.. I appreciate her families service 2 humanity and her journey 2 make the best of herSELF. In appreciation of the VERA, this is MY render of her! MANY MANY hours of play 2 MAKE a PUBLICATION of the historical wonder in her own TIME, in praise of what is beautiful. BODY BUILDERS take pride as sculptors. So many pretty people rest on FATE, VERA paints herself as PICASSO used CANvas. KUDOS & conGRATS fr: Kirk Maillet.. ..

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new fr: Vera

Veruschka.net

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Dankeschön 2U all

Vera Gottlieb Anna von Lehndorff AKA "Gottlieb"

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Vera Gottliebe Anna Gräfin von Lehndorff

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Christian von Alvensleben : alvensleben-photography.de

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Veruschka's enduring mystique

February 21 2003 By Naomi West

Veruschka was no ordinary '60s model; a German countess, she could be anything from Greta Garbo to a leopard in a tree. Now, at 61, she is still an inspiration.

Of all the players in Michelangelo Antonioni's cult 1966 film BlowUp, there was one legendary enough to star as herself.

Veruschka - the model whose farout features dominated fashion magazines in the late '60s - appeared for hardly five minutes, but her performance was electrifying.

Announcing herself ("Here I am") at the studio of the David Bailey-esque photographer (played by David Hemmings) barefoot and in a black mini-dress, she proceeded to seduce the photographer's lens by writhing on the floor like a wildcat, while he sat astride her, snapping furiously."

She moves like nobody on earth, " Hemmings sighed afterwards.

In real life her photo shoots were no less extraordinary; US Vogue editor Diana Vreeland would give Veruschka carte blanche to conceive fashion stories with her then lover, the Italian photographer Franco Rubartelli.

The leotard-clad Veruschka and Rubartelli would jump on a plane together, taking all the clothes, body paint and photographic equipment they needed to the middle of a desert, or to some snowy wasteland against which Veruschka would throw her lean body into contorted shapes. They once travelled to the Bahamian island Eleuthera on Christmas Day to take photographs by moonlight.

You would expect such an astonishing figure to make an entrance. But when Veruschka, now 61, arrives at a Parisian photographic studio, she glides in swiftly, shrouded like a brightly coloured Lawrence of Arabia.

Within seconds she has disappeared into a back room for a further hour to apply her make-up.

Veruschka, who now goes by her real name, Vera von Lehndorff, is in Paris to meet the New York fashion designer Michael Kors, who chose to capture her spirit in his spring/summer 2003 show for the French fashion house Celine.

To a sitar-laden remix of the Rolling Stones' Jumping Jack Flash, Kors sent on to the catwalk a collection he dubbed Veruschka Voyage, a holiday wardrobe gleaming with gold embroidery and hot pink and orange tie-dyes.

Kors's models looked like leisured, sun-tanned bohemians, sporting collar-bone-skimming earrings made of linked brass discs.

Today, von Lehndorff is just here to hang out while the photographer Vincent Peters shoots the Celine advertising campaign with the 27-year-old Midwestern model Frankie Rayder, who appears airily unconcerned about measuring up to one of modelling's all-time greats.

Von Lehndorff's pale, heavily lined face and broad features remain impassive as she draws on a cigarette. Her ensemble is on the outer reaches of eccentricity; over her taut body she wears something resembling a black body stocking, a floor-length orange cardigan and a raggedy orange tie-dyed scarf.

On her size-nine feet are Vivienne Westwood pirate boots, and her straggly tawny hair hangs from under an orange bandanna decorated with spangles.

Odder still, earlier in the day this look was completed with a pair of orange-lensed Ali G-style sunglasses.

However, von Lehndorff's career as a model has had unusually little to do with clothes. As she said to Nova magazine in 1968, "I hate the whole kind of chic look - Dior, St Laurent. They might look very nice, but I don't feel them." And her attitude hasn't changed. "I'm not especially inspired by fashion, " she says slowly in her contralto, Germanic voice, before giving the rail of Celine outfits a polite but cursory survey. For von Lehndorff, modelling was all about transforming herself. "I was always being different types of women. I copied Ursula Andress, Brigitte Bardot, Greta Garbo. Then I got bored so I painted myself as an animal, " she says in a deadpan way. "One day I ended up as a stone. I was depressed and went out on to my terrace in Rome. I wanted to disappear, to be like the stones of the terrace. I painted myself lying down in the mirror, and copied the stones on to my face."

But at the beginning of her career, changing was a necessity, not an artistic, endeavour. She had first travelled to New York in 1961 as plain old Vera, but failed to secure a single booking. After retreating to Milan for a spell, she returned to take Manhattan under her new name, Veruschka.

