Max Beckmann at the Met VIDEO HERE
It's so easy to become somewhat blaze about seeing great artists that one thinks one knows. And photographing art never quite works. But the Met's Beckmann show is a revelation. Seen en masse rather than isolation his art towers over you; the deja vu of it haunts you; the brushwork transfixes you.
A Saline Bath, RAF Hospital (Alfred Thomson, 1943)
Gustave Caillebotte: Man at His Bath (1884)
Vogue’s greatest ‘washrooms’;) !
Salle de Bain de Marie-Antoinette
No-one, would wish that a great artist could/would make a segue into anything,,,if there was ever a shoe-in then surely that by its very nature would be so so boring....
RIZZOLI, rather unfairly, somewhat in the recent decade, got relegated to coffee table books. There is no table more worthy of a Rizzoli book. (as a disclosure for that praise: I get a few free drinks that is no more than any ‘fish’ could get, and most certainly no free merchandise). And yet I suffer under a hot Final Cut editing stove...well not a stoker, Ken Loach. I could never have pretensions to that ...
Had a fascinating conversation with The Perfect Bath’s Barbara Sallick.
One wishes she had written the definitive book on bathroom history. But, in fairness, that wasn’t the book. Though could it have been? The history o the human bathroom is somewhat totally bizarre!. Decade after decade after decade and all the fashion and décor and stress on design and a la mode. And yet: the bathroom rarely got a look in a la mode. Barbara Sallick said that her success was that NOBODY was interested in the bathroom until the early 1980’s. Go Figure?! All that Mad Men advertising, all that decade after decade of advertising to women and yet the bathroom was not of EVER design interest? !
The bathrooms in the Vanderbilt Mansion (1900) are sparce and spartan though everything including plumbing and electricity were ahead of everyone else. Interesting, though, there is a photo in Sallick's book of the Vizcaya bathroom (1920) looking every bit 'Park Avenue'.
So what took bathroom design so long to ignite? A sales associate from Waterworks probably nailed the explanation. The bathroom was always seen as a private place to do those private things. So why bother. Did the Europeans think differently?
Are our Octobers getting hotter?
