The Richmans of Quorn

Two more berths in my carefully selected club of thirty-two, thankfully unrelated great-great-great grandparents may now be filled by John Henry Richman and his wife Frances (née Hampton), who, with three young children, Henry John (“Uncle Jim”), Sophia, and Frances, sailed from Gravesend via Deal on November 20, 1838, aboard the Thomas Harrison (Captain E. M. Smith). They reached Port Adelaide on February 25, 1839, beating the Gooches of Benacre Hall (q.v.) by a little more than a month.

Emily, the future Mrs. George Cornelius Gooch, my great-great grandmother; her sister Olive, the future Lady Fergusson, and a good handful of other supernumerary daughters must all have been born in Adelaide.

When their only son was born in January 1826, Mr. and Mrs. Richman were living in Lymington on the Solent in Hampshire.

According to Lymington, Being a Familiar Description of Every Thing in the Town and Neighbourhood, that is Likely to Be Useful or Interesting to the Inhabitants, But Especially to Occasional Visitors, by “a Resident” (Lymington: Printed and Published by R. King..., and by Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, London, 1826, pp. 11 and 147), Mr. J. Richman was Clerk of Petty Sessions of the Peace, presumably also a junior member of the firm of John Richman and Sons, attorneys.

The following notice appeared in the Salisbury and Winchester Journal on Monday, November 2, 1812:

CLINGAN’S CHARITY.

To Masters of Vessels in the Coasting or other Trades.

NOTICE is hereby given,—That the next Meeting of the Trustees of the Charity of Mr. John Clingan, will be held at the George Inn, at Christchurch, in the county of Southampton, on Monday the 16th day of November next, at twelve o’clock, for the purpose of placing out Poor Children as Apprentices; and that, according to the directions of the said Charity, peculiar regard will be had to all those intended for the Sea-Service.—Sea-faring Persons in any employment fitted for taking APPRENTICES, are therefore hereby informed, that a Premium of Ten Pounds will be given with such Apprentices, upon application at the Meeting of the Trustees, at the time and place aforesaid, obtaining the approbation of the Trustees thereto.—Dated this 31st day of October, 1812.

JOHN RICHMAN, Receiver.

John Henry Richman entered the South Australian government service, and became Assistant Crown Solicitor, and also Clerk of the Bench of Magistrates in Adelaide.

After working on farms and sheep stations, Uncle Jim Richman (above) took up land near Mount Brown some miles south of Quorn in the Flinders Ranges, a venture presumably subsidized by his parents. Richman Valley and Richman’s Creek were named after, or, more probably, by him.

At some point, the family returned to England for a few years for the sake of their childrens’ education.

Jim Richman later left Mount Brown, and purchased generous stretches of sheep country at Lincoln Gap, southwest of Port Augusta, and other spots nearby.

The Campbells of Argyll

My paternal grandmother, Iona Heather (Nan), was the daughter of “Alexander Campbell of Argyll,” a doughty Scots Presbyterian mining engineer and businessman, and Jane Heather, the daughter of George Frew, a Catholic grazier, who owned property at Tabor in the western district of Victoria, not far from the southern end of the Grampians.

The Alexander Campbells married in 1886.

The Frews’ ancestors are said to have come originally from Killyleagh, Co. Down, on the west side of Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland, where they are well documented in about 1800.

In 1856, George Frew married Eliza, the daughter of a Mr. Wright, and in due course they had nine children, at first living in Brunswick: (1) William George Frew (1857-1931); (2) Richard Henry Lee Frew (1859-1931); (3) Jane Heather, our great-grandmother, who was born in 1861; (4) Eliza Annie Frew (b. 1864); (5) James Frew (b. 1866); (6) Mary Frew (b. 1868); (7) Frederick Frew (b. 1871), who died aged five; (8) Arthur Frew (b. 1873), and (9), the baby, Alice Maud Frew (b. 1876).

Evidently, Nan’s mother “married well,” in that ghastly Victorian phrase, because at least one of her first cousins, Kathleen, the daughter of Jane Frew’s eldest brother, William George, entered domestic service aged fifteen, and worked as a nursemaid for the Bigelow family at Bloomfield, the big property a few miles south of Beechworth. She eventually transformed herself into Mrs. Griff, and died in 1982.

Presumably the sectarian issue arising from the Alexander Campbells’ mixed marriage, to which the odd compromise solution was for Nan and her siblings to be raised in the Church of England, caused some distance to open up between Jane Campbell and her Catholic Frew relations.

Alexander Campbell of Argyll was immensely proud of his solidly documented connections to the Clan Campbell, and, ultimately to the earlier dukes of Argyll, though it is impossible to work out from which of these he claimed descent, because the huge and complicated hand-drawn family tree that Nan once owned went missing after she died.

This invaluable document commenced at its apex with none other than the Emperor Constantine the Great.

Now, according to my estimable colleague Roberta Frank, Marie Borroff Professor of English and Professor of Linguistics here at Yale, there is some evidence to suggest that Constantine’s mother, St. Helena, was actually born in Scotland, so this claim may not be as kooky as it looks, although the document never offered much historical reassurance because from Constantine the Great it led, only a few generational notches down, to a Scottish medieval person who rejoiced in the name of “Egon, Fool of the Forest.”

