Gossip Central

Looking for Cindy Sherman: A Retrospective at MoMA

On the 6^th floor of the Museum of Modern Art, Cindy Sherman is just where you want her, everywhere. In a retrospective of her work opening Sunday, in every portrait, her image --made up, masked, reconfigured --shocks, satirizes, surprises with its smart take on contemporary looks, fashion, and ideas of what it means to be visible: portraits from every period in her career, from black and white film stills evoking no particular picture specifically, to the clown series, to the more recent grand portraits of be-pearled and head-banded Park Avenue matrons with enigmatic and sad Mona Lisa smiles or smirks suggesting dubious delight, dismay and possible disgust. Ladies locked in luxury.

More Marilyn: Monroe Photos at the Milk Gallery

A lovely ingénue strolled about the Milk Gallery in a black Dior with train, a replica of a dress worn by Marilyn Monroe in an iconic photograph by Bert Stern. The exhibition, Picturing Marilyn, a joint effort by Staley Wise and The Weinstein Company was an attempt to stage a surreal visitation in tandem with the release of the film, My Week with Marilyn. The young actress was in fact Dree Hemingway, great granddaughter of Ernest and daughter of Mariel who might have been her age when she starred in Woody Allen's Manhattan. Also present at Wednesday's opening were hosts Harvey Weinstein, Dominic Cooper, Celeste Holm, and many well-wishers: Andrea Riseborough, Christie Brinkley, Harry Benson, Vogue's Grace Coddington, among them.

Remembering 9/11: Portraits of Resilience

You could feel the weight of the occasion at the Milk Gallery in the Meatpacking on Thursday night, the site of a portrait exhibition and screening of a documentary marking the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Not that NYC was lacking in remembrance, but these photographs of key players in the event and after by Marco Grob for Time Magazine's tribute volume, Portraits of Resilience embody ennobling gravitas, the kind of historic moment captured in oils by the great masters.

Richard Prince Covers Jackson Pollock at Guild Hall

To imagine Richard Prince doing drip paintings in honor of Jackson Pollock is too linear a concept for what Prince does in Guild Hall's new exhibition, Richard Prince: Covering Pollock. The iconic abstract expressionist is pure subject for Prince's collages, repetitions in the manner of Warhol, Rauchenberg-like juxtapositions. He's evoking a whole lot more than just Pollock in this homage. 

Joel Grey: Museum of the City of NY / The Normal Heart / Anything Goes

April 11. It was Joel Grey's birthday and what a celebration: an opening of an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York featuring a chronology of his life in the theater and his own photographs with an essay by playwright Jon Robin Baitz. Explaining Grey's particular eye, Baitz calls Grey a magician, “a very close observer” of the city around him. 

Ron Galella in Focus: Smash his Camera, A Love Story

The word paparazzi always had a tinge of menace--camera toting maggots a-prey on celebrities--and got a worse name after the throng chasing Princess Diana through a Paris tunnel caused her death.  But the Ur-paparazzo, a lone figure lurking behind Central Park foliage, disguised in funny wigs and hats, was Ron Galella. Famously sued by Jackie Kennedy, his jaw broken by Marlon Brando, he is the subject of a new documentary, called "Smash His Camera" expertly directed by Leon Gast, to air on HBO on June 7. 

A career defining encounter with the obsession of his life provides the title, not his gorgeous wife Betty, to whom he proposed within two minutes of their meeting and whisked off to bed “to seal the deal,” but Jackie, by this time, O, commanding her secret service detail, “Smash his camera.”

It's easy to be competent in photography, says Chuck Close eloquently in this biopic, hardest to be distinguished because of all the arts photography lacks the human hand, begging the question, is self-proclaimed superstar Galella, artist or stalker? This topic was much debated at a premiere screening at MoMA on Tuesday. Dick Cavett, Floyd Abrams and son Dan, Bob Balaban, Marie Brenner, David Margolick among photographers Harry Benson, Sonia Moskowitz, Neil Leifer, watched as Galella on film presented his extensive, historic archive, millions of photos of Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Robert Redford, and more, neatly stored in his Montville New Jersey mansion, and explained his guerilla tactics, how he got his “Mona Lisa” shot, “Windblown Jackie,” the former first lady in jeans and t-shirt walking, her tight torso half turned toward his camera, her hair strewn across the iconic semi smile. 

Gossip doyenne Liz Smith, splendid in yellow silk, suggested in her Q&A that Jackie, despite taking him to court, loved his attention too, and Betty, shouting out from the audience reminded everyone that he was Andy Warhol's favorite for recording the famous in the unexpected act of being who they really are, that Roger Ebert called him a “national treasure.” Is he still an idealist, asked Smith. Oh yes, it all paid off, said the unrepentant Galella. “I want to thank Jackie for suing me,” he went on. “She made me famous.”

