Gloria Vanderbilt's new art exhibition

Gloria Vanderbilt
Memories

oil on canvas, 20" x 30"

images copyrighted by Gloria V. Cooper

Gloria Vanderbilt: Books, fashion and now fine art

By STACEY MORRIS, Special to the Times Union
First published: Saturday, June 30, 2007

Gloria Vanderbilt's one-woman show of recent paintings at the Southern Vermont Arts Center in Manchester, Vt., is a dream come true.

Many of Vanderbilt's 25 oil paintings are the end result of dreams she recorded in her journal. The paintings are divided into three categories: Three Girls, Figures of Women and Landscapes.

"There were dreams I had about the three girls, and I started painting them in a kind of narrative way," Vanderbilt said in a recent interview.

"I've always paid attention to dreams. I have dream journals going back forever and ever," she said. "My paintings are a way of grounding my dreams into reality."

It's a way that is effective for Southern Vermont Arts Center Executive Director Christopher Madkour. "Her current paintings are a stunning example of her love of bold color and dynamic composition."

It might come as a surprise that one of America's most famous blue bloods spends hours on end in front of a canvas, clad in comfy drawstring pants and a smock, but for years that has been how Vanderbilt chooses to spend her days.

The only child of railroad heir Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt and Gloria Laura Mercedes Morgan, she became heir to the family fortune after her father's death, when she was just more than a year old.

At age 10, she found herself in the center of an acrimonious custody battle between her mother and aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. The trial incited a media circus that later became a book and then a television miniseries. Her aunt was awarded custody.

Her young adult life was marked by tumultuous times, including three divorces, but Vanderbilt eventually found happiness when she married writer Wyatt Emery Cooper in 1963. Vanderbilt said the years during which they raised their two sons were some of the happiest of her life. Cooper died in 1978.

Throughout her life, she continued with her art. Her paintings and collages have been exhibited in galleries throughout the United States, including a one-woman show of paintings at Neiman-Marcus stores in Dallas and Houston.

Retrospectives of her work have been exhibited at The Reading Public Museum and Art Gallery in Reading, Pa.; the Fine Arts Museum at Cheekwood in Nashville, Tenn.; the Amarillo Art Center in Amarillo, Texas; and the Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art in Monterey, Calif.

Along the way, she experimented in other vocations, including acting, writing (she wrote four memoirs and two novels published by Knopf) and fashion design.

Vanderbilt entered the fashion business in the early '70s when a collection of her paintings was used on scarves for Glentex. And who can forget how she made blue jeans (with her signature and swan logo embroidered on the back pocket) an elegant commodity during the '80s? Though Gloria Vanderbilt jeans are still sold, she long ago gave up creative control of the brand.

"I did commercials (for the jeans) and it was very successful," she said. "But fashion design is a business, not an art. It's not comparable to painting."

Whoever said the litmus test of a true calling is that it doesn't feel like work must have observed Vanderbilt in her studio, a floor below her Upper East Side apartment in Manhattan.

"I can work for six hours and it seems like 10 minutes," said Vanderbilt. "I lose all track of time."

(One thing she does make time for is Anderson Cooper's nightly current events show on CNN -- not just because she enjoys the content, but because Cooper is her son. "I'm glued every single night," she said. "I'm his greatest fan. If I'm going out, I tape it.")

All the time she has devoted to making art has allowed Vanderbilt to contemplate the nature of creativity. "Being creative is so important for one's self-image," she said. "It's the key to renewing and reinventing oneself."

She gave a talk about the creative spirit at the opening of her show and is now hoping to dip back into writing long enough to pen a book on the creative process -- but she's not making any promises.

"I might do it someday. But I'm so obsessed with painting, I just haven't gathered my thoughts."

Stacey Morris is a freelance writer living in Queensbury.

Solo Exhibition

GLORIA VANDERBILT

Where: Yester House Gallery, Southern Vermont Arts Center, West Road, Manchester, Vt.

When: Through July 17

Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, noon-5 p.m. Sunday. The gardens and grounds are open to the public at no charge.

Admission (suggested donation): $8 adults, $3 students, free for children younger than 13

Info: (802) 362-2522; http://www.svac.org

More Anderson Cooper Photos

Here are more images of the events. Seems as if Anderson didn't stay for dinner and Gloria Vanderbilt was simply FABULOUS, as always!

Anderson Cooper's Larry King Live Interview... In case you missed it!

Here is the copy - thanks to Marie - of the interview rerun Larry did to Anderson. He was promoting his book Dispatches from the Edge.

Part 1 Family Background


Part 2 On his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt


Part 3 Gloria Vanderbilt


Part 4 Sarajevo


Part 5 Politics on their sleeves

Anderson Cooper Keeps it Positive

I really enjoyed last night show. Who can control Robin Williams! Anderson just let it flow. I have never saw him laugh that much, and the idea of Gloria Vanderbilt walking around Manhattan with a Burka almost kept me up laughing all night. She must be so much fun. Still so active and alive at the young age of 82. I hope her new art exhibition, opened November 18 at the Andre Zarre Gallery, will be a total success.

