d e s i g n ~ f ê t e

2008-12-26T05:49:00.001-08:00

John Rawlings (1912-1970) was one of the most prolific photographers of the 20th Century, with more than 200 Vogue and Glamour covers to his credit, as well as numerous ad campaigns and nude studies.

Rawlings’s three-decade affiliation with Conde Nast began in 1936, when he was hired by Vogue Studios as an apprenticed assistant working alongside many legendary masters, including Cecil Beaton, Horst P. Horst, George Hoyningen-Huene, Irving Penn and George Platt Lynes.

Memo headline: Women in Necessary Civilian Jobs

Although his early work for British Vogue showed the strong influence of Hoyningen-Huene and Horst, Rawlings slowly departed from their style. "Rawlings was certainly the first major Conde Nast photographer to demonstrate a truly American eye ... John Rawlings's photography has a practical, no nonsense feeling ... he focused his lens on the vibrant world surrounding him," writes Charles Dare Scheips Jr., former director of the Conde Nast Archives, in his introduction to Kohle Yohannan's book, John Rawlings: 30 Years in Vogue. "Rawlings brought a realistic visual style, presenting fashion as a force rather than a decoration."

:john rawlings via foto decadent

2008-12-15T05:20:00.001-08:00

One of the world’s longest exposures ever. For six months between the winter and summer solstice, Justin Quinnell left open his homemade pinhole camera and tracked each phase of the sun over Bristol's Clifton Suspension Bridge. The lowest arc shows the first day of exposure on the winter solstice, the top curves were captured in the middle of summer.

:justin quinnell

visionaries: tim walker

2008-09-27T04:45:00.000-07:00

Tim Walker's evocative images are full of textured nuance and intriguing detail. Stunning sets and lavish locations juxtapose the everyday with the absurd and the fabulous, to create captivating, original photographs.

Walker loves turning "funny daydreams into funny photographs," adding that he lives much of the time in an imaginary world, a world rooted in real-life and memory, specifically the British countryside of his childhood.

How does he pull off such elaborate productions? According to Andrew Thomas, one of Walker's agents:

Every season there comes a conversation with Tim on his ideas for upcoming stories. Tim is going to suspend a model on a giant hook; float a bathroom in the sea; paint various animals in pastel shades; attach a bed to the top of a classic car and then drive it; a roomful of rabbits; a tree in a house; a horse in a house. Then it dawns on you: how on earth is all of this going to be accomplished? Eventually, somehow, it all comes to fruition.

Walker's work is on exhibit at The Design Museum through September 28. Has anyone out there been lucky enough to see it?

Anyone?

:tim walker; daily telegraph; images © tim walker pictures

autumnal splendor 08

2008-09-19T07:24:00.001-07:00

Although you and I purchase (or - for the lucky few among us - grow!) vibrant, technicolor blossoms throughout the year, autumn has the trademark on that gorgeous sidelong light. Its amber glow warms my soul.

2008-05-10T06:07:00.001-07:00

antea: beguiling, strange beauty

2008-03-30T04:56:00.001-07:00

Antea was painted in the early 1530s by Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, known as Parmigianino (1503–1540). This captivating painting is on view at The Frick through May 1. While there is no known evidence definitively linking the woman Parmigianino depicted to a specific person, her identity has been the cause of speculation for centuries.

Holland Cotter notes in his Times review of Antea: A Beautiful Artifice, that 'we enliven objects with our attention.' The bewitching Antea has captured mine. Truth be told, I'm most intrigued by her adornments and their composition — her gold satin dress, the marten fur, pearl drop earrings, ruby ring and gold chain; the lavish ruby and pearl jewel in her hair; her apron and the cuffs of her underdress decorated with delicate blackwork embroidery — not to mention that implausibly long right arm. I have returned again and again to dote on this Frick visitor; I hope to see her one more time before she leaves.

The woman in the painting was first identified as “Antea” in 1671 by the artist and writer Giacomo Barri, who claimed she was Parmigianino’s mistress. As Antea was the name of a famous sixteenth-century Roman courtesan, it was assumed that this was the woman to whom Barri referred. She has been identified alternatively as the daughter or servant of the artist; a member of an aristocratic northern Italian family; and a noble bride. It is most likely, however, that the Antea represents an ideal beauty, a popular genre of portraiture during the Renaissance. In such portraits, the beauty of the woman and the virtues she stood for were the primary subject, while the sitter’s identity — and even her existence — were of secondary importance.

More from Holland Cotter's review:

We know that the name “Antea” was attached to the picture only in the late 17th century, after the artist’s death. In classical mythology it referred to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. In the 16th century it was associated with a Roman courtesan of high renown, though there is no reason to think Parmigianino had either in mind.

Attempts have been made to determine the social status of his subject through a close reading of her sumptuous attire, though the results are contradictory. One scholar concludes that her apron indicates she was a servant, but another points out that noblewomen wore aprons too, fancy ones. Marten fur stoles like the one draped over the woman’s right shoulder were emblems of fertility, suggesting an identity as a young bride. But in other contexts the marten was a symbol of unbridled lust. The head of the animal preserved on the stole, its teeth as sharp as the fangs on a Japanese anime demon, looks rabid rather than nurturing.

In short, after much interpretive parsing and sorting, we know nothing at all about who this woman called Antea was, or what she meant to the artist, or to anyone else.

:parmigianino’s ‘antea’: a beautiful artifice is on view through may 1, frick collection.

true nature

2008-03-27T12:59:00.001-07:00

Birds’ nests are ephemeral, often abandoned once the young have fledged. But the sheer ingenuity of these miniature marvels of architecture is as durable as the impressions left by San Francisco photographer Sharon Beals who captures them in their lasting glory.

