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V Garbo Walks I Greta Garbo Josefine Skomars (Text) II Mata Hari (1931) Josefine Skomars (Text) III In the Realm of Being Lonely Niko Hallikainen (Text) IV I’m Not Here Paparazzi (Images) V Power of Yoga Maria Schönhofer (Text) Ture Sjölander (Images) VI Ture Sjölander Josefine Skomars (Text) Ture Sjölander (Images) VII The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone Olivia Laing (Text) VIII Clarence Sinclair Bull: The Man Who Shot Garbo Josefine Skomars (Text) Clarence Sinclair Bull (Images) IX Street Haunting Lauren Elkin (Text) Greta Garbo Josefine Skomars (Text) Greta Garbo resists explanation. She didn’t give interviews and never confirmed a rumour; purposely full of contradictions, she eluded any categorization. She wrapped her life in a mist of mystery, with the inevitable effect of raising everyone’s curiosity. But trying to define the enigmatic star, about whom nothing is known except through hearsay, speculation and intimate letters, is not only difficult but also feels somewhat disrespectful. ‘I was born; I grew up; I have lived like every other person. Why must people talk about me? We all do the same things in ways that are just a little different. We go to school, we learn; we are bad at times; we are good at others. But we grow up, the one the same as the other. We find our life work and we do it. That’s all there is to anyone’s life story, isn’t it?’ Those were the words of Greta Garbo, born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson in Sweden on 18 September 1905, one of the world’s most watched, yet least known, movie stars. After 28 movies and nearly two decades in Hollywood, Garbo withdrew, never to return to the screen. Once, when asked why she retired, she answered after a thoughtful silence, ‘I had made enough faces.’ But which face was Greta Garbo’s? That of the seven - year - old dreamer who slipped down the streets of Stockholm, out of view of her parents, towards the theatres? Who, not able to afford tickets, waited outside Södra Teatern hoping to get a glimpse of the actors coming and going? And who in her family’s cramped apartment on Blekingegatan 32, in the working - class area of Södermalm, fantasized about a different life? Was she the shy girl who in 1922 tried out for Sweden’s Royal Dramatic Theatre? The tall, plump Swede who in 1925 boarded a ship with film director Mauritz Stiller towards a career with Metro - Goldwyn - Mayer? Was she the one who upon arrival spent her first months in a sultry New York alone in the bathtub to cool off? Who didn’t know English, Greta Garbo photographed by Cecil Beaton in her garden, California, 1948 © The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s struggled to make sense of the strange world of Hollywood and kept to herself? The one who in the glossy heat of Beverly Hills longed for home in Sweden, for the snow on New Year’s Eve and the melancholic rain of summer? Was she the woman onscreen who enthralled audiences with her androgynous beauty, expressive acting and, with the entrance of the talkies, her husky voice? Who played the femme fatale and said, ‘I cannot see any sense in getting dressed up and doing nothing but tempting men in pictures’? The one who dressed in masculine trousers and overcoats and referred to herself as a boy? Who most of all wanted to play Dorian Gray? Was she the one who at the height of her career expressed a sincere wish for ‘two faces, one for the screen and one for my private life, so I could live quietly without being followed and hounded’? Her alter ego Miss Harriet Brown, shortened to ‘Harry’? The one who couldn’t cook? Was she the adventurous woman who travelled with her friends to various places of refuge around Europe: Klosters, Cap - d’Ail in France, Tistad Castle in Sweden? Or the one who wrote in a letter, ‘I go nowhere, I see no one. It is hard and sad to be alone, but sometimes it’s even more difficult to be with someone’? Was she the one who regarded any mention of private life, especially hers, as indiscreet and vulgar? Was she the woman Cecil Beaton wrote so passionately about? Or the one in a stormy relationship with Mercedes de Acosta? The one who never got over her friend from her days at ‘Dramaten’, Mimi Pollack? Was she the one who never grew up and hated growing old? The one who hid in her apartment? Was she the one walking among the skyscrapers, alone in the company of thousands? We can never know for sure. Garbo passed away in 1990 without giving any answers, but her reclusive existence had only enhanced the legend and still today she continues to captivate. Mata Hari (1931) Josefine Skomars (Text) Mata Hari was the stage name of Margaretha Geertruida Zelle (1876 — 1917), a Dutch burlesque dancer who during the First World War was executed for espionage. In 1931 the story of Mata Hari was made into a fictionalized Hollywood production, with