By a process of remedial adjustment, it seems likely that the compiler of Nan’s ambitious pedigree was hopelessly mixed up, because, according to the hugely relevant Popular Tales of the West Highlands (Vol. III: “The Lay of Diarmaid”) by John Francis Campbell (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1860–62, p. 94, referring there to “a MS. which came from Cawdor Castle…called “GENEALOGY ABRIDGEMENT OF THE VERY ANTIENT AND NOBLE FAMILY OF ARGYLL, 1779”),

Smoroie Mor, or as others have it, Sir Moroie Mor, was “a son of King Arthur,” of whom great and strange things are told in the Irish traditions. He was born at Dumbarton Castle, on the south side of the fort, in the place called the Red Hall, or in Irish, Tour na-hella dheirg, i.e., the Tour of the Red Hall. He was called to his by-name, The fool of the Forest; he was a wild and undaunted person, and married a sister of King Andar’s, the forty-ninth king of the Scots, and was contemporary with Columbus pius; called in the Gaelic Colmkill, or Calum na-kill, because, when he retired from company they were always sure to find him in his cell at prayer.

“Constantine,” almost certainly therefore refers to that mythical person who was traditionally thought to be grandfather to the legendary King Arthur of the Round Table.

The reliability of this document is deeply questionable also, because, according to its anonymous author,

In the following account we have had regard to the genealogical tree done by Niel MacEwen, [who] received the same from Eachern MacEwen, his father, as he had the same from Artr. MacEwen, his grandfather, and their ancestors and predecessors, senachies and pensioners to great familys, who, for many ages were employed to make up and keep such Records in their accustomed way of Irish Rhymes; and the account left by Mr. Alexr. Colvin, who had access to the papers of the family, and Pedro Mexva, a Spaniard, who wrote the origin of diverse and sundry nations, in his book entitled the Treasury of Antiquities.

This last reference is another extremely garbled but failed attempt to get it right.

The “Mexva” book is actually a wacky post hoc English translation, The Treasvrie of Avncient and Moderne Times: Containing the learned collections, iudicious readings, and memorable obseruations: not onely diuine, morrall and phylosophicall: but also poeticall, martiall, politicall, historicall, astrologicall, &c.; translated out of that worthy Spanish gentleman Pedro Mexio. and M. Francesco Sansouino, that famous Italian. As also, of these honourable Frenchmen, Anthonie du Verdier, Lord of Vaupriuaz: Loys Guyon, sieur de la Nauche, counsellor vnto the king: Claudius Gruget, Parisian, &c. (London: Printed by W. Iaggard, 1613) by Pedro Mexía (?1496–?1552).

Naturally it’s in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library here at Yale, and I’ve checked it.

I am not quite sure how the compiler of Nan’s pedigree managed to turn the MacEwens’ “Smoroie Mor” into “Egon, Fool of the Forest,” that wild and undaunted person, but I am rather glad he did.

The Gooches of Benacre Hall, near Beccles, Suffolk

Another two of my thirty-two thankfully unrelated great-great-great grandparents were Charles Henry Gooch, of Benacre Hall, near Beccles in Suffolk (above), who in about 1830 married Georgiana Hayward and in due course emigrated to South Australia.

It is not clear how this Charles Henry Gooch fitted into the enormous family of Sir Thomas Gooch, fourth baronet, who was born in 1745; appointed High Sheriff of Suffolk in 1785, and married on December 23, 1766, Anna Maria (d. September 28, 1814), the daughter and heir of William Hayward, of Weybridge, Surrey.

Presumably he falls into the category of descendants of Sir Thomas and Lady Gooch’s “other issue,” whom Burke presumed died young or unmarried.

If indeed Charles Henry Gooch was an unidentified grandchild, his uncles and aunts were rather interesting, and included (1) Sir Thomas Sherlock Gooch, fifth baronet (1767–1851); (2) Lieutenant-Colonel William Gooch (1769–1851); (3) Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas [sic?] Gooch (1773–1849), who married Hannah, the daughter of Sir Robert Barker, Commander-in-Chief of the East Indies; (4) The Reverend Richard Gooch (1781–1873), Rector of North Cove-cum-Willingham in Suffolk; (5) The Reverend Paul Gooch (1786–1867), a confirmed bachelor; and (6) Sophia Gooch, who on March 10, 1818, married Captain George William Manby, R.N., F.R.S., of Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, who invented the life-boat.

In any event, thus far Charles Henry and Georgiana Gooch seem to stake a fairly promising claim to being the earliest of our ancestors to sail to Australia. They departed from Gravesend on November 13, 1838, aboard the Jersey-based, 440-ton, three-masted, copper-sheathed slow-coach D’Auvergne, which was owned by St. Croix & Co. (Master: P. Le Huquet), and did not reach Port Adelaide, South Australia, until March 21, 1839.

