Long overdue

Michael Clark by Michael Bracewell and Suzanne Cotter

Violette Editions 7th June, 2010


Notorious for his continually subversive takes on classical dance, Michael Clark is without doubt one of the most important dancers and choreographers of our time. He has created some of contemporary dances finest productions, often using leftfield rock music (most famously in his fantastic collaboration with The Fall, I Am Kurious, Oranj). Situated at the heart of the British post-punk art scene, Clark is much admired for his judicious choice of collaborators, such as designers Bodymap and Hussein Chalayan, artists Cerith Wyn Evans, Leigh Bowery, Charles Atlas and Sarah Lucas, film director Peter Greenaway (Clark played Caliban in Prosperos Books) and bands The Fall, Laibach and Wire. This monograph, the first on this major artist, celebrates the whole of Michael Clark's career to date, from the late 1970s to the present. Rich in visual and archival material, it contains new essays on Clark's work, reprints of key texts and journalism, photography by Nick Knight, David LaChappelle and others, plus interviews with many of Clark's collaborators from the worlds of dance, art, fashion and music. A protege of Richard Alston and Karol Armitage, Michael Clark set up his own dance company in 1984, at the age of 22. He immediately won the admiration of Rudolf Nureyev, who commissioned ballets from Clark for the repertoire at the Paris Opera. Clark has also been the subject of numerous films and documentaries, including the fictional biography Hail the New Puritans by Charles Atlas and The Late Michael Clark, directed by Sophie Fiennes. Michael Clark's new ballet opens in June at the Biennale in Venice, and travels to Edinburgh, Stockholm, Paris and, in late October, to the Barbican in London.










Michael Clark in collaboration with Leigh Bowery


Now playing: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - More News From Nowhere

Little Glory

The World of Gloria Vanderbilt
By Wendy Goodman with foreword by Anderson Cooper

Out in November. If this is anything akin to Tony Duquette, which Goodman coauthored, this is indeed something to look forward to.



Now playing: Laura Branigan - Gloria

Once lost, now found

Pink Flowers, Water Colors, (Jay Garvin) by James Bidgood


Necessity was the mother of invention for Bidgood, who created elaborate photographic tableaux in his small midtown Manhattan studio apartment. His first erotic series was an underwater epic called Water Colors, made in the early 1960s, in which he used a dancer from Club 82 named Jay Garvin as his subject. The underwater atmosphere is completely fabricated; the bottom of the ocean was created with silver lame spread across the floor of Bidgood's apartment; he made the arch of a cave out of waxed paper, and fashioned red lame into the shape of a lobster. He coated Garvin with mineral oil and pasted glitter and sequins to his skin so the silver fabric under photographic lights would reflect on his body like water. For weeks at a time, Bigood would eat and sleep within the sets he constructed in his apartment. - Off to Camp: The Photographs of James Bidgood, Aperture





James Bidgood by Bruce Benderson


James Bidgood is represented by CLAMPART


Now playing: Etta James - At Last

Fit

American Beauty by Patricia Mears

...the first to examine the relationship between innovation and aesthetics as expressed by American couturiers and fashion designers from the late 1910s to the present day. The book, which accompanies a major exhibition at The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, reveals that great design and great style were consistent elements in the work of American’s best fashion designers.



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Now playing: Diane Birch - Valentino

Muse

She enjoyed the attentions of painter Gustav Klimt, composer Alexander Zemlinsky and painter Oskar Kokoschka. But she married composer Gustav Mahler, architect Walter Gropius and writer Franz Werfel. Some she inspired and some she tortured. She being, Alma Maria Mahler-Werfel (née Schindler), the most beautiful girl in Vienna.





Danae by Gustav Klimt.





Double portrait (Kokoschka and Alma Mahler), 1912-13
Museum Folkwang, Essen




Alma Mahler, 1912
The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo




Bride of the Wind, Kokoschka's self-portrait expressing his unrequited love




Two Nudes (Lovers), 1913
Self-portrait of Kokoschka with Alma Mahler


Kokoschka and Alma Mahler: Testimony to a Passionate Relationship




The polydrama Alma by writer Joshua Sobol and director Paulus Manker.



