Tag: midtown

Art to lift the spirits

The Humble Fabulist1 Comment

I think we can all use a booster

  • Frank Lloyd Wright || The San Francisco Building. Project, 1913
  • Frances Stark || Chorus Line, 2008. Cut-and-pasted printed and coloured papers on paper
  • Daniel Grataloup || Urban Proposal with Multi Thin-Shell Capsules. Project, 1974
  • Sonja Sekula || The Town of the Poor, 1951. Oil on canvas
  • Florine Stettheimer || Procession: Zizim of Persia, Agnes of Bourganeuf, the Unicorn, and Pierre d’Aubusson. Costume design for artist’s ballet Orphée of the Quat-z-arts, c. 1912
  • Florine Stettheimer || Family Portrait II, 1933. Oil on canvas
  • Florine Stettheimer || Portrait of My Mother, 1925. Oil on canvas
  • Hilma af Klint || The Dove No. 2, Series UW, Group IX, 1925. Oil on canvas
  • Metastadt-Planungsgesellschaft, est. 1969
    Richard Dietrich – Bernd Steigerwald
    Metastadt-Bausystem (Metacity Building System), 1965-72

MoMA New York

December 8th, 2019

Sunday afternoon museum walk

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The new MoMA had recently reopened after a four month closure, the last phase of a multimillion dollar expansion and renovation, and it was high time we explored all that extra space. These are a few of my favourite things:

  • Ludwig Mies van der Rohe || Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper, Berlin – Project, 1921
    Charcoal and graphite on paper mounted on board
  • Heinz Schulz-Neudamm || Poster for the film Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang 1926 – Lithograph
  • Film stills from Metropolis, 1927
  • Film still from Metropolis, 1927
  • Film still from Bride of Frankenstein, 1935 – gelatin silver print
  • Film still from Frankenstein, 1931 – gelatin silver print
  • Film stills from Der Golem, 1920 – gelatin silver prints
  • Egon Schiele || Portrait of Gerti Schiele, 1909. Oil, silver, gold-bronze paint, and pencil on canvas
  • Pablo Picasso || Boy Leading a Horse, 1905-06. Oil on canvas
  • Pablo Picasso || Woman Plaiting Her Hair, 1906. Oil on canvas
  • Edvard Munch || Man’s Head in Woman’s Hair, 1896. Woodcut
  • Julia Margaret Cameron || Mrs. Duckworth, 1867. Albumen silver print
  • Alfred Stieglitz || A Dirigible, 1910. Photogravure

MoMA New York

December 8th, 2019

John Singer Sargent: Portraits in Charcoal

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  • Charlotte Nichols Greene and Her Son Stephen Greene, 1924, Charcoal
  • Daisy Fellowes, ca. 1920, charcoal
  • Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, Later Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother, 1923, charcoal
  • Olimpio Fusco, ca. 1900-1910, charcoal.
    Olimpio Fusco was likely one of the numerous professional models, often Italians living in London, whom Sargent employed to pose for his mural cycles.
  • Lady Helen Venetia Vincent, ca. 1905, charcoal
  • Lady Diana Manners, 1914, Charcoal
    Lady Diana Manners was the youngest daughter of Violet Lindsay and Henry Manners, eight Duke of Rutland. Her mother, herself an exhibiting artist, was a central figure in the Souls. Along with other children of the Souls, Lady Diana became part of the ”Corrupt Coterie”, a group of aristocrats and intellectuals known for their extravagant parties in the years leading up to WWI. During the war, many members of this group would be killed; Lady Diana served as a nurse and married Alfred Duff Cooper, a fellow survivor, in 1919. Legendary for her beauty, she proved fascinating for authors like Evelyn Waugh and F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • Ellen Peabody Endicott, 1903, Charcoal
  • Helen Dunham, ca. 1895, charcoal
  • Dr. Charles Fleischer, 1903, charcoal
    Sargent is said to have thought that Fleischer, with his prominent mustache, bore some resemblance to Edgar Allan Poe, which this relaxed portrait likewise suggests
  • Charles Martin Loeffler, 1917, charcoal and graphite
  • Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, ca. 1913, charcoal and graphite
    In this joyful drawing, Sargent represented her in an outfit thought to have been designed by Bakst, the costume designer for the Ballets Russes. Whitney went on to found the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1930 with her collection of more than five hundred works by contemporary American artists
  • Dr. William Sturgis Bigelow, 1917, charcoal and white chalk
  • Sir William Blake Richmond, ca. 1910, charcoal
    The son of portraitist George Richmond, he was named after his father’s friend and mentor, William Blake.
  • William Adams Delano, 1922, charcoal
  • Nancy Astor, 1907, charcoal
    Nancy Astor was the first woman to take a seat in British Parliament when, in 1919, she ran as a Conservative for the post previously held by her husband in the House of Commons.
  • Winston Churchill, 1925, charcoal
  • Eleonora Randolph Sears, 1921, charcoal
    A devoted and successful athlete and a pioneering figure in women’s sports. She garnered as many as 240 athletic trophies during her lifetime, winning the US doubles tennis championship four times between 1911 and 1917 and becoming the first female national squash champion in 1928
  • Gertrude Kingston, ca. 1909, charcoal
  • Ruth Draper as a Dalmatian Peasant, 1914, charcoal
    The American actress Ruth Draper is credited with originating the now-familiar one-woman show. She wrote her own monologues and impersonations, both dramatic and comic, and gained fame in the United States and Europe. Sargent first drew a conventional portrait

John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) was one of the greatest portrait artists of his time. While he is best known for his powerful paintings, he largely ceased painting portraits in 1907 and turned instead to charcoal drawings to satisfy portrait commissions.

The Morgan Library & Museum presented a major exhibition of his beautiful portraits of beautiful people, in charcoal.

November 10th, 2019

Joseph Cornell Illuminated

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Hans Namuth

Joseph Cornell in His Backyard, Utopia Parkway, New York, 1969

”It kills me, it’s so good. Let’s pretend I took this, okay?… I used to go to Cornell’s house once a week for I don’t know how long. He would make tea on his ancient, Depression-era stove. He’d turn the gas on, and the flames shot up. He talked a lot, gesturing, in this very fluffy angora sweater he wore. And I’m thinking, I should keep the camera ready in case he goes up. A Flaming Cornell: that’d be amazing! Unfortunately, he never caught on fire. But this portrait is going to upstage the whole exhibit – I may have to set it on fire.” – Duane Michals

From ”Illusions of the Photographer”, an exhibition of the art of Duane Michals, which included this photograph of Joseph Cornell by Hans Namuth and, as far as I was concerned, upstage the whole exhibit, it did.

The Morgan Library

November 10th, 2019

Resident Alien

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An exhibition at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York exploring the cultural contributions of Austrian architects that emigrated to the United States. Divided in five themed sections spread from the lower all the way up to the upper mezzanine of the ACFNY’s gallery, that is itself housed in a building designed by Austrian-American architect Raimund Abraham, it felt like an immersive experience, greatly appreciated by this humble resident alien.

  • Coop Himmelb(l)au || Central Los Angeles Area High School #9 for Visual and Performing Arts, 2002-2009
  • Adolf Loos || Josephine Baker House, 1927 – 11 Avenue Bugeaud, 75116 Paris, France (Model photography)
  • Le Corbusier and Josephine Baker attending a costume gala aboard the Lutetia, December 1929. Their outfits and makeup were controversial and have lead to cultural debates challenging binary norms and delimited monist oppositional ways of thinking. Bi-isms occupy, deconstruct, and open up potential spaces of the in-between
  • Richard Neutra || Lovell Health House, 1927-1929, Los Angeles. Photograph by Julius Shulman
  • Rudolph Schindler || Charles H. Wolfe Residence, 1928-1931, Avalon, Catalina Island, CA. Pencil and ink on paper
  • Rudolph Schindler || Charles H. Wolfe Residence, 1928-1931, Avalon, Catalina Island, CA
  • Rudolph Schindler || Charles H. Wolfe Residence, 1928-1931, Avalon, Catalina Island, CA
  • Liane Zimbler (with Carl Schwarz) || Candianides Residence, 1961, Ventura, CA. Photograph by Leland Y. Lee
  • Charles Paterson || Boomerang Lodge, 1961, Aspen, CO
  • Hans Hollein || Urban Renewal in New York, 1964, Project perspective
  • Peter Trummer || Pile-City Vienna, 2015, Digital image
  • Peter Trummer || Pile-City Vienna, 2015, Digital image
  • Peter Trummer || Pile-City New York, 2016, Digital image
  • Herwig Baumgartner || Los Angeles Residence, 2018
  • Coop Himmelb(l)au || The White Suit Project, 1969
  • Haus-Rucker-Co || Palmtree Island (Oasis), 1971, New York
  • Carl Pruscha || Vision for Global Urbanisation: Global Linear City, 1963
  • Carl Pruscha || Vision for Global Urbanisation: Global Linear City, 1963
  • Victor Gruen || Welfare Island Project, 1961, Roosevelt Island, NY
  • Erwin Hauer || Design 2, Church in Liesing, 1951, Vienna, Austria
  • Victor Gruen Associates || Wilshire Terrace, 1959, Los Angeles. Photography by Julius Shulman
  • Josef Frank || United Nations Headquarters, 1947, New York

November 9th, 2019