What Vivian Maier Saw in Color

Self-portrait New York NY May 5 1955

From the 1950s until a few years before she died, in 2009, destitute at the age of 83, Vivian Maier took at least 150,000 pictures, mostly in Chicago, and showed them to nobody. Now she has earned her place alongside Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Lisette Model, Garry Winogrand, and other giants of the American street. See her vivid photos, which might have languished in obscurity if not for a chance acquisition.

A photograph is a secret about a secret,” Diane Arbus said. In the case of Vivian Maier, the photographer was a secret, too. From the nineteen-fifties until a few years before she died, in 2009, destitute at the age of eighty-three, Maier took at least a hundred and fifty thousand pictures, mostly in Chicago, and showed them to nobody. It’s telling, perhaps, that one of her favorite motifs was to shoot her own shadow. For decades, she supported herself as a nanny in the wealthy enclaves of the city. But her real work was roaming the streets with her camera (often with her young charges in tow), capturing images of sublime spontaneity, wit, and compositional savvy. When pressed about her occupation by a man she once knew, Maier didn’t describe herself as a nanny. She said, “I am sort of a spy.” All the best street photographers are.

Maier’s covert work might have languished in obscurity if not for the chance acquisition, in 2007, of a cache of negatives, prints, contact sheets, and unprocessed rolls of film, all seized from a storage locker because she fell behind on the rent. When John Maloof, a Chicago real-estate agent, bought the material, everything about Maier’s identity was a mystery except for her name. It was only when he ran across her death notice, two years later, that her story began to unfold. (His wonderful documentary on the subject, “Finding Vivian Maier,” was nominated for an Academy Award in 2015.) Maier shot in both color and black-and-white; perhaps to establish her credibility as a “serious” artist, the first of her pictures to be widely disseminated were the latter. Now that Maier has earned her place alongside Arbus, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Lisette Model, Garry Winogrand, and other giants of the American street, a new book, “Vivian Maier: The Color Work,” and a related exhibition at Howard Greenberg Gallery (opening on November 14th) consider her eye for the vivid.

Chicago, 1978.

Maier is such an original artist that it feels a like a cheat to play games of compare and contrast. But, leafing through the book, it’s remarkable how often other photographers spring to mind. On an unknown date, at the Art Institute of Chicago, she pulled a Thomas Struth when she documented a mother (a nanny?) and a child staring raptly at a painting on the wall, both dressed in navy and white; the composition is centrally anchored by another child staring, defiantly, directly at Maier. 

In another image, a red-headed boy, who sucks his thumb while slumped against a wood-panelled wall on which four framed handguns are hanging, could be the shy, sullen cousin of Arbus’s manic boy with a toy hand grenade. The detached bumper and crash-crumpled metal of a Volkswagen Beetle, shot in Chicagoland in 1977, assumes sculptural proportions that invite thoughts of Arnold Odermatt, the Swiss policeman whose forensic photos of automobile accidents deserve to be more widely known.

Location unknown, 1960.

The Beetle was yellow, a color that brings out Maier’s best. In 1975, she took one of her shadow self-portraits against a green lawn dotted with little gold blossoms; cropped by the lens, the dainty, painterly landscape splits the difference between a Warhol silkscreen of flowers and the allover compositions of AbEx. (Note that Maier was shooting her shadow in the nineteen-fifties, roughly a decade before Friedlander, who is renowned for the gesture, did the same.) 

The same year, she came across two men on a sidewalk—one standing, one striding—both wearing canary shorts and lemon-fizz socks. To their right is a woman in a sensibly dark woolly cardigan and a daffodil-colored skirt. Their outfits are almost absurdly sunny, but not one of them is smiling.

Chicagoland, April, 1977.

Maier can pack an entire short story’s worth of details into a single frame. Consider the overly tan, skin-baring couple shot in an unknown location in 1960. They stand peeping through two cruciform holes in a high wall separating them from a swimming pool. The woman’s dingy white curls echo the hue of the stucco; his peeling, freckled back repeats its mottled texture. The ruched fabric of her bitter-orange bathing suit is the same palette and pattern as a poolside cushion in the near distance.

