ROXY MUSIC - GRAHAM SIMPSON band co-founder

 As we were mentioning Roxy Music through Phil Manzanera’s 'Diamond Head' and the line up after Brian Eno’s leaving, I noticed a reference to bass player Graham Simpson who it is said started Roxy Music with Bryan Ferry before Eno, Phil and Andy and I looked him up as I hadn’t heard of him.  This is sad but worth a read . . . . 

Andy (I guess), Brian and Graham on SG bass

Brian Ferry’s webpage has a profile which is well worth a read and worth knowing . . . . .a fellow art student at Newcastle under the tutelage of Richard Hamilton [and fellow student Rita Donagh who went on to be Richard’s partner and wonderful artist in her own right], Graham seems to have been an entirely supportive and encouraging voice to Ferry when he was somewhat less self assured. It seems only fair to share this link

Graham Simpson Roxy Music co-founder

Paul and Richard Hamilton working on 'The White Album' Cover

Richard Hamilton and Paul McCartney designing the cover of the Beatles’ White Album, 1968. 

Photograph by Rita Donagh.

Now I have said I did my final thesis at Art College on Richard Hamilton and went to interview him (I should really have published the interview before he died perhaps I will now) and Rita his partner was a delight and they became sort of friends and came to my show of my work with fellow artist the ever kind and supportive Graham Dean at one of the first Oxford Art Weeks open studio festivals. Rita had a show at MOMA Oxford and I adored her work as much as found Richard’s so fascinating. 

The Beatles White Album project here . . . .

Richard Hamilton - White Album poster

again thanks to Alice at O My Soul - - - - - - for the reminder

 MARCEL DUCHAMP

'THE LARGE GLASS'

I have mentioned before I think that I was a part of study group at Leicester Polytech Fine Art Dept under historian Fred Orton  and composer Gavin Bryars. We interviewed Richard Hamilton about his days teaching at Newcastle and the reconstruction of the Large Glass and I was lucky enough to call Richard a friend later as he and his lovely partner and fine artist in her own right, Rita Donagh, were so welcoming to me and always spoke when they visited MOMA years later when I worked there and when I interviewed him for my final thesis in their wonderful house in Highgate back in the early seventies. 

This is from grupaok who are Julian Myers and Joanna Szupinska   

grupaok:

Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915–1923, on view in the International Exhibition of Modern Art arranged by the Société Anonyme, installation detail, Brooklyn Museum, 1926.

Remarkably, this was the only time that Duchamp’s masterwork was exhibited publicly before its glass panes shattered. Painstakingly reassembled by Duchamp in the 1930s, the work survives in a broken state.

grupa o.k.’s essay on the 1926 exhibition, titled “Bachelor Modernism,” will  be published in The Avant-Garde Museum, edited by Agnieszka Pindera and Jarosław Suchan and published by Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź. A preview of our essay is available HERE for download and discussion.

Along with other essays on the Société, the book also examines the Soviet Museums of Artistic Culture, El Lissitzky’s Abstract Cabinet, and (our namesake) grupa a.r.’s Neoplastic Room, and includes source texts by Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Malevich, Katherine Dreier, Władysław Strzemiński, and more.

Through The Large Glass - Richard Hamilton - Tate papers

© Estate of Richard Hamilton and Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2020