FISH HOOKS OF THE PACIFIC ISLANDS VOL II

FISH HOOKS OF THE PACIFIC ISLANDS VOL II

 

The Pacific is the single largest contiguous ‘place’ on earth, sprawling across a third of its surface.Without the fish hook, the settlement of the Pacific Islands over the last 2,000 years would have been impossible.
 
For us, these works of art are significant, eloquent witnesses to a rich and bygone universe of cultures. The task of preserving them, of tracing and describing their histories and origins, and of passing those stories on to new generations around the world,is as wonderful a calling as any lover of art could hope to be presented with.
 
This limited-edition book is the ultimate resource on the fish hooks of the Pacific Islands. More than 450 fish hooks and dozens of related objects are presented here in their true size (1:1) for the very first time, spread across more than 450 pages and more than 80 full-page or fold‑out plates, and accompanied by over 220 color and 75 monochrome accessory illustrations, 45 photos of people and islands, 50 maps, and comprehensive expert commentary.
 
Foreword and texts by Daniel Blau and Klaus Maaz.
 
Essays by Anthony JP Meyer and Sydney Picasso.
 
30×25 cm, hardcover with embossing and dust cover.

 
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Daido Moriyama

Daido Moriyama

DANIEL BLAU is pleased to present an exceptional exhibition of 23 new paintings Japanese artist Daido Moriyama based on photos he took in 1971 in New York City. (b.1938, Osaka, Japan).
 
Over the course of his 60-year long career, the renowned Japanese artist, Moriyama, has documented his immediate surroundings, analyzing the society of post-war Japan along the way. He has significantly changed the way we perceive photography – and even called the very medium into question himself.
 
His diverse œvre is shaped by his many publications and largely comprises traditional photographs, installations and silkscreen prints. With focus on bold contrast, Moriyama’s unmistakeable visual language was influenced by Andy Warhol.
 
Moriyama’s work between 1968 and 1972 is characterized by depth and density, the result of his talent feeding off the cultural pulse of the time. Photography was omnipresent, both in the press and in advertising.
 
These 2023 works in bronze and black are devoted to the themes of mass media, consumer society and everyday life and are based on early photographs taken by the artist in New York City in 1971. Of the city, Moriyama said:
 
“My favourite city: New York. I have no doubt that I like it even more than Tokyo. Somewhere hidden in it is a strange kindness and sadness, Sometimes when I want to remember the person I love, I think of the lights of New York. Since I’m afraid to travel by plane, it’s a great pity that even if I wanted to, I can’t just fly there right now.“
 
During his time there, Moriyama manipulated his camera such that each negative image could take two single exposures, each half the size of a regular 35mm negative. Now, these pairs of images are combined onto single canvases, creating a kind of “multifaceted reality” typical of Moriyama’s style from this period, which embodied the concept of are, bure, bokeh – meaning grainy, blurred and out of focus.

 
 
 
Exhibition Dates:
 
September 5 – October 12, 2023
 
11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München

 
 

The works in the exhibition are for sale. Please contact us for availability and prices.

 

 
 


35. OPEN ART – DANIEL BLAU presenting Daido Moriyama
Daido Moriyama
DANIEL BLAU, is pleased to present for the first time in this new Open Art Edition, an exceptional exhibition of 23 paintings by the famous Japanese artist Daido Moriyama.
 
A few words about Daido Moriyama:
Born in 1938 in Osaka, Japan, Moriyama has significantly changed the way we see photography over the course of his 60-year career. With his camera, he has not only documented his immediate surroundings and artistically analyzed the society of post-war Japan, USA, but also questioned the photographic medium itself. His unmistakable visual language is just as legendary as his numerous publications, which play a central role in his work.
 
Moriyama’s diverse oeuvre, very much focused on strong contrasts and inspired by Andy Warhol, comprises above all traditional photographs, installations and silkscreen prints. Between 1968 and 1972, Moriyama created works of great density. His talent was enhanced by the cultural pulse of the time. Photography was omnipresent, in the press and in advertising.
 
