BRUCE CONNER Conceptual SAN FRANCISCO CA Modern Artist NY FILM FESTIVAL Poster

Description: Bruce Conner (Am., 1933-2008) poster, "New York Film Festival", circa 1964-65, offset lithograph print on paper (offset photo-litho of laminated film-strips) printed by Herst Litho, Inc. 35 x 30 inches. Unframed. Printed upwards along lower left edge: "Bruce Conner/Commissioned by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts for the List Art Poster Program of the American Federation of Arts". I consider it to be signed or at least marked, per the "Bruce Conner" printed part of that, but it's not hand-signed and wasn't meant to be. Poster is laid on (glued to) Masonite. Being around 60 years old, the paper has browned. It has stains, scuffs, marks, a small ding/tear, losses at edges, etc. While obviously imperfect, I enjoy looking at it as it is. It's heavy, because of the Masonite, and it's large. I'll have to ship it UPS. It won't be cheap, and I can't afford to lose the shipping expenses due to a remorse return. It's 'right', I've been upfront about it having condition flaws, and there will be no good reason for returning. I will insure the package. Please look over all my photos carefully. Serious buyers only, please. Bruce Conner was a major San Francisco, California, avant-garde conceptual artist. In July 2016, It's All True, a career-spanning retrospective of Conner's work was co-organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The record price for this artist at auction is 631,500 USD for Ca**a*is Collage, sold at Christie's New York in 2016. Sometimes, a poster is just a poster. But, in this case it was conceived by Bruce Conner as a work of art. Everything was going as planned until the New York Film Festival or Lincoln Center staff decided not to use the poster. It ended up like a scrapped project. Conner intended for people to see the poster all over New York City, like in the subways, also see the actual film depicted in the poster, spliced together, in 10 second commercials, have people's brains put two and two together, and that would be an emblem for them going into each program at the Festival. It's Conceptual Art. Conner: "I, on my own, spliced the film together (after the process of making the poster) to make it into ten 16mm prints and five 35mm prints. I gave them to the New York Film Festival so they could use them as 10 second commercials in motion picture theaters and on television. My purpose there was that all these people who would be going to see the movie every day for two weeks would see the poster everyday and, hopefully, they would use this as an emblem to start each program". Being a scrapped project, who knows how many posters were made / destroyed. However many there were, they weren't used. This one, being mounted to Masonite, might have been intended for some specific place to be displayed. We just don't know, because it never happened. A few, just a few, of the posters, have surfaced on the market over the years. I was also able to locate 3 others as well in the collections of: The Walker Art Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. If you study the poster carefully, you'll see that Conner did a very creative job (probably too creative for 'the masses') of promoting the Festival. It says that it'll be September 7 to 18 at Philharmonic Hall, Lincoln Center. Conner was informed by past movements like Dada. He was doing his own thing, though, of course. I don't know that Conner meant for this poster to be seen as Pop Art, but I sort of see it that way. There are, in fact, many comparisons that can be made between Bruce Conner and Andy Warhol. They were both really into film. Even though Bruce Conner's project, or his original idea for it, was scrapped, I suspect that The New York Film Festival did something strange that year. Lincoln Center had commissioned Conner to do the work, so he was paid. I don't know that he even knew this because I assume he wasn't living in NY at the time. But, I think they ended up taking his image for the poster, edited it so that just 7 of the 10 film strips remained, changed it to an overall purple and black color, accentuated the advertising in the image (time, place, etc., of the Festival) by making it an orange color, and produced a 46 x 30 inch poster, actually leaving Conner's name off of it. I saw an example, online, of the poster I've just described, and I don't think it was a fake. So, even though The Festival / Lincoln Center apparently did that, I'd still credit Bruce Conner as the designer for 1965. The poster designers, in the first five years (1963-1967), in order, were: Larry Rivers, Robert Indiana, Bruce Conner, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol. It's been said that the poster here "reproduces all the footage of Conner's TEN SECOND FILM (1965)". That's not really accurate. What Conner said, at the 1968 Flaherty Seminar, after he had screened all his films for the Seminar participants, was that he "spliced the film together (after the process of making the poster)". The original poster design, as offered here, came first, and the film came afterwards.

Price: 1100 USD

Location: Pitman, New Jersey

End Time: 2024-11-14T22:20:59.000Z

Shipping Cost: N/A USD