Degas - A Strange New Beauty

Edited by Jodi Hauptman.

Essays by Carol Armstrong, Jonas Beyer, Kathryn Brown, Karl Buchberg, Hollis Clayson, Samantha Friedman, Richard Kendall, Laura Neufeld, Stephanie O'Rourke, Raisa Rexer, and Jill de Vonyar

Muse Books
May 25, 2017

Edgar Degas is best known as a chronicler of the ballet, yet his work in monotype reveals his restless experimentation. In the mid-1870s, Degas was introduced to the monotype process – drawing in ink on a metal plate that was then run through a press. Captivated by the monotype's potential, he embraced it with enthusiasm, taking the medium to radical ends. He expanded the possibilities of drawing, created surfaces with heightened tactility, and invented new means for new subjects, from dancers in motion to the radiance of electric light, from women in intimate settings to meteorological effects in nature. With his monotypes, Degas is at his most modern, capturing the spirit of urban life, depicting the body in new ways, and exploring abstraction.

Published to accompany an exhibition at MoMA, this richly illustrated catalogue presents approximately 120 monotypes and some 60 related works in other mediums. Texts by curators, scholars, and conservators explore the creative potency of Degas's rarely seen monotypes and highlight their impact on his wider practice.

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The Vitality of the ‘Berlin Painter’

by James Romm

New York Review of Books
May 24, 2017

Only twice in modern times have museums surveyed the career of a single Greek vase painter, and both shows were at major international institutions (the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1985 and Berlin’s Staatliche Museum in 1990-1991). Thus it is a marvel that the more modest Princeton University Art Museum has assembled a vast selection of the works of the master referred to as the Berlin Painter, who lived in Athens in the early fifth century BC. Curated by J. Michael Padgett, the show charts the development, over some four decades, of an artist whose name, nationality, and even gender remain unknown, but whose distinctive and confident illustration in the red-figure style stands out as clearly as any signature.

In his pioneering research on attic vase painting, the Oxford art historian Sir John Beazley devised the label “Berlin Painter” in 1911 in honor of a large lidded amphora decorated by this artist that is housed in Berlin’s Antikensammlung. He assigned thirty-seven other works to the same artist on the basis of the unique line they shared, which he described as “thin, equable, and flowing,” and various features of the depiction of the human form. By now several hundred vases have been attributed, more or less confidently, to this artist’s hand, many recovered from the graves of wealthy Etruscans in western Italy. More than fifty can be seen in the Princeton show, along with pots by the equally talented Kleophrades Painter—who, because of the similarity of their styles, is thought to have been the Berlin painter’s teacher—and by other, later artists who clearly took their inspiration from these two masters.

The Berlin Painter began working at the end of the sixth century BC, when the red-figure technique of vase painting—in which black glaze fills the background, leaving silhouettes of unglazed red ceramic to form the image—was just starting to replace its inverse, the black-figure style that had prevailed earlier. The possibilities offered by this new medium clearly intrigued the artist, who began to expand the black background and diminish the red subject to a single, static figure—a lyre-playing singer with his head thrown back in musical ecstasy, a young athlete holding a discus. These figures seem to float, anchored to the physical world only by the short geometric band on which they plant their feet. In some cases, even this tiny hint of landscape disappears.

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Critical Thinkers: The Ties That Bind Orwell and Churchill

by Richard Aldous

New York Times
May 23, 2017

Among the many stories about Winston Churchill that may or not be true is the one of him barking grumpily at a waiter, “Take this pudding away; it has no theme!” In Churchill and Orwell, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Thomas Ricks (who is now the Book Review’s military history columnist) clearly has a theme. Both subjects, he tells us in this page turner written with great brio, are “people we still think about, people who are important not just to understanding their times but also to understanding our own.” Nonetheless, given that Churchill and Orwell seem never to have met, the question is not so much if this dual biography has a theme but more whether there is actually a pudding in the first place.

It hardly needs to be said that Ricks has chosen two historical figures who are still in the news. Orwell’s most famous novel, 1984, enjoyed a renewed wave of attention in the days after the inauguration of Donald Trump. And as the new president moved into the White House, among his first gestures was to restore the famous Jacob Epstein bust of Churchill to the Oval Office. He is even said to model a scowl on that of Britain’s wartime leader.