With the themes of mass media, consumer society and everyday life, the 2023 works in gold bronze and black are based on early photographs Moriyama took in New York City in 1971 and reused here on canvas. Through his images, he creates a kind of “multifaceted reality”.
 
Why this fascination with New York? A quote from Moriyama explains it best:
“My favorite city: New York. I have no doubt that I like it even more than Tokyo. Somewhere hidden in it is a strange kindness and sadness. Sometimes when I want to remember the person I love, I think of the lights of New York. Since I’m afraid to travel by plane, it’s a great pity that even if I wanted to, I can’t just fly there right now”.
 
During his visit to New York City in 1971, Moriyama manipulated his 35mm camera in such a way that each negative image could take two single exposures half its size. The larger and fuzzier graininess of the resulting image is part of the desired pictorial effect.
 
The images in the exhibition are not simple reproductions of one or the other photograph: under the motto grainy, blurred out of focus (are, bure and boke), Moriyama has combined the successive negatives, one on top of the other, to form a single image and joined them together on a common, vertical, canvas.
 

 
Exhibition Dates:

 

35. Open Art:

 
September 8 – 10, 2023
presented by Initiative Münchner Galerien zeitgenössischer Kunst
 
11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München

 
 

SPECIAL GUIDED TOUR:

Saturday 8th, 2023
 
Meeting point:
from 3pm at Daniel Blau, Maximilianstr. 26
 
Tickets:
from the guide
 
Duration:
approx. 2 hours
 
Costs:
15,- € per person, pupils and students 10,- €
Children up to 14 years free
 
Registration required:
info@muenchner-galerien.de
Tel. +49 (0) 89 288 08 509
 
Find more information about guided tours here
 

 

 
 


Art Basel Review 2023

Art Basel Review

2023

 

Exhibition: July 18 – August 31, 2023
 

11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München

 
All illustrations are available for purchase. Prices upon request.

 

 

 

Art Basel 2023

Art Basel 2023

For ART Basel 2023, and the second part of the jubilee celebration for over 30 years of Blau at ART Basel, we are pleased to present a rich selection of renowned European and American artists. The online exhibition will include outstanding works by Ottone Rosai, Georg Baselitz, Antonius Höckelmannm Llyn Foulkes, Julian Schnabel, George Condo, Elaine Sturtevant and Hans Arp.
 
We look forward to seeing you in Basel.
 
 

 

 
Fair Dates:

 
Vernissage:
Wednesday, June 14, 2023
5 pm – 8 pm
 
Public Days:
June 15 – 18, 2023
11 am – 7 pm

 

Booth E15
 
Messeplatz 10
4005 Basel
 

 
 

George Grosz

George Grosz

Drawings 1913 – 1916

 

Exhibition: March 7 – April 18, 2023 ! Extended until June 15, 2023 !
 

11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München

 
All illustrations are available for purchase. Prices upon request.

 

 

 

Precious Pictures The Daguerreotype Memento

The Daguerreotype initially took over from silhouette paper cutting (Scherenschnitt) and portrait painting and drawing
 

Precious Pictures The Daguerreotype-Memento

 
When we speak of Daguerreotypes, we are referring to the earliest photographs, those made possible through the process advanced by and named after the Parisian Louis-Jacques-Mandé-Daguerre (1787-1851). The process saw a silver-coated copper plate exposed to iodine fumes, thereby creating a light-sensitive layer of silver iodide. The next step was to expose the copper plate to light from within a camera obscura. The plate – for the time being still looking exactly the same as it did before exposure – would be removed from the darkened box of the camera obscura and exposed to mercury fumes. At this point the picture was developed and visible to see; bathing the plate in a saline solution, then washing and drying it, would fix that picture permanently to the plate. Each daguerreotype was a completely unique item, not capable of further reproduction. The heritage of the invention extends beyond Daguerre himself – he made use of various physical, optical, and chemical laws and properties that were already known and understood. The camera obscura, for instance, had been in use as an aid for creating perspective drawings since the fifteenth century. The photosensitive properties of silver salts had been discovered by the German medical doctor Heinrich Schulze at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Even the photographic process itself was already known to science, thanks to Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. Niépce developed a method that required an exposure time lasting hours; thanks to Daguerre’s invention, that could be reduced to mere minutes.

