Bluebird

because dead flowers are so beautiful

Yes, he'd been laid off, completely unexpectedly.

Yes, they'd immediately reined in excess expenditures while she applied for a multitude of jobs, six on Wednesday, four more on Friday. As many as she could find, but there were only so many in less than a week.

Still, she had to have Chinese for dinner that Sunday night. Not take-out either because her favorite dish of salt and pepper prawns didn’t hold up too well when transported home in a carton. And no cheap-o fake-o joint even if it was close to home, with its just okay pot stickers, spring rolls, and chow Mein for the kids. It had to be their new favorite—that place in Alameda they’d gone to on his birthday, where they’d been the only non-Asians. Less than ten days ago, just before the fallout. It seemed like ages.

Catching her reflection in the side mirror as they sped through the Webster tunnel she noticed that with her hair pinned back and her lips painted she bore an uncomfortable resemblance to Wallis Simpson.

“Well why not,” she thought lifting her chin. “Wouldn’t Wallis assume a confidently serene disposition no matter the forecast?”

They couldn’t just cower in the house, they had to rally. Appearances matter almost as much as faith, all the more so when circumstances conspire against you. They had to go on, best face forward and all that, because anything was possible—bad, good, maybe it’d work out even better than before.

The point being, it was so much easier to be positive if she got her prawns.

and when she was bad, she ate gloriously...

Bakesale Betty donned a fierce blue wig and enflamed the east bay with her down-home chicken sandwich almost a dozen years ago. Moving to Seattle and Portland, we missed her inauguration and only tasted it a year ago. Oona has been sampling chicken sammies nonstop since she had her first Betty chicky. No recourse but to eventually make our own, which happily involves neither the bothersome Telegraph Avenue queue or the mid-day high-caloric meltdown. Reduced to one main meal a day, I save the calories for dinner with familia, especially when it's as sinfully delish as this.

Chicken legs, unbreaded...

Awaiting that final flourish...

...of delectable and spicy coleslaw on an Acme torpedo. OMG. Not a single crumb was left.

Here's the recipe...

http://www.sfgate.com/food/chefsnightin/article/Betty-riffs-on-a-picnic-favorite-2512877.php

Das Perfekte Model

 

Carmen Dell'Orefice

Career highlight: Cover of Vogue at 15. 
Now: A victim of Bernie Madoff, Dell’Orefice is still modeling at 80.

 

Jean Shrimpton

Career highlight: Swinging London. 
Now: Hotel owner in Cornwall.

 

Twiggy

Career highlight: Changed the silhouette. 
Now: Released pop standards album Romantically Yours last fall.

 

Veruschka

Career highlight: Blow Up.
Now: Recently re-signed with Elite

 

Marisa Berenson

Career highlight: “The Girl of the Seventies,” per Yves Saint Laurent. 
Now: Playing world’s most glamorous grandmother in I Am Love.

 

Lauren Hutton

Career highlight: A $1 million contract with Revlon as the follow-up to her teenage career as a Playboy bunny. 
Now: Muse to the Olsen twins.

 

I had to look up several words just reading her obituary

Christine Brooke-Rose, Inventive Writer, Dies at 89

By MARGALIT FOX

Published: April 10, 2012

Christine Brooke-Rose, an English experimental writer known for wielding words with the ardor of a philologist, the fingers of a prestidigitator and the appetite of a lexivore, resulting in novels that exhilarated many critics and enervated others, died on March 21. She was 89.

Carcanet, via Guardian of London

Christine Brooke-Rose

Her death was announced on the Web site of her British publisher, Carcanet Press. Fittingly for a writer whose work could take artful pains to dispense with seemingly indispensable linguistic foundation stones (she once wrote an entire novel without using the verb “to be”), the “where” of Ms. Brooke-Rose’s death — whether it occurred at her longtime home in the South of France or elsewhere — was unspecified.

