Thursday, April 30, 2009

May 2009 American Vogue: Karen Elson, Photo: Norman Jean Roy

Norman Jean Roy photographed Karen Elson for American Vogue on February 9, 2009 at Freemans Restaurant with stylist Tabitha Simmons.

May 2009 American Vogue editorial
Model: Karen Elson
Photographer: Norman Jean Roy
Stylist: Tabitha Simmons
Makeup: Mark Carrasquillo
Hair: Jimmy Paul



Bea Arthur (1991), by John Currin

Bea Arthur inspired many people, including artist John Currin. In 1991 John Currin painted "Bea Arthur Nude". I saw this painting at his solo show at the Whitney Museum in 2003.

Bea Arthur Nude (1991) - cropped by myself


Did Bea Arthur ever see this painting? If so, what did Bea think of this portrait? Was she flattered?

What does it feel like to have someone you've never met paint you nude, from their imagination? And, what would it feel like to see your imaginary breasts exhibited for the world to see at the Whitney Museum?

There are many things I'd have liked to ask Bea Arthur.

John Currin (born 1962) is an American painter. He is best known for satirical figurative paintings which deal with provocative sexual and social themes in a technically skillful manner. His work shows a wide range of influences, including sources as diverse as the Renaissance, popular culture magazines, and contemporary fashion models. He often distorts or exaggerates the erotic forms of the female body.

Currin was born in Boulder, Colorado, and grew up in Connecticut, where he studied painting privately with a renowned traditionally trained artist from Odessa, Ukraine, Lev Meshberg. He went to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he obtained a BFA in 1984, and received a MFA from Yale University in 1986.

In New York City in 1989 he exhibited a series of portraits of young girls derived from the photographs in a high school yearbook, and initiated his efforts to distill art from traditionally clichéd subjects. In the 1990s, when political themed art works were favored, Currin brazenly used bold depictions of busty young women, mustachioed men and asexual divorcee's, setting him apart from the rest. He used magazines like Cosmopolitan along with old issues of Playboy for inspiration for his paintings. When criticized for being sexist, Currin did not deny it, but did remark that he felt that "at that time [he] didn't feel like a man and [he] didn't feel like a woman." In 1992 a subsequent exhibition focused, less sympathetically, on well-to-do middle-aged women. Nonetheless, by the late 1990s Currin's ability to paint subjects of kitsch with technical facility met with critical and financial success, and by 2003 his paintings were selling "for prices in the high six figures".More recently, he has undertaken a series of figure paintings dealing with unabashedly pornographic themes.

He has had retrospective exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and is represented in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gardenand the Tate Gallery.

Currin is based in New York City, where he lives with his wife and fellow artist, Rachel Feinstein. John Currin and his wife, Rachel Feinstein, in the front row at Marc Jacobs Spring 2006 show:


from: New York Magazine

Influences: John Currin

By Karen Rosenberg
Published Nov 19, 2006

Karen Rosenberg:You famously painted a topless portrait of Bea Arthur. Were you a big fan?

John Currin:Bea Arthur painting is from Maude, which I used to watch as a kid. In the eighties, I didn’t have TV for, like, a whole decade. When I started watching again in the nineties, The Golden Girls was in syndication. When I had a loft with Sean and Kevin Landers, we’d always take a break in the afternoon and watch The Golden Girls. When I made the painting, I was living in Hoboken and still making abstract paintings, and I was very frustrated. I was walking back from the PATH train and this vision of Bea Arthur just came to me.

From ArtForum:

