In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.
—T. S. ELIOT
The bright blue banner above the entrance to the Metropolitan Museum of Art unfurled to a depth of thirty feet, with Avedon’s name printed almost fifteen feet across it in the casual script of his own signature. In 1978, not only did the prominence of his name on the facade of that museum give more symbolic weight to photography in the precincts of high art than all the scholarship about the medium until that point combined, but the media attention generated by the show grounded the idea of photography as art into the public imagination. Avedon: Photographs, 1947–1977, which opened on September 14, was the first retrospective exhibition of a living artist at the museum; the first exhibition of its size (more than 185 pictures) and scope (thirty-three years) by a single photographer; and the first exhibition that featured fashion photography in depth at any major museum.
On the occasion of this milestone, Newsweek published a cover story called “The Avedon Look,” in the October 16 issue. In a self-portrait Dick stares out under the Newsweek logo, his glasses hovering on his forehead, his dark eyes penetrating, his expression alert and intent as he stands beside his Deardorff camera. “Fashion work has long attracted photographers who shadowed the fine arts like bloodhounds,” writes Charles Michener in his profile of Avedon, listing examples such as “Baron de Meyer, who drew from the gauzy pictorialism of Whistler; Edward Steichen, who appropriated art deco; surrealists like Man Ray; neo-Victorians like Cecil Beaton; open-air realists like Munkacsi. . . . Avedon’s work shows debts to so many of these styles, but he did something unique: he democratized fashion.”
The exhibit was seven years in the planning, going back to 1971, when Dick and John McKendry first discussed doing a show of Avedon’s fashion work. After McKendry died, in 1975, Ashton Hawkins guided the project through the administrative bureaucracy of the museum, playing an instrumental role in bringing the show to fruition.
As a lawyer for the Met, Hawkins was a kind of rainmaker, serving a unique role between curatorial interests and society patronage. He once accompanied Bill Lieberman, a curator at the Met, to Santa Fe, where he was working on a project with Georgia O’Keeffe. When she came to New York, everyone wanted to meet her. “So, I had a party for her in 1977 or ’78,” Hawkins said. “Jackie [Onassis], Lillian Hellman, Dick and Andy [Warhol] and Diana [Vreeland] all came to my house for dinner one night. No one talked but everyone listened to Georgia O’Keeffe, who held court the entire evening.” This successful gathering was his version of community relations.
Hawkins could be seated next to someone at dinner who would fund an entire exhibit or get a former Harvard classmate to put up the money for a major acquisition. For the Avedon exhibit, he wrote letters to friends soliciting support, and he succeeded in obtaining the funds from Mitzi Newhouse, whose foundation put up $85,000 to pay for the show. “It was so much more familial then, friendly, elegant, artful,” Johnnie Moore Hawkins, Ashton’s husband, said about the process of raising money. Of course, while Mitzi Newhouse was genuinely enthusiastic about the idea, the arrangement was incestuous: the Newhouse family owned Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue, Avedon’s employer.
In his role as in-house counsel, Ashton Hawkins negotiated the terms of the exhibit, representing the museum, but equally his good friend Dick. The final letter of agreement gave Avedon inordinate control over his own show at a renowned institution where curatorial deliberations took place as if they were Supreme Court proceedings. “All decisions regarding the content of the show (number, size and subjects of the photographs) will be made by Mr. Avedon subject to final approval of the Museum’s Department of Prints and Photographs,” states the agreement. And while the museum had final say over the mounting and lighting of the show, as well as all publicity and promotion, these elements were also subject to Avedon’s approval.
Colta Ives was the curator in charge of the Department of Prints and Photographs at the museum. There were people at the institution who felt it to be inappropriate to show a living artist, much less a photographer, never mind a fashion photographer. “But in the curatorial circles I was in,” Ives said, “there was no prejudice against photography whatsoever.” While the amount of control Avedon had over his show raised eyebrows, Ives was unfazed. She was happy to honor the memory of her mentor, John McKendry, and the Avedon show, she said, was “fulfilling one of John’s dreams.”
“I was in the galleries every day while Dick was hanging the show,” Ives explained. Avedon had definite ideas about the photographs he wanted to include and where they should go, often consulting Elizabeth “Betti” Paul, his young designer, and relying on her judgment about the sequence and the size of images, perhaps in the absence of Marvin Israel, who had recommended her, and with whom he had worked so closely on his previous exhibitions until their falling-out over the Marlborough show—when, last minute, Dick had Marvin’s name as the exhibition designer removed from the marquee wall on the day of the opening. Of course, he consulted Ives, too. “Dick was courtly in his respect and collaborative spirit, even though, in the end, he was making the decisions,” she said. “He seemed so delighted by the whole enterprise.” Ives believed that Dick’s artistry was in setting the stage, an awareness she recognized as a quality of his fashion images as well. She considered his sense of space and staging to be a strength of the show and spoke of an atmosphere of excitement during the entire installation.
John McKendry’s widow, Maxime de la Falaise, was also gratified by the realization of this exhibit. “For me to be finally present at the opening of this show was a strange experience, with feelings of loss and of triumph and pleasure that something [my husband] started was completed,” she wrote. “I had modeled for one season for Avedon and knew the clothes in the show so well I could almost point to the spot that was too tight or loose on me, remember the color and the feel of the wool on a Schiaparelli suit, the tiny landscape on the hand-painted button.”
