LOOT 2013 MAD ABOUT JEWELRY (c) By Polly Guerin

THIS JUST IN: The Museum of Arts and Design’s annual exhibition and sale of one-of-a-kind , artist-made jewelry returns to the MAD from October 2-5, 2013. A Museum-wide Jewelry Day will take place on the last day of the exhibition, Saturday October 5 from 12 pm to 5 pm, and will offer panels on contemporary art jewelry, drop-in workshops, screenings, curator-led tours and a roster of some of the most exciting local artist and designers creating jewelry in Open Studies.

RARE OPPORTUNITY Now in its 13th year LOOT has become the ultimate pop-up shop for contemporary studio and art jewelry, offering the public the rare opportunity to meet some of the most innovative jewelry arts in the world and purchase a treasure at the same time. It’s the best of New York, and Only in New York my friends. Here’s the scoop!!

INTERNATIONAL COUNTRIES represented at LOOT include Argentina, Denmark, Japan, Poland, South Africa, and the United Kingdom to name a few. Participating artists in this year’s LOOT, too many wonderful artisans from 20 countries to mention here, includes:

Marina Massone (Argentina) Marina creates unique, and airy, metallic structures, cascading, bibs and necklaces with curves and movement in precise and finely pleated metals, organic flower-like structures that move with the body. Pictured left one of Massone's necklaces.

Michael Berger (Germany) – Berger’s hand-made collections feature kinetic rings that move and spin on the wearer’s hand. Some twirling objects resemble space ships while others fashion in black twirl about inbedded with diamonds.

Jane Macintosh (UK)- inspired by the Bauhaus movement, Mackintosh crafts one-of simple yet bold jewelry using traditional goldsmithing skills. She combines silver with gold or palladium and uses a matte finish to bring out the subtle tones and colors.

Ta Ta darlings!! LOOT at MAD is my choice this week. Fan mail welcome at pollytalk@verizon.net. Visit Polly’s Blogs at www.pollytalk.com and in the left hand column click on the link to Blogs on fashion, remarkable men and women.



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CULTURAL TREASURES, THE 1920S AND '30S REVISITED (c) By Polly Guerin

The culture capital of the world invites you to experience a wealth of museum treasures revisiting icons of modernism, The Mystery of the Ordinary and more than meets the eye in the best of New York, and Only in New York my friends. Here’s the scoop!!

THE FUTURIST NORMAN BEL GEDDES In a first collaboration with the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas, at Austin, the Museum of the City of New York presents “Norman Bel Geddes: I Have Seen the Future," which will be on view from October 16 to February 10, 2014. It is the first major exploration of this remarkable visionary’s work. Bel Geddes played a significant role in the 1920’s and ‘30s shaping of modern America. He is best known to New Yorkers for the Futurama exhibition at the 1939-40 World’s Fairs and much of what Americans take as commonplace, such as interstate highways, a visit to a multi-media Broadway show, dinner in a sky-high restaurant were innovations by Geddes. The exhibit brings together 200 never-before-seen drawings, models, photographs and films of theater sets and costumes, housing projects, appliances, airplanes and automobiles. For the schedule of events www.mcny.org Image: Norman Bel Geddes, Motor Car No. 9 (without tail fin) ca. 1933. Courtesy of the Edith Lutyens and Bel Geddes Foundation/Harry Ransom Center.

MAGRITTE, The Mystery of the Ordinary Explores the Artist’s breakthrough surrealist years with pivotal works from the 1920’s and 1930’s. On view at The Museum of Modern Art the exhibit showcases an intensely innovative period in which Rene Magritte aligned with the Surrealist movement, and his uncanny depictions of ordinary objects constituted an important new direction in Surrealist art. The exhibition offers fresh insight into the beginnings of Magritte’s extraordinary career as a modern painter and Surrealist artist. Like the artist and poets associated with the Surrealist movement, Magritte sought to overthrow what he saw as the oppressive rationalism of bourgeois society. PICTURED HERE: The Human Condition (1933) brings together two of Magritte’s favorite themes: the window painting” and the “painting within a painting.” For further details www.moma.org MoMA, 11 W. 53rd St.

