The Brooklyn Rail

Maryam Eisler lives in London but plies her trade in the alternately luxe and retro haunts of Palm Beach, the south of France, and the Hamptons. Her second show at Harper’s includes seventeen large color pigment prints shot in these settings and seven Polaroids framed with small versions of the larger works. The pictures nimbly tread the line between product, lifestyle endorsement, and gentle social critique. The exhibition’s title, Summer of 69, appears to reference the era of Woodstock and Pop art, but the imagery, despite a wealth of precisely focused details, is not overly precious in its evocation of that specific period—a trap Ang Lee fell into by painstakingly replicating the details of suburban Connecticut in 1973 for his 1997 film The Ice Storm. There, the accoutrements became distraction. Here, Eisler loosely channels a particular milieu, with models posed in vintage Pucci outfits, surfboard-slinging Montauk cowboys, bikinied lifeguards at trendy seafood shacks, and unbothered women relaxing in poolside settings.

The ur-images for the Palm Beach works are from Slim Aarons’s “Poolside Story” series (1970), but those sought to pin down a specifically modern sartorial and architectural aesthetic. Eisler’s vibe is sun-splashed erotics with a nod to the history of art, as in a work such as Spins and Whims, Summer Hymns (2026), with its soft-porn-adjacent treatment of a white female model lying on the floor in a Venus Pudica pose that channels Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #6 (1977) and #11 (1978). Her obvious pleasure in her pursuits recalls the gusto with which Sydney Sweeney’s Cassie approached her OnlyFans photoshoots in the recent season of Euphoria. Eisler’s women want to feel in charge. Poolside Watching (2026) includes an homage to the late David Hockney’s pool images, replete with some rippling male beefcake in the foreground.

The white female models with their perfectly glazed bodies are appropriately cross-generational melds of Catherine Deneuve, Christie Brinkley, and Margot Robbie, though their lush sandy blonde hair reads as more eighties-to-now than late-sixties. But no matter. The title of the show leaves out the apostrophe in ’69, distancing it from the specific year and its celebratory Bryan Adams song of 1984 and instead foregrounding the sex position, a move suggested in the positioning of the male and female sitters in Killing Me Softly (2026), a low and wide photograph displayed upstairs and the most successful work in terms of an implied narrative and a sense of ennui. It feels like a washed-out scene from Ralph Lauren’s “Safari” campaign in the mid-1980s, with a male figure in denim overload on a wide upholstered chair in the reverse pose of the Hellenistic Barberini Faun, floppy hair off his face as he stares up into space, his left hand behind his head.

The woman lies upside down across his lap and turns outward, her heavy-lidded eyes locking on the viewer, while her left hand protectively covers her right breast, mimicking the hand covering the genitalia of Manet’s Olympia (1863). Meanwhile, her right hand lolls on the jowl of a life-sized glossy ceramic leopard, the type of prop you find among floor samples in a furniture store—my parents have owned one of a tiger (named Namer) since my childhood. On a table in the foreground is a blurred blue hydrangea that harmonizes in hue with the jeans and a bronze figurine whose position parallels that of the woman. But the product here is a strange nostalgia, a feeling of precoital squandered time: melancholia drained of attendant intellectualism or creativity.

The leopard also appears in Fur, Ferns, & Feline Turns (2026), wherein another female model is posed in the mode of African dictators from the 1970s, like Mobutu Sese Seko in then-Zaire or Halie Selassie I in Ethiopia, who sat for state portraits with real cats, or—n the case of the former—wore leopard skin hats and clothing amid hides, an iconography itself derived from Western Orientalist art. Here the model sits in a broad rattan chair backed by tropical wallpaper, inert leopard and added ceramic leopard cub at her side, wearing only a fake white tiger fur coat with large-lensed blue-tinted glasses. The cover of the September 1969 issue of Lui appears in the foreground with Brigitte Bardot on a similar rattan peacock chair/throne, a motif familiar from portraits of Huey Newton and Donna Summer. Andy Warhol’s Silk Electric album cover (1982) portrait of Diana Ross is in the foreground as well. On the table is a Carmen Miranda vase next to a copy of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard. There is much to unpack, but the image knowingly trades in its aggregate ridiculousness—as in the second-century marble portrait of Commodus as Hercules or Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s over-the-top 1806 portrait of an enthroned Napoleon, a picture so outrageous that even the megalomaniacal emperor was allegedly unsettled by it.

Eisler’s exhibition is accompanied by a fine standalone artist’s book with the same title, a more unified project devoted only to the East End of Long Island. The many Polaroids, shot with a vintage SX-70 camera, seek to form the collage-like and nostalgic equivalent to what Mick Jagger achieved in drawing out the last line of this couplet from The Rolling Stones’s Montauk-inflected “Memory Motel” (1976):

It took a starry night to steal my breath away
Down on the waterfront her hair all drenched in spray

As against that golden glow, it is when Eisler’s pictures espouse a Jagger-like languidity blended with an arch critique of wealth’s self-fashioning, like in Killing Me Softly, that they hit the mark.