De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum

This post is dedicated to Terry Teachout, who has professed an ambivalence (one might say hostility) toward all things Bloomsbury (from About Last Night, on February 10):

The Bloomsbury group bores me silly. Always has. All hat, no cattle—and that most definitely includes the only marginally readable Virginia Woolf. It's the highbrow counterpart of the Algonquin Round Table, with better gossip and fewer one-liners. Now they're all dead, and about time, too. The sooner they're forgotten, the better for British literature.

"Marginally readable"? I instantly became an admirer when I first read Virginia Woolf in high school: as someone who enjoyed reading Jacob's Room, The Waves, A Room of One's Own, To the Lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway, I am surprised that those words could be applied to her books.

And it is surprising that boredom can be a reaction to the people featured in movies like The Hours (2002) and, more salaciously, Carrington (1995), based on the racy biographical account of Bloomsbury by Michael Holroyd (Lytton Strachey [buy this book from Amazon], 1967–1968; to make The Literary Saloon like us more, we are trying to avoid using links to Amazon without identifying them as such). For heaven's sake, in the latter movie, Dora Carrington (the incomparable Emma Thompson) is shown with disarming frankness, as in the book, having a series of anonymous trysts. I can see a number of reactions to this group of people, but being bored silly is not one of them.

Not that I think I am able, or really even want, to change Terry's mind, but the latest news from the battleground to keep Bloomsbury's memory alive is the discovery of a portrait of Virginia Woolf, once thought lost, by her sister Vanessa Bell. In an article (Rediscovered portrait on display, April 5) in The Guardian, Maev Kennedy reports:

A long-lost portrait of a calm, cheerful and relatively short-nosed Virginia Woolf by her sister Vanessa Bell has been rediscovered after 70 years. It was painted in 1934, at the time when she turned down an official request from the National Portrait Gallery.

In a letter to her nephew Quentin Bell, she forecast the probable fate of any such portrait. "They keep the drawing in a cellar, and when I've been dead 10 years they have it out and say 'does anyone want to know what Mrs Woolf looked like?' 'No,' say all the others. Then it's torn up." In the end the National Portrait Gallery acquired 18 images of Woolf, and none has been torn up.

The story is also reported, with a much better image of the painting, by BBC News (Virginia Woolf portrait uncovered, April 5). In related news, the British Library has recently purchased a collection of manuscript documents written by Virginia Woolf with and for her two nephews, Julian and Quentin, in mock newspapers that show their "view of the Bloomsbury set, who were renowned for their Bohemian lifestyle. Outings, dinner parties and dances are all recounted and often illustrated."

To disappoint Terry further, here is a list (with images) of the portraits of Virginia Woolf in the National Portrait Gallery in London. You can make pilgrimages to Bloomsbury shrines like the country homes Monk's House and Charleston, in Lewes. The latter is where the rediscovered portrait will be on exhibit.

The Game of I

The new exhibit at the Musée du Luxembourg, organized by Pascal Bonafoux, is on the theme of the self-portrait in the 20th century: Moi! Autoportraits du XXe siècle (Me! Self-portraits of the 20th century), through July 25. Annick Colonna-Césari has briefly reviewed the show in an article (Têtes de l'art [Art heads], March 29) in L'Express. Of the 540 self-portraits selected for the show, there is a short Jeu du je (Game of I), a set of nine paintings which I had great fun trying to identify. If you want to see more, there are over 150 images in the exhibit's Aperçu des Œuvres. Or you can buy Pascal Bonafoux's book, if you want to see all of the paintings without going all the way to Paris. I particularly like Victor Vasarely's Autoportrait (1945).

For other news coverage of this exhibit, see Éric Biétry-Rivierre, Les mille facettes des miroirs ardents (in Le Figaro, April 2); and Cécile Brisson, <<Moi! Autoportraits>>: les 101 visages de l'art du XXe siècle au musée du Luxembourg (in Le Nouvel Observateur, March 30).

Birthday Thoughts

We're always the last to learn everything. Happy birthday, Mark! Here's to simplicity!

"It takes a long time to become young."
— Pablo Picasso
How did this happen? A guy looks and feels (acts) 18 but one day turns 49? But what does that have to do with painting? Everything and nothing. One view is that I'm still making art after all these years, and secondly there's something to be said about maturity (in my painting).

Saying more with less and actually having a more informed opinion is a nice benifit of time. One of my favorite quotes is by a writer in a letter to a colleague and it goes something like "forgive me for writing such a long letter: I haven't the time to write a shorter one." My one birthday wish is to make that time.

