Morris Louis

[In my recent report on art in Washington over the year-end holidays, “Art in D.C.” (18 January), I wrote about an exhibit at the Hirshhorn Museum of works by Anne Truitt, a member of the Washington Color School. I mentioned another Washington artist, a contemporary and colorist colleague of Truitt’s, Morris Louis (1912-62), and made a superficial comparison between her art and his. In the late fall of 2007, I went to an exhibit of Morris’s paintings, also at the Hirshhorn, and I’m publishing on ROT an expanded version of that short, two-year-old report.]

On Wednesday, 21 November 2007, my mother and I took the bus down to the National Mall in Washington to see Morris Louis Now: An American Master Revisited at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, organized by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and exhibited earlier at San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art. There were four series in the 28-work Louis show—I think they are all the series he created in the short time he worked in this vein—and three are wonderfully vibrant and brightly colored: Florals (1959–1960), so called because the streams of intense color appear to blossom out from the center; Unfurleds (1960–1961), with streams of opaque color that flow in from the sides over an unpainted surface of plain, white fabric; and Stripes (1961–1962), tightly grouped bands of pure color producing a rainbow effect. His first series, Veils (1954, 1958–1959), does what the name suggests. After staining the canvas with bright colors, he "veiled" them by overstaining the colors with a wash of gray, brown, or black. (The series names designate the different ways in which Louis dripped and poured the paint. The works have individual titles, but they aren't really his—he didn't title his works; his widow, Marcella Louis Brenner, gave them titles, mostly letters from the Greek or Hebrew alphabets.)

Morris Louis, born Morris Louis Bernstein in Baltimore, began studying art in his home city at the early age of 15. He moved to New York in 1936 (where he legally dropped his last name) and stayed there for four years, working for the WPA’s Federal Arts Project. Louis, an Abstract Expressionist, started as a Realist—though he destroyed almost all his early works and what remains are his experimental color works from the '50s and '60s. He returned to Baltimore and began experimenting with the newly-developed acrylic paints, beginning with Magna, a medium made especially for him by friends in the paintmaking business in New York. Louis moved to Washington in 1952 and in that decade, working largely outside the New York art scene (of which he was never fully a part) with other Washington artists like Kenneth Noland and Gene Davis, helped develop what became known as Color Field painting—simultaneously establishing the Washington Color School. (Color Field painting is one of the two branches of Abstract Expressionism in the United States. The other is known as action painting, the style which characterizes the best-known works of Jackson Pollock.) The principal tenet of the colorists was to cover their canvases with unified blocks of bright, pure colors. Like all abstract painters, Color Field painters rejected the representation of identifiable figures. In addition, colorists also eschewed symbolism in art, feeling that even abstract forms distracted viewers from experiencing the pure color. There weren’t supposed to be any subjective, emotional connotations in the hues or forms on the canvas. Red was just a color, not an expression of passion. The painting was just art, nothing more meaningful or symbolic. It was all supposed to come to a pure sensation of enjoyment. The focus on purity of form strongly links Color Field painting with Minimalist art—as we saw in the exhibit of Anne Truitt’s work. Louis, for instance, pared his paintings down to just what he felt was necessary, the bare minimum to create his effects.

Between 1954 and 1962, the year of his death, Louis created about 600 canvases. At the same time, the artist was a perfectionist and harsh self-critic: between 1955 and 1957, he destroyed some 300 of his own paintings as unsatisfactory. Even in the cramped confines of his suburban home in Washington, however, Louis was able to make large paintings; the size of his canvases (the ones at the Hirshhorn were all 8-14 feet on a side) seems to conflict with the fact that he created them on the floor of the tiny dining room of his apartment. Louis was an early experimenter not only with color but with new media like acrylics and unprimed canvases. (There was a companion exhibit following the Louis show that demonstrated the hardships in conserving some experimental paintings, including those like Louis's. It seems that these artists, focused on creating new effects and exploiting new materials, never considered how their works would age.) In 1953, Louis and his fellow D.C. artist Ken Noland (who just died this past 5 January) visited New York where they saw paintings by Pollock and Franz Kline, another Abstract Expressionist. The two Washington painters also paid a call on Helen Frankenthaler at her New York studio where she introduced them to the idea of pouring the pigment to stain unprimed canvases. Louis has said that Frankenthaler, essentially the founder of Color Field painting, created “a bridge between Pollock and what was possible.” The exposure would have a profound effect on Louis’s own work from then on. Within two years, the painter had begun to produce the works that made him famous, the subject of the Hirshhorn’s Morris Louis Now. It was the first such retrospective in the U.S. since 1986.

Conventionally, artists prime their canvases with a base coat of some neutral paint—usually white—to prevent the oil-based pigments from bleeding into the fabric itself; the color stays on the surface of the primer. What Louis began to do, first with oil paint then with acrylics, was "stain" the canvas—allow the color to seep into the untreated fabric—to create thin swatches of intense color. By soaking into the untreated canvas, the streaks and fields of color also gave the impression of depth. (We ran into an acquaintance of Mom's at the exhibit, a docent at the Hirshhorn, and she said the backs of the paintings are as vibrant and striking as the fronts.) The oil paint created a corona as the oil spread beyond the edges of the color medium and was thus hard to control, so Louis switched to the new pigments made with acrylic (principally Magna, the first acrylic medium invented for artists) which he could manipulate more precisely. He didn't brush his pigment onto the canvas, which he also left unstretched so he could twist and fold it in any direction—he poured or dripped the thinned pigment. (In the beginning of this experimental stage, Louis took a leaf from the new book of Jackson Pollock who was just beginning to work on his spatter and drip paintings.) He nearly always let the pigment run off the edge of the canvas; you can see where his work started, but they have no "end." In fact, since Louis worked on his canvases in sections, never seeing the whole thing at once, and he didn’t work on a frame or stretcher, some of his paintings were trimmed and cut after he’d finished them so there might not even have been an “end.” In some cases, the little gold-rimmed frames put around the canvases when they were mounted for display—often the first time Louis would have seen the whole painting—put an artificial perimeter around the art, circumscribing the paintings in a way that the creation hadn’t. (Only one painting in the exhibit was entirely contained within the dimensions of the canvas.) The results are various stripes or washes of translucent color bursting off the canvas in random shapes that invoke flowers or flames or sunbursts.

The Veils are the most worked of the paintings at the Hirshhorn, with the additional covering of the layer of dark stain over the vivid colors underneath. In contrast, the Unfurleds make the most use of unpainted space as Louis left large expanses of the canvas bare, often framing the whiteness with pigment. The effect of these paintings comes as much from the blankness as from the color, bringing to mind the concept of “negative space” of which painter and teacher Hans Hofmann spoke. Playwright Tennessee Williams explains the idea in his pay Will Mr. Merriwether Return From Memphis?:

LOUISE: Did you set something on the table?
NORA: I just set down the upside-down cake on a vacant spot on the table.
LOUISE: There is no such thing as a vacant spot on the table.
NORA: — Ow, but there was a space with nothing on it, I didn’t move anything, not a thing, not an inch!
LOUISE: The spaces on the table are just as important as the articles on the table. Is that over your head?
NORA: I’ve seen your pitcher of ice tea on the table and glasses for it.
LOUISE: The pitcher of ice tea and the glasses for it are part of the composition.
NORA: — The what of the what did you say?
LOUISE: In painting there’s such a things as plastic space.
. . . .
LOUISE: If you’ve ever looked at a painting in your life you must have observed some spaces in the painting that seem to be vacant.
NORA: I’ve looked at paintings in the museum, dear, and I’ve seen vacant spaces between the objects painted.
LOUISE: The vacant spaces are called plastic space.
NORA: — Ow.
LOUISE: The spaces between the objects, as you call them, are important parts of the total composition.
NORA: — Ow?
LOUISE: What would a painting be without spaces between the objects being painted? . . . . Nothing. And so the spaces are what a painter calls plastic.
NORA: Plastic, y’mean, like a plastic bottle or --
LOUISE: No. Plastic like the spaces between the objects in a painting. They give to the painting its composition like the vacant spaces on my table give to the articles on the table its arrangement. . . .
. . . .
LOUISE: The articles on the table, including the spaces between them, make up a composition . . . .

