Picture for an Exhibition

When we settled in our current tiny digs last summer, we left one wall empty.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Fifty-two years ago tonight, dear Mr. Eisenstadt snapped this perfectly charming shot of what Life described as "Mrs. Gustav Mahler, widow of composer, raptly listening to his 'Resurrection Symphony,' conducted by Leonard Bernstein, at Carnegie Hall."

Well, possibly, but I think we might be justified in thinking that the lady known to her friends and not inconsiderable number of enemies as Alma Maria Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel (yes, she got around) finds the Maestro's obsession with her late (first) husband just about as tiresome as she found the composer himself by the time he conveniently shuffled off this mortal coil back in '11.

Yes, I do believe we're safe in saying that this is a picture of a widow (twice over, actually; Gropius she divorced) napping, possibly even snoring lightly, happy in the knowledge that not a soul will dare to say a word about it (not to mention perfectly content in her sables, false fringe, and continuing notoriety-by-association). She's probably dreaming of what Bernstein's excellent cook will whip up for the after-party; she looks like someone who enjoyed a toast point and a glass or two, no?

Birthday Girl: The Queen of Cartoons

The work of Roz Chast is one of the things that makes me very, very happy. Her scratchy little people, with their hopeless clothes, questionable posture, and ongoing existential dilemmas, are reminders to me that a certain strain of America continues, one nearly subsumed by mass media and Walmart. Bright, puzzled, well-intended, of a kind likely to subscribe to The New Yorker but not to show up at the more experimental first nights or daunting restaurants profiled therein, they are in some ways the stateside cartoon counterparts of the characters who populate the world of Alan Bennett. Let's just say I identify with their constant surprise at what the universe throws at them.

Roz aside (and why aren't there more Rozes in the world, and what can we do to encourage them?), it's a fierce, fierce birthday day, kids - she shares her celebrations with an intimidating array that runs from Her Imperial Majesty Maria Feodorovna, last Dowager Empress of all the Russias (and her niece, the signficantly mousier Maud of Norway) to Her Imperial Majesty, Miss Tina Turner. Also in the running: Supreme fifth wheel Jean Terrell, delightfully oleaginous belter Robert Goulet, and Lindbergh-baby ultrabaddy Bruno Hauptmann.

Picture This: A Coupla Swell Dames

For no better reason than that things have been a little melancholy lately, let's spend a moment considering this marvelous confection by the brilliant Miguel Covarrubias, part of his long-running "Impossible Interviews" series in the old real Vanity Fair.

The idea of Miss Mae West sitting down with the formidable Queen Marie of Rumania to discuss life, love, and diamonds is both delicious and, in its own demented way, quite sensible. They actually had a lot in common, those girls, not least a gift for self-transformation.

West started out a scrappy and deeply unsuccessful small-time vaudevillian from the wrong side of Brooklyn and ended up - even now, almost thirty years after she left us - an international synonym for sex taken not-too-seriously. Marie, from her precariously Ruritanian position in the 1930s as Queen Mother of the Balkans, must have looked back at her sheltered girlhood as a proper Victorian English princess with something like disbelief.

Together, I think they would have had a ball.

Picture This: in Dreams

Divine Deco androgyny from the Master, Peter Ashworth.

The subject, we're told, is Walter, "an Elizabethan Gentleman." He handles with aplomb the plaguing question of just what is the right inseam to be worn with platform stilettos...

Party Like It's 1969

Dear Bill was recently sweet enough to say a kind word about the new banner, which made me out of all proportion pleased, as I never know if anyone pays attention to this occasionally changing feature of the Café. My skills at digital manipulation are slight (no cracks, please), and the banners are about as techno as I get.

This current one, as you can see from the snap above, is a detail of a photo by the remarkable Slim Aarons, that indefatigable chronicler of pretty people in pretty places. It's a garden party in Miami, in 1970.

