Favourite Painting #10 (The Cocktail Party)

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.

Complicated compositions such as this one can easily become chaotic. To establish visual order, Katz here deployed a few, key formal devices. First, all the figures, regardless of their distance from the viewer, are the same height so that they fill the bottom half of the canvas as a uniform mass. Above them, the canvas is divided into thirds by the dark studio windows whose rhythmic rectangles are echoed in those of the buildings across the street. Katz supports this very stable geometry with a palette limited primarily to black, white, and grey; a few additions of local color—especially from the red family—punctuate the bottom center of the composition.

Katz adopted the large scale and distinctive cropping of contemporary cinema to picture his rarified slice of urban life. Such borrowings came easily to the artist, who had been an avid moviegoer for years. For the viewer, they suggest an implicit correspondence between the artist's personal experience and the glamorous, fantasy world of a Hollywood movie.

- The Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University

An Obsession with Collier Schorr's Obsession

"Whatever I’m drawn to I run to."

"A theme of twinship has always run through my work, of people that look alike. And that was another reason I was drawn to wrestling because I feel like wrestlers look a certain way. And I’ve grown to love that face. And so I’m looking for guys that fit that pattern. I’m looking for this tribe of people. Usually their ears get a little smaller as time goes by and the ridge starts to come out of their forehead. They start to get a bit more of a heavy brow. The nose is either pushed up or it’s pushed down. For me they’re really beautiful, but they’re definitely unusual looking. I remember that even about guys in my high school. The guys that wrestled looked different than the other guys. They weren’t the same kind of sports hero, but they were sportsmen."

"I like devastation. I like exhaustion. I really like seeing someone that I know can’t barely get up. The thing about a wrestling practice is, in a good school like Blair, the coach will get every last bit of energy out of you and then you’re just deflated. And there’s a peacefulness in that moment that I really love, to see someone who’s just used their entire body. For me it’s all performance, it’s all dance. Particularly wrestling practice. It’s about choreography because there are particular moves. There’s many of them and they put them in certain orders. And they do certain moves with names and everyone knows those moves. So instead of a plié, it’s a single leg or something. I love watching them perform these movements and in an extremely graceful way."

- Collier Schorr (PBS | art:21)





PBS | art:21: Loss & Desire featuring Collier Schorr

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

Alex Da Corte

Cool Hunting's Seth Brau Interviews Alex Da Corte

"...and most people say yes."

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"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.

The Magnetic Fields' Nothing Matters When We're Dancing featuring John Barrowman as Captain Jack Harkness

Paul's Postcard: Saul Leiter

Mr. Leiter captured the passing illusions of everyday life with a precision that might almost seem scientific, if it weren't so poetically resonant and visually layered.

His images depict a complex interaction of people, architecture and weather that is full of fragmented, partial, veiled or multiplied forms and figures. People are seen through plate-glass surfaces covered with condensation, or in mirrors that slice up space. Their distant forms can be veiled in snow and shrouded by a building canopy that descends on the scene like a too solid final curtain, as is the case with ''Canopy, New York.'' In the end his subject is the urban visual experience -- not people on the street, but what they see.

- Roberta Smith (The New York Times)


Saul Leiter's "Canopy (New York)", 1958

Raymond Loewy (1893-1986)

Raymond Loewy (1893-1986) designed many of the corporate logos and objects that became defining images of the period between the 1930s and the early 1960s, like the Lucky Strike cigarette package, the rounded Coke bottle and the classic "United UPA 100" jukebox from 1957. Born in France, he translated a distinctly European sense of style into dozens of American industrial objects and gave household appliances an almost unprecedented visual command within a space. A savvy businessman known for the "hard sell" approach, Loewy also realized that image is one of the most important facets in moving product and he paid great attention to both his personal appearance and that of his company. At the height of his career he had offices in America, London and France, and it was said that on the average, three out of four Americans would encounter his designs each day.

Loewy trained briefly as an engineer in France, before being called to fight in World War I. He moved to America in 1919 to pursue a career in graphic design, and, for most of his life he maintained houses in both countries. His first jobs were window dressing for Macy's and Saks Fifth Avenue and illustrating fashion magazines. He established his own firm in 1930. Loewy's winning tactic for design was to make products so visually seductive that consumers would feel the need to buy them. He was undeterred by the added challenge of trying to work during the Depression, managing to continually design objects that sold miraculously well. It was almost as though he were prematurely introducing the optimism and freewheeling consumption of the 1950s. Stylistically, he gave his objects an innate kinetic energy, designed in shapes that suggest motion like teardrops and bullets. He would add features like horizontal racing stripes to accentuate the theme of speed and movement. For his objects and furniture he used a great deal of chrome and bakelite in clean, mechanical forms. He simple maxim was that, "Good design keeps the user happy, the manufacturer in the black, and the esthete unoffended."

