About MsSusanB

Arts and technology writer who is in the know about the latest and greatest that New York City – and other places in the country – have to offer and the fossils that are being dug up around the world

Armory Show Stars on the West Coast of Manhattan

Posted on March 14, 2014 by MsSusanB

The Artforum Lounge on the Contemporary Pier

For four action-packed days, the art crowd made its way to the West Coast of Manhattan Island past gritty lots, warehouses, the ball fields of Clinton, and high-rises-under-construction to enter a white, light-filled glittery expanse of painting, sculpture, and champagne bars at the 2014 edition of The Armory Show.

This year, 205 exhibitors showed off the best in modern masters and contemporary upstarts. Walk through it with us on our Flickr feed.

If you’ve never been there, just know that the art fills two full piers (yes, where the cruise ships come in). You may think the Whitney Biennial is big, but The Armory promenade is vast.

On the Modern Pier: Chicago’s Alan Koppel Gallery gave tribute to original Armory Show in 1913 with several Duchamps, but most of the work is post-1940 by Modern superstars. Right at the start of the pier, Galleria d’Arte Maggiori positioned a nice rough-and-ready Mattia Moreni in kind-of a face-off with a pretty primitive Basquiat nearby.

Dramatic paper collage and charcoal work by Elaine de Kooning with two Picasso ceramics at Vivian Horan

Dramatic paper collage and charcoal work by Elaine de Kooning with two little Picasso ceramics at Vivian Horan

Frankfurt’s Die Galerie gave NYC glamour-icon Louise Nevelson a mini-tribute, and several galleries featured Marca-Relli’s painting/collages.

Best on the Modern Pier: Vivian Horan’s booth, dominated by a large Elaine de Kooning charcoal drawing with collage, but populated by two small Picasso ceramics that most fair goers didn’t even see, although they were practically out in the aisle. You don’t see Picasso ceramics too much, and they really added a nice touch.

Second runner-up was the Armand Bartos booth with a sharp Kenneth Noland, Andy’s chicken soup can under glass, and a no-holds-barred Stella. In fact, there were multiple 1980s 3D Frank Stellas leaping out from walls, demanding attention. Besides posing with the soup can, lots of visitors were snapping photos of themselves in front of Mr. Stella’s work.

1949 Hans Hoffman oil at London’s Crane Kalman

Welcomed surprises: Even though he taught most of the post-war painters in New York, you don’t often see Hans Hoffman paintings, so it was nice to encounter one of his color explosions at Crane Kalman. And we’ve never seen the two super-early skinny Lichtenstein sculptures at Barcelona’s Galeria Marc Domenech booth. Guess they were made in those lean before-the-dots years on his path to Pop.

Susan Harris curated a great micro-show of 20^th century female artists, mostly works on paper (e.g. Georgia O’Keefe, Kiki Smith, Lee Bonticou), all contributed by gallery exhibitors.

Richard Long’s 1994 Merrivale Circle at the Lisson Gallery

Although you could hike outdoors to get to the second pier along the West Side Highway, most were guided through a wormhole and down a flight of stairs to descend directly into the booths from 17 contemporary galleries across China – a great landing into a warren of booths featuring installations (watch out for the Roomba!), and user-friendly exercise equipment that the PRC makes available in public parks for citizen fitness.

From there, you enter the Contemporary Pier area. Highlights: the whirling handbag piece (with real handbags) by Egill Saebjornsson at Reykjavik’s i8 Gallery, Richard Long’s stone circle at London’s Lisson Gallery booth, the completely constructed entry to Boesky Gallery, and Claudia Weiser’s cool wooden sculptures at Sies + Hoke (Dusseldorf).

Nick Cave Soundsuits at Jack Shainman

A great place to end the journey was at the Jack Shainman booth, with its dramatic contemporary art exploring expressions from Africa, African-Americans, and global artists — the Nick Cave soundsuits and Richard Mosse’s spectacularly dissonant hot-pink infrared photograph of a waterfall in the continually disintegrating, war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo.

Take a look at the highlights here.

Fair goer relaxes on modernist egg chair under the watchful eye of Dali

Berlin Artist Loves NYC and MoMA Loves Her Back

Posted on March 7, 2014 by MsSusanB

Schauspieler (Actors) (2012-2013) welcome visitors to Isa’s show.

Isa’s Schauspieler (Actors) (2012-2013) welcome visitors.

Early in her art career, she zigged and zagged and eventually found inspiration in New York, but then who hasn’t? Take a ride at MoMA through the career of an “artist’s artist”, Isa Genzken Retrospective, through March 10.

