June 15, 2017 On Sports Orange Crush By Rowan Ricardo Phillips Photo: Krbo, Flickr Late in the nineteenth century, William Renshaw, an Englishman famed for his tennis game—he’d won six Wimbledons in a row—found himself with a dilemma. He was in sunny Cannes on vacation, planning to make some money on the side by giving tennis lessons. Back then, the game was played exclusively on grass; anything else was heresy. But when Renshaw examined the court at his disposal, he could see that the grass had grown brown and thin beneath the hot sun—it would wilt under the pressure of his well-heeled feet. A light went off in his head: he decided to have load after heaping load of red clay transported from Vallauris, a small seaside town known for its devotion to the ceramic arts. He convinced the town to part with some of its rejected pottery, pulverized the clay into tiny grains, and applied a thin, protective layer to the grass court in Cannes. The clay court was born. Today, it’s a fifteen-minute drive from Vallauris to Cannes, and less than an hour to Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, the home of the Monte Carlo Open, the first stop in the men’s clay court season. The stylish locales of the biggest clay tournaments—Buenos Aires, Rio, Monte Carlo, Barcelona, Madrid, Rome, Paris—belie the true grit at the heart of their tennis. Clay games are a grind; the surface is rooted in a pragmatism made from and infused by the tactile, utilitarian art of ceramics, and it distinguishes itself from other tennis surfaces in its erratic effects. It forces the player’s body to adapt or fail. Shots sponge off the granular surface, slowing down and trampolining back into the air at unlikely angles. Returns that would have been winners on grass and hard courts come ricocheting back to you, sometimes bouncing as high as your shoulders, and players have to slide into their shots. It’s hard to stress how difficult it is to adjust to these conditions. Imagine a two-month span of the basketball season in which everyone was forced to play on a thin layer of sand. Suddenly there’s a premium on probing, strategic shots over straight-ahead power. Read More
June 15, 2017 At Work Writing Walter Hopps: An Interview with Deborah Treisman By Dan Nadel Walter Hopps, in Washington, D.C., in 1978. Photograph by William Christenberry. Collection of William Christenberry. Walter Hopps’s just-published memoir, The Dream Colony, opens with the sentence “My parents collected plein-air California paintings, and that was the art that hung in the Hopps household.” The line is striking for its thumbnail sketch of the pattern Hopps’s life would take: that he managed to turn identifying, collecting, and living with art into a career that vastly influenced post–World War II American art. As a teenager in Los Angeles, the precocious and curious Hopps regularly visited the great collectors and Duchamp supporters Walter and Louise Arensberg and explored the museums and galleries of LA; by night he soaked up the city’s jazz scene, where he befriended Chet Baker and a young Dave Brubeck. In 1952, at the age of twenty, he opened a gallery, Syndell Studio, and, three years later, mounted an exhibition called “Action” in an empty carousel on the Santa Monica Pier. The show introduced both an aesthetic and a group of artists that would engage Hopps for the length of his career: gritty assemblage and abstraction as exemplified by Jay DeFeo, Hassel Smith, and Craig Kauffman. With the sculptor Ed Kienholz, Hopps opened Ferus in 1957. It became the ur–sixties Los Angeles gallery, home to the young artists Wallace Berman, Ken Price, and Billy Al Bengston, among others, and host to Andy Warhol’s first West Coast solo show. Hopps, however, was never very comfortable as an art dealer, and in 1962 he became the curator of the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum of Art), where he gained fame and critical attention for shows that were the first of their kind in the United States, including Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell retrospectives and the country’s first Pop Art overview, “New Painting of Common Objects.” From the midsixties through the seventies, Hopps served in leading curatorial roles at the Washington Gallery of Fine Art; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, where he showed artists as diverse as Walker Evans and Robert Crumb; and the Smithsonian’s National Collection of Fine Arts, where he mounted a Robert Rauschenberg retrospective and began a friendship with the artist that lasted the rest of his life. In 1980, Hopps began collaborating with the collector Dominique de Menil as a consultant to the Menil Foundation in 1980, and in 1987 the Menil Collection opened; he was its first director, and then its curator of twentieth-century art. Hopps was made adjunct senior curator of twentieth-century art at the Guggenheim Museum in 2001. In 1990, he joined Jean Stein’s Grand Street as art editor. It was there that he began collaborating with the magazine’s