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.
Tuesday, June 18, 2019
Tuesday, June 4, 2019
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)