“We are certainly not invisible old ladies,” comments one of the ‘fashionistas’ in this marvelous documentary. Thank you to my friend Jane for sharing it!
Monthly Archives: November 2013
Philomena
Tonight, I went across the street to the Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center for a screening of the new film “Philomena” with Judi Dench and Steve Coogan, who also wrote and produced the movie. Tender and traditionally told, the story centers on a not-too-bright Irish woman who longs to find the son taken from her as an unwed mother in a convent.
The stories of the ‘Magdalene Girls‘, as these young women came to be known, is a familiar one by now. So you go to this one for the performances. Dench, as ever, is tremendously subtle and sensitive. The packed house stayed in its seats all through the credits, something I’m not used to in the movie theater. Some things are just best left to a good ol’ storytelling. Look for this one at Oscar time.
Exiting the theater, it’s back to the real world. A poster had been slapped onto a light pole–man and dog murdered, $60,000 reward.
The future is now
The art world never stays still. Now digital and video are the hot new forms of expression. At the Museum of Arts and Design new exhibition ‘Out of Hand‘, artists explore the hybrid world of the computer and the artist joining together to make pieces.
There’s the microphone you can talk, sing, or whistle into and create a vase-like object on the screen above. There’s the ‘white space’ to step into to make an object. I’m wearing a red shirt with a black and white vest. When I stepped into the zone, a wreath-like donut formed on the overhead screen, melding the three colors.
3-D printer
An organization called Shapeways from Long Island was there today, demonstrating how the make objects using a 3D printer.
She’s on the turning platform
The resulting object
I watched a couple step onto a platform and kiss. While they held their pose, a huge scanner continually scanned the length of their bodies and the platform slowly turned, so that the scan captured information from each angle. Over about a seven hour period, a 3D printer will print out a four or five inch tall, full color, plastic version of their kiss. But only if they order it from the website.
Not all the objects take that long to print, which happens in layers, resulting in a solid piece. This intricate toy with moving pieces could be printed in only thirty minutes and cost only a few bucks.
A toy-thing with moving parts
You can also upload your own design and concept, pick one of 30 materials, including ceramics and metals, and create your own custom object. They also have a marketplace you can shop. The Shapeways tag line: “made in the future.”
A man next to me interrupted the young guy explaining the process. “You know, my dentist uses a 3D printer,” he said. “He makes the teeth right there, while you wait.”
This may indeed be the future of art… and dentistry.
Balm for the Soul
Carel Fabritius
The Goldfinch
Last year, it was Bernini. When do we see Bernini in the United States? This year, it’s Fabritius. Despite The Goldfinch painting being supposedly located at the Met in the hot novel by Donna Tartt, Fabritius’s precious work lives at the Mauritshius. It’s currently on holiday at the Frick, along with about a dozen other paintings from that museum.
Why the Bernini comparison? Not just because these are also Baroque masterworks, this time from Holland. But because of the effect on the soul. In an art world that rewards shock, violence, ugliness, and noise, these works, with a key exception, are quiet, intimate, even full of solitude. As old-fashioned as I am, I find that a balm.
There’s the beauty of the Coorte still life of four apricots, so evocative to the senses of taste and smell, and the Ruisdael panorama of Haarlem, with its bleaching fields–where linens were bleached in the sun. The four Rembrandt paintings include his delicate, sensitive version of Susanna from 1656. From the year before, The Old Lacemaker by Maes glorifies the industrious woman making bobbin lace — its tiny patterns had such universal appeal that they contributed to Dutch wealth. The figure’s meditative focus is painted with religious reverence, calling for us to respect her virtues.
Nicolaes Maes
Old Lacemaker
For some, Girl with a Pearl Earring by Vermeer will be the highlight. What’s useful to know, the painting is a tronie–a head study of a fictional character or type, innovated by Rembrandt. It is not a portrait, no matter what the wonderful novel by Tracy Chevalier would have you believe. Sorry to burst your bubble.