The author of more than a dozen novels, as well as short stories, essays and criticism, Ms. Brooke-Rose was one of relatively few Britons to maintain a long association with experimental fiction. Her stylistic techniques — playful, polyglot, punning, postmodern and slyly self-referential — are more typically associated with writers of the French Nouveau Roman school.

Because she often used alternative narrative devices (including unorthodox chronology and unusual typography) to create alternative realities, her work is sometimes classified as science fiction, though much of it is beyond category. As with much postmodern fiction, her writing — organized around an unspoken compact between the author, who is unspooling the text, and the reader, who is watching it unspool — is about the act of writing itself.

Her best-known novels include four whose combined titles run to just five syllables — “Out” (1964), “Such” (1965), “Between” (1968), “Thru” (1975) — followed by a syllabic splurge: “Amalgamemnon” (1984), “Xorandor” (1986), “Verbivore” (1990) and “Textermination.” In “Textermination,” published in 1992, literary characters from a spate of famous pens — Austen’s, Flaubert’s, Pynchon’s, Rushdie’s — convene in a San Francisco hotel to importune readers for their continued existence.

Ms. Brooke-Rose was a linguistic escape artist. In book after book she dons self-imposed syntactic shackles, and in book after book she gleefully slips them.

In “Between,” the very nature of identity is called into question by her avoidance of the verb “to be” in all its forms. In “Next” (1998), about the dispossessed in London, her characters are literal have-nots: throughout the book, she avoids the verb “to have.”

In “Amalgamemnon,” narrated by a literature professor about to lose her job, Ms. Brooke-Rose uses only verb forms — including future tense and subjunctive mood — that conjure conditions unobtainable in the present.

Ms. Brooke-Rose’s earliest novels, published in the late 1950s, are conventional satires of manners. But as early as her third novel, “The Dear Deceit,” published in 1960, she had begun to play with narrative form. The novel opens with the death of its protagonist and, in successive chapters, works backward to his birth.

This convention has a time-honored analogue in narrative nonfiction, as when, for instance, a newspaper article begins with word of its subject’s death and, only lower, reads:

Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose was born in Geneva on Jan. 16, 1923, into a French-, German- and English-speaking household. Her enigmatic English father, who left the family when she was a child and died when she was 11, had been, she later learned, an Anglican Benedictine monk and a convicted thief, though not necessarily in that order; her American-Swiss mother became a Benedictine nun after the dissolution of her marriage.

Reared in Geneva, Brussels and Britain, the young Ms. Brooke-Rose worked at Bletchley Park during the war, decrypting intercepted German messages. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Oxford, followed by a doctorate in medieval literature from University College London. From the late 1960s to the late ’80s she taught British and American literature at the University of Paris.

Ms. Brooke-Rose was married three times. (Her second marriage was to the prominent Polish writer Jerzy Pietrkiewicz.) Information on survivors was not available.

Her other books include an autobiographical novel, “Remake” (1996); the story collection “Go When You See the Green Man Walking” (1970); a volume of criticism, “A ZBC of Ezra Pound” (1971); and translations of the French experimental writer Alain Robbe-Grillet.

What proved to be her last book was a novel published in 2006. It is presciently titled, in the manner of a catalog entry, “Life, End Of.”

 

 

  

LATimes Elmore Leonard interview

by Megan Abbott

PHOTO: DAN BORRIS

“I was just watching “Cheek to Cheek’ [in Top Hat] on channel 66,” legendary crime novelist Elmore Leonard says over the phone from his home in suburban Detroit. “Astaire and Rogers. They’re not very good dancers, but the songs were wonderful. Except Astaire sings them with his little weak voice.”

