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Helen Levitt 1913-2009

Helen Levitt's photographs from the 1940s of children on New York streets, perhaps the most revealing and tender studies of play ever recorded, offer few clues about the formidable person who took them. That was no doubt fine with Levitt, who died this week at the age of 95 and scoffed at the idea that anyone's biography could help in understanding photographs, her own especially. Almost all of the many appeals over the years by curators and worshipful photographers that she speak in public about her work were rejected, often so dismissively you didn't ask twice.

Most of us can recognize in this no-nonsense attitude the stereotype of the truculent New Yorker, and it was one that Levitt voiced fully throughout her later years. Born in 1913 in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, she was resolutely independent, never marrying and reliant instead on a vast network of long-standing friendships. At the same time she never strayed far from home. Her only major body of pictures from outside New York was done over a few months in 1941 in Mexico City, and even there she managed to find working-class neighborhoods that might have been lost corners of Spanish Harlem.

Like the 20th-century photographers she most admired -- Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Manuel Alvarez Bravo -- she was drawn to the fraying edges of society. Her identification with people marginalized by income or race was philosophical as well as practical.

Levitt's photographs of Harlem and the Lower East Side, primarily from the late 1930s through mid-1940s, were among the first to expose the inner lives of children, worlds that had only recently surfaced in American art through the spread of psychoanalysis and surrealism. Her boys and girls immerse themselves in their roles as gangster, diva, street-corner dandy, wise guy, or holy terror with utter conviction.

She negotiated these rough streets without fear. (Not so Walker Evans, who balked at going too far uptown with her.) Her true purpose was often masked by the use of a right-angle viewfinder so her subjects would be unaware of being photographed. As fluent with a 16mm movie camera as she was with a 35mm Leica -- "In the Street," the 1948/1952 documentary she shot and edited with her friends Janice Loeb and James Agee was selected in 2006 for the National Film Registry -- she regarded still photography as a truer challenge of her eye and reflexes. Mistakes in film could be taped over with cuts in the editing room. With a still camera, you either captured what you thought you saw, or you missed it.

Link:

Helen Levitt, No-Nonsense New Yorker 

By Richard B. Woodward 

The Wall Street Journal

Past Postings on Helen Levitt HERE and HERE

 

"Is Shepard Fairey's poster of Obama really the best design of the year?"

“I find the relationship between Fairey’s work and his sources discomforting. Nothing substantial has been added.” - Milton Glaser

"Well, what else could have won?" people keep asking me. Illustrator Shepard Fairey's famous poster depicting a moody, mystical Barack Obama gazing into the great future above Chicken Soup for the Soul incantations like Hope and Progress, won the Brit Insurance Design of the Year, picked by a panel of greats and goods including Alan Yentob and Paola Antonelli, curator of architecture and design at New York's Museum of Modern Art. It was, apparently, chosen as "most innovative and forward thinking design of the past 12 months".

Really? Innovative and forward thinking? Really?

It is indeed a handsome poster. Bold. Graphic. Packed, like most of Fairey's work, with allusions to Soviet revolutionary propaganda, and from the street art and graffiti culture in which Fairey's made his name since his teenage years. Though it hardly pushes the envelope in terms of posters as a type of design; while as street art Fairey's work lacks the light wit and many-layered subversion of, say, a Banksy. "Just as the presidential candidate's campaign speeches recaptured the lost art of oratory," says the jury's citation, "so this poster breathed new life into a form that had lost its purpose." This poster, they go on to say, "demonstrates the power of communicating ideas and aspirations from grass-root level."

There's no denying any of this. But this is Designs of the Year. Not Poster of the Year. Or Ad Campaign of the Year. And the prize's self-defined role is to reward the most "innovative and forward thinking" design. This poster is neither innovative or forward thinking, certainly not compared with last-year's winner, the bargain-basement laptop in reach of the world's poor, designed by Yves Béhar. Indeed the poster's very nostalgia - nodding to a past, and, it implies, a future, of Kennedy-sque cosy God-Bless-America certainty in which we really can believe in our Messiah-like leaders - is part of its appeal. Maybe the jury, like the rest of the western world, is still riding the wave of Obamamania, taking leave of their critical faculties. Yes the poster is bold and powerful; yes, it helped galvanise support. But it says precisely nothing about the direction in which design is going right now.

Still, maybe it's comfort and nostalgia and certainty we want right now, not challenge and provocation. In which case Fairey's poster delivers it in spades.

link: "Is Shepard Fairey's poster of Obama really the best design of the year" 

By Tom Dyckhoff 

Times Online

History of Russian Video Art

Some 40 video works (single-channel videos, multi-channel installations, interactive installations, video sculptures), representing the best of the Russian production made in the crucial decade of passage from Soviet to post-Soviet are on display at the premises of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art at Ermolaevsky Lane, from March 26 to May 3, in the second volume of a three-part exhibition, titled History of Russian Video Art.

History of Russian Video Art. Volumes 1, 2, 3 is a large-scale project offering a comprehensive overview of the evolution of video art in Russia
 since its origins in the mid-1980s till today.In its essence, this is an educational project because it allows the audience to get acquainted with a part of the history of Russian contemporary art which is still not well known in Russia, though its culture relevance is of primary importance.

Since its birth about 40 years ago in the United States, video art has grown to become the leading genre in today’s art production and the one that best allows to integrate art into the world context, rather than a regional one.

link: onculture.eu 

Blued

"turquoise, indigo, aqua, lapis; under the molten, under the bruise of night"

Excerpt from the Poem:

"Hudson" By Hugh Seidman

Painting:

 Alexander Rodchenko

     Pure Blue Color 1921

                                                                                            

"The Endangered Species of New York"

For sentimental New Yorkers, these are tear-jerking times. Along with many overly posh things that most of us will survive just fine without, the bad economy threatens to flush away lots of fragile, old-school features of the city we love. James T. and Karla L. Murray document many of these in their excellent new coffee-table book, Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York. Since they began their project eight years ago, fully one-third of their subjects are closed, and many more are certainly on the brink.

link: Daily Intel:  nymag

Grace Period

Seven years ago, the photographer Tanyth Berkeley met an albino woman named Grace on the subway and quickly turned her into her model and muse. A retrospective of Tanyth's mildly disturbing pictures of Grace are at Danziger Projects' new 24th Street space.

Grace is depicted as a lost soul, the sun shining through her see-through white dress, other photos highlighting her apparently chubby buttocks and thighs. At the afterparty at the club called Apartment, I asked Tanyth Berkeley if she and Grace were friends. The artist replied, "Grace lives down the street from me. I often fix her up with male friends. We get together about once a month to plan projects, but I wouldn't describe Grace as a friend."

link: "Graceland" By Charlie Finch -- artnet

The artist/muse relationship is often a potent story, but in the case of Berkeley's work with Grace the relationship is more academic – the model as a figure with whom the artist can explore his or her style and ideas without emotional entanglement. As an albino Grace brings both a luminosity of skin as well as a paradoxical sensitivity to light that often makes it hard for her to open her eyes to the sun. This brings an inherent tension to many of the images as Grace is both attracted to and forced to keep a distance from photographic contact. At the same time her appearance makes her both a "star" and an outsider – qualities that Berkeley's is much drawn to.

link: Tanyth Berkeley "Grace" -- NY Art Beat

Window Dressing

In 1960, while a construction crew dismantled a row of brownstones right across from my own brownstone studio on East 58th Street, I was inspired to, somehow immortalize those buildings. I had the vision of 43 women in formal dress adorning the windows of the skeletal facade.

We had to work quickly to secure City permissions, arrange for models which included celebrities, the demolition supervisior's wife (third floor, third from left), my own wife (second floor, far right), and also secure the Rolls Royce to be parked on the sidewalk. Careful planning was a necessity as the photography had to be accomplished during the workers' lunch time!

The day before the buildings were razed, the 43 women appeared in their finest attire, went into the buildings, climbed the old stairs, and took their places in the windows. I was set up on my fire escape across the streeet, directing the scene, with bullhorn in hand. Of course I was concerned for the Models' safety, as some were daring enough to pose out on the crumbling sills.

The photography came off as planned. What had seemed to some as too dangerous or difficult to accomplish, became my fantasy fulfilled, and my most memorable self - assigned photograph. 

Most professional photographers dream of having one signature picture they are known for. "GIRLS IN THE WINDOWS " is mine. 

Ormond Gigli

"Girls In The Windows"

1960

Whigby and me

Express your true feelings on Whigby’s Seven Angry Woman by Kim DeMarco. Why she agreed to work with an upstart like Whigby is a real mystery. 

(No mystery here, I jumped at the chance to work with The Great Whigby)

 Seven Angry Women is hand silkscreened in black plus one ultra-brilliant (Hexachrome®) ink colour and printed on Skin, a brand of luxurious printing papers from the Curious Collection. 

 Many Thanks Whigby!

Dutch Households

Taco Anema makes portraits of families in the Netherlands. He prefers to work during the summer and with the use of existing light. Over the years, these tranquil scenes have come to be known as Anema's Dutch Households. The strength of these tableaux vivants lies in the body language with which the family members silently yet clearly relate to each other. Here is an unusual view of the wide spectrum of today's Dutch family.

Empty Frames

The heavy gold frames in the Dutch Room have been empty for 19 years this month. And the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston's beloved temple to idiosyncrasy, seems no closer to finding the masterpieces they once held than it has on every other sad anniversary of the nation’s most storied art heist.

The frames are the bluntest reminder of the dead-of-night theft on March 18, 1990, of three Rembrandts, a Vermeer, a Manet and other works worth several hundred million dollars by two men disguised as police officers. They remain blank because the will of Isabella Stewart Gardner, the museum’s exacting founder, requires that nothing in the collection ever be moved, and that no new works brought in.

For Anne Hawley, the museum’s director since 1989, the heist presented a paradox: the shock helped her bring about change far more rapidly than she would have as a new director under normal circumstances. She described it as a “shot of adrenaline” that led not just to the expansion campaign but to a residency program in which artists have installed surreal video art, composed vibraphone music or created graphic novels to complement the timeworn surroundings.

Now, in a victory the Gardner had been awaiting for months, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled on March 4 that the museum can depart from the strict parameters of Gardner’s prickly will. It called the expansion a “reasonable deviation” from the will because it is in the public interest to protect the building from overuse.

link: "A Wounded Museum Feels a Jolt of Progress"

The New York Times