Florida has more than a balmy climate to commend it this winter. It’s one of the nation’s liveliest cultural centers, and, this season, it’s offering you Paris.
Or as Ernest Hemingway would say, Paris when it was good.
From now through Jan. 18, St. Petersburg’s Salvador Dali Museum (1000 3rd St. South; 813-823-3767) is hosting “Man Ray’s Paris Portraits: 1921-1939,” an exhibition that serves as homage to the extraordinary figures who made Paris between the two world wars perhaps the most important, intense, liberated and exciting time and place in the history of world culture.
Sometimes profound, sometimes antic and frequently outrageous, the inventive, flamboyant New York-born American expatriate Man Ray was a leader of the Paris-centered avant garde and a friend and frequent collaborator of some of the most brilliant artists, writers and musicians of the era.
Among those of his confreres and chums whose portraits are in the exhibition are Surrealist painter Dali, for whom the museum is named; writer/saloniste Gertrude Stein; Pablo Picasso; Hemingway; and the inimitable Kiki de Montparnasse, the model/mistress who sometimes went to restaurants completely naked and was called by Hemingway the closest thing to an actual queen he’d ever encountered.
Joining them in the exhibition are writers James Joyce, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marcel Proust, Sinclair Lewis, Louis Aragon and Aldous Huxley. Painters Andre Derain, Joan Miro, Georges Braque and Wassil Kandinsky are also in the show, as are fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, English aristocrat turned actress Lady Diana Manners Cooper and editors Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap of “The Little Review,” the celebrated literary magazine founded in Chicago and transplanted in Paris, where it became the first to publish Joyce’s “Ulysses.”
Surrealist poet and later Communist Paul Eluard appears in the show, though not his beautiful wife Nusch — a man-killer of a temptress loved by Ray and Picasso, who painted her as a vicious, predatory beast.
Gender bending
Equally provocative though far more contemporary are two shows running through this month at Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum (117 Sandusky St.; 412-237-8300), both about gender and androgyny. “Candy Darling, Always a Lady” has 50 images of the short (30-year) life of Warhol friend and transvestite James Slattery, who as Darling became one of the leading ladies of New York’s art scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Among the works is a picture of Darling mugging for the camera with Jane Fonda.
“Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography” contains 80 photographs emphasizing the interchangeability of male and female images. Some of the more memorable pictures include works by Warhol and the sometimes brutal Cindy Sherman, not to speak of the controversial Robert Mapplethorpe, but the exhibition also includes more arty and stylized images from the 1920s taken by Man Ray and Cecil Beaton.
Broadway, the very epicenter of American theater, is more than 200 years old, and New York’s PaineWebber Gallery (1285 Avenue of the Americas; 212-713-2885) is celebrating this most American of institutions with “Direct From Broadway: 200 Years of New York City Theater.” Running through Dec. 5, this marvelously colorful show has 125 photographs, paintings, posters, costumes, set plans and other souvenirs, dating back to the 18th Century. “Broadway,” home to high Shakespearean drama as well as bawdy revue, originally started down near New York’s City Hall, moving up to Union Square, Madison Square, Herald Square and finally Times Square throughout the decades. This show is an absolute must for anyone who loves the theater.
Birds of fancy
The work of Eliot Porter (1901-1990), who was to bird photography what John James Audubon was to bird painting, is on display this month through Jan. 18 at the Amon Carter Museum in Ft. Worth (3501 Camp Bowie Blvd.; 817-738-1933). The show, “A Passion for Birds,” displays 95 color and black-and-white prints from the more than 1,200 images he took of some 251 bird species.
Italian Renaissance
Washington’s National Gallery of Art (4th and Constitution, N.W.; 202-737-4215) is staging two very grand exhibitions of American landscape and Italian Renaissance painting this season.
Through Jan. 11 in the National Gallery’s East Building is the first-ever retrospective of the great 19th Century western landscape painter Thomas Moran (1837-1926), whose monumental oil of Yellowstone prompted the Congress to establish Yellowstone National Park. His epic “The Three Tetons,” on loan from the White House, is also among the 100 oil and watercolor landscapes in this show.
Through March 1 in the Gallery’s West Building, is the very worthy first major American exhibition of works by Renaissance master Lorenzo Lotto (1480-1557). Famed as a colorist and considered a precursor of Impressionists and some modernists for his idiosyncratic style, psychological approach to portrait painting and insistence on breaking convention and tradition, Lotto was a student of the great Giovanni Bellini and, like him, noted for the impish, “Where’s Waldo?” kind of details he’d insert upon his grand canvasses.
Also in Washington, the National Museum of American Art (8th and G Streets, N.W.; 202-357-2700) is showing the deep Catholic European roots of Puerto Rican culture in an exhibition through March 28 of colonial period art from the noted Teodoro Vidal collection, which was recently donated to the Smithsonian Institution.
Two important Washington notes: The Kennedy Center has completed its mammoth reconstruction and refurbishing of its once forbidding concert hall, creating what is considered the most handicapped-friendly and wheelchair-accommodating theater in America. Vast sums were also lavished on making it one of the most comfy auditoriums you’re likely to find anywhere, and the acoustics, formerly difficult, are now close to absolute perfection.
This writer recently took in a performance of James Galway and the National Symphony doing Corigliano’s “Pied Piper Fantasy” and was able to hear every tiny skitter and trill.
For information, call 202-467-4600.
