Corcoran Doubles Attendance

In my post on September 4 (Living Inside Art History), I first wrote about the J. Seward Johnson show at the Corcoran. Before and since, this exhibit has gotten a lot of press, including a vitriolic review by Blake Gopnik in the Washington Post on September 12, which itself caused quite a stir. In another post (Savage Review on September 14), I linked to several other reviews of the exhibit, all of which were overwhelmingly positive, just to make the point that Gopnik's ideas about Johnson's work do not represent the mainstream. I must clarify that I agree with Gopnik's assessment and was simply trying to point this out as an example of a trend that is hardly new: the disconnect between critics and the public. This is no different from the indignation many literary critics felt about Stephen King receiving an honorary National Book Award. As I said in my September 14 post, "I still believe that the Corcoran is going to make a lot of money on this exhibit."

From ArtsJournal I learned about an article by Harry Jaffe (Too Much Poison in Art Critic's Pen?) in the November issue of The Washingtonian, recapping the dispute between Gopnik and the Corcoran, which confirms that I was right:

Perhaps it comes down to money. Being a private enterprise, as opposed to the National Gallery, which receives $80 million a year in federal funds, the Corcoran must charge admission. Seward is a draw. The Corcoran says it has doubled its attendance, from an average of 5,000 visitors a week to 10,000. Cher showed one Saturday and stayed for two hours. Perhaps kitsch draws—and sells.

Several of my Humanities students have been to see the Johnson exhibit at the Corcoran and have enjoyed showing me photographs of themselves with the sculptures, "inside" the paintings he tries to recreate. Yes, the work is derivative, and yes, I wish painting styles other than Impressionism would fascinate larger audiences. Still, in my opinion, it's good if kids spend hours reading, even if it's "Harry Potter" and they get headaches, and anything that gets high-school students to think about art and to remember it as part of their lives is ultimately worthwhile. Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes will be glad to know that a few of my students also enjoyed Gyroscope at the Hirshhorn, as well as my favorite, the Picasso exhibit at the National Gallery (see my post on October 27).

Les Compères

By writing about film, I am secretly hoping to goad the Ionarts film critic into writing something. Les Compères [The Emcees, with pun on père, or father] (1983) is a classic French comedy I have just seen again recently. It reunited the triumvirate of actors Gérard Dépardieu and Pierre Richard and writer/director Francis Veber, who had collaborated with such success on the even funnier La Chèvre [The goat] in 1981. (The team milked the same cow in Les Fugitifs [The fugitives] in 1986.) Veber's comic writing is legendary: his best work includes La Cage aux Folles (1978 [The Crazy Women Cage]) and the cruel but hilarious Le Dîner de Cons (1998 [The Dumbass Dinner]).

Veber's work is directly in the line of French comic playwrights from Molière onward. He has a comic type, the hapless neurotic François Pignon, who appears in several of his screenplays and is played by different actors. In effect, the character is really only a mask in the sense that it doesn't matter who plays him; he is universal. Much of the comic development occurs because of misunderstandings and often the audience understands a situation perfectly that none of the actors in the film understand. In Les Compères, for example, both protagonists are chasing after the same teenager, but each has been told that he is the boy's father. For the first part of this chase, they tell each other and other people about their sons, who are as different as the two supposed fathers. The conceit is sustained until they both show duplicate photographs of the same boy to a gas station attendant (see image at right). As they instantly go from confirmed bachelors to opinionated parents, Veber uses his two opposing characters to skewer society's conventions about raising children: one that is disciplinarian and machoistic in style and the other that is touchy-feely psychobabble.

Why do Hollywood companies insist on remaking successful French films into mediocre American ones? Ivan Reitman adapted Veber's script of Les Compères for Robin Williams and Billy Crystal as Father's Day (1997). Veber himself remade Les Fugitifs in English with Nick Nolte and Martin Short as The Three Fugitives in 1989. Mike Nichols adapted La Cage aux Folles for Robin Williams and Nathan Lane as The Birdcage in 1996. Happily, Le Dîner de Cons has yet to be remade as an American film, although I'm sure there is a pitch being made right now somewhere in Studio City. Are subtitles really so odious?

