This 40-year retrospective of the acclaimed photographer, Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply, published by the University of Texas Press, covers the full scope of Bey’s work chronicling American communities. The photos are accompanied by essays from leading curators, critics, and scholars. Over the course of his long and varied career, Bey has paired photographs of high school students next to brief biographies written by the subjects; created studio portraits of artists and colleagues; and shot unlikely pairs of people from the same communities who wouldn’t otherwise have met. Through Bey’s lens, his subjects receive a level of respect and a glimpse into their shared humanity that is nothing short of marvelous.

The post Dawoud Bey’s Unwavering Candor appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Napoleon Sarony, Portrait of Oscar Wilde, 1882.

When his health collapsed, he was laid up at the Hotel d’Alsace, in a seedier part of the Latin Quarter. He expired there—surrounded by hideous wallpaper—at age 46. A discreet burial took place at suburban Bagneux. At the time, it looked as if Wilde’s tarnished name would sink with him into the grave.

An exhibition now underway at the Petit Palais in the heart of Paris proves otherwise. Oscar Wilde: L’impertinent absolu offers as stunning array of artworks, manuscripts, and photographs that illuminate—as never before—Wilde’s legendary career.

This exhibition, on display until January 15, 2017, leads visitors through his phenomenal achievements, along with his difficult years of exile in Paris, and includes previously unseen materials from private collections.

The exhibition’s provocative title very loosely translates as “Insolence Incarnate” in recognition of the irreverent style that defines Wilde’s tremendous legacy. I recently spent several hours shuffling through with a busy crowd, all of us eagerly viewing the displays, arranged chronologically, beginning with letters from the time he excelled in Classics at Oxford and then moving to the paintings that he reviewed at the opening of the avant-garde Grosvenor Gallery in London.

Such works include G.F. Watts’s Love and Death. Wilde admired the strength with which “Love, a beautiful boy with lithe brown limbs and rainbow-coloured wings” tries to “bar the entrance” to the “giant form” of Death. Equally impressive among the artworks at the Grosvenor is Evelyn Pickering de Morgan’s Night and Sleep, featuring two entwined figures floating through the air, the one holding the cloak of darkness while the other scatters poppies on the earth below. Truly stupendous is James Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold, The Falling Rocket, which caused outrage when John Ruskin alleged that the American artist had “thrown a poet of paint in the public’s face.” (A libel suit ensued.)

Napoleon Sarony, Portrait of Oscar Wilde, 1882.

As Wilde acknowledged, Whistler’s Nocturne—which brilliantly captures the fireworks at London’s Cremorne Gardens—counted among “the most abused” paintings at the London gallery. But he didn’t seem impressed. The painting, he observed, was “certainly worth looking at for about as long as one looks at a real rocket”—“for somewhat less than a quarter of a minute.” Together, these phenomenal paintings recreate the impact that the Grosvenor enjoyed in 1877.

Then, around a corner, there is the unforgettable image of Wilde as an aesthete embarking on a yearlong lecture tour of North America, where he spoke on “aesthetic” topics to bemused audiences. The famous theater entrepreneur Richard D’Oyly Carte recruited Wilde to deliver talks on the much-publicized English movement that championed art for art’s sake, seeking to bring beauty into everyday life. The tour supported Carte’s American production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera, Patience, which did much to promote the image of the modern art-loving man as an effete, sentimental, and somewhat vain fashionista. Wilde perfected this image. Especially striking at the Petit Palais is the complete set of photographs taken by renowned portraitist Napoleon Sarony in New York, just before Wilde launched his coast-to-coast adventures. He stands in a range of languid poses, sporting knee breeches, silken hose, and opera pumps, as well as a sumptuous beaver topcoat. Sold at every venue where he gave his talks, these images—over which Sarony controlled the copyright—ensured that Wilde became a celebrity icon. Americans were so taken with Wilde’s persona that caricatures appeared throughout the press. Meanwhile, advertisers adapted his “aesthetic” look for the sale of ordinary goods, including spools of cotton, carpets, and rugs.

Harper Pennington, Portrait of Oscar Wilde, 1884.

