Jessica Lange, Antonio & Joan Juliet Buck from “Antonio Lopez” at Danziger Gallery
Joan writes in New York
“I met the great illustrator Antonio Lopez in 1968, in the apartment he shared with Juan Ramos in one of the studios atop Carnegie Hall; their neighbor was Bill Cunningham, who started taking pictures when Antonio and the photographer David Montgomery gave him a camera. We’d get dinner around the corner at the Automat, or go dancing up in Harlem, jammed into a friend’s fancy car. On deadline for the New York Times or Vogue, Antonio would draw all night. Juan invented the background context and colored in the drawings.
In the wonderful James Crump documentary that opens this fall, Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco, you see Antonio go into a kind of trance as he draws, pulling shapes out of the air. He drew better than anyone: perfect hands and points of elbows, the way hips jut out, the indentation of muscles above thighs. He could draw desire, music, movement. He’d tried tap dance as a child and never stopped dancing, never stopped imparting movement to his drawings. After Carnegie Hall came years in Paris under the patronage of Karl Lagerfeld, and then New York again, Union Square, and then AIDS: He died in 1987, when he was 44.“
You can read the whole thing here, Antonio Lopez opens March 8 through April 28 at Danziger Gallery (pics, below) and the documentary Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco is scheduled to open in September at IFC. (Watch the clip, below.)
Happy birthday, Antonio.
Antonio Lopez (self-portrait), 1976
Jerry Hall, 1974
Grace Jones, 1975
Grace Coddington, 1975
Jessica Lange, 1974
Jessica Lange, 1974
Joan Juliet Buck, 1975
Tina Chow, 1975
Paloma Picasso, 1975
Karl Lagerfeld, 1975
Pat Cleveland, 1975
(Photos, Antonio Lopez, Danziger Gallery)