John Currin - Critical Essay

ArtForum , Sept, 2003 by David Rimanelli
Bea Arthur Naked, 1991, remains the most sensational of these pictures, and the best. The artist depicts the star of Maude, that '70s sitcom about an uppermiddle-class do-gooder, women's libber, and suburban wit--not Arthur's later incarnation in The Golden Girls. Naked, Arthur nevertheless remains composed and dignified, her smile and slightly peaked eyebrows conveying a sense of irony, even amusement. The portrait is too psychological for the everyday antifeminist caricature. And Currin's technique, stiff but more than adequate, dry but not fussy, betokens too much effort for the sake of mere snide laughter. Painted in the rapidly expanding '90s context of well-meaning art (the kind that Maude herself might collect were she part of the scene?), Bea Arthur Naked draws together multiple threads: the "incorrect" representation of women; the campy Pop aura of television sitcoms, perhaps a hang over from the '80s (think "Infotainment" and all those other group shows about a generation raised by the unwholesome light of the tube); and a commitment to figurative painting in the face of politicized art practices, the ever escalating fortunes of photography, and scatter and/or abject art. Perhaps Currin indulged in the last tendency somewhat, given his debased or pathetic subject matter and an impoverished or superannuated technique that savors more of the thrift-shop aesthetic than of the Old Masters.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Mariacarla Boscono and David O'Donnell
on Nick Knight's set

More live updates can be seen at: http://twitter.com/showstudio:

Soft Furnishings: The Erotic House of Peter Saville - Mariacarla Boscono, Photo: Nick Knight

SHOWstudio bradcasted live to expose every intimate detail of Soft Furnishings, a fashion shoot with a difference sprung from the fertile imagination of graphic design legend Peter Saville and captured by Nick Knight for the July 2009 issue of Wallpaper* magazine. Inspired by the distinctly modish fetishisation of contemporary furniture design - and applying this to the sexualisation of an entire environment - Peter Saville has worked with set designer Gideon Ponte to construct an 'Erotic House' of Pop perversity, layering abstract and contrasting colours and textures inspired by Richard Hamilton's collages and Allen Jones' canvases. To people this post-modern dreamhome, Nick Knight and Peter Saville turned to stylist Francesca Burns, Italian model Mariacarla Boscono and Autumn/Winter 2009 fashion from the likes of Chanel, Prada, Yves Saint Laurent and Lanvin, accessorised by the less standard accoutrements of the sexual playroom.

Alongside all this will sit SHOWstudio's constant Twitter feed and frequent live updates delivered direct from each and every imaginary room of Saville's eroticised abode.

The entire process of creating and documenting Saville's 'Erotic House' can be seen real-time on SHOWstudio.com, with our broadcast streaming live from 13:00 GMT (times subject to change). Shoot highlights will be constantly available, just in case you miss anything, including interviews with mastermind Peter Saville, image-maker Nick Knight and key players Fran Burns, Gideon Ponte and Mariacarla. Alongside all this will sit SHOWstudio's constant Twitter feed and frequent live updates delivered direct from each and every imaginary room of Saville's eroticised abode.

SHOOT
Art Direction: Peter Saville
Photography: Nick Knight 

Styling: Francesca Burns at Management + Artists
Set Design: Gideon Ponte
Models: Mariacarla Boscono at Women Management, Tony Bruce at Storm, David O'Donnell

Hair: Christian Wood
Make-up: Hannah Murray at Julian Watson

Nails: Marian Newman at Streeters
Casting: Sidonie Barton
Digital Capture: Joseph Colley
Photographic Assistance: Tristan Thomson, Andy Vowles and Adam Goodison
Styling Assistance: Helen McGuckin and Rosa Maria Bertoli
Set Design Assistance: Poppy Bartlett
Make-up Assistance: Lauren Parsons
Hair Assistance: Jess Furlan
Production: Gainsbury & Whiting
Production Assistance: Stefania Farah
NK Image Production: Charlotte Wheeler
Lighting: Kinetic
Post Production: Epilogue Imaging
Location: Park Royal Studios, London



























SHOWstudio
Creative Direction: Paul Hetherington
Editorial Direction and Interviews: Alexander Fury
Editorial and Production Management: Laura Bradley
Technical Development: Ross Phillips and Dorian Moore 

Front-End Web Design and Development: Francisco Salvado
Camera Operators: Rik Patel, Antonio Silva and Andy Vowles
Vision Mixing: Jez Tozer
Film Editing: Harry Hanrahan
Design Assistance: Kate Swingler

Editorial Assistance: Isabella Burley, Lauren Fried and Caroline Legrand

Bea Arthur as Maude meets Esther Rolle as Florida Evans

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Tokion May 2009 Cover - Jamie Bochert, Ph: Samantha Rapp

Samanthan Rapp photographed Jamie Bochert for Tokion Magazine on March 21st, 2009 with stylist Christian Stroble.

Tokion May 2009 Cover
Model: Jamie Bochert
Photographer: Samantha Rapp
Stylist: Christian Stroble
Hair: Andre Gunn
Makeup: Osvaldo Salvatierra







Broadway to Dim Its Lights for Bea Arthur




Broadway to Dim Its Lights for Bea Arthur

The marquees of Broadway theaters will be dimmed for one minute on Tuesday at 8:00pm in honor of Bea Arthur, who died on Saturday. She was 86.

In 1966, Ms. Arthur won a Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical for her performance as Vera Charles in the original Broadway production of “Mame.” Her other Broadway credits include “Plain and Fancy,” “Seventh Heaven” and “Nature’s Way;” she also played Yente the Matchmaker in the original 1964 production of “Fiddler on the Roof” and appeared in Woody Allen’s 1981 play “The Floating Lightbulb.” Her one-woman show “Bea Arthur on Broadway: Just Between Friends” was nominated for Tony in 2002.

Three Hundred and Seventeen and Counting

From the New York Times / T The Moment:

Fine Print ‘Three Hundred and Seventeen and Counting’
By David Sebbah




The photographer Steven Meisel has photographed every single cover of Italian Vogue for the last 20 years and nine months. From visual parodies of super models heading into rehab, to B-listers posing on the red carpet, to photographing the artist Elizabeth Peyton for the cover way back in 1998, Meisel has used his lens to tap into the zeitgeist. This week, the photographer’s third book, “Three Hundred and Seventeen and Counting,” will be published by Mallard/Janvier. For information about purchasing the book, write to mallard.janvier@gmail.com.

WWD Japan - The Model Issue

Every Season WWD Japan interviews the top runway models of the season - this season Reiko Suga of WWD Japan interviewed Nimue Smit, Yulia Kharlapanova, Natasha Poly, and Jourdan Dunn.

Nimue Smit:


Yulia Kharlapanova:


Natasha Poly:


Jourdan Dunn:

Monday, April 27, 2009

GF by Gianfranco Ferré S/S 09 ad campaign - Viktoriya Sasonkina, Photo: Steven Meisel - behind the scenes video

Very Hollywood Michael Kors fragrance campaign - Carmen Kass, Photo: Mario Testino

Mario Testino photographed Carmen Kass for Michael Kors Very Hollywood fragrance campaign on October 22, 2008 at the Santa Monica Airport, Hanger 8 with stylist Brana Wolf.

Michael Kors Very Hollywood fragrance campaign
Model: Carmen Kass
Photographer: Mario Testino
Stylist: Brana Wolf
Hair: Orlando Pita
Makeup: Tom Pecheux



Michael Kors’ success on the small screen with “Project Runway” has fueled an even more lofty goal: a fragrance franchise inspired by Tinseltown’s movie heritage.

“Hollywood glamour is the ultimate escape,” said the designer during an interview at his Manhattan showroom Tuesday. “It is an emotional pull, no matter what your age — which gave us the idea for this fragrance. Everyone needs a little escape these days.”

The scent, dubbed Very Hollywood Michael Kors, is slated to be launched in September and is the third primary fragrance franchise for Kors.

As for Very Hollywood, “this is the indulgence. This is the gold dress!” But, he hastens to add, it’s not necessarily a nighttime fragrance. “It’s more of a mood,” he said. “This is definitely not the customer’s sporty moment.”

Very Hollywood, concocted by Kors and the Estée Lauder Cos. Inc.’s Evelyn Lauder and Trudi Loren in cooperation with International Flavors & Fragrances, is a sophisticated floral. Top notes are of mandarin and iced bergamot; the heart is of wet jasmine, ylang-ylang, raspberry and gardenia, and the drydown is of Italian orris, creamy amber, soft white moss and vetiver. “This is the most glamorous, indulgent scent we’ve ever done,” said Kors, adding that he thinks the sunny Southern California landscape adds optimism to the mix.

The bottle is glass molded to suggest the flashbulbs of Fifties and Sixties photography. Outer packaging is a rich coral with a shagreen texture and a gold border; the Very Hollywood moniker (in a font inspired by the Beverly Hills Hotel) is also in gold. “I want women to have that boudoir moment,” he said. “The texture of the packaging, the bottle — they’re all very opulent and glam, with an architectural edge.”

Print and TV advertising are planned for Very Hollywood, both featuring models Carmen Kass and Noah Mills and with creative direction by Mario Testino. “Carmen has been my muse for quite some time,” said Kors. “She’s such a chameleon — we can shoot her in a guy’s T-shirt or dripping in Fred Leighton jewels, and she looks fantastic in both.” The print campaign is expected to break in October fashion, beauty, lifestyle and entertainment magazines. One version, a multipage concept for entertainment magazines only, is intended to look like a tabloid section, while fashion, beauty and lifestyle books will get more traditional single- and double-page spreads (some scented) featuring the couple. Sampling vehicles include scented ribbons with gold-toned, charm-sized replicas of the fragrance bottle, in addition to the traditional vials on card and scented strips. Upward of 60 million scented impressions are being targeted.

TV plans are still being determined, although the expectation is that the bulk of the ads will run in November and December for holiday sales.

Californian optimism and a fifties look characterises the floral fragrance featuring notes of mandarin, bergamot, jasmine, ylang-ylang and gardenia, with creamy amber and vetiver.

Michael Kors Very Hollywood will be available in 30, 50 and 100 ml Eau de Parfum and 30 ml Parfum; the bottle is meant to evoke old-fashioned flashbulbs. There will also be a ballpoint pen with scented ink, a cocktail ring with solid perfume, and a matching body lotion.

Valeria Dmitrienko - Photo: Joshua Jordan

Joshua Jordan photographed Valeria Dmitrienko for German Elle on November 18, 2008 at Splashlight Studios with stylist Kathrin Seidel.

German Elle May 2009 Editorial
Model: Valeria Dmitrienko
Photographer: Joshua Jordan
Stylist: Kathrin Seidel
Hair: Fred van de Bunt
Makeup: Paco Blancas















RIP Bea Arthur



I believe that laughter is the best medicine. No matter what happens to me, as long as I have the ability to laugh, I am free. Bea Arthur brought me years of laughter, and freedom, and I will miss her very much.

Golden Girls---Best of Dorothy Seasons 1/2


Golden Girls - Blanche & Rose read Dorothy:


Clips of Bea's greatest moments can be seen here, from Newsday.com

From the New York Times:

Bea Arthur, Star of Two TV Comedies, Dies at 86

By BRUCE WEBER

Bea Arthur, who used her husky voice, commanding stature and flair for the comic jab to create two of the most endearing battle-axes in television history, Maude Findlay in the groundbreaking situation comedy “Maude” and Dorothy Zbornak in “The Golden Girls,” died Saturday at her home in Los Angeles. She was coy about her age, and sources give various dates for her birth, but a family spokesman, Dan Watt, said in an e-mail message she was 86.
The cause was cancer, Mr. Watt said.

Ms. Arthur received 11 Emmy Award nominations, winning twice — in 1977 for “Maude” and in 1988 for “The Golden Girls.”

She was a seasoned and accomplished theater actress and singer before she became a television star and a celebrity in midcareer, and she won a Tony Award in 1966 for playing Angela Lansbury’s best friend, the drunken actress Vera Charles, in “Mame.”

But while she was successful on stage, on television she made history. “Maude,” which was created by Norman Lear as a spinoff from “All in the Family,” was broadcast on CBS during the most turbulent years of the women’s movement, from 1972-78, and in the person of its central character, it offered feminism less as a cause than as an entertainment.



Maude Findlay was a woman in her 40s living in the suburbs with her fourth husband, Walter (played by Bill Macy), her divorced daughter, Carol (Adrienne Barbeau), and a grandson. An unabashed liberal, a bit of a loudmouth and a tough broad with a soft heart, she was, in the parlance of the time, a liberated woman, who sometimes got herself into trouble with boilerplate biases just the way her cultural opposite number, Archie Bunker, did. She was given a formidable physicality by Ms. Arthur, who was 5 feet 9 ½ inches and spoke in a distinctively brassy contralto.

