Scene

ICE, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

As a shooter of film for forty years, it has been a struggle to grasp the impact of the digital age and the Internet on of the status of photography in our world.  The act of shooting has become an indulgent, social event.

Henry Wessel, sadly recently deceased in California, was a profound photographer, mentor, professor and thinker on photography, especially on the American West.

“Pressing the shutter is saying yes to the world.’” One of his most poignant quotations which set me back; upon arriving at LAX, he commented on the light intensity, “it looked like you could lean against it.” He was honored by many museum exhibitions from Szarkowski’s at Moma, to Eastman House, to Cologne. He was instrumental in the photo program at the San Francisco Institute, joining its faculty in 1973.

Lee Friedlander called him the “Photo Buddha.” I could mention Walker Evens or Cartier Bresson as his inspiration, but he embarked further into the ordinary terrain of life. This plots a direct collusion with Instagram and Facebook imaging. He was concerned about the proliferation of pictures and it’s deterioration of the import of the photograph.

“People don’t pay much attention these days to the descriptive, expressive and suggestive facts found in a good still photograph.

“The process of photographing is a pleasure: eyes open, receptive, sensing, and at some point connecting. It’s thrilling to be outside your mind, your eyes far ahead of your thoughts.”

That’s picture taking.

I cannot help to be critically drawn to the narcissistic nature of people’s images – selfies, food, pets and fronting famous objects. Nothing to do with image making but all about themselves. Sadly that is our future.

RAUSCHENBERG: The 1/4 Mile

October 28, 2018 – June 9, 2019, at LACMA

One of the most pioneering artists of the last century, Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) produced a diverse body of work characterized by experimentation, the use of varied mediums and methods, and cross-cultural exchange. Rauschenberg’s monumental The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece (1981–98) exemplifies these tenets of his artistic practice. Created over 17 years, the work is composed of 190 panels that, combined, measure approximately a quarter mile in length. An eclectic array of materials comprise the piece: textiles, mass media images, and photographs by the artist intermingle with bold passages of paint, while everyday objects such as chairs, cardboard boxes, and traffic lights add sculptural depth. Rauschenberg incorporated materials and photographs from the U.S., Asia, Europe, Latin America, and Northern Africa, including audio of ambient street sounds recorded during his travels.

The 1/4 Mile reveals the broad scope of Rauschenberg’s practice through the multitude of mediums and techniques employed, and serves as a self-contained retrospective of his oeuvre. This presentation is the first time The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece will be exhibited in its entirety.

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ANDY WARHOL: From A to B and Back Again

Nov 12, 2018 – Mar 31, 2019, at Whitney Museum of American Art

Few American artists are as ever-present and instantly recognizable as Andy Warhol (1928–1987). Through his carefully cultivated persona and willingness to experiment with non-traditional art-making techniques, Warhol understood the growing power of images in contemporary life and helped to expand the role of the artist in society. This exhibition—the first Warhol retrospective organized in the U.S. since 1989—reconsiders the work of one of the most inventive, influential, and important American artists. Building on a wealth of new materials, research and scholarship that has emerged since the artist’s untimely death in 1987, this exhibition reveals new complexities about the Warhol we think we know, and introduces a Warhol for the 21st century.

The exhibition positions Warhol's career as a continuum, demonstrating that he didn't slow down after surviving the assassination attempt that nearly took his life in 1968, but entered into a period of intense experimentation. The show illuminates the breadth, depth, and interconnectedness of the artist’s production: from his beginnings as a commercial illustrator in the 1950s, to his iconic Pop masterpieces of the early 1960s, to the experimental work in film and other mediums from the 1960s and 70s, to his innovative use of readymade abstraction and the painterly sublime in the 1980s. His repetitions, distortions, camouflaging, incongruous color, and recycling of his own imagery challenge our faith in images and the value of cultural icons, anticipating the profound effects and issues of the current digital age.

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JEWELRY: The Body Transformed

November 12, 2018 – February 24, 2019, at
The Met

What is jewelry? Why do we wear it? What meanings does it carry? Traversing time and space, this exhibition explores how jewelry acts upon and activates the body it adorns. This global conversation about one of the most personal and universal of art forms brings together some 230 objects drawn almost exclusively from The Met collection. A dazzling array of headdresses and ear ornaments, brooches and belts, necklaces and rings will be shown along with sculptures, paintings, prints, and photographs that will enrich and amplify the many stories of transformation that jewelry tells.

