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Date: Fri, 19 Nov 1999 11:31:08 -0500
From: <nytab@pipeline.com>
Subject: (exotica) [obits from NYTimes] Horst, Bowles
November 19, 1999
Horst P. Horst, Photographer of Fashionable, Dies at 93
By CATHY HORYN,NYTimes
Horst P. Horst, a master of light and deep shadow whose photographs of fashion and fashionable creatures like Coco Chanel, Marlene Dietrich and Noel Coward evoked the glamorous 1930s as well as his own chic circle in Paris, died Thursday at his home in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. He was 93.
The photographer, who was known from the beginning of his expansive career as, simply, Horst, had been in failing health since suffering from pneumonia last year, said Richard J. Horst, his manager and archivist, who also became the photographer's adopted son.
Best known for his classical images of models and society figures posed in dramatic, often Greek-inspired settings, Horst started taking pictures in 1931 as a protege of the aristocratic photographer George Hoyningen-Huene, and continued to work until 1991, photographing subjects as diverse as Jean Cocteau, Harry Truman, Maria Callas, Gertrude Stein and Andy Warhol, as well as settings like the Iranian deserts and interiors of Irish castles.
"He really was the 20th century," said the photographer Eric Boman, who met Horst in 1978, when both were assigned to photograph the French fashion collections, and who subsequently became a regular visitor to the Horst home on Long Island. Many of the furnishings there were from his friend Chanel, and a portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy, leaning against a White House pillar, hung in a bathroom.
The people he knew, the clothes he photographed, conjure up a world where elegance and manners still mattered, and indeed Horst was himself a specimen of prewar savoir-faire, with blond hair and a trim, muscular body. His settings were often highly stylized, and he preferred to work in a studio, where he could use artificial light to impose an unreality on his subjects, elevating them to a glamorous ideal.
In a 1984 biography by Valentine Lawford, a former British foreign service officer who became Horst's companion, Horst recalled a photo session in 1935 with the Comtesse de la Falaise for French Vogue: "To get this shot, it took two days. It was the idea that counted then, not the sort of nervous rush they work in today."
Horst also had an exquisite, if slightly eccentric, eye for detail, and in his early years as a photographer for French Vogue would shoo away overly fastidious fashion editors who tried to make immaculate his settings -- fussing with a stray flower, for instance.
"My best pictures always have a little mess -- a dirty ashtray, something," he said. And when he was asked by Diana Vreeland, the editor in chief of American Vogue, to photograph interiors, he was equally adept at recognizing the details that brought out the inhabitants' personalities.
"The cravats around the carafes of wine at the Rothschilds' house in Mouton," mused Mrs. Vreeland in 1984. "The Duke of Windsor's red leather dispatch box marked 'The King.' When those pictures came in, I went berserk. I'd be intoxicated for hours."
The younger of two sons of a well-to-do hardware merchant, Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann was born Aug. 14, 1906, in the eastern German town of Weiseenfels-an-der-Saale. Although he seldom bothered to use his surname even as a fledgling photographer among an expatriate crowd in Paris in the early 30s, he formally dropped it in 1943, after he had become an American citizen, so as not to be confused with the Nazi official Martin Bormann. He legally changed his name to Horst P. Horst.
A somewhat indolent youth who gravitated toward artists and actors, Horst initially wanted to be an architect, and was accepted by LeCorbusier as an apprentice in the Bauhaus architect's studio in Paris. But in Paris he soon met Hoyningen-Huene, whose father had been chief equerry to Czar Nicholas II, and his life took a different course.
Through Hoyningen-Huene, Horst met Cecil Beaton, who in turned introduced him to Charles James, the Chicago-born dressmaker. Horst was to spend a productive decade in the glittering orbit of the interior designer Jean-Michel Frank, the writer Janet Flanner, the set designer Bebe Berard, and, course, Chanel, whom Horst called "the queen of the whole thing."
He left for America in the late summer of 1939, shortly after taking what would be one of his most enduring images -- of a model, bathed in deep shadows, wearing an unraveling corset. He said the picture summed up his feelings about an era's end. "While I was taking it," he said, "I was thinking of all that I was leaving behind."
He went on to have a successful career as a photographer for American Vogue, though, in the 1960s, when editors demanded more lifelike shots of models running and skipping, he fell out of favor. Still, he continued to find work, shooting interiors as well as portraits and advertising images for Seventh Avenue designers like Bill Blass and Calvin Klein, for whom he used his sense of drama and elegance to light socks.
Aside from his son, Horst had no survivors.
Writer Paul Bowles Dies at 88
By MEL GUSSOW,NYTimes
Paul Bowles, the novelist, composer, poet and quintessential outsider of American literature, died of a heart attack Thursday in a hospital in Tangier, Morocco.
He was 88, and throughout his life, he remained an artist whose name evoked an atmosphere of dark, lonely Moroccan streets and endless scorching deserts, a haze of hashish and drug-induced visions.
Bowles was taken to the hospital on Nov. 7 from his home in Tangier, where he had lived since 1947.
