An Architect Whose Work Stood Out, Even if She Didn’t
Demetrius Freeman/The New York Times
Natalie de Blois helped guide
the design of buildings like the Lever House, whose suave
steel-and-glass facades still exude the cool confidence of postwar Park
Avenue.
Ms. de Blois, a senior designer at the architectural
firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, was the hidden hand behind a number
of modernist buildings in New York.
Almost invisibly in her own day, Natalie de Blois,
of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, helped guide the design of three of
the most important corporate landmarks of the 1950s and ‘60s — the
headquarters of Lever Brothers, Pepsi-Cola and Union Carbide — whose
suave steel-and-glass facades still exude the cool confidence of postwar
Park Avenue.
“There wasn’t anybody in the country quite like Natalie, because there
was no one else working for a firm quite like Skidmore,” said Beverly
Willis, the founder and chairwoman of the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation in New York, which seeks to raise the general consciousness about the role of women in the building industry.
“At that point, there were only five or six women across the U.S. who
had a substantial architectural practice,” Ms. Willis said. “And, of
course, Natalie was doing bigger buildings, and she was doing them in
the heart of Manhattan. These were celebrated buildings that the press
fawned over, but Natalie’s name was never mentioned.”
“Natalie and Gordon Bunshaft were a team,” Ms. Willis said. “He took all the credit and she did all the work.”
Debates can always be had about the provenance of almost any significant
architectural project, particularly one coming out of an office as
large and collaborative as Skidmore (where my father was a partner until
his death in 1973). No one person can ever wholly claim credit.
But there is little doubt that Ms. de Blois, who died last week, was long denied her due. That was acknowledged 40 years ago by Nathaniel A. Owings, a founding partner of the firm, in his autobiography, “The Spaces In Between: An Architect’s Journey.”
Of Ms. de Blois, he wrote: “Her mind and hands worked marvels in design —
and only she and God would ever know just how many great solutions,
with the imprimatur of one of the male heroes of S.O.M., owed much more
to her than was attributed by either S.O.M. or the client.”
God knew she was often slighted.
Just before a meeting about the International Arrivals Building planned
at Idlewild Airport (now Kennedy International), Mr. Bunshaft looked at
Ms. de Blois and said: “You can’t come to the meeting unless you go home
first and change your clothes. I don’t like green.” Ms. de Blois did
just that, she recalled in a 2004 interview in the S.O.M. Journal.
Ms. de Blois was pregnant with the third of her four sons — Frank,
Robert, Patrick and Nicholas — when she was invited to the opening of
the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company Headquarters
in Bloomfield, Conn., on which she had worked. “You know,” Mr. Bunshaft
said, “don’t come to the opening if you haven’t had that baby yet.”
Perhaps she persevered in the face of such treatment because
construction ran in her blood. She was born on April 2, 1921, in
Paterson, N.J. Her father, an engineer like his father and his father’s
father, encouraged his daughter when she dreamed of becoming an
architect.
After she received an architecture degree from Columbia University in
1944, Ms. de Blois began working at a small firm on East 57th Street.
When she resisted a colleague’s romantic advances, she was let go
because he said he couldn’t concentrate with her around. But
her boss did her a favor: he introduced her to Louis Skidmore, whose
office was downstairs.
Mr. Skidmore hired her. She practiced in New York until the early 1960s,
when she moved to Skidmore’s Chicago office, where she was made an
associate partner. Over time, her portfolio included the Terrace Plaza Hotel
in Cincinnati, the Hilton Hotel in Istanbul and the Equitable Building
in Chicago. She left the firm in 1974, having never been elevated to
full partnership.
By then, however, her reputation had begun to catch up with her achievements.
“When I was a young architect in the ‘70s and ‘80s, there weren’t that
many older women architects who had worked on a scale other than
domestic,” said Sara Caples,
a principal in Caples Jefferson Architects in Long Island City, Queens.
“It was definitely encouraging to know that was out there.”
