Rome Journal: Rome, NY

Sophie Loren Displays Her Hairy Armpits

When you’re young you fall in love with other cultures and ways of life. You're swept away by the glamour, sexuality and cultivation of the French with their cuisine and their encyclopaedists following the tradition of Diderot. You love the Italians for their romance and passion. All the women seem to be like Anna Magnani and you might even rebel against the tsunami of Brazilian waxing to let the hair in your armpits grow as Italian actresses did in the neorealist films of the 50’s. If you're a Russophile, you might sport a beard like Solzhenitsyn or start pounding your shoe on a podium like Khrushchev. If you fall in love with North Korea, you might find a bomb to smile at like Kim Jong-un. But is life in Rome, for example, different than any large city in the United States, New York, Chicago or L.A. ? Well, it’s warmer in general than Chicago or New York and if you happened to arrive in Rome from JFK after the big January freeze, you might find the city almost tropical by comparison, even though the temperatures were only in the 50’s and 60’s and went down to the 30’s and 40’s at night. At the end of the day harried looking commuters crowd the bus stops and subway platforms just as they do in New York. If you give in and take a cab you might find an old-fashioned driver full of old-fashioned bonhomie, who talks to you about how he eats pizza for breakfast and quizzes you in broken English about how well you speak Italian even though your mastery of the language is limited to “grazie” and “arrivederci.” “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” goes the old Thoreau saw. But is it really true? Is there no difference to living in Rome than New York? Underneath the parodies of classic Roman behavior, like the wild gesticulating of hands, is there not something elementally different, some almost ineffable quality that permeates, food and love and work? You make the rounds in Rome, just like you do in any metropolis, but the choreography is different and so is the music and sure there's a difference in the quality of life between Rome, Italy and Rome, NY?

In Defense of "L'Origine du monde"

Gustav Courbet's "L'Orgine du monde"

Why must any form of artistic expression be defended? Should one be grateful that The Philadelphia Museum is not going to take a Chuck Close show down electing instead to simply introduce it with another show dealing with gender and power issues. ("PAFA Declines to Remove Chuck Close Exhibit After Sexual Harrassment Allegations," Philly Magazine, 1/30/18.) Meanwhile  The National Gallery of Art has gone one step further ("National Gallery of Art Cancels a Chuck Close Show After Misconduct Allegations,"NYT, 1/26/18). Back in December, the Met was being challenged by two young women regarding the exhibition of work by Balthus. ("We Need to TalkAbout Balthus,"NYT, 12/8/17) The Met by the way did not comply. What is astonishing is that lack of protest about Courbet’s “L’Origine du monde,” depicting his subject, who had happened to be a famous Whistler model Joanna Hiffernan, in a famously wanton pose. Perhaps it’s better not to write about this, for fear of exciting some new protest, but isn’t making art into the equivalent of Samizdat a form of collaboration with the most reactionary forces in our culture? A.O. Scott in a recent essay on the Woody Allen controversy ("My Woody Allen Problem," NYT, 1/31/18) makes the point that the life of the artist can’t be separated from his work. Well what about Caravaggio? He was a murderer. Should his shows be taken down or introduced by admonitory co-exhibits which warn vulnerable viewers about the dangers of undertaking a life of crime?

Rome Journal: Arcimboldo

"La primavera" by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (photograph by Hallie Cohen)

Was Arcimboldo the first surrealist? The answer is "no" based on the show at the Palazzo Barberini which paints him as an ecumenical Renaissance man. Milanese of birth, Arcimboldo became the “painter of the court” in 1562 for Maximillian who had become Holy Roman Emperor. However, the inception of his work was more a product of the humanistic spirit of discovery in which the bizarre and grotesque constituted the panoply of mankind’s condition. Both the spirit of Leonardo and of course the discovery of the New World influenced the famous “composite heads” made of fruits, or illustrating verdant nature in “The Four Seasons.” “The Platter of Roast Meats” is one of the so-called “Reversible Heads.” Depending on which way you look at it, it’s either the chef's pate or the dish he’s serving. Fans of the contemporary artist Georg Baselitz, who paints the bottom on top, will experience the shock of recognition. And then there are the “teste caricale” also known as the “pittore ridicule” like “The Jurist” which shows a lawyer’s collar made of documents or “The Librarian,” with its torso composed of books. One can imagine a painter like Dali delighting in his discovery of Arcimboldo, but the sensibility is based less on incongruity than an almost irrepressible exultation in the all that is human.

Rome Journal: Two Way Street

"Mi Ricardo lll," watercolor by Hallie Cohen

When Robert Rauschenberg photographed Cy Twombly descending the Ara Coeli Steps he might have been filming Eurydice descending into the underworld. Why assume that ground level was the end of a journey eventually leading into the heart of darkness? But modernism is a purgatory filled with damned souls who are condemned to wander aimlessly while reinventing the world in the absence of any handed down notion of how human existence can be represented. Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death are the titles of Kierkegaard’s essays. "Do lost people really go round in circles?" was a story in National Geographic (8/20/13). Rauschenberg could have shot Twombly’s ascent but he chose the opposite direction to indicate in Yeats’ words, that the “the center cannot hold/mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

Rome Journal: A Room of One's Own

Some people look at a room as a launching point. A Room of One’s Own is the name of a series of essays by Virginia Woolf and the title connotes a certain integrity of being. But many travelers to Rome regard their digs as merely the equivalent of a tent at a campsite. To them it’s merely a place to sack out. That can be a big mistake since one of the most sublime pleasures of visiting one of the great tourist meccas of the world, a virtual ode to antiquity itself, is to stay holed up in one’s room and just look out the window. It’s nice if you are on the Gianocolo and you overlook St. Peter’s, but no mind if you’re simply facing a brick wall. There’s something special about making a long journey to some place where everyone  is rushing to accumulate as many memories as possible and simply refusing to go anywhere. It’s a test of one’s mettle. Can you simply be sitting at some makeshift desk or lying flat on your back staring at the cracks in the ceiling with your hands folded behind  your head, while your friends are photographing relics? There’s another Rome that's there for those who don't like to sightsee.  It's a Rome of sirens wailing in the streets and plumbers talking loudly as they repair a pipe in the hallway outside your door, the Rome of solitary telephones which wouldn’t connect to reception if you wanted them to and then finally the Rome of buses filled with impatient sightseers whose idling engines make it impossible to get that once last wink of early morning sleep.