Renek Gaszewski [Blog]

Adolescence, with its mix of unfixed sexuality, mood-swinging narcissism, nihilist glamour and abused innocence, has been a major theme in art of the 90’s, and it’s still going strong, as this show of photographs suggests.
The historical material by August Sander, Disfarmer and Diane Arbus is familiar stuff, though Arbus’s scary 1962 ”Teen-Ager with a Baseball Bat, N.Y.C” feels right up to the road-rage minute. But the older images set the stage for the contemporary artists who make up the bulk of the show.
They include the Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra, whose color portraits of youths in bathing suits on beaches in the United States and Europe (four are included here) have the face-forward formality of studio shots but catch their subjects in poses that seem at once self-conscious and unguarded.
These attitudes also play out in two 1977 Ellen Brooks pictures of nude teen-agers, one of a girl with a knowing, sidelong smile, the other of a stunned-looking boy; and in Eve Fowler’s recent head shots of young male hustlers with troubled complexions and over-pitched expressions (eager smiles, serious snarls).
Self-presentation gets codified in fashion, which can carry fetishistic weight when identity is under construction. Within this context, the pictures of young Montauk beauties by Adam Bartos and the mock-magazine cover portraits of teen-age girls by the Swiss team of Bruno Burgin and Christian Schoch offer one ideal of personal style, and Judith Joy Ross’s suburban-punker high school students, with their teased hair and Motley Crue T-shirts, offer another.
The show’s most elaborate piece is Mitchell Syrop’s installation of laser print blowups of male high school yearbook photos from the 1960’s or 70’s, hung in rows in a metal frame.
A quick look reveals as many similarities as differences (ominipresent post-Beatles haircuts, distinctive faces). But what about the empty slots here and there? Do they represent classmates who have dropped out of the picture, and if so, to what fate? Mr. Syrop’s piece, which he has created on a monumental scale in Los Angeles, gets weirder the longer one looks at it, which is, after all, pretty much the story of the Awkward Age itself.

I see naked people. This is not because I have the uncanny powers of Haley Joel Osment or because I own X-Ray Specs. It is because looking at naked people is part of my job. Twice a year for a month or so I find myself spending a great deal of time backstage at fashion shows. And few other settings come to mind in which observing or standing alongside or quizzing people who are wearing next to nothing is an occupational … well, hazard is not the word.
That these people happen to be among the world’s most beautiful does little to diminish the surreal dimension of the circumstances. Consider what it is like to take notes as Gisele Bündchen holds forth while dressed in nothing but a G-string and you will get the idea. Picture interviewing Chad White — a model from whose torso statues could be cast — as a makeup artist strokes bronzing gel on his thighs, and the odd dimensions of the task become clear.
What is strangest, perhaps, about this particular form of employment — for which there is no comprehensive job description — is that being around rooms filled with unclad women and men is anything but stimulating. At least this is true for people in the fashion business, who are either puritanically decorous about nudity or so involved with clothes that often they can barely see the naked limbs for all the glorious weeds. And it is true for me.
It is not as though one is unaware that wandering backstage at a Victoria’s Secret fashion show is a died-and-gone-to-heaven dream for some people, or anyway, most Maxim readers. And it was plenty exciting when once, in a backstage scrum, Helena Christensen brushed against me with her breast. Still it must be said that, as in pro-sports locker rooms and on pornographic-movie sets, after a while you stop being shocked.
“It’s all context,” said Tim Blanks, a contributing editor for Style.com and Men.Style.com, who over two decades of backstage reporting has watched generations of models stripping down to their skivvies. “When you see some doll walking down the catwalk in some sheer thing or nearly naked, it’s fashion,” Mr. Blanks remarked in Paris last week. “If you saw that same girl pole dancing in a club, it would be hot.”
It is certainly true that the atmosphere at most fashion shows is weirdly unerotic. It may seem strange to say so, but even in a season like the one just ended — during which designers offered sheer blouses, peekaboo skirts, dropped crotches and bared breasts — sensuality seemed far from central. The parts that were revealed seemed no sexier than the parts that remained covered. Nakedness was less provocation than another design tool.
And backstage at the shows the atmosphere is always so frenetic and focused, the deadlines so tight, the volume of tasks to complete so improbable within the time allowed that Eros is the last thing on anybody’s mind.
“We’re here for the clothes, and so there’s nothing erotic about it,” the model Raquel Zimmermann said before the Chloé show in Paris on Sunday. “If you think about it, in Europe everyone goes topless on the beach and it’s not a big deal,” she added, noting that the naked pictures that surfaced from Carla Bruni’s modeling days did not exactly hinder her transition to first lady of France.
