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Brompton Cemetery is full of stories, and to coincide with LGBT History Month we're highlighting those buried here who we would identify today as members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Starting in February 2019, historians and museum professionals Sheldon K. Goodman and Sacha Coward have been working with Brompton Cemetery and The Royal Parks in finding out more about these little known and recorded histories. For 2021, we're digitally introducing you to some of the lives and stories we've found - and there are many more. Celebrate our queer forebears as we introduce you to the Queerly Departed buried here!
We'll be sharing a total of eight short videos during the month, with a new video added each Tuesday and Thursday. Make sure you check back regularly to ensure you don't miss out, and don't forget to sign-up for our free live event too.
1. Luisa Casati (1881-1957)

The life and soul of the party in the 1920 and 30s: this legendary Italian heiress and eccentric has the aesthetic of a modern day icon such as Madonna or Lady Gaga and was written about by the likes of Jack Kerouac and painted by Augustus John. She was also a bodacious bisexual woman, whose small headstone does no justice to her influence in the social sphere of the early 20th century.

2. Barbe Sangiorgi

A famous Soho dining institution was a favourite haunt of a noted wit and raconteur of the 19th century. But more-so, it provided a safe space for little-tolerated passions and desires to play out, away from the judging eyes of the outside world. This is the grave of Barbe Sangiorgi of Kettner's restaurant, founded by and managed with her late and second husbands.

3. Ernest Thesiger (1879-1961)

Known largely today as his role as Dr Frankenstein's mentor in the 1935 horror classic 'The Bride of Frankenstein', Ernest Thesiger's career on stage and screen was show his background allowed him to be 'out' and proud.

4. Julian and the Suffragettes

Emmeline Pankhurst's monument was created by a sculptor who challenged the sexual and societal norms of the day. On a wider scale, Sacha looks at evidence of lesbianism in suffragettes and how to look beyond what we see in a cemetery above ground.

5. Pretty Policemen

Gay and bisexual men in the 1970s and 80s saw the cemetery as more than a place of remembrance - it was also a space to indulge in illicit encounters, away from prying eyes. Pretty policemen would operate - and it is this history that Sacha confronts in this episode of Queerly Departed.

Credits

Public historian Sheldon K. Goodman and museum professional Sacha Coward. Queerly Departed is a Cemetery Club production for the Royal Parks.

Funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, thanks to the contributions of National Lottery Players, as part of the Brompton Cemetery Conservation Project.

Special thanks to Dan Vo for additional direction and camera duties.

Thanks to Virgin Xtravaganzah, Son of A Tutu, Keith Jarrett, Claire Mead, Toni-Dee Paul, Floria Lundon and Dan Gilbert for being part of the in-person events held at Brompton Cemetery and to Charli Carver and Claire Harris for their support for the project

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Brompton Cemetery is full of stories, and to coincide with LGBT History Month we're highlighting those buried here who we would identify today as members of the LGBTQ+ community. Starting in February 2019, historians and museum professionals Sheldon K.

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American film, television and stage actress and director.

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Sarah Paulson Won’t Watch Anything She’s In, Even Though She’s In Everything

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American television personality and retired Olympic gold medal-winning decathlete.

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Rickey Thompson

An absolute queen. Internet star spreading positivity and expressing his sexuality

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Trans woman, social/political activist, Comedian.

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Comedian, actor, activist and marathon runner

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Civil rights campaigner and the first Black actress to star in a major motion picture

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Who was Josephine Baker?

What was Josephine Baker's early life like?

How did Josephine Baker get famous?

What awards did Josephine Baker win?

This article was most recently revised and updated by

Josephine Baker, original name Freda Josephine McDonald, (born June 3, 1906, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.-died April 12, 1975, Paris, France), American-born French dancer and singer who symbolized the beauty and vitality of Black American culture, which took Paris by storm in the 1920s.

Baker grew up fatherless and in poverty. Between the ages of 8 and 10 she was out of school, helping to support her family. As a child Baker developed a taste for the flamboyant that was later to make her famous. As an adolescent she became a dancer, touring at 16 with a dance troupe from Philadelphia. In 1923 she joined the chorus in a road company performing the musical comedy Shuffle Along and then moved to New York City, where she advanced steadily through the show Chocolate Dandies on Broadway and the floor show of the Plantation Club.

In 1925 she went to Paris to dance at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in La Revue Nègre and introduced her danse sauvage to France. She went on to become one of the most popular music-hall entertainers in France and achieved star billing at the Folies-Bergère, where she created a sensation by dancing seminude in a G-string ornamented with bananas. She became a French citizen in 1937. She sang professionally for the first time in 1930, made her screen debut as a singer four years later in Zouzou, and made several more films before World War II curtailed her career.

During the German occupation of France, Baker worked with the Red Cross and the Résistance, and as a member of the Free French forces she entertained troops in Africa and the Middle East. She was later awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honour with the rosette of the Résistance. After the war much of her energy was devoted to Les Milandes, her estate in southwestern France, from which she began in 1950 to adopt babies of all nationalities in the cause of what she defined as "an experiment in brotherhood" and her "rainbow tribe." She adopted a total of 12 children. She retired from the stage in 1956, but to maintain Les Milandes she was later obliged to return, starring in Paris in 1959. She traveled several times to the United States to participate in civil rights demonstrations. In 1968 her estate was sold to satisfy accumulated debt. She continued to perform occasionally until her death in 1975, during the celebration of the 50th anniversary of her Paris debut.

Her life was dramatized in the television movie The Josephine Baker Story (1991) and was showcased in the documentary Joséphine Baker. Première icône noire (2018; Josephine Baker: The Story of an Awakening).

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Patricia Bauer.

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Josephine Baker | Biography, Children, Movies, Banana Skirt, & Facts

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Josephine Baker, American-born French dancer and singer who symbolized the beauty and vitality of Black American culture, which took Paris by storm in the 1920s. She was one of the most popular music-hall entertainers in France and was also known for her work with the French Resistance during World War II.

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'Orange is the New Black' star

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Who Is Laverne Cox?

Laverne Cox is a transgender actress who studied dance for years before doing TV work that included Law & Order episodes and the reality show TRANSform Me. She stepped into the limelight in a major way with her role on the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, eventually becoming the first openly transgender person in history to be nominated for an Emmy. Cox has continued to be an advocate for trans and LGBT rights while appearing in additional screen projects such as The Mindy Project, Doubt and Grandma.

Photo: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for Hilarity For Charity

Laverne Cox as a Child, Twin Brother

Laverne Cox was born on May 29, 1972, in Mobile, Alabama. She and her twin brother were raised by their mother, Gloria, who was single and worked as a teacher. Though Cox was born biologically male, she had always felt herself to be female, not really seeing a difference between boys and girls. She was often taunted and harassed mercilessly for being feminine, though she was able to hold onto her love for the arts.

"I begged my mother to put me into dance classes and finally, in third grade, she did," Cox said years later in a Times magazine interview. "Tap and jazz but not ballet. She thought ballet was too gay ... Throughout all of that, I was very feminine and I was really bullied, majorly bullied. There was this side of me that was this over-achiever that loved learning."

She attended high school at the Alabama School of Fine Arts before going on to study at Indiana University in Bloomington and Marymount Manhattan College, from which she graduated with a BFA in dance and where her twin pursued studies in visual art.

Movies and TV Shows

In 2008 Cox appeared on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit before becoming one of the contestants on the reality series I Want to Work for Diddy. Other roles followed in TV and indie films, as well as on another reality program, TRANSform Me (2010), before Cox landed her breakthrough role on Orange Is the New Black.

'Orange Is the New Black'

Premiering in 2012, the highly successful Netflix drama followed the inhabitants of a women's prison in upstate New York over the course of seven seasons. Cox was tapped for the part of Sophia Burset, an imprisoned trans woman who fights for appropriate hormone treatments and has a highly strained relationship with her son while also receiving love and acceptance from her wife. The show, co-starring Taylor Schilling, Uzo Aduba, Laura Prepon and Kate Mulgrew, among many others, received raves for its diverse characters, edgy plot lines and honest depictions of sexuality and gender expression.

'Grandma' to 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show' Reboot

Cox has continued to explore other roles, guest starring on The Mindy Project and co-starring in 2017 in the CBS pilot Doubt as a transgender attorney (the show was cancelled shortly after premiering). She has also appeared in the comedy Grandma - a film starring Lily Tomlin - which was part of the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival, and in the 2017 Berlin International Film Festival entry Freak Show. Additionally, Cox played Dr. Frank-N-Furter in a 2016 reboot of cult favorite The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let's Do the Time Warp Again.

Trans-Rights Icon & Recent Work

Cox is a trailblazer, becoming the first openly transgender person to be nominated for an Emmy (doing so in 2014 for the category of Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series) and to appear on the cover of Time magazine. She also works as a trans-rights advocate, hosting her own column on The Huffington Post where, among other write-ups, she's penned an eloquent essay on gender expression and oppression. Cox is also the executive producer behind the documentaries The T Word (2014), which follows the lives of several trans youth, and Free CeCe (2016), which tells the plight of an imprisoned trans woman. For The T Word, Cox won an Emmy, making her the first transgender women to win for an executive producer role.

For the February 2018 South African edition of Cosmopolitan, Cox became the first openly transgender cover girl in the magazine's history.

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Laverne Cox is a transgender actress who studied dance for years before doing TV work that included Law & Order episodes and the reality show TRANSform Me. She stepped into the limelight in a major way with her role on the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, eventually becoming the first openly transgender person in history to be nominated for an Emmy.

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Pop artist who promoted AIDS awareness and other societal issues

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Keith Haring: Art is for Everybody
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
November 8, 2023 - March 17, 2024
Visit Website

remembers the life and work of Keith Haring. They interview GIL VAZQUEZ, Executive Director and President at Keith Haring Foundation in New York, one of Haring's closest friends, confidants and heir.

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Keith Haring: Art is for Everybody Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto November 8, 2023 - March 17, 2024 Visit Website remembers the life and work of Keith Haring. They interview GIL VAZQUEZ, Executive Director and President at Keith Haring Foundation in New York, one of Haring's closest friends, confidants and heir.

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Musician and performance artist

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Anohni is the lead singer of the group Antony & the Johnsons. She is also known for singing vocals on Hercules and Love Affair's hit single "Blind", as well as her collaborations with Björk, Laurie Anderson, Cocorosie, Lou Reed, Boy George, Nico Muhly, Current 93, J. Ralph and Marina Abromovic among others.

In 2015 she announced that she would be using the name Anohni as her professional moniker, a name which she had been using in her personal life for many years prior to the public announcement.

This moniker change came with a change of sound as well. Her politically charged dance and pop-oriented album, Hopelessness, (co-produced by Oneohtrix Point Never and Hudson Mohawke) was released on May 6, 2016.

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Anohni is the lead singer of the group Antony & the Johnsons. She is also known for singing vocals on Hercules and Love Affair's hit single "Blind", as well as her collaborations with Björk, Laurie Anderson, Cocorosie, Lou Reed, Boy George, Nico Muhly, Current 93, J. Ralph and Marina Abromovic among others.

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Editor of British Vogue

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British actor

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Rupert Everett has lived a life so full of sexual partners (male and female), drugs (hard and soft), Hollywood friendships (and bust-ups), hit performances (and forgettable flops) and other archly recounted, outrageous anecdotes that one approaches a meeting with him wondering if he still harbours any surprises. The answer comes quickly enough: of course he does.

"I'm living with my mother!" he says and gives a little wry laugh.

Everett is 58 and his mother is 83, and they live in Wiltshire - not in the same house, it transpires, but very close, so he can keep an eye on her. His father died a few years ago. When Everett isn't travelling for work, he and his partner, Henrique, a Brazilian accountant, divide their time

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Rupert Everett: 'I don't want anyone else's opinion, frankly'

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Rupert Everett has lived a life so full of sexual partners (male and female), drugs (hard and soft), Hollywood friendships (and bust-ups), hit performances (and forgettable flops) and other archly recounted, outrageous anecdotes that one approaches a meeting with him wondering if he still harbours any surprises.

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French fine artists

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Written by Michael-Oliver Harding, CNN

Back in the 1990s, Michael Jackson phoned French photographer Pierre Commoy and painter Gilles Blanchard -- better known as Pierre et Gilles -- to place an order for 70 portraits.

The King of Pop was eager for his own opulent icon, perhaps having seen the duo's fairytale depictions of Madonna as a flute-toting Japanese divinity or Boy George as the Hindu god Krishna.

But Jackson had failed to understand the labor of love that went into each image, requiring the construction of a three-dimensional theatre set, built from scratch, with details meticulously hand-painted on each photograph after it is printed.

"Like many others, I think he assumed we did everything in Photoshop," said Blanchard, one half of the partners-in-life-and-art, whose production has never exceeded 20 portraits a year. "So we sadly had to refuse."

For Pierre et Gilles, disappointing the world's most famous singer was just one extraordinary event during a 40-year career spent photographing music and film royalty. Two new exhibitions in Paris and Cannes are currently delving into the DIY illusionists' craft, which has transposed their subjects into mythological tales and transformed them into exquisite saints and martyrs.

The exhibition in Cannes, home to the famous film festival on the French Riviera, gives visitors a rare glimpse of the behind-the-scenes magic. Its subtitle, "Le Goût du Cinéma" (A Taste for Cinema), is a nod to the makeshift stagecraft of early filmmaking and their fascination with George Méliès, the Parisian film director who pioneered handmade special effects techniques at the turn of the 20th century.

"When you see a Méliès film, you're awe-struck and left wondering how he achieved all the trickery," said Cannes curator Numa Hambursin. "Pierre et Gilles' playful bricolage is reminiscent of this."

Since meeting in 1976 at a party hosted by Japanese fashion designer Kenzo Takada, Frenchmen Commoy and Blanchard have conjured up hundreds of candy-coated portraits of famous faces and lesser-known friends. There's German punk rocker Nina Hagen as a rubber-clad, rope-bound housewife; singer Serge Gainsbourg as a shabby, libidinous Santa behind bars; and Belgian musician Stromae as a pious presence framed by a flashy flower bouquet.

Reimagining pop stars as objects of worship came naturally to the artists. Both grew up in small towns where they cultivated a fascination for biblical figures, classical painting and cultural idols as eclectic as Brigitte Bardot and The Little Mermaid. "After all, they're pretty much the pagan deities of our time," Blanchard suggested over the phone during their visit to Cannes.

Having first cut their teeth taking photographs of Salvador Dali and Iggy Pop for Façade magazine (the French counterpart to Andy Warhol's Interview), they found a like-minded creative tribe at Palace, Paris' answer to notorious nightclub Studio 54. "It was one giant party, with no barriers between ethnicities, sexualities, genders or religions," said Commoy. "That message of acceptance and open-mindedness is at the heart of our work."

Indeed, the duo has always eschewed hierarchies of taste, embracing a technicolor mix of pictorial traditions, from Greco-Roman gladiators to tear-shedding Soviet soldiers, Renaissance paintings to softcore gay porn, Alice in Wonderland to Adam and Eve.

Indeed, their highly stylized tableaux vivants, or living pictures, were initially outliers in France's late 1970s art scene. "As opposed to, say, the US or Germany, French contemporary art remains very influenced by the conceptualism of Marcel Duchamp, where message takes precedence over form," said curator Hambursin. "With Pierre et Gilles, the form pretty much creates the message."

Their friend Farida Khelfa, a former model and muse to couturier Azzedine Alaïa, first met them as Gilles and Pierre during Palace days. "They're singular artists who've always openly flouted trends and what's in vogue," she said.

Pierre et Gilles have never sought the validation of cultural gatekeepers, nor held back from provocation. Their work has proudly celebrated the male nude and evoked sociopolitical issues, including the AIDS epidemic, the war in Iraq and same-sex marriage. Alongside image-makers such as photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and artist James Bidgood, they've also prided themselves on showing that "homosexuality isn't dirty."

"Since the 80s, we've received many letters from gay youths in China, Russia and beyond telling us that we gave them confidence by depicting their desires in a positive light," said Commoy. "That's so precious to us."

Major museums eventually took an interest in their flamboyant fantasy worlds, which now enjoy the rare distinction of appealing to art insiders, outsiders and the general public alike, said curator Hambursin

"The immediate subject -- this famous actor, that beloved singer -- gives (art) newbies an immediate entry point. Then, there are many subtexts for anyone able to pick up on references to art history, literature, mythology and so on."

Now both in their late 60s, there is one celebrity the duo still hope to work with, despite their usual reluctance to force collaborations into being.

"Lana Del Rey would be an ideal model for us," revealed Blanchard.

"Her music soundtracks many of our shoots," added Commoy. "Her voice is so dreamlike and poignant, and her beauty uncanny."

It is perhaps a fitting choice: the creative universes imagined by Del Rey and Pierre et Gilles share an overarching sense of melancholy and nostalgia.

Perhaps above all, it appears that acclaim has not dampened the outsider appeal of the singer. Nor -- more than four decades after their first portraits -- has it diminished the draw of Pierre et Gilles.

"Maybe it's because it took time for the art world to embrace us, but we still feel slightly marginal," said Commoy. "But we do what makes us happy, without compromise. That's what matters."
Pierre et Gilles, "Factory of Idols" runs at Cité de la Musique in Paris until 23 February 2020. Pierre et Gilles, "Le Goût du Cinéma" continues at Centre d'art La Malmaison in Cannes until 26 April 2020.

