December 14, 2016 Inside the Issue Mario Carreño and Concrete Cuba By Caitlin Love The story behind our Winter cover. The cover of our Winter 2016 issue features Sin título, composición (Untitled, composition), a muted, geometric painting from 1956 by the Cuban artist Mario Carreño. Its quiet oranges, somber reds, and deep-sea blues are held within measured rectangles, triangles, and squares. In the top right, a red curve rests on an ocher block like an accent. Sin título hearkens back to the abstract covers the Review favored through the sixties and into the seventies, featuring the work of artists such as Günter Fruhtrunk and Geneviève Claisse. Sin título was on display last February in David Zwirner’s exhibition “Concrete Cuba,” which showcased eleven artists from 1950s Havana. The artists, formally known as Los Diez Pintores Concretos, converged to articulate historical “concrete art within a Cuban context,” as Abigail McEwan writes in the show’s catalogue. The form favored “a mathematical, mechanical construction.” Some paintings, like Loló Soldevilla’s, look like planetary studies, with globular shapes snaking after one another. Mario Carreño held an outsize position in this community. He positioned himself as an early theorist of the movement by working on the magazine Noticias de arte, writing articles such as “Morality in Abstract Painting,” in which he introduced Cuban Concretism as “an aesthetic corollary of the historical and spiritual needs of our time.” Read More
December 14, 2016 Our Correspondents A Good Whipping By Anthony Madrid On the “Mrs Thrale” bit in Frank O’Hara’s “Meditations in an Emergency.” Sir Joshua Reynolds, Hester and Queeney Thrale, 1777–1778. Frank O’Hara composed the piece that he later called “Meditations in an Emergency” on or around June 25, 1954—anyhow, that is the date on the manuscript. At that time, the title was “Meditations on Re-emergent Occasions,” which makes O’Hara’s debt to John Donne’s 1624 text Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions much more obvious. O’Hara’s piece, retitled at the suggestion of Kenneth Koch, was published in Poetry about four months later, which is an excellent turn-around time. This was during the five years when Karl Shapiro was editor. You can have a look at the original page layout of “Meditations in an Emergency” here. Clickers who know the text will find no surprises. Read More
December 14, 2016 Arts & Culture A Comics Adaptation of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky By Jane Mai The latest entry in the NYRB Classics Book Club is Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s novel The Return of Münchausen, translated into English for the first time by Joanne Turnbull. Though Krzhizhanovsky wrote for some twenty years, Soviet censorship and World War II conspired against him, and none of his fiction was published in his lifetime (he died in 1950). “A fantastical plot is my method,” he once wrote. “First you borrow from reality, you ask reality for permission to use your imagination, to deviate from actual fact; later you repay your debt to your creditor with nature, with a profoundly realistic investigation of the facts and an exact logic of conclusions.” In Münchausen, Krzhizhanovsky borrows from the life—both real and legendary—of Baron Münchausen to spin his own absurd tale involving the baron’s post–World War I perambulations in Berlin, London, and Moscow on a diplomatic mission. Bizarre and fantastic, Münchausen (or is it Krzhizhanovky?) defends imagination above all else. The Daily is featuring a trio of adaptations of short excerpts from the novel. In our latest installment, Jane Mai finds the baron pondering the subject on love and marriage and remembering “a mild flirtation with a pair of charming eyes.” Read More
December 14, 2016 On the Shelf Democracy Sausage, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Wilhelm Trübner, Great Dane with Sausages, 1877. Shirley Hazzard has died at eighty-five: “Hazzard’s fiction is dense with meaning, subtle in implication and tense in plot, often with disaster looming: A shipwreck tears away the parents of tiny children. A man who has waited a lifetime for a woman loses her at the last moment. A disease slowly saps the life from a beloved brother … Her childhood in Australia was filled with reading—she said of poems that she ‘ate and drank them up as nourishment’—but also with family discord, alcoholism, mental illness (her mother’s), infidelity (her father’s) and ultimately the disintegration of her parents’ marriage. She recalled seeing maimed veterans of World War I still haunting Australia years later, and she had felt the effects of the Depression.” Speaking of Australia—their word of the year is democracy sausage. Yes: where the Oxford English Dictionary went for post-trust, our comrades in the Antipodes have opted for democracy sausage. Elle Hunt explains, “The barbecued snag, bought at a polling booth sausage sizzle on election day, beat out smashed avo and census fail to define the year, following a mammoth eight-week election campaign … Amanda Laugesen, the director of the [Australian National Dictionary Centre], said democracy sausage had first been recorded in 2012 but had risen to prominence in 2016. ‘There certainly seem to be plenty of terms—sausage sizzle itself is an Australianism, snag is an Australianism. We seem to be quite fond of our sausages here in Australia.’ ” Read More
December 13, 2016 Arts & Culture Poor Richard By Sarah Cowan Philip Guston’s drawings of Nixon have transcended their subject. Philip Guston, Untitled (Poor Richard), 1971, ink on paper, 10 1/2″ x 13 7/8″. “A lot of work after the election looks very different,” I overheard someone say in Hauser & Wirth as we followed the saga of Poor Richard, Philip Guston’s satirical drawings of Richard Nixon’s rise to power. The show had been installed on November 1 as a last minute idea; on opening night it drew an amused crowd of boomers and millennials, the distance in their experience bridged by the convincing sense of security many of us had that doomed week. When I returned to the show less than a month into the Trump transition, the drawings had turned on us: a joke at the expense of our smugness. Guston made most of the drawings in August 1971, in Woodstock, egged on by his friend Philip Roth, who had taken Nixon as the subject of his novel Our Gang. Just a month earlier, Nixon, who had built his political career as the wunderkind of the House Un-American Activities Committee, announced he was planning to visit China. Poor Richard and its preparatory sketches ride the arc of this hypocrisy, from Dick’s beginnings in California, where, lonely, poor, and studious, he dreams of the White House, crushing hammers and sickles in his path. He poses for photographs with his arm around the necessary demographics—hippies, blacks, “mom and pop” whites—bearing a grin betrayed by a hungry glare. Guston dresses him in a police uniform, a Ku Klux Klan hood, blackface, and, in the final panels, offensive Orientalist costumes as he sets sail confidently on his ill-fated “journey of peace.” Read More
December 13, 2016 Correspondence A Fresh Bag of Bananas By James Wright The poet James Wright was born on this day in 1927. In September 1975, he answered a fan letter with the story of how he’d cheered up a lonely poet (Bill Knott, no less) one Thanksgiving: with bananas. Lots of them. Read more of Wright’s correspondence in A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright. Poetry is a strange adventure; at crucial times it is—it has to be a search undertaken in absolute solitude. But when we emerge from the solitude, we so often find ourselves lost in loneliness—which is quite a different thing from solitude. America is so vast a country, and people who value the life of the spirit, and try their best to live such a life, certainly need times and places of uncluttered solitude all right. But after the journey into solitude—where so many funny and weird and sometimes startlingly beautiful things can happen, whether in language or—even more strangely—in the silences between words and even within words—we come out into crowds of people, and chances are that they also are desperately lonely. Sometimes it takes us years—years, years!—to convey to other lonely persons just what it was that we might have been blessed and lucky enough to discover in our solitude. Read More