Gossip Central

Christmas at Moran Studio: Peaceful Holiday Cheer

When he wasn’t in a brownstone in Chelsea, the painter Thomas Moran occupied a studio on Main Street in East Hampton. “A shingled two-story boardinghouse with a smoking chimney” facing the pond, described the late Robert Long in his 2005 book, De Kooning’s Bicycle. In the late 1870’s, “Moran thought that this could be his Fountainebleau.” Visible from Montauk Highway, the stately “cottage” was in disrepair for years, and has been restored as an exhibition space for Moran’s etchings, and this year, for a Victorian Christmas.

Denzel Washington’s Vision: The Museum of the Moving Image Honors Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

Blues singer Ma Rainey was plus sized in many ways, most especially her voice. In a new film based on August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Viola Davis gives her Ma a grimace to go with her mega-sound, as large as life for blacks in America. Davis’s Ma is a grand performance balanced by that of one of her horns-men, lithe Levee, played with charm cum mischief and madness by Chadwick Boseman. Ruben Santiago-Hudson adapted Wilson to perfection in this gem, and this week, the movie, to air on Netflix, had its premiere at the Museum of the Moving Image gala. Virtual, this event was a state-of-the-art forum on the movie’s production, starring Viola Davis and cast, costume designer Ann Roth, director George C. Wolfe who accepted an award from producer Denzel Washington.

Washington, a longtime interpreter of August Wilson’s art, vowed to make the playwrights’10- play cycle, one for every decade of the 20^th century, into film. That vision started with his direction of Fences in 2016, an Oscar nominated film in which he starred with Davis. While Fences does not take place in a recording studio, Wilson's dialogue is always rhythmic. Speaking about the musicality of Ma Rainey, the actors talked about filming with rehearsal time as if this were a staged production, and the bond created among the players. The actor Glynn Turman, Toledo in Ma Rainey, recounted Denzel seeing him in a production of the play and saying, “Stay ready. I stayed ready.”

Audrey Flack and Amy Zerner: The Goddess and her Wiles at M & M Fine Arts

In her 1986 book, Art & Soul: Notes on Creating, the artist Audrey Flack recounts a time when, housebound in East Hampton, she listened to “Candle in the Wind,” Elton John’s elegy to Marilyn Monroe, allowing the muse to infuse the painting of Marilyn she was working on. Now two drawings of Marilyn, still evocative to the artist, as muse and goddess, are a compelling part of a show at M & M Fine Arts in Southampton: “Smiling Marilyn with JFK” and “Marilyn Phantom of Delight” (2014). The Marilyns, exhibited among many other works by Flack, are paired perfectly with art from Springs resident Amy Zerner. Using “goddess” as their theme, the artists occupy adjoining spaces with paintings, drawings, and tapestries that are distinctly feminist, strongly narrative, featuring bold female entities, provocative and beautiful.

A world class artist, a pioneer in photorealism, a master sculptor, Flack’s expansive career includes a 1974 painting, “Leonardo’s Lady,” currently on view at MoMA. Goddesses are Flack’s metiere, including “Medusa,” depending on how you view the snakes adorning her hair. For me she’s beatific, radiating otherworldliness.

Blair Underwood’s Ecstatic Face in The Pack, a Virtual Premiere at Guild Hall

The season would not be eh, the season without all-star comedy from Eugene Pack. He was back virtually on Sunday premiering a program of 3 short works to benefit Guild Hall, starring Matthew Broderick and John Leguizamo performing together for the first time, Blair Underwood and Sherri Shepherd, and Rachel Dratch, Cecily Strong, Andrea Martin, Santino Fontana and Maulik Pancholy. The talented Dayle Reyfel, Pack’s partner and frequent ensemble player, appeared in an unusual way. The playlets inaugurated the final leg of a series that will include some live, distanced, performances in the Guild Hall garden, all sold out. Reached by phone in LA, playwright/ performer, Eugene Pack said he is busy bringing actors together, but he wants everyone to know The Pack owes more to film, although it sounds more like an innovative hybrid, reflecting our current states of creativity.

South Etna: A Pop-Up Provides Food for Thought in Montauk

If it is true, you are what you eat, at South Etna’s inaugural show in Montauk, “Painting is Painting’s Favorite Food: Art History as Muse,” art was most nourishing. At this week’s official gallery opening, a masked affair of course, scenesters and artists alike gathered in the outdoor space beside the exhibition space to talk art, to see each other, and queue up to view the work, only four at a time in the two-room faux Tudor space. Over Pimm’s and iced tea, a lively group including Cynthia Rowley, Ugo Rondinone, Stella Schnabel and many others congratulated Amalia Dayan and Adam Lindemann on this tasteful pop-up gallery. As joyful as the art is colorful and fresh, curated by Alison M. Gingeras, the event was a nostalgic nod to our pre-pandemic celebrations.