Listening to the critique, it’s hard not to see a parallel to Leonard’s own adventures in the screen trade. With some notable exceptions—foremost Steven Soderbergh’s wily, intoxicating Out of Sight—most adaptations of his work have failed to capture his blend of audacious storytelling, true grit and dialogue that twists, snaps and curls in the characters’ mouths. But with Justified, the FX series based on his short story “Fire in the Hole”—and featuring U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, introduced in 1993’s Pronto—Leonard finally has a singer worthy of his hardboiled song. Set in the hollows of Kentucky, the show centers on Givens (Timothy Olyphant) as he wrestles with drug rings, coal-mine feuds and his own itchy trigger finger.

The new novel Raylan, his 45th, emerges as a gift to fans of Leonard’s fiction and the show, the supremely cool eponymous hero navigating a menagerie of lowlifes (where, in classic style, the organ thieves have a slight moral advantage over the coal-company executives). The author happily settled in to discuss his storied career, Tinseltown and the mysteries of inspiration.

Who did you read when you were starting out?
Hemingway, [but] I never cared for the man. I used to read a lot of him till I learned he had no sense of humor.

Did you read many of the hard-boiled masters?
Never read Chandler. Not much Hammett. James M. Cain was an influence way back. Spillane, I haven’t read in 40, 50 years. I remember his first books, thinking, Man, this guy is good. And I met him—good guy. But he remained the same. His books never changed.

While Spillane is often accused of sexism, you seem to love women.
Years ago, a reviewer for the Detroit News said my female characters were like Spillane’s. After that, I paid more attention. I don’t think of them as women. I think of them as a person and go from there. Sometimes female characters start out as the wife or girlfriend, but then I realize, “No, she’s the book,” and she becomes a main character. I surrender the book to her. A few years ago, my researcher gave me this photo: a female marshal in front of Miami’s courthouse—this Colombian drug trial. It was her and another marshal, and she was just standing there with a shotgun, hip cocked and angled, holding it half up. And I thought, She’s a knockout. And she’s a book.

Is a lot of you in Raylan?
I suppose, sure. In a given situation, I just know he’s gonna shoot the guy. But it takes me a lot longer than Raylan to come up with the good lines. It can take days to come up with that scene ender. I spend most of my time on those. But for Raylan, the words just come. Dialogue is easier to me than narrating—[it] has that sound.

Sound seems especially important in your writing. It has such a unique cadence.
I’m not aware of a cadence when writing, but I hear it after. I write in longhand, and that helps. You’re closer to it, and you have to cross things out. You put a line through it, but it’s still there. You might need it. When you erase a line on a computer, it’s gone forever. [Timothy Olyphant] recites the lines just as I wrote them for Raylan. His temperament is exactly the way I wrote him.

You’re happy with Justified?
Oh, I’m so pleased with the show. The dialogue works, and the actors just get it.

Do you work closely with the producers and writers?
I’m not in much contact with them. We get together for appearances sometimes, which is great. I hear the writers wear wristbands: WWED: What Would Elmore Do?

That’s pretty unusual.
Very unusual. Writers—all writers, even screenwriters—like to make their mark. I don’t think many screenwriters can write. They pass as writers. But it’s not like that with this show. When they sent me the first script, I read it and didn’t see a word to change. It was perfect.

The show is referred to all over the place, even by its producers, as a western. Do you consider it a western?
I have never thought of it as a western. The only reason they’ve tagged it as that is the hat. It’s not the hat I described. I pictured it like a businessman’s Stetson—like the marshals arresting Jack Ruby but well worn with a certain shape unique to him. It was just an old worn hat.

When you write Raylan now, do you picture the bigger hat?
No. I’ve never seen a hat like the one on the show. The brim is fairly straight. He doesn’t try to get cute with it. At first I didn’t like it, but I’m getting used to it.

Do you think the creators are more into the western elements than you are—the hat, the music? Raylan seems angrier, more like a classic sheriff.
Angrier, yes. The music, though, is down-home, not western, but with a mean beat. It goes with Kentucky. They shot it in Pennsylvania and now L.A., but they really get the feel of Harlan County. It has the sound, so you feel you’re there. The accents are so good—every one. The dialogue of the locals, it’s just a different sound down there. It takes you to that place.

Justified creator Graham Yost has likened Raylan to the cowboy and detective heroes of old, with their strong moral codes. But he doesn’t have any of the self-righteousness we might associate with that tradition.
I never cared for cowboy heroes or PIs. I’ve never understood PI novels, because I’ve met a few PIs, and they didn’t seem particularly smart. Raylan is not self-righteous. He can’t understand why marijuana isn’t legal—the only people against it have never tried it. Give them a puff, see if they like it.

You’re the master of creating “bad guys” with quirks that utterly charm. In Raylan, Boyd Crowder corrects another character’s poor grammar.
Yeah, Boyd—he’s dumb, but he thinks he’s smart. You know, I just love them all. There’s only one character [I’ve written] I don’t like—in Glitz. The guy killed women under the Atlantic City boardwalk, and he was so nice to his mother, so cloying. He’s the only bad guy I ever wrote.

You did your time working in Hollywood but ended up returning to books.
I quit in 1993. I got so tired of writing and rewriting the script. This producer from Paramount wanted me to do a rewrite on an existing script. The original story was so dumb. I woke up at 5 a.m. in this hotel in L.A. and came up with a story, a way to fix it. Then I had to wait three hours for him to wake up so I could tell him about it. He loved it, but I didn’t have my heart in it. It’s on a shelf. But I got paid for it.

The books are truly your own.
With books, when you put it down, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. My editors don’t tell me what to do. The copy editor has special instructions not to mess with my sentences. I end Raylan with this shower scene with him and a girl. She asks if he remembers the scene from Young Frankenstein when the monster gets it on with the woman [Madeline Kahn], and she starts singing “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life.” He asks what made her think of that. She says she doesn’t know. And that’s the end. I was surprised the publisher let me do it. I knew it would be the ending when I wrote it, but I was sure it wouldn’t fly. They didn’t touch it.

I heard you’re not reading many crime novels these days.
I haven’t read much at all in the last year. I used to always have a book on the bedside table. I can’t understand these best-sellers. I got halfway through The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I don’t get it at all. What’s the big thrill? It’s boring.

What are you working on now?
It’s going to be a book about private prisons. I’ve been reading all about them. They’re corrupt, and they don’t work. This one’s going to be south of Palm Springs. Raylan’s out there. A warden, a former marshal, is killed during escape, so Raylan goes. I just went to Palm Springs for the first time, stayed in a house there. It was a knockout. The whole time I kept thinking, I can’t wait to set a book here. My Hollywood agent had me write up a five-pager about it: “A world apart from the desert towns of westerns...the superrich and movie stars.”

I’m hooked.
You’re hooked? Good.

MEGAN ABBOTT is the Edgar Award–winning author of five crime novels, including The End of Everything, Queenpin and Bury Me Deep. Her newest, Dare Me, will be published in July.

 

Bring it on!

Migraine-ready with three packs stocked up, eight pills in each. It's almost enough to make a headache girl relax!

Farewell to a fab Individual

Zelda Kaplan, a Fixture of New York’s Fashion Scene, Dies at 95

By RUTH LA FERLA

Published: February 17, 2012

Zelda Kaplan exited this world much as she had lived in it for the last four decades or so of her 95 years — as an inimitable fixture on fashion’s front lines and an inveterate clubgoer in Manhattan.

Jason Kempin/Getty Images for Joanna Mastroianni

Zelda Kaplan at a Fashion Week show on Wednesday, shortly before she collapsed and died.

In June, she danced the night away ather 95th-birthday party at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Last month she was photographed at the reopening of the XL club, surrounded by people a third her age. And only Wednesday she took her customary front-row seat at the fashion show of her friend, the designer Joanna Mastroianni, at Lincoln Center, part ofNew York Fashion Week.

As the show was under way, she collapsed and was carried from the room by security guards. She was pronounced dead at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center shortly afterward.

Ms. Kaplan held a colorful place in a layer of New York society made up of flamboyant, surprising and self-invented people — she had been a suburban housewife in another life — who are largely known for being seen. Well into her 90s she was a strikingly dressed regular at nightclubs, fashion shows and parties in Manhattan while living there in a rent-controlled studio apartment.

“When Zelda was in the room, you knew it was an occasion,” said Patrick McDonald, a fellow style-world habitué. “Her lust for life was unbelievable.”

Ms. Kaplan could be readily picked out in a roomful of glitterati. She was the one wearing a giddy composite of oversize glasses, bold African prints and a toque that matched her outfit.

Still, she might have remained largely unknown, a footnote in the story of New York nightlife, but for the release of “Her Name Is Zelda,” a 2003 documentary that introduced her to a national audience on HBO, generated a raft of profiles in newspapers and magazines, and elevated her to a celebrity, if a minor one.

The film, by Nicole Sampogna and Mona Eldaief, charted her transformation from homemaker to social gadabout flitting from party to party, sometimes alone, sometimes with art and fashion world friends like Grace Edwards, a designer who once asked Ms. Kaplan to model in a runway show. The artist Andres Serrano captured her seductively in a photograph.

 She almost invariably designed her own wardrobe, buying cloth from local weavers during her frequent humanitarian trips to Africa and Southeast Asia and having it cut to her frame by a New York dressmaker.

“So many Americans want to look like everybody else,” she once said. “I don’t think people should be happy to be a clone.”

On Wednesday, for Ms. Mastroianni’s fashion show, she wore a red-and-black banded version of her habitual toque matched to a dress cut and stitched from a rhythmically striped length of tribal cloth.

“Her life was like an ongoing photo shoot,” the fashion publicist Kelly Cutrone said.

Zelda Berkowitz was born on June 20, 1916, in Flemington, N.J., where her mother had a horse farm. Little more is known about her early years. “I don’t like to talk about my past,” she once said, “because I was so conventional and middle-class. It was boring.”

She married three times, once for 11 months. Her second husband, Samuel Kaplan, a doctor, persuaded her to move to Miami, which she grew to disdain as a cultural desert. Though she had attended (but did not graduate from) South Jersey Law School (now part of Rutgers University), she did not work outside the home, in deference to her husband, she said. 

Her survivors include two sisters, Shirley Dworkin and Ruth Berkowitz.

It was not until she and Mr. Kaplan divorced in the late 1960s that Ms. Kaplan moved to New York, finding work as a ballroom dance instructor and as a framer in an art gallery. At parties she would demonstrate the fox trot and other dance standards. “To me the dancing that young people do in the clubs is exercise,” Ms. Kaplan said.

Living largely off her inheritance from the sale of the family horse farm and the proceeds from investments, she developed a passion for indigenous cultures and began traveling to countries like Mali, Ghana and Ethiopia in search of the woodcarvings and fabrics from which she made her designs. She made many trips on behalf of the World Culture Society, an organization she founded and financed.

On her foreign jaunts she would hire a driver to take her from village to village to speak to tribes about the perils of female genital cutting and to lobby for a woman’s right of inheritance. Like her tireless partying, her humanitarian efforts attested in part to an appetite for novelty and adventure.

“I’m a curious person,” she once said. “I want to keep learning until it’s over. And when it’s over, it’s over.” 

 

R.I.P. Dory Previn

Dory Previn, Songwriter, Is Dead at 86

By BRUCE WEBER

Published: February 14, 2012

Dory Previn, the lyricist for three Oscar-nominated songs who as a composer and performer mined her difficult childhood, bouts of mental illness and a very public divorce to create a potent and influential personal songbook, died on Tuesday at her home in Southfield, Mass. She was 86.

Larry C. Morris/The New York Times

Dory Previn performing at the Bitter End in New York in 1973.

Her death was confirmed by her husband, Joby Baker.

Ms. Previn rose to prominence as a singer-songwriter with a substantial cult following in the early 1970s and she enriched a period in pop music history that also saw the emergence of Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Laura Nyro.

She never became as widely known as they were (though she did record a live double album at Carnegie Hall), partly because her voice was never as big as theirs, but also because her lyrics — frank and dark, even when tinged with humor, and often wincingly confessional — were not the stuff of pop radio. They were, however, clear antecedents of the work of later balladeers like Sinead O’Connor and Suzanne Vega.

In “With My Daddy in the Attic,” Ms. Previn wrote of her complicated relationship with her disturbed father. In “Esther’s First Communion,” she wrote about a girl’s indoctrination into religious ritual and her revulsion at it. In “Yada Yada La Scala,” she wrote about women in a mental hospital. In “Lemon Haired Ladies,” she wrote about an older woman pining for a younger man:

Whatever you give me

I’ll take as it comes

Discarding self-pity

I’ll manage with crumbs.

Unusually for a pop singer of the day, Ms. Previn’s background was in neither folk nor rock. Her early success came in Hollywood, writing songs for the movies, generally as a lyricist working with her husband, André Previn, who later earned fame as a classical composer and conductor.

Together they were nominated for two Academy Awards: in 1960 for “Faraway Part of Town,” from “Pepe,” and in 1962 for “Second Chance,” from “Two for the Seesaw.” But their best-known collaboration was the theme from the 1967 film version of Jacqueline Susann’s drug-soaked show-business novel “Valley of the Dolls” (later recorded by Dionne Warwick), which begins:

Gotta get off, gonna get

Have to get off from this ride

Gotta get hold, gonna get

Need to get hold of my pride.

The halting, almost stammering progression of laments, Ms. Previn later said, came from her own experience of relying on pills.

In 1969, working with the composer Fred Karlin, Ms. Previn earned a third Oscar nomination, for “Come Saturday Morning” from “The Sterile Cuckoo,” which became a hit for the Sandpipers.

By then, however, the Previn marriage was in a shambles. Mr. Previn had begun an affair with the actress Mia Farrow, then in her early 20s, whom he later married, and Ms. Previn, who had a history of emotional fragility and mental illness, fell apart. Fearful of traveling in general and of flying in particular, she had a breakdown on an airplane that was waiting to take off, shouted unintelligibly and tore at her clothes, and spent several months in a psychiatric hospital.

The episode, as awful as it was, proved to be a turning point in her life and career.

Her first album afterward, “On My Way to Where” (1970) — the title was a reference to the airplane debacle — included perhaps her most famous song, “Beware of Young Girls,”about Ms. Farrow, and received polarized reviews. On her second, “Mythical Kings and Iguanas” (1971), many critics noticed a growing vocal confidence. Her third, “Reflections in a Mud Puddle/Taps Tremors and Time Steps” (1971), included a pained report of and reflection on her father’s death, and drew praise from the New York Times music critic Don Heckman.

“Ms. Previn is no great singer, her guitar playing is only adequate, and her melodies sometimes have an uncomfortable tendency to move in too-familiar directions,” he wrote. “But her message is stated so brilliantly in her lyrics, and the tales she has to tell are so important, that they make occasional musical inadequacies fade away.”

Dorothy Veronica Langan was born in New Jersey — sources differ on the town, Rahway or Woodbridge — on Oct. 22, 1925, and she grew up in Woodbridge. Her father, Michael, was a laborer and a frustrated musician who pushed her toward music and dance. He had also been deranged, Ms. Previn wrote in a 1976 memoir, by his service in World War I. He had been gassed, she wrote, and he was convinced the gassing had made him sterile; therefore she could not be his daughter. For a while he locked himself in the attic.

Ms. Previn left home as a teenager and worked in summer stock and in commercials and sang in small clubs, writing new verses to popular songs. Her work came to the attention of Arthur Freed, the producer of MGM movie musicals like “An American in Paris” and “Singin’ in the Rain,” who hired her for MGM, where she met Mr. Previn. They married in 1959. She had been married and divorced previously.

In addition to her husband, Mr. Baker, a painter whom she met in the 1970s and married in 1984, she is survived by three stepchildren, Michelle Wayland, Fredricka Baker and Scott Zimmerman, and six step-grandchildren.

In the 1980s, Ms. Previn and Mr. Previn reconciled as friends, and she came to loathe the fact that she was best known for their breakup. But the pain and grief were the foundation of her art. In the hospital after her breakdown, she was encouraged to write down her feelings, and they emerged as poems.

“I was always afraid to write music,” she said in 1970. “I wouldn’t have presumed to with a musician like André around the house. But I play a little guitar. So I started working them out on the guitar, thinking I could interest some singer in recording them and that’s how all these songs were born.”

 

R.I.P. Ms. Bassman

Lillian Bassman, Fashion and Fine-Art Photographer, Dies at 94

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Lillian Bassman, who moved from fashion to fine art, at her home in Manhattan in 2009. More Photos »

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Published: February 13, 2012

Lillian Bassman, a magazine art director and fashion photographer who achieved renown in the 1940s and ’50s with high-contrast, dreamy portraits of sylphlike models, then re-emerged in the ’90s as a fine-art photographer after a cache of lost negatives resurfaced, died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 94.

Multimedia

Slide Show

Lillian Bassman

Lillian Bassman

Lillian Bassman's “Dovima, New York” (1954, reinterpreted in 1994), from “Lillian Bassman: Women” (Abrams).More Photos »

Her son, Eric Himmel, confirmed the death.

Ms. Bassman entered the world of magazine editing and fashion photography as a protégé of Alexey Brodovitch, the renowned art director of Harper’s Bazaar. In late 1945, when the magazine generated a spinoff called Junior Bazaar, aimed at teenage girls, she was asked to be its art director, a title she shared with Mr. Brodovitch, at his insistence.

In addition to providing innovative graphic design, Ms. Bassman gave prominent display to future photographic stars like Richard Avedon, Robert Frank and Louis Faurer, whose work whetted her appetite to become a photographer herself.

Already, at Harper’s Bazaar, she had begun frequenting the darkroom on her lunch hours to develop images by the great fashion photographer George Hoyningen-Huene, using tissues and gauzes to bring selected areas of a picture into focus and applying bleach to manipulate tone.

“I was interested in developing a method of printing on my own, even before I took photographs,” Ms. Bassman told B&W magazine in 1994. “I wanted everything soft edges and cropped.” She was interested, she said, in “creating a new kind of vision aside from what the camera saw.”

When Avedon went off to photograph fashion collections in Paris in 1947, he lent her his studio and an assistant. She continued her self-education and in short order landed an important account with a lingerie company. In its last issue, in May 1948, Junior Bazaar ran a seven-page portfolio of wedding photographs she had taken, titled “Happily Ever After.”

Ms. Bassman became highly sought after for her expressive portraits of slender, long-necked models advertising lingerie, cosmetics and fabrics. Her lingerie work in particular brought lightness and glamour to an arena previously known for heavy, middle-aged women posing in industrial-strength corsets.

“I had a terrific commercial life,” Ms. Bassman told The New York Times in 1997. “I did everything that could be photographed: children, food, liquor, cigarettes, lingerie, beauty products.”

Lillian Violet Bassman was born on June 15, 1917, in Brooklyn and grew up in the Bronx. Her parents, Jewish émigrés from Russia, allowed her a bohemian style of life, even letting her move in, at 15, with the man she would later marry, the documentary photographer Paul Himmel.

