March 14, 2019 Look Nudes By The Paris Review Innumerable nudes are scattered across millennia of art history, but none look like Alice Neel’s. With radical frankness, she painted bodies outside the scope of most visual art: those of pregnant women, of children, of a blissfully domestic couple peeing in a bathroom. There’s a touch of the surreal to her demonic reds and sickly greens—and, as often accompanies the surreal, there’s also a touch of the uncomfortably alive. The subjects stare out from the canvas and feel uncannily real. But Neel rejected traditional realism. Of her style, she once said: “I hate equating a person and a room and a chair. Compositionally, a room, a chair, a table, and a person are all the same for me, but a person is human and psychological.” Instead of the omnipresent male gaze, here the gaze is Neel’s, in which nakedness is not explicitly sexual and body parts can assume proportions untethered from the purely representational. A mother’s breasts sling out like red-tipped yams. A penis, thin and long, slithers like an enoki mushroom. A child’s hands clutch and creep like opera gloves filled with hay. Through April 13, David Zwirner will host “Alice Neel: Freedom,” a new exhibition of significant paintings and works on paper from Neel’s six-decade career. Below, we present a selection of the glorious nudes for which she’s known. Alice Neel, Bronx Bacchus, 1929. The Estate of Alice Neel. Courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner. © The Estate of Alice Neel. Read More
March 14, 2019 Arts & Culture The World Association of Ugly People By Rebecca Brill This year’s contestants at the Festival of the Ugly (Photo: Rebecca Brill) In order to become a member of the World Association of Ugly People, you need to be assessed. In the clubhouse of the Association, known by locals as Club dei Brutti, the president, a stocky man named Gianni with a lopsided goatee, produces a card featuring the official Club dei Brutti ugliness rating system: non definita (undefined), insufficiente (insufficient), mediocre, buona (good), ottima (great), straordinaria (extraordinary). Gianni examines my face and body quickly but thoroughly. Then, on a membership card on which he has written my name, he checks off the box marked “insufficiente.” At first, I’m confused by this designation and the ranking system as a whole. I can’t tell whether insufficiente means I am insufficiently attractive (and therefore ugly) or insufficiently ugly (and therefore not eligible to join the organization). As it turns out it’s the latter. Gianni signs my card anyway, thereby designating me the 31,310 member of Club dei Brutti. “Time makes us all ugly,” he explains. I have not really come to Piobbico, a small village between two mountains in central Italy, to join the organization. Rather, I’m here for Club dei Brutti’s annual Festival of the Ugly, where thousands of self-identified ugly people gather in the town square to celebrate ugliness and cast their votes for the club’s president. But it is hard to observe life in Piobbico, whose ties to the hundred-and-fifty-year-old organization are inextricable, without inadvertently becoming a participant. This is in part because Piobbico is small, in terms of both its geography and its population of just under two thousand. But the more time I spend here, the more I attribute this feeling of inherent involvement to something else about the village: a panoptic sense of being watched. The people in Piobbico look at each other: women hanging laundry call out to passersby from flung-open windows; men sit in front of bars in long rows rather than circles, ogling local women as they smoke; children shout “Ciao!” from their bicycles to people they appear not to know. (I realize that all of this sounds too picturesque to be true, but indeed, Piobbico feels like something straight out of an Elena Ferrante novel.) There is nowhere to hide here; no action goes unseen. To be in Piobbico is to be on display, to perform, to be known. I wonder how anyone stands it. Read More
March 13, 2019 The Big Picture You’ll Never Know Yourself: Bonnard and the Color of Memory By Cody Delistraty Pierre Bonnard’s revolutionary and controversial use of color became a means toward unlocking his past and the truths of his own self. But what if, ultimately, there was nothing to find? Pierre Bonnard, The Bath, 1925 For years, Pierre Bonnard juggled the love of two of his models. The women were Marthe de Méligny, who would eventually become the artist’s wife, and Renée Monchaty, who would kill herself in spurned grief. In Young Women in the Garden, Bonnard painted them both. They are in a bourgeois backyard garden, like something out of a Renoir or Manet, at a large table adorned with a basket of fruit. Monchaty is the focal point of the scene. She sits in a chair, turned toward the viewer; her head rests innocently in her hand. She appears contented, at ease. In the bottom corner of the scene, looking not at the viewer but toward Monchaty, de Méligny looks quietly bemused, her profile nearly cut out of the frame. Bonnard ultimately left Monchaty for de Méligny. Sensing that his marriage to de Méligny was imminent, and that his affections were fading, Monchaty fatally shot herself on her bed. More sensationally, another version has it that Monchaty slit her wrists in the bath so that Bonnard would arrive to find her dead. Whatever the case, Monchaty’s suicide was one of the central definers, tragedies, and regrets of Bonnard’s life. Read More
