Women Irritated the Painter. Oh Dear

“Woman-Ochre,” after its conservation. It is one of a series of dynamic works by de Kooning that stretched the female figure with slashing brushwork. “Women irritate me sometimes. I painted that irritation in the ‘Woman’ series,” the painter said in 1956. Credit… Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; J. Paul Getty Trust.

John Elderfield, who curated the last big de Kooning survey for the Museum of Modern Art, said that originally the Woman series upset different people in different ways… Some were dismayed by the vulgar treatment of the female form… Elderfield’s take is that the paintings’ power stems in large part from their particular combination of a classic medium and aggressive subject matter. “He was using thick brushes and broad swaths of oil painting in this way in which Venetian painters have for centuries…, traditional techniques to make alarmingly modern paintings, and I think this hybrid quality made people uncomfortable.”

(Jori Finkel, “Sacred or Sexist? After a Brazen Theft, Seeing de Kooning in a New Light,” NYTimes, 5-20-22)

There’s more alarm in the dismay it purportedly caused than there is in de Kooning’s gestural nude itself. Save “vulgar” for the Kardashians.

At the very end, [the conservator] Birkmaier “inpainted” a number of cracks so they are less visible on “Woman-Ochre.” “We did the minimum needed to return the painting to a stage where you can read it properly without noticing damage first.” Credit… Philip Cheung for The New York Times.

The photos detailing the work’s repair provide a nice close-up of pigment, stroke and surface.

One tear in the canvas is located just below the artist’s signature. Here it appears before conservation was complete. Credit… Philip Cheung for The New York Times.

(c) 2022 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

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Pledge of Resistance

I pledge resistance to the flag of the AR-15s of America, and to the mythology for which it stands. Wounded nation under Fox, indefensible, with liberty and justice for some.

In the summer of 2008, the Supreme Court decided District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the court held for the first time that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to gun ownership… Justice Scalia’s majority opinion held that [it] protected an individual right to keep a usable handgun at home… Justice Stevens argued that [its] protections extended only to firearm ownership in conjunction with service in a “well-regulated militia,” in the words of the Second Amendment… Nothing in Heller casts doubt on the permissibility of background check laws… Heller also gives the government at least some leeway to restrict the kinds of firearms that can be purchased… Most of the obstacles to gun regulations are political and policy based, not legal… because of an unduly expansive reading of Heller.

(Kate Shaw and John Bash, “We Clerked for Justices Scalia and Stevens. America Is Getting Heller Wrong,” NYTimes, 5-31-22)

…A violent society ought… to regard its handiwork… I myself would like politicians to view [the Uvalde photographs]: to look — really look — at the shattered face of what was previously a child and to then contemplate the bewildered terror of her last moments on earth. But that would not mean that the jig is up. People, not photographs, create political change….

(Susie Linfield, “Should We Be Forced to See Exactly What an AR-15 Does to a 10-Year-Old?” NYTimes, 3-31-22)

(c) 2022 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

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‘The Small Miracle of Translation’

Daisy Rockwell, who translated “Tomb of Sand,” and Geetanjali Shree, who wrote the novel. Credit… Andrew Fosker.

The novel… is the first in an Indian language to win the International Booker Prize, and the first in Hindi to even secure a nomination… [Translator Daisy Rockwell’s] work on the book showed “the small miracle of translation,” [Frank Wynne, chair of the judges for this year’s prize,] said, borrowing a phrase from the Italian author Italo Calvino.

One of the International Booker judges called “Tomb of Sand” an “extraordinarily exuberant and incredibly playful book.”

The International Booker Prize is awarded every year to the best book translated into English and published in Britain or Ireland. It is separate from the better-known Booker Prize, awarded for novels originally written in English, but it comes with the same prize money and has helped turn some authors into stars.

(Alex Marshall, “Hindi Novel Wins International Booker Prize for the First Time,” NYTimes, 5-26-22)

(c) 2022 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

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Language Is a Weapon, Too. Keep It Sharp

… Any honest accounting shows that more of the blame for these senseless rampages lays at the feet of bought-and-paid-for politicians who have blocked any reasonable gun control measures in order to retain their own hold on power.

