Two Art Fairs & Joan Miró at MoMA

My friend Diana and I caught a variety of art exhibits at the beginning of May.  First up were two immense art fairs, Frieze on Randalls Island and Art New York at Pier 94; both fairs ran from Thursday, 2, to Sunday, 5 May.  We followed that with a visit to the Museum of Modern Art for Joan Miró: Birth of the World, which runs from 24 February-15 June.

Diana and I went to Art New York, which was launched in 2015 as an off-shoot of Art Miami (established in 2012), last year (see my report posted on Rick On Theater on 13 May 2018), and for the most part this year’s exhibit was very similar to last year’s.  Diana went to 2018’s Frieze on her own, so this was my first trip to Randalls Island to see that one.  Frieze New York started in 2012.  Both fairs are hosts to exhibits of dozens of galleries from around the country and the world.  We drove to Frieze—Randalls Island is a city park in the East River off of about East 125th Street in Manhattan, west of Queens and south of the Bronx—on Saturday afternoon, 4 May (Star Wars Day, May the Fourth); we went to ANY at the pier, which is at West 55th Street off the West Side Highway, on Sunday, the 5th. 

I provided a description of last year’s ANY in my report on that exhibition (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2018/05/art-new-york-2018.html), and it’s the same for ANY 2019 so I won’t do that again.  (Some exhibitors are new and the art on display at any given gallery’s space may also be different—though there were a lot of repeats—but the layout and overall experience was the same.) 

Frieze, except that it’s in a huge tent instead of a huge building, was also very similar in set-up.  According to its own PR, Frieze, a media and events company that publishes frieze magazine, Frieze Masters Magazine, and Frieze Week, was founded in 1991 with the launch of frieze magazine, a magazine covering contemporary art and culture.  The founders established Frieze London in 2003, which takes place each October. In 2012, Frieze launched Frieze New York, which runs in May; and Frieze Masters, which coincides with Frieze London in October and is dedicated to art from ancient to modern.  In February 2018, Frieze established Frieze Los Angeles. 

Those big art fairs are exhausting.  I got back after Frieze fairly late Wednesday night, about 10:30—and very tired.  (The fair actually closed at 6 p.m., but getting back to Manhattan and then downtown was a long, slow trip!)  Then I met Diana at Pier 94 at 2 the next afternoon for Art New York.  I got home from Art New York at 6:30-ish, but I was still bushed!  Both ANY and Frieze are immense exhibits; Frieze hosted 191 sellers and ANY advertised “more than 70.” 

Though Frieze had lots of benches all around the huge tent that was its pavilion, ANY didn’t provide any rest areas except the café all the way at the end of the building—and must require miles and miles of walking (and we only covered maybe a third of the exhibit spaces!)  After about three hours it all becomes a blur.  (When I used to go to museum shows with my mom, we always figured that two hours was the max unless we took a break in the middle—and that was rare.)

I noticed a couple of things this time that hadn’t occurred to me when we went to ANY last year, since I had nothing with which to compare it.  Frieze seems to focus on contemporary artists and work—lots of art dated 2019 and 2018—with the oldest going back only to the ’80s for the most part (and not much of that).  ANY had lots of artists from the early 20th century, like Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Alexander Calder (1898-1976), and so on, as well as current stuff.  (I enjoyed ANY more both last year in retrospect and this year than I did Frieze.  The mid-century moderns are my favorite art next to Impressionism and Post-impressionism.)

I also see that non-Western artists working in Western traditions—or what might be more accurately called International—rather than the traditions of their native regions have proliferated immensely.  Both fairs, but especially Frieze, exhibited lots of Asian, Middle Eastern, and African artists, and even at least one Australian Aboriginal artist, whose works could easily have been mistaken for European or American artists.  (In some case, there were homages to the artists’ native cultures embedded in the work—it was mostly painting rather than sculpture—but the styles were very like their Western colleagues.) 

I don’t know whether these artists—I  didn’t know any of them before—studied or worked in the West, either here or in Europe, or if they worked from their native regions.  I think this is something of a phenomenon of the last few decades.  A small sample of these artists are Bijan Saffari of Iran,  Rachid Koraichi of Algeria, Zhang Hongtu from China, Tony Wong from China, Izumi Kato of Japan, Anju Dodiya from India, Srijon Chowdhury of Bangladesh, Katsumi Nakai from Japan, Danh Vō of Vietnam, Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi of South Africa, Otobong Nkanga from Nigeria, and Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri of Western Australia. 

(In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when I was a boy and my parents were involved in the little modern-art gallery in Washington—see “Gres Gallery” on ROT, 7, 10, and 13 July 2018—shows like Six Painters of Japan and Contemporary Polish Paintings were notable because they spotlighted artists working in contemporary Western styles who were from areas where that kind of art was uncommon or even suppressed.  I hadn’t noticed that what had been an occasional divergence from conventional practice had become mainstreamed. 

(Among the Japanese painters in the 1960 exhibit was Yayoi Kusama, represented at Frieze by her installation of silver metal globes, Narcissus Garden, 1966, displayed on the floor beneath to take and to give, 2012, by Chris Ofili, a British artist of Nigerian heritage.  Inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphosis, the sets for which at London’s Royal Opera Ofili designed, To take is a monumental painting, 17 feet high and 29 feet long, depicting in vibrant rainbow colors a group of sinuous female figures emerging from the sea from where a woman, presumably Diana, arises, and climbing, even merging with, a pyramidal mountain.)

The New York Times asserted that the fair had a “conservative vibe” in order to sell more art, but then art reviewers Martha Schwendener and Will Heinrich added, “That said, there are many islands of daring.”  Musée magazine, a digital quarterly dedicated to emerging artists, attributed the reserved atmosphere to a “diminished” “urge to present aggressively hip, over-the-top installations.”  Belle McIntyre reported, “There were a number of really fun things on offer, as well.”  ARTnews’ Annie Armstrong and Claire Selvin observed that “this year seems to be much more about the quiet discoveries,” but announced that “there are some more modest spectacles,” noting particularly Red Grooms’s 1995 The Bus (about which more in a bit). 

