In Memory of Georgia Brown (1933-1992)

Georgia Brown as seen in A Study in Terror 

(dir. James Hill, 1965)

 

"A carefree, goodtime girl you see / Queen of swell society ..."

 

 

I. 

 

Ever since reflecting on Warhol's Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century - click here - I've been constantly revising my own list of such figures ... 

 

For whilst I'd be willing to keep Kafka and Freud, I'm not sure about Gershwin or Bernhardt, for example, and would quite happily drop Martin Buber, Louis Brandeis and Golda Meir as these names mean nothing to me. 

 

In fact, come to think about it, I'd probably not miss Gertrude Stein, Albert Einstein, or even the Marx Bros very much either (and one presumes that Groucho Marx wouldn't want to belong on any list of Jewish luminaries that included him).

 

So, retaining Kafka and Freud, who would comprise the other famous eight? 

 

It's tricky: because some Jewish figures - such as Wittgenstein, for example - did not always identify as such, whilst others whom I would have added to my list - such as Larry David - don't qualify because they are still living and Warhol's portraits are exclusively of the dead.    

    

Then there are those like Amy Winehouse who are disqualified from consideration because although born in the twentieth-century, they rose to prominence and died in the early years of this century.  

Or those like Rhoda Morgenstern who are fictional characters and so I suppose don't count (though I'm not sure why).

 

Anyway, I think I can legitimately add the names of Anne Frank, Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Derrida and Malcolm McLaren to the list (even if Derrida died in 2004 and McLaren passed away in 2010). 

 

And someone else I think I'm entitled to have on my list and would very much like to add (particularly if I can't have Amy Winehouse), is the singer and actress Georgia Brown ...

 

 

II. 

 

Born Lilian Claire Klot in October 1933 and raised in the East End of London, Klot grew up in a large, extended family of Jewish-Russian descent. Adopting the professional name of Georgia Brown, she established herself as a teenage nightclub singer and recording artist in the early 1950s and soon after made her first TV appearance.   

 

Without ever becoming a huge star, Brown had a varied and successful career in showbiz, including musical theatre; playing Lucy, for example, in the 1956 West End production of The Threepenny Opera at the Royal Court, and Nancy in Oliver! (1960) - Lionel Bart specially adapting the role for the woman he had known since childhood.   

 

From the mid-1960s, Brown concentrated more on developing a screen career - and I personally remember her best for her appearance as a singer at the Angel & Crown in the British 1965 thriller A Study in Terror, in which Sherlock Holmes (played by John Neville) is on the trail of Jack the Ripper [1].

 

Brown treats us to two music hall songs in the film - including the classic Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay! [2], about which I have written elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark: click here. 

 

An intelligent and politically conscious woman, Brown also appeared in the highly acclaimed BBC adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre's The Roads to Freedom (1970), for which she sang the theme song La route est dure, and co-created another BBC drama - Shoulder to Shoulder (1974) - which chronicled the struggle for women's suffrage in late-19th and early-20th century. 

  

Brown continued singing and acting throughout the 1980s, but in her later years she limited herself to concerts, cabaret appearances, and guest spots on hit TV shows, including Cheers and Star Trek: The Next Generation (by then she was a permanent US resident).

 

Sadly, Brown died at the age of 58, in London, in July 1992. She was interred at Mount Sinai Memorial Park Cemetery (the largest Jewish cemetery in California).

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Although not much loved or praised by the critics, I like this film; not simply because Georgia Brown is in it, but because it also features a young Barbara Windsor as Annie Chapman (the second of Jack the Ripper's canonical five victims). Readers who are interested can watch the 1965 trailer by clicking here. 

 

[2] Georgia Brown sings her version of 'Ta-Ra-Ra Boom-De-Ay' (accompanied by Ted Heath and His Music) on the album A Little of What You Fancy (Decca, 1962): click here.    

