Amanda LePore – The WOW Report

Self Portrait (1889)

March 30, 1883– Vincent van Gogh:

“I dream my painting and I paint my dream.”

He has been widely celebrated (to say the least) since his death in 1880 at 37-years-old. I counted at least 15 films about him, or where his work figures in the story line, including the Academy Award winning film Lust For Life (1956) with Kirk Douglas, Vincent (1986), Vincent & Theo (1990) with Tim Roth as Vincent, and Van Gogh: Painted With Words (2010) with Benedict Cumberbatch as the artist. Last fall brought Loving Vincent, the first fully painted animated film, made up of 65,000 frames of an oil painting on canvas, using the same technique as Van Gogh. It was created by a team of 115 painters. Loving Vincent was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and was also nominated for a Golden Globe and BAFTA.

You all know the story; he was the handsome Dutch painter who died believing his life’s work was a failure. Supposedly, van Gogh sold only a single painting in his lifetime. He painted The Starry Night, but he was no star. He lived a life plagued by self-doubt, crippled by mental problems.

The Starry Night

The Starry Night remains one of the world’s most recognizable works of art, but its creator didn’t even think it was very good, and the world’s initial response seemed to confirm that. Yet, in 1941, the painting became part of the permanent collection of NYC’s Museum Of Modern Art (MoMA). In 1973, an entire museum in Amsterdam opened, dedicated to housing his work.

If it is true that he sold only one painting in his lifetime, his works now command bigly amounts of money at auction. A self-portrait from 1889 recently sold for $71.5 million. Yet, there are plenty of them around: van Gogh was prolific. With no formal training, he managed to produce more than 2,000 paintings. That is more than all the major Renaissance painters who used students and assistants for the work. When he was living in Arles from 1888-1889, a decade of swirling creativity, he produced at least 400 paintings and drawings; that’s a new work of art every day.

In Arles, van Gogh also wrote 200 letters, the shortest of them is six pages long. Each night, after a full day and evening of painting, he would write to his brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris, and fellow artists, describing details of his day, including sketches. He would even work into the night placing lit candles in his hat so he could continue to paint. In a letter to his brother, van Gogh writes: “Starry Night Over The Rhone was painted under a gas jet.”

In another letter to Theo, van Gogh observed:

“It often seems to me that the night is much more alive and richly colored than the day.”

Although I was always told in Art History class that van Gogh killed himself, several articles I have read since have suggested that he may have been murdered.

In Van Gogh: The Life (2011) by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, there is the claim that van Gogh was killed by a local teenage bully. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam still says that his death was a suicide, but a fascinating article by Naifeh and White published in Vanity Fair in November 2014 featured a skeptical forensic specialist’s report that van Gogh could not have shot himself, due to the painter’s inability to hold the gun that close to his body without leaving burn marks on his hands, plus the gun was never found, the easel and the painting he was working on were missing and the trip on foot that van Gogh claims to have taken from a wheat field to an inn where he was staying would be too long for someone with a fatal wound. There is also the argument that van Gogh’s paintings around the time of his death were bright and playful and the artist had written that he was against suicide in his letters.

On the flip-side, at that inn, he claimed that he wanted to die and refused medical help, telling Theo: “The sadness will last forever”.

When we think of van Gogh, we also think of the missing ear; that’s how many people identify him in history. Actually, his ear was mostly intact. Only a small piece of his left earlobe was cut off. According to a police report, van Gogh did give a part of his earlobe to a prostitute, but whether he cut the earlobe off himself is up for debate.

Van Gogh had been living with his friend, artist Paul Gauguin at the time of the incident, and Gauguin was a fencer. The two painters would sometimes fight violently. Van Gogh claimed to have cut the earlobe off himself, but it might have been a cover up so as not to shame his friend. Van Gogh loved Gauguin more than Gauguin loved him, and Theo had paid Gauguin to keep living in the house to keep track of his brother.

Van Gogh claimed he had no recollection of that night, but he wrote Theo:

“Luckily Gauguin is not yet armed with machine guns and other dangerous war weapons.”

Van Gogh was discharged from a hospital in Arles following the incident with his ear. However, he checked himself into the Saint-Paul asylum, worried for his mental health. Theo wrote to his brother there:

“It pains me to know that you’re still in a state of incomplete health. Although nothing in your letter betrays weakness of mind, on the contrary, the fact that you judge it necessary to enter an asylum is quite serious in itself. Let’s hope that this will be merely a preventive measure. As I know you well enough to believe you capable of all the sacrifices imaginable, I’ve thought that there’s a possibility that you may have thought of this solution to encumber less those who know you.”

While at Saint-Paul, van Gogh painted some of his most iconic works:, including The Starry Night.

Van Gogh was not pleased with The Starry Night which he viewed as a failure. He noted that the painting “says nothing to me”. He did not include it in a package of canvases that he sent to Theo to sell.

Van Gogh was born and raised in Zundert, Netherlands. His father was a pastor of a Dutch Reformed church. Van Gogh had a brother that shared his name, Vincent, who died as an infant and was buried at the church. The grave is still there. There is a Vincent van Gogh Square with statues of van Gogh and Theo in the town.

Before he considered being an artist, van Gogh tried being a teacher and an art dealer, but he wrote to Theo, at Christmas 1881:

“Theo, I am so very happy with my paint box, and I think my getting it now, after having drawn almost exclusively for at least a year, better than if I had started with it immediately. For, Theo, with painting my real career begins. Don’t you think I am right to consider it so?”

Van Gogh had a form of epilepsy and most importantly, he suffered from a condition called Hypergraphia, a behavioral tic that causes a person to have an intense need to write or paint.

His epilepsy might account for his famous brush strokes, some of them tore through the canvases. His form of epilepsy is associated with personality disorders including unstable sexual behavior, aggressiveness, and clingy conduct.

During his short lifetime, van Gogh was most likely bisexual. His affair with Gauguin, sexual or not, was volatile, to say the least. Gauguin’s writes about them in his memoirs.

Gauguin: Self-Portrait With Portrait Of Émile Bernard (Les misérables), 1888

Gauguin was a very charismatic and seductive person who flirted with every person he met, women and men. Van Gogh was drawn to him right away. During the time that they lived together in the Yellow House in Arles, Gauguin sometimes woke up in the middle of the night to discover van Gogh standing over his bed staring down at him. They visited the brothels together. After he was admitted to Saint-Paul Asylum, van Gogh and Gauguin never saw each other again.

Van Gogh’s relationship with Gauguin seems proof to me that that he did have a degree of gayness, and that he probably had experiences with several men. Plus, he never managed to have a serious, lasting relationship with a woman. He always chose ones that would never work: a prostitute, a cousin, a high society English girl. He wrote:

“For my part, I still continue to have the most impossible and highly unsuitable love affairs, from which as a rule I come away with little more than shame and disgrace. And in my own opinion I am absolutely right to do this.”

A rare photograph of van Gogh via Wikimedia Commons

We can’t really be sure of his gayness, but I would still like to claim Vincent van Gogh as a Gay Icon. Don’t become angry with me and slice off a part of my ear.

Rent is officially due!

It’s almost the first of the month and Big Freedia is getting us more hype than we ever have been before to drop off our rent checks with her new single Rent that dropped today!

I ain’t even lying when I say I’m about to be lit as hell dropping stacks (aka a paper check we hope cashes) on my landlord’s desk tomorrow!

This bounce beat is gonna have you twerking on the couch and feeling like you run the show (or at least own the building)! So do yourself a favor and blast this hot new single! Find out how to blast this hot new single RIGHT NOW! This is Big Freedia’s first single with new record label Asylum Music, a subsidiary of Warner Music.

YOU ALREADY KNOWWWWW, Big Freedia already is a gift from Mother herself, but she went and blessed us with a music video for the song as well!!! Snatch my wig and catch me because I am LIVING for this video!!!!!!

Watch it and appreciate Big Freedia for the god send she is!!!!

Resistor of the Week – March for Our Lives

Listen in at 3:00PM EST and again at 3:00 PST (6 PM EST) on SiriusXM! Or listen whenever you want on the SiriusXM App!

And be sure to give your ears the gift of THE WOW REPORT on Radio Andy SiriusXM EVERY Friday.

