In the past few days I’ve been reading the letters that Henry James wrote to the young sculptor Hendrik Andersen in the early years of the twentieth century. What fascinates me are the things that James has to say about the act of creation. He is begging his young friend to sacrifice the general to the specific, to express the boldest emotions through the subtlest formal calculations. Andersen was twenty-seven when James met him in Rome in 1899, and at least since Leon Edel published his biography of James more than a generation ago, this handsome, fair-haired, Norwegian-American youth has been a source of fascination for anybody who wants to understand the nature and extent of James’s homoerotic experience. But reading the letters now, the infatuation strikes me as less interesting than the clear-eyed attention that James gives to Andersen’s work. James, who was, even as he wrote to Andersen, developing the magnificent excess of his own late style, keeps pushing his young friend to attend to the details, to reject the general effect, “to individualize & detail the faces, the types, ever so much more—to study, ardently, the question of doing it.” Here we have one of the great exponents of the madness of art arguing for the sanity of art. “You see,” he writes to Andersen, “I live myself in the very intensity of reality and can only conceive of any art-work as producing itself piece by piece and touch by touch, in close relation to some immediate form of life that may be open to it.”
What has turned my attention back to Andersen right now is a visit I made, when I was in Rome a few weeks ago, to the Museo Hendrik Christian Andersen, the very existence of which I had been unaware until a friend who lives in the city told me I must go. I had known that Andersen’s sculpture was grandiosely neoclassical, but nothing can really prepare you for the homoerotic high camp of his prancing gods and athletes. And if this orgy of testosterone is not enough to convince you that the Museo Andersen is a kitsch classic, just wait until you take a look at Andersen’s lunatic designs for a World City dedicated to art, science, philosophy, and religion. The studies for this vast, Beaux Arts Babel are heaped and strewn with hundreds if not thousands of Andersen’s icy humanoids. Although some of the figures purport to be female, their musculature keeps giving them away. James—the man some have accused of being oblivious to sex—is unequivocal about this. “I sometimes find your sexes not quite intensely enough differentiated,” he writes to this young man he found extremely hot, commenting that the ladies resemble “a shade too much the gentlemen.” Some of Andersen’s sculpted lovers are, James first says, “noble & admirable.” But he doesn’t “find the hands, on the backs, living enough & participant enough in the kiss. They would be, in life, very participant—to their finger-tips & would show it in many ways.”
When Andersen, in the years before World War I, was on the verge of putting together a folio volume outlining the World City, he sought a statement from James. James turned him down. He could not see “any use on all the made earth … for a ready-made city, made-while-one-waits, as they say, & which is the more preposterous & the more delirious, the more elaborate & the more ‘complete’ & the more magnificent you have made it. Cities are living organisms, that grow from within & by experience & piece by piece; they are not bought all hanging together, in any inspired studio.” Looking at Andersen’s chilly, simplified heroes, you cannot help but think of Fascist sculpture. And there are certainly proto-totalitarian fantasies mixed up with the megalomania of the World City. James felt this. His critique of the World City amounts to a plea for the city as a product of liberal experience. Andersen had some contact with Mussolini, who in 1926 promised him land for his urbanist fantasy. And in a 1935 radio broadcast, Andersen praised Mussolini and related his ideals to those that Andersen had developed in his plans for the World City. Andersen may be a ridiculous clown, nothing but a bit player in the tangled story of how art-for-art’s-sake precipitated the anti-democratic leanings of certain artists and writers, including, of course, Ezra Pound. But the Museo Andersen is a part of that story. And people are taking notice. Yinka Shonibare—the ultra-hot British artist responsible for the headless mannequins, outfitted in African-patterned eighteenth-century outfits, that are popping up in museums around the globe—did an intervention at the Museo Andersen a few years ago, and the museum still contains a ridiculous Shonibare sculpture, of a headless James and Andersen reenacting the Birth of Adam from the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
The Museo Andersen has a power—the power of an over-the-top personality indulging his every whim. Walking through rooms full of figures so over-sexed as to feel sexless—they were bankrolled by Andersen’s wealthy American sister-in-law, who came to live with him after his brother’s early death—you can see that what held James in Andersen was more than his Scandinavian good looks. In the unabashedness of the young artist’s aims James recognized something of his younger self. He loved the excess of Hendrik Andersen. The man was excessively attractive and excessively ambitious. But James could not avoid the conclusion that Andersen’s was a simpleminded excess—an excess without depth or nuance. Looking at one of Andersen’s studies of two lovers, James insists that there has to be “more flesh and pulp in it, more life of surface & of blood-flow under surface, than you have hitherto, in your powerful simplifications, gone in for.” This was written in 1906. A decade later, when the world was at war, Andersen was sitting in Rome, fantasizing about a World City, while Henry James was in London, visiting wounded soldiers and Belgian refugees—“the exiled, the broken, and the bewildered.” Hendrik Andersen could not see, despite James’s best efforts, that art-for-art’s-sake is grounded in reality. He would be neither the first artist nor the last artist who has failed to grasp that essential point.
Jed Perl is the art critic of The New Republic.
