'Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib' (2007)

[On 21 November, I posted “A Passion for Art,” an article about my parents’ art collecting.  Prominently featured in both the article and the collecting was a painting by Colombian artist Fernando Botero, who was also the subject of several exhibits at the art gallery in which my parents had an interest.  Back in 2007, my mother and I went to a very special show of work by the artist, Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib, and I decided my archival report on the show would make a good follow-up to “A Passion for Art.”  So, here is a reedited version of that pre-ROT report.]

I spent ten days in Washington, D.C., through the Thanksgiving weekend because there were several art exhibits and some shows that seemed worth visiting.  I took my usual bus (the “Kosher bus”) down on Friday morning/afternoon, 16 November 2007, and on Saturday, my mother and I drove to the nearby American University Museum to see the exhibit of Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib paintings and drawings, part of AU’s “Art of Confrontation: AU Exploring Human Rights through Art,” a three-exhibit series at the museum  

The Botero exhibit was a display at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center of his paintings about the torture and mistreatment of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison, inspired by the photos that were released in April 2004. The depictions of torture are unnerving and the artist doesn’t intend to sell these works because, he says, he doesn’t want to profit from the pain of others.

Fernando Botero was born in 1932 in Medellín, Colombia (d. 2023), the second of three sons to David Botero, a salesman who traveled by horseback, and the former Flora Angulo, a seamstress.  David Botero died of a heart attack at the age of 40 when Fernando was four and his mother supported the family; his uncle Joaquín took a major role in his life.  Although isolated from art as presented in museums and other cultural institutes, Botero was influenced by the Baroque style of the colonial churches and the city life of Medellín, at that time a relatively small and isolated city, while growing up.  He began drawing and painting watercolors as a young child. 

He received his primary education at the Antioquia Ateneo and, thanks to a scholarship, he continued his secondary education at the Jesuit School of Bolívar.  In 1944, Joaquin enrolled him in a school for matadors for two years, but it was soon obvious that the boy was more interested in drawing and painting the bulls than in fighting them.  His earliest works, watercolors of bulls and matadors, were sold by a man who traded them for bullfight tickets.  In 1948, when he was just 16, Botero had his first illustrations published in the Sunday supplement of the El Colombiano, one of the most important newspapers in Medellín.  He used the money he made to attend high school at the Liceo de Marinilla de Antioquia.

                                                    

From 1949 to 1950, the young artist worked as a set designer before moving to Bogotá in 1951.  His first one-man show was held at the Galería Leo Matiz in Bogotá, a few months after his arrival.  In 1952, Botero travelled with a group of artists to Barcelona, where he stayed briefly before moving on to Madrid, where he studied at the Academia de San Fernando and spent his days copying the Old Masters at the Prado Museum.  In 1952, he traveled to Bogotá, where he had a solo exhibit at the Matiz gallery.

In 1953, Botero moved to Paris, where he spent most of his time studying the works in the Louvre.  He lived in Florence, Italy, from 1953 to 1954, studying the works of Renaissance masters.  While Botero was enrolled in art schools for periods during these early years, he considers himself to be essentially self-taught.  In 1958, he won the ninth edition of the Salón de Artistas Colombianos.

Botero’s early artistic inspiration began with the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera (1886-1957), José Orozco (1896-1974), and David Siqueros (1883-1949), as well as the Spanish masters Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Juan Gris (1887-1927). While Picasso’s Cubist breakthrough came after experimenting with the deconstruction of a guitar, Botero found his artistic insight in a mandolin. In 1956, while he was living in Mexico City, Botero painted a mandolin with an unusually tiny sound hole, allowing the instrument to suddenly take on exaggerated proportions (Still Life with Mandolin).  (Personal note: the Botero canvas my parents owned is Boy with Mandolin, ca. 1960.)  This began the artist’s iconic distortion of figures, known as “Boterismo,”  including people, animals, and objects, in his paintings and sculptures.

Botero maintains that “art should be an oasis, a place of refuge from the hardness of life,” but some of his work is blatantly political.  He and his art have even been the target of criminals and suspected terrorists: Colombian drug dealers tried unsuccessfully to kidnap him for ransom in 1994 and in 1995, a bomb was exploded beneath one of his sculptures in Medellín, killing 25 people.  In the 1990s, he started a series focusing on Colombia’s drug-related violence (which was largely centered in Medellín), including Death of Pablo Escobar, which depicts the notorious Colombian drug lord being gunned down by police.  Later, of course, the artist produced his Abu Ghraib series.  As Erica Jong, who wrote an editorial review of the exhibit for the Washington Post, averred, “Before the Abu Ghraib series I would have shrugged off this image.  Now I see all Botero's work as a record of the brutality of the haves against the have-nots.  I would be surprised if the Abu Ghraib series of images did not completely change our view of Botero as an artist.” 

In recent decades, he has lived most of the time in Paris but spends one month a year in his native city of Medellín.  The prolific artist has had more than 50 exhibits in major cities worldwide, and his work, which is seen all around the world in museums, private and corporate collections, and in public spaces, can command prices in the six and seven figures.  (Botero’s second solo show in the United States was Botero at the Gres Gallery, the gallery my parents part-owned in Washington, D.C., in 1960.  It was from this exhibit that they bought Boy with Mandolin.  It was also from this show that the Museum of Modern Art purchased Mona Lisa, Age Twelve, 1959.)  Over his career, Botero had donated more than 300 works of art, including both his own and those by 19th- and 20th-century European Masters, to cities, museums, and public spaces all around the world, such as Reclining Woman in the cultural plaza on Avenida José de Diego in San Juan across from the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico which I spotted when on a visit to the island in 2008.  In 1993, 14 of Botero's monumental, voluptuous bronze sculptures of people and animals were exhibited for about 2½ months along the grassy median strip of Park Avenue. 

Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib at the AU gallery, part of the new Katzen Arts Center on Ward Circle near my mom’s [then] apartment, from 6 November to 30 December 2007, is an exhibit of 79 paintings and drawings of the abuse and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.  The series was reportedly inspired, in part, by Picasso’s 1937 Spanish Civil War-protest painting, Guernica.  (Full disclosure: Mom went to the opening of this exhibit because Botero was there.  Furthermore, as I said, we own a Botero painting.)  Botero was so incensed and angered by the photos and reports of the acts by American soldiers entrusted with the oversight of the Iraqi prisoners that he spent much of 2004 and ’05 creating the series, which is graphic, disturbing, explicit, brutal, and, unfortunately, accurate.  “I did it because I was very angry.  It was a shock for the rest of the world—for everybody—but for an artist, even more,” said Botero in an International Herald Tribune review.  “The whole world and myself were very shocked that the Americans were torturing prisoners in the same prison as the tyrant they came to remove,” the Washington Post quoted Botero as stating to the San Francisco Chronicle. 

For those who don’t remember the scandal, the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison 20 miles outside Baghdad became widely known when CBS News broadcast a report in April 2004 on its television news-magazine 60 Minutes, followed by a detailed story by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker in May.  The war to unseat Saddam Hussein, the military dictator of Iraq who’d made the United States his principal enemy, began in March 2003 and Baghdad, the capital, fell in April.  The U.S. and its allies occupied Baghdad and took control of the prison in the city’s outskirts.  It housed both criminal detainees, including those arrested by the post-Hussein Iraqi government, and suspected Hussein and Ba’athist partisans and supporters, who were under the control of the coalition forces. 

In January, members of the U.S. unit serving as prison guards and interrogators, both military (at least one woman among them) and contracted civilians, were convicted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice of prisoner abuse, including the torture and humiliation of Iraqi detainees.  The report and published photos, taken by the perpetrators, horrified American citizens and the international community as well.  Fernando Botero began sketching the series in 2005 after “stewing over the outrage.”.  “I started seeing these images in my mind of what was going on,” the artist explained.  He completed the series around September 2006.

