I have just finished reading The Painted Girls — a great new work of historical fiction. Set in Belle Époque Paris, The Painted Girls tells the story of the Van Goethem sisters, students (les petits rats) at the Paris Opéra Ballet School. The middle sister, Marie, was the real-life model for Edgar Degas’ rather revolutionary sculpture, Little Dancer Aged 14. Degas, the Opéra, known criminals of the day and even Émile Zola are all characters in Buchanan’s rich, captivating novel. Her juxtaposition of the beauty of the ballet, the Paris Opéra and the entire era with the ugliness and despair of the daily lives of the Van Goethem sisters and the world from which they come and seemingly cannot escape is immensely powerful. Most profound though is the deep and quite exquisite relationship between these sisters.
The Painted Girls (Penguin Group, 2013)
With Venice on my mind this week, I have been thinking about one of my favorite spots in this wonderful city — the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Located right on the Grand Canal in her beloved home, Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, it houses her renowned collection of modern masterworks as well as special exhibitions — a Robert Motherwell show just opened this week. Peggy lived at Palazzo Venier dei Leoni from 1949 until her death in 1979 and opened it to the public every summer in order to share her growing collection. I love the Palazzo and all of the works of art therein, but I especially love the sculpture garden which is also the buriel site of Peggy’s many dogs and Peggy herself. I find it the perfect place to sit and imagine the extraordinary life that was lived there.
www.guggenheim-venice.it/inglese/news.php
Today begins the previews of la Biennale di Venezia — the 55th International Art Exhibition in Venice. We love Venice best at just this time, at the start of the Biennale, when the city is full of the contemporary art world’s most notable figures and an energy and vibe that is almost unmatched. The Director of this year’s exhibition, titled Il Palazzo Enciclopedico (The Encyclopedic Palace), is the New Museum’s Massimiliano Gioni — perhaps making for the most impactful Biennale yet.
The Biennale is open to the public from June 1 – November 24, 2013.
I finally picked up a copy of How To Boil An Egg, Rose Carrarini’s newest cookbook just published in February! I love Rose Bakery in Paris and I love her first book, Breakfast, Lunch, Tea. How To Boil An Egg too has that simple, stylish design and is full of gorgeous recipes and exudes the freshness and particular sensibility that is Rose Bakery. And instead of photographs, this cookbook is illustrated with original paintings by botanical artist Fiona Strickland. Check out this lovely video about this lovely book.
How To Boil An Egg by Rose Carrarini (Phaidon, 2013)
This weekend marks the close of the 28th International Festival of Fashion & Photography organized by Villa Noailles in Hyères, France. This festival seems the perfect legacy for the owners and creators of the villa — Vicomte and Vicomtesse Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles. Legendary modern art patrons and collectors, they commissioned numerous works of art and financed films in the 1920s and 30s by their surrealist friends Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. Man Ray’s film was actually shot in part at their Hyères residence and starred, among others, the Vicomte and Vicomtesse themselves. The villa was designed by architect Rob. Mallet-Stevens, and is considered one of the earliest and most important modern structures in France. Completed in 1925, its original furnishings represent the work of some of the leaders of the modern movement including Eileen Gray, Pierre Chareau, Georges Djo-Bourgeois and Francis Jourdan. The much-lauded Cubist garden was designed by Josef Hoffmann-trained architect Gabriel Guévrékian. Today, the Villa Noailles through its programs, residencies and exhibitions very clearly represents the keen vision of the Vicomte and Vicomtesse to support and encourage emerging artists and designers. We imagine they would be very pleased.
www.villanoailles-hyeres.com
With all of the hype surrounding the newest film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, I have found myself thinking about a certain Fitzgerald. Although Zelda’s (1900-1948) identity and legacy seem too often enmeshed in that of her famous husband, she was in her own right an accomplished artist, dancer and writer. I often think about a fascinating exhibition of her work I stumbled upon several years ago — wishing I had purchased the catalog, if there even was one — that included her paintings and the lovely paper dolls created in the 1930s for her daughter Scottie and later for her own pleasure. Her paper dolls are very delicate and detailed, as one would expect them to be. Her paintings contain quite distorted, sometimes grotesque figures, even those of ballet dancers, which appear to have been a favorite subject. Fitzgerald’s body of work in a way feels at once cohesive and as divergent as we have come to understand her life to be.
We are very pleased to be working on the African Rainforest Conservancy’s Artists for Africa Spring Gala on Tuesday, April 23 at The Bowery Hotel. There is a virtual auction on Paddle8 happening right now until the day of the event with incredible works of art by Kiki Smith and Gerald Forster among many others. Check out this fantastic auction for this very vital organization.
www.africanrainforest.org, http://paddle8.com/auctions/artistsforafrica
We recently visited the Museum of Modern Art secretly hoping to find Tilda Swinton sleeping in her glass case — unfortunately we were most unsuccessful. Instead, we decided to check out Bill Brandt: Shadow & Light that opened last month. Regarded by many to be one of the most significant British photographers of the 20th century, Brandt was born in Germany in 1904. After a brief stint in Vienna, he spent five years in Paris, from 1929 to 1934, before moving to London permanently. During his time in Paris he briefly assisted in Man Ray’s studio which proved to have a lasting influence on his work, most obvious in his nudes from the 1950s and his photographs of eyes from the 1960s. We found the nudes among the most compelling in this exhibition, quite abstract and some even quite surrealist. His series of eyes of notable artists including Alberto Giacometti and Louise Nevelson, photographed extremely close up, are also among the most powerful in this really great show. Bill Brandt: Shadow & Light is on view until August 12.
http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1343
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| Corita Kent, E eye love, 1968 |
We recently saw a great exhibition at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College curated by Michael Duncan and our friend, the museum’s director, Ian Berry — Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent. A prolific graphic artist and print maker, Kent created murals, posters and serigraphs with themes of spirituality and politics at the forefront. Her work, the bulk of which was made in the 1960s and 70s, very much speaks to those tumultuous years, and Kent’s overwhelming hope for peace and love. She was an art educator and nun in Los Angeles where she counted among her friends design luminaries Buckminster Fuller and Charles and Ray Eames. She left the order and L.A. in 1968 and moved to Boston to focus full-time on her art. This is the first major retrospective of Kent — clearly one of the most important and influential pop artists and women of her generation.
Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent is at the Tang Museum through July, and will be at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland in 2014 and the Andy Warhol Museum in 2015.
http://tang.skidmore.edu/index.php/
Here at THE BATON we speak constantly of the importance and necessity of collaboration. Most winter days I think of master collaborator NAU, a luminary Portland-based clothing company, as I wear my favorite cold weather coat to face the elements. NAU’s sustainability practices are almost unmatched and they give 2% of each sale to one of their five Partners for Change, each one an environmental or humanitarian organization, and the consumer chooses to which of the five that percentage will go. We also love the fact that they feature on their website friends who are positively and powerfully impacting the world. One item from their line is matched with each of these individuals and NAU donates 5% of every sale of that item to the charity of that friend’s choice. We think however that our personal no turning back moment was a few years ago at NAU’s pop-up store in Soho where they invited our friend TS McFadden (interviewed on THE BATON on New Year’s Eve 2012) to show his Mother Series — works which are created by removing dried, left over paint from his palettes and remounting and thus repurposing it as works of art in their own right — in their lower level art and performance space. Check out this very nice video of the installation.
www.nau.com, www.tsmcfadden.com
