outsider art. Now it's more called self-taught art. But the artists who didn't go to school, didn't go to an art academy, didn't go to a college, just was compelled to draw. It was within them. There's a whole bunch of amazing self-taught artists that now are getting recognized as being important and the book features several of them. There is a woman from Algeria who inspired both Picasso and Matisse. She actually did these really great, very loose paintings of exotic women and birds. And then a woman in Paris saw her work, fell in love with it, brought her to Paris and gave her an exhibit. And both Picasso and Matisse saw her work and they were quite changed by it. They were very inspired and then she wanted to.
Speaker 3:What's her name so I can look it up. What's her name?
Speaker 2:I'm looking it up right now. It's not a name that flows off the top of my, flows out of my tongue very easily, but I'm getting there.
Speaker 1:It's okay.
Speaker 2:Her name is Baya. It's a really hard name to pronounce, baya, medahede. You're going to have to look up how to pronounce it, but it's Bayaics. And so picasso would paint one and then she would do the rest of them. There'd be like an edition of, say, 50. If he made a bowl or he made a picture, she would paint the rest of them um, so she was that good at copying his style, kind of thing um well, she was just very intuitive to this natural ability, never went to school.
Speaker 2:Then she leaves, goes back to algeria, marries this guy doesn't paint at all for like 30 years, has a bunch of kids, he dies and then she goes back to painting. But she's really a fascinating, fascinating character uh that would be one.
Speaker 3:I will have to look up her name I can't even sound phonics.
Speaker 2:I can't find it uh, so so to her name is spelled, last name is m-a-h-i-e-d-d-i-n-e all right.
Speaker 3:Oh, so that was a little fast for me, but, like I said, I'll look her up later okay, well, when you look, at the pdf you can read about her.
Speaker 2:And then another self-taught artist that I knew was a man who called himself Mr Imagination. His real name was William Wormack. Gregory Wormack was his name, not William. William was his brother. Gregory Wormack was an African-American man who grew up on the south side of Chicago and wanted to stand out. So one day he was walking around the beach and picked up a big log and carried it around to get noticed. And then he started collecting old paintbrushes big paintbrushes you would paint your house with and turned them into characters. He used molding clay and plaster of Paris and would turn them into little figurative objects. And eventually he kept making these things with bottle caps and carving things out of sandstone and he just totally would let people come into his house and buy something necklaces, little small sculptures, paintbrush heads. Eventually he got noticed. His work was being shown in galleries, but he worked really hard, like all night long and was a self-taught artist. Who his studio? He didn't have have a studio. He did it all in a studio apartment so that his workspace was a piece of plywood on his bed and then when it's time to go to bed he would move the plywood and then sleep on the bed and um.
Speaker 2:Extraordinary artist who identified and felt that he was a long last, long lost pharaoh from e Egypt. He always identified with the pharaohs of Egypt but he made lots of pyramids. But the work is really quite fascinating and so to draw him, because I knew him, I drew him as one of his creations. But I looked at photographs of Mr Imagination, who was a warm and friendly guy and whenever he would see you he would say the same thing Well, how are you, young man? And he would give you a big hug or a big handshake. He was quite tall. He's like six foot five tall and skinny, um and uh. For the portrait of him, I drew him as one of his characters, uh, as a paintbrush headed. So, um, hopefully you can look at it. Um, I can send you an image. You can share it with your listeners if you like. But he's a really fascinating guy who, sadly, um had a hard life. Uh, at the end of his life he was invited to Bethlehem, pennsylvania, where the mayor gave him a home and he taught art to little kids. Uh, he went to Paris. He went to Venice, um, uh, he went to paris. He went to venice, um, but he had some health problems that no one knew about and, sadly, um died, uh, in a hospital with with a terrible infection. But, um, he is dearly loved. Mr imagination, uh, he, it was the heart of chicago art.
