one piece

"The Village starts to dance - The men beat on their drums - The dominatrix sleeps tonight "

  

 The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight (12")

Side A 

1. The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight (3:30) 

2. Chants (1:35) 

Side B 

1. The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight (Dominant Mix 4:45) 

2. Beat Me (2:20)

"The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight" by Dominatrix is a New York favorite on Streetwise Records, which was played alongside New Order's "Confusion" and other goodies of the time. It's essentially Claudia Summers speaking (not singing) how "women beat their men..." over a sparse electronic beat.

The video was banned by MTV in 1984, which should come as no surprise.

The Dominatrix" was produced by DJ Ivan who was pretty active in New York circles during the mid 1980s. 

 

Kees van Dongen's "Jeune Arabe" Sells for $13.8 Million

“Jeune Arabe” (Young Arab) painted in 1910 by Van Dongen when the Dutch-born painter still remembered the coloristic fury of his Fauve days a few years earlier. The linear simplification has a Matisse touch about it. Its impact is multiplied tenfold by the blazing red color of the boy’s skin, which is underlined by the off-white ground. This may not be the greatest Van Dongen in the world, but its punch hits you in the stomach, like a brilliant poster adorned with a master’s signature. Bidders sent it flying to a world record of $13.8 million. 

According to trade sources, the painting is that of embattled Dutch investor, Louis Reijtenbagh. The son of a farmer, Reijtenbagh worked as a family doctor but made a fortune from trading in stocks in the 1980’s. 

Last year he was rated as one of Holland’s 50 wealthiest individuals. But recently his business empire has been entangled in a web of debt amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars. 

Last May, accompanied by representatives of JP Morgan Chase, which had secured a court order to recover artworks which had been used as collateral for a loan, deputy sheriffs in New York removed an estimated 29 paintings belonging to Reijtenbagh, valued at some $23 million, from an apartment in the Trump Tower.

Luc Tuyman's "Silent Paintings"

Luc Tuymans' first U.S. retrospective opens today at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. Featuring over 80 works. The European art world had already taken considerable note of the Antwerp based Tuymans (b.1958) before he had his first show in New York at David Zwirner in 1996.

Since then, what the Wexner calls "his stark, often muted canvases" exploring "issues of history and memory" have become immensely influential, not to say popular among museums and collectors. David Coggins recently sat down in aback room at Zwirner and discussed -- as he smoked Marlboro Reds continuously -- the relevance of context, the dangers of political art and the importance of making silent paintings.

Read interview here 

Michael Jackson and Bubbles by Jeff Koons.

 Provocative conceptual artist Jeff Koons has made a career of turning tabletop kitsch and American novelties into megalithic icons, and Jackson was not immune. Koons’s porcelain statue of the singer esthetically recalls the precious glass tchotchkes your grandmother might have kept, but the sculpture's message was more suggestive. Part of Koons’s Banality series, the piece is outsized (more than six feet long) and depicts Jackson’s young, male pet chimpanzee nestled in the singer’s arms. It sold for $5.6 million at auction.

via: Jackson in Five: Iconic Artworks of the Late Singer

“The Rohlfs Style”

Charles Rohlfs thought of himself as an American original. This charismatic furniture designer from Buffalo, New York, emphatically denied any connection to particular movements or stylistic influences. He claimed that his individual inspiration came from the natural grain of oak and his own creative imagination. He called his work “Artistic Furniture” or, simply, “The Rohlfs Style” and, in turn, cultivated an enigmatic persona that has persisted until now.

The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs is the first major museum exhibition to bring together this designer’s rich body of work. Over forty of Rohlfs’ extraordinary creations will be presented in the context of groundbreaking research into the Rohlfs family archives and new documentary sources, which begin to reveal the origins of Rohlfs’ designs and the role of his wife, Anna Katharine Green. Rohlfs’ devotion to personal expression has roots in the “art for art’s sake” theories of the late-nineteenth-century Aesthetic movement. Formally, his virtuosic carving and imaginative silhouettes relate to the abstract naturalism of Art Nouveau styling, combined with a wide range of international design traditions. At the same time, Rohlfs’ innovations influenced the pared-down oak forms that became hallmarks of the Arts and Crafts movement. Combining design motifs in remarkably inventive ways, Rohlfs created furniture like none other, whose story and legacy contribute a new chapter to the history of American design.

