TO LIFE, TO DEATH: Quinzaine Photographique Nantaise

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Nan Goldin - Battle of Sexual Dependency

Every year, by mid September, the city of Nantes celebrates photography. For the 15th year on a row, the Quinzaine Photographique Nantaise will be deployed all around the city from September 16th through October 16th, offering visitors free access to over twenty exhibitions. As many events of this kind, the festival will evolve around the theme “À la vie, à la mort” (To life, to death), the title for the 2011 edition.

Sidi Touré First Ever U.S. Tour

Sidi Touré made his first guitar as a child, constructing it from his wooden writing slate in the ancient town of Gao, Mali. Once the heart of the Songhaï empire and burial place of its Askia kings, the town rests between the Niger and the encroaching ocean of sand known as the Sahara Desert. The Songhai empire was the last of the great empires of the Sahel, reaching its zenith under Soni Alibert (Sunni Ali) in the mid 400’s. Sidi Touré was born here in 1959, but to be born a Touré, a noble family who trace their lineage directly from the Askia kings, carried a significance and onus of a past that reaches directly into the present. Like another Malian noble turned singer, Salif Keita, Sidi Touré faced a conflict between the inexorable pull of music and the expectations of family and society. Touré’s family had been sung about, and sung to, by traditional griots for centuries, but until a small boy challenged the rules, the Touré’s did not sing! Sidi Touré is currently on his first ever US tour in support of his 2011 release, Sahel Folk, via Thrill Jockey Records.

Double Solitaire

The Davis Museum at Wellesley college presents Double Solitaire: The Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy, the first major touring exhibition to explore the dynamic exchange of ideas that shaped the astonishing landscapes of these Surrealist artists. This groundbreaking exhibition, which features approximately 25 paintings along with selected ephemera by each artist, provides unprecedented access to the couple’s intertwined artistic and personal lives. Sage and Tanguy were inseparable throughout their 15-year marriage, sharing adjoining studios in Woodbury, CT and communicating only in French until Tanguy’s untimely death in 1955. As Karen Rosenberg writes in the New York Times, this “fascinating” exhibition “intently explores the couple’s sinister dreamscapes of polymorphous pebbles (his) and menacing monoliths (hers).” Both artists sought to create paintings that the French poet André Breton called “peinture-poésie,” a style influenced by poetry and dream-like imagery.  Double Solitaire: The Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy is on view Oct. 19, 2011 - Jan. 15, 2012 - 106 Central Street Wellesley, MA, 02481

This Side of Paradise

From the pages of Jonas Mekas diary: “Unpredictably, as most of my life’s key events have been, for a period of several years in the late 60s and early 70s, I had the fortune to spend some time, mostly during the summers, with Jackie Kennedy’s and her sister Lee Radziwill’s families and children. Cinema was an integral, inseparable, as a matter of fact, a key part of our friendship. The time was still very close to the untimely, tragic, death of John F. Kennedy. Jackie wanted to give something to her children to do, to help to ease the transition of life without a father. One of her thoughts was that movie camera would be fun for the children. Peter Beard, who was at that time tutoring John Jr. and Caroline in art history, suggested to Jackie that I was the man to introduce the children to cinema. Jackie said yes. And that’s how it all began. I bought them a very easily operable 16mm movie camera, and even wrote a “mini-textbook” suggesting some simple movie exercises…The images in the exposition, with a few exceptions, they all come from the summers Caroline and John Jr. spent in Montauk, with their cousins Anthony and Tina Radziwill, in an old house Lee rented from Andy Warhol, for a few summers. Andy himself spent many of his weekends there, in one of the cottages, as did Peter Beard, whom the children had adopted almost like their older brother or a father they missed. There were summers of happiness, joy and continuous celebrations of life and friendships. These are ‘Little Fragments of Paradise.’ " Tomorrow night marks the opening of “This Side of Paradise,” an exhibition of photo prints taken from original 16mm film from Jonas Mekas’ celebrated film “This Side of Paradise: Fragments of an Unfinished Biography” (1999). The exhibition will mark the first time these rare and personal images of the Kennedy and Radziwill families are on view in NYC in their entirety. Opens September 24 at the Agnès B Gallerie Boutique - 50 Howard Street New York, NY.

