In collaboration with Janos Gat Gallery

On June 12, 1964 a Federal Court in Brooklyn put an end to one of the more bizarre episodes of censorship in American history. On that day, three judges condemned police seizure at the bindery of 21,000 copies of Evergreen Review April/May No. 32 as “unconstitutional” and ordered their immediate return to the publisher. The county’s District Attorney had deemed the publication obscene. The issue contained works by Norman Mailer, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Bryon Gysin, Michael McClure and Karl Shapiro–a who’s who of the day’s practitioners of perceived outrage–but what provoked the seizure was a portfolio of erotic photographs by one Emil Cadoo created in connection with a memorable 1963 edition of Henry Miller’s Sexus published in Paris.

Born in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, Cadoo emigrated to Paris in 1960 and essentially lived there until his death. Cadoo’s energy and personality put him at the center of the expatriate community and he encountered and photographed many of the most important artistic and literary lights of his time. Like his friend and subject James Baldwin, he found easier acceptance in Paris as an African-American and as a homosexual. Paris was also a congenial atmosphere for Cadoo’s interest in erotica. It was there that he created the work he is best known for: his book covers and portfolios for Barney Rosset’s Grove Press and Evergreen Review, which became a cause célèbre in the fight against artistic censorship.

Much of Cadoo’s practice was devoted to creating double-exposure photomontages, often combining images of statues, as well as human and botanical forms, with more abstract images of varying textures. Often the double exposures involved erotica, but he did not exclusively rely on the erotic. One of his best-known images, the cover of Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, is a simple, elegant, almost somber montage of foliage and a face.

Cadoo was a painterly photographer, whose experimental “imagistic duets” contain magical juxtapositions of layer and texture. Always an improviser, the photomontages that Cadoo created for or around Sexus are filled with image upon image that attest to the photographer’s preternatural sense of rhythm and harmony. Combined with the faculty of timing exhibited in his double exposures–which invariably seem to find the decisive syncopated moment–these photomontages mark him as the rare visual artist whose mastery of timing, tempo and texture relates conceptually to Jazz.

Cadoo had his first New York exhibition at the Janos Gat Gallery in 2001, just one year before his death. Since then, his photographs have been exhibited at various institutions, such as the Houston Museum of Fine Art (his photographs of the last concert of Edith Piaf) and the Menil Collection also in Houston (his Children of Harlem series). Both museums have large selections of Cadoo’s work, as does the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

UBU GALLERY eLIST

Central to this exploration was the Riga Artists’ Group, an association of painters and sculptors active from 1920 to 1940 (Cubist period through 1928). Oto Skulme exhibited the first Cubist composition in Latvia in 1920 and he was joined in his interest in Cubism by other members of the Rĩga Artists Group, including Romãns Suta (its first chairman), Jēkabs Kazaks, Konrãds Ubãrsns, Valdemãrs Tone, among others. These artists not only painted still lifes, but also depicted cafes, bars, circus scenes, vagrants and musicians. Through this a new range of motifs, images and aesthetic theories were introduced to Latvian art, specifically reflecting and addressing the atmosphere associated with burgeoning urban environments and lifestyles. The 1930s there saw a unique application of Constructivist design to journals and book graphics, as well as in the industrial arts.

The leading figures in art and literature in interwar Latvia were leftists espousing revolution and a new social and economic order. They resonated with an extensive political underground that printed “Samizdat” (translating literally as “self-publishing”), including handmade fliers, broadsheets and propaganda and who organized rallies and demonstrations, most of them suppressed. Possession of these grassroots publications, which were physically handed from reader to reader to evade official censorship, was fraught with danger and harsh punishments were meted out to those caught with censored materials. As such, surviving examples of these makeshift publications are exceedingly rare. Ubu is offering examples of “Samizdat” as a sizeable archive and in a few duplicates also on display.

Ubu invites you to visit the gallery, preferably by appointment, to enjoy these works in person or they may be viewed online at www.ubugallery.com.