The opening of the Avedon exhibit started at nine p.m., following a private dinner, and the line of people spread down the front steps of the museum into the street. Stephen Koch, author, educator, and, also, director of the Peter Hujar Archive, attended the opening with Hujar. “If Peter was going to be ignored by Avedon, he did not want to endure the humiliation alone,” Koch said, describing Hujar’s discomfort about seeing Dick after a decade-long silence that followed a year of intense, intimate, late-night phone conversations between them. “It was jammed, one limo after another, and in the big hall Avedon was at one end, and all of New York society lined the corridor. Peter was quite stiff and worried. We walked about ten feet in and Avedon threw out his arms and yelled ‘Peter!’ then ran toward him and embraced him while camera flashes went off. I never saw Peter again for the rest of the night.”
The show was divided into five rooms, in which the work was presented consecutively, each room representing a period in Avedon’s evolution as a fashion photographer, and then, in the final room, selections from his portraiture. The pictures grew in size from one room to the next, from small and conventionally framed to the final individual portraits that hung loose on the wall, as if photographic tapestries. “On one level, the progression from small to big mockingly traces the photographer’s rise from modest beginnings as an eager toiler at Harper’s Bazaar to his current status as the biggest and richest and most celebrated fashion photographer in our galaxy,” writes Janet Malcolm in her New Yorker review. “On another level, and, quite seriously, it expresses Avedon’s sense of himself as an expanding artistic consciousness. Finally, it is a kind of meta-statement about the almost monstrous complexity of Avedon’s late vision of art.” While Malcolm suggests that Avedon was, at times, trying too hard, she acknowledges his success at achieving a new style: “His shrewd recognition of the fact that to join the ranks of the masters he must do more than imitate them drove him to lengths of artifice that fashion photography had hitherto not seen. These ruses and tricks were so persuasive, the inventions and ideas so ingenious, that to this day Avedon’s reputation for naturalness and spontaneity is undimmed.”
As for his portraits in the show, all of them women unknown to the general public (June Leaf, Renata Adler, and Loulou de la Falaise, daughter of Maxime), Malcolm remarks on the difference between his published portraits, which seem more human and accessible, and those on the wall, whose monumental size forces the viewer to contend with images of strong women. With the Met portraits, she concludes, “Avedon continues the work that commenced with the great, unbearable studies of his dying father, about which there is ‘nothing personal’ (to borrow the telling title of Avedon’s second collection of photographs), and in whose implacable objectivity lies a description of photography as well as of our common fate.”
The idea that Avedon’s work is about “a description of photography” is seminal to an understanding of his oeuvre. All artists deconstruct the form in which they are working—whether unconsciously or deliberately—to reveal what Owen Edwards once referred to, in Avedon’s case, as “the shadow of his meaning.” In Avedon’s portraiture, in particular, the choice of camera, the consistency of format, the moment of exposure, its optical precision, his forensic presentation, the quality of the print, and the size of the image are all photographic properties to which he paid exacting attention. These portraits, his subjects ranging from the most celebrated to the least known, would not be as significant to portraiture itself without the technical and aesthetic challenges Avedon threw at the medium to advance the art of photography itself.
Over the years, critics dismissed Avedon’s portraiture as too formulaic to be anything more than high stylization. It’s true that he stripped his portraits to nothing but the figure in the frame, the subject staring into the camera, “every wrinkle, stubble, wen and nervous tick” visible on a face; but it is a mistake to conclude that his uniformity of style is a mere formula that lacks the substance of artistic insight, the promise of revelation. The utter simplicity of format is the message: All of us lost our innocence when we arrived at the ability to annihilate ourselves. The stark outline of the individual against the postnuclear white backdrop is worthy of our contemplation, whether we get lost in the complexity of the individuals’ faces, the mythology of certain subjects, or the somber mood that is consistent through the sum of his portraiture. Avedon pushed the technology of the photographic process to its very limits to enable us a clear-eyed, uniform look at ourselves—honestly, directly, soberly. The camera is a machine that sees us more clearly than we can see ourselves. Avedon knew that. Warhol knew that. “The photographs have a reality for me that the people don’t,” Avedon said. “It’s through the photographs that I know them.”
In 1977, Susan Sontag published On Photography, a collection of essays she had written throughout the 1970s for the New York Review of Books. In April 1978, Avedon photographed Sontag for an upcoming feature in Vogue by Elizabeth Hardwick, who called Sontag “a romantic of the intellectual life.” Three months later Sontag wrote a meditation about Avedon’s work in the same magazine on the occasion of his exhibit at the Met. Called “The Avedon Eye,” the Vogue feature opens with a portrait of Dick taken by Irving Penn, in which he is holding his hand over his face, his forefinger and middle finger spread to reveal the penetrating intensity of his left eye. The picture echoes another Penn portrait, of Picasso, in which the artist’s eye is the focal point around which the rest of his face recedes into shadow. Sontag writes about fashion photography in philosophical terms: “Fashion is an acute mentalizing of the erotic,” she asserts. “Its subjects are beautiful women, and women comprise most of the audience for these images when they first appear in magazines: women scrutinizing images of women—for an idea of the erotic.” She follows an evolution of fashion over time from the royal court to the drawing rooms of “society” to the eventual democratization of style. “This ongoing transformation of fashion, its so-called death and its rebirth as a much larger subject for photography, explains much of the shape of Richard Avedon’s prodigious and varied activity,” Sontag writes. “Endlessly knowing about and loyal to fashion as spectacle (the theatricalization of beauty; the erotic as artifice; the stylization of appearances as such), Avedon has taken pains to show that fashion photography is not limited to fashion—a development that now seems inherent in fashion photography itself.”
