The Lost City of New Orleans
by Timothy Hagy, Paris Editor

There was a surreal quality to the images that flashed across the television screen on Wednesday. President Bush stood in the rose garden of the White House cheerfully reciting a laundry list of FEMA facts and figures, while New Orleans, inundated by flood, overcome by fire and looting, seemed to be quickly disintegrating - becoming if you will, the lost city of Atlantis.

Tennessee Williams wrote in his memoirs that he knew of “no city where it is better to have a skylight. You know, New Orleans is slightly below sea level and maybe that’s why the clouds and the sky seem so close. I suppose they are really vapor off the Mississippi more than genuine clouds and through that skylight they seemed so close that if the skylight were not glass, you could touch them”.

If New Orleans is an American city that conjures up a dreamy world of absinthe, beignets and rémoulade, it also represents the birthplace of American culture: from Duke Ellington’s cool jazz to Williams lyrical verse. From Truman Capote’s Southern Gothicism to Gallatoires fusion cuisine. At the heart of it you find a certain mystique that even the French admire.

“In the courtyard there was an angel of black stone,” wrote Capote in his travel sketch of New Orleans written in 1946. “And it’s angel head rose above giant elephant leaves; the stark glass angel eyes, bright as the bleached blue of a sailor eyes, stared upward. I lived beyond in three old white rooms, rooms with elaborate wedding-cake ceilings, wide sliding doors, tall French windows. On warm evenings, with these windows open, conversation was pleasant there, tuneful, for wind rustled the interior like fan-breeze made by ancient ladies. And on such warm evenings the town is quiet.”

At a time when America’s standing in the world is at an historic low, it seems all the more unkind that the frail thread that runs to the best of the past seems every more likely to snap under the weight of the growing tragedy. Like all art, fashion and beauty - that illusory world is ephemeral.

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OLYMPUS FASHION WEEK IN NEW YORK takes place from September 9th to 16th. Look for Fashionlines' New York Report this month by Marilyn Kirschner. 7th on Sixth, created in 1993 produces Olympus Fashion Week in New York, as well as Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week at Smashbox Studios in Los Angeles and Sunglass Hut Swim Shows Miami presented by LYCRA. Internationally IMG Fashion and 7th on Sixth produce, manage and/or represent international fashion properties including: Fashion Fringe (London), Lakmé India Fashion Week, Milan Fashion Week, Paris Fashion Week, Thai Supermodel Search and Toronto's L'Oreal Fashion Week. But New York Fashion Week is what 7th on 6th is most reknowned for, and we look forward to seeing the latest for Spring 2006.

New York Fashion Week

Gallery Paule Anglim announces an exhibition of recent works on paper and cloth by LOUISE BOURGEOIS. In the internationally renowned artist's fourth show at Gallery Paule Anglim, Louise Bourgeois will feature drawings, hand-colored prints, artist¹s books and works printed on cloth. The exhibition will provide an opportunity to see a breadth of imagery in a variety of media. In 1994 the Museum of Modern Art in New York launched a major retrospective of Louise Bourgeois' complete prints and assembled a catalogue raisonné of all her published works. The artist's legendary artistic output spans more than five decades. In 1982 at New York MoMA her work was given overdue recognition in a critically applauded retrospective. She has since had many international exhibitions and represented the United States in the 1993 Venice Biennale. In 1999 she built three monumental sculpture towers for the inauguration of London's Tate Modern. Acclaimed for her mastery of a great variety of materials (marble, bronze, steel, glass, latex, plaster, fabric and wood) she continues to address nearly obsessive themes of anxiety and alienation; of sex, identity and family history; of love and death.

LOUISE BOURGEOIS
Gallery Paule Anglim
September 1 - October 8, 2005.

14 Geary Street
San Francisco, Calirofnia 94108

www.gallerypauleanglim.com