February 10, 2017 Arts & Culture Our Gilded Coonskin By Mike Pepi To fight Trump, look to the vulgar style that’s long ruled American art. George Bellows, Men of the Docks, 1912, oil on canvas, 45″ x 63.5″. In 2014, the National Gallery in London acquired their first American picture, George Bellows’s Men of the Docks (1912), in which hulking workers loiter in the dead of winter. White horses join the dockworkers just as the scene cracks with the faintest suggestion of activity. The ship and the city are an imposing frame for an otherwise bleak, bathetic subject. The work, when it comes, will be toil. But it’s better than the idle cold. This little drama never ends, really. Bellows leaves the men trapped somewhere between hope and despondence. It’s a vulgar scene. If the Ohio-born Bellows walked through the National Gallery today, he might recoil at the gauntlet of gentility that lay before him. The Gallery doesn’t have an American wing. Instead, Men of the Docks hangs chronologically alongside the Gallery’s Impressionist and Modern masterpieces, standing out like a sore thumb alongside the l’art pour l’art of Cézanne and Van Gogh. It’s an even ruder departure from the National Gallery’s standard fare, where scarcely a room passes without a meditation on Ovid, a Madonna and Child, or a court-commissioned history painting. To an American of a certain persuasion, this all seems like a powder keg of Whig history. Bellows’s is the first and only painting whose figures appear unfazed by that history’s watchful eye. Read More
February 9, 2017 Arts & Culture Parting Shot By Angela Chen “Famous last words” and Japanese death poems offer two strikingly different approaches to mortality. Edvard Munch, By The Deathbed (Fever) I, 1915. I was born in the middle of March in a small town in China. My parents didn’t give me a name; they simply never got around to choosing one. On April 7, I nearly died after choking—and they saddled me with that date as a moniker, a sort of inescapable memento mori. When I came to the United States, at age five, my mother told me I was to be named Angela, after a coworker of hers. Was this coworker particularly kind or smart or pretty? I asked. By all accounts, no. It seemed to be an entirely arbitrary decision. Fittingly, I’ve long been fascinated by the traditions surrounding the words that bookend a life. There’s a split, I’ve found, between the East and the West: the latter favors spontaneous last words that serve as a final confirmation of your personal brand, whereas the East has a custom of premeditated death poems, jisei, that offer a rare chance to break with convention. These differing traditions offer a glimpse into the clash of individualism versus collectivism, spontaneity versus control—forces I’ve tried to balance in my own life, living between Asian and American culture. Read More
February 8, 2017 Arts & Culture I Found This Wastebasket for You By Dan Piepenbring Jules Bouy, Wastebasket, ca. 1930. This week, the Metropolitan Museum of Art released some 375,000 images into the public domain, granting unprecedented digital access to a wide swath of its collection. This is a boon. “Wikipedia’s hundreds of millions of users from around the globe will now be able to experience the Met’s greatest treasures,” said Wikimedia’s Katherine Mahler, “no matter where they live.” And there are treasures. Fourteen kinds of Tiffany glass are there. This Paul Klee drawing of a chicken and a pig—it’s so there. You can search acres of immaculate Pre-Raphaelite tresses. There is also, I’ve found, this iron wastebasket by Jules Bouy. It is the only wastebasket in the Met’s collection. Read More
February 6, 2017 Arts & Culture A Walk Around the Left Bank By Lauren Elkin Talking about the history of Shakespeare and Company on a stroll through Paris. From left to right: Sylvia Whitman, Lauren Elkin, and Krista Halverson. Photo: Mathew McWilliams It was the first of the really cold days when I went for a walk around the Left Bank with Sylvia Whitman, the owner of the bookshop Shakespeare and Company, and Krista Halverson, the editor of a new book on its history, Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of the Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart. Published last November on the shop’s sixty-fifth anniversary, the book is full of stories and documents from interviews, letters, diaries, news articles. It reproduces autobiographies from generations of Tumbleweeds, as the staff calls the young people who live there in exchange for helping out around the shop and the promise to read a book a day. There are amazing photographs (including one of an ill-fated combustible wishing well), and handwritten notes posted on the community bulletin board in the 1950s: EXECUTIVE TYPE WISHES TO LEARN INFORMALITY AND RELAXATION FROM BOHEMIAN FRIENDS; FOR THE LADY IN THE BOIS DE BOLOGNA WHO LOST HER SMILE FROM THE GENTLEMAN WHO FOUND IT. I’d recently published a quasi-memoir of my own, Flâneuse, about my love of walking in cities, and Paris specifically, and the many women who’ve lived and walked in those cities before me. The chapter on Jean Rhys begins in Shakespeare and Company, where I first discovered her novels as a student in 1999. Excited about the overlaps in our books, Sylvia and Krista invited me on a walk to dish about the shop and all the literary women who’ve been associated with it, making their names in the shadows of more famous men. We walked from the Jardin du Luxembourg to the Place Saint-Sulpice and then back to the shop across the river from Notre Dame, talking of Sylvia Beach, who founded the original Shakespeare and Company on the nearby rue de l’Odéon, in 1919; her partner, Adrienne Monnier, who ran her own French-language bookshop across the street from Sylvia’s; and Sylvia Whitman’s dad, George, who is said to have received Sylvia Beach’s blessing to carry on the Shakespeare and Company name after the war. (He named his daughter after her, too.) We began in the Café de Tournon near the Jardin de Luxembourg, where some of the friends of the shop used to gather and drink, including a group of young bohemians who founded the avant-garde literary journal Merlin out of the shop in 1952. Read More
January 20, 2017 Arts & Culture So Long, Farewell By Kate Guadagnino Still from The Sound of Music. The Sound of Music hasn’t tarnished over time; it was always dated, always reviled by the learned. Rumor has it that Pauline Kael was fired from McCall’s for her withering review of it (“the sugar-coated lie that people seem to want to eat”) and that Joan Didion was fired from Vogue for hers, which described it as “more embarrassing than most, if only because of its suggestion that history need not happen to people … Just whistle a happy tune, and leave the Anschluss behind.” She’s right that the film hints at the limits of art’s power in the face of real danger. “Believe me,” Billy Wilder said at an industry party when he heard of Fox’s production plans, “no musical with swastikas in it will ever be a success!” Of course he was wrong—this was three years before The Producers—though the film might have contained more swastikas than it does. Before Robert Wise could be convinced to sign on, William Wyler was meant to direct. He’d lost relatives in concentration camps and was angling to add a military scene showing tanks decimating Salzburg. Instead, the film treats Nazism as little more than a vague threat to the Austrian aristocracy. At the same time, it capitalizes on a villain everyone can get behind, rendering the Third Reich a least favorite thing. Who among us doesn’t love siblings, lakeside villas, and grandma-chic floral prints—and who wouldn’t root for a Nazi-sympathizing boyfriend to get dumped? Read More
January 18, 2017 Arts & Culture Good Atticus, Bad Atticus By Nina Martyris Last week, in an uncomfortable but enlightening coincidence, America was confronted with the two faces of its most ambiguous fictional hero, Atticus Finch, the principled racist who bestrides Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and Go Set a Watchman (2015). On Tuesday, Finch took to the public square in both his avatars. There was Atticus, the moral exemplar of Mockingbird, who appeared in President Obama’s farewell speech to the nation. And there was Atticus, the courteous Southern chauvinist of Watchman, in the form of Senator Jeff Sessions, who was being vetted by the Senate Judiciary Committee for the post of U.S. Attorney General. Addressing a profoundly divided nation in his final presidential plea, Obama urged black and white America “to heed the advice of a great character in American fiction—Atticus Finch—who said, ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.’ ” Read More