Photographer: Irving Penn (1917-2009)

Irving Penn died today. He was 92.

When he was young, he wanted to become a painter and in 1938 graduated from the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts). He wasn't very good though. However, in the 1930s he began creating personal photographs. And by 1943, he was hired as an assistant photographer at Vogue moving his way up and shooting over 150 covers for the magazine. He became one of the first photographers to marry commercial photography with art. No matter what subject he photographed -- from a model to a cigarette butt -- he isolated it with close-up graphic precision. The result icons, not just images.

Although he was known to mistrust perfect beauty, somehow he created it casting all things he photographed with a beautifully soft, even light. His subjects... casual and fluid and comfortable.

Met Museum

Dynamic yet restrained. Quiet and serene.

Veiled Face (Evelyn Tripp), 1949

He discarded all of the narrative trappings. He created an expressive visual vocabulary so unique. And when we, the viewer, gaze upon his images, they seem all our own.

My Brain

My brain in the past several days... (and NOT on drugs...) the result of too much work, a deadlined moved up, another next week and these days in 2009 flying by too quickly. A number of half written posts paitently waiting in the folders of my computer need to be completed and posted. Many thanks for those stopping by and especially to those who really do return. Hopefully, I'll be back up and running soon...

Pink

Breast Cancer.

My Grandmother died from it. She had a double mastectomy, but she still died. My Grandmother is my name sake. My given name. I never knew her. I listen closely to all the stories I hear about her. Advances in technology weren't as sophisticated back then. I wonder if she had a chance, how much I could have learned from her. I could have known her. Can one miss someone without even knowing them?

My doctor told me I needed to have a screening done. With a lot of cancer in my family, and arriving at that "age", it just is a wise thing to do. I still haven't made an appointment. I have some fears.

Test and misfortune that comes our way is not beyond the course of what others have had to face. Many of us have been let down in life and seen loved ones suffer without reason. We've been pushed to our limit and when we think we cannot take one more thing, that one more thing still comes. But we will always regret if we hadn't done something early. Because you won't wonder if it is too late. October is the month to make an appointment if anyone already hasn't. We need to promise ourselves. Because "The best protection is early detection".

National Cancer Institute

Susan G. Komen Foundation

Blog B-Day

Happy Birthday little Blog. You are one year old today.

and Happy Birthday to me. I better be one year wiser.

(top image French Vanilla Ooh Lah Lah cupcake from Cupcake à la Mode...)

Designer: Johnny Swing

Johnny Swing is a pseudonym for a furniture designer who has created a series of chairs using ordinary items as material for his work. He is a trained sculptor and licensed welder, and not a porn star as his name might suggest. (Did anyone else think that?)

Born in Salisbury, Connecticut in 1961, he studied at Skidmore College (I almost went there) and then the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has been working as a professional artist for the past two decades: first in NYC’s Greenwich Village and now on his farm in Vermont. His past experience includes creating furniture and interiors for corporate clients, as well as appearing on the Discovery Channel show, "Junkyard Wars” (2001-2003 seasons). His works can be found in the Robert Crowell Museum in Newfane, Vermont and the Storm King Arts Center, Mountainville, New York.

His interest in coins isn’t anything new. When he was five, he set up a toll both during his parent’s parties where guests would have to buy one of his drawings before they were allowed to pass through the hallway.

Johnny Swing has created his Obsessive Furniture Line which makes use of common, everyday materials like glass jars, nickels and coins repurposing them to give new life to ordinary objects.

He has also created a series of chairs created from coins -- functional furniture creations which also serve as unique pieces of sculpture.

QUARTER SIDE CHAIR (2002)
This is the fourth in his coin series, but my favorite. The coins are not welded together which lends to a clean, floating appearance. Instead, they are held together with a U-shaped metal wire which is welded at the back side edges of the coins. The legs are stainless steel.


Some critics have said he defacing money by using it in this manner. But there is something so slick, cool and shimmery about his chairs -- like a bonefish quietly swimming in shallow, brilliant tropical waters before it darts away. At first, they seem unyielding and cold, but there is something so tactile and intriguing. I’ve been reading that one of these chairs will set you back anywhere from $10,000 each to $25,000.

NICKEL COUCH (2001)

This sofa is the second in a series of furniture made from coins. Created from 7,000 nickels, it is fixed together with 35,000 welds and rests on a substructure of stainless truss work. It weighs about 125-lbs. Johnny Swing spends about 300 hours sculpting one of these. I read it retailed for $51,000 a few years back.

Above is the artist in his creation. However, there is something about this arm I find a little… threatening. Anyone see this too?