While the artist didn’t try to recreate the photos, he says he didn’t paint anything that wasn’t reported in the news media.  “I didn't invent anything,” said the artist.  “If I did, then all the rest of the paintings would lose their significance.”  The figures of prisoners, guards, and dogs, while bearing all the bulbous features of the artist’s habitual style, are nonetheless frighteningly realistic.  Zadzi, a reviewer on an on-line journal (who happens to be Egyptian-born), characterized the pictures as “a strange marriage of horror and caricature.”  Post critic Kennicott made an interesting point about this aspect of Botero’s series: 

These paintings leave you with the sense that two worlds have collided with very odd results.  The men at Abu Ghraib may not have been skeletal, but they weren't pleasantly plump, a condition that suggests (in artistic terms) bourgeois prosperity or complacency.  Indeed, being fat, in our image-conscious society, is almost the same as being guilty, and yet the guilt, at Abu Ghraib, rests squarely with the Americans—who are never explicitly represented as such; no identifying flags or insignia appear in any of these works.  The perpetrators are often faceless or are represented only by a hand or a boot coming in from the margin of the painting.

The artist has previously used his roly-poly figures as objects of amusement and fun—commenting wryly on the indulgences of the upper classes in his South American society. 

Whereas Botero’s typical paintings are brightly colored, however, the palette of the Abu Ghraib pictures is subdued: flesh tones, military olive drab, a kind of bile yellow for the floor tiles, and black for the darkness and the bag hoods the prisoners wear in some of the renderings.  Bright colors are reserved for what Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott designated “the paraphernalia of sadism: a blue latex glove worn by an American captor, strangely festive blindfolds, or bright-red women's underwear, used to demean and embarrass the men.”  Then there’s the dull, brick-red of the blood that stains the prison clothes of the abused men in many of the paintings.

These portrayals are not fun.  Botero composed the works after reading official reports of the atrocities, but he concentrated on the suffering and dignity of the victims, often naked and blindfolded or hooded, rather than their tormentors.  All of the images we saw in the photos are interpreted here, including sodomy and forced fellatio, as well as several images of guards urinating on prisoners.  There are also a number of details of bound hands and feet and one of a pair of hands, bound at the wrists and suspended over the unseen prisoner’s head from a ceiling.  Some of the scenes are very reminiscent, intentionally I believe, of crucifixion scenes and other depictions of Christian martyrdom.  In fact, Jack Rasmussen, director of the AU museum, acknowledged that Botero is “using the iconography of Christian art.”  Having noted the same parallels I did, Rasmussen continued, “In a way, you could argue that he’s making martyrs out of Arab men.”

The pictures, which are all untitled (they are given numbers, like prisoners I guess) are intentionally difficult to look at, graphic and unblinking; Botero believes that Americans have been willfully blind to the actions of our surrogates and their leaders—and I’m not sure he isn’t right.  (This atrocity isn’t an issue in the current presidential primary campaign—among Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Christopher Dodd, John Edwards, Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, and Bill Richardson for the Democrats and  John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Fred Thompson, Alan Keyes, Duncan Hunter, and Rudy Giuliani for the Republicans—and though Attorney General-designate Michael Mukasey, who replaced Alberto Gonzales at the end of the George W. Bush administration, was asked about waterboarding in his confirmation hearings—a depiction of which is the subject of one of Botero’s paintings—the actual use of torture wasn’t raised.  Mukasey was ultimately let off the hook—no pun intended—and confirmed even though he never answered the questions.)  In the Washington Diplomat, Rachel Ray calls the exhibit “an in-your-face experience of the media-reported atrocities.”  Just as the victims are blindfolded, the faces of the tormentors are unseen or hidden—they are anonymous, generic.  Often all we see of the American torturers is a latex-gloved hand, a boot kicking out of nowhere, or a leashed dog snarling  at a terrified prisoner.  Except that we know who they are, of course. 

Erica Jong noted that “Botero calls art ‘a permanent accusation,’” and posited that “his Abu Ghraib series seems to me more than an accusation.”  The novelist, poet, and nonfiction writer observed, “Botero’s Abu Ghraib series has been shown before, but never in Washington.  It is a moment: The people who got us into Abu Ghraib can contemplate what went on there.”  Jong added, “I dare them to look at these images and be unmoved.”  Also in the Post, Kennicott, who viewed the pictures in a New York City showing at the Marlborough Gallery (which handles Botero’s work), declared:

It is a remarkable show, and a disturbing one.  Few artists in this country have focused so obsessively on the events at Abu Ghraib, and even fewer have done it in a figurative, representational style.  And no artist with a style so recognizable as Botero's has dared to infuse his cash-cow calling card with such nakedly political sentiment. 

The artist doesn’t hold out any hope that his work will actually change anything: “Guernica was the greatest painting of the 20th century,” Botero asserted, “but it could do nothing against (Spanish dictator Francisco) Franco.”   Botero’s Abu Ghraib depictions, said Kennicott, “form a kind of history book, not one written by the victors but one sketched and colored by the meek of the earth, hidden away until the tables are turned and the truth can come out,” and the artist himself proclaimed, “But this will remind people of a dark moment of this government, of what is torture.”  

Perhaps not ironically, no U.S. museum would show the Abu Ghraib works until AU’s gallery the next year so they had their U.S. première here in a commercial New York gallery.  Rasmussen revealed that he had had to be especially persuasive to get the American University administrators to present the exhibit.  In the end, the museum director affirmed, the freedom of speech and academic inquiry prevailed.  The university spokeswoman, Maralee Csellar, attested, “Because the museum is linked to the university, we are allowed to be more open and daring with our exhibits,” and then Botero added, “There was criticism, phone calls, letters and hate mail.  It was expected.” 

The AU showing, which is the first exhibit of the entire series, is the opening of a tour to several U.S. galleries, as well as abroad, following New York’s Marlborough (18 October-21 November 2006) and the University of California at Berkeley from 29 January to 25 March 2007.  Botero has announced he will donate the entire collection to UC-Berkeley.  

Jong asked in her review if Botero’s art will have any lasting effect on our attraction to violence and brutality.  “No,” she said.  “But the role of the artist in raising our consciousness and bearing witness is essential.  The artist makes us open our eyes to our own cruelty, our own passivity, our own indifference.” 

[With a man in the Oval Office who, as a presidential candidate, said he “would absolutely authorize something beyond waterboarding,” Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib pictures may have even more significance now than they did in 2007.  Though I doubt the depictions of the depravity perpetrated by U.S. personnel at the Baghdad prison would have any effect on Donald Trump, it might remind those around him and the lawmakers in Congress of the excesses our country and its government have already committed.  As Botero himself has said, “I hope that these paintings will serve as a testimony through time.”]

A Passion For Art: My Parents’ Art Collecting

On Monday, 6 November, an exhibition of the small art collection assembled by my late parents over 40-some-odd years opened at the Stan Kamen Gallery at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.  This was the final act in a more-than-two-year process to make a continuing loan of the collection to the university.  I first contacted the university’s Reeves Collection, the division that oversees the school’s art holdings that are used in the art department and campus display, a short time after my mother, Judith (b. 1923), died in May 2015.  (My father, Eugene, b. 1918, had died in 1996.  I’ve written memoirs of both my parents for Rick On Theater: “Dad,” posted on 20 June 2010, and “Mom,” 1 November 2016.)  After negotiating several administrative and logistical hurdles, Washington and Lee agreed to accept the loan, which will be renewed every several years.  (W&L doesn’t take permanent or perpetual loans.)

