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Overview
Incisive reflections on more than twenty portraits of the author by some of the greatest artists of the last century
Over the course of his life as a friend and confidant of artists and collectors, and as a lover of art himself, James Lord has written some of the best accounts we have of modern aesthetic genius; his biography of Giacometti was widely acclaimed for succeeding, in the words of one reviewer, "in every way as one of the most readable, fascinating and informative documents, not just on an artist, but on art and artists in general" (The Washington Times). And yet through his connection with the great artists of his day, it was inevitable that Lord would himself become the object of the artist's gaze. In fact, from the time he was a young man, Lord sat for many of the major and minor painters and photographers of his day, including Balthus, Cocteau, Cartier-Bresson, Freud, Giacometti, and Picasso—in all but one case at the artist's request. In Plausible Portraits, Lord gathers, alongside these images, his reflections, penetrating the mind of artist and model alike in a sequence of illuminating double portraits of two masters at work.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429921879 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 04/15/2003 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Dark Eros
Black Erotic Writing
By Reginald Martin
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 1997 Reginald MartinAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-2187-9
CHAPTER 1
Phase 1
Sensuous Skyline
Peter Schielemann's Black Eros (1971) delineates a precolonial African sexuality that was very different from its concurrent European counterpart, and even different from its later African-American emanations. As there was no separation of different phases of the precolonial African life/African psyche from other aspects of itself, sex was an integral part of everything else, such as religion, gender traditions, and social exchange; at the same time sex was not eroticism, and eroticism undergird each and every aspect of the African psyche. John Mibiti, in African Religions (1973), points out even more tellingly that eroticism is to African religion as African religion is to eroticism: one cannot exist without the other. Today, visit any urban, black Pentecostal church for three-dimensional proof, and one will quickly notice a number of erotic indexes, especially the willed confusion of the sexualized male minister with Christ-like associations in a female-dominated forum. The screams for Jesus take on additional meanings.
So it should not surprise us then that the current progenitors of African essence bring eroticism to everything they touch in the asphalt jungles and concrete condos in which they find themselves. The big- city beat is black.
Tina South-X in "Kitchen Tails" seductively illustrates that black suburban life needs excessive stimulation and that is what the black professional females provide as they talk about their one, best love — never their husbands. Frank Lamont Phillips's "Sunday & Ms. Fantasy" takes us into the nonerotic/erotic mind of one Cheryl, who is sure to become the favorite table dancer in all of fiction. Jennifer Holley's "I Want to Speak" repeats a late-night phone encounter in the recording studio, and Tim Seibles's "Valentine's Day" reveals that the heart is seldom the most favorite organ on erotic holidays. Rebecca Delbridge's urban run-in with auto-eroticism in "No Turn on Red" and Jeul A. Harris's "Black Sugar" are only emblematic of all the alleys and expressways of the African-American erogenous zones. Carole Hill Faulkner's "Midnight Call" is as manipulatively masturbatory as Ken Norfleet's excerpt from his novel Binghampton Bad Boy Blues is dyadically direct. Lana Williams's "... To the Head"; and Lurlynn Franklin's "in the dreams of a former whore goddess" voyeuristically show female aggressiveness and shout the new urban sexuality of the forthright female. "C:\Back Slash\Merge" by Oktavi shows that the computer age has some personality, and Winston Benons's "Gail & John" diary entries show us why those tomes are the most private of erotic texts. Black eroticism brings complications with its benefits, but the benefits remain worth it in Shange's "Black Love." Herr Reverend Schmidt (a pseudonym) of Berlin exposes us to his "Hunger" (translated from the German), which represents the real-life side of an international black Christian minister's own purposely suppressed sexuality. Jennifer Gibson's untitled piece and "Do Ya Got Some Blow?" by Druervonn Washington move us to erotic hip-hop rap for the first time on a high literary plane. Eunice Townsend's "Electric Lover" reminds us that work and play must mix for sanity, and "comes: a suicide note" by Victor E. Blue reminds us, even if we have not forgotten, of the reason people wanted into the cities and out of the country in the first place. Rest and refresh yourself at the end of this first phase leading toward erotic fulfillment with "Marriage" by Cassie Granberry and Estelle Farley's "Dessert."
These pieces illustrate that, once again, one of the frustrating things about trying to keep up with city life is that it changes too quickly to be fully captured. As Alvin Toffler convincingly showed in The Third Wave (1979), it is not change but the rate of change that drives people crazy trying to keep up. This is also why a stagnant culture hates the African-American impulse: the culture cannot keep up. What is often missed is that the same is true for black eroticism, which is the driving force of the city's change.
