New York | Art Blart

Posts Tagged ‘New York

Jul

Exhibition: ‘Irving Penn: Centennial’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Part 2

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, designer, digital photography, exhibition, existence, fashion photography, gallery website, light, London, memory, New York, Paris, photographic series, photography, portrait, reality and works on paper
Tags: African-American supermodel, American fashion photography, american photographer, American photography, American portrait photography, American studio photography, Asaro Mud Men, Balenciaga, Balenciaga Mantle Coat, Balenciaga Sleeve (Régine Debrise), Black is Beautiful movement, Cigarette No. 52, Cigarette No. 85, Cigarette No. 98, Cucumber Seller, Cuzco, Cuzco Children, Cuzco Father and Son with Eggs, Dahomey Girls, Deli Package, Dior, family portraits, fashion photography, Fishmonger London, flower photography, indigenous people in Cuzco, Ingmar Bergman, Ingmar Bergman Stockholm, Irving Penn, Irving Penn Balenciaga Mantle Coat, Irving Penn Balenciaga Sleeve, Irving Penn Cigarette No. 52, Irving Penn Cigarette No. 85, Irving Penn Cigarette No. 98, Irving Penn Cucumber Seller, Irving Penn Cuzco Children, Irving Penn Cuzco Father and Son with Eggs, Irving Penn Deli Package, Irving Penn Fishmonger London, Irving Penn Ingmar Bergman, Irving Penn Kerchief Glove (Dior), Irving Penn Large Sleeve, Irving Penn Marchand de Concombres, Irving Penn Marchande de Ballons, Irving Penn Naomi Sims in Scarf, Irving Penn Nude No. 130, Irving Penn Nude No. 18, Irving Penn Nude No. 42, Irving Penn Nude No. 57, Irving Penn Nude No. 72, Irving Penn Pablo Picasso at La Californie, Irving Penn Rochas Mermaid Dress, Irving Penn Single Oriental Poppy, Irving Penn Three Asaro Mud Men, Irving Penn Three Dahomey Girls One Reclining, Irving Penn Tribesman with Nose Disc, Irving Penn Two Men in White Masks, Irving Penn Two Miyake Warriors, Irving Penn Ungaro Bride Body Sculpture, Irving Penn Window Washer, Irving Penn Woman with Roses, Irving Penn Young Quechuan Man, Irving Penn: Centennial, Kerchief Glove (Dior), Lafaurie, Large Sleeve, Large Sleeve (Sunny Harnett), Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn in Lafaurie Dress, Marchand de Concombres, Marchande de Ballons, Marisa Berenson, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Naomi Sims, Naomi Sims in Scarf, New Guinea, New York, Nude No. 130, Nude No. 18, Nude No. 42, Nude No. 57, Nude No. 72, Pablo Picasso, Pablo Picasso at La Californie, Paris, Picasso, Platinum-palladium print, portrait photography, Quechuan Man, Rochas, Rochas Mermaid Dress, Single Oriental Poppy, still life, still life photography, studio photography, Sunny Harnett, supermodel, supermodels, The Model as Muse, The Queen of the Scene, Three Asaro Mud Men, Three Dahomey Girls One Reclining, Tribesman with Nose Disc, tribesmen in New Guinea, Two Men in White Masks, Two Miyake Warriors, Ungaro, Ungaro Bride Body Sculpture, Ungaro Bride Body Sculpture (Marisa Berenson), Window Washer, Woman with Roses, Young Quechuan Man

Exhibition dates: 24th April – 30th July 2017

Irving Penn. The high priest of high modernist photography.

I know a lot of people adore his photography but I am not an acolyte, quietly accepting his elevation to sainthood in the high temple of art museums.

I find Penn’s aesthetic aesthetic, his performing photography if you like, unappealing. To me his work is more about the photographer than it is about the subject. His photographs, in whatever style – portraiture, nude, still life – seem cold and lifeless. Like a dead fish. There is little pleasure to be gained from looking at his photographs or the people in them. I find little celebration of photography in his work, as in, this is what the camera does at its best, a dialogue between photographer and subject.

Penn was a commercial photographer who had aspirations of being an artist. As Mark L. Power observes, “One of the characteristics of the Penn style was the expressive silhouette or outline around the figure, a sculptural delineation of form, at once beautiful and austere, whether his subject was a still life, a fashion model or a portrait.” My god did he love silhouette and shadow, usually played off against a plain backdrop.

There is that key word, play. There is no sense of spontaneity in his photographs, no sense of fun, no sense of an understanding of the aura of the subject.

I think of the portraits of August Sander or Richard Avedon’s series In the American West (the latter using a plain backdrop), both with their depth of vision and feeling for the people they were photographing … and then I look at the Cuzco portraits of Penn. I get nothing back about the lives of these people in Penn’s photographs. I think of the distorted nudes of Bill Brandt with their sensuality and sublime angles … and then I look at the nudes of Penn. They just don’t stack up, they feel clumsy, trite. I look at his colour still life, and I imagine the colour work of Paul Outerbridge, the absolute intensity of feeling that I can recall from Outerbridge’s still life in my mind’s eye. No such feeling exists in Penn’s still life.

If you watch the video of Penn at work in Morocco in 1971 (below), everything is controlled to within an inch of its life. A tilt of the head here, a raise of the chin there. This is a commercial studio photographer at work. As I said earlier, the work is not a celebration of photography but about the control of the photographer through the pose of the subject. Jammed into a wedge of scenery the sitters perform for his camera – Schiaparelli, Capote, Charles James et al – flaccid characters, almost caricatures in their positioning. Other than variants such as the intense eye of Pablo Picasso, or the blindness of Ingmar Bergman, I don’t believe that Penn was ever, will ever be, a great portraitist. He has no feeling for his sitters.

Of course, there is “the relationship of content to form – a relationship that underpins all art” at which Penn excels, but he is no Atget, Evans or Eggleston, where we are constantly surprised at where the photographer places the camera, how they place the frame, how they “form the starting point of the image’s visual structure,” how we wonder at the results, how we day dream the narrative. As Victor Burgin observes, “… what the world ‘is’ depends extensively upon how it is described: in a culture where the expression ‘old bag’ is in circulation to describe an ageing woman that is precisely what she is in perpetual danger of ‘being’.”

In Penn’s work the photograph and its representation is never in any danger of “becoming”, it already is. Penn’s “old bag” never changes. By repeating the same trope over and over – the formalist aesthetic, the silhouette, the plain back drop, the controlled pose – his work never evolves, never moves with an illusive quality to a place that the viewer does not feel they already know. The world of murky imperfection, uncertainty and ephemeral juxtapositions to which our mortal senses have access is replaced by a world of perfection and light in which everything has its predestined place.

Perhaps I just long for the fundamental contradictions of life in art, antinomies, options for now and the future.

Marcus

Irving Penn on Location in Morocco, 1971

This 8mm film footage, shot by Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn in 1971, shows Irving Penn at work in his portable studio on location in Morocco. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Irving Penn: Centennial,” on view at The Met Fifth Avenue from April 24 through July 30, 2017.

Irving Penn Centennial

A preview of the exhibition Irving Penn Centennial April 24 – July 30, 2017 at The Met, featuring Jeff Rosenheim, Curator in Charge, Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Maria Morris Hambourg, Independent Curator and Former Curator in Charge, Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“As a way of beginning, one might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing. All of us, even the best-mannered of us, occasionally point, and it must be true that some of us point to more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations than others. It is not difficult to imagine a person – a mute Virgil of the corporeal world – who might elevate the act of pointing to a creative plane, a person who would lead us through the fields and streets and indicate a sequence of phenomena and aspects that would be beautiful, humorous, morally instructive, cleverly ordered, mysterious, or astonishing, once brought to our attention, but that had been unseen before, or seen dumbly, without comprehension. This talented practitioner of the new discipline (the discipline a cross between theater and criticism) would perform with a special grace, sense of timing, narrative sweep, and wit, thus endowing the act not merely with intelligence, but with that quality of formal rigor that identifies a work of art, so that we would be uncertain, when remembering the adventure of the tour, how much of our pleasure and sense of enlargement had come from the things pointed to and how much from a pattern created by the pointer.”

.
John Szarkowski. “Atget, Pointing”

“The word classic is often used about Penn’s work; it entails a certain gravitas characterised by rigour almost to the point of aloofness, an awareness of beauty throughout many genres, a graphic elegance of line and contour that is uniquely his, and a relationship of his work to artists of the past, usually painters rather than photographers. Although it could be said his photography was an advertisement for a haut monde world, his work was sometimes a subtle and somewhat sly subversion of the values of that lifestyle.”

.
Mark L. Power. “Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty,” at Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC.

The most comprehensive retrospective to date of the work of the great American photographer Irving Penn (1917-2009), this exhibition will mark the centennial of the artist’s birth. Over the course of his nearly 70-year career, Penn mastered a pared-down aesthetic of studio photography that is distinguished for its meticulous attention to composition, nuance, and detail.

The exhibition follows the 2015 announcement of the landmark promised gift from The Irving Penn Foundation to The Met of more than 150 photographs by Penn, representing every period of the artist’s dynamic career with the camera. The gift will form the core of the exhibition, which will feature more than 200 photographs by Penn, including iconic fashion studies of Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, the artist’s wife; exquisite still lifes; Quechua children in Cuzco, Peru; portraits of urban labourers; female nudes; tribesmen in New Guinea; and colour flower studies. The artist’s beloved portraits of cultural figures from Truman Capote, Picasso, and Colette to Ingmar Bergman and Issey Miyake will also be featured. Rounding out the exhibition will be photographs by Penn that entered The Met collection prior to the promised gift.

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Young Quechuan Man, Cuzco
December 1948, printed 1949
Gelatin silver print
Image: 7 15/16 x 7 3/16 in. (20.1 x 18.2 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© The Irving Penn Foundation

In Cuzco, Penn photographed both residents and visitors who came to the city from nearby villages with goods to sell or barter at the Christmastime fiestas. Many arrived at the studio to sit for their annual family portraits. Penn later recalled that they “found me instead of him [the local photographer] waiting for them, and instead of paying me for the pictures it was I who paid them for posing.”

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Cuzco Children
December 1948, printed 1968
Platinum-palladium print
Image: 19 1/2 x 19 7/8 in. (49.5 x 50.5 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© Condé Nast

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Two Men in White Masks, Cuzco
December 1948, printed 1984
Gelatin silver print
Image: 10 9/16 x 10 7/16 in. (26.8 x 26.5 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© The Irving Penn Foundation

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Cuzco Father and Son with Eggs
December 1948, printed January 1982
Platinum-palladium print
Image: 11 3/4 x 11 5/16 in. (29.8 x 28.7 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© Condé Nast

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Nude No. 18
1949-50, printed 1949-50
Gelatin silver print
Image: 41 x 38.4 cm (16 1/8 x 15 1/8 in.)
Gift of the artist, 2002
© The Irving Penn Foundation

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Nude No. 42
1949-50, printed 1949-50
Gelatin silver print
Image: 39.1 x 37.5 cm (15 3/8 x 14 3/4 in.)
Gift of the artist, 2002
© The Irving Penn Foundation

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Nude No. 57
1949-50, printed 1949-50
Gelatin silver print
Image: 39.4 x 37.5 cm (15 1/2 x 14 3/4 in.)
Gift of the artist, 2002
© The Irving Penn Foundation

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Nude No. 72, New York
1949-50, printed 1949-50
Gelatin silver print
Image: 39.7 x 37.5 cm (15 5/8 x 14 3/4 in.)
Gift of the artist, 2002
© The Irving Penn Foundation

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Nude No. 130
1949-50, printed 1949-50
Gelatin silver print
Image: 40 x 38.1 cm (15 3/4 x 15 in.)
Gift of the artist, 2002
© The Irving Penn Foundation

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Kerchief Glove (Dior), Paris
1950, printed 1984
Gelatin silver print
Image: 15 3/8 x 15 5/16 in. (39.1 x 38.9 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© Condé Nast

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Balenciaga Sleeve (Régine Debrise), Paris
1950
Gelatin silver print
Image: 10 3/16 x 10 7/16 in. (25.9 x 26.5 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© Condé Nast

In general, daughters from nice families were not encouraged to be in-house models. “Being a studio model was viewed as preferable,” said Régine Debrise, who posed for the photographers Irving Penn and Henry Clarke before becoming an editor at French Vogue, “because the hours were contained and the conditions were better. Being in-house meant sharing the cabine, often a cramped room, with 10 other girls, and it lacked any kind of privacy.”

“Cabine fever: inside Dior’s fitting room,” on The Telegraph website

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Balenciaga Mantle Coat (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn), Paris
1950, printed 1988
Platinum-palladium print
Image: 21 15/16 x 17 5/8 in. (55.7 x 44.7 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© Condé Nast

Lisa Fonssagrives (May 17, 1911 – February 4, 1992), born Lisa Birgitta Bernstone was a Swedish fashion model widely credited as the first supermodel.

Before Fonssagrives came to the United States in 1939, she was already a top model. Her image appeared on the cover of many magazines during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, including Town & Country, Life, Time, Vogue, and the original Vanity Fair. She was reported as “the highest paid, highest praised, high fashion model in the business”. Fonssagrives once described herself as a “good clothes hanger”.

She worked with fashion photographers including George Hoyningen-Huene, Man Ray, Horst, Erwin Blumenfeld, George Platt Lynes, Richard Avedon, and Edgar de Evia. She married Parisian photographer Fernand Fonssagrives in 1935; they divorced and she later married another photographer, Irving Penn, in 1950. She went on to become a sculptor in the 1960s and was represented by the Marlborough Gallery in Manhattan.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Woman with Roses (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn in Lafaurie Dress), Paris
1950, printed 1968
Platinum-palladium print
Image: 22 x 15 11/16 in. (55.9 x 39.9 cm
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© Condé Nast (Fr.)

Jeanne LaFaurie was a Paris couturiere working from 1925 until 1958. The house was known for dependable, if not spectacular, clothing and fine draping. Courreges worked there as a draftsman in 1947. Michel Goma became the house designer 1950 – 58, when he bought the house and renamed it. It closed in 1963.

Text from the Vintage Fashion Guild website

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Rochas Mermaid Dress (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn), Paris
1950
Platinum-palladium print Image: 19 7/8 x 19 11/16 in. (50.5 x 50 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© Condé Nast

Rochas is a fashion, beauty, and perfume house founded in 1925 by French designer Marcel Rochas (born 1902, died 1955) the first designer of 2/3-length coats and skirts with pockets. “His designs could be seen as the polar opposite of Chanel’s simplicity. Dresses were proper gowns and came with the optimum amount of frills, with lace, wide shoulders and nipped-in waists.”

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Large Sleeve (Sunny Harnett), New York
1951, printed 1984
Gelatin silver print
Image: 14 3/4 x 14 3/4 in. (37.5 x 37.5 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© Condé Nast

Annemarie Margot “Sunny” Harnett (1924 – May 1987) was an American model in the 1950s and actress. She can be found in fashion magazines throughout that era – including frequently on the cover of Vogue – and was often a model of choice by photographer Edgar de Evia. Harper’s Bazaar ranks her as one of the 26 greatest models of all time.

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Marchand de Concombres [Cucumber Seller]
1950, printed 1976
Platinum-palladium print
Purchase, The Lauder Foundation and The Irving Penn Foundation Gifts, 2014
© The Irving Penn Foundation

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Marchande de Ballons, Paris
1950, printed 1976
Platinum-palladium print
Image: 15 3/4 × 12 9/16 in. (40 × 31.9 cm)
Purchase, The Lauder Foundation and The Irving Penn Foundation Gifts, 2014
© Les Editions Condé Nast S. A.

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Window Washer
1950, printed 1967
Platinum-palladium print
Image: 19 7/8 × 14 13/16 in. (50.5 × 37.6 cm)
Purchase, The Lauder Foundation and The Irving Penn Foundation Gifts, 2014
© The Irving Penn Foundation

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Fishmonger, London
1950, printed 1976
Platinum-palladium print
Image: 19 11/16 × 14 13/16 in. (50 × 37.6 cm)
Purchase, The Lauder Foundation and The Irving Penn Foundation Gifts, 2014
© Condé Nast Publications Ltd.

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Pablo Picasso at La Californie, Cannes
1957, printed February 1985
Platinum-palladium print
Image: 18 5/8 x 18 5/8 in. (47.3 x 47.3 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© The Irving Penn Foundation

When Penn arrived at Picasso’s house in the south of France, the artist pretended not to be home. But after Penn’s assistant climbed over the locked gate, Picasso granted the photographer ten minutes. Covering his sweat-shirt with a Spanish cape, Picasso tried to playfully deflect him. Variants of this image show how Penn patiently worked the pose, allowing the artist his costume play while progressively boring in to isolate the riveting gaze of his left eye.

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Ingmar Bergman, Stockholm, 1964
1964, printed 1992
Gelatin silver print
Image: 15 1/16 x 14 15/16 in. (38.3 x 37.9 cm
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© The Irving Penn Foundation

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Single Oriental Poppy, New York
1968, printed 1989
Dye transfer print
Image: 21 7/8 x 17 1/8 in. (55.5 x 43.5 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© The Irving Penn Foundation

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Naomi Sims in Scarf, New York, c. 1969
c. 1969, printed 1985
Gelatin silver print
Image: 10 1/2 x 10 3/8 in. (26.6 x 26.3 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© The Irving Penn Foundation

Naomi Ruth Sims (March 30, 1948 – August 1, 2009) was an American model, businesswoman and author. She was the first African-American model to appear on the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal, and is widely credited as being the first African-American supermodel. …

She became one of the first successful black models while still in her teens, and achieved worldwide recognition from the late 1960s into the early 1970s, appearing on the covers of prestigious fashion and popular magazines. The New York Times wrote that (her) “appearance as the first black model on the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal in November 1968 was a consummate moment of the Black is Beautiful movement”. She also appeared on the cover of the October 17, 1969 issue of Life magazine. This made her the first African-American model on the cover of the magazine. The images from the 1967 New York Times fashion magazine cover and the 1969 Life magazine cover were exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in an exhibition entitled The Model as Muse.

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Ungaro Bride Body Sculpture (Marisa Berenson), Paris, 1969
1969, printed 1985
Gelatin silver print
Image: 11 15/16 x 9 5/16 in. (30.3 x 23.7 cm.) Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© Condé Nast

Emanuel (Maffeolit) Ungaro (born 13 February 1933) is a retired French fashion designer, who founded the fashion house that bears his name in 1965. At the age of 22, he moved to Paris. Three years later he began designing for the House of Cristobal Balenciaga for three years before quitting to work for Courrèges. Four years later, in 1965 with the assistance of Swiss artist Sonja Knapp and Elena Bruna Fassio, Emanuel Ungaro opened his own fashion house in Paris.

Vittoria Marisa Schiaparelli Berenson (born February 15, 1947) is an American actress and model. A fashion model who came to prominence in the 1960s – “I once was one of the highest paid models in the world”, she told The New York Times – Berenson appeared on the cover of the July 1970 issue of Vogue as well as the cover of Time on December 15, 1975. She appeared in numerous fashion layouts in Vogue in the early 1970s and her sister Berry was a photographer for the magazine as well. She was known as “The Queen of the Scene” for her frequent appearances at nightclubs and other social venues in her youth, and Yves Saint Laurent dubbed her “the girl of the Seventies”.

Eventually, she was cast in several prominent film roles, including Gustav von Aschenbach’s wife in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film Death in Venice, the Jewish department store heiress Natalia Landauer in the 1972 film Cabaret, for which she received acclaim (including two Golden Globe nominations, a BAFTA nomination and an award from the National Board of Review), and the tragic beauty Lady Lyndon in the Stanley Kubrick film Barry Lyndon (1975).