On a weekend with the bit-of-everything Biennial debut, why not also see work a sculptor who’s done it all herself — tried a little bit of everything on a career-long journey through computerized wood, concrete and electronics, resin, subversive architectural models with ready-mades, and mannequin-and-outfit art. Hey, she’s a one-woman Armory Show!

We have highlights on our Flickr feed, but MoMA’s digital interactive team has done an outstanding chronology of this Berlin artist’s invention over the past 40 years. Click through the show on the web, read the label copy, and enjoy the audio tour.

Weltempfänger (World Receiver) (1987–89) mimic the real thing in concrete

What we found interesting: Back in the late 1970s, she wondered what it would be like to design sculptures on computers and ended up making huge wooden sculptures that took collaboration with physicists and carpenters. To put her achievement in perspective, her 1980 sculptures were displayed at a time when the Mac was still essentially a garage project. Good going, girl!

Around the same time, she became captivated by electronics and began experimenting with collages, sculptures, and ready-mades with hi-fi equipment and wideband radio receivers.

Fenster (Window) (1992) installed under a MoMA skylight from which you can see the buildings outside.

MoMA’s installed a spectacular gallery populated with large, high, dramatic, airy structures that she made in the 1990s. Are they windows? Empty stretchers for paintings? Look closely and you’ll see that they are made of see-through resin. It’s all the more mysterious because their tops are reaching up to Midtown’s rectangle skyscrapers visible through MoMA’s own window. (You’ll feel like you’re in Stacy and Clinton’s 360, except it’s reflecting Modern architecture.)

It’s a nice gateway to what lies beyond – a room filled with work inspired by her first trips to New York in 1995-1996. She loved what she saw. She collected mementos of her Downtown travels – invites to clubs, flyers, posters, gallery notices, calling cards – and made them into bright, colorful scrapbooks.

In 2000, she went on another collecting trip from her flat near Wall Street to pay tribute to the City’s world-class skyscraper architecture that so inspired her.

Genzken’s 2000 series that paid tribute to NYC’s modernist architecture. A sly Tatlin touch.

But rather than rely on “substantial” materials to interpret hard-edge Modernist design, she cobbled together vignettes of toy cars, pizza boxes, and other ready-mades holding it all together with brightly colored adhesive tape. (As you walk through her tall plywood stands perusing her cityscapes, watch out for the tiny Hula-Hair-Barbie-wannabe toy standing along the narrow pathway facing the gallery wall.)

And be sure to look up. On the ceiling above, she’s showing a film shot on the noisy city streets, interspersed with tranquil river views of the Hudson.

There’s much more to the exhibit – commentaries on corporate America (featuring Scrooge McDuck) and her phenomenal we-are-all-actors-in-this-crazy-life installation at the entrance. You can’t really describe it.

And don’t worry if you’ve never heard of Isa before, as this MoMA YouTube attests. If you have 20 minutes, take a tour of Berlin, New York, and the Venice Biennale through the eyes of Isa’s fans — Lawrence Weiner, Wolfgang Tilmans, Dan Graham, and a host of German gallery owners, collectors, and curators:

Take a stroll through Isa’s work in person at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (April 12-August 3) and the Dallas Museum of Art (September 14 – January 4).

The Most Lavish Natural History Show in the World

Posted on March 6, 2014 by MsSusanB

Remember 17th c. Dutch tulipmania? JAR Tulip Brooch 2008 made of rubies, diamonds, pink sapphires, garnets, silver, gold, and enamel. Private collection. Photo: Jozsef Tari. Courtesy: JAR, Paris.

Remember 17th c. Dutch tulipmania? JAR  Tulip Brooch 2008. Rubies, diamonds, pink sapphires, garnets, silver, gold, and enamel. Private collection. Photo: Jozsef Tari. Courtesy: JAR, Paris.

If you took the detailed observational field skills and plant-and-animal artistry of JJ Audubon and crossed them with the gold-and-jewels precision of a Fabergé master, you can understand the enjoyment, beauty, and wonder that await the luxury-lovers crowding into Jewels by JAR, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s tribute to the world’s most exclusive and reclusive jewelry artist. Meditate on his exquisite take on the natural world before it all goes back to the vaults on March 9.

Plenty of worshippers were wielding tiny flashlights last Saturday night, working their way meticulously through the darkened gallery perusing every detail of 400 tiny, sparkling, jewel-encrusted pieces by JAR (or, Joel A. Rosenthal as he was known growing up in the Bronx). He’s one of the world’s experts in the pavé technique and achieves subtle effects by painstakingly arranging miniscule diamonds, rubies, opals, and amethysts across gold, platinum, and silver surfaces.

