Chanel and Lagerfeld in London

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Beehives and big bags at Lagerfeld's first London show: Chanel's top designer pulls in British devotees with a beautiful collection

Hadley Freeman Deputy fashion editor
7 December 2007
The Guardian


© Copyright 2007. The Guardian. All rights reserved.

The quilted bags were big but the blow dries were bigger. In the foyer of a London auction house yesterday, Chanel's most devoted British customers showed that it would take more than rain to stop them from adhering to the most entrenched stereotypes about a typical fashion show audience.

While waiters served brightly coloured macaroons, everyone, including Naomi Campbell, a woman not known for her patience, seemed perfectly content to wait out the requisite 45-minute delay before the start of the first ever Chanel show in London.
Although the traditional fashion weeks take place in September and February, such restrictions have never hemmed in Chanel's indefatigable designer, Karl Lagerfeld, who sporadically stages extra shows to celebrate the seemingly endless lines he does for the venerable French label. Since 2002 this has included an extra show every year for what he calls his Metiers d'Art collection, created specifically to showcase the skills of the Parisian ateliers that work with the company, providing the label with intricate jewels and sculpted shoes.
Every year Lagerfeld has staged the show in a different city and this year it was London's turn, a fact which Lagerfeld rather endearingly worked into the collection itself amid all the jewels and sparkles.
While guests sat on gold chairs whose backs mimicked clothes hangers - perhaps in an attempt to put everyone in a shopping sort of mood - the first models came out dangling tiny evening bags splashed with the union flag. A little more subtly, and prettily, their hair was all swept up into oversized Amy Winehouse-style beehives. But unlike Winehouse's they were trimmed with jewels and, more importantly, looked recently washed.
The clothes, too, frequently had a British theme. The opening outfits - knee-length simple skirts or blouson culottes, piles of tweed jackets, thick black tights, simple pea coats and shiny loafers - made the models resemble English schoolgirls, albeit conspicuously well-dressed ones, with jewellery that looked a little finer than the sort available in Claire's Accessories. The leather coats and sharp jackets, often accessorised with fingerless gloves or jewelled feather dusters, seemed to be paying homage to the Clash and other 1970s British punk icons.
The live music was provided by Sean Lennon and the latest model girlfriend of Pete Doherty and face of Topshop - no, not that model, but her friend, Romanian-born Irina Lazareanu. Well, surely with those accolades she's an honorary Brit.
But leaving aside the nationalistic nods, the clothes were beautiful, better than much of what has been seen on the Chanel catwalks for a season or two. Perhaps because this was a show with such a heavy customer presence, Lagerfeld toned down his occasional impulse to make gimmicky clothes for sylph-like teenagers, such as the denim bikinis and tweed hotpants he showed in the mainline collection for next season, and concentrated on making things his monied and older customer base would want to buy. The simple knee-length black coats, lying strictly against the body and then kicking out, were flattering and, like much in the show, festooned with delicate jewels, while gold discs at the top of an evening gown lay as smoothly as the gills of a fish.

More info on: http://www.chanel.com/

ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH : Basel's Running of the (Art World) Bulls

By Judd Tully on Artinfo.com

Takashi Murakami works from 2005 in synthetic resin, fiberglass, and paint at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin. Each figure is 6.2 by 3.1 by 1.6 feet.
Photo by Judd Tully

MIAMI—The sixth edition of the Art Basel Miami Beach fair and the last orchestrated by founding director Samuel Keller opened to VIP types at noon today with a resounding bang.
As in years past, some super-caffeinated collectors literally ran down the center aisle to reach favorite galleries. You might have mistaken the scene for the running of the bulls in Pamplona.
“I was surprised how many good things there are,” said New York dealer Neal Meltzer, “but it’s a name-your-price market.”

Indeed, prices seemed sky-high or what’s referred to in the trade as “retail plus.”
Plenty of Europeans were on hand to take advantage of the weak American dollar and pretend they were getting bargains. An unidentified European buyer snatched Swiss painter Louis Soutter’s oil on paper Espagne fevrier (ca. 1939) for approximately €350,000 from Berlin’s Haas & Fuchs. The work was on view in a new category called Art Kabinett, which gives 15 galleries an opportunity to show small, curated exhibitions, and Soutter’s punchy and expressionist compositions fit the bill.

But there wasn’t much time to linger and appreciate as waves of art world aficionados streamed along the carpeted aisles, rubbernecking at every possible distraction.
“I’m not feeling good,” said New York supertrader Jose Mugrabi. “This is the first place I asked for prices and it scares me how low they are.”

He burst out laughing at his comment, posed at the edge of the Haas & Fuchs stand, and pointed to an Andy Warhol “Playboy Bunny” painting from 1978 measuring 23 by 18 inches that had a price tag of $680,000. “This is the best piece I’ve seen so far,” he said.

