Annemarie Beaulieu
Annemarie Beaulieu | |
|---|---|
 Annemarie Beaulieu in 1965 | |
| Born | Anḑai Samyn 28 December 1934 Etra, Alscia |
| Died | 18 March 2003 (aged 68) |
| Nationality | Gylian |
| Style | Gauchic |
Anḑai Samyn (28 December 1934 – 18 March 2003), known professionally as Annemarie Beaulieu (Gylic transcription: Anmari Bolió), was a Gylian artist. She is considered the founder of gauchic, and remained a significant figure in the Gylian artistic scene until her death.
Jokingly describing herself as a "dabbler and dilettante", Annemarie worked in various fields, including photography, cinema, illustration, and publishing. She was a pioneer in applying industrial methods to art, assembling a large team of assistants who helped her execute her works based on her instructions. The bulk of her output consists of self-portraits, making her one of Gylias' most famous faces, and slice of life scenes.
Annemarie became one of Gylias' best-known artists, and an influential figure in Groovy Gylias. She was highly sought after for portraits, and her studio L'Usine was a popular gathering place for bohemians, intellectuals, and celebrities. She shifted from self-portraits to portraits of other people as she grew older. She had a strong connection with Gylias' music scene, contributing artwork and directing music videos for The Beaties, The Watts, The Tea Set, My Bloody Valentine, and Stella Star, among others.
Early life
Anḑai Samyn was born on 28 December 1934 in Etra. She came from a working class family, and was sickly as a child, frequently bedridden with fevers. She took up drawing in bed to pass the time. Her childhood ailments left her with a fear of germs, and a habit of nearly obsessive hand washing.
Alscia's incorporation into the Free Territories precluded conventional schooling. Instead, she was educated in volunteer classes and through autodidacticism. She showed interest in art classes, but was a lackluster student, described by colleagues as easily distracted and averse to effort. She attended several workshops and exhibitions by Tamara Łempicka, who became her mentor and a crucial influence.
She later served an apprenticeship at a photography studio, which sparked her fascination with photography. She obtained a camera and incessantly took pictures, developing her style through trial and error.
During the latter stages of the Liberation War, she spent several years unemployed, experimenting with her camera, drawing at home, and attending art classes. Late in life, she reflected:
"I wouldn't have ended up where I am today without unemployment. I would recommend it to anyone. Any decent civilisation will look after its own, so you should be able to disengage from life for a while to figure things out. It's a freedom — you can get bored or overwhelmed by it, but you can also find what you didn't know you were looking for."
Career
After the Liberation War, she found work as a freelance photographer and illustrator. She occasionally modeled as well, but later expressed distaste for her early modeling work, claiming she "didn't have the right look" until her late twenties. She moved into an apartment in Mişeyáke, turning it into a small studio. She adopted the professional name "Annemarie Beaulieu" and developed the persona of an "ostentatiously idle socialite", modeled after her idol Tamara, to go with it.
She held her first exhibition in 1961, renting the ground floor of her building when it was vacant and putting several of her photographs and paintings on display. She appeared in public for the first time as Annemarie Beaulieu and chatted with visitors, most of which hadn't heard of her before and assumed she was a famous foreign artist, which greatly pleased her. The exhibition was modestly successful but suffered from inconsistent quality; a second exhibition held the next year was more successful and started her rise to fame.
In 1963, she relocated her studio to a larger loft, which she named "L'Usine" (The Factory). She worked with her assistants on the first floor, used the ground floor to display her works, and turned the basement into a darkroom and storage facility. L'Usine became a popular hangout for a wide range of artists, bohemians, and celebrities, and formed part of Mişeyáke's "magic tetragon" together with the Sibylla nightclub, Ludmila Canaşvili's salon, and the Mişeyáke Metro Mail building, all located nearby.
Photography
Annemarie took a vanguard position in Gylian art during the Groovy Gylias era. She was seen as the face and founder of gauchic, and was one of the best-known and most in-demand photographers, together with Viviane Mayer. Rin Tōsaka, who posed for portraits with both, remarked, "They both pursued everyday glamour, Annemarie putting emphasis on the 'glamour' and Viviane on the 'everyday'." She achieved exposure abroad through the Gylian Invasion, leading to portrait commissions and collaborations.
Among her favourite collaborators, and the most represented in her portraits besides herself, were Isabel Longstowe and Sima Daián. The three were close friends and kindred spirits in many ways; Isabel famously described Annemarie as her "artistic soulmate".
Her dilettante image reflected her working methods. Since most of her works were self-portraits, she hired a team of assistants who helped her execute them; Jane Russell recalled seeing "around 30 or more" assistants in L'Usine "working the assembly line", and visitors were often enlisted to help with production of photographs, films, and other work. When she registered her works with the Creative Rights Organisation, she included her assistants as co-authors and split royalty payments with them equally, but it was understood the final product would be published under Annemarie's name due to its public value. In interviews, she always acknowledged the contributions of her assistants, crediting them with helping her realise the vision she couldn't by herself.
Filmmaking
Annemarie branched out from photography into other pursuits. She began to experiment with filmmaking in 1964. Her films were described as "slice of life taken to its logical conclusion" — mainly static, depicting ordinary themes and events in unobtrusive fashion, and enlivened by technical experimentation. Her best-known films were filles ďelsa (1966) — which consisted of two films projected side by side in split screen, one in colour and the other in black-and-white — and film bleu (1969) — depicting two of her friends having sex in their apartment, tinted blue by accident because the wrong kind of film had been used in production.
She created a long-running black-and-white short film series named art hystérique ("Hysterical Art"), which showed fully dressed women reading passages from a book of their choosing, while brought to orgasm by a vibrator controlled by an unseen assistant under the table. The series was greatly successful and acclaimed for its celebratory depiction of female sexuality, featuring numerous famous women ranging from contemporary artists to cabinet ministers, and continued to be produced until Annemarie's death.
Her ventures into filmmaking deepened her connections with the contemporary music scene. She worked with The Beaties, directing a promotional clip for their single "Paperback Writer"/"Rain" (1966), co-designed the covers for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) and the "White Album" (1968), and directed Magical Mystery Tour (1967). She also directed promotional clips for The Watts, The Tea Set, and various Gylian Sound acts, including The Sapphires and Les Myas.
During the 1990s, she formed close relationships with the shoegazing and Neo-Gylian Sound scenes. She worked with Recreation Records, particularly in collaboration with filmmaker Angus Cameron, designing sleeves and directing music videos for My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive. She also worked frequently with Readymade Records, where she particularly enjoyed collaborating with Stella Star and their art director Miyuki Morimoto, with whom she developed a close mentor relationship.
She was interviewed by Rasa Ḑeşéy's 1999 documentary series Nation Building, a variation from her usual directing role.
Publishing
Annemarie published several books that were largely based on conversations she'd recorded with a portable tape recorder and subsequently transcribed. These included:
- a (1968), based on conversations with her friends Helen Wilkinson and Susan Wallace.
- fille au sophie (1975), a collection of humorous "quotable quotes" expressing her thoughts on a variety of subjects.
- moi: une livre (1986), an autobiography.
Her diaries were published posthumously in 2004 as journales. In one of her audio journals, she expressed interest in the idea of publishing her diaries, but joked that she felt sorry for whoever would have to edit them.
She founded the interview magazine bavarde, and was a regular contributor to magazines like L'Petit Écho, Silhouette, The Travelling Companion, and the Mişeyáke Metro Mail.
Death
Annemarie died in her sleep on 18 March 2003. She had undergone surgery for lung cancer and suddenly developed complications that caused her death.
Style
Annemarie is considered the founder of gauchic, a label she embraced. Her primary influences were Tamara Łempicka and fashion photography, to the point that Downtown described her work as "fashion photography stripped of context and transformed into fine art". Other influences included pictorialism and straight photography, the latter in evidence in her unobtrusive approach and preference for candidly capturing moments of daily life.
Her photography and filmmaking is characterised by themes of "everyday glamour" and "homemade psychedelia". She was especially praised for her ability to draw subtly playful and sensual facial expressions from her subjects, a quality that kept her in demand for portraits. Many of her portraits have a shallow depth of field or blurred and manipulated backgrounds, producing dreamlike effects.
The bulk of her oeuvre is glamorous self-portraits, which exhibit the playful detachment and glamorously languid persona that were key to her success. Susan Wallace later wrote in Silhouette that "Annemarie never ceased to give critics ammunition that she was just a narcissist, but if she was just a pretty face, she never would've gotten anywhere. It was the mischievous awareness behind her composed façade that fascinated people."
Public image
Annemarie developed the persona of a socialite and dilettante to complement her art. She modeled it heavily after Tamara Łempicka, her idol and mentor. By the time she had matured as an artist, she had refined this persona into the role of a playfully detached, amused observer of humanity. Although critics saw her numerous self-portraits as vanity, she was also praised for instilling a spirit of mono no aware into them.
Francité formed a significant component of her image, as attested by her choice of professional name. However, she was quite self-conscious about her Gylic-accented French. She once said of fellow gauchic artist Romain Goudreau, "We're both frustrated creatures. I was born a woman but not French, and he was born French but not a woman."
Annemarie was very generous — she would freely give away possessions to friends, make portraits of them as gifts, and take photographs of herself with others as gifts. Her husband said she "thrived in a crowd of people and loved the companionship; she most talked about how L'Usine brought people together." Maki Nomura also observed in the 1990s that "Annemarie enjoyed being a living link to Groovy Gylias, and she was as wise, kind, and good-humoured as the role required and then some."
Her model of bypassing the art market and exhibiting her works in person at L'Usine proved lucrative. She grew wealthy as a result of her popularity and diverse ventures, with an estimated net worth of Ŧ10 billion in 1972. She famously asked the Beaties for a remarkably high payment for her work on the "White Album"'s cover and for it to be publicised, to mischievously imply she had been overpaid for doing very little work. She attended the Decleyre Summit and became a participant in the Social Partnership Program; she had largely exhausted her wealth by the 1990s through gifts and living expenses.
Legacy
Annemarie is considered one of Gylias' most famous artists, and served as the prototype for numerous depictions of artists in pop culture, ranging from inspiration to affectionate parody.
Many famous Gylian artists, models, actors, and musicians worked with her before achieving fame.
The art hystérique series is considered an important touchstone for Gylian pornography and broader Gylian depictions of sexuality, particularly in its emphasis on laughter as a manifestation of orgasm.
Personal life
Annemarie was married to Tom, a photographer of Cacertian descent, from 1958 until her death. The couple had two children. They were close collaborators during their careers.
She mainly practiced Concordianism, and was a passionate socialist, with a pronounced sympathy for aristerokratia.
Among her famous eccentricities, she wrote exclusively in lowercase letters and always used the feminine forms of French words, even appending feminine articles and determiners to masculine words.
