Will Cotton's Candy Stick Tree

In the early nineties I made a group of paintings using advertising icon characters. I felt like this was a cultural iconography I could understand, a set of universal symbols that we'd all grown up with. I made paintings of Mr. Bubble, the Hamburglar, Twinkie the Kid, and many others, and I found myself being drawn more and more toward anything specifically involving sweets. I was looking for a metaphor for pure indulgence, pure pleasure, something that only exists for enjoyment and nothing else. It was around this time that I came across the Candy Land board game I'd played as a child and I started to explore how a sweet landscape might take on the role of main character in the narrative.

-Will Cotton


"Candy Stick Tree," 2005, walnut ink on paper, (30 x 22 inches), through Mary Boone Gallery.

June: Crush (via Bart Boehlert's Beautiful Things)

"On the way home I saw this guy on the subway; I think he was a model. Slim white shirt, narrow dark denim jeans, brown suede wing-tip tie-ups, cotton canvas bag with leather trim, wooden skate board. Very cool. Don't you love New York?"

-Bart Boehlert (A Trip to the Met)

*Please Click On Image (Below)

Obsession: Jean Royère's Oeuf Chair, 1951

Jean Royère’s Oeuf* chair, 1951, one of a pair, oak with lavender and black (original) upholstery, through Phillips de Pury & Company.

*The ovum is the seat of human life and the largest cell in the body. Jean Royere flipped the egg and sat the body in it. He first exhibited his small 'Oeuf' chairs at the 1954 Salon des Arts Menagers in Paris, although they had incubated since 1951. Two halves faced each other across his 'Foyer d'aujourd'hui'. He placed a low 'Puddle' table between them like a spilt yolk. In Jean Royere (Galerie de Beyrie, 2000), Michael Boyd wrote: "There is a serious sculptural content imbued—but there is a playful, even humorous side, too." Simply put, Royere cracked a good joke. 'Polar Bears', 'Elephants', 'Bananas'—he enlivened his furniture with surrealist good humor. But Boyd is right, Royere modeled in the round. His 'Sculpture Furniture' (1955), overstuffed forms raised on turned oak legs, hatched from his 'Oeufs'. Of all the Gallic roosters, Royere fluffed his feathers highest. His elaborate upholstery and exaggerated lines best reflected the buoyant mood of the postwar years. In the mid-1950s, attendance at the Salon des Arts Menagers routinely surpassed a million. It's hard to imagine Pierre Paulin, Verner Panton, and the rest of the flock weren't aware of his cupped seats—especially Arne Jacobsen whose own 'Egg' chair followed in 1958. -Catherine and Stéphane de Beyrie, with Jacques Ouaiss.

"Oh, she got freckles." @ 0:16

Herb Ritts: Calvin Klein featuring Mark Wahlberg and Kate Moss, 1992

"Shouts goes out to my man Calvin Klein for looking out for the drawers. I'm not saying I would do another Fruit of the Loom commercial or nothing like that because they don't make the hype shorts.

These are the '90s, man. They just fit good and they hold me snug.

So I'm about to go get some skins, so I'm not going to put on, like, no silk underwear.

Oh, she got freckles.

Next question.

You know, the best protection against AIDS is keep your Calvins on.

Now that could definitely come between me and my Calvins."

Favourite Interiors #19 (Jim Lambie's Vinyl-Tape Floor)

When you imagine an apartment in Gramercy Park’s National Arts Club—an architectural ode to all things Victorian—you’d sooner expect to find an Edith Wharton character sprawled on a fainting couch than a hip young bachelor leaning on an Italian modernist sectional. For the unsuspecting visitor, the dissonance makes gallerist Tim Nye’s sleek, airy duplex a delightful shock.

“It was blind luck that I found this place,” says Nye of his 1,800-square-foot apartment in the recesses of the landmark 1840s mansion. The founder of the Thread Waxing Space, the downtown contemporary-art gallery and performance venue that opened in 1991, Nye had been searching for a new location when the gallery’s lease ran out. “My grandmother was friendly with Aldon [James, president of the National Arts Club], and she learned there was a space available there,” he says. Now he rents two floors for the gallery, named Nyehaus, and another two floors directly below for his own private quarters. “They are pretty much lifelong rentals,” says Nye. “Aldon likes to say, ‘The only way tenants vacate the spaces is horizontally.’ ”

But it needed a gut renovation. “Sheets of paint were falling from the ceiling,” says Nye. Designer Jacqueline Miro-Abreu, Nye’s high-school pal, carved out a streamlined, hyperfunctional space in six months. “Tim wanted a dining-room table to seat ten people, a bar, a seating area, space for artwork,” says Miro-Abreu. Before she built the platform that now serves as the dining area, the mammoth window was five feet above the floor; now it’s waist-high and the living room, by contrast, appears sunken.

The brightly striped floor was added after the renovation. It was created by Glasgow-based artist Jim Lambie. “I’d wanted to acquire a major piece of his for some time,” says Nye. “It’s practical. Anytime it gets ripped or scuffed, I just cut out the ruined piece and replace it with fresh tape in the same color. He left me a lifetime supply.”-Juliet Barnes (New York)


The twelve-foot Corian bar, left, is flanked by bar stools. Guests can perch along the back of the Zanotta couch if they want to face each other. On the bar is a camel leg made into a clarinet by the artist Jim Shaw, from a series called Dream Objects. Top left, a 215-gallon blue glass fish tank houses eels and sharks. The vinyl-tape floor took four people four days to complete.

Fleur Cowles (1908-2009)

Cowles had taken up painting in the late 1950s. Many of her works feature tigers and other big cats, partly inspired by childhood memories of zoos but also by a lively cat given to her by her husband when they moved into Albany, where animals were forbidden. She hoped to make people happy with her paintings, a reflection of her private world — “a peaceful one that rejects the unpleasant, the ugly and the frightening”. Prominent among her patrons and collectors were Grace Kelly and James Stewart.

-The Times

Fleur Cowles: Tiger, Flowers in the Moonlight, 1980

FLEUR COWLES, 101, IS DEAD; FRIEND OF THE ELITE AND THE EDITOR OF A MAGAZINE FOR THEM (THE NEW YORK TIMES)

"You've been excommunicated, Miss Norr." -P.P.

Garbage - Stupid Girl

Stephen Shore: Photographs of Old New York for Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence

“Being here is like–like–being taken on a holiday when one has been a good little girl and done all one’s lessons.”

-Countess Olenska on New York (The Age of Innocence)

Door handles, West Tenth Street

Washington Square North

Hotel Chelsea, West Twenty-third Street

James Renwick, architect

University Club, West Fifty-fourth Street

The Dakota, West Seventy-second Street

Puto at the Met

Central Park gate

Park Avenue Armory

Horse trough, Grace Church

Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence has a special status as affectionate record of the streets and buildings of New York City. Its story of Old New York is firmly placed in the physical city as the author knew it when she was growing up there in the 1870s and 1880s. 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. Her feeling for "place" is one of Wharton's distinctive strengths as a novelist, according to her biographer R. W. B. Lewis, who writes of The Age of Innocence, "The exploitation of place as a basic fictional resource was something Edith Wharton had learned from James and admired in Proust, and in none of her novels is this mastery more striking."

For this reason, Arion Press decided to illustrate Edith Wharton's great novel of New York with images of its actual setting, as they are today. We engaged the photographer Stephen Shore, who like Wharton spent his childhood in New York, to photograph the locations of the novel as they appear to one walking along the streets of the city, as he did, in June of 2004.

Shore now lives near Rhinecliff, New York, the vicinity of one of Edith Wharton's family estates and key locations in The Age of Innocence. Shore brought to this project a personal knowledge of the historic buildings and streets that made up Wharton's New York world. These include such public places as the Mall in Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum, Grace Church, and the Century Association, as well as the houses and streets where her characters lived: Fifth Avenue, West Twenty-Third Street, West Tenth Street, and Washington Square North. -The Arion Press

Who I'd Like To Meet: Igby Slocumb*

*Igby Slocumb (Kieran Culkin), the sarcastic preppy 17-year-old protagonist of "Igby Goes Down," is a contemporary Holden Caulfield engaged in a flailing search for truth, beauty and the authentic after fleeing military school and hiding out in New York. The movie is a darkly funny exploration of American upper-crust malaise viewed through Igby's merciless eyes, and Mr. Culkin's Igby, alternately smart-aleck and vulnerable, is pitch perfect. Susan Sarandon as his bitter, social-climbing mother, Ryan Phillippe as his yuppie older brother and Jeff Goldbum as his shark of a godfather are almost as fine. The movie suggests that as much of the chill of today's Darwinian social climate filters down the ladder, it just as surely seeps upward. —Stephen Holden (The New York Times)

New York City: Peter Hujar (1934-1987)

“It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.”

-Agatha Christie


Peter Hujar: Leroy Street, 1976

Peter Hujar was to downtown New York in the late 1970s and early ’80s what Brassai was to 1930s’ Paris: its camera-wielding, nighthawk poet designate. If one intuits Hujar’s feel for fleetingness in his effortlessly iconic indoor portraits (the sexily intellectual Susan Sontag, 1975; Candy Darling on her Deathbed, 1974), urban loneliness is the subject of his nocturnal cityscapes. In The Woolworth Building (1976) the edifice noses self-assuredly into a foggy silver sky, while in Leroy Street (1976) a desolate cobbled thoroughfare basks in the cold glow of a street lamp. Here is the city as experienced by outsiders longing to belong: glamorous, forbidding and, finally, redeemed by its elegant organization within Hujar’s trademark square-format photographs. -(MH) Frieze

May: Crush (Paul Varjak)

Paul Varjak

Favourite Interiors #81 (Maximilian Sinsteden's Dorm Room)

It’s not unusual to find twenty friends crammed into Sinsteden’s room, enjoying the contents of his well-stocked bar. Shockingly, perhaps, Sinsteden has no formal design training. It’s all, as he says, “inherent and experience.” He grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, in a family of doctors who traveled often and spent summers in Ireland and Germany. His father, now retired, became an expert in Georgian Irish silver. “He’s been very involved with auction houses and museums and antiques my whole life,” says Sinsteden. “So that’s sort of where it stemmed from.”

-Sarah Bernard (New York)

*CLICK HERE FOR MORE MAXIMILIAN SINSTEDEN

Inspired by THE ADVENTURES OF TARTANSCOT

David Godbold

David Godbold's small works on paper are made, mostly in brown ink, on letter-sized tracing paper. They depict biblical themes, drawn in a remarkable facsimile of 17th-century Dutch master style. The tracing paper is then overlaid on some found document, and an aphoristic comment added as a caption. The found document--a to-do list, wrapping paper, a page of a book--sets up a message contradictory to the drawing, and the caption rarely has to do with either. So, for example, a medieval looking Salome holds a tray containing John the Baptist's head. This is overlaid on a child's drawing of a house bearing the words "Room Wanted." The caption reads: "everything is just hunky-dory. Peaches and cream."

-Michael Harvey (Art in America)

*Please Click On Image (Below)

"No sounds," 2007, ink on tracing paper, laid over found paper, (16.1 x 11.4 inches), through Kerlin Gallery.

37 West 12th Street (Butterfield House)

The building was constructed in 1960. It has often been described both by critics and by neighbors as fitting well into its street. When the Village was designated an historic district, Butterfield House was cited as proof that "new" could indeed exist alongside "old." Why is this? Certainly the next door stoop and entrance is not replicated in our architecture, nor are window types or materials. It is because the building is a good size for the street, but mostly because it has in its design solid evidence of human scale and many other humane considerations and thus does share fundamental qualities with its older neighbors. -Notes on the Butterfield House by William J. Conklin


Butterfield House* (c. 1970)

*Designed by William J. Conklin and James S. Rossant of the architectural firm of Mayer, Whittlesey & Glass

"Anyone who has a continuous smile on his face conceals a toughness that is almost frightening." -Greta Garbo

*Please Click On Image (Below)

Harry Benson: Greta Garbo, Antigua, 1976

Claudy Jongstra Bedcover

This 'unique' (commissioned) bedcover is by Claudy Jongstra.