Mugrabi moved on, but a short time later he scored his first trophies of the day, buying three 40-by-40-inch Warhol “Gremlins” from 1986 at Dusseldorf’s Galerie Hans Mayer. The works went for under $500,000 each, according to David Mugrabi, one of Jose’s art-dealing sons. “The dealers are already selling like crazy,” raved the younger Mugrabi.
Not everyone sounded so enthralled. One noted retired dealer turned collector snapped, “They’re an awful lot of Calders here. They’re coming out of the woodwork and are very expensive.”

But sticker shock isn’t anything new, and besides, at Art Basel there’s really no time to hesitate or even haggle, especially so early in the privileged view.
Another European collector pounced at Paris/Miami's Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, buying a matching pair of large, upright Takashi Murakami sculptures, titled Kaikai Kiki, from 2005. The goofy guardians measure approximately 6 by 3 by 1.5 feet and are made of synthetic resin, fiberglass, and paint. Perrotin declined to reveal the price, but an informed passerby suggested the pair had sold in the $3 million range.

But even the standout Murakamis were overshadowed by a spectacular untitled Rudolf Stingel baroque abstraction from 2007 in nine plaster panels at Milan’s Galleria Massimo De Carlo. Another version in black fiberglass is at Francois Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi in Venice. Again the gallerist declined to cite a price, though another informed passerby pegged it in the $600,000 range.

There were sour notes, though: One only had to drift over to the newly organized Art Supernova, in which 20 galleries present work by emerging artists, and perk up his ears.
The section was tucked into a tributary of the sprawling convention center. Though plenty of signage led to it and a wall map plotted out the locations of the galleries, inside the series of unadorned rooms there wasn’t a single gallery sign in sight—nor were there chairs or tables for the dealers to fume on. This was apparently a deliberate move on the part of the organizers, intended to give this section a more curated quality. In fact, the section seemed, at least to this viewer, to fit in with the slapdash or post–arte povera style of “Unmonumental,” the inaugural exhibition at the new New Museum of Contemporary Art.

“The only other thing they [the organizers] could have done,” hissed one Supernova exhibitor, “was to blindfold us and tie one arm behind our backs.”Judd Tully is editor at large for Art+Auction.

To learn more : http://www.artbaselmiamibeach.com/

Wallinger takes Turner prize with re-creation of parliament protest

Judges praise 'visceral intensity' of artist who once dressed as a bear

Charlotte Higgins, arts correspondent

Tuesday December 4, 2007

In The Guardian

It was the man in the bearsuit who won it: Mark Wallinger, 48, was awarded the Turner prize last night, 12 years after he was first nominated but lost to Damien Hirst. His film Sleeper, 154 minutes of him wandering around a deserted German gallery disguised as a bear, but recognisable by his very particular gait, has baffled and entranced visitors to the Turner prize exhibition by turns.
The prize was officially given not for Sleeper, but for State Britain, his meticulous re-creation of Brian Haw's anti-war protest in Parliament Square. That was praised by the judges for its "immediacy, visceral intensity and historic importance", combining "a bold political statement with art's ability to articulate fundamental human truths".


