I made one of my periodic trips down to Washington in late May to visit my mom—and to catch the Gauguin exhibit at the National Gallery before it closed early in June (see my report, "Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin" on ROT, 26 June). Mom has subscriptions to two District rep theaters, the Round House Theatre in Bethesda and the Studio Theatre in the 14th Street-Logan Circle area of D.C. During the time of my visit, they both ran season-ending productions of some interest, so I joined my mother and her companions for the performances. In my lifetime, Washington has become one of the country’s premier theater towns, alongside Minneapolis, Chicago, and Seattle, among others, so I always enjoy checking out what’s playing in the Nation’s Capital.
Mother, the friend who shares the Round House subscription, and I attended the matinee performance of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus on Saturday, 28 May. I hadn’t seen the stage version of the play since it played on Broadway in 1980-83 (though I did see the 1984 film a few years after it came out), so I was looking forward to seeing it again. I’d liked the original enough to buy the script (as I had with Shaffer’s previous Broadway foray, Equus). Shaffer’s plays are among the best examples of theatricality with a provocative point that I know, and I often cite these two when I teach theater appreciation as examples of plays whose themes are different from their plot outlines. (Equus’ plot is about a boy who blinds six horses; its theme, by contrast, is how a doctor confronts the moral and ethical dilemma of whether to render a patient functional in society but an empty vessel or keep his soul intact but leave him unable to live among other people. I’ll make the contrast for Amadeus in a bit.)
By the way, in reference to the theme of a play (or a production, should that be different), I have to commend director Mark Ramont of the Round House staging for his note “From the Director” in the program. Back on 28 August 2009, I published an article on ROT, “To Note, Or Not To Note,” which scolded directors and producers for writing elaborate program notes explaining what they had tried to do on stage, even (or especially) when the results didn’t pan out. “If the ideas are well thought-out and the work is clear, the notes become superfluous,” I wrote. “I don’t need to be told what I can plainly see. If the ideas are muddled and unfulfilled on stage, the note serves only to illuminate what might have happened, but didn’t.” What Ramont wrote in his note was: “. . . [I]f I’ve done my job well, there should be no need for a program note; the experience of the play itself should hold within it everything you need to know to enjoy and appreciate the play.” Excellent sentiment. Ramont wrote further: “The older I get, the less interested I am in saying something than I am in letting the play speak for itself and in letting the audience take what it will from the experience.” Well said, too. Ramont showed me that he trusts his audience to see what is going on before our eyes and himself and his company to accomplish what they’d set out to. I won’t speak for the audience, since I can’t vouch for everyone in it, but as for the company, his trust was well placed. They acquitted themselves well.
I originally saw Amadeus in May 1981 at the Broadhurst Theatre. (The Broadway production had opened on 17 December 1980.) I saw Ian McKellen as Salieri and Tim Curry as Mozart, the original leads, but Constanze Weber (Mozart’s wife) was being played by Coris Corfman, the original Katherina Cavalieri. (I believe Jane Seymour, who was the original Constanze, was pregnant and left the show at just about this time.) Aside from the actors in the film (which I saw in 1991), this was the cast I’ve had in my memory for three decades. Allowing for the fact that it’s a 30-year-old memory, I can say that the Round House cast was more than up to the job of erasing any preconceived ideas I had about the way Amadeus is played. I will get to the acting momentarily, but I’ll make one further comment on that score. The strongest recollection I have of the 1981 performance is of McKellen’s Salieri, particularly his transformation at the beginning of each act from the dying old man in 1823 to the vigorous younger one 40 years earlier. Edward Gero, a longtime Washington-area actor, may not have been concerned with the comparison, but he had the most vulnerability to it—and he more than measured up. (I don’t mean this to sound like a backhanded compliment. I’ve seen Gero a number of times, perhaps most recently as John, the former-priest-turned-therapist, in Conor McPherson's Shining City in 2008. He’s a versatile actor, appearing in classics and modern works, as contemporary and period characters, and in musicals and straight plays, and he’s always grounded, solid, and believable. He’s been nominated 14 times for Helen Hayes Awards, Washington’s local counterpart to the Tony, and won four times.)
Amadeus, as I said, is a favorite play of mine, in particular as an example, like Shaffer’s Equus, of a play with a theme distinct from its plot. If you ask people what Amadeus is about, I believe most will tell you that it examines whether Antonio Salieri murdered Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart out of jealousy and frustration. That’s how the play and the movie were both sold, with ads that asked in an ominous voice-over, “Did he do it?” That’s what the story’s about, and Shaffer holds off telling us whether or not his play will declare Salieri guilty or innocent of Mozart’s early death. If you see Amadeus as a murder mystery, then that’s what it’s about.
But that’s not what Shaffer wrote about. That’s the story he tells, but it isn’t the point he’s making. It isn’t the play’s theme. The mystery of Mozart’s death and the question of Salieri’s complicity is the vehicle through which the playwright is exploring what I find a very provocative and challenging dilemma, one most of us avoid in our lives, I believe. The question Shaffer’s asking is: What does a man do when he’s confronted with proof that he’s a mediocrity in his chosen field? How do you handle that revelation? How do you go on once you’ve learned that all you will ever be is an also-ran? What an awful situation. The cliché has it that most people see themselves as the lead characters of their own stories. Salieri discovers that once Mozart’s genius is recognized—and God curses Salieri with the clarity to see Mozart’s genius without the talent to challenge it—he’s only going to be a bit player.
Just to raise the stakes—this is drama, after all, not a documentary—Shaffer reminds us that Salieri made a pact with God. If God made him a success as a composer, a celebrated leader in his profession, Salieri would devote himself to God and live an exemplary life. Then along comes Mozart, an effortless genius who succeeds beyond comprehension with apparent ease—and to make this even more unbearable, he’s an egotistical, sybaritic, “obscene” child. Yet, God chose him as His vessel. That’s why the play isn’t called either Salieri or Mozart, but Amadeus, using the composer’s middle name. It means “Lover of God,” the Latin equivalent of the German name Gottlieb, but Salieri, who always calls Mozart “Amadeus” when speaking of him to the audience, refers to his rival as God’s “preferred Creature”—the “Beloved of God.” Salieri wanted to be, worked for it—but Mozart didn’t care and was. That’s what the play is about. That’s the point Peter Shaffer’s making. That’s the awful dilemma at the center of the play that raises it above the average, often phony drama, to a great piece of theater. (I’m not talking dramatic literature here—Shaffer’s not Shakespeare. But Amadeus is a piece of theater that meets all my criteria magnificently.)
That said, I should go on to point out that the director and cast probably shouldn’t pay much attention to it when they’re developing their production. The director has to know it, and I’d say the actors should, too—but then they should ignore it. They need to play the script, not the message. The knowledge may inform some of the choices the director and actors make—not that I have any idea what this company was up to, of course—but actors play actions, not themes. So director Ramont, who’s finishing his tenure as director of theater programming at historic Ford’s Theatre (now there’s a gig!), and his company did as he hinted—they went about their business, playing their roles and doing their jobs, leaving the meaning up to us spectators.
I’ll assume that by now, what with Milos Forman’s film (which is much more diffuse and looser than the stage play) and the many revivals around the world, that you all know the story. So I’ll launch right into my performance report. And I’ll state my overall conclusion right at the outset: I found not one aspect of the Round House production to criticize. (How’s that for a lead?) Most local reviews were very positive, especially for the performers. The Washington Post, while touting Gero’s work as “thrilling” and “commanding” and calling Sasha Olinick “wonderfully intuitive” as Mozart, characterized Ramont’s production as “stately” and complained that it sometimes “smacks of reenactment.” I can’t say I felt that. The Gaithersburg, Maryland, Gazette, a District suburban newspaper, called the production “pitch-perfect,” which echoed most of the other area outlets. (For some reason, Washington’s other daily, the Washington Times didn’t seem to have run a review.) Washingtonian magazine caviled about the quality of the sound system’s reproduction of Mozart’s music, but my ears are not so finely calibrated—this isn’t a musical, after all—and I suspect you’d have to be an audiophile to register that complaint.
From the costumes by Bill Black to the sets by James Kronzer to the sound and lights by, respectively, Matthew M. Nielson, responsible for the theater-filling renditions of Mozart’s music and the echoes of Salieri’s confessions that give the play some of its texture, and Matthew Richards, whose shadows and murky edges create the moments of magic—the unseen operas—and ominousness—the specter that haunts Mozart at the end—to the acting and directing, it all worked so well together that I’m not sure I can pull the production apart to analyze it. (No wonder Ramont didn’t feel it’d be necessary to say anything about the work—he and his team did it and it showed.)
Kronzer’s sets were what I’d describe as fragmentary Realism. With the exception of the cathedral set at the beginnings and ends of the two acts, which was pretty much a fully realized church interior, the 18th-century rooms of the rest of the play were represented by set pieces like chairs, tables, and a harpsichord that were moved on and off as each scene started, facilitating the quick segues necessary to keep the two-hour-and-forty-five-minute play moving. The cathedral set, which greeted the audience as we entered the auditorium, setting the tone, was vaulting and imposing, recalling many of the vast churches I saw all over Europe in the ‘60s and ‘70s. It was dominated by immense faux-marbre columns with tiers of glowing red votive candles across the rear. It was rather stern, befitting the confessional content of the opening and closing scenes, in contrast with the Rococo rooms of Schönbrunn Palace and Salieri’s home that followed.
For the most part, the center of the stage was left bare like the dance floor of a cabaret to give the characters maximum space to work so what we don’t have is a drawing-room drama. In fact, a dance of sorts isn’t a bad metaphor—a sort of non-rhythmic ballet, if you see what I mean—though perhaps a spoken opera is an apter metaphor. Ramont’s staging was somewhat presentational, so the space served as a kind of theater stage-within-a-stage. The set design accommodated this action perfectly, creating an atmosphere while reproducing a set of period rooms. It did concentrate the action to the middle of the stage, but I didn’t see that as a fault. This is a play about theatrical performing (concerts and operas), after all.
The costumes (with wigs by Heather Fleming) were more literal. Mozart’s wig was wilder than the rest (and probably than the age would have tolerated), but not as punk-inspired as Tom Hulce’s in the film; the rest of the clothes and hairstyles were perfectly period-appropriate while at the same time suggestive of character and role. Count Von Strack, imperial groom, “stiff and proper,” wears brown and earth colors, decidedly unflashy, but Count Orsini-Rosenberg, imperial opera director and enamored of all things Italian, is dressed in high-fashion blues and bright colors with plenty of gold trim.
Shaffer has written cartoonish versions of his characters, especially Salieri and Mozart, but also Emperor Joseph II and his courtiers. The two antagonists at the center of the play are drawn so that they are diametrical opposites, and this is no accident. Director Ramont kept to this plan and both actors, Gero as Salieri, an angry and frustrated cartoon to be sure, and Olinick, an alternately potty-mouthed vulgarian and infantile clown, were more than willing to go to the extremes the production demanded. Floyd King, who plays comedy as if he were born to the genre and is a favorite of my mother and Washington audiences in general, made Emperor Joseph an almost-simple-minded monarch with charm and a lot of power. (I’ve seen King in many roles, including Feste in Twelfth Night—but his picture ought to illustrate the encyclopedia entry for Andrew Aguecheek.) His court is made up of little wind-up dolls. None of them is real—Shaffer wasn’t writing about real people because Amadeus isn’t a history play—and the actors all did what they needed to to make the horror of Salieri’s self-recognition palpable.
Both Gero and Olinick, whom I don’t recall ever having seen before, took on the mercurial changes with virtuosity. Gero shifted from oleaginous charm and dissembling to barely controlled rage at God without a blink. When Salieri’s the master of his domain, Gero’s control is calm and complete, a vision of self-satisfaction and confidence, even as he lies and misrepresents. When the Italian composer starts to realize where he stands in God’s esteem, I could feel the actor quiver and burn beneath his skin until he explodes. Olinick’s Mozart was by turns a possessed genius who sneers at the ignorance of those around him and a frolicking, uninhibited child for whom everything is a toy and every place is a sandbox. Despite his small stature, the actor isn’t as boyish-looking as Hulce was in the film, or even as Curry appeared on Broadway, but when Olinick burst into his antics, rolling around on the floor with Constanze and cooing baby-talk, he was like a grotesque imp on speed. (I can only surmise that the work, for both actors but especially Olinick, was exhausting.)
One local reviewer from DCTheatreScene wrote on line that “Shaffer succeeded in creating a compelling, highly intellectual drama that pursues a number of interesting threads.” Ramont and his company fully realized this intention as far as I’m concerned, and did it exceptionally. Another on-line reviewer, DCist, warned that Ramont intended “to suck you into the play.” Well, he sure did get me in! Round House’s Amadeus was one of the most satisfying theater experiences I’ve had in recent years.
[The second show I saw in Washington in May was the Studio Theatre’s revival of the Off-Broadway hit, Venus in Fur by David Ives. I’ll publish my report on that production shortly. Come back to ROT in a few days to see what I had to say about this two-hander.]
01 July 2011
'The Illusion'
For the final production in the Tony Kushner season at the Signature Theatre Company, my friend Diana and I went over the Peter Norton Space on far West 42nd Street for The Illusion, the playwright’s adaptation of L’Illusion comique (The Theatrical or Comic Illusion, 1636), Pierre Corneille’s 17th-century “mongrel oddity.” That’s what New York Times’ reviewer Ben Brantley called the play that features magic and other enchantments (“phantasms,” Kushner calls them), adapted when Kushner was working on Angels in America. The Illusion was first performed in a reading at the New York Theater Workshop in 1988 and the full production premièred, directed by Mark Lamos, in 1990 at the Hartford Stage Company “where the play became what it is now.” It went on to productions at such regional companies as Berkeley Rep in 1991 and around the country and abroad thereafter, becoming the work that made Kushner a playwright who lived off his writing. It was last staged in New York in 1994 at the Classic Stage Company. The Signature production, which has been extended through 17 July, was staged by Michael Mayer, best known for the musicals Spring Awakening and American Idiot.
Corneille (1606-84), older contemporary of Jean Racine (1639-99) and Molière (1622-73), is principally known for his tragedies, especially Le Cid (1637). His most popular comedy is The Liar (Le Menteur, 1643), a translation of which by David Ives (on a regional production of whose Venus in Fur I’ll be reporting for ROT shortly) was staged last spring at Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company. Corneille described L’Illusion comique as a “gallant extravaganza” and it’s often compared to Shakespeare’s The Tempest (including by Brantley and other reviewers), to which it bears some superficial resemblances. (Both plays have a sorcerer at the center and feature a pair of young lovers.) Coincidentally, like Ives’s Venus, L’Illusion has metatheatrical aspects: the two young lovers are actors and the play ends with a defense of acting.
Kushner’s Illusion follows the lawyer Pridamant of Avignon as he searches for the son he banished 15 years earlier. At the opening of the play, Pridamant’s been directed to the cave of Alcandre, a mysterious and powerful sorcerer who claims to be able to conjure images of the young man. Throughout the play, Alcandre presents three different versions of the son’s life, all with the same two women and three men, but they are referred to by different names and behave differently in each image, and the visions are in different locations. The old man recognizes his son, but the younger man is never called by his real name, which we never learn because Pridamant can’t seem to remember it. As the images become increasingly sinister, Pridamant becomes more determined to rescue his son from what looks like inevitable tragedy. In the end, most of what Alcandre reveals turns out to be illusion. The way Pridamant responds to what he sees is, of course, what Kushner wants us to observe.
