Vale Barry Humphries
Barry Humphries loved telling a story concerning a visit he and the painter David Hockney made to an art exhibition held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1991. What drew them there was a reconstruction of the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition the Nazis had assembled in Munich in 1937 to help validate and promote their racial ideology. The crude argument it promoted was that the distorted forms typical of much modern art of the time somehow demonstrated the corrupting influence of the artists (often Jewish) who had painted them.
Humphries recalled asking Hockney how it was possible that, even when so many of the artists themselves later perished, much of the art work had survived. Hockney replied, ‘Because somebody loved them.’
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Comments (5)
The essay and the recording, have stayed with me and now I would like to simply say: Thank you! - and also to hope that the material Barry Humphries collected over the course of his life will be preserved in a national institution so that the intellectual curiosity underpinning his own work can always be explored with “rapt attention”.
I first saw Barry Humphries in Adelaide in 1960 when Edna was a much gentler character. She was the spitting image of a client of mine and her troublesome daughter in a small country town. My favourite was and remains Sandy Stone who was so laid-back in his chair and slippers l didn’t think he would get up again.
The last time I saw Humphries was at Australia House in 2019 at a University Alumni event. It was rumoured he would attend but there was no sign of him until the Vice Chancellor was halfway through his speech. The double doors of the room were suddenly flung open and there he was in hat, coat and scarf. Humphries pushed his way through the standing crowd and positioned himself halfway between the audience and the Vice Chancellor. Unannounced, he interrupted the Vice Chancellor and broke into a speech as Barry Humphries that had us all in stitches of laughter for thirty minutes. As he spoke he patrolled the front row of people who feared they might be picked on by Edna, but Edna wasn’t there. Humphries exhausted himself and stopped. He had a quick word with the Vice Chancellor, spoke calmly to a few members of the audience and left through the same double doors that hadn’t closed.
I will miss him.
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