Asymmetry: Best book of 2018 by Lisa Halliday

Asymmetry is now at the top of both the New York Times and the New Yorker year end best lists. And I am in full agreement. I’ve just finished my second full read. As someone who pines for ‘good old fashioned novels’, I was completely swept up by Lisa Halliday’s fictionalizing of her affair with Philip Roth when she was in her twenties and he was much older. Though she submits it’s not actually Roth but an amalgam of people in her life, it feels like reportage…and yet not.

 Her character is just brilliant enough, self-deprecating enough, attractive enough, young enough, clever enough, to make it not only believable that he would be attracted to her but that she would see through him.  Roth saw the MS and liked it. Here’s a case where life and art are intertwined—and they were apparently still friends up until his death. There could be nothing more flattering, in the end.

Once many years ago in northwestern Connecticut, I walked into a popular restaurant and saw Philip Roth sitting in a booth with some friends.(Roth had a home nearby)  I know he shot a glance my way. I say that not to boast but to affirm how compelling this man’s gaze was.

 At first Halliday’s sandwich of the story of the young Iraqi-American who is detained at Heathrow felt jarring. But on my second read, I understood her impulse to make us see that while her intimate story was playing out, a much graver, life-or-death defining experience was afoot. These characters are both young and trying to find their place in a world in which normal expectations have been upended. 

 I am hugely jealous of Lisa Halliday, who not only has dominated the charts but lives now in Milan, away from the fray of NY publishing.  I enjoyed reading this novel twice and I imagine it will become a classic example for all aspiring authors. I look forward to her next book.

Becoming Astrid: a film about the real-life Pippi Longstocking

My office library is organized by subject matter.  Non fiction—biography and memoir—load most of the shelves.  Fiction is in the bedroom—hardcover—and art books in the den. The children’s books are still in one of the rooms once occupied by my youngest son.  

 But on the two shelves above my desk are the books which are the most personal.  The series of French film books and DVDs of the New Wave, the books by friends which have been inscribed to me by their authors, and a short selection of novels and non fiction which reference my current work.

 On the very top shelf, in the middle, now encased in a plastic baggie as it’s so fragile is the paperback version of Pippi Longstocking which I ordered as part of the Scholastic book club in elementary school.  The binding is shot, the pages are brittle and many are loose and have disengaged from their mooring.

I know I am far from the only girl, or person, who nourishes such fond affection for a novel which found in me the brave girl I wanted to be, who didn’t give a fig for what anyone else thought, who could climb trees and wash the floor as if she were skating, had a horse in her backyard and was so strong she could lift him, who made excellent pancakes, who could sleep whenever and however she liked, join the circus, and had a pet monkey and was so nice to the more conventional children next door.

 Author Astrid Lindgren found her way to millions of childrens’ hearts all over the world because, as one says in a letter she receives when she is very old in a new film biography from Sweden, “ You understand us Astrid, you are on our side”.

 Becoming Astrid directed by Pernille Fischer Christensen tells the fairly conventional story of an unconventional girl: a rebellious farmgirl with talent who leaves her family behind as her talent is recognized, and along the way has a affair which changes the course of her life, but only serves to deepen her ability to understand how a child feels.

 And it shows in a very simple way how it’s impossible to entirely separate the writer from the document no matter how much they (we) protest.

 Like Laura Ingalls Wilder, Lindgren took the basics of her own life and put them into her stories; she wrote many more books but Pippi is the one best known to English speaking audiences.

 I don’t really want to spoil the film for anyone.  Alas I believe one sex scene would make it difficult for anyone younger than middle school or high school to see it, it’s really a film for older teenagers and adults.

 I took an informal survey of friends. Everyone identified with Pippi. Like Eloise and Madeline she is smart but feisty, all three of them girls who prevail in the end just by being themselves.

The film is perfect holiday treat about loss and forgiveness, following your passion, the clichés of growing up and out which are all too true. A new generation is discovering the marvels of Pippi every day.

It opens on November 23rd.

Van Gogh by Julian Schnabel: At Eternity's Gate

Julian Schnabel is a very brave artist.  After being a wildly successful artist du jour and then coming down off that perch, he turned his hand to film and made, among others, some beauties: the story of Basquiat and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. 

 At Eternity’s Gate, his film portrait of Van Gogh is as ambitious as the others but is hampered more than anything by the dialog seemingly lifted in whole chunks from letters that Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, to Paul Gauguin fellow artist, and others. Despite help from veteran screenwriter Jean Claude Carriere (or maybe alas because of it)  nothing ever sounds natural.  And therefore the performances, though earnest and deep, draw attention to their static quality instead of to their verisimilitude.  Schnabel should have trusted himself more. 

 Instead of bringing on a French screenwriter, the casting could have been more European. Not that I am PC about that. But the American-ness and British-ness of the principal roles doesn’t help you dive into the characters. 

 Willem Dafoe is abjectly tortured, (even if a good thirty years older than the artist actually was as this series of events unfolds), the artist who can’t get anyone to even hang his work for free in a bar, whose manic depression overwhelms him, whose obsessions for capturing on canvas a girl walking home from work or a fellow asylum mate get him into trouble.  His compulsive desire to fill every canvas, to layer it, to exhaust the paint itself, is made real and here Schnabel’s own expertise comes into play. We feel keenly his desire to suck up the sights, sounds and even smells of the world.

 Oscar Isaac is a suitably arrogant Gauguin who alternately thrills and chills his less successful friend.  The best surprise is Rupert Friend as brother Theo.

 This relationship of the brothers is wonderfully drawn: Theo the sane, Vincent the genius madman, linked forever as helper and helpless.  Theo’s desire for his own life eventually overrides his compassion for Vincent when he institutionalizes him. 

 Van Gogh’s intellectual heft, his knowledge of Shakespeare and the Bible is set against his dramatic deficits of personal intelligence.  I don’t know if Schnabel invented this or it was real. (I reached out to John Walsh, ex Getty director, now giving a series of lectures on Van Gogh at Yale open to the public for some context. Walsh reminded me he would be dealing with this period in Arles next semester .)

 The production is filled with the southern French light that so warmed Van Gogh’s aching heart and soul.  (Arles, once a favorite city of mine, is now undergoing massive development by the Luma Foundation. I saw things in construction a few years ago. I’m hopeful they can retain something of the city’s historic character) Schnabel managed to find the still rural Arles, the one that was Van Gogh’s home at the end of his life both inside outside the asylum walls. 

 Every loaf of bread, bowl of fruit and indeed every character from barmaid to priest is filled with the unique texture of real life. And then every once in a while the screen goes black.  A moment of darkness descends on us just as it does on Vincent. 