ART IN THE SPANISH AMERICAN HOME (1492-1898) This is the first major exhibition to explore the private lives, power struggles, and domestic collecting practices of the Spanish Colonial elite, some of the wealthiest people of their time. The Brooklyn Museum brings together some 160 paintings, sculptures, prints, textiles and decorative art objects that demonstrate how the new moneyed classes secured their social status through the spectacular private display of luxury goods, from all over the world. The exhibition invites visitors into an elite Spanish colonial home, beginning with public reception rooms hung with family portraits and filled with luxurious objects and ending with more private rooms where the family received only the most trusted confidants. Through January 12, 2014. www.brooklynmuseum.org

Ta Ta darlings!! A Norman Bel Geddes is my choice this week. Fan mail welcome at pollytalk@verizon.net. Visit Polly’s Blogs at www.pollytalk.com and in the left hand column click on the link to Blogs on fashion, remarkable men and women.

CULTURAL CAPITAL OF THE WORLD, BIG APPLE VENUES (c) By Polly Guerin

New York City, the culture capital of the world, invites you to experience Mumbai. Pictured here highlights from Maharashtra.                                                         

Or wear your best French beret and trip the light fantastic into the world of French culture and dining delights. Discover marble sculptures and cross the line to enjoy French venues. It’s the best of New York, my friends, only in New York. Here’s the scoop!!

UNVEILING MAHARASHTRA (MUMBAI) invited everyone to Times Square this weekend to experience Diwali, widely known as the festival of lights and the most popular Asian-Indian festival in the first-of-its-kind international initiative to promote Indian culture, heritage and diversity with live-performance from some of the biggest names in Bollywood featured with a breathtaking laser light show. Produced by Event Guru, a global event management company. Visit www.diwalitimessquare.com

A TASTE OF FRANCE Calling all Francophiles!!! Billed as “The world’s largest event dedicated to France,” the second annual Taste of France showcases both traditional and cutting edge French contributors to the fields ranging from fashion and culture to education, tourism and technology. More than 50 of the country’s finest chefs present scores of regional specialties paired with wine and other beverages. The show includes market stalls, live entertainment, a “Promenade of the Arts” and petanque fields. September 28 and 29 at Bryant Park, 40th to 42nd Street between Fifth and Sixth Ave. www.letasteoffrance.com

CROSSING THE LINE Now in its seventh year, Crossing the Line is a critically acclaimed month long festival celebrating the talents of innovative visual and performing artists based in France and New York City. The 2013 edition includes “Systema,” a collaboration between the 81-year old electronic music composer Elaine Radique and the prominent contemporary artist Xavier Veilhan; “La Bibliotheque,” an interactive project by the conceptual artist Fanny de Chaille; and playwright, theater director and choreographer Pascal Rambert’s “Une (micro) histoire economique du monde, dansee.” Mid-September through Mid-October at various venues; fiaf.org

DAVID D’ANGERS : MAKING THE MODERN MONUMENT The 19th century sculptor executed numerous monumental commissions, notably the reliefs on the pediment of the Pantheon in Paris, as well as hundreds of busts and portrait medallions of the leading literary, political and artistic figures of his time. He was well versed in Neoclassicism but invested his work with forward-looking Romantic sensibility. The exhibit at the French Collection presents some 45 works on paper and sculptures in marble, bronze and other materials, many never before exhibited. Through Dec. 8, 2013. www.thefrick.org

Ta Ta darlings!! A Taste of France is my choice this week. Fan mail welcome at pollytalk@verizon.net. Visit Polly’s Blogs at www.pollytalk.com and in the left hand column click on the link to Blogs on fashion, remarkable men and women.

ARTISTIC MELANGE and ENTERTAINMENTS (c) By Polly Guerin

The fall season ushers in rich cultural diversions and entertainments to fill your social agenda and cultivate your mind. Chagall and Kandinsky are revisited and the theater opens analytical discussions. Here’s the scoop!!!

CHAGALL; LOVE, WAR, and EXILE The Jewish Museum in New York presents the first U.S. exhibition exploring the darker works by Marc Chagall created during the World War II era. A significant but neglected period in the artist’s career, the exhibition from the rise of fascism in the 1930s through 1948, years spent in Paris by the artist and then in exile in New York. While Chagall oeuvre is recognized to its lighthearted and folkloric imagery, the era brings to light the suffering and persecution of the times through evocative paintings deeply responsive to the suffering inflected the war and his own personal losses and concerns. By the mid-40s, Chagall returns to joyful, colorful compositions expressing the power of love. Through Feb. 2, 2014, for information about public programs call 212.423.3200.