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CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI: Sculpture

July 22, 2018 – February 24, 2019, at MoMA, NY

Poet Ezra Pound spoke of artist Constantin Brancusi's work as providing “the master keys to the world of form.” Over a career that spanned half a century, Brancusi's innovations transformed sculpture as it had been known, and influenced generations of artists to come. After moving to Paris in 1904 from his native Romania, Brancusi affected the appearance of a Romanian peasant—a long beard, work shirt, and sandals—while embedding himself in avant-garde art circles. He soon began pushing modernist sculpture to the threshold of abstraction, developing a new, simplified vocabulary of graceful crescents, gleaming ovoids, and rough-hewn blocks that often evoked rather than resembled the things named in their titles, such as Bird in Space or Fish. He put the natural properties of his materials on display, carving directly into wood and stone and polishing metal to high reflectivity. The bases for his sculptures were often built of stacked elements—wood cubes, cylindrical slices, pyramidal blocks, or cruciform stones—becoming an integral component of the work itself and hinting at the possibility of infinite rearrangement, an idea that would prove fertile in future decades.

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VIDEOGAMES: Design/ Play/ Disrupt

September 8, 2018 – February 24, 2019, at
The Victoria and Albert Museum

The show will open in the Fall of 2018 and will examine the most diverse and eclectic manifestations of gaming, including indie productions, eSports, and politics. The stated goal is to fully and deeply explore the social, cultural, and artistic impact of games. It is a relief to hear that the exhibition won't follow a chronological order, opting instead for a thematic display of artworks. Artifacts will cover a twenty year period (2000-2018).

Organized into three sections - hence the subtitle, Design, Play and Disrupt - the exhibition will cover aspects related to the production of innovative original narratives like The Last of Us and Journey, the ascent of bedroom and indie coding, the new DIY arcade scene (represented, for instance by Robin Baumgarten's Arcade Backpack), and the typologies of game spaces.

It will also juxtapose traditional/modern art with modern interpretations, for instance Rene Magritte’s 1965 painting La Blanc Seing will be shown beside a section of the 2013 Cardboard Computer's game Kentucky Route Zero, which it inspired. There will be also interactive installations of spectacle and performance.

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CELEBRATING TINTORETTO: Portrait Paintings and Studio Drawings

October 16, 2018 – January 27, 2019, at The Met

Jacopo Tintoretto was one of the preeminent Venetian painters of the sixteenth century, renowned for his monumental narrative scenes and his insightful portraits of patricians and citizens. In celebration of the five hundredth anniversary of the artist's birth, this exhibition explores an innovative and little-studied aspect of Tintoretto's portraiture: small-scale, informal portrait heads characterized by immediacy, intense observation, and startling modernity. These works capture both the appearance and the spirit of the sitter, and are painted with the artist's famous prestezza, or quickness.

The exhibition brings together for the first time approximately ten portrait studies from European and American museums and private collections, drawing them into a larger discussion of the artist's portraiture and approach to painting. The exhibition also highlights significant facets of artistic practice in the Tintoretto workshop, in particular the dynamic relationship between Jacopo and his son Domenico, through a series of figural drawings and a painting in The Met collection, The Finding of Moses.

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THE NEW BERLIN: 1912 - 1932

October 5, 2018 – January 27, 2019, at The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels

Travel back in time to early 20th-century Berlin at an exhibition at Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique that portrays the horrors of the first world war, the excitement of the Golden 20s and the crises thereafter. There is particular emphasis on how society was changing and the various (short-lived) utopian movements, through paintings, sculptures, photography and film by Otto Dix, Raoul Hausmann, Kazimir Malevich and others.

The exhibition “The New Berlin” focuses on politicized art and the urban challenges of the modern but war-scarred metropolis between 1912 and 1932. Through paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs and films by artists such as Otto Dix, Raul Hausmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko, … the key movements and creative minds of this gripping period come alive again.

