Champagne and Heels

Just finished Steve Martin‘s latest novel “An Object of Beauty,” which came out last November and it is so good! It centers on an uber-ambitious young art dealer in NYC in the 90’s and how she works her way up. I love Steve Martin’s quiet observational pacing and the characters he creates. It’s like reading about a girl you went to college with. Too familiar and believable. He also inserts images of amazing works of art that connect to the story throughout the book including one of my favorite paintings above, by Dorothea Tanning called “A Little Night Music”. She did the painting in 1946, the same year she married Max Ernst. It’s an amazing surrealist image that I saw years ago at the Tate in London and got attached to. If there was a painting I could own in my lifetime this would be it. And also maybe something by Andrew Wyeth (“Christina’s World”) and anything by John Singer Sargent, and maybe a Francis Bacon (again, anything will do) and an Alice Neel too. Ok, I also really want a Balthus… and an Edward Hopper and something by Eric Fischl. A show of Dorothea Tanning’s work, “Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams,” opened this weekend on June 11th at the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane and will be up through October 2, 2011.

John Singer Sargent “Die Töchter Boit” (1882) owned by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston above and something from Eric Fischl’s recent series, “Beach Scene With Pink Hat” (2006) below.