HORVATLAND - THE '60s - SCULPTUREGO TO HOME

Written in 2013.

Sometimes I wonder about the place of art in our time. Some of the contemporary sculptors, painters, writers or photographers that I most admire are people whom I have met by chance and who have remained totally unknown to a wider public – while others, that I admire much less, are shown in famous museums or published as bestsellers. Among the former are Marvin Israel and his wife Margaret Ponce, he a painter and she a sculptor. I saw their work in New York, at the beginning of the Sixties, and was deply impressed. Recently I looked them up in Wikipedia: Marvin has seven lines, Margaret three. Marvin (who died in 1984) was my art director at Harper’s Bazaar. We became friends. I often visited him at his two-storey cupola atelier, on top of a building in midtown New York. Once he spoke to me about Margaret, his extranged wife, and suggested that I take some photos in her studio, of which he had the keys, on a day when she was out of town: because she was peculiar, he said, and did not like meeting people. I spent a morning in that basement in the Village, under the eyes of the janitor, a middle aged woman who looked like a man and sat all that time, motionless and silently, in an armchair, watching my movements. I remember it as one of the most intense experiences of my life: like travelling inside a person’s brain. What I saw and photographed was an assemblage of objects of which I kept wondering if they had been placed there by accident or by Margaret’s intention – but which gave me the feeling that they had to be there, and that they represented the mind of a person that was possibly psychotic and probably a genius. I never met Margaret Ponce Israel personally. According to Wikipedia, she died in 1987.