"I dressed all in black and went to see all the top photographers, like Irving Penn, and said, 'I am Veruschka who comes from the border between Russia, Germany and Poland. I'd like to see what you can do with my face.' "

It worked; constantly booked, Veruschka gained almost mythical status. When Life magazine profiled "the most sought-after model in the world", they magnified her 1.8-metre frame to an alien 1.9 metres. Her extraordinary physique, complete with outsize hands and feet, even spawned industry rumours that she had once been a man.

Von Lehndorff's background is as intriguing as the Veruschka creature she invented. Of noble birth, her full title (which she never uses) is the Countess Vera Gottliebe Anna von Lehndorff. Her father was a Prussian count who was involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944 and hanged that year, when Vera was three. Her mother was arrested, and Vera and her sisters spent the rest of the war in Gestapo camps. They were reunited with their mother after the war, but the family was destitute, and ostracised by other Germans for their father's treachery. She ended up studying textile design in Florence, where a fashion designer first asked her to model.

Von Lehndorff stopped modelling in the early '70s when the newly appointed editor-in-chief at Vogue, Grace Mirabella, advised her to cut her hair so readers could identify with her ("I hate that idea"). She then sought to become "an artist who had modelled for a few years". Collaborating with the artist Holger Tradilzsch, she was photographed in 1971 and 1972 as a series of characters, clad only in body paint.

Although she has made the odd foray back into modelling (for example, to launch a menswear collection for Karl Lagerfeld in 1995), von Lehndorff lives the life of an artist in a rundown area of Brooklyn, with her lover Micha Waschke, a musician who doubles as her assistant. She has exhibited a steady stream of work, from photos of herself covered in ash to a short film, Buddha Bum (1998), in which she plays a series of homeless people and Buddha.

It is unfortunate that von Lehndorff talks about her art in the kind of indistinct terms that smack of half-baked pretension. "Veruschka was the first emanation of the children of illusion, " she murmurs, referring to her sprawling work in progress, Emanations. Since the mid-'90s, she has collaborated with designers ranging from Helmut Lang to Paco Rabanne to explore characters that include "urbanites and savage animals, presidents and movie stars". But the results are compellingly strange, and far from anachronistic.

The fashion world fosters an ongoing fascination with her '60s persona, the make-up brand MAC sells a lipstick called Veruschka, and there are still boutiques named after her, yet she is detached from any hype. Asked if she misses the glamour of modelling, she looks down her wide, flat nose unselfconsciously: "No. I have my own drama and glamour anyhow. As long as I am here, it is not gone."

"Oh, I think she's more glamorous than she ever looked in her pictures, " designer Michael Kors chips in, which is plainly untrue. But in fashion, where myths can hold more sway than reality, Veruschka will always be an extraordinary beauty.

- Telegraph

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veruschka.net

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a fan in "Vera" & "veruschka" rates high (internet) in respect to

original

pbase.com/veruschka/impromptu

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IMDB

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Veruschka was born in 1939 in East Prussia as Countess Vera Gottliebe Anna von Lehndorff. For a short time, she enjoyed a wealthy lifestyle residing in East Prussia in a 100-room house on an enormous estate that had been in her family for centuries. Her father, Count Heinrich Graf von Lehndorff-Steinort, was a wealthy landowner and German army reserve officer who became a key member of the German Resistance after witnessing Jewish children being beaten and killed. When she was just a child, Heinrich Graf von Lehndorff-Steinort was executed for attempting to assassinate Adolf Hitler in the July 20 Plot. After his death, the remaining family members spent their times in camps until the end of World War II. By the end of the war, her family was left homeless

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press release fr: v..net
Press Release In a first for the Foundation, another artist will be given a forum at the Helmut Newton Foundation: Vera Lehndorff. Known since the 60’s, when she began her career as a model, she entered the public domain using the pseudonym 'Veruschka' – a fictional character representing pure perfection. As such she became one of the most sought-after and heavily publicized models in international fashion. Prior to her crossing over to the art world with a renowned series of camouflage body-paintings, many prominent photographers worked with her, including Newton. A decade ago, Vera Lehndorff performed and transmitted her role as the cliché model in collaboration with Andreas Hubertus Ilse as documentary photographer. ‘Veruschka Self-Portraits’ were created to represent this fictional character posing for the camera as a series of off-beat personalities. The exhibited vintage photographs show different aspects of Veruschka in eccentric, custom-made costumes. Here she can be seen exploring the boundaries of personality, whether as a trans-gendered male intellectual, a streetwise rapper, a Hollywood superstar, or her own glamorous alter-ego, Veruschka. The directed self-portraits are supplemented by an archive of magazine covers and by Vera Lehndorff’s film ”Inszenierung (m)eines Körpers”, directed by Paul Morrissey.

