A fine art, film, history and literature site oriented to, but not exclusively for, the gay community. Please be aware that there is mature content on this blog. Information on images and links to sources will be provided if known. Enjoy your visit and please subscribe.
Dave Whyte is a Generative artist living and working in Dublin, Ireland. He accepts commissions for graphic work through dawhyte at tcd.ie. Equipped with a PhD in Physics and taking inspiration from the early days of GIF Art on Tumblr, Whyte, also known as @beesandbombs, has crafted his own mind-bending aesthetic worth celebrating.
Roger de La Fresnaye, “Artillery”, 1911, Oil on Canvas, 130 x 159 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Born in Le Mans, France, in July of 1885, Roger de La Fresnaye was a French painter who combined melodic colors with the geometric simplified forms of Cubism. He studied at several art schools in Paris, including the Ranson Academy, under painter Paul Ranson, and the École des Beaux-Arts. La Fresnaye, in his early works, experimented both with Symbolism, with its colorful shapes and dream=like quality, and also with Expressionism, which feature bold colors and swirling brushstrokes.
Around 1910, Roger de La Fresnaye began incorporating the more abstract style of Cubism into his work. In 1912, he became a member of the Section d”Or, a group of artists and dealers aimed at spreading the influence of the new art form of Cubism. Although La Fresnaye adopted the geometric emphasis of Cubism, he emphasized the use of color and retained some recognizable forms in his work. This was largely due to Robert Delaunay’s abstract style called Orphism, which its interplay of shapes, colors, and use of light.
Roger de La Fresnaye exhibited his works at the 1912 Salon de la Section d’Or, one of the more important shows of its time which featured more than two hundred Cubist works. He entered the French Army during World War One and was discharged in 1918 due to his contracting tuberculosis. La Frewnaye went to the south of France to recover, continuing to draw and paint in watercolor. However, he never recovered enough energy to undertake a sustained work load.
Although his paintings did much to popularize Cubism, Roger de La Fresnaye later abandoned the avant-garde and become one of France’s advocates of traditional realism. He ceased painting in 1922 but continued to produce drawings. La Fresnaye’s death occurred in Grasse on the French Riviera in November of 1925 at the age of forty.
Roger de La Fresnaye’s1911 “Artillery”was painted three years before the outbreak of World War One. It depicts officers on horseback accompanying a caisson, or ammunition wagon, transporting a field gun and three soldiers in helmets. A military band wearing the blue and red colors of the French infantry is in the background. La Fresnaye’s geometric rendering of the forms strengthens the composition, evoking the military group’s cadenced movement through the canvas’s space.
Top Insert Image: Roger de La Fresnaye, “Nature Morte à l’Oeuf”, 1910, Oil on Board on Panel, 66.2 x 50.9 cm, Private Collection
Second Insert Image: Roger de La Fresnaye, Le Malade Assis dans son Lit, 1922, Gouache and Graphite on Paper, Private Collection
Bottom Insert Image: Roger de La Fresnaye, “Alice au Grand Chapeau”, 1911, Oil on Canvas, 130.5 x 97 cm, Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon
Artists Unknown, (Paint in Your Color), Computer Graphics, Film Gifs
“खो देना चाहता हूँ मैं अपनी रंग ,
तुम्हारे रंगों में ।
होली तो बस बहाना है,
अपनी “अहं” रंग छोड़ के,
बस तेरे रंग मे रंग जाना है ।
आओ चलो बैठते हैं ,
फिर से एक साथ ,
की ख्वाइस है,
की मैं तुझे देखता रहूँ , की बस तू मुझे देख रहा है ।
तुम्हारी “बराभय” अदाओं से ,
मुझे देखती तुम्हारी दोनों नैनों से ,
मेरी तो अपनी “अहं” रंग खो जाना है ,
बस अब तेरे रंग मे रंग जाना है।”
“I want to lose my color, in your colors Holi is just an excuse, leaving your own color, all you have to do now is paint in your color.
Let’s sit down together again, my desire is, that I keep looking at you, that you are just looking at me.
From your blessings and offerings, seeing me with your two eyes, I have to lose my own color, all you have to do now is paint in your color.”