Bodo von Dewitz and Fritz Kempe, Daguerreotypien. Ambrotypien und Bilder anderer Verfahren aus der Frühzeit der Photographie. Document of Photography 2, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, 1983. p. 31

 
In a lecture at the Academy of Sciences and Fine Arts in Paris on August 19, 1839, the physicist François Dominique Arago at last announced the final details of the technical process that he had been involved in developing. With Daguerre, who gave his name to the first widely available and practical photographic process, a centuries-old scientific dream had come true. Daguerre had presumably begun the relevant experiments in 1825. Niépce and Daguerre had agreed to share the financial windfall of their research, should it prove successful. Arago, Daguerre and Niépce’s son – his father having, in the meantime, passed away – offered the invention to the French government in exchange for the payment of a lifelong pension. The French state bought the patent and released it to the public as a generous gift “à tout le monde.” Daguerre took his pension – 6,000 francs per annum – and retired to a private life in the countryside, where he died in 1851.
Volker Jakob, „Menschen im Silberspiegel: Die Anfänge der Fotografie in Westfalen.“
In Aus westfälischen Bildsammlungen, Vol. 1, ed. Wolfgang Linke, Eggenkamp Verlag, Greven, 1989. p. 11-12

 

When the process was made public, news reports began flying off the presses around the world, and a genuine ‘daguerreotype fever’ broke out in Paris. Contemporary reports speak of countless enthusiasts crowding the squares and streets with the first Daguerreotype cameras in hand. The demand for the devices seems to have been so great that production wasn’t able to keep pace. Some amateur photographers even attempted to create homemade versions. The Daguerreotype initially took over from silhouette paper cutting (Scherenschnitt) and portrait painting and drawing. Anyone could have life- like portraits of family and friends. This kind of memento gave rise to the fame and the propagation of the Daguerreotype.
 
The metropolis of Berlin was the new art form’s first center in Germany, playing its part in ensuring the Daguerreotype method’s continuing spread and dissemination. Readers wanted new information and news reports constantly, and the press gave its all to keep its readers satisfied. Daguerreotype chemicals and the associated tools were readily available, supporting the experimentation of early photographers.

Jochen Voigt, Der gefrorene Augenblick. Daguerreotypien in Sachsen 1839-1860. Chemnitz, 2004. p. 13

 

 
 

 

All photographs are available for purchase. Prices upon request. For further information please send an email to: contact@danielblau.com
All offers are noncommital. We cannot guarantee the items are still available on request.
 

 

Other Diversions

 
How was it made? The Daguerreotype by Victoria & Albert Museum Daguerreobase Dark Valley Das finstere Tal Daguerreotype | Le Secret de la Chambre Noire Writings on the Daguerreotype | Photoinstitut Bonartes (Albertina)

Unidentified American Photographer, "Anonymous Portrait", 1850s
Unidentified American Photographer,
“Anonymous Portrait”, 1850s,
daguerreotype,
6,1 (9,5) x 5,0 (8,2) cm, ©Daniel Blau, Munich
NASA photographs

NASA photographs

The unbelievable happened in 1969. A spacecraft crewed by humans touched down on the moon. Even now, the moon landing, and the missions into space that led up to and succeeded it, retain their fascination for us. A curation of high-quality images, both in color and in black-and-white, are presented here as kaleidoscopic insight into the NASA missions of the late 1960s and ‘70s they document. It could be that even the photo-enthusiast public sees little special, today, in space photography, overwhelmed as it is by countless satellites sending back high-resolution glimpses into the cosmos.
If we cast our thoughts back some 60 years, though, NASA’s photographs appear again in new light: the surface of the moon recorded by man, the earth photographed for the first time from that lunar surface, heavily historic and phenomenal images. From a scientific perspective, of course, these missions, of an era already receding into memory, gained mankind a wealth of new information and ways of understanding the universe around us. The stillness, though, the endless quiet of these photographs, the play of light and shadow on another world and beyond our ken, the colors glistening off the horizons of other planets and into boundless space – these are artworks, pure, and fascinating moments in the history of photography.

