Art and artists of a summer's day... (Art - James Ensor at MOMA & Books - Beautiful Shadow, The Children's Book, and The Snow Geese)

A variety of activities at Bookeywookey central this weekend which all began with seeing the James Ensor show at MOMA. Who? I didn't know his name either. Ensor was a mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century Belgian painter. His worked spanned styles from the impressionism of his early contemporaries to the expressionism of his later ones, and spanned subject matter from domestic portraits with a stunning sense of light to Belgian carnival masks, to satire of both religious and contemporary artistic iconography. Great show and it's just opening in case you're around NYC this summer.

Got a chance to dip back into Andrew Wilson's very thorough, though longish biography of Patricia Highsmith - Beautiful Shadow. In it I learned of her novel The Tremor of Forgery, thought by many to be her best and most serious work. I am going to have to see if it's available at the library. I was struck by this quote from the character of Derwatt, the artist who is the subject of Highsmith's second Ripley novel, Ripley Under Ground.

There is no depression for the artist except that caused by a return to the Self.

That certainly sounds as thought it were true for Highsmith. The other posts on this biography are here: 1, 2, 3.

I have also made a dent in A. S. Byatt's latest novel The Children's Book, though it's only about 150 pages. It is plain to the eye what her subject matter consists of, but I'm not sure what it all adds up to yet. There is a well-to-do family and their friends, who relate to the world in a more conventional fashion, and there are also a bunch of artistic folks, most of whom seem to be Fabians, who are involved in issues of social justice and free love. The piece is set prior to World War I and seems to pit forces of convention against forces of chaos in all sorts of complicated ways. The cast of characters is broad and the saga is long. So far let's say I feel admiring of Byatt's beautiful prose but rarely propelled by the action. There are several artists among the characters - a pupetteer, a potter, and a writers of children's stories. Byatt is certainly more at home writing about writing than she is writing about artistry of a more viceral nature - like throwing pottery. The writing on the puppet show, however, is lovely:

An illusion is a complicated thing, and an audience is a complicated creature. Both need to be brought from flyaway parts to a smooth, composite whole. The world inside the box, a world made of silk, satin, china mouldings, wires, hinges, painted backcloths, moving lights and musical notes, must come alive with its own lawas of movement, its own rules of story. And the watchers, wide-eyed and greedy, distracted and supercilious, preoccupied, uncomfortable, tense, must beomce one, as a shoal of fishes with huge eyes and flickering fins becomes one, wheeling this way and that in response to messages of hunger, fear or delight. August's flute was heard, and some were ready to listen and some were not. The curtains opened on a child's bedroom. He sat against his pillows. His nurse, in comfortable grey, bustled about him, and her shadow loomed over him on the white wall...

Her writing really can cast a spell. I'm suspicious that the art-making will become a more far-reaching metaphor but I'm not sure how yet.

Finally, having enjoyed William Fiennes memoir The Music Room so much, I tracked down his first book The Snow Geese while in England. Also a memoir of sorts, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it is non-fiction, but Fiennes story is not merely of his subject, the geese, but of his discovery of them, his following their migratory pattern, and the effect of that journey on him. While at school, Fiennes falls ill with some illness that demands a lengthy recovery. During that time, he learns of the snow geese and read's Paul Gallico's story The Snow Goose and is moved to pursue them in their natural habitat from Southern Texas to Baffin Island in Hudson Bay. He travels to Texas and awaits his first glimpse:

The first sign was a faint tinkling in the distance, from no particular direction, the sound of a marina, of halliards glicking on metal masts. Drifs of specks appeared above the horizon ring. Each speck became a goose. Flocks were converging on the pond from every compass point, a diaspora in reverse, snow geese flying in loose Vs and Ws and long skeins that wavered like seaweek strands, each bird intent on the roost at the centre of the horizon's circumference. Lines of geese broke up and then recombined in freehand ideograms, kites, chevrons, harpoons. I didn't move. I just kept watching the geese, the halliard yammer growing louder and louder, until suddenly flocks were flying overhead, low over the shoulder, the now geese yapping like small dogs, crews of terriers or dachshunds - urgent sharp yaps in the thrum and riffle of beating winges and the pitter-patter of goose droppings pelting down around me. They approached the roost on shallow glides, arching their wings and holding them steady, or flew until they were right above the pond and then tumbled straight down on the perpendicular. Sometimes whole flocks circled over the roost, thousands of geese swirling round and round, as if the pond were the mouth of a drain and these geese the whirlpool turning above it. Nothing had prepared me for the sound, this dense, boisterous din, the clamour of a playground at breaktime, a drone-thickness flecked with high-pitched yells, squels, hollers and yamps - the entire prairies's quota of noise concentrated in Jack's holding pond by the two-storey house and the raised lake stocked with bass for fishing...

There is a lyricism as well as a straightforwardness to Fiennes's writing that I find evocative and moving, especially given that I was never aware of being interested in geese, indeed in birds of any kind.

Les Nuits d'Ete...

This is a week of intense writing as I have 3 projects due for school, so it was lovely to be able to dash downtown yesterday evening to my old stomping ground and see a concert featuring one of my former students at Alice Tully Hall. I don't generally review the work of people I know, so I'll just offer an appreciation - Sasha's Cooke's debut New York concert with orchestra singing Les Nuits d'Ete was uncommonly self-possessed. She brought something distinctly personal to Berlioz's setting of Theophile Gautier's poems - singing them with great warmth. Really lovely stuff. Here's one, just for fun - Dites, la jeune belle...

Say, young beauty,
Where do you wish to go?
The sail swells itself,
The breeze will blow.
The oar is made of ivory,
The flag is of silk,
The helm is of fine gold;
I have for ballast an orange,
For a sail, the wing of an angel,
For a deck boy, a seraph.

Say, young beauty,
Where do you wish to go?
The sail swells itself,
The breeze will blow.

Is it to the Baltic?
To the Pacific Ocean?
To the island of Java?
Or is it well to Norway,
To gather the flower of the snow,
Or the flower of Angsoka?
Say, young beauty,
Where do you wish to go?
Lead me, says the beauty,
To the faithful shore
Where one loves always!
This shore, my darling,
We hardly know at all
In the land of Love.

Red rooms, red poems, read books....

A fabulous New York night yesterday with my fabumanic old friend Shiela. After four hours of neurosicence, I headed down to the East Village to bar KGB, Soviet themed, as it sounds. Old Russian posters on the red, red walls, Baltika beer served in large bottles, and what looked suspiciously like a painting of my favorite film director - Nikita Mikhailkov - (if you haven't seen Anna or Burnt by the Sun, put them on your list!). Anyhoo, we were there for not for the fabulous red wine, nor for the fabulous red atmosphere, but for a reading by Red Hen Press authors which included Ernest Hilbert reading from his accessible and thoughtful Sixty Sonnets, and Timothy Green reading, among other things, his breathless American Fractal, which I loved. There was also a short story from Greg Sanders's Motel Girl about a woman and a bear she rescues from a Moscow circus (appropriately enough) that was touching and memorable. Tapas,more wine, and much conversation followed - a great evening. Thanks Sheila! (You can see pictures over at her place).

This week has also brought some new reads. From the library come Kissing Doorknobs and Total Constant Order, both YA novels about obsessive compulsive disorder, on which I'm doing a presentation for school. I also received The Lunar Men in the mail. It is by Jenny Uglow and concerns the Lunar Society, a group of experimenters and creative thinkers who met regularly in late 18th Century England. It included James Watt - the inventor of the steam engine, Erasmus Darwin - poet and inventor, and Joseph Priestley - scientist and political and religious radical who I just learned about in Steven Johnson's book The Invention of Air. In fact, it is from that book that I learned about this one, which will probably end up on the summer reading list given what I have to do before the semester is over.



I also picked up and started Will Lavender's Obedience, which is another college campus thriller in the vein of Donna Tartt's The Secret History or Barry McCrea's The First Verse. It concerns a logic class offered as a thought experiment in, well, obedience. Given the frequent mentions of Stanley Milgram, famous for social psychology experiments testing people's willingness to listen to authority, I have a feeling I know where this one is going. I would not describe the writing as long on subtlety, but I bought it for the plot, which does really keep things moving. I also bought a copy of Cynthia Ozick's The Puttermesser Papers. I have only read the occasional short story of Ozick's in The New Yorker. I have never actually read a novel and thought it was high time. Mark Sarvas thinks she's the cats meow, so what more can you ask? And a lovely Persephone Classics edition of Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski also caught my eye. I had never heard of Laski or any of her novels, written in the 1950s. I have only sampled a couple of pages, but the story of a lost child in post-war France and the taut writing really have my interest piqued. And finally An Equal Stillness by Francesca Kay, a recommendation of Cornflower Books', and I Haven't Dreamed of Flying for a While by Taichi Yamada, which writer Junot Diaz talked about in a radio interview, are also on their way. An embarrassment of riches.