Texts from the Wikipedia website

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Three Asaro Mud Men, New Guinea, 1970
1970, printed 1976
Platinum-palladium print
Dimensions:Image: 20 1/8 x 19 1/2 in. (51.1 x 49.6 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© The Irving Penn Foundation

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Three Dahomey Girls, One Reclining, 1967
1967, printed 1980
Platinum-palladium print
Image: 19 11/16 x 19 11/16 in. (50 x 50 cm.)Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© The Irving Penn Foundation

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Tribesman with Nose Disc, New Guinea, 1970
1970, printed 2002
Gelatin silver print
Image: 15 1/2 x 15 3/8 in. (39.4 x 39.1 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© The Irving Penn Foundation

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Cigarette No. 52, New York
1972, printed April 1974
Platinum-palladium print
Image: 23 1/2 x 18 1/2 in. (59.7 x 47 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© The Irving Penn Foundation

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Cigarette No. 85, New York
1972, printed Fall 1975
Platinum-palladium print
Image: 18 1/8 x 23 1/16 in. (46.0 x 58.5 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© The Irving Penn Foundation

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Cigarette No. 98, New York
1972, printed June 1974
Platinum-palladium print
Image: 23 3/16 x 17 1/16 in. (58.9 x 43.3 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© The Irving Penn Foundation

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Deli Package, New York
1975, printed March 1976
Platinum-palladium print
Image: 15 7/8 x 20 11/16 in. (40.3 x 52.5 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© The Irving Penn Foundation

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Two Miyake Warriors, New York, 1998
June 3, 1998, printed January-February, 1999
Platinum-palladium print
Image: 21 x 19 5/8 in. (53.4 x 49.8 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© The Irving Penn Foundation

Issey Miyake (born 22 April 1938) is a Japanese fashion designer. He is known for his technology-driven clothing designs, exhibitions and fragrances…

In the late 1980s, he began to experiment with new methods of pleating that would allow both flexibility of movement for the wearer as well as ease of care and production. In which the garments are cut and sewn first, then sandwiched between layers of paper and fed into a heat press, where they are pleated. The fabric’s ‘memory’ holds the pleats and when the garments are liberated from their paper cocoon, they are ready-to wear. He did the costume for Ballett Frankfurt with pleats in a piece named “the Loss of Small Detail” choreographed by William Forsythe and also work on ballet “Garden in the setting”.

Text from the Wikipedia website

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
New York, New York 10028-0198
Phone: 212-535-7710

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Thursday: 9.30 am – 5.30 pm*
Friday and Saturday: 9.30 am – 9.00 pm*
Sunday: 9.30 am – 5.30 pm*
Closed Monday (except Met Holiday Mondays**), Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day

The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Jul

Exhibition: ‘Irving Penn: Centennial’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Part 1

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, exhibition, existence, fashion photography, gallery website, intimacy, light, memory, New York, photographic series, photography, portrait, reality, space, time, video and works on paper
Tags: "Morandi" still lifes, After-Dinner Games, After-Dinner Games New York, American fashion photographer, American fashion photography, american photographer, American photography, American photography. American artist, American portrait photography, American studio photography, Ballet Society, Ballet Society New York, Bridget Tichenor, Bridget Tichenor and Jean Patchett, Charles James, Charles James New York, cigarette still lifes, colour flower studies, colour studies of flowers, Corrado Cagli, Elsa Schiaparelli, Elsa Schiaparelli New York, fashion and style, fashion photographer, fashion photography, female nudes, flower photography, George Balanchine, Girl Drinking, Girl Drinking (Mary Jane Russell), Glove and Shoe, Glove and Shoe New York, indigenous people, indigenous people in Cuzco, Irving Penn, Irving Penn After-Dinner Games, Irving Penn American photographer, Irving Penn Ballet Society, Irving Penn Charles James, Irving Penn Elsa Schiaparelli, Irving Penn Girl Drinking, Irving Penn Girl Drinking (Mary Jane Russell), Irving Penn Glove and Shoe, Irving Penn Le Corbusier, Irving Penn Marlene Dietrich, Irving Penn O'Sullivan's Heels, Irving Penn Pulquería Decoration, Irving Penn Salad Ingredients, Irving Penn Still Life with Watermelon, Irving Penn The Tarot Reader, Irving Penn The Twelve Most Photographed Models, Irving Penn Theatre Accident, Irving Penn Truman Capote, Irving Penn Union Bar Window American South, Irving Penn: Centennial, Jean Patchett, Le Corbusier, Le Corbusier New York, Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, Marlene Dietrich, Marlene Dietrich New York, Mary Jane Russell, modern compositions, mortality, New York, nude studies, O'Sullivan's Heels, photographic portrait, photographic portraitist, photographic still life, photography as a fine art, picture press, Platinum-palladium print, portrait photography, portraitist, Pulquería Decoration, Salad Ingredients, Salad Ingredients New York, Small Trades portraits, still life, still life photographs, still life photography, Still Life with Watermelon, studio photography, supermodel, Tanaquil Le Clercq, the American South, the growth of photography as a fine art, the human face, The Irving Penn Foundation, The Tarot Reader, The Twelve Most Photographed Models, Theatre Accident, Theatre Accident New York, tribesmen in New Guinea, Truman Capote, Truman Capote New York, Union Bar Window, Union Bar Window American South, urban labourers, Vietnam War era, Vittorio Rieti, Vogue magazine

Exhibition dates: 24th April – 30th July 2017

Part 1 of this bumper posting, with some biographical information on the lesser known sitters. More to follow ~ Marcus

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Union Bar Window, American South
1941, printed c. 1941-42
Gelatin silver print
Image: 7 3/16 x 8 3/4 in. (18.2 x 22.3 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© The Irving Penn Foundation

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
O’Sullivan’s Heels, New York
c. 1939
Gelatin silver print
Image: 9 x 9 3/8 in. (22.9 x 23.8 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© The Irving Penn Foundation

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Pulquería Decoration, Mexico
1942
Gelatin silver print
Image: 11 7/8 x 10 9/16 in. (30.2 x 26.8 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© The Irving Penn Foundation

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Le Corbusier, New York
1947
Gelatin silver print
Image: 9 15/16 x 7 15/16 in. (25.3 x 20.2 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© Condé Nast

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Elsa Schiaparelli, New York
March 29, 1948, printed c. 1948
Gelatin silver print
Image: 9 7/8 x 7 7/8 in. (25.1 x 20 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© The Irving Penn Foundation

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Charles James, New York
February 28, 1948, printed June 2002
Gelatin silver print
Image: 9 15/16 x 7 15/16 in. (25.3 x 20.1 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© The Irving Penn Foundation

Charles Wilson Brega James (18 July 1906 – 23 September 1978) was a British-born fashion designer known as “America’s First Couturier”. He is widely considered to have been a master of cutting and is known for his highly structured aesthetic. …

James looked upon his dresses as works of art, as did many of his customers. Year after year, he reworked original designs, ignoring the sacrosanct schedule of seasons. The components of the precisely constructed designs were interchangeable, so that James had a never-ending fund of ideas on which to draw. He is most famous for his sculpted ball gowns made of lavish fabrics and to exacting tailoring standards, but is also remembered for his capes and coats, often trimmed with fur and embroidery, and his spiral zipped dresses. He is also famed for a unique, one of a kind white satin quilted jacket made in 1938 and now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, described as the starting point for “anoraks, space man and even fur jackets”.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Ballet Society, New York [Tanaquil Le Clercq with Corrado Cagli, Vittorio Rieti, and George Balanchine]
March 5, 1948, printed November 1976
Platinum-palladium print
Image: 22 3/4 x 18 3/8 in. (57.8 x 46.7 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© Condé Nast

Tanaquil Le Clercq (October 2, 1929 – December 31, 2000) was a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet. Her dancing career ended abruptly when she was stricken with polio in Copenhagen during the company’s European tour in 1956. Eventually regaining most of the use of her arms and torso, she remained paralysed from the waist down for the rest of her life. …

When she was fifteen years old, George Balanchine asked her to perform with him in a dance he choreographed for a polio charity benefit. In an eerie portent of things to come, he played a character named Polio, and Le Clercq was his victim who became paralysed and fell to the floor. Then, children tossed dimes at her character, prompting her to get up and dance again.

Corrado Cagli (Ancona, 1910 – Rome, 1976) was an Italian painter of Jewish heritage, who lived in the United States during World War II. …

He enlisted in the U.S. Army and was involved in the 1944 Normandy landings, and fought in Belgium and Germany. He was with the forces that liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp, and made a series of dramatic drawings on that subject. In 1948, Cagli returned to Rome to take up permanent residence there. From that time forward, he experimented in various abstract and non-figurative techniques (neo-metaphysical, neo-cubist, informal). He was awarded the Guggenheim prize (1946) and the Marzotto prize (1954).

Vittorio Rieti (January 28, 1898 – February 19, 1994) was a Jewish-Italian composer. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Rieti moved to Milan to study economics. He subsequently studied in Rome under Respighi and Casella, and lived there until 1940. … He emigrated to the United States in 1940, becoming a naturalised American citizen on the 1st of June 1944. He taught at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore (1948-49), Chicago Musical College (1950-54), Queens College, New York (1958-60), and New York College of Music (1960-64).

George Balanchine (January 22 [O.S. January 9] 1904 – April 30, 1983) was a choreographer. Styled as the father of American ballet, he co-founded the New York City Ballet and remained its Artistic Director for more than 35 years.

Balanchine took the standards and technique from his time at the Imperial Ballet School and fused it with other schools of movement that he had adopted during his tenure on Broadway and in Hollywood, creating his signature “neoclassical style”. He was a choreographer known for his musicality; he expressed music with dance and worked extensively with leading composers of his time like Igor Stravinsky. Balanchine was invited to America in 1933 by a young arts patron named Lincoln Kirstein, and together they founded the School of American Ballet. Along with Kirstein, Balanchine also co-founded the New York City Ballet (NYCB).

All texts from the Wikipedia website

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Truman Capote, New York
March 5, 1948
Gelatin silver print
Image: 10 1/16 x 8 3/16 in. (25.5 x 20.8 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© The Irving Penn Foundation

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present a major retrospective of the photographs of Irving Penn to mark the centennial of the artist’s birth. Over the course of his nearly 70-year career, Irving Penn (1917-2009) mastered a pared-down aesthetic of studio photography that is distinguished for its meticulous attention to composition, nuance, detail, and printmaking. Irving Penn: Centennial, opening April 24, 2017, will be the most comprehensive exhibition of the great American photographer’s work to date and will include both masterpieces and hitherto unknown prints from all his major series.

Long celebrated for more than six decades of influential work at Vogue magazine, Penn was first and foremost a fashion photographer. His early photographs of couture are masterpieces that established a new standard for photographic renderings of style at mid-century, and he continued to record the cycles of fashions year after year in exquisite images characterised by striking shapes and formal brilliance. His rigorous modern compositions, minimal backgrounds, and diffused lighting were innovative and immensely influential. Yet Penn’s photographs of fashion are merely the most salient of his specialties. He was a peerless portraitist, whose perceptions extended beyond the human face and figure to take in more complete codes of demeanour, adornment, and artefact. He was also blessed with an acute graphic intelligence and a sculptor’s sensitivity to volumes in light, talents that served his superb nude studies and life-long explorations of still life.

Penn dealt with so many subjects throughout his long career that he is conventionally seen either with a single lens – as the portraitist, fashion photographer, or still life virtuoso – or as the master of all trades, the jeweller of journalists who could fine-tool anything. The exhibition at The Met will chart a different course, mapping the overall geography of the work and the relative importance of the subjects and campaigns the artist explored most creatively. Its organisation largely follows the pattern of his development so that the structure of the work, its internal coherence, and the tenor of the times of the artist’s experience all become evident.

The exhibition will most thoroughly explore the following series: street signs, including examples of early work in New York, the American South, and Mexico; fashion and style, with many classic photographs of Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, the former dancer who became the first supermodel as well as the artist’s wife; portraits of indigenous people in Cuzco, Peru; the Small Trades portraits of urban labourers; portraits of beloved cultural figures from Truman Capote, Joe Louis, Picasso, and Colette to Alvin Ailey, Ingmar Bergman, and Joan Didion; the infamous cigarette still lifes; portraits of the fabulously dressed citizens of Dahomey (Benin), New Guinea, and Morocco; the late “Morandi” still lifes; voluptuous nudes; and glorious colour studies of flowers. These subjects chart the artist’s path through the demands of the cultural journal, the changes in fashion itself and in editorial approach, the fortunes of the picture press in the age of television, the requirements of an artistic inner voice in a commercial world, the moral condition of the American conscience during the Vietnam War era, the growth of photography as a fine art in the 1970s and 1980s, and personal intimations of mortality. All these strands of meaning are embedded in the images – a web of deep and complex ideas belied by the seeming forthrightness of what is represented.

Penn generally worked in a studio or in a traveling tent that served the same purpose, and favoured a simple background of white or light grey tones. His preferred backdrop was made from an old theatre curtain found in Paris that had been softly painted with diffused grey clouds. This backdrop followed Penn from studio to studio; a companion of over 60 years, it will be displayed in one of the Museum’s galleries among celebrated portraits it helped create. Other highlights of the exhibition include newly unearthed footage of the photographer at work in his tent in Morocco; issues of Vogue magazine illustrating the original use of the photographs and, in some cases, to demonstrate the difference between those brilliantly coloured, journalistic presentations and Penn’s later reconsidered reuse of the imagery; and several of Penn’s drawings shown near similar still life photographs.

Exhibition credits

Irving Penn: Centennial is co-curated by Maria Morris Hambourg, independent curator and the founding curator of The Met’s Department of Photographs, and Jeff L. Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs at The Met.

Press release from the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Glove and Shoe, New York
July 7, 1947
Gelatin silver print
Image: 9 9/16 x 7 3/4 in. (24.3 x 19.7 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© Condé Nast

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
The Tarot Reader (Bridget Tichenor and Jean Patchett), New York
1949, printed 1984
Gelatin silver print
Image: 19 5/16 x 18 1/2 in. (49 x 47 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© Condé Nast

Bridget Bate Tichenor (born Bridget Pamela Arkwright Bate on November 22, 1917 – died on October 20, 1990), also known as Bridget Tichenor or B.B.T., was a Mexican surrealist painter of fantastic art in the school of magic realism and a fashion editor. Born in Paris and of British descent, she later embraced Mexico as her home. …

Bate Tichenor’s painting technique was based upon 16th-century Italian tempera formulas that artist Paul Cadmus taught her in New York in 1945, where she would prepare an eggshell-finished gesso ground on masonite board and apply (instead of tempera) multiple transparent oil glazes defined through chiaroscuro with sometimes one hair of a #00 sable brush. Bate Tichenor considered her work to be of a spiritual nature, reflecting ancient occult religions, magic, alchemy, and Mesoamerican mythology in her Italian Renaissance style of painting.

The cultures of Mesoamerica and her international background would influence the style and themes of Bate Tichenor’s work as a magic realist painter in Mexico. She was among a group of surrealist and magic realist female artists who came to live in Mexico in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Jean Patchett (February 16, 1926 – January 22, 2002) was a leading fashion model of the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s. She was among the best known models of that era, which included Dovima, Dorian Leigh, Suzy Parker, Evelyn Tripp and Lisa Fonssagrives. Patchett was the subject of two of Vogue Magazine’s most famous covers, both shot in 1950 by Erwin Blumenfeld and Irving Penn. She was famous for being one of the first high-fashion models to appear remote; previously, models had appeared warm and friendly. Irving Penn described her as “a young American goddess in Paris couture”.

Texts from the Wikipedia website

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
The Twelve Most Photographed Models, New York
1947
Gelatin silver print
Image: 13 3/8 x 16 15/16 in. (34 x 43 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© Condé Nast

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Girl Drinking (Mary Jane Russell), New York
1949, printed December 1977
Platinum-palladium print
Image: 20 1/2 x 19 1/4 in. (52.1 x 48.9 cm.)
Loan from The Irving Penn Foundation
© Condé Nast

Mary Jane Russell (10 July 1926 – 2003) was a successful New York-based American photographic fashion model between 1948 and 1961. She often worked with Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Irving Penn, and appeared on many covers for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar during the course of her modelling career. …

Russell was … a favourite model of Irving Penn, who remembered her qualities of concentration and tenderness. Two of Penn’s better known images of her were Girl Drinking, published in Vogue in 1949, and the 1951 photograph Girl with Tobacco on Tongue. As Russell did not smoke, the process of taking the latter photograph made her physically sick.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Marlene Dietrich, New York
November 3, 1948, printed April 2000
Gelatin silver print
Image: 10 x 8 1/16 in. (25.4 x 20.4 cm.) Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© The Irving Penn Foundation

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Theatre Accident, New York
1947, printed 1984
Dye transfer print
Image: 19 1/2 x 15 1/4 in. (49.6 x 38.8 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© Condé Nast

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Still Life with Watermelon, New York
1947, printed 1985
Dye transfer print
Image: 22 x 17 1/2 in. (55.9 x 44.5 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© Condé Nast

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
Salad Ingredients, New York
1947, printed 1984
Dye transfer print
Image: 19 7/16 x 15 3/16 in. (49.3 x 38.6 cm.)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© Condé Nast

Irving Penn (American, Plainfield, New Jersey 1917-2009 New York)
After-Dinner Games, New York
1947, printed 1985
Dye transfer print
Image: 22 3/16 x 18 1/16 in. (56.4 x 45.8 cm)
Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation
© Condé Nast

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
New York, New York 10028-0198
Phone: 212-535-7710

The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Mar

Exhibition: ‘A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde’ at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Exhibition dates: 3rd December 2016 – 12th March 2017

My apologies to readers of Art Blart, but my postings will be short of comment in the next month or so as I try to take as much rest as possible. I have bad hands which is preventing me from using the keyboard. At the moment I am using dictation software to do the writing for me. I will keep the blog going as much as possible because it is my form of therapy for my mental health.

Which brings me to this posting, another slice of the brilliance of the European inter-war avant-garde, this time from Russia. Design, intense colouration (or lack of it), and complexity of form are hallmarks of this “new, militant art.” Photomontage, form and propaganda go hand in hand with this New Vision. The photograph and the cinema were social and essential elements of this new world order.

Perspective shifted. Pictorial planes fractured. Points of view pictured the unusual: from below, from above, with few vanishing points contained within the image or photomontage. Films had no sound and often no story and no actors. They were experimental intersections of man, machinery, and the world. Art was exciting and revolutionary. For me, Aleksandr Rodchenko is the star of the show. You only have to look at images such as Mother, Pioneer with Bugle, Pioneer girl, and the two photographs titled Dive (1934, below) – both with a sense of weightlessness and perspectival difference – to understand the genius of this artist.

It is indeed a telling indictment that such creativity, in both Russia and Germany (and by default, the rest of Europe), was snuffed out by two dictators who imposed on art a (usually masculine) utopian purity which stifled any hint of militant subversion and originality.

Marcus

.
Many thankx to the Museum of Modern Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

We are breaking with the past, because we cannot accept its hypotheses. We ourselves are creating our own hypotheses anew and only upon them … can we build our new life and new world view.

.
Lyubov Popova

Various artists with Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Nikolai Rogovin, Vladimir Tatlin
Mirskontsa (Worldbackwards)
1912

For the hundredth anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, MoMA curator Roxana Marcoci explains how artists such as Malevich, Rodchenko, and Vertov attempted to revolutionise Russian society through new means of artistic production – and how the styles developed by the Russian Avant-Garde still affect how we look at art today.

