Dutch designer Anthon Beeke wins against Louis Vuitton

Dutch graphic designer Anthon Beeke will not say if luxury goods maker Louis Vuitton and Italian artist Vanessa Beecroft have paid him damages after admitting infringing his copyright on an alphabet made up of naked women, says Tuesday's Volkskrant.
Louis Vuitton used Beecroft's version for a logo. Beeke made his alphabet in 1969.

[Nude Alphabet]. Beeke, Anthon and Kooiman, Geert with Photo-Story by Ed van der Elsken. Produced by Anna Beeke. Anton Beeke and Steendrukkerij de Jong & Company, Hilversum, Holland, 1970. From the Quadrat-Print Series, which was edited by Pieter Brattinga. First edition. Small square quarto. Stiff white paper portfolio; grainy photograph of one shooting session on cover. With thirty plates on stiff paper laid in loose, as issued.

A photographic project rooted in the tradition of sixties 'happenings' and experimentation, it demonstrates a relaxed European attitude toward nudity. The three stiff paper portfolio panels unfold to display fifty-five small photographs by Ed Van Der Elsken documenting the photo shoot that produced the plates. In each of the thirty plates, nude female models are arranged to spell out a letter of the alphabet or a punctuation mark. An unusual production.

Anthon Beeke is a towering figure in Dutch graphic design culture. His posters for major Dutch theatre companies and museums have graced and stirred the streets of Amsterdam and the rest of the Netherlands for decades. He started out as a young rebel in the 1960s, thoroughly upsetting the prevalent Dutch design culture of stern modernism with his provocative images and personal style. Since, Beeke has become the dean of Dutch poster makers and an internationally acclaimed designer of posters, books, magazines, exhibitions and identities. This monograph follows his life’s work and analyses the themes which have fascinated and inspired Beeke throughout his career. Whether he is interpreting a classic theatre play or designing an identity for a cultural institution, Anthon Beeke is a sophisticated aesthete who never forgets where life really takes place: on the street.

Paris's Louis Vuitton store and 4306-square-foot exhibition space on the Champs Elysees just underwent a high-profile 20-month renovation to reopen bigger, brighter and full of art at the end of 2006. Vanessa Beecroft marked the date with a performance in which, as Artforum described it, "30 naked models--black and white--sat silently on shelves alongside classic Louis Vuitton handbags and luggage." Charta's VB LV documents Beecroft's monumental inaugural performance in this one-foot-square, glossy hardcover album. According to New York's Deitch Gallery, "Vanessa Beecroft works in the gap between art and life. The work is neither performance nor documentary, but something in between. Her live events are recorded through photography and film, but her conceptual approach is actually closer to painting. Beecroft is making contemporary versions of the complex figurative compositions that have challenged painters from the Renaissance onwards. She sets up a structure for the participants in her live events to create their own composition, presenting themselves according to their own internalized aesthetic system." Beecroft was born in 1969 in Genoa, Italy. She currently lives between New York and Los Angeles.

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