In Avedon’s early period, the designers all came from Paris. While he was always aware of the architecture of the clothing—the geometries of Dior; the structure of Chanel; and, later, the space-age materials of Courrèges—he would create an entire ethos around the model, whether on a cobblestone street or in the Tuileries Garden. He invented moments of poetic regard by coaxing his models to perform, and he captured the scene in medias res, in effect constructing the appearance of authenticity. This inspired approach was aptly described by the haiku-like title of the early profile about him in the New Yorker: “A Woman Entering a Taxi in the Rain.” Leading up to the 1960s, he started developing sequences in which each fashion shot served as a “film still” in a grouping that tracks a cinematic narrative: Suzy Parker and Robin Tattersall on a honeymoon escapade in Paris; Suzy Parker and Mike Nichols escaping the paparazzi in a high-drama European caper; or the Spanish Abascal twins in a ménage à trois with a Brazilian aristocrat in an island idyll out of The Sheltering Sky. Each continuous narrative exists solely as a platform for the clothes.
Bill Cunningham, who chronicled the intersection of fashion and culture in New York for nearly a half century, had two weekly “photographic columns” in the New York Times that presented both street fashion and the ceremonial formality of evening wear. Before he took up the camera, though, he wrote expertly about the history of fashion and the evolution of style, and, in 1978, he wrote a full-page review of the Avedon show in the SoHo Weekly News:
“Seventy-five years ago, Edward Steichen started the chain of events that has culminated in photography being thought of and looked at as art. It is ironic at this time, when the Steichen vision appears full-focus, that the main event should be fashion photography,” writes Cunningham. “Fashion pictures have long been considered by museums and purists as commercial fluff and an insult to serious photo exhibitions. The critics fail to see that fashion photography, while seemingly frivolous, and often retouched, like a painter repaints his canvas, can mirror just as accurately the real world.”
A lavish publication accompanied the exhibition at the Met, Avedon: Photographs, 1947–1977, with a ponderous essay of unfortunate incomprehensibility by Harold Brodkey. The selection of pictures underscores the fact that not all of Avedon’s fashion work survives the migration from magazine page to book format or museum wall. Some do, however, such as Renée pirouetting in a Dior skirt in the play of sunlight on the place de la Concorde; Dorian at the mirror in the marble bathroom of Helena Rubinstein’s apartment on the Île Saint-Louis; Dovima and the elephants at the Cirque d’Hiver; Sunny leaning on a roulette table at Le Touquet; Suzy backstage at the Folies Bergère; Carmen leaping across a cobblestone curb. These photographs transcend their original purpose and reside today with enduring resonance as defining examples of “a way of being” at a twentieth-century moment of infinite possibility.
By turns, the better book—and the more vital publication in the conversation about Avedon’s historic significance—is Portraits, published in late 1976 following the Marlborough show, with an essay by the art critic Harold Rosenberg, a serious rumination on the nature of portraiture in photography in the context of art history.
Portraits opens with Avedon’s first portrait of Renata Adler, taken in 1969. His portrait of Evie is in sequence after June Leaf. There are more portraits of writers in the book than artists, among them Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Henry Miller, Isak Dinesen, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Harold Brodkey, and William S. Burroughs. Artists include Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Robert Frank. Among several unexpected portraits in this pantheon of arts and letters are John Szarkowski, curator; R. D. Laing, psychiatrist; and Dr. Lothar Kalinowsky, Evie’s psychiatrist and the advocate of electroshock therapy; Herbert Marcuse, professor of philosophy; Joe Babbington, the caterer across the street from his studio; and Rose Mary Woods, presidential secretary. There are several foldouts for the mural portraits: the Chicago Seven, the Warhol Factory, the Mission Council.
Portraits is arguably Avedon’s most lucid book of photographs. Modest in size—eleven by fourteen inches—the work is presented in a uniform, straightforward manner, one picture per page. In late 1975, Avedon hired Alicia Grant Longwell, a young woman who had worked in the registrar’s office at the Museum of Modern Art, to establish and maintain his archive of noncommercial photographs. “Dick would have certainly discussed with his intimate circle whom he should ask to write the essay,” Alicia said about the choice of Harold Rosenberg. “To have the leading critic of Abstract Expressionism bring his cachet to the project was key. Dick sought this art world connection.” The studio made an initial contact with Rosenberg, who was not only the art critic for the New Yorker, but also at that time teaching at the University of Chicago. In a mission Alicia described as “very Dick,” he dispatched her on a plane to Chicago armed with a mock-up of the book. “I rang the doorbell and was graciously received,” she said. “Harold Rosenberg spent a thoughtful hour looking at the dummy and then acquiesced.”
In his essay, Rosenberg, who in the early 1950s ascribed the term action painting to what Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline were doing, later to be called abstract expressionism, suggests that the difference between painting and photography in their relation to reality could be “summed up in the notion that painting as an art has been freed of its ‘literary’ aspects by the advent of the camera.” He quotes Picasso, who believed that photography had reached the point where “it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and even from the subject.” While painting had become nonrepresentational, Rosenberg posited, “‘stories’ had become the province of the photograph.”