I’m extremely pleased that the university agreed to this proposal.  My father was an alumnus of W&L’s class of 1940 and I’m a graduate of the class of 1969.  My father was a very active alumnus, serving on several committees in the years since World War II until his death, and Mother supported him wholeheartedly in all his efforts.  (An alumna of Elmira College in upstate New York, Mom essentially shifted her allegiance from her own alma mater and became a sort of daughter-in-law of Washington and Lee.)  Both my parents were particularly interested in the arts on the W&L campus, perhaps because I was an avid member of the Troubadours, the extracurricular university theater in my day, for my four years in Lexington.  Dad was particularly active in the development program for the Lenfest Center for the Arts, the home to the school’s fine and performing arts programs and activities (and the site of the Kamen Gallery).  He was on the development committee for the center, responsible for raising the money for its construction, and my parents were invited to attend the opening gala when the theater was inaugurated with a dedication ceremony and a production of Evita on Saturday, 25 May 1991.

Both Mother and Dad were very proud to have contributed to the Reeves Collection over the years, most significantly a pair of antique carved wood sculptures of Japanese deities.  When I came back briefly to New York City in June 2015 after my mother’s death in Maryland, I found a note of condolence from the directors of the Reeves Center and I decided to contact them to thank them for their sentiments and to broach the subject of the loan proposal.  My parents had been collecting art since the late 1950s and had gathered about 40 pieces of various forms (oil paintings, watercolors, prints, sculptures, tapestry) and periods.  Several of the pieces are large and together with the number, it was impossible for me to keep the art myself—unless I bought another apartment just for the collection.  (I actually remember reading of a man who did just that.  He lived in one apartment and kept a second one across town in which he stored his works of art.  Periodically, he’d swap out the pieces he displayed in his home with some stored in the other apartment and would thus rotate the art on his residence walls.) 

Two things I knew: I didn’t want to sell off the art—it had meant too much to my parents and, by legacy, to me as well—and I didn’t want to put it in some kind of permanent or long-term storage until I happened to move to larger quarters . . . or died.   A loan to some place that would agree to keep the collection together was my best solution, and my Dad’s and my alma mater was the optimum choice if they could be persuaded to be interested.  Luckily for me, as soon as I broached the idea to the W&L art folks, they expressed great interest in making the deal.  As it turned out, the university was looking for works to fill in gaps in its art holdings, particularly in “20th-century and non-Western art,” as Patricia Hobbs, Curator of University Collections of Art and History, put it to me.  Among the pieces in my parents’ collection are a Fernando Botero (Colombian) oil, an Antoni Tàpies (Spanish) oil, three Sam Gilliam (American contemporary) acrylic pieces of different styles, two Leonard Cave (American contemporary) marble sculptures, and a Fritz Scholder (Native American contemporary) bronze.  There are also several non-Western pieces, including pre-Columbian (Latin American terracotta figures), Chinese (19th-century scroll), Thai (18th/19th-century works on linen), and Japanese (18th-century woodblocks).  (There were a number of African pieces, but my mother gave them to me during her lifetime.  My will, however, stipulates that all my art will be bequeathed to Washington and Lee at my death, so the school will get that parcel as well as a few other interesting works in a decade or so.)

W&L doesn’t have an art gallery or museum like some colleges.  The art in its collection is primarily used in the classes of the Department of Art and Art History; selected works are displayed in academic and administrative buildings around the campus and changed periodically.  The rest are kept in storage, available for the art classes and swapped for those on display.  This struck me immediately as an ideal situation because I believe my parents would not only approve, but actually delight in the arrangement.  Hanging the art in buildings where students and faculty come and go daily, rather than corralling it in a special space designated an “art gallery” where people have to go expressly to see it, seems ideal for art that had been part of the home I grew up in and saw every day as I went about the ordinary business of life.  My family didn’t go to a museum to see their art, why would they want anyone else to have to? 

And using the works in classes is a benefit it goes without saying would please my father especially.  I always felt he’d have been an exceptional teacher.  He was a kind of one first as the director of the Amerika Haus in Koblenz, West Germany, his Foreign Service post in the early ’60s, where his job was to inculcate the idea of America and the history of the U.S. to post-war Germans; and later, as a volunteer docent at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington in the ’80s, explaining some of the works of art there to museum-goers.  (Mother, too, was involved in teaching, volunteering in the D.C. public schools’ reading programs and screening applicants for high school exchange programs from Russia for Youth for Understanding.)  I know this proposition would meet with their approval all around.  (The Lenfest Center exhibit, which will remain on view until 30 June, will be the only time at W&L that the whole collection will be shown together while the university retains it.  It’s entitled A Passion for Art, which I’ve borrowed for the title to this article.  It expresses perfectly my folks’ approach to art collecting, as I hope you’ll see.)

The loan arrangements and the Lenfest exhibit are also the culmination of my parents’ nearly 50-year adventure in art collecting.  It started in 1958 or ’59 when my father bought a part ownership in the Gres Gallery in Washington, a respected venue for contemporary one-artist and theme shows.  It was a total impulse buy: Dad came home one day and pretty much exclaimed, “Guess what I bought!”  Of course, we had no idea—my brother and I were all of about 10 and 12 at this point—and when my father told us he’d bought into an art gallery, Mom asked, “What  kind of art gallery?”  “Modern art,” Dad replied, and Mom came back, “But we don’t know anything about modern art!”

That was true, too.  There was certainly more on the walls of my family’s home at this point—they weren’t bare as far as I can recall—but I only specifically remember three pieces that predate the Gres Gallery days.  Two were old-fashioned Romantic oil paintings that I recall had been presents from my mother’s father as house-warming gifts for my folks’ first apartment as a married couple.  One was a picture of four men playing dice, painted according to some notes of my father’s, by German artist Claus Meyer (1856-1919).  (A quick search on the Internet reveals a work called The Dice Game by Meyer, painted in about 1900, that strongly resembles my recollection of the painting my parents owned.)  The other, essentially its mate (though the artists are almost certainly not the same), is a painting by an unknown painter of two small children playing with a cat in what looks like a farmyard.  Both paintings are dark and painted in the style of a late-19th-century oil, framed in elaborate gold-leafed wood frames.  I was never partial to them, but my cousin loved them and my parents gave them to her when she got married in the ’70s. Today they hang in her dining room in Bethesda.  (My grandfather was her great uncle.)

The third piece of art that my parents had when I was a little boy was a mid-20th-century Impressionist painting, Out My Apartment Window (ca. 1948) by Maurice Bizot, a French artist who lived in the late 19th to middle 20th centuries.  This was the first piece of art my parents bought, a good decade before they became immersed in the world of contemporary art through their experience with Gres.  It's certainly not a great piece of art, and Bizot’s almost unknown.  He has almost no Internet footprint; even his life dates are unrecorded.  I know from what my folks told me years later that they bought this painting without any knowledge of art or artists and the desire was just for a piece of décor that they liked.  I don't know where they bought the painting—probably a gallery in Washington, but it could have been New York (where both sets of grandparents lived then)—but I suspect it was the 1940s equivalent of art sold at those motel exhibits that are advertised on TV late at night.  Nonetheless, it had sentimental value to my parents and it's rather a good example, technically at least, of the techniques and criteria of an Impressionist painting, even though it was painted decades after the true Impressionist era.  I always had a fondness for it, too, mostly for its view out an apartment window.  I always liked to imagine I was looking down on a Paris street, perhaps in Montmartre.

That was the extent of my parents’ involvement with art, modern or otherwise, until Gres Gallery.  My folks got interested in modern art when Dad made that impulse-buy and they threw themselves into the operation of the gallery—though Mother was the principal activist (Dad had a day job, of course—two, actually).  I got into the act, too, going with Mother to the 20th Street gallery near DuPont Circle to help stuff envelopes and such.  For all of us, that engagement was a total-immersion course in contemporary American and Western art and artists.  What I found most exciting was that the vernissages rotated among the six or so households, so when my folks hosted the parties, the décor had to include displaying some of the artist’s (or, sometimes, artists’) work in our home.  I helped in the set dressing, so not only did I get to see “real” art at the gallery, but I got to have this art in my house, at least temporarily.  It was like actually having taken one of those imaginary midnight shopping trips Mom and I later would joke about after seeing a good museum exhibit.  What’s more, I got to meet actual artists.  This whole venture was an art education for all of us and an adventure for me, and it lasted well beyond the demise of Gres Gallery in 1961 or ’62 to the end of my parents’ lives.

