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New Alexander McQueen Images at V&A

In the 1990s, Alexander McQueen formed a close relationship with the photographer Ann Ray (Anne Deniau), allowing her to photograph his studio and shows forming what he called, ‘my life in pictures’. Thirteen of these pictures will be on display at V&A in preparation for the upcoming exhibit Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty.

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Francesca Woodman: I’m Trying My Hand at Fashion Photography

The work of Francesca Woodman, the prodigious photographer who took her life in 1981 by jumping out of a window, is now on display at the Marian Goodman gallery in New York.

Interest in Woodman’s work has resurged after the 2011-2012 exhibits at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, with several books being published in their wake.

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Deepti Barth – Transgression

Before Deepti Barth, the former right hand in the design studio of Carol Christian Poell, departed to make her own line, she did an art project called Transgression, which can now be viewed at L’Eclaireur in Paris.

In November 2012 Barth flew to Cyprus with a small batch of clothes by Poell. The capital of Cyprus, Nicosia, has been partitioned between the Greek and the Turkish Cypriots after the Turks invaded the country in 1974. It remains the only city in Europe separated by an iron curtain, a subject all too familiar to Barth, who is German and now based in Berlin.

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Ken Schles: Invisible City/Night Walk 1983-1989

“Limelight, 1983,” is the title of one of the prints that opens Ken Schles’ show at Howard Greenberg Gallery of gritty, grainy, high-contrast prints of downtown New York.  ‘Entering The Palladium, 1985” is the title of another.  “Chair 619 East 5th Street, 1984” is another.  (That’s pretty damn east by the way, 619, even by today’s standards). “View From 224 Avenue B, 1983.”  “Boy on East 5th Street, 1984.”

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Porzellan Manufaktur Nymphenburg

If you find yourself in Munich, Germany, you might visit the Nymphenburg Palace, which was built in 1679. But you could easily miss one of its hidden treasures, Porzellan Manufaktur Nymphenburg, which has been producing porcelain wares since 1747.

The manufactory still belongs to the Bavarian crown. Although calling it a manufactory is misleading, because today the word implies mechanized production on industrial scale.

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On Kawara — Silence

On making the first turn of the spiral up the Guggenheim ramp you too might question whether there is going to be enough to keep this exhibition of On Kawara going.  It is one thing to walk the thirty-six Date Paintings permanently on view at Dia:Beacon, where the mind has been primed for the experience, and a whole other matter to walk in fresh off Fifth Avenue and immediately hit the ramp with three months of consecutive Day Paintings (“Everyday Meditation” 1971).

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KISHIO SUGA

The Upper East Side outpost of L.A.’s Blum & Poe gallery takes up the top floors of an unprepossessing brownstone and is easy to miss. That said, you will most likely have the place to yourself, which is a special way to get to walk through the first New York solo show of Kishio Suga that takes up the gallery, including its courtyard-facing terrace.

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DEBORAH TURBEVILLE UNSEEN VERSAILLES REVISITED

I had forgotten that Doubleday editor Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis originally commissioned the photographs from Unseen Versailles by the late Deborah Turbeville that are on view at Staley Wise in 1981.  The mind at first could not, perhaps did not, want to reconcile the withdrawn, intimate vision that is Turbeville’s with the stately, public and, one imagines, rigid New York of Kennedy Onassis.

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Future Beauty

“Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion” is currently showing at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), in Brisbane, Australia. The exhibition comes from the archives of the prestigious Kyoto Costume Institute and explores the influence Japanese fashion designers have had over the last thirty years.

The comprehensive collection is comprised of more than one hundred pieces from the heavyweights like Rei Kawakubo of