Major American corporations like Sears Roebuck, Coca-Cola, the Pennsylvania Railroad Company and Studebaker hired Loewy to redesign their existing products and to design their forthcoming ones. For Sears he created the softly curved steel frame for the 1935 "Super Six Coldspot" refrigerator, and went on to design the next two versions, changing the exterior enough so that people would want to update their model yearly. He designed the "S-I" train for Pennsylvania, featured at the 1937 New York World's Fair, as well as their sleek "K45" locomotive. Loewy was responsible for Studebaker's 1947 "Champion," and the 1950 "Commander" with round edges and a subtle fin motif. He also designed busses for Greyhound and, in 1939, contributed to the New York World's Fair a prototype for a streamlined rocket ship. In the late 1960's he was commissioned by NASA to create the interior for their Skylab space capsule.

A bold self-publicist, Loewy published his autobiography Never Leave Well Enough Alone in 1951. He recounted that his start in industrial design came when, at sixteen, he designed and sold a successful model airplane. Over the course of his career he combined presentation, functionality and spectacle to create an enduring image of the mid-century industrial designer.

- R 20th Century


DF-2000 cabinet, 1965, by Doubinsky Frères, France, wood and laminate with red and orange molded plastic drawer fronts, (49.21 x 41.34 x 21.65 inches).

For S. / Winona Ryder / Angelina Jolie / Brittany Murphy

@2:39
Lisa: Lady, back off!
Mrs. Gilchrist: Was I talking to you?
Lisa: No, you were spitting on me, so mellow fuckin' out!
Mrs. Gilchrist: Don't you tell me what to do.
Lisa: Look, she gave your husband a rim job. Big fuckin' deal! I'm sure he was begging for it, and I heard it was like a pencil anyway.
Mrs. Gilchrist: Why you - how dare you!
Lisa: Some advice, okay? Just don't point your fuckin' finger at crazy people!

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)

Rei Sato's "CUTENESS"

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About Chance Encounters, 2008

Lehmann Maupin Gallery will present the first New York solo exhibition of the artist Rei Sato (26 June - 8 August 2008). Her seemingly childlike approach to painting and drawing provides an insight into feminine identity and perspective in Japan through the usage of simple figurative forms, bold compositions and expressive color.

For this exhibition, Rei Sato will present a new series of paintings, drawings and photographs influenced by ‘cuteness’ or what is known in Japan as ‘kawaii.’ Sato’s process begins with taking chance photographs of the ordinary like a parked car, a grassy plain along the highway or a cracked sidewalk. These are then printed onto a canvas and Sato superimposes images of children, butterflies and furry animals into the scenery with watercolor and line drawing. Sato communicates a form of escapism by removing the everyday through this series of manipulations.

Rei Sato (born 1984 in Yamagata Prefecture, Japan) currently lives and works in Tokyo. She was discovered by Takashi Murakami at GEISAI#1 event in 2002.

- ArtDaily

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Dragonfly, 2008

Copycat, 2008

Picnic, 2008

What's Up, What's Up?, 2008

Postcard from Malia Stewart @ Jackson Fine Art featuring the work "Andy (Warhol) under the Silver Cloud" by Steve Schapiro

Anjelica Huston wearing "The Jealous Husband" by Alexander Calder featured in the upcoming "Calder Jewelry" @ Philadelphia Museum of Art

A 1976 cover illustration from The New York Times Magazine shows Angelica Huston wearing a Calder necklace known as "The Jealous Husband." Her body presents the sculpture, while the necklace enhances her beauty - a perfect performance.

- Karla Klein Albertson (Style Century Magazine)


Anjelica Huston wearing "The Jealous Husband" (c. 1940), by Alexander Calder, in a 1976 photograph by Evelyn Hofer.

Calder family sculpture runs like connective tissue through Philadelphia.

After emigrating from Scotland in 1868, Alexander Milne Calder made 250 sculptures for City Hall, including the statue of William Penn.

Son Alexander Stirling Calder created the figures on the Swann Memorial Fountain on the Parkway.