There is something incredibly evocative about this particular subset of Aarons's pictures; they are like Johnson-era variations on the rococo féte galante, with socialites in hostess gowns replacing frolicking court ladies and the gardens of the rich standing in for those of the king. Here we have a Beverly Hills tea party, circa 1960.

Whether Miami, Beverly Hills, or, as here, Marbella, there is a stillness and serenity in these pictures that one suspects was absent in the actual events, where shrill conversation about Jackie and Liz and assassinations would have competed with Sérgio Mendes on the hi-fi.

In any case, these pictures make this fairly recent past look as exotic and distant as a dream; it's hard to imagine that some of these people might still be alive. One wonders if it all feels as far away to them as it does to us...

Van Leo, Revisited

I'm having a lovely, lazy day at home today, mostly spent avoiding ridding out closets and cupboards in preparation for an upcoming jumble sale (Susan Boyle may look like a Barbara Pym character, but I'm living the life of one). As a result, I've been dealing with some digital jumble, clearing out files and folders, and ran across the following, which have put me in an Egyptian mood.

Many months ago, back when the Café was just a wee thing a few weeks old, we looked at remarkable photographs taken by Van Leo, who lived and worked in Cairo from the start of the Second War until nearly the turn of the century.

There are few things that more strongly conjure up Egypt's vanished past than his pictures, whether they are of glamourous film stars, as here in this study of the lovely Kariman;

Or of forgotten transients through the city. Here is a portrait of an English dancer called Katie Grey, as elegant as an ancient Egyptian bas relief.

His work could be quite straightforward, as with this study of actor Rushdi Abaza, a mid-century matinee idol...

Or hauntingly evocative...

This is the profile of a young Adonis known only as Nubar, a common Armenian name in pre-revolutionary Egypt. All we know is taken from the photographer's (wistful?) note - "immigrated to the U.S.A."

Van Leo's self-portraits take many forms, casting the artist as everything from a dapper man-about-town to, as here, a bearded desperado.

We often watch old Egyptian movies, Mr. Muscato and me, and we are especially riveted when they include location shots. We watch Omar Sharif or Laila Mourad or any of the great stars as they walk down a tree-lined street or enter through the revolving doors of a downtown boite and wish we could have lived in that city, seen that place that now exists only in traces and crumbling corners. We would certainly have paid a call, or more than one, on Van Leo...

RIP, Ernie Pook; Vivat Lynda!

I was fascinated to find a recent article from the Chicago Tribune on one of my 80s crushes, cartoonist and writer Lynda Barry. Back in the days of campus life and alternative weeklies, the best reason to rush out and find the Philadelphia CityPaper was "Ernie Pook's Comeek", her marvelous, wordy, frequently heartbreaking take on the life and times of a pair of drifting young sisters and their weird friends.

I honestly don't think she's crossed my mind since the fall of 2001. Then, her incredible meditation on 9/11, a series of pictures "narrated" by Emily Dickinson's poem 341 ("After great pain, a formal feeling comes") was one of the works that most affected me that dreadful fall.

It turns out she's had a difficult few years, marked by declining income due to the disappearance of papers like CityPaper and a bout of what sounds very much like depression.

It was good to hear, though, that while Groening-style mega-success may have eluded her, and while she recently retired "Ernie Pook", she continues to make wonderful art, selling some of it directly on e-Bay. Both of the examples seen here could now be yours - unless I outbid you.

Princess Blue Doggie reminds me very much of Thurber, and the sleeping dog has a wonderful, almost Japanese economy of line. Miss Barry's work goes far beyond spotty teens and cat's eye glasses, and it's amazing to think that genuine work by such an American original is just a few clicks away.

Picture This: Youssef Nabil

I have just fallen under the spell of a considerably talented young photographer, one Youssef Nabil, an Egyptian expatriate now settled in Manhattan. Lucky city.

Nabil's speciality is the portrait photograph. He works in soft tints and handwashes, creating an effect that recalls the glory days of Egyptian film and the lost cosmopolitan world that was swept away in the Nasserist revolution of 1952.