Past the man’s ear, there’s a lively brunette whose blue one-piece is a shade darker than the water below. She’s thrown her arms in the air, as if describing a wild night at a party. The elderly pair are on the outside looking in, and it’s worse than having their noses pressed against glass—they can smell the chlorine. When you see that she’s clutching a wrinkly brown paper bag, the mise en scène becomes somehow sadder.

Location unknown, c. 1960–1976.

The Art Institute of Chicago, date unknown.

One question that has dogged the discovery of Maier’s photography is how a lowly nanny could make such high art. Let’s call that sexism. I’ve never heard anyone ask how another exceptional Chicago outsider, the visionary writer and artist Henry Darger, could have produced his fifteen-thousand-page magnum opus while holding down a job as a janitor. The photographer Joel Meyerowitz contributed a foreword to the new book, a canny choice given that, like Maier, he learned how to shoot on the streets. He also co-wrote (with Colin Westerbeck, who also contributes an essay) an esteemed volume on the genre, “Bystander: A History of Street Photography.” 

He concludes, rightly, that “Maier was an early poet of color photography.” But he also floats a wince-inducing theory about her knack for snatching secrets, what he terms all great street photographers’ “cloak of invisibility”: “She’s as plain as an old-fashioned schoolmarm. She’s the wallflower, the spinster aunt, the ungainly tourist in the big city . . . except . . . she isn’t!” Has Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” ever been defined in terms of his looks?

Location and date unknown.

Location and date unknown.


Chicagoland, March 1977.


Chicago, December 1974.


Chicago, 1975.



Location unknown, 1976.


Chicago, 1973.


Self-portrait, Chicagoland, 1975.


Self-portrait, Chicagoland, October 1975.

Andrea K. Scott

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Behind the Scenes of How Kodak Film is Made

Curious how Kodak manufactures its film? In this 8-minute video, Studio C-41 shows the process from making the original giant rolls of plastic that eventually becomes film, to the finished product found on store shelves around the world.

Despite the demand for film falling significantly over the last couple of decades, Kodak continues to produce it in large amounts from its factory in Rochester, New York.

The manufacture of film can be broken down into three main steps. The first step involves heating, stretching, and forming the film base into a large rolled sheet. Those rolls can be up to 12,000 feet long. The next step is to sensitize the film rolls to light. Emulsions and chemicals are added to the film base to prepare it for final finishing.

The final step sends the sensitized film to the film finishing department, where it is cut to size, perforated, labeled, and prepared for shipping.

Despite what Kodak as a business has gone through over the past ten years and despite a shift to producing pharmaceuticals, the company still continues to press on with film production. While not particularly detailed in what it shows, the video does still provide an interesting look inside a company that was instrumental in the revolutionary spread of photography. Without Kodak and what it has been doing in that same factory for decades, many events may never have been captured for the future to look back on

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The ultimate insider view of The Beatles and Beatlemania

In 1964, on the band’s first world tour, Paul McCartney took pictures that have only recently been discovered. What do they show us?

On November 4, 1963, the Beatles played at the Prince of Wales Theatre, in London, exuberant, exhausted, and defiant. “For our last number, I’d like to ask your help,” John Lennon cried out to the crowd. “Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you’d just rattle your jewelry.” Two weeks later, the band made their first appearance on American television, on NBC’s “Huntley-Brinkley Report.” “The hottest musical group in Great Britain today is the Beatles,” the reporter Edwin Newman said. “That’s not a collection of insects but a quartet of young men with pudding-bowl haircuts.” And, four days after that, “CBS Morning News with Mike Wallace” broadcast a four-minute report from “Beatleland,” by the London correspondent Alexander Kendrick. “The Beatles are said by sociologists to have a deeper meaning,” Kendrick reported. “Some say they are the authentic voice of the proletariat.” Everyone searched for that deeper meaning. The Beatles found it hard to take the search seriously.

“What has occurred to you as to why you’ve succeeded?” Kendrick asked Paul McCartney.

“Oh, I dunno,” he answered. “The haircuts?”

Kendrick’s report had been set to air again that night, on “CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.” The rerun was cancelled. The sixties started in 1964, observers like to say, and 1964 started that afternoon, November 22, 1963, when Cronkite broke into “As the World Turns.” “In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade,” Cronkite said, his voice grave and urgent. You couldn’t see Cronkite; the news had just come in on the wire service, and onscreen was a slide that read, “cbs news bulletin.” Minutes later, with the cameras finally on, Cronkite appeared in shirtsleeves, spruce but shaken. “If you can zoom in with that camera, we can get a closer look at this picture,” he told a cameraman, holding up a photograph of the motorcade taken moments before the shooting. At 2:38 p.m., Cronkite looked up at the clock, and announced that the President had died.

“We were backstage somewhere on a little tour in England when we heard the news,” McCartney told me last year. We were in his office in New York; McCartney, eighty, wore jeans and a pullover, slouching in his chair like a teen-ager. More pensive than wistful, he remembered that day, how it was surreal, unreal, but, then, everything about that year was surreal. Two days after Kennedy was killed, Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald on live television. In 1964, you could hold your camera up to the world. But what madness—what beauty, joy, and fury—would you capture?

In 1964, the Beatles became the first truly global mass-culture phenomenon. As the historian Sam Lebovic has pointed out, they’d been shaped by a wide, wide world. They wore Italian suits and Cuban-heeled boots and French haircuts popular with German students. They played nineteen-twenties British music-hall music, and rhythm and blues, and Black roots music from the banks of the Mississippi and the streets of Detroit. It’s even in the name: “the Beatles” is a mashup of the name of Buddy Holly’s band, the Crickets, and the Beat poets, a label that came from Black slang. Beatles records played on radio stations from Tokyo to Johannesburg. By the time they broke out, the sun had set on the British Empire, but the age of globalization had begun. And something more, too, was catching fire: an unsettling, an upheaval, revolutionary. Time, writing about the Beatles, called it “the New Madness.”

Partly it was the magnificent irreverence, the affectionate cheekiness, the surprisingly soft sexiness. The band’s interviews became a signature, four very clever young men batting back reporters’ endlessly idiotic questions, a patter only barely fictionalized in the 1964 film “A Hard Day’s Night”:

reporter: Tell me, how did you find America?

lennon: Turn left at Greenland.

reporter: Has success changed your life?

mccartney: Yes.

reporter: What would you call that hair style you’re wearing?

harrison: Arthur.

Asked, preposterously, to explain their own significance, they made fun of the question. Still, McCartney tried to capture some of that New Madness through the lens of a camera. In 1963, each of the Beatles had been given a Pentax. It helped them cope with the stress of being photographed constantly, and with the worry that they were about to travel to a country where they expected, like Kennedy himself, to be greeted by frenzied crowds and hordes of photographers and exposed to possible gunmen. From 1963 to early 1964, McCartney shot dozens of rolls of film, as the band travelled from Liverpool and London and Paris to New York, Washington, and Miami. Somehow, hundreds of his photographs were saved, and then rediscovered, in 2020, in his archives. The images, which will soon be the subject of an exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery, in London, are a glimpse of Beatleland from the inside. Everyone was looking at the band in 1964. 

What did the Beatles see?

Everyone was looking at the band in 1964. What did the Beatles see?

The marquee at the Olympia Theatre.

George Harrison wearing two hats.

The New Madness started in Liverpool, where Lennon and McCartney had been playing together since 1957. “We were from the North of England, which was nowhere to a lot of people,” McCartney said. The dark and gritty, war-wearied, working-class North had lately become the subject of a certain fascination. “Coronation Street,” a kitchen-sink soap opera set in Manchester, had débuted, in 1960. But the Beatles became the embodiment of the North, the sound of it. It wasn’t just their music or their accents; it was their wit, which was a little Flanders and Swann, a little “Goon Show,” and a lot Liverpool.

reporter: Why do you wear all those rings on your fingers?

starr: Because I can’t get them through my nose.