JAR’s 2010 bracelet evokes snow on branches. Diamonds, silver, and platinum. Private collection.  Photo: Jozsef Tari. Courtesy: JAR, Paris.

Despite being one of the most sought-after jewelers in the world, JAR will not do commissions. Each piece is one of a kind, so the subjects that he chooses tell you a lot about him. Look closely.

The first case features bracelets, earrings, brooches, and necklaces fashioned into exact, delicate replicas of just about anything you can find at the New York Botanical Garden on a spring day — gardenias, roses, camellias, tulips, lilacs, carnations, wisteria, pansies, and even wild oats. Across the room, you’ll see perfect oak leaves and acorns (made from diamonds, platinum, silver, and gold) formed into dramatic rings, cufflinks, necklaces, and earrings.

Growing up, JAR loved roaming the halls of the American Museum of Natural History and the Met, which shows. He’s made one pair of pendant earrings (No. 83) from iridescent beetle wings, married with tiny emeralds, garnets, and diamonds set into silver and platinum.

JAR  Butterfly Brooch 1994.  Sapphires, fire opals, rubies, amethyst, garnets, diamonds, silver, and gold. Private collection. Photo: Katharina Faerber. Courtesy: JAR, Paris

Right next to that (No. 84) you’ll see his 1981 Egyptian-style faience earrings with emeralds, coral, and gold — a 20^th century take on the Middle Kingdom. He’s crafted stalactite earrings (No. 93) from diamonds and silver and found a heart-shaped pebble into which he’s set a perfect ruby surrounded by silver and gold (No. 283).

In the center of the room there are moon and stars pendant earrings (a tribute to Cole Porter) made of sapphires and diamonds (No. 274), and a box (No. 260) inspired by lightning (rock crystal and diamonds). JAR’s 1991 Phases of the Moon Bracelet, made of basalt, diamonds, silver, and platinum, makes you think he probably also hung out at the Hayden in his youth.

The finale to the gallery is the Met’s jeweled twin to the AMNH Butterfly Conservatory – a wall in which 22 of JAR’s beautiful butterflies take flight. OK, there are 2 dragonflies in there, too, but the overall message is butterflies.

A few animals are in the show, too. JAR Zebra Brooch 1987 made of agate, diamonds, a sapphire, silver, and gold. Private collection.  Photo: Katharina Faerber. Courtesy: JAR, Paris

Every person in the crowd seemed to pause here in the dark to choose which creature was the most beautiful before entering the bright, unforgiving lights of the gift shop. A personal favorite was the 1987 Dragonfly Brooch (No. 378) with double-layered rock crystal wings.

If you love nature, wit, color, and fool-the-eye magic, you’ll like getting lost in the dark among the billions of points of light that JAR has created in his glittering universe.

Mutu Takes Art-Lovers on a Fantastic Brooklyn Journey

Posted on March 3, 2014 by MsSusanB

Le Noble Savage, 2006. Ink and collage on Mylar (over 7 feet tall). Collection: Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg. Image: courtesy of the artist. © Wangechi Mutu

The Saturday night crowd at the Brooklyn Museum was intent on exploring every inch, sketchbook, plastic-wrapped ball, and cut-out supplied by the born-in-Kenya Brooklyn vision-artist in her one-woman show, Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey. Explore her world (installed right next to The Dinner Party) before March 9.

Wangechi has been turning out thought-provoking work for the last 15 years, and the show, originally created by the Nasher Museum on the Duke University campus, presents the gigantic collage images that made her famous with collectors as well as a brand-new video and on-site installation.

Ladies’ fashion lips, stiletto-heeled shoes, African totems, African animals, high-fashion eyes, and magical shapes and patterns are interworked onto large-scale pieces portraying Amazons that are pushed, puzzled, and probed in fantasy landscapes, surrounded by plants and creatures from different worlds.

She’s a visual virtuoso who knows that how things look from a distance are nothing like what you’ll see when you get up to her images very, very close. For example, when you come into the gallery, you see a wall-sized work that Wangechi created that looks like a she-centaur being chased by who-knows-what-in-3D flying into the frame. Up close, you’ll see that her “hooves” are collages of African sculptures and engine parts. The furtive creature flees atop a huge root system of “earth” created out of masses of folded felt. Take a look at how she assembled it:

Walking up to each piece, shapes shift right in front of you, conjuring mixed messages and forms associated with female beauty, African “otherness”, the fallout from colonialism, and the disassociation with the natural world. Wangechi wants everyone and everything to exist harmoniously, but her techniques constantly remind you of the dissonance and difficulty in achieving this.