March 13, 2019 Arts & Culture A Poet’s Complaints Against Fiction By Anthony Madrid Leonid Pasternak, The Passion of Creation. 1892 First, a word about the traditional feud between poets and fiction writers. I wish to acknowledge, up front, that that feud does not exist. Not traditionally. Conditions in the wild are very unfavorable to it. To witness episodes of this feud, you have to visit a special kind of mismanaged zoo called an M.F.A. program. Perhaps I needn’t add that it is not my object to prosecute any such feud here. Let me be explicit: I revere the great novelists as much as I revere the great poets. I do not see poetry as the higher form of writing. I do not think poets are better people. If anything, I’m sick to death of poets and poetry in a way I could never be sick of fiction and fiction writers. Poets are my family—with all the opprobrium that implies. Whereas, fiction writers strike me as delightfully removed from any familiar mode of being. They have houses and lifestyles. And they traffic in plots, an inherently good idea. Still, I do “have somewhat against thee,” fiction writers. There are certain abuses, rare enough in poetry, that are commonplace in works of fiction. A person who reads and writes poetry all the time will perhaps see these abuses more clearly than the practitioner of fiction, who is naturally and understandably accustomed to them. Take a moment to reflect on the memorable metaphor that Niccolò Machiavelli deploys on the dedication page (as it were) of Il principe. He says there that a painter, in order to paint the lowlands, must of course go up into the mountains, and in order to paint a mountain, must head to the valley. Analogously, in order to really understand the nature of common citizenship, one must be a prince, and in order to know the real deal regarding princes, one must be an ordinary person like Machiavelli himself. That’s why it’s okay for him to tell you how to rule your kingdom, O Prince. And perhaps it is the same, I am suggesting, with fiction writers and poets. The theory’s a good one. Think of the many times nonpoets have laid down memorable and all-but-devastating criticisms of poetry. Think of the recently dead V. S. Naipaul on poetry: Read More
March 12, 2019 Redux Redux: The Stone-Revising Sea By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Frank O’Connor. Sketch by B. Whistler Dabney, 1957. This week, we’re celebrating the writers of Ireland and the Irish diaspora, from Frank O’Connor’s 1957 Art of Fiction interview to Edna O’Brien’s short story “Dramas” to Daniel Tobin’s poem “Yeats at Balscadden.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Frank O’Connor, The Art of Fiction No. 19 Issue no. 17 (Autumn–Winter 1957) INTERVIEWER Why do you prefer the short story for your medium? O’CONNOR Because it’s the nearest thing I know to lyric poetry—I wrote lyric poetry for a long time, then discovered that God had not intended me to be a lyric poet, and the nearest thing to that is the short story. A novel actually requires far more logic and far more knowledge of circumstances, whereas a short story can have the sort of detachment from circumstances that lyric poetry has. Read More
March 12, 2019 Feminize Your Canon Feminize Your Canon: Eliot Bliss By Emma Garman Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. Here, the life of Eliot Bliss, a prolific lesbian writer from the British Caribbean who may have had a strong influence on the work of Jean Rhys. Eliot Bliss I don’t want to go out into the world and earn my living. I don’t want to have to say goodbye to a quiet scholar’s life, to smooth, civilized hours around a Wedgwood teapot. I want to be able to watch the evening in the sky, to dream on some far hill, to make things slowly out of patterns that I have been finding for years. I don’t want to feel cramped, jostled, frightened, herded among thousands of people; to work among the noise of machines, the incessant clamor of traffic vibrating on the nerves. I don’t want to be terrorised into a set formula of life. These are the thoughts of Louie Burnett, the heroine of Eliot Bliss’s enchanting and lyrical first novel, Saraband (1931). After an English convent school education, Louie has her independence thrust upon her: her army officer father is dead and her mother’s upper-class Anglo-Irish family, thanks to the Great War, is no longer rich. “Perhaps you’ll pick up some nice young man, my dear,” says an uncle. But marriage isn’t on the cards. It is clear, though unspoken, that Louie is a lesbian. The female friends who move in and out of her life are irresistibly, lovingly drawn, so real they leap off the page. There’s boarding school classmate Zara, with her brilliantined ebony hair and reassuring fearlessness; aspiring actress Jonquil, a “tall boyish girl with a certain lackadaisical look about her”; artist Mark, neé Marcelle, who “gave one an extraordinary sense of vividness.” The most significant relationship Louie forms, however, is with her beautiful Parisian cousin, Tim, a talented violinist who, the reader intuits via the subtlest of hints, is also gay. Their relatives suspect a romance, but Louie’s affinity with Tim, whom she considers “marvellous and holy,” is deeper and more steadfast for being platonic. Like all of Bliss’s work, Saraband is autobiographical, a faithful portrait of the author as a young woman. It was certainly true that Bliss refused to be “terrorized into a set formula of life,” sometimes to her own detriment. As an Eton-cropped twenty-two year old in twenties London, she rechristened herself Eliot (her given name was Eileen) after both T. S. and George. Semiestranged from her family, she also left Catholicism and, at least among friends, was open about her sexuality. She had dalliances with women including the modernist poet Anna Wickham (from whom emanated, Bliss wrote, a “tremendous electric force”), moved in the storied lesbian literary circle of Natalie Clifford Barney, and eventually settled down with the artist Patricia Allan-Burns, who remained her partner for more than fifty years. Throughout her life, Bliss wrote prolifically—novels, poetry, plays—despite almost constant financial insecurity, recurrent depression and illness, and scant success. The elderly Bliss told her literary executor, the publisher Alexandra Pringle, that her second novel, Luminous Isle (1934), had failed in part because poverty kept her from socializing. “I refused invitations because I had no clothes, and you ought to go about when you have a book out.” Read More