Favourite Painting #30 (Wayne Thiebaud)

The top lot by Thiebaud was Seven Suckers (1970), a brightly colored, small (19 x 23 in.) painting of two rows of lollipops. It sold for $4,521,000, considerably more than its presale estimate of $1,400,000-$1,800,000, and a new auction record for the artist. A second Thiebaud "still-life," this one depicting a rack of neckties, also soared past its presale estimate to sell for $3,401,000.

- Art Market Watch: 12 November 2007 @ Christie's New York

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Wayne Thiebaud: Seven Suckers, 1970

“Delicious: The Life and Art of Wayne Thiebaud,” is the story of a happy man known for his happy paintings of cakes and pies. It turns out he also has many happy things to say about painting. For example: “I love art history” and “I was a spoiled child. I had a great life, so about the only thing I can do is to paint happy pictures.”

- Sarah Boxer (The New York Times)

Favourite Beauty #67 (Cole) and #81 (Luke)

Cole Mohr (left) and Luke Worrell: "...we're everywhere."

Favourite Interiors #35 (Ceiling by Otto Zitko)

Howard Read, co-owner of Chelsea gallery Cheim & Read, and his wife, Katia, used to live in the kind of megaloft art dealers tend to favor, with enormous swaths of canvas-friendly white space. So when they were in the market for a new place, “the last thing we were looking for was a Federal-style townhouse,” says Howard. “The broker called about it, and we said, ‘Oh, no, that’s a dollhouse. We need something with some kind of scale.’ ” But they were taken with an 1827 “wreck” in the West Village, which they’ve meticulously restored—and in the case of this drawing room, radically altered.

One night, the Austrian artist Otto Zitko— who was in town preparing a show at Cheim & Read—came over for dinner, and “we had this idea to commission one of his wall drawings for the house,” says Howard. But Zitko “thought the walls were too busy and full of architectural whatnot: doorways or fireplaces or moldings. Then he looked up at the ceiling. We were kind of taken aback.” After considering it for a few minutes, they said, “Okay, why not?”

Zitko returned to the house, put on some Wagner CDs, and completed the oil-stick drawing in a day. “We were thrilled,” Howard says. People can see the ceiling from the street, and Katia says she has overheard a wide range of commentary. Some discerning passersby know it’s a Zitko. Others simply suspect a bunch of kids have been up to no good.

- Wendy Goodman (New York)

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The fireplace: Although the house was in total shambles, there were still treasures to recover, like the original blue-and-white tiles and the unusual narrow finger bricks that surround the fireplace. The windows: like the rest of the room, they have been completely restored, but with the original 1820s glass intact. The art: The two bronze sculptures that flank the fireplace are by Louise Bourgeois, as is the drawing over the mantel. The photograph between the windows is by David McDermott and Peter McGough. The black-and-white flower painting is by Donald Baechler, and the multicolor canvas is by Juan Uslé. The furniture: The two red chairs are by Saarinen, and the couch is Empire. The coffee table is fifties German from Kimcherova.

Favourite Film #80 (White Mischief)

It's not easy being decadent, though intelligence isn't required. One must have a certain amount of time and money (or credit), an all-consuming self-interest and, whenever possible, an exotic setting in which to misbehave. Good looks, preferably beauty, also help, as well as the constitution of a goat.

This is pretty much the sum and substance of ''White Mischief,'' Michael Radford's entertaining, sometimes perilously giddy screen variation on James Fox's 1982 investigative book. Like the book, some of whose facts it reshapes for its own purposes, the film is a recollection of a notorious murder case and the lives of a small, privileged group of upper-class colonials in Kenya in 1940 and 1941.

- Vincent Canby (The New York Times / 22 April 1988)

Favourite Beauty #3 (C. Z. Guest)

Pity the poor socialite today. She will never know what it's like to be painted in the nude by Diego Rivera or photographed in couture by Cecil Beaton, Horst and Louise Dahl-Wolfe, though she can claim one or two paparazzi snaps. Her company will never be sought by Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote or the Maharaja of Jaipur. And she most definitely can't say she has been hunting with Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

- Cathy Horyn (The New York Times)


Lucy Douglas Cochrane Guest (TIME / 20 July 1962)

Favourite Interiors #40

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The open-plan second floor of Marc Newson's house in Paris (built in 1953 by the French architect Fernand Riehl as his home and office) includes this area for working. The space is furnished with Newson's Black Hole carbon-fibre table (1988) that serves as a desk, his Komed Chair (1996), and a Franco Albini shelving system filled with books and a set of "Seven Samurai" dolls inspired by his favourite Akira Kurosawa film.