Natalia Goncharova (Russian, 1881-1962)
Rayonism, Blue-Green Forest
1913
Oil on canvas
21 1/2 x 19 1/2″ (54.6 x 49.5 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Riklis Collection of McCrory Corporation

Olga Rozanova (Russian, 1886-1918)
The Factory and the Bridge
1913
Oil on canvas
32 3/4 x 24 1/4″ (83.2 x 61.6 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Riklis Collection of McCrory Corporation

Kazimir Malevich (Russian, born Ukraine. 1878-1935)
Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying
1915
Oil on canvas
22 7/8 x 19″ (58.1 x 48.3 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquisition confirmed in 1999 by agreement with the Estate of Kazimir Malevich and made possible with funds from the Mrs. John Hay Whitney Bequest (by exchange)

Lyubov Popova (Russian, 1889-1924)
Untitled
c. 1916-17
Gouache on board
19 1/2 x 15 1/2″ (49.5 x 39.5 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Riklis Collection of McCrory Corporation

Kazimir Malevich (Russian, born Ukraine. 1878-1935)
Suprematist Composition: White on White
1918
Oil on canvas
31 1/4 x 31 1/4″ (79.4 x 79.4 cm)
1935 Acquisition confirmed in 1999 by agreement with the Estate of Kazimir Malevich and made possible with funds from the Mrs. John Hay Whitney Bequest (by exchange)

Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956)
Non-Objective Painting no. 80 (Black on Black)
1918
Oil on canvas
32 1/4 x 31 1/4″ (81.9 x 79.4 cm)
Gift of the artist, through Jay Leyda

This work belongs to a series of eight black paintings Rodchenko made in direct response to a group of white paintings of the same year by the older and more established artist Kazimir Malevich. Malevich relied on a severely reduced palette of whites to suggest a floating form in an infinite spatial expanse; Rodchenko moved toward eliminating colour completely in order to focus instead on the material quality of the paintings surface. “Where the black works are winning is in the fact that they have no colour, they are strong through painting …,” declared artist Varvara Stepanova, Rodchenko’s wife. “Nothing besides painting exists.” Both series were first shown in Moscow in April 1919, in the 10th State Exhibition: Non-Objective Art and Suprematism. The black works were received with enthusiasm and helped establish Rodchenko as a leader of the Russian avant-garde. (MoMA gallery label 2015)

Jean Pougny (Ivan Puni) (Russian, born Finland. 1892-1956)
Flight of Forms
1919
Gouache and pencil on paper
51 1/8 x 51 1/2″ (129.7 x 130.8 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund
© 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

A new art was needed, armed by technology and chemistry, an art that stood side by side with socialist industry, a new, militant art, which could organize the will of the masses.

.
Gustav Klutsis

In the first decades after the 1917 Revolution, a central focus of the nascent Soviet Union was the modernisation of its vast territories. Through a series of comprehensive economic development plans, the socialist state attempted to institute rapid industrialisation, collectivise agriculture, achieve nationwide literacy, and update the infrastructure of towns and cities. Artists, often working in official capacities, captured these aspirations in a variety of projects, many of which were propagandistic.

Some turned to agitational photomontage, in which photographs and images culled from mass media were spliced together to create ideologically charged designs for posters, book covers, advertisements, and postcards. Artists also made illustrations for children’s books that feature didactic tales aimed at rallying the next generation of Soviet citizens. Architects were tasked with reconceiving domestic and civic spaces in order to advance a communal way of life, reflected in studies for buildings and triumphant photographs of construction. While much of this work celebrates Soviet might and ingenuity, Joseph Stalin’s repressive regime began to reign in the activities of artists and other cultural producers in the 1920s, terminating this period of utopian innovation in the early 1930s with the declaration of Socialist Realism as the official Soviet style.

El Lissitzky (Russian, 1890-1941)
Proun 1 D
1920
One from a portfolio of eleven lithographs
Composition: 8 7/16 x 10 9/16″ (21.5 x 26.9 cm); sheet: 13 1/2 x 17 5/8″ (34.3 x 44.7 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Vincent d’Aquila and Harry Soviak Bequest, by exchange, Committee on Prints and Illustrated Books Fund, Orentreich Family Foundation, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Endowment, Mrs. Sash A. Spencer, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, Peter H. Friedland, Maud I. Welles, Deborah Wye Endowment Fund, Riva Castlemen Endowment Fund, Lily Auchincloss Fund, Monroe Wheeler Fund, and John M. Shapiro
© 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

El Lissitzky (Russian, 1890-1941)
Proun 19D
1920 or 1921
Gesso, oil, varnish, crayon, colored papers, sandpaper, graph paper, cardboard, metallic paint, and metal foil on plywood
38 3/8 x 38 1/4″ (97.5 x 97.2 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Katherine S. Dreier Bequest

Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956)
Spatial Construction no. 12
c. 1920
Plywood, open construction partially painted with aluminum paint, and wire
24 x 33 x 18 1/2″ (61 x 83.7 x 47 cm)
Acquisition made possible through the extraordinary efforts of George and Zinaida Costakis, and through the Nate B. and Frances Spingold, Matthew H. and Erna Futter, and Enid A. Haupt Funds

The nesting ovals that compose this construction were measured out on a single sheet of aluminium-painted plywood, precisely cut, then rotated and suspended to make a three-dimensional object suggestive of planetary orbits. It was made at a time of both civic turmoil and great possibility in Russia, when Rodchenko and his fellow Constructivist artists sought to apply aesthetic ideals to everyday materials. They hoped their approach to art would help create a new language for the Communist state. Reflecting back on this time, Rodchenko said, “We created a new understanding of beauty, and enlarged the concept of art.”

Nikolai Suetin (Russian, 1897-1954)
Teapot
c. 1923
Porcelain with overglaze painted decoration
5 1/2 x 4 1/2″ (14 x 11.4 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Estée and Joseph Lauder Design Fund

Installation views of A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, December 3, 2016-March 12, 2017
© 2016 The Museum of Modern Art
Photo: Robert Gerhardt

The Museum of Modern Art presents A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde, an exhibition that brings together 260 works from MoMA’s collection, tracing the arc of a period of artistic innovation between 1912 and 1935. The exhibition will be on view December 3, 2016 – March 12, 2017. Planned in anticipation of the centennial year of the 1917 Russian Revolution, the exhibition highlights breakthrough developments in the conception of Suprematism and Constructivism, as well as in avant-garde poetry, theater, photography, and film, by such figures as Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova, El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Lyubov Popova, Alexandr Rodchenko, Olga Rozanova, Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg, and Dziga Vertov, among others. The exhibition features a rich cross-section of works across several mediums – opening with displays of pioneering non-objective paintings, prints, and drawings from the years leading up to and immediately following the Revolution, followed by a suite of galleries featuring photography, film, graphic design, and utilitarian objects, a transition that reflects the shift of avant-garde production in the 1920s. Made in response to changing social and political conditions, these works probe and suggest the myriad ways that a revolution can manifest itself in an object. A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde is organized by Roxana Marcoci, Senior Curator, Department of Photography, and Sarah Suzuki, Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints; with Hillary Reder, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints.

A series of works by artists including Natalia Goncharova and her husband and artistic collaborator Mikhail Larionov open the exhibition. Goncharova and Larionov sought to combine Western European developments such as Cubism and Futurism with a distinctly Russian character, drawing on history, folklore, and religious motifs for inspiration. One outgrowth of their efforts was Rayonism, an abstract style that derived its name from the use of dynamic rays of contrasting colour, exemplified in Goncharova’s Rayonism, Blue-Green Forest (1913). A hallmark of this period was a fertile collaboration between painters and poets that resulted in illustrated books, also on view in the exhibition. These collaborations rejected fine-art book traditions in favour of small, distinctly handmade volumes, such as the rare book Worldbackwards (1912), shown in an astonishing four variations, each with a unique, collaged cover.

Radical new efforts in painting and poetry are also featured, such as an unpublished, uncut sheet from poets Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov’s Te li le (1914), with images by Olga Rozanova. The sheet features a poetic language conceived in 1913 by the pair called Zaum (“transrational,” “beyonsense,” or “transreason”), which frees letters and words from specific meanings, instead emphasising their aural and visual qualities. Painters likewise sought to push their medium to its limits, dismissing the strictures of realism and rationality in favour of advancing new abstract forms. The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10 (zeroten), held in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) in December 1915, highlighted two new models of abstraction. One, developed by Vladimir Tatlin, focused on a group of nonrepresentational Counter-Reliefs (“reliefs with a particular pronounced tension”). An example can be found in the exhibition in the exceedingly rare Brochure for Tatlin’s counter-reliefs exhibited at 0.10 (1915). The other, proposed by Kazimir Malevich, unveiled a radically new mode of abstract painting that abandoned reference to the outside world in favour of coloured geometric shapes floating against white backgrounds. Because this new style claimed supremacy over the forms of nature, Malevich called it Suprematism. The exhibition includes Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying (1915), which was featured in 0.10, and Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918), which ranks among the most iconoclastic paintings of its day.

While Suprematism’s focus on pure form had a spiritual bent, the adherents of Constructivism privileged the creation of utilitarian objects with orderly, geometric designs. In 1918, Rodchenko made Non-Objective Painting no. 80 (Black on Black), one of a series of eight black paintings he conceived in direct response to the group of white paintings by Malevich. By eliminating colour almost completely, Rodchenko underscored the material quality of the painting’s surface. Around this time, he also produced a series of “spatial constructions” focused on kineticism, marking a significant leap from his exploration of the painted surface to three-dimensional objects. 5 x 5 = 25: An Exhibition of Painting (1921), a brochure for an exhibition of the same title, typed by Varvara Stepanova, features contributions from Rodchenko, Lyubov Popova, Alexandra Exter, and Aleksandr Vesnin. Held in Moscow at the All-Russian Union of Poets in September 1921, the exhibition featured five works by each of the five participants, and was the Constructivist group’s last presentation of painting.

Between 1919 and 1927 El Lissitzky produced a large body of paintings, prints, and drawings that he referred to as Proun, an acronym for “Project for the Affirmation of the New” in Russian. A particular highlight is the portfolio Proun (1920), made during Lissitzky’s short but prolific period working at the art school in Vitebsk, alongside Malevich. Lissitzky asserted Proun is “the station on the way to the construction of a new form,” and in these lithographs, he arranges geometric forms in dynamic, overlapping relationships to create imagined spaces. It will be the first time this rare portfolio, acquired in 2013, will be on view. New developments in theater are surveyed through the example of Alexandra Exter, an artist deeply engaged with theatrical design and production, including several examples of her innovative set designs and costumes for the science-fiction film Aelita (1924). These are shown alongside prints from Lissitzky’s portfolio Victory Over the Sun, which he made after seeing a 1920 restaging of the seminal Cubo-Futurist opera of the same name, and features characters from the production transformed into “electromechanical” figurines.

As the 1920s progressed, photography and film surpassed painting and sculpture as the chosen medium for the avant-garde, moving works from the studio to the public sphere. The exhibition includes an in-depth look at Soviet avant-garde cinema, in a gallery that features clips from seminal films by Alexander Dovzhenko, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov, highlighting a variety of strategies in montage, including disjunctive cutting, extreme close-ups, unusual angles, and image superimposition. At this time, Lissitzky began to describe his work as fotopis (painting with photographs), a neologism that first appeared in the title of a maquette for a mural version of Record (1926), a photomontage included in the show. After turning away from painting, Rodchenko also found new means to build networks of communication – in photographs and book design. He collaborated with the progressive writers Nikolai Aseev, Osip Brik, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Sergei Tret’iakov on covers and layouts for the journal Novyi LEF (1927-28), a complete run of which is on view. Eschewing the conventional belly-button view in his photographs, Rodchenko’s pictures of this era – such as Mother (1924), Assembling for a Demonstration (1928-30), and Pioneer Girl (1930) – favour dynamic camera angles. Advocating for a cinematic, fractured representation of his subjects, Rodchenko also tried his hand at film, designing inter-titles for Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda newsreel series.

The ideology of the Revolution touched all aspects of daily life, from economy to education. The most significant artists of the day, in accordance with state orders, were soon applying avant-garde tactics to create propagandistic work that would be easily comprehensible to the Soviet public at large. The final gallery of the exhibition contains this kind of material, including children’s books created by Vladimir Lebedev and Samuil Marshak, whose book designs balanced sophistication and accessibility, drawing on Cubism and Suprematism, with stories that nourished the intellectual and visual imagination. Also on view are film posters, by the brothers Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg, which feature radical uses of typography and colour, underscoring the relationship between graphic arts and the burgeoning Soviet cinema. The Constructivist architect Iakov Chernikov applied his ideas to imagine a future reflecting the avant-garde culture of the new Soviet Union. His Architectural Fantasies: 101 Compositions in Color, 101 Architectural Miniatures (1933) featured here, however, never had a chance to materialise. Joseph Stalin’s repressive regime effectively put an end to Constructivism and other avant-garde activities in the cultural sphere by the mid-1930s.

El Lissitzky (Russian, 1890-1941)
Announcer (Ansager) from Figurines: The Three-Dimensional Design of the Electro-Mechanical Show “Victory over the Sun” (Figurinen, die plastische Gestaltung der elektro-mechanischen Schau “Sieg über die Sonne”)
1920-21, published 1923
One from a portfolio of ten lithographs
Composition (irreg.): 13 3/4 x 11 7/8″ (35 x 30.2 cm); sheet: 21 x 18″ (53.3 x 45.7 cm)
Purchase

El Lissitzky (Russian, 1890-1941)
The Globetrotter from Figurines: Plastic Representations of the Electro-Mechanical Production Entitled “Victory over the Sun” (Figurinen, die plastische Gestaltung der elektro-mechanischen Schau “Sieg über die Sonne”)
1920-21, published 1923
One from a portfolio of ten lithographs
Composition (irreg.): 14 3/16 x 10 1/4″ (36 x 26 cm); sheet: 21 x 17 7/8″ (53.3 x 45.4cm)
Purchase

Alexandra Exter
Construction
1922-23
Oil on canvas
35 1/8 x 35 3/8″ (89.2 x 89.9 cm)
The Riklis Collection of McCrory Corporation

Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956)
Pro eto. Ei i mne (About This. To Her and to Me)
“Pro eto” by Vladimir Mayakovsky
1923
Book with letterpress cover and illustrations
Overall (closed): 9 1/16 x 6 1/8 x 1/8″ (23 x 15.5 x 0.3 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of The Judith Rothschild Foundation

Yakov Protozanov
Aelita Queen of Mars NTSC
1924

Alexandra Exter
“Guardian of Energy” (costume design for the film “Aelita” by Yakov Protozanov)
1924
Ink, gouache, and pencil on paper
21 1/4 x 14 1/4″ (54 x 36.2 cm)
The J. M. Kaplan Fund, Inc.

Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956)
Mother
1924
Gelatin silver print
8 7/8 x 6 1/2″ (22.5 x 16.5 cm)
Gift of the Rodchenko family
© 2017 Aleksandr Rodchenko/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

El Lissitzky (Russian, 1890-1941)
Record
1926
Gelatin silver print
10 1/2 x 8 13/16″ (26.7 x 22.4 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
© 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

El Lissitzky (Russian, 1890-1941)
Self-Portrait
1924
Gelatin silver print
5 1/2 x 3 1/2″ (13.9 x 8.9 cm)
Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by exchange

The essence of New Vision photography is pointedly expressed in this picture, commonly known as The Constructor, which puts the act of seeing at center stage. Lissitzky’s hand, holding a compass, is superimposed on a shot of his head that explicitly highlights his eye: insight, it expresses, is passed through the eye and transmitted to the hand, and through it to the tools of production. Devised from six different exposures, the picture merges Lissitzky’s personae as photographer (eye) and constructor of images (hand) into a single likeness. Contesting the idea that straight photography provides a single, unmediated truth, Lissitzky held instead that montage, with its layering of one meaning over another, impels the viewer to reconsider the world. It thus marks a conceptual shift in the understanding of what a picture can be.

Gallery label from The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook, April 16, 2012–April 29, 2013

The (painted) picture fell apart together with the old world which it had created for itself. The new world will not need little pictures. If it needs a mirror, it has the photograph and the cinema.

.
El Lissitzky

By the mid-1920s, leading figures of the Soviet vanguard extolled photography, theater, and film as quintessential mediums of the future. Eager to answer Lenin’s call to build a new Soviet mass culture in the wake of the Revolution, artists embraced performative and lens-based mediums for their democratising potential. They also seized the opportunity presented by stage and costume design to realise Constructivist principles in real space.

Film, one of the most experimental mediums of these years, wielded a profound influence on Soviet visual culture, particularly graphic design and photography, as well as on international cinema. Dziga Vertov redefined still and motion-picture photography with the concept of kino-glaz (cine-eye), according to which the camera lens creates a novel perception of the world. Aleksandr Rodchenko was likewise inspired by photography’s ability to energise audiences with its thrilling images of a transformed reality, which he shaped with distinctive strategies: unconventional camera angles, radical foreshortening, and close-ups. Rodchenko’s commitment to mass communication is also manifest in his engagement with the illustrated press, exemplified by his cover and layout designs for the avant-garde journal Novyi Lef.

Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956)
Cover design for Novyi LEF: Journal of the Left Front of the Arts, no. 1
1928
Letterpress
Page: 9 1/16 x 6″ (23 x 15.2 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of The Judith Rothschild Foundation

Aleksandr Rodchenko
Novyi LEF. Zhurnal levogo fronta iskusstv (New LEF: Journal of the Left Front of the Arts), no. 7
1927
Journal with letterpress cover and illustrations
Page: 8 15/16 x 5 15/16″ (22.7 x 15.1 cm)
Publisher: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, Moscow
Gift of The Judith Rothschild Foundation

Sergei Eisenstein (Russian, 1898-1948)
Potemkin
1925
35mm film (black and white and hand-colored, silent)
75 min.
Acquired from Reichsfilmarchiv

Vsevolod Pudovkin (Russian, 1893-1953)
Mat (Mother)
1926
35mm film (black and white, silent)
90 min.
Acquired from N.I.S., Soyuzintorkino, Moscow 1985

Mother (1926) [film based on Maxim Gorky’s famous novel]

In this film, the mother of Pavel Vlasov is drawn into the revolutionary conflict when her husband and son find themselves on opposite sides during a worker’s strike. After her husband dies during the failed strike, she betrays her son’s ideology in order to try, in vain, to save his life. He is arrested, tried in what amounts to a judicial farce, and sentenced to heavy labor in a prison camp. During his incarceration, his mother aligns herself with him and his ideology and joins the revolutionaries. In the climax of the movie, the mother and hundreds of others march to the prison in order to free the prisoners, who are aware of the plan and have planned their escape. Ultimately, the troops of the Tsar suppress the uprising, killing both mother and son in the final scenes.

Esther Shub (Ukrainian, 1894-1959)
The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty
1927
35mm film (black and white, silent)

Gustav Klutsis (Russian, born Latvia)
Memorial to Fallen Leaders
1927
Cover with lithographed photomontage illustrations on front and back
13 1/2 x 10 1/4″ (34.3 x 26 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of The Judith Rothschild Foundation
© 2016 / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Vladimir Stenberg (Russian, 1899-1982) and Georgii Stenberg (Russian, 1900-1933)
Symphony of a Big City
1928
Lithograph
41 x 27 1/4″ (104 x 69 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Marshall Cogan Purchase Fund

Aleksandr Rodchenko
Untitled
1927
Gelatin silver print
8 11/16 x 5 13/16″ (22.1 x 14.8 cm)
Gift of the Rodchenko family

Semyon Fridlyand
In the Gallery
1927
Gelatin silver print
8 9/16 x 6 5/8″ (21.7 x 16.8 cm)
Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Harold Edgerton, by exchange

Dziga Vertov (Russian, 1895-1954)
The Man with the Movie Camera
1929
35mm film (black and white, silent)
Acquired on exchange with Gosfilmofund

Man with a Movie Camera is an experimental 1929 silent documentary film, with no story and no actors by Soviet-Russian director Dziga Vertov, edited by his wife Elizaveta Svilova. Vertov’s feature film, produced by the film studio VUFKU, presents urban life in the Soviet cities of Kiev, Kharkov, Moscow and Odessa. From dawn to dusk Soviet citizens are shown at work and at play, and interacting with the machinery of modern life. To the extent that it can be said to have “characters,” they are the cameramen of the title, the film editor, and the modern Soviet Union they discover and present in the film.