Funkalicious fruit field, 2007. Ink, paint, mixed media, plastic pearls, and collage on Mylar. Collection of Glenn Scott Wright. Courtesy: Victoria Miro Gallery, London. © Wangechi Mutu

In a 2007 piece titled Funkalicious fruit field, the far-away feeling is organic, dense, watery, and surreal. But when you get right up close, you’ll discover three jackals, a sacred cow, and a white rhino floating around, and you’ll start scouring the weeds for more surprises. Her female portraits can sometimes feel scary as you recognize the genesis of some of the cut-up images creating the illusion – medical textbooks whose components aren’t pretty.

The crowd was captivated by her first animated film, The End of eating Everything. A female-headed magical creature belches volcano steam from her misshapen body, eating everything in sight. Thankfully, it has a bit of a surreal, happy ending as hopeful, intelligent heads eventually prevail, framed by a cloud-filled blue sky.

Listen to a discussion of her work at the Brooklyn Museum via YouTube, and enjoy this beautiful 9-minute documentary produced by Arise Entertainment 360. You’ll meet this fascinating artist, see close-ups of her collages, and experience what’s so great about this show:

Exquisite Journey Through Time via Modern Venetian Glass

Posted on February 28, 2014 by MsSusanB

Scarpa’s striped Rigati e tessuti glass pieces (1938–1940). Sources: private collection; Carraro Collection (Venice); European Collection

The gorgeous art and design show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Venetian Glass by Carlo Scarpa: The Venini Company, 1932–1947, is deceptive.

It’s a tribute to one of the top innovators in Murano glass, stepping visitors through more than two dozen styles and innovations that he brought to glass-making, but it also provides a brilliant introduction to the virtuosity that characterized decorative luxury items as far back as the first century B.C. See it before March 2.

Scarpa was inspired by 18th c. Chinese porcelain. Source: The Met

Scarpa, a trained architect, began working as an artistic consultant at Paolo Venini’s glass factory in Venice right after he graduated, but soon his creativity and vision catapulted him into the job of artistic director and into the spotlight with every new collection he debuted at the Venice Biennale.

At the start of the show, you’ll see his Bollicine group (1932-1933) with tiny air bubbles incorporated into each white, blue, black, and green piece. In awe of the artistry of Eastern Asia, he fused this modern technique with a reliance on traditional shapes from one of his favorite periods of Chinese porcelain – the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), where ceramic artists crafted bold, dramatic single-color works. Check. Let’s take a page out of that book and put it to use in creating sleek, modern icons of Italian design.

At the far side of the circular Lehman Wing gallery, the Met curators have put together a shelf that fools you from a distance. You’ll think that the gorgeously modern works are all opaque glass masterpieces by Scarpa, but only half are. The rest are beautifully arranged works from 18^th and 19^th century China from the Met’s own collection.

Scarpa’s bubble-glass liqueur set (1935). Source: The Met.

Venini and Scarpa felt it was important to document the specific silhouettes that they created, and the Met has matched the archive shape with many of the modern glass works in the collection.

Just look at each label and wonder what the 18^th century Chinese ceramicists would think of their shapes being transformed into glass marvels.

Working your way around the gallery, you’ll experience astonishing artistry resulting from dozens of technical approaches – for example, glass with rough, irregular surfaces (Corrosi 1936-1938), glass blown from thin slabs made of alternating clear and colored glass rods (Mecca filigrana 1934-1936), boldly striped pieces, and iridescent glass (Iridati, 1940). The variety and effects are astonishing and it’s easy to float dreamily through this art for art’s sake show.

Luxury Italian modern glass from the early 1st century A.D. Source: The Met

The curators also make use of the Met’s vast collection of ancient glass to remind modernists that the glassmaking tradition extends back nearly two millennia along the Mediterranean and Adriatic shores.

Be sure to look for the Met’s cast glass created in Greece between the 2^nd century and 1^st century B.C. and in Rome from the late 1^st century B.C. to the early 1^st century A.D. Glass was a super-high-end luxury item back in those days.

You’ll be blown away by how modern it all looks.