Above is one of my favorite, to date, of his works, a suitably formidable portrait of that Café favorite, the smoldering dancer/actress/phenomenon Fifi Abdou. As you can see, she's fierce.

But Youssef also works in a gentler and considerably more romantic vein, as evidenced by the moody study above. I really can't rave about him too much, and I insist that you visit his presence on the Intertubes at your earliest convenience. He has not only a dazzling range of pictures, but some marvelously literate articles and interviews, including a fabulous one with Egyptian screen legend Faten Hamema (a former Mrs. Omar Sharif and something of the Audrey Hepburn of the Nile).

Lucky readers in Washington, DC (well, something has to make you lucky, to make up for living there) will have the chance to see some of his cinema portraits as part of the Kennedy Center's upcoming Arabesque festival. I'd get there, if I were you; Fifi's waiting.

Picture This: A New York Painter

Ages ago, in talking about a little fête chez Muscato, I used this painting, Cocktail Party, by American painter John Koch to illustrate the post. I don't know when, exactly, I first ran across it, but I remember it being much on my mind all those years ago when I was throwing far more modest parties in my own little New York flat, for it has long seemed to me to sum up a certain kind of very specific New-Yorkiness.

As, it turns out, did much of the life of this remarkable and highly underappreciated painter. Almost wholly self-taught, he dedicated himself to a thorough exploration of the pleasures of life, in their more moderate and civilized forms.

His partner in much of this was his wife Dora, a music teacher and fellow aesthete. Together, they transformed their rambling Upper West Side apartment, in the words of one essayist, into "the stage for a play-in-progress, in which furniture and friends alike were props and Koch was the director and lead actor. Everything was placed just so as evidence of his exquisite tastes, in anticipation of an admiring audience..."

The apartment appears, in various guises, innumerable times in his works, as both a setting for their social life and a workspace; this 1974 painting of a model watching the artist work captures the winter light of Manhattan better than any painting since Childe Hassam.

Koch used portraiture to help pay the bills; his picture of HRH The Princess Margaret captures far more of that lady's amused good humor than is normally seen; she seems almost to be supressing a giggle.

Perhaps she was, while sitting, looking at one of Koch's nudes, for they are very pleasing indeed, and show a healthy interest in both genders (as, apparently, did the painter in his private life). Here we have The Sculptor, showing a private moment between painter and model (and the most superlative ass, I would say, to appear on canvas in the 20th century).

If you like, you may read an excellent pair of essays on Koch here and here, written in connection with a 2001 exhibition of his works at the New York Historical Society. I really think you ought to.

Still a Valid Question

British artist Richard Hamilton asked it some 53 years, more or less creating Pop Art in the process.

Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?

My guess would be: the advanced electronics. And the canned ham.

Picture This: The Distaff Cubist

Once upon a time artists lived on pittances (or inheritances, or both) in Paris and were friends with Gertrude Stein and Picasso. I've always thought I missed the boat on that one, as I think I would have gotten along famously with some of them, especially the painter Marie Laurencin.

She was the mistress (and muse) of poet and generally amusing troublemaker Guillaume Apollinaire; she painted this group portrait (which also includes Picasso, bottom left) with him at the center (and herself the smiling odalisque bottom right).

After Apollinaire, she married a German (not a brilliant idea early in World War I, if you were a French woman), but she soon saw reason and returned to Paris.

This portrait by Rousseau (from her Apollinaire period) sees her a little less faun-like than the photo would indicate.

She is considered the main female painter of the Cubist circle, as is clear from the self-portrait above.

As time passed, though, their influence seems to have diminished considerably; she came to specialize in willowy, languishing pictures of women in various stages of deshabille.

Still, at its best, her work is, I think, quite beguiling. Gertrude Stein claimed that in fact she was just painting what she saw - because her eyesight was so bad, the whole world actually was vague and pastel-colored.