managing editor, Deborah Treisman, and the assistant art editor, Anne Doran, on art essays for the magazine and catalogue essays. A few years later, the three began work on his memoir. I corresponded with Treisman, the fiction editor of The New Yorker, about the process behind the book and the particular talents of its subject. INTERVIEWER When did you come to this project in its current iteration? TREISMAN I didn’t actually “come to the project,” I was part of it from the conception. At Grand Street, Walter selected the artists whose portfolios appeared in the magazine and often provided the accompanying text. He wasn’t particularly comfortable writing—he was far better at speaking and storytelling—so usually we would talk on the phone, or he would talk onto tape, or he would be interviewed by Anne, and I would turn those conversations into the essays that ran alongside the visuals. We went through the same process to put together catalogue essays for some of the major exhibitions Walter curated in the nineties. At some point, after I had moved to The New Yorker, we started discussing the idea of doing a larger project, a book that wasn’t a direct autobiography but that would cover most of Walter’s life and the many artists he wanted to talk about. I wrote up a proposal for the book, which Bloomsbury USA acquired, and Anne was on board to do the interviewing. She had known Walter for decades and was familiar with many of his stories and with much of the work he’d done, so she was able to guide him and keep him focused on the project, which wasn’t always an easy task. Walter had a tendency to digress! Read More
June 15, 2017 On the Shelf Long May Your Walrus Snooze, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From Conrad Gesner’s Icones Animalium, 1560. Image via Public Domain Review. Ours is a sad era, for we have lost our ability to marvel at the walrus. We may chuckle at the walrus, sure, or name magazines after it, or claim that it is Paul McCartney. But just look at the walrus! Have you ever seen something so extraordinary? In the sixteenth century, a walrus marked the outer limits of exotica—to conceive of one was to dabble in a realm of chimera and myth. As Natalie Lawrence writes, Olaus Magnus’s seminal History of the Northern Peoples (1555) sought to portray the wonders of the far-off north—mostly by concocting them or stealing them from other old books—and one of these wonders was the walrus, or morse, a creature so inexorably magical that it was liable to fall asleep while clambering around and supping the dew from the wet grasses: “Magnus wanted to present the North as an impenetrable region of wonders and marvels—flesh-eating Scricfinns, magicians, vast whirlpools, and flaming volcanoes—at the very edge of the known world. Importantly, he wanted to portray wonders that were resonant to an audience in Catholic Southern Europe … To do so, he used practical, local information, but, ironically, also based much of his description on classical scholarship and Southern European perceptions of the north. He was reigniting images of the ‘septentrional lands’ rather than generating them: selling mythologies back to the traditions that had created them. The morse was one such arctic wonder. Magnus went on to relate how ‘using their tusks, these animals clamber right up to the cliff-tops, as if they were going up a ladder, in order to crop the sweet, dew-moistened grass, and then roll back down into the sea again, unless, in the meantime, they have been overcome with a heavy drowsiness and fall asleep as they cling to the rocks.’ Hunters would sneak up on the napping behemoths, tie ropes around their tails, and, from a safe distance, wake the animals with a hail of stones.” At an exhibition of diaries in London, John Mullan has chanced upon something sublime: “One of the weirdest diaries (if that is the right word) sampled here is one Peter Fletcher’s record of all his sneezes since July 2007. Each entry describes where he was and what he was doing when he sneezed. Not very interesting, you might think (perhaps not very trustworthy: Can he always be recording the circumstances before they are forgotten?). Yet Fletcher’s filmed commentary on his project is an absurdist version of what was once the religious self-discipline of diary-keeping. The point, he explains, is to cheat his own preconceptions about what is important in his life. Which is just what a true Christian was once trying to do.” Read More
June 14, 2017 Our Correspondents Interview with the Neanderthal By Anthony Madrid Jindřich Štyrský, The Cave, 1926, oil on canvas. THE NEANDERTHAL I’m already uncomfortable with this. INTERVIEWER Why? Are you worried people are going to misunderstand, or … ? THE NEANDERTHAL The whole thing is misleading. I’m not even a Neanderthal. INTERVIEWER Listen, there’s nothing to worry about. We can start the interview right there on that note. Go ahead and explain the situation. THE NEANDERTHAL It’s … I don’t even know where to begin. Read More
