May 31, 2018 Arts & Culture A Black Artist Named White By Kerry James Marshall Charles White, Sound of Silence, 1978, color lithograph on white wove paper. All images: © The Charles White Archives Inc. I have been a stalwart advocate for the legacy of Charles White. I have said it so often, it could go without saying. I have always believed that his work should be seen wherever great pictures are collected and made available to art-loving audiences. He is a true master of pictorial art, and nobody else has drawn the black body with more elegance and authority. No other artist has inspired my own devotion to a career in image making more than he did. I saw in his example the way to greatness. Yes. And because he looked like my uncles and my neighbors, his achievements seemed within my reach. The wisdom he dispensed to the many aspiring artists who gathered around him was always straightforward: do your work with skill and integrity, everything else is superfluous. It is a right time for him to be considered again in the fullness of his expertise. And fitting that he should be recognized with a survey in three of the best museums in the world. Read More
May 30, 2018 Literary Cities Thomas Bernhard, Karl Kraus, and Other Vienna-Hating Viennese By Matt Levin Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze, 1902. Alone in Vienna, January sky smoothed and silvery over a thin lip of sunlight, streets windless, I sat in the Café Museum before a strudel and a cup of milky coffee, reading an Austrian novel propped open and freshly coffee stained. I was perfectly, touristically happy, a state in which even the most prosaic things partake in the novel glory of a place. I had just dispatched a schnitzel the size and shape of a small umbrella, beaded with oil, as well as a pilsner whose gold-brown glow rhymed with the schnitzel, the coffee, and the dusk lights—everything, in fact, seemed fringed with burnt gold. The booth was crushed crimson velvet, soft but thinly packed and straight-backed, a blithe discomfort surviving charmingly out of the past. Similarly, the waiter—bow-tied, bald head monumentally mounded and catching the light like marble—was unaccommodating and gruff in a manner that seemed, at the time, a piece of old-world charm. Across the street, washed hospital white, the Secession Building, house of Gustav Klimt’s luminous Beethoven Frieze, was wrapped in a mesh tarp and looked like the depression of a pulled tooth covered in gauze. I found it all beautiful. And yet, as I sat and sipped and sighed like a sentimental character in a nineteenth-century novel, the twentieth-century novel I was reading, Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard, in which a narrator attends a dinner party with old artistic friends he despises, was heaping scorn on this very city: “This dreadful city of Vienna,” “Going for a walk in the Graben, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, means nothing more nor less than walking straight into the social hell of Vienna.” Adolf Loos, the architect and designer of the very Café Museum I sat in, I later learned, had derisively called Vienna a “Potemkin city.” I left the Café Museum and walked to the Inner City as dusk clasped around the metropolis, in a trance, blessing all the facades. Read More
May 30, 2018 Arts & Culture Muriel Rukeyser, Mother of Everyone By Sam Huber In moments of desperation, a favorite poem has resurfaced lately, sometimes on Twitter and sometimes in memory. Muriel Rukeyser’s “Poem,” originally published in The Speed of Darkness fifty years ago this month, is in part about the entanglement of these two stimuli, internal and external: I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane, The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories, The news would pour out of various devices Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen. Since 2016, “Poem” has become a vehicle for anti-Trump sentiment, an equivocal fate for any artifact but one Rukeyser would not likely have chafed against. Throughout her career, she remained sensitized to a political and cultural landscape that was changing rapidly. When The Speed of Darkness appeared in 1968, that landscape was more crowded than ever and more vividly perceived: the civil rights movement had given way to Black Power, the women’s and gay liberation movements were coalescing, the Cold War raged on, and U.S. involvement in Vietnam escalated, despite being the most thoroughly reported and divisive military conflict since the Civil War one hundred years before it. The speaker of “Poem” can’t opt out of this deluge, as the vitality of her art depends on its responsiveness to the world it enters. But neither can art concede to that world’s terms: “Slowly I would get to pen and paper, / Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.” Rukeyser struggles, here and elsewhere, to write toward the poem’s divergent “unseen”: an anticipated future audience of poetry and that other living audience already in thrall to newspapers, TV, and the various devices through which the world tries to reach us. Read More
May 30, 2018 Arts & Culture How Much Should the Met Cost You? By Daniel Penny It will soon be three months since the Metropolitan Museum of Art instituted its new admissions policy: pay what you wish for New Yorkers and tristate students, a discount for the elderly and groups, and twenty-five dollars for everybody else. From 1970 to 2018, the Met’s policy had been a more beneficent one—admission fees were up to the discretion of each guest, and the museum was, as Alexandra Schwartz recently wrote for The New Yorker, “as open to the public as Central Park.” When the Met announced the new fee, commentators envisioned an apocalypse on Fifth Avenue—“The Met Should Be Open to All. The New Pay Policy Is a Mistake,” “The Metropolitan Museum’s New Admission Policy Sticks It to Tourists.” In its press release, the Met made clear that it “will accept a variety of other documents that demonstrate New York residency,” and suggested that virtually no underprivileged guests have actually been turned away. However, this change affects more than just access to the Temple of Dendur. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is arguably the world’s most influential museum, with many ambitions besides serving its visitors. It maintains one of the best conservation labs in the world, sponsors architectural excavations, and funds the research of expert scholars. These are all valuable endeavors, yet the Met’s decision to curtail pay-what-you-wish signals to museums everywhere that when the budget demands, the public should take a backseat to other priorities and stakeholders. Since its inception, the Met has grappled with how to fulfill its civic and educational missions while catering to wealthy donors and preserving the world’s treasures, many of them ill-gotten. Facing a budgetary crisis of its own making, the museum’s decision to scrap its most symbolically open-hearted policy once again brings that conflict out of storage and into the light. Read More
May 29, 2018 Redux Redux: Philip Roth (1933–2018) 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. Philip Roth, a longtime friend and an early contributor to the magazine, died last week at age eighty-five. Roth’s influence on American letters is staggering, and it didn’t take long for the remembrances, appreciations, and obituaries to pour in from every publication imaginable. This week, to honor Roth, we bring you his Art of Fiction interview, from our Fall 1984 issue; his novella Goodbye, Columbus, from our Autumn–Winter 1958–1959 issue; and a special bonus episode of our podcast, where we share a recording of Roth’s speech from our 2010 Revel, when he was given the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement. Read More
May 29, 2018 Video & Multimedia The Premiere of Four Women Artists By William Ferris Pecolia Warner, 1975. Something shapes people. It’s the world in which they act that makes their experience, that furnishes the economic background that he grows up in and the folkways and the stories that come down to him and his family. It’s the fountainhead of his knowledge and experience. One of the reasons Southerners have this to talk about is that they don’t have much else to talk about—it’s their source of entertainment, besides their source of knowledge. You’ve got the family tales to wile away a long winter evening, and that’s what they have to drawn on, especially in the little hamlets where people sit on the store porch and talk in the evenings. All they have to talk about is each other and what they’ve seen during the day and what happened to so-and-so and also encourages our sense of exaggeration and the comic, I think. Because tales get taller as they go along. It is a pleasure but it’s also something of deep significance to people. Eudora Welty’s introductory dialogue in the 1977 documentary film Four Women Artists, by William Ferris, is also a metacommentary on the filmmaker himself. Ferris was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1942, grew up on a farm outside town, and began documenting his friends and community at an early age. Between the fifties and the late seventies, he captured—in photographs and on tape and film—the stories, the songs and music, and the spirit of Southern culture during Jim Crow and the fight for civil rights: among his subjects are musicians James “Son Ford” Thomas, Sonny Boy Watson, Lovey Williams, and Fannie Bell Chapman, and the writers Barry Hannah, Alex Haley, Alice Walker, and Robert Penn Warren. Best known as a folklorist, Ferris founded, with the filmmaker Judy Peiser, the Center for Southern Folklore, in Memphis, in 1972; in 1979, he became the founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, where he taught for nearly two decades. In 1989, he coedited the Pulitzer Prize–nominated Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and, in 1997, was named chair of the National Endowment of the Humanities. Read More