Their five children were (1) Harriet, presumably Mrs. Henry Hughes (b. 1832); (2) Charles Henry, junior (b. 1833); (3) Louisa, (b. 1835); (4) my great-great grandfather, George Cornelius Gooch (b. 1836); and (5) Douglas G[eorge?]. (b. 1838).

George Cornelius Gooch married Emily, the youngest of the many daughters of John Henry Richman, of Warnbunga, South Australia (another member of the club of thirty-two), on September 1, 1858.

Emily Gooch, I think, had only one brother (Sophie Pearson’s “Uncle Jim” Richman) (q.v.), but one of her sisters, Olive, married Sir James Fergusson, G.C.I.E., sixth baronet, sometime Governor of South Australia, New Zealand, and of Bombay, but Lady Fergusson (she was his second) died there of cholera in 1882.

When my great-great grandfather, George Cornelius Gooch married Emily Richman, they settled on a remote property far north of Adelaide, in the Flinders Ranges.

Granny recalled:

Grannie [Emily Gooch] was all alone when mother [Sophie] was born. She knew she would be, as grandfather had to be away. She taught a lubra what to do, and all went well. She was 17! Grandfather [George Cornelius] brought home a sewing machine some years later, and mother could remember all the black faces pressed against the windows, watching the strange devil-devil working.

Great-grandmother Sophie Pearson was the eldest child, and her many Gooch siblings were: (1) Charles Henry Gooch, not to be confused with his uncle and namesake, who married Lucy Alice Brough Abbott in 1886 at Sale in East Gippsland.

On December 10, 1909, this Charles Henry Gooch (“Uncle Charlie”) purchased for £1,670/10, payable by instalments, 1,883 acres of land at Three Springs in Western Australia, between Perth and Geraldton, on the south side of what it is now the Three Springs–Perenjori Road, as well as an option to purchase 1,778 more (adjoining) from the Midland Railway Company, which he soon executed.

Charles Gooch named this hugely profitable wheat property Binderrie. In 1910, he was a member of the Kadathinni Farmers and Progress Association. From 1911 to 1917, Binderrie was managed by his eldest son Sydney C. (“Uncle Sid” ) Gooch, who, with his cousin Uncle Roy, was allowed to join the Duke of York’s shooting party at Kilmany Park.

After spending a few months at Binderrie, in early August 1915, Uncle Charlie Gooch returned home to comfortable retirement at Dutson, near Sale. Nevertheless, clearly he continued to go back and forth to Western Australia to keep an eye on his lucrative wheat interests.

Certainly his dog won the Sheep Dog Trials at the Red Cross Gala Day held in Three Springs on May 23, 1918.

He judged the horse events at the “Three Springs Day” picnic meeting on Thursday September 25, 1919. Uncle Charlie Gooch died in 1920 at Dongara, Western Australia. Charles and Lucy Gooch had seven children: Ethel, Sydney, Jack, Lurline (oh?), Fannie, Olive, and Eric.

Eric Gooch was born on September 7, 1899, in Sale. On September 9, 1915, Cousin Eric enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force in Melbourne. His mother wrote and signed a short statement giving her full consent for him to enlist, because he was under 21 years of age, in fact only sixteen years and two days old.

He was 5 feet 7 inches tall, had green eyes, brown hair, and a complexion that was described as “fresh.”

After training at the Broadmeadows Camp, on December 9, 1915, he was appointed to the 14th Reinforcements of the 5th Battalion. He embarked from Melbourne aboard H.M.A.T. A32 Themistocles on December 28, 1915, and reached Alexandria in Egypt on February 28, 1916.

After further training, Eric Gooch was appointed to the 48th Battalion on April 2, 1916. He proceeded to France, arriving on June 8, 1916; was promoted Lance Corporal 4495 in the Australian Imperial Force’s 46th Battalion on March 9, 1917; received a severe gunshot wound to his left shoulder on April 11, 1917, and was then evacuated to England for lengthy treatment. He was fortunate not only to survive, but to have his wealthy Pearson cousins close at hand. He was only seventeen.

Discharged from the Australian Imperial Force on January 28, 1918, Eric Gooch received the British War Medal, and the Victory Medal. From January 29, 1918, onwards, the date of his discharge, he received from the A.I.F. a fortnightly pension of 45s. He never married.

To revert to my great-grandmother’s many younger siblings: (2) Uncle George, the second Gooch in that generation, evidently got married, and had one girl, but the William Pearsons lost touch with them after he was killed in a mysterious shooting accident.

(3) John (“Uncle Jack”) Gooch got married, and settled on land near Warrigul.

(4) Frank Gooch married Emily, the daughter of Eyre Lewis Bruce, a Gippsland surveyer who migrated to Victoria from Cork in Ireland in 1854; settled near Sale in East Gippsland ten years later, and surveyed Bruce Road, his only monument, which still skirts the Colquhuon State Forest, commencing at a point on the Princes’ Highway that is roughly half way between Swan Reach and Kalimna West, and leads most of the way north to the neighborhood of Tambo Upper. I am afraid that one day someone will feel it necessary to pave it.

The wife of Eyre Lewis Bruce was Mary (Minnie) Atkinson Whittakers, the daughter of William and Louisa Whittakers, Welsh pioneers of the Monaro district of New South Wales.