Description: Here is the beautiful song from the movie of the same name ("Veruschka - Poesia Di Una Donna", Italy, 1971), written by Ennio Morricone and performed by the great Edda Dell'Orso, and illustrating wonderfully well the beauty of Veruschka. Veruschka was born in 1939 in Königsberg, East Prussia, Germany (now Kaliningrad, Russia) as Countess Vera Gottliebe Anna von Lehndorff, to a Prussian count (Count von Lehndorff-Steinort) who was involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944 and hanged that year, when she was three. Her mother was arrested, and Vera and her sisters spent the rest of the war in Gestapo camps. They were reunited with their mother after the war, but the family was destitute, and ostracised by other Germans for their father's treachery. She ended up studying textile design in Florence, where a fashion designer first asked her to model. She had first travelled to New York in 1961 as plain old Vera, but failed to secure a single booking. After retreating to Milan for a spell, she returned to take Manhattan under her new name... Veruschka! As an actress, she played notably in "Blow Up" (1967) and recently in "Casino Royale" (2006). She is considered as one of the world's all-time greatest supermodels. She said: "I was always being different types of women. I copied Ursula Andress, Brigitte Bardot, Greta Garbo. Then I got bored so I painted myself as an animal." Enjoy Veruschka's glamour!

RUMOR

LIFESTYLE: "Sexual feelings, " she said. No kiddin’. When actor David Hemmings asked her "who the hell were you with last night" in Blowup, she sort of shrugged out an answer that implied she had places to go and people to do. One had the feeling that this was pretty close to Veruschka's reality. She told Michael Gross in Model that from '66 to the early '70s she lived with a photographer named Franco Rubartelli, who made an Italian film about her in '71. He was, she claimed, the first man she'd ever lived with. But not the most famous that she ever knew: Peter Fonda wrote about his flings with Veruschka in his autobiography, Don’t Tell Dad ('98). In '65 he saw her in Rome and was immediately overwhelmed by her astounding beauty. He pestered her until she consented to go out with him — once she did, they spent the next several days and nights together, rolling around on tiny twin beds that were far too short and narrow for their lanky physiques. They reunited in Paris shortly thereafter and fell deeper in love, but they split up after a few days so that Fonda could return to his wife and child in L.A. He wrote that they rendezvoused only three more times in the next six years, though they exchanged many letters during that time. Their "farewell bash, " as Fonda called it, came in '71 when they holed up in a luxury hotel suite in Manhattan. A tryst of fate: The exciting evening alone was interrupted by an impromptu visit from two of the '60s' most dazzling couples — Jane Fonda/Roger Vadim, and Warren Beatty/Julie Christie. According to Peter Fonda, after the party finally died down he and Veruschka finally got down to business, which they did several times, once with his sister Jane watching from the open doorway.

http://www.stern.de/unterhaltung/fotografie/562310.html?q=newton+veruschka&cp=10

Veruschka von Lehndorff wurde in ein ostpreußisches Adelsgeschlecht geboren. Ihr Vater, Heinrich Graf von Lehndorff-Steinort, wurde 1944 wegen seiner Teilnahme an der Verschwörung des 20. Juli 1944 gegen Adolf Hitler hingerichtet, ihre Mutter kam in ein Arbeitslager. Nach dem Krieg wuchs sie mit ihrer Mutter und drei Schwestern in Flüchtlingslagern und der Obhut von Bekannten auf. Sie begann ein Design-Studium, welches sie nach zwei Jahren abbrach, um sich in Italien ganz dem Malen zu widmen. In den 1960er Jahren entdeckte man die hoch (1, 83 m) gewachsene Schönheit bei einem Aufenthalt in Florenz als Fotomodell. Unter dem Namen Veruschka wurde sie das erste deutsche „Supermodel“. Veruschkas Filmdebüt in Michelangelo Antonionis Kultfilm Blow Up (1966) blieb ihr bekanntester Auftritt auf der Leinwand. Es folgten noch einige Rollen in europäischen Produktionen. 1983 trat sie in dem deutschen Dokumentarfilm Vom Zusehen beim Sterben auf, der dazu beitrug, die Öffentlichkeit auf das Schicksal der vietnamesischen Boat People aufmerksam zu machen. Sie spielte die Hauptrolle in Ulrike Ottingers Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse. Veruschka von Lehndorff, die in den Hungerjahren nach dem Krieg ein ambivalentes Verhältnis zu ihrem sehr schlanken Körper entwickelte, ist auch eine Pionierin des Bodypainting sowie anderer Inszenierungen und künstlerischer Verfremdungen des eigenen Körpers. Sie arbeitet heute als eigenständige Malerin und Performerin. 2004 drehte der durch seine Zusammenarbeit mit Andy Warhol bekannt gewordene Regisseur Paul Morrissey einen Dokumentarfilm über sie (Veruschka - A Life For the Camera). Seit Juni 2006 zeigt die Helmut Newton-Stiftung im Berliner Museum für Fotografie die Ausstellung Veruschka Self-Portraits. Ebenfalls 2006 hatte Veruschka von Lehndorff einen Cameo-Auftritt in dem James Bond-Film Casino Royale. 2007 war sie in der ARD-Dokumentation „Frauen auf der Flucht“ zu sehen, wo sie über ihre Erlebnisse auf der Flucht aus Ostpreußen berichtete.

