Monthly Archives: February 2012

John Button

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(1929-1982)

John Button Resume

Born in California, John Button (1929-1982) was educated at University of California, Berkeley. After moving to New York City in the early 1950s, he became friends with Fairfield Porter and Frank O’Hara and assumed his part in the New York School of painters and poets.

Amidst the frenzy of Abstract Expressionism, Button remained true to his interest in realism, and is now most commonly associated with such New York School artists including again Fairfield Porter, along with Jane Freilicher and Alex Katz, among others. Concerning Button, Bill Berkson has written: “The scaled-up perceptual intimacy his best paintings assert is part of what the realist wing of the New York School developed, beginning in the ‘50s, as a counterthrust to—as well as an absorption of—abstraction’s headlong specifyings of applied paint.”

Dieter Appelt

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Dieter Appelt (b. 1935) is a German artist working in a variety of media, primarily photography. He studied music from 1954-1958 in Leipzig. In 1959, he left East Germany and settled in West Berlin to study in the music school of Berlin until 1964. That same year he decided to study fine art and began experimenting with painting, photography, etching, and sculpture. His first exhibition was at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 1974.

Appelt is well known for his photographs from the 1980s addressing the mechanics and techniques of the medium. In 1990 and 1999, he took part in the Venice Biennale. He lives and works in Berlin.

David Armstrong (1954-2014)

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David Armstrong was born in 1954, in Arlington, Massachusetts, and graduated from the Satya Community School, an alternative high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he met Nan Goldin at the age of 14. He then enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston as a painting major, but soon switched his concentration to photography after studying alongside Goldin, with whom he shared an apartment. He attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Cooper Union from 1974–78, and earned a BFA from Tufts University in 1988.

During the late 1970s, Armstrong became associated with the “Boston School” of photography, which included artists such as Nan Goldin, Mark Morrisroe, and Jack Pierson. Armstrong first received critical attention for his intimate portraits of men. In the 1990s, he began photographing cityscapes and landscapes in soft focus to contrast with the sharpness of his portraits.

In 1981, Armstrong created a series of black-and-white portraits which he showed at PS1’s “New York/New Wave” exhibition. In 1996, Elisabeth Sussman, curator of photographs at the Whitney Museum, enlisted Armstrong’s help in composing Nan Goldin’s first retrospective. She gained such respect for Armstrong’s eye, she acquired work for the Whitney Museum’s permanent collection, and he was subsequently featured in the 1994 Whitney Biennial.

Larry Clark

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Larry Clark first made a name for himself when he revolutionized documentary photography in his classic book “Tulsa,” released in 1971, in which he presented straightforward, autobiographical images of violence, drug use, and adolescent sexuality. While Tulsa earned Clark a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for use toward his next project, that work was delayed over a decade by the artist’s heroin addiction and a stretch in Oklahoma’s McAlester Penitentiary. Eventually, Clark completed his second and equally innovative body of work titled “Teenage Lust,” in which he largely shifted his focus from drug culture to sexual obsession.