By 1963, the New York Times was reporting on a development in the U.K. that had been dubbed “Beatlemania”: writhing crowds of young people screaming, shrieking, bursting, blooming, and wilting, like fields of flowers. “By comparison, Elvis Presley is an Edwardian tenor of considerable diffidence,” the reporter Frederick Lewis wrote. The Beatles could claim to be “spokesmen for the new, noisy, anti-Establishment generation.”

As the "final Beatles record" is announced, unseen photos of the band are revealed, chronicling an extraordinary time, as witnessed through the eyes of one man at the heart of it, Paul McCartney, writes Deborah Nicholls-Lee.

I

In the 60s, youth culture exploded, spawning pop music, short hemlines and screaming fans. One witness saw this exciting time closer up than almost anyone else. "Millions of eyes were suddenly upon us, creating a picture I will never forget for the rest of my life," he recalls. Sir Paul McCartney was centre stage in some of the most iconic images of the era, as Beatlemania gripped Britain and beyond. Until now, the period described by McCartney as "bedlam", "pandemonium" and "mass hysteria" has largely been recorded from the outside looking in. But what did McCartney see as he looked out?

Now, a new exhibition, Paul McCartney, Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm at London's newly reopened National Portrait Gallery, and a new book, 1964: Eyes of the Storm, feature more than 200 images taken by McCartney, rediscovered by the singer-songwriter in his production company archives in 2020. The images track his time in The Beatles from 1963 to 1964 when the band were taking off, moving from the dingy picture houses of their home city of Liverpool, to the capital cities of London and Paris, and culminating in their electrifying debut in the US, which took place in New York, Washington DC and Miami.

Included in the remarkable collection of photos are several self-portraits (Credit: Paul McCartney)

Younger Beatles fans, who missed the fun and furore the first time round, can soon experience the launch of what McCartney described to BBC Radio 4 yesterday as "the final Beatles record", created thanks to AI technology extracting John Lennon's voice from an unused track on an old demo tape. With The Beatles enjoying a resurgence on platforms such as TikTok and YouTube, the unnamed song, to be released later this year, will delight a flourishing fan base of Gen Z enthusiasts.

We know that the band's frenzied fans have always been enthralled by the four young men, but McCartney's photos show this fascination to be mutual. As well as off-guard moments of the band relaxing between gigs, they include snaps of the crowds they attracted, taken from a rear windscreen or hotel window − unseen images chronicling an extraordinary time as witnessed through the eyes of one man at the heart of it.

Eyes of the Storm takes its name from the eyes that were everywhere. "Who is looking at who?" writes McCartney in the book's foreword. "The camera always seems to be shifting, with me photographing them, the press photographing us, and those thousands and thousands of people out there wanting to capture this storm."

It's about Paul and the experience that he was having with his friends, who happened to be The Beatles – Rosie Broadley

Photography is to play a greater part in the refurbished National Portrait Gallery, which launches with two major photography exhibitions, starting on 22 June with Yevonde's colour photographs of the 1930s, and followed by Eyes of the Storm on 28 June. The gallery's internationally recognised photographic collection will be "much more integrated" into displays, Eyes of the Storm curator Rosie Broadley tells BBC Culture. "This enables us to tell a much more nuanced and layered narrative because the people who sit for photographs are often much more diverse."

The images by Sir Paul McCartney are exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, London (Credit: Paul McCartney)

The gallery's archives include photographs of The Beatles taken by big names such as David Bailey and Don McCullin, but these new images, where the camera has been passed back to the subject, offer a unique insight. "The essential difference is that it’s his perspective on the band and what’s happening. They were never meant to be publicised or shared. They're private," explains Broadley. "It's about what he was interested in, who he wanted to remember, and it’s not really so much about The Beatles – it's about Paul and the experience that he was having with his friends, who happened to be The Beatles."

