A Look Into the Life of Henry James, in His Own Unsimple Words

by Dwight Garner

New York Times
February 16, 2016

“I hate American simplicity,” Henry James (1843-1916) said to his niece Peggy, who had the sense to write his comment down. “I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.”

James’s most elaborate books were his late novels, “The Wings of the Dove” (1902) and “The Golden Bowl” (1904) among them. He stacked clause upon clause in their sentences, constructing towering and often opaque chains of thought and feeling. These books don’t merely abstain from American simplicity; they poke it in the sternum.

James’s autobiographical books — “A Small Boy and Others” (1913), “Notes of a Son and Brother” (1914) and the uncompleted and posthumously published “The Middle Years” — are among his final works, and they too are prime examples of his radically unsimple late style.

The Library of America has now, on the 100th anniversary of James’s death, gathered together these three books, and added a selection of his other personal writing, to create the most comprehensive and the handsomest one-volume edition of his autobiographical work we have.

This is not easy reading. James’s prose here is so ornate you often feel you are groping in a giant box of wrapping tissue into which no gift has been placed. You hike backward along his snaking sentences, searching for antecedents to distant pronouns, while experiencing vague terrors, as if you should leave a trail of breadcrumbs. How else will you get safely home?

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Street Life In London

Spitalfields Life
February 6, 2016

In Brick Lane these days, almost everyone carries a camera to capture the street life, whether traders, buskers, street art or hipsters parading fancy outfits. At every corner in Spitalfields, people are snapping. Casual shutterbugs and professional photoshoots abound in a phantasmagoric frenzy of photographic activity.

It all began with photographer John Thomson in 1876 with his monthly magazine Street Life in London, publishing his pictures accompanied by pen portraits by Adolphe Smith as an early attempt to use photojournalism to record the lives of common people. I like to contemplate the set of Thomson’s lucid pictures preserved in the Bishopsgate Institute – both as an antidote to the surfeit of contemporary imagery, and to grant me a perspective on how the street life of London and its photographic manifestation has changed in the intervening years.

For centuries, this subject had been the preserve of popular prints of the Cries of London and, in his photography, Thomson adopted compositions and content that had become familiar archetypes in this tradition – like the chairmender, the sweep and the strawberry seller. Yet although Thomson composed his photographs to create picturesque images, in many cases the subjects themselves take possession of the pictures through the quality of their human presence, aided by Adolphe Smith’s astute texts underlining the harsh social reality of their existence.

When I look at these pictures, I am always startled by the power of the gaze of those who look straight at the lens and connect with us directly, while there is a plangent sadness to those with eyes cast down in subservience, holding an internal focus and lost in time. The instant can be one of frozen enactment, like the billboard men above, demonstrating what they do for the camera, but more interesting to me are the equivocal moments, like the dealer in fancy ware, the porters at Covent Garden and the strawberry seller, where there is human exposure. There is an unresolved tension in these pictures and, even as the camera records a moment of hiatus, we know it is an interruption before a drama resumes – the lost life of more than one hundred and thirty years ago.

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David Bowie: Invisible New Yorker

by Steven Kurutz

New York Times
January 16, 2016

About 10 years ago, the playwright John Guare got a call asking if he wanted to meet David Bowie to discuss a theater project.

As Mr. Guare remembered it, Mr. Bowie was “in a very dark place” (it was shortly after he had had a heart attack onstage in Berlin), and a mutual friend, the English producer Robert Fox, was trying to coax him back to a creative life. Mr. Guare immediately said yes.

He and Mr. Bowie met at each other’s homes in New York to throw around ideas, and sometimes they went out. “We would take walks around the East Village,” Mr. Guare said. “And I was always praying somebody would run into us so I could say, ‘Do you know my friend David Bowie?’”

It never happened.

Mr. Guare was at first puzzled and then amazed at how Mr. Bowie — the stage creature, the persona, the guy he saw command an audience at Radio City Music Hall in 1973 with his spiky orange hair and snow-white tan — could walk the city streets unrecognized.

“He traveled with this cloak of invisibility — nobody saw him,” Mr. Guare said. “He just eradicated himself.”

People often forgot, but up until his death, on Sunday at age 69, Mr. Bowie was a New Yorker. He said so himself, emphatically. “I’m a New Yorker!” he declared to SOMA magazine in 2003, after he’d been here a decade.

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Splendors of the Dead

by Garry Wills

New York Review of Books
December 10, 2015

Twenty-one Greek museums and four North American museums have cooperated to collect over five hundred artifacts from Ancient Greece in an extraordinary exhibition called “The Greeks: Agamemnon to Alexander the Great.” The show went first to Canada (Montreal, then Ottawa), where it had 280,000 visitors. It is now on view at the Field Museum in Chicago, in a series of superbly lit rooms, and will continue to Washington, D.C., in May. The Greek museums were able to make good choices of a variety of important items to lend to the exhibition, including many works that had never been outside Greece. Richard Lariviere, the president of the Field Museum, told me he was glad to see the Greeks coordinate their effort without a need for him to negotiate with twenty-one different institutions.