Berlin, a cosmopolitan, mythical artistic hotspot, and the capital of the first German democracy, was synonymous with artistic pluralism during the interwar. In Berlin, at a crossroads between East and West, art was closely linked to an everyday reality that was marked by crisis, social change, and decadence, but also by a short period of welfare known as the “Golden ‘20s”. It was a city where artists often painted a gloomy reality, despite the hope of a revival and a desire for peace after the First World War. A war that some had anticipated and others experienced at the front.

Based on the specific example of Berlin as the cultural metropolis of the ‘20s and on the various links between the Belgian and German art scene, this exhibition pays special attention to the society’s changes and utopias: the New Man, the New Woman, the New Objectivity, the New Building, the New Vision…

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BRUEGEL

October 2, 2018 – January 13, 2019, at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

2019 sees the 450th anniversary of the death of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c 1525/30 – 1569). To mark the occasion the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna is dedicating the world’s first ever major monograph exhibition to the artist widely regarded as the 16th century’s greatest Netherlandish painter.

Just over forty paintings by Bruegel’s own hand have been preserved to this day. The Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna owns by far the largest collection, with twelve panels. This is due not least to the fact that, already in the 16th century, Habsburg collectors had recognised the exceptional quality and originality of Bruegel’s imagery and endeavoured to acquire his prestigious works. Bruegel’s popularity is also down to the stunning compositions themselves, which are often moralising and always teeming with characters, inviting the viewer to reflect on the multi-layered complexity of the image contents.

In museums and private collections, Bruegel’s works are rightly held to be among the most precious, but also the most fragile inventories. To date, the vast majority of the wooden panels have never been loaned for exhibition purposes. So once the collection at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna is complemented by many paintings on loan from international museums and private collections, the overview of Bruegel’s entire oeuvre is set to be nothing short of sensational.

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REMBRANDT: Britain's Discovery of the Master

July 7, 2018 – October 14, 2018, at Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh

This exclusive new exhibition, which will only be shown in Edinburgh, reveals how the taste for Rembrandt’s work in Britain evolved over the past 400 years. From early beginnings around 1630, it grew into a mania that gripped collectors and art lovers across the country, reaching a fever pitch in the late-eighteenth century. The exhibition also reveals the profound impact of Rembrandt’s art on the British imagination, by exploring the wide range of native artists whose work has been inspired by the Dutch master, over four centuries, right up to the present day.

The exhibition brings together key works by Rembrandt which remain in British collections, including Belshazzar’s Feast (c.1635) from the National Gallery London, and Girl at a Window (1645) from Dulwich Picture Gallery, as well as star paintings now overseas, such as The Mill (1645/8) from the National Gallery in Washington, which left Britain when it was sold to a US collector for the staggering sum of £100,000 in 1911.

Rembrandt is renowned for the penetrating realism of his self-portraits and there will be some particularly fine examples in this show, including the extraordinary Self-Portrait, aged 51 (on long-term loan to the Scottish National Gallery) and Portrait of the Artist as Young Man (c.1629-31) from the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, which was the first painting by the artist to leave Holland and the first to enter a British collection, when it was presented to Charles I in the early 1630s.

It was Rembrandt’s portraits and landscapes that most attracted British collectors, and which had a particularly powerful impact on British artists. The exhibition will include his only portraits of ‘British’ sitters, Rev Johannes Elison and his wife Maria Bockenolle (both 1634), on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and key landscapes including The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1647) from the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. Although they were painted in Amsterdam, the Boston portraits depict a Dutch couple who lived in Norwich, and the paintings were in Britain by 1677. They are one of only three pairs of full-length portraits painted by Rembrandt, and have not been seen in the UK since 1929.

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WANDERLUST

May 10, 2018 – September 16, 2018, at the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin

When we think of the wanderer as a painterly motif, the famous painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich of circa 1817 comes to mind. This exceptional loan from the Hamburger Kunsthalle forms the starting point for a special exhibition held at the Alte Nationalgalerie, which follows this surprisingly central theme in art throughout the nineteenth century and all the way to Hodler and Gauguin.

With Rousseau’s call to get “back to nature!” and Goethe’s Sturm und Drang poetry, wandering around 1800 became the expression of a modern awareness of life. As part of a reaction against the rapid social changes that began in the French Revolution, a new form of decelerated self- and world knowledge developed, whose presence can still be felt today.