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veruschka_Gr%C3%A4fin_von_Lehndorff

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/02/21/1045638469233.html

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veruschka

Veruschka: A face of a decade
http://www.stylelist.com/blog/2008/09/22/veruschka...

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Vera's limited edition LIFE book is now available

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Swetlana Heger, Untitled (The Cohen Residence/Paradise Valley)

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Veruschka / Edda Dell'Orso: Veruschka

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I'm not really hiding in plain site

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theKIRK fr: lumal.com,
half the calories ALL THE BLAME Veruschka is the most beautiful Moman in the world ... RICHARD AVEDON TELLS-IN HIS OWN WORDS WHAT MAKES HER UNIQUE, Veruschka is the most beautiful woman in the whole world. There's just nobody like her. If she's beautiful, she's beautiful alone. There are imitations of Sophia Loren, only not as good, and a new Garbo is discovered every decade, but there is and will always be only one Veruschka. Beauty isolates the person who owns it and isolation makes demands on the imagination. Veruschka's bones, her body, her extraordinary length have compelled her to invent her own person. There's just no one she could imitate. There's never enough of her. Each encounter is unfulfilled and -unforgettable. It has nothing to do with ordinary life. The last time I photographed her she said, "Goodbye for now, " and then she didn't come back for five years. When she finally walked in, I felt as if we'd both been waiting every day of those years between. I couldn't disappoint her. I love looking at her through the dressing-room door. It's usually pretty crowded in there and she sits at the dressing table with her tea and honey, naked, oblivious to hairdressers, fashion editors and assistants, making up her face with a Japanese paintbrush. She has the concentration of a child playing some totally private, wordless game alone as she places the shadows where she wants them and the highlights where she thinks they belong. She chooses words very carefully. She talks about her skin as if it has a mind of its own. It can be tired when she's not. She speaks of her hair as a head of independent hairs and calls them "my hairs, " even the baby ones at the back of her neck. And that's not a grammatical error. It has to do with consideration. She'll cover her breasts in front of some and not in front of others. That selectivity has implications of intimacy and trust. It's a commitment. She's sensitive to the fact that she's undressed and you're there and it's full of nuances which she will neither deny nor resolve. They become resolved in the work. I love talking with her because of that voice. There's none like it, deep, unimaginably soft, and, for a romantic girl, remarkably unsentimental, which gives romance its real power. She knows the value of a quiet, two-hour conversation before going on the set. The time is never wasted. Her skin is like litmus paper for her feelings. She's all made up and ready and, as we sit together, her skin gets very warm in color and then, suddenly, it drains. The second the color leaves her face, I know she's ready to work. Veruschka is the only woman I permit to look at herself in the mirror while I'm photographing her. The mirror makes most women aware of their weaknesses and, in trying to correct them, they come up with evasions, hiding arms that seem too thin or hips that seem too wide. Veruschka knows that it is what's peculiar to her that's beautiful and she works to bring it forward. It's wonderful to see her searching for and emphasizing her irregularities. There are times during a sitting when she turns to look at me or at the camera and, without so much as lifting an eyebrow or curving her mouth, smiles, challenges. It's like the opposite of the Dylan song, "I'll let you in my dream if you'll let me in yours." That seems to be what most people need. But not Veruschka. She'll let you look into her dream but she wouldn't fit in yours. There's a profoundly moving moment at the end of every sitting with Veruschka when I say, "I think I've got it." She looks at me with a startled expression that comes very quickly across her face. I once asked her what she hopes for from a sitting, why she does it, and she said, "When I was a child I loved things because they were beautiful, but that isn't enough. I want to do something with it. You make photographs. I would like to do it with my own body. I'm fascinated to see myself reproduced again, that there is no end of looking always a little bit different. And this is like a wine or a drug or something. You always have to have another one." Ending the sitting, which is something only I can do, is like an interruption. I feel as if I'm taking her away from work that, for her, will always be unfinished. It's impossible to be beautiful without being moving and impossible to be moving without a sense of irony. Veruschka makes me laugh a lot. She makes everybody laugh. At her most remarkable, when everything is perfect and the light is on her and we are all frozen by what she has accomplished, she sinks a little deeper into her knees, looks at my assistant holding the light, and says, "He makes good lightning, no?" It is both deliberate and a little hesitant. She keeps you guessing about how much she really knows. She seems to hover, waiting for the laughter. It's the subtlest kind of demand. It's not just that she's said something funny. She's made you want to laugh for her. She turns words around. She turns everything around. Her presence in a room calls it all into question, what you thought you knew, what you were sure of. Nothing looks the same as it did before she got there. Tall girls become short girls. Brown walls go golden. Being beautiful in her way demands something and you must extend yourself to meet the challenge or know that a kind of splendor is lost to you forever.

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Veruschka Michele Tournier, winner of the prix concourt, (the key and the lock) Gallimard Paris 1988 She is the oddest and most painful of the eternal feminine emanations ever created by the occident. A small, perfectly beautiful head with shaved skullcap and melancholic eyes crowns her elongated, slender body. She bares resemblance to a wax-figure and to queen Cleopatra – just raised from her mummification bandages. She was already to be marveled at totally nude and again painted shrill from head to toe. We discovered her as green Liana - plant wrapped around a tree trunk. Or we observed, put large into the picture by the photographer, a strip of beach with oval rocks, one of which is the head of Veruschka, she seems, the eyelids down, to sleep… It is perhaps no accident that this fantastic creature evolved straight from the most dramatic historical events. July 20. 1944 a bomb detonates at 12.42 hours in the situation room of the Wolfs lair near Rastenburg in East Prussia, where Hitler and his staff is following events of the front on the map. The “Fuhrer” is only slightly injured. For the event of his death, however everything had been prepared. A group of dissident officers had planned to take power and negotiate conditions for a truce. Bloody repression follows. The number of arrests exceeds 7000, executed are nearly 5000, including 3 General Field Marshals: Witzleben, Kluge, Rommel. Heinrich count Lehndorff is, without having been one of the key of figures of the conspiracy, an example of the fiercely anti-national socialist orientated nobility of East Prussia, which revolted against the regime as soon as the conditions allowed. He was a born horseman - his uncle had managed the famous imperial horse farm of Thrakhenen – and a high-ranking member of the landowning nobility, heir to the six thousand hectare estate Steinort at lake Mauersee. The land had been in possession of the Lehndorff family since the year 1400. The large and magnificent baroque palace was build in 1689 by a countess Marie Eleonore, who painstakingly listed all details and specifications of the endeavor, so that we know to this day the price of each door lock, the measurements of each tapestry and the name of the artisan, who graced the ceilings in the house. The alleys of the park, bordered by age-old oak trees, lead down to the reed grass of the lake, on which black swans thrived and the call of …duck and rain piper sounded. A romantically ruined pavilion bore as an insignia the French verse of a mysterious madrigal. Si j'eusse été le jour de ta naissance Chargé de te donner un nom Et que l'avenir la connaissance M' eút été conférée par le dieu Apollon De peindre au vif ton áme et ton regard, Ton nom sans hésiter aurais êté Bayard. If I was told the day that you where born To pick a name for you to bear And if god Apollo had me chosen And gave me knowledge of future affairs To paint your heart and eye so clear I called you without hest Bayard Geographically and in ethical respects there could not be a larger distance between Steinort and the brewery cellars of Munich – crammed with tobacco smoke and growling – out of which the Nazi movement fermented. But the irony of fate is inexhaustible. It happened that Steinort is located about 5 miles from Rastenburg, where Hitler took Headquarters in June 1941. The foreign Minister of the Reich Joachim von Ribbentropp, confiscated half of the von Lehndorff castle as quarters for himself and his entourage so that against their will the family found themselves in the nerve center of the regime and surrounded by high ranking military and Gestapo. Heinrich von Lehndorff had been notified of the assassination intended for the following day. He left Steinort, put on his Uniform and went to Koenigsberg where he was supposed to take over the military command post for the conspirators. There, after a long day of terrible delay, he learned that the assassination attempt had failed. Desperate he drove by car into the vicinity of Steinort and returned in civilian clothing and on horseback to the mansion, as if coming from one of his regular farm inspections. But he didn’t have any illusions. What should he do? To remain meant certain arrest. To escape implied the deliverance of his wife and three small children into the hands of the SS. He decided to stay. The next day he saw the car of the Gestapo drive up to the open stairway of the manor, his sense of self-preservation was overpowering. Like a shadow he disappeared into the deep forest in which he had dwelled since childhood and where the hounds lost his trace. A few hours later his sense of responsibility again prevailed. He telephoned from a hunting lodge to give himself up. He is detained at first in Koenigsberg and later deported to Berlin. But again he is overpowered by the will to survive. On the way to Berlin he manages to escape from the armored vehicle. For four days and nights he wanders through the forests of Mecklenburg with bleeding feet, because his shoes had been taken away. Exhausted he finally seeks asylum at a wood keepers inn … who turns him over to the police. His wife, Gottliebe countess von Lehndorff, had been arrested and separated from her three small children, Marie Eleonore, Vera and Gabriele – seven, five and three years old- to be left totally in the dark about their fate for the next five month. Only a few days after her arrest she gave birth to a fourth child. All children of conspirators where detained in the infamous Sippenhaft- facility Bad Sachsa. Sentenced to death Heinrich count Lehndorff manages to send a last letter from the depth of his dungeon to Gottliebe. He asks forgiveness for having endangered her and their daughter’s lives by attempting to flee. He confesses to being weak enough to open his veins to escape a more gruesome faith. He blesses little Katharina whom he will never see. On September 4th, at age thirty-five he is hung on a piano wire from a meat hook alongside his companions. A camera films the endless agony of the conspirators for the evening entertainment of the Fuehrer. One has to imagine the apocalypse that thunders in January 1945 across east Prussia, the first German Province to be conquered by the Russian Army: the headlong retreat of a whole population in midwinter, the cities in ruins, the scorched earth, and this despite all the down pouring of orders from a fanatically mad Dictator. The story’s epilog completes the picture of Vera. In the beginning there was a Paradise, the fairytale castle Steinort. Then came the purgatory, the war; then occurred the hell of July 20th 1944 and then the other hell of the collapse of the German Empire. And from all the ruins arises, growing larger and larger, this astounding girl, the little Vera of five years with the angel face, the same girl that she had been when her father was executed. And gradually she became Veruschka. The greatest picture magazines compete for her long-drawn-out liana-like body, her mysterious features with the bold androgynous head, her cunning overbread eroticism. It is possible that all the lost Glamour, the magnitude of bravery, the nobility, the destruction, the blood and the tears were needed so that she finally might blossom, this exotic poisonous flower, whom a Baudellaire would have loved so much.

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EX MODEL FOUND IN WALL Garry Indiana Artforum May 1985 "The recent work of Vera Lehndorff and Holger Trülzsch "- some variant of this proposed itself as the initial solution to writing about them-"produces an 'ironic cramp in the mind." Yes, that was the difficulty, this irony-that Veruschka von Lehndorff, the most celebrated fashion model of the "60s, in tandem with another artist, had devised a body of photographic work as much about painting, sculpture, performance, and architecture as it is about photography, paradoxically a conceptual extension or negation of her fashion career-the recognition of a sequence that continues logically from one place to another but seems, nevertheless, bizarre. "Here is a large collection of photographic objects in which the subject is one of the most extensively photographed human bodies in the world, used as a painting ground to become almost indistinguishabie from numerous rotting, peeling, decomposing surfaces and surroundings, obliterating'the bod) (s identity by means of a physically excruciating process that reaches its full refinement in the negation of physical space." But not the total negation, not entirely obliterated. Collapsed certainly, banished somewhat, figureground relation complexified-this was, I thought, a way to begin. Most people are surprised, after all, when they learn it was Verushch ka who made these things with Trülzsch. "On an obvious level, "I wrote, they comprise an ingenious reversal of fashion presentation" Every stab at an essay produced this kind of defenivenes this false assumption that anyone implicated in fashion, even Veruschka, would meet a certain resistance from people concerned with "art: 'though it is simple enough to look at the pictures and see that they are "arf' of an extremely high order. Veruschka: I wanted to make clear, is Veruschkas invention. She was trained as a painter and an artist, otherwise she would never have been abie to do what she did as a fashion model. She worked with the photographers, not in a passive model way, but as a coilaborator. By the end she was probably the only model up to her time to have final control of what images were used. Before Veruschka, models were not encouraged to have distinct personalities. No one eise did what Veruschka did. She operated on a principle of total out.rageousness. lf there ' is a rule, break it' lf I began that way, I could tell the story of the two eggs a day. Before she decided to become Veruschka she had been "discovered" in Paris by the head of a big New York agency. "You are too tall for Paris:' the woman said. "Come to New York, you're perfect for America." So she came and this same woman did not remember ever talking to her. 'Well try to do something with you, since you're here. Eat two eggs a day, nothing else. And walk everywhere, to every appointment, get that fat off' She was quite skinny at the time but ate two eggs a day for months and walked everywhere and the.agency moved her'into an apartment with two other girls. Then the, apartrnent was broken into, and she found out she had this aunt who lived in the West Village in a townhouse, and she moved in with this aunt and had strawberries for breakfast. Nothing was happening, so she decided to go back to Germany and figure out a strategy. Because even if she did not think much of fashion it ired her to fail at such a silly business. She returned to her mothers house in Germany and remembered that someone had told her that in America you only need to have one idea, one really good idea, and push it. Because even if you have only one, that is one more than other people. And so she, invented Veruschka. I am not telling this the way I planned: "a-persona she launched two decades ago in a gambling mood, sensing the precise moment when a countess whose bone structure was twice the prescribed height:' I started in that style, that formal voice, "might slink into a top modeling agency_ without a portfolio and become, within six months, the fashion symbol of a decade" Is it necessary to explain that Veruschka was, and symbolized, a necessary moment quite a long moment in the glare of 15 minutes of fame, and that Veruschka among many others who had other things to do understood perfectly that celebrity is the trivial -form of fame? That. one could, at that time, expand the form, make it say things it wasn't designed for. That time is here again. Celebrity is a way of being there: intensely so, when a mass consciousness of death prevails. In the'60s Vietnam, now nuclear terror. The work under discussion is, unambiguously, horrifyingly, about death. Vogue has gone right back to being flypaper. But the Vreeland era at Vogue, aligned fashion with the convulsions of the culture, instead of trailing them from. a safe distance as it had before. It brought fashion and its photographly close, , too art than if., had ever been in America What everyone loved about Veruschka was this: the idea of a really intelligent person being a fashion model, someone who understood that life lies beyond appearances. "I thought you were supposed to be in Paris:' David Hemmings says to her near the end of Blow-Up, running into her at a party "I am in Paris, " she replies. If I decided to junk the necessary but (to the, artists and the art) unwelcome angle of past identity and its analogical linkages it is because that take presumes a certain codifying distance, flattening the ground around the subject, stating the obvious the obvious the obvious, why bother, it's enough to say you can relate this work to the other work but this work is worlds away from it, or, for the last time, worlds away "from the circumstance of being an ambulatory objet d'art in the '60s, Veruschka devised a method of transmogrifying her relation to the camera while remaining in front of it. She' had always made her own ideas manifest in her fashion pictures. In the late'60s she began painting her body to be photographed with water-based theatrical paint, transforming parts of it into trompe l'oeil vegetation, rocks, and animals." In 1970 Veruschka began collaborating with Trülzsch in developing body paint into an art form, beyond a novelty' using it as a central trope in an ensemble of effects culminating in photographic images. Trülzsch was trained as a painter and sculptor and had performed music with groups, percussion in experimental music, and worked in photography. Now he is an outstanding photographer with a- widely exhibited body of non collaborative work. This work with Veruschka became important in both their lives, starting with the "Mimicry Dress Art'pictures. These are parodies of cinema and magazine images, in sequences. For example, Rita Hayworth in Gilda, with Veruschka doing the Rita Hayworth poses and expressions and with the dress painted on her skin. Hardly anyone notices that all the clothes are painted on, the jackets with the ruffled shirtronts underneath, the shadows of the lapels; anyone viewing them cold is liable to perceive the requisite mfatrix of signifiers to elicit a paradigm. In another, the sexy James Dean type she plays in denim and slicked hair will read as an incipient stiff phallus as persuasively as one of Bruce Webees crotchoramas of Matt Dillon, despite the female anatomy discernible under the paint job. Pictures say whatever we -are conditioned to want. There are striptease sequences. One is of a standard burlesque- queen stripping, but when she is finally naked she continues to strip, unzipping her forehead down the middle to reveal, on one side, a black void. You can see that they are not trick photography and that they are about the illusionistic capacities of painting as well as those of photography. The perfected studio lighting and seamlessbackdrop buildup of the pose amplify the visual manipulation into its parody The facetious tone of the Mimicry Dress Art pictures is something like Pat Oleszkos work in which the conceit is the confection of a second skin which makes a statement and at the same time conceals the body of the artist. Oleszko does this by padding herself with a soft sculptural covering, while Lehndorff-Trülzsch erase the body's contours with a mirage of artificial volumes. In both cases the caricature has its aenerous aspect of viewer-accessibility and a less often noted hard-edged quality of ridicule which gleans depth from savaginghuman cliches drawn from both sexes. With Mimicry Dress Art, Lehndorff-Trülzsch consider the body in relation to its socialization, its cladding, its deceptive language. The series dismantles the social identity of "Veruschka!" by concealing one celebrity persona inside another, and by simulating the fashion image-the self as materials-with materials that stick to the skin and are literally less than skin-deep. These isolated episodes in the history of the body and fashion seduction are rarefied into exegetical art pieces which relate coherently to Cindy Shermaris later emblematizing of mass-media archetypes, which catalogue the more rapid turnover of female "looks!' prevailing in the Age of Television. - Vis-A-Vis body art, there is a clear difference in purpose. between exhibiting the body plain and making it do unpleasant things, and generating an environment around or r with the body that effects a partial or complete dematerialization. Certain