27 June 2018

Dispatches from Israel 15

by Helen Kaye

[My generous Tel Aviv friend Helen Kaye has sent me another pair of her Jerusalem Post reviews from earlier this month.  In this instance, both plays are by Israeli dramatists, Hillel Mittelpunkt (b. 1949) and Hanoch Levin (1943-99); coincidentally, both writers are also native Tel Avivians (though, of course, Levin was born in Mandatory Palestine).  Mittelpunkt’s The Others is a new drama, while Levin’s The Child Dreams (also known as The Dreaming Child) premièred in 1993.  I’ll let Helen tell you more.]

The Others
Written & directed by Hillel Mittelpunkt
Cameri Theater, Tel Aviv; 4 June 2018

A Mittelpunkt play is always an Event, but this is the first Mittelpunkt play I’ve seen that doesn’t seem to be sure of itself, trying to paper over the cracks with a lot of posturing and shouting. Like some of his other plays, (Track to Damascus – 2010, Then, Prague – ’13) Others is set in the Palestine of the British Mandate, here a few months short of its end, a period that Mittelpunkt has described as “a fertile cushion for ‘big’ dramas” because of the various and competing forces in Jewish society at the time.

We are in Ida’s (Irit Kaplan) shabby, beachside boarding house – a metaphor for transience – where jobless jazz musician Amiram (Avishai Meridor) is playing the piano prior to an audition that may or may not provide him with employment. Another resident is Thea (Kineret Limoni) who very often entertains British soldiers in her room. Then there’s the silent Mr. Mayer (Itzhak Heskia), a Survivor, dumped by the Jewish Agency whom a relative is supposed to, but never does, pick up.

Then one morning Dassi (Neta Garty) arrives. Her very presence is heinous. She is an outcast, disowned by her family, her name on a Jewish blacklist of ‘traitors’. Her crime? She fell in love with, and married, a British soldier, bore his child, and went to live in the UK. She is here, ostensibly, for her sister Gila’s (Joy Rieger) wedding, but that plan goes awry due to her father, Marshak (Dudu Niv) and despite her sympathetic Aunt Riva (Esti Kosovitsky). From there it’s basically downhill until the (more or less) deus ex machina ending.

I suspect that what Mittlepunkt is trying to say with his cast of solitary and diverse characters is that we are all Others to somebody, especially here, especially then, and even more especially now when, if we cannot see and respect the Other – whoever he or she may be – destruction may be the consequence.

Or as Ida says “you see how the best ideas lead to the worst deeds? There’s no ideal in the world that justifies murdering a 17 year old.”

The characters themselves are mostly believable. It’s some of what they do and how they act that seems contrived, even forced sometimes as in the case of Marshak, presumably feeling guilty over his lucrative World War II dealings with the British, whom Dudu Niv uncomfortably plays as a bullying, raving male harridan. Esti Kosovitsky’s Riva, Dassi’s only link to Eretz Israel, radiates sympathy, but that seems to be her sole function while the purpose of Amiram, whom Meridor plays with a nice mix of anxiety and nonchalance, indicates that he’s carrying a large torch for Dassi, and that’s it. The Gila character also serves, more or less, only as a conduit but Rieger does the best she can with her.

As Dassi, the charming Neta Garti anticipates too much, her body and voice often signaling what’s going to happen before it does, which is unfortunate. We get to know only that she considers herself a victim, that she lies a lot, that she’s manipulative, which is why what she finally does cannot ring true.

Others truly springs fully to life first in Limoni’s unabashed yet, still innocent (despite her profession), Thea, then in Itzhak Heskia’s quivering, slowly-getting-less-terrified, silent-but-speaking-volumes Mayer, and finally and most wonderfully in Irit Kaplan’s energetic, no-nonsense, utterly decent Ida whose for-the-record barkings actually fool nobody. It’s she who gives The Others heft.

*  *  *  *
The Child Dreams
By Hanoch Levin
Directed by Omri Nitzan
Cameri/Habima Theaters, Tel Aviv; 14 June 18

Is there more perfect tranquility than the sight of a quietly sleeping child, the eyelashes gently feathering pink cheeks, the small, even breaths as the little chest rises and falls?

“Let time stop now at the peak of happiness because better than this it cannot be,” says the Mother (Ola Schur-Selektar) as she looks at her son (Naama Chetrit) asleep in his little white bed, and at his Father (Ben Yosipovich) across the bed while Yosef Bardanashvili’s starry (for the moment) music reinforces the idyll.

Then Hell breaks forth. Literally. From a gaping blood-red maw suddenly come tumbling refugees, desperate, clutching their suitcases, and a violinist, dying of a gunshot wound to the belly, still unable to believe that he should be targeted.

This juxtaposition drives Omri Nitzan’s beyond superb production of The Child Dreams, each nostalgic, indifferent, tender, brutal, white-hot and unrelentingly poetic moment perfectly tempered for maximum impact.

Polina Adamov’s set is brutalist, á la 1950s Soviet architecture, the stage being on two levels which a curve (to tumble on, the curve that life throws, the curvature of the uncaring earth – you pick the metaphor) connects. The bed on which we first see the Child becomes a boat, becomes an island, becomes limbo. The colors of Adamov’s costumes are drab, washed out, save for the gold mesh and bright yellow dresses, respectively, of The Woman Born for Love and the Governor’s Wife (Ruth Asarsai). The Dead Children wear white underwear (underwear is a Nitzan trademark signaling vulnerability and often guilelessness).

On the surface Child deals with the fortunes of a group of refugees who attempts to find shelter after being driven from their homes. It is the Child, wrested from peace and innocence, hounded inexorably towards death, who drives the narrative. For parents, for us all, the death of a child represents an ultimate awfulness. But Levin doesn't do surface; The Child Dreams is universal; it is at once a searing indictment of man's ghastly inhumanity to man and an anthem to mercy, even hope.

The 20th was a seminal century, encompassing the glorious – the discovery of antibiotics, man on the moon, and the gruesome – two horrendous world wars, MAD [mutually assured destruction], Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler, monsters masquerading as humans, and then, around the time that Child premiered we had the Balkan wars, the seemingly endless civil wars in Africa that are still ongoing, and the refugees that inevitably result from conflict.

Which makes the revival of Child almost mandatory because, at the moment, there are some 21 million refugees in the world, more than at any time since World War II. We have some of them and we treat them about as well as the Governor (Alexander Krul/Shahar Raz) – he has an electric bullhorn in place of a head – treats the refugees that attempt to land on his Island. Child is a morality play but there’s no God present.

