Celebrating the Everyday, and Other News

Detail from an 1870s photograph in the Loewentheil Collection.

In June 1941, Stefan Zweig, having fled Austria for England and then New York, sat down to elaborate on the circumstances of Hitler’s rise—a story he feared would be lost to history if it weren’t told often and in great detail. George Prochnik explains, “Zweig set to furious work on his autobiography—laboring like ‘seven devils without a single walk,’ as he put it. Some four hundred pages poured out of him in a matter of weeks. His productivity reflected his sense of urgency: the book was conceived as a kind of message to the future. It is a law of history, he wrote, ‘that contemporaries are denied a recognition of the early beginnings of the great movements which determine their times.’ For the benefit of subsequent generations, who would be tasked with rebuilding society from the ruins, he was determined to trace how the Nazis’ reign of terror had become possible, and how he and so many others had been blind to its beginnings.”

Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities sprang from a brilliant, contentious speech she gave in 1956—one that defied the doctrines of urban planning before an audience who’d staked their careers on those doctrines. It was also, as Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow writes, a tightrope walk between conservatism and liberalism: “Jacobs was celebrating commerce and condemning government overreach in the form of public housing, and thereby showing some sympathy with the values of the right. Yet she was doing so on behalf of low-income people who, she believed, had been ill served. Like any good leftist, she was defending the underdogs: the mom-and-pop stores as well as the residents of these projects, many of whom hated their bleak housing as much as she did.”

Cornell University’s Loewentheil Collection of African-American Photographs has been fully digitized: it features 645 images of black lives from the 1860s through the 1960s, all of which eschew stereotypes: “One of the goals—both the Loewentheils in putting the collection together and ours in putting the digital collection online—is to push back against the predominance of material on African-Americans as enslaved people or working in menial jobs or other stereotypical situations … We wanted to show a broader swath of people in everyday settings.”

A book of Gerhard Richter’s early drawings really captures the good old-fashioned soul-sucking loneliness that comes with being a biped, J. Hoberman writes: “Shortly after the Berlin Wall went up and the painter defected, or as he would say ‘relocated,’ from Dresden to the West, Richter drew a series of images featuring a single protagonist going through an abstract landscape. Recently discovered in a 1962 notebook, these have been published by his archives in a facsimile edition titled Comic Strip … More elemental than the exaggerated two-dimensional Walking Woman that Michael Snow incorporated into his early paintings, photographs, and films, or the armless Falling Man that figured in Ernest Trova’s sculptures and paintings, Richter’s Biped Silhouette makes his way through a series of laconic, not-quite-narrative situations. Often standing alone, the Biped is a loner in a world of the replicas.”

Prince’s longtime recording engineer, Susan Rogers, elaborates on the key to his creative success and his prolific, generative spirit—he made the space for himself, and he stayed there: “Here’s why his life was possible. He was that much of a genius. Joseph Campbell talked about this in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, about the archetypal myth. In order to express a universal, archetypal truth, you have to go to a deep place in your psyche. You have to go into that deep well of creativity … In order to write that much, and be that prolific, you must protect your psyche, because you go to this dangerous place, really easily and often. You put up a wall, and you tell your management, ‘Don’t let anyone approach me. I’ve got my system. Here’s the system that allows me to create. These are my people who I’m familiar with. These are my places. This is a system where, within this circle, I can create.’ That allows you to have a very long career, because you’ve figured out an armor to protect yourself … Prince was smart enough, as a young man, to know that he’d need to do that if he wanted to have a long career, so he did it. But, to the outside world, he appeared as a big enigma … He valued being invisible, because he valued the work.”

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