These drawings are intimate play dates with my mind, that’s why they often turn out to be so intense and busy. In some ways, I still draw like my pre-teen self, when I burned down pirate ships, stabbed every sailor until the water turned blood red and the piece of paper was filled with black smoke. The battle defined the composition. I still see the storyline of my childhood drawings forty years later. I never stopped drawing this way.

My stories play in these in-between spaces. My beaches are conveniently located between the gates of a bubble-gum heaven and some eternal dumpster, call it hell, an angel’s La La Land, where physics and ethics are redefined, and unity seems only possible as a Sisyphean struggle between one side and the other. Peace here is movement; struggle is the best possible peace. I think of these drawings as fun-loving days at the beach, in a Hieronymus Bosch-ian kind of way. Fun can turn into gruesome horror as much as great joy. Or both…

There was a time when the idea of heaven gave me comfort, but I gave up on that. The heaven I once knew and which comforted me has evaporated. Now it’s bubble-gum occupied and claimed by patriots and fundamentalists, fanatics swarming the beaches to plant their flags and to get a good tan line. I was always more interested in life before death than life after death.

Farewell pink flamingo!

Help us celebrate the closing of the exhibition with a spontaneous reception, Friday, December 20th from 6:00-8:00PM!

Featured Artists: Vito Acconci, Julian Beck, Hans Bellmer, Denise Bellon, Bob Brown, Joseph Cornell, Raphael Delorme, Marc Eemans, Max Ernst, Brion Gysin, David Hare, Marta Hoepffner, Georges Hugnet, Marcel Jean, Gerome Kamrowski, Thérèse Le Prat, Nathan Lerner, Boris Lipnitzki, Andre Racz, Pierre Roy, Kurt Schwitters, Bernard Schultze, Arthur Siegel, Jindřich Štyrský, Yves Tanguy, Karel Teige, Raoul Ubac, Unica Zürn

Exhibition Extended

We are pleased to announce that Weightlessness will remain on display until December 21, 2018.

Adventurer. This is surely the word that obviously embodies Daniel Cordier. Born in 1920 and now 98 years old, this native of Bordeaux has had several lives in one. A World War II Resister at 20 years old, he became the secretary to Jean Moulin, on whom he authored a milestone biography.

Jean Moulin introduced him to modern art. Ironically, it was by opening the Galerie Romanin in Nice in 1943, which they used as a cover for their Resistance activities, that Cordier discovered with curiosity and passion the world of art. At the end of WW II, his growing interest in art turned him into a budding collector. There were seminal meetings, among them with Bernard Réquichot, an exciting young artist he collected and exhibited later.

At the end of 1956 on rue de Duras in front of the Elysée Palace, Daniel Cordier opened his first commercial gallery, before moving to rue de Miromesnil in 1959, where at year-end he hosted the legendary Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme (read EROS), organized by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp. His pioneering spirit was obvious. Cordier took risks. He dared. He was the first to show artists never previously exhibited in France, among them Henri Michaux in 1959 and Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in 1960.

Notably, this avant-garde and generous dealer and collector made several donations to the French State, perhaps totaling as many as 1,000 works. More than a month before Sotheby’s Paris announced its recently-held sale “Alias Daniel Cordier,” which may have largely dispersed the balance of his impressive collection, Ubu began collecting works around the theme “Homage to Daniel Cordier” to present at FIAC 2018. On view will be approximately 50 works, some with the provenance of Cordier, most created at or around the time Cordier exhibited and collected these artists.

Ubu’s “Hommage à Daniel Cordier” pays tribute to this man of courage and vision; a boundary breaker; a life long and well lived; and most importantly as it relates to Ubu’s presentation, to his fabulous and uncompromising taste.

September 28 – November 30, 2018
Reception: Friday, September 28, 6:00 – 8:00PM

Ubu’s presentation coincides with an exhibition of the artist’s recent drawings, Judit Reigl: Dance of Death, at the Shepherd W & K Galleries located at 58 East 79th Street, New York NY and on view from September 25–October 20, 2018. Both exhibitions are presented in collaboration with Janos Gat Gallery.

Please view Ubu’s previous exhibitions of Judit Reigl Unfolding Unfolding and Annus Mirabilis, Annus Horribilis: Works from May 1954–June 1955.