After a few fertility-goddess figurines from the Cyclades, the show begins with a bang from Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations of sixteenth-century BC Mycenae, and it ends with a bang in the fourth-century tomb of Alexander’s father Philip II of Macedon at Vergina. The finds revealed a spectacular prosperity in both periods—not only in the profusion of gold artifacts but in the training of large numbers of craftsmen executing intricate designs. An elaborately sculptural vessel for sacrificial libations from Mycenae is as full of interactive curves as a Frank Gehry building, but it is carved from one solid block of alabaster.

From the twelve centuries between the Mycenae and the Vergina findings, we are treated to well-selected vases, jewels, and statues. There are two kouroi from Boeotia—life-size nude statues of stylized young men, imitated from Egypt and teaching Greek sculptors how to carve large figures. There is also a kore—life-size young woman stylishly dressed. The vases include a black-figure lekythos that shows Achilles dragging the body of Hektor around the walls of Troy, and a red-figure kylix from Athens that shows Herakles defeating Antaeus by holding him away from his restorative earth.

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Dickens’ fascination with London

by Daniel Tyler

Oxford University Press Blog
October 29, 2015

At the height of his career – during the time he was writing Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend – Dickens wrote a series of sketches, mostly set in London, which he collected as The Uncommercial Traveller. The persona of the ‘Uncommercial’ allowed Dickens to unify his series of occasional articles by linking them through a shared narrator. Travelling the streets of London he describes and comments upon the city, its inhabitants, commerce and entertainment. Scenes of poverty and social injustice are interwoven with childhood experiences and adult memories. In the interactive map below, you can explore the areas of London visited by Dickens throughout his travels.

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Sargent & His People

by Jean Strouse

New York Review of Books
October 5, 2015

At the age of fifty-one, with his work in high demand on both sides of the Atlantic, John Singer Sargent swore off painting portraits. He had been eager for some time to escape the confines of the studio, the pressures of multiple sittings, and society portraiture altogether. “No more paughtraits,” he wrote to a friend in 1907. “I abhor and abjure them and hope never to do another especially of the Upper Classes.” He had been charging a thousand guineas a portrait “in order to have fewer to do,” he told another friend, but price did not discourage his affluent clientele.1 A Max Beerbohm cartoon shows the portly, bearded artist peering out the window of his London studio in alarm at a queue of fashionably dressed ladies, with uniformed bellhops holding places in line for more.

Sargent made exceptions to the portrait ban for friends, and for eminences such as Lord Curzon, the archbishop of Canterbury, John D. Rockefeller, and Woodrow Wilson (he turned down Pierpont Morgan). Yet for the most part, once he had slipped the silken shackles of commissions, he turned his attention to painting murals for the Boston Public Library, and to doing more of what he had loved all his life: traveling, often with artist friends, and working outdoors in natural light.

The “off-duty” paintings he did primarily for his own pleasure tend, not surprisingly, to be looser, more intimate and experimental than his formal grand-manner portraits, and about ninety of them are currently on view at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in an exhibition called “Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends.” Organized by the National Portrait Gallery in London, where it opened last spring, and curated by Richard Ormond with Elaine Kilmurray, the coauthors of the definitive Sargent catalogue raisonné (eight volumes so far), it brings together from public and private collections a glorious selection of some of the artist’s finest work. For New York, the Met’s Elizabeth Kornhauser and Stephanie L. Herdrich have added works from the museum’s own extensive Sargent collections, including twenty-one on paper.

Sargent seems to have known everyone, and his cultural tastes ranged from Wagner and Voltaire to Javanese dancers and Charlie Chaplin. Very much in evidence here are the vitality and technical virtuosity of his work, his insistence, as Richard Ormond describes it, “on the material of paint, on the flux and instability of surface textures, on condensed forms and odd angles of perspective.” The exhibition traces the arc of Sargent’s career over geography and time. Among its abundant pleasures is a quiet sense that the paintings trace the reticent artist’s own profile through his life in art, which is where he most intensely lived.

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‘Death and Mr. Pickwick,’ by Stephen Jarvis

by Michael Upchurch

New York Times
July 17, 2015

You don’t normally wish a novel would come with a bibliography, but Stephen Jarvis’s new book practically begs for one. Death and Mr. Pickwick makes some eyebrow-raising claims: that Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers was “so widely circulated that only the Bible, Shakespeare and perhaps the Book of Common Prayer can better its circulation”; that for a century or more Samuel Pickwick, the book’s genial bumbling hero, was “the most famous character in fiction there has ever been”; and that Dickens didn’t name or invent Samuel Pickwick.

