Anna Sokolow: You Love Talent
Excerpt from Anna Sokolow: We Must Be Ready, Right Now, To Do What We Must
by James Grissom
Available on Amazon
[Carlos] Merida told Sokolow about his friend and arts partner
Carlos Valenti, a Parisian-born artist who was close friends with Jaime
Sabartes, the secretary to Pablo Picasso. Described as a flickering Roman
candle of talent and inspiration, Valenti touched deeply everyone with whom he
worked or socialized, and he lived furiously through the arts. “When I heard
Merida talk about Valenti,” Sokolow told me, “I realized that there were other
people like me in the world: People who felt and feared that time was limited;
talent was limited. You love talent, wherever it may find a home, and you
foster it. If you take on the responsibility of helping people, educating
people, leading them away from danger and destruction, the hours of each day
become terribly precious. You become very impatient to keep moving and working
and seeing.” Diagnosed with diabetes at a young age, Valenti soon developed
problems with his vision, and a specialist in Paris advised him to completely
rest his eyes, to avoid color and light and contrasts. “This, of course, was a
death sentence,” Sokolow explained, “and he fell into a deep depression. To be
cut off from visual stimulation was more damaging than to be deprived of food.”
Merida traveled with Valenti to Paris,
for “one last look” at the art he could no longer remove from his line of
vision. A note he wrote around this time reads “There are some among us that
have the real faith – Art – for which you have to sacrifice yourself, stepping
over everything, to whom you have to render homage as a deity, give everything
up for it; live only for your work… there, in the canvas, deposit an entire
life, all our love; transmit to the painting everything that cannot be
explained; live in it, deposit all our being, all the most saintly emotions
that the artists’ heart experiences.” Not long after penning this note, Valenti
fired two shots into his chest, in the presence of Carlos Merida, who watched
in shock as his friend died before his eyes. “I work for him now,” Merida
explained to Sokolow. “In his memory.”
Sokolow took notes on the life of Carlos Valenti and she shared them
with Tenn at a meeting in 1951, after she had seen a performance of The Rose Tattoo, a play she loved and
which she felt was terribly Mexican in its language and attitude. “That play,”
she said, “so much more than any other that Tennessee wrote, has a feel of
Mexico, and of these artists who came to mean so much to me.” Sokolow explained
that in Mexico she met people who were close to the earth, rustic and simple.
The people she met were not distracted by noise or entertainments or excess;
they relied on each other and on ancient myths that helped them to understand
their world and their lives.
The notes on Valenti, which were given to Tenn by Sokolow, led to the creation of Camino Real.
© 2014 James Grissom
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