He was most famous for his stories and his novels, especially "The Sheltering Sky." He was also known for his songs, concertos, incidental music and operas; for his marriage to Jane Bowles a novelist and playwright who died in 1973, and, simply, for being Paul Bowles.
He became an icon of individualism. Although he remained elusive to his biographers as well as his critics, his life as an expatriate was as fascinating as his own experiments in art.
One of the last of his cultural generation, what might be called the post-Lost Generation, he knew and occasionally collaborated with many of the major artistic figures of his time, among them Orson Welles, Tennessee Williams and Gertrude Stein. He put a stamp of sui generis on whatever he chose to do, or not to do. In many ways, his career was one of avoidance.
In an interview with The New York Times in 1995, the last time he visited New York, he said that a typical Bowles fictional character "slips through life, if possible without touching anything, without touching other people." Asked if that was how he lived his own life, he admitted: "I've tried. It's hard. If you discover you're affecting other people, you have to stop doing whatever you're doing."
Bowles's fiction deals with civilization overcome by savagery, a world in which innocence is corrupted and delirium thrives. At the core is a feeling of isolation, self-contained compartments in which people live alone and are fearful of communication. As he said in an interview in The Paris Review in 1981, "Everyone is isolated from everyone else." A Place Of Wisdom, Ecstasy, Even Death
Although Bowles's 1972 autobiography was titled "Without Stopping," his career was filled with stops and restarts. At various points he turned away from music and took up fiction, gave up writing novels, retreated to Tangier and became a collector of Arabian stories and songs, and moved farther away from the worlds of publishing and society toward an unknown destination.
As he said in his autobiography, "Like any Romantic, I had always been vaguely certain that sometime during my life I should come into a magic place which, in disclosing its secrets, would give me wisdom and ecstasy -- perhaps even death." In contrast to other writers who chose to keep their names in the public spotlight, Bowles steadfastly preferred not to, avoiding commitments and rejecting offers."I'm not ambitious," he said. "If I had been, I'd have stayed in New York."
Bowles became a magnet for those envisioning the artist's life away from the mainstream. It is not surprising that he was idolized by writers of the Beat Generation, many of whom visited him in Tangier.
Allen Ginsberg called him "a caviar writer." Sweet Songs, Light in Texture
There were two sides to Bowles's art, as Ned Rorem explained in his memoir "Knowing When to Stop." Rorem said that Bowles's stories were "icy, cruel, objective" and his music was "warm, wistful, witty."
It was his feeling that of his 50 stories only two were marked by violence. In one of the most brutal -- and most admired -- stories, "A Distant Thunder," a professor is captured by nomads who cut out his tongue and treat him as their slave.
Virgil Thomson said about Bowles's work as a composer: "Paul Bowles's songs are enchanting for their sweetness of mood, their lightness of texture, for in general their way of being wholly alive and right. . . . The texts fit their tunes like a peach in its skin."
One of the oddities of Bowles's life is that this international traveler, who was marked by his rootlessness and who was seemingly a wanderer in the desert of his own choice, was born into a middle-class environment in Jamaica, Queens. During his childhood, Jamaica was still a bucolic environment with sheep grazing on the main street.
In one family legend, Claude Bowles, who was a dentist, tried to kill his son, Paul, in infancy by stripping off the baby's clothes and placing him in a basket on a windowsill during a snowstorm. According to the story, he was rescued by his grandmother. In his biography of Bowles, "An Invisible Spectator," Christopher Sawyer-Lauτanno said that the incident might not have happened "but Bowles has always believed it to be true," and it haunted him.
He could read by the time he was 3 and within the year was writing stories. Soon, he wrote surrealistic poetry and music. When he was 16, he published poetry in Transition magazine.
Until he was 18, he followed a rigidly formalized life. Then, in his first semester at the University of Virginia, he suddenly quit school. He left the United States without telling his parents, expecting never to see them again. For the first of several times, he changed his life.
In characteristic Bowles fashion, he fled to Paris. He once said that he was not running away but was "running toward something, although I didn't know what at the time." A year later, he returned to the United States , where he met Aaron Copland and began to study composition with him. For four months he lived in Berlin, where one of his friends was Christopher Isherwood, who was gathering material for what would later become the book "Goodbye to Berlin." Isherwood named his leading character Sally Bowles after Paul Bowles.
In 1931, at the suggestion of Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Bowles went to Morocco, where he and Copland shared a house in Tangier.
Instant Rapport and Countless Affairs
By the mid-1930's, he was back in New York. He wrote musical scores for Orson Welles and later for works by William Saroyan, Tennessee Williams and others. In 1937 he met Jane Auer. She was a lesbian, and he was bisexual; there was an immediate rapport and an intimacy. Within a year they were married.
Through countless affairs on both sides, they remained married and permanently attached to each other. Looking back on their marriage, Bowles said: "We played everything by ear. Each one did what he pleased."
