Word: pimp
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...Portrait painting is a pimp's profession," John Singer Sargent once proclaimed. "Mugs" was what he called his 500-odd sitters, mostly proper Bostonians, British nobles and French socialites, and he sometimes contemptuously held their attention by coloring his nose red or pretending to eat his cigar. "No more paughtraits" he wrote in relief to a friend after he began shunning them in 1910, at the height of his renown...
...after his death in 1925 when he became confused with less talented imitators, high again now that most of the portraits have found their way into great museums. Yet before he began concentrating on commissioned portraits, and sometimes during that period, and often after he balked and quit the "pimp's profession," Sargent painted people and landscapes for his own creative satisfaction. A big show of these works (see next two pages) opens this week in Washington's Corcoran Gallery...
...Northeastern Brazil, a peasant named Ze, honoring the saint who spared the life of his injured donkey, carries a cross "as heavy as Christ's" 30 miles to the Church of Santa Barbara in Bahia. In the city, Ze's wife Rosa is seduced by a sneering pimp. Next morning a vindictive priest refuses to let Ze enter the church, scorning his promise to the saint as a pagan vow made through an intermediary god at a macumba ceremony. "Black magic," cries the priest. Ze shakes his head sadly. "My church has no image of Santa Barbara...
...peasant settles down on the padre's church steps, the city throbs to carnival tempo. It is a feast day. Some newsmen hear of Ze's plight and exploit him in headlines as a Communist agitator, a heretic, a miracle worker; then the pimp instigates a riot that ends in Ze's death. Here, the usual Christ symbolism is seized upon, but Director Anselmo Duarte brings it off feelingly as the sullen, silent crowd carries the dead man in to fulfill his promise...
Without benefit of Sartre, for instance, what is to be made of Our Lady of the Flowers? The book is infested with shadowy characters-like the handsome pimp known as "Darling Daintyfoot"-who come to gruesome ends after enjoying a succession of couplings and even triplings. The heroine at first seems to be a dead prostitute called "Divine." But Divine is also referred to as "Lou" and "Culafroy," and it is eventually apparent that she is Jean Genet. It is also clear that she is not really a she but a he in she's clothing...