The 20 member cast plays many roles and every actor gives of his utmost and with utmost effect. Most outstanding are Schur-Selektar whose Mother dredges up the strength to continue with no hint of pathos, Chetrit’s Child is real, disciplined and infinitely touching, and Oshrat Ingedeshat impresses as a compassionate Dead Child. As the Woman Born for Love and the faceless Governor’s Wife, Asarsai is beginning to realize the promise she showed in Woyzzek while Norman Issa chills as the rapacious Captain.

Perhaps Child’s greatness best comes through in this exchange between the Lame Youth (Shlomi Avraham) and a Bum (Eran Sarel): “You wrote those poems to make an impact/And now you try to impress by tearing them up./It’s too dramatic, excessive, unnecessary/. . . You will yet learn to despair/More quietly, more modestly/In silence. As you ought.”

[Readers should note that The Child Dreams was written long before the current refugee and immigrant crises that have enveloped Europe (mostly from the Syrian war against ISIS and the simultaneous civil war) and the United States (because of Donald Trumps immigration policies concerning our southern border). Though the Cameri/Habima production seems especially relevant to the latter issue right now, it was obviously planned and scheduled long before the Mexican-border crisis involving separating migrant children from their incarcerated parents developed here.

[This is Helen’s fifteenth installment of “Dispatches from Israel”; her last collection of reviews was posted on Rick On Theater on 18 April.  Helen’s also contributed several other articles for this blog, but the list of her guest blogs has grown so long, I won’t include it here.  Instead, I refer interested readers to “Dispatches 10” (11 November 2016) for the dates of Helen’s posts up to then—look down in the afterword—and add numbers 11 (17 June 2017), 12 (27 October 2017), 13 (27 February 2018) , and 14.]

22 June 2018

“Glenda Jackson’s third act is a return to Broadway after decades in politics”

by Jeffrey Brown

[Glenda Jackson is indubitably one of the best actors on the English-speaking stage and screen, with many iconic roles to her name.  Currently, she’s appearing (through 24 June) in the Broadway première of Edward Albee’s 1994 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Three Tall Women at the John Golden Theatre (for which she’s now won both a Tony and a Drama Desk  Award for her performance).  On 4 June 2018, PBS NewsHour correspondent Jeffrey Brown sat down with Jackson for an interview, the transcript of which is republished below (and available at https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/glenda-jacksons-third-act-is-a-return-to-broadway-after-decades-in-politics#transcript).]

Glenda Jackson is back on Broadway for the first time since 1988, starring in Edward Albee's “Three Tall Women.” Jackson, 82, sits down with Jeffrey Brown to discuss the challenge of finding interesting female roles and why she spent 23 years away from acting as a Labor Party member of the British Parliament championing women's rights.

Amna Nawaz:  Now the return of one of the greats of theater and film, after many years she spent in politics.

Two years ago, Glenda Jackson made a powerful acting comeback, and now she’s back on Broadway with a third act to her remarkable career.

As Jeffrey Brown reports, she is also a strong favorite for a Tony Award later this week.

Jeffrey Brown:  It was quite a return. After 23 years away from the theater, Glenda Jackson took to the stage of London’s Old Vic in 2016 in Shakespeare’s “King Lear” playing Lear.

Glenda Jackson:  That’s one of the endearing things about the theater. I can put it into a kind of immediate context. You work with people, you may not see them for decades, you bump into them in the street, and it’s as though you have just walked out to the same coffee bar. You know, there’s no time gap.

Jeffrey Brown:  Now 82, Jackson is back on Broadway for the first time since 1988, starring with Laurie Metcalf and Alison Pill in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women.”

It’s a play about memory and aging that appealed to Jackson partly because of its strong female roles, something she says is a rarity. We talked recently at the famed Sardi’s Restaurant in Times Square.

Glenda Jackson:  It has been my experience, ever since I first walked onto a stage and got paid for it, that contemporary dramatists find women really, really boring. We are never, or hardly ever, the kind of dramatic engine of what they are writing.

Jeffrey Brown:  Why do you think that that’s been the case?

Glenda Jackson:  You’re a man. You tell me. Why do men, who are in the main still the majority of contemporary dramatists, find us so boring? They just don’t seem to think that being a woman is either interesting or dramatic or challenging or dangerous, or any of the things that any woman in the world knows our lives can and not infrequently are.

Jeffrey Brown:  And has this been a problem for you in your career in finding roles that you like?

Glenda Jackson:  Well, of course it’s a problem.

Jeffrey Brown:  Yes.

Glenda Jackson:  And it’s a problem that doesn’t seem to have changed.

That is bemusing to me, because it hasn’t shifted in all the years that I was in the theater, and now I am back in it.

Jeffrey Brown:  It’s hard to imagine anyone finding Glenda Jackson boring. Beginning in the 1960s, Jackson was a prominent presence on stage and screen on both sides of the Atlantic.

Glenda Jackson:  I could never love you.

Jeffrey Brown:  She reached wide fame in the 1969 film “Women in Love,” for which she won her first Academy Award for best actress.

Her performances, often playing strong, dynamic women, continued to win acclaim and awards, including two Emmys for the 1971 BBC series “Elizabeth R,” which aired on public television’s “Masterpiece Theatre.”

She won a second Oscar for the 1973 film “A Touch of Class.”

But in 1988, Jackson, a longtime critic of the government of conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, left acting for what would become a decades-long political career as a Labor Party member of the British Parliament.

Glenda Jackson:  By far, the most dramatic and heinous demonstration of Thatcherism was where every single shop doorway, every single night, became the bedroom, the living room, the bathroom for the homeless.

Jeffrey Brown:  When you left acting, was it because you had done enough or had enough?

Glenda Jackson:  Good heavens, no.

Jeffrey Brown:  No.

Glenda Jackson:  My country was being destroyed. Anything I could do that was legal to get Margaret Thatcher out, and her government out, I was prepared to have a go at, and because everything I had been taught to regard as vices, she told me were virtues.

Greed wasn’t greed. It was doughty independence. Selfishness wasn’t selfishness. It was taking care of your immediate responsibilities.

Jeffrey Brown:  Did you come to feel that you accomplished something meaningful as a politician? Was it…

Glenda Jackson:  Not as an individual, because the idea that you have individual power in that sense is actually not true. You have clear responsibilities towards your own constituents and your own constituency.