 The film opens on November 16th.

City Center honors Jerome Robbins at Studio 5 series

I am just this year discovering the City Center rewarding series Studio 5, intimate evenings that let you get up close to superior dancing and understand something of what dancers go through to prepare for a role.

In the last weeks they have focussed on Balanchine. Now, for two evenings, they are moving the dial to my favorite choreographer, Jerome Robbins. I’ve written extensively about his Goldberg Variations, to me one of the most moving and intricate ballets ever made.

Adrian Danchig-Waring, an NYCB principal, in what may have been his first outing as a speaker, needed an editor as he had over prepared his notes—distilled from the biographies and his own experiences— but what he had to say was meaningful. Robbins was a tortured soul: about his Judaism, his homosexuality, his politics, even his talent.

Robbins was not Balanchine, though a disciple. They both had Broadway in their bones, but Robbins made more of a serious career of it (Fiddler, West Side Story, etc). When he came to NYCB he wanted to learn from the master. But his powers of observation and gift for spontaneous though rigorous movement moved him up to be Balanchine’s equal (not everyone agrees with me on this).

Craig Hall, Kennard Henson, Sterling Hyltin, Lauren Lovette and Teresa Reichlen performed two early Robbins masterworks: The Cage and Afternoon of a Faun. I do not like The Cage with its buggy, static movements and deeply Freudian themes though I recognize its being ahead of its time.

But having grown up seeing Allegra Kent and Jacques D’Amboise dance Faun at City Center I was thrust back into the memories of my first understandings about sex and dance and how they can be all mixed up together. This ballet set to Debussy is still one of the most erotic confections and also gives a glimpse of life in a ballet studio and its insistence on the mirror.

There’s another evening of Robbins on November 26.

East Western Divan Orchestra proves detente possible

The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra though now based in Seville, Spain was founded in Germany after discussions between writer Edward Said and conductor Daniel Barenboim as a vehicle to promote interchange between Palestinian and Israeli musicians. My attention was first drawn to the orchestra last year in Berlin when I went to a concert at the new hall Frank Gehry has designed for the Barenboim-Said Academy.

 Daniel Barenboim has said,

 "The Divan is not a love story, and it is not a peace story. It has very flatteringly been described as a project for peace. It isn't. It's not going to bring peace, whether you play well or not so well. The Divan was conceived as a project against ignorance. A project against the fact that it is absolutely essential for people to get to know the other, to understand what the other thinks and feels, without necessarily agreeing with it. I'm not trying to convert the Arab members of the Divan to the Israeli point of view, and [I'm] not trying to convince the Israelis to the Arab point of view. But I want to – and unfortunately I am alone in this now that Edward died a few years ago – ...create a platform where the two sides can disagree and not resort to knives."

 I finally had a chance to catch them at Carnegie Hall last week, where much of this unique collaboration was on display.  The orchestra which now crowds even the ample stage at Carnegie Hall is a rousing tribute to music. The mostly young musicians were intent and dedicated in their renditions of Strauss’s Don Quixote and Tchaikovsky’s passionate Symphony 5, always an inspirational piece. 

 I first saw Barenboim conduct Brahms 2 at his home base at the Staatskappelle in Berlin, a legendary architectural confection.  He’s apparently a wonderful and warm person (see this 60 minutes story) and his style is self-effacing but electric.  He bows low to the orchestra in a kind of swan dive as he coaxes out what he wants from them.  

 I had an amazing seat behind Placido Domingo and across the aisle from Alec Baldwin, both passionate artists themselves. Domingo, also a conductor, nodded his head and air-conducted through some particularly engaging musical passages. Baldwin kept his head down after the more combative events of last week, but is to be commended. He is the voice of the NY Phil and supports the arts.

 Coming hard on the heels of the midterms and our own divided country displayed in such harsh relief the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is a welcome example that getting close to each other means everything.  

Photo Credits: Chris Lee.

A new generation gets to meet Andy Warhol

You will get it all at the Whitney Warhol, as they say, A to B and Back again

 You will get your Brillo boxes, your Coke bottles, your dollar bills, your Green Stamps, your Campbell’s soup cans, the Cow wallpaper, the Elvises, the raunchy films and video, and of course the gift shop filled with yummy, branded trinkets. Why the very word brand might first have been associated with Warhol the artist who made branding part of his artistic practice.

 Like Picasso, the other great innovator of the 20th century, every successive generation discovers Warhol in its own way. The exhibition is dynamic and it’s going to feel completely contemporary to millennials. Selfies, brash colors, repetition as a motif, gay and transgender themes, news, fake news, record your conversations, (Warhol often referred to his Norelco Carry Corder as his ‘wife’), video.  What’s not to like?

 Warhol is also like Picasso in that you don’t need to say much more for people to have an image in their heads right away. This exhibition will help people to add to the Soup Can.  If you are one who thinks of Warhol as precursor to artists like Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst, you will see how far above them he floats. The technical innovation alone is impressive. 

 What might also seem new-- though there have been smaller exhibitions relating to his early career as a graphic artist—are the charming drawings of Louis Quatorze golden slippers, Matisse-ean portraits, sweet illustrations for the many magazines and companies he worked for.

The Golden slippers are my favorites and precursors to the society and celeb portraits displayed in a large room on the first floor, the ones that buttered his bread and were a way into a magic kingdom which the shy, gay Pittsburgh boy from a Polish immigrant family had always held on high. The Golden slippers, like the later silk screen portraits are dedicated to his heroes and heroines: Diana Vreeland, Truman Capote, Mae West, Babe Paley, and the Bergdorf Goodman Shoe salon;)

 I think however it’s better to start on Floor 5 because you see the genesis of these rather than having old ideas about Warhol reinforced.

 He loved gold, and it was threaded through all his work.  He loved camouflage. He stamped, stenciled, he cropped, he printed, the repetition functioning as a kind of punch in the gut. Oh yeah? Take that, and that and that again. Notice me, pay attention.

 Curator Donna de Salvo who has toiled in the Warhol world for much of her adult life says Warhol asked the question in his Death and Destruction paintings: What is history? When do headlines become history? At first, he hand painted large scale copies of the front page.  One of his first pieces is the NY Mirror 129 Die in jet,and the technique is breathtaking.  Then he realized he could achieve very similar effects by silk screening these giant images.

 Irving Blum’s story is that Warhol couldn’t make it out for the Ferus Gallery LA opening of 1963 so he instead sent stretchers and an uncut roll of printed canvas to the gallery and instructed Blum how to stretch and hang them around the perimeter of the gallery.  Presto, change-o, Sell-o.