(“Plastic space,” which Williams attributes to Hofmann and further defines in the novella Moise and the World of Reason, was never actually a term used by the art teacher. Williams, who was an amateur painter himself, knew Hofmann in the 1940s and was also friendly with Lee Krasner, a painter who had been a Hofmann student, and her husband, Jackson Pollock, whom she had introduced to Hofmann and who had attended some of the teacher’s lectures.)

Exactly how Louis created his effects is uncertain as no one has ever duplicated the pouring technique he used. While he didn’t use brushes or easels, or even frames, he did occasionally fasten his canvas to a support. Much of the time, however, Louis manipulated his canvas so that the poured acrylic paint would flow across it and stain it in different and unpredictable streams. Because the studio he made out of his dining room was so tiny, he worked on his paintings in sections. The artist was never able to see a whole painting at once, much less more than one canvas at a time. One thing’s pretty certain, however: the results are . . . okay, I know it’s a cliché, but there’s no other adequate word—luminous. By diluting the paint, the color staining the canvas is transluscent rather than opaque. Whether poured in ribbons or broad washes, the colors are rich and intense. As a result, the paintings shine with light and, well, color. They shimmer and vibrate and run off the canvas as if they were still wet. (Several reviewers described a “just-painted” quality of the 50- and 60-year-old works in the exhibit.) While Noland’s colors are confined and finite, hard-edged and controlled—his work formed a bridge to the newly-emerging style of Op Art—Louis’s colors bleed and overlap in unruly and startling combinations. Like other Abstract Expressionists, Louis rejected literal (or literary) meaning for his art. (The artist left little in the way of written interpretation or explanation of his intentions.) It is supposed to be all about the color, the paint, the textures, and the technique. It is raw color and raw form that evokes raw feeling at a visceral level. Baltimore Sun art reviewer Glenn McNatt even insisted of Louis’s art: “It mostly eludes critical analysis. Louis' paintings resist interpretation because no theory seems quite expansive or wise enough to encompass them.” But, as Blake Gopnik of the Washington Post asserted in his review of the exhibit, “But—sorry, guys—humans are such deeply ‘literary’ creatures that we'll find a story and meaning in anything and everything we see. Our entire brain is geared to take a wild mess of ‘abstract’ stimuli and read it as an image of some world outside our head.” And so, I saw flags, flowers, leaves, sunbursts, Technicolor tornadoes, jewels, and all manner of other vibrant and delight-inducing images which Louis apparently never meant for me to see. Tough!

(Gopnik’s column, “Back to Color School: Four Lessons on Morris Louis,” 30 September 2007, an expository treatise rather than strictly a review, was four small essays to "interpret"—admittedly on a very personal basis—different aspects of one painting, 1954’s Breaking Hue, in the exhibit. The writer called this “reading” the painting. The first part focused on the colors and Gopnik's tag-line for this section was: “So much for ‘Breaking Hue’ as a purely abstract patch of red.”)

Louis died on 7 September 1962, just before his fiftieth birthday, from the lung cancer that had been diagnosed just two months earlier. The illness had gone undiagnosed until too late, just as his career was taking off. (In the days when my folks were partners in the Gres Gallery, a highly-regarded showplace near Dupont Circle, Louis used to come around to try to get a show, but the managing partner didn't want the gallery to be known as a Washington artists' gallery, so she kept rejecting him.) Until the end of his life, he’d had few paintings exhibited, but his prodigious work at the end of his life was about to launch him into the ranks of the famous and successful. (Clement Greenberg, the most influential art critic of the middle of the 20th century, was a champion not only of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting, but of Louis himself. It was Greenberg who had introduced Louis and Noland to Helen Frankenthaler.) The work of his last eight years, from the Veils through the Stripes, were not only the basis of Louis’s fame and position in the continuum of American art, but began a shift in technique and approach initiated by other young artists who adapted his staining and pouring practices and the use of the new, synthetic paints because they flowed more freely than oils. Louis’s own work, such as that on exhibit in Morris Louis Now, continues to excite and stimulate strong feelings itself, too.

Thespis

On New Year’s Day, the dog believed to be the oldest in the U.S.—perhaps even the whole world—celebrated his twenty-second birthday. By one formula, that makes him 101 in human years. Uno, a cocker spaniel in Sherman Oaks, California, may even have several more years in him, but he’s already outlived the conventional age-limit for dogs, usually figured at about 16 years.

On 24 December last year, the Times published a column about another “four-legged elder,” Otto, a brown Lab who was just about to turn 11 (human equivalent: 75). All this has put me in mind of my last dog, the successor to Sobaka (see “Sobaka: A Memoir,” 31 July 2009), a little Jack Russell terrier mix I named Thespis. (Thespis is the historical first actor of the Greek drama.) 

Like ’Baka, Thespis was adopted as an adult from a private kennel in New York City; I brought him home one winter afternoon in 1990, about six months after I returned from a year’s teaching upstate and 2½ years after ’Baka died. 

It had taken me a year to decide I was ready to take a new dog into my life, by which time I was in the temporary stint in Oneonta; when I got home, it took me six months to find the right companion. 

(Aside from any personal requirements, my parents in Washington had moved into an apartment building with rules about dog size—and my mom had some ideas of her own. Since I brought my dog with me when I visited, I had to make some effort to meet their criteria, too, if I could.)

At any rate, I did finally settle on this little mutt, the only male of five siblings who’d been rescued from a pit bull breeding and training kennel. (I never confirmed this, but I imagined that these and other small dogs were the targets for attack training or fighting for the pit bulls.) 

I’d been calling the shelters to ask if they had any small dogs for adoption, and I kept hearing the same answer: No one’s bringing in small dogs. Finally, the Humane Society replied that they had this Jack Russell mix, but I didn’t even know what a Jack Russell was at the time. 

Well, I went up to East 59th Street near the Queensboro Bridge and the Manhattan terminal for the Roosevelt Island Tram to check out this prospect, and I found a cute, if funny-looking, brown-and-white dog of about 20 pounds—about five or ten pounds heavier than my parents’ condo permitted. 

I figured my pet wouldn’t be a resident dog, though, so I could fudge the criteria some, especially since the limit was really set so owners could carry their dogs through the building’s lobby, in the passenger elevators, and on the residence floors, and I could easily carry this little fellow.

The Humane Society allows prospective adopters to take the dogs for a walk in the neighborhood, so out we went. The dog’s kennel name was Alpha—Alphie, for short—because he was the first of the five siblings. The others were Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon (called Eppie, the only one of Alpha’s sisters I ever met). 

As we walked east on 59th Street, past a small park—really nothing more than a wide sidewalk with some benches along the abutment for the bridge—Alphie strained at the leash towards a pair of HS volunteers who were exercising other kennel residents—but he paid absolutely no attention to me. I was just an inconvenience: some guy holding him back from running across the street to greet his friends. 

In fact, Alpha ignored me pretty much through the whole walk, but even so, when we got back to the HS shelter, I decided this was a shot I’d better take since I’d been looking for so long with no other prospects—unlike my choice of Sobaka, whom I immediately fell for as soon as I saw him.

The adoption people at HS sketched out his background very briefly—the rescue and all—and showed me that Alphie had a slightly deformed mouth. (His lower jaw was shorter than his upper, which protruded like a severe overbite, but it wasn’t noticeable unless you pulled his lips open to look). 

They told me he was about two years old, but afterwards when I took him for his pre-adoption check-up at the vet clinic downstairs, the medical records indicated he was about three, so there was a discrepancy about Alphie’s actual age. (When I registered my new pet, I put down his birth year as 1988, but I always knew he could be as much as a year older than that.) 

