Uncovering the lost history of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender artists in New York City.

Queer people have always flocked to New York seeking freedom, forging close-knit groups for support and inspiration. Gay Gotham brings to life the countercultural artistic communities that sprang up over the last hundred years, a creative class whose radical ideas would determine much of modern culture. More than 200 images — both works of art, such as paintings and photographs, as well as letters, snapshots, and ephemera — illuminate their personal bonds, scandal-provoking secrets at the time and many largely unknown to the public since.

Starting with the bohemian era of the 1910s and 1920s, when the pansy craze drew voyeurs of all types to Greenwich Village and Harlem, the book winds through midcentury Broadway as well as Fire Island as it emerged as a hotbed, turns to the post-Stonewall, decade-long wild party that revolved around clubs like the Mineshaft and Studio 54, and continues all the way through the activist mobilization spurred by the AIDS crisis and the move toward acceptance at the century’s close. Throughout, readers encounter famous figures, from James Baldwin and Mae West to Leonard Bernstein, and discover lesser-known ones, such as Harmony Hammond, Greer Lankton, and Richard Bruce Nugent. Surprising relationships emerge: Andy Warhol and Mercedes de Acosta, Robert Mapplethorpe and Cecil Beaton, George Platt Lynes and Gertrude Stein. By peeling back the overlapping layers of this cultural network that thrived despite its illicitness, this groundbreaking publication reveals a whole new side of the history of New York and celebrates the power of artistic collaboration to transcend oppression.

About the Author:

Donald Albrecht is the curator of architecture and design at the Museum of the City of New York and the author of many books, including Cecil Beaton: The New York Years.

This inspiring book accompanies the first travelling exhibition about Doris Duke’s estate Shangri La and its influential synthesis of modernist architecture and Islamic art and design. 

Situated on five acres of terraced gardens and pools overlooking the Pacific Ocean and Honolulu’s Diamond Head, Shangri La was the idyllic paradise of philanthropist Doris Duke, reflecting her personal passion for the art, architecture, and design of the Islamic world. The estate incorporates unique architectural features, such as carved marble doorways, jalis, and floral ceramic tiles, and the decor includes artifacts, such as silk textiles, jewel-toned chandeliers, and gilt and coffered ceilings, many collected during her travels. 

This volume presents an exclusive tour of Shangri La’s breathtaking interiors and landscape, including the splendid furnishings and art. Archival photographs of Duke and friends as well as correspondence and drawings provide a view into a lifestyle defined by the highest sense of aesthetics. Doris Duke’s Shangri La is sure to inspire both art and design lovers.

About еhe Author

Thomas Mellins has organized exhibitions for many institutions and coauthored with Robert A.M. Stern an award-winning New York architecture and urbanism series. Donald Albrecht is the Museum of the City of New York’s curator of architecture and design and the writer of many books. Deborah Pope is the executive director of Shangri La; Keelan Overton is the institution’s curator of Islamic art; Sharon Littlefield Tomlinson is its former curator. Linda Komaroff is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s curator of Islamic art. Tim Street-Porter is a widely published photographer and the author of numerous books.

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Пролистать книгу Doris Duke's Shangri-La: A House in Paradise: Architecture, Landscape, and Islamic Art

Sumptuous and scrupulous in equal measure, the work of William T. Georgis is a glamorous blend of high-style architecture and expressive, innovative applications of the traditions of the decorative arts. In the twenty years since he founded his namesake firm, Georgis has created a dazzling portfolio consisting primarily of houses and apartments; other projects include restaurants, commercial interiors, and galleries. Georgis melds elegant architecture, imaginative furniture and fixtures (often custom-designed), and a layered assembly of art and objects with what he terms "a bit of magic." A thoughtful eclecticism, informed by an extensive knowledge of art, architecture, and the decorative arts, characterizes all his work.

The first monograph on Georgis, Make It Fabulous presents sixteen houses and apartments in New York City, Long Island, Florida, Montana, and California. All the residences were designed around important art collections and often include specially commisioned pieces. Among the projects showcased are Georgis's own homes, a smoked-glass townhouse in New York and a vacation house that hangs over the bay in La Jolla, California. Also included in the volume are Chinatown Brasserie, a theatrical eatery in lower Manhattan, and the interiors of historic Lever House, a respectful restoration of a modern masterpiece.

Along with lavish, large-scale photography, each project features the architect's trenchant commentary on the architecture, the decoration, and the process. Perceptive essays by design historians Donald Albrecht and Natalie Shivers illuminate Georgis's relationships with his clients, or "patrons," and the creation of narratives in his work. Multifaceted and multilayered, just like the work, this inventive volume is a virtuoso tutorial in the world of fabulous.

Norman Bel Geddes Designs America accompanies a landmark exhibition exploring the career of Norman Bel Geddes (1893–1958), one of the 20th century’s foremost theatrical and industrial designers. This companion volume explores Bel Geddes’s life and career in comprehensive detail through nearly 100 projects, ranging from streamlined airplanes, ships, and cars, to stage sets, appliances, and much more. Both the exhibition and the book bring together never-before-seen drawings, models, photographs, and films drawn from the Ransom Center’s Bel Geddes collection. He is perhaps best known for his Futurama display for the General Motors Highways and Horizons exhibit at the New York World’s Fair of 1939–40, which to this day remains a useful model for city planning and design. The exhibition is curated by Donald Albrecht, who contributed the book’s introduction and serves as its editor. In addition to Albrecht, who has written the introduction, twenty scholars have contributed essays.

Indisputably the grande dame of modern design, Andrée Putman burst onto the scene twenty-five years ago with the graphic, black-and-white interiors of the Morgans Hotel in New York.

