Leave the colors to the autumn leaves. That’s what the Metropolitan Museum of Art is doing with “Richard Avedon: Portraits,” a collection of 180 black-and-whites by the dean of American photography, which go on exhibit Sept. 26.
The simple, intense and revealing portraits by the 79-year-old photographer (an alumnus of DeWitt Clinton High School in The Bronx and the U.S. Merchant Marine Photographic Department) include not only the high and mighty in politics and the arts – Eisenhower, Stravinsky, Marilyn Monroe, Marian Anderson – but average Americans like those in his “In the American West” series, which features nurses, truckers, oil workers, drifters and more.
In addition to the single portraits, a highlight of the exhibit will be Avedon’s murals, which include the Chicago Seven and Andy Warhol and his Factory cohorts. Avedon, a onetime staff photographer for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue and the first to hold that position at The New Yorker, starting in 1992, had his early fashion-snapper life put on film – the fictional Avedon played by Fred Astaire – in the 1956 feature “Funny Face.” Now, the faces he’s put on paper will be put on the walls of the Met.
At the Guggenheim Museum, the walls will be alive with the sound of, well, the sights and sounds of “Bill Viola: Going Forth By Day.” Making it’s North American debut on Sept. 21, this work by video installation pioneer Viola, features five image sequences simultaneously playing – projected directly onto the walls – in a large gallery. Each of the five, exploring themes of human existence, is 35 minutes and plays in a continual tape loop, complete with sound. The five pieces are Fire Birth, the Path, The Deluge, The Voyage and First Light.
The Whitney Museum of American Art is also in a numbers game come autumn – 86 is its lucky number. On Oct. 24, the Madison Avenue museum opens its “An American Legacy, A Gift to New York” show, which features 86 landmark works of American postwar art. And all were donated to the museum by members of its board of trustees. “We believe this is the largest and most significant gift of postwar art ever made to any museum,” said Whitney director Maxwell L. Anderson. The gifts, encompassing the work of 23 artists, include Andy Warhol’s “Double Elvis” and “Nine Jackies,” Roy Lichtenstein’s “Worlds Fair Girl,” Claus Oldenburg’s vinyl sculpture “Giant BLT,” and a 1951 untitled Jackson Pollack black-enamel painting on canvas.
Once again, the Brooklyn Museum of Art is cloaked in controversy. Only unlike the “Sensation” exhibit three years back, the moral outrage over this fall’s featured show all took place during the Victorian age. Brooklyn’s taking a trip back in time with the exhibit “Exposed: The Victorian Nude,” beginning Sept. 6. Back then (during Queen Victoria’s reign from 1837-1901) the British debated whether the nude figure in art was part of high culture or an assault on public morality. In addition, “The Dinner Party,” Judy Chicago’s iconic feminist installation – a triangular table of sorts filled with place settings – is returning to Brooklyn on Oct. 11, for the first time in more than two decades. (It will become part of the permanent collection in 2004.)
While the renovation of the Museum of Modern Art has gone from the drawing board to the construction site, MoMA’s new, temporary home in Queens will exhibit “Drawing Now: Eight Propositions,” more than 250 contemporary drawings, by 26 young artists. It includes three site-specific wall drawings by Los Carpinteros, Julie Mehretu and Richard Wright. Among the eight propositions, which go on display Oct. 17, are drawings of natural phenomena, ornament, engineering & architecture, comic book & animation illustrations, fashion illustrations & 19th century pencil portraits.
And as New Yorkers continue to debate what should be built on the site of the World Trade Center, another MoMa show might offer inspiration. Visionary Architectural Drawings from the Howard Gilman Collections – the 173 drawings from the foremost collection of utopian drawings of the 20th century, include Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House project (1927) and Ron Herron’s 1966 Cities-Moving, goes up on Oct. 24.
The American Museum of Natural History, which offers art of another kind – the art of science – is offering what’s billed “the most comprehensive presentation ever mounted” on the life and theories of Albert Einstein. Starting Nov. 15, be there or be E=MC2.
Likely to stir up a hornets nest of controversy, the new Museum of Sex, on Fifth Avenue at 27th Street, opens it’s doors to the public Sept. 23. It’s inaugural exhibit is “NYC Sex: How New York City Transformed Sex in America,” which looks at histories of prostitution, burlesque, birth control, obscenity, fetish, using photos, films, letters, newspapers and more. No one under 18 admitted!
