December 14, 2016 Arts & Culture A Comics Adaptation of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky By Jane Mai The latest entry in the NYRB Classics Book Club is Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s novel The Return of Münchausen, translated into English for the first time by Joanne Turnbull. Though Krzhizhanovsky wrote for some twenty years, Soviet censorship and World War II conspired against him, and none of his fiction was published in his lifetime (he died in 1950). “A fantastical plot is my method,” he once wrote. “First you borrow from reality, you ask reality for permission to use your imagination, to deviate from actual fact; later you repay your debt to your creditor with nature, with a profoundly realistic investigation of the facts and an exact logic of conclusions.” In Münchausen, Krzhizhanovsky borrows from the life—both real and legendary—of Baron Münchausen to spin his own absurd tale involving the baron’s post–World War I perambulations in Berlin, London, and Moscow on a diplomatic mission. Bizarre and fantastic, Münchausen (or is it Krzhizhanovky?) defends imagination above all else. The Daily is featuring a trio of adaptations of short excerpts from the novel. In our latest installment, Jane Mai finds the baron pondering the subject on love and marriage and remembering “a mild flirtation with a pair of charming eyes.” Read More
December 13, 2016 Arts & Culture Poor Richard By Sarah Cowan Philip Guston’s drawings of Nixon have transcended their subject. Philip Guston, Untitled (Poor Richard), 1971, ink on paper, 10 1/2″ x 13 7/8″. “A lot of work after the election looks very different,” I overheard someone say in Hauser & Wirth as we followed the saga of Poor Richard, Philip Guston’s satirical drawings of Richard Nixon’s rise to power. The show had been installed on November 1 as a last minute idea; on opening night it drew an amused crowd of boomers and millennials, the distance in their experience bridged by the convincing sense of security many of us had that doomed week. When I returned to the show less than a month into the Trump transition, the drawings had turned on us: a joke at the expense of our smugness. Guston made most of the drawings in August 1971, in Woodstock, egged on by his friend Philip Roth, who had taken Nixon as the subject of his novel Our Gang. Just a month earlier, Nixon, who had built his political career as the wunderkind of the House Un-American Activities Committee, announced he was planning to visit China. Poor Richard and its preparatory sketches ride the arc of this hypocrisy, from Dick’s beginnings in California, where, lonely, poor, and studious, he dreams of the White House, crushing hammers and sickles in his path. He poses for photographs with his arm around the necessary demographics—hippies, blacks, “mom and pop” whites—bearing a grin betrayed by a hungry glare. Guston dresses him in a police uniform, a Ku Klux Klan hood, blackface, and, in the final panels, offensive Orientalist costumes as he sets sail confidently on his ill-fated “journey of peace.” Read More
December 7, 2016 Arts & Culture A Comics Adaptation of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky By Kevin Huizenga The latest entry in the NYRB Classics Book Club is Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s novel The Return of Münchausen, translated into English for the first time by Joanne Turnbull. Though Krzhizhanovsky wrote for some twenty years, Soviet censorship and World War II conspired against him, and none of his fiction was published in his lifetime (he died in 1950). “A fantastical plot is my method,” he once wrote. “First you borrow from reality, you ask reality for permission to use your imagination, to deviate from actual fact; later you repay your debt to your creditor with nature, with a profoundly realistic investigation of the facts and an exact logic of conclusions.” In Münchausen, Krzhizhanovsky borrows from the life—both real and legendary—of Baron Münchausen to spin his own absurd tale involving the baron’s post–World War I perambulations in Berlin, London, and Moscow on a diplomatic mission. Bizarre and fantastic, Münchausen (or is it Krzhizhanovky?) defends imagination above all else. The Daily is featuring a trio of adaptations of short excerpts from the novel. Here, Kevin Huizenga finds the baron composing aphorisms at a house known as Mad Bean Cottage. Read More
