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    Brad Holland, Subversive Artist Who Reinvented American Illustration, Dies at 81

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    Brad Holland, an idiosyncratic artist who upended American illustration in the 1970s with his startling imagery for Playboy magazine and The New York Times’s opinion page, spawning a generation of imitators, died on March 27 in Manhattan. He was 81.His brother, Thomas Holland, said he died in a hospital from complications of heart surgery.Mr. Holland was in his late 20s and contributing to Playboy and a few of New York City’s underground papers, including The New York Review of Sex and Politics and The East Village Other, when he was invited to be part of an experiment at The New York Times.In 1970, the paper had introduced what it called an Op-Ed page — the name referred to its placement opposite the editorial page — as a forum for essays and ideas. The art director of this new page, Jean-Claude Suares, was another veteran of the underground presses; while working at The Times, he was also designing Screw magazine.For The Times, Mr. Suares wanted to commission standout art to accompany the writing, but he didn’t want to illustrate the themes of the articles literally. He was an admirer of Mr. Holland’s work and recruited him, along with other notable insurgents, including Ralph Steadman, the British caricaturist who had been illustrating Hunter Thompson’s gonzo adventures, and a coterie of European political cartoonists.One of three illustrations for a 1968 essay by P.G. Wodehouse, “The Lost Art of Domestic Service,” that were Mr. Holland’s first assignment for Playboy magazine. He would work for the magazine for a quarter-century.Brad Holland/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New YorkMr. Holland had already attracted attention with the gorgeous rococo images he made to illustrate Playboy’s “Ribald Classics,” a series that reprinted erotic stories by the likes of Ovid, Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain. His work could be surreal, grotesque and beautiful, and it was often inscrutable. It recalled the satirical engravings of the 19th-century caricaturist Thomas Nast and the more terrifying paintings of Francisco Goya.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Reinaldo Herrera, Arbiter of Style for Vanity Fair, Dies at 91

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      Both old school and Old World and married to a celebrated fashion designer, he helped define Manhattan’s high life for many years.Reinaldo Herrera, a dapper Venezuelan aristocrat, married to the fashion designer Carolina Herrera, whose social connections made him an indispensable story wrangler and all-around fixer for Vanity Fair magazine, where he served as a contributing editor for more than three decades, died on March 18 in Manhattan. He was 91.His daughter Patricia Lansing confirmed the death.Mr. Herrera was born into South American nobility and grew up between Caracas, Paris and New York. After attending Harvard and Georgetown Universities and working as a television presenter for a morning show in Venezuela, he joined Europe’s emerging jet set, mingling with Rothchilds and Agnellis, Italian nobles and British royals.Princess Margaret, Queen Elizabeth II’s sister, was a pal. He dated Ava Gardner and Tina Onassis, the first wife of the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle, and in 1968 he married his younger sister’s best friend, Maria Carolina Josefina Pacanins.He was old school and Old World. He wore bespoke suits with immaculate pocket squares; his jeans were always crisply pressed. His manners were impeccable. He spoke classical French without an accent. Graydon Carter, a former editor of Vanity Fair, described his voice as a combination of Charles Boyer, the suave French actor, and Count von Count, the numbers-obsessed Muppet.Mr. Herrera with his wife, the fashion designer Carolina Herrera, in 1983.Cathy Blaivas/WWD — Penske Media, via Getty ImagesBy the late 1970s, the Herreras were part of the frothy mix that defined Manhattan society at the time — the socialites, financiers, walkers and rock stars, along with a smattering of politicians, authors and artists, who dined on and off Park Avenue and danced at Studio 54. (Steve Rubell, the club’s rambunctious co-owner, used to slip quaaludes into Mr. Herrera’s jacket pockets; Mr. Herrera, who loved a party but not those disco enhancements, would throw them out when he got home.) Robert Mapplethorpe photographed the couple for Interview magazine, Andy Warhol’s monthly chronicle of that world.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Robert E. Ginna Jr., Whose Article Bolstered U.F.O. Claims, Dies at 99

