Pub Apocalypse?

Posted on January 4, 2021 by JMN
Credit… Warwick Johnson Cadwell.

A good pub feels a bit like a living room: a familiar, informal space where you can have a pint with friends and strangers… Enjoying a drink in a room that has been used for the same purpose for hundreds of years is an anchoring experience you are unlikely to get from your sofa.

(Eleanor Salter, “Will Britain’s Pubs Survive the Coronavirus?” NYTimes, 5-15-20)

I give high marks to this article’s illustration for its clever spookiness and skillful draughtsmanship.

The encomium to the British pub makes me realize how alcohol-centric my own relationship with booze is. Wherever I find myself, a bottle alone endears that spot to me; anchors me there; lends beauty to the moment; wraps me in fuzzy contentment.

My sofa is the ideal spot to “have a pint.” If I’m caught outside the house, any perch that’s friend-and-stranger-free will do for a swig. The alcohol completes it — a boosting and buffering companionable consolation.

Mine is not a commended orientation, I grant, which is why I corked the bottle.

(c) 2020 JMN

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‘The Flag Is Also Waving You’

Posted on January 3, 2021 by JMN
The 1901 flag of Maine. Credit… David B. Martucci.

Someone who studies flags is a “vexillologist.” There’s a North American Vexillological Association for persons devoted to this study. In the 18th and 19th centuries, a flag was not so much a symbol as a practical way to tell from a distance whether a ship or an army was friend or foe, according to a past president of the association.

The contemporary Maine flag. Credit… Visions of America/Corbis, via Getty Images.

What I take away from Jennifer Finney Boylan’s piece about Maine’s flag, besides a happy meeting with “vexillology,” is how flags can become bully props pressed into the service of hem-kissing and disuniting narratives.

Words can evolve similarly, especially under the stress of feral politics. The advent of “homeland” rather than “national” security took our civic discourse in the direction of Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism, or the “USA PATRIOT Act.” The labels have a discomfiting whiff to the “fatherland” to them.

Boylan’s parting comment is food for thought: “When you wave the flag, the flag is also waving you.”

(Jennifer Finney Boylan, “Two Flags Over Maine (and America),” NYTimes, 6-10-20)

(c) 2020 JMN)

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Alice Trumbull Mason: ‘Adamantine’

Posted on January 2, 2021 by JMN
“Spring” (1931), a joyful painting from “Alice Trumbull Mason: A Pioneer of Abstraction.” Credit… Alice Trumbull Mason/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Washburn Gallery.

In the matter of electing to be born of illustrious forebears Alice Trumbull Mason, of Litchfield, Connecticut, chose well. Her rumbling name preserves affiliation with a “well-off family of old New England stock.” (All stock isn’t equal even where egalitarian mythology reigns!) Ancestors included Revolutionary-era painter John Trumbull and William Bradford, a 17th-century governor of the Plymouth colony.

Roberta Smith writes that Mason “has long been a painter’s painter, known mainly to a small number of artists and collectors.”

To be a “painter’s painter” is to be known mainly to a coterie of adepts and buffs. It’s an interesting label, presumably losing its force if an artist attracts broader recognition. In urging “institutional attention” for Mason’s achievement, Smith credits her with finding her voice early and with “adamantine pursuit of its implications.”

Alice Trumbull Mason in 1946. She was a true independent whose careful, balanced abstractions are just being appreciated. Credit… via Alice Trumbull Mason, the Archives American Art, and Washburn Gallery; Charlie Horowitz.

Mason held steadfastly that abstraction was “the true realism” (her words). Her influences ran through Wassily Kandinsky and Joan Miró to light on Piet Mondrian.

She spent long periods as a single mother when her sea captain husband was away, during which time she stopped painting and wrote poetry instead. The likes of William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein, encouraged her to publish.

Mason’s “Paradox #10 Chiaroscuro” (1968) is a geometric landscape. Credit… Alice Trumbull Mason/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Washburn Gallery.

Mason’s work is not something you absorb in a flash. Its integrity, “mindfulness” and assured beauty emerge slowly, in careful compositions, color choices, delicate but tactile brushwork, and inevitable balance.

(Roberta Smith, “Alice Trumbull Mason: America’s Forgotten Modernist,” NYTimes, 4-20-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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Cardin Made His Bed and Lay in It

Posted on January 1, 2021 by JMN
Mr. Cardin in his Paris studio in 1963 with a model and the actress Jeanne Moreau, right. Credit… Pierre Godot/Associated Press.

“I wash with my own soap… I wear my own perfume, go to bed with my own sheets, have my own food products. I live on me.”

The proudest garment in my closet was once a blazer with the Pierre Cardin label on it. Stealing a trope from the great man, I was merely the water it shaped.

Clothing, he said, was meant “to give the body its shape, the way a glass gives shape to the water poured into it.”