Capturing the Accident (Culture - Pierre Bonnard, The Late Interiors, Film - In a Lonely Place, Books - Treasure Island)

The Raggazo and I celebrated our anniversary yesterday with a trip to the Metropolitan Museum to see Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors and have drinks on the mezzanine afterward. Although the atmosphere of their Friday Cafe is nice, for the price their artisanal cheese plate could have featured something other than colby. I'm not five. It's New York City, can't you find any good cheese? The show, on the other hand, was wonderful. It allows you to wander through the development of his interiors over about a thirty year period, its satisfying to see how his depiction of color, form, and light enriched over that time. What I liked best about the paintings was his ability to capture the accidental feel of the placement of objects on a table, the posture of his wife as she feeds the dog, or the sudden awareness of someone of themselves in a mirror. The feeling of a candid photo of a day at home - except in paint. It's interesting to see over and over again, how his interest was with the form of a table against the view out of a window, or the angle of light on the half-opened door of a room. People were usually off to the side, never posing, and with the exception of his self-portraits, they are usually painted in the color of the background. I value that ability to court the accident in art more than perhaps any other quality. I love it in acting, in directing, in painting and in words. That's why I like the poems of Frank O'Hara, the acting of Geraldine Page or Billy Cruddup, the singing of Jeff Buckley, and it's what I really loved about this show, which is on at the Met through April 19.

Also in the world of the arts, the library finally came up with a copy of the 1950 Humphrey Bogart film In a Lonely Place, a recommendation of Sheila's, 'natch. It's an unusual film for the time - the writing has an elegant feel to it, yet it is about uncontrollable passion. Bogart is a volatile and cynical screen writer who finally meets a woman he cares for when he is suspected of murder of a young coat check girl who was seen leaving a restaurant with him. Bogie gets to show both a more refined side of himself and a more vulnerable one, and he gives a really terrific performance. It has a couple of very suspenseful scenes and it does not suffer from a typical Hollywood ending. Highly recommended!

And, inspired by Verbivore, I pulled some Robert Louis Stevenson off the shelf after I finished Damon Galgut's The Imposter. I began re-reading Treasure Island for the first time since I was a child. I'm experiencing a fun, cozy, kid-reading-in-bed nostalgia that's a welcome contrast to studying for exams and writing papers.

Perspective (Theater - Sunday in the Park with George)