And the Philadelphia Museum of Art owns many works by his son, the Alexander Calder many of us know best. His magnificent 1964 mobile is a familiar sight in the Great Stair Hall. Few people know, however, that throughout his life, this Calder created individual small sculptures that can be worn by human beings.

Starting July 12 and running through Nov. 2, an exhibit, "Calder Jewelry," will put roughly 100 necklaces, bracelets, pins, earrings and tiaras on display in the Exhibition Gallery of the museum's Perelman Building. Accompanying the show is a beautifully illustrated companion book published by the Calder Foundation.

The 20th-century Calder (1898-1976) never considered his jewelry a lesser art form. The earrings and necklaces he made individually from hammered silver or brass wire often have suspended sections that react to movement like his mobiles.

Most of us wear our jewelry, but Calder's jewelry seems to wear the owner.

"I was awestruck with how beautiful the pieces were," says Elisabeth Agro, associate curator of American modern and contemporary crafts and decorative arts, who is responsible for the show's installation. "Depending on your personality, you either become activated by the piece itself - become part of the sculpture - or it uses you as a post to be placed upon."

The bold pieces - many featuring the dramatic spiral forms that were a Calder favorite - might not suit the pale and petite. The catalog includes a famous photo of actress Anjelica Houston wearing a hammered-brass necklace the artist called "The Jealous Husband" - the former model can carry it off.

Many pieces made for Calder's beloved wife, Louisa, are gathered together in a special section of the exhibition. "I decided to open the show with the work he made for his wife," Agro says. "The jewelry is a very intimate expression of his devotion to her."

In a 1950 photograph, artist Georgia O'Keeffe wears a brooch with the initials OK that her friend "Sandy" Calder had made just for her. Calder never reproduced or made multiple copies of his jewelry creations.

Fortunately for collectors, he did offer some of the 1,800 or so pieces he made to the public, some through exhibitions at the Marian Willard Gallery in New York. He also sent out collections for "trunk shows" in other cities.

In May 2006, two brass necklaces - both made in the 1940s - sold for $284,800 and $318,400 at Sotheby's New York. A silver bug pin in the same sale brought $120,000.

- Karla Klein Albertson (The Philadelphia Inquirer)

"Calder Jewelry" opens July 12 and runs through Nov. 2 at Philadelphia Museum of Art's Perelman Building.

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)

*Please Click On Image (Below)

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)

Tim Walker

"We were worried about applying the powder, but they were so vain they loved it"

- Tim Walker


"A lot of people get confused when they see this image. They think it was done by computer, but we actually took pigment powder, mixed it with talc to get the right ice-cream pastel colours, and brushed it into the cats.

The owners were two proud members of the Persian cat club. I can't remember how I found them, but they turned up in a van, covered in cat fur, and stood breathing down my neck as I took the picture. We were worried about putting all that powder into the animals' fur, but they said: "Oh no, they absolutely love it." The cats were such vain creatures - they adored being touched and pampered.

We didn't really think about which cats, or how many, should be done in which colours. We just did each one, and then they had to go back into their cat beds in the owners' van. I think I lost count of how many were pink and how many were blue, but when we were finished they all came out and looked great together. There wasn't enough light to do the picture indoors - but, by a fluke, all the cats seemed to gravitate to this clematis at the bottom of some steps. I didn't arrange them. This is just what the cats did, and they all pretty much stayed where they were throughout. So it's actually quite a naturalistic portrait - apart from the colour.

At the time, in May 1998, I had no idea how the picture would resonate with people. But it has been the image I've been asked about the most. For some reason, people are just fascinated with it - more than any model, house or celebrity I've ever shot. Everyone wants to know about the pastel cats."

- Tim Walker (The Guardian)

Renate Müller's Therapeutic Toys for H. Josef Leven (1960's)

This Therapeutic Zoo was the result of a collaboration between designer Renate Müller and her former instructor Helene Haeusler. Their unique and celebrated collection of therapeutic and developmental toys were produced in the late 1960's through early 1971 for German manufacturer H. Josef Leven. These large jute and leather toys have handles and tabs for tugging, wrestling, hugging and riding.



"Therapeutic Toy" Elephant made by Renate Muller for H. Josef Leven, Germany, 1969, (17'' L x 7" W x 15" H), through R 20th Century.



"Therapeutic Toy" Hippopotamus made by Renate Muller for H. Josef Leven, Germany, 1969, (30" L x 13" W x 13" H), through R 20th Century.

