The Crisis of Credit visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo. Supremely helpful.

VIEW

Remembering Gene. On the 10th Anniversary of his death, Roger Ebert looks back on the life of Gene Siskel. A more moving tribute is seldom read.

___

“We both thought of ourselves as full-service, one-stop film critics. We didn’t see why the other one was quite necessary. We had been linked in a Faustian television format that brought us success at the price of autonomy. No sooner had I expressed a verdict on a movie, my verdict, than here came Siskel with the arrogance to say I was wrong, or, for that matter, the condescension to agree with me. It really felt like that. It was not an act. When we disagreed, there was incredulity; when we agreed, there was a kind of relief.

In the television biz, they talk about “chemistry.” Not a thought was given to our chemistry. We just had it, because from the day the Chicago Tribune made Gene its film critic, we were professional enemies. We never had a single meaningful conversation before we started to work on our TV program. Alone together in an elevator, we would study the numbers changing above the door.”

 

Chicago Sun Times

“He’s so clearly a neglected 13-year-old

that there’s something really kind of heartbreaking about him,”

McKay said, calling him “a good-time Charlie”

who was “just used his whole life

to front questionable business endeavors,

and in a way that’s what his presidency was.”

 

Adam McKay, Director of Will Ferrell’s,
“You’re Welcome America.
A Final Night with George W Bush”
commenting on the former President.

“The French Window (Mourning at Le Cannet),” an oil on canvas from 1932.

Over the course of 24 years, Pierre Bonnard painted the familiar, simply furnished rooms of his home at Le Cannet in southern France. All are interiors or still lifes or, best, a hybrid; all were made from 1923, when Bonnard was 56, to the end of 1946, a month or so before his death.

“Corner of the Dining Room at Le Cannet,” 1932

Although his subjects were close at hand, he rarely painted directly from life, relying instead on memory. He preferred the simplicity of pencil drawings sketched rapidly in little diaries. So detailed were his notations that he laid out idiosyncratic marks as reminders of color, tone, intensity, and contrast.

The White Interior of 1932

Bonnard’s paintings often convey a feeling of forbidden sights, as if one is trespassing among private or intimate settings. In Before Dinner (1924), the figures, though physically present, are emotionally absent.

“Before Dinner,” 1924

Working in his modest house overlooking the Mediterranean, Bonnard’s paintings transformed the rooms and objects that surrounded him into dazzling images infused with intense light. It is these luminous late interiors that define Bonnard’s modernism and prompt a reappraisal of his reputation in the history of 20th-century art.

“Breakfast,” circa 1930

“Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors” is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org, through April 19.

“The Table,” 1925.

“Dining Room Overlooking the Garden” 1930-31.

New York Times

The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential…in Business and in Life by Leo Babauta.

Lartigue’s “Zissou in his Tire Boat.” (Color changed for graphic effect.)

“One of my favorite Lartigue stories involves a conversation between Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud. The pair were discussing a major Lartigue show they had each just seen and Freud was enthusing about the work. “My dear Francis,” he began, “It’s quite remarkable. This man can actually photograph happiness!”

Bacon looked up from his beer with a look of derision. “Silliness if you ask me.”

Of course both were right. Lartigue, the great prodigy of photography, blessed with a sharpshooter’s eye and a wealthy and sporty family who were always having fun, could photograph both happiness and silliness, as well as all kinds of love and desire, and make it all sing. The picture above is one of the silly ones but it never fails to make me smile.”

The Year in Pictures

“The greatest disgrace of these past weeks has not been the naysaying; it’s been the shabby way the naysayers treated the President. Americans are a hopeful people, & until the President betrays us, as Dubya did, we don’t like no-name Congressmen & bloviating Senators denegrating the President, especially when the President treats even the petty bloviators with respect.

The President is the winner of the month not because he got his historic bill through the Congress, but because he maintained his dignity while his Republican critics showed themselves to be folks you wouldn’t let in the house.”

— marie burns, fort myers, fl

Reader response to columnist Frank Rich’s NY Times Op/Ed piece for Sunday, Feb. 15, 2009 entitled “They Sure Showed that Obama.”

London-based animator Michael Schlingmann created this near perfect 20-second animated pun. The animation and sentiment are out loud laughable.

VIEW

Gerald and Sara Murphy on La Garoupe beach, Antibes, 1926.

