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Beatrix Ost More Than Everything
Beatrix Ost More Than Everything Biography And Selected Press Illustration by Beatrix Ost for “More Than Everything”. Biography of Beatrix Ost Anyone who has met Beatrix Ost knows that she is impossible to pigeonhole. Often dressed in haute couture of her own design, complete with her characteristic turban, she embodies the Zen of elegance and savoir vivre. Born in 1940, Beatrix grew up in the tumultuous aftermath of the Second World War. She studied painting with Kokoschka, danced at the Isadora Duncan School, starred in movies and onstage, wrote scripts including Killer Venus, and created the film Hearts’ Lonely Hunters with her son Daniel Kuttner. Having displayed her art at shows throughout the world, she moved to New York where her kaleidoscopic life took a new turn. She was artist-in-residence at the New York Academy, founded by Andy Warhol. Her art and style were featured in “Vogue”, “Harper’s Bazaar” and “Vanity Fair.” Bill Cunningham has chronicled her many innovations in the world of fashion and art, all embodying her motto: In your body is a good place to be. Her world is open to artists of every stripe, peopled with the likes of Andrew Solomon, John Casey, Nena, Bob and Uma Thurman, Rita Dove, Wallie Shawn, Alan Buchman, Bob Balaban, William Wegman, Sheila Metzner and Deborah Eisenberg. Azzendine Alia designed couture for her. Even the new upstarts in the fashion world look to her for inspiration. “She is inimitable,” say the Olsen Twins. Her first memoir, My Father’s House, was published by the small press Helen Marx Books in 2007. Readers clamored for more. Now, with the sequel More Than Everything, The Halycon Company, headed by Derek Anderson and Victor Kubicek, has discovered her life, and a feature film is in the works. Muse Beatrix’s unique personal style has been an inspiration not only for some of the world’s greatest designers, from Azzendine Alia to Ron Shamask to Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, but also for cutting-edge architects such as Sulan Kolatan and Bill MacDonald. She has excited readers in publications from “Vogue” to “Harper’s Bazaar” to “Vanity Fair” and has been a regular fixture in Bill Cunningham’s column in “The New York Times” where he has chronicled her sartorial stylings for the last four decades. Beatrix also designed a fashion line for Nordstrom and is visible on the store’s website. Illustration by Beatrix Ost for “More Than Everything”. Excerpt from “Advanced Style” a book by Ari Seth Cohen. Fashion & Style Selected Press Click Any Page for Viewing Fashion & style Fashion & style Fash & styl Fashion & style Fashion & style ge ge Colla Fashion & style Colla Artist Beatrix has exhibited her paintings, sculpture, conceptual art and film in solo and group shows from Munich, Stuttgart and Bratislava to New York and Newport News to Mexico City, and is collected throughout the world. Illustration by Beatrix Ost for “More Than Everything”. Qoute by Beatrix Ost Exhibitions Wo rk Acclaim & Reviews acclaim & Reviews Selected Press Click Any Page for Viewing acclaim & Reviews acclaim & Reviews acclaim & Reviews acclaim & Reviews acclaim & Reviews acclaim & Reviews acclaim & Reviews acclaim & Reviews acclaim & Reviews acclaim & Reviews acclaim a& cclaim & Reviews Reviews acclaim & Reviews acclaim & Reviews acclaim & Reviews acclaim & Reviews acclaim & Reviews acclaim & Reviews ge Colla Bon Vivant Beatrix’s is a life well lived, celebrated and shared, featured in publications throughout the world. Her exquisite taste has transformed her homes in New York and Virginia into magical worlds of beauty, fantasy, ideas and dreams, which have attracted a virtual cavalcade of artists and intellectuals. Illustration by Beatrix Ost for “More Than Everything”. Lifestyle & Deco r Selected Press Click Any Page for Viewing liFestyle & Deco R liFestyle & Deco R ’s rty trix Bea hday PaGlass t illip Bir h Ph wit 2010 liFestyle & Deco R liFestyle & Deco R liFestyle & Deco R liFestyle & Deco R liFestyle & Deco R liFestyle & Deco R liFestyle & Deco R liFestyle & Deco R ge Colla liFestyle & Deco R Writer Beatrix’s books and screenplays share the variety and signature verve present in her paintings and drawings. Having started as the screenwriter on Killer Venus and Hearts’ Lonely Hunters, she surprised everyone, and herself, by migrating to prose. More Than Everything is her recent work, which Robert Thurman compared to Proust. Excerpt from “Killer Venus” the screenplay by Beatrix Ost. Illustration by Beatrix Ost for “More Than Everything”. A Review My Father’s House Beatrix’s Debut Memoir Published by Helen Marx Books, 2007 “Imagine a feminine Marcel Proust growing up consciously on a farm in Bavaria during troubled times, delving into the archeology of desire through her parents’ love letters, and deftly evoking a fascinating world with the sensitive eye and delicate hand of a skilled painter of scenes and moods and emotions, and you’ll be ready to enjoy Beatrix Ost’s delicious gift, her book, My Father’s House. She transports you there to her lost times and world most powerfully, unforgettably.” - Robert Thurman, Professor and Author of Inner Revolution, Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Infinite Life “Beatrix Ost has written a memoir which captures the end of World War II in Germany through the eyes of a bright and sensitive girl. The large farm, the houses, the family and the many other people they sheltered come to life. It is as though Beatrix Ost pressed her head on each page and magically transmitted (oh! If it could ever be that easy!) the vision of the little girl she was then and the wisdom of the woman she is now. This is a valuable testimony, but above all a gorgeous book.” - John Casey, Award Winning American Writer “Occasionally we meet a writer whose work can be read not only for historical detail but also for the sheer pleasure of the act of reading. Beatrix Ost is just such a writer, and a recent journey with her husband to the idyllic Bavarian farmland of her youth carries this beautiful memoir through the innocent travails of youthful innocence and the horrors of Nazi administration. Throughout, the nuances of a youthful view of life in a war-torn land, combined with her skill in choosing the perfect sentiment time and time again, left me both breathless and inspired. Ost writes with the flair and freedom of the artist supported by the precision of a diamond cutter. If you have ever wondered what it was like for an established, intelligent and sensitive family in Hitlerian Bavaria, you will find the wonders of truth in My Father’s House.” - Dennis Smith, Writer An Introduction By Andrew Solomon The first time I met Trixi Ost was in my living room, where a friend had brought her to tea, and I was overwhelmed by what she looked like: this beautiful woman with her piercing sapphire eyes, and her grey hair streaked with bright blue as though she had come from the atelier of Yves Klein, and her bright red lips, and the elegant jewelry, and a perfectly tailored suit, and that amazing Bavarian accent that resonated from some more civilized time and world but also seemed to know the underside of the avant-garde. Here was a refined mix of extravagance and severity, as though she had allowed herself everything and then, with rigorous self-discipline, had removed half from the mix. I was so struck by her almost forbidding glamour that I didn’t notice, for the moment, that she also has a smile in which all the world’s openness and generosity are expressed. After she left, the friend who had introduced us asked whether I didn’t think she was the warmest person I’d ever met, and only then did I retrospectively notice the thrill of her enthusiasm, which I later learned to know as love. Six months later, Trixi and I went to Nepal together, along with other friends. There are not so many people with whom one would be bound for Nepal on such brief acquaintance, but once you enter Trixi’s world, you are in it deep, and we had both wanted to visit the monasteries of the highlands and the palaces of Kathmandu and Patan. Halfway through our wonderful trip, we ended up waiting for several hours at an airstrip near the foot of Mt. Everest, and it was there that Trixi began telling me stories of her past. It is not always the case that a great storyteller has great stories to tell, but Trixi’s life in Germany was as fascinating as her recitation was eloquent, and on that windy mountain, a history and a sensibility were revealed to me. Some of the anecdotes were difficult ones, but she recounted them with joy. Her book is a lot like her. It’s impressionistic; it scuttles along from one thing to another in a way that can be confusing; it’s very stylized and yet also disarmingly frank, with its gentle humor and its embracing of collective humanity. So often in literature, style obscures content, but here the content feels transparently exposed even though the style is highly visible, much as in real life Trixi’s naturalness of emotion coexists with her chic self-presentation. The book expresses a child’s naive pleasures, and so its evocation of childhood is utterly convincing; but it also reflects the astuteness of someone in the later part of her life, who can compare her own youth to that of her grandchildren. What one most senses here is an underlying kindness. In an age when fashionable memoirs recount the lurid foibles of dysfunctional families, this one is written with authentic affection and great respect. But it is no gauzy fantasy. These are real people, with their many