Preparing Oneself for Theater

WARNING: This is one of those "gee-whiz, isn't the Internet dreamy?" kinds of digressions. If your aversion to this sentiment makes you ill, please skip this post. So, I am going to the Shakespeare Theater to see Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals (1775). I have always wanted to see Mrs. Malaprop be compounded in her circumablution (e.g., "As headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile," from Act III, sc. 3). Not only can I find out some information about the author (his grandfather was a friend of Jonathan Swift and his father wrote a biography of Swift), I can read the full text of the play (see above) and look at portraits of the author and his wife (that by Gainsborough to the left below, that by Reynolds to the right). Isn't this cool?

Buying Art from the Nazis

On Friday, without any real evidence, I posed a rhetorical question about how hopes to purchase art from the Nazi plunderings may have influenced J. Paul Getty in his newly revealed support of Hitler's regime (see post on September 5). Ever watchful, Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes has responded with the following message, which he has allowed me to quote here (and to which I have added some links):

Getty seems not to have been motivated by the opportunity to purchase art from the Nazis. In her definitive history of the Nazi plunder of European art, The Rape of Europa, Lynn Nicholas never mentions Getty. Nicholas calls out several Western industrialists who purchased art from the Reich for a variety of reasons—some of them potentially semi-noble. (For example, Joe Pulitzer bought Matisse's Bathers with a Turtle for 9,100SFr in a 1939 auction of 'degenerate art' because he was pretty sure that the Nazis would destroy it if he didn't. "The real motive in buying was to preserve the art," Pulitzer said. Others, such as Alfred Barr, refused to participate in the auction for a variety of reasons.) This is hardly definitive—Nicholas' book is nine years old and new information may have become available since then, but she mentions many prominent collectors. If Getty had been on the Reich's collector list, I would think it would have made it into her book.

To complement Tyler's thoughtful response to my question, I add the following article (Web Site Goes Online to Find Nazi-Looted Art by Elizabeth Olson, September 7) in the New York Times, and a page of information about Nazi-Era Assets at the Research Library of the Getty Institute. The Web site mentioned by Ms. Olson in her article is the Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal, run by the American Association of Museums. The Getty is one of the 66 museums currently participating in the registry program.

Collector-Driven Museums

Modern Art Notes introduced this concept of museums created to house single collections and how they are different from large institutions (see post on August 19). Another such museum I never knew about is the Sammlung Rosengart in Lucerne, Switzerland. An article by Alan Riding on the father-daughter team that created the collection ran in the New York Times (On a Swiss Lake, a Father-Daughter Art Dream Lives, September 1); if you cannot access their Web site, it was also carried today in the International Herald Tribune (Family Collection Testifies to Artistic Ties that Bind). Angela Rosengart (shown to the left as drawn in a lithograph by Picasso in 1964) continued the work of her art dealer father, Siegfried Rosengart, collecting art for their apartment in Lucerne. Partly because of personal friendships with Paul Klee and, through the Parisian art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Pablo Picasso, their collection is now strong in the works of both artists. After her father's death, Frau Rosengart purchased and renovated a modern neoclassical building in Lucerne built originally for the Swiss National Bank. (The Rosengarts had already donated a large number of Picassos from their private collection to the city of Lucerne, which are shown at the city's little Picasso-Museum.) According to an article in Schott-Glas magazine (How Miró Came to "Mirogard" by Inge Keller-Höll), since her apartment is now devoid of her beloved collection, Frau Rosengart walks through the museum every day, often guiding visitors and speaking about the works in the museum.

Also, thanks to Michael and Friedrich of 2Blowhards for mentioning and linking to Ionarts. I will always endeavor to live up to their exaggerated review of Ionarts as "high-end, civilized blogging."

J. Paul Getty and Hitler

Are all 20th-century art collectors eccentric? The bizarre decisions of Albert Barnes are on the brink of accomplishing a tragic end to his remarkable collection (see the latest news on the fate of the Barnes Foundation summarized in Modern Art Notes on September 4). Now there is the revelation from recently declassified documents in the British National Archives that J. Paul Getty not only knew and admired Adolf Hitler but was supplying the Nazi army with oil up to 5 months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. This story was broken in The Telegraph (Getty Helped Traitors Sell Oil to Hitler by Peter Day, August 25) and then carried by Deutsche Welle (Oil Baron Getty Revealed as Hitler Fan, September 2), which is where I first heard of it. How much did hopes to purchase stolen art treasures at rock-bottom prices tempt Getty into this shameful complicity?

Representational Art

If atonal compositional techniques are becoming just another option for composers today (see post on September 1), on equal footing with more traditional techniques, then perhaps illusionistic art and drawing are also de retour. If so, where are today's great draftsmen? Much has been made in the art world of late about the drawing ability of Leonardo, which I certainly do not dispute. Still, for my money, I am awed most by the work of Albrecht Dürer, which is why I have followed the lead of an article (Aus der Natur gerissene Kunst by Ulrich Weinzierl, September 6) in Die Welt to the new exhibit of the works of Dürer at the Albertina in Vienna (September 5 to November 30).



They are showing the original version of the famous watercolor Feldhase (The Hare, 1502, left image). My favorite, which is also owned by the Albertina so I hope it will be in the exhibit, is the Great Piece of Turf (watercolor, 1503, right image). Naturalists sometimes credit this work as an early example of a type of descriptive field manual illustration. The spirit of the work seems not so scientific to me, or stemming from a desire to classify. The clump of grass reminds me most of the piece of nature that a child brings to an adult, a leaf, a caterpillar, whatever. It's not much, you may have stepped on it as you rushed by, but when you take the time to look at it close up, you see something else.

Living inside Art History

The Fall 2003 issue of the Corcoran Gallery's magazine Corcoran Views came to my mailbox at school a few days ago. If I had any doubts that the world's impressionomania was out of control, they disappeared on seeing an article by Valerie Gladstone on the museum's upcoming exhibit Beyond the Frame: Impressionism Revisited, the Sculptures of J. Seward Johnson, Jr. (September 13, 2003, to January 5, 2004). (Another exhibit, The Impressionist Tradition in America, is simultaneously showing at the Corcoran, until April 2004.) The exhibit will consist of 18 mixed-media installations that recreate and rework famous paintings in three dimensions and on a life-size scale. According to Valerie Gladstone:

Happy to fulfill fantasies, Johnson wants people to be able to walk into a painting and enter the life being lived there. . . He couldn't be more pleased that visitors to the Corcoran will not only be able to walk into the paintings but will be able to touch their contents—the ivory shoulder of Edouard Manet's Olympia, the jaunty hat of the winsome little boy in Manet's The Fifer, even rest on Vincent Van Gogh's narrow bed—and be photographed in the act.

I will not be surprised if attendance at this exhibit is higher than normal for the Corcoran. (I can already envision the quirky morning news piece on the exhibit that is the trademark of Fox 5 reporter Holly Morris, who is always a little too peppy for me at 7 am.) The sculptor will be at the museum for a talk on October 9, and two other public programs (see the remarkable list of events and programs at the Corcoran) will discuss the subtext of the exhibit: why certain artworks are so important to the popular imagination (what the Corcoran calls "icons of modernism").

My first reaction to this exhibit was to regret how derivative it is. However, as an educator, I usually conclude as I do here that anything that gets people into a museum to look at art is ultimately good, even if it is an unhealthy obsession with impressionism. I cannot tell you how many times my students have remarked in class, "I saw that painting on The Simpsons (or some other show)." So if Seward Johnson wants to give people the chance to touch or live inside their favorite paintings, it makes room in people's minds for art to have a place. For a different way to live inside art (or, rather, to have it live in you), check out the hilarious art cartoon Kunstbar, which a former student brought to my attention this week.

Dictionary Watching

In his strange, prognosticative novel Paris au XXe Siècle (Paris in the Twentieth Century, 1863), Jules Verne prophesied that French would be overrun by scientific words, mostly taken from English and other languages. While this is certainly true in colloquial French today, the vigilance of the guardians of the French language never wavers. A short article (Les nouveaux mots des dictionnaires 2004, September 2) in Le Nouvel Observateur reviews the new words officially accepted by the Petit Larousse and the Petit Robert in their upcoming editions, noticing in particular the growth of computer-related words. My favorite is pourriel (courrier électronique envahi de publicité qui ira à la corbeille, "electronic mail invaded by advertisements which will go to the wastebasket," or spam), which first appeared among computer users in Québec. It is a contraction of poubelle (trash can or trash) and courriel (the not very popular word for e-mail, a contraction of courrier électronique, electronic mail). To me at least it also recalls the adjective/participle pourri, spoiled or rotten. These are different and in some ways more satisfying connotations than those of spam in English, something that is a sad and disgusting imitation of the real thing and that is used in a mass-distributed way.

This post was intended to be published yesterday but could not be, due to troubles at Blogger. Sorry about that. One word of thanks to Terry Teachout, for including a link to Ionarts on his ArtsJournal blog About Last Night (essential reading).

Tonal music as the New Avant-Garde

Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, made an interesting statement about the development of musical language in his review (Deep Song, September 1) of Osvaldo Golijov's new opera Ainadamar, premiered at Tanglewood this summer. In the last paragraph of the article, he wrote about the contrasting receptions the audience gave to Golijov's work and to Robert Zuidam's Rage d'Amours, which relied on "hoary devices of twentieth-century technique":

The trouble with having two premieres side by side is that the evening inevitably became something of a popularity contest. Zuidam received respectful applause; Golijov won a shouting, stomping ovation. No doubt a few old-school Tanglewood cerebralists went away complaining that Golijov had pandered to the audience. If so, they were pandering to their teaching assistants. The composer is triumphing not because he uses an accessible language—anyone can string together superficially pleasing chords—but because he speaks it with dire conviction. His sincerity is avant-garde.

This is nothing new, of course. Charges of pandering to the audience have been directed against many composers who returned to some form of more traditional musical language, often coupled with accusations of commercialism. As if how much money Philip Glass makes has anything to do with whether his music is interesting. However, to say that Golijov's "accessible language" has nothing to do with his success is also not sincere. I have been teaching atonal music to students for several years, and no matter how much I force them to learn about how and why some composers created the sounds they did, some students (and their parents) are just never going to like them. This also has something to do with the number of performances received by works of John Corigliano versus those of Andrew Lloyd Webber. If music history (and Nicolas Slonimsky, in particular) has taught us anything it is that popular acclaim and historical relevance certainly do not always coincide.