Your Proust Excerpt for Today

One of the most captivating parts of Marcel Proust's novel À la recherche du temps perdu is the final section of the second volume, À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur [In the shadow of the blossoming young girls] (Moncrieff's translation is called, blandly, Within a Budding Grove). This section is subtitled, in Moncrieff's translation, Seascape with Frieze of Girls, a phrase which creates an indelible image in my mind, again a way of creating and elevating memory by association with art. The descriptions of the band of girls the narrator encounters during his stay in the hotel at Balbec are lyric and beautiful and incarnate adolescence in an inimitable way. Perhaps Proust had in mind something like the image below, from the eastern side of the Parthenon frieze, showing girls in the Panathenaic procession.

Balbec is a fictional beach town based on Proust's many vacations to the Grand-Hôtel in Cabourg, a real place that is well worth a visit. You can actually stay in a room (the Chambre souvenirs Marcel Proust), which has been decorated to match the careful description of the narrator's room in the hotel in the novel. I have made some corrections to Moncrieff's translation at points where I think it strays too far from the original. However, it is probably impossible to capture the insolence of the girl's mean-spirited and clipped remark about the old man, but a modern American equivalent might be something like "Old dude's bringin' me down with his half-dead self."

And were they not noble and calm models of human beauty that I beheld there, in front of the sea, like statues exposed to the sunlight upon a Grecian shore? Just as if, in the heart of their band, which progressed along the shore walk like a luminous comet, they had decided that the surrounding crowd was composed of creatures of another race whose sufferings even could not awaken in them any sense of fellowship, they appeared not to see them, forced those who had stopped to talk to step aside, as though from the path of a machine that had been let loose and which you should not expect to avoid pedestrians, and if some old gentleman of whom they did not admit the existence and thrust from them the contact, had fled with a frightened, furious, headlong or ludicrous motion, they were even happier to look at one another laughing. They had, for whatever did not form part of their group, no affectation of contempt; their genuine contempt was sufficient. But they could not set eyes on an obstacle without amusing themselves by crossing it, either in a running jump or with both feet together, because they were all filled to the brim, exuberant with that youth which we need so urgently to spend that even when we are unhappy or unwell, obedient rather to the necessities of our age than to the mood of the day, we can never pass anything that can be jumped over or slid down without indulging ourselves conscientiously, interrupting, interspersing our slow progress—as Chopin his most melancholy phrase—with graceful deviations in which caprice is blended with virtuosity. The wife of an elderly banker, after hesitating between various possible exposures for her husband, had settled him on a folding chair, facing the shore walk, sheltered from wind and sun by the band-stand. Having seen him comfortably installed there, she had just gone to buy a newspaper which she would read aloud to him, to distract him—little absences during which she left him alone and which she never prolonged for more than five minutes, which seemed long enough to him but which she repeated at frequent intervals so that this old husband on whom she lavished an attention that she took care to conceal, should have the impression that he was still quite alive and like other people and was in no need of protection. The platform of the band-stand provided above him a natural and tempting springboard, across which, without a moment's hesitation, the eldest of the little band began to run; she jumped over the terrified old man, whose yachting cap was brushed by the nimble feet, to the great delight of the other girls, especially of a pair of green eyes in a doll-like face, which expressed for that act an admiration and a merriment in which I seemed to discern a trace of timidity, a shamefaced and blustering timidity which did not exist in the others. "Oh, the poor old man; he makes me sick; he looks half dead," said a girl with a croaking voice and with a half-ironic tone. They walked on a few steps, then stopped for a moment in the middle of the road, with no thought whether they were impeding the passage of other people, in a council, an aggregation of irregular shape, compact, unusual and shrill, like birds that gather on the ground at the moment of flight; then they resumed their leisurely stroll along the shore walk, above the sea.

