Modern Kicks

recent acquisitions

So Franklin was recently describing some of his recent purchases from library sales in Boston.  Some nice things, very nice, to be sure--but I think I have him beat.  It's not exactly a fair contest--I had inside access to the book sale I went to before it was open to the public, and I'm afraid I spent more money than he likely did--but I still can't help but brag about the following:

The Glory of Byzantium.  Wanted this one for a while--the catalog to the Met's magisterial exhibition of . . . more than ten years ago?  How did that happen?  This one was a steal, at any rate, at only $3.

Pieter Saenredam, The Utrecht Work.  I'm not sure I would have bought this, as good as it looks, except it was a like-new hardcover and Saenredam had been on my mind, having been looking at a painting by him just the day before.  Plus, I once spent a couple of pleasurable days in Utrecht, mostly in the churches he painted.

Art & Architecture of India: Buddhist-Hindu-Jain.  An old Pelican, out of date, I'm sure, and in an area I know next to nothing about, but hey, it's got some pictures and is in hardcover.  It was also very cheap (50 cents?), if I remember correctly.

The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age.  The embarrassment of admitting I've never read this?  The embarrassment of buying it?  They had multiple copies, and it's probably entertaining.  Also very cheap.

Art and Architecture in Italy, 1600-1750.  An old, unrevised edition, but worthwhile nevertheless.

Along the Ancient Silk Routes: Central Asia Art from the West Berlin State Museums.  Excited about this--very Black Narcissus.  Since I read Foreign Devils on the Silk Road a few months back, it seemed like a natural.

Watteau, 1684-1721.  National Gallery exhibition catalog, huge, not much more to be said.  Only misgiving is that the binding is a little weak--have to be careful with it.  Still, only $7.

Edouard Manet and the Execution of Maximilian.  Before MoMA got there, Brown's Bell Gallery did this fine exhibition.  Paid a little too much for this one, but I was happy to find it.

Henri Matisse: The Early Years in Nice, 1916-1930.  Really have no idea if this is any good, but it has a lot of really good color reproductions, and I realized that there was very little Matisse in my life or my book collection (only one book on him, and it's a tiny Elderfield essay.)  At $3, why not?

There's more, including the stack of periodicals I mentioned in comments below, but the centerpiece has to be this: Agnes Mongan and Paul J. Sachs, Drawings in the Fogg Museum of Art: A Critical Catalogue.  First edition, 1940, three huge fat volumes in very good condition (aside from the dust jackets, which are somewhat soiled, crinkled, with small tears, I'd say excellent condition.)  I'm so excited, I took a bad cellphone photograph of them on my bookshelf.  Damn, even in that bad photograph that doesn't do them justice, they look good.  These did cost a bit of money, but far less than half of what Powells is selling them for (and their price is cheap compared to what I've seen it go for elsewhere.)  Needless to say, I am very excited about this one.  Now I just need the time to look at them.

There's some other stuff, but the one that excites me most is not an art book: The Selected Poems of Janet Lewis.  I've been reading about her poetry for more than a decade, so it's a pleasure to finally read the work itself.  More on that, I hope, to come.  But if you'll excuse me now, I've got to spend some time on the couch in my office with a few good books.

things ain't what they used to be

I was amused by the below, found in an article published in The Art Quarterly vol. 19 (Autumn 1956) on Detroit's St. Jerome in His Study attributed to Jan Van Eyck. As an explanation as to why the theory of W. R. Valentiner that the painting was started by Van Eyck and finished by Petrus Christus did not receive wide acceptance, the author offers this explanation:

Dr. Valentiner's lecture was given as the third after-dinner talk at the meeting of the College Art Association in New York in 1932, in the usual clatter and confusion that follows a hotel banquet. 

That's exactly how conferences always work for me!  Any remaining readers are invited to share their own stories of how their vital contributions to field were lost amid the port and cigars.  In the meantime, cue the Duke and Johnny Hodges:

the eyelessness of days without a letter

Is there anyone who doesn't like mail?  I mean good mail, not just random advertising (some of which can be fun) or endless credit card offers (which never are.)  Like everyone else who came of age before the spread of email and the internets, mail was for me growing up meant one of the main ways of entrance into subcultures.  Freaky catalogs with pages of pins for sale, fanzines, play-by-mail games (all the way back to correspondence chess)-this kind of mail was for you in a very specific kind of way.  And that's not to mention letters of all kinds, infrequent (in my experience) though they might have been (I must confess to a preference for writing by keyboard myself, but we are talking about receiving mail here.)  So you can imagine my approval at reading these words:

Writing and sending letters was a huge part of our upbringing. We sent letters to our grandparents and cousins who live around the Northeast. Whenever we went on vacation, we would send postcards to people back home. So the idea kind of stems from loving mail, the kind you find in your mailbox, and the very personal relationship that mail affords.

They come from Tess Knoebel, co-creator with her sister Anna Knoebel, of Abe's Penny, "a micro-magazine."  From their website:

Each volume contains four postcards that subscribers receive one by one, once per week, for one month. Each postcard features an image and a few lines of text. The full set of four postcards is a full story.

Volume 1.3 (May) will feature photographs by Peter Bernard Killeen and a story by Eric Ledgin, inspired by Peter's images.

I've just received the third installment of the Killeen/Ledgin series, which has amused my co-workers for the past few weeks.  The laconic style of Killeen's unpopulated scenes of obscure buildings and infrastructure are matched by the Ledgin's quietly hilarious story of mayhem.  The Knoebel's cite the penny press as their inspiration, which also seems apt--this is a micro-magazine, a witty image and text feuilleton delivered via postcard, not mail art as its purists would have it.  It's certainly restored some of the delight of checking the mail--at least until next week's final installment.

Also: Abe's Penny on Newsgrist.

just so

Culturegrrl gets this exactly right:

It's unthinkable that Boston's premier newspaper could die at the hands of New York's premier paper. Having just heard the NY Times' cultural news editor, Sam Sifton, exult that his paper's financial troubles had not caused any decrease in the space allotted to the arts, and having read Times assistant managing editor Richard Berke's recent boast that the paper possessed sufficient resources to bankroll art critic Michael Kimmelman's farflung peregrinations, I find the Globe's global plight even harder to comprehend.

I'm just trying to get back into this game, and as part of that I've been trying not to dwell on the depressing topics that haven't been helping so much lately.  But perhaps that's wrong, and I should dwell, because to me the thought of Boston without the Globe is like Boston without the Red Line.

ooh, snap

From the opening paragraph of a review of Simon Vouet: The Italian Years, 1613 - 1627 in The Burlington Magazine (March 2009):

Exhibitions of old masters are no longer so common in France and for several years it has been noticeable that they are more likely to be organised by regional museums (Lille, Grenoble, Rennes, Caen, Nancy . . .).  Has Paris only got eyes for Jan Fabre and Jeff Koons?

The review, alas, is not online, because that (along with dauntingly expensive subscription fees) is how The Burlington Magazine rolls.  Fortunately, we have the The Art Tribune, which has an extensive review complete with some installations shots.

as never before, huh?

I believe I came close to a spit take a few months ago when I read that Michael Fried had a new book out entitled Why Photography Matters as Never Before.  Susan Sontag, I guessed, was rolling in her grave at that one, while a colleague to whom I told the news laughed and said something like, "He's such a little bitch."  Searching through Amy Newman's oral history Challenging Art: Artforum, 1962 - 1974 for something, though, brought me to the quote below.  Rosalind Krauss speaking:

"Radical," "unprecedented"--my feeling about that kind of hyperbole is that the two people whose very form of speech was hyperbole were Michael and Phil.  I think it was partly the basis of their mutual recognition, a kind of badge worn by Jews from New York: if I got cheated, it was the worst cheat that ever happened; if I had a good time, it was unprecedented.

Sounds about right.  Somehow I don't think I'll be getting to the new book.

links, etc.

I have been remiss in, well, a lot of things, but let's stick for now with "not adding or mentioning some noteworthy links" and move on from there.  Anyone reading sites such as this one knows all the below already, but still, here goes:

- Art in America has arrived in the new century, finally creating a website that someone might want to visit.  Of particular note is the "News and Opinion" page, under the direction of the forwardly retreating Sarah Hromack and featuring writers (such as this one, this one, and this one) also found in the sidebar at right.  I'm looking forward to spending more time with the site.

- As much as I like it when media professionals get into the online world, I can't help but often wish it were happening in some other way.  Don't even get me started on the latest headlines about the Boston Globe (the imagine title for that post, should it ever be written: "The world is gradually becoming a place where I do not care to be anymore.")  My general lassitude, along with a certain degree of shame, stopped me from posting about it at the time, but I found myself reading the last months of Regina Hackett's page at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer fairly obsessively.  I found it beautiful and painful.  Art to Go is now gone, but Regina's still here, now at ArtsJournal.  So Another Bouncing Ball will take a place a right.