In a totally unrelated occurrence connected to the two fairs, I was interested to learn how variant two people’s response to art can be.  I was put in mind of a 19 September 1993 segment of 60 Minutes, the CBS television newsmagazine, in which correspondent Morley Safer (1931-2016) asked of modern abstract art, “Yes . . . But Is It Art?”  Safer, who died at 84 three years ago this week, was an amateur dauber himself, but he was bemused at what people in the art market would buy.  He posited that gallerists and dealers were defrauding an uninformed and gullible art-buying public.  One piece especially exercised Safer, a painting by renowned artist Cy Twombly (1928-2011), which the TV pundit characterized as “a canvas of scrawls done with the wrong end of a paintbrush [that] bears the imaginative title of . . . Untitled.”  Safer was nonplussed that the piece sold for $2 million ($3,540,000 today).  (In the interest of full disclosure, Twombly was born in Lexington, Virginia, and was a 1950 alumnus of my alma mater there, Washington and Lee University.)

This isn’t that exactly, but Diana kept making the same comment when she came across something at the art fairs that she didn’t much like: “What’s the point?”  I suspect that’s something Morley Safer might have contemplated when he confronted an artwork made up of two basketballs immersed in a fish tank or featuring vacuum cleaners.  It’s a question people have asked ever since Marcel Duchamp produced Fountain, a porcelain urinal mounted and signed “R. Mutt” in 1917. 

At the end of Frieze was a large mock-up of a New York City bus made of fabric.  As we approached it, I said, “That looks like a Red Grooms, but bigger.”  Turned out, it was.  Diana asked what it’s point is and my only response was that, like all Grooms pieces I know, it was pure whimsy.  A little light social commentary thrown in maybe—the passengers (viewers are encouraged to go on board) were a cross section of New York denizens in caricature and the ads on the sides of the bus were parodies of “real” ones (e.g.: “Mister Saigon”). 

Diana responded as if that didn’t compute, but I don’t think all art, even all good art, has a “point.”  What’s the point of Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers or even Michelangelo’s David?  An evocation of natural beauty on the one hand and strength on the other—that’s all I see.  The Washington Color School eschewed meaning or representation in their art.  The paintings and sculptures had one purpose: to provide the experience of pure pleasure in the bright, vibrant colors (see my post “The Washington School of Color” on 21 September 2014).

Some ROT-readers may remember one of my criteria for good theater: it must do more than just tell a story.  That doesn’t exclude plays that make you laugh or smile (Kaufman and Hart’s You Can’t Take it With You), shiver in horror (Emlyn Williams’s Night Must Fall), or some other response to frivolity.  I argued with my MFA classmates at Rutgers that theater for the sake of entertainment isn’t second rate.  The Boy Friend (or High Button Shoes, which I’ve just seen) isn’t less theatrically worthy than Execution of Justice.  Entertainment is a commendable goal for art.

Another thing Diana said when she saw an artist she liked: “She (or ‘He’) knows what she’s doing.”  She meant that the artist was applying (or so Diana thought) principles of line, color, and form.  Diana likes art (including theater art, i.e., playwriting) that follows “rules,” the kind of criteria a teacher might inculcate in a class like at the Art Students League, where Diana has studied.  She said this repeatedly at both fairs.  (She also said it at the Whitney when we were there a couple of weeks ago.  Edward Hopper, whose works were on display at the Whitney, is one of Diana’s favorite artists because she thinks he follows all the rules—and she’d stand in front of one of his paintings and explain how one field of color balances another elsewhere on the canvas.) 

I don’t even notice stuff like that!  I think I’ve said before that my response to art isn’t analytical—I don’t know those rules in any case, since I’ve never studied art.  It’s purely emotional or psychological: I respond to a piece of art according to how it makes me feel.  (I respond to music the same way, by the way.)  When Diana and I went to a Jackson Pollock exhibit at MoMA in 2016, she asked me what it is that I like about his paintings, and the best I could come up with was that I simply find his work beautiful and it excites me (see my report on Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey: 1924-1954, 4 March 2016).. 

Interestingly, in a variation of “he knows what he’s doing,” my companion occasionally pronounced that opinion about a work or an artist, then added, “but it’s not working.”  That was obviously her way of saying she didn’t like the art, but couldn’t get around the apparent fact that the artist checked all the boxes.  To me, what this response proved was that following the rules doesn’t always make good art.  The corollary to this, it seems logical, is that good art doesn’t always follow rules.  Which has been my point all along!

Which brings me to the MoMA show we saw on Wednesday evening, 8 May, Joan Miró: Birth of the World.  (Diana is a member of MoMA, so we went on an evening when the museum held one of its periodic Member After Hours.  The museum reopens at 6:30 p.m. after closing to the general public, and members, who enter free, and their guests, who pay a $5 entry fee, can enter and stay until 9:30.)  It turned out that just as Diana doesn’t like Jackson Pollock, she doesn’t like Miró, either.  I asked her why she came to the show and she explained that she thought she might see something to reveal why the artist is so esteemed.  (She said at the Pollock that she went because she hoped I’d tell her why I thought he was so good.  I’m sure I didn’t satisfy her.)

She may have found a glimmer of an answer on her own, however.  Birth of the World, curated by Anne Umland, the Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Senior Curator, and Laura Braverman, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, largely from the museum’s collection, is arranged vaguely chronologically.  The first gallery holds works that start with a 1917 oil portrait, Portrait of Enric Cristòfol Ricart.  Miró’s dates are 1893-1983, so he was about 24 when he painted this Fauvist work, which has echoes of van Gogh and Henri Matisse and includes a pasted panel of an actual Japanese print that reflects the Orientalism of Ricart’s striped yellow silk pajamas.  (The most recent piece in the show was Maquette for dust jacket for Joan Miró by James Thrall Soby from 1958.)

The arrangement of the 60 or so works, which include several sculptures and constructions as well as printed illustrations for books, a number of drawings and sketches, some etchings and other prints, and a couple of maquettes (mock-ups) for a poster and a book cover, permit the viewer to see the development over time of the artist’s style and his iconic figures and geometric shapes that start to recur as his work progressed.

When Diana entered the first gallery and looked at a few of Miró’s early works, her first reaction was that he didn’t know anything about form and line.  In other words, she disparaged his art because he was apparently not following the rules as she understood them.  (I suggested that she didn’t really know that he didn’t know “the rules”; he could be deliberately subverting them.  He wouldn’t be the first artist to rebel against the established academic standards of his time.)  As she had at the Pollock show, Diana asked me why I liked Miró.  Again, my answer was inadequate: I love his whimsy.  Even when he had something to say—he was a loyal Spaniard and Catalan (he was born in Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia) and a staunch Republican and anti-Falangist during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and the resulting Francoist dictatorship (1939-75)—he couldn’t help slipping in a little humor.