Do something this weekend that makes YOU go WOW!!!

Via Wikimedia Commons

March 31, 1872 – Sergei Diaghilev:

”Of all the wonders that the world had to offer, only art promised immortality.”

Oh, to have lived in Paris in the 1920s, to have seen those performances with collaborations between Claude Debussy, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso and Igor Stravinsky.

Sergei Diaghilev was a great Russian impresario, art patron and founder of the famed Ballet Russes.

Heir to a vodka fortune, Diaghilev was raised in Perm, Russia, by his cavalry officer father and stepmother. The stepmother was an affectionate and key influence on his life, encouraging his early love of music.

His family went bankrupt when he turned 18-years-old and the young Diaghilev was forced to support them on an inheritance willed to him by his late mother. He had planned on law degree at Saint Petersburg University, although he soon abandoned the law to pursue his true passion, studing music at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory.

Graduating in 1892, Diaghilev ended up abandoning a music career on the advice of his professor who told him frankly that he lacked real talent. Determined to prove the professor wrong, Diaghilev wrote to his stepmother in 1894 declaring his intention to pursue a more practical line of work promoting other musicians.

In 1897, Diaghilev and his artistic circle of friends founded the World Of Art (not to be confused with World Of Wonder), an innovative, modern magazine backed by the director of the Russian Private Opera Company and the wealthy Princess Maria Tenisheva. Two years later, the ever-industrious Diaghilev took a job as a special assistant to Prince Sergei Mikhaylovich Volkonsky, owner of the Imperial Theatre chain, where he imagined and then produced a series of popular productions.

Around this time, Diaghilev began embracing a flamboyant sense of style and quietly, had a love affair with his first cousin, Dmitry Filosofov, later a famous journalist.

Diaghilev developed a reputation in the art world that took him to the cultural capital of the world, Paris, a city he fell in love with while visiting while on a tour with a Russian folk-dance company. In 1909, he founded the legendary Ballet Russes in Paris.

The company became a sensation, celebrated for scrapping the starched traditions of ballet and introducing original musical scores and wild new choreography, plus costumes, lighting and sets designed by the most creative members of the belle époque avant-garde: Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau and Coco Chanel. They contributed to his ground-breaking presentations: Parade, Le Tricorne, and Le Train Bleau.

The Ballet Russes drew attention by using the most striking dancers, with principles Vaslav Nijinsky, Ida Rubenstein and Anna Pavlova.

Diaghilev had a talent for attracting the most exciting European musical talents to work with the Ballet Russes, even his nemesis Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov provided a score, plus works by Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Erik Satie, Richard Strauss, Sergei Prokofiev, and Francis Poulenc were all staged for the company.

Ballet Russes “Ode” 1928, photo from Victoria & Albert Museum archives

Ballet Russes had a run for two decades and was truly international in its staff and dancers, having toured Europe, North America, and South America. Ballet Russes brought something new, and defied the convention that female dancers should be delicate and gave male dancers more of the spotlight.

Diaghilev enjoyed several creative relationships throughout his life. There was his lover Nijinsky, of course, yet perhaps the most important was fellow Russian Stravinsky. Diaghilev commissioned Stravinsky to compose The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite Of Spring, with original choreography by Nijinsky, which famously provoked riots at its premiere at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in May 1913. Its outrageous costumes, unusual choreography and bizarre story of pagan sacrifice caused Parisian audiences to lose their shit. Backstage at the premiere, Nijinsky shouted at the dancers while Diaghilev tried to control the riot by flashing the house lights. Stravinsky fumed at the audience’s response to his music. Yet, the ballet’s premiere managed to instill in the audience the true spirit of the music, with pagans onstage making pagans of the audience.

The Ballet Russes closed down production briefly at the start of WW I, but sprung to life again in 1915 with a tour of North and South America. They played at the Metropolitan Opera in NYC in 1916. At the same time, the Russian Revolution prevented Diaghilev from ever returning to his homeland again.

Nijinsky and Diaghilev, 1911, photograph by A. Botkin via Victoria & Albert Museum archives

With Stravinsky 1913 from Victoria & Albert Museum archives

Diaghilev was openly gay in an era where such a thing was quite dangerous. He had affairs with several Ballet Russes dancers, Nijinsky, of course, but also Anton Dolin, Léonide Massine and Serge Lifar, and possibly Stravinsky. He fired both Nijinsky and Massine, after both men married women.

While on tour in South America, Nijinsky, in a rash, reckless and ruinous moment, had married a Romanian countess, Romola Pulsky, who had taken up ballet in order to pursue the young dancer across Europe and beyond. The incensed and injurious Diaghilev fired him.

Nijinsky tried to start his own dance company. But, bad choices and ill-conceived projects brought the celebrated star from luster, laurels, and lavish gifts, to needing to support a wife and child with no funds and no dance company.

Nijinsky went to Hungary to recover from nervous exhaustion. When WW I broke out, he was considered an enemy because he was a Russian citizen and he was jailed. In 1916, Diaghilev rescued him and took the entire family to NYC, so that Nijinsky could re-join Ballets Russes. Diaghilev and Nijinsky rekindled their love affair, but the wife did all she could to come between them.

Nijinsky’s mental state declined. The dancer became paranoid and obsessive. He became frightened of performing on stage. With Diaghilev back in Europe, Nijinsky was left in charge of Ballet Russes. But, his mental problems became more apparent to members of the company. He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1919 and his mercurial career ended.

Nijinsky was diagnosed with schizophrenia and taken to Switzerland by his wife. Later Diaghilev attempted to reconcile, and again his wife kept her husband from him, preventing any more reunions. Nijinsky he was just 29-years-old. For the next three decades he was in and out of institutions until he took that final curtain call in London in 1950. He left a diary where he wrote of his love for Diaghilev.

A 1921 London production of Petr Ilich Tchaikovsky‘s Sleeping Beauty, renamed The Sleeping Princess, with new orchestrations by Stravinsky and sets and costumes by Léon Bakst, nearly bankrupted Ballet Russes. Described by a critic as a ”gorgeous calamity”, The Sleeping Princess ran for 115 performances, but to finance the lavish production, Diaghilev had taken a large advance against box-office receipts and then could not pay back the borrowed sum. The sets and costumes were impounded, and Diaghilev was sued. The Ballets Russes was barred from performing in England until 1925.

When Nijinsky’s sister married another dancer, Diaghilev gave her an expensive sapphire ring, yet he also informed her that it was to “wed her to her art”. He gave similar rings to Nijinsky and Massine, a strong message that they were to remain faithful to him and to ballet.

Diaghilev suffered from diabetes, and he became ill and lapsed into a coma while visiting Venice, a tragically ironic place to die for a man with a chronic fear of water. He took his final bow there in August 1929. He died as he had lived, on credit. After his passing, friends had to pay his hotel bill.

His work had a major influence on how the art and performance worlds come together. Many dance companies and arts organizations are still based on the Ballets Russes concept.

Ballets Russes is brilliantly reflected in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s film The Red Shoes (1948). The film is a story of gay tyranny. The thinly disguised Diaghilev stand-in named Lermontov, portrayed by Anton Walbrook, himself openly gay, forces a dancer played by Moira Shearer to choose between love and art.

If you should want to learn more, try Diaghilev: A Life (2010) by Sjeng Scheijen.

In 1970, a long-planned film about Nijinsky and Diaghilev was to start filming, with a screenplay by Edward Albee, to be directed by Tony Richardson, starring Rudolf Nureyev as Nijinsky and Paul Scofield as Diaghilev, but the project never happened.

A decade later a film was finally made. Nijinsky (1980) is directed by Herbert Ross, and stars dancers George de la Peña as Nijinsky, Leslie Browne as Romola, with Alan Bates as Diaghilev. The real Romola Nijinsky has a writing credit for the film. The filmmakers got the attitude right, but the history all wrong. It is available on something called VHS, I have no idea what this is. I believe the story is ripe for the right team to take another shot at it. My suggestion: John Cameron Mitchell writing and directing, with Daniel Radcliffe as Nijinsky, Natalie Portman as Romola and Stephen Rutledge as Diaghilev.

Prokoviev observed: