In the Spanish Manner

The Spanish Manner: Drawings From Ribera to Goya at the Frick is like precognition. If one had been alive to see these works in the 16th or 17th Century, one would have been able to travel through a wormhole to the future. The prescient character of art and the way it reflects both the strivings and turbulence of the mind never ceases to amaze. Here we see the seeds of the Spanish temperament that produced Dalì’s “The Persistence of Memory” and Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou. All the ingredients of the surrealist nightmare are represented: sex, extreme aggression (the auto da fé), and the dichotomy between the sacred and the profane. “Studies of  Two Ears and a Bat”  by Jusepe de Ribera, with its inscription, “FULGET SEMPER VIRTUS” (Virtue Shines Forever), is hung next to a depiction of an enormous head covered with Lilliputian figurines. In Goya’s albums, which the curators describe as “a form of talking to himself,” there are drawings of women fighting, of a defrocked nun. “Beggar Holding a Stick” is a picture of poverty that foreshadows social satirists like Daumier. Like a graphic artist, Goya uses captions like “you are having a bad time” and “don’t fill the basket so full.” There is the torture of a man by Strappado, in which the shoulders are dislocated, and even the memory of horrible torture and mutilation in a drawing subtitled, “He Appeared Like This, Mutilated, in Zaragoza, Early in 1700.” “Tuti li Mundi” (Peepshow) is a garish drawing of a woman leering at the ass of a man looking into what is obviously a peep device. The Frick show is small in scale, but haunted by the future it augurs.

De Daumier-Smith's Long Blue Period

Jerry Fletcher, the character played by Mel Gibson in Richard Donner’s Conspiracy Theory (l997), fills his Greenwich Village apartment with copies of Catcher in the Rye. Of course, the twist lies in the fact that Fletcher, who was modeled to some extent on Mark David Chapman—John Lennon’s killer, who carried a copy of Catcher at the time of the killing and later said the book would explain his actions—is indeed the victim of a conspiracy involving the kind of mind control reminiscent of another classic, John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962). (Could the youthful Frank Sinatra, who starred opposite Angela Landsbury in that film, have played Holden Caulfield in the movie version of Catcher that will never be?)

    

Though Jerry Fletcher may have turned out not to be truly paranoid, paranoia is certainly part of the epitaph of the author he adored. In a way, Fletcher is a perfect metaphor for J.D Salinger’s enormous following. Fletcher has been damaged by events he no longer remembers, and so he is striking out blindly, manufacturing explanations for a world that makes no sense to him. Yet he finds solace in a literary character. The problems affecting Fletcher are far greater than anything that Holden Caulfield faced, but the same cannot be said about Caulfield’s creator, who might have been, for all his brilliance, one of the great miser’s of all time.

   

Authors copyright their inner lives. However, Salinger behaved as if someone was trying to steal his, slapping a “Top Secret” label on his creatiive life and ceasing to publish at all after 1965. If writing is ultimately about giving, and not just the kind of narcissism that led Salinger to spend the last 45 years of his life writing only for himself, then Salinger didn’t have a philanthropic bone in his body. “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” is one of the Nine Stories Salinger published in 1953.  Speaking of Daumier, the nineteenth-century French caricaturist might have been the perfect artist to capture this egregious instance of creative hoarding.