Oh, well.  To each his (or her) own, I suppose! Toward the end of Birth of the World, however, Diana came around a little, repeating a couple of times that she had to acknowledge that the artist had a sense of humor.  She said it with a smile, almost as if she was embarrassed to admit it.  Now, I don’t think Diana is a convert to the Joan Miró Fan Club—but I’d like to think that she’s not so ready as she was to dismiss angrily all the artists in whose works she doesn’t see “a point.” 

By the way, just because Diana or I don’t see the “point” of a piece of art, it doesn’t mean there isn’t one.  Maybe we just missed it.  I have no doubt I have—often.  In a very early post on ROT, I wrote that when I was writing regular theater reviews, “I have even admitted when I didn’t understand a play, suggesting that others with different sensitivities might tune in where I couldn’t.  It’s simply that I don’t feel comfortable dismissing something I haven’t understood—I don’t know everything, after all, and try to be honest enough to admit it in print” (from “On Reviewing,” 22 March 2009).  In another blog report, “The Art of Writing Reviews by Kirk Woodward, Part 2” (8 November 2009), I acknowledged that “when I’ve had to review shows with which I know I’ll have trouble [because of a personal bias], if I couldn’t get out of the assignment, I’ve always tried to admit right up front that I probably wasn’t the best person to assess the performance.”  When that happened, I would describe the experience rather than evaluate the production.

The MoMA holdings of Miró works is one of most extensive in the world and Birth of the World is judiciously augmented with some apt loans.  (I’ve posted two previous reports on Joan Miró exhibits; “Van Gogh & Miró at MOMA (2008),” 12 October 2016, recounts my visit to MoMA’s Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937 and “Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape,” 5 October 2012 [https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2012/10/joan-Miró-ladder-of-escape.html], on an exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, includes a short bio of the artist.)

Two things about Miró’s art of which Birth of the World gives evidence are that the artist was a Surrealist and that before that, he was a Dadaist.  (For a discussion of Dadaism, see my report on Dada, a large exhibit at the National Gallery in 2006 and MoMA in 2007, posted on 20 February 2010; https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2010/02/dada.html.)  From Dadaism, Miró learned an anti-aestheticism and a disdain for established art techniques and styles.  I suspect that this is where Diana picked up the notion that he didn’t know the standards of line, form, and color she looks for in good art.  He’d discarded them when he threw over the conventional art of painting (see my report on Painting and Anti-Painting, https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2016/10/van-gogh-Miró-at-moma-2008.html) in order to reinvigorate it.  “I want to assassinate painting,” the artist is alleged to have said in 1927.

Surrealism, the art style Miró began practicing in about 1924 after he came to Paris in 1920 and found this new form in its infancy, is derived from dreams and the subconscious (greatly influenced first by the theories of Sigmund Freud and later of Carl Jung).  His dreamlike images, which are compiled from squiggly lines and small, carefully hued shapes, may be hard for a viewer to understand because they aren’t the viewer’s dreams.  This may account for Diana’s feeling that Miró’s works have no point.  They do, but it’s a very subjective point.  For this reason, as Carl Daher Delnero, arts correspondent for the Rutland Herald, pronounced: “Miró is a painter to be seen, not explained.”

There’s another attribute of Miró’s art that obtains here as well.  “I make no distinction between painting and poetry,” the artist asserted.  He considered making visual art the same as writing poems.  Just as poetry isn’t a straightforward verbal communication medium, neither, then, is Miró’s painting and sculpture.  It has to be interpreted and that interpretation has to be sussed out carefully and deliberately.  Both art forms have an emotional and an intellectual or rational component and all of the signals are not immediately comprehensible. And one viewer’s reading of a Miró canvas won’t be the same another’s—and both are as likely to be right (if there is such a thing).

Impressionism is all about feelings and your response to an Impressionist painting or sculpture hits you right away—it washes over you as soon as you look at it.  You have to work out Miró’s point.  Just as Miró labeled this focus on the smallest elements of the work his “slow understanding,” his intent grows on the viewer gradually, maybe even after leaving the gallery or on repeated viewings.  Understanding accumulates for both the artist and the viewer. 

One of Miró’s most pervasive subjects in his art was unconditional freedom.  Remembering what I said earlier about Miró’s political loyalties, we should note that he fled Spain for France when the Spanish Civil War broke out because he was a Republican and a foe of the totalitarian forces led by General Francisco Franco.  He was in Paris when France was occupied by the Nazis and, now sandwiched between two fascist forces, was forced to return to now-Francoist Spain.  It’s little wonder that from 1936 to the end of Generalissimo Franco’s dictatorship in 1975, Miró’s interest would be in the evocation of personal, intellectual, and artistic liberty.

A Surrealist in style  for most of his career, Miró was an anarchist in his artistic approach, so his works here are representations of uncompromising freedom, from the amoebic shapes to the seemingly haphazard arrangement of his images to the choice of his palette.  One good example in Birth of the World is The Hunter (Catalan Landscape) (1923-24), a fantastical, mesmerizing scene of intricate geometric shapes atop beds of soft rose and pea green.  The landscape is not meant to be a reflection of what Miró called “outer reality”; the effect is vertiginous and idiosyncratic. The painting is centered on a flesh-pink eye that seems to stare at the viewer.  It “is the eye of the picture staring at me,” Miró declared. 

The imagery of Miró’s work, especially in his Surrealist paintings, can baffle viewers because the artist saw his art as a spiritual act.  He asserted, “Before taking up paper and pencil I carefully washed my hands, and then worked as if performing a religious act.”  He read works of Christian mysticism and poetry and when Picasso looked at Still Life II (1922), he declared, “This is poetry.”  A trapezoidal patch of ochre suggests a shaft of sunlight from a window falling on a flat, gray surface—perhaps a table or the floor—Still Life II was reportedly Miró’s first attempt to put recognizable, everyday objects into his paintings.  A realistically rendered slice of tomato rests in the lower left corner of the trapezoid, beneath an equally representational carbide lamp; an iron stand overlaps the right edge of the light patch.  

Though a few of Miró’s pieces in the MoMA exhibit show signs of Dadaist nonsense, such as Still Life II, the works all reward careful viewing.  The Birth of the World (1925), the show’s title work, and Portrait of Mistress Mills in 1750 (1929), two works from  the time the artist was transitioning between Dadaism and Surrealism, both demonstrate Miró’s blending of the two styles, as does Mural Painting (1950-51), a later work that was commissioned for Harvard University’s graduate dining hall.

Mural Painting, which Miró replaced with a ceramic-tile mosaic ten years after the its installation because it was less destructible (MoMA bought the original oil-on-canvas painting in 1963), is approximately 6¼  feet tall by 19½ feet long.  The mural shows bullfighting figures—which the artist identified as a bull with a banderillero on the left and a matador on the right—floating over an atmospheric ground of browns and blues.  The figures are contoured with thin black lines, some of which are filled in with flat colors while others remain transparent. 

In Portrait of Mistress Mills, based on a c. 1786 portrait by British artist George Engleheart (1750-1829) of the singer and actress Mrs. Isabella Mills (1734/35-1802; Miró humorously recast her as “Mistress” rather than “Mrs.,” a manifestation of the artist’s Dadaism), Miró rejected the naturalism of his source imagery, aggressively simplifying and distorting it.  Whereas the Engleheart original (produced as a hand-colored mezzotint) is painted in the muted hues of Neoclassicism, Miró’s figure and background are vividly colored with odd shapes and bright, flat colors which are afforded weight by negative space on the canvas.  As abstract as Miró’s rendering is, the shape of the subject’s wide-brimmed hat and the paper she’s holding in her right hand are recognizable echoes from Engleheart’s portrait. 

(Also in the exhibit is Final study for Portrait of Mistress Mills in 1750, 1929, a charcoal-and-pencil sketch on paper.  The study, drawn on a numbered grid for transfer to canvas, is even more reflective of the 18th-century portrait, with a representation of the plume in Mrs. Mills’s hat and some facial features, however distorted.)

The Birth of the World, considered one of the artist’s iconic works, is simple, with a grayish-brown background on which appear a small red circle (perhaps a balloon) and a white circle (which appears to be the head of a stick figure with thick, black legs), a black triangle (perhaps a kite) and a shooting star.  Pencil-thin black lines shoot out like projectiles ejected from an explosion.  Miró applied paint to an unevenly primed canvas in a manner that anticipated the experiments of artists 35 years in the future, pouring, brushing, and flinging the pigment so that the canvas absorbed it in some places while it stayed on the surface in others.  According to the wall panel, “Miró once said that The Birth of the World describes ‘a sort of genesis,’ an amorphous beginning out of which life may take form.”  (Sounds like a point to me!)

Arguably, the work in Birth of the World  that’s most demonstrative of Miró’s sense of humor, even with respect (or, maybe, disrespect) to his art, is 1950’s Portrait of a Man in a Late Nineteenth-Century Frame.  According to Miró, his childhood friend Joan Prats (1891-1970) found an elaborately framed, pretentious academic portrait by an anonymous artist and sent it to him as a joke.  The subject’s pose and garb, the medal and ribbon of some award on the table, his fixed gaze of authority, and the rose garden through the window epitomize the bourgeois taste and confidence of the fin de siècle.  Within this orderly, rational, and humorless world, Miró mischievously sanded the frame down in spots and inserted his own creatures and signs.  As if to suggest the man’s puzzlement at this unexpected interruption, he punctuated his forehead with a small swirling form (which put me in mind of the twirling-finger gesture suggesting someone’s nuts). 

Miró’s unusual painting-and-frame combination ties the original image and the frame into a single composition that harks back to the artist’s anarchic Dadaist days, thumbing his nose at a whole culture he saw as self-satisfied.  (Portrait of a Man is halfway to the kind of art, like Duchamp’s “readymades,” to which Morley Safer took such exception in 1993.  I wonder what he’d have said about Miró’s Portrait if he’d seen it.)

Miró’s paintings of the female form, radically free expressions unbound by logic, render the body unrecognizable with elongated and undefined body parts painted in glaring colors.  Bather (1932), with its bright yellow figure on a geometric background composed of three horizontal bars of blue, yellow and white, and dark green is vividly painted.  The backdrop is hard to interpret, but the blue strip at the top could be read as the sky, with a red sun hanging just above the center strip.  The yellow and white blocks in the middle strip might be the sea (though why two colors and those in particular, I couldn’t begin to guess), and the shore is green so dark it almost looks black.  Because of its title, the painting suggests a weird beach scene. 

A boldly colored beach-goer, her head enormous and her contorted limbs pulled out grotesquely, sits in the center of the wood-panel painting, sun-bathing. While the bathing woman’s profile is decipherable, the rest of her body is more difficult to read.  One reviewer described Bather “as if Miró took the knuckle of his subject and expanded it like a balloon, placing it next to an elongated crease of an elbow,” adding, “It may not make sense, but Miró’s painting was Miró’s mind.”

After having returned to Barcelona in 1932 after his sojourn in Paris, Miró and his family returned to the French capital in 1936 for a visit and, as the civil war in Spain expanded, stayed as voluntary exiles.  The next year, he created Still Life with Old Shoe (1937), a painting that’s both dark, with a black or dark charcoal-gray background, and bright, with psychedelic-colored patterns that would have seemed familiar in the 1960s.  

Feeling uprooted and increasingly anxious, according to the Birth of the World curators, Miró decided “to do something absolutely different,” and Still Life with Old Shoe is both a still life and a landscape: the back edge of the tabletop across the center of the canvas can be read as a horizon line.  The painting is divided into four quadrants and the objects—a fork stabbed into what could be a roll or a vegetable, a loaf of bread, a bottle, and the titular shoe—are isolated in their own cells (possibly as a reflection of the way the artist felt being separated from his favorite surrounding, the Catalan countryside).  Against the somber background, the colors are “acidic, highly saturated, and dissonant.”  

Miró was not a political activist, which is why he left Spain despite his intellectual and emotional support of the Republican cause, but Still Life with Old Shoe, a depiction of an apocalyptic landscape, clearly conveys a sense of tension and anguish over the fate of his native land.

Like almost any exhibit of Miró’s work, the MoMA show challenges the viewer’s imagination and powers of interpretation and understanding.  The few pieces of Miró’s art I’ve tried to describe here—a small sample of this artist’s broad and deep interest in forms of artistic expression, not to mention that sense of humor that prompted him to tweak the noses of both the pompous and self-satisfied, but also his viewers—is hardly adequate to capsulize Joan Miró: Birth of the World. 

My visits to Frieze and Art New York were a flurry of brief encounters with art I knew and art I didn’t, a gallimaufry of impressions, a kaleidoscope of art.  It was the mixed grill of art—what my father described as too much of some things and not enough of anything.  The visit the MoMA Miró show was intense.  On one hand, I wish I could have stayed longer than the two hours we had—there was so much in those 60 works to contemplate; on the other, I couldn’t have taken much more.  I was wrung out, my brain was overloaded.  (Writing this report has helped me sort out the experience some, I’m pleased to report.)

In the Wall Street Journal, Michael FitzGerald observed, “Miro’s status as one of the great underappreciated artists of the 20th century extends to the Museum of Modern Art, whose remarkable collection of his work—arguably the best in the world—is rarely shown in depth.  So MoMA’s . . . ‘Joan Miro: Birth of the World’ is an exceptional gift.”  The New York Times’ Roberta Smith proclaimed, “Periodically the Museum of Modern Art orchestrates what I call a Miró Immersion, one of those experiences that can make you an art lover for life or, if that’s already the case, prompt you to renew your vows.”  So, “thanks to MoMA’s extraordinary holdings in Miró’s work and its curatorial familiarity with them,” Birth of the World, said Smith, “achieves a pervasive, extra-visual intensity.” 

Barbara Hoffman of the New York Post wrote, “Before there were Colorforms, there was Joan Miró.  Few artists before, during or after left such a colorful legacy, let alone a work built around a stuffed parrot.”  She explained, “That last, a taxidermied bird the artist perched above a derby hat with a plastic fish in its brim, is the star of ‘Object’ [1936].  It’s one of many dada-esque delights in the Museum of Modern Art’s new show, ‘Joan Miró: Birth of the World.’”  Miró “’called himself a proud international Catalan,’” Hoffman quoted curator Anne Umland.  “However he saw himself, he’s given us a world of joy.”

In the Brooklyn Rail, Jessica Holmes reported that MoMA’s Birth of the World exhibit “proceeds in laying out a case for the evolution of the artist’s visual poetics, an alphabet of forms that he developed into a singular language.”  Nora Quintanilla wrote in the Los Angeles Times that MoMA’s exhibit “is giving devotees of Spanish painter Joan Miro (1893-1983) an opportunity to immerse themselves in dozens of artifacts from the period when he developed his pictorial universe.”  Birth of the World “aims to shed light on the artist's formative years,” she explained. 

Peter Schjeldahl of the New Yorker dubbed Birth of the World an “enchanting show” and insisted, “Miró is fun.  He earns and will keep his place in our hearts . . . with abounding charm.”  In the Art Newspaper, Nancy Kenney reported, “The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has dug into its extensive holdings of pieces by Joan Miró for a show that demonstrates how one major work can be a turning point in an artist’s career.” 

On DailyArtMagazine.com, Howard Schwartz declared, “This collection of Joan Miró’s paintings and sculptures is magnificent.”  He added, “The art is so wonderful, it does not need an interesting theme to warrant attention.”  Sandra Bertrand called Birth of the World a “dazzling exhibition” and asserted that Umland and Braverman “have done an exemplary job in helping to elucidate this complicated Catalan genius.”

[A few words about two of the shows discussed in this post: Frieze Sculpture is a new public art initiative, presented at Rockefeller Center in partnership with Frieze New York. It opened on 25 April will run through 28 June.  Frieze Sculpture will exhibit new sculptures by 14 international artists across the Rockefeller campus.

[Joan Miró: Birth of the World closes on 15 June, after which the Museum of Modern Art will shut down for four months for a major reconstruction project.  The doors will close on 15 June and reopen on 21 October to a museum with increased exhibit space and a new plan for the display of its art.]

Landmarks

by Kirk Woodward

[Soon after his last two contributions to Rick On Theater in March and April, my friend Kirk Woodward is back now with an article paying homage—he calls it a “valentine”—to a series of books for children which he read  . . . well, when he was one!  (In point of fact, I believe I read some of the titles Kirk mentions in “Landmarks.”  Just as his parents got them for him, mine must have gotten some of them for me—or I took them out of the school or local library.) 

[The remarkable things, at least to me, are that he held the series of histories and biographies in a special place in his memory (he reread them for this article) and that he kept the books all these years—surely going on 60 for many of them.  (I suppose it’s also remarkable that so many of them survived so long; as you’ll read, Kirk didn’t treat them all very well.)

[Nostalgia is one thing, but as you’ll learn, Kirk found some lasting lessons in his reading of the Landmark Books that have fed his adult mind.  Reacquainting himself with the books, he’s also found some points he was too young to see when he first read the books.]

This article is a valentine to a series of books.

I was fortunate to be born into a reading family. I’m not certain that my parents read all the books they bought. For example, they signed up for a book of the month club of some sort, and some of those books turned out to be instrumental for me, like In Search of Theater (1953) by Eric Bentley, an eye-opener for me if there ever was one – but I know for certain my parents never read it.

Around that same time, my parents started to buy books about history that were intended for me. How old I was when they started, I’m not sure. I also don’t know if they bought them on some sort of program or if they just picked one up whenever they saw it in a bookstore – I suspect that was the case, because my family has spent a lot of its time in bookstores. (Fairly late in her life, my mother became a librarian.)

In any event, as I said, when I was very young, in the early 1950s, I began to be given these volumes, from a series called Landmark Books, published by Random House. (Sometimes these were hand-me-downs, originally read by my cousin Bucky.)

Altogether there are 122 volumes in the Landmark Books series, which began in 1950 and published its last book in 1970. Although out of print today, books in the series can still be found on the Internet. The idea of the series was to provide works of history and biography for children, written by the best authors of the time.

What a splendid concept! The books were commercially successful, and I know they were crucial for my own education. I have twenty-nine of the books today, and my daughter has asked me to save them for her, for the time when they have a new audience. A friend urged me to buy the rest of the books and read them as part of the preparation for this article, but here I’m going to limit myself to the ones I read as a child.

I have re-read all my Landmark Books, and I’ve noticed things I hadn’t noticed before, some literary, some not. For example, an alarming number of the books have food stains on them. Many also have the corners of pages torn off. My vague memory is that I would eat the corners. I don’t do that anymore, but I do still get food stains on books sometimes, since I tend to read while eating. I know that’s not the best way to eat (or read), but there it is.

With rare exceptions, the Landmark Books don’t talk down to their child readers. They are quite frank about history – about death, and about the fragility of good things. One might expect that a series of books for young readers might make a point of turning their leading characters into heroes and heroines. With minor exceptions, this is not the case.

The books are illustrated, ordinarily with drawings, but once in my collection with photographs (The U.S. Frogmen of World War II, 1964, by Wyatt Blassingame, 1909-1985, a gripping story, vividly told). Few of the books list references or sources. Indexes are standard equipment.

An exception is King Arthur and His Knights (1953), my least favorite of the Landmark Books I’ve read, which has no index. It’s a dull retelling of the story as written around 1460 by Thomas Mallory (c. 1415-1471). The first fifteen pages of my copy of the Landmark volume are missing, and in those pages the author, Mable Louise Robinson (1874-1962), may explain why she decided to limit herself to Mallory, but the rest of the book doesn’t interest me enough to find out. Another book in the series that I do not like much is The Story of San Francisco (1955) by Charlotte Jackson (1903?-1989), which contains a great deal of pedestrian writing. These are, however, the exceptions.

Occasionally authors describe their processes in detail. For example, in Adventures and Discoveries of Marco Polo (1953), Richard J. Walsh (1887-1960), who was also the editor of the John Day publishing company, writes that every quotation is taken from Polo’s book (Book of the Marvels of the World, also known as The Travels of Marco Polo, c. 1300), while “some of the facts have been taken from other books.” The book does not come across as a series of quotes, however; Walsh tells its story well.

In general, the books are splendid, and in many cases I find them as useful as much longer volumes on the same subjects. (In a recent interview in the New York Times, the enormously successful Jeopardy winner James Holzhauer says that he typically locates a book written for children when he wants to learn a new subject.)

One of the rewards of rereading the Landmark Books is that I had almost no awareness when I was a child of who the authors were, and now at least some of their names are meaningful to me. Although few of the Landmark Books authors are household names today, many in their own time were quite well known, or even famous.

As a thought experiment, we might put ourselves in the place of the editors of the series, and try to imagine how we’d select authors for the books we wanted to include in our project.  

For example, if we want a biography of Jesus Christ or the Protestant reformer Martin Luther, we might go to an eminent clergyman of the time. It’s hard to think who would best fit that role today; in 1956 (the date of the Luther biography) or 1959 (the date of the book on Jesus) it would almost certainly have been a clergyman, of course.

So it was – both books are written by Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969), for decades the “voice” of liberal Protestantism. Fosdick’s biography of Luther is respectful but also aware of Luther’s faults. Writing a biography of Jesus must have been a daunting assignment. Fosdick handles it with aplomb, choosing to write in a way that suggests “it might have happened this way,” rather than strictly retelling the gospel accounts.

Fosdick’s books are not the only ones in the series to cover religious topics. There’s The Explorations of Pere Marquette (1951) by Jim Kjelgaard (1910-1959), who was not a religious figure but a dedicated outdoorsman, particularly fond of bears! Marquette (1637-1675) was a Jesuit priest who explored much of the northern Mississippi River valley. Religion obviously plays a part in this story, but Kjelgaard doesn’t over-stress it, and doesn’t steer away from the dangers of exploration either.

What about a choice for a book about Alexander the Great? Well, he traveled over much of the known world of his time, conquering and building, so a logical choice might be John Gunther (1901-1970), the author of the sophisticated series of “Inside. . . ” books of world reporting (Inside America, Inside Russia, and so on) that were famous for decades.

Gunther’s account is extremely well told. One of the features of Gunther’s work, echoed in many of the others, is that, as I mentioned above, although Landmark Books are designed for children, they do not shy away from the subjects of death and suffering. Gunther provides much foreshadowing of the dissipation that was to shorten Alexander’s life. My copy of this book is in disrepair – I must have read it a lot, and as I began to read it again I recalled it vividly.

For the story of the end of the Civil War, Lee and Grant at Appomattox (1950), we might very likely turn to MacKinlay Kantor (1904-1977), a Pulitzer Prize winner, who was a highly regarded Civil War historian, the author of Gettysburg (1952) and Andersonville (1955), and of the novella that was the basis of the film The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Kantor writes vivid vignettes that carry the dramatic scene at Appomattox along.

And who else would you want to write The Barbary Pirates (1953) ther than the novelist C. S. Forester (1899-1966), who wrote a twelve-volume series of naval adventure novels about the fictional seaman Horatio Hornblower? His account of the struggle of the young United States with the Barbary pirates is beautifully, excitingly written.

One of the best books in the series, Genghis Kahn and the Mongol Horde (1954), was written by the historian Harold Lamb (1892-1962), who had written a full-scale biography of its subject in 1927. Lang treats the reader to a particularly judicious summary of the Great Kahn’s life on the last page of the book.

Similarly, The Monitor and the Merrimack (1951) was written by Fletcher Pratt (1897-1956). Pratt was a prolific writer, and, appropriately, he frequently wrote on naval subjects. The result is splendid storytelling, clear and forward moving, highly informative, with no waste of words. Pratt puts a premium on ingenuity and invention. Pratt’s book is illustrated by John O’Hara Cosgrave II (1908-1968), another appropriate choice – he was known for his many pictures of boats.

Stonewall Jackson (1959) was written by Jonathan Daniels (1902-1981). Daniels was briefly press secretary to both Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) and Harry Truman (1884-1972), but more to the point, he was from North Carolina, and a prolific author of many books about the Civil War. His illustrator, William Moyers (1916-2010), was best known for iconic paintings of the West, and he provides clear and vivid illustrations.

Many of my Landmark Books are so worn and covered with food stains that it’s clear I read them repeatedly. Stonewall Jackson, on the other hand, looks like I’d never opened it. (Ironically, when I went to college at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, I walked by Jackson’s grave every night – it was my best shortcut home.)

Daniels tells Jackson’s story sympathetically, and from the Southern point of view, with bare mention of slaves (Jackson owned some), but he does describe the complexities and even peculiarities of Jackson’s character.

Similar complexity can be found in the life of Robert E. Lee (1807-1870), and for Robert E. Lee and the Road of Honor (1955) Landmark chose, again, a Southern writer, Hodding Carter II (1907-1972), a Louisiana journalist and publisher and the father of President Jimmy Carter’s aide of the same name.  (Those are a lot of Carters to keep straight.)

Hodding Carter II wrote Pulitzer Prize winning articles about the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, and shows at least mixed feelings about the Civil War and slavery, but in Lee’s biography he chooses to put heavy stress on Lee’s “honor,” and it’s difficult for me to understand what’s honorable about slaveholding.

For The Story of the U.S. Marines (1951), the series publishers chose George P. Hunt (1918-1991), logically enough a former Marine, who spent most of his career as a writer and editor for Time Inc. I see that my copy is one of the books originally owned by my cousin Bucky. I wonder if he wants it back.

Hunt tells the story with no awareness of the impact of the Vietnam War, a decade or so in the future, and the book ends with the Marines still in Korea (1950/51). The stories of heroism in the book would make great movies (maybe they have), but occasionally there are hints of other things as well, for example, “As was usually the case in these [wars with the Indians], white men wanted Indian land.” Similarly, Hunt writes about “America’s ambition to spread out over the southwest and western regions of a continent it considered its own,”  and one detects a nuance in tone.  

