A generation ago, the illustrator Tony Viramontes captured the essence of the jet-set ’80s with portraits of the fashion and night-life sets in Manhattan and Paris, rendered in little more than a decisive dash of charcoal and a few saturated strokes of gouache. Tragically, he didn’t live to see the end of the decade he depicted so vividly, dying of AIDS in 1988 at the age of 31.
But a quarter century after his death, his work is enjoying a reappraisal: 25 of his original portraits go on sale tomorrow on the luxury goods site 1stdibs.com; Bergdorf Goodman is giving him tribute in its September window displays; and a monograph on Viramontes, “Bold, Beautiful and Damned” (Laurence King, $50) hits shelves next month. Many of Viramontes’s collaborators, clients and muses are interviewed in the new book, including Rene Russo, Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, Valentino Garavani, Nick Rhodes and Janet Jackson, for whom Viramontes created the iconic cover art for the 1986 album “Control.”
Viramontes had a knack for summoning his subjects’ personalities with great economy. “Tony rarely worked from photographs and didn’t dream much with his pencil,” said Dean Rhys Morgan, a Welsh collector who wrote the book and curated the online sale. “However stylized, Tony’s drawings were always based on a real girl standing in front of him.”
Morgan first encountered Viramontes’s work in the late 1990s, while leafing through an old issue of the French fashion bible Le Mode en Peinture in his college library at the Wimbledon School of Art. In 2009, he opened a gallery to deal in fashion and interiors prints. Soon after, he received an e-mail from Ed Viramontes, Tony’s brother, who’d been storing the illustrator’s archives on baking trays and in cardboard boxes in his garage in the San Fernando Valley of California. Morgan flew out to have a look. “The boxes, untouched since he brought them back from Paris, still had the shipping stamps and customs forms attached,” he recalled. “Ed opened them quite nonchalantly to reveal the most exquisite pieces of work. A book had to be assembled.”
One could credit Viramontes’s renaissance to the continuing ’80s nostalgia boom. But Morgan thinks the artist’s chosen medium has something to do with it too. “For so long, drawing has been considered laughably anachronistic in an age of computer-generated everything,” he said. “But the skilled use of line is one of the most effective artistic methods to convey emotion — direct and opinionated. And Tony painted the mood of the day with a drive no photograph could match.”
The 1stdibs.com auction Viramontes begins tomorrow at 1 p.m. “Bold, Beautiful and Damned” is out next month from Laurence King.