 

 

Reflections on Andy Warhol's Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century (1980)

Andy Warhol: Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century (1980) 

Top row: Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Martin Buber, Albert Einstein and Louis Brandeis

Bottom row: George Gershwin, the Marx Bros, Golda Meir, Sarah Bernhardt and Sigmund Freud

 

 

Warhol, one of my favourite 20th-century artists, was not Jewish and yet, for some reason, I often think of him as Jewish - or Jew-ish, to use a complex and at times controversial term [1].

 

I suppose it's partly because as the child of East European migrants, he would likely have been subject to the same kind of othering within American society during the 1930s, where, as one commentator notes, "cultural and social interactions were built around ethnic identities and tensions" [2]. 

 

This same commentator also claims that despite being Capatho-Rusyn and an orthodox Catholic, Warhol's "closest childhood friends were Jewish, and you can imagine him sharing their sense of being permanent outsiders within the American mix" [3].

 

And indeed, throughout his life and career, Warhol continued to form important relationships with Jews and was clearly sympathetic to anyone who is marked out as queer, different, or alien; "Warhol knew and cared more about alterity, and the difficult quest for cultural inclusion, than most other artists you could name" [4].   

 

So, it should be no surprise that in 1980 Warhol produced a series of ten silk-screened canvases (each 40" x 40") which celebrated some of the most important Jewish figures of the twentieth century.

 

What is surprising, perhaps, is the fact that this work was dismissed or condemned by the critics at the time [5] and remains still, in my view, undervalued - although there has, admittedly, been something of a critical reappraisal in recent years and Jewish art lovers continue to view the work with enthusiasm and pride. 

 

In sum: whilst it would be wrong to claim Warhol was an ardent philosemite - and it should be noted that the idea for the above work was not his, nor did he select the ten figures chosen (or even know who Martin Buber was) [6] - Warhol was certainly not guilty of Jewsploitation, nor jokey antisemitism (hang your head in shame for this last remark, Ken Johnson) [7].

 

I like the series: although if I were asked to compile a list of ten dead Jewish figures that I would like to see portraits of, it would certainly have to include Serge Gainsbourg, Malcolm McLaren and Jacques Derrida ...    

 

Notes

 

[1] See Aviya Kushner, 'What does it mean to be "Jew-ish"? How the term went from warm inside joke to national flashpoint', Forward, (28 December, 2022): click here.

 

[2-4] Blake Gopnik, 'Andy Warhol's Jewish Question', Artnet, (22 November, 2016): click here. 

 

[5] Writing in the New York Times, Hilton Kramer accused Warhol of exploiting his Jewish subjects "without showing the slightest grasp of their significance". The critical consensus was that the work was produced in the cynical knowledge it would fetch a high price from a wealthy Jewish collector.    

 

[6] The series was suggested to him by art dealer Ronald Feldman and the subjects of the portraits were subsequently chosen by Feldman after consultation with Susan Morgenstein, director of the art gallery of the Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington, where the work was first exhibited in March 1980. 

      The series was later exhibited at the Jewish Museum of New York (September 1980 to January 1981) and was first displayed in the UK at the National Portrait Gallery, London, between January and June 2006, where they were described thus by curator Paul Moorhouse in the booklet that accompanied the NPG exhibition:

 

"Magisterial in conception, they advance a new subtlety and sophistication in technical terms. One of their most compelling aspects is the way surface and image are held in a satisfying and fascinating dialogue, generating new depths of meaning and implication. [...] 

      The disjunction between sitter and surface is a visual device that unites the portraits, but the series has a conceptual unity also. Warhol's insistence that the subjects be deceased invests the series with an inescapable character of mortality. The faces of the dead appear as if behind a veneer of modernity. The tension sustained between photograph and abstraction focuses the issue of their celebrity. Probing the faultlines between the person and their manufactured, surface image, Warhol presents these individuals' fame as a complex metamorphosis. The real has been transformed into a glorious, poignant, other-worldly abstraction."

 

[7] See Ken Johnson's piece in The New York Times entitled 'Funny, You Don't Look Like a Subject for Warhol' (28 March 2008), in which he wrote: "What is remarkable about the paintings now, however, is how uninteresting they are. What once made them controversial - the hint of a jokey, unconscious anti-Semitism - has evaporated, leaving little more than bland, posterlike representations."