Introducing The New Editor

Yesterday morning I received a message from a young man explaining me the reasons why he wants to carry forward this project. He has the intention of keeping the same spirit of the blog. His respectful and keen words, plus the photograph of a very well dressed gentleman helped me to think he is the right one to inherit the blog. Elegance and style should be shown through the way we think, speak and dress. After all, every kind of art (fashion included, of course) is an expression of someone’s inner self. So, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, let me introduce you the new administrator and editor of The Genealogy of Style.

His name is Andrei Armiean. Andrei’s style comes at the crossroad between his passion for arts and his passion for his profession (computers).

A short-circuit occurs between the two and a flash comes out in a polymorphic shape, radiating colors in all sorts of surreal opalescent diffractions.

Andrei lives in Bucharest and often enjoys taking long walks, reading poetry, taking pictures and making collages and drawings of the bits of memory from the aforementioned.

I ask you to be nice with them and keep supporting this blog, through the likes, sharing the content and please, don’t be shy, express your opinions about the content.

 

Andrei Armiean

Passing on the baton

Three years ago (9 January 2013) I started this blog encouraged by my then boyfriend. He helped me with the English grammar corrections and in the meanwhile I was getting some confidence posting in a foreign language (to me) that I love almost since I was a toddler.

As you may have noticed I had stopped posting. There’s a lot of personal reasons. One of them is that I can’t help remembering I used to think The Genealogy of Style is Paul’s and mine child. And it will always be. But this is not a child anymore. It’s time for me to let it go now that has grown up. It’s a circle of life. Not even in my wildest dreams I thought this blog could get such nice feedback and support from almost 1.000 followers (I rather call you FOLKS, FAMILY). Words can’t express my huge gratefulness to you all. I wish I could carry on.

I really regret inform you that I really can’t continue posting this anymore. I am looking for someone who wants to inherit this blog. Someone who wants to get married to this project, someone who really would love to keep it alive. If you are that person, or you know someone who would like to become the editor of this blog, please send a private message to the Facebook page telling the why do you want to receive the baton. I am accepting suggestions about how that person should be picked. In the meanwhile, if someone wants to be chosen as a contributor, please let me know (again by inbox).

Thanks again for your support.

Love!

Luis,

Paths That Cross

Robert Mapplethorpe and Sam Wagstaff. Photo by Francesco Scavullo, 1974

Samuel Jones Wagstaff Jr. and Robert Mapplethorpe share the same birthday – November 4. But Sam Wagstaff was born 25 years earlier than Robert, in 1921

After seeing the exhibition The Painterly Photograph, 1890-1914 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1973 and meeting Robert Mapplethorpe in 1972, Wagstaff became convinced that photographs were the most unrecognized and, possibly, the most valuable works of art. He began selling his collection of paintings, using the proceeds to buy 19th-century American, British, and French photography. Then, influenced by Mapplethorpe, Wagstaff’s taste veered toward the daring, and he began to depart from established names in search of new talent. His collection was soon recognized as one of the finest private holdings in the United States.

 

PATHS THAT CROSS
Dedicated to the memory of Samuel J. Wagstaff.

Speak to me
Speak to me heart
I feel a needing
to bridge the clouds
Softly go
A way I wish to know
A way I wish to know

Oh you’ll ride
Surely dance
In a ring
Backwards and forwards
Those who seek
feel the glow
A glow we will all know
A glow we will all know

On that day
Filled with grace
And the heart’s communion
Steps we take
Steps we trace
Into the light of reunion

Paths that cross
will cross again
Paths that cross
will cross again

Speak to me
Speak to me shadow
I spin from the wheel
nothing at all
Save the need
the need to weave
A silk of souls
that whisper whisper
A silk of souls
that whispers to me

Speak to me heart
all things renew
hearts will mend
round the bend
Paths that cross
cross again
Paths that cross
will cross again

Rise up hold the reins
We’ll meet again I don’t know when
Hold tight bye bye
Paths that cross
will cross again
Paths that cross
Will cross again

