The guilty pleasure of reading Hollywood memoirs

by Carolyn Kellogg

Los Angeles Times
June 29, 2017

A friend and I were standing on a corner waiting for the light to change, talking about the FX series Feud. “Isn’t it great,” he said, “how much it winds up on Joan Crawford’s side?” Yes, but no, I started to reply, but before I could we crossed and the conversation turned away. I wondered if what we saw in the show was a kind of Rorschach test. Who’s the hero: Joan Crawford or Bette Davis?

Being Team Davis, when I stumbled across a paperback of her memoir, The Lonely Life, I bought it, brought it home and promptly started reading. As The Times’ book editor, you might expect me to be reading Plutarch’s Lives in my spare time — but Hollywood lives are far more interesting.

You don’t have Los Angeles history without Hollywood history. The entertainment industry found a new home here led in part by theater business rascals slyly getting as far as they could from Thomas Edison in New Jersey, who was trying to enforce his motion picture patents. In Los Angeles, they found a safe distance, lovely weather and light that was particularly suited to the new film medium. You may know all that: It’s part of the many terrific, straightforward, deeply researched histories and biographies I’ve read.

Memoir is another matter. Idiosyncratic and biased, obfuscatory and boastful, even unctuous and vain, the Hollywood memoir is not going to portray the past in a clear light. But like Sriracha on the table, it’s going to bring the heat and make the meal better. So much better.

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A Life of Toscanini, Maestro With Passion and Principles

by Robert Gottlieb

New York Times
June 27, 2017

On the night of June 30, 1886, Arturo Toscanini — recently turned 19 — arrived, barely on time, at the imperial opera house in Rio de Janeiro, where the touring company for which he was the principal cellist was about to perform “Aida.” Pandemonium. The unpopular lead conductor had resigned in a huff. His unpopular replacement had been shouted off the podium by the audience. There was no one else. Toscanini, who was also assistant choral master, was thrust forward by his colleagues. “Everyone knew about my memory,” he would recall, “because the singers had all had lessons with me, and I had played the piano without ever looking at the music.” He was handed a baton and just started to conduct. A triumph! Typical of the glowing reviews: “This beardless maestro is a prodigy who communicated the sacred artistic fire to his baton and the energy and passion of a genuine artist to the orchestra.” For the remaining six weeks of the tour, Harvey Sachs tells us in his biography Toscanini: Musician of Conscience, the maestro led the orchestra in 26 performances of 12 operas, all from memory. No one offered him a raise, and it didn’t occur to him to ask for one.

It was almost 68 years later, in April 1954, that he conducted his final concert, an all-Wagner program, at Carnegie Hall. He was 87, and decades earlier had established himself as the world’s most famous conductor — the world’s most famous musician; a “genius,” in fact, alongside such names as Einstein, Picasso and, with a backward glance, Thomas Alva Edison. Nor was this a new notion: Back in the conservatory in Parma, his hometown, “Arturo’s fellow students teased him by calling him Gèni, the dialect word for ‘genius.’”

Genius or not, he unquestionably was a prodigy. At school he had been assigned the cello as his instrument, and he quickly mastered it — by the time he was 14 he was playing in the Parma opera company’s orchestra. He taught himself to play the piano, the violin, the double bass. He sang, he composed, he organized and led groups of his fellow students. Everyone was aware of his astounding photographic memory and his immense powers of concentration. In his final year he was named the school’s outstanding graduate, and he was liked as well as admired. “When I look back at the years of my adolescence,” he would reminisce, “I don’t remember a day without sunshine, because the sunshine was in my soul.”

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See also

Facing Off with the Old Masters

by Ingrid D. Rowland

New York Review of Books
June 21, 2017

One of the favorite sports of Renaissance artists was a contest called the paragone, the “comparison,” the age-old debate about the most expressive form of art. Like sport itself, the paragone never led to a definitive conclusion; the fun lay in playing the game with headlong passion, insisting that painting, or sculpture, or architecture reigned as queen of all the other arts. At the very least, the paragone sharpened its participants’ eyes and wits, though it must have led to the occasional tavern brawl as well. It also engendered endless repetitions of Horace’s ut pictura poesis, “poetry is like painting,” making the three-word phrase one of the sovereign clichés of the Renaissance.