Things weren’t always so relaxed, of course. Anyone who remembers “Unzipped,” Douglas Keeve’s 1995 documentary about Isaac Mizrahi, will recall the lobbying required to persuade people like Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford to change clothes in front of a fashion show audience, while silhouetted behind a theatrical scrim. Nowadays, they would be lucky not to be asked to appear stark naked, as one model was in the designer Hussein Chalayan’s Spring 2007 show.
“What I hope for backstage is that everybody that’s there at that moment is serious and professional, and there for the clothes and not to be disrespectful and take a picture of a naked girl,” Ms. Zimmermann said.
This seemed a lot to ask for, given that the backstage area at Chloé, a tent set up in the Tuileries, was a typically elongated rectangle lined on two sides with tables and mirrors and chairs and stools and as crowded as a clown car.
There were makeup teams and hairdressing teams and manicurists and pedicurists. There were house photographers assigned to capture the atmosphere, fashion photographers assigned to capture the clothes for Vogue, beauty photographers who sell their images to the wire services. There were public relations people wearing earpieces and black suits. There were the security men known informally as les cravates rouges for their red ties.
There were modeling agents and bookers and boyfriends and hangers-on and minders. There were the models themselves, of course, and it is probably worth pointing out that every person in that room had some kind of camera.
Undoubtedly this is why so many pictures of unclothed models turn up on the Internet and also FTV, the French fashion channel whose video feeds the Indian government banned this year for what it called “unsuitable” content.
“It’s completely inappropriate” to capture pictures of models while they are changing in or out of their clothes, said Robert Fairer, who has photographed fashion backstage for Vogue for over a decade. But it happens. “Backstage areas are not hermetically sealed,” Mr. Fairer said.
They are imperfectly secured by the red ties in France and the house bouncers in Milan and the black suits hired to police the Bryant Park tents. They are also policed in an informal way by those in the business, who tend to be vigilant when it comes to the models, especially “the girls.”
“And they are girls,” said Brana Wolf, the fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar and a seasoned stylist who has been known to chew out photographers caught snapping topless shots at shows she styles. “I go after them if I catch them taking pictures they shouldn’t,” said Ms. Wolf, referring particularly to photographs of the teenage Lolitas currently much in favor — girls like Karlie Kloss, a St. Louis native who is one of the big success stories of the season, and who recently turned 16.
“It is an issue,” Ms. Kloss said, as she waited before a show in Paris for her turn with hair and makeup. “People respect that you want and need some privacy,” she added, or most do, anyway.
“One time, I was with Vlada,” Ms. Kloss said, referring to the Russian model Vlada Roslyakova, and “a photographer took a picture of her topless and then left.” Ms. Roslyakova leapt from her chair, chased the woman into the street and tussled with her until she deleted the shot.
Still, it’s going to happen, Ms. Kloss added; even in these early days in the business, she said: “I’m numb to the nudity. It’s just part of the job.”
As Ms. Kloss said that, as if on cue, the Polish model Magdalena Frąckowiak wandered into view in a G-string and with her arms modestly wrapped around her bare torso. “I was raised as a small kid in the theater,” explained Ms. Frąckowiak, who just turned 24. “So, for me, doing modeling is a little bit like being in a play. And being backstage is like every backstage, where you’re changing costumes and you have to be nude and so what?”
What is the point of being prudish, as the model Chad White once told me before a Duckie Brown show. At the time, Mr. White was barefoot and wearing a postage stamp bikini. When asked whether it wasn’t embarrassing to parade nearly buck naked in front of so many strangers, he laughed. “You should see what they put me in on the runway at Dolce & Gabbana,” Mr. White said. “Compared to that, right now I’m wearing a lot.”

This drama was an interesting, although unsuccessful, attempt at combining a film with on-stage scenes (about the only one who seemed to do this well was George Beban, who made a couple of films this way). The story involves an incident in the life of notorious early 20th century nude model; Audrey Munson. Munson herself appears in various stages of undress, but she doesn’t actually play herself — that’s left to Jane Thomas. According to the picture, Munson is supporting herself and her mother through her modeling, but she is actually a good girl — when a painter makes a play for her, she walks out. She is brought to a celebrated sculptor (Holmes E. Herbert), who is inspired by her beauty and asks her to pose nude for a statue. The sculptor’s wife (Hedda Hopper) becomes jealous of all the attention her husband is giving his art and has an affair with the painter. The painter dumps his latest model/mistress for the wife, and the rejected girl swears revenge. She writes a letter to the sculptor informing him that his wife is having dinner with the painter. Munson rushes to take the wife’s place at the table and pretends to be drunk when the sculptor shows up. He’s so disgusted that he destroys the statue he made of her. Eventually Munson orchestrates a reconciliation between the sculptor and his wife.