The blue self portrait from 1964, his first large self portrait made him a star in his own firmament of many stars though Ethel Scull got 36 reps and Warhol only 4.  Warhol made selfies before there was such a term.

Warhol supposedly announced his retirement in 1965 and started doing cow wallpaper but really what he meant was that he wasn’t going to let painting confine him anymore but wanted to experiment in every medium. How contemporary does that sound? He collaborated with the Rolling Stones for the Sticky Fingers album cover ( I own one. Listen to the great songs on the album if you haven’t)

At first the perpetual outsider looking in and then an insider looking out, even when he became famous there was an ‘aw shucks’ quality about him. He was genuinely impressed with wealth and position. He loved Hollywood, and he loved rich Europeans too but he also admired his fellow creatives.

 The exhibition makes clear Warhol was not androgynous.   Drawings and early works from the 50s depict his gay friends and lovers and are evidence this was a man for whom sex was a driving passion.

 He was also one of the first artists to conceive of exhibitions as immersive experiences interrelating with their environments. This is nimbly illustrated by a series of photos of him vacuuming the space before installing his work at the Finch College Art Museum.

 Yes, like many many others, I met and exchanged sentences with Andy Warhol a few times. I can say that going to the Factory for me (as a hanger on to a bevy of European heiresses) felt like going to Studio 54. I was scared of the mylar and the druggie corners and the post-Edie ennui. As the hands of the Factory became more pronounced and Warhol moved to film and other interests, he did a series of shadow paintings (installed now at Dia). Camouflage came back. Maybe just another version of the white wig he always wore to make him disappear.

 But de Salvo makes the case that the work of the 70s and 80s was every bit as revolutionary as the 60s, though at the time, this work was in eclipse and people felt he had homogenized himself, “that the work had lost its vitality”.  She is convincing only up to a point.  It’s no secret—and understandable-- that after he was shot, a certain fearlessness seems to have disappeared along with innovation.

When the headline appeared on the front page of the Daily News it was as if Warhol himself had painted it—life imitates art, you bet.

 Warhol died at 58 later, of surgical complications. Would he have made more groundbreaking work? De Salvo thinks most certainly yes. 

 Attention younger folks: if you see the new Studio 54 documentary , and this exhibition, and read Truman Capote and Jean Stein’s still marvelous book on Edie Sedgwick, you will feel the strands of the 60s and 70s tied up quite neatly. Everything about 2018 was there in 1968 except the internet which I think Warhol would have adored.  Once again, The Price of Everything seems old news when you see that Warhol was onto the art vs commerce thing so very long ago.  

 De Salvo boils it down to this thematic essence:  innovation vs conformity.  Obama vs Trump, I mean I could go on and on. As a wall label explains, ‘the sizzle, not the steak”. 

But first a school: SAB students display the Balanchine ethos at City Center

The second of two parts of a City Center Tribute to George Balanchine’s years of creativity at City Center unfolded with all the charm of a performance of the Nutcracker. The evening was structured a bit like a seder, where the youngest has to to ask the important four questions: Why is a Balanchine dancer different from all others? 

 Arlene Schuler, head of City Center and herself an SAB veteran invited three other veteran NYCB ballerinas and ballet mistresses along with selected students to answer these questions in a show and tell about “the West Point of the ballet world”.  These teachers learned from Mr. B himself and could recite him chapter and verse. They have drunk the kool aid. Or rather, the champagne, as metaphors military and bubbly were as resplendent as the dancers.’’

 Katrina Killian, head of the early years, Kay Mazzo head of the teen years and Suki Schorer who in the last stages of prep is the arrow which flings these rapid delivery systems of the B method onto the stage showed us the differences in the Balanchine style: rapid, powerful, staccato, attenuated, precise, and inferred all other ballet regimens are more or less second rate.  Certainly I can hardly bear to watch the old-school Russians now when the Bolshoi comes to visit.

 The important thing as Mazzo said, and where SAB has been largely successful, is engendering “the full circle of training, performing and giving back”.

 Here are some of the Balanchine axioms they quoted:

 Maintain a pose as if you are holding eggs and don’t want to break them

 Keep your body long and stretched

 Keep your weight on your toes.

 Though musicality is a first priority, it’s the teacher who sets the tempo in class, not the pianist who is to be ‘quieter”

 Always face front, spot front during turns, not profile, as if you are offering one cheek for a kiss

 Execute certain steps as if they are being “shot from a canon”, or like a “boxer in the ring” or pushed out “like a champagne cork”

 Extend your leg “as if you are taking it out of your décolleté of your evening gown” (my favorite)

 Move like a bullfighter, this way and then that way

So: a combination of aggression and rigor (West Point, canons, boxers, bullfighters) and delicacies (eggs, cheeks, champagne,) are what makes an SAB student eligible to become a New York City Ballet dancer.

 Balanchine took his training from Russia and gradually added jazzy or sexy riffs to his own style.  But the students are taught more or less as he was taught in Russia in a method that allows them freedom only as they reach maturity. 

 The thing is: I believe in this system.  I began in this system.  I was in the second class of 8 year olds.  I didn’t last long as my mother refused to devote her life to my commute but I was there long enough to understand that it was through pain, hard work and serious repetition that we would become the feathered swans I saw in the Moorish theater at City Center as Cecil Beaton’s creaky swan crossed the stage in Balanchine’s “lite” version of Swan Lake.  Or really anything else we wanted to be.

 I still walk tall, crook my head slightly and turnout, as a default.

 Some dancers who were estranged from the company like Suzanne Farrell and Gelsey Kirkland (different reasons but both Balanchine-derived) started their own companies.  Other dancers rail at the restrictiveness of the indoctrination.

 Coming hard on the heels of a former female SAB student exposing the alleged harassment of two male NYCB dancers (among them Amar Ramasar, one of my favorite dancers) and their subsequent forced resignation, it was instructive to see: the ballet mistresses are still referring to the dancers as ‘girls” in the old school tradition and the men as assets to show them off.   Balanchine left some traditions that have not held up in the modern era. Still, I have every hope that the ship is being righted. 

 Of all the dancers on display, from Children’s division 1 through Daniel Applebaum and Joseph Gorden (newly named soloist and principal two weeks ago, presumably in light of having lost the two male principal dancers) it was Olive Omelchenko in her powder blue leotard from Children’s 1 who made the most vivid impression. Her turnout and body position and her bun, were perfection, her carriage and comportment professional even at 8.  Afterwards,I approached the teachers to thank them all.  When I exclaimed over Omelchenko, Mazzo nodded her head in agreement. “Just wait ten years,’ she said.

Magazzino Italian Art Museum is a captivating outpost of passionate collecting

Private museums are all the rage.  A month ago, Glenstone opened in Maryland. There’s the Broad and so many others worldwide.