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art duo pierre et gilles create opulent shrines to pop icons - cnn

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Art duo Pierre et Gilles have spent 40 years creating opulent shrines to pop icons

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Written by Michael-Oliver Harding, CNN Back in the 1990s, Michael Jackson phoned French photographer Pierre Commoy and painter Gilles Blanchard -- better known as Pierre et Gilles -- to place an order for 70 portraits.

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British actor

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Sir Ian McKellen to celebrate 80th birthday with UK tour

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The actor will criss-cross the country with 'a mixture of anecdote and acting' tailored to each venue.

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Iconic French Fashion Designer

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French designer Jean-Paul Gaultier said Friday that his next Paris haute couture fashion show will be his last.

The flamboyant creator said he would be bowing out Wednesday with a big party to mark his 50 years in the business after his latest collection hits the catwalk.

His brand told AFP that his high-end fashion and perfume business would live on, but that Gaultier was stepping back from designing clothes himself.

"Rest assured haute couture will continue with a new concept," said the designer, who famously invented the "man skirt" and put Madonna in a conical bra.

The eternal enfant terrible dropped the bombshell in a typically jokey video message, shot as if he was giving an exclusive interview to a reporter over the phone.

Reclining on a chaise longue, he whispered, "Now I am going to give you a scoop. It will be my last couture show. You have to come, you can't miss that... but, but, but, I assure you, Gaultier Paris will go on, the haute couture will continue.

"I have a new concept. I will tell you about it later, all the little secrets. To be continued! Kisses, kisses."
'Fiesta of fabric and flesh'
Gaultier, 67, stopped designing ready-to-wear clothes in 2015 to concentrate on haute couture -- extravagant handmade clothes which only the world's richest women can afford.

But as late as last year the maverick insisted that he had no intention of hanging up his scissors -- although he despaired of animal rights activists pressuring him to stop using furs.

"I really like the feel of fur," he told AFP, as he confessed that he was wavering about dropping furs from his shows.

"We are in an age when there is too much of everything, so we shouldn't be killing animals. I have a charming little pussy, and I love animals, though I draw the line at crocodiles," he said.

While his couture business owned by the Catalan luxury conglomerate Puig was never a huge money maker, his perfumes -- often featuring his impossibly handsome sailors -- continue to be bestsellers.

A child fashion prodigy, Gaultier said he starting by making showgirl outfits for his teddy bear.
Corsets and leather tutus
He was personal assistant to French fashion magnate Pierre Cardin at 18, and rose to fame in the 1980s alongside designers like Thierry Mugler when the Paris fashion scene was at its most decadent.

Gaultier then carved out a parallel television career as the co-presenter of a cheeky series, "Eurotrash".

He was also the industry's jester in chief. In a world riddled with snobbery and pretension, he had the common touch -- poking fun at himself and fashion's myriad follies.

In 2018, he staged his own hit cabaret show based loosely on his life story called "Fashion Freak Show", at the Folies Bergere theatre in Paris.

The Guardian hailed it as "a fabulous fiesta of fabric and flesh" when it transferred to London last year.

It included a key moment that was to change his life -- the first time he laid eyes on a corset in his grandmother's wardrobe.

He traced his fascination to corsetry and bondage to that moment -- and both would be recurring motifs in a career also replete with leather togas and tutus, feathers and all sorts of outsiders and freaks.

Hugely-loved within the fashion world, Gaultier pioneered using plus-sized models and welcomed "all shapes, sizes and sexualities" on his catwalk.

A spokeswoman for his brand told AFP the designer would be back, but like the veteran Japanese creator Kenzo -- who has moved into interior design -- it would be in other areas.

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French fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier announces retirement

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French designer Jean-Paul Gaultier said Friday that his next Paris haute couture fashion show will be his last. The flamboyant creator said he would be bowing out Wednesday with a big party to mark his 50 years in the business after his latest collection hits the catwalk.

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American/Caribbean artist

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Thirty years after his death, Jean-Michel Basquiat defies easy categories. Was he an artist, an art star, or just a celebrity?

Photograph: 'Jean-Michel Basquiat Wearing an American Football Helmet' (1981) by Edo Bertoglio; Courtesy of Maripol; Artwork: © VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, the estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat; licensed by Artestar, New York

In May 2016, a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat sold for $57.3 million. One year later, another painting of his from 1982, Untitled, sold for $110.5 million, making it the sixth-most-expensive work of art ever purchased at auction, and setting a record for an American artist. Basquiat is not the first painter to have a canvas sell for a price that strikes ordinary people as obscene. But when Jeffrey Deitch, a prominent curator and dealer, said after the sale, "He's now in the same league as Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso," it was hard to pin down the precise meaning of the word league. Was Basquiat now considered as great an artist as Picasso? Or was he merely as expensive to own?

Basquiat became famous in the early 1980s, when the idea that artists were supposed to be commercial innocents fell apart for good, and when the idea of the "art star"-a funnily abbreviated inversion, if you think about it, of starving artist-first came into vogue. In 1985, The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story on Basquiat, titled "New Art, New Money." Its tone was both awed and suspicious, with constant references to a hot, possibly gullible, market in contemporary art. His work was said to be selling "at a brisk pace-so brisk, some observers joked, that the paint was barely dry," and Basquiat himself was quoted as worrying he had become a "gallery mascot." Whatever else was true, as the art historian Jordana Moore Saggese has said since, "this was not the starving artist the public was accustomed to seeing."

In the 30 years since Basquiat died of a drug overdose, in 1988, at the age of 27, the prices of his work have climbed steadily upward, taking some astonishing leaps along the way. Everyone remains fascinated by him-the life is compelling, the person bewitching, the canvases impossible to turn away from-but nobody agrees on why. His work seems to elicit one of two reactions from people. The first, as the writer bell hooks noticed when she attended a 1992 retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum, in New York, is avoidance:

I wandered through the crowd talking to the folks about the art. I had just one question. It was about emotional responses to the work. I asked, what did people feel looking at Basquiat's paintings? No one I talked with answered the question. They went off on tangents, said what they liked about him, recalled meetings, generally talked about the show, but something seemed to stand in the way, preventing them from spontaneously articulating feelings the work evoked.

Standing before Jeff Koons's Balloon Dog, you take a selfie. Before Untitled, which its owner is now exhibiting on a global tour, you ... do what, exactly? A common initial response-that the art is slapdash, tender, true-feels wrong somehow, as if we haven't gotten it. Unwilling to play the part of the rearguard philistine anymore, we stay quiet, stranded in a vaguely shameful silence. In front of the painting, we fear we have seen or felt too little, especially given the $110.5 million price tag.

Basquiat's works can also elicit the opposite response, very much in evidence in commentary on a recent retrospective mounted at the Barbican, in London, and then at the Schirn Kunsthalle, in Frankfurt. Anxious to stake a claim for the paintings' place in art history, critics load them up with extra signification. I've seen the following cited as influences on, or analogies to, Basquiat's work: action painting, art brut, surrealist automatism, William Burroughs's cut-ups, the schizoanalysis of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Leonardo da Vinci, punk, postpunk, no wave, hip-hop, bebop, Lee "Scratch" Perry, Einstein on the Beach, Herman Melville, and Jack Kerouac. The convergence of multiple lines of influence is apparent in Basquiat's work, and has been called a form of "creolization," and fair enough. But there's creole, and then there's the kitchen sink. If all of his creations were lost, and you had to reconstruct them going only on the criticism, you would end up with some abominable artwork.

What critics seem to be striving for on behalf of Basquiat isn't understanding but respectability, which anyone looking at the paintings can immediately see Basquiat was uninterested in. These canvases were made by a young man, barely out of his teens, who never lost a teenager's contempt for respectability. Trying to assert art-historical importance on the paintings' behalf, a critic comes up against their obvious lack of self-importance. Next to their louche irreverence, the language surrounding them has felt clumsy and overwrought from the beginning. What little we know for sure about Basquiat can be said simply: An extraordinary painterly sensitivity expressed itself in the person of a young black male, the locus of terror and misgiving in a racist society. That, and rich people love to collect his work. We have had a hard time making these two go together easily. But so did he.

For many years, the photos accompanying the Times piece supplied the public with its image of the artist. Basquiat is dressed in an Armani suit, barefoot, dreadlocked, paint-spattered. He looks-it's hard to tell, he stares so blankly into the camera. With the benefit of hindsight and some good reporting, we now know that Basquiat was being crushed under money and publicity. At the very same time, he was being asked to reinvest painting with its foregone aura of authenticity, even saintliness, because he was black. No human being could have survived that, and he didn't. The irony of his work's ever-rising prices is that, far from clarifying his stature, they keep alive the question he repeatedly asked himself: Am I an artist, an art star, or just another celebrity?

Basquiat's mother, Matilde, was a Brooklynite of Puerto Rican descent. In some accounts she is a loving and nurturing figure, taking him to the Museum of Modern Art to see Picasso's Guernica and to the theater to see West Side Story, giving him a copy of Gray's Anatomy. (All of these appear as touchstones in his work.) In other accounts she is erratic, beating him for wearing his underwear backwards, threatening to kill her entire family with a jerk of the steering wheel. Basquiat once said his mother carried "a worry line on her forehead from worrying too much." He called her a bruja, a "sorceress." She was in and out of mental hospitals. He told one interviewer: "She went crazy as a result of a bad marriage."

His father, Gerard, was a Haitian immigrant. He was upwardly mobile, middle class, and professional, and he wanted to instill middle-class values in his oldest child. His oldest child wanted none of it. Gerard Basquiat reportedly once beat his son so severely that Jean-Michel went to school the next day walking with a cane. (Gerard has denied this.) Other times, the story goes, he was so badly beaten that he called the police. His parents separated permanently when he was 7, and his father later moved him and his two younger sisters from East Flatbush to a townhouse in Boerum Hill. Gerard, who always insisted that the Basquiats had been an elite family in Haiti, obtained a night-school degree in accounting and eventually became the comptroller for the Macmillan publishing company.

In their new neighborhood, Gerard played the happy divorcé, in a blue blazer with brass buttons, driving a Mercedes-Benz. Jean-Michel disappeared into the crawl space beneath the staircase, covering it in his drawings. What art Basquiat made, and how he made it, remained closely bound up in his own unsettled relationship to real estate. He ran away at least twice before leaving home for good at 17. That meant-and here something of a mythical fog descends-living in Washington Square Park and fleabag hotels, and rotating through the sofas and beds of various friends and lovers.

He began his life as an artist spray-painting tantalizing koans on the walls in and around SoHo under the pseudonym Samo, short for "same old shit." His work as Samo was a collaborative project with a friend, born of an impulse universal among teenage boys. As 17-year-old "Jean" explained to The Village Voice, Samo was designed as "a tool for mocking bogusness." He kvelled at how the SoHo types had fallen for it. "They're doing exactly what we thought they'd do," he told the reporter. "We tried to make it sound profound and they think it actually is!" It's hard, reading the piece now, not to hear him talking back to the blue blazer:

This city is crawling with uptight, middle-class pseudos trying to look like the money they don't have. Status symbols. It cracks me up. It's like they're walking around with price tags stapled to their heads. People should live more spiritually, man. But we can't stand on the sidewalk all day screaming at people to clean up their acts, so we write on walls.

In 1979, he gained "his first stable home," says Alexis Adler, his roommate from the time, "the first place he had a key to." He was 18; she was 22. In their sixth-floor walk-up, Basquiat began to make the transition from street tagger to gallery artist. "He wrote and drew on any surface," Adler recalled in Basquiat Before Basquiat, a slim volume that accompanied the first public exhibition, in 2017, of the surviving materials from that East 12th Street squat. His terrain included "the walls and floor of the apartment and the building's hallways, which were strewn with discarded appliances." Their apartment is described as a heavenly cocoon, overlooking the "shooting galleries," the drug dens of Avenue B. They went dancing every night. "Art was life and life was art," Adler wrote.

A new documentary, Boom For Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat, made with the cooperation of Adler, expands on a now-familiar story. "One week ago New York City tottered on the brink of financial default," President Gerald Ford intones over the opening montage of a busted-up and burning city. During this period, we're told, a tiny subset of young people, fleeing boring lives elsewhere, gravitated to the lawlessness and decay and created their own urban village. The streets may have been dangerous, but that encouraged a sociable and intimate scene.

From Our July/August 2018 Issue

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The streets were as much Basquiat's home, apparently, as the squat, and the work he made reflects this fact. He scrawled on detritus fished from the neighborhood, on discarded scraps of canvas or a torn-off apartment door, illustrating them with street action: car accidents, ambulances, skylines. These works are very crude-they scarcely even count as juvenilia-but they are also very sweet, and contain hints of what was coming. He began crossing out words as a way to draw attention to them. He was also developing a set of symbols that remained important throughout his career-among them the copyright symbol. It was meant ironically, given that Samo's work was very much in the public domain. Once he started working indoors, the symbols began to take on a different irony, at once darker and more fragile. Is this work mine? Should I use my given name instead of the Samo tag? If so, will it make me money?

As Basquiat moved toward more conventional painting, he transitioned from streetscapes to human figures. These are shown frontally, with little or no depth of field, and nerves and organs are exposed, as in an anatomy textbook. Are these creatures dead and being clinically dissected, one wonders, or alive and in immense pain?

Adler and Basquiat lived together on East 12th Street from the fall of 1979 to the summer of 1980. That June, he exhibited his work for the first time: He painted a mural inside the " Times Square Show," the legendary event held in a former massage parlor off Seventh Avenue. The show featured performance art, graffiti, film, and a carnival atmosphere. But it was Basquiat's contribution that was singled out in Art in America. ("A patch of wall painted by samo, the omnipresent graffiti sloganeer, was a knockout combination of de Kooning and subway paint scribbles.") The following February, Basquiat was included in the "New York/New Wave" show at PS1, the nonprofit arts space housed in a defunct elementary school in Long Island City. Of more than 100 artists, he was the only one to be given a prominent space for paintings. He showed more than 20 works on their own wall in the final room of the show.

His paintings, the art dealer Annina Nosei later said, "had a quality you don't find on the walls of the street, a quality of poetry and a universal message of the sign. It was a bit immature, but very beautiful." Nosei's background in the art world was deep-she had worked for the eminent dealer Ileana Sonnabend, toured the country with John Cage, met her husband through Robert Rauschenberg. Her connection to Basquiat's work was instantaneous and serious. She was frantic to represent him, but there was a hitch. Other than what he'd exhibited, he had no paintings. Visiting Basquiat (different apartment, new girlfriend), Nosei was floored to discover that he had no inventory to show her. "You don't have anything?" she asked him, as she recalls in a 2010 documentary called The Radiant Child. And so, in September 1981, Nosei put him to work producing canvases in her Prince Street gallery's basement.

The arrangement understandably makes commentators squirm: a white taskmistress keeping a black ward in her basement to turn out paintings on command. Basquiat himself said, "That has a nasty edge to it, you know? I was never locked anywhere. If I was white, they would just say 'artist in residence.' " With its large, oblong skylight, the space was neither gloomy nor cramped, and it was continuously restocked with supplies by fawning assistants. Basquiat treated the arrangement like a job. Nosei recalls him showing up early in the morning with croissants from Dean & DeLuca and apologizing if he was late. Once in the basement, he would put on music, often Ravel's Boléro, incurring the bang of Nosei's umbrella from the floor above. And then he would paint.

Here his work begins to mature so quickly, so decisively, one can scarcely process it. At the same time, race enters his work more explicitly. In Irony of Negro Policeman, Basquiat offers his own excruciatingly personal take on what W. E. B. Du Bois famously called " double-consciousness." Elsewhere, black men for him are at once virtuosos and martyrs, Dizzy Gillespie and Sugar Ray Robinson featured prominently among them. His favored symbol, the crown, appears more often, but what is it, exactly? An Apollonian laurel wreath, the ultimate symbol of victory and honor? Or a crown of thorns, which, along with the cross, is Christendom's ultimate symbol of humiliation and mockery?

Basquiat worked several canvases at once, dancing from surface to surface like "Ali in his prime," according to an assistant. He could finish two or three in a day. Sometimes he would paint in pajamas and slippers. At intervals, one of Nosei's assistants would walk him over to a Citibank to provide him with cash.

Paintings have been tradable commodities since at least the 16th century, and by the middle of the 17th century, something like an international market in art was up and running. It dealt mostly in antiquities and old masters, and was small and illiquid. When a trade in modern art first arose, in the late 19th century, it was defined by an absence of heat or velocity. An art dealer discovered unknown artists, then supported them through years, even decades, of obscurity. "We would have died of hunger without [Paul] Durand-Ruel, all we Impressionists," Claude Monet famously said of the renowned dealer.

Modern art was once deemed serious because it derived from an avant-garde, and what the garde was in avant of was the market. This much is plain if you read the memoirs of Durand-Ruel, and of his successors Ambroise Vollard and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the original dealers in modern art. All three acknowledge the market, and Durand-Ruel and Vollard make constant reference to prices. Kahnweiler invoked Picasso's dictum: "For paintings to be worth a lot of money, they must at some point have been sold cheaply." Artistic validation was a process, a struggle that entailed trial and condemnation by the market, then triumphs in the market, which over time revealed the "true" value of the work in high, and finally exorbitant, sale prices.