And that was for me the most interesting part of it. But, yes, we did make changes. But then, of course, along came the Iraq War, and it went boom, like that, as far as I was concerned.

Jeffrey Brown:  One issue she championed, women’s rights in the home and workplace. I asked if she was surprised by the force of the MeToo movement now.

Glenda Jackson:  What surprises me is that people are surprised. I mean, in my country, for example, two women die every week at the hands of their partner, not infrequently male, usually, invariably male, every week.

Now, that’s not on the front pages of our newspapers every week. So this sudden almost cataclysm of surprise, shock, horror, how could this have happened, I don’t buy it. I mean, people are deluding themselves. I mean, we fail to acknowledge it, we fail to really work to eradicate it, and it — it takes more than just being shocked to eradicate it.

Jeffrey Brown:  So, for you personally, do you have any regrets about having taken the time away from acting to be a politician?

Glenda Jackson:  No.

Jeffrey Brown:  No.

Glenda Jackson:  I mean, it is an inordinate privilege to be a member of Parliament. I mean, people give you their trust, and they also give you what I regard as their most valuable right in a sense, their vote.

And that is a very humbling and privileged experience to have.

Jeffrey Brown:  So, now that you’re back, do you plan to continue acting?

Glenda Jackson:  Well, I would hope to. Yes. I mean, you know, yes. It’s one of the things that have been and is at the moment very central and essential in my life, if the work is that exciting and daunting as I have been privileged to experience over the past couple of years.

Jeffrey Brown:  “Three Tall Women” runs through June 24.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown on Broadway in New York.

17 June 2018

Short Takes: Some Art Shows


[I seem to be on something of an art jag on Rick On Theater just now (“Akunnittinni: A Kinngait Family Portrait” on 15 January; “Art New York 2018” on 13 May; “Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1900-1960” on 12 June), so I thought I’d dig up some comments on past art shows that are too brief to post on their own (they were parts of longer reports mostly about theater) and collect them in a “Short Takes”—something I haven’t done in a long time now—and post them for a look back.  (The dates on each section below are the dates I wrote the original report; they are not necessarily the dates of the exhibits or my visit.  Multiple dates indicate I wrote the complete report in installments.)  One of the following mini-reports is on Edward Hopper, an exhibit I saw at the National Gallery of Art in 2008 and which I mentioned in my recent post on the Whitney Museum’s Where We Are.  Another segment below is on the Barnes Collection when it was at its original home in Merion, Pennsylvania, before it moved to Philadelphia.  I haven’t seen the collection since the move, so I don’t know if the lay-out duplicates the initial set-up, mandated by founder Albert C. Barnes, but that arrangement of the art was unique, to say the least, and I though it would be interesting to record my impressions of that peculiar display.  ~Rick]

PIERRE BONNARD: EARLY AND LATE
9 & 12 January 2003

Pierre Bonnard: Early and Late at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. (22 September 2002-19 January 2003), is interesting, but less so than its size would suggest.  It’s a big show, installed on three floors of the gallery (two flights of stairs to climb), and covers his paintings, etchings and prints, posters and illustrations, sketches, and photos.  That was part of the interesting aspect—that this artist, who really began as a dilettante, explored so many different forms of expression, including the very new technique of photography.  (The photos on display were all from around 1900—some original prints and some new prints from old negatives.) 

There were works from his earliest days right through the end of his life, but the most interesting works for me were his prints and etchings.  These were mostly small—though there was a wonderful three-panel screen (he did several screens, inspired, apparently, by the Japanese practice) of scenes from the Paris street.  Many of his prints were no more than four colors—a practice he experimented with frequently.  Bonnard (1867-1947) was also one of the first “graphic artists” and he got his professional start making advertising posters (for champagne, for instance), some of which resemble the famous theater posters of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.  He also did illustrations for books and was one of the very first graphic artists to use text as part of the artwork—not just the content, but the style.  Bonnard’s paintings were pretty much the least interesting part of this show. 

*  *  *  *
THE CUBIST PAINTINGS OF DIEGO RIVERA: MEMORY, POLITICS, PLACE
11-13 May 2004

A small show, The Cubist Paintings of Diego Rivera: Memory, Politics, Place, was at the National Gallery of Art’s East Building (4 April-25 July 2004): an exhibit of Diego Rivera’s cubist paintings.  Rivera (1886-1957) went to Paris in the 1920s to study contemporary art on a stipend from the government from his home state in Mexico.  He was in the circle that included Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Marcel Duchamps, and others, and he began trying out all the current styles, including Cubism, for brief periods, trying to find his own voice.  None of these experiments lasted very long, and there weren’t many cubist works in the show—and most of them were interesting only as curiosities the way Picasso’s realistic works as a young artist are.  They merely contrast with the more identifiable works of the maturer artists—in Rivera’s case, the murals and Mexican history and folklore he worked with for most of his career.

*  *  *  *
HENRI ROUSSEAU: JUNGLES IN PARIS
21-25 August 2006

On Wednesday, 16 August 2004, my mother and I went down to the East Building of the National Gallery to see Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris (16 July-15 October 2006).  Rousseau (1844-1910) isn’t among my favorite artists; in fact, I find his paintings curious without being really compelling.  After reading the Washington Post review, however, I found him an interesting socio-artistic phenomenon.  First, he was unschooled as an artist.  He was a weekend duffer, so to speak, until he retired from his job as a customs clerk at 49—he was known in the art world as Le Douanier (the customs agent)—when he took up painting full time.  His aim was to be accepted by the Paris art establishment, which was committed to Realism, but he failed completely. 

He was, however, embraced by the avant garde, the upstart Impressionists and their literary confrères (Guillaume Apollinaire; Alfred Jarry, who gave him his nickname).  Picasso bought several of Rousseau’s paintings, as did others among the new, young artists and writers—whom Rousseau rejected.  (He found Matisse’s work “horribly ugly.”)  The irony is too much.  The fact seems to be that Rousseau really stumbled onto his naïve style and bold forms—he was trying to paint Realism and didn’t have the skill.  By sheer coincidence, he was doing naturally what the Impressionists were trying to do, and they had a fondness for “primitive” art.  They usually found this in far-off cultures like Africa, but in Rousseau, they saw their very own, homegrown primitive.  (All those jungle paintings, which were his most popular and are his most recognizable today, are the products of his imagination and his visits to natural history museums and international exhibitions or from magazine illustrations.  Rousseau never left France, and rarely left Paris.  His notion of the jungle wasn’t close to accurate—or he took tremendous liberties—since he combined images that don’t belong together, such as an American Indian fighting with a gorilla—in the rain forests of, what?  Illinois?) 

The Post even poses a provocative paradox: “Rousseau’s best paintings are undeniably great . . . .  But that begs the question of whether the man who made them was also a great artist.”  When he died penniless and was buried in a pauper’s grave, Picasso and fellow artist Robert Delaunay paid for a better plot, Apollinaire wrote a poem for the headstone, and sculptor Constantin Brancusi engraved it.  I don’t care much about his art, but Rousseau’s story is wonderful.

As part of the exhibit, the gallery is displaying many of the sources of Rousseau’s fantasies—a stuffed lion attacking an antelope from a natural history museum, illustrations in nature magazines, and so on.  Among these are two large bronze statues by Emmanuel Frémiet (described in the Post as “a hack realist”).  One of them is called Gorilla Carrying Off a Woman (1887), and that’s just what it depicts.  It looks exactly like a scene from King Kong (except that the woman is more Jane Russell than Fay Wray).  The museum labels and panels don’t say if this was in any way connected to the movie—say an inspiration for it—but you have to wonder if someone like the screenwriter or the director, whoever originally conceived of the movie, hadn’t seen the sculpture.  I mean, it’s just too exact.

*  *  *  *
A VIEW TOWARD PARIS: THE LUCAS COLLECTION OF 19TH-CENTURY FRENCH ART
17 January 2007

Mom and I drove over to Charm City (I don’t know, either) to see an exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art and got my cousin, who lives in Baltimore, to meet us there.  The show, A View Toward Paris: The Lucas Collection of 19th-Century French Art (1 October–31 December 2006), had gotten an interesting review in the Washington Post and was going to close on the last day of the year, so we went over on Thursday, 28 December 2006, on what turned out to be a beautiful afternoon. 

George A. Lucas (1824-1909) was the heir to a Baltimore papermaking fortune who made a trip to Paris in 1857 and ended up staying 52 years, until his death.  He became an art collector, both for himself and as agent for others back in the U.S (including Duncan Phillips, whose art became the basis for the Phillips Collection in Washington; William and Henry Walters, who formed the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore; and William Corcoran, founder of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in D.C.).  Lucas was instrumental in bringing many of the late-19th-century painters on the Paris art scene to the attention of American collectors and critics.  But he had one peculiarity in retrospect (though it wouldn’t have seemed so at the time): he liked the art that everyone else liked, including the contemporary critics—the mainstream art, not the avant-garde work by the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists.  As a result, the works and artists he championed weren’t the ones that later went down in art history as the greats of the era and have emerged as the icons of modern art. 

This isn’t to say Lucas collected bad art or supported mediocre artists—they were the stars of their day, in fact, and the point of the exhibit, in a way, is a reappreciation of these neglected painters who are often totally unknown today—undeservedly so, according to Post critic Blake Gopnik.  (Gopnik points out that one artist, August Molin, “doesn’t appear once in the 32,600 pages of the Grove Dictionary of Art, and even a thorough Google search comes up with all of two hits that have anything to do with him.”  He suggests that “his impressive walk-on part in the Lucas show will get some graduate student to dig deeper.”)  Since most of the works fall into the Realism and Romanticism categories—not my favorite styles of painting—and only a few barely touch on the emerging Impressionist challenge, the medium-sized show (200 works) became a little repetitive for me, but there were certainly some charming pieces.  (Nothing for a Midnight Shopping Trip, though.) 

What’s more, a number of the artists in the exhibit were the teachers of the emerging Impressionists or had been influential on their development.  In addition, the comparison of the works in Lucas’s collection—he ended up with 300 paintings and almost 20,000 prints—with the more famous works of the late 19th century not only shows a little of the development of the groundbreaking innovation that was Impressionism but also raises your appreciation for those iconoclastic artists and their work. (Impressionism is one of my favorite styles of art.)  It wasn’t a great art exhibit, and not to my mind as interesting as the Picasso and American Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City a few months ago (28 September 2006–28 January 2007), but it was more than pleasant, and had its virtues.  (One curiosity, because Lucas developed relationships with many of the artists whose works he bought, was that some of the painters presented him with their palettes—some just as they had been used for work and others with art added as a lagniappe.)

Besides the art, Mom, my cousin, and I had lunch in the museum restaurant.  And, since we were in Baltimore, I got to have crab cakes from an authentic Maryland kitchen!  Unless you’ve had crab cakes from within shouting distance of the Chesapeake, you haven’t lived!!  (If you’ve had them anywhere else, conversely, you have no idea what you’re missing.)

*  *  *  *
THE BARNES COLLECTION (Merion, Pennsylvania)
20 August/20 September/27 September 2007

[The Barnes Collection reopened at its new building in Philadelphia on 19 May 2012.]

On my return to New York City on Friday, 17 August 2007, after a visit with my mother in Washington, Mom decided to accompany me so we could make a detour to Merion, Pennsylvania, the suburb of Philadelphia where the Barnes Collection is located (until they move to Philadelphia as they plan).  In part because of the way Albert C. Barnes set his foundation up and the restrictions he put on it in his will, this is also a confusing collection—although the quality of the art makes up some for the oddness of the display.  (I won’t go into all the peculiarities of the legal set-up—it’s been in the news for the past several years as the board has sought permission to move from Merion into Philadelphia—but he mandated that no painting could be moved, either on the walls or from the building.  This is why the courts are involved in the proposed move, which the museum’s directors feel is necessary to increase attendance and income in order to maintain the collection.) 

Barnes (1872-1951), who became wealthy from a pharmaceutical invention he made in the early 20th century, also became interested in art, especially modern art (though he also has an extensive collection of African pieces) and began collecting here and in Europe at the turn of the last century into the years before WWII.  Now, some guys who do that end up with awful pieces by some of the most famous artists of the modern canon, but Barnes had excellent taste and he has a beautiful collection of Monets, Cézannes, Prendergasts (both brothers), Modiglianis, Lipschitzes (mostly sculptures), Klees, Picassos, Rouaults, and so on. 