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      A founding editor of People, he also served as editor in chief of Little, Brown and produced films. But his public image was defined by a 1952 story for Life.Robert E. Ginna Jr., a founding editor of People magazine, a book editor and a film producer whose 1952 Life magazine article provoked a frenzy by validating the idea that flying saucers might exist and could have visited Earth from outer space, died on March 4 at his home in Sag Harbor, N.Y.His death was confirmed by his son, Peter St. John Ginna. He was 99.Mr. Ginna (pronounced gun-NAY) enjoyed a wide-ranging, eight-decade career. As the editor in chief of Little, Brown, he persuaded the acclaimed novelist James Salter to shift from screenplays to books and discovered Dr. Robin Cook as an author of thrillers. He also produced movies and was part of the team that started People as a highbrow showcase for profiles of cultural figures like Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, but quit when the magazine descended into what he viewed as celebrity fluff.To the general public, though, he was perhaps best known for an article he wrote with H.B. Darrach Jr. for the April 7, 1952, issue of Life magazine. The cover featured an alluring photograph of Marilyn Monroe under the headline “There Is a Case for Interplanetary Saucers.”The April 7, 1952, issue of Life magazine featured a seductive photo of Marilyn Monroe juxtaposed with the now-infamous headline “There Is a Case for Interplanetary Saucers.”Philippe Halsman/Life Magazine, via Magnum PhotosTo Mr. Ginna’s eternal dismay, the article made him a target for U.F.O. buffs and kooks. Headlined “Have We Visitors From Space?,” it examined 10 reports of unidentified flying object sightings, followed by an unequivocal assessment from the German rocket expert Walther Riedel: “I am completely convinced that they have an out-of-world basis.”While reports of U.F.O.s in the late 1940s were often trivialized, Phillip J. Hutchison and Herbert J. Strentz wrote in American Journalism in 2019: “By the early 1950s, however, more substantial human-interest features embraced the idea that U.F.O. reports might correspond to extraterrestrial Earth visitors. A widely cited April 7, 1952, Life magazine feature titled ‘Have We Visitors From Space?’ represents one of the most influential examples of the latter trend.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Confirm or Deny: Graydon Carter Edition

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      A king of the glossy-magazine era sits for a lightning-round interview.Maureen Dowd: Annie Leibovitz took your passport photo.Graydon Carter: She took my passport photo.You were told to sod off by James Bond.Confirm! One year I invited all the men who played James Bond to the Oscar party. For one reason or another, all but one were either working or unavailable. We got George Lazenby, who had appeared in the pre-Sean Connery era in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.” I spotted him at the bar by himself. I went over and introduced myself. He just looked straight ahead and then turned and in the sort of fragrant language not generally permitted in a high class newspaper, told me to buzz off.When you were at Time — and single — you wrote fun tidbits for the “People” page, and you had a romantic encounter with the young woman who wrote Newsweek’s version of the people page, called “Newsmakers.”No comment.The two funniest non-comedians you’ve ever met are George Clooney and Anderson Cooper.In both cases, they were so funny that I had to tell them to stop because I thought my trachea would break.When a New York Times push alert announced the news of your departure from Vanity Fair, multiple friends later told you that seeing your name pop up on their phone, they assumed it was because you died.Yes, and for some of them, it put a spring in their step.Anna Wintour should retire.Absolutely not. I think she can go on for decades.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: ‘When the Going Was Good,’ by Graydon Carter

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      The former Vanity Fair editor reflects on an era’s power moves and expense-account adventures in a new memoir.WHEN THE GOING WAS GOOD: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines, by Graydon Carter, with James FoxLorne. Graydon. Keith. Three abiding kings of New York City’s cultural life are the subjects of new books. Lorne is Lorne Michaels, the creator of “Saturday Night Live,” who is examined under the stereo microscope that is Susan Morrison’s biography, “Lorne.” Graydon is Graydon Carter, a co-founder of the stinging magazine Spy in the 1980s and the editor of Vanity Fair during its plumpest and happiest decades, whose memoir is our topic today. Keith is Keith McNally, the proprietor of that consummate French bistro Balthazar — which is so well run, so well lit and so well victualed that surely one idea of a good death is to deliquesce in one of its red leather banquettes — who has a memoir out soon.Lorne is 80; Graydon, 75; Keith, 73. Each is still very much in the game. But to have these books in a clump on my coffee table has given me an Auld Lang Syne-ish feeling. An era is approaching its end.Carter’s memoir, “When the Going Was Good,” runs on two overlapping tracks. It’s the story of an underdog — the hockey-playing, Canadian-born son of an air force pilot — who morphs into a crisply dressed and flamboyantly maned overdog. It is, figuratively, the story of a young man who walks into Gotham barefoot and leaves, whistling, owning the keys to one of its castles.A class journey is described as well. The consumption grows conspicuous and conspicuouser. Thorstein Veblen’s eyes would pinwheel. By the second half, Carter can’t seem to get out of a paragraph without mentioning his possession of the perfect apartment, or vintage car, or bespoke suit, or excursion, or hotel suite, or weekend house, or restaurant table, or friend (Fran Lebowitz), or pajamas or fishing camp.D.H. Lawrence held a class animus against the Bloomsbury group; Pauline Kael distrusted the high-living Joan Didion. Paul Theroux called luxury the enemy of observation. This is another way of saying that Carter’s book will make some readers itchy. I quickly and (mostly) happily consumed it anyway. The journalism stories and the character analysis, as Elizabeth Hardwick liked to call gossip, are first-rate.Let us get three drawbacks out of the way. 1) Although Carter wrote “When the Going Was Good” with James Fox, a co-author of Keith Richards’s electric memoir, the prose is basic. Anyone who comes in hoping for a tincture of the old Spy style — ironic, wised-up, dense with intellect and allusion — will be disappointed. 2) Carter is not one for introspection. There are no “Rosebud” moments. 3) He doesn’t talk about his signature, wide-winged, George Washington-esque hair, with its Nike whoosh up the center.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      James Ledbetter, Media Critic and Business Journalist, Dies at 60

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      He wrote the Press Clips column for The Village Voice, held top jobs at Inc. magazine and Slate, and wrote a book about how the startup magazine The Industry Standard fizzled.James Ledbetter, a former media critic who wrote the Press Clips column for The Village Voice in the 1990s, led Inc. magazine as its editor in chief and started an online financial technology newsletter, died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 60.His sister Kathleen Ledbetter Rishel confirmed the death but declined to specify the cause.At The Village Voice, where Alexander Cockburn had originated Press Clips, Mr. Ledbetter was a keen observer of local and national news media.“Week after week, perhaps no one tops James Ledbetter’s razor-sharp dissection of the nation’s print media,” Seth Rogovoy of The Berkshire Eagle in Massachusetts wrote in 1995.Michael Tomasky, the editor The New Republic and a friend, said Mr. Ledbetter “was a voracious reader of the tabloids, all four of them at the same time,” adding, “He wrote Press Clips at a time when media criticism exploded into an industry.”In a column about The New York Post in 1998, Mr. Ledbetter castigated New York State for approving a $12.9-million economic development grant to the newspaper to keep it from moving to New Jersey.“Why, taxpayers want to know, should part of our hard-earned paychecks pamper the pockets of the paper that’s always complaining about everyone else’s welfare check?” he wrote. “Especially since that paper is owned by billionaire Rupert Murdoch?”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Dan Morgenstern, Chronicler and Friend of Jazz, Dies at 94