Whatever the case, she was, as far as I can see, one of the very last painters who could convincingly paint a classical nude, and that has to be worth something...

Peacock en pointe

A typically evocative - if uncharacteristically glamourous - snap by the one and only Weegee.

What at first seems an almost risible Vaudeville actually - as with so many improbably lovely things - has a back story strange and rather sad. You can read more here about the picture, and the dancer, a onetime star of the Ballets Russe called Marina Franca, née Wilhelmina Roothooft, sometimes known as Marina Lord. She ended her life Marina Salz, the widow of a prominent art dealer.

Weegee captured her about halfway through her transformation from ballet girl to society lady, on stage between pictures at the Radio City Music Hall. Apparently the tail was motorized, which only makes the whole thing all the more fabulous, no?

Sordid Lives, Kid-Lit Division

The Goops they lick their fingers,
and the Goops they lick their knives;
They spill their broth on the tablecloth,
Oh, they lead disgusting lives!

Were you raised with the Goops? I was, and every now and then I will find myself realizing that I've violated one of the cardinal rules of good behavior first laid out for me in the battered copy of The Goops and How to be Them that started out as a present to my father sometime in the early '20s.

The little demons were the brainchild of author and illustrator Gelett Burgess, seen above with a pair of his creations.

They are nothing less than the spirit of childhood anarchy in proper Edwardian knickers and pinafores. They kick, they scream, they abuse the furniture, they eat like feral monkeys and they generally rebel against every genteel stricture of their day.

In short, they have a marvelous time, and I'm not entirely sure that I took all of their lessons in exactly the spirit in which they were meant.

But one never knows. Burgess himself was something of a cutup, far from the disapproving-vicar type his occasionally moralistic little verses might suggest.

He also wrote "I never saw a purple cow," for instance, and invented the word "blurb." In a 1910 essay he introduced American audiences to the revolutionary new art being created in Paris by people like Picasso, Matisse, and Braque, a good three years before the Armory Show brought Cubism to Manhattan.

He realized, as well, that Goopism is an international phenomenon, and this season - this season, here, of terrible driving, of spitting in public, of pushing in the shops, and of breaking-fast meals that resemble middle-school food fights - so do I.

Picture This: Curiouser and Curiouser

Well, there's nothing I enjoy more than a good false-identity scandal.

The last few years have certainly been rich with them - flat out crazies like Lauren Stratford, lost souls like Binyamin Wilkomirski (those two separate sagas actually intersected at one point), literary notorieties Messrs. Frey, LeRoy (or is that Miss?), and Nasdijj, you name it.

Now, it seems, the art world has its own mystery: the life (if there was one) and (putative) career of an artist named Pietro Psaier. According to a British auctioneer (and almost no one else), he was something of a Zelig-as-Painter, starting with a supposedly close association with Andy Warhol.

This distinctly unconvincing image, though, is pretty much the only evidence offered up to date, with every other lead turning up dead, every supposed associate off the scene or quite willing to say they've never heard of Psaier or seen his work, and generally not a whole lot that one can place any trust in to confirm that the artist even existed, let alone basked in the charmed/toxic air of the legendary Factory.

From there, at various times, it's been bruited about that he worked with Basquiat, been a leading rock-poster designer, been New York's "artist of the year", been the last artist to sketch the dying Francis Bacon - and finally was washed away in the Tsunami of 2004. It sounds like quite a time - almost too good to be true. And likely is.

The art? While it has a certain Pop charm, it isn't exactly what one would call original.

But it's awfully decorative; really the kind of thing that people like in their living rooms. As one dealer has said, "My clients want something more modern these days. An Andy Warhol costs millions; these are just a couple of thousand. Frankly, I wouldn't mind if they were by Fred Bloggs."

Which may be just as well. I have a feeling that the poor souls who have, supposedly, been paying upwards of £14,000 for some of Psaier's works may well have ended up with, more or less, an original Fred Bloggs and not much more.