Kitchen Tails
TINA SOUTH-X
"Tell about your best love," they squealed above wine, crackers and cheese, refrigerator humming in the background for needed sound cover.
Long draw on the champagne and editorial indexes in place.
"It can only be one — that's it — and why!" A sound-sight-and-scent check for husband-lurk, then direct eye contact with the crowd.
Statement: "Heartbeats, smells, mirrors, a scream that lasted for ten years."
Silence from the crowd.
Then applause.
Sunday & Ms. Fantasy
FRANK LAMONT PHILLIPS
Ms. Fantasy didn't like to work on Sundays. She didn't like to work at all, really. She didn't like to fuck. She didn't even like the nom de porn of the last few months, Ms. Fantasy. Not really. Mostly what she called her coochie, her moneymaker. Ms. Fantasy. It was everything you would like it to be. She would just like to be Cheryl Yvette Wilson again. She would just as soon be at home in bed, or even getting ready to go to church, not as an adult mind you, but as a pigtailed, ribbon-legged girl, arm out in front, being pulled by her mother to do what every child needs to do, go into the house of the Lord, to hear his wonders.
Before she became Ms. Fantasy she had been Coffee, then Miss Sinn, and before that Misty Dawn. The first feature she had starred in, her bustier-clad image brought telephoto close as she gazed lewdly from the videocassette box after lifting her semen-splotched face from the blow-job she had been giving to some guy who was not shown above the pectorals, was under the name Misty Dawn. Matter of fact, it was called Crack of Dawn, one of those all-anal features which advertised, with some truth, that she was to be "interracially butt-fucked for the first time on video." Cheryl had been a "video virgin" two, maybe three times in features that promised "amateurs" making love on film for the first time. She had several all-black productions to her credit, as well as a dozen or so of the endless popular interracial features, whose main selling points were contrasting skin color and large dicks.
Cheryl knew the kinds of people who bought and rented her movies. She had met the men on personal appearances in theaters, or in clubs where she danced, back when she still danced in clubs. They were every kind of guy. The best ones though, the ones that couldn't get enough, were the guys who had never grown up, who had fantasies they indulged by watching the videos and buying the magazines. They were the endless supply of quarters and dollars. They dreamed of girls like and unlike Cheryl, still innocent-looking, even as she performed the most debauched acts. Cheryl had been surprised to find that she had women fans too. Now, she liked to think that nothing surprised her, but of course, now and then, something did.
Cheryl wasn't surprised that most of her fans were middle-aged white men. Even the women she had occasion to meet were mostly white, mostly VCR-rich middle-America, though she had met some famous athletes through her work. She had been a groupie for athletes, and some athletes were groupies for her as well. Black or white, male or female, at some time or another almost everybody she had come in contact with had wanted or tried to fuck her. Some had, but for a price for that kept going up and up.
Sometimes she had a thought that she would meet somebody to fall in love with. She didn't think that she could fall in love with a white man. Sometimes she just thought that she would meet somebody who would take care of her for the rest of her life. That kind of thing had happened to a girl in the business just often enough to stoke the fantasies of a lot of other girls in the business.
Lately, Robert had been trying to sell her on the idea of getting her breasts enlarged. They were going for big boobs now. Always had, really. She wouldn't do it, though.
"I can't understand why you won't think about it," he'd say. He always talked more or less straight with her. More or less. He said he respected her intelligence and he acted like it. He gave her a better snow job. "Titties," he said. "It's all titties. A black girl with great big titties would have to scoop up the money with a shovel."
He looked at her with this great big puppy-dog look on his face. He knew she wasn't having it, but he didn't know how to quit pitching. It was his whole life. Cheryl knew as much as he did. Titties were popular and there were lots of girls with them. Problem was they weren't something you could just get put in and then take off to look normal. The fashion was bazooka boobs. Tits way out to here. Cheryl couldn't see herself freaked out like that.
"You know, it's funny. A lot of guys like a chick with big fake boobs better than they like one with big boobs that are for real. They like women who aren't like any women they're likely to meet. You know, impossible, fantasy gals with helium tits and enormous fuck holes. It's something you ought to think about. Really. It's all about the dollar green."
It was when he talked like that, got all wound up like a hype and then started that ragged winding down, defeated and drawn, that Robert reminded her of her late uncle Bubba. He didn't look anything like old good-for-a-nickel, sometimes a dime, Uncle Bubba, who, drunk, had been killed in a one-car crash into a utility pole just before Cheryl left Memphis. Uncle Bubba was a failed schemer. He was always trying to convince everybody, or maybe just himself, that he could get something going, get out of warehouse work someday, be a biggety. He acted like a biggety too, always drove a block-long second-hand Cadillac. He wouldn't have a car if it wasn't a Cadillac, or a woman if she wasn't high yaller. The way she remembered it, the house became off-limits to Uncle Bubba when she was fourteen because her mamma caught him sneaking a feel on Cheryl.
"They always want colored girls," Robert said after a silence. "You got that going for you."
There was a time when she wouldn't let him use the term colored. She used to run her pie hole quite a bit in the beginning, starting out. Now she mostly listened. Anybody could be played. You just had to listen to them, let them think it was their way.
Cheryl nodded her head.
"I mean you're one pretty black girl," Robert said. He was sweating. In the three years she had known him he had gained a lot of weight, and he had been fat to begin with. Now he was always sweating. No matter what the temperature was he sweated, and he was forever soaking rivulets of sweat in a soiled handkerchief he kept in the pocket of his suit coats, complaining about the heat and promising to God to diet.
Robert could have been thought of as handsome once. He had acted in movies full time until recently. He was pretty well hung. He'd do anything for a buck. He still made appearances when he could get the work, in everything from straight to transsexual to gay and fetish films. Cheryl had appeared in one film with him, back when she was Miss Sinn. She was dressed in leather, the whole dominatrix trip. She didn't mind fetish films. For one thing, in most of them she seldom had to completely undress. She never had to fuck. For another thing, she got to be in control. In this particular film, she twisted Robert's balls and spanked him hard with a Ping-Pong paddle. It was then that she discovered his particular kink, and maybe her own as well. She hadn't enjoyed anything she had ever done on film so much as she enjoyed beating Robert's big hairy ass red with that paddle.
"What the heck," Robert shrugged. "You're making money. My opinion is you're the prettiest colored girl making these movies. You're a looker all right. Gimme a wet one for old times."
They didn't really kiss. Cheryl didn't want it and it was unlikely that Robert wanted it either. He just liked to fall back on that mack type of shit. Sometimes he liked to talk like he was black. In his mind he was cool. That was just in his mind, though.
"You're a pretty black girl," Robert had said.
She was defined and circumscribed by that. Heck, this whole line of work was built on contrasting skin color and big dicks, that and new faces. It was for that reason, that unless a girl were some kind of transcendent star who could sell a video with the image she had built over dozens, maybe hundreds, of features and magazine layouts, it paid to keep being a new face, or to keep doing something new on camera for the first time.
Now and then Cheryl liked to go to a church in Oakland. She always put something in the plate. Sometimes she spoke to the minister afterward. She never joined the church, but she had given it considerable thought. All the way to the shoot she had thought about church, about getting lost in the orgiastic vocal dexterity of the choir. Cheryl had a passable voice. She thought that she would like to sing in a choir, maybe the choir of Mount Vernon Baptist Church in Oakland. She would throw her arms out and shake her head and stomp her foot and take the whole congregation right along with her.
If not that, then she would just like to sit in the middle of the bed with everything she shouldn't eat spread out in front of her. She would gorge as if she didn't have to worry about how she looked. She was thinking of a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich with lots of mayonnaise dripping from her mouth onto the percale sheets. The trouble with that was the more she thought about it the more it sounded like something in a movie she had made. The mayonnaise in her mouth and in her lipstick looked like the semen it would soon be replaced by, and she couldn't taste the bacon at all.
Cheryl was getting dressed now. She was driving up to the shoot alone. She had been to this particular location before, a really nice house that belonged to some minor actress and her husband. The husband liked porn films and got off on watching them being made in his own house. Besides, he got paid. What wouldn't people do for money.
Cheryl had never thought that she was pretty, not even when people told her so. She tended to look at herself with her mother's reproving eyes. In her mother's eyes, whatever anybody had was all that they had, and it was neither enough nor so good that it didn't need improvement. Moreover, flesh was weak. In her mother's mouth the word flesh had a creepy spook-house sound that made Cheryl want covers to put her head under, and darkness to make her invisible.
Cheryl was about five feet without the heels. She had a nice hard body. That wasn't the fashion when she first started. Now it was. Girls were in the gym pumping up and working out. Cheryl was glad she had gone with her own mind and not listened to what anybody else had to say.
"You're gonna love this," Robert had said to Cheryl. "He's so easy it'll be like stealing money. No, really, it's easier than that, easier than stealing. It's like sitting back and having money fall on you, hundreds and hundreds of dollars float out of the air and fall on you like spring rain. It's an easy shoot. Easy. Easy."
