January 2012
20 posts
4 tags
Pity the poor starlets! Every time they step out they are photographed, the photographs go online, and they are scrutinized instantaneously by a heartless, fashion-savvy public. Most celebrities have professional stylists for support, but even so they once in a while end up wearing things that are very simply wrong. Last Wednesday, just halfway through the festival, Huffington Post ran a...
6 tags
The exhibit of work by Roberto Burle Marx, the legendary Brazilian landscape architect, at Rooster Gallery is called Tablecloth, after a large canvas one he painted in the 1960’s that’s been cleaned, stretched and given pride of place in the small gallery. Burle Marx is best known for designing the park Ibirapuera in Sao Paulo and for his collaborations with architect Oscar Niemeyer...
7 tags
In their smaller, ground-floor gallery FIT has mounted an exhibit of notable pieces from their own collection. It opened with the title Great Designers but, after some controversy, was renamed, with less boldness and brevity, Fashion, A-Z: Highlights from the Collection of the Museum at FIT, Part One. The garments are displayed alphabetically by designer name, so that the show kicks off with...
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Last week interior designer Clodagh (like Cher and Madonna, there’s no last name required) concluded a presentation of her chic, contemporary bathroom designs with a heartfelt appeal for water conservation. She showed images of happy, hydrated children around the world, and of a toilet/lavatory like this one, with a sink over the toilet tank that reuses handwashing water for flushing. It...
9 tags
Damien Hirst’s Spot Paintings, on view now simultaneously at the eleven Gagosian galleries world-wide, are inane and pleasure-giving. Hirst painted them from 1986 to 2011, in different sizes and scales, applying these basic rules: each canvas has a white background, each spot in a canvas is a different color, and each spot is almost always spaced one diameter away from the next. In...
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The gentleman who introduced architect Kevin Roche at the Museum of the City of New York earlier this week, where there’s an exhibit honoring his work, did so with a bang, like this: “Kevin Roche studied with Mies van der Rohe and worked with Eero Saarinen.” And Roche, who’s 90 years old and still runs his own office, ended the whole affair with a bang, like this:...
6 tags
Last week, after lunch at a purposefully disheveled Brooklyn restaurant serving artisanal junk food (mac-and-cheese sandwiches pan-fried in butter, deep-fried chicken topped with coleslaw and hot sauce, collards stewed in maple syrup), I walked back home over the Williamsburg Bridge. The Williamsburg Bridge is an ugly stepsister to the city’s historic interborough bridges. A pragmatic,...
7 tags
When I was in younger I looked to Eva Hesse, just as I looked to Virgina Woolf, as a symbol more than as an artist. The facts of this artist’s life and death made more of an impression on my fevered college-girl mind than her actual work. A German-born painter and sculptor who emigrated with her family to New York City as a child, Hesse lived and worked in the city through the...
8 tags
File under “Wish I’d Kept Mine.” It’s socially acceptable now, for the first time in fifteen years, for women to wear plaid flannel shirts. (Although it seems that they never fell out of fashion in some parts.) It’s not the first time that I can remember a trend from its most recent incarnation (neons, boyfriend jeans, camouflage), but it’s the first time a...
5 tags
Last night was a giddy night for TV watchers, with an important Giants game, a new episode of Downton Abbey, and the Golden Globe Awards on all at once. I watched the awards show, thinking I could catch Downton in a rebroadcast and the Giants (fearless prediction) in the SuperBowl. It wasn’t until I spotted Viggo Mortensen at the Globes with a MLK pin on his tuxedo lapel that I...
10 tags
At a reception at the University Club earlier this week I met a gentleman who’d visited Udaipur and stayed at the Taj Palace. “The rooms were so incredibly ornamental,” he said, “you couldn’t tell where the walls ended and the decoration began.” That’s an apt description of the Club itself. Built by McKim Mead and White in 1893, it’s the most...
6 tags
Vision-impaired, temporarily, from dilating drops administered during a routine eye exam, I stumbled home from the doctor’s office like a movie drunk, navigating by counting blocks, and attaching myself to other pedestrians to cross the street. I couldn’t read street signs, gauge the distance of oncoming traffic, or see clearly into store windows. For the hour or so that the drops...
4 tags
Stepping into the living room of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Little House from 1912, a permanent display at the Met, I thought to myself how ridiculous it was to have a big piece of someone’s house sitting inside the museum. And then, after thinking about it for a bit, I realized that it made a great deal of sense to have a big piece of someone’s house sitting inside the museum if it...
7 tags
I’m a girl who is in love with her books, all her books: super-sized art books, life-changing novels, and tattered, secondhand paperbacks from college. I live with them in piles, on shelves, and lying randomly throughout my home. Then last year, to save trees, I started reading the newspaper on a tablet, and then, because it was easier than running to the library, I started reading...
6 tags
I subscribe to the myth, still. I believe that Modernism is something entirely divorced from what went before, a historical rupture, a revolution. But the exhibit celebrating reknown nineteenth-century New York furniture maker Duncan Phyfe on view now at the Met makes it seem much less so. Phyfe opened his workshop in 1794 and died in 1854. His work impresses because, like a lot of great...
5 tags
The Shard
(photography by Jeffrey Kilmer)
Far removed from China and the Middle East, where super-tall buildings are sprouting like weeds, there’s a spectacular 1,017-foot tall, 72-story glass tower taking shape. It’s the London Shard, under construction in the south side of the city near London Bridge. Designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, the Shard will be Europe’s tallest building. But unlike...
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Although I missed the display of Elizabeth Taylor’s clothing and jewelry at Christie’s, I was able to see Robert Rauschenberg’s private art collection at the Gagosian just before it closed. It’s eclectic but unsurprising. There are some Native American artifacts and some Americana. There’s a great four-panel Marilyn painting by Andy Warhol, and an intimate,...
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The movie Melancholia opens with what director Lars von Trier calls a “doomsday ballet,” a strange, thrilling, eight-minute sequence of hyper-real tableaux that unspool to an overture from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Each scene prefigures a moment from the movie. They are clearly computer-doctored, rendered in otherworldly hues and extravagant slow motion, and yet they are...
9 tags
A few years ago Thomasville launched The Ernest Hemingway Furniture Collection with four lines called “Paris,” “Kenya,” “Key West,” and “Havana,” inspired by the great writer’s travels. The pieces, exaggerated versions of regional styles, had a real appeal. (The company still sells Hemingway furniture in some of these styles, but now...
6 tags
Eva Zeisel, the great ceramic designer, died last week at the age of 105 after a very long, very great career. She was designing new pieces at her studio in Rockland County as recently as 2009. Zeisel first gained wide acclaim in the 1950’s, and lived long enough to see her work “rediscovered” by more than one new generation. She was trained, in Europe, at that moment when...
