Word: mondrian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...VIPs in attendance were, as usual, wowed by what Schrager, 53, calls "hotel as theater." But these days the Brooklyn-born co-founder of New York's legendary Studio 54 nightclub and the man behind such chic cribs as New York City's Royalton and Los Angeles' Mondrian hotels, is looking for a broader audience--people willing to pay up to be put up in his brand of hotel hipness. Trying to stay ahead of the curve he started, Schrager is adding 10 hostelries to the five he had been running. "It's a very capital-intensive business, which doesn...
...reinvent" dilapidated structures instead of building from scratch. He has made an art form of saving money with style--making industrial-quality fixtures look fashionable. He never skimps on attitude, though--ask anyone who has been chided for trying to move the carefully arranged pool chairs at Los Angeles' Mondrian. Schrager stages casting calls and hires aspiring actor-models to play the help; the snooty service can be unimpressive to customers who lack agents...
Later, in Hollywood, the fictional Morris becomes a hack screenwriter and spies Reagan and his soon-to-be first wife Jane Wyman on the beach: "This mature Dutch--'Ronnie' she calls him--is tall and sparely straight, constructed in flats, a mobile Mondrian... Even his pectorals are flat and square; he has no bulges in him, of brawn or brain...
...second time it appears Dick is going to die is when he is rocking on a chair leaning against a window 12 floors above the pool at the Mondrian hotel. "It makes me a little nervous, but in a weird, comforting way," he says, momentarily straightening the chair. Looking down at the pool, where beautiful, half-naked European women lounge on giant pillows sipping cocktails, he thinks about his girlfriend. "You would really s__ if you saw my girlfriend," he says...
Early American modernism is filled with European borrowings, from Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Picabia, Leger, etc., etc. Nothing characteristically American there, you might say. But the crux of the identity issue is not the stylistic sources the artists drew on but the experiences on which they used them. It was there that the American-ness of American art hove into view, and it showed itself in two enormous image fields...