It isn’t just a character in the novel who argues these points. It’s Jarvis who, in a prefatory note, insists that Death and Mr. Pickwick departs from traditional accounts of the origin of The Pickwick Papers because “the accepted origin is not true.” Instead, he credits the caricaturist Robert Seymour with dreaming up the concept of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (to give the novel its full title).

Death and Mr. Pickwick is, after a fashion, Seymour’s story, and it has some compelling elements. But it’s so weighted down with minutiae that it may defeat even the most rabid Pickwick Papers fan. Moreover, if you haven’t read the Dickens novel recently and don’t have it fresh in your memory, you won’t pick up on half of the games Jarvis is playing.

His novel, in broad outline, sticks to the known facts. There’s little doubt that Seymour and his publisher decided on the format The Pickwick Papers would initially take. The idea was to chronicle the pastimes of an imaginary gentlemen’s club in a pretend periodical whose “editor” would, in fact, write the whole text. The 24-year-old Dickens — already being published under the pseudonym “Boz” — was recruited to be that “editor” after other writers didn’t work out. By Dickens’s own later account, he balked at the constraint of allowing Seymour’s illustrations to shape his story­telling. The collaboration lasted for only two issues — featuring seven Seymour etchings — before Seymour killed himself in April 1836.

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On Edward Hopper

by Mark Strand

New York Review of Books
June 25, 2015

This essay by Mark Strand was originally written for The New York Review of Books as a review of the exhibition of Edward Hopper’s drawings at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2013. It was found as a handwritten text in his notebook after he died in November 2014 and transcribed by his literary executor, Mary Jo Salter.

—The Editors

Paints and scrapes, paints and scrapes to get something right, the something that is not there at the outset but reveals itself slowly, and then completely, having traveled an arduous route during which vision and image come together, for a while, until dissatisfaction sets in, and the painting and scraping begin again. But what is it that determines the success of the final work? The coincidence of vision—his idea, vague at first, of what the painting might be—and the brute fact of the subject, its plain obdurate existence, just “out there” with an absolutely insular existence.

Until, that is, Edward Hopper sees something about it as a possible subject for a painting and this image with its possibilities lodges itself in Hopper’s imagination and the formation of the painting’s content begins—content being, of course, what the artist brings to his subject, that quality that makes it unmistakably his, so when we look at the painting of a building or an office or a gas station, we say it’s a Hopper. We don’t say it’s a gas station. By the time the gas station appears on canvas in its final form it has ceased being just a gas station. It has become Hopperized. It possesses something it never had before Hopper saw it as a possible subject for his painting. And for the artist, the painting exists, in part, as a mode of encountering himself. Although the encountered self may not correspond to the vision of possibility that a particular subject seemed to offer up. When Hopper said, in an interview with Brian O’Doherty, “I’m after ME,” this is undoubtedly what he meant.

Hopper’s avowed uncertainty over whether or not he ever succeeded is perhaps what many painters experience. The point of arrival or the point when the painting is done cannot be known beforehand and yet cannot be totally unknown. A sense—it is no more than that, increasingly clearer and more convincing—of what the painting will look like when it is finished is all that guides the painter. And there is rarely any assurance that the painting is finally completed; the possibility always exists that a wrong turn has been taken, that what he ended up with bears little resemblance to that vague suggestion or hope of what the painting might be. And so, the scraping and painting begin yet again. With the uncertainty under which the painter labors, extended periods of doubt, it is a wonder that he can ever be free of anxiety or finish a work. Even the prodigiously talented Picasso needed constant reassurance.

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It’s Still a Scandal!

by Adam Thirlwell

New York Review of Books
April 23, 2015

One small scene from the annals of heroic modernism is the moment when, in the winter of 1921, the French novelist and critic Valery Larbaud gave the world’s first-ever talk on James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, at Shakespeare & Company, an Anglophone bookstore and lending library in Paris, run by a young American woman called Sylvia Beach. The book had still not been published—and Joyce was not well known. No critic had examined his work in depth, and not many of even the most literary people in England or America had heard of him. But in the last two or three years, Larbaud explained, Joyce had acquired an “extraordinary notoriety”—he had become the literary equal of Freud or Einstein. His name was an alluring rumor. Those who had read his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and especially those who had managed to read his new novel Ulysses, as serialized in the New York magazine The Little Review, all agreed.