One of the running jokes in On Beauty, Zadie Smith’s third novel, is that its main character is philosophically opposed to beauty. Howard Belsey is a professor of art history at Wellington College, and like all middle-aged professors in campus novels, he is a ludicrous figure--unfaithful to his wife, disrespected by his children, and, of course, unable to finish the book he has been talking about for years. In Howard’s case, the book is meant to be a demolition of Rembrandt, whose canvases he sees as key sites for the production of the Western ideology of beauty.
Lourdes
Palisades Tartan
Harlan--In the Shadow of “Jew Süss”
Zeitgeist Films
The Art of the Steal
Sundance Selects
Catholic churches are where Catholic people go to pray. The Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes is where Catholic people go for miracles. When I was a schoolboy, a Catholic classmate of mine had a sister with a malformed foot. Their parents, working-class people, were saving scrupulously for a trip to Lourdes, hoping for a miracle to heal their daughter’s foot. The family moved away, and
I never learned the end of the story; but from them I got my first encounter with fervent faith.
Memory of their fervor was refreshed by Jessica Hausner’s Lourdes. This Austrian director’s film is not a documentary, but it uses its story as a means to explore the procedures at the Lourdes shrine. The film is neither an obeisance nor an exposé: it is a journey through a complex institution founded on faith.
Christine, a young woman who is paraplegic and wheelchair-bound, is a member of a group that is on a mission to Lourdes. All visitors--and there are about six million a year from around the world, many of them ambulatory--either come in groups or they are grouped and are assigned a guide. These guides are either women wearing headdresses, nurses’ uniforms, and red cardigans, or they are uniformed men who are members of the Order of Malta. All along the way there are priests as advisers.
Hausner’s tone is set at once. The first shot could not be more thoroughly free of bloated religiosity. (Lourdes is not in any industrial sense a “religious” picture.) We see the cafeteria of the sanctuary before visitors arrive: waitresses are setting tables. Choral music filters in, as it occasionally does later. Thus simply, the director tells us that we are in for experience, not proselytizing. Christine’s group arrives, eats--Christine has to be fed--and sets forth on its adventure.
There isn’t much of a narrative, just enough to let us see most of the resources of the experience, which takes several days and includes everything from the sacred grotto to the souvenir shop. Though the pilgrims go there for miracles, the church is very strict about determining whether or not they occur. Bernadette Soubirous, a peasant girl in southwestern France, believed that she saw the Virgin Mary here eighteen times in 1858, a belief that is the bedrock of the shrine, which has subsequently had about 200 million visitors. Those who claim that their prayers here cured them of some kind of complaint are put through inquiry by a medical board; if they pass, they face a church board of inquiry. Very many have claimed cures, but only about seventy miracles have been confirmed. (The change must not only really happen, it must last.) Christine is one of the candidates for the miraculous, and we make the journey with her.
The archbishop in Shaw’s Saint Joan says, “A miracle is an event that creates faith.” But faith also creates the miracle, apparently. And, as Hausner shows, the miracle also creates jealousy. (“Why did he get helped and not me or my friends?”) So miracles not only help individuals, they also nourish disappointments, with which the priests deal.
Hausner’s chief accomplishment in the film, aided by her competent direction and a pleasant cast, is the maintenance of her view. She neither kneels nor winks at us. She presents an activity of faith by fellow human beings, hard or easy though it may be for us to accept it. (A physician tells me that some American Catholic hospitals occasionally send patients to Lourdes with a nurse assistant. Medicine, for these people, finds its appropriate level in the great scheme of things.) The state of mind of those who leave Lourdes still in their wheelchairs is not deeply explored here. But the film is a moving reminder of a fairly universal condition--the hunger for otherness that persists in most human beings, religious or not.
Germany continues its stern self-scrutiny. At least since Stalingrad (1993), Germans have been making films that examined various segments of the Nazi past. That this is a sign of generational change is underscored by the latest. Harlan--In the Shadow of “Jew Süss” is completely generational: this documentary concentrates on the children and the grandchildren of a prominent Nazi figure.
Veit Harlan was one of the prime film directors of the Hitlerite day. Born in 1899, he began his career in 1926 as an actor--he was a man of striking good looks-and began directing in 1935. (His first marriage, to a Jewish woman, had already been dissolved.) When Hitler and Co. took power, Harlan was compliant, was approved, and kept on working. In 1940 he was commissioned to make the anti-Semitic propaganda film Jew Süss. (The screenplay, bitterly enough, was based on a novel by a Jew, Lion Feuchtwanger, but its treatment of the story was drastically canted for Nazi purposes.) The film won high official admiration. Though there is no means of accurately measuring its malevolent effect, it was seen by millions. Goebbels was so pleased with Harlan that in 1944, by which time World War II was grinding Germany down, he commissioned the director to make a patriotic historical epic called Kolberg, for which--even in those straitened days--more than 200,000 soldiers and sailors were detached to serve as extras.
After the war, Harlan was tried twice for aiding the Nazis and twice acquitted. He made a few more films of no distinction, and died--on Capri--in 1964. But this new film is not about him, even though he is glimpsed in footage from old interviews: it is about his children and grandchildren and niece--the states of mind and feeling of thirteen people who, in this altered age, whether they still bear the name Harlan or not, are descendants of the man who made one of the most successfully vicious of all Nazi films. (Among the odd facts, his niece was married to Stanley Kubrick.)
