From the cheerful Gloria Swanson to the intimidating Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Avedon spent much of his career photographing the old, the wrinkled, and the wise - revealing the contradictions of the human heart.
By: Adam Gopnik, edited excerpt from the book's foreword Richard Avedon Immortal: Portraits of Aging, 1951-2004 / The Guardian
Translation:Telegrafi.com
Richard Avedon hated aging—and lived within it, laughed at it, viewed it with pity, compassion, and, above all (how could it be otherwise?), fatalism. “I am an old man,” he said, even when he was a relatively young man in his sixties. Throughout his career, he produced an endless number of images that showed the effects of aging on the human face—and its inevitability. For someone who was initially, and perhaps still is, associated in the world’s imagination primarily with images of youth and beauty, vitality and joy—the girl waving her skirt, jumping on a pool of water, playing pinball in Paris at midnight—there is an equally large body of his work (which he, ironically, called “Irv”) devoted to the elderly, the withered and the wise.
Jean Renoir, film director, California, May 11, 1972© The Richard Avedon Foundation
His friends always said he was the youngest man in every room—but he didn’t want to be the youngest man in the room. It wasn’t exactly an insult, but a banality: Dick wanted to be the most complicated man in the room. He loved images, like those famous Leonardo da Vinci juxtaposed the profile of a handsome young man with an old man with a nutcracker jaw. And so, in a beautiful pair of portraits of film directors, we first see the belligerent John Ford opposite the sympathetic Jean Renoir. Ford’s defiant lips and his nervous bandaged eye—the eyepatch is angry in its insistence on announcing his loss of the eye—are seen against the gentle, humanistic gaze of Renoir, who at first seems like a French artist-saint of the Georges Braque variety.
Gloria Swanson, actress, New York, September 4, 1980© The Richard Avedon Foundation
But look again, and Ford and Renoir are both belligerent and kind; the warlike curve of their lips belies the brightness in their eyes, and Renoir’s asymmetrical gaze is as calculating as it is holy. Ford may look at us defiantly (in a very American way), but Renoir is analyzing us. The easy-going clichés of humanism are either betrayed or deepened: people don’t become filmmakers through kindness alone. Ambition, craftsmanship, and purpose are on display here too.
Avedon was at war with the clichés of portraiture, including the clichés of aging, and anything that seemed merely humble or too picturesque offended him. Contradiction was the engine of his art. It was sometimes hard for his subjects to believe that he was not belittling or betraying them when he told them that he valued as much the things they tried to hide as the things they were proud to show. This was one of the reasons why Avedon struggled and never quite managed to come to terms with himself in old age—either by making himself, in a completely unusual way, seem very angry, or very determined but in a way that was too self-absorbed, perhaps because the vital contradictions in his character were as invisible to him as those of his subjects were to others. The magician could work magic on others, but not on himself.
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, New York, 16 April 1957© The Richard Avedon Foundation
(The real contradiction in his character, between the serious and reserved student of human achievement that he was, and the ambitious, hyper-competitive force within New York City that he was often accused of being, was invisible to him, just as our real contradictions are to each of us. A documentary of his life, in his later years, showed him walking absentmindedly along the Montauk cliffs outside his house, lost in thought—a place he never actually went to, because he stayed inside, on the phone with friends, advising, consoling, planning, entertaining.)
Men and women, old, who knew how to be two things at once - or more, were his true subjects, and his gift for somehow conveying their inner multiplicity in a single, radically condensed and seemingly laconic image remains astonishing and unparalleled in the history of portraiture. He is often at his best with the worst: the anti-Semite Ezra Pound howling with the very pain of existence, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor transformed into nightmares, like a Beckettian couple with bulging eyes. Even the people he admired were complimented by his eye for their asymmetries: Stravinsky looks at us with a balanced gaze that is almost wounded and calculating - at once a man of fierce genius and a man of calculation and ambition, a genius and a carpet merchant.
Toni Morrison, writer, New York, September 10, 2003© The Richard Avedon Foundation
WH Auden is a druid and oracle, his face lined with age, a silent comedian who goes for a clumsy walk, like a pilgrim on the Lower East Side in slippers in the snow. (“I woke up and it was snowing, and I wanted to see Auden in it,” Dick once explained, and called the perhaps bewildered but willing poet and asked him to take a picture of him.) Truman Capote’s portrait of his old friend, contemporary, and collaborator shows him to be far more intelligent than he chose to pretend and more wicked than he cared to admit. When it comes to the elderly Dorothy Parker, Avedon did not admire her spirit any less because her face had become less “beautiful,” and, by accurately recording her decline, he emphasized her courage.