The appearance of the art market as we now know it has been traced to the early 1970s, and to one auction in particular. In 1973, Robert Scull, a New York taxi tycoon, sold off 50 works of contemporary art. At the auction, Double White Map, an encaustic collage by Jasper Johns, sold for $240,000. For Scull, this represented a 2,250 percent return on his money in eight years. As the sociologist Olav Velthuis discovered through extensive interviewing, dealers and artists point to this as the moment when the " art market proper [turned] into a commodity or investment market."

And then, in September 1980, the Jasper Johns painting Three Flags was sold to the Whitney Museum for $1 million. This was a record price for a work by a living artist, though it wasn't only the money that made the sale notable. A Connecticut couple, the Tremaines, had acquired Three Flags in 1959, for $900, from the legendary art dealer Leo Castelli. Selling it, they had bypassed him completely; and this, Castelli felt, violated the established courtesies of his profession.

Castelli had presided over a market that was not a free market at all. It was a field of action dense with personal meaning-handshake agreements, favoritism (in the form of a waiting list and some genteel price discrimination), and, most crucial, a blacklist of collectors who resold works. Together these customs restricted supply, protecting collectors from a flooded market while keeping ultimate jurisdiction over a painter's career in the hands of his dealer. "It was bucolic," Castelli said of the period. "Money was not so important."

The sale of Three Flags made the front page of The New York Times. It heralded, Velthuis has argued, the arrival of "superstar prices" in contemporary art. By late 1982, thanks in part to the onset of the Reagan-era economic boom, a period of reckless, almost spastic, buying had begun in earnest. Whatever else was true, the garde was no longer avant, and prices were rising fast. In 1983, Julian Schnabel's Notre Dame was auctioned at Sotheby's for a winning bid of $93,000 -a three-year return on investment of more than 2,500 percent. Relationships between artists and dealers were becoming more nakedly transactional. When the painter and sculptor Donald Judd left the prestigious dealer Paula Cooper for the Pace Gallery, Cooper said, "Artists today are like baseball stars."

In October 1981, Noseiincluded Basquiat in a group show. She gave his six paintings the entire back room of her gallery, and after his work sold, she was ready to make another proposal. She offered, in a stroke, to put the entire apparatus of the working artist in place around him. She would give him a loft to live in, a studio to paint in, assistants to work for him, supplies, and, waiting at the end of this pipeline, collectors to buy his art. Basquiat had arrived, but he, at least, didn't seem sure where.

The Crosby Street loft was on the second floor, and visitors would either hit the buzzer, which Basquiat had labeled tar in trademark Samo handwriting, or call up from the street. Collectors would drop in, and if they wondered aloud whether a painting might blend in with their decor, Basquiat would chase them away, often hurling abuse, or sometimes food-cereal, rice, milk-from the window down on their heads. Graffiti kids, groupies, celebrities, and, not least, drug buddies-people came day and night and found a space strewed with art, garbage, toys, magazines, books. A Haitian voodoo statue stood in a corner. The bed had a polyester Superman comforter and a cocaine mirror on the headboard shelf. Reports from this period converge on two details: The television was always on, and the fridge was always filled with gourmet sundries-chocolates, pastries, Russian caviar-slowly going bad.

Basquiat's girlfriend at the time, Suzanne Mallouk, remembers him covering the windows with black paper, banishing daytime from the living space and the internal clock from their bodies. They did more and more coke, and Basquiat began freebasing. Along with drugs, renown, hangers-on, and paranoia, money was now a force in his life, and large bills were stuffed in books and under the carpet, or left to drift where they may. Basquiat once binged on expensive electronics, then sat on the floor surrounded by his latest gadgets and cried.

In March of 1982, he exhibited work he had made in Nosei's basement- Arroz con Pollo, Crowns (Peso Neto), Untitled (Per Capita) -in the upstairs of her gallery. This was his first solo show in the United States, and his first solo show as Basquiat. (He had recently shown as Samo in Italy.) It sold out in one night. He was 21 years old. He followed up his debut in New York City with a mob-scene opening in Los Angeles, and a solo show at the Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, in Switzerland.

Shortly after his triumph, he was flown back to Italy, and in an airplane hangar in the industrial outskirts of Modena, Basquiat was deposited in front of massive 25-by-15-foot canvases, stretched and ready, and was given just days to produce fresh material for a second Italian opening. He was attended by his Italian dealer, as well as by Nosei and Bischofberger. "They set it up for me so I'd have to make eight paintings in a week," he later told The New York Times Magazine. "I made them in this big warehouse ... It was like a factory, a sick factory."

Two months later, he snuck into Nosei's basement and destroyed 10 of his canvases. Using a box cutter, he slashed them down to rags, and then, as if to make sure that they could never be resurrected as salable art, he doused them with a bucket of white paint.

When I saw "Basquiat: Boom For Real," the major retrospective of his work that recently closed in Frankfurt, the exhibit was not only well, but reverentially, attended. Viewers paused over items as if they were holy relics. ( Someone knew to save this, I thought over and over.) The presentation flowed gracefully from Samo to the East 12th Street material through to the danse macabre of his last major works. Mostly glossed over in the catalog commentary and exhibit photographs was the fact that, after he became famous, Basquiat went, in quick and ghastly succession, from sweet East Village magpie to café-society boor to dead. The artist who presided at the show instead is the pre-boom Basquiat, the marvel of a crumbling yet vibrantly creative New York City. What is he being made innocent of here if not the market, the 1980s art market in particular? Yet to make him innocent of the market is to cleave him in two, and discard the struggle that defined him as an artist.

By early 1982, Basquiat had plainly entered a new phase. He started replacing the incidental crud of his surfaces-torn bits of paper affixed with glue, sneaker prints-with something more calculated, deploying techniques of collaging reminiscent of Rauschenberg's. His use of color, surface, and line to achieve expressionistic affect showed a newfound confidence. At the same time, he was suddenly making paintings for the market, and making a lot of them quickly and under pressure.

The result was a heroic mastery combined with the randomness of trash buoyed in the wind. Basquiat became frenetic in his inclusion of materials he found ready to hand, filling his canvases with yet more symbols: renditions of dollar signs, coins, Federal Reserve notes, Japanese yen, Afro-Cuban ideograms, logos, cars, airplanes, feathers, feet, skulls. To do this, he grabbed at anything that might serve as raw material-from Henry Dreyfuss's Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols to the 1980 catalog of the Met's permanent collection. By 1984, his collaging technique had become more sophisticated. He'd sometimes layer the canvas densely with color photocopies, which he would then paint over. He even began using Andy Warhol's trick of silk-screening to repeat images both within and between canvases.

Warhol reported in his diaries that when Bischofberger first saw these works he gave them a "sour look." The approach had "ruined [Basquiat's] 'intuitive primitivism.' " There is a kernel of truth even to this casual racism. Inevitably, words like primitive, unschooled, undisciplined are perilous, given how carefully vetted Basquiat criticism is for offensiveness. Yet if you are afraid, you will never understand who he was or what he was getting at. The curators and critics of "Basquiat: Boom For Real" tried running in the opposite direction, describing him as a maestro in all things, with one contributor to the catalog going so far as to call him an "extraordinary painter and draughtsman." But Basquiat wasn't even a good draughtsman, and he cheerfully admitted it. It is useless to pretend otherwise: Unlike Jean Dubuffet, he made unschooled images because he was unschooled. Unlike Picasso's, his figures were crude because he could barely draw.

To insist that Basquiat was a virtuoso is to turn away from the paintings all over again, to miss their ultimate dare. The search for authenticity of form and feeling that led white artists toward naive (even childish) techniques and human primitives-what does that quest mean when a black artist pursues it? It's a good question, a biting one, and we've become accustomed to asking it of Basquiat while leaving the follow-up hanging in the air: What does it mean when a black artist vaults altogether beyond technique, or formal training, or deep study? On his canvases, Basquiat turned to the black athletes and musicians he venerated, to Hank Aaron and Charlie Parker. They were the consummate virtuosos, yet Aaron was vilified when he displaced Babe Ruth, the greatest of white American athletes, as the home-run king in the sport that is a stand-in for national innocence. Parker, as one of the pioneers of postwar bebop, took "Negro genius" to abstruse places it was never supposed to go.

What does it mean to have depicted them in paintings that are easily misread as lazy, among the most loaded of racist terms? Black American genius has long been forced into music and sports, where it has been asked to further vindicate itself by displaying a total virtuosity, only to be martyred when that genius breaks out of the mold that respectability and conformity has made for it. Basquiat refused to play that game. First, he rejected the role of ingratiating virtuoso, placing himself instead within the lineage of the (white) modernist genius, of "Twombly, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Johns," as he said. Then he made the martyrdom of the black virtuoso the subject of his work. To be the first black artist who was not a black artist, while never not being a black artist: This is to make of yourself a holy singularity.

The new owner of Untitled, Yusaku Maezawa, has indicated that the proper fate of the painting is not to be hoarded, but to be seen. I went to see the single-painting show "One Basquiat" in March, at the first stop on its global tour, the Brooklyn Museum. The viewing room was chapel-like. At the near end, a glass case held Basquiat's junior museum membership card. On the far wall hung the most expensive (for now) artwork by an American.

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Viewers feel stared at by Basquiat's paintings, one commentator has said, and I agree. But in their presence, I also have the feeling of happening upon something I was never supposed to see. Basquiat's art was made under conditions that, one has to believe, are anomalous in the history of art, and yet we would apply to it the traditional standards and vocabularies of art history. On the one hand, Basquiat was a heroic master like Picasso, even though he was rushed to market before he could fully develop his mastery. On the other hand, we need him to be one of the ultimate authentics, à la Vincent van Gogh, even though he interacted directly and on a continuous basis with the market. To this day, he is asked to restore the symbolic capital of the starving artist to a system that otherwise does everything in its power to destroy it. And so he remains, to this day, a perpetually uncertain thing.
This article appears in the July/August 2018 print edition with the headline "Searching for Jean-Michel Basquiat."
Untitled, an agonized skull from the Crosby Street period, was first purchased in 1984 for $19,000. At its recent sale price, it had increased in value by 581,479 percent. One shakes one's head in disbelief and thinks: Whatever the market will bear. At the same time, one bows one's head in awe and thinks: Worth every penny.

Stephen Metcalf, the host of Slate's Culture Gabfest podcast, is at work on a book about the 1980s.

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The Enigma of the Man Behind the $110 Million Painting

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Thirty years after his death, Jean-Michel Basquiat defies easy categories. Was he an artist, an art star, or just a celebrity? In May 2016, a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat sold for $57.3 million. One year later, another painting of his from 1982, Untitled, sold for $110.5 million, making it the sixth-most-expensive work of art ever purchased at auction, and setting a record for an American artist.

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South African social activist and visual artist.

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You refer to yourself as a visual activist. Why is photography so powerful in the context of activism; what can it achieve that other mediums cannot? Conversely, your work deals with serious issues, but, is there also another side to it that doesn't get asked about? Are you interested in the pleasure aspect for viewers of looking at and appreciating your photographs?
I consider myself a visual activist first and foremost because my work has a political agenda. What is important to me is how my work challenges and contributes to society and the place of Black LGBTQIA+ people within it. I picked up the camera because there were no images of us that spoke to me at the time when I needed them the most. I had to produce a positive visual narrative of my community and create a new dialogue with images.

With all of this, however, I'm still interested in the technical aspects of photography such as light and composition. I choose to work with silver gelatin printing because it amplifies what is pleasurable in the images. I've said that my work focuses on people's dignity and using the camera to reflect their beauty is an extension of that. People have the right to be seen with grace.
Your work has been described as "mourning and celebrating". How does it embody this duality? I can think of the series Only Half the Picture, for instance, which celebrates the love and intimacy of the LGBTQIA+ community, while also representing its trauma. Why is this duality significant? How do you reconcile the discordance between the beauty of your work and its darker underlying narratives? In Only Half the Picture your subjects are anonymous, while in Faces and Phases they hold the viewers' gaze and are identifiable by the captions. In Somnyama Ngonyama you turn the camera on yourself. Why did you abandon the element of anonymity, and turn the camera from focusing on others to focusing on yourself? Why did the face become so central?
Narratives around the LGBTQIA+ community have historically been negative. From being classified as a mental illness to being labelled un-African, the violent stigma around HIV/Aids and hate crimes including rape, the story is often only 'half the picture'. So, with Only Half the Picture, I decided to show what is often left out of mainstream portrayals.

Lives have joy and sadness, including the lives of LGBTQIA+ people, so this duality is something we all have to face and live with. I try to reflect both of these because anything else would be a lie.

Each of my projects is about giving participants the most dignified representation possible. In Only Half the Picture, the series is more about intimacy, privacy and body politics within our community, rather than about specific individuals. Faces and Phases is specifically about affirmative portraits of lesbian, bisexual, trans and non-binary individuals - everyone is asserting their place in history and the world; and so naming, placing and timing are necessary.

Somnyama Ngonyama is a body of self-portraits that deal with politics of representation, race, and Blackness. I use my own body and face because the work is meant to be confrontational, both personal and political at the same time. The project addresses my own experiences in our society head-on: things that are painful, and I would not expect anyone else to carry that with me. I had to do it myself.

Anonymity is neither abandoned nor embraced in any of these works, and most importantly: the face is always central. Most confrontations begin with our faces. And to face the camera is to open a conversation - to make yourself both vulnerable and powerful at once.

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Reading Time: 16 minutes "To face the camera is to open a conversation, to make yourself both vulnerable and powerful at once," says Muholi in an interview begun before lockdown, ahead of the South African artist's planned survey exhibition at Tate Modern opening this autumn

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Photographer

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Opie, a self-described "twisted social documentary photographer," made pictures in gay, lesbian, and transgender leather-culture circles in Los Angeles during the 1990s. Her series Portraits (1993-96)-a celebration of her sitters' tattoos, piercings, and clothing, adopted in defiance of mainstream heterosexual culture-emerged from these collaborations. Here the woman's shorn hair and freckled shoulders frame the tattooed word at the nape of her neck. By taking possession of the label "dyke" through its imprint on her body, she aimed to render the slur powerless. In a broader context, "dyke" has been adopted as a positive term of self-reference by lesbians, whose use of it is intended to disarm derogatory connotations.

Opie's work simultaneously satisfies and upends traditional expectations of portraiture. Although her backdrops, poses, and lighting befit the genre, she applies these formal tactics to atypical subjects. Particularly influenced by the portraits of the sixteenth-century German painter Hans Holbein the Younger, Opie's color-intensive backgrounds, like Holbein's, create neutral spaces that focus attention on the person rather than documenting the environment. The blue damask fabric in this work emphasizes the sitter's contours and highlights both her biological and self-selected physical attributes. "I try to present people with an extreme amount of dignity," Opie has said. "They're always going to be stared at, but I try and make the portraits stare back."

Publication excerpt from MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019)

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Opie, a self-described "twisted social documentary photographer," made pictures in gay, lesbian, and transgender leather-culture circles in Los Angeles during the 1990s. Her series Portraits (1993-96)-a celebration of her sitters' tattoos, piercings, and clothing, adopted in defiance of mainstream heterosexual culture-emerged from these collaborations.

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American Pop Artist

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Explore Andy Warhol's life-from his Pittsburgh roots to his career in New York City.

Early life

Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, in a two-room apartment at 73 Orr Street in a working-class neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants from an area in the Carpathian Mountains in what is present-day Eastern Slovakia, his parents Andrej and Julia Warhola had three sons, Paul, John, and Andy, the youngest.

In 1934, the family moved to their home at 3252 Dawson Street in Pittsburgh's South Oakland neighborhood, which was closer to their church St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic. Devout Byzantine Catholics, the family regularly attended mass and observed their Eastern European heritage.

As a child, Warhol suffered from Sydenham chorea, a neurological disorder commonly known as St. Vitus dance, characterized by involuntary movements. When the disorder occasionally kept him home from school, Warhol would read comics and Hollywood magazines and play with paper cutouts. Growing up in Depression-era Pittsburgh, the family had few luxuries, but Warhol's parents bought him his first camera when he was eight years old.

He attended elementary at Holmes School and took free Tam O'Shanter art classes at Carnegie Institute (now Carnegie Museum of Art) taught by Joseph Fitzpatrick, before attending Schenley High School in 1942. Recognizing his son's talent, Andrej saved money to pay for Warhol's college education, and he attended Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) from 1945 to 1949.

Health

Throughout his life, Warhol fixated on his physical imperfections. As a child, Sydenham chorea (St. Vitus dance) occasionally kept him bedridden, and he had pigment issues that caused discoloration of his skin, leading to the nicknames "Spot" and "Andy the Red-nosed Warhola." In response to his perceived physical flaws, Warhol cultivated different looks through his clothing, wigs, cosmetics, and plastic surgery to change the shape of his nose. Later in his life he had premature baldness and massive scars from gunshot wounds suffered in 1968. His lifelong interest in beauty regimes and skin care made its way into his work, with early paintings depicting a nose job, wigs, and pain relief for corns. By the 1980s, Warhol had a near daily exercise regime and took vitamin supplements to improve his hair and skin; he incorporated bodybuilder imagery into his work and exercise equipment populates photographs of his studio.

1950s

Andy Warhol, "Success is a Job in New York," Glamour magazine, 1949
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
© The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
1998.3.2453

Warhol was known for his blotted-line ink drawings, using a process he developed in college and refined in the 1950s. This working method combined drawing with basic printmaking and allowed Warhol to repeat an image and to create multiple illustrations along a similar theme. He could also make color or compositional changes quickly in response to client requests.

