Remembering Louise Nevelson on her birthday 🎂
📷 Ara Güler, c.1974 @smithsonian@ArchivesAmerArt
"I don’t like the safe way, it limits you. One has to have courage and one has to gamble with life to really move into the areas where they can fulfil themselves."
Louise Nevelson by Hans Namuth, 1977 @smithsoniannpg
"While it’s risky to conflate the artist with the art, in Nevelson’s case her public persona was an extension of her sculptural practice: another fabulist, layered creation."
- Andrea K. Scott
Louise Nevelson by Arnold Newman, NY 1980
Newman told her grand-daughter Maria "how he photographed Nevelson at the Whitney in 1980 the day she learned her brother died. With her insistence, they continued the photo session even though she was visibly upset."
Here's Louise Nevelson with her high school basketball team in 1913. She's the captain: 4th from the left. @smithsonian @ArchivesAmerArt
Louise Nevelson
White Vertical Water, 1971 @Guggenheim
"I once asked Josef Albers if he was a great reader and he said, 'If I wanted to read, I’d write my own book.'"
Louise Nevelson
Luminous Zag: Night, 1971 @Guggenheim
"There hasn’t been a surprise in my life. In my darkest moments, I was never not with what I was doing. My life was important to me—I certainly expected it to be what it is."
Louise Nevelson
Untitled, 1967 @MuseumModernArt
"My work is the mirror of my consciousness. In my own work, I think there is a beyondness, some call it mystery. It contains the awareness of love, or sorrow, all the human emotions."
Louise Nevelson
Black wall, 1959 @Tate Modern
"I fell in love with black; it contained all color. It wasn't a negation of color... Black is the most aristocratic color of all... You can be quiet, and it contains the whole thing."
Louise Nevelson by Ara Güler, c.1974 @smithsonian@ArchivesAmerArt
"Her black walls lived in shadow and drew sustenance from it, and a large public found in her work a satisfaction that it found nowhere else in modern art."
- John Russell
Louise Nevelson by Arnold Newman, New York, 1972
"Life isn’t one straight line. Most of us have to be transplanted, like a tree, before we blossom."
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Happy birthday to Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk 🎂
📷 Ara Güler
"His books are multi-layered, allegorical, sometimes fanciful, Proustian in their attention to detail and Borgesian in their dazzling complexity."
- Sarah Lyall
Orhan Pamuk by Sophie Bassouls, 1990
"Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow."
It's so great that other photographers have continued Philippe Halsman's #jump! tradition. Here's Orhan Pamuk by Alex Majoli.
This was taken at Cannes in 2007, when Pamuk was a member of the Festival Jury.
Celebrate the Richard Avedon Centennial 🎂💯
📷 Irving Penn, Vogue, August 23, 1993
"He was small, dark & electric with his own sort of vitality. Crackling. Sparks seem to fly out of him. He flashes his fingers like tiny rapid moths."
- Ginette Spanier
On Richard Avedon's Centennial, my favourite portraits
Carson McCullers & Tennessee Williams, April 25, 1950 #Avedon100
On Richard Avedon's Centennial, my favourite portraits
Buster Keaton, 1952 #Avedon100
I'm listening to Concerto Italiano play Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, in their 2005 recording under Rinaldo Alessandrini.
I've always loved the cover photo; it's by Julia Fullerton-Batten. I'll start a thread of some of my favourites of her photos here. 🧵
Julia Fullerton-Batten
The Lady of Shalott, 2018
... which is, of course, a reinterpretation of John Waterhouse's 1888 painting of Lord Tennyson's poem.
Happy birthday Sofia Coppola 🎂
📷 Kate Barry
"Coppola is a true auteur — a filmmaker with a distinct worldview and sensibility and a personal set of quasi-autobiographical interests."
- J. Hoberman
Sofia with her dad on the set of Godfather 2
📷 Steve Schapiro, 1974
The Coppola family by Ted Streshinsky, 1974
Eleanor & Francis Ford Coppola with their kids Sofia, Roman & Gian-Carlo
Celebrate the Red Garland Centennial 🎂💯
📷 Bill Spilka, c. 1957
"Garland's style was understated and harmonically sophisticated; he would delineate a melody, then shade it with distinctively voiced block chords and hints of counterpoint."
- Jon Pareles #RedGarland100
Esmond Edwards' great album cover for Red Garland's "Red in Bluesville", from 1959. Edwards took the photo, & designed the album as well.
Remembering Bea Arthur on her birthday 🎂
📷 Martin Mills, 1972
"Those of us working with her knew we were working with a golden comedic touch." - Norman Lear
Beatrice Arthur with Bill Callaway & Carl Ballantine in Bruce Jay Friedman & Richard Adler's musical A Mother's Kisses
📷 Jack Mitchell, 1968
Angela Lansbury & Beatrice Arthur in Mame
📷 Friedman-Abeles, 1966
Arthur won the Best Featured Actress in a Musical Tony for her performance. She was Beatrice on the stage & Bea on TV.