As a result, there emerged an Atlas statue between the windows on the second floor of the store, it is not the story in the Greek mythology but a fine clock on the shoulders of giants. The Atlas giants figure is the famous artist Henry Frederick Metzler's masterpiece, this genius sculptor carved bow portrait for a number of New York ships in the 19th century, so he was famous. The Atlas Status he created for Tiffany Jewelry was as high as 9 feet, and was standing proudly with a hollow space inside which can almost hold a man standing upright. This portrait with cedar carving, bronze outer layer, has become a color of aerugo and increased a sense of classic elegance after years. There is another interesting allusion of the clock. In 1905, Tiffany & Co. moved from Broadway to the junction between the Fifth Avenue and 37 Street, the new building did not have the name of Tiffany & Co., because the management felt that the Atlas clock outside the second floor is sufficient enough to be a company logo.Trend Alert! Mary-Kate Olsen in tiffanys
In fact, this clock has been giving the correct time for the passers-by in New York shopping district in 52 years. {P15}> Interestingly, Tiffany & Co. decided to design a kind of watch in 1980, which gained its inspiration from concise American decorative Tiffany Building and Atlas clock.Tiffany Pendants
The essence of Silver Tiffany's Design lies in the back to nature, while the real source of its watch is from the clock. Meanwhile, the Atlas has become irreplaceable symbol of Tiffany`s elegance world. Over the years, Tiffany's design has never meet on the popular fashion of ups and downs. Her designs can arbitrarily extract inspiration from everything in nature and get rid of cumber and artificialness. It requires the integration naturally of the simpleness and clearness, the exciting moving grace, harmony, proportion and coherence in every Tiffany design.
At present, Tiffany has leapt to the palace of gate-level design named world-famous jewelry companies and played around the leading role throughout the world. Museums around the world, people in pursuit of high-style goods and discerning collectors all take Tiffany's masterpiece as collections
The store opened in 1940 has a typical America-decoration style, simple is its characteristic and it greatly used non-glass and bright surface stainless steel as its decoration material. With clear and elegant figure and without any affected concise furnishings, there is another free and unyielding character, which is 100% Tiffany Image. Exclusive points: There is a clock on the facade of the Tiffany building, which is called Tiffany Atlas clock. This well-known clock has been a symbolic ornament of Tiffany`s stores, and it`s also the unique among the specialized stores Tiffany all over the world, The earliest an Atlas clock can be traced back in 1853.Experts also Love Fascinating tiffany bracelet Tiffany Jewelry
Flagship store of Tiffany & Co. in New York Fifth Avenue was established in 1939 when it was coincided with the beginning of World Expo in New York City. Epoch-making image of the famous store brightened up us, as if the previews of the future trends, drawing up the curtain of the new design style of the late 20th century.Silver Tiffany
In 1853, Tiffany & Co. were largely developed, for Charlie Tiffany expanded their business through moving the old store in Manhattan to a huge store in No. 550 Broadway. Feeling the monotonous front outer wall of store, he conceived the clock for decoration.Hottest, Newest, Latest: tiffany silvers
AMONG the many rooms that make up this grand retrospective of the work of Takashi Murakami, Japan's best-known contemporary artist, one is especially provocative. It is not the gallery with the wide-eyed cartoon-like figures in bizarrely erotic poses. Nor is it the atrium, with its towering sculpture of a colourfully grotesque, pointy-headed alien, surrounded by adorable marshmallow-like sentries. The biggest buzz is about the space right in the centre of the Brooklyn Museum's 18,500 square-foot (1,700 square-metre) show: a fully operational Louis Vuitton shop, where visitors can buy their very own luxury handbag covered in Mr Murakami's playful designs for upwards of $650.
"Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art," Andy Warhol once said. Mr Murakami, 46, who is often called the "Japanese Warhol" for his savvy publicity and branding, thoroughly muddles the difference between his art and commercial work. In addition to his Louis Vuitton collection (which he describes as "the heart of the exhibition"), his personal company churns out everything from paintings to keyrings. His promotional literature advertises his auction records and makes little distinction between artistic and financial success.
