London Review of Books (LRB) – June 15, 2023 issue: James Butler on Italo Calvino’s Politics; John Lahr – My Hollywood Fling; Ferdinand Mount – Safe as the Bank of England; Africa’s Cold War by Kevin Okoth, and more…
In April 1973, on a Pan Am 747 jumbo jet from London to LA, I took my seat in the upstairs dining room opposite a Cincinnati salesman and his wife. He sold screws – really. Just as improbably, I had sold my first novel to the movies. The tablecloth, the silverware, the crystal wine glasses, the Chateaubriand being carved in front of us at five hundred miles an hour felt extraordinary, a swank unreality that matched my elevated mood. I was 32. I was going to Hollywood. I was making a movie. I was going to be a screenwriter.
Sotheby’s (June 5, 2023) – Trained in the school of Art Deco decorators and sculptors, Diego Giacometti was equally attached to the discipline of pre-WWII production standards as to the classical artistic vocabulary deriving from ancient Greece, Egypt and Etruscan decorative arts .
The eminent history and personal connection of these tables and lamps to the artist and one of his dearest friends echo the oeuvre of Diego Giacometti itself— a sumptuous and timeless universe in bronze filled with the unique character and artistic prolificity of a true poet.
The featured ”Racine” Guéridon in particular figures as one of Diego’s most rare and original creations in bronze. The piece shows the sculptor’s prowess at skillfully adapting an organic motif into a strikingly abstract and perfectly balanced composition, which is simultaneously sculptural in its intent and highly functional.
The New Yorker – June 12, 2023 issue: The artist behind the cover for the June 12, 2023, issue, Sasha Velour, is a gender-fluid drag queen, author, television and theatre performer, and visual artist. In 2017, she was named the winner of the ninth season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
Robert Redford, Gwyneth Paltrow, Paul Rudd, and Angela Bassett now disappear into movies whose plots can come down to “Keep glowy thing away from bad guy.”
Lawyers tried to use the independent-state-legislature theory to sway the outcomes of the 2000 and 2020 elections. What if it were to become the law of the land?
An extreme version of the theory could give state legislatures the power to award Electoral College votes however they see fit. Illustrations by Golden Cosmos
Galerie LeRoyer (June 3, 2023) – A corpus called “Migratory Series”. It is an ode to manifest colours, driven by the hot winds of June and the full moon of strawberries. Coming from elsewhere, like the tropical butterfly, their glass hooves fuel the playfulness of our fantasies.
Dominic Besner’s creative work is based on a mixed technique on canvas. He has a preference for oil sticks and their rich palette of colours as well as acrylic paint, structural mortar, china marker and aerosol paint. In addition to these materials, he uses a technique of application by the fingers and scraping of the canvas.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – JUNE 4, 2023: The summer reading issue lands this weekend, 56 pages filled with suggestions of books to keep you company at the beach or in that shady mothballed nook you discovered in your rental share. The issue closes with a beautiful photo essay of swimmers pictured underwater, from an art book that evokes summer as vividly as fried clam strips and soft-serve ice cream: “Swimmers,” by Larry Sultan.
In “The Bathysphere Book,” Brad Fox chronicles the fascinating Depression-era ocean explorations of William Beebe.
Consider the siphonophore. An inhabitant of the lightless ocean, it looks like a single organism, but is actually a collection of minute creatures, each with its own purpose, working in harmony to move, to eat, to stay alive. They seem impossible but they are real. In 1930 William Beebe was 3,000 feet underwater in a bathysphere, an early deep-sea submersible, when he spotted a huge one: a writhing 20-yard mass whose pale magenta shone impossibly against the absolute blackness of the water. As you can imagine, it made an impression.
Henry Hoke’s latest novel, “Open Throat,” follows an observant — and starving — cougar living in the Los Angeles hills surrounding the Hollywood sign.
