Word: whitneys
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...favorite athletes, hockey's New York Rangers. His engaging lack of inhibition prompted him to accept a cameo role as a doctor in Woody Allen's forthcoming film Hannah and Her Sisters. Truth to tell, the movie appearance was set up by Schmidt's third wife, Helen Cutting Whitney, producer and director of ABC and PBS documentaries on such topics as McCarthyism and homosexuality, and co-author, with Eugenia Zuckerman, of a feature-film script titled K.589...
Some of the shapes, materials and images that resulted are currently on display in an exhibition at New York City's Whitney Museum, "High Styles: Twentieth-Century American Design." The show, which includes 300 pieces of furniture, craftworks, tableware and household appliances, was assembled by six different curators and seems more the rough outline of a museum exhibit than a finished show. Indeed, in a gallery that is like the vast attic of some anonymous and impossibly trendy old American family--interesting, to be sure, but incoherent--the recurrent evocation of the future is one of the few themes reaffirmed...
...futurist sensibility took hold, mainstream designers showed some transitional ambivalence: a goofy "electric candle" (1929) on view at the Whitney is unsure if it is supposed to look like a rocket or an actual candle or a tiny fluted Doric column. But the black-paneled Atwater Kent radio from the same period has a machine-age spareness that is, like Fred Astaire, both suave and ingenuous. It is an American synthesis that product design has only lately been recapturing, as in Apple's nubile Macintosh computer...
...future as it was conceived in a more hopeful past. It is a neat trick. This strain of the new-wave sensibility is an ironic mixture of nostalgia and contempt, simultaneously mock futurist and mock historicist. The allusions are to old television and B movies. At the Whitney, Dakota Jackson's UFO-shaped Saturn stool (1976) and R.M. Fischer's enormous, intimidating Max lamp (1983) are like fakey props from 1950s science-fiction films. Burton's saw-toothed aluminum chair (1980-81) seems to be a throne awaiting a space-age dictator, Dune-style. Bruce Tomb's wood-and-granite...
...Stumped for a Christmas gift? Give a loved one a chapel, as Marylou Whitney gave her husband Sonny, so he might worship without leaving their Saratoga Springs, N.Y., estate. Or do as Washington Contractor Samuel Gessford did when he built five Philadelphia row houses for his homesick wife to look at. Mansions, yachts, planes--they are all among the grand gifts in Only the Best by Stuart E. Jacobson (Abrams; 216 pages; $35). In this celebration of the sumptuous, it is the odd items that twinkle brightest: a money clip from Jack Benny to George Burns ("I want the dollar...