The prize was awarded at a ceremony last night at Tate Liverpool - the first time outside London in its 23-year history - by actor, director and Easy Rider star Dennis Hopper. Accepting, Wallinger praised Haw's "tireless campaign against the folly and hubris of our government's foreign policy". He added: "Bring home the troops. Give us back our rights. Trust the people."
State Britain was the worthy winner, he believed: "It was the best thing that was shown this year, and I don't think I should be humble about it."
He added: "I think it's regrettable that people have been so quiescent about what the Serious Organised Crime Act has done to people who want to demonstrate. It is against Magna Carta, and that was produced in 1215, before democracy. It's important these freedoms are fought for and preserved."
Haw professed himself delighted with Wallinger's win, saying he and the artist "shared the same heart" - despite Haw having told him "politely to piss off' when first approached. Asked whether he would share the prize money with Haw, Wallinger said "what I do with the prize money is my business".
Wallinger was favourite to win in an uneven contest which saw Wallinger and Mike Nelson, also nominated before, in 2001, pitched against photographer and film-maker Zarina Bhimji and Glasgow sculptor Nathan Coley.
State Britain, on show between January and September this year at the Duveen galleries at Tate Britain, London, was by far the most overtly political work in contention. Wallinger remade Haw's peace camp in every detail: from the tea-making area to banners, flags, photos and posters amassed by Haw and his supporters.
Weather
It took 14 people six months to source the materials and age them to authenticity in Wallinger's studio in the Old Kent Road, south-east London. It cost him £90,000 to make, and the commission paid £3,000, so in a curious irony the £25,000 Turner prize will recoup at least a fraction of the cost of making the work, now in storage, but to be shown in Paris and Switzerland next year.
The work had piquancy, as Haw's protest, begun in 2001, was largely dismantled on May 23 2006, following the passing of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act forbidding unauthorised demonstrations within a kilometre of Parliament Square. That exclusion zone, taken literally, bisected Tate Britain, and part of State Britain fell within its border.
Wallinger's best-known work is perhaps Ecce Homo, a statue of Christ that occupied Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth during 1999.
For the Turner prize exhibition at Tate Liverpool he chose Sleeper, first seen at the 2005 Venice Biennale. There was controversy about his decision to show a single, two-year-old work, rather than a new piece, but Sleeper has never been seen before in the UK. The film shows Wallinger, in a bear suit, wandering around in a darkened space in the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Wallinger made multiple references: the bear is a symbol of Berlin, but also alluded to the cold war and history of "sleeper" spies.
Wallinger was born in 1959 in Chigwell, Essex, the son of a fishmonger who later worked in life insurance. He studied at Chelsea School of Art and at Goldsmiths, and lives in London. He has said: "I think art needs to engage the viewer and has to have a hook that isn't entirely cerebral ... I like Velázquez, Manet, Warhol - realists that held up a mirror to their society that was radical, but not pedantic."
The Turner prize is awarded for the best exhibition by a British or Britain-based artist in the 12 months preceding the May nominations. Each of the shortlisted artists receives £5,000.
· The Turner prize exhibition continues at Tate Liverpool until January 13. A retrospective of the previous prizes is at Tate Britain, London until January 6.

Mark Wallinger beside his installation, State Britain, at Tate Britain earlier this year. Photograph: Cathal McNaughton/PA

To learn more: www.tate.org.uk/britain/turnerprize/

Posh, Kate and Amy get the Pop Art treatment

The Kiss (2007)

By Ciar Byrne, Arts and Media Correspondent
Published: 03 December 2007 in The Independent.

In the early 1960s, Gerald Laing became famous for his Pop Art pictures of Brigitte Bardot and Anna Karina. Four decades on, he has once again taken celebrity as his subject in a series of paintings of Amy Winehouse, Kate Moss and Victoria Beckham.
As with his early works, Laing's new paintings are based on "perfect" images of the stars from newspapers and magazines. It marks a shift from his recent work in which he used the medium of Pop Art to express horror at the conflict in Iraq and the images of torture from Abu Ghraib prison.

The portrait of Winehouse shows the troubled singer standing on a red carpet kissing her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil. It is entitled The Kiss, because Laing felt the pose resembled that in Auguste Rodin's sculpture of the same name.
While The Kiss is unmistakeably Winehouse, the painting of Kate Moss is far more abstract, showing a woman in a bikini with a flesh coloured sphere as a head, which recalls Laing's image of Bardot, in which a pink circle surrounds her face, as well as Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

The painting of Victoria Beckham is also recognisably the Spice Girl, wearing a short blonde crop, sunglasses and a strappy sun dress.
Laing said: "The first paintings I did were of similar people at a different time in history. This is old territory but new subject matter."
He added: "There's so much about [Winehouse] that's fascinating. She's got massive talent and a very interesting personality. She's got quite a self-destructive streak and I find that interesting. We've all been self destructive at some point in our lives. It's like a kick in the face for mortality. It's a position that many very talented people have taken.
"Then there's her extraordinary body and clothes and her hair. It was something that I really wanted to capture."

With Moss, Laing got into a "visual riff, thinking about what I'd read and heard about her". He added: "It's for me amazingly sensual." The painting of Beckham is more figurative and formal.
The half-tone areas of black dots on a white background in Laing's paintings convey moral, humanistic issues, whereas the areas of flat colour represent more abstract qualities, he said.
He is now working on another painting of Winehouse, taken from a media image of her sitting with acolytes drinking champagne at an awards ceremony, which he is re-imagining as Rembrandt's Belshazzar's Feast.

He is also keen to turn his gaze on to some of the men in contemporary celebrity culture, so a painting of Pete Doherty may not be far off.
"I think an artist should be relevant," said Laing. "It's extraordinary the difference between the art press and real life. I always try to operate in real life."
Olivia Connolly, the director of the Ocontemporary gallery in Brighton which represents Laing, said: "The paintings are getting an absolutely phenomenal response. People are talking about Amy as Gerald's new Bardot. It's such a pop culture image. There are so many people trying to emulate Pop Art, but Gerald still has that lightness of touch. He's just as contemporary as he ever was."