Patti Smith

Dream of Life

1988

To listen to this song, please take a gander at The Genealogy of Style’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Genealogy-of-Style/597542157001228?ref=hl

Hare Harri

“hare kṛṣṇa hare kṛṣṇa

kṛṣṇa kṛṣṇa hare hare

hare rāma hare rāma

rāma rāma hare hare”

Maha Mantra (Great Mantra)

 
 

Portrait of George Harrison by Richard Avedon, 1967

 
 

Recreation by John Paul Thurlow, 2012

Radiant in White

Woman’s Head (Marie-Thérèse) by Pablo Picasso. Brassaï, 1932. Photograph taken at Picasso’s sculpture workshop in Boisgeloup.

 
 

The photographer Brassaï visited Pablo Picasso’s studio in 1933 and commented on the classical and undulating character of the majority of works he found there: “He opened the door to one of those immense naves, and we could see, radiant in white, a city of sculptures… I was astonished by the roundness of all these forms. A new woman had entered Picasso’s life: Marie-Thérèse Walter”

Censorship Is to Art

“Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.”

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

 
 

Photographs by Robert Doisneau

The Biggest Splash

A Bigger Splash, David Hockney

 
 

A Bigger Splash depicts a swimming pool beside a modern house, disturbed by a large splash of water created by an unseen figure who has apparently just jumped in from a diving board. It was painted in California between April and June 1967, when David Hockney was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, United States. Jack Hazan‘s 1974 film A Bigger Splash, a fictionalized biopic concentrating on the breakup of Hockney’s relationship with Peter Schlesinger, was named after the painting.

 
 

Photograph by Richard Kolker, 2011

 
 

Hockney’s composition is based on a photograph of a swimming pool in a book and an earlier drawing by Hockney of Californian buildings. It was created with meticulous care, simplified, but enlarging his earlier paintings entitled A Little Splash (1966) and The Splash (1966). Both are held in private collections; the latter was sold at Sotheby’s for £2.6 million in 2006.

The Marquess of Dufferin and Ava bought the finished work from John Kasmin‘s gallery in 1968, and sold it to the Tate in 1981.

In a March 2009 interview for the Tate, to the question “Who jumped into the pool?” Hockney answers : “I don’t know actually. It was done from a photograph of a splash. That I haven’t taken, but that’s what it’s commenting on. The stillness of an image. (…) Most of the painting was spent on the splash and the splash lasts two seconds and the building is permanent there. That’s what it’s about actually. You have to look in at the details.”

 
 

Peter Schlesinger in Beverly Hills, date and photographer unknown

 

To watch the Jack Hazan’s A Bigger Splash movie trailer, please take a gander at The Genealogy of Style’s Facebook page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2sEkXKxQs8

Crumbs Off a Master’s Table

The Genealogy of Style

Robert Crumb’s Self-portrait

Walt Kelly

Popeye, The Sailor(1933)

Uncle Scrooge

Harvey Kurtzman’s comic

Sometimes it’s hard to believe that Robert Crumb, being as irreverent as he is, made his first sketches imitating the candid contours taken from animated characters created by E. C. Seglar (Popeye), Walt Kelly (Pogo), Carl Barks (Donald Duck) and many more artists from the same batch. What better source for a young boy, whose only amusement and motivation relies on comic books and nothing else?

Crumb brothers

This delight was fomented by Robert Crumb’s older brother, Charles. But it was Robert, who, on a most uncommon occasion, asserted his authority on Charles and pressed him to point toward a new direction. Eventually, Robert, Charles and Maxon (the younger brother who is also a talented illustrator) drew scenes from Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. The Crumb brothers’…

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They Shall Be One Flesh

The Genealogy of Style

21 And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof.

22 And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from a man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

23 And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

25 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

Genesis, Chapter 2

The Bible

“Saying whatever you want it to say. It is just us expressing ourselves like a child does, you know, however he feels like then…

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