#bob colacello

[twixnmix]

Pat Cleveland and her fiancé Sterling St. Jacques dancing at a party at Halston's home in New York City, 1976.

Photos by Bob Colacello

[leggerezza-dell-essere]

_____ Bob Colacello

[bitter69uk]

“At four in the afternoon, Elizabeth Taylor sauntered onto the set, followed by her secretary, her hairdresser and her wardrobe mistress. She didn’t look puffy; she wasn’t that short and her eyes really were purple. She was already costumed in the one dress her character wears throughout the movie, a pink, green, yellow, orange and blue print Valentino that more than met the script��s requirement for something “garish and vulgar” and was said to have cost $22,000 including four copies to rotate during shooting. Her hair was teased up and out – the script again – but she still looked beautiful, “really beautiful”, as Andy put it. Her secretary and her hairdresser were a pair of Mediterranean musclemen named Ramon and Gianni, in matching tight white t-shirts and tight white trousers, accessorized with red patent leather belts, shoes and shoulder bags. Every so often between takes Ramon would pull a mirror out of his bag and hold it up in front of Elizabeth’s face; then Gianni would pull a teasing comb out of his bag and hand it to Elizabeth, who would fitfully tease her own hair higher. She looked almost mad when she did that, though one couldn’t be sure if she was just in character or almost mad.” From Bob Colacello’s juicy account of the tempestuous production of Italian-made psychodrama The Driver’s Seat in his book Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (1990), in which his then-boss – cadaverous pop art visionary Andy Warhol – makes a memorable guest star appearance as “a rich creep of undisclosed nationality and occupation” (dubbed with an incongruous British-accented voice!). The Driver’s Seat (aka Identikit) was released fifty years ago today (20 May 1974) and remains mesmerizingly strange. Suffering whiplash mood swings as a woman with a “date with death”, Taylor gives one of her definitive performances. The Driver’s Seat dates from my favourite Elizabeth Taylor era in the late sixties and early seventies when she was gutsily portraying variations of women-having-a-nervous-meltdown in oddball “failed art movies” (like Boom! (1968), Secret Ceremony (1968) and X, Y and Zee (1972)). Taylor goes full blast cray-cray in The Driver’s Seat and it’s awesome to observe.

[fashionbooksmilano]

Bob Colacello's Out

Bob Colacello

Introduction Ingrid Sischy, Design by Sam Shaid

Edition 7L Steidl, Göttingen 2007, 232 pages, 30x21,4cm, ISBN 9788654034

euro 50,00

email if you want to buy booksinprogressmilano@yahoo.it

Out documents a social era that seems so close and yet so far away: that wild, glamorous, disco-and-drugs-driven decade between the end of the Vietnam war and the advent of AIDS, when every night was a party night and such distinctions as uptown and downtown, gay and straight, black and white were momentarily cast aside. As the editor of Andy Warhol's Interview from 1971 to 1983, Bob Colacello was perfectly placed to record the scene, which he did in his monthly "Out" column, a diary of the frenetic social life that took him from art openings to movie premieres, from cocktail parties to dinner parties, from charity balls to after-hours clubs, often all in the course of a single evening. Although Colacello started writing his column in 1973, it didn't occur to him to take his own pictures for it until two years later, when the Swiss art dealer Thomas Ammann gave him one of the first miniature 35-mm cameras to come on the market, a black plastic Minox small enough to hide in his jacket pocket.

With their skewed angles, multilayered compositions, and arbitrary lighting effects, Colacello's pictures have an immediacy, a veracity, and an aesthetic not often found in the work of professional party photographers. He wasn't standing at the door pairing up celebrities and telling them to smile; he was in the middle of the action - "an accidental photographer", he likes to say, catching his "subjects" off-guard. And what subjects he had: Diana Vreeland, Jack Nicholson, Raquel Welch, Mick Jagger, Yves Saint Laurent, Nan Kempner, Gloria Swanson, Anita Loos, Willy Brandt, Joseph Beuys, Robert Rauschenberg and Warhol himself, at his most relaxed and private. Here as well are those who didn't survive the endless party - Truman Capote, Halston, Studio 54's Steve Rubell, Egon von Furstenberg and Tina Chow. Because space in Interview was limited, only a handful of Colacello's pictures were published each month, so most of these images have never been seen before. They bring to life a carefree but reckless moment in history when social mobility and personal expression were played out to the limits.