And yet, Larbaud had to admit:

If you ask a member of the (American) Society for the Suppression of Vice: “Who is James Joyce?” you will receive the following reply: “He is an Irishman who has written a pornographic work called Ulysses which we have successfully prosecuted when it appeared in the Little Review in New York.”

For what had happened to Flaubert and Baudelaire, said Larbaud, had happened to Joyce. His art had been deemed obscene. Larbaud’s proposal, therefore, was to “try to describe the work of James Joyce as precisely as possible.” And then he began his lecture, using notes prepared by Joyce himself.

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The Floating Studio

by Colin B. Bailey

New York Review of Books
April 23, 2015

Online articles and blogs, and the streaming of lectures, have placed the last nails into the coffin of the small art book devoted to an illustrated talk by an eminent scholar, accessible to specialists and general readers alike. The Walter Neurath Memorial Lectures and the Council of the Frick Lecture Series are two such casualties (the former’s demise in 2000 preceded the Internet Age). And so the Getty Research Institute is to be commended for commissioning David Dollenmayer’s fine translation of Willibald Sauerländer’s Manet Malt Monet: Ein Sommer in Argenteuil, a lecture given in Munich in the summer of 2004, published by Verlag C.H. Beck of that city in 2012, and now—over a decade later—appearing in a handsomely designed English edition.

Now aged ninety, Sauerländer—a contributor to The New York Review for over thirty years—is a medievalist recognized above all for his work on Gothic and Romanesque sculpture and architecture. His interests have ranged widely to embrace Poussin, Rubens, Houdon, and Fragonard, but only very recently has he chosen to write on nineteenth-century topics (as in reviews in 2012 of exhibitions devoted to Corot and Renoir). “Trained in looking at things in a very intense way,” he has noted that the art historian needs to “absorb the emotional process in front of a work of art” and then “undergo the critical task of asking ourselves whether the emotional impact of the art is identical with the historical, or original, mission of the object.”

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Tennessee Williams on His Women, His Writer’s Block, and Whether It All Mattered

Tennessee Williams tasked James Grissom with seeking out each of the women (and few men) who had inspired his work—Maureen Stapleton, Lillian Gish, Marlon Brando and others—so that he could ask them a question: had Tennessee Williams, or his work, ever mattered?

Below is an excerpt from the book Follies of God, by James Grissom, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. Dana writes:

James Grissom wrote a letter to Tennessee Williams in 1982, when he was only 20 years old, asking for advice. Tennessee unexpectedly responded, ‘Perhaps you can be of some help to me.’ Ultimately he tasked Grissom with seeking out each of the women (and few men) who had inspired his work—among them Maureen Stapleton, Lillian Gish, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, and Marlon Brando—so that he could ask them a question: had Tennessee Williams, or his work, ever mattered? This is Grissom’s account of their intense first encounters, in which Tennessee explains his thoughts on writing, writer’s block, and the women he wrote.

“Perhaps you can be of some help to me.”

These were the first words Tennessee Williams spoke to me in that initial phone call to my parents’ home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It was September of 1982, a fact I noted in a small blue book. The book was new and had been purchased for an upcoming test in World History that I would not be taking because Tennessee invited me to lunch in New Orleans, and I accepted.

I know that pleasantries were exchanged, and he laughed a lot—a deep, guttural, silly theatrical laugh—but the first quotation attributable to Tennessee Williams to me was the one I wrote in my small blue book.

Perhaps you can be of some help to me.

How could I be of help to Tennessee Williams? How, when in fact I had written to him, several months before, seeking his help? From a battered paperback copy of Who’s Who in the American Theatre, I had found the address of his agent (Audrey Wood, c/o International Famous Agency, 1301 Avenue of the Americas), and had written a letter—lengthy and containing a photograph, and, I’m thankful, lost to us forever—asking for his advice on a writing career. I wrote that his work had meant the most to me; that I was considering a career in the theater. I also enclosed two short stories, both written for a class taken at Louisiana State University. It was a time I recall as happy: I was writing, and exploiting the reserves of the school’s library and its liberal sharing policy with other schools. I was poring over books and papers that related to Tennessee and other writers I admired.

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‘Manet Paints Monet’

by Colin B. Bailey

New York Review of Books
April 14, 2015

In the summer of 1874, Claude Monet was living in Argenteuil, a suburb on the Seine some seven miles north of Paris, and Édouard Manet was spending time at his family’s property in nearby Gennevilliers, just across the river. Two paintings made by Manet that summer are the subject of Willibald Sauerländer’s new book, Manet Paints Monet: A Summer in Argenteuil, which Colin B. Bailey reviews in The New York Review’s April 23 issue. Monet’s influence is crucial to what Sauerländer considers to be Manet’s “conversion” to Impressionism. Yet their acquaintance was not always amiable.

We present below a series of paintings by Manet, Monet, and Renoir, with commentary drawn from Bailey’s review.

The Editors

Édouard Manet: Olympia, 1863

Monet had first crossed Manet’s path at the Salon of 1865, where confusion resulted owing to the regulation of hanging works alphabetically by artists’ names. There Manet showed his highly controversial nude Olympia.

Claude Monet: A Seascape, Shipping by Moonlight, 1864

At the Salon, Monet’s two large seascapes had been placed near the older artist’s work, and the Monets were much admired. Infuriated at being congratulated for Monet’s seascapes, Manet apparently exclaimed, “Who is this rascal who pastiches my painting so basely?”

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John Steinbeck’s Pen: How the Joy of Handwriting Helps Us Draft the Meaning of Life

by Maria Popova

Brain Pickings
April 9, 2015

Edgar Allan Poe believed that handwriting is an indication of character, revealing our “mental qualities.” Mary Gordon saw in its “flesh, blood and the thingness of pen and paper” a reminder that “however thoroughly we lose ourselves in the vortex of our invention, we inhabit a corporeal world.” Indeed, the marks we leave on the paper are our most human trails of thought. Few things exercise — and exorcise — the not always seamless collaboration between brain and body like that direct line between the tip of the pen and the tip of the neuron. To be particular about one’s writing instrument is, then, to be particular about thought itself — one can’t afford to be careless about the corporeal transmitter of creative flow.

John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902–December 20, 1968) captures this curious role of the pen as a negotiator between brain and body in a series of disarming observations in Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (public library) — that remarkable volume that gave us a glimpse of how the great writer used the diary as a tool of discipline and a hedge against self-doubt when he embarked on the most intense writing experience of his life, the masterwork that earned him the Pulitzer Prize and paved the way for his Nobel Prize.

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A Window Into the Real Lauren Bacall

by Alexandra Jacobsmarch

New York Times
March 27, 2015

She loved animals. And piecework quilts. And Louis Vuitton suitcases.

So exalted was Lauren Bacall’s affair and subsequent ménage with Humphrey Bogart, it threatened at times to overshadow her acting career, as well as her other passions: for politics, literature and, yes, material possessions. Mr. Bogart died on Jan. 14, 1957; Ms. Bacall on Aug. 12, 2014, and against the title of the movie on whose set they first fell in love, her credo during the intervening years seems to have been “To Have, and Have a Lot.”

“Literally every tabletop had things on it,” said Jon King, a vice president and the director of business development at the auction house Bonhams New York, describing the 4,000-square-foot apartment in the Dakota building on 72nd Street in Manhattan that Ms. Bacall bought for tens of thousands of dollars in 1961 and crammed with art and antiques including (and this is but a small sample) Henry Moore and Robert Graham sculptures, David Hockney photographs, Picasso pottery, Chinese bronze figures, Congolese head rests, Louis XV bureaus, Edwardian bamboo, Victorian needlework and Majolica china — notably two nut dishes presided over by nibbling squirrels.

“Her taste was really eclectic,” Mr. King said with a note of understatement, describing a panoply for her many visitors and friends, who included Anjelica Huston, Mr. Graham’s widow; Barbra Streisand; and Ted Kennedy, who gave “Betty,” as Ms. Bacall was called by almost all, a signed lithograph of a daffodil painting he did for his wife Victoria. “Every time they turned, something caught their eye.”

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Goya: Order and Disorder

by Colm Tóibín

New York Review of Books
January 21, 2015

“There are two ways, perhaps, of looking at Francisco Goya,” writes Colm Tóibín in the Review’s December 18, 2014 issue. In the first version, Goya, who was born near Zaragoza in 1746 and died in exile in France in 1828, “was almost innocent, a serious and ambitious artist interested in mortality and beauty, but also playful and mischievous, until politics and history darkened his imagination…. In the second version, it is as though a war was going on within Goya’s psyche from the very start…. His imagination was ripe for horror.” We present below a series of prints and paintings from the show under review—the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s “Goya: Order and Disorder,” now closed—along with commentary on the images drawn from Tóibín’s piece. (The Editors)

Francisco Goya: Self-Portrait While Painting, circa 1795

Although Goya’s costume makes him appear the painter as performer, his face has nothing of the actor about it; he is almost comically ordinary as he sets about his work. His button nose lacks appeal. His hat, which has candleholders embedded in it, is too large. It is clear from the composition that he has no time for dullness. As you look at the eyes, the frank and pitying gaze, you get an effect that is quietly unsettling and disturbing.

Francisco Goya: Self-Portrait with Doctor Arrieta, 1820

This sombre self-portrait has elements of a Pietà, in which the stricken Goya, his left hand gripping the sheet in pain, is held in the tender arms of his doctor, with ghostly figures behind them. Goya’s instinct for theatricality, so apparent in the self-portrait made in the studio, returns now as an image of dark and unsparing self-exposure.

