lesbianartandartists: Janet Flanner, Poem Written for Mercedes d'Acosta, c. 1928 “This water-s
lesbianartandartists:Janet Flanner, Poem Written for Mercedes d'Acosta, c. 1928“This water-stained piece of paper is a love letter. Drawn by Janet Flanner, Paris correspondent for The New Yorker, it is addressed to the champion seductress and unsuccessful Hollywood screenwriter Mercedes d'Acosta. ‘Say what you want about Mercedes,’ Alice B. Toklas famously observed, ‘she’s had the three greatest women of the twentieth century.’ (Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich were certainly on Toklas’s shortlist, but no one knows the identity of the third woman.) Flanner uses words to render images of flowers - in this case, a tulip. ‘She ate daintily,’ Flanner wrote to draw the edge of a leaf, 'consuming a sweetened crumb like a sinner taking a high note. She ate flesh talking of flowers and flesh.’ The love letter is but one scrap in the mounds of paper generated by the army of lovers that populated expatriate lesbian Paris. Ink on paper was the women’s route to visibility. They ran bookstores (Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier), they helped each other out by producing interdisciplinary work (Nathalie Barney’s soirees), wrote gossip columns about their gay lives (Flanner’s letters in The New Yorker), and fired off sexy poems (Gertrude Stein’s 'Tender Buttons’). They also painted (Romaine Brooks), photographed (Berenice Abbott) and drew each other (Djuna Barnes).”Catherine Lord, Art & Queer Culture (New York: Phaidon, 2013), 80. -- source link
#janet flanner#ephemera#poetry