Founded around 1957 by a Spaniard named Tana Gres, the gallery was purchased in ’58 or ’59 by a consortium of amateurs put together by Beatrice (Mrs. Hart) Perry who trained as a sculptor.  With Beati as managing partner, Gres held first-in-America exhibits by artists from Europe, South America,  and beyond, such as painter and sculptor Wojciech Fangor of Poland (1922-2015), Colombian painter Fernando Botero (1932-2023), and Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929).  Beati Perry (1921-2011) had little interest in showing local art because she didn’t want Gres to become known as a Washington gallery, so several artists like Kenneth Noland (1924-2010) and Morris Louis (1912-62) never showed at the gallery.  Washington, however, had a lively and active art scene.  Not only have the city’s art museums such as the Corcoran Gallery (established in 1874), the Phillips Collection (1921), the National Gallery of Art (1941), and the various Smithsonian facilities (Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1829; National Portrait Gallery, 1968; Renwick Gallery, 1972; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1974; along with several specialized repositories) been important venues for displaying and viewing art of many cultures and eras, but Washington also had long had a vibrant retail gallery presence, including Gres; the Jefferson Place Gallery (1957-75), Gres’s principal competition; and the renowned Washington Gallery of Modern Art (1961-68), catering to the many collectors in the metropolitan area and beyond.  Since World War II, the Nation’s Capital has been a true art center, and it even spawned its own art movement, the Washington Color School (of which Noland and Louis were among the adherents), that flourished from the 1950s to the 1960s.  

My parents began exploring this aspect of our hometown once the Gres Gallery bug had bitten them.  Mother already had a couple of friends who were Washington artists.  Minnie Klavans (1915-99), the wife of contractor Elmer Klavans, who specialized in restorations (and did the renovation of the house in Barnaby Woods my family moved to in 1958), was an award-winning painter, sculptor, and jewelry-maker; Lila Oliver Asher (b. 1921), a friend of Mother’s from their childhoods (Lila had been Mom’s camp counselor), is an internationally esteemed printmaker, sculptor, and watercolorist.  Mom and Dad, who owned one of Lila’s prints (I also own one) and four of Minnie’s paintings and prints (plus one small painting the artist gave Mom in lieu of a greeting card—which I now have), added to these acquaintanceships by becoming friendly with other area artists they met once their interest in the work had been piqued. 

Among these new friends were Jacob Kainen (1909-2001), a painter, printmaker, collector, art historian, and curator of the Division of Graphic Arts at the Smithsonian’s U. S. National Museum (later the National Museum of American History); sculptor Leonard Cave (1944-2006), whom my folks met through friends; and Sam Gilliam (b. 1933), a painter who was a later member of the Washington Color School.  Sam’s partner, Annie Gawlak, who’s also his manager, is a gallery-owner in the Nation’s Capital and Mom and Dad frequently visited her various galleries in Georgetown or Logan Circle just to see what she was showing.  They also struck up an acquaintanceship with American sculptor Chaim Gross (1904-91) and visited him several times at his studio in Provincetown, Massachusetts, when my folks had a Cape Cod summer house in Brewster.  Their collection includes three Gilliams, two Grosses, two Caves, and a Kainen.  (One of the Grosses and the Kainen are now in my possession.)

They also got to know David Lloyd Kreeger (1909-90), an art philanthropist (who’d been a benefactor of the Museum of African Art for which my dad had worked) and recipient of the 1990 National Medal of Arts, who built a mansion for himself and his wife on Washington’s exclusive Foxhall Road, designed in 1963 by architect Philip Johnson and built in 1968, which was intended to become a museum to display his art collection after his death.  My folks were invited to see the museum-home before it was opened to the public (I got to tag along), and the funny thing was—it felt more like the Kreegers were living in a museum than in a home that would eventually be transformed into a museum.  Kreeger, who in his other life was formerly the president, chairman, and CEO of GEICO, the insurance giant, had the reputation in the D.C. art scene of having bought the worst works of the greatest artists—and I have to say that what we saw at the Kreeger mansion that afternoon bore this rep out.  (The Kreeger Museum opened to the public on 1 June 1994.)

The group ownership of Gres Gallery lasted only three or four years, but the association impelled my parents into an exploration of contemporary art from Europe, the United States, and Latin America.  Their artistic interests soon broadened, however.  Dad’s volunteer stint from the late ’60s into the ’70s as Director of Development for the private Museum of African Art, precursor to the present National Museum of African Art on the Mall, generated an enduring interest in the art of sub-Saharan Africa and trips to China, Thailand, India, Nepal, and Japan spawned an attraction to Asian art.  Visits to the American Southwest and to Mexico and Central America resulted in an affinity for Native American and pre-Columbian art, as well. 

Vacations always included visits to the local art museums and they often went on trips that were expressly arranged as art tours organized by the Smithsonian or other art institution.  Frequently, these trips included visits to artists’ studios—and they not uncommonly brought home a new work of art with which they’d fallen in love.  A trip to Mexico City in 1981 yielded Personaje de Perfil ("Head of a Man," 1980), a mixografia/aguafuerte etching by Ruffino Tamayo (1899-1991).  A visit to Los Angeles in 1987 resulted in the purchase of Mother’s favorite piece of art, Stanley Boxer’s (1926-2000) Highfromblare (High From Blare) (ca. 1987), a large mixographia monotype on white linen, and one to Dallas the same year netted Another Mystery Woman (ca. 1987), a bronze sculpture by Native American artist Fritz Scholder (1937-2005), whose work we later encountered in 2002 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Scholder had lived and taught. 

When my folks took a trip to Yugoslavia in 1981, they went to the government-sponsored artists’ colony in Kovačica (now part of Serbia) and purchased a naïve/folk art oil on canvas entitled Bride and Groom (Bridal Couple) from the artist, Martin Paluska (1913-84).  They had arrived in the little town (population then, about 8,000), and went to the municipal showroom, where samples of all the artists’ work were on display.  They liked Paluska’s painting of the couple in their traditional wedding garb and went to the artist’s home and studio.  Negotiating through the painter’s wife, who spoke some German, my parents explained that they liked the painting they’d seen at the showroom and wanted to buy one like it—but in a different color scheme.  Was that possible?  Paluska assured them it was a perfectly common request and my parents placed the order for the painting to be created and shipped to them in the States.  Three months later, the notification came that the painting was ready as requested and had been shipped. 

Of course, the element that set my parents’ art collecting apart from many other art patrons was that they didn’t buy as an investment, and they didn’t buy work by famous artists—or artists they thought might become famous.  They bought only what they really liked.  As a result, the growing collection represented an expression not only of their taste in art, but of their enthusiasm; it was a reflection of their emotional responses to the painting or sculpture—and to the artist.  Consequently, the collection meant much more to my folks than an assemblage of attractive decorations; the art was a treasured facet of their life together.  One suggestion of this is that Mother stopped buying art after Dad died.  It was something they did together, as a couple; it wasn’t an activity either indulged in individually.  (The one exception was Botero’s Boy with Guitar, 1960.  Mother bought that as a 42nd birthday gift for my father from her, my brother, and me; it was one of the earliest art purchase after we’d become involved with Gres, from which it was purchased at the artist’s second show there, Botero in October 1960, and that situation never arose again.)