VASILY KANDINSKY: From Blaue Reiter to Bauhaus, 1910-1925. An exhibition of masterworks that explores the development of Kandinsky’s art over a critical period of time: from the Blaue Reiter period into the pure abstraction and total environment of his Bauhaus years connects art, music, and theater. This gathering of loans from private and public collections traces the evolution of Kandinsky’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. The exhibit charts the birth of abstraction, evolution of work that extends beyond easel painting with artists among his peers including Albert Bloch, Marcel Breuer, Paul Klee, and August Macke. At Neue Galerie New York, 1048 Fifth Ave. at 86th St. Opens October 3.

FINAL ANALYSIS By Otho Eskin and directed by Ludovica Villar-Hauser is a though provoking play set in Vienna. The inception of Final Analysis was a historical incident. In 1910, Gustav Mahler, one of the great composers and orchestral conductors of his era, sought out Sigmund Freud for psychoanalytic help as his wife; Alma was threatening to leave Gustav. The setting brings us into this world of Vienna on the eve of World War I, a hot-house in which the upper classes lived in the twilight of the Hapsburg Empire, against a background of crushing poverty of the masses, corruption, ethnic hatred and virulent anti-Semitism. At the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre, The Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 W. 42nd St. (between 9thand10th Ave.) Call Ticket Central: 212.279.4200. Through Oct. 6th.

Ta Ta darlings!! Final Analysis was my choice this week. Fan mail welcome at pollytalk@verizon.net. Visit Polly’s Blogs at www.pollytalk.com and in the left hand column click on the link to Blogs on fashion, remarkable men and women.

STAVRINOS, GEORGE Illustrator Extraordinaire (c) By Polly Guerin

A seductive draftsman and fashion illustrator, the renaissance artist George Stavrinos was a gifted designer, photographer, filmmaker and commercial illustrator who gets stellar recognition in the exhibition, THE VISION OF GEORGE STAVRINOS at the Museum of American Illustration/the Society of Illustrators at 128 E. 63rd St. in New York City through October 19, 2013, which features over 100 illustrations highlighting Stavrinos’ career. His works are punctuated by supreme beings, women and men so chic and elegant that they graced the pages of elite magazines and the fashion advertisements of the most prestigious department store advertisements in the city.


A TALENTED STUDENT Like a phoenix rising from the sea Stavrinos emerged as an unprecedented talent in a family that approved his career choice. He studied graphics at the Rhode Island School of Design, moving later in 1973 to New York City where he presented his portfolio to eh prestigious Push Pin Studios where co-founders Seymour Chwast and Milton Glaser recognized his talent and offered him a staff position. Though Stavrinos chose only to be represented by Push Pin, his oeuvre was prolific. He expanded his client list to include the New York Magazine, Bonwit Teller, Psychology Today, Pan Am, Columbia Records, Capezio, Viva, Oui and Gentlemen’s Quarterly to name a few.

A BRILLIANT CAREER George’s career, kicked off in the fast trace and in 1977, when he began producing fashion illustrations for Barney’s and in conjunction with an ad agency, his work quickly became the face of Barney’s, new, chic, upscale look. It was at this time that George contributed work to the Gay Source: A Catalog for Men. Stavrinos was at the height of his métier, a sort after artist and weaver of magical images that live in his illustrations. He also taught at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and was invited to lecture at Tokyo's Designers Gakium College and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. In 1979, Stavrinos began an association with the retailer Bergdorf Goodman that would launch him into the fashion world's stratosphere.

PARTNERSHIP WITH LGBT Stavrinos’ life was cut all too short in 1990 at the age of 42 from pneumonia related causes and by the AIDs epidemic that swept through an entire generation. Yet, his work steadfastly remains an inspiration for art and fashion today so it is fitting that in partnership with Live Out Loud a non-profit organization dedicated to inspiring and empowering LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) youth that a portion of the proceeds generated during the exhibition will be donated to the Live Out Loud scholarship program awarded to college-bound LGBT high school seniors based on leadership, community service, academic credentials, financial need and future goals. Visit: www.liveoutloud.info

The Society of Illustrators, founded in1901, is the oldest non-profit organization solely dedicated to the art and appreciation of illustration in America. Prominent Society members have been Maxfield Parrish, N.C. Wyeth and Norman Rockwell, among others. It is open to the public free of charge on Tuesday, 10-8pm; Wednesday-Friday, 10-5pm; and Saturday, 12-4pm. www.societyillustrators.org.