Helmut Newton

This spring, the Grand Palais shows the first retrospective of Helmut Newton’s work in France since his death (1920–2004), which is surprising in a way, since he did so much of his work in Paris and St Tropez especially, for French Vogue and other magazines. Provocative, open and daring, Newton explored the violent undertones and sexual politics of the fashion world with humour and beauty – and often shocked people while doing so. But the first impression of his work is simply how technically brilliant and extensive it is. There are over 200 photographs in the exhibition – mostly original or vintage prints made under Newton’s watch.

Between Embodiment and Identity

Beginning with a large glass display case, diagrams and drawings of body parts alongside plastic replicas of the same introduce us to the overlap of art and science. While Joseph Beuys might arrange rows of fat and felt referencing his “history” of plane crash and rescue – a doctor’s surgery would likely display body-part models as visual aids to explain a physical condition. The first may be enticing us to participate in his story through found or constructed objects; the second might be following a series of sequential narratives within a Victorian aesthetic.

Fashion’s Archeologist Excavates Her Past

A woman who shares her living space with a Mexican Huastec figure dated to 900 CE, Russian icons, Indian and Syrian gold and bronze objects, ancient Chinese vessels, Noguchi sculpture, paintings by Morris Louis and Franz Kline, and a cache of other precious art works is a woman to take seriously, particularly when she has spent decades travelling the globe to acquire them, meanwhile creating dramatic ensembles and jewellery for her fashion house, and doing some impressive interior design for good measure. The woman described is American couturier Mary McFadden, and a new monograph-cum-memoir spectacularly illustrates her career as designer, writer, art historian, collector and, perhaps foremost, adventure-seeker.

Frieze Art Fair New York: in Pictures

The first edition of Frieze New York took place in Randall’s Island Park, Manhattan from 4–7 May 2012. Featuring 180 galleries and works by over 1,000 artists it was housed in a bespoke structure designed by New York-based SO – IL Architects and located in a unique setting overlooking the East River.

Michael Dean: Government and Phyllida Barlow: Bad Copies

Michael Dean’s current exhibition, Government, at the Henry Moore Institute is the artist’s first major solo exhibition featuring entirely new works many of which were made on site. In many ways Dean has taken the brief to create new works in-situ literally. The handles of the doors leading to the galleries have been replaced by two works, Yes (working title) and No (working title), the galleries polished concrete floors have been covered with thick, wall-to-wall carpet and instead of standing the gallery attendants have been instructed to sit on the floor.

Shezad Dawood. Piercing Brightness

In his feature length film, Piercing Brightness, Shezad Dawood uses the genre of science fiction to contest fixed notions of race, migration and identity. In an interweaving narrative, the film follows Jiang and Shin, a young Chinese boy and girl, on a mission to retrieve the “Glorious 100” - agents who were sent to this planet millennia ago to study and observe.

Louis Vuitton – Marc Jacobs

Louis Vuitton – Marc Jacobs is an analysis and a commemoration of two high-powered men working over two centuries, who have in their own original ways revolutionized the fashion industry. Vuitton and Jacobs share interest of the revolutionary and the royal – freely channelling both. Their work also overlaps in that Jacobs has been working at Louis Vuitton for 15 years, modernising the brand and balancing elements of the Vuitton history with his own very modern sensibility. And they are certainly both at home in this former palace, and basking in the admiration of the fashion industry and Parisian aesthetes.

A Fitting Coda to a Culture-Bridging Career.
An interview with Joe Earle of Japan Society Gallery, April 2012

In September 2007, Joe Earle joined Japan Society in New York as vice-president and director of the Japan Society Gallery. His appointment came at a critical juncture; in 2007, Japan Society celebrated its 100th anniversary. During the previous two years, key personnel had left the organisation, while the gallery was operating without a director and a schedule for upcoming exhibitions. Thus, Earle, who had co-curated the gallery’s autumn 2006 “Contemporary Clay”, found an open field for making his mark.

Jazz-Age Style with an Asian Twist

Just when every vein of the wildly diverse art deco movement seems to have been mined by comprehensive exhibitions such as Art Deco: 1910–1939 at the V&A, London in 2003 and Alastair Duncan’s definitive 2009 survey Art Deco Complete, a relatively obscure flowering of it emerges to remind us that objects produced purely for pleasure and profit are well worth the effort. Japanese art deco is the subject of a new travelling exhibition – Deco Japan: Shaping Art and Culture, 1920–1945. Organised by Art Services International (ASI), the show opened at its debut venue, Japan Society Gallery in New York City, during Asia Week 2012 (16–24 March).

Alvar Aalto and the Sustainable Nordic House

45 years ago, Alvar Aalto was commissioned by the Nordic Council of Ministers to design the Nordic House, a cultural centre in Reykjavik, aimed at fostering cultural connections between Iceland and the other Nordic countries. To visit the building today is to be reminded how proficient this leading modern architect had become in purpose-built design, and in contemporary terms how sustainable, from one who led the reform of modernism at the time to a more humane idiom.

A Casual and Purposeful Art.
The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936–1951

In an effort to counter “historical myopia”, The Radical Camera examines the vital impact of New York’s Photo League on the evolution of documentary photography despite the cloud cast over the group during the second phase of America’s anti-Communist Red Scare, from 1947 to 1952. The exhibition just finished its initial showing at The Jewish Museum, New York, and will travel to three other venues through April 2013.