This film is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invents, deploys or develops, such as double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, stop motion animations and self-reflexive visuals (at one point it features a split-screen tracking shot; the sides have opposite Dutch angles).

In the British Film Institute’s 2012 Sight & Sound poll, film critics voted Man with a Movie Camera the 8th best film ever made. In 2014 Sight & Sound also named it the best documentary of all time.

Dziga Vertov (Russian, 1895-1954)
The Man with the Movie Camera
1929
35mm film (black and white, silent)
Acquired on exchange with Gosfilmofund

Alexander Dovzhenko (Russian, born Russia (Chernigov province) 1894-1956)
Zemlya (Earth)
1930
35mm film (black and white, silent)
62 min.
Acquired from Gosfilmofond

Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956)
Pioneer with a Bugle
1930
Gelatin silver print
9 1/4 x 7 1/16″ (23.5 x 18 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Rodchenko Family

Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956)
Pioneer Girl
1930
Gelatin silver print
19 1/2 x 14 9/16″ (49.6 x 37 cm)
Gift of Alex Lachmann and friends of the Rodchenko family

Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956)
Assembling for a Demonstration
1928-30
Gelatin silver print
19 1/2 x 13 7/8″ (49.5 x 35.3 cm)
Mr. and Mrs. John Spencer Fund

Iakov Chernikhov
Arkhitekturnye Fantazii
before 1933
Letterpress
12 x 8 7/8″ (30.5 x 22.5 cm)
Arthur A. Cohen Purchase Fund

In his introduction to Architectural Fantasies: 101 Compositions, Iakov Chernikov’s sixth and final volume on design theory, he defended the significance of visionary paper architecture: “Not without reason, however, have great thinkers of all times accorded vast importance to fantasy, as being the forerunner of any kind of progress. To look one-sidedly at the idea of fantasy and not to consider its positive role in all fields of culture and art-this is to make a great mistake.” For Chernikov the fantasy drawing offered the architect an effective means of liberating himself from convention and imagining a future reflecting the avant-garde culture of the new Soviet Union.

As a Constructivist, and like contemporaries such as Kasimir Malevich and El Lissitzky, Chernikov was possessed by the powers of abstraction and geometry. This is reflected in the phrase Combination of curvilinear and rectilinear forms along principles of design, the rather perfunctory subtitle for Complex Architectural Invention (composition no. 49 from Architectural Fantasies): this is a formal composition based on line (curved or straight), plane, surface, body, and volume. The excitement and brilliance of Chernikov’s fantasy lie in his dynamic handling of diagonal lines, ellipses, and bright colors, presented in a dizzying axonometric view. The imagery, unabashedly industrial in character yet devoid of any context or program, is remarkably fresh and pregnant with possibility.

In producing his Architectural Fantasies Chernikov was interested not only in self-discovery but in inspiring his viewers. The seeds of his fantasies, however, never had a chance to germinate in the Soviet Union: Stalin’s repressive regime, which effectively put an end to Constructivism in the 1930s, favored a banal architecture based on monumental classicism and Social Realism. The potential of Architectural Fantasies lay dormant until Chernikov and other Constructivist architects were “rediscovered” in the 1980s, inspiring a new generation of architects worldwide in a movement that was labeled “deconstructivist.”

Publication excerpt from Matilda McQuaid, ed., Envisioning Architecture: Drawings from The Museum of Modern Art, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002, pp. 78-79

Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956)
Dive
1934
Gelatin silver print
11 3/4 x 9 5/16″ (29.9 x 23.6 cm)
Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by exchange

Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956)
Dive
1934
Gelatin silver print
11 11/16 x 9 3/8″ (29.7 x 23.8 cm)
Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by exchange

The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
New York, NY 10019
T: (212) 708-9400

Opening hours:
Monday – Thursday, Saturday – Sunday 10.30 am – 5.30 pm
Friday, 10.30 am – 8.00 pm

MoMA website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Feb

Exhibition: ‘Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York’ at the Museum of the City of New York, New York City Part 2

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, book, Cecil Beaton, colour photography, curator, documentary photography, drawing, exhibition, existence, film, gallery website, illustration, installation art, intimacy, Japanese artist, jewellery, light, memory, New York, painting, photographic series, photography, postcards, printmaking, psychological, quotation, reality, sculpture, space, street photography, surrealism, Susan Sontag, time, video and works on paper
Tags: African American photographer, Alice O'Malley, Alice O'Malley Melanie Hope, Alvin Ailey, American art, american artist, American gay culture, An Oval Braid, André Tellier, André Tellier Twilight Men, androgyny, andy warhol, Andy Warhol and Candy Darling, Andy Warhol Cecil Beaton's Feet, Andy Warhol Gee, Andy Warhol Gee Merrie Shoes, Andy Warhol Kiss, Andy Warhol Screen Test: Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol Studies for a Boy Book, Andy Warhol Studies for a Boy Book exhibition, Ann Bannon, Ann Bannon I Am a Woman, Anna May Wong, Antony Tudor, Art Against AIDS, Art and Underground Culture in New York, Art in Transit, Asian American actress, Beau of the Ball, Beauford Delaney, Beauford Delaney James Baldwin, Bill T. Jones, Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, Bill T. Jones Body Painting with Keith Haring, black New Yorkers, Blair Niles, Blair Niles Strange Brother, body painting, Candy Darling, Carl Van Vechten, Carl Van Vechten Alvin Ailey, Carl Van Vechten Anna May Wong, Carl Van Vechten Hugh Laing, Cecil Beaton, Cecil Beaton Andy Warhol and Candy Darling, Cecil Beaton's Feet, Chantal Regnault, Charley Inside Ramrod, Chinese American movie star, Christopher Street, Clit Club, cruising, Danceteria, Design by Gran Fury for Art Against AIDS, Downtown invitations, Downtown invitations Shazork! invitation, DYKE, DYKE A Quarterly, dyke magazine, dykes, East Meets West, Edie Sedgwick, Edmund White, Edmund White Nocturnes for the King of Naples, Einsteins, Einsteins "Circus" window display, Eva Weiss, Eva Weiss Upwardly Mobile Home, Expeditionary Series, Fan Lady meets Cactus Lady, Fania Marinoff, flamboyant homosexual, Foujita, Foujita Helen Morgan Jr. And Jean Malin at the Smart Club Abbey, Frank O'Hara, Gallery of Extraordinary Portraits, gay cruising, Gay Gotham, Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York, Gay Power, Gee Merrie Shoes, Giovanni's Room, Gladys Bentley at the Ubangi Club, Gladys Bentley at the Ubangi Club in Harlem, Gran Fury, Gran Fury Kissing Doesn't Kill: Greed and Indifference Do, Greenwich Village, Greer Lankton, Greer Lankton and Paul Monroe wedding, Greer Lankton Einsteins "Circus" window display, Greer Lankton Mini-Einsteins, Greer Lankton Siamese Twins, Harlem, Harlem Renaissance, Harmony Hammond, Harmony Hammond An Oval Braid, Harmony Hammond Fan Lady meets Cactus Lady, Helen Morgan Jr., Helen Morgan Jr. And Jean Malin at the Smart Club Abbey, homosexual issues, homosexuality, Huck Snyder, Huck Snyder Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin, Hugh Laing, I Am a Woman, Isabelle Collin Dufresne, James Arthur Baldwin, James Baldwin, James VanDerZee, James VanDerZee Beau of the Ball, Jazz Age Manhattan, Jean Malin, Joseph Tseng, Judy Linn, Judy Linn Robert Gets Dressed at the Chelsea, Keith Haring, Kiss, Kissing Doesn't Kill: Greed and Indifference Do, Larry Rivers, Larry Rivers O'Hara Nude With Boots, Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin, Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, Leonard Fink, Leonard Fink Charley Inside Ramrod, lesbian, lesbian magazine, Liberation News Service, Light Gallery invitation, Liza Cowan, Lois Greenfield, Lois Greenfield Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, Max Ewing, Max Ewing Gallery of Extraordinary Portraits, Mel Odom, Melanie Hope, Melanie Hope Clit Club, Muscleboy, Museum of the City of New York, nan goldin, Nan Goldin Greer Lankton and Paul Monroe wedding, New York, New York City, New York City street photograph, New York gay culture, New York Magazine, New York queer culture, New York's queer culture, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, O'Hara Nude With Boots, Panzy Craze, Paul Monroe, Paul Monroe and Greer Lankton, Paul Monroe Chanel No. 5 earrings, Peter Hujar, Peter Hujar Quentin Crisp, Peter Hujar Susan Sontag, posing, Queen of Lesbian Pulp, Quentin Crisp, Ramrod gay club, Robert Gets Dressed at the Chelsea, Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Mapplethorpe and Jay Johnson, Robert Mapplethorpe Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, Robert Mapplethorpe Jim Sausalito, Robert Mapplethorpe Light Gallery invitation, Robert Mapplethorpe Studio Portrait, Robert Mapplethorpe X Portfolio, Shazork! invitation, Smart Club Abbey, Statue of Liberty, Sterling Paige, Sterling Paige Gladys Bentley at the Ubangi Club in Harlem, Strange Brother, Studies for a Boy Book, Studies for a Boy Book exhibition, Susan Sontag, Teri Toye necklace, the Factory, The Piers Hudson River, THE RAMROD, The Young Physique, The Young Physique magazine, Tseng Kwong Chi, Tseng Kwong Chi Bill T. Jones Body Painting with Keith Haring, Tseng Kwong Chi East Meets West, Tseng Kwong Chi New York Statue of Liberty, Twilight Men, Ubangi Club, Ultra Violet, Ultra Violet modeling Mapplethorpe-designed jewelry, Underground Culture, Underground Culture in New York, Upwardly Mobile Home, Valerie Santagto, Valerie Santagto Robert Mapplethorpe and Jay Johnson, Vanity Fair

Exhibition dates: 7th October 2016 – 26th February 2017

An exhibition showcasing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer artistic life in New York City through the social networks of Leonard Bernstein, Mercedes de Acosta, Harmony Hammond, Bill T. Jones, Lincoln Kirstein, Greer Lankton, George Platt Lynes, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Andy Warhol.

Curators: Donald Albrecht, MCNY curator of architecture and design, and Stephen Vider, MCNY Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow.

Part two of this monster posting on the exhibition Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York at the Museum of the City of New York.

Highlights include photographs by Carl Van Vechten; art work by and of Andy Warhol; a video of the “Panzy Craze” of the the 1920s and 1930s; a photograph of a very young and skinny Robert Mapplethorpe and some of his early art work; some wonderful subversiveness from Greer Lankton; two glorious photographs from one of my favourite artists, Peter Hujar; and a great selection of book covers and posters, including the ever so sensual, German Expressionist inspired Nocturnes for the King of Naples cover art by Mel Odom.

Marcus

.
Many thank to the Museum of the City of New York for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Themes

Printing

Foujita
“Helen Morgan Jr. And Jean Malin at the Smart Club Abbey”
Vanity Fair
February 1931
Private collection

Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita (藤田嗣治 Fujita Tsuguharu, November 27, 1886 – January 29, 1968) was a Japanese-French painter and printmaker born in Tokyo, Japan, who applied Japanese ink techniques to Western style paintings. He has been called “the most important Japanese artist working in the West during the 20th century”. His Book of Cats, published in New York by Covici Friede, 1930, with 20 etched plate drawings by Foujita, is one of the top 500 (in price) rare books ever sold, and is ranked by rare book dealers as “the most popular and desirable book on cats ever published”.

André Tellier
Twilight Men (Greenberg, New York)
1931
Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University

First published in 1931, this is an extremely uncommon early novel set in New York City of homosexuality and a young man whose gay tendencies infuriates his father, who attempts to set him upon the “path of normality” by hiring a mistress to seduce him.

“Like many early gay novels, the book does not have a happy ending: the main character becomes addicted to drugs, murders his father, and kills himself. This theme (the gay monster or the gay degenerate) occurs very frequently before the 1960’s. Originally, this was the only way that a book with any kind of gay themes could even be published; that is, it was only palatable – or even legal – to feature a gay protagonist if that person “gets what’s coming to him” in the end.

The February 1934 issue of Chanticleer, a gay literary “magazine,” includes reviews by Henry Gerber of several novels, including Twilight Men. He wrote: “TWILIGHT MEN, by Andre Tellier, deals with a young Frenchman, who comes to America, is introduced into homosexual society in New York, becomes a drug addict for no obvious reason, finally kills his father and commits suicide. It is again excellent anti-homosexual propaganda, although the plot is too silly to convince anyone who has known homosexual people at all.”

Little has been written about the author, Andre Tellier, himself. He wrote other books, including A Woman of Paris, The Magnificent Sin, Vagabond April, and Witchfire; but nothing else is really known about him.” (Text from the Somewhere Books website)

Blair Niles
Strange Brother (Horace Liveright, New York)
1931
Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University

Strange Brother is a gay novel written by Blair Niles published in 1931. The story is about a platonic relationship between a heterosexual woman and a gay man and takes place in New York City in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Strange Brother provides an early and objective documentation of homosexual issues during the Harlem Renaissance.

Mark Thornton, the story’s protagonist, moves to New York City in hopes of feeling like less of an outsider. At a nightclub in Harlem he meets and befriends June Westbrook. One night they witness a man named Nelly being arrested. June encourages Mark to investigate. This leads Mark to attend Nelly’s trial, where he is found guilty and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment on Welfare Island for his feminine affections and gestures. Next Mark researches the crimes against nature sections of the penal code. Shaken up by his findings and the events, Mark confesses his own homosexuality to June.

Mark and June’s friendship continues to grow, and June introduces Mark to a number of friends in her social circle. Various social interactions ensue including a dinner party for a departing professor, a trip to a nightspot featuring a singer called Glory who sings Creole Love Call and attending a drag ball. Despite reading Walt Whitman’s poetry collection Leaves of Grass, Edward Carpenter’s series of papers Love’s Coming of Age, and Countee Cullen’s poetry, Mark is afraid to come out. Subsequently, Mark is threatened with being outed at work. In response to this threat, Mark commits suicide by shooting himself.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Ann Bannon
I Am a Woman (Gold Medal Books, New York)
1959
Private collection

The classic 1950s novel from the Queen of Lesbian Pulp. “For contemporary readers the books offer a valuable record of gay and lesbian life in the 1950s. Most are set in Greenwich Village, and Ms. Bannon’s descriptions of bars, clubs and apartment parties vividly evoke a vanished community. Her characters also have historical value. Whereas most lesbians in pulp are stereotypes who get punished for their desires, Beebo and her friends are accessibly human. Their struggles with love and relationships are engrossing today, and half a century ago they were revolutionary.” ~ New York Times “Sex. Sleeze. Depravity. Oh, the twisted passions of the twilight world of lesbian pulp fiction.” ~ Chicago Free Press “Little did Bannon know that her stories would become legends, inspiring countless fledgling dykes to flock to the Village, dog-eared copies of her books in hand, to find their own Beebos and Lauras and others who shared the love they dared not name.” ~ San Francisco Bay Guardian “Ann Bannon is a pioneer of dyke drama.” ~ On Our Backs “When I was young, Bannon’s books let me imagine myself into her New York City neighborhoods of short-haired, dark-eyed butch women and stubborn, tight-lipped secretaries with hearts ready to be broken. I would have dated Beebo, no question.” ~ Dorothy Allison “Bannon’s books grab you and don’t let go.” ~ Village Voice

The Young Physique
October/November 1964
Collection of Kelly McKaig

Muscleboy
March/April 1965
Collection of Kelly McKaig

Design by Gran Fury for Art Against AIDS/On The Road and Creative Time, Inc.
Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do
1989
Bus poster
Gran Fury, Courtesy The New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division

Placemaking: Cruising

Anonymous photographer
New York City street photograph
1960s
Collection of Philip Aarons and Shelley Fox Aarons, New York

Leonard Fink
Charley Inside Ramrod
c. 1976
Courtesy LGBT Community Center National History Archive

THE RAMROD, 394 West Street, (between Charles and West 10th Streets). Constructed in the 1850’s this building (actually two, that were attached) housed S. J. Seely & Co., a lime dealer, and C. August, (on the corner) a porter house, and private residence. In the late 70’s it was one of the most popular leather bars in New York. Attracting a large motorcycle clientele, West Street always had a plethora of bikes parked out front. The doorman, Rico, had a long black bushy beard, and an ever present black cowboy hat, also he wore on his hand a glove with sharp stainless steel blades attached to it, (sort of a precursor to Freddie Kruger). The bar, and Rico could be very intimidating, if you were new, or “Brown” as the uninitiated were called… referring to the brown leather they wore.

Greenwich Village: A Gay History

In June 1993, the Estate of Leonard Fink donated a photographic collection to The Center in New York City through its executor, Steven E. Bing. The materials in the Fink Estate was willed to four AIDS related organisations who gave all of the rights to the photos to the Center Archive. Some of these were signed “Len Elliot,” which might have ben a pseudonym of Fink’s. The collection consists of over 25,000 negatives and images capturing Greenwich Village and much of the spirit of the late 60s and 70s. Some of the most well known images in the collection are Fink’s work at “The Piers” along the Hudson River. Fink documented over 25 years of gay life in New York City but his photography was never exhibited or published in his lifetime. He was self taught and used an old 35mm camera while working out of a homemade darkroom in his West 92nd Street apartment.

Text from the Gay Cities website

Leonard Fink was an amateur photographer who documented over 25 years of gay life in New York including parades, bars, and especially the west side piers. He worked in complete obscurity and was apparently very reclusive. His photographs were seen by only a few close friends and were never exhibited or published in his lifetime. He seems to have taught himself photography using an old 35mm camera and a homemade darkroom in his small apartment on West 92nd street. He lived frugally, spending much of his income on photographic supplies which he bought in bulk and stored in his darkroom and his bedroom. He stored the prints and negatives in a file cabinet. By the time of his death, the photos in the file cabinet covered a period from 1954 to 1992. His photographs of gay life begin with groups of gay men photographed in Greenwich Village in 1967. His photographs of Gay Pride parades begin with the first parade in 1970. His earlier photographs are of friends, trips to Europe, and scenes in New York. Leonard Fink was a colourful and ubiquitous character in the Village and at Pride parades, usually appearing on roller skates in short cut-offs, and a tight t-shirt with cameras always around his neck. He sometimes arrived on a bicycle or a motorcycle. He was born in 1930. His father and older brother were both physicians. He worked for many years as an attorney for the New York Transit Authority. He died of AIDS in 1993.

