Observer Review: Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters By John Richardson Essay, Research Paper

Genitalias on paradeSacred Monsters, Sacred MastersJohn RichardsonCape? 20, pp378It was Jean Cocteau who foremost defined famous persons as sacred monsters. Despite its sarcasm, the phrase was respectful: the man-about-towns, prostitutes, barons, pot monsters and slumming creative persons whose misbehavior Cocteau chronicled were, in his position, our modern-day version of the Olympian deities & # 8211 ; non better than the remainder of us ( as the Christian God and his immediate household claim to be ) but simply richer, more concupiscent, more self-indulgent ; animals for whom wealth, glamor and jet-propelled mobility were the following best thing to the immortality enjoyed by their classical prototypes.John Richardson has adopted Cocteau & # 8217 ; s catch phrase for this assemblage of recycled book reappraisals and maliciously gabby memoirs, but he deploys it with a difference. His characters & # 8211 ; Philistine aggregators who commandeer art as a agency of procuring societal publicity and extorting sexual favors, vampirish Muses who attach themselves to creative persons in order to pick their pockets & # 8211 ; are surely monstrous. But whatever happened to the holiness Cocteau admired? Despite the facile initial rhyme of his rubric, Richardson no longer see the modernists whose private lives he blabs about as & # 8217 ; sacred Masterss & # 8217 ; . He takes a sadistic pleasance in robbing them of any pretense to deity: an essay about the Sitwells begins by acknowledging his stripling crush on them but concludes with his determination to & # 8216 ; boot them out of my pantheon & # 8217 ; .Many of these pieces read like histories of love personal businesss that turned rancid and revengeful. Sacredness hardly gets a look-in, except in Richardson & # 8217 ; s claim that Warhol & # 8217 ; s famous person portrayals reinvented the Baroque reredos, leting the haloed caputs of Liz Taylor or Jackie O to drift in a aureate, expensive Eden, or in his lemony remark on Judy Chicago & # 8217 ; s cheerfully blasphemous pick of a nom de plume flourishing the desired initials J.C.Richardson & # 8217 ; s ain beliefs, as his excellent, still uncomplete life of Picasso makes clear, owe more to sorcery than to the mythic charades Cocteau invoked when he described Biarritz or St Tropez, the resort areas of his sacred monsters, as latterday versions of Cythera.Picasso, for Richardson, was a black prestidigitator whose oculus had the power to project enchantments, and that sense of supernatural malignity recurs frequently in these essays. The witchy Eugenia Errazuriz, Picasso & # 8217 ; s frequenter, visible radiations votive tapers at the incorrect terminal and puts a jinx on autos ; the squinting, club-footed critic Mario Praz, reputed to possess the evil oculus, causes an Empire vase to break out by simply peeking at it and subliminally force a pendant to crash to the floor of a Roman drawing-room.Gossip, as practised by Richardson, mimics such occult intercessions. He was one time richly retained by the oil baron and piratical conman Armand Hammer, paid to rede about art acquisitions ; now he writes an exhibition & # 233 ; of his former employer & # 8217 ; s tortuosity, entitling the piece & # 8216 ; Hammer Nailed & # 8217 ; as if he were driving a posthumous spike through the bosom of a hibernating vampire.He is every bit deadly about Douglas Cooper, a former lover who housed him in Provence and introduced him to Picasso. The highest compliment he can pay is to name Cooper

the ‘equal in fiendishness’ of ‘the beastly Dr Barnes’, a Philadelphia collector who took a vicious delight in keeping people out of his personal museum. Evil excites Richardson and he confides that Cecil Beaton’s unpublishable caricatures of crones such as Lord Snowdon’s mother ‘are of a fiendishness beyond praise’.His attraction to the moral monstrosity of his characters and his enjoyment of their twisted humour can become quite unsettling. Barnes, he reveals, had an ‘eerie interest in abnormal psychology’, and ‘must have been almost as fearsome as Dr Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter’; the anthropophagous doctor crops up again in Richardson’s review of the Merchant Ivory biopic Surviving Picasso, where he complains that ‘casting Anthony Hopkins, who played Lecter, as Picasso demonises the artist’. But doesn’t Richardson regard Picasso as a demon? And isn’t he too somewhat devilish, elated by his capacity to profane the sacred monsters he writes about?Though he scoffs that ‘achievements do not interest Merchant and Ivory as much as sexual relationships’, the same is true, on this showing, of Richardson himself, as he lays out his juicy titbits for our delectation. Vita Sackville-West, we learn, seduced a bridesmaid at her own wedding.Federico Garcia Lorca discloses that Salvador Dali could only manage an erection if an encouraging digit was inserted in his rectum. Dali’s mercenary muse, Gala, possessing ‘the libido of an electric eel’, prefers two men at once and laments that an anatomical quirk ‘ruled out simultaneous fore and aft penetration’.Truman Capote obliged society hostesses to entertain his ‘humble love object’, a former prison guard and refrigerator repair man called, rather too blatantly, Randy. One essay is illustrated with an obscure Picasso which depicts the artist receiving a blow-job – even though Richardson comments that the picture has been ‘clumsily repainted’ and is ‘uniquely uninspired’, which sounds like the combination of prurience and censoriousness he derides in Merchant and Ivory.Beneath all the satire there is a possibly tragic realisation: the awareness that the beauty of an artist’s work can coexist with an ugly life, since greatness and goodness are seldom allied. But beneath this disillusionment there is another perception: creativity and sexuality are necessarily muddled, because art is another mode of reproduction. Hence Richardson’s reveries about the organs of regeneration. Peggy Guggenheim unscrews a detachable bronze phallus from one of her statues and secretes it upstairs, while Joan Miro in one of his portraits garnishes a feathered hat with a ‘beribboned erection’.Richardson squeamishly speculates about the intimate excavations James Morris underwent in that Casablanca clinic, and when writing about Judy Chicago’s ceramic vaginas he recalls Kingsley Amis’s remark that the vulva resembles ‘the inside of a giraffe’s ear or a tropical fruit not much prized even by the locals’.He calls Capote ‘a court dwarf-jester’ to New York cafe society. Richardson himself sleekly moves in the same circles and performs a related function: he scourges and flagellates his moneyed victims, assuring them that the pain he causes will do them good. At the bonfire of vanities, he’s the one holding the pen that looks like a pitchfork.