Friday, December 5, 2008

TCHELITCHEW AT THE MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK

I was pleasantly shocked when I visited the Museum of the City of New York the other day to find Pavel Tchelitchew's Hide and Seek hanging there. The painting is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and, despite it being rumored to be the "most popular" painting in the museum, has not been on view there in many years. It is at the MCNY as part of the exhibition Paris/New York: Design Fashion Culture 1925-1940:
http://www.mcny.org/exhibitions/current/paris-new-york-design-fashion-culture-1925-1940.html
The exhibition is worth seeing in any case but the opportunity to see Hide and Seek requires a visit. Since I'm blogging about Tchelitchew I might as well add a photo (below) of his Sleeping Pinheads, which is in my top ten favorite paintings by any artist. If I had the resources I'd buy Sleeping Pinheads and hang it in my living or dining room. Since I'm blogging about people with microcephaly check out the Foundation for Children With Microcephaly:
http://www.childrenwithmicro.org

Hide and Seek:
Sleeping Pinheads:

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

PARIS - Last Pictures

Inside the Romanian ambassador's residence:

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

ELIZABETH PEYTON

Go see Elizabeth Peyton's exhibition at the New Museum. My portrait is not in the show but here's the study Peyton did of me and my brother Charles around 1995. Peyton's elegant and delicate sensibility is extremely well served by the survey. While you're at the New Museum also go see my good friend Mary Heilmann's wonderful retrospective. Her beautiful paintings are more complicated than they seem and easier to understand than you might be led to believe.
http://www.newmuseum.org/

Sunday, November 2, 2008

JUDITH EISLER

Judith Eisler's show show at Cohan and Leslie has closed before I was able to catch up with my blogging. Well, go to their website or go to the gallery and ask to see Judith's paintings. Her new painting, her portrait of me and my brain scans seem to fit together.

FRANCE - NANCY

Nancy was great--so many things to see: the Musee des Beaux Arts, the Musee de l'Ecole de Nancy (art nouveau museum), the Villa Majorelle, the Place Stanislas, the botanical garden, the Museum of Natural History, lots more, and we saw it all. Next time I think I'll try to slow down and do a bit less.
http://edn.nancy.fr/web/index.php/portail
http://www.ot-nancy.fr/uk/centre_historique/index.php

18th Century Gates of the Place Stanslas:


The aquarium pavillion at the Musee de l'Ecole de Nancy:

The Villa Majorelle:

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

PARIS VINTAGE HAUTE COUTURE

Here I am looking in the window of the shop of a dealer in vintage fashion. The well-known dealer whose shop is in Palais Royale shall remain nameless since the staff was not too nice to us. Beautiful things though.

Monday, October 27, 2008

AMIENS

We went to Amiens which is famous for its cathedral. The cathedral is huge but everything else in Amiens is charmingly small-scale: narrow little canals snaking through the old town, itty-bitty houses and a tiny, lovely, botanical garden. The excellent museum (photos below) is not so small; in fact it's a rather large small-museum but does not seem to have its own website. One of my favorite things in Amiens was an interesting small garden-housing development called Square Darlington that must have been built around 1950--like Stuyvesant Town but with just 5 or 6 buildings; you can see one of its brick "towers" (3 stories) just beyond the beds of the botanical garden, below.

MONTFORT L'AMAURY

Monfort l'Amaury is the charming village near the Chateau de Groussay. It is a wealthy area, so wandering around reminded me a bit of browsing around someplace like Old Roslyn, with cute, expensive little boutiques and restaurants and lovely historic architecture. Below is the cloister of the cemetery.
http://www.ville-montfort-l-amaury.fr/

MORE GROUSSAY

More photographs from the Chateau de Groussay including Charles and me in the Chinese pavillion:




Friday, October 10, 2008

CHATEAU DE GROUSSAY

Thanks to a very gracious invitation from Jean-Louis Remilleux, the owner of the Château de Groussay, we visited the chateau and toured the rooms with Mr. Remilleux himself. As you may know Groussay was the home of Charles de Beistegui from 1938 until his death in 1970. Throughout that period Beistegui remodeleled the 1815 house, adding rooms in various historic styles and building a series of follies in the park. Beistegui's heirs sold his meticulously chosen furnishings at auction several years ago, however Mr. Remilleux has done a splendid job of reconstituting Beistegui's fantastic vision.