(My parents never again bought art for each other—I don’t think this was some kind of pact; it just developed that way—but they did buy art for me and my brother.  The very next purchase, also from Gres, was Intermezzo, 1958, by Norman Carton, 1908-80, in December 1960, a gift my folks made to me for my 14th birthday.  Unlike Botero, who soon became world-famous, Carton, who was on the faculty of the New School for Social Research—now known simply as The New School—in New York City, never became well known outside art circles.  Nonetheless, I cherish the little, heavily impastoed, multi-colored abstract expressionistic oil as much as any piece of art I own.  Almost 30 years after it was painted, when the oil paint finally began to dry inside the thick blobs, it began to flake and peel away from the canvas and I knew I’d lose the painting if I didn’t do something.  I asked my dad, then working as a docent at the National Portrait Gallery, to find a conservator who might be able to save the Carton and I ended up paying five times the purchase price—but a quarter of its estimated value at the time—to stabilize it.  The expense was more than worthwhile to me.)

Along with Boy with Guitar (also called Boy with Mandolin) and Intermezzo, my parents acquired several pieces from Gres, all within the short period between 1959 and the gallery’s demise in 1961 or ’62.  Among these, the foundation of their small collection, were Pegasus (1951) by Spanish painter Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012); Biblique (1959) by Aleksander Kobzdej (Polish, 1920-72); Ossidiana VI (1959), aluminum gel on canvas by Franco Assetto (Italian, 1911-91); and an untitled pen-and-ink drawing  (ca. 1959) by Rafael Alvarez Ortega (Spanish, b. 1927), part of his line-drawing series “Los Niños del Mar” (“Children of the Sea”).  (The last two are in my possession now.)  One piece which is no longer in the collection, a Yayoi Kusama canvas, an untitled 51"-square, red-and-black oil from her “Infinity Net” paintings, was bought from one of the 1960 shows of her work at Gres; Mom sold it in 1996.

The Kusama canvas was the only piece of art my parents sold from their collection.  They did give the two Romantics to my cousin and over the years, they gave a number of works to me; in the last several years of Mother’s life, she decided to give me pieces of art instead of presents on my birthdays and other holidays, so some things that were originally part of my parents collection are now in my home.  They never, however, sold another work of art other than the Kusama.

The Yayoi Kusama Infinity Net painting, along with Kobzdej’s Biblique, are artifacts in a couple of historically interesting art events at Gres in which my parents participated.  One early exhibit Beati Perry organized at the gallery was Six Japanese Painters in 1960, a display of Japanese artists working in Yōga, or contemporary Western-style painting, rather than Nihonga, traditional Japanese forms—something that was unfamiliar to American collectors at that time.  Six Japanese Painters was so noteworthy (not to mention popular) that it toured the country, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.  Kobzdej was part of a show that was even more striking, a group of Polish painters, which also included Fangor, who were working in contemporary forms instead of the approved Soviet style of Socialist Realism.  This work wasn’t officially sanctioned in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe and had never been allowed outside the region before, but Perry put together 15 Polish Painters at Gres and it, too, was borrowed in its entirety by MoMA in 1961. The show was still only quasi-officially recognized: the Polish ambassador didn’t come to the opening—I believe he came privately later—but the embassy did send a middle-ranking diplomat as a representative. 

My parents eventually met Kobzdej, but it was hard to do because of the Cold War.  The artists hadn’t been allowed to come to Washington or New York for the exhibits; the art was okay to leave the country, but the artists apparently weren’t.  The Cold War was a truly Kafkaesque time!  I wasn’t there when my folks met the artist (I was probably at school), but I heard the tale.  Kobzdej had been allowed to travel a little in Western Europe by then (the early ’60s), but he was closely monitored and his itineraries were carefully laid out so as to leave little opportunity to socialize with Westerners—or, worse, defect.  Somehow my folks had learned the artist was going to be somewhere in West Germany—I guess they must have been in correspondence—so they planned to go there at the same time and try to see him.   Anyway, they didn’t connect—either Kobzdej’s schedule changed or my parents couldn’t get to see him in person.  (The same thing happened to a friend and me trying to connect with his pen-pal in the Soviet Union.)  But he was going to be in another town later or on another trip, and this time they were able to get together and had a long talk about his work and travels and my folks’ lives in Germany—just chitchat (I imagine they were monitored; it would have been the practice in the Cold War that Kobzdej have a minder).  I do remember that he was delighted that my parents had one of his paintings—I think he remembered the specific one.  (When Mom met Tàpies years later, he didn’t recall the Pegasus we had!)

The subsidiary consequence of the way my parents bought their art was that it came to mean more to me than mere possessions as well.  I’ve already said that the art was more important to me than the furniture or my mother’s jewelry, or the set of crystal, or the sterling flatware.  Those were nice—my parents had wonderful taste and Mother had an eye for home decorating—but I wasn’t ever going to use them, so I gave some of it to family members and sold the rest at auction.  But I couldn’t do that with the art, as I explained.  It’s not even quite that I “grew up with it.”  I didn’t live in my parents’ home from 9th grade on; I came home for holidays when I was at school and visits after I was an adult—but I didn’t live there anymore.  But the art was somehow special—and it wasn’t only because of the way Mom and Dad acquired it.  I love it, too, separate from its association with my folks—probably because I went though that initiation back in the late ’50s along with my parents.  I suspect it made a stronger impression on me, at 12, 13, and 14, than maybe it did on Mom and Dad.  (The experience doesn’t seem to have had the same effect on my brother, two years my junior.)

The collecting, as I said, went on in earnest from 1959 until a few years before my father’s death in 1996.  I moved out of my parents’ home in September 1961 to go away to school, but until college, I returned home regularly.  So the art that was accumulated between 1960 and 1965 might as well have been mine in the sense that I lived with it almost continually as I was growing up.  As I told people at Washington and Lee when I was there for A Passion for Art, some of those works became like old friends.  My relationship with the pieces added later, after I was in the army and then had my own home in New York City, was different—even though some of my favorite pieces of art in the collection are among these.  But those pieces are just that: works of art I like and admire, not special friends I visited when I came to see my parents.  Among these are Sam Gilliam’s Chinese (1990), a formless canvas of many-colored acrylic which is shaped differently every time it’s hung and takes on a completely different character depending on who’s done the installation.  (Gilliam himself hung the piece the first time it was installed in my parents’ Washington, D.C., apartment in 1990.  He rehung it for Mother when she moved several years later to another apartment, and it was different in both apartments: in the first, it bent around the corner of an entranceway from the dining room into the living room; in the second, a lobe reached up the wall onto the ceiling.)  Another favorite is a maroon-and-white op-art tapestry by Victor Vasarely (French/Hungarian, 1906-97).  Both Gilliam and Vasarely are artists my parents liked particularly; they owned three Gilliam works (and, as I recounted, he became a friend) and two Vasarelys, plus a pair of Vasarely “wearable art” cufflinks, Jolie (silver and black enamel, 1988), Mother and I bought for Dad as a gift for his 70th birthday.  (I also own a Gilliam—and I have the Vasarely cufflinks, which Mom gave me after Dad died.  I made a particular point of wearing the jewelry to the 14 November reception at the Kamen Gallery that marked the exhibit’s opening.)

I guess the upshot is that my parents passed on to me an affection for this collection because of the way they brought it together.  I’ve affirmed that my mother and father didn’t buy art because they saw it as an investment; it wasn’t a statement of any kind, either.  It was more than just decorative, pretty things to put around the house or apartment—although it definitely served that purpose as well.  They bought what they truly loved, which is why I found the exhibit title so apt: they undeniably had a passion for art.  But they also developed a love of the process of collecting, going to galleries and museums to see the work of artists, to studios where they met the artists in whom they took an interest, getting to know some along the way.  Art and art-collecting became one of my parents’ greatest pleasures; even though my mother stopped acquiring art after my father’s death, she never stopped enjoying seeing it and being around it.  Mom and Dad went to art museums and galleries almost as far back as I can remember and later took trips, as I’ve noted, expressly to see art and artists.  We always included art museums, especially museums of local art, in our trips in the U.S. and abroad and when Dad died, Mom often saved those kinds of visits for when we visited one another.  She began giving me art as gifts not because it was easier than buying presents, but because she wanted me to have the pieces—and she knew I’d love them, too. 

