Docent-Led Public Tour:

Gloria Vanderbilt: An Artful Life

Jonathan Becker: Social Work
Four Decades of Movers, Shakers and Thinkers

Thursday, Dec. 3 | 6 p.m.

Enjoy a public, docent-led tour of Gloria Vanderbilt: An Artful Life and Jonathan Becker: Social Work, Four Decades of Movers, Shakers & Thinkers during $5 After 5 PM. The tour is included with general admission but registration is required. Learn more and register at the button above.

American photographer Jonathan Becker began contributing to Vanity Fair magazine on the heels of an especially successful solo exhibition in Chelsea in 1981. His portraits of filmmaker Louis Malle and of his mentor and friend Brassaï featured largely in the pages of prototype for the magazine’s relaunch in 1983. Becker’s specialty in portraits, photographed by and large on location, soon became a Vanity Fair staple: Robert Mapplethorpe, Jack Kevorkian, Jocelyn Wildenstein, and Martha Graham, as well as countless socialites, artists, and heads of state. This exhibition features 45 images of movers, shakers and thinkers taken by Becker between 1976 and 2015, hand selected by the Museum, including artists, authors, fashion designers, socialites, Hollywood celebrities, and more.

A mesmerizing photograph of Gloria Vanderbilt by Francesco Scavullo graced the cover of the November 2010 issue of Town & Country magazine with the caption, “There will never be another Gloria Vanderbilt.” This statement speaks volumes about a woman who was in the public eye throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Many of us are aware of Gloria’s unsettling early childhood, during which she was caught in the middle of a custody battle between her young, absent mother, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, and her powerful aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. We know her from writings concerning her marriages, romances, and the tragic loss of her son, Carter, to suicide. And, of course, we know her from her fashion breakthrough in creating her signature designer jeans in 1978. This exclusive boutique exhibition which not only features memorable photographs of Vanderbilt by Horst, Jonathan Becker, Adrián Villeta, Annie Leibovitz, and Jack Mitchell, but also a selection of Vanderbilt’s own artworks, as well as memorabilia documenting Vanderbilt’s recent association with the Huntsville Museum of Art.