BUTTERFLY CHAIR (2002)
This is the third in the series: each chair uses 1500 half dollars and is created with 7000 welds. It looks comfortable, no doubt. I’d put a pillow behind my head, curl up sideways and flip on Bravo TV. (A bit reminiscent of Eero Saarinen’s Womb Chair.)



You can purchase this one on Vivre for a small $59,000 – yes, the amount of 0s I typed are correct.

See more on his Johnny Swing site HERE ; And on Design Boom ; Top image from Metropolis Magazine click HERE to read an interview

Anyone? Thoughts?

More "Falling" Women

William Holman Hunt shocked his female viewers when he painted “The Awakening Conscience” in 1853. This melodrama of sin and recognition was meant to teach women a vital lesson about her role in society. Surely this gave cause for some women to be upset?

A new ideal of womanhood was developing in the nineteenth-century. Spurred on by the anxiety created by the Industrial Revolution, the expanding mercantile-industrial middle class needed to establish a new identity and self-justification. The world of commerce was becoming increasingly the play ground of corporations rather than individual entrepreneurs. (Does this sound familiar today?)

The Industrial Revolution promised material and cultural success. And it was delivered with the abuse of laborers, absence of personal tax and the marginalization of women. With the increase of money came vice and debauchery -- something the revolutionaries fought so hard against to win their independence from Britain -- which began to creep in and contaminate the new world. “Luxury,” one American writer urged Thomas Jefferson in 1782 “consisted of a dull, animal enjoyment which left minds stupefied and bodies enervated by wallowing forever in one continual puddle of voluptuousness.”

Women were advised to cover up their arms and legs. And after age 16, the wrists and ankles. This image dates from 1868. (I have no idea where I got this image, have had it for years, my apologies for lack of credit.)

Something had to change. Reform was needed. Instead of reorganizing and recognizing the greed of emerging capitalistic society, reform was controlled in the home. With economic changes came a new family dynamic. Men left the home to work while women stayed behind to care for the house and children. This is nothing new, this structure has worked in the past and it works for many today. However, back then a heavy burden was placed upon women to be moral guiders. This “new ideal of womanhood” created very particular attitudes about work and family. It was clearly defined and drilled into girls at a very young age. It essentially had four characteristics that any good and proper young woman should cultivate: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness.

Religion or piety was considered the core of woman’s virtue. It was to be the source of her strength. Young men looking for a wife were cautioned to first look for piety; if that was there, everything else would follow. Religion was considered the divine right of women. It was a gift of god. Her piousness gave her the strength to control the naughty and vulgar world of men. Women were warned not to let their literary or intellectual pursuits take them away from religion. If so, she could risk being barren.

From Godey's Lady's Book March 1850, Philadelphia. Quiet moment between friends before THE wedding night.

Purity was the essential piety to a young woman. Without it she was considered unnatural, unfeminine or worse no woman at all. She was considered a ‘fallen woman’. The marriage night was to be the single greatest event of a woman’s life. It was then when she “bestowed her greatest ‘treasure’ upon her husband”.


Mrs. John Farrar (Eliza was her name) wrote in a manual The Young Lady’s Friend lending advice how to avoid trouble: “Sit not with another in a place that is too narrow; read not out of the same book; let your eagerness to see anything induce you to place your head close to another person’s.” It was a huge success in America with reprints well into the 1890s.

Were women really buying into this?

“The Old, Old Story Was Told again at 3 O’Clock in the Morning” chromolithograph (although this version in b/w) unknown printer, c. 1870.

I was walking Billy one warm summer night. A cab came to a screeching halt and out poured three young girls from the car door, falling over one another into the street. They were also falling out of their dresses and shrieking in drunken obnoxious laughter. One girl couldn’t find her 4” high-heel shoe and another was uncertain if this was even the street where she lived. In the darkness, a sneer of disapproval came over my face followed by a cold shudder. I thought – wow - my friends and I certainly dressed differently at that age. And then a cold clammy sweat began to seep from my pores in horror knowing years ago I had untamed nights like that. I felt a little ill, but why? Would I have not blinked an eye if this was a taxi full of three young males? What if these were older men? Would that be any less appropriate? Was I judging these girls because they were girls? Haven’t we come a long way?

One girl could not get her key into the door and began doubting that she lived in the house. So she decided to take a nap in the front yard. The other two girls were laughing and dancing in the street. The cab driver, concerned, got out of his car and came up to me. He said: “Is this how young girls behave in your country?”

Smart or safe are not two words that came to my mind to describe this behavior. But I am certainly glad to be a woman living in this country. Although his comment did make me wonder: has conventional gendering behavior not changed that much? Today, how many husbands sit at home anxiously taping their foot as they await their drunken wives to teeter-totter home giggling at 3 O’clock in the morning? Women seem to just get annoyed when husbands come home from a late night out drinking -- they hog the bed, they smell and they miss the toilet. But men seem to fear when women behave this way. As if they will sully their reputation or run off you a much younger man... Double standard still prevails.

Guess the Date: Shoes

My mom was flipping through a box of old photographs the other day and found an article she had forgotten she tucked away. Any guesses as to the year it was written? (Click on image to read the article...)

I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up: Rockingham Ware

For the women out there… Think about this: when was the last time you pulled out a household object such as a tea pot, water pitcher, baking dish, pie plate, or even a soap dish, and had to look at a pictorial image which reminded you to strive to be an “ideal” woman.

Today we have magazines pages to thumb through and commercial advertisements to watch on tv. Many of us pooh-pooh them as the messages are so trivial. We can close a magazine and turn off the tv. How many of us truly aspire to the media’s fabricated ‘idealized’ woman. Sure we buy the face creams, go to yoga to minimize the fatty texture on our bottoms, color the gray, and put on our spanx before a night out, but trying to look better doesn’t truly make us better women. We know this.

During Victorian America, women were bombarded with images of the ‘ideal’ woman. Problem was these images targeted core beliefs. Not superficial ones like today. They sent messages to women reminding them what a good woman was.

Pie Plate: Skinner, February 23, 2003

Rockingham pottery did just that. It was an inexpensive nineteenth-century ceramic widely used in America – an ordinary good. It performed a variety of tasks and played a variety of different roles in everyday life. But what is interesting is that much of Rockingham ware is pictorially embossed with an array of Victorian themes. The themes spoke of urbanization, nostalgia for country life and visually communicated hard messages. They depicted stories of men’s role in the world of hunting and woman’s role at home. How many men out there would like to have in their possession reinforcing pictorial images on every day wares such as a beer pitcher or a shaving mug of graphic hunting scenes?

10-paneled bulbous "manly" probably beer pitcher depicting a boar and stag hunt with hound handle. Awful to see those pronounced ribs -- feed the dog. Cowan’s, Cincinnati, Ohio, October 18, 2008.


Another pitcher of the same subject showing the other side. This one is attributed to E. & W. Bennett, Baltimore, Maryland, circa 1850. Cowan’s, June 21, 2008.

And how pleasant, hanging game... Garth’s Auctions, May 4, 2007
(Bummed the photo has been truncated.)

The embossed patterns on them maintained a cultural identity and the enactment of social roles. Although the ceramic was used at all social-class levels and in all types of communities from urban to rural, the images reinforced heavy expectations. Victorians were deeply concerned and conflicted about gender roles. And they were intensely materialistic people. For women, the theme of Rebekah at the Well was common. It reminded women to behave, serve and obey.

Garth's Auctions, Delaware, Ohio January 6, 2005.


D Marie's South Portland, Maine

Culture is a complex package of beliefs and behaviors. They are expressed through goods. Some of it we shape through our own preferences, and others forced upon us telling us what we need to choose and how we need to be.

These messages were seen over and over again every single day as the wares were used again and again. E. & W. Bennett pottery of Baltimore, Maryland is said to have first introduced Rebekah at the Well in the mid-nineteenth century and nearly all the potteries copied the pattern. In fact, by 1897 it was advertised in four sizes in the Sears Roebuck catalogue becoming the best and longest selling pattern in Rockingham history. The Rebekah at the Well theme embodied the Cult of True Womanhood which flourished during the mid-nineteenth century. (more of that in a post to come… as well as more Rockingham ware... for the darker, less mottled tortoise shell like glaze... Scatter ware, a colleague of mine likes to call it.)

Top image: Augustus Egg, Past and Present (1858)

Marie Antoinette, Big Hair and moi (Part III)

These poufs, no doubt, were impossible to wash and provided a bit of a breeding ground for bugs. Special head-scratchers called grattoirs were made from ivory, silver and gold. Women gracefully slid the flattened, slightly curved end of the stick up into their do for a graceful, discrete scratch.

Christie’s, Paris, April 2006

from Les Arts Décoratifs

The reign of the three Louis Louis Louis is synonymous with everything elaborate, dramatic and no doubt dazzling. Not one object – even utilitarian – seems to have escaped the court unadorned or under embellished. Shopkeepers, hairstylists and menuisiers benefited from this extravagance (while peasants paid the price). So why would a hair dressing chair be ignored? A variety was created, in different forms and from different materials. Fauteuils à coiffer, as they were called, were comfortable. They had to be, women had to sit in them for long hours. Cushioned during the winter months and caned for the summer, they were indented back to facilitate the fixing of a lady's do.