This mosaic glass dish may look like Italian 1980s, but it’s Greek from the 2nd-1st century B.C. Source: The Met

The Art of ElBulli’s Culinary Genius

Posted on February 24, 2014 by MsSusanB

Notebooks and menu drawings from ElBulli’s kitchen displayed in front of a mural of Ferran Adrià and staff in Roses, Spain in the most famous kitchen in the world. Courtesy: elBullifoundation, The Drawing Center

If you weren’t able to visit the famed ElBulli restaurant on the coast of Spain before it closed two years ago, don’t worry. Pop down to Soho to meet the man, his team, and his legacy through The Drawing Center’s provocative show, Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity, running through February 28.

Even if you can’t taste the world-renowned creations, you’ll feel as though you’ve entered his kitchen during the six months per year that his team worked on R&D through up-close looks at experiments, plating, techniques, codes, inventions, and graphic treatises. Take a look at the installation on our Flickr feed.

Close-up of large working board of photo and diagrams document the plating and components of each dish. Courtesy: elBullifoundation

Last weekend, the Wooster Street space was jammed with visitors eager to see glimpse the genius behind the magic of the famed elBulli – notebooks filled with diagrams of exacting platings of food, a room inside the gallery evoking elBulli’s Barcelona archive, huge storyboards pinned with drawings and photographs of artist-inspired dishes, and glass-topped tables containing inventions that created some of the most amazing food–art in the world.

Examples: the apparatus that turns cheese into “spaghetti”, the glass bowls used to serve diners “edible air”, or the cocktail device that literally sprays a dry martini right into a diner’s mouth.

240 plasticine models used to standardize recreation of the sizes and shapes of various portions of food used as components in his highly inventive, artistic dishes. Courtesy: elBullifoundation, The Drawing Center

240 plasticine models used by staff to recreate precise shapes and portions of artistic dish components.

And how do you keep the beautiful dishes consistent? By making little plastic sculptures so that the kitchen crew knows how to duplicate forms for delicate platings precisely on everyone’s plate. When you’re delivering identical 40-course dinners to guests who have flown halfway around the world to join you for dinner, precision counts.

Improvisation may have happened during the six months of the year that elBulli shut down to devote itself to R&D, but not so much during dining-season crunch time. Just look at the large wall drawing that Adrià sketched for this show — Map of the Creative Process: Decoding the Genome of Creativity. Organization is key.

Last weekend, there were no empty seats in the downstairs video viewing gallery, as visitors sat mesmerized by 1846, the 90-minute film co-produced by The Drawing Center, showing every dish Adriá ever served at elBulli (1987 – 2011).

Plasticine model of the 1994 Le Menestra dish composed only of textures, including cauliflower mousse, basil jelly, almond sorbet, avocado, and numerous other components.

Photos of gorgeous, glistening food on plates, rocks, and wood lilted by to an opera soundtrack punctuated by the sounds of water lapping on the shore near the restaurant. Plates of vegetables, seafood slices, sprigs, and flowers wafted by. What are those spoons filled with? What appeared to be “hatching” out of that egg? What was the egg? What was perching on a stalk like an insect? The effect made you feel as if you were seeing life on Earth evolve…biomorphic shapes surrounded by foam.

You could tell that these art-and-food lovers had absorbed the exhibit upstairs when there was a collective gasp of recognition when the real-life version of La Menestra (accurately and lovingly represented in plascticene upstairs) floated onto the screen.

Since he shut the most desired and famous restaurant in the world, Adrià has been hard at work making sure that his thoughts, processes, philosophy, and research were well documented and translated to digital form. Although it’s still in beta, he’s incorporating it all into an online encyclopedia of gastronomic knowledge.

Kudos to Brett Littman and his team at The Drawing Center for mounting a show that pays tribute to food-as-art and shows us how creativity, inspiration, and documentation (in the hands of an genius, or team of geniuses) can turn experiments in a kitchen on a small Spanish seaside cove into a global digital export of wisdom and innovation for the next generation of chefs.

Take a look at Bullifoundation’s promo video to see what’s in store:

Happily, this show is going on the road in the United States before it leaves for The Netherlands in 2016: See it at the ACE Museum in LA (May 4-July 31), Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland (September 26-January 18, 2015), or Minneapolis Institute of Art (September 17, 2015-January 3, 2016).

Here’s a link to Documenting Documenta, a 2011 film about Adrià’s life, inspiration, work, and participation in Documenta 12, an international cultural festival in Kassel, Germany that happens every five years.

The Armory Show: One Ends, One Begins

Posted on February 21, 2014 by MsSusanB

Mr. Duchamp’s 100 year-old icon exits NYHS on Central Park West after seeing the show.