Andy Warhol, Seated Male Nude Torso, 1950s
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
© The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
1998.1.1692

Sexuality

In the early 1950s, many of Warhol's friends and fellow artists were accepted to show at the Tanager Gallery in New York City, but the works he submitted were rejected because of their subject matter-two men embracing. Warhol was a gay man, and homosexuality was criminalized in 1950s America. Warhol filled sketchbooks in the 1950s with drawings titled Boy Portraits , which were loving, humorous depictions of the male form and studies of feet, torsos, and genitalia. During his foray into film in the 1960s, Warhol did not shy away from sexuality. His films included scenes of sexual escapades, explicit and not-from turning tricks to sleeping. One of Warhol's earliest films featured his then-boyfriend, poet John Giorno, sleeping nude in the nearly six-hour-long (1963). Throughout his career, Warhol blurred the lines between his romantic and professional relationships, mixing business and pleasure. Edward Wallowitch, Ted Carey, John Giorno, Jed Johnson, and Jon Gould were some of Warhol's business associates with whom he also had intimate relationships. He returned to the male-and female-nude in the 1970s with his and series. In the 1980s, Warhol's focus on the body in his work and return to hand painting corresponded with the early days of the HIV/AIDS public health crisis, which devastated New York City's arts scene and gay community.

Entrepreneur

As equally as he was an artist, Warhol was an entrepreneur. He kickstarted his career in the 1950s as a commercial illustrator, earning a sizeable revenue to finance his artistic ventures. Warhol grew up during the rise of post-war consumer culture in the U.S. and England and realized the benefit of assembly lines in manufacturing, employing studio assistants and processes to aid his artistic production. Warhol successfully balanced commercial and entrepreneurial endeavors with avant-garde, underground work. He continually pushed himself to experiment in new media-publishing, film, music production, television, fashion, theater-throughout his career and frequently collaborated with artists and brands. Warhol wrote in THEPhilosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), "Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art."

1960s

In 1963, Warhol began his series of Death and Disaster paintings that used images from magazines and newspapers as well as police and press photographs of suicides, car crashes, and accidents as source material. Warhol produced a range of films between 1963 and 1968, beginning with his first feature-length film (1963), five hours and twenty-one minutes of poet John Giorno asleep. His groundbreaking eight-hour-long silent film (1964) features continuous slow motion footage of the Empire State Building in New York City. In 1966, he made his most commercially successful film, the three-hour-long, double-screen The Chelsea Girls .

Warhol first began making box sculptures in 1963. Invoking a factory assembly line and enlisting help from his studio assistants at the Silver Factory, he created hundreds of replicas of large supermarket product boxes-including Brillo Boxes , Heinz Boxes , Del Monte Boxes , and more. The ﬁnished sculptures were nearly indistinguishable from their cardboard supermarket counterparts, single packing cartons. The Brillo Boxes were first exhibited in 1964 at the Stable Gallery in New York where they were tightly packed and piled high, recalling a grocery warehouse.

Running at the same time as was Warhol's exhibition of Cow Wallpaper and Silver Clouds at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City. Created with engineer Billy Klüver, the metallic, floating Silver Clouds sculptures are made of silver plastic film filled with helium and air. Choreographer Merce Cunningham saw the sculptures at the opening and asked Warhol if he could use the floating installation as stage décor for his piece Rainforest (1968). The clouds floated among dancers on stage.

Corset, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
1998.3.8198.1

William John Kennedy, Untitled (Andy Warhol Looking Through American Man), 1964, reprinted 2010
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Gift of Kiwi Arts Group
© William John Kennedy, Courtesy of KIWI Arts Group
2013.12.96

Repetition

In college, Warhol developed a blotted-line technique that combined drawing with basic printmaking. Blotted line allowed him to create a variety of illustrations using the same initial pattern, important to his commercial illustration career when he could bring several ideas to clients. This was the beginning of his lifelong interest to quickly create multiples. Warhol famously quipped, "I want to be a machine," alluding to his interest in mass production. His most notable style, photographic silkscreen printing, replicated the look of commercial advertising. It gave Warhol a faithful duplication of his source images while allowing him to experiment with various techniques, such as over-printing (printing one color on top of another), registration (aligning colors on a single image), and color combinations. Warhol worked with art assistants and professional printers to produce thousands of silkscreen paintings and print portfolios throughout his lifetime.

1970s

Warhol became increasingly involved in publishing in the late 1960s, becoming fully immersed in the 1970s. In 1969, he co-founded , a magazine devoted to film, fashion, and popular culture that gave him access to the stars. He published his first mass-produced book, Andy Warhol's Index (Book) , in 1967, and Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) was published in 1975. Published posthumously in 1989, The Andy Warhol Diaries chronicle his daily life from November 24, 1976, through February 17, 1987, five days before he died; his assistant and friend Pat Hackett transcribed their daily phone conversations detailing the previous day's events.

During this period, Warhol used a Polaroid camera and a tape recorder to document his daily life, from business meetings to star-studded social occasions. He also used Polaroid photographs as source materials for his iconic celebrity portraits and many still lifes throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

A major 1972 exhibition that signaled Warhol's renewed focus on painting featured a series of works depicting Chairman Mao. Warhol saw the pervasiveness of Mao's image in China as akin to Western advertising strategies. By 1974, increasing his painting production, Warhol moved his office to a larger space on the 3rd floor of 860 Broadway on Union Square. The 1970s saw a prolific number of paintings, often including controversial or charged imagery, including Vote McGovern (1972), Ladies and Gentlemen (1975), (1976), Hammer and Sickle (1976), and Oxidation Paintings (1978), which were created by Warhol friends and studio assistants urinating onto a canvas primed with a metallic paint.

Warhol started his largest serial work in 1974, the . He filled, sealed, and sent to storage 569 standard-sized cardboard boxes, 20 filing cabinets (two Time Capsules Time Capsules per cabinet), and a large steamer trunk. Each Time Capsule is filled with ephemera-letters, photographs, publications, recordings, clothing, food, medicine, toys, antiques, ticket stubs, artworks, and more-dating from the 1950s to his death in 1987.

Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger, 1975
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution Dia Center for the Arts
© The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
1997.1.8b

Celebrity

Warhol was infatuated with Hollywood celebrity and fame since childhood. He wrote to movie stars for headshots and fan photos, assembling scrapbooks between 1938 and 1941. In the 1960s, The Factory became a hangout for artists, musicians, and writers, including Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Truman Capote, and many more. Warhol's Superstars, including Edie Sedgwick, Brigid Berlin, Ondine, and Candy Darling, were Factory goers who appeared in his films and became fixtures in his social life. In the 1970s, Warhol was a regular at the New York disco Studio 54, and he received hundreds of portrait commissions from wealthy socialites, musicians, and film stars. He remained in the spotlight in the 1980s with his television work and high-fashion modeling. Warhol achieved stardom, and helped others do the same, realizing his expression, " In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."

Collecting

Central to Warhol's practice were collecting and documenting. He collected everything from watches to cookie jars, and his largest serial work, Time Capsules , encapsulated items from his daily life from the 1950s to his death. He documented the world around him not only through his paintings and films, but also through his tape recorder and Polaroid photography, capturing his encounters, both mundane and magnificent.

1980s

Throughout his career, Warhol frequently collaborated with artists, and in 1984 he worked with young artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, and Keith Haring. When working with Basquiat and Clemente, each artist worked independently on the canvas before passing it along, the artist's individual marks remaining distinct and recognizable signs and logos becoming part of the compositions. Warhol also returned to hand painting with a brush in the 1980s, something he had set aside in the 1960s in favor of the silkscreen.

Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ten Punching Bags (Last Supper), 1985-1986
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
© The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
1998.1.791a-j

Warhol took an interest in television and produced two cable shows, Andy Warhol's T.V. (1980-83) and Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes (1985-87) for MTV. He also made television appearances on The Love Boat and Saturday Night Live , appeared in both print and television commercials, produced music videos, and modeled in fashion shows. Continuing his artistic experimentation, Warhol made a series of digital artworks in 1985 using an Amiga 1000.

Nine months before his death, Warhol created a series of iconic monumental self-portraits featuring his gaunt face, fixed gaze, and a spiky wig, some of the canvases measuring nine feet square.

On February 22, 1987, Warhol died at New York Hospital in Manhattan due to complications following a surgery to remove his gall bladder. Warhol is buried next to his mother and father at St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery in Bethel Park, a suburb south of Pittsburgh.

Religion

Warhol was born into a devout Byzantine Catholic family that attended mass at Pittsburgh's St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church . Later in life in New York City, Warhol regularly attended St. Vincent Ferrer to pray and to attend mass. As a child, Warhol would have seen the richly painted iconostasis during mass and learned about this wall of icons and their role in worship in Eastern Catholic churches. Warhol painted religious symbols using imagery such as Raphael's , Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper , and the cross as source material.

If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.

Andy Warhol, The East Village Other, 1966

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American photographer

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A few days apart in mid-March, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) will open their joint retrospective, "Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium." This unprecedented double exhibition, which will run until the end of July at both institutions, is all the more remarkable given the controversial-not to say scandalous-radical sadomasochistic content of much of Mapplethorpe's best-known work. One could see it as a sign not only of how far the idea of photography as a fine art form has come over the past four decades but also of how far the boundaries of American culture and taste have been pushed and expanded during that same period.

Both museums will include related works and materials from Mapplethorpe's extensive archive, which they jointly acquired in 2011, largely as a gift from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, but with some support from the David Geffen Foundation and the Getty Trust. In addition, the Getty will exhibit a selection of works from the mammoth photography collection of Sam Wagstaff, Mapplethorpe's patron and lover. Under Mapplethorpe's influence, Wagstaff, a former curator from an old New York family, had voraciously bought up thousands of vintage prints by everyone from Julia Margaret Cameron and Edward Steichen to Diane Arbus and Peter Hujar when the photography market was still in its infancy. He sold his collection to the Getty in 1984, three years before succumbing to AIDS. Mapplethorpe died in 1989, also of AIDS.

As if to enhance the sense of historic occasion surrounding the Getty/LACMA extravaganza, on April 4 HBO will air its highly provocative documentary Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, produced by Katharina Otto-Bernstein (whose most recent film was on avant-garde theater guru Robert Wilson). As the directors, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, themselves have made clear, "even his most shocking and forbidden images are included without blurs, without snickers-in other words, exactly as the artist intended." Indeed, after the fourth or fifth appearance of Mapplethorpe's most notorious self-portrait-the one in which he has inserted the bottom end of a leather whip into the rear end of his body-I began to wonder if this is what we really need to see, to contemplate, to memorialize in the age of ISIS.

All this and more was revealed at a lunch in New York last November, hosted by Getty director Timothy Potts and LACMA C.E.O. and director Michael Govan to announce their joint venture. As a large part of the city's art press faced a first course of kale-and-carrot salad in the Martha Washington Hotel Ballroom, Potts declared Mapplethorpe "one of the great artists of the 20th century," whereupon everyone applauded, perhaps none more fervently than the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation's astute and charming president, Michael Stout. Detailed descriptions of the parallel exhibitions by the Getty's and LACMA's curators of photography, Paul Martineau and Britt Salvesen, respectively, followed in the same reverential mode.

My mind wandered back to the early 1970s, when I came to know Mapplethorpe when he was the literally starving young artist-now undergoing art-world beatification. Of course, Robert would have been thrilled-though not amazed, because his ambition even then was limitless. But I could also imagine him chuckling quietly to himself over the absurdity of it all, the incongruity and officiousness, not to mention the choice of venue for the luncheon. I could envision him looking at me with that glint of mischief in his emerald-green eyes, that facility for complicity that would take him so far up, as well as so far down.

Scene and Heard

Robert was 24 when I first saw him, in February 1971, at his girlfriend Patti Smith's first public poetry reading, at St. Mark's Church, on East 10th Street. He was slouched against the wall, in a black, belted trench coat, a purple-and-white silk scarf tied around his neck, his hair a crown of angelic Pre-Raphaelite curls. But I realized right away that he wasn't pure angel. He was pretty but tough, androgynous and butch. I found it hard not to look at him, even as Patti manically seduced a crowd that included her other boyfriend, the (married) playwright Sam Shepard, and such New York poetry stars as Anne Waldman and Gerard Malanga with her rock-like odes to Bertolt Brecht and James Dean. I was half a year younger than Robert, having been made managing editor of Interview magazine (print run 5,000) the previous fall by Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol, and still very new to the ultra-hip downtown scene. I was also writing film reviews for The Village Voice, and, as with so many journalists before and after me, that's how I came to befriend the object of my desire: by writing about him.

That November, the Museum of Modern Art, as part of its Cineprobe underground-film series, screened a short color film directed by Sandy Daley, Robert and Patti's neighbor at the Chelsea Hotel. The title said it all: "Robert Having His Nipple Pierced." As Robert, in black leather pants, swooned into the arms of his boyfriend, David Croland, a tall, dark, and sultry fashion illustrator and model, while the delicate operation was performed by the Chelsea's doctor-in-residence, Patti, in her thickest New Jersey accent, explained on the soundtrack why she had mixed feelings about homosexuals: because she felt left out and "they use their assholes." I gave the film a rave and was rewarded with a phone call from its star, proposing we meet for coffee. "I thought your article was funny," he said, "but you got it, too." The *Voice'*s headline was taken from my text, SOME MIGHT CALL IT DEGENERACY.

We were two of a kind: rebel Catholic boys who had fled middle-class Long Island suburbs, Robert from Floral Park, on the Queens/Nassau County line, I from nearby Rockville Centre, and come to "the city"-Manhattan-to make it. We started spending long afternoons wandering around the Village, trading childhood stories, sharing dreams of success over endless cups of black coffee in empty tourist cafés. Robert loved hearing about how I spit out my First Communion wafer because the nuns had done such a good job of convincing me that it really was the actual flesh and blood of Jesus. "Protestants believe in consubstantiation," I would intone, mimicking the mother superior who had terrified me, aged seven, in catechism class. "But we believe in transubstantiation. " Robert, who had been an altar boy, would giggle and point out that if you grew up in the 1950s the only place you ever saw a naked male body was at Mass: Christ on the Cross, hanging over the altar. "And he had a crown of thorns, and there was blood," he'd say. "No wonder we're perverse." He would listen intently as I held forth on Kierkegaard's belief that the spiritual, aesthetic, and erotic were closely related, one of the few bits of knowledge I retained from the required philosophy courses at the Jesuit Georgetown University. Robert had left Pratt one course short of a B.F.A.; his college education was almost entirely visual, and what he knew of literature came mostly from Patti. Fortuitously, her favorites were also mine: Rimbaud, Cocteau, Genet, William Burroughs. In any case, I talked much more than he did. Like many visual artists I have known, Robert was not loquacious.

Robert didn't consider himself a photographer then, nor did he own a real camera. His very early artworks often used photographic images he culled from gay porn magazines, over which he airbrushed a fine mist of paint, usually lavender or turquoise, transforming the blatantly sexual into something more romantic and mysterious. In 1970, he had started taking portraits of himself and Patti with Sandy Daley's Polaroid. Robert couldn't afford to buy a camera of his own and scrimped on food to buy the $3-a-pack Polaroid film. Sometimes he would manipulate the developed picture's image, using a Q-tip to lift the emulsion and twist it into curvaceous shapes. He gave me one of those not long after we met: a self-portrait of his crotch in psychedelic bikini briefs. There were other small gifts over the next couple of years, always signed, "To Robert love Robert" in his spidery, barely visible script.

After Robert and I showed up a few times together in the back room of Max's Kansas City, that hotbed of Factory intrigue, Candy Darling, the most bourgeois of Warhol's drag queens, warned me not to get romantically involved with him. "Everyone knows he's a sicko," she said. Andy started giving me a hard time, too. "You don't have a crush on Robert Mapplethorpe, do you? He's so dirty. His feet smell. He has no money ... " For his part, Robert was both fascinated by and afraid of Warhol. Robert thought Warhol was the most important artist of our time, but he was wary of getting caught up in Andy's entourage and losing his creative identity, which he felt I was in danger of doing.

Things came to a head one day in May 1972, when I brought Robert along with Andy and me to see Rudolf Nureyev rehearse with the Royal Ballet at Lincoln Center. The cab ride uptown was agony, as neither Andy nor Robert uttered a word, because, each told me later, he didn't want to have his ideas stolen by the other. The scene that followed was a kind of duel by Polaroid as Andy and Robert took competing pictures of Nureyev in action, and Nureyev grabbed the pictures from their hands and tore them to pieces, declaring that he hadn't agreed to a press conference. Andy was on the phone that night, berating me: "We would have got a real interview out of Nureyev if you hadn't brought that awful Robert Mapplethorpe along." "But Nureyev asked me to bring him," I countered. "But it's your fault they even met, because you got him invited to Sam Green's dinner for Nureyev. Robert's just using you, Bob. Did you ever think of that?"