December 6, 2016 Arts & Culture From Writings By Donald Judd Donald Judd at 101 Spring Street, second floor. Judd Foundation, New York, 1985. Photograph by Doris Lehni Quarella © Antonio Monaci. Reproduced from Donald Judd: Writings. Donald Judd Writings, a new collection of Donald Judd’s essays, criticism, and ephemera, was published last month by Judd Foundation and David Zwirner Books. Spanning 1958 to 1993, the book includes expansive, previously unpublished excerpts from Judd’s notes, integral to his creative process—they find him wrestling with the role of art and criticism in the culture. “Don’s writings were a parallel activity to his art, architecture, and design,” Flavin Judd, Donald’s son and the book’s coeditor, writes in an introduction. “The goal should be to find something within the writings that is useful, something that can be a tool for future use. We hope that Don’s thoughts, ideas, and complaints can be used by others to create.” Below, Flavin has selected some of his favorite excerpts from his father’s work. Read More
December 5, 2016 Arts & Culture Little Books, Big Books By Cynthia Payne A glimpse of Charlotte Brontë’s juvenilia. Charlotte Brontë, Lycidas, watercolor drawing, March 4, 1835. Copied from a print after painting by Henry Fuseli. Brontë Parsonage Museum. To attempt to pry into the juvenilia—or “hidden works,” as the biographer Claire Harman terms them—of Charlotte Brontë is to encounter a gentle but undeniable refusal. The current exhibition devoted to Brontë’s life and work at the Morgan Library & Museum, drawn largely from its own collections and that of the Brontë Parsonage Museum, allows a few tantalizing glimpses of Brontë’s early writing. Most touching and accessible is her very first extant work, a small book made for her youngest sister “Ane,” who was motherless by her second year and motherless again at age five after the deaths of the family’s two eldest daughters. Open to a page illustrated by a beguiling tiny watercolor of a sailing ship, the book makes clear how early Brontë, then age twelve or so, understood the power of imaginary travel. That travel was very soon denied to adults, for the books that followed are, even when examined with a magnifying glass, virtually unreadable, despite their careful script and wonderfully exact illustrations; they’re simply too tiny for the middle-aged eye, and perhaps for any eye other than that of a Brontë sibling. The four surviving Brontë children—three sisters and a brother—all wrote, but their intent was never to have their manuscripts read by others, most especially perhaps their father and aunt. Charlotte once promised a boarding-school friend a glimpse and then reneged. It seems that Monsieur Heger, her teacher, muse, maître, and great unrequited love, was the first to be entrusted with a few of her most cherished early works. Read More
November 25, 2016 Arts & Culture The Eye of Baudelaire By Madison Mainwaring A new exhibition looks at the upheaval in the visual culture of Baudelaire’s Paris. François Biard, Four Hours at the Salon, 1847. In puritanical America, the intellectual tradition is in exile from the luxury of the senses: Americans hold steadfast to the idea that the right kind of knowledge comes from the Word of books. Harold Bloom’s omnipresent theory of the anxiety of influence would have you think that writers did nothing else but read the work of their forefathers in Oedipal distress, ignoring the sensual theater which makes a part of any lived life. In post-revolutionary Paris, where the optic regime underwent a series of explosive changes as the Romantics and post-Romantics pressed against all limits of language, to ignore the visual influence on literature is to misread it. Images flooded homes in books, keepsake albums, lithographs, small paintings, and photographs; they plastered the streets with, as Baudelaire described it, a “monstrous nausea of posters,” and crowded shop-windows and studios. They covered museums like doilies covered the bourgeois interior; they were in the dark rooms of stereoscopes, erotic printers, and panoramic theaters. It comes as no surprise that the theories of literature of the era made metaphoric use of mirrors (Stendhal), decals (Sand), and screens (Zola). At the Museum of Romantic Life, in Paris, curators have set about trying to capture this flurry of imagery. “The Eye of Baudelaire,” commemorating the 150th anniversary of his death, recreates the visual culture in which he was immersed with a collection of paintings, photographs, sketches, and frontispieces. The museum, a stone’s throw from Pigalle, occupies the house where George Sand lived, wrote, and wore her men’s clothes. The rooms, painted in rich, warm colors of burgundy and deep red, replicate the look of an old salon; the architecture, virtually untouched, requires that you cross the courtyard and climb several spiral staircases to enter. Read More