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Washingtonian Wiener, and Other News

By Dan Piepenbring

April 26, 2017

On the Shelf

Canova’s nude Washington.

Go on, take a peek at my search history. You’ll see a lot of this: “Nude presidents.” “Nude dead presidents.” “George Washington naked.” “Presidential peen.” “Free naked U.S. American founding fathers pixxx.” “Portrait of signing of Declaration of Independence where all signers are nude.” It has been a long road for me. I am not often delighted by what Google brings to me. But now Antonio Canova’s nineteenth-century sculpture of a totally nude George Washington—presidente numero uno, a hundred percent in the raw, not even any powdered wig—is coming to the Frick. It’s a big deal, a time to rejoice, for, as James Barron writes, we are not accustomed to exposed presidential flesh: “The first president had been dead for seventeen years by the time Canova went to work. Canova had done a nude Napoleon as the god Mars about 10 years earlier. But when it came to Washington, clothes made the man—and the statue—because his appearance mattered. ‘John Marshall, his first serious biographer, even entitled the chapter on Washington’s arrival in the world “The Birth of Mr. Washington,” ’ the historian Joseph J. Ellis wrote, ‘suggesting that he was born fully clothed and ready to assume the presidency.’ Nathaniel Hawthorne seemed to echo Marshall’s notion after posing a provocative question: ‘Did anybody ever see Washington naked?’ ‘It is inconceivable,’ Hawthorne wrote. ‘He had no nakedness, but, I imagine, was born with clothes on and his hair powdered, and made a stately bow on his first appearance in the world.’ ”

When Virginia and Leonard Woolf started the Hogarth Press, it was all fun and games, just like running an indie press should be. But then, as Rafia Zakaria writes, Virginia got bored: “Those first afternoons, when Leonard and Virginia sat covered in ink in the drawing room of Hogarth House, learning by trial and error just how hard it was to set type and center it on the page, were charmed ones. The experience was a simulacrum of the creative process: the beloved final product did not always reflect the pains of its production. But the labors of printing always delivered the satisfaction of a real and tangible object … If Leonard’s involvement was steady, Virginia’s was mercurial, waxing and waning through her depressive and creative spells. As early as March 1924, as they got ready to publish her novel Jacob’s Room, she declared in a letter that ‘publishing one’s own books is very nervous work.’ By October 1933, when Hogarth Press turned sixteen, Virginia declared herself tired of the ‘drudgery and sweating’ and the ‘altered travel plans’ that running the publisher required. She demanded that an ‘intelligent youth’ be found to take over its day-to-day operations.”

I’ve seen zero Fast and Furious movies. Mark Krotov has seen all eight of them, and is prepared to defend them (some of them, at least) as art: “Every film franchise is a testament to growth and conquest. In the case of the Marvel movies, that growth is exponential and expanding: movies beget more movies, more spinoffs, more series that emerge from spinoffs. What sets the Fast and the Furious series apart from franchises like this—at least for now—is its habit of folding all that hot-media-property energy back into itself, making the movies all the more strange and intense. Whereas Star Wars and Harry Potter build out more worlds, more histories, to populate with new and random protagonists, The Fast and the Furious is loyal to its core, producing something closer to America’s most beloved miniseries about cars and the increasingly superheroic men and women who love them.”

Anthony Lane on Jean-Pierre Melville, the French filmmaker whose movies capture the oppression of World War II: “Melville later described his experiences of the Second World War as awful, horrible, and marvelous, and discovered a surprising nostalgia for the period, as if its intensity were a legacy on which he could continue to draw. A movie director, he said, should be ‘constantly open, constantly traumatizable,’ and he made three films on the trauma of Occupied France: Le Silence de la Mer (1949), Léon Morin, Priest, and Army of Shadows. Yet that is not the end of the affair. Although most of his works are tales of private crime, internecine rather than international, and set in postwar France, there is almost no corner of them that is not illuminated by what he saw and heard when his country was ruled by oppression, and when ordinary people were forced to decide what, or whom, they would obey—and, in some instances, to keep their decision a secret. In the roll call of cinema, and with good cause, Melville is the laureate of mistrust.”

Jonathan Guyer and Surti Singh on surrealism in Egypt: “ ‘We find absurd, and deserving of total disdain, the religious, racist, and nationalist prejudices that make up the tyranny of certain individuals who, drunk on their own temporary omniscience, seek to subjugate the destiny of the work of art.’ So wrote thirty-seven Egypt-based artists and writers in their 1938 manifesto Long Live Degenerate Art, expressing solidarity with their counterparts in Europe suffering under fascism. This was the beginning of the Art and Liberty Group, an avant-garde movement also known as Egypt’s Surrealists … The Art and Liberty Group forged connections with Surrealists and Trotskyists abroad while shaping their own identity. Working in tandem with their European peers, they also grappled with the circumstances of an increasingly militarized Egyptian capital, where trends in art and publishing remained conservative. They responded to the fault lines of interwar Cairo and were of a piece with them.”