Kushner’s rendition, which runs two hours and 20 minutes plus an intermission, has the adapter’s inimitable stamp on it, though the basic plot generally seems to follow the original. “Freely adapted” from Corneille, as the published edition states, none of the text is a direct translation from the French. L’Illusion comique (which I haven’t read) included only two visions; The Illusion uses a scene Kushner borrowed from a 15th-century Spanish comedia called Calisto [y Malibea] by Fernando de Rojas for the first illusion. The language in The Illusion, however, is purely Kushner’s, including the occasional verse passages. The text has aspects of both 17th-century formality (or faux-formality, perhaps) and contemporary colloquiality, but the two don’t seem to clash. (Kushner’s adaptation is published in a 1994 and a 2004 edition.) As Brantley says, Kushner’s “one of the most linguistically luxuriant dramatists of our time.” He’s besotted with language, in fact. If Alcandre casts spells with magic, Kushner does it with words—not incantations, but ordinary words. This early work, which was written on commission at the request of Jim Nicola of the New York Theatre Workshop for director Brian Kulick (now at CSC), is perhaps a pure example of Kushner’s love affair with language since it contains none of the political and social commentary of, say, Angels, which he set aside briefly to write The Illusion. “Of all my plays it’s the least overtly political,” says Kushner of The Illusion. He sees it as a romance “about love and disappointment and disillusion.”
And magic. Kushner also admits, “I’ve always loved magic,” including that it never seems to work fully on stage. “You can always see the wires,” he says with some apparent delight. (I wonder if he was thinking about the mega-musical in previews a few blocks east at the time of the interview, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark?) The Illusion, Kushner concludes, is “mostly very romantic and magical and it’s the only time I’ve ever given myself permission to really write about what we do.” I take that last clause to refer to the making of theater, because at the center of The Illusion, just as it is in L’Illusion comique, is theater, acting, and creating theatrical illusions. At least in Kushner’s version, that’s the plot line. As I discuss in my upcoming report on Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, the theme’s different. As Alcandre’s last speech makes clear, love is the greatest of life’s illusions, and the take-away for The Illusion.
(A note here: Though the French play apparently makes it known that Pridamant’s son falls in with a troupe of actors early in the plot, giving us a big hint about what’s going on, Kushner doesn’t tell us anything of that until after all the visions have concluded and Pridamant responds to what he believes he’s seen. If you didn’t read the reviews or a synopsis of Corneille’s play, you might be in the same position as the old man, but even though it’s retrospective, the theatrical aspect of the plot and theme are significant to understanding the play, and I’ve had to be something of a spoiler. Sorry about that. I don’t know how to get around it.)
Kushner considers that all his work is about family and love. The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide, he says, is his “conscious attempt to write a big family drama” and Angels is about the way “LGBT people have had a history of having to cobble together a family in the absence of a biological family” that had often rejected them. In The Illusion, the dramatist offers, “the central relationship is between a father and a son,” driven, Kushner says, “by the way the father has replicated in his son a kind of violence.” Indeed, the playwright believes we could perceive a connection between Pridamant and Roy Cohn in Angels, the surrogate father for the conflicted Mormon lawyer, Joe Pitt. All three plays, Kushner notes, depict “a struggling with the issue of fathers.” (Kushner insists that this wasn’t part of his own experience, but that he’d observed it among gay people he knew.)
The “improvised family,” a “trope” Kushner says appears in “a lot of gay literature,” is a force in Angels, of course, but it can also be seen in the theater troupe that Pridamant’s son substitutes for the father who banished him. But the father doesn’t entirely get the dilemma: when Alcandre reveals that the young man had become an actor, Pridamant ponders this news and though he’s glad his son isn’t really in jeopardy, he says he isn’t sure he likes the idea the boy’s an actor. (Is that irony—a lawyer looking down on an actor?) When Alcandre tells Pridamant that his son’s appearing at a theater in Paris and encourages him to travel there to see him, the old father demurs—the roads are bad and it’s an arduous journey. Maybe he’ll go—and maybe he won’t. So much for paternal love and regret.
Let me come back to the script shortly and say my piece about the production first. In all, the Signature’s staging is excellent, as it usually is. Christine Jones’s set and Kevin Adams’s lighting combine effectively to create a mystical and magical environment within Alcandre’s cave, with giant framed mirrors upstage for apparitions to come and go, entering our world at the sorcerer’s command; a half-buried piano (which may also be a portal to the nether world) with many mechanical applications around its casing; mysterious lanterns suspended from the ceiling that rise and fall for various purposes (not least of which is to brighten or darken the surroundings); and a huge vase from which flowers sprout instantaneously. (The set is crisscrossed with mysterious red string like some of Richard Foreman’s early environments.) It’s more like a spooky attic in an enchanted mansion than a dank bat cave, perhaps, but Pridamant is quickly convinced that anything can happen here, as on Prospero’s island, and I was more than willing to go along and, as Kushner wants, “suspend your disbelief and suspend your belief as well.” Susan Hilferty’s 17th-century costumes are at once theatrical and dream-like.
The performances are universally good, though there are clear standouts among the cast. The wizard Alcandre, usually a male role, is here played by the wonderful Lois Smith whom I last saw at Signature as Carrie Watts in Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful in December 2005. I don’t think Smith can deliver anything less than a credible and warm performance, and she does here as a sort of maternal witch, if that’s a possible concept. (I suspect that casting the part with a woman, especially one as innately sympathetic as Smith, softens the character that appears to be written as a cynic and misanthrope. I mean, who else lives in a cave with only a deaf-mute servant? Really!) It works well enough here and Smith keeps the pressure on Pridamant to see the hatefulness of his actions toward his teenaged son so long ago. Her natural empathy also makes Alcandre’s final lines about theater, love, and illusion—which are really just romantic claptrap—almost believable.
Pridamant is played by another vet, David Margulies, a former teacher of mine from several decades ago. (Brantley remarked that together, Smith’s and Margulies’s “combined years on the stage total more than a century.” I suppose that’s accurate, if a little harsh.) I last saw David on stage in Tina Howe's Chasing Manet for Primary Stages in April 2009. He’s a little idiosyncratic as an actor—not enough to approach mannered, but he’s recognizable to me instantly, especially, since in this case he enters in partial darkness and covered by a large hat, by his voice. (David’s an old-school stage actor, despite his film and TV credits: he uses his voice not only to help create character and circumstances, but to project them to the back row of the house. You never miss one of his lines.) A true character actor, David can make any role unique, substantial, and believable no matter how eccentric or peculiar, and that includes Pridamant. (I think especially of his work in Comedians and Zalmen or The Madness of God.) While this man is the definition of bad fatherhood, David makes him worthy of sympathy even at the last moment when he balks at going to Paris to reconcile with his son. David’s Pridamant is so befuddled and confused, not only by the scenes Alcandre has set before him but because he just hasn’t ever understood what he’s done to his son or what it means to be a father, that it’s almost reasonable that he wouldn’t know what to do next. David here combines bluster and self-delusion in such a way that it becomes a whole new emotion. Just as Lois Smith makes Alcandre a sort of tough-love teacher rather than a sadistic cynic, David makes Pridamant almost a victim rather than an abuser.
The standouts, however, aren’t these vets. Abetted by Kushner’s writing (he created the characters that are the platform for the performances), another old hand and a newer talent stand in the spotlight, so to speak. Peter Bartlett, whose own career goes back to the ‘60s, is Matamore, a braggart, loony aristocrat with a rubbery face that suggests Jack Gilford when he did his bubbling oatmeal gag. Matamore shuts out the reality of the world to perpetuate the fantasy realm in which he’s a great warrior and lover and Bartlett makes you feel he may even have the right tack for Kushner’s funhouse-mirror universe. When Matamore’s inner world is pierced by the truth, the crestfallen Bartlett resembles nothing more than a bereft puppy, upon which he becomes a desolate hermit (and escapes inside that magical piano). But Bartlett could be performing in his own play, Matamore’s world is so self-contained. As a series of maids and confidantes, Merritt Wever has so totally captured the feeling of Kushner’s alternate universe that above all the other actors, she shone. She does tart extremely becomingly! Though we learn that the people Alcandre has conjured for Pridamant are actors in plays, the others project a tentativeness that told me they were acting, playing parts created for them. Wever is of that world, whether conversing with her mistress or the young swain, or delivering soliloquies and asides for our benefit. (I don’t know if Wever’s ever done Maria in Twelfth Night, but she’d be a natural. I bet she'd make a terrific Beatrice in Much Ado, too.)
(There seems to be an invasion of New York theater this season by members of the Nurse Jackie production company. Edie Falco—Nurse J her own self—was on Broadway with the recently-closed House of Blue Leaves; Rajiv Joseph, a writer on the show, had two plays on New York City stages, including his current Broadway début, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo; and now Merritt Wever in The Illusion, who plays Nurse Zoey on the Showtime series. The show tapes and is set in the city.)
The other cast members—Henry Stram mostly as Alcandre’s put-upon Amanuensis, Finn Wittrock as Pridamant’s son and the young lover in the visions, Amanda Quaid as the high-born maiden, and Sean Dugan as the swain’s rival—all take on the multiple roles with energy and verve. Wittrock and Dugan even engage in a rapier-and-dagger duel (excitingly choreographed by fight director Rick Sordelet). Getting to play three different Renaissance parts like that—a commedia role, a Restoration-like romantic farce, and a tragedy—in one production must be an actor’s dream gig, and I’d bet this is a popular script for college theaters—or it should be. Director Mayer needed to have tightened the performances a tad to keep them from seeming like late rehearsals or scene-study acting—not quite off, but not finished. (I’m being generous here: another possibility is that the actors just aren’t experienced enough with classical roles to be comfortable with period characters like these and are still figuring out the style. They sometimes seemed to be playing Naturalism rather than Neoclassicism. Among the younger actors and the director, only Wittrock lists a number of classical roles in his program bio.) Mayer also didn’t really reconcile the duality of Kushner’s script. The writer said he loves the “doubleness” of magic, and his play has a dual dynamic as well: the fantasy of the illusions and the sincerity and truth of the Alcandre-Pridamant interludes. The production becomes segmented at the joints and Mayer never found a way to segue from one into the other without a jolt and change of gears.
The interstitial scenes between Pridamant and Alcandre only seem to attenuate the proceedings since they are far less active and more cerebral than the visions. At the risk of diminishing the characters played by Margulies and Smith, for all the good work those actors do, theatricality demands that the play move more quickly from illusion to illusion without so much delay. The greatest deficit to this production, though, isn’t in the performances at all, but in Kushner’s adaptation. I don’t know how long Corneille’s original runs, but the almost-2½-hour length of The Illusion is at least 20 minutes too much. I said that Kushner was besotted with language, an attribute evident in all three plays in the Signature’s season. (Angels took two plays totaling over seven hours and IHG was 3½ hours long.) He really needs someone to snap him out of his logorrhea—he needs an editor. First, the dramatist added a whole scene to the French original (one so long it had to be split between act one and act two), then each of the scenes goes on way too long and could all stand some serious trimming. The New Yorker sums Kushner’s weakness up nicely: “[A]s a genre parodist, he is nimble but lacking in urgency. . . . [The Illusion is] the work of a poet in search of his true subject.”
[The Illusion marks not only the last show of the Signature Theatre’s Tony Kushner season, the company’s 20th, but the final production at its longtime base, the Peter Norton Space at 555 W. 42nd Street. If all goes according to plans, the Signature Theatre Company will reopen in February 2012 in its brand-new, Frank Gehry-designed space, the Signature Center, housing three theaters, two rehearsal studios, and administrative offices, at 440 W. 42nd Street, within the new highrise building that will be known as MiMA (for “Middle of Manhattan”), occupying an entire city block on 42nd Street between 9th and 10th Avenues. Signature’s first Residency One playwright in the new Signature Center will be Athol Fugard.]
Corneille (1606-84), older contemporary of Jean Racine (1639-99) and Molière (1622-73), is principally known for his tragedies, especially Le Cid (1637). His most popular comedy is The Liar (Le Menteur, 1643), a translation of which by David Ives (on a regional production of whose Venus in Fur I’ll be reporting for ROT shortly) was staged last spring at Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company. Corneille described L’Illusion comique as a “gallant extravaganza” and it’s often compared to Shakespeare’s The Tempest (including by Brantley and other reviewers), to which it bears some superficial resemblances. (Both plays have a sorcerer at the center and feature a pair of young lovers.) Coincidentally, like Ives’s Venus, L’Illusion has metatheatrical aspects: the two young lovers are actors and the play ends with a defense of acting.
Kushner’s Illusion follows the lawyer Pridamant of Avignon as he searches for the son he banished 15 years earlier. At the opening of the play, Pridamant’s been directed to the cave of Alcandre, a mysterious and powerful sorcerer who claims to be able to conjure images of the young man. Throughout the play, Alcandre presents three different versions of the son’s life, all with the same two women and three men, but they are referred to by different names and behave differently in each image, and the visions are in different locations. The old man recognizes his son, but the younger man is never called by his real name, which we never learn because Pridamant can’t seem to remember it. As the images become increasingly sinister, Pridamant becomes more determined to rescue his son from what looks like inevitable tragedy. In the end, most of what Alcandre reveals turns out to be illusion. The way Pridamant responds to what he sees is, of course, what Kushner wants us to observe.
Kushner’s rendition, which runs two hours and 20 minutes plus an intermission, has the adapter’s inimitable stamp on it, though the basic plot generally seems to follow the original. “Freely adapted” from Corneille, as the published edition states, none of the text is a direct translation from the French. L’Illusion comique (which I haven’t read) included only two visions; The Illusion uses a scene Kushner borrowed from a 15th-century Spanish comedia called Calisto [y Malibea] by Fernando de Rojas for the first illusion. The language in The Illusion, however, is purely Kushner’s, including the occasional verse passages. The text has aspects of both 17th-century formality (or faux-formality, perhaps) and contemporary colloquiality, but the two don’t seem to clash. (Kushner’s adaptation is published in a 1994 and a 2004 edition.) As Brantley says, Kushner’s “one of the most linguistically luxuriant dramatists of our time.” He’s besotted with language, in fact. If Alcandre casts spells with magic, Kushner does it with words—not incantations, but ordinary words. This early work, which was written on commission at the request of Jim Nicola of the New York Theatre Workshop for director Brian Kulick (now at CSC), is perhaps a pure example of Kushner’s love affair with language since it contains none of the political and social commentary of, say, Angels, which he set aside briefly to write The Illusion. “Of all my plays it’s the least overtly political,” says Kushner of The Illusion. He sees it as a romance “about love and disappointment and disillusion.”
And magic. Kushner also admits, “I’ve always loved magic,” including that it never seems to work fully on stage. “You can always see the wires,” he says with some apparent delight. (I wonder if he was thinking about the mega-musical in previews a few blocks east at the time of the interview, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark?) The Illusion, Kushner concludes, is “mostly very romantic and magical and it’s the only time I’ve ever given myself permission to really write about what we do.” I take that last clause to refer to the making of theater, because at the center of The Illusion, just as it is in L’Illusion comique, is theater, acting, and creating theatrical illusions. At least in Kushner’s version, that’s the plot line. As I discuss in my upcoming report on Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, the theme’s different. As Alcandre’s last speech makes clear, love is the greatest of life’s illusions, and the take-away for The Illusion.
(A note here: Though the French play apparently makes it known that Pridamant’s son falls in with a troupe of actors early in the plot, giving us a big hint about what’s going on, Kushner doesn’t tell us anything of that until after all the visions have concluded and Pridamant responds to what he believes he’s seen. If you didn’t read the reviews or a synopsis of Corneille’s play, you might be in the same position as the old man, but even though it’s retrospective, the theatrical aspect of the plot and theme are significant to understanding the play, and I’ve had to be something of a spoiler. Sorry about that. I don’t know how to get around it.)
Kushner considers that all his work is about family and love. The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide, he says, is his “conscious attempt to write a big family drama” and Angels is about the way “LGBT people have had a history of having to cobble together a family in the absence of a biological family” that had often rejected them. In The Illusion, the dramatist offers, “the central relationship is between a father and a son,” driven, Kushner says, “by the way the father has replicated in his son a kind of violence.” Indeed, the playwright believes we could perceive a connection between Pridamant and Roy Cohn in Angels, the surrogate father for the conflicted Mormon lawyer, Joe Pitt. All three plays, Kushner notes, depict “a struggling with the issue of fathers.” (Kushner insists that this wasn’t part of his own experience, but that he’d observed it among gay people he knew.)
The “improvised family,” a “trope” Kushner says appears in “a lot of gay literature,” is a force in Angels, of course, but it can also be seen in the theater troupe that Pridamant’s son substitutes for the father who banished him. But the father doesn’t entirely get the dilemma: when Alcandre reveals that the young man had become an actor, Pridamant ponders this news and though he’s glad his son isn’t really in jeopardy, he says he isn’t sure he likes the idea the boy’s an actor. (Is that irony—a lawyer looking down on an actor?) When Alcandre tells Pridamant that his son’s appearing at a theater in Paris and encourages him to travel there to see him, the old father demurs—the roads are bad and it’s an arduous journey. Maybe he’ll go—and maybe he won’t. So much for paternal love and regret.
Let me come back to the script shortly and say my piece about the production first. In all, the Signature’s staging is excellent, as it usually is. Christine Jones’s set and Kevin Adams’s lighting combine effectively to create a mystical and magical environment within Alcandre’s cave, with giant framed mirrors upstage for apparitions to come and go, entering our world at the sorcerer’s command; a half-buried piano (which may also be a portal to the nether world) with many mechanical applications around its casing; mysterious lanterns suspended from the ceiling that rise and fall for various purposes (not least of which is to brighten or darken the surroundings); and a huge vase from which flowers sprout instantaneously. (The set is crisscrossed with mysterious red string like some of Richard Foreman’s early environments.) It’s more like a spooky attic in an enchanted mansion than a dank bat cave, perhaps, but Pridamant is quickly convinced that anything can happen here, as on Prospero’s island, and I was more than willing to go along and, as Kushner wants, “suspend your disbelief and suspend your belief as well.” Susan Hilferty’s 17th-century costumes are at once theatrical and dream-like.
The performances are universally good, though there are clear standouts among the cast. The wizard Alcandre, usually a male role, is here played by the wonderful Lois Smith whom I last saw at Signature as Carrie Watts in Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful in December 2005. I don’t think Smith can deliver anything less than a credible and warm performance, and she does here as a sort of maternal witch, if that’s a possible concept. (I suspect that casting the part with a woman, especially one as innately sympathetic as Smith, softens the character that appears to be written as a cynic and misanthrope. I mean, who else lives in a cave with only a deaf-mute servant? Really!) It works well enough here and Smith keeps the pressure on Pridamant to see the hatefulness of his actions toward his teenaged son so long ago. Her natural empathy also makes Alcandre’s final lines about theater, love, and illusion—which are really just romantic claptrap—almost believable.
Pridamant is played by another vet, David Margulies, a former teacher of mine from several decades ago. (Brantley remarked that together, Smith’s and Margulies’s “combined years on the stage total more than a century.” I suppose that’s accurate, if a little harsh.) I last saw David on stage in Tina Howe's Chasing Manet for Primary Stages in April 2009. He’s a little idiosyncratic as an actor—not enough to approach mannered, but he’s recognizable to me instantly, especially, since in this case he enters in partial darkness and covered by a large hat, by his voice. (David’s an old-school stage actor, despite his film and TV credits: he uses his voice not only to help create character and circumstances, but to project them to the back row of the house. You never miss one of his lines.) A true character actor, David can make any role unique, substantial, and believable no matter how eccentric or peculiar, and that includes Pridamant. (I think especially of his work in Comedians and Zalmen or The Madness of God.) While this man is the definition of bad fatherhood, David makes him worthy of sympathy even at the last moment when he balks at going to Paris to reconcile with his son. David’s Pridamant is so befuddled and confused, not only by the scenes Alcandre has set before him but because he just hasn’t ever understood what he’s done to his son or what it means to be a father, that it’s almost reasonable that he wouldn’t know what to do next. David here combines bluster and self-delusion in such a way that it becomes a whole new emotion. Just as Lois Smith makes Alcandre a sort of tough-love teacher rather than a sadistic cynic, David makes Pridamant almost a victim rather than an abuser.
The standouts, however, aren’t these vets. Abetted by Kushner’s writing (he created the characters that are the platform for the performances), another old hand and a newer talent stand in the spotlight, so to speak. Peter Bartlett, whose own career goes back to the ‘60s, is Matamore, a braggart, loony aristocrat with a rubbery face that suggests Jack Gilford when he did his bubbling oatmeal gag. Matamore shuts out the reality of the world to perpetuate the fantasy realm in which he’s a great warrior and lover and Bartlett makes you feel he may even have the right tack for Kushner’s funhouse-mirror universe. When Matamore’s inner world is pierced by the truth, the crestfallen Bartlett resembles nothing more than a bereft puppy, upon which he becomes a desolate hermit (and escapes inside that magical piano). But Bartlett could be performing in his own play, Matamore’s world is so self-contained. As a series of maids and confidantes, Merritt Wever has so totally captured the feeling of Kushner’s alternate universe that above all the other actors, she shone. She does tart extremely becomingly! Though we learn that the people Alcandre has conjured for Pridamant are actors in plays, the others project a tentativeness that told me they were acting, playing parts created for them. Wever is of that world, whether conversing with her mistress or the young swain, or delivering soliloquies and asides for our benefit. (I don’t know if Wever’s ever done Maria in Twelfth Night, but she’d be a natural. I bet she'd make a terrific Beatrice in Much Ado, too.)
(There seems to be an invasion of New York theater this season by members of the Nurse Jackie production company. Edie Falco—Nurse J her own self—was on Broadway with the recently-closed House of Blue Leaves; Rajiv Joseph, a writer on the show, had two plays on New York City stages, including his current Broadway début, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo; and now Merritt Wever in The Illusion, who plays Nurse Zoey on the Showtime series. The show tapes and is set in the city.)
The other cast members—Henry Stram mostly as Alcandre’s put-upon Amanuensis, Finn Wittrock as Pridamant’s son and the young lover in the visions, Amanda Quaid as the high-born maiden, and Sean Dugan as the swain’s rival—all take on the multiple roles with energy and verve. Wittrock and Dugan even engage in a rapier-and-dagger duel (excitingly choreographed by fight director Rick Sordelet). Getting to play three different Renaissance parts like that—a commedia role, a Restoration-like romantic farce, and a tragedy—in one production must be an actor’s dream gig, and I’d bet this is a popular script for college theaters—or it should be. Director Mayer needed to have tightened the performances a tad to keep them from seeming like late rehearsals or scene-study acting—not quite off, but not finished. (I’m being generous here: another possibility is that the actors just aren’t experienced enough with classical roles to be comfortable with period characters like these and are still figuring out the style. They sometimes seemed to be playing Naturalism rather than Neoclassicism. Among the younger actors and the director, only Wittrock lists a number of classical roles in his program bio.) Mayer also didn’t really reconcile the duality of Kushner’s script. The writer said he loves the “doubleness” of magic, and his play has a dual dynamic as well: the fantasy of the illusions and the sincerity and truth of the Alcandre-Pridamant interludes. The production becomes segmented at the joints and Mayer never found a way to segue from one into the other without a jolt and change of gears.
The interstitial scenes between Pridamant and Alcandre only seem to attenuate the proceedings since they are far less active and more cerebral than the visions. At the risk of diminishing the characters played by Margulies and Smith, for all the good work those actors do, theatricality demands that the play move more quickly from illusion to illusion without so much delay. The greatest deficit to this production, though, isn’t in the performances at all, but in Kushner’s adaptation. I don’t know how long Corneille’s original runs, but the almost-2½-hour length of The Illusion is at least 20 minutes too much. I said that Kushner was besotted with language, an attribute evident in all three plays in the Signature’s season. (Angels took two plays totaling over seven hours and IHG was 3½ hours long.) He really needs someone to snap him out of his logorrhea—he needs an editor. First, the dramatist added a whole scene to the French original (one so long it had to be split between act one and act two), then each of the scenes goes on way too long and could all stand some serious trimming. The New Yorker sums Kushner’s weakness up nicely: “[A]s a genre parodist, he is nimble but lacking in urgency. . . . [The Illusion is] the work of a poet in search of his true subject.”
[The Illusion marks not only the last show of the Signature Theatre’s Tony Kushner season, the company’s 20th, but the final production at its longtime base, the Peter Norton Space at 555 W. 42nd Street. If all goes according to plans, the Signature Theatre Company will reopen in February 2012 in its brand-new, Frank Gehry-designed space, the Signature Center, housing three theaters, two rehearsal studios, and administrative offices, at 440 W. 42nd Street, within the new highrise building that will be known as MiMA (for “Middle of Manhattan”), occupying an entire city block on 42nd Street between 9th and 10th Avenues. Signature’s first Residency One playwright in the new Signature Center will be Athol Fugard.]
26 June 2011
Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin
While my mother was in New York City in April, we did a little gallery-hopping, as is our habit. I’d clipped the review of an exhibit of collages by Romare Bearden at a gallery on 57th Street and the weekend Mom arrived, there was an ad in the Times for a gallery show of Picasso portraits in far-west Chelsea. There were a few other potentially interesting exhibits, but those were the ones we ended up catching, plus one at the Marlborough, a few doors west of the Bearden show.
On Monday, 18 April, Mom and I took two busses over to the west Chelsea area between 10th and 11th Avenue to check out two galleries showing artists in which we were interested. One, the Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery on West 26th Street, had a show of the works of colorist Ken Noland (who died in January 2010), but I’d never thought that, like most museums, many commercial galleries are also often closed on Mondays, and Mitchell-Innes was one. (I tried to convince Mom to go back over on another day before she left, but she just didn’t feel like making the trek to far-west Chelsea again. I mentioned Noland in passing in “Morris Louis,” my report on an exhibit at the Hirshhorn in Washington in November 2007, posted on ROT on 15 February 2010; and in my article “Art in D.C. (Dec. ’09-Jan. ’10)” on 18 January 2010.) In a New York Times article about the Chelsea art scene, Roberta Smith described the Noland show as an “invigorating survey of early, casually geometric stain paintings” emphasizing “unknown, idiosyncratic works.” Noland was a Washington artist, part of the Washington Color School like his friend Morris Louis, and I’m sorry I couldn’t convince Mom to make a second attempt to see the exhibit.
(Mom did remind me that back in the late ‘50s, when my parents were part of a small group that owned the Gres Gallery in Washington, Noland had wanted to show his work there. The managing partner, who actually ran the gallery, a respected venue for one-artist and theme shows, declined because she didn’t want Gres to become known as a Washington gallery. She won that battle: Gres was only the second gallery in the U.S. to mount a solo show of Fernando Botero’s work—MoMA bought Botero’s Mona Lisa from the Gres show—and the first to exhibit abstract paintings from Poland, a show MoMA took to New York; but as a result several artists like Noland and Louis never showed at Gres. By the turn of the decade, though, most of the partners, many of whom were Foreign Service officers, were transferred out of the country—my own parents went to Germany in 1962—and Gres Gallery closed. It had provided me with an exciting and eye-opening art education before I was a teenager and the influence has remained strong ever since. “Helping out” in the gallery—I stuffed envelopes and such—and meeting artists at the vernissages the partners hosted are some of the most vivid and cherished memories of my childhood.)
The other gallery in the area for which we were headed was the Gagosian Gallery on West 21st Street, and on the chance that it might be the one gallery open on Mondays, we walked down the five blocks—and sure enough, it was indeed open! Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L’amour fou (that’s “. . . Crazy Love”), on display through 25 June, included several dozen portraits—in paint, ink, and pencil as well as plaster and bronze—of Marie-Thérèse Walter (1909-77), the young mistress, model, and muse of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). The works, curated by John Richardson, the artist’s biographer, and Diana Widmaier Picasso, an art historian and the granddaughter of the painter and his model, all date between 1927, when the two met by chance on a Paris street, and 1940; several portraits of their daughter, Maya (b. 1935), either alone or with her mother, are also on view. (Diana Widmaier Picasso, b. 1957, the co-curator of the exhibit, is Maya’s daughter.) The art generally shows the growth of the relationship between the artist and his model, from her earliest portrait, the drawing Marie-Thérèse coifée d’un beret (Marie-Thérèse wearing a beret, 1927) in which she’s still 17 before the affair began, moving on to the next drawing, Portrait de Marie-Thérèse (Portrait of Marie-Thérèse, 1935), which now depicts the young woman in a clearly sexual attitude. Interestingly, even though Picasso was already becoming well-known and was no longer the novice artist of his early days of Realism (he introduced himself to the 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse by taking her to a bookstore and showing her a monograph of his works on sale there), several of the pieces are realistic or nearly so, especially several of the sketches (like the two just named). Most, however, cover Picasso’s several styles—he shifted from technique to technique almost yearly, I think—for the dozen years during which the works were created. In fact, Smith asserts that Marie-Thérèse “inspired Picasso to review and preview nearly all the phases of his long career . . . .”
In the Chelsea article, Smith described L’amour fou as “a big, museum-quality show,” and that’s accurate. (I suppose any show of Picasso’s work could be small, but a curator’d have to work hard for it not to be “museum-quality.” According to the Gagosian, the exhibit was inspired by the successes of several other recent Gagosian shows: Picasso: Mosqueteros (New York, 2009) and Picasso: The Mediterranean Years (London, 2010). The gallery describes Marie-Thérèse as “the primary inspiration for Picasso’s most daring aesthetic experiments in the decade to come.” I generally distrust superlatives like that—it’s always arguable what’s “the most daring” and what’s only second-most, for instance, depending on your threshold for innovation—but this show certainly covers a gamut of experimentation and new styles, not just for Picasso, but for modern art. The exhibit contains not only paintings and the bronze and plaster sculptures I mentioned, but drawings and prints as well as several small carved wooden pieces. (These latter, about the size of large toothbrushes, along with some bronzes that seem to have been cast from the wooden models, are reminiscent of Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, a comrade of Picasso’s.) Generally unified by the subject, though not all the works are specifically of Marie-Thérèse or even Maya, such as Femme nue dans un fauteuil rouge (Nude woman in a red chair, 1932) or Femme lisant à la table (Woman reading at the table, 1934), the show is an excellent primer on Picasso both for the aficionado and the novice. Because of the artist’s constant shifting of style and technique, the art on display never seems repetitive—especially since the curators didn’t arrange the 80-plus works in chronological order, so there’s no obvious progression from one stylistic adjustment to the next. Clearly, if you don’t like Picasso, then this isn’t a show for you, but if you do, or are just curious about the work of the man once dubbed “the most famous artist in the world,” then the Gagosian’s collection is perfect. Add to this the lagniappe that several of the pieces have never been seen in the U.S. before.
