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Lipstick and High Heels

Deng Xiaoping and the Making of Modern China Richard Evans

Deng Xiaoping is widely rumoured to be dying, but it would be a mistake to write off this feisty little man before the grave is cold, as Sir Richard Evans, Our Man in Peking from 1984 to 1988, makes clear in his shrewd biography of the most important Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. It could be said of China that for forty centuries nothing happened and, then, in a single century, everything happened. The feudal agricultural society that had moved through the millennia at an almost geological pace burst into the modern age with the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 1912. A new China soon emerged – urban, industrializing and, in due course, fiercely Marxist – and with it arrived a new kind of Chinese man and woman, as many Westerners found to their cost.

In 1949 my father was trapped in Shanghai after the communist takeover and, like all old China hands, confidently expected the ideological purity of the invading armies to last as long as it took them to climb down from their tanks and stroll into the bars and brothels of downtown Shanghai. In fact, their puritan zeal only intensified, and my father found himself on trial, accused of various anti-communist misdeeds. Fortunately he was able to quote enough Marx and Engels to convince the magistrates that he had seen the error of his ways. He was acquitted and a year later escaped to Hong Kong, aware that the old China of ‘squeeze’ and corruption had gone for good, a transformation that I still find hard to grasp and which was due in large part to men such as Deng Xiaoping.

Deng was born in 1904, the son of a prosperous landowner in Sichuan province, and at the age of sixteen travelled to France as a worker-student, where he laboured at a series of menial jobs, developed a life long taste for croissants and met Zhou Enlai, who introduced him to Marxism. After five years he returned to China a committed communist. He survived the Long March in 1934–5, served as a political commissar during the war against Japan, and after the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek helped to drive through the programme of land reform, when hundreds of thousands of landowners and rich peasants were killed in what Sir Richard calls the greatest social revolution in the history of the world. These numberless deaths, like those in Tiananmen Square in 1989, cast a shadow over this apparently likeable man, whose talent for friendship frequently saved his life.

As Sir Richard points out, Deng’s years in France inoculated him against the sinocentrism that marred the vision of Mao Zedong, who never went abroad except to visit Russia. Early in his career Deng realized that China could develop into a modern state only if it was willing to learn from the outside world. In 1958 he spoke publicly of the day when Chinese women would be able to afford lipstick and high-heeled shoes, a more revolutionary notion, given the extreme poverty of the peasant population, than anything dreamed of in the Communist manifesto. Inevitably he became a victim of the Cultural Revolution, and was persecuted by Mao’s vicious wife, Jiang Qing, and the Red Guards, who accused Deng of being a ‘capitalist-roader’ and humiliated him by forcing him to kneel in the ‘airplane’ position with his arms outstretched behind his back. After years of exile in a remote province Deng was restored to office upon Mao’s death in 1976. As China’s leader during the 1980s he launched the immense programme of economic and political reform that opened the country to foreign investment and transformed its landscape in a way that must have dismayed the old guard.

In 1991, during a visit to Shanghai, I had dinner in the restaurant on the top floor of the television tower with the affable director of the TV foreign news service. He asked me what I thought of the new Shanghai. Looking out at the forest of skyscrapers that reared from the crumbling streets of the old International Settlement, I tactlessly said that it reminded me of New York. He stared at me in a deeply depressed way, slowly exhaling the cigarette smoke from his lungs, as if the same thought had crossed his own mind more than once.

Summarizing Deng’s achievements, Sir Richard speculates about the future facing China after his departure. He predicts that the present collective leadership will give way to the rule of one dominant figure, in accord with Chinese tradition, and that China’s educated class, despite its appetite for social and cultural freedom, will doubt the wisdom of abandoning one-party rule. This combination, it seems to me, of a paramount leader, one-party rule and phenomenal economic and industrial growth (a yearly average of 10 per cent, a potential for mischief-making on a global scale that thankfully was denied to Mao) will make China’s future a matter of vital concern to all of us, and we can only hope that the country is led by someone with the hard-headed pragmatism displayed by Deng Xiaoping.

Daily Telegraph 1993

3 THE VISUAL WORLD

Warhol, Hockney, Dali and the Surrealists …

The Spectre at the Feast

The Andy Warhol Diaries edited by Pat Hackett

Said hello to lots of people, who said hello to me … This entry in November 1976 virtually sums up the entire contents of the diaries which Warhol kept for the last ten years of his life. The endless parties and gallery openings drift by in a dream of Manhattan, touched by movie stars and pop celebrities. Mick and Bianca, Jack Nicholson and Jackie O, Madonna and Yoko flare briefly through a prose as soft and depthless as his screen prints of car crashes and electric chairs. As he moves through the New York dusk with his white wig and ashen pallor, Warhol resembles a spectre at the feast, a role in which he seems literally to have cast himself. In June 1968 he had been shot and critically wounded by Valerie Solanas, founder of SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men, who had played a small part in his film Bike Boy. Semi-conscious, Warhol heard his doctors say that he had died, and from then on considered himself ‘officially back from the dead’.

Sadly, Warhol’s creative imagination failed to join him on the return journey, and the gun-shots in the Factory sounded the effective end of his remarkable career. Was Warhol the last important artist to emerge since the Second World War? The works of his fellow pop-artists, the comic-strip blow-ups of Roy Lichtenstein and the billboard murals of James Rosenquist, seem as dated as half-forgotten advertisements. By contrast, Warhol’s silk-screened soup-cans and celebrities, criminals and race riots are now even more vivid than their original sources, exposing the eerie banality of the world that modern communications have created. The multiple images mimic the mass-produced news photographs that swamp our retinas, and make an unsettling judgment on our notions of fame and success.

What sets Warhol apart is his effortlessly assumed naivety, a wide-eyed innocence that recalls an earlier filmmaker. In many ways Warhol is the Walt Disney of the amphetamine age. In his silk-screen images there is the same childlike retelling of the great fairy-tales of our time, the mythic lives of Elvis and Marilyn, Liz and Jackie. Presented in cartoon form, the replicated frames resemble film strips, their colours hand-painted by a studio of assistants.

Like Disney, he then moved on to wildlife documentary films, Flesh, Trash and Bad, his camera lens observing the mating rituals and reproductive cycles of the canyon-life of Manhattan. And Warhol, of course, was for ever his own greatest creation, a Valium-numbed Mickey Mouse in a white fright-wig. His dead-pan comments on his own work show a teasing astuteness. ‘If you want to know about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings. There’s nothing behind it … I want to be a machine … Everybody’s plastic. I want to be plastic …’

Inevitably, his dream came true. Why did this brilliant and gifted man – after Warhol, remember, came Schnabel with his wall-loads of broken crockery and the lurid twilight of Gilbert & George – lose his inspiration and devote himself for his last twenty years to commercial portraits and the cocktail party circuit described in his diaries?

As a child Warhol was a keen reader of movie magazines, and all his life remained star-struck by the rich and famous. Together, his paintings and films constitute the ultimate fan-magazine devoted to celebrity. The multiple images of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy drain the tragedy from the lives of these desperate women, while the Day-Glo palette returns them to the innocent world of the child’s colouring book. The same banalization of celebrity seems to have affected Warhol himself, ensnaring him in the reductive process he had once observed in the glitterati around him. He records in July 1983: ‘There was a party at the Statue of Liberty, but I’d already read publicity of me going to it so I felt it was done already.’

So the diaries unroll, recording the endless parties (nine, I counted, in one evening alone) and not a single interesting conversation. He notes the impossible arrogance of Jane Fonda and reflects without envy on the astronomical prices paid to his fellow-artists Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns – he himself was having to get by on $25,000 portraits of bankers and their wives. Neutral to the last, he confirms his Valium addiction and lists the deaths of his friends from Aids, a fear of which may have led to the slight social ostracism he seems to have suffered. People avoid him, fail to invite him to parties, seat him at remote tables. One assumes that his unexpected death in 1987 after gall-bladder surgery would not have unduly surprised him. By then he was almost as celebrated as the stars he so thrillingly admired, his imagination fixed for ever in those carefree days in New York ten years earlier, when ‘it was wall-to-wall everybody rich and famous, and you couldn’t understand how they were all in town because it was August, and then you know it is a great city’.

Guardian 1989

Escape into the Seraglio

Hockney on Photography: Conversations with Paul Joyce

Affable and engaging, his Yorkshire savvy filtered through the warmest shades of California sunshine, David Hockney wears his celebrity more casually than any post-war artist. Neither Warhol, with his eerie, death’s-head stare, nor Dali, too often coming on like a hallucinating speak-your-weight machine, ever achieved the comfortable rapport with his audience that Hockney has been able to take for granted since the 1960s.

Together, Hockney’s life and work sum up exactly what the public today asks of its artists. Cannily, Hockney has saved his real waywardness for his life-style – the gold lamé jacket and dyed blond hair, once so outrageous, and the pool-boys high in the Hollywood Hills – while his paintings have remained wholly acceptable to his Sunday supplement admirers. The playgroup palette reminds them of the kindergarten paintboxes with which they dabbled as toddlers, while the images of Los Angeles offer a romanticized vision of that latter-day Samarkand among the freeways. In many respects, Hockney performs the role today which Alma-Tadema played for his Victorian audience. Both artists have satisfied the public’s need for exotic, far-away lands filled with graceful houris and sybaritic dreams. Both specialized in swimming-pools, but where Alma-Tadema, depicting the seraglios of a wholly mythical east, surrounded his marble grottos with pretty girls, Hockney furnishes the pools of his equally mythical west with a parade of pretty boys.

Anyone who has spent even five minutes in Los Angeles can see that this city of dreadful night is nothing like the sanitized realm invented by Hockney in his paintings of the 1960s. Hockney’s Los Angeles resembles the real terrain of dingbats and painted glue, stretching as far as forever under a tangle of overhead wires, only in the sense that Rick’s Cafe resembles the real Casablanca. Needless to say, Hockney’s vision is all the better for that, and I for one wish that he had stayed with his houris in the Hollywood Hills, painting ever bigger and bigger splashes. But the great period of the swimming-pools had passed with the end of the 1970s, at about the time when the first British visitors arrived en masse and discovered the reality of his imaginary city.

By then Hockney had himself begun to discover reality in the form of photography, a long-standing enthusiasm which seems to have seized the centre stage of his imagination during the 1980s. Hockney on Photography is a lavishly illustrated guide to the series of photo-collages he has made in the last six years. These, he believes, pose a fundamental challenge to the ‘one-eyed’ tradition that has always dominated photography since its birth.

In his interviews with the filmmaker Paul Joyce, Hockney describes his first experiments with the Polaroid camera and the significance for the future of photography of what he calls his ‘joiners’. He ranges widely over the history of western painting, contrasting its single-point perspective with the generalized perspective of eastern art, and discusses his attempts in the photo-collages to enlarge the dimension of time and infuse a greater degree of realism. Hockney speaks with all his customary wit and intelligence, though he is frequently pushed over the top by an immensely subservient interviewer. ‘I wonder whether you are going almost beyond art itself,’ he gushes. ‘Photography is no longer the same after this work of yours …’

‘Picasso and others then took off from Cezanne, and now I’m trying to take off from Picasso in an even more radical way,’ Hockney rejoins. He disdains the ignorant viewpoint of ‘people who think they know about art, or write for the Guardian’.

Suitably chastened, I none the less feel that Hockney’s ambitious claims suffer severely when placed against the actual photo-collages. The overlapping rectangular prints form a mosaic of sharp angles and unintegrated detail that soon irritates the eye. Hockney maintains that the joiners are ‘much closer to the way that we actually look at things’ but the human eye is not faceted, and the only people who see like this are suffering from brain damage. Gazing at these jittery panoramas one sees the world through the eyes of a concussed bumblebee rather than, as Hockney hopes, through the visionary lens of some future Rembrandt of the Rolleiflex. There is no sense of when the separate photographs were taken, and the collages could equally have been shuffled together from cut-up copies of the same snapshot. A masterpiece of still photography such as Cartier-Bresson’s ‘The Informer’, reproduced in the book, showing the revenge of concentration camp inmates, resonates with a richness of meanings that transcends the single image and the moment of time it records.

These resonances are missing from the photo-collages, which work, if at all, only as still lives or landscapes. Hockney himself gives the game away when he admits that his technique would be unsuitable for a serious subject like the tragic image of a napalmed child on a Vietnam highway, also reproduced. I hope Hockney returns to his swimming-pool near Mulholland Drive, shuts his eyes to the city below and once again brings us the candied dreams of his mythic west.

