Author John Loring (Photo by Harry Benson)
Join us in welcoming John Loring author of “Ukraine-Russia 1961”. Copies are available for purchase and signing.
Ukraine-Russia 1961 is a unique color-photo coverage of the Communist USSR at a time when the Iron Curtain had come down on that vast and mysterious country and no accurate images were allowed to reach the Western world by Nikita Khrushchev's autocratic and iron-fisted government. Vintage black-and-white photos of little quality or interest were not that difficult to see but told nothing of conditions in post-WWII Russia, nor of the destruction wrought by the German occupation nor of that wrought by local Bolsheviks. Much was destroyed by WWII and not yet reconstructed, but much was saved and much of great beauty, as properly shown for the first time here. The color photos from 1961 here bear eloquent testimony to the realities of Russia at the very beginnings of Nikita Khrushchev's de-Stalinization of Russia. They are most probably the only surviving color photos of the real Russia in 1961.
About the author:
John Loring was born in Chicago on Thanksgiving Day, November 23, 1939, to an adventure-prone English father and worldly American mother. His education went from a small, one-room schoolhouse in Cave Creek, Arizona, in 1946 to a BA in English at Yale at age 20 in 1960 and on to four years at the Beaux Arts in Paris studying painting and printmaking. His artworks are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Chicago Art Institute, the Boston Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Yale Art Gallery, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, etc.
He lived in Paris from 1960 to 1971, working on his lithographic prints with one-man shows in Paris, Vienna, and Venice while opening and running a boutique for Yves Saint Laurent in Venice for three years. In 1971, he moved to New York, continues painting and printmaking while writing hundreds of magazine essays on art and design, the majority for Architectural Digest. His prints were given three one-man shows, one at Ivan Karp's Hundred Acres Gallery in SoHo and two at Pace Editions on Fifty-Seventh Street.
In 1979, he was made design director and senior executive of Tiffany & Co., a position he held for thirty years until 2009. He has published twenty-two books on art, design and architecture. He holds an honorary doctor of arts degree from Pratt Institute in New York.
Author John Loring will be signing books purchased at the Palm Beach Book Store.
RSVPs are encouraged but not required.