As you enter the gallery on the right, a post-expressionist painting, “The Seated Painter (After Vermeer),” illustrates at once the quality of work in the exhibition, and its theme, the way in which art inspires art. A figure seated at an easel has his back to us, perhaps the artist known as Maryan himself in 17^th century dress, from 1966. Born Pinchas Burstein, Maryan survived Auschwitz and lived for a time in New York, famed among artists.

Remembering Milton Glaser in Tangier

By the summer of 1983 when I met him, designer/ illustrator Milton Glaser, who died this week at age 91, was already famous. The founder of Push Pin Studios, a founder of New York Magazine, had already created the iconic sign, I [heart] New York, as well as so many other memorable designs, you knew his work before you knew who made it. Glaser was a friend of Silas Rhodes,  the founder of The School of Visual Arts, and taught graphic design at the school, participating in a summer program in Tangier, Morocco.

Silas liked to surround himself with talented people, and knowing that the writer Paul Bowles resided there, added creative writing to the program that already offered photography, fine arts, and graphic design. Paul, however, did not teach. That’s where I came in, with a freshly minted Ph.D. in American literature, having written a dissertation on Jack Kerouac, who Paul knew in the New York literary circles he occupied when he visited New York. More often, Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, all came to see Paul. That summer, our group included, aside from Milton, Brice Marden, Mary Ellen Mark, Louise Bourgeois, Marshall Arisman, Ed Benguiat, Duane Michals, and guests passing through, Pete Hamill, and Francine du Plessix Gray.

Remembering Photographer Elsa Dorfman

A longtime collaborator with Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and other literary figures, photographer Elsa Dorfman was a true American original. A portrait artist often associated with her main instrument, the large format 20" x 24" inch Polaroid camera, Dorfman, an influence to poets, and, from all reports, a great friend, died this week at 83.

In 2017, I met her when her pal Errol Morris made a film about her, The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography, his most intimate documentary. Usually working with out-sized personalities, McNamara to Rumsfeld, the murderous gasman of Zyklon B, to name a few, 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 neighborhood friend seems a smaller portrait indeed, 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 his picture of her surprises as it covers the technical aspect of Polaroid photography, and perhaps, the end of an era. This conversation from that time, as the film was about to open after a distinguished festival run including the New York Film Festival, reveals something of Dorfman’s charm. Errol and Elsa complete one another’s sentences.

John Waters Cajoles Graduates at SVA Commencement: Become Covid-19 Commandoes!

Superstars Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey may be grabbing headlines offering online encouragement to college graduates this season, but John Waters did the job this week, dispensing discordant wisdom to designers and other artists graduating from The School of Visual Arts. The ceremony, usually held at Radio City Music Hall, featured far flung speakers, Waters himself at a podium with curtain backdrop from his home in Baltimore, setting of his most famous satiric films including his underground homage to filth, Pink Flamingos, and his breakout commercial hit, Hairspray. A dapper dresser in brocade jackets, Waters wore a traditional gown, cap, and latex gloves, all in black, his signature pencil thin ‘stache under an artsy mask. Pulling it off, he consoled the graduates who’d been robbed of a “normal” graduation: “If you do die tomorrow, at least you’ll have a college degree.”

Remembering Michael McClure

A West Coast beat, Michael McClure was less of a presence in New York than the seminal figures: Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, but he was no less of a master poet, combining his love of nature with traditional forms such as villanelles, sonnets and sestinas. One of the last beat poets, Michael McClure (87) died this week.

Back in 1956, at the pivotal Six Gallery reading, where Ginsberg read Howl for an audience for the first time, and a shy Kerouac passed around a jug of red wine, as legend has it, McClure performed his 1954 poem, “For the Death of a Hundred Whales,” breaking down its ballad meter to A-B-C-B rhymes, to form a “cubist poem,” as he explained in his “The Beat Journey: An Interview.” He combined a love of theater, poetry, and art with his ecological concerns, and, among his credits, performed with Ray Manzarek of The Doors.

Mystery in Montauk: The Untoward End of Peter Beard’s Wild Ride

The story of Peter Beard has a grim end: some 19 days after he disappeared, after search parties including helicopters had given up their trawling the rocky coast, the erstwhile adventurer has just turned up. Some thought he went into the sea, lunch meat for sharks, if there are such fish at these shores, but no: maybe he’d gone into some secret corner of the woods, and like beat poetry catalyst Neal Cassady, another legend, died of exposure. No body, no news. But now all that may change.

The Times retold an anecdote about Beard, that while working in the city, when he was told his house had gone up in flames, he just continued his work. What the Times failed to say, and what might merely be Montauk rumor, was that the house had been burnt down by workers, locals disgruntled that they had not been paid. Legends abound about such adventurers: some saw the house lifted off the nearest cliff by Sikorsky helicopter, moved to the most remote point, a piece of property jutting farther into the sea than the lighthouse. Montauk residents gathered outside the church in the early ‘80’s, when Beard married Cheryl Tiegs.