The director, Felix Moeller, has interviewed all those involved, apparently asking sharp questions (which we do not hear) and evoking considered, open replies. The range of response is wide, depending inevitably on the respondent’s age. Harlan’s son Thomas, also a film director, has carried the knowledge of his father’s career through his own life like a kind of therapeutic burden. On the other hand, a granddaughter says that if Harlan had been a Resistance fighter, it would not make her heroic: why, then, should her grandfather’s misdeeds taint her? Though the sense of involvement varies, virtually all Harlan’s descendants have had to evolve some sort of perspective to help them.
Cinematically, Moeller flourishes. He shows again, through braided interviews, that talking heads can be used in rhythms and large thematic phrases--with a sense of movement--if the people are interesting. Besides, Moeller has interwoven relevant clips from Harlan’s films and bits of past personal footage to illustrate what is being discussed. The result is a fearfully fascinating and disturbing picture. All of the family want to be treated justly, which is reasonable enough, though of course that justice would not exist if their forebear and his friends had prevailed. Once again history devolves into irony.
Through the past decade, a struggle in and around Philadelphia has come to national attention--the dispute over the Barnes Foundation. Pre-eminently, this foundation is known for its art museum in a suburb of the city. Its collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist and early modern painting is glorious--Matisse, Renoir, Monet, Degas, Seurat, Picasso, and so forth by the score. (Whenever the collection is mentioned, its estimated value is also mentioned, as if to certify its quality. A current guess is $25 billion.)
The foundation was created in 1922 by the mightily rich Albert C. Barnes, a physician who developed medications that were hugely successful. The museum’s condition and position have been the main points of contention. The building is in need of renovation. This and its relative inaccessibility have motivated Philadelphians of some prestige and financial clout to agitate for a new building more accessible to the city. Opposition to these proposals was equally fierce, because Barnes’s will specifies that the collection remain in this building in this locality.
The conflict has evoked blasts and counter-blasts and legal proceedings, all of which are now past, according to The Art of the Steal. This lively documentary about the dispute, directed by Don Argott, makes its position known through its title and now serves chiefly as a reminder of how important an aesthetic decision was to a metropolitan community. It closes with a note telling us that the new building is under construction in town and will be ready, with the Barnes collection installed in it, in 2012.
But the film says little about the matter in Barnes’s will that seems to me most extraordinary. In one salient aspect Barnes reminds me of the theater director Jerzy Grotowski. When Grotowski’s Polish Laboratory Theatre played in New York in 1969--three productions in an Off-Off-Broadway space--Grotowski himself was in the lobby at the entry to the space for every performance and, with only a glance, vetted each prospective member of the audience. (The attendees never numbered more than sixty.) He could tell at once, at least in his own view, whether he wanted this person to be present when his company strove for profundity. Some well-known people were turned away as--he apparently thought--mere novelty hunters. Grotowski believed that the director always “keeps in mind that he has two ‘ensembles’ to direct: the actors and the spectators. The performance results from an integration of these two ‘ensembles.’” (I saw all three productions, and only a few other times in a lifetime of theater-going have I felt that I was part of a transcendent event.) In short, Grotowski wanted his audience to be collaborative, as far as he could foretell, in what was going to happen.
Barnes had much the same idea about his museum. His will stipulated that admission to his collection was mostly to be granted in response to written applications, not all of which would be honored. He loathed those museumgoers who were mere strollers-through or vogue addicts, and frequently said so. He apparently wanted his visitors to know that they were specially privileged--not by him but by the artists. This was no kind of snobbism: he encouraged people from every stratum of society. (His own background was working class.) And it should be noted that on one social subject he was advanced: race. He involved Lincoln University, a historically black college near Philadelphia, in the foundation’s structure from the beginning. Two of the past presidents of the foundation are black men.
This selective aspect of the museum will apparently be lost. In the name of democracy, as well as increase in revenues, it seems that admission will be unencumbered by any test of the person’s seriousness. Obviously, the control of museum admissions is a different matter from admissions to a small theater space. But the opponents of the new site, the Barnes loyalists, feel that the Barnes collection will now become just another tourist stop. The matching of art and viewer will no longer be attempted. The intentions of Barnes’s admission plan are now history.
Stanley Kauffmann is the film editor of The New Republic.
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Raymond Carver: Collected Stories
By Raymond Carver
(Library of America, 1019 pp., $40)
Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life
By Carol Sklenicka
(Scribner, 578 pp., $35)
In the summer of 1984, the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami and his wife traveled to the remote coastal town of Port Angeles, Washington, to visit Raymond Carver in the glass-walled “Sky House,” overlooking the ocean, which he shared with his partner, the poet Tess Gallagher. It was more of a pilgrimage than a social call. Murakami, who had run a jazz bar in Tokyo before taking up writing six years earlier at the age of twenty-nine, admired Carver more than any other writer. Although they had never met, he considered Carver “the most valuable teacher I had.” Murakami had embarked on the epic task of translating all of Carver’s writings--stories, poems, essays--into Japanese. He had somehow concluded that Carver must be “thin and delicate,” and was surprised by his massive shoulders and big hands. As Carver sipped black tea instead of the alcohol he had sworn off after thirty years of dangerously heavy drinking, Murakami felt that his idol “sat on the sofa with his body crouched up as if to say that he had never intended to get so big.”
Imagine a new Library of Alexandria. Imagine an archive that contains all the natural and social sciences of the West—our source-critical, referenced, peer-reviewed data—as well as the cultural and literary heritage of the world's civilizations, and many of the world’s most significant archives and specialist collections. Imagine that this library is electronic and in the public domain: sustainable, stable, linked, and searchable through universal semantic catalogue standards. Imagine that it has open source-ware, allowing legacy digital resources and new digital knowledge to be integrated in real time. Imagine that its Second Web capabilities allowed universal researches of the bibliome.
Well, why not imagine this library? Realizing such a dream is no longer a question of technology. Remarkable electronic libraries are already being assembled. Google Books aims to catalogue about 16 million books. The nonprofit Internet Archive already has some 1 million volumes. Public expectations run ahead even of these efforts. To do research, only one in a hundred American college students turn first to their university catalogue. Over 80 percent turn first to Google.
The search for sublimity in the city is one of the most traditional quests of modernity. Urban life is a sacrifice of nature for culture, but it is not obvious that culture can provide the same exaltations as nature. When I saw Manhattan from 17,000 feet a few days ago, it looked like a folly, a vast vain pile of blocks and cubes into which the air and the light seemed to disappear. In the city, the question of being (I’m dating myself here) is a little ludicrous. What is the metropolitan sublime? The city is built on delineations and differentiations, and its particular beauty is owed to its artifice, to its rejection of stillness, to the almost anarchic spectacle of its many relations. It is a pluralist world. It is not created for oneness or wholeness, or to strike you dumb. Instead it articulately disperses you. Sometimes the art of the city has renounced these profane fascinations for an ontological ambition--as in the late Eliot, or Rothko, or Morton Feldman--but these experiments in timelessness seem almost like protests against the subways and the streets, in the name of a more fundamental plenitude, with no parts. (Critics were quick to discern Friedrich in Rothko.) Sometimes even the most sophisticated man needs to see the sky. The urban-spiritual question is whether the soul can subsist only on the experience of other people. Is the Other--the epic hero of contemporary thought--enough? We have been trained to think so. There is a current in modern philosophy that attempts to confer upon the encounter with other persons a metaphysical dazzle, but this is a romantic mistake: the prosaic character of moral conduct, its secular sufficiency, is an important element of its universality. Materialists, too, aspire to goodness. And there is an older modern tradition that discovers transcendence in the social rapture of the city, in the delirium of the crowd--un bain de multitude, Baudelaire called it. “Not all men have the gift of enjoying a crowd-bath,” he wrote, in which “multitude and solitude are equal.” I am one of those lesser men. I detest crowds and their oceanic effects; for me, they promise only conformity and violence. But last week the disorder of the city delivered another sort of release. It was a sunny morning. The snows were finally melting, and the appearance of the toys that were buried in the deep drifts heartened me. The busyness all around me, which usually I dislike, looked to me only like a lot of life. On my way to work I stopped at a local filling station, and as I stood at the pump I was taken up contentedly with errands and obligations. I phoned a friend to talk about the battle of Marja. I reviewed the plans for Purim. I made a mental note to check on the publication date of Saul Bellow’s letters. I looked at some girls. The public square was a rich and good place to be. And then I heard the tapping of a cane against an oil truck parked nearby, and then against the pump. When I turned around, I saw a hideously mutilated man. He was tall and thin, with a dancer’s body, and dressed in jeans and a red sweater; but there was a crater where his nose would have been, and his upper lip was ripped and pulled and seemed to have been soldered to his cheek. The skin on his face was twisted and flattened, like a mask gone horribly wrong. And he was blind. The deformed man immediately emptied my mind. All my contentment was banished by the shock. For a few moments, he was everything I knew. I am embarrassed to say that pity gave way to fear. It was suddenly an uglier universe. The image of this devastation filled me with a sense of all possible horror. I lived with the shudder for most of the day. My last stop was the flower shop, and I bought thistles.
Heinrich von Kleist’s famous story “The Earthquake in Chile” is set in Santiago in 1647. A young Carmelite nun named Josephe, condemned to death for becoming pregnant out of wedlock, is about to be beheaded. Across town, her lover, Jeronimo Rugera, is preparing to hang himself in the prison where he has been incarcerated. Just as the bells announcing Josephe’s imminent execution begin to toll, a gigantic earthquake strikes: We now know that it measured around 8.5 on the Richter scale, just a little less than the recent 8.8 quake. The pillar on which Jeronimo was to hang himself becomes his support, and he escapes as the building collapses around him. His beloved, saved by the same “heavenly miracle,” finds him in the countryside, where the refugees from the city have gathered. (This quotation and the others come from Peter Wortsman’s new translation of Kleist’s Selected Prose, just out in an attractive new edition from Archipelago Books.) The same townspeople who earlier that day had gathered to watch Josephe’s execution now greet the pair with warmth and compassion. Had the past, they wonder, only been a bad dream? The earthquake seems to have acted as a great leveler, erasing the previous divisions of class and piety:
Amidst these awful moments that had brought about the destruction of all of humanity’s worldly possessions, and during which all of nature threatened to be engulfed, it did indeed seem that the human spirit itself blossomed like a lovely flower. In the fields all around, as far as the eye could see, there were people of all social classes lying together, nobles and beggars, matrons of once stately households and peasant women, civil servants and day laborers, monks and nuns: all commiserating with each other, helping each other, cheerfully sharing the little of life’s necessities they’d been able to salvage, as though the common calamity had joined all those who’d managed to survive it into a single harmonious family of man.