Is it possible that the exhaustingly prolific Richard Greenberg has been even busier than anyone suspected? Current evidence suggests that Mr. Greenberg, who has new plays opening at Lincoln Center and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago this season, has been moonlighting as a gag writer for sitcoms. And that he has been hoarding all the one-liners deemed too academic or simply too tired for television and crammed them together into yet another new play.
In outline, “A Naked Girl on the Appian Way,” which opened last night at the American Airlines Theater, does sound alarmingly like a last-ditch pitch for a comedy series by a writer desperate to make back alimony payments. You want a situation? Well, listen to this: A middle-aged pair of married, free-thinking intellectuals find their liberalism sorely tested when their three adopted, grown-up kids come home to roost in the old empty nest. And get this: Each of the kids is from a different race!
No, I’m not done yet. For the roles of the husband and wife, picture Jill Clayburgh and Richard Thomas. That’s right, Ms. “Unmarried Woman” and John Boy Walton themselves, except 30 years or so later. And along the way, there will be some flirting with taboos, like lesbianism. Oh, that’s not taboo anymore? Well, how about incest, except a kind of incest that won’t really offend a mainstream audience? And to keep things lively, we’ll throw in a wacky, semi-senile and completely un-self-censoring old broad.
You think you’ve seen that one before, huh? It’s true that “A Naked Girl on the Appian Way,” directed by Doug Hughes and featuring Ms. Clayburgh (who deserves better) in her first appearance on Broadway in two decades, brings to mind a long, blurred roster of dysfunctional family comedies, from “Soap” to “Arrested Development.” It’s not just television, either, that has kept extending the genre. Christopher Durang, John Guare, Nicky Silver and, more recently, Paul Weitz have all created toxic comedies of eccentric, unhappy families for the stage.
What makes “Naked Girl,” a Roundabout Theater Company production, stand out from the warped domestic pack is its stunning lack of a cohesive style. A sense of disconnectedness pervades everything, from the limping parade of witticisms to the performers’ relationships with their roles. Even the title, a reference to a mysterious vision on foreign shores, feels ill at ease with itself, a mixture of 1960’s-style continental titillation and literary epiphany.
Mr. Greenberg and Mr. Hughes, both Tony winners and estimable talents, appear to have lost touch with what they do best. The lyricism and all-embracing empathy evident in Mr. Greenberg’s “Three Days of Rain” (to be revived on Broadway later this season with Julia Roberts) and “Take Me Out” rarely make an appearance here. The same is true of Mr. Hughes’s gifts for guiding actors into solid yet luminous performances, so evident in his work on John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt” and Bryony Lavery’s “Frozen.”
Both of those works were sober, probing examinations of the nature of sin and the limits of moral judgment. It could be argued (by the kindhearted) that “Naked Girl” considers the same subjects in a lighter vein. Its central quandary (to call it a plot would be stretching things) arises when Thad (Matthew Morrison) and Juliet (Susan Kelechi Watson) return to their adoptive parents’ cozy home in the Hamptons from a European wanderjahr with a shocking announcement.
The news forces their brilliant and open-minded parents - Bess (Ms. Clayburgh), a cookbook author and television personality, and Jeffrey (Mr. Thomas), an innovative business consultant - to wonder, perhaps for the first time, just where they went wrong in child rearing. Matters are complicated by the arrival of a jealous third sibling, Bill (James Yaegashi), and the occasional, plot-propelling interruptions of Elaine, the feminist author next door (Leslie Ayvazian), and Sadie, her crazy mother-in-law (Ann Guilbert).
So far, so prime time, right? What slightly skews “Naked Girl” away from basic television fare is its characters’ professions, affluence (John Lee Beatty’s multiwindowed set reeks of casual Hamptons hauteur), educations and penchants for historical name-dropping. (Juliet and Bill spar over the dates of the Antinomian controversy of the 17th century; the prolixity of Henry James is used for a punch line.)
But in tone, the dialogue is sub-”Everybody Loves Raymond.” Jeffrey on his dietary habits: “After ‘Babe,’ I couldn’t eat pork for a day.” Bess on writing a cookbook: “I didn’t know beans about edamame.” Bill on feeling excluded by his brother and sister: “I’m bisexual. I’ve been rejected twice.” Winking, politically incorrect zingers fly among the three siblings, since Juliet and Bill are of Dominican and Asian extraction, respectively, while Thad is a cute Aryan lug.