Guardian 1988

In the Voyeur’s Gaze

This August, 300 yards from our apartment in Juan-les-Pins, the pleasant park of eucalyptus and fir trees between the RN7 and the sea had unexpectedly vanished, along with the old post office and the tabac selling the Marseille edition of the Guardian. In their place was an immense bare-earth site, exposed soil raked by bulldozers, for the moment occupied by an air-conditioned pavilion fit for some latter-day caliph resting en route from Nice Airport to his summer palace in Super-Cannes.

Cautiously entering the pavilion, we found ourselves in a property developer’s showroom, filled with promotional displays and a huge model of the new Côte d’Azur, ‘truly the French California’. An attractive guide took us on a tour of this visionary realm, a multilingual Scheherazade who swiftly spun her 1,001 tales of the world in waiting. Here, at the newly named Antibes-les-Pins, will arise the first ‘intelligent city’ of the Riviera. Outwardly, the pitched roofs supported by dainty classical columns, the pedestrian piazzas and thematic gardens suggest something to calm the fears of our uneasy heir to the throne, but behind the elegant façades everything moves with the speed of an electron.

The 10,000 inhabitants in their high-tech apartments and offices will serve as an ‘ideas laboratory’ for the cities of the future, where ‘technology will be placed at the service of conviviality’. Fibre-optic cables and telemetric networks will transmit data banks and information services to each apartment, along with the most advanced fire, safety and security measures. To cap it all, in case the physical and mental strain of actually living in this electronic paradise proves too much, there will be individual medical tele-surveillance in direct contact with the nearest hospital.

I’ve no doubt that Antibes-les-Pins, to be completed by 1999, will be a comfortable, pleasant and efficient place in which to live and work. Claire, my girl-friend, couldn’t wait to move in. While I dozed on the balcony with Humphrey Carpenter’s Geniuses Together, an enjoyable memoir of the 1920s Paris of Gertrude Stein, Joyce and Hemingway, Claire had discovered a piece of the twenty-first century under my nose.

The next day, as we drove to Marseille to see the Edward Hopper exhibition at the Musée Cantini, police helicopters raced overhead along the high-speed auto-route, while Canadair flying boats water-bombed the blazing hillsides a few miles from the city. The endless marinas and highways of the Côte d’Azur, and the fibre-optic vision of Antibes-les-Pins, reminded me of how technologically obsessed the French have always been. The future, which in Britain has been dead for decades, still thrives in the French imagination and gives its people their strong sense of get up and go. Prince Charles may be doing his best to propel the British into a nostalgic past where, in due course, he will feel more comfortable under an ill-fitting crown, but the French are still living in the future, far more fascinated by high-tech office blocks, electronic gadgets and Minitels than they are by Escoffier and Saint-Laurent.

Walking around the Edward Hopper paintings in the quiet gallery near the Old Port, we had entered yet another uniquely special world, that silent country of marooned American cities under a toneless, depression-era sky, of entropic hotel rooms and offices where all clocks have stopped, where isolated men and women stare out of one nothingness into the larger nothingness beyond. It was ironic to see the French visitors to the exhibition, residents one day, perhaps, of the California of the new Côte d’Azur, enthusing over Hopper’s images of a stranded US. They seemed to show the same appreciation for these pictures of a vanished American past that an earlier generation of Americans had felt for the Impressionist painters and their evocation of the Paris of the belle époque. Presumably, too, they saw Hopper’s close links with Degas and Monet, and recognized that in a sense this American painter was the last of the French impressionists.

Surprisingly, for a painter who seems so completely of his own country, Hopper’s ties to France are strong. To British eyes Hopper’s melancholy bars and hotel rooms sum up the America of the 1930s and 1940s, the antithesis of the folksy and sentimental Saturday Evening Post covers of Norman Rockwell. Hopper depicts that hidden and harder world glimpsed in the original Postman Always Rings Twice, and many of his paintings could be stills from some dark-edged James M. Cain thriller.

