It’s an understatement to note that the world changed profoundly between the completion of Nancy Rubins’s latest work and its unveiling on September 13. The ways in which we relate to works of art have changed in varying degrees since September 11, but the effect is particularly dear in the case of the lone piece comprising Rubins’s show—a gargantuan assemblage of jumbled airplane fragments.

The title of the work—Chas’ Stainless Steel, Mark Thompson’s Airplane Parts, About 1000 Pounds of Stainless Steel Wire, and Gagosian’s Beverly Hills Space—provides as good a nutshell description

Spanning four decades, these twenty-seven drawings offer a glimpse of the most delicate works produced by an artist famous for her rugged sculptures in heavy canvas, wire, plastic, and other materials on steel armatures. The most recent drawings are generally the most refined, with draftsmanship that would knock an old master’s socks off, and all show an unexpected sensitivity to drawing media. This is not, however, the kinder, gentler side of Bontecou, whose work, even at its most elegant, is never easy on the eyes—or the mind. The drawings involve strange jumbling of serene and sinister,

His annus mirabilis was 1976. While continuing to work for long-term clent Roland Jourdan of Charles Jourdan shoes, Guy Bourdin created advertising campaigns that year for Gianfranco Ferré, Complice and Callaghan (designed by Gianni Versace), Madame Grés, and Loewe, among others, and still managed to put together his dazzling “Sighs and Whispers” lingerie catalogue for Bloomingdale’s. In some sense the only “book” he published of his work in his lifetime, this eerie opus is an influential combination of commerce, fashion, and art—well, if not art, then photography as its unruly, promiscuous