MANHATTA – PAUL STRAND & CHARLES SHEELER
The 1926 avant-garde movie.
From “ The American ” website
One of the great ironies of Sheeler’s career—and a lingering, unresolved question—is the diminished role of photography in the artist’s work after 1929, especially in light of the extraordinary level of accomplishment represented by the River Rouge series. In the early 1930s, Sheeler came to recognize what photography could do for his painting; but many critics found works like “Classic Landscape” to be oppressively…photographic. Indeed, Sheeler’s business arrangement with Edith Halpert, his new dealer in the 1930s, required him to keep photography in the background, to prevent his paintings from being found overly dependent on the “machine.”
FRANK O’HARA – Having a coke with you
HAVING A COKE WITH YOU
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it
— Frank O’Hara
MARCEL DZAMA
N.A.S.A. – The Tree People
Marcel Dzama (born 1974 in Winnipeg) is a Canadian artist living in NY city known for small-scale ink and watercolor drawings of human figures, animals, and imaginary hybrids. Dzama has a BFA from the University of Manitoba.