Once back in London, Wilde resumed lecturing. As he shared his “Personal Impressions of America” with British followers, he dispensed with his “aesthetic” garb and adopted more sober but fashionable attire. We can see his changing style in the full-length portrait that American painter Harper Pennington created for Wilde as a wedding gift. This imposing picture, in which the aesthete dons a fashionable frockcoat, has never before been exhibited abroad. It presents an attractive, poised 29-year-old man in the prime of life. His elegant walking cane planted firmly on the ground, Wilde returns our gaze with quiet reassurance. Initially, the painting hung in Wilde’s family home, where he moved with his wife Constance in early 1885. It was sold, however, along with his books and furnishings, during the court proceedings. Mercifully, two well-to-do friends—Ada and Ernest Leverson—rescued it, though in the wake of Wilde’s very public scandal Ernest eventually found it a source of embarrassment. Wilde ensured that it went to another friend. The public had no knowledge of the portrait until it was bequeathed to UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library by Harrison Post, Clark’s romantic partner, more than 80 years ago. In May 2017, the artwork will be a centerpiece in Tate Britain’s “Queer Art in Britain, 1885-1967.”

Oscar Wilde: L’impertinent absolu traces his evolution into a major writer. This was the period when he enjoyed a blissful marriage, for a time. Particularly joyful is a photograph of Constance embracing their oldest boy, Cyril. The mid 1880s was also the period when Wilde made his mark with his classic collection of fairy tales, The Happy Prince (1888). A central part of the exhibition shows how successfully Wilde built his relations with French authors, including Stéphane Mallarmé. Other continental figures are equally well represented: Maurice Rollinat, Pierre Louÿs, and Henri de Régnier, as well as J.K. Huysmans, whose anti-realist novel, A rebours (1884), left a deep impression on Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, revised 1891).

The Picture of Dorian Gray was a turning point. A small but vocal minority of critics denounced it for its homoerotic subtext, and so it gained Wilde notoriety. By 1892, his first comedy, Lady Windermere’s Fan, wowed the London stage with Wilde’s aphoristic wit. Three more triumphant plays followed. In the interim, he started focusing his personal life on other men. He became intimate with an Oxford undergraduate, Lord Alfred Douglas, and he slept with several younger males, some of whom traded in sex work and extortion.

The Cameron Studio, Portrait of Constance and Cyril Wilde, 1889.

Most intriguing to me was the exhibit showing a single opened-out leaf of a hefty document. This is the set of witness statements from Wilde’s libel suit against Douglas’ father, John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry. In early 1895, Queensberry—a hotheaded Scottish lord—penned an insulting visiting card (with an infamous misspelling) declaring that Wilde was “Posing as Somdomite.” Wilde sued for libel. Yet the witness statements show the extent of Wilde’s homosexual contacts. Once the libel suit collapsed, the authorities decided to prosecute Wilde, and the controversy that followed preoccupied the press for weeks before he was sentenced to two years in jail.

Wilde’s reputation began to revive not long after his demise. Richard Strauss’s Salome (1905), which features in L.A. Opera’s current season, helped turn the tide. And the publication of Wilde’s prison letter, De Profundis, did much to rehabilitate him in the same year. More than a century later, Oscar Wilde: L’impertinent absolu reveals how strongly Wilde speaks to us now. It also reveals—for all his lasting fame—that much remains to be learned about Oscar Wilde.

The post Why Oscar Wilde’s Life Was a Work of Art appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But alongside this work—now preserved at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History as “Portraits of a City: The Scurlock Photographic Studio’s Legacy to Washington, D.C.”—are the family’s abundant but lesser-known images of schoolchildren.

These are exquisitely posed demonstrations of the promise of the next generation, a generation—theoretically anyway—less burdened by and beholden to a heavy, harmful past. Children with more freedom, to think and learn and acquire a good education.

The Scurlocks endeavored to portray the subjects of all of their work in the most flattering light, dressed in Sunday finery or their Lindy Hop best. They showcased the best examples in the display window of their U Street studio. To make it into the window became a substantiation of success.

As author and journalist Wil Haygood put it: “The style of their work—refined, dignified and poised—became known as ‘the Scurlock look.’ It said a lot of things, chief among them that classiness is swell and uplift gets rewarded.”

To create and sustain this view took a deep commitment, one handed down from father to sons. In a 2003 interview, Robert Scurlock described his father as “very intense, in all of his endeavors.” And so for more than six decades the Scurlocks documented, collected, and shared an idealized beauty, and in that act declared that this, too, was a part of the story of black America worth knowing and telling.

