A year or so ago someone asked me what my favorite painting was. "Of all time?" I gulped. After some cogitation, I offered up Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow, seen years ago in Vienna, which I kept circling back to for hours, and which continues to haunt me.
Migrant Mother by photographer Dorothea Lange. (Courtesy Palm Beach Photographic Centre)
Sometimes a picture is more than a picture; sometimes it’s a message in a bottle from 150 years ago.
In this particular case, the picture is both an original albumen print and a gorgeous close-up portrait of a sleeping 2-year-old child. In the lower margin is written in longhand, "My grandchild Archie."
The photographer — and the writer of the marginal notation — was Julia Margaret Cameron, whose unusually intimate pre-Raphaelite images proved not only that photography was an art, but that women could master it.
It’s an arresting image, but it’s far from the only high point of the Palm Beach Photographic Centre’s "Full of Grace: The Child in Photography," the most extensive theme show the Centre has ever done.
It revives dormant memories of Edward Steichen’s "Family of Man" exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955, which resulted in a book that sold four million copies.
In essence, the show traces the history of photography from close to its beginnings through modern masters such as Joel Meyerowitz and Gregory Crewdson in a knockout series of more than 250 prints, most of them original prints from private collections.
Andre Masson's Le Temp Profane is part of the exhibit at the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens. (Courtesy Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens)
It’s clear from the exhibition of André Masson’s work at the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens that he functioned as both an original and as a synthesizer.
Some of his figures are more or less straight out of Marc Chagall, while in Sirens, he seems to be channeling Picasso; sometimes he even resorts to Picasso’s iconography – the bull. And sometimes, as with a painting called Avanche, he’s clearly playing around with what became abstract expressionism.
But the fact remains that Masson had his first one-man show in 1924, while Miro and Max Ernst were still wrestling with the precepts of surrealism, so it’s entirely possible that the entire crew were happily cross-referencing (read: pillaging) each other.
What’s clear is that Masson was a major figure in European art in the 20th century, an abrupt, slashing draughtsman, with a gift for bold colors and what the French have valued in their artists since World War I – a subtle aura of derangement.
In fact, Masson was a soldier in the war, and was seriously wounded. Once he recovered, he became known for what he called "automatism," by which he meant staying up for as long as possible, in order to exhaust himself before he began painting without any kind of planning or premeditation.
The idea was that art could only be pure if it came directly from the subconscious, without any mental editing.
Paul Stapleton transforms ordinary objects into an unusual breed of sculpture. (Photo provided)
Things are changing in the art world, changing fast.
The evidence will be on view at the 16th annual American International Art Fair, which opens in downtown West Palm Beach Friday for a 10-day run.
What began as an art and antique fair is making a transition to an art and design fair.
The colors will be stark – black and white and gray, with LED lighting throughout the show. "There’s a movement toward minimalist works," says David Lester, whose company runs this fair and January’s ArtPalmBeach.
"A contemporary home tends to have white walls and neutral colors. The furnishings of today are rarely as ornate as in the past. Mar-a-Lago was typical of Palm Beach in its time, but today’s house is much more contemporary in nature."
The fair will still present a broad range, from 19th- and 20th-century paintings and photographs and sculpture to objects that are intrinsically beautiful, from a 17th-century Stradivarius violin to World War I-vintage automobiles.
Michael Feinstein performs at the Kravis Center on Friday. (Photo by AJ Mast)
These are good years for Michael Feinstein.
The singer-pianist’s New York cabaret, Feinstein’s at the Regency, continues to be successful, his PBS series is coming back for another season, he has a new album out (The Sinatra Project, Volume II), and he will also publish his first book, a memoir about Ira Gershwin, for whom he worked as archivist, this fall.
And of course, he continues to tour, with six Florida shows in six nights. He performs at the Kravis Center on Friday, Feb. 3.
A Q and A:
It seems to me that you’ve won your argument. The American Songbook has much higher visibility than when you started out 30 years ago.
I don’t have a perspective on it, because I’ve been so immersed. I guess it’s good that Rod Stewart is singing the songs. That’s some measure of visibility and success. But I do know that audiences are strong and fervent. I remember that when I was first starting out, at least on a national level, I would look out at the audience, and they were predominantly older people who had grown up with the music. I didn’t know if I’d have an audience in 20 years.
But I’ve discovered that young people have access to possibilities of discovering these artists and composers that didn’t exist then. The potential for discovering music of all kinds on the Internet is much greater now.