Yet Hopper’s imagination was formed across the Atlantic, above all by the three visits to France which he made before the First World War. Born in Nyack, New York State, in 1882, Hopper was a life-long francophile. In the catalogue of the Marseille exhibition Gail Levin, curator of the Hopper collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art, points out that Hopper’s passion for all things French extended far beyond painting to take in poetry and the novel, theatre and cinema. During their long marriage he and his American wife, Josephine Nevison Hopper, frequently wrote to each other in French, although they were never to visit France together.

At the New York School of Arts his teachers lectured Hopper enthusiastically on Courbet, Degas, Renoir and Van Gogh, and Hopper later spoke of the ‘Vital importance of the French art of the nineteenth century for American painting’. In 1906, when he arrived on his first visit to France, he was consummating an already intense love affair. After the money-driven tumult of New York he found Paris elegant and unhurried. He particularly liked the way the Parisians seemed to live their entire lives in the street, and spent his time sketching them in the boulevards and cafés.

Among these drawings a figure appeared who would dominate the paintings of Hopper’s maturity – a nude woman standing by an open window, hand to her face in a meditative pose. In spite of Hopper’s strict Baptist upbringing, or perhaps because of it, as Gail Levin comments, Hopper was especially fascinated by the prostitutes who plied their trade in the streets of Paris, and the sight of these women seems to have unlocked the door of his sexual imagination. In his sketches, the prostitutes sit in their cafes, indifferent to the stares of the passers-by, marking out for the first time the voyeuristic space that separates Hopper from the mysterious and impassive women who dominate his paintings.

Nearly forty years later, in ‘Morning in a City’ (1944), we see the same woman by her open window, standing naked by an unmade bed as she stares into the street below. She appears again and again, in ‘Night Windows’ of 1928 and ‘Hotel Room’ of 1931, as if glimpsed from a passing elevated train or through an open hotel-room door. This voyeur’s eye bereft of emotion, in which all action is suspended, all drama subordinated to the endless moment of the stare, seems to be the key to Hopper’s paintings. Even the isolated houses and office buildings that form a large part of his subject matter are depicted as if they too are the object of a voyeur’s gaze.

In 1909 and 1910 Hopper made two further journeys to France. On his return he married Josephine Nevison, and when she asked him why she attracted him he replied: ‘You have curly hair, you know a little French, and you are an orphan.’ Curiously, Josephine Hopper, to whom he remained happily married for the rest of his life, served as his model for almost all the solitary women whom Hopper poses in their tired hotel rooms.

He never again crossed the Atlantic. He and Josephine bought a car and embarked on a series of long drives across the United States, to Colorado, Utah and California. Hopper’s paintings depict an archetypal America of small cities and provincial towns, late-night bars embalmed in the empty night, airless offices and filling stations left behind by the new highway, but seen through an unfailingly European eye. The mysterious railway lines that cross many of his paintings are reminiscent of Chirico’s, and his steam locomotives might pull the carriages that Delvaux left stranded in their sidings, while his strange nudes sleep-walk in the evening streets.

Out of sympathy with the art of his American contemporaries, he protested publicly in 1960 against what he felt was the excessive attention given to the abstract expressionists. In a sense he had bypassed the American art of the twentieth century, and his own roots went back to the Paris he had known before the First World War. Still at work after the deaths of Bonnard, Leger and Matisse, Hopper may arguably be not only the last impressionist, but the last great French painter. Hopper’s ‘New York Movie’ of 1939 might easily have been painted by Degas had the latter lived on into the age of the great picture palaces. In a gloomy side-chapel the usherette stares into the carpeted darkness, lost in her own dreams while a larger dream fills the distant screen. Degas remarked that he painted his women subjects as if he was seeing them through a keyhole, catching them in their most intimate and unselfcon-scious moments. Degas’ women are precursors of Hopper’s, but in painting the depression America of the 1930s Hopper brings his eye to bear on the alienation of the twentieth-century city.

His women expose themselves to a far more public gaze than a keyhole. They stand by their open windows as if no one can see them, as if the anonymity of the modern city renders them invisible to the passengers of a passing train. They expose everything but reveal nothing. In a late-night bar, in the ‘Nighthawks’ of 1942, a couple sit like characters on a theatre stage, but no drama is communicated to the audience. Hopper’s gaze is far removed from that of Hitchcock’s Rear Window. He is uninterested in whatever banal mystery surrounds his solitary men and women, or in whatever pointless business is transacted in their provincial offices.

