we have just completed a new poster for an exhibition of 50 years ‘dutch national ballet posters’ which opens on the 29th of january (till late apri) at the dutch poster museum in the small town of ‘hoorn’
a series of roughly 50 of our posters are featured in the show and were also used to create the paper tutu shown above…
i’ve been doing some research: the dutch national ballet ‘bacchanten’ poster from ’86 by anton beeke posted last week in fact appears to be part of a tryptich… the other two have slightly more erotic scenes with knickers being removed etc…
a set of classic ‘anton beeke’ posters which i got hold of last week, including the top one for ‘toneelgroep amsterdam’ which i rank as one of his very best, the poster is beautifully printed in mat black and the blue rectangle is actually a UV gloss layer on top…
and here baove and below some of the striking posters he made for the ‘globe’ productions… my poster collection just got a bit better, thank you anton
in preparation for the exhibition ’50 years of the dutch national ballet’ at the dutch poster museum (late january till april), the national ballet have asked me to help curate and choose the selection of posters to be shown…
amongst the graphic designers who have at some point designed posters for them during that 50 year period (otto treumann, jurrian schroffer, dick elfers, gielijn escher) there was also a notable example by none other than ‘anton beeke’, the poster was very difficult to find and wasn’t even available in their own extensive archive, after calling a few reliable contacts i eventually managed to trace the original picture (shot by ‘boudewijn neuteboom’) shown above
fortunately last friday i finally found the original poster for ‘bacchanten’ (printed in black on brown parcel paper, with bronze silkscreen typography) from 1986, in the collection of the dutch theater institute ‘TIN’, both the poster and the actual performance were quite controversial at the time, although not one of my most favourite designs by ‘beeke’ it is very interesting for me as a ballet poster designer to see what preceded my own work…
a journalist told me that beeke had apparently once told him that one of the four models in the bacchanalian scene is photographer ‘rineke dijkstra’ who was, at the time, his assistant… we also managed to trace several other interesting archive pieces which will be shown when the exhibition opens later this month, more news soon…
the new year hangover started early with a photoshoot together with the misses at our house on sunday, the poster should be ready this week… a serious hard disk crash on monday, meant a lot of files have possibly been lost, so not so good…
and some paper sculpting/illustration work currently underway for a new project this week…
