Eugène Atget exhibit at MoMA

MoMA in New York will soon host from 6 February to 9 April next year, a retrospective on French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927). The title of the exhibition, “Documents pour artistes”, refers to the sign which hung on the door of Atget’s studio in Paris. Atget officially started photography in 1890, and aimed to capture the city of Paris in order to offer the material documentation to other artists.

Ans Westra: Washday at the Pa

NEW ZEALAND – Forty-seven years ago Ans Westra provided the text and forty-four images for a Department of Education journal made for primary schools. Titled Washday at the Pa the book followed a day in the life of a rural Maori family of eight children awaiting relocation to a state house in the city. Following protests by the Maori Women Welfare League Washday at the Pa was controversially withdrawn from circulation by the Department of Education. The League condemned Westra's depiction of the poor, rural Maori family living in sub-standard housing as untruthful and inaccurate. Westra defended the integrity of the images and as copyright owner later in 1964 published the second edition through the Caxton Press. Westra took this opportunity to add twenty-two new images, some introducing whole new episodes to the story. An new exhibition at the Suite Gallery in Wellington, New Zealand supports the publication of a new edition of Washday at the Pa, which features images made for the 1964 first and second editions of the book as well as images made by Westra in 1998 as part of a subsequent project: Washday at the Pa Revisited.Accompanying Westra's 35 uncropped images is text by Mark Amery. Washday at the Pa is on view at the Suite Gallery until November 26.

Cinema Sex Sirens

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Diana Dors

CINEMA SEX SIRENS, published by Omnibus Press, is a unique collection of photographs of female stars of the '60s and '70s. That period marked a new era of frankness in society and the movie industry lost no time in following suit after some 25 years of censorship and self-imposed regulations. The women who became the new erotic goddesses also became world-famous and defined a generation's view of sexuality. Dave Worrall and Lee Pfeiffer's gallery illustrates a luminous collection of idealized women and offers a fascinating insight into the movies' depiction of female sexuality during the '60s and '70s. From the indisputable legends to actresses whose used their beauty to gain fame in the short-term through exploitation movies, this book provides little-known insights into their lives and careers. Cinema Sex Sirens can be found through Omnibus Press.

MAURIZIO CATTELAN: ALL

Hailed simultaneously as a provocateur, prankster, and tragic poet of our times, Maurizio Cattelan has created some of the most unforgettable images in recent contemporary art. His source materials range widely, from popular culture, history, and organized religion to a meditation on the self that is at once humorous and profound. Working in a vein that can be described as hyperrealist, Cattelan creates unsettlingly veristic sculptures that reveal contradictions at the core of today’s society. While bold and irreverent, the work is also deadly serious in its scathing cultural critique. On view starting today at the Guggenheim in New York City, a major retrospective of Maurizio Cattelan is on view – literally hanging in the middle of the museums rotunda. Maurizio Cattelan: All is on view until January 22, 2012.  

Alexandra Grecco

With an unyielding desire to encourage women to play dress-up in their everyday lives, Alexandra Grecco created her eponymous womenswear line. The Brooklyn-based designer pays tribute to luxurious ladies of bygone days, drawing inspiration from silent film actresses of the 1920's and the burlesque dancers of the vaudeville stage. Grecco's pieces combine clean, ethereal and feminine elements while paying attention to practicality for today. Her line incorporates sumptuous silks, delicate tulle and birdcage veiling in a color palette of blush pinks, ivory and dusty cyan to conjure the old Hollywood glamour of an earlier age. Hand-sewn headbands and gowns embroidered with vintage millinery flowers and rhinestones showcase an attention to detail that creates a one-of-a-kind, custom feeling. The 26-year old FIT graduate is a former ballet dancer and painter and would not be surprised to discover she was a traveling circus performer in another lifetime.  For Alexandrea Grecco's Spring/Summer 2012 collection director and choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall directs an eccentric, chic, and cinematic fashion film featuring Erika Spring of the band Au Revoir Simone. 

The Radical Camera

Sid Grossman, Coney Island, 1947

In 1936 a group of young, idealistic photographers, most of them Jewish, first-generation Americans, formed an organization in Manhattan called the Photo League. Their solidarity centered on a belief in the expressive power of the documentary photograph and on a progressive alliance in the 1930s of socialist ideas and art. The Radical Camera, on view starting tomorrow at the Jewish Museum in New York, presents the contested path of the documentary photograph during a tumultuous period that spanned the New Deal reforms of the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951 is on view November 4 through March 25.

EVA & ADELE Part of Survey of Recent Drawing

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EVA & ADELE claim to have to come to the future and say they have invented a new sex. EVA & ADELE are now part of a survey of artists form London and Berlin, entitled LONDON/BERLIN: Anschlüssel, on view until next month at the Center for Recent Drawing. This survey, curated by Andrew Hewish, seeks to present the vibrancy and depth of drawing production in London and Berlin. From recent graduates to the well established, these artists operate from within an understanding of the complexities of drawing values, of Anschlüssel: speculative, connective, playful - unlocking links wherever a line might lead. In bridging the space between these two metropolises, we find similar polyglot populations, artists from all over the world working in these cities, and with a similar breadth of expressive possibilities that reflect the exchange of ideas and forms in a globalized field.

