Gossip Central

Guild Hall Celebrates Peter Marino: Renaissance Man

“I hate it,” architect Peter Marino exclaimed surprising even himself, as he noted Gotham Hall, a cavernous former bank on Broadway, decorated for the 350 guests arriving for a tribute to him, and to art collectors Tom Roush and LaVon Kellner. This was Guild Hall’s winter gala, celebrating too the venerated East Hampton art institution’s emergence from a long renovation. Can it be that Peter Marino, clad in his hard-to-miss signature head-to-toe leathers and silver rings, all his own designs, is oddly demure? A video featured his many achievements and talents: architect, painter, sculptor, potter, gardener, collector with an impeccable eye. It finally took the Israeli artist Michal Rovner, a longtime friend, to underscore his bold innovations with a telling anecdote: In Tokyo, at the opening of a Chanel store he designed, he found the perfect use for the building’s façade, projecting her art on it.

This was not a boast. An internationally renowned multimedia artist, Rovner will be featured at Peter Marino’s art foundation housed in Southampton, as part of a series, “Brunches with Bob,” the Bob being writer Bob Colacello who was part of Marino’s entourage, with his daughter Isabelle Trapnell Marino, who, despite her valuable input quips, she’s the “Vanna White” of the conversation series. The culture-packed room also included Michael Halsband, just back from his opening of his iconic sparring Basquiat/ Warhol photos at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, April Gornik, Blythe Danner, Lisa Perry, Iris Smyles, Alice Aycock, and many more to honor their East End neighbors, Tom Roush and LaVon Kellner. A retired doctor, he used to treat many artists when they occupied lofts in Soho, before they became big names.

George Condo at The Morgan Library: Looney is a State of Consciousness

At the Morgan Library last week, in celebration of a show of his drawings, painter George Condo spoke about knowing he was an artist at age 4. It took a while before language kicked in; enrolled in school, he said, he responded to lessons with artwork. As he matured, so did his influences: French writers: Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Celine. Jack Kerouac’s “automatic writing,” the spontaneous writing Kerouac used in composing his Book of Sketches made a big impression. Among Condo’s many credits, he wrote the introduction to the Viking Penguin publication in 2006. Beguiled by Picasso when he lived in Paris, Condo made several portraits in a cubist mode. Music brought Condo to Jean-Michel Basquiat—when they met, they talked about electronic music—but Basquiat was most inspiring in insisting Condo move to New York.

At a dinner in Watermill, at the home of agent Andrew Wylie, Condo met novelist Salman Rushdie, who wrote about a Condo painting in his 2001 novel Fury. Titled “Psychological Puppeteer Losing His Mind,” (1994), Condo’s painting of Akasz Kronos, as Rushdie describes it, features “the puppet … broken free of the puppeteer’s control.” Rushdie’s writing here seemed most prescient as we think about Rushdie today, with a new novel, Victory City, even as the long-forgotten fatwa returned most unexpectedly, in all its horror this past summer, when a young man jumped the stage at a famed writers’ colony, badly knifing Rushdie.

Charlie Mackesy’s Journey: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse

Jet-lagged as you might expect for a British writer/illustrator just arriving from L.A., having promoted his film, and looking as you might imagine a mad scientist crossed with Gene Wilder, Charlie Mackesy held forth at a luncheon at the Whitby Hotel, signing cupcake boxes, posters, copies of his book, and telling a story about how his teaching drawing to a Holocaust survivor helped the man, now 100, unleash painful memories. His energy seemed remarkable, but the occasion, a celebration of the film adapted from his beloved book, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, was nominated for a Best Animated Short Film Oscar. Then you realize he’s fueled by the film, a fable with a fresh message. Starting with an encounter between a boy and a mole who is looking for cake in a snowy landscape—(well, isn’t everyone?)—the film addresses a fundamental question: the mole asks, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” The boy answers: “Kind.”

Okay. Simple enough. The mole voiced by Tom Hollander thinks he sees a cake, and even when he discovers it is a tree, there’s no disappointment, well, not really, because the tree is the most perfect tree, just as the boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse they encounter on their journey are drawn with a romantic perfection, becoming kind together, and yes, a family. The fox—gently voiced by Idris Elba—bares his teeth. He could just as easily have eaten the mole who saved him from a trap—but he doesn’t and saves him right back from drowning in fast-moving icy waters.

Martin Scorsese to Cate Blanchett at the New York Film Critics Circle Gala: Where Are You Going with This?

Joining the party at Tao Downtown on a screen, Martin Scorsese looked genuinely bewildered as he presented the Best Picture award to the movie Tar, noting the extraordinary performance of its star Cate Blanchett. As Lydia Tar, a genius orchestra conductor, Blanchett rages and purrs, at times in impeccable German. Scorsese has indeed worked with an actor or two but seemed awed over Blanchett: given she can do anything, and is, perhaps the actress of her generation: how far is she willing to go? Tar is on many “best” lists as it turns the cliché of the toxic male around, but the question is not how far Lydia Tar can go, but, for me, how far she has come.

