The left foot of Michelangelo’s Jonah on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, as it was before restoration (left), and after restoration (right), in the course of which the shadow cast by the foot was removed. Note the loss of other shadows and the changes that occurred to the design of the draperies.

A record of the original Sistine Chapel survives. In 1967/8 the writer, painter and former art critic of Time, Alexander Eliot and his film-maker wife, Jane Winslow Eliot, spent over 500 hours on the scaffold making The Secret of Michelangelo, Every Man’s Dream, in the course of which film they noted that:

“With the exception of the previously restored Prophet Zachariah, almost everything we saw on the barrel vault came clearly from Michelangelo’s own inspired hand. There are passages of the finest, the most delicately incisive draughtsmanship imaginable.”

Someday, the Eliots’ film (made for ABC Television) might be re-shown, but meanwhile, Alexander Eliot’s testimony is now on the record in a new full-length film/DVD biography, A Light in the Dark: The Art and Life of Frank Mason, in which he and other early campaigners against the restoration (including the late painter, Frank Mason, and the late Professor James Beck) are given voice on the Sistine Chapel restoration. Not least of the delights among this film’s precious and historical footage, are Tom Wolfe’s account of his lessons in Frank Mason’s painting classes at the Art Students League, New York, and the sight of the former Metropolitan Museum of Art director, the late Thomas Hoving, belligerently boasting that he himself had helped sponge from the ceiling the “filth” that was in truth the last stages of Michelangelo’s painting.

The 500th anniversary of the completion in 1512 of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling paintings has gone almost entirely un-celebrated. On October 31st, in a small “in-house” service marking the 500th anniversary of Pope Julius II’s service celebrating the completion of the ceiling, Pope Benedict XVI asked a group of cardinals, Vatican employees and guests to imagine what it must have been like 500 years ago, adding that contemplating the frescoes renders them “more beautiful still, more authentic. They reveal all of their beauty. It is as if during the liturgy, all of this symphony of figures come to life, certainly in a spiritual sense, but inseparably also aesthetically.” Apologists for the transforming 1980-90 restoration of the ceiling are nonplussed by the missed opportunity for a mega-beano half-millennium art celebration.

http://artwatchuk.wordpress.com/tag/art-restoration-the-culture/

In this promotional intro, you can see Jane and Alex climbing the scaffold to the ceiling.

Competitive buddies from prep school days, we used to play chess once or twice a week, attended prizefights, and boxed occasionally as we had in school. Subject to the macho tradition of our literary idol Ernest Hemingway, Alan and I especially enjoyed boxing, or thought we did.

At this point, I couldn’t punch out a wet wall of Kleenex. Back then, however I supposed that I possessed punching power. But Alan was a relatively graceful fighter, with a longer reach. My “deviated septum” condition stems from his nice, abrupt left jab.

His best remembered novel, “The Revelations of  Dr Modesto”, became a small cult classic. That owed a great deal to Luba  (“the Tuba”)  Petrova. his imperious mistress and manager.

Alan and I collaborated on a science-fiction spoof for the New Republic, called “We Take you Now to Bikini.”  After that, we made a  serious attempt at radio-drama: “The Trial of Ezra Pound.”  We wrote our radio show in order to give Pound the fair trial which he’d never received.

The broadcast executive to whom we offered our script returned it with a scrawled note:

“Far too controversial for the nation’s airwaves.”

(Excerpt from Alex’s forthcoming memoir, to be published by WriteSpa Press)

Rubens adorned his garden with baroque statues of Minerva the Roman goddess of wisdom, and Mercury the guide of souls. He also set a small temple of Hercules — the only pagan hero to achieve godhood — in its midst. Hercules wore a lion skin, with the lion’s head hooding his own. The champion’s observant face gazes sympathetically from under the kingly beast’s muzzle.

(Excerpt from Alex’s forthcoming memoir, to be published by WriteSpa Press)

Soon afterward, Tack left Time to join Look magazine.

At fifty-two issues a year, it wasn’t long before Time accumulated a color reproduction “electroplate” equity worth millions of dollars.

Then one day in January, 1956, over lunch at the Century Club, I fell into fateful conversation with a visiting French critic.

I happened to mention my enthusiasm for American art.
Exuding Continental courtesy, the critic carved the air with his hands: “Mais, oui.  Pre-Columbian sculpture.”

“No,” I said, “I mean painting.”

“Vous avez raison. Jackson Pollock!”

“Aren’t you aware of any other art on our side of the water?

“Alors. Nothing to pause over.”

I gaped at the man, thanked him kindly for getting my all-American goat, rose from my chair, and scurried back to Time. There I scrolled a sheet of paper into my typewriter and banged out an urgent memo to my bosses.

Time Inc, I wrote, ought to publish an art book authored by myself and designed to re-cycle over two hundred American  paintings in our color-reproduction bank. We could, for the first time, firmly establish American painting on the world map.

(Excerpt from Alex’s forthcoming memoir, to be published by WriteSpa Press)

The Persistence of Memory

Most critics up to now have sneeringly dismissed the art of Salvador Dali. It’s almost as if they resented its popular impact. I myself believe he’ll eventually be revered as an uneven, weird, yet absolutely topnotch “Old Master.”

Dali’s signature image hangs at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art. Created in exquisite Flemish Primitive style, “The Persistence of Memory” features a half-melted watch dangling from the outstretched arm of a dead tree.

Done in 1931, that picture foreshadowed the horrors of World War Two. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were great cities untll American atom bomb attacks melted and tossed whole multitudes of Japanese urbanites in mid-thought and their wristwatches in mid-tick.

The limp watch that Dali depicted still ticks, tocks, and knocks upon public consciousness. This never would have happened, were it not for the input of an intellectually intense and sexually insatiable Russian woman nicknamed Gala.

(Excerpt from Alex’s forthcoming memoir, to be published by WriteSpa Press)

Alex Eliot and Phil Cousineau at Getty Malibu

Alexander Eliot recently visited the J.Paul Getty Museum http://www.getty.edu/museum/ with fellow artist friend Gregg Chadwick and award-winning writer and filmmaker Phil Cousineau.

Alex Eliot and Gregg Chadwick at Getty Malibu

Alexander Eliot and Jasper Eliot

Alexander, Sydney and Jasper Eliot