Since then Putman has gone on to redefine design for a diverse group of prestigious clients, including Karl Lagerfeld, the French Ministry of Culture, and the interior of the supersonic Concorde. Projects since 1980 range from museum interiors, a jewellery line for Christofle, private residences for global trendsetters, and a film set for Peter Greenaway. Putman’s work is the epitome of chic, incorporating cashmere and leather with affordable ceramic tiles and industrial metals for interiors that speak volumes for Putman’s unmistakable style of quiet luxury.

The same attention to detail is given to a simple necklace as to furniture collections, grand offices, and entire spa hotels. Putman is also credited for the revival of once-forgotten early modernist designers, such as Eileen Gray, Robert Mallet-Stevens, and Jean-Michel Frank, whose designs she put back into production and used in her famous interiors. The first comprehensive monograph on Putman’s essential designs in 20 years, Andrée Putman Complete Works will be an indispensable road map of style and elegance to all lovers of modern design.

About the Author:

Donald Albrecht is the curator of architecture and design at the Museum of the City of New York. He prepared the first retrospective of the work of Eero Saarinen and the international traveling exhibition The Work of Charles and Ray Eames. Jean Nouvel is an award-winning French architect.

In the aftermath of World War II, New York emerged as a world-class city and the de facto national financial capital, becoming a magnet for moguls and strivers. At the same time the city remained a collection of small towns made up of people going about their daily rounds. No other publication captured this twin identity as successfully as Look magazine.

In the pre-television era, the editors of Look recognized the great demand for photographs of all kinds - politicians, titans of industry, and unsung heroes, glamorous events and intimate moments, society matrons and showgirls, violent crime and courtroom drama - that provided entertainment and diversion to voyeuristic subscribers to the magazine. Reaching a peak circulation of nearly 8 million in the late 1960s, Look was a national publication with a focus on the fascination and allure of New York.

The magazine's New York images - more than 200,000 in all - were donated to the Museum of the City of New York. Only in New York draws from that astonishing archive to present the tapestry that was New York in the 1940s and 1950s.

A burst of creative energy in the fields of architecture, design, and fashion characterized the years between the two World Wars. Shaping new styles of buildings and furnishings, redefining contemporary dress, and giving visual form to avant-garde performing arts, architects and designers forged a still-influential modern aesthetic. The era's most creative figures rarely worked in isolation, preferring instead to participate in international dialogues that crossed national boundaries and linked capital cities in collaborative artistic enterprise.

No two cities engaged in a more fertile conversation than Paris and New York. The interchange between them was never simple, however, comprising in equal measure admiration and envy, respect and rivalry, as artists and designers in each city interpreted and incorporated principles of Art Deco, Cubism, the International Style, Neo-Romanticism, and Surrealism into their own practices.

The definitive book on the legendary photographer's life in New York City, with many never-before-seen images and reminiscences by his closest friends and confidants.  

From the 1930s, when he helped revolutionize fashion journalism, through the 1960s, when he launched headlong into the Pop art era, London-based photographer Cecil Beaton brought to New York City his own perspective - aristocratic, sexually ambiguous, and theatrical. At the same time, New York offered Beaton innumerable opportunities to reinvent himself and his career.

Cecil Beaton: The New York Years features sketches, costumes, set designs, previously unpublished letters, and over 220 photographs and drawings, many in color and never seen before. This volume documents Beaton's most influential relationships with quintessential figures of the New York art scene, including Greta Garbo, his female confidant and muse, and Andy Warhol. Richly illustrated, Cecil Beaton is the definitive portfolio chronicling Beaton's stunning career in fashion, portraiture, and the performing arts.  The book will be divided into five parts:

Beaton in Vogue: Beaton's photography for Condé Nast's Vogue in the 1930s hastened the decline of fashion illustration in favor of today's emphasis on photography. Beaton himself became a celebrity photographer, as famous as his subjects, in the later mold of Richard Avedon and Annie Leibovitz.

Beaton and the Stage: After World War II, Beaton appeared on the New York stage as an actor, and he also designed sets and costumes for such musicals as My Fair Lady and Coco and operas Vanessa and La Traviata, both at the Metropolitan Opera. 

Beaton on New York: Beaton produced many illustrated books on New York City and his tell-all diaries detailed his life among the city's best-known figures. Beaton was also commissioned to produce innumerable photographs of New Yorkers, from Truman Capote to Tom Wolfe.

Beaton on Garbo: Greta Garbo was Beaton's closest female friend  She was also his muse, and his photographs captured her in many different scenarios and moods from the mid-1940s, when she ended her Hollywood career and permanently moved to New York.

Beaton on Warhol: In 1968, Beaton was advised to photograph a group of young New Yorkers, the most famous of which was Andy Warhol and his Factory. In effect, this photo shoot charted the passing of the torch from Beaton to Warhol, two figures who defined their era's concepts of popular culture, celebrity, and sexual mores.

About the Author:

Donald Albrecht is the Museum of the City of New York's curator of architecture and design. He has contributed essays to a number of books about architecture and design, including Andree Putman: Complete Works and Gabellini: Architecture of the Interior.

Easily the most recognizable architectural style in America, with its brick or shingled facades trimmed in white and ornamented with restrained classical detail, the Colonial Revival emerged in the late nineteenth century and is still the basis for classical design today. The American Style surveys the evolution of the Colonial Revival from the 1890s to the present, focusing on the period from 1900 to the 1930s when New York City was a major center of architecture and decorative arts. Leading architects, including McKim Mead & White, Delano & Aldrich, and Mott B. Schmidt, used its vocabulary for private residences and clubs as well as institutional buildings - banks, schools, churches, and museums.

Richly illustrated with archival photographs and objects from the collections of the Museum of the City of New York and other major institutions, The American Style will be the definitive record of an enduring aesthetic in architecture and decorative arts.