 But Magazzino Italian Art Museum seems an outlier. It took me a year to finally have a Sunday to get up to Cold Spring. I had hoped for a better show of leaves along the Hudson River train route, but like everywhere else, global warming has pushed back on nature. For at least the second year in a row, there were only muddy browns and golds with the occasional red pop to remind us of what we were missing.

Derived from the collection of Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu, the largely Arte Povera works at Magazzino were lovingly collected with intense focus and scholarship. Arte Povera really becomes understandable at this museum, its motives less murky. Having been lured by post war Torino and north Italy and then tumbling headlong into Sicily and Puglia these last years, the art had special resonance for me.

 Margherita Stein was Arte Povera’s champion in Italy and she has passed the torch to the Olnick/Spanus with white heat. Architect Miguel Quismondo has designed a home for them in nearby Garrison and they asked him to carry on with the museum.  Having only seen exterior shots of Glenstone’s gray pavilions and coming upon the (smaller) Magazzino gray pavilions, I was slightly put off by the austerity.  Once inside however, there is a warmth and logical spaciousness that felt in keeping with the art. 

 An hour and a half long series of short films hosted by Germano Celant who coined the term Arte Povera at the entry is too long for one go, but 15 minutes will give you the necessary tools to approach the art.  No wall labels of course (my pet peeve) but the small booklet you are given at the entrance is a pithy port to the artists and their works. 

 Celant explains the crucial animating theory of this group, largely a sixties reaction to industrialization and the loss of nature and natural elements. Taking their cues from water, air, land and fire, the primitive elements revered by the Greeks, as well as the animal kingdom, this self-organized Italian group juxtaposed the work of man and the work of nature in novel ways. The point, a very contemporary one, is that we are losing our way.

 Alas, until Marisa Merz’s work was ‘exhumed’ a few years ago at the Whitney there was little attention paid to the concurrent work of women. Merz--husband Mario was more closely associated with the group—is here represented by works that captivate for their “warmer” delivery system.

 Workers and students were unusually aligned, especially in Europe during the late sixties and the art reflects a rejection of the status quo, then more oriented towards Pop and Minimalism. Other groups of Italian artists were seeking a different way out of the postwar but the Poveristos (my coinage) including Michelangelo Pistoletto, Marco Anelli, Alighiero Boetti, Luciano Fabro, Pino Pascali, Jannis Kounellis, Giuseppe Penone, Giulio Paolini marched to their own drum.

 The Olnick Spanus also support contemporary Italian art, some currently on view at the Italian Culture Institute and the exhibition, which closes this week, makes a good pairing with the works at the museum.

Michelle Dorrance shows ABT can do it all

Can Michelle Dorrance, erstwhile tap megastar do everything else well too? 

 This summer on Facebook I saw Heather Watts’s posts on Dorrance at Damian Woetzel’s Vail Dance Festival.  I had seen Dorrance last year at the Joyce and was suitably impressed but there was something else going on in Vail that was even more intriguing. 

 It turns out to be Dream within a Dream, a new ballet which just premiered at ABT. And yes, she has figured out how to transfer her tap to the ballet dancers. With a combination of canes, claps (or as we call them in flamenco, palmas) and the wooden toes of the ballet shoes, Dorrance has made the syncopation an integral part of this new piece.

 The dancers are game! They have fun to the forties Duke Ellington medly.  One, James Whiteside, can really tap and shows off all the lessons he must have once taken (or takes) and he’s really good. What the dancers get more than anything is the Dorrance shuffle, or crouch, or sidestep.  They have picked up on her ability to perambulate like no other.

 Calvin Royal had just danced Alexei Ratmansky’s Robbins-Russian inflected Songs of Bukovina with Christine Shevchenko which premiered last year at this time. Both did admirable double duty in the Dorrance.    

 A good time was had by all.

Photo Credits: Dream within a Dream, photographed by Marty Sohl  

The Balanchine Woman on intimate display at City Center

George Balanchine is reported to have said “Ballet is Woman”. Last night at City Center in the 5th floor space that was once a studio for his nascent New York City Ballet company, we saw two women who have thoroughly imbued this ethic and yet who both have transcended it. Balanchine ballerinas are a lot smarter and more savvy than most imagine.

 In the Balanchine Woman hour-long program (the first of two, there is another Monday night with Kay Mazzo on the School of American Ballet) which is an adjunct to the Balanchine: The City Center Year festival beginning next week, Heather Watts, a star in the 70s and 80’s acted as a kind of ringmaster-slash-historian for demonstrations by Tiler Peck and Jared Angle, and, spontaneously, pressed her life partner, Damian Woetzel, into service in an Apollo demonstration for good measure.

 Peck is in her prime, generally flawless in execution, even though she never worked directly with Balanchine, and it was a treat to see her up close, ending her chene turns practically in the lap of an audience member. Her high, delicate voice is in contrast to her masterful technique and precision. Watts—who has not diminished her ardor and respect for Balanchine--coached her in excerpts from the Nutcracker, Apollo, Serenade and the Four Temperaments. Cameron Grant, the longtime NYCB pianist accompanied them with his usual panache.

 Watts was very good in tracing the lineage of the dancers who came before Peck in these ballets—Tanaquil Le Clerq (a Balanchine wife), Karin Von Aroldingen, Sara Leland, Gelsey Kirkland, Alexandra Danilova, Maria Tallchief, Merrill Ashley et al. While not all remained faithful to Balanchine, each passed along a precious strand of ballet DNA to the next generation. Each however made a dance her own—an extra hip here, an elegant port de bras there.. 

 “We carry our predecessors with us,” said Watts.  Watts said Theme and Variations, though made by Balanchine on Alicia Alonso at ABT in 1947, is also claimed by the NYCB dancers who, after all, had the benefit of Balanchine full time for many years.

 Next week the Marinsky, Paris Opera, Joffrey, Royal, San Francisco, and Miami City Ballet companies will show us their take on Balanchine, and his women as part of the festival.

 As someone who began by watching these ballets in my party dresses with their wide hoop skirts in the beautiful Moorish theater, I look forward to this rare confluence.  

(An added bonus: Damian—now head of Juilliard—once spent a minute teaching me the Mambo from Jerome Robbins West Side Story. Ok, not Balanchine, but still….!)

The Price of Everything: an HBO documentary lifts the veil on the art world

The Price of Everything is a comprehensive and clear-eyed documentary on the subject of the relation of art to commerce. To that end, we hear from collectors, curators, journalists, auctioneers and artists—from the wildly successful (Jeff Koons), to very successful (George Condo, Marilyn Minter) to those whom the market lost sight of (Larry Poons) and those just coming into view (Njideka Akunyili Crosby).

