#peter watson

Peter Watson & Pavel Tchelitchew (c 1934), Cecil Beaton

"Aşk , insanın yalnızlığına bir çözüm değildir;

yalnızlık için bir sığınaktır."

Cecil Beaton, Pavel Tchelitchew painting Peter Watson, Ashcombe, 1934.

The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s

Paul Mpagi Sepuya was asked about a photograph that meant something to him by Photograph Magazine, and he had this to say about the Beaton photograph.

♂︎♂︎

This is a triple portrait of painter Pavel Tchelitchew; his partner, the writer Charles Henri Ford; and their patron and painting subject Peter Watson. Tchelitchew looks over his right shoulder at the camera – Cecil Beaton, the photograph’s author – and at us. Tchelitchew is paused in front of a canvas depicting Watson, whose glance looks past Beaton and us, somewhere out of the frame. To the left, Ford sits absorbed in his own reading, completing the formal elements of the picture while avoiding what Thomas Waugh, in his book Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall, called the “circuits of the desiring look,” which envelop the other subjects, the photographer, and us as contemporary viewers.

Our word “ceramic” comes from the Greek keramikos, meaning clay. The area of Athens where the ceramies, or community of potters, lived was known as Ceramicus, occupying an area bordering the Agora, along the banks of the Eridanos River. The fine clay of Ceramicus, combined with the brilliant technique of many Greek potters, resulted in the creation of multifarious shapes for vases, according to their function. Scholars and collectors who share a passion for Greek vases now recognize about a hundred different shapes for them, each of which has its own name. […]

The third—and crowning—aspect of Greek vases is their decoration. Many archaeologists and art historians believe that after the very beautiful but very mysterious cave paintings produced by early man, mainly in Europe about 30,000 years ago, Greek vase paintings are the highest achievement of human art until at least the great cathedrals of the High Middle Ages more than a millennium later. It is one of the reasons the ancient Greeks are held in such esteem. As Sir Peter Hall puts it in his book Cities in Civilisation (1998), in a chapter on ancient Athens that he calls “The Fountainhead”:

“The crucial point about Athens is that it was first. And first in no small sense: first in so many of the things that have mattered, ever since, to western civilisation and its meaning. Athens in the fifth century BC gave us democracy, in a form as pure as we are likely to see…. It gave us philosophy, including political philosophy, in a form so rounded, so complete, that hardly anyone added anything of moment to it for well over a millennium. It gave us the world’s first systematic written history. It systematized medical and scientific knowledge, and for the first time began to base them on generalisations from empirical observation. It gave us the first lyric poetry and then comedy and tragedy, all again at so completely an extraordinary pitch of sophistication and maturity, such that they might have been germinating under the Greek sun for hundreds of years. It left us the first naturalistic art; for the first time, human beings caught and registered for ever the breath of a wind, the quality of a smile.”

This is what evokes a passion for Greek vases in so many people.”