Text from The Center website

Posing

James VanDerZee
Beau of the Ball
1926
Gelatin silver print
Donna Mussenden VanDerZee

James Van Der Zee (June 29, 1886 – May 15, 1983) was an African-American photographer best known for his portraits of black New Yorkers. He was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Aside from the artistic merits of his work, Van Der Zee produced the most comprehensive documentation of the period. Among his most famous subjects during this time were Marcus Garvey, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Countee Cullen…

Van Der Zee worked predominantly in the studio and used a variety of props, including architectural elements, backdrops, and costumes, to achieve stylized tableaux vivant in keeping with late Victorian and Edwardian visual traditions. Sitters often copied celebrities of the 1920s and 1930s in their poses and expressions, and he retouched negatives and prints heavily to achieve an aura of glamour…

Works by Van Der Zee are artistic as well as technically proficient. His work was in high demand, in part due to his experimentation and skill in double exposures and in retouching negatives of children. One theme that recurs in his photographs was the emergent black middle class, which he captured using traditional techniques in often idealistic images. Negatives were retouched to show glamor and an aura of perfection. This affected the likeness of the person photographed, but he felt each photo should transcend the subject. His carefully posed family portraits reveal that the family unit was an important aspect of Van Der Zee’s life. “I tried to see that every picture was better-looking than the person.” “I had one woman come to me and say ‘Mr.Van Der Zee my friends tell thats a nice picture, But it doesn’t look like you.’ That was my style.” Said Van Der Zee.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Carl Van Vechten
Anna May Wong
1932
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York, Gift of Carl Van Vechten

Little known today, Carl Van Vechten was a prolific novelist, critic, photographer, and promoter of all things modern, most actively engaged in the city’s cultural life during the 1920s and ’30s. The City Museum is rich in Van Vechten materials; its collections include about 2,200 photographs taken by him and 3,000 Christmas cards sent to him and his wife, film and theater actress Fania Marinoff. Taken together, they chronicle Van Vechten’s influential circles of friends and colleagues – a hybrid mash-up that defines the modern America at the heart of White’s new book. Images and correspondence in the City Museum’s collection range from Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes to writer Zelda Fitzgerald (wife of F. Scott), and playwright Eugene O’Neill.

Around 1920 Van Vechten gave up journalism for fiction and over the next decade wrote hotly debated novels about Jazz Age Manhattan. His 1923 book The Blind Bow-Boy, for example, is a classic of gay camp and a public expression of Van Vechten’s sexual orientation; while he and Marinoff were married from 1914 until Van Vechten’s death in 1964, he had numerous homosexual relationships… Van Vechten’s role in the Harlem Renaissance remains a controversial topic. To some he’s a valuable bridge between white and black New Yorkers, to others he’s an outsider who patronised and exploited his African-American subjects…

Carl Van Vechten abandoned writing altogether in the early 1930s and embraced photography, a field he would pursue until his death. All told, it is estimated that Van Vechten took some 15,000 photographs. Because his inherited wealth offered him financial independence, Van Vechten took pictures for his own pleasure, usually inviting local and visiting celebrities to a studio he set up in his own apartment. While Van Vechten was aware of the stylistic artifice of such contemporary commercial photographers as Edward Steichen and Cecil Beaton, he stood apart from them. He used a small-format camera, and his aesthetic, which included deep and dramatic shadows that sometimes obscured his subjects’ faces, resulted in picture-making that was far more immediate and spontaneous than that of his contemporaries. Using this technique, Van Vechten photographed musicians Billie Holiday and George Gershwin, Hollywood actors Laurence Olivier and Anna May Wong, and writers Sinclair Lewis and Clifford Odets, to name only a few. The sum of Van Vechten’s work, according to photography historian Keith F. Davis, “constitutes the single most integrated vision of American arts and letters produced in his era.”

Donald Albrecht. “Carl Van Vechten and Modern New York,” on the Museum of the City of New York website

Anna May Wong (January 3, 1905 – February 3, 1961) was an American actress. She is considered to be the first Chinese American movie star, and also the first Asian American actress to gain international recognition. Her long and varied career spanned silent film, sound film, television, stage and radio…

Wong’s image and career have left a legacy. Through her films, public appearances and prominent magazine features, she helped to humanise Asian Americans to white audiences during a period of overt racism and discrimination. Asian Americans, especially the Chinese, had been viewed as perpetually foreign in U.S. society but Wong’s films and public image established her as an Asian-American citizen at a time when laws discriminated against Asian immigration and citizenship. Wong’s hybrid image dispelled contemporary notions that the East and West were inherently different.

See an excellent short biography on the Wikipedia website

Carl Van Vechten
Hugh Laing
1941
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York, Gift of Carl Van Vechten

Hugh Laing (6 June 1911 – 10 May 1988) was one of the most significant dramatic ballet dancers of the 20th-century. He was the partner of choreographer Antony Tudor. Known for his good looks and the intensity of his stage presence, Laing was never considered a great technician, yet his powers of characterisation and his sense of theatrical timing were considered remarkable. His profile as a significant dancer of his era was almost certainly enhanced by Tudor’s choreographing to his undoubted strengths and Laing is generally regarded as one of the finest dramatic dancers of 20th-century ballet. He remained Tudor’s artistic collaborator and companion until the choreographer’s death in 1987.

Carl Van Vechten
Alvin Ailey
1955
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York, Gift of Carl Van Vechten

Alvin Ailey (January 5, 1931 – December 1, 1989) was an African-American choreographer and activist who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York City. He is credited with popularizing modern dance and revolutionizing African-American participation in 20th-century concert dance. His company gained the nickname “Cultural Ambassador to the World” because of its extensive international touring. Ailey’s choreographic masterpiece Revelations is believed to be the best known and most often seen modern dance performance…

Ailey made use of any combination of dance techniques that best suited the theatrical moment. Valuing eclecticism, he created more a dance style than a technique. He said that what he wanted from a dancer was a long, unbroken leg line and deftly articulated legs and feet (“a ballet bottom”) combined with a dramatically expressive upper torso (“a modern top”). “What I like is the line and technical range that classical ballet gives to the body. But I still want to project to the audience the expressiveness that only modern dance offers, especially for the inner kinds of things.”

Ailey’s dancers came to his company with training from a variety of other schools, from ballet to modern and jazz and later hip-hop. He was unique in that he did not train his dancers in a specific technique before they performed his choreography. He approached his dancers more in the manner of a jazz conductor, requiring them to infuse his choreography with a personal style that best suited their individual talents. This openness to input from dancers heralded a paradigm shift that brought concert dance into harmony with other forms of African-American expression, including big band jazz.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Larry Rivers
O’Hara Nude With Boots
1954
Oil on canvas
Collection of the Larry Rivers Foundation

“Among Rivers’ portraits of the mid-1950s, the most notable and controversial work for a discussion of the relationship among autobiography, sexuality, and art is O’Hara, which he painted during January 1954 as he re-entered an emotional relationship with the sitter. According to [poet Frank] O’Hara’s biographer, Brad Gooch, Rivers and O’Hara had a relatively short, turbulent romance that began in 1952m but during 1953 the two men became involved in other romantic relationships…. Beginning in 1954, however, Rivers and O’Hara resumed their intimate relationship, which then lasted less than a year…

A nude of a contemporary figure on such a huge scale as O’Hara appeared unusual and even controversial in the 1950s New York art world. Rivers recalled that when the painting was first shown at the Whitney Annual in 1955, a guard often stood in front of it to ensure that the painting would not be defaced or damaged: “There was something about the male nude that seemed to be more of a problem than the female nude.” Some contemporary viewers where shocked by O’Hara, given its depiction of a naked male body with meticulous attention to the genitals.”

Dong-Yeon Koh. Larry Rivers and Frank O’Hara: Reframing Male Sexualities Phd dissertation 2006, pp. 196-198.

Beauford Delaney
James Baldwin
c. 1957
Oil on canvasboard
Halley K. Harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld, New York

Beauford Delaney (December 30, 1901 – March 26, 1979) was an American modernist painter. He is remembered for his work with the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as his later works in abstract expressionism following his move to Paris in the 1950s.

In his Introduction to the Exhibition of Beauford Delaney opening December 4, 1964 at the Gallery Lambert, James Baldwin wrote, “the darkness of Beauford’s beginnings, in Tennessee, many years ago, was a black-blue midnight indeed, opaque and full of sorrow. And I do not know, nor will any of us ever really know, what kind of strength it was that enabled him to make so dogged and splendid a journey.”

James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His essays, as collected in Notes of a Native Son (1955), explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th-century America, and their inevitable if unnameable tensions. Some Baldwin essays are book-length, for instance The Fire Next Time (1963), No Name in the Street (1972), and The Devil Finds Work (1976).

Baldwin’s novels and plays fictionalise fundamental personal questions and dilemmas amid complex social and psychological pressures thwarting the equitable integration not only of black people, but also of gay and bisexual men, while depicting some internalised obstacles to such individuals’ quests for acceptance. Such dynamics are prominent in Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room, written in 1956, well before the gay liberation movement.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Performing

New York’s queer cultures gained remarkable visibility on the city’s stages in the 1920 and 1930s. Broadway producers and nightclub owners put on plays and acts exploring gay and lesbian themes. They launched a popular “Panzy Craze,” where minorities where accepted. This period lasted until the mid-1930s when morals and ethics changed because of right-wing pressure. The film code was then in full force to protect society’s “morals” and there was, once more, open hostility towards minorities that latest into the 1970s.

With permission of the Museum of the City of New York for Art Blart

The Museum of the City of New York
Film compiliation
Produced by Cramersound

Max Ewing
Gallery of Extraordinary Portraits
1928
Courtesy Yale University, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library

Max Ewing’s Gallery of Extraordinary Portraits encapsulates the exhibition’s wider exploration of queer communities in 20th-century New York. Ewing was a novelist, composer, pianist, and sculptor who created this gallery in the walk-in closet of his Manhattan studio apartment on West 31st Street. His semi-public closet exhibition paid homage to interracial, gay, and artistic communities with images of friends and celebrities plastered floor to ceiling, corner to corner.

Sterling Paige
Gladys Bentley at the Ubangi Club in Harlem
early 1930s
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY

1960-1995

Portraits

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol
Studies for a Boy Book exhibition announcement for Bodley Gallery
c. 1956
Offset lithograph Susan Sheehan Gallery, New York

Andy Warhol
Gee, Merrie Shoes
1956
Hand colored offset lithograph
Susan Sheehan Gallery, New York

Andy Warhol
Cecil Beaton’s Feet
1961
Black ink on buff wove paper
Philadephia Museum of Art
The Henry P. Mcllhenny Collection in memory of Frances P. Mcllhenny, 1986

Cecil Beaton
Andy Warhol and Candy Darling, New York
1969
Gelatin silver print
© The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s

Candy Darling (November 24, 1944 – March 21, 1974) was an American transgender actress, best known as a Warhol Superstar. She starred in Andy Warhol’s films Flesh (1968) and Women in Revolt (1971), and was a muse of the protopunk band The Velvet Underground.

Harmony Hammond

Liberation News Service #624, featuring Harmony Hammond, right, with daughter, Tanya, at the Christopher Street Liberation Day Gay Pride March, photograph by Cidne Hart for Liberation News Service, July 3, 1974
Private collection

Harmony Hammond
An Oval Braid
1972
Charcoal on paper
Courtesy the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York

Harmony Hammond
Fan Lady meets Cactus Lady
1981
Lithograph
Courtesy the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York

Robert Mapplethorpe

Judy Linn
Robert Gets Dressed at the Chelsea, #3
1970
Modern digital print
Courtesy the Artist and Susanne Hilberry Gallery

Gay Power, Volume 1, No 16, April 15, 1970
Alternative Press Collection, Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries

Robert Mapplethorpe
Light Gallery invitation
1973
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles California

Ultra Violet modeling Mapplethorpe-designed jewelry
c. 1975
Gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to The J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Isabelle Collin Dufresne (stage name Ultra Violet; 6 September 1935 – 14 June 2014) was a French-American artist, author, and both a colleague of Andy Warhol and one of the pop artist’s so-called superstars. Earlier in her career, she worked for and studied with surrealist artist Salvador Dalí. Dufresne lived and worked in New York City, and also had a studio in Nice, France…

In 1954, after a meeting with Salvador Dalí, she became his “muse”, pupil, studio assistant, and lover in both Port Lligat, Spain, and in New York City. Later, she would recall, “I realized that I was ‘surreal’, which I never knew until I met Dalí”. In the 1960s, Dufresne began to follow the progressive American Pop Art scene including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist.

In 1963, Dalí introduced Dufresne to Andy Warhol, and soon she moved into the orbit of his unorthodox studio, “The Factory”. In 1964 she selected the stage name “Ultra Violet” at Warhol’s suggestion, because it was her preferred fashion – her hair color at the time was often violet or lilac. She became one of many “superstars” in Warhol’s Factory, and played multiple roles in over a dozen films between 1965 and 1974…

In the 1980s, she gradually drifted away from the Factory scene, taking a lower profile and working independently on her own art. In her autobiography, published the year after Warhol’s unexpected demise in 1987, she chronicled the activities of many Warhol superstars, including several untimely deaths during and after the Factory years…

In 1990 she opened a studio in Nice and wrote another book detailing her own ideas about art, L’Ultratique. She lived and worked as an artist in New York City, and also maintained a studio in Nice for the rest of her life.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Valerie Santagto
Robert Mapplethorpe, front, and Jay Johnson in Mapplethorpe designed jewelry
c. 1970-75
Gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to The J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Robert Mapplethorpe
X Portfolio with Jim, Sausalito
1978
Black silk clamshell case with gelatin silver print photographs mounted on pure rag board
Designed by John Cheim
Courtesy Yoshi Gallery, New York and Cheim & Read, New York

Greer Lankton

Einsteins installation designed by Paul Monroe for Gay Gotham, 2016
Courtesy of Greer Lankton Archives Museum

Greer Lankton
Mini-Einsteins
1987
Cardboard, glass, paint, styrofoam board

Andy Warhol
1990
Fabric, wire, glass, human hair

Teri Toye
1988
Fabric, wire, glass, human hair

Siamese Twins
1988
Paper, wire, fabric

Greer Lankton (dolls and photo)
Einsteins “Circus” window display by Greer Lankton and Paul Monroe
1986
Courtesy Paul Monroe for Greer Lankton Archives Museum

Greer Lankton (1958 – November 18, 1996) was an American artist known for creating lifelike, sewn dolls that were often modelled on friends and celebrities and posed in elaborate theatrical settings. She was a key figure in the East Village art scene of the 1980s in New York.

Gender and sexuality are recurring themes in Lankton’s art. Her dolls are created in the likeness of those society calls “freaks”, and have often been compared to the surrealist works of Hans Bellmer, who made surreal dolls with interchangeable limbs. She created figures that were simultaneously distressing and glamorous, as if they were both victim and perpetrator of their existence.

In 1981 Lankton was featured in the seminal “New York/New Wave” exhibition at P.S.1 in Long Island City, and began to show her work in the East Village at Civilian Warfare. She gained an almost cult following among East Village residents from her highly theatrical window displays she designed for Einstein’s, the boutique that was run by her husband, Paul Monroe, at 96 East Seventh Street. Besides her more emotionally charged dolls, Lankton also created commissioned portrait dolls. These include a 1989 doll of Diana Vreeland that was commissioned for a window display at Barney’s as well as shrines to her icons, such as Candy Darling.

Critic Roberta Smith described her works in the New York Times as: “Beautifully sewn, with extravagant clothes, make-up and hairstyles, they were at once glamorous and grotesque and exuded intense, Expressionistic personalities that reminded some observers of Egon Schiele. They presaged many of the concerns of 90’s art, including the emphasis on the body, sexuality, fashion and, in their resemblance to puppets, performance.”

Photographer Nan Goldin said of her work, “Greer was one of the pioneers who blurred the line between folk art and fine art.” She had spots in the prestigious Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale, both in 1995, where her busts of Candy Darling, circus fat ladies, and dismembered heads gained her notoriety…

Greer was friends with photographer Nan Goldin, and lived in her apartment in the early 80’s, often posing for her. She also played muse to photographers like David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar.

Text from the Wikipedia website

“Writing about the wax dolls of German artist Lotte Pritzel (to whom Lankton’s own work bears a strong family resemblance), Rainer Maria Rilke noted: “With the doll we had to assert ourselves, because if we surrendered to it there was nobody there. It made no response, so we got into the habit of doing things for it, splitting our own slowly expanding nature into opposing parts and to some extent using the doll to establish distance between ourselves and the amorphous world pouring into us” [“Dolls: On the Wax Dolls of Lotte Pritzel,” tr. Idris Parry]. This relationship imbues the doll with its “soul,” Rilke writes, arguing that it is the extremity of this attachment that leads us to both desire and reject the doll. Unalterable strangeness: Lankton’s own work is plotted along the rejection-desire axis, granting the work a peculiar levity that hovers between fearsome and friendly…

Lankton’s art is both realistic and unrealistic, a difficult balance that is not unlike Candy Darling’s work as an actor, which often operated at the juncture between self-conscious play and unanticipated reality to evoke, again, unalterable strangeness. Following Douglas Crimp’s description of the superstar as someone whose “self … recognizes otherness already there in itself [and] performs its own self-alienation” [Our Kind of Movie: The Films of Andy Warhol, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012], Lankton likewise performs the double work of representing bodies (hers and others) while asserting their alienation. Darling rehearsed and played herself in order to be someone else. It might be said that Lankton rehearsed and played others in order to be herself.”

Extract from “Unalterable Strangeness: Andrew Durbin and Paul Monroe on Greer Lankton,” on the Flash Art website, March – April 2015

Paul Monroe
Chanel No. 5 earrings
1985
Glass (actual miniature Chanel products filled with No. 5), 14k gold wire and glass pearls

Candelabra ring
1986
Metal, chain, glass jewels and wax

Paul Monroe and Greer Lankton
Teri Toye necklace
1985
Clay, acrylic paint, gold metal chain and rhinestones

Einsteins promotional cards 1986-1992
Einsteins business card, 1985

Nan Goldin
Greer Lankton and Paul Monroe wedding
1987
Greer Lankton Archives Museum

Bill T. Jones

Lois Greenfield
Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane
1982
Modern print Courtesy Lois Greenfield Studio

Robert Mapplethorpe
Studio Portrait (Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane)
1986
Private Collection of Bill T. Jones

Tseng Kwong Chi
Bill T. Jones Body Painting with Keith Haring
1983
Silver gelatin selenium-toned print
© Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc., New York. Body Drawing on Bill T. Jones by Keith Haring
© 1983 Keith Haring Foundation

Huck Snyder
Small mask from Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin
1990
Painted cardboard and fabric
New York Live Arts

Huck Snyder was a visual artist and a designer of vivid stage settings for dancers and performance artists. He created sets and stage furniture that were surrealistic yet extremely simple and almost childlike at times. Imaginative and free in their execution and unmistakably his work, his sets often seemed inseparable from the vision of the performers with whom he worked. Huck had designed stage sets for the performance artist John Kelly beginning with sets for Diary of a Somnambulist in 1985…

Mr. Snyder also created sets for dances by Bill T. Jones and Bart Cook, and for theater pieces by Ishmael Houston-Jones. He conceived, directed and designed his own work “Circus,” a performance-art piece presented in 1987 at La Mama E.T.C. Mr. Snyder’s work has been displayed at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Dance Theater Workshop in New York. His paintings and installations have been exhibited at galleries throughout the United States and in solo and group shows in Europe and Japan.

Text from the Visual AIDS website

Themes

Downtown

Downtown invitations
Shazork! invitation, Danceteria
Late 1980s
Museum of the City of New York, Gift of Carrie Goteiner and Miriam Montaug Ashkenazy in memory of Haoui Montaug

Peter Hujar
Quentin Crisp
1982
Vintage gelatin silver print
© The Peter Hujar Archive; Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Quentin Crisp was born Denis Charles Pratt in Surrey, England, on December 25, 1908. A self-described flamboyant homosexual, Crisp changed his name in his early 20s as part of his process of reinvention. Teased mercilessly at school as a boy, Crisp left school in 1926. He studied journalism at King’s College London, but failed to graduate. He then moved on to take art classes at Regent Street Polytechnic. Crisp began visiting the cafés of Soho, London, and even worked as a prostitute for six months. Crisp was always true to himself and expressed himself by dying his long hair lavender, polishing his fingernails and toenails, and dressing in an often androgynous style. Despite the ridicule and violence often directed toward him, Crisp carried on. He tried to join the army with the outbreak of World War II, but was rejected by the medical board, who determined that he was suffering from sexual perversion. Instead, Crisp remained in London during the Blitz, entertaining American GIs, whose friendliness inculcated a love for Americans.