Challenging, ground-breaking art from all over the world under one roof, fashionable crowds, and buyers looking for the next big thing. On March 6, the 2014 edition of The Armory Show opens at the Hudson Piers 92 and 94; but for art-history lovers, there’s just a few days more to travel back in time to experience the 1913 edition that inspired it all at the New-York Historical Society’s show, The Armory Show at 100: Modern Art and Revolution, closing February 23. Check out the spectacular online exhibition site.

NYHS has gathered together 100 of the great art works that rocked Manhattan 100 years ago downtown at the 69^th Regiment Armory on Lexington and 26^th Street, where the Fighting Irish rented out their parade hall for a month to the newly formed Association of American Painters and Sculptors to show 1,400 works representing the latest trends in modernism.

One of the many postcards sold at the 1913 show’s merchandise table. Source: Smithsonian Archives of American Art

Picasso, Cezanne, Matisse, Gauguin, and Munch were there in all their shocking glory – the first time many of these Europeans had been shown stateside. Take a look on the NYHS site and see what chaos ensued in the popular press. Even T. Roosevelt himself wrote an editorial about it.

NYHS not only shows us the work, but puts it all in the context of the times – the bohemian life in Greenwich Village, upstart galleries with an interest in the primitive and new, dissatisfaction with the confines of taste at the National Academy, and New York tastemakers yearning to make their mark on a world stage.

In the little low-light gallery next to the library, you’ll find all sorts of interesting ephemera – letters by the organizers of the show, registration cards with the insurance value of now-famous works, postcards for sale at the show, and a scrapbook of satirical telegrams read by the organizers at their celebratory dinner. This is where you can marvel at Gauguins selling for $8,100, Redon for $810, an oil by Braque for $200, a plaster Brancusi for $200, and Cezanne lithographs for $20 to $40. No wonder Stieglitz amassed such a great collection at these prices!

He had to have it. Stieglitz bought Kandinsky’s 1912 The Garden of Love (Improvisation Number 27) as soon as he saw it. Source: Metropolitan Museum/ © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris

It’s interesting that the show would not have been such an affordable-art extravaganza without mega-dealer Vollard riding to the rescue, shipping crates of color lithographs and drawings to New York from Paris a scant three weeks before the show. Kuhn and his co-organizers devoted three galleries to works on paper. Works by Gaugin, Cezanne, Lautrec, and Munch flew off the walls, and when the show closed in New York, half of all the works sold had been supplied by Vollard.

Check out the price list and who-bought-what online. You can also probe the Smithsonian’s archive of Armory Show-related materials here.

The International Exhibition of Modern Art (a.k.a. Armory Show) installed in the 69th Regiment Armory at 25th & Lexington. Source: Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Kuhn family papers.

The NYHS show is organized according to the original layout, including the grouping of Cubists with Mr. Duchamp’s iconic Nude Descending a Staircase, and the Fauve-Brancusi area – otherwise known in New York critic circles as the “Chamber of Horrors.” Looking at Matisse’s Blue Nude today, it’s hard to imagine that Art Institute of Chicago students found Matisse so shocking that they held a mock trial for him and burned it in effigy when the show arrived in the Windy City in April 1913.

And speaking of Chicago, the Armory Show was a huge success there – attracting over 180,000 art lovers, nearly double the attendance in New York. See the Art Institute’s gorgeous web site of exactly how everything looked in its grand galleries on Michigan Avenue. Everything really got the royal treatment. In turn, AIC can say it was the first museum in North America to show Picasso, Matisse, Duchamp, and Brancusi. No second-city status there.

Kuhn kept Picasso’s 1912 list of which artists should be shown. Source: Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Kuhn family papers.

Buy your ticket to this Armory Show before you buy one for the next one and feel what it’s like to walk through a turning point in American art history.

The Corset that Changed Cultural History and the Man Who Made It

Posted on February 20, 2014 by MsSusanB

JPG’s creation for Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” segment of her 1990 tour. Made from vintage 1930s lame

Amidst the light, glamour, glitter, and mystery sending shock waves and awe through the masses crowding into the Brooklyn Museum’s show, The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk, a hush falls as each person realizes they’re only an arm’s length away from the Icon’s icon. Lovingly crafted from vintage lame, JPG and Madonna had no idea (according to Madonna) what a sensation their underwear-as-outerwear statement would create in fashion, performance, pop, and culture when JPG designed her get-ups for the Blond Ambition World Tour. Get out to Brooklyn to experience this über-tribute before Feb 23.