Blooming in the Shadows

Contemporary Chinese art has taken the art world by storm in the last decade through heralded museum exhibitions, well-read publications, and heavily attended art auctions. However, even with all this attention, few exhibitions have asked the question of how, against the background of thirty-five years of Socialist Realism, this internationally-oriented artwork suddenly appeared and why it captured the attention of the international art market. Blooming in the Shadows: Unofficial Chinese Art, 1974 –1985 at the China Institute in New York will introduce the work of three unofficial Chinese art groups who worked in this vein: the No Names, the Stars, and the Grass Society, all of which arose following the end of the Cultural Revolution and helped launch the avant-garde movement in China. These artists pursued creatively diverse paths to personal artistic freedom under the harsh political circumstances of the time. Blooming in the Shadows will examine work produced by these three significant groups of young artists in the critical decade after the end of the Cultural Revolution leading up the Communist Party’s 1985 decision to allow modern artistic practices. On view until December 11 at the China Institute – 125 East 65th Street, New York.

Beyond Limits

CHATSWORTH, ENGLAND - The Duchess of Devonshire views the sculpture Burning Desire by Marc Quinn in the gardens of their home Chatsworth on September 9, 2011 in Chatsworth, England.  The work is part of the Beyond Limits exhibition of modern and contemporary sculpture displayed in the gardens of Chatsworth by Sotherby's between 9th September to 30th October 2011.  (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

Philip Roth: Art, Sex, & Death

When the young Philip Roth warned his parents to brace for a media assault with the release of "Portnoy's Complaint" in 1969, his mother broke down in tears: she thought he was suffering from delusions of grandeur. Four decades after the novel shot him to stardom, the American literary giant talks candidly about his early years, about writing, sex and Jewishness, depression and dying, in a rare and moving documentary to be screened Monday on the French-German channel Arte. Based on eight hours of interviews, the hour-long film "Philip Roth Without Complexes" was shot a year ago between the 78-year-old writer's Upper East side apartment and his forest lodge in Connecticut.

Love Jim, James Deans Love Letters For Sale

Three intimate love letters from James Dean to his first 'serious' love Barbara Glenn will be sold at an auction this Novemeber in Christie's popular culture category.  The letters, which were found in a drawer by Glenn's son, reveal a smitten James Dean prior to his magnesium flash into celluloid iconography.  The auction will be held November 23.

Speaking in Tongues

Wallace Berman (1926-1976) was born in Staten Island, NY and came to Los Angeles with his parents when he was four years old. In 1955 he founded the small but influential mail art publication Semina – a brilliant, loose-leaf compilation of the most advanced artists and poets of his time, including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jess (Collins) to name a few. Today, Berman is best known for his Verifax collages, softly sepia-colored works created with a forerunner of the photocopy machine. Influenced by surrealism, assemblage, and contemporary artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Andy Warhol, Berman produced multi-layered works that combined the picture of a hand-held transistor radio with images culled from newspapers and popular magazines. An exhibition at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California, entitled Speaking in Tongues: Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken, brings two seminal yet under-studied Los Angeles artists into close conversation with one another for the first time. This exhibition is concurrent with the Pacific Standard Time showing across Los Angeles in an en masse celebration of the Los Angeles art scene. Speaking in Tongues will on view October 2 to January 22, 2012. 

