Those kids put literal meaning to the words ”bucket list”!
Penn Station, N.Y.C., on the way to Washington D.C.
March 17th, 2019
Picnic at the Station
Category: march 2019
New York City ||Matrix
Avenue of the Americas
March 15th, 2019
Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern – part III
Actor’s Mask, 1924
Oil on canvas mounted on board
Wedding in South Street, 1937
Oil on canvas
Leaf Children, 1940
Oil on canvas
The Lovers, 1946
Gouache and ink on paper-faced board
Head of Autumn (Study for Hide-and-Seek), 1941
Watercolour and pencil on paper
House by the Railroad, 1925
Oil on canvas
Willis Avenue Bridge, 1940
Gouache on paper on board
Woman, 1928
Oil on canvas
The Lovers, 1946 (detail)
Gouache and ink on paper-faced board
Hide-and-Seek, 1940-1942
Oil on canvas
Man in the Open Air, c. 1915
Bronze
MoMA, Mar-Jun 2019
March 15th, 2019
Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern – part II
Ballet Positions. Drawings for Ballet Alphabet: A Primer for Laymen 1939
Ink, pencil, coloured ink, and gouache on paper
Costume design for the ballet Harlequin for President 1936
Gouache, watercolour, metallic gouache, and pencil on paper
Finale Girls. Costume design for the ballet A Thousand Times Neigh 1940
Gouache, pencil, stamped ink, and stapled fabric on coloured card
Costume design for the ballet Charade (or The Debutante) 1939
Gouache, stapled fabric, pencil, and stamped coloured ink on coloured card
Costume designs for the ballet Promenade 1936
Watercolour and pencil on paper
Costume designs for the ballet The Four Temperaments c. 1946
Fourth Variation/Choleric
Gouache, watercolour, coloured pencil, and pencil on paper
Costume designs for the ballet The Four Temperaments c. 1946
First Variation/Melancholic
Crayon, gouache, watercolour, coloured pencil, and pencil on paper
Costume designs for the ballet The Four Temperaments c. 1946
Second Variation/Sanguinic
Gouache, watercolour, coloured pencil, crayon, and pencil on paper
Costume designs for the ballet The Four Temperaments c. 1946
Theme 3 (Female)
Gouache, watercolour, and pencil on paper
Lincoln Kirstein, 1964
Gelatin silver print, printed 1968
Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern
MoMA, Mar-Jun 2019
March 15th, 2019
Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern – part I
Portrait of Lincoln Kirstein, 1950
Oil on canvas
Kirstein sat for this portrait while he was in London for a New York City Ballet performance at Covent Garden and to organize the exhibition Symbolic Realism in American Painting: 1940-1950 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Portrait of a Woman, 1949
Oil on canvas
George Platt Lynes, 1935
Coloured ink on paper
Lincoln Kirstein, c. 1931
Gelatin silver print
Designs for the ballet Filling Station, 1937
Designs for the ballet Filling Station, 1937
Designs for the ballet Filling Station, 1937
Designs for the ballet Filling Station, 1937
Designs for the ballet Filling Station, 1937
Costume designs for the ballet Pocahontas, c. 1936
Costume design for the ballet Billy the Kid, 1938
“I have a live eye,” proclaimed Lincoln Kirstein, signaling his wide-ranging vision. Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern explored this polymath’s sweeping contributions to American cultural life in the 1930s and ’40s. Best known for cofounding New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet with George Balanchine, Kirstein (1907–1996), a writer, critic, curator, impresario, and tastemaker, was also a key figure in MoMA’s early history. With his prescient belief in the role of dance within the museum, his championing of figuration in the face of prevailing abstraction, and his position at the center of a New York network of queer artists, intimates, and collaborators, Kirstein’s impact remains profoundly resonant today. [source: MoMA]
Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern
MoMA, Mar-Jun 2019
March 15th, 2019
”Through blue-tinted glass”
Woman at the Piano, c. 1917 (detail)
Stained and painted wood
Taglioni’s Jewel Casket, 1940
Taglioni’s Jewel Casket, 1940
Taglioni’s Jewel Casket, 1940
Woman at the Piano, c. 1917 (detail)
Stained and painted wood
The first of dozens of works that Cornell made in honor of famous ballerinas, this box pays homage to Marie Taglioni, an acclaimed nineteenth-century dancer of Italian origin, who, according to the legend inscribed in the box’s lid, kept an imitation ice cube in her jewelry box to commemorate the time she danced in the snow at the behest of a Russian highwayman. The box is infused with erotic undertones—both in the tactile nature of the glass cubes, velvet, and rhinestone necklace (purchased at a Woolworth’s dime store in New York) and in the incident itself, in which Taglioni reportedly performed on an animal skin placed across a snowy road. Adding to the intimacy of this delicate construction, the glass cubes were designed to be removed, revealing a hidden recess below that contains two beaded necklaces and rhinestone chips placed on a mirrored surface and seen through blue-tinted glass. [source: MoMA]
Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern
MoMA, Mar-Jun 2019
March 15th, 2019
For a minute there, I lost myself…
Sleepers II, 1959
Tempera on wood panel
Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern
MoMA, Mar-Jun 2019
March 15th, 2019
SEA WALL / A LIFE
Sunday matinee
The Public Theater
Manhattan, East Village, N.Y.C.
March 10th, 2019
By All Means: Time travel @ The Morgan
Travelling in time and space in just a few steps, from gallery to gallery, at The Morgan; when three fantastic exhibitions ran simultaneously through May 2019.
By any means: Contemporary drawings from The Morgan
Speaker Drawing (22.06), 2006 – Pigment and spray fixative
This work is part of a series in which Vitiello explored the relationship between sound – his primary medium – and drawing. He placed pigment in a speaker that was embedded in a table, laying a sheet of paper on top. Vibrations from a synthesizer’s low-frequency oscillator moved the pigment from the speaker to the paper, creating an image that contrasted in its minimalism with the density of the aural event.
Untitled (folded paper drawing), 1971
Where R = Ryoanji (2R)/4-6/83, 1983
Graphite pencil
Cage often relied on chance to determine the forms of his works. The present sheet belongs to a series inspired by the Zen rock garden of the Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto, in which fifteen rocks are carefully arranged. The selection of stones, the number of tracings (here 30, as denoted by 2R, where R is equivalent to 15, the number of stones at the temple), their placement, and the number of pencils of different softness that he used (4) were determined by the I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination manual, by way of a computer simulation developed by Bell Labs in New York.
Old Museum (Interior_7), 2015
Laser toner
Although Cottrell uses a computer to make her work, she does not use a computer programme to determine composition but instead passes Japanese paper through a printer numerous times, each time changing or rearranging the shapes on the screen to generate dense, layered images.
Invention and Design: Early Italian Drawings
Metamorphosis of the Nymph Amymone, ca. 1500
Brush and brown, green-brown, and blue wash, pen and green-brown ink, and white opaque watercolour, over black chalk, on paper
Head of a Young Man, in Profile to the Right, 1490-1500
Black chalk, brown wash, and white opaque watercolour, on blue paper
Head of a Woman Crying Out, ca. 1509-11
Charcoal and black and white chalk, on two pieces of light brown paper joined vertically
Head of a Woman in Profile to the Right, ca. 1515
Black and white chalk, on two pieces of paper joined vertically; incised with stylus
Nude Man Standing Beside a High Pedestal, ca. 1515
Brush and black ink and brown wash, heightened with white opaque watercolour, over traces of black chalk, on blue paper faded to brown
Head of a Man Wearing a Cap, in Profile to the Left, ca. 1490-1500
Red, black, and white chalk
Head of a Young Man, Turned to the Left, Looking Downward, ca. 1490
Metalpoint, with white opaque watercolour, on pink prepared paper
Head of a Bearded Man in Profile to the Right and Head of a Youth Facing Left, ca. 1500
Red chalk
Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth
The Tree of Amalion, [?1940s] – Coloured pencil, watercolour, silver paint, black in on grey paper
MS. Tolkien Drawings 88, fol. 1
”He was the sort of painter who can paint leaves better than trees. He used to spend a long time on a single leaf, trying to catch its shape, and its sheen, and the glistening of dewdrops on its edges. Yet he wanted to paint a whole tree, with all of its leaves in the same style, and all of them different.”
This extract from Tolkien’s allegorical short story, ”Leaf by Niggle”, is a poignant expression of his own creative struggle as he sought to bring his works, both literary and academic, to completion. The story was written in the early 1940s as he worked fitfully on The Lord of the Rings, his Elvish languages and his wider legendarium, all of which seemed very far from completion. His perfectionism often resulted in numerous revisions and rewritings, whilst his interest in the minutiae led him down interesting but distracting side roads.
The only snapshot I could steal; so long were the lines, the guards had to usher Tolkien’s devotees, or the gallery would burst from overcrowding!
The Morgan Library
March 9th, 2019
The Young and Evil
From February through April 2019, David Zwirner presented The Young and Evil, a group exhibition featuring significant works from the first half of the twentieth century by Paul Cadmus, Fidelma Cadmus Kirstein, Charles Henri Ford, Jared French, Margaret Hoening French, George Platt Lynes, Bernard Perlin, Pavel Tchelitchew, George Tooker, Jensen Yow, and their circle.
Among them, some works by Pavel Tchelitchew, to which I was particularly drawn.
March 7th, 2019
The Humble Fabulist 