Camera Man

Robert was definitely interested in the glamorous social life that came with my job as editor of Andy Warhol's magazine, both as a means of career advancement and because he was attracted to the world of fashionable society, as was I, to be honest. One of our favorite afternoon pastimes was to make guest lists for his first gallery exhibition and my first book party, including socialites and stars we had met or hoped to meet, though neither event was about to happen anytime soon. He had already made inroads into that world through David Croland, who had introduced him to Loulou de la Falaise, the Yves Saint Laurent muse and daughter of Maxime de la Falaise, whose second husband, John McKendry, was curator of prints and photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The McKendrys lived in a sprawling pre-war apartment on Riverside Drive at 91st Street, where they frequently held dinners mixing the beau monde and demimonde, the Rayners and Erteguns with Factory transvestites and Halston mannequins. In fact, Maxime was the star of Vivian's Girls, a combination soap opera/talk show directed by Factory kid Vincent Fremont and Andy in one of his first attempts at, as he put it, "doing something peculiar with video."

John McKendry was madly and unrequitedly in love with Robert, and Maxime played along because it added to their bohemian, bisexual image. ("Bi" was much more "in" than gay or straight among this group.) She hosted a tea for Loulou's girlfriends-Marisa and Berry Berenson, Marina Schiano, Pat Ast-to meet Robert and buy the jewelry he was making out of black string, blue and purple glass beads, and rabbits' feet bound in black mesh, which he sold for $50 apiece. I also remember a Patti Smith reading in the McKendrys' exotic lair of a living room that did not go over so well with the Kempners and de la Rentas, though Kenny Lane thought the proto-punk performer was onto something. No matter, through the besotted Met curator, Robert was getting to know influential art-world figures, including David Hockney and Henry Geldzahler. And when Robert and Patti were flat broke, not an unusual situation, John and Maxime would send a taxi downtown with a $20 bill in an envelope so that they could eat for a few days. The fall before I met Robert, John had invited him to London, where he had been taken up by the most far-out branch of the English aristocracy, including the Tennants, Guinnesses, and Lambtons, all of whom were also very friendly with Andy and his Anglophile business manager, Fred Hughes.

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Robert Mapplethorpe's posthumous art-world apotheosis, heralded this spring by a two-museum exhibition in L.A. and an uncensored HBO documentary, had its seeds in 1970s downtown New York. It was there Mapplethorpe shared his dreams with Vanity Fair's Bob Colacello (then editor of Andy Warhol's fledgling Interview magazine) as he headed down a path toward death-and immortality.

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Multidisciplinary artist

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Rachael House is an artist who makes events and objects. She is also co-director of artist run Space Station Sixty-Five.
Rachael's Pet-Tastic art events, fancy dress picnics for dogs, started in Peckham and have since taken place in Norway, Lewisham, The De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill and most recently in Blackpool, where the documentation of Blackpool Pet-Tastic is in Grundy Art Gallery's permanent collection.

Concerns in Rachael's work include the use of public space, extending an invitation to participate and collective joy.
Before making work that brings people together in public space, Rachael made self-published comics, which brought people together via international postal services and soaped stamps.

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Rachael House is an artist who makes events and objects. She is also co-director of artist run Space Station Sixty-Five. Rachael's Pet-Tastic art events, fancy dress picnics for dogs, started in Peckham and have since taken place in Norway, Lewisham, The De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill and most recently in Blackpool, where the documentation of Blackpool Pet-Tastic is in Grundy Art Gallery's permanent collection.

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British artist

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David Hockney is one of our best-loved living artists, and in 2010 we were let into his world thanks to A Bigger Message, a book by Martin Gayford detailing conversations with Hockney about his life and practise. Recently republished with new and updated materials, the publisher Thames & Hudson has kindly let us reprint an extract where we learn more about Hockney's LA studio.

In Los Angeles, the studio is the centre of Hockney's world. It is the place where he spends most of his waking hours. The structure, built higher up than the house and at a slight angle, is much smaller than the one in Bridlington, but still a big room, high and spacious, with an upper gallery at one end and comfortable chairs disposed on the floor.

On most days Hockney goes there after breakfast, stays until lunch, and usually returns in the afternoon following a rest. For him it is as much a place for thinking as for working. On the walls are hung pictures in progress and also finished ones, in arrangements that frequently change. It is a private exhibition of very recent work, out of which the next pictures, yet to be made, will grow.

DH: I sit in the studio a lot, just taking in the pictures. I like being in here. A bed in the studio would suit me. It would be great. You need to do an awful lot of looking. I think unless you do that, you're not going to "get" a lot of things.

MG: A studio is a place for looking, and also a place for thinking about looking. And there is a tradition of paintings about studios, which are therefore pictures about the act of making pictures and in a way about what pictures are.

DH: Yes, for example, Vermeer's Art of Painting is a painting about sitting in the studio and looking. It shows Vermeer at an easel in front of you, painting it. There are paintings of studios by Braque, Matisse, Picasso, and many others.

In the early summer of 2014, Hockney's interest metamorphosed again. By that stage, he had produced over fifty portraits in the Comédie humaine series. Then, he began to paint groups of people in his studio, who were also the sitters for some of the portraits, gazing at the paintings on the wall (which of course were created in this same space).

MG: The new series started as pictures of people looking at pictures, which suggests that they are paintings about looking and pictures about pictures.

DH: Yes, they are. The earlier groups are people in conversation, or just contemplating something. I had them all posing simultaneously at the start. The largest group is of eleven people. So I'm putting the people in the space, and then looking at them.

MG: It is actually very unusual, historically, to paint multi-figure compositions like this from life in that way. The normal procedure from the Renaissance onwards has been to study each figure separately, then fit them into a space. You are doing it all at once.

DH: Yes, I am. Rodrigo Moynihan did a large figure composition of the Penguin editors at a supposed cocktail party After the Conference, 1955]. But because there was a large number of people involved, he filmed it, then took stills. That was a terrible idea. A filmed picture - like any photograph - will only have one perspective. In real life when you are looking at ten people in a room there are a thousand. Because the moment the eye moves, it changes. That's what real life is. The eye moves all the time. When my eye moves in one direction, the perspective goes that way. So it's constantly changing with my eye.

MG: In a sense, what you are doing with these group paintings is putting yourself in the picture. Everything is seen from your viewpoint, which is inside the picture space, not outside it, as a normal photograph or single-point perspective picture would be.

DH Yes. There's a weird spatial thing going on which seems to me to be about the centre of the picture, not the edges. In these groups, there's a general perspective for the room but also for each person, because I'm looking at them. In fact, they may have several. If a figure is close to me, I am seeing his face head on, but also looking down at his feet. So you are moving in to view just that one individual. Then, you have to turn to look at another person, if he is close too. You cannot actually see both at the same time. In moving, you see another figure, then another. You make space through time, I think. And the space between where you end and I begin is the most interesting space of all. It's far more interesting than outer space.

From painting groups of people standing around looking at pictures or talking to each other, Hockney moved on to depicting people in movement. On 27 August 2014, I watched him paint a group of dancers. In a way, it was a reworking of Matisse's great compositions of 1909 and 1910, La Danse. He was doing something quite different from simply imitating the original, however. His idea recalled Cézanne's famous remark that he wanted to "refaire Poussin sur nature" ("redo Poussin from nature"). Hockney was painting Matisse's dancers from life. To do so, he followed a highly unusual, perhaps unique, procedure.

In the morning, a group of five young dancers assembled in Hockney's Los Angeles studio. When everybody was there Hockney stood, charcoal in hand, at the easel and gave his first instruction: "Hold hands, spread out a bit, start going round." And they began to rotate with slow, graceful steps.

For a short while, Hockney just watched. Then he told them to stop and drew one of the dancers. The position in which this young man was frozen - poised with one leg on tiptoe - looked extremely hard to hold, but he remained amazingly steady while Hockney captured his outline. When that was finished, the dancers moved round for a few more revolutions, then Hockney paused them and drew one of the women in an even more awkward posture, leaning forward, her arms held out behind her. This continued until all five were sketched, after which they returned - one by one and in groups - while Hockney began to lay on the paint.

DH: The very first picture of the dancers was of them stood in a circle, it was ok, but they weren't moving, they weren't dancing. I got them to go round in a circle, then I would say stop, and draw one and I slowly built it up. Now I've moved out of the room and put them in a landscape - on top of the world, really.

The paintings of dancers were connected with the remarkable eighteen-screen films made in 2011 and 2012. These were not landscapes, in which the multiple cameras moved along a road, but interiors in which the cameras were static but people constantly moved. They included a marvellous one of the York Juggling Club processing and performing in the Bridlington studio.

DH: I thought the jugglers would be good because there is constant movement from each juggler, wherever they were, and that would keep each screen lively. With one camera you can't show many people in a room, each doing something different in this way - because you are seeing them all at once. But with nine separate cameras you can have a different exposure in different parts of the image. You are being forced to do what you would in reality: scan through space. So this is the opposite of MTV. We're not telling you what to look at; you can choose where to look.

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David Hockney reveals what life is like in his Los Angeles studio

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David Hockney is one of our best-loved living artists, and in 2010 we were let into his world thanks to A Bigger Message, a book by Martin Gayford detailing conversations with Hockney about his life and practise.

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British artists

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I love . I saw this 1981 film for the first time one afternoon in a small alternative space in Vienna, 17 years after they had made it. I had just moved to London and fallen in love with an Englishman I met at Spitalfields Market. I felt like I could feel his spirit through this film-his 'Englishness'. The muted clouds, the buildings and streets we moved around in, the city I was beginning to know- The World of Gilbert and George reflected that to me.

Now, watching the film again, it's still great. The editing is wonderful-the slow pacing, the moments of silence. It feels so simple, as if anyone could make such a film about themselves and their surroundings. I sense their love for each other, their humour and joy, the awkward honesty of the young men they interview. The film is tender, delicate and intimate. It enlivens history and it elucidates the present. It is emotional. I feel unnerved as I watch it, tears well up for no obvious reason.

But walking through their Tate retrospective I am surprised at how little I am able to connect with the work. My young (English) assistant says that she feels the work reflects the historically closed nature of the English man. Even in the pictures in which Gilbert and George are naked, their nudity is simply another mask. Perhaps the film is the only crack in their system of invulnerability,or maybe something similar can be found in the earliest small photo pieces of their drunken escapades. But at the Tate, those particular photos are hung so high that they are virtually impossible to see. Worse yet, the film is shown as a video on a small LCD screen in the noisy cafeteria -this in a retrospective spanning the entire fourth floor, the largest amount of space this museum has ever allocated to one exhibition. Is this a market-driven decision, to make the works that are not commercial (film/video, older works from collections) nearly invisible? Why do they keep calling their work 'living sculpture' when actually their work is two-dimensional photomontages? How did these artists move from innovating ephemeral postcard sculptures to making art that looks like it was designed for a Tate retrospective?

The early drawings, invitations, printed book pages take us back to the world of an aesthete like Denton Welsh. I can feel his sensitivity, romance and elegance in their work, and his historical precedent for a certain way of being gay, for loving life in all its everyday detail. And the 1977 'Dirty Word Pictures' are full of raw emotion. The graffiti itself is potent, and Gilbert and George's response to it feels poignant-I sense their questions and fears. Here, Gilbert and George are not a masked version of themselves but vulnerable counterparts to the city and its political/economic unrest. The colour also has a palpable relevance-red feels angry, upsetting. I ask myself their question: 'ARE YOU ANGRY OR ARE YOU BORING?' and feel inside the reverberations of these words.

But as I walk through other rooms and the work progressively becomes larger and larger, I find myself largely disconnected and even irritated. Why is work from the 1980s so brightly coloured, so acerbic? Why is it so big? 'Screaming Ambition'? I am reminded of the New York art stars from that time: Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Andy Warhol.

Does this art for 'all', speak to me as a woman? Gilbert and George's imagery is of men-naked in suits, naked men, good-looking young men. Intellectually I can understand the themes expressed in these works-ageing, desire, disease, death. But I am weary of the world of men representing 'all' mankind. Angry and Bored.

In fairness, their huge work has great impact, and often the larger it is the more powerful it feels. Their investigations are interesting. It is curious to realise that semen under a microscope looks like a crown of thorns, thought-provoking to see urine samples juxtaposed with lines of city maps, and their bared asses and blood samples are reminiscent of medical exams and redolent of the AIDS crisis. But this content is dominated by their prescribed visual branding.

Was this work made for corporate office lobbies? Perhaps, and this could be their greatest subversion. Looking at 'Shitty Naked Human World', 1994, I think of the corporate offices on Park Avenue with their monumental lobbies and huge, banal art commissions. Gilbert and George's scale and slick presentation is in keeping with such corporate theme parks. The imagery of themselves in suits could speak of corporate male executive power. Yet, they are also naked, pulling down their pants, with giant pieces of shit that form phalluses and a mega-crucifix. I am reminded of a Bob Dylan line: 'Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.' I would enjoy seeing this shitty work in the Time Life lobby on Avenue of Americas.

Ellen Cantor is an artist based in London

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I love . I saw this 1981 film for the first time one afternoon in a small alternative space in Vienna, 17 years after they had made it. I had just moved to London and fallen in love with an Englishman I met at Spitalfields Market.

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British artist

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The one thing everyone knows about Grayson Perry, the celebrated British artist and Turner Prize winner, is that he's a man fond of wearing a dress. Nowadays, his famous alter-ego Claire tends only to come out for special occasions, such as the opening of his first solo exhibition in France: "Vanity, Identity, Sexuality" at the Monnaie de Paris. Perry has made himself a household name in Britain by sculpting pots and stitching bold tapestries that grapple with modern social issues.

He sat down with FRANCE 24's Eve Jackson in Paris.

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Encore! - Grayson Perry: Turner Prize winner on transvestism, Trump and Brexit

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The one thing everyone knows about Grayson Perry, the celebrated British artist and Turner Prize winner, is that he's a man fond of wearing a dress. Nowadays, his famous alter-ego Claire tends only to come out for special occasions, such as the opening of his first solo exhibition in France: "Vanity, Identity, Sexuality" at the Monnaie de Paris.

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African-American actor - star of "Pose" TV series

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Nominated for 2 Golden Globes. Another 9 wins & 17 nominations. See more awards "

Filmography

- Blow (2019) ... Pray Tell

Personal Details

Other Works:

(September 1 to 20, 1998) He played Belize, Mr. Lies and Man in Tony Kushner's play, "Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches," at the Actors Theatre of Louisville (Mainstage) in Louisville, Kentucky with Adale O'Brien (Rabbi Chemelwitz/Henry/Hannah Pitt/Ethel Rosenberg); William McNulty (Roy Cohn/Prior 2); Jon Brent... "

Publicity Listings:

Did You Know?

Personal Quote:

I'm done with teaching moments for people who don't want to learn nothing. I'm done!

Trivia:

2013 Tony Award® for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical - as Lola in Kinky Boots. "

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Billy Porter, Actor: Pose. Before embarking on a career as a mainstream pop vocalist, Billy Porter built a substantial reputation as a theatrical singer in Broadway productions such as Grease and Smokey Joe's Cafe. He made his initial impact by placing 'Love Is On The Way' on the soundtrack to the film First Wives' Club, in 1996.

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American actor - Big Bang Theory

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Won 1 Golden Globe. Another 27 wins & 82 nominations. See more awards "

Filmography

Show Self (128 credits)

Personal Details

Other Works:

Broadway: Played Tommy Boatwright in The Normal Heart. "

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Did You Know?

Personal Quote:

I've always loved TV very much, and as a child I was so religious with it, but now it's more when it fits in. "

Trivia:

Owns a production company, That's Wonderful Productions, with his partner, Todd Spiewak. "

Trademark:

His tall and slender, beanstalk frame. "

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Jim Parsons, Actor: The Big Bang Theory. Having grown up in Houston, and its northern suburb of Spring, he made his first stage appearance in a school play at the age of 6. Parsons then went on to study theater at the University of Houston.

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American drag queen

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REM lead man

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The answer to the question 'What determines good music - lyrics or melody?' is an unresolved one and is as debatable as the chicken-egg theory. Although many have logically stated that it's a melody that separates music from poetry, making music much more democratic and far more moving, the contribution of good lyrics can't be dismissed. If allowed to take a neutral stance in this debate, one may claim that the amalgamation of lyrics and melody in a proper ratio makes a song memorable. Of course, this stance can be faulted for excluding non-lyrical music, further triggering the debate. But since songs are the most popular form of music it is safe to assume that songwriters are responsible for tipping the scales in their favour.

One such gifted lyricist who made a mark in the history of English songwriting is Michael Stipe. The lead vocalist of R.E.M though primarily noted for his distinctive mumbling singing style also held a mighty pen that engraved songs in listeners' minds forever. He has always effortlessly toed the line of pop mastery and poetic discourse with a deft touch.

Though Stipe refuses to take his skill seriously saying that "I'm tired of being this solemn poet of the masses, the enigma shrouded in a mystery..." it is definitely worth taking a look at his craft. His songs cover a myriad of themes be it mystical, social, political or more specific ones like mortality, love and disillusionment. Even his early pieces which he dismissed as nonsense speaks a volume about his creative genius.

It's rather a tough job to choose only six lyrical pieces from an ocean of pearls. Nevertheless, here are our picks that put Stipe's versatility on full display. In case we miss your favourites, don't forget to let us know in the comment section.

Michael Stipe's 6 best lyrics for R.E.M.:

'Driver 8'
"I saw a treehouse on the outskirts of the farm
The power lines have floaters so the airplanes won't get snagged
The bells are ringing through the town again
The children look up, all they hear is sky-blue bells ringing"
R.E.M's second single that also featured in their 1985 album Fables of Reconstruction, though lyrically abstract, loosely narrates the history of the United States through a train driver's point of view. As always, the readers are left to decide if the journey is literal, metaphorical or both. The destination, though undecided, lures the audience to step off the platform and take the journey.

Stipe during a 2009 Rolling Stone interview said, "It's like breathing - I don't think about it when I sing it. I was listening to these live tapes and thought it was a beautiful song with incredible imagery."

'Let Me In'
"Yeah all those stars drip down like butter
And promises are sweet
We hold out our pans with our hands to catch them
We eat them up, drink them up, up, up, up"
The 1994 song was a eulogy to Kurt Cobain who committed suicide just before the release of the album. Cobain was a R.E.M fan which brought him close to Stipe. The death of Cobain and actor river Pheonix left Stipe distraught who said during an interview, "River's death prevented me from being able to write for almost five months. When I did start writing, I came up with 'Crush With Eyeliner,' 'What's The Frequency, Kenneth?,' 'Circus Envy' and then when Kurt died halfway through making the record, and I just threw my arms up, and I had to express the frustration that I had, trying to pull him out of the state of mind he was in and not succeeding you know, I wrote that song ('Let Me In') and we put it on the record."

Within the song, Stipe is captured in his most vulnerable state, desperate to help his friends - to be let in. During recording, the band used Cobain's left-handed Fender given to them by Courtney Love which added another personal touch to the song.

'It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)'
"It's the end of the world as we know it
It's the end of the world as we know it
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine"
The song first appeared in their 1987 album Document and then was released as a single, taking place at number 69 in Billboards Hot 100. Stipe's lyrical abstraction is found at its best here. It's narrated as a stream of consciousness, evoking unrelated images at every turn. The only thing that connects the scattered imagery is the sense of destruction, hopelessness and catastrophe.

There is repeated reference of people with the initials L.B such as Lenny Bruce, Lester Bangs and Leonard Bernstein. In his 1990 interview with Music magazine, Stipe stated that it was inspired by a dream where he found himself surrounded by people with the initials L.B.

'Country Feedback'

"One, two, three, four
Oh
This flower is scorched
This film is on
On a maddening loop
These clothes
These clothes don't fit us right
I'm to blame
It's all the same
It's all the same "

This country-rock gem is from their 1991 album Out of time. What made the song special was Stipe's impromptu modification of the lyrics. Recalling the incident, he said that he "just had a piece of paper with a few words. I sang it, and I walked out." He anxiously made up the following lines directly in the recording session the next day. The song was recorded in one take much to Stipe's surprise. His bandmate Peter Buck explained the reason behind it saying "It's exactly what was on his mind that day. It was real."

Stipe's personal favourite, the song evokes a series of disturbing and keen observations that run through the narrator's mind.

'Orange Crush'
"High on the roof, thin the blood
Another one came on the waves tonight
Comin' in, you're home"
Stipe took the listeners by surprise when he discarded his cryptic style and took up a direct approach to refer to the political scenario that surrounded him in his life. Among the band's protest songs, the 1988 album Green caused a stir for its advantageous direction. One of the best moments on the LP, 'Orange Crush' and its naive title can often trick one into believing that it's an innocent song, but in reality, it hides gruesome truth deep under the surface.

It condemns the atrocities of the Vietnam War in which Stipe's father served. The chemical weapon Agent Orange is referred to in the chorus and the band go one step further to create the dreadful soundscape of war by using whirring of helicopter and military chants in the interlude.

'At My Most Beautiful'
"At my most beautiful
I count your eyelashes secretly
With every one, whisper, "I love you"
I let you sleep
I know your closed eye watching me
Listening
I thought I saw a smile"
It is probably the most un-Stipe-esque song ever. A piano-driven ballad, it is a sweet romantic song. Released in their 1998 album Up, the song was a pleasant surprise to the audience and quickly rose to number 10 on the Uk singles chart.

The melody of the song is said to be influenced by The Beach Boys' album Pet Sounds. Stipe confirmed by saying "The idea for it happened driving up and down Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles when I was putting together the Patti Smith book [Two Times Intro: On the Road with Patti Smith] last year...I had CDs and tape of new songs in the car. I came up with this one line, 'I found a way to make you smile.' All I knew was The Beach Boys had a record or a song called Smile... so I was like, Well, this will be my gift to [bandmates and Beach Boys fans] Peter and Mike, and Bill at the time. It was hard to write."

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Michael Stipe's 6 best lyrics for R.E.M.

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The answer to the question 'What determines good music - lyrics or melody?' is an unresolved one and is as debatable as the chicken-egg theory. Although many have logically stated that it's a melody that separates music from poetry, making music much more democratic and far more moving, the contribution of good lyrics can't be dismissed.

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American actor

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WW2 Enigma code breaker

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Home Science Mathematics
Table of Contents

in full: Alan Mathison Turing ...(Show more)

died:

June 7, 1954, Wilmslow, Cheshire (aged 41)

...(Show more)

Alan Turing, (born June 23, 1912, London, England-died June 7, 1954, Wilmslow, Cheshire), British mathematician and logician who made major contributions to mathematics, cryptanalysis, logic, philosophy, and mathematical biology and also to the new areas later named computer science, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and artificial life.

Early life and career

The son of a civil servant, Turing was educated at a top private school. He entered the University of Cambridge to study mathematics in 1931. After graduating in 1934, he was elected to a fellowship at King's College (his college since 1931) in recognition of his research in probability theory. In 1936 Turing's seminal paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem [ Decision Problem]" was recommended for publication by the American mathematical logician Alonzo Church, who had himself just published a paper that reached the same conclusion as Turing's, although by a different method. Turing's method (but not so much Church's) had profound significance for the emerging science of computing. Later that year Turing moved to Princeton University to study for a Ph.D. in mathematical logic under Church's direction (completed in 1938).

The Entscheidungsproblem

What mathematicians called an "effective" method for solving a problem was simply one that could be carried by a human mathematical clerk working by rote. In Turing's time, those rote-workers were in fact called "computers," and human computers carried out some aspects of the work later done by electronic computers. The Entscheidungsproblem sought an effective method for solving the fundamental mathematical problem of determining exactly which mathematical statements are provable within a given formal mathematical system and which are not. A method for determining this is called a decision method. In 1936 Turing and Church independently showed that, in general, the Entscheidungsproblem problem has no resolution, proving that no consistent formal system of arithmetic has an effective decision method. In fact, Turing and Church showed that even some purely logical systems, considerably weaker than arithmetic, have no effective decision method. This result and others-notably mathematician-logician Kurt Gödel's incompleteness results-dashed the hopes, held by some mathematicians, of discovering a formal system that would reduce the whole of mathematics to methods that (human) computers could carry out. It was in the course of his work on the Entscheidungsproblem that Turing invented the universal Turing machine, an abstract computing machine that encapsulates the fundamental logical principles of the digital computer.

The Church-Turing thesis

An important step in Turing's argument about the Entscheidungsproblem was the claim, now called the Church-Turing thesis, that everything humanly computable can also be computed by the universal Turing machine. The claim is important because it marks out the limits of human computation. Church in his work used instead the thesis that all human-computable functions are identical to what he called lambda-definable functions (functions on the positive integers whose values can be calculated by a process of repeated substitution). Turing showed in 1936 that Church's thesis was equivalent to his own, by proving that every lambda-definable function is computable by the universal Turing machine and vice versa. In a review of Turing's work, Church acknowledged the superiority of Turing's formulation of the thesis over his own (which made no reference to computing machinery), saying that the concept of computability by a Turing machine "has the advantage of making the identification with effectiveness...evident immediately."

Pop Quiz: 17 Things to Know About World War II

Code breaker

Having returned from the United States to his fellowship at King's College in the summer of 1938, Turing went on to join the Government Code and Cypher School, and, at the outbreak of war with Germany in September 1939, he moved to the organization's wartime headquarters at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire. A few weeks previously, the Polish government had given Britain and France details of the Polish successes against Enigma, the principal cipher machine used by the German military to encrypt radio communications. As early as 1932, a small team of Polish mathematician-cryptanalysts, led by Marian Rejewski, had succeeded in deducing the internal wiring of Enigma, and by 1938 Rejewski's team had devised a code-breaking machine they called the Bomba (the Polish word for a type of ice cream). The Bomba depended for its success on German operating procedures, and a change in those procedures in May 1940 rendered the Bomba useless. During the autumn of 1939 and the spring of 1940, Turing and others designed a related, but very different, code-breaking machine known as the Bombe. For the rest of the war, Bombes supplied the Allies with large quantities of military intelligence. By early 1942 the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park were decoding about 39,000 intercepted messages each month, a figure that rose subsequently to more than 84,000 per month-two messages every minute, day and night. In 1942 Turing also devised the first systematic method for breaking messages encrypted by the sophisticated German cipher machine that the British called "Tunny." At the end of the war, Turing was made an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his code-breaking work.

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Alan Turing | Biography, Facts, Computer, Machine, Education, & Death

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Alan Turing was a British mathematician and logician, a major contributor to mathematics, cryptanalysis, computer science, and artificial intelligence. He invented the universal Turing machine, an abstract computing machine that encapsulates the fundamental logical principles of the digital computer.

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African-American Actress

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Won 1 Primetime Emmy. Another 5 wins & 37 nominations. See more awards "

Personal Details

Other Works:

Book: "Yeah, I Said It". "

Publicity Listings:

1 Print Biography | 2 Interviews | 13 Articles | 2 Magazine Cover Photos | "

Alternate Names:

Wanda Sykes Hall | Wanda Skyes | Wanda Sykes-Hall | Wanda

Did You Know?

Personal Quote:

[on the upcoming 2016 US federal election] I think they should make everyone vote. Everyone should have to vote. Maybe everyone gets a Powerball ticket if you vote. I don't know. Vote and you get a scratch-off. "

Trivia:

In 2009, she made history as the first African-American master of ceremonies at the White House Correspondents' dinner. "

Trademark:

Has a sassy sounding voice

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Wanda Sykes, Actress: Monster-in-Law. Wanda Sykes has been called one of the funniest stand-up comics by her peers and ranks among Entertainment Weekly's 25 Funniest People in America. Her smart-witted stand-up has sent her career in many different areas. She was recently seen in Comedy Central's Wanda Does It (2004), where she tried various non-showbiz jobs.

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Singer

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NME | Music, Film, TV, Gaming & Pop Culture News

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Ricky Martin has been cast in a forthcoming new season of American Crime Story. After its acclaimed opening season - which covered the infamous O....

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Female British Rapper

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NME | Music, Film, TV, Gaming & Pop Culture News

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Lady Sovereign is trouble. Just ask the Yanks. Within a couple of years, she went from having Jay-Z shut down Times Square for the...

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American actor - Star Trek and Heroes (TV series)

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Zachary Quinto was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Margaret J. (McArdle), an Irish-American office worker, and Joseph John Quinto, an Italian-American barber. Zachary graduated from Central Catholic High School in Pittsburgh, with the class of 1995, where he won Pittsburgh's Gene Kelly Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as ... See full bio "

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Zachary Quinto, Actor: Star Trek. Zachary Quinto was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Margaret J. (McArdle), an Irish-American office worker, and Joseph John Quinto, an Italian-American barber. Zachary graduated from Central Catholic High School in Pittsburgh, with the class of 1995, where he won Pittsburgh's Gene Kelly Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as ...

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British Olympic Diver

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American actor

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British TV and Film Maker

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Often described as a genius, Russell T. Davies is one of the leading British television writers of his generation, who specializes in emotional dramas, frequently with gay and sex-related adult themes. He was born in Swansea, Wales (UK) in 1963. After initially taking a BBC Television director's course in the 1980s, he briefly moved in front of ... See full bio "

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Russell T. Davies, Writer: Doctor Who. Often described as a genius, Russell T. Davies is one of the leading British television writers of his generation, who specializes in emotional dramas, frequently with gay and sex-related adult themes. He was born in Swansea, Wales (UK) in 1963.

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This article was first published in The Studio, Vol 1, No 1, April 1893, pages 14-19

From a drawing in illustration of Mr. Oscar Wilde's 'Salome' by Aubrey Beardsley (detail). In A New Illustrator: Aubrey Beardsley, The Studio, An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art, Vol 1, No 1, April 1893, page 19. © Studio International Foundation.

By JOSEPH PENNELL

I have lately seen a few drawings which seem to me to be very remarkable. The very limited number which the artist is said to have produced makes their perfection of execution all the more remarkable. I am quite well aware that the mere fact of publicly admitting one's interest in the work of a new man, whose first design may be a delight to artists, is not considered to be good form in criticism.

But why should one care about good or bad form - or criticism either, for that matter? For the criticism of art to-day is merely the individual expression of persons who mostly know nothing about their subject. Though artists may be struck with a man's earliest work, and though the creator of it may, and frequently does, never produce anything better, one usually waits until he is dead, or discouraged, before any visible sign of appreciation is granted him. Thus is the intelligent critic spared from making a spectacle of himself.

The illustrations from Mr. Beardsley's work in this number are: Salome, from the original belonging to the artist; La Cigale, Les Revenants de Musique, the property of THE STUDIO; Siegfried, from the original drawing belonging to Mr. Edward Burne Jones; the frieze on page 10, from a pen-and-ink design, kindly lent by Mr. Robert Ross; and four blocks from Messrs. J. M. Dent & Co.'s new illustrated edition of Malory's " Morte d'Arthur," to be published in half-crown monthly parts, beginning in June next. A New Illustrator: Aubrey Beardsley, The Studio, An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art, Vol 1, No 1, April 1893, page 16. Image: From the forthcoming edition of Malory's Morte d'Arthur, (by special permission of Messrs J. M. Dent & Co.). © Studio International Foundation.

A New Illustrator: Aubrey Beardsley, The Studio, An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art, Vol 1, No 1, April 1893, page 19. Image: From a drawing in illustration of Mr. Oscar Wilde's 'Salome' by Aubrey Beardsley. © Studio International Foundation.

But whether Mr Beardsley's work is appreciated or despised - and my only fear is that he will suffer from over-appreciation and enthusiasm - the drawings here printed show decisively the presence among us of an artist, of an artist whose work is quite as remarkable in its execution as in its invention: a very rare combination. It is most interesting to note, too, that though Mr Beardsley has drawn his motives from every age, and founded his styles - for it is quite impossible to say what his style may be - on all schools, he has not been carried back into the fifteenth century, or succumbed to the limitations of Japan; he has recognised that he is living in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and he has availed himself of mechanical reproduction for the publication of his drawings, which the Japs and the Germans would have accepted with delight had they but known of it.

The reproduction of the "Morte d'Arthur" drawing, printed in this number, is one of the most marvellous pieces of mechanical engraving, if not the most marvellous, that I have ever seen, simply for this reason: it gives Mr Beardsley's actual handiwork, and not the interpretation of it by someone else. I know it is the correct thing to rave over the velvety, fatty quality of the wood-engraved line, a quality which can be obtained from any process-block by careful printing, and which is not due to the artist at all. But here I find the distinct quality of a pen line, and of Mr Beardsley's pen line, which has been used by the artist and reproduced by the process-man in a truly extraordinary manner. The decorative borders also are very charming. Mr Beardsley has recognised and shown by his work that decoration means, not the production of three or four fine stock designs, and the printing of these in books, to which they have no earthly relation, on a hand-press ; but that decoration should be the individual and separate production of designs which really illustrate or decorate the page for which they were made, and that the artistic value of such designs is not lessened by the fact that they are quite as well, if not better, printed by steam than they have ever been by hand.

Although in all of Mr Beardsley's drawings which I have so far seen there are signs of other men's influence, I know no reason why this influence should not be apparent if the inventor of what we may consider the type is a worthy man to imitate. However, to say that Burne Jones, or even his far greater master Rossetti, invented what is vulgarly known as the Rossetti type, is absurd. They did not invent it: they have only recorded a type which is very common in this country, emphasising certain characteristics which no one had ever so emphasised before. Mr. Beardsley, in illustrating the " Morte d'Arthur," wished an appropriate type; he has taken the one which appealed to him most, and he was perfectly justified in doing so. But it seems to me that he has drawn such special attention to it that this detracts from the otherwise great merit of his designs. However, in a series of portraits which I have seen, and in designs which he himself calls Japanesques, this type scarcely occurs at all. It is far more amusing to dwell upon one's pleasure in a man's work than upon what may seem its weaknesses, and though he has allowed recently a number of drawings to be printed elsewhere which are not worthy to be signed by him, some of the little headpieces, notably one of men in armour, seem to me, in execution as well as design, quite equal to the best fifteenth-century work. Then, too, his little landscapes are altogether delightful: though they are conventional in the right sense, they are not imitations. But most interesting of all is his use of the single line, with which he weaves his drawings into an harmonious whole, joining extremes and reconciling what might be oppositions - leading, but not forcing, you properly to regard the concentration of his motive. In his blacks, too, he has obtained a singularly interesting quality, and always disposes them so as to make a very perfect arabesque. Certainly, with the comparatively small amount of work which Mr Beardsley has produced, he has managed to appeal to artists - and what more could he wish?

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From the archive: A New Illustrator - Aubrey Beardsley

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From a drawing in illustration of Mr. Oscar Wilde's 'Salome' by Aubrey Beardsley (detail). In A New Illustrator: Aubrey Beardsley, The Studio, An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art, Vol 1, No 1, April 1893, page 19. © Studio International Foundation.

