Before fading into obscurity, the Polish emigre had a moment almost as interesting as Lana Turner's discovery in Schwab's Pharmacy except it actually happened. Shortly after Hirshfield began painting at the age of 65 an art dealer, who was curating an "painters-you've-never-heard-of" exhibit, spotted his work and included it. The Surrealism crowd, very much in vogue at the time, embraced the former tailor and slipper designer as a kindred spirt and MoMA gave him a one-man show!
"Beach Girl" (1937-39)
"Tailor-Made Girl" (1939)
Predictably, contemporary art critics were appalled that MoMA had recognized a self-taught Brooklyn artist who had picked up his paint brush only six years earlier. Hirsfield's funky depiction of female anatomy got under their skin; it looked as if most of his women had two left feet. A retrospective of Hirshfield's work at the American Folk Art Museum curated by Richard Meyer, along with a gorgeous catalog, hopefully will re-introduce the man to a less snooty audience.
American Beauty (1945)
Hirshfield often painted animals as well as women.
"Baby Elephant With Boy" (1943)
"Dogs and Pups" (1944)
"Stage Girls With Angels" (1945)
Label text indicates the happily married Hirshfield drew from his imagination because it would be improper to be in a room with nude models. No Picasso, he!
"Nude With Flowers" (1945)
"Harp Girl II" (Girl With Harp, 1945)
"Wintersled I" (1946)
He painted his final work from a postcard of Sacré-Cœur sent to him from Paris by a friend. The title mystifies.
"Parliamentary Buildings" (1946)
A display of boudoir slippers, patented and designed by Hirshfield during the Roaring Twenties, and custom-made by artist Liz Blahd especially for this retrospective nearly a century later, anticipates the decorative motifs in his paintings. I believe it slyly spoofs his early critical reputation, too: they all seem to be for left feet!
It's easy to see how the E-Z Walk Manufacturing Company, owned by Hirshfield and his wife, made a mint selling these gorgeous "Foot Pals." This one's made from cashmere.
With master thespian Ralph Fiennes starring as master builder Robert Moses, you don't fret much about numerous secondary cast substitutions particularly when they're as good as as those on Saturday's matinee performance of Straight Line Crazy. David Hare's very talky play gets a little too preachy in the second act but the dynamics-of-power ballet performed by Fiennes and bourbon-swilling Danny Webb as New York Governor Al Smith in the first left me as giddy as I ever get in the theater. Too bad that Fiennes is forced to pantomime the youthful vigor of the ultimately reviled man who probably did more good than bad. Assholes can get public works done, after all. Look no further than Andrew Cuomo for proof of that. Hare, or maybe Moses himself, gets bonus points for articulating the appeal and challenges of open-water swimming, which led directly to the establishment of Jones Beach State Park where I picked up the habit half a century later. Usually getting there by car, of course!
It's not often I can say I enjoyed a house much more than the book but Dennis Severs atmospheric execution of a wacky concept is more easily appreciated than this labored, if occasionally amusing account of his intention. As an American expatriate from California, he seems to have been very dedicated to the philosophy of yin and yang--which he expresses in terms of a circle and square--and returning his visitors to the Age of Enlightenment through flea market acquisitions. Huh? But for his interior design seance to work, you really have to be there.
Queer ones, too. I've read about Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures for years but had absolutely no idea what his experimental film was about. I still don't.
Many well-known artists today were just beginning to show their work.
"Woman Brushing Her Hair on Green Chair" by George Segal (1964)
The exhibit also features rooms decorated in exaggerated period style. Jackie on the end table, Marilyn singing "Happy Birthday" to her husband on the boob tube!
TV also beamed images of the peaceful Black protesters and angry southern bigots into American homes. Many historians credit it with changing minds. I became aware of the Civil Rights movement more through magazine coverage because my father was stationed in France and Germany during the time of this exhibition.
African American artists were producing little-seen work on the same subject.
"The Last Civil War Veteran" by Larry Rivers (1959)
Everybody my age remembers where they were on November 22, 1963. I was on a field trip in Heidelberg and came home to find my mother--a Nixon voter--in tears. It's impossible to imagine that kind of across-the-aisle grief today.
Warhol produced "Jackie Frieze" and Empire, one of his early underground movies, shortly after the assassination. I remember being fascinated by him and the Factory through reports in Time magazine.
I love unsung heroes. Not Robert Rauschenberg (left), of course, but Alan Solomon, an early director of the Jewish Museum and chair of the government committee that selected Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella, along with six other artists he had exhibited at the museum, to represent America at the 32nd Venice Biennale.
After Rauschenberg nabbed the Grand Prize, New York became the center of the art world as pop art took off.
"Third Time Painting" by Robert Rauschenberg (1961)
"Marrakech" by Frank Stella (1964)
Italian television interviewed Solomon, who was prematurely dead at age 49 by the end of the decade. His progressive taste also cost him his job at the museum.
Perhaps my stubborn resistance to the source material (heterosexual cross dressers? no thanks) increased my enjoyment of this adaptation of a Billy Wilder classic, but plenty of people in the preview audience were laughing a lot more loudly than I. NaTasha Yvette Williams commands the stage with her Black sass, Christian Borle's timing is impeccable and Adrianna Hicks accomplishes the extraordinary feat of making you forget Marilyn but J. Harrison Gee steals the show, adding a sweet believability to the contemporary update, credited to Matthew Lopez (The Inheritance) and Amber Ruffin. Although Marc Shaiman's serviceable score grows monotonous in the second act it doesn't matter because the dancing throughout is sensational. If you like watching superbly talented, gorgeously costumed chorus girls and boys do their thing, Some Like It Hot is your musical.
Let me begin with envious regard for Douglas Stuart's superb writing. In this early description of a Protestant gang's thieving assault on a construction site, he lyrically sets the stage for the brutal cross-cultural rumble--not unlike the climactic one in West Side Story--that sickens the reader with its dream-crushing violence.
They ran this obstacle course of follow-my-leader and climbed higher and higher. They found new ways to make it more dangerous. They took it in turns to climb the angled neck of the brontosaurus excavators, they crept upwards to the bucket and then they leapt, gliding through the air to the roof of a backhoe. If they missed, then it was a 20-foot plummet to the ground. But they flew across the night sky like fearless angels, their tracksuits flapping behind them like flightless wings.
Stuart is particularly adept with unexpected allusion:
Mungo had been delighted to catch a glimpse inside the boozer and spy a cluster of stout women dancing together, gyrating across the floor like washing machines that had juddered loose from their brackets.
While his references to pop culture are few, they often work double-time, allowing a kind man with a pair of dogs who picks up a traumatized hitchhiker to establish his unthreatening heterosexuality.
“This is Crystal and that one is Alexis. Never let your wife name your pets.”
Stuart's dissection of porn models contrasts hilariously with the bodies (and innocence) of Mungo, a Protestant named for Glasgow's patron saint, and James, the slightly older Catholic boy who keeps homing pigeons:
The magazine was full of bloated Americans. Men with swollen muscles and lines of amber tans that showed the ghost of their missing swimming trunks. They didn’t have the long, thin limbs of him or James, the soft downy trails of hair, or the white skin that flushed when you touched it, that turned blue or pink depending on temperature, on emotion. Everything about these Americans was artificially plump; they were shaved and plucked, lying on their backs, legs in the air, more like Christmas turkeys than men. There was a painful rictus on their faces, glazed eyes, false winces of pleasure. One man was grinning at the camera while he choked his floppy cock, strangling it like it was an empty tube of toothpaste.
Like Stuart's Booker Prize-winning Snuggie Bain, the novel depicts a lower-class Glaswegian family barely supported--emotionally or financially--by a single alcoholic mother. While a gay mama's boy narrates both novels, Young Mungo is more engaging in many respects. The dialect isn't quite as pervasive, and it tells a tender story of love flowering between two teenage boys, something we've rarely seen in serious literature. At the same time, Stuart veers into what I call A Little Life territory, or misery porn. Is life in the East End really this sadistic? It's a miracle that anyone gets out alive. The birds certainly don't.
Lou Reed was SO New York when I was a sophomore at Columbia that posters advertised Transformer, his seminal solo album, in the subway. Mick Rock took the cover photo, manipulated here even more than it was there.
I bought the album mostly for "Walk on the Wild Side" and the opportunity to study the back cover, surely the most explicit presentation of the gender bending pioneered by Mick Jagger and David Bowie. For a kid still confused about his sexuality, it was radical! To paraphrase Mae West: "Is that a banana in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?"
Here's an iconic period photo (also by Mick Rock) of Lou with his glam pals, David Bowie and Iggy Pop wearing a T-Rex tee. Call me a fan boy for 'em all--my idolatry is wide, not deep. It's hard to believe Iggy is the last one standing. Bowie produced Transformer--you just know he was responsible for best pop music chorus ever--and played sax on "Walk."
