To read the full article at AVENUE Insider click here.

HEPBURN vs DIETRICH, 2009

Check out this 2011 Chromogenic Print with Dibond Plexiglass from renown New York artist Alex Guofeng Cao.

The most recent body of work by Cao is a series of images of popular culture icons.  At a glance almost anyone can identify some if not all of the characters in the menagerie of stars.  But, upon closer inspection, one can see that these stars are composed of a constellation of tiny repetitive images each slightly differing from its neighbors.  The arrays of miniscule visages that compose and conspire to form the larger portraits are iconic images themselves.  The plot thickens as one realizes that there is a play, a dialogue between the chosen characters that inhabit each other.

Visit the AVENUE Antiques, Art & Design Show’s Final Day at the Park Avenue Amory to see this and many more amazing items.  Also follow us on Pinterest, Facebook  and Twitter.

Steen Ipsen, "Tied up 1", 2012, ceramic, 27 x 11 x 11 in.

Says Joern Lohmann, owner of J Lohmann Gallery,

“I was mesmerized by Steen’s Ipsen ceramic sculptures the first time I saw them in his studio in Denmark.  They are so cutting edge and the color combinations of the glazes and PVC strings are very eye catching.”

Visit the September 21-24 AVENUE Antiques, Art & Design Show at the Park Avenue Amory to see this

Steen Ipsen, "Tied up 9", 2012, ceramic, 18 x 12 x 12 in.

and many more amazing items.  Also follow us on Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter.

12.27 carat Majestic Pink Diamond Ring (Natural Fancy Pink Type IIa Diamond)

Check out the ice: a spectacular, nearly flawless 12.27 carat natural fancy pink diamond set into a signed Cartier platinum and rose gold mounting courtesy of M.S. Rau Antiques of New Orleans, LA.

Prized by diamond connoisseurs, only a handful of natural pink diamonds are known to exist in the world today. This immaculate gem represents the absolute pinnacle of beauty and quality.  A pure 12-carat Natural Fancy pink diamond, the Majestic Pin Diamond’s color is free of any secondary modifiers and boasts a clarity and sparkle almost never seen in pink diamonds of this magnitude.

Visit the September 21-24 AVENUE Antiques, Art & Design Show at the Park Avenue Amory to see this and many more amazing items.  Also follow us on Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter.

Robert Indiana HOPE (Red/Violet) Painted Aluminium sculpture, 2008

Today we bring you a bit of Monday inspiration to kick-off your week, courtesy of artist Robert Indiana and via Waterhouse & Dodd of New York, NY and London, England and Art Link International of Lake Worth, FL.

Conceived in 2008 to raise funds for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign the HOPE series represents a beautiful concept that radiates with optimism and, through association, LOVE.  Robert Indiana was born in Newcastle, Indiana, as Robert Clark in 1928 and his body of work includes paintings, silk screens and sculpture.

The HOPE sculpture is edition III / IX, painted on aluminum and measures 18 inches x 18 inches x 9 inches from Waterhouse & Dodd.

Robert Indiana The Rainbow HOPE Silkscreen on Canvas, 2009

The Rainbow HOPE Silkscreen on Canvas measures 36 inches x 36 inches from Artlink International

Visit the September 21-24 AVENUE Antiques, Art & Design Show at the Park Avenue Amory to see this and many more amazing items.  Also follow us on Pinterest, Facebook  and Twitter.

Known as the fun, shopable show, Antiques, Art & Design offers a wide array of high quality items spanning many eras and interests including:

Furniture from the 17th century through mid century modern design • fine silver including Early American, English, 20th century decorative silver including Tiffany, Italian, Jensen • Russian antiquities • rugs and tapestries • Tiffany lamps • antique enamels • French Art Nouveau and French Art Deco furniture and objects • vintage and contemporary photography • art glass • English and Chinese export porcelain • pottery • objets de Vertu • whimsical objet • antique wicker • fine antique, estate and contemporary jewelry • fine, modern, and contemporary art • works on paper • sculpture •  antique and signature purses • and much more.

The AVENUE fair runs from Friday, September 21 through Monday, September 24, at the Park Avenue ARmory, 643 Park Avenue. Hours are Friday-Sunday 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., and Monday 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

For more information, please visit www.avenueshows.com

For a full schedule of show events, click here.

Via Patrick McMullan. Photo by Jimi Celeste/patrickmcmullan.com

Not every teenage girl relishes a sudden unbidden thrust into the public eye. Georgina Bloomberg, who was 18 when her father was elected mayor and will be 30 when he leaves office next year, is nearing the end of her term as the city’s first daughter. Along the way she has come to see it as less of a sentence than she once rather famously did. “As a teenager I was rebellious,” she admits, sitting on the bright fire-engine-red sofa in her Upper West Side apartment. “I did not want to be in that position. Now I feel I have grown in my own right. I’m proud of my dad, and he’s proud of me.”

Georgina Bloomberg, once named by Forbes as the fourth most intriguing billionaire heiress in the world, has done a lot of growing up. And she has done so, by remaining steadfastly true to who she is, and where her passions lie—her dogs, animal rescue, her horses, her sport, her philanthropy and her plans for the future.

She still has her compact trim, athletic, youthful figure, round tanned face and outspoken style—just recently she publicly disagreed with her father on his proposed soda ban. She told New York magazine she favored more of a market-based approach, in which healthy drinks are subsidized, to the nanny state approach, where large sugary sodas are prohibited. But still, some of the edge has come off. She has developed a clarity of purpose and a sense of calm that she admits she lacked when she was younger, once announcing she was embarrassed to be named Bloomberg. “I have come to accept all of myself,” she says, choosing her words purposefully. “There is no part of me that I don’t accept.”

Her dad, who was always impressed with her equestrian accomplishments, though he worried about her safety and wondered how she’d make a living riding horses, is more than accepting. He’s proud, and proud in a way that makes you think he never doubted her, and does not mind at all that she speaks her mind.  “It’s hard to pick out just a few things you admire most about your daughters,” the Mayor says, “but I’m very proud of how much Georgina has accomplished without anyone’s help, and I love how she says exactly what she’s thinking without second-guessing herself.”

      Georgina has even surprised herself. She admits she was not a shining student at Spence, where she and her older, more studious sister, Emma, attended school. After high school, while Emma went on to Princeton and Harvard Business School, Georgina committed herself fully to her sport. Now, she is the co-author with Catherine Hapka of two young adult novels set in the elite equestrian world. The latest is entitled My Favorite Mistake, is published by Bloomsbury, and dedicated to her father, who showed her “nothing is out of reach if you believe in yourself.” She has a third on contract, and at least enough material to fill a fourth. “I never liked writing when I was in school,” she says. “And I never thought I’d enjoy it as much as I have.”

The material for the books is adapted, of course, from her experiences in that rarified world. Georgina started riding at four and competing when she was six. “That’s when I fell in love with it,” she says, adding with characteristic humility, “I wasn’t that naturally talented at it. I just had to work harder than others at it.” She has remained passionately committed to her sport ever since, making a serious run at a berth on the 2008 Olympic team, only to drop out when her horse was injured. Then, it was her injury from a fall, a concussion and spinal fracture, then surgery on her back that prevented her from going for it again in 2012. But Georgina is nothing if not a tough cookie. She always gets back on the proverbial horse. Recovered now, she is back training six days a week (the horse has to rest on the seventh), slowly returning to competition, and planning on making an appearance at the Hamptons Classic, where she sits on the Board. “My sport is a lifestyle,” she says. “People peak in their 40s, 50s, sometimes 60s.” But she does not personally have plans to ride competitively that far into the future. “I want to take one more serious run at my sport in the next couple of years,” she says. “But for me, having a family is starting to be important.”

She does have a serious boyfriend, who is a reportedly a minor-league baseball player she met at the gym, and with whom she recently enjoyed a cross-country road trip, but whose name she prefers to keep private.  Whether or not he’ll be integral to this family she’d like to start in the not-to-distant future, she’s got it all planned out: Five kids, “three of my own,” she says, “two adopted.” Five is the magic number she has discovered with her dogs—it’s the maximum number of creatures you can have, love and still give each of them individual attention.

Ah yes, the dogs. Hugo, Mona, Mabel, Stella and Chopper play a big role in Georgina’s world, spending idyllic days at Gotham North, the estate in North Salem that Georgina shares with her mother, Susan Bloomberg nee Brown, the Mayor’s ex-wife. The dogs yelp and cluster around Georgina, demanding her attention. She is always attuned to their needs. A drink of water, a pat on the head, a chipmunk scurrying amidst the rocks, which doors and gates must be shut to avoid letting them out, which ones must be kept separate from her mother’s dogs. This is where Georgina spends most of her time when she is training, and where she keeps the six horses she rides in competition, plus a few that are retired. This is where she wakes up wakes up and heads straight out to the barn.

When Georgina comes to her Upper West Side apartment, she can only bring a few of her canine companions, because of building rules. There she has outfitted them with comfy dog beds and pretty much their own room. These are some seriously lucky dogs; four out of five of them are rescue pups. “The day I adopted blue-eyed Mona,” Georgina says, “She was scheduled to be put down in a few hours.” It started with Hugo, “the love of my life,” whom Georgina adopted on her very first puppy mill raid in 2008. “That’s when I saw the light,” she says.  She’s been on a crusade for animal adoption ever since.

She works with both the ASPCA, which she points out started as an organization devoted to equine welfare, and on behalf of the Humane Society of the U.S. to help get more legislation passed regulating puppy mills. The sad fact, she says, is that 99 percent of the dogs sold in New York City pet stores come from puppy mills, another argument for animal adoption. And she does not just try to legislate against those puppy mills; she raids them. On a recent puppy mill raid with her friend and fellow animal advocate Amanda Hearst and others from the Humane Society, she helped save more than 80 dogs, and a pregnant cat, from deplorable, inhumane conditions. It’s messy, grueling, not to mention, smelly, work.

“Not everybody would be willing or able to go on a puppy mill raid,” says Hearst. “But Georgina is the type of person who commits herself fully to what she believes in. She went down with me on the raid, spent the whole day helping the vets and suffering dogs, and then flew back to Florida for work.”

Georgina, Kick Kennedy, Daisy Johnson and Dylan Lauren all are members of the group Hearst started within the Humane Society called Friends of Finn, dedicated to raising money and awareness about the puppy mill industry. In November, Georgina and Amanda will co-chair the Humane Society’s annual gala for the second year in a row.

Georgina’s equestrian activities have given rise to other charities, notably the Rider’s Closet, her invention, which recycles riding clothing and gear to schools and programs that might not necessarily be able to afford such luxuries. “I met a girl when I was at NYU who was going to have to quit the team because she could not afford the apparel,” Georgina explains. “So I connected the dots, and pretty soon people just started sending me stuff.” Eventually, the operation outgrew her and she turned the day to day running of the Rider’s Closet over to an organization in Brewster, New York called Pegasus, which offers therapeutic riding for troubled and special needs children. “I got grief about Rider’s Closet,” Georgina says. “People thought I should be feeding starving people, which is a great thing to do, obviously. But I believe you have to do charity work that you are passionate about.”

Along the way, Georgina has developed some other interests and plans as well. One is fashion, perhaps an outgrowth of the painting and drawing she enjoyed while in school.  This summer she attended an intensive course in fashion design at Parsons to help her with the creation of her own riding clothing line. Red, her favorite color—as evidenced by the fact that all of her living room furniture in her Manhattan apartment, and a number of the dog beds as well are bright fire engine red—is certain to figure into the collection. She also has ambitions to start a world-class equestrian magazine, something she says is missing from the marketplace. “I’ve always loved magazines, and I just think there needs to be one for our sport.”

The love of animals, Georgina suspects, comes from her mother’s side.  “We always had animals growing up,” she says. Other traits she hopes to inherit from her mother: “Her sense of humor, her sense of style, her knowledge of tradition and manners. She’s the softer side.” She also loves travel and made sure that her daughters had an appreciation for other cultures. What might have been traumatic, the Bloomberg divorce when Goergina was 10 and Emma was 14, turned out to be a bonues, Georgina says. For one thing, it was unusually friendly: For a while after the divorce, the entire family lived in Bloomberg’s Upper East Side townhouse, even as both parents were dating other people. “I had great people in my life,” Georgina says. “That includes my father’s girlfriends and my mother’s boyfriends.”

And her dad? Well, she may not agree with everything he does and says—and don’t even get her started on the issue of carriage horses in the city— but he’s okay too. “He’s my biggest inspiration,” she says. “He showed me that if you have an inspiration, and people doubt you, do it anyway. You don’t have to follow anyone else’s path.”

Text courtesy of AVENUE Magazine.

It’s not often that a father passes his mistress down to his son, but William Woodward Sr. did just that—hoisting Kansas-born radio actress Ann Crowell into New York’s high society and catalyzing a series of scandals for the Woodwards. When William “Billy” Woodward Jr., heir to a bank fortune and a famous estate, and Ann Crowell met, they had an electric attraction to each other. The two quickly married and began a volatile relationship—plagued with affairs and dramatic fights but full of passion and commitment to making it last.

The year was 1955 and the Woodwards, by then, were considered old money and a well-respected fixture of the upper class. William Woodward Sr. served as chairman of Central-Hanover Bank and was the owner of the renowned Belair Stud, the Maryland thoroughbred farm that had given rise to three Kentucky Derby champions. His wife and Billy’s mother, Elsie, was a queen bee of high society, one of the famously well-married “Cryder Triplets”, and an active philanthropist. Ann—whose first offense was not being born into the Woodwards’ world—hardly did herself any favors by continuously making major faux pas for the era. From wearing red shoes with a blue dress to smoking in public, Ann was seemingly unable to acclimate.

On the night of Oct. 30, 1955, Billy and Ann Woodward attended a party honoring Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor. Later asked to testify, guests recalled that the couple seemed perfectly happy that evening, albeit quite drunk. At 1 a.m. the pair arrived home to their Oyster Bay, Long Island weekend retreat and retired to their respective bedrooms. Feeling slightly haunted following reports of a prowler in the neighborhood, both slept with loaded guns within reach.

Two hours after they went to bed, the couples’ dog, Sloppy, began to bark. He continued to bark at a mysteriously opened door until Ann emerged, with shotgun in hand. The young Mrs. Woodward saw a shadowy figure near Billy’s room. Spooked, she fired two shots at the moving figure. Almost immediately she discovered it was her husband.

Ann summoned an ambulance, police, and, curiously enough, thought to beckon her attorney, Sol Rosenblatt. Under normal circumstances, a fleet of police officers on duty would have investigated the scene. However, the prominence of the victim called for the Nassau County prosecutor and the Oyster Bay Chief of Police. Ann, in absolute hysterics, was taken to a Manhattan hospital for sedation (at the insistence of her lawyer) where she was spared from investigators for the following 48-hours. All this preferential treatment raised suspicion and served to fuel gossip about the murder and obstruction of justice.

The shooting was front-page news and dubbed “the shooting of the century” by Life Magazine. Many say Elsie had a heavy hand in getting Ann let off by the grand jury—$400,000 is the speculated price tag on sparing the Woodwards from the further trauma and embarrassment of a trial. The elder Mrs. Woodward banished Ann from New York—asking her to take her mourning period somewhere across the Atlantic, where she was most often seen drowning her sorrows in a tumbler at Harry’s bar in Venice. She eventually returned to New York but was hardly received with open arms. Her life continued a spiral of scandal and tragedy, finally halted at her own accord, with a single capsule of cyanide in 1975.

One of our sister publication’s AVENUE Insider recently covered an event celebrating the collaboration of House of Waris and Forevermark, and we couldn’t help but include a series of this oh-so urbane looking New Yorker.

From AVENUE:

Vogue’s Meredith Melling Burke, Olivia Chantecaille, Annabel Tollman, DJ Chelsea Leyland, and designers Yigal Azrouel and Bibhu Mohapatra were just a few of the glittery cross-section of style setters who flocked to the historical National Arts Club on Tuesday night. The occasion? To celebrate the first time collaboration between the HOUSE of WARIS and Forevermark, and to fete the debut of the showstopping “Center of my Universe” diamond necklace that Waris Ahluwalia created for the brand owned by the De Beers group of companies.. With the central oval stone weighing in at 14.58 karats, and surrounded by a pave of diamonds,the design had absolutely no trouble living up to its namesake – eliciting “oohs” and “ahhhs” from even the most jaded of guest. Not surprisingly, the stone is the largest Forevermark diamond ever featured in a designer collaboration.

As a jazz band played amidst the Belle Epoque, wood paneled decor of the Gramercy Park landmark, who dutifully greeted and air kissed his friends (and he has many) upon arrival, explained that the concept celebrates the notion of a woman as the emotional center of those around her. “And in my experience, women love diamonds more than just about anything,” he smiled. Finally – a man who knows his way to a woman’s heart!

To read more from AVENUE Insider click here.

Heidi Klum

A glowing Klum arrived at the launch decked in Dolce and Gabbana. Written by Eila Mell, the newest coffee table must-have is composed of 100 independent conversations and 1,000 images. The hardcover commemorates a television series that gave light to the design genius of nine seasons worth of hidden gems.

Capturing highlight moments of seasons aired to date with personal updates from former contestants, the book also includes an intro written by the executive producer and host herself.  Fall in love with the series all over again with this fun summer read.

To read more from AVENUE Insider click here.