July 31, 2019 Look Maurice Sendak at the Opera By The Paris Review In the late seventies, well into his career as a writer and illustrator, Maurice Sendak began designing sets and costumes for the stage, including productions of The Magic Flute, The Nutcracker, and an opera adaptation of Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. Storyboards, sketches, and more from this relatively unheralded portion of his oeuvre comprise the exhibition “Drawing the Curtain: Maurice Sendak’s Designs for Opera and Ballet,” which is on display at The Morgan Library and Museum through October 6. Fans of Sendak’s books will recognize in his theater designs the distinctive creatures and critters that haunt all his work, the unnerving but delightful processions they form, the mischief and wonder—and wildness—alive in their eyes. A selection of images from the show appears below. Maurice Sendak (1928–2012), Design for show scrim (The Magic Flute), 1979–1980, watercolor and graphite pencil on paper on board. © The Maurice Sendak Foundation. The Morgan Library and Museum, Bequest of Maurice Sendak, 2013.104:120. Photo: Janny Chiu. Maurice Sendak (1928–2012), Design for March curtain, Act II (The Love for Three Oranges), 1981, watercolor and graphite pencil on paper. © The Maurice Sendak Foundation. The Morgan Library and Museum, Bequest of Maurice Sendak, 2013.106:166. Photo: Janny Chiu. Read More
July 12, 2019 Look Part Love Letter, Part Cookbook By The Paris Review “This is a cookbook,” Dorothy Iannone’s deeply personal, handwritten collection of recipes begins. “Please read the remarks.” It’s a fair request. Dedicated to her lover and muse Dieter Roth, Iannone’s 1969 A Cookbook drips with love and color. Nestled among instructions for her favorite dishes are the feminist artist’s sweetest, most intimate thoughts. Across from an entry on lentil soup, she writes: “Only pain or pleasure can make art. Some people say longing too.” Directions for beef Wellington abut her admission that “even the wedding a few weeks ago of my best friend failed to move me.” Ticking across the top of her gazpacho recipe: “I don’t like to be sad. Half of the time I am.” A selection of images from the new facsimile printing of A Cookbook, out now from JRP|Editions, appears below. Dorothy Iannone, A Cookbook, 1969/2019. Courtesy the artist and Air de Paris. Photo: JRP|Editions/Nicolas Leuba. Dorothy Iannone, A Cookbook, 1969/2019. Courtesy the artist and Air de Paris. Photo: JRP|Editions/Nicolas Leuba. Read More
June 28, 2019 Look After Stonewall By The Paris Review Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, a flash point in the struggle for queer and trans rights. To commemorate the occasion, OR Books has reissued Fred W. McDarrah’s long out-of-print Pride: Photographs after Stonewall, an essential collection of images by the Village Voice’s first staff photographer and picture editor. In McDarrah’s work, we see the nascent stages of a movement that’s still making strides to this day. There is pain—an Act-Up demonstrator getting dragged away by cops in riot gear—but also triumph and joy: men kissing in Central Park, silhouettes slinking toward waterfront bars, the Gay Men’s Chorus singing, smiling, looking dashing in their matching tuxedos. A selection of McDarrah’s photos appears below. The first Stonewall anniversary march, held on June 28, 1970, was organized by the Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee, led by Foster Gunnison and Craig Rodwell. Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah, from Pride: Photographs after Stonewall (OR Books 2019). June 29, 1975. Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah, from Pride: Photographs after Stonewall (OR Books 2019). Read More
June 14, 2019 Look Mystical, Squishy, Distinctly Unsettling By The Paris Review A list of words that could describe Hyman Bloom’s work: loud, abstract, mystical, colorful, squishy, fleshy, grotesque, distinctly unsettling. But Bloom aimed to communicate beyond language. When thirteen of his paintings appeared in a group show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1942, he refused to provide a statement for the exhibition catalogue. Doing so would have stood in direct opposition to the nonverbal, Blakean transcendence for which he aimed. Bloom’s paintings often represent moments when, in his own words, “the mood is as intense as it can be made,” which ends up looking like some meeting of the corporeal and the cosmic. What are we looking at here? What is earthly, and what is ethereal? Bodies swim into blurs. Horizons melt like heated plastic. Blobs bristle with tooth and bone. Modern Mystic: The Art of Hyman Bloom presents the artist’s work in all its soupy, horrifying glory; see a selection of images from the book below. Hyman Bloom, Seascape I (First Series), 1974, oil on canvas, 53″ x 62″. Private collection. Read More
June 6, 2019 Look Beach Life By The Paris Review No one captures the colorful, blissful chaos of the beach like the British photographer Martin Parr. Some of his seaside shots swim with the verve of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Others are spare, dotted with tiny figures who are nearly swallowed up in the sprawl of the dunes. Everywhere there are stories: a seagull going about its day; surfers cresting and crashing; a couple, still wet from a dip, canoodling across their towels. Martin Parr: Beach Therapy collects and reproduces the latest in Parr’s long-running series of sandy photographs. A selection of images from the book appears below. Martin Parr, Mar Del Plata, Argentina, 2014. From the series Beach Therapy. © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos. Read More
May 31, 2019 Look Walt Whitman’s Right Hand By The Paris Review The great Walt Whitman sang a song of himself, and that song has continued to resonate over the two centuries that have passed since his birth. As a poet, a queer icon, and a literary celebrity, his influence on the American consciousness was monumental. A new exhibition at The Morgan Library and Museum, “Walt Whitman: Bard of Democracy” (on view from June 7 to September 15), examines how thoroughly Whitman’s work is threaded into this country’s DNA and mythology. A selection of artifacts from the show—including a plaster cast of the poet’s right hand, a notebook containing early versions of lines from Leaves of Grass, and the cardboard butterfly he posed with in one of his infamous author portraits—appears below. Phillips & Taylor, Photograph of Walt Whitman, 1873. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Image provided courtesy of the Library of Congress. Walt Whitman’s cardboard butterfly, 1850. Manuscript Division, Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of Walt Whitman Papers, Library of Congress. Image provided courtesy of the Library of Congress. Read More