Greta Garbo in the leading role. The film, directed by George Fitzmaurice, was a brilliant box - office success, but most brilliant of all were the costumes. The bejewelled creations Garbo wore in Mata Hari were designed by Adrian, who as head of costumes at Metro - Goldwyn - Mayer from 1928 to 1941 created legendary looks for hundreds of films — perhaps most famously The Wizard of Oz — his work simply credited as ‘Gowns by Adrian’. For Mata Hari he drew inspiration from a vast range of sources, from Turkish dolman sleeves to Balinese headdresses. The opening scene of the film shows Mata Hari in a sensual dance with a Shiva statue, dressed in an ornate jewelled breastplate and veils. Zelle herself had lived in the Dutch East Indies (today Indonesia) and brought Javanese fashions with her to the stages of Paris, where she moved in 1903 and where her dances and her dress — and the act of taking it off — were much celebrated. From that first dance scene the drama follows the cold - hearted German spy through Paris as, dressed in beaded skullcaps, sequin - trimmed tunics and a glistening limb - hugging gold gown she infiltrates the bedrooms of officers. But as Mata Hari falls in love with a Russian pilot, she softens, and so does her costume, changing from metals to velvets. At the end she sheds her glittery skin and, in floor - length matte black, true to the last photograph of Zelle, she meets her death before the French firing squad. Ture Sjölander Josefine Skomars (Text) Ture Sjölander (Images) The body of work of the Swedish intermedia artist Ture Sjölander (b. 1937) is concentrated around vivid experiments with the shapes of the familiar. By electronically manipulating, distorting and morphing images borrowed from celebrity culture and other iconography, Sjölander pushes outlines and features to the last point of recognition. The characteristic faces of Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin, for example, are distilled into eyes and mouths and merged in a black - and - white silkscreen print: the two movie icons remain distinctly themselves yet also become curiously alike. A pioneer in the field of computer animation, Sjölander has explored the possibilities of electronics since the early 1960s. His vast range of media includes video, photography, tapestry and, since the dawn of the World Wide Web, innumerable official Ture Sjölander websites. His experiments with oversaturated colour and techniques were first shown on Swedish television in 1965, and his work has since been exhibited at international art institutions including the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in group shows alongside other multimedia artists like Nam June Paik and Bill Viola. One of Sjölander’s stylized portraits also graces the cover of Garbo (1971), a biography of his fellow Swede that he curated in the form of a picture - essay. Around the time of publishing the book Sjölander visited the reclusive star in Klosters, Switzerland — one of her favoured places of exile. He remembers Garbo not wanting close - up photographs taken but instead suggesting a series of ‘paparazzi’ style pictures from afar, as ‘people seem to like them’. The result is a collection of tinted 1970s pictures, distant yet intimate portraits in which softness and humour replace the handkerchief and other props Garbo typically had at hand to hide her face. Now Sjölander himself lives secluded, on Magnetic Island just off the Queensland coast of Australia. Retired from the art world, he titles himself online as an ‘Ex - Artist - in - Exile’, but his work can be experienced through his intricate website system. Headed by the words ‘Open Sesame / Ouvre - toi’, it is a cave of early internet treasures where each click leads you down a rabbit hole into yet another layer of Sjölander’s online universe and career. Clarence Sinclair Bull: The Man Who Shot Garbo Josefine Skomars (Text) Clarence Sinclair Bull (Images) During what is known as the Golden Age of Hollywood, photographer Clarence Sinclair Bull was head of stills at the film studio Metro - Goldwyn - Mayer. From the 1920s onwards, over a period of nearly 40 years, Bull shot the portraits for MGM’s publicity pictures. Louis B. Mayer claimed that the studio had ‘more stars than there were in heaven’, and Bull photographed them all: Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, Gary Cooper, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlene Dietrich. But above all, he is known as the man who photographed Greta Garbo. These were the early days of cinema and photography. As Roland Barthes wrote in his collection of essays Mythologies (1957), ‘Greta Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced.’ Garbo was the most unreachable of all the silver screen icons; instead of enjoying the fame she had gained, her time off - set was spent avoiding the public eye.

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