23/12/23

[romanbymarta]

Roman Polanski and Bob Colacello photographed by Andy Warhol, 1973

[limedollar]

[vqtblog]

Gloria Crespo Maclennan: ‘New York Memories’ Un español en Nueva York las fotografías de David Jiménez para evocar la ciudad de Bob Colacello

[atna2-34-75]

Bob Colacello

[mykristeva]

Jessica Lange in the conference room at 860 Broadway with Fran Lebowitz, 1979. Photo by Andy Warhol.

Bob Colacello & Warhol interview Lange, the rising star. Read here.

Colacello seems dumb, poor Jessica. Warhol is ok. And Fran is Fran:

Jessica: I like your book a lot, Fran.

Fran: Thank you. I haven't read it yet.

[twixnmix]

Andy Warhol's boyfriend Jed Johnson and Bob Colacello in Rome, 1973.

[alessandro55]

Moments Roxanne Lowit Photographs

Textes et dessins inédits en fin d'ouvrage par Marian McEvoy, Grace Jones, Sonia Rykiel, Bob Colacello, Yves Saint Laurent

Editions Assouline, Paris 1992 2nd Ed, 164 pages, 22x32cm, ISBN 2-908 228-08-4

euro 150,00

email if you want to buy booksinprogressmilano@yahoo.it

A record of the celebrity photographs of Roxanne Lowit including superb black and white portraits of Salvador Dali, Grace Jones, Karl Lagerfeld, Yves-Saint Laurent, Diana Vreeland, Andy Warhol, Anna Piaggi,Lou Reed etc) .

12/07/24

[bitter69uk]

“Dietrich is not a woman, not a man, but a phantom as could only come out of Central Europe.” Doyenne of fashion Diana Vreeland quoted in the book Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (1990) by Bob Colacello.

“She has sex but no positive gender. Her masculinity appeals to women and her sexuality to men.” Kenneth Tynan.

“If we had to invent someone to be the ideal woman … we would have to invent Marlene Dietrich.” Billy Wilder.

Let’s all pause for a moment of old-school diva worship! Supremely world-weary, enigmatic and throaty-voiced German actress, chanteuse, personification of Continental decadence and all-round international glamourpuss extraordinaire, Marlene Dietrich (27 December 1901 – 6 May 1992) was born on this day! Pictured: portrait of Dietrich by John Engstead, promoting the 1940 film Seven Sinners.

[donnahinkleystaceytroy]

Lot #507: CHER - Andy Warhol-autographed Edition of Interview Magazine Featuring Cher An autographed edition of Interview magazine featuring Cher on the front cover published in May 1982. Founded in October 1969, Interview was co-founded by artist Andy Warhol and journalist John Wilcock and is still running today. This issue includes an interview named "In Bed with. . . Cher" conducted by Warhol and editor Bob Colacello and the front is autographed in black ink by Warhol. The lot exhibits some minor wear down the spine and light creasing. Dimensions: 43 cm x 27.5 cm x 0.5 cm (17" x 10 3/4" x .25")

Estimate: £500 - 1,000

https://tinyurl.com/sbxzzdx8

[fashionbooksmilano]

Jonathan Becker 30 Years at Vanity Fair

Assouline,New York 2012, 352 pages, 28x35cm, ISBN  978-1614280798

euro 280,00

email if you want to buy booksinprogressmilano@yahoo.it

Photographer Jonathan Becker began contributing to Vanity Fair following a successful solo exhibition in 1981. His portraits featured largely in the prototype for the magazine’s relaunch in 1982. Becker’s specialty in portraits, photographed mostly on location, soon became a Vanity Fair staple: Robert Mapplethorpe, Jack Kevorkian, Jocelyn Wildenstein, and Martha Graham, as well as countless socialites, artists, and heads of state. Assignments for the magazine have dispatched Becker far and wide—from the Amazonian jungle, for firstencounter photographs of members of the Yanomami tribe, to Buckingham Palace, for the first photographs showing the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles together. Over three decades with Vanity Fair, Jonathan Becker has photographed some of the most fascinating characters from the rarefied worlds of art, literature, politics, pop culture, and society, capturing the personality and individuality of his celebrity subjects often unseen through other lenses. Becker is known for his close collaboration with Bob Colacello, Alex Shoumatoff, and other Vanity Fair writers on stories about the denizens of worldly watering holes: the Adirondacks and Aspen, Palm Beach and Palm Springs, Capri and so forth. Over the course of three years’ work for the Rockefeller Foundation, Becker documented its funded projects on five continents. Four books of his work have been published: "Bright Young Things", "Studios by the Sea", Artists of Long Island’s East End (derived from a Vanity Fair assignment with Bob Colacello) and "Jonathan Becker: 30 Years at Vanity Fair".