(Kara Swisher, “In the Texas Rampage’s Wake, Social Media Can Reform Itself,” NYTimes, 5-26-22)

When we lay fit blame at the feet of the venal, the craven and the vulpine, the blame lies at their feet.

Language standards must stand their ground. They’re all we’ve got at the moment.

(c) 2022 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

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To Whom It Concerns

Hey, you. I’ll love you every kind of always.

(c) 2022 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

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Crisis Antidote: Neighborhood Bookshops

Cecilia Fanti, owner of the Céspedes bookstore, curates the books that appear on her shelves daily. Credit… Magali Druscovich for The New York Times.

The small shops are sprouting where their readers are, in residential areas, keeping alive the rich literary scene that made Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital, one of the cities with the most bookstores per capita in the world.

Readers at the Malatesta bookstore in Parque Chas. Small neighborhood stores became lifelines under pandemic restrictions. Credit… Magali Druscovich for The New York Times.

“Argentina may always be in crisis but there are a lot of readers,” said Cristian De Nápoli, author and owner of Otras Orillas, a small bookstore in the Recoleta neighborhood. “And they aren’t just any readers, but readers who are always in search of what’s new.”

Nurit Kasztelan at her bookstore, Mi Casa, in Villa Crespo. Credit… Magali Druscovich for The New York Times.

(Daniel Politi, “Through a Recession and a Pandemic, the Book Business Is Thriving in Buenos Aires,” NYTimes, 5-26-22)

(c) 2022 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

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The Hardest French Word to Pronounce for a Texan

“Bucked,” (detail), oil on canvas, 24×36 in. (JMN 2020)

L’aurore (the dawn)

Low roar” is the best we can do.

Governor Abbott, born kids have a right to life, too.

(c) 2022 JMN — EthcalDative. All rights reserved

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A Good Outing: Roger Angell (1920-2022)

Roger Angell at his Manhattan home. He was sometimes referred to as baseball’s poet laureate, a title he rejected; he called himself a reporter. Credit… Patrick Andrade for The New York Times.

“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team,” he wrote in his book “Five Seasons” (1977). “What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives.”

The bit about “caring” serves a large dollop of sentiment. The seriousness which the spectatorship invests in professional sport looks deucedly perfervid from outside the circle of fandom.

I warm more to the Angell who said, “The stuff about the connection between baseball and American life, the ‘Field of Dreams’ thing, gives me a pain… I hated that movie.”

And the one who “once referred to Ron Darling as ‘the best right-handed part-Chinese Yale history major among the Mets starters,’” and wrote that Carl Yastrzemski, “like so many great hitters, has oddly protuberant eyes.”

(Dwight Garner, “Roger Angell, Who Wrote About Baseball With Passion, Dies at 101,” NYTimes, 5-20-22)

(c) 2022 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

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Bah-BOOM-BOOM Riff

To Her

One’s home is her castle,
a refuge from hustle
and bustle of office,
the jostle of mobs;
nest in which refuge to seek
from apostles of doom
by the wherry that’s painted on wood
on a wall of the room.

Kitchen to mortar and pestle
the herbs for the grub
that she rustles;
nook where to nestle
in comfort and wrestle with issues,
indite her epistles,
ensconced at the trestle desk
cunningly made from a door,
delight in the whistle
of blackbirds, bristle of brushes,
the thistle-and-mistletoe theme
of the rug on the floor.

(JMN)

(c) 2022 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

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‘Drawings Are the Great Teachers’

Henri Michaux, “Untitled,” a 1954 watercolor in “Take Three” of “Ways of Seeing” at the Drawing Center. Credit… Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris.

… The mark-making basic to drawing is the starting point of so much else: the development of written language, numbers, musical scores.

Robert Rauschenberg, “Untitled,” 1965, in “Take One” and “Take Three” at the Drawing Center. Credit… Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Drawings are the great teachers; they educate the eye and make us more conscious of seeing. They present visual power, relatively unbuffered by materials or size.

Stanley Whitney, “Untitled,” 2020, exuberant grids of scribbled color in crayon and graphite, at the Drawing Center. Credit… Stanley Whitney.

(Roberta Smith, “Drawing, a Cure for the January Blahs,” NYTimes, 1-20-22)

(c) 2022 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

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