There is a moment toward the end of “Open Throat,” Henry Hoke’s slim jewel of a novel, where the narrator, a mountain lion living in the desert hills surrounding Los Angeles’s Hollywood sign, falls asleep and dreams of Disneyland. It will be hard for those who haven’t yet read this propulsive novel to understand, but the lion’s waking life at this moment is so precarious that this slippage into pleasant dream left me scared to turn the page.
KCET (June 2, 2023) – Keith Haring’s first museum exhibition in Los Angeles debuts at the Broad, featuring over 120 artworks that showcase the artist’s legacy of blending fun street art with activism.
The exhibition features works that span the artist’s career, tackling pertinent social issues of the time like anti-Apartheid movements and the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 80s as well as works that address relevant issues that persist today — from capitalism and environmentalism to race, sexuality and religion. “” at the Broad is on view from May 27 through October 8, 2023.
In his short but prolific career, Keith Haring was known for his fluid, uniform lines, intricate compositions, and repeating imagery such as the barking dog and radiant baby. Since the 1980s, Haring’s art has garnered worldwide recognition, breaking down barriers and spreading joy while shining a bright light on complex issues from capitalism and the proliferation of new technologies to sexuality and race.
Born in 1958, Keith Haring grew up in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, where his father, Allen, taught him to draw cartoons from Walt Disney and Dr. Seuss. He moved to New York City in 1978 to enroll in the School of Visual Arts (SVA). In New York, he embraced his homosexuality, which informed his worldview and art practice. The city was pulsing with energy with the emergence of hip-hop, graffiti art, and an active nightclub scene. In alternative spaces such as Club 57 and Paradise Garage, Haring developed his visual style alongside artists Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat, performers Grace Jones and Madonna, and many others.
Philip Mould & Co Films (June 2, 2023) – Starting off at Charleston House, where Stephen Tomlin’s friends, lovers, and sitters came together, this exhibition film traces Tomlin’s life and career, revealing the stories behind the artworks on display in ‘Bloomsbury Stud: The Art of Stephen Tomlin’, on view at the Philip Mould Gallery from 5th June until 11th August 2023.
Stephen Tomlin, the Bloomsbury group’s primary sculptor, immortalised the faces of Bloomsbury’s best-known characters, including Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf. With inexhaustible charisma, disarming good looks and undeniable talent, Tomlin captivated his contemporaries, and references to Stephen ‘Tommy’ Tomlin pepper countless biographies of 20th century figures.
However, until recently, that was where his story remained. Now, this exhibition aims to return Tomlin to the artistic spotlight where he belongs.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art –Join Susan Alyson Stein, Engelhard Curator of Nineteenth-Century European Painting, to virtually explore Van Gogh’s Cypresses, the first exhibition to focus on the trees—among the most famous in the history of art—immortalized in signature images by Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890).
Such iconic pictures as Wheat Field with Cypresses and The Starry Night take their place as the centerpiece in a presentation that affords an unprecedented perspective on a motif virtually synonymous with the Dutch artist’s fiercely original power of expression. Some 40 works illuminate the extent of his fascination with the region’s distinctive flamelike evergreens as they successively sparked, fueled, and stoked his imagination over the course of two years in the South of France: from his initial sightings of the “tall and dark” trees in Arles to realizing their full, evocative potential (“as I see them”) at the asylum in Saint-Rémy.
Juxtaposing landmark paintings with precious drawings and illustrated letters—many rarely, if ever, lent or exhibited together—this tightly conceived thematic exhibition offers an extraordinary opportunity to appreciate anew some of Van Gogh’s most celebrated works in a context that reveals the backstory of their invention for the first time.
Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong (June 1, 2023) – Angel Otero is known for his signature approach to visual storytelling, synthesizing magical realism and abstraction, the observed and the imagined, and the past and the present.
Beginning 1 June, Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong presents ‘The Sea Remembers,’ Otero’s first solo exhibition in Asia since he joined the gallery in 2022. Through a labor-intensive process of laying down, scrapping and collaging oil paint, Angel Otero’s works are rooted in abstract image making and engage with the idea of memory through addressing art history, as well as his own lived experience.
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
KCET
Philip Mould & Co
Boomers Daily 