But the paintings are mounted on walls in no order or thematic arrangement whatsoever, and they are hung from about waist height to about 10-12 feet off the ground.  (Mother said that when she first went there years ago, they were hung all the way to the ceiling.)  They’re not labeled (though the artists’ last names are sometimes on the frames) so the only way to identify the paintings (none of the sculptures or other objects—there are some tapestries and a lot of furniture pieces—are identified at all) is to go to the small placards placed in each room.  These are a photograph of each wall (or, when the wall is long and full of art, half the wall) with each picture frame numbered.  Below the photo of the wall layout is a list with corresponding numbers that names the paintings, the artists, the dates, and the media, like the wall labels on most other museums. 

Since there are at least four different layouts in each room, and there are several copies of each placard, you have to shuffle through all of them to find the wall you want to look at, then find the next one, and so on.  Not only is this an annoying task, it’s also time-consuming; the visit to each gallery takes at least half again as long as it otherwise would.  The galleries—there are two floors of art; Barnes had 2500 pieces when he died in 1951—are also dimly lit and there are no lights on each painting.  (This is not a building converted from a residence or anything; it was built, albeit in the ’20s, to be an art gallery.)  As I said, if it weren’t for the quality of the man’s art, the Barnes would be a monumentally frustrating place to visit. 

*  *  *  *
EDWARD HOPPER
            4 February 2008           
(21 December 2007-4 January 2008)

[I quoted from these comments in my report on the Whitney’s Where We Are.]

Im not really a fan of Edward Hopper, but Ill give a very brief (well, superficial anyway) run-down of the National Gallery exhibit nonetheless.  A fairly large show was at the East Building of the NGA on the Mall.  We went down to see Edward Hopper on Boxing Day, 26 December 2008, and encountered a very long line snaking around the second floor of the East Building.  The line kept growing even as we stood debating whether we should switch over to the West Building and give J. M. W. Turner a try; but fortunately, it moved quickly and we spent a pleasant-enough afternoon walking through the several galleries housing the 110 works of the show. 

Hopper (1882-1967) doesnt move me; I find his work cold and emotionless.  His lack of human figures in most of his paintings leaves them bloodless and vacant.  Even in the works with people, they are distant and alone—unengaged.  I know that this is what Hoppers fans find intriguing in his work, and its surely a fascinating psychological insight into his art, but it makes his paintings an intellectual curiosity to me, not an artistic experience.  He was captivated by architecture and the way light and shadow played on buildings and houses and he could paint the same one from different angles and at different times of the day over and over to try to capture the various ways the light fell, but this is a study to me, not an aesthetic evocation. 

Hopper painted at the same time that many other American artists were turning away from figuration and experimenting with abstraction and expressionism (and, er, Abstract Expressionism), but he fiercely resisted the shift and became an icon among younger and later artists of figurative painting.  (Not surprisingly, I guess, I am a fan of abstract art; I know some commentators—not necessarily art critics, however—see that movement as a fraud on gullible viewers, arguably most famously the late Morley Safer’s “Yes . . . but Is It Art?” segment on CBS’s 60 Minutes on 19 September 1993, but Ive always found the works exciting and moving, emotional and expressive.)  So I found the show, called simply Edward Hopper, pretty much just a curiosity; there was nothing I wanted to come back for on a Midnight Shopping Trip. 

This doesnt mean that I didnt learn anything, however.  The earliest works in the exhibit were etchings; I never knew Hopper did any kind of print work, and the 12 small etchings on show here, though they all displayed the same focus on empty cityscapes and lonely figures, were somehow more interesting to me than the later large oils.  (Hopper also painted watercolors in his early days.)  I will also add that theres a strange kind of theatricality in Hoppers paintings—not action or drama, but his interiors especially look like stage sets, a kind of set designers rendering. 

Theres an implied plot in some of them.  People sitting, essentially isolated even in a group, in a diner, viewed from the street through a long expanse of window (Nighthawks, 1942), make you wonder what might have just happened—or might be about to happen—in that single lighted room on a dark, empty street.  The woman, apparently an usher, leaning against a wall in a near-empty movie theater (New York Movie, 1939)whats she thinking about while the movies unreeling on the screen just out of her vision?  But these are intellectual curiosities, not emotionally-engaging ones.  A Hopper play would likely be one in which people sit around speaking in low tones—but only occasionally, leaving most of the play to silence.

[I mentioned in passing a “Midnight Shopping Trip” above a couple of times.  As regular ROTters will recall, this was my mother and my private joke, used as a benchmark for art shows we liked, suggesting a return after closing to pick up the pieces we liked.] 

12 June 2018

'Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1900–1960'


My friend Diana, with whom I usually go to the theater, called me on the evening of Tuesday, 8 May, to tell me that the Whitney Museum of Art was holding a Member Night on Wednesday, the next evening.  Diana’s a member of the Whitney, which is now (since May 2015) located in Manhattan’s West Village, within walking distance from my apartment in the Flatiron District.  On designated Member Nights—the Whitney holds them throughout the year; we went to another one on 7 July—museum members get to spend two-and-a-half hours, 7:30 to 10 p.m., after the museum closes to the public (6 p.m. on Wednesdays) for free.  Each member may bring a guest—that would be me in this case—and there are some special events scheduled throughout the evening: talks, performances, demonstrations and workshops, music); while not all the museum’s facilities are open after closing, the main restaurant, Untitiled, the Studio Café and Bar on the eighth floor, and the museum shop and bookstore in the first-floor lobby are all operating.  All the exhibit galleries are open for viewing, and, after a light meal at Untitled, off the lobby north along Gansevoort Street in the shadow of the southern terminus of the High Line Park, we decided to go straight to the seventh floor where Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1900-1960 is on exhibit.

Where We Are opened on Friday, 28 April 2017, for an open-ended run.  It features artists drawn entirely from the Whitney’s holdings such as Louise Bourgeois, James Castle, Elizabeth Catlett, John Steuart Curry, Edward Hopper, Jasper Johns, Jacob Lawrence, Archibald Motley, Jr., Florentine Stettheimer, and Georgia O’Keeffe, among others.  Where We Are, comprising around 140 works, is organized by David Breslin, DeMartini Family Curator and Director of the Collection, with Jennie Goldstein, assistant curator, and Margaret Kross, curatorial assistant.