–Ananda Shailendra
Ananda Shailendra was a popular Indian Hindi-Urdu poet and lyricist. He is considered to be the first to combine Hindi and Urdu poetry traditions. Shailendra won the Filmfare Best Lyricist Award in 1958, 1959, and 1968 for his songs in films.
Born on August 30, 1923,at Rawalpindi, now in Pakistan, Ananda Shailendra was brought up in Mathura, a city in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.He started writing poetry during the time he began working as an apprentice with the Indian Railways workshop in Bombay in 1947. Shailendra became involved with the Indian People’s Theater Association, the cultural wingof the Communist Party of India, writing songs and socialist-themed poems set in a post-Independence India.
Actor and film maker Raj Kapoor first met Shailendra when he was reading his poem “Jalta hai Punjab (Punjab Burns)” at a poetry symposium in Bombay.Kapoor offered to buy the poem for inclusion in his upcoming movie “Aag (Fire)” to be released in 1948; however, Shailendra refused , being wary of mainstream media. When Kapoor was filming “Barsaat (Rain)” in 1949,he was able to purchase two songs from Shailendra:“Patli Kamar Hai (My Slim Waist)” and “Barsaat Mein (In the Rain)”, with the composition work being done by notablecomposer Shankar-Jaikishan.
The team of Kapoor, Shailendra, and Shankar-Jaikishan produced many hit songs during their time together. Shailendra’s song “Awara Hoon (I’m a Vagabond)” from Kapoor’s 1951 film “Awaara (Vagabond)” became the most popular Hindustani film song outside of India at that time. All of Shailendra’s songs from the 1955 “Shree 420 (Mr. 420)” became super hits and are still sung on popular occasions.
In 1961 Ananda Shailendra invested heavily in the production of director Basu Bhathacharya’s film “Teesri Kasam (The Third Vow)”, released in 1966 and starring Raj Kapoor and Waheeda Rehnam. Although the film won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film, it was a failure commercially. Failing health resulting from tensions with the film’s production and its financial loss, coupled with alcohol abuse, resulted in Shailendra’s early death in December of 1966 at the age of forty-three.
Born in July of 1906 in Tokyo, Japan, Olivia de Havilland was an American motion-picture star remembered both for the lovely, gentle roles of her early career and the later, more substantial roles she secured. With a cinematic career spanning from 1935 to 1988, she appeared in forty-nine feature films, becoming one of the leading actresses of her time.
Olivia de Havilland moved, along with her mother and younger sister Joan Fontaine, to California in 1919, settling in the village of Saratoga. After graduating from high school in 1934, she attended Mills College in Oakland, hoping to pursue a career as a teacher. De Havilland was chosen from the cast of a community theater production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by director Max Reinhardt to be first the understudy, and then the star of his theater production of the play.
Impressed by her performance, Reinhardt offered Olivia de Havilland the same role of Hermia in his upcoming Warner Brothers film version of the stage production. She signed a five-year contract with Warner Brothers in November of 1934, beginning her professional acting career. De Havilland appeared in many costume adventure movies with then little-known actor Errol Flynn in the 1930s and 1940s. Their first film together was the 1935 “Captain Blood”, the success of which resulted in four Academy Awards nominations, including Best Picture.
De Havilland appeared in Mervyn LeRoy’s 1938 historical drama “Anthony Adverse” playing the role of peasant girl Angela opposite actor Fredric March. The film earned six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, giving de Havilland good exposure and a chance to renegotiate her contract with Warner Brothers for a seven year term with higher salary.
De Havilland worked again with Errol Flynn in the 1938 “The Adventures of Robin Hood” and the 1939 Technicolor western, her first, entitled “Dodge City”. In early 1939, De Havilland exerted her influence to get the role of Melanie Wilkes/Hamilton in the upcomingDavid O’Selznick film “Gone with the Wind”, giving her the opportunity to play a substantial role she understood, and resulting in her first nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
Winning a precedent-setting case in 1945 against Warner Brothers Studios, Olivia de Havillland was released for a six-month penalty obligation added onto her contract. The result of extending greater creative freedom to performers enabled her to take more challenging roles. She gave an Academy Award-winning performance as an unwed mother in the 1946 “To Each His Own”, played twin sisters in the 1946 psychological thriller “The Dark Mirror”, and won an Academy Award nomination for her role as a psychiatric ward patient in the 1948 “The Snake Pit”.