The show was considered a sitcom, but like “All in the Family,” it used comedy to take on serious personal issues and thorny social ones — alcoholism, drugs, infidelity.



“We tackled everything except hemorrhoids,” Ms. Arthur said, sounding much like Maude, in a 2001 interview with the Archive of American Television, a collection of video oral histories compiled by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

In the show’s first season, Maude, at the age of 47, learned she was pregnant; her distress was evident.

“Mother, what’s wrong? You’ve got to share this with me,” Carol says. Maude’s response is typical, with barbs aimed both inward and outward, delivered by Ms. Arthur with a flash of simultaneous anger, despair and humor: “Honey, I’d give anything to share it with you.”
The two-part episode was broadcast in November 1972, two months before Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that made abortion legal nationwide, was decided. By the episode’s conclusion, Maude, who lived in Westchester County in New York, where abortion was already permitted, had chosen to end the pregnancy. Two CBS affiliates refused to broadcast the program, and Ms. Arthur received a shower of angry mail.

“The reaction really knocked me for a loop,” she recalled in a 1978 interview in The New York Times. “I really hadn’t thought about the abortion issue one way or the other. The only thing we concerned ourselves with was: Was the show good? We thought we did it brilliantly; we were so very proud of not copping out with it.”

The Golden Girls Season 5-7 Opening Credits:


“The Golden Girls,” an immensely popular show that was broadcast on NBC from 1985-92 and can still be seen daily in reruns, broke ground in another way. Created by Susan Harris (who wrote the “Maude” abortion episode), it focused on four previously married women sharing a house in Miami, and with its emphasis on decidedly older characters, it ran counter to the conventional wisdom that youthful sex appeal was the key to ratings success.



Which is not to say “The Golden Girls” wasn’t sexy. Like “Maude,” it was a comedy that dealt with serious issues, especially those involved with aging, but also matters like gun control, gay rights and domestic violence. And like “Maude,” it could be bawdy. The women were all active daters and, to different degrees, openly randy. As Dorothy, Ms. Arthur was coiffed and clothed in a softer, more emphatically feminine manner than she had been in “Maude,” but she was no less sharp-tongued, and she and the show’s other stars — Rue McClanahan, Betty White and Estelle Getty (who, though younger than Ms. Arthur, played Dorothy’s mother) — were frequently praised for portraying the lives of older women as lively, uncertain, dramatic and passion-filled as those of college sorority sisters.

Familiarly known as Bea, Ms. Arthur was billed in the theater and on television as Beatrice, but the name was one she made up. She was born Bernice Frankel in New York City on May 13, 1922, according to Mr. Watt. But she preferred to be called B — “I changed the Bernice almost as soon as I heard it,” she said — and later expanded it to Beatrice because, she said, she imagined it would look lovely on a theater marquee. The name Arthur is a modified version of the name of her first husband, the screenwriter and producer Robert Alan Aurthur.

When she was a child, her family moved to Cambridge, Md., on the Eastern Shore, where her parents ran a small women’s clothing store, and she dreamed of being a chanteuse and an actress, and entertained her friends with imitations of Mae West. She attended Blackstone College, a two-year school in Virginia, and later studied to be a medical technician, then eventually moved to New York to study acting with Erwin Piscator at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research. Among her classmates were Tony Curtis, Walter Matthau and the actor and director Gene Saks, whom she married in 1950. (He directed her in “Mame.”) They divorced in 1978; their two sons, Matthew and Daniel, survive her. She had two granddaughters.

Ms. Arthur worked regularly Off Broadway and in summer stock, appearing as Lucy Brown in Marc Blitzstein’s adaptation of “The Threepenny Opera” at the Theater de Lys in 1954. And in 1955, in a well-received musical tidbit, “Shoestring Revue,” she was seen for the first time by the man who would become a lifelong friend and professional benefactor, Norman Lear.

She also sang in nightclubs and worked occasionally on television, appearing on “Kraft Television Theater” and other shows featuring live drama. On Broadway, in 1964, she played Yente, the matchmaker in “Fiddler on the Roof.” In the movies, she appeared in the comedy “Lovers and Other Strangers” (1970), and in a reprise of her stage performance as Vera Charles, she appeared in “Mame” (1974), again directed by her husband, this time alongside Lucille Ball.

In 1971, she was living in New York but visiting her husband, who was directing a movie, “The Last of the Red Hot Lovers,” in Los Angeles, when Mr. Lear persuaded her to do a guest spot on “All in the Family.” The role he created for her, Maude Findlay, was a cousin of Edith Bunker, Archie’s wife (Jean Stapleton), who arrives to care for the family when everyone gets sick. Her tart sparring with Archie (Carroll O’Connor, with whom she had worked on stage, in a play called “Ulysses in Nighttown”) was a hit with viewers. Almost immediately CBS ordered up a new series from Mr. Lear, with Ms. Arthur’s Maude at the center of it. It changed her life.

“I think we made television a little more adult,” Ms. Arthur said. “I really do.”

Sex and The City Parody, starring Bea Arthur:


Bea Arthur's Finest Final Performance - Pamela Anderson Roast:

Friday, April 24, 2009

RIP Kenneth Paul Block

It is Friday, 65°F (18°C) and Sunny and I am wrecked.

Again.

Last Summer Yves Saint Laurent passed. And now Kenneth Paul Block has passed as well.

It is getting harder and harder to find the human touch in fashion..........something that was created by a real person, that has their fingerprints on it.

How much more digital photography, copycats, misogyny, porno chic, designer t-shirts, skinny jeans, latex leggings and tranny shoes can I take?

No matter what happens, I promise to focus harder to see the tangible beauty in this world. I remain open to all positive possibilities.

Yves Saint Laurent, by Kenneth Paul Block:


Yves Saint Laurent's Mondrian inspired dress, by Kenneth Paul Block:


Yves Saint Laurent's 1976 Ballet Russes collection, by Kenneth Paul Block:


Longtime WWD and W magazine illustrator Kenneth Paul Block, 84, a champion of the art of fashion illustration, died Thursday at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital in New York.

The cause of death was complications from a fall he suffered earlier in the week, according to his nephew, Steven.

Men wore fedoras and women still wore gloves when Block joined Fairchild Publications Inc. in the Fifties. And none of that dash was lost on Block, whose fondness for ascots, cigarette holders and impeccable jackets never waned, nor did what one friend described as his Dorian Gray-like youthfulness. But his studied drawings were never strictly surface, always managing to capture the gesture at hand, whether it be the swing of a skirt or the tilt of the head. “I was never only interested in the clothes. I was more interested in the women in the clothes,” he once said.

One of three boys growing up, Block was the kind of kid who appreciated the chicness of his fashion editor aunt Elsie Dick’s zip-front fur jacket. He combed through Harper’s Bazaar magazines in the attic of his family’s home in Larchmont, N.Y.

At Parsons School of Design, he was drawn to what he described as the “world of immense style,” introduced by interior designer Van Day Truex. After graduating, Block’s first job was sketching for McCall’s Patterns, a post friends said he would rather have omitted from his résumé. But Block went on to cement his presence as a leading fashion illustrator during his reign at Fairchild Publications, which lasted until the fashion illustration department was disbanded in 1992. Through it all, he swiftly, yet fastidiously, captured an array of subjects with a cool and detached manner, jetting to Europe for the couture shows or sauntering just up the street to sketch unsuspecting notables at lunch (martini in hand to mask his intentions). All the while, he fulfilled what he once described as a childhood quest “to draw glamorous women in beautiful clothes.”

Block’s portfolio was packed with portraits of blue bloods such as Babe Paley, the Duchess of Windsor and Jackie Kennedy, as well as commercial work for Bergdorf Goodman, Bonwit Teller and Lord & Taylor and labels such as Halston and Perry Ellis. But for Block, the end result was never just a matter of lines on a page.

“Gesture to me is everything in fashion. It is the way we stand, sit, walk and lie. It is the bone,” he once said.