Richard Avedon hated ageing – and lived within it, laughed about it, viewed it piteously, compassionately and, above all else (how could he not?), fatalistically. “I’m a geezer,” he would say when still a youngish man in his 60s. Throughout his career, he made innumerable images of the consequences of ageing on the human face, and of its inevitability. For someone first, and perhaps in the world’s imagination still, most associated with images of youth and beauty, vitality and joy – the girl swirling her skirt, leaping over a puddle, playing pinball in Paris at midnight – there is at least as much of his oeuvre (his “Irv” as he would self-mockingly say) devoted to the old and wizened and wise.
His friends always said that he was the youngest person in the room – but he didn’t want to be the youngest person in the room. It was, if not exactly an insult, a banality: what Dick wanted was to be the most complicated person in the room. He loved mixed emotions and contradiction within a single image, or sitter, more than a clumping at either end of the emotional spectrum. He loved images like the famous Leonardo da Vinci that juxtaposes the profile of a beautiful youth with a nutcracker-jawed old man. And so, in a beautiful pairing of portraits of movie directors, at first we may see the belligerent John Ford pitted against the benevolent Jean Renoir. Ford’s curled lip and ostentatious, angry eye patch – an eye patch is angry in its insistence on making you aware of the loss of the eye – seen against the gentle humanist glance of Renoir, who seems at first like a sage French artist-saint of the same kind as Georges Braque.
But look again, and Ford and Renoir are equally belligerent and benevolent, the pugilistic curl of their lips contradicting the beam in their eyes, and Renoir’s asymmetrical gaze is as calculating as it is saintly. Ford may be staring us down (very Americanly), but Renoir is sizing us up. The easy complementary cliches of humanism are betrayed or deepened: men do not become movie directors by geniality alone. Ambition, craft and purpose are portrayed here too.
Avedon was at war with the cliches of portraiture, including the cliches of ageing, and anything that seemed either merely pious or too picturesque offended him. Contradiction was the engine of his art. It was difficult sometimes for his sitters to believe that he was not belittling them or betraying them when he told them that he valued what they were hiding as much as what they were proud to display. This was one reason Avedon struggled, and never entirely succeeded, in taking on his own ageing self – either making himself look too angry in a way that was entirely uncharacteristic, or else too firm in a way that was too self-enclosed, perhaps because the vital contradiction in his own character was as invisible to him as his subjects’ were to them. The magician could work magic on others but not himself.
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Waldorf Astoria, suite 28A, New York, 16 April 1957.
(The real contradiction in his character – between the serious and austere student of human accomplishment he was and the ambitious, hypercompetitive force within New York he was often accused of being – was invisible to him, as our real contradictions are to all of us. A late-in-life documentary showed him moonily walking the Montauk cliffs outside his house, lost in thought – a place in fact he never went, remaining inside on the telephone with friends, advising, consoling, strategising, delighting.)
The old men and women who knew how to be two things at once – or even more things than that – were his true subjects, and his gift for somehow conveying their multitudinous selves in a radically compressed and seemingly laconic single image remains breathtaking, unique in the history of portraiture. He is often at his best with the worst: the antisemite Ezra Pound howls with the sheer pain of being, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor become a frightened, wide-eyed Beckett couple. Even the people he admired were complimented by his eye for their asymmetries: Stravinsky looks at us with a levelled gaze that is almost stricken and calculating, both a man of surly genius and a man of calculation and ambition, a genius and a rug merchant.
WH Auden is a druid and oracle, face lined with care, and a silent comedian out for an awkward flat-footed walk, a pilgrim on the Lower East Side in his bedroom slippers in the snow. (“I woke up and it was snowing, and I wanted to see Auden within it,” Dick explained once, and he phoned up the presumably bemused but willing poet and asked to take his picture.) His portrait of his old friend, contemporary and collaborator Truman Capote shows him as far more intelligent than he chose to pretend and eviler than he liked to admit. When it came to the elderly Dorothy Parker, Avedon did not admire her spirit less for her face becoming less “beautiful” and, registering accurately her decline, he italicised her courage.
Toni Morrison, writer, New York, 10 September 2003.
One portrait that I had long overlooked is that of Harold Arlen, the great songwriter who married blues and jazz to Broadway melody. He was part of a class of men whom Avedon understood unconditionally; the artists who walked the dangerous and unwelcoming wire between art and show business. Arlen comes at us as astonishingly anxious, perhaps vain – his hair seems darker than the age of his face allows – his face marked by the stigmata of anxiety that Avedon sought and prized as much as Leonardo loved a half smile. He hardly looks the image of a smooth, suave, successful songsmith of the self-willed Hoagy Carmichael sort. But Avedon’s portrait shares a deeper truth in the form of a more contradictory view.
It’s for that reason that, pressed to the wall to choose his own greatest portrait, Avedon almost certainly would have chosen that of Oscar Levant. He admired him almost unconditionally, as a wit and musician and member of the 20s Gershwin circle – for Dick, the highest social circle he could imagine, Jewish in its warmth but aristocratic in its self-presentation. Levant was a great songwriter (Blame It on My Youth) and in his day the most admired exponent of Gershwin’s concert music on stage. Levant had betrayed his own talent with drugs and dissipation – yet his gleam and crazy ecstasy in the midst of his own ruin seemed to Avedon the image, not only of where we’re all likely to go, but of where we’d all want to be.
What worse than going toothless and to seed in Beverly Hills? But what better than being frankly crazy in one’s own best bathrobe? The descent of genius into madness, and the elevation of desperation into a kind of ecstasy – both of these were Avedon’s benchmarks, his obsessive fascinations. Avedon’s Levant is an image of doomed self-degradation in the grip of addiction; delighted self-celebration even in the face of despair. Both are there, and both are true.
Jacob Israel Avedon, father of Richard, Sarasota, Florida, 25 August 1973.
Of all of Avedon’s pictures of ageing, the series he did of his father was closest to his heart and mind, and still in many ways the most difficult for us to assimilate and accept. It is a brutal study of an old man dying, from first anxious intimations of mortality to head bowed in the indignity of a hospital gown. It is difficult to believe – it was difficult for his father, who saw the first ones at least, to believe – that they were in any sense beneficent or empathetic, or even admiring. Avedon insisted that they were, and in one memorable night, he tried to explain to me why. His father had assumed a facade his whole life: Smilin’ Jack Avedon, an entrepreneur, a family man, like every Jewish man of that generation, as Philip Roth wrote once, serving his family in a self-annihilating way. The facade was not what was admirable about his father, or human – it was the frailty, the doubt that the facade was covering.
“There was a picture of you on the piano that I saw every day when I was growing up,” Avedon wrote. “It was by the Bachrach studio and heavily retouched, and we all used to call it ‘Smilin’ Jack Avedon’ – it was a family joke, because it was a photograph of a man we never saw, and of a man I never knew. When you pose for a photograph, it’s behind a smile that isn’t yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people.”
An existentialist by generational conviction, Avedon was a humanist by instinct – someone who believed that being alive is the only conscious condition in the cosmos, and that what we are as people is all there is to know. No afterlife, no eternity, not even much chance of the immortality of reputation – and in any case, what good is the immortality of reputation if you are not there to experience it? Still, there is life …
Richard Avedon, photographer, New York, 31 May 2002.
A reasonable case has been made that the famous Leonardo double profile in fact shows one man – the artist himself – imagined at two extremes of existence, youthful beauty and older senescence, not a confrontation of two kinds but the metamorphosis of a single being. The blurred line dividing beauty and ugliness is its subject, the two bookend conditions suggesting the spectrum between. Pictures of the human condition? Avedon’s portraits of the aged are more like commentary on the conditional nature of being human; we are all in the process of making ourselves, hiding ourselves, trying to be more beautiful and sage – like those other people, in their portraits – while forced to remain ourselves.
Age creeps up on us genially from behind, a smiler with a knife, then stabs us in the back. All we can do is dance. And if the death throes look very much like the most ecstatic steps? Well, that’s life. Even when leaving the stage, we are still upon it. Even dying, we are still in play.
This is an edited extract from the introduction by Adam Gopnik to Richard Avedon Immortal: Portraits of Aging, 1951-2004. Photographs by Richard Avedon, edited by Paul Roth, with contributions from Vince Aletti and Gaëlle Morel (Phaidon, £59.95)
