Matisse's "The Red Studio" at MoMA

two plaster sculptures from "The Red Room"

Matisse’s “The Red Studio” derived from the tradition of studio paintings (Velazquez's Las Meninas” is one of the most famous of its predecessors). Matisse was not painting himself so much as the objects in his studio and not the process ie palette or easel but the product. “The Red Studio” was as Apollinaire commented, the “most disparaged” of Matisse’s work.  His patron Serge Shchukin rejected the commission. There were ll objects in the artist’s studio at Issy Les Molineux  painted over in vermillion red. Amongst them were two plaster sculptures from a series entitled “Jeannette IV” clearly visible on two stools. The large nude has a particularly interesting provenance. Matisse used his daughter Margaret Duthuit as one of the models who posed with their knees raised. He alternately called these particular paintings, which were destroyed (and only exist as they're portrayed in "The Red Studio") as “night” or “dawn” after the names of Michelangelo’s sculptures on the two tombs in the Medici chapels. Alain Robbe-Grillet once said,“New forms seem like the absence of form.” Curiously there's still something radical and extreme about "The Red Studio." It feels like an act of erasure, as if the artist sacrificed the objects of his world--and their meanings--to color.

read "Inventing Abstraction at MoMA" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "A Whiter Shade of Pale" by Procol Harum

Dear Ethicist: Is it Wrong to Have Violent Thoughts?

Tomas de Torquemada, the first Grand Inquisitor

Dear Ethicist: Is it wrong to have violent wishes? And what about sexual fantasy? Let’s say I covet my neighbor’s non-binary partner and want a threesome in a dungeon. Should I try not to think these things? Repression is never a good thing. It’s like depression. Some psychiatrists believe it should be treated and others think the symptom is sending a message. Let’s not confuse the messenger with the message, BTW, but I'm disinhibiting which is giving me a loose tongue. Soon I’ll be having one of my Tourette episodes in which repressed hatred takes the form of invective. It’s wrong fitting your enemies for cement shoes before you toss them in the East River—one of the punishments Mafia dons once handed out. The stocks are another punishment and visits to museums of medieval torture devices in hillside Tuscan villages don’t help matters. You don’t need to be rocket scientist to allow that the Inquisition could be very creative when it came to punishment and retribution. On the other hand, what good is it to try to fill the mind with thoughts of love, when you're going to turn into Rasputin the moment the endorphins wear off?

read "The First Law of Emotional Thermodynamics: Longing Is Directly Proportional to Self-Hatred" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "Shake Me, Wake Me When It's Over" by The Four Tops

Elsinore or White Castle?

Now is the winter of your discontent made glorious summer by this sun of New York! My, how all occasions do inform against not only me but everyone (get off the pity pot already), but not sans teeth which you will need when you attend the convention of Shakespearians scholars held this year at White Castle. White Castle is a latter day Globe Theatre and a cynosure for scholars like Harvard’s Stephen Greenblatt and Columbia’s James Shapiro. White Castle may conjure horsepower rather than horses and there are few White Castles that have a moat. White Castle was founded September 13, 1921 so it obviously had an influence on Orson Welles’ classic Chimes at Midnight which centers around the repudiation of Falstaff by Henry. The rest is silence but by the time Fortinbras arrives at Elsinore he’s hungry and ready to join Craver Nation.

read "The Final Solution: All in the Family" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and see the animation of Erotomania

Et in Arcadia ego

Here is a quote from Jonathan Bate's review of Paul Holberton's A History of Arcadia in Art and Literature in the TLS: “Panofsky’s essay was called ‘Et in Arcadia ego.” It proposed that the tomb of Daphnis in Virgil’s fifth eclogue was the source for the inscription on the plinth holding a skull in Guercino’s baroque painting of two Acrcadian shepherds confronted by the knowledge there is mortality even in the most pleasant place.” Panofsky was the father of iconography and Bate is a knighted academic and novelist who teaches at Arizona State University, no less. But it’s a mouthful by any standards. “Say no more!” as Monty Python used to warn. The subject of Arcadia is actually an interesting piece of iconography and the above sentences are swimming in the kind of erudition in which some readers may actually drown, a la Narcissus who was smitten by his own reflection. Epistemology is a fragile discipline. An educated person can be like an overexcited child always raising their hand in class—unable to hold off disgorging all they know. It’s notoriously hard for intellectuals to keep a secret. Arcadia is generally thought to be a place of simple repose and beauty, something that was apotheosized by the pre-Raphaelites. It’s ironic that so many long sentences, no matter how interesting they turn out to be, are needed to convey the point. I am in Arcadia. While reading Bate's piece was heady, the experience could hardly be called Arcadian.