imperfections: the pretentious Aunt Julia, the nightmarish Marie-Louise, the nervous General Brün, the resigned Grandfather Theodor. Through it all runs the melancholy of Trixi’s father, Fritz, the stern and capable master of Goldachhof, aristocratic and repressed, loved but feared and never quite known. The only person who seems unequivocally rosy is Adi, the mother who holds the center with her infinite gentleness and mercy and wisdom: sometimes stern, as when she takes the chambermaid to get an abortion; sometimes heroic, as when one of the farm workers murders another and she has to restore order; but always empathetic, knowing, as mothers should, the feelings of her children before the children do themselves. She is sympathetic magic incarnate. The process of this book is the accrual of anecdote. There is no grand underlying narrative trajectory except the passage of time and a child’s slow maturation. Still, these are not just discrete sketches; they accumulate to form rich characters and evoke a vanished life so palpably that one tastes it. The author rekindles the sensuality of things long gone: the flavor of the black-market coffee to which Grandmother was addicted as though it were opium, selling off family treasures to get it; the smell of the cigar Trixi stole from her father’s drawer for the neighborhood boys; the sweet taste of berries gathered at a secret spot deep in the woods. In the way of children, Trixi makes little social distinction between her relatives and the foreign servants who kept the household running: passionate, homesick Olga, the Russian cook; flighty, irrepressible Justa, the Yugoslavian chambermaid; and elegant Umer, the Hungarian coachman, with his intuitive control over the horses and his deep connection to Fritz. These staff worked hard, and in turn were cared for and educated by the family. The local farm workers and their bewildering kin also figure large: the sinister Sepp with his dead moles, the sprawling König family with their cheerful violence. Even the animals have vivid personalities: the terrifying, tumescent bull seeking his cow; the high-strung horses who could turn wild at any time; and, most wonderfully, the doe who came to stay for a winter and slept under the kitchen stove until springtime tempted her back to the wild. My Father’s House is imbued with a profound sense of place. Every aspect of Goldachhof ’s hallway and kitchen and living room is evoked, and the shapes of the royal-crested furniture, the textures of the woods and the moor, the very dirt of the fields. The farm is a character in the lives of the people whom it has embraced, and the landscape of Bavaria is a necessary condition to these stories. Trixi Ost has lived most of her life in the United States, and that particular yearning that is the harsh fate of expatriates comes through in the sharpness of her recollections. Her regional pride is rendered more vivid because so many of the domestics and farm-workers who lived beside her dreamt of homelands to the East. Little Trixi could not fathom how or why they would want to be anyplace but right where she was happiest, but that very happiness throws their sadness and longing into poignant relief. The good manners that Fritz and Adi taught to the children and servants are somehow borne out in the way Trixi tells the stories, apt and precise but always a little deferential to those who were older and wiser than she. Despite this reserve, she acknowledges how the sinister quality of the outside world impinged on Goldachhof, and the book has a richly specific flavor of its time. Adi had to buy and sell food illegally, and Trixi was afraid of these clandestine acts committed in the half-light of dusk. From time to time, the impoverished gleaners would come to pick whatever the farm workers had left behind, and she did not miss the hungry rumble of their despair. When the air raid sirens went, and they went often, the children hid under the bridge, barely protected. And yet for Trixi, it was possible to love the Americans when they came, not as liberators and not as conquerors, but as an interesting new variety of people among whom she would spend her adult life. America’s perspective on wartime Germany remains famously tortured. We see it through the eyes of victims: the Poles, and the Jews, and the brave men who plotted against Hitler, and the Allied soldiers. We hear almost nothing of what happened to ordinary Germans. The idea of “two Germanys” is often used in relation to the subsequent division of the country into East and West, but there is another Teutonic dichotomy, and it is between the Germany of brutalism and expansionism and concentration camps, and the Germany that is all gingerbread and music and apple-cheeked women in dirndls, and this book is a resounding affirmation that