*Please Click On Image (Below)
Note From Claudy Jongstra:

Dear Paul,

I hope that you are well.

The materials used for the bedcover are:

-Drenthe Heath, of our own herd of sheep
-raw silk
-wool merino
-Changeant chiffon on the backings

All of the fibres have been dyed in natural indigo.

Warm wishes,

Claudy

Claudy Jongstra @ Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum

Favourite Beauty #30 (Tinsley Mortimer)

Some of their story is well known. She was a year ahead of him at The Lawrenceville School, where she was an athlete and a beauty, a star tennis player from a wealthy family in Richmond, Virginia. Topper, scion of the Mortimer clan, descended from the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Jay, and named for New York founding father Robert Livingston, with family ties to Standard Oil and cousins with last names like Harriman, Davis, Biddle, Burden, Vanderbilt and Shields (as in Brooke). Topper spotted Tinsley walking across campus one snowy day, decided she was the girl for him and promptly threw her in a snowbank. The kiss came shortly after.

-Janet Allon (Avenue)

*Please Click On Image (Below)

Tinsley Mortimer photographed by Thomas Whiteside for Avenue at de Gournay*

*Fishes in blue pearl on silver gilded silk with pearlescent antique finish

William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008)

His father (an oilman) and father-in-law (gold, oil and timber) had been thoughtful enough to provide for a lifetime of high comfort. But Buckley leveraged his wealth with energy, passion and cheerful relentlessness. He wrote books laying out the conservative worldview, launched a magazine, National Review, to nurture and promote conservatism, and created one of the longest-running shows in public television history, Firing Line, to broadcast his views to millions — laying the groundwork for the countless pundits who dominate the airwaves today.

Along the way, Buckley made many things look easy — he dashed off bestselling spy novels, composed newspaper columns in spare half-hours, breezed through Bach on his harpsichord, even ran for mayor of New York City. The trickiest, and most important one, though was the way he glided from the intellectual to the conversational. He could translate the lofty ideas of Milton Friedman and Russell Kirk into table talk; he was a sort of jet-set Samuel Johnson, if only grumpy old Johnson had known the joys of Gstaad in ski season.

-David Von Drehle (TIME)

*Please Click On Image (Below)

Sam Falk for The New York Times: "William F. Buckley, Jr. in his office at 150 E. 35th Street," 1965

Obsession: Hernan Bas

Hernan Bas finds inspiration in youth and goth culture, fashion layouts and books for boys—the Hardy Boys and Boy Scout manuals—as well as Moby-Dick and the film Carrie. In his paintings and installations he retells these stories about male bonding, adventure and dreaming about other places and ways to be.

-Roberto Juarez (BOMB)


"Floating in the Dead Sea with ghost ship pirated by Hedi Slimane," 2003, through Lehmann Maupin.

Jean Després Modernist Hammered Silver and Ivory Necklace, c 1930

*Please Click On Image (Below)

Jean Després Modernist Hammered Silver and Ivory Necklace, 1930, composed of alternating hammered silver and ivory balls conjoined by simple links, signed J. Després.

Edith Bouvier Beale (1917-2002)

How to fight loneliness?
Smile all the time

Shine you teeth 'til meaningless
And sharpen them with lies

And whatever's going down
Will follow you around
That's how you fight loneliness

You laugh at every joke

Drag your blanket blindly
And fill your heart with smoke

And the first thing that you want
Will be the last thing you ever need
That's how you fight it

Just smile all the time
Just smile all the time
Just smile all the time
Just smile all the time

Random: Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996)

“Harvard was a kind of luxurious afternoon.”

-Lincoln Kirstein

Walker Evans: Lincoln Kirstein, 1930

The Proust Questionnaire: Who are your favourite prose authors?

Q: Who are your favourite prose authors?
Marcel Proust: Currently, Anatole France and Pierre Loti.

Jacques-Emile Blanche: Portrait of Marcel Proust, 1892

Inspired by DILETTANTSIA (Snobber)

Bubbles: Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702-1789)

Jean-Étienne Liotard's "Children blowing bubbles," Schönbrunn Palace

Postcard from Malia Stewart @ Jackson Fine Art featuring "Untitled #30" from Vee Speers' The Birthday Party

"During my daughter's 8th birthday party in Paris a few years ago, I closely observed the dynamics between the children, and the various levels of role-playing. It reminded me of my own childhood, and that anarchy and freedom of expression. I realized that as we grow older, we lose that sense of play and spontaneity so I decided to capture the last moments of childhood with an imaginary party."

- Vee Speers

"Untitled #30 (The Birthday Party)," 2008, through Jackson Fine Art.

*CLICK HERE FOR VEE SPEERS' THE BIRTHDAY PARTY

March: The List (LINKS)

Ambassador Covered Candy Dish (1925) for Lobmeyr*

• MANDEVILLE, JAMAICA
• Oswald Haerdtl's Ambassador Covered Candy Dish
• S.T. Dupont's Andalusia Pocket Lighter
• JANE IRISH
• Lamy Safari Fountain Pen (Orange)
• LINCOLN KIRSTEIN (1907-1996)
• Dow's, Vintage Port, 1963
• GABRIELLA CRESPI
• Marcus Tullius Cicero On Friendship: A Summary
• Dr. Gitta Rott's Home
• "YOU'RE A VERY STRANGE MAN." (Reversal of Fortune)
• The Year In Pictures (James Danziger)
• ROLEX BUBBLEBACK WRISTWATCH
• Josh Shaddock @ Gallery-C (Selected by Alex Logsdail)
• The (Atherton) Bartelby Seven

*Roddy keeps an Ambassador Covered Candy Dish filled with Nestlé's Smarties on his nightstand.

March: Crush (HRH The Crown Prince of Denmark)

Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark

Favourite Interiors #37 (Christian Lacroix's Hôtel du Petit Moulin)

The seventeen-room boutique hotel is a veritable map of the designer's psyche; it represents both a compression and an implosion of the flamboyant postmodern pastiche that Lacroix has been nurturing since 1987, when he founded his signature label. With its intimate scale and labyrinthine structure, the building, which used to house a bakery, proved to be an ideal vehicle for the designer's penchant for layering. In narrow corridors leading from the lobby to the rooms, polka dots collide with dominos on the carpeting underfoot. - Susan Yelavich (Contemporary World Interiors)

Christian Lacroix's Hôtel du Petit Moulin

*CLICK HERE TO TOUR THE HOTEL DU PETIT MOULIN

This song is for Lily, who entered rehab last week. The fourth time's the charm! | Her "style is the bom-diddi-bom di-dang di-dang diggi-diggi ..."

Robyn - Cobrastyle

More Lily Fribourg Here

Lady GaGa Pisses Off Andreas Kokkino @ The Moment

“I wonder how much it would take to buy a soap bubble, if there were only one in the world.”

- Mark Twain

Lady Gaga Pisses Off Andreas Kokkino @ The Moment

More Lady GaGa Here ; )

Paul's Postcard: Roe Ethridge

"It's the same image whether it's illustrating a text or has a caption, on the walls or on a bus stop. I like the fact that photography is ubiquitous and polymorphic, that it can be for the specialist or the dilettante or sometimes both at the same time."

- Roe Ethridge


Roe Ethridge: Sage and Daisies, 2005, through Andrew Kreps Gallery

Boundless plurality is the raison d’être of Roe Ethridge’s photographs. Selecting subjects ranging from suburban houses to surfers to still lifes, and just as happy shooting glossy studio portraits as grainy shots of signage, he’s capable of a technical faultlessness that turns reality vividly hyper-real – and, when the occasion demands, of resisting the temptation to deploy it. - FRIEZE

New York City: Morris Engel (1918-2005)

“The Park Avenue of poodles and polished brass; it is cab country, tip-town, glassville, a window-washer's paradise.”

- Gay Talese


Morris Engel: Park Avenue, New York City, 1938

Diana Vreeland Wearing Marc Jacobs & Edie Beale Wearing Chanel via Vain and Vapid

Illustrations of Diana Vreeland and Edie Beale by Jonas Löfgren for Lula (Issue No. 8)

"And The Award For Most Attitude In A Runway Sequence Goes To..." - Gabriel Bell (Refinery 29)

George Michael - Too Funky*

*The video for "Too Funky" featured Michael as a director filming a number of Supermodels, similarly to the video for his 1990 single "Freedom! '90". The Supermodels featured in this video include Julie Newmar, Linda Evangelista, Tyra Banks, Beverly Peele, Nadja Auermann, Emma Sjöberg, Rossy de Palma, and Estelle Hallyday. - Wikipedia

Random: J. C. Leyendecker (1874-1951)

Before Norman Rockwell, there was J.C. Leyendecker – arguably the nation's most popular and successful commercial artist of the first four decades of the 20th century. - The Haggin Museum

J. C. Leyendecker Advertisement (1920's) for B. Kuppenheimer & Co.

The Proust Questionnaire: What is your favourite colour?

Q: What is your favourite colour?
Marcel Proust: Beauty lies not in colours but in their harmony.

Jacques-Emile Blanche: Portrait of Marcel Proust, 1892

Inspired by DILETTANTSIA (Snobber)

"Women at that time were supposed to look pretty and throw little handkerchiefs around. Well, I couldn't play that role." - Louise Nevelson

Richard Avedon: Louise Nevelson, Sculptor, New York, May 13, 1975

"I'm So Happy 'Cause Today / I've Found My Friends / They're In My Head..." - Kurt Cobain

Nirvana - Lithium

Random: Madonna and Sean Penn

"You call it madness, but I call it love." - Don Byas (1912-1972)

David Mcgough for LIFE: "Singer Madonna and husband, actor Sean Penn," 1985

Slater Bradley

Slater Bradley is impossibly arrogant. He likes to preface his own thoughts with phrases like, "Here's something quotable." Or, offers, "You know what nobody has written about me? That I'm really a great editor." It's tempting to let him write his own feature if only for the lesson in self-promotion. - DAZED & CONFUSED

*Please Click On Images (Below)

"Silver Kurt 01," 2008, silver paint marker on c-print, unique, (6 x 7 inches), through Team Gallery.

"Perfect Empathy (Margaret 02), 2008, red paint marker on c-print, unique, (4 x 6 inches), through Team Gallery.

Tema Stauffer

"I found this mysterious creature - the daughter of a celebrated show horse - nearly two years ago on desolate farm near Gibsonton, a legendary town in Florida's swamplands where carnies and circus freaks spend their winters."

"Taking this photograph was without a doubt one of the most romantic experiences of my life. My white horse ran up and down the driveway, towards me and away from me and towards me, and what passed between us felt like curiosity and shyness and wonder and beauty all at once. For that moment, I was fully alive and present in my dream world. Breathless, stunned, exhilarated."

- Tema Stauffer

*Please Click On Image (Below)

"White Horse," 2007, through Daniel Cooney | Fine Art Gallery.

*Click Here For Tema Stauffer's American Stills

*Click Here For Tema Stauffer's Water Park

*Click Here For Tema Stauffer's Chicago Police Ride-Alongs

*Click Here For Tema Stauffer's The Ballad Of Sad Young Men (Binghamton)

Favourite Beauty #5 (Marina Marshall Rust Connor)

"You would expect someone with this elegant, icy beauty to be like that on the inside, but she's just very sweet and kind of kooky."

- Bret Easton Ellis

Marina Marshall Rust Connor

OSTENSIBLY Marina Rust is another pretty young thing being honored for good works by a charity tonight in hopes that the charity, the Henry Street Settlement, will attract more P.Y.T.'s and their money. It's a good bet: In the junior committee world of in-training society doyennes that encompasses 25 blocks of the Upper East Side, Ms. Rust has, for now, broken out ahead in the cashmere-sweater set.