Who else but Stephen Sondheim would write an entire act of a musical in which nothing happens except an artist attempts to see and paint a picture. But that artist is pointellist Georges Seurat and that picture is Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and the musical is Sunday in the Park with George and so much happens in it. The work is in some ways a grand undertaking - it is about the artist's vision and the artist's role, it is about creative process, the prices and rewards of obsession, it about the perseverance necessary to go against the grain, it is about the acts that give life value. It is a grand undertaking presented but presented in an intimate rather than opulent production - if it's big Broadway you're after you will not find it here. The actors playing Georges (Daniel Evans) and Dot, his model (Jenna Russell) give honest and nuanced performances. Their singing voices are not flashily beautiful. The unit set is spare and functions as a blank canvas, imagine that, on which the show's settings can be painted (or projected in this case). The orchestra has only a handful of musicians in it. I appreciated how the characters other than Georges and Dot operated in a usual sort of Broadway idiom - the scale of their performances is a bit larger, they operate more as types - so that every time the actions returns to Georges or Dot, the lens seems to zoom in and we are in a room with them. The production uses theatrical form to talk about artistic form and I found that apt. In the first act, as I mentioned, we witness Georges Seurat painting his famous Sunday in the Park..., in the second, it is 100 years later in the gallery in which the painting hangs. A contemporary artist, also named George, makes an homage to his artistic predecessor involving his grandmother (Dot's daughter, perhaps the child of Seurat) and tries to figure out what his work is all about. He tries to find the courage to create what he wants instead of what he thinks others want of him. At some level we all play out this struggle of our individual wants against current of what others expect and demand of us. In that way this show is very universal. The music makes use of an appropriately narrow palette, I've always thought it referenced French classical music. I love the way this Sondheim work sets text to music, it is relentlessly speech-like. It has a very - talked-on-the-note sound to it. The one now well-known song, Putting it Together, immortalized by Barbara Streisand's Broadway Album is, to my ear, the one trite bit of music in the piece. This production did not convince me otherwise. But I love Dot's two songs - Sunday in the Park with George, in which she complains of the inconveniences and indignities of posing for the famous artist, and Everybody Loves Louis - as she tries to justify to herself leaving a famous artist for a well-loved baker. George's Finishing the Hat is a beautiful anthem to his obsessiveness, his determination to see, to recreate what he sees in a way that the viewer of the painting (even 100 years later) becomes complicit in creating with him. Seurat made use of the optical science of his day, that observed that two colors just overlapping can have the appearance of a third and different color when seen from a distance, and this gave birth to pointillism. If you look at the "black" hat, the "white" sail or the "green" leaves in Seurat's paintings, you see that they are each really composed of multiple colors. One can stand up close to the paintings and observe the composition of the colors as the forms fragment - like looking through a rain spattered window - or one can stand further away and that distance allows us to see whole forms with illusions of single colors that our eyes create. The paintings use not the perspective of the classical painters trying to render architecturally faithful reproductions of scenes on their canvases, but make one aware of how perspective is a tool that can help us see different elements of the world depending on where we stand. Sondheim's musical also uses perspective with two acts spaced 100 years apart, one in which a ridiculed maverick messed up any opportunity for a career by not painting what was expected of him and ended up alone by not living as he was expected, another in which that famous painter - his value now understood - attracts the donations of millionaires, the serious criticism of cogniscienti, and the appreciation of ordinary art lovers too, as a new generation of artist struggles with this battle of personal vision and the pressures of public opinion. The finale of both acts I and II are company numbers in which the spare melodic palette of the other songs, and the exchanged lines usually of solo voices blossom into a rousing chorus dense with harmonies and the previously white stage is saturated in the colors or the painting as each George creates his Sunday - they let you feel the ultimate satisfaction of creating a work and they are very movingly composed and staged.

It's a pity that MOMA's exhibit of Seurat's drawings is not still up. But if you will be in New York City before the end of June, get some tickets for Sunday in the Park with Georges and then spend a day at the Museum of Modern Art or the Metropolitan and take a look at some of Seurat's drawings and paintings and see if you see them as you looked at works of art before.

Robert Rauschenberg, Artistic Experimenter

"Being right all the time can stop the momentum of a very interesting idea."

“Everyone was trying to give up European aesthetics... That was the struggle, and it was reflected in the fear of collectors and critics. John Cage said that fear in life is the fear of change. If I may add to that: nothing can avoid changing. It’s the only thing you can count on. Because life doesn’t have any other possibility, everyone can be measured by his adaptability to change.”

Mr. Rauschenberg, who knew that not everybody found it easy to grasp the open-endedness of his work, once described to the writer Calvin Tomkins an encounter with a woman who had reacted skeptically to “Monogram” (1955-59) and “Bed” in his 1963 retrospective at the Jewish Museum, one of the events that secured Mr. Rauschenberg’s reputation: “To her, all my decisions seemed absolutely arbitrary — as though I could just as well have selected anything at all — and therefore there was no meaning, and that made it ugly.

“So I told her that if I were to describe the way she was dressed, it might sound very much like what she’d been saying. For instance, she had feathers on her head. And she had this enamel brooch with a picture of ‘The Blue Boy’ on it pinned to her breast. And around her neck she had on what she would call mink but what could also be described as the skin of a dead animal. Well, at first she was a little offended by this, I think, but then later she came back and said she was beginning to understand.”

Robert Rauschenberg, the influential artistic experimenter, died on Monday at 82 years old. Above some excerpts from The New York Times obituary and here's the Washington Post and The Guardian. You can feel the creative energy, the possibilities he saw in the materials around him still bouncing off those canvases. The prince of the unexpected.