My show at the Met

From The Met to the Washington Opera

Sounds grand, doesn't it? New York's Lincoln Center - the centre of the cultural world, you might say. But 2001 saw just a modest exhibition of a selection of my paintings and prints of famous musicians in the The Gallery at Lincoln Center. It was actually tucked away with gift shops and such-like underneath the Metropolitan Opera House on the way to the car park. Everybody passes by to get to their car, right? Even Maestro James Levine popped in, looked at my paintings and exclaimed "Hey, I know all these people! Drop by any time if you want to sketch during our rehearsals".

The Metropolitan Opera Guild had entitled my show Center Stage! (which seemed to me a bit over the top) and timed it to coincide with the Gala celebrating Plácido Domingo's 60th birthday, so they could use my first painting of him on the programme cover. On reflection, I feel now that the painting is a bit stiff, but there was more to come.

Plácido Domingo I. (detail)

I had painted some of the big names in opera (Jessye Norman, Cecilia Bartoli, Gergiev, Georg Solti, Pavarotti, José Carreras, Kiri Te Kanawa, not to mention Maestro Kurt Masur at the N.Y. Phil next door, Yo-Yo Ma etc., so surely this was a prime spot to exhibit. The opening was crowded and everybody was buying the beautiful catalogue (which should have been a signal to tone down my expectations of major sales). Drinks and snacks were seized by both invited guests and party-crashers, straight off the street. What can you do? I understand you can eat quite well from the opening nights of exhibitions.

The calm before the storm

With Cathie Curran Gamble and Connie McPhee Curran

Then there was an elegant after-party hosted by my dear late friend Catherine Curran Gamble. A lover of all the arts, Cathie had been extraordinarily generous to me, ever since her daughter Constance Curran had been one of my students at Aiglon College in Switzerland - actually the best student I ever had. Cathie had a breathtaking art collection in her Park Avenue apartment; she would host a reception in my honour when I was in town and she commissioned me to paint her daughter and grandchildren. Catherine was an eminent philanthropist and patron of the arts and education, daughter of Sidney Gamble (the grandson of the co-founder of Procter & Gamble). He had travelled widely as a sociologist in China between 1918 and 1932 and made an extraordinary photographic documentation of life in China long before the revolution. Cathie (who was born in China) later discovered a huge collection of his original photographic glass plates in an attic and facilitated an exhibition of the prints that were showed in China and elsewhere. They can now be seen in the Duke University Sidney D. Gamble Collection.
I shall never forget the kind friendship of Cathie and her family.

Constance Curran McPhee, Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This gown is probably at least 100 years old.

The exhibition didn't sell well. After so much effort I was terribly disappointed, in debt and stuck with a load of excellent framed fine art prints. Happily another dear old friend and benefactor Karen Free Royce came to my rescue. She arranged to have the lot transported and put in storage in her basement in Connecticut, until I could collect my wits and eventually ship the stuff home.

Despite this apparent failure, I later got a fax from a fan of Plácido Domingo's who had seen my show. She not only wanted my fine art prints of the "Three Tenors", but commissioned me to make a new painting of Plácido. She was a patron of the Washington National Opera, where Plácido was at that time Music Director, so I proposed a painting of him as conductor. She arranged for me to sit in the orchestra pit, while Domingo was rehearsing Carmen. As he coaxed this production into shape, he couldn’t help singing all the parts of a work that he knew intimately. Plácido’s expression radiated encouragement and a real understanding of the needs of his soloists.

My watercolour places him on a diagonal rising from bottom left to top right, at the heart of the action, a surge of energy reaching up to the stage. Dominated by the plush reds of the auditorium, my splashy red-brown paint-strokes might be seen as the dynamic bow movements of the strings, or a hint of the earthy passion and bloody drama about to take place on stage.

My patron flew me to Washington D.C., (where I had a suite right opposite the offices of the Watergate scandal) to show her my one metre square watercolour. She burst into tears. Yes! So far so good.

Then, back-stage at the Opera, all ready for a performance, Plácido took time to view the watercolour himself. He just beamed, made some very kind comments and insisted on adding his own signature.  My sponsor's architect got a phone call to please re-model the north wall of her summer home, to give this work centre stage. And the final highlight of that Washington trip was to bump into the world's great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich in my hotel. I had painted him in 1991 and it was big hugs all round! All's well that ends well.

It all seems so long ago. Reflecting on these adventures on the eve of my eighty-fourth birthday, I feel so fortunate and blessed - enriched in the best sense of the word.

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Yaltah

Remembering Yaltah Menuhin

Yaltah died on June 9th, sixteen years ago. She was named after the Crimean resort, her mother's birthplace. An exceptionally talented woman full of humour, wisdom and poetic musicality, the pianist Yaltah Menuhin grew up in the shadow of her brother, the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin and of her sister the pianist Hephzibah Menuhin. Rudolf Serkin, who taught both sisters the piano as small girls, thought Yaltah the more talented. But as "only" the little sister she was at a disadvantage - her tyrannical parents would not allow her to detract from the brilliant career of her brother. (How often has this happened to excellent female musicians!). Nevertheless she played internationally until just before her death. We met in the sixties at the Gstaad Menuhin Festival. Much has been written about the extraordinary multicultural lives of the Menuhin trio, their travels and adventures - I couldn't even begin to summarise it.

Yaltah said of this rather serious oil painting: "You have painted the burdens of my race". But I rather think that it reflects the burden of my unhappy marriage in 1971. In those years I was still clinging to a visual likeness, afraid to disturb it with the vibes that I was certainly getting from the music. The dynamic Yaltah deserved something much more lively, so I resolved to do something about this. But I was still searching for a style, a way to paint movement without entirely abandoning the visual impression, as so often trying to compromise. Then in 1972 my marriage broke up. My free brushwork and colour in the second painting shows you what happened to my style!

Yaltah's hands and eyes suggest her intensity, the colours her emotions, but the fact that the mouth is almost invisible can only be explained by my experiments in portraits of that period to paint something more than just a conventional portrait, giving some features more emphasis than others - not always effectively, I'm afraid. But it's an early work, painted with my newfound lease on life. Her fingers do the talking.

So on Friday June 9th., I shall reflect with love on Yaltah's kindness to me and encouragement with my work, when I was going through difficult times. Her understanding came from her own lifetime of frustrations and disappointments, yet she was happy. She was a romantic and wrote a poem every day in one of the many languages in which she was fluent. She generously found ways to bring creative people together, as did her siblings. We maintained an affectionate correspondence until shortly before her death in 2001, her letters and cards always decorated with a little flower or improvised design in her favourite colours, azure blue and purple. Whenever possible she dressed colourfully, in later years with a headband around her long flowing golden hair turned grey, somewhat resembling a crazy priestess or a hippy. She played with an infectious exuberance, with a joie de vivre that is unforgettable.

Her monogram: Yaltah Menuhin-Ryce.

Here's the link to the lovely informative website dedicated to her memory by Iain and Charlotte Phillips: Yaltah Menuhin.
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