The collected works had special meaning to Mom because their assembling had been an endeavor she and my father shared.  Each piece reflected something unique.  I have anecdotes about many of the works in the collection—Mom had stories about all of them.  As sentimental as it sounds to articulate it, my parents’ art collection was brought together with love.  More than anything else they left me, the art collection holds the most meaning for me.  In a way, I’m glad I can’t display it in my home.  If I did, no one would see it except me and a few friends and relatives.  On loan to Washington and Lee University, where it can be seen around the campus by students, faculty, and visitors (and W&L is a historic school with a campus designated a National Historic Landmark and renowned as the “most beautiful college campus in America,” so it gets a fair number of visitors), I get to share it with others—even if they don’t actually know why they’re seeing it.  (Pat Hobbs told me before A Passion for Art opened that there was a lot of buzz around the campus and after the reception she confirmed that the attendance was the largest ever in the Kamen Gallery and had included not only faculty and staff, but students and community members as well.  I hope that’s a harbinger of interest to come.)

[I’ve covered art and artists a fair amount on Rick On Theater, including some of the painters and sculptors named above.  Both “Washington Art Matters,” posted on 5 September 2013, and “The Washington School of Color,” 21 September 2014, touched on some of the art history mentioned here as well as several of the artists shown at Gres Gallery and included in my folks’ collection.  Sam Gilliam, who figures in both the general articles, is featured in “Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin,” 26 June 2011; “Lila Oliver Asher,” 26 September  2014, and “Yayoi Kusama,” 18 May 2017, are profiles of the artists of the titles.  There’s also a report on Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian, a two-part exhibit at the two branches of the National Museum of the American Indian in 2008-09 which I posted on 20 March 2011.]

Frankie

by Kirk Woodward

[I hadn’t expected Kirk to return to Rick On Theater so soon after making such a terrific contribution as “The Red Letter Plays, Continued” (1 November), my friend’s “continuation” of my reportage on the Signature Theatre Company’s revivals of Suzan-Lori Parks’s two Scarlet Letter-inspired plays, In the Blood and Fucking A.  (My reports were posted on 12 and 17 October, respectively.)  But, lo and behold, here he is again with a consideration of Frankie Valli in concert—some 55 years after he fronted The Four Seasons (as chronicled in the recent juke box stage musical Jersey Boys and the 2014 film adaptation).  In “Frankie,” Kirk focuses on Valli’s musicality, his singing and his stage presence.  It’s not so much a review as a personal appreciation from a long-time fan—though Kirk sees Valli’s flaws as a performer as well as his many strengths and assets.  Like all of Kirk’s posts on ROT, “Frankie” reveals some profound points about rock and pop performance and the effects of longevity on our veteran musical performers.]

Enjoy ‘em while we’ve got ‘em . . . .

Sometimes an appearance by a performer comes with a question. Lawrence Olivier had memory trouble for a while – would that keep him from remembering his lines in The Merchant of Venice? Richard Burton had back trouble – would that make him less effective in the revival of Private Lives? Any numbers of singers have had substance abuse and behavioral problems – will they show up for their concerts? Will they be late? Will they be able to perform?

When I saw the singer Frankie Valli at the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, New Jersey, on November 3, 2017, the question – one could sense that the audience had it in mind – was: would Valli be able to sing the piercing falsetto notes that he sang on the famous Four Seasons recordings of the 1960’s and 1970’s? Valli is, after all, 83 years old.

The answer, to the great relief of those of us who were there, is yes, he can.

There were several aspects of the concert that can be identified as concessions to age. For one thing, in the glory days of the Four Seasons, there were four singers, including Valli, some of whom also played instruments, and all of whom did dance steps.

Since the 1970’s, Valli has toured as “Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons,” with four other singers (Todd  Furnier, Brian Brigham, Brandon Brigham, and Landon Beard, according to Wikipedia), none of them original Seasons, backing him up vocally, and doing the Temptations-derived dance moves that Valli doesn’t do any more. (He did essay a couple of cautious choreographed movements late in the show.)

I am pretty certain as well that the keys of the songs have been lowered, so that Valli’s high notes don’t have to be quite as high any more as they used to be. If I’m correct about this, however, the use of the lower keys is nevertheless not particularly distracting

Most importantly, Valli paces his concert (about an hour and a half long) well, particularly in regard to the spectacular notes of some of the songs. By my count he did not sing anything using falsetto until the third number, and then only sparingly – the songs are sequenced so he doesn’t have to.

Little by little, the falsetto sections get longer, until he is really belting them out in “Stay,” after which he said, the night I was there, “I think I hurt myself on that one.” By the end of the show, when the big hits (and terrific songs) like “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Bye Bye Baby,” and “Let’s Hang On” make their appearance, his high notes are strong. A stunning demonstration of this was an a cappella (that is, unaccompanied) verse of “Sherry,” sung by only Valli and the Four Seasons to brilliant effect.

I learned from an actor, Jarrod Spector, who played a remarkable “Frankie Valli” in the musical Jersey Boys (which ran on Broadway from 2005 through 2017), that Valli advised him not to hit the falsetto notes too hard – to take it easy on them, not try to bellow each one. Valli clearly takes his own advice – he seems barely to open his mouth, which indicates that he is not overworking his vocal equipment. This may have something to do with why it has stayed in good shape for so long.

For that matter, Valli is by no means just a high note singer. His “regular” singing voice is notable – the listener can recognize it anywhere by its mix of clarity and growl. He would be a distinctive singer of popular songs if that were all the voice he had. The novelty of the high falsetto tones, of course, set the group apart from others, as did Brian Wilson’s pure falsetto tones for the Beach Boys. But Valli would probably have found a career path anyway…

Maybe in Las Vegas. He has acknowledged that his idol was Frank Sinatra. A good deal of his present show has a Vegas feel about it, a night club feel – although I suspect that some of the items that feel that way were added for the appearances of his concerts on Broadway in 2012, 2016, and 2017, particularly a sentimental film segment over a song called “Harmony” I hadn’t previously heard.

I have always loved the songs the Four Seasons recorded. For a long time I had to defend this opinion, but the task has gotten easier since the massive success of Jersey Boys. The fact is that the music of the Four Seasons has always occupied an odd space between Las Vegas style entertainment, doo wop singing, novelty acts, and rock. To specify:

Las Vegas style entertainment

I felt this both times I saw the original group, in Louisville, Kentucky. In 1964, I noted in my journal that “to my surprise [I was already a fan of their records], I didn’t like them at all,” which I believe I wrote because I thought they had a “night club” rather than a “rock” feel to their performance. I was more specific when, after the second time I saw them, in 1967, I wrote:

Last night, Friday, Patti and I saw the Four Seasons give a good show at the Convention Center. No other groups; they played two halves, with intermission. Their humor low, poor – about underwear, hernias, etc.

I considered that kind of humor to be typical of Las Vegas style entertainment of the time, like the Rat Pack. To be fair, I did continue in the journal:

Sound and songs fine – I was impressed by the quality of their material, like “Bye Bye Baby,” “Don’t Think Twice” [!], “Candy Girl,” “Don’t Worry About Me,” “Tell It To the Rain,” and especially “Let’s Hang On.”

Doo wop

From the beginning the Four Seasons used a typical doo wop lineup of four singers, with one a tenor voice (Valli), one a bass, and so on.

Novelty acts

Valli’s super-distinctive falsetto provided an irresistible and essentially unique “hook” for the songs the group sang.

