Gossip Central

Dinner with Georgia O’Keeffe at the Brooklyn Museum and Beyond

Exhibitions featuring the life and art of women abound in New York at this time, a happy coincidence. Especially fine is the Brooklyn Museum’s “Living Modern,” devoted to the oeuvre and style of Georgia O’Keeffe. The artist had her first solo exhibition at the museum in 1927, organized by Alfred Stieglitz and featuring 15 paintings. The current show, consisting of paintings, sculpture, and photographs of O’Keeffe by some of the most well known photographers of the twentieth century, Stieglitz, Richard Avedon, Bruce Weber, Ansel Adams, Cecil Beaton to name a few, also displays her clothing. An excellent seamstress, as the accompanying catalogue makes clear, she made her own dresses, blouses, shirtwaists, and coats, and also collected simple, architecturally structured designs from the Japanese. Her Lee overalls and plaid shirts are fashionable today. Maria Chabot’s photo of the artist has her posed on a dusty road at Ghost Ranch, hair pulled back, in a woven checked shirt and loose jeans. In Andy Warhol’s silkscreen of O’Keeffe from 1980, she looks stern, her face naturally wrinkled as would befit a woman of unselfconscious, ageless beauty, at 92.

Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait Premieres at Tribeca

Don’t you want to paint a giant picture now? Laurie Anderson asked the audience at a post Tribeca Film Festival screening Q&A following the premiere of the documentary, Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait about the artist well known for his work on outsized canvases and plate paintings. An art star for decades, Schnabel is also well known for his films, especially Basquiat, Before Night Falls, Berlin, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Each one is about the creative process, illuminating fellow artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cuban poet Reinaldo Areinas, rocker and close friend Lou Reed, and writer/editor Jean-Dominique Bauby. Despite the subtitle, A Private Portrait, director Pappi Corsicato never gets beneath the artist’s skin, but in showing his work and the man working, the film shows the breadth of a big career in progress.

Frida Kahlo in Andrea Dantas’ One-Woman Show at BAM

Perhaps Frida Kahlo, a singular artist, could only be portrayed in a one-woman show. Voices of her parents, Diego Rivera, Nelson Rockefeller, Georgia O’Keeffe, and others supply the illusion of an outside world. Playing with her dolls and stuffed monkey, or her paints, Brazilian actress and Flamenco dancer Andrea Dantas, who also wrote Fragmented Frida, inhabits this legendary figure at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Fisher Hall under the fine direction of Christine Renee Miller; the outside world, outside the clay house in Coyoacan, Mexico with its vivid red bougainvillea comes alive through the chatter of fascinating art world and political characters, Kia Rogers’ superb lighting, Justin West’s projections of New York City, and evocative Mexican music: “Llorona” fills the room.

Cezanne et moi: Breakfast with Daniele Thompson and Guillaume Gallienne

Introducing her friend Daniele Thompson’s new film Cezanne et moi at a special screening at the Whitby Hotel last week, Diane von Furstenberg noted the painterly look, the sheer beauty of this movie. The audience of artists in all media could not have been more fitting: Marina Abramovic, Eric Fishl, Ahn Duong, Bennett Miller, Ellen Burstyn, Fran Leibowitz, Brigitte Lacombe, Art Spiegelman, among many others. Cezanne et moi, limns the intense and passionate friendship between two towering figures of world culture, painter Paul Cezanne and writer Emile Zola, imagining them as schoolmates, and rivals in art and love.

Just before the movie’s premiere, I had breakfast with Daniele Thompson, the esteemed director of Avenue Montaigne, co-writer of Cousin, Cousine, and the actor Guillaume Gallienne, who stars as Cezanne. Both Thompson and Gallienne identified with these artists’ struggles, while recognizing Cezanne as something of a mad genius. Thompson originally wanted Gallienne to play Zola. As it turned out, Guillaume Canet, the film’s Zola, and straight man in the bromance, could not make the celebration as his real-life partner Marion Cotillard was just giving birth to their child.

