The Power of Artistic Exile

The filmmaker and polymath Melvin Van Peebles died last week at the age of 89 at his home in New York. He is best known as the auteur behind the first hit blaxploitation film, (1971), but he was an artist of great breadth and versatility: sculptor; poet; painter; composer and, with Gil Scott-Heron, progenitor of rap and hip-hop; playwright; gifted novelist. I would continue, but I have run out of semicolons. From his obituaries, one gets the sense that his crowning act of mischief-making was to leave obituarists an impossible task, to contain seven or eight human lifetimes in a few paragraphs. Throwaway lines that during a long period of expatriation, he “studied astronomy—a personal fascination—at the University of Amsterdam.” He worked as a gigolo. He painted portraits professionally in on Wall Street.