Since the Romantic period, artists have discovered nature for themselves, exploring it on foot and looking at it from new angles. Wandering, in art, came to stand for life’s journey, for symbolic pilgrimage. For the traveller, the self-determined journey on foot brought with it a new, intensified encounter with nature and a form of world-appropriation that was both sensual and physical.

The works shown in the exhibition, including masterworks by Caspar David Friedrich, Carl Blechen, Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Johan Christian Dahl, by Gustave Courbet, Ferdinand Hodler and Paul Gauguin, show just how powerful and fruitful the motif of the wanderer was in art throughout the nineteenth century, not only in Germany but in many places, from France to Norway and from Russia to the USA.

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AFTERMATH: Art in the Wake of World War One

June 5, 2018 – September 16, 2018, at the Tate, London

Tate Britain marks the centenary of the end of the First World War with a major exploration of how artists responded to the impact of the conflict. The horrors of war became a catalyst for a great amount of social change, but it was also a time of creativity and artistic reflection. Works by big names like Picasso will be shown alongside lesser known artists such as Winifred Knights, C.R.W. Nevison and Otto Dix.

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ANDY WARHOL: After Munch

May 26, 2018 – August 26, 2018, at Munch Museum, Oslo

Edvard Munch was one of Andy Warhol’s favourite artists, and he visited the Munch Museum in 1983. The gallery is returning the favour this year with Andy Warhol – After Munch, an exhibition of his take on famous Munch works, including drawings, silkscreen prints and paintings. They include his versions of The Scream, and Self-Portrait with Skeleton Arm and Madonna, plus a screening of his 1963 film Kiss.

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J. Paul Getty’s first museum was on the shores of the Pacific Palisades in the 1970's, at his home, which he acquired in the f1950's, now called The Getty Villa. I first visited it in the seventies, driving up the steep driveway in my VW bug, and walking through the Italianate structure with a mishmash of stuff. Upon his death, the Trust took on a new venture, the purchase of swath of over one hundred acres above the Santa Monica Hills. Getty hired the then reigning architect, Richard Meier, to deign the modernist structure. After an alleged one billion dollar expenditure, it opened to the public in 1997. Rumor has it that the endowment, estimated at $3.2 billion, is larger than all the other museums in the world combined. Hence the power to Acquire Everything! My interest is in the photographic collection.

This publisher’s recent visit to the Center brought nostalgia to mind. Upon my first viewings in the 1990's, I complained that the buildings interfered with the collection, and it’s ostentatious design distracted from the appreciation of the extensive collection. Separate buildings stood like soldiers to be saluted. I have admire Meier’s work at a distance, from the High Art Museum in Atlanta to his homes. But on this visit, I feel it is wearing very well; the travertine structure is warm and inviting, and aging with a lovely patina after twenty years. The public space with the columns and luscious gardens invite the public (free admission) to enjoy the complex and the surrounding spectacular view. Hear-hear to money well spent!

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A recent Flaneur sighting in San Francisco! This fetching show featured 40 Impressionist paintings and pastels, including key works by Degas—many never before exhibited in the United States—as well as those by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet, Mary Cassatt, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and 40 exquisite examples of period hats.

Best known for his depictions of Parisian dancers and laundresses, Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) was enthralled with another aspect of life in the French capital—high-fashion hats and the women who created them. The artist, invariably well-dressed and behatted himself, “dared to go into ecstasies in front of the milliners’ shops,” Paul Gauguin wrote of his lifelong friend.

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We have celebrated The Boulevardiers raison de’tre for five years now, founded on the French pre-occupation of strolling and window gazing in Paris, and London, and Rome. This Publisher was struck by a newly found term, "Faire du Lèche-Vitrines," which is crudely translated as “window licking.” Now knowing the decorum of the French, I am convinced that they would not apply this term to their promenading in the trendy section, the Marais, of Paris, which is the center of all that is cool, hip and expensive. The original center of Paris, built in the 13th century by the Knights Templar, much has remained, avoiding destruction by City decree in 1964. The Boulevardiers strolled through this section last summer on the way to L’Orangrie and gazed covetously at the many shops, bakeries and patisseries... and could very well appreciate this phrase.