Like most shelters, HS had a guarantee period during which a prospective adopter can bring a pet back if the match doesn’t work out. (I had been ’Baka’s second adopter; the first family to take him couldn’t keep him when he turned out not to be very good with small children.) I wasn’t very confident that this would work out, but I decided to take a chance anyway because I was being so unsuccessful otherwise.

So Alpha and I walked home from 59th and 2nd to 16th and 5th (about 2-2½ miles), and I tried to make friends with him along the way. 

When I had brought ’Baka home the same way, we were great friends by the time we reached Madison Square (which, I recall, is where I settled on his new name), but Alphie wasn’t being very companionable. This choice was looking less and less likely. 

We got home and I introduced my guest to his bowl, his bed, and some toys. These last were mostly old socks I’d knotted into a big ball at the foot and then turned inside out. 

Sobaka had never played with toys, so I didn’t have any around. To my delight, Alpha took to these makeshift playthings avidly. 

Anyway, I let the dog explore the apartment on his own and went to sit in my bedroom and read. 

Soon, the dog came in and pretty unceremoniously climbed up into my lap. I guess he decided that with no other humans around, I was all there was—and that was fine under the circumstances. 

He abandoned his reserve, and that was it for me—I lost all my reservations about my new companion. We were okay—and I renamed him Thespis.

No sooner did Thespis start getting used to his new digs than he began displaying some of his habitual, and frequently very funny, behavior. Some, I decided, was derived from his Jack Russell heritage, like the way he played with his new sock chews. (He turned out to love these so much that I just kept making them as I wore out socks and Thespie chewed up the older ones.) 

He used to throw the sock toys in the air and chase after them. It was so funny to see him get confused when the toy landed on top of a piece of furniture instead of the floor where he expected it. 

He'd run over to where it should have landed and look all around, apparently wondering how the thing could have disappeared that way. Then I'd retrieve the toy for him and he'd be off tossing it up again immediately. 

It was also funny to see him pounce on the thing, grab it in his mouth, and shake it while he growled ferociously. Very macho for a little guy. I found out later that that's exactly how Jack Russells kill their prey when they hunt small rodents—what they were bred for. Turns out Thespis was play-hunting instinctively.

Other conduct was what dog shrinks apparently consider compulsive behavior. He chased his tail, spinning on his own axis three or four times, then he’d stop and look up at me with what looked like a doggy smile as if to say, ‘See what I can do? Aren’t I just a hoot?’ (I’m convinced that dogs know.) I’d always crack up. 

Thesp was also extremely agile—he could almost always evade me if he saw me coming to pick him up, something he didn't like. (I did it anyway!) 

He used to delight in running through the apartment at full speed, dashing around the furniture as if it were a canine obstacle course. He made a circuit around the living room, weaving in and out of the furniture, and then ran into the bedroom, went to the far side of the bed and dove under it, came out the other side, and ran back into the living room, where he started the route over. 

He did maybe two or three laps at a time, and he did the whole routine daily or more when he was an adolescent. I stopped whatever I was doing and just watched in amazement—he never once hit or even jostled a piece of furniture—and just howled with laughter at the whole escapade. 

I also always wondered how he got under the bed that way until one day I happened to be standing at the foot of it when he did his thing. I dropped down instantly and watched him propel himself under the bed. 

I had always pictured him literally sliding on his belly, like a baseball player coming into home plate. It turns out he dropped down into a ground-level crouch and sort of doggy-paddled himself along with his legs—at quite a clip, mind you—as he slid on his tummy. What a sight!

Finally, there was behavior that I suspected was related to his past at the pit bull breeder’s. Thespie had small scars and nicks on his face and ears that suggested some rough treatment, perhaps from the pit bulls or perhaps from the other dogs left to roam the kennel, and I imagined that he hadn’t had an easy time before he was rescued. 

Thespie wasn’t an aggressive dog, so I don’t think he’d have fought back; he probably just protected himself and kept out of harm’s way if he could. 

So when he grabbed mouthfuls of kibble from his bowl in the kitchen and came out into the middle of the living room and dropped it on the floor to eat piece by piece, I just assumed that was the way he’d made sure to have some food for himself without having to fight over the bowl. 

Another possibility was that he just didn’t want to eat alone, so he came where the people were. In either case, when he finished the mouthful he brought out, he’d go get another and repeat the process. Eventually, he just ate at his bowl.

Little by little, Thespis abandoned all these habits, though it took years in some cases. One behavior he never quit, though—at least not until he got really old. 

Thespis had his own definition of how much attention was sufficient. ’Baka had been content to wait quietly, chewing on one of his "bones," until I decided it was time to play. But Thesp was a real attention-whore. 

When he decided he'd been left alone long enough, he came and poked me with his nose. If I was sitting at my desk, he’d stick his nose through the arm support of my chair until I quit working or reading or whatever and petted him. If I didn't respond quickly enough, he’d lay his chin on my knee and look up at me. That always worked! 

And heaven forbid I should stop! Very demanding. (Notwithstanding a sore arm, I never resisted, either.)

Like Sobaka before him, Thespie turned out to be a great pet. Oh, both dogs had their foibles, some of which were even serious. (’Baka, for instance, was violently aggressive with other animals. I could never walk him without a leash and I had to have him specially trained to make his aggression manageable when he was around other dogs.) But for the most part, they were terrific companions. 

They were markedly different from one another in several ways, though, diametrically opposite, in fact. 

Aside from appearances—’Baka was pretty, dark-colored, long- and wavy-haired, somewhat big (35 pounds); Thespie was funny-looking, short- and straight-haired, light-colored, smallish (ultimately 25 pounds: he gained weight after the kennel)—and their difference in attention-seeking needs, their personalities were contrasting. ’Baka was relatively calm (except that problem with other animals); Thespie was hyper (a Jack Russell trait). 

Sobaka didn’t play with toys, though he’d chew on a rawhide or nylon bone for hours; Thespis loved to toss around almost anything he could grasp in his mouth, especially those old, knotted socks. 

’Baka hated riding in cars (and even got carsick enough to need medication) and had to be lifted up into one if we went for a drive; Thespis loved to get into cars, even a stranger’s if he happened to be passing by one when the door opened. 

’Baka wasn't much for playing by himself, but he was great at playing with me—catch, tug-o’-war, wrestling; Thespis wasn't much good at playing with me, though he was terrific at playing on his own. 

Neither dog, however, was especially demonstrative—they weren’t lickers, though Thesp would sometimes lick the back of my hand—but they were both devoted to me. 

And they both hated to be left behind, either at home alone, where they moped near the door until I came back (they used to bark then, too, for a few months after I got them), or outside a store when I couldn’t take them in with me. I never left them on the sidewalk unless I couldn’t avoid it and knew I’d be in and out fast. Otherwise, I’d save that errand for another time.

Until they each got too infirm to walk long distances comfortably, we used to take really long walks all around lower Manhattan—down into SoHo or even TriBeCa, deep into the West or East Village, or over into the far west of Chelsea.

Thespie didn’t like crowds or loud noises (like a metal garage door opening or closing right near him). Still, we’d go off for jaunts on decent days, sometimes walking through the Greenmarket at Union Square (where he’d scuttle under the vendors’ tables whenever I stopped to look over some produce or baked goods), circle back through the park, go off into the East Village—maybe down to Astor Place or over to Tompkins Square—and then meander back home. 

Whenever we turned back toward home, no matter how far away we were or in what part of town, he’d start to pull at his leash. He knew we were on our way back somehow and always reacted this way. 

I had had to find a different kind of attachment for his leash because he never figured out that pulling so hard against the leash was choking him. This contraption, called a Halti, went around his snout and the lead attached under his chin. When he tugged, it would pull his head up and he’d stop yanking so hard. (It’s the same principle as pulling the reins of a horse.) 

Ultimately, he learned not to pull at the leash, but people on the street saw the straps around his nose and thought he was wearing a muzzle and sometimes asked if he bit or was unfriendly. 

In reality, of course, he was the timidest dog on the street, I suspect. Strangers frightened him and he’d try to hide behind me, winding the leash around my legs, to get away from anyone who tried to make friends with him on the sidewalk until he got much older and mellowed a little. 

Eventually he’d let little kids pet him without running around behind me, but only if I crouched down next to him and put my hand on him somewhere to reassure him it was all right. Even so, I could see his eyes widen and feel him tense up, ready to bolt if things didn’t go right in his estimation. 

Right afterwards, of course, I’d give Thespie a good rub somewhere like the top of his head or under his chin, or I’d scratch his belly, and praise him so he’d understand he did a good thing. I don’t know if he really believed me; I suspect he may have been indulging me.

When my father was in a nursing home and Mom and I used to spend all day with him, I brought Thespis because it was too long to leave him. He had no training as a therapy dog, but the staff, who encouraged me to bring him whenever I came, very much welcomed him. 

The other patients made a great fuss over him when I brought him into the ward, even though all he did was hang out. My father used to respond to him, too, before Dad got too sick—but he’d been a dog person all his life and he knew Thespis from before the nursing home. 

When Dad moved to the hospice where he died, we’d spend all day there, too, so Thespie went along as well. He was welcome there, too, and one time when I had to step out of Dad's room—the staff was changing his bed or his pajamas or something—one of the nurses asked if I’d take Thespis over to another patient's room. 

It turned out to be a young man who was dying from AIDS or one of the AIDS-related illnesses, and Thespis got up on his bed and the guy petted him and played with him until the young man got too tired. The patient’s friend made a point of finding me later and thanking me for bringing Thespie. 

I know that Thespis, and Sobaka before him, always used to make me feel better, almost no matter what. On a rough day, even the anticipation of finding Thespis waiting for me would buck me up on the way home from the subway or bus.

About two or three years before his death, Thespie began to deteriorate. I noticed a white patch in his right eye which turned out to be a cataract. It had already blinded him in the one eye and the other eye would soon follow, but the doctor was also worried about glaucoma and put him on medication to reduce the pressure in his eyeballs. In the end, I had to have his eyes destroyed chemically to avoid removing them, but his sight was gone by then. 

Little by little, Thespis started into a physical decline which took away most of the good parts of his life, though I was assured that he wasn’t in pain. He just wasn’t having any fun. 

Except for his eyes and a touch of arthritis, he was in good health so far. I wondered sometimes, however, if I was keeping him around when I shouldn't, but everyone I talked to, including his vets, said that he wasn’t in pain or discomfort, so there was no reason to consider putting him down yet. 

Thespie, of course, didn't know he had no life; he just thought that was the way things were supposed to be. At his age, though, things could change on a dime. Eventually, they did change, of course.

In 2003, Thespis gave me a terrible scare. I woke up the Sunday morning before Memorial Day and found that he'd peed and crapped on the rug he slept on. I thought it was just an "accident"—which he had from time to time anyway (incontinence was beginning to rear its head)—until I saw that he was lying in part of the pee—something he'd never do. (He was also under a table, which wasn’t a habit of his, either.) 

I cleaned up a little and then went to take him right out, and I discovered he couldn't stand up! I also saw that his eyes were all bugged out, way more than at the height of his glaucoma (his eye pressure had returned to nearly normal as a result of the ablation), and then I saw that his head was bobbing around like Stevie Wonder when he sings. 

I got really scared—I thought Thespis' eyes had swollen so they were pressing on his brain. I scooped him up and grabbed a cab to the Animal Medical Center. 

We got there at about 9:45 in the morning and a doctor saw him immediately to assess him, but then we were left alone in the examining room for hours. 

I sat there petting, stroking, and talking to Thespie, fearing the worst—until I noticed that all his symptoms were disappearing. 

By the time the doctor came back, Thespie looked perfectly normal, and he even walked from the exam room. The vet said his eye pressure was normal now, and that the episode may have been caused by a tumor, but he didn't know without an MRI or CAT scan.

The doctor wanted me to see another vet the next day (which was the holiday), but Thespis' regular eye doctor wouldn't be available, and the other clinic would be closed until morning, so I'd have to go on spec and hope the specialist there could see him. I didn't like those options, and I decided to wait till I could speak to our regular ophthalmologist, so I called her and left an urgent message and e-mailed her the details of the episode. 

She called me on Tuesday and said the episode was probably something that sometimes happens with older dogs and wasn't necessarily symptomatic of anything—and that all of what the emergency doctor saw had been normal for Thespis; they weren't changes or deteriorations. 

Some of his symptoms, like the peeing/pooping, may have been the result of fear and my ministrations during the hours we were alone may have been the reason they all subsided. She agreed that he didn't need to see some third doctor and that his next scheduled appointment with her would be fine. 

She really put my mind at ease—I was wondering if I had made a bad decision and was jeopardizing Thespis' life. He was perfectly normal afterwards—for a superannuated puppy, that is—though I still watched him every time he moved (or didn't move) and checked to see that he was breathing when he was asleep.

I kept envisioning Sobaka stumbling around like Lee Marvin's drunken horse in Cat Ballou, and then collapsing. I saw myself rushing him off the AMC at 3 in the morning when I knew he was done, and having him euthanized. 

All this was going through my mind for days until I heard back from Thespis' regular doctor. I knew Thespis was at the end of his life, and that at 15 or 16 he’d really outlived most dogs, but he seemed okay for the most part, and I didn't see the purpose in putting him down just because he was no longer convenient or fun. 

As long as he wasn’t in pain or anything—and his doctor assured me he was okay on that score—I wanted to keep him around for a while longer.

A year or so later, Thespis had gotten really old. Along with his blindness, he'd become a crotchety old man. He wasn’t really incontinent yet, but he no longer had the waiting power he used to, so I had to take him out every four or five hours. 

That meant he couldn't make it through the night without a walk. So I took him out at about 3 or 4 a.m., and when I woke up sometime in the early morning, I took him out again then lay down for another hour or so. 

I’d had to give up going out to eat before theater or spending the whole day in the library because it meant leaving Thespie too long, but I figured I owed him. 

In December 2002, the New York Times published an article on superannuated pets. The article focused on dogs, and the "old" ones it described were 13 to 15. Thespis was already 14 or 15 when that article came out, a sort of canine Methuselah—older than the oldest animal in the article. (Uno, the dog now considered the oldest in the U.S., would have been about Thespie’s age, between 69 and 73 in human terms.)

By the following year, those seizures had become noticeably more frequent, weeks rather than months apart. He wouldn't have many more days left. I planned the usual trip to Washington for the end of 2005.

Then, just after Christmas, I had to say goodbye to Thespis. 

I said I was never sure how old Thespis was, but I know he was my companion for about 15 years. The effects of his advanced age, somewhere between 17 and 18 (81 to 85 for people), finally became too much for me to feel he could go on without discomfort. 

I was more than willing to manage most of the infirmities with which he was plagued—arthritis, blindness, incontinence—but one thing ultimately became too hard to put him through any longer—the seizures. For a long time, they had been brief and seldom, and he seemed to recover from them immediately. 

But starting the week before Christmas 2005, he began having these attacks frequently, one night even several in a row. I thought this might be an aberration, but when he had three attacks and then four during two brief walks and he seemed unable or unwilling to walk after they subsided, I realized he was at the stage where he must be in distress and I couldn't hold on to him into the New Year. 

He died quietly with my mother and me petting him gently as he went to sleep.

Even after many weeks and even months, I still missed him and wondered what I would do with the things he’d left behind. I also still caught myself thinking, ‘I have to take Thespis out now’; then realized that I didn't. He’d often been my principal excuse to get out of the apartment, especially on a lousy day. 