Some 50 years after meeting Gerald and Sara Murphy, a still dazzled Donald Ogden Stewart wrote: ”Once upon a time there was a prince and a princess: that’s exactly how a description of the Murphys should begin. They were both rich; he was handsome; she was beautiful; they had three golden children. They loved each other, they enjoyed their own company, and they had the gift of making life enchantingly pleasurable for those who were fortunate enough to be their friends.”

Gerald Murphy, Ginny Carpenter, Cole Porter, and Sara Murphy, Venice, 1923.

Gerald and Sara Murphy were, to many of their contemporaries, the beautiful couple of the 1920’s, and they left their mark on many works of art about the period: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ”Tender Is the Night,” Ernest Hemingway’s ”Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Philip Barry’s ”Holiday,” Archibald MacLeish’s ”J.B.,” John Dos Passos’ ”Big Money” and Pablo Picasso’s ”Woman in White,” among others.

Much has been written about Paris in the 20’s with the Murphys at the epicenter of one of the most enviable circles that included among others Joyce, Miro, Picasso, Man Ray, Stravinsky, Hemingway, Beckett, Brancusi, Leger, Balanchine, Fitzgerald, Isadora Duncan: everyone, it seemed, was in Paris, and the Murphys — generous, stylish and hospitable — knew and entertained them all.

”The Murphys were among the first Americans I ever met,” Stravinsky said, ”and they gave me the most agreeable impression of the United States.”

Ernest Hemingway with Sara and Gerald Murphy at Nordquist L Bar T Ranch, Wyoming, 1932.

Yet the Murphys’ life together was no fairy tale; in the end it came very close to tragedy. Sadly with the passage of time and the vagaries of friendships, a few of their cohorts proved to be as undependable as life’s destinies.

Amanda Vaill in her brilliantly rendered biography, Everybody Was So Young quotes from Hemingway’s posthumous memoir, ”A Moveable Feast,” in which Hemingway nastily — and unforgivably, considering their generosity to him — commented, ”They were bad luck to people but they were worse luck to themselves and they lived to have all that bad luck finally.”

Gerald reacted with his odd, characteristic blend of sympathy and resigned detachment: ”What a strange kind of bitterness — or rather accusitoriness . . . . What shocking ethics! How well written, of course.”

The Murphys, Pauline Pfeiffer, and the Hemingways, 1926, Pamplona, Spain

“It wasn’t the parties that made it such a gay time.

There was such affection between everybody. You loved your friends

and wanted to see them every day, and usually you did see them

every day. It was like a great fair, and everybody was so young.”

Idle Hours, 1894. William Merritt Chase.

Although East Hampton in the 1920’s was becoming a watering place for the wealthy with vast singled “cottages” arising along its windblown dunes and tranquil saltwater ponds, the vacationing artists had given it a distinctive flavor. …

Intellectual it may or may not have been, but East Hampton was relaxed, entertaining, and gay. The daughter of one of Sara’s closest friends remembered it as bathed in a kind of perpetual summer light, like a William Merritt Chase painting;

“the women all had tiny waists and beautiful shoes,

and they wore long fluttering eyelet dresses, and veils on their hats –

chiffon veils they tied under the chin –

and there were was always a breeze.”

There were golf games and amateur theatricals at the Maidstone Club, horse shows and dog shows in neighbors’ paddocks, parties on friends’ porches and sloping lawns — and it was at one of these that Sara Wiborg met a boy named Gerald Murphy.

 

Everybody was so Young.

THE END OF THE WORLD

AS WE KNOW IT

Headline out of Today’s Business Press, Sunday, February 15, 2009

An exquisite 98-page sketchbook by the illustrator Craig Frazier.

Sølve Sundsbø, Camouflage, 2008

Dazzlingly inventive, hugely artificial and hyper-sophisticated fashion images by 40 photographers are plastered over the walls, floor to ceiling, in “Weird Beauty: Fashion Photography Now,” the new exhibition filling the ground-floor galleries of the International Center of Photography. In a notably budget-conscious approach, curators Carol Squiers and Vince Aletti have used magazine tear-sheets rather than original prints (though the show does include 20 actual photos), as if surrendering to the reality that this kind of material is everywhere.

Tim Walker, Alice Gibb and Olga Sherer, Sennowe Park, Norfolk, England, 2007

The Kiss (1901-4) by Rodin in Tate Modern. Rodin’s enthusiasm is infectious, his sensuality awe-inspiring. Modern art’s most perfect Valentine.

For its publicity campaign, the Cord Corporation enlisted Norwegian figure skater Sonja Henie, who won gold medals in the 1928, 1932, and 1936 Winter Olympics, to pose with the 1936 Cord 810.

