Julie Kavanagh

Wednesday

Julie Kavanagh

The genius of Richard Avedon

From our UK edition

‘I have seldom had such a delicious hour,’ Isaiah Berlin wrote to me in January 1993. ‘I realise that Avedon and I are now friends for life, even if I never see him again.’ Berlin wasn’t alone in being bewitched. A few months earlier, Tina Brown had taken over as editor of the New Yorker and hired Avedon as staff photographer to open up its pages of solid, sacrosanct text. It was a blasphemous but brilliant move. With him came an incredible archive of images: Picasso, Stravinsky, Beckett, Hitchcock, Bogard, Garland, Auden, Chaplin, Streisand, Bacon, Capote, the Beatles… I could go on. As the TNY’s photographer – its only photographer – Avedon was under commission to produce new work, and as London editor, my role was to suggest new subjects to interest him.

Thursday

Julie Kavanagh

Nijinsky, by Lucy Moore – review

From our UK edition

The first biography of Vaslav Nijinsky, which appeared in 1934, was written by his wife Romola with the help of two ghosts — the young Lincoln Kirstein and Little Blue Bird, an obliging spirit called up by a psychic medium to provide information from beyond the grave. Needless to say, the book wasn’t entirely accurate; and nor, two years later, was her edition of Nijinsky’s confessional diaries, a stream-of-consciousness record of his descent into madness, which she censored, restructured and cut by over a third. It took Richard Buckle’s now classic life of the dancer (published in l971 and amended after Romola’s death) to sort fact from fiction and recreate the phenomenal impact of Nijinsky and Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet.