BEFORE HIS DESIGNS for the Broadway production of Dracula and his animated titles for the television series Mystery! made him internationally famous, Edward Gorey was known mainly for a series of quirky little books of which he was not only the illustrator but the author and sometimes the publisher as well.
MoreYOU CAN GET TO Hide/Seek, the groundbreaking exhibit of gay art at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., which runs through February 13, 2011, in one of two ways. The first is down a corridor lined with photographs of Elvis Presley. The second is through an exhibit called The Search for Justice displaying black civil rights figures, Earl Warren, and two white feminists.
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According to the back cover of this oversize, illustrated book, author Jonathan Katz is tackling nothing less than “how questions of gender and sexual identity dramatically shaped the artistic practices of influential American artists, including Thomas Eakins, Romaine Brooks, Marsden Hartley … and many more.”
MoreTHIS PAST HALLOWEEN WEEKEND, you couldn’t get a hotel room in Washington for love or money. I wish I could say that the hordes descending on the country’s symbolic heart were heading for the posh Friday night opening of Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery, the first-ever “gay show” of national significance.
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IN THE PAST TWO YEARS, at least two dozen books about Warhol’s life, career, and work have been produced. Is there anything new to say? Tony Scherman and David Dalton’s Pop is an entirely new take on Warhol and his world.
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HARRIET HOSMER (1830-1908) was a lesbian sculptor who emigrated from the United States to Rome at an early age to become part of an expatriate community of writers and artists, including a circle of prominent “independent women.” She worked in marble, and the quality of her surviving sculptures is extraordinary. The operative word is surviving: much of Hosmer’s work has been lost or destroyed, preserved in sketches and descriptions in dusty catalogs but otherwise forgotten.
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ANYONE who’s even casually acquainted with Tom of Finland’s work knows that, for Tom, size was everything. The frolicking gay men in his pictures are always well-muscled, often to absurd proportions. Invariably, they sport either impossibly large bulges in their pants or, better yet, titanic, tree-trunk-thick erections that defy the laws of physics. So it’s altogether fitting that the new Tom of Finland book just published by Taschen is as much a physical monument to the legendary gay artist as it is a study of his work.
MoreAn exhibit of the Polaroid photos of Robert Mapplethorpe
MoreTHIS NEW BOOK of photographs is remarkable in a number of ways. … [and] comes with a pair of plastic glasses that produce the 3-D effect and magnify the image as well. …
MoreNORTHERN GERMAN market towns don’t get much more idyllic and sleepy than Schwerin. All that changed this last summer when the authorities agreed to stage this, the first exhibition dedicated to Hitler’s favorite sculptor. This latter fact guaranteed there would be controversy: the exhibit’s curator Rudolf Conrades defended the show on the grounds that people deserved a chance to see the works, many of which were custom-designed for the Führer’s extensive building projects. Still, the manner of their presentation caused outrage in Germany’s artistic circles.
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