Bikini models and trade shows may seem to go hand-in-hand, but in the auto-show world, models have evolved from sticker roles to spokespeople and can be just as informed about the vehicles as the auto-industry executives. Margery Krevsky’s new book, Sirens of Chrome, traces the story of auto models from short shorts to business attire. Glorious photography from the industry’s history.

Hazel Forbes, star of Down to their Last Yacht and Bachelor Bait, lends her bathing suit-clad image to a 1934 Packard Super Eight Convertible Victoria.

Packard Motor Co. enlisted members of the Marion Morgan Dancers to promote the 1927 model Packard 343 Series Eight. The troupe danced around the United States at auto events and in London in variety shows, specializing in interpretative Greek movement. Here, dancers perform a circle ceremony around a convertible coupe.

The Morning News

Extraordinary chef-thinker Chef Dan Barber tells the story of a small farm in Spain that has found a humane way to produce foie gras. This enchanting parable about farming, cooking, eating and foie gras is simply joyous.

VIEW

“Sluggy Hollow,” a 1920s adobe house on Shoreham Drive in Los Angeles, was home to Humphrey Bogart and his third wife, actress Mayo Methot, during the years he starred in The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1943) and To Have and Have Not (1944). The name “Sluggy Hollow” came from Methot’s widely known nickname, “Sluggy,” after her combative nature.

 

Architectural Digest

CZ Guest, age 36, photographed for Town & Country in 1956 by Stephen Colhoun, wearing a Tiffany necklace by Jean Schlumberger and a gray flannel dress and a ranch-mink waist length “barrel” jacket, both by Mainbocher.

The Amish have the undeserved reputation of being luddites, of people who refuse to employ new technology. It’s well know the strictest of them don’t use electricity, or automobiles, but rather farm with manual tools and ride in a horse and buggy. In any debate about the merits of embracing new technology, the Amish stand out as offering an honorable alternative of refusal. Yet Amish lives are anything but anti-technological.

One Amish-man told me that the problem with phones, pagers, and PDAs (yes he knew about them) was that “you got messages rather than conversations.” That’s about as an accurate summation of our times as any. Henry, his long white beard contrasting with his young bright eyes told me, “If I had a TV, I’d watch it.” What could be simpler?

Featured: Homebuilt gas powered ice cutter to make ice for non-electric icebox.

The Technium

Nico in Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests

Andy Warhol was in thrall to beauty,

glamour and charisma. His Screen Tests -

ravishing film portraits of Lou Reed, Susan Sontag,

Salvador Dalí and others -

are about the act of looking itself.

After Marcel Duchamp, who had thought of everything first, Andy Warhol was the 20th-century artist who worked hardest to efface himself from his own oeuvre. For sure, he remains the century’s most recognisable artist, his face a screen-print spectre that will not fade: the garrulous dowager of the Diaries did not lack for ego. But much of his art, and especially his films of the 1960s, was a celebration (also an anatomy) of his diverse milieu – a demimonde that, for a time at least, it seemed anyone could join. Had he lived into an era when fame means peddling your own line of perfume, there is no doubt what his would have been called: Andy Warhol’s Entourage.

Between 1964 and 1966, Andy Warhol trained his rapt and tireless gaze on the human face as if for the first time, shooting nearly 500 Screen Tests, beautiful and revealing portraits of hundreds of different individuals, from the famous to the anonymous, all visitors to his studio, the Factory. Subjects were captured in stark relief lit by one strong keylight, and filmed by Warhol with his stationary 16mm Bolex camera on silent, black and white, 100-foot rolls of film. Each two-and-a-half-minute film reel was screened in slow motion, rendering a ghostly collection of four-minute masterpieces both startling and mesmerizing.

Plexifilm is releasing “13 Most Beautiful…Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests” a 60 minute film featuring 13 of the tests (including Nico, Lou Reed, Edie Sedgwick, and Dennis Hopper).

Guardian

The ruckl crystal glassworks in the czech republic manufactures an extensive range of cut 24% leaded crystal in a wide variety, from the simple to the extremely complex, with gilt, hand painting and sandblasting.

Inspired by the sometime archaic-seeming world of the engineer (translation: prehistoric), each piece in the the engineering collection is so named for the etched designs on all the pieces involving the dimensions and spec’s of each piece. The utilitarian in me loves it.

Unica Home

The Inspiration

The Result

Mats Gustafson

Actress Mary Heberden, 1935.