Ms. Bassman studied fabric design at Textile High School, a vocational school in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. After modeling for artists employed by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project and working as a muralist’s assistant, she took a night course in fashion illustration at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

She soon showed her work to Brodovitch, who was impressed. Waiving tuition, he accepted her into his Design Laboratory at the New School for Social Research, where she changed her emphasis from fashion illustration to graphic design.

Brodovitch took her on as his unpaid apprentice at Harper’s Bazaar in 1941, but desperate to earn money she left to become an assistant to the art director at Elizabeth Arden, whereupon Brodovitch anointed her his first paid assistant. Like her mentor, she was artistically daring. At Junior Bazaar, she experimented with abandon, treating fashion in a bold, graphic style and floating images in space.

“One week we decided that we were going to do all green vegetables, so we had the designers make all green clothing, green lipstick, green hair, green everything,” she told Print magazine in 2006.

Her nonadvertising work appeared frequently in Harper’s Bazaar, and she developed close relationships with a long list of the era’s top models, including Barbara Mullen (her muse), Dovima and Suzy Parker.

The stylistic changes of the 1960s, however, left her cold. The models, too. “I got sick of them,” she told The Times in 2009. “They were becoming superstars. They were not my kind of models. They were dictating rather than taking direction.”

In 1969, disappointed with the photographic profession and her prospects, she destroyed most of her commercial negatives. She put more than 100 editorial negatives in trash bags, putting them aside in her converted carriage house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She soon forgot all about them.

By the mid-1970s, she was out of the fashion world entirely and had begun focusing on her own work, taking large-format Cibachrome photographs of glistening fruits, vegetables and flowers, pictures of cracks in the city streets and distorted male torsos based on photographs in bodybuilding magazines.

It was not until the early 1990s that Martin Harrison, a fashion curator and historian who was staying at her house, found the long-forgotten negatives. He encouraged her to revisit them.

Ms. Bassman took a fresh look at the earlier work. She began reprinting the negatives, applying some of the bleaching techniques and other toning agents with which she had first experimented in the 1940s, creating more abstract, mysterious prints.

“In looking at them I got a little intrigued, and I took them into the darkroom, and I started to do my own thing on them,” she told The Times. “I was able to make my own choices, other than what Brodovitch or the editors had made.”

Her reinterpretations, as she called them, found a new generation of admirers. A full-fledged revival of her career ensued, with gallery shows and international exhibitions, including a joint retrospective at the Deichtorhallen museum in Hamburg with her husband and a series of monographs devoted to her photography.

A one-woman show at the Hamiltons Gallery in London, organized by Mr. Harrison in 1993, was followed by exhibitions at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris and an assignment from The New York Times Magazine to cover the haute couture collections in Paris in 1996. She completed her last fashion assignment for German Vogue in 2004.

Mr. Himmel died in 2009, having abandoned photography in his late 50s to become a psychiatric caregiver in the city’s hospitals and later a psychiatrist in private practice. Besides her son, the editor in chief of Abrams Books, she is survived by a daughter, Liza Himmel, known as Lizzie; two grandchildren; and a step-grandchild.

Ms. Bassman’s work has been published in “Lillian Bassman” (1997) and “Lillian Bassman: Women” (2009). A new book, “Lillian Bassman: Lingerie,” is to be published by Abrams on April 1.

 

politix without women

With all the political debate about planned parenthood, birth control and religion, all hot-button  issues lately, it's interesting how female-centric they all are. A friend pointed out the fact that none of those men running seem as concerned about broader issues like the economy, oil, or taxes.

That makes me wonder why there is no party that speaks for/represents just women? Why do we let parties speak for us, affecting our bodies, our rights, our very selves? Personally, I resent powerful, ambitous, successful men authoring and dictating what affects me, my insurance, my right to decide for myself. It's a throwback to the fifties, which was a decade all about restraining women.

I think it's high time for a party along the lines of the Tea party or the Komen Foundation that speaks solely for women--because I want and need to be represented. Where are my likeminded brethrettes?