Et n'étaient-ce pas de nobles et calmes modèles de beauté humaine que je voyais là, devant la mer, comme des statues exposées au soleil sur un rivage de la Grèce? Telles que si, du sein de leur bande qui progressait le long de la digue comme une lumineuse comète, elles eussent jugé que la foule environnante était composée d'êtres d'une autre race et dont la souffrance même n'eût pu éveiller en elles un sentiment de solidarité, elles ne paraissaient pas la voir, forçaient les personnes arrêtées à s'écarter ainsi que sur le passage d'une machine qui eût été lâchée et dont il ne fallait pas attendre qu'elle évitât les piétons, et se contentaient tout au plus si quelque vieux monsieur dont elles n'admettaient pas l'existence et dont elles repoussaient le contact s'était enfui avec des mouvements craintifs ou furieux, précipités ou risibles, de se regarder entre elles en riant. Elles n'avaient à l'égard de ce qui n'était pas de leur groupe aucune affectation de mépris, leur mépris sincère suffisait. Mais elles ne pouvaient voir un obstacle sans s'amuser à le franchir en prenant leur élan ou à pieds joints, parce qu'elles étaient toutes remplies, exubérantes, de cette jeunesse qu'on a si grand besoin de dépenser même quand on est triste ou souffrant, obéissant plus aux nécessités de l'âge qu'à l'humeur de la journée, on ne laisse jamais passer une occasion de saut ou de glissade sans s'y livrer consciencieusement, interrompant, semant, sa marche lente—comme Chopin la phrase la plus mélancolique—de gracieux détours où le caprice se mêle à la virtuosité. La femme d'un vieux banquier, après avoir hésité pour son mari entre diverses expositions, l'avait assis, sur un pliant, face à la digue, abrité du vent et du soleil par le kiosque des musiciens. Le voyant bien installé, elle venait de le quitter pour aller lui acheter un journal qu'elle lui lirait et qui le distrairait, petites absences pendant lesquelles elle le laissait seul et qu'elle ne prolongeait jamais au delà de cinq minutes, ce qui lui semblait bien long, mais qu'elle renouvelait assez fréquemment pour que le vieil époux à qui elle prodiguait à la fois et dissimulait ses soins eût l'impression qu'il était encore en état de vivre comme tout le monde et n'avait nul besoin de protection. La tribune des musiciens formait au-dessus de lui un tremplin naturel et tentant sur lequel sans une hésitation l'aînée de la petite bande se mit à courir: elle sauta par-dessus le vieillard épouvanté, dont la casquette marine fut effleurée par les pieds agiles, au grand amusement des autres jeunes filles, surtout de deux yeux verts dans une figure poupine qui exprimèrent pour cet acte une admiration et une gaieté où je crus discerner un peu de timidité, d'une timidité honteuse et fanfaronne, qui n'existait pas chez les autres. "C'pauvre vieux, i m'fait d'la peine, il a l'air à moitié crevé", dit l'une de ces filles d'une voix rogommeuse et avec un accent à demi-ironique. Elles firent quelques pas encore, puis s’arrêtèrent un moment au milieu du chemin sans s'occuper d'arrêter la circulation des passants, en un conciliabule, un agrégat de forme irrégulière, compact, insolite et piaillant, comme des oiseaux qui s'assemblent au moment de s'envoler; puis elles reprirent leur lente promenade le long de la digue, au-dessus de la mer.

Rereading this passage now brings to mind a very different encounter between youth and age on a beach, that of von Aschenbach and Tadzio on the Lido in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. Von Aschenbach watches Tadzio come back out of the water at the call of his governess: "He turned and ran back against the water, churning the waves to a foam, his head flung high. The sight of this living figure, virginally pure and austere, with dripping locks, beautiful as a tender young god, emerging from the depths of sea and sky, outrunning the element—it conjured up mythologies, it was like a primeval legend, handed down from the beginning of time, of the birth of form, of the origin of the gods." What von Aschenbach first admires when he sees Tadzio is his disdain for the world around him, exactly what sets the "petite bande" apart for Marcel, the petulance, single-minded and ignorant, of the blissful young.

Music at the National Shrine

This weekend has been very busy at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, with All Saints Day on Saturday and All Souls Day today. Except for individual funerals, the words of the Requiem Mass are proper only to the feast of All Souls, November 2, contrary to the common programming of Requiem Masses on Good Friday or Palm Sunday (Jesus does not need a Requiem Mass) or All Saints Day, November 1 (the saints in heaven do not need a Requiem Mass). At the National Shrine, the choir performed extensive excerpts from the Requiem Mass and the Cantique de Jean Racine by Gabriel Fauré at the solemn noon Mass.

The future repertoire at the Shrine will include, notably, performances of music by Ned Rorem (see my October 23 post on celebrations of Rorem's 80th birthday). We will perform the first of the Three Motets (1973), "O Deus Ego Amo Te" (text, O God I Love Thee, by Gerard Manley Hopkins) at the Mass for the American Catholic Bishops on November 10 and the wild, powerful Praise the Lord, My Soul (1982, text from Psalm 146) on the feast of Christ the King, November 23.

Voltaire's Candide: An Autobiography?

A review in Le Figaro Littéraire, which has now disappeared from the Internet, drew my attention to a new edition of Voltaire's classic story Candide, ou l'optimisme (there is also an English translation available online) by Frédéric Deloffre [Paris: Gallimard, Coll. Folio classique (no. 3889), July 2003]. (I also found a review of the book from July on EspacesTemps reviews, Candide, c'est moi.) On the surface, this may not seem all that interesting, but Deloffre has a reputation for shaking up our thinking, even about well-known and often-critiqued books. He has advanced a new theory about the autobiographical background of Voltaire's most famous story, in which Candide is Voltaire, Cunégonde is Madame de Bentinck, Pangloss is Heinrich Meister, the king of the Bulgarians is Frederick the Great of Prussia, and "Make your garden grow" is a reference to the paradise Voltaire found at his château in Ferney. This is one of those books I expected to go for the rest of my life without being confronted with a truly new thought about it. Deloffre's work should be a warning to all of us not to be content with what scholarship there already is, even about the best-known works.

One Hundred Days of Ionarts

You read that correctly: today is the 100th day of this blog, which seems like as good an occasion as any to take a look back at some of the topics that have appeared here. It's remarkable in the world of blogging how things end up working out as they do, in the freeform way that is the hallmark of this new medium. (If you can't stand this sort of retrospective because it's repetitive, just hang in there for another day, because more posts are on the way. Maybe something about the theme of eyes in art, like the Eye of the Sun, shown at right, a rock formation in Monument Valley in southern Utah.) As I see it, here is an assortment of some of the big posts and ideas that have been worked out here:

• July 24, Marsden Hartley at the Phillips Collection and Gertrude Stein (as an art collector)
• July 26, Latest Reading, was the first appearance of the Paris Reading List, which has evolved into a separate part of this site
• July 28, A Whole New Perspective on Realism, about a controversial painting by Gustave Courbet
• August 1, Field Trip!, about the church of Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce
• August 3, Glaring at Cardinal Law, one of several posts about seeing Cardinal Law, former archbishop of Boston, at Mass at the National Shrine
• August 4, We've Been Googled, first discovered that you could find Ionarts with a Google search
• August 5, Das Ring at Bayreuth Festival, first post about Wagner
• August 6, The Idea of a National Patrimony, about Prosper Mérimée
• August 7, Mel Gibson, about seeing Mel Gibson introduce a viewing of clips from his controversial movie The Passion
• August 8, More Renoirs Than You Can Shake a Stick At, about a visit to the Barnes Collection
• August 11, Changes Planned for the Château de Chambord?, about the plans for the future of that castle
• August 13, More Artistic Strikes Planned in France, about the summer strikes by the intermittents du spectacle
• August 14, What Would Mozart Think?, about a controversial sculpture in Salzburg
• August 18, The Popularity of Impressionism, about an exhibit in Auvers-sur-Oise
• August 19, Wagner Festival in Washington?, first notice of an article in Die Welt on the Millennium Wagner Opera Company
• August 21, Eugène Atget Photographs for Sale, about the sale from the collection of the Modern Museum of Art
• August 23, One Month of Ionarts, about the recovery of lost 18th-century marble reliefs by the Louvre
• August 25, Albéniz the Opera Composer
• August 27, Centenary of the Prix Goncourt, about the anniversary of the prestigious literary award
• September 10, REVIEW: The Rivals at the Shakespeare Theatre
• September 11, Now How Much Would You Pay?, about determining the authenticity and value of a recently stolen Leonardo painting
• September 12, American Cultural Imperialism, about the battle over American interests in the new Jeunet film
• September 14, Translation of Interview with Don DeLillo, which provoked some strong reactions both positive and negative
• September 19, European Patrimony Days, about an annual event in France
• September 20, INTERVIEW: Wagner in Washington, first installment of six-part interview with Carol Berger, founder of Millennium Wagner Project
• September 24, The Marquesas, about Paul Gauguin and Jacques Brel and their time there
• October 1, Botticelli at the Palais du Luxembourg, about the Botticelli exhibit and the concept of the profile portrait
• October 2, Tomb of St. Peter on the Vatican Hill, about the excavations under St. Peter's
• October 3, András Schiff on the Goldberg Variations
• October 7, Your Weekly Proust, about Botticelli and the character of Swann in Proust
• October 8, Botticelli Exhibit, Ionarts in Paris begins
• October 10, Conference on the Air de Cour in Versailles, Ionarts in Versailles on early Baroque music
• October 14, Concerts at Versailles, Ionarts in Versailles continues
• October 16, Photographs at the Musée d'Orsay, Ionarts in Paris continues
• October 17, Gauguin—Tahiti at the Grand Palais (in four parts), end of Ionarts in Paris
• October 20, Verdi Requiem at the Kennedy Center, Ionarts back in Washington
• October 22, Juilliard Quartet at the Library of Congress (and October 24)
• October 26, "The Texas Chainsaw" Massacred, guest blogger Todd Babcock weighs in with his first posting on cinema
• October 27, Picasso at the National Gallery, Picasso and Fernande Olivier
• October 28, Chilingirian Quartet at the Library of Congress

Update on Festival d'Automne in Paris

On September 27, I wrote a short post (Autumn Festival in Paris) about the plans for this year's edition of the annual Festival d'Automne in Paris. I have just learned that Le Monde has created a Web page with more information and links to other sites about the festival. You can also read and print out a copy of the newspaper's special Supplément (.pdf) about the festival, and read several articles about Chinese artists and musicians in France, who are featured prominently in this year's festival (Dominique Frétard, Un bataillon rouge mène les artistes chinois en France, October 15; Frédéric Edelmann, A Pingyao, l'architecture et la photo en trompe l'oeil, October 15; links to other articles can be found on the latter page). This is also the occasion of the year-long celebration of L'année de la Chine in France, which will be bringing a large number of Chinese artists, musicians, dancers, and so on to France in an important cultural exchange.

Chilingirian Quartet at the Library of Congress

I was once again in the Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress tonight, to see the latest in the 2003-2004 season of the annual series of free concerts. The Chilingirian String Quartet presented a program of three quartets by Mozart, Bartók, and Dvořák. This was my first time hearing this group perform, and I discovered that their reputation, particularly as interpreters of Bartók and Dvořák, is well merited. The quartet was formed by four graduates of London's Royal College of Music in 1971, and two of its founding members are still performing, Levon Chilingirian on first violin and Philip DeGroote on cello. Charles Sewart has been playing second violin since 1992, and violist Susie Mészáros is playing her first season with them this year. The Chilingirian Quartet is now in residence at the Royal College of Music, where Mr. Chilingirian is a professor. They have also partnered with the remarkable vocal ensemble Anonymous 4, for which collaboration John Tavener composed an octet for string quartet and four voices. (This piece, titled "The Bridegroom," was just performed by them in a concert called "Darkness into Light" on October 23 at the World Financial Center Winter Garden in New York City. There is also a CD of the program available.)

The concert began with Mozart's String Quartet in C Major, K. 465 ("Dissonance"), which was beautifully played but not the best part of the concert. (Mozart is not one of the quartet's areas of specialization, according to the biography included for them in the program.) This is the last quartet in the set of six "Haydn" quartets that Mozart dedicated to Haydn, and it owes many of its characteristics to that composer's influence. The nickname "Dissonance" was attached to the quartet after Mozart's death, and it refers to the strange harmonies in the brief Adagio introduction to the first movement, the only such slow introductory movement among Mozart's final string quartets. The piece has troubled many listeners since it was composed: Mozart's wife Constanze related a story about one Prince Grassalkovich, who got angry because he thought his string players were making mistakes when they played the Dissonance quartet. When they assured him the notes they played were on the page, he tore up the score. The Chilingirian Quartet chose a very fast tempo for the first movement, which was perhaps just a hair too allegro for the extremely agile second theme. The movement came to a soft and charming conclusion, in spite of Mr. Chilingirian's mishap with his music: it fell from the stand as he turned a page, but he quickly recovered without missing too much. The variations of the rather slow rendition of the Andante movement were dark and lovely. The happy Menuetto of the third movement is contrasted with a Trio of an almost Sturm und Drang feel. There were occasional minor inaccuracies in the first violin spiccatos in this movement, but a soaring and pure E string sound that was quite beautiful. The strongest influence of Haydn, I think, is the humor of his Rondo movements, with their quirky starts and stops, which is lovingly imitated by Mozart in the final movement here. Again the Chilingirian chose a very fast tempo, which required the first violin especially to be extremely adroit.

The best performance of the concert was Bartók's String Quartet no. 5, a piece that was commissioned by and dedicated to Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge (the great music patron for whom Coolidge Auditorium is named, shown at right in a charcoal drawing by John Singer Sargent) and first performed in Coolidge Auditorium by the Kolisch Quartet in 1935. (If you want to learn more about Mrs. Coolidge and her incredible work supporting the cause of new music in the 20th century, you should read Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge: American Patron of Music, a book by my former professor at Catholic University, Cyrilla Barr.) Although it is usually considered to be less harshly dissonant than the third and fourth quartets, Bartók's fifth string quartet begins with a strident and marked opening that was played with great force this evening. Since this piece includes many examples of Bartók's fascination with the mirror form or chiasmus, those striking harmonies from the beginning of the first movement return toward the end of the last movement. What Bartók began with folk music in his first quartet (see my review of the Juilliard String Quartet's performance of that piece on October 24), he develops fully in this piece, with its Bulgarian and other folk rhythms and sounds. The many effects called for in the piece (muting, tremulos, percussive off-string bowing, glissandi, and even glissandi in pizzicato) were used by the Chilingirian to create marvelous sound worlds. I don't know their recording of all six Bartók quartets (made before the present second violin and viola were members), but on the basis of this performance, I would be willing to buy it. The famous moment near the end of the last movement, where the music breaks into a sort of Viennese serenade gone insane, is marked by the composer "Allegretto, con indifferenza" when a theme is restated absurdly and then given a satirical twist harmonically. This was performed tonight with the perfect mixture of humor and banality.

The concert concluded with Antonín Dvořák's String Quartet in G Major, op. 106. This performance was also excellent, especially the deep-throated folk song of the second movement and tragic folk lament that begins and returns throughout the fourth movement. This was the first time that I had ever heard this quartet performed, and the more I get to know Dvořák's music, the more I like it. His harmonic vocabulary and folk-derived melodic construction have had, I think, a significant influence on American film composers especially, something which I appreciated even more hearing this piece. It was a night of many discoveries, for which I again thank the Library of Congress.