Spread out over several galleries, including the Jasper Bloomberg and Zelda  Bloomberg Outdoor Gallery, the works of painting, drawing, photography, and sculpture are separated into five themes: family and community, home, work, the nation, and the spiritual. The museum’s publicity explains the show’s rationale:

During the six decades covered here, the United States experienced war and peace, economic collapse and recovery, and social discord and progress.  American artists responded in complex and diverse ways, and a central aim of the exhibition is to honor each artist’s efforts to create her or his own vision of American life.  The artists and their works suggest that our sense of self is composed of our responsibilities, places, and beliefs.

The curators have taken the poem “September 1, 1939” by W. H. Auden (1907-73) as a sort of guiding template for the exhibit’s organization, using lines from the poem for the title of the entire exhibit and each of its sections: “No One Exists Alone,” a look at family relationships and responsibilities, filial and parental affection, and friendship; “The Furniture of Home,” an examination of “the objects with which we identify, the home [which] can serve as a window into the period when an artwork was made, a stand-in for its inhabitants, or a symbol of the class of its residents”; “The Strength of Collective Man,” displaying “works that portray the sites of production, scenes of working, and the individuals who constituted the workforce”; “In a Euphoric Dream,” featuring works by artists looking at the symbols of the United States to study the times in which they lived and the history of the country George Washington called a “great experiment” (in a letter to British historian Catherine Macaulay Graham on January 9, 1790); and “Of Eros and Dust,” representing artists who “sought recourse in spirituality and mysticism . . . through the symbolic, the sublime, the natural, and the abstract.”  

(The date in the title of Auden’s poem, written on the first day of World War II, is the date of the German invasion of Poland.  First published on 18 October 1939 in the magazine New Republic and then in book form in the Auden collection Another Time in 1940, the poem, speaking of anguish over events that have occurred and apprehension about the potential repercussions, has figured in several modern occasions in the United States.  A paraphrase of one of the poet’s lines, “We must love one another or die,” was included in a speech by Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson that became part of the famous “Daisy” campaign commercial for Johnson’s election in 1964.  In the commercial, which ran only once, on 7 September 1964, Johnson’s voice is heard saying “We must either love each other, or we must die.”  After the 11 September 2001 terror attacks, Scott Simon, host of Weekend Edition Saturday, read the poem on National Public Radio and it was widely discussed and reprinted in the days following the attacks.)

Having said all that about the themes and curatorial narrative of the Whitney’s Where We Are, I should confess that I was far more interested in the art—that is to say, the individual works and the artists whom I didn’t already know—than what the exhibit’s organizers intended to tell me about “how artists have approached the relationships, institutions, and activities that shape our lives.”  The whole relationship of the art and artists with Auden’s poem went pretty much right over my head.  The curators have written, for example:

Although mournful, the poem concludes by pointing to the individual’s capacity to “show an affirming flame.”  Where We Are shares Auden’s guarded optimism, gathering a constellation of artists whose light might lead us forward.

This strikes me as awfully pretentious and overblown, even for a museum self-promotion.  The poem’s a response to the first shots fired in what would become a six-year, worldwide armed conflict; most of the art wasn’t anything like that.  Furthermore, I don’t accept the suggestion the curators seem to be making that the artists’ intentions were to comment specifically and directly on the themes the organizers have carved out.  Theirs is a retrospective reinterpretation from the vantage point of a half century to a century after the art was created.  Somehow I doubt anyone asked the artists about their intentions—almost all of them are dead.  (As an acting teacher of mine used to say about playwrights no longer with us: We don’t have their telephone numbers.  Which makes the curators free, I guess, to say whatever they want.)

In the end, the thematic organization was irrelevant to me; the art itself was all that mattered.  Nonetheless, I enjoyed the show if for no other reason than it was largely made up of works from perhaps the greatest era so far of American art (IMHO), the post-World War II period of the ’40s to the ’60s.  The decades of the 20th century before that, from the century’s turn until the war cut us off from Europe’s cultural influence and allowed American artists to set a path of their own, was the cocoon out of which an indigenous American art emerged.  

Mind you, I should acknowledge here that the culmination of this period was the time when I first was introduced to modern art and the period of the art that most influenced my interest and taste.  (I’ve told the story of Gres Gallery and its connection to my family several times in this blog—see, for example, “Washington Art Matters,” 5 September 2013; “Yayoi Kusama,” 18 May 2017; “A Passion for Art,” 21 November 2017; and “Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib (2007),” 26 November 2017; among other posts.  That started in 1958, or thereabouts, when I was 11, and continued through about 1961, the years when I was forming tastes and interests that would follow me into adulthood.  By the way, my tastes in music also began in those years as well; so did my interest in theater, though my appreciations in that field broadened considerably in the ensuing years.)

Though there are many wonderful artists in Where We Are, the star of the show is arguably painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967), who also happens to be a favorite of Diana’s (though not of mine; as I wrote in my 2008 report on Edward Hopper at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., this artist “doesnt move me; I find his work cold and emotionless”).  Visitors congregated around his paintings and the Whitney has scheduled an “Exhibition Talk,” one of the perks of attending a Member Night, on A Woman in the Sun (1961), one of the two Hopper canvases in “The Furniture of Home.”  Small crowds gathered for the four short (15-20 minutes) lectures by Whitney teaching fellow Janine DeFeo.  Diana and I listened in on this talk, which also included a stop at New York Interior (c. 1921), the other Hopper in this section of Where We Are.  

While DeFeo made some pointed comments about Hopper’s painting style, noting his use of light—one of his signatures—and space, the solitariness of the woman in the picture, and the sparseness of the room’s décor, I don’t really appreciate someone telling me what a piece of art “means,” since  by its nature, art means something different to each partaker.  Art—whether music, poetry, drama, or painting—means to me whatever I take from it, not what someone else tells me I should take from it.  Once again, we come up against the tendency of some “expert” deciding what the artist meant to communicate which, unless she or he left notes (and even then . . .), none of us can actually know.  (Diana complained strongly about commentators who “psychoanalyze” a painting, and I think this is what she objected to.) 

In her 1964 essay “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag asserts:

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us.  The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

I have had a hard time agreeing with Sontag’s ban on interpretation for one fundamental reason: it’s not possible to experience a work of art—or nearly anything else—without finding some kind of meaning in it.  I think it’s human nature—we’re hard-wired to find meaning in what we see and experience.  But when it comes to someone else—a critic, say—interpreting  a piece of art for me, that is in my stead or in my behalf—I’m with Sontag: I say nix!  (I’m not even terribly sanguine about artists themselves telling me what their art should mean to me!)