this good Germany existed even in the period when the evil Germany was ascendant. Fritz managed to resign from the Nazi party after serving in North Africa; he detested Hitler and the war, but kept a policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” in his own ever-expanding household, which was constantly absorbing displaced relatives and friends. Trixi’s troublesome brother Uli, on the other hand, happily signed up for Hitler Youth, and was kept out of the SS only by his authoritarian father. The dinner time debates about the Nazis took much the form of political debate in any family in any place; these could be arguments about George W. Bush, and do not participate in the absolutism with which history has treated National Socialism. It is one of the refinements of this narrative not to sentimentalize the characters into false acts of political courage. Mostly, these people were not engaged with politics, but with immutable rural concerns, cycles and struggles more fundamental than those of policy. Their idyll was not about formulating a better social system, but about escaping systems they could not hope to change. Of course, for the child through whose eyes we see, these matters were all incomprehensibly abstract anyway. The fact that the book is neither an indictment nor a rationalization makes more touching the scene in which a group of Serbs and Gypsies appear on the horizon and walk toward the farm, refugees from Dachau. The kindness that Trixi’s mother shows them, nursing one through his final hours, is universal, an embodiment of character rather than of politics. The most evil things imaginable happened in wartime Germany, but all of humanity was not corrupted. Beside unspeakable horror and great moral courage, simple benevolence also persisted. At the end of this book, the reader finds himself nostalgic for someone else’s childhood. That is no mean accomplishment. It is particularly impressive given that the tale is set in a malevolent larger context. These stories are not saccharine, but their message is that wartime is not antithetical to love or to beauty. Those dark days formed the person who is our narrator, whom one cannot help but like and admire, in part for the way she likes and admires her own past self. Between the Trixilein who is described and the Trixi who is describing, there is unbroken continuity, and that is as reassuring to the reader as recollection of the farm’s cozy solace is to the author. Illustrations by Beatrix Ost for “More Than Everything”. More Than Everything Beatrix’s Second Memoir Thoughts from Others “A proper young girl defies her family and gambles everything, or more than everything, on love. And she loses. ‘With his soul each person will take his indescribable flight,’ wrote Mandelstam, ‘like the swallow before the storm’, but in More than Everything the flight is described, breathtakingly: a young artist’s own whooshing flight into passion, its early joys and then disaster: the flame-out of loving a bad alcoholic. Quicksilver and terribly alive, what’s most remarkable in More than Everything is the point of view, as of a sun or a star. As she ranges from happiness to misery, the voice speaks from that still center, no matter the crashing wash of human planets circling around her... The heroic keeping of that poise in the face of all obstacles, and the finding of a language capable of summarizing in words that lift of the head, that swan neck of poise, is the book’s triumph: the reader is with her, with her grace and pain, every inch of the way. Her great love for Ferdinand (dancing in flames like a small Indio god) may have to die there in Mexico, but Ost stunningly captures her own dreamlike voyage to adulthood: shaking free of an impossibly dark life as the wife of an alcoholic, she brushes off the stardust of romance and, stepping back in the light, comes into her own.” - Barbara Epler, President and Editor-In-Chief, New Directions Books Photo illustration for “More Than Everything”. “More Than Everything takes us so deeply and poetically into the delicious journey of Beatrix as she moves beyond My Father’s House and into a post-holocaust world we have never encountered from the perspective of those from whom it was hidden. Her personal quest, love of life, suffering and liberation poignantly echo the struggle of her people to raise their beautiful land up out of the ashes, and gradually create a society inconceivably renewed and intensely dedicated to never again allowing such horrors to arise. I strongly recommend this poignant, touching, and inspiring memoir.” - Robert Thurman, Professor and Author of Inner Revolution, Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Infinite Life Photo illustration for “More Than Everything”. “So many, many lovely lines... ‘across a little bridge, toward the forest, which like a broad charcoal stroke separated the land from the sky’... I love best the pages on which she, and I, her reader, lived in the country, the ponds, the lanes, the deep forests, the farm itself a kind of character. I, too, grew up (or at least until the age of twelve) in the country and all of that, however weighted with sorrow, is somehow searched for again on my own farm, in this time. Her portrait of Frau Rider on 114 and 115 is exceptional. ‘Warily hanging her head a little forward, leaning it to the side, full of mistrust... she balanced her heavy, squat body like a weight on the edge of the chair, as if she would be leaping up and running off any moment...’ And then she writes of her hand at her purse: ‘open, shut, open, shut.’.. I cannot, of course, name all the passages that engaged me, for I would be at it for some time. But I know that I appreciate her crafting skills, and power to remember, and the grand ability to bring back a time that was full of both marrow and bone. Her father’s death scene and the unwritten letter which her mother composed in her heart, a gem.” - Jan Karon, American Writer and Novelist: The Mitford Years Series Photo illustration for “More Than Everything”. “When Beatrix Ost enters a room, or your life, there will be change that lasts forever. She herself is a living and breathing celebration. Her More Than Everything is written with the brush stroke of Kandinsky. A fascinating sequel to My Father’s House.” - Alan Buchman, Director of Culture Project Theater Photo illustration for “More Than Everything”. “Beatrix Ost is an extraordinary writer and I am proud of having published her lyrical and spellbinding childhood memoir, My Father’s House. Her dazzling new book continues the fascinating story. Beatrix studies with Oskar Kokoschka, dances at the Isadora Duncan school, and eventually marries the dark and mystical Ferdinand. Her descriptions of their life together in Munich and Mexico, surrounded by the cultural elite, are sensuous and intoxicating. Her Proustian sense of the past draws us into this magical and sometimes tragic story, exploring the nature of love.” - Jeannette Watson, Writer Muse and Former Publisher Photo illustration for “More Than Everything”. “Seldom does it happen, but I finished More Than Everything in a day. I did not want to stop. The story moves you along at such a compelling pace, with such variation of rhythms, until you go galloping into oblivion and revelation at the end. Beatrix Ost has told a remarkable story, but most importantly, she has told it in a language of the senses, as few people know how to do. Every scene achieves what she says Kokoschka wanted in a painting: for the object to catch hold and reflect everything that is contained in the room. I was breathless reading her words, and sometimes I just had to stop and marvel.” - Rosalind Casey, Artist Photo illustration for “More Than Everything”. “All one can wish for is more AND more AND more of Beatrix Ost’s More Than Everything. A turbulent, jubilant, shattering, ebullient celebration of life and love, betrayal and survival. And every page an extraordinary sensual banquet of language, powerfully and evocatively rendered with innate compassion and unobtrusive grace.” - Camilla Carr, Playwright and Screenwriter: All About Bette: An Interlude with Bette Davis Photo illustration for “More Than Everything”. “Beatrix uses words like she uses paint. . . with brush strokes so vivid and rich, I feel as if I’m there watching as her story unfolds. I love this book!” - Sissy Spacek, Academy Award Winning Actress Photo illustration for “More Than Everything”. Marketing and Publicity More Than Everything represents a number of unique marketing and promotional opportunities stemming not only from Beatrix’s relationships with the media, opinion leaders, and important cultural institutions, but also from the recent success of her first book with its unique niche in postwar literature. The following are some examples. The National Arts Club A Beatrix Ost Retrospective www.nationalartsclub.org Balaban, Jack Huston, Sissy Spacek, and other friends and supporters. This event will be an incredible opportunity to create word of mouth with key influencers, and will garner celebrity, social, and event media coverage both online and in print. Coinciding with the launch of More Than Everything, The National Arts Club will feature a retrospective of Beatrix’s artwork. Paintings, drawings and sculptures from all phases of her About Culture Project career will illustrate the chapters of her life and the text from the book. Culture Project, of which Beatrix is a board member, has since 1996 told This opening night party will draw the stories as timely as the morning newsglitterati of the art world and generate paper in a way that cannot