 

Exhibition: January 10 – February 23, 2023
 

11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München

 
All images are available for purchase. Prices upon request.

 

 

 
Kronos: Fire and Water

Daniel Blau has assembled an outstanding collection of photographs bearing testimony to the attack
 

Kronos: Fire and Water

Strife and war are driving forces for mankind. Depictions of the hunt and scenes of war, of sword and spear, appear in our record even before recordkeeping, in the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux, the rock art of North Africa and Europe. We have, even from the earliest times, used our art to show our weapons at work exerting dominance over the natural world and our fellow man alike.

Sunday morning, December 7th, 1941: a grainy image shows Hawai’i from a bird’s-eye view. The island, the harbor, and a row of ships. Concentric waves. A torpedo has dropped into the water to leave those waves behind; in just a few moments it will hit one of those ships, and explode. The photo has captured the precise moment when the USA comes under direct attack by Japan. The attack on Pearl Harbor, more than any other single event, is what transformed a European war into a truly global one, a world war in all its senses and with its consequences.

Daniel Blau has assembled an outstanding collection of photographs bearing testimony to the attack. U.S. Navy photographers are found here alongside the much rarer work of their counterparts within the Imperial Japanese Army. This contrast and compliment permits a vivid, haunting insight into this brief instant in history, this era-defining attack, and forms the basis for a deeper engagement with war photography at large and the artistic considerations and aspects involved.

Nearly 81 years ago, Japan’s surprise attack on the US Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor brought about World War II’s turning point: the entry of the world’s most powerful military might, the USA, into the war. The unanticipated act of war lasted only about two hours. It came in two waves, claiming the lives of over 2,000 American soldiers and civilians. The photographs from our present collection illustrate almost every single military step taken by the two sides. The first Japanese bombers flew over Pearl Harbor that day at 7:48 am Hawaiian time. Their targets included, among others, seven US Navy battleships anchored in the vicinity of the Ford Islands, along the so-called ‘Battleship Row.’ In the course of those two attack waves, each lasting only a few minutes, 353 Japanese fighter jets and 28 submarines destroyed three US battleships and inflicted considerable damage on the remainder. The Americans were able, all the same, to shoot down 29 enemy planes.

The progression of weapons at human disposal has been matched by the progression of our illustration of them, from the dawn of art down to today. Rocks for bludgeoning and hurling gave way to the sword and the spear; the spear turns to arrow, to bullet and bomb and torpedo, until ultimately, in our own age, the long destructive evolution culminates in Fat Boy and Little Man, the atomic bomb in use, something like a response to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The moment those first torpedoes dropped from Japanese planes above Hawai’i is also, then, the same decisive moment upon which the lives of hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki hung. It is also, though, the moment in which the USA decided to demand an end to German hubris and arrogance. In a sort of paradox, then, the most important event of the 20th century was not so much a world peace, but rather the world war which engendered it.

A deeply symbolic photograph, the earliest image from the attack, was shot from a Japanese warplane. The arial photograph clearly shows the torpedoes that hit the US Navy warships stationed along the coast. Our exhibition, however, begins with a photo taken from a Japanese newsreel, published much later in the war. Japanese fighter pilots can be seen being prepared for their mission on board an aircraft carrier. Pilots of the Shimpū Tokkōtai, the Japanese kamikaze unit, are given a symbolic sip of sake; they do not expect to survive their mission.