Francisco Goya: Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga, circa 1788

Light comes from the right of the painting above the cage; it appears as a gray-green glow and then as greenish shadow, leading to darkness on the left of the painting above the cats, becoming a sandy yellow at the boy’s feet and then a shadowy brown at the very front of the painting. The drama within this picture arises from an image of innocence and the sense of a great still artificiality that the boy exudes appearing to dominate the space and then slowly being undermined not only by the birds and the cats, but also by the background colors, which are ambiguous, uneasy, and almost ominous.

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Van Gogh: The Courage & the Cunning

by Michael Kimmelman

New York Book Review
February 5, 2015

“Don’t be cross with me that I’ve come all of a sudden,” Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother. He instructed Theo to meet him under the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. It was late February 1886. Vincent was about to turn thirty-three. He arrived in Paris to complete an artistic education that had so far yielded no financial returns for his long-suffering sibling paymaster; nor did Vincent’s career promise the slightest profit in future. Now Theo, a dealer at the art gallery Goupil & Cie, was expected to put him up.

As Julian Bell reminds us in a splendid new biography, Vincent had dabbled as a self-appointed preacher in the grimy coalfields and pit villages of the Belgian Borinage. He had mostly taught himself art on the margins of Antwerp, Brussels, and The Hague. Now he was just catching up with the Impressionists in Paris when the movement was nearly exhausted.

Mostly unimpressed, van Gogh saw the future of modernism in figures like Adolphe Monticelli, a mediocrity in multiple genres whose work he came across at a gallery run by a friend of Theo’s. Along with Seurat and Signac, Hiroshige and Hokusai, Monet and Toulouse-Lautrec, Monticelli would help point Vincent away from potato eaters and gray, wintry landscapes toward sunshine and the south. It turned out that Vincent’s obstinacy and sheer otherness, much as they pained friends and family and alienated strangers, bought him the perspective he needed to reach this juncture, where he could pick and choose his sources and stake out a path for himself.

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The Dark & Light of Francisco Goya

by Colm Tóibín

New York Review of Books
December 18, 2014

In the summer of 1969, as the violence intensified in Northern Ireland, the poet Seamus Heaney was in Madrid. Like any tourist, he went to the Prado, but not specifically, he later said, “to study examples of art in a time of violence.” He found, nonetheless, that some of Francisco Goya’s work on display “had the force of terrible events…. All that dread got mixed in with the slightly panicked, slightly exhilarated mood of the summer as things came to a head in Derry and Belfast.” He found Goya’s work “overwhelming,” and was fascinated at the idea of an artist confronting political violence “head-on.” In his poem “Summer 1969,” he wrote of his time in the heat of the Spanish city while Belfast burned:

I retreated to the cool of the Prado.
Goya’s “Shootings of the Third of May”
Covered a wall—the thrown-up arms
And spasm of the rebel, the helmeted
And knapsacked military, the efficient
Rake of the fusillade.

Heaney ended the poem with an image of Goya at work:

He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished
The stained cape of his heart as history charged.

There are two ways, perhaps, of looking at Goya, who was born near Zaragoza in 1746 and died in exile in France in 1828. In the first version, he was almost innocent, a serious and ambitious artist interested in mortality and beauty, but also playful and mischievous, until politics and history darkened his imagination. In this version, “history charged,” took him by surprise, and deepened his talent. In the second version, it is as though a war was going on within Goya’s psyche from the very start. While interested in many subjects, he was ready for violence and chaos, so that even if the war between French and Spanish forces between 1808 and 1814 and the insurrection in Madrid in 1808 had not happened, he would have found some other source and inspiration for the dark and violent images he needed to create. His imagination was ripe for horror.

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Taking a Wrench to Reality

by Julian Bell

New York Review of Books
December 4, 2014

The man who did the most to give Cubism a cohesive identity was Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. In early 1907, this progressive-minded twenty-two-year-old used funds from his German banking family to open a little gallery in the rue Vignon, just off the grands boulevards of Paris. He had an eye for the innovatory, and soon canvases by André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck were hanging on his walls. Two years earlier at the Salon d’Automne, the big event in the contemporary art calendar, these painters had been linked to Henri Matisse under the label les Fauves. But any group allegiance was now disintegrating. Matisse, serving on the 1908 Salon jury, rejected the latest work of another associate of les Fauves, Georges Braque, complaining that it was composed of “little cubes.” Kahnweiler promptly offered Braque a solo show.