Icons of the Invisible

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As part of the Pacific Standard time art exhibitions in Los Angeles, the Fowler Museum at UCLA presents Icons of the Invisible: Oscar Castillo. Since the late 1960s, Oscar Castillo has documented the Chicano community in Los Angeles, from major political events to cultural practices to the work of muralists and painters. This exhibition will present rarely seen photographs from 1969-1980 exploring major themes (social movement, cultural heritage, urban environment, and everyday barrio life) and approaches (photojournalism, portraiture, art photography) that have guided Castillo’s work. Complementing the concurrent exhibition on Chicano art groups, Mapping Another L.A., the exhibition will provide another level of contextualization of L.A. history during this pivotal period. Icons of the Invisible will be on view from September 25 to February 26, 2012.

[BOOKS] BALLET RUSSES

The Ballets Russes introduced an unprecedented freedom into the arts, influencing not only ballet and theater, but also fashion, visual arts, and interior design. An unprecedented, oversized special edition, out this November by luxury publisher Assouline, celebrates the explosion of creativity in Western Europe created by Serge Diaghilev and his collaborators—including Igor Stravinsky, Leon Bakst, and Pablo Picasso. Over 200 pages feature photography and drawings tipped on watercolor cotton paper. You can purchase the book here. 

PATTI SMITH: Babelogue + Outside Society

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PATTI SMITH: BABELOGUE: The Hunter College Art Galleries present Patti Smith: 9.11 Babelogue –  on view from September 8-December 3, 2011 –  twenty-six works on paper by the esteemed poet, performer, and visual artist Patti Smith as a response to the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001. The artist’s elegiac homage does not align the Twin Towers with one nation, religion, or race, but instead offers them as symbols of the universal resiliency of the human spirit. Smith’s “9.11” series was created between 2001 and 2002 and will be shown in its entirety for the first time in New York, in the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery, to coincide with the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

PATTI SMITH: OUTSIDE SOCIETY: Patti Smith raises the curtain on Outside Society, a new collection of her signature songs on the Arista and Columbia labels. The landmark 18-song release marks the first single-CD collection to span Patti's entire body of recorded work. The chronologically arranged tracks move from 1975 (her debut album, Horses, with "Gloria" and "Free Money") through 2007 (Twelve, with her cover of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit").

Andy Warhol's Headlines

The first exhibition to fully examine the works that Andy Warhol created on the theme of news headlines will premiere at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, from September 25, 2011, to January 2, 2012. Warhol: Headlines will define and present some 80 works—paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, film, video, and television—based largely on the tabloid news, revealing the artist's career-long obsession with the sensational side of contemporary media. Source materials for the art will be presented for comparison, demonstrating the ways in which Warhol cropped, altered, obscured, and reoriented the original texts and images, underscoring his role as both editor and author. After Washington, the exhibition will be on view at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt from February 11 to May 13, 2012.

[BOOKS] Naked Hollywood: Weegee in Los Angeles

In 1946, the tabloid photographer known as Weegee relocated from New York City to Los Angeles. Abandoning the grisly crime scenes for which he was best known, Weegee trained his camera instead on Hollywood celebrities, starlets, autograph seekers, and shop-window mannequins, sometimes distorted through trick lenses and multiple exposures. “Now I could really photograph the subjects I liked,” said Weegee of his newfound career in Los Angeles, “I was free.” Presenting approximately 200 photographs, many of which have never before been shown, the book, Naked Hollywood: Weegee in Los Angeles, explores Weegee’s related work as an author, filmmaker, and photo-essayist.  You can purchase the book here. 

Joy-Art: Ladislav Sutnar

The Czech-American designer Ladislav Sutnar (1897—1976) created many internationally-acclaimed design icons. At the age of 65, he delved into painting. Now on view at Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague, U.S. Venus is the first independent exhibition of Sutnar’s art in forty years and presents his paintings of female nudes never shown before. Sutnar called these works Venus and exhibited them under the label Joy-Art. In this art manifesto, he formulated his concept of art for the 21st century – as vigorous, humanistic and joyful. His geometric figures rendered in contrasting colors reflect American painting of the time, namely Pop Art. U.S. Venus is on view until October 8.