Photos: amarcord vintage, courtesy of amarcord vintage fashion; fashion show, © bettman//corbis; trend-ology, courtesy of the museum at FIT; desigual, courtesy of desigual; max beckmann, “departure,” frankfurt 1932, berlin 1933-35, digital image © 2014 the museum of modern art/licensed by scala/art resource, ny/© 2014 artists rights society (ars), new york/vg bild-kunst, bonn; jeff koons, “balloon dog (red),” 1995, courtesy of puccio fine art; andy warhol, © fred w. mcdarrah/getty images
In 1964, Huntington Hartford opened his Gallery of Modern Art at 2 Columbus Circle; today, the Museum of Arts and Design occupies the site. Jeff Koons was 9 in 1964; 50 years later, he’s the enfant terrible of the art world, cast in the Warhol mold. His multiples, like “Balloon Dog (red),” 1995, fetch top dollar. Beginning Jun. 27, the Whitney Museum confirms Koons’ superstar status with a career retrospective.
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let my colleagues fantasize about New York in 1964: I lived through what was the best and worst of times, forever defined (for me, at least) by the assassination of President Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. But New York was—and is—nothing if not resilient. One of the first signs of a return to life after the tragedy was the Broadway opening of Hello, Dolly! on Jan. 16, 1964. I loved it then, but I wonder now if the critical and public reception would have been half so ecstatic had the world not desperately needed a lighthearted musical in which to find escape. The power of art to heal extended to the fine arts, too. Blockbuster retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art—on Pierre Bonnard and Max Beckmann—opened my eyes, while a show at the Wildenstein gallery turned me on to Camille Pissarro, who became the hero of a term paper in which I trashed pop idol Andy Warhol as a charlatan. Heady stuff. My fondest 1964 memory? The Vatican Pavilion at the World’s Fair. Enshrined there, direct from St. Peter’s Basilica, was Michelangelo’s “Pietà” sculpture. Reverent spectators, standing on futuristic moving walkways, glided past the 1499 marble masterpiece. Going forward and looking back: a fitting metaphor for what we IN editors have been doing here.—Francis Lewis
The triptych, “Departure,” from the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and a star of that institution’s 1964 Max Beckmann show, is currently on view in the Neue Galerie’s exhibit, Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937.
Pop art immortal Andy Warhol would be laughing all the way to the bank, if he knew that one of his 1964 Brillo Soap Pads boxes sold at Sotheby’s New York in 2012 for $722,500.
for the full story, go to innewyork.com/editorsblog IN New YORK | april 2014 | innewyork.com
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