one piece

Happy 4th!

Elliott Erwitt

Simply Put.

via: Eyebeam reBlog

'The Boys and the Subway' By Christoph Niemann

My sons Arthur, 5, and Gustav, 3, are obsessed with the New York City subway system. They can barely sit through an episode of “Sesame Street.” But when we go for aimless subway joy rides on the weekends, they sit like little angels, devoutly calling out the names of every station for hours. People often ask me for directions in the subway. Even though I know my way around rather well, I still have to defer to Arthur very often. Yet it seems people don’t trust the advice of a preschooler. They should.

link: The Boys and the Subway

"After Love"

He is watching the music with his eyes closed.

Hearing the piano like a man moving

through the woods thinking by feeling.

The orchestra up in the trees, the heart below,

step by step. The music hurrying sometimes,

but always returning to quiet, like the man

remembering and hoping. It is a thing in us,

mostly unnoticed. There is somehow a pleasure

in the loss. In the yearning. The pain

going this way and that. Never again.

Never bodied again. Again the never.

Slowly. No undergrowth. Almost leaving.

A humming beauty in the silence.

The having been. Having had. And the man

knowing all of him will come to the end.

After Love

by Jack Gilbert

The New Yorker Magazine

photograph: Pentti Sammallahti

Farewell Florent, Hello R&L?

So, Florent. Just to recap: We learned back in, oh, January that Florent was going to close its storied doors. The landlord, Joanne Lucas, put the space on the block for something like $58,000 or maybe even $70,000 a month. Florent Morellet had been paying around $6,000 — clearly, Lucas wasn't looking for a new diner to move into her space. For that kind of money, Lucas was clearly looking for the kind of tenant that is synonymous with the meatpacking district's latest incarnation: a high-end retailer, perhaps the sort of chic, Euro-friendly designer or boutique that would willingly bleed that sort of money just to sit on a cobblestone corner near Soho House.

But, as we all now know, Lucas didn't get that high-end retailer as a tenant. She didn't get any tenant, it would seem, as it has been reported that after Florent shuts its doors for good on Sunday night, Lucas will reopen the joint on Tuesday as R&L Restaurant, the diner that Florent replaced many years ago (and which was once owned by Lucas's father). Even better, R&L will have the same staff and menu as Florent. So besides a name change and the removal of a quaint neon sign, we're guessing the only real, quantifiable difference will be the absence of the inimitable Mr. Morellet. And that's a big difference, of course — but still, we can't help feeling a little duped here.

read more here

LOUISE BOURGEOIS: THE SPIDER, THE MISTRESS, AND THE TANGERINE

A true (and sometimes terrifying) original, Ms. Bourgeois, now 96, is more than the sum of her parts. The uncommonly elegant and evocative portrait “Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine” reveals much about this haunting and haunted master while leaving intact what Georges Braque once wrote was the only thing that mattered in art: the thing you cannot explain.

link: Portrait of a Haunted Artist Who Befriended Giant Spiders

By Nathan Lee, The New York Times

“No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980”

Of all the strange and short-lived periods in the history of experimental music in New York, no wave is perhaps the strangest and shortest-lived.

Centered on a handful of late-1970s downtown groups like Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, DNA and James Chance’s Contortions, it was a cacophonous, confrontational subgenre of punk rock, Dadaist in style and nihilistic in attitude. It began around 1976, and within four years most of the original bands had broken up.

But every weird rock scene — and every era of New York bohemia — eventually gets its coffee-table book moment. This month Abrams Image is publishing “No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980,” a visual history by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley.

The book will be celebrated with an exhibition opening at KS Art, at 73 Leonard Street in TriBeCa. With crisp black-and-white photographs and interviews with musicians and visual artists, the book is a loving reminiscence of a largely unheard period, as well as a look at a seedy, pre-gentrified Lower East Side. Most groups in the no wave scene — which also included Mars, the Theoretical Girls and the Gynecologists — left behind few recordings, and the compilation album that defined the genre, “No New York,” produced by Brian Eno in 1978, has never been legitimately issued on CD in the United States.

link: A Brief, Noisy Moment That Still Reverberates

By Ben Sisario, The New York Times

'People of the Empire' : Early Russian Color Photographs

Museum Geelvinck Hinlopen Huis presents People of the Empire: Early Russian Colour Photographs. This summer a special exhibition about the Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky will be on show at the Museum Geelvinck Hinlopen Huis in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

This pioneer in colour photography captured the population in different area's of the vast Russian empire in colour with financial support of Tsar Nicolas II. The selection of photographs at this exhibition shows the ethnic diversity of a vanished great power. The images, as the photographer stated in his days, were made with an eye to the historical value of the subject. The early twentieth century photographs are not only remarkable because of the subject matter. The intensity of the colours and the sharpness of the images are as well of extraordinary quality. Early 1900 Prokudin-Gorsky developed his own method of colour photography.