One portrait I have long overlooked is that of Harold Arlen, the great composer who fused blues and jazz with Broadway tunes. He was part of a class of men whom Avedon understood implicitly; artists who walked the dangerous and unsatisfying tightrope between art and showbiz. Arlen appears to us extremely anxious, perhaps conceited—his hair darker than his age would allow—his face marked by the stigmata of anxiety that Avedon sought and valued as much as Leonardo loved the half-hearted smile. He is nothing like the image of a calm, sophisticated, successful singer-songwriter of the insistent Hoagy Carmichael type. But Avedon’s portrait conveys a deeper truth in the form of a more contradictory image.
Charlie Chaplin, actor, California, April 9, 1972© The Richard Avedon Foundation
For this reason, pressed against the wall to choose his best portrait, Avedon would almost certainly have chosen that of Oscar Levant. He admired him almost unconditionally, as a witty man, a musician, and a member of Gershwin's circle in the 20s - for Dick, the highest social circle he could imagine as a Jew in his warmth but aristocratic in his manner. Levant was a great composer (Blame It on My Youth) and in his time the most admired exponent of Gershwin's concert music on stage. Levant had betrayed his talent with drugs and debauchery - yet his enlightenment and mad ecstasy in the midst of his own destruction seemed to Avedon an image not only of where we are all likely to go, but also of where we would like to be.
What's worse than being left toothless and ruined in Beverly Hills? But what's better than being openly insane in your best clothes? The descent of genius into madness and the rise of despair into a kind of ecstasy - both were Avedon's points of reference, his obsessive fascinations. Avedon's Levant is an image of doomed self-destruction under the power of addiction, complacency in the face of despair. Both are there, and both are true.
Oscar Levant, pianist, California, April 9, 1972 \u00a9 The Richard Avedon Foundation
Of all Avedon’s photographs of aging, the series he took of his father was closest to his heart and mind and yet, in many ways, the hardest for us to internalize and accept. It is a brutal study of an old man dying, from the first signs of the act of mortality to his head lowered in the humiliation of a hospital gown. It is hard to believe—it was hard even for his father, who at least saw the first few photos—that they were in any way helpful or empathetic, or even admiring. Avedon insisted that they were, and on one memorable night he tried to explain to me why. His father had maintained a facade all his life: “Smilin’ Jack Avedon,” an entrepreneur, a family man, like every Jewish man of that generation—as Philip Roth once wrote—who served his family in a self-destructive way. The facade wasn't what made his father admirable, or human - it was the fragility, the doubt that the facade covered.
“There was a picture of you on the piano that I saw every day growing up,” Avedon wrote. “It was taken by the Bachrach studio and it was heavily retouched, and we all called it ‘Smilin’ Jack Avedon’ — it was a family joke, because it was a picture of a man we never saw, and a man I never knew. When you pose for a picture, behind it is a smile that is not yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I appreciate about you is intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people.”
Jakob Israel Avedon, father of Richard, Florida, August 25, 1973 \u00a9 The Richard Avedon Foundation
An existentialist by conviction of his generation, Avedon was a humanist by instinct - someone who believed that being alive was the only conscious state in the cosmos, and that what we are as humans is all there is to know. No afterlife, no eternity, no great chance for immortality of fame - and in any case, what's the point of immortality of fame if you're not there to experience it? Yet there is life ...
A reasonable argument has been made that Leonardo's famous double profile actually represents a single man - the artist himself - imagined at the two extremes of existence, youthful beauty and late aging, not a confrontation of two types, but a metamorphosis of a single being. The blurred line that separates beauty and ugliness is its subject, the two extreme states suggesting the spectrum in between. Views of the human condition? Avedon's portraits of the elderly are more a commentary on the conditioned nature of being human; we are all in the process of constructing ourselves, of hiding ourselves, of trying to be more beautiful and wiser - like those other people, in their portraits - while being forced to remain ourselves.
Old age creeps up on us from behind, a knife-like smile, then stabs us in the back. All we can do is dance. And what if the tremors of death seem more like the most ecstatic steps? Well, that's life. Even when we leave the stage, we're still on it. Even dying, we're still in the game. /Telegraph/
