Adam Lewis, who wrote a biography of Mr. Hadley, confirmed the death. Mr. Hadley, who was born in Tennessee, died of cancer at the home of his sister, Elizabeth Hadley, his only survivor. He had homes in Manhattan and in Southport, Conn.

Both independently and as a partner with the prominent interior designer Sister Parish, Mr. Hadley created residences for an illustrious roster of clients with resonant family names like Astor, Grunwald, Paley, Rockefeller, Bronfman, Getty, Whitney and Mellon, not to mention Al and Tipper Gore and Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer.

His taste was relatively spare and modernist, but he was willing to mix ideas, drawing on a deep knowledge of design history. And reflecting his own moderate temperament, he had a keen sense of how much was too much and how much was not enough.

He and Mrs. Parish, whose work was more English in style, worked together as the firm Parish-Hadley for 33 years, creating interiors that were always beautiful, sometimes lush but never overstuffed.

“Never less, never more,” Mr. Hadley was fond of saying of a well-realized interior. “Glamour is part of it,” he added in a 2004 interview in New York magazine. “But glamour is not the essence. Design is about discipline and reality, not about fantasy beyond reality.”

Perhaps his most celebrated work was the library at the Park Avenue home of Brooke Astor. He transformed a high-ceilinged faux-French drawing room into a strikingly elegant space with red-lacquered shelves and brass trim befitting a client who had given considerable philanthropic support to libraries, especially the New York Public Library.

One early project was for the Park Avenue apartment of Edgar Bronfman, the chairman of Seagram, and his wife, Ann Loeb. They wanted more modern quarters with a good deal of open space, so Mr. Hadley demolished a drawing room wall, replaced it with glass and installed a travertine staircase. It was a contemporary space forged from a traditional one. Mrs. Parish then filled it with 18th-century furniture.

“The chairs became like sculptures,” Mr. Hadley recalled, “and it was fantastic.”

Albert Livingston Hadley Jr. was born in Springfield, Tenn., north of Nashville, on Nov. 18, 1920. His father owned a farm implement business, and the family moved often, giving his mother, Elizabeth, the opportunity to decorate several houses and young Albert to develop an interest in it himself.

As a child, Mr. Hadley studied fashion and design magazines and was enthralled by the movies, and by the time he was 13 he had already determined that his future lay in New York. Later in life he said he continued to prefer black-and-white movies because they let him supply all the color.

After high school and two years of college in Nashville, Mr. Hadley approached A. Herbert Rogers, a prominent local decorator, for a job as a junior assistant. Hired, he gained entry to many of Nashville’s finest houses and began his career as an expert on high residential style.

He was drafted into the Army in 1942 and served as a company payroll clerk in Chelmsford, England. With the help of the G.I. Bill, he was able to make the long-awaited move to New York in 1947, to attend the Parsons School of Design. There he caught the attention of Van Day Truex, the president of the school and an avatar of the urbanity and sleek good manners of postwar design. (He was later design director at Tiffany & Company.) Recognizing his abilities, Mr. Truex offered Mr. Hadley a teaching job shortly after his graduation in 1949.

In 1956, Mr. Hadley went to work for Eleanor Brown at McMillen, then the most prestigious decorating firm in the country. As he recalled for Mr. Lewis, the author of “Albert Hadley: The Story of America’s Preeminent Interior Designer” (2005), Mrs. Brown’s establishment was graciously strict. Hours were 9 to 5, with no Saturday or Sunday work allowed. Every afternoon a maid pushed a mahogany cart of tea and cookies from office to office, and Mrs. Brown would visit with her decorators, discussing their work and, by example, instilling the social finesse required to be in the business.

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Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

 

22-25 Jackson Avenue, at 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens

Through April 30

Gavin Brown’s Enterprise

620 Greenwich Street, at Leroy Street, West Village

Through April 21

Do you dream of anonymous sex with random strangers but fear actual physical contact? You are in luck. Sign on to any number of Web sites and you can fulfill your fantasies remotely with real, live others via the miracle of Skype.

Frances Stark, an assistant professor at the Roski School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has been indulging in this activity over the past few years and has distilled her experiences into visually chaste and verbally promiscuous videos. Her magnum opus, at PS1, is “My Best Thing,” a 99-minute film that she made for, and presented at, the 2011 Venice Biennale. What you mainly see are two digitally animated, childlike figures resembling dolls made from Lego blocks — a female who speaks in computer-generated standard English, and one or the other of two males, who each speak in heavily Italian-accented, grammatically uncertain English — isolated on green-screen backgrounds. (To create these animations, Ms. Stark used free software available from Xtranormal.com.)

Intermittent episodes of simultaneous masturbation are represented by expressions like “mmmm” and “omg!” Mostly, the characters talk about art, film, literature, language and philosophy, and about Ms. Stark’s plan to make an artwork out of these interactions for the Venice Biennale. Improbably, there unfolds a genuinely affecting story about the vagaries of emotional connection and the difficulties of making art and being an artist.

At Gavin Brown, more of this dialogue is video-projected in two rooms as lines of text accompanied by music. These shorter pieces feel like outtakes from “My Best Thing,” which is, against all odds, some kind of masterpiece.

534 West 26th Street, Chelsea

Through April 14

In her latest series, “High School Football,” the photographer Catherine Opie doesn’t seem to know quite what to do with this all-American, über-masculine subject. Her images run the gamut from action shots to sentimental “Friday Night Lights”-style views of the field and bleachers to landscapes in which the game seems incidental.

There are portraits of warrior-faced young men in their team uniforms, too, which turn out to be a pretty effective defense against emotional candor.

Her “Football Landscapes,” taken all over the country, showcase different climates and conditions, with the sport as a reassuring constant. In a shot from Waianae, Hawaii, the players are upstaged by a spectacular mountain view. A game in Poway, Calif., takes place in the pouring rain. An image from Twentynine Palms, Calif., goes further, with a desert background that reminds us of the nearby Marine Corps training base and reinforces some of the series’s latent associations between football and the military.

Among the portraits, few subjects give Ms. Opie room to play with gender. One exception is “Stephen,” who wears a sneer and a cropped Superman muscle T-shirt and holds his helmet at jockstrap level. Another is “Conor,” who cradles the ball as if it were an infant.

Ms. Opie’s stated subject isn’t the actual game so much as the feeling of community it engenders among athletes and fans. (“High School Football” is very much in the mold of her earlier series, “Surfers,” which also vacillated between portraits and groups of figures in the landscape.)

But she doesn’t tell us very much about this particular group: its fears of debilitating head injuries, its hazing problems, its life-changing athletic scholarships. And though her distanced approach allows her to avoid some of the clichés of sports photography, you can’t help wanting her to enter the scrum.

“Good lord,” said Pat, a New York friend, eyeing the eager faces, the stilettos, the sheer force field of energy. “Is anybody here over the age of 18?”

“I got a very good price on it,” I said.

We walked to a nearby bar in another hotel. There, the median age doubled, the lights didn’t throb, and screaming to be heard was optional, not mandatory. All of a sudden, I didn’t feel like my own mother.

Well, maybe you get a little self-conscious and defensive about aging when you’re in a hotel lobby crowd younger than your own children (who are grown, but still). Or maybe I was just in a chronological-spiral frame of mind after seeing the new play “Marrying George Clooney: Confessions From a Midlife Crisis,” at Cap 21 Theater Company in Chelsea.

Based on the memoir of the same title by Amy Ferris, the play features three menopausal women with insomnia. They’re scouring the Internet for news of old boyfriends, researching dire diseases they’re sure they’re dying of, sweating out their latest hormonal surges, cleaning their closets. You know, what you usually do at 3 a.m. when you’re middle-aged, haggard and homebound in your torn bathrobe — and not young, fresh-faced, dressed to dazzle and in search of a New York party. The play’s three unnamed women speak of their demons and fears. They swap stories of recent weight gains and parents’ deaths, the disappearance of a waistline and the lingering of a mother who’s losing her mind to dementia. They drink wine, they loudly regret quitting cigarettes, and they dance and they sing.

All the above happened to her during her plunge into menopause, Ms. Ferris, a first-time playwright (who adapted the memoir with her husband, Ken Ferris, and Krista Lyons), said when we met at the nearby Tipsy Parson restaurant. (She is, I should add, happily married and does not personally know George Clooney, at least not yet.)

Ms. Ferris’s memoir, which is freewheeling, poignant, funny and cranky, ends in an epilogue recounting her last hours with her dying mother. As she tries to comfort her mother, her own mind is overwhelmed with images and memories from both their lives. In many ways, these final scenes in the book are more powerful than the staged versions. Or maybe, when you’re a reader, your mind is freed to imagine, and the dying mother — with her lifetime of rage and unhappiness — becomes your own.

“When I do book readings,” Ms. Ferris said, “it almost always ends up like a therapy group, with all the women in the audience talking about their mothers.”

Well, of course they do. Sure, middle-aged women talk about aging and wrinkles and menopause and how we’re not young any longer. But sometimes I think that’s only a passing phase, as we plummet into a new time in our lives and learn to adjust.

But our mothers! Do we ever outgrow talking about our mothers — apologizing to them, confronting them, reproaching them, grieving for their lives — no matter how long they have been dead?

Ms. Ferris’s mother wanted to be an artist. Instead she had children she loved but deeply resented. Ms. Ferris, with her own career as a screenwriter, author and now playwright, often feels she is leading the life her mother wanted for herself.

I was still thinking about mothers and their middle-aged daughters when I met my friend Nancy at the Museum of Modern Art exhibition of Cindy Sherman’s photographs. We wandered through the rooms marveling at the artist’s diversity, her intensity, the detail in her work, both subtle and lavish.

“Do you think,” I asked Nancy, “when Cindy was just beginning in the ’70s and ’80s, that her mother started saying, ‘Enough with photographing yourself, Cindy! What’s wrong with a nice landscape now and then?’ ”

Before I left town, I went shopping at Vince in Chelsea. Like the women at the Downtown Dream, every other woman I’d seen in New York, it seemed, had been wedged into skinny jeans and boots. The boots I could skip, but the jeans were a definite possibility.

I squeezed myself into a pair and went to peer into a store mirror. Both the young man and the young woman who worked there told me the jeans looked great. I said that, unfortunately, I couldn’t breathe or sit down. In fact, I felt I lacked the commitment to wear skinny jeans and, presumably, expire while looking great.

The experience made me sympathetic to all the young women I saw wearing skinny jeans after that. It isn’t only middle-aged women who suffer in this life, I told myself.

Maybe you had to get to middle age to realize your mother was right: you should never buy clothes you aren’t comfortable in.

Ruth Pennebaker’s latest novel is “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakthrough.” She blogs at geezersisters.com.

 

PARIS — When London’s National Gallery mounted its blockbuster Leonardo da Vinci exhibition late last year, advance tickets sold out the first week, online scalpers pocketed up to $400 per ticket and crowds lined up around the block at dawn for the paltry number of tickets still for sale.

Now it may be Paris’s turn. On Thursday, the Louvre unveils a newly restored Leonardo masterpiece, “The Virgin and Child With St. Anne,” the centerpiece of a major exhibition running through June 25 of more than 130 works exploring the painting’s genesis, execution and legacy, as well as the cult of St. Anne in the late 15th century.

The new “St. Anne” dazzles with color and light. Gone is the heavy veil of yellow-brown and most of the dark stains left by aging varnish. New details have emerged: a rocky pool of water bathing the subjects’ feet; crisp lines in the imaginary landscape in pale blues; the right leg of the infant Jesus; the lamb’s tail and draping on the dresses that clearly show that Leonardo had not finished it when he died in 1519.

“It is a true resurrection of the ‘St. Anne,’” Vincent Delieuvin, the exhibition’s curator, said. “The painting has recovered a depth and a relief almost like sculpture, with an intense palette of lapis lazuli blue, lacquer red, grays and vibrant browns.”

Among the other works in “St. Anne: Leonardo da Vinci’s Ultimate Masterpiece,” as the exhibition is called, are preparatory studies by Leonardo; earlier versions of the work by his workshop; and other works influenced by it, the most important by Raphael and Michelangelo; a black-and-white study of the head of the Virgin lent by the Metropolitan Museum that resembles a photograph; and 22 Leonardo sketches lent by Queen Elizabeth.

The exhibition also brings together for the first time archival documents referring to the painting throughout history and two manuscripts by Leonardo on the science of painting.

Leonardo’s preparatory studies — including drawings, compositional sketches, landscape studies and the full-size cartoon tracing lent by The National Gallery of London — trace the transformation of the painting through three different versions. Infrared images and a full-scale photograph of the painting before restoration document the stages of the restoration.

Other Louvre treasures, including Leonardo’s “Madonna of the Rocks,” are part of the exhibition, although “Mona Lisa” has not been moved from her place of honor in another part of the museum.

The “St. Anne” was acquired by Francis I of France in 1517 and is regarded as perhaps second only to the Mona Lisa among Leonardo’s later works. The museum hopes that the public viewing of the 500-year-old canvas will end a battle that has raged within both the art community and the Louvre’s own restoration advisory committee over whether the cleaning has been too aggressive.

Out of caution, the Louvre left an extra layer of varnish on the subjects’ faces and decided to leave two major repaintings believed to have been added much later: a group of tree trunks on the right and the puffed fold on the back of the Virgin’s robe.

But Ségolène Bergeon Langle, a chemist and former director of conservation for the Louvre and France’s national museums who resigned from the advisory committee, told the Louvre’s in-house magazine that she remained unhappy about some aspects of the restoration. Most important for her was the removal of a white patch on the body of the infant Jesus, which she believes may have been painted by da Vinci himself. “In doubt,” she said, “I would not have wanted it.”

Herman Wouters for The New York Times

The European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht is expected to draw around 70,000 visitors and collectors. More Photos »

By GUY TREBAY

Published: March 23, 2012

Maastricht, the Netherlands

 

THE lady in pearls was shimmying under a table. Valentino skirt tucked primly around her knees, she lay on her back beaming a flashlight on a yellowed label, a scrap of paper that lent apparent weight to the proposition that the article on view was as old as its seller claimed.

This was at the European Fine Art Fair, where it is not at all unusual to see well-polished people getting intimate with French-waxed consoles, where old specimens can be seen squinting through loupes at granite busts of even older specimens and where for the past quarter-century the acquisitive rich have descended each spring in hordes. The early social arbiter Emily Post once characterized groups like this as the Worldys, the Oldnames and the Eminents...