Christie’s, London, April 10, 2002

Sotheby's, Paris, France, June 14, 2006


Christie's, London, United Kingdom, December 14, 2005,
by Antoine Nicolas Delaporte, circa 1775

Not Much

My apologies, the school semester has begun (I teach) and seems like everything is due right now. I do have a Marie Antoinette part III post to present, which will be short, but I must carve out some time for it. However, in the meantime, if you are interested in reading a little about the modern American furniture design market here is something. CLICK

As the end of the month is closing in, I hope everyone is having a tolerable August!

Thoughts on the Passing of John Hughes

Though he has been gone a week, I would like to say: Thank You John Hughes.

Many of us have not forgotten you.

For those teens and young adults who struggled to understand life during the 80s, the writer and director broke everything down, categorized and explained the vunerable and impressionable dynamics of those angst-filled teenage years. He captured high school, the dress, the hair, underage drinking parties and personal emotional situations… perfectly. It was real. He didn’t sit in judgment. He didn’t make you feel alone.

The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off were the ones I remember most. And also my favorites of the time.

I had a bit of a thing for 'Bender' in The Breakfast Club. His dirty, disheveled bad boyness intrigued me. I attended an all-girls 'Claire' kind of school and proper parents didn’t like for us to associate ourselves with the broken type. Donning our monogrammed sweaters, kilt skirts and tasseled loafers, we were groomed to marry the Emilio Estevez popular athlete who made good grades, the right choices and called his father ‘sir’.


Or worse, James Spader's character in Pretty in Pink, with his upturned collar, cigarette dangling from his lips and reeking of Polo cologne in the classic green bottle.

But John Hughes safely exposed me to the outcast creative angry type. And there was no turning back.

In high school, I was looking for the 'Bender', but instead dated a football player from another school. He wasn’t dirty or disheveled, he just got into a lot of trouble, chain smoked and dressed weird, and I liked that. I moved on and dated the various types John Hughes had characterized up on the screen, and then some in between. Regardless of which character each resembled (it's sounding as if there were many, not the case), and how diverse I thought my range to be, they all had something in common. It is interesting how there is a certain something -- a type, a look, a mind -- that embeds in our heads at a young age which we can never seem to shake. It took me a long time to realize the 'Bender' type I was looking for didn’t have to be the brooding outcast. And more importantly, he didn’t have to have an arrest record in his repertoire.

So thank you John Hughes for broadening my horizons of male suitors, I wouldn’t have explored the variety of types and made so many horrendous (and expensive) mistakes if it wasn’t for your films. I finally ended up with one who is just right. I probably wouldn't have gotten here unless I explored these other very, very bumpy roads. Though annoying and painful, I salute you for what you did to make me who I am.

8.8

To my husband who surprised me this morning with a cupcake and flowers for our anniversary. Although I know you will never be reading this, (which will also spare me from you realizing just how corny I can be), you mean the world to me.

And to my first little Westie in heaven. Happy Birthday Tulla! I miss you so much each and every day. You taught me how to be kind and patient no matter what. When you died, I felt for a long, long while as if someone had taken a metal ice cream scoop and cut out a jagged hole where my heart once beat. You waited, I am sure, to go when you knew I was safe. That gives me comfort. But still after these years, I have such sadness, my breaths are short and tight when I think of you.

(Top image from Cupcake a la Mode; Bottom image: Tulla's last birthday with her Uncle Tony)

Marie Antoinette, Big Hair and moi (Part II)

By 1769, shortly after Marie Antoinette arrived to the French court, there were no less than 1200 hairdressers in Paris. Over time, Marie Antoinette began wearing larger and more ornate bouffants. The collaboration between her famous milliner, Rose Bertin, and her hairdresser, Léonard, proved to be quite a creative one and the vogue for these hairstyles lasted for ten years. Marie Antoinette began to don more and more outrageous hairstyles. She didn't invent fashions -- she promoted radical new ones – and set the trend. These hairstyles became all the rage among the aristocracy. Women began to do more than decorate their big coifs with ribbons, feathers, flowers, beads and jewelry. They crowned it with silk or lace. But after some time, that just wasn’t enough.