FRED HERZOG: PHOTOGRAPHS

Herzog: Mexico City with Chevy, 1963

Hezog: Lucy, Georgia, 1968

The definitive book about the stunning oeuvre of a pioneer of colour photography—Vancouver's Fred Herzog.For more than five decades, Fred Herzog has focused his lens on street life, and his striking colour photographs—of vacant lots, second-hand shops, neon signs and working-class people—evoke nostalgia in an older generation and inspire wide-eyed revelation in a younger one. The images that we now consider iconic once relegated Herzog to the margins: his bold use of colour was unusual in the 1950s and ’60s, a time when art photography was almost exclusively associated with black-and-white imagery. Fred Herzog has worked with Kodachrome slide film for over 50 years, but only in the past few years has technology allowed him to make archival pigment photographic prints of exceptional colour and intensity. Fred Herzog: Photographs, a new book out now by Douglas & McIntyre, showcases this innovative artist’s impressive collection in a beautifully crafted volume.

ED WOOD'S SLEAZE PAPERBACKS

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"LET ME DIE IN DRAG!" Ed Wood, cinema auteur of the ultimate b-grade weird in the Hollywood miasma of sleaze and degradation, best known for his films Plan 9 from Outer Space or Glen Or Glenda, was also a writer of dirty books. Next week in New York a collection of Wood's rare X-rated fiction will be on display in New York at the Boo-Hooray gallery in New York City. The antiquarian mystique surrounding Edward Davis Wood Jr.’s career as an author of pornographic pulp fiction is legend. He wrote under a variety of pseudonyms, books were published and re-published under different titles, and occasionally under different author names. Multiple authors would share the same pseudonym, and the companies that published the titles weren’t the kind of operations that kept any kind of records, nor paid royalties, nor really existed in the manner that most are to expect of book publishers.  His descent into alcoholism and poverty was mirrored by the publishers that employed him. Towards the end of his life he wrote pornography with decreasing amounts of the strange flourishes of his eccentric personality. He died in 1978 of an alcohol-induced heart attack. His friends say the porn killed him. Ed Wood's Sleaze Paperbacks will be on view at the Boo-Hooray Gallery in NYC from November 2 to December 1.

Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties

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How did American artists represent the Jazz Age? The exhibition Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties at the Brooklyn Museum brings together for the first time the work of sixty-eight painters, sculptors, and photographers who explored a new mode of modern realism in the years bounded by the aftermath of the Great War and the onset of the Great Depression. Throughout the 1920s, artists created images of liberated modern bodies and the changing urban-industrial environment with an eye toward ideal form and ordered clarity—qualities seemingly at odds with a riotous decade best remembered for its flappers and Fords. Artists took as their subjects uninhibited nudes and close-up portraits that celebrated sexual freedom and visual intimacy, as if in defiance of the restrictive routines of automated labor and the stresses of modern urban life. Reserving judgment on the ultimate effects of machine culture on the individual, they distilled cities and factories into pristine geometric compositions that appear silent and uninhabited. American artists of the Jazz Age struggled to express the experience of a dramatically remade modern world, demonstrating their faith in the potentiality of youth and in the sustaining value of beauty. Youth and Beauty will present 140 works by artists including Thomas Hart Benton, Imogen Cunningham, Charles Demuth, Aaron Douglas, Edward Hopper, Gaston Lachaise, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Luigi Lucioni, Gerald Murphy, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston.  Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties is on view until January 29, 2012 at the Brooklyn Museum. 

The Mexican Suitcase

Robert Capa, [Ernest Hemingway (third from the left), New York Times journalist Herbert Matthews (second from the left) and two Republican soldiers, Teruel, Spain], late December 1937

The Mexican Suitcase will for the first time give the public an opportunity to experience images drawn from this famous collection of recovered negatives. In December 2007, three boxes filled with rolls of film, containing 4,500 35mm negatives of the Spanish Civil War by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and Chim (David Seymour)—which had been considered lost since 1939—arrived at the International Center of Photography. These three photographers, who lived in Paris, worked in Spain, and published internationally, laid the foundation for modern war photography. Their work has long been considered some of the most innovative and passionate coverage of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Many of the contact sheets made from the negatives will be on view as part of the exhibition, which will look closely at some of the major stories by Capa, Taro, and Chim as interpreted through the individual frames. These images will be seen alongside the magazines of the period in which they were published and with the photographers' own contact notebooks. On view now at the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya until January 15.

Watch Alexander McQueen's Short Film for the Autumn/Winter 2011 Scarf Collection

Alexander McQueen presents a short film created by Paris-based director/photographer Babette Pauthier, featuring Alexander McQueen’s Autumn/Winter 2011 seasonal scarf collection. Visit the Alexander McQueen online Scarf Boutique.