Two days later, we again boarded a city bus and traveled up to 57th Street, heading for the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery and a small show of 21 collages by Romare Bearden (1911-88). Since we came up on 6th Avenue, we passed the Marlborough Gallery first, however, where I knew that Tom Otterness’s sculptures were on display—so we made a detour. (I’d taken Mom to the 8th Avenue/14th Street subway station some time ago to show her the installation of Otterness’s tiny bronze figures all over the corridors and platforms. I published a profile on ROT of the artist and Life Underground on 27 April.) In the atrium of 40 W. 57th outdoors, where large works by several artists, including Fernando Botero, are on public view, there’s a monumental Otterness showing three figures in the “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” pose (the sculpture’s just called See No Evil) but cast in Otterness’s characteristic style. The building’s lobby also contains a number of pieces, including Otterness’s whimsical Bear Riding Bull—which depicts exactly what the title suggests: a bear in suit and tie sitting astride a bull that’s a sort of gentler rendition of Charging Bull, the huge bronze beast in Bowling Green Park. Then we went up to the second floor gallery and spent an hour or so walking through the display of Otterness’s bronze sculptures, a few Botero works (both paintings and bronzes), one or two Jacques Lipchitzes, a wonderful Red Grooms, and several new artists we hadn’t encountered before. The Grooms piece is this year’s Snow Down, inspired by the snowstorm this past winter and the city’s inadequate response to it. (Grooms calls the three-dimensional work, which depicts a New York City neighborhood buried under snow, his homage to Mayor Bloomberg.) Among the pieces still on view from Tom Otterness: Animal Spirits (23 February-26 March) is Big Cat, a monumental bronze which may be either a huge statue of a house cat or a representation of an actual “big cat”; given Otterness’s cartoon-like style, it could be either, but my money’s on the huge house cat. (The figure’s too cute to be a real predator.) There’s also a series of middle-sized bear sculptures in various poses—Standing Bear, Sitting Bear, and so on—that are awfully reminiscent of the Pooh doll that used to be on display in the Donnell Library. I’m sure that Otterness had Pooh in mind at least subliminally, though I don’t think he intended to do a “take” on Milne’s characters. Of course, it could be just me . . . .
A few doors east, we visited the small Rosenfeld Gallery to see Romare Bearden Collage: A Centennial Celebration. (Like Tennessee Williams and Ronald Reagan, who received considerable attention earlier this year, 2011 marks the 100th anniversary of Beaden’s birth.) As interesting as the Picasso show was, the much smaller Bearden show could easily take several hours to navigate because each piece is so fascinating and engaging. Aside from the subjects of the works, which cover a variety of aspects of the black experience—or experiences as the artist saw it, some actual and some imagined—the collage technique makes each picture a technical wonder as well. (It’s not at all surprising that Bearden was an influence on playwright August Wilson, who said Bearden’s work "was the art of a large and generous spirit that defined not only the character of black American life, but also its conscience. I was looking at myself in ways I hadn't thought of before and have never ceased to think of since.") It’s hard not to go up close to each one and see how Bearden made it, using cut-out photos, both black-and-white and color, from magazines or newspapers; bits of cloth; and just about anything else the artist found useful. (I suspect Bearden wasn’t just making collages, but bricolages as well. He also manipulated his sources somewhat: according to Roberta Smith, some of the black-and-white pictures were rephotographed and enlarged by Photostat.) Mother and I had had a mildly unpleasant encounter at the Gagosian Gallery when we leaned in close to one of the Picassos and a guard got testy, but at the little Rosenfeld we had no problem getting up close and personal, so to speak. Collages, of course, are not just abstract or expressionistic images, like a painting, but they have a texture that’s unique to each work and it’s just too enticing to see how Bearden created that aspect of the picture.
A few weeks later, when I went to Washington, Mom and I went down to the Mall to take in the large Gauguin exhibit at the National Gallery. As I have at several exhibitions in recent years, I found I had to linger at each painting or sculpture and read the wall panel because the information was so interesting and instructive. At Romare Bearden, I had to linger also, but it was to scrutinize the artwork itself for the marvel of its construction. Ever since those years in the ‘50s when I hung around the Gres and met some of the artists, none of whose names meant anything to me at the time—I just knew they were artists and created the works I saw at the gallery—I’ve become fascinated with how that kind of creative personality fashions her or his art. I’ve been an actor and director and I write some—though not what is generally called “creative writing”—but I’m confounded by the way an artistic mind generates ideas. I know how an actor creates, at least as it worked in me, and I can imagine a little how a writer conjures words—though the more innovative wordsmiths bewilder me—but I have difficulty imagining how visual artists “think” in images. (I often have the same confusion about composers—I can’t conceive of thinking in musical notes; it’s a mystery to me.) I even made collages (cut-out construction paper, to be sure) as a child, inspired by a collagist exhibited at the gallery, but the working of the true artistic brain still mystifies me.
Of course, it helps that Bearden was a marvelous artist. (In her New York Times review of the show, Roberta Smith asserted that Bearden didn’t become a “great artist” until he started making collages in the 1960s. I don’t have the credentials to make a statement like that—or evaluate Smith’s—but I can afffirm that these collages are terrific no matter your perspective.) The works, which were created between 1964 and 1983, are colorful and stunning, filling the small galleries with vibrant and irresistible images. Bearden depicted scenes of rural life, jazz musicians jamming, and urban people working at their trades. (He worked in a different medium and style, but his focus was quite similar to that of Jacob Lawrence, a friend and artistic colleague. For me, the two also have a similar impact.) Of the Blues (1973) is not only a wonderful evocation of a Harlem nightlife scene, but a visual rendering of another form of art from a different medium and The Dressmaker (1983), as Smith notes, is a terrific variation on the artist-and-model theme as the seamstress helps her naked customer dress. One of the most charming pieces, a tall, slim work, is La Femme Martinique (1970). Done on Masonite and illustrating one of Bearden’s frequent subjects, Caribbean life, the collage portrays a woman on her way to market posed in an almost queenly posture. (Bearden’s field of interest was more than the African-American experience, he depicted scenes from the entire black world.) In another vein, he also illustrated the fall of Troy with black soldiers. Some of the collages are rendered in bright colors, like the Matisse cut-outs the informational material said had influenced Bearden. Others have clearly been distressed (with sandpaper, according to Smith) so that they resemble the ancient frescoes of Italy which the artist loved. In each one, however, the selection of materials is inspiring. The patterned dress fabric of Femme Martinique, for instance, is created by the photograph of a paisley print from some publication; the vegetables in her basket are another photo, this one in color, while the basket itself was simply painted by Bearden.
Bearden had an eclectic background, encouraged and essentially ordained by his highly intellectual parents. His education alone was—shall we say multifaceted. He ended with a BS in Education from NYU, but his route there was peripatetic. He served as a New York City social worker until 1969, even as he was studying and making art. He wrote journalism and essays, drew cartoons, even composed songs—and associated with artists and prominent thinkers, both black and white, in many media. He served in a segregated unit in New York City during World War II and then used the GI Bill to fund a trip to Paris to study art history and philosophy at the Sorbonne. While there, he met some of the most illustrious artists of the mid-20th century, along with writers James Baldwin and Richard Wright. Bearden didn’t devote himself wholly to making art until he was in his mid-40’s, in 1954. He experimented with several techniques, including reworking famous paintings using a Photostat machine. Bearden also began to explore color and eventually began making collages in the ‘60s. In this medium, he strove to “redefine the images of man in terms of the black experience.” Back when he was experimenting with the Photostat, he found that it provided two copies of an artwork: a positive and a negative. The negatives rendered the white images as black, likely an inspiration for the Fall of Troy with its black soldiers—and for Bearden’s artistic thrust in general. The Rosenfeld exhibit, however small in number of works, was a good display of Bearden’s scope and breadth.
Some weeks after visiting the Chelsea and Mid-town galleries in New York City, I made a week’s visit to Washington, D.C., principally to see the Gauguin exhibit at the National Gallery. It turns out, schedules being what they are, that I got to NGA near the end of my stay, and before going down to the Mall, my mother and I paid a short visit to the Katzen Art Center at American University on Friday, 27 May. Most of the gallery was in the process of getting new exhibits installed, but we went over expressly to see a site-specific installation, Sam Gilliam: Close to Trees, on view through 14 August. The artist conceived the work, made up of dozens of draped nylon and polypropylene cloths brightly dyed with acrylic colors, especially for the 8000 square feet of the gallery’s third floor. Gilliam has transformed the space into a forest of color which visitors move around and past the way we’d walk through a grove of trees, stopping here and there to admire one or simply to stand in its shade. (The artist says the title refers to the way you can “be so close one can reach out and touch” the work, like trees in a forest.) Like a small forest, too, Gilliam’s installation uses natural light to illuminate the acrylic rainbow. Gilliam and his installers tested the play of light in the gallery at different times of the day before deciding the final placement of the drapes, some of which hang from the ceiling and droop free like actual trees while others are mounted on walls and still others on the floor. Some draped pieces include mirrors on the floor beneath them to reflect the colors back up, and others also have scattered pieces of fabric and other material on the floor like huge leaves fallen from the trees. While the draped fabric looks much like the dyed works that Gilliam has done in other installations (including one I saw at the Museum of Folk Art in Manhattan several years ago when the artist gave a presentation of his work), the arrangement and display of these hangings is entirely different.
Like Bearden’s collages, Gilliam’s “trees” aren’t just paintings. They, too, take on additional dimensions because, first, the fabric has various textures which catch the light and absorb the paint in different ways. Second, the folds and creases of the draped material changes each “tree.” Finally, some of the trees, mostly the ones suspended from the ceiling, turn slightly under their own momentum. Since the light isn’t evened out by artificial illumination, the movement changes the way the colors, a lot of yellows, blues, and oranges, strike the eye. (Like another Washington Colorist, Morris Louis , Gilliam’s paintings often run off the edge of the canvas; even on stretched works, the color continues around the rim of the stretcher.) Like many of the artist’s works over the years, Close to Trees blurs the division between painting and sculpture. Gilliam, who was born in Mississippi in 1933, grew up in Louisville, and came to Washington in 1962, has also often worked with both texture and draping in some way or another. My mother has three Gilliams at home (the artist is a friend), and one of them is a free-form, frameless painting that is mounted directly on the wall and is made up of separate pieces of thickly painted canvas which Gilliam weaves together when he hangs it; it’s different every time its remounted. It was hung in my parents’ last apartment so that it actually turned a corner and went onto the next wall. In its present location, it climbs up the wall and spreads onto the ceiling. Another work, Flowers, of which my mother and I both have a version, is constructed of hand-made paper which Gilliam printed in abstract patterns, then cut into pieces. In a deep frame (a box, really), he reassembled the pieces into a three-dimensional assemblage of more abstractions. The frames (mine is essentially square, but Mother’s is trapezoidal) are decorated with chunks of flat stone which pierce the sides of the casing. Even in Flowers, which had an almost-conventional frame which the artist broke, Gilliam doesn’t confine himself to the picture frame. Close to Trees has elements of these in other ways: free-form, textured, and changing. The bright colors are another trademark of Gilliam’s work; he’s considered the second generation of the Washington Color School of which Ken Noland and Morris Louis were members of the first generation.
I’ve liked other Gilliam works and shows more than Close to Trees, including the large retrospective at the Corcoran in 2005. But walking through the Katzen installation is less a stimulating or revealing experience, like, say the Gauguin show at the NGA, than a pleasant stroll through a grove of really fascinating trees. Spend 45 minutes or so in Gilliam’s woods, stopping here and there, and you just feel a little happier. That, after all, is no mean achievement.
Finally, on Tuesday, 31 May, Mother and I took the bus down to the Mall to see Gauguin: Maker of Myth at the National Gallery of Art (which closed on 5 June). This show was one of the most informative and revealing I have seen in a long time, probably not since the Dada show at NGA and MoMA back in 2006. In the case of Dada, what I learned was mostly historical—how the art movement fit into the politics and events of the first decades of the 20th century—but at Gauguin, I learned a lot of startling stuff about the artist and his artistic philosophy, as it were. I don’t pretend to be well-educated in art history, and I didn’t know anything about Paul Gauguin except the general outline of his life and career. I’ve seen many of his paintings in other exhibits and collections over the years, and I like his work, but basically I associated him with Tahiti and the South Pacific and having spent some time in Arles with van Gogh. The first thing I learned is that far from being just a painter, which was all I knew before, Gauguin was an artistic polymath, engaging just about every medium and form, from pottery to sculpture. Painting remained his main métier, but he made drawings, prints, reliefs, and some wonderful wood blocks. (Pottery he’d studied in his early years, but making wood blocks was something he just decided to try on a whim.)
The title of the exhibit suggests another aspect of Gauguin’s life and work: he drew on and created myths in and for his art. Like many artists, many of Gauguin’s pieces depict or refer to figures out of mythology and legend, including the Bible (Eve, Jacob and the angel, Jesus, Satan) and Polynesia. But like Tennessee Williams, Gauguin also made up myths about his own life—he claimed to be descended from Incan ancestors, though there’s no evidence of such heritage—so much that it became hard to tell the truth from the fiction. (The artist’s Tahitian memoir, Noa Noa, like Williams’s Memoirs, is mostly fantasy. The New York Times’s Holland Cotter quipped: “If he published it today, Oprah would be demanding an apology.”) He also combined these impulses when he invented gods for the Tahitians that never existed in their pantheon and portrayed other deities in poses he borrowed from Hindu gods (depictions of which he’d seen in museums). Nearly his entire depiction of Polynesian life was drawn from his imagination and the way he thought earlier generations, before European colonization had changed everything, had lived. He borrowed liberally from images from Easter Island, Buddhist carvings, and the photographs and descriptions by earlier visitors like Charles Georges Spitz or Louis Antoine de Bougainville. “Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it,” Gauguin wrote a friend, as if to explain his impulse to create imaginary realities.
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) led something of a peripatetic early life, including five years of his early childhood in Lima with a maternal uncle who had been the last Spanish viceroy of Peru, and later stints in the merchant marine and the navy. He settled down to a life as a stockbroker in 1872 and married in 1873, fathering five children. He painted on the side as an amateur, until 1886 when he left his family, now living in Copenhagen where his wife was born, and devoted himself full time to art. His main guiding belief was that society had become corrupted by civilization and he made a series of voyages farther and farther away from Paris, the center of Western culture and art at the time. He traveled first to Brittany in 1887, a rugged part of France on the northwest coast, where he painted his version of the native life of the Bretons. In his mind, the Breton peasants, whom he painted in the fields or at play as children, were closer to the unspoiled natural people he sought. “Here in Brittany,” he wrote, “the peasants have a medieval air about them and do not for a moment look as though they think that Paris exists and that it is 1889.” His paintings from Brittany, which included several landscapes and still lifes, are almost classic Impressionism, both is tone and style. The artist would return to Brittany in 1888 (as well as making a two-month stay with van Gogh in Arles), but the spell would eventually wear off, of course, and Gauguin would move farther from civilization in search of ever more untainted lands. He set sail for Panama in 1887 and spent five months in Martinique; the art that came out of that sojourn displayed his first step toward “primitivism.” Though the subject was the Afro-Caribbean life he saw there, the style was still as impressionistic as the work from Brittany. Two years later, in 1889, he sketched himself as an American Indian. He declared himself a “savage” and promoted his wanderings as his search for the untamed and uncorrupted. “To do something new,” the artist proclaimed, “you have to go back to the origins, to humanity in its infancy.”
