September 27, 2017 Look Picabia’s Covers for André Breton’s Literary Magazine By Stephanie LaCava The cover of Littérature from May 10, 1923. Littérature, founded in 1919 by André Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Louis Aragon, was couched as an innocent literary journal, but it was known for its avant-garde writings and critiques. In March 1922, André Breton launched Littérature: New Series. He asked his friend, the shape-shifting artist Francis Picabia, to create drawings for the covers. Ultimately, only nine of Picabia’s twenty-six covers were chosen and published. The rest remained in an envelope dated August 8, 1923. They were unseen by the wider public until 2008, when they were presented by Breton’s daughter, Aube Breton-Elléouët, at the Galerie 1900-2000, in Paris. In an essay accompanying exhibition, “In Praise of the ‘Funny Guy,’ Inventor of Pop Art,” Jean-Jacques Lebel argued that these cover illustrations foreshadowed Pop Art. He credited Picabia with “the transformation of a commercial strategy into a subversive artistic practice.” Picabia’s work provided an early, wicked critique of the art and literature industries. In a letter from Marcel Duchamp to Breton in 1922, Duchamp wrote that the scandalous nature of Picabia’s images, many of which associate sex and religion, made it difficult for him to distribute Littérature in New York; vendors were reluctant to display it in public. So Duchamp distributed it among his friends instead. Read More
September 27, 2017 Books Writing a Memoir of Difficult Women By David Plante David Plante and Germaine Greer (center) with friends, in Umbria, 1975. Difficult Women comes, word for word, from my diary. I remember extracting entries about Jean Rhys after she died and pasting them together to form not so much a portrait of Jean but a portrait of my relationship with her. I gave the work to my partner, Nikos Stangos, to whom I gave all my writing for his comments; I recall coming in one evening and finding him in bed, reading, and he immediately said, “This is good!” He did not always say that about my writing. My friendship with Jean had very much to do with writing, about which she had some deeply inspiring insights. Read More
September 27, 2017 Our Correspondents Joyce’s Unpunctuated Rigmarole of Numerical Spangablasm By Anthony Madrid An seventeenth-century shilling. Joyce was good. He was a good writer. He makes me grumpy a lot, especially Ulysses, but he was good. There are at least twenty irresistible qualities to Ulysses. At or near the top of the stack, at least for me, is the way he traffics in what I call “hyperrealistic unnecessaries.” Shakespeare was like that, too. Sprinkled all through his plays are these exchanges that are not at all essential to the plot but that “ring true” in some surprising way, causing one to turn ’em over and over in one’s mind, pleasurably. FIRST PLAYER But who, O who, had seen the mobled queen? HAMLET The “mobled” queen? POLONIUS That’s good. “Mobled queen” is good. The above is especially ticklish because Hamlet, a moment before, had sputtered in indignation at Polonius’s having interrupted the player’s speech. Suddenly, surprisingly, and delightfully, Hamlet himself interrupts—and deflates the very speech he was just defending. And then Polonius reverses himself as well! Moreover, the fact that the whole thing turns on the word “mobled” raises the pitch well into the “exquisite” range. (The best Simpsons episodes are full of this kind of thing, as well.) But to return to Joyce: the unnecessary bits that are just so perfect are everywhere in Ulysses. I want to unpack one of them from my favorite chapter (chapter 1), for the benefit of American readers who have absolutely no idea how traditional British money works. Here is the passage: Read More
September 26, 2017 Look Tina Barney’s Embarrassment of Riches By Joseph Akel Tina Barney, Self-Portrait, 2014. For the photographer Tina Barney, proximity to, and membership in, the upper class has come to define her body of work chronicling the life of the patrician set. Her images, taken over some forty years, are at once a choreographed glimpse into the lives of the leisure class and candid meditations upon universal themes of family. Barney’s recently published an eponymous monograph—with an introduction by Peter Galassi, the former curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art—comes at a time when economic inequality is at the forefront of people’s minds. Here, she reflects on the critical reception of her work, the importance of time in her photographs, and the role of family in creating them. Read More
September 26, 2017 Arts & Culture John H. Johnson and the Black Magazine By Dick Gregory Let me tell you a story about Jet magazine. In the late 1970s, I went to the African country Uganda, which was falling apart under Idi Amin. His rule was over, and he had left a mess. I wanted to see about helping sick and hungry folks over there. I got on a plane, and then onto a bus. Things were crazy, with people fighting for control of the country. A group of men made everybody get off the bus I was on. And the saddest thing was: suddenly I was looking at a nine-year-old African child with a gun, who walked up to me and said, “Get up on the sidewalk.” A man on a bicycle jumped off and said, “Dick Gregory! Dick Gregory!” He looked at that little punk packing the gun and said, “Get outta here. You know who this man is?” Read More
September 26, 2017 Arts & Culture Travel Snapshots from an Odyssey By Daniel Mendelsohn Daniel Mendelsohn’s memoir, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, begins when his eighty-one-year-old father, Jay Mendelsohn, enrolls in Daniel’s undergraduate seminar on the Odyssey. From those risky beginnings, the two embark on an intellectual journey that becomes an emotional one, and then a literal one, when they take a cruise designed to retrace Odysseus’s steps through the Mediterranean. Below, Mendelsohn shares photos from that cruise. He described them to us over the phone, from Canada, as he shuffled from one book-tour event to another. —Ed. June 19, 2011: the day we embarked on the cruise. This photo is from the day we arrived in Athens to embark on the cruise. One of the things that amused me the most about my dad was his indefatigable attachment to both his camera and his iPad, without which he never traveled. It’s funny because the opening of the Odyssey emphasizes two things about Odysseus: that he traveled far and wide, and his intellectual capacity. Odysseus wanted to know the minds of men. In a certain sense, he’s the first anthropologist in Western literature. He goes places partly because he has to, but while he’s there, he’s very interested in “the natives,” so to speak. I found my father’s indefatigable recording of everything endearing. I’m very lazy in that way when I travel—I just sort of let things wash over me—but he was constantly taking notes and taking pictures. I thought it was really funny, when we got there, that he was taking pictures and making notes about the ship. I said, Really, Dad? And he replied, Everything is part of this experience. Which was a very Odysseus-like attitude, actually. So I took a picture of him taking a picture of the boat. We hadn’t even boarded yet. Read More