Madonna’s lent her JPG corsets to the section of the show where the walls are covered in quilted satin, and JPG dug into his archives, too: You’ll see the series of illustrations he did to show the looks he would create for the tour, as well as JPG’s personal Polaroids shot during the initial fittings. If you’re very quiet in this part of the show, you’ll also hear visitors gasp when they realize that they’re looking back at artifacts from 1990!

Crowds listen to the mannequin sing in the Metropolis gallery during the show’s final week.

This genuinely theatrical tribute to JPG is chock full of corsets and cages made from silk, leather, raffia, wheat, and enough other stuff to win the Unconventional Materials challenge hands-down. O ye of Project Runway, worship at the mannequins of the Master!

At the entrance to the show, there are two small photo portraits of JPG taken by Mr. Warhol himself. They’re at a dance club in 1984 and JPG is in one of his Boy Toy collection outfits. Andy is quoted as saying, “What he does is really art.” It’s a curatorial anointment that offers a subtle, quiet, reflective moment to what you’re about to experience.

Dealing with the recent blizzards would have been more fun if you had shopped JPG’s Voyage Voyage ready-to-wear collection (2010-2011). These are styled with pieces from older collections.

Room after room of gender-bending, mind-altering, color-crazy, history-twisting looks, gowns, shoes, bodysuits, and haute handwork reminds us that JPG has been pushing the boundaries for over 40 years, inspired by French sailors, French culture, 50s TV, global culture, his grandmothers unmentionables drawer, and the ever-inspiring gritty street. How do you use embroidery, neoprene, stuffed silk tubes, tulle, and illusion in a subversive manner? Take a stroll through JPG’s master class.

You’ll find mermaids worn by Beyoncé, a French sailor-striped gown worn by Princess Caroline, red carpet looks worn by Ms. Cotillard, a Mongolian shearing coat sported by Bjork, and photos of supermodels and superstars sporting outrageous and inventive looks. The names of the collections alone tell you the scope of his interests – Haute Couture Salon Atmosphere, Ze Parisienne, Flower Power and Skinheads, Paris and Its Muses, So British, Forbidden Gaultier, and Great Journey collections.

Close-up of corset from JPG’s Countryside Babes collection, prêt-à-porter spring/summer 2006. Made of wheat and braided straw, created in 84 hours

The show features 140 ensembles in all, enough to fill the entire wing. Mr. Gaultier even tells us that he expanded it a little for Brooklyn’s gigantic space, adding a “Muses” section with American icons and runway looks for big-boned, curvy girls.

Oh, and did I mention that the mannequins talk? (We can’t even begin on that, so here’s a video to explain how that magic happened.)

Brooklyn is the last stop on JPG’s North American tour, which was organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Maison Jean Paul Gaultier.

If you can’t visit, take a walk through the show via our Flickr photos, and listen in on an hour-long discussion between JPG himself and the show’s curator Thierry-Maxime Lorio, where they talk about his “express yourself” philosophy.

The special promo video will give you a taste of the creative genius behind 40 years of memorable, challenging fashion as art:

Top of the Pop 80s Style at NY Historical

Posted on February 12, 2014 by MsSusanB

Keith’s “Into 84” exhibition poster inspired by choeographer Bill T. Jones (1983). Photo: Tseng Kwong Chi. © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc.; Keith Haring artwork © Keith Haring Foundation

When you stand in line to get your tickets for The Armory Show at 100 at the New-York Historical Society, look up and you’ll see a piece of history from the era of Madonna and Danceteria right above you – the entire beautiful, embellished ceiling of one of the must-see stops during the raging Eighties club culture in NYC, Keith Haring’s Pop Shop as part of the special installation Keith Haring All-Over.

Although the Pop Shop closed its doors on Lafayette Street in 2005, it achieved worldwide pop-culture recognition for being the most iconic sites where art, music, dance, graffiti, celebrity, and the street mixed. Haring, whose Radiant Baby and other works ubiquitously plastered subway station walls in the 80s, decided to put Warhol’s commerce-as-art philosophy into practice. He created an art-filled shop downtown where the international art collectors, celebrities, club kids, and graffiti artists would feel comfortable.

Installation view of the Pop Shop ceiling over the cash registers at NYHS, right behind a video wall of Oertel’s Pulling Down the Statue of King George III. Courtesy: NYHS/John Wallen

The walls were covered in Haring’s instantly recognizable doodle-cartoon figures and stuff to buy, so when the Haring Foundation gave the ceiling to NYHS, it did so with the stipulation that it be hung somewhere where money is exchanged. So, right inside the door in the same beautiful entrance hosting the treasures of Revolutionary New York, is the ceiling from a place where music blared, fun was had, all-night parties raged, and Downtown 80s life was celebrated.