The basis for his approach essentially consisted of a three-phase black and white recording made through a red, green and blue filter. The glass plates were projected with a self-built three-colour filter projector resulting in a colour image. With the assistance of the current digital technology these colour images can be reconstructed from the past. The Prokudin-Gorsky collection resides at the Library of Congress in Washington and thanks to a large digitalisation project colour images of pre-revolutionary Russia is available for the public.

Charles and Ray Eames Postage Stamps

Issue Type: Commemorative

Issue City: Santa Monica, CA 90401

Issue Date: June 17, 2008

link: USPS

Darkness Visible

For the July issue of Italian Vogue, Steven Meisel has photographed only black models. In a reverse of the general pattern of fashion magazines, all the faces are black, and all the feature topics are related to black women in the arts and entertainment. Mr. Meisel was given roughly 100 pages for his pictures. The issue will be on European newsstands next Thursday and in the United States soon after.

Under its editor, Franca Sozzani, Italian Vogue has gained a reputation for being more about art and ideas than commerce.

She said that, as an Italian, she has been intrigued by the American presidential race and Mr. Obama, which was one source of inspiration when she and Mr. Meisel began discussing, in February, the idea of an all-black issue. Also, she was aware of the lack of diversity on the runways in recent years and the debate it fueled last fall in New York, where Bethann Hardison, a former model who ran a successful agency, held two panel discussions on the topic.

link: Conspicuous by Their Presence

By Cathy Horyn, The New York Times

Purpleness

Over the past 15 years, Purple Magazine worked closely with individual artist contributors building stable connections with such culturally celebrated figures of today as Terry Richardson, Juergen Teller, Jack Pierson, and Inez van Lamsveerde. Artists who have contributed to Purple’s pages include Richard Prince, Christopher Wool, and Vanessa Beecroft. Ever in quest of the fresh and innovative the magazine could not deny a certain attachment to various media figures it regularly featured, muses in the form of Kim Gordon, Chloe Sevigny, Kate Moss, Catherine Deneuve, Charlotte Gainsburg and Vincent Gallo, all of whom make an appearance in the pages of the Purple Anthology.

Captured together in one volume, reviewing fifteen years in cutting edge fashion, photography, art and graphic design, Purple Anthology represents a serious engagement with documenting the visually groundbreaking and aesthetically innovative in contemporary culture at the end of the millennium.

Portraits / Faces

A compelling virtual exhibition from

Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Who's Your Daddy?

Happy Father's Day

Rembrandt Smile

In October 2007 a painting of a laughing man came to light, and there was speculation that it might be by Rembrandt. This painting will be on show in the Rembrandt House from 7 June until 29 June.

Although this little painting was feted as a new discovery, its existence was already known of thanks to a reproductive print dating from around 1800. The printmaker believed that it was a painting by Frans Hals, but in the early twentieth century several art historians became convinced that the print was produced after a work by Rembrandt. This view, however, went virtually unnoticed by the art world.

When the painting surfaced at an English sale in 2007, some people recognized it as an authentic Rembrandt. In the ensuing months it was subjected to an exhaustive examination. It has now been established on a range of technical and stylistic grounds that this is an authentic early work by Rembrandt dating from around 1628.

During the early part of his career Rembrandt studied the various emotions ('affects') of human beings as they were expressed in the face and in the posture. The painting is an exceptional expression of this interest. A number of striking similarities between this work and Rembrandt's early self-portrait of around 1629 in Nuremberg leaves it in no doubt that this little picture must have been painted in front of a mirror. Hence the title that has been chosen: Rembrandt Laughing.

Jugs

Aphrodite

pitcher (large)

designer:

unknown

design year:

2001

manufacturer:

Collection Regards, France

materials:

Glazed "terre noire" ceramic

notes:

Perfect for serving milk.

price:

$650.00

link: moss

I Love This Tiny House

On this tree-shaded stretch of 19th- and early 20th-century buildings a block from Gramercy Park — widely known as New York’s “block beautiful” — the one-story brick carriage house is a standout. Its footprint is small, its black-painted facade trim and elegant, with a Dutch-style stepped roof, a fire-engine-red door and a matching flower box hung below white-painted windows.

“I love that building,” said the Rev. Dr. Thomas F. Pike, the archivist for the Gramercy Park Trustees and the rector at Calvary Church on Park Avenue South and 21st Street. The carriage house has no great historical significance, he said, but “it contributes a great deal to the charm of the block. I think that is its great claim.” These days, it is the house’s windows in particular that draw the voyeuristic eye. Large and at sidewalk level, they are rarely covered, giving passers-by a clear view inside. For anyone who has wandered among the buildings of New York wishing for X-ray vision, they are irresistible.

link: Tiny, Inviting and Ready for a Party

The New York Times

“Roy adored women.”