Cheryl had just nodded her head. She had looked unbelieving, disinterested. Robert knew how much she hated to work on Sundays. Lately it had been a chore just getting her to work at all.
Robert was Mister Show Biz, meaning that he was Mister Bullshit. He knew just the thing to say, just the anecdote to tell to get a girl moving. The girls in the business said that he could sell sin to Jesus. When she first heard that Cheryl laughed. Maybe he could sell sin to their Jesus, she had thought, but certainly he couldn't sell anything at all to the Jesus of her mother and of her youth, the Hollywood-handsome white man whose image adorned the living room of the house she grew up in, as well as the living rooms of so many of her mother's many friends back home in Memphis.
Now, listening to Robert in her head as she closed the door of her modest apartment behind her, never really believing anything that he said, but going along with it anyway, she knew for sure that he could sell sin to Jesus, that no saint was safe before him, that hell was down the long lying mouth of the snake who tempted Eve.
It was a money thing she told herself as she got into her car. It was just-bought. It was a money-green sports car. She looked at herself one last time in the rear-view mirror before she set it. She looked like a woman maybe going to sunrise service. Shoots were always so damn early. She took the gold crucifix from around her neck and put it in the ashtray and sighed. Then she drove off.
I Want to Speak
JENNIFER HOLLEY
Slender manicured fingers from her hand reach out and begin to depress each of the hard buttons. She knows what she wants.
It was 8:00 P.M. He is waiting. Each long finger goes down on the keypad, craving it.
She knows he is waiting. The radio is on. The song they are playing seems unusually sad to her.
She dials a little faster now. Anticipation makes her nipples hard. Her breath is heavy and labored. Would he be waiting?
The last number quickly goes through.
His voice seems to shake when he says, "YES YOU MAY COME FUCK ME NOW."
He hears only the sound of the receiver hitting the floor.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Dark Eros by Reginald Martin. Copyright © 1997 Reginald Martin. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Picasso
Chapoval
Gindertael
Mondain
Brown
Freud
Cocteau
Maar
Craxton
Giacometti
Morgan
Balthus
Mason
Cartier-Bresson
Szafran
Toubeau
Theimer
A Russian Artist
Séchert
Cordell
Lennard
Roy
Papetti
Palliser
Appendix: Catalogue of Illustrations
Index
Foreword
Foreword
What is a portrait? No element, certainly, essential to the continuity of human life. Assuming, however, the portrait to be a work of art, it possesses a durable existence all its own, not powered by muscles and blood, to be sure, but by a constitution which survives in reality and contributes to our limited lives a vivifying intimation of eternity. What more persuasive purpose can there be for human beings to create works of art than the yearning that these shall outlive them? And they do. Those fated to appreciate art find that it adds to experience a magically magnified dimension of vitality, within which one dwells somewhat as a single snowflake in a blizzard. Intimacy with art is therefore desperately personal. Amongst those masterpieces which have survived the myriad madnesses of mankind, the intemperance of nature, and the wastage of the millennia, the greatest are the most solitary. The Parthenon, Bach's B-Minor Mass, Keats's odes, and Cézanne's apples all bid us to consider them with a selfless concentration that acknowledges the universal solitude of things, and then -- but only then -- they can respond with their sublime revelation that the solitude of men and of things are one and the same, whereupon a painted apple, a phrase of music, a ruined temple, a poem may assume the configuration and identity of the cosmos. Such is the frail human compulsion to search for meaning beyond reason. What incomprehensible creatures are we, for whom the breath of life is sung or painted or written or built of stone! And yet we know that our species alone can confront and overcome its physical, intellectual, and historical limitations by mindful yielding to the truth of art.
A portrait, thus, even before it begins to represent its aesthetic, social, and personal raison d'être, bears a weighty metaphysical burden by virtue of being a creation brought into existence from nothingness, the product, in short, of a transcendent act. That this smacks of something akin to sacrilege is self-evident and may presently bring about the loss of artistic creation in favor of technological invention. Acts of scientific penetration, after all, have brought to mankind's awareness splendid revelations, albeit of phenomena already extant, though unknown, and thus are not products of pure creativity but practical discoveries in a realm of which the future is in fact an incomprehensible past. The potential for controversy, not to mention misunderstanding, seems infinite. Who, for example, is to determine with absolute assurance whether Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is as great, beautiful, and moving an expression of human attainment as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony? Luckily it is neither my prerogative nor my presumption to have, much less to advance, an opinion. Looking backward, in any case, provides a far wealthier prospect for meditation upon the paradox in human experience which brought forth portraits.
