By Personal Choice

“The portraits he (Robert Mapplethorpe) shot by personal choice are a different take from the commercial portraits he did for cash. Let’s say Robert was good at perfecting people in the way that a good courtier perfects his patron, all the while keeping his cynicism cleverly coded even within the art piece.”

Edward Lucie-Smith

Patti Smith

William S. Burroughs

Keith Haring

Andy Warhol

Willem de Kooning

Robert Rauschenberg

Carolina Herrera

Feb 13

The Same Rediscovery of Individual Soul’s

“The influence was that originality of taking the materials from your own existence rather than taking on hand-me-down poetic materials, speech units, rhythmic units and trying to adapt your life to them – you articulate your rhythm, your own rhythms. The concept of that led, in the ‘forties, to Abstract Expressionist painting and (Willem) de Kooning and (Franz) Kline, it led, in music, to Ornette Colman and all, and uh.. who was a teacher there? – the guy who died two [actually, four] years ago – John Coltrane. It was the same rediscovery of individual soul’s impulse that led into Coltrane.”

Allen Ginsberg
In Partisan Review, in 1971, (speaking of William Carlos Williams)

Patti Smith photographed by Danny Clinch, 2000

To watch a documentary short chronicling the influence John Coltrane has had on other musicians, please take a gander at The Genealogy of Style‘s Facebook page:https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Genealogy-of-Style/597542157001228?ref=hl

May 25

Pretentiousness Stripped Away

Self-Portrait

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, born in Florida on 1952, is an American documentary filmmaker and portrait photographer, son of Miami musician and teacher Dr. Ruth W. Greenfield. The majority of his work is shot in large format.

Simple yet revealing, his portraits are direct and get right to the heart of the subject. Timothy Greenfield-Sanders prefers to strip away pretentiousness when portraying political figures, entertainers, artists, musicians and other intriguing personalities. His backdrops never distract from the subject, and he often uses a single light source to mimic natural light. His work has elevated him to one of the most acclaimed portrait photographers of our time.

He started out with an interest in filmmaking, and majored in art history at New York’s Columbia University. He later moved to Los Angeles, to study at the American Film Institute. Renowned actors and directors, such as Ingmar Bergman, Orson Welles, and Alfred Hitchcock (“the masters of the cinema”) often made appearances at the school to talk about their work. To document these occasions, AFI sought a volunteer to shoot these visiting celebrities’ portraits. On a whim, Greenfield-Sanders took the challenge and became the school’s photographer.

With these luminaries available to him, Greenfield-Sanders snapped away, and learned much in the process. “Because of AFI, I got tips from celebrities as well as access to them,” he says. Hitchcock once remarked, “Young man, your lights are all wrong,” while Bette Davis criticized him harshly for “shooting from below.” (“She had some great swear words,” he laughs.)

His father-in-law is Joop Sanders, a founder of the abstract expressionist movement in New York, who introduced Greenfield-Sanders to a number of artists. Thus, painters like Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers and Robert Rauschenberg posed for his camera. Over a 20-year span, he photographed hundreds of artists, dealers, collectors and critics. In 1999, 700 of these images were displayed at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York, and he published an accompanying book, entitled Art World. In the beginning, Greenfield-Sanders’ editorial photos that he shot for clients like Barron’s and SoHo News helped to pay for this project.

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ portraits are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The New York Public Library, The Whitney Museum and The National Portrait Gallery among others. In 2004, seven hundred of his art world portraits were accepted into the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

A number of books on Greenfield-Sanders’ work have been published: Art World (Fotofolio), Timothy Greenfield-Sanders his first monograph, (Alberico Cetti Serbelloni Editori), XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits (Bulfinch Press) “Face to Face” (Skira), Look: Portraits Backstage at Olympus Fashion Week (Powerhouse) The Black List (Atria of Simon and Schuster) The Latino List (Luxury) and The Black List 50 (Luxury).

Greenfield-Sanders produced and directed nine films. His first, Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart, was a feature documentary about the legendary rock musician. The film aired in April 1998 on the PBS Series American Masters and premiered in the United States at Sundance Film Festival and in Europe at The Berlin Film Festival. It screened at over 50 film festivals worldwide. Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart won a 1999 Grammy Award for best music documentary.

In addition to this once-in-a-lifetime experience, he took the opportunity to build an impressive portfolio of many of the biggest names in Hollywood. His access to these stars bolstered his reputation as a celebrity shooter and he soon got work taking portraits for Interview and People magazines. “I began loving portrait photography more than making films,” he comments. He is also a contributing photographer at Vanity Fair magazine.

Thinking XXX, a film about the making of the XXX book, first aired in October 2004 on HBO. A soundtrack CD was released in November 2004 by Ryko Records. In addition, in October 2004, the XXX portraits were exhibited in New York at the Mary Boone Gallery and subsequently at numerous galleries worldwide including John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco, Bernd Kluser Gallery in Munich, Berman/Turner Projects in Los Angeles, Paolo Curti Gallery in Milan and Howard Russeck Gallery in Palm Beach.

In 2006, Greenfield-Sanders photographed injured soldiers and marines for HBO’s film, Alive Day Memories. The images were widely published, shown in numerous exhibitions and purchased by The Library of Congress.

Between 2008-2010, Greenfield-Sanders produced and directed The Black List Project: a series of 3 documentaries for HBO, a traveling museum exhibition of portraits organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, a book with Simon and Schuster’s Atria and DVDs with Target. In addition, the project included an educational initiative in conjunction with The United Negro College Fund.

Alfred Hitchcock

Orson Welles

John Waters

Ethan Hawke

Toni Morrison

Robert De Niro Sr.

Elaine De Kooning

Louise Bourgeois

David Wojnarowicz

Francesco Clemente

Keith Haring

Dennis Hopper

Slash

Lou Reed

Mark Strand

Norman Mailer

William S. Burroughs

David Bowie

Nov 20

A Verb, a Noun and an Image

“A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image”
Elaine De Kooning

Elaine de Kooning sketching President John F. Kennedy at his West Palm Beach residence. Between 1961 and 1963

Elaine de Kooning (March 12, 1918/1920 – February 1, 1989) was an Abstract Expressionist, Figurative Expressionist painter in the post-World War II era and editorial associate for Art News magazine. On December 9, 1943, she married artist Willem de Kooning, who was a highly influential artist in the Abstract Expressionism movement.

She was born Elaine Marie Catherine Fried in 1918 (she later gave her birth year as 1920) in Brooklyn, New York. The oldest of four children born to Charles Frank Fried and Mary Ellen O’Brien Fried, she was raised in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn. Her artistic sensibility was encouraged by her mother, who took her to museums and taught her to draw what she saw. After graduating from Erasmus Hall High School, then brief studies at Hunter College in New York City, in 1937 she attended the Leonardo da Vinci Art School, Hoboken, New Jersey. In 1938 she went on to study at the American Artists School in New York City.

Working and teaching outside the shadow of her more famous husband, de Kooning gained acclaim as one of America’s premier artists. In 1962 she received a commission from the White House to paint the portrait of President John F. Kennedy; an impressive honor bestowed upon an artist commonly associated with the bohemian New York School of painting. De Kooning then spent the better part of 1963 fine-tuning the portrait, collecting hundreds of photographs of Kennedy, and drawing short-hand sketches of him whenever he appeared on TV. The resulting portrait remains one of de Kooning’s most well known and celebrated paintings, and easily stands out in the long line of presidential portraits.

May 10

Portrait of a Mother

Anna Mathilda McNeill in Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (Whistler’s Mother) James Abbott Whistler, 1871

Shushan Adoyan by Arshile Gorky, 1936

Cornelia Nobel in Woman I by Willem De Kooning, 1952

Ginevra de’ Pozzi by Guido Reni, 1612

Marguerite Merlet by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1860

Eugénie-Desirée Fournier by Édouard Manet, 1880

Ernestine Faivre by Georges Pierre Seurat, 1883

Marie-Francoise Oberson by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, 1838

Lucy Read by Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1797

Laura Catherine Bjølstad by Edvard Munch, 1899

Countess Adèle Tapié de Celeyran by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1883

Katherine Kelso Johnston by Mary Cassat, 1878

Sophie Maurice by Franz Marc, 1902

Marie Soukupová by Egon Schiele, 1911

Anna Cornelia Carbentus by Vincent van Gogh, 1888

Alina Maria Chazal by Paul Gauguin, 1890

Anne Elisabeth Honorine Aubert by Paul Cézanne, 1866-67

Barbara Holper by Albrecht Dürer, 1490-93

Neeltgen Willemsdochter van Zuytbrouck by Rembrandt, 1630

Gemma Cervetto by Giorgio De Chirico, 1911

Elizabeth Griffiths Smith by Edward Hopper, 1916-20

Anne Mary Hill was the inspiration and model for Mother Tucking Children Into Bed by Norman Rockwell, 1921

María Picasso y López by Pablo Picasso, 1896

Laura in Mum by David Hockney, 1985

Lucie Brasch by Lucian Freud, 1983

María del Pilar Barrientos by Diego Rivera, circa 1904

Flora Angulo by Fernando Botero, 1990

Felipa Domenech Ferrés by Salvador Dalí, 1920

Julia by Andy Warhol, 1974

May 5

Twombly & Rauschenberg

During the late forties Cy Twombly‘s main interests were German Expressionism, the Dada movement, Kurt Schwitters‘ as well as Chaim Soutine‘s work. Saw for the first time reproductions of works by Jean Dubuffet and Alberto Giacometti which greatly impressed him.

Twombly arrived in Manhattan in 1950 while the New York School painting of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning was in full swing. That same year he continued his studies at the Art Students League in New York City on a tuition scholarship. During the second semester met Robert Rauschenburg who was the first person of his own age to share the same interests and preoccupations as an artist. Upon Robert Rauschenberg’s encouragement, Twombly joined him for the 1951–1952 sessions at Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina – a liberal refuge, a site of free experimentation and exchange in a nation growing increasingly conservative during the Cold War. Among the influential teachers present at this time were Charles Olson, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and John Cage. Building on the freedom afforded by the previous generation, the younger artists emphasised libidinal energy integrated through experience.

For eight months spanning 1952–1953 Twombly and Rauschenberg travelled through Europe and north Africa, joined for a while by the writer Paul Bowles. Upon returning to New York, Rauschenberg set up the Fulton Street studio that Twombly sometimes shared. Eleanor Ward invited the two artists to exhibit at her Stable Gallery.