My Life, My Loves: Memoirs of Alma Mahler, out of print

Diaries 1898-1902 by Alma Mahler-Werfel

The picture and the lady

Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), the German born naturalist who defied social conventions and produced some of the most beautiful insect studies of the 18th century.





Two plates from Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (1705)




Insects and Flowers: The Art of Maria Sibylla Merian






Now playing: The Ugly Bug Ball

Masterclass

Charlie Rose in conversation with Jeffrey Bilhuber





Jeffrey Bilhuber's Design Basics

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Now playing: Enigma - The Rivers of Belief (The Returning Silence)
via FoxyTunes

On the horizon

Yves Saint Laurent by Farid Chenoune

One of the most distinctive and influential designers of the second half of the twentieth century, Yves Saint Laurent takes his place in the pantheon of French couturiers, alongside Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, and Jeanne Lanvin. Yves Saint Laurent, the first comprehensive retrospective of his life’s work, will accompany an exhibition of some 250 garments from the collection of the Fondation Pierre Bergé–Yves Saint Laurent at the Petit Palais in Paris.





Thierry Mugler by Danièle Bott

A visual journey through four decades of Thierry Mugler’s unmistakable style and inexhaustible creativity. The designs of the iconic French couturier Thierry Mugler convey a powerful and seductive image of womanhood. His architectural, ultra-stylized silhouettes, his exploration of new materials, his passion for staging and spectacle, and his futuristic fantasies have left an indelible impression on the world of fashion.



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Now playing: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - We Call Upon the Author
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In the life

Jean and Dinah: Who Have Been Locked Away in a World Famous Calypso Since 1956 Speak Their Minds Publicly
By Tony Hall



Jean and Dinah, Rosita and Clementina
Round the Corner Posing,
Bet your life is something they selling . . .
- Mighty Sparrow, 1956


Based on the 1956 calypso by the Mighty Sparrow, the play is a tragi-comedy set in present-day Port-of Spain, Trinidad, in Act One, then in Act two, the characters take us some 40 years back to their theatre of the streets of Port of Spain.

It is Jouvay morning, the dawn of Carnival Monday and Jean comes to take her friend, Dinah, to play mas (masquerade) in the city as they have done for the past forty years. This year, however, Dinah is tired and ailing and does not want to go. Jean tries desperately to rally her into making their annual pilgrimage through the streets where they play sailor mas on Carnival Tuesday.

In the ensuing battle to get Dinah out of bed onto the streets of Port of Spain, both women discover things about themselves that shaped their lives. This play gives the women in Sparrow’s calypso a voice. Their stories take us on an emotional roller coaster of laughter, pain and sorrow.

Little girl blue

Princess Noire
The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone
By Nadine Cohodas


From Books of The New York Times
Under a Strange, Soulful Spell by Dwight Garner

More often than not

Source books for curtains and hangings (note the deliberate omission of the hateful phrase window treatments) are overwrought affairs full of fussy suburban interpretations of historical designs.

But not always, thanks to Caroline Cliffton-Mogg.



The Curtain Design Source Book




Curtains, A Design Source Book





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Now playing: Bobby Darin - The Curtain Falls
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Manfred, lord of the castle

The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well. So said Horace Walpole, the 18th century English art historian, author, politician and, not least of all, arbiter of taste. Today he is most remembered for his Gothic revival villa, Strawberry Hill.


Strawberry Hill




The Long Gallery




Strawberry Hill
By Anna Chalcraft and Judith Viscardi




Walpole also said, Nine-tenths of the people were created so you would want to be with the other tenth.


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Now playing: Barenaked Ladies - What a Good Boy
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Sounds like...

