Los Angeles Review of Books

L.A. Woman by Steffie Nelson

December 18th, 2011 reset - +

Painting © Maria Przyszychowska from a Photograph by Julian Wasser

IN EVE BABITZ'S THIRD BOOK, Sex and Rage, the main character Jacaranda Leven comes upon a black-and-white photograph hanging in a grand Hollywood penthouse apartment, next to "a David Hockney swimming pool, and a huge pornographic watercolor by John Altoon." Shot by Julian Wasser in 1963, the image shows Marcel Duchamp playing chess in an art gallery with a voluptuous naked woman whose face is obscured by a curtain of dark hair. "The contrast between Duchamp's dried-out ancient little person and the large young girl's Rubenesque flesh," Babitz writes, "was not (unlike chess) at all subtle." Leven, an aspiring writer who, like all of Babitz's protagonists, is an obvious stand-in for the author, can't believe her host owns a print of this legendary photograph, while her host can't believe this surfer girl in thrift-store Dior has even seen it before. "She'd have to be an idiot," Jacaranda comments to the reader, "to spend all her time around artists and not know this photograph."


Jacaranda's creator, for her part, knew it well, for the naked girl is none other than Babitz herself, age 20. She'd agreed to this stunt proposed by Wasser to spite her married boyfriend, Walter Hopps, who had curated a Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum and failed to invite her to the opening reception. Almost 50 years later, despite the fact that she went on to write a total of seven books, this staged chess match with Duchamp remains the single act Babitz is best remembered for, if she is remembered at all. Sex and Rage, like all of her books, is long out of print. Shockingly, most o...

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