Olivia de Havilland was the recipient of numerous honors: the American National Medal of Arts in 2008, an appointment as a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 2010 in France, and was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2017, shorty before her 101st birthday. Olivia de Havilland passed away peacefully of natural causes on July 26, 2020, at her residence in Paris, France.
Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Olivia de havilland”, 1940, Studio Publicity Shot, Gelatin Silver Print, Warner brothers Studio
Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Olivia de havilland and Erol Flynn”, 1938, Still Shot from “The Adventures of Robin Hood”, Director Michael Curtis and William Keighley, Warner Brothers
Theodor Hildebrandt, “Düsseldorf Freundschaftsbild (Düsseldorf Friendship)”, c1823, Oil on Canvas, 53 x 34.5 cm
Born in September of 1804 in Stettin, Germany, Theodor Hildebrandt was an entomologist and an artist of the Düsseldorf school of painting. He studied under German Romantic painter Friedrich Schadow at the prestigious Berlin Academy of the Arts. In 1828, upon Schadow’s appointment to the new Düsseldorf Academy of the Arts, Hildebrandt decided to relocate, following his teacher to Düsseldorf.
Hildebrandt began his artistic career by painting illustrative themes from the works of Shakespeare and Goethe. His “Faust and Mephistopheles” was painted in 1824, followed the next year by his work “Faust and Margaret”. In 1828, Hildebrandt painted a Shakespearean scene featuring King Lear and his youngest daughter Cordelia in the work entitled “Lear and Cordelia”.
Beginning in 1829, Hildebrandt traveled outside of Germany, initially with Schadow in the Netherlands and later, in 1930, alone in Italy. After his return to Düsseldorf, he painted several works in alternating styles: the more realistic style of the 1829 “The Robber”; the Shakespearean scene of the 1830 “Romeo and Juliet”; in the same year, “Tancred and Clorinda” a scene from Torquato Tasso’s poem “Jerusalem Delivered”; and in 1832 “The Captain and His Infant Son”, an affected realistic work that captivated the public.
Theodor Hildebrandt’s most famous work is the 1836 “The Murder of the Sons of King Edward IV, King of England”. In this canvas, Hildebrandt shows the men’s hesitation, given the innocence of the sleeping boys, and highlights the frozen action in the midst of the dramatic plot. The painting was considered realistic in tone and regarded by contemporary reviewers to be the crowning achievement of the Düsseldorf School of Painting. This painting currently resides in the Spiegel Collection at Halberstadt.
After 1847, Hildebrandt concentrated on portrait paintings, a genre that succeeded in supplying a large number of commissions. He continued through the rest of his life painting and, as a member of the Entomological Society of Stettin, studying the order of insects known as Coleoptera, the group containing beetles. Theodor Hildebrandt died in Düsseldorf in 1874
Bottom Insert Image: Theodor Hildebrandt, “The Robber”, 1829, Oil on Canvas, 114 x 99 cm, National Gallery, Berlin, Germany
Photographer Unknown, (A View of the City), Photo Shoot
“What he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller’s past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Photographer Unknown, Gold-Framed Interior Clock, Atrium of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France
On the eve of the 1900 World Fair, the French government ceded land to the Orleans railroad company, who, disadvantaged by the remote location of the Gare d’Austerlitz, planned to build a more central terminus station on the site of the ruined Palais d’Orsay. In 1897, the company consulted three architects: Lucien Magne, Emile Bénard and Victor Laloux. The project was a challenging one due to the vicinity of the Louvre and the Palais de la Légion d’honneur: the new station needed to be perfectly integrated into its elegant surroundings. Victor Laloux, who had just completed the Hôtel de Ville in Tours, was chosen as winner of the competition in 1898.
The station and hotel, built within two years, were inaugurated for the World Fair on July 14th, 1900. Laloux chose to mask the modern metallic structures with the façade of the hotel, which, built in the academic style using finely cut stone from the regions of Charente and Poitou, successfully blended in with its noble neighbours. Inside, all the modern techniques were used: ramps and lifts for luggage, elevators for passengers, sixteen underground railtracks, reception services on the ground floor, and electric traction. The open porch and lobby continued into the great hall which was 32 metres high, 40 metres wide and 138 metres long.