But calling Ms. Rust, the granddaughter of Marshall Field 3d, a pretty young thing is really the end of her story. Her past is in fact so exotic, startling and sad that it provided her with voluminous material for a novel, the largely autobiographical ''Gatherings,'' published by Simon & Schuster in 1993.

''Someone once told me, 'Marina, the problem is, you've been so sheltered,' '' Ms. Rust said, dryly, in her small but Mark Hampton-decorated Upper East Side apartment, where a John Singer Sargent portrait of her grandfather hangs in the entrance.

''There's usually a Sargent there,'' Ms. Rust said, pointing to a seascape in the living room, ''but it's on loan to the National Gallery.''

Jonathan Becker: Marina Rust Connor, 2000

The point here is that after a decade in New York, with her own foundation and connections uptown and downtown, Ms. Rust, 34, has of late forged a distinctive profile for herself -- a quirky heiress, much photographed, who gives her money to inner-city literacy programs and who wrote the ''She's Gotta Have It'' column about her shopping obsessions for Vogue.

(It was after all her great-great grandfather, Marshall Field, the founder of the department store, who coined the phrase, ''Give the Lady What She Wants.'' )

''I think that love of retail is somewhere in the blood,'' said Ms. Rust, who has a sense of humor and the manners of a debutante. She looks like everyone would like to.

On Tuesday, Ms. Rust talked for two hours about society, her novel, her philanthropy and her mother, Fiona, Marshall Field 3d's daughter, the inspiration for the mother in ''Gatherings,'' who died in the book. Ms. Rust's real mother is in contrast very much alive, living in France and married to her fourth husband, Jean Kay, who served time in prison for trying to hijack a plane at Orly Airport in 1971, saying he wanted it to carry medical supplies to refugees in Bangladesh.

''It was much easier to have the mother dead in the book,'' Ms. Rust said. ''If I was going to write something about my mother, it would take several volumes.''

Marina Rust Connor with Tory Birch

The tale begins in Washington, where Ms. Rust's father, David, was curator of French painting at the National Gallery. Ms. Rust's parents split when she was about 18 months old, and by the time she was 4 she found herself living in a trailer outside of Greenville, Miss., where her mother had gone to teach for Head Start. ''She felt like she wasn't contributing,'' Ms. Rust said.

NEXT stop with her mother was a neighborhood next to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, where the two lived for about a year in 1969. What was her mother doing there? ''Drugs,'' said Ms. Rust lightly, then smiled. ''Whoops.''

By 1970 Ms. Rust's mother and her 5-year-old daughter were living on a commune in Oregon, where Ms. Rust rode a pony, played with goats and didn't attend school for her last year there, when she was 9. Her mother had pulled her out, saying, Ms. Rust recalled, that ''if you stay in that school, all you'll care about by the time you graduate are cars, clothes and boys.' ''

There are pictures of this period, disorganized in an otherwise neat apartment, but Ms. Rust managed to find a snapshot of herself on the commune, shirtless. ''I like that one because I'm actually wallowing in dirt,'' Ms. Rust said.

Clearly there are no little round white collars in this childhood. ''Oh, I have those pictures, too,'' said Ms. Rust. ''That's when I would go home to visit my father. That's why not only my pictures are mixed up.''

Around the time of the no-school year, ''there was a bit of a custody battle,'' as Ms. Rust delicately puts it, ''but I made the choice.'' At 9, she went to live with her father in Georgetown, in a bedroom with pink roses on the wallpaper, done by Mark Hampton, of course. ''And I liked it very much,'' Ms. Rust said. ''I liked roses.''

Ms. Rust proceeded through the National Cathedral School, boarding school at Westminster in Simsbury, Conn., and then Duke University, where she majored in art history and was in the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority with Brooke Douglas de Ocampo, her friend on the New York social circuit. She wrote her novel in Durham, N.C., moved to New York, went to parties, shopped, started writing for Vogue (where she is now a contributing editor), gave away money and worked on junior benefit committees.

This fall she plans to marry Ian Connor, an investment banker at Lazard Freres, whom she met on a blind date in 1998. Ms. Rust's plans are children, books, charities, a country house. She says she talks to her mother twice a week and gets along with her, but has been more relaxed since she finished her book.

''I think I've rebelled in the usual ways,'' Ms. Rust said, acknowledging that she ended up where her mother began. ''I sort of wanted the life she ran away from.'' - Elisabeth Bumiller (The New York Times | 20 May 1999)

February: Crush (Matthew Goode)

Robert Maxwell for The New York Times: Matthew Goode

February: Book List (LINKS)

Massimo Vitali: Yves Saint Laurent's Library, 2009

“I had a profound feeling of the transience of life and the sheer audacity of our time here,” Vitali says. “There was not a single item that really stood out as such, but what did strike me, nonetheless, was the sheer abundance of contradictory objects: these contradictions are what life is made of. The library shelves point to the breadth of the designer’s interests and inspirations." - Massimo Vitali (The New York Times Magazine)

• OTTO ZITKO: THE CONSTRUCTION OF GESTURE (Hemma Schmutz)
• JAMES MONT - Exhibition Catalogue (10 September-20 October, 2004)
• JOCKS AND NERDS: MEN'S STYLE IN THE 20TH CENTURY (Richard Martin & Harold Koda)
• COUTURE: The Great Fashion Designers (Caroline Rennolds Milbank)
• HIGH SOCIETY: The History Of America's Upper Class (Nick Foulkes)
• PORTRAITS BY DAVID SEIDNER
• The Artist in His Studio by Alexander Liberman
• LONG ISLAND COUNTRY HOUSES AND THEIR ARCHITECTS, 1860-1940
• CROSS (KELLY KLEIN)
• Encyclopedia Britannica Eleventh Edition (1910-1911)
• ART AND EMANCIPATION IN JAMAICA (Tim Barringer | Yale University Press)
• HERZOG & DE MEURON: ZEICHNUNGEN DRAWINGS (Peter Blum Edition)
• Warhol From The Sonnabend Collection (Graphic Thought Facility)
• KARL LAGERFELD: METAMORPHOSES OF AN AMERICAN, A CYCLE OF YOUTH 2003-2008
• ART & ARCHITECTURE 1945-54: THE COMPLETE REPRINT
• 125 Great Moments of Harper's Bazaar (Anthony T. Mazzola)
• RYAN MCGINNESS WORKS (Rizzoli)
• Modern Americana (Todd Merrill & Julie V. Iovine)
• JEAN ROYERE: DECORATEUR A PARIS (French Editon)
• GUEST BY CHRISTOPHER BUCKLOW (BLIND SPOT)

Juan Erlich's Animals

"My project is based on the artificial construction of real or fiction animals, present time and wiped out animals. They are shown alive, like in natural settings, fading the limit out between what is real and what is possible, and bringing them to this world of foolishness which endangers many species, including our own." - Juan Erlich

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Mara, 2006

El Burro, 2008, through Lyle O. Reitzel Gallery

Asia, 2007

Toxodonte, 2006

Spring, 2007

Delta, 2006

Retrato IV, 2007

El Palmar, 2006

"Much more interesting were a series of strange animal pictures by Juan Erlich." - THE YEAR IN PICTURES: Report from Miami - Day 1

Happy Valentine's Day

Alec Soth's photographic series "NIAGARA" also includes three photographs of love letters, one written out of intense pain (I Can't Go on Like This); one emanating from the depths of remorse (Would You Come Home?); and another expressing mushy, gushy love (To the Love of My Life). Characterized by poor penmanship and grammar, the missives were written by people Soth met in Niagara Falls who trusted him enough to share proof of their emotions. - Jan Avgikos (ArtForum)


Alec Soth: Would You Come Home?, 2005 through Gagosian Gallery.

Postcard from Owen Reynolds Clements @ Team Gallery featuring the work of Jakob Kolding

Danish artist Jakob Kolding’s posters, collages, lambda prints, and sculptures which have been exhibited extensively throughout Europe, take as their subject the cultural collisions inadvertently set up by the contemporary city. Kolding’s work celebrates a number of urban cultural, synthetic emanations (hip-hop, graffiti, skateboarding, electronic music), as well as the aesthetics of urban studies. Hybrids of invention and documentation, renderings and diagrams, his work depicts processes and events, historical and futuristic narratives pointing to propositions and effects of urban economics, planning, architecture, ecology, transportation systems, politics, and social relations. - Team Gallery

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Untitled (Barbican), 2008-09, lambda print, 55.5 x 86 inches

Untitled (Alice), 2008-09, lambda print, 55.5 x 86 inches

Untitled (hands), 2008, lambda print, 60 x 84 inches

Untitled (...and Evil), 2007, lambda print, 55 x 84 inches

*CLICK HERE TO TOUR JAKOB KOLDING'S EXHIBIT "MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE" @ TEAM GALLERY

"deer diary ... male models are like white roses in hotel rooms in the morning ... always ... terence ... 26th feb '09. paris." (Terence Koh)

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Cole Mohr (left), Terence Koh, and Luke Worrell (Paris, 2009)*

*More Cole Mohr and Luke Worrell Here ; )

A Pair Of Banquettes by Gustave Miklos (1888-1967) @ Christie's: Collection Yves Saint Laurent Et Pierre Bergé

The rectangular seat reupholstered with leopard skin to the original concept, set in a palmwood frame decorated on each side with a red lacquered bronze grip representing stylised heads, with silver lacquered eyes, on four straight square section legs mounted with red lacquered bronze sabots. - Christie's

Gustave Miklos: One of two banquettes, CIRCA 1928-1929, Estimate: €2,000,000-€3,000,000 million for the pair.

The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef (Christine and Margaret Wertheim)

In 2008, the International Year of the Reef, marine scientists played second string to an upstart star: the brilliant and wooly Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef. All riotous color and outlandish form, the panorama of some 4,500 hand-crocheted pieces was conceived by twin sisters Margaret and Christine Wertheim in homage to the Great Barrier Reef of their native Queensland, Australia. Here, science, math, and handicrafts come together to illustrate the terrible plight of the fragile coral reefs—Earth’s earliest and most complex ecosystems—which are threatened (by the usual suspects) with total devastation.

Each crocheted element is rooted in a geometry most mathematicians thought impossible to reproduce in physical form— though nature has no problem achieving the feat. When, in 1997, Daina Taimina, a Cornell University mathematician and lifelong practitioner of the needle arts, found a way to make models of hyperbolic space using wool and a hook, it was also the genesis of the faux reef. The Wertheim sisters quickly recognized Taimina’s crocheted forms as those of their treasured reef and set about creating a woolen tribute. Before long, crocheters from all over the world were fashioning different kinds of reef forms and sending their works to the Wertheims with a note of wonder or concern attached. “We’ve been reinvigorated in our own creative ideas by our contributors,” says Margaret. “The totality of the piece is wonderful because it contains the labor and imagination of many.”

While members of the art world have responded with rapture to the kelps and anemones and elaborate corals that form the several “sub-reefs” (red, blue, and bleached reefs; the “Ladies’ Silurian Atoll”; and a toxic reef, crocheted largely from trash), scientists have yet to take note. “The future of the coral reefs, let alone this project, depends on funding,” says Margaret, who happens to be a science writer by trade. May we suggest she sends the scientists some wool? - Heather Smith Macisaac (Culture+Travel)

Favourite Interiors #63 (Fleur Cowles' Drawing Room)

''We don't believe in dining rooms,'' Tom Montague Meyer chimes in, as they reminisce about the deviled chicken and ice cream with caramel sauce that they served in the blue room, a glorious space that began its party career in 1780 as Albany's ballroom. Designed by Sir William Chambers, a favorite architect of King George III, the grand chamber is crowned by a ceiling of lacy plasterwork that reminds you of an exquisite Wedgwood box. More appreciatively than immodestly, Fleur Cowles declares, ''I believe it's the most beautiful drawing room in London.'' - Heather Smith Macisaac (The New York Times)

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Fleur Cowles' Drawing Room @ Albany (London)

*CLICK HERE TO TOUR THE HOME OF FLEUR COWLES

Random: Sarah Jessica Parker's homage to Diana Vreeland

SJP paid homage to another famous acronym, DV, the legendary Diana Vreeland. Vreeland, who served as the fashion editor of Bazaar from 1936 to 1962, was given to distinctive pronouncements, many of which were published in her “Why Don’t You...?” column. In the March 2009 issue of Harper's Bazaar, Sarah Jessica Parker infuses classic DV portraits with a SJP sensibility. - Harper's Bazaar

Peter Lindbergh and Sarah Jessica Parker's homage to Louise Dahl-Wolfe's iconic 1942 portrait of Diana Vreeland

*CLICK HERE FOR MORE OF SJP'S HOMAGE TO DV

"Cause S.* is a New York City boy." - P.P.

*s. went to bennington college after taking a year off to travel through south america. he ran a gay male escort service for two years because a television movie on "mayflower madam," sydney biddle barrows had inspired him ; ) his mother is a high-WASP. his father is jewish. he collects rare table lighters and is fond of telling everyone that the love of his life is gibson beach (sagaponack). his portuguese water dog, charlie, pisses everywhere and on everything. all that said, he's all heart : )

Random: C.Z. and Cornelia Guest

When C.Z. was married in 1947 to Winston Frederick Churchill Guest, an international polo star, heir to the Phipps steel fortune and a second cousin of Winston Churchill, the ceremony was held at the home of Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, with Hemingway serving as best man.

- Enid Nemy (The New York Times)

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Ann Clifford for LIFE: C.Z. and Cornelia Guest, 1989

New York City: Berenice Abbott (1898-1991)

“I went to see a band in New York. The lead singer got on the microphone, and he said: 'How many of you people feel like human beings tonight?' Then he said: 'How many of you feel like animals?' And everyone cheered after the animals part. But the thing is, I cheered after the human being part because I did not know that there was a second part to the question.”

- Mitch Hedberg

Berenice Abbott: Night View, New York, 1932

Random: The Last Thylacine

The last captive Thylacine, later referred to as "Benjamin" (although its sex has never been confirmed) was captured in 1933 and sent to the Hobart Zoo where it lived for three years. Frank Darby, who claimed to have been a keeper at Hobart Zoo, suggested "Benjamin" as having been the animal's pet name in a newspaper article of May 1968. However, no documentation exists to suggest that it ever had a pet name, and Alison Reid (de facto curator at the zoo) and Michael Sharland (publicist for the zoo) denied that Frank Darby had ever worked at the zoo or that the name Benjamin was ever used for the animal. Darby also appears to be the source for the claim that the last Thylacine was a male; photographic evidence suggests it was female. This Thylacine died on 7 September 1936. It is believed to have died as the result of neglect—locked out of its sheltered sleeping quarters, it was exposed to a rare occurrence of extreme Tasmanian weather: extreme heat during the day and freezing temperatures at night. This Thylacine features in the last known motion picture footage of a living specimen: 62 seconds of black-and-white footage showing it pacing backwards and forwards in its enclosure in a clip taken in 1933 by naturalist David Howells Fleay (1907-1993). National Threatened Species Day has been held annually since 1996 on 7 September in Australia, to commemorate the death of the last officially recorded Thylacine. - Wikipedia

Will Cotton's "ICE CREAM GIRL" featured in Will Cotton: Drawings @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller

These drawings add to an expanding body of work detailing Will Cotton’s primary aesthetic obsession - the representation of pleasure. The drawings in oil and varnish display a graceful, fluid style, an exuberant gestural freedom that belies the carefully honed craftsmanship of a hand and eye that, while deft, is never less than exacting in its requirements. Studies made from some of Cotton’s earlier works – Candy Forest (Study) from a painting of 2005 entitled Candy Stick Forest – denote an artist who is serious about understanding issues of draftsmanship and composition. The earthy monochrome pallet of this work gives the drawings a gravitas and groundedness. Something of the Baroque spirit inhabits these pieces, recalling works by Fragonard and other 18th century painters, artists similarly given over to the celebration of life’s pleasures and appetites. - Glenn Horowitz Bookseller

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"ICE CREAM GIRL," 2007, Oil on paper, 15 x 22 inches, through Jeremy Sanders @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller

The Proust Questionnaire: What natural gift would you most like to possess?

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

Jacques-Emile Blanche: Portrait of Marcel Proust, 1892

Inspired by DILETTANTSIA (Snobber)

January: The List (LINKS)

Empiric Studio's Powder-coated Steel Pharmacy Cabinet*

• Philip Kingsley Trichological Clinic
• BOTOT (Concentrated Mouthwash)
• Dr. Dennis Gross' Alpha Beta Daily Body Peel
• SHU UEMURA CLEANSING BEAUTY OIL PREMIUM A/O
• Ling Skin Care Spas
• CREED GREEN IRISH TWEED (Cologne)
• Mason Pearson Large Military Style Hair Brush (Boar Bristle)
• THE MADISON SQUARE CLUB
• Annemarie Borlind Facial Toner
• Adolf Biecker Health Club @ The Rittenhouse (Swimming)
• Aesop Wild Lime Hair Polish
• Philips Sonicare FlexCare Toothbrush 
• LA MER'S THE EYE BALM
• Paul Mole Barber Shop @ 1031 Lexington Avenue (73rd & 74th)
• Sutton East Tennis @ 488 East 60th Street

*I spotted this cabinet in Domino two years ago and purchased it for the guest bathroom. It's filled with many of the health, beauty, and grooming essentials listed above ; )

Random: Paloma Picasso

Helmut Newton: Paloma Picasso, Saint-Tropez, 1973

January: Crush (Bruno de Caumont)

Count Bruno de Caumont

Favourite Photograph #5 and #12 (Tina Barney)

"When people say that there is a distance, a stiffness in my photographs, that the people look like they do not connect, my answer is, that this is the best that we can do. This inability to show physical affection is in our heritage."

- Tina Barney

Tina Barney: Young Man With A Dog, 2003

Tina Barney: The Foyer, 1996

Tina Barney is best known for her ongoing documentation of the lifestyles and relationships of her family and close friends, many of whom belong to the social elite of New York and New England. Barney’s style is part candid, part tableau; her subject matter raises in equal measure issues of privilege and the interaction of family members. While striving for the candidness of a snapshot, Barney became one of the first artists working in the 1980s to explore a “directorial” mode of making pictures. Her decision to direct her subjects stems in part from her choice to sacrifice the nimble freedom of a 35 millimeter camera (with which she began her photographic career) for the large format camera’s ability to deliver a more detailed rendering of the trappings of wealth so integral to depicting her subjects and their environment. Her direction ranges from posing her subjects to simply asking them to repeat a spontaneous gesture, and her style of working often includes careful lighting and the help of an assistant. The effect is an unexpectedly intimate access to her subjects.

Barney was born in 1945 to a wealthy family in New York. Her grandfather introduced her to photography when she was a little girl and at 26 she began collecting photographs, though she did not take up the practice herself until the mid-1970s. Her work is in such collections as the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York; Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut; Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She currently lives and works in Watch Hill, Rhode Island.

- Kendra Greene (Museum of Contemporary Photography)

Maira Kalman @ Jackson Fine Art

"I was out walking the dear dog and I saw 500 things that made me want to make art."

- Maira Kalman

"Charlotte Russe," 2001, Gouache on paper, 5 3/4 x 3 3/4 inches

"Boy with Green Striped Jacket," 2003, Gouache on paper, 11 x 9 inches

"Charles-de-Gaulle, France," 2002, Gouache on paper, 12 x 9 3/4 inches

"John Soanes Yellow Room," 2005, Gouache on paper, 7 x 10 inches

"Armani at the Guggenheim," 2001, Gouache on paper, 15 x 11 inches

"Guests at Armani," 2001, Gouache on paper, 13 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches

"Lolita," 2006, Gouache on paper, 11 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches

"Muschamp Hotel," 2006, Gouache on paper, 8 x 6 3/4

"Man with Wings," 2006, Gouache on paper, 9 x 8 inches

"Pierre Wrapping Package," 2006, Gouache on paper, 8 1/2 x 7 inches

And After All The Obstacles | It's Good To See You Now With Someone Else | And It's Such A Miracle That You And Me Are Still Good Friends

Gwen Stefani - Cool*

*meeting your ex-boyfriend's current boyfriend can be exhilarating and amazing ... and cool ; )

Postcard from Malia Stewart @ Jackson Fine Art featuring Alfred Eisenstaedt's "Waiters Watching Sonya Henie Skate, St. Moritz, 1932"

“Once the amateur's naive approach and humble willingness to learn fades away, the creative spirit of good photography dies with it. Every professional should remain always in his heart an amateur."

- Alfred Eisenstaedt

*Please Click On Image (Below)

"Waiters Watching Sonya Henie Skate, St. Moritz, 1932," Silver Print, Signed in ink recto; Titled, dated in pencil verso, AP 7 of 25, (16 x 20 inches), through Jackson Fine Art.

Stephen Sprouse: Drawings 1970s-1980s @ John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller and Art Gallery

John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to present Stephen Sprouse: Drawings 1970s-1980s, an exhibition featuring 100 pieces of the artist’s original fashion drawings and inspirational related ephemera. The exhibit will open Saturday, January 10th, 2009 with a reception from 6-8pm and run through February 21st.

Drawn from an archive of more than 1500 separate pieces, including 600 original drawings, the featured work on show spans the decades of the 70’s and 80’s. Presented is a wide array of working drawings and notes executed in marker, pen, pencil and Xerox, black-and-white and color - some hand colored in gouache and watercolor. Sample fabric books and strategic worksheets in which Sprouse collaged his signature color palettes will be on view. This show offers a rare opportunity to observe intimately the late designer's process through his sketches, notes and inspirational references. More Details

Random: Bianca Jagger

Andy Warhol: Bianca Jagger at Halston's House, New York

Esque Studio (Andi Kovel and Justin Parker)

There aren't many eco-minded designers sharing studio space with Formula One race-car drivers, but that's just one of the things that set glassmakers Andi Kovel and Justin Parker's company, Esque Studio, apart. The two designers blow and hand-finish every vase, candlestick and terrarium to order (they also make glass for Ralph Lauren Home and Donna Karan). When the pair, who started by doing glass renderings for artists like Claus Oldenburg, Damien Hirst, and Kiki Smith, moved from Brooklyn, N.Y., to Portland, Ore., they began to use wind-powered energy and remelting their glass remnants into a line for select shops. "Eco-conscious companies are going to become the norm," says Kovel, "and good design will be part of it." 

- Deirdre Van Dyk (TIME)

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"Glass Eye," 2008, Blue, (4''d), through Esque Studio.

The Proust Questionnaire: In what country would you like to live?

Q: In what country would you like to live?
Marcel Proust: A country where certain things that I should like would come true as though by magic, and where tenderness would always be reciprocated.

Jacques-Emile Blanche: Portrait of Marcel Proust, 1892

Inspired by DILETTANTSIA (Snobber)

Favourite Interiors #6 (Tobias Meyer)

*Please Click On Images (Below)

Tobias Meyer, Sotheby's worldwide head of contemporary art, left, and Mark Fletcher, a private art consultant, in the eclectic Time Warner Center apartment Meyer describes as "Mark's and my soup." In their living room, a John Currin oil hangs above a French 1740s kingwood commode. In many ways, the centerpiece of the apartment is the Currin. Titled The Clairvoyant, it depicts the face of a blind woman with enormous eyes, in the spirit of a Michelangelo Sibyl. The piece's Renaissance aura is underscored by the ornate, 17th-century Florentine gilt-wood frame Fletcher and Meyer found for it. The apartment's other defining feature is the mural installed in the living room, the work of Assume Vivid Astro Focus, the nom de plume of Brazilian-born art star Eli Sudbrack. After seeing it at Deitch Projects, Fletcher ran home, excited about the possibility of installing it in a hall or closet. But Meyer pushed it further: "I said, 'No, let's put it in the living room.'"

A Warhol silk screen of a gun and a giant light-up dollar sign by Tim Noble and Sue Webster are the apartment's twin icons, representing what Meyer calls the "two inescapable truths." As Meyer explains, "Everything is about the reality of it all, about the human condition and facing death. Art right now is about desire, human nature, sexuality, power and violence."

Their good friend painter John Currin describes the place as a "modern rococo fantasy" that reminds him of the Fragonard Room at the Frick Collection. Here, Liz Craft's The Witch, cast bronze and glass, gazes out the window, at right. Furniture includes a Louis XVI bergère and early 19th-century Danish chairs.

The low-grade plywood that Fletcher found to line the entry hall sets the tone right away. "I like using low-grade materials, so things could change," he says. "It doesn't matter if there are nail holes in it. And there is a hopefulness to its unfinished quality. It's an experiment, just as young art is an experiment." A boldly striped carpet from Stark runs throughout the apartment. An untitled work by Nigel Cook hangs in the office.

Decorating a home of their own represented an opportunity to merge their sensibilities, Meyer's historicist leanings with Fletcher's contemporary passions. Here, a diptych from Matthew Barney's Cremaster series hangs above a German 1760 gilt-wood console, with German rococo ormolu candelabra. "It's so refreshing they didn't do the usual 'clean oasis of calm in the city,'" says Currin. The pair's aesthetic reflects "a resentment of their own taste," the artist observes. "You can see kind of warring impulses--it's aggressive yet comfortable, insane but principled. It takes a hell of a lot of refinement to be able to achieve that as they have." Currin's wife, sculptor Rachel Feinstein, is even more lavish in her praise. (The two couples are best friends: Meyer and Fletcher are godparents to the artists' 18-month-old son, Francis.) "I think it's the most beautiful apartment in New York," she says. "It blew me away, because it's like this explosion of everything they love. It's a mix of old and new and all things personal to them. It's an artistic sensibility versus a design sensibility."

- James Reginato (W | March 2005)

Random: Kate Spade

If, however, your feelings have changed, I will have to tell you: you have bewitched me, body and soul, and I love, I love, I love you.

December: The List (LINKS)

Jaime Hayón's The Rocking Chicken Ride for Lladró*

• McKim, Mead and White (Stanford White)
• TERENCE KOH WANTS TO LIVE IN THE LAND OF THE SHY PEOPLE
• Point O'Woods: 90 Years of Gentility and Privacy
• Slater Bradley
• HE'S JUST AN AMORY BLAINE
• Colonial Philadelphia Porcelain: The Art of Bonnin and Morris
• TOBIAS GOUNOD'S LATEST ACQUISITION: JAGUAR XK140, 1955
• VIC Face and Body Cloth
• TEMA STAUFFER'S BINGHAMPTON (Photographic Essay)
• CoSTUME NATIONAL (Ennio Capasa)
• Jaime Hayón's The Rocking Chicken Ride for Lladró
• Who I'd Like To Meet: NICK SMITH

*Jaime Hayón's Fantasy Collection is a "positive cross-contamination" of his world with that of Lladró, a perfect fusion of the expressiveness of porcelain art and the touches of fantasy and whimsy that Hayón is famous for.

Random: Tina Chow (1950-1992)

David Seidner: Tina Chow, 1981

December: Crush (Prince Harry)

Prince Henry of Wales

Favourite Beauty #11 (Anh Duong)

"I came to New York in 1988 to do a Christian Lacroix fashion show. I was one of his muses at the time. While I was in New York, I met Julian Schnabel. We fell in love. Suddenly, I landed in the heart of the art world, and it was a booming place in the ‘80s. It was in this high-energy context that I reconnected with my love of art and gave my talent the attention it deserved. I had my first show at the Sperone Westwater gallery in 1991, two years after I started painting seriously." 

- Anh Duong


Herb Ritts: Anh Duong, 1990 (GAP Advertisement)

The French actress Béatrice Dalle was once quoted as saying that her sex appeal blossomed the moment she "decided to be beautiful." In much the same way, Anh Duong, the New York-based painter, model, actress and ubiquitous party-page presence in magazines such as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and W, paints self-portraits that expose the layers of self-examination, determination and character that go into creating a famous "‘jolie-laide" celebrity.

Born in 1960 in Bordeaux to a Spanish mother and a Vietnamese father, Duong studied architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and danced with the Franchetti Academy of Classical Dance before she moved to New York City to work as a model. During the late 1980s and into the ‘90s, she posed for prestigious fashion photographers such as Michel Comte, Peter Lindbergh, Steven Meisel and Deborah Turbeville, as well as serving as muse to designers Donna Karan, Christian Lacroix, John Galliano and Diane von Furstenberg. She also appeared in films, including High Art (1998), I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) and Scent of a Woman (1992).


David Seidner: Anh Duong, 1994

Her high-profile relationships with art-world figures such as artist Julian Schnabel and Phillips auctioneer Simon de Pury have earned her a dubious reputation as a socialite. Yet she paints herself in unflattering postures, dressed in self-mocking garb such as a kinky French maid's uniform or an oversized NYC T-shirt. After having played the role of the swan on the social scene and modeling rare, beautiful clothes, her paintings expose an unexpected, unglamorous, intimate relationship with her body.


Anh Duong's Anatomie de l'errance (The anatomy of wandering), 1991

Duong's paintings belong alongside the work of women such as Dora Maar, Anaïs Nin and Frida Kahlo, artists who compellingly exposed interior worlds whose beauty, intelligence and character inspired creativity, both in themselves and in others.

- Ana Finel Honigman (Artnet)

Happy Christmas!

"I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys." - Charles Dickens


Karen Kilimnik: The Snow Queen's Sleigh, 2007, C-Print, (14 x 11 inches), through Sprüth Magers Berlin London.

Tam Ochiai

Throughout his oeuvre, Ochiai’s works have explored the slippages of everyday life to draw subtle connections between the light and the heavy, and the serious and the humorous. His drawings, which resemble an archive of scattered thoughts, at times function as parts, or like tiny germinating buds encapsulating an exhibition theme, and at others constitute an entire exhibition by themselves. Ochiai pulls snippets of inspiration from everyday non-events such as misspelled words, questionable mathematical formulas, quotations from films or novels, used in pieces or in repetition, or the curious harmony between a girl’s hairstyle and a striped shirt. Given these fragments, the viewer is naturally tempted to try and imagine the whole.

- Tomio Koyama Gallery

Tam Ochiai: Tiam O'Shian IV @ Team Gallery

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"behind the orange paint," 2008, mixed media on paper, (11 x 8.5 inches), through Team Gallery.


"flashing eyes of some animals in the forest on a dark blue night," 2008, mixed media on paper, (11 x 8.5 inches), through Team Gallery.

Favourite Photograph #58 (Four Trees, Near Ferapontovo Monastery)

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Andrew Moore: Four Trees (Near Ferapontovo Monastery), 2004

"I have to admit that one of the aspects of being a photographer I enjoy most is the opportunity to play both detective and spy. As a child, I seem to have been attracted to forbidden places. It actually got me into quite a bit of trouble later when I was a teenager, and even today my son teases me that I will go anywhere at anytime until the dogs chase me out."

- Andrew Moore (Conscientious)

R 20th Century @ Design Miami featuring Kelly McCallum's Victorian Taxidermy Fox Sculpture with 18-Carat Gold Maggots

I am interested in the stories of how things age, how they decay or are preserved, are forgotten, covered in shrouds of grime, only to be found again and given new meanings by our own sentimentality. Taxidermy seeks to preserve life by celebrating death: it is a strange half-live, a suspension, an illusion. Insects on the other hand, through their lives, destroy this illusion: they feed on death, breaking down, demolishing, creating movement from a silent tableau, forcing change and action.

- Kelly McCallum

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Random: Linda Evangelista

Winnie-the-Pooh @ Sotheby's

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E.H. Shepard's "I saw a Heffalump to-day, Piglet." Estimate: 30,000—50,000 GBP*

*This original illustration is reproduced on page 55 of Winnie-the-Pooh. It is from the chapter in which Piglet meets a Heffalump. ...Christopher Robin finished the mouthful he was eating and said carelessly: "I saw a Heffalump to-day, Piglet."

An Obsession with David Godbold's Obsession

David Godbold's new body of work marks both a departure and a return in his practice. ‘Art, Drugs and Prayer’ predominantly manifests as paintings on canvas, rendered at a scale and form that Godbold has not engaged with since the early 1990s. However, like most of his recent works ‘Art, Drugs and Prayer’ engages his diverse penchants for relatively obscure art history, philosophy and metaphysics. Indeed this body of work draws reference from the 19th century French poet, Charles Baudelaire, who considered it possible for the individual to escape from “…the grey flats of the everyday…” through to some form of ‘spiritual’ transcendence with the assistance of a combination of art, prayer and drugs.

- Kerlin Gallery

*Please Click On Images (Below)

David Godbold's 100,000,000 angels singing, 2008

David Godbold's ...yet in so may ways it had been such a good day, 2008

David Godbold's This vale of tears, 2008

Alex Da Corte

Cool Hunting's Seth Brau Interviews Alex Da Corte

"...and most people say yes."

*Please Click On Image (Below)


"Run Run Run," 2008, Enamel, pigment print on plexiglass, hole punch sequins and epoxy resin, (60 1/8 x 60 1/8 inches), through Fleisher/Ollman Gallery.

Take advantage of the shitty weather tonight and head out to Stonefox Artspace in Soho to check out the opening night of Alex Da Corte’s I Attach Myself To You. The exhibit will feature color portrait photographs and related sculptures that explore the nature of intimacy in a digital world where online dating, chat rooms, MySpace.com, blogs, etc. increasingly supplant real human interaction.

The photographs on view document the artist’s ongoing project, ”Activities,” (ie. Activity #9 - stuffing strawberries in your mouth) a series in which Da Corte invites strangers he meets in public parks to perform simple actions utilizing a variety of props in his studio. The props are often childlike in nature and include fake flowers, happy-face balloons, holiday party signs, brightly colored ribbon, costume make-up, glitter, etc. and the “Activities” are equally whimsical as well. The main directive is “to play spontaneously with a chosen object(s), and do something with it you wouldn’t ordinarily do.”

- FRICTION NYC


"Activity #9," 2007, Archival pigment print on museo silver rag, Edition of 3, (35 x 42 inches), through Fleisher/Ollman Gallery.

Mr. (Masakatsu Iwamoto)

Mr.’s terminally cute, denim-clad sculptured waifs resemble fourth-generation flower children, as well as Muffie dolls, the younger predecessors to Barbies. Their heads are enormous. Their chirpy smiles reveal bright pink tongues. Their plate-size eyes are hallucinatory worlds unto themselves, with rainbow-colored irises and dreamlike scenes.

- Roberta Smith (The New York Times)

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"Coming home from prep school," 2007, watercolour and pencil on paper, (11 x 9 inches), through Lehmann Maupin.

November: Crush (Jack McCollough)

Proenza Schouler's Lazaro Hernandez, left, and Jack McCollough

Alfredo Häberli

Alfredo Häberli's idea behind Pattern was to create a non-horizontal shelf. One which helps the thin books or magazines to stay in an upright position. By searching a geometrical figure to repeat, Häberli found an irregular pentagon; adding them to each other, creates a Pattern and gives the opportunity of using it for several sizes. Meanwhile there is a horizontal surface which allows arranging objects on it. The back shows the same Pattern, so it can also be used as a room divider. Wallpaper* Magazine (February 2007) chose PATTERN as best shelving system. - bonluxat

*Please Click On Image (Below)

"PATTERN," 2007, Lacquered aluminum composite material panels constructed under tension with screws, Satin silver with black edges, (L 130 cm x H 195 cm x D 36 cm), through Quodes.

Alfredo Häberli was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1964. Today, he is an internationally established designer based in Zurich. He manages to unite tradition with innovation, joy and energy in his designs. The result are works with companies such as Alias, Camper, Iittala, Kvadrat, Luceplan, Moroso and Volvo.

Postcard from Courtney Plummer @ Lehmann Maupin featuring new work by Mr. (Masakatsu Iwamoto)

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Mr.'s Team rabbit, 2008

Mr.'s Together also at school, 2008

Mr.'s Celebration at the Oden Food Stall, 2008

Expanding upon his examination of the Otaku subculture in Japan, which emerged in the 1970s and mainly consists of obsessive males whose fetishes include cuteness or kawaii, Mr. uses adolescent Japanese girls he discovered on the streets of Tokyo as the subjects for his film, paintings, and his first foray into photography. Inspired by the painting It hurts when it hits bare skin, the film follows these fictional characters, who are obsessed with a war-like survival game, as they transform from their peaceful everyday lives into Technicolor warriors outfitted in pink, yellow and green camouflage with matching guns.

- Lehmann Maupin

"Lily* won't quit smoking." - P.P.

*lily started smoking nat sherman's fantasia lights at 13. she collects hervé léger bandage dresses from the early 1990's...she's owns 11. she borrowed her father's patek philippe calatrava watch four years ago and never returned it ; ) she partied with michael alig long before he went to prison and long before she turned 21. she owns an orange birkin bag which conor oberst once used to vomit in : ) she loves figs.

Ernesto Caivano

By absorbing numerous references from archaic folklore, medieval fairytales, Renaissance literature, fractal geometry or more contemporary discoveries in nanotechnology, ecology and the greater cosmos, Caivano creates a metaphor of human progress.

- White Cube (Video)

*Please Click On Image (Below)

"Chroma Fractals," 2008, Ink on paper, (9 3/8” x 6 3/8"), through Esme Watanabe @ Guild & Greyshkul.

Ernesto Caivano was born in Madrid (1972) and currently lives and works in New York. He studied at The Cooper Union and Columbia University in New York. Selected recent shows include the Whitney Biennial, New York (2004) PS1, New York (2004), ’Games for a Blackout Machine’, Guild and Greyshkul, New York (2006), ‘Floral Veins’, Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica (2006) and ‘Traps, Screens and Offerings’, Carlier Gebauer, Berlin (2006).

Ernesto Caivano: Floral Veins and Conduits" at Richard Hellery Gallery.

The intimate scale of Ernesto Caivano’s six-by-nine-inch drawings at Richard Hellery Gallery commands close scrutiny, and the delicate graphite and ink marks that compose these intricate works compound this demand, drawing the viewer closer still. The effect is almost oppressive in its intensity. Precedents for Caivano’s meticulous practice are not easily found in recent art. Nor, perhaps, are the most apposite points of reference to be located in the annals of fine art, though this is emphatically where Caivano’s drawings themselves reside. While Caivano’s fondness for building texture and indicating volume through the accumulation of fine, discrete lines recalls the prints and drawings of Albrecht Dürer, the graphic, illustrative quality of these drawings also evokes the more labored, pedestrian aesthetic of botanical studies found in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century illustrated encyclopedias, the primary purpose of which was to record clearly the physical characteristics of floral specimens. However, if Caivano’s drawings are studies of anything, the subject is not the natural world. Rather, these works are highly self-reflective essays on the process of markmaking, a form of intensive personal analysis reiterated by the fact that the drawings in this show are the latest in a long-standing, self-authored narrative entitled After the Woods. This is not to suggest that Caivano tacitly advocates the wholesale revival of fine draftsmanship in the age of multimedia. These drawings are, however, an effective argument against the presumed obsolescence of traditional media and methods and, perhaps more important, represent a cunning critique of the art world’s market-driven infatuation with gregarious formal innovation, an obsession that often conspires to marginalize more subtly inventive work. - Christopher Bedford (ARTFORUM)

Floral Veins, and Conduits: 088, 2006, Ink and graphite on paper, (9.375 x 6.375 inches).

Floral Veins, and Conduits: 082, 2006, Ink and graphite on paper, (9.375 x 6.375 inches).

"Ernesto Caivano: Traps, Screens, and Offerings" at Carlier | Gebauer.

These works are from the series called "Armor Shell." They are a strange mixture of strong geometric elements, mostly on lined paper, harmed through the extensive use of shellac ink. The entire series is comprised of 18 works, pencil and ink on paper, all produced in 2007.

"Inside the Armor Shell 1," 2007, pencil and ink on paper, (46 x 36 inches).

"Inside the Armor Shell 4," 2007, pencil and ink on paper, (7 x 5 inches).

"Inside the Armor Shell 5," 2007, pencil and ink on paper, (10 x 7.5 inches).

"Inside the Armor Shell 6," 2007, pencil and ink on paper, (10.5 x 8.25 inches).

November: The List (LINKS)

Baccarat's Lalande Pencil Cup

• D.R. Harris & Co. Ltd. (Arlington Stick Deodorant)
• BRIGID BERLIN (Socialite | Needlepoint | Interiors | The Cock Book)
• RONAN & ERWAN BOUROULLEC
• Meredyth Sparks @ Elizabeth Dee Gallery
• Similasan Eye Drops (Post-Party Repair)
• Pin-Up: LOUIS GARREL
• Wendy Brandes' Memento Mori Cufflinks
• Nina Simone: Ain't Got No / I Got Life
• KLONOPIN
• William James' The Principles of Psychology (1890)
• Baccarat's Lalande Pencil Cup
• Dashwood Books
• Thom Browne (The Best-Dressed Runner In Central Park)
• EDITH SITWELL
• Annick Goutal's Eau du Sud

Favourite Interiors #71 (Richard Avedon's Bedroom)

For his bed, Avedon envisioned a system by which many books would be within arm’s reach. The structure, designed by Brian Tolle and built by Jim Gratson, is mahogany. But Tolle got the idea for the containers from cleaning out a shed at his Catskills house: “I found an old Bear Mountain water-cooler crate.” Tolle first had 100 cardboard boxes made so that Avedon could play with the configuration. Avedon’s book collection included a rare 34-volume set of Christian Zervos’s Pablo Picasso catalogue raisonné (he was also fond of Proust). Avedon commissioned the artist Christopher Hewat to make cameras out of brass, as seen on the right. Other brass objects by Hewat, like the book, were gifts.

- Wendy Goodman (New York)


*CLICK HERE TO TOUR THE HOME OF RICHARD AVEDON

"It's a song about an imaginary friend who's gonna come and save you from yourself." - Noel Gallagher

Oasis - Wonderwall

Mary Russell Smith (1842-1878)

Mary Russell Smith was born in Philadelphia, the daughter of the theater scenery and landscape painter Russell Smith (1812–1896) and his wife, the flower painter Mary Priscilla Wilson Smith (1819–1874). As a young girl, her favorite hobby was raising chickens, and at the age of fourteen she began to paint them so well that her family encouraged her to become a professional artist. No less an authority than Henry Tuckerman, Book of the Artists: American Artist Life (New York: Putnam, 1867), p. 521, praised her work as being “remarkable for grace, fidelity, and skill in delineation of the feathered tribe—her special branch.” Smith’s chicken paintings were in great demand among Philadelphia art patrons, and she exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1859 to 1869, and from 1876 to 1878. She exhibited two paintings at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1868, and another in the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Smith suffered from chronic ill health and never married. In a letter to Mrs. S. F. Du Pont (1 September 1878, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware), Xanthus Smith attributed his sister’s premature death to “over brain work,” noting that “she was so wrapped in her profession that it would have been impossible to induce her to lay it aside.”

- Schwarz (Philadelphia)

*Please Click On Image (Below)

"Chicks with a Butterfly," 1878, Oil on canvas, (9 x 12 inches), Signed and dated lower left: "Mary Smith/1878," through Schwarz (Philadelphia).*

*This very typical composition with chicks in a barnyard investigating a butterfly is one of Mary Russell Smith’s last works.

"Serena looked f-ing hot last night. There's something wrong with that level of perfection—it needs to be violated." - Chuck Bass

"If you wanted to play rough, all you had to do was ask." - Chuck Bass

Favourite Photograph #27 (Ryan McGinley)

"Kiss me and you will see how important I am."

- Sylvia Plath

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Ryan McGinley: Untitled (Kiss Explosion), 2005

An Appreciation of Martin Munkácsi (1896-1963)

Munkacsi was a stylist, and he made catchy images the only way he knew how, in a modernist mode, which, being an opportunistic form, could serve any master. Shortly after that he left for the United States. On a trip to New York near the end of 1933 he was hired by Carmel Snow for a Harper’s Bazaar assignment. His picture of the socialite model Lucile Brokaw running down a Long Island beach in a bathing suit and cape introduced a whole new vocabulary of vigor and action to American fashion.

- The New York Times


Lucile Brokaw on a Long Island Beach, 1933, (Harper's Bazaar)

In 1932 the young Henri Cartier-Bresson, lately returned from Africa, saw a photograph of African children charging into waves on a beach. “I must say that it is that very photograph which was for me the spark that set fire to fireworks,” he recalled years later. “I couldn’t believe such a thing could be caught with the camera. I said, ‘Damn it,’ took my camera and went out into the street.” What Cartier-Bresson produced during the next few years, as the curator Peter Galassi once wrote, became “one of the great, concentrated episodes in modern art.”

- The New York Times


Boys running into the surf at Lake Tanganyika, 1930

Hollywood legend reports notes from an early Fred Astaire screen test for RKO Pictures as reading, "Can't act. Slightly bald. Also dances." And dance he did. Astaire broke with existing formulae for musical films and offered a purer, freer alternative to the spectacular and highly regimented productions of Busby Berkeley and others. His work is distinctive for the minimal camera movement required to film his body in action — dances often were recorded in a single shot by a stationary camera — and for the ways in which song-and-dance is fully integrated into the narrative. The major part of Astaire's movie career, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s, spans the Depression through World War II and the political antagonisms of the Cold War; typically romantic and comic, his films provided an escape in dark times and became essential to the cultural memory of 20th-century America.

This series is presented in conjunction with Martin Munkacsi: Think While You Shoot! Astaire and Mukacsi were both great artists of the body in movement. Working in the same time period of the 1930s and 1940s, they represent the escapist culture of America in those decades.

- SFMOMA


Fred Astaire, 1936 (LIFE)

Yaddo: Making of American Culture @ The New York Public Library

"The 40 or so acres on which the studios and principal buildings of Yaddo stand have seen more distinguished activity in the arts than any other piece of ground in the English-speaking community or perhaps in the entire world."

- John Cheever


*CLICK HERE TO TOUR YADDO

Founded in 1900 by financier and philanthropist Spencer Trask and his wife, Katrina Trask, Yaddo began receiving guests in 1926 and was immediately hailed by The New York Times as 'a new and unique experiment, which has no exact parallel in the world of fine arts.' Since that inaugural season, Yaddo has navigated the roiled cultural and political life of 20th-century America while hosting thousands of artists and writers, including such luminaries as James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Flannery O'Connor, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Truman Capote, Jacob Lawrence, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Philip Guston, Sylvia Plath, Milton Avery, Patricia Highsmith, Langston Hughes, Ted Hughes, Alfred Kazin, Ulysses Kay, Katherine Anne Porter, Mario Puzo, Clyfford Still, and Virgil Thomson.

Collectively, artists who have worked at Yaddo have won 63 Pulitzer Prizes, 25 MacArthur Fellowships, 58 National Book Awards, 22 National Book Critics Circle Awards, 108 Rome Prizes, a Nobel Prize (Saul Bellow, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976), and countless other honors. Many books by Yaddo authors have been made into films.