Crisp held a number of jobs, including engineer’s tracer, life model, and author. His most famous work, The Naked Civil Servant, detailed his life in a homophobic British society. When the book was adapted for television, Crisp began a new career as a performer and lecturer. He moved to Manhattan in 1981, when he was 72 years old; settling in a studio apartment in the Bowery. Upon meeting and spending time with Crisp, Sting was inspired to pen his hit song, “An Englishman in New York.”

Crisp continued to tour, write, and lecture; including instructions on how to live life with style and the importance of manners. Crisp landed a few roles on American television and the 1990s became his busiest decade as an actor. In 1992, Crisp took on the role of Elizabeth I in the film Orlando.

Quentin Crisp died in November 1999, just shy of his 91st birthday, while touring his one-man show.

Text from the Biography website

Peter Hujar
Susan Sontag
1975, printed 2014
Pigmented ink print
© The Peter Hujar Archive; Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Peter Hujar (born 1934) died of AIDS in 1987, leaving behind a complex and profound body of photographs. Hujar was a leading figure in the group of artists, musicians, writers, and performers at the forefront of the cultural scene in downtown New York in the 1970s and early 80s, and he was enormously admired for his completely uncompromising attitude towards work and life. He was a consummate technician, and his portraits of people, animals, and landscapes, with their exquisite black-and-white tonalities, were extremely influential. Highly emotional yet stripped of excess, Hujar’s photographs are always beautiful, although rarely in a conventional way. His extraordinary first book, Portraits in Life and Death, with an introduction by Susan Sontag, was published in 1976, but his “difficult” personality and refusal to pander to the marketplace insured that it was his last publication during his lifetime.

Text from the Peter Hujar Archive website

Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer, filmmaker, teacher, and political activist. She published her first major work, the essay “Notes on ‘Camp'”, in 1964. Her best-known works include On Photography, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, The Way We Live Now, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others, The Volcano Lover, and In America.

Sontag was active in writing and speaking about, or travelling to, areas of conflict, including during the Vietnam War and the Siege of Sarajevo. She wrote extensively about photography, culture and media, AIDS and illness, human rights, and communism and leftist ideology. Although her essays and speeches sometimes drew controversy, she has been described as “one of the most influential critics of her generation.” …

It was through her essays that Sontag gained early fame and notoriety. Sontag wrote frequently about the intersection of high and low art and expanded the dichotomy concept of form and art in every medium. She elevated camp to the status of recognition with her widely read 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp’,” which accepted art as including common, absurd and burlesque themes.

In 1977, Sontag published the series of essays On Photography. These essays are an exploration of photographs as a collection of the world, mainly by travelers or tourists, and the way we experience it… She became a role-model for many feminists and aspiring female writers during the 1960s and 1970s.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Printing

Liza Cowan (designer)
DYKE, A Quarterly
c. 1974
Flyer
Courtesy Liza Cowan and Penny House

DYKE, A Quarterly Call for poster design flyer
1976
Illustration by Liza Cowan Penny House

Christopher Street
September 1977
Private collection

Christopher Street
June 1978
Private collection

Edmund White
Nocturnes for the King of Naples
Paperback edition with cover art by Mel Odom, 1980 (originally published 1978)
Private collection

New York Magazine
June 20, 1994
1994
Courtesy New York Magazine

Posing

Eva Weiss
From left, Lois Weaver, Peggy Shaw, and Deb Margolin performing as Split Britches in ‘Upwardly Mobile Home’
1984
Contemporary archival print
Courtesy Eva Weiss Photography

Alice O’Malley
Melanie Hope, Clit Club
c. 1992
Vintage gelatin silver print
Alice O’Malley Photography

Tseng Kwong Chi
New York, NY (Statue of Liberty)
1979
Gelatin silver print
Muna Tseng Dance Projects Inc.

Tseng Kwong Chi, known as Joseph Tseng prior to his professional career (Chinese: 曾廣智; c. 1950 – March 10, 1990), was a Hong Kong-born American photographer who was active in the East Village art scene in the 1980s.

Tseng was part of an circle of artists in the 1980s New York art scene including Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and Cindy Sherman. Tseng’s most famous body of work is his self-portrait series, East Meets West, also called the “Expeditionary Series”. In the series, Tseng dressed in what he called his “Mao suit” and sunglasses (dubbed a “wickedly surrealistic persona” by the New York Times), and photographed himself situated, often emotionlessly, in front of iconic tourist sites. These included the Statue of Liberty, Cape Canaveral, Disney Land, Notre Dame de Paris, and the World Trade Center. Tseng also took tens of thousands of photographs of New York graffiti artist Keith Haring throughout the 1980s working on murals, installations and the subway. In 1984, his photographs were shown with Haring’s work at the opening of the Semaphore Gallery’s East Village location in a show titled “Art in Transit”. Tseng photographed the first Concorde landing at Kennedy International Airport, from the tarmac. According to his sister, Tseng drew artistic influence from Brassai and Cartier-Bresson.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Chantal Regnault
From left, Whitney Elite, Ira Ebony, Stewart and Chris LaBeija, Ian and Jamal Adonis, Ronald Revlon, House of Jourdan Ball, New Jersey
1989
Gelatin silver print
© Chantal Regnault

Museum of the City of New York
1220 Fifth Ave at 103rd St.,

Opening hours:
Open Daily 10am – 6pm

Museum of the City of New York website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Feb

Exhibition: ‘Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York’ at the Museum of the City of New York, New York City Part 1

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Exhibition dates: 7th October 2016 – 26th February 2017

Curators: Donald Albrecht, MCNY curator of architecture and design, and Stephen Vider, MCNY Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow.

#POD

This is part 1 of a monster, two-part posting on this fabulous extravaganza: Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York at the Museum of the City of New York, “a groundbreaking exhibition that explores New York’s role as a beacon for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) artists seeking freedom, acceptance, and community.”

Freedom. Acceptance. Community. A tripartite motto to which we could add equality (different from acceptance), echoing the Brotherhood of man of the Third Republic of France. In these days of Lumpism, we do have an idea how important these concepts are – for our civil liberties, for our sexual freedom, and for our right, our write, to choose and voice an opinion which is different from that of the oligarchy. We know we have to stand up to these bigots.

Freedom to be ourselves has always been at the core of GLBTQI identity. Our Point of Difference (#POD).

While I came out in London six short years after Stonewall, and was wearing silver hair, eye shadow, rings on every hand and pink and cream satin bomber jackets in London in the 1970s, many of the people pictured in this posting had no doubt endured numerous persecutions for who they were many years before it was acceptable to be GLBTQI. And still today in many parts of the world (Russia, Papua New Guinea, South America, and Africa) GLBTQI people face discrimination and death.

But do you know what?

The world would be a much poorer, less creative place without all of the GLBTQI people who have lived over all of the centuries of human existence… continuing to be themselves in the face of adversity and resentment. Continuing to enrich the lives of themselves and other human beings.

Are we going away? Hell no!

I have spent hours researching the people in this posting, adding sound and video provided by the Museum of the City of New York. Because this information deserves to be out there on the WWW.

As we still strive for equality or even just existence in the world, our #POD, in New York or wherever – not our assimilation into the main stream – is what makes us relevant and interesting and emotional in this world. Long may it remain so.

Dr Marcus Bunyan for Art Blart

PS The dancing in the Audio and video excerpts from Filling Station (1938) and Billy the Kid (1938), especially the latter, are a joy to behold!

.
Many thank to the Museum of the City of New York for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

1910 – 1960: Portraits

Richard Bruce Nugent

.
Richard Bruce Nugent (July 2, 1906 – May 27, 1987), aka Richard Bruce and Bruce Nugent, was a writer and painter in the Harlem Renaissance. (The Harlem Renaissance, a cultural, social, and artistic explosion that took place in Harlem, New York spanned from about 1918 until the mid-1930s). One of many gay artists of the Harlem Renaissance, he was one of few who was out publicly. Recognized initially for the few short stories and paintings that were published, Nugent had a long productive career bringing to light the creative process of gay and black culture. …

During his career in Harlem, Nugent lived with writer Wallace Thurman from 1926 – 1928 which led to the publishing of “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” in Thurman’s publication “Fire!!!”. The short story was written in a modernist stream-of-consciousness style, its subject matter was bisexuality and more specifically interracial male desire. Many of his illustrations were featured in publications, such as “Fire!!!” along with his short story. Four of his paintings were included in the Harmon Foundation’s exhibition of Negro artists, which was one of the few venues available for black artists in 1931. His only stand-alone publication, “Beyond Where the Stars Stood Still,” was issued in a limited edition by Warren Marr II in 1945. …

Nugent’s aggressive and honest approach to homoerotic and interracial desire was not necessarily in the favor of his more discreet homosexual contemporaries. Alain Locke chastised the publication “Fire!!!” for its radicalism and specifically Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” for promoting the effeminacy and decadence associated with homosexual writers.

Nugent bridged the gap between the Harlem Renaissance and the black gay movement of the 1980s and was a great inspiration to many of his contemporaries… As one of the last survivors of the Harlem Renaissance, Nugent was a sought-after interview subject in his old age, consulted by numerous biographers and writers on both black and gay history. He was interviewed in the 1984 gay documentary, “Before Stonewall,” and his work was featured in Isaac Julien’s 1989 film, Looking for Langston.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Richard Bruce Nugent
Lucifer
1930
From the Salome series
Watercolor on cardstock
Art & Artifacts Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Richard Bruce Nugent
Drawing from Alexander Gumby’s scrapbook
1920s
Ink on paper Alexander Gumby Collection of Negroiana, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University

Richard Bruce Nugent
“Drawings for Mulattoes” Numbers 2 and 3
1927
Illustration in Ebony and Topaz: A Collectanea
Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University

Richard Bruce Nugent
Self-portrait
1930s
Pencil on paper
Art & Artifacts Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Richard Bruce Nugent
Smoke, Lilies and Jade
c. 1925
Mixed-media work
Howard University Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Richard Bruce Nugent poems and prose read by Rodney Evans, director of the 2004 film Brother to Brother. Audio produced for the exhibition by Tim Cramer.

Mercedes de Acosta

Mercedes de Acosta (March 1, 1893 – May 9, 1968) was an American poet, playwright, and novelist. Four of de Acosta’s plays were produced, and she published a novel and three volumes of poetry. …

De Acosta was involved in numerous lesbian relationships with Broadway’s and Hollywood’s elite and she did not attempt to hide her sexuality; her uncloseted existence was very rare and daring in her generation. In 1916 she began an affair with actress Alla Nazimova and later with dancer Isadora Duncan. Shortly after marrying Abram Poole in 1920, de Acosta became involved in a five-year relationship with actress Eva Le Gallienne. De Acosta wrote two plays for Le Gallienne, Sandro Botticelli and Jehanne de Arc. After the financial failures of both plays they ended their relationship.

Over the next decade she was involved with several famous actresses and dancers including Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Ona Munson, and Russian ballerina Tamara Platonovna Karsavina. Additional unsubstantiated rumors include affairs with Pola Negri, Eleonora Duse, Katherine Cornell, and Alice B. Toklas.

An ardent liberal, de Acosta was committed to several political causes. Concerned about the Spanish Civil War, which began in 1936, for example, she supported the loyalist Republican government that opposed the fascist Franco regime. A tireless advocate for women’s rights, she wrote in her memoir, “I believed… in every form of independence for women and I was… an enrolled worker for women’s suffrage.” …

De Acosta’s best-known relationship was with Greta Garbo. When Garbo’s close friend, author Salka Viertel, introduced them in 1931, they quickly became involved. As their relationship developed, it became erratic and volatile with Garbo always in control. The two were very close sporadically and then apart for lengthy periods when Garbo, annoyed by Mercedes’ obsessive behaviour, coupled with her own neuroses, ignored her. In any case, they remained friends for thirty years during which time Garbo wrote de Acosta 181 letters, cards, and telegrams. About their friendship, Cecil Beaton, who was close to both women, recorded in his 1958 memoir, “Mercedes is [Garbo’s] very best friend and for 30 years has stood by her, willing to devote her life to her”.

De Acosta was described in 1955 by Garbo biographer, John Bainbridge, as “a woman of courtly manners, impeccable decorative taste and great personal elegance… a woman with a passionate and intense devotion to the art of living… and endowed with a high spirit, energy, eclectic curiosity and a varied interest in the arts.”

Text from the Wikipedia website

“After Cecil Beaton accompanied her to the theater one night in 1930, he wrote in his diary that he sensed people looking at him and questioning why he associated with “that furious lesbian.” She often boasted of her sexual prowess, saying “I can get any woman from any man.” There was perhaps justification for Alice B. Toklas’s observation, “Say what you will about Mercedes de Acosta, she’s had the most important women of the twentieth century.” …

Even though she avoided direct representation of same-sex eroticism in her writing, she freely “smuggled in” ideas and issues common to those of us in the homosexual community but she put them in a heterosexual setting. It is what one scholar calls “queening.”

Mercedes de Acosta was not hugely famous. Her contributions to the theater were minimal. Yet her story reveals a woman who stood up courageously for her beliefs and values. She seldom stumbled, even when her friends and peers turned against her. She lived her desire and paid the price. Her love for other women and her struggle for acceptance were certainly sources of her originality and fueled her writing. Perhaps the description of her as “that furious lesbian” should become an admirable attribute rather than a scornful slur.”

Robert A Schanke. “Mercedes de Acosta.”

Abram Poole
Mercedes de Acosta
1923
Oil on canvas
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Gift of Mercedes de Acosta in honor of Ala Story

Abram Poole
Mercedes de Acosta (detail)
1923
Oil on canvas
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Gift of Mercedes de Acosta in honor of Ala Story

Anonymous photographer
Eva Le Gallienne in Jehanne d’Arc
1925
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of Mercedes De Acosta

Anonymous photographer
Effie Shannon as Marie-Louise (left) and Michael Strange in the title role of L’Aiglon
1927
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York, Gift of Mr and Mrs Spencer Merriam Berger

Janet Flanner
Letter in the shape of a tulip from Janet Flanner to Mercedes de Acosta
1928
The Rosenbach, Philadelphia

George Platt Lynes
Cecil Beaton
Undated
Inscribed by Beaton to Mercedes de Acosta
The Rosenbach, Philadelphia

George Hoyningen-Huene
Mercedes de Acosta
1934
Modern print
Courtesy The Rosenbach, Philadelphia

Cecil Beaton
From left, Alfred Stieglitz, Mercedes de Acosta, and Georgia O’Keeffe
c. 1943
Gelatin silver print
The Rosenbach, Philadelphia

Works by Mercedes de Acosta works read by performers Moe Angelos and Carmelita Tropicana. Audio produced for the exhibition by Tim Cramer.

“The Museum of the City of New York presents Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York, a groundbreaking exhibition that explores New York’s role as a beacon for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) artists seeking freedom, acceptance, and community.

The first exhibition of its kind to be presented by a New York City cultural institution in terms of depth and scope, Gay Gotham peels back the layers of New York City’s LGBT, or queer, life that thrived even in the shadows to reveal an often-hidden side of the city’s history and underscore the power of artistic collaboration to transcend oppression. The exhibition, which runs through February 26, 2017, will examine the worlds of New York’s famous LGBT cultural innovators, as well as those of ordinary citizens. The exhibition will also identify historical trends that led to the increased visibility of LGBT artists over the course of the 20th century.

“New York City, an international source of creativity throughout its history, provided the canvas, stage, and backdrop for LGBT artists and cultural innovators, and helped make it possible for them to transcend oppression and discrimination,” says Whitney Donhauser, Ronay Menschel Director of the Museum of the City of New York. “Gay Gotham not only exhibits, but also celebrates the vibrant lives of artists who were suffering from injustice, and offers optimism for tomorrow.”

Gay Gotham brings to life the queer networks that sprang up in the city from the early-20th century through the mid-1990s – a series of artistic subcultures whose radical ideas had lasting effects on the mainstream. It explores the artistic achievements and creative networks of ten individuals, as well as four key ways that such networks are made: place-making (making places to meet and work together); posing (creating portraits of friends and artists); printing (creating publications); and performing (representing LGBT life in theater and film). The show is also organized into three chronological sections, dividing LGBT art and underground culture in 20th century New York:

Visible Subcultures: 1910 – 1930
Open Secrets: 1930 – 1960
Out New York: 1960 – 1995

.
Occupying two full galleries, Gay Gotham features 225 works from a mix of iconic and lesser-known LGBT artists, whose work will be presented chronologically to reveal the trajectory of queer life in 20th century New York: composer Leonard Bernstein; playwright, poet and novelist Mercedes de Acosta; activist Harmony Hammond; dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones; arts impresario Lincoln Kirstein; artist Greer Lankton; photographer George Platt Lynes; artist and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe; artist and author Richard Bruce Nugent; and artist Andy Warhol. Each of these individuals will be examined within the overlapping networks of numerous fellow artists and colleagues who advanced their professional careers, sustained their social lives, and propelled them into the city and nation’s cultural mainstream.

Gay Gotham, curated by Donald Albrecht, MCNY curator of architecture and design, and Stephen Vider, MCNY Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, includes paintings, drawings, photographs, sound recordings, and films that explore queer artistic achievements in music, the visual arts and theater during the 20th century. Ephemera such as correspondence and scrapbooks are also displayed, illuminating the artists’ personal bonds and revealing secrets that were scandal provoking in their time and remain largely unknown today.

On the impetus behind the show, Curator Donald Albrecht explained: “While exploring New York City’s gay artistic communities in past shows here at the Museum, I found them to be consistently hidden in plain sight and thought an exhibition ‘un-hiding’ these queer networks would be a revelation. Gay Gotham is the result, and I hope visitors gain an understanding of the cultural communities that formed as a response to injustice.”

Some of the works that will be featured in the show are: Bernstein’s own annotated copy of Romeo and Juliet, the inspiration for the 1957 Broadway musical West Side Story, alongside original drawings of the production’s sets and costumes; a circa 1970 handmade, collaged scrapbook by Robert Mapplethorpe that includes images of friends and lovers like Patti Smith; Arnie Zane’s video of Keith Haring hand painting the body of Zane’s partner, dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones – a collaboration of three leaders of the 1980s queer downtown art scene; several of artist Greer Lankton’s dolls, including a life-size one of Diana Vreeland made in 1989 for a Barneys display window.

Joel Sanders Architects designed the exhibition to give spatial expression to the show’s two main themes: the people and places that allowed queer artistic life to flourish in New York City. On both floors of the exhibition, the perimeter gallery walls are painted a deep purple, the color traditionally associated with queer culture. The center of both galleries will feature maps setting artistic explorations against the evolving backdrops of LGBT life in New York City, including gay neighborhoods and nightspots, as well as activist groups and key social and cultural events, such as protests and parades.

Gay Gotham will be accompanied by a 304-page book, Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York, by Donald Albrecht, with Stephen Vider and published by Skira Rizzoli. It includes more than 350 images, illustrations and background essays on the social and cultural themes of the LGBT artistic underground, as well as portraits of the show’s iconic artistic figures.”