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Guest Musing from The Boulevardiers "Muse" Sally Steele:

Never let it be said that the Boulevardiers don't celebrate all who wander in search of inspiration, or in daily observation. A recently published book, The Flâneuse, is a lively tome focusing on the French flâneuse, the feminine of flâneur: defined as a woman who is or who behaves like a flaneur; who is defined as an idle man-about-town.

Author Lauren Elkin: "The portraits I paint here attest that the flâneuse is not merely a female flâneur, but a figure to be reckoned with, and inspired by, all on her own…She is a determined, resourceful individual keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk."

For some time, I have been lamenting whilst walking my town, enviously observing the abundance of hipster bistros and coffee bars populated all day and into the evening by those lucky enough to grab the time to simply sit and watch the world go by. But how oh so boring that would be!

Recently perusing the tales of Diego, the sire of Galapagos tortoises, I smiled having "met" Diego in the Galapagos several years ago. And when reading about the rich arts scene in Milan, funded mostly via the largesse of the fashion houses, my head was full of images of days spent wandering there, not so long ago. As I poured over my travel photos I saw Los Angeles, Lima, and Santiago; New York, Maui and Athens; Venice, Istanbul, and Marseilles; Cannes, Sydney, and Tokyo, and so many more. I walked for miles in for London, from my favorite museum, The V&A, to Harrod's, to the trendy parts of town with all the big name galleries. Ditto for New York. And Rome, major renovations to ancient and Renaissance sites currently underway, again due to the largesse of the world's fashion leaders. And oh, Paris, strolling in the Tuileries in the drizzle after a glorious morning spent at l'Orangerie. Then there were some standout strolls on La Croisette amidst the excitement of the awards season. I live a fanciful life!

I'm lucky enough to be partner to the ultimate flâneur, who has so graciously guided me into becoming a full-fledged flâneuse.

Here's to women everywhere, and to living a life that takes the good walk, and turns it into the truly great walk.

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More reflective of how important this closing was than the claim that, ‘the owners let it go,’ were the results of the auction this week of items from the restaurant. The items went off the hook pricewise. The sign alone, estimated at $5-7,000 sold for $96,000! The ashtrays went for $10,000! (A fifteen-hour marathon auction!) This enthusiasm for artifacts, not only harkens back to the MAD MEN ERA, but also revered to very recently, indicates the longing for a place where the elite and the common folk, albeit New Yorker’s of means, can mingle and gawk at one another in a gorgeous setting. I had my last martini there, last fall.

This Publisher had the fortunate experience to eat there a few times, both with Time Inc. Editors, and with my parents. My Dad exclaimed…"$6.00 for carrots!" once in the POOL ROOM. I did not give it a second thought. I always coveted the chain ball curtains that lined the Grill Room windows to the outside. I intended for years to install them in my home, and even tried to source them at one point unsuccessfully. But the spirit of the restaurant was unique. There was the mention in the Metropolitan Section of the New York Times, of a conversation overheard by the Maître D' on the phone when asked to forward a message to a patron at the bar who was Indian. He inquired, Dot or Feather?

Everything about the place bespoke of power and success. The NY times recently published the seating chart of the patrons. A veritable who’s who of the publishing and financial world of the US. It did shift occasionally over the years since its opening in 1959, from various power brokers and intuitions. A number of the items were reserved for the Metropolitan Museum’s collection. This included the mid-night blue sofas designed by Philip Johnson. Martha Stewart was in attendance. She blurted out that she wished the nickel wine coasters, designed by the infamous architectural critic, Louie Huxtable, to be used at her ‘next’ wedding. A notable Saarinen Tulip table went for $36,000!

There has always been this murky history to the restaurant’s design. The renowned Mies van der Rohe designed the Seagram’s Building for the liquor magnate family, Bronfman. At that time, Philip Johnson was his assistant. Johnson claimed later to be a partner in design which has been disputed, but he was definitely involved in the design of the Four Seasons, which came a few years later.

Mr. Niccolini, the restaurant owner, who used salty language to refer to the building owner, ended the auction carrying a platter of pink cotton candy, a signature desert for the eatery, across the Pool Room upon which various patrons pulled off sections. A patron who flew up from Charleston to pick up ‘whatever’ she could proclaimed, “A place like this won’t happen again!"