14/10/23

[dankusner]

Warhol | Sex Parts

In 1977, at the height of the gay liberation movement, and just two weeks following Robert Mapplethorpe’s notorious New York exhibition at The Kitchen of his sexually explicit X Portfolio comprised of male subjects and sadomasochistic scenarios, Andy Warhol began photographing his own nudes at the Factory then located on the north end of Union Square.

Meant as a radical counterpoint to his commercially driven commissioned portraits, Warhol was not necessarily anticipating the times, but rather sensing them, which “enabled him not only to join the latest trend but to leap to the head of the line” as described by Bob Colacello in The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Paintings 1976-1978—Volume 5.

Warhol described the nude imagery as “landscapes,” reflecting his interest in the body as a site open to exploration and discovery, and his interest in the abstract positive-negative space present in the compositions.

While the artist had explored sexually explicit material in the 1960s in such films as “Blow Job” (1964) and “Blue Movie” (1969), he preferred to delineate between his films and fine artworks, as he was keenly aware of the innate conservatism of the art world at that time, and the fact that erotic imagery would not be well received by museums or private collectors.

For procuring his male subjects, Warhol relied on confidante Victor Hugo to recruit men of impressive endowment from the New York bathhouses.

Back at the Factory, the men were encouraged to strip and make themselves comfortable, and as was typical for the artist, Warhol acted as the shy, coy voyeur photographing the models with a demeanor of remove and distance, never participating in the scenes which unfolded in front of the camera lens.

These photographs were employed to produce the series titled Torsos (1977) and later the more graphic Sex Parts and Fellatio silkscreen portfolios—both from 1978.

Notably, faces were never included in the imagery which preserved the models’ anonymity.

Further, the sketch-like qualities in Sex Parts distinguishes the series stylistically from Warhol’s other work, which is characterized by big blocks of bold color, layering, and less frenetic lines.

Sex Parts was never sold or distributed through galleries.

Rather, Warhol chose to place the artworks privately with collectors, or to gift them to special friends.

Sex Parts was never publicly exhibited during Warhol’s lifetime, but the silkscreens did appear in Richard Gere’s 1980 film “American Gigolo” displayed in the drug dealer’s living room.

The complete portfolio in the present exhibition was acquired directly from The Andy Warhol Foundation around 1997, a decade after the artist’s death.

The portfolio, straight from the original owner, is being sold intact to an institution only (or to an individual open to committing the portfolio to an institution as a promised gift).

The prints will not be broken up.

Also included in CLAMP’s show are original Polaroids and photographs shot by Warhol in the Factory, similar to those he used to produce the silkscreens comprising the portfolio Sex Parts.

Additionally, CLAMP is presenting a wall vinyl reproduction of a photograph shot by Warhol’s assistant Ronny Cutrone during one of the nude studio sessions.

While less known to the wider public, Sex Parts is a significant series signaling the artist’s final acceptance of his own sexuality.

It also opened the door for other progressive and controversial bodies of work such as the Piss, Oxidation, and Cum series

[bitter69uk]

“The first picture I saw that impressed me was The Prodigal (1955) with Lana Turner and when I was a child, I used to fill up the bathtub and put blue food colouring in it to make it blue like in Technicolour. I used to bring all of my mother’s plants into the bathroom and I had a yellow towel I would put on my head for blonde hair, for Lana’s hair. My mother had an ocelot coat and I used to put her coat which cost I think several thousand dollars on the floor of the bathroom, and I would go into the blue water with the blonde towel on my head, and make-up … blue eyeshadow …and get out of the water and slip into my mother’s high heels, walk on the ocelot coat with the plants all around and … I was Lana Turner in The Prodigal. A few years later I discovered Kim Novak in The Eddie Duchin Story (1956). I was always attracted to women with white hair. I thought it was the prettiest.”

/ Candy Darling quoted in a 1972 British documentary for British TV /

“Candy didn’t want to be avant-garde; she wanted to be Kim Novak.”

/ Bob Colacello in Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (1990) /

Born on this day: ethereally beautiful, memorable and funny transgender Warhol Superstar Candy Darling (24 November 1944 - 21 March 1974). (Yes, THE Candy “from out on the Island” immortalized in the 1972 Lou Reed song “Walk on the Wild Side”). Pictured: portrait of Darling by Jack Mitchell, 1971.

Candy Darling by Jack Mitchell 1971