Rock

My definition of that genre, when I first saw them, was I’m sure restrictive, and I believe many rock critics also had the problem of thinking the Four Seasons weren’t pure rockers – which they weren’t. But heard in concert, for example when I saw them, their songs, well, rock.

Valli’s audiences respond to him. At the November 3 concert, the crowd was mostly on the older side – a friend said she felt like she was at Lourdes! But its loyalty was rewarded. He seems to inspire personal loyalty too – his musical director, the flamboyant and distinctive keyboard player Robby Robinson, has worked with Valli for forty years, and the night I saw the show, Joe Long, who was the group’s first major replacement (from 1965 through 1973 according to Wikipedia), was in the house and Valli introduced him from the stage.

In addition to all the factors I’ve listed here, part of Valli’s appeal, these days, is that performing at his time of his life gives him a kind of gallantry. He is not a “warm” personality on stage. But he is a courageous one to go out at his age and sing vocally daunting music the way he does, and to sing it well. At the concert I heard, his voice got stronger with each song, and he sang with grit and determination. One can hardly ask for more. Long may he wave.

'1789: The French Revolution' (Theatre de la Jeune Lune, 1989)

[In April 1989, I was in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to do some research on a 1985 production of the Guthrie Theater.  This was part of a multi-city project and it was my practice while I was spending a few days in such important U.S. theater centers as Chicago, Seattle, Milwaukee, San Francisco, Houston, and Louisville, along with Minneapolis, to try to see performances at the theater where I was conducting my research and any other production house that was presenting something while I was in town.  As it happened, the Guthrie was between productions, with a show having just closed and the next one in rehearsal.  So I looked around and selected the experimental theater company Theatre de la Jeune Lune to see during my brief stay in the Twin Cities.  Theatre de la Jeune Lune was in performance with a startling company-created production, 1789: The French Revolution, at the Guthrie Lab Theater .  So on  Sunday, 16 April  1989, I went over to the former warehouse along the banks of the Mississippi River. 

[1789, described by Jeune Lune dramaturg Paul Walsh as “a reverie of music, spectacle and drama,” was written by Barbra Berlovitz Desbois, Vincent Gracieux, Felicity Jones, and Robert Rosen, with Christopher Bayes and Paul Walsh.  The music was composed by Chan Poling and directed by Eric Jensen.  The production was directed by Dominique Serrand, with sets designed by Vincent Gracieux, lights by Mark Somerfield, and costumes by Andrea McCormack.  

[The Theatre de la Jeune Lune, a name reminiscent of Ariane Mnouchkine’s international experimental troupe, Théâtre du Soliel, was a nationally respected theater company based in Minneapolis.  (It won the Regional Theatre Tony Award in 2005.)  The company operated from 1978 to 2008 and was renowned for its visually stunning, highly physical productions.  The troupe’s style was derived from clown, mime, dance, and opera, based on the teaching of Jacques Lecoq, the French actor, mime, and acting teacher  with whom many of the founders had studied.  The theater’s reputation also stemmed from the reimagined classics they staged and their productions of highly ambitious original work, as exemplified by 1789.  I’ll give a brief history of the company after the production report, which I wrote within days after I saw the show.  (I have lightly reedited this report to make it more accessible 28 years later.)]

In case it has escaped anyone’s attention, this is the bicentennial of the French Revolution.  In various cities in America, there have been events to note this anniversary with nearly the solemnity and spirit with which we approached our own two-hundredth birthday thirteen years ago.  Books have been published, speeches made, and visits from French dignitaries scheduled.  The acknowledgement by the Theatre de la Jeune Lune, a Minneapolis experimental theatre company, makes clear some of the disturbing problems of the French Revolution. 

1789: The French Revolution (which carries an additional subtitle of Feast of Rage, Feast of Reason) doesn’t mean to make this point, and, indeed, tries to gloss over it in two ways, one intentional and the other, I imagine, inadvertent.  The company says, on the words of composer for the project, Chan Poling: “We are here to celebrate a particular revolution, but the idea of revolution—of a class or of a mind—is being examined here as well.”  Nonetheless, as a piece of theater, this sprawling, boisterous environmental production has some interesting ideas, particularly as an exemplar of the use of space as described in Richard Schechner’s Environmental Theater (Hawthorn Books, 1973). 

The Guthrie Lab Theater, at 700 North 1st Street in Minneapolis [now the LAB Theater], in the old Warehouse District way over on the banks of the Mississippi, is a huge barn of a place, some 6,000 square feet of space.  My guess is that the room is about 65 feet long and 35 feet wide, with a ceiling height of about 35 feet.  You enter the arena—for that is what it feels like—from above, winding down a metal staircase in the corner of one end.  As you descend, you pass a sort of double wooden bridge about 12 feet off the floor across the width of the room.  The bridge, approximately one-third of the way from the entrance end, connects two catwalks along the two long walls, also at about 12-foot heights.  Under the bridge is a small, wooden platform, about eight feet square and three feet high, jutting out into the space.  At the far end is a kind of thrust stage, approximately 15 feet square, decorated with a huge, blue column and, at the rear, a flat, red proscenium arch and drape.  This is the only color in the set (designed by Vincent Gracieux and lit by Mark Somerfield); all the other construction being raw wood, undecorated and plain.

The audience area is made up of two pairs of tiered platforms with metal folding chairs along the side walls between the bridge and the thrust stage.  Each pair of platforms is split by an entrance into the space at about the middle of each wall.  Other entrances are at either end—one under the bridge and the other through the false proscenium—and above on the catwalks. 

Having been one of the first to enter the playing space, I took a seat that looked like a good vantage point.  As more people came in, some stayed in the center, around the small platform, though there were seats available.  This was the first I realized that spectators were allowed to stay in the playing area; no one said anything while we waited upstairs or as we entered. 

The performance started rather abruptly as actors dressed in 18th-century costumes (by Andrea McCormack) moved into the space, threading their way through the spectators as through a milling crowd.  Other performers entered onto the bridge as, below on the platform, a village representative of the “Third Estate”—the peasants—urged the citizens to tell him what issues to raise at the meeting of the three estates called by the king.  More actors came in, gently moving the spectators aside as they made their way to the platform to talk with the delegate.

This all proceeded a little self-consciously I thought, since the spectators on the floor did not know whether to participate or act merely as living scenery, and the actors only dealt with them in a perfunctory way, never addressing them or confronting them except to make a path through them.  Still, the idea seemed interesting: to explore the French Revolution by immersing the audience in the struggle perhaps the way many peasants got involved—swept up in the tide without really knowing the script.  Unfortunately, this never developed.

After a few more similar scenes about the gathering of the representatives of the Third Estate and laying out the historical background, the second episode of 1789 moved on to Versailles for the assembly.  Now the audience became the assembled delegates and spectators in the Salle de Menus Plaisirs, and members of the cast ushered those left standing to seats in the tiers, ending the commingling of the cast and audience for the rest of the performance.  (The Salle des Menus Plaisirs was the hall in Versailles occupied by the royal department of the Maison du Roi responsible for the ceremonies, events, and festivities  of the royal household.  The meeting of the États généraux took place there on 5 May 1789.)  Occasionally, at rehearsed moments, the actors playing delegates would turn to us and appear to invoke our participation, delivering remarks our way as if addressing fellow delegates in the galleries, but no real response was anticipated or, if it came, used.  It was a phony audience-participation set-up, and probably little any spectator could have done would have changed the conduct of the performance.  Again, it would have been interesting to see the company take some chances with real audience involvement, even risking an argument that might diverge from the written speeches.  Failing that challenge, the fake direct address employed seemed very hollow, and I wished they had stuck with a conventional representational performance.