For such dialogue to pass as wit, it must swoop and flutter blithely, then evaporate before anyone has a chance to think about it. Mr. Morrison (the Italian love interest from “The Light in the Piazza”) brings surprisingly original charm to the increasingly familiar role of male bimbo. (I’m waiting for the gender-reversed “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”) But most of the cast combines leaden intensity with comic archness, a poisonous mix.
Mr. Thomas is an excellent dramatic actor of the species that can’t say “hello” without gale-force passion. This does not suit the role of a perpetually abstracted genius. Similarly, Bess is meant to be dithery and discombobulated, a part made for Diane Keaton. Ms. Clayburgh, though a warm and attractive maternal presence here, is by nature too trenchant and focused. When this couple go wandering in clouds of vagueness, you feel they are only pretending, though the urge to escape is understandable.
Hope dies young in “Naked Girl.” For me, rigor mortis set in when Sadie, the foul-mouthed little old lady, entered not knowing she was in the wrong house. Still, out of the mouth of unbearable clichés, wisdom sometimes emerges. It’s Sadie who, stumbling into Bess and Jeffrey, asks the burning question of this production: “Who are you people? What do you think you’re doing here?”

The mood was relaxed, even familial, on a recent Tuesday evening as the painter Will Cotton welcomed visitors to his Lower East Side loft. As he set out bowls of chocolate Easter candy, the artist Inka Essenhigh, who first made her name with paintings of anime-like creatures, pinned paper to an easel. Delia Brown, an art world provocateur who specializes in society scenes starring herself, relaxed in a chair with a drawing pad at the ready. The multimedia and performance artist Guy Richards Smit handed Mr. Cotton the first CD of the night - a post-punk mix - and unpacked his watercolor kit.
With a studiously blank expression on her face, another guest, Linda Marraccini, then casually pulled off her clothes, revealing ample, Rubenesque curves.
“Standing poses!” Mr. Cotton called. The model twisted her torso, lifted an arm aloft, and the life-drawing session began.
Only a few years ago, the idea of artists gathering to paint from a model would have seemed impossibly old-fashioned and hokey - and if the model was female and nude, sexist to boot. Yet for nearly three years now, a number of artists - not students putting charcoal to paper for the first time, but successful artists with established styles and audiences of their own - have flocked to Mr. Cotton’s weekly invitation-only sessions.
“There’s something kind of fun about doing something so geeky, so nerdy, so traditional,” Ms. Essenhigh said. “To do something so anti-conceptual and anti-Modernism feels really good, as if it were going to lead to helping you express things.”
Mr. Cotton mused, “The usual idea is you do your two years at school and then you’re done with it.”
In the market where these contemporary artists ply their trade, the age-old discipline of drawing human figures is considered a rather fuddy-duddy exercise. Although figurative painting and drawing has always maintained some presence, in recent years rumors of its demise were rampant, as video, installation, and conceptual art rose to the ascendant.
Though figuration has recently made a comeback, hand-in-hand with the burgeoning popularity of painting, the art-world laurels still tend to go to those who package their figuration with a conceptual gambit - like John Currin’s devastating grotesqueries, which often skewer precisely the types of people who can afford to buy them, or Elizabeth Peyton’s romantic portraits, celebrated because they’re fashioned at her own pleasure rather than a patron’s behest.
Many artists feel the need to make work that speaks more directly. Yet plainspoken figuration still seems discomfortingly close to that dirty word “illustration” - or, worse, to 19th-century academic realism, dismissed as kitsch for most of the 20th century. And for some members of the group, exploring this taboo territory through life drawing, the ultimate academic learning tool, is part of the allure.
Although some members of the group are more traditional figurative painters, like Wade Schuman and Paul Caranicas, both of whom show with staunchly realist galleries on 57th Street, most are part of the downtown gallery world, where representational painting usually requires a sexy selling point. Among the regulars are Adam Cvijanovic, known for making room-size, wallpaper-like landscapes on Tyvek; Hilary Harkness, whose intricately detailed, perversely Bosch-like fantasies are peopled by lingerie-clad female figures; and the painter Steve Mumford, who until recently was traveling in Iraq, depicting the experiences of American soldiers and local people in wartime.
The group also draws a sprinkling of nonartists, most notably the fashion designer Cynthia Rowley, who modeled for the group when she was nearly nine months pregnant.
Mr. Cotton uses eight models in rotation, half of whom dance burlesque at New York venues like the Slipper Club. (Ms. Marraccini, the model on that recent Tuesday night, is better known as Dirty Martini.) He pays them the going rate of $20 an hour, and each artist who turns up - usually with paper, brushes, ink and charcoal in tow - chips in $5 apiece. Afterward, the artists sometimes go out for dinner, but more often they hang around and look at one another’s work. Although it’s not a class, Mr. Cotton is said to offer technical pointers from time to time.