Speaker 2:And there was another woman, very opposite of Mr Imagination, her name was Lee Godey, who started making art because she had a lot of trauma in her life. She was a woman who grew up very privileged, married a man, he was a Christian scientist. They had two children. One child got sick and then died because they didn't take him to the doctor, because the Christian scientists at that time didn't believe in medicine, and so another child died and she had a daughter who then was put up for adoption and she basically had a breakdown and then wound up as a bag lady on the street making art and hanging out with the art students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. And she would paint on window shades, she would buy prime canvas at the art supply store and she did these, her idea of a very beautiful woman. And she was quite the character Like she would help in court. She would invite people for tea in the park and she would quite the character like she would help court she would. She would invite people for tea in the park and she would show her paintings and um, she became quite famous and people magazine wrote about her. Newspaper articles were written about her. Um, my partner, um, collected her work early on and when he and I were dating we would go on dates with Lee Godi where we would hang out on a windowsill of, like Neiman Marcus, where there was a big bench that she could sit on and paint and.
Speaker 2:But life on the streets is very hard if she would get, you know, beaten up by by bad people and it was cold and she would just make enough money to stay in a cheap hotel for the night. But she also had bad habits. She'd been living on the streets so these transient hotels didn't want her because she attracted mice and roaches and all kinds of things. But for the end of her life a woman started showing up, who was her long-lost daughter, who found out she had had a nice life. She was raised by the people who adopted her long lost daughter. Who found out she had had a nice life. She was raised by the people who adopted her, but when she got married she needed to get a passport to leave the country and she found a relative and she said if you want to find your mother, she's a bag lady on the street. And so she found her and took a long time to gain Lee's confidence. And and then she, lee, was an older, an older woman, so older woman. So she was in her 70s and living on the street, which is not easy in a cold place like chicago, like right now. Yeah, I don't mind who's on the radio set, it's stupid cold, it's so cold right now, um. But luckily then she had an accident. She was taken to a hospital, she recovered and then she felt comfortable and went and lived in a nursing home and sometimes lived with her daughter. So at the end of her life she was warm and loved.
Speaker 2:But she left behind this amazing art. That was all her idea of what something beautiful was. But she identified with the French Impressionists. So the French Impressionists are Renoir and Degas and others, who Monet, who painted light, bright, pretty paintings. They were mavericks of their time too, because before that painting in Paris was big and heroic, it was all scenes that referred to Greek mythology. But here these French Impressionists are painting flowers and beautiful women, but it's all kind of light touches, and so she identified with that period, not her own period, but a period that she admired from the past, and so she created her own idea of it.
Speaker 2:There was a popular drawing drawing um in the in the early turn of the century, um known as the gibson girl, and the gibson girl um is this drawing of, with like a, like a big piled up hair, um, kind of like a bun, but more, more big. If you look up gibson girl and then if you look at the Lee Goatee painting, you'll see that the ideas came from that, that her whole idea was creating beauty and her again she, she is the is really the queen of outsider art in Chicago, and after she died her work now goes for a lot of money. You can actually, if you google lee goatee antiques road show, you'll find me talking about lee goatee. Um, we had a painting of hers and a friend of mine had tickets to the antiques road show, which is not my favorite show, but my partner, david, loves it, and he said you're going with me, what are you going to take? And I said I'll take this new, this new painting we got of lee goatee, and so they picked me to be on the show and so it's a great reference. You can see it, um, but, uh, she wanted to be a french impressionist and so, um, just recently there's an outsider art museum, or self-taught museum, or intuitive art as it's called it has many names now, but it's called Intuit in Chicago, and Chicago has a large collection of various self-taught artists who came in and out of Chicago or lived here.