I had to readjust many of the tasks I performed for 15 years as an adjunct to walking him—getting my paper in the morning, dropping letters in the corner box, picking up my mail in the afternoon, stopping by the ATM at night for the week’s cash, and other quotidian chores I always took care of on the way out or back with Thespis. 

Even now, after four years, I sometimes forget to get my mail and my newspaper can sit on my doormat into the afternoon because I don’t go out first thing to walk the dog anymore. The routine that he’d generated over a decade-and-a-half no longer had an anchor and it just dissipated.

Lots of people compare having a dog with having a child. Despite obvious parallels, of course, the situations are very different in many ways. One difference is that a child eventually grows up and becomes independent of the parents. Gradually, the relationship changes. A dog always remains dependent on its human companion. In a way, it was as if I’d had a toddler in my house for 15 years. And then he was gone.

The Case of the Purloined Paper

Two years ago, my friend Kirk Woodward was asked to write an essay on Tennessee Williams and Tony Kushner for a forthcoming book on Williams’s impact on contemporary playwrights. (That essay, “‘All Truth Is a Scandal’: How Tennessee Williams Shaped Tony Kushner's Plays,” is now published in The Influence of Tennessee Williams: Essays on Fifteen American Playwrights [Ed. Philip C. Kolin (McFarland & Co., 2008)].) 

Kirk and I are in frequent e-mail contact, and we chatted about the essay a bit as I asked him how it was coming along and what he was learning about the two writers. In mid-July 2007, Kirk asked me if he could quote from an essay I’d written five years earlier about plastic theater, a Williams concept Kirk thought would “fit wonderfully” into his discussion. 

My essay, “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theatre,” was published online by the Tennessee Williams Annual Review (no. 5 [2002], but I did a Google search to see if there was also a printed copy available for Kirk to use. TWAR had gone online a few years earlier, but I wasn’t sure if they still put out a paper edition. 

The only paper version of my essay of which I knew was the much shorter rendition in my plastic theater article for The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia (Ed. Philip C. Kolin [Greenwood Press, 2004]). That’s when I made a startling discovery.

On 16 July, two days after Kirk asked me about “‘The Sculptural Drama,’” I learned that the essay had apparently been published in some form in Harold Bloom's 2007 edition of his critical book on The Glass Menagerie. 

Besides the fact that I thought an editor had to get permission to republish something like that, and no one asked me (not that I objected, of course), I tried to find the book in any division of the NYPL or at Barnes & Noble, and I couldn't determine if the book even really existed. 

The library seemed to have only older editions of the book, before my essay had even been published, but B&N listed a 2006 edition, except that its table of contents was odd (online, at least) and didn't list the essays included. 

The Library of Congress listed the book, including a table of contents with my essay titled “Richard E. K***** on Sculptural Drama and Plastic Theatre.” Some of the other info on the B&N site was different from what was included in the edition that supposedly had my essay in it. (It had the same ISBN (International Standard Book Number) code, but I didn't know if that was conclusive.) 

I had no idea if the essay version in the book was even the same as the one published in TWAR or if it was an edited version or something. I had no idea how someone could reedit my work without asking me but, then, I didn't know that someone could even republish my essay without telling me, much less getting my permission. The whole thing was odd.

The next day, I went in search of the book to see what was going on, but no one around here (which at that time included the huge Strand Book Store and no less than three B&N’s), had the right edition. I considered ordering the book from B&N, but it was a $45 hardback, so I put that off until I ran out of other options.

The whole thing became confusing. Aside from the obvious--how someone could publish an essay of mine without asking me--there were other oddities. First, there seemed to be two different series in which there was a volume called Tennessee Williams's Glass Menagerie by Harold Bloom (1930-2019)--"Bloom's Guides" and "Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations," both apparently from Chelsea House/Facts on File. 

Second, one or both series reissued the title every several years with different critical essays in it. 

Third, there may (or may not) have been both a 2006 and 2007 edition of the "Bloom's Guides" book, the one that had my essay in it. The B&N website had the 2006 on it, but the table of contents didn't list all the essays, so I didn't know if it was the same as the 2007 that was in the Library of Congress and on OCLC (both of which listed my essay in the contents). 

Neither collection of the NYPL had the correct edition of the book; I hadn't yet searched other local libraries like NYU and I also hadn't looked in Books in Print to see what I could learn from that. I also hadn't tried BookFinder.com to see if I could buy a cheap copy of the book.

I wanted to figure this out one way or the other, but it could take a while!

The next day, my friend Kirk sent me the following message:

I just had an article in Living Pulpit magazine, and the agreement has a few things about republication:

"You grant TLP the right to publish the article in TLP as well as in any foreign language editions or anthology of selections from back issues that we might publish in the future.

"You grant us the right to include your article as part of any electronic and/or computer data base containing TLP articles in which we approve its electronic publication, including that of the American Theological Library Association, and to make the article available for distribution through such.

"It is the policy of TLP to permit reproduction of articles in church bulletins, newsletters, and other such non-commercial formats [underlining theirs]. We usually do not charge the user for such permissions and you are granting us the right to use your work in this manner without requiring us to make any further payment to you.

"Requests for republication by commercial publishers will be directed to you as the author and you are free to make whatever financial arrangements you wish with that publisher. We recognize that you have the right to grant other publishers permission to print your article, without any payment to us, including in collections of your own work. We request that if and when you do so, however, that you acknowledge TLP as the original publisher of this work."

The last paragraph seemed the applicable one to my situation. But I had never signed any such agreement with TWAR (though publication may have automatically subjected me to such terms). 

I noticed that the earlier provisions, which granted TLP rights to reprint Kirk’s essay, almost all pertain to church-controlled publications (except the very last provision, the underlined one, which is slightly ambiguous). 

Except that TWAR is published by a college, it had no similar affiliation or sister publications that might have had a claim on material published in the journal. 

(When Dr. Kolin, the co-editor of Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present, had republished my interview with playwright Karen Malpede in Speaking on Stage, a collection of past interviews from SAD, he asked my permission and even offered me the opportunity to reedit/expand it. I got to update the intro and to reinsert material I had had to cut from the SAD version.)

Next, I gathered more info, which only confused the matter further: I couldn't tell if the 2006 edition and the 2007 edition of the book with my essay in it were actually the same book. (Some references listed the copyright date, some the release date--which aren't the same when the publication happens at the end of the year as this one did.) 

The ISBN code was the same, but I didn't really know what that indicated. I assumed that each edition of a book (not printing, but new edition) got a new number, which would mean that books with the same ISBN code all had the same content--but I didn't know if that was true.

I also confirmed that though the two different books had the same publisher, Chelsea House, they were parts of different series. The one with my essay was part of "Bloom's Guides" (a blue or blue-and-buff cover, depending on the title); the other series was "Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations" (a cover of various colors, depending on the subject, with a black-and-white photo). 

Since none of the sites, like B&N or Amazon.com, that had "Bloom's Guides" provided a complete table of contents or list of essays included, I couldn't compare the "2006" Bloom’s Guide with the "2007" publication in the Library of Congress catalogue. (I wasn’t sure, of course, but it looked as if the brief table of contents on the B&N site may have been for the wrong book.) 

The only local library I could find that had the "right" book was Columbia, which is located mighty inconveniently for me.

Curiouser and curiouser.

(This is all beginning to sound like a postmodernist book I read back in the late ’80s: If on a winter's night a traveler, a 1979 novel by the Italian writer Italo Calvino [1923-85].  Calvino created a novel that’s actually the beginnings of ten separate books by ten different fictional authors.  He lays a trail of incomplete works with false titles attributed to the wrong authors. 

(As soon as the Reader thinks he’s found the continuation of his last interrupted story, he not only discovers that it’s a different book from the one he’s left off, but that the one he was reading isn’t the one he thought he was reading at all.  That was virtually the world into which I’d gotten.)

On 22 July, about a week after I learned of the unknown publication, I wrote to Philip Kolin, the co-editor of SAD who had edited the Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia (where the plastic theater essay had originated as the article I mentioned earlier) and who had much more experience in the area of publication than I did. 

He was also associated with TWAR as the review editor. (In 2004, I wrote a review of some Tennessee Williams one-acts in Washington for him.) I recounted the saga as it stood at that point, and asked his opinion. His only advice was to contact the editor of TWAR directly, which I did. A week later, I wrote to Robert Bray at TWAR:

I have a dilemma you might be able to help me with--you have much more experience in this area than I do. You recall, I imagine, my essay on TW's plastic theater that was published on line at TWAR. That was 5 years ago now. I have just learned that the essay has been republished in the last Bloom's Guide to TW's Glass Menagerie. Now, I haven't been able to find the book so far, but both OCLC and the Library of Congress list it and a table of contents that includes my name and a version of the essay's title. The book was published in 2006 (the end of the year, apparently, so sometimes it's listed as a 2006 publication and sometimes 2007), so it's been out there for half a year or more. But my problem is--no one ever asked me for permission to republish the essay or even told me it was being reprinted. Is that legal? It's certainly not ethical, is it? I wouldn't have objected of course, but I should have been informed at least, shouldn't I? (No bookstore around here has the right book and edition--there's a different series by Bloom with a 2007 volume with the same title but different essays--and the only library in NYC that has the book is Columbia and I haven't gotten up there since I learned about the book, so since I haven't seen the book, I don't even know if the essay's been tampered with.) Does any of this seem strange to you? It does to me, but I don't have that much stuff out there, so maybe it's common practice.

Since TWAR is the only venue in which my essay, “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theatre,” ever appeared, did anyone contact you about reusing it? Even if no one contacted me, someone should have contacted someone for the right to republish--at least I'd have thought so.

I have no idea what some editor might have done with the essay, but at least my name's on it. (Or, maybe I shouldn't presume that's a good thing. Maybe it's a bowdlerized version!)

I'd appreciate your take on this if you have one.

Dr. Bray sent this response the next day:

You raise a question that I must admit I've never thought of; that is, would a contributor to the TWAR object to having his/her essay reprinted. The Bloom people did contact me about your essay, as well as another (I think it was Gilbert Debusscher's). I gave my consent to the reprint.

As far as the legal side, once you contribute an essay to the journal (or any journal, for that matter), it becomes the copyright of the journal, so you basically relinquish rights to it.

As far as your other point, the "ethical" side, it now occurs to me that I should probably contact the original author to see if there is an objection to having it reprinted. I haven't done so before but will do so from now on. Perhaps this is an obvious oversight on my part, but I must admit I just hadn't given it any thought.

Hope this answers your question. On the bright side, the essay assures you that more people will be edified by and appreciative of your good work.

When I wrote Dr. Bray back, I explained that he seemed to have misunderstood me. I didn't object to the republication; in fact, I was quite flattered. My concern was only that no one informed me, much less asked me, about the reuse of the essay. I was glad to hear that the Bloom folks contacted Dr. Bray; at least they didn't just abscond with the essay!

I certainly would gladly have assented to the republication. I might have asked if it were possible to correct errors or update information (as I did when Dr. Kolin had rerun the Malpede interview), but I couldn't see any reason I would have objected. But it was a little like having illegitimate children I didn't know I had running around out there--it was a little disconcerting to find, almost a year later, that the essay had been republished. 

In this case, it's especially peculiar since I still hadn't seen the reprint. If nothing else, I'd like to include it in my résumé and list of published works--just in case I try to get a legitimate job somewhere sometime. (You never know!)

Well, the mystery was somewhat solved. Dr. Bray seemed a little miffed that I inquired--apparently no one ever questioned his giving authority to republish work from TWAR. According to Dr. Bray, once my essay has been published in TWAR, I had tacitly given up all rights to it. 

Even if that was legally correct, it still seemed to me that courtesy and ethics would have dictated that the journal editor at least inform the authors when he's permitting reuse of their work.

Finally, on 3 October, I stopped in at HSSL, the main NYPL facility on 42nd Street (the one with the lions out front). I had requested a copy of the “Bloom’s Guide” on Menagerie that had my essay in it and it had just arrived--assuming I got the right one. I was curious to see if the editors of the book had done anything to the essay without my permission. (Yes, I know: I had no rights once TWAR ran it.).

Well, I did get the right book, and what Bloom had done was excise the whole middle of the paper, the entire discussion of the derivation of the concept and term "plastic theater." The essay was cut from page 3 to page 11 of the typescript! That's eight pages of a 13-page paper. 

Bloom did no internal editing, it seemed, so painter Hans Hofmann’s term "push-pull" was left in, but the explanation and source of it was missing. It was part of Hofmann’s definition of "plasticity"--and the source reference was still in the biblio, which wasn't edited--but no one reading this version of the essay would ever have known that unless they had read Hofmann's writings on art--or my original complete essay. 

The reference to Williams’s novella Moise or the World of Reason, where the playwright invokes the name Hans Hofmann, was also cut, so the mention of the painter that led me to his writings was missing, too. 

Also missing was the reference to Williams's journal entry on "sculptural drama" which was part of my hypothesis on the evolution of the concept, but which also gave the essay its title. (Bloom didn't use the original title exactly, but he did include "sculptural drama" in his title; also, the original title was listed in the acknowledgments section of the book.) 

In my (admittedly biased) opinion, Bloom gutted the essay. (Mine wasn’t the only contribution that was edited--the edits were marked with ellipses--but I have no idea how much had been omitted from any of the others.)

By the way, in the section listing the contributors, Bloom said they made an effort to contact the writers. I'm not that hard to find--certainly Dr. Bray knew how to reach me--but I never heard from anyone. They seem to have gotten permission from TWAR, listed as the copyright holder in the acknowledgments, and gone no further. That may be legal, but I don’t think it’s ethical--and it’s certainly discourteous.

I don't know whether to be miffed or to be pleased to have been selected. What's that joke about the ox who's called a bull? Something like, "I thank you for the honor, but I'd rather have restored to me what was mine"? I think that's how I feel!

I had thought about writing the Bloom people, but I doubted, even if a letter would have reached anyone with real responsibility (a dubious assumption to start with), they'd do anything, either about the existing book or about their practices for the future. 

It would have been a fruitless effort; I'd even have been surprised if anyone acknowledged it at all. So I decided not to write. I thought of the joke about how many Jewish mothers it takes to change a light bulb: None . . . I'll just sit here alone in the dark and suffer. Well, I was like that: I sat home and stewed on my own.

As it happens, while I was searching for the availability of my “‘The Sculptural Drama’” (for Kirk’s use as a citation), I also came across a reference to it somewhere else. I didn't know what it was exactly until I had a look the day I was at the library, but I'm quoted in a reference book that's a lot like The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia. 

The Critical Companion to Tennessee Williams (Ed. Greta Heintzelman and Alycia Smith-Howard [Facts On File, 2005]) has an entry on plastic theater, too, and the authors quote me and list my essay as "Further Reading." How 'bout that! I'm (not really) famous.