This approach to art is particularly Japanese, argues Mr Murakami. Discriminating between fine art and popular merchandise, or individual genius and learned craft, is a Western preoccupation. Trained in traditional Japanese art, Mr Murakami coined the term "Superflat" for his theory about the similarities between the formal, decorative flatness of Japanese painting and the shallow, glossed fantasies of popular Japanese cartoons. It also recognises the lack of distinction between high and low in Japanese art. To others his art is known as the school of "infantile capitalism".
This 90-piece, multimedia show, originally curated for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where it was on view until mid-February, is the most ambitious examination so far of the whole Murakami brand. Galleries feature his distinctive mix of sinister and innocent, otherwise known as "sadocute": enormous canvases of googly-eyed mushrooms (subtly evocative of mushroom clouds); walls of hysterically cheerful flowers; a sexually explicit female robot that turns into an aeroplane; a demonic character named Mr DOB who is clearly derived from Mickey Mouse; and an animated film of two weirdly cute, snaggle-toothed creatures, Kaikai and Kiki.
Kaikai Kiki is also the name of Mr Murakami's company, which employs more than 100 people in three offices in Tokyo and New York. Unlike Warhol's "Factory", which was a stylish, party-ready conceit, Mr Murakami's operation oversees a sophisticated assembly-line. He designs and then delegates, and crafts the elegant theories that help sell his works for record prices. His solo show at the Larry Gagosian gallery in Manhattan last summer, where his works were priced at $100,000-$1.6m, sold out before it even opened.
Mr Murakami argues that the Japanese fixation with violent comic books, titillating plastic figurines and super-cute creatures, such as Hello Kitty, is a product of the country's sense of impotence following the second world war. The humiliation of Japan's military and the rise of the female corporate executive served to invert the traditional gender hierarchy; in his writing he refers to the "self-medicated denizens of a castrated nation-state".
Yet Mr Murakami's art is less articulate than you would expect from this elaborate theorising. The colourful, slick canvases are technically impressive, but they have all the emotional weight of the "go-faster" stripes you see on cars. Even his largest and most dynamic works fail to move, largely owing to the sterile application of bright acrylic paint on canvas. As for Mr Murakami's sexualised sculptures, with their oversized breasts and silly big eyes, like "Miss Ko2 at Wonder Festival 2000" (pictured left), here he is clearly celebrating the emotional regression and sexual perversion of Japanese manga comics, even as he claims to critique the genre.
Having it both ways is typical of Mr Murakami, who has managed to create an intellectual framework that lets him do and sell whatever he wants. Perhaps the best thing you can say about it is that his unbridled embrace of commercialism seems more honest than cynical.
AGED nine, a Russian-Georgian boy called Georgi Balanchivadze moved in 1913 from rural Finland to St Petersburg to enrol as a ballet student in the Imperial Theatre School. Some 11 years later, he travelled to East Prussia with the Soviet State Dancers; refusing an order to return home, he defected and fled to Paris, where another Russian exile, Sergei Diaghilev, hired him as a choreographer for the Ballets Russes. After a brief stint in London, George Balanchine (as he was by then) moved to America in 1933, where he founded American ballet, and became perhaps the most inventive choreographer of the 20th century. He called America "land of the lovely bodies" and he started an athletic, limber style of dance that celebrated those bodies, explicitly rejecting the mannered, regal European tradition.
Six years after Balanchine came to America, the exclusive Curtis Institute, a music academy in Philadelphia, extended an invitation to teach to Rudolf Serkin, an Austrian-trained pianist. In his youth he had advised his sister to restrict her listening to "real music-nothing modern! Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert." Every recital he played at Carnegie Hall during his 50 years there included something by Beethoven; in his entire performing career he played only two pieces written by Americans. He saw himself as standard-bearer for the pre-war Teutonic civilisation ruined by the Nazis, and he brought this civilisation to America as an enlightening service, something to benefit the natives.
These two poles of experience-roughly speaking, Russian acclimatisation and Germanic colonisation-anchor Joseph Horowitz's masterful study of how the Russian revolution, the rise of European fascism and the second world war all transformed the American performing arts by sending an unprecedented wave of immigrants and refugees from Eastern Europe. Between those poles lay a variety of experience, from the reinvented success of Marlene Dietrich to the pioneering loneliness of Edgard Varèse, a French-Italian Russophile who was one of the first composers to mine non-Western traditions. These immigrants came to a country with barely a single ballet company, a few young orchestras, a dramatic tradition of instructive melodrama, a film industry whose greatest director was a nativist bigot (D.W. Griffith) and whose greatest star (Mary Pickford) exuded wholesome blandness. Its most renowned writers and painters (such as Henry James and John Singer Sargent) emulated Europeans and sought their approval. The immigrants Mr Horowitz profiles did not simply fit in to American culture; they created it, giving a young country cultural self-confidence to match its growing political strength.
Mr Horowitz tells his story through brief biographies. This lets him showcase his excellent analytical skills, particularly when it comes to music: his discussion of Erich Korngold, a composing prodigy who grew rich and famous writing rather saccharine film scores, is especially insightful. He also has a taste for the endearing, if a bit gossipy, personal anecdote: Arnold Schoenberg watched "The Lone Ranger" and "Hopalong Cassidy"; Arturo Toscanini enjoyed New Orleans jazz and televised boxing.
As a coda, Mr Horowitz compares the experiences of Thomas Mann and Vladimir Nabokov in the United States. The former fled the Nazis, settled in Los Angeles and became America's "good German": he allegorised Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal in "Joseph the Provider". Yet the cold war and McCarthyism disillusioned him, and he rejected the "artificial paradise" of California for Switzerland. Nabokov also left America for Switzerland, but while Mann's subject remained Germany, Nabokov's American masterpiece, "Lolita", is a love-letter to the country in all its plastic kitsch. "I am as American as April in Arizona," Nabokov wrote in 1966. It's a beautiful sentence. That it does not really mean anything, makes it no less beautiful or American.
THE city has been all things to all men. To Jews, whose ancestors had been taken in captivity from Jerusalem in 586BC by King Nebuchadnezzar II, the rivers of Babylon were where they sat down and wept. Genesis claims that these Jews went on to build the Tower of Babel, although there is no physical evidence of its existence (or of the Hanging Gardens, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world). Reformation Christians depicted Babylon as a whore, dedicated to orgies and feasting; Martin Luther compared the Rome of his day with ancient Babylon.
Archaeologists tell a different story. They show that Babylon was a centre of innovation, regarding itself as "the cosmic city", with a history stretching back to the third millennium BC and lasting until the death of Alexander the Great in Babylon in 323BC. It was a great innovator in medicine, astronomy, astrology, mathematics and banking; the Babylonians may even have believed that the world was round.
THINK of the word "bluestocking" and you are likely to conjure up something female, formidable and frumpy-a dingy corner of feminism, the historical equivalent of dungarees. "Brilliant Women", a show at London's National Portrait Gallery, blows all that away.
Between 1750 and 1790 a high tide of British confidence lifted into prominence a number of intellectual and creative women, some of whom occasionally met for conversation. (The name stuck after an absentminded male guest once attended wearing the blue woollen stockings of working men instead of the more formal white silk.) The women are portrayed as sometimes fashionable, sometimes casual, but always unencumbered by domesticity. Not a husband, child or dog in sight. Instead there are books and pens, palettes and musical scores.
This was the Age of Enlightenment which looked to the classical world for its symbols of order, reason and inspiration. What could be more rational than that women should be educated and have their work taken seriously? In 1779 Richard Samuel, a painter, sent the Royal Academy exhibition his "Nine Living Muses of Great Britain"-a group of female writers and artists, all robed in classical style, holding scrolls and musical instruments, with Angelica Kauffmann at the easel. Kauffmann survives, but many of the others are now obscure outside academia: Elizabeth Montagu, a critic-"Queen of the Blues", as Dr Johnson dubbed her-whose portrait by Allan Ramsay shows her looking faintly amused in a froth of lace and pink silk, leaning on a volume by David Hume, the Scottish philosopher and historian; or Anna Seward, a poet who is portrayed turning a page in her Milton-plainly waiting to get back to it; or Elizabeth Carter, poet, classicist, rival of Alexander Pope and translator of Epictetus, helmeted as Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, and carrying a volume of Plato.
These portraits are public statements. But for women then, public meant immodest. A learned woman's morals were always suspect, especially if she earned her living. Catharine Macaulay, a republican historian (pictured above), could pose as a Roman matron all she liked, but that did not stop caricaturists mocking her for using cosmetics and for her male friendships. In fact, the exhibition shows how fragile the whole enterprise was, how conflicted the women were themselves, and how quickly the revolutions in America and France turned the tide against them. There is a portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft in the 1790s holding an open book. Unlike all the rest, this one is blank. Was her "Vindication of the Rights of Woman" unmentionable? Or was this her sense of starting from nothing, with no female forebears? But just as you leave, near a vicious Thomas Rowlandson etching of fighting bluestockings, there hangs an intriguing silhouette of an elderly Hannah More. The year is 1827, a generation later, and she sits at what looks like a tea table. But look again, and instead of cups and saucers there is a book in her hand, and pen and ink at the ready.
ALL IT takes to be a photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson once said, is "one finger, one eye and two legs". He visualised photography as a way of engaging with the world. He quietly stalked his subjects-Balinese dancers, Mongolian wrestlers, New York bankers-until that "decisive moment" when the right composition filled the frame. It all came so naturally. He rarely used a light meter or checked his aperture setting, and he seldom took more than a few shots of a single subject. With the instinct of a hunter, he knew when to click the shutter: "I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, determined to ‘trap' life-to preserve life in the act of living."
Born in 1908 in Paris, the eldest son of wealthy cotton-thread manufacturers, Cartier-Bresson had a lusty, rebellious hunger for travel. With a head full of Rimbaud and a copy of "Ulysses" under his arm, he set off for west Africa in search of adventure. (He aspired to be a painter, but Gertrude Stein suggested he drop the brushes.) He bought his first Leica in the Côte d'Ivoire when he was 23. Light and quiet, the camera had just come onto the market, and it was a revelation. It fitted into his pocket, along with a few rolls of film. "Nobody took pictures that were better at exploiting the portability of the camera," says Peter Galassi, the chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where "Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century" is on view.
The show, many years in the making, is drawn primarily from the huge archive of work held by the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris, founded a year before he died in 2004. From the thousands available, Mr Galassi has selected 300 images from 1929 to 1989, a fifth of which have never been seen publicly before.
As cameras grew smaller and picture magazines bigger, Cartier-Bresson became a globe-trotting hired hand. But though he had a knack for being in the right place at the right time-in India at the time of Gandhi's assassination, in China during the Cultural Revolution-he did not really have a nose for a good scoop. What he excelled at was seeing things in a different way from most other people.
The visitor is greeted by a wall of four photographs: a crowd of flag-waving, bespectacled Nixon-supporters in Texas in 1960 (the illustration above shows a couple of more sedate fans in Indiana); a cluster of Chinese youth gawking at a television in Beijing in 1958; a mass of French mourners in coats holding hands in 1962; and a group of wizened and rather menacing old men in Sardinia, lounging in straw-like grass, also in 1962. The juxtaposition of these images shows not just Cartier-Bresson's range but also his gift for group portraits. When snapping a spectacle-a coronation, say, or a parade-he trained his camera on the unsuspecting bystanders.
The show is divided into sections, starting with some of Cartier-Bresson's most arresting surrealist work from the 1930s, such as a sunbather in Trieste, Italy, whose white body echoes a sliver of white in the grass, and his self-assured prostitutes in Mexico City. Then came the war (he was a prisoner in Germany for three years before escaping) followed by his career as photojournalist and portrait photographer.
There is much to marvel at, such as the pictures of China in 1948, which capture the photographer's powerful sense of formal composition. Some of the curator's choices seem a bit odd and the written descriptions, which add little, are occasionally heavy-handed. One section, for instance, is introduced as Cartier-Bresson's criticism of "American vulgarity, greed and racism". But the visitor is left with a remarkable chronicle of the transformations of the 20th century-the rise of industrialisation, the fall of colonialism, the spread of commercialism and the grand-scale shift in world order-all captured by a lone man and his camera.