“Roy Lichtenstein: Girls,” at the Gagosian Gallery, presents 12 of Lichtenstein’s early paintings of the female creatures otherwise known as women. Based on cartoons and mostly blond, they are anonymous, beautiful and often unhappily bothered, usually by men. Or, if you like, by boys.

These paintings are themselves bursts, hot flashes of composition, America, humor and color galvanized and made one by pictorial intelligence. Because their visual machinations are perfectly obvious, they make normally arcane terms like form and formalism exhilaratingly accessible. Basically we watch them work.

What Lichtenstein had in mind was form, a transformation of the terms of real and fake. This show makes especially clear how Lichtenstein’s work functions as a kind of primer in looking at and understanding the grand fiction of painting: the thought it requires, its mechanics, its final simplicity and strangeness. These great paintings convey all this in a flash of pleasure, compounded by the thrill of understanding.

link: The Painter Who Adored Women

By Roberta Smith The New York Times

Maria Sibylla Merian & Daughters: Women of Art and Science

This exhibition, at the Getty Museum charts the artistic and scientific explorations of German artist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) and her daughters Johanna Helena and Dorothea Maria. Enterprising and adventurous, these women raised the artistic standards of natural history illustration and helped transform the field of entomology, the study of insects. The exhibition presents books, prints, and watercolors by Merian and her contemporaries and features one of the greatest illustrated natural history books of all time, The Insects of Suriname.

link: 'Maria Sibylla Merian & Daughters: Women of Art and Science'

June 10 - August 31, 2008 at the Getty Center

Hans Scholten: Urban Future #2

Huis Marseille Museum for Photography presents Hans Scholten: Urban Future #2, on view through August 31, 2008. The future of the city: that is the theme raised by Amsterdam artist Hans Scholten (1952) in his photographic project Urban Future. For a number of years now, he has been photographing the urban landscapes of huge cities in Asia and the Middle East. There he captures scenes of rapidly growing neighborhoods, in which chaos and anarchy seem to arise due to a lack of organized city planning. Scholten concerns himself specifically with the way in which the inhabitants themselves shape and set up these neighborhoods: how political, cultural and economic developments determine the outward appearance of these cities. He points out differences and similarities, particularly in the uncontrolled pace of construction and the surprising swiftness with which decay sets in at the same time.

Rapid construction, concrete structures and little concern for infrastructure characterize both the Chinese cities (Shanghai, Beijing, and X’ian) and those in the Middle East (e.g. Teheran, Shiraz, Beirut, Damascus, Aleppo and Baku). They expand like patchwork quilts due to the inability of municipal authorities to counteract the pressure of a growing economy, as in China, or a growing, young population, as in the Middle East. Urban planning that reflects an interest in history, harmony and homogeneity continues to be a luxury reserved for Western cities.

There are differences though. In China, where money is generally more apparent than in Iran, Lebanon or Syria, there is an orientation toward the West; more high-rise buildings and a diversity of architectural styles can be seen. New residential areas in Middle-Eastern cities consist of low-rise construction derived from traditional styles of architecture. In Iran the houses, shut off from the street, are surrounded by high walls and closed facades, so that the coercive measures of the religious regime have as little influence as possible in the private realm. In Syria and Lebanon the street and public space are, on the other hand, part of the city’s social life, which is also expressed in architecture. And in China the increasingly prevalent ‘gated community’ has developed as a modern-day form of the traditional Chinese house, in which family life takes place around the courtyard.

link: Huis Marseille Museum for Photography Presents Hans Scholten: Urban Future #2

“Framing a Century: Master Photographers, 1840-1940”

From the daguerreotype to the cellphone snapshot, the history of photography has unfolded as a series of miracles, each of which has profoundly altered our understanding of the time-space continuum. As the innovations become familiar, the photographs become miracles in another way, as connections to a past we’ve never seen.

“Framing a Century: Master Photographers, 1840-1940,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, manages to operate in the gap between both kinds of miracles, innovative and talismanic. It presents the history of a medium as well as history itself.

The show singles out 13 photographers, representing each with 10 to 16 mostly stunning images. It begins with the innovations of the British gentleman William Henry Fox Talbot, and concludes with the homespun classicism of the American Walker Evans, the studio experiments of Man Ray and, finally, the breathtaking moments captured by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Brassai, geniuses of the street. In between are the landscapes of Roger Fenton, Gustave Le Gray and Carleton E. Watkins; portraits by Nadar and Julia Margaret Cameron; and views of 19th- and early-20th-century Paris and France by Charles Marville, Édouard Baldus and Eugène Atget.

link: Aristocracy of Talent for an Egalitarian Art

By Roberta Smith, The New York Times