In Liverpool, we meet a fresh-faced Cilla Black, while in Paris, McCartney seems very taken with the French actress and pin-up Sophie Hardy. Intimate pictures of the band also provide rare through-the-keyhole glimpses as John towels himself off after a swim, for example, or George puts on sunscreen. And we are introduced to the offstage players that helped make the madness happen: the roadie, the driver, the manager, the bodyguard… captured smoking, reading or napping, or fooling about with the boys during downtime. "We messed around. It kept us sane," McCartney writes.

There are surprising discoveries, too. Behind the scenes, the US tour was not always rock 'n' roll. We learn that John's wife Cynthia travelled alongside him, for example. And we meet Paul's Miami date, a modestly-dressed wide-eyed teenager who he collected, in a gentlemanly manner, from her father's office.

The images catch candid moments of the iconic band, laughing and messing around (Credit: Paul McCartney)

McCartney, a working-class lad who previously had holidayed in budget resorts in the UK, was just 21 in 1963, and the photographs reflect his unworldliness and his curiosity about the new worlds he was discovering. The novelty of travel is clear from the many photographs taken from planes and his touristy snaps of the Arc de Triomphe and the White House; while shots of posters and billboards with the band’s name on them suggest a baffled pride at their celebrity so far from home. "Looking at these photos now, decades later, I find that there is a sort of innocence about them," writes McCartney. "Everything was new to us at this point."

American Dream

For McCartney, the United States was synonymous with success. "Everything we listened to was from America," he writes, describing touring the US as "the big time" and "the big prize". In many ways it lived up to the band’s expectations. Their performance on the Ed Sullivan Show on 9 February 1963 attracted a record 73m viewers and McCartney drank in the US culture, photographing the skyscrapers and flashing lights of New York and going to a drive-in movie for the first time.

After the monochrome snow scenes of Washington DC, sun-kissed Miami radiates warmth as McCartney reaches for the colour reel, and we get bright green palms, blue skies and canary-yellow beach wear. Described by McCartney as "Wonderland", Miami was a tropical paradise for the boys, who had the time of their life nipping around in convertibles loaned by MG and lounging by their private pool.

But the US revealed a darker side, too. Kennedy had been assassinated just months before on 22 November 1963 – the band arrived in the US on 7 February 1964 – and a close-up of a gun slung about a police officer's waist suggests McCartney's unease. It was, he writes, "the first time I had ever seen something like that". The band were also shocked by the racial inequality and became part of the ground shift when they refused to play to segregated audiences. "The Beatles were not the first white band to speak out against racial segregation. But no one had a platform the size of theirs," historian Jill Lepore, who wrote the introduction to 1964: Eyes of the Storm, tells BBC Culture.

John Lennon pictured in Paris – the images are featured in a new book, Eyes of the Storm (Credit: Paul McCartney)

The photographs have significant historical merit. They document a pivotal time in politics, animated, says Lepore, by a "far more purposeful spirit of rebellion". "Huge structural changes" were taking place, she says, pointing to the end of the draft in the UK and the lowering of the voting age to 18 in the US. The US Civil Rights Act was being passed just as colonies around the world were gaining independence; while the advent of the contraceptive pill coincided with the first steps towards equal pay legislation.

We were moving at such speed that you just had to grab, grab, grab! – Paul McCartney

"Reporters were always asking them [The Beatles] to make sense of that world, and all its changes, and I just love how they refused to participate in that," says Lepore. "There's this one moment, when The Beatles are in Washington, DC, and a reporter asks, 'What place do you think this story of The Beatles is going to have in the history of Western culture?' And Paul says, 'You must be kidding.' It's just so beautiful. The irreverence right back."

For photographers, however, McCartney had great respect and curiosity. "I often took pictures of them, not so much for revenge, but because they were interesting people," he writes. The band selected exceptional photographers to tour with them. Harry Benson, Dezo Hoffman and Robert Freeman all feature in McCartney's photographs, and when they were behind the lens, McCartney would watch them at work, eager to learn from their artistry.

The images in Eyes of the Storm were taken with a 35mm Pentax, and include modern prints made from negatives and enlarged images taken from contact sheets. Several bear the scratchy cross of McCartney's chinagraph pencil, where he has marked out his favourite shots. Some pictures, such as a grinning Ringo Starr and a self-portrait in the mirror, are blurred. Sometimes this was deliberate and sometimes it was because there was simply no time. "We were moving at such speed that you just had to grab, grab, grab!" he writes.

