German artist and activist Gustav Metzger was born to Jewish parents in Nuremberg in 1926. Having found refuge from the Nazis in the UK in 1939 and having been awarded a grant by the Jewish community there after the war, he was able to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in the late 1940s. His experience of mankind’s destructive capabilities during World War II led him to formulate his concept of…
American photographer, poet and publisher Ira Cohen was born to deaf parents in the Bronx in 1935. After having dropped out of Cornell University, having married and having had two children with his wife Arlene Bond, Cohen sailed to Tangier in 1961, where he stayed for four years. In those years Cohen published his seminal Gnaoua journal with contributions by Jack Smith…
Herman de Vries (1931), who prefers to have his name spelled ‘herman de vries’ to avoid hierarchy in capital and lower case letters, was trained as a gardener in the early 1950s. After a spell as an agricultural worker in France, De Vries worked in Wageningen at the Institute for Research Plant Diseases from 1952 to 1956. During that period he started his long and fertile practice as an artist. The monochrome and informal paintings from…
L’Assiette au Beurre was an anarchist French satirical magazine founded by Samuel Schwarz in 1901. The magazine was published as a weekly from 1901 to 1912 and as a monthly from 1921 to 1925. Under the editorial supervision of Schwarz – which only lasted from 1901 to 1903 – the magazine invited established artists, such as Félix Valloton, Jacques Villon, Kees van Dongen and Frantisek Kupka, to take care of the design. In January 1902 Kupka produced an issue of L’Assiette au Beurre…