The Errant Æsthete

"Elegance is refusal."

 

~Coco Chanel

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R. Kenton Nelson

Awaiting A Return

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Frantisek Drtikol

Frank Lloyd Wright

In “Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward,” an exhibition currently on view at the Guggenheim Museum, the models of Wright’s designs are attracting as much attention as the exhibition itself. Perhaps the most notable model is that of Wright’s Herbert Jacobs House #1 of 1936-37, the first of the architect’s pioneering open-plan, energy-efficient Usonian houses.

The basswood model takes the house’s components — from its window frames to its innovative copper-piped radiant-heating system — and explodes them, so that they seem to hang in midair.

Un Coeur Tres Nature

Robert Motherwell

Sudden Bronze

Sunburn Series

Jeff Zaruba

Berenice Abbott

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Michael Levin

Joyce Tenneson

Asaf Ben Zvi

Larry Abramson

Will Cotton

Dietmar Busse

Andy Warhol

Eric Baker on Design

As I bounce around online looking for images I always look for the extraordinary, the esoteric, the naive, and the emblematic of a time; works that are not the pieces we often see in design history books.

Just as a map helps us find our way and shows us where we are, looking at design from years past helps us better understand the trajectory contemporary design has taken. DesignObserver.

Great Performances

Summer Sangria

The Remarkable Mr. Jones

     The novelist Alison Lurie wrote:

“Whatever is worn on the head is a sign of the mind beneath it.”

  Stephen Jones, the greatest milliner of his   generation, disagrees.

“Whatever is worn on the head is a sign of what a person would like to be.
Hats are a passport
to another world.”

  Jones advises that you wear a new hat   around the house.

“Get used to it”, he said, "before you go out. Then you will wear it with nonchalance.”

An Anthology by Stephen Jones;
24 February - 31 May

Ernst Haas

Annechovie

Patricia Gray

Tim Davis' Un Coin d'Appartement

Some may frown on Tim Davis' photographs of famous paintings. For one thing, it appears that his camera's flash intrudes upon and harms each masterpiece. However, the artist doesn't use a flash at all, instead relying on the light provided by sources within the museums where the works are housed.

Davis shoots them from angles that accentuate the available light and then creates prints that reveal the physique of the paintings.

The added beams of light modify our sense of these mostly familiar images. In certain pieces the light reveals texture (the aged paint cracks in Corot's Evocation of Love); in others it alters the figures (notably the child, now resembling a specter, in Monet's Un Coin d'Appartement).

Fifi Flowers Design

Edouard Chimot

Anne Rothenstein

Stewart Halperin

J. David McKenney

And the Pursuit of Happiness

Mats Gustafson

Suzanne Katzenberg

Hendrik Kerstens' Paula

 "One day [photographer Hendrik Kerstens' daughter] Paula came back from horseback riding. She took off her cap and I was struck by the image of her hair held together by a hair-net.

It reminded me of the portraits by the Dutch masters and I portrayed her in that fashion."

A number of the portraits of Paula are very reminiscent of Johannes Vermeer. The austerity of the photograph, its clarity, the serene expression on the young girl’s face, untouched by the experiences of adult life and, not least, the characteristic ‘Dutch’ light, all combine to create this impression.

 Bag (detail) by Hendrik Kerstens, 2007 National Portrait Gallery

The New Dutch Masters

Color

Maira Kalman

Sound Files

Les Indiennes

Tim Walker

Lost Archives

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Alex MacLean

Tim Davis: Trains, Vol.1

John Atkinson Grimshaw

Proust on Proust

Q: What natural gift would you most like to possess?
Marcel Proust: Will-power and irresistible charm.

George Condo

Reading

The Age of Innocence

In this classic novel of old New York, Edith Wharton recreates the city of her girlhood in the 1870s. The Arion edition has been illustrated with photographs of the actual settings of the story.

“Truly a thing of beauty” according to Forbes magazine, this edition celebrates a classic of American literature. The book has a special status as an affectionate record of the streets and buildings of New York City. At every moment of the novel the reader knows where the characters are, walking down a particular street, standing in front of a certain address, looking out the window of a familiar room.

The Arion Press edition is illustrated with images of the novel's actual setting, as they are today, captured by noted photographer Stephen Shore who brought to this project a personal knowledge of the historic buildings and streets that made up Wharton's New York world.

New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman raved: "The work’s laconic eloquence speaks of an era and a nation."

The Kindle

Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon's sickly serene Self Portrait 1971 is a refracted faceted face akin to some of Paul Cézanne's self-portraits which are reminiscent of cut precious gem stones reflecting light. Bacon painted with a very dry brush giving the sensation of a granular, grainy effect.

The melancholia mood is of a man melting before you: a disturbing image of a disturbed man in a disturbed century. This is one of the last great self-portraits Bacon painted before he went off the rails and went back into to the lazy worn grooves of inane illustration.