Source: The New York Times

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Italian Fascism finally dies…with the recent death of supporter Licio Gelli. I must say I have a weakness for Fascist architecture. Visiting the Valle de los Caídos ("Valley of the Fallen"), a Catholic basilica and a monumental memorial to the dictator Francisco Franco of Spain shot chills of fear and admiration through my veins. Talk about “reductivism” at its purist, even the most libertarian minded person gasps at this monument. The scoundrel was convicted numerous times for bank fraud and embezzlement but never did hard time, due to his “health” but managed lived till 96 years of age. He personified the glorious phrase only Italians could invent, “dietrologia” which means that the widely held suspicion that behind official government narrative lurks a more sinister explanation.

His political and financial shenanigans set the bar for the unbridled greed that we see on Wall Street today.

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The raking light of fall brings out the Flaneur in me, the season of Flanerie. Elaine Sciolino reminds us of the first establishment of this pastime in literature, “Tableau de Paris,” a twelve volume set of observations the gestalt the of ‘street’ in Paris. Half a century later, this sites’ figurehead, Charles Baudelaire, demarked the ‘wander-spectator’ activity as flaneur. “The crowd is his habitat, as is air for the bird or water for the fish” he quoted.

This activity is so important to the French, that Hermes created a pop-up museum on the left bank to honor its significance. The artistic director of the project, Pierre-Alexis Dumas also created an illustrated book on the subject. It’s a small single room structure with four window displays, including from the collection of a past president, Emile Hermes.

To observe yes, to interact no. The sounds, the smells and the visual jewels glistening in the shop windows- draws us to the streets of Paris, or London or our favorite ville, Roma. And of course, the most animated of them all – the people who stroll and sit and observe in the cafes, not the harried New Yorkers who are irritated by strollers in their path. Years ago, I proposed a story for Life Magazine, on the important promenades of the world, but to no avail. Sadly, it is not an American occupation.

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Whether I imagined it as a child or I actually saw the magazine HOLIDAY, I knew it was a gem of graphic design and photography. I knew Slims Aarons was a rock star, even when I was a young photographer. Though I was more interested in ‘real’ journalism, I admired the veneer he lay over celebrities and glamour, locales-who did not want to be there? A few art directors changed the face of magazines - the “golden age of magazines”: Alex Brodovitch, Frank Zachary and Roger Black. They produced a short-lived magazine, Portfolio in 1949, regarded as the “definitive graphic magazine” by The New York Times. Zachary died at age 101 yesterday in East Hampton, NY.

Brodovitch changed the thinking on typography, especially for Harper’s Bazaar, that I subscribed to for years just to see his work (overlaying type); Zachary changed the importance of photography in magazines. The weeklies were in full bloom in the 1960's & 70's, Saturday Evening Post, Life, Look, Town and Country and Esquire were employing photographers and giving them extravagant exposure. Zachary assigned the greats: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa and Arnold Newman.

Born to a Croatian immigrant parents (1914), named Frank Zaharija, his father a steel worker in Pittsburgh, Zachary never attended college, he climbed his way up through hard work. He art directed at Holiday (1951-1964) including being managing editor, Town and Country, Modern Photography to which I subscribed as a child, Travel and Leisure.

I think his brilliance is best described by a friend, Owen Edwards, “Like any good anthropologist, he studied this particular tribe, figured out what most interested them and their habits, and found writers [including Faulkner] and photographers who could show their world in the most entertaining way.”

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Publisher’s Musings: Dateline Saigon ~ January 26, 2015

As publisher, I have vowed not to include politics. But after visiting the War Remnants Museum here, which brought tears to my eyes, I think my renewal of the power of photography urged me to reflect on this exhibition, which covers the second floor, of heart wrenching imagery. In an era that has eroded the value of images with self-indulging selfies, seeing photos by some of my heroes, Larry Burrows, Robert Capa and Phillip Jones Griffith (whom I met) rocked me to the core. Burrows and Capa died here. Visitors seemed unable to focus on them.

Life Magazine is well represented here with large reproductions. As an Air Force cadet, I was frightened by what I saw. The images contributed to my request for a Conscientious Objector status. It was considered the first ‘live’ coverage of a war. I remember clearly one issue with tiny pictures of the 58,000 men who died. Both the imagery of the devastation of incursions wreaked on the Vietnamese and the impact the war had on the shooters, it was the darkest period of U.S. history. In the name of stopping Communism, our inexcusable use of Agent Orange is illustrated in the museum in unfathomable images. It is the power of this photography that is widely considered to be what initiated President Johnson’s withdrawal from the war. Despite the pain, it was life-affirming to see the power of photography!