The exhibition - Yaddo: Making of American Culture - is drawn from the intimate letters, papers, photographs, art objects, and ephemera that constitute the Yaddo Records, now in The New York Public Library's Manuscripts and Archives Division; from collections throughout the Library; and from Yaddo's own holdings of rare books and artworks.

- The New York Public Library

Hillary Rodham Clinton

"I have gone from a Barry Goldwater Republican to a New Democrat, but I think my underlying values have remained pretty constant; individual responsibility and community. I do not see those as being mutually inconsistent."

- Hillary Rodham Clinton


Annie Leibovitz: Hillary Rodham Clinton, 1998 (Vogue)

Favourite Interiors #59 (Guillaume Houzé)

"Art is a necessity for me,” Guillaume Houzé notes in his rapid-fire French. “Probably an addiction, I’ll admit. It is inseparable from who I am.” Houzé, a descendant of Théophile Bader, who founded the Galeries Lafayette department store more than a century ago, has the charm and easy confidence, though none of the frivolity, of a young man born to privilege.

Houzé says mixing art and design seems “natural,” although he views the two disciplines quite separately. “What interests me is to surround myself with talent. I choose furnishings based on a certain idea of excellence, created by the best and most interesting designers.” His go-to source is Galerie Kreo, whose owner, Didier Krzentowski, has become a close friend.

- Amy Serafin (Art + Auction)


In Guillaume Houzé's Paris apartment (Office): Roman Signer photographs with a Gino Sarfatti light fixture, a Jean Prouvé desk and a Pierre Charpin chair

Agathe Snow

There is a shot of Snow’s bloodied face: a self-portrait. “I think he jumped through a window? I’m not sure what happened that night.” Next is a photograph of a glorious girl grinning in a hat on the boardwalk. “That’s Dash’s wife, Agathe.” They married when they were 18, and Agathe, who is Corsican, needed papers to stay in the country.

“But Dash was totally in love,” Dan Colen tells me later. “They were like husband and wife for a long time, and they still have a really strong bond, as much as either one of them likes to ignore it or pretend or whatever. They were like the coolest couple ever.”

- Ariel Levy (New York)

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"N," 2005, from the series NEW RECIPES FOR APPROACH, Collage on paper, (8.5 x 11 inches), through JAMES FUENTES LLC

43 Fifth Avenue

Lucy Van Pelt: I know how you feel about all this Christmas business, getting depressed and all that. It happens to me every year. I never get what I really want. I always get a lot of stupid toys or a bicycle or clothes or something like that.
Charlie Brown: What is it you want?
Lucy Van Pelt: Real estate.

*Please Click On Image (Below)

43 Fifth Avenue

October: The List (LINKS)

Johann Joachim Kändler's Elephant, 1745 (Meissen)*

• Geo. F. Trumper's Extract of West Indian Limes (Cologne)
  
• JAKOB KOLDING
• William Stout Architectural Books
• Carolyne Roehm's Blue & White
• MADONNA, BRITNEY AND CHRISTINA (VMA | 2003)
• VISIONAIRE 54. SPORT (LACOSTE)
• Borotalco (Talcum Powder)
• RAF SIMONS @ OKI-NI
• The Honourable Stephen James Napier Tennant (1906-1987)
• Scully & Scully
• HEDI SLIMANE FASHION DIARY
• Farrow & Ball (Bumble Bee BP 547)
• Johann Joachim Kändler's Elephant, 1745 (Meissen)
• Reading List via CAKE @ NOW VOYAGER
• Who I'd Like To Meet: IGBY SLOCUM

*This elephant was modeled based only on description; Kändler himself had never seen an elephant, which accounts for the human-like features and the awkward, fantastical appearance of this particular figure.

Postcard from Malia Stewart @ Jackson Fine Art featuring new work (Boys Tethered, 2008) by David Hilliard

*Please Click On Image (Below)

"For me, the construction of panoramic photographs, comprised of various single images, acts as a visual language. Focal planes shift, panel by panel. This sequencing of photographs and shifting of focal planes allows me the luxury of guiding the viewer across the photograph, directing their eye; an effect which could not be achieved through a single image."

- David Hilliard

Hermès Pheasant Feather Hunting Umbrella

"I call what we do quality manufacturing - not luxury. We're not expensive, because to be expensive you have to be vain. We're costly. We have a devastating passion for detail. Our fight for quality is forcing us to strive for a better world."

- Pierre-Alexis Dumas (Culture + Travel)


Hermès Pheasant Feather Hunting Umbrella

October: Crush

The Sartorialist: At Dries Van Noten, 2008

Obsession: Frederic Weinberg's Birdcages

"Put a bird cage near the window so that the bird can see the sky? It's much better to look than not to, even if it hurts."

- Klaus Kinski


Birdcage (Gilt Metal and Lacquered Wood), United States, 1955, (59 x 20 x 20 inches), through Wright.

Book: Spaced Out: Radical Enviroments of the Psychedelic Sixties

Spaced Out: Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties
(Crash Pads, Hippie Communes, Infinity Machines, and other)
Author: Alastair Gordon
Publisher: Rizzoli

Through hundreds of groovy photos, Alastair Gordon's book explores the tripped-out buildings of the age of Aquarius. Spaced Out shows how ambitiously experimental, hallucinogenically colorful, and at times laughably impractical the designs were - from a waterbed prototype to a house that changed colors in response to human touch. Gordon, a New York Times contributor, highlights the technologies in use today that were pioneered during the era's kaleidoscopic revolution. Turn on, drop out, move in.

- Wired


The utopian sixties inspired revolutionary and alternative ways to live, love, and entertain—and equally radical spaces to do it in. Stimulated by the psychedelic drug culture, rebel designers and architects distorted space to create womblike coves and isolation chambers, forging a spatial vocabulary that still reverberates today. At the same time, the tune-in-turn-on-drop-out message lured youths into far-flung communes, often under the roofs of brightly painted geodesic domes draped and tie-dyed fabric. Idealistic and anarchic enclaves with names like Drop City and Morning Star redefined the concept of community, inventing a wildly spontaneous way of building and dwelling. For the first time, these ephemeral spaces are brought together in Spaced Out. The many never-before-published photographs and an inventive text by acclaimed author Alastair Gordon show in detail the spirit and ideas of this radical period.

ALASTAIR GORDON is an award- winning critic, curator and author of numerous books including Weekend Utopia, Naked Airport, Romantic Modernist, and Beach Houses: Andrew Geller. He writes about design and the built environment for several different publications including The New York Times, Architectural Digest and Dwell. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and four children.

via Pamela Talese

Pamela Talese's small, quietly observed works, painted from life, honor the plein-air tradition that many assume to be dead by turning to industrial subjects and pushing the style slightly toward documentary photography. Fittingly, they record a dying phase of New York history: the piers, buildings, cranes and docking equipment of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, along with tugboats, fireboats and ships in and out of dry dock.

The subjects have all seen better days, but the images are not nostalgic. And despite the paintings' documentary aspect they clearly could not be photographs; they record places of honest work in part by exemplifying it. They are carried by an unforced accuracy abetted by a subtle color sense and straightforward surfaces that are neither finicky nor juiced up.

- Roberta Smith (The New York Times)


The John D. McKean in Dry Dock 1 for Painting and Repair

"We Think You're A Joke / Shove Your Hope Where It Don't Shine..." - Santogold

Santogold - Shove It
Brooklyn we go hard / We on the look for the advantage, we work hard / And if we seem to rough it up a bit / We broke but we rich at heart / Pull ourselves up now we won't choke / It's our time, put the lights on us / War tactics they make me sick / reel your heart in run away with it / Smile in your face, undermine your back / got guns for the strength they lack / So if you know another way / you can't look the other way / if you know another way, / tell them so right to their face / We think you're a joke / Shove your hope where it don't shine (4x) / I pay for what's called / eccentricity and my will to evolve / I hear them all say / that I got heart / but not everything that it takes / Taint my mind but not my soul / Tell you I got fire / I wont sell it for no payroll / Let 'em hold me down / I know if I know another way / I can't look the other way / I know another way / I'll tell them so right to their face / We think you're a joke / Shove your hope where it don't shine (4x)

"Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh." - W. H. Auden

Richard Avedon: W. H. Auden, poet, St. Mark's Place, New York, 3 March 1960

Paul's Postcard: Tam Ochiai

Misspellings or the misuse of words are often a starting point for Ochiai’s artwork. For his current exhibition at Team Gallery, Tam Ochiai becomes Tiam O’shian IV, a prize-winning show cat born in 1899. Ochiai uses a cat in spirit and form to address drawing in paper, sculpture, and text.

For the past two years, Ochiai has created a series of drawings — eternal soup and sudden clarity — that range from the mundane tasks of everyday life to emotional reactions to Beethoven. The style changes to fit the content, from wispy fashionable figures to aggressive abstractions of cat scratches.

- team (gallery, inc.)


"Peacock Man," 2008, Mixed media on paper, (11 x 8.5 inches), through Team Gallery.

Obsession: Gerte Hacker (1911-2000)

Gerte Hacker of Shaker Heights, Ohio was praised in a 1957 article in Ceramic Industry for her “smooth progress from a small individual studio to personalized commercial production involving the assistance of others.” The article noted that “although the Hacker studio operates with a number of carefully trained assistants, no pieces are identical and every one has the Gerte Hacker touch and is signed by her.”

- Alan Rosenberg - Works of Art


An Enamel on Copper Plate, United States, circa 1960, 8 inches diameter, Signed: Gerte Hacker

R Gallery and curator Michael Reynolds' Sticks, Stones, Bones @ R 20th Century

R Gallery and curator Michael Reynolds' Sticks, Stones, Bones, an exhibition of extraordinary objects from antiquity to today, intimately paired in powerful and breathtaking combinations.

For this second of our annual Guest Curator Series, Michael Reynolds has assembled an exhibition that passionately explores how we think about design. By combining ritualistic, religious and decorative artifacts—from ancient cultures as far-flung as Imperial Rome, Tibet and China, Cambodia and South America—with fine art, hand printed wallpaper and some of the most sensuously sculptural and exceptional pieces from R 20th Century Gallery’s collection of 20th and 21st century design, Reynolds encourages the viewer to meditate on the art of past and present culture. Whether exemplified by an ancient Roman marble statue or a contemporary illuminated sculpture by Jeff Zimmerman, this exhibition serves a reminder of the evocative power of important objects and their ability to unite maker and viewer in a shared experience.

- R 20th Century


Unique dining table by Wendell Castle with birdseye maple top, green resin inlay, and stack laminated ebonized maple base. Signed 'W. Castle '78'. Elephant skull, Belgian Congo, 19th Century, from the collection of Michael Reynolds.

Favourite Beauty #9 (Daphne Guinness)

"I grew up in an artists’ colony near Barcelona with Salvador DalÍ and the Surrealists, so my dress sense is very coloured by my youth. Everybody knew that DalÍ was the most crazy; you’d go to his house and he would have lobsters in his pool. Anything went, clothes-wise. You could wear whatever you wanted any time of day, so people would wear evening clothes at breakfast time, simple Catalan shoes and hats, lots of brightly coloured hippy kaftans, and a lot of French, tailored outfits."

- Daphne Guinness


Welcome to the utterly madcap, delightfully glamorous, teensy bit brittle world of Daphne Guinness. A world that her great-aunt Nancy Mitford (her grandmother was Diana Mitford, the infamous society beauty who fell in love with Oswald Mosley) would surely have loved to chronicle. No doubt it would include reference to her great friend and distant relative Isabella Blow, the eccentric fashion muse and fellow armour-lover who tragically committed suicide earlier this year, and whose mantle one cannot help feeling, sitting here watching Guinness being so adoringly scrutinised by the Japanese tourists on the next table, has been passed on.


“Oh my God, I dain’t knair!” she cries, silver handcuff shooting up to a rouged cheekbone in genuine modesty. “I mean, Izzy – Izzy was great. A proper person. With proper existential angst, and a real artist, too. But it’s true, we did have a very similar outlook on life, and I knew at the end exactly how she felt. We were either terribly excited about something or terribly upset about something, then everything else in between was just sort of beige. Now I’m starving, what should I have to eat? A scone, perhaps? Although I probably shouldn’t, because I’ve just put on half a stone. No, I promise you, I’m 53kg now, although of course there is always the possibility that the scales in my bathroom are wrong.”

If Guinness sounds too English-eccentric to be true – as her friend the French writer Bernard-Henri Lévy once told her: “You are no longer a person; you are a concept!” – she isn’t. It’s all in her provenance. The daughter of the brewery heir Jonathan Guinness, aka Lord Moyne, and the youngest of five, she spent part of her childhood in an artists’ colony in Spain, where she used to swim in Salvador Dali’s lobster-filled swimming pool; part of it in Paris, where, with her mother, the French beauty Suzanne Lisney (who died of lung cancer two years ago), she’d sit in the front row of all the couture shows; and part of it in London, where she’d spend Saturdays in the art-deco room in Biba, drinking strawberry milkshakes and developing her trademark passion for all things feathered. As the designer Valentino told American Vogue: “We joke that we can find her in London by just following the plumes scattered on the ground.”


Vogue Italia (September 2008)

In the early to mid-1980s, she lived in New York, where her sister Catherine Guinness was PA to Andy Warhol, and toyed with the idea of becoming an opera singer. Her friends at the time were Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, the owners of Studio 54, Fred Hughes, the editor of Interview magazine, and, of course, Andy himself, although he never really said anything to her because she was always so terribly shy, sheltering herself from the world with her outrageous outfits.

“That’s why I could probably be quite a good actress,” Guinness offers, the pair of us now in the back of her chauffeur-driven car, en route to the north London mansion she shares with her three children by her exhusband, Spyros Niarchos. “Being in disguise, assuming another role, hiding behind a costume, is so easy. Being oneself, now that’s always a little more tricky, don’t you think?”

It was exactly 20 years ago yesterday, as Guinness volunteers, that she got married to Niarchos, son of the Greek shipping billionaire Stavros Niarchos. The couple met on a skiing trip in Switzerland and tied the knot in 1987, when Daphne was only 19. They divorced in 1999 – Daphne was reported to have got a settlement of about £20m. “Gosh, being married, that was my ‘caged bird’ period,” she recalls as we walk through the ultra-grand hallway, past the Chapman brothers’ “crucified hamburger” sculpture, past the Grayson Perry mind maps, past her precious 17th-century disembowelling prints. “One long round of boats and bodyguards and Greek islands and glitzy resorts. Not me at all. I remember, for example, going to that ghastly place in St Tropez, Cinquante Cinq, with all these people at the table eating in their bikinis and getting sprayed by those horrible hoses they’ve got in the canopy above, and there I was in full riding gear. Well, I didn’t want to be half naked in front of all these ghastly, repulsive pink people in their horrid little floaty dresses getting sprayed with water, did I?”

We are now sitting in her drawing room, an equally ornate space overlooking an outrageously large garden. It is filled with books (“Reading is my passion. I can sit for hours dissecting a book on English grammar”), overflowing arrangements of cabbage roses and more art she has either inherited or collected on the way. Above the stripy sofa, opposite one of Damien Hirst’s more magnificent butterfly canvases, is a large portrait of her grandfather, the poet Bryan Guinness, and her father, Jonathan, as a baby, being carried in the arms of his mother, Diana. “You can see there’s a lot going on in that picture,” Guinness points out wryly. “Looks like she’d far rather be somewhere else – like in the arms of that Oswald Mosley, right?”

Scattered round the room, meanwhile, are framed photographs of her and her beloved children. Here they are in Spetsopoula, the Niarchos family’s private island; here they are when they lived in their grand, art-deco-appointed townhouse in New York. “It’s funny, I love it here in north London, but I’m thinking of moving to a flat in town. I get so lonely when the children aren’t around [the eldest is now studying comparative literature at Yale], and they’re not around a lot, because they stay with their father over every single one of the holidays. Christmas is the worst. I always have to take myself off somewhere, usually to a hotel, because I worry that if I stay with friends, I might be a pain in the neck. Last year, I ended up scheduling myself a hernia operation in LA to while away the time. The thing was, it ended up being much more serious than they thought; they had to keep me in for ages, and because I had come alone, without telling anyone where I was, I had to sign in the concierge at the Beverly Hills Hotel as my own next of kin.”

“In a way, I love being older, much better than being in my married twenties,” she continues. “The awful thing is ending up, er, alone . . .” Readers will remember the pint-sized actor Tom Hollander as her last public paramour. She says she has a very good “working relationship” with her exhusband and is categorically not seeing anybody else.

While we both stare at the trampoline outside, contemplating this thought of her being 70 and alone, in walks her middle son, a modelly-looking 15-year-old, to tell his mum he just got back from the doctor and thinks he needs to be off school for a few days. Guinness’s aristocratic features, simultaneously young and old for her years, are suddenly suffused with maternal pride. “Love you, darling,” she calls as he ambles out of the room, and then, to me: “It’s so strange being all these different things. A mother. An ex-wife. And then this, I don’t know, fashion person, I suppose. In a way, what I’m trying to do, after 15 years of not really doing very much with my life, is to start anew, to reinvent myself, although not in an egotistical way. What I love doing most of all is collaborating with people” – she recently produced a film short with the fashion photographer Sean Ellis, which won an Academy Award nomination – “and being the midwife, if you like, to their brilliance. One of the nice things about having a bit of money is being able to make things happen. Not just in fashion, but in a political way. I mean, isn’t that part of the social contract? Isn’t that what people with money are meant to do? Bring others up rather than down, rather than hog it all for themselves? I’m sure that’s what Bertrand Russell used to say. He was so clever, Bertrand Russell – funnily enough, a distant relative.”

Daphne insists that her driver take me home.

As we drive away, I think of how her friend Amanda Harlech once described her: “She’s like Tinker Bell, like thistledown or gossamer. If you hug her, she’ll break in two.” I think of her rattling around that great big house of hers like a tiny little pea. I hope she invests in some new scales. Fifty-three kilos? No way.

- Christa D'Souza (The Sunday Times | 21 October 2007)

WHAT DAPHNE LOVES

— Sudden illuminating ideas where you get that amazing feeling of what life is all about
— Classical architecture
— Beautiful jewellery
— Thunderstorms and clouds
— Moss
— Mushrooms
— Butterflies
— Rocks
— High mountain peaks where the air burns your throat
— Textiles and embroideries
— Armour and ancient weapons
— The human skeleton, and how to drape it (it’s quite wonderful naked as well)
— Love, but that should be first

An Appreciation of George Plimpton

George with a camera

George with Muhammad Ali

George at a wedding

George and William Styron

George with some favourite football items

George prepares to dive

George with Marianne Moore

George playing the triangle

George and his tailor

George on the street

George with a drum

George in a Bruins hockey uniform

George in the boxing ring

George boxing

George

Images via THE PLIMPTON PROJECT

"I Got My Head Done / When I Was Young..." - Damon Albarn (Blur)

Blur - Song 2

Roberley Bell's Flower Blobs

The Flower Blob sculptures take their cue from blob architecture. Their forms are in fact nothing in nature, though the sculptures reveal themselves as natural forms.

The Flower Blobs continue to explore the spills of my landscape projects, the space where the artificial meets the real. In these intimately scaled sculptures the dialogue between the real and the artificial extends to the surfaces covered with plastic flowers and novelty birds. The Flower Blob sculptures continue my interest in examining our control and manipulation of nature.

- Roberley Bell



"Flower Blob #70," 2006, Cast foam dyed plastic with plastic flowers and novelty birds and fruit, (25 x 16 x 10 inches), through Christine Pfister @ Pentimenti Gallery.

An Obsession with Starlings, Binocular Vision and Richard Barnes

A Murmuration of Starlings

European starlings have a way of appearing in unexpected places — the United States, for example, where they are not native but owe their origin to a brief reference in Shakespeare’s “Henry IV, Part 1.” In 1890, a drug manufacturer who wanted every bird found in Shakespeare to live in America released 60 starlings in Central Park. After spending a few years nesting modestly under the eaves of the American Museum of Natural History, they went from a poetic fancy to a menacing majority; there are now upward of 200 million birds across North America, where they thrive at the expense of other cavity nesters like bluebirds and woodpeckers, eat an abundance of grain — as well as harmful insects — and occasionally bring down airplanes.

In Europe, where the birds are native — Mozart had a pet starling that could sing a few bars of his piano concerto in G major — they still have the power to turn heads. Each fall and winter, vast flocks gather in Rome. They spend the day foraging in the surrounding countryside but return each evening to roost. (Rachel Carson, author of “Silent Spring,” called the birds reverse commuters.) They put on breathtaking aerial displays above the city, banking in nervous unison, responding like a school of fish to each tremor inside the group.

The birds are beloved by tourists and reviled by locals — understandably, since the droppings cover cars and streets, causing accidents and general disgust. A flock of starlings is euphoniously called a “murmuration,” but there is nothing poetic about their appetites. Their ability to focus both eyes on a single object — binocular vision — allows them to peck up stationary seeds as well as insects on the move. In the countryside outside Rome, they feast on olives. Like us, the birds are enormously adaptable but what we admire in ourselves we often abhor in our neighbors.

Richard Barnes’s photographs capture the double nature of the birds — or at least the double nature of our relationship to them — recording the pointillist delicacy of the flock and something darker, almost sinister in the gathering mass. Many of Barnes’s photographs, which will be shown at Hosfelt Gallery in New York this fall, were taken over two years in EUR, a suburb of Rome that Mussolini planned as a showcase for fascist architecture. The man-made backdrop only enhances the sense of the vast flock as something malign, a sort of avian Nuremberg rally.

It is, of course, natural for birds to surrender individual autonomy to the flock; according to the Roman ornithologist Claudio Carere, who has identified 12 basic flock patterns, the starlings are primarily trying to evade falcons. But we project onto the natural world a large measure of ourselves. In ancient Rome, augurs studied the flight patterns of birds to divine the will of the gods; part of the fascination of the starlings is the way they seem to be inscribing some sort of language in the air, if only we could read it.

- Jonathan Rosen (Flight Patterns)


Richard Barnes: Mumur 8 (14 December 2005)

Richard Barnes: Mumur 14 (21 January 2006)

Richard Barnes: Mumur 1 (15 November 2005)

via FREEMAN'S

Beginning in the mid-thirteenth century, the kilns of Dehua, capital of the Fujian Province in southeast China, began producing brilliant white porcelain pieces, the likes of which had never been seen before. Today, Blanc de Chine pieces are some of the most sought-after collectibles in the world of Chinese art, their aesthetic appeal lying in their stark shapes and color, and their impossibly delicate, glasslike glaze.

- Robert H. Blumemfield (Blanc de Chine: The Great Porcelain of Dehua)


Fine Dehua (Blanc de Chine) Elephant Censer, early Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), (H: 12''), through FREEMAN'S.

Of two section form, the cover carved and molded to show three musicians over dragon and lattice carved howdah, over standing elephant, well and delicately incised to show mask and dragon saddle, lingzhi bands.

PROVENANCE:
Illustrated; P. J Donnelly- Blanc de Chine; The porcelain of Tehua in Fukien, plate 113b, Published 1969.

Estimate $5,000-8,000

FREEMAN'S: Asian Arts | 15 September 2008

Happy Birthday, Madonna!

*Please Click On Image (Below)

Pierre et Gilles: Legend (Madonna), 1995, through Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont.

Bunny Tomerlin is Style

“Style is primarily a matter of instinct.”

- Bill Blass

*Please Click On Screen Capture (Below)