Gossip Central

“Camp” at the Metropolitan Museum: Susan Sontag as Metaphor

The sound of typewriter clicks permeates “Camp: Notes on Fashion” the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute’s extravaganza exhibition, relieved only by a recording of Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow,” from The Wizard of Oz. The MET gala, its yearly benefit this week, may only exist as a distraction from all that the “Camp” show shows, with un-wearable art on celebrities devised to do and outdo the “camp” theme, dressing up itself as camp. But the exhibition, taken from Susan Sontag, the twentieth century diva of cultural dialogues, is a cerebral tour de force.

The Times of Bill Cunningham Premieres at the New York Film Festival

When New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham would train his camera on you—whether at a posh opening or on the street—it made your day. Anna Wintour --Cunningham photographed the Vogue editor since she was a teen—famously used to say, “One dresses for Bill.” His discerning eye assessed celebrities and civilians alike, snapping those with elan, style, joie de vivre. His attention would say, You had “IT.” This beloved New York icon, who died in 2016 at age 88, is revived in a new documentary, The Times of Bill Cunningham, Mark Bozek’s loving tribute. Featuring an interview with Cunningham at its center, this entertaining documentary premiered at Alice Tully Hall this week, one of several stellar non-fiction selections at this year’s New York Film Festival.

Love, Cecil: Picturing the Queen

In his memoir, Without Stopping, the American writer and composer Paul Bowles describes a party held on the beach in North Africa’s Caves of Hercules, with one grotto that had been decorated by Cecil Beaton. Truman Capote, fearful of scorpions, had to be carried down the face of the cliff by a group of Moroccans. Guests lay in the moonlight among cushions in the sand sipping champagne and smoking hashish, serenaded by an Andaluz orchestra. If Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s documentary, Love, Cecil, about the life and times of Beaton, a singular British photographer and illustrator for Vogue and Tony and Academy Award winning scenic and costume designer—for the films Gigi and My Fair Lady-- omits mention of this gathering, she must be forgiven, because the detail she does provide—especially of Beaton’s art-- is truly illuminating. As she said in a recent phone chat, “Making the film was a pleasure to me.”

Peter Beard in That Summer, a New Grey Gardens Documentary

That Summer, the summer of 1972, Peter Beard and Lee Radziwill had the idea to make a film about East Hampton. On the Memorial Day weekend, a crowd of East Enders attended a private screening of That Summer in East Hampton. Director Goran Olsson was not present, nor was Lee, but Peter Beard and his wife Nejma Beard, a producer of this film attended, along with Bruce Weber, Joy Behar, and many others, to hear Vincent Fremont and Bob Colacello, experts on Warhol, tell stories about Andy Warhol and visitors Truman Capote, Bianca Jagger and many others to the Montauk estate back in the day. The film serves as a history of those heady times, of a great group of artists who came to Montauk in 1972.

Peter Hujar: Photographs of a Bygone Era at the Morgan Library & Museum

At an opening at the Morgan Library & Museum celebrating exhibitions of Peter Hujar’s photographs and Tennessee Williams’ memorabilia, a gentleman in a maroon jacket marveled that the Morgan, known for collections of old master drawings and manuscripts would now show photography, especially of the type created by Hujar. While Williams’ scripts and Playbills form the kind of closeted history right up the Morgan’s proverbial alley, well, Hujar’s work is something else. A decade older than Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin, Hujar too documented the downtown demimonde, its denizen in drag. Hujar’s portraits—black & white-- haunt, testament to the era before AIDS, a vibrant artistic world in the autumn of life.

Avedon’s America at Guild Hall: Another Country

A simple walk through Guild Hall’s exhibition “Avedon’s America” is an encounter with the familiar. Portraits from the world of pop culture: Hendrix, Joplin, Dylan, along with iconic fashion work like Dovima with elephants, evening dress by Dior, Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, August 1955, grace the walls. A favorite portrait of mine is the loving embrace of poets Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg from 1964, naked and showy, the former with his genitalia limp, just part of the candor from an era when such displays were just not done. So is it merely loving, or up yours to anyone uptight?

“Fly Into the Sun:” Cocktails at the Watermill Center

The grounds at Watermill Center, Robert Wilson’s art retreat on the east end are always difficult to navigate, what with slippery grasses and rock paths. It would have been good to follow Daedalus’ flight, as the evening’s theme suggested, flying high—but not too high-- into the sun. Alas in myth, the sun’s heat melts his wings and he perishes. That’s what happens when you soar too high. Evoking this myth as well as Lou Reed’s lyric, this year’s pre-gala cocktails had hubris galore on the paths through the woods. And there, in the large courtyard, a wall boasts, “SHE OUTWITS HIM/ SHE OUTLIVES HIM.” On its other side, artists, formal in black suits, one from Lithuania, graffiti with spray paint, the art called “Too M@ch Talk.” These days, walls say much.

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.