Braque’s recently acquired friend Pablo Picasso was meanwhile starting to depend on purchases by Kahnweiler. The German was reliable: he made sure his painters had sufficient funds to continue with their artistic researches. Moreover, he was fastidious. By 1911 self-described “Cubists” had popped up all over Paris and were crowding out the Matisse contingent at the Salon, but of these only one, Fernand Léger, was let into the rue Vignon. Juan Gris, a personal protégé of Picasso’s, made it through the door soon after. Kahnweiler discouraged his exhibitors from submitting to the annual Salon, which he regarded as an occasion for contrived controversy. The sheer discretion of his operation gave it unique cachet, and the fortunes of all involved rose.

When war was declared in 1914, the French government impounded the gallery stock of this enemy alien. Stuck in neutral Switzerland, Kahnweiler composed Der Weg zum Kubismus (The Rise of Cubism), a philosophically reasoned advocacy of the work of Picasso, Braque, and Léger, his three “pathfinders of Cubism.” (Gris he favored with a later monograph.) In 1921, a year after it was published, word came down from the Elysée that the stock sequestered during the war must all be sold off. The market became flooded with hundreds of pre-war Cubist canvases, with the result that prices for them suffered a twenty-year slump. A chief beneficiary of this was a young and moneyed British aesthete, Douglas Cooper, who was able to acquire 137 Cubist pieces by the time the next war started.

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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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The Outsider Art of Tennessee

by Geoffrey O’Brien

New York Review of Books
October 23, 2014

Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh: John Lahr’s subtitle for his biography of Tennessee Williams nimbly fuses madness, spiritual quest, and sexuality in one inextricable formulation. The tone of the phrase alone—it comes from a 1937 diary entry—with its hint of what may now seem self-consciously overripe eloquence, its elusive mix of ironic gaudiness and open-hearted romanticism, already suggests a voice from a past more remote than could ever, to those of us who lived through Tennessee Williams’s era, have seemed possible.

That voice dominates Lahr’s exuberantly detailed and constantly engaging account: a voice of unabashed truth-telling, frequently hilarious interjections, and a sense of musicality that did not fail him. Its traces are scattered profusely in diaries, letters, memoirs, prefaces, newspaper articles, and interviews, and in the plays, poems, stories, and screenplays in which Williams never stopped exploring new frames within which to give shape and meaning to his life even as it appeared to be dissolving. Whatever his circumstances he never stopped turning himself inside out, fashioning voices to articulate what he found there. The dialogue continued to the nearly exhausted outer limit where it became an echoing chamber theater of isolation.

It was an isolation played out in public, however, and so Lahr’s book has more the quality of picaresque epic than of solitary portrait. It is an irresistible chronicle of midcentury American theater and of the media universe in which that theater still played an important role. Its pages teem with a multitude of other voices filling out or contradicting Tennessee’s testimony—among them Gore Vidal, Elia Kazan, Anna Magnani, the doomed Diana Barrymore, and the somewhat fantastical Maria St. Just, whose high-handed mismanagement of his literary estate makes a bizarre coda to the story—a hyperarticulate and often hyperbolic crew.

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Irresistible El Greco

by Ingrid D. Rowland

New York Review of Books
June 19, 2014

For many of the four hundred years since the death of Domenikos Theotokopoulos, the artist known to his Spanish neighbors as El Greco, his work was regarded with the same disdain as that of his younger contemporary Caravaggio. If Caravaggio’s detractors vowed that, as Poussin put it, he had “come into the world to ruin painting,” the Greek who made his career in the land of Don Quixote was “contemptible and ridiculous, as much for the disjointed drawing as for the insipid colors.” In the nineteenth century, El Greco’s monumental Burial of the Count of Orgaz lay rolled up and despised in a basement of the Toledan church of Santo Tomé, the venue for which he had painted it in 1586–1588 (and where it hangs again today in glory).

In the early twentieth century, the Benedictine sisters in the convent of Santo Domingo de Silos sold their altarpiece, an El Greco Assumption of the Virgin, to a Chicago art collector, just like many other Toledans who decided to unload their ugly, inconvenient canvases on wealthy foreigners just before the tides of taste began to turn. One Castilian count liquidated his El Greco to invest in a collection of contemporary art—yet it was modern painters who first began to open their eyes, and ours, to the color, the fantastic imagination, and the supreme elegance that “the Greek” brought to his work. By 1914, the three hundredth anniversary of his death, he could count admirers like Delacroix, Manet, Picasso, Miguel de Unamuno, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Benigno de la Vega-Inclán, who created the Museo del Greco in Toledo in 1911. The pintor extravagante, no longer an embarrassment, had become a guiding light.