Mark Barry (www.markbarryportfolio.com) is an artist working in Baltimore.

Museum in Toulouse Reopens

In an article (A Toulouse, la Fondation Bemberg rouvre, April 2) in Le Figaro, Philippe Motta reports on the reopening of a museum in Toulouse, the Fondation Bemberg, which was damaged in the terrible explosion at the AZF chemical factory there. (Because that explosion occurred on September 21, 2001, it received very little coverage here in the United States. Here are some pictures of the effects of the explosion.) According to the article:

The foundation saw in this disaster an opportunity to review the arrangement of its galleries, while at the same time expanding its existing collection. The museum is a Renaissance treasure tucked away in old Toulouse. Built for a rich pastel-maker in 1555, the Hôtel de Pierre d'Assézat left the hands of that illustrious family and disappeared from notice at the end of the 19th century. It was not until the end of the 20th that, little by little, a new benefactor revived it and revealed its splendor by decorating it with the jewels of a unique art collection. Erudite, lover of literature, pianist, and composer Georges Bemberg was familiar with the cosmopolitan destiny of an heir of a great European family. Without ever stopping his writing, he left his piano closed and undertook as his quest the work that is the domain of few men: a collection.

When Bemberg began to think about where his collection would go when he died, he searched around Europe. He admired the Hôtel d'Assézat and offered his artwork to the city of Toulouse, on the condition that the building would be refurbished as a museum for it. A look through the images available on their excellent Web site reveals a collection including works by Canaletto, Guardi, Van der Weyden, de Hooch, Jean Clouet, Cranach, Veronese, Tintoretto, Gauguin, Fantin-Latour, Picasso, Degas, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Especially impressive is the room full of paintings by Vuillard and Rouault, a nice Dérain (La clairière), Monet's Bateaux sur la plage à Etretat (Boats on the beach at Etretat), and a room full of paintings by Pierre Bonnard. The building itself is quite extraordinary (pictures shown here), which makes this little jewel of a museum (which I have not yet seen) well worth a visit, now that the damage done to it has been repaired.

Love for Sale: Tribute to Luciano Berio

In a post on January 24 (Renzo Piano on Luciano Berio), I wrote about the Paris premiere of Italian serial composer Luciano Berio's last piece, Stanze, completed two weeks before his death (May 28, 2003). The void left from Berio's death continues to be felt in experimental music circles: in London, Royal Festival Hall and the Royal Academy of Music (with support from the Italian Cultural Institute and the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung) are jointly presenting a series of events as a tribute to Berio, called Omaggio, from April 15 to 30.

In a series of short interviews ('I wanted to murder him', April 2) in The Guardian, Charlotte Higgins presents commentary by several people who worked closely with Berio about their memories of him: composers John Woolrich, Louis Andriessen, Steve Reich, Will Gregory, and Martin Butler, conductor Semyon Bychkov, opera director Graham Vick, pianist Marielle Labèque, and architect Renzo Piano. Butler's comments on his personality are particularly amusing:

In 1982, I was one of 12 composers to spend two months studying with him at Tanglewood summer school in the US. He used to have amazing soirées where we would get together and perform all his favorite show tunes. He loved making a sleazy nightclub atmosphere: an excuse for expensive cigars and a lot of red wine. In fact his favorite song was Love for Sale, which he loved above Mozart and Beethoven.

Berio's great strength, according to Bychkov, is one that more modernist composers would do well to emulate: he composed music and changed the rules about how to do that, "without burning the bridges to the past—which makes him important to a wide spectrum of people. He could talk about music on the highest intellectual level without losing his audience: there was always a connection to life, and one never felt excluded."

That's Good Reading: Fully Credited Links

• John Perreault writes up the Whitney Biennial at Artopia (post on March 14):

  The bad news is that the biennial is too big; it sprawls all over Central Park, the 42nd Street Whitney branch, the Kitchen, and includes so many films, concerts, and video presentations that you would have to devote a major part of your life to seeing it all. Something for everyone is not always a good idea; more is not necessarily more. But, being charitable for once, perhaps this is an inevitable function of too many artists in too many cities working in too many media.
  
  The good news is that this show's intergenerational mix really works. The curators have even included the recently dead, I think a first. It is refreshing to see established artists along newcomers, and the reverse. For the art virgins, there has to be some transfer of prestige: What biennial were you in? Oh, you know, the one that had Robert Mangold, Kusama, David Hockney, Robert Longo, Alex Hay, Jack Goldstein (d. 2003), Richard Prince, and, in film, Stan Brakhage (d. 2003). Even Mel Bochner.

  His list of awards in many categories is not to be missed.
• Roberta at artblog posted yesterday and Libby posted on Sunday about Kara Walker's new installation (Fibbergibbet and Mumbo Jumbo: Kare E. Walker in Two Acts, through August 14) at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. Neither of them was particularly impressed. Quoth Roberta:

  It's great the Fabric Workshop provides a space and support for artists to experiment and take risks. You can scratch your head at the results, as we're all doing here, but in the end, I'd rather have a new Kara Walker piece to mull over than a lot of other things.

  In support of this, Libby said: "I found myself waiting for the justification of using such loaded material, waiting for Walker to skewer it the way her visual work until now has consistently skewered the stereotypes of the past. It never happened."
• Alan Riding writes about the growing interest in Islamic art in western museums (Entr'acte: Islamic art as a bridge to understanding in West, March 31) in the International Herald Tribune:

  A case is being made for the benefits of promoting Islamic art in the West: the Islamic world would feel its heritage is admired in countries that increasingly link "Islam" with "terrorism," Westerners could look beyond today's turmoil to recognize one of the world's great civilizations, and alienated Muslim youths in Europe could identify with the glories of their Islamic roots.

  As Riding puts it, "all too often Islamic art has been hard to find in museums; invariably, it is treated as a poor relative of Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities." This attitude is changing right now, he notes, with the newly created Department of Islamic Art (here are some highlights) at the Louvre moving to spiffy new digs (from its former location in the basement), which will be constructed over the next five years at a cost of $60 million. Second, a Saudi businessman has donated $9.7 million to build a new gallery for the Islamic collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; some of the museum's Islamic art will be displayed temporarily at the National Gallery of Art here in Washington (Palace and Mosque: Islamic Art from the Victoria and Albert Museum, from July 18, 2004, to February 6, 2005). Third, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is also going to renovate its Islamic galleries, along with several other projects (see press release). Fourth, the new Benaki Museum of Islamic Art will open this summer in Athens, in time for the Olympic crowds. Fifth, I. M. Pei has designed the new Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, which will open in 2006.

The Passion Opens in France

Although there were attempts to block the movie from being shown in France, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ opened today on over 500 screens there, distributed by Tunisian producer Tarak Ben Ammar (see the article on him by Nicole Vulser, Tarak Ben Ammar, l'ami des milliardaires [Tarak Ben Ammar, friend of billionaires], in Le Monde, March 31). Three brothers named Patrick, Gérard, and Jean-Marc Benlolo had asked the French government, as "Jewish citizens of France," to ban Gibson's movie from French theaters because, they claimed, its erroneous adaptation of the New Testament would provoke antisemitism "since the Jewish people are presented in it as a deicidal people" (see this article from Le Nouvel Observateur, March 29). The panel of judges rejected these claims and authorized the film's release.

The story of the film's premiere is reported by Marie-Noëlle Tranchant, <<La Passion du Christ>> gagne la France (in Le Figaro, March 31). This article is accompanied by several others (follow the links on that page), and the media blitz on the premiere is impressive: reports from some of the first viewers in France from Agence France-Presse; it was called, among other things, "in bad taste, heavy, naive, and idiotic" and "an absolute joke in terms of history" by the critics at Libération. More to follow.

For past commentary on the movie at Ionarts, see Jens Laurson's review on March 17 and my posts on February 29 and March 5.

Ruth Laredo at the National Gallery

At the 2491st concert in the free series at the National Gallery of Art last Sunday, a full audience heard a program by pianist Ruth Laredo. This performer enjoys an international reputation, especially as an interpreter of Rachmaninoff and Scriabin (see the write-up of Ms. Laredo from the International Piano Archives at the University of Maryland), but the echoing acoustic of the West Building's West Garden Court obscured what could otherwise probably have been exceptional performances. From where I was seated to the right of Ms. Laredo's piano, we could see the performer's face in concentration over the open case, and I suspect that our auditory experience was as clear as it was going to get. The first piece on the program was four pieces from Robert Schumann's Phantasiestücke (Fantasy pieces), op. 12 (the whole collection was played by Marc-André Hamelin at the National Gallery last December: see the Ionarts review by Jens Laurson on January 18). These pieces showed some of Ms. Laredo's strengths, such as the wandering, aimless tune of Des Abends (Evening time) and the well-voiced contrapuntal melodies of Warum? (Why?), both of which incarnate Eusebius (Schumann's dreamy, moonish alter ego), as well as the power and technical precision displayed in the two movements more in the character of Florestan (the manic yin to Eusebius's more depressed yang in Schumann's personality). In Aufschwung (Impulse), the fullness of sound was supported by a firm bass that was not overpowering, and in In der Nacht (In the night), the fast section seemed to buzz like a swarm of bees.

This was followed by the least pleasing part of the program, Beethoven's Sonata no. 23 in F Minor ("Appassionata"), which had some nice moments. However, an unjudicious use of the sustaining pedal created a far too cloudy sound for the space, in which one of the main motives of the first movement (le-le-le-sol) was often obscured. Before the last part of the first half, featuring three pieces by Alexander Scriabin, there was a long pause during which the lighting on the stage was changed, a sign that many people in the audience, myself included, interpreted as the beginning of intermission, only to be surprised by the words offered by Ms. Laredo about the composer, who is by all accounts one of her specialties. She noted that Scriabin and Rachmaninoff had similar backgrounds and musical training and that, while the latter most admired the music of Tchaikovsky, the former admired that of Chopin. The first piece that Ms. Laredo chose to play—Poème, op. 32, no. 1 (1903)—is from the composer's early, Chopinesque period, and it is in an only slightly dissonant post-Romantic style, with a pretty, tonal ending. The second piece—Guirlandes, op. 73, no. 1 (1914)—is still quite tonal in structure but with an unresolved ending that sounds more modern.

Scriabin Complete Piano Sonatas, with Ruth Laredo

Ms. Laredo reserved most of her comments for the last Scriabin piece she played—the Sonata no. 10, op. 70 (1913)—which she said is often labeled the "Trill" Sonata. Reading from the score, Ms. Laredo joked that the composer's performance directions, all written in French, "read more like a French novel than a piano sonata." Without saying what I perceived later during her performance (that is, that the main inspiration for this sonata is the singing of birds), she noted a major change in the character of this single-movement piece, marked by Scriabin "shuddering and winged," that comes with the musical entrance of a totally new sound. This section records warbling dissonant birdcalls, in multiple registers that required Scriabin to notate the music on four staves instead of the two (grand staff) normally used for piano, as reported by Elmer Booze in his program notes. This passage, with its constant shifting up and down the keyboard, revealed the still-remarkable technical fortitude of this pianist, now in her 60s. Marked overall by Scriabin with the words "Très doux et pur" (Very sweet and pure), this sonata has remarkably few moments of harsh dissonance, for its time (let us recall that Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire was premiered in 1912), although it does descend into an almost Webernesque pointillism near the end. Not surprisingly, the audience reacted with much less enthusiasm to the Scriabin offerings, despite Ms. Laredo's introduction. Nevertheless, I do recommend Ms. Laredo's recording of the complete Scriabin piano sonatas, with a selection of études and other pieces, as well (link to the left), from 1970, at the height of her powers.

After a short intermission, it was apparent that a number of audience members had left the building. First, Ms. Laredo played several preludes by that other side of the Russian prerevolutionary coin, Sergei Rachmaninoff. I admit freely that I am not a fan of Rachmaninoff, and I often reach the end of a performance of his music wondering if the result was worth all the effort, as I did that night. There was never any doubt as to Ms. Laredo's control over the most difficult passages, but the music itself left me uninspired. The piece that ended the program was Maurice Ravel's La valse, from 1921. This is a piece that I really like, but I was left somewhat flat by Ms. Laredo's rendition of the arrangement for one piano. The opening of this piece is a confused, turbulent wash of sound, out of which is supposed to rise the charming dance that is a tribute to the Viennese waltzes of Johann Strauss, Jr. Elmer Booze situates this fascination with the waltz in relation to the death of Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and Ravel's desire "to maintain and reinforce his preeminence." However, the other thing that happened in 1918 was the conclusion of the devastation of World War I, which seems to have been the inspiration for the rumbling music that almost obscures the lighthearted waltz in this piece. Here, too, Ms. Laredo seemed to apply too much sustaining pedal for the room, and her focus on the technical intricacies of the often-dissonant whirring of music further obscured the soaring waltz melody, to which it should be subordinate. What we needed to hear was the clear treble sound of the Stradivarius violin with the Bartók String Quartet (see Ionarts review on March 24), sawing out that twirling, dizzying tune.

For me, one of the most enjoyable parts of attending concerts at the National Gallery is walking out of the gallery to go home. I always walk through the courtyard between the gallery's two buildings and get to stare at the illuminated 4th Street façade of I. M. Pei's East Building, with Henry Moore's colossal bronze Knife Edge Mirror Two Piece (c. 1977), gleaming in the darkness. That night, it heard the melodies of Ravel's La Valse as I passed by it.