be matched media coverage in the art and society by commercial media. pages both in print and on line. Through brilliantly conceived, expertly About The National Arts Club staged dramas blending prizewinning theater with urgent moral dilemmas, Since 1989 The National Arts Club Culture Project sparks conversation has hosted some of New York’s most and incites political action. exciting exhibitions, screenings, readings and performances, including in A venue for acclaimed performances, recent times Martin Scorcese, Ethan Culture Project is also a magnet for Hawke, Dennis Hopper and Robert today’s best talent, including awardRedford to mention just a few. winners such as Meryl Streep, Danny Glover, Mary J. Blige, Robin Williams Marisa Tomei, Bob Balaban, Rinde Eckert, Lynn Redgrave, Sarah Silverman, and other artists who share a pasCulture Project sion for theater and social justice. Readings with Beatrix and Friends www.cultureproject.org Coinciding with the launch of More Than Everything, Tibet House will announce a special reading and discussion with founder Robert Thurman, Uma Thurman, and Beatrix, who is a practicing Buddhist and longtime supporter and board member of Tibet House. About Tibet House The New York City center comprises 7,000 square feet including gallery space, Tibetan Buddhist shrine, photographic archives, a lending library of over 1,000 volumes, and staff offices. In keeping with the mission as a cultural embassy, Tibet House US develops and presents innovative educational and cultural programs for the general public. The Cultural Center’s activities include exhibits, print publications and media productions. It serves as a central meeting place for the local Tibetan community to hold programs and events. Other Promotions These include a joint event with a Culture Project will host a one-night global fashion brand, and similarly reading timed to coincide with the Tibet House festive occasions at choice venues release of the book. Beatrix will join Sacred Memories: A reading and dis- including universities, libraries and some of Culture Project’s most escussion with Uma Thurman, Robert private clubs in Los Angeles, Washteemed associates, including Sting, Thurman, and Beatrix Ost ington, San Francisco, Chicago and Vanessa Redgrave, Sam Shepherd, Bob www.tibethouse.us other U.S. markets. Media Coverage More Than Everything has already been optioned as a film and will receive widespread media coverage. Beatrix has longstanding relationships with many people in the media and receives regular requests to be featured. Beatrix’s direct outreach to her media friends will include: Vogue Vanity Fair Harper’s Bazaar The New York Times New York Magazine The New Yorker Elle Paper Interview Marie Claire Town and Country The Huffington Post The Washington Post The New York Post Art in America Art Forum Gawker Nylon W WWD Harper’s The Daily Los Angeles Times Another Magazine The Herald Tribune Illustrations by Beatrix Ost for “More Than Everything”. O Contact Meg Thompson Co-Director Einstein Thompson Agency 27 West 20th St. No. 1003 New York, NY 10011 212.221.8797 x 2 [email protected] www.einsteinthompson.com Illustration by Beatrix Ost for “More Than Everything”. Selected Press Fashion & Style Fashion & Style Fashion & Style Fashion & Style Fashion & Style Fashion & Style Acclaim & Reviews Acclaim & Reviews Acclaim & Reviews Acclaim & Reviews Acclaim & Reviews Acclaim & Reviews Acclaim & Reviews Acclaim & Reviews Acclaim & Reviews Acclaim & Reviews Acclaim & Reviews Acclaim & Reviews Acclaim & Reviews Acclaim & Reviews Acclaim & Reviews Acclaim & Reviews Acclaim & Reviews Acclaim & Reviews Acclaim & Reviews Lifestyle & Deco r Lifestyle & Deco r y ix’s r art ss t P a y e B a a thd illip Gl Bir h Ph wit 2010 Lifestyle & Deco r Lifestyle & Deco r Lifestyle & Deco r Lifestyle & Deco r Lifestyle & Deco r Lifestyle & Deco r Lifestyle & Deco r Lifestyle & Deco r Lifestyle & Deco r ince Charles Beatrix and Pr The End Designed by Laura DuBois Video Clips from BeatrixOst.com No Sour Meadows Dailies Mystery of Love Beatrix Beatrix Ost | Grey Magazine Fashion Words Beauty Art Travel Interiors B Rants Chronicle Shop Beatrix Ost Abstracts / 29 August 2015 Truth Disarms Philosophy of a Metal Frog by Beatrix Ost I know her from other train rides, this conductor. She is the Prime Minister of the Business Class Department. She has her parliamentary seat right on the left as you enter. To rest a little and to oversee her charges. Read more... Abstracts / 26 June 2015 Venice by Beatrix Ost “Love can be surprising. Love can be heartbreaking. Love can be an art. But love is the singular emotion that all humans rely on most ... and crave endlessly no matter what the cost ...” -Casanova Read more... http://grey-magazine.com/contributors/beatrix-ost (1 of 7)10/21/15 5:43 PM