Picture This: Seurat, Revisited

One fine day in 2006, a group of volunteers, mostly friends and neighbors, in Beloit, Wisconsin, gathered by the blue purple yellow red water on the green purple yellow red grass, to (re)create a perfect moment in a perfect park.

Sometimes I really do love America.

If you haven't heard the song in an eon or two, you really owe it to yourself. On an ordinary Wednesday, why not have six minutes and 11 seconds of perfect beauty?

Picture This: René Gruau

Daily, for the moment, I walk a few blocks through a faceless commercial district just outside DC, subjecting myself to another day's indoctrination in things bureaucratic.

En route, I pass a sad little dress shop, the kind that's clearly just holding on until it, too, turns into a McCosiQuiznoChipotleBucks, of which there apparently can't be enough in any neighborhood through which pass commuters.

On the far wall, wrinkled, stained, and just off-center, is a fading framed poster, one that calls up a world infintely distant from the dowdy frocks on offer:


It is, of course, a work by the late, great René Gruau, an artist who is just a fashion illustrator only in the way that Ella Fitzgerald was just a girl singer.

That said, he was of course an extraordinary fashion illustrator, one whose bold, graphic style did much to cement in the popular imagination the High Fashion worlds of Dior, Balmain, and other mid-century greats:

Much of his work, though, balances delicately between illustration and abstraction, fueled by his tremendous gift for fast, swooping lines that evoke anything from an eyelash to a jetliner to, as here, a LoieFulleresque skirt:

His best works not only show a product - a line of Van Cleef & Arpel baubles, for example - but make it clear that owning it would transform the wearer:

His women are impossibly glamourous, elegant - languourous houris who combine a nineteenth century hauteur with a very modern élan.

When called on, however, he had a fetching way with The Opposite Sex as well...

He was that rare specimen, someone whose birthname was actually a great deal more interesting than his professional one: Count Renato Zavagli Ricciardelli delle Camminate.

Something in his exotic Franco-Italian heritage clearly rubbed on his sensibility.

He was for decades as much associated with American magazines like Flair and Harper's Bazaar as French couture, which perhaps accounts for something insouciant and approachable in even his most chic creations.

And the man himself? In the measured words of one obituary, in the veddy British Guardian, "His private life remained discreetly private."

Picture This: Van Leo

Cabaret Dancer, 1940s

Fragments of old Cairo remain: the crumbling buildings that line the downtown streets, the faded cafés, the antique shops in backstreets full of Déco light fixtures and chipped sets of cocktail glasses.

And in the photographs of the master of Egyptian portrait photos, Van Leo.

Self Portrait

In the photographs of Van Leo, old Cairo comes alive - the Egypt of the 30s, 40s, and 50s, when it was a cosmpolitan country at the center of Arabic culture, film, finance, and intrigue, home to thriving commnities of Armenians, Greeks, Italians, English, French (not to mention the tens of thousands of Egyptian Jews whose absence today is a unspoken one).

He was born Leon Boyadjian, and as late as the turn of the century was a presence on the Cairo scene. One of the great proofs of my idiocy is not having been photographed by Van Leo while I lived here...

He is remembered for his intense, saturnine self portraits:

Which did, sometimes, show more than a flash of humor - as here, pictured as a gaucho:

He photographed le tout Egypte, people like intellectual and feminist (and possessor of the most expressive eyebrows this side of Miss Crawford) Doria Shafik:

But he was somehow most at home in the city's demi-monde, photographing the actresses, dancers, and hangers-on who filled the nightclubs and waited for their Big Chance:

He worked, as a studio and movie photographer, mostly unheralded outside Egypt, for his whole long life. He even, during her time in Cairo working with Youssef Chahine, photographed Dalida:

And who could ask for more than that?

There has been something of a renaissance in interest in Van Leo of late, as attested by this gallery with essay tributes from the American University in Cairo, as well as this gallery of almost demented glamour focusing on his entertainment photos.