:audobon magazine

holi: spring arrives in india

2008-03-13T06:07:00.001-07:00

The Inimitable Persephone of What Possessed Me and Sarah the Intrepid of Passementerie are two of my most favoritest, most fantacularly well-traveled blogging comrades.

Sarah is journeying through India right now - having recently overcome a combination of formidable in-country lodging and weather and physiological challenges. Follow her here. The other day, Sarah got me thinking more about Holi, India's festival of color, when she left this comment on another post:

...we arrived here in Varanasi on Holi which is the celebration of springtime (as far as I can gather) and the city is still liberally daubed in pink, blue and green dye, even some of the goats are brightly coloured!

Holi is the Hindu festival which celebrates the time when Krishna paid amorous attention to young women tending cows by spraying colored water over them. (Interesting.) Holi occurs each year, the day after the full moon in early March. Holi and Divali (the Festival of Light which occurs in October or November) are India’s most celebrated holidays.

I've just noticed that P very recently posted some remembrances of travels past, here. She trekked to a friend's wedding in Mumbai earlier this year - go here for a sample of some sublime visual treats. You can also screen P's slideshows from the expedition to India as well as her solo backpacking tour of northern and eastern Ethiopia here. Wondrous gorgeousness.

The images on this post serve as double homage: to those who literally fulfill the promise of Oh, The Places You'll Go! (and who possess the skill and desire to share their stories with the rest of us) - as well as to the intriguing, exuberant traditions of a beautiful land.

This painting (above) depicts the Indian deity, Krishna, celebrating Holi with Radha and the Gopis (great name for a Hindi jazz-rock fusion band, don't you think?).

:flickr

2008-03-13T06:06:00.001-07:00

San Francisco’s Paul Hayes creates large surreal installations of foam and paper that swirl like schools of fish and hover like an invading flock of birds. They say that when you stand among them, you'd swear the swarm is multiplying.

Hayes, a Rhode Island School of Design graduate, currently has an installation at Johansson Projects in northern California. The exhibit, Propagations, also features works by Tadashi Moriyama, Kiersten Essenpreis, Rebecca Whipple and Alexis Amann. Showing through May 2.

:johansson projects; paul hayes flickr

leonard cohen: you're our man

2008-03-10T06:40:00.000-07:00

This evening, Leonard Cohen will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. My reaction? It's about time.

Few artists in the realm of popular music can truly be called poets, in the classical, arts-and-letters sense of the word. Among them are Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Joni Mitchell and Phil Ochs. Leonard Cohen heads this elite class. In fact, Cohen was already an established poet and novelist before he turned his attention to songwriting. His academic training in poetry and literature, and his pursuit of them as livelihood for much of the 50s and 60s, gave him an extraordinary advantage over his pop peers when it came to setting language to music. Along with other folk-steeped musical literati, Cohen raised the songwriting bar. (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame + Museum)

I love this line from Cohen's Anthem. It just may be my favorite lyric. Ever.

There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

I recently discovered a remark that Cohen made about this bit of his poetry: That’s the closest thing I could describe to a credo. That idea is one of the fundamental positions behind a lot of the songs.

And regarding his work and method:

You know, you scribble away for one reason or another. You’re touched by something that you read. You want to number yourself among these illustrious spirits for one advantage or another, some social, some spiritual. It’s just ambition that tricks you into the enterprise, and then you discover whether you have any actual aptitude for it or not. So I’ve always thought that I, you know, do my job OK.

It thrills me to know I'm sharing an area code with Mr. Cohen - at least for the evening. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony will air live from the Waldorf-Astoria on VH1 Classic tonight at 8:30 p.m. EST. BTW, Lou Reed will present Mr. Cohen.

O Canada. You must be so proud of this Native Son.

K.D. Lang performs Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. Juno Awards, Winnipeg, 2005. (Of the 10,983,477 listens to the guskillion covers of Hallelujah on YouTube, I claim 795,517. K.D. gets into it here, for sure.) Word has it that Damien Rice will perform Hallelujah at the induction ceremony this evening.

Rufus Wainwright performs Everybody Knows. This is a clip from the Cohen-tribute film I'm Your Man. Rufus talks about meeting Cohen for the first time. Cohen says a word or two. The song begins at 1:51.

Martha Wainwright performs Leonard Cohen's Tower of Song. Late Night with Dave.

Our Man himself, performing Hallelujah. (Love the set. Looks to be borrowed from The Muppets, c. 1985.)

:photo © sony bmg; quotes via the vancouver sun; the rock and roll hall of fame + museum

vivienne in pink

2008-02-28T11:18:00.001-08:00

Vivienne Westwood, arguably the most influential British fashion designer of the twentieth century, revels in incendiary provocation and a defiance of convention, but nonetheless finds beauty and inspiration in the past. This apparent contradiction, to attempt to upset the status quo while clearly having a consciousness of tradition and history, made Westwood the most representative designer of The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute's 2006 exhibition AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion. Given Westwood’s violation of expectations, it's really no surprise that the designer so associated with torn T-shirts, bondage jackets and punk rock (see last image, below) is also capable of creating astonishingly rigorous examples of tailoring and dressmaking.

At the time, Westwood said that this dress was her most important work to date. Comprising a beautifully constructed and boned bodice as its base, the gown has been draped, fitted and spiraled around the body in one unbroken length. Yes, one unbroken length. It is an aesthetic marvel, all the more important for the virtuosity of Westwood’s approach, at once conceptually reductive and technically audacious. While the gown might evoke the French haute couture of the 1950s and an attendant impression of retardataire elegance, Westwood’s subversion is in her breaking of any prior conventions of draping and dressmaking.