 It could not be more depressing.

 Koons’ hedge fund factory art which some collectors can’t get enough of is on full display. So is Poons’ neglected ramshackle self and barn. So is Amy Cappellazzo’s auction house sophistry, and Jerry Saltz’s I’ve-seen-it-all shrug. And Crosby’s face as she realizes a work of hers has topped 900,000 at auction—and she won’t see a cent of it.

 A Russian collector cries over her Hirst butterflies. Condo paints an entire painting as if he’s painting a fence while carrying on an interview. Between him and Koons and really the rest of the interviews with the possible exception of Crosby, the veil is entirely lifted so as to dispel any remaining magic we ever felt about artists or certainly the art world. The film is in direct contradiction to the artist’s panel I attended last week. 

 The following conclusions are drawn:

 It’s very important for good art to be expensive.

If the gimmick owns you. it’s over.

To be an effective collector, you have to be a decorator.

Everything is metaphor.

Contemporary Art is a luxury brand.

 Kill me now. Or maybe the messengers? The producer of the film is Jennifer Blei Stockman, an art collector herself, former chair of the Guggenheim Board, once named ‘Republican Woman of the Year”. The director is Nathaniel Kahn, architect Louis Kahn’s son who once made the infinitely more marvelous and uplifting documentary about his father.  

 The film opens theatrically this weekend in NY and then makes its way across the country to depress everyone else.  A program at the 92nd Street Y on November 4th with some of the subjects is just more masochism if you ask me. On November 12th it hits HBO. 

The Spirals and Spiritualism of Hilma af Klint at the Guggenheim

The Hilma af Klint exhibition curated by Tracey Bashkoff, just opening at the Guggenheim is an almost perfect marriage of subject and space.  Like Frank Lloyd Wright, and a number of other artists working at the time, af Klint was absorbed with spirals and circles.  These forms had migrated from spiritual practices, specifically Theosophy, Rosicruianism, and Utopianism, and influenced the practices of Kandinsky, Kupka, Malevich, and other artists and architects who were seeking to find some kind of artistic  compatibility with the universe and scientific discoveries. Color theory became connected to mood and a number of new ideas relating to psychiatric states of being. Symbols and words were incorporated. 

 Like other adherents, Klint, who had already been a member of a Swedish women artists group, began to hold séances with four other like-minded women. After ten years, at one of the séances, she felt herself ‘instructed’ by one of the ‘High Ones” to create a cycle of paintings. (I would have liked to have been at this one). Af Klint felt herself to be a receptacle, similar to the adherents of surrealism and Breton’s automatic writing. Out of this impulse, arose The Paintings for the Temple, 193 works begun in 1906 , many on view at the museum. These works, some quite large, are lush abstractions that build on the geometries of the spiritual but are not in any way circumscribed by that impulse. The colors pop, but also soothe, and a rare harmony is achieved. They were never installed in any temple, but now they are installed in Wright’s temple.  And it is heavenly. 

 Smaller works, later watercolors, display similar forays into geometric and biomorphic work, but then you will see hints of Josef Albers, Georgia O’Keefe and Victor Hugo. Af Klint often worked in series, variations on a theme. This adds to the didactic quality but surprisingly, that does not get in the way of delight.

 It is going to be a social media extravaganza.  Contemporary artists and audiences will thrill to these lesser-known works. (There is a roundtable on her, and her work on Friday open to the public)  Apparently, wounded in love at an early age, she decided never to marry. 

 Af Klint’s will stipulated that the work not be shown for 20 years because it had been misunderstood by Rudolf Steiner, one of her philosophical idols, and he counseled her that she might get a similar reaction among her contemporaries. She was part of a 1986 exhibition at LACMA where I first saw her work, and much more recently a retrospective in Sweden but her foundation still is the principal proprietor. This exhibition marks the first dedicated solely to her in the US, . 

Tell Me Something Good

An ordinary/extraordinary thing happened last night.  Three artists and a moderator/interlocutor sat down on folding chairs in a funky, large space with peeling paint and mottled stained cork floor at the NY Studio School and talked about their art with each other, with him, and eventually with us. They sat with a mini slideshow that read Tell Me Something Good.

Miles away from trickster artists letting their paintings explode, fancy gallery shows and auctions where artists do not generally participate except through their work, it was just three guys and a girl sitting around talking.

 It was not contentious. It was not invasive. The artists got to talk a little about their own practice and what other work inspired them. They got to ask questions and interact with each other. People were respectful and listened to each other at non CNN/Fox/MSNBC decibel levels.  It was everything that the world, not only the art world, is mostly not these days. It was a real pleasure.

 Nominally also hosted by The Brooklyn Rail (still free, a commercial publication would never let its writers run on so…) moderator Jarrett Earnest and artists Rikrit Tiravanija, Matvey Levenstein and Dana Schutz revealed something of what made them get up in the morning and work.  All of them have taught, or are teaching, but they were not professorial. They are just worker bees. 

 There were references made to Pontormo and angels, Caspar David Friedrich, Philip Guston, Rudolph Schindler, Ned Kelly, Sidney Nolan, the Vienna Secession, Expressonism, religion, Utopia, dystopia, certainly an eclectic set, and we were an eclectic audience: young, younger, old, older, male, female, students, artists and I don’t know what else.  Politics, blessedly, was mostly not present. It was a good break from all the #Toos. 

 We first looked at Pontormo’s Visitation (now at the Morgan Library)

We looked at Levenstein’s Peonies

We looked at Schutz’s Self Exam

We looked at Tiravanaja’s Performance Structure 

Among other things.

 Only Schutz is US born. The others privileged their immigrant status as both adding and subtracting to their experience here as artists. They talked about meaning in art. Should art have to mean anything? Does it by default? No conclusions were reached. That was ok.

 Schutz was brave enough to ask about the impact of social media.  The elephant in the room was of course her own experience with its vicious onslaught last year. But the others did not push her to revisit this terrible time. 

 Do artists need to be in NY? Not really, it was agreed for the nth time, NY has changed. I wanted to tell them they are asking the same thing in LA, London, Paris, Rome, et al. Artists, and all creative people, by definition, are always wondering if they are in the right place to receive the magic and also sleep and eat reasonably well.  The grass is always greener, or in the case of LA, browner. 

 The evening did almost end however on a bit of down note.  It was generally agreed: There is too much art. There is too much art writing. Nobody has time to see (or presumably, read) anything except her or his favorites anymore. 

Earnest ended by telling us just to go have fun.

 I hopped on the subway and read the latest issue of the Rail on the way home.  Really there is too much art and writing about art.  But it’s fun. 