Sunday, October 5, 2008

FRANCE - NORMANDIE

I'm back from France and still recovering from my state of exhaustion. I will be posting pictures from the trip in installaments. After arriving in Paris we commenced our whirlwind itinerary with a visit to the Musee Jacquemart Andre, http://www.musee-jacquemart-andre.com/fr/jacquemart/, followed by dinner with Liz O'Brien (http://www.lizobrien.com/) who was in Paris for the Biennale des Antiquaires.
Musee Jacquemart-Andre:

The next morning we left Paris to spend a few days in Normandie with my friend artist River Dillon, aka Denis Angus, aka Denis Dandurand, in his beautiful beachfront home at Grandcamp-Maisy were we joined a delightful, international group of friends:

http://www.riverdillon.com/

http://riverdillon.blogspot.com/

http://riverdillonlife.blogspot.com/

Denis and me:
Lunch on the lawn:

Beach in the background:



The house:

More coming soon . . .

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Off to Paris

I leave tommorow for two weeks in France! I'll be attending, and reporting on, the Biennale des Antiquaires (http://www.bdafrance.eu/) and visiting River Dillon in Normandy (http://riverdillon.blogspot.com/), the Chateau de Groussay (http://www.chateaudegroussay.com/), the Musee de l'Ecole de Nancy (http://edn.nancy.fr/web/index.php/portail) and a hundred other wonderful places (I'm exhausted already). Gorgeous photos of the 1966 Biennale below.


ALIX PEARLSTEIN AT THE KITCHEN

A vintage Yves Saint laurent gold lamé blouse and a wild mink coat by J. Mendel make star appearances in Alix Pearlstein's bold, ambitious and strikingly successful video/installation After the Fall, now on view at The Kitchen. In the piece, which surrounds the viewer with projections on four sides, a cast of eight is divided into two "teams"--red and gold--suggesting opposing social groups. According to the artist (in an exclusive interview with me) the glittering metallic blouse "was the inception for developing a group identity that is flashy/trashy/glamorous/Hollywood-Vegas, in opposition to the other group that is utilitarian/sporty/abstract/bright--night and day: two different logics that are detailed and specific but can't be precisely identified in terms of time and place." The piece is absolutly mesmerizing: you are surrounded by moving figures on four sides--you move, they move, and the black box that you/they inhabit extends without limit in time and horizon. This major work is complemented by two smaller pendant pieces making this a spectacular presence in the Fall art scene. In Goldrush "a seemingly invaluable object - a white rectangular panel - is placed in the middle of a black box theater. A group of nine, each wearing an article of metallic gold clothing set upon the task of ripping it apart. They tear it to shreds, taunting, fighting and climbing all over each other to greedily gather every last shard of it for themselves." Two Women suggests a runway fashion show and, as with all the artist's work, is a hypnotic study of performance and relationship.


Tuesday, September 2, 2008

LAWRENCE COPELAND IN SILVER MAGAZINE

My article on silversmith Lawrence Copeland is now out in the September/October issue of Silver magazine (http://www.silvermag.com/). Some examples of Copeland's work from the early 1950s are shown below. Lawrence Copeland is one of the least well-known mid-20th century American silversmiths but as a student, craftsman, designer and teacher he interacted with some of the most important personalities of the mid-century crafts scene and contributed to some of the most prominent crafts institutions and enterprises. He studied silversmithing at Cranbrook and in Sweden with Baron Erik Fleming. Copeland's work was exhibited at America House, Shop One and the 1958 Brussels Worlds Fair. Now 86 years old, Copeland lives in retirement in Colorado.