While the famous supped on sea bass at the Monkey Bar afterparty, Galella snapped away soon joined by celebrity photographer Patrick McMullan. At his table sat newly discovered relations, Ottavio Galella and family from Montreal, responsible for a show of his work in the small town in Italy of his ancestry. Ottavio's wife Marisa nailed it, he may have started as a stalker but he became an artist, which may just show a change in the times, as Galella laments a loss of fun, “there are few to photograph now. The new girls, Lindsay Lohan, are bombarded, they expect it and they love it.”

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Bill Cunningham Documentry Opens New Director's Film Festival at MoMA

 
On Wednesday, a posh crowd filed into MoMA for the opening night of the 39th New Directors/New Films series, a collaboration of the museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. As he would for any such opening, the New York Times society and style photographer Bill Cunningham in blue jacket snapped away, capturing the well-turned out and a la mode.

Eschewing the red carpet where another type of party photographer had the likes of Anna Wintour and Carmen dell' Orefice posing, Cunningham waited at the entrance for a lady in a tiered hat, a brocade coat, some elegant, eccentric froufrou the merits of which only he could discern. New Yorkers are used to his trend spotting preoccupation, except that on this special night, the film was a documentary about him. And not only hadn't he seen “Bill Cunningham New York,” he disappeared before he could. As the producer knowingly introduced, “He's allergic to attention.”

Less biopic, more homage, this portrait of an artist, a first feature by Richard Press, is also a history of New York. One of its great pleasures is a subplot about the artists' residences above Carnegie Hall where Bill Cunningham, now 81, has lived in a file cabinet lined cubicle --bathroom down the hall-- for his entire career: as a milliner under the name William J, and fashion photographer for Details, Women's Wear Daily, New York Times, from the end of World War II till today, as those spaces are being converted to offices. We see footage shot by Andy Warhol of his neighbor Editta Sherman's private performance in tutu and feathers of “The Dying Swan,” as well as her photos of Warhol, Elvis and Dali. At 98, she will be the last to be relocated to some fine apartment elsewhere, but still.

Editta Sherman joined the MoMA celebration, carrying a 1978 publication, Facades, photography by Bill Cunningham with Sherman as model in period dress, bustled and corseted. On hand too: frequent Cunningham subjects Patrick McDonald and Kenny Kenny.

Bill Cunningham may be attention phobic but ladies who dress are not. Anna Wintour-Cunningham has been photographing the Vogue editor since she was a teen-- says, “One dresses for Bill.” Naturally the challenge of dressing for this night was nerve-wracking. Alas, my vintage Moschino cocktail number with Roy Lichtenstein print failed to catch his eye, even though it had others shooting throughout the night. An aficionado of haute couture, he must have known it was only the designer's bridge line, “Cheap and Chic.”

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Who Shot Rock & Roll at the Brooklyn Museum

The iconic and infamous cover the walls at the Brooklyn Museum's fine exhibition (on view till January 31, 2010), “Who Shot Rock & Roll.” Yes you will see many old favorites, like John Lennon wearing a New York City sleeveless tee in Bob Gruen's contact sheet from the familiar 1974 shoot. You will see him again in Richard Avedon's 1967 formal portraits of the Beatles, their mop hair newly coiffed. And again in Allan Tannenbaum's shot of John and Yoko in bed, NYC, 1980 just two weeks before he died. The text explains that Lennon liked Tannenbaum's work: “You really capture Yoko's beauty.” And that sums up the essence of this show's raison d'etre as curated by Gail Buckland who also edited the excellent catalogue, to focus on the photographers, how the subject inspired them and the photographic arts . What fascinates is remembering the B-52's as in George DuBose's 1978 photograph, or Ike and Tina in Memphis in 1962, as in Ernest C. Withers' photo that shows Ike's eagle eye trained on her wailing at the mike, or Amy Arbus' 1983 black & white Madonna in a boxy coat before Kabbalah and before she was buff juxtaposed with the dizzying 2001 “Madonna I” by Andreas Gursky emphasizing the pop star in the marketplace, that is, 15 combined exposures taken over a period of days from the same vantage point at the same moment in a concert with a tiny well-lit  singer to the bottom left, when lights flash, confetti falls, and people hang upside down from scaffolding mechanically lowered from the stage. Epic-scale, monumental, the celestial shot overwhelms.  Buddy Holly on the bus in a 1958 Lew Allen photo, Dennis Hopper's James Brown in 1964, a wistful Elvis at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis by Lloyd Shearer in 1956, David Gahr's 1968 Janis Joplin, Jill Furmanovsky's Joy Division in 1979 and her 1977 Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, Ray Stevenson's Sex Pistols on Carnaby Street in 1976, William “Popsie” Randolph's shot of the Brooklyn Paramount where Alan Freed staged his rock and roll shows in 1955, Godlis' 1976 Patti Smith outside CBGB and Stephanie Chernikowski's 1978 “Debbie Harry CBGB NYC” take you down Memory Lane.  On opening night last Thursday, the museum featured photographer Josh Cheuse DJing, while many of the photographers-Godlis, Marcia Resnick, Bob Gruen, Allan Tannenbaum among them-- milled about with a film crew in tow. Bob Gruen had a birthday party a few nights  before where Bebe Buell performed songs from her new CD “Sugar” with Ronnie Spektor in attendance. On this night, with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame celebrating across the river, the Brooklyn Museum rocked with Blondie:  Debbie Harry in black wig and black satin suit with red glitter, performing her hits: “Call Me,” “Heart of Glass,” and “One Way or Another;” her cover of Michael Jackson's “Don't Stop” was evocative, like the rest of this show, of a rich, remarkable, and resonant music history.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Robert Frank Has Eyes

In his introduction to the iconic book of photographs, The Americans, Jack Kerouac wrote, You Got Eyes, honoring photographer Robert Frank as if he were a jazzman, You Can Play.  Now these words are writ large at the Metropolitan Museum's fine show, Looking In, exhibiting the 83 photos that were published in the original book from the mid-1950's, some contact sheets that reveal much about how this artist made his choices and cropped his work, as well as earlier photo sequences and related essays and correspondence. The result is a thrilling glimpse into the development of Frank's unique sensibility, and a prophetic time capsule. There aren't many works that changed the way people see: this book is one of them.
     The Americans, like Kerouac's On the Road, reflects a cross-country car trip. Its vision is a sad America of individuals caught in a wide expanse of highways, connecting, but not, disenfranchised from the American Dream. Robert Frank, having recently arrived from Switzerland, made the trip on a Guggenheim scholarship in 1955-6, and its look at America is one that you could argue can only be seen by an outsider: An empty chair in a barbershop seen through a screen door in McClellanville, South Carolina. U.S. 285 in New Mexico, the line dividing the road leading to a hazy horizon. Drugstore in Detroit, the black counter woman serving whites with large posters advertising “Orange Whip 10 cents” looming overhead. A movie premiere in Hollywood shows a glamorous blond with a far off gaze, background animated onlookers in focus. Robert Frank's family huddled in the back seat of a car, its headlight beaming.
     The catalogue accompanying the exhibition features excellent essays providing the backstory to Frank's road trip as well as the history of the book's critical reception. Luc Sante relates the vision in The Americans to another Frank/Kerouac collaboration, the film Pull My Daisy. “The intersection of the two men may have lasted less than two years, finally, but it was momentous, with echoes that have persisted ever since. The road they separately traveled and chronicled has done nothing but expand in the popular imagination, becoming the site for a paradigmatic rite of passage.”
     Interestingly enough, the opening of the Met's exhibition coincides with the release of Michael Moore's new satiric opus, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” and the timing could not be more apt, as each reveals an underbelly of America, beatific citizens somehow left behind. With respect to Obama-bashers and their ilk, these are “real Americans,” for anyone with eyes.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

 

The Hunger at the Waverly Inn

Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter with his ski slope sculpted white hair and Ecco Press's Daviel Halperrn in a halo of white frizz hosted a party for chef John De Lucie's “The Hunger,” at The Waverly Inn on Monday night. This book records his rise from low management head hunter, to cooking school, working through the kitchens and women of New York-with a detour to Nick & Toni's and Oceans in the Hamptons-- to become co-owner of the hottest restaurant in the city. Adding to its allure, The Waverly Inn operates through a secret system of reservations. Packed every night, the restaurant has no phone, a fact that astonishes De Lucie even as he tries to explain this phenomenon. His rake's progress takes the reader into the behind the scenes grit of resto life as he finds his passion, with De Lucie's surprising self effacing humor, his bewilderment at diners like “Jenny from the block” and the “taxi driver” lauding his signature dishes like the mac and cheese with truffles and chicken pot pie. On Monday night, the diverse crowd chomping on hors d'oeuvres of filet mignon, jumbo shrimp cocktail, tuna tartare, and truffled pizza included Marty Richards, Harvey Weinstein, Jill Hennessey, and John Scotto of Fresco in a moment of one happy restaurateur celebrating another. A number of leggy celebrity models made it past the invisible velvet ropes. The real secret of The Waverly Inn is like the appeal of “The Hunger.” What it offers, you cannot put down. 

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura