The Best American Magazine Writing 2015

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  Few artists reward prolonged scrutiny more than Matisse, and in scrutinizing him, a beautiful paradox arises: The Cut-Outs are some of the easiest great works to love in the history of Western art. Yet they contain some of the most complex spatial architectonics in all of art. Without any kind of shading, rendering, or cross-hatching, Matisse is layering space without illusionism; the eye is always savoring surface and different internal juxtapositions. In addition to the physicality of the surface, Matisse gets different-colored paper to conjure tiny changes in spatial depth. Shades of color on similar shapes might be reversed to make one shape come forward and the other go back. He gets lighter colors and larger forms to go back into space and darker colors and smaller shapes to come forward. This should not work according to our laws of perspective and color theories. New visual ordinances form. Whole careers have sprung in some part from The Cut-Outs, notably those of Robert Motherwell, Ellsworth Kelly, and Richard Tuttle. The Egyptian levels of optical clarity, blocky shapes, and opaque color have helped form contemporary artists as varied as Gary Hume, Wangechi Mutu, Huma Bhabha, and Joe Bradley. And I surmise this show, too, will exert a pull on artists everywhere, now and in the future.

  Yet despite all this visual firepower and radical experimentation, many persist in dismissing Matisse as a painter interested only in prettiness and making art “a comfortable armchair.” The unspoken charge is that “He’s not as powerful as Picasso.” Or macho. Just last month, an Artforum writer decried The Cut-Outs as “sensuous distraction.” This has been a party line since 1908, when Gertrude Stein recorded that “the feeling between the Picassoites and the Matisse-ites became bitter.” In 1925, “Picassoite” Jean Cocteau wrote that Matisse painting in the sun-drenched South of France had “turned into one of Bonnard’s kittens.” This prejudice goes beyond the need for heroes and powerful male figures; it comes from the fear of art being too beautiful, girly, gay-looking, ornamental, or decorative and can be traced back to the proscriptions against pleasure, sensuality, and sex in Judeo-Christian tradition. Similar arguments were used against geniuses like Boucher and Fragonard and all of the Rococo, which was seen as too feminine and frilly to be taken seriously. Interestingly, these proscriptions never existed in Asia, Oceania, or Africa. It has never been explained why pure beauty, form, color, comfort, or even kittens are any less visceral than a picture of a bull with a naked lady being raped in the background. Part of what makes The Cut-Outs feel especially electric today is that few artists buy the old bogus arguments.

  Plus, there is pain in them. Lots of pain. In fact, the kitty-cat Matisse said that before working, he wanted “to strangle someone,” and that making art was like “slitting an abscess with a penknife.” Nearly everything you’re seeing was made while Matisse was confined to bed or in a wheelchair. Unable to walk, he chose colors for assistants to paint on paper, directed them to place shapes, and pointed at or drew on surfaces with a long stick. He’d already suffered a colostomy and pulmonary embolism. Knowing the end was near, suffering all day, he was unable to sleep for more than a few hours, sometimes waking up in cries of physical agony that could be heard a quarter-mile down the road.

  The Cut-Outs are Matisse’s long good-bye to painting—but not a bitter one. He never painted again after 1948, saying “Painting seems to be finished for me now.” He saw that the four sides and semirigid surface of painting was holding him back; the processes of painting itself could not create the tangible real surface he longed for. In paintings, he said, “I can only go back over the same ground,” while The Cut-Outs allowed him to “cross into a different dimension.” The Cut-Outs, he noted, were “beyond me, beyond any subject or motif, beyond the studio … a cosmic space.” Which brings us back to Picasso. After looking over their shoulders at one another’s work for decades, Matisse just went his own way. But Picasso knew a new “cosmic space” was in the offing. Accompanied by Francois Gilot, he visited the ailing Frenchman often. Gilot recorded seeing The Cut-Outs: “We were spellbound, in a state of suspended breathing.” After one visit, Matisse wrote of Picasso, “He saw what he wanted to see. He will put it all to good use in time.”

  As for what we can see—our eyes can only stand so much, but gather your forces for the mind-bending extended crescendo to come. In the last four or five galleries are what I think of as the masterpieces in this show. The huge gaga dreamboats that alternatively have the majesty of Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, the marbleized flying power of Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel frescos, the shimmering lightness of being of the Blue Mosque, blues as blissful as those in Fra Angelico. Chinese fish mutate into heraldic underwater beings, a beautiful bathing nude is looked at from deep within a candy-colored canopy of palm fronds by a parakeet that must be the dying Matisse. A wraparound frieze of splashing bathers is part swimming pool, part Greek temple, and part Zen garden of delight. The enormous abstract Snail turns history painting into prehistory painting. Seeing all these visual facts beyond facts, we witness a mighty tree falling in art’s forest. And we beguiled are transformed into things that move forward like eels, mouths forever agape in this Sea of Love.

  Vogue

  WINNER—MAGAZINE OF THE YEAR

  Vogue, said the judges who chose it as the 2015 Magazine of the Year, “has proved that there is no limit to its hold as the absolute fashion and style authority”—further testament to the talent of Anna Wintour, the title’s long-time editor in chief and a member of ASME’s Hall of Fame. This piece, which profiles the model Kate Upton as it explores the growing importance of social media to fashion and its -istas, was published in the celebrated Kim Kardashian–Kanye West issue. The writer, Jonathan Van Meter, is a veteran magazine journalist whose work, including the definitive profile of Joan Rivers, was nominated for Ellies in 2010 and 2011.

  Jonathan Van Meter

  Follow Me

  Kate Upton Leads the Charge of Models Who’ve Gone Crazy for Social Media

  Have you met Kate? Kate who? Upton!

  This is how it all begins, in Paris, way back in October (an eternity on Planet Fashion)—spring 2014 Chanel ready-to-wear, Grand Palais, ten a.m. The show has not yet begun, editors are staring into their smart phones, and I am standing this close to Kate Upton but have somehow failed to recognize her. To be fair, not only is she not in a bikini, but she is totally covered up! The honey-blonde hair is coiffed; the assets disappeared beneath a classic Chanel tweed jacket. The only thing missing is a briefcase. Trust me, you wouldn’t have recognized her either.

  Well, hello, lady. I’m the guy who’s writing about you, I say. “Then I guess I shouldn’t say anything too offensive,” she says, four inches from my face, eyelashes aflutter. And that is when I notice: Her Miami-blue eyes are yellow at the center, like an egg yolk. “I have sunflowers in my eyes,” she says in a this-old-thing voice. She stares for a second to see if I am in on the joke yet. “My favorite flowers are in my eyes! I can’t help it!” and then lets out one of her loud giggle-honks.

  In an instant, I get it: She is a modern-day Mae West–meets–Marilyn Monroe, the perfect larger-than-life avatar for our exhilarating (and vexing) social-media moment. Suddenly the lightsdim and Upton, who is here as a front-row celebrity, scurries to her seat. Among the many peculiarities of this Instagram era is that one of the most famous models in the world almost never gets invited to walk the runway. When the music kicks up—bleep! bleep! bleep!—it’s like the sound of a million tweets going off at once. Around the perimeter of the football-field-length room are send-ups of bloated, supersize modern art. The Jay Z song “Picasso Baby” booms from the speakers, and the procession begins. An editor sitting next to me leans over and says, “The art world is so horrifying right now—this is perfect.” One girl after another, robots in identical wigs and makeup, marches past, all but indistinguishable from each other.

  I know that Joan Smalls and Liu Wen, whom I will chase after for this story, are in there somewhere, but I cannot make them out in the clone parade. Is fashion, at least
as it is presented on the runway, really still doing this? The no-personality, samey-samey thing? Is it any wonder so many models have taken to Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and Tumblr to establish themselves as actual humans, with quirks, style, and interests all their own? No one should be the least bit surprised that Upton, who looks nothing like most models, has stormed the gates. The hunger for personality—for stars—in the modeling world is just that great.

  On the runway, the women are carrying Chanel bags covered with graffiti, which puts me in mind of a time before the ubiquity of cell phones—the eighties—when the way for a model to become super was by dating a famous man (rock star, handsome actor) or by showing up at every A-list party and misbehaving. Or she could just be sassy and louche and say outrageous things to writers, like We don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day, which, come to think of it, would have made the perfect tweet. Well under 140 characters, it was the quote heard round the world. Evangelista, Campbell, and Turlington were household names back then—and they did it all without posting a single selfie.