George Harrison photographed relaxing in Miami, February 1964, during the band's US tour (Credit: Paul McCartney)

Though an amateur, McCartney's aptitude is noteworthy. "Not only has he absorbed the ideas around photojournalism… the Cartier-Bresson idea of capturing that decisive moment, he's already looking to frame shots, looking for interesting angles," says Broadley, who helped select the photos for the exhibition from a pool of almost 1,000. "He understands what makes a good portrait, he’s quite good at placing a figure in space, [and] he's interested in architecture and the interesting perspectives you can get."

Occasionally, he hands his camera to someone – a manager, roadie or bandmate – and there he is, McCartney himself, performing on stage or posing for press shots, the familiar doe-like eyes peeping out from the mop-top haircut.

"We were just wisecracking guys, and we had fun with each other whatever we did and wherever we went. I think this comes across in my photos," writes McCartney in the book's closing chapter. "Words cannot describe what happened to us, but imagine every dream you’ve had coming true, and you might get close."

Paul McCartney, Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm is at the National Portrait Gallery from 28 June to 1 October 2023. The book, 1964: Eyes of the Storm, is out now, published by Penguin.

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Forget Supersonic. This Hypersonic Jet Can Fly From NYC to London in Under an Hour.

Supersonic flight is arriving—in a hurry. In the last 18 months, Boom has successfully tested its XB-1 demonstrator aircraft and pre-sold 15 of its still-in-development 30-seat Overture models to United Airlines. Virgin Galactic and Rolls Royce rolled out a partnership to develop a 19-seater. Even the Russian Federation revealed plans to build a supersonic jet for commercial use.

Then there’s the Hermeus Quarterhorse. Think supersonic or Mach 1—the speed of sound—multiply by five and you have the hypersonic Quarterhorse.

Last week, the Atlanta-based company announced a $60 million award from the US Air Force to finance testing of the aircraft. Like the Greek god Hermes, this Hermeus is designed to travel seamlessly between worlds, with a projected top speed of Mach 5.5—or 4,219 mph. That makes it the fastest reusable aircraft on the planet, so a New York-to-London flight will take less than an hour.

Belly of the beast: The Quarterhorse’s engine is based on the GE J85 turbo jet, but has been modified to reach hypersonic speeds. - Credit: Courtesy Hermeus

The speed will come from a unique engine set-up, a turbine-based combined cycle (TBCC) propulsion system. Such systems use a standard jet engine for launch and landing and to build enough speed in flight to feed air into a second turbine—known as a ramjet or scramjet—which produces more power, but requires high-speed air flow in order to ignite. The difficulty is managing the transition between the turbines and achieving the necessary aerodynamics.

Hermeus is off to a good start. In nine months, it designed, built and tested its engine, which is based on GE J85 turbo jet, and it has two advantages when it comes to testing. The Quarterhorse will fly autonomously, so the development team can get prototypes in the air and learn from them without risking pilots’ lives.

Right now, it plans to test a small-scale version in 2023, a mid-size cargo-carrying version in 2025 and a larger commercial passenger version in 2029.

This is the Hermeus cargo version, scheduled to be tested in 2025. - Credit: Courtesy Hermeus

The other advantage is, of course, the government money. “While this partnership with the US Air Force underscores US Department of Defense interest in hypersonic aircraft, when paired with Hermeus’s partnership with NASA announced in February 2021, it is clear that there are both commercial and defense applications for what we’re building,” said AJ Piplica, Hermeus CEO.

Yes, defense is important, but really, let us know when we can wake up in the morning and make it to a late-afternoon tee time at St. Andrews.

J. George Gorant

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NYC’s newest park Little Island finally opens on the Hudson River

The offshore public park in the Hudson River that almost didn’t get built officially opens on Friday. Designed by Heatherwick Studio and MNLA, Little Island at Pier 55 is designed to resemble a leaf floating on water, with an undulating base of tulip-shaped concrete pots ranging in elevation from 15 feet to 62 feet. The two-acre park features a 687-seat amphitheater, a plaza with concessions, a small stage, and incredible views, all surrounded by an abundance of greenery.

Thomas Heatherwick’s Heatherwick Studio, the team behind Hudson Yards’ Vessel, created a support structure made up of 280 concrete piles. On top of the piles, there are 132 concrete “tulips,” each with a unique shape and weight capacity to hold the soil, overlooks, and trees.

Engineering firm Arup led the structural development of the pots, each of which is supported by precast concrete columns and pile-driven down as far as 200 feet below water.

Led by Signe Nielsen, principal at MNLA, the landscape design of the park features different landscape typologies at each of the four corners, in addition to rolling hills, walking paths, and lawns. Plantings will change with the seasons, with more than 66,000 bulbs and 114 trees planted so far, according to a press release.

“Every time I come to Little Island, I’m struck by the same sense of wonder. This is an environment made to surprise,” Nielsen said. “I wanted New Yorkers to feel delight and excitement around every turn from the moment they set foot here. When you enter from the concrete of the city, you’re immersed in this living, breathing ecosystem full of unexpected corners, hills and overlooks. I can’t wait to see New Yorkers experience this special place for the very first time.”

Arts and culture programming is set to begin at Little Island in June, including performances from four artists in residence announced earlier this year. The park will host performances and events six days a week, most of which will be free or low-cost.

Some of the already scheduled events include a concert with Broadway Inspirational Voices, a Pride weekend celebration with Tina Landau, a performance from the American Ballet Theater, and more, with additional details expected to be announced at a later date.

Food and beverages, including wine, beer, and cocktails, will be available at stalls located in the park’s “Play Ground,” which has lots of shaded seating.

Billionaire Barry Diller first proposed the futuristic project in 2014. After critics continually blocked the park’s progress with several legal challenges, Diller later pulled the plug on the park. The project was then revived in 2017 after Gov. Andrew Cuomo brokered a deal, which included a pledge from the state to fund the completion of Hudson River Park.

Little Island cost roughly $260 million, funded primarily by Diller and the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation. The Hudson River Park Trust is managing the park.

“I hope Little Island will serve as a whimsical oasis for everyone who visits, a place to wander around and be happily surprised at every turn, to lounge and graze the landscape, and to be entertained, educated and stimulated by our programming,” Diller said.

The park will be open daily from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. Timed reservations are required between 12 p.m. and 8 p.m. Starting May 21, book a spot online or in person at the park entrance.

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Study Finds Artists Become Famous through Their Friends, Not the Originality of Their Work

Steve Schapiro
Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick and Entourage, New York Fahey/Klein Gallery

In a 2012 exhibition about the birth of abstraction at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, curators highlighted the way that the artists may have influenced one another. Titled “Inventing Abstraction: 1910–1925,” the show illustrated over 80 artists’ radical departures from the traditions of representational art, and opened with a large diagram depicting their network to show who knew each other (an interactive version of which is online), with the most connected, like Pablo Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky, toward the center.

While working on the show with her colleagues, exhibition curator Leah Dickerman (now MoMA’s director of editorial and content strategy) was influenced in part by a course she had taken with Columbia Business School professor and Chazen Senior Scholar Paul Ingram, which was about how curators can use their professional networks to achieve success. Ingram helped to develop an early iteration of the network of early pioneers of abstraction, and later, he used the same data to embark on a new investigation.

Ingram and his colleague Mitali Banerjee, of HEC Paris, used MoMA’s findings to examine the role that creativity and social networks played for these artists, in relationship to the level of fame they achieved. In a 2018 paper, they relayed their findings—including that for successful artists, making friends may be more important than producing novel art.