The illustrious career of Edward Steichen crossed so many genres of photography but some of my favorite of his works are his fashion images.Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, The Conde Nast Years 1923 – 1937 currently on exhibit at the International Center of Photography through May 3, 2009 features the finest examples of his fashion and celebrity portraiture made for Vogue and Vanity Fair. Much of the exhibition is drawn from the Steichen Archive at Condé Nast, which contains more than two thousand original vintage prints. A staggering collection.

Model Margaret Horn wearing Jay-Thorpe, 1935.

Model Marion Morehouse and unidentified model wearing dresses by Vionnet, 1930.

No other fashion photographer could rival Steichen for the range he covered: Chanel, Lanvin, Lelong, Alix, Gres, Piguet, Pacquin, Schiaparelli, and a host of other couturiers and couturieres saw their creations depicted creatively and convincingly by Steichen on the pages of Vogue.

Actress Joan Crawford in Schiaparelli, 1932

An architect of American Modernism and a Pictorialist, Steichen exhibited his fashion images alongside his art photographs. Steichen’s crisp, detailed, high-key style revolutionized fashion photography, and his influence is felt in the field to this day—Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Bruce Weber are among his stylistic successors.

Model Marion Morehouse in a bouffant dress and actress Helen Lyons in a long sleeve dress by Kargère; masks by the illustrator W.T. Benda, 1926.

Evening shoes by Vida Moore, 1927.

The 1920s and 1930s represent the high point in Edward Steichen’s photographic career, and the work he did for Condé Nast’s influential magazines will stand forever among the most striking creations of twentieth-century photography. Personally speaking, the photograph of one of the leading men of the day, Gary Cooper, takes my breath away.

Actor Gary Cooper, 1930.

Self-Portrait of Steichen with Photographic Paraphernalia, New York, 1929.

At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland,

some of the most interesting discussions revolved around whether

we would be in the same mess today

if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters.

The consensus (and this is among the dead white men

who parade annually at Davos)

is that the optimal bank would have been

Lehman Brothers and Sisters.

Nicholas Kristoff

Martha Washington by Michael Deas

So often, we never fully realize or appreciate how history is recreated, not based on reality nearly as much as interpretation. For example, the above portrait of the country’s first First Lady by Michael Deas creates an image of what a young Martha Washington was imagined to have looked like (”By George, Martha was a hot mama” exclaimed the New York Post) based on a computer generated age-regression image created at Louisiana State University’s forensic anthropology department.

Contrast that with the more traditional portrait of Martha rendered by James Peale in a watercolor on ivory done in 1776.

The more conventional view of Martha.

Left – miniature portrait of Martha Washington, 1796. Right – detail of Deas’s portrait, 2008

Now which of the two interpretations would you choose as your legacy? Michael Deas’ updated version of the more comely Martha was commissioned for the cover of Patricia Brady’s definitive biography of America’s first First Lady. Known as a realist painter more in the tradition of Parrish than Wyeth, Deas has created such enduring likenesses as the current Columbia Pictures logo as well as recent U.S. stamps commemorating movie stars like Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, and Marilyn Monroe.

Deas’s Logo for Columbia Pictures

Happily for history’s sake and Martha’s reputation, Mount Vernon, the historic home of George and Martha Washington, recently acquired Deas’s portrait of Martha where it will now remain on permanent display.

The Year in Pictures

“Leanne Shapton’s splendid book is completely sensational

and over-the-top great.

I am nuts about it. This is the stuff of life, literally.

Oh, love. Oh, despair. Oh, stolen salt shakers.”

—Maira Kalman

 

Auction catalogs can tell you a lot about a person—their passions and vanities, peccadilloes and aesthetics; their flush years and lean. Think of the collections of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Truman Capote, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

Important Artifacts . . . from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris may look like an everyday auction catalog. But the auction itself is a literary conceit: What this book-type object really does is show us the trajectory of a failed four-year relationship — by showing us the physical detritus that two (fictional) lovers leave in their wake.

Conceived and executed by the director of the New York Times Op-Ed page, Leanne Shapton’s marvelously inventive and invented auction catalog, the 325 lots up for auction are what remain from the relationship between Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris (who aren’t real people, but might as well be). Through photographs of the couple’s personal effects—the usual auction items (jewelry, fine art, and rare furniture) and the seemingly worthless (pajamas, Post-it notes, worn paperbacks)—the story of a failed love affair vividly (and cleverly) emerges.