The standout scene is when she returns home to Staten Island, as Linda. Here was the modest provincial place she had to flee to self-invent, to flourish in her music, and, horrifically, to nurture a monstrously warped ego. Discussing the film with its director Todd Field, I mention this resonant film moment. In writing it, he said, he was exploring, how does a talented person break into the elite cultural world of orchestras. He was thinking of Billy Strayhorn and how he fixed himself up to see Duke Ellington, into his idea of the cool Manhattan jazz society, and how everyone then looked to copy his style, his idea of how to be cool.

Remembering Aline Kominsky-Crumb

The Crumb documentary is ruining my life, complained Aline Kominsky-Crumb in 1993, as Terry Zwigoff’s biopic about Robert Crumb, her husband, gained acclaim, becoming a darling on the festival circuit. “Next thing you know, we’ll be invited to the Jerusalem Film Festival.” All of this drama was played out in a comic strip that appeared in The New Yorker magazine. Festival director Leah von Leer saw an opportunity and wrote to the Crumbs. “Your nightmare has come true. You are officially invited.”

Nominated for an academy award for best documentary feature, Crumb was a revealing look not only of this famous cartooning couple but Robert’s unusual family, capturing his highly eccentric and artistic brothers just before one committed suicide. Passionate for jazz, Robert had a huge record collection. Vinyl filled a room. Fearing an atmosphere of violence in their area of California, where gun ownership was de rigeuer, the Crumbs left for the south of France and lived in a multistoried house carved out of the rock on the banks of the Vidourle.

This much I knew when I encountered Robert and Aline in the lobby of our hotel in Jerusalem; I too came with a film, a documentary about the writer/composer Paul Bowles who lived in Tangier. “Did your records make it across the Atlantic?” I asked him as a way of saying hello. The Crumbs and my family—my husband Bob Salpeter, our two daughters, and my mother aged 73 and a survivor of Auschwitz --hung out. While Aline and I gabbed away getting to know one another—we had grown up in the New York City boroughs, finding our escape to Manhattan; we had ties to the Soho Weekly News-- Robert was helping my mother navigate the streets, gentle as could be. Aline dubbed her own mother Blabette, but genuinely liked mine grasping her spirituality.

Idris Elba Stars in Beast: An Old-Fashioned World Premiere at MoMA

No one will ever fall asleep at a screening of Beast, a new movie directed by Baltasar Kormakur and starring Idris Elba who goes mano a eh, mano with a rogue lion. Very Hemingway. Man against beast. He’s protecting his daughters in the wilds of Africa, a place that is at once beautiful with animals running free, and fraught with the dangers of poachers interfering with the natural law of the jungle. The Lion King this is not. 

You really can’t blame the lions—mangy, miserable creatures-- for being beasts after being hunted and raped, so to speak, by evil, greedy humans—certainly the film’s hands down villains. You might call this movie an adventure thriller with many of the trappings of a gasp-worthy horror story: a giant paw piercing the glass of a disabled jeep, a family cowering inside. A soundtrack that punctuates the suspenseful momentum. The family’s backstory creates a rich buffer for the formulaic genre. No beasts were hurt in the making of this movie. The fiercest among them were CGI.

Hamptons Journal: Longhouse’s Artistic Legacy as the East End Expands as a Destination for Fine Art

Wood stitched with wire does not sound like an ideal way to structure an outdoor shed, but that’s what Steven Ladd and his brother William Ladd used to create one of the masterful works showcased at this year’s Longhouse Benefit. As Steven guided visitors through this piece, open on both ends, he explained how he learned to sew using his grandmother’s sewing machine, and in fact, the upstate New York resident wore slacks and a shirt that he had made himself. It defied the imagination to think how that textile practice might be translated to their sculpture titled “Right Here, Right Now.” Similarly, Taiwanese artist Cheng Tsung Feng invited celebrants into an airy bamboo pavilion, “Fish Trap VI.” The spirit of Longhouse founder Jack Lenor Larsen could be felt in these works on this annual occasion with Robert Wilson, Nathan Lane, Alice Aycock, and many others celebrating his legacy at the best art party of the summer.

Newer art venues in Montauk flourish: The Ranch, the site of the famed Deep Hollow Ranch, where for years a summer concert would bring hoards to the East End, to be seated on haystacks and hear, for example, Paul Simon one year, The Eagles the next, and James Brown. Repurposed barns featured Frank Stella’s sculpture at the early part of summer. His larger pieces were spread out on the immense, now grassy field. Currently, in The West Barn, hangs, Jo Messer’s “Whale Tail,” a presentation of nine new paintings of women emphasizing limbs and gesture in incongruous position saturated in monochromatic palettes. The exhibition title comes from “a resurgent trend of hiking a g-string thong above the waistline as overt provocation.” Yes, provoke it does.