Leave it to the Oscars to frustrate me even when they’re properly awarded. On Friday, I loudly declared my belief in inavataribility, arguing that, given the Academy's lifelong emphasis on movies' commercial success, there was no way it would give Best Picture to a $12.6 million-grossing indie (The Hurt Locker) over a well-reviewed juggernaut that made 50 times as much (Avatar). On Sunday, it gave Best Picture to a $12.6 million-grossing, etc., etc.
Irving Thalberg: Boy Wonder to Producer Prince
By Mark A. Vieira
(University of California Press, 504 pp., $34.95)
There are times of such chaos and promise, danger and daydream, when all of us hope for a superb and flawless leader. If he can swing it, we are off the hook. But he need not be a hero who turns into a tyrant. He is not necessarily strong, fierce, and Herculean. Indeed, it may add to his charm, to his magic, if he is slight, youthful, on the pretty side, and--better still--dying. He should be gentler than other leaders, more reliant on reason, calm, and explanation than those commanders who insist on being obeyed. In modern times, I can think of three such figures--Michael Corleone (Ivy League, good military record, the clean boy in the family), Irving Thalberg (the sickly genius who led MetroGoldwyn-Mayer in its great days), and Barack Obama, the once-marginal man who was so wise and so far-seeing that he believed he did not have to behave like an American politician to save America.
Paolo Veronese: The Petrobelli Altarpiece
Blanton Museum of Art
Combine a mystery and a masterpiece and what do you have? You have “Paolo Veronese: The Petrobelli Altarpiece,” a small, perfectly focused exhibition recently at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. The show--which has also been seen at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa--comes with a backstory engaging enough to make museum-goers pay close attention.
In the 1560s, already in command of his genius for opulent decorative effects, Veronese painted a vast altarpiece for a Franciscan church in the town of Lendinara, not far from Venice. Two centuries later, after the convent with which the church was associated was suppressed, the altarpiece was acquired by an art dealer, and he cut it into pieces and sold them off one by one--“just like meat in a butcher’s shop,” as the Scottish artist Gavin Hamilton observed at the time. Only now, after decades of work resolving the relationship of fragments in London, Edinburgh, and Ottawa, plus the recent discovery of a fourth fragment in Austin, can we see what Veronese had in mind. No matter that several pieces are still missing and are unlikely to be recovered: the Petrobelli Altarpiece, some fifteen feet high, turns out to be an astonishingly powerful meditation on themes of mortality and immortality. Veronese brings a luxuriant gravitas to his representations of saints and sinners alike. The canvas, for all its bold public appeal, has undercurrents of haunted, dusky reverie.
Mounted in one of New York’s major museums, “Paolo Veronese: The Petrobelli Altarpiece” would be hailed as exactly the kind of brilliant, concise exhibition we need in these recessionary times. In Austin, the exhibition was embraced by a loyal audience that has come to expect world-class scholarly work from the curators at the Blanton. When I was last in Austin, a little over a year ago, the museum was host to a show unlike “The Petrobelli Altarpiece” in every respect except its sky-high quality. This was “Reimagining Space: The Park Place Gallery Group in 1960s New York,” organized by Linda Dalrymple Henderson, an art historian at the University of Texas. Henderson brought unexpected shadings to our understanding of New York in the 1960s by focusing on a group of artists--among them Mark di Suvero, Robert Grosvenor, and David Novros--who were re-imagining the old Abstract Expressionist swagger in terms of their own increasingly hard-edged, conceptual, and technologically oriented sensibilities. And two years before that, Jonathan Bober, the curator of European art at the Blanton who is responsible for bringing the Veronese show to Austin, organized a retrospective of the sixteenth-century Italian painter Luca Cambiaso. He is best known today for his geometricized drawings of the human figure, which have long had a cult following among painters, who see their sharply angled forms as a prefiguration of Cubism. In his paintings, Cambiaso’s mingling of analytical rigor and poetic fantasy occasionally brings to mind the uncanniness of Uccello. The Blanton was the only American venue for this unprecedented event.
“Paolo Veronese: The Petrobelli Altarpiece,” “Reimagining Space: The Park Place Gallery Group,” and the Luca Cambiaso retrospective epitomize a kind of offbeat, imaginative programming that is at risk in our museums even in the best of times, and is most certainly at risk today. There are perfectly good reasons why museum administrators prefer brand-name events. Monet--or, for that matter, Warhol--has a proven track record when it comes to bringing in a reluctant public. And if you seek sponsors for a Monet show, you won’t have to cope with the blank looks with which the name Cambiaso will be received. Innovative curators such as Bober and Henderson are fighting an uphill battle, no question about it.
Ned Rifkin, the new director of the Blanton, arrives at a museum where there is surely a desire to enlarge the audience for art in Austin. This is an altogether honorable objective. For the Blanton, which has in recent years considerably expanded its operations, fund-raising is perhaps more of a priority now than ever. One has only to consider the museum’s ambitious new building complex, which opened in stages between 2006 and 2008. There are civilized, invitingly proportioned galleries for the museum’s permanent collection, with strengths in mid-twentieth-century American painting, in modern Latin American art, and in late Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo painting, drawing, and printmaking. There is also an unfortunate tendency toward gigantism in these interiors, beginning with a sky-high atrium and formal staircase that a visitor cannot help finding simultaneously overbearing and bland. Behind such overblown public spaces--you see them in new museums all over the world--there is the assumption that if you build it big, big crowds will come. The truth is that the people who do come end up feeling small.
But what is the Blanton to do in these straitened times? A few months ago the National Endowment for the Arts released a rather bleak “Survey of Public Participation in the Arts,” indicating that although museums were faring better than other cultural institutions, attendance at art museums and galleries was down to 22.7 percent of the adult population in 2008, from a high of 26.7 percent in 1992. Frankly, I think there can be too much anxiety about that missing 4 percent. We are not selling Pepsi here. We are selling the experience of Veronese. Anybody running an arts organization must attend to the bottom line: we can all agree about that. What I would like to hear from more museum directors is an insistence that in a country as wealthy as this one--and this is still a rich country, recession or no recession--museums have an obligation to present the finest work in the most uncompromising way, because in the long run that is how you sustain a culture.
So far as I can see, that kind of old-fashioned thinking has powered some of the most exciting exhibitions at the Blanton, exhibitions in which the best art historical scholarship, closely linked to the academic values of the university, flows seamlessly into the dazzling showmanship that any museum needs to attract the public. And many of these exhibitions are supported by important catalogues, contributions to culture that museum patrons ought to be proud to leave out on the coffee table long after the show has closed. Is “Paolo Veronese: The Petrobelli Altarpiece” a life-changing show? Of course not. But it is a powerful example of a medium-sized museum building on its strengths and coming up with something truly substantial.
For decades there had been a mystery as to what precisely was at the center of the Petrobelli Altarpiece, because the large fragments in London, Edinburgh, and Ottawa came only from the top and the left and right sides of the canvas. The conservation of figure groups in London and Ottawa had revealed fragments of a missing figure, apparently the Archangel Michael, a sword in his right hand, a scale for weighing souls in his left, his feet firmly planted on the sprawling and defeated figure of Satan. But what that figure of Saint Michael looked like was anybody’s guess, until Xavier Salomon--a curator at the Dulwich in London who co-organized the show with conservator Stephen Gritt--remembered seeing a head of an angel by Veronese on a visit to the Blanton, and the mystery was solved. Art historians love this kind of whodunit. So does the general public. All you need are a few bankable movie stars and some ecclesiastical-satanic twists and you would have a Dan Brown–style Hollywood hit.
In Austin it also did not hurt that the region’s large Catholic community came out to see a masterpiece of sixteenth-century religious art. One afternoon I found myself looking at the painting along with a group of boys and girls in their early teens who were being home-schooled, and were taking in Veronese as part of the day’s studies. They were engaged not only by the story of how the pieces of the puzzle were put together, but also by the beauty of the painting itself. To see those children and their parents at the Blanton was to see elite culture working its magic in a democratic society.
There is nothing in the art of the old masters that exerts as much of a fascination today as Venetian painting. The public, without necessarily realizing it, finds the origins of modern art’s exuberance--of everything from Matisse’s color to de Kooning’s brushwork--in the painterly poetry that was evolving in Venetian art from the late fifteenth century onward in the work of Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto, and others. The Blanton show, which included four canvases by Veronese and his workshop in addition to the altarpiece, was one of a considerable number of events that have in recent years focused on the Venetian Renaissance. Last summer, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston was host to “Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice,” the first exhibition at that museum to inspire real enthusiasm among artists I know since the Chardin retrospective in 1979. Three years ago, the National Gallery was host to “Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting.” And in Europe there have been recent exhibitions devoted to Giorgione and late Titian at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
While the Blanton show cannot rival any of those exhibitions in artistic splendor, there is a particular pleasure in looking at a work such as the Petrobelli Altarpiece in something approaching isolation. This is, after all, how such devotional works were meant to be seen--as one-off experiences, not as paintings surrounded by other paintings in an art gallery. The generously proportioned room in which the altarpiece hung in Austin may well have echoed the scale of the space, long ago demolished, where the canvas was first seen. Certainly in Austin, Veronese’s conception, in equal parts dramatic and contemplative, had a chance to work its magic. The setting is a portico, with huge columns framing green distances, impressive hills, and a vast cloud-studded sky. In the altarpiece’s arched upper regions, the dead Christ appears, borne aloft by three angels and surrounded by cherubs holding the instruments of the Passion, especially the crown of thorns and the whip used for the thirty-nine lashes.
At the very center of the composition stands Saint Michael, of whom nothing survives except the beautiful head in Austin, with its softly sensuous features, gently downcast gaze, and cap of golden curls. Framing Saint Michael are two pairs of figures, the Petrobelli cousins and their patron saints, with Antonio Petrobelli kneeling beneath Saint Anthony Abbot on the left and Girolamo Petrobelli at Saint Jerome’s feet to the right. In a scheme not unusual among Renaissance altarpieces, there is a mingling in Veronese’s fictive space of different temporal and moral and spiritual worlds. The Petrobellis who paid for the altarpiece and live in the here and now are permitted a certain access to the saints and to the angels and even to the figure of Christ.
