Gossip Central

The B-Side: A Conversation with Elsa Dorfman and Errol Morris

Errol Morris’ new film, The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography, is his most intimate yet. Usually working with out-sized personalities, McNamara to Rumsfeld, the murderous gasman of Zyklon B, to point at a few of his subjects, documentarian Errol Morris has the further distinction with his 1985 The Thin Blue Line, of having changed the course of one man’s destiny with his investigative work, unearthing evidence that showed he was innocent of murder.

Elsa Dorfman, a longtime friend seems a smaller portrait indeed by comparison, but the filmmaker caught up with this mild-mannered photographer just as the Gentle Giant movers were removing some large scale Polaroids for storage, so the resulting movie surprises as it covers the technical aspect of Polaroid photography, and perhaps, the end of an era. In conversation, Errol and Elsa complete one another’s sentences.

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.

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.

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.

Peter Beard: Last Word from Paradise at Guild Hall: Out of Africa

Peter Beard occupies the last house on the East End, and from his perch the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean is compelling. Having made art, collages and photography for decades, both here and on exotic travels, and featuring an array of celebrities including Mick Jagger, Jerry Hall, Bianca Jagger, Lee Radzivill, the two Edie Beales, Karen Blixen, Kamante Gatura, his wife Nejma, and himself often with his head in a fish, he’s taken more than a note about fame from Andy Warhol, his erstwhile neighbor. At Guild Hall’s new exhibition, “Last Word from Paradise,” celebrities and animals mix it up: there’s more than a hint of nostalgia for travels to remote places. Beard’s artwork juxtaposes party photos from Studio 54 with pictures of endangered animals like the elephant, or alligators that live best in the wild suggesting lost worlds: What about precious, fragile Nature on our planet?

Robert Mapplethorpe: His Perfect Moment on HBO

The subtitle of the unflinching documentary, Robert Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, comes from Senator Jesse Helms, enemy of free expression, hallmark of our democracy. Bookending the movie about the photographer who came of age in the ‘60’s and died at age 42 of AIDS in 1989, the senator’s words are meant to denigrate the art of one of the era’s most gifted photographers, and to usher in a new era of conservative repression. In fact, if you look at the pictures as instructed—and they are amply provided in this rich film to air on April 4 on HBO, you will see classic harmonies of shapes, genitals posed as objects of design, pistils and lilies so idealized, flowers exude an austere eroticism. Original and emblematic of the bygone moment from which the demimonde portraits emerged, Mapplethorpe’s work is simply beautiful.

“This Place” at the Brooklyn Museum: Outsiders Photograph Israel

In the fall of 2012, the French-born photographer Frederic Brenner took me to a swimming hole in the Bet Shean valley in Israel. Crowds sat on the edge of rocks waiting to jump in. Brenner exulted in the place, where the Romans, he told me, came in ancient times, a site I “dare not miss.” He had taken a hand-picked group of photographers there, as part of a briefing for a grand project he had devised. The photographers were then commissioned to take pictures of Israel. After exhibitions in Prague, Tel Aviv, and West Palm Beach, this project reaches its next great moment at the Brooklyn Museum in “This Place.”

Robert Frank Attends the Premiere of Robert Frank Don’t Blink

The famously reclusive and curmudgeonly photographer/filmmaker Robert Frank smiles throughout the documentary Robert Frank Don’t Blink, as if he’s having a good time with Laura Israel, a longtime assistant who deigned to make a film about him. When she asked, the Swiss-born artist did not say no. 

In distinct stages marked by evocative music (Velvet Underground, Rolling Stones, subjects of his 1972 Cocksucker Blues, and more), the film moves through his making of The Americans, the iconic photo-book of the 1950’s, its poetic, sainted “road” essence affirmed in Jack Kerouac’s introduction, the filming of Pull My Daisy, featuring Kerouac’s narration and starring Larry Rivers, David Amram, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, Delphine Seyrig, Alice Neel, Milo O’Shea, and his son Pablo, the little boy.