Antoni Clavé, Catalan born, has become completely Parisian and brings to the French art world a rare exuberance and dash, both in the boldness of his brush and in his palette of black-and-gray spiced with scarlets and purples. His youth in Spain was of extreme poverty and hardship – he began at 14 to work long hours as a house-painter, but still was able to study at night in the École des Beaux Arts of his native Barcelona. At 26 he came to Paris and drew comic strips, music covers, posters until 1943. After the Liberation his first show of paintings at the Galérie André Joly , his first theatre designs [for two Roland Petit ballets: Los Caprichos and the celebrated Carmen] put him at once into the front rank of important painters. With delightful facility and constant invention he has created theatrical décors [Ballabile for Covent Garden, Les noces de Figaro for Aix-en-Provence, Deuil en 24 heures for Roland Petit, and Ruth Page’s forthcoming ballet of The Barber of Seville at the Chicago Opera], about a dozen lithographs, book illustrations [Carmen, La Dame Pique, and the new Rabelais which is considered one of the great illustrated books of the half-century], a new show of paintings in Paris in 1953, in Rome and London this season. Clavé lives and paints in a little atelier on a garden not far from the corner of Boulevard du Montparnasse and the Boul’ Mich’. His future plans: to paint, then to paint some more.
Suggested Reading
The Green and the Gold
By Helen Longstreth“Gabe said he’d told his dad that he’d marry me if he had a dollar. ‘I dunno about marriage,’ I told him.”
The Daily
First Person
The Art of Poetry No. 114
By Sharon Olds
From left, Galway Kinnell, Robert Hass, Olds, and Brenda Hillman in the Oakley house at the Community of Writers, Olympic Valley, California, 1989. Courtesy of Sharon Olds and the Community of Writers.
Sharon Olds published her first book, Satan Says, in 1980, at the age of thirty-seven. The book is organized into four sections, “Daughter,” “Woman,” “Mother,” and “Journey,” and it begins with its title poem, whose speaker is locked in a box she can open only by repeating after Satan: “Say shit, say death, say fuck the father.” At the time, Olds—who was born in San Francisco, graduated from Stanford, and received a Ph.D. in English from Columbia—was married to a psychiatrist, and she spent her days on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, caring for their two young children. Not long after the book’s publication, she told me last year, someone who had invited her to give a reading picked her up at the airport and said, “I thought you would look angrier.”
From the Archive, Issue 244
Interview
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Episode 22: “Form and Formlessness”
In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
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