My cousin Barbara Schaefer is having a show of recent work at Shop Art, on Bergen Street in Brooklyn. (Convenient!) Barbara is walking sunshine, and her pictures—big tactile abstractions, with caligraphic skeins of paint—channel her personality. I’ve always thought there was something Rubensian about them in their energy and handling of the painted surface. Also, they make me smile.
We spent this past weekend at the beautiful weekend home of the Woo family, a masterwork of modernist architecture sequestered high in the rolling Vermont hills. Kyu Sung Woo, the paterfamilias, designed it himself, and his limpid vision and great attention to detail show everywhere. (The project may be familiar; it was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal.) The main house is comprised of a pair of light-filled, two-story bar structures, hinged at the middle. The volumes and geometries are asymetric but have a natural sense of harmony to them. Horizontal and vertical bands in a variety of materials (blond-wood floors, green clapboard siding panels, corrugated metal) give interiors and exteriors visual energy and direct the eye into the landscape. It’s all controlled and executed with immense care and polish. A few pictures:
Next week the MET will put on display Michelangelo’s “Torment of Saint Anthony,” reputedly the artist’s first painting. It’s a rare chance to see the picture, which was restored by the museum’s crack conservation department, before it heads off to its home at the Kimbell, in Ft. Worth. You have to love how flat-out bezonkers it is, understandable when you learn that it was (supposedly) painted when the artist was all of 12 to 13 years old. Contemporary sources tell us the boy-genius studied the wares at the local fish market to aid him in the realism of his monsters. The small boat at the bottom of the picture, sailing off apparently unaware of the drama above, is an especially nice touch.
Has Leigh Bowery, said to have died more than a decade ago, been hiding out on the Coney Island boardwalk sporting a mullet all along? Peter Arkle took the photo at left on Sunday. Lucien Freud’s classic portrait of Bowery on the right. You make the call. But wIth all due respect, when it comes to fleshy naked derrieres, I’ll stick with the master: