What Would Mrs. Webb Do? MAD Celebrates Its Visionary Founder

By Ellen Gilbert 

"A good life is found only where the creative spirit abounds, where people are free to experiment and create new ideas for themselves." - Aileen Osborn Webb

Referred to as “MAD,” the Museum of Arts and Design is anything but disordered or wildly foolish, nor does it have anything to do with the eponymous magazine. This MAD was founded in 1956 by arts and design champion Aileen Osborn Webb (1892-1979), and from now through February 28, 2015 it is celebrating her achievements in an exhibit, What Would Mrs. Webb Do? A Founder’s Vision. more

Toulouse-Lautrec

By Lynn Adams Smith

Pictured: At the Moulin Rouge: The Clowness Cha-U-Kao, by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1895

The woman in this portrait was one of Lautrec’s favorite models. She was a dancer, contortionist, and clown, deriving her stage name from the chahut, an acrobatic dance similar to the cancan. Crowds often became chaotic and roared in applause when she performed on stage. Her Japanese-sounding stage name was undoubtedly due to the infl uence of Japonism, the movement inspired by Japanese wood-block prints which was admired by many French Impressionist painters. more

Visiting The 9/11 Museum The Memories Come Flooding Back

By Ilene Dube // Photography by Scott Lynch

If I had been asked, before visiting the 9/11 Memorial Museum, if I was personally affected by the September 11 attacks on our country, I might have answered no. After viewing the eight-acre site honoring the 2,983 people who were killed in the horrific attacks, I would have to say we are all personally affected.

When you enter the glass trapezoidal entry pavilion, you immediately develop a somber mindset. An enormous photograph depicting a peaceful scene of the Brooklyn Bridge and East River at 8:30 that morning gets you thinking about what you were doing when the planes hit. more

Charles James Shines at the Met

By Ellen Gilbert

A new show at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is reintroducing a master of 20th-century fashion whose name (until now, at any rate) may be unfamiliar to many: Charles James. Cristóbal Balenciaga, the Basque designer and founder of the eponymous couture house in Paris, is reported to have observed, “James is not America’s greatest couturier. He is simply the world’s best.” Christian Dior credited James’s work as the inspiration for his romantic “New Look” designs after World War II.  more

Clara Wolcott Driscoll, Louis Comfort Tiffany’s Secret Asset

By Linda Arntzenius

Louis Comfort Tiffany. His name evokes one-of-a-kind Art Nouveau windows and lamps with jewel-like, leaded glass shades. Clara Wolcott Driscoll? Not so much. And yet, Driscoll’s was the creative hand behind many of Tiffany’s most iconic designs. How do we know? Because like many Victorians, Clara was an avid letter writer who kept her family back home in Ohio up-to-date on New York City life at the turn of the 20th Century. Her letters reveal a lively young woman with a wry sense of humor, making her way in a man’s world, bicycling around Manhattan in a riding skirt just a tad shorter than the accepted length, going to the opera, and, even though women weren’t allowed to vote, fully informed on the politics of her day with a perspective that took in the Lower East Side as well as Gilded Age Manhattan. more

A Tropical Paradise in the Bronx

By Ellen Gilbert 

Inspirational, coveted, and, let’s face it, kind of crazy-making, orchids have a reputation for inspiring passionate feelings. “The nursery owner petted each plant as we passed,” reports author Susan Orlean in her book The Orchid Thief. She herself makes it a point to never own an orchid, lest she fall prey to the proprietary orchid madness she is observing all around her. more

Simon Doonan, the Classy Iconoclast New York Needs

By Jessica Gross

Call Simon Doonan's style unconventional, punky, iconoclastic, irreverent, humorous, startling - but don't call it campy.

I love camp, but try to avoid anything that is ‘campy,’” says Doonan. “It might sound like splitting hairs, but there is a huge difference between real camp—a la Susan Sontag—and ‘campy,’ which tends to mean predictably tacky. High camp—like Liberace, Carmen Miranda and La Lupe and Oscar Wilde—is the lie that tells the truth. It’s a beautiful thing.” more

Bling-Bling: Two Exhibits Recall New York’s Gilded Age

By Ellen Gilbert

The sorry spectacle that played out over the last several years as the late Brooke Astor’s 89-year-old son, Anthony Marshall, was tried, convicted, and lead to jail for stealing from his mother is unlikely to be remembered as a high point in the annals of New York’s beautiful people. (Citing ill health, Marshall was recently sprung.) Two current exhibits, though, remind of us of the sheer gorgeousness of the lives Gilded Age New Yorkers. more

Art Underground

By Dilshanie Perera

New York City’s largest art gallery is below street level. It boasts commissioned work by artists as varied as Roy Lichtenstein, Romare Bearden, Maya Lin, Sol LeWitt and countless other contemporary sculptors, designers, and multimedia specialists. The space housing the collection isn’t a secret extension of the Met or a new gallery in Chelsea. It’s the city’s transit system. more