Doolan appears to have been a clever and adoring girlfriend, who showered the often-absent Morris with confetti-packed envelopes (LOT 1126) and lavender pajamas (LOT 1061). Morris, who had commitment issues and a drinking problem, expressed himself via mixtapes (LOTS 1276 and 1044). What finally drove them apart? Each of the 331 lots provides another piece of the puzzle. Yes, breaking up is hard to do, but reading about it has never been so pleasurable.

From first meeting to final separation, the progress and rituals of intimacy are revealed through the couple’s accumulated relics and memorabilia. And a love story, in all its tenderness and struggle, emerges from the evidence that has been left behind, laid out for us to appraise and appreciate.

Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry

While there’s clearly a downside to the recession, evidence is emerging that suggests an unexpected and uncommon upturn — a return to civility from the worst offenders of all that is genteel and mannerly — the haughty representatives of the service industry better known as surly waiters. The self-appointed demigods of cuisine who have long intimidated, exasperated, and, on occasion, eviscerated wary diners are now adopting the new mantra of the times – humbling humanity.

“The attitude that a number of places used to have, they don’t have anymore,” a New York restauranteer noted, her tone of voice communicating equal measures bewilderment and relief. “That attitude of ‘we’re doing you a favor,’ that frosty condescending attitude — I don’t find that anymore. And I’ve experienced that change over and over again.” Servers, she said, make double- and triple-sure that the table has everything it needs. Managers circle back to the table more often than ever to ask, with new urgency, if everything’s O.K.”

For opportunistic diners, there are at least three big advantages to this trend.

1. Great food at relatively reasonable prices.

2. Dining opportunities at great but previously unavailable restaurants at good times.

3. The chance to become a highly valued regular at your favorite restaurant. If they’re doing things right and you support them when times are tough (visit often, tip well, etc.), they’ll gratefully reward you in better times with reservations at prime times, VIP treatment, and dishes “courtesy of the chef.”

NY Times

Margarett Sargent, Beyond Good and Evil (self-portrait), 1950, oil on canvas, 40×23”. Courtesy of Berry-Hill Gallery.

Born just before the turn of the century, (1892-1978), Margarett Sargent, a fourth cousin of John Singer Sargent, was an exuberant socialite, iconoclastic wit, audacious lover—and mother and wife—from Brahmin Boston. She was also a uniquely talented and professionally recognized painter. Her brightly colored oils, pastels and watercolors, influenced by Matisse and Picasso, were widely exhibited in the 1920s and ’30s.

Her marriage in 1920 to rich Boston businessman Quincy Shaw McKean became a battleground of wills and temperaments, and Sargent had numerous affairs with men and women, including novelist Jane Bowles. She began drinking heavily in the 1930s while trying to balance the demands of raising four children and an artistic career. In 1948, Shaw McKean announced that he was divorcing her to marry tennis champion Kay Winthrop.

In her early 40s, she abruptly stopped making art. Suffering from severe depression, using alcohol to quell the growing conflict between her creative and social drives, she spent the last years of her life in and out of sanatoriums undergoing shock treatment or traveling with a chauffeur through Europe, estranged from her family and isolated from friends and colleagues.

 

INTERVIEWER
You seem to shun literary society. Why?

UPDIKE
I don’t, do I? Here I am, talking to you. In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be’s and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering. Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, and having them speak to him.

Interview with the late novelist John Updike, Winter, 1968

Paris Review

Inspired by his life as a “farm kid,” photographer Chadwick Tyler, preferred lensman of Alexander Wang, produced original black and white portraits reminiscent of the Dust Bowl, but with a modern twist. What Tyler calls “the juxtaposition of the meticulous and the disheveled.”

His first gallery exhibition starts Feb. 10 through March 12 at the Honey Space Gallery in New York.

Fashionologie

Approximately forty years ago, the Beatles last ever public concert took place around mid-day on Thursday, January 30, atop the group’s own Apple headquarters at No 3 Saville Row in London. It lasted 42 minutes. It may well have gone on longer had it not been for the complaints of their neighbor, Stanley Davis, who was quoted as saying “I want this bloody noise stopped. It’s an absolute disgrace”. He called the police and the concert was stopped.

VIEW

Robert Mapplethorpe, Self Portraits, 1980’s

“I went into photography because it seemed like the perfect vehicle

for commenting on the madness of today’s existence.”

~Robert Mapplethorpe

Best known for his lush black-and-white photographs of flowers, celebrities—and male nudes engaged in sadomasochism, Mapplethorpe’s work fueled debates about public funding for the arts for years.

“Polaroids: Mapplethorpe” runs through April 5 at the Block Museum of Art.