The most widely published of these photographs originates with photographers of the US Navy. It shows the USS Shaw, a small and fast warship of the class known as ‘destroyer,’ at the instant of its explosion in dry dock. The tragic moment, the exploding ship itself, all is framed by palm fronds and an otherwise idyllic scene. Holiday paradise and bloody conflict come directly face-to-face. Clouds, the fireworks of explosion, the bursting apart of the USS Shaw, all appears together like the elements of some old master’s oil painting.

It is here that the matter of artistic photography comes to the fore. The pictures made by both the Imperial Japanese Army Photographers and the US Navy photographers serve as valuable source material, chronologically documenting not only the attack on Pearl Harbor itself but also our very knowledge of it; through the visual language in use, through the spectacular motifs, through the thick swaths of smoke and formations of ocean cloud, in every shade and nuance of greyscale, these photographs also bring their enormous artistic and emotional worth before us, more than purely documentary evidence of the sinking wrecks, the uniformed young and old men alike on the docks and on doomed ships. These are artworks, showing their artists’ every effort in grasping towards a profound aesthetic in that hectic and instantly fleeting state of being which is war.

The timeline reasserts itself in another photo, taken May 24th, 1943: the slow and arduous salvage of the USS Oklahoma is underway. Throughout the 17 months following Japan’s surprise attack 16 of the 19 sunken ships were recovered by the Navy and put back into service. In the wake of such terrible events, a photograph like this can serve to grant man once again hope, a sense of security and faith in our capacity not only to survive but to rise up ever stronger.

Every single photo gathered here serves as an important document of its time. Most of these photographs also find elaboration through the original text or newspaper reports (slugs) included on the back; the word choice and the language of these texts opens the images up to us on yet another level, allowing each recipient to ‘read’ the image of the war again, as though through new eyes or with deeper understanding. Amongst all this abundance of art-historical objects and photographs, it remains the image itself, the reproductive depiction of an event – and this was as true then as it is today – which is taken as the ultimate proof of occurrence. We use words to name objects and occurrences, to give some meaning and purpose to them. But we also, in just the same way, rely upon the portrayal of history-laden events, whether in the form of something sketched or photographed, to bring us towards belief in the truthfulness of what has happened. Here we might look to the buried photographs of the Buchenwald concentration camp as an example. Images have enormous influence on the very way in which we see; they reflect political and military structures, can even be used, ultimately, as evidence in court proceedings, in investigation for instance of war crimes. The space always left for interpretation within a photograph’s frame, however, can also serve as space for propaganda. Photography always anchors itself, in our collective visual memory, as a genuine reproductive depiction of one moment. These different dimensions lead also to an understanding, though, that the recipient too must be held responsible: he must cast his thoughts to matters of seeing, of not-seeing and of not-wanting-to-see, and must pose to himself the question of what it is that in the last accounting remains as the real expressive significance of the photo. It is up to him to close the invisible hole in history that has opened up between the reproduced depiction and the real event itself.

 

 

 

“Kronos” is available for purchase as a set. Price upon request. For further information please send an email to: contact@danielblau.com
This offer is noncommital. We cannot guarantee the set is still available on request.
 

 

Other Diversions

 
Examine the facts and timeline of the Attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 The National WWII Museum - Pearl Harbor Attack, December 7, 1941 Naval History and Heritage Command View footage of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor U.S. Navy Pearl Harbor - The Attack and Aftermath Film “Pearl Harbor”, 2001 Pearl Harbor History

Unidentified Japanese Photographer, "Pearl Harbor, Attack Photographed from Japanese Bomber", December 7, 1941
Unidentified Japanese Photographer,
“Pearl Harbor Attack, Photographed from Japanese Bomber”, December 7, 1941,
vintage silver gelatin print on glossy paper, printed in 1942 in Germany,
17,1 (18,0) x 23,5 (24,4) cm © Unidentified Japanese Photographer, courtesy Daniel Blau Munich
Tommaso Cuccioni (1790-1864) & Giuseppe Ninci (1823-1890)

“Colosseum, Rom”, 1860s, vintage albumen print (in three parts) from mammoth plate collodium glass negatives,
mounted on original boards, 71,8 (85,7) x 157,9 (173,0) cm