The more she learned, Ms. Caples said, the more she appreciated the fact
that Ms. de Blois was not simply a female architect, but a good one.
“She was a designer who was a great practitioner of lightness in
architecture,” Ms. Caples said, “with an elegant sense of proportion.”
Rijks
Summer! Today, you’ll hear a cheerful 'Happy Birthday' around all of
Henry Moore’s sculptures. He was born 115 years ago today. He decided
to become a sculptor when he was just eleven years old, after hearing a
story about Michelangelo. At Sunday school. http://bit.ly/17sVzEn
Mauritshuis, The Hague“Girl With a Pearl Earring,” one of Vermeer’s most famous works.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, and Teller, the nonspeaking partner in the illusionist team of Penn & Teller,
is a man of few. Still, he’s interested enough in pictures, paintings
and the creation of fine art that he has made them the subject of a new
documentary, “Tim’s Vermeer,” that has been acquired for distribution by
Sony Pictures Classics.
On Monday, Sony Pictures Classics said it had picked up the worldwide
rights to “Tim’s Vermeer,” a nonfiction film that is directed by Teller
and that chronicles Tim Jenison, a Texas-based inventor who explores
how Jan Vermeer created his photo-realistic paintings in the 1600s, a century and a half before photography was invented.
In a decade-long exploration, Mr. Jenison travels to Delft, Holland,
where Vermeer painted, and meets with the British artist David Hockney,
who has made his own inquiries
into how Vermeer and other master painters created their works.
Ultimately, Mr. Jenison’s project “succeeds as he uses 17th-century
technology — lenses and mirrors — to develop a technique that might have
been used by Vermeer, supporting a theory as extraordinary as what he
discovers,” Sony Pictures Classics said in a news release.
Penn Jillette, the more verbal performing partner of Teller,
explained the origins of the film in a statement. “My buddy, Tim
Jenison, told me over supper he was going to try to paint a Vermeer,”
Mr. Jillette said. “Tim is a genius, but I’m a skeptic. I wanted to see
him do it. Teller has been the Penn & Teller de facto director since
our beginnings, so we made a movie of Tim’s whole monomaniacal trip.
Having Sony Pictures Classics as the first words on the screen means
it’s more than just a couple of Vegas magicians and an eccentric
inventor in his garage. Now it’s a real film that will change the
history of art.”
Sony Pictures Classics said it will release “Tim’s Vermeer” next year.
The
understanding and enjoyment of a work of art depends as much on the
story it depicts as on the artist's execution of it. But what were once
biblical or classical commonplaces are not so readily recognizable
today. This book relates in a succinct and readable way the themes,
sacred and secular, on which the repertoire of Western art is based.Here
in a single volume are combined religious, classical, and historical
themes, the figures of moral allegory, and characters from romantic
poetry that established themselves through paintings and sculpture in
Western art before and after the Renaissance. More than just a
dictionary, this text places these subjects in their narrative,
historical, or mythological context and uses extensive cross-referencing
to enhance and clarify the meanings of these themes for the reader. The
definitive work by which others are compared, this volume has become an
indispensable handbook for students and general art appreciators alike.
This wholly redesigned second edition includes a new insert of images
chosen by the author, as well as a new preface and index to highlight
the ideas, beliefs, and social and religious customs that form the
background of much of this subject matter.
A Japanese architect's latest work is examined in ideas,
technologies and designs to elucidate the key to J-architects' rising
global recognition.
> Hosted by Yusuke Koshima
Thu. 1:30 - 2:00 (UTC)
Thu. 5:30 / 9:30 / 13:30 / 17:30 / 21:30 (UTC)
* broadcast every last Thursday of the month
Next
Jul. 25, Thu.
Sou Fujimoto
Visionary architect Sou Fujimoto creates
surprising new buildings. Born in 1971, the University of Tokyo graduate
established his practice in 2000. He is the recipient of numerous
international awards, including the AR's Emerging Architecture Prize and
Rice Design Alliance's Spotlight Prize. He's also the frontrunner at
global design competitions. In 2013, he was appointed designer of the
Serpentine Gallery Pavilion. Fujimoto's innovative architecture inhabits
a space between nature and artificiality. We focus on one of the most
important architects coming to prominence worldwide.
Latest
Jun. 27, Thu.
Shuhei Endo
Shuhei Endo uses materials boldly and
creates buildings that are full of surprises. Born in Shiga Prefecture
in 1960. Graduated from the Graduate School of Kyoto City University of
Arts in 1986. He established the Shuhei Endo Architect Institute in
1988. His 1998 work "Springtecture H" is made of corrugated steel plates
presented in a spiral shape and it is renowned as one of the most
famous bathrooms in the world. He has won many international awards such
as the "Arcasia Award for Architecture Gold Medal" and the "9th Venice
Biennale Special Award".
Robert Hughes, the eloquent, combative art critic and historian who
lived with operatic flair and wrote with a sense of authority that owed
more to Zola or Ruskin than to his own century, died on Monday at
Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. He was 74 and had lived for many years in
Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.
He died after a long illness, said his wife, Doris Downes.
With a Hemingwayesque build and the distinctively rounded vowels of his
native Australia, Mr. Hughes became as familiar a presence on television
as he was in print, over three decades for Time
magazine, where he was chief art critic and often a traditionalist
scourge during an era when art movements fractured into
unrecognizability.
“The Shock of the New,” his eight-part documentary about the development
of modernism from the Impressionists through Warhol, was seen by more
than 25 million viewers when it ran first on BBC and then on PBS, and
the book that Mr. Hughes spun off from it, described as a “stunning
critical performance” by Louis Menand of The New Yorker, was hugely
popular. In 1997, the writer Robert S. Boynton described him as “the
most famous art critic in the world.”
It was decidedly not Mr. Hughes’s method to take prisoners. He was as
damning about artists who fell short of his expectations as he was
ecstatic about those who met them, and his prose seemed to reach only
loftier heights when he was angry. As early as 1993, he described the
work of Jeff Koons as “so overexposed that it loses nothing in
reproduction and gains nothing in the original.”
“Koons is the baby to Andy Warhol’s Rosemary,” he summarized, adding:
“He has done for narcissism what Michael Milken did for the junk bond.”
Of Warhol himself, the most influential artist of the last 40 years, he
was not wholly dismissive — he once referred to him as “Genet in paint” —
and he softened in his judgment over time. But he argued that Warhol
had only a handful of good years and that his corrosive shadow over
contemporary art ultimately did more harm than good. “The alienation of
the artist, of which one heard so much talk a few years ago,” he wrote
in 1975, “no longer exists for Warhol: his ideal society has
crystallized round him and learned to love his entropy.”
About artists he admired, like Lucian Freud, he cast the stakes in
nothing less than heroic terms. “Every inch of the surface has to be
won,” he wrote of Freud’s canvases in The Guardian in 2004, “must be
argued through, bears the traces of curiosity and inquisition — above
all, takes nothing for granted and demands active engagement from the
viewer as its right.”
“Nothing of this kind happens with Warhol, or Gilbert and George, or any
of the other image-scavengers and recyclers who infest the wretchedly
stylish woods of an already decayed, pulped-out postmodernism.”
“The Fatal Shore,” Mr. Hughes’s epic 1987 history of his homeland,
Australia — which he left in 1964 and where his reputation seemed to
seesaw between hero and traitor — became an international best seller.
And he continued to write prolifically and with ambitious range, on
beloved subjects like Goya, Lucian Freud, fishing, the history of
American art, the city of Barcelona — and himself — even after a
near-fatal car crash in Australia in 1999 left him with numerous health
problems. “Things I Didn’t Know,” a memoir, was published in 2006 and
“Rome,” his highly personal history of the city he called “an enormous
concretion of human glory and human error,” was published last year. In
the memoir, Mr. Hughes was as poetically descriptive about his brush
with death as he was about the art he loved: “At one point I saw Death.
