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.

• 1
• 2

Next Page »

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.

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...

 

Vinyl records are a totem of the past, a nostalgic symbol of a time when Americans seemed to share more — at least in the way of music: People of a certain age can still remember when, say, Carole King’s 1971 Tapestry sold 25 million copies and engulfed the nation.

Simultaneously, vinyl records are up to the moment. Young hipster collectors now snatch them up both for the sheer physicality of playing a vinyl record and the artistry involved in record covers. DJs like the sound of vinyl: as local legend DJ Le Spam (Andrew Yeomanson) says, an MP3 download is like “a fax of a song.”

Visual artists have long put vinyl to their own uses, and the exhibition at the Miami Art Museum, The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl has a bit of everything: outsider artists, emerging artists and established icons like Ed Ruscha. Within the show, vinyl records are photographed, melted and deconstructed for other ends: most of the work has little to do with music directly, and remain conceptual works of art.

The Record — encompassing 99 pieces by 41 artists — originated at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, N.C. According to Nasher curator Trevor Schoonmaker, the show’s strength lies in its adherence to a mission of remaining serious contemporary art. “Some of the work refers to pop culture, but we don’t have any music ephemera, posters or whatever.”The intersection of pop culture and high art is tricky terrain, but it can be done right. In 2008, MOCA’s Sympathy For The Devil: Art and Rock & Roll Since 1967 revealed the not-so-quiet artistry of rock. Last year, at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, the show Artist Unknown/The Free World created a compelling portrait of contemporary life using countless Facebook images of ordinary people.

At MAM, the first exhibition room of The Record strikes just the right note. In the middle of the room is a thoughtful sculptural installation by William Cordova, a Peru-born Miami artist who was exhibited – along with locals Adler Guerrier and Bert Rodriguez — in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. The piece, Greatest Hits (para Micaela Bastidas, Tom Wilson, y Anna Mae Aquash) 2008 consists of a stack of 3,000 vinyl records, Peruvian gourds, a VHS tape and candles. Focusing on the ideas of transition and displacement, the monolithic work refers to three icons: Bastidas, a 18th century Peruvian independence martyr; Aquash, a 1970s leader in the American Indian movement; Wilson, a 1960s record producer known for his work with Bob Dylan.

The first exhibition room also has Laurie Anderson’s 1977 Viophonograph — a hybrid-creation between a record player and violin that Anderson played in concert — and David Bryne’s 1978 photo-montage for the album cover of Talking Heads’ More Songs About Buildings and Food. Created with a Polaroid Big Shot camera, the 90-inch-by-90 inch piece is a life-size rendering of the band, pieced together with countless close-up photos.

A smaller project space, covered in plywood and photos contains an installation by the New York-based artist Xaviera Simmons, Thundersnow Road, North Carolina, 2010. Simmons, also a DJ, created a character of a folk rock singer posing for moody circa 1973 album liner photos in rural North Carolina. She then asked friends in music groups — Rain Machine, Midnight Masses, etc. — to compose songs based on the photos, ultimately making an entire vinyl album. This is perfectly-realized conceptual art, a world onto itself, filled with humor and loss, “Once we all listen to music with chips planted in our brains,” Simmons says, “maybe the first quaint iPods will inspire art shows.”

 

ON Tuesday, the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands held a hearing on Frank Gehry’s controversial design for the Dwight D. Eisenhower memorial. National memorials are managed by the National Park Service, which is why the Congressional subcommittee involved itself, even though reviewing architectural design, as Representative Raúl M. Grijalva observed, involves “something well outside our purview.”

What has fueled the Eisenhower memorial controversy in the media are the public pronouncements of two of the president’s granddaughters, Susan and Anne Eisenhower, who have proclaimed themselves dissatisfied with the design. Understandably, their position is being taken seriously. Yet I am concerned that the growing public brouhaha will ultimately weaken the memorial design.

The Eisenhower memorial is to be located on a parcel of land just south of the National Mall, between the National Air and Space Museum and the Department of Education building. It covers four acres, slightly more than the area of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The proposed memorial would not sprawl over the entire site, as some critics have maintained. What Mr. Gehry has done is to place the memorial to the 34th president in what is effectively a new public park.

The dominant feature of the memorial, and one of the design elements to which the Eisenhower family objects, is the 80-foot-high colonnade that rings the site. The design has been described, somewhat pejoratively, as “Gehryesque,” as if it were an alien presence.

But this is precisely what it is not. As my former colleague on the United States Commission of Fine Arts, Michael McKinnell, pointed out when the commission reviewed the design (we unanimously approved the general concept), this is, in effect, a roofless building; more specifically, it is a roofless classical temple — in a city replete with classical monuments. Moreover, it provides a sense of cohesion to this city’s currently fragmented urban space.

The colonnade supports a metal screen that carries images of the Kansas landscape in which Eisenhower grew up. When first confronted with this idea, I was concerned that mechanically imprinted screens, which the architect insisted on calling “tapestries,” would resemble large billboards.

Since then Mr. Gehry and his collaborators have developed hand-weaving techniques so that the screens really do resemble tapestries. Having seen full-size mock-ups of the screens on the site, I am convinced that their size will not be out of scale with the surroundings.

Another target of the critics is the proposal to include a statue of the president as a youth, recalling that he sometimes referred to himself as a “Kansas farm boy.” Some consider this an affront to a man who was a victorious five-star general as well as a successful two-term president; others find it a touching reminder of Eisenhower’s modest Midwestern roots.

I fall in the second camp, but in either case, it is important to recognize that the statue, whose design has not been finalized, will not be the only, or the largest, representation of the president on the site. The design, as it currently stands, includes two very large bas-reliefs of Eisenhower, one as military leader and one as president, as well as inscribed quotations. In this context, the small statue will have the effect of a footnote.

Still, the debates over the memorial give the impression that Mr. Gehry is effectively being forced on the family, the city and the president’s legacy. But that’s simply not true.

The four finalists who prepared designs for the memorial were picked, by a jury that included Eisenhower’s grandson David, from a list compiled by a panel of leading architects, who in turn chose from among 44 firms that submitted their names to the memorial commission. Ever since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial competition was won by Maya Lin, then a college student, it is taken for granted that the best memorial designs are the result of open competitions, in which hundreds of (largely unqualified) individuals compete.

But the accepted wisdom is wrong — the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is an exception. It’s worth remembering that the Lincoln Memorial was the result of a competition between only two young architects — Henry Bacon and John Russell Pope — and the loser, Pope, was later invited to design the Jefferson Memorial; no one else was considered.

What’s more, both the Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson Memorial were the objects of criticism when they were proposed: why was Lincoln portrayed as a tired rather than a triumphant leader; why was Jefferson housed in a Roman temple? Today, of course, these memorials are among the country’s most beloved structures.

Presidential memorials take a long time to come to fruition — the Lincoln Memorial took more than 12 years — and the design team will continue refining its design for the Eisenhower memorial. Mr. Gehry, our finest living architect, has already shown himself willing to listen to critical suggestions.

But in this case, too many cooks will definitely spoil the broth. Compromise and consensus are important when devising legislation, but they are a poor recipe for creating a memorial.

Witold Rybczynski is a member of the United States Commission of Fine Arts and the author, most recently, of “The Biography of a Building.”

Christieís Images, Ltd.

“Chinquapin, 1967” by Forrest Bess shows how he was influenced by his surroundings on the Gulf of Mexico.

The art of Forrest Bess (1911-77), like that of Vincent van Gogh, may be in danger of being overtaken by his life story. Especially now, when the work of this eccentric visionary painter — who spent the bulk of his maturity as a fisherman on the Gulf of Mexico, living on a spit of Texas beach — is having an especially intense New York moment.

An Eccentric World

The current Whitney Biennial includes a show within a show of 11 Bess paintings, organized by the sculptor Robert Gober; it proffers Bess as a kind of foundational artist of our time. And an additional 40 of his paintings can be seen in “A Tribute to Forrest Bess,” an exhibition at Christie’s that is occasioned by a private sale of those works for a single seller. (It makes for the rather uneasy sight of an auction house acting like a commercial gallery handling what is tantamount to an artist’s estate.)

The facts of Bess’s life are nothing if not sensational. They include isolation, poverty, recurring visions — Bess said that he merely copied motifs that had appeared to him in dreams since childhood — and even self-mutilation. In the late 1950s, convinced that uniting the male and female sides of his personality would guarantee immortality, Bess attempted to turn himself into what he called a “pseudo-hermaphrodite” through two acts of painful self-surgery that yielded a small vaginalike opening at the base of his penis.

 

Inside the show were walls of sceney photographs, a re-creation of one of Haring’s installations at Performance Space 122 and another blast of music (accompanying a slide show of his famous subway drawings). It looked as if the museum had simply repackaged the mythic Haring — club kid, Warhol protégé and maker of friendly street art — for a younger generation, glamorizing the permissive culture of downtown New York in the 1970s and ’80s.

It has done that, stopping well short of Haring’s death from AIDS-related complications in 1990, at 31. But within the exhibition’s party atmosphere other Harings emerge in early drawings, collages and journals, and, especially, on video. And each one is just as relevant, to young artists today, as the figure celebrated in shows like last year’s “Art in the Streets” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and on the reality television series “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.”

Organized by the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati and the Kunsthalle Wien in Austria, this show includes equal quantities of works on paper and rarely seen archival objects (about 300 pieces in all). Also here are seven videos, a medium Haring took up as a student at the School of Visual Arts but later abandoned.

He shouldn’t have. He was great at it from the get-go. In his first video, “Painting Myself Into a Corner” (1979), a spry and shirtless Haring bops along to Devo as he works on a large drawing at his feet. He’s simultaneously a Bruce Nauman testing the limits of a confined space and a Jackson Pollock hovering over the floor. In “Phonics” and “Lick Fat Boys,” both from 1980, he plays games with language: breaking words into phonemes and rearranging them, physically with letters on a wall and orally by recitation.

These works sound dry but aren’t. Neither is “Tribute to Gloria Vanderbilt,” in which Haring makes eyes at — and eventually makes out with — the camera while dancing spastically to a New Wave beat. One of the little gems of the exhibition, this piece does double duty as a dig at oversexed advertisements for designer jeans and an exuberant expression of queer identity.

The notebooks provide more evidence of Haring’s interest in linguistics and semiotics. The words from “Lick Fat Boys” reappear as poems, puzzles and anagrams, alongside studious jottings about Roland Barthes and the information theorist Abraham Moles.

In these books Haring also formulated his own theory of spatial relationships. “Shapes that contain no inner components of positive/negative relationships will function better with other shapes of the same nature,” a part of it reads.

And in his drawings he put those ideas into practice: first in a series of 25 individual Tetris-like shapes in red gouache, and later in his interlocking forms made from wriggling lines of Sumi ink on large scrolls of paper. The largest and most striking of the examples on view (“Matrix,” from 1983) generates unlikely synergies among pregnant women, U.F.O.’s, clocks, televisions, men with dog heads and crawling babies.

Some of the earlier works remind you that Haring started out, in Kutztown, Pa., as a cartoonist. In the silly series “Manhattan Penis Drawings” (1978), the World Trade Center appears as two phalluses. But other drawings from that same year evoke pre-Columbian art, Paul Klee, Stuart Davis and the Swiss outsider Adolf Wölfli.

Interspersed with the works on paper is plenty of archival material, which isn’t just there for ambience. It makes the point that Haring was a social-media savant in a Xerox and Polaroid age, distributing his art in the form of buttons, fliers and graffiti. (The Keith Haring Foundation is picking up where he left off, posting pages from Haring’s journals on its Tumblr account.)

In 1980, for instance, he photocopied and pasted around the city provocative collages made from cut-up and recombined New York Post headlines. One reads, “Reagan Slain by Hero Cop”; another, “Pope Killed for Freed Hostage.”

More famous are the chalk drawings he made in subway stations, on the sheets of black paper that covered old advertisements. The Brooklyn show ends with an entire gallery of them, though the accompanying slide show of photographs by Tseng Kwong Chi preserves more of the original, semi-illicit context.

At this point you will either have succumbed to the blaring punk and New Wave soundtrack — compiled by DJ Scott Ewalt and available as an iTunes playlist — or fled the galleries altogether. The show was organized by Raphaela Platow, the Contemporary Arts Center’s chief curator; the Brooklyn Museum’s nightclublike presentation has been supervised by its project curator, Tricia Laughlin Bloom, and Patrick Amsellem, a former associate curator of photography.

My advice: Go, and enjoy the party. Relive the Paradise Garage, if you are old enough to have been there; celebrate the progenitor of Banksy, if you weren’t. But keep an eye out for the other Harings: the theory head, the video whiz, the impresario, the cartoonist from Kutztown.

“Keith Haring: 1978-1982” continues through July 8 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park; (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org.