Emily Gooch’s sister, Minnie Grant Bruce (1878–1958), gradually evolved into the famous journalist and author of the Billabong stories, Mary Grant Bruce, whose first big break was editing the school newspaper at Miss Estelle Beausire’s Ladies High School in Sale, aged ten.

(5) Alexander (“Uncle Sandy”) Gooch married Lilias Macleod.

(6) After his mother died, Archie Gooch, the baby, aged twelve, went to live with his (much older) eldest sister, our great-grandmother Sophie Pearson, first at Bonegilla, and later at Kilmany Park. He married Norma Macleod, a cousin of Lilias Macleod, and had two sons.

(7) “Aunt Nance” Gooch married Arthur Gellion, and later joined Sophie Pearson in retirement at Metung. Their house was up the hill, tucked behind the village, and Mum recalls going to visit them for tea on the verandah when she was a little girl.

(8) Kate Gooch married William Pearson’s brother, Jack. Their daughter, Joan Pearson, who, despite being born with an extraordinary congenital disability, eventually settled permanently and independently on land at Narre Warren with her first cousin and intimate friend, Mollie Grant Bruce (“Mungie”), who is not to be confused with her mother and namesake, viz:

(9) Mollie Gooch, who married another of the Bruce siblings, Maxwell Bruce, i.e. the brother of Emily and Minnie, a.k.a. Mary Grant Bruce, the famous novelist.

This Mollie, Sophie Pearson’s beloved and by all accounts very beautiful youngest sister, died only a very short while after giving birth to her only child, a daughter, Mollie, known affectionately to the Pearson family as Mungie, who was essentially, maybe even formally, adopted by William and Sophie Pearson, and grew up with Granny, Aunt Mim, Uncle Roy, and the cross-generational Uncle Archie at Bonegilla and then Kilmany Park.

Eventually she settled with her cousin, Joan Pearson, at Narre Warren, and become wholly eminent in Pony Club circles.

Tragically, in the early 1970s, Mungie took her own life. She jumped from a window at the Alfred Hospital in Commercial Road, having been diagnosed with inoperable cancer. Towards the end of his life Uncle John used to comment on this tragedy rather too often for comfort; he seemed to think that Mungie exhibited extraordinary bravery.

Now I only think of poor Joan Pearson, and Granny, who both loved her, and were left behind.

As a young woman, Mungie suffered from some long and tedious illness, and spent much time convalescing with Granny. During that period she created and, indeed, succeeded in selling to commercial radio, a number of highly ridiculous radio plays, based on cuttings from popular magazines and other matter which Mum still preserves at 20, Denham Place.

They must be preserved, because they reflect a rare comic genius, no doubt to some extent related to Mungie’s far more distinguished but rather po-faced aunt, Mary Grant Bruce.

Unlike Mary Grant Bruce, the Mungie radio plays did not in any way eschew, as a matter of principle, the necessary love interest.

(10) Florence Gooch, who was born at sea on the cranky old sailing ship, grew up and married Ted Phillips, and had a son and daughter. Their son, Boyd Phillips, married Nan King, and prospered.

The Smile in Warhol

My success? It’s magic. I never want anything. I used to be sort of crushed. When? In childhood maybe. You want then, but not now. I thought people in New York were detached, but they really care. In Paris it’s great. They are detached. They laugh at you. I thought that maybe they didn’t know anything, but now I think they know everything.

—Andy Warhol, from an interview with Polly Devlin for British Vogue, 1965.

From the utter vacuity of the camera-oriented smile of the wife of an international banker to the startling disclosures of moods fit for a private diary, these painting snapshots add up to a Human Comedy for our time, in which pictorial surface and psychological probing are combined in differing proportions and in which the very existence of not one but two or more variations on the same photographic fact add to the complex shuffle of artistic fictions and emotional truths.

—Robert Rosenblum, in Andy Warhol: Portraits of the 1970s, 1979.

The Jew as Celebrity: it is of a piece with the ruling passion of Warhol’s career, the object of his fixated attention—the state of being well known for well-knownness. That was all Exposures [1979] was about—a photograph album of film stars, rock idols, politicians’ wives, cocottes, catamites and assorted bits of International White Trash baring their teeth to the socially emulgent glare of the flash bulb: I am flashed, therefore I am.

—Robert Hughes on Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century (1980), “Andy Warhol,” in The New York Review of Books, vol. 29, no. 2, February 18, 1982.

ANDY WARHOL: What color are your eyes?
RUDOLF NUREYEV: The interview is canceled.

—Bob Colacello, notes on an interview for Interview magazine, May 1972.

These glimpses into the dark heart of the Warhol literature serve to illustrate what is best described as the problem of critical construction that has always beset the artist himself, his subject–collaborators, his powerful advocates and detractors alike.

To shore up what he saw as the artist’s formidable credentials, for example, the late Robert Rosenblum found it necessary to plot the unabashed commercialism of the later portrait production against a stave that descends from the shrill high notes of “utter vacuity” to resonant chords of psychological depth. This is great art, not merely good business.

By contrast, when summing up the same species of portrait, Robert Hughes gathered into the corral of Andy’s portraiture film stars, rock idols, “cocottes, catamites, and bits of International White Trash,” where necessary dismissing otherwise un-dismissible historical subjects such as Sarah Bernhardt, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, and Associate Justice Louis D. Brandeis of the U.S. Supreme Court by instead impugning Warhol’s motives in choosing to portray them. In other words, this is cynical, shallow stuff.

To some extent the scholar and the critic gaze down at Union Square from the opposing mountain-tops of the Institute of Fine Arts and Time, but in each case the unnamed “wives” of the banker or politician are the convenient, limping antelopes at the edge of Andy Warhol’s herd, the easiest of targets, whereas in purely social and economic terms one would be hard pressed to discover a material difference between those sitters and the gilded-age socialites who paid a much larger fee to sit for John Singer Sargent 100 years earlier.

In fact, somewhat paradoxically, numerous automated photo-booth strips from the mid-1960s reveal moments of great candour, intimacy, even joy, which do not always vanish from the finished portraits screenprinted afterwards.

In retrospect, Gary Indiana described these as “a kind of photo morgue that portraits could be made from. The ones that got made were the ones of people who could buy the portraits”. No doubt, but the language used to describe those sittings tends to be condescending and misogynistic, notwithstanding the special status of insiders such as the pouting, cigarette-fondling Edie Sedgwick.

Of a strip of four shots of Lita Hornick, for example, David Riminelli remarks: “She doesn’t move. She just stood there [sic]. This time she moved a little bit, she moved her head, she opened her mouth. I think she’s warming up. She acts up more for the camera each time.”

If “she” sits still, she is a dummy; if she responds to off-camera prompting, she is acting up.


Meanwhile the artist himself made an unconvincing show of not caring about “what people think”—a confidence he shared with the readers of Vogue—while, obviously, he cared desperately and bitterly: for decades, in fact, creating a pattern-book of duly contorted, lonely selves, the better to excise or even tear out the pages.

It was not merely that, in the self-portraits, Andy said he “left out the pimples because you always should”. From the apparently playful batterings of 1963, which were staged (with dark glasses) in the photobooth “confessional,” to the 10-canvas “strangulation” self-portraits of 1978, and, finally, the “fright wig” heads overlaid with murky Reagan-era camouflage (1986), Andy continually offered up a vitiated, unknowable artistic personality, and to some degree it is the drag self-portrait polaroids of 1980–81 that yield some of the most direct, disarming and, incidentally, beautiful moments of self-fashioning.

The irony is that this supremely masked self should have become the lodestar of fame for other people, a source of covers for Time magazine, and an uneasy partner in the cutthroat game of modern celebrity. Yet Andy’s ego found neither the inner resources nor, in fact, the will to master that game, except inside the gradually accreting cocoons of the Factory.

The thread that joins these initial, disparate remarks is the smile and laughter. Warhol told Polly Devlin he thought “it’s great” in Paris because they laugh at you, and in so doing display omniscient detachment; Andy rarely allowed himself to be seen smiling: only rarely in other people’s snapshot photographs, and never in any self-portrait.

Equally, for Rosenblum and Hughes, the self-serving smile of the “wives” is merely fodder tossed at the hungry maw of the camera, and in this sense it is a trope of total meaninglessness. So there is a case to be made for looking a little more closely at the fluctuating barometer of the smile in Warhol, if for no other reason than that it forms the bedrock of the four crucial series directly prompted by sensational events in the turbulent years of 1960–63: Elizabeth Taylor’s nearly fatal bout of pneumonia, early in 1960, from which she was rescued by means of an emergency tracheotomy; the sudden death of Marilyn Monroe at home in Brentwood, California, on August 5, 1962;


the brief appearance early in the following year of Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a loudly trumpeted event of international significance, and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, later that year, on November 22, 1963. In each of the subsequent series of Lizzes, Marilyns, Monas, and Jackies, the smile for Warhol became a powerful memento mori.

All the Marilyns were based on a single, cropped, open-mouthed, glossily-lipsticked ad vivum publicity photograph, but straight away Andy began the process of boiling down the image still further. In Two Marilyns, from August–September 1962, the left-hand head has already shed all facial features except the eyebrows and the shapely, parted lips. But in Marilyn Monroe’s Lips, 1962, the actress–icon is drastically reduced to what has been described as her “single most salient feature…a synecdochal detail”, the grid of eighty-four floating mouths, held in the suspended animation of a photographically frozen smile. The lips-only idea continued to hold Andy’s interest into 1964, when in Basel E. W. Kornfeld published in the unbound book 1¢ Life a related lithograph entitled Marilyn Monroe I Love Your Kiss Forever Forever.

Andy once remarked: “What makes a painting beautiful is the way the paint’s put on, but I don’t understand how women put on make-up. It gets on your lips, and it’s so heavy. Lipstick and make-up and powder and shadow creams. And jewelry. It’s all so heavy.” While the earliest Marilyns followed the actress’ death by a matter of weeks, and to some degree at first conveyed a rictus-like chill, by the voluptuousness of their colouring they also persuade us that, in this instance, it is more prudent to believe the tale than the teller.