Laura Osnes and Tony Yazbeck in Surprise Performance at the Guild Hall Gala

If you are going to honor Susan Stroman for her achievement in performing arts, as Guild Hall did this week at their annual gala at the Rainbow Room, you may expect, aside from the usual clip reel, some real live Broadway stars. Laura Osnes, a sublime Cinderella, now preparing for the opening of Bandstand, sang the Gershwin classic “But Not For Me.” And Tony Yazbeck, dazzling in On the Town, to star in Stroman’s next musical, Prince on Broadway, sang Gershwin's “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.” Among many highlights on this special night, was Tanya Gabrielian’s rendition of Chopin's Nocturne in C-sharp Minor, Op. Posth. on piano, and poetry from Alice Quinn, Executive Director of the Poetry Society and Philip Schultz, another of this year’s honorees. “Poetry asks us to celebrate our differences,” said the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, and he read a new poem about a same-sex couple called “The Kiss.”

Marcelo Mastroianni’s Presence at Rendez-Vous With French Cinema

A photo exhibit at the Film Society of Lincoln Center features color stills from the set of Fellini’s 8 1/2, the maestro’s last film in black & white. Photographer Paul Ronald shot them as an aside while he was shooting black & white production stills, and of course, as these things go, the cache was lost—and now found. Glorious Anouk Aimee, and Marcelo Mastroianni seated in profile, waiting, perhaps for his next scene. Curated by Sam Stourdze, the show will stay up till summer, as the Film Society is now planning to screen a Mastroianni retrospective. Back in the day, Mastroianni came to Lincoln Center for the New York Film Festival. Following a press screening, reporters and critics surrounded him, begging for autographs. “But you are the press,” he said gesticulating wildly, reminding the crowd of its place. Icon that he was, he would not tolerate this breach of decorum.

Discovering John Cohen--Again

At a wall-to-wall packed opening at the Grey Art Gallery, photographer/ filmmaker / musician John Cohen held court in front of a video installation of some vintage photographs he took at the heyday of artist owned galleries on 10^th Street. Talk about a fascinating pocket of art history! “Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City 1952-1965” features paintings by Alex Katz, Jim Dine, Jane Wilson and other noted artists of the midcentury, Dan Flavin, George Segal, exhibited in the context of the galleries: Tanager, Hansa, Brata, Delancey Street Museum, to name a few. A John Cohen photograph graces the handsome exhibition catalogue’s cover: Red Grooms crossing Third Avenue, transporting artwork in what looks like a baby buggy to the Reuben Gallery in 1960.

Aspects of Minimalism at Guild Hall: Dan Flavin’s Neons and More

For Guild Hall curator Christina Strassfield, a show on minimalism was a no brainer. Currently on view in two large galleries, stark works in sand colors, geometrics, in brown felt material, in bright neon, the exhibition displays art from the collection of Bridgehampton resident Leonard Ruggio, whose passion is minimalism, a midcentury movement that challenges our notions of the types of materials can be used in art, and in fact our traditional notions of beauty. Minimalism contrasts with the extravagant collages of the previous show featuring the photography of Peter Beard, and was historically a contrast to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, begging the question, is less more?

Hamptons Journal: Robert Wilson: Art with Edge at the Watermill Center / Adrian Nivola at The Drawing Room

Against a wall proclaiming “Make America Great Again” in blood red, an electric chair did not seem out of place. Not for nothing was the Watermill Center’s annual gala called “Fada: House of Madness.” Created by Pussy Riot, the work augured the ironies of installations throughout Robert Wilson’s foundation’s ample grounds. Even though rain threatened the evening’s anarchy, bronze angels spouted eerie wisdom and monitors flickered in the woods.

Hamptons Journal: Nona Hendryx Pays Tribute to Bowie at LongHouse Reserve Jubilee/ Richard Mishaan’s Design at Guild Hall, and the East Hampton Historical Society

Jack Lenor Larsen’s LongHouse Reserve, home to a spectacular sculpture garden including Yoko Ono’s “Wishing Tree,” became the site of great music, food, and art, in “serious moonlight,” its 25^th year celebration. As maidens in midnight flowy frocks danced around a reflecting pool, partiers slurped oysters and sipped peach bellinis, gathering for a piano recital by Nico Muhly, last year’s honoree. Robert Wilson, Ralph Gibson, Mary Jane Marcasiano, Jack Youngerman, Eric Fishl, April Gornik, some of whom had paintings on display for a silent auction to benefit the Longhouse program for young artists, sought a breeze on this steamy night.