He was sitting at a desk, like a banker. He made no gesture, but he
opened his mouth and I looked right down his throat, which distended to
become a tunnel: the bocca d’inferno of old Christian art.”
Boca do Inferno. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Jump to: navigation, search. Hell's Mouth near Cascais. Boca do Inferno (Portuguese for Hell's Mouth) is ...
Robert Studley Forrest Hughes was born July 28, 1938, in Sydney, into a
family of successful lawyers. His father, Geoffrey Forrest Hughes, was a
flying ace during World War I, who died when Robert was 12.
Mr. Hughes studied art and architecture at the University of Sydney and
was associated with a group of leftist artists and writers that included
Germaine Greer and Clive James, who described Mr. Hughes during those
years as “the golden boy.” He pursued criticism mostly as a sideline
while painting, writing poetry and serving as a cartoonist for the
weekly intellectual journal The Observer.
After leaving Australia, he spent formative time in Italy before
settling mostly in London. There, he quickly became a well-known
critical voice, writing for several newspapers and diving into the
glamorous hedonism of the ’60s London, an experience that confirmed him
in a kind of counter-counterculturalism — not that he didn’t indulge
himself during those years.
As he related in his memoir, he was so under
the influence of drugs when Time magazine called to offer him a job
that he thought that it might be a trick by the C.I.A. (He wrote that he
contracted gonorrhea from his first wife, Danne Patricia Emerson, who,
he believed, had contracted it from Jimi Hendrix.)
gonorrhea
音節
gon • or • rhe • a, ((主に英))-rhoe • a
発音
gɑ`nəríːə | gɔ`nəríə
[名][U]淋疾(りんしつ), 淋病.
-al
[形]淋病の, 淋菌性の.
With Ms. Emerson, who died in 2003, Mr. Hughes had a son, Danton, from
whom he was estranged after he and Ms. Emerson divorced in 1981. Danton,
a sculptor who lived outside of Sydney, killed himself in 2002, at the
age of 34.
Besides his wife, a painter, Mr. Hughes is survived by two stepsons,
Freeborn Garrettson Jewett IV and Fielder Douglas Jewett. He is also
survived by his brothers, Thomas Hughes, a former attorney general of
Australia, and Geoffrey Hughes, and by a sister, Constance Crisp, all of
Sydney. His niece, Lucy Hughes Turnbull, was a former lord mayor of
Sydney, and her husband, Malcolm Turnbull, is a member of the Australian
House of Representatives.
Mr. Hughes lived for many years in New York in a loft in SoHo, whose
blossoming art scene he often lampooned. In 1978 he was recruited to
anchor the new ABC News magazine “20/20,” but the reviews of his first
broadcast were so disastrous that he was quickly replaced by Hugh Downs.
In 1999, while in Australia working on a documentary about the country,
he was driving on the wrong side of the road after a day of fishing and
crashed head-on with another car carrying three men, one of whom was
seriously injured.
Mr. Hughes was critically injured, spending weeks in a coma. He fought a
charge of dangerous driving, and after a bitter and highly public legal
battle, he described the men in the other car as “lowlife scum.” (He
was fined and banned from driving in Australia for three years; his
anger about it led to his saying in the hearing of a reporter that it
would not matter to him if Australia were towed out to sea and sunk.)
The accident slowed him greatly and required him to walk with a cane, a
harsh blow for the kind of writer who almost always seemed happier
aboard a motorcycle or a fishing boat than behind a desk. But he
continued to travel, to study deeply, to appear on television speaking
in impromptu sentences almost as accomplished as those he wrote, and to
write.
“No critic could have asked for a better run,” Christopher Hitchens wrote in a review of Mr. Hughes’s memoir.
Mr. Hughes’s essential motivating drive may have been expressed best in
his own words about Goya, who he said haunted him in the months when he
was recovering from the crash. He was an artist, he wrote, whose genius
lay in his “vast breadth of curiosity about the human animal and the
depth of his appalled sympathy for it.”