- Closer to home, I'm not sure how I've escaped knowing about this site for so long.  A recent note on the front page indicates changes will be coming soon, so I hope I haven't found about it just too late.  Worth keeping an eye on.

- I also missed congratulation the Big RED & Shiny crowd on busting through the 100 issues mark back in February.  That is a heck of an achievement that deserves recognition.  At the time, Matt Nash looked back and asked, "How the hell did we get here?"  By working a heck of a lot, I bet.

- More recently in BR&S, New England in decay: a review of a mid-20th century New England printmaker who illustrated Robert Frost and whose work, or some of it, is as grim as its time.  Or ours.

- I've mentioned Adventures in the Print Trade before, and now do so again, as a reminder to myself to look at it more often and to add it to the sidebar.

- Despite appearances, I have been out a bit these past few months.  Work took me to Albany in January (whoo-hoo), and since I read Anaba, I knew I had to go see the Empire State Plaza Art Collection.  It was as weird and wonderful as I could have hoped, though I didn't get to see all of the same works that Martin shows.  Think of the lighting and ambience of Penn Station, but with no bustle and no commuters.  Instead, a few government bureaucrats and those come to see them move through the largely empty corridors, past the giant McDonalds, the shoeshine kiosk, and an amazing collection of American modernism at or just past its apex.  It's great stuff, and a very strange experience.  I took some pictures, which I'm not much good at, but you can see them over at Flickr.  Gene Davis, getting no respect, sets the tone.

Soon I'll be out to see this in Newport (the late artist's site here); and of course there's the Venetians in Boston, the Dutch sailing to Salem, and more.  As for reading, I'm going through this and that, with a book on a Swedish bird painter at the top of the stack right now.  Not kidding.  We'll see what it's like, maybe tell you soon.  We shall see.

the rose

You know, when I sit at the computer to do a last check of email and the headlines before getting ready for bed, I'm not expecting to be punched in the stomach (full story, for the moment, here.)  These days, though, perhaps I should be.  I'm sure in the days to come, starting tomorrow, there will be the usual accounts of ethical and legal wrangling, denunciations and expressions of protest.  And those are all to be expected, even necessary, and perhaps might even do some good.  Perhaps I'll even engage in a bit of them myself.  Right now, though, I'm just numb--numb, and tired of feeling like things are just going to keep getting worse.

waking when it's over

First post of the new year!  That means I should take notice of some of the usual year-end business around the web, I suppose.  So:

- Sebastian Smee in the Globe, praising RISD's new building and Mass MoCA's Sol LeWitt, and lamenting that so many museums closed their doors around the time he came to town.

- Also on the local front, Matt Nash does the review thing, taking stock of the changes (via.)

- For those that like that sort of thing, Sharon Butler had the year in art blogging, a practice that seems very odd and remote to me now--a strange feeling, given how much time I spent over the past few years reading art blogs and writing something like one.

- And from Sharon, a bit of year-end cleverness.  OK, I haven't read them all, so I don't know how clever they actually are, but it's a little different, at least.

- Back to New England, Greg Cook recently collected nominations for the 2008 Boston Art Awards, which you can read here (with the added background info here.)  Greg kindly invited me to make nominations, but I failed to do so, partly because (as this site shows) I saw or did very little in the past year, partly because of general inertia.  I'm trying to work on that.

- Over in that other England, plants in the frost at Black Crag on New Year's Day.  No word if a thrush was also spotted; Bunny remains optimistic anyway, about 2009, at least.

Winter's dregs remain desolate here as the snow and ice falls.  For the coming year, Foreign Policy assembles a cheery crew to chant "Doom, doom, doom," and it's hard to say that they're wrong.  On the other hand, Shepard Fairey's "Hope" portrait of the President-elect is going into the National Portrait Gallery.  So there's that.  Unfortunately, on the proverbial third hand, I had never noticed before how Fairey's foreshortening of Obama's head made him look more like Deval Patrick than himself.  So perhaps I should just prepare myself, as the cool kids say, to get disappointed by someone new.

how can we know the dancer from the dance?

Stepping away from the chocolate-covered toffee for a moment, I just finished reading Michael Barber's Anthony Powell: A Life, finding it a modest but serviceable biography.   Last year at this time I was immersed in the midst of A Dance to the Music of Time, so Barber's volume, which I received as a gift, seemed especially appropriate reading for the holidays.

Biography is not, generally speaking, my favorite genre.  I'm as entertained by old gossip as anyone else, of course, and as easily caught up in a compelling narrative, but most lives--even notable ones--aren't all that interesting.  The good parts only come after one's dutifully pressed through chapters on school days and the like, and the ending's always the same.  Then there's the business, with artists' lives, among others, of the relation of life and work, and how tiresome that whole question can be.  A friend of mine once observed that the profiles of actors that the entertainment press routinely churns out could reliably be divided into two groups,  those that breathlessly revealed the performer was nothing like his current character and those that, with the same sense of amazement, observed that he was just like it.  With artists' biographies, the usual expectation is somewhat different, though no less predictable: be amazed as it's learned that the creator of great things actually was an awful shit!  No, thanks.

With Powell, it's a bit different.  The worst that anyone--or, more precisely, that Barber--can say about him, while not always edifying, doesn't rank so poorly.  That he could be peevish, that some thought him a bore or a snob, that he had a bit of an ego--those are not far from the equivalent of claiming, in a job interview, that one's worst flaw is that one works too hard or the like.  And given that Powell did spend decades in and around literary London, there's no shortage of amusing anecdotes to fill the chapters.  Barber dutifully gives the high points of Powell's career, providing summaries of the press reception for his novels, and charting out his progress across the decades.  So what's not to like?  The book's two main flaws are perhaps unavoidable, though the larger one seems to be made worse by the author's style.  Barber spends a great deal of time on the literary parlor game of which figures from Powell's life became characters in Dance, a subject that inevitably has colored a great deal of the commentary on the work (the Chicago paperbacks, which I read, even promote certain identifications on the back cover, if I remember correctly.)  Not unexpected, but in the end, who cares?  Obsessives do, of course, and they probably make up a great deal of the audience for a Powell biography, but it didn't strike me that there was much to be learned.  Ultimately this sort of source-seeking, while diverting to a point, amounts to a failure to take the work on its own terms.  Knowing the George Orwell contributed to some degree to the character of Erridge, to pick a well-known example, doesn't really tell you anything about Powell, his character, or his source; and Powell drew inspiration from figures of even less current interest.  If Barber endeavored to show us in detail how the novelist turned his models into art, what methods he used, that might be worthwhile, but playing spot-the-inspiration simply gets old.

The more serious limitation lies with Barber's unwillingness or inability to really animate Powell's own story, to bring to life the inner motivations behind his large ambition and deep curiosity.  This is in part due to Barber's aforementioned modesty, which is not without its charm--as was widely noted in reviews, he cheerfully quotes Powell's own assessment of him as "an uninspiring figure, to say the least"--and has a certain honest integrity to it.  It's also reflective of, as Barber argues, Powell's own retiring character and the fact that, as an unauthorized work, certain resources were closed to the biographer.  Still, there's a rather surprising breeziness to the book, both in style and in judgments, that caused more than one raised eyebrow on my part.  It feels as if, having laid the ground for the book's limits to be forgiven, Barber felt relieved of the duty to not be sloppy, a very undergraduate sort of failing that makes one itch for a red pen.  That said, the only howler I found is when he blandly writes of Edmund Wilson and F. Scott Fitzgerald that they "overlapped at Princeton."  True as far as it goes, I guess, but I don't consider that an endorsement, nor think British understatement can be accepted as a plea.  In any event, I'm not equipped to judge the accuracy or handling of much of the material under examination, but Barber does not always give one confidence.

He does, in the end, though, give a good read, and a balanced, sane look at the life of a balanced, sane writer.  As most of the reviews I saw seemed to shrug, Barber's book will do until someone comes along to do it better.  Until then, there's always Powell's novels, memoirs, and journals, which should give any prospective biographer a good idea of what it means to examine character.

Also in recent reading of somewhat old books: The United States of Arugula.  Since I think everyone's read this already, I'll just link to the post by Michael Ruhlman from last summer that made me want to read it in the first place--he covers most of the bases, including the annoying footnotes.  Enjoyable read, though.  Next up, as I continue to try to ignore the outside world, we go way back with The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century.  It's got all the Mathers!  Can't wait.