I can’t help but wonder what else you’ve said that you didn’t really mean.
Diana
Toulouse-Lautrec rarely painted himself, and when he did, he hid the flaws of his lower body. In At the Moulin Rouge, he put himself in the background next to his much taller cousin, but hid his deformed legs behind a group of people at a table. In a self-portrait, he depicted himself from the waist up. There is a famous photograph of him dressed as a little clown, as if to underscore that people who focused on his disabilities formed an inaccurate impression of him.
All of this made Kitomi Ito’s painting even rarer. This was the only work of Toulouse-Lautrec’s where he was literally and figuratively baring himself, as if to say that love renders you naked and vulnerable. There were other differences, too. Unlike most of his work, which had been exhibited after his death in Albi, his birthplace, at a museum funded by his mother, this one disappeared from the public eye until 1908. Until then, it had been stashed away with a friend of Toulouse-Lautrec’s, an art dealer named Maurice Joyant. With the painting had come the express directive of the artist: sell this only to someone who is willing to give up everything for love.
The first owner of the painting was Coco Chanel, who received it as a gift from Boy Capel, a rich aristocrat who bought it to lure her away from her first lover, étienne Balsan. Chanel fell madly for Capel, who financed her foray into clothing design and her boutiques in Biarritz and Deauville. Their relationship was intense and sizzling, even though Capel was never faithful to her and married an aristocrat and kept another mistress. When he died at Christmas 1919, Chanel draped her windows with black crepe and put black sheets on her bed. I lost everything when I lost Capel, she once said. He left a void in me the years have not filled.
Years later, Chanel had an affair with the Duke of Westminster, who took her aboard his yacht, the Flying Cloud. Long after that, the duke offered up his yacht for a friend who needed a place for a tryst—Edward VIII, briefly the king of England, who was obsessed with the American divorcée Wallis Simpson. Although they didn’t wind up using that yacht, they did have an affair—one that led him to give up the throne. Months later, in 1937, Edward VIII bought the Toulouse-Lautrec painting for Wallis Simpson, negotiating with Chanel through their mutual friend the duke. Chanel wanted it out of the house, she said, because it broke her heart.
In 1956, Wallis Simpson was said to be jealous of Marilyn Monroe because Marilyn had pushed her off the front pages of the newspapers. She invited her nemesis for tea, choosing to keep her enemies close. While at Simpson’s home, Monroe was left breathless by the Toulouse-Lautrec painting. In 1962, when Joe DiMaggio was trying to get Monroe to remarry him, he convinced Simpson to sell him the painting. He presented it to Marilyn three days before she died.
No one knows how Sam Pride and Joe DiMaggio crossed paths, but in 1972, Pride bought the painting from DiMaggio, and gave it to Kitomi Ito as a wedding present. It hung over their bed until he was killed, and then she moved it into the hallway of their apartment.
There is a small matte smudge on the frame of the painting, from where Kitomi Ito touches it as she passes, drawing her like a lodestone, or a statue you rub for good luck.
Provenance, in art, is a fancy word for the origins of a work. It’s the paper trail, the chain of evidence, the connection between then and now. It’s the unbroken link between the artist and the present art collector. The provenance of Kitomi Ito’s painting is devotion so fierce, it scorches the earth with tragedy and lays waste to those who experience it. Starting, of course, with the man who’d caught syphilis from his paramour … ?but who stared at her from the corner of the painting with single-minded focus, as if to say, For you, love, I would do it all again.
From: [email protected]
Six of my patients died today.
Their families were allowed to come in here and say goodbye the hour before they died—and that’s an improvement over what it was last week, when they had to do it over FaceTime.
This last patient was on ECMO. Everyone’s talking about vents and how we’re running out of them but no one is talking about ECMO—which is when your lungs are so bad, even the vent doesn’t work anymore. So you get a giant-ass cannula in your neck and one in your groin and the blood gets pumped through a machine that acts like your heart and lungs. You get a Foley catheter and a rectal tube and a nasal gastric tube for nutrition—we are literally outsourcing their bodies.
This woman was twenty years old. TWENTY. All that bullshit about how the virus is killing old people? Whoever’s saying that isn’t working in an ICU. Of my six patients who died, none were over 35. Two were Hispanic women in their twenties who developed Covid bowel necrosis, which required surgical resection—they made it through surgery but died from complications. One was an overweight man, 28—overweight, but not obese. One, a paramedic, bled into her lungs. One guy I thought was gonna make it, until his pupils blew out—the heparin we gave him so the ECMO could do its work without clotting gave him a brain bleed.