He raises an interesting paradox about portraiture in the early days of photography, when sitters were posed before the camera in the same way they had sat for painters. “In turn, painters depended on photographs for more accurate likenesses,” he writes. “In most of the painted and photographed portraits I have compared, the photograph is superior in credibility and depth and in uniqueness of expression. The often-reproduced daguerreotype of Poe is far more mysterious and intriguing than the etching by Manet.” Rosenberg asserts that in order for a photographer to achieve anything approaching the truth, it is necessary to curtail his resources. “Avedon is difficult as a photographer, in the same way Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still are difficult painters. Like them, Avedon is a ‘reductionist,’ that is, one who purges his art of inessential or meretricious elements. . . . He meets each individual head-on; he is allowed only such grace as may come through the vacant stare of the lens.”
IN EARLY 1976, SOON after Laura Kanelous’s death, Dick asked Norma Stevens to come work for him as his business manager. Norma had been in advertising, worked as a creative director and copywriter, and understood the anatomy of salesmanship. She was married to Martin Stevens, a creative director at Revlon who presided over the cosmetic company’s advertising department, and with whom Dick had worked on the brand’s major ad campaigns for years. Not only was Norma a Madison Avenue insider who brought stealth expertise to her representation of Avedon in the advertising world, she was also a firecracker—savvy, fun-loving, kind, with a laser-focused intensity when it came to driving hard bargains. She turned out to be a perfect fit for Dick in her ability to navigate his cool and calculated business expectations and his wildly mercurial creative demands. Over the years, Norma would become as close to Dick as a spouse in terms of their deeply entwined day-to-day engagement as business coconspirators, and, equally, as parents of the studio household.
“Work was not the only four-letter word that made the studio tick,” Norma Stevens wrote. “Food was the other.” Every morning, breakfast was provided on the studio’s budget by the assistants, who took turns picking up breads from one bakery or pastries from another, the local choices being, of course, first rate, whether William Greenberg, say, or William Poll. “Dick would usually pop downstairs in time to pick most of the pecans off everybody’s pastries,” she writes, “then help himself to a spoonful or two of jam straight from the jar that he had brought back from Paris and to a couple of slices of apple slathered with Skippy peanut butter.”
While Dick could be enormously expansive in his generosity and informal and inclusive with his staff—one working premise of the studio was “the family that eats well together works better together”—he could, unexpectedly, throw a tantrum at the least imagined offense or some incidental disappointment. Stevens describes in her memoir a dizzying array of capers and adventures as Avedon’s sergeant at arms: for more than a quarter century, she brought in a steady and abundant stream of lucrative accounts, solved interminable and wide-ranging studio problems, and served as much a business adviser for Dick as a personal confidante. While there were spectacular rewards—flying first-class to Paris, attending opening nights in parterre seats at the opera, cavorting with Dick’s accomplished friends, having her clothes made directly by designers—they came with a retributive share of irksome injustices. Dick could be divine, but he exacted a price for all of the goodwill whenever he woke her up at two a.m. to share a spur-of-the-moment bright idea, or if she was forced to cancel important personal plans with her young children at the last minute whenever his needs—personal or professional—dictated.
Owen Edwards experienced the unpredictability of Dick’s behavior after five years of what had been a thoroughly delightful and affectionate friendship. In the late 1970s, Edwards decided it was time “to write my piece about Dick and not Dick’s piece about Dick.” His profile of Avedon appeared in American Photographer, where he was then the executive editor, in a sequence of profiles of leading photographers over three consecutive months. “In it I wrote that Dick was a control freak and he wanted people to live the lives he wanted them to live—as opposed to who they are,” Edwards explained. “Of course, he wanted to see it before it came out, but that wasn’t possible.” When the piece was published, a case of Dom Pérignon arrived for Edwards in the lobby of his doorman building, with a note from Avedon: “Wonderful article. I grovel. Dick.” It was verboten for a journalist at a major news organization to receive gifts from the subject of an article, but the ethical conflict was more ambiguous in the context of trade publications, and Edwards was more than pleased to receive Dick’s extravagant present. Yet ten days later, when his colleague Sean Callahan, the editor of American Photographer, asked Avedon to make a cover portrait of Hiro for a subsequent issue, Avedon refused: “Owen Edwards writes gossip instead of truth,” Dick scoffed. “I will never do anything for you people again.” Edwards and Callahan were both left scratching their heads. Edwards returned the remaining bottles of Dom Pérignon to the Avedon studio with a note saying, “You didn’t really mean to send these,” and then received from Dick a nonvintage ordinary magnum of champagne with a note: “You wrote what you needed to write. I said what I needed to say. And, now we can move on.”
Meanwhile, the studio was in an upward transition in the mid-1970s. As Dick’s reputation as an artist grew, his awareness of his legacy demanded a new kind of attention. “Dick had a long view of his career,” Alicia Grant Longwell said. Her first task as the studio archivist was to make sure there were edition prints of the images Avedon had given to the Smithsonian when he had his show there in 1962. “My recollection is that the prints had been made at the time of the gift and just never ‘editioned,’ i.e., signed and numbered—never closely reviewed, in fact,” Alicia said. Some of the prints were inferior, and Dick ordered those destroyed and new ones made. “Dick could not have foreseen the scope of the art market for photography as it increased in the 1970s, but he believed enough in himself and in his work to know that the gift to the Smithsonian valorized the photographs.” That was only the beginning of a symbiotic process in which his gifts to museums over the years would not only “valorize” his work, but also increase its value in the marketplace.