The year 1914 was not an auspicious time to mount an international exhibition, as Europe prepared for self-lacerating war. One hundred years later, the continent may be racked by economic crisis, but it is a united Europe, in which all of the countries through which El Greco passed share the same currency and the same problems; furthermore, it was only Greece, Italy, and Spain together that could have made him an artist of such universal scope as well as startling individuality.

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A New ‘L’Étranger’

by Claire Messud

New York Review of Books
June 5, 2014

One of the most widely read French novels of the twentieth century, Albert Camus’s L’Étranger, carries, for American readers, enormous significance in our cultural understanding of midcentury French identity. It is considered—to what would have been Camus’s irritation—the exemplary existentialist novel.

Yet most readers on this continent (and indeed, most of Camus’s readers worldwide) approach him not directly, but in translation. For many years, Stuart Gilbert’s 1946 version was the standard English text. In the 1980s, it was supplanted by two new translations—by Joseph Laredo in the UK and Commonwealth, and by Matthew Ward in the US. Ward’s highly respected version rendered the idiom of the novel more contemporary and more American, and an examination of his choices reveals considerable thoughtfulness and intuition.

Each translation is, perforce, a reenvisioning of the novel: a translator will determine which Meursault we encounter, and in what light we understand him. Sandra Smith—an American scholar and translator at Cambridge University, whose previous work includes the acclaimed translation of Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française—published in the UK in 2012 an excellent and, in important ways, new version of L’Étranger.

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‘Majesty, Vehemence, Splendor’

by Andrew Butterfield

New York Review of Books
May 17, 2014

In 1909, Henry James wrote of seeing Paolo Veronese’s The Family of Darius before Alexander in London:

You may walk out of the noon-day dusk of Trafalgar Square in November, and in one of the chambers of the National Gallery see the family of Darius rustling and pleading and weeping at the feet of Alexander. Alexander is a beautiful young Venetian in crimson pantaloons, and the picture sends a glow into the cold London twilight. You may sit before it for an hour and dream you are floating to the water-gate of the Ducal Palace.

Long regarded as among the greatest Venetian paintings, it has attracted the intense admiration of many writers, including Goethe, Hazlitt, and Ruskin, as well as James. Its acquisition by the National Gallery in 1857 was considered a triumph; Queen Victoria even made a special visit to the museum just to view the picture.

It is now one of the high points in the magnificent show about Veronese on view at the National Gallery, the first comprehensive exhibition of the painter in over twenty-five years. For much of the twentieth century Veronese was regarded more as a skilled purveyor of decorative finishes than as a profound master, and his reputation was in decline, but of late there are signs of renewed interest, which this show and its catalog will certainly do much to advance. Perhaps more than any other picture in the show, The Family of Darius before Alexander reveals his great strengths as a painter; it also makes clear why he can seem so foreign to common modern ideals of art and of the artist.

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Quiet, Sensuous Piero

by Sanford Schwartz

New York Review of Books
March 20, 2014

American, or at least New York, lovers of the work of Piero della Francesca—love seems to be a better word than admiration to describe how people feel about this artist—have been given a rare two-part opportunity over the past year. Last winter and spring the Frick Collection brought together a small number of works by the fifteenth-century Italian painter, most coming from American museums. They were principally portraits of saints from an altarpiece, along with Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels, a strong (if not incandescent) picture from the Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It is the one “American” Piero that gives a clear taste of an aspect of his art that made him a particularly exciting figure for painters and writers in the early twentieth century—when he crowds together a number of figures in a tight space, making them feel full-bodied yet flat, like overlapping cards you hold in your hand in a game.

Now the Metropolitan Museum, in “Piero della Francesca: Personal Encounters,” has assembled a few pictures that fortuitously complement the Frick show, which emphasized the grave and hieratic side of the painter’s art. Organized by Keith Christiansen, a curator at the Met, the current exhibition is the first ever about Piero’s devotional works. They are small-size paintings created for bedrooms or set-apart areas in the home. In spirit they take us to much the same austere and bare-bones realm as his more public pictures. Yet they present more directly and pleasurably the qualities that make Piero such a special figure, even by the heady standards of the fifteenth century, when so many Italian and Flemish artists, newly working with oil paint, were finding one personal way after another to portray the actual, corporeal world they lived in.

Piero was an obsessively methodical artist. He spent his last decades—he died in 1492, probably around age eighty—not painting but, rather, writing treatises on geometry and perspective. His goal was to bring the laws of perspective and measurement to bear on his scenes, and in the process he turned figures and aspects of buildings, even items of clothing, into so many precisely self-contained shapes. Yet his militant orderliness was of a piece with an extraordinary feeling for character and emotion. In their bearing and marvelous faces, the people in his pictures are shy, and also aloof, in a way few artists have matched. His figures can be strangely contemporary in their sexiness, and there is nothing dated about the way they encounter and judge one another, or appraise us.

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