She embodied the eliminating elegance of the California of the 1960s. The “Eve in Hollywood” is dead Friday at the age of 78.
Le Monde with AP
The photographer and novelist Eve Babitz died, Friday, December 17, at the age of 78 years. Lili Anolik, his biographer, confirmed that she died of Huntington’s disease complications, Friday afternoon, in a Los Angeles hospital.
This muse of the Californian art scene of the years 1960-1970 was passionate about its time and the city of Los Angeles. His chronicles on the troubadour nightclub, the hotel of the Stars Château Marmont, the famous boulevard Sunset Strip or Venice Beach are living testimonials of the carelessness of those years. Eve babitz knew everyone, from Jim Morrison to Steve Martin.
“A gigantic permanent studio”
In 1963, it became known thanks to a photograph become emblematic from Julian Wasser who represented her naked and aged 20 years playing chess against the artist Marcel Duchamp, on the occasion of a historical retrospective that he gave his work at the Pasadena Museum of Art.
Eve babitz continued a career as a photographer, hollywood museum and amused chronicler for Vogue or Rolling Stone. She told her sexual life or various experiences of psychotropic substances. She wrote a cult novel, Eve in Hollywood, published in 1972 in the United States, or a book of souvenirs, quiet days, brief encounters, on the Hollywood of the 1970s.
His father was violinist in the Tweetieth Century Fox orchestra, his mother was an artist. Igor Stravinsky was his godfather. Eve Babitz lived one year in New York and a few months in Rome, but Los Angeles was his home and his source of inspiration, a playground for personal inlage, a “gigantic permanent studio”, she said.