In the years between his 1975 exhibit at the Marlborough gallery and his 1978 show at the Metropolitan Museum, Dick continued to go to the theater religiously. He would have been among the first to see A Chorus Line, at the Public Theater downtown, before it went to Broadway; Bob Fosse’s Chicago; Equus, starring either Anthony Hopkins or Richard Burton; and his friend Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures. One of the most important theatrical events in the mid-1970s, however, was the five-hour avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach, at the Metropolitan Opera, in 1976, a premiere not unlike that of The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky, in Paris in 1913, that caused a riot as people stormed out. Some people walked out of Einstein, too, in part because of its length, but also because of the trancelike, synthesizer-based music that was so radical at the time. Still, theater critics and music critics found it more palatable than an opera-going audience.
Dick photographed the creators of Einstein on the Beach in his studio for Vogue, and the picture ran above a lengthy caption that read: “Is the vanguard dead? No—not while theater-man Robert Wilson collaborates with composer Philip Glass, choreographer Andrew deGroat, and a pride of actor-singer-dancers ranging in age from 10-year-old Paul Mann to gorgeous Lucinda Childs to almost-octogenarian Samuel M. Johnson. . . . Einstein is already being hailed as a maximum-minimalist masterwork of twentieth-century art.”
Avedon’s picture of the Einstein team has all the elements of his multiple mural portraits in a single image. Here the figures do not appear in a lineup across multiple frames; instead, they compose a single tableau of spatial choreographic gesture: they are posed against a white background of indeterminate depth in an ambiguity of space created by the cyclorama. Philip Glass and Robert Wilson stand full length, facing each other and stepping forward, as if to frame the three other figures behind them, respectively sitting, lying across a table, and standing on a stool, their limbs in acrobatic suspension. This portrait is most resonant of Avedon’s 1960 photograph of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg—clearly the Einstein team’s avant-garde antecedents. Once again, Dick documented history in the making.
Meanwhile, a drama of another stripe unfolded in real life in the summer of 1977, one with characteristics of the Theater of the Absurd, had it not been more tragic than it was perverse. The Avedon studio began receiving intermittent phone calls from unknown women who claimed that Dick had promised them studio sessions with the intent of turning them into fashion models. It was a mystery with a pattern, and soon enough Dick notified the police. He began working with detectives quietly to capture a “rapist” who had been preying on unsuspecting women outside New York by impersonating Richard Avedon.
On September 17, an item appeared in the New York Times with the headline: “Suspect in Rape Called Impostor of a Celebrity.” The police in Washington, DC, arrested a man “suspected of impersonating Richard Avedon, the fashion photographer, to pick up women to swindle and sometimes rape. . . . The suspect is Oscar Edward Kendall, 33 years old, who is baldish, 6 feet 5 inches tall and weighs 220 pounds.” Kendall, who looked nothing like Avedon, had approached over thirty women in cities around the country, introducing himself as the famous fashion photographer and promising them careers in modeling. In an age before the Internet, they couldn’t know that the impostor in no way resembled Dick, despite the fact that most of them had recognized his name.
Aram Saroyan recounted an evening not long after when he and his sister, Lucy, were visiting Dick in New York, sitting in “his luxurious cave, with books piled in stacks on the floor,” and Dick delved into the story of his would-be doppelgänger. “Dick had managed to contact the man, meet with him, and do studio portraits of them both in similar poses,” Aram wrote in a small-press memoir about his friendship with Avedon. Dick showed them the pictures, which Saroyan described as being Avedon-like portraits of them both from the waist up, shirtless, their belts unbuckled to the top button of their trousers. When Saroyan mentioned something about the seminakedness, Dick nodded, making a puerile reference to his curiosity about comparing “cocks,” but having stopped short of going through with nude portraits.
In the summer of 1978, the Marcuse Pfeifer gallery on Madison Avenue mounted a photography exhibit called The Male Nude that roused a great deal of critical controversy in the press. A review in the Village Voice disparaged the male nude as a valid subject of aesthetic contemplation, characterizing the male genitalia visible in many of the figures as “phallic symbols between the legs,” thereby claiming it was a show about homosexuality—despite the fact that many of the seventy-five photographers represented were heterosexual, and a portion of those were women. Peter Hujar’s picture Bruce de Sainte Croix, presenting a man sitting naked in a chair contemplating his own erection, ran with the review of the show in the Voice, the first time a picture of a man in flagrante had been published in a mainstream, albeit alternative, newspaper. The picture wasn’t even in the show, although edition prints of the image were available in the gallery. One day, Avedon’s car was double-parked in front of the gallery while he went inside and purchased the Hujar picture. Over time, Dick purchased several important pictures by Hujar—many years before Hujar’s work would be regarded as perhaps even more significant than that of Robert Mapplethorpe.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1977, Dick had gone on a luxurious excursion of sorrowful purpose. His dear friend Felicia Bernstein, to whom over the years he had become even closer than Lenny, was being treated for breast cancer. While she was in remission, Dick took her to the island of Patmos, one of the most beautiful places he could think of, where there was an expanse of blue ocean and white hillsides, and good friends, and good food, and leisurely activity, and a contemplative kind of quiet. They stayed at the Grikos Hotel, a small, simple, comfortable, open-air hotel in the sleepy harbor, just down the hill from Ashton Hawkins and Tim Husband, where Renata Adler was also staying, and, during the day, either they would all go out on the boat, or Dick and Felicia would walk up to Owen Edwards’s house—pre–Dom Pérignon—and work in the garden. Felicia loved to garden and, for years after that trip, Edwards said that he and his wife referred to their hillside courtyard as the “Felicia Bernstein memorial garden.” “Dick took an amazing photograph of my mother,” Jamie Bernstein said about that trip to Patmos. “It’s very meaningful, and you can tell how warm the whole relationship was.” Felicia died in June 1978. Many years later, Dick and Mike Nichols—also a close friend of the Bernsteins—instituted an annual dinner for Jamie, Alexander, and Nina, a get-together to pay homage to Felicia, their mother. “It was always in a good restaurant,” Jamie remembered, “Babbo or Craft.” Dick and Mike always treated.
