All Photos By Gail
This Grecian Sofa (New York Circa 1820 – 25) exhibits a highly sophisticate blend of line, detailed carving and subtle color.
The carved vert antique legs in the shape of dolphins are found on others sofas of the period and relate to maritime talismans. Traditionally, in Greek myth, dolphins aided shipwrecked sailors.
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
Photo By Gail
Irving Penn purchased his first of many twin-lens Rolleiflex cameras in 1938. He acquired this one in 1964 and used it and other similar models for portrait sittings for the next four decades. The camera is topped with a modified Hasselblad chimney viewfinder and mounted on a Tiltall pan/tilt head above a table tripod of the artist’s own design.
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
Photo By Gail
Juan Gris (1887 – 1927), a master of disguised images, presents a table brimming with coffee cups, stemmed wineglasses, a large white-footed fruit compote (see from the side and from above) containing thickly painted grapes, a bottle of red wine, a bottle of Bass extra stout ale with its distinctive red diamond logo, a newspaper, and a guitar. Yet, Still Life with Checked Tablecloth (1915) has another equally compelling identity: a Bull’s head. The coffee cup at lower center doubles as the animal’s snout, black-and-white concentric circle at left is a “bull’s eye,” the bottle of ale is an ear, and the sinuous edge of the guitar is the horn. The letters “EAU” on the wine label, which ostensibly stand for “bEAUjolais” can just as easily represent “taurEAU” (Bull).
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC
Photo By Gail
William Baziotes (1912 – 1963) embraced the Symbolist concept of “correspondences”– poetic analogies in which a single form can suggest multiple references. Also influenced by the surrealist works of Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro, Baziotes painted semi-abstract images with legible though ambiguous forms, like those found in Figure on a Tightrope (1947). In the year that he made this painting. Baziotes explained his process, “Each beginning suggests something. Once I sense the suggestion, I begin to paint intuitively. The [intuitive] suggestion then becomes a phantom that must be caught and made real.”
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
Photos By Gail
This modern and affordable dining-room chair was designed by the American husband-and-wife team Charles and Ray Eames. Built after an exhaustive period of testing, the different parts of the chair were fabricated using heat and pressure to bend the plywood. The DCW Side Chair (1946) was lauded for being both ergonomic and comfortable
The Eames‘ pioneering use of new materials and technologies transformed the way people decorated their homes, introducing functional, affordable, and often highly sculptural objects and furnishings to so many middle-class Americans.
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
All Photos By Gail
Every year , the Metropolitan Museum of Art hosts a fashion exhibit full of mind-blowing, ‘wearable’ works of art. We enjoy making multiple visits during each exhibit’s tenure, which generally lasts into late summer, and taking way too many photos than we will never do anything with. Because too may photos is a thing. and it is how we roll.
For spring/summer 2017, the Costume Institute’s exhibition examines the work of Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo, founder of Comme des Garçons (French for “Like Boys”), who is known for her avant-garde designs and ability to challenge conventional notions of beauty, good taste, and fashionability. The thematic show features approximately 140 examples of Kawakubo’s womenswear for Comme des Garçons dating from the early 1980s to her most recent collection, many with heads and wigs created and styled by Julien d’Ys. 90% of the designs are just out of control, crazy couture that no one would ever wear anywhere but the runway, or one time only to a gala where you need to be remembered for wearing a dress that comes with its own cage, or something.
The galleries illustrate the designer’s revolutionary experiments in “in-betweenness”—the space between boundaries. Objects are organized into nine aesthetic expressions of interstitiality in Kawakubo’s work: Absence/Presence, Design/Not Design, Fashion/Anti-Fashion, Model/Multiple, Then/Now, High/Low, Self/Other, Object/Subject, and Clothes/Not Clothes. Kawakubo breaks down the imaginary walls between these dualisms, exposing their artificiality and arbitrariness.
If you are intrigued by the Pink Presses in this post, which is how I was able to distill the exhibit for this blog, then you need to check this shit out in person, because it is just insane.
18th Century Punk, Autumn/Winter 2016 – 2017
Look: Proof that this ‘dress’ fits on a human body!
Rei Kawakubo / Comme des Garçons Art of The In-Between Runs Through September 4th, 2017 at The Met, NYC.
All Photos By Gail
Donald Deskey (1894 – 1989) creator of the interiors at Radio City Music Hall, is a towering figure of modern design. This Art Deco Lamp (circa 1927) is a response to the upward thrust of the New York City skyline. Its boxy proportion echo a tall, narrow building, while on the two side panels, rectilinear puzzle-like patterns similarly evoke compressed architectural forms.
The use of frosted glass in different textures activates the lamp’s surface, even as it diffuses the emitted light, and its compactness attests to Deskey’s awareness that he was typically designing for small domestic interiors.
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