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)

Sloane Tanen

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Sloane Tanen is a painter whose work has been exhibited in a number of shows that can be found in private and corporate collections in Manhattan, Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and holds graduate degrees in literary theory from NYU and in art history from Columbia University. Sloane lives with her husband in New York City. She is the author of Bitter with Baggage Seeks Same, Going For The Bronze, Hatched!, and the children’s book Where Is Coco Going?

"Wish I could shut my playboy mouth..." - Lady GaGa

Lady GaGa, who’s fond of performing in naughty underwear ensembles, chains and stripper heels, got her start playing Brooklyn parties and clubs in Manhattan in 2005 with her equally brazen backup dancers. “I put together a show in New York where we spun beats on vinyl and I played keyboards over the records,” she says. “We wore matching bikinis,” Lady GaGa giggles, adding that the show was “yummy.”

It remains to be seen whether or not the rest of America will find Lady GaGa’s musical offerings as delicious as New York does. Her music sounds not unlike a drunken Madonna, Peaches and Kylie Minogue recording session with lots of sticky Champagne spilled on the demos. Lady GaGa’s debut disc, made for the “rock and rollers who wanted to listen to pop records,” drops this summer.

- Charlie Amter (Los Angeles Times)

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

*Please Click On Image (Below)

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

Yves-Henri-Donat-Mathieu Saint Laurent (1936-2008)

"Chanel gave women freedom. Yves Saint Laurent gave them power. He was someone who was very shy and introverted, who had only very few friends and hid himself from the world.

Like all creators, Yves Saint Laurent had two faces, a public face and a private face.

He no longer liked the world of today's fashion... he said it didn't understand him. He had a great, immense love affair with fashion. It's true that he left the profession, but in a couple you can split up because you must do so ... and still be very unhappy. That was his case."

- Pierre Berge (BBC)


"Yves Saint Laurent was born August 1, 1936 in Oran, in French Algeria. His father owned a chain of movie houses and was prosperous. His mother loved fashion. The childhood, however, was traumatic and tortuous. He was a delicate and effeminate boy who, as the Telegraph obit points out, had a solitary childhood amusing himself with his creative fancies, like making paperdolls to play with.

The story as he told it, later in life, to a mutual friend of his and mine was darker. One afternoon as an eight year old, he was raped in one of his father’s theaters. The perpetrator, he recounted, was his father – the father who he also said beat him throughout his childhood. The taunting didn’t end there – he was regularly bullied and beaten by his schoolmates. Not surprisingly, the thought of going to school made him sick."

- David Patrick Columbia (New York Social Diary)


"The new collection is about to be unveiled. Last winter's had a mixed reception. His career's at stake. If it's a flop, he'll have to close his house. Or he could be the Dior of tomorrow. It depends on those who shape public opinion."

Gavin Turk

Right through Turk's work over the past few years, the rubbish at the edges of city life has surfaced. Walk along Old Street in east London and the bloodstained paper, gobs of phlegm and shapeless black plastic sacks are nothing you want to speculate on. But at Turk's show in nearby Hoxton Square, casts of those same black bags, stuffed with God knows what shit, become art. They are positively philosophical. What's inside? And what's not inside?

The casts are authentically lumpen. Shapes sag where you least expect, bulge mysteriously; the surface recedes in pointless crevices and rivulets, and stimulates a curiosity that can never be resolved. You're not allowed to touch, to test their unreality, but there is an infallible clue - they are odourless.

- Jonathan Jones (The Guardian)


"Bag Sticker," 2000, screen print on vinyl, on paper, edition of 100, (23 1/4 x 33 1/16 inches), through White Cube.

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

Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth / The Dandy Warhols / David LaChapelle

I never thought you'd be a junkie because heroin is so passe. / But today, / if you think that I don't know about depression and emotional pain, / you're insane, / or your a fool who hasn't paid attention to a word that I say. / In a way, / I can't help but feel responsible. / I always knew that you were insane / with your pain. / But I never thought you'd be a junkie / because heroin is so passe. / hey. / So passe / now a-day. / You never thought you'd get addicted, / just be cooler in an obvious way. / I could say, / shouldn't you have got a couple peircings and decided may-be that you were gay. / In a way / I can't help but feel responsible, / I always knew that you were insane / with your pain / But I never thought you'd be a junkie / because heroin is so passe, hey. / Heroin is so passe. / hey.

Favourite Photograph #47

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