Office/Diary:
Friday
The weather was awful yesterday, unseasonably cold and miserably wet — although not quite as miserable as the same weather will be in March or early April, when the novelty factor has been stripped away. I ought to have stayed home and done a thousand things that need doing, but I couldn’t stand another day of domesticity, so I went to the Museum.
¶ Matins: George Packer reminds us Why Vietnam Matters, and receives a sad letter from Rufus Phillips, the adviser who tried to shout down the groupthink about Vietnam in Kennedy’s White House.
At the Museum, I discovered that I really ought to have stayed home. The place was packed, and, as always, the more people there are in the Museum, the more slowly they move. Most of them, naturally, have no idea of where they are or of where they’re going. Every move is inflected with uncertainty, especially when maps aren’t consulted. The cafeteria was jammed; I wasn’t at all sure that I’d find a table of my own. When I did, I found myself next to a nursing mother, embowered in a chatty family. I did not linger over the book that I had just bought upstairs in the gift shop — having failed, rashly, to port along a magazine.
¶ Lauds: Critics agree — Damien Hirst can’t paint.
After lunch — which, to be brutally honest, was the whole point of the Museum visit — I teetered on the verge of going back home. Indeed, I didn’t stay long. I saw the two big shows that are up at the moment, and I didn’t go anywhere near Vermeer’s Milkmaid — a big show in some ways, but not in size. The Art of the Samurai is going to open soon, but at the moment the big shows are American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life 1765-1915 and Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans.
¶ Prime: We’ve been waiting for this story for so long that we actually forgot all about it: Electronic stock trading, which can be located just about anywhere, has perhaps mortally dented the action on the New York Stock Exchange and its European counterparts.
The Frank show was too crowded to enjoy; I sashayed through the rooms in a getting-acquainted state of mind. I’d have taken in the show that way anyway, but I was extra express. Frank’s photographs have never moved me in the way that Walker Evans’s do, and a lot of the images seemed, glaringly, to miss William Eggleston’s color. That’s to say that, as the photographs are documents rather than compositions, there is something false about the black-and-white, which is not only arty and un-American but missing the riotous vulgarity of the American scene. There’s no gainsaying, however, that Political Rally — Chicago, 1956 is one super-duper photograph.
¶ Tierce: In case you didn’t have all day, yesterday, for the Scocca-Gessen bout, Christopher Shea not only summarizes it but evaluates Mark Greif’s underlying article.
I’ll have more, I hope, to say about American Stories. I’m trying to figure out a way to write about shows just like it — exhibitions that I visit five to ten times during their stay. What I want to convey is a sense of the temporary collection of pictures, and American Stories gets a boost from the recent Americans in Paris, in which at least one of the new show’s very best paintings was also shown. Mary Cassatt painted it as a thank-you gift, only to have it rejected by the giver. She ended up calling it Lady at the Tea Table, but it is in fact a portrait of Mary Dickinson Riddle. Riddle’s daughter, Anna Scott, who had given the Cassatts the gilt Canton service that litters the tea table, thought that her mother’s nose had been rendered too large, so the picture went back to the discouraged painter. Decades later, it was appreciated as a masterpiece, and it is one of the relatively few great paintings to have been given to the Museum by their creators.
¶ Sext: A profoundly un-green solution to a wintry problem:
Luzhkov is a long-time proponent of fighting clouds by spraying liquid nitrogen, silver, or cement particles into the cloud mass, which forces precipitation to fall before it can reach the capital and spoil holidays like Victory Day and City Day.
(via The Morning News)
I almost fell in love with Lady at the Tea Table at the Americans in Paris show, but there was a distraction. Standing in front of the Cassatt (where it hung in that show), I had only to turn to my left to gaze at my true love, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, the almost perfectly square Sargent that hung in the next gallery. (The difference between height and width is half an inch.) It seemed obvious that Daughters was the best painting in the world, period. Making do, I’m now inclined to find in Mrs Riddle — possessor of the clearest blue eyes that I have ever seen in a top-drawer painting — the subject of an extravagantly wonderful picture.
¶ Nones. In Monocle, Matthew Brunwesser urges Turkey to expunge the infamous and totally un-European Article 301 from its constitution; insulting a nation may sound like a bad thing, but the power to enforce sanctions against deprecation is more than most mortals can handle. More about the crippling Dogan Yayin fine from Stephen Castle and Sebnem Arsu at the Times.
As I’ve said, Lady at the Tea Table belongs to the Museum. It hangs in the American Wing — currently closed for renovation and set to open in 2011. I’m sure that I stared at it in its native ground. But I never noticed it, not really. This is something else that I want to talk about. Every show has a greatest hit (not that everybody agrees what it is — I’m only talking about my view here). It has nothing to do with ranking; one doesn’t look for runners-up. The contest is nonetheless intensely relative: to win, the greatest hit doesn’t have to be the greatest painting in the world. It merely has to seem to be the greatest, in comparison with everything else on the walls.
¶ Vespers: “It may also be true that Michiko’s judgment works on the time-release principle of certain antacids…that hindsight makes the heart grow fonder.” Garth Risk Hallberg on Michiko Kakutani’s critical maneuvers, à propos of her very unfavorable review of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City.
In a related way, pictures gain attraction by being moved around the Museum. For a few months earlier this year, Sargent’s Madame X was thrillingly hung at the end of the André Meyer enfilade. You could see her (if you were as tall as I am) from the top of the rise in the prints and photographs gallery that runs from the grand staircase to the Chamber of Horrors (think “Cot“). That is where Madame X belonged — in so many ways. At least she was there for a while.
Compline: The staff at XXfactor give Mad Men-style office drinking a try. Result: they have a fun day but are not creative. There don’t appear to be any adults on hand to tell them that they’re not in training.
If anybody asked me, which variation on the same thing is more interesting, La Gioconde or Lady at the Tea Table — but enough silliness. If you do get to the show, try to spend some time with Mrs Riddle. She’s an American fascinator.