Take the elevator to the Luce Center to see the rest of the show, which is on loan to NYHS by the Haring Foundation, which Keith established just before he succumbed to AIDS in 1990. Go to Keith’s website to see him in action in the subway, galleries, and performance and click through images of his amazing body of work in digital form by decade. It’s all here.

Keith’s “Radiant Baby” buttons in the NYHS collection, gifted by Roy Eddey.

But back upstairs at NYHS, you’ll see Keith’s 1985 repeated-pattern design for a fabric run right above two NYC mile markers from the 1800s, a Haring-painted black-and-pink leather jacket (done with graffiti artist LAII), and Jeremy Scott’s Haring-inspired sneakers for Adidas. The NYHS is also screening some vintage video in the little 80s space, right next to the classical busts of New York’s 19^th century high and mighty. Hang out to see Madonna’s 1984 performance of Dress You Up for the Keith’s Party of Life and the 1986 Grace Jones video I’m Not Perfect (But I’m Perfect For You), which Keith co-directed.

The show is tiny, but it’s a great little secret spot to time travel back to the Eighties. For more Keith, visit the Fales Library at NYU for Keith Haring: Languages through February 28 and NYPL’s Why We Fight: Remembering AIDS Activism through April 6. The NYHS installation is an open run.

Hey, and don’t forget to shop in the online Pop Shop, where revenue from (RED) items goes to combatting AIDS.

Must-See Skytop Panorama of NYC Past & Present at The Whitney

Posted on February 3, 2014 by MsSusanB

The installation view of T. J. Wilcox: In the Air, 2013. Photo: Bill Orcutt

If you want to enjoy a beautiful view of Manhattan from the roof, don’t worry about the snow, rain, or cold weather. Go over to the Whitney Museum before February 9 and take in the film installation T.J. Wilcox, In the Air, that features a beautiful panorama (from the roof of Wilcox’s Union Square studio) that dreamily introduces six stories about the past and present of life, art, energy, fame, events, and cosmic forces that ebb and flow continuously below.

The big, in-the-round screen circles around you (duck and just walk into it), so you can really take in the view, all the way from the Battery to beyond the Empire State Building.

Still from T.J. Wilcox’s panoramic 2013 silent film installation, In the Air. Image courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.

The film cycles from dawn to dusk, but along the way, Mr. Wilcox takes you on little journeys as you enjoy his movie panorama. The experience is one where you begin to see New York through his eyes, past and present together.

After a few minutes, one of his panorama screens fades you see a short, reflective, poetic, subtitled NYC story-movie. It’s a quiet experience — bringing you back to the Thirties when the Empire State Building was contemplated to be used as a zeppelin-docking station, to the present when 14th Street is one of the best vantage points to contemplate the out-of-this-world spectacle of Manhattanhenge, and the days of glitter, glamour, and grit of Warhol, Gloria Vanderbilt, and fashion-industry icon, Antonio Lopez.

Watching Wilcox’s Gloria Vanderbilt vignette from outside the installation. Photo: Bill Orcutt.

He reminds you that Gertrude Whitney, the museum’s founder, long ago succeeded in a custody battle to care for little Gloria. The film takes you to her apartment and reflects on the fact that Gloria was “in the public eye from birth” and celebrates her vibrant artistic, business, and family accomplishments (re: plenty of shots of Anderson Cooper). Another mini-film focuses upon a nano-second in Warhol’s life, when his Factory crew unfurled Mylar balloons to welcome the arrival of the pope-mobile to New York City in 1965.

Weegee’s Variant of Untitled (Striking Beauty) is hung in an adjacent gallery. Courtesy: Whitney Museum

In his musing on the film about fashion-illustrator extraordinaire, Antonio, Wilcox reveals his surprise that Antonio’s studio was located right next to his own building, takes pleasure in asking us to gaze out over the community where so much magnificent art was made, careers enlivened, and life lived.

In a tiny back-room gallery, the Whitney has installed a few other reflections on skies over the City – Weegee’s lightening strike behind the Empire State Building and Yoko’s Sky TV, are two – but the big “wow” here is Mr. Wilcox’s ability to take us on a 35-minute journey in and among the streets and skyline that from his quiet, contemplative perch.

It’s quite a collage of memory, reflection, mythologies, politics, history, and beauty. Click here to see the Whitney’s slide show of the storyboards in Wilcox’s studio, and listen to him talk about it this beautiful work in this YouTube video:

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Susan B's advice on what you shouldn't miss in NYC and other museums

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