For anybody who counts on Veronese for a ripe theatrical atmosphere, with figures in chaotic profusion and compositions that are dynamically twisted and angled, the Petrobelli Altarpiece will come as something of a surprise. The luxuriant rhetoric that is one of Veronese’s glories is subdued here. His coloristic rubato and his hyperbolic dramaturgy are energizing a composition that is essentially stable, almost Byzantine in its formality. The tastes of Veronese’s patrons in Lendinara were probably a factor, for what was wanted in a small town may well have been a painting that would have looked retrograde by the up-to-the-minute standards of Venice. Much of the fascination of the Petrobelli Altarpiece is in how Veronese engages with what might be seen as a conservative structure. He deploys his most sophisticated sense of color and movement to animate an older idea of figures as relatively isolated sculptural groups in a composition that is hieratic rather than dynamic, the structure reminiscent of Giovanni Bellini’s work around 1500. The result is a radical reconsideration of what might be regarded as conservative values--not a loss of strength but a different kind of strength, a drama that is psychological rather than physical, with a more concentrated emotional temperature than we generally associate with Veronese’s maturity.
Especially astonishing are the two groups of male figures, with the Petrobelli cousins, strong-willed middle-aged men, kneeling in black before the towering presences of their patron saints. The theme of worldliness subdued, not uncommon in Renaissance art, is approached with particular urgency, so that you feel the conflict between self-assurance and submissiveness played out on the Petrobellis’ lively faces. Girolamo kneels right next to Saint Michael’s scale, on which a tiny trembling soul is being weighed. It is chilling to turn from that homunculus to the strong man, with his sleek beard and hands held in prayer, who gazes up at the enfolding figure of Saint Jerome. But nothing here is more beautiful than the interaction between Antonio Petrobelli and Saint Anthony Abbot, the saint bending down to instruct the man, the man’s finely shaped head with its close-cropped hair seen in strict profile, a head from a Roman coin now stamped with Christian piety.
The play of gestures in the altarpiece revolves around the dynamic figure of Saint Michael, with one arm raised and one arm lowered, as he weighs souls on Judgment Day. The outflung arms of Antonio are opposed to the praying hands of Girolamo. The downturned, instructing hand of Saint Anthony Abbot is opposed to the raised arm of Saint Jerome. And the men, even as they play their appointed roles, also suggest an allegory of the three ages of man. Michael is the beautiful youth who so fascinated the poets and painters of the Renaissance. Antonio and Girolamo represent the self-awareness of middle age. And Saint Anthony and Saint Jerome exemplify the contemplative wisdom of the old.
The painting has all the full, deep color of the Venetian Renaissance at its height: the velvety purples, the shimmering blacks, the wild greens and oranges. Here are the beginnings of the sense of color as pure sensation that became a keynote of Symbolism four centuries later. And as with all the great Venetians of the sixteenth century, Veronese’s painterly power has sculptural resonances. He creates a feeling of massiveness through the manipulation of color itself, recalling a Byzantine world where the shimmer of golden icons and mosaicked domes was a focus for ritual and prayer. In the Petrobelli Altarpiece, an artist at the height of his powers revisits the traditions from which his art emerged. The result is a plangent conservatism, a virtuosic primordialism. Even as Girolamo and Antonio are confronting the states of their own souls, Veronese is confronting the soul of Venetian painting.
‘Paolo Veronese: The Petrobelli Altarpiece” demonstrates how a museum can build an innovative exhibition program on the foundation of a solid permanent collection. Veronese’s head of Saint Michael arrived at the Blanton in 1998, as part of the Suida-Manning Collection, at that time the largest gathering of Old Master work still in private hands in the United States, with some 260 paintings and 400 drawings. This collection, put together by two generations of a family of art historians, had been an object of considerable interest among some of America’s major museums, where there had been hopes of cherry-picking its greatest hits. That the Blanton managed to acquire the entire collection was a coup. This involved convincing the heirs and some people in Texas that the museum needed a wide-ranging collection of Old Master paintings and drawings. The Suida-Manning Collection includes, in addition to paintings by Veronese and Claude Lorrain, an extraordinary gathering of work by Cambiaso and other figures mostly esteemed by specialists and connoisseurs.
In 2002 the Blanton brought off another miracle. The museum acquired the print collection of the art historian Leo Steinberg, a trove of some 3,200 works that contains, in addition to highly desirable images by Picasso and other famous artists, a huge group of prints meant to chronicle the importance of reproductive processes in the dissemination of Renaissance and Baroque art. This will be an invaluable resource for scholars. Jonathan Bober, who had a hand in bringing both the Suida-Manning and Steinberg collections to Austin, has spoken about organizing a show that would focus on prints related to the art of Michelangelo, a project that could double as a salute to Leo Steinberg’s pathbreaking studies of the Italian Renaissance.
At a time when high culture is often dumbed down, forced to fit some ill-examined notion of what the public wants, there are museum people at the Blanton who have refused to lower their sights. Even after you have factored in Austin’s long tradition of intellectual sophistication, there is something rather extraordinary about the amount of money that has been raised to support a program of collections and exhibitions at the Blanton that has focused, among other things, on the byways of late Renaissance and Baroque painting and printmaking. To a visitor from the east, the best developments at the Blanton do not seem entirely unrelated to the other extraordinarily sophisticated and even rarified museological adventures in Texas, the Menil Collection in Houston and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth.
Each of these museums is of course a unique institution, the product of singular circumstances, but high culture is in some sense always an accretion of anomalies. What is interesting is that in the Lone Star State, where there is a lot of money that is often dismissed as dumb money, some of it turns out to be culturally astute money. The hankering for the loftiest artistic experiences arises everywhere and anywhere in a democratic society, and when somebody addresses that need, there is a public that comes. At the Blanton, there are curators and administrators who have never doubted that Texans might care about Luca Cambiaso, about the Park Place Gallery group in 1960s New York, about Veronese’s Petrobelli Altarpiece. Is it odd to be contemplating the glories of the Venetian Renaissance in Austin? After you have spent an hour before the Petrobelli Altarpiece, it can seem like the most natural thing in the world.
Jed Perl is the art critic of The New Republic.
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Now that Valentine’s Day is safely around the corner and all the romantic breezes have blown out to sea, let’s take a cold, hard look at Lori Gottlieb, the marriage maven of the post-Sex and the City era. Savvy enough to publish a book about marriage in time for V-Day and reap the subsequent media blitz, Gottlieb has suffered from poorer timing in her love life. Two years ago, she lamented her ill-advised dating strategy in The Atlantic: Rather than “settle for” (read: marry) one of her numerous boyfriends during her twenties or thirties, she kept holding out for “something better,” convinced she had not yet met her “soul mate.” But still alone at age 40, with a sperm-donated baby and no husband prospects on her horizon, Gottlieb doubted the wisdom of her choice. “Marrying Mr. Good Enough might be an equally viable option, especially if you’re looking for a stable, reliable life companion,” she wrote. “Madame Bovary might not see it that way, but if she’d remained single, I’ll bet she would have been even more depressed than she was while living with her "tedious but caring" husband.
Now she’s spun the article into one of those books whose argument doesn’t go much further than the title: Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. Women today, Gottlieb explains, have unrealistic expectations of the qualities they want in a mate, bringing a checklist 30 items long to the dating table and automatically excluding anyone who doesn’t perfectly conform. (He’s blond; she prefers tall, dark, and handsome. Next!) If you really want to get married, she writes, you should stop looking for qualities immediately attractive in a boyfriend—passion, intensity, brilliance—and open your mind to men who on the surface might be less scintillating but in the long run would make better partners.
What’s interesting about all this isn’t the dating advice Gottlieb offers, which is nothing new. Among the old standards she falls back on is the wisdom of the arranged marriage, in which partners unite owing to a meeting of values rather than minds or hearts and fall in love later (ideally). While her evidence is largely anecdotal, buffered with statistics from the National Marriage Project and various psychological studies, her research methods are clever. At the book’s start, she interviews a group of single women in their late 30s and early 40s. A friend tells Gottlieb, “Even if he’s not the love of your life, make sure he’s someone you respect intellectually, [who] makes you laugh, appreciates you. … I bet there are plenty of these men in the older, overweight, and bald category (which they all eventually become anyway).” But it’s not “settling” to marry a guy who is intelligent, funny, appreciative, and so on, if you connect with him intellectually and emotionally—as many of these women, even Gottlieb herself, say they did with their boyfriends. To marry a man you “adore,” even if sparks didn’t fly at the first meeting, sounds like a rational start for a happy relationship, not a radical way to readjust your priorities. What is settling is to accept a vision of marriage utterly different from the one you thought you wanted. This happens to be exactly what Gottlieb originally suggested, perhaps inadvertently, in her Atlantic article. Charles Bovary, after all, wasn’t “tedious but caring"; he didn’t respect Emma, make her laugh, or appreciate her. To suggest that the Bovary marriage might have had a happier ending if Emma had just readjusted her expectations is like saying Werther could have been cured by a little Prozac.
Gottlieb never devotes her considerable analytic skills to the most obvious question: Why does she assume that being married is better than being single? In the article, she acknowledged that marriages might not always be ideal, and even admitted the possibility that her life alone “is better (if far more difficult) than the life I would have in a comfortable but tepid marriage.” But she made it clear that she’d still rather be unhappily married than on her own. “My married friends with kids don’t spend that much time with their husbands anyway (between work and child care), and in many cases, their biggest complaint seems to be that they never see each other,” she explained. “So if you rarely see your husband—but he’s a decent guy who takes out the trash and sets up the baby gear, and he provides a second income that allows you to spend time with your child instead of working 60 hours a week to support a family on your own—how much does it matter whether the guy you marry is The One?” But I would venture that rarely seeing your husband isn’t what most women envision when they think about marriage. We can take out the trash and set up the baby gear ourselves; that’s not why people want partners.
In Gottlieb’s unashamedly marriage-boosting book, I counted all of two references to unhappy marriages. Marriage is simply presumed to be a good, better by definition than being single. There is no awareness of domestic violence and other abuse—not to mention other far more minor grievances that seem petty on the surface but erode a person’s well-being: the daily squabbles, the claustrophobia, the loneliness of discovering that the person you thought would be your constant companion no longer has the interest or ability to meet your needs. In ten years, will Gottlieb’s comfortably, tepidly married subjects reunite for the sequel, Divorce Him? That’s a book I’d be curious to read.
Ruth Franklin is a senior editor of The New Republic.
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