Splendour and Squalor: The Decline and Fall of Three Aristocratic Dynasties


From stunning stately homes to the prisons of wartime Britain; from the House of Lords to Edwardian asylums; from the Ritz and the Dorchester to East End pubs, "Splendour and Squalor" tells the stories of four of Britain's most illustrious aristocratic dynasties and of the black sheep who brought them down. They kept monkeys in West End hotels, and rent-boys in Deauville and Kensington. They spiced up life in pre-war Britain by patronizing illegal gaming clubs and staging elaborate five-in-a-bed sex in stately homes. They used firearms with convincing disregard for their own and others' safety and drove their Rollses and Bentleys with apparently suicidal intent. They acquired yachts and helicopters as they shipped the family silver to California and disposed of Old Masters at auction. They married frequently and unsatisfactorily, humiliating their wives and always withholding from them dynastic secrets of schizophrenia and insanity. Lacking the energy and appetite to do so, they rarely developed their talents. Carpeting their lives with deceit, they sought consolation in ferocious expenditure, funding narcotic and alcohol-fueled blow-outs. They ignored the advice of sane relations, shrugged off trustees, and experimented with burglary, shop-lifting, vagrancy and fraud. Their primary, possibly sole, accomplishment was to drag down their families with them. They were the black sheep of aristocracy and this is their story.

my kind of people.



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Now playing: Shirley Bassey - Get the Party Started
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American master

Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield


The work of Charles Burchfield is most decidedly founded, not on art, but on life, and the life that he knows and loves best. - Edward Hopper



An April Mood
1946-1955



Glory of Spring (Radiant Spring)
1950



Sun and Rocks
1918-50



The Insect Chorus
1917



Two Ravines
1934-1943




Curator Robert Gober discusses Hammer exhibition Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield
Run Time: 9 min. 44 sec.



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Now playing: Bronski Beat - Heat Wave
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Delicious

The Eastern and Oriental Cookbook by Will Ricker

Pan-Asian cuisine at its best.

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Now playing: Malcolm McLaren - Madame Butterfly (On the fly mix)
via FoxyTunes

The curious made extraordinary

All Visual Arts presents The Age of the Marvellous

Inspired by the Wunderkammer, or Cabinet of Curiosities, popular in the late Renaissance through the Baroque period (ca. 1550–ca. 1700). An era characterized by a revival of learning, the sum of all of man’s knowledge could be represented in rooms filled with natural wonders, artificial exotica and relics or art works concerned with the supernatural.

The Wunderkammer‘s particular ability to evoke the marvellous, to incite the emotions of awe, wonder, surprise and astonishment leading to curiosity and then learning was based on its ability to draw parallels and unify seemingly unrelated fields of human knowledge like Science and Art. The brilliant evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson considered the unification of knowledge – or what he labeled ‘Consilience’ in his eponymous book published in 1998 - nothing short of imperative for the survival of the human species.



Adam Fuss’s photograms
Alastair Mackie's Metamorphoses




Polly Morgan's At the Beginning, inspired by a Victorian proposal for a flying machine.




Kate MccGwire's sculptural works made from crow and jackdaw feathers.



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Now playing: Depeche Mode - World in my Eyes
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Looking forward to...

seeing,





Precious



and reading,



Mia Mask's Divas on Screen - Black Women in American Film


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Now playing: Mary J. Blige - No more drama
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Fash. Ed. Supreme.

That was how Joanna Lumley's fashion editor character, Patsy Stone, in Absolutely Fabulous described her idol Grace Coddington.


Vogue's Grace Coddington
More from Style.com





With the release of The September Issue Coddington finds a new audience and confirms what those of a certain age already knew - she is genius.





Her 2002 opus Grace: Thirty Years of Fashion at Vogue



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Now playing: Aretha Franklin - Amazing Grace
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Don't forget

In House by Mitchell Owens and Derry More is coming out soon.

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Now playing: Diana Ross - I'm Coming Out (Unreleased Chic mix)
via FoxyTunes

From A to C without Lucia

Dresser of souls led to...



The Wyndham Sisters: Lady Elcho, Mrs. Adeane, and Mrs. Tennant by John Singer Sargent

The symbol of the English clique known as The Souls.



Which in turn led to...




Clouds: The Biography of a Country House

The house built by Percy and Madeline Wyndham that would become known as the house of the age.




And finally ...




Cabinet designed by Philip Webb in 1861.

Philip Webb was the architect who not only designed Clouds but also William Morris's country retreat, The Red House.



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