Lil Picard

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Lil Picard (born Lilli Elisabeth Benedick, October 4, 1899 in Landau in the Palatinate ; died 1994 in New York ) was a German- American actress and journalist , married to Fritz Picard until 1926 , and from 1935 to the banker Hans Felix Jüdell. The couple emigrated to New York in 1936 because of the increasing anti-Semitism in Germany . Lil Picard was successful there as a painter , sculptor , art critic , photographer , performance and happening artist .

life and work

Elisabeth Benedick was the only child of Rosalie and Jakob Benedick. Benedick was a Jewish winemaker and wine merchant in the Palatinate (region) . Elisabeth Benedick experienced her childhood and youth in Strasbourg (at that time in Alsace-Lorraine, Germany) and attended school there.

In 1918, shortly after the end of the First World War, she met Fritz Picard, with whom she lived in Berlin against the wishes of her parents and whom she married in 1921. In Berlin in the early 1920s she studied art and literature, took ballet and singing lessons, played in cabaret revues and had a brief appearance in the film Variété with Lya de Putti and Emil Jannings . Friends of Berlin Dada artists such as Richard Huelsenbeck , George Grosz , Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball , Else Lasker-Schüler and Kurt Schwitters were among those around her .

Divorced from Franz Picard in 1926, she kept the name Lil Picard and moved to Vienna for a few years. In 1928 in Vienna she wrote for the features section of the Berliner Börsenkurier . Back in Berlin in the early days of National Socialism in 1933 , she worked successfully for the magazine for German clothing and wrote articles for the fashion and women's pages of the Berliner Tageblatt .

In 1935 she married the banker Hans Felix Jüdell. Because of the increasing persecution of Jews in the German Reich and the withdrawal of their press pass, the couple emigrated to New York in November 1936. Jüdell was able to work in the New York banking system and changed his name to Henry Odell or O'Dell . Lil Picard became known in the New York art scene from 1937. She had success as a jewelry and hat designer (mentioned in Vogue issue May 1, 1940) and ran several extraordinary fashion boutiques one after the other.

Her artistic development as a painter began around 1939. In 1947 she met Patricia Highsmith , who remained a friend for life and introduced her to the Abstract Expressionists. She continued her artistic education at the Hans Hofman School of Art . Picard used a variety of artistic techniques that she had come to know in the Berlin and Paris avant-garde . She named Kurt Schwitters as the strongest influence . Like the Dadaists, she used puns.

In 1952 she met Alfred Jensen , with whom she studied with Hans Hofman. Through him she met Seymour Boardman , Sam Francis , John Grillo , Franz Kline , Raymond Parker and Mark Rothko . Despite her ten-year affair with Jensen, Hans Felix Jüdell remained connected to her for life.

From 1955 she was noticed as a visual artist with important solo exhibitions. Towards the end of the 1950s she anticipated developments in her work that would be formulated years later in Pop Art . Their use of letter combinations is reminiscent of the later work of Robert Indiana . As in a premonition of the Coke cans by Jasper Johns and the Brillo boxes by Andy Warhol, she uses commercial cosmetics as a motif.

The radical avant-garde and anti-art movement, NO! Art , active from 1959 onwards, counted Lil Picard among its members.

Around 1960 Lil Picard was working on reliefs and tableaus that showed autobiographical and feminist references. She held her first happening, The Bed , in 1964 at the age of 65, in Café Au Go Go . The work consisted of a kind of striptease on an electrically adjustable bed, with Meredith Monk assisting as a dancer. The bed in connection with feminist meanings remained the subject of further appearances: Bed Sheet Event 1969; Working from Bed 1971 and 1972; White Sheets and Quiet Dots 1974 and 1976 (with Hannah Wilke ); Bed Tease 1978 and 1980; Bed Paint 1981.

As an early artist of sociopolitical happenings and performances, she was involved in Jon Hendricks' innovative performance programs at the Judson Church art space and Charlotte Moorman's annual avant-garde festival. Her performances were directed against the Vietnam War and the manipulation of women through media and advertising.

In 1965 Lil Picard met Andy Warhol and maintained close relationships with other artists at the Warhol Factory . Her performance Construction-Destruction-Construction in the Factory was filmed by Warhol and published in his underground experimental film **** (Four Stars) in 1968. Participants in the performance were: Al Hansen , Taylor Meade, Viva , Kate Millet, Nam June Paik . Picard played his mother in an autobiographical film by Warhol and wrote related publications such as Interview for Warhol .

In her happenings and performances, Picard often used methods of destructive art, such as those made famous by Gustav Metzger and Ralph Ortiz . She worked with Ortiz a lot. In this way she tried to raise awareness of humanistic values ​​and to contribute to improving the political, sociological and ecological situation of society. Until the early 1980s she built interactive environments and organized happenings and performances, mostly in connection with the New York Avantgarde Festival.

Lil Picard was on friendship and artistically with Boris Lurie , Chuck Close , Helen Frankenthaler , Franz Kline , Robert Motherwell , Carolee Schneemann , Joseph Beuys , Roy Lichtenstein , Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist , Larry Rivers and Patricia Highsmith.

Her artistic oeuvre includes poems, paintings, collages, assemblages , films, happenings and performances. From 1976 she took part in several films, including Rosa von Praunheim's Underground and Emigrants .

She has also written for magazines such as Village Voice , East Village Other, Feminist Art Journal, High Performance, Arts Magazine, was an art correspondent for Kunstforum International and Die Welt and translated Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) into German.

Solo exhibitions and performances

  • 1960: White Sculptures. David Anderson Gallery , New York.
  • 1964: Bed. Happening, Cafe Au Go Go, New York
  • 1966: Ballad of Sweet Peas (Peace) and Lollypops. Performance on the Staten Island Ferry. 5th Annual Avant Garde Festival, organized by Charlotte Moorman
  • 1968: protest action . With Wolf Vostell , Italian Pavilion, 34th Biennale di Venezia .
  • 1968: Construction-Destruction-Construction (CDC). Performance, The Factory, New York
  • 1976: Political Dematerialization. Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York
  • 1976: title to be determined. Holly Solomon Gallery Gallery, New York
  • 1976: title to be determined. Goethe House New York
  • 1978: retrospective. New Berlin Art Association Berlin
posthumously
  • 2011: Lil Picard and Counterculture New York . February 24 to May 27, 2011, University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City

Group exhibitions

  • 1949–1960: Exhibitions in New York. Among others in the March Gallery, Brata Gallery and Fleischman Gallery
  • 1960: New Media New Forms. Martha Jackson Gallery, New York.
  • 1971: Happening and Fluxus. Exhibition at the Kunstverein Cologne
  • 1972: American Women Artists. Kunsthaus Hamburg
posthumously
  • 1995: NO! New Society for Fine Arts Berlin
  • 2001: NO! Art and the Aesthetics of Doom. Block Museum, Evanston IL
  • 2002: NO! Art and the Aesthetics of Doom. University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City

Others

Artistic publications

  • 1970: Lil Picard: YES & NO thoughts. In: Boris Lurie, Seymour Krim (ed.). Cologne 1988.

Media production

  • Hubert Fichte: Lil Picard: Original recordings New York 1975/76. 1CD, Suppose Verlag, Cologne 2007, ISBN 3-93251342-8 . Hubert Fichte interviews Lil Picard.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Kathleen A. Edwards: Lil Picard and Counterculture New York. The University of Iowa Museum of Art, p. 2 , accessed March 4, 2012 .
  2. Mark Bloch: Lil Picard and Counterculture New York. In: Whiteout Magazine. July 2011, accessed on March 2, 2012 (English): "Finally, whether it was the influence of her number-obsessed lover Jensen or the achievement of beating Robert Indiana or Jasper Johns to the punch by several years, it is impossible to ignore the importance of her 1958-59 paintings that, way before the pack, spelled out the 26 letters of the alphabet or four doppelgangers in particular that combined as a square to sing the word LOVE. "
  3. ^ Kathleen A. Edwards: Lil Picard and Counterculture New York. The University of Iowa Museum of Art, p. 2 , accessed March 4, 2012 .
  4. ^ Kathleen A. Edwards: Lil Picard and Counterculture New York. The University of Iowa Museum of Art, p. 1 , accessed March 4, 2012 .
  5. ^ Kathleen A. Edwards: Lil Picard and Counterculture New York. The University of Iowa Museum of Art, p. 2 , accessed March 4, 2012 .
  6. ^ Roberta Smith : Lil Picard, 94, Artist and Critic Who Was Once a Hat Designer. The New York Times, May 14, 1994, accessed March 2, 2012 .
  7. ^ Protest-Action , Lil Picard Papers, University of Iowa Libraries. Retrieved March 17, 2018
  8. Choice of ladies . In: Der Spiegel . No. 20 , 1972, p. 157 ( online - May 8, 1972 ).