From 1900 to 1939, the Gare d’Orsay was the head of the southwestern French railroad network. The hotel received numerous travellers in addition to welcoming associations and political parties for their banquets and meetings. However, after 1939, the station was to serve only the suburbs, as its platforms had become too short for the modern, longer trains that appeared with the progressive electrification of the railroads.
The Gare d’Orsay then successively served different purposes : it was used as a mailing centre for sending packages to prisoners of war during the Second World War, then those same prisoners were welcomed there on their returning home after the Liberation. It was then used as a set for several films, such as Kafka’s “The Trial” adapted by Orson Welles, and as a haven for the Renaud-Barrault Theatre Company and for auctioneers, while the Hôtel Drouot was being rebuilt.
The hotel closed its doors on January 1st, 1973, not without having played a historic role: the General de Gaulle held the press conference announcing his return to power in its ballroom (the Salle des Fêtes).
In 1975, the Direction des Musées de France already considered installing a new museum in the train station, in which all of the arts from the second half of the 19th century would be represented. The station, threatened with destruction and replacement by a large modern hotel complex, benefitted instead from the revival of interest in nineteenth-century architecture and was listed on the Supplementary Inventory of Historical Monuments on March 8, 1973. The official decision to build the Musée d’Orsay was taken during the interministerial council of October 20, 1977, on President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s initiative. The building was classified a Historical Monument in 1978 and a civil commission was created to oversee the construction and organisation of the museum. The President of the Republic, François Mitterrand, inaugurated the new museum on December 1st, 1986, and it opened to the public on December 9th.
Henry Jasper Redfern, Untitled, (British Athlete), Early 1900s, Silver Gelatin Print
Henry Jasper Redfern was a British optician, photographer, filmmaker, and an x-ray and radiographic pioneer. Born in Sheffield, England, in 1871, he operated a photographic studio and sold cameras and other optical goods such as opera glasses. Redfern also worked as an optician in Sheffield, offering photographic lessens as a side line. In 1898, he became an agent for Lumière’s Cinématographe in England, holding demonstration exhibitions for the Lumière company.
In 1894, Redfern, teaming with photographer and cinema projectionist Fred Holmes, presented film and x-ray demonstrations with a Kineopticon, a recently patented projector that was becoming popular. In 1898, Redfern secured an exclusive contract in England for the right to tour the groundbreaking, first feature film of the Corbett-Fitzsimmons boxing match of 1897. This, along with a number of high profile films of local sports events, marked a step towards the headline feature as an event in itself, and with a view towards securing return audiences week after week.
Frustrated by the limitations of the music hall circuit and having thoroughly exhausted many of the non-theatrical spaces in and around Sheffield, Redfern struck into new territory in 1904 by pitching his own theatre on a beach outside Southend. With deckchairs for stalls, and a tent to cover the rafters Redfern, with the assistance of Holmes, brought his own programme of film and variety performers to the seaside resort for the summer. The venture successfully addressed a niche in the still open market, yet the concerns of the local licensing authorities over the non-permanent structure ultimately made this a short-term venture and it ran for two seasons.
During the first World War Redfern was called to serve as a field radiologistand eventually was assigned to the 2nd Western General Hospital in the clinical staff. In 1914, he enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps with the much needed skill as a radiographer, particularly during wartime. The small x-ray department at the hospital was called upon to use the new technology of x-rays for diagnostic and therapeutic studies.
Jasper Redfern, a pioneer in the field, accepted the call to serve his fellow wounded soldiers. He became a martyr by performing radiographs and paid the price by losing all of his fingers from the radiation exposure. In 1928, Redfern died of cancer, probably due to his heroic efforts and prolonged exposure to radiation from x-rays.
Insert Image: Photographer Unknown,”Henry Jasper Redfern”, circa 1914-1920, Vintage Photograph
Photographers Unknown, The Parts and Pieces Making a Whole: Set Eight
“If human nature were not base, but thoroughly honorable, we should in every debate have no other aim than the discovery of truth; we should not in the least care whether the truth proved to be in favor of the opinion which we had begun by expressing, or of the opinion of our adversary. That we should regard as a matter of no moment, or, at any rate, of very secondary consequence; but, as things are, it is the main concern. Our innate vanity, which is particularly sensitive in reference to our intellectual powers, will not suffer us to allow that our first position was wrong and our adversary’s right.