At first, he focused on his music while she began writing a novel. When she gave him a draft of him in Mexico in 1945, he read it carefully and, acting as editor, suggested changes. The book, "Two Serious Ladies," received mixed reviews, but it was the beginning of Jane Bowles's literary reputation, and it acted as an inspiration to her husband. "It was the excitement of participating in that that got me interested in writing," he said to Millicent Dillon, author of biographies of both Bowleses.
In New York, the Bowleses were immersed in a literary world. In the early 1940's they lived with other artists in a house on Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights. The residents included W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten and Oliver Smith, the scenic designer. For two years in the late 1940's the couple lived on West 10th Street in Manhattan. Smith rented three floors of a brownstone. Bowles lived on the top floor, Smith was on the floor below, and another flight down lived Jane Bowles and her friend Helvetia Perkins. The four shared a cook and lived communally. For a time, the first two floors in the house were occupied by Dashiell Hammett.
During this period, Bowles wrote scores for seven plays (including "The Glass Menagerie") and collaborated with Tennessee Williams on the song fragments "Blue Mountain Ballads." He also returned to writing short stories and translated Jean-Paul Sartre's play "Huis Clos," retitling it "No Exit." Identifying with the credo of the play, he said that mankind could be saved not through faith "but only by ourselves -- by looking straight at our own weaknesses so that we know them through and through."
One night in 1947 Bowles had a dream about "the magic city" of Tangier, one of his homes during the 1930's, and he decided to return there. Before departing, he had an idea for a novel that would take place in the Sahara, and he thought of a title, "The Sheltering Sky," borrowing it from the popular song, "Down Among the Sheltering Palms." Later his wife joined him in Tangier. Published in 1949, "The Sheltering Sky" quickly became the foundation of his estimable career as an author. He described the book as "an adventure story in which the adventures take place on two planes simultaneously: in the actual desert and in the inner desert of the spirit."
The central characters are Port and Kit Moresby, a married couple who are generally considered to be surrogates for Paul and Jane Bowles. But in his Paris Review interview, Bowles denied that possibility: "The tale is entirely imaginary. Kit is not Jane, although I used some of Jane's characteristics in determining Kit's reactions to such a voyage. Obviously I thought of Port as a fictional extension of myself. But Port is certainly not Paul Bowles, any more than Kit is Jane."
The story leads ineluctably to Port's death, which the reader sees from the character's point of view: "It was in the silence of the room that he now located all those hostile forces: the very fact that the room's inert watchfulness was on all sides made him distrust it. Outside himself, it was all there was. He looked at the line made by the joining of the wall and the floor, endeavored to fix it in his mind, that he might have something to hang on to when his eyes should shut."
A Best Seller and a Film
Reviewing the book in The New York Times Book Review, Tennessee Williams proclaimed the author as "a talent of true maturity and sophistication." Williams said it was one of the few books by an American writer "to bear the spiritual imprint of recent history in the Western world."
In a review in The Times of a subsequent Bowles novel, Conrad Knickerbocker ranked "The Sheltering Sky" "with the dozen or so most important American novels published since World War II." The book became a best seller and was sold to the movies, but it was to be 40 years before it was filmed. In 1990 Bernardo Bertolucci's lavish movie, starring John Malkovich and Debra Winger and with Bowles himself playing a cameo role, received mixed reviews. The author was disappointed. His one-word criticism of the film: "Awful."
The novel was followed, in 1952, by "Let It Come Down," about an American bank clerk who journeys to Tangier and is caught up in a world of intrigue and corruption.
"The Spider's House" (1955) deals with an American novelist living in Fez during a Nationalist revolt. It was 11 years before Bowles published his next novel, "Up Above the World." At the center of that book are an American doctor and his wife, adrift in Central America and held captive by a charming man of mystery. Neither novel measured up to Bowles's first success.
In Morocco he began translating the stories of Arab writers, particularly Mohammed Mrabet. Because Bowles seldom traveled, friends (and journalists and potential biographers) came to see him as if on a pilgrimage. Eventually his dream city of Tangier was invaded by tourists and became something of a nightmare. Still he stayed on.
He lived alone in a modern apartment building in Tangier. For many years, he limited his contacts with the outside world by refusing to have a telephone, but recently had installed both a phone and fax.
There are no survivors.
Cherie Nutting's "Yesterday's Perfume," a photographic diary of Bowles's last years, with text by the author, is scheduled to be published in the fall of 2000.
"I live in the present," Bowles said, and added about the past: "I remember it as one remembers a landscape, an unchanging landscape. That which has happened is finished. I suppose you could say that a man can learn how to avoid making the same actions which he's discovered were errors. I would recommend not thinking about it."
For Bowles, the point of life is to have fun, "if there is any point at all." Enjoyment, he said firmly, "is what life should provide."
When it was suggested to him that others might say that life should provide a greater moral purpose, he said: "What is moral purpose? The word 'moral' sets nothing ringing in my head. Who decides what's moral and what isn't? Right behavior, is that moral? Well, what's right behavior?"
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