Given their pervasive influence today, it is worth remembering that in the 1930s, before either reached the heights of reputation, both men were in disgrace. Churchill was a political pariah, alienated from his own Conservative Party by his opposition to the appeasement of Hitler. Frederic Maugham, Lord Chancellor in the national government, suggested that Churchill should be “shot or hanged.” Similarly, when the socialist Orwell wrote Homage to Catalonia (1938), a coruscating indictment of both left and right during the Spanish Civil War, he was denounced by many on the British left. His usual publisher, the Communist fellow-traveler Victor Gollancz, refused even to put out the book.

The “lower-upper-middle-class” Orwell and the aristocratic Churchill were both children of the Empire, yet they shared a certain contempt for the snobbery of British society. “For a popular leader in England it is a serious disability to be a gentleman,” Orwell wrote in 1943, adding admiringly, “which Churchill … is not.”

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A Radical Redo for ‘Madama Butterfly’ — to Save It?

by Mary Von Aue

New York Times
May 19, 2017

When Anna Netrebko appeared in full old-fashioned geisha get-up at the recent gala concert celebrating the Metropolitan Opera’s 50th anniversary at Lincoln Center, you didn’t need to look at your program to know that she would be performing “Un bel dì,” the most recognizable aria from Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.”

Ms. Netrebko’s dramatically contoured eyebrows, black wig adorned with kanzashi (ornaments) and stylized arm and hand movements paid homage to traditional stagings of this beloved 1904 opera, which revolves around Cio-Cio San, a Japanese teenager who is seduced and then abandoned by a caddish American naval officer. But opera is going through a broad reassessment of the way its classics, almost all conceived by Western men, have regularly portrayed Asia.

The kitschy, kimono-clad white actors who have often been cast in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado” have stirred outrage in recent years, setting off a debate about whether that 1885 piece can be acceptably presented to a modern audience. The gaudy Orientalism of another Puccini crowd-pleaser, “Turandot,” set in an imaginary ancient China and featuring three ministers named Ping, Pang and Pong, has also been criticized. “Butterfly,” an opera based on a short story and subsequent play, helped perpetuate the modern Western stereotype of the obedient, long-suffering Asian woman. “Love me with a little love,” Cio-Cio-San sings at one point, because “we are a people used to small, modest and quiet things.”

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The Disasters of War

by James Fenton

New York Review of Books
May 25, 2017

It comes as a surprise to a British reader to find World War I routinely referred to, by Americans, as America’s “forgotten war.” The British would never use such a term. It is true that certain significant aspects of the war have faded from the collective memory. Every one of us can remember why World War II was fought (“Hitler had to be stopped”), but few can do the same for World War I. Yes, the archduke had been shot in Sarajevo, but who the archduke was, and why his assassination led to general war, and why the war was or wasn’t worth fighting—that takes a rarer expertise to answer.

The war itself, though, is vividly, viscerally remembered through a series of images, stories, and rituals: bugle music—the Last Post and Reveille, framing the Two-Minutes’ Silence; the wearing of poppies on or around Armistice Day; the trenches; gas masks; the Christmas Truce (a famous moment of unauthorized fraternization on the western front in 1914); shell shock; the refusal to distinguish between the shell-shocked and the malingerer; the brutal idiocy of the generals; women handing out white feathers to noncombatant men; songs and parodies of songs; poets at the front line.

The list expands, contracts, expands again. It holds an abiding fascination for us. But that fascination changes with the decades. When I was a child the standard poppy had a black disk in the center, stamped with the name of the Haig Fund, named for Field Marshal Earl Haig, the commander of the British Expeditionary Force. But over the years the reputation of Haig, the “Butcher of the Somme,” went into such a decline that his name was removed from the poppy. Siegfried Sassoon’s “The General,” written in a hospital in April 1917, gives us a generic World War I commander as he will inevitably be remembered—the affable fool with blood on his hands:

“Good morning; good morning!” the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
“He’s a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

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