Robert Frank’s Unsentimental Journey
The master had died, but I was frozen momentarily by the copious tangle of his ear hairs. The sagging lower lip. The stonemason’s physique. The soup stain on the pants. The unsentimental posture of death. Dead in a soup kitchen. And no one with a camera, for Christ’s sake.
And why should I have felt lousy or manipulative for being exhilarated by the moment? Frank has made a career of the raw and the naked in search of higher truths. He has used his own family many times in his artwork, mining through the rubble of their lives for something new to say.
At the soup shop, his wife did not cry over his corpse. That is how a relationship goes after four decades. Hysteria is the stuff of poetry and youth. I loosened his belt and felt for a pulse, which I could not find. The interpreter called for a car. The table was moved. A silent panic enveloped the room. I could see it in the proprietress’s face. Somebody would be punished for that chicken soup.
Leaf moved herself to the chair next to the master. The loving wife. The dutiful handmaiden. She stroked his unshaven face. She had loved him hard and well and as best she could since the minute he fell in love with her breasts at that Manhattan party 40 years ago.
Just as suddenly as he had died, the master’s eyes snapped open. “Don’t touch me,” he hissed at her.
Beautifully written piece in Vanity Fair about Robert Frank. Well worth the 20 minutes.