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What to Know About Virginia Woolf's Love Affair With Vita Sackville-West

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The new movie 'Vita & Virginia' depicts the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Here's the true story behind their love affair.

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HE'S known for his relationships with men but Queen frontman Freddie Mercury secretly had dozens of relationships with women, including famous models and actors.

As a new film about his life starts showing in Australia on November 1, reveals the bevy of beautiful women who found their way into the musician's bed and heart and the candid details of the parties he threw where dwarfs served cocaine to celebrity guests.

Even though Mercury was a star of galactic proportions, he still managed to keep many of the details of his drug-fuelled parties, kinky sex life and his relationships with women private.

As biographer Lesley-Ann Jones, who toured with Queen at the height of their fame, told of the star's ability to keep secrets: "There were lots of Freddies.

"He was quite shy. But he lived fast, died young and left a beautiful corpse."

Here, The Sun reveals some of the secrets of his scandalous showbiz past.

WILD PARTIES WHERE DWARFS SERVED COCAINE

At the peak of his career, flamboyant Freddie threw himself into the party scene with gusto.

Queen became known in the industry for throwing the most outrageous events, including a notorious bash at New Orleans' Fairmont Hotel in 1978.

The party, to celebrate the release of the album Jazz, reportedly featured naked waiters and waitresses, an entertainer biting heads off live chickens, nude models wrestling in a bath and an army of dwarfs walking around the venue with trays of cocaine strapped to their heads.

His wild partying ways were a far cry from his childhood where he spent time at a strict Indian school before fleeing to London with his family, aged eight.

350 BOTTLES OF CHAMPAGNE, 232 SMASHED GLASSES

Allegations of excessive drug use followed Freddie throughout his life, but he never put the brakes on his social life - even after he contracted HIV.

He celebrated his 41st birthday at the Pikes Hotel in Ibiza, just months after his diagnosis, with one of the wildest parties the island had ever seen.

Freddie invited 700 guests, including Kylie Minogue, Bon Jovi and Boy George, to witness a fireworks display so spectacular that it could be seen over 160km away in Majorca.

A staggering 350 bottles of Moet & Chandon champagne were poured over the course of the evening, and the final bar bill - presented to Queen's manager, Jim Beach, included the cost of 232 glasses which had been smashed.

PARTYING WITH PRINCESS DI, MICHAEL JACKSON, AND A LLAMA

By the mid-80s, Queen were so famous they began hanging out with the royals.

Freddie - born Farrokh Bulsara - was mates with Princess Diana, and it has been claimed that he once sneaked the late princess into a gay club.

The singer disguised Diana with a thick jacket, hat and sunglasses, and took her to the Royal Vauxhall Tavern where she spent a rare night away from the limelight as Freddie kept the crowds distracted.

But Freddie's high-profile friends weren't limited to Diana - he also had a close bond with Michael Jackson.

The two musical titans spent time recording together in 1983, but it was reported that some of Jackson's quirky behaviour pushed Freddie over the edge before they could finish anything.

Jim Beach has spoken about a memorable phone call where Freddie begged to put and end to recording.

"Michael's bringing his pet llama into the studio every day and I'm really not used to recording with a llama," Freddie said. "I've had enough and I'd like to get out."

However, it has also been claimed that Jackson pulled the plug on a session when he caught Freddie snorting coke through a hundred-dollar bill.

THE BLOND 'WIFE'

Freddie wrestled with his own sexuality throughout his life, sleeping with both men and women but rarely addressing his sexuality in public.

Although he never even told his parents he was bisexual, it was later claimed that he used the track Bohemian Rhapsody as his coming out song - hiding his feelings behind the obscure lyrics.

As for the women in his life, Freddie had two great loves: his pre-fame girlfriend Mary Austin, who he always thought of as a wife, and then later the Austrian actor Barbara Valentin - a bombastic blond with a fiery personality to match Freddie's.

Mary had always suspected that Freddie was gay, and he had been experimenting with men while they were together.

When Freddie died, Mary was the one who he left his money to in his will.

As for Barbara, Lesley-Ann said: "They met their match in each other. They were explosive and they lived recklessly.

"He was still having sexual affairs with men and quite often there were threesomes.

"That reckless lifestyle was getting the better of Freddie at the end but he didn't curb his behaviour.

"When asked if he was being more careful about his sex life he famously said: 'Darling, I'm doing everything with everybody.'"

Later in his life, Freddie began a long-term relationship with hairdresser Jim Hutton, who cared for him as his health deteriorated and lived with him for the last six years of his life.

When Freddie died, Jim was with him at his bedside, and Freddie allegedly took his last breath while wearing a wedding band that Jim had given him.

AN OBSESSIVE CAT LOVER

Freddie was a man of many obsessions, but outside of his wild love life, his strongest attachments were to the many stray cats he kept as pets.

He filled his home with them, and found it so difficult to be apart from his furry brood while Queen was touring that he would often phone home just to speak to them.

In 1991, the year he died, Freddie's tortoiseshell cat Delilah was so close to his heart that he named a song after her.

He also had other obsessions, amassing huge collections of stamps and Japanese art which he kept in his home.

"He was passionate about everything he did and obsessive as well," Lesley-Ann said. "His home was like a museum."

It was this obsessive personality which made Freddie so committed to his own art: making genre-defining music with his boundary-pushing bandmates.

"Queen argued like hell in the studio," Lesley-Ann said. "Freddie once said: 'We argue about the air we breathe.'

"That was why their music became so brilliant - because they worked so hard on it."

'LOVER OF LIFE, SINGER OF SONGS'

Freddie's late life was defined by his struggle with AIDS, although he never publicly confirmed that he had the disease until the day before he died.

Having conquered the world with Queen, the debilitating condition made the life of a rock star harder to maintain - with Freddie eventually spending his final days completely bed-bound.

Even Freddie's bandmates found him mysterious, although everyone who knew him was well aware of the immense talent and enormous presence which lay beneath his complex personality.

When he died in 1991, the music world was devastated, having lost a true icon who lived at lightning pace and continued to captivate long after his death.

It was hard to sum up the loss of his passing, but Queen icon Brian May offered the best, most succinct, obituary: "Freddie Mercury: lover of life and a singer of songs."

Bohemian Rhapsody: The Definitive Biography Of Freddie Mercury by Lesley-Ann Jones is published by Hodder & Stoughton.

This article was originally published on The Sun and is reproduced with permission.

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HE'S known for his relationships with men but Queen frontman Freddie Mercury secretly had dozens of relationships with women, including famous models and actors. As a new film about his life starts showing in Australia on November 1, reveals the bevy of beautiful women who found their way into the musician's bed and heart and the candid details of the parties he threw where dwarfs served cocaine to celebrity guests.

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by Elyse Graham

Born in Dublin in 1854, Oscar Wilde was the son of prominent and affluent parents; when he was nine, his father received a knighthood. Wilde's social class would be strongly determining not only of his targets for satire, but of a casual extravagance in matters of romance that would contribute to his downfall. His romance also came from his mother. She was born plain Jane, but because she lived to delight her biographers, she signed herself Speranza Francesca Wilde, a name that looked appropriately glamorous above her poetry and signaled a bloodline that was, she always claimed, Italian and blue. (Among her ancestors she listed Dante.) Having named herself for greatness, she determined that her children would not row through life on ordinary praenomens. Her second son she named Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde. "He is to be called Oscar Fingal Wilde," she wrote to a friend. "Is not that grand, misty, and Ossianic?"

He was to tailor his own name to his personal mythology. Near death he called himself, by way of giving a hint to his eulogists, "the infamous St Oscar of Oxford, Poet and Martyr" (Ellmann, 105). He had entered Magdalen College in the fall of 1874 after passing through Trinity College, Dublin on a Royal School Scholarship. A classmate, J.E.C. Bodley, wrote in 1882 for the New York Times a cruel but probably faithful account of Wilde's undergraduate years. Bodley describes an overweening freshman who, after his errors of etiquette earned him scorn as "a good-natured though unsophisticated young Irishman," systematically reshaped himself into a figure who in dress and bearing "out-Oxforded young Oxford." "My Irish accent was one of the things I forgot at Oxford," Wilde later explained (Ellmann, 38). It was necessary for his style of humor that he speak with the effortless superiority of a gentleman, even if the energy of his satirical imagination fed on an outsider's sense of alienation.

The teachers he sought out at Oxford were John Ruskin, the Slade Professor of Fine Art and at fifty-five already an eminence grise in British art criticism, and Walter Pater, a fellow of Brasenose College, twenty years younger than Ruskin and an aspirant to his position. Wilde attended Ruskin's lectures and carted mud for his road-building project, but he pursued and eventually won Pater's friendship. When in his freshman year he read Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), the book had the force of a revelation. It was an event of his life, comparable to a religious experience. Wilde committed large portions of The Renaissance to heart and in later years referred to it as his "golden book" (Ellmann, 47).

Pater was the writer who showed Wilde the critical possibilities of his own emotional idiom. Wilde brought from Trinity College, Dublin a love of aestheticism and things Greek. Pater not only put these subjects at the center of his philosophy, he made an art of the discussion of them, and he turned things so that the presence of art is no polish upon discussion but the reason it exists. To this he added a sense of life as grand drama and an exhortation to exhaust every moment. "To burn always with this hard gem-like flame," runs his most famous line, "to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."

Like Pater, Ruskin believed in a morality of art, but he did not mean by this what Pater implied, that aesthetics can replace theology; he meant that art should put itself to higher service. The artist must be faithful to nature if he would honor God's handiwork. Ruskin is also a great prose stylist; he thought of style as the working outward, through the resistance of raw material, of the growth of the soul. Critics like to set Ruskin in opposition to Pater, especially because Ruskin called the Italian Renaissance a decline for Western civilization-he preferred the Middle Ages-but both men ascribed a sublime value to art, and both set lessons into the very motions of prose. Wilde called shallowness a vice, but he was always ready to discuss the importance of surface.

In 1881 he met Constance Lloyd-sometime art student, reader of Dante, long chestnut hair. They married in 1884; the bride wore a dress that the groom had designed. Wilde's attraction to her seems to have faded as childbirth changed her body, and they settled into a passionless harmony; her brother said that she suspected nothing, although Wilde became footloose, independent, characteristic for intense relationships with other men. The year his second son was born he met Robert Ross, a young Canadian who had, Wilde said, "the face of Puck," and who successfully made himself Wilde's first lover, an event that Wilde referenced obliquely in the magazine version of Dorian Gray before thinking better of it for the book. Richard Ellmann believes that Wilde contracted syphilis in his twenties, probably from a female prostitute, and that he told his wife that his illness had flared up again (Ellmann, 275-78).

The year he met Constance he published his first book of poetry, but already it was clear that his genius lay in his ideas about poetry and in his wit. These are not independent. Believing that masking is more exciting than revelation, Wilde made it a characteristic move to ridicule what he really believed, and he demonstrated so well how to do it that imitators rose to his bait. Punch ran a series of caricatures of two aesthetes, one distantly based on Whistler and the other closely on Wilde. Wilde impersonators strode onstage in The Grasshopper (1877), Where's the Cat? (1880), The Colonel (1881), and, most famously, Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience (1881). A New York producer, sensing that it might help Patience sell on Broadway, recruited Wilde for a lecture tour of the United States (Ellmann, 159).

The turn of the decade was his liveliest period as an essayist. One of the writers that Wilde liked to tweak was Wordsworth, who found an important insight in the observation that all things are alike in their shared existence. Wilde was more interested in the way that all things are different even from themselves. Many of his essays, including "The Decay of Lying" (1888) and "The Critic as Artist" (1890), split the writer's voice into symbiotic couples, conversational pairs that onstage would be understood as particles of every one person, who exist together so the proposition can be simultaneously raised and questioned; what's important is that the conversation keep going. Wilde was good at conversation. When in 1889 the publisher of Lippincott's Monthly invited Wilde to contribute a short novel to the magazine's pages, he found the transition to narrative difficult: "I am afraid it is rather like my own life-all conversation and no action," he told a friend. "I can't describe action: all my people sit in chairs and chatter."

The story he produced is well known. The Picture of Dorian Gray ( 1891) tells the story of a young man whose portrait grows older and uglier while he, descending into a life of sin and wickedness, remains young and beautiful. The disarticulation of those terms, however, starts with the protagonist's name: Dorian, a description of Greek beauty, and then Gray sneaking behind as a kind of doubt. Art, says the painter of Dorian's portrait, is the essence of beauty, the representation of an aesthetic ideal. It should make us uneasy that his representation of Dorian, the ideal face and form, reveals itself to bear a soul of corruption.

The years that followed Dorian Gray were years of productivity and success. Wilde was notoriously kind to those who asked him to read their manuscripts, and his following, which included Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, and Lionel Johnson, flourished with his fame. (He chose Dorian's surname in part to honor one disciple and probable lover, a clerk named John Gray.) (Ellmann, 308) Johnson loaned his copy of Dorian Gray to a cousin at Oxford, who read it "fourteen times running," the boy told a friend, and went to meet Wilde at the first opportunity. He was Lord Alfred Douglas, the youngest son of the Marquess of Queensberry: blond, slender, famously good-looking. Wilde gave him a deluxe copy of the book and offered to tutor him for Greats (Ellmann, 324).

For an 1891 commission from the St. James Theater, Wilde wrote Lady Windermere's Fan, his first successful play and the first of several comedies to deal with hypocrisy, lost children, and mistaken identity. Around the same time, following an acquaintance in Paris with Mallarmé, whose unfinished poem, "Hérodiade," tells the story of Salomé, Wilde decided to pursue her in earnest as a dramatic subject (Ellmann, 338). The censor shut down Salomé in rehearsal, citing an old law forbidding the stage treatment of Bible characters; Wilde threatened to take French citizenship, but settled for publishing the play between covers. His dramatic technique sharpened with experience. When he wrote The Importance of Being Earnest, his best play and the most characteristic of his style, it more or less poured out. He arrived at the page with his architectural knowledge in place, which gave him freedom to play.

The Importance of Being Earnest ( 1895) is an intricate comedy influenced by Restoration comedy and the French comic tradition after Molière. But whereas Molière takes as part of his project the social education of the audience, Wilde works hard to free his work of anything as single-minded as a lesson. (Wilde is good at the idea, as Christopher Ricks says of Beckett, that a half-truth is not something the substance of which is half true but something that is true half of the time. Algernon in Earnest recognizes this as the essence of Wildean epigram: "It is perfectly phrased! And quite as true as any observation in civilized life ought to be.")

The Importance of Being Earnest is a story of the leisure class. Two young men each pretend, first to have fun incognito and then to court two girls, to bear the name Ernest Worthing; complications ensue, especially when the girls come to believe that they are engaged to the same man. In Leonard Barkan's reading, the play makes wit an object as well as an instrument of criticism-wit here in reference to perfect phrases, the expressions of an insular world that has the leisure to cultivate elegance in the perception of things, and in Wilde's treatment, the leisure to treat the trivial as serious and the serious as trivial.

An example is the relative weight of facts and manners in schooling. A governess tells her charge, "Cecily, you will read your Political Economy in my absence. The chapter on the Fall of the Rupee you may omit. It is somewhat too sensational" (Earnest, 59). The line is utterly irrelevant to the plot and quite relevant to more serious issues not allowed to intrude into the play. The same logic is at work when Lady Bracknell tells Jack that she can't recall his father's Christian name: "But I have no doubt he had one. He was eccentric, I admit. But only in later years. And that was the result of the Indian climate, and marriage, and indigestion, and other things of that kind" (Earnest, 108).

British control of India is the economy that makes possible the world of the play; from it arise the money, the power, the gentility to spawn country estates and cucumber sandwiches. But it surfaces here only to become part of a joke in which a character makes three different things into things of one kind. The world of the characters relies on a larger world, but the characters only let that world filter in as nonsense. We might read this with Barkan as a kind of defense: if the graceful phrases of Algernon and Lady Bracknell are the speech of people who thrive on utter control, nonsense is perhaps their weapon against the possibility of the uncontrollable.

Throughout this period Douglas was still enrolled at Oxford, the editor of a literary magazine and increasingly sure that he too was a poet. He and Wilde met often and exchanged love letters; in his writing Douglas was even bolder than Wilde, for he was young and proud of being kept by a famous artist.

On 28 February 1895, Wilde received a letter at his hotel from the Marquess of Queensberry. Queensberry wanted an interview, presumably about his son. The letter began, "To Oscar Wilde posing Sodomite." Wilde was enraged. He sued Queensberry for libel, an extremely unwise decision in which Douglas egged him on. Possibly Wilde felt that unless he defeated them in court, Queensberry and his spies would never leave him alone.

The papers covered the trial with all the tact and reserve that give fame to the British press. The evidence against Wilde was plentiful; he and Douglas had not been monogamous. The jury found him guilty on all counts except those concerning one alleged consort, Edward Shelley. The court sentenced Wilde to prison and hard labor for two years. The response to the verdict was overwhelming celebration: "Open the windows! Let in the fresh air!" cried the Daily Telegraph. "The aesthetic cult, in its nasty form," announced The News of the World, "is now over" (Ellmann, 479).