Migrations: Journeys into British Art. Interview with Sonia Boyce

This exhibition gives snapshots through the last 500 years of work produced by artists who migrated to Britain for reasons of opportunity and freedom. The complex yet subtle layout allows the viewer to loop back and forth through the exhibition of painting, sculpture and photography, encountering the sound of the film and video work whilst walking through the outer track of rooms. These not only take a generally chronological view of moments in art history, but also encourage the viewer to hover attentively between works.

Hirst Reconsidered

Reviews of Damien Hirst’s work invariably focus on the artist’s apparently contradictory identity. Genius or con man? Manufacturer or craftsman? People’s philosopher or shameless shock-exploiter? Like anything defined through opposition, though, these questions rarely take us to the heart of Hirst’s undeniable stranglehold on the art world.

Elemental Extravagance

Widely admired and acquired during her lifetime, Marie Zimmermann’s jewellery and metalwork reference a gamut of influences – ancient Egypt and Rome, the Far East and Colonial America, popular styles of her time like arts and crafts and art deco – modernised by dynamic geometric patterning. Since 1940, when she closed her studio, Zimmermann’s contribution to the history of early 20th-century American decorative arts has become a sideline to the main story. A new volume published by American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation in association with Yale University Press aims to restore Zimmermann’s reputation as one of the most sophisticated and skilled designers of the period.

Studio Collaboration in Perth, Scotland

Arthur Watson is a well-established artist of international repute and newly elected President of the Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture in Edinburgh. He met Perth architect Fergus Purdie at Dundee University, where they both teach. They worked together on projects, most recently on a Camera Obscura building on CairnGorm, at the ski centre in the Cairngorms National Park. The Melville Street site came up and the pair could see that the city planners found in it an insoluble problem.

Extra Muros: Masterpieces at MAS, Five Centuries of Images from Antwerp

A light breeze off the river Schelde guides visitors to Antwerp's newly constructed Museum Aan de Stroom (Museum by the Stream). The first temporary exhibition set up in this industrial edifice, adorned by 3,000 legendary little hands, invites the viewer to consider the development of western visual culture over five centuries and the key role Antwerp played in the cultivation of The Image; an intense display showing a journey through Old and New via Fouquet and Panamarenko to name but two of the impressive list of artists represented.

Lucian Freud Portraits

Over the last couple of decades, critics have adopted an increasingly benign attitude to Freud, even acclaiming him as “Britain’s (the world’s) greatest painter”. This wave of critical approval is a mounting but relatively recent phenomenon. The fact is that Freud spent most of his career on the margins of the mainstream of recognition and art discourse.

Lucian Freud: Drawings

To commemorate the life and career of Lucian Freud, and coinciding with the National Portrait Gallery, London exhibition curated by Sarah Howgate, which will then travel to Fort Worth, Texas, 2 July–28 October, Blain Southern produced a museum standard exhibition of drawings in their Mayfair exhibition space and a superb catalogue. Lucian Freud: Drawings has been co-organised with Acquavella Galleries, New York.

Late Modern or Postmodern? New Architecture by Trevor Dannatt

Comparisons and parallels will inevitably be drawn about this new, and very private house designed by nonagerian British architect Trevor Dannatt RA. Despite a prolonged and successful career Dannatt has personally eschewed publicity and promotion. But today in 2012 it is inevitable, given the critical interest this swansong project has already raised in the architectural press.

A Walk Down One Fashion Magazine’s Memory Lane

Fashion appears to be a momentary phenomenon. With a click of the shutter, the moment is gone and the model, outfit and photograph are passed to the fashion archives. Rummaging through the closets of past decades and centuries can yield charming or chic retro details for new designs, but the key word is “new”, and consumers and the fashion press are always looking for it. Vogue magazine has made its name by promoting merchandise and people at the front, on the edge or just over it.

Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties

It is almost impossible to separate the decade of the 1920s in America from the Jazz Age spectacle found in the stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a social scene celebrating opulence, wealth and sexuality, populated by young flappers with cropped hair and dapper gents in seersucker suits sipping on mint juleps, dancing the Charleston in shiny new shoes. Culturally these boom years are also tied to both a celebration of industry and steel, as seen in the Precisionist cityscapes of Charles Sheeler, and the flowering of African American cultural in the Harlem Renaissance.

The Steins Collect. Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde

When Leo Stein settled in Paris in late 1902 it was with the same romantic intention, as so many before him, to become an artist. Dutifully he spent hours at the Louvre and Musée du Luxembourg, enrolled in art classes and found himself a studio adjacent to his flat on 27 rue de Fleurus. But what was more momentous was Leo’s decision to start buying contemporary art, purchasing his first Cézanne, The Spring House (c1879), from Ambroise Vollard’s gallery in 1903. In the fall of 1903, Leo was joined by his sister Gertrude, who moved in with her brother on rue de Fleurus.

Pipilotti Rist - Eyeball Massage

Once upon a time there was a girl called Elisabeth Charlotte Rist who was born in the Alps of Switzerland. While growing up she realised that she saw the world through different lenses from the majority of people. Years later, when older, she renamed herself Pippiloti Rist - paying homage to the fictional powerful heroine of her childhood - and decided to become an artist to share her creative universe with everybody else.

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