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This is Picasso's umpteenth fifteen minutes of fame:
His renovated mansion in Paris, Musée Picasso Paris, has just re-opened after an exorbitant five year renovation, ribbon cut by François Hollande himself, but under the dark shadow of the Cultural minister, Korean-born Fleur Pellerin, who declared she has not ‘read’ a book in years and could not name a book of the recently awarded Nobel Prize winner for Literature, Patrick Modiano, France’s fifteenth in the category.

Back on home turf, there are two private gallery showings of his work that rival any museum exhibitions, in fact many of the pieces were loaned from museums. They almost seem to challenge one another, since they are both top tier galleries, The Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea and Pace Gallery, both in New York. The Gagosian is a photograph-based exhibition, titled "Picasso & the camera" curated by an old friend of his, John Richardson, designed by a Las Vegas show designer David Korens. There are many images of his various mistresses, s well as films. Despite his reputation as a misogynist, the museum’s president, Anne Baldassari, denies this but claims he only had difficulty maintaining relationships. I saw the MoMa exhibition in the 1990's of his with a room dedicated to his various wives and mistresses and the progressive horrification of their faces as he lost interest in them. Quite revealing. The Pace exhibition focuses in a different direction. On his enduring relationship with his last wife Jacqueline Roque, until his death, with tender imagery and a loving hand.

As an artist, I cannot help but to admire his vitality and fecundity. I read a memoir of life in the South of France, especially the summer jaunts to the country with the likes of Francoise Gilot. To top off the adoration, the exhibition at the Met of Lauder’s Cubist collection (Interesting Openings below) features many of his paintings from that period.

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On every trip to NY, I visit one of my favorite urban spaces, The Grand Central Oyster Bar. Between my passion for oysters and my adoration for Guastavino's tile craft, this is my ideal spot. We traveled to 103rd Street this last trip to enjoy a beautifully illustrated and informative exhibition at The Museum of New York, of his sumptuous tilework throughout New York employed by McKim, Mead and White, and NY City (including the recently uncovered bottom to the Queensborough Bridge, now a Farmer's Market).

Guastavino tile is the "Tile Arch System" patented in the United States in 1885 by Valencian (Spanish) architect and builder Rafael Guastavino (1842–1908). Guastavino vaulting is a technique for constructing robust, self-supporting arches and architectural vaults using interlocking terracotta tiles and layers of mortar to form a thin skin, with the tiles following the curve of the roof as opposed to horizontally (corbelling), or perpendicular to the curve (as in Roman vaulting). This is known as timbrel vaulting, because of supposed likeness to the skin of a timbrel or tambourine. It is also called "Catalan vaulting" and "compression-only thin-tile vaulting".

Guastavino tile is found in some of New York’s most prominent Beaux-Arts landmarks and in major buildings across the United States.

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CREATURE FEATURE

The 166-million-year-old extinct squid relative Belemnoteuthis antiquus had a large, internal shell that likely made it slower than its modern-day, shell-less relations.

Credit: Courtesy of Jonathan Jackson and Zoë Hughes/NHMUK

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences:
The ancestors of octopuses and squid once sported hard shells, but when did they lose their "mobile homes" and become agile, soft-bodied swimmers? A new study finds that this change may have occurred during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.

Squishy creatures like squid and octopuses rarely leave behind well-preserved fossils. That has left scientists perplexed over when in the creatures' evolutionary history these cephalopods lost their shells. Researchers have now used a mix of fossil and genetic models to solve the puzzle.

The reason? The loss of shells made the ancient relatives of the modern-day octopus, squid and cuttlefish nimbler, a feature that likely helped these animals catch prey and evade predators, Vinther said.

The heavy shells led to the demise of many cephalopod ancestors, because they couldn't "keep up with the 'new [shell-less] kids on the block,'" Vinther told Live Science.

The researchers made the discovery using a molecular clock technique, which helped them determine when different cephalopod branches sprouted on the family tree.

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