read "Why Big German Words Like Vergangenbangenheit Carry Weight" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "What a Wonderful World"by Sam Cooke

Diplomacy Porn

Christiansborg Palace

The popular Netflix series Borgen deals with the machinations of a fictitious female Danish prime minister, Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen) who inhabits Copenhagen's Christiansborg Palace, also known as Borgen. It’s “diplomacy porn,” Scenes from a Marriage meets Clausewitz--who once famously said “war is diplomacy by other means." Both the Danish national politics with its moderate, left and right wing parties are spotlighted along with both the civil war in an African country Khorun resembling Ethiopia and the war in Afghanistan. Borgen bears comparison to The Bureau, another popular series, where the internecine workings of the French Intelligence service are counterposed with the complex interior lives of the characters. In Borgen, diplomacy goes on in the news room of the country’s major news station as well as between the PM's press secretary, Kasper Juul (Pilou Asbaek) and a reporter, Katrine Fonsmark (Birgitte Hjort Sorensen) who are involved in a romantic duel a la Philadelphia Story. Truth itself is the sometimes inflated currency. It's the lode that's mined and ultimately drives the narrative. The feminist angle, as manifest both in the chambers of government and bed chambers is naturally an important part of the plot, as well as a host of painful secrets involving childhood abuse and mental illness. The lucubrations of plot recall another Bergman movie, Through a Glass Darkly in which the mental illness of a child attends the striving and self-centered parent.  

read "More Flicks Than Pricks" by Francis Levy, TheScreamingPope

Vassily Kandinsky: Around the Circle

"Study for Improvisaton #28" by Vassily Kandinsky

You can take liberties when reviewing an exhibition by the author of a seminal treatise entitled “On the Spiritual in Art.” The current show at the Guggenheim "Vassily Kandinksky: Around the Circle"cleverly sandwiched between the two parts of a exhibit by the Chilian Artitst, Cecily Vicuna, “Spin Spin Triangulene,” which if you don’t know is a “polyradical framework(s) with high spinning ground states.” Vicuna, in fact, quotes Kandinsky thusly “The circle is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in balance.” The artist himself describes his poetics as an exploration of “the expressive potential of color in the symbolic often spiritual resonance of forms.” You might call this ur-abstraction. "Around the Circle" underscores the enormous influence Kandinsky had on almost all abstract art.There are intimations of Miro’s dreams and Braque’s geometry, just to name a few. Kandinsky’s spiritualism opened the door to surrealism too. He said: “Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays touching one key or aother to cause vibrations in the soul.” The show itself starts from the end of Kandinsky’s career and as you significantly circle upwards leads back to the beginning, with the museum's architecture inadvertently making its own statement about the trajectory of the artist's career. BTW, talking about the arc of life and the spiritual (vs the material?), Kandinsky didn't start out as a starving artist. He had inherited some real estate which he lost after the revolution in l917.

read "Inventing Abstraction at MoMA" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to 'Walking on Broken Glass" by Annie Lennox

55 Cancri e

deep field image from James Webb Space Telescope

The Big Bang is estimated to have occurred 13.2 billion years ago.  The James Webb Space telescope launched December 21 2021 reached the LT Lagrange point, one million miles in space. Hubble previously the most powerful tool revealed that space was expanding and there are also instruments like the Event Horizon telescope that explore black holes like the one at the center of the Milky Way. One of the points of interest is the locating of exoplanets, like the recently discovered 55 Cancri e surrounding distant stars--light years away. Webb is estimated to be able to relay images going back as far as l00,000,000 years after the Big Bang. What will this mean for those who believe in the existence of wormholes? Is the astrophysics behind a space telescope a little like the difference between driving and flying? Will those who believe in string theory and alternate worlds, based on the quantum notion that one piece of matter can be two places at the same time, tell NASA scientists to “get a horse.” Though a mystery is not necessarily something that can’t be understood, it may be a force that has yet to be explained. Back in l956, amateur astronomers could discover Sputnik, the first satellite in the night sky, but what does it mean to have the ability to sight phenomena that still elude understanding? 55 Cancri e is an exo-planet about eight times the size of the earth that takes 7 days to orbit a G star named Copernicus.

read "The Wormhole Society" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and listen to "Tell It Like It Is"by Bonnie Raitt, Aaron Neville and Greg Allman