May 6, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Degenerate Art By Sadie Stein Lasar Segall, Eternal Wanderers, 1919, oil on canvas; on display at the Neue Galerie. Cornelius Gurlitt, identified in obituaries as a “Nazi-era art hoarder,” died this morning in Munich of heart trouble. Gurlitt’s cache of more than 1,400 important modern works, inherited from his art-dealer father—including pieces by Picasso, Matisse, Manet, and Renoir—was discovered in 2012. It was not made public until November 2013. Although classified as “second-degree mixed-race Jewish,” Hildebrand Gurlitt was one of three dealers given official sanction by Hitler to peddle “degenerate art” in other countries, with the profits going to Germany. And although Gurlitt was required to return a number of works to their former owners, the majority of the collection is thought to have been acquired “legally.” Says Bloomberg, Isolated from the outside world, Gurlitt stopped watching television in 1963, booked hotel rooms months in advance by post when he had to travel, and never used the Internet, according to Spiegel magazine. His collection was discovered in a raid after authorities became suspicious when he was found carrying 9,000 euros during a random search at the Swiss border in 2010. He was returning from a visit to Bern to sell some artwork there. It is unclear what will happen to the collection, although art historians will apparently continue to investigate the works’ provenance and post images of them. Read More
May 5, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Escapism By Sadie Stein Today on HuffPo books, Jay Crownover discusses the different subcategories of the “literary bad boy,” which include “The Unattainable” (Sherlock Holmes), “The Nonconformist” (Holden Caulfield, of course), “The Alpha” (Achilles), “The Lothario” (Bond), “The Misunderstood” (Ponyboy from The Outsiders), and, in a bold move, “The Anti-Hero,” as represented by Hannibal Lecter. It is hard not to wrestle, increasingly, with the listicle-ization of lit, the too-easy shorthand of Virginia Woolf finger-puppets, cheeky pro-book tote bags, Dickens bibs, and twee-pop-Brontë mashups. There is reading, and then there is reading as signifier, in which we don’t lose ourselves in books themselves so much as turn them into easy, quotable advertisements for ourselves. Sexy librarians? Sure. “Keep Calm and Read On”? Okay. “What Would Jane Austen Do”? How about live two hundred years ago in an unrecognizable world with a completely different set of mores? How much less scary when Lady Chatterley’s Lover is not a cultural battleground but just a vintage cover on a T-shirt. Read More
May 2, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent So Green By Sadie Stein Semik, a Russian lubok from the nineteenth century. You never really get over secret childish chauvinism about your birthday month. At least, I never did. In my mind, May will always be the best month of the year; emerald, the best birthstone; and lily-of-the-valley, the finest flower. (On the subject of Taurus, I am agnostic; I have always resented the fact that we are supposed to be stubbornly rolling around in velvet or something.) Because my own birthday falls so early in the month, and because I was definitely on the “preciousness” spectrum, my eighth birthday had a May Day theme. I knew little of the day’s ancient roots or traditional practices, let alone its adoption by the labor movement. But I had a Tasha Tudor book called Around the Year that featured young girls, flower garlands, and a beribboned maypole, and I was sold. For my birthday, we gathered flowers, made May baskets, and left them on neighbors’ doorsteps while we hid nearby. They must have been very confused. Although my parties were generally homespun affairs, on this occasion my mom hired a gentleman in Renaissance dress who played a hurdy-gurdy while we danced around a maypole that a friend’s dad had constructed from a birch trunk. We were all terrified of the hurdy-gurdy man, and kept our distance. “The Merry Month of May” was written in 1599 by the prolific playwright and pamphleteer Thomas Dekker. Dekker was widely considered a wastrel and a hack—Ben Jonson dismissively called him a “dresser of plays about town”—and he spent seven years in debtors’ prison. But his pastoral is one of the most enduring paeans to the fifth month. Somehow I doubt it was in the hurdy-gurdy man’s repertoire. Read More
May 1, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent LOL By Sadie Stein Robert Henri, The Laughing Boy, 1910. Last night, I was part of a panel on the late novelist Dame Muriel Spark, in concert with the publication of The Informed Air, a collection of her essays. In no way am I an expert, but I am a devoted fan—more and more as I get older—and I was glad to take part in the celebration of a writer who should be more widely read. As anyone on the East Coast knows, yesterday was characterized by lashing rains and driving winds—a fact that sort of explains why I was dressed like an old salt in a fisherman’s sweater, wellies, and slicker. (Emphasis on sort of. I put on some red lipstick to make it look as though the whole thing was dashing and deliberate, but I don’t think anyone was fooled—or cared.) In spite or maybe because of the monsoon-like conditions, it was a lot of fun, and I came away with a new appreciation for an author whose work is as notable for its guarded compassion as what John Updike termed its “sweet sting.” Everyone agreed that Spark is frequently hilarious. At least, we thought so. In the course of the conversation, my friend Emily and I discovered that in recent months both of us had attempted to read particularly amusing passages aloud to respective boyfriends, and the men in question were completely unmoved. She wondered if it was a British-American thing; I wondered if it was a male-female thing. Whatever it was, it was awkward. Read More
April 30, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Playscale By Sadie Stein Detail from the cover of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler If you get the chance before September 7, make a point of checking out the New York Public Library’s exhibition “The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books Matter.” Even if you need no convincing on this score, you’ll love it: the exhibition is divided into a series of roughly chronological sub-categories—“Artistry of the Picture Book,” “From Page to Stage”—and illustrated with a wealth of amazing original sketches and manuscripts from iconic children’s books. Then there are the artifacts; you can see P. L. Travers’s parrot-head umbrella, and the original Winnie the Pooh stuffed bear, surrounded by his menagerie of equally well-worn friends. If you are someone who loves children’s books, you may find yourself overwhelmed by the onslaught of Proustian reveries the show inspires. It feels a bit the way psychics say hospitals and graveyards feel to them—too many memories and associations and forgotten feelings clamoring to be heard at once. Certainly you will have to leave and come back. Read More
April 29, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Hoosier State By Sadie Stein Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture, on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fifty-Fifth Street. Once, when I was working as a waitress, a mother came into the restaurant with her two little boys, whom we’d seen before. I must say, they were not particularly appealing children—they were wild and hard to control, and frequently cruised around the interior of the restaurant on scooters. On this day, one of them, about four years old, climbed atop an empty table and wouldn’t get down. I said, “Honey, you have to come down from there.” To which he said, “Fuck you!” So I lifted him down bodily. He ran to his mother in tears, screaming and whining. His mother said, “Sweetheart, the lady only did that because she loves you.” Read More