A Pierre Cardin trouser suit in an undated photo. Mr. Cardin viewed the female body as an abstraction, a hanger of sorts. “I think of the dress,” he said. “The woman doesn’t matter.” Credit…Keystone/Getty Images.

The consummately French Italian-born designer, Pietro Costante Cardin (1922-2020), has shuffled off this mortal runway in his tenth decade.

He earned the title “Napoleon of licensors” from his marketing. Judging by this obituary, added to the outsized gifts and acumen that he parlayed cannily into wealth and fame was a Napoleonic knack for lionizing himself.

“I was born an artiste… but I am a businessman.”
“The dresses I prefer… are those I invent for a life that does not yet exist.”
“If I can put a Maxim’s [restaurant] in Beijing, I can put a Maxim’s on the moon.”
“I don’t play cards, I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I don’t like sports… I just work. It’s marvelous. It amuses me.”
“My life is on an intellectual level much higher than that of La Couture.”
“I’m the financier, the banker and the creator… I’ve always done what I wanted because I’ve never had a boss.”

(Ruth La Ferla, “Pierre Cardin, Designer to the Famous and Merchant to the Masses, Dies at 98,” NYTimes, 12-29-20)

Cardin creations at a fashion show in Moscow in 2011. Credit… Alexander Nemenov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.

High fashion isn’t about clothing per se; it’s about concept and vision embodied by an art whose chief medium is drapery around bodies. Keeping that thought present helps me value the outlandish contributions of the fashion titans.

(c) 2020 JMN

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‘A Different Philosophy’

Posted on December 31, 2020 by JMN
Monte Brown and his wife Christine at Brown, Owens, and Brumley Family Funeral Home and Crematory, in Fort Worth. Credit… Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times.

“What everybody is talking about right now is, what happened to pneumonia?” he said. “What happened to a lot of deals, a lot of common flu deaths, why is everything being reported Covid now?… We’ve heard that hospitals are getting reimbursed more for Covid cases…”

Perhaps Mr. Brown sensed that I was skeptical. “Right now you’re located in Texas, you’re in North Texas, you’re in the Bible Belt,” he told me. “So people around here have a different philosophy than a lot of people in New York.” Mr. Brown paused for a moment, holding my eyes with a practiced earnestness. “I’m just being honest.”

(Elizabeth Bruenig, “Death and Texas,” NYTimes, 6-5-20)

We Texans often have to remind visitors of where they’re located and where they’re from. It’s a kind of forgetfulness we cure them of with our honesty.

(c) 2020 JMN

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‘I Belong to Brazil’

Posted on December 30, 2020 by JMN
A statue of Lispector on Leme Beach in Rio de Janeiro. She was a literary sensation in Brazil who cultivated an air of mystery. Credit… Fabio Motta/EPA, via Shutterstock.

The 1940s debut novel of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920 – 1977), “Perto do Coração Selvagem” (“Near to the Wild Heart”), is described as the “reflections of a young female protagonist determined to live freely in a world ordered by men.”

This informative tribute to her shows how hard it can be for a female artist to fight free of the male gaze.

In a newspaper review, the poet Lêdo Ivo called the book “the greatest novel a woman has ever written in the Portuguese language.” “Hurricane Clarice,” declared the writer Francisco de Assis Barbosa on reading the book.

We’re told that many of her male critics and admirers echoed translator Gregory Rabassa’s remark that Lispector “looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf,” a comment which Lispector herself rebuffed.

“I don’t like when they say that I have an affinity with Virginia Woolf,” Lispector wrote in one column, adding that she had encountered Woolf’s work only after her own first novel was published. “I don’t want to forgive her for committing suicide. The terrible duty is to go to the end.”

The statue of a solitary woman on a Rio beach (“I belong to Brazil,” she wrote) pouring her “mystery” into her writings is an appealing memorial to a woman who kept her cool intact.

(Lucas Iberico Lozada, “Overlooked No More: Novelist Who Captivated Brazil,” NYTimes, 12-18-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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Neruda XCIV

Posted on December 29, 2020 by JMN
Montsant en el Priorat. Credit Nuria.

[XCIV]
Si muero, sobrevíveme con tanta fuerza pura
If I die, survive me with so much pure force
que despiertes la furia del pálido y del frío,
that you awake the fury of the pallid and the cold,
de sur a sur levanta tus ojos indelebles,
from south to south raise your indelible eyes,
de sol a sol que suene tu boca de guitarra.
from sun to sun let your guitar mouth sound.

No quiero que vacilen tu risa ni tus pasos,
I want neither your laughter nor your steps to falter,
no quiero que se muera me herencia de alegría,
nor my inheritance of joy to die;
no llames a mi pecho, estoy ausente.
do not invoke my chest, I am gone.
Vive en mi ausencia como en una casa.
Live in my absence as if it were a house.

Es una casa tan grande la ausencia
It is such a grand house, absence,
que pasarás en ella a través de los muros
that in it you will pass straight through the walls
y colgarás los cuadros en el aire.
and you will hang the pictures in the air.

Es una casa tan transparente la ausencia
Absence is a house that’s so transparent
que yo sin vida te veré vivir
that, lifeless, I will see you live
y si sufres, mi amor, me moriré otra vez.
and if you suffer, love of mine, I’ll die again.

Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada. Cien sonetos de amor, 1924, Pablo Neruda y Herederos de Pablo Neruda
1994, Random House Mondadori
Cuarta edición en U.S.A: febrero 2004

[English translation is mine.]

(c) 2020 JMN

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Alternatives to Fact

Posted on December 28, 2020 by JMN
George Condo — There’s No Business Like No Business. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

“I think that perception and comprehensible information based in truthful reality is what has been burned to the ground,” he says. “Answers are lit on fire like burning leaves in the wind. Nobody really has any facts.”

Never at a loss for words is George Condo. He calls his style “artificial realism” or “psychological cubism,” to give you an idea.

I keep returning to his remark that “nobody really has any facts.” The context is the viral divisiveness which is steadily gutting the American dispensation. Condo applies his wizard painting skills to the holocaust of perceptual consensus with gripping effect.

George Condo — Father and Daughter with Face Mask. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Having ditched Manhattan for the Hamptons to shelter from Covid, Condo pokes “truthful reality” in the kisser from his artful isolation. It’s as if the smithereens from serial explosions in the schism factory are landing on his picture plane. This-is-what-I-see-in-my-head contrivances confront the viewer with McEnany truculence: Look with these eyeballs, not yours.

The difference is that Condo’s disorienting figurations, modeled in loopy forms and luscious colors, are disarmingly engaging.

(Nadja Sayej, “George Condo: ‘Change can’t just be an idea or a slogan — it has to get real,’” theguardian.com, 11-6-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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Salman Toor

Posted on December 27, 2020 by JMN
Salman Toor’s “Nightmare” (2020). Credit… © Salman Toor; courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

Ligaya Mishan’s early-December essay on cancel culture is well worth reading (“The Long and Tortured History of Cancel Culture,” NYTimes, 12-3-20).

Initially, however, I was distracted from the essay itself by the paintings of Salman Toor which figure among the art works that illustrate it. I was attracted to Toor’s lush brushwork and use of pigment, as well as the arresting expressiveness, slightly cartoonish, of his figures. (Also, who has seen smart phones depicted in high art until now?)

Salman Toor’s “The Texter” (2019). Credit… © Salman Toor; courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

Since then, Roberta Smith has given lavish treatment to the “evocative, tenderly executed paintings” of this Pakistan-born painter in “Salman Toor, A Painter at Home in Two Worlds” (NYTimes, 12-23-20). Mr. Toor (b. 1983) is based in New York City, and is the subject of a debut exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

I like Smith’s characterization of the show’s work as almost forming “an unusually sumptuous graphic novel.”

Salman Toor’s “Bar Boy” (2019) is one of three mostly green paintings in the artist’s Whitney Museum debut. Credit… Salman Toor and Luhring Augustine, via Whitney Museum of American Art.

She ranks Toor among several “consummate stylists” whose paintings focus on gay life and love.

His delicate, caressing brush strokes and intriguing textures are somewhat too large for the images. So they remain staunchly visible and comforting, conveying crucial details and capturing the telling facial expressions at which the artist excels.

(c) 2020 JMN

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Missionary Phallacy

Posted on December 26, 2020 by JMN
Hite in London in 1981. Trevor Leighton.

Shere Hite (1942-2020) published “The Hite Report” in 1976. It gathered candid feedback from women suggesting canonical sexual congress was not the be-all and end-all prescribed by male-centric orthodoxy. Two more best-selling studies followed in 1981 and 1987.

Hite’s work provoked a prolonged storm of blowback. Critics tagged her a man-hater. Social scientists faulted her conclusions as flawed and unreliable because her samples of women didn’t match census data. Critics referred to her as “Sheer Hype.” Playboy magazine called her book “The Hate Report.” Religious groups credited her with destroying traditional family values. She was stalked by paparazzi and received death threats.

Ultimately Hite found living in America untenable for continuing her work. In 1995, she became a German citizen and lived in Europe until her death this year. She published her last book, “The Hite Report on Hite: A Sexual and Political Autobiography,” in 2000.

The article referenced here cites her affecting description of discovering her sexuality “on her own”:

“Not hearing about it first through pornography or seeing naked bodies displayed for profit on every newsstand, but just alone in my room, in my own bed, finding my own sensual self.”

(Jazmine Hughes, “Shere Hite Explained How Women Orgasm, and Was Hated for It,” The New York Times Magazine, “Remembering some of the artists, innovators and thinkers we lost in the past year.” Hite’s obit was published in the NYTimes on 9-11-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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