It had to be very soon after Felicia’s funeral, and during the final preparations of his show at the Metropolitan Museum, that Dick had a second flare-up of his heart condition. The doctor prescribed a period of rest, and Dick spent several weeks recovering at a ranch in Montana, in which he had invested as a part owner. The only people he saw while he was there were the foreman of the ranch—Wilbur Powell—and his wife. “I was like one of the cows on the ranch that he checked on every day,” Dick said. “He’d walk into the kitchen to see how I was doing, there’d be a pot of coffee on the stove, we’d exchange a few words, then he’d leave.” At the end of Dick’s stay, he asked Wilbur if he could photograph him, and Wilbur agreed. “The Powells were so very special, and kind, in a completely undemanding way,” Dick recalled. “I began to feel that this cowboy, this cow ranchman, is no different from me. He has the same concerns, in a different atmosphere.”
Wilbur Powell, Rancher, Ennis, Montana, July 4, 1978 is a portrait like all Avedon portraits—the figure appears straight on, half length, staring into the camera against a white background. There are differences as well. While Powell’s hands are on his hips, his right arm juts out of the frame, his elbow cropped, in the position of some of Avedon’s mural figures that seem to be exiting one frame and entering another. In Wilbur’s case, he is simply standing off center. He wears a cowboy hat, also cropped out of the frame at the top. His expression is pinched, a bit of a line drawn in the sand.
Wilbur Powell’s portrait appeared in the Newsweek cover story “The Avedon Look,” on October 16, 1978, likely because it was the most recent portrait Dick had made, and the subject was unique and unexpected in his body of portraiture. Mitchell Wilder, the director of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, which was founded on its namesake’s collection of paintings of the Old West by Frederic Church and Charles M. Russell, saw the portrait of Dick’s “Western cowboy” in Newsweek and called him up. Wilder was interested in developing a contemporary body of work on the American West and, along with a museum adviser named Robert Wilson (no relation to the director), flew to New York to meet Richard Avedon and explore the possibilities of an artist’s commission.
While Wilder posited an initial idea about a series of women of the West, Dick persuaded him that it had to be broader and more exploratory. It would require Avedon to be able to spend periods of time away from the studio over the next four or five years, and the museum was in a position to endow the project. “I can’t guarantee what I’ll find,” Dick said, “but you know my vision is not a romantic one. You know my work. You’ve looked at my portraits.”
Robert Wilson’s wife, Laura, a photographer, came on board to serve as a researcher and coordinator for the project just as Marguerite Lamkin had with Nothing Personal, Doon Arbus had with “Hard Times,” and Renata Adler had with “The Family.” They would spend the next five years on mostly summer adventures out West over a week, or sometimes a month at a time, visiting cattle auctions, rodeos, oil fields, mining towns, and any local events unique to the geography of a particular region. Their first venture was in March 1979, a kind of test shoot at a “rattlesnake roundup.” Dick flew into Dallas, and they drove two hundred miles to Sweetwater, Texas. This annual event had a practical purpose to rid the countryside of snakes that burrowed into the grasslands and rocky ledges of western Texas. Farmers and ranchers and local kids spread out across the plain to hunt the snakes, and the local Jaycees paid four dollars per pound for them—as long as they were brought in alive, since a dead snake is hard to skin and the meat spoils. Some years the hunters brought in seven thousand pounds. “They bring thousands of rattle-snakes into a big arena, cut them up, sell the rattles and the venom, and fry the meat,” Dick said. “Tastes like chicken. That weekend, I began to establish many of the themes that I developed over the next few years.”
They wandered through the crowd for people to photograph. His two assistants from New York had set up the Deardorff camera on a tripod in front of a nine-by-twelve-foot piece of white seamless taped to the shady side of the Sweetwater Coliseum. His first subject from that series was Boyd Fortin, one of the rattlesnake skinners, an adolescent cherub with curly locks, in white overalls, holding up a rattlesnake whose head he had just sliced off, maybe six feet long, in the grip of his two hands. He stares into the camera like a mythological figure. Laura Wilson was struck by Avedon’s way of working. “He was alert, buoyant, inquisitive, and full of visceral intelligence,” she said. “What distinguished him in person was the focus and intensity he brought to a conversation. His observations were disarming and he was quick in the extreme to respond to those around him. And I remember his conspiratorial approach. He would make a side comment or witty remark, or just give a glance to draw you closer.”
