The year was 1981 and the New York art scene was heating up as a new generation of artists, photographers, filmmakers, performers and musicians came of age. After a decade of “benign neglect”, which left a trail of abandoned buildings and vacant lots in its wake, the city was finally beginning to rebound. Frame had just moved into a fifth-floor walk-up apartment on Perry Street in the West Village, where he regularly invited friends like Nan Goldin, Cookie Mueller, Kenny Scharf, David Armstrong and Alvin Baltrop.
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David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (John Masturbating), 1978–79
Peter Hujar , Nicolas Abdallah Moufarrege, Paris, 1980
Allen Frame, Darrel Ellis and Wendell Headley, Brighton Beach, 1982
Barbara Alper, Marsha P. Johnson, Christopher St., 1982
Indeed, New York circles can run surprisingly small, sending a small cohort of artists skyrocketing while the rest soldier forth. During the 1980s, artists like Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Robert Mapplethorpe shot to fame, taking a page from Andy Warhol, and ushering in a new era of the artist as celebrity.
“With this exhibition, we wanted to create a context around Darrel Ellis’s life and experience, and in the process, an interesting theme emerged that is driving the show, with the title, which is a Baudelaire reference,” Frame says, pointing to the French writer’s famous poem, Invitation to the Voyage from his landmark 1857 collection, The Flowers of Evil. Here, Baudelaire weaves an intoxicating spell of fire and desire that wafts across the page as a luminous dream evoking a world of spun gold, unfolding as a tapestry of bliss where “there is all beauty and symmetry / Pleasure, calm, and luxury [luxe, calme, volupté].”
It’s the perfect image for this sensuous portrait of promise and youth that all pursuing their dream feel so exquisitely in those first flutters of freedom. “The embrace of beauty, elegance and extravagance contrast with the brutal reality of the Aids, crack and homelessness epidemics in the 80s,” says Frame. “There’s a juxtaposition in the exhibition between the gritty struggles of the street and the desire to experience this kind of excessive opulence; the harsh contrast of beauty and destruction of the times.”
Alvin Baltrop, The Piers (Sunbathing Platform with Tava Mural), 1975–86
Luxe, Calme, Volupté is on show at Candice Madey in New York until 11 August 2023. plus at the Bronx Museum
of the Arts in New York Darrel Ellis: Regeneration is on show until 27 August 2023.
