One of the great surprises in the exhibition catalogue for Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Always To Return)—which I brought up to curators Charlotte Ickes and Josh T. Franco in our conversation yesterday—is the essay by Joshua Chambers-Letson about Felix’s 1992 photo of flowers, “Untitled” (Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein’s Grave, Paris). Chambers-Letson discusses the work as portraiture, and in the context it’s traditionally been seen in, of “queer death, queer grief, and queer love.” But then pivoting to the work as an affirmation of queer life, he proceeds to expand on Stein and Toklas’ relationship as a complicated but revolutionary and rather boldly open example of queer companionship in a hostile world.
Chambers-Letson traces the contours of Stein & Toklas’ relationship IRL and in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Its queerness stands as “the open secret at the heart of the book” in which Stein places Toklas “among the ‘wives of genius.'”
None of which is unknown, of course, but it was new to me in the context of Felix’s work, and especially of the show. Ickes mentioned confronting the archival evidence of Stein & Toklas’s close relationship with the Vichy government of France. Documentation of their enthusiastic postwar support for the Vichy politician and nazi collaborator who protected them, Jewish American lesbians in France, is in the catalogue. It’s information not available to Felix is his time, but it’s all the more important now amidst our fascist resurgence.
Felix’s view of the limitations of portrait photography lingered in my mind as I searched for a picture of Cy Twombly to post on his birthday the other day. [I went with this one, btw, not this one] Which led me to Catherine Lacey’s great 2018 review of Chalk, Joshua Rivkin’s fascinating and revelatory thwarted biography of Twombly.
I wrote about Rivkin’s book, which Nicola Del Roscio had disapproved of and tried to stop, on the occasion of Nicola sending a cease & desist order to Tyler Green for using images of Twombly’s work in an interview with a classics scholar who’d just written a book about 50 Days At Iliam. Published by the Philadelphia Museum. With a foreword by Nicola Del Roscio. [I made an artist book about that one.]
This morning I looked for a podcast about Rivkin & Chalk, and found Lacey again. Because she referenced Rivkin’s Twombly book in a 2023 conversation about her novel, The Biography of X, at Shakespeare & Co. Books. Lacey’s novel is structured and presented as a biography by C.M. Lucca, the widow of the renowned artist formally known as X, whose world turns out to be an alternate history of the 20th century where the US elected a socialist woman as president after WWII. Lucca’s biography likewise appears authoritative and conventional at first blush, before the gaps, contradictions, and anomalies start to appear. X’s fraught history in the theofascist secessionist South of Lacey’s America ends up altering the understanding of the great renegade artist’s work.
I write this with the caveat of not yet having read the book; which I will do straightway, because, as you’ll see below, I feel the need to investigate my hypothesis and report back.
Because Lacey’s invocation of Twombly, and her own epiphanic experience with his work at the Menil that resonates with Rivkin’s, and then her ongoing insights into Rivkin’s auto/biographical project, makes me think of Andrea Bettinetti’s authorized documentary, Cy, Dear [which dropped, like Chalk, in 2018.] Whatever else its magic or message, Cy, Dear is an obliquely shot portrait of Nicola Del Roscio’s untended grief and a witness to, if not specifically a search for, a sense of self subsumed in a lifetime of support of a great artist.
In Cy, Dear and throughout his texts—forewords, anecdotes, and recollections—Nicola shares seemingly offhand revelations of his life together with Twombly, and of the particularly southern world Twombly grew up in. I’m now riveted to read The Biography of X, not just for itself—it sounds like a remarkable achievement—but to see how it relates to Twombly, and what Lucca has to tell about Del Roscio. He may be joining Ross, Alice, and C.M. on the Wives of Genius pedestal.
[barely started it update] The first chapter starts with an encounter rejecting an unwanted biographer and denying him access to X’s archives and work, I think this is going to be amazing.
Buy Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Always To Return) or Catherine Lacey’s The Autobiography of X [bookshop.org]