Artwork © Howard Hodgkin. Directed by Miriam Perez; Produced by PerryDuke
April 21, 2017
Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends
Howard Hodgkin was one of the last century’s greatest painters. A recent show at London’s National Portrait Gallery persuasively argues that Hodgkin should also be canonized as one of its greatest portraitists. Absent Friends includes works that span from 1949 to 2016. In this affecting video interview, the show’s organizer and NPG senior curator Paul Moorhouse explains how, as Hodgkin evolved as an artist, he increasingly abstracted what people meant to him, representing people in his pictures through memories, evocations, and feelings. His viscerally intense works (like Absent Friends, the 2000–01 painting that gave the show its title), in which the aching feelings of presence, memory, and loss become increasingly palpable over time, argue most eloquently for Hodgkin as a sophisticated portraitist.
Visions of the Self: Jenny Saville on Rembrandt
Jenny Saville reveals the process behind her new self-portrait, painted in response to Rembrandt’s masterpiece Self-Portrait with Two Circles.
Layla and Majnun
A celebrated collaboration between Sir Howard Hodgkin and choreographer Mark Morris. Nancy Dalva takes us behind the scenes.
Howard Hodgkin From London to Hong Kong
In Howard Hodgkin: From London to Hong Kong, we are welcomed into the celebrated painter’s London studio. Narrated by Robin Vousden.
Francesca Woodman
Ahead of the first exhibition of Francesca Woodman’s photographs at Gagosian, director Putri Tan speaks with historian and curator Corey Keller about new insights into the artist’s work. The two unravel themes of the body, space, architecture, and ambiguity.
Simon Hantaï: Azzurro
Join curator Anne Baldassari as she discusses the exhibition Simon Hantaï:Azzurro, Gagosian, Rome, and the significance of blue in the artist’s practice. The show forms part of a triptych with Gagosian’s two previous Hantaï exhibitions, LES NOIRS DU BLANC, LES BLANCS DU NOIR at Le Bourget in 2019–20, and Les blancs de la couleur, la couleur du blanc in New York, in 2022.
Vladimir Kagan’s First Collection: An Interview with Chris Eitel
Chris Eitel, Vladimir Kagan’s protégé and the current director of design and production at Vladimir Kagan Design Group, invited the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier to the brand’s studio in New Jersey, where the two discussed the forthcoming release of the First Collection. The series, now available through holly hunt, reintroduces the first chair and table that Kagan ever designed—part of Eitel’s efforts to honor the furniture avant-gardist’s legacy while carrying the company into the future.
Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire: Frida Escobedo
In this ongoing series, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has devised a set of thirty-seven questions that invite artists, authors, musicians, and other visionaries to address key elements of their lives and creative practices. Respondents select from the larger questionnaire and reply in as many or as few words as they desire. For the first installment of 2024, we are honored to present the architect Frida Escobedo.
Border Crossings: Exile and American Modern Dance, 1900–1955
Dance scholars Mark Franko and Ninotchka Bennahum join the Quarterly’s Gillian Jakab in a conversation about the exhibition Border Crossings at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Cocurated by Bennahum and Bruce Robertson, the show reexamines twentieth-century modern dance in the context of war, exile, and injustice. An accompanying catalogue, coedited by Bennahum and Rena Heinrich and published earlier this year, bridges the New York presentation with its West Coast counterpart at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Fashion and Art: Maria Grazia Chiuri
Maria Grazia Chiuri has been the creative director of women’s haute couture, ready-to-wear, and accessories collections at Dior since 2016. Beyond overseeing the fashion collections of the French house, she has produced a series of global collaborations with artists such as Judy Chicago, Mickalene Thomas, Penny Slinger, and more. Here she speaks with the Quarterly’s Derek Blasberg about her childhood in Rome, the energy she derives from her interactions and conversations with artists, the viral “We Should All Be Feminists” T-shirt, and her belief in the role of creativity in a fulfilled and healthy life.
You Don’t Buy Poetry at the Airport: John Klacsmann and Raymond Foye
Since 2012, John Klacsmann has held the role of archivist at Anthology Film Archives, where he oversees the preservation and restoration of experimental films. Here he speaks with Raymond Foye about the technical necessities, the threats to the craft, and the soul of analogue film.
Whit Stillman
In celebration of the monograph Whit Stillman: Not So Long Ago (Fireflies Press, 2023), Carlos Valladares chats with the filmmaker about his early life and influences.
Stanley Whitney: Vibrations of the Day
Stanley Whitney invited professor and musician-biographer John Szwed to his studio on Long Island, New York, as he prepared for an upcoming survey at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum to discuss the resonances between painting and jazz.