Marie Antoinette by Jacques-Fabien Gautier D'Agoty (1775) Musee Antoine-Lecuyer, Saint-Quentin France

In the court of Louis XVI, members competed for attention and tried to outdo each other with witty remarks and the latest novelty fashions. The most unusual hairdo would soon have to be outdone by another -- something more ingenious and over the top.

Image from La Mesure de l'Excellence.

A beehive form made from wire was created stuffed with wool or horse hair, and then it was mounted on top of the head. Hair was wrapped around these frames – and when women didn’t have enough (or it was too fine or thin) false hair was added -- building it up to soar up to three feet high. The do was powered with flour which helped to set the creation and absorb natural oils from the head. But it was this same flour that so many starving peasants desperately needed to have to bake bread.

Image from La Mesure de l'Excellence.

Women placed in their hair little figurines made from fabric and small objects made from papier maché. Their hairdresser arranged them as sceneries or landscapes. Sometimes, they used their hair as a stage to replicate historical scenes or sometimes to communicate an emotion -- sentimental pouf -- this type of do was called.

Image from La Mesure de l'Excellence.

Themes began to develop. Marie Antoinette wore a pouf à la jardinière which included such garden vegetables as carrots, radishes, an artichoke and a head of cabbage. Another woman exclaimed in glee after seeing the pouf do that she would never again wear anything but vegetables in her hair. “Vegetables were so much more natural than flowers,” she said. Women were not to be involved in politics. It wasn’t a ladylike thing to do. But it didn’t mean they couldn’t participate in their own way. Marie Antoinette wore her pouf a’ la inoculation in support of the small pox vaccination which showed Aesculapius’s serpent wrapped around an olive tree.

She wore these hairstyles at court and in town, and this had a swift and contagious effect. Rose Bertin, a mere plebeian, was now known as the Minister of Fashion.

"Everybody was talking of the poufs created by the firm of Bertin . . . one famous pouf was that of the Duchesse de Lauzun. She appeared at a reception wearing a most delicious pouf. It contained a stormy sea, ducks swimming near the shore, someone on the point of shooting one of them; on the top of the head there was a mill, the miller’s wife being made love to by an abbe, whilst near the ear the miller could be seen leading a donkey."

excerpt from Rose Bertin -- The Creator of Fashion at the Court of Marie Antoinette. By Émile Langlade. Published in 1913. I so want to find this book....

“The Preposterous Head Dress, or the Featherd Lady", London: Published by M. Darly, March 20, 1776. Yale Library.


The Duchesse de Chartres was one of the biggest big pouf wearers. She wore in her pouf small figures of her five children. Another time she appeared at the opera with her hair dressed in a sentimental pouf – nestled in it she had a little figure of her eldest son in his nurse's arms, a parrot pecking at a cherry, a little black boy, and the initials of her son and husband.

This trend spread England and to Sweden, one woman was report to have even created a replica of her dead husband’s tombstone.

“Miss Juniper Fox”, London. Published by M. Darly, March 2, 1777. Yale Library.

One of the most fashionable hairstyles of the eighteenth century was called: À la Belle Poule, which commemorated the victory of a French ship over an English ship in 1778.


In 1776 the Duchess of Devonshire was said to have made the addition of ostrich feathers, beads and flowers fashionable in le pouf. “Lady All-Top", London: Published by J. Lockington, May 15, 1776. Yale Library.

These big hairstyles created problems though. Hairstyles would obstruct other patron’s views at the theatre. It was difficult to move through doorways or in and out of carriages without knocking it over. Women would stick their head out of a moving carriage – the roof was simply not high enough. Some women kneeled on the floor for the extra room. Rumor says that many slept upright for weeks as not to muss their do. And many others would get their hair caught on fire from candlelit sconces. Lice, mice and other such things were said to have made these pouf their home.

This one is my favorite: "Miss Shuttle-Cock", London, Published by M. Darly, December 6, 1776. Yale Library.

Queens were always expected to look like the king’s dutiful subject – necessary only to produce heirs. It was the king’s expensive, flashy favorite mistresses for whom ultra-chic fashion was appropriate -- not his wife. But Louis XVI was faithful to Marie Antoinette and instead of providing excitement in the bedroom, he allowed her to spend spend and spend some more. Marie Antoinette’s end was tragic, no doubt. She lived a life of furbelows, flounces, and fandangle, (I don’t think I’ve used that word since 1982!); extravagance and excessive spending. And then she paid for it -- her pouf permanently separated from her shoulders.

(Top image from Boston Museum of Fine Art: Gallerie des Modes et Costumes Français. 2e. Cahier des Nouveaux Costumes Français pour les Coeffures B.12 (duplicate) "Pouf d'un gout nouveau..."French, 1778)