  As the models make their laps, I grow distracted by the editor next to me, who is by now manipulating her phone with such intensity that she may as well be juggling chainsaws: Snap the look, type a description, post the look. Snap, type, post! Fully half of the faces in the front row are lit glow-stick blue from below by their iPads, which only heightens the sense that, like so many of us, the audience is torn between watching what’s happening right in front of them and participating in it in real-time, via their interweb machines.

  The next day I catch Marc Jacobs’s spooky-great farewell to Louis Vuitton, where he reprises the carousel staging from his spring 2012 collection. (Back then, Kate Moss was the last model to dismount her horse and stalk the circular runway. Today, it is Kate Upton who rides round and round, the cherry at the center, although she never gets off.) Seeing the carousel again, this time in all black, reminds me of something Jacobs said to me back then: “This merry-go-round idea is such a simple thought. It’s like, you get on it, it’s a pleasure, and it just kind of never ends—as long as you’re enjoying it.”

  The carousel—Planet Fashion—has been spinning at pretty much the same rate for as long as there have been Fashion Week schedules, which began in earnest by the 1930s. And while social media hasn’t sped up the wheel, exactly, it has caused the ride to be a lot more hectic. Snap, type, post! Once upon a time, Linda and Naomi could at least have a moment backstage after a show (and a glass of champagne and a cigarette) and share in the designer’s triumph: Genius! May-jah! Today, as Karlie Kloss puts it, models are required to be “almost like reporters,” documenting the scene with their iPhones. “Everything gets posted right away,” says Kloss, who has more than 700,000 followers on Instagram, where you might see her smiling in the Seahawks’ end zone during the Super Bowl or posing with Diane von Furstenberg after the designer’s fortieth-anniversary-of-the-wrap-dress show. “You can post what’s happening before something even happens!” she adds. “When I was live-tweeting the Victoria’s Secret show, I think I gained 60,000 Instagram followers in a matter of hours. It’s shocking, the power of having a presence on these platforms.”

  Having a presence on these platforms may now be de rigueur, but, like the rest of us, most fashion designers did not immediately grasp the way social media were going to change everything. Prabal Gurung was an exception: He was one of the first designers on Twitter, which really caught on shortly before his career began in 2009. Demi Moore, another early adopter of social media (thanks, no doubt, to her ex-husband the Twitter enthusiast Ashton Kutcher), wore one of Gurung’s dresses to her perfume launch in Paris. “In a tweet she said, ‘Wonderful young designer to look out for Prabal Gurung!’” he remembers. “I signed up just to say thank you, and I went from eighteen followers to 500. So I talked to my very small team. ‘There’s something here. We don’t have the budget for marketing or PR, but I think this is at our disposal.’”

  Four years later, when Gurung’s fall 2013 digital ad campaign featuring Bridget Hall was teased on Instagram in advance of his runway show, it sent a ripple through the fashion world. “It was just one piece at a time,” he says. “Twelve photos, and then finally we showed her face.” Other blue-chip brands have been catching on. Oscar de la Renta also rolled out his fall 2013 campaign on Instagram, thanks largely to his senior vice president of global communications, Erika Bearman, a.k.a. @OscarPRGirl. “She started her Instagram account a long time ago,” says Sara Wilson, who oversees fashion companies and public figures for both Instagram and Facebook. “She is the living, breathing embodiment of the Oscar lifestyle—but you also get this really amazing backstage view.” As Burberry’s Christopher Bailey, who’s celebrated for, among other things, the clever social-media spin he’s put on the classic English brand, points out, “Digital is part of the way we live, and it would be counterintuitive to pretend that it’s not—to do one thing in real life, and then have a business that didn’t reflect that behavior.”

  For John Demsey, the group president at Estée Lauder Companies, it was Lady Gaga who t-t-t-telephoned with the wake-up call. Thanks to Gaga tweeting to her fans, MAC’s Viva Glam campaign raised $33 million for the company’s AIDS charity. “It was unprecedented,” Demsey says, which is why “today when we look to sign a modeling contract, it’s a prerequisite that our models are on social media.” Vicky Yang, who works for Elite, explains, “Brands are recognizing that models are the true middlemen between a young girl who might buy a bag and the brand itself. The models are communicating on social media: ‘Oh, I have this bag, and it’s cool.’”

  Given the frenzy around the possibilities of social media, models, and branding, it should come as no surprise that Demsey sounds positively Donald Trump–like in his enthusiasm about some big … news: In July, Kate Upton will follow Katie Holmes as the face of Bobbi Brown, a mash-up that he sees as near-perfect brand-to-celebrity synergy. Brown herself has a huge social-media following, a persona that is “earthy and no-nonsense,” says Demsey, and embraces “all shapes and sizes.” Likewise, Upton “has capitalized on the medium like no one has ever done before,” has a “big personality,” and is not “überthin.” He goes on, “She took a risk by putting herself out there in a fun, sexy way while always looking bombshell gorgeous and yet still somehow like the girl next door—we love the notion of Bobbi Brown and the Bombshell.”

  By the time I finally catch up with the Bombshell again, it’s early December in Los Angeles. We meet at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills and find a table in the lounge. It’s freakishly cold outside, so once again, Upton is all covered up: black Viktor & Rolf jacket, big scarf, leggings, and buckle-y black riding boots.

  You may not be able to tell from her Twitter feed, a high-low mix that occasionally veers dangerously close to soft-core, but social media’s favorite pinup girl used to be a serious equestrian, competing at a national level on the paint-horse circuit. “It definitely relates to what I’m doing now,” she says. “At a very young age I was traveling the country. It was our life. You have to be so dedicated. And that’s exactly what I did with modeling. I had a goal, and it’s a passion, and it’s become my life.”

  Thanks in large part to her canny use of social media, Upton, twenty-one, is probably the closest thing that fashion has to a supermodel right now, and she’s done it with her own distinct body type and in her own distinct way. Though she’d signed with Elite at fifteen and made a splash in Sports Illustrated, it wasn’t—as everyone knows by now—until dippy videos appeared on You-Tube of her doing the Dougie and the Cat Daddy that she truly became a sensation. (“A booby-star,” as a friend of mine likes to say.) When I ask about her unusual route to the top of the fashion heap, she insists that it was not calculated. “I had no clue,” she says. “I wasn’t the target audience. I grew up in Florida, where you walk around in flip-flops and jean shorts. I didn’t know the fashion world. It really happened in an organic way, wanting to do jobs that I loved.�
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  Given her 1.26 million Twitter followers, I had assumed that Upton had been a kid who always had a phone in her hand. “Who would I call?” she says. “I was out at the barn every day. I barely watched TV. People think I am an expert on social media, but I am still trying to figure it out, too. How much do you want to put yourself out there?” She lets out a honk. “Well, I am out there. There’s no turning back for me.”

  Upton sometimes worries that one of the things that made her a star—her refreshingly unfiltered voice on Twitter—is being compromised by the success that her social-media persona has brought her, especially now that she is about to become the face of a major cosmetics brand. “Now I overthink it. Like, ‘Ugh, are people going to understand this joke?’ Before, I had no filter because I had, like, a hundred followers.”

  From her self-deprecating humor to her game-for-anything spirit, Upton radiates an authenticity that has clearly struck a nerve. Despite the fact that she was raised in Florida and now has an apartment in New York, she has a very pronounced Midwestern aspect—that “nice” thing. Sure enough, her big extended family all now live in the same neighborhood in the same town in Michigan. Kate’s uncle, Fred Upton, a Republican congressman, lives next door to her parents, Jeff and Shelley. It’s hard not to think about all of that when one watches some of her more notorious YouTube videos, not least of all the banned Carl’s Jr. ad in which she appears to be making love to an extra-spicy patty melt.

  When I ask her point-blank how Jeff and Shelley feel about that stuff, she stammers for a bit. “Hold on, let me think,” she says. “Well, they never sit there and say, ‘Why did you do that?’ Because I always talk about things with them before I take a job. I don’t really ask for their permission.” She laughs. “But I will say, ‘I really want to do this.’ And they understand. It’s just part of my personality, and maybe some things I took too far, but … I like being sexy.” Is there anything she won’t do? “Yes, I definitely have limits. But I never like to say never because I feel like I’m setting myself up. There’s a line between becoming, you know, a little cheap and cheesy versus being sexy. And I try to be very careful of that line.”