The Silver Lizzes of June–July 1963, meanwhile, are even more strategically labial, the screened lipstick applying a slight but distinct upturn to the corners of the mouth that was not present in the original publicity photograph. Moreover, the origins of these cosmetically enhanced Silver Lizzes were quasi-obituary.

As Andy himself recalled: “I started those a long time ago, when she was so sick and everybody thought she was going to die. Now I’m doing them all over, putting bright colors on her lips and eyes.” The publicity still was taken from Butterfield 8, in which “she”, Elizabeth Taylor, had been forced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to fulfill the concluding terms of her contract by playing the role of a call-girl.

Although that performance won her the Oscar for Best Actress in 1961, it was well known that, having recently re-married in the Jewish tradition, to Eddie Fisher, she never wanted to play the part.

The Monas followed closely upon the Butterfield 8 Silver Lizzes and the earliest Marilyns. By alighting upon this rapidly degrading totem of “great art”, especially at a moment when it was also deployed as a pawn in cold-war Franco-American diplomacy, much assisted by the personal intervention of Mrs. Kennedy in the White House, Andy now harnessed an even more famous, in fact endlessly lionized, and, this time, long-dead smiler, whose enigmatic qualities were largely invented by French critics in the nineteenth century, and raised to exceptional prominence in the twentieth. hIS source was the Met’s widely circulating Mona Lisa publicity brochure. In his far more complicated assemblage of Jackies, meanwhile, Andy carefully created a pathetic antithesis between the charming, youthful, cultivated châtelaine of the White House, and the “Roman widow” or “modern Agrippina” who so impressed the nation by her stoic dignity and self-discipline in the weeks and months following her husband’s assassination.



The “post mortem” flavour of the Red and Blue Jackies of July–August 1964, in particular, largely derives from the fact that Andy started with the cover photograph of an undated official 50¢ White House souvenir booklet entitled Jacqueline Kennedy, First Lady: Her Fashions, Her Home, Her Words. That photograph was actually taken by Jacques Lowe at Hyannisport in the summer of 1960, well before that year’s presidential election.

As Senator Kennedy’s official campaign photographer, Lowe had exclusive access to the family at home, and wherever else they went. From the gloomy post-assassination vantage point of summer 1964, the cold air of loss which Andy captured in these otherwise serene heads, set against fields of bright cadmium red and cerulean blue, could not have been more economically attained than by choosing to doctor an original image so laden with pre-election optimism.

Rosenblum once wrote that, compared with the jet-set portraits of the following decade, the smiling Lizzes, Marilyns and Jackies of the early to mid-1960s “smacked of the New York Post or Screen Romances and almost made us feel that our fingers might be stained with cheap newsprint if we touched them”, but this is surely misleading because in each case Andy’s sources were not only devised with unapologetic glamour in mind, but also frequently carried into the final work the related quality of an apparently perfect toilette by means of pure, saturated colour: especially that of red lipstick, undulating extravagantly beyond the natural edges of the lips, as was frequently the custom forty years ago. By arranging a selection of one 40 by 40-inch canvas plucked from each series—a Shot Orange Marilyn, a Liz, and a Red Jackie—on the wall of his bedroom at home in the expensive, “five-towns” suburb of Lawrence, Long Island, the collector Leon Kraushar not only compounded the allure of each subject, but by forming a kind of funerary polyptych for the sleek modern boudoir, surely also heightened the varying degrees of frank sexuality Andy applied to the eyes and lips of all three.

A host of other, more unequivocal smilers exist in Warhol and, while none are as important as Liz, Marilyn, Mona and Jackie, they stretch from early drawings such as the intriguing perfume bottle with cupid’s bow lips and a question-mark stopper, c. 1953, to the late skulls and disembodied, grinning dentures. To the handlist may be added such strategic subjects as the tooth-baring “news foto by Tarrington” set against the headline of Pirates Seize Ship, 1961; the ebullient Bobby Short, 1963, for which the photobooth strip survives; the vigorously animated, newly-elected Jimmy Carter III, 1977, as against Jimmy Carter I and II (in repose); Pele, 1977; Howdy-Doody, 1980; Mickey Mouse from the portfolio Myths, 1981; Michael Jackson, 1984, and Lee Iaccoca, 1985, both commissions for the cover of Time magazine; and Van Heusen (Ronald Reagan) from the portfolio Ads, 1985. The existence of other political smilers such as Senator Edward F. Kennedy, Joseph Kennedy III, 1986, even a surprisingly sympathetic 1981 photograph of Nancy Reagan, is noteworthy because Andy came to suspect with anxiety bordering on paranoia that the close interest in his finances that was shown throughout the 1970s by the Internal Revenue Service resulted from his unusually demonizing portrayal of President Richard M. Nixon for the doomed McGovern campaign of 1972.

(In November of that year Nixon was re-elected in a landslide, and the partisan hostility of Andy’s ill-judged work was surely accentuated by the nearly contemporary, hugely successful sequence of images of an apparently more statesmanlike Mao. Judging from President Nixon’s amply documented willingness to exploit the taxation system as a weapon against his opponents, Warhol’s suspicions may well have been correct.)

By contrast, the ranks of subjects whom Andy represented, like himself, occluded and determinedly not smiling, is equally revealing, as if to conjure not so much by passive aggression as by vaguely sexualized sullenness, even vacancy, the dominant mood of international fame in the 1970s and early to mid-1980s.

Celebrity was a serious business, as the images of Marlon Brando, Elvis Presley, Mick Jagger, Dennis Hopper, Liza Minnelli, Debbie Harry, Joseph Beuys, and a host of others amply demonstrate. It was enough for Andy simply to ask the great Russian ballet star Rudolf Nureyev the colour of his eyes to bring to an abrupt close that brittle encounter between two frightened homosexual men, each fiercely protective of his public persona, each wary of intrusion. Upon both was impressed the importance of staging a meeting for the benefit of Interview. It was neither sought nor even desired by either. Not surprisingly, it did not work.

Against the conventional line on fame and celebrity that is generally adopted in relation to portrait encounters such as these, it is worth pointing out from the vantage point of 2007 that many of Andy’s subjects were famous for good reasons, as anyone who was lucky enough to witness performances in their heyday by Marilyn Monroe, Bobby Short, Liza Minnelli, Mick Jagger, or even Elizabeth Taylor, now so unfortunately overshadowed by the memory of terrible later roles, will gladly attest. In the depressing moment of Posh, Becks, Britney, JLo, Anna Nicole, and Paris (who happens to be the granddaughter of Elizabeth Taylor’s first ex-husband), Warhol’s pantheon takes on considerable weight.

Finally, a cursory glance at the multi-volume catalogue of the estate sale of April–May 1988, which followed Andy’s sudden death in the New York Hospital on February 22, 1987, an awful consequence of medical malpractice in connection with routine gallbladder surgery, further suggests a measure of private preoccupation with smile imagery: from the cover lot in the sale of his contemporary art collection, Roy Lichtenstein’s tondo Laughing Cat, 1961; through the remarkable collection of American Indian Tlingit ceremonial dance blankets, with their bared-teeth mask motifs; the grotesque figure of Punch by the folk artist “[New] Jersey Jim” Campbell, c. 1870–80; a terrible 1963 portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy by Norman Rockwell; to the enormous collection of “down-home” cookie jars—thirty-seven lots comprizing 164 objects, most of them cheerfully anthropomorphic, and grinning from ear to ear.

As if to underline the point that the smile itself, a fleeting phenomenon in time, inherently resists static portrayal, in 1972 Claude Picasso asked Andy why he collected cookie jars so voraciously. “Andy whispered back, hiding a naughty-little-boy’s smile, ‘They’re time pieces’.” In the circumstances, it is hugely suggestive that at the end of his life Andy Warhol owned no fewer than 286 wrist-watches, while his “time capsules” are only beginning to see the light of day.

Benjamin West and the Venetian Secret

Yesterday at 5.00 o’clock, our tiny exhibition entitled Benjamin West and the Venetian Secret reached the end of its run of nearly four months.

Closing a show is always a little sad, but with this one I feel it more keenly. Maybe this is because West attracted such a warm response from our visitors, or it is the first time I have made it onto the backside of a New Haven bus (above), or because the project was largely made possible by the generosity of an unusually public-spirited lender, Michael D. Eisner, of Disney fame, and therefore seemed to justify the occasional far-fetched show business fantasy.

Certainly in terms of column inches per object in the exhibition (eight only), our press coverage in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books (forthcoming), Modern Painters, and elsewhere, outstripped anything that I have previously encountered, including Love and Death.

I am sure that the reason for this was the subject matter: Everyone likes a juicy fraud, and lately of course, what with the fall-out from Mr. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, it seems curiously germane. The baffling question remains, why on earth did West and the others fall for the Provises’ fraudulent business arrangement? These artists weren’t stupid, but there is no doubt that they were gullible.

The episode is a perfect illustration of the basic principle according to which fakes and forgeries generally succeed in duping people at the time they are concocted, but spectacularly fail to persuade later generations, precisely because they addressed a specific, overriding need or hunger.

In the case of West, there was such widespread belief in the existence of some missing recipe for Venetian painting of the High Renaissance, that none of the victims even for one second doubted its authenticity when at last the Provises presented it to them by private deomonstration.

The other reason I am a little sad is that it has been the best, easiest, and most stimulating partnership between three co-curators: Helen Cooper and Mark Aronson could not have been more enjoyable companions in this enterprise, but we are busily trying to concoct a reason to do something else together soon.

Helen sits on the White House Preservation Committee, and is not yet sure whether she will be called upon to continue in that role under President-elect Barack Obama. I hope she will. Mark has now crossed Chapel Street to join us here as Chief Conservator of Paintings, and has already made himself indispensible.

And now I must press on with Edwardian Opulence.

Craigellachie

Craigellachie, in East St. Kilda, was built for my great-great-grandfather, William Pearson, in 1876, but his third and oldest surviving son used it as his family pied-a-terre in Melbourne after Mr. Pearson died in 1893.

This charming photograph shows my great-grandmother, Sophie Pearson, at the reins, accompanied (I think) by her sister, Aunt Nance Gooch. Sophie Pearson was an exceedingly able horsewoman, and driver.


These rather depressing photographs were taken by J. T. Collins in the 1950s, after the grounds had been so severely subdivided and hemmed in by modern buildings that it was no longer possible to capture a full view of the house, which was, and remains, carved up into flats.

It is something of a mystery to know how it was possible for the Pearsons’ considerable wealth to evaporate so completely between 1893 and 1920, when my grandmother married W. A. Borthwick, but old William Pearson’s extravagance with racehorses; the Depression of the 1890s; the closure of the Long Tunnel Mine in 1914; and enormous cost of the Great War, during which time Kilmany Park and Craigellachie both stood vacant, must have combined to make a huge dent in the assets of the younger William Pearson, who presumably died before he was entirely aware of the seriousness of his and his family’s situation.

Even so, the sum of 50,000 guineas was settled on Granny when she got married, and, during the Great Depression, thanks to the ascetic style of financial management at the Trustees Executors Company, Ltd., in Melbourne, earned a quarter of one percent per annum, evidently just enough to educate four children at private schools in Geelong.

As far as I am aware, W. A. Borthwick was not very good at making, or even preserving money.

Metung is all that is left.

Granny again

Granny again:

All the year of 1912 we knew we were going to England at the end of it. It was the most wonderful thing to look forward to. Mother and Father went for a trip on the boat at Easter, the apple trip it was called, round Tasmania, picking up cases and cases of fruit. The boat was the Orient liner Osterley.

We traveled three times on her. Mollie [Mungie] used to be quite happy if I would give her a day to day account of what it would be like, as I had never been on a boat—except the Omeo and Dargo to go to Lakes Entrance. It was all make-up on my part, but we both enjoyed it!

I left school in the middle of 1912 to “come out,” put my hair up, and go into long dresses. Phil Fairbairn (Shuter) came out at the same dance, and stayed with us at the Oriental Hotel [in Collins Street]. The dance was given by Dr. and Mrs. Wood (Marjorie Jamieson’s parents) and Dr. and Mrs. Brett for their daughters.

Even in those days we could take partners. Ours were Lex and Keith Borthwick, but we did not dance the whole evening with them only. We had programmes which were filled up satisfactorily, and we were not wall-flowers!

My coming out dress was made at Hicks, Atkinson [& Co., 350 Collins street, Melbourne]. It and one other that was made in Sale were my two for the eleven dances I went to before we went to England. It was very exciting, as the dances were very different to school ones!

I remember driving back to the hotel after one dance, with Mother and Hal Maudsley in a cab, and the sun coming up. After another, when I was stopping with the Charlie Fairbairns, we all ate eggs and bacon in the drawing room, using the grand piano as a table!

What I enjoyed more than anything else were the golf tournaments, especially the one at Kilmany. There were some people from Royal Melbourne stopping with us. I remember [Marion] Mildred Manifold (Rutledge) and two Miss Lemprieres very well. There were big fires at the first tee to warm us up before we started. I think everyone enjoyed it. We went to Traralgon and Bairnsdale.

I remember winning mixed doubles with Uncle Sandy [Gooch] at the latter.

Great excitement.

"My Curly-Headed Baby"

I have the most vivid early childhood recollection of Mum holding me in her arms, standing in the old kitchen at 18, Denham Place, rocking back and forth, and singing me this much of the old negro lullaby “My curly-headed Baby,” which was covered by Paul Robeson in the late 1940s, when the Victor Gramophone Company described it as an old “plantation song”:

Oh, a-lula, lula, lula, lula bye-bye,
Do you want the moon to play with?
Or the stars to run away with?
They’ll come if you don’t cry...

Oh, a-lula, lula, lula, lula bye-bye,
In your mammy’s arms a-creeping
And soon you’ll be a-sleeping, lula:
Lula, lula, lula, lula bye...

Curiously, it was also covered by the soprano Elsa Stenning, “The Australian Nightingale,” who, with cut-glass diction, achieved success at Covent Garden considerably earlier, in the 1930s.

Maybe this is the version Mum knew, because although Paul Robeson pronounced those “lulas” as lulla (rhymes with duller), which is logical, Mum definitely followed the pretty scarifying old Elsa Stenning rendition, which you can now see in a British Pathe “Pathetone” newsreel. Mum, too, pronounced them as lula (as in cooler).

I’m not sure what it is about soothing lullabies, but I have no recollection of ever being other than in floods of hot tears when Mum sang me this song, although—cart before the horse—I suppose it may well have been the floods of tears that compelled Mum to sing it in the first place. Nor do I remember her singing any other song, apart from Coo-ee!

Even at that early age, I cannot have been much older than three or four, the lyrics sent me into a panic, because I recall being very anxious about what on earth you would do with something as big as the moon, even if you could play with it, and I most certainly didn’t want to run away—stars or no stars.