Celestial Eyes | |
---|---|
Artist | Francis Cugat |
Year | 1924 |
Medium | Oil on canvas |
Movement | Art Deco |
Location | Princeton University, Princeton |
Celestial Eyes is a painting painted in 1924 by Spanish painter Francis Cugat and preserved at the Princeton University Library for the Grafic Arts Collection. [1] [2]
The Art Deco style work is the cover of Francis Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby , set in the 1920s Jazz Age and considered one of the most representative novels of American literature. [3]
The work depicts a female face of a flapper with poorly delineated contours, of which are seen only the eyes and mouth, suspended above the night sky of a city, evoking the Coney Island amusement park in New York. Inside the irises there are female nude figures and a green tint in correspondence of the left eye resembling a tear. [4]
The iconic motif of the cover is given by its abstractness that gives it a mysterious charm and that is why it has met with many strongly conflicting opinions. [5]
In addition, her ill-defined characters have prompted readers and critics to wonder what she may have been inspired by, with the main hypotheses pinning on Dr. Eckleburg's billboard in the Valley of Ashes or the description of Daisy, loved by the protagonist Jay Gatsby in the novel. [6]
The painting was made by Francis Cugat, born as Francisco Coradal-Cugat in Spain but grew up in Cuba. [7]
Francis studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of Paris. He moved to the United States at the beginning of the 1920s where he began his career as an illustrator in New York City during the 1940s before moving to Hollywood. [8]
Here he worked as a consultant Technicolor in sixty-eight films in the period between 1948 and 1955. His role in the film industry led him to collaborate with several characters in the show, including the actor Douglas Fairbanks.
Cugat was commissioned to cover the novel by an unknown individual in Scribner's art department to illustrate the cover while Fitzgerald was still completing the novel, in the 1924, with the book still unfinished and provisionally titled Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires. [9] The author liked the design of Cugat so much to write in a letter from the August 1924 while he was in France:
For Christ's sake don't give anyone that jacket you're saving for me. I've written it into the book.
For his work, Cugat was paid $100 at the time, about $1,700 of today. [10]
In a preliminary sketch, Cugat drew a gray, blem landscape, inspired by the original title Fitzgerald wanted to give to the novel, Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires. [11]
After discarding this concept for being excessively gloomy, the painter then implemented a radical modification that became the foreshadowing of the final cover: a pencil and pastel drawing of the half-hidden face of a typical flapper of the time on the canal of Long Island Sound. Similar to the final version, the woman was characterized by her scarlet lips, at least a clearly heavenly eye and a tear that gushed out of it. [12]
Perfecting this idea, another draft thus presented two bright eyes that were standing out over a shaded New York City scape. In later versions, Cugat replaced the urban landscape in the shade with dazzling lights reminiscent of those of the carnival and a sparkling scenery, which even evoked a Ferris wheel and with probable allusion to the sparkling amusement park of Coney Island, New York City. [13]
Finally, he painted naked figures inside the woman's irises and a green tint in correspondence of the left eye indicating a tear.
This cover, which was praised by the same Scott Fitzgerald and from his editor Maxwell Perkins, was the only job Cugat did for the publishing house of Charles Scribner's as well as the only one he ever drew and later established himself as the most famous in all of American literature, if not worldwide. [14] [15]
The novel was first published in 1925 and later in 1978 in the pocket edition. [16]
What makes this work unique, however, is the peculiar collaboration between Fitzgerald and Francis Cugat himself. [17]
Having read only part of the book and taking as inspiration only a few conversations with the author and the title, instead of representing an image taken directly from the text Cugat has created a strongly symbolic one with the eyes of a woman who play the protagonist, thus transforming a visual work into an abstract representation. [18] [19]
Originally the background was more arid and barren, as in fact in the novel it is the Valley of the Ashes of the second chapter, but at the suggestion of Fitzgerald himself it was cleverly adapted in the city of New York. [20]
The writer Ernest Hemingway was very close to Fitzgerald, whom he met during his stay in Paris, in the spring of the 1925. In his memoirs, published posthumous in the 1964, with the title A Moveable Feast , Hemingway recalls his intimate relationship with the writer, and how they had discussed together about the book cover that he personally did not appreciate. [21]
Scott brought the book over. It had a garish dust jacket and I remember being embarrassed by the violence, bad taste and slippery look of it. It looked the book jacket for a book of bad science fiction. Scott told me not to be put off by it, that it had to do with a billboard along a highway in Long Island that was important in the story. I took it off to read the book
The relationship between the inspiration for the cover and its correspondence with the text of the novel has been the subject of debate. [22] [23]
Several critics, according to Hemingway, suggest that the cover are representing the eyes of a faded billboard, which appears in the second chapter of the novel, that were inspired by Cugat.