Actually, I’ve almost always seen Hopper’s paintings, at least those with people in them, as stills from a playlet or a scene from a play.  I can spin a whole little scenario from them.  (My favorite painting for this exercise, which isn’t in Where We Are, is 1942’s Nighthawks, a scene at night in a corner diner from the perspective of the street outside.  As I pondered in my pre-ROT report on the Hopper show at the National Gallery, it makes “you wonder what might have just happened—or might be about to happen—in that single lighted room on a dark, empty street.”)

A Woman in the Sun depicts a nude woman standing profile in the center of a shadow-shrouded bedroom.  She’s brightly lit, however, by the sun shining through an unseen window out of the frame to the right, creating a long rectangle of yellow light and casting the elongated shadows of her legs behind her.  The bed to her left is unmade, as if she’d just gotten out of it; her high-heeled pumps are sitting haphazardly on the floor just at the edge of the bed.  Another window in the room’s far wall is closed, but the curtains are pulled back as if the woman wasn’t concerned if anyone could see in.  The rolling green hills just visible through the glass suggests that the room’s on an upper floor and that the house is in the country so there’s no one to see her anyway.  The room, with sea-green walls, is sparsely decorated and furnished.  The only piece of furniture is the bed; there are framed pictures on two walls.  Aside from the shoes, there’s no other clothing in sight.

So, what’s the woman’s story?  Is this her room, or is she a guest in the house?  A visiting relative?  An old friend?  A paying guest?  Did she sleep naked?  There’s no nightgown or pajamas or slippers.  Was there a lover or a husband just moments before?

Is it morning, afternoon, or evening?  The curtain visible at the right edge of the canvas seems to be billowing a bit, so that window might be open.  That suggests it’s warm out—maybe late spring or summer.  Of course, if it’s down south some place, it could be fall or even winter—we don’t know. 

The woman’s not young—probably early middle-aged.  She’s got long, brown hair, which doesn’t seem mussed from the woman’s having been in bed just moments ago.  Did she brush it just before the picture was made?  There are no toiletries to be seen.  A bathroom down the hall, maybe?  There’s no bathrobe around, though.  Maybe the house is hers and she’s alone and doesn’t have to worry about such things.  Maybe she’s about about to get in the bed, not just getting up from it.

The woman doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to get dressed or go anywhere. She’s smoking a cigarette.  Why is she smoking standing up instead of sitting on the bed?  There no ashtray in sight—does she drop her ashes on the green rug? 

New York Interior, though a smaller “scene,” raises many intriguing questions, too.  The woman sitting with her back to us, sewing what looks like a white dress, could tell a fascinating story.  Is she making the dress, or mending it?  Letting it out or taking it in—maybe for someone else?  Is it a hand-me-down?  The room looks well furnished and appointed—it’s not a tenement.  I could go on—Hopper leaves so much out of his paintings—but supplies hints, even if he doesn’t mean to.

In another section of Where We Are, Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning (1930) is on display.  It’s one of the artist’s works with no people in it, a deserted strip of storefronts along a town street.  It’s a stage set!  Are the shops, all empty like the street, closed because it’s early morning on a Sunday (no businesses open on Sundays in 1930!)?  Or is it because it’s 1930—the second year of the Great Depression?  (The painting’s title was apparently attached by someone else, not Hopper—so maybe it isn’t even Sunday.)  There are apartments on the second floor above the shops—but no one’s visible there, either.  The artist’s said that the painting depicts 7th Avenue in New York City, but does it?  It looks like a small town to me.  Sunday Morning’s less intriguing than the populated paintings, but there’s still a lot we can wonder about and imagine.

The exhibit opens with a display outside the entrance to the first gallery, facing museumgoers as they exit the elevators in the seventh floor, of Jacob Lawrence’s War Series, 14 panels that present expressionistic representations of World War II, which Lawrence (1917-2000) saw first hand as a Coast Guardsman.  In the paintings, made between 1946 and 1947, Lawrence showed the war as perceived by the individual, whether soldier or civilian on the home front.  Among the War Series are depictions, in muted earth colors of rust and olive green and brown and black with splashes of white, of Coast Guardsmen reporting for Another Patrol (1946), soldiers Shipping Out (1947) for the combat zone, wounded and injured men Going Home (1947), a father or brother or son receiving The Letter (1946) telling him his loved one died in battle, and finally, Victory (1947), the image of a soldier in full battle gear, his rifle held vertically in front of his, kneeling in prayer or thanks.  The series may be the most moving images in the show. 

One example of what I meant when I complained about shoe-horning an interpretation onto a piece of art that may not have been remotely what the artist was out to do comes from Pittsburgh (1927) by Elsie Driggs (1895-1992).  It’s in “The Strength of Collective Man,” the section on industry, labor, and the working man.  Pittsburgh is a painting of the stacks and tubes of a steel mill, presented as a depiction of 20th-century American industry, the “dark Satanic mills” of William Blake, perhaps a warning of industrial pollution to come.  But Driggs said she was compelled to paint the scene because, “This shouldn’t be beautiful.  But it is.”  So she drew it!  It was a purely aesthetic impulse, not an environmental or political one.  The Where We Are curators are perfectly free to see in Driggs’s Pittsburgh what they want, or what they feel.  But they don’t get to lay their experience of the art work on me.  I see more or less what Driggs saw at the mill—a (perhaps frightening or ominous) beauty, majesty even, in the almost gracefully curved and sentinel-straight steel pipes, stacks, and tubes.  (There’s even a hint of M. C. Escher.)

Where We Are is too chock-full of terrific art to do it justice in a short report.  (Fortunately, the show is open-ended and should be accessible for a while yet, so I can recommend a trip down to Gansevoort Street in Greenwich Village  for you to see it for yourself.)  I do need to make one more stop: Morris Louis’s Tet (1958).  I do this not only because I like Louis’s work—I like it a lot because (and Diana doesn’t understand this) it cheers me up, it makes me happy—but also because Louis (1912-62) is a founding member of the Washington Color School (about which I blogged in The Washington School of Color,” 21 September 2014) and, yes, I am a hometown chauvinist.  (So sue me!)  

Tet (Louis’s titles aren’t his—he didn’t title his canvases before he died at the age of 49; after his death, his wife assigned titles, almost all letters of the Greek or, as in this case, Hebrew alphabets) is one of the artist’s Veil paintings.  (I explain what Louis’s techniques were, including “veiling,” in my post “Morris Louis,” 15 February 2010.)  But I want to make another point here about assigning meaning to works of art.  Tet is in the section covering spirituality and mysticism, “Of Eros and Dust.”  

The Color School movement, however, wasn’t about meaning.  Not at all.  A piece of Color School art was meant to stir the viewer totally by the pleasure received from the colors and shapes.  A Color School painting doesn’t mean anything—not spiritual or mystical or concrete or symbolic.  Now, you can find meaning in it—like you do when you look at clouds—but you cannot tell me I have to find your meaning in the painting, or any meaning at all.  So Tet doesn’t “mean” anything to me—it’s just wonderful colors on a canvas that please me.  (By the way, if you check out my post on Louis, you learn that he didn’t actually “paint” his canvases.  He poured the pigment onto the canvas and let gravity and chance share in the creation of the effect.  It’s hard to make meaning with that technique.)

There wasn’t a lot of critical press on Where We Are.  Calling the exhibit “timely” at this time when we’re debating “what it means to be American,” Elena Martinique of Widewalls observed, “Featuring both icons and the not-yet-known or the forgotten, the exhibition Where We Are brings together the beauty, diversity, difference, and complexity.”  In The Villager, Stephanie Buhmann called Where We Are a “stunning installation.”  

Ben Diamond declared, “Every piece of art in this show is incredible,” in Avenue magazine, but reported that the exhibit is “a bold experiment, one that ignores the dictums of rigid art historians in favor of an approach grounded more in thematic and aesthetic concerns.  Unfortunately, its admittedly excellent parts never combine into a coherent whole.”  As if to echo my complaint about the curatorial interpretation, Diamond asserted, “The thematic groupings in ‘Where We Are’ do the work on display [a] disservice, forcing viewers to interpret art in narrowly particular ways.”  The reviewer cited Frank Stella’s “maxim” that “‘what you see is what you see,’ was expressly created to resist the sort of easy interpretation that the show imposes on it.” 

*  *  *  *
On Wednesday, 7 June, Diana invited me to another Member Night at the Whitney.  My friend and I checked out three exhibits.  One was another show drawn from the museum’s permanent collection called An Incomplete History of Protest, an exhibit of art and artifacts (from 1940 to 2017) inspired by or in support of various political movements (civil rights and anti-lynching, women’s rights, the AIDS crisis, anti-Vietnam war).  As art, it was only mildly interesting; as a look back at history, it covered movements most of which I’ve lived through and didn’t feel compelled to revisit.  (I’m not a devotee of political art, including political theater.  It’s almost always more compelling as politics than as art.)

We also breezed through Mary Corse: A Survey in Light.  She’s an artist of whom I’d never heard (she’s about a year older than I am, born in 1945), and a lot of her work is white-on-white paintings.  (Do any of you know a play called Art by Yasmina Reza, a French playwright of Iranian heritage, that played on Broadway in 1998-99?  Three men in a Paris apartment argue over whether an all-white painting one of them just bought is even art.  It won an Olivier and Molière Award and the 1998 Tony, all for best play.)  A Survey in Light is a small show, but I didn’t find it very interesting.

We spent most of the visit at Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Myths.  The show opened in one of the museum’s fifth-floor galleries on 2 March and closed on 10 June.  Grant Wood covers all of the artist’s career, from his beginnings designing decorative objects, through his early paintings, to his fame generated by American Gothic (1930), and his mature work in murals; the exhibit also includes examples of his book illustrations and covers.

I’m not a fan of Wood’s, but though I knew he did other work, I only knew American Gothic (which is in the show, on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago).  After seeing this exhibit, I’m not more taken with the Iowan’s art, but he is an interesting figure.  One thing I learned: he had a sly sense of humor which he occasionally exercised in his paintings.  Daughters of Revolution (1932) is a dig at the DAR’s pretensions and snobbishness disguised as a portrait of three middle-aged Iowan ladies.  (When I saw the canvas from across the gallery, before I even knew what its subject was, I immediately thought of The Music Man—a play set in Iowa, coincidentally—and the song “Pickalittle (Talkalittle)” in which three biddies show disdain for Marion “the Librarian” because “she advocates dirty books . . . Chaucer, Rabelais, Balzac!”)

Wood (1891-1942) began as a decorative artist, though he didn’t accept a distinction between decorative art and fine art.  In the early part of the show, there are household furnishings, including a Tiffany-like glass lampshade, that Wood designed.  His early paintings were decidedly impressionistic, influenced by the European artists he was studying and emulating (Van Antwerp Place, 1922–23).  In 1930, the year he painted American Gothic, Wood decided that he was going to devote himself to developing an indigenous, hard-edged, straightforward American style of art, influenced and inspired by his Midwestern roots and the Iowa landscape in which he grew up and the people he knew.  (His models for American Gothic, for instance, were his sister—a portrait of whom, Portrait of Nan, 1931is in the showand his dentist.)  He often included images of Iowan icons, especially corn, in  his works (especially Corn Cob Chandelier for Iowa Corn Room, 1925, one of his decorative arts creations for the Montrose Hotel in Cedar Rapids.). 

Another example of Woods’s sense of humor is Parson Weems’ Fable (1939), which presents the famous apocryphal tale of  young George Washington confessing to his father that he chopped down the cherry tree.  It’s shown as a stage scene, with Parson Weems, the fable’s originator, pulling back a  curtain to reveal the drama taking place.  Presented as a fiction this way, Woods manages to cast doubt on the  popular story’s veracity while still celebrating the moral lesson it purports to teach.

Woods painted many scenes celebrating the Iowa farm and small-town culture in which he’d grown up (Rural Landscape, c. 1931. for example).  But the farms, rural landscapes, and little towns he painted were not only idealized renditions of the real Iowa of the 1930’s, but they weren’t even the actual Iowa of his childhood, though that’s what he put out that he was painting.  He was recreating images not of the world he remembered as a child, but a world he wanted to remember—but which never actually existed.  In his later work, however, Wood wasn’t above treating some ominous or dark subjects, most starkly exemplified in Death on the Ridge Road, a 1935 oil that depicts a rather expressionistic scene, viewed from above as if he were suspended in the air, of an impending automobile crash as two cars are speeding along a windy two-lane blacktop as a truck is hurtling down the steep road towards them.