In the real world, of course, the paragone rarely convinced an artist to turn down a good commission in any medium, be it architecture, embroidery, engraving, cannonry, or ceramic design. Filippo Brunelleschi started as a goldsmith and ended up an architect, shifting his scale from miniature to monumental. The sculptress Properzia de’ Rossi exercised her talents both in carving a crowd of saints’ faces into a single peach pit and in chiseling big blocks of marble. Giorgio Vasari designed temporary pageants and permanent structures, including the daring riverside Uffizi complex in Florence. He also painted, wrote, and helped to found the Accademia del Disegno, the state-sponsored artistic academy of Florence, where the paragone dominated discussion. For Vasari himself, disegno, which can mean both drawing and design, stood at the heart of every artistic enterprise and ruled them all.

This spring and summer, the Florentine exhibition “Bill Viola: Electronic Renaissance,” organized around the work of the acclaimed American video artist Bill Viola, has brought the paragone into the twenty-first century. Centered in the massive fifteenth-century Palazzo Strozzi, “Electronic Renaissance,” which runs until July 23, also involves several other venues in the city, placing Viola’s videos alongside Renaissance works by the likes of Jacopo Pontormo, Michelangelo, and Paolo Uccello.

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Matisse: The Joy of Things

by Claire Messud

New York Review of Books
June 20, 2017

Daily, I slice bread with my maternal grandmother’s bread knife. Neither beautiful nor valuable—its handle scored white melamine, its wide serrations still sharp—it connects me to my mother’s hands (that used this knife) and to my grandmother’s hands (smaller than my mother’s, arthritic already when I was born); to my grandmother’s kitchen, beloved in my childhood; and to the long-ago morning light that filtered through the sunroom into that kitchen, in a long-sold house, in a far-off city. All this is present when I take it up and tackle a loaf. No other knife will do.

Matisse, unsurprisingly, had similar feelings about the objects of his daily life. They delighted, inspired, or confounded him, in their humble ordinariness and in all that they evoked: a chocolate pot, a green glass vase, a pewter jug, embroidered hanging cloths (haitis) from North Africa, masks and figurines from sub-Saharan Africa, a brazier, a marquetry coffee table, a low-slung chair. Present in photographs of his studios over the years, they appear, too, in countless drawings, paintings, and sculptures; and they can now be seen in “Matisse in the Studio” at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, alongside the works that draw upon them, in a dance of recurrences and self-referential variations, spanning, chiefly, Matisse’s mature years.

These mundane items, the organizing principle for this exhilarating show, served as sparks for Matisse’s art. Assembled in the gallery, they also provide an occasion for fresh reflections and analyses by the exhibition’s curators. Essays gathered in the catalogue—by Ellen McBreen, Helen Burnham, Jack Flam, and others—illuminate various threads of Matisse’s oeuvre, including his interest (shared with Picasso, as well as with contemporaries such as Brâncusi and Man Ray) in African masks and sculptures, specifically the simplicity and directness of their forms. This fascination emerges in his paintings—notably, for example, in his painting Seated Figure with Violet Stockings (1914), a nude that, in style and stance, closely resembles a Fang-region reliquary figure that he prized; and in his heartbreaking portrait of his wife Amélie, the last for which she sat for him, although they were married for another twenty-seven years before separating. In this portrait, the mask-like set of Amélie’s features and her hollow black eyes echo the tribal masks he collected. He explored the mask effect also in his sculptures, as in the series of Jeanne Vaderin (a frequent model for Matisse around the time of World War I), her features ever more abstracted, their planes in each iteration fiercer and more simplified.

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He Built Roads. He Oversaw Mines. He Shrank the Deficit. He Was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

by Michael Hofmann

New York Times
June 16, 2017

In many instances, the Germans have been content for the lives of their great literary figures to be written by Anglo-American biographers; there is a narrative flair, a curiosity, an animation, a love of character and anecdote, a juice, that it seems only the English provide. Biography may be the true vice anglais. Frances Wilson’s De Quincey and Ruth Scurr’s Aubrey (both published last year) are clever, considered and brilliantly unorthodox books; Richard Holmes’s lives of Shelley and Coleridge are masterpieces on any terms; would it have occurred to anyone but an Englishman or an American to call a life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan “Uncorking Old Sherry”?