Lou's reserved masculinity appealed to me almost as much as Iggy's wild child. It's hard to look at this shot, again by Mick Rock (glam's official photographer), and not think "Everything old is new again."
Unlike most discriminating rock 'n roll fans of my time, I did not pretend to revere the Velvet Underground despite its deep connection with Andy Warhol. The muddiness of the first recording, the one with Andy's banana art, alienated me. I'm not even sure I realized Lou had written most of the songs on Rock 'n Roll Animal, still my all-time favorite live album, while a member of the Underground.
"Caught Between The Twisted Stars," an exhibit at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center stimulated all this reverie about Lou. The library acquired his archives in 2017. That would have been inconceivable to me when I worked there, pretty much at the height of Lou's fame. If you live long enough, astonishment goes with the territory. Another case in point: Susan Boyle, Lou's least likely cover artist, turning "Perfect Day," (my second favorite song from Transformer) into a choral hit nearly 40 years after he composed it. Unbelievably, his song survived the schmalz treatment perhaps because it always was a bit treacly.
Here's an excerpt from the film Andy directed about the Velvet Underground that features Lou, Nico and Nico's son.
Lou and bandmate John Cale paid tribute to Andy with "Songs for Drella," several years after his death. The two musicians hadn't worked together since Cale left the Velvet Underground in 1969.
Although Lou never recorded another song as popular as "Walk on the Wild Side" (released exactly half-a-century ago on November 24) he kept churning out one (mostly) transgressive classic after another: "Kicks," "Coney Island Baby," "Rock 'n Roll Heart," "Temporary Thing," "Street Hassle" and "I Wanna Be Black" which you probably aren't supposed to like any more. Of course there were some bombs, too, including Berlin, an autobiographical rock opera about a couple's drug addiction, and the unlistenable Metal Machine Music. Like many fans, I eventually came around to the former although not before I gave my copy away. Damnit!
Live performances at the Bottom Line, where I took the photo below in 1977, and the Academy of Music suggested that his gender bending was more au courant than characteristic. He rocked with New York attitude. Lester Bangs, the rock critic immortalized in Almost Famous, wrote: He fixes you with that rusty bug-eye, he creaks and croaks and lies in your face, and you're helpless.
I kept up with Lou's solo career until 1983. Now that he was married and in recovery, sex, drugs and rock 'n roll were behind him. So was I, after The Blue Mask, his most critically acclaimed recording. The music had lost its punch. I gave up entirely with the release of Legendary Hearts, which I bought mostly because it featured this motorcycle helmet on the cover.
My copy is probably still as pristine as the library's because I played it only once or twice.
Lou jotted down his lyrics in small notebooks.
I looked for my favorite singalong, from "Rock 'n Roll Heart," to no avail.
I don't like opera and I don't like ballet
And New Wave French movies, they just drive me away
I guess I'm just dumb, 'cause I know that I ain't smart
But deep down inside, I got a rock 'n' roll heart
Yeah-yeah-yeah, deep down inside I got a rock 'n' roll heart
Lou's marriage to Laurie Anderson in 2009 enhanced the "downtown" credibility of both artists. A year later they served as the grand marshals of Coney Island Mermaid Parade along with Lola Belle, their pooch.
When Lou died, Laurie writes in the exhibition hand-out, he left everything to me. It was overwhelming and it took me a while to imagine what to do with it. The process took years but the collection of Lou's public life has finally entered the New York Public Library.
I'm so happy! First, because Lou is a legendary New Yorker and his work belongs to this city. And second because the library is free and public. This is not a white gloves collection. Anyone can come in and look and listen to his life's work.
Hear ye, hear ye! It's comforting to think that the future generations always will have access to "New York Telephone Conversation," a throwaway song from Transformer that captures one of the fundamental pleasures of mid 20th-century life:
I was sleeping, gently napping, when I heard the phone
Who is on the other end talking, am I even home?
Did you see what she did to him, did you hear what they said?
Just a New York conversation rattling in my head
Ooh my, and what shall we wear, ooh my, and who really cares?
Just a New York conversation, gossip all of the time
"Did you hear who did what to whom?", happens all the time
Who has touched and who has dabbled, here in the city of shows
Openings, closings, bad rap party, everybody knows
Ooh, how sad and why do we call, ooh I'm glad to hear from you all
I am calling, yes I'm calling just to speak to you
For I know this night will kill me, if I can't be with you
If I can't be with you
In my imagination, Andy was usually on the other end, and their conversations inspired "Walk on the Wild Side." Here in the city of shows.
