Too Far to Go or Going too Far?

Klaus Mann, Staff Sergeant US Fifth Army (photo: United States Fifth Army)

In her review of Frederic Spotts Cursed Legacy, The Tragic Life of Klaus Mann, Anna Katharina Schaffner quotes the author and Mann himself as follows: “In his diary Klaus complained that his father’s 'general lack of interest in human beings is especially strong towards me.'” Schaffner also quotes Spotts thusly, “Klaus Mann was six times jinxed. A son of Thomas Mann. A homeless exile. A drug addict. A writer unable to publish in his native tongue. A not-so-gay gay. Someone haunted by all his life by a fascination with death.” But the case of Thomas Mann raises another question, that of the camouflage of humanism under which artistic depredations are allowed to fester. A great writer may have an exorbitant appetite for life while at the same time being life’s deadly enemy. Look at Tolstoy who early on exercised his doit du seigneur with his serfs while ending his last days, abandoning his wife and dying in Astopovo railway station. Norman Mailer famously stabbed his wife Adele on the eve of his candidacy for Mayor. V.S. Naipaul’s sadistic treatment of his mistress which involved beatings and disfigurement has been documented in Patrick French’s biography. And what can we say about Picasso. His portraits of the many women in his life appear to be the kiss of death; when he could no longer “palate” them they became works of art. It’s no revelation to learn that successful creative people often possess enormous egos which sucks up experience like a black hole light. When one reads Too Far to Go the short stories that comprise Updike’s eulogy to his first marriage, one wonders if the tristesse of the break up, so beautifully rendered, didn’t, in fact, represent the author sacrificing life for the sake of art. In this view creative work is a form of taxidermy, in which the skinned animal is used to make the head which hangs over the fireplace.

The Expressionist as Rationalist

Thinking is not always associated with abstract expressionism. After all, the technique was called “action painting” and it’s quarterback, Jackson Pollock, was intentionally or unintentionally rough around the edges. He had some of the qualities of the outsider artist with his edgy personality and primal energy. “Robert Motherwell: The East Hampton Years, l944-52,” the exhibit currently on display at East Hampton’s Guild Hall (which is also the title of the book to accompany the exhibition by Phyllis Tuchman), records the sensibility of an artist who came to abstract expressionism from a more cognitive direction than some of his contemporaries. Motherwell was a Stanford graduate who studied philosophy at Harvard and art history with Meyer Schapiro at Columbia. He hung around with the likes of the architect Percival Goodman and when Goodman commissioned him to do a wall painting at B’nai Israel Synagogue in Milburn, New Jersey he consulted Schapiro on Jewish Iconography. Although not part of the current show, “Elegy for the Spanish Republic” (1961), with its political overtones (calling to mind Picasso’s “Guernica,” l937) is one of his most famous paintings and he provided drawings for a poem by Harold Rosenberg (the future art critic of The New Yorker) in a magazine they were both involved with, Possiblilities. In addition, as a young man he travelled to Europe with his father, where he had the luxury to weigh his options between surrealism and cubism. The exhibit features a film in which Motherwell comments on the violence of abstract expressionism quoting Rothko to the effect that “people don’t understand how aggressive my paintings are.” One of his best friends was David Smith and Motherwell was a charter member of the famous circle that included Rothko, Pollock, Kline, de Kooning and Newman. But the film reveals a personality that had the repose to also consider the very movement he was part of from the distance. It’s as if there were six degrees of separation between Motherwell and his contemporaries. He wanted to have his cake and eat it too. Extemporaneity and action were part of his process, but he constantly reworked his paintings and separated himself from his crowd to the extent that he thought before he acted. Eric Bentley wrote The Playwright as Thinker about Brecht. Someone could undertake a monograph on Motherwell called The Expressionist as Rationalist. Here for instance is a text by the poet and painter Henri Michaux which is the centerpiece of a drawing from l952 entitled “In Bed:”  “The sickness that I have condemns me to absolute immobility in bed. When my boredom takes on such excessive proportions that it will wreck my equilibrium this is what I do: I smash my skull--stretch it out before me as far as possible; and when it is all flat, I send out my cavalry. The horses stamp distinctly on the the firm yellow soil.The squadrons then break into a trot and there’s prancing and kicking. And the noise, this clear and repeated rhythm, this excitement that breathes struggle and Victory, enchants the soul of one who is nailed to his bed, and cannot make a move.” For good or bad, Motherwell was tethered to words from the very beginning of his career.

Barcelona Journal IV: Picasso

Watercolor by Hallie Cohen

Picasso was born in Malaga in 1881 and in l895 arrived in Barcelona, as a young art student. If you’d seen his work for sale on a street corner would you have snapped it up? If it was the painting of his dog Klipper, maybe not, but if you knew anything about art you would have grabbed at two postcard sized paintings exhibited as “Two Rooms” now at the Museum, which contains a collection of 4249 pieces, many from the early stages of his career. The museum was created by Picasso secretary and biographer Jaume Sabartes at Picasso’s request and Picasso contributed many works in the collection. Clearly Picasso was one of the world’s great Picasso collectors in l960, when he first proposed the idea to Sabartes.  Many of the early works on exhibit demonstrate the influence on Picasso of other proto-modernists like Cezanne, Manet and Toulouse Lautrec. But his portraits and set pieces have an authority which demonstrate his immersion in and understanding of the Old Masters,--something which is exemplified by his "Science and Charity,” which was painted in l897 when Picasso was only 15 and which depicts a doctor, nun and infant and attending to a dying woman. The curators quote Picasso himself from his biographer Jaume Sabartes in L’Atelier de Picasso. The subject are the 58 paintings based on Velasquez's “Las Meninas,” (1957) which are also exhibited in the museum. “Suppose one were to make a copy of “Las Meninas” in good faith. If it were me the moment would come when I would say to myself: suppose I moved this figure to the right or a little to the left. If the case arose, I would do it my own way forgetting Velasquez. I would almost certainly be tempted to modify the light or arrange it differently in view of the changed positions of the figures.” Is that ever an understatement! What emerged was a synthetic cubist concerto. It’s a homage in the way some of his portraits of his former mistresses are homages and distortions at the same time.

The Square

The bottom line is that after two years of turmoil beginning in the winter of 2011 Mohammed Morsi remains under what the Times describes as "indefinite detention," Hosni Mubarak has moved from jail to house arrest “Mubarak to Be Transferred to House Arrest,” NYT, 8/21/13) and the military is still in power. These are the events that are narrated in Jehane Noujaim’s documentary, The Square, currently playing at Film Forum. Of course, the title referring to Cairo’s Tahir Square, the epicenter of unrest during the initial rebellion against the Mubarak dictatorship, also conjures up the memory of Tiananmen Square, where the Chinese movement was crushed in l989. Politically, both Arab Spring, of which the Egyptian uprising was a part, and the early rebellion in China both emanated from the same impulse--the struggle for human rights. The Square is a jeremiad since it betokens the tragic fate of many freedom movements in which resistance to authoritarianism becomes so ideologized that it spawns its own forms of repression. That’s what’s happening in Syria where Al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist factions have co-opted the opposition. Who knows if parliamentary democracy would have been the product of a successful people’s revolution against the party elite in China? The narrative of The Square is told in microcosm through the eyes of Ahmed, a streetwise agitator, Khalid an actor (who has starred in films like The Kite Runner) and Magdy, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the most torn of all the characters, precisely due to a political agenda—which increasingly puts him at odds with his confreres. The Square recapitulates the sickening history of freedom movements from the Russian Revolution on, with the early millenarian fervor attendant upon shocking degrees of naivete. While one has to admire the courage of the protestors, one wants to give them a history lesson—or two. Have they never heard of an Italian sociologist named Vilfredo Pareto and his concept of  “the circulation of the elites?” Have they never heard the expression that that power is conservative and self-perpetuating, no matter how lofty the ideals it seeks to uphold? The film is rather straightforward and earnest, but there’s one exception and that’s the intermittent cross cuts to a mural that’s constantly being painted by an unidentified hand. This brilliant little touch links the film to the works of painters as varied as Goya, Orozco and Picasso and their narratives of human suffering.

Paris Journal II: Le Petit Fumeur

Photograph: Hallie Cohen

Only in Paris can you find Le Petit Fumer, a shop which specializes in “la cigarette electronique.” If you fell in love with those classic shots of Camus and Picasso, cigarettes dangling out of their mouths, when you were an impressionable young Francophile, but are now trying to kick the habit, Le Petit Fumeur is for you. The attractions are listed the minute you walk into the store “La Sante” (health), “70% economie," “pas de tabaqisme passif” (no innocent sufferers from your smoking), "le service client" and "le qualite." This new kind of smoking even has an endorsement from The Economist which is quoted as saying: “Le monde devrait accueiller la cigarette electronique” ("the world must welcome electronic cigarettes"). Now smokin’ Thai prostitutes have a more exotic solution which is to light up from another orifice, but if you're less adventurous yet want to live a certain style of life without suffering the consequences, Le Petit Fumeur offers an alternative. Always heeding what we might call "l’appel hedonistique” the French have found their way around the stoic suffering that addictive American smokers have to endure. Afashionably attired woman walking out of the Sevres Bablylon Metro stop, wearing bright red lipstick and a camel hair coat, already had her unlit cigarette in hand as she talked animatedly into her headset. She looked like a computer printout for the kid of customer Le Petit Fumeur is looking for.

Inventing Abstraction

"Artist Network Diagram" from Inventing Abstraction

“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here is,” are the lines that adorn Dante’s entrance to Hell. At the entrance to Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925 at MOMA are the following lines written by Kandinsky in l911, “Must we not then renounce the object altogether, throw it to the winds and instead lay bare the purely abstract?” The curators leave Picasso to answer the question in their commentary accompanying his “Woman with Mandolin,” an exercise in analytic cubism from l911, “There is no abstract art. You always have to begin with something.” Move on in the exhibit to Kandinsky's “Impression III.” The work is offered up as an example of how the great painter, noted for his famous work on abstraction, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, has foresworn the object. However, without being juridical, where would the painting be formally or in terms of so-called “content” without the Schoenberg concert on which it was based? By the way according to the exhibit, abstraction was not invented by a person, but a network and it begins with a family tree emphasizing connectivity. At the top are Alvin Langdon Coburn and Duncan Grant and at the bottom the futurist Marinetti. In between those who are connected to at least 24 others—Picasso, Kandinsky, Stieglitz, Leger—are highlighted in red. It looks a little like a weather map, but has the net effect of defeating the the larger concept being espoused. If everything is interrelated, then every subject has an object on which he or she has gazed. So what, you might ask, is the object of Malevich’s "Suprematist Composition: White on White” (1918)? You might also ask “what is reality?” Perhaps it’s not the nature of the object that was changing but the definition of what an object was a la quantum mechanics and relativity theory. Consider that the so-called invention of abstraction was coeval with Einstein's The Theory of General Relativity which was published in l916. “Duchamp seemed to intuit immediately that the emergence of abstraction spelled the demise of painting as a craft and its rebirth as an idea,” is another of the questionable bit of curatorial commentary that appears during the course of the show. Even accepting the notion that abstraction harbingered the death of the object, this is clearly not the case, unless one accepts the view that action painting was merely an ideology. And who says abstraction was invented in the first place? It’s a dubious art historical premise. History and particularly primitive art is rife with it. Still, Inventing Abstraction is only on view until April 15 and even if an objectionable premise has been the occasion to bring these seminal works together, they are well worth seeing.