Picasso: The View from Florence

by Ingrid D. Rowland

New York Review of Books
November 20, 2014

A show on Pablo Picasso may seem an odd occurrence in Florence, but the exhibition Picasso and Spanish Modernism at Palazzo Strozzi makes a cogent case for its location with the very first objects we encounter: a 1963 painting of The Painter and the Model, and a copy—from a Florentine library—of Ambroise Vollard’s luxurious 1931 edition of Honoré de Balzac’s short story The Unknown Masterpiece (first published in 1831) with Picasso’s illustrations. The Balzac illustrations range from a pure classical line worthy of Flaxman to an equally pure, revolutionary abstraction, and sometimes both tendencies can be found, arrestingly, in a single image.

By the end of his life, Picasso had become an Old Master in his own right, but not before he had devoured the works of past Old Masters with his all-seeing, all-hungering eye and processed them into something new. Like Leonardo da Vinci, he continually accounts for the world, in various media, by way of his own ravenous sight, and like Leonardo Picasso draws his fellow creatures, human and animal, with eyes that flash with intelligent life, from the clutch of fishes in his painting Conger Eels (1940) to the agonized horse whose scream reverberates through all the sketches leading up to the great Guernica—not to mention the women who weep, some at the cruel 1937 German bombing raid on a defenseless Basque town, the first civilian bombing of World War II, some for the sheer agony of loving Picasso.

In the past few years, under James Bradburne, the Anglo-Canadian director of the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation, this big Renaissance mansion has become a home for madcap genius, its ponderous doors thrown wide open to the city, its coffee shop and friendly benches ministering to weary passersby whether or not they climb the stairs to see what is being shown. The exhibitions, meanwhile, which have included Imperial China, Galileo, Bronzino, Jacopo Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino, the Russian Avant-Garde, and the fifteenth-century “Springtime of the Renaissance,” have been coming along at a consistent rate and at a consistent standard of quality; they’ve also been bolstered by a remarkable children’s program—every exhibition has its own child-level labels, a special children’s book, and twelve exquisite little custom-made suitcases: bags of tricks for families to take around on their visit.

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‘Tennessee Williams,’ by John Lahr

by Blake Bailey

New York Times
November 14, 2014

Tennessee Williams’s career began and ended very badly. The boffo finish of his first Broadway-bound play, “Battle of Angels” (1940), was a big onstage fire — a special effect that generated so much smoke a number of theatergoers fainted while others bolted for the exits. “If ever the professional debut of a major playwright was a greater fiasco,” John Lahr writes in his new biography of Williams, piquantly subtitled “Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh,” “history does not record it.” Five years and a lot of crummy jobs later, Williams clawed his way back with a play that would make him famous, “The Glass Menagerie,” whose premiere almost proved an even bigger disaster. Laurette Taylor, plucked from a long alcoholic oblivion to play Amanda Wingfield, was found an hour and a half before opening curtain in an alley outside the stage door, soaking wet in the rain and all but dead drunk. Occasionally pausing to vomit in a bucket offstage, she gave the performance of her life and thus saved our greatest postwar playwright from almost certain ruin.

“Well, Mrs. Williams,” the raffish actress remarked to the author’s mother, Edwina, after the Chicago premiere, “how did you like yourself?” Whether Edwina had sufficient self-awareness to recognize her own maundering about (say) “seventeen! — gentleman callers!” is doubtful, but she was indeed Amanda in the flesh: a doughty chatterbox from Ohio who adopted the manner of a Southern belle and eschewed both drink and sex to the greatest extent possible. Her husband, Cornelius, was inordinately fond of both, and theirs was not a happy union. Drunk and embittered, Cornelius took to calling his effeminate older son Miss Nancy — until, many years later, as Tennessee Williams, this son would have the ineffable pleasure of sitting on the family tombstone while signing autographs at Cornelius’s funeral.

Williams might have used that image as an insignia on his letterhead, so aptly did it capture the triumph of art over life — the alchemy whereby a miserable childhood, and the enduring alienation that followed, were made into something sublime. For her part in this process, Edwina was rewarded with half the royalties from “The Glass Menagerie”; she had supplied not only the play’s most memorable character, but also a theme that Williams would never quite exhaust: the ravages of repression. Edwina used to scream (in horror) during sex, and imposed on her children such a “dread of the physical” that Tennessee did not masturbate until the age of 26 — as Lahr informs us twice, lest we be skeptical in light of Williams’s later exertions. As for the playwright’s unfortunate sister, Rose, she was driven to such a pitch of hysteria that she taunted her mother with tales of abusing herself with altar candles at All Saints College, until Edwina demanded that her innocence be restored by way of a lobotomy. Or so Williams claimed, with a faintly humorous rue and no little sympathy, perhaps, for both parties. Often told that he dealt only with neurotic people, Williams replied that “when you penetrate into almost anybody you either find madness or dullness,” and he was considerably less interested in dullness.

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Rembrandt in the Depths

by Andrew Butterfield

New York Review of Books
November 7, 2014

“Rembrandt: The Late Works,” an exhibition now on view at London’s National Gallery, will linger long in the mind of anyone who has the pleasure to see it. Bringing together approximately ninety paintings, prints, and drawings Rembrandt made at the end of his life, it reveals a great artist working with unprecedented technical command and emotional power, even as the world closes in around him.

In the fifteen years before his death in 1669, Rembrandt suffered one terrible reversal after another. In 1654, his common-law wife Hendrickje Stoffels was condemned as a whore for her relationship with Rembrandt, and this led some important clients to ostracize him. Ever a spendthrift, he went bankrupt two years later and was forced to auction off his house, art collection, and printing press. Despite such desperate steps, he plunged still further into poverty, becoming so destitute he even had to sell the grave of his first wife, Saskia. Worse still, Hendrickje died of the plague in 1663, and Rembrandt’s beloved son Titus died in 1668, leaving him all but alone.

His prestige as an artist also fell in these years. The dark lighting and rough brushwork of his pictures were deemed unfashionable by many. While still able to attract the occasional attention of major patrons—the Grand Duke of Tuscany Cosimo III de’ Medici visited his studio in 1667—he was now often passed over for major commissions, which frequently went to his former pupils instead.

Yet this time of anxiety, debt, grief, and solitude was the most productive of his career. Despite the decline in his reputation, he made more pictures than ever before, and he painted with increased abandon and inventiveness. It was in these final decades that he created what are now considered many of his greatest paintings, including some of the most renowned images in the history of European art.

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