In ancient Egypt a sculptor was known as "one who keeps alive," which he did principally by modeling in diverse materials innumerable votive and funerary objects needed to depict the multitude of living things, some of them, incidentally, human, essential to the arcane rites of Egyptian religion. Almost none of these sculptures attempted to faithfully represent an individual physiognomy, though the specific features of certain royal personages, especially during the short Amarna period, are recognizable. In Mesopotamia as well as Egypt, artistic work was ruled so strictly by convention that purposeful likenesses of living persons were viewed with indifference, whereas symbolic, traditional effigies were countless and often monumental. Oddly enough, given the supreme skills of Greek painters and sculptors, portraiture per se seems not to have stirred their ambitions, and it was only as the Hellenistic world of Alexander began to merge with the Roman republic that portraiture as we recognize it today became prevalent. The most striking and lifelike portraits of this early period are the famous funerary paintings found in profusion beneath the sands in a northwestern corner of Egypt called Faiyum. From the earliest times portraits were widely believed to confer access to immortality, and the Faiyum portraits, painted with unsparing exactitude and striking technical virtuosity, were made -- probably during the model's lifetime -- to adorn his mummy with his effigy as a passport, so to speak, for the voyage into the hereafter. These very early and specific portraits were therefore free from any taint of vanity or infection of flattery. To see their equals in freedom of representation it would be necessary to wait a thousand years. Republican and Imperial Rome left innumerable portrait sculptures, of course, but these are not objective, reliable likenesses, as sculptors were compelled to please wealthy or imperial clients, while stone, moreover, does not lend itself with such plastic ease to figurative representation as paint or even pencil and paper. Caesar, Augustus, Caligula, and Hadrian as well as numerous other rulers, senators, men, women, and children of the upper classes are nonetheless familiar faces in the world's great museums and private collections, but their features have lost to vandalism, restoration, and time the lifelike likeness so striking in the portraits from Faiyum.
And yet these conventional Roman stones and occasional bronzes express extravagant vainglory, smug self-satisfaction, pensive serenity, handsome innocence, vicious cruelty, and, above all, imperturbable indifference to the inherent dignity of an individual human life. Games of death, indeed, were a thrilling public entertainment throughout the Roman world until the Western empire was annihilated in the fifth century. The barbaric Visigoths, Huns, and well-named Vandals cared nothing for portraits, portraiture, or the glories of historical civilization and destroyed or neglected what they could not be bothered to plunder, whereupon all of Europe sank into the heartless gloom of the Middle Ages, saved from utter oblivion only by the faint but defiant glimmer of graven gold and religious faith.
And, ironically, it was the power and the glory of the church that little by little raised from obscurity the art and the act of portraiture, though had the contemporary popes ever suspected what human frailties and brazen breaches of piety would proceed from this creativity they would surely have issued a bull to prevent it. But heir Holinesses were too preoccupied at the time by the Great Schism and by down-to-earth corruption within the papacy itself to be troubled about artistic matters. The men, beginning with Giotto, who painted magnificent frescoes and altarpieces to glorify Christian faith were presently paid to include in their symbolic religious scenes portraits of the donor and his family. Portraits of individuals inevitably followed, often of the worshipful donors themselves as strictly secular human beings. Thereafter it was but a half-step to portraits of the popes themselves, their nephews, humbler prelates and prestigious noblemen, poets, and persons of worldly eminence, whose distinction nourished a hankering for glory and for the blessed bargain of immortality. The propriety and prestige of portraiture as an autonomous mode of artistic expression, thus, was assured by the beginning of the fifteenth century. The roster of artists who gladly devoted themselves to the portrait inspires not only awe but also an awareness that a spiritual ideal of man's relation to man and to the world, an ideal harking back nearly two thousand years, had been reborn. This, of course, was the emergence of the Renaissance. It would be vain to list the great masters whose works of portraiture, often depicting themselves, are as moving, mysterious, and profound as The Adoration of the Lamb or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Surely, moreover, it is pertinent to point out that the most celebrated painting in all the world is a portrait, created by a man unique in the history of civilization.
Now, it is relevant to ask what is the meaning of a portrait, what the purpose, what the personal, aesthetic, sensuous value, what the revelation of human nature, what the significance of relations between artist and model, model and artist, and what the status of both and, indeed, of posterity itself as observers of a human creation, an image of humankind which happens to be a portrait but which even as such remains a reality apart.
Copyright 2003 James Lord