ONE DAY IN LATE 1978, Jim Elliott, the director of the University Art Museum at Berkeley, asked his curators to draw up a list of twentieth-century artists they considered to be household names: Picasso, of course, was at the top of the list, followed by Warhol. Avedon’s name was also included. Soon after, Elliott saw the Avedon show at the Met and began preliminary discussions about bringing it to the Berkeley museum.
The University Art Museum was one of the best examples of Brutalist architecture in the country, its raw concrete exterior handsomely modulated with receding stepped-back levels that housed multiple exhibition spaces, all of which extended out from a central core gallery. While Jim Elliott had a retiring New England veneer from his years as the director of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, he was known to embrace the most contemporary currents in art, and he was particularly enthusiastic about photography. Only the year before he had mounted two shows of photographs from the personal collections of Sam Wagstaff, the predominant private photography collector at the time, and Robert Mapplethorpe, who collected alongside Wagstaff.
“We started from scratch and put everything together,” David Ross, the museum’s deputy director, said about the Avedon show. “We took every show that Dick had already done,” which included his portraits of his father from the MoMA exhibit; the entire show of portraits from the Minneapolis Institute of Art; all the fashion photographs from the Metropolitan Museum of Art show; the Alice in Wonderland series; and more recent portraits from the Marlborough show. “The entire museum was given to Avedon,” Ross said. “Of course, Dick controlled everything.”
They worked on the show for almost a year and a half. Dick had scale models made in his studio of every gallery at the museum, and he would fly out to the Bay Area for weeks at a time, staying at Grandma’s, a bed-and-breakfast off Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, an easy walk to the museum. During the day he and David Ross would stand in the galleries and look at the photographs as Dick considered what to include in the show and how to block out the sections. It was during these informal conversations that Ross began to formulate his own conclusions about Avedon’s respective bodies of work: “I came to understand that his fashion work constituted a very personal critique of both the nature of the aspiration to glamour and the effects of that on the so-called fashionable woman—I mean the hollowness of that life,” Ross said. “And those photos he took of his father, by the way, a man who, to hear him talk, was just terrible—mean, harsh, unforgiving—constitute one of the most compelling portrait series in the whole twentieth century. Because they were taken with honesty, which is more important than love or hate.”
While Dick was working on the show, he spent time with the Berkeley luminaries of that period. Alice Waters was creating a new, healthier American cuisine at Chez Panisse, where Dick ate almost every other night. He and Waters became friends, and one night she offered him fresh sea urchin, then a rare delicacy, which he dared not refuse to eat and liked more than he expected to. Dick spent time with Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone magazine, the bible for rock and roll, and his wife, Jane, whom Dick referred to as the “real Bianca Jagger.” He spent time with Francis Ford Coppola, who lived in San Francisco and had a vineyard in Napa Valley. While Dick was working on his exhibition, Coppola was making Apocalypse Now.
“In that time, I fell in love with Dick,” Ross said. “He became like my second father—so warm and thoughtful and understanding. And he identified with me because he was also an autodidact. We had the same insecurities.” They would walk into a record store and Dick would whisper, “I don’t know anything about classical music”—which was not true—and buy $1,000 worth of records, and then they might get stoned and spend hours listening to the music. “He liked to smoke pot,” Ross recalled, “but really only in Berkeley.”
In the weeks leading up to the show, Dick summoned more and more of his studio staff to Berkeley to assist him. Of course, Norma was there. Betti Paul Avedon, his designer—now also his daughter-in-law and pregnant with Dick’s first grandchild—was there to design and install the show with him. Marvin Israel was there, too, as an adviser more than exhibition designer, as he and Dick were taking incremental steps toward a rapprochement. Alicia Grant Longwell was called out to Berkeley before the show opened to avert a potential catastrophe. “They found mold on several of the plexiglass sandwich frames from the Marlborough show,” she said, and it was her job to conserve them.
In the buildup to the opening, the activities surrounding the Avedon show escalated. Stanley Donen and his wife, Yvette Mimieux, came up from Los Angeles for an exclusive evening in which Funny Face was screened for the University Art Museum Council, followed by a conversation with Stanley and Dick. Later that week Dick was the guest of honor at a luncheon in the home of Ann and Gordon Getty, several doors away from the Coppolas, in Pacific Heights.
Several days before the show opened, Harold Brodkey received a frantic call from Dick imploring him to fly out to San Francisco to help him write the speech he was obligated to deliver the night of the opening, where he was to receive a citation for distinguished achievement from the university chancellor. Brodkey said he could just as easily write the speech in New York and fax it, but Dick insisted. “I need you here,” he said. “The situation is fluid.” Ellen Brodkey remembers first-class airline tickets arriving at their apartment within hours, and the next morning a limousine waiting downstairs to take them to the airport. When they arrived, Dick confessed to Harold that he had lost his confidence. He didn’t think he could stand before so many intelligent people in one place and give a coherent speech.
The day before the opening, Dick took a suite at the luxurious Stanford Court hotel in San Francisco, and that night, in extravagant Richard Avedon style, threw a pajama party–poker game for his close friends who had flown out for the occasion. Everyone was required to wear pajamas: André Gregory; Harold and Ellen Brodkey; Walter and Carol Matthau; Lucy Saroyan; Stanley Donen and Yvette Mimieux; Marvin Israel; and, of course, Norma. And David Ross from the museum.
Richard Avedon: 1946–1980 opened on March 5, 1980. Whatever anxieties Dick may have had about the exhibit were cushioned by the spectacle of the evening, a black-tie dinner dance attended by the Coppolas, the Gettys, the Matthaus, the Donens, the journalist Herb Caen, and the romance novelist Danielle Steel, among a buoyant and glittering San Francisco crowd. “I know I look like a Polish wedding cake,” Carol Matthau, in Yves St. Laurent, said to her son, Aram Saroyan, when he arrived. Dick had his posse of studio regulars close at hand, along with his speech, written by one of the great writers of his generation, to bolster his confidence at so heady a tribute to his accomplishment.
“For more than two decades Richard Avedon has been recognized internationally as a significant and highly original fashion and portrait photographer,” writes Jim Elliott in the exhibition introduction. “As photography has gained greater and greater recognition during the last decade as having a legitimate place as one of the fine arts, Avedon has also come to be recognized as one of the United States’ contemporary masters in the medium.”
John Russell, the art critic for the New York Times, did not know what to make of photography, nor did he formulate any conclusion about Avedon’s work in his review. “It is difficult to believe that anyone, anywhere, has ever put a photograph by Richard Avedon in his wallet,” his review begins. “Mr. Avedon’s images need size, and they need space. Where other people’s photographs ask to be taken in hand like hamsters, his get up and stare us down from no matter how great a distance.” It didn’t bother Russell that the show was an “Avedon omnibus,” as he called it; he credits David Ross, in concert with Dick, with “maximizing the spectacular opportunities” for the installation to which the “grim, granitic affair” that was the museum’s architecture gave rise. He singled out the first picture of the American West series, the photograph of Boyd Fortin, and imagined what Dick might have said to himself about it: “What if this person were the only human being left alive? And if he were, what would be most worth saying about him?”
John Russell came close to the core of Avedon’s larger art historical gesture without quite understanding how original and insightful it really was. In the postnuclear world in which Avedon came of age, everything had changed. Life became more dire. The anxieties underlying daily existence affected the way the species experienced itself. This is what propelled Avedon to make a systematic chronicle of Homo sapiens, clear eyed and straight on, with no extraneous distractions.
Offering another clue about his broader intention, Dick would later write about the white backdrop, the Deardorff camera, the head-on, half-length uniformity of his portraiture: “These disciplines, these strategies, this silent theater, attempt to achieve an illusion: that everything embodied in the photograph simply happened, that the person in the portrait was always there, was never told to stand there, was never encouraged to hide his hands, and in the end was not even in the presence of a photographer.”
While the reviews of the show at the University Art Museum at Berkeley acknowledged the virtuosity of Avedon’s achievement, only Roland Barthes addressed his work in serious art-historical terms. Barthes wrote that what you see when you look at an Avedon portrait is “the paradox of all high art: the extreme finish of the image opens onto the extreme infinity of contemplation, of sideration”—an obsolete word that means “planet-stricken,” or “suddenly paralyzed.” Barthes observed that Avedon’s portraits “manifest the opacity, the hardness, the gloom of the American establishment, everything which turns the successful man into a closed body, the body which has granted too much power and not enough pleasure.” It is among the most astute acknowledgments of what Avedon captured in his sweeping portraiture, and in turn revealed about himself in the process: “All my portraits are self-portraits,” he said often enough for it to become a kind of refrain.
During the run of the Berkeley exhibit, Andy Warhol and Members of the Factory, the ten-feet-high and thirty-one-feet-long mural, was vandalized. A statement to the museum staff reported that on Wednesday, April 30, at approximately 4:45 p.m., it was sprayed with a discoloring liquid, which left marks in the area immediately surrounding the figure of Andy Warhol at the extreme right of the photograph. “It was a senseless and wanton act of vandalism,” said Jim Elliott. “Although the damage is relatively limited in area, there appears a good chance that it will in effect destroy the entire mural, one of the most moving and perceptive in an exhibition full of great photographs.”
Eric Weill, forty years old, described as “a tall, gaunt man who often dressed like Abraham Lincoln,” was arrested and charged with vandalism for spraying iodine on a work of art in a museum.
“What the hell am I supposed to say at a time like this?” Dick said. “I can understand that a picture about gender confusion might upset someone fragile. But it was a kind of masterpiece and he killed it. It’s not replaceable. In six months’ time I can achieve a print of that scale, but never of that quality and anyway, I don’t have six months.”
That was an unfortunate coda to what had to have been a gratifying tribute to his career. Dick had been having the time of his life in the San Francisco Bay Area. There was a joyous kind of ease about the place, and particularly at that moment at the end of the 1970s, when San Francisco was the gay capital of the United States. Evidence of the playfulness in the ethos of this city, in the years before the AIDS epidemic, could be seen in the name of the most popular gay disco, Dance Your Ass Off, or a local hamburger place in the Castro called Hot and Hunky, or another restaurant on Folsom Street called Hamburger Mary’s. It isn’t known whether Dick explored that side of San Francisco, but he was obviously comfortable enough to open the gate just long enough to divulge to Norma late one evening after a luscious meal and a bottle of wine that he had been living a lie to protect a lifetime of guilt and shame about his sexuality. Perhaps it was seeing the breadth of his lifework all in one place, or spending time with people who were imaginative and productive and freer in their views of the world than their East Coast counterparts, or looking at the bougainvillea in bloom in March that enabled him to simply acknowledge in words to another person who he really was.