Press release from the Museum of the City of New York

George Platt Lynes
Lincoln Kirstein
1940s-50s
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Lincoln Kirstein, 1985

Lincoln Kirstein

Lincoln Edward Kirstein (May 4, 1907 – January 5, 1996) was an American writer, impresario, art connoisseur, philanthropist, and cultural figure in New York City, noted especially as co-founder of the New York City Ballet. He developed and sustained the company with his organizing ability and fundraising for more than four decades, serving as the company’s General Director from 1946 to 1989. …

Beginning in 1919, Kirstein kept a diary continuing through the practice until the late 1930s. In a 2007 biography of Kirstein, The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein, Martin Duberman drew on his diaries, as well as Kirstein’s numerous letters. Kirstein wrote about enjoying sex with various men including Harvard undergraduates, sailors, street boys, and casual encounters in the showers at the 63rd St. YMCA. He had longer affairs with Pete Martinez, a dancer, Dan Maloney, an artist, and Jensen Yow, a conservator. Kirstein had both platonic relationships and many that started as casual sex and developed into long-term friendships…

Kirstein’s eclectic interests, ambition and keen interest in high culture, funded by independent means, drew a large circle of creative friends from many fields of the arts. These included: Glenway Wescott, George Platt Lynes, Jared French, Bernard Perlin, Pavel Tchelitchev, Katherine Anne Porter, Barbara Harrison, Gertrude Stein, Donald Windham, Cecil Beaton, Jean Cocteau, W. H. Auden, George Tooker, Margaret French Cresson, Walker Evans, Sergei Eisenstein and others.

In his later years, Kirstein struggled with bipolar disorder – mania, depression, and paranoia. He destroyed the studio of friend Dan Maloney. He sometimes had to be constrained in a straitjacket for weeks at a psychiatric hospital. His illness did not generally affect his professional creativity until the end of his life.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Ballet in America

After seeing ballets by George Balanchine, including Prodigal Son (the first Balanchine work he was to experience) in 1929 and Les Ballets 1933 in Paris, Kirstein met the choreographer for the first time in London in 1933 and immediately invited him to work in the United States where together they would build an American ballet tradition. Balanchine’s response, “But, first a school.” is now part of ballet history. In 1934, the School of American Ballet opened its doors on Madison Avenue with Kirstein as president, a post he held until his retirement in 1989.

Together, Balanchine and Kirstein embarked on the creation of a permanent company to realize their vision. There would be four such enterprises before the establishment of New York City Ballet in 1948. The first of these, American Ballet Company, toured in the eastern United States and was the resident ballet troupe for the Metropolitan Opera (performing under the name American Ballet Ensemble) from 1935-1938. A second company, Ballet Caravan was founded in 1936 to tour and produced notably, among other American works, Lew Christensen’s Filling Station and Eugene Loring’s Billy the Kid with libretti by Kirstein. It was succeeded by American Ballet Caravan which made a much-acclaimed tour of South America in 1941 before disbanding. Upon Kirstein’s return to the States from military service in World War II, Ballet Society was founded in 1946 to present performances for a subscription audience. Following a 1948 performance of Orpheus, the invitation came from City Center’s then-Chairman of the Executive Committee, Morton Baum, to establish a resident company to be known as New York City Ballet as part of the City Center of Music and Drama. Kirstein became the Company’s General Director and served in that capacity until relinquishing the post in 1989. …

The distinguished English critic Clement Crisp has written, “Lincoln Kirstein was a man of protean gifts and immense intellectual and organizational energy. He was one of those rare talents who touched the entire artistic life of their time: ballet, film, literature, theater, paintings, sculpture, photography – all occupied his attention. These many and other seemingly disparate concerns were united by a guiding intelligence which was uncompromising and uncompromisingly generous and served as the artistic conscience of his era. This was the essentially American quality of his work: that desire to ameliorate and inspire a society to the goal of a more humane and imaginatively rich world. To a grand extent his work was as intermediary between the arts and a vast public who benefited from his genius.”

Classical dance amplified by Balanchine’s own genius, expressed perfectly Lincoln’s immovable conviction that each human being contains the seeds of perfectibility. When he was 28, a significant year, he wrote that ballet provided the means for the human body in heightened capability, to set a poetic standard for each person’s ideal capacity. And he wrote and worked toward that standard in connection with everything he cared for all his life. Lincoln’s unending personal struggles, and searching and learning, led him in turn to give so much of himself to others. With uncanny intuition he understood who each one of us was: artists, students, friends, supporters alike were woven into a family with common cause.

Text from the New York City Ballet website

Lincoln Kirstein
Blast at Ballet: A Corrective for the American Audience (Marstin Press, New York)
1938
Private collection

George Platt Lynes
From left, Michael Kidd, Beatrice Tomkins, and Ruby Asquith in Billy the Kid
1938, printed c. 1953
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Lincoln Kirstein, 1985

Paul Cadmus
“Ray” costume design for the ballet Filling Station
1937
Gouache, pencil, and ink on paper
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Lincoln Kirstein, 1941

Paul Cadmus

In the gorgeous, occasionally garish, always gratifying works of the great American artist Paul Cadmus, sailors and sunbathers, models and mannequins, nitwits and nudes all are suffused with a sensuality born equally of idyllic splendor and urban squalor, natural grace and graceful artifice. Active since the 1930s as a renderer of pretty boys and ugly ploys, Cadmus has spent many remarkable decades honing a singularly complex style of idealized sexuality and vivid displeasure in justly celebrated paintings, drawings and etchings of nude figures, fantastical scenes and supercharged allegories.

While often working quite deliberately in the genres of social satire and community critique, Cadmus is just as compelling when exploring the personal and political proclivities of bodies in rest and motion. Male bodies, that is. More than most artists of his substantial stature, Cadmus has detailed with exquisite tenderness and unblinking bluntness the manner in which gay males – and the gay male gaze – represent the polemics of aesthetics. …

As much as some younger artists would like to see Cadmus adopt the persona of nonagenarian poster boy for Gay Y2K, he’s generally content to let his images speak for themselves. That’s his choice to make; more perplexing, frankly, is the majority of critical writing on Cadmus that blatantly ignores his gay perspective and homoerotic imagery. Lincoln Kirstein, founding director of the New York City Ballet and the artist’s self-defined bisexual brother-in-law (married to Cadmus’s sister, Fidelma), wrote the “definitive” Cadmus monograph with nary a mention of the artist’s crucial homoeroticism, preferring to tiptoe around the truth with statements like, “As for sexual factors, he has without ostentation or polemic long celebrated somatic health in boys and young men for its symbolic range of human possibility. His addiction to aspects of physical splendor has never been provocative, sly, nor ambitious to proselytize.”

I wish Kirstein had taken a more careful look at the slender lad sporting a box kite and a noticeable bulge in “Aviator,” or the mine’s-bigger-than-yours posturing and relentless cruising on display in “Y.M.C.A. Locker Room” … Even more telling is “Manikins,” in which two small artist’s models lovingly do the nasty atop a copy of Corydon, André Gide’s plea for queer rights.

Steven Jenkins. “Paul Cadmus: The Body Politic,” on the Queer Arts Resource website

Excerpts from Filling Station, a seminal ballet with an American theme and setting, choreographed and performed by Lew Christensen with Ballet Caravan (1938). Perhaps the most enduring and popular work by Christensen, the comic ballet combined classical dancing with vaudevillian antics.

And excerpts from Billy the Kid (1938) a ballet written by the American composer Aaron Copland on commission from Lincoln Kirstein. It was choreographed by Eugene Loring for Ballet Caravan. Along with Rodeo and Appalachian Spring, it is one of Copland’s most popular and widely performed pieces.

With permission of the Museum of the City of New York for Art Blart.

George Platt Lynes

The greatest photographer of the male nude the world has ever seen – George Platt Lynes (American, April 15, 1907 – December 6, 1955).

Lynes worked as a fashion photographer in his own studio in New York (which he opened in 1932) before moving to Hollywood in 1946 where he took the post of Chief Photographer for the Vogue studios. Although an artistic success the sojourn was a financial failure and he returned to New York in 1948. Although continuing his commercial work he became disinterested in it, concentrating his energies on photographing the male nude. He began a friendship with Dr Alfred Kinsey of the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana and helped with his sex research. Between 1949 and 1955, Lynes sold and donated much of his erotic nudes to Kinsey.1 By May 1955 he had been diagnosed terminally ill with lung cancer. He closed his studio. He destroyed much of his print and negative archives particularly his male nudes. However, it is now known that he had transferred many of these works to the Kinsey Institute. After a final trip to Europe, Lynes returned to New York City where he died.

See my full text George Platt Lynes and the male nude including many photographs and another text by Associate Professor Elspeth H. Brown (University of Toronto).

George Platt Lynes
Self-Portrait, in Tights
1948
Gelatin silver print
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Gift, Anonymous and In Kind
Canada, 1998

George Platt Lynes
Marsden Hartley
1942
Gelatin silver print
Marsden Hartley Memorial Collection, Bates College Museum of Art

George Platt Lynes
George Tooker at 5 St. Luke’s Place, New York, with Paul Cadmus and Jared French in Mirror
c. 1940
Vintage silver print
Estate of George Tooker, Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York

George Tooker

George Clair Tooker, Jr. (August 5, 1920 – March 27, 2011) was an American figurative painter. His works are associated with Magic realism, Social realism, Photorealism and Surrealism. His subjects are depicted naturally as in a photograph, but the images use flat tones, an ambiguous perspective, and alarming juxtapositions to suggest an imagined or dreamed reality. He did not agree with the association of his work with Magic realism or Surrealism, as he said, “I am after painting reality impressed on the mind so hard that it returns as a dream, but I am not after painting dreams as such, or fantasy.” …

His most well known paintings carry strong social commentary, and are often characterized as his “public” or “political” pieces. Some of these include: The Subway (1950), Government Bureau (1955-1956), The Waiting Room (1956-1957), Lunch (1964), Teller (1967), Waiting Room II (1982), Corporate Decision (1983), and Terminal (1986). These works are particularly influential, because they draw from universal experiences of modern, urban life. Many portray visually literal depictions of social withdrawal and isolation. In many ways, these images reveal the negative side of the subject matter celebrated in Impressionism. Modernity’s anonymity, mass-production, and fast pace are cast under an unforgiving, bleak, shadow-less light that conveys a sense of foreboding and isolation…

While Tooker’s “public” imagery is hostile and solemn, his “private” images are often more intimate and positive. Some of these include the ten images of the Windows series (1955-1987), Doors (1953), Guitar (1957), Toilette (1962), and the Mirror series (1962-1971). Many of these images juxtapose beauty and ugliness, youth and age, in the analysis of the female body. The space is often compressed by a curtain or close-up wall, so that the viewer is confronted by the symbolic identity of the protagonist.

Text from the Wikipedia website

“Mr. Cadmus’s exuberant use of homosexual themes in his work also encouraged Mr. Tooker to address that aspect of his identity in paintings like the terrifying, Bruegel-esque “Children and Spastics” (1946), in which a group of leering sadists torment three frail, effeminate men.

Equally influential was Jared French, part of Mr. Cadmus’s intimate circle, whose interest in Jungian archetypes and in the frigid, inscrutable forms of archaic Greek and Etruscan art inspired Mr. Tooker to take a more symbolic, mythic approach to his subject matter.”

William Grimes. “George Tooker, Painter Capturing Modern Anxieties, Dies at 90,” on The New York Times website, March 29, 2011

George Platt Lynes
Jared French
1938
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1941

Jared French

Born in Ossining, New York, French received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Amherst College in 1925. Soon after this he met and befriended Paul Cadmus (1904-1999) in New York City, who became his lover. French persuaded Cadmus to give up commercial art for what he deemed, “serious painting”.

Jungian psychology is thought to have played an important influence upon the dream-like imagery in the paintings of French’s maturity. The highly stylized, archaic-looking figures in his paintings suggest that they are representative of the ancestral memory of all mankind, what Carl Jung called “the collective unconscious”. French himself was never explicit about the sources of his imagery, although on a stylistic level, the influence of early Italian Renaissance paintings by such masters as Mantegna and Piero della Francesca is evident, as it is also in the work of both Tooker and Cadmus. On the level of content, he made only one, short, public statement regarding his intentions:

“My work has long been concerned with the representation of diverse aspects of man and his universe. At first it was mainly concerned with his physical aspect and his physical universe. Gradually I began to represent aspects of his psyche, until in ‘The Sea’ (1946) and ‘Evasion’ (1947), I showed quite clearly my interest in man’s inner reality.” …

In 1938, French and Cadmus posed for a series photographs with the noted photographer George Platt Lynes (1907-1955). These photographs were not published or exhibited while Lynes was living and show the intimacy and relationship of the two. In the photographs, 14 of which survive today, the subjects, Cadmus and French, vacillate between exposure and concealment, with French generally being the more exhibitionist of the two. Cadmus stated that French was the model for all four male figures in his 1935 painting, Gilding the Acrobats, as well as his 1931 painting, Jerry.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Jared French
Billy the Kid costume sketch for “Billy’s Last Act”
1938
Watercolour and pencil on printed paper on cardboard with ink and pencil
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1941

Jared French
Billy the Kid costume sketch for “Billy’s Last Act” (detail)
1938
Watercolour and pencil on printed paper on cardboard with ink and pencil
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1941

Jared French
Billy the Kid costume sketch for “Alias as Drunken Cowboy”
1938
Watercolour on paper on cardboard with felt-tip pen
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Lincoln Kirstein, 1941

Jared French
Billy the Kid costume sketch for “Alias as Drunken Cowboy” (detail)
1938
Watercolour on paper on cardboard with felt-tip pen
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Lincoln Kirstein, 1941

George Platt Lynes
Fidelma Cadmus Kirstein
1941
Gelatin silver print
George Platt Lynes Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin

George Platt Lynes
Orpheus (Nicholas Magallanes and Francisco Moncion)
1950
Modern print
Courtesy ClampArt, New York

George Platt Lynes
Jimmie Daniels
Undated
Gelatin silver print
George Platt Lynes Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin

A fresh-faced teenager, Jimmie Daniels arrived in Harlem sometime during the mid-1920’s. He was lithe, delicate, and had an engaging, infectious smile that he would soon learn to use to his advantage. Singer Alberta Hunter, a lifelong friend, remembered the time well. “This one was just a little one” she said. “Handsome? Oh, was he handsome! He had hair as red as fire, and his folks had money.” Dare anyone have said that they thought the young, refined singer with the impeccable style, grace and proper enunciation was just a little snobbish and pretentious too?

It wouldn’t have mattered! It certainly would not have stopped the young, attractive Daniels from enjoying the ride of his youth, and becoming one of the most popular cafe singers and masters of ceremonies of the Harlem Renaissance. In demand from New York to Paris, these accomplishments were but stepping stones toward bigger and better things. Fortunately, the journey was documented by some of the leading photographers and artists of the time like George Platt Lynes, Carl Van Vechten and Richmond Barthe. And having several high profile, rich white boyfriends didn’t hurt him not one bit!

Text from the Fire Island Pines History website

Museum of the City of New York
1220 Fifth Ave at 103rd St., New York

Opening hours:
Open Daily 10am – 6pm

Museum of the City of New York website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Jan

Exhibition: ‘Thomas Ruff: New Works’ at David Zwirner, New York

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Exhibition dates: 18th November 2016 – 5th January 2017

The first posting of a new year and we are off to a cracking start.

In my opinion, Thomas Ruff is one of the most creative contemporary photo-media artists working today. Since the early 1980s, Ruff has constantly pushed the boundaries of both photography and its representation of space time, culture and identity. From the early interiors, through hyperrealist portraiture, haunting night vision photographs, stereoscopes, nudes based on internet pornography and my particular favourites, the “jpegs” series, the artist has a wonderful self-effacing way of interrogating contemporary culture. Ruff turns the world on its head by looking at things from a different point of view. Through the use of scale, colour, manipulation and the digital layering of information, he proposes an acknowledgment of the strangeness of the world in which we live and the fracturing of seemingly holistic identities.

The artist is at his probing best again in his new series, press++, which features photomontages of the back and front of press images of various subjects including film stars, car crashes, bank robbers, car advertisements and, most notably, planes and space exploration. “Interested equally in the subject matter (and any touch-ups) on the front of the paper and the words, stamps, signatures, and smudges on the back, he thus created seamless montages of image and text, in the process compromising the integrity of the former as well as adding relevant context. The overlap causes each side to lose its intended information and merge into a new image altogether.” As the press release continues, “press++ continues Ruff’s long-standing interest in the deconstruction of the image and the new structures of photography following digital technology…. As layers of information coexist seamlessly, the idea of a source becomes increasingly obsolescent and the image acquires even greater agency. The information of the press image is lost in favor of an image of its own artistic value.”

In this sense, that the press image is lost in favour of an image that radiates it own artistic value, the strongest images in this new series are the plane and space exploration ones, and for this reason I have concentrated on them in this posting. The images of film stars, car advertisements, car crashes and bank robbers are much less successful – the film stars because the original image is already laden with cultural semiotics (beauty and the surreality of star power) that cannot be so easily broken down/overwritten; the car advertisements because of the prosaic nature of the original image and the box-like design of the cars; and the car crashes (Warhol) and bank robbers because of the strong verisimilitude of the original image, the photographs relationship to its referent, which does not allow the images to be transformed so easily into new artistic works.

Only in the works of planes and space exploration does the new series take flight – a flight of fancy if you like – through the deconstruction of the original image. Here, layers of information coexist seamlessly and the idea of a singular source becomes increasingly obsolescent. Here, aerodynamic planes soar “Beyond Earth”; Gloster “Meteor” aircraft strike vertically through the clouds surrounded by a spiralling blue line, as though the plane were breaking through the limits of the Earth; bursting Aerobee rockets are excised by thick black lines; Snark guided missiles engage Associated Press Wirephoto Notices of reproduction intent (in which, now, the rocket cannot be used for the purposes of trade); and a Little Joe rocket roars skyward through a space “3 cols full deep” on the PICTURE PAGE on November 5th 1959. The day of the week was a Thursday.

Only in these photomontages is the series really successful in its goal… to produce images with their own artistic value beyond that of the original document. But what a triumph these plane and space exploration images are. They take the picture away from its origins, the rockets and planes away from the Earth, and the viewer away from the stable ground on which they stand. Conceptually they are tight and inventive, subverting known taxonomies of pictorial construction. Spiritually, they take the viewer away from themselves into another world, into Barthes’ extended form of punctum: time. These vertiginous images are indeed “the vertigo of time defeated.” Full deep.

Dr Marcus Bunyan for Art Blart

.
Many thankx to David Zwirner for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Thomas Ruff (born 1958) is a German photographer, known for his blown up passport-like photo large scale portrait, executed between 1981 and 1985. In 2003 he published a series of nudes based on internet pornography, which were digitally processed and obscured without using any camera or traditional photographic device. Ruff’s “Substrat” series (2002-03), continued to explore digitally altered Web-based pictures, this time based on Japanese manga and anime cartoons, although the source material was altered and manipulated so the had no visual memory of the original image. In 2009, he produced “jpegs”, another large-scale series of photographs exclusively using downloaded images, which bared lots of jpeg compression artefacts.

press++30.18, 2016. Chromogenic print, 87 1/2 x 72 1/2 inches (222.3 x 184 cm) (right)
Installation view of Thomas Ruff New Works at David Zwirner New York, 18 November 2016 – 05 January, 2017

press++70.01, 2016. Chromogenic print, 72 1/2 x 88 3/4 inches (184 x 225.5 cm) (left)
Installation view of Thomas Ruff New Works at David Zwirner New York, 18 November 2016 – 05 January, 2017

press++22.01, 2015. Chromogenic print, 88 15/16 x 72 7/8 inches (226 x 185 cm) (left)
press++28.04, 2016. Chromogenic print, 92 1/2 x 72 1/2 inches (235 x 184 cm) (right)
Installation view of Thomas Ruff New Works at David Zwirner New York, 18 November 2016 – 05 January, 2017

press++09.26, 2016. Chromogenic print, 72 1/2 x 92 5/8 inches (184 x 235.3 cm) (left)
Installation view of Thomas Ruff New Works at David Zwirner New York, 18 November 2016 – 05 January, 2017

press++28.19, 2016. Chromogenic print, 72 7/8 x 93 3/4 inches (185 x 238 cm) (left)
press++21.11, 2016. Chromogenic print, 102 x 72 1/2 inches (259.1 x 184 cm) (right)
Installation view of Thomas Ruff New Works at David Zwirner New York, 18 November 2016 – 05 January, 2017

press++21.11, 2016. Chromogenic print, 102 x 72 1/2 inches (259.1 x 184 cm) (left)
Installation view of Thomas Ruff New Works at David Zwirner New York, 18 November 2016 – 05 January, 2017

Thomas Ruff
press++28.19
2016
Chromogenic print
72 1/2 x 93 1/2 inches (184 x 237.5 cm)
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London

Thomas Ruff
press++28.04
2016
Chromogenic print
92 1/2 x 72 1/2 inches (235 x 184 cm)
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London

Thomas Ruff
press++70.01
2016
Chromogenic print
72 7/8 x 89 inches (185 x 226 cm)
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London

Thomas Ruff
press++32.10
2016
Chromogenic print
15 x 11 7/8 inches (38.1 x 30 cm)
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London

Thomas Ruff
press++65.33
2016
Chromogenic print
11 7/8 x 14 7/8 inches (30 x 37.6 cm)
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London

Thomas Ruff
press++65.21
2016
Chromogenic print
11 7/8 x 14 7/8 inches (30 x 37.6 cm)
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London

“David Zwirner is pleased to present press++, a new series of works by Thomas Ruff on view at 533 West 19th Street in New York.