The way out of this difficulty would be simply to take the trouble always to form a correct judgment. For this a man would have to think before he spoke. But, with most men, innate vanity is accompanied by loquacity and innate dishonesty. They speak before they think; and even though they may afterwards perceive that they are wrong, and that what they assert is false, they want it to seem the contrary. The interest in truth, which may be presumed to have been their only motive when they stated the proposition alleged to be true, now gives way to the interests of vanity: and so, for the sake of vanity, what is true must seem false, and what is false must seem true.”
—Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Always Being Right
“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”
—Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 7: 1966-1974
Anais Nin was a twentieth-century essayist, author, and diarist, born in France in 1903 to Cuban-born parents. Her father, composer Joaquin Nin, abandoned the family, prompting them to sail to America for a new life. This event at her age of eleven prompted Anais Nin to begin her life-long work of writing in her diary.
In 1923, Nin married a young banker, Hugh Guiler, and moved to Paris. She continued her education by reading contemporary literature and writing analyses of controversial novels, Nin met writer Henry Miller and his wife June in 1932, beginning a period in her life of socializing with artists and becoming more liberated from society’s mores. She achieved some literary success during this peiod with fictionalized portions of her diary, includingthe 1939 “Winter of Artifice”, a one-volume series of three novelettes published in Paris.
With Europe on the brink of war in 1939, Nin and her husband traveled back to New York, where she struggled to publish her highly stylized fiction. Experiencing many frustrations in the publishing world, Nin purchased her own printing press to self-publish her books, many containing artwork of her husband under the name of Ian Hugo. Beginning in 1947, she met and embarked on a secret relationship with Rupet Pole, marrying him eight years later in 1955 without divorcing Hugh Guiler. During these emotional years, Nin wrote a one-volume novel series of five books that fictionalized her experiences, publishing it in 1959 under the title “Cities of the Interior”
While living a dual life in New York and Los Angeles during the 1960s, Nin made the risky decision to allow her diary to be published, though she chose to remove the most private details of her romantic relationships. The first installment, published in 1966, was titled “The Diary of Anais Nin” and it was an immediate success. Though it was a profoundly personal work, it hit a universal vein of experience,especially with women. Nin found herself, then in her sixties and seventies, playing the part of an international feminist icon.
While Nin traveled the world speaking about her writing and meeting fans, subsequent volumes of her edited diary were published. They covered the period up through the end of her life and totaled seven volumes. In 1977, Anais Nin died of cancer in Los Angeles with Rupert Pole by her side.
Before she died it was Nin’s decision to have her early diaries published, as well as erotica she’d written in the 1940s. As a result, “Delta of Venus”, “Little Birds”, andthe childhood diary “Linotte” were released. Also, in a decision that generated much controversy, Nin asked Rupert Pole to publish the “secret” parts of her previously-released diaries. The first of these diaries is titled “Henry and June”; it includes the material removed from Nin’s first published diary and was made into a feature film.
Bottom Insert Image: Irving Penn, “Anaïs Nin”, 1971, Platinum-Palladium Print, 49.8 x 49.5 cm, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC
Sergei Eisenstein, “The Battleship Potemkin”, The Odessa Steps Scene, December 1925, Starring Aleksandr Antonov, Vladimir Barksy, and Grigori Aleksandrov, Cinematography by Eduard Tisse and Vladimir Popov, Produced by Mosfilm
Born in January of 1898 in Riga, Latvia, Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was a film director, scriptwriter, film theorist, and a pioneer in the theory and development of montage. Using his technique of montage film editing, he portrayed the rapid developments of events on the screen, separating each scene into fragments and rearranging them into his preferred order.
Eisenstein studied engineering at the Petrograd Institute of Civil Engineering, leaving in 1918 to join the Red Army in the revolution. Still a member of the Red Army after the Bolshevik seizure of power, he took part in many theater productions and was eventually assigned to organizing productions and ensembles. In 1920 Eisenstein returned to Moscow and worked with the Proletkult Theater, becoming co-director and later the most noteworthy theater director in the USSR.