Another example of appropriate choice of author is The West Point Story (1956), by Colonel Red Reeder and Nardi Reeder Campion. Red Reeder (1902-1998) – what a wonderful name! – was himself a cadet at West Point, earning 6 demerits in his first two hours there. He rebounded well, however; he was a leader in the Normandy Invasion, lost a leg, was awarded eight medals, and originated the idea of the Bronze Star medal. (Nardi Campion, 1917-2007, was his sister, an author and screenwriter herself.) For twenty years he was the athletic director at West Point (1947-1967).

The tone of the book, not surprisingly, is more or less awestruck. Men are amazing! World War II “was won by combined effort – by sacrifices in the homes, by men laboring in the factories and shipyards, by men serving in the air, on the sea and on the ground.” Ahem – there were women involved, sir. Sometimes the effect of his book can be chilling: “The government sent more troops into the field and the ‘Indian Fighting Army’ gradually wore down the savages.”

Another kind of service is described in Royal Canadian Mounted Police (1953) by Richard L. Neuberger (1912-1960), a Senator from Oregon and a good choice to write that particular book because he knew many Mounties and their families, and is able to report a number of personal experiences he had with the Mounties and their families. It’s a superlatively written book, dedicated to his wife Maurine (who succeeded him in the Senate after his death), “[w]ho went on patrol and baked the famous chocolate cake just as good as the Mountie’s wife!”

The author of Captain Cook Explores the South Seas (1955), Armstrong Sperry (1897-1976), had a great grandfather who was a sea captain! Sperry wrote a number of historical novels for children. Possibly as a result, his book about Captain Cook contains lots of visualized scenes that couldn’t possibly be based on historical record. At one point Cook says to his wife, “A good sailor makes a poor husband, Elizabeth.” “Not my husband. . . ” she replies. Possible, I suppose . . .

Exploring the Himalaya (1958) is written by a Supreme Court justice, William O. Douglas (1898-1980), who might seem a strange choice for the subject, but he was an environmentalist and spent time in the Himalayas. Douglas appears in the book a good deal, telling what he observed. The book also follows the story of a young Tibetan woman and an Indian man who marry, under the shadow of increasing Russian and Chinese domination.

The Story of Scotland Yard (1954) comes from Laurence Victor Thompson (1914-1972), a British author who also wrote 1940 (1966), a fascinating account of that year from an “inside” political point of view. He writes a riveting account of Scotland Yard, making the reader – this one at least – think vaguely about joining the force, and he includes many personal stories.

The Pony Express (1950) is by Samuel Hopkins Adams (1871-1958), an investigative journalist, a major exposer of health frauds, and a prolific writer in many genres. He is quite clear about the authenticity of his book:

The record here set down is intended to be faithful to period and event without being strictly factual. Detailed data on the Pony Express are scanty, vague, and often contradictory. With a few exceptions it is not even known with certainty what men rode what routes.

Permitting myself a certain license of treatment, the better to round out the picture, I have attempted to present in broad outline the character and atmosphere of [the] enterprise.

Adams acknowledges the unfairness of treatment the “Indians” received at the hands of U.S. citizens. He has a personal connection with the Pony Express, too: he met one Pony Express rider himself, an experience he tells about in the book.

The Story of the Naval Academy (1958) comes from the pen of Felix Riesenberg, Jr. (1913-1962), the son of an historian with the same name and the author of naval books. It’s a pretty straightforward history, with a slightly idealized idea of the Navy, but with acknowledgment of pranks, odd traditions, and misbehavior at the Academy, some of them remarkably dangerous.

Geronimo: Wolf of the Warpath (1958) is by Ralph Moody (1898-1982), a colorful American author and an authentic cowboy, who drew on his upbringing and adventures for over 50 Western-themed books. Appropriately, he provides a vigorous narrative.

One of my favorite books in the entire series is Queen Victoria (1958) by Noel Streatfeild (1895-1986), a genuine British aristocrat from an “historic” English family from Chiddingstone, Kent, that traces its ownership of its house there to the 1500’s. There is an easy, chatty, almost gossipy feel to the book, appropriate for someone comfortable in high British society, and she provides wonderful insights about royalty:

. . .  the country was suffering from a surfeit of expensive royal Dukes.

. . .  a monarch in a rage is not easy to deal with, since no one may answer back.

. . .  there is nothing in the history of Britain, or indeed of any other country, to suggest that heirs to the throne dreaded wearing the crown. In fact quite the contrary. History is full of examples of would-be heirs fighting to retain it, and of dethroned monarchs who could not endure existence amongst commoners.

Unconsciously [Victoria] was giving a large section of her peoples something which, without knowing it, they had always wanted: pomp and circumstance in quantity, allied to a thoroughly normal home life in the best middle-class tradition.

Historical novelists are an obvious source of writers for the Landmark Books Series. For Remember the Alamo! (1958), the publishers recruited one of the best, Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989), notably the author of the celebrated and Pulitzer Prize winning novel All the King’s Men (1946). Even Warren’s chapter titles (“Stephen Austin Was an Honest Man,” “Sam Houston Gets a Razor”) are memorable, and his book is full of evocative details, with no words wasted. It is hard to imagine a better retelling of the disastrous story, or a better way to get both the facts and the atmosphere of the Alamo.

Thomas B. Costain (1885-1965) was also known for his historical novels, and The Mississippi Bubble (1955) is a serviceable retelling of a remarkable economic catastrophe, with a great deal of information about New Orleans along the way. Similarly Joan of Arc (1953), by Nancy Wilson Ross (1901-1986), an American novelist and an expert in Eastern religions, is patiently, thoroughly told. Garibaldi – Father of Modern Italy (1956) is by Marcia Davenport (1903-1996), a novelist, memoirist, and music critic. Perhaps she got her sympathy for Garibaldi from Italian opera?  

Journalism should be a good source of writers for a series like the Landmark Books, and many of its authors have journalistic backgrounds. Quentin Reynolds (1902-1965) was a well-known newspaperman in his day, and he wrote three of the books in my collection. Custer’s Last Stand (1951) is a novelistic telling of the story rather than straight history, effective and notably sympathetic to Native Americans – “We made hundreds of promises to the Indians and broke almost all of them.”

The Battle of Britain (1953), also by Reynolds, is mostly told from his point of view as a war correspondent – he was allowed to fly as a passenger in British bombers, and was also in London during the 84 days of the Battle of Britain. His first person account of that desperate period is highly effective.

