What the Brontës Made

by Francine Prose

New York Review of Books
October 28, 2016

Even those who think they know all there is to know about the Brontë family will likely be surprised by many of the documents and artifacts included in “Charlotte Brontë: An Independent Will,” currently on view at New York’s Morgan Library. Many of these revelations have to do with size and scale, with the contrast between the breadth and depth of Charlotte Brontë’s imagination and her physical delicacy, between the forcefulness of her and her siblings’ prose and the neat, astonishingly miniscule handwriting (not unlike Robert Walser’s microscript) in which she, Emily, and their brother Branwell penned their early work.

The first thing we see, on entering the gallery, is a glass case containing one of Charlotte Brontë’s dresses and a pair of her shoes, objects that make us acutely aware—more effectively than any description or photograph of these items could—of how diminutive (by modern standards) this strong and resilient woman was. Tiny books and magazines, including a copy of a satirical play about the art of writing, The Poetaster, that Charlotte wrote when she was fourteen, offer a view of the way in which the Brontë children saw writing as an imaginative game; to them, these miniature, handmade volumes—meticulously printed, and in some cases illustrated with watercolors—were, essentially, toys. Included also is the manuscript of a poem that Emily Brontë wrote when she was nineteen, a work of three hundred words, divided in forty-six lines, on a page that is only ten centimeters tall.

Anne Brontë’s Bible and a group of family prayer books provide a sense of the intensely religious atmosphere in which the siblings were raised by their clergyman father. Other volumes—a world atlas that Charlotte decorated with doodled portraits of women, Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds—increase our understanding of what the family read, and of the ways in which they supplemented the sparse and punitive education that Charlotte and Emily received at the nightmarish boarding school that appears, thinly disguised as Lowood, in Jane Eyre. Among the most affecting documents are letters and journal entries in which Charlotte expresses the unhappiness and loneliness she experienced as a teacher (“neither is my heart in the task, the theme or the exercise”), as a governess (“I am miserable when I allow myself to dwell on the necessity of spending my life as Governess”), and as a student in Brussels (“I am tired of being amongst foreigners it is a dreary life”).

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‘Icons of Modern Art’: Picassos, Matisses, Monets, Oh, My!

by Jason Farago

New York Times
October 28, 2016

The history of collecting, the development of painterly style, the changing fortunes of individuals and nations: You will think about all these things on your second go-through of “Icons of Modern Art: The Shchukin Collection,” which opened last week at the Fondation Louis Vuitton here.

Your first visit will probably elicit another, less intellectual reaction: dumbstruck awe.

This titanic exhibition assembles 127 works of French painting — by Monet, van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso and many more artists on the Modernist hit parade — that belonged to the Russian textile magnate Sergei Shchukin (1854–1936).

He acquired them in a concentrated buying spree of just 15 years, and displayed his collection in a palace in Moscow — capped by “Dance” and “Music,” the monumental panels that stand among Matisse’s boldest works. By 1918, though, Lenin was in the Kremlin, Shchukin had gone into exile, and the collection was nationalized and dispersed; some works ended up in Siberia. The group’s partial reassembly here amounts to the blockbuster of blockbusters, and a welcome coda features works by Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko and other artists whose study of Shchukin’s French pictures was decisive for the development of the Russian avant-garde.

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The Growing Charm of Dada

by Alfred Brendel

New York Review of Books
October 27, 2016

During World War I, Zurich, the largest city in neutral Switzerland, was a refuge for artists, writers, intellectuals, pacifists, and dodgers of military service from various countries. A handful of these decided in 1916 to create a new kind of evening entertainment. They called it Cabaret Voltaire and established it at Spiegelgasse 1, not far from the room that was occupied by an occasional visitor to the cabaret, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

The group, which became known as Dadaists, consisted of three Germans (Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, Emmy Hennings), one Alsatian (Hans Arp), two Romanians (Marcel Janco and Tristan Tzara), and the Swiss Sophie Taeuber. They were soon joined by Walter Serner, an Austrian born in Bohemia. The youngest, Tzara, was twenty; Hennings was the oldest at thirty-one. All were united in their loathing of the war.

The initiator of the group appears to have been Hugo Ball. He was, like most Dadaists, a writer but had also worked in the theater and performed in cabarets. After having to leave Germany as a pacifist, he settled with Emmy Hennings in Zurich where, pale, tall, gaunt, and near starving, he was regarded as a dangerous foreigner. At the Voltaire, he declaimed his groundbreaking phonetic poem “Karawane” (Caravan)—written in nonsensical sounds—to the bewilderment of the public. After a few intense months of Dada activity he left the group, turned to a gnostic Catholicism, and died in the Swiss countryside, regarded as a kind of saint. His diary Die Flucht aus der Zeit (The Flight from Time) remains one of the principal accounts of Dadaism.

For Richard Huelsenbeck, noise seems to have been the most natural form of virility. Within Dada, he was the champion of provocation. A poet and journalist who subsequently traveled the world as a ship’s doctor and practiced as a psychoanalyst for a time in New York, Huelsenbeck remained with Dada and helped to establish in 1917 its very different Berlin branch.

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The Chase

by Inigo Thomas

London Review of Books
October 20, 2016

J.M.W. Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed: The Great Western Railway hangs in a corner of Room 34 at the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square. The painting remains close to where it was first exhibited in 1844 when the Royal Academy occupied the gallery’s east wing. ‘There comes a train down upon you,’ Thackeray wrote after seeing the painting. ‘The viewer had best make haste … lest it dash out of the picture and be away to Charing Cross through the wall opposite.’ The National Gallery has been refashioned, the RA has moved to Piccadilly, but the train in Rain, Steam and Speed is forever hurtling towards Charing Cross.

The only other painting at the National Gallery that comes close to its depiction of speed is Titian’s Death of Actaeon, which shows Diana, the goddess of hunting, running through woods to witness Actaeon’s death: she has already transformed him into a stag as punishment for coming across her and her nymphs bathing. His own hounds have caught up with him, they don’t recognise their master and they’re about to tear him apart – just as certainly as the train will destroy a hare in Rain, Steam and Speed.

‘Always take advantage of an accident,’ Turner once said. ‘A painter can only represent the instant of an action, and what is seen at first sight’ was another of his aphorisms, one that he borrowed from Gotthold Lessing or John Opie, magpie that he was. ‘Every glance is a glance for study,’ he also said. The scene in Rain, Steam and Speed is of an imminent death, the instant of an action caught by a glance. A train rushes across a bridge and is bearing down on a hare that’s running over the washed-brown bed of a railway track. The hare isn’t immediately obvious because it is partially obscured by the driving rain. The train will catch up with the hare and kill it: there’s no escape, the track is encased by walls. The hare’s typical act of self-defence, to turn back on itself so dramatically that it throws off its pursuers, marvelled at by hunters for centuries, isn’t available: the locomotive blocks its path. ‘Each outcry of the hunted hare/A fibre from the brain does tear,’ Blake said, but this hare’s death looks as if it will be instantaneous.

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‘Picasso Portraits’ Review: Face to Many Faces With a Modern Master

by Tom L. Freudenheim

Wall Street Journal
October 10, 2016

It’s likely that any Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) show will assure the exhibiting museum of high visitor numbers. Nevertheless, such a project requires the Sisyphean task of plowing through the work of one of art history’s most prolific and protean artists. So it’s a relief that the judicious selection of 87 works in “Picasso Portraits,” which recently opened at the National Portrait Gallery, is tighter and more focused than the 200-plus works in MoMA’s memorable 1996 Picasso portraiture survey. It’s a persuasive case for the “less is more” advice that NPG guest curator Elizabeth Cowling, a University of Edinburgh emeritus professor and Picasso authority, says she was given during the planning (and, presumably, winnowing) process. The resulting manageable, and even somewhat unexpected, Picasso survey includes works both familiar and previously unexhibited in a range of mediums, deftly organized in a chronological, yet also topical, installation.

A perceptive teenage self-portrait of 1896, executed while Picasso was studying art in Barcelona, asserts the maturity of his juvenilia. This, in turn, prepares us for the constant shifting of depictive modes with which the artist, over the course of his lifetime, shocked and delighted viewers while concurrently confounding curators and scholars. A large and familiar, completely different, self-portrait of 1906 not only channels Cézanne but also prepares us for Picasso’s lifelong dialogue with other artists, seen throughout the show, even while he was being very self-consciously inventive.

By the time of his 1910 Cubist portrait of noted art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the artist has forcefully challenged our understanding of portraiture’s possibilities. Reportedly the outcome of 20 to 30 sittings, the Kahnweiler image fuses an assemblage of tonal geometric forms in so-called Analytic Cubism, the most radical painting of the day, with the most conventional pose of a gentleman in waistcoat with watch chain, hands clasped, sitting for his portrait. It’s astonishing to note how far Picasso has moved from the several 1901 portraits on view, which range from suggestions of Toulouse-Lautrec to the brilliantly colored smirking image of Bibi-la-Purée, the “King of Bohemia” in artistic Paris.

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‘Abstract Expressionism’ Review: Some Americans Abroad

by Tom L. Freudenheim

Wall Street Journal
October 4, 2016

It’s a spine-tingling experience for an American visitor to encounter the spectacular Abstract Expressionism exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. The truly patriotic may also see it as a confirmation of, as art historian and critic Irving Sandler put it in the title of his 1970 book on the movement, The Triumph of American Painting. Perhaps that’s why, on entering the RA’s courtyard, one can’t help but chuckle at the life-size bronze of the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), first president of the Royal Academy, apparently looking away from the imposing group of David Smith (1906-1965) abstract metal sculptures installed as an introduction to the show.

As the heir to various modes of European abstract painting, American Abstract Expressionism was understood to be a home-grown approach to art that exercised a powerful force from the 1940s into the 1960s. This first major U.K. exhibition in almost six decades on a subject so central to American art history—163 works in a splendid sequential visual package with beginning, middle and end—is meant to present these works as “informed by new thinking.” But it mostly confirms the canonical and heroic mythology of an art world commandeered by a small group of macho guys that’s long been the primary way in which this historical yarn has been spun.

So the London show may disappoint those who want to reset the inclusiveness button in regard to gender equity, despite several paintings by Lee Krasner, and single works by Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Janet Sobel and Louise Nevelson (strangely, the only sculptor of any gender other than Smith to merit inclusion). A far greater number of artists and their variant styles—especially the inclusion of more sculpture than only the splendid Smiths here—would have presented a more complete and complex view of what comes off as a fairly neat and familiar package.

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