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.

The Lonely Crowd II

Erica Jong coined the term “zipless fuck,” but the desire for instant intimacy obviously has a storied history, from Catullus to The Canterbury Tales, from Rabelais to Sexus, Nexus, and the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, to Nicholson Baker’ s brilliantly erotic Fermata.  However, the sexual passages from these works can be so stimulating that we forget the more profound desire to connect that lies at the heart of even the most perverse scenarios. It might be worth our while to interject E.M. Forster’s famous words from Howards End—“only connect”—into the discussion, though that work is hardly noted for its sexual content. Inevitably, even the most promiscuous fantasy about a hot sexual encounter with an anonymous partner has everything to do with connection. If the orgasm is, as the French have termed it, a little death, then the birth of consciousness, the child’s entry into the world and separation from the womb (and what Freud termed its “oceanic effect”) represents a displacement, an individuation that is purchased at the price of isolation. If ego can be defined as the literal and symbolic boundary of the material self, then that demarcation constitutes a prison. Furtive browsers of Internet porn sites might convince themselves that they are engaging in little acts of rebellion in which they only want to see gonads or sexual practices that would normally be hidden from sight, but ultimately the obsession with intimate acts emanates from a more profound search for intimacy. The wandering ego is an exile from the paradise of oneness with nature. Humans, and indeed all organic matter, even molecules, demonstrate a tendency to differentiation, together with a countervailing tendency to dissolution and finally unification with the whole. Isn’t that what the peasants are after in the famed orgy sequence in Bunuel’s Viridiana? The Lonely Crowd is the name of a classic work of sociology, but the title may have even more universal implications than its authors, concerned with the world of post-war strivers, ever intended.

Emmanuel Radnitzky (1890-1976)

“The Destruction of the Object” (l923) is the show-stopper in the current Man Ray show at The Jewish Museum. The artist—born Emmanuel Radnitzky—had been jilted by his lover of three years, the legendary Lee Miller, and the resulting work, fired in the crucible of his heartbreak, made art-textbook history, a little like the image of the eye ball slit by a razor in Buñuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (l929).  Radnitzky photographed Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Proust (on his deathbed), and Joyce. But it is the image of André Breton in front of De Chirico’s “L’Enigme d’une journée” that is the show’s second most stunning piece. Blend Surrealism with Futurism and what do you get? Something curiously naturalistic, like the metronome in “The Destruction of the Object”—a time capsule sending a nostalgic message back from the past, beyond love and loss.

Radnitzky was bar mitzvahed in Brooklyn, but eventually ended up in Paris in time for Dada and Surrealism, with its infatuation with the spontaneity of the photographic image. He moved to Hollywood, and then returned to Paris at a time when New York had emerged as the center of the art world. “All NewYork is Dada and will not tolerate a rival,” he said. The current exhibit, which includes Radnitzky's first film, Le Retour à la Raison (film stock, successions of geometric images, and a nude that all defy reason), is like a message in a bottle, washed up on some silent shore after bobbing solitudinously at sea.