The spark of divinity is in all... -The Silver Surfer Brought together as if at a backstage party, images of artists, writers, scholars, statesmen, actors, and the ever-popular portraits of a lady make up the guest list for V.I.P., along with you, the beholder. The exhibition, presented in the Theater Gallery, features more than fifty portraits on paper from the museum's collection, dating from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. V.I.P. includes self-portraits by Edvard Munch and Andy Warhol, drawings by Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, and photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron and Nan Goldin, among many others. In the 1993 book A Double Life by Nan Goldin and David Armstrong, Armstrong recalls, "That summer of 1972 was the happiest summer of my life... Nan's first real body of work came out of this time on Grove Street, pictures of Tommy, Suzanne and me, our close friends Bea and Kenny, and the other queens who hung out at The Other Side, a drag bar in Park Square. Nan worshipped the queens and it showed in the pictures." Goldin wrote, "David is the first person I ever took a picture of - and the last one I photographed today. He's the one who named me Nan and showed me my personality... Before I met David I looked inside myself and found emptiness but he looked inside me and found pearls." Their mutual admiration is evident in the photograph David at Grove Street, Boston, 1972. Like Goldin and Armstrong a century later, Julia Margaret Cameron and Alfred, Lord Tennyson enjoyed a close relationship. Friends since the 1850s, and neighbors on the Isle of Wight in Great Britain, they shared time, conversation, and mutual respect. Cameron did not begin her photographic career until the age of forty-eight. When she was fifty-nine, she was invited by Tennyson to illustrate his book of poems Idylls of the King, inspired by the King Arthur legend. Cameron chose her niece May Prinsep to portray the character Elaine, a young girl who died of a broken heart. Publisher C. Kegan Paul praised the artist and model, saying to Cameron, "Miss Prinsep must be a great actress, as you are a great artist to be able to put pathos in her face, now that her life is not like Elaine's, but crowned and happy." In Vienna, another friendship began in 1907 when the seventeen- year-old artist Egon Schiele went to the atelier of forty-six-year-old Gustav Klimt and presented him with a portfolio of his drawings. He asked, "Do I have talent?" to which Klimt replied, "Talent? Yes! Much too much!" Although they did not see each other often, Klimt helped Schiele by sending him models and introducing him to important patrons of the arts. As he had once done for Oskar Kokoschka, Klimt arranged a position for Schiele at the famous arts and crafts association of the time, Wiener Werkstätte, where among his duties the young Schiele designed men's clothing, women's shoes, and postcards. The spark of divinity is in all.
