Columnist, writer, photographer and above all muse of the Californian art scene of the 1960s and 1970s, the American Eve Babitz died in Los Angeles hospital on Friday, December 17, from Huntington’s disease. She was 78 years old.
The name Eve Babitz immediately evokes a famous photo taken in 1963, by a photographer for the magazine Time, Julian Wasser, in a room at the Pasadena Art Museum (California). It shows a game of chess which begins: on one side, Marcel Duchamp – he is in a black suit and plays with the whites; on the other, the young Eve Babitz, completely naked (she has very white skin and plays with blacks). Note that his emancipated posture does not seem to distract at all the father – already stuck – of the famous “ready-mades”.
How does one come to pose “In Eve’s outfit” – this will be, later, the title of one of his books published in February 2021 (Points, 96 p., 5.90 €) – at just 20 years old, in front of the tutelary figure of the art of the XXe century? Without doubt, for that you have to belong to the artistic world yourself, which is the case with Eve Babitz. The girl is a pure Hollywood product. It was there that she was born, on May 13, 1943, to a mother who drew houses and a classical violinist father in the Twentieth Century Fox orchestra. His parents are very introduced. They picnic with Bertrand Russell. Friends of the family are called Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin. As for Eve Babitz’s godfather, he is none other than “The little one, happy and brilliant” Igor Stravinsky. While she is 16 and judges adults “Cans and creeps”, Igor slips scotches under the table to Eve during dinner and places rose petals in her bodice.
False tunes by Brigitte Bardot
As a teenager, Babitz read eagerly. Virginia Woolf and Colette are his idols. At 14, she wrote “Memoirs” entitled – for her parents? – I wouldn’t be raising my kid in Hollywood. She would later be known as the inspirer, both muse and Madonna, of Harrison Ford and Jim Morrison to whom she boasted of having made advances. “After only three minutes”. Unbridled life with celebrities, art, parties, drugs and sexual freedom… Babitz will relate all of this in his books. But it wasn’t until the early 1970s that she really began to write. Previously, she designed record covers, before becoming a columnist for magazines Vogue Where Rolling Stone, especially.
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