June 14, 2017 On Film The Best for the Most for the Least By Sarah Cowan Though best known for their furniture designs, Charles and Ray Eames made more than 125 films—striking attempts “to get across an idea.” Still from Powers of Ten. The movie theater is a gauge for datedness. From the darkened seats, insurrectionary giggles further distance the audience from the screen, which plays on foolishly. Last month, when Metrograph screened a selection of films by the designers Charles and Ray Eames, the image of a white woman in a starched A-line dress, batting her eyelashes while caressing a S-73 Sofa Compact, hit a ten on the theater’s laugh-o-meter; it hadn’t aged well since 1954. But it’s important to understand why the Eameses cast her and how her seductive touch becomes that of the camera’s eye, shifting the focus from woman to sofa and seeming to connect the two. Both are ready to endure spills, support children, and foster intimacy, signaling wholesomeness and modernity at once. “There is no predicting what may happen in the life of a sofa,” the narrator said in all seriousness, unaware that he was speaking to a theater of skeptics. Charles was trained as an architect and Ray as a painter. During World War II, they found recognition for the leg splints and aircraft parts they’d designed for the U.S. Navy. Their Case Study No. 8 house in Los Angeles has become an icon of midcentury design, but they’re best known for their furniture: the sofas, chairs, and tables of molded plywood and fiberglass that became fixtures of the sixties home and office. Lesser known are their toys and exhibitions, and more obscure still are their films, of which they made more than 125 between 1950 and 1982. Read More
June 14, 2017 On the Shelf Your Patron Is Holding You Back, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring No place for decent people. If you’re buying a new home, avoid the intersection of Art and Commerce. It’s no place to raise a family. Out on the streets you’ll find foppish aesthetes and sturdy banker types in three-piece suits, variously copulating with and murdering one another at all hours of the night. The sidewalks are littered with cigar butts and paperbacks, many of them used. This week has seen an especially nasty accident there: Delta Airlines and Bank of America pulled their funding from a Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar in which the emperor takes on a distinctly Trumpian tint. (Spoiler: he is stabbed.) As Justin Davidson argues, the takeaway here is not that the American public is too foolish to “get” Caesar or that corporations are lumbering, amoral agents of ignorance and destruction—we knew that already. Instead, the controversy illustrates just how vexed our expectations of corporation patronage have become: “Neither art nor money is a neutral force … To pretend that people who write checks have an abstract duty to fund an artistic enterprise without caring about the result is naïve. Most of the time the decision whether to fund a novel, a new piece of music, or an exhibition is made long before these works see the light of day. The Public’s Julius Caesar is a rare instance of a donor’s after-the-fact judgment, but that doesn’t make it outrageous … Corporations often fund the arts as a way of cleansing reputations they have sullied through their business practices or products, and money-hungry organizations have to decide how willing they are to play the game … Organizations slaver over big-ticket philanthropists who can jump-start a construction project, ensure a blockbuster exhibition, or pay for a production by writing a single check. Pursuing them usually means arguing that the work they’re paying for will exhilarate more people than it will anger. Dependence on donors, by its nature, nudges the arts toward traditionalism and conservatism.” Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a portraitist with a devastating secret: none of her subjects are real. I, too, gasped. The impudence. The temerity! And yet, as Zadie Smith writes, it all works out: “Yiadom-Boakye’s people push themselves forward, into the imagination—as literary characters do—surely, in part, because these are not really portraits. They have no models, no sitters. They are character studies of people who don’t exist. In many of Yiadom-Boakye’s interviews, she is asked about the source of her images, and she tends to answer as a novelist would, citing a potent mix of found images, memory, sheer imagination, and spontaneous painterly improvisation (most of her canvases are, famously, completed in a single day). From a novelist’s point of view, both the speed and the clarity are humbling. Subtleties of human personality it might take thousands of words to establish are here articulated by way of a few confident brushstrokes. But the deeper beguilement is how she manages to create the effect of wholly realized figures while simultaneously confounding so many of our assumptions about the figurative … Who is this? The answer is both literal and liberating: No one.” Read More