Working in distinct series since the late 1970s, Ruff has approached different genres of photography, including portraiture, architecture, astronomy, the nude, surveillance footage, reportage, and photograms. Using a wide range of technological approaches, and often pushing the limits of photographic representation in the process, he has reinvented historical conventions and expectations of the medium. In his considered approach to the means and possibilities of photography, Thomas Ruff explores a breadth of themes that is reflected in the range of techniques he employs: analogue and digital exposures taken by the artist exist in his practice alongside computer generated imagery, photographs from scientific archives, and pictures culled and manipulated from newspapers, magazines, and the Internet.

Shown here for the first time, press++ features large-scale photographs of archival media clippings from American newspapers that relate to the theme of space exploration. Ruff scanned the front and back of the original documents, which he has been collecting over several years, and combined the two sides in Adobe Photoshop. Interested equally in the subject matter (and any touch-ups) on the front of the paper and the words, stamps, signatures, and smudges on the back, he thus created seamless montages of image and text, in the process compromising the integrity of the former as well as adding relevant context. The overlap causes each side to lose its intended information and merge into a new image altogether. As such, the often disrespectful treatment of press pictures by newspaper editors becomes obvious, as text, cropping, and retouching can all fundamentally change the original document.

press++ continues Ruff’s long-standing interest in the deconstruction of the image and the new structures of photography following digital technology. It relates to earlier series by the artist including Newspaper Photographs (1990-1991), in which images were sourced from analog newspaper prints, and jpegs (2004-2007), where he used digitally disseminated photographs. The new works further recall the emergence of photomontage in Germany in the 1920s, where it was employed by Dada artists as a potent and subversive political tool. Ruff’s digital composites, however, are not concerned with the often fragmented and surrealistic effects produced by these art historical precedents, but with the treatment of the photographic image when it is redistributed and re-archived. As layers of information coexist seamlessly, the idea of a source becomes increasingly obsolescent and the image acquires even greater agency. The information of the press image is lost in favor of an image of its own artistic value.”

Press release from David Zwirner

Thomas Ruff
press++01.38
2015
Chromogenic print
11 1/4 x 14 7/8 inches (30 x 37.8 cm)
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London

Thomas Ruff
press++09.27
2016
Chromogenic print
14 1/2 x 11 7/8 inches (36.9 x 30 cm)
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London

Thomas Ruff
press++20.56
2016
Chromogenic print
14 1/2 x 11 7/8 inches (36.7 x 30 cm)
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London

Thomas Ruff
press++21.11
2016
Chromogenic print
102 x 72 1/2 inches (259.1 x 184 cm)
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London

Thomas Ruff
press++22.01
2015
Chromogenic print
88 15/16 x 72 7/8 inches (226 x 185 cm)
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London

Thomas Ruff
press++01.64
2016
Chromogenic print
15 1/4 x 11 1/4 inches (38.5 x 30 cm)
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London

Thomas Ruff
press++24.75
2016
Chromogenic print
14 7/8 x 11 7/8 inches (37.6 x 30 cm)
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London

Thomas Ruff
press++25.05
2015
Chromogenic print
88 7/8 x 72 7/8 inches (226 x 185 cm)
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London

Thomas Ruff
press++02.20
2015
Chromogenic print
15 3/8 x 11 7/8 inches (39 x 30 cm)
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London

David Zwirner
519, 525 and 533 West 19th Street
New York, NY 10011
Tel: 212 727 2070

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday, 10am – 6pm

David Zwirner website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Nov

Exhibition: ‘Louis Faurer’ at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, light, memory, New York, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, space, time and works on paper
Tags: "Win Place and Show", 1940s American photography, 1950s American photography, 3rd Avenue El at 53rd Street New York, 42nd Street New York, Accident New York, ambient melancholy, american artist, American black and white photography, American documentary photography, american photographer, American photography, Bazaar Studio, city landscape, déjà vu, déjà vu magazine, Deaf Mute New York, despair, documentary American photography, documentary reporting, Eddie New York, Family of Man, Farm Security Administration, film noir, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Harper's Bazaar, human struggle, IN AND OUT OF FOCUS, John Szarkowski, loneliness in the city, Louis Faurer, Louis Faurer "Win Place and Show", Louis Faurer 42nd Street New York, Louis Faurer Accident New York, Louis Faurer Champion New York, Louis Faurer Deaf Mute, Louis Faurer Eddie, Louis Faurer Market Street, Louis Faurer New York, Louis Faurer Orchard Street, Louis Faurer Somewhere in West Village, Louis Faurer Staten Island Ferry, Louis Faurer Steidl Verlag, Louis Faurer Unemployed and Looking at Rockefeller Center, Louis Faurer Union Square, Louis Faurer Union Square from Ohrbach’s Window, Louis Faurer Untitled, Louis Faurer Untitled New York, Louis Faurer Viva New York, lyricist with a camera, Market Street Philadelphia, New Documents, New York, Orchard Street New York, overlaid negatives, Paris, pervasive distress, Philadelphia, photographic graininess, poetic use of facts, Robert Frank, Somewhere in West Village, Staten Island Ferry, Steichen IN AND OUT OF FOCUS, Szarkowski New Documents, The Family of Man, Times Square, uncanny eye, Unemployed and Looking at Rockefeller Center, Union Square, Union Square from Ohrbach’s Window, urbanscape, Viva New York, Walker Evans photography

Exhibition dates: 9th September – 18th December 2016

Curator: The exhibition has been curated and organized by Agnès Sire, director of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in association with the Estate of Louis Faurer in New York, Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York and Deborah Bell Photographs.

Life, love and loneliness in the big smoke.

Champions and accidents.

Home of the brave, land of the fractured and destitute.

Unemployed and Looking.

Both * eyes * removed
Wounded

I AM TOTALLY BLIND.

Marcus

.
Many thankx to the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“However, with shocking suddenness in 1976 I came to believe that American photography of the moment of mid-century belonged to Louis Faurer.”

.
Walter Hopps

“I have an intense desire to record life as I see it, as I feel it. As long as I’m amazed and astonished, as long as I feel that events, messages, expressions and movements are all shot through with the miraculous, I’ll feel filled with the certainty I need to keep going. When that day comes, my doubts will vanish.”

.
Louis Faurer

Louis Faurer
“Win, Place, and Show”, 3rd Avenue El at 53rd Street, New York, New York
c. 1946-1948
© Louis Faurer Estate

From September 9 to December 18, 2016, The Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson dedicates an exhibition to the American photographer, Louis Faurer. This show is the occasion to discover this artist who has not been the subject of an exhibition in France since 1992. A native of Philadelphia, Louis Faurer moved to New York after the War, as if irresistibly pulled into the life of Times Square, where he homed in, objectively and pitilessly, on loneliness in the crowd. Reporting held little interest for him, and journalism even less; he was drawn – as the captions to his photographs sometimes indicate – to the poetic side: the fragility of things and the unconscious revelation. He carried out much-admired commissions for leading magazines including Flair, Junior Bazaar, Glamour and Mademoiselle. This gave rise to an unfeigned self-contempt and a paradoxical inner division only humor could counter. These assignments earned a living and helped him pursue a more personal work in New York streets.

Profoundly honest, he refused the excessiveness (or obscenity) of violent scenes that might humiliate his subjects, and deliberately projected himself into the people he photographed; and if he often recognized himself in them, this was the whole point. Sometimes he encountered his double, or even appeared in shot as a reflection. Each of his images was “a challenge to silence and indifference” – theirs and his own.

After studying drawing and being noticed by the Disney Studios at the age of thirteen, Louis Faurer started his professional path by creating advertising posters and sketching caricatures in the seaside of Atlantic City. At the age of 21, he bought his first camera and won first prize for “Photo of the Week” in a contest sponsored by the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger. Market Street would then be the scene of his first shots. In 1947, he left for New York, as Lilian Bassman, art director for Junior Bazaar, hired him as a photographer. He met Robert Frank who was to become a close friend and with who he would share a studio for a while.

In 1968, he abandoned New York, the scene of his most successful work, for personal and financial reasons. Faurer worked briefly in England, and then in Paris where he struggled doing fashion work, with occasional assignments from Elle and French Vogue. Shortly after Faurer returned to New York in 1974 at the age of 58, he found that photography was being embraced by the art world and was soon to become a commodity in the international art market. The art dealer, Harry Lunn brought his work to public attention through an exhibition at Marlborough Gallery in 1997 and resurrected his career, his contribution then began to be acknowledged. In 1984, a car in New York streets hit Faurer, his wounds prevented him to pursue his career as a photographer. He passed away in Manhattan on March 2, 2001.

Deeply concerned with what he saw, he shares his doubts with us as he chooses anonymous figures spotted amid the ordinariness of the sidewalk: figures pulled out of the ambient melancholy, the film noir, the pervasive distress that seem to have been his personal lot. A remarkably gifted printer, Faurer experimented with blur, overlaid negatives and the marked graininess resulting from his fondness for the nocturnal. His touchiness meant frequent problems with clients and people like the numerous photographers who tried to lend a helping hand; among the latter was William Eggleston, who had discerned the unique depth of Faurer’s work. The issue the elegant Japanese photography quarterly déjà vu devoted to him in 1994 speaks of a rediscovery and a style ahead of its time, and quotes Nan Goldin: “Some people believe again that photography can be honest”.

In 1948, Edward Steichen, Head of the Department of Photography of the MoMA, supported Faurer and included him in In and Out of Focus. Steichen wrote: “Louis Faurer, a new comer in the field of documentary reporting, is a lyricist with a camera, a seeker and finder of magic in some of the highways and byways of life.” Afterwards, Steichen presented Faurer photographs in a few other exhibitions and in particular The Family of Man, in 1955. During his lifetime, Faurer did not have the wherewithal to edit his photographs into a book.

Press release from Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Louis Faurer
Union Square from Ohrbach’s Window, New York
c. 1948-1950
© Louis Faurer Estate, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Narrative of my career

My earliest experience in art occurred at the Benjamin Rush Public school in Phila., Penna. Miss Duncan, who seemed to float on a rose petal scent, having requested that numbers be written on paper with lead pencil, was shocked when my sheet yielded a drawing of a locomotive. My next surprise, at the age of 13 arrived in the mail. I had submitted my drawings to Walt Disney and he proposed considering me for a position, although he couldn’t guarantee it, if I travelled to California. It seemed unreachable and so I didn’t go.

After graduating the South Phila. High School for Boys, I enrolled in a Commercial Lettering School. After months of hand trembling, I looked at my first sign, it read “FRESH FISH”. From 1934 to 1937 I sketched caricatures on the beach at Atlantic City, N.J. My interest in photography began in 1937. It was greatly intensified when I was awarded first prize in the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger for the photo of the week contest. Soon, the Farm Security Administration’s early books became my bible. I was especially taken by Walker Evans’ photography. The world of Harper’s Bazaar also fascinated me.

Later, in New York, I was to meet Robert Frank at the Bazaar Studio. Since I was a commuter, he invited me to stay at his loft together with nine cats. He had recently arrived from Switzerland and was alone. New York enchanted and amazed me. Everywhere a new discovery awaited me. Rejection slips from U.S. Camera were transformed into reproduced pages. My work was being accepted, often it seemed unreal. I showed my photographs to Walker Evans. A handsome brass tea kettle in his tiny room in the offices at FORTUNE projected his stability and eloquence. “You wouldn’t photograph fat women, would you?” he asked me. Later he warned me, “don’t become contaminated.” My need to continue photographing was solved by photography for commerce. I worked for periodicals which included Harper’s Bazaar.

1946 to 1951 were important years. I photographed almost daily and the hypnotic dusk light led me to Times Square. Several nights of photographing in that area and developing and printing in Robert Frank’s dark room became a way of life. He would say, “whatta town”, “whatta town”. I was represented in Edward Steichen’s IN AND OUT OF FOCUS exhibit. Then, work, work, and more work. “Boy,” he boomed, “go out and photograph and put the prints on my desk.” This command was synchronized with a pound of his fist on the glass top desk. I thought it miraculous, that the glass did not shatter.

I tasted and accepted the offerings of the 50s and 60s. LIFE, COWLES PUBLICATIONS, HEARST and CONDE NAST, enabled me to continue with my personal photography efforts. Often I would carry a 16mm motion picture camera as I would a Leica and photograph in the New York streets. The results were never shown commercially. The negative has been stored.

In 1968, I needed new places, new faces and change. I tried Europe. I returned in the mid-seventies and was overwhelmed by the change that had occurred here. I took to photographing the new New York with an enthusiasm almost equal to the beginning. After the Lunn purchase, the gallery world. I was brought again to the drawing I first experienced, and as an unexpected bonus, the photographer had become an artist! 1978 found me the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Grant and the Creative Public Service Grant for photography. The latter is known as (CAPS). My eyes search for people who are grateful for life, people who forgive and whose doubts have been removed, who understand the truth, whose enduring spirit is bathed by such piercing white light as to provide their present and future hope.*

Louis Faurer

.
* Reproduced, with editorial revisions, from the artist’s original text. Text published at the occasion of the exhibition Louis Faurer – Photographs from Philadelphia and New York 1937-1973 presented from March 10 to April 23, 1981 at the Art Gallery of University of Maryland. Extracts from the book Louis Faurer published by Steidl, September 2016

Louis Faurer
Steidl Verlag

Foreword: Agnès Sire. Essay: Susan Kismaric. Original texts: Louis Faurer and Walter Hopps

208 pages
24 x 17.6 cm
100 illustrations
ISBN : 978-3-95829-241-3
September 2016

Extracts from the book

New York City has been the major center of the Faurer’s work, and that city’s life at mid-century, his great subject. The city is totally Faurer’s natural habitat. He can be at home, at one, with people on its streets, in its rooms. However serene or edgy his encounters, one senses Faurer (if at all) as being the same as the people in his photographs. And since these people are extremely varied, it is a transcendent vision that allows the photographer to be so many “others.” Faurer’s at-oneness with his subjects contrasts with both the mode of working and the results of Evans and Frank. They have proved to be great and wide-ranging explorers and fi nders of their images. Faurer made only one important trip: from Philadelphia (where he made his first, early brilliant photographs) to New York, where he stayed, and where in the course of things his vision consumed, whether ordinary or odd, the all of it.

Walter Hopps

Louis Faurer was a “photographer’s photographer”, one whose work was not known to a broad audience, or appreciated by the art world, but was loved by photographers. They saw in his pictures a purity of seeing, akin to what Faurer saw in the work of Walker Evans, the “poetic use of facts”. Faurer distinguished himself within this way of working through his instinct and his uncanny eye for people who radiate a rare and convincing sense of privacy, an inner life. They are people who would be true in any time and place,who are emblematic of human struggle.

For whatever reasons, Faurer did not have the wherewithal to edit his photographs into a book, the most visible and long-lasting expression of a photographer’s work. Yet his pictures are indelible. Their content presages a major shift in subject matter within the rubric of “documentary” American photography that was to come to fruition almost two decades later. In 1967 John Szarkowski identified this radical change when he wrote in his wall text for New Documents, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, about the work of Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand: “…In the past decade, a new generation of photographers has directed the documentary approach toward more personal ends. Their aim has been not to reform life, but to know it”.

Susan Kismaric

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
2, impasse Lebouis, 75014 Paris

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 1pm – 6.30 pm
Saturday 11am – 6.45 pm
Late night Wednesdays until 8.30 pm
Closed on Mondays

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: ‘Études’ 1994

Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: 'Études' 1994

ARCHIVE OF ALL AUSTRALIAN ARTISTS AND EXHIBITIONS THAT HAVE APPEARED ON THE BLOG AT THIS LINK

ARCHIVE OF ALL INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS AND EXHIBITIONS THAT HAVE APPEARED ON THE BLOG AT THIS LINK

Art Blart RSS feed

RSS - Posts

Art Blart Email Subscription

Lastest tweets

'Photographs Become Pictures' Städel Museum wp.me/pn2J2-9iW #AndreasGursky #CandidaHofer #ThomasRuff… twitter.com/i/web/status/8… 3 days ago
'Photographs Become Pictures' Städel Museum wp.me/pn2J2-9iW #publicspace #architecture #transit #leisure… twitter.com/i/web/status/8… 3 days ago
'Photographs Become Pictures' Städel Museum wp.me/pn2J2-9iW #grid #series #portrait #appearance… twitter.com/i/web/status/8… 3 days ago
'Photographs Become Pictures' Städel Museum wp.me/pn2J2-9iW #media #aesthetic #Düsseldorf #typology #memory… twitter.com/i/web/status/8… 3 days ago
'Photographs Become Pictures' at Städel Museum wp.me/pn2J2-9iW #photography #art #objectivity #beauty… twitter.com/i/web/status/8… 3 days ago
'Photographs Become Pictures. The Becher Class' at Städel Museum wp.me/pn2J2-9iW #PhotographsBecomePictures… twitter.com/i/web/status/8… 3 days ago

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes the Art Blart blog which reviews exhibitions in Melbourne, Australia and posts exhibitions from around the world. He has a Dr of Philosophy from RMIT University, Melbourne and is currently studying a Master of Art Curatorship at The University of Melbourne.

Posts Tagged ‘New York

Exhibition dates: 24th April – 30th July 2017

Exhibition dates: 24th April – 30th July 2017

Exhibition credits

Exhibition dates: 3rd December 2016 – 12th March 2017

Exhibition dates: 7th October 2016 – 26th February 2017

Themes

Printing

Placemaking: Cruising

Posing

Performing

1960-1995

Portraits

Andy Warhol

Harmony Hammond

Robert Mapplethorpe

Greer Lankton

Bill T. Jones

Themes

Downtown

Printing

Posing

Exhibition dates: 7th October 2016 – 26th February 2017

#POD

1910 – 1960: Portraits

Richard Bruce Nugent

Mercedes de Acosta

Lincoln Kirstein

Ballet in America

Paul Cadmus

George Platt Lynes

George Tooker

Jared French

Exhibition dates: 18th November 2016 – 5th January 2017

Exhibition dates: 9th September – 18th December 2016

Narrative of my career

Extracts from the book

Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: ‘Études’ 1994

Art Blart RSS feed

Art Blart Email Subscription

Recent Posts

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Top Posts

Archives

Categories

Interesting Links