If you happen to be in Paris, don’t miss the Anselm Kiefer exhibit at Centre Pompidou. This comprehensive retrospective, first in Paris since 1984, of nearly 150 works of the German master of pain and reckoning is spread over ten thematically organized rooms. It is an awe-inspiring show, profound and simultaneously quiet and disquieting.
Francesca Woodman was one of those art prodigies who has never quite found her place in this world.
She died young, but she has left a rich body of work that consists of photographs that could easily be mundane in the hands of a lesser artist, but in Woodman’s hands become enigmatic.
We would like to present to you a documentary on the work and ethos of designer Zam Barrett.
If you happen to be in Venice in the next few months, don’t miss the Sarah Moon exhibit at Palazzo Fortuny. Moon is a perennial favorite, and this sensual, melancholic series of photographs taken at the Palazzon is no exception.
Several days ago I announced the closure of my eponymous label. But instead of dwelling on that, I want to share with you my deep passion for music, as a farewell of sorts. Not a sad one, but meaningful.
So, here are 13 songs I could live with on a desert island – or, better yet, in a fortress of solitude.
New Order, a band that came out of the tragedy that ended Joy Division, is one of those rare acts that have somewhat inexplicably achieved critical acclaim and dance floor popularity. Much ink has been spilled by music journalists to trace the ups and downs of the band over the years. (Former) band members have weighed in – most notably the bassist Peter Hook who has left the band in 2007 and in 2013 released a memoir called “Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division,” documenting the band’s fraught existence and his fallout with Bernard Sumner, New Order’s singer.
The closest I got to Tilda Swinton was almost a year ago in Florence, when I gave her my sleeveless jacket. She gave me a cloakroom ticket, took the jacket, touched it gingerly, put it on a table, dragged it around, fixing it with her trademark, hypnotizing gaze. Then she put it on a hanger and hung it on a garment rack. True story. What was I doing with Ms. Swinton is that I was part of a select group of fashion editors at the Pitti Uomo trade fair that got to witness a performance art piece by Swinton, masterminded by Olivier Saillard, the director of the Palais Galleria, Paris’s fashion museum.
Few artists that came into their own after high modernism measure up to Francis Bacon, whose paintings are models of twisted introspection. What’s more, Bacon actually knew how to paint. Not silk-screen, not put messages on LED boards, not make collages, not arrange objects together, but actually work with phenomenal skill like the greatest of the artists had done. And his work hits not only on the visceral level, but on the intellectual as well.
For those fond of making lists, Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting, a large-scale solo exhibition of paintings currently on view at the Guggenheim Museum in New York provides a fertile stomping ground: Catrami, Gobbi, Muffi, Bianchi, Sacchi, Combustioni and Legini, Ferri, Combustioni Plastiche, Cretti. Tars, Hunchbacks, Molds, Whites, Sacks, Combustions and Woods, Irons, Plastic Combustions, Cracks. Ground pumice stone, tar, discarded linens, burlap sacks, wood veneer, cold-rolled steel, plastic sheeting off factory rolls, Celotex and blowtorch.
Today is the final day of the StyleZeitgeist Book Week, where we have brought you Fall titles that we liked. We hope you do, too. We wanted to end it on a light-hearted note. Light-hearted by our standards, of course: