Max Beckmann “Self-Portrait With White Cap, 1926,” at the Neue Galerie in New York. His sober and analytical gaze was an artistic project born from disastrous war and political disenchantment. Credit… Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Christie’s Images. [New York Times caption and illustration]
“I have been drawing,” Beckmann wrote to his wife one evening, after a day caring for men who’d survived the trenches. “That protects one from death and danger.”
Though he never served at the front, Beckmann had a nervous breakdown by the end of 1915. The war went on, but Beckmann, now in Frankfurt, began painting biblical scenes with nightmarish directness: a sharp-angled “Descent from the Cross” …
Condemned by the Third Reich as a “degenerate” artist, he spent his later life in the Netherlands and eventually the United States…
Max Beckmann, “Paris Society,” which he began in 1925 and reworked in 1931 and again in 1947. The show reveals how the expressionism of the early 1900s would be distilled into the hard-boiled objectivity of the Weimar years. Credit… Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. [New York Times caption and illustration]
Beckmann did not depict the war head-on. He preferred satire, effrontery, and a certain artistic sacerdotalism…
Max Beckmann, “In the Tram,” a Berlin public transport scene from 1922. The shallow spaces and hard angles Beckmann initially applied to Christian motifs get reapplied to acid views of Weimar society. Credit… Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Drypoint Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. [New York Times caption and illustration]
The more urgent paintings and prints here are those that hold fast to the greatest virtue of German art of the years after World War I: Sachlichkeit, or “objectivity,” a view of society purged of emotion, which saw the substance of things on their surfaces.
Beckmann’s “Trapeze,” 1923, shows acrobats tumbling one over the other in a hopelessly failed circus act. Credit…Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Toledo Museum of Art. [New York Times caption and illustration]
(Jason Farago, “For Max Beckmann, Art’s Ironist, Crisis and Rediscovery,” New York Times, 11-10-23)
“People who don’t speak languages. We have languages coming into our country, nobody that speaks those languages. They’re truly foreign languages. Nobody speaks them.”
A promotion that Mr. Tscherny designed for the Strathmore Paper Company in 1966. Credit… George Tscherny, via SVA Archives. [New York Times caption and illustration]
He recognized from an early age the way that high art and commercial art overlapped, blended together and even nestled inside each other.
I called myself a space salesman when I worked in newspaper advertising. When I was made ad manager, I “dummied” each day’s newspaper, which meant placing all the ads sold for the next edition, after which the editor could count up the column inches left over which he could fill with something to read which wasn’t an advertisement. That was then; the internet is now.
The digital titans have long since harvested our personal details. They can rifle advertising instead of shotgunning it like in the old days. They know what foods make me gassy and which cheek I shave first; they know when your period starts. They can micro-purvey amenable product for every susceptibility, disposition and failing of yours, mine, his, hers and theirs. Never mind that it’s deeply creepy.
But that’s an aside. I came here to admire a man I met in his obituary. George Tscherny (pronounced CHAIR-nee), who died in late 2023, created the logo for the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.
The SVA logo.
It’s a squiggly flower “positioned next to the school’s name, written in what [Tscherny] called the ‘icy perfection’ of the elegantly formal Bodoni typeface…” Bodoni was the default typeface for the ads we laid out at the newspaper, so I registered its mention with affection. (The newspaper taught me to use no more than a couple of typefaces in an ad; to avoid script fonts like the plague; and to convince local merchants that white space was their friend.)
The cover of a 1958 appointment calendar. Credit… George Tscherny, via SVA Archives. [New York Times caption and illustration]
When Tscherny went to work there in 1955, the SVA was still called the Cartoonists and Illustrators School (with no apostrophes!). Why couldn’t it keep that name? “School of Visual Arts” has neither originality nor distinction.
“I see myself as a bridge between commerce and art,” Mr. Tscherny said in an interview for the Art Directors Club in 1997, when the club inducted him into its Hall of Fame. “For just as copy can be literature, design can be art when it reaches certain levels of originality and distinction.”
A poster for the School of Visual Arts in New York, with which Mr. Tscherny was long associated. Credit… George Tscherny, via SVA Archives. [New York Times caption and illustration]
(Clay Risen, “George Tscherny, Whose Graphic Designs Defined an Era, Is Dead at 99,” New York Times, 11-17-23)
Remember me to one who waits there, She once was a server of mine.
Love to Michelle and Phyllis in their respective states; to Raúl in Barcelona at the university bar; to the vendor near the Plaza de Cataluña who put extra cheese on my bocadillo (¿Desea más queso?); to the Parisian bartender who crafted the p’tit café crême which I drank standing every morning; to all the fine staff of the world’s eateries who put the heart in hospitality, the joy in dining out. And to Paul and Art for the music.
André Leon Talley on the Pont Alexandre III in Paris in 2013. Jonathan Becker/Contour, via Getty Images. [New York Times caption and illustration]
Poetry doesn’t need music. All of its music is contained in print on the page. (PJ Harvey)
People try to tell me I’m a poet and I say, No, I have music and rhythm to help me get my point across but real poets do it all just with the language and the lines. (Melissa Etheridge)
The language and the lines: Melissa Etheridge’s phrase sticks with me. I can’t think of an analogy to draw between music and poetry that doesn’t smack of overreach. Music has tone and beat. Poetry has word and line. Absent measured foot-fall, does sheer lineation mark rhythm in poems? Music has a certain existence on the page, but hardly completes its mission there. It wants to vibrate in a soprano’s or trombone’s voice. Poetry is happy to stay in print, to be read silently and aloud.
The lines of Derrick Austin’s eulogy of André Leon Talley are honed to within an inch of formal life (“dear to” goes no further!), yet they make statements celebrating the “lordly lantern”:
Notes Amanda Petrusich, “Feeling the Sting of Time With PJ Harvey,” The New Yorker, 7-23-23. By the Book, “Melissa Etheridge’s ‘First Love’ as a Reader Was Poetry,” New York Times, 2023, but no other date). Maureen Dowd, “Farewell, André the Glorious,” New York Times, 1-22-22). The poem is “André Leon Talley” by Derrick Austin, published in Poetry, September 2023.
Art is something scrappy and strange; it may hiss rather than purr. How it redeems, presumably, is at the heart of the critic’s project, but also the lay consumer’s. That’s me. In doodling my readings of <clears throat> lineated discourse, I’m at pains, inconsistently, to speak of the “verse-object” as I ponder a given text. I must feel the art before calling it a poem. It’s a high-horse presumption. No it’s not. It’s risible. It’s a stab at bootstrapping an expansive sensibility. Yes it is.
It isn’t clear. The non-ordinary object provokes, disquiets, taunts. An opportunity lies in paying it enough attention so it has a chance to impinge, and you come under its sway. Good critics are people who look, read, listen more closely than we chickens who scurry around “liking” stuff.
The phrase in my title is Roberta Smith’s assessment of painter Henry Taylor’s “excursions into three dimensional works.” It’s dismissive but indulgent, because she really likes his painting. “Taylor’s best impulses,” she writes, “are the ones he answers in two dimensions.” I’ve been swayed by his work before. His paintings are odd and engrossing; raunchy and raw; scrappy and strange.
“Untitled” (2020), a double portrait of Barack and Michelle Obama. Credit… Karsten Moran for The New York Times. [New York Times caption and illustration]
… Taylor’s paint handling… tends to be startlingly tough and direct. It proceeds in slabs of untempered color and skirmishes of brushwork, sidestepping traditional notions of finish and beauty… Taylor’s paint also makes his figures very present. As do their staring, often dissimilar eyes.
I relish the reference to staring, “often dissimilar” eyes, but what does Smith mean when she says they “make his figures very present”? Her answer may be in the observation that you “can keep pondering their expressions — and the feelings behind them.” Fair enough. I stumbled upon this uncanny feeling of “presence” recently in contemplating Frans Hals’s smiling lute player.
A painting titled “the [sic] dress, ain’t me” has an excitingly faceless figure — who needs one anyway? As if the painter said to himself, “I’ve done enough,” and washed his brushes.
The body language is superb. With her hands gently clenched, the older woman inspects the dress. The work’s palette of browns, ochers, white and light blue is an exemplar of Taylor’s odd, frugal color.
In “the dress, ain’t me,” 2011, a young girl seems displeased while a grandmother looks on. Credit… Karsten Moran for The New York Times. [New York Times caption and illustration]
(Roberta Smith, “Henry Taylor’s ‘B Side’ Is Full of Grade-A Paintings,” New York Times, 10-17-23)
“What I’ve come to realize after 30 years of research is that the pictorial output of Picasso basically consists of drawings rendered in paint. His entire oeuvre is conceived, anticipated and elaborated through drawing.”
(Anne Baldassari)
Give my my pencil, madre, I must be about my drawing. Those joshing words are mine. The anecdote introducing the article is that baby Picasso’s first word was “piz,” which is the last syllable of “lápiz,” the Spanish word for “pencil.” It’s put forward as part of the great man’s legend that he drew, practically, from the cradle.
An experienced artist introduced me to the exercise of drawing without lifting point from paper. I was charmed at how the practice took me out of my head’s visual waxworks. I detect Picasso doing it in the drawing below, but of course <sigh>, with his storied finesse.
Pablo Picasso’s “Cheval et son dresseur” (1920), showing his sense of whimsy and his finesse with pencil on paper. Credit… Succession Picasso/RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris); Adrien Didierjean. [New York Times caption and illustration]
… Drawing was not just a quick preparatory pursuit for Picasso; it was an end in itself, and at the very core of his art, a discipline that came before all else… Picasso would draw with whatever he laid his hands on: pencil, crayon, charcoal, red chalk. He would cut pieces of wood and dip them in ink, paint, coffee, grease, anything he could find, when he had the urge to draw.
Picasso’s industry and improvisation inspire. Perhaps because they camouflage muddle I’m a fool for brush and pigment, ever spanking myself for not doing more line. A childhood of coloring books, paint-by-number kits and jigsaw puzzles weighs heavily. But this isn’t about me.
Ms. Baldassari said she sees Picasso’s pictures as “drawings rendered in paint.” Here, a 1937 drawing in pencil and crayon, “Tête de faune.” Credit… Succession Picasso/BPK, Berlin, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais; Jens Ziehe. [New York Times caption and illustration]
There’s interesting mention of an “ancient studio technique, which Pablo mastered from childhood,” though promoting it to “the basis of the Cubist revolution” sounds inflationary:
… Young Pablo was in charge of making paper cutouts, painting them in different shades and tones, and pinning them to his father’s canvases so that his father could see what effect the different tones would have on the final work. This… would go on to form the basis of the Cubist revolution.
Picasso’s “Baigneuses (Projet pour un monument)” (1928). Credit… Succession Picasso/RMN-Grand Palais (Musée national Picasso-Paris); Rachel Prat. [New York Times caption and illustration]
Anne Baldassari, the Picasso scholar interviewed for the article, says the following about a painting titled “The Weeping Woman” (not illustrated in the article):
People say [it] represents his lover Dora Maar, who has been mistreated by him. The reality is that at this time, the Spanish Civil War has just broken out, and Dora Maar is the face and representation of pain: a mask that is crying out with hurt. What Picasso is seeking to do is to mourn the dead of the Spanish Civil War.
Consistent with Susan Sontag’s position Against Interpretation, I like to dwell on the painting as an innovative treatment of a woman weeping. The last two drawings featured in the article (shown above) are exciting. Perhaps because I forget they’re by Picasso.
(Farah Nayeri, “Exploring the ‘Epicenter’ of Pablo Picasso in His Drawings,” New York Times, 10-17-23)
… The buccinator assists the muscles of mastication. It aids whistling and smiling, and in neonates it is used to suckle.
(Wikipedia)
It’s also useful for reciting poetry. I met buccinator (BUCKS-i-nater), an ancient horn tooter, in the poem “Sissy Aqueducts”* by Brandon Menke. From its outset the poem has a baroque, recitable stickiness. Notice the powerful apostrophe dangling from an enjambment:
Legionnaires loiter on the Via Appia, Smutty with Visigoth gore & as smug
As frat bros shotgunning Budweisers With glitter entangled in their pubic hairs’
Michelangelian sprawl. […]
Elsewhere a hyphen brazenly finagles a fifth iamb:
[…] while the fanfares Of Respighi mount the skies — the spit
Collects at the corners of the six Bucc- Inators’ lips, like dew falling on hyacinths, […]
It’s hard not to use some such term as tour de force or Roman candle for the sheer play and display of wit, musical phrase and allusion in Menke’s cascading couplets. (They begin with old-school capital letters!) Concerning those as-if hyacinths collecting the dew of bugler spit, they are
Racemes moody by the battered racquet, Or the Rococo, sperm-candle lambency
Of the Lacedaemonian prince, struck Dead by a tennis ball, his god-beloved body
Immaculate on a cascade of marmalade Chiffon. […]
The cultural references take me back to lectures of a charismatic gay French prof in college: Arendt, Respighi, Dallesandro circa Flesh, Callas in Turandot, the school of Rococo, Pasolini. Call it Tiepolonian, which mates with Menke’s term Michelangelian for that sprawl of pubic hairs flecked with glitter.
One effulgency leads to another, but ultimately the poem exalts the aqueducts, and resolves to an exclamation with a soupçon of yearning: The arches are “graffitied with all the vulgarities of Pompeii,” and they “look barely able to stand,”
But the waters they bring are so sweet— They taste of such distant mountains.
Frans Hals’s “The Lute Player” (1623-4). Some of Hals’s most popular paintings depict characters he encountered in the taverns of Haarlem, the Netherlands. Credit… Mathieu Rabeau/RMN-Grand Palais (Louvre). [New York Times caption and illustration]
Hals bet everything on portraiture… It was a profession, not a calling. His job was to disappear into the paint.
(Zachary Fine)
For me Vermeer is glassy and distant where Hals is rudely… reachable. The tossed-off affect of his paintings’ brushiness draws one in. (A museum guard allowed an awed Whistler to feel up a Hals canvas.) Hals’s intention, according to an expert, “was to make the paint itself visible.” (Shades of Van Gogh!)
The key to the sense of spontaneity was not speed, but loose brushwork — paint vigorously daubed onto the canvas with thick, expressive strokes (Nina Siegal)… Even when you’re standing ten feet back from the canvas, you can peel off individual brushstrokes with your eyes. They’re just floating there, like little spears of light. (Zachary Fine)
Hals bet the farm on portraiture, and my own bent for breaking lances on faces adds to my affinity with him. I, too, have had to confront (not with his success) mouth and teeth issues, including the grin-grimace ambiguity. In my humble experience it’s the eyes that must somehow break the tie.
Many of Hals’s portraits, like “Malle Babbe” (c. 1640) were not commissioned: He merely chose to depict interesting people from his surroundings. Credit… Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie. [New York Times caption and illustration]
At the time Hals was working, “No one really painted laughter and joy in paintings,” [said an expert]. “Most other artists shunned it, first because it was kind of against decorum, but also because it’s incredibly difficult.” By showing teeth, he explained, artists run the risk of making the subject appear to grimace, or even cry: It’s a delicate balance of brushwork to get a smile right. (Nina Siegal)
Hals’s paintings stir me in distinctive ways. The frippery encasing “The Laughing Cavalier” is carnivalesque. I want to knock the cocked hat off the corpulent, smirking dandy and addle his curvaceous moustache.
The “Regents of the Old Men’s Alms House” makes me laugh in a good way while savoring the fact that it was painted by a Methuselah for his time whose legend is to have wasted his life in the tavern. Zachary Fine’s description enhances the experience:
When we reach his last piece in the exhibition, “Regents of the Old Men’s Alms House” (1664), Hals has gone full Manet. He’s in his eighties and appears to be freed from whatever demands his sitters might have. One of the almshouse regents looks like a melted puppet. Another could be easily mistaken for a corpse.
This is where Fine’s quotation of Lucian Freud is apt: Hals was “fated to look modern.”
Sources Nina Siegal, “Frans Hals and the Art of Laughter,” New York Times, 10-2-23. Zachary Fine, “The Man Who Changed Portraiture,” newyorker.com, 11-3-2023.
Javier Sánchez knows how to open up a can of tough love and share it with his reader. What he wrote the other day in Las palabras de Javier follows, along with my English translation (kindly authorized by Javier). Can his bracing volley be read as a wry challenge to the facile enabling of middling performance, of pollyanna nostrum peddling, of glib, way-to-go atta-boy-ism — when, in fact, if you are alive and having a day of any description, not starving, raped, bombed, held hostage, cheated, goaded, lied-to or bereft, you’re among the world’s lucky people? Decide for yourself.
En caso de que nadie te haya dicho hoy que eres genial, increíble, inigualable, que vales más de lo que crees y que no tengas miedo de sonreír nunca. Pues que sepas que no te lo van a decir, porque eso no pasa y además es mentira. ¡Ahora ve, y ten un día de mierda, como todo el mundo! Con esa cara que tienes. Hala, pasa por caja y paga 100 euros.
Firmado Dr. Diego Luis Machiatto Doctor en Psicología inversa por la Universidad de Buenos Vientos Argentina
In case no one has told you today that you’re ingenious, incredible, insuperable, that you’re worth more than you think and never to be afraid of smiling, know this: They’re not going to tell you that because such things don’t happen and besides it’s a lie. Now go and have a shitty day like everyone else! With that face of yours. Run along: drop 100 euros in the till on your way out.
Signed, Dr. Diego Luis Machiatto Doctor of Reverse Psychology at the University of Balmy Winds, Argentina
EthicalDative 
George Tscherny (1924-2023): Ad Artist
I called myself a space salesman when I worked in newspaper advertising. When I was made ad manager, I “dummied” each day’s newspaper, which meant placing all the ads sold for the next edition, after which the editor could count up the column inches left over which he could fill with something to read which wasn’t an advertisement. That was then; the internet is now.
The digital titans have long since harvested our personal details. They can rifle advertising instead of shotgunning it like in the old days. They know what foods make me gassy and which cheek I shave first; they know when your period starts. They can micro-purvey amenable product for every susceptibility, disposition and failing of yours, mine, his, hers and theirs. Never mind that it’s deeply creepy.
But that’s an aside. I came here to admire a man I met in his obituary. George Tscherny (pronounced CHAIR-nee), who died in late 2023, created the logo for the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.
It’s a squiggly flower “positioned next to the school’s name, written in what [Tscherny] called the ‘icy perfection’ of the elegantly formal Bodoni typeface…” Bodoni was the default typeface for the ads we laid out at the newspaper, so I registered its mention with affection. (The newspaper taught me to use no more than a couple of typefaces in an ad; to avoid script fonts like the plague; and to convince local merchants that white space was their friend.)
When Tscherny went to work there in 1955, the SVA was still called the Cartoonists and Illustrators School (with no apostrophes!). Why couldn’t it keep that name? “School of Visual Arts” has neither originality nor distinction.
“I see myself as a bridge between commerce and art,” Mr. Tscherny said in an interview for the Art Directors Club in 1997, when the club inducted him into its Hall of Fame. “For just as copy can be literature, design can be art when it reaches certain levels of originality and distinction.”
(Clay Risen, “George Tscherny, Whose Graphic Designs Defined an Era, Is Dead at 99,” New York Times, 11-17-23)
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