Speaker 2:Most often they were very poor people, but they created art because they had to, they felt it was, it was burning inside them. They had to do it. Anyway, there was an amazing exhibit that went to Paris, france, and Lee Goethe was represented in that exhibit. So she didn't have this dream in her lifetime, but 15 years after she died, her work is being shown in Paris. So it's rather an extraordinary story. And the thing that's cool about our book is that we kind of tell you the more personal side of the artist. It's not an academic book by any means. There's a strong sense of scholarship. Lots of research went into it and a lot of just looking at the art and figuring out how an artist may be yeah, I bet. So he sent me some material yesterday. Um, and a lot of just looking at the art and figuring out how an artist maybe.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I bet no, as I've looked at the. So he sent me some material. Yesterday we, uh, we had a chat and he sent me some of his um, his art in his book, which I recommend you just find a copy somehow and look at it. It's easy you can.
Speaker 2:You can get it on amazon. Um uh, you can buy it at an independent art, independent bookstore. It's called iconic artists. The publisher is trope T R O P E and uh, jean-michel Basquiat is on the cover. Uh, it's a bright blue cover. Um I I think you would all enjoy it.
Speaker 3:It really is. It's. It's quite fascinating and when you look at it he adds layers of mystery. But for me I didn't know what I was looking at until he explained it. But when you go through and he explains it better, you see it then what he did with the artist, kind of thing. So it's definitely worth looking it up. His book it's fascinating. Is there anything else? In particular, david, we want to go over that I might have missed.
Speaker 2:No, the book is intended to be for anyone, for any age. The publisher thinks of these as sort of coffee table books, sort of modestly sized coffee table art books that they would. That would really inspire a younger audience. So they're intended to be for, um, you know someone who's in their, in their, in their teens, from 16 to to 85? Um, it's meant for a variety of people. It's not intended to be a kid's book, um, but that's um, where the marketing hey it's whatever the marketing department says.
Speaker 2:So, uh, this is the fifth book. Um, first we did a book of. Each one has 50, uh, people in it. Each one, all of the books are. I did all the art for it.
Speaker 2:Um, the first one was LGBTQ icons, and Frida Kahlo is on the cover of that. The next one was Science People there's a picture of Jane Goodall and one of her famous chimps on the cover. Next was Composers, and it features a forgotten composer from the time of Marie Antoinette and the French court, before the French Revolution, but his name is Chevalier de Saint-Georges. He was a composer who wrote operas and ballets and symphonies and was friends with Mozart and Marie Antoinette, queen of Paris and Queen of France. And then we did one on 50 icons in fashion. And then the most newest book is Iconic Artists, and it's a lovely series of books. They're about $24.95 each. It's hardback, it's beautifully printed and if people are looking for a gift for a younger person who has an interest in fashion or art, or or a younger person who has an interest in fashion or art, or fashion or music, these are the books that you would love to give as a holiday present.
Speaker 3:Definitely, and it's really good. I'm actually I have an artist friend. I might pick up a copy for him. Please do so. It's absolutely been a magical, wonderful experience. David, I love how you told your stories and it was very captivating, but I could still look up the artists and it just made it more impactful hearing your story and looking at the artists.
Speaker 2:Thank you, thank you, thank you Josh.
Speaker 3:You're welcome. Is there any place in particular? They can reach you at.
Speaker 2:You can find me on Instagram at Cisco Kid. So my last name is Hungarian, so it's very hard to spell. It's two pairs of CSS, which is classic Hungarian, so it's C-S-I-C-S-K-O-K-I-D. I'm on Instagram there and I'm also on Facebook and unfortunately my website is down for reasons I don't understand, so I'm trying to get that remedied and then you can find me again. But if you, if you can spell my name, you and just google it.
Speaker 2:Um, I've done a lot. I've done a lot of things, from train stations to, uh, I designed all the holiday decorations at the Obama White House in 2012, which were large stained glass windows and ceramics, all kinds of things. So I'm a lucky guy. I love drawing. I draw every day. Every day I wake up drawing with a pad and pencil and then I work on a computer, and so I'm sort of a crossover artist. But the beauty of this artist's book the iconic artist's book is that the style is consistent, but it changes to go with each artist, so it's a, it's a visual treat and, um, I think your audiences would love it wonderful.
Speaker 3:Thank you again.