The Finesse of The Individual Mark

“One could say that any child could make a drawing like Twombly only in the sense that any fool with a hammer could fragment sculptures as Rodin did, or any house painter could spatter paint as well as Pollock. In none of these cases would it be true. In each case the art lies not so much in the finesse of the individual mark, but in the orchestration of a previously uncodified set of personal “rules” about where to act and where not, how far to go and when to stop, in such a way as the cumulative courtship of seeming chaos defines an original, hybrid kind of order, which in turn illuminates a complex sense of human experience not voiced or left marginal in previous art.”

Kirk Varnedoe

Cyrus Alessandro Twombly and his pet posing in front of a large-scale painting by Cy Twombly. Photo: Horst P. Horst, 1966

Feb 3

Penelope’s Hungry Eyes

Self-portrait, London, 1972

Abe Frajndlich was born in 1946 to in Frankfurt. At the age of ten he moved to the United States via Israel, France and Brazil. His role model and mentor was photographer Minor White, from whom he learnt “the art of seeing”.

It is with “hungry eyes”, but also with a tenacity and patience only equaled by Penelope’s firm belief in the return of her husband Odysseus, that over the last 30 years Abe Frajndlich has taken portraits of his famous fellow photographers. A selection of over 100 pictures from the ever growing portrait collection has been published in book form for the first time under the title Penelope’s Hungry Eyes. It features grand old masters of the art and photographic artists, contemporaries of the author and younger masters from the Düsseldorf School.

Abe Frajndlich has succeeded in luring the world’s most famous photographers out from behind their cameras and in front of his. With extraordinary skill, he has trained his lens on people used to hiding their own eyes behind a camera. For each of his portraits (some in color, some black and white) Frajndlich has conceived an individual setup that brings into focus in diverse ways the photographer’s primary organ, namely their eyes, which are as special as the voice of talented singers. Some of the photographers shy away by closing their eyes, wearing a mask or turning away (Cindy Sherman, Annie Leibovitz, Thomas Struth or Hans Namuth). Others use props such as glasses, mirrors or magnifying glasses to set their eyes in scene (Bill Brandt, Duane Michals, Andreas Feininger, Lillian Bassman) and still others draw attention to the vulnerability of their eyes using knives and scissors (Imogen Cunningham, Lucas Samaras). Yet many of the subjects respond to the unfamiliar “change of perspective” by looking directly into Frajndlich’s camera (Candida Höfer, Berenice Abbott, Gordon Parks).

Abe Frajndlich has presented a Who’s Who of recent photographic history, enriched with a highly subtle eye for humorous situations. In images and text (the photographer has added a personal note to each portrait) Frajndlich sets out to discover the ever enigmatic relationship between the real person and their own legend.

Lucas Samaras

Bill Brandt

Josef Koudelka

Arnold Newman

Robert Lebeck

Imogen Cunningham

Elliott Erwitt

William Wegman

Marc Riboud

Ruth Bernhard

Lillian Bassman

Louise Dalh-Wolfe

Ilse Bing

Dennis Hopper

David Hockney

Richard Avedon

Annie Leibovitz

Cindy Sherman

Andres Serrano

Harold Edgerton

Horst P. Horst

Norman Parkinson

Gordon Parks

Masahisa Fukase

Daidō Moriyama

Eikoh Hosoe

Nov 17

Lanvin on Stairs

Lanvin Gown posed beside stairs. Photo by Horst P. Horst, Vogue, December 1934

Photo by Arik Nepo, 1949

Coat and hat Lanvin; coat and hat Cardin; coat and fur Cardin; coat with belt and black hat, on stairs, Carven. Photo by Jeanloup Sieff. Paris, Jardin des Modes, 1961

Robe longue Mikonos. Maison Lanvin. Collection Haute couture spring-summer 1970 by Jules-François Crahay

Prêt-à-Porter Fall 2010 Lanvin by Alber Elbaz. After each model walked the runway, she climbed a dramatic circular staircase at the end

Lanvin by Alber Elbaz, Pre-collection Spring-Summer 2012. Promotional picture by Max Berlinger

Nov 2

Orgiastic Inspiration

Salvador Dali’s costumes for the ballet Bacchanale, of which Dali designed the set, costumes and wrote the libretto based on Ricard Wagner‘s Tannhäuser and the myth of Leda and the Swan. A “bacchanale” is an orgiastic musical composition often depicting a drunken revel or bacchanal. Photo by Horst P. Horst, 1939