PHILIP HOARE

Friday, July 26 / 8:00 PM/ Tickets: $ 5
Information: 508.487.5151

Narrowland Arts presents presents THE MIND’s EYE events series: PHILIP HOARE on Friday, July 26 at 8 PM.

Philip Hoare's talk for the Schoolhouse Center is entitled:

Wilde, Coward & Tennant: Three Decadent Lives?

'I have nothing to declare but my genius', Oscar Wilde told New York customs on his arrival in America in 1882. Fifty years later, Stephen Tennant asked the US customs man for a pin for his orchid buttonhole. Between those two visits, Noel Coward arrived in New York as an impoverished young man and proceeded to use Broadway to invent himself for a new century. For each man, arrival in the New World seemed to frame
their extraordinary lives, as if its very newness allowed them to express their otherness. Quite consciously, they used their image to further their careers, with varying degrees of success - and transgression.

Using memorable photographs by Beaton, Sarony, Horst and others, Hoare will
explore the manner in which these three visitors to America - Wilde, Coward and Tennant - embodied and exploited the decadent image of their age. Were they a submissive cultural reaction to their respective eras, disguising their sexuality in glamorous fancy-dress? Or were they subversive dandies tailoring and manufacturing their extraordinary identities as an expression of a positive otherness? And just what is it that links Wilde, Coward and Tennant with Andy Warhol, David Bowie and the Pet Shop Boys?

PHILIP HOARE is the author of Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant (1990), an account of the outrageous aesthete which featured on best-seller lists on both sides of the Atlantic. In a front-cover review for the New York Times books section, John Waters described it as ''witty and amazing...both scholarly and hilarious at the same time.'

Noel Coward: A Biography (1995) was described by Sheridan Morley as 'the definitive biography' of the playwright and author, and also received the front-cover review in the New York Times. Hoare was consultant to three-part BBC television documentary, The Noel Coward Story, and he is consultant to the Noel Coward Society

Oscar Wilde's Last Stand (1997) received a full page review in the New York Times, and was a 'Notable Books of the Year' for the paper. In the London Sunday Times, Simon Callow noted: 'Hoare has identified one of the key moments in the formation of the modern world, and he has documented it with dazzling brilliance.' Sir Ian McKellen wrote, 'Oscar Wilde's Last Stand is a shocking tale of heroes and villains - illuminating and upsetting in equal measure.' The Boston Globe noted, 'Hoare proves a learned, witty, intelligent guide to significant aspects of subcultural history…[with] an eye for the memorable detail (Goering, at his final arrest, was wearing red nail polish, and his toes were painted, too) and the telling quip.'

Hoare's latest book, the part-autobiography, part-psychic investigation of a vast Victorian military hospital, Spike Island (2001), has also garnered praise, dubbed by one critic 'a scholarly equivalent of The Blair Witch Project'. The acclaimed German writer W.G. Sebald chose it as his Sunday Telegraph 'Book of the Year', noting, 'Spike Island has everything a passionate reader could possibly want - a subject that far transcends the trivial pursuits of contemporary writing, stylistic precision, concerns both public and private, astonishing details, a unique sense of time and place, and a great depth of vision.' In February 2002 Spike Island was chosen as the focus of an acclaimed symposium, The Haunted Place, at Tate Britain.

Hoare is a frequent contributor to broadcast and print media, reviewing for The Independent, The Observer, and the Times Literary Supplement. His piece on Princess Margaret was published in the April edition of W magazine, and he regularly appears on Larry King Live in his role as social historian. His film for BBC 2's Travels with Pevsner series was acclaimed as 'masterful' by the Daily Telegraph, and in 1999-200, he was co-curator of Icons of Pop at the National Portrait Gallery, which drew a record 226,000 visitors to the gallery. He lives in London, and is currently curating an international touring exhibition, originating in the US, for the Pet Shop Boys.

Narrowland Arts presents programs and opportunities for artists at
The Schoolhouse Center, located at 494 Commercial Street in Provincetown’s
historic East End Gallery District.

For information or an interview with the artists please contact Michael Carroll at 508.487.4800 X 105