The living area is sparsely furnished with a sofa from Svenskt Tenn covered in a Josef Frank print, one of Newson's Wood Chairs (1988), and a television. A Flaminio Bertoni rendering of the Citroën DS19 hangs in an ornate frame on one wall. The dining table is made from a slab of African bubinga wood.

Favourite Photograph #16

Anna Gaskell crafts foreboding photographic tableaux of preadolescent girls that reference children's games, literature, and psychology. She is interested in isolating dramatic moments from larger plots such as Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, visible in two series: wonder (1996–97) and override (1997). In Gaskell's style of “narrative photography,” of which Cindy Sherman is a pioneer, the image is carefully planned and staged; the scene presented is “artificial” in that it exists only to be photographed. While this may be similar to the process of filmmaking, there is an important difference. Gaskell's photographs are not tied together by a linear thread; it is as though their events all take place simultaneously, in an ever-present. Each image's “before” and “after” are lost, allowing possible interpretations to multiply. Gaskell's girls do not represent individuals, but act out the contradictions and desires of a single psyche. While their unity is suggested by their identical clothing, the mysterious and often cruel rituals they act out upon each other may be metaphors for disorientation and mental illness.

- Guggenheim Museum


Anna Gaskell: untitled #3 (wonder), 1996

Anna Gaskell was born in Des Moines, Iowa, on October 22, 1969. She studied at Bennington College for two years before attending the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received a B.F.A. in 1992; she received an M.F.A. from Yale University in 1995. Gaskell's early photographs were self-portraits, but she soon began photographing girls as they collectively acted out stories.


Slideshow: Anna Gaskell's Photographs
Music: Najwa Nimri's That Cyclone

Favourite Painting #10 (Alex Katz)

"I wanted to paint a composition [because]...people don't paint compositions in the twentieth century much. And I wanted to use overlapping forms because people don't [paint them today]...So a cocktail party is a place where there are gestures, you know."

- Alex Katz


Alex Katz: The Cocktail Party, 1965

Cocktail parties were a favorite subject for Alex Katz in the 1960s. Here, he depicts one in his New York studio; another large painting from the same year shows a similar gathering on the lawn at his summer house in Maine. In each, the artist represents his immediate environment as one populated by a stylish group comfortably enjoying the privileges of their station—an effect compounded for art world denizens who could find their peers' faces in the crowd. For Katz, this aspect of the work was not inconsequential, as he noted about this painting, "I had to use something that was part of my life. I mean I couldn't paint angels or people in Vietnam, stuff like that." At the same time, the ambitious, multi-figured painting was motivated by the formal concerns of a representational painter.

- The Picker Art Gallery (Colgate University)

Favourite Video #11 (Bruce Weber)

"She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring"

- Zelda Fitzgerald


Bruce Weber: Being Boring (Pet Shop Boys), 1990

Chris Lowe just said “I wanted it to be sexy—he laughed at that!” and Neil Tennant told him about the Zelda Fitzgerald quote that had inspired him. It was filmed in one day at the beginning of October in a house in Long Island, just outside New York; Bruce Weber chose Long Island because of its associations with Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Bruce Weber had explained his idea of a wonderful party: he said he didn’t want it to be street because he looked at MTV and everything was street and he thought it was corny. He wanted it to be like this beautiful fantasy. When the Pet Shop Boys turned up they felt quite intimidated, all these beautiful people running around in towels. (The cast were people Bruce Weber was friends with, or knew the girlfriends or boyfriends of, or had photographed before. They included Neneh Cherry’s half-brother, ex-TV presenter Eagle Eye, and Robert De Niro’s daughter).

- Literally

Favourite Photograph #55

From the late 1940's through the mid-70's, Mr. Faurer worked as a fashion photographer, producing images first for Junior Bazaar, then for magazines like Harper's Bazaar, Vogue and Flair. But most of his fashion prints and negatives were probably thrown away, Ms. Bell said. Before leaving on one of his trips to Paris in the late 1960's or early 70's, she said, Mr. Faurer had left that body of work with an acquaintance in New York. When he returned to the city, he was repeatedly told to retrieve his things or they would be thrown out. Mr. Faurer never picked them up.