From the Buffalo News

Keep it positive
Perhaps a little intimidated by having to follow the Dalai Lama's opening act, Anderson Cooper got some expert coaching for his own appearance last Saturday in the second installment of the University at Buffalo's Distinguished Speaker Series.
Taking the podium, first-time visitor Cooper pulled out a BlackBerry and read off an e-mail received a couple hours earlier from CNN colleague Wolf Blitzer, a UB alum.
Blitzer's advice on things for Cooper to remember was, more or less, this:
Go Bills. Go Sabres. Wings. Beef on weck (Cooper confessed to being puzzled by that one). And don't tell any snow jokes - they're sensitive about that.
Cooper obviously is a quick study. There were no snow jokes thereafter.

Anderson Cooper, L'Infant Terrible, and the Meridian Connection

I always liked this series, and the new batch of pics that was published on the www.robinsonarchive.com are out takes of the photo shoots.

They speak volumes of the kids; it is difficult to keep a child interested during a photo session and their characters come across very brightly.

Anderson and Carter bored...

Anderson throwing a tantrum.... Gloria's face, priceless!

"I'M BORED! "...

I think Anderson was a handfull...

Wyatt holding Anderson very "tightly"

"Did he finish?"

I just LOVE OUTTAKES!!

About the Photographer

Jack Robinson, Jr. was born in Meridian Mississippi on September 18, 1928 to Jack Robinson, Sr. and Euline Jones. He grew up in Clarksdale Mississippi, the literal heart of the Mississippi Delta. Jack graduated from Clarksdale High School in 1946. He attended Tulane University in New Orleans. In 1950 He began his professional career in photography.

His early work captured the charm of the French Quarter and documented the nightlife there. He photographed the Mardi Gras festivities. He went to Mexico in 1954 where he captured old Mexico in large and medium format photographs. In 1955 Jack moved to New York where he quickly became noted for his fashion photography and was sought out by many of the top designers and others in the fashion industry.

By 1959 he had a cover shot for a fashion special for "Life" magazine. He worked with fashion maven Carrie Donovan at the "New York Times" until 1965. Jack traveled to Europe on occasion to photograph the great design houses of the day. When Carrie went over to "Vogue" Jack followed with his freelance work where he photographed both fashion and celebrities. Jack was published in "Vogue" over 500 times from 1965 through 1972. In 1967 "US Camera" did a feature story on Jack's work for "Vogue's Own Boutique", a monthly feature that utilized celebrities as models in various boutiques around New York. The article reprinted shots Jack had done of Baby Jane Holzer, Tom Wolfe, Sonny and Cher and Julie Christy. The Vogue section was the brainchild of the legendary Diana Vreeland, Editor-in-Chief of "Vogue". Jack was her personal favorite and in fact it was Jack whom she chose to do her own portrait. In 1974, about a year after Jack left New York, "Vogue" mounted a retrospective of "50 Years of Women in Vogue". "Newsweek" magazine covered this show with a two-page spread that featured six photographs, one by Avedon, two by Irving Penn, one by De Hoyningen-Huene', one by Edward Steichen and one by Jack Robinson. It is clear that by the early 1970's Jack had established himself as one of the more important photographers in the world but suffered a malaise that would, during the rest of his life, preclude additional recognition. Jack's personal life was a challenge. He was a classic tormented eccentric genius from the Mississippi Delta like so many others before him: Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, most musicians, yes, including Elvis. Jack turned to drugs and alcohol to escape. The fact that he was gay at a time when it was not socially acceptable caused suffering in Jack. He also ran in the fast lane of Warhol and company. That he eventually succumbed to the temptations found in the very social scene he was photographing should be no surprise. As you read his daybooks and job assignments you can see the deterioration of his life. Jobs dwindled: he had to move from his Toney studio address on 11 East 10th Street, sell his beloved Steinway and finally in December of 1972 retreat to Memphis. He was broken and addicted to alcohol. He was taken in by Audrey Stroll, a long time friend who got him into AA and got him back on his feet. Jack stopped all commercial work and took up painting. He soon took a job as assistant to noted artist Dorothy Sturm designing stained glass windows for churches at one of the 10 largest stained glass studios in the country, Laukauff Stained Glass. After his stint at Laukauff Studio he joined another glass studio where he spent the last year of his life doing water color and pen and pencil designs for the stained glass windows for the chapel at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital where Danny Thomas is buried. He fell ill in November 1997 and went to see his doctor. Mr. Robinson died of cancer within a month of that visit. Though Jack Robinson's professional photography career spanned only 17 years they were pivotal years in modern history. Jack was there to document in fine art photography the social changes that occurred in the 60's and early 70's as reflected by fashion, art, the written word, the stage and silver screen, and probably most important of all, the music. Jack photographed virtually every musician that we think of when we think Woodstock and the Summer of Love. Jack did album covers and fashion shoots. He photographed the Nixon White House, then Dennis Hopper of "Easy Rider", the unbridled decadence of the 60's in New York and unequaled elegance of Jacquelyn Kennedy in full formal regalia. Jack captured what is arguably the absolute zenith of modern fashion as given us by Pucci, Cardin, St. Laurent, Blass and the like. But he also showed us the casual look that was to become and sometimes what was not to become (electric clothes by Diana Dew). From the "Beat Generation", as an insider and a participant, Jack Robinson captured on film what the world will remember for generations, as the 60's.