This mission presented a particular challenge when it came to portraying the schoolchildren of Washington D.C., where the educational inequities that scourged the nation emerged in a particular way. Unlike anywhere else in the country, public school teachers were employees of the federal government, and so they were paid the same regardless of skin color. The District was also home to the nation’s first public high school for non-white students, named for Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose own literary career, as one of the first nationally recognized black poets, was launched during his years attending an all-white high school.

And yet, the ugliness of segregation and the hardships that it wrought persisted—a school desegregation case from Washington D.C. was one of five from around the country that were combined into Brown v. Board of Education.

But in the Scurlock photos of schoolchildren, the “Scurlock look” is in full effect, in scenes carefully posed to evince the high-minded activities underway. A group of girls in their ballerina best. Boys receiving training in Safety Patrol. Tiny children propped on folding chairs paying rapt attention to their music instructor. And a drama class, complete with fainting couch and a large sign on the wall reading: “Enroll your child and inspire youth to seek a life of value.”

Of course, children often have their own ideas, and among the photos of children, also, are glimpses of a restless shaking-loose from the restraint of the Scurlock sensibility. A preschool girl smiles widely and directly into the camera as she prepares to cut her birthday cake. A group of boys dressed as clowns and circus animals express both ferocity and fun. Three thespians posed on the set of a school play bear expressions of grudging tolerance bordering on misery.

Who were these children and what were their lives like at that time? How do these moments sit in their memories? The information on many of the images in the collection is incomplete, and the Smithsonian welcomes any help in filling in the blanks. You can view much of the collection through their web portal, and also email them on specific photos. In this way, the story of the “Scurlock look” continues to unfold.

The post In the Segregated 20th Century, Schoolchildren Embodied Black Uplift appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Opie’s photographs show the Hollywood legend’s homey—if opulent—setting. We see paintings from Taylor’s art collection hung in comfortable living spaces: There’s a Pissarro landscape above the sofa and a Warhol silkscreen by the fireplace. We see Taylor’s sparkling necklaces set out on a dressing table near a tray of makeup and brushes. We see a pet cat stepping over a line of Chanel shoes. Also a manual for the television remote control, resting on Taylor’s bedside table near a clock and a cup of pens and emery boards. The photographs reveal Taylor’s rooms as equally beautiful and intimate—a series of clothing and purses, for example, forms a lush rainbow of color and texture.

Intimacy was Opie’s goal. She described it as trying to be “as loving as possible.” Wanting to avoid the taint of voyeurism, she hoped to draw her audience into a private, familiar place. This ambition distinguishes 700 Nimes Road from its most obvious predecessor, William Eggleston’s photographs of Graceland, Elvis Presley’s home, made in 1984. Eggleston began his series when Graceland was already open to the public; his camera is analytic, even scornful, whereas Opie’s strives for empathy. For her, portraiture is necessarily personal—regardless of its subject.

700 Nimes Road might seem like something of an outlier for Opie. A professor of photography at UCLA, she is known for her pictures of people. An exhibition of her work now on view at the Hammer Museum is called, simply, “Portraits.” It features gorgeous, softly-lit images of friends and artists. Opie’s pictures also explore questions of community and have documented members of LGBTQ communities in particular.

But this project fits solidly into her larger body of work. When working at Elizabeth Taylor’s home, Opie said, she reflected on the “multigenerational community” that related to this movie star’s work. This included older filmgoers who watched her in movies like National Velvet, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Cleopatra, and a “queer community,” Opie explained, who knew Taylor as a “bad-ass activist” ready to support AIDS patients in the ’80s. But the most important link between Nimes Road and other Opie photographs is an intimate sensibility. When Opie takes a picture of someone—celebrity or unknown, outsider or insider—it’s about “being with them on the simplest level.”

A photo can also try to preserve simple togetherness when the person is no longer around. Taylor died while Opie was assembling the photographs for 700 Nimes Road. When Taylor’s personal assistant allowed Opie to continue and finish her work, she became part of a household plunged into grief: “All of a sudden I’m with the people who are closest to [Taylor], going through this mourning process [for] a person I had never met,” Opie recalled. Taylor’s passing is evident in some of the volume’s images, which show jewels being packed and labeled for auction (one box is called “Mike Todd Diamond Tiara”). Her passing also made editing and choosing images—Opie took thousands—harder. But it made the book, Opie knew, even more important. This volume is “really the last portrait of Elizabeth Taylor,” Opie explained. 700 Nimes Road shows us what a simple description like “last portrait” can mean.

The post Elizabeth Taylor Never Appeared in Her Final, Most Intimate Portrait appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.