- Margarett Loke (The New York Times)


Louis Faurer: Bowing for the Collections, French Vogue, 1973

Louis Fourer was born on August 28, 1916 in Philadelphia. “Faurer,” a misspelling of his last name at school, became legal by the time he graduated. He attended Philadelphia’s School of Commercial Art and Lettering from 1937 to 1940. Faurer started photographing in Philadelphia when he bought first camera in 1937. Winning a weekly photography contest in the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger a few months later convinced him to pursue photography as a career. He served as a civilian photographic technician for the U. S. Army Signal Corps in Philadelphia during World War II. With the help of Lillian Bassman, Faurer embarked on a career as a fashion photographer, publishing his first fashion photo in a 1948 issue of Junior Bazaar. He continued to shoot fashion into the 1960s, working for Flair, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, Look, Mademoiselle, Marie-Claire, Seventeen, and Vogue.

- MoCP (Museum of Contemporary Photography)

Favourite Painting #40

Gerald Murphy: Bibliothèque (Library), 1926–27

Gerald Murphy's paintings are a gold standard that backs, with creative integrity, the paper money of the couple’s legend. He started by assisting on sets for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, with quick lessons from the painter Natalia Goncharova. His work consists of crisply hard-edged, cunningly composed, subtly colored, semi-abstract pictures of machinery, common objects, architectural fragments, and, in a disturbing final image, a wasp battening on a pear. Numerous influences are plain, but Gerald jumped ahead of his time with a laconic style that was prescient of big-scale abstraction and of Pop art. (If one of the lost paintings, “Boatdeck”—a sensation at the 1924 Salon des Indépendants, in Paris—had survived, it surely would be an icon of modernism. Eighteen feet high by twelve wide, it billboarded transatlantic cultural intercourse with a tremendous image of ocean-liner structures.) “Watch” (1925), depicting clockwork, achieves a spankingly representational translation of Cubism. “Razor” (1924), which monumentalizes a safety razor, a fountain pen, and a matchbox, might enable future archeologists to reimagine the essential theory and practice of modern art, should every other example perish. It is by a man who wasn’t really an artist.

- Peter Schjeldahl (The New Yorker)

Favourite Film #18

Louis Malle’s critically acclaimed Murmur of the Heart (Le souffle au coeur) gracefully combines elements of comedy, drama, and autobiography in a candid portrait of a precocious adolescent boy’s sexual maturation. Both shocking and deeply poignant, this is one of the finest coming-of-age films ever made.

- The Criterion Collection


Louis Malle: Le souffle au coeur, 1971

Favourite Photograph #79

Angela Strassheim stages painstaking portraits of her evangelical family. She photographed her dead grandmother in her casket and her brother-in-law combing his son's hair before a mirror. They're surreal pictures, candy colored and strangely loving.

- Michael Kimmelman (The New York Times)

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Angela Strassheim: Untitled (Father and Son), 2004, from Strassheim's series Left Behind

Strassheim comes from a born-again Christian family in Minnesota. According to the exhibition’s press release, the title Left Behind refers not only to the “unsaved” souls left behind after the Rapture has transported the faithful into heaven but also to “the memory and evidence people create that outlives them." Portraits of the artist’s family are juxtaposed with images of domestic narratives, inspired by childhood and adult experiences.” The press release adds that Strassheim’s “obsessively careful compositions and lighting” were developed from her experience as a certified forensic photographer.

- Thomas Micchelli (The Brooklyn Rail)

Favourite Painting #14

On first glance, Fifer (1866) is simply a painting of an innocent young boy. In reality, however, it is one of Manet’s oddest “portraits” of Victorine Meurent: she was one of several models who sat for the painting. As a result, her eyes seem to peer strangely from another’s face. The fifer’s intense but abstracted gaze and light, half-formed eyebrows seem lifted directly from The Street Singer, and the hand that blocks Victorine’s mouth in that painting is echoed here by the fife before the boy’s lips - a reminder of Manet’s obsession with control.

- Nathalie Lagerfeld, Princeton Class of 2009


Edouard Manet: The Fifer, 1866

Of The Fifer, 1866, Zola remarked that Manet did not shrink from "the abruptness of nature": "His whole being bids him to see in patches, in simple elements charged with energy." The same claims would be made by the postimpressionists—patch and discontinuity, "arrangement" as against continuous modeling. If The Fifer were a little more abstract, more "Japanese," it would almost be a Van Gogh. At times, Manet's tact in balancing the decorative and the real almost passes belief, an example being the black stripe on the fifer's right leg—swelling and closing with negligent grace, extending the black of the tunic only to stop it an interval above the foot.

- Robert Hughes (TIME)

Favourite Painting #75

"Wearing pearls, a cardigan and a printed-chintz dress, Dali's C.Z. is cast in divine light and draws you in with her cryptic expression. If WASPishness were a religion, this would be the Madonna."

- Fiona Murray (Dan's Papers)


Salvador Dali: C.Z. Guest

Favourite Photograph #63

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Helmut Newton: Elsa Peretti as Bunny Girl, New York, 1975

Favourite Artist #31 (LIU YE / 劉野)

"But as with fairy tales themselves, something sinister sometimes creeps onto Liu's canvases. In “Who's Afraid of Madame L,” a pretty woman dressed as a schoolgirl holds a cane with her outstretched hands..."

- Anna Sansom (Whitewall)


Liu Ye's "Who is afraid of Madame L," 2005

Liu Ye's "Banned Book," 2006


"Liu Ye's studio bears evidence of his continued zest for children's literature in the stuffed-animal versions of Dick Bruna's Miffy that sit on a shelf next to catalogues of Bruna's work. Miffy, the funny bunny drawn with few lines and even fewer colors, appears in many of Liu's paintings, accompanying a girl to an art gallery. In concert with Miffy's Dutch origins, the two are always examining Mondrian's vibrant compositions of red, blue, and yellow. Perhaps it is a comment on the melding of high and low art, or on children's potential to absorb challenging ideas-or perhaps it is a subtle endorsement of the value of exposing people of all ages to international culture."

- Barbara Pollack (Modern Painters)


Liu Ye's "Boogie Woogie, Little Girl," 2005

Liu Ye's "International Blue," 2006

Installation view at Sperone Westwater Gallery

Liu Ye's "Once Upon a Time in Broadway," 2006


"...the paintings of Snow White, the girl in her dancing red shoes, and the portrait of Hans Christian Andersen perhaps initially seem somewhat apart from the others. Coincidentally, in the year that people around the world celebrated the bicentennial of the Danish storyteller’s birth, Liu Ye embarked upon a series of paintings derived from Hans Christian Andersen’s great body of fairy tales, including these three paintings. In truth, as a source of inspiration, the universe of Hans Christian Andersen brought Liu Ye full circle, straight back to the world of his childhood, one possessed of a dark, perilous secret. For, contrary to the experience of most Chinese children of his generation, during Liu Ye’s formative years, he had been introduced to and become entirely familiar with the oeuvre of this extraordinary storyteller.

Liu Ye’s father worked as an author of children’s books. Although this was an era where even children’s reading matter was thoroughly controlled by political ideology, Liu Senior, as a member of the work unit of the children’s press, had access to a library of children’s books from around the world which included anthologies of stories from authors like Hans Christian Andersen."

- Karen Smith (Liu Ye: Temptations / Sperone Westwater)


Liu Ye's "Hans Christian Anderson in the Snow (After Albert Kuchler)", 2005

Installation view at Sperone Westwater Gallery

Liu Ye's "Snow White," 2006

Favourite Photograph #81

Philippe Halsman's Jump Book, released in 1959, gave a more in-depth look at the photographer's concept of suspension. “Jumpology,” as Halsman referred to his new science, "is a method of interpreting someone's personality from a photograph of that person jumping. People tend to pose for photographers, but when asked to jump, they reveal whether they are rigid, fun, or mentally unstable."

Philippe Halsman: The Duke and Duchess of Windsor (from Halsman's Jump series), 1956

Favourite Photograph #51

Candida Höfer: The Merrion Dublin II, 2004

Favourite Photograph #47

Rineke Dijkstra: Olivier, The Foreign Legion, Camp Rafalli, Calvi, Corsica, June 18, 2001