The study

Andy Warhol, Photograph of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Bryan Ferry, Julian Schnabel, Jacqueline Beaurang, Paige Powell, and Others at a Party at Julian Schnabel's Apartment, 1985, 1985 Hedges Projects

Ingram and Banerjee started their study by quantifying the fame, creativity, and social network of the artists in “Inventing Abstraction.” To determine each artist’s renown, they turned to Google’s database of historical texts in French and English (given that the artists were primarily living in France and the U.S.), and recorded the number of mentions each artist had between 1910 and 1925. They were looking at fame in terms of how well-known the artists were beyond their own social circles, Ingram noted, “and we’re essentially saying [that] how often you show up in the written word is an indicator of that.”

To examine the artists’ social networks, they relied on MoMA’s research, which was based on sources like biographies and artists’ letters to identify relationships. Ingram and Banerjee analyzed the artists’ social circles, which also involved data on each artist’s nationality, gender, age, and location, as well as the media they were using and the schools they attended. (They didn’t look into the artists’ exhibition history or the market for their work, though Banerjee’s future research may include such factors, Ingram said.)

In order to understand the creativity of the artists’ work, they employed two methods. First, they used machine learning to analyze and rate the creativity of thousands of artworks by the relevant artists; the computer program rated how unique works are in comparison to a set of representational artworks from the 19th century. They also asked four art historians to rate artworks by each artist for their creativity, based on factors like originality and innovation. (They found that the scores artists earned from machine learning and art historians were positively correlated.)

What it found

Peer network of the artists in “Inventing Abstraction.” Courtesy of Paul Ingram and Mitali Banerjee.

While past studies have suggested that there is a link between creativity and fame, Ingram and Banerjee found, in contrast, that there was no such correlation for these artists. Rather, artists with a large and diverse network of contacts were most likely to be famous, regardless of how creative their art was.

Specifically, the greatest predictor of fame for an artist was having a network of contacts from various countries. Ingram believes this indicates that the artist was cosmopolitan and had the capacity to reach different markets or develop ideas inspired by foreign cultures. The “linchpin of the network,” he added, was Kandinsky. They also found that famous artists tended to be older, likely because they were already famous as abstraction was emerging, Ingram explained.

In terms of creativity, they found that neither the computational evaluations nor the art historians’ expert opinions were strong indicators of an artist’s renown. In other words, if an artist had high creativity scores, they were not necessarily famous.

“An important implication of the paper is to show that diverse networks matter not only as a source of creativity…but could mean other benefits,” Ingram said. “That even aside from creativity…the artists benefit from the cosmopolitan identity.”

What it means

Wassily Kandinsky with a group of artists from the Blue Rider. Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images.

Given the modern imperative to meet new people and network across professional industries in order to open oneself up to career opportunities and advancement, Ingram and Banerjee’s findings aren’t surprising. However, they do offer important reminders—that we won’t become famous in a vacuum and should seek to diversify our social circles.

By way of illustrating the findings, the researchers pointed to the example of two artists among the group, Vanessa Bell and Suzanne Duchamp. While neither artist is a household name, they shared similar backgrounds had very famous siblings (Virginia Woolf and Marcel Duchamp, respectively), and had similar creativity scores—but Bell was more famous.

“Both artists were part of influential artists’ groups—Suzanne Duchamp was part of the Dada circle while Vanessa Bell was part of the Bloomsbury group,” the authors wrote. “Yet Duchamp’s social circle was confined to the Dada artists; in fact, even within this circle, her closest friends were her brother Marcel, her husband Jean Crotti and the artist Francis Picabia, a family friend. In contrast, Vanessa Bell’s social world encompassed the Bloomsbury group, a broad swathe of artists who were part of the London Group, collectors and patrons located outside England such as Gertrude Stein as well as theatre producers and artists associated with Sergei Diaghilev’s Les Ballet Russes.” Ultimately, Bell’s more diverse circle correlates with her greater fame.

“What we know from different kinds of research is that diversity in networks feeds creativity, which is an important thing for artists, as well,” Ingram explained. Having such a network, he added, meant that “you could kind of be positioned in a market, and may be more interesting and worthy of attention, if you are connected to a diverse set of others.” And even though the study focused on a specific, century-old context, he predicts that the findings ring true for artists today.

Casey Lesser is Artsy’s Lead Editor, Contemporary Art and Creativity.

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