Reynolds was not present for the story of The Wright Brothers: Pioneers of American Aviation (1950), of course. He only takes the story up to the brothers’ first major success. His narrative is apparently mostly fictionalized, and it makes oddly slow reading since it spends a great deal of its time describing how the brothers developed their experimental method.

Another notable journalist in the book series is the author of The American Revolution 1760-1783 (1958), Bruce Bliven, Jr. (1916-2002), a well-regarded writer for the New Yorker and author of many books, including children’s books, noted for their fresh perspectives on historical events. His account of the Revolution is clearly told, and he has strong opinions about the events of the war which he is not shy about expressing.

Abe Lincoln: Log Cabin to White House (1956) by Sterling North (1906-1974), a noted writer of books for children, is notably well written. It does become a little rushed in recounting Lincoln’s first election campaign, has nothing about his famous and dangerous train trip to Washington through Baltimore, and ends with Lincoln’s first inauguration. (Other books in the series, of course, cover later events in the Civil War.)

The Story of the Secret Service (1957) by, Ferdinand Kuhn (1905-1978), a distinguished diplomatic correspondent, is a well reported book, clear and useful in understanding what the Secret Service does – not only its famous duty of protecting the President and other officials, but also its activities against counterfeiters.

Of course many of the books are written by authors chosen simply because they can write well. For example, Napoleon and the Battle of Waterloo (1953), by Frances Winwar (1900-1985), is exceptionally well told, with an excellent final summary:

He showed what a man can accomplish through strength of purpose, courage, and imagination. He destroyed the last remnants of feudalism in Europe and abolished the Inquisition in Spain. He helped to build the modern code of laws. He encouraged art and science and education.

But once he gained power he paired it with his colossal ambition. The two, like fiery steeds driven recklessly for his own glory, plunged him and his empire to destruction. So great was his fall at Waterloo that since then all defeat has been known by its name.

In many cases I feel the Landmark books are as good in their way as more famous books by writers specifically for adults. For example, Leonardo da Vinci is written by Emily Hahn (1905-1997), a prolific writer, especially for the New Yorker, and an ardent feminist who spent years in China – a fascinating character in her own right. (So is the book’s illustrator, Mimi Korach, known for sketching numerous soldiers during World War II in the United States and Europe.)

Hahn is independent minded. Concerning the famous painting Mona Lisa she writes

For my part, I am glad that Leonardo had this work to comfort him when his “Battle of Anghiari” went wrong, but I don’t think “Mona Lisa” is beautiful.

She narrates an extremely well told story, especially since Leonardo didn’t always have an exciting life. Her book, I would say, is as good in its way as Walter Isaacson’s book of the same title (2017).

I realize that I have given the illustrators in the series short shrift. Many of them were notable in their time, for example the illustrator of The Pony Express, Lee J. Ames (1921-2011), well known for his Draw 50 learn-to-draw books; Geronimo’s Nicholas Eggenhofer (1897-1985), a famous specialist in Western illustrations; William Moyers (1916-2010), a well-known Western artist suitably chosen for the story of the Alamo; and Valenti Angelo (1998-1982), a much collected artist in his time, with his icon-like pictures for the book about Joan of Arc. Clayton Knight (1981-1969), who illustrated the air fights of the Battle of Britain, had been a combat flier in World War I!

Perhaps my favorite of all the books in the series I have read is Will Shakespeare and the Globe Theater by Anne Terry White (1896-1980), a prominent non-fiction writer for children. She admits at the outset that “this book does not pretend to be a biography; for the known facts of Shakespeare’s life are too few to warrant such a designation.” Within those limits she tells a vivid story as well as any of the much longer adult biographies of Shakespeare that I have read. 

The illustrator, C. Walter Hodges (1909-2004), spent much of his career writing and illustrating books about theater, ultimately leaving his collection of Elizabethan theater artifacts to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. His drawings in the book are imaginative and convincing.

Looking back, I am filled with gratitude for the opportunity to read (and re-read) the Landmark series of books. They filled my mind with history and, just as importantly, with stories, in an intelligent and comprehensible way. They genuinely are a landmark in the telling of the long narrative that is history.

Why does this particular series of books strike me as so important? I can think of several reasons. One is that they represent a respect for history that I believe we all need. Mark Twain said (or didn’t say), “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” It’s important for people to learn as they grow up that the same themes resonate in life over the years – heroism, determination, respect, ambition, striving, the impulse toward war, the struggle for peace. History prepares us for what the world is like.

The Landmark Books also represent a respect for children and young adults that I feel is lacking in a great deal of what is written for them today, when fantasy in particular receives such an emphasis. Certainly imagination is important, although we certainly can argue about the uses to which it is often put.

But history is also important, and history is happening now, in remarkable ways, just as history was made in the age of the Alamo or of Genghis Kahn. The Landmark Books pay young readers the enormous compliment of telling the stories straight.

The books also introduce their readers to great personalities. The great Greek historian Plutarch (AD 46-120) wrote, “I’m not writing history, but lives,” and for millennia the study of character was a staple of education. In my opinion there is still great value in that approach, particularly since today we don’t need to think just of “great men,” but of “great people,” including women and people of varied nationalities and races.

Additionally, the Landmark Books represent good and sometimes exceptional writing. We have already noted how the editors of the series went for the “best in their fields,” and came up with some remarkable choices. Surely an exposure to literary excellence must be of great value in education.

And, speaking for myself, reading these books has given me both facts and perspectives that have been of great assistance to me, as much as possible, in acting and in playwriting. The great scenic designer Robert Edmond Jones (1887-1954) wrote, “Keep in your souls some images of magnificence,” and those words are good advice for anyone interested in working in theater. They also point out an important contribution of the Landmark Books.   

[If you are a book lover as Kirk clearly is—and ROTters will know that I am, too—you’ll appreciate Kirk’s fondness for these estimable books.  I don’t know if there’s anything in print that approximates the value and quality of the Landmark Books of the 1950s and ’60s, and the original titles are no longer available except in used bookstores and on book websites (Bookfinder.com is one I use to track down titles I want), but if you have children in the preteen years, it might well be worth looking for some of them.  Many libraries also still have copies of some if the titles.

[I haven’t thought about the Landmark Books for decades, unlike Kirk, but his having reminded me of them, I recall being engrossed in some of them, especially the Civil war books like The Monitor and the Merrimack and Lee and Grant at Appomattox.  (As I told Kirk after reading “Landmarks,” I was completely hooked on the coverage of the centennial of the Civil War in the early 1960s.  I read everything I could find and subscribed to Life and Look magazines which did illustrated stories on the war over the five years of the centennial.]