Yowzah.

:images metropolitan museum of art; vivienne westwood (british, b. 1941). “propaganda” dress, fall/winter 2005–06. lilac silk faille; shoes, autumn/winter 1990. hot pink crocodile-embossed patent leather.

dianamuse feature: yellena's temple and allusion

2008-02-25T18:52:00.000-08:00

Temple

If you haven't met Yellena James, allow me to introduce her to you. Yellena is a 29-year-old artist who lives on the Central Oregon Coast with her musician husband and two cats, Masha (good kitty) and Fisher (bad kitty). Yellena explores flow, movement and organicity in her extravagantly fanciful creations. She loves to invent new relationships between shapes and colors from those that exist naturally.

Flirt

Yellena was born in Sarajevo and lived there until the end of the civil war, in 1995. During the war, she would sneak past snipers to attend a high school that was dedicated to the arts. That's where she grew passionate about her own art. The school had electricity most of the time—which meant heat and music—and like-minded people who just wanted to create and get away from the horrors of the world outside. After moving to the United States (Orlando, FL), Yellena received a BA in graphic design from UCF and eventually made her way to the West Coast.

Breeze

From a (pilfered) interview on etsy, used here with Yellena's permission:
What is the first thing you can remember making by hand? How and why did you make it?

When I was seven years old, I was in a city-wide competition to do a drawing that had a '21st-century' theme. I drew a bunch of robots wearing aprons and baking cookies. I wish I still had that drawing. It took second place.

Magic

What inspires you? Where do your ideas come from?

I think that my works come from a desire to put something in front of myself that I would really want to look at later. Inspiration is everywhere: the works of other artists, books, design blogs, catalogs, my husband, my sister (danca dot etsy dot com), my friends, vintage patterns, fine-point pens, velvet paper, felt, deep-sea creatures, Julie Mehretu, music, cacti, moss, wallpaper, micro-cosmos, macro-cosmos, pebbles, plants, animals, the universe. That's about it.

What are your favorite materials?

Pens, inks, markers, good quality paper. I also love to work with acrylics. I could spend hours in an art supply store, just touching everything.

Allusion

:yellena's shop, blog, gallery

leigh wells

2008-02-15T18:55:00.000-08:00

During her successful career as a commercial artist in New York and California, Leigh Wells simultaneously created an entirely separate body of personal work "exploring complexity and the unknown in the physical world, human life and culture, with an interest in attempts by science, religion and history to address these issues."

With inspiration as diverse as scientific diagramming, early Chinese ceramics, theoretical physics and extreme religious beliefs, Wells transforms her materials—gouache, acrylic, graphite, collage and found materials—into fascinating and beautiful abstractions of tangled strands, shadow objects and cosmic conglomerations that swirl together to form a dynamic whole.

I've had this grouping of Wells's work waiting in the wings (how's that for an alliterative run?) for some time. I thought to pull them out and put them up after recently spotting a Wells painting at sfgirlbybay—one I'd not seen before. There's something about the combination of contained chaos, underlying calligraphic form, Wells's wit and her judicious use of color and emphatic use of red that makes my heart beat a little faster.

:leigh wells

mad about mad men

2008-01-15T16:37:00.001-08:00

I'm surprised that those of you (you are many) with a predilection for all things mid-mod haven't yet posted about this terrific series. Perhaps you young people aren't inclined to watch AMC? Perhaps you've got a post buried somewhere and I haven't yet discovered it? Don't know. But I predict that this show—with its star, Jon Hamm—is going to rock the cazbah at upcoming awards events (or...er...announcements).

So forget for a moment that Mad Men is the best new thing on TV. What really fuels the series is pure, undiluted mid-century Manhattan Glamour. With its intoxicating styling and set design, Mad Men is a super-crisp reflection of what many New Yorkers think of as their own personal alternate universe, a place where men wear fedoras and lipstick leaves dark stamps on everything it encounters. The show is heaven for design geeks and retro romantics alike.

Don Draper (Jon Hamm - pictured just below) is an icon of male confidence—a cynic with smarts who, like so many New Yorkers, has erased his own history and learned to control the city that would swallow him up. Each day, he dominates a midtown playground, one outfitted with eight-martini lunches. Unlike, say, Entourage, Mad Men is willing to acknowledge its rat pack’s ugly streak (Don's casual insensitivity to his wife tops the list of his ugly). But thank heaven for decent character development.

Mary Corey, a lecturer at the University of California in Los Angeles who specializes in post-World War II intellectual and cultural history, said Mad Men is a dead-on depiction of the era, with its vast inequities between the sexes. “It is at the very moment that the party is almost over for American men,” she said. “It’s extremely accurate — the sadness and loneliness of the women.”

Professor Corey described the era as a “roiling mess” about to explode. “The show explains why the ’60s had to happen, because it can’t stay like that,” she said. “The surface tension is too profound.”

Bonus: A bit of John Hamm's backstory (if you don't already want to know something about this guy, give it time):

“Nothing [in Hollywood] happens without incredible luck,” says Hamm, 36, “being in the right place at the right time and taking advantage of what you have.” Times were hard (until relatively recently!) for Hamm, but he was used to it. His mother died when he was 10. His father followed 10 years later. “What my mother left me was a trust that was used to pay for my high school and a little bit for college,” he says. “And my father had nothing when he passed away. My mother—it sounds very Dickensian and romantic—but my mother’s dying wish was that I go to this particular private [high school], John Burroughs School in St. Louis because friends had gone there. I have to say it was the single most profound, resonating decision ever made in my life. It wasn’t made by me, but it’s what every mother should want for her child.”