“Dymaxion” Car Model by Buckminster Fuller & Isamu Noguchi

In 1929, Buckminster Fuller was introduced to an artist who shared his own mania for “comprehensivity”: Isamu Noguchi. Their first meeting at Romany Marie’s Tavern in New York City was a transformative experience for both men. Noguchi had just returned from studying in Europe on a Guggenheim fellowship, where he worked alongside Constantin Brancusi. For hours Noguchi would listen to Fuller’s orations at the tavern on the utopian possibilities of technology revolving around his “Dymaxion” house and automobile.

In later years, Fuller recalled that the aim of the “Dymaxion” transport project was “to develop an omni-medium transport vehicle to function in the sky, in negotiable terrain, or on water.” Using existing Ford Motor engines, Fuller postulated that by taking the conceptual basis of an airplane and applying the principles of wind resistance and the aerodynamic shape of fish, he could develop a new concept of the automobile. The word “Dymaxion” as an amalgamation of the words dynamism, maximum and ions, represented the energy that Fuller felt could be harnessed and used to advance the current simplistic concept of land transport.

Fuller originally sketched his stylized vehicle in 1927 and in 1932 looked to his friend,Noguchi, to sculpt the three-wheel model for the “Dymaxion” car based on these early drawings. The models were later painted by Fuller.

In the full-scale prototypes, Fuller abandoned the multi-terrain concept and sought to maximize the efficiency of existing technology, using rear wheel steering and aerodynamic shaping. The three realized “Dymaxion” cars were plagued by bad press following a fatal driving accident at the 1933 World’s Fair debut and the project was abandoned.

Dymaxion Car Model, Executed by Isamu Noguchi, Painted by Buckminster Fuller, Sold at Auction $92,500, at Sotheby’s.

via: Daily Icon

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

"Imagining The Unknown And The Unknowable"

There will be many, many changes for art and artists in the years ahead. Trying to predict them is like trying to forecast the economy. You can only ask questions. The 21st century will almost certainly see consciousness-altering changes in digital access to knowledge and in the shaping of visual culture. 

What will artists do with this? Will the art industry continue to cling to art’s traditional analog status, to insist that the material, buyable object is the only truly legitimate form of art, which is what the painting revival of the last few years has really been about? 

Will contemporary art continue to be, as it is now, a fancyish Fortunoff’s, a party supply shop for the Love Boat crew? Or will artists — and teachers, and critics — jump ship, swim for land that is still hard to locate on existing maps and make it their home and workplace? I’m not talking about creating ’60s-style utopias; all those notions are dead and gone and weren’t so great to begin with. 

I’m talking about carving out a place in the larger culture where a condition of abnormality can be sustained, where imagining the unknown and the unknowable — impossible to buy or sell — is the primary enterprise. Crazy! says anyone with an ounce of business sense. Right. 

Exactly. Crazy. 

link:The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art!

 By Holland Cotter

The New York Times

Rare 1937 Bugatti found

Dr. Harold Carr, an orthopedic surgeon in England, was a recluse in his later years, according to relatives. He never married or had children. So when the doctor died in 2007 at the age of 89, few knew what to expect inside his dusty garage. The last thing Dr. Carr’s relatives expected to find was one of the rarest cars in the world, a 1937 Bugatti 57S Atalante, which The Associated Press said was one of 17 in existence.

link: Rare Bugatti Found in British Garage

pint-sized pushkin

Miniature edition of Pushkin's great poem. A thumbnail printing that fits neatly in a vest pocket. First serialized between 1825 and 1832 and first published in book form in 1837, Pushkin's novel in verse remains one of his most popular works and a classic of Russian literature. It was the basis for Tchaikovsky's 1879 opera.

est. $1000 – $1500

link: Bloomsbury Auctions