***** The Shock of the Newu.有漢譯本
The Shock of the New is a 1980 documentary television series written and presented by Robert Hughes produced by the BBC in association with Time-Life Films and produced by Lorna Pegram. [1] It was broadcast by the BBC in 1980 in the United Kingdom and by PBS in 1981 in the United States.[2][3] It addressed the development of modern art since the Impressionists and was accompanied by a book of the same name; its combination of insight, wit and accessibility are still widely praised.
The End of Modernity - The commercialisation of Modern Art.
Book
The book of the series was published in 1980 by the BBC under the title The Shock of the New: Art and the century of change.[5] It was republished in 1991 by Thames and Hudson.[6]
The New Shock of the New
The New Shock of The New (2004) - Art Documentary - Robert Hughes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXSSTkDNwcE
1979 EPISODE IThe mechanical paradise - The influence of technology on art from 1880 to 1918.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_8y0sQ0HME
His
TV series The Shock of the New changed the way people thought about
modern art. A quarter of a century on, Robert Hughes has returned to the
story - and found a world overtaken by money and celebrity
Robert Hughes: the art world 'is taking on some of the less creditable aspects of showbiz'
Photo: BBC
Twenty-five years is a mere eyeblink in the story of Egyptian,
Mayan or even medieval English art, but it is a long time in the modern
or (weasel word) post-modern context, and if one is given a single
programme - a mere 55 minutes - to bring the story up to date from where
The Shock of the New left off when we finished making the series, one
is bound to fail. Too much has happened in art. Not all of that "too
much", admittedly, is compelling or even interesting, but the ground is
choked with events that defy brief, coherent summary.
So we decided to
sample rather than summarise. Most of the "1980s artists" over whom such
a fuss was made have turned out to be merely rhetorical, or inept, or
otherwise fallen by the wayside. Is there anyone who really cares much
what Julian Schnabel or David Salle, for instance, are now doing? Do
the recent paintings of Sandro Chia or Georg Baselitz excite interest?
Maybe in your breast, but not in mine.
The period has been full
of conceptual art, but conceptual art makes for utterly droning TV. On
the other hand, there are a few - a very few - artists of the
"neo-expressionist" generation whose work continues its efforts to take
on the burden of history, to struggle to explain our bizarre and
terrible times to us in memorable visual terms, and one of the most
complex and rewarding of these talents, uneven though he can be, is
surely Anselm Kiefer.
No less so is Paula Rego, a painter I'd hardly
heard of until a few years ago because she was scarcely known in the US -
but how strongly put together, how viscerally and deeply felt, are her
renderings of bad parental authority and of the psychic nightmares that
lie just be low the supposedly sweet surface of childhood! Rego is a
great subversive without a trace of the dull, academic conceptualism
that renders the more approved American radical-feminists of the 80s-90s
so tedious - and she draws superbly, which her sisters across the
Atlantic have either forgotten or never learned to do. Like Kiefer, but
unlike most painters at work today, she does art with a strong political
content that never turns into a merely ideological utterance.
It
used to be that media-based, photo-derived art looked almost
automatically "interesting". It cut to the chase instantly, it mimicked
the media-glutted state of general consciousness, it was democratic -
sort of. The high priest of this situation was of course the hugely
influential Andy Warhol, paragon of fast art. I am sure that though his
influence probably will last (if only because it renders artmaking
easier for the kiddies) his paragonhood won't, and despite the millions
now paid for his Lizzes and Elvises, he will shrink to relative
insignificance, a historical figure whose resonance is used up. There
will be a renewed interest - not for everyone, of course, but for those
who actually know and care about the issues - in slow art: art that
takes time to develop on the retina and in the mind, that sees instant
communication as the empty fraud it is, that relates strongly to its own
traditions.
It doesn't matter whether the work is figurative or
not. Sean Scully's big abstracts retain much more than a memory of
experienced architecture, but they relate to the human body too, and
there is something wonderfully invigorating about the measured density
with which their paint brings them into the world. Not everything of
value is self-evident and there is no reason in the world why art should
be. Nor is it true that instantaneous media, such as photography and
video, should or can deliver "more" truth than drawing. All you can say
is that they offer a different sort of truth. This is an issue with
which an artist like David Hockney has been struggling for years, and
it's fascinating to see how he has given up on the photographic collages
he used to make in favour of pure recording in watercolour, of which he
is such a master.
Styles come and go, movements briefly
coalesce (or fail to, more likely), but there has been one huge and
dominant reality overshadowing Anglo-Euro-American art in the past 25
years, and The Shock of the New came out too early to take account of
its full effects. This is the growing and tyrannous power of the market
itself, which has its ups and downs but has so hugely distorted nearly
everyone's relationship with aesthetics. That's why we decided to put
Jeff Koons in the new programme: not because his work is beautiful or
means anything much, but because it is such an extreme and
self-satisfied manifestation of the sanctimony that attaches to big
bucks. Koons really does think he's Michelangelo and is not shy to say
so. The significant thing is that there are collectors, especially in
America, who believe it. He has the slimy assurance, the gross patter
about transcendence through art, of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp
acres in Florida. And the result is that you can't imagine America's
singularly depraved culture without him. He fits into Bush's America the
way Warhol fitted into Reagan's. There may be worse things waiting in
the wings (never forget that morose observation of Milton's on the
topo-graphy of Hell: "And in the lowest depth, a lower depth") but for
the moment they aren't apparent, which isn't to say that they won't
crawl, glistening like Paris Hilton's lip-gloss, out of some gallery
next month. Koons is the perfect product of an art system in which the
market controls nearly everything, including much of what gets said
about art.
An interesting result of the growing power of the
market is that artists and their dealers are looking for ways, through
copyright law, to control what is written or broadcast about the work,
so as to prevent critics who might feel less than prostrate admiration
for it from saying anything about it at all. On TV, if you can't show,
you can't tell. I have seen quite a lot of this in recent years; it is
here to stay, and getting worse. Sometimes the results look merely
silly, as when the American conceptual artist Mel Bochner, whose work
(consisting of vaguely related words printed in capitals on canvas in
various tasteful colours) we filmed in the last Whitney Biennial in New
York, waited until a few days before broadcast to announce, through his
agent, that he "did not wish to participate" in our film. Never mind.
Damien
Hirst was another story. We were in London, hoping to film some of
Hirst's work and perhaps a brief interview with him for The New Shock of
the New. Oh no, absolutely not, came the word back. "Damien," said his
gallery, "is very fragile to criticism." Could this fragile aesthete really be the Hemingwoid sheep-slicer, dot-painter and all-round bad boy? I
had not actually written about Hirst's work (though I consider him a
much more real artist than some of the lesser geniuses of our time) but
it was clear he suspected he might be treated as someone less than
Michelangelo or, for that matter, Richard Serra. The last message from
him was that never, no-how, under no circumstances, could we film
anything of his in the current show at the Tate, In a Gadda da Vida.
Why? "Conservation reasons," it said. Better to discourage anything
being said about the great work than risk the utterance of dissent or
doubt.
I think the drift of such examples (and there are plenty
of others) is clear enough. The art world is now so swollen with
currency and the vanity of inflated reputation that it is taking on some
of the less creditable aspects of showbiz. Hollywood doesn't want
critics, it wants PR folk and profile-writers. Showbiz controls
journalism by controlling access. The art world hopes to do the same,
though on a more piddly level. No other domain of culture would try this
one on. No publisher, fearing that an unfavourable review, would
attempt to stop a book critic quoting from some novel. No producer would
make a guarantee of innocuousness the price of a critic's ticket to the
theatre. It just wouldn't happen. But in art, it can. And since it can,
as Bill Clinton remarked in another context, it does. · The New Shock of the New is on BBC2, Saturday, 9.05pm.
Looptecture F
Springtecture H
Slowtecture M
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