August 30, 2017 Look “Henry James and American Painting” at the Morgan Library By Julia Berick James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne, Blue and Silver: Battersea Reach, 1872–78, oil on canvas. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. The Morgan Library is the perfect place to muse on Henry James: John Pierpont Morgan’s scholarly sanctum, with those lapis columns and rare woods, is as much a tribute to costly good taste as to literature. James himself mused there on January 18, 1911; record of his attendance is on display in a logbook at the door to the summer-long exhibition “Henry James and American Painting,” curated by Colm Tóibín and Declan Kiely and on view for another week and a half. It’s possible that the Morgan’s show on James’s relationship with expatriate painters won’t convert the uninitiated, but it will undoubtedly serve as a pilgrimage stop for the faithful. There are some titillating letters from James to a probable lover, and who doesn’t love a Whistler? I heard my favorite lines from The Ambassadors, about the clink of unseen bracelets, when I paused in front of Frank Duveneck’s portrait of Elizabeth Boott Duveneck: “Her smile was natural and dim; her hat not extravagant; he had only perhaps a sense of the clink, beneath her fine black sleeves, of more gold bracelets and bangles than he had ever seen a lady wear.” It was the wrong novel: Boott Duveneck was apparently the inspiration for the uncanny Pansy Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady, not for the sophisticated Madame de Vionnet of The Ambassadors. But the Jamesian perfume is so pervasive you’re bound to hear all manner of rustles and breaths—that is, until you exit onto Madison Avenue. Read More
August 29, 2017 Arts & Culture Collection By Anton Chekhov A textile design by Varvara Stepanova, 1924. The other day I stopped to see a friend, the journalist Misha Kovrov. He was sitting on his couch, cleaning his fingernails and drinking tea. He offered me a glass. “I don’t drink without bread,” I said. “Let’s get some bread!” “Under no conditions! I’d offer an enemy bread, certainly, but never a friend.” “That’s peculiar. Why not?” “This is why. Come here!” Misha walked me to the table and pulled out a drawer: “Look!” I looked into the drawer and saw distinctly nothing. Read More
August 29, 2017 Arts & Culture I ♥ John Giorno and So Should You By Chantal McStay Ugo Rondinone, THANX 4 NOTHING, 2015, multichannel film installation. In any given decade of his life in New York, John Giorno could be found right in the middle of whatever the new scene might be, hanging out with the era’s defining figures and embodying the moment: in the fifties, meeting Jack Kerouac at Columbia’s West End; in the sixties, making a movie with Andy Warhol; in the seventies, studying Buddhism in India; in the eighties, playing in a band at CBGB. He has always been a poet who operates primarily in the art world. His practice is multimodal and collaborative: he’s experimented with sound recording, painting, video, and has been muse and lover to a number of artists, including Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. This last detail, which is so often salaciously foregrounded in the literature and mythos surrounding Giorno, would appear to put him in a passive or sidelined role, but his work gleefully subverts this, showing just how potent and active these roles can be. It reveals, too, the advantages of having passed the time with great artists and what he has learned from being the subject of their gaze. “I ♥ John Giorno,” Ugo Rondinone’s exhibition-as-artwork love letter to his husband and collaborator, which appeared at the Palais de Tokyo in 2015, has come home to New York this summer. This iteration requires a peripatetic tour of thirteen independent and nonprofit venues throughout the city. Rondinone, Giorno’s partner of eighteen years, explores nine distinct chapters in Giorno’s diverse body of work and interweaves portraits of and responses to the poet by filmmakers, painters, videographers, and musicians of many generations. I spent five days taking in the show and feel as if I’ve only begun to traverse Giorno’s staggering creative output, as intricate as it is wide-ranging. Read More
August 29, 2017 Our Correspondents The Ontology of Circus Peanuts By Jane Stern I confess I am not by nature an early adopter. I still like manual typewriters, stick-shift cars, and simple appliances with on and off buttons instead of confusing symbols. I still do not know how to text. I am, however, very proud that I was in the vanguard when it came to hating the circus. I remember how out of sync I was when, at age nine, my parents took me to the circus at Madison Square Garden. I screamed in horror at the clowns, I was a whining bummer when the ringmaster with a whip made the frightened horses jump through fiery hoops, and I only perked up when the lion tamer stuck his head into the lion’s mouth. I was hoping he would be decapitated. Now everyone has jumped on the “I hate the circus” bandwagon. It is under attack by animal-rights activists and fire departments and performers unions. The glory days of Barnum and Bailey are long gone. People with compassion no longer want to see elephants paraded down Main Street holding tail in trunk; the dirty-water hot dogs and rancid clouds of ancient cotton candy no longer hold sway with kids of all ages. There is one tangential remnant of the circus that thrills me to the bone, and that is the low-grade confectionary candy called Circus Peanuts. Read More
August 29, 2017 From the Archive A Party in the Archive (Food-Storage Lovers Only) By Toniann Fernandez A 1950s Tupperware party. We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you this very important product from our archive: Tupperware. Late last December, a friend announced that her New Year’s resolution was to replace all of her plastic Tupperware with Tupperware of glass. She was glowing. She already had an IRA, she had learned all of the moves from Gloria Estefan’s “Bad Boys” video, and now she would no longer tote her butternut-squash soup in a polycarbonate container that threatened to leach bisphenol A into her blood stream. In that moment, I wanted her to run for president. Read More
August 28, 2017 Arts & Culture A Case of Mania Grandiosa By Anton Chekhov A textile design by Varvara Stepanova, 1924. That civilization, in addition to its benefits, has also brought humanity terrible harm, no one now doubts. Doctors especially insist on it, not unreasonably locating in progress the source of those nervous disorders which have been observed with such frequency throughout the past decades. In America and Europe, one encounters everywhere all sorts of nervous illness, starting with common neuralgia and ending in serious psychosis. I myself have observed cases of serious psychosis, the causes of which should be sought only in civilization. Read More