Also in 1889, the Universal Exhibition opened in Paris with a focus on what was then known as primitive cultures in France’s colonial territories in Asia and the Pacific. Gauguin was enchanted and took off for the South Seas to “live as a savage,” landing in Papeete, the capital of Tahiti, in 1891. Later that year, the artist moved further out to a small village. He began sending canvases back to Europe where their exoticism immediately attracted attention. What Gauguin depicted in his Tahitian art, however, was based more on his romantic notions than anything actual: Tahiti and its inhabitants had been thoroughly Frenchified and Christianized by the end of the 19th century, and the Edenic society which the artist had envisioned no longer existed, erased entirely by the Christian missionaries and European colonists. So he reinvented it—adding elements, including some deities, that had never been part of the culture to start with. J. R. R. Tolkien, who was just born about this time, invented a whole mythology in his books; Paul Gauguin did, too—in his art. The painting had begun to move away from classic Impressionism and even Post-impressionism to the brightly-colored—what Holland Cotter called “crushed-fruit colors”—imaginative depictions for which the artist is mostly recognized today. They were less about feelings and sensations, the stuff of Impressionism, than imagination and dreams. (There’s nothing in his Polynesian canvases or other works that looks like Surrealism, which wouldn’t hit the art scene until two decades after Gauguin’s death, but his subjects and his approach perhaps served as a bridge to the art style that focuses on dreams and the subconscious.) Further, unlike his Impressionist colleagues back home who painted ordinary people at their ordinary lives—farmers, peasants, fishermen, diners in a café, artists and dancers, people on a street—Gauguin filled his Tahitian art with images of supernatural beings, dreamers, symbolic creatures, romanticized landscapes, scenes assembled from far-flung elements, and imagined inhabitants. He painted in bold colors, flattened his images, distorted space and the spatial relationships of figures, creating unreal juxtapositions. Moreover, Gauguin had a stronger relationship with his subjects and his art than did the Impressionists, who insisted they were mere observers, not participants in the scenes they depicted. The Impressionists may have had an emotional response to the subjects they portrayed, but they weren’t part of them. Gauguin, however, was fully invested in the world he revealed—created—in French Polynesia.
Gauguin returned to Paris in 1893, weakened by illness (he was diagnosed with syphilis in 1895), but returned to Tahiti two years later. His art sold better, his friends and supporters pointed out, when he sent his exotic scenes back from the South Seas, the expatriate artist living in Paradise, than from a Paris studio. Despite his illness, Gauguin moved 850 miles to an even more remote island in the Marquesas in 1901, reinvigorating his art. In 1903, after a series of heart attacks almost certainly caused by the syphilis, Gauguin died and was buried in the Marquesas, never having returned to France after 1895.
The nearly 120 works in the NGA exhibit, originated by the Tate Modern in London, was divided into themes based on the type of myths Gauguin made: “Identity and Self-Mythology,” “Landscape and Rural Narrative,” “Sacred Themes,” “Allusive and Elusive Tales,” “Earthly Paradise,” and others. (Some works from Russia didn’t travel to Washington due to legal problems.) The dates and styles of the art included in each section were mixed, including not only various types of painting, but prints, woodcuts, carvings (Gauguin was a marvelous woodcarver, creating full sculptures, many totem-like posts, and both bas- and haut-reliefs), and ceramics. The near-mania Gauguin displayed for creating myths, about himself and his subjects, was almost so absorbing that the art itself nearly got lost. Let’s face it: Gauguin was a rotten guy in almost every respect except his art—he abandoned his family, bullied everyone he knew, stole other people’s ideas and images, lied about his history, fabricated the world he depicted in Tahiti, took teenaged girls as his lovers—but he was an absolutely fascinating character . . . at a 100-year remove.
Cotter characterized the work in the Maker of Myth as “dark.” “Bizarre, even just plain ugly images occur,” he wrote in his review. “The atmosphere is tense, claustrophobic, depressed.” I didn’t feel that way at all. Besides being revelatory, I found the art engrossing and almost haunting at times. I’ll cop to “dark” and “bizarre” (Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post contributed “troubling and contradictory,” which are apt), though not as negative qualities but as striking and surprising aspects of Gauguin’s work that I hadn’t known about before. (I’m sure Cotter is far more conversant with Gauguin’s art and life than I was, so he may not have approached the exhibit with the same naïveté that I had when I arrived.)
Another aspect of Gauguin of which I hadn’t been aware but which is amply displayed in the works in the exhibit is his sense of whimsy. The artist liked a good joke, sometimes on himself, sometimes on his friends and colleagues, and often on those whom he disrespected. Some of his whimsical work was little more than doodling. He carved himself a walking stick (Carved Cane, 1888-90) and while in Brittany, he wore the local wooden clogs—except Gauguin decorated his by carving little bas-relief designs on the toes. Gauguin did dozens of self-portraits, many with themes of one kind or another; in 1889, for instance, he painted himself so as to evoke Lucifer, the fallen angel, against a bright (sulfur?) yellow background with a halo over his head, two apples hanging on a branch behind him, and a small snake in his right hand. His whimsy could also be macabre: he depicted himself with reference to John the Baptist in Self Portrait Vase in the Form of a Severed Head (1889). The artist’s likeness, glazed in olive green, has its eyes closed and a gaping hole in the top of its head for the vase’s opening (it’s really a mug, with a handle); the severed neck is glazed in dripping red as if freshly cut. Gauguin’s Portrait of Meijer de Haan by Lamplight (1889) portrays his friend the Dutch artist, who was Jewish, with horn-like tufts of red hair and his hand as a cloven hoof, clearly suggesting Satan.
Gauguin liked to tweak his political adversaries, especially the Catholic Church. (The artist was born Catholic and was buried in the Catholic cemetery on Hiva-Oa.) In one of his most provocative gestures, he trimmed the entrance to his residence in the Marquesas with carved wooden panels labeling the house as the “Maison du Jouir,” or “House of Pleasure.” Gauguin’s neighbor was the Catholic bishop, and it pleased Gauguin to know that every time the priest entered the house, he passed under that sign. (In French, jouir has the connotation of ‘sexual pleasure,’ even ‘orgasm,’ not just ‘fun.’)
Organizing the show around the several stories Gauguin told in and with his art, curators Belinda Thomson, an independent British art historian, and Mary Morton, curator of French paintings at the NGA, started with works that showed how the artist invented himself (“Identity and Self-Mythology”), including the self-portraits I just mentioned starting with an 1876 painting, the earliest self-portrait in the collection and one that has only recently been identified as Gauguin’s work. In his late 20’s, the image is a young man, perhaps a student (he’s wearing a sort of pillbox hat that might have been a student cap), portrayed nearly realistically with just a touch of Impressionism. The last portrait was Self Portrait with Glasses from 1903, the year the artist died, and shows an older man with a fuller face, nut-brown from the sun, with short, graying hair, wearing oval-lensed, wire-rimmed glasses. One interesting painting in this section was Self Portrait with Yellow Christ (1890): it shows a stern-faced Gauguin in dark sweater and shirt standing in front of his own 1889 painting The Yellow Christ (on display in the “Sacred Themes” section); on a shelf above the painter’s left shoulder we see his Self Portrait in Form of Grotesque Head (1889), a ceramic sculpture of the artist that I can only describe as expressionistic in its monstrousness. In contrast with the portrait as the Devil, as if to demonstrate his dichotomous nature, the 1889 Christ in the Garden of Olives is actually a self-portrait of the artist as a disheartened Jesus in a bleak landscape, depicted here with red hair and beard (like van Gogh?) but with Gauguin’s unmistakable hooked nose.
In “Sacred Themes,” Thomson and Morton placed many of the Tahitian works that depict the deities and religious beliefs, real and imagined, of the islanders as well as the Judeo-Christian images from the Western Bible. The Yellow Christ was in this section and here also was the fascinating Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) (1888) which juxtaposes a Bible scene with everyday Breton life. In a letter to van Gogh, Gauguin himself described this painting:
I have just painted a religious picture, very clumsily; but it interested me and I like it. I wanted to give it to the church of Pont-Aven. Naturally they don't want it. A group of Breton women are praying, their costumes a very intense black. The bonnets a very luminous yellowy-white. The two bonnets to the right are like monstrous helmets. An apple tree cuts across the canvas, dark purple with its foliage drawn in masses like emerald green clouds with greenish yellow chinks of sunlight. The ground (pure vermillion). In the church it darkens and becomes a browny red. The angel is dressed in violent ultramarine blue and Jacob in bottle green. The angel's wings pure chrome yellow. The angel's hair chrome and the feet flesh orange. I think I have achieved in the figures a great simplicity, rustic and superstitious. The whole thing is very severe . . . .
Also in “Sacred Themes” are several carved wood “tikis” that Gauguin used to depict the Tahitian gods, mostly Hina, the moon goddess, and Te Fatu, the earth spirit. There were no images of Tahitian deities by the time Gauguin arrived so his representations were based on his imagination and the depictions of the sacred figures of other cultures, such as Hindu and Easter Island. The little posts, Hina and Fatu and Hina with Two Attendants (both ca. 1892), mid-reliefs carved of native wood, are about a foot tall and look an awful lot like something you might find in a Pacific island souvenir shop today (except maybe better made). One very interesting piece in the same section was an 1899 oil painting, The Last Supper. Gauguin used elements of other cultures, such as Maori carvings (which he’d seen and sketched in an Auckland museum on a stop-over on a return from Europe), to create his image of the New Testament subject. Though raised a Catholic, Gauguin had spent many years reading and studying about the world’s faiths and he viewed religion syncretically.
In “Fictions of Femininity,” the curators assembled works that depict Gauguin’s various visions of women, including a number of renderings of Eve (among them several Polynesian Eves) and Oviri, a fictional goddess whose name is derived from the Tahitian word for ‘savage.’ This collection included Merahi Metua no Tehamana (Les Aïeux de Tehamana/The Ancestors of Tehamana or Tehamana has Many Parents) (1893) in which Gauguin shows his young mistress with flowers woven into her hair, wearing a prim, blue-and-white striped Western dress, and holding a fan. Behind Tehamana is a wall painted with figures of gods below a panel of strange inscriptions. The background design has nothing to do with Tahiti: the gods are displayed in Indian poses and the writing is borrowed from Easter Island. In the section “Allusive and Elusive Titles” is Te Rerioa (The Dream) (1897) in which two women sit on the floor of a frescoed room, a baby in a crib in the left foreground, a dog to the left of the seated figures, and outside the open door is man on horseback. Gauguin wrote of this painting: “Everything is dreamlike in this canvas; is it the mother, is it the horseman on the path? Or is it the painter’s dream!” There are several other depictions of dreaming and dreamers, including paintings of Gauguin’s little son Clovis (Clovis Asleep, 1884, and The Little One Is Dreaming, 1881), illustrating how significant dreams and dreaming were to the artist’s work. The almost iconic Two Tahitian Women (1899)—so recognizable, Philip Kennicott suggested, that “you wonder whether it’s from the cover of a cheap paperback edition of Herman Melville”—depicting one bare-breasted woman and another with a blue cloth covering one breast, is in “Earthly Paradise” (and was the target of an incident, recounted below). In contrast to the platter of bright red flowers one woman holds, the surrounding woods is dark and ominous, lit only by a triangle of yellow sky. Is this Gauguin’s commentary on the Eden he expected to find from the accounts of Frenchmen who sent back reports over the previous century but which had turned out to be so long disappeared that the artist had to reinvent it largely from his own imagination?
There were, frankly, too many sections in Maker of Myth for me even to name each of them and too many interesting and wonderful works for me to discuss even a small percentage. The best I could do here is provide a taste of this really magnificent and revelatory exhibit and hope that you get the idea from the tip of the iceberg how deep and broad it was, even in its limited scope.
(A sidelight to the exhibit occurred on 1 April when a 53-year-old woman, Susan Burns, attacked Two Tahitian Women, trying to tear it from the wall. “I feel that Gauguin is evil,” Burns told an investigator later. “He has nudity and is bad for the children. He has two women in the painting and it’s very homosexual.” She said the painting should be burned. Burns, from nearby Arlington, Virginia, also said, however, “I am from the American CIA and I have a radio in my head. I am going to kill you”—which kind of undercut her protest. The painting was unharmed and remained on display.)
Since two of these venues are commercial galleries, though one has locations around the country and the world, and one was a site-specific installation, it’s probably not likely the shows will travel like some museum exhibits might. (Even the last, the Gauguin, isn’t scheduled to go on from Washington.) Still, you never know for certain—I mentioned that back in 1961, the Gres Gallery show Fifteen Polish Painters was taken in its entirely by MoMA and displayed in New York even though Gres was a selling gallery. Stuff does happen.
On Monday, 18 April, Mom and I took two busses over to the west Chelsea area between 10th and 11th Avenue to check out two galleries showing artists in which we were interested. One, the Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery on West 26th Street, had a show of the works of colorist Ken Noland (who died in January 2010), but I’d never thought that, like most museums, many commercial galleries are also often closed on Mondays, and Mitchell-Innes was one. (I tried to convince Mom to go back over on another day before she left, but she just didn’t feel like making the trek to far-west Chelsea again. I mentioned Noland in passing in “Morris Louis,” my report on an exhibit at the Hirshhorn in Washington in November 2007, posted on ROT on 15 February 2010; and in my article “Art in D.C. (Dec. ’09-Jan. ’10)” on 18 January 2010.) In a New York Times article about the Chelsea art scene, Roberta Smith described the Noland show as an “invigorating survey of early, casually geometric stain paintings” emphasizing “unknown, idiosyncratic works.” Noland was a Washington artist, part of the Washington Color School like his friend Morris Louis, and I’m sorry I couldn’t convince Mom to make a second attempt to see the exhibit.
(Mom did remind me that back in the late ‘50s, when my parents were part of a small group that owned the Gres Gallery in Washington, Noland had wanted to show his work there. The managing partner, who actually ran the gallery, a respected venue for one-artist and theme shows, declined because she didn’t want Gres to become known as a Washington gallery. She won that battle: Gres was only the second gallery in the U.S. to mount a solo show of Fernando Botero’s work—MoMA bought Botero’s Mona Lisa from the Gres show—and the first to exhibit abstract paintings from Poland, a show MoMA took to New York; but as a result several artists like Noland and Louis never showed at Gres. By the turn of the decade, though, most of the partners, many of whom were Foreign Service officers, were transferred out of the country—my own parents went to Germany in 1962—and Gres Gallery closed. It had provided me with an exciting and eye-opening art education before I was a teenager and the influence has remained strong ever since. “Helping out” in the gallery—I stuffed envelopes and such—and meeting artists at the vernissages the partners hosted are some of the most vivid and cherished memories of my childhood.)
The other gallery in the area for which we were headed was the Gagosian Gallery on West 21st Street, and on the chance that it might be the one gallery open on Mondays, we walked down the five blocks—and sure enough, it was indeed open! Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L’amour fou (that’s “. . . Crazy Love”), on display through 25 June, included several dozen portraits—in paint, ink, and pencil as well as plaster and bronze—of Marie-Thérèse Walter (1909-77), the young mistress, model, and muse of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). The works, curated by John Richardson, the artist’s biographer, and Diana Widmaier Picasso, an art historian and the granddaughter of the painter and his model, all date between 1927, when the two met by chance on a Paris street, and 1940; several portraits of their daughter, Maya (b. 1935), either alone or with her mother, are also on view. (Diana Widmaier Picasso, b. 1957, the co-curator of the exhibit, is Maya’s daughter.) The art generally shows the growth of the relationship between the artist and his model, from her earliest portrait, the drawing Marie-Thérèse coifée d’un beret (Marie-Thérèse wearing a beret, 1927) in which she’s still 17 before the affair began, moving on to the next drawing, Portrait de Marie-Thérèse (Portrait of Marie-Thérèse, 1935), which now depicts the young woman in a clearly sexual attitude. Interestingly, even though Picasso was already becoming well-known and was no longer the novice artist of his early days of Realism (he introduced himself to the 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse by taking her to a bookstore and showing her a monograph of his works on sale there), several of the pieces are realistic or nearly so, especially several of the sketches (like the two just named). Most, however, cover Picasso’s several styles—he shifted from technique to technique almost yearly, I think—for the dozen years during which the works were created. In fact, Smith asserts that Marie-Thérèse “inspired Picasso to review and preview nearly all the phases of his long career . . . .”
In the Chelsea article, Smith described L’amour fou as “a big, museum-quality show,” and that’s accurate. (I suppose any show of Picasso’s work could be small, but a curator’d have to work hard for it not to be “museum-quality.” According to the Gagosian, the exhibit was inspired by the successes of several other recent Gagosian shows: Picasso: Mosqueteros (New York, 2009) and Picasso: The Mediterranean Years (London, 2010). The gallery describes Marie-Thérèse as “the primary inspiration for Picasso’s most daring aesthetic experiments in the decade to come.” I generally distrust superlatives like that—it’s always arguable what’s “the most daring” and what’s only second-most, for instance, depending on your threshold for innovation—but this show certainly covers a gamut of experimentation and new styles, not just for Picasso, but for modern art. The exhibit contains not only paintings and the bronze and plaster sculptures I mentioned, but drawings and prints as well as several small carved wooden pieces. (These latter, about the size of large toothbrushes, along with some bronzes that seem to have been cast from the wooden models, are reminiscent of Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, a comrade of Picasso’s.) Generally unified by the subject, though not all the works are specifically of Marie-Thérèse or even Maya, such as Femme nue dans un fauteuil rouge (Nude woman in a red chair, 1932) or Femme lisant à la table (Woman reading at the table, 1934), the show is an excellent primer on Picasso both for the aficionado and the novice. Because of the artist’s constant shifting of style and technique, the art on display never seems repetitive—especially since the curators didn’t arrange the 80-plus works in chronological order, so there’s no obvious progression from one stylistic adjustment to the next. Clearly, if you don’t like Picasso, then this isn’t a show for you, but if you do, or are just curious about the work of the man once dubbed “the most famous artist in the world,” then the Gagosian’s collection is perfect. Add to this the lagniappe that several of the pieces have never been seen in the U.S. before.
Two days later, we again boarded a city bus and traveled up to 57th Street, heading for the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery and a small show of 21 collages by Romare Bearden (1911-88). Since we came up on 6th Avenue, we passed the Marlborough Gallery first, however, where I knew that Tom Otterness’s sculptures were on display—so we made a detour. (I’d taken Mom to the 8th Avenue/14th Street subway station some time ago to show her the installation of Otterness’s tiny bronze figures all over the corridors and platforms. I published a profile on ROT of the artist and Life Underground on 27 April.) In the atrium of 40 W. 57th outdoors, where large works by several artists, including Fernando Botero, are on public view, there’s a monumental Otterness showing three figures in the “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” pose (the sculpture’s just called See No Evil) but cast in Otterness’s characteristic style. The building’s lobby also contains a number of pieces, including Otterness’s whimsical Bear Riding Bull—which depicts exactly what the title suggests: a bear in suit and tie sitting astride a bull that’s a sort of gentler rendition of Charging Bull, the huge bronze beast in Bowling Green Park. Then we went up to the second floor gallery and spent an hour or so walking through the display of Otterness’s bronze sculptures, a few Botero works (both paintings and bronzes), one or two Jacques Lipchitzes, a wonderful Red Grooms, and several new artists we hadn’t encountered before. The Grooms piece is this year’s Snow Down, inspired by the snowstorm this past winter and the city’s inadequate response to it. (Grooms calls the three-dimensional work, which depicts a New York City neighborhood buried under snow, his homage to Mayor Bloomberg.) Among the pieces still on view from Tom Otterness: Animal Spirits (23 February-26 March) is Big Cat, a monumental bronze which may be either a huge statue of a house cat or a representation of an actual “big cat”; given Otterness’s cartoon-like style, it could be either, but my money’s on the huge house cat. (The figure’s too cute to be a real predator.) There’s also a series of middle-sized bear sculptures in various poses—Standing Bear, Sitting Bear, and so on—that are awfully reminiscent of the Pooh doll that used to be on display in the Donnell Library. I’m sure that Otterness had Pooh in mind at least subliminally, though I don’t think he intended to do a “take” on Milne’s characters. Of course, it could be just me . . . .
A few doors east, we visited the small Rosenfeld Gallery to see Romare Bearden Collage: A Centennial Celebration. (Like Tennessee Williams and Ronald Reagan, who received considerable attention earlier this year, 2011 marks the 100th anniversary of Beaden’s birth.) As interesting as the Picasso show was, the much smaller Bearden show could easily take several hours to navigate because each piece is so fascinating and engaging. Aside from the subjects of the works, which cover a variety of aspects of the black experience—or experiences as the artist saw it, some actual and some imagined—the collage technique makes each picture a technical wonder as well. (It’s not at all surprising that Bearden was an influence on playwright August Wilson, who said Bearden’s work "was the art of a large and generous spirit that defined not only the character of black American life, but also its conscience. I was looking at myself in ways I hadn't thought of before and have never ceased to think of since.") It’s hard not to go up close to each one and see how Bearden made it, using cut-out photos, both black-and-white and color, from magazines or newspapers; bits of cloth; and just about anything else the artist found useful. (I suspect Bearden wasn’t just making collages, but bricolages as well. He also manipulated his sources somewhat: according to Roberta Smith, some of the black-and-white pictures were rephotographed and enlarged by Photostat.) Mother and I had had a mildly unpleasant encounter at the Gagosian Gallery when we leaned in close to one of the Picassos and a guard got testy, but at the little Rosenfeld we had no problem getting up close and personal, so to speak. Collages, of course, are not just abstract or expressionistic images, like a painting, but they have a texture that’s unique to each work and it’s just too enticing to see how Bearden created that aspect of the picture.
A few weeks later, when I went to Washington, Mom and I went down to the Mall to take in the large Gauguin exhibit at the National Gallery. As I have at several exhibitions in recent years, I found I had to linger at each painting or sculpture and read the wall panel because the information was so interesting and instructive. At Romare Bearden, I had to linger also, but it was to scrutinize the artwork itself for the marvel of its construction. Ever since those years in the ‘50s when I hung around the Gres and met some of the artists, none of whose names meant anything to me at the time—I just knew they were artists and created the works I saw at the gallery—I’ve become fascinated with how that kind of creative personality fashions her or his art. I’ve been an actor and director and I write some—though not what is generally called “creative writing”—but I’m confounded by the way an artistic mind generates ideas. I know how an actor creates, at least as it worked in me, and I can imagine a little how a writer conjures words—though the more innovative wordsmiths bewilder me—but I have difficulty imagining how visual artists “think” in images. (I often have the same confusion about composers—I can’t conceive of thinking in musical notes; it’s a mystery to me.) I even made collages (cut-out construction paper, to be sure) as a child, inspired by a collagist exhibited at the gallery, but the working of the true artistic brain still mystifies me.
Of course, it helps that Bearden was a marvelous artist. (In her New York Times review of the show, Roberta Smith asserted that Bearden didn’t become a “great artist” until he started making collages in the 1960s. I don’t have the credentials to make a statement like that—or evaluate Smith’s—but I can afffirm that these collages are terrific no matter your perspective.) The works, which were created between 1964 and 1983, are colorful and stunning, filling the small galleries with vibrant and irresistible images. Bearden depicted scenes of rural life, jazz musicians jamming, and urban people working at their trades. (He worked in a different medium and style, but his focus was quite similar to that of Jacob Lawrence, a friend and artistic colleague. For me, the two also have a similar impact.) Of the Blues (1973) is not only a wonderful evocation of a Harlem nightlife scene, but a visual rendering of another form of art from a different medium and The Dressmaker (1983), as Smith notes, is a terrific variation on the artist-and-model theme as the seamstress helps her naked customer dress. One of the most charming pieces, a tall, slim work, is La Femme Martinique (1970). Done on Masonite and illustrating one of Bearden’s frequent subjects, Caribbean life, the collage portrays a woman on her way to market posed in an almost queenly posture. (Bearden’s field of interest was more than the African-American experience, he depicted scenes from the entire black world.) In another vein, he also illustrated the fall of Troy with black soldiers. Some of the collages are rendered in bright colors, like the Matisse cut-outs the informational material said had influenced Bearden. Others have clearly been distressed (with sandpaper, according to Smith) so that they resemble the ancient frescoes of Italy which the artist loved. In each one, however, the selection of materials is inspiring. The patterned dress fabric of Femme Martinique, for instance, is created by the photograph of a paisley print from some publication; the vegetables in her basket are another photo, this one in color, while the basket itself was simply painted by Bearden.
Bearden had an eclectic background, encouraged and essentially ordained by his highly intellectual parents. His education alone was—shall we say multifaceted. He ended with a BS in Education from NYU, but his route there was peripatetic. He served as a New York City social worker until 1969, even as he was studying and making art. He wrote journalism and essays, drew cartoons, even composed songs—and associated with artists and prominent thinkers, both black and white, in many media. He served in a segregated unit in New York City during World War II and then used the GI Bill to fund a trip to Paris to study art history and philosophy at the Sorbonne. While there, he met some of the most illustrious artists of the mid-20th century, along with writers James Baldwin and Richard Wright. Bearden didn’t devote himself wholly to making art until he was in his mid-40’s, in 1954. He experimented with several techniques, including reworking famous paintings using a Photostat machine. Bearden also began to explore color and eventually began making collages in the ‘60s. In this medium, he strove to “redefine the images of man in terms of the black experience.” Back when he was experimenting with the Photostat, he found that it provided two copies of an artwork: a positive and a negative. The negatives rendered the white images as black, likely an inspiration for the Fall of Troy with its black soldiers—and for Bearden’s artistic thrust in general. The Rosenfeld exhibit, however small in number of works, was a good display of Bearden’s scope and breadth.
Some weeks after visiting the Chelsea and Mid-town galleries in New York City, I made a week’s visit to Washington, D.C., principally to see the Gauguin exhibit at the National Gallery. It turns out, schedules being what they are, that I got to NGA near the end of my stay, and before going down to the Mall, my mother and I paid a short visit to the Katzen Art Center at American University on Friday, 27 May. Most of the gallery was in the process of getting new exhibits installed, but we went over expressly to see a site-specific installation, Sam Gilliam: Close to Trees, on view through 14 August. The artist conceived the work, made up of dozens of draped nylon and polypropylene cloths brightly dyed with acrylic colors, especially for the 8000 square feet of the gallery’s third floor. Gilliam has transformed the space into a forest of color which visitors move around and past the way we’d walk through a grove of trees, stopping here and there to admire one or simply to stand in its shade. (The artist says the title refers to the way you can “be so close one can reach out and touch” the work, like trees in a forest.) Like a small forest, too, Gilliam’s installation uses natural light to illuminate the acrylic rainbow. Gilliam and his installers tested the play of light in the gallery at different times of the day before deciding the final placement of the drapes, some of which hang from the ceiling and droop free like actual trees while others are mounted on walls and still others on the floor. Some draped pieces include mirrors on the floor beneath them to reflect the colors back up, and others also have scattered pieces of fabric and other material on the floor like huge leaves fallen from the trees. While the draped fabric looks much like the dyed works that Gilliam has done in other installations (including one I saw at the Museum of Folk Art in Manhattan several years ago when the artist gave a presentation of his work), the arrangement and display of these hangings is entirely different.
Like Bearden’s collages, Gilliam’s “trees” aren’t just paintings. They, too, take on additional dimensions because, first, the fabric has various textures which catch the light and absorb the paint in different ways. Second, the folds and creases of the draped material changes each “tree.” Finally, some of the trees, mostly the ones suspended from the ceiling, turn slightly under their own momentum. Since the light isn’t evened out by artificial illumination, the movement changes the way the colors, a lot of yellows, blues, and oranges, strike the eye. (Like another Washington Colorist, Morris Louis , Gilliam’s paintings often run off the edge of the canvas; even on stretched works, the color continues around the rim of the stretcher.) Like many of the artist’s works over the years, Close to Trees blurs the division between painting and sculpture. Gilliam, who was born in Mississippi in 1933, grew up in Louisville, and came to Washington in 1962, has also often worked with both texture and draping in some way or another. My mother has three Gilliams at home (the artist is a friend), and one of them is a free-form, frameless painting that is mounted directly on the wall and is made up of separate pieces of thickly painted canvas which Gilliam weaves together when he hangs it; it’s different every time its remounted. It was hung in my parents’ last apartment so that it actually turned a corner and went onto the next wall. In its present location, it climbs up the wall and spreads onto the ceiling. Another work, Flowers, of which my mother and I both have a version, is constructed of hand-made paper which Gilliam printed in abstract patterns, then cut into pieces. In a deep frame (a box, really), he reassembled the pieces into a three-dimensional assemblage of more abstractions. The frames (mine is essentially square, but Mother’s is trapezoidal) are decorated with chunks of flat stone which pierce the sides of the casing. Even in Flowers, which had an almost-conventional frame which the artist broke, Gilliam doesn’t confine himself to the picture frame. Close to Trees has elements of these in other ways: free-form, textured, and changing. The bright colors are another trademark of Gilliam’s work; he’s considered the second generation of the Washington Color School of which Ken Noland and Morris Louis were members of the first generation.
I’ve liked other Gilliam works and shows more than Close to Trees, including the large retrospective at the Corcoran in 2005. But walking through the Katzen installation is less a stimulating or revealing experience, like, say the Gauguin show at the NGA, than a pleasant stroll through a grove of really fascinating trees. Spend 45 minutes or so in Gilliam’s woods, stopping here and there, and you just feel a little happier. That, after all, is no mean achievement.
Finally, on Tuesday, 31 May, Mother and I took the bus down to the Mall to see Gauguin: Maker of Myth at the National Gallery of Art (which closed on 5 June). This show was one of the most informative and revealing I have seen in a long time, probably not since the Dada show at NGA and MoMA back in 2006. In the case of Dada, what I learned was mostly historical—how the art movement fit into the politics and events of the first decades of the 20th century—but at Gauguin, I learned a lot of startling stuff about the artist and his artistic philosophy, as it were. I don’t pretend to be well-educated in art history, and I didn’t know anything about Paul Gauguin except the general outline of his life and career. I’ve seen many of his paintings in other exhibits and collections over the years, and I like his work, but basically I associated him with Tahiti and the South Pacific and having spent some time in Arles with van Gogh. The first thing I learned is that far from being just a painter, which was all I knew before, Gauguin was an artistic polymath, engaging just about every medium and form, from pottery to sculpture. Painting remained his main métier, but he made drawings, prints, reliefs, and some wonderful wood blocks. (Pottery he’d studied in his early years, but making wood blocks was something he just decided to try on a whim.)