Stones to Stains: Victor Hugo's romantic drawings at the Hammer Museum

As a college student of 19th Century French literature, I became enamored of the great observers of love and life, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Zola and Balzac.  Though Victor Hugo, poet, journalist, statesman, politician and hero of the Republic for his resistance to waves of Napoleonic repression and the death penalty was among them, it was not until I saw Francois Truffaut’s L’Histoire d’Adele H while working at the New York Film Festival that Hugo resounded for me in a more personal way. 

 The story of the film is based on the true story of Hugo’s daughter Adele, diagnosed in real life with schizoprenia, but in the film primarily the victim of unrequited love. As anyone who has seen the film knows, Adele goes crazy after being rejected by a handsome solider with whom she’s had an affair, follows him to Halifax, then Barbados where she eventually collapses in the street and is returned to Paris and her father.  Hugo never appears in the film as Truffaut, who got the rights from his son Jean, was contractually obliged never to depict him on screen. We hear him only in voice over. 

View fullsize

In another stroke of luck, I was often able to stay at the home of friends on the Place des Vosges, right near Victor Hugo’s home which has been preserved qua home and archive.

 All this came back to me when I entered the magical exhibition of Victor Hugo’s drawings at the Hammer Museum curated by Allegra Pesenti and Cynthia Burlingame. Besides being one of the leading writers, politicians and human rights advocates of his century, Hugo was a marvelous and ingenious draftsman and observed and depicted the world in a very original way.

 The exhibition of 75 drawings is titled Stones to Stains (Taches) as these were the methodologies with which he began and ended his drawing practice which took place largely while he was in exile for 20 years in Jersey and Guernsey, the Channel Islands to which he had repaired when political events continued their downward spiral. Not content to use the formal methods available to him, he creased, folded, puddled, stenciled, smudged, traced, collaged, frottaged, cut out, and literally shadow boxed with his paper. Though most of the drawings are a range of sepias, browns, beiges and blacks, it is the ones with a just a touch of polychrome that do stand out.  

 A highly romantic and skilled amateur of photography, astronomy, oceanography, and spiritualism, Hugo incorporated aspects of these passions into much of the work. Yet the work is not literal minded or illustrative.  Instead as Pesenti reminds us, he took the simple tools with which he was writing Les Miserables and Notre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) and other works—pen, paper, and ink—and gave them alternative expression in the drawings.  

I imagine him late at night in Hauteville House, his splendid home on Guernsey which he decorated himself, after a long day of writing, taking out a clean sheet of paper and giving his automatic style which the surrealists eventually so admired, free reign, a release after the long day of keeping together his complex plots and syntax. Florian Rodari, a consulting curator on the project says in his excellent and enlightening catalog essay that he “defended disorder and the commotion of life”. He describes how Hugo looked on architecture as another alphabet, stones set upright, each one a letter, finally forming words in the ensemble.

 Adele was not the only Hugo family victim.  Her older sister Leopoldine, reportedly Hugo’s favorite, was drowned in a horrible accident along with her husband who tried to save her.  Hugo had many devoted mistresses in addition to his wife and so we see the elements of the classic genius syndrome where geniuses are allowed things the rest of us are not.

 Hugo did not sell his drawings. They were given to friends as gifts or aides-memoires of events, or eventually to publishers who used them in various publications, outlined in Burlingame’s catalog essay. The loans for this show, primarily from the Bibliotheque Nationale and the Maison of Victor Hugo in Paris will probably not be allowed to travel outside of France again, and the Hammer is the only venue  Do watch the video of the curators in their behind the scenes of the creation of the exhibition.

 Pesenti summons Odilon Redon, Andre Breton and Picasso, as artists akin to Hugo in various ways, but all I could think of was Alberto Burri, perhaps because I had so recently both written about his Guggenheim exhibition and the Gibellina Cretto. 

Alberto Burri

Victor Hugo

 The exhibition is open until the end of the year. The Hammer is screening the film on November 20 but it’s also for rent on Amazon. It’s a great warm up to the exhibition as it’s filmed almost entirely on Guernsey. And if you’ve ever been rejected in love, you will weep along with Adele as she tries to win back the favor of her lover. In real life, Truffaut, who often fell in love with his leading ladies, apparently was rebuffed by the much younger Isabel Adjani who played the role and she instead had an affair with her co star Bruce Robinson, who was also a very good writer. So real life imitated the art which imitated real life, precisely in keeping with the masterful Victor Hugo. 

Images courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France, The Metropolitan Museum of Art / image source, Art Resource, NY, Collection of David Lachenmann, Maisons de Victor Hugo, Paris / Guernesey / Roger-Viollet, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon/François Jay.

Contemporary Muslim Fashion shows how cool a burqa can be*

I’m not sure if Contemporary Muslim Fashion at the De Young, San Francisco, is the right swan song for Director Max Hollein en route to the Met, but it’s a far more interesting exhibition than I expected. His stated impulse was to extend the reach of the classic museum show, inclusivity etc, themes he plans to continue at the Met.

 So it’s an interesting counterpoint to “Heavenly Bodies” the fashion show that just came down at the Met and was a truly splendiferous display of both the richness of the Catholic church and the imagery and craft it has spawned over the centuries.

 Should one even compare?

 What’s most engaging about the Muslim fashion is not the Saint Laurent or Oscar imports of elements of traditional garb or even the glorious embroidery in the more traditional garments but rather the ingenious ways Muslim designers from the world over (and I mean the world over—one forgets how global the religion really is) have owned the religious restrictions. So, the street fashion Instagram stars and the videos that document original takes on the burqa and other hallmarks of religious Muslim garmentry are the things that pop. It makes you want to wear a burqa.

 Yet the Burqa (and it’s offshoots the hajib, et al) is one of the most incendiary items of clothing that a woman can don—or remove.  Wearing one can mean devotion to religion or to the state. Removal can mean compliance with state law and defiance of religious law (eg France, where it’s not permitted to wear one in the street).  Some of the designs seem to skirt that by showing hair or neck, but as I am not as attuned to the gradations I must refrain from commentary on that aspect. (One of the least intriguing displays is of Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, the consort of an ex Qatari Emir. She looks like a fashion model with expensive camera crews trailing her ‘philanthropic’ efforts in slums and amidst the ruins. (What does this remind you of in Africa this week?)

 With the two exhibitions piggybacked what is safe to say is that religion has nurtured some of the most creative artistic responses and some of the most exclusionary. And now nobody gets ruffled when fashion exhibits are in museums anymore. Remember those recent, dark, days?