Hamm went on to finish college with a major in English. “By the time I graduated college I managed to talk them into giving me a theater scholarship and then into hiring me to do plays ... I went back to my old high school and said, 'You’re the reason I am the person I am today and I would like to inspire other people in the way this place has inspired me.' They thought it was a good idea, and I went back and taught school there for a year under the person who had taught me acting.”

It was after he’d resolved that debt that he decided to take the tumble into show biz. “I thought, 'If I don’t do it now I’m never going to do it.' For me, I think, the idea of not doing this was way more terrifying than doing it. I couldn’t imagine the soul-rushing regret of not giving it a shot. And even had I never gotten a job and never gotten a career or any of it, I would’ve said, 'You know what? At least I was the man in the arena, at least I threw it out there and gave it a shot. I had my opportunities and I tried.'”

You go, Jon.

:amc

and the tony goes to...

2007-12-19T16:27:00.001-08:00

Resistance. Is. Futile. I just have to offer another homage to Tony Duquette, the brilliant and eccentric California designer of interiors, stage sets and jewelry. Some of you posted such wonderful tributes, I hesitated to keep it going here. I got over it. To my mind, we'd do well to keep Duquette's obsessive, audacious, transform-the-pedestrian-into-something-beautiful-and-splendid vision front and center--a source of daily inspiration.

I'm weaving together some shots I took of the Duquette-influenced BG windows with some of Guy Trebay's words (pilfered from his TD piece that appeared in The Times this fall).

In 1999, the last time Tony Duquette was rediscovered, Amy Spindler, the style editor of The New York Times Magazine, made an observation in [The Times] that still rings true. “When a Banana Republic catalog starts to look like the trendy, vacuous pages of Wallpaper, and Club Monaco is indistinguishable from Prada,” she wrote, “you know it’s time for high style to move on.”

But an era of baroque theatrics in fashion and design, which Ms. Spindler suggested a Duquette comeback might inspire, never quite materialized. “A coral branch on a coffee table does not a Duquette make,” as the interior designer Jeffrey Bilhuber said. Mr. Duquette died in late 1999 at 85, and what followed in the design world was, if not uniformly pedestrian, somehow lacking the rococo whimsy for which he was renowned.

Rather than the fantastical visions Duquette conjured up for clients with the movie sets he designed for Vincente Minnelli, the jewelry he made for the Duchess of Windsor and interiors he created for, among others, Mary Pickford and Doris Duke, consumers were delivered into what Louis Bofferding, an antiquarian and style columnist, called the era of “the square lampshade, of boring beige and white.” Those trendy vacuous pages of Wallpaper turned out to be a visual template for a lot of designers.

With the arrival [this month] of Tony Duquette, a hefty lavish monograph on the late designer, the style world may be getting a kind of gilt-edged Post-it note, an overdue reminder to a market dominated by monotonous status goods that nothing is quite so luxurious as an individual eye. “There is way too much out there that feels corporately and central-office driven,” said Linda Fargo, the fashion director at Bergdorf Goodman, the Fifth Avenue retailer whose Christmas windows are inspired by Duquette’s vision, as rendered in scenarios that are part Elsie de Wolfe and part Brothers Grimm.

“Tony always said he was about beauty and not luxury, if you’re going to define luxury by cost,” Ms. Fargo said. Enthusiastic about raiding the storehouses of the past for his projects, Duquette was also audacious in his use of shoestring effects to set off important antiques. “He was Rumpelstiltskin spinning gold from straw,” said Ms. Fargo, echoing Tom Ford’s observation that only Mr. Duquette could see a piece of junk and imagine a pagoda.

Hutton Wilkinson, who wrote Tony Duquette with Wendy Goodman, the design director of House & Garden, says that where some people saw a hubcap, Duquette saw a shining disc to set in the middle of an improvised sunburst.

“Tony was no label lover,” Mr. Wilkinson said. “His attitude was that the last definition of luxury was that it’s just for you.” It was not mass production that Duquette resisted; it was the dumbing-down of style. “The democratization of style and design may be a fantastic thing,” Ms. Goodman said. “But while there’s a level of accessibility now, there’s also a kind of standardization he disliked.”

In his jewelry designs, he balked at the notion that everything revolved around the gem. “I love his approach to doing real jewelry in the spirit of fake jewelry,” said Victoire de Castellane, the designer of playful jewels for Dior. “His approach was not to be enslaved by materials, to be concerned first with the creative effect. He combined gems, cut stones and rough gems, forgetting their value,” Ms. de Castellane said. “They were completely crazy, mixes of real coral with amber and pink quartz, associations with colors that were audacious, odd, maybe not in such good taste, but never bourgeois.”

“Duquette’s work was either haute Bohemian or Bohemian masquerading as haute,” Mr. Bofferding said. “You did not necessarily want to see it by the light of day.” Still, he added: “the vision was informed and full of historical reference. And he looked at things as an artist does,” with an emphasis on color and texture and aesthetics instead of price tags.

“Tony really sprung out of nowhere,” said Ms. Goodman, which is to say tiny Three Rivers, Mich., by way of early 20th-century Los Angeles. “He was of the culture of make-believe,” she added, referring to studio-era Hollywood, where Duquette’s work was enthusiastically taken up by the movie people who also formed a social set around him and his wife.