The title of the exhibit suggests another aspect of Gauguin’s life and work: he drew on and created myths in and for his art. Like many artists, many of Gauguin’s pieces depict or refer to figures out of mythology and legend, including the Bible (Eve, Jacob and the angel, Jesus, Satan) and Polynesia. But like Tennessee Williams, Gauguin also made up myths about his own life—he claimed to be descended from Incan ancestors, though there’s no evidence of such heritage—so much that it became hard to tell the truth from the fiction. (The artist’s Tahitian memoir, Noa Noa, like Williams’s Memoirs, is mostly fantasy. The New York Times’s Holland Cotter quipped: “If he published it today, Oprah would be demanding an apology.”) He also combined these impulses when he invented gods for the Tahitians that never existed in their pantheon and portrayed other deities in poses he borrowed from Hindu gods (depictions of which he’d seen in museums). Nearly his entire depiction of Polynesian life was drawn from his imagination and the way he thought earlier generations, before European colonization had changed everything, had lived. He borrowed liberally from images from Easter Island, Buddhist carvings, and the photographs and descriptions by earlier visitors like Charles Georges Spitz or Louis Antoine de Bougainville. “Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it,” Gauguin wrote a friend, as if to explain his impulse to create imaginary realities.
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) led something of a peripatetic early life, including five years of his early childhood in Lima with a maternal uncle who had been the last Spanish viceroy of Peru, and later stints in the merchant marine and the navy. He settled down to a life as a stockbroker in 1872 and married in 1873, fathering five children. He painted on the side as an amateur, until 1886 when he left his family, now living in Copenhagen where his wife was born, and devoted himself full time to art. His main guiding belief was that society had become corrupted by civilization and he made a series of voyages farther and farther away from Paris, the center of Western culture and art at the time. He traveled first to Brittany in 1887, a rugged part of France on the northwest coast, where he painted his version of the native life of the Bretons. In his mind, the Breton peasants, whom he painted in the fields or at play as children, were closer to the unspoiled natural people he sought. “Here in Brittany,” he wrote, “the peasants have a medieval air about them and do not for a moment look as though they think that Paris exists and that it is 1889.” His paintings from Brittany, which included several landscapes and still lifes, are almost classic Impressionism, both is tone and style. The artist would return to Brittany in 1888 (as well as making a two-month stay with van Gogh in Arles), but the spell would eventually wear off, of course, and Gauguin would move farther from civilization in search of ever more untainted lands. He set sail for Panama in 1887 and spent five months in Martinique; the art that came out of that sojourn displayed his first step toward “primitivism.” Though the subject was the Afro-Caribbean life he saw there, the style was still as impressionistic as the work from Brittany. Two years later, in 1889, he sketched himself as an American Indian. He declared himself a “savage” and promoted his wanderings as his search for the untamed and uncorrupted. “To do something new,” the artist proclaimed, “you have to go back to the origins, to humanity in its infancy.”
Also in 1889, the Universal Exhibition opened in Paris with a focus on what was then known as primitive cultures in France’s colonial territories in Asia and the Pacific. Gauguin was enchanted and took off for the South Seas to “live as a savage,” landing in Papeete, the capital of Tahiti, in 1891. Later that year, the artist moved further out to a small village. He began sending canvases back to Europe where their exoticism immediately attracted attention. What Gauguin depicted in his Tahitian art, however, was based more on his romantic notions than anything actual: Tahiti and its inhabitants had been thoroughly Frenchified and Christianized by the end of the 19th century, and the Edenic society which the artist had envisioned no longer existed, erased entirely by the Christian missionaries and European colonists. So he reinvented it—adding elements, including some deities, that had never been part of the culture to start with. J. R. R. Tolkien, who was just born about this time, invented a whole mythology in his books; Paul Gauguin did, too—in his art. The painting had begun to move away from classic Impressionism and even Post-impressionism to the brightly-colored—what Holland Cotter called “crushed-fruit colors”—imaginative depictions for which the artist is mostly recognized today. They were less about feelings and sensations, the stuff of Impressionism, than imagination and dreams. (There’s nothing in his Polynesian canvases or other works that looks like Surrealism, which wouldn’t hit the art scene until two decades after Gauguin’s death, but his subjects and his approach perhaps served as a bridge to the art style that focuses on dreams and the subconscious.) Further, unlike his Impressionist colleagues back home who painted ordinary people at their ordinary lives—farmers, peasants, fishermen, diners in a café, artists and dancers, people on a street—Gauguin filled his Tahitian art with images of supernatural beings, dreamers, symbolic creatures, romanticized landscapes, scenes assembled from far-flung elements, and imagined inhabitants. He painted in bold colors, flattened his images, distorted space and the spatial relationships of figures, creating unreal juxtapositions. Moreover, Gauguin had a stronger relationship with his subjects and his art than did the Impressionists, who insisted they were mere observers, not participants in the scenes they depicted. The Impressionists may have had an emotional response to the subjects they portrayed, but they weren’t part of them. Gauguin, however, was fully invested in the world he revealed—created—in French Polynesia.
Gauguin returned to Paris in 1893, weakened by illness (he was diagnosed with syphilis in 1895), but returned to Tahiti two years later. His art sold better, his friends and supporters pointed out, when he sent his exotic scenes back from the South Seas, the expatriate artist living in Paradise, than from a Paris studio. Despite his illness, Gauguin moved 850 miles to an even more remote island in the Marquesas in 1901, reinvigorating his art. In 1903, after a series of heart attacks almost certainly caused by the syphilis, Gauguin died and was buried in the Marquesas, never having returned to France after 1895.
The nearly 120 works in the NGA exhibit, originated by the Tate Modern in London, was divided into themes based on the type of myths Gauguin made: “Identity and Self-Mythology,” “Landscape and Rural Narrative,” “Sacred Themes,” “Allusive and Elusive Tales,” “Earthly Paradise,” and others. (Some works from Russia didn’t travel to Washington due to legal problems.) The dates and styles of the art included in each section were mixed, including not only various types of painting, but prints, woodcuts, carvings (Gauguin was a marvelous woodcarver, creating full sculptures, many totem-like posts, and both bas- and haut-reliefs), and ceramics. The near-mania Gauguin displayed for creating myths, about himself and his subjects, was almost so absorbing that the art itself nearly got lost. Let’s face it: Gauguin was a rotten guy in almost every respect except his art—he abandoned his family, bullied everyone he knew, stole other people’s ideas and images, lied about his history, fabricated the world he depicted in Tahiti, took teenaged girls as his lovers—but he was an absolutely fascinating character . . . at a 100-year remove.
Cotter characterized the work in the Maker of Myth as “dark.” “Bizarre, even just plain ugly images occur,” he wrote in his review. “The atmosphere is tense, claustrophobic, depressed.” I didn’t feel that way at all. Besides being revelatory, I found the art engrossing and almost haunting at times. I’ll cop to “dark” and “bizarre” (Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post contributed “troubling and contradictory,” which are apt), though not as negative qualities but as striking and surprising aspects of Gauguin’s work that I hadn’t known about before. (I’m sure Cotter is far more conversant with Gauguin’s art and life than I was, so he may not have approached the exhibit with the same naïveté that I had when I arrived.)
Another aspect of Gauguin of which I hadn’t been aware but which is amply displayed in the works in the exhibit is his sense of whimsy. The artist liked a good joke, sometimes on himself, sometimes on his friends and colleagues, and often on those whom he disrespected. Some of his whimsical work was little more than doodling. He carved himself a walking stick (Carved Cane, 1888-90) and while in Brittany, he wore the local wooden clogs—except Gauguin decorated his by carving little bas-relief designs on the toes. Gauguin did dozens of self-portraits, many with themes of one kind or another; in 1889, for instance, he painted himself so as to evoke Lucifer, the fallen angel, against a bright (sulfur?) yellow background with a halo over his head, two apples hanging on a branch behind him, and a small snake in his right hand. His whimsy could also be macabre: he depicted himself with reference to John the Baptist in Self Portrait Vase in the Form of a Severed Head (1889). The artist’s likeness, glazed in olive green, has its eyes closed and a gaping hole in the top of its head for the vase’s opening (it’s really a mug, with a handle); the severed neck is glazed in dripping red as if freshly cut. Gauguin’s Portrait of Meijer de Haan by Lamplight (1889) portrays his friend the Dutch artist, who was Jewish, with horn-like tufts of red hair and his hand as a cloven hoof, clearly suggesting Satan.
Gauguin liked to tweak his political adversaries, especially the Catholic Church. (The artist was born Catholic and was buried in the Catholic cemetery on Hiva-Oa.) In one of his most provocative gestures, he trimmed the entrance to his residence in the Marquesas with carved wooden panels labeling the house as the “Maison du Jouir,” or “House of Pleasure.” Gauguin’s neighbor was the Catholic bishop, and it pleased Gauguin to know that every time the priest entered the house, he passed under that sign. (In French, jouir has the connotation of ‘sexual pleasure,’ even ‘orgasm,’ not just ‘fun.’)
Organizing the show around the several stories Gauguin told in and with his art, curators Belinda Thomson, an independent British art historian, and Mary Morton, curator of French paintings at the NGA, started with works that showed how the artist invented himself (“Identity and Self-Mythology”), including the self-portraits I just mentioned starting with an 1876 painting, the earliest self-portrait in the collection and one that has only recently been identified as Gauguin’s work. In his late 20’s, the image is a young man, perhaps a student (he’s wearing a sort of pillbox hat that might have been a student cap), portrayed nearly realistically with just a touch of Impressionism. The last portrait was Self Portrait with Glasses from 1903, the year the artist died, and shows an older man with a fuller face, nut-brown from the sun, with short, graying hair, wearing oval-lensed, wire-rimmed glasses. One interesting painting in this section was Self Portrait with Yellow Christ (1890): it shows a stern-faced Gauguin in dark sweater and shirt standing in front of his own 1889 painting The Yellow Christ (on display in the “Sacred Themes” section); on a shelf above the painter’s left shoulder we see his Self Portrait in Form of Grotesque Head (1889), a ceramic sculpture of the artist that I can only describe as expressionistic in its monstrousness. In contrast with the portrait as the Devil, as if to demonstrate his dichotomous nature, the 1889 Christ in the Garden of Olives is actually a self-portrait of the artist as a disheartened Jesus in a bleak landscape, depicted here with red hair and beard (like van Gogh?) but with Gauguin’s unmistakable hooked nose.
In “Sacred Themes,” Thomson and Morton placed many of the Tahitian works that depict the deities and religious beliefs, real and imagined, of the islanders as well as the Judeo-Christian images from the Western Bible. The Yellow Christ was in this section and here also was the fascinating Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) (1888) which juxtaposes a Bible scene with everyday Breton life. In a letter to van Gogh, Gauguin himself described this painting:
I have just painted a religious picture, very clumsily; but it interested me and I like it. I wanted to give it to the church of Pont-Aven. Naturally they don't want it. A group of Breton women are praying, their costumes a very intense black. The bonnets a very luminous yellowy-white. The two bonnets to the right are like monstrous helmets. An apple tree cuts across the canvas, dark purple with its foliage drawn in masses like emerald green clouds with greenish yellow chinks of sunlight. The ground (pure vermillion). In the church it darkens and becomes a browny red. The angel is dressed in violent ultramarine blue and Jacob in bottle green. The angel's wings pure chrome yellow. The angel's hair chrome and the feet flesh orange. I think I have achieved in the figures a great simplicity, rustic and superstitious. The whole thing is very severe . . . .
Also in “Sacred Themes” are several carved wood “tikis” that Gauguin used to depict the Tahitian gods, mostly Hina, the moon goddess, and Te Fatu, the earth spirit. There were no images of Tahitian deities by the time Gauguin arrived so his representations were based on his imagination and the depictions of the sacred figures of other cultures, such as Hindu and Easter Island. The little posts, Hina and Fatu and Hina with Two Attendants (both ca. 1892), mid-reliefs carved of native wood, are about a foot tall and look an awful lot like something you might find in a Pacific island souvenir shop today (except maybe better made). One very interesting piece in the same section was an 1899 oil painting, The Last Supper. Gauguin used elements of other cultures, such as Maori carvings (which he’d seen and sketched in an Auckland museum on a stop-over on a return from Europe), to create his image of the New Testament subject. Though raised a Catholic, Gauguin had spent many years reading and studying about the world’s faiths and he viewed religion syncretically.
In “Fictions of Femininity,” the curators assembled works that depict Gauguin’s various visions of women, including a number of renderings of Eve (among them several Polynesian Eves) and Oviri, a fictional goddess whose name is derived from the Tahitian word for ‘savage.’ This collection included Merahi Metua no Tehamana (Les Aïeux de Tehamana/The Ancestors of Tehamana or Tehamana has Many Parents) (1893) in which Gauguin shows his young mistress with flowers woven into her hair, wearing a prim, blue-and-white striped Western dress, and holding a fan. Behind Tehamana is a wall painted with figures of gods below a panel of strange inscriptions. The background design has nothing to do with Tahiti: the gods are displayed in Indian poses and the writing is borrowed from Easter Island. In the section “Allusive and Elusive Titles” is Te Rerioa (The Dream) (1897) in which two women sit on the floor of a frescoed room, a baby in a crib in the left foreground, a dog to the left of the seated figures, and outside the open door is man on horseback. Gauguin wrote of this painting: “Everything is dreamlike in this canvas; is it the mother, is it the horseman on the path? Or is it the painter’s dream!” There are several other depictions of dreaming and dreamers, including paintings of Gauguin’s little son Clovis (Clovis Asleep, 1884, and The Little One Is Dreaming, 1881), illustrating how significant dreams and dreaming were to the artist’s work. The almost iconic Two Tahitian Women (1899)—so recognizable, Philip Kennicott suggested, that “you wonder whether it’s from the cover of a cheap paperback edition of Herman Melville”—depicting one bare-breasted woman and another with a blue cloth covering one breast, is in “Earthly Paradise” (and was the target of an incident, recounted below). In contrast to the platter of bright red flowers one woman holds, the surrounding woods is dark and ominous, lit only by a triangle of yellow sky. Is this Gauguin’s commentary on the Eden he expected to find from the accounts of Frenchmen who sent back reports over the previous century but which had turned out to be so long disappeared that the artist had to reinvent it largely from his own imagination?
There were, frankly, too many sections in Maker of Myth for me even to name each of them and too many interesting and wonderful works for me to discuss even a small percentage. The best I could do here is provide a taste of this really magnificent and revelatory exhibit and hope that you get the idea from the tip of the iceberg how deep and broad it was, even in its limited scope.
(A sidelight to the exhibit occurred on 1 April when a 53-year-old woman, Susan Burns, attacked Two Tahitian Women, trying to tear it from the wall. “I feel that Gauguin is evil,” Burns told an investigator later. “He has nudity and is bad for the children. He has two women in the painting and it’s very homosexual.” She said the painting should be burned. Burns, from nearby Arlington, Virginia, also said, however, “I am from the American CIA and I have a radio in my head. I am going to kill you”—which kind of undercut her protest. The painting was unharmed and remained on display.)
Since two of these venues are commercial galleries, though one has locations around the country and the world, and one was a site-specific installation, it’s probably not likely the shows will travel like some museum exhibits might. (Even the last, the Gauguin, isn’t scheduled to go on from Washington.) Still, you never know for certain—I mentioned that back in 1961, the Gres Gallery show Fifteen Polish Painters was taken in its entirely by MoMA and displayed in New York even though Gres was a selling gallery. Stuff does happen.
21 June 2011
Short Takes: Quotations On Writing, Art, & Literature
Josef Albers (1888-1976), artist and art teacher
[A]rt is concerned with the HOW and not the WHAT. . . .
Jean Anouilh (1910-87)
Life is very nice, but it has no shape. The object of art is actually to give it some and to do it by every artifice possible—truer than the truth.
Roger Ascham (1515-68), scholar, writer, and courtier
He that will write well in any tongue, must follow this counsel of Aristotle, to speak as the common people do, to think as wise men do; and so should every man understand him, and the judgement of wise men allow him.
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate the darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.
The artist cannot and must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question that answer hides.
Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself, and with that revelation, make freedom real.
Julian Beck (1925-85)
The power of art is the power of truth.
William Blake (1757-1827)
Degrade first the Arts if you’d Mankind Degrade. Hire Idiots to Paint with cold light & hot shade: Give high Price for the worst, leave the best in disgrace, And with Labours of Ignorance fill every place.
Rome & Greece swept Art into their maw & destroy’d it; a Warlike State never can produce Art. It will Rob & Plunder & accumulate into one place, & Translate & Copy & Buy & Sell & Criticize, but not Make.
Nicolas Boileau (1636-1711), poet and critic
Of every four words I write, I strike out three.
Georges Braque (1882-1963)
Art is meant to disturb, science reassures.
Robert Browning (1812-89)
Because it is the glory and good of Art, That Art remains the one way possible Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine at least.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82)
And so every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.
Gustave Flaubert (1821-80)
You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the hard that is spoken of it.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-90)
If you would not be forgotten . . . , either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.
Paul Gachet (1828-1909), van Gogh’s psychiatrist
Love of art is not exact; one must call it faith—a faith that maketh martyrs.
Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1999)
Art is a ripening, an evolution, an uplifting which enables us to emerge from darkness into a blaze of light.
William Hazlitt (1778-1830), essayist
Rules and models destroy genius and art.
Werner Heisenberg (1901-76)
Therefore, the two processes, that of science and that of art, are not very different. Both science and art form in the course of the centuries a human language by which we can speak about the more remote parts of reality, and the coherent sets of concepts as well as the different styles of art are different words or groups of words in this language.
Paul Henri, Baron d’Holbach (1723-89), philosopher
Henry James (1843-1916)
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
Samuel Johnson (1709-84)
The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.
Ben Jonson (1572-1637)
Art hath an enemy called Ignorance.
John F. Kennedy (1917-63)
[A]rt establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstone of our judgement.
In a free society art is not a weapon.
Paul Klee (1879-1940)
Art does not reproduce the visible, rather, it makes visible.
Tony Kushner (1956- )
I don’t think you have to earn your income as an artist to be an artist. But if you are an artist, then art is what you do, whether or not you’re paid for doing it; it is what you do, not what you are. I regard artist not as a description of temperament but as a category of profession, of vocation.
Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864), poet
Clear writers, like clear fountains, do not seem so deep as they are; the turbid look the more profound.
Susanne Langer (1895-1985), philosopher
[T]he function of art is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.
David Oppenheim (1922-2007), educator
The world is chaotic. Art is an ordering of that chaos.
George Orwell (1903-50)
Good prose is like a window pane.
Walter Pater (1839-94)
For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1993)
We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their great artists.
Jules Rénard (1864-1910), novelist and playwright
Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.
Diego Rivera (1886-1957)
To be an artist, one must first be a man, vitally concerned with all problems of social struggle, unflinching in portraying them without concealment or evasion, never shirking the truth as he understands it, never withdrawing from life. As a painter, his problems are those of his craft. He is a workman and an artisan. As an artist, he must be a dreamer; he must interpret the unexpressed hopes, fears, and desires of his people and of his time; he must be the conscience of his culture. His work must contain the whole substance of morality, not in content, but rather by the sheer force of its aesthetic facts.
All art is propaganda. . . . . The only difference is the kind of propaganda. Since art is essential for human life, it can’t just belong to the few. Art is the universal language, and it belongs to all mankind. All painters have been propagandists or else they have not been painters. . . . . Every artist who has been worth anything in art has been such a propagandist. . . . . Every strong artist has been a propagandist. I want to be a propagandist and I want to be nothing else.. . . . I want to use my art as a weapon.
[T]he rôle of the artist is that of a soldier of the revolution.
David Salle (1952- ), painter
. . . I feel that the only thing that really matters in art and life is to go against the tidal wave of literalism and literal-mindedness—to insist on and live the life of the imagination.
George Santayana (1863-1952)
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), stage director
Being provoked and offended by art you don’t like can be a creative, life-enriching experience. It can make you think, it can make you question your values and assumptions. Or if you are a vicious abused puppy it can make you snarl and bite.
Not giving the artist the necessary support to create prevents everybody from experiencing that art; supporting the artist and creating the art forces nobody to experience it.
We . . . confuse art and advertising. But they are not at all the same: art makes the invisible visible, advertising makes the visible attractive.
In a secular society, art is the necessary erotic/spiritual/ritual basis of culture. Art is soul-making.
If art is only telling you what you already know, it isn’t telling you anything. It isn’t art.
John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham and Normandy (1648-1721), poet and politician
Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature’s chief masterpiece is writing well.
Learn to write well, or not to write at all.
Joseph Stalin (1879-1953)
The writer is an engineer of the human soul.
Laurence Sterne (1713-86), novelist
Writing, when properly managed . . . is but a different name for conversation.
John Updike (1932- )
The artist brings something into the world that didn’t exist before, and . . . he does it without destroying something else.
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)
Do you know that drawing with words is also an art. . . ?
Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and continuous observations. By persistent, I mean not only continuous work, but also not giving up your opinion at the bidding of such and such a person.
I have a firm faith in art, a firm confidence in its being a powerful stream which carries a man to a harbor . . . .
Art is jealous, and demands our whole strength . . . .
[A]rt is something greater and higher than our own adroitness or accomplishments or knowledge; . . . art is something which, although produced by human hands, is not created by these hands alone, but something which wells up from a deeper source in our souls; and that with regard to adroitness and technical skill in art I see something that reminds me of what in religion may be called self-righteousness.
Sometimes art seems to be something very sublime, and, as you say, something sacred.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
It is through Art, and through Art only, that we can realise our perfection; through Art, and through Art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.
Robert Wilson (1941- )
Artists are recording our times, and the artists are the diaries of our time. In the future this is what society will look back on as a record of our times, of what artists are saying.
[A]rt is concerned with the HOW and not the WHAT. . . .
—Lecture to students, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present [RoseLee Goldberg], 1988
Jean Anouilh (1910-87)
Life is very nice, but it has no shape. The object of art is actually to give it some and to do it by every artifice possible—truer than the truth.
—The Rehearsal, 1950
Roger Ascham (1515-68), scholar, writer, and courtier
He that will write well in any tongue, must follow this counsel of Aristotle, to speak as the common people do, to think as wise men do; and so should every man understand him, and the judgement of wise men allow him.
—Toxophilus, 1545
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.
—“Of Studies,” Essays, 1625
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate the darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.
—“The Creative Process,” Creative America, 1962
The artist cannot and must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question that answer hides.
—“The Creative Process”
Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself, and with that revelation, make freedom real.
—“The Creative Process”
Julian Beck (1925-85)
The power of art is the power of truth.
—The Life of the Theatre: The Relationship of the Artist to the Struggle of the People, 1972
William Blake (1757-1827)
Degrade first the Arts if you’d Mankind Degrade. Hire Idiots to Paint with cold light & hot shade: Give high Price for the worst, leave the best in disgrace, And with Labours of Ignorance fill every place.
—“Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynold’s Discourses,” 1808
Rome & Greece swept Art into their maw & destroy’d it; a Warlike State never can produce Art. It will Rob & Plunder & accumulate into one place, & Translate & Copy & Buy & Sell & Criticize, but not Make.
—“On Virgil,” c. 1822
Nicolas Boileau (1636-1711), poet and critic
Of every four words I write, I strike out three.
—Satire, 1665
Georges Braque (1882-1963)
Art is meant to disturb, science reassures.
—Le Jour et la nuit: Cahiers 1917-52
Robert Browning (1812-89)
Because it is the glory and good of Art, That Art remains the one way possible Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine at least.
—The Ring and the Book, 1868-69
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82)
And so every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.
—“Art,” Society and Solitude, 1870
Gustave Flaubert (1821-80)
You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the hard that is spoken of it.
—Letter to Louise Colet, 14 June 1853
Benjamin Franklin (1706-90)
If you would not be forgotten . . . , either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.
—Poor Richard’s Almanac, 1738
Paul Gachet (1828-1909), van Gogh’s psychiatrist
Love of art is not exact; one must call it faith—a faith that maketh martyrs.
—Letter to Theo van Gogh [Vincent’s brother], ca. July-August 1890
Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1999)
Art is a ripening, an evolution, an uplifting which enables us to emerge from darkness into a blaze of light.
—Towards a Poor Theatre, 1968
William Hazlitt (1778-1830), essayist
Rules and models destroy genius and art.
—Sketches and Essays, 1839
Werner Heisenberg (1901-76)
Therefore, the two processes, that of science and that of art, are not very different. Both science and art form in the course of the centuries a human language by which we can speak about the more remote parts of reality, and the coherent sets of concepts as well as the different styles of art are different words or groups of words in this language.
—“The Relation of Quantum Theory to Other Parts of Natural Science,” 1958
Paul Henri, Baron d’Holbach (1723-89), philosopher
Art is only Nature operating with the aid of the instruments she has made.
—Système de la nature, 1780
Hippocrates (ca. 460-357 BCE)
Life is short, the art is long.
—Aphorisms
Henry James (1843-1916)
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
—“Letter to H. G. Wells, July 10, 1915”
Samuel Johnson (1709-84)
The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.
—A Free Enquiry, 1757
Ben Jonson (1572-1637)
Art hath an enemy called Ignorance.
—Every Man Out of His Humor, 1600
John F. Kennedy (1917-63)
[A]rt establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstone of our judgement.
—Speech at Amherst College, 26 October 1963
In a free society art is not a weapon.
—Speech at Amherst College
Paul Klee (1879-1940)
Art does not reproduce the visible, rather, it makes visible.
—“Creative Credo,” Inward Vision, 1920/1958
Tony Kushner (1956- )
I don’t think you have to earn your income as an artist to be an artist. But if you are an artist, then art is what you do, whether or not you’re paid for doing it; it is what you do, not what you are. I regard artist not as a description of temperament but as a category of profession, of vocation.
—“A Modest Proposal,” American Theatre, January 1998
Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864), poet
Clear writers, like clear fountains, do not seem so deep as they are; the turbid look the more profound.
—Imaginary Conversations, 1824
Susanne Langer (1895-1985), philosopher
[T]he function of art is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.
—Feeling and Form, 1953
Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.
—Feeling and Form
David Oppenheim (1922-2007), educator
The world is chaotic. Art is an ordering of that chaos.
—“School of Arts’ Location Belies Educational Status” [McCandlish Phillips], New York Times, 12 Sept. 1971
George Orwell (1903-50)
Good prose is like a window pane.
—“Why I Write,” Collected Essays, 1968
Walter Pater (1839-94)
For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.
—The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 1873
Pablo Picasso (1881-1993)
We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.
—Picasso on Art [Dore Ashton], 1972
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their great artists.
—“Henry James,” Literary Essays, 1954
Jules Rénard (1864-1910), novelist and playwright
Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.
—Journal, 1906
Diego Rivera (1886-1957)
To be an artist, one must first be a man, vitally concerned with all problems of social struggle, unflinching in portraying them without concealment or evasion, never shirking the truth as he understands it, never withdrawing from life. As a painter, his problems are those of his craft. He is a workman and an artisan. As an artist, he must be a dreamer; he must interpret the unexpressed hopes, fears, and desires of his people and of his time; he must be the conscience of his culture. His work must contain the whole substance of morality, not in content, but rather by the sheer force of its aesthetic facts.
—Diego Rivera: The Shaping of an Artist, 1889-1921 [Florence Arquin], 1971
All art is propaganda. . . . . The only difference is the kind of propaganda. Since art is essential for human life, it can’t just belong to the few. Art is the universal language, and it belongs to all mankind. All painters have been propagandists or else they have not been painters. . . . . Every artist who has been worth anything in art has been such a propagandist. . . . . Every strong artist has been a propagandist. I want to be a propagandist and I want to be nothing else.. . . . I want to use my art as a weapon.
—“The Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Art,” Modern Quarterly, Autumn 1932
[T]he rôle of the artist is that of a soldier of the revolution.
—“What Is Art For?” Modern Monthly, June 1933
David Salle (1952- ), painter
. . . I feel that the only thing that really matters in art and life is to go against the tidal wave of literalism and literal-mindedness—to insist on and live the life of the imagination.
—“Profile: Forty-one False Starts” [Janet Malcolm], New Yorker, 11 July 1994
George Santayana (1863-1952)
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
—The Life of Reason, 1905
Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), stage director
Being provoked and offended by art you don’t like can be a creative, life-enriching experience. It can make you think, it can make you question your values and assumptions. Or if you are a vicious abused puppy it can make you snarl and bite.
—“Tough Answers: Rebutting Tom Carson’s NEA Quiz Point by Point,” New York Press, 1-7 August 1990
Not giving the artist the necessary support to create prevents everybody from experiencing that art; supporting the artist and creating the art forces nobody to experience it.
—“Tough Answers”
We . . . confuse art and advertising. But they are not at all the same: art makes the invisible visible, advertising makes the visible attractive.
—“The Tip of the Iceberg,” Performing Arts Journal, September 1991
In a secular society, art is the necessary erotic/spiritual/ritual basis of culture. Art is soul-making.
—“The Tip of the Iceberg”
If art is only telling you what you already know, it isn’t telling you anything. It isn’t art.
—Unpublished interview, 3 March 1992
John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham and Normandy (1648-1721), poet and politician
Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature’s chief masterpiece is writing well.
—“Essay on Poetry,” 1682
Learn to write well, or not to write at all.
—“An Essay on Satire,” 1689
Joseph Stalin (1879-1953)
The writer is an engineer of the human soul.
—Inside Russia Today [John Gunther], 1962
Laurence Sterne (1713-86), novelist
Writing, when properly managed . . . is but a different name for conversation.
—Tristram Shandy, 1759-67
John Updike (1932- )
The artist brings something into the world that didn’t exist before, and . . . he does it without destroying something else.
—Writers at Work [George Plimpton], 1977
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)
Do you know that drawing with words is also an art. . . ?
—Letter to Theo van Gogh, 6 July 1882
Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and continuous observations. By persistent, I mean not only continuous work, but also not giving up your opinion at the bidding of such and such a person.
—Letter to Theo van Gogh, undated [ca. July 1882]
I have a firm faith in art, a firm confidence in its being a powerful stream which carries a man to a harbor . . . .
—Letter to Theo, undated [ca. March 1883]
Art is jealous, and demands our whole strength . . . .
—Letter to Anthon G. A. Ridder van Rappard [Dutch painter (1858-92)], undated [June 1882]
[A]rt is something greater and higher than our own adroitness or accomplishments or knowledge; . . . art is something which, although produced by human hands, is not created by these hands alone, but something which wells up from a deeper source in our souls; and that with regard to adroitness and technical skill in art I see something that reminds me of what in religion may be called self-righteousness.
—Letter to Rappard, undated [April 1884]
Sometimes art seems to be something very sublime, and, as you say, something sacred.
—Letter to Wilhelmina J. van Gogh [Vincent’s youngest sister], undated [Summer or autumn 1887]
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
It is through Art, and through Art only, that we can realise our perfection; through Art, and through Art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.
—“The Critic as Artist,” Intentions, 1891
Robert Wilson (1941- )
Artists are recording our times, and the artists are the diaries of our time. In the future this is what society will look back on as a record of our times, of what artists are saying.
—“Robert Wilson in conversation with Ariel Goldenberg at the Opéra Bastille, Paris, 1 May 1995,” In Contact with the Gods, 1996
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