Tag Archives: Gertrude Stein

WARHOL WOMEN AT LÉVY GORVY

Forty-two paintings of women by Andy Warhol—including portraits of Gertrude Stein, Ethel Scull, Liza Minnelli, Dolly Parton, Golda Meir, Debbie Harry, Marilyn Monroe, and the artist’s mother Julia Warhola—are now on view at Lévy Gorvy in Manhattan.

In a silver-tin-foil-covered room in the gallery, a selection of Warhol’s 1964–1966 Screen Test shorts will play on a loop. Among the artist’s subjects for these 3-minute films were Yoko Ono, Edie Sedgwick, Marisa Berenson, Barbara Rubin, Amy Taubin, Susan Sontag, Niki de Saint Phalle, Cass Elliott, Donyale Luna, Holly Solomon, Maureen Tucker, and Nico.

“I don’t think I’ve ever met a collector today who is in between, let’s say, 25 to 65 [years old] who will tell me, ‘I won’t collect Warhol,’ and I don’t know that about any other artist… Our great-grandchildren will still be collecting Warhol more than many of the artists that are more pricey today.” — Dominique Lévy

WARHOL WOMEN

Through June 15.

Lévy Gorvy

909 Madison Avenue (at 73rd Street), New York City.

Andy Warhol, from top: Judy Garland (Multicolor), 1978, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas; Wilhelmina Ross, from the series Ladies and Gentlemen, circa 1974–1975; Triple Mona Lisa, 1964, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas; Kimiko Powers, 1972, acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas; Aretha Franklin, 1986, synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on canvas; Red Jackie, 1964, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, photograph courtesy Froehlich Collection, Stuttgart. Images © 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Paintings photographed by Tim Nighswander, courtesy Lévy Gorvy.

JULIANA SPAHR AND CLAUDIA RANKINE

DU BOIS’S TELEGRAM is a brilliant inquiry into the institutions—from the CIA to the foundations and literary magazines it funded—that inform and shape literary production. The promoted, the funded and heralded—from Richard Wright to Gertrude Stein to James Baldwin—do the work of the nation state under the umbrella of culture. Our complicit freedoms are brought out in the open in this thought-provoking and erudite book. This is not a book to agree or disagree with, but rather a compelling argument that brings relevant facts forward for clear-eyed consideration. One would be remiss to pass on such essential research and analysis.” — Claudia Rankine

Juliana Spahr—author of DU BOIS’S TELEGRAM —will be joined by Rankine for a discussion about the book, which takes as its impetus the telegram W.E.B. Du Bois sent when he was denied a passport to attend the 1956 Présence Africaine Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris:

“Any Negro-American who travels abroad today must either not discuss race conditions in the United States or say the sort of thing which our State Department wishes the world to believe.” — W.E.B. Du Bois

 

CLAUDINE RANKINE AND JULIANA SPAHR

Thursday, December 13, at 7:30 pm.

92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue, New York City.

 

DUBOIS’S TELEGRAM—LITERARY RESISTANCE AND STATE CONTAINMENT, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

Above: Claudia Rankine.

Below: Juliana Spahr.

GIACOMETTI AND JAMES LORD

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FINAL PORTRAIT—starring Geoffrey Rush as Alberto Giacometti and Armie Hammer as James Lord—recounts the friendship between the artist and his biographer.

Lord was a great intimate of Giacometti, Picasso, and Dora Maar. In addition to his Giacometti texts, Lord is the author of several memoirs recounting his times with Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Marie-Laure de Noailles, Jean Cocteau, Balthus, and Harold Acton. Lord’s last book was My Queer War, based on his experiences in the Second World War.

The film, directed by Stanley Tucci, co-stars Clémence Poésy, Sylvie Testud, and Tony Shalhoub as Diego Giacometti.

SXSW will host the North American premiere on Friday evening.

 

FINAL PORTRAIT, Friday, March 9, at 6 pm.

STATESIDE THEATRE, 719 Congress Avenue, Austin.

 

schedule.sxsw.com/2018/films

Opens March 23:

LAEMMLE ROYAL, 11523 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Los Angeles.

laemmle.com/films

nytimes.com/lord

Armie Hammer (left) and Geoffrey Rush in Final Portrait.

Final Portrait

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WITH IT WHICH IT AS IT IF IT IS TO BE

“Each one is one and there are many.”

WITH IT WHICH IT AS IT IF IT IS TO BE, a new film by Eve Fowler, rises and falls to the tune of this line, written by Gertrude Stein in her 1910 short story “Many Many Women.” [The 33-minute 16mm film] is a lovingly made collective portrait of female artists at work in the studio….Fowler has directed her camera, through the cinematography of the artist and filmmaker Mariah Garnett, toward the intimate spaces of women’s art work. The film’s title is a line from Stein’s text which is read as voiceover by eight writers and artists….[each lending] a personal tone and inflection to the text, accentuating the subjective dimension of each artist’s individual labor and technique.

WITH IT WHICH IT AS IT IF IT IS TO BE documents the practices of over twenty artists based primarily in Los Angeles and New York, paying special attention to their process, their work with materials, their contemplative approaches, their manipulations. Shots cut from one studio to the next, and oscillate between focused close-ups of process-based activities and more casual portraits, where an atmosphere of trust and friendship clearly lies behind the screen. In one, the sculptor Daphne Fitzpatrick walks around her studio, a dog in tow—the feel is familiar, the portrait honest. In another, the painter Nicole Eisenman climbs atop a wooden scaffold to reach the upper portion of her large-scale canvas. There, she picks from an array of brushes before getting to work on one of her own complex, group portraits, which turns scenes from the everyday into the stuff of contemporary history painting. In yet another, the choreographer Taisha Paggett performs movement work as the camera attentively follows the gestures and modulations of her expressive body.” — Rachel Valinsky*

WITH IT WHICH IT AS IT IF IT IS TO BE, Thursday, July 27, at 7 pm.

MOCA GRAND AVENUE, 250 South Grand Avenue, downtown Los Angeles.

moca.org/program/with-it-which-it-as-it-if-it-is-to-be-a-film-by-eve-fowler

*Rachel Valinsky is an independent curator, writer, and translator, and the quote here is from her review originally published in Millennium Film Journal, Issue 65, Spring 2017. Valinsky is the translator of Whites Jews and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love by Houria Bouteldja (with a foreword by Cornel West), which Semiotext(e) will publish as part of their Intervention Series in September, 2017.

rachelvalinsky.com/Eve-Fowler-Participant-Inc-Millenium-Film-Journal

Image credit: With it which it as it if it is to be (2016), directed by Eve Fowler. 16mm film, sound, transferred to video, 33:02 minutes.

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