Duquette, like his early mentor, the decorator Elsie de Wolfe, had both the moxie and the unfettered, rule-breaking approach typical of certain self inventions. “Elsie de Wolfe always said, ‘I was born an ugly child in an ugly age,’ and so she committed herself to creating beauty,” Ms. Goodman said. Having taken the same inventory, Duquette arrived at a similar resolve. “He was channeling something, putting all his references into the blender of his imagination,” Ms. Goodman said. “He believed more than anything that people had access to things they were not aware of.”

Young designers looking to shake off the more deadening aspects of an increasingly corporate design culture might learn a lot from Duquette, Ms. Goodman said. “It’s like: ‘Wait a minute, those things I thought about, I can do them,’” she said. “‘I can do things in an unorthodox way. I can be a mess.’”

:bottom two images of duquette's home, dawnridge, courtesy of the times. all others dianamuse.

neue galerie: klimt retrospective

2007-12-15T12:57:00.001-08:00

"Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections,” with eight paintings and more than 120 drawings by the controversial artist, is on view at the Neue Galerie through June 2008. The exhibition also features a reconstruction, with original furnishings, of the receiving parlor from the second Klimt studio.

The show is the first museum retrospective of the work of Gustav Klimt ever held in the United States (I find this hard to believe). Klimt was little known in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. In the decades immediately following his death, there was virtually no American interest in the artist. His reputation gradually began to grow in the 1960s, with Klimt eventually reaching cult status.

You'll enjoy Michael Kimmelman's fascinating article, published in The Times last year:

Gustav Klimt's 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer...is now aptly installed like a trophy head above the mantelpiece in Mr. Lauder’s Neue Galerie for German and Austrian art. Jon Stewart was joking on “The Daily Show” the other night about what that little green patch in the corner of the picture must be worth. You can’t buy publicity like that.

Well, maybe Mr. Lauder could. The portrait cost him the equivalent of the combined gross domestic products of Kiribati and São Tomé and Principe.

It’s a large, hallucinatory square of spectacular gold filigree. Adele looks almost as if she has inserted her head into one of those carnival cutouts, her thin face partly cast in shadow, obscured by the glare. Her lips are parted, eyelids heavy, cheeks pink. The eyes are two big, brown almonds. The overstuffed headrest of her chair makes a halo of beetle-wing delicacy. Monogrammed, her gown undulates with gently raised letters.

And that green patch Mr. Stewart likes so much is a glimpse of emerald floor, thrusting the picture into depth. The coup de grâce is a spider web of hands, a classic Klimt touch of decadence, clasped so that one wrist bends at a rakish right angle.

She’s half queen, half Vegas showgirl. The perfect New Yorker.

It would be churlish of art lovers in the city not to thank Mr. Lauder for the portrait that for decades was a Viennese civic symbol. Its passage, there to here, is quite a saga. Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, a wealthy Jewish industrialist, commissioned Klimt to paint his wife, twice. Klimt obliged, so the story goes, by making her his mistress. Public-spirited, she willed her art to Austria. Then she died of meningitis, at 43, in 1925.

Ferdinand had to flee the Nazis 13 years later. They seized the family’s paintings; the family castle in Bohemia went to Reinhard Heydrich, the murderer of Wannsee; the family home in Vienna went to the Austrian national railway, which shipped Jews to the camps; and the diamond choker that Adele is wearing in the portrait went to Hermann Goering for his wife. Hitler apparently balked at acquiring the family porcelain. Too expensive, he said.

And then, for more than 60 years, the Austrian government refused to return the paintings to the family, although Ferdinand had redone Adele’s will. Led by his niece, Maria Altmann, now 90 and living in Los Angeles, the Bloch-Bauer heirs finally won a court battle in January.

In a nod to the city where she settled (her lawyer, by the way, is the grandson of another exile in Hollywood, Arnold Schoenberg), Mrs. Altmann lent the pictures to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in April. Meanwhile, Mr. Lauder was negotiating the purchase of Adele, and arranging for this show to stop here.

It includes the second Adele, painted in 1912. No longer gold and Byzantine with Egyptian flourishes, instead flowery, sketchier and brightly colored, like a Japanese print, she wears a halo made out of the brim of a huge black hat. Her dress is high-collared, not off the shoulder, her body face-forward and erect, a slender, sinuous Coke bottle shape, more chaste than carnal. This older Adele gazes at some spot just over our heads — she’s still regal but less Vegas. More Aubrey Beardsley via Edith Wharton.

The other Bloch-Bauer pictures are landscapes; the earliest one, from 1903, of a birch forest, is exquisite: an archetypal Klimt mix of uncanny naturalism and geometric abstraction. Its forest floor makes a mosaic of Pointillist dots, broken up by irregular vertical stripes of perfectly real trees receding into idyllic space. For Klimt, bodies were erotic, nervous subjects, ripe for pornography; landscapes were Edenic.

The Bloch-Bauers also acquired a picture he painted of an apple tree and an unfinished jigsaw-puzzle view of houses on the shore of the Attersee, where he spent summer vacations. Neither is great. But like the two Adele portraits, they raise the question whether, had he not died at 55, in 1918, Klimt would have ended up a pure abstractionist like Mondrian.

The four pictures are on the market, Mrs. Altmann has said. She and her relatives are cashing in, which is their right. They offered the Austrian government a chance to buy the whole collection for about the money that Mr. Lauder reportedly spent on Adele.

The Austrians balked. Too expensive, they said.

When the Metropolitan spent $5.5 million on Velazquez’s portrait of Juan de Pareja in 1970, it was a scandal; now it seems cheap for one of the great paintings in the country. The sums that places like the Museum of Modern Art squander on mediocre buildings, which become obsolete the moment they open, are scandalous.

The art market operates according to its own logic, which may have nothing to do with the quality of the art. Value is not price — whether the issue is a Klimt, or a ballplayer, or a chief executive paid millions of dollars, who runs his company into the ground.