public spectacles of pain are as tritely staged as hard-core pornography, more so in fact- I have in mind Stelarc, the artist who suspends himself from meat hooks as an exercise in self-transcendence. On the other hand, an artist like Chris Burden crawling over broken glass or Valie Export walking through fields of electrical current leads the spectator through a brilliantly aroused awareness of mind-body dynamics. Although stoic "performancee are sometimes recorded on film and video as well as photographed, the most recent work that Lehndorff Trülzsch have bracketed with the term "Oxydationert' (Oxidations, 1978) (this is the formal name of the series, but also the generic description of works outside the series) is not primarily concerned with the duration of the "endurance' required to arrive at an image The agonizing immobility implied by the key images are single-frame compressions of experience, different but comparable to the remarkable dramas of immobility presented at full length in works by Ulay and Marina Abramovi6. "The combinative technical procedures involved in 'Oxydationen:" the analysis could read, "are part of the finished products metaphysical aura." But I like better the motto from Novalis in the catalogue Oxydationen by Lehndorff and Trülzsch: "Life is a process of involuntary oxidation" As we know from Robert Rauschenberg's erased Willem de Kooning, there is something far more esthetically engaging and philosophically astute than a thing's appearance, and that is a thing's disappearance. Why is there something rather than nothing, Heidegger wanted to know. We know that appearance and being are not the same the body is not the same as the self. And in our time, - our century, the thing that has devastated human life, diminished human life below the vegetal level, reduced human life to slavelike mimicry, is the denial of this difference; lets speak plainly- everything in this barbaric century that has degraded human life has been the successful identification of the body with the self, the reduction of the body to nothing more than the body. The metaphysical aura of "Oxydationert" is essentially Buddhist in its contemplative character. The methodology is that of noninterference ~ with the found backgrounds, which are essentially the content of the photographs: they are never decorated or retouched, though often they look that way. A location is found, a place with its own resonances: the Fish Auction Hall in Hamburg, for example, an enormous iron structure abandoned to the depredations of climate and transient clochards. Surfaces are studied: beams festooned with dangling electrical fixtures, huge metaf. doors covered with generations of crackling paint, walls phosphorescently scrumbled by oxidation. The artists enter into the physical and psychological field the location emits, setting up a square plastic working tent for their materials. A zone 6f decay is concentrated on; areas concealed when the body stanIds in front of them are examined under various conditions of light. Surfaces are measured, their colors studied; then the artists begin matching. the found surfaces and colors on her body which has been covered with a kind of paste onto which the paint is finally applied. The painting itself will take as long as 16 hours. Eventually the entire displaced area is replicated on the body by both of them: bricks, industrial molding, rivets, door handles, hinges, pipes, wires, cables, parts of a fuse box, flakes of chipping paint, indentations in, the wall surface, splashes of a rust-colored substance used to combat rust on door locks and handles whatever is there. The immobile bodys pain reactions to the environment (cold, tics, the stench of decomposing garbage) and to the painting process (glaring lights, skin irritations, prolonged immobility) provide an intimate access to the environment. In Zen meditation the meditator is absorbed into the perceived object, becoming "the same thing: 'The goal of the images in the. "Oxydationen series is the merger of the body with the found environment, but'the body never disappears completely. The extent of its absorption into the background is. the psychic charge of the image. So we see the artifact of displacement, the iron architecture of the wholesale fish industry, absorbing the soft architecture of the human body into its rigid geometries. "Oxidationen deals with man-made structures designed and built by social and economic imperatives, structures' that have become dysfunctional but persist, as evidence of their own mortality and ours. "Time destroys everything we do, " wrote Thomas Bernhard, "whatever it is." This work is morbid and sublime and terrifying.