And so, some early biographies of Kafka and Thomas Mann were written in English; the outstanding recent life of Brecht was by Stephen Parker; while in 1991 and 2000 the Cambridge scholar Nicholas Boyle brought out the first two volumes of what will surely be the definitive life of Goethe (1749-1832), at 800 and 950 pages; with luck, Boyle will live to Goethe’s age (82) or beyond, and complete the third and concluding volume. When Boyle tells you in his first paragraph that “the mail from London to Edinburgh took over a week, Moët and Chandon had begun to export the recently invented champagne, and a pineapple cost as much as a horse,” I for one signed up for all two or three thousand pages. Against such a background, the appearance in English of Rüdiger Safranski’s “Goethe: Life as a Work of Art” is a bit perplexing. (Happily, the cringe-making subtitle is utterly disregarded in the text itself.)

Safranski’s book (a best seller in Germany) is aimed squarely at a German readership of Bildungsbürger, educated and tolerant of abstractions and paraphrases. It doesn’t feel the need to locate Goethe for a non-German readership. Safranski is an energetic writer, without much refinement or subtlety. Dozens of obscure names scoot past the reader’s eye with nary a word of introduction or presentation. There is little sense of the tiny, mad ferment of the so-called Age of Genius (the 1770s) — as if a nation had acne — the thing that Penelope Fitzgerald caught so miraculously well in her novel “The Blue Flower.”

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From Vittorio De Sica, the Comic Anxieties of la Dolce Vita

by Glenn Kenny

New York Times
June 15, 2017

The Italian director and actor Vittorio De Sica is best known internationally for the searing, poignant, humanist pictures he made in the late 1940s and early ’50s. These are classics of the so-called Neo-Realist movement that include Shoeshine, Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D. Careers in film often take unusual turns. My film students teared up at Bicycle Thieves and then were both puzzled and amused when I showed them the opening of After the Fox, an elaborately silly 1966 caper comedy starring Peter Sellers that seems worlds away from Thieves but was also, as it happens, directed by De Sica.

The circumstances under which De Sica made After the Fox are too complex to get into here. But as deftly demonstrated by Il Boom, a 1963 film he made that is only now getting a United States release, courtesy of Rialto Pictures and Film Forum, comedy was always a part of this director’s skill set. Written by Cesare Zavattini, who did the screenplays for many of De Sica’s best-known works, the movie skewers the mendacity inherent in the postwar economic resurgence in his country.

Alberto Sordi plays Giovanni, a building contractor with big ideas and a lavish lifestyle that’s mostly enjoyed by his wife, Silvia (Gianna Maria Canale), with whom he is quite properly besotted. But the movie begins with our hero in a bit of a spot, owing a large sum of money he can’t pay. So convincing is his masquerade of affluence that when he asks a rich tennis partner for a loan, the other man assumes that Giovanni is joking. An appeal to his boss ends when that boss falls asleep in the middle of his pitch. During a heart-to-heart with the wife of a megarich industrialist, she makes him a proposition. “What I’m about to ask may surprise you: Would you sell an eye?”

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Shape-shifter: The careers of Philip Guston

by Prospero

Economist
June 2, 2017

In Philip Guston’s “bed paintings”, on show at Venice’s Accademia, he and his wife huddle under the blankets—an old couple, here clinging to each other, there sleeping peacefully side by side. The tenderness of the works comes as a surprise, given that they’re painted in the curious, cartoonlike style that Guston developed in the late 1960s, and continued to work with for the rest of his life. But it’s not the only surprise in an exhibition that invites us to delve into the psyche of an artist best known for the storm of disapproval he prompted by abandoning abstract expressionism.

Guston (1913-80) grew up in Los Angeles. He began drawing at an early age and soon fell in love with the art of the Italian Renaissance. At high school, he met Jackson Pollock and the pair were eventually expelled for distributing satirical pamphlets. Guston’s progression from muralist with the Federal Art Project during the Depression, to successful abstract expressionist, then back to figurative artist makes for an individually absorbing tale, but is also telling in the wider context of what was happening to art in America.