But Oscar Wilde had it right about cynics, price and value. It’s only natural to play the skeptic when the art world is a circus of profligacy, drunk with cash, and when dimwitted speculators make headlines, wasting fortunes on bad art. Who knows what the most money paid in private for a painting really is: maybe $135 million. For that amount, assuming it is what Mr. Lauder paid, his portrait of Adele, a hedonistic masterpiece, will be talked about in terms of how many lives might have been saved or how many lifted from poverty for this sum.

As for the border separating public interest from private enterprise, it has never been fixed. The Neue Galerie is Christie’s annex now, exhibiting paintings for sale ($15 general admission, no children under 12 allowed), whose display is also a public service.

Someday Adele will be seen for just what she is: beautiful, a gift to the city. And $135 million may even come to look like a bargain.

Besides paintings and drawings, the exhibition contains rare vintage documentary material, ranging from letters, photographs, and personal effects, such as the artist’s cufflinks and seal (both designed by the architect Josef Hoffmann), to the only known surviving example of the painting smock that Klimt wore.

As a special addition to the exhibition, the Neue Galerie is presenting the re-created interior—based on original floor plans and a 1912 photograph—of the receiving room from Klimt’s studio at Josefstädter Strasse 21, Vienna, which was occupied by the artist from 1892 until the summer of 1912. The display includes the original furnishings designed by Josef Hoffmann, executed by the Wiener Werkstätte.

On the lower level of the museum is a display of children’s drawings created by students in Vienna, ages 10 to 14. The drawings are based on the departure from Austria of the Klimt painting Adele Bloch-Bauer I. They are presented at the Neue Galerie under the title “Adele Comes to America.”

:neue galerie, 1048 fifth avenue, at 86th street; (212) 628-6200 or the neuegalerie website.

piranesi's continuing influence

2007-11-13T05:56:00.000-08:00

Although Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) is best known today as the supreme master of the art of etching, his early training and lifelong concerns as an architect and designer were essential to his brilliance and versatility. His chosen profession as architect was the dominating factor throughout a highly productive career of nearly forty years, which included not only the graphic arts, archaeology, and polemical debate, but also interior design, decorative arts and the restoration of classical antiquities.

Piranesi as Designer (on view at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum through January 20, 2008) examines the artist's role in the reform of architecture and design from the 18th century to the present. This is the first museum exhibition to show Piranesi's full range and influence as a designer of architecture, elaborate interiors and exquisite furnishings. On view are etchings, original drawings and prints by Piranesi, as well as a selection of three-dimensional objects. In addition to his better-known architectural projects, Piranesi also designed fantastic chimneypieces, carriage works, furniture, light fixtures and other decorative pieces.

The impact he had on subsequent generations of architects and designers was profound. His manifold influence continued throughout the nineteenth century, evident in both architecture and stage design, and then reemerged in twentieth-century film-set design. Today, Piranesi’s ideas have surfaced in the work of leading architects such as the Postmodernists Michael Graves, Robert A. M. Stern, and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, as well as in the Deconstructivist work of Peter Eisenman and Daniel Libeskind.

Piranesi as Designer is the first museum exhibition to present Piranesi’s full range and significance as a designer, by means of etchings, original drawings, and objects. The core of this exhibition has been drawn from the riches of the Smithsonian Institution and from New York City public collections, most notably from the Cooper-Hewitt, Morgan, and Avery Libraries.

Featured alongside these drawings is an unprecedented display of objects gathered from prestigious collections around the world, especially the magnificent chimneypiece and pier table from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Together, this testament to Piranesi’s continuing influence eloquently conveys the impact of historic design on the present (italicized for extra-super emphasis - consider it a virtual hit over the head).

Pier table designed for Cardinal Giovanni Battista Rezzonico, ca. 1768. This carved and gilt wood table, together with its pendant (in the Minneapolis Institute of Fine Arts), were integral elements of the lost state rooms of Monsignor Giambattista Rezzonico in the Quirinal Palace. Ornamented by stylized natural forms from antiquity.

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum is located on Museum Mile, at the corner of 91st Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City.

:Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum; check out the stunning exhibition website here

paula scher @ home

2007-11-09T06:13:00.001-08:00

Great interiors from the great Paula Scher's Flatiron apartment. Check out the opinionated pillow on the sofa.

Good weekend, everyone.

:these images (+ more) and lovely interview at nysocialdiary

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build-a-tree

2007-11-07T19:31:00.000-08:00

There's a pack of ten architecturally-endowed holiday greeting cards waiting for you at Jill Dryer's etsy digs right here. The face of the card features these delightful "trees of the architects" - the back is light blue and inside...b l a n k .

In her product description, Jill graciously offers a Who's Who refresher which includes the following backgrounders:

Zaha is a cool female architect from Iraq who won the Pritzker Prize (basically, the Oscar for architecture) a couple years ago.

Margaret McCurry is a lovely Chicago architect who works with her husband Stanley Tigerman.

Santiago designed the most recent Olympic Stadium, the Milwaukee Art Museum (which opens up like it has wings) as well as the Spire, a big high rise headed for Chicago.

My personal favorite? The FG, of course. How about you?

:jdryerart

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it's all in black & white

2007-11-03T05:18:00.001-07:00

By now, you've seen this great wrapping paper offering from Blueprint. But take it one step further and combine with these charming scallop-edged tags from threepotatofour and you've got something uber-special going on!

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letterpress love

2007-11-02T08:28:00.000-07:00

I just picked up a box of this and other red&orange patterned beauties from Albertine Press on etsy. Just right (don't you think?) for autumn missives.

~ ~ ~

dianamuse feature: van gogh in new york

2007-09-28T10:40:00.000-07:00

"Painted with Words: Vincent van Gogh's Letters to Émile Bernard" opens today at The Morgan Library and runs through January 6, 2008. From the Library's site: Painted with Words is a compelling look at Vincent van Gogh's correspondence to his young colleague Émile Bernard between 1887 and 1889. Van Gogh's words and sketches reveal his thoughts about art and life and communicate his groundbreaking work in Arles to his fellow painter. Unseen for nearly seventy years, and never before exhibited, the twenty letters document the close, vital friendship of the two artists.

Van Gogh's letters to Bernard reveal the tenor of their relationship. Van Gogh assumed the role of an older, wiser brother, offering praise or criticism of Bernard's paintings, drawings, and poems. At the same time the letters chronicle van Gogh's own struggles, as he reached his artistic maturity in isolation in Arles and St. Rémy. Throughout the letters are no less than twelve sketches by van Gogh meant to provide Bernard with an idea of his work in progress, including studies related to the paintings The Langlois Bridge, Houses at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, Boats on the beach at Saintes-Maries, The Sower, and View of Arles at Sunset.

To complement the letters, more than twenty paintings, drawings, and watercolors by van Gogh and Bernard are on view. These works document their dynamic exchange of ideas—among them are paintings and drawings discussed and sketched by van Gogh in his letters to Bernard. The works of art are drawn mostly from collections outside of New York, and feature numerous works not recently shown in the U.S.

I imagine that some of the art is from the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (haven't been there for - sheesh! - 15 years or so.) Beyond his art, van Gogh's relationships offer such insight into his complex character and motivations. I'll be sure to report back once I've seen the show!

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glass aid

2007-09-20T09:59:00.000-07:00

A bright treat to help this neglected blog feel pretty.
And witty.
And gay.

:via elle decor

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under the influence

2007-08-26T06:05:00.000-07:00

:whitney museum of art

The two images just above are card-carrying treasures that I picked up at The Whitney this weekend. The Summer of Love exhibit is a total groove-fest. Inspired me to get off the dime and start writing and posting about San Francisco in the 60s (or stories of my youth) and other tales of the many, varied early influences on my aesthetics.

Hope you've all had a great weekend.

please, have a seat

2007-08-25T06:44:00.000-07:00

Now that we've broken on through to the other side of Labor Day, returned from oh-the-places-you'll-go travels and taken on some new, exciting ventures, it's time to burrow deep into work and resume the pace of everyday life. And my bloggies need some attention, too. They've been abandoned for a solid two weeks or more.

The lovely chair (above) is probably familiar to those who visit this blog. It graces the cover of Florence de Dampierre's richly photographed and well-written homage to the chair, Chairs: A History. Many of you probably have this book in your library.

And now...pop quiz! Without peeking, do you know which chair appears on the BACK cover?

(Jeopardy music.)

I'll tell you. It's the perfect juxtaposition: the Diamond Chair (Harry Bertoia, of course) designed for Knoll.

So, what to put with the parcel-gilt armchair?? Hmm. How about this...a Louis XIV medal cabinet. Oak veneered with tortoiseshell, brass, and ebony; gilt-bronze mounts; sarrancolin des Pyrenées marble top. Circa 1700, attributed to André-Charles Boulle (photo courtesy of The Getty Center Los Angeles).

When I was growing up, we had Boulle furniture in our living room. I was very fond of two pieces, a tall single-door marble-top cabinet and an exquisite commode. (The design of the table was quite delicate, very unlike the grand, almost overwhelming piece I've shown here.) I loved to study the intricate brass & tortoiseshell marquetry and run my hands over the varied textures of wood, shell and metal; I spent hours at this - the patterns are all but imprinted on my brain. And the gorgeous, elaborate ormolu mounts? To die. My father purchased these beautiful pieces at the Butterfield & Butterfield auction house in San Francisco, probably in the late 50s or early 60s.

Here's another example:

For those new to Boulle as well as aficionados, here's a bit of background:

André Charles Boulle, a French cabinetmaker, the master of a distinctive style of furniture, much imitated, for which his name has become a synonym for the practice of veneering furniture with marquetry of tortoiseshell, pewter, and inlaid with arabesques of gilded brass - and often utilized ormolu mounts. (Ormolu is an imitation of gold used to ornament furniture and moldings.)

Although he did not invent the technique, Boulle was its greatest practitioner and lent his name to its common name: boulle work.

André was awarded the title of master cabinetmaker before 1666. In 1672 he was admitted to a group of skilled artists maintained by Louis XIV in the Louvre palace, and thereafter he devoted himself to creating costly furniture and objects of art for the king and court. That same year he also received a warrant signed by the Queen, giving him the added title of 'bronzier' as well as 'ebeniste'. (Interesting, no?)

Boulle's pieces, having in general the character of Louis XIV, specialized in the inlaying of ebony with precious woods and mother-of-pearl. Large areas were covered with tortoiseshell, inlaid with arabesques of gilded brass. He was born in 1642 and died in 1732.

Today, Boulle is manufactured from PVC and copper instead of tortoiseshell as follows: Two plates of Copper and PVC which is colored in drawings of red and black are hand cut simultaneously in the specific Boulle shapes, and are then intermingled and inlaid complementary to each other (like a puzzle) in two items i.e. PVC inside copper in item one and copper inside PVC in item two. The surrounding frames are either black or mahogany.

And here we have some simple illustrations that represent this particular 'Louis' period - the XVth, to be clear. I found these sketches at an online tutorial. If you want the link, just let me know - I've yet to figure out how to embed links in text (my tech weaknesses are an embarrassment to me.)