The most personal glimpse of the next few years that Wilde allowed the public he withheld until after his death. First published in 1905 by an arrangement between Wilde and Robert Ross, who visited Wilde at Reading and later became his literary executor, De Profundis was written in prison over three months in 1897. It is a curious document: part apologia, part aesthetic discourse, part religious testimonial, part retort to religion, a letter that addresses a private recipient and was written for public view, but that despite these layers of performance has a strange inward quality; this is a letter from Wilde to himself.

The theme of De Profundis is tragedy, its expression and possibility. The text has a controlled voice and turns often toward the writer's old extravagance of expression, the petty generosity of a rich man who takes pleasure in making constant small expenditures; but underlying this is the heavy tone of one who feels himself to be speaking from the depths of potentially final defeat. "Hardly if at all have my friends suffered to see me," he writes. "But my enemies have had full access to me always; twice in my public appearances in the Bankruptcy Court; twice again in my public transferences from one prison to another have I been shown under conditions of unspeakable humiliation to the gaze and mockery of men." During Wilde's early months of imprisonment his mother died. "Her death was terrible to me," he writes; "but I, once a lord of language, have no words with which to express my anguish and my shame" (DP, 27).

De Profundis is in large part an effort to find a way of rationalizing his suffering. "Where there is sorrow there is holy ground," Wilde writes, paraphrasing a stanza from Goethe that his mother used to recite. "Some day people will realize what that means. They will know nothing of life till they do" (DP, 29).

Why should sorrow be the material of holiness? The move to Wandsworth and Reading was a transition from the self-definition of the artist to the featureless and ritualized existence of a prisoner. "I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age," Wilde says. "I had realized this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realize it afterwards" (DP, 36). When he speaks of his present existence, he often slides into the anonymous plural. "With us time does not progress," he says. "It revolves. It seems to circle round one's center of pain" (DP, 26). He describes his pain on learning that the law had stripped him of rights to his children, cutting away his final connection to social particularity: "We are doomed to be solitary, while our sons still live" (DP, 35).

As a prisoner, and more broadly as one who suffers, Wilde is excluded from the pleasures that accompany the fulfillment of individual desires, but he gains access to the universal of human existence: our shared unhappy fate. The still, sad music of humanity, as Wordsworth phrased it, is our existence together, and Wilde can hear it better where he is no longer a dazzling exception. "There is not a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of life," Wilde writes. "For the secret of life is suffering" (DP 57).

What emerges in the final measure from Wilde's text is his sheer will, his determination to make from abjection itself the material for aesthetic transformation-on one side a heartening gesture of faith in the enduring grace of art, and on the other side a reminder, as a reflection of the condition he endeavors to flee, of the depth of his unhappiness: "It will force on me the necessity of again asserting myself as an artist, and as soon as I possibly can. If I can produce only one beautiful work of art I shall be able to rob malice of its venom, and cowardice of its sneer, and to pluck out the tongue of scorn by the roots" (DP, 50).

Wilde gave the manuscript to Ross on the day of his release in 1897. His philosophy of acceptance did not seal off his disquiet any more than other such works rest their writers. "I need say that my task does not end there," he writes in De Profundis. "It would be comparatively easy if it did. There is much more before me. I have hills much steeper to climb, valleys much darker to pass through" (DP, 42). As his final years would make clear, De Profundis is not a declaration of certitude but a fragile foundation erected against the bottomlessness of human life.

After prison Wilde crumbled away. Douglas, who during Wilde's imprisonment, still determined to win literary fame, had persisted in trying to publish articles on their relationship, even though Wilde and his friends made clear to him that such publicity could harm the chances for early release, now won Wilde back, more or less to prove that he could. When they found out, Wilde's wife and Douglas's mother put a stop to the affair on threat of withdrawing their allowances.

Wilde put pen to paper a few times. In prison the intercession of Richard Haldane, an old acquaintance, had enabled a number of books to be delivered for Wilde, and eventually ink and paper as well. In 1898 Haldane received an anonymous gift of The Ballad of Reading Gaol (Ellmann, 486).

By late September 1900 Wilde was bedridden with what his doctors diagnosed as cerebral meningitis. He died on 30 November. Afterward Ross paid off Wilde's debts and recovered copyrights for his sons. In 1912 Douglas published a hostile memoir, Oscar Wilde and Myself, in a later preface to which he wrote that he had been "born into this world chiefly to be the instrument, whether I would or not, of exposing and smashing Wilde's cult and the Wilde myth."

For years there persisted rumors that Wilde had survived his death. In 1905 the New York Critic repeated several popular stories: Wilde had taken orders at a Spanish monastery; Wilde was living in New York and quietly attending brilliant parties. The article closed with a plea for romance: "Was not this brilliant lover of the paradoxical capable of making his very life and death a paradox, and in the phrase of a Greek poet, 'to be and not to be, not being to be'? And was not the Unexpected, the Sensational, the element in which he loved to move in life and art? And would it not be quite in accordance with his character to carry to the last point of consistency the Christ pose, blasphemous perhaps, which he adopted especially in his last book 'De Profundis,' and from his tomb to roll the stone and rise from the dead?"

Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988): 6-17. Hereafter cited as Ellmann, with page number.

J.E.C. Bodley, "Oscar Wilde at Oxford," New York Times; 4 February 1882; pg. 2.

That is, he would tell you what he really believed, but he would serve it to you on a silver tray of irony.

Pers. comm., Christopher Ricks, March 2008. Possibly Beckett knew this line of Wilde's: "Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true."

Pers. comm., Leonard Barkan, April 2007.

Wilde framed the text as a letter to Alfred Douglas, and Ross sent a copy to Douglas upon Wilde's release; however, wider publication was always part of the plan. During the initial period of publication Ross concealed Douglas's involvement from the public, partly because Douglas treated litigation as a personal sport. See Ellmann, 510-16.

George Sylvester Viereck, "Is Oscar Wilde Living or Dead?" The Critic 47, 1 (July 1905): 86-88.

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by Elyse Graham Born in Dublin in 1854, Oscar Wilde was the son of prominent and affluent parents; when he was nine, his father received a knighthood. Wilde's social class would be strongly determining not only of his targets for satire, but of a casual extravagance in matters of romance that would contribute to his downfall.

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The New York Women in Communications held their 44th Annual Matrix Awards Monday, and Queen Latifah was one of seven extraordinary women honored. Here award was presented by friend and singer Mary J. Blige, who acknowledged Latifah for having the courage to write feminist laced lyrics as a young rapper.

Latifah was honored for her accomplishments as a musician, award-winning actress, record-label president, author, entrepreneur, and Cover Girl. She has earned a Golden Globe Award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, two Image Awards, and a Grammy Award as well as nominations for six additional Grammys, an Emmy, and an Oscar. Her daytime talk show, The Queen Latifah Show, which she regards as the perfect platform to showcase her range of talents and unique ability to connect with and entertain people.

The awards ceremony was created to shine a light and recognize women who have made significant contributions within the communications industry. "The Matrix Awards are an exciting and visible symbol of NYWICI's two pillars: the advancement of women at every stage of their careers and the ever-changing face of communications,â€ said Liz Kaplow, president, New York Women in Communications. "These seven women bring those pillars to life with their achievements. We are grateful to them for leading by example, and are delighted to add their names to the Matrix honor roll of inspirational women.â€

Other honorees and speakers included Gloria Steinem, "Meet the Pressâ€ moderator David Gregory, CNN's Christiane Amanpour, NBC's Cynthia McFadden and former chair of Citigroup and CEO of Time Warner Richard Parsons. Previous Matrix award recipients include Barbara Walters, Tina Fey, Bette Midler, Sheryl Sandberg, Anna Wintour, Candace Bushnell, Lesley Stahl and Maya Angelou, to name a few.

Only 19 when she was anointed hip-hop's first lady of rap with the release of her highly successful debut album, All Hail The Queen. In 1993, she and partner Shakim Compere formed Flavor Unit Entertainment, a production company. The Miami-based studio develops emerging talent, manages artists, and produces film and television projects. It currently has several films and television series in production, including VH1's Single Ladies and the upcoming CW reality show, The Star Next Door. Additionally, she is producing The Queen Latifah Show with Shakim Compere and Overbrook Entertainment's Will Smith, Jada Smith, and James Lassiter.

During the ceremony Latifah thanked her mom for allowing her to dream, be creative, and to think freely. Here are some highlights from her acceptance speech:
I never wanted to be put in a box. I hate boxes...when people expect you to be a one way or to do a certain thing. You are expected to fall into some idea of who you are supposed to be, that never worked for me. Not from day one. I wanted women to be strong, fearless, and powerful. I wanted us to be able to step up on a stage and rock. I wanted us not to have to be there already but to allow ourselves the time to get there and the support to fall on our faces and make mistakes and get up and dust ourselves off and try again. I didn't know what a feminist was growing up. I found out when my records came out. I didn't realize that the things that I cared about were really things that we were fighting for. I did realize that I wanted to make the same amount of money or more for the same job. I wanted to fight for what was right. I am so excited to have this daytime platform, the Queen Latifah Show, to spread positivity in that space of entertainment and to continue to support woman in the way that I have been supported throughout my life. I've tried to share love throughout my life. I know how to fight. I know how to kick ass. Most importantly I believe I know how to share and give love... to pass it on to the next generation. We want you to change the world. This world needs more love. We need to have more compassion for one another. Women need to connect and lift each other up not tear each other down. We don't need to fight each other. We need to hold each other up.
To hold women like us back is just futile. We are all queens. That is what I was raised to believe. That is why I call myself Queen Latifah when my name is Dana Owes. Latifah means delicate, sensitive, kind, and nice. Queen is regal, royal. I am, I be. I sit in it. You create your own destiny as a queen.

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Queen Latifah Honored by New York Women in Communications

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The New York Women in Communications held their 44th Annual Matrix Awards Monday, and Queen Latifah was one of seven extraordinary women honored. Here award was presented by friend and singer Mary J. Blige, who acknowledged Latifah for having the courage to write feminist laced lyrics as a young rapper.

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Transgender American Games Designer

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Danielle Bunten Berry was a pioneer game developer who created one of the first successful multiplayer games on the Atari platform, which required players to both compete and cooperate.

"It is a measure of Dani Bunten's genius and enduring legacy, then, that Bunten is still considered something of a rock star among game designers and those interested in the history of games."
David Koon (Feb 08 2012): Danielle Bunton changed video games forever: The story of a (largely) forgotten game designer from Arkansas

Danielle Bunten Berry

Born in 1949 in St. Louis, Missouri, Missouri, Danielle Bunten moved to Little Rock, Arkansas as a junior in high school. In 1974, she earned a B.S. in industrial engineering; a few years later she began applying this training to computer programming, creating text-based computer games for fun. By 1978, she had completed her first computer game: Wheeler Dealers. The game ran on Apple II computers and necessitated a custom controller. This set up the game relatively expensive and inaccessible-leading to the game only selling 50 copies.

A year later, in 1979, Bunten partnered with her brother and a few friends to found the game company Ozark Software. The group ran the organization from Bunton's basement in Little Rock and began working with larger gaming firms, including Electronic Arts.

In 1983, Bunten developed and released M.U.L.E., one of the first successful multiplayer games. An 8-bit family Atari game inspired by Robert A. Heinlein's novel Time Enough for Love, M.U.L.E involved competing against and cooperating with other players in order to colonize a planet. A year later, she developed The Seven Cities of Gold.

In 1983, Ozark released M.U.L.E., a multiplayer strategy game which required users to both compete against and cooperate with one another to colonize a planet. A successful and highly reviewed game, M.U.L.E. sold 30,000 copies across various computer platforms. Bunten passed away of lung cancer in 1998 at the age of 49. Earlier that year, the Computer Game Developers Association gave her their coveted Lifetime Achievement Award.

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Danielle Bunten Berry was a pioneer game developer who created one of the first successful multiplayer games on the Atari platform, which required players to both compete and cooperate. "It i...

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Hollywood actress and role model - bi - sexual and proud.

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Breaking Fast (2015) Director: Mike Mosallam -  the first film to break the myths around being gay and Muslim.

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Mexican painter best known for her surreal self-portraits

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Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is remembered for her self-portraits, pain and passion, and bold, vibrant colors. She is celebrated in Mexico for her attention to Mexican and indigenous culture and by feminists for her depiction of the female experience and form.

Kahlo, who suffered from polio as a child, nearly died in a bus accident as a teenager. She suffered multiple fractures of her spine, collarbone and ribs, a shattered pelvis, broken foot and a dislocated shoulder. She began to focus heavily on painting while recovering in a body cast. In her lifetime, she had 30 operations.

Life experience is a common theme in Kahlo's approximately 200 paintings, sketches and drawings. Her physical and emotional pain are depicted starkly on canvases, as is her turbulent relationship with her husband, fellow artist Diego Rivera, who she married twice. Of her 143 paintings, 55 are self-portraits.

The devastation to her body from the bus accident is shown in stark detail in The Broken Column. Kahlo is depicted nearly naked, split down the middle, with her spine presented as a broken decorative column. Her skin is dotted with nails. She is also fitted with a surgical brace.

Kahlo's first self-portrait was Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress in 1926. It was painted in the style of 19th Century Mexican portrait painters who themselves were greatly influenced by the European Renaissance masters. She also sometimes drew from the Mexican painters in her use of a background of tied-back drapes. Self-Portrait - Time Flies (1929), Portrait of a Woman in White (1930) and Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky (1937) all bear this background.

I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best." - Frida Kahlo

In her second-self portrait, "Time Flies," Kahlo uses a folk style and vibrant colors. She wears peasant clothing, and the red, white and green in the painting are the colors of the Mexican flag.

During her life, self portrait is a subject that Frida Kahlo always returns to, as artists have always returned to their beloved themes - Rembrandt his Self Portrait, Vincent van Gogh his Sunflowers, and Claude Monet his Water Lilies.

Frida and Diego: Love and Pain

Kahlo and Rivera had a tumultuous relationship, marked by multiple affairs on both sides. Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair (1940), Kahlo is depicted in a man's suit, holding a pair of scissors, with her fallen hair around the chair in which she sits. This represents the times she would cut the hair Rivera loved when he had affairs.

The 1937 painting Memory, the Heart, shows Kahlo's pain over her husband's affair with her younger sister Christina. A large broken heart at her feet shows the intensity of Kahlo's anguish. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera divorced in 1939, but reunited a year later and remarried. The Two Fridas (1939) depicts Kahlo twice, shortly after the divorce. One Frida wears a costume from the Tehuana region of Mexico, representing the Frida that Diego loved. The other Frida wears a European dress as the woman who Diego betrayed and rejected. Later, she is back in Tehuana dress in Self-Portrait as a Tehuana (1943) and Self Portrait (1948).

Pre-Columbian artifacts were common both in the Kahlo/Rivera home (Diego collected sculptures and idols, and Frida collected Jewelry) and in Kahlo's paintings. She wore jewelry from this period in Self-Portrait - Time Flies (1926), Self-Portrait With Monkey (1938) and Self-Portrait With Braid (1941), among others. Other Pre-Columbian artifacts are found in The Four Inhabitants of Mexico City (1938), Girl With Death Mask (1938) and Self-Portrait With Small Monkeys (1945).

My painting carries with it the message of pain." - Frida Kahlo

Surreal or Realist?

Frida Kahlo participated in the "International Exhibition of Surrealism" in 1940 at the Galeria de Arte, Mexicano. There, she exhibited her two largest paintings: The Two Fridas and The Wounded Table (1940). Surrealist Andrew Breton considered Kahlo a surrealistic, a label Kahlo rejected, saying she just painted her reality. However, In 1945, when Don Jose Domingo Lavin asked Frida Kahlo to read the book Moses and Monotheism by Sigmund Freud - whose psychoanalysis works Surrealism is based on - and paint her understanding and interpretation of this book. Frida Kahlo painted Moses, and this painting was recognized as second prize at the annual art exhibition in the Palacio de Bellas Artes.

Kahlo did not sell many paintings in her lifetime, although she painted occasional portraits on commission. She had only one solo exhibition in Mexico in her lifetime, in 1953, just a year before her death at the age of 47.

Today, her works sell for very high prices. In May 2006, Frida Kahlo self-portrait, Roots, was sold for $5.62 million at a Sotheby's auction in New York, sets a record as the most expensive Latin American work ever purchased at auction, and also makes Frida Kahlo one of the highest-selling woman in art.

Widely known for her Marxist leanings, Frida, along with Marxism Revolutionary Che Guevara and a small band of contemporary figures, has become a countercultural symbol of the 20th century, and created a legacy in art history that continues to inspire the imagination and mind. Born in 1907, dead at 47, Frida Kahlo achieved celebrity even in her brief lifetime that extended far beyond Mexico's borders, although nothing like the cult status that would eventually make her the mother of the selfie, her indelible image recognizable everywhere.

At the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City, her personal belongings are on display throughout the house, as if she still lived there. Kahlo was born and grew up in this building, whose cobalt walls gave way to the nickname of the Blue House. She lived there with her husband for some years, and she died there. The facility is the most popular museum in the Coyoacan neighborhood and among the most visited in Mexico City.

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Frida Kahlo: 100 Paintings Analysis, Biography, Quotes, & Art

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Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is remembered for her self-portraits, pain and passion, and bold, vibrant colors. She is celebrated in Mexico for her attention to Mexican and indigenous culture and by feminists for her depiction of the female experience and form. Kahlo, who suffered from polio as a child, nearly died in a bus accident as a teenager.

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Graphic designer and illustrator known for colourful, vibrant patterns