The piece is written by Joseph Giovannini, someone whose name I've never seen associated with a NYT obituary. I suspect they are from one of the foreign bureaus. Ms. Putman passed away at her home in Paris.
Ms. Putman's physical features and thinking are described as if she was one of her own creations. And she apparently designed a wide variety of things, from high-end boutique stores to tableware. There is a 1981 photo of her standing behind a round table, looking somewhat like the actress Helen Mirren with a towel over her right shoulder. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then Ms. Putman is worth the picture, and what seems to be a thousand adjectives.
Her appearance is glowingly described as Parisian chic, "whether wearing a black sash of a skirt...a lace bustier under a creamy jacket big on shoulders or a long-sleeved Yamamoto silk dress with an eruption of white..." draped over a person "with a gravelly Gauloise voice worthy of a chanteuse" who "seemed to exhale words" that came from a head that was topped with a "tsunami of auburn hair over her Mount Rushmore features."
Based on the black and white photo, she appears better looking than any of those guys in stone, but poetic license is apparently taken.
Her thinking and philosophy is described with equal excess, where she is conversant in the "lingua franca of the Latin Quarter avant-garde," describing her own work as having "the interiority of emotion, of emptiness and of the inner scenography of space." She truly hung out with Samuel Beckett.
There's more. A lot more. The closing paragraph with her summed-up life quote goes on for two and one-half column inches.
You can't finish reading this obituary and think Andree Putman has simply passed away. She did way more. She ascended.
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
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