Today the National Portrait Gallery unveiled Imaginary Portraits, a selection of works by artist Derek Boshier, who is the subject of a monograph I am editing.
Prominent are two studies of David Bowie; an oil-on-canvas painting executed in New York in 1980 while Bowie was rehearsing for his role in Bernard Pomerance’s play The Elephant Man at the city’s Booth Theatre and a 1981 ink-on-paper drawing which resulted from Boshier’s design for the sleeve for the album Lodger a couple of years earlier.
//Outer gatefold sleeve, Lodger, David Bowie, RCA, 1979. Design Derek Boshier, photography Brian Duffy//
//Top fellas and brushes in the 60s and 70s. Photos courtesy Tadhg Taylor//
For my money, Sharpies beat all other youth cults hands down, so news of the publication of the third edition of Tadhg Taylor’s Top Fellas is cause for celebration.
A few years ago on THE LOOK blog I explored the style and musical tastes of this unique subculture which blossomed among Melbourne teens from the 60s to the early 80s, and never tire of the clips from Greg Mcainsh’s 1974 documentary which captures the top fellas and brushes in the prime.
//Clockwise from top left: Cover, Helen And Desire, 1970; George O'Dowd, photo: Richard Bevan, 2013; Carnaby Street book and Palisades swing tag, 1970 and 1966; front cover, Anarchy In The UK newsprint fanzine, 1976//
I’m involved in a couple of events which open in London this week: artist Lucy Harrison’s multi-layered project Carnaby Echoes in the West End and photographer Nick Knight’s exhibition Punk at his Showstudio space in SW1.
“The black gay community has given kids with holes in their trousers the opportunity to look as glamorous as mannequins on a Paris runway.
“By imitating the Great White Way of success – Vogue magazine, the profiles of glamour, the poses that intimate that…we’re not gonna criticize it, we’re gonna celebrate it, because that’s the Great White Way…
//Scrubbing up well. Cygan with auction house assistant. Photo: Christie's//
M.Goldstein’s Nathaniel Lee Jones is on fire at the moment; on the heels of next week’s Reginald Alan Westaway exhibition in Prague, his awesome 9ft-high robot Cygan goes on sale at Christie’s Out Of The Ordinary auction on September 5.
The fabulous Peggy Noland has selected four online clips loosely linked by the theme of transformation for LA’s Museum Of Contemporary Art channel MOCAtv:
• A “haul video” from Mall Of America made by dedicated shopper PiinkSparkles
//Clockwise from top left: Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen, Badlands, 1973; Arnella Goes Rodeo, West One, 1974; Malcolm McLaren, January 1972; clothes from The Emperor Of Wyoming, 1973//
A fashion shoot styled by Pru Walters and photographed by Karl Stoecker for a 1974 issue of Janet Street-Porter’s secretarial magazine West One foregrounds the importance of Westernwear to London street style in the early to mid-70s.
//West One, May 14, 1974, p14: Fringed blouse from Kweens, 109 King's Road; shorts Stirling Cooper; boots + hat The Emperor of Wyoming, 404 King's Road//
The intriguing new project from photographer Bradley Richards is Austerity Measures, a hand-bound and printed collection of observations taken in and around Canary Wharf, the capital’s business district and financial hub.
//Reginald Alan Westaway, 1928-2008. Nude self portrait, 1960s//
Property Of A Gentleman, the exhibition opening at Prague’s Svit gallery at the end of the month, will cast much-deserved light on the life and creative outpourings of Reginald Alan Westaway, the British outsider artist and recluse.
Westaway died in 2008, the walls of his house in Herne Bay, Kent, scrawled with diagrams and plans for a lute he was making at the point of his demise. The words were written in Latin and the discarded instrument was propped amid the detritus of decades: empty wine bottles, documents and reference papers, threadbare clothes, packaging and paper bags. The “drawing room” was frozen in time – the curtains hadn’t been opened for years- and the surfaces in the house were submerged under accumulations of spiders’ webs.
From this clutter emerged a complete oeuvre indicating a singular artistic life, self-catalogued and apparently self-sufficient. Westaway’s achievements would have rested in obscurity were it not for the devotion of M.Goldstein’s Nathaniel Lee Jones, who is collaborating with the artist Dirk Bell on the forthcoming exhibition, the Czech title of which is Majetek ušlechtilého muže.
//’Mick Passes Shirley, 1955′ Illustration for a feature about growing up in the 50s by Mick Farren, Club International 1975 by Hollyhead/NTA from an idea of George Hardie’s//
