Word: evening
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...prevailing climate of this collection is one of spare, sharp lines, big graphics and crisp edges. John loves Irving Penn, whose work looks clean and sober even when his subject was a New Guinea tribesman caked in ceremonial mud. He loves Robert Mapplethorpe, but without the whips and chains, which means the Mapplethorpe of laser-cut male torsos and tulips that loom before you like stage-lit pachyderms. These pictures were not collected by the inebriated stage floozy we used to know and love. They bear the mark of the studious Sir Elton John, a man buying things...
...buried good friends--Gianni Versace, Princess Diana--and lost others to AIDS. The Elton John who wrote Daniel, with its baffled yearning, is the one who loves the blue-tinted male nudes of John Dugdale, with their Victorian grief. The somber undercurrent is plain even in Andres Serrano's vivid crimson circle in a rectangle of bright yellow, which on closer inspection turns out to be a pool of blood...
...Even if you didn't know that John started buying pictures after he stopped drinking, you might figure it out from the pictures. They suggest the mental climate of a man cleaning up his act. The old John was a circus clown shot out of his own cannon, so you'd expect his collection to have more of the orangutan behavior and chili-pepper colors you get from, say, David La Chappelle, the celebrity photographer who pinwheeled around John three years ago. You do find some of that in the Polaroid self-portraits Lucas Samaras made in the 1970s, when...
...neighbor Richard M. Nixon "prowling restlessly around his garden." In a little while a party begins at the Schlesinger house. A guest--invited by a friend of his wife's--comes to the door, a man whom Schlesinger has never met: Alger Hiss. They have a polite chat--even though Schlesinger considers Hiss to be just about as guilty as Nixon said he was long years before...
...Martha's Vineyard with movie stars, the lunches at Manhattan's Mortimer's restaurant with the society crowd). He indulges the old New Deal intellectual's habit of bashing business and businessmen in an almost recreational way. (At one point he blithely equates capitalism with sexism and racism.) But even his smugness has a certain hilarious pungency. He records the time in London toward the end of the war when a V-1 bomb fell close by; everyone else in his office fell to the floor, but as a co-worker's journal noted, "Arthur...boldly looked out the window...