The billboard is located in a barren, desolate area, called the "Valley of the Ashes" near the garage of mechanic George Wilson, and perhaps had been exposed to advertise an ophthalmologist of the Queens, New York, Dr. Eckleburg, but later abandoned. [24]
The description that Fitzgerald performs it is very similar to the cover: the gigantic tall eyes still strike at a distance, rest on a nonexistent nose and the city of New York, where he would have had such a study ophthalmologist, is represented in the lower part of the cover.
The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic — their irises are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
— Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
However, there is also the hypothesis that the cover may have been inspired by the character of Daisy, cousin of the story's narrator, Nick Carraway. [25]
As the most popular girl in Louisville, Kentucky, Daisy had an affair during the 1910s with the then anonymous and penniless James Gatz. But the outbreak of the First World War forces the latter to leave for Europe and, despite the vain promise to return, too much time that has elapsed drives Daisy to marry Tom Buchanan, a wealthy polo player.
The hypothesis is supported by the fact that the lips are certainly feminine as well as the eyebrows and eyes, vaguely afflicted and on the verge of crying. In addition, most of the plot of the novel takes place in New York City.
Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour. [...] Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs, and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan, scornful mouth smiled, and so I drew her up again closer, this time to my face.
— Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
This, on the other hand, would raise the question of how much Fitzgerald and Cugat knew in advance of each other's work.
Correspondence between Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins would reveal that the cover had been commissioned in advance, but the writer still delayed the delivery of the novel. Nevertheless, it is evident from the correspondence that Perkins had already read part of the book and would have kept its cover for Fitzgerald.
The question, to date remains opened.
Charles Scribner's cousin, George Schieffelin, found the sketch in a bin of the publishing house where unused documents were thrown. [26] He preserved the painting, and bequeathed it to the Princeton University Library for the Graphic Arts Collection, where it is still kept today. [27]
The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with Jay Gatsby, the mysterious millionaire with an obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan.
A Moveable Feast is a memoir by Ernest Hemingway about his years as a struggling expatriate journalist and writer in Paris during the 1920s. It was published posthumously in 1964. The book chronicles Hemingway's first marriage to Hadley Richardson and his relationships with other cultural figures of the Lost Generation in interwar France.
Zelda Fitzgerald was an American novelist, painter, and socialite. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, to a wealthy Southern family, she became locally famous for her beauty and high spirits. In 1920, she married writer F. Scott Fitzgerald after the popular success of his debut novel, This Side of Paradise. The novel catapulted the young couple into the public eye, and she became known in the national press as the first American flapper. Because of their wild antics and incessant partying, she and her husband became regarded in the newspapers as the enfants terribles of the Jazz Age. Alleged infidelity and bitter recriminations soon undermined their marriage. After Zelda traveled abroad to Europe, her mental health deteriorated, and she had suicidal and homicidal tendencies, which required psychiatric care. Her doctors diagnosed her with schizophrenia, although later posthumous diagnoses posit bipolar disorder.
William Maxwell Evarts "Max" Perkins was an American book editor, best remembered for discovering authors Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Thomas Wolfe.
Matthew Joseph Bruccoli was an American professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He was an expert on F. Scott Fitzgerald; his biography of Fitzgerald, published in 1981, was considered the standard biography for decades. He also wrote about other writers, including Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and John O'Hara, and was editor of the Dictionary of Literary Biography.
Save Me the Waltz is a 1932 novel by American writer Zelda Fitzgerald. It is a semi-autobiographical account of her life in the Deep South during the Jim Crow era and her marriage to F. Scott Fitzgerald. The novel recounts the lives of Jazz Age hedonists Alabama Beggs and her husband David Knight, thinly-disguised alter-egos of their real-life counterparts. An aging Alabama aspires to become a prima ballerina, but an infected blister from her pointe shoe leads to blood poisoning, forever ending her dreams of fame.
This Side of Paradise is the debut novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1920. It examines the lives and morality of carefree American youth at the dawn of the Jazz Age. Its protagonist, Amory Blaine, is an attractive middle-class student at Princeton University who dabbles in literature and engages in a series of romances with flappers. Exploring the theme of love warped by greed and taking its title from a line of Rupert Brooke's poem Tiare Tahiti, Fitzgerald spent years crafting the work prior to its publication.
Tender Is the Night is the fourth and final novel completed by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in French Riviera during the twilight of the Jazz Age, the 1934 novel chronicles the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist, and his wife, Nicole, who is one of his patients. The story mirrors events in the lives of the author and his wife Zelda Fitzgerald as Dick starts his descent into alcoholism and Nicole struggles with mental illness.
Jay Gatsby is the titular fictional character of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The character is an enigmatic nouveau riche millionaire who lives in a luxurious mansion on Long Island where he often hosts extravagant parties and who allegedly gained his fortune by illicit bootlegging during prohibition in the United States. Fitzgerald based many details about the fictional character on Max Gerlach, a mysterious neighbor and World War I veteran whom the author met in New York during the raucous Jazz Age. Like Gatsby, Gerlach threw lavish parties, never wore the same shirt twice, used the phrase "old sport", claimed to be educated at Oxford University, and fostered myths about himself, including that he was a relation of the German Kaiser.
"Winter Dreams" is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald that was first published in Metropolitan magazine in December 1922 and later collected in All the Sad Young Men in 1926. The plot concerns the attempts by a young man to win the affections of an upper-class woman. The story, frequently anthologized, is regarded as one of Fitzgerald's finest works "for poignantly portraying the loss of youthful illusions."
The Great Gatsby is a 1974 American historical romantic drama film based on the 1925 novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The film was directed by Jack Clayton, produced by David Merrick, and written by Francis Ford Coppola. It stars Robert Redford, Mia Farrow, Sam Waterston, Bruce Dern, and Karen Black. The plot concerns the interactions of writer Nick Carraway with enigmatic millionaire Jay Gatsby (Redford) and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan (Farrow), amid the riotous parties of the Jazz Age on Long Island near New York City.
The Great Gatsby is a 1949 American historical romance drama film directed by Elliott Nugent, and produced by Richard Maibaum, from a screenplay by Richard Maibaum and Cyril Hume. The film stars Alan Ladd, Betty Field, Macdonald Carey, Ruth Hussey, and Barry Sullivan, and features Shelley Winters and Howard Da Silva, the latter of whom later returned in the 1974 version. It is based on the 1925 novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set during the raucous Jazz Age on Long Island near New York City, the plot follows the exploits of enigmatic millionaire and bootlegger Jay Gatsby who attempts to win back the affections of his former lover Daisy Buchanan with the aid of her second cousin Nick Carraway.
Daisy Fay Buchanan is a fictional character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The character is a wealthy socialite from Louisville, Kentucky who resides in the fashionable town of East Egg on Long Island during the Jazz Age. She is narrator Nick Carraway's second cousin, once removed, and the wife of polo player Tom Buchanan, with whom she has a daughter. Before marrying Tom, Daisy had a romantic relationship with Jay Gatsby. Her choice between Gatsby and Tom is one of the novel's central conflicts. She was described by Fitzgerald as a "golden girl".
Nick Carraway is a fictional character and narrator in F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The character is a Yale University alumnus from the American Midwest, a World War I veteran, and a newly arrived resident of West Egg on Long Island, near New York City. He is a bond salesman and the neighbor of enigmatic millionaire Jay Gatsby. He facilitates a sexual affair between Gatsby and Nick's second cousin, once removed, Daisy Buchanan which becomes one of the novel's central conflicts. Carraway is easy-going and optimistic, although this latter quality fades as the novel progresses. After witnessing the callous indifference and insouciant hedonism of the idle rich during the riotous Jazz Age, he ultimately chooses to leave the eastern United States forever and returns to the Midwest.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, widely known simply as Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Francis Cugat, also known as Francisco Coradal-Cougat, was a painter and graphic designer whose most famous work was Celestial Eyes, the original 1925 dust jacket for The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. From the mid-1940s he was a Technicolor consultant on more than 60 Hollywood films.
Ginevra King Pirie was an American socialite and heiress. As one of the self-proclaimed "Big Four" debutantes of Chicago during World War I, King inspired many characters in the novels and short stories of Jazz Age writer F. Scott Fitzgerald; in particular, the character of Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. A 16-year-old King met an 18-year-old Fitzgerald at a sledding party in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and they shared a passionate romance from 1915 to 1917.
All the Sad Young Men is a collection of short fiction by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. The stories originally appeared independently in popular literary journals and were first collected in February 1926 by Charles Scribner's Sons.
"The Rich Boy" is a short story by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was included in his 1926 collection All the Sad Young Men. "The Rich Boy" originally appeared in two parts, in the January and February 1926 issues of Redbook. In the January installment, the story is described on the front cover as: "A great story of today's youth by F. Scott Fitzgerald".
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigmatic writings of the Jazz Age. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with age and despair.