Alan Shayne and Norman Sunshine met more than 50 years ago. They have written a dual memoir of their lives together as a gay couple in the upper reaches of society. (Taylor Jones / Palm Beach Post)
Begin with the beginning.
They met in 1958, after a matinee of Jamaica, a Harold Arlen musical starring Lena Horne. Understudy Alan Shayne went on that day in place of star Ricardo Montalban. In the audience was a young artist named Norman Sunshine, who had gone to the show with a friend.
After the show they went backstage because the friend had worked with Shayne on television. Alan and Norman met, shook hands. There was a slight spark, but nothing spectacular. That came later, but not much later.
Fifty-three years later, the part-time West Palm Beach residents have written Double Life, a dual memoir of two lives lived openly together, at a time when that sort of thing wasn’t done, or, if it was done, was done surreptitiously.
Each of them has focused on creative endeavors – Shayne eventually quit acting, got into production and rose to become president of Warner Bros. television; Sunshine devised the "What Becomes a Legend Most?" ads for Blackglama, later serving as creative director for Lear’s magazine. Mostly, though, he’s concentrated on his fine art.
But the book makes clear that the most meaningful creation for these men has come from the mutual making of their life together. In one sense, it’s a book consciously written by tribal elders for those who come after. This is how we did it, they’re saying. This is the way it was. Weren’t we lucky? And aren’t you even luckier?
"We decided to tell the truth," says Shayne, as the two men relax in their stunning wrap-around downtown waterfront condo. "In retrospect, we can see that much of what we lived through was because people were afraid to be themselves. So we made a conscious decision to be ourselves. We felt we had a responsibility to tell our story for anyone who thinks that gay life is paradise and costumes."
Beth Lipman is assisted with gluing her sculpture by Norton assistant registrar John Welter (Jeffrey Langlois / Palm Beach Daily News)
Beth Lipman’s "One and Others" was created to commemorate the 50th anniversary of studio glass in America, but you might say it’s site-specific.
In outline, it’s a table setting resting on a black coffin. Why the coffin? When Lipman was walking to the Norton Museum of Art for the first time, she couldn’t help but notice the large cemetery right across the street.
The juxtaposition of art, which aims to illuminate life, and death, for which no illumination is possible, was too rich to resist.
In broad formation, the large glass sculpture consists of eight or 10 specific objects – a pineapple on its side, a dead rabbit, some beautiful carafes and gazing globes, a pear, a basket with splayed melon, some stemware, a painter’s palette and a candelabra – surrounded by foamy waves of glass that represent disrupted tablecloths and other linen.
Overall, it resembles a more-or-less sumptuous feast interrupted by some ambiguous but encompassing disaster.
Three of Eyman's 'maybe' nominees: Melissa McCarthy of 'Bridesmaids', Jean Dujardin of 'The Artist', Glenn Close of 'Albert Nobbs'.
Oscars nominations are like dating: sometimes it’s serious; sometimes it’s not. Some nominees actually have a chance to win, and some don’t.
Movie studios are not primarily in the business of manufacturing quality motion pictures – in any given year, any major studio will rarely disgorge more than a couple of pictures that are supposed to be good; the rest are just supposed to be commercial.
In addition, almost nothing that gets released until the last couple of months of the year has any claim on quality. This particular brilliant strategy is why nearly everybody over the age of 40 has gotten out of the habit of going to the movies regularly – whole seasons go by without anything made for them.
That said, picking winners is a lot easier than picking the nominations, because it’s always possible that a really good performance in a film almost nobody saw and/or liked will get nominated, even if it has little chance of winning.
Last year’s gambit of nominating 10 movies for Best Picture rather than the traditional five was an amusingly craven effort to appeal to the widest possible audience, but it strained credibility.
This year, the Best Picture category might have five nominees, or it might have any number up to and including 10, depending on the number of votes cast for each title. (Keep in mind that these are the same people who thought that smug twerp James Franco was a suitable Oscar host.)
THE HOUSE OF SILK: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery, by Anthony Horowitz. Mulholland; 294 pages; $27.99.
At the beginning of Anthony Horowitz’s graceful and compelling pastiche, Sherlock Holmes is dead and Dr. John H. Watson isn’t feeling too good. Despite Watson’s two marriages, three children and seven grandchildren, it is Holmes who monopolizes Watson’s imagination in his old age.
I wasn’t entirely sure that anybody remembered Myrna Loy anymore, but Emily Leider has gone and proved that someone does by writing Myrna Loy: The Only Good Girl in Hollywood (U. of California) – the subtitle comes from a passing remark from John Ford, who had a yen for her but never pursued it.
It’s an excellent biography of an underrated actress.
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