I nonetheless personal a portray that I bought at a flea market in Los Angeles in 1993. I received it low-cost; $25 and it was at the back of my clapped-out convertible . It turned out to be a replica of Bronzino’s Portrait of a Younger Man with a Guide. In Sixteenth-century Florence, in case you wished your portrait painted then he was your man, for one easy motive: he made you look nice. His specific reward – and shrewd business resolution – was to imbue his rich topics with swagger, confidence and even a sure weight reduction.
Three centuries earlier than you might sit earlier than a photographer and greater than 4 earlier than you might take a selfie, wealthy Florentines would sit nonetheless for days and belief that Bronzino would do for them what he’d executed for his or her rich neighbours, for Dante. It paid to flatter.
In recent times, I’ve had, as a screenwriter, to wrestle with the extent to which the artist ought to or mustn't search to serve the self-importance of the topic and have now executed so throughout an array of “sitters”, from popes Francis and Benedict to Stephen Hawking… and now Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
I take it as self-evident that I'm serving artwork, not biography; that the info alone, so far as they'll ever be identified, will merely not do. The place’s the room for interpretation, for “my” depiction?
These points have been very a lot on my thoughts after I started to jot down my play about Warhol and Basquiat, two males with fastidiously managed personas. How might I seize them entire – not as they wished to be seen however in a approach that tells us one thing we don’t already know, exactly as a result of they didn’t need us to know.
Within the case of Warhol you may nearly say that he was all persona. His biggest creation was his personal picture. His journey, from pale runt out of steel-town America to wig-wearing aesthete presiding over American artwork, was one completely of painful self-creation. He thought artwork ought to do not more than provide you with a pleasant little hit, “like if you see a star on the street”. It ought to purely be about surfaces as a result of, as such, it mirrored that trendy life had grow to be all floor, no substance.
Basquiat additionally barely stated boo in public. He was the primary high-profile black painter America had ever seen and was younger when he turned well-known, so younger it nearly damage. The truth is, his fame did damage.. The eye that got here so shortly overwhelmed him as the cash rolled in and he tried to take care of his air of hobo stylish, of smack-addicted road artist turned gallery genius in paint-spattered Armani fits.
Though he did sleep tough on the busted streets of New York’s Decrease East Aspect when he first crossed the river from Brooklyn, his father was really a profitable accountant and he had lived in a brownstone home for his whole childhood and been educated in an costly personal college. Right here, once more, persona meets actuality and produces a tantalising shortfall.
So, how do you get below the hood of such varieties who, we will assume, would slightly sit for a Bronzino than a Lucian Freud?
Within the case of Warhol, a fast learn of his diaries helped persuade me that I might create, on stage, a mouthy Andy, a rivalrous Andy, a take-no-prisoners talker. For right here, in his entries, was a personality completely completely different from any I’d seen drawn: a gossip, a torrential name-dropper and popper of bubble reputations who was each bit as bitchy as his one-time crush, Truman Capote.
Basquiat was a harder nut to crack in that there's little or no extant of his utterances and beliefs. And but we've the thousand work he left earlier than his loss of life from an unintentional heroin overdose, aged 27. From these, I figured, an outline could possibly be made.
The work, I really feel, inform us an awesome deal in regards to the burden that he shouldered. His works teem with a playful however troubled questioning, inviting us to conclude that, in contrast to Warhol, he believed within the energy of artwork to remodel the artist and the viewer.
So, if somebody in my place is to supply something worthwhile past biography, strict guidelines have to be noticed. The portrait have to be drawn from deep analysis (sorry, Bronzino) however it will probably’t surrender its interpretive tasks. Whether or not we’re speaking about unreliable entries left behind in a diary or simply obscure markings on a canvas, actual lives can nonetheless be discerned within the mists.
Post a Comment