Chair and cabinet could co-exist in a room of their own - though they'd be right at home here in this Met period room. (Quiz query #2: What is the period represented in this period room?)

Ah. It's good to be back.

jungle peas and pink pods

2007-08-20T15:00:00.001-07:00

:domestic.fr
Flowing over a landing or sprouting from a baseboard, this fanciful flora and fauna vinyl-art is a great (washable, removeable!) alternative to a greenhouse. (BTW, I repotted about ten geranium plants this weekend - indoors. May I just say that bits and flecks of potting soil are not easily recovered from the in-between spaces of parquet floors. FYI.)

pisanka: mixed-media collage series

2007-08-17T10:19:00.001-07:00

:dianamuse

I recently pulled out an image from a collage-series I developed this spring. These colors never fail to delight and amuse me. And the egg, although an ancient symbol of spring, reminds me of rebirth and renewal year-round. So, I ask myself, why not today?

And here's some info (more than you need, surely) on the origins of eggart.

The art of the decorated egg in Ukraine (pysanka)--pisanka in Russia--dates back to ancient times. As in many ancient cultures, Ukrainians worshipped a sun god (Dazhboh). The sun was important - it warmed the earth and thus was a source of all life. Eggs decorated with nature symbols became an integral part of spring rituals, serving as benevolent talismans. In pre-Christian times, Dazhboh was one of the main deities in the Slavic pantheon; birds were the sun god's chosen creations, for they were the only ones who could get near him. Humans could not catch the birds, but they did manage to obtain the eggs the birds laid. Thus, the eggs were magical objects, a source of life. The egg was also honored during rite-of-spring festivals––it represented the rebirth of the earth. The long, hard winter was over; the earth burst forth and was reborn just as the egg miraculously burst forth with life. The egg, therefore, was believed to have special powers.

more fun from eieio

2007-08-16T07:28:00.000-07:00

:eieio at luxepaperie

...and snow & graham

2007-08-16T07:24:00.000-07:00

:snow & graham at luxepaperie

lively, delightful papers

2007-08-15T11:23:00.000-07:00

:eieio

I have a framed sheet of this cheery wrapping paper hanging in my studi~o~ffice. (Someday I'll post photos of it in vivo). It's from eieio and you can find it at luxepaperie.

simple line, splendid color

2007-08-14T11:58:00.001-07:00

:pleasebestill at etsy

These lovely prints caught my eye during a quick run to etsy this afternoon. The shades of green totally stopped me in my (virtual) tracks. The prints are of original illustrations from the 'Between These Walls' series. Each image in the series is limited to 250--signed, numbered and dated. Shop for them on etsy at pleasebestill.

yes, indeed - tord lights the way

2007-08-13T08:01:00.001-07:00

:tord boontje

Talk about visual entertainment--it doesn't get better than this.

writing in style

2007-08-12T08:02:00.000-07:00

Please e-me or leave a comment if you want to know more about this little (green, bejeweled) beauty. (As a relative-newbie-to-the-world-of-blogging blogger, I've not yet figured out how to post a link that takes you directly to the source-site. Any help from readership on that front would be most welcome.)

arresting juxtaposition

2007-08-10T07:43:00.000-07:00

:house and garden

Rococo meets 2001: A Space Odyssey (magenta version).

tricia guild thursday

2007-08-09T11:18:00.000-07:00

:designers guild

Her work is scrumptious, luxe, simply irresistible.

for my cool (younger) bro

2007-08-08T09:22:00.000-07:00

:flavorleague

Have a great trip.

classic pop

2007-08-07T05:48:00.000-07:00

:marimekko at reprodepot

in situ

2007-08-02T05:14:00.000-07:00

:eric gizard associes

More classic Knoll.

Harry Bertoia's 1950 experiment with bending metal rods into practical art produced a revered collection of seating, including the exquisite Diamond chair. Innovative, comfortable and strikingly handsome, the chair's delicate appearance belies its strength and durability. In Bertoia's own words, "If you look at these chairs, they are mainly made of air, like sculpture. Space passes right through them."

A classic, modern design that enhances any environment, Bertoia's Diamond chair remains a fascinating study in bent metal and a fixture of mid-century design. Knoll is the only authorized and licensed manufacturer of the Bertoia Collection which has been in continuous production since 1952.

flowers-on-flower

2007-08-01T05:48:00.000-07:00

:dianamuse

From our journey to Central Park this morning. The photos (there are many) warrant a mini-slideshow of their own, but this shot deserves to be HERE, where orange is IT!

you CAN go home again - the knoll womb chair

2007-07-30T09:01:00.001-07:00

knoll.com

your itty bitty stickers

2007-07-29T13:53:00.000-07:00

More at moo.com

and this from howaboutorange.com

keeping all the balls in the air

2007-07-29T06:06:00.000-07:00

:elumdesigns.com

i'll have the orange and pink combo, please

2007-07-27T14:08:00.000-07:00

:reprodepot

it's easy being green

2007-07-27T14:04:00.000-07:00

:reprodepot

our lady in winter

2007-07-27T07:02:00.000-07:00

:dianamuse

i do believe we're getting somewhere

2007-05-17T04:17:00.000-07:00

Right. I've got to come up with a bit more content so I can get a feel for the look of the text, post, title, blog title, etc. colors and fonts.

2007-05-13T13:19:00.001-07:00

prime number, you're in

The story goes like this

2007-05-11T03:26:00.001-07:00

Long ago and far away

Day One

2007-04-23T11:32:00.001-07:00

The elements of style: