Six Characters at BAM

Pirandello’s Six Characters at BAM

One of Gertrude Stein’s most famous lines is, “there is no there there.” Theatre de la Ville’s production of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author directed by Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota and currently playing at BAM visualizes Stein’s phenomenology as Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Shadows hidden behind scrims of Yves Collet’s set mask elusive ideal forms which never divulge their true essence. A great piece of art can sometimes make the familiar strange and new, allowing the viewer to feel he or she's seeing the world anew. It also can create a feeling of understanding. In Pirandello the reverse takes place. Art and theater are the lie that doesn’t tell the truth and it’s the unformed protoplasm of reality that’s one step closer to revelation (the playwright, an early practitioner of metatheater, comments dismissively about his The Rules of the Game that’s being rehearsed at the beginning and offered by one Luigi Pirandello). But then even so called reality begins to fail the test and in the end the director (Alain Libolt) simply says “tell the electrician, turn everything off.” And who is this electrician but the prime mover, the force that makes us conscious of the world, Descartes's maxim reversed, “sum ergo cogito.” The current production with its actors playing actors and actors playing supposedly real people points to the huge influence Pirandello has had on both theater and film. Could you imagine Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche,New York where human life is imagined as an enormous stage set, without Six Characters? The other side to Six Characters are also the primordial passions, which can make it sound like something in between an afternoon soap and classic tragedy. And in spite of all the modernity, there were times when the current French version iterated at breakneck speed made Pirandello’s lines sound curiously like Corneille and Racine—minus the alexandrines, of course. Attempting to parse the subtitles, unless you’ve taken speed reading, can also give you vertigo.

If I Told Him Would He Like It

Picasso’s l906 portrait of Gertrude Stein hanging in the current Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso…the Stein Family show at the Grand Palais is one of the iconic portraits of the modern era. Is there any basis for comparison to another, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa also known as La Gioconda which is one of the great masterpieces of all time. Many commentators have remarked upon the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile. Stein isn’t smiling in the Picasso portrait, but her expression is enigmatic. Her stare is piercing, the epitome of determination. Yet there is also something inscrutable about it, as if all her resolve were mitigated by something clever, sly, almost uncanny.  It’s not that she’s seductive, but there’s something imperturbable and magnetic about her. Apparently at one point during the creation of the work,  Picasso eliminated Stein's face entirely, saying “I can’t see you anymore when I look.” Stein was a collector, an acquirer, but she was also intellectually acquisitive and while Picasso was studying her, the energy was undoubtedly travelling in the opposite direction too. Picasso often painted his former mistresses, with the representations existing like the heads of stags on the wall a hunter’s lodge. But as the author of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas wasn’t Stein collecting too? Was Picasso’s famous comment a reflection of his fear of being swallowed up by his subject’s inertial force? The portrait of Gertrude Stein is what survives, but can we speculate that the reason for Picasso’s ceasing his work was his realization that though he was doing the painting, he himself was also a subject and not only her? "If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him" was how Stein began her poetic portrait of Picasso. 

The Cone Sisters of Baltimore

When we think of art collecting today, the names Gogosian and Saatchi come to mind. Huge international galleries function almost like stock markets, catering to wealthy individuals who buy art for its investment as well as esthetic value. Collecting Matisse and Picasso: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore, an exhibition at The Jewish Museum, provides a different perspective on the art of collecting. Dr. Claribel Cone and her sister Etta collected before there was a market. They bought Matisse when critics savaged his work and those of his contemporaries in the Salon D’Autonme (1908), dubbing them les Fauves, or wild beasts. By 1913, when Matisse, Picasso and Cezanne were presented to New York society in the famed Armory Show, Claribel and Etta had already been collecting for a decade. Gertrude and Leo Stein befriended the Cones, further helping the sisters, who were beneficiaries of the fortune that their brothers Moses and Ceasar made in the cotton trade, to feed their passion for art. There are many wealthy people, but relatively few amass a trove of art that rivals the Cone sisters’ collection, which would eventually comprise 3,000 works, now housed in the Baltimore Museum of Art. Their accomplishment underscores the importance of the pure form of collecting that comes out of a love of beauty, as well as the crucial role that patronage plays in the survival of artists, particularly in seminal periods like that which led up to so-called Modernism. The Cones, like Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, took an almost maternal role towards artists like Matisse and Picasso. There is a wonderful Picasso drawing in the show, which was included in a letter to Etta, in which the artist portrays himself as a portly gent with his hat in his hand. In a BBC documentary narrated by Michael Palin, which is part of the current exhibition, a commentator remarks that when you looked out of the Marlborough apartments—the building the Cones occupied in Baltimore—you saw the past, but on their walls you saw the future, insured by the sisters’ loving attention.   

Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris is a monstrosity, proof that even a comic genius who also happens to be the Jane Austen of his age (to the extent that he is a great documenter of manners and morals) can still miss the mark. If we were to see the film with no knowledge of Allen’s oeuvre, we might summarily dismiss it as the work of an inferior artist. Could the meta-view of Paris that Allen presents be intentionally ugly and factitious in order to render a world someone might want to escape from? Gil (Owen Wilson) posits escape as a kind of brass ring when he says “the present is a little unsatisfying because life is a little unsatisfying.” He later quotes Faulkner’s “the past is not dead; it’s not even past.” But the intention of Allen's directorial disquisition is never clear. Parenthetically, Wilson is as unsuccessful in playing the Woody-Allen-type doofus as Allen is in portraying Paris. It is unlikely that F. Scott, Zelda, Ernest, Salvador, Gertrude or any of the Lost Generation would have been terribly pleasant company, despite their bouts of genius, but the film’s heavy-handed plot line, which transports our protagonist back in time, from the dreary materialism of the present to the Paris of the ‘20s and eventually La Belle Epoque, where he interrupts Toulouse-Lautrec while he’s drawing the Folies and makes the acquaintance of Degas and Gauguin, presents us with a series of gargoyles that would be booed off of a high-school stage. The movie starts with a Paris montage that aspires to Hemingway’s moveable feast, but instead of creative sumptuousness, it has the gastronomic and esthetic appeal of Leonard's, the garish Great Neck bar mitzvah parlor. It's a sequence that would have made Cartier-Bresson vomit.

Paris Journal IX: A Moveable Feast

Hemingway called Paris “a moveable feast,” but it is hard to regard the Parisian salons presided over by the great cultural figures of the past—Breton, Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway himself, and numerous other denizens of Parisian cultural life—as feasts in the same sense as the collations that occurred in American and even English cultural life. For all the brilliance of French cuisine, one associates the great gatherings of Parisian intellectuals that occurred in the early part of the twentieth century at cafés like Les Deux Magots (which are now over priced tourist meccas) with buffets of conversation and ideas. In contrast, Truman Capote threw his famed Black and White Ball for Katharine Graham in the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza in l966. It would be hard to imagine a latter-day infant terrible and major French celebrity like Houellebecq throwing a comparable society bash for someone like Carla Bruni. Thus, though one reads about the social mores of the French upper classes in Remembrance of Things Past, it is really difficult to imagine the kind of literary cocktail parties and dinners one expects in New York occurring in Paris, where the spread of ideas has a more extemporaneous feel, fueled by the ongoing presence of a true café society on streets like the Rue Mortorgueil, which is to Paris today what the Boulevard St. Germain was a century ago.

A Unified Theory

Picasso had a blue period between 1901-4 and a Rose period, from l904-6, during which he met his first wife Olivier in the Bateau Lavoire in Montmartre and painted Gertrude Stein. 1906-16 was his cubist period, when he painted Les Demoiselles D’Avignon. The 347 Suite is the last element in the current Picasso show at the Met. These prints, including sugar-lift aquatints, were done in Mougins. Aldo and Piero Crommelynck, who Picasso met during the ‘40s in the atelier of Roger Lacourière, had established a studio near Picasso’s villa Notre-Dame de Vie in l968. It is really useless to talk about Picasso after John Richardson and numerous other scholars have exhumed both his life and work, but may we make at least two statements? He absorbed the history of art almost magically and had a hand that can only be characterized as sleight. He loved to paint and draw naked women, and he was willing to sacrifice them for his art. Further, anyone who has ever gone to a whorehouse will recognize the girls in Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (a painting not included in the current exhibit). There is an almost documentary quality to the abstraction. If there is anything that the Met show illustrates, it is the fact that Picasso had one foot in the 19th century and one foot in the 20th. He fell into the tradition of the great naturalists who triumphed in the art of mimesis, to the extent that his blue, rose and cubist periods were great documents of their times, while revolutionizing the media of painting, drawing and lithography in which he worked. Like Einstein, he was attempting to create a unified theory between micro and macrocosm, between the small and large worlds, between the basics of matter and the universe. The only difference is that Picasso succeeded.