Diego Rivera is known for a multitude of paintings: vast murals that pay homage to the struggle of the proletariat, canvases that alluded to events and people from Mexican history, even still lifes that flirt with the Cubist style coming out of France during the early 20th century.
But a lesser known work by him—a salacious painting of a nude New York socialite—ended up taking the spotlight on Thursday’s episode of the Hulu TV series Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, which traces the manipulative friendships between the writer Truman Capote and the moneyed Manhattanites in his circle.
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One of those Manhattanites was C. Z. Guest, a debutante turned actress who married Winston Frederick Churchill Guest. Played by Chloë Sevigny in Feud, Guest is remembered for having remained friends with Capote much longer than the other women he claimed to adore.
When it comes to art history, Guest played a bit part, posing for famed artists of her era. The Surrealist Salvador Dalí painted her in one of his dreamy landscapes, coolly seated before galloping equines—an allusion to Guest’s own love for horseback riding and her husband’s career as an international polo champion. The Pop artist Andy Warhol photographed Guest playing out that passion, seated atop one of her horses.
But it is a 1945 Rivera painting of Guest that became the most well-known representation of her—and ended up sealing her fame.
That painting, titled In vinum veritas, features Guest reclining in the buff, her body readily displayed for the viewer. (Images of the work are hard to come by, but one appears in a Christie’s press release from 2015.) She lays amid flowers draped across her, and her cheeks are rosy. If its title, which translates from the Latin to “In wine, there is truth,” is to be heeded, she may already be drunk.
In vinum veritas was painted after Guest had already found a following in New York, having appeared in the Broadway show Ziegfeld Follies, and she had gone to Mexico to raise her profile even more. It worked, and the painting became her calling card abroad. The New York Times even mentioned it in its obituary for Guest when she died in 2003, and in a remembrance, published in the Times the following day, fashion critic Cathy Horyn wrote, “Pity the poor socialite today. She will never know what it’s like to be painted in the nude by Diego Rivera.”
Initially, the nearly-nine-foot-long painting hung in a Mexico City bar called Ciro’s, located at the Hotel Reforma. But once Guest married in 1947, her husband, a prominent polo player with a sizable family steel fortune, saw fit to get In vinum veritas out of public view.
According to the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, which ran an extensive article on the painting in 2005, Winston Frederick Churchill Guest proceeded to buy the painting. It remained stowed away in private for many years, only to reemerge in 1986, four years after he died. The painting then headed to auction at Sotheby’s, where it was reportedly valued at $1.5 million.
Nineteen years later, the owners of Mexico City’s Avril Gallery saw the work in a Miami home. With the journalist Sondra Schneider, they researched the painting and even put it on view at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach in 2005. In 2015, the painting reappeared at a selling exhibition held by Christie’s.
Still, as Rivera’s works go, this one is a deep cut. But in the lore about Guest, it has occupied a central place. Capote himself wrote of the work, referring to it as “a honey-haired odalisque desnuda.” And Guest even spoke highly of Rivera, noting that he “was very kind, and I became famous.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
