VOGUE „ October 1999
People are talking about
A book of portraits by Francesco Clemente coincides with the
opening this month of a major retrospective of the artist's work at the
Guggenheim Museum.
Among
that cadre of ambitious, then-young artists who catapulted to celebrity in New
York in the precrash, go-go days of the eighties, Francesco Clemente is the
only one who starred in an advertising campaign for Comme des Garons --
serving as sad-eyed poster boy for Rei Kawakubo's spring/summer '89
collection. It's a small,
anecdotal detail, but like the fresco Clemente labored over for Ian Schrager
and Steve Rubell at the Palladium nightclub in 1985, it's revealing -- not only
of that decade's fascination with artists such as Clemente and Julian Schnabel
and David Salle and Eric Fischl and Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat but
of those artists' determination to ascend to social, financial, and,
occasionally, even sartorial prominence, to say goodbye to the
starving-artist-in-the-garret clich and hello to town houses in Greenwich
Village and every matre d' who matters in Manhattan.
Life
is Paradise: The Portraits of Francesco Clemente (powerHouse Books) serves as a kind of figurative compass to the world
Clemente hasn't merely traveled through but conquered since 1981. In many ways, these portraits suggest
that it's been a charmed journey, one on which Clemente has been accompanied by
people with very familiar, and
evocative, names: Niarchos, Von
Furstenberg, Picasso, Paltrow, Mehta, Lebowitz, Van Sant, Sottsass.
"One can wallow for days in these faces," writes Vincent Katz in his essay prefacing the 93 sometimes haunting, sometimes dreamlike watercolors, oils, pastels, and frescoes of models (Lauren Hutton, Christy Turlington) and movie stars (Minnie Driver, Robert De Niro), of pop stars (Bryan Ferry, Nick Rhodes) and poets (William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg), of royalty (Her Serene Highness the Princess Thurn and Taxis) and family (Alba and the children). -- CHARLES GANDEE