American Author
Written by Alexander Eliot, The Secret of Michelangelo: Every Man’s Dream an hour long special, appeared on ABC prime time television Dec. 6, 1968 9:30-10:30 p.m. Christopher Plummer and Zoe Caldwell narrate this documentary on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes.
In this promotional intro, you can see Jane and Alex climbing the scaffold to the ceiling.
My lanky, sallow, saturnine friend Alan Harrington had the distantly bemused air of a desert dweller. Alan’s mother was an anthropologist, working among America’s Southwest Indian tribes, so I wondered whether he might be half Indian. If so, he never mentioned it. Continue reading “Alexander Eliot – Alan Harrington”
I spent my writing time at the beautifully restored Rubenshuis, sitting on a bench in the old master’s garden, with its low hedges, little gates, blackish trellises, straight paths, white and yellow flowers, and yellow-billed blackbirds calling sweetly back and forth.
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)
During my early years at Time I had nothing but black and white “cuts” of artworks to illustrate my section. Finally, Dana Tasker succeeded in establishing a regular “art-color page”, with me choosing the material and writing the copy.
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)
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)