While still a theater director, Eisenstein wrote a manifesto, “Montage of Attractions,” for the literary journal “Lef”, rejecting the idea that dialogue is the dominant element in theater and claiming that all the elements function on equal terms, forming a fusion or montage that made the entire work. Montage in film, as Eisenstein understood it, means that a film should be constructed not in narrative fashion but from brief segments that serve to reinforce and counterpoint one another. The meaning of the film arises from the interplay of these elements, leading the audience into new recognitions.
In the spring of 1924, Eisenstein proposed that Proletkult undertake a series of films portraying the Russian revolutionary movements before 1917. Working with cameraman Eduard Tisse, a Latvian newsreel photographer who would go on to be the cameraman on all his films, he took on the making of “Strike”, the fifth film in the series. In 1925, Eisenstein made his second and probably his greatest film “Battleship Potemkin”, examining themutiny carried out by sailors of the Russian warship, Prince Potemkin, stationed in the Black Sea fleet near Odessa.
Sergei Eisenstein’s film “The General Line”was an experiment in presenting the feeling of ecstasy in film. Directed by both Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov, the film, centering on a rural heroine instead of a group of characters, was a celebration of the collectivization of agriculture, a policy championed by Bolshevik Leon Trotsky.Eisenstein used his montage method with great success in the filming of the milk coop, its sequence conceived as a enthralling spectacle of raptured faces and the triumphant introduction of new farm machinery. After Trotsky’s fall from grace, the film was quickly re-edited and released in 1929 as “The Old and the New”.
Eisenstein’s vision of Communism brought him into conflict with officials in the ruling regime of Stalin. Frequent attacks on Eisenstein and then subsequent rehabilitation would be a repeated pattern throughout his life. His popularity and influence in his own land thus waxed and waned with the success of his films and the passage of time. In 1930, Eisenstein was approached with offers from Paramount Studios for several films; however, because of his artistic approach and disagreements with scripts, the contract was declared void by mutual agreement.
Eisenstein came back into prominence with the 1938 “Alexander Nevsky”, in which Eisenstein exchanged his montage style for one that focused and developed the individual characters to a greater extent. This was due to the rise of Socialist Realism in the arts which was becoming the cultural and artistic policy of the state. Well received, the film won Eisenstein the Order of Lenin and the Stalin Prize.
Eisenstein’s 1944 “Ivan the Terrible, Part One”, a film presenting Ivan IV as a national hero, also won the approval of Stalin and a Stalin Prize. However, the sequel “Ivan the Terrible, Part Two, although finished in 1945, was criticized by the government and not released until 1958. All footage from the unfinished Part Three was confiscated by the state and mostly destroyed, with only a few scenes still existing.
Sergei Eisenstein suffered a heart attack in February of 1946, recovered, but died from a second heart attack in February of 1948, at the age of fifty. His body laid in state in the Hall of the Cinema Workers, was cremated two days later, and his ashes buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.
Second Insert Image: Sergei Eisenstein, “The Battleship Potemkin”, 1925, The Odessa Steps Sequence
Third Insert Image: Sergei Eisenstein, “Que Viva Mexico!”, 1932, Directed by Eisenstein and Gregory Aleksandrov
Bottom Insert Image: Sergei Eisenstein, “Strike”, 1925, Cinematography by Eduard Tisse, Vladmir Popov, Vasili Khvatov
“Lovers’ reading of each other’s bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeat itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognized in it, a route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end in view it arranges rhythmic phases, metrical scansions, recurrence of motives. But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against moments, recovering time?”
—Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, 1978
“The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble…. They can never be solved, but only outgrown…. This ‘outgrowing’, as I formerly called it, on further experience was seen to consist in a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through this widening of view, the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life-tendency.” —Carl Jung
Édith Piaf, “La Vie en Rose”, 1956 Film “Música de Siempre”
Édith Piaf was French singer, songwriter, cabaret performer, and film actress, noted as France’s chanteuse and one of the country’s most widely known international stars. Her autobiographical songs specialized in chanson and torch ballads about. love, loss and sorrow.