In the early 1950s, Guston was one of the most influential abstract expressionists, delivering tightly composed webs of often pink or red brushstrokes that some critics thought evocative of Monet. In the following decade, however, he returned to figuration largely for political reasons. With the country embroiled in protest against the Vietnam war, he began to feel “schizophrenic”, asking “what kind of a man am I, sitting at home… going into a frustrated fury about everything—and then going to my studio to adjust a red to a blue?”

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MoMA’s Makeover Rethinks the Presentation of Art

by Robin Pogrebin

New York Times
June 1, 2017

The final design for the Museum of Modern Art’s $400 million expansion project, which will be officially unveiled on Thursday, is striking and provocative less because of its look than its implicit message: MoMA isn’t modern yet.

Under the new plans, the museum is moving away from discipline-specific galleries that feature established artists — many of them white men — and toward more chronological and thematic approaches that include multiple formats as well as more minority and female artists.

Museum executives also want to update and streamline their Midtown Manhattan building once and for all, after several iterations over the years. The most recent — an $858 million reconfiguration in 2004 by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi — resulted in congestion and overcrowding.

The new design calls for more gallery space and a transformed main lobby, physical changes that, along with the re-examination of art collections and diversity, represent an effort to open up MoMA and break down the boundaries defined by its founder, Alfred Barr.

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The Magician of Delight

by Geoffrey O’Brien

New York Review of Books
June 1, 2017

Lubitsch: I heard the name long before I ever saw one of his movies. Adults whose movie-going memories went back to the Twenties or Thirties savored the texture of its syllables, as if it named a circle of delight to which I had not yet been admitted. It was a delight perhaps beyond recapture, enmeshed as it was with nostalgia for a vanished world, steeped in champagne and the melodies of cabaret violinists. “The world he celebrated,” Andrew Sarris wrote in 1968, “had died—even before he did—everywhere except in his own memory.” The Ernst Lubitsch retrospective about to unfold at Film Forum (June 2–15) will offer a most welcome occasion to gauge its dimensions and sample Lubitsch’s very particular pleasures. He offers a parallel domain of buoyant elegance, a theater of free-floating desire and inextinguishable humor ingeniously stitched together out of the fabric of Austrian operettas and French farces and the plot devices of a hundred forgotten Hungarian plays, flavored by delicate irony and risqué innuendo, where sex is everywhere but just out of sight behind discreetly closed doors, constantly implied in what is never quite stated.

The world conjured by Lubitsch had vanished all the more thoroughly for having never altogether existed to begin with, except as filtered through the imagination and observations of a Berlin Jew, a tailor’s son, with a passion for every form of theatricality and a genius for comic invention. A member of Max Reinhardt’s company at nineteen, he moved on to writing and directing short film comedies in which he also starred. He experimented constantly in early comedies like the grotesquely satirical The Oyster Princess (1919) and the visually audacious The Mountain Cat (1921), with its shape-shifting screen formats, but it was his lavish historical epics Madame DuBarry (1919) and Anna Boleyn (1920) that brought him worldwide celebrity. By 1922 he was in Hollywood where he reinvented himself for American audiences as the purveyor of a “Continental” style steeped in civilized suggestiveness with silent comedies of marriage and infidelity like The Marriage Circle (1924) and So This Is Paris (1926).

He created not only a style but a place, his imaginary homeland: that paradise of sophistication disguised as Paris, Vienna, Budapest, the operetta kingdom of Marshovia, or even eventually as the Gay Nineties American Neverland of Heaven Can Wait (1943). We are always looking back toward some long-lost capital city of joy. In Lubitsch’s films memory is constantly being invoked—his characters are forever dwelling on cherished first encounters, unforgettable honeymoon excursions, the minutiae of tiny freshly recalled episodes that encapsulate the deepest of feelings—but it is always an open question whether these memories are not flights of invention, decorating and orchestrating an exquisite counterlife. Those flourishes—magic feats performed in full view of the audience—become something like a companionable accompaniment, enriching the action with deeper layers of joking and commentary.

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