The mood seems strikingly collegial and supportive. Ms. Brown said that some nonartists who attend arrived knowing only how to make stick figures. “They’re cool - they’re, like, adventurous,” she said, with no hint of irony.
When Mr. Cotton, now 39, started the group in September 2002, he was known for fantastical landscapes made of sweets, like a house built from donuts or a molten chocolate waterfall, rendered in titillatingly photorealistic detail. He usually worked from photographs and maquettes of the scenes he was painting, built from chocolate kisses, gingerbread, Karo syrup, Crisco and the like). But when he decided to populate his landscapes with another type of eye candy - naked women - he recounts, he realized he needed to return to working from life.
So one evening, he arranged for a friend to model, and to keep things respectable, invited some friends as well. “It wasn’t that I thought I should provide a forum for people to come and brush up their drawing skills,” he said. “It was that I knew that I needed to, and I thought inviting other people would ensure that I did it.”
The event was a success, Mr. Cotton said, not least because the results - figures executed without torturous reflection - were so immediately obvious in his work. He decided to hold another session the next week, and he has continued ever since. He now sends weekly announcements to 62 people, usually pulling 4 to 18 artists a week. Recently the group spawned its first satellite, run by Mr. Schuman in his Midtown studio.
On that Tuesday night, as ever, the group followed the standard ritual for life-drawing classes the world over. They started with short standing postures - warm-ups that benefit artists and model alike - and gradually increased the time span until Ms. Marraccini was reclining on cushions in a 40-minute pose. By then, most of the drawings were fairly far along and the mood was mellow and focused, enhanced by Eminem’s lullaby “Mockingbird” on the CD and the scent of sugar drifting from Mr. Cotton’s maquettes. Even though most of the artists view the event as a practice session, much of the work they made seemed proficient. Life drawing is said to get short shrift in art school these days, but many group members were doing it long before they reached art school - like Mr. Smit, who started out drawing Greek statues in the Metropolitan Museum of Art while in grade school and graduated to live people by the age of 10.
Most say the sessions have influenced their work, although not necessarily in obvious ways. Ms. Essenhigh, who was standing at an easel at the back of the room making strong, muscular pencil drawings, said that life drawing was great for “keeping your chops up.” It serves “to prevent yourself from being clichéd, from your hand always going with the same thing,” she explained. (Since she began attending, the figures in her paintings have gone from flat to volumetric, and her aesthetic has changed to match.)
Ellen Altfest spent the evening trying to work at close range, moving around the room as Ms. Marracini’s poses changed so she could always see her face. She said she was considering making some portraits - a sharp departure from the hyperdetailed trees and foliage she usually paints.
(“I asked Will when he was gonna have a man” as a model, Ms. Altfest joked, “and he said, ‘Ellen, this is not a democracy.’ “)
Ms. Harkness usually sketches loosely with colored pencils or watercolor wash, whereas her paintings are tightly rendered and intensely detailed. She said she uses the sessions “to solve problems” and to “download information.” “I’m one of those people who can build a figure out of spheres and cones,” she said. “Observing helps me make the people I draw more real.”
Mr. Cotton stood at an easel working with charcoal and Conti pencil on primed watercolor paper, producing highly finished renderings that looked finished enough to be shown. Every so often, he roughed up the drawing’s surface with a stiff paintbrush, a technique he said he’d picked up from a portrait painter in Central Park.
As people gazed upon one another’s work afterward, the prevailing mood was curiosity. Impressed by Ms. Brown’s skillful modeling, Ms. Harkness asked where she had studied art. When Ms. Brown replied U.C.L.A., renowned for its conceptual artists, Ms. Harkness looked startled. “And you can draw like that?” she exclaimed.
Later, over dinner at Good World Bar & Grill on Orchard Street, the talk turned to the 200-year-old Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the oldest art academy and museum in the country. “You’ve gotta go!” Mr. Cvijanovic said. “It’s the only place in America that didn’t throw out their plaster casts,” he said, referring to the sculptures that that 19th-century art students usually drew from before moving on to live people.
In an art world that seems chiefly to revolve around the market, the weekly sessions offer the artists a chance to get together without focusing on who is showing where, and to reconnect around the basic activity that their profession is really all about.
“It’s not like going to an opening because you’re drawing,” said the painter Amy Cutler, who has attended on and off since last October. “It’s not one of those weird social situations. What you have in common is right there.”