Born Édith Giovanna Gassion in 1915 in Belleville, Paris, Édith Piaf was the only child of Louis-Alphonse Gassion, a highly skilled street acrobat, and Annetta Giovanna Maillard, a cafe singer of Moroccan Berber descent. When her parents’ marriage failed, Édith Piaflived with her paternal grandmother, who ran a brothel. At the age of seven, she joined her father, participating with him in street performances, on a traveling circus caravan to Belgium and eventually France.
Renowned for her voice even at a young age, Piaf separated from her father and became a street singer in Paris and its vicinities. In 1935,she was discovered by Louis Leplée, the owner of the successful nightspot “Le Gerny” located on Rue Pierre- Charron. Leplée starred Piaf as “La Môme Piaf” (The Little Sparrow)”, due to her small stature and nervous energy, and ran a major publicity campaign for her opening night. Piaf’s popularity, after the successful show, enabled her to record two albums in 1935.
After the murder of Louis Leplée in spring of 1936, Piaf worked with French lyricist Raymond Asso, who became her lover and mentor. She also worked closely with songwriter and composer Marguerite Monnot, who as a female composer of popular music in the 1930s was a pioneer in her field. Piaf commissioned songs in the style of ‘chansons réaliste’, which dealt with the lives of the French poor and working class in a realistic and emotive manner.
Édith Piaf became one of the most famous performers in France. During World War II, she went to sing for the French prisoners in Germany and posed for pictures with them. When she returned to France, Piaf had made individual passports for the prisoners, using the pictures taken in Germany during her visit. She was instrumental in helping a number of prisoners to escape. It was during these war years that Piaf wrote “La Vie en Rose”, which is remembered as her signature song.
After the war years, with her fame spreading quickly, Piaf toured Europe, the United States, and South America. In 1950 in Paris, she gave Héctor Roberto Chavero, the central figure in Argentine folk music, an opportunity to share the stage and make his debut in France. Piaf also helped launch the career of Charles Aznavour, whose songwriting and distinctive tenor voice would span seventy years, making him one of France’s most popular performers. In 1962 she married singer and actor Théo Sarapo, birth name of Theophanis Lamboukas, who would sing with Piaf in some of her last engagements.
Bruno Coquatrix’s famous Paris Olympia opera hall is where Édith Piaf achieved lasting fame, giving a series of concerts at the hall, the most famous venue in Paris, between 1955 and 1962. Excerpts of these concerts were issued on record and CD, and have never been out of print. Piaf debuted her song “Non, Je ne Regrette Rien” at the 1961 concert in the opera hall, which she had promoted to financially save the venue. Her final recorded song was “L’Homme de Berlin”, in April of 1963.
Édith Piaf’s life, while containing fame and fortune, also had many tragedies. The love of her life, legendary French boxer Marcel Cerdan, died in a plane crash of an Air France flight in October of 1929, while traveling to meet her. In 1951, Piaf was severely injured in a car crash, breaking an arm and two ribs, the resulting trauma leading to difficulties with alcohol and morphine addictions. Two more near-fatal car crashes followed, worsening the situation. After a series of surgeries in 1959, Piaf’s health, seriously affected by her alcohol use and medications,deteriorated further; by 1962,her weight had dropped to 30 kg or 66 pounds.
Édith Piaf died of an aneurysm due to liver failure at age forty-seven while residing at her villa in Plascassier on the Riviera, on October 10, 1963. She is buried at the family gravesite inPére Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. The name inscribed at the foot of the tombstone is Famille Gassion-Piaf. Her name is engraved on the side as Madame Lamboukas dite Édith Piaf.
Denied a funeral Mass by Cardinal Maurice Feltin because of her lifestyle, her funeral procession drew tens of thousands to the streets of Paris; the ceremony at the cemetery drew one hundred thousand fans, Fifty years after her death, the Roman Catholic Church recanted and gave Piaf a memorial Mass in the St. Jean-Baptiste Church in Belleville, Paris, the parish into which she was born.
Note: The video footage behind the song includes a travel film of her vacation in Mexico entitled “Édith Piaf Au Mexique, Film de Voyage”. It should be noted that Édith Piaf sings “La Vie en Rose” in Spanish in this color video footage. This is a rarity; there are no other known films of Pilaf singing in Spanish.