Born in 1936 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Laing served as an officer in the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, before attending St Martin's School of Art. In the 1960s, he lived and worked in New York, but by 1969, disillusioned with America after the assassinations of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King and the Vietnam War, he returned to the UK, where he settled in Scotland and devoted the next 30 years to sculpture.
In 2003, the "shock and awe" invasion of Iraq inspired Laing to return to Pop Art, using bold colours to create chilling images of the "war on terror".
Early in his career, many of Laing's paintings were quickly sold and disappeared from view – he sold the Bardot painting to a fellow art student for £50. Now, he is keen to show his new work as widely as possible. Limited edition prints of each of the celebrity portraits are on sale at around £1,000 each.

To learn more: www.ocontemporary.co.uk/

Paul Smith: art or fashion ?

The exhibition entitled "Paul Smith @ Illford" is held until 8 December at the store located at 3 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore in Paris, and was previously shown this summer in the Paul Smith shop of Tokyo. This series of exclusive photographs, made by the British artist Martin Parr highlight the winter 2007-08 collection by Paul Smith. For this project, Martin Parr met people from the street in the city of Illford and photographed them dressed in Paul Smith. "I used real people because I know that Illford, only 10 km from the center of London, is full of different ethnic groups in addition to being a welcoming town." This exhibition also displays color in the pages of "Fashion Newspaper ," created by Martin Parr.

To learn more: http://www.paulsmith.co.uk/

Jeff Koons broke my heart ...

NEW YORK - "Hanging Heart", the huge stainless steel heart of the American Jeff Koons, sold Wednesday evening by the auction house Sotheby's, has found a buyer for 23.6 million dollars (including fees ), hence becoming the most expensive work of a living artist sold at an auction. The previous record for a living artist had been reached with the sculpture "Lullaby Spring" by Damien Hirst. The piece was sold for 19.5 million dollars at Sotheby's in London last June. "Hanging Heart" was bought by Gagosian Gallery, which has also acquired "Diamond (Blue)", another sculpture by Koons, for 11.8 million dollars. The sale of contemporary art by Sotheby's on Wednesday reported 315.9 million dollars, a record for the company.

At Christie's on Tuesday, another work "Liz (Colored Liz)" drew the attention. Made in 1963 by American artist Andy Warhol, the portrait of Elizabeth Taylor was sold to an anonymous buyer for 23.7 million dollars. London media claimed that the seller was the actor Hugh Grant.

Paris Photo : 15-18 November 2007

Duane Michals
Dr. Heisenberg Magic Mirror of Uncertainty, 1998 Max Estrella

Paris Photo returns

Over the decade since it first began, Paris Photo has won recognition as the world’s premier fair for photography. This event offers a deep and broad view of the medium, with the best of fine art photography from its earliest days until the most recent, and a forward-looking worldwide overview of what is happening in this art form.

On November 15-18, 2007, Paris Photo brings together 104 exhibitors (83 galleries and 21 publishers) from 17 countries. With 26 first-time participants and 73% of its exhibitors from abroad, the 2007 selection promises to be one of the best in the show’s history. Eighty-three rigorously chosen international galleries are presenting more than 500 artists in monographic
and thematic exhibitions, and collective showings of rare or previously unseen work.

Oswaldo Ruiz
Pemex IV, 2006 Luis Adelantado Valencia / Miami

Alongside the 18 French galleries, Italy, with its 16 galleries, remains the largest foreign representation followed by the U.S. (15), Spain (7), Germany (6), the UK (5), the Netherlands and Japan (3 each), Finland (2), and one each from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Hungary, Luxembourg, Portugal and South Africa.

Contemporary photography is gaining ground with the first-time participation of international names like Yvon Lambert (Paris / New York) and Massimo Minini (Brescia) and the return of the Kicken (Berlin) and Xippas (Paris / Athens) galleries.

The record participation of 21 publishers in Paris Photo 2007 (compared to 18 in 2006) is yet another sign of the boom in the market for photography books.

Simon Norfolk
Tibetan Refugees in the McLeod Ganj District of Dharamsala, India Bonni Benrubi Gallery

Guest of this year honour: Italy. For this eleventh edition, Italy is being honored through a retrospective in a "Central Exhibition" with works from the UniCredit collection and gathers great figures of Italian photography from 1979 to 1990. "The Statement" will showcase emerging artists such as Luca Andreoni, Botto e Bruno or Lorenza Lucchi Basili.

Finally, the "Project Room" shows a panorama of contemporary video developed with the support of Italian institutions. Two young talents are also to be awarded. On 15 November, the price BMW-Paris Photo will reward an artist on the theme "Water in the origin of life". The SFR Young Talents award will also allow five young artists, who were selected at the end of October, by a jury, to exhibit their works that explore the theme of "urbanity: Learn to live together in the city".


More info on : http://www.parisphoto.fr/