 Check out the Instagram feeds of Langston Hues, Feda Eid, Nabiila Bee if you’re not near San Francisco. Otherwise, the exhibition is up until January.

*The 'Presenting' sponsor of this exhibition is listed as Anonymous. That is a highly unusual situation for a major museum exhibition. In light of recent events surrounding journalist Jamal Khashoggi we are asking the de Young museum to identify the funder. 

Studio 54: A new film brings back the highs and lows

Nostalgia is a funny thing.  Am I regretting the jackets with shoulder pads that added heft but not necessarily strength? How about that picture of me with hair that looked like a magnolia tree? Every couple of years it seems fashion and art loop us back to a decade about which I have very mixed feelings.  First it was the 60’s, then the 80’s.  Now the 70’s are grabbing hold.

 Almost concurrently with a giant retrospective of Andy Warhol’s work due soon at the Whitney comes Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary on Studio 54.  Or “Studio” as the owners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager and anyone who was anyone referred to it. Warhol hung at Studio. So did Liza Minelli, and Halston, and Bianca Jagger and Capote.

 That did not include me.  Oh, I don’t mean to suggest I was a victim of the velvet rope.  In fact, my boyfriend in college belonged to a fraternity in which Rubell and Schrager were older brothers, already besties, and I met them at events and so it was not impossible to think I could have become a denizen. The journey of these two Brooklyn boys who remained soulmates and partners until Rubell died of AIDS is the film’s narrative spine. I did not know that Schrager’s father was a mobster but it makes perfect sense in light of what eventually befell him.  I suppose you can learn the grift at the knee just like woodworking. 

 But truth be told, Studio 54 terrified me.  Walking in there reminded me of Dead concerts only better dressed, or mostly undressed, but with the same lighting and tripped-out sweaty scene that brought back intense acid flashbacks. Representing as it did the age of celebrity mixed with the toxicity of drugs, the scourge of AIDS, and then the revelation that the two owners were crooks, Studio 54 took the temperature of the 70’s with a vengeance.

Club culture, until then decidedly fringe, became mainstream. The place to see and be seen. Dancing--which I did love-- took on an added sexual dimension, a way to hook up, especially if you were gay.  The documentary is replete with interviews with the worker-bee non-celebrities: the silent investor, the Rubell brother, the door guy, the lighting guy, the accountant, and a narration provided largely by Schrager who by the looks of it can’t decide if he’s really contrite about his tax evasions, or not. Events, he implies, got away from them.  The headiness of being at the epicenter of a certain cultural zeitgeist was too tempting to resist. He almost seems bemused by his follies, his stay in prison.

I’m trying to decide if anyone who did not live through that era will find Studio 54 avant garde or totally retro.  Nobody knows who Minelli and Halston are anymore.  Nobody knows that Capote totally combusted after his novel Answered Prayers, which contained a infamous chapter on the rich who had supported him, abandoned him, precipitating a fall into alchoholism and drug addiction similar to many of the celebs at Studio 54.   How was it to have close friends and colleagues in the culture world get sick with AIDS, keep it a secret until they couldn’t anymore and then die?  It was a brutal era, less optimistic than the decade that preceded it, and it gradually gave way to a New York which was all about money. 

Tyrnauer, who has had his eye on more intellectual residents of NY as well, does a good job conveying the madness and the mayhem. But in the end,though the ostensible through line is the ‘freedom’ that Studio 54 purportedly made its regulars feel, the documentary made me sad for all the missing persons and not at all nostalgic for this aspect of the seventies when being able to do whatever you wanted began to seem like the scariest thing in the world.   

The film opens in NY on October 5 and then rolls out across the country.  I’m curious to see how it does outside the NY region. 

The Sketchbooks of Francoise Gilot: life went on after Picasso

I worked on a film biography for PBS on Picasso in conjunction with MoMA’s first comprehensive retrospective after Picasso’s death. William Rubin, the chief curator of MoMA, who was organizing the exhibition was adamant we not interview Francoise Gilot because he was very concerned about getting loans from Picasso’s widow Jacqueline who was controlling an important part of his estate and he thought contact with Gilot might jeopardize that, given the acrimony with which Picasso and Gilot had landed after her 1964 tell all memoir about her life with him.

 I had read Life with Picasso and thought it not only bold but instructive. It told how to hold your own with a powerful man. I came away admiring the only woman who had been able to extricate herself from Picasso and go on and have a productive life. I fought for her inclusion in the film, but I was very junior and had no say. 

 Though I did spend time with Claude and Paloma her children, it wasn’t until 2012 on the occasion of her show at Gagosian Madison that I finally got to meet her.  She was on the arm of John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, who is still working on the last volume of his definitive series on the life. Frail but steely is how she came across to me.

For a long time I had not admired her work as much as her person.  

 But having now received the new Taschen set of three sketchbooks she made while on travels to Venice India and Senegal, I am newly taken with it. These more spontaneous drawings, watercolors and make for a window into this remarkable woman that is a fresh look at the open, attentive, original way she has seen the world.

Gilot was a young artist when she met Picasso at 21, an acolyte. Inevitably, there has always been Picasso in her work. That’s not being revelatory. There is something of Picasso in almost every artist who worked in the 20th and 21st centuries.  

 But it is Matisse she invokes in these sketchbooks. She says he was the painter she felt closest to. That would have driven Picasso, who felt Matisse was his most important rival, crazy.  

 The Taschen series, 1974-1981, is a lively, colorful pictorial diary of her exotic travels. They began when she traveled with Jonas Salk, having moved on from an artistic genius to a scientific one (there was photographer Luc Simon in between). Francoise was both a companion to famous men (some women have a talent for that) and an artist who was able to maintain her own practice even in the midst of these larger lives.

 “These little books are complete in themselves,” she says. “I made them, and then once I’d made them I was free.  For me these little books are a step toward freedom.” 

Corot's Women at the National Gallery: A penny for their thoughts

I am not an ardent fan of landscape, however beautifully wrought, so Camille Corot, one of the great 19th century practitioners has not been much on my radar.

 All this changed when I saw the jpegs of 44 of Corot’s Women in the National Gallery exhibition which has just opened in DC.  I have not seen them in their sumptuous flesh yet but I have seen the catalog and heard the curators talk.  Many of the paintings are on loan from the Met, but as this is the only venue of the exhibition which has also aggregated other important works, it’s worth a special trip.

 To be female in the 19th century was fraught.  In France, Balzac, Zola and Flaubert were zeroing in on the dilemma of those of the fair sex who did not have the resources to maintain a position in society. You were either well-to-do, or poor, a milkmaid, a courtesan or princess. If you were beautiful, it helped but then you had a choice of how to deploy your resources. Sometimes that did not turn out so well. 

The paintings do not reflect the down trodden. And yet being a model in those times was certainly not an upper class occupation. The question about what the models did besides model is ever present. Curator Mary Morton suggests they were not performing for Corot. Are they thinking about how hungry they are and how soon they will be able to eat after posing, or something more elevated?

Corot, like his peers, had also certainly come to depend on photography, the medium that had taken the century by storm, and had fostered the development of collections of erotica.

Yet like Delacroix, after touring Italy or southern regions, Corot portrayed the exotic woman in situ, in costume, fully attired. His portraits are often pensive, his nudes not nearly as confrontational as Manet’s who looked the viewers directly in the eye, daring them to respond. Though he played with the male gaze, my impression is of a certain chastity and remove, even in his splendid odalisques. Picasso was apparently quite taken with them.

Corot was by all accounts religious and devoted to his mother and sister with whom he lived. Possibly asexual. He swore off marriage. His family had the resources to allow him to become an artist and finally with their blessing, after his sister’s death, he did so. His family were bourgeois wigmakers and hat makers and he had worked as a draper. Though he was reportedly very shy and wary of the female clients, he obviously had occasion to observe them in close quarters when they were at ease.  

I have seen the sumptuous and thrilling Delacroix show in Paris now largely arrived at the Met. Delacroix is a favorite and I have to confess that Delacroix’s portraits of women are even more splendid.

 But Corot captures something else. Not patriotism or sensuality, but a haunting interiority, a  penny for their thoughts.  

Kusama-Infinity film documents the bumpy journey of an art star

I came to the Kusama-Infinity film by Heather Lenz a skeptic and emerged something of a convert.

 There isn’t one city I’ve visited in the last years that has not had a Kusama retrospective recently completed, up, or on the horizon. Museums fight to get a Kusama show, attendance increases dramatically when they land one.  Who does not covet a selfie with a Kusama?

It was not always thus.  Lenz’s film makes a strong case for another Kusama, the outsider who came to the US in 1958 with money sewn into her kimono at a time when Japan was stifling and reactionary after the war.  Her family—in the seed and flower business—did not recognize or support her talent. Her father was a philanderer and filled her mother with anger which spilled over into the children. To escape this toxicity was bold and rare.

New York held its own challenges.  Kusama was neither Ab Ex nor Minimalist nor Figurative.  Maybe she had a little bit of Pollock’s energy—less drippy- and Agnes Martin’s precision—less restrained.  She could not get arrested (later this would change).  But Kusama had extraordinary belief in herself and her work. She was very striking.  She recognized early on the value of documenting her work, and her person. Artfully draped over her or standing amongst her creations, she is every bit as arresting. 

Finally, in some smaller shows, other artists began to see her value and innovation.  There’s no doubt that Oldenburg—stuffing—Samaras—mirrors—and Warhol—immersive patterned installations—and later Hirst-dots--were inspired by her. Stella craved and eventually bought an early yellow work for 75 dollars.  Cornell had a crush on her, called her “my princess’ even though he was celibate (as was she.)

She cycled through obsessions with dots, infinity nets, balls, stuffed fingers, mirrors, naked happenings and protests.  She was against the war in Vietnam. She did get arrested. I could not help but think of Yoko on a parallel path at this point only instead in bed with a Beatle. Kusama was in bed with her dots and fingers. I also glimpsed affinities with Rei Kawakubo. And with Ruth Asawa, another outsider who marched to her own net-like drums.

Finally she moved back to Japan and eventually she had to check herself into a psychiatric facility, where she still sleeps each night.  Being obessesive compulsive and celibate? I don’t know how she was able to survive. 

“When I see dots my eyes get brighter”, she now says with her signature red wig. Alas, though I very much appreciate the earlier work, mine now glaze over when I see the red and white dots. But I’m an admirer of the grit and determination with which she has approached her life and practice.    

The film is in general release

The Getty's Icons of Style fashion photography exhibition beats Instagram

The Getty's fashion photography exhibition  Icons of Style is more modest Yin to the Met Museum Heavenly Bodies extravagant Yang.  There we experience actual fashion. Here we experience it largely by its more quotidian delivery system: an ad or a spread in an increasingly moribund genre, the print magazine. (The recent announcement by Conde Nast that they are selling three more of their titles including fashion magazine W is testament to this trend.) It’s still mostly via photographs that we salivate over a dress or pair of shoes artfully displayed or that we are made ambitious to look a certain way. What will we do without these commissioning print magazines which represent extraordinary curation (and expenditures)? 

A general chronological survey from 1911-2011, the Getty exhibition goes down easy.  Some of these images are familiar: Helmut Newton's Lisa Taylor in her man-spread, Avedon’s Dovima with her elephants.  The big guns are all here, and blessedly not just the males.  Some delightful  excerpts from film and video are interspersed. 

But what inevitably drew my eye were the lesser known vintage gems. (Dora Maar's Model in Swimsuit, Man Ray's Model wearing a Gown, Baron de Meyer's Frightened by a Mouse )  There is true art in these fashion photographs, some counterposed with architecture, others in very original formal but playful compositions   There’s a great deal of humor in surreal juxtapositons that bring a smile or create mystery. 

I attended a panel with some famous models including Cheryl Tiegs and Beverly Johnson. Alas, none spoke in depth of the actual work as art, but more of long hours, branding, acting, the celebs they met, how they broke through, which is after all what the sold-out crowd came to hear. There was too little conversation about the many male photographers and stylists accused of systemic abuse. (At least one included in the exhibition)  

The conversation seems to be suggesting this is a cultural moment for female empowerment. But hey, y’all.  I know we thought we had this licked in the sixties.  We need to go back to the ur-texts: Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan, et al.  Let’s raise awareness and not be fooled by the fact that media is paying attention. It’s in the actual workplace that change must come about, and models need to be talking seriously about that as much as anyone. 

Certainly the crowd was not the typical art crowd and the Getty got a lot of new bodies in the door—and that’s the goal for many museums these days.  The curator of the exhibition was there, I was sorry he wasn’t invited to say a few words.  There are other events attached to the exhibition which are probably more in keeping with discussions of the actual work. 

At the Annenberg Center for Photography there is a Library of Congress companion exhibition that brings other vintage photography front and center. And I’ve been delving into the Los Angeles Public Library online collections, newly databased,  also worth a look.  

Photography (with writing as a close second) has probably both gained and suffered more because of the internet than any other medium.  As in the debate over a hard copy of a book vs the Kindle, we know many readers have gone back to the real thing. Instagram, with all its virtual breadth and disposability cannot match the in-person richness of these professional photographs.  

The exhibition runs through October 21st.