Archives 2023

Around the time Irving Penn made 1950’s The Harlequin Dress (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn), one Vogue reader declared that his pictures were so intense that “they burned on the page.” Nearly 75 years later, it remains among the magazine’s most celebrated fashion photographs and, surely, Penn’s masterpiece. The picture was a collaborative affair between the image-maker and his model, who, as the title reveals, he would soon marry. Her eyes follow you like the Mona Lisa’s—to whom Time magazine had already compared her—compelling you to stare back.

An exceptional version of it can be seen this spring as London’s V&A opens the Sainsbury Gallery, its biggest space, for an epic new exhibition of photographs. At more than 300 artworks, “Fragile Beauty: Photographs from the Sir Elton John and David Furnish Collection” is the largest photographic show in the museum’s history and a glimpse into one of the finest collections in private hands. It starts at 1950, Penn’s annus mirabilis, and goes bang up to now. (“We’ve somehow managed to squeeze in a 2023 cyanotype by Meghann Riepenhoff,” says Furnish.)

In the early 1990s and just beyond, Sir Elton made several of those volte-faces that have often punctuated his collecting career. He sold nearly everything—cars, jewelry, paintings, Dresden figurines, art deco bronzes, Italian silver—to concentrate instead on acquiring photographs. Penn’s tour de force was one of his first buys.

Jonas Brothers fans, Tina: The Tina Turner Musical fans, and Jason Robert Brown fans, hold on to your hats: Next spring, Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren will star in the first Broadway production of Brown’s Drama Desk Award-winning musical The Last Five Years, with 2024 Tony nominee Whitney White (Jaja’s African Hair Braiding) directing.

The announcement arrives almost 25 years to the day after Brown—the brilliant composer-lyricist behind Parade, 13, The Bridges of Madison County, and Mr. Saturday Night—wrote the show’s very first song. “It was the first time I had started a project without knowing where it was going to end up,” he recalled in a statement, “without a producer or collaborators, just me very much on my own needing to find the music and words that would tell a story that was twisting my heart into impossible shapes every day.”

He continued: “For 25 years, I have let The Last Five Years lead me on its journey, through our very first production in Skokie in 2001 to our Off-Broadway premiere a year later, a thrilling film version, a record-breaking revival at Second Stage, and thousands of productions spanning every continent. I have always believed that when the time was right, The Last Five Years would make its way to Broadway. To have Nick and Adrienne taking on these roles is a composer’s dream come true, and to have Whitney’s extraordinary guidance and vision is the hope of every playwright. It has taken 25 years, but the time is right.”

Excepting the Jonas Brothers’ weeklong residency at the Marquis Theatre last year, The Last Five Years will mark Nick Jonas’s first appearance on Broadway since 2012, when he succeeded Daniel Radcliffe and Darren Criss as J. Pierrepont Finch in a revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Warren, meanwhile, has not trod the boards since her Tony-winning turn in Tina: The Tina Turner Musical from 2019 to 2021.

As the show’s logline reads, The Last Five Years “follows two New Yorkers, rising author Jamie and aspiring actress Cathy, as they fall in and out of love over the course of five years,” examining “whether a couple, once united by their dreams, can remain connected as their paths diverge.” Brown, who also wrote the book, loosely based the story on his first marriage.

“The Last Five Years is one of the greatest original American musicals in the canon,” White said in a statement. “I think we all understand how hard it is to leave something behind; a lover, a job, a country, a relationship that doesn’t serve you anymore. But for me, the heartbreak at the center of the show walks hand in hand with abundant love and possibility. I know that audiences will be blown away, once again, by the brilliance of Jason Robert Brown’s one-of-a-kind composition, orchestration, and musical vision, and that they will see themselves in Jamie and Cathy—two young people trying to figure it all out.”

Throughout the past four decades, British artist Lubaina Himid has leaned into big questions. How can the African diaspora become more visible to the world? What are the ongoing effects of colonialism, of slavery? What can be done about hunger, incarceration, war?

For such loaded topics, Himid’s work is often filled with humor, her folksy figuration executed in bright, saturated colors. Her paintings and installations have a way of beckoning the viewer closer. “You’re invited into the conversation,” Himid, 70, tells me.

A leading figure in the British Black Arts Movement in the 1980s and ’90s, Himid has exhibited widely and received many prestigious accolades, including the Turner Prize in 2017 and a CBE appointment in 2018. Most recently, she was awarded the Suzanne Deal Booth/FLAG Art Foundation Prize, which led to “Lubaina Himid: Make Do and Mend,” now on view at the FLAG Art Foundation in New York. (The show was co-organized by The Contemporary Austin, where it debuted earlier this year.)

“Make Do and Mend” consists of two new bodies of work: a suite of what she calls her Strategy Paintings, and a sculptural series of 64 colorful, anthropomorphized planks titled Aunties. The latter are installed along the walls of FLAG, framed by the city’s gleaming architecture and piercing natural light.