Andy Warhol’s shoes
Fairfield Porter, “Jimmy and John” (1957-58) oil on canvas
Jorge Luis Borges self-portrait, drawn after he’d gone blind
Edward Hopper — women and windows, lights on the diagonal, night and day, inside and out
John Koch, “The Bath,” (1973) oil on canvas
Koch was a self-taught painter who began in impressionism but moved toward realism, crafting some of the loveliest (and most quintessentially New York) moments on 20th c. canvas. Like his other paintings of music lessons and cocktail parties, there’s an incredible intimacy on display in this piece. Koch lived the last several decades of his life in a large apartment overlooking Central Park, and many scenes in work came directly from his home.
1989 menu design by Ellsworth Kelly for New York’s Chanterelle’s, a now-closed Tribeca restaurant that asked various artists or luminaries to design menu covers over its 30-year history. Participants included Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, and even Edward Albee.
Joseph Beuys, “Royal Pidge Pine” (1953)
From the famed artist, theorist, and sculptor, a bookshelf.
Robert Longo, “Untitled” (1982) - Charcoal, graphite, oil and ink on paper
Longo has done plenty: married Barbara Sukowa, directed music videos for New Order and R.E.M., played with Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio — but he’s probably best known for his intense, rhythmic “Men in the Cities” series of drawings.
Coles Phillips, Good Housekeeping cover (1916)
An example of ad and cover artist Phillips’s distinctive “take-away” style, where his subjects’ clothes would bleed into the backgrounds, vividly turning negative space into positive — and vice versa.
Sue Tompkins, “Fruit Works”
A “typewriter drawing” from poet-writer-singer-artist extraordinaire Tompkins, former lead singer of the much-missed Life Without Buildings. This piece brings some of the energy of her live performance to the page.
We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all ‘now,’ in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.
“I think this is good news. As people become increasingly comfortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of sources — cherry-picking whatever makes sense to them — it becomes more natural to do the same thing with their social, political and other cultural ideas. The sharing of art is a precursor to the sharing of other human experiences, for what is pleasurable in art becomes thinkable in life.
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Hein Heckroth, “The Ballet of the Red Shoes” (1948)
The zenith of Powell and Pressburger’s masterpiece THE RED SHOES comes during its 17-minute ballet number, but Heckroth, a surrealist painter, was the one largely responsible for the famed sequence’s design. He made hundreds of oil paintings (like the one above) that were turned into an animated film, which in turn inspired the set-piece’s choreography and score.
My favorite image-based site on the web alongside If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats is this terrific blog, which compiles amazing images across time and cultures. To give you an example of what the site offers, there have been recent posts on Year of the Monkey postcards, vintage souvenir magician programs, Tibetan anatomical paintings, and so much more, all in luscious hi-res. But like If Charlie Parker…, Ephemera Assemblyman is really a triumph of curation, an education in photos and drawings.
Letter from Mick Jagger to Andy Warhol, on designing album art for the Stones.