Of course, the Fabritius pulled my heart. Disappointingly, Tartt’s novel has virtually nothing to do with the painting. But who cares? The elegant, spare Goldfinch is waiting for you now at the Frick.
Don’t miss the tiny chain attaching the bird’s foot to a mysterious box. This chain has been interpreted variously as a way to keep the popular Dutch pet from flying away to a moralizing commentary on domesticity and flight. My favorite interpretation suggests it’s a pet trick, where the bird was taught to pull the chain to release a thimble-full of water in a tiny cup, otherwise hidden in the box.
I first met the painting as a feat of trompe l’oeil, or trick the eye, painting. In person, I didn’t really experience it as trompe l’oeil. But it has its own magical draw.
- Jan Steen
Girl Eating Oysters
Even Jan Steen displays an eloquent beauty in his diminutive Girl Eating Oysters. Of course, Steen being Steen, its detail, exquisite coloration, and dainty sensibility are subsumed by the girl’s provocative glance at us. Oysters, after all, were thought to be an aphrodisiac, and she invites us to partake with her. Ooh la la.
The exception to the exhibit’s quiet comes with Steen, too. Now with his largest work, we get this rare opportunity to see one version of As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young in noisy-person. I use the painting in my thesis as a prime example of a messy household. And boy is it. You just have to go see it. Its exuberance and abandon are so joyous, so contemporary, so archetypal, so fresh. The moral lesson may be there, but with a wink and a nod. Steen places himself at center, looking knowingly at us, as he teaches a boy to smoke a pipe. Yes, the red parrot in the corner tells us that children will parrot their elders. So serious.
Jan Steen
As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young
see the artist on the right in the hat grinning at us
But, as stated above, who cares? How much more important are the joy, the beauty, the quiet of these moments with great art and the worlds they reveal.
The Pickle Stick
In the ongoing quest for essential knowledge, I wish to share an important discovery with you.
The Pickle Stick
While wandering the cold streets of downtown New York tonight, the smell of pickles drew me straight to the vendor with his barrels. As I was starving, I couldn’t resist a sour straight from the brine.
I have now learned there’s no better way to eat a pickle while walking down the street than using a pickle stick.
Too dark for a photo in the moment, I was unable to get that candid-camera shot. What you have here is a re-enactment, with an olive–the best I could do in order to transmit this critical information to you in a timely manner. I know you will make good use of it.
Spectacles
Ben Franklin responded to her request and sent his sister Jane thirteen pairs of glasses. So began an adventure of discovery about Jane and her life. Jill Lepore, the co-author of 
one of my favorite books of recent years Blindspot, has done the research. More about that in a minute.
You might wonder why her novel is co-authored, pretty unusual for fiction. She and her friend and fellow historian Jane Kamenksy co-wrote a story for a older colleague as a birthday present. It centered on a Colonial girl who desperately wanted to be an artist. The profession was unheard of for a woman, so she cuts her hair and dresses as a boy and becomes an apprentice for an artist very much like the ribald Gilbert Stuart in Boston.
The story was such a hit, the two historians decided to turn it into a full-fledged novel. Not only is it evocative of a volatile period in Boston in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War, but also gives a lot of insight into how paint was made and used then, the role of the artist with patrons, and life in a paint “factory” system. The pants role is just fun, and of course, there’s a love story inside it all. If this appeals to you, I think you’ll find it just as good a ride as I did.
Lepore brings the same charm and historian chops to this new work (and continues working with the eye metaphor). She spoke at the Yale British Art Center, where I’m training to become a docent, before a packed house. I had already gotten the book Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin from the library and now can hardly wait to read it.
Using spectacles as an organizing device, Lepore talks about how close the siblings Benny and Jenny (Jane’s nickname) were.
He began wearing spectacles at age 24, while working in his brother James’s print shop. James, too, wore specs. Ben invented spectacles with temples, innovating the form of our modern glasses, and later bifocals. Up until then, no one, man nor woman, wore spectacles in the street. They were a private tool for reading. Franklin was noted for having his portrait painted wearing spectacles–highly unusual.
And Jane wanted some spectacles. Only most girls didn’t or couldn’t read. Jane learned how with her brother, but her life was taken up making candles, making stitches, making babies. She never left her childhood home, while her famous brother traveled the world. She lived in penury with a destitute husband who moved into her parents’ house. Her brother was wealthy. Ten of her 12 children died young. She was sad. Ben was a wit and a womanizer.
But Jane needed glasses, and Lepore details how Jane was a voracious reader, even as she had trouble with writing. By the time of her death, late in the 1700s, the nature of education for girls was starting to change. So the historian unveils a period just prior, when an accomplished mind was limited by gendered work and poverty.
These bespectacled siblings, readers and letter writers, were both remarkable. The glasses enabled them to look and see and therefore think. Lepore talks about how glasses act as a door to knowledge and a way to hide. Jane and Ben did both, in their own ways, in their own worlds. Her story is a remarkable one, quiet and small. How wonderful to celebrate that with Lepore and with you.
Miniature paintings of an eye were intriguing and fashionable gifts between lovers
Nobody can tell you who you be
The very tall, slim man, with his hand on a short, plump woman’s shoulder, said as they passed me on the street, “Nobody can tell you who you be.” That statement was clearly the theme for my day in New York.
Anticipating my professor’s panel discussion with Eleanor Antin, I went to see a show of her work from the 1970s on constructed identity. Oh dear, you’re thinking, how boring. Trust me, this show at Columbia University’s gallery is anything but dull. Antin is known for the harsh diet she put herself on to “carve” her body, documenting her weight loss in photographs each day for a month.
This show has a different focus. More in the vein of Cindy Sherman, Antin t
akes on new physical realities. Unlike Sherman, she clearly remains herself, constructing new identities. Hilariously, she teaches herself ballet from a book and is photographed as a prima ballerina, on pointe. The video of her own choreography defies the idea of the artist’s ego.
I also really liked the various nurse incarnations as Eleanor Nightingale. Her photographs as if from the 19th century definitely have that period feel, even as she comments on Vietnam, the senseless war raging at the time.
Me, 1854
And the puppets on a hijacked plane and the accompanying video of playing with paper dolls sends up gender roles.
Here are the dolls inside the airplane.
My favorite was probably Antin becoming a 1920s, exiled, Russian male movie director, shooting a film for the nostalgic Jewish audience in the US. She got the silent film stereotypes just right as she played off 1970s political sensibility.
The work that stood out to me as perhaps having a different meaning today than she originally intended is Antin as King of Solana Beach. She riffed on Anthony Van Dyck’s aristocratic painting tropes to indicate disgust at her impotence protesting against the Vietnam War. So she decided to become king of her own geography. 
Acting as a valiant but ineffective ruler of a tiny beach community was her way of coping. I saw the series as a contemporary statement of how insular and self-oriented we have become. We’re each king of our own little worlds and as such, have no room left to make other people and their priorities important.
That cynicism was both tapped into and eradicated by the new musical version of “Little Miss Sunshine.” As Tolstoy stated, each family is miserable in its own way. In this family, each character is passionately and uniquely miserable. Except for Olive, the tiny contestant for the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant. Where do they find these children? Goodness. At age nine, this one has already been in fifteen different musicals.
Well, if any Off-Broadway production were more clearly headed for The Great White Way, then tell me. I don’t want to miss it, just as you need to hurry and get your ticket for this one now. The scalpers were already working the show.
This one is upbeat for such a dark, miserable bunch of characters–laugh out loud funny, with hummable songs. A very feel-good ending that isn’t warranted given the action. That contradiction is part of why the show works. It’s tighter and crisper than the film, which I think is an improvement.
And you might just come away King of who you be, with just enough room for all the other Kings out there who matter most.
Constructed webs
To the warm rain of this Halloween was added a hanging bat and an enormous spider, its web attached to the ubiquitous New York construction scaffolding.
Residents of this building on 80th St, just off 5th Ave, certainly go all out for the spookiest day of the year.
Ohhhh my!