Leaving this powerful but unsettling exhibition, we set off for the Old Port and a necessary drink at a quayside cafe. Beyond the white picket fence which I had last seen in The French Connection was moored the life-size replica of a square-rigged sailing ship from Polanski’s ill-fated Pirates, a masterpiece of fibre-glass that towers above the fishing-boats in the harbour. Two years ago it was moored at Cannes, as if taking its revenge on the film festival where it came unstuck, but has now moved down the coast to Marseille, and it was ironic to see the natives of the great seaport paying their 30 francs to inspect this cathedral of floating kitsch.

But for once kitsch was reassuring. As the Côte d’Azur of Matisse and Picasso gives way for the last time to the fibre-optic, telemetric California of Antibes-les-Pins, to English language radio stations and the science park of Sophia-Antipolis, Hopper’s marooned hotel rooms appear positively inviting, as his French admirers may have realized. In the context of the future unwrapping itself on our doorsteps Hopper’s voyeurism and undisguised loneliness seem almost like intimacy. Penned in their high-security apartments, constant medical tele-surveillance linking them to the nearest hospital, a generation of even more isolated women will soon stare across their bedrooms. But this time there will be no keyholes through which others can observe them, no half-open doorways or windows on to the watching night.

Guardian 1989

A Humming-bird for Salvador Dali

Edward James John Lowe

Poeted: The Final Quest of Edward James Philip Purser

Scurrying from continent to continent in his surrealist search for a quarry he never identified, Edward James led his life as if he had forever mislaid his invitation to the Mad Hatter’s tea party. The highest compliment one can pay this spoilt and eccentric man, who must have been one of the most tiresome people imaginable, is to say that no one else so deserved to sit beside Alice and the March Hare at that magical table.

During the dark days of the late 1940s, when I was first discovering surrealism for myself, the name of Edward James began to appear in catalogues and reference books. Who was this mysterious collector, all the more strangely an Englishman, for years the patron of a group of artists regarded as little more than charlatans? A tantalizing clue appeared in Magritte’s ‘Not to Be Reproduced’, a double portrait of the back of James’s head as he stood beside a mirror with Lautréamont’s Song of Maldoror, the black bible of surrealism, and gradually a few facts about James began to emerge. He had been active in surrealist circles in the 1930s, and had financed a ballet season for George Balanchine. Dali described him as ‘my little humming-bird’ and, on the family estate near Chichester, James had furnished a house with Dali’s sofa in the shape of Mae West’s lips, and a stair carpet into which were stitched the bath-time footprints of his wife, the dancer Tilly Losch.

Apart from these details, there was little more to go on, and James himself seemed to vanish until Philip Purser’s Where Is He Now? – The Extraordinary Worlds of Edward James, published in 1978, and now revised and enlarged as Poeted: The Final Quest of Edward James. In his lively detective story, Purser describes how he tracked James down to a remote hillside in Mexico, where he was building a jungle Xanadu among the snakes and parrots. Unhappily for his long-time admirers, James turned out to be a shrill and eccentric old man pottering about in an Old Etonian blazer, who talked and twittered but had nothing interesting to say. Yet this was the man who had opened his purse so generously to the surrealists, and whose judgements had been tested by time, in a way that those of the Saatchis, and the New York bankers at present buying warehouses of Manhattan kitsch, are never likely to be.

Fashions in biography change, as they do in the novel. Ruthless documentation of frailty is now the vogue, a fashion set off in the 1970s by American academic biographers who funded teams of PhD students eager to scan ancient hotel receipts and discover exactly how many whiskey sours Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald drank on a dull afternoon in Atlanta in 1928. Richard Ellmann’s much praised biography of Oscar Wilde took frankness a stage further. Scarcely any sense of Wilde appears in this massive account – he comes across as flawed but vaguely presidential, rather like Goering – but the book is filled with details of sheet stains at the Savoy, Wilde’s symptoms and pus-filled diseases, the exact daily distance he was forced to climb on the prison treadmill and, above all, the money he made, details which fascinate us but may strike future readers as prurient or irrelevant.