Lost Illusions: A Classy Take on a French Classic

The French can be vicious, bringing backstabbing to a fine art. Just look at les Liaisons Dangereuses. This year’s winner of seven Cesars, including Best Film, went to Xavier Giannoli’s adaptation of Honore Balzac’s Lost Illusions, a splendidly captivating romp through 19^th century Paris via the extravagant “illusions” of a young, determined, and talented poet, as his ideals are bought and sold by alluringly fancy vipers of the first order. 

Fresh from the rural fields, the ambitious newbie makes his way to the big city’s swank salons, taking journalism as a day job. Needless to say, the work consumes him. He falls for a beautiful kept woman/would be actress, a lover of exceptional skill, who is ill (a little “la Boheme”). Lucien appears to have it all—acclaim, love, all except title, --until he does not. The Devil exacts his price. At Lucien’s inevitable fall, editors, rivals, --everyone exclaims, “Well, who do you think you are?” His shifting identity is just one of his conceits. In the French court of commerce and public opinion, betrayal –and its sister, humiliation--rule.

Weaving such tales of the ups and downs of Fortune’s Wheel with finesse and finery—with cunning contrasts in temptation and scandal, the French are masters. This is great work for an ensemble of actors starting with Gerard Depardieu, Cecil de France, Jeanne Balibar, Xavier Dolan, Salome Dewaels, and more. As Lucien, Benjamin Voisin plays the poet as pouty, seductive, and naïve.

A classic story, classically made! Yes, the French are great at tales of vicious misfortune, and that’s why we love them. 

Vik Muniz at the Peter Marino Foundation: “When I See Garbage, I think of You”

Kicking off a series of intimate talks with artists, Brazilian painter/ collagist Vik Muniz captivated an art-loving crowd at the Peter Marino Foundation in Southampton. In conversation with Peter Marino, his daughter Isabelle Marino, and Bob Colacello. Muniz had an abundance of stories: Having grown up in a Sao Paolo favela, he learned to read when his grandmother taught him the shape of words at age 4. Baffled at his son’s vocation, his father first stepped into a gallery to see his son’s work and asked a patron, why did you buy this painting. Known for his unusual choice of art materials, such as chocolate syrup and peanut butter, he laughed asking everyone if they actually knew what goes into paint. Also famous for making art of junk, he is the main subject of Lucy Walker’s documentary, Wasteland, a story told at a giant dump site. Trying to pay him a compliment, someone said, “When I see garbage, I think of you.”

Perhaps the most outrageous story of all is how he funded his trip to America. Wearing a tuxedo, as he had just won an award, he came to the aid of a man who was being beaten to death, and was shot in the leg. The shooter paid his hospital costs, and more, to avoid involving the police. With many of his paintings adorning the space, a most special art venue, Muniz could reflect on having worked first in advertising. Comparisons with Andy Warhol were inevitable: his ideas about art production, making no distinction between commercial and fine art—such as the portraits Warhol was paid to do. As we all learned, Warhol used to draw his bullies. And flattered, they ended up protecting him.

JR’s Spontaneous Poetics: Paper and Glue

JR, French  graffiti artist and Agnes Varda collaborator on Faces, Places is infectious. His virus, a matchless enthusiasm for the creation of art, is impossible to describe: his energy is a force. Burroughs/Gysin had their Third Mind, Ouevres Croissees in French, a roadmap to artistic creation through collaboration, and JR inherits their spirit along with Varda’s. In his new documentary, Paper and Glue, he takes us to the US/Mexican wall, a California prison, the banlieu of Paris, favela of Rio, places we would never think to want to see. Infusing them with his je ne sais quoi, voila, they become the only places that matter, sites with superstars among the disenfranchised, the movie’s inscription from Varda: “If we opened people up, we’d find landscape.

His pal Bradley Cooper introduced the nomadic JR at the MoMA premiere this week, hosted by MSNBC whose filmmaking arm funded the film. Cooper, a bona fide movie star in awe, seemed happy to just to be in JR’s posse, a growing populace of fans and volunteers helping to build his outrageous installations. At the wall—yes that wall—someone even jokes about who is going to pay for it--JR erected a structure to paste a giant-sized photo of a small Mexican boy, waiting for the authorities to shut him down. Instead, they arrived and shared tacos. That’s just what you want to do with the irresistible JR. “Kevin,” a prison inmate sporting a swastika tattoo on his cheek, calls collect and JR picks up wherever he is. He sends Kevin a signed copy of Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Now, the prison system provides a tattoo removing system.