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February 27, 2009

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

9

A fresh look at a familiar artist, and at one who should be

by Anthony Glassman

It is a fitting end to Black History Month to examine the lives of two gay African American artists, one of whom is a household name, the other not quite so well-known.

Portrait of Richmond Barthé, 1928. Alan Locke Papers, Moorland-Spingam Research Center, Howard University.

It could be assumed that, by this point, every single word uttered by James Baldwin has already been examined so thoroughly that there is nothing new to discover about the writer. That would be a fallacy, as Magdalena J. Zaborowska's James Baldwin's Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Duke University, trade paper, $24.95) chronicles the decade between 1961 and 1971, when Baldwin shifted his expatriate residence from France and western Europe to the east, setting down roots and establishing a network of friends and colleagues.

While there, he continued to write, creating and staging a play with his local "family" that outraged censors but did incredible box office. He was also the subject of a short documentary by Sedat Pakay, From Another Place.

Filled with rare personal photographs, interviews with artists in Turkey who knew Baldwin and information from Turkish archives, the book correlates his experiences in the East with his views on the West, showing how Baldwin drew on his surroundings to help analyze the American South in No Name on the Street.

The change in locale gave him early

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impetus to finish his novel Another Country, and a decade later, when Pakay was filming his short documentary, Baldwin decided to settle in the south of France. He had, by that point, known Pakay for six years, and with him had seen much of Turkey.

Zaborowska's book is the first indepth examination of this period in Baldwin's life, and her access to material and people from this time makes it an integral chapter in the life of a man best known to gay white men as the author of Giovanni's Room.

Baldwin was born during the Harlem Renaissance, the period from around 1919 to perhaps the mid-1930s when African American artistic expression was achieving its greatest prominence, and he knew many of the key players in later years.

Sculptor Richmond Barthé was a part of that epoch.

The first black sculptor to achieve critical success. his 80 years are chronicled in Barthé: A Life in Sculpture by Margaret Rose Vendryes (University Press of Mississippi, hardcover, $40).

Vendryes' tome makes great use of images from collections across the country, including Barthé's papers in the Amistad Research Center in New Örleans, so photos of the artist as a child, sketches he did mimicking fa-

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ALDWIN'S TURKISH DECADE: Erotics of Ba

mous works of art, and his more solid works in installation are scattered throughout the book, giving a sense of time and place to what would otherwise be pieces of metal floating ephemerally in the ether.

Continued on next page

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