Follow-up to "Francoise Gilot"

I just wanted to follow up on the previous post. I stated that it might be fun to cut some of the prints out of the paperback edition of the Picasso retrospective catalogue and mat and frame them. And I did. There are seven in all:

These are The Swimmer, in the Musee Picasso in Paris; Woman-Flower (Francoise Gilot); Boy Leading a Horse, famously owned by CBS chairman William Paley and now in the Museum of Modern Art; and Bullfight.

These are Girl with a Mandolin, also MoMA, and The Cock.

And Three Women at the Spring, also MoMA.

The frames for all these pictures all came from local thrift stores. They all had pictures in them, but I was only buying them for the frames. I never paid more than five dollars for any one of them. Part of the fun was figuring out which frame best suited which picture.

At one of the thrift stores I saw a fairly large framed poster of this photo of Ben Hogan. 

I didn't buy it because the frame was just a cheap metal poster frame, and anyway it wasn't what was foremost on my agenda that day. Also, although I could tell right away that it was Hogan, I didn't have any idea what tournament it was from.

Last Saturday there was an article in The New York Times about Phil Mickelson and his quest to complete the career grand slam. The article misidentified the five golfers who have accomplished this feat. In addition to Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods, they included Bobby Jones and left out Gary Player. I sent an e-mail to the editors pointing out the mistake, but for three days they failed to make the correction. Finally today they corrected it.

The paragraph in question is the 19th paragraph, and you can see their note on the correction at the end of the article. Here is what I wrote to the editors: "There is a mistake in Karen Crouse's article on the U.S. Open dated June 15, 2019 ('U.S. Open: Time Is Becoming Even Less on Phil Mickelson’s Side'). She states that the five golfers who have won the career grand slam are Bobby Jones, Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, and Tiger Woods. Gary Player, not Jones, should be included on this list. While Jones won each of the majors of his day (the U. S. Open, the British Open, the U. S. Amateur and the British Amateur), he did not win the modern career grand slam consisting of the Masters, the U. S. Open, the British Open, and the PGA Championship."

After quietly congratulating myself for the good deed I'd performed, I idly went to Hogan's Wikipedia page. (I spend a lot of time on Wikipedia. I make corrections all the time, and regular readers of this blog will remember that I wrote the Wikipedia page for The Starry Night.) One paragraph of Hogan's page refers to a one iron he hit on the 72nd hole of the 1950 U. S. Open, at Merion, a shot that the page said was immortalized in a photograph by a man named Hy Peskin. I said to myself, "I wonder if that's the photograph I saw in the thrift store the other day?" And sure enough it was. It's funny how sometimes something you've never heard of all of a sudden starts popping up all over the place.

Françoise Gilot

This post originated as an e-mail to my friend Laurie Israel.

So, last week a student of mine posted something about Picasso's Guernica, and I went to my beloved exhibition catalogue from the 1980 blockbuster Picasso retrospective at the MoMA:

As you know, my mom really loved living in New York. She got married and moved there in the summer of 1980, when this exhibition was held. I remember her talking about going to it like it was the most memorable experience of her life. She bought the catalogue and the poster for the show (I used to have the poster; don't know what happened to it), and I begged her to get me a copy of the catalogue, which cost fifty bucks and was an extravagance for her and Bill. Her inscription on the inside of this book says she gave it to me on my 20th birthday, in 1984. It's probably one of the first "art" books I owned, and it has ever since been a cherished member of my collection.

After I got what I needed about Guernica and responded to the student's post, I went back to the catalogue and flipped through it for the first time in years. I was struck not only by the many great paintings, many favorites that I had forgotten about, but also by the quality of the reproductions. I remembered that I had seen a paperback copy of the exhibition catalogue at my local used book store, and I thought it would be fun to buy it and cut my favorite pictures out and tack them to my wall.

The back story on this is that I put that Starry Night poster on the wall a couple of months ago, and a couple of weeks ago when my upstairs neighbor's bathroom leaked through the ceiling of my kitchen, the poster stuck to the wall! I told one of the maintenance guys about it, because to pull it off the wall would damage the sheetrock, and he recommended that I just leave it there. "It's wallpaper, now," he said. "You should put some other posters around it." He's actually into art, for a maintenance guy. His name is Clay. His work partner's name is Paul. Paul and Clay. Paul Clay. Paul Klee. His name's actually Clarence, but nobody dares call him that except for his mother. Have I told you that I go by Edward up here?

So anyway I bought that paperback edition of the Picasso retrospective catalogue (for nine bucks) and ripped it to shreds! There were actually two copies when I bought the one, and I'm thinking about going back to get the other one. I thought it might be fun to mat and frame my favorite paintings from the book. My favorite among these many favorites is the one at the bottom right: Woman-Flower (Françoise Gilot), from 1946. 

This is not my framed copy. I stole this image off the Internet. My new computer doesn't recognize my old printer/scanner as a scanner.

It's been a long time since I paid any attention to Picasso, so I was, like, "Okay, who is Françoise Gilot?" I knew she was one of his mistresses but I couldn't remember where she came in the succession. Turns out she was the third of his three mistresses, sandwiched between two wives! Not quite sandwiched, actually, because he comported with all three of his mistresses (Marie-Therese Walter, Dora Maar and Gilot, in that order) while he remained married to his first wife, Olga K-something, a Russian ballerina, whom he married sometime in the teens and stayed married to, though separated from, until her death in 1955. His last wife was Jacqueline Roque. He had a son with Olga (Paulo), a daughter with Marie-Therese (Maya) and two children with Françoise (Claude and Paloma).

Paulo is dead. Marie-Therese and Jacqueline both committed suicide. Claude and Paloma are still alive. And . . . Françoise Gilot is still alive! She's 97 and lives in NYC. It appears that she still owns this painting. She is listed as the owner in the exhibition catalogue, and an internet search doesn't bring up any news of a sale of this painting. If her estate decides to sell it after she dies, it will go for a pretty penny. It's quite large: 57" x 34".

Gilot is the main character (besides Picasso) in the Merchant-Ivory/Anthony Hopkins film Surviving Picasso, which I saw when it came out but which I don't remember much of, except when he fired his long-time chauffeur for no reason and gave him no severance and left him on the side of the road. This film was the beginning of the mainstream revelation that Picasso was an asshole. It was based on a book by Arianna Huffington, which was supposedly plagiarized from the unpublished PhD dissertation of one of my professors at UVa, Lydia Gasman. Gilot wrote her own book, Life with Picasso, which might be fun to read.

I have this semi-morbid obsession with New York Times obituaries, which I also get from my mom. Back in the nineties a friend of mine and I came up with something called the Ghoul Pool, which was a list of a hundred famous people fixing to die. We put all the names (on pieces of paper cut with pinking shears) into a Mason jar and took them around to all the bars in downtown Charleston, selling the names for five dollars each. We weren't trying to make money; whoever had the name of the first person to die got the entire pool. The winner (or loser) was Dizzy Gillespie. I don't remember who had his name.

A couple of months ago I came up with a new list of famous people fixing to die, just for fun. I won't bore you with the entire list, but some of the top names are Olivia de Havilland (102), Kirk Douglas (102), Betty White (97), Jimmy Carter (94), and Elizabeth II (93). I. M. Pei, Doris Day, and Bart Starr are three recent decedents from the list. Françoise Gilot has now been added to the list.

Flat Bill vs. Curved Bill

When I ordered my commemorative baseball cap celebrating the University of Virginia’s national championship in basketball—the same cap the players were given after the game—I noted to myself that once it came in the mail I would curve its flat bill. I didn’t really even think about it. It was a reflexive response based on my history of wearing curved-bill caps and the objective fact that I do not belong to the subculture that wears their bills flat.

Back in the day, all baseball caps had flat bills. That’s the way they came, and you curved them to your liking. One theory is that this provided greater shade to the eyes in the peripheral vision. Personally, I think the main reason was simply to mold the cap to the contour of the skull. A random search of images of post-war Major Leaguers—Hank Aaron, Mickey Mantle, Carl Yastrzemski, Willie Mays—shows very little curvature. Some could even be perceived as rocking the flat bill avant la lettre. 

With the rise of hip-hop culture, rappers and the people who follow them started keeping the bills on their newly purchased hats flat. (It also became a thing to leave the tags on.) It wasn’t until the flat bill was adopted by some Major Leaguers that the issue became a topic of national debate. Some views on the subject would be downright hilarious if they weren’t so obviously racist.

Personally, I’ve never had a problem with those sporting the flat brim in the Major Leagues. It’s basically just fashion. If it doesn’t affect the way the game is played, who cares. The other seismic shift in the baseball uniform in recent years has been the move to wear the britches all the way down to the cleats, straight-leg style. I’m sure many purists hate this, too, but, you know, hater’s gon’ hate.

So much of fashion, and so much of culture in general, is just a rebellion against the previous generation, the way people stopped saying “man” and started saying “dude,” or stopped saying “cool” and started saying “sick.” They mean the same thing, it’s just a way of distinguishing your generation from your uncle’s. My students all say “based off” where my generation said “based on,” and I’ll admit that this one bugs me a little bit, but I don’t correct them because it’s just fashion. It doesn’t affect the meaning of their work.

Of course, there is a social aspect to wearing the flat bill, too. As the style is obviously rooted in hip-hop culture, it is a way for younger Major Leaguers to pay homage to their subculture and perhaps attract new fans to the game. 

Not being a member of this subculture, I naturally planned to curve the bill of my new hat. But then it came in the mail. It was shipped in a square cardboard box (as opposed to a plastic mailing bag) which seemed specifically intended to allow the hat to keep its shape. It occurred to me that, whereas in the old days the flat bill was the default format for all baseball caps, in an era where many caps are manufactured pre-curved, this cap was purposely manufactured with a flat bill. That was its design. I felt that to curve the bill would be to adulterate it in some way. After all, the same cap is available with a pre-curved bill. More importantly, I felt that to curve the bill would somehow amount to a racist act in itself, as if to say, “I like this cap, but I ain’t gonna wear it ghetto style.” 

And when I put it on, I had to admit that it looked pretty cool. Or sick. Possibly even fly.