Eisenstein’s Theory of Attractions

Almost anyone who’s been to a movie in the past 85 years has seen a montage sequence, and it’s likely most of us know what one is even if we can’t actually define it. It’s such a common movie technique, one of the first developed in film, that it almost seems an attribute of cinema itself rather than a contrived technique that was once an innovation. But it was. Film pioneers such as Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970), Dziga Vertov (1896-1954), and Vsevolod Pudovkin (1893-1953) introduced the use in early Soviet cinema and, of course, the great filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) made it almost a personal signature in his films in the early ‘20s. The word ‘montage’ derives from the French verb monter, ‘to set up,’ ‘to assemble,’ or ‘to organize.’ Simplistically, a film montage is a succession of pictures, often of unconnected moments, edited together into a rapid sequence. It can have many uses in a movie, such as indicating the passage of time or speeding through distances. In the hands of a master filmmaker, of course, it can accomplish much more as well. Eisenstein and his colleagues in Soviet film standardized the use of montage, a technique employed masterfully by others like Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Stanley Kubrick. Before montage was a filmmaking tactic, however, it was the foundation of an innovative stage technique. Eisenstein, mostly known today for his film work, was first a stage director and he developed a practice he eventually called “the montage of attractions.” Eisenstein described this idea, sometimes also called the “theory of attraction assembly,” in his essay “The Montage of Attractions” which first appeared in LEF (Left Front of the Arts [Moscow] 3 [1923]: 70-75; the essay’s also reprinted in many books, including Eisenstein’s own Film Sense). The concept was named and defined by the renowned filmmaker in 1923, but Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1942), the innovative Russian stage director who’d been Eisenstein’s teacher and mentor, was clearly employing the technique as early as 1918 (notably in Mystery-Bouffe, 1919 and 1921) and even before. As a stage technique, montage of attractions has appeared in the work of contemporary companies like the Living Theatre, the Performance Group, and the Wooster Group, among others; one contemporary director used the term to mean “one thing after another . . . like a sideshow.” In fact, Eisenstein found the models for the technique not in film but in music hall and circus, two forms to which Meyerhold had also been drawn. Eisenstein coined a term, the ‘circusization’ of theater, which he applied to his 1923 production of Aleksandr Ostrovsky’s Enough Simplicity in Every Wise Man by staging an actual circus performance, a montage of attractions comprised of tightrope walkers, jugglers, acrobats, clowns, music hall comedy, and other circus acts. Eisenstein, having observed how popular entertainments at fairs and circuses held the attention of the spectators, defined an “attraction” as “any aggressive aspect of the theatre; that is, any element of it which subjects the spectator to a sensual or psychological impact.” ‘Attraction’ is the same word, not coincidentally, that we use to designate the elements of a sideshow, vaudeville, or a circus; in fact, the Russian noun attraktsion also means ‘sideshow.’ (One of Meyerhold’s seminal essays, published in 1913, was called “The Fairground Booth” or “Balagan” in Russian.) The OED defines an attraction in this sense as a “thing or feature which draws people by appealing to their desires, tastes, etc.; esp. any interesting or amusing exhibition which ‘draws’ crowds.” But it also offers, “The action of drawing forth interest, affection, or sympathy,” and, “The action of causing men or animals to come to one by influencing their appetites or desires.” An attraction can be anything, in other words, that “attracts” the audience’s interest, including gimmicks and tricks--as long as they’re “calculated to produce . . . certain emotional shocks” in the spectator. (Eisenstein denied that gimimicks could be attractions, but they clearly can be if used for a purpose.) Each attraction is discrete and complete in itself, selected and presented to have the strongest effect on the spectator, and doesn’t depend on any of the others either for its meaning or for its presence on the stage. As Meyerhold explained it: I have come to regard the mise en scène not as something which works directly on the spectator but rather as a series of ‘passes’, each intended to evoke some association or other in the spectator . . . . Your imagination is activated, your fantasy stimulated, and a whole chorus of associations is set off. A multitude of accumulated associations gives birth to new worlds . . . . You can no longer distinguish between what the director is responsible for and what is inspired by the associations which have invaded your imagination. A new world is created, quite separate from the fragments of life from which the [piece] is composed. The attractions are then arranged or “assembled” to guide the audience to “the ultimate ideological conclusion.” The spectators then connect the dots, so to speak, filling in the lacunæ for themselves, generating an understanding they hadn’t known before. The “dots” are the attractions and their arrangement’s the “montage of attractions.” The purpose, said Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)--who knew Eisenstein, was attracted to film technique, and employed his own form of montage of attractions, notably in Man Is Man and Galileo--is to guide the spectator “to draw abstract conclusions.” A well-known example of how Eisenstein’s theory works states that by showing someone first a fragment of a photograph of a woman in black and then a second fragment showing a grave, the viewer, supplying the missing continuity, will conflate the two discrete images into the representation of a widow. The arrangement of the attractions isn’t a logical or chronological sequence, pursuing an Aristotelian or Stanislavskian causality that’s “self-contained and all-determining,” but a theatrical one. It’s not illogical, but alogical, “with a view to establishing a certain final thematic effect” which is more than the simple sum of the fragments. Eisenstein drew an analogy with the way Chinese ideograms combine to form meanings different from the separate symbols: The sign for ‘dog’ plus the sign for ‘mouth,’ for example, combine not to mean ‘dog’s mouth’ but ‘bark.’ In Brecht’s 1930 chart comparing “dramatic” and “epic” theater, the playwright included “each scene for itself” in contrast to “one scene makes another”; he further explained, “The episodes must not succeed one another indistinguishably but must give us a chance to interpose our judgment. . . . The parts of the story have to be carefully set off one against another by giving each its own structure as a play within the play.” Most of Brecht’s plays are constructed from various elements such as action, songs, music, slides, captions, and stylized acting which create their impact through juxtaposition and contrast. The scenes are often disparate and succeed one another rapidly, essentially presenting a journey of experience episode by episode. In Brecht’s dramaturgy, this structure forces the spectator to draw comparisons and consider the inconsistencies between the images presented on stage and not become immersed in the fictional narrative without thinking about it. The selection of the attractions, however, isn’t haphazard or serendipitous, as Eisenstein instructed: each element is carefully and purposefully chosen from all the possibilities to generate the desired response. How each attraction rubs against the ones around it, creating tension or conflict, determines the selection and juxtaposition and how they effect the audience, the same way Vincent van Gogh believed that one painting, say a blue one, is more resonant when hung next to another in a complementary color, such as orange. Describing the effect of two sequential scenes in his production of The Wiseman (as Eisenstein’s adaptation of Ostrovsky’s play was known), the innovative director observed: “The surprising intersection of the two dialogues sharpen the characters and the play, quicken the tempo, and multiply the comic possibilities.” While Eisenstein, also likening the theory to the relationship of musical overtones to melody, intended montage to generate an emotional, psychological, or ideological response in his audience, Brecht applied the technique to engender an intellectual reaction. Since the juxtaposition of multifarious attractions, drawn from the many resources of theater, art, and technology, necessarily means that the production will break away from the linear continuity of conventional storytelling, as it did in Meyerhold’s Mystery-Bouffe or D.E. (1924), it permits, even forces, the spectator to take time to analyze and examine what she’s experiencing. In Brecht’s view, causal inevitability makes the audience complacent; an audience cannot be passive when confronted with a non-linear theatrical structure, but must actively participate to connect the dots, to become critical observers. For Meyerhold and Eisenstein, then, montage was a way to a theater removed from what Eisenstein called the “illusory imitativeness” and “representationality” of Stanislavskian Naturalism. “In the theatre the spectator’s imagination is able to supply that which is left unsaid,” Meyerhold declared. “The stylized theatre produces a play in such a way that the spectator is compelled to employ his imagination creatively in order to fill in those details suggested by the stage action.” Eisenstein believed that the strength of montage was that “it includes in the creative process the emotions and mind of the spectator”: In fact, every spectator, in correspondence with his individuality, and in his own way and out of his own experience--out of the womb of his fantasy, out of the warp and weft of his associations, all conditioned by the premises if his character, habits and social appurtenances, creates an image in accordance with the representational guidance suggested by the author leading him to understanding and experience of the author’s theme. On the other hand, while some spectators found the new, non-linear presentationalism exciting and stimulating, others were confused and complained about the excess of abstractions and symbols. The fragmentation of montage, if the director isn’t careful about carrying the audience along with the images, can lose them in a welter of unconnected moments. The attractions may not be linked causally in Eisenstein’s technique, but if they aren’t connected thematically in some way, the dots will never coalesce in the spectators’ imaginations. Just as Jerzy Grotowski (1933-99) wanted to pare away all of what he saw as unnecessary spectacle in theater, Brecht wanted to strip theater down to its intellectual minimum--putting on stage only what was necessary to show his audience what he wanted them to understand. For Brecht, theater wasn’t a medium to present a series of events, but to focus the audience’s attention on the truths beneath the facts portrayed and lead them into an intellectual debate the conclusion of which the spectators themselves would determine. Narrative connectives, psychological justifications, character development were all superfluous and would interfere with the spectator’s ability to judge critically. The effect wasn’t intended to be literary or dramatic but theatrical and thematic. By following Eisenstein’s lead, plays like Mystery-Bouffe and Mother Courage keep the distractions to a minimum and give the audience only what the author and director think is necessary for them to make the pertinent connections. Meyerhold, however, suspended both the causality and the temporality of individual scenes, which he equated with Eisenstein’s attractions and treated as discrete episodes, so that the actions and objects would no longer seem familiar. In the filmmaker’s application, since the attractions are in themselves unconnected to one another, the spectators’ preconceptions are constantly shaken by the juxtapositions. This tactic, like Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, allows the audience to observe and comment on the situation. The individual episodes generate an impression of continuity in the minds of the spectators because they’re held together by the director’s “concept.” One result is that by showing two concrete (that is, visible) images, a third, abstract (invisible) one is revealed. “Two pieces of any kind, placed together, inevitably combine into a new concept, a new quality, arising out of that juxtaposition,” said Eisenstein, who described this process thus: The woman [and] the mourning robe she is wearing . . . both are objectively representable. But ‘a widow,’ arising from a juxtaposition of the two representations, is objectively unrepresentable--a new idea, a new conception, a new image. (Playwright Sergei Tretyakov [1892-1939], on several of whose plays Meyerhold had worked, introduced Brecht to both Meyerhold’s work and the concept of priyom ostranneniya [literally, ‘device’ or ‘method for making strange’], a phrase coined in 1914 by Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky [1893-1984] which Brecht rendered in German as Verfremdungseffekt.) For Eisenstein, the realization of the theory isn’t just the juxtaposition of disparate elements, but the clash of conflicting images that’s the most effective kind of montage. Indeed, he called his technique “collision montage,” which Meyerhold described as “the conflict of episodes, each one conflicting with the next.” The effect is generated by a clash of contrasting components in a kind of thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic. Brecht also disparaged the causal through-line of Stanislavskian theory, both in his dramaturgy and in the work of his actors, whom he admonished not to try to connect the separate moments made up of the actions enacted on the stage. In Brecht’s theory, the spaces between the moments are as meaningful as the moments themselves. The connections, Brecht insisted, become visible both despite and because of the interstices. This notion is remarkably similar to “plastic space,” an art concept Tennessee Williams (1911-83)--who absorbed several Brechtian influences both from the German writer’s own theories and through Brecht’s early mentor, Erwin Piscator (1893-1966), with whom the young American had studied and worked--ascribed to painter and teacher Hans Hofmann (1880-1966). Williams, who had an affinity for film himself, explained that the empty space in an arrangement of objects is as significant to the total assemblage as the space in which there are objects. Though Hofmann never actually used the term “plastic space,” he did describe “positive” and “negative” space in terms of the presence or absence of “visible matter” and defined “plasticity” as the communication of a three-dimensional experience in the two-dimensional medium of a painting. Plasticity derives from the tension between the forces and counter-forces created by the separate elements of the painting--the juxtaposition of negative space and positive space, for one. Like the conflict of images in Eisenstein’s montage of attractions, Hofmann’s plasticity generates a response in the spectator that’s more than just the depiction of reality. (For more on Williams’s ideas on plastic space and plastic theater, see my essay “’The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theatre” [Tennessee Williams Annual Review no. 5 (2002), http://www.tennesseewilliamsstudies.org/archives/2002/3kramer.htm].) Since Eisenstein’s concept owes its inception in part to Constructivism, the director’s emphasis, too, was to reduce theater to its fundamental productive essentials--the parallel of Grotowski’s search--as if it were a machine which the engineer (for which profession Eisenstein had studied) designed with only the parts necessary for producing the desired product. Toward this end, Eisenstein kept the barriers between the spectators and the performers minimal. Like circus, too, such performances are “more real” (as one circus artist phrased his comparison of circus and traditional theater): Eisenstein, himself, observed that the application of the theory of attractions results in a performance of “immediate reality.” As Meyerhold wrote, both he and his former student “were looking for a new type of stage, free from anything which might get in the actor’s way.” Indeed, all of the artists who practiced some version of the montage of attractions--Meyerhold, Eisenstein, Piscator, Brecht, even Williams--were seeking a new theatrical form, and the relationship between the spectator and the performers is key. Theater audiences start out as a mass of individuals and the traditional Aristotelian theater lulls the individuals into a sense of privacy and isolation--they’re alone in the dark, separate not only from the actors on the stage but from everyone else around them, not to mention everyone outside the theater. The activist theater artists, wanting their audiences to respond directly, need to resist this separateness and create a sense of commonality, a community among the spectators. From an artistic perspective, Meyerhold was, like Eisenstein, earnestly searching not only for a new stage but for a new theatrical form--an echo, perhaps not coincidentally, of Konstantine Treplyev in Chekhov’s The Seagull, the part Meyerhold played in the Moscow Art Theater’s 1898 production: “What we need is a new kind of theatre. We need new forms.” This urge parallels the call for a “new plastic theater” by Tennessee Williams (in his “Production Notes” to the text of The Glass Menagerie), who may be seen to have used his own adaptation of Eisenstein’s theory of attractions in plays like Glass Menagerie (which, in the playwright’s original concept--not realized in the Broadway première--is startlingly Brechtian) and, especially, Camino Real--performances that came together from elements which weren’t only causally unlinked, but structurally unconnected. There’s an apparent correlation between plastic theater, which draws on all the stage arts to generate its theatrical--as opposed to simply literary--effect, and Hofmann’s idea of plasticity. In a plastic theater, the tension among the disparate attractions creates the plasticity of the performance and, just as the viewer of a plastic painting has a three-dimensional experience from a two-dimensional work of art, the audience of a plastic theatre work has a theatrical experience beyond the mere image of actual life. Meyerhold also writes of plasticity, by which he means not just three-dimensional settings, but three-dimensional acting (“plastic movement”); Williams was, in a sense, going to the next level, using plasticity to create multi-dimensional plays and productions. Meyerhold made theater out of disparate elements as opposed to “illustrating” dramatic literature. Productions like D.E. and The Inspector General (1926) were composed of scenes which each had its own mood, tempo, atmosphere, rhythm, mode, plot, development, and climax. In D.E., for instance, Meyerhold included elements of Kabuki, Expressionism, music hall, military drill, Chaplinesque pantomime, biomechanics, wild dancing, jazz, and calisthenics. Eisenstein, in fact, made the point that a dynamic work of art, as opposed to a “lifeless” one, is not fixed or ready-made, but arises--is born. The image planned by author, director and actor is concretized by them in separate representational elements, and is assembled--again and finally--in the spectator’s perception. This is actually the final aim of every artist’s creative endeavor. The multi-dimensionality of a montage production owes much to the pioneering work of Piscator. Unlike Grotowski, Piscator sought to use all the technological and staging arts he could apply to create the images and effects he wanted for his audience. Piscator’s impact on Brecht and his own development of political theater, along with Brecht and Meyerhold, in the early decades of the 20th century mean that his ideas would filter down half a century later through the work of groups like the Living Theatre, whose co-founder, Judith Malina, had been a student of Piscator. In his “Total Theatre,” Piscator made extensive use, for instance, of film clips, projections, loudspeakers, and other technology available--even innovative--in his day for his political spectacles. These, too, are attractions in the Eisensteinian sense. Let the filmmaker sum it all up: 

And now we can say that it is precisely the montage principle, as distinguished from that of representation, which obliges spectators themselves to create and the montage principle, by this means, achieve that great power of inner creative excitement in the spectator which distinguishes an emotionally exciting work from one that stops without going further than giving information or recording events.