Gods and Foolish Grandeur: Pavel Tchelitchew

Friday, August 23, 2019

On the far side of the lens - Victor Kraft photographed by Beaton (and others)

By Cecil Beaton, circa 1935.

A "ballet film improvisation" with Princess Natalie Paley, directed by Pavel Tchelitchew and photographed by Beaton, 1935.

By Carl Van Vechten, 1935.

Victor Kraft (né Victor Hugo Etler Kraftsov; 8 August 1915, Oneonta, New York – 2 July 1976, Maine), professional photographer and life-long friend/lover of composer Aaron Copland. A violin prodigy, he gave concerts as a child. He later attended Juilliard and studied composition with Roger Sessions. When he was sixteen, he met Copeland who encouraged him to give up music and focus on photography. The two would maintain a close relationship until Kraft's death; Copeland called Kraft his, "pupil, companion, secretary and friend." He went on to contribute photographs to many of the most prominent publications of the day, he worked as a photojournalist during the Spanish Civil War, and became known for his portraits of leading figures in the world of music. All this time, though, he was also paid by Copland as his secretary and chauffeur, and the two lived together and traveled extensively. All through their relationship Copeland had a series of affairs or brief relationships with other handsome young men, much to Kraft's distress. And after a retaliatory affair with Leonard Bernstein, he married writer Pearl Kazin in 1951; only a few months later he returned to Copeland. Nine years after that, though, he married again and settled in Croton-on-Hudson, nearby to Copeland. The couple had a son - Copeland was the godfather - but the child was mentally handicapped. In 1968 Kraft, long upset about his son's condition and the state of his relationship with Copeland, kidnapped the then seven-year-old Jeremy and left the country for several months. Copeland remained in contact though, even meeting with Kraft in England and Israel. And only a few years later when Kraft died of a heart attack in Maine at the age of sixty, Copeland looked out for Jeremy, paid his tuition at a private school, and later helped him get training to become an auto mechanic.

By George Platt Lynes, 1936.

Sunday, December 11, 2016

L'Ange noir aux Folies Bergère - dancer Féral Benga

These first images are all by Waléry, Paris, circa 1930.

Féral (François) Benga (1906, Dakar - 4 June, 1957, Paris), Senegalese dancer and model. He was the illegitimate grandson of one of the richest landowners in Dakar, his father had been educated by Catholic missionaries in France, and his uncle was a successful lawyer in Paris. He emigrated to Paris in the early Twenties, adopting the stage name of Féral (wild beast); he was promptly disinherited by his father for "living disgracefully and embracing whiteness". In 1925 he auditioned for and was given a contract by the Folies Bergère and, by the next year, he was one of the group of semi-nude young men playing the drums while Joséphine Baker danced in her infamous banana skirt; the revue was La Folie Du Jour, and Baker and Benga were both only twenty years old. The latter soon became well known as a dancer, himself, an exotic and erotic male counterpart to Baker. It appears that he, like Baker, well understood the commodification of black culture and the black body and his marketability as an object of desire, in his case, particularly in artistic and homosexual circles. He performed successfully in revue after revue, well into the Thirties. While his career didn't have the length and breadth of Baker's, his image survives in the work of photographers Carl Van Vechten and George Platt Lynes, the painter Pavel Tchelitchew, the well known African-American sculptor, Richmond Barthé, and others. He also appeared in a handful of films, most famously as the ange noir in Cocteau's great, surrealist Le Sang d'un Poète of 1930. He accompanied the English anthropologist and author Geoffrey Gorer on a tour of Africa in 1935; the two may have been lovers. (Most of the the artists he collaborated with were gay or bisexual, and his own love life was fairly active.) Up until World War II, it seems he enjoyed a rather lavish and showy lifestyle: a large apartment near the Champs-Élysées, a custom-made Delahaye convertible, a small army of poodles. Not much is known of his life during the war, and what there is is contradictory. At the Olympia Theatre in 1943 he performed in the ballet "Tam Tam", part of which he choreographed. But it's also said that he suffered greatly - physically and emotionally - during the Occupation and had to go into hiding. Having had his own small cabaret before the war, from 1946 he worked at then owned and operated La Rose Rouge, a popular and fashionable cabaret-restaurant on the Left Bank. But eventually, changing times and his lack of business acumen meant that, after ten years, he was forced to close in 1956. At this point, only a year before his death, his family in Senegal decided to welcome him back into the family circle. There, he submitted to familial pressure and - quite unexpectedly - married a cousin, and is even said to have fathered a son. Still, he soon returned to Paris where he died of a pulmonary embolism at the age of only fifty-one.