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      He wrote prolifically about the music and played an important role in documenting its history, especially in his many years with the Institute of Jazz Studies.Dan Morgenstern, a revered jazz journalist, teacher and historian and one of the last jazz scholars to have known the giants of jazz he wrote about as both a friend and a chronicler, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 94.His son Josh said his death, in a hospital, was caused by heart failure.Mr. Morgenstern was a jazz writer uniquely embraced by jazz musicians — a nonmusician who captured their sounds in unpretentious prose, amplified with sweeping and encyclopedic historical context.He was known for his low-key manner and humility, but his accomplishments as a jazz scholar were larger than life.He contributed thousands of articles to magazines, newspapers and journals, and he served the venerable Metronome magazine as its last editor in chief and Jazz magazine (later Jazz & Pop) as its first. He reviewed live jazz for The New York Post and records for The Chicago Sun-Times, as well as publishing 148 record reviews while an editor at DownBeat, including a stint from 1967 to 1973 as the magazine’s chief editor.His incisive liner-note essays won eight Grammy Awards. He was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2007 and received three Deems Taylor Awards for excellence in music writing from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, two of them for his books “Jazz People” (1976) and “Living With Jazz” (2004). He was involved — as a writer, adviser, music consultant and occasional onscreen authority — in more than a dozen jazz documentaries. Most decisively, he served from 1976 to 2011 as the director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University-Newark, elevating the institute into the largest repository of jazz documents, recordings and memorabilia in the world.“I don’t like the word ‘critic’ very much,” Mr. Morgenstern often maintained. “I look at myself more as an advocate for the music than as a critic,” he wrote in “Living With Jazz.” “My most enthusiastic early readers were my musician friends, and one thing led to another. What has served me best, I hope, is that I learned about the music not from books but from the people who created it.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lloyd Ziff, Visionary Photographer and Art Director, Dies at 81

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      He designed some of the most visually exciting magazines of the 1970s and ’80s. But his real love, and eventually his focus, was photography.Lloyd Ziff was not yet a celebrated art director in 1968, when he photographed an art school classmate, Robert Mapplethorpe, and his girlfriend, Patti Smith, in their tiny Brooklyn apartment. “I found them very beautiful,” Mr. Ziff said years later.The black-and-white portraits he took are tender and moving, almost heartbreakingly so; as James Danziger, the gallerist who showed them in 2013, said recently: “Youth is moving. They capture a moment in time just before Patti and Robert were going to explode. They both carried an aura, and Lloyd was drawn to that. They wanted to be photographed just as much as he wanted to photograph them.”Mr. Ziff photographed Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith at their apartment in 1968. “I found them very beautiful,” he said.Lloyd ZiffMr. Ziff went on to serve as art director for some of the most influential and visually arresting magazines of the 1970s and ’80s, including Rolling Stone, House & Garden, Vanity Fair and Condé Nast Traveler. Mr. Mapplethorpe and Ms. Smith, of course, would find their own fame, and tragedy, when Mr. Mapplethorpe died of AIDS in 1989. When Ms. Smith wrote of their coming-of-age in her 2010 memoir, “Just Kids,” she included a few of Mr. Ziff’s portraits.“Although we weren’t particularly close,” Mr. Ziff said, “I believe we recognized in each other something we probably couldn’t put into words at the time.”Mr. Ziff died on Aug. 1 at his home in Orient Point, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 81.His husband, Stephen Kelemen, confirmed the death. He said that Mr. Ziff had been in declining health.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Landon Y. Jones, Who Made People a Star Among Magazines, Dies at 80

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      An unapologetic champion of the newsworthiness of celebrities, he also drew attention to teenage pregnancy and helped popularize the term “baby boomer.”Landon Y. Jones, who was the top editor of People magazine in the 1990s, when its profits increased fourfold, and whose fascination with popular culture inspired him to write a 1980 book that helped popularize the term “baby boomer,” died on Aug. 17 in Plainsboro, N.J. He was 80.His son, Landon Jones III, said the cause of his death, in a hospital near Princeton, N.J., where he had lived for more than 50 years, was complications of myelofibrosis.An unapologetic champion of the newsworthiness of celebrities, Mr. Jones was perpetually eager to learn about the next famous person. As a writer for People, he interviewed a young Bill Gates in 1983 and brought along a colleague, one of the few he knew with a personal computer, to help him understand the Windows operating system.During his stint as People’s managing editor, the top editorial job, from 1989 to 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales, appeared on the cover dozens of times. Mr. Jones would say that People, a publication of Time Inc., was about the “three D’s”: Diana, diet and death, specifically that of celebrities.“There were other people at People who dreamed of being on the big book — on Time,” Jeff Jarvis, a colleague of Mr. Jones’s, said in an interview. “But I never sensed that Lanny was chagrined about being on People. It was the pathway that led to the things that fascinated him, like baby boomers and celebrity. He did it with pride.”During Mr. Jones’s tenure, People introduced color printing; moved its newsstand date from Monday to Friday to capture weekend supermarket sales traffic; and made women its primary target audience.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More