The end of the play brought one more attempt at contact with the audience.  To emphasize the principle that the grain and food horded by the aristocrats and clergy belonged to the people who worked the land that grew it, the cast brought out baskets of French bread and passed them among the spectators.  We were supposed to share the bread with one another, but it was an empty moment for me, as the baskets were passed around while the cast simply went back to the performance space and went on with the play, which by now had turned entirely sentimental.

It is in this sentimentality that 1789 loses its edge and renders the French Revolution a dreamy romance.  I suspect that it is unintentional, but the play turns into the kind of feel-good experience that Godspell was, right down to the bread as a substitute for Godspell’s wine.  At the end of the performance, as the cast laboriously decorated the floor with pretty, colored sand paintings of the slogans of the Revolution, a young man with a sweet tenor voice, sang the Declaration of the Rights of Man.  (The music was composed by Chan Poling and directed by Eric Jensen.)  It was a lyrical ballad, a lullaby, whereas, for my ears, what was called for was an angry, violent rendition, since the document, once passed by the National Assembly, was immediately trod into the ground by both the revolutionaries and the counter-revolutionaries.  The Declaration—a demand for rights—was, after all, born of rage and died in the Terror.  It is not a sweet image.  Instead of Godspell, the theatrical model might have been a kind of reverse Marat/Sade in which sweet music accompanied brutal word images.

The play’s intentional mollification of the truth of the Revolution is the conceit that the year 1789, ending with the adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, was idealistic and rational, that the Revolution sank into the Terror, anarchy, and civil war only afterwards.  A note in program makes this clear, stating: “For about a year, both crown and people appeared willing  to follow the lead of the patriots, but by the summer of 1790, political attitudes hardened and become irreconcilable.  France began its downward slide into civil war.”  Historically, this just was not so.  The peasants and the middle class were butchering aristocrats and clergy—as well as each other—practically right from the start.  The vaunted Declaration, however noble its sentiments, was never more than a piece of paper as far as the progress of the Revolution was concerned; it was never enacted or followed, unlike its models, the American Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights.

While the performances, by a company of 24 actors each playing multiple roles, were spirited and energetic, the performance style clashed with the language of the text.  Drawn from written works by numerous chroniclers of the time, among them Jean-Baptiste-Joseph de Lubersac, Bishop of Chartres (1740-1822); Victor Hugo (1802-85); Jacques Roux (1752-94); Maximilien de Robespierre (1758-94); Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778); and Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just (1767-94), the text by Barbra Berlovitz Desbois, Vincent Gracieux, Felicity Jones, Robert Rosen, with Christopher Bayes and Paul Walsh consistently sounded like proclamations and speeches, from which it was most likely compiled.  Nonetheless, the actors kept treating it like dialogue, and the resulting dichotomy made it all sound artificial without being theatrical.  Here was another half-measure which was ultimately unsatisfying because the lines never sounded like anybody really talking, nor were they stylized theatricality.

Stylization and theatricality were not altogether out of director Dominique Serrand’s mind.  There were scenes set at the Palais Royal, for instance, in which patrons of a Paris café staged revolutionary playlets.  The patrons were costumed in bits and pieces of anachronistic clothing from the 1930s and ’40s.  In addition, the make-up for the nobles and their clerical allies was often non-realistic: whiteface and black shadows, apparently to emphasize their inhumanity and soullessness.  Performance, however, never matched these visual notes. 

One possibility might have been to go all the way in performance with the formality suggested by the language, or reduce the language to more colloquial speech.  It might even have been interesting to see the citizens speak and behave colloquially while the aristocrats and clergy behaved with stylized formality.  (Dramaturg Walsh’s note addressed this possibility in passing when he wrote that the production “emulates the revolutionary search for a language that is at once new and old . . . .”)  Speechifying quickly becomes enervating, and all the energetic running around in the world will not vitalize it.

Ultimately, I was disappointed because the possibilities were so great and my expectations kept being raised, then dashed.  With the dimensions of the Guthrie Lab, the scope of the French Revolution—even a single year of it—and the stature of characters like kings, counts, bishops, revolutionaries, poets, painters, and orators, not to have flown, but to have stayed earthbound, is a shame.

[The Theatre de la Jeune Lune (French for “Theater of the New Moon”) was founded in France in 1978 by Dominique Serrand, Vincent Gracieux—both native Parisians—and Barbra Berlovitz—a Minneapolitan—who were later joined by Robert Rosen, all graduates of the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris.  Actor Steven Epp joined Jeune Lune in 1983.  (All these artists were participants in 1789, which was part of Jeune Lune’s tenth anniversary season.)  The company’s name was inspired by the verses of a poem by Bertolt Brecht which reads, “As the people say, at the moon’s change of phases / The new moon holds for one night long / The old moon in its arms “  (These verses are on several sites concerning Theatre de la Jeune Lune, including Wikipedia, as well as a 2008 profile of the company in American Theatre, but I was not able to identify the poem further—except that it was apparently written in 1919.)  According to Jeune Lune’s board chairman, the company saw itself as “the new moon forming out of the old.”

[In Jeune Lune’s early years, the company worked part of the time in Paris and part in Minneapolis.  It permanently settled in Minneapolis in 1985 and, in 1992, moved into the Minneapolis Warehouse District.  AP reporter and native Minnesotan Patrick Condon depicted the nascent company as ” a band of outsiders running the show—a motley crew of actors, writers and musicians in their 20s out to smash traditional notions of how to stage a play.”  The company was in “complete chaos, and that’s what was great. . ., Serrand recalls.  “We wanted to change theater but we didn’t have a clue how to do it.”  In 2001, the five founders officially became co-artistic directors, a collaborative directorate that gave everyone an equal voice in company decisions.

[The troupe was highly regarded for its hallmark practice of integrating Lecoq techniques of improvisatory and dynamically physical performance into the interpretations of Molière, Shakespeare, and Mozart, making for a characteristic performance style “with movement as a primary element of expression and character development.”  The company also employed innovative scenic designs as well as an acting style reminiscent of silent film star Charlie Chaplin and mime Marcel Marceau, combined with components of Commedia dell’arte and circus arts (including clowning).   Epp described Jeune Lune’s production approach: “We dissect the body in its movement, power and playfulness, and glean from that ways to apply that physicality to whatever material we’re working with, to galvanize the role and find what’s pertinent to a contemporary audience.”  As the company stated in the program for 1789, its credo was: “We are a theatre of directness, a theatre that speaks to the audience, that listens and heeds its response.  We believe that theatre is an event.  We are a theatre of emotions—an immediate theatre—a theatre that excites and uses a direct language—a theatre of the imagination.”

[In addition to reimagining classic plays and operas, Jeune Lune was known for its company-created original works.  Most notable was its 1992 creation of the Brecht-styled Children of Paradise: Shooting a Dream, a fictionalized account of the making of the 1945 French film Les Enfants du Paradis, written by poet Jacques Prévert and directed by Marcel Carné.  The production was conceived as an inauguration of the troupe’s newly acquired permanent performance space in downtown Minneapolis.  The troupe used Brecht’s characteristic Epic Theater style by paralleling scenes from the film’s 1830s setting and the movie’s filming in the 1940s.  The audience, seated on the stage for the prologue, was encouraged to participate as witnesses to the events portrayed in the movie.  The Jeune Lune production received critical praise, winning the 1993 ATCA New Play Award (now known as the Harold and Mimi Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award and Citations).

[In 2005, the Theatre de la Jeune Lune was awarded the Regional Theatre Tony Award; they also received international praise when both Serrand and Gracieux were knighted by France  in the Order of Arts and Letters for their contributions to French culture.  In spite of critical acclaim, however, the company struggled in its later years to retain its audience.  By 2007, four of the five founding members had either left the company or stepped down